All the way from poppy seed to jackfruit, we are told to measure each week, each stumble and kick. From produce to blood levels we weigh chances the way we weigh ourselves, breath held, fear crawling up our naked skin. We don’t budget for peaches and avocado; grapefruit and corn. We don’t expect time to lapse with soap scrubs reaching beyond the elbow, under nail beds scrubbing our lifelines down to broken. The smell of unsullied skin, how it lingers, sticks fast to the nose, how showers at 3am can’t wash the loss away even with our tears scraping, stabbing wounds that won’t slow, won’t fill our empty wombs the way alarms fill NICU hallways with those red lights, quickening footsteps, the one two three push on tiny ribcages as our babies lie in sheep fur bundles, underripe and blue.
Serena Rodriguez’s work has been published in Poetry, Inverted Syntax, Santa Fe Literary Review, and MindWell Poetry. She was the winner of the Santa Fe Accolades Poetry Contest 2017 and The Roadrunner Review Poetry Prize 2022, and was a 2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize finalist for The Georgia Review. She graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with her MFA in Creative Writing. Serena works as a Creative Writing Visiting Professor at IAIA. Born in Mississippi, she lives in New Mexico with her partner and kiddo, where they hike the Bosque and eat all the tacos.
Featured Artwork:
Full Moon
Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas. She has an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella GOODBYE TO THE OCEAN won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her short prose and poetry have appeared in over fifty different publications. Find more at her website.