Jennings, Brittany – Page 4 – Willow Springs Magazine

Two Poems by Elizabeth Tannen

Found in Willow Springs 90

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Liz Phair, fifteen weeks

On the same morning I learn
the fetus is developing folds that

will become ears I also hear
that Liz Phair has a new album

which makes me weepy because
special sentimentalities go along

with being pregnant and with being
a teenager and hearing her name now

converges these chapters, makes
me reminisce about being fifteen

and in the back of Webster Hall,
swaying because I was so uncomfortable

in my body and so taken
with excitement to be at my very

first concert beside a very
pretty friend whose taste in music

I let mold mine. Liz’s voice
has stayed the same but her heartache

hasn’t aged well. She sounds
less fierce, more codependent.

We were both supposed to stay
youthful forever. We were both

supposed to remain as cool
as we felt in the 90s. I listen

to the new album again to try
and like it better but it just

makes me want to hear
Exile in Guyville, and I belt out

the lyrics like the fetus
can hear, like it might forgive

me and Liz for the imperfect
ways we’ve aged.

Riddle, six weeks

Are you sure you want to switch
to pregnancy-tracking mode?

my period-tracking app asks and a purple
circle with a peanut-shaped image of an embryo

at the center stares up at me as I stand
in the white-walled laundry room

of my apartment building basement
where I have come to hide

from my partner who does not want
a pregnancy or a baby or a child

and to retrieve a load of wet washing
and in the process I’ve hit what now

appears to be a very significant button
whose pressing will activate an endless

stream of content warning women what

to eat and what not to eat and what skin

products to avoid and which to use and
on any given day, whether your embryo

is the size of a sesame seed or a lentil
and which exercises you should try

and which never and whatever you do,
don’t stress out, it’s bad for the baby,

but I don’t know that yet and in the moment
I’m not prepared because it’s Friday

and I’m between Zoom meetings and
it’s been only minutes since I removed

the pink wrapper on the First Response test
and peed into a glass jar that used to hold

a pine-scented candle but today
holds my yellow urine which apparently

contains the hormone that the test
says means positive which means

that today my body is pregnant and yet
my body is also over thirty-five and has

never, to my knowledge, carried a pregnancy
and there are too many emotions to process

all of which will conflict directly with those
of my baby-hating partner and so it seems

strange that the app whose job I thought
it was to simply track my menstrual cycle

should be so bold as to ask whether
I’m sure about anything

Elizabeth Tannen is a writer, educator and fundraiser in Minneapolis. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of New Mexico and has published poems and essays in places like Copper Nickel, PANK, Salon, The Rumpus, Passages North and elsewhere. You can find more of her work at her website. She tweets on occasion at @TannenElizabeth.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "Riddle, six weeks" and "Liz Phair, fifteen weeks"

I wound up writing a book’s worth of poems when I was pregnant, which I didn’t anticipate. I always knew I wanted to have a child, but I wasn’t attached to having one biologically (it just happened to be the easiest path for me, in the end) so I didn’t know anything about pregnancy and found myself completely astounded by its utter weirdness. I think there’s a fascinating tension between the common-ness of pregnancy (as well as birth and child-rearing) and also how completely wild and strange and miraculous they all are. I just couldn’t (can’t) get over it. Also, I’ve written very few poems since my son was born, and it’s not an issue of time because I have worked on essays. Maybe there’s something more lyric or poetic about a potential life than an actual one? (There is a line in Lydia Millet’s novel “The Children’s Bible” that gets at this but for the life of me I can’t find it, please help if you can!)

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

Music: Becoming a parent, as “Liz Phair” references, can make you prone to erratic bouts of nostalgia–so in addition to the typical Raffi and Beatles and Peter Paul and Mary I’ve also been playing a lot of Joni Mitchell, Grateful Dead and James Taylor. My partner plays a lot of Leonard Cohen and Talking Heads. We both play a lot of classical. It’s the Jewish High Holidays and I’ve also been listening to the traditional melodies played in shul. (See nostalgia comment above.) Sidenote - a friend got me a copy of this songbook called Rise Up, Singing with lyrics to every song you’d ever want to sing to your child - big recommend! That was an extremely peripatetic response!
Food/Booze: Fall makes me want to chug apple cider or, on occasion, that absurdly delicious “chaider” hybrid drink that some fancy coffee shops seem to have. On the booze front, as I’ve gotten older I’m leaning more and more into spending some money on red wine that I actually like drinking. I recently schlepped my ten month old to a suburban Costco immediately following Rosh Hoshanah services to stock up (I usually just get a bottle or two at once) and I felt very adult and also very ridiculous and sketchy.
Kittens: I hate cats. (Sorry.) But I do have a shepard/retriever mix (actual genetic heritage unknown because we’re too cheap to find out) named Elsa. She is extremely sweet and tolerant of the baby’s constant (and I mean quite literally, constant) harassment but clearly would prefer it if he was removed from her life tomorrow. This weekend we’re having our first baby-free overnight so dropped him with my in-laws and I don’t think I’ve ever seen Elsa so happy as when we pulled out of their driveway without him! She’ll be in for a disappointment come Sunday…

