ONE INTERPRETATION

by Erika Takacs

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has come under public fire for publicly endorsing the misogynistic views of Idaho pastor Doug Wilson (above) and his colleagues in a CNN interview… What sparked the latest round of worry is CNN’s interview in which [Wilson] says “women are the kind of people that people come out of”… Hegseth reposted the CNN interview link on X and wrote, “All of Christ for All of Life.” —Baptist News, August 10, 2025 

Oh—like the crone who strides forth 
out of my skin (wise, bossy, bolder)
whenever I see a young woman try
to tuck herself into a smaller, smaller,
smaller space. Or the diner waitress
who can’t help calling everyone Hon,
the school nurse whose eyes catch
on every helpless child, like the gawky
teen in line at the airport who needs me
to tell him when he’s allowed to board. 
There’s my grandmother, when I use salt
(never measure, more is better), 
and my dad, when I cry at commercials 
(Christmas morning, someone is home 
from college, or the army, and has brewed 
coffee). My brother when I am truly selfless; 
my mother when I’m just lucky. I’ve coaxed
wizards from this old body, vixens
and virgins and vamps. So many people
have come out of me, though not one
is my child. Or maybe all of them are—
every one a new creation, a dazzling
refraction of an infinite heart. 

Erika Takacs is an Episcopal priest, teacher, musician, and poet originally from Wilmington, Delaware. Her writing has been published in The Orchards Poetry Journal, Earth & Altar, The Christian Century, Braided Way, and Thimble Literary Journal. Outside of her work and her family, her three great loves are the music of J.S. Bach, books, and baseball. She currently resides in North Carolina, where she and her husband serve at the pleasure of their very spoiled beagle. 

WOMEN’S HISTORY 2025: SAY HER NAME

by Robin Stevens Payes

my country is busy writing out history
1.     women
2.     immigrants
3.     ukraine
so I must write them in
 
grandma sophie checks
these boxes 
one
two
three
she left the shtetl in 1893
for the american dream
 
she fled
1.     pogroms 
2.     despots
3.     poverty 
 
she arrived by
1.     horse and wagon 
2.     train
3.     ship 
 
violently assaulted
violated
a #metoo moment
before we could speak
such things aloud
my grandmother kept
her life lost a life 
silenced
 
in pursuit of 
1.     love
2.     safety
3.     family
 
silenced by shame she
never spoke her trauma
but passed it down
on top of the genes
 
episilencing generations
1.     ancestors
2.     descendants
3.     ascendance
 
through no fault of her own
and now her landsman
this democratically elected
leader of a free country
 
symbolized by the sunflower
source of seeds and oil
hearth and home like sophie
symbols of peace and resilience
 
comes to defend freedom
and dignity for all
not to grovel
at the tsar’s feet
 
violently assaulted
violated
an #ustoo moment
we must speak aloud
 
I call out the horror 
sophie’s story is america’s story 
truth trauma triumph and all 
 
i am writing herstory  
1.     SOPHIE her name
2.     PROUD her legacy
3.     AMERICA her goldene medina
 
episilenced #nomore 

Sophie

Robin Stevens Payes is a time traveler who reasons that time and space are just inconvenient rules that other people decided the world must follow. After decades of trying to fit some notion of “normal” she chose to dive deeper into the offbeat, allowing verse to fill a poetic void. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies: Dawn Horizons, East Sea Bards, Maryland Bards Poetry Reviews, and Reflections. She is time traveling to retrieve fragments of her grandmother Sophie’s story in [re]member the world, weaving together poetry, memoir, history and science. She writes about the process of weaving memory into a tapestry on her Substack https://remembertheworld.substack.com/

INHERITANCE

by Mary Hills Kuck

To Governor Kristi Noem

My grandmother gave me one sterling spoon

for each of my first twelve years. A wandering

rose fills the neck of the spoon, sends vines

down the stem, with roses here and tiny

leaves there, then finally a clustered bouquet

next to M marked for Mary, the name we happily shared.

 

Did she imagine I’d take out these spoons,

tied year by year in a soft flannel roll,

and set them on linen with vases of roses,

my friends gathered there to talk about art,

song, and church over tea, petit fours?

 

I’m sorry to say I use one at a time

in my mug of strong tea before eight.

Then I race off to teach, attend meetings or shop.

Yet the spoon stirs my thoughts of her love  

for her namesake, her hope for my future, my home.

 

Your granddaughter, Governor, as you have said,

gets a gift every year of your love.

She already owns a gun for each year

of her innocent two-year-old life.

 

Did you engrave on the barrel of each new piece

your name and the year of the gift?

Did you ask the seller to add little blooms,

tiny vines, or sweet pinky hearts?

 

How do you think she’ll make use of these gifts

when she’s reached the allowable age to aim,

indeed, fire; what prey will your granddaughter shoot?

Will she start with the birds, then on to the cats,

and finally seek out the big game?

Mary Hills Kuck has has published poems in print journals, including the Connecticut River Review, SLANT, Tipton Poetry Journal, Burningword Literary Journal, From the Depths, Poetry Quarterly, Main St. Rag, and others online. Intermittent Sacraments, her chapbook, was published in 2021 by Finishing Line Press. She has received a Pushcart Prize nomination.

