I Am Here and Here and Here and Here

By Sarah Twombly

Don’t worry, I say to my screen, where Zoom has frozen my colleagues into solid, black cubes, but to whom I am speaking anyway, because I am not late, I made it, I am here, just barely here, or maybe here, but not completely; a semblance of parts are here, for instance my right-forefinger and the crook of my knee are here, while my tiptoes are outside doing their best not to topple while stringing up the Christmas lights, and my lap is downstairs on the couch, overfull of children who are, like me, home and not home, here and there—and somedays neither here nor there—and my heart is in my chest, locked in place by my breastbone—I feel it beating—but my vasculature has sprung a leak or been mis-plumbed, because my blood, instead of flowing to my right-forefinger or my big toe, is flowing to Nora’s father who, yesterday, was admitted to the isolation ward in Jordan, and my oxygen is circulating through Jodi’s daughter, contact-traced just this morning and now quarantined; my breath is caught in the naked fingers of the beech trees outside, struggling to rise, to fall, to flow; my guilt is downstairs, abandoned with the groceries on the counter—boxes like sentries, announcing my neglect; and my fear—my precious fear—is trapped across the street with my neighbor who is speaking, again, of stolen elections and the plight of women under progressive regimes, how girls will be forced to go without make-up and to wear pants—dear god, my fear says, not pants! anything but pants—while the meteorologist is whispering to my ears, which have been attached to the radio for days and days, that the weather will be warm again today; seasonably, unseasonably, who can say: my temperature regulation has been stranded in Tonga, where foreigners have not been allowed in or out since March; March, my hair is still in March, a heap of, it deserted on the bathroom floor, after my husband drew the scissors closed and promised, “I got this."

Sarah Twombly’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Prairie Schooner, Esquire Magazine, and Scary Mommy, among others; she lives in Bangor, Maine.

"Before and After," mixed media by Jodi Paloni.

The Land of Milk and Honey

By Matthew Medendorp

You live in the land of milk and honey, kid, hunny hunny hunny I say to you shush shush shush your crying hush hush hush your wailing, wave after wave after wave you bind you wallow you wail again you scratch your eyes out of the sackcloth that binds your feet in the mornings, you blink blink blink against the coming dawn or sometimes son you root root root for a lullaby, you stretch, you want the womb again, you don’t want to crawl into the light, you want to find your small cozy cave and curl back to sleep sleep sleep for a while; child, can’t you see this is the promised land?

Matthew Medendorp is a poet, essayist, and an MFA candidate at Northern Arizona University with work in HAD, Up North Lit, and the Boardman Review; he spends his spare time washing boats in a warehouse without heating or cooling and posting the occasional 35mm photograph to his website: mattmedendorp.com.

Art by Nick Botka.

Bread Making

By Jan Priddy

I was still a young girl, still trying to be the sort of person society expected girls to be in the 50s and 60s by doing the chores expected of girls, when my mother stood over me in her kitchen and taught me to bake bread, following her recipe from before I was born, stirring the soft flour with the packet of yeast and water and corn oil, kneading the yeasty dough before folding it into four loaves that rose waiting for the oven, and me waiting the long hour while my bread baked until it came from the oven: beautiful fragrant loaves all golden brown and steamy, tipped out onto racks before I was allowed to cut warm tender slices, thick and crumbly and spread with margarine my mother bought to save money, and the bright red jam Mom made from sugar and fresh strawberries that I helped her pick north of Seattle, and each bite deep into the gooey slices left my cheeks sticky with jam—all those years ago—until here now, I bake bread in my own kitchen, serving the bread to my husband and myself, the berry jam homemade too just as my mother taught me, even while the world diminishes these womanly crafts, and punishes me for insisting, for demanding that not merely what I make but what I am—be valued.

Jan Priddy is a walker of beaches and weaver of wool and words whose work has been nominated or became a finalist for numerous awards including a Pushcart, and appeared in CALYX, Liminal Stories, The Humanist, North American Review, anthologies about running and race, and dozens of other publications.

Art by Jeff Kallet.