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“To Appreciate Squirrels” by Joan Murray

Found in Willow Springs 90

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To appreciate squirrels
you have to walk toward Peterborough with Eric Gamalinda,
down the steep part of High Street
where there are woods on both sides of the road.
It should be a day or two before the summer solstice,
you must be discussing feng shui—
when you suddenly see a squirrel on its hundredth daily crossing
from one side of the road to the other.
Forget that Eric is an important poet in Manila—
Eric says that everyone in Manila is an important poet—
this isn’t a matter of authority.
What matters is that Eric sees the squirrel and shouts,
Look at that amazing thing!

And immediately you notice that the tail of a squirrel
is the incarnation of impulsive grace,
and you stand there motionless as it maneuvers that tail,
shaking off your received opinions, your discriminatory
attitudes, until it has disrobed itself
of you, and is only itself.
And you recall a morning when you were new,
when you still believed you could float through the window
if you pleased, when a squirrel came in from the fire escape
and stood on your crazy quilt, contemplating you eye to eye,
the only thing that’s ever come to your bed unbidden.
Oh, but then it was your mother, screaming, screaming,
as if she’d caught a molester.

But now that squirrel’s there again, starting to cross over,
and you’re standing with Eric Gamalinda,
seeing that thing, as if you were in Eden and
it had no name, as if it were the first one,
unspoiled by the success of its adaptation to your world,
and you think, my God, it is amazing—
a word you never thought you’d see in a poem,
much less put in one yourself,
but you’ve just been walking with Eric Gamalinda,
who comes from a place where there are no squirrels,
who spoke without irony when he praised the squirrel,
who gave you permission
to appreciate it.

Issue 90: Joan Murray

About Joan Murray

Joan Murray is a (mostly narrative) poet who’s published prize-winning books with Wesleyan, Beacon, White Pine and Norton. Her favorite is Queen of the Mist, a first-person novel in verse about the first person to go over Niagara in a barrel. Her poems have been in The New Yorker and The Atlantic and lots of wonderful smaller journals; her new fiction will be in River Styx, her non-fiction in Alaska Quarterly Review. A two-time NEA Fellowship winner, she’s been Poet in Residence at the New York State Writers Institute, and is editor of the Poems to Live By anthologies and The Pushcart Book of Poetry.

www.JoanMurray.com

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "To Appreciate Squires"

In writing poems, I’m usually trying to understand something, rather than tell what I already know—which happened in my squirrel poem. The “dramatic situation” was a walk I took with a poet named Eric Gamalinda when we were at the MacDowell colony in New Hampshire. We were newly arrived (Eric from the Philippines, I from New York) and we didn’t know each other. But Blake Tewksbury, MacDowell’s groundsman-gardener, lunch-basket deliverer, and unobtrusive shaman, recognized some spiritual dimension in us both and invited us to dinner at his house in town.

As Eric and I were headed there, down a long steep road, an epiphany ran across my path—in the form of a squirrel. My consciousness, with its received opinions, barely took in the squirrel and swatted it away. But Eric regarded it with open eyes and allowed himself to be amazed. Which allowed me to pause and be amazed too.

The next day as I wrote the poem, I was riffing along as I usually do, when up popped my ur-squirrel—the one who came into my bedroom when I was very small. And up popped my mother across the room. And there I was, stretched out in wonder, until my mother started feeding me her negativity. I had pictured that scene often, but never grasped its meaning, until I started writing about Eric’s ur-squirrel: “as if we were in Eden and it had no name.” In most of my poems, I’ll spontaneously make connections like that. Things that strike sparks to reveal things. What a gift—to suddenly break free from an old prejudice.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

I want to say I’m a connoisseur of ambient electronica, saffron dishes and stirred martinis, who sported a lizard tattoo and rescued a baby raccoon. But here’s the more complete truth: At night, I listen to ambient sounds on PRX’s Echoes, but when I’m walking, driving, or at the gym, my sounds are Bach, Santana, and Yellowman. And while I’ve made saffron risotto a few times, the food of my native land is junk food. My go-to’s are Cheez-its, Fritos, and Snickers. For real meals, I favor vegetarian. Every evening after a mile-long walk (where I sometimes see eagles), my husband makes me a gin-and-tonic so I can sit on the side porch watching hummingbirds until it gets cold. As for martinis, I’ve gotten smashed on Cosmos a couple of times with a couple of friends singing show tunes.

