Forcing Roses
by Ranney Campbell

tent and keep clement
cover, secure,

and wait

bathe in warm water

give a sharp cut

set aside
in a vase

upon your return, blow
into the closed
bud

reflex and pull
and pour
your heated water
into her

let gravity
spread petals

untouched by your hand

then quickly upend her
let drain
to ready

run your fingers
between the folds into crevices
and gently
push
through
tips tracing
the ruffles
circling open

A version of this poem was originally published by The Main Street Rag.

PAINTING:Roses by Vincent van Gogh (1890).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ranney Campbell earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Missouri at St. Louis and lives in Southern California. Her poetry has been published by Misfit Magazine, Shark Reef and others, and is forthcoming in the Rat’s Ass Review and Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. Her chapbook, Pimp…

Instructions for Writing a Poem
—First line after Amy Crane Johnson
by Jennifer Finstrom

You start beyond the field in back of my house.
Never mind that this is the city.

Never mind that I don’t live in a house.
Stand still for a moment and listen. The mice

run through the weeds at your feet,
crying in their small, shrill voices.

Their shabby coats don’t keep out
winter. The seeds they hoard do not

protect them. Wind comes, and makes
its own hoard of husks and bones.

Never mind that this field doesn’t end.
Cross it anyway. Carry nothing in your hands.

Previously published in Threshold LIterary Magazine.

PAINTING:The Barbed Noose with the Mice by Paul Klee (1923).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote this poem approximately 10 years ago, and reading it again during the pandemic, its absence of people feels even more relevant.

ABOUT THE…

How to breathe
by Patrick T. Reardon

Accept air in.
Process it. Expel it.

Accept bliss and ache,
random acts of existence.

Accept other voices
or don’t listen.

Accept the flower and dog shit
or close your eyes.

Accept a journey
that starts and ends.

Accept the gamble
of waking up.

Accept limits.
Accept freedom.
Accept gravity.
Accept fragility.
Accept the cloud of unknowing.

Accept unscheduled beauty.

Accept your own sins.

Accept confused alarms,
bad intent,
the chafing of coupling.

Accept the communion of saints,
the quick and the dead,
the mob, the family, the dance.

Accept another’s fingerprint.
Accept the risk of reaching.

Accept alone.

Accept the blinding white beyond.

PAINTING:Breath by Kexin Di (2018).

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Breathing, it seems to me, is a synonym for living. So what does that entail? That’s what I sought to express in the poem. When I was done, I…

High school students are hit by a high-pressure water jet from a fire hose during a peaceful walk in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. As photographed by Charles Moore, images like this one, printed in Life, galvanized global support for the demonstrators.

“The Birmingham campaign, also known as the Birmingham movement or Birmingham confrontation, was a movement organized in early 1963 by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to bring attention to the integration efforts of African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama. Led by Martin Luther King Jr., James Bevel, Fred Shuttlesworth and others, the campaign of nonviolentdirect action culminated in widely publicized confrontations between young black students and white civic authorities, and eventually led the municipal government to change the city’s discrimination laws. In the early 1960s, Birmingham was one of the most racially divided cities in the United States, both as enforced…

How to Fly
by Lisa Alletson

Love the cliff face first.

Measure and weigh
the hands that shackle your ankles
holding you back.

Test the troposphere
with a snowdrop
sprung from your glow.

Leave out a bowl
of black holes
to consume gravity.

Inhale the sweetness
of the wet blade of grass
between you and freedom.

Build a pair of wings
out of tendons and memories
with your naked fingers.

The wings will stick
to your body at first —
low and frightened.

Towel them down
with your childhood blanket
to soak up burdens.

Don’t forget
to take your children —
past and future.

(They will know if you leave without them.)

Don’t forget your strength.
Never forget your strength.

Let go.

IMAGE:Les Oiseaux (The Birds), silkscreen by Henri Matisse (1947).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Lisa Alletson writes poetry using stark imagery inspired by the political, geographic, and cultural…

How to Eat an Avocado
by Michael Minassian

Cover yourself in green—
nestle it in your hand,
squeeze until it yields
to gentle pressure;
slice in half,
then scoop out the pit
as if you were
removing a broken heart.

When you taste the flesh,
let it linger on your tongue,
flowering like a grove
of epiphanies—
earth, rain and sun,
hunger and thirst,
like the first touch of lips
in a voluptuous embrace.

IMAGE: Avocado (Persea) (1916) by Amada Almira Newton. Original from U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel, rawpixel.com.

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: Avocados have long been considered symbols of love and fertility. Used by Aztecs as an aphrodisiac, the fruit takes its name from the Nahuatlword ahuacatl, which means “testicle.”

AUTHOR’S NOTE ON THE PHOTO: When we lived in Florida we had a huge…