Manthipe Moila

Jacaranda mimosifolia

You have given up your abandonment the way a boy jumping into a river gives up

his shoes. You have given up your hurt, that ancient skin; your want, that old wound.

There are moments like this where you walk the streets of Joburg with friends

or family, bare of yourself, smelling the Jacaranda mimosifolia; crushing

the fallen flowers beneath your school shoes. You do not know that this is your

way of practicing forgiveness, nor do you know that it will all be for naught:

the trees bloomed in Pretoria weeks ago, and you are smelling time already going,

a belated world of violet; one that your father will slip into and never return from. 

---

Manthipe Moila is a poet from Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a BA Hons. in English Literature from Rhodes University. She has been published in a few online and offline publications including Stirring, Tupelo Quarterly, Agbowó and Saranac Review. She is currently based in Seoul, South Korea.

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Amelia Martens

Mid-Winter, Far West Kentucky

I am a series of ghosts;

the bones in my ankle creak

my ascent and descent

each stair, a platform

to perform new human

transcendence, or rest.

From the backseat

our daughters discuss

how many children

can fit in the heart

of a blue whale, how

all blood is blue until

it comes out of you.

The light is yellow

as I transport us

through the inter-

section, over ice.

My mind fixed

on microfossils,

the bits of teeth

and skeletal splinter

of manta rays found

shattered in the desert.

It turns out two

children can fit

into the heart.

They ask me to play

the song about trains.

---

Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016), and four poetry chapbooks. In 2021 she was awarded an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and in 2019 she received an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council.

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Carl Little

Grapefruit

After halving the pink-hued fruit

using skinny knife to cut around wedges

and taking up appointed spoon     

to slip slivers into mouth,

you look ahead, anticipating

largest pieces, what they’ll feel like

on your tongue barely touching teeth

on the way to the throat.

And when done, rushing as usual,

there’s your main squeeze, ravaged half

wrung into a cup brought to the lips 

like devotion near the end of

some holy ceremony, blood-and-body portion

when we kneel and partake

and look floorward, the world

sweet, bitter, and wanting.

---

Carl Little is the author of "Ocean Drinker: New & Selected Poems." His second collection, "Blanket of the Night," with a cover by Abby Shahn, will be out later this year from Deerbrook Editions. His poetry has appeared most recently in The Lowell Review, Maine Arts Journal and Maine Sunday Telegram. He lives and writes on Mount Desert Island.

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