Once at Yaddo, I had a lizard around my bicep, until an artist told me she was envious, and I scraped it off. Back in the Bronx, we had raccoons on our balcony, and recently in the country, I rescued a baby one—long enough so a professional could collect it. But my major animal relationships have been feline. When we bought our rambling, crumbling house, it begged for cats, so I adopted two. The sign in the Country Store said “they like to curl up in your lap when you read” (it wasn’t true). A third came along that December when we had cat food and compassion. The fourth appeared with a broken hip, a missing eye, and two kittens inside. Time went by, and then there were none. Please don’t send kittens; Snickers will do.

“To Appreciate Squirrels” by Joan Murray

Found in Willow Springs 90 Back to Author Profile To appreciate squirrelsyou have to walk toward Peterborough with Eric Gamalinda,down the steep part of High Streetwhere there are woods on both … Read more

Found in Willow Springs 90

Back to Author Profile

ONCE, THERE WAS A GIRL. But she wasn’t a girl, she was a spider. But she wasn’t a singular spider, she was a thousand: tiny spindly legs tucked and tangled, clustered eyes dancing, twinkling, bodies nestled in silk cocoon, hidden beneath the disguise of a girl with a slick black ponytail and ten fingers and ten toes and a dotted freckle, just beneath her left eye.

ONCE, THERE WAS A GIRL/SPIDER/CLUSTER who wanted to find love. But being made of spiders made lovemaking difficult. Men, in her experience, even the ones who claimed to be fearless, were scared of anything smaller than they were. Scared of anything
unknown or unknowable. Plus, when she peeled back her soft skin to reveal a writhing mass of arachnids, she couldn’t quite understand where a vagina was supposed to be, or how deep a burrow to make inside herself, or where hands were supposed to grab or hold or squeeze if not for her breasts, which were also spiders, who did not want to be pinched, in any case.

The cluster/spider/girl did not like the idea of letting another invade her, redefine her, as anything other than what she was, a multitude of miracles. So, she found things to love that weren’t men, such as the way night slipped down across the horizon and turned the sky inky black, or the way small bugs would skitter from hiding corners and tickle her tongue during dinner, or the way silk webs wrapped so softly around her feet at night.

ONCE, THE CLUSTER/GIRL/SPIDER MET SOMEONE. He was tall and thin and reminded her of the best tree branches, and his eyes were the ochre of grasshopper guts, and his teeth so much like smooth sea-pebbles.

“Hey,” he said, admiring the way her fingers worked a skein of yarn as she was knitting on a park bench, looking as if she were wondering if it would be considered rude to molt in public.

She looked up, fingers missing a loop and tangling the thread. He didn’t notice as one of the spiders crawled out from her blouse and
quickly untangled the knot with practiced pedipalps.

“Hey,” she said, the spiders which worked her tongue creating the perfect pitch, the ‘ay’ as soft as breath.

The man asked her for coffee, because she looked so lonely and so beautiful, so she said yes, and he didn’t even question why she didn’t drink her skim-milk latte or touch her scone, which was too warm and smelled like artificial vanilla, too sweet. The spiders who occupied her brain whispered worries about the way his eyes never met their own, and how something with his smile was off, and why he never asked her questions about herself but rather focused the conversation on his job as a part-time bartender on the south side, and the string of ex-girlfriends he left behind in Philly, and his preference of ankle socks over midcalf (not on him, but on her, of course). But the spiders crowding her heart-space gossiped about true love and nights spent caressing warm lips and where they would lay their collection of eggs as abundant and fragile as froths of seafoam.

The girl/cluster/spider gave him directions to her apartment, which was modest and dim and smelled like cobwebs, cedar-scented candles, and expensive parfum. He commented on her collection of crickets housed in glass terrariums, which she explained was for a science experiment about the benefits of ambient noise indoors and not a key ingredient in her morning smoothies.

“Hmm,” he said, and left it at that.

