We are excited to share poetry by Wren Hanks and Tracy Mishkin, whose chapbooks have been selected by editor Kiki Petrosino for inclusion in the Mineral Point Poetry Series this fall. Wren Hanks’s The Rise of Genderqueer will be available August 14, and Tracy Mishkin’s This Is Still Life releases September 18.

Poems by Wren Hanks

from The Rise of Genderqueer

It’s her mouth on my cock in a unisex bar stall / my hand squeezing his cock under the greasy table / it’s my girlfriend on the marble countertop / while I’m breaking a wooden spoon / against her ass / Daddy, it’s me in a car / at 16 / convincing a Catholic boy / to put his hands on my breasts / it’s that you think / I’m a dyke / when you see my shaved head / like definitions / will protect anyone / from me / Daddy, I’m coming / for your daughters / I’m coming for your sons / coming for the dog whistle genders / in between / perhaps I am / the dog whistle / in between / Daddy Pence / don’t wait up

Dear Daddy Pence, meet me at Olive Garden

We’ll compare notes on nuptial bliss / on nights staring at Seven of Nine’s tits / while our wives drink reasonable / thimbles of wine / on ironing shirts / (tomatoes off the vine, Daddy, / and garlic bread too) / on spitting our Crest into those sinks / rimmed / with cat hair / I’ll take your hand / and ask you how long it’s been / really / since one look / at a man’s / brought your pulse up / I know the answer, already, Daddy / It’s the camera-ready red / this soldier’s aiming for

Daddy Pence, when you kiss your wife is it like

stars and stripes / your tongue an eagle’s wing / no wait a talon / do you make her mute, daddy / the way you wanna make me / a silent statistic / de-transitioned with those / chewable / bubblegums hips / Daddy, were you ever / the beauty / on someone’s bed / have you ever been / a fucking object

Poems by Tracy Mishkin

from This Is Still Life

The Deadweight Machine

As if a tectonic shift has dumped a mountain
on his chest, my husband slumps in the easy chair.
Five weeks until the homeowners insurance
drops us, stacks of useful junk around the yard.
The deadweight machine measures how you hold up
against tension and compression.

When he begins to snore like Rip Van Winkle,
I imagine an organic grocer’s typo has created
a display of orgasmic blueberries. I eat them all
without paying. A man in a green apron restocks
the shelves with tender hands.

Before the war, people weighed beginning again
in a new language against the coming storm.
Every time I think of leaving, he catches a death
rattle in my car, stops the house from flooding,
sweet-talks a raccoon out the kitchen door.

This is Still Life

The house has a fresh coat of pain.
Screwdriver and utility knife abandoned
on the bed. Drawers choked
with plastic forks. Receipts, seeds,
and batteries. Needles, carpet tacks,
an open blade. Red string streaming
from cabinets—the battle flag
of a man who throws nothing away.

I should have split when I first saw
his apartment, crammed with power tools
and old TVs. Barely space to sleep.
But we weren’t sleeping, we were burning.
Falling. More room in my heart
for crazy than I knew.

My mother knows I’d rather get wet
than wait. She warns me not to fight
to reach the items on the highest shelf.
Lightning isn’t fair, she says. Arugula
doesn’t make it healthy. When you need
a Phillips, all you find are flatheads.
She calls my house memento mori:
orchids, bonsai, sun-bleached boards.

Stumbling Through

After the yellow tape and the dark blood,
after the wallet with our family photos
is released, after three days of paid bereavement
pass and the jar goes round at work
for casket funds, after I dream of identifying
the body, after the cops come back
to question us again, after praise for the Lord
and the embalmer’s skill, after whispers of revenge
and today we do not mourn, then the first breath
without a sob.

We are excited to share poetry by Rita Feinstein and Sarah McCartt-Jackson, whose chapbooks have been selected by editor Kiki Petrosino for inclusion in the Mineral Point Poetry Series this fall. Rita Feinstein’s Life on Dodge will be available October 16, and Sarah McCartt-Jackson’s Calf Canyon releases November 13.

