AS A TEN-YEAR-OLD OHIO GIRL

by Laura Grace Weldon

file photo… not the author

I lived the lives I read in books.

I wandered English moors,

raced my horse past Russian wolves,

befriended dolphins, spoke in whistles,

made my home in a hollow tree.

Made a pact with Kim—we’d never

grow breasts, agreeing the encumbrance

made girls act stupid. Boys, stupider.

I’d grown well past playing house

so no longer stuffed a baby doll

under my shirt, letting it drop

into my hands to make me a mama.

I hadn’t grown out of stuffed animals,

Barbies, hula hoops, or bubbles.  

At ten I rode my bike, climbed trees,

giggled with girlfriends. I wasn’t old

enough to babysit. Wasn’t sure

what sex was, exactly.

Now a ten-year-old girl 

is deemed old enough 

in Ohio to be the mother

of her rapist’s child.    

Laura Grace Weldon served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. Laura lives on a ramshackle Ohio farm and as a book editor. 

THE LEAK, THE CHILL, AND FOAMCORE

by Tricia Knoll

5am. This fleece robe does not ward off April chill

that goes to my bones knowing what leaked. 

Someone could not stay silent. Someone was right. 

Fifty years and my hand knows a rage. I grab a marker

to make my sign. Simple words, I insist, simple words:

I remember

 

                        that girl who hired a man to drive her

to Mexico. They did not drink Margaritas. She returned

with a raging infection. She lost one possible future

as a mother. She was eighteen. Jobless. Alone. 

She rocked herself holding a teddy bear

and smoked menthol cigarettes. She did not tell

her Catholic family.  I could hear her rocking

 in the room next door. Her teddy bear wore

 a scarlet ribbon. 

 

Rachel Maddow said all her life women had this one right. 

How strange to have become this old: I remember.

The Janes remember. The jobless remember. Those raped

remember. Those with hard decisions remember. 

And now it’s possible to get legal abortions in Mexico. 

Yes, I remember. My sign smells of broad-stroke marker. 

Tricia Knoll does remember the days before Roe v. Wade. This draft court opinion terrifies her. As people in Ukraine have expressed, it is no gift to experience deja vu. Her poetry appears widely in anthologies, journals, and five collections of poetry. She is a contributing editor to Verse Virtual. 

THE ROAD BACK TO YEMEN FROM A BROOKLYN LAUNDROMAT GOES UP IN SMOKE

Editor's Note: We are pleased to repost this poem, originally published in TheNewVerse.News on Tuesday, May 19, 2015. It is one of our 2015 Pushcart Prize nominees.


THE ROAD BACK TO YEMEN FROM A BROOKLYN LAUNDROMAT GOES UP IN SMOKE
by Linda Lerner

                                                     
separate, he asks, as he puts my laundry
on the scale.  Yes, separate, I say
still . . . week after week, tries to make
this American woman understand
what it feels like, no, make me smell
the smoke of mortar & rocket fire politics
keeping him from getting his wife & daughter
everything so carefully arranged, end of
June, his graduation from college, and then . . . puff
do you see?
                what I see is the road
twisting and turning  in his mind
teasing him  now it’s here, now it’s gone
he says of a promised cease fire;

when he speaks of his birth country
of things getting worse
I see frightened people imprisoned
in their homes  being deprived of basic necessities

I see a country being raped…
I do not see his wife and daughter
he will not let me

Internally displaced people bathe and wash clothes in a local river close to the Al-Mazraq IDP camps, Al-Mazraq, Yemen. Source: Daily Mail

Linda Lerner’s latest  collection "Yes, the Ducks Were Real" (NYQ books) and her chapbook "Ding Dong the Bell  Pussy in the Well" (Lummox Press) were published recently. 

THE ROAD BACK TO YEMEN FROM A BROOKLYN LAUNDROMAT GOES UP IN SMOKE

by Linda Lerner

                                                     
separate, he asks, as he puts my laundry
on the scale.  Yes, separate, I say
still . . . week after week, tries to make
this American woman understand
what it feels like, no, make me smell
the smoke of mortar & rocket fire politics
keeping him from getting his wife & daughter
everything so carefully arranged, end of
June, his graduation from college, and then . . . puff
do you see?
                what I see is the road
twisting and turning  in his mind
teasing him  now it’s here, now it’s gone
he says of a promised cease fire;

when he speaks of his birth country
of things getting worse
I see frightened people imprisoned
in their homes  being deprived of basic necessities

I see a country being raped…
I do not see his wife and daughter
he will not let me

Internally displaced people bathe and wash clothes in a local river close to the Al-Mazraq IDP camps, Al-Mazraq, Yemen. Source: Daily Mail

Linda Lerner’s latest  collection "Yes, the Ducks Were Real" (NYQ books) and her chapbook "Ding Dong the Bell  Pussy in the Well" (Lummox Press) were published recently.