He was all too quick to kiss her, lead her into her bedroom, tug at the skin which covered thousands of legs and eyes and spinnerets nervously spinning their sticky web in her stomach. The spiders whose job it was to make the lips weren’t happy with the way he bit down on their cephalothoraxes, and the tongue-spiders were less than pleased with being slicked with spit.

“Stop,” she said.

He ripped at her blouse, which she’d knitted herself from proteins consumed and recycled and remade, and toppled her onto the bed.

“Stop,” she said.

He wasn’t dissuaded by the lack of opening between her legs, or the few spiders that rushed to escape the holes of her ears in fear of what might come next.

“Stop,” she said.

But he didn’t. He wouldn’t. He tore away her skin and pressed his fingers into the cloud of trichobothria and wispy web. In fairness, the bravest of the bunch threw their legs into a threat posture, swaying back and forth, showcasing fangs meant for cleaning and catching and anything but this. He laughed, mumbling something about how beautiful it was that even their threats looked so much like dancing.

The spider/girl/cluster didn’t want to force herself into the man’s lungs. They didn’t want to occupy whatever filth hid beneath his flesh and sinew, muscle and bone. They didn’t want to eat him, but otherwise he might have gone to waste. The cluster/spider/girl closed their eyes and thought of anything other than what was happening. They thought of warm beds wrapped from gossamer and dew, not of the gooey wet behind his eyes. Of nights weaving stories from threads, not of the tangle of his unwashed hair. Of drinking together with their millions of sisters, not of how warm his blood tasted, bitter iron and butter, thin before coagulating into jelly.

“and thank every hour” and “prayer” by nicole v basta

Found in Willow Springs 90

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"and thank every hour"

the small yellow gods that are warblers
are skimming the scum at the top with their wings
and may all words be like the name of this bird
the mouth trampling over the tongue to make sound
of our naming, an honest attempt to do justice
to what has no concept of justice and thank every hour
for each breathing honorable thing not making a mess
of another, no crooked law or wicked judge needed
to mitigate wrongdoing—and remembering the wrens
the tiny eyelashes on the cheek of the field
and how these birds throw the eggs out of the nests
of other birds instead of building their own
and so is instinct, in a way, like a soldier
who follows an order from the top?
can you tell me please where is it written
how to forgive

"prayer"

no one is watching and then, i watch

a praying mantis ladders the window screen

and i don’t believe in mistakes

so my looking at the moment she shimmies

herself upside down, as i understand it,

is a kind of signal for a new year

one where when a dusty god in the lowgrass

nips at my ankles, it translates to kissing

to a welt in honor of pleasure

what i am trying to say is there’s some sort of heaven

in her triangle head

in the way she turns toward me

rocking as if weeping

how motion can soothe

how power can arrive on naked wings

without warning

i do believe in sequences

how things belong to sound and meaning

a place from which we can measure

mantis, from the greek word for prophet

i want to be the butterfly

in her mouth

a silence snatched from the air

Issue 90: nicole v basta

About nicole v basta

nicole v basta's poems have found homes in Ploughshares, Waxwing, Plume, Crazyhorse, North American Review, The Cortland Review etc. She is the author of the chapbook V, the winner of The New School's Annual Contest and the chapbook the next field over, out now from Tolsun Books.

More: nicolevbasta.com

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "and thank every hour" and "prayer"

While I was an artist-in-residence at the magical Art Farm Nebraska, I read a lot of old books that had been kicking around the farm for probably decades, one of which taught you how to identify birds, bugs, among other things. I think “and thank every hour” really did begin with a deep appreciation for the sound of the word warbler. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard says “Why didn’t God let the animals in Eden name the man…” So I think I am trying to say something like that, or I am always saying who the hell put humans on a pedestal above the rest. These poems are part of a larger manuscript that contends with ancestral stories including the disappearance of my great-great grandmother at the hands of Russian soldiers. I also deeply care for a person who was a soldier. The complexity of militarized violence includes how a soldier is also a kind of victim of that violence. The final two lines of the poem surprised me but they were there from the start and I knew that they belonged.