Poems by Rita Feinstein

from Life on Dodge

When you left, there was a sound
like the scraping of a dagger
being unsheathed from my heart,
and in the left-behind hollow,
a red bat came to roost.
Good, I thought, because bats go
where moths go and moths go
where the light is, which means
there’s still something like a streetlamp
in me, however dusty and guttering.
But where its corona bleeds to black,
you can still hear it—the sleek shriek
of steel against bone, the infinite echo
of you pulling away.

You have gone, and so can I.
I can go to a red planet
with no name, no coordinates.
There is no wind here, no dust,
nowhere to stake a flag. No rotation,
no view. No ocean under the crust
and no ice at the poles. There is
no gravity, no atmosphere,
and no one to name its craters.
There is not a robot to help repair
the spaceship I don’t have.
There are no giant worms in the sand.
There is no sand. There is nothing here
but not enough of it.

This planet is my home now—
might as well name it. I name it Dodge,
in the hope that someday I will
get the hell out of it. Or that it will
get out of me. It lodges deeply
in my hips, constricting its fist.
It’s a hard, round ache in my breasts.
I can taste it on the back of my tongue,
sour like beef blood. The last time
I hurt this much, we were too poor even
for a bath plug, so you filled a plastic bag
with sand and let the drain suck it into place.
It was the best you could do. The iron-orange
water held, but so did the pain.

Poems by Sarah McCartt-Jackson

from Calf Canyon

Drought

It begins with drink. Our eyes drink color and reflect it back to our brains, which drink shape. Shape drinks shade, leafshadows scrambling on their stems like starlings stuck to wire. Wire drinks voices, spliced threads chopped apart and ribosomed back together in a winding ladder propped against our earlobes. Our earbones drink the wet sounds of leaves unfolding newborn fists, the desperate sound of fish gills in a boat bucket. Our hands drink the wormblood and hook. Our foreheads drink sweat, our forearms hair and knuckle. Our ankles the mosquito tongue, dry of our neighbor’s blood. Boatplanks drink scales and shoe soles and cigarette ash and oceanfog and the heat of sunlogged turtles, which drink the cloverstem milk, which drinks the roothairs, which drink the cavelight, which drinks the batwing, drinks the limestone, drinks the fossilbone slipped between a molten stone harvest. The inner core drinks iron-tasting pennies, nickel. Not enough liquid in the world to fill its iron core. And this is how in drought I learn a rogue billet does not raise a doe’s eye, how a doe does not lift from drinking.

Wildfire

We watched the fires spread.

Neighbors set up their lawn chairs

to watch their neighbors’ houses burn.

Which is how I caught a bottle

to the face when I threw a cigarette

butt out the window. And how

the bottle shattered and fractured

the windshield after my jaw and how later

he didn’t remember (or said he didn’t)

how the windshield cracked,

and I told him,

and he said that wasn’t true.

And so it wasn’t true.

Creston

I did not see the moonwashed lake behind our trailer or the yellow finch in the avocado tree. I did not see the fire, the smoke of which we watched from the mustard thistle lawn. I did not see the coyotes eating the dead cattle or the California mouse while it was still alive. I did not see old Ted (all thirty-three and married) wreck on Shell Creek Road with a nineteen-year-old passenger in lip gloss and cutoffs, when it was not just ten days before he took me to a baby’s grave on our way back from buying a pack of cigarettes, and me seventeen. The freeze on the vineyard edges. The lizard drinking from the wild pig bleed. The shotgun slug through the throat of a barn owl, hanging by a wing from its owl house.

I saw what happens when girls—who are not supposed to—witness their babies’ faces. I saw the helicopters circling like released seeds, their gondola buckets of water dangling. I saw the cattle troughs dry as the Camatta creekbed and cow bodies bulked in the live oak shade. I saw a peregrine falcon tearing the mouse bones, beak to skull, hunger coagulated in its nares. A flatbed truck with whiskey and paper cups, an empty graveyard with a moon big as a belly. Reservoirs turned to sulfur. Pig hooves charred in the barbecue pit. A fifty-three-year-old owl perched in the left ventricle of my heart.