Month: August 2023

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Stained: An Anthology of Writing About Menstruation, Curated and Edited by Rachel Neve-Midbar & Jennifer Saunders

This selection, chosen by guest editor Amber Alexander, is from Stained: An Anthology of Writing About Menstruation, curated and edited by Rachel Neve-Midbar & Jennifer Saunders, released by Querencia Press in 2023.

Paloma Wings

by Katherine Hoerth

I wondered why maxi pads have wings,
and what the use of wings are
if all they do is hold you in place.

As a kid, I imagined a flock of them,
of maxi pads,
taking to the sky like startled palomas,

outstretching their white wings
and using them to get as far from me
as possible at that time of the month.

I thought that wings
were only used to fly away—
to touch the sky like Icarus,

who never had to wear a maxi pad.
Who would ever want to be grounded
in such a place, the delta of a river,

to collect the flotsam left behind
from the wreck of another month?
Because when you’re thirteen,

you learn there’s nothing worse
than yourself, a girl,
the red red red of you.

Katherine Hoerth is the author of five poetry collections, including Flare Stacks in Full Bloom (Texas Review Press, 2022). She is the recipient of the 2021 Poetry of the Plains Prize from North Dakota State University Press. Her work has been published in numerous literary magazines including Literary Imagination (Oxford University Press), Valparaiso Review, and Southwestern American Literature. She is an assistant professor at Lamar University and editor of Lamar University Literary Press.

Poet, essayist, and translator Rachel Neve-Midbar‘s collection Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach, 2020) was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014), winner of The Clockwork Prize. Rachel’s work has appeared in journals such as Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Grist, and The Georgia Review as well as other publications and anthologies. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California where her research concerns menstruation in contemporary poetry.

Jennifer Saunders is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), winner of the 2017 Clockwise Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Glass, Spillway, The Shallow Ends, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere, and has earned nominations for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize, and the Orison Anthology. Jennifer holds an MFA from Pacific University, and lives in German-speaking Switzerland.

Amber Alexander, who publishes creative work as e. holloway, is a poet based in Ohio. They currently work in higher education and as an Assistant Editor for Best Of The Net within Sundress Publications. Alexander is a former Editorial Intern for Sundress Publications, former Editorial Board Member for Cornfield Review, and was a Sundress Academy for The Arts Writing Resident in 2023. Their work has been published by Cornfield Review and earned multiple awards during undergrad at The Ohio State University.

Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents “The Poetry of First Date Impressions”

Knoxville, TN— The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “The Poetry of First Date Impressions,” a workshop led by Maya Williams on September 13, 2023, from 6-7:30 PM.  This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).

First impressions are fun to observe for their embodiment of awkwardness, the effect of imagery of first sights, and the setting of location that could either help or hurt a first meeting. This can especially be true in first date impressions whether you have experienced them, know you’re about to experience them, or heard of a person’s Bumble/Tinder/Hinge related befuddlement. This goes for romantic and platonic dates. Maya Williams will be using poems from their second collection Refused a Second Date, Khadijah Queen’s I’m So Fine, and Chen Chen’s Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency to encourage participants to write and discuss the poetic devices of displaying first date impressions.

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Maya Williams via Venmo @MayaWilliams16, PayPal through mayawilliams16@gmail.com, or CashApp at $williamsmay13.

Photo of Maya Williams

Maya Williams (ey/they/she) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who is currently the seventh poet laureate of Portland, Maine. Eir debut collection Judas & Suicide is available now via Game Over Books. Maya was one of three artists of color selected to represent Maine in The Kennedy Center’s Arts Across America series in 2020. Maya was also selected as one of The Advocate’s Champions of Pride in 2022. You can follow more of their work at mayawilliamspoet.com.

This workshop is brought to you in part by a grant provided by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. Find out about the important work that they do here.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Stained: An Anthology of Writing About Menstruation, Curated and Edited by Rachel Neve-Midbar & Jennifer Saunders

This selection, chosen by guest editor Amber Alexander, is from Stained: An Anthology of Writing About Menstruation, curated and edited by Rachel Neve-Midbar & Jennifer Saunders, released by Querencia Press in 2023.