99.9% of the time, my poems have 10-30 drafts before I start sending them out. “prayer” is one of maybe two poems that I wrote in almost one fell swoop. This praying mantis came to visit me at my studio in the middle of a field on Art Farm. I guess I was thinking about control and chance that day while this mantis performed a bunch of cool moves in front of me. I read in the book that a praying mantis can grab a butterfly mid-flight for a snack. Sometimes I want to be the mantis, sometimes the butterfly, sometimes the little bugs that nip at your ankles. I always want to believe all of it means something

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

Well, it is suddenly too close to winter so I am trying to lean in. I’ve been eating a lot of roasted veggies and thai chili peanuts and night cap cheese. I’ve switched to whiskey from tequila, but mostly I’m drinking lemon balm and skullcap cinnamon tea. I’m currently not a mother to any human or fur children but an auntie to two beauties: Spudzy and Beanie, an elder pup (you’re so smart, Spudz) and an actual puppy. Loretta Lynn died today and I wouldn’t be a coal miner’s (grand)daughter, if I wasn’t honoring her by listening my way through her years as a honky tonk angel. Also, my poet sis Sophie Klahr turned me on to Ethel Cain and I’ve been listening to her a bunch. Townes Van Zandt and John Prine are always on repeat in my world and I’m in a big Brandi Carlile, Valerie June, and Kate Wolf (Across the Great Divide!) season of my life.

“and thank every hour” and “prayer” by nicole v basta

Found in Willow Springs 90 Back to Author Profile “and thank every hour” the small yellow gods that are warblers are skimming the scum at the top with their wings … Read more

About Lauren Osborn

Lauren Osborn is a Ph.D. candidate in OSU’s creative writing program and a graduate of the MFA program at Queen's University of Charlotte. Her fiction and nonfiction are published or forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review Micro Series, The North American Review, Fourteen Hills, Lake Effect, The Laurel Review, JMWW, and elsewhere. She resides in Stillwater, Oklahoma with her collection of tarantulas and other unusual pets.

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "Gossamer Girl"

Spiders are among the most misunderstood creatures on the planet. Once, while explaining how spiders don’t seek confrontation—how they throw their legs up in warning, flashing their fangs before using them—a man responded with “it’s funny how their threats look so much like dancing.” It struck me then how much women and spiders are alike; Our fear often overlooked or mistaken. While writing this story, other themes such as isolation and exclusion bled through, and I found myself reckoning with what it means to be part of a collective but also separate. What do we lose when we mask ourselves for other’s comfort, for acceptance? What part do labels play in our identity and actions? I imagine more than a few of us have felt like a mass of arachnids wearing human skin at some point in our lives. I certainly have.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

I recently reared silk-moth caterpillars as part of a summer job for the entomology department at Oklahoma State University. Polyphemus caterpillars are jolly-rancher green, have suction-cup feet, and eat handfuls of oak-leaves each hour. In other words: they’re delightful. At the end of the summer, they wrapped themselves in silk cocoons, and now have begun to emerge this fall as mature moths. The adults are suede-winged with large purple eyespots mirrored on each side. Beautiful. Yesterday, I snuck one home and held it in my hand, amazed at how something that was once an egg—half the size of a split-pea—now filled my entire palm, quivering its downy scales against my fingertips. In other words, it felt like holding a miracle. I’m fortunate to spend my life surrounded by wonderful creatures, whether they be moths, spiders, or my beloved three-legged chinchilla, Emmerson.

“Gossamer Girl” by Lauren Osborn

Found in Willow Springs 90 Back to Author Profile ONCE, THERE WAS A GIRL. But she wasn’t a girl, she was a spider. But she wasn’t a singular spider, she … Read more

Found in Willow Springs 90

Back to Author Profile

Dismantling

They’re taking off the head of the snake,
and we are watching to remember

what we worry won’t exist once we can’t
see it anymore. First, they remove the tongue,

slippery from its metal mouth. This is
one of the last of these metal giants,

towering so great that it marks its place
in our memories, doesn’t change quick like

the landscape around it. They have packed up
the left edge of the cobra’s hood and are moving

their crane to the right. You can see now
that it is empty inside, but when we drove by

again and again—because we wanted to be
taken back to another time—that time—

it was solid and permanent. Now
we feel empty, too. They are down

to the coils of the body, the place where
the snake is rooted to the ground—

was rooted. We mourn the soldered bones.
Next door, there used to be an open-mouthed

fish, sucking in the whole sky until the palms
grew unruly and branched into its mouth.

A genie marked the next town over, his blue
face waking the streets from nighttime each day,

until he was taken from his magic carpet,
until the magic was gone altogether. The snake

has been stacked onto a flatbed trailer,
the dirt damp with earthworms beneath

where his body sat before being driven
to a junkyard between stretches of Florida

farm town. We stand on the roadside
and draw with our fingers on the sky

what used to be there, far more looming
now that it is made of emptiness and cloud.