THE GHOST OF THE OLD COUNTRY

by Kathryn A. Broderick

My grandmother is from the Old Country

A land of winding cities, valorous heroes, and ancient towers

Across the green-glass seas.

 

She whispers words that flow like water

As she sparks to life stories in that distant place

—But lowly and in secret, shamed by her foreign tongue.

 

Yet her secrets drip into the new life she’s crafted here

Coloring the edges of suburbia in Anywhere, USA

A resilient stain that assimilation cannot wash away.

 

The dust of butter-rich tea cakes

Cling to her withered fingers

As she weaves tales of her faraway home.

 

She tells me of the wild Baba Yaga

A witch that lives in a hut atop a mighty bird’s leg

And the ways to escape her enchantment.

 

She often weaves together the push-pull of escape and return

Haunted by the melancholia of self-imposed exile

As she tries to accept her unwilling divorce from the Old Country.

 

In her garden, soniashnyk bow their golden heads toward the sun

She calls the flowers her little kings with many-petalled crowns

She rests in their shadows as she paints pictures of her lost home.

 

My grandmother died before I knew the Old Country meant Ukraine.

She told me tales of its beauty. I never knew of its death.

She fled from its capital as a child.

 

Her father did not survive the journey

—at least, not as the same man.

Ghosts lingered in his heart.

 

The famine turned into skeletons those that remained.

Their bones returning to the embrace of earth in unmarked graves.

“Have another tea cake,” she’d say. “You look hungry.”

 

What was it like to be Slavic and living in America during the Cold War?

Living under the hostile glare of suspicious eyes branding you an enemy?

Surviving against your will as your family withered away?

 

I sit in the shadow of her sunflowers

Listening to news of Russia’s unprovoked attack

And I feel her fingerprints upon the pulse of the Old Country.

 

The heroic threads and tragedy lining each of her secret stories

Now shout at me from modern headlines.

We dwell in dark times—but in the darkness heroes rise

At least, as my grandmother said, they do in the Old Country.

Kathryn A. Broderick’s work has appeared in First Line and Mirror Dance. Her second novel Gorgon Crown will be released in June 2022.

PUBLIX

by Ron Riekki

In a Royal Palm Beach, Florida Publix filled with lunchtime shoppers, a man Thursday walked into the produce section, fatally shot a woman and her young grandson, and then turned the gun on himself, the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said. —Palm Beach Post, June 10, 2021 [Photo credit: GREG LOVETT/palmbeachpost.com]

Another shooting, this one at the grocery store where I go 

every week. Sixty separate shootings throughout the US 

today, and the day’s not done, except the day is done, a day 

shot, shit, really. Forty-five injured today. Forty-five. I hate 

that number. Jolts into my mind, cold, the radio announcing, 

TV announcing, ex-girlfriend announcing, Isn’t that the store 

you always go to? A grandmother dead, her grandson dead, 

a one-year-old boy, in “the produce section.” And what does 

America produce? Twenty-one killed today. So far. Suffer 

is what we do. Grandmother. One-year-old grandson. Blocks 

from me. I went there yesterday, bought bananas, bread, beer. 

My ex- says, you know, I’ve never read a poem where some- 

one wrote simply, ‘Fuck the NRA.’ You should do that. She’s 

Haitian, hates guns, has this way of saying curse words where 

you feel Shiva is in the room. My ex- before my ex- had 

a brother who committed suicide, how she died after that, 

disappeared in my hands, turned to ghost, still alive, but I 

felt her slip through my arms, gone, like morning. I drove 

by the store, the tape around it, sign saying Closed to Sunday, 

how empty inside, and not, how if felt filled with ghosts, so 

many of them that you couldn’t see anything but the dark 

of the dead pressed together in the heat of the day. How hot. 

My air conditioner in the car broken. How hot. Drowning 

in it. Forty-five. Twenty-one. Three. And one headline 

that sticks out from two days ago: “‘Our kids are becoming 

extinct’: Chicago children are being killed by guns at far 

faster rate than years past.” Far. I’m south Florida. So far. 

And the fear is that we’re numb, that we’re OK with numbers 

now, how we’ve gotten used to this. How hot. How hot.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).

QUARANTINE AUBADE

by Juditha Dowd

"Lifeline" by Pascal Campion

The trucker is hauling food. We often hear him down on
the river road around this hour, hitting his Jake brakes,
slowing his rig on the curves. The sound bounces up and out,
finds us here on College Hill—wide-awake at four o’clock,
trying to return to sleep. He pauses at the highway ramp,
crosses the river, picks up speed. Soon he’ll unload at a market,
where workers rush to stock the shelves, where items spurned
for years are in demand: dry beans, yeast and prunes.
And here in the dark I’m my grandmother’s little girl again,
helping to squeeze red dye into bags of oleomargarine, waiting
to eat the biscuits she’ll take from her small white oven
while she listens to the radio, hopes there may be a letter today
from my uncle in the Army. Always the waiting. For the
the morning paper, twice-daily mail. Always we want news.
Bless our neighbor leaving now for what must be essential work.
Beams from his headlights circle the room. Birds are beginning
to stir, recalling those childhood mornings when I rose ahead of
my family, roused by their chorus, lifted into the dawn on wings.
After breakfast I’ll weed radishes we planted on a day that seems
like years go. Despite a killing frost, they’ve sprouted leaves.
Light is on the way. See how the air is whitening? That there’s
food … and those who must be fed. No certainties but these today.

