Issue One: June 1, 2018
A CHURCH IN BRONZEVILLE a golden shovel for Gwendolyn Brooks
my cupped hands full of honey, and you can’t see it there but it’s not a metaphor, we all came to a point like an artichoke heart, we knew how to pour warm sticky divinity beautifully into our hearts, how we knew is how we knew throb throb yum throb throb yum is the soundtrack to honey, glistening gift of bees still living, how we knew to give divinity, divinity pulled up from the bowl of the pelvis to flavor the point of the artichoke heart above our single head, women and men breathing together, walking together, we entered the place made sacred and we were cold, it was not summer, the place was made sacred by angels dark as chestnuts spread across the nave, behind the altar, carved into the doors, yum yum throb scrivened into wood from the tropics, yum yum throb dropped into my hollow head, today we are all that is left of the nine thousand who once worshipped here, our artichoke attention our gift, our sticky divinity our love
HYACINTH
Not even
the small violence
that skinned
her round brown foot
against the sides
of a pot too small
can restrain
the violet décolletage
that froths above
her corseted green gown.
Lisa L. Moore is the author of the chapbook 24 Hours of Men (Dancing Girl, 2018). Her poems have appeared recently in Nimrod International Journal, The Fourth River, and Borderlands Texas Poetry Review. Her poetry and critical writing have been recognized with the Art/Lines Juried Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Foundation Book Award. The author or editor of five books of literary criticism, she teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.