Motels We Stay in While Trying to Get Pregnant: The Gables

A fresh coat of paint covers everything
and hides nothing, stubby Roman columns
zigzag like teeth along the banisters
and they cut, too, inside my hip bones.
And inside the rooms the walls are empty.
There is nothing beautiful anymore
about my body. We will try again
tomorrow and tomorrow. And we’ll fail.
All three nights a child’s wail swelters through
the courtyard, and on the third night I leave
our room propped open and put my ear to
door after door frantic to find the cry.
But I don’t. I crawl back to bed, my whole
torso a clenched jaw waiting to let go.

Issue 90: Emily Schulten

About Emily Schulten

Emily Schulten is the author of The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar (Kelsay Books) and Rest in Black Haw (New Plains P). Her poetry and nonfiction appear widely in national journals such as Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Tin House, among others. Currently, she is a professor of English and creative writing at The College of the Florida Keys.

emilyschulten.com

Twitter: @emilyeschulten

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Dismantling” and “Motels We Stay in While Trying to Get Pregnant: The Gables”

“Dismantling” is a poem that moved from a question of where the past has gone, tangibly, toward the question of where it has gone intangibly. So often, when something moves into the realm of the past, it seems emptiness – or something lesser – has been left in its place. I think the part of coming of age that involves the loss of things that were iconic – the end of icons – is a macrocosm for the personal losses that a person starts to realize are part of aging, particularly in middle age. The poem is an inspection of nostalgia’s truth and lies.

“Motels We Stay in While Trying to Get Pregnant: The Gables” is from a series of three sonnets, each based on a different experience of staying overnight in or near Miami for failed fertility treatment. This one progresses from the speaker’s current mindset which, like the motel, is uncomfortable and vulnerable, to the speaker’s physical failure, to the speaker’s emotional deterioration. The poem ends in the discomfort of both waiting and not being able to be in control of the situation. I suppose there is some hope there – in that irritation of waiting and the unknown, but at the center is this feeling that something you have never had, something you can almost feel to the touch and that has been part of your identity your whole life, has been lost.

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

I’ve been making a playlist for my son for the past two years. The idea began as a way to impart taste, or to brainwash him into positive associations with tunes I’m partial to, but I think I chose those first songs to bring him closer to some ideal time or times in my own life. From the moment he was born, perhaps before, there is this urge to keep him close: you give birth to this little gremlin, and he goes from being so completely dependent on your body to immediately learning how to be independent from you. Immediately. I think instinct tells us to keep him tethered. The first songs were a lot of folk rock, Cat Stevens and Bob Dylan and Patsy Cline and Neil Young, some Elvis ballads and lots of Roy Orbison. Now, though, he has opinions. (Independence and all.) I’ve added jams he prefers, like “Fool in the Rain” and “Boys Don’t Cry.” But I have to say, he seems to take after his dad here, surprising us with an affinity for Black Sabbath from infancy. The saving grace is that he’s always been soothed by Billie Holiday and Thelonious Monk and Dave Brubeck. But that’s a whole other playlist.

Also I have a toddler, so wine. I’m drinking lots of wine.

Two Poems by Emily Schulten

Found in Willow Springs 90 Back to Author Profile Dismantling They’re taking off the head of the snake,and we are watching to remember what we … Read more

Two Poems by Elizabeth Tannen

Liz Phair, fifteen weeks

Riddle, six weeks

Issue 90: Elizabeth Tannen

About Elizabeth Tannen

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "Riddle, six weeks" and "Liz Phair, fifteen weeks"

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

“To Appreciate Squirrels” by Joan Murray

Issue 90: Joan Murray

About Joan Murray

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "To Appreciate Squires"

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

“To Appreciate Squirrels” by Joan Murray

“Gossamer Girl” by Lauren Osborn

“and thank every hour” and “prayer” by nicole v basta

"and thank every hour"

"prayer"

Issue 90: nicole v basta

About nicole v basta

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "and thank every hour" and "prayer"

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

“and thank every hour” and “prayer” by nicole v basta

Issue 90: Lauren Osborn

About Lauren Osborn

A Profile of the Author

Notes on "Gossamer Girl"

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

“Gossamer Girl” by Lauren Osborn

Two Poems by Emily Schulten

Dismantling

Motels We Stay in While Trying to Get Pregnant: The Gables

Issue 90: Emily Schulten

About Emily Schulten

A Profile of the Author

Notes on “Dismantling” and “Motels We Stay in While Trying to Get Pregnant: The Gables”

Music, Food, Booze, Tattoos, Kittens, etc.

Two Poems by Emily Schulten