The Devil Shows You How to Use a Tampon

by Megan Mary Moore

The first time you bleed,
the Devil comes to see.
She knows life can find a room in you
and that scares Mom, Dad, and
every boy you’ve met. But not her.

She sits on the edge of the tub, not there to convince,
but advise. And as your fingernails grow redder
she warns you, they blame blood for ghosts.
When you leave this bathroom,
the burden is on you.

And after she shows you how to
push, press, and pull inside yourself,
she grabs your daisy print panties from the ground,
throws them in the trash and tells you to
wash the last bit of sidewalk chalk from your hands.

Megan Mary Moore holds an MFA in poetry from Miami University. She is the author of To Daughter a Devil (Unsolicited Press, 2023) Dwellers (Unsolicited Press, 2019) and her work has appeared in Rattle, Grist, and Contemporary Verse 2. She lives in Cincinnati where she frequently dresses like a fairy princess, watches too many horror movies, and writes poems about things that scare her.

Poet, essayist, and translator Rachel Neve-Midbar‘s collection Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach, 2020) was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014), winner of The Clockwork Prize. Rachel’s work has appeared in journals such as Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Grist, and The Georgia Review as well as other publications and anthologies. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California where her research concerns menstruation in contemporary poetry.

Jennifer Saunders is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), winner of the 2017 Clockwise Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Glass, Spillway, The Shallow Ends, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere, and has earned nominations for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize, and the Orison Anthology. Jennifer holds an MFA from Pacific University, and lives in German-speaking Switzerland.

Amber Alexander, who publishes creative work as e. holloway, is a poet based in Ohio. They currently work in higher education and as an Assistant Editor for Best Of The Net within Sundress Publications. Alexander is a former Editorial Intern for Sundress Publications, former Editorial Board Member for Cornfield Review, and was a Sundress Academy for The Arts Writing Resident in 2023. Their work has been published by Cornfield Review and earned multiple awards during undergrad at The Ohio State University.

Meet Our New Intern: Jen Gayda Gupta

Though I have always been a writer (filling composition notebooks full of silly stories as a kid, writing novels through college) poetry was not something I loved. Rather, poetry was something I actively claimed to dislike. 

I remember completing a poetry analysis in tenth grade English on Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” where we had to identify, line by line, the most accurate description of the meaning. This was a computerized test, and as I selected each answer, the screen would flash red—INCORRECT. INCORRECT. INCORRECT. I earned a D and was asked to retake the test. I decided right then, I wasn’t smart enough for poetry.

In college, I was required to take a poetry class for my English degree. I thought, can’t I just stick to fiction? That’s my thing! I went on to learn about a few other famous poets (ones that weren’t all white men, but were certainly all dead). While I enjoyed this class a little more, I still left thinking poetry wasn’t my thing. 

It wasn’t until four years after I graduated that I found contemporary poetry—poetry about things I could relate to, in words I could mostly understand. I was intrigued. I kept reading. Over time, I came to understand what I wasn’t taught in school, that poetry is so much more than meter and rhyme, so much more than can be captured in a few widely regarded poems. I have sat in many workshops discussing the definition of poetry, questioning if there is one at all. The freedom and play I have found while writing poetry is unmatched. 

As much as I now appreciate some of the classics, starting with them made me feel like I was trying to enter a secret club and I didn’t have the password. When I became a teacher, I knew I wanted a different experience for my students. I wanted them to believe they were welcome. I wanted them to read poems written by writers they could relate to, and ones that presented an entirely new worldview. I wanted them to express themselves in whatever way felt right. I always told my students, there is no wrong way to read or write a poem. If a poem left you a little bit different than it found you, that is the magic of poetry.