Juditha Dowd’s latest book is Audubon’s Sparrow, a verse biography in the voice of Lucy Bakewell Audubon, out this month from Rose Metal Press. She has contributed work to many journals and anthologies, including Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, Spillway, Ekphrasis, Rock & Sling, and Florida Review.

OFF DUTY

by Ann Neuser Lederer

Photo by Carol Dorf 

A man crawls
into his own bedroom
window.

It's already night.
He might be contagious.

Soon, a tone—a lone violin—
seeps through the shut room's door.

A grandma nudges—you
can join in with your dad.

A few bars, back and forth.
An unseen whispered conversation.

In the dark of the morning
he descends.

Instead of the bus he walks.
Invisible birds announce it is day.

All playgrounds are locked, the schools deserted—
the children still safe in their sleep.

Ann Neuser Lederer's poetry and nonfiction are published in journals such as Diagram, Passages North, Brevity, 2 River Review, and UCity Review whose "noteworthy" section presents ten of her poems. Her work is also honored in Best of the Net and Ohio State University's Vandewater Poetry Award; published in anthologies such as A Call to Nursing and The Country Doctor Revisited; and in her chapbooks Approaching Freeze (2003), The Undifferentiated (2003), Weaning the Babies (2007), and Fly Away Home (2019). Ann was born in Ohio and has worked there and surrounding states as a Registered Nurse.

MY GREAT-GRANDPARENTS & THE BURKINI BAN

by Judith Terzi

Image source: Judith Terzi

after “What people are saying about ‘burkinis’ in France” 

—L.A. Times, August 18, 2016

Zipporah. She is covered from head to toe 

with an apron & layers of cloth. 

There is the idea that . . . women are 

immodest, impure, that they

should therefore be completely 

covered. Wool scarves swirl around her 

hidden neck in the black & white 

photo. A headscarf, or a tichel, hides 

every strand of great-grandmother's 

hair. [This] is not compatible 

with the values of France and 

the republic. Zipporah––a bird in Hebrew.

She flew from Russia to a brownstone 

in Baltimore. She sits on a stoop. Even her 

hands are invisible; we see only her 

withered face. She is over a hundred. 

I issued this order . . . to ensure the safety 

of my city . . .  am only prohibiting 

a uniform that is the symbol of Islamist 

extremism. Zipporah––a bird who 

flew to the heavens before I was born. She 

sits next to my great-grandfather 

in the black & white photo. Hasidic white 

beard, a yarmulke between him and 

his God. It is the soul of France that is

in question . . . France does not hide half 

of its population under the . . . odious

pretext that the other half would be 

afraid of temptation. An oversized wool suit 

envelops his body & his fringes. 

In the 32mm film, he blesses my mother 

& her sisters. His body rocks. Back 

& forth, back & forth, as he recites prayer. 

Pious great-grandfather who gave me 

my name. The beaches, like any 

public space, must be  preserved 

from religious demands. Great-grandparents 

covered in faith & fabric.

Author’s Note: Italics indicate direct quotes from French governmental officials, including the Prime Minister, the Minister for women's rights, and the Mayor of Cannes.

Judith Terzi's poetry has appeared in a wide variety of journals and anthologies including Caesura, Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai, Raintown Review, Spillway, Unsplendid, and Wide Awake: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. If You Spot Your Brother Floating By is her most recent chapbook from Kattywompus Press. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and Web.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

by Rhiannon Thorne

"This evening, Michelle and I will do what I know every parent in America will do, which is hug our children a little tighter, and we'll tell them that we love them, and we'll remind each other how deeply we love one another. But there are families in Connecticut who cannot do that tonight . . ."

Next year I will wrap you presents
and you will not understand the need for bows,
but will reach towards them for days
in anticipation.

I will fret my wardrobe decision: do I dress you
for photographs or in a pattern that will hide
your smudgy fingerprints?  Or maybe the floral one
your grandmother, your father's mother,
will surely buy you to match her couch.

You'll have to wear it sometime, anyways,
to appease her.

You will laugh, pressing slobbered fingers
into sticky cake, and scowl at the flash while I sing you
Happy Birthday; whisper in your ear:
it was the happiest day of my life.

In Connecticut, a former mother will spend the week crying.
She will wonder what flowers
she should order for your birthday: White roses
or something with color?

She will sink down to her knees on a fresh wound
with well established grass.

I love you, she will say; it was the worst day
of my life.


Rhiannon Thorne’s work has appeared/is forthcoming in Gr@wl!x, Surreal Grotesque, The Legendary, Ditch, The Junk Lot Review, Vox Poetica, Zygote in my Coffee, e-Fiction, and Fried Chicken and Coffee. She also co-edits the online publication cahoodaloodaling.