This selection, chosen by guest editor Alexis Ivy, is from Dark Beds by Diana Whitney (June Road Press, 2023).
Ice House
1.
Hazard lights in the breakdown lane—
three semis stuck halfway up Searsburg Mountain,
the state trooper bending to set flares
on treacherous ice roads winding slow
east/west over the ridge
where my mother is re-learning how to knit.
Her marled stitches furl into a ribbon,
loose scarf for an imaginary child, another
project she’ll never finish. She carries
the soft cowl from room to room,
couch to chair, with the mystery
she’s been reading since August.
2.
Why aren’t the windmills turning when we pass?
They razed the ridgeline but those giant blades
stand sentinel above the riddled snowpack.
Tension is just trapped energy, the teacher says,
rubbing the knot at the nape of my neck.
I want to believe her, I breathe
into the interstices, imagine
I’d be different with a different man,
would soften like a rag beneath his grip.
3.
Out on the Meadows, the fishermen arrive
in darkness, live bait in lidded buckets.
They light the woodstove in the metal house,
bore a hole through the ice,
revealing the netherworld: murky reeds
and black mud, the promise
of slow perch in cold water.
They hook a minnow below the dorsal fin
and it swims around the hole all day
tethered to an invisible line, battering
the smooth walls. The only way out
is to be consumed, the only freedom a mouth
darker and colder than this frozen river.
Diana Whitney writes across genres with a focus on feminism, motherhood, and sexuality. Dark Beds, her second poetry collection, was published by June Road Press in 2023 and named a finalist for the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award. She is also the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves (2021), winner of the Claudia Lewis Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Kenyon Review, Glamour, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her first book, Wanting It, won the Rubery Book Award, and her third collection, Girl Trouble, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in 2026. Diana has received numerous grants for her writing, including from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Vermont Arts Council, and holds an MFA in poetry from New England College. A feminist activist in her Vermont hometown and beyond, she advocates for survivors of sexual violence and works as a writing coach and as a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit.
Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry. She is the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. She is co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023). A recent resident of the Sundress Academy for the Arts, she lives in her hometown Boston, working as an advocate for the homeless, and teaching in the PoemWorks community.
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