I left the classroom two years ago for a life on the road and have since had to find new, creative ways to spread this magic. I began teaching my own workshops and challenging people to write more freely and authentically. I want to support poetry (something I believe is largely undervalued in our society) in any way I can. I am thrilled for this opportunity to work with Sundress Publications, to help spread the words of those who are generously sharing their stories with the world.

Jen Gayda Gupta is a poet, educator, and wanderer. She earned her BA in English at the University of Connecticut and her MA in Teaching English from New York University. Jen lives, writes, and travels across the U.S. in a tiny camper with her husband and their dog. Her work has been published in Up the Staircase, Rattle, Jellyfish Review, Sky Island Journal, The Shore, and others. You can find her @jengaydagupta and jengaydagupta.com.

Sundress Reads: Review of In the Cosmic Fugue

Jocelyn Heath’s debut poetry collection, In the Cosmic Fugue (Kelsey Books, 2022), travels beyond Earth’s atmosphere and deep into memory to explore queerness and identity. Using macrocosmic settings like black holes and personal locals like a neighborhood cul-de-sac or a T.G.I. Friday’s, Heath tells a story of self-discovery and, perhaps even more bravely, acknowledges that much is still unknown.  

“Out of Chaos,” the opening poem of the collection, hosts the vast and the minute side by side, exemplified by metaphor in the first line “meteors are sugar” (Heath 15). Play with spacial reasoning performs a large role in the origin story for the speaker’s journey. She even “walk[s] over multitudes” (Heath 15), a moment directly combining the physical and the metaphysical. The first-person singular pronoun “I” grows into the plural “we” in later lines. Heath cleverly pulls readers into a collective unit to witnesses the cosmic and the possible all in one.  

Grounded geographically in the unique landscape of central Australia, “Syzygy” awes at the mystery of the universe. While drawn to look up into a starry night sky, the speaker wonders what is possible:  

What do I think I’ll find here?
When star and crescent align
over Uluru, when I can’t look away,
do I think that here I’ll find
some truth? Far from home, in the night sky
over Uluru? I can’t look away. (Heath 39)

Poetry of witness bears immense responsibility, and Heath’s speaker is humbled. She recognizes that she has much to discover in an unfamiliar place. In the poem, “Evolution,” Heath adds a layer of self-reflection to this search for meaning. She writes, as instructions for herself, “Chart those who walk / the periphery of the universe— / find who I am to seek them out” (Heath 40). Here, Heath commends those who are brave, who live on the edge of their comfort zones. This can relate to other queer folks who live authentically from a young age, and/or despite societal obstacles. As a queer writer who came into my identity as an adult, I know seeking community can be intimidating. Heath recognizes her path is her own, and while there is knowledge to gain about what’s beyond, what’s in the outer edges of what’s possible, there is also significance to looking inward, to understanding her place within the world in order to decide where to go next.

In the Cosmic Fugue includes many poems that examine memory, an expanse often equally as inexplicable as outer space. For example, Heath smartly structures “That Other Girl” as a list poem in order to hold a plethora of rich detail with ease. Some lines focus on the corporeal, including “has just a toss of freckles on her nose” and “rubs on fruit punch lip balm after lunch” ( Heath 23), to provide readers with image. The poem then spirals inward, to position the subject in relation to the speaker: “sits in my orbit if I take a wide loop / doesn’t know I am her satellite” (Heath 23). These last lines add depth and story to a seemingly straightforward poem. Heath inspires readers to wonder about their relationship past, present, and future.

A variety of poetic forms appear throughout the collection, indicating Heath’s attentiveness to readers’ experiences. While “Self-Portrait as a Black Hole” and “Self-Portrait as a Supernova” appear consecutively, they call to each other in both title and structure across the white space between two different sections of the collection. The first poem is an abecedarian, emulating the suction of a black hole by tumbling down the alphabet. The latter, inspired by its titular subject, instead explodes outwards. “Self-Portrait as a Supernova” is a reverse abecedarian, undoing what was previously done and starting with Z.

