THE FIRST HUNDRED DAYS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

If you can see the moon from your window
even through the wall of branches
then it is calling you to worship.
Hard to stay in bed,
impossible to stay in the house.  
If you can see the moon from the front porch,
you can see raccoons and the seven doe
in blue shadows. The owl wonders
what you are doing here.  Thick
wandering roots reach from the trees, 
dusted with a skin of snow, like veins 
on the backs of your hands going 
where they must go. 
If you can see the moon from Earth,
the cataclysm is still in the future.
Your breath is a cloud without shape.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

BATHING BEAUTIES

by Karen Olshansky

I’ve always despised Martha Stewart,

her smug, “I can cook anything from scratch, 

decorate a table with weeds from my

yard,”and, her hints:

add a Lazy Susan to your fridge,

label everything,

make a triple fudge multilayered cake

while dictating an article on preventing mildew,

create a blender smoothie from 

home grown vegetables,

and, most importantly,

how to be the perfect prison inmate by teaching yoga.

My first swimsuit was a

two piece blue stripped beauty

with a skirt bottom.

I loved it, the only problem was that after a hard afternoon

of playing in the shallow river waters, 

my top would

drift upwards to reveal tiny nipples, my mother would say,

“just take off your top” but that was bad advice for a 

self conscious little girl.

at 16 I wore a one piece tank suit with four buttons on 

the front outlining my breasts,

my mother thought I looked wow, 

I felt that my thighs were fat.

At 26, I had a grown-up two piece with a skirt bottom.

After a dip in the ocean a much older male relative said,

“You are a fine figure of a woman” which made me 

feel slightly dirty, never did wear that outfit  again.

Now when I go swimming, I hide accordion skin,

vein lined legs, and falling body parts

by wearing a long sleeve caftan

that drapes towards my ankles.

Martha Stewart, who, at 81, throws her perfectly coiffed hair

around like she is making a Clairol commercial, dons white (white!)

bathing attire that shows

the full top half her breasts. 

My grandmother and her friends would go swimming 

unashamed of the blue streaks threatening to

escape from their legs, belly fat and breasts hanging low 

as ripe peaches on a tree.

They never heard of Martha Stewart.

Karen Olshansky lives in Marin County California with her husband and a well fed Koi named Pickle Face. She writes poetry in order to maintain her sanity. Her work has appeared in The Literary Nest, Tuck Magazine and the anthologies Lingering in the Margins, Life in Ten Minutes, Unspoken, and The James River Anthology.

HOW WE IMAGINED WE BLED OUR SUPPLICATIONS

by Ranjani Murali

Ink, Blood, and Tears, an OtherWords cartoon by Khalil Bendib

As if water dripping into
            the steel sink, bleaching

our brushes white, scoring the floors
            of our glass-doored office /

as if the vein of our favorite fountain
            pens (the ones that dug into

our index fingers while we caricatured
            old art teachers with balding

heads) had been spliced, spurting forth
            ink-splotched faces, the aphorisms

we drew in bubbles, their blood-vowels /
            as if bullets we drove into the walls

of easels, blithely / as if specks of flesh
            carving out their wounds, sinew

torn in watercolor, shards of glass painted
            in felt-tips / as if the tilt of our

mouths in these scenes, the seconds we
            almost smiled between smearing

steeple-minaret-altar as if wings / as if
            hierologists of tomorrows,

revealing our schisms, our compositions
            in grays and whitespace/ as

if ours, a name stenciled on drywall, on
            acid-free paper, beneath our

benedictions, beneath the as if / as if
            beneath the /  if  /


Ranjani Murali received her MFA in poetry from George Mason University. Her poetry, nonfiction and translations have appeared in Pratilipi, Phoebe, elimae, Kartika Review and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2014 Srinivas Rayaprol Prize and has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Vermont Studio Center.