Heath’s poetry is both search and meditation, both conversation and observation. Throughout the pages of In the Cosmic Fugue, she aims to name what is unnamable, ultimately learning that the most reliable aspect of the universe is its ability to change. In the title poem, Heath writes, “in a wild search for constellations, / I find no fixed stars” (48).  Placed in the center of the collection, these lines embody what it means to be human, as well as what it means to be queer—an identity that is fluid, impossible to define. And yet, there is courage and beauty in such intimate self-reflection. Though so many queer youth aren’t supported with knowledge or guidance of what’s possible, we continue to find ourselves, and each other, every day.

Order In the Cosmic Fugue from Kelsey Books.

Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of Honey in My Hair and the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She won Breakwater Review‘s 2022 Peseroff Prize and earned a 2022-2023 Poetry Fellowship from The Writers’ Room of Boston. Her writing has found homes in Gasher, Solstice Lit, Thrush, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA from Emerson College, where she now teaches writing and literature. She is a cancer survivor.

Interview with Sarah Renee Beach, Author of Impact

Front cover of "Impact" by Sarah Renee Beach—a photo of a shattered window.

On the release of her debut chapbook Impact, Sundress intern Annie Fay Meitchik and writer Sarah Renee Beach discuss themes such as forgiveness and grief. Here, Beach shares her insights about poetry as catharsis after tragedy.

Annie Fay Meitchik: Can you speak to the use of erasure throughout Impact?

Sarah Renee Beach: Excavating the past is tricky under any circumstances, but when you add traumatic memory to the mix, it’s an entirely different beast. It’s difficult to rely on your own account of what happened, so you go looking for corroboration where you can find it. I turned to documents to help ground myself—or to provide a fact from which to work—but the documents themselves present a challenge in that they can complicate, contradict, obscure, or compound what little memory you have. My hope is that the erasures throughout the collection mirror this process of excavation both its illuminations and its failures.

AFM: When dealing with traumatic content, were there instances of self-censorship beyond the stylistic use of erasure?

SRB: I’m not sure self-censorship is the term I would use. In any event, there’s a multitude of perspectives and experiences, which makes silences, retractions, and obfuscations necessary aspects of any writing and editing process. A complete and accurate account will always elude us. Poetry gives us the ability to point to these voids and to give them texture, rather than smoothing over them and delivering a polished point of view. I think it was important for me to incorporate that texture, because—while this was a collective experience that could have been told from many different angles—I have only my perspective to draw from. And even that is a flawed, warped, and biased thing.

AFM: What does an epistolary form allow you to achieve or explore that you wouldn’t have with a different form of writing?

SRB: I find that the epistolary form points to the relational aspect of writing and allows for a level of intimacy that can be harder to tap into when the intended audience is less specific. It highlights what knowledge is shared, what can be offered, and what one wishes to receive. In Impact, the epistolary form gives voice to a perpetually unmet desire to connect, to share knowledge, to give and receive, showing how traumatic events both create and sever connections between the survivors as well as the deceased. I’m sure there are other ways to communicate this, but I chose the form of letters and that seemed to fit.

AFM: Can you share the intention behind writing “New Normal” in two columns?

SRB: I wrote this one many years ago, so it’s tough to remember exactly. I know I liked how the physicality of the two columns mirrored the kind of schism being discussed in the poem. It also creates a kind of hallway down the middle, your eyes darting side to side as you make your way down the poem. I think all of that was accidental, though. I believe I set out to write a contrapuntal and that’s how it eventually ended up.

AFM: In the poem, “Lucky,” there is the line: “Her name means God’s Princess,” which subtly recognizes yourself in the third person. Could you speak to what informed this choice and who the “I” is in the final line: “The heart quivered each time I escaped over the sill and under the pane”?

SRB: This poem speaks to dissociation, so the third person narration hopefully highlights that kind of unembodied experience of trying to escape yourself and your surroundings. Even in the throes of this kind of self-destructive propulsion, though, there are moments of return. The “I” in the last line is indicative of a return to the present and the body and making a conscious decision to keep fleeing rather than turning back.

AFM: Impact explores forgiveness and grief—do you see these things as being distinct from one another or overlapping?

SRB: For me, they were not only overlapping but intertwined. Sudden and tragic loss triggers very complicated emotional combinations, all of which are compounded when the experience is collective. The lack of discreteness and the way blame and anger get absorbed into the communal grieving process necessitates a movement towards forgiveness as well as acceptance—the fifth and final stage of grief. I don’t see Impact as making it to this destination so much as gesturing towards it on an individual level, grasping for a resolution perpetually out of reach.

AFM: With the incorporation of legal questioning, do you see your book contributing to a larger conversation about the way people are treated in the legal system?

SRB: Our legal apparatus, the way it operates out of sight and out of mind for so many people, is fascinating to me. None of us really knows how impersonal and indifferent it is to human complexity and emotion until we are embedded into it. Your story, your memory, your pain all become useful in this necessarily dispassionate way. With this book, I only hoped to shed some light on that experience. In the aftermath of a tragedy like the one my book explores, this is just one of the many processes set into motion, a kind of churning survivors are pulled into and spit out of. Not the whole story, but certainly part of it.

AFM: Can you speak to the recurring references to Frida Kahlo’s work? How do they relate to the goals of your collection?

SRB: I’d been looking for a touchstone, for an example of an artist making art from tragedy in a way that resonated with my experience of it. What struck me most about Frida Kahlo—and what has me turning to her art and writing again and again—is that she isn’t translating an experience or telling a story so that an outside observer can understand it. Her art, to me, shows the incorporation of a tragedy into a lived life, one that has not been overcome but endured. That felt revelatory to me as someone who for many years felt rushed through processing and pressured to package the event as something I’d learned and grown from, a story I could quickly and succinctly recite. Frida helped me to resist the pull towards narrative reduction and to honor the complexity. As Hayden Herrera noted in her biography of the artist in the quote that serves as Impact’s epigraph: …the accident was too ‘complicated’ and ‘important’ to reduce to a single comprehensible image. I couldn’t agree more.

AFM: Who do you hope your collection reaches?

SRB: If not ourselves, we all know someone who has experienced tragedy, or we’ve read about something tragic that happened to someone somewhere. I hope Impact speaks to what we like to call “unimaginable.” Because, really, what’s more conceivable than human and mechanical error, violence, a fatal crash? It’s living in the aftermath that we fail to imagine and, thus, reimagine. In that way, I hope it reaches anyone who might otherwise struggle to behold another’s pain, to resist the urge to transform it into something beautiful or useful or meaningful.

Impact is available to download for free on the Sundress website.

A photo of the author of "Impact," Sarah Renee Beach, standing in front of some greenery.

Originally from Southeast Texas, Sarah Renee Beach completed her MFA at The New School. Her poetry can be found in White Wall Review, Rust + Moth, and anthologized in Host Publications’ I Scream Social Anthology Vol. 2. She currently lives in Austin, TX. More information about her work may be found at sarahreneebeach.com.

A black and white photo of Sundress Intern, Annie Fay Meitchik.

Annie Fay Meitchik is a writer and visual artist with her BA in Creative Writing from The New School and a Certificate in Children’s Book Writing from UC San Diego. Through a career in publishing, Annie aims to amplify the voices of marginalized identities while advocating for equality and inclusivity in art/educational spaces. Her work has been published by Matter Press, 12th Street Literary Journal, and UNiDAYS. To learn more, please visit: www.anniefay.com.

Call for Workshop Proposals for Retreat for Survival and Healing

The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA)  and the Poet Laureate program in Oak Ridge, TN welcomes proposals from writers, therapists, narrative medicine practitioners, and more for our fourth Retreat for Survival and Healing.

This two-day retreat for sexual assault survivors will be a safe space for creativity, generative writing exercises, discussions on ways to write trauma, advice on publishing, and more. This event will be open to writers of all backgrounds and experience levels and provide an opportunity to work with talented writers from across the country who use trauma-informed teaching techniques to guide workshops that will focus on mutual support for a weekend of writing time centered on healing, safety, and comfort.  

These workshops should be designed with an eye toward forging connections and making creative writing accessible to beginners and experienced writers alike. Proposals in all writing genres, as well as hybrid genres, will be considered. Each workshop will be approximately 90-minutes in length and will be conducted twice. Workshop leaders may also be asked to work with writers in one-on-one conferences or as part of group exercises.

This retreat will take place in Oak Ridge, TN, which is 25 miles outside of Knoxville, during the weekend of March 23-24, 2024. Workshop leaders will receive a $1,000 honorarium to cover travel, housing, and teaching fees. These honorariums are supported by a grant from the Academy for American Poets.

Proposals should be no longer than 250 words and include information on the type of workshop you’d like to hold, what writers you may be looking at as examples, and goals of the workshop itself in regards to the retreat’s stated goals. Previous workshops included topics such as “Writing Trauma through Fabulism,” “The Hero’s Journey: Reclaiming Your Narrative by Embracing the Impossible,” “Reclaiming Truth: Owning Your Personal Story in the Public #MeToo Moment,” and “Self-Care as Self Preservation.”

Submit proposals by no later than August 31, 2023.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Stained: An Anthology of Writing About Menstruation, Curated and Edited by Rachel Neve-Midbar & Jennifer Saunders

This selection, chosen by guest editor Amber Alexander, is from Stained: An Anthology of Writing About Menstruation, curated and edited by Rachel Neve-Midbar & Jennifer Saunders, released by Querencia Press in 2023.

premenstrual dysphoric disorder

by Leila Tualla

There is a silent chaos that follows me,
shadowing my movements and biding its time.
It manifests quietly, slowly gathering its power.
I can feel myself leaving for a moment before this version of me
slips through the cracks and comes alive.
I succumb to her power, leaving nothing
but tears and fire in our wake.

She is passion; blindly going on instinct and fueled by turmoil.
She is my shame, my guilt, my walking nightmare;
A monthly companionable adversary and a savior I can call by name.

Our foundation is built on her intensity,
and as the moon shifts back into the shadows,
I surrender to this phase.
She slips away, leaving me exhausted and wounded.

A few more days of rest,
a few more moments of clarity,
a few more rounds of daylight,
before
a scream is uncurled, refusing to be held back
and sorrow pierces through my fragile defenses
that she emerges out of the shadows and takes her place once more.

Leila Tualla is a Filipino-American poet and author based in Houston, TX. Leila’s books include YA contemporary romance Love, Defined, and Letters to Lenora. She has a memoir/poetry collection called Storm of Hope: God, Preeclampsia, Depression and Me. Leila’s poetry has been featured in several mental health anthologies and she is an outspoken advocate for maternal mental health and PMDD. Her chapbook PMDD & me is out now. Leila is currently working on a full poetry collection on Asian American identities.

Poet, essayist, and translator Rachel Neve-Midbar‘s collection Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach, 2020) was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014), winner of The Clockwork Prize. Rachel’s work has appeared in journals such as Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Grist, and The Georgia Review as well as other publications and anthologies. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California where her research concerns menstruation in contemporary poetry.

Jennifer Saunders is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), winner of the 2017 Clockwise Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Glass, Spillway, The Shallow Ends, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere, and has earned nominations for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize, and the Orison Anthology. Jennifer holds an MFA from Pacific University, and lives in German-speaking Switzerland.

Amber Alexander, who publishes creative work as e. holloway, is a poet based in Ohio. They currently work in higher education and as an Assistant Editor for Best Of The Net within Sundress Publications. Alexander is a former Editorial Intern for Sundress Publications, former Editorial Board Member for Cornfield Review, and was a Sundress Academy for The Arts Writing Resident in 2023. Their work has been published by Cornfield Review and earned multiple awards during undergrad at The Ohio State University.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Stained: An Anthology of Writing About Menstruation, Curated and Edited by Rachel Neve-Midbar & Jennifer Saunders

This selection, chosen by guest editor Amber Alexander, is from Stained: An Anthology of Writing About Menstruation, curated and edited by Rachel Neve-Midbar & Jennifer Saunders, released by Querencia Press in 2023.

Rose

by Amy Hsieh

I bleed liquid rose
into water—red,
slowly opening smoke.
Plumes of an old future.

Petals shed in my panties.

Having and losing
count of moons, small pearls
slipped
between fingers.
Night skies in the window
still framed for fairy tales.

My breasts grow cold,
an unpicked orchard.

Just how many names for Rose?

I zip up,
trying to grasp
a thinning bouquet
in my body.

Amy Hsieh lives in Ontario, Canada. She is a Taiwanese-Canadian, bi, neurodivergent writer recovering from post-concussion syndrome. Her poems have appeared in IHRAF Publishes, Watershed Review, Grain Magazine, Barrie Today, Devour: Art and Lit Canada, Acta Victoriana, Hart House Review, and The University College Review. She was the recipient of the 2021 Reinhilde Cammaert Memorial Writing Scholarship from Inkwell Workshops.

Poet, essayist, and translator Rachel Neve-Midbar‘s collection Salaam of Birds (Tebot Bach, 2020) was chosen by Dorothy Barresi for the Patricia Bibby First Book Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach, 2014), winner of The Clockwork Prize. Rachel’s work has appeared in journals such as Blackbird, Prairie Schooner, Grist, and The Georgia Review as well as other publications and anthologies. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California where her research concerns menstruation in contemporary poetry.

Jennifer Saunders is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), winner of the 2017 Clockwise Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Glass, Spillway, The Shallow Ends, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere, and has earned nominations for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize, and the Orison Anthology. Jennifer holds an MFA from Pacific University, and lives in German-speaking Switzerland.

Amber Alexander, who publishes creative work as e. holloway, is a poet based in Ohio. They currently work in higher education and as an Assistant Editor for Best Of The Net within Sundress Publications. Alexander is a former Editorial Intern for Sundress Publications, former Editorial Board Member for Cornfield Review, and was a Sundress Academy for The Arts Writing Resident in 2023. Their work has been published by Cornfield Review and earned multiple awards during undergrad at The Ohio State University.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: The Curator’s Notes by Robin Rosen Chang

This selection, chosen by guest editor Amber Alexander, is from The Curator's Notes by Robin Rosen Chang, released by Terrapin Books in 2021.

Great Green Macaw

Garnish of world, flourish 
		of medieval manuscripts, 
you prance, one foot lifted, 

		head held high, through gold 
and silver swirls. Bedecked 
		company to kings and queens, 

chanter of wild entreaties— 
		wings slathered turquoise, 
orange-splashed, and scarlet, 

		you cross empires and seas, fly 
to forests deciduous. You caw and squawk 
		quick-witted cries. 

Oh, blessed one, festooned 
		in layers of finest plumage— 
come. Rest here, for a moment 

		on my wrist. 
Tell me how you survive 
		this perishing world.

Robin Rosen Chang is the author of the full-length poetry collection, The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books). Her poems appear in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, Diode, North American Review, The Cortland Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the Oregon Poetry Association’s Fall 2018 Poets’ Choice Award, an honorable mention for Spoon River Poetry Review‘s 2019 Editors’ Prize, and a 2021 Pushcart nominee. She has an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Amber Alexander, who publishes creative work as e. holloway, is a poet based in Ohio. They currently work in higher education and as an Assistant Editor for Best Of The Net within Sundress Publications. Alexander is a former Editorial Intern for Sundress Publications, former Editorial Board Member for Cornfield Review, and was a Sundress Academy for The Arts Writing Resident in 2023. Their work has been published by Cornfield Review and earned multiple awards during undergrad at The Ohio State University.