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6.3
Stevie Edwards
That the Desperate Shall Inherit the Sky

is the hollow I keep licking: its dual promise of empty and enough room fretting me into the disaster glamor of two wept coats of mascara, a feral mask to greet the New Year I won’t want in the morning: the mirror, familiar trouble. Bandit, I am and have been to Love and all its familial heirlooms gathering dust in the attic apartment I call home in place of the home that calls me back with all the salt, butter and gravy God intended, if he or she or it or they is there inside cumulous and everything killed for dinner and less explainable consumptions on nighttime news footage I don’t want to sleep with: the twenty dead school children in Newtown and the ones to come that could be mine if I decide to make things with pulses and tiny grabby hands that can be ended in less time than it takes to scold tantrums and messes, wash off glitter and glue-sticks, or kiss pancake-syrup-matted hair for being such a manageable misstep amid the hyper hum of Saturday morning cartoon explosions. I am trying to tell the little scoop of hell in me not everything is a catastrophe: the mounds of snow on snow, the cooped up dogs barking at couches and wood-paneling, the chewed patent heel of a shoe too dainty for this hill and ice town.  

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6.3
Not Gently Will I Lose Her

If she were to die, my one, the only Michigan anchor steadying me in this erudite mess of neologisms for old truths, this university on a steep gorgeous hill where we are funded generously to learn to call our home-hearts trash, to discard them on the curb for removal or vermin feasting— If she were to die here as I nearly did in the winter that did not lack light any more than the Midwest but did swallow fierce the horizon, my peasant accent, wardrobe, fifth after fifth of please, muscles, raise me back into want— If I were to find her gone and going away from me, from her body, if there were blood in her mouth or shat panties or a neck lynched and swaying or a note or a thousand other agonies— I would roar at the many beasts in this landscape, pull my hair out strand by strand until I am a sight for sorry eyes, carve her name into every tree with a butcher knife. & I would cradle whatever is left of her cold head in my hands and cry out to the God I don’t have: No, not this one. You give her back. & I would gouge out my eyes, hack off the first hand that touched death and wander the gorges searching for a force to finish the job. & I would weep a sixth Great Lake to drown in. Which is to say that I need with all my flesh & wonder for you to survive.

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6.3
Thanksgiving Poem

R leaves groceries in the cart and drives off on the Thanksgiving her friend loses a child to an 11-year bout with cancer to prove randomness in the year I tried to die and did not: Ground, what are you doing eating the scrappy, fighting hearts, leaving the fatty ones out in the field? Cradle, star ladle in the sky so high, teach me to bless this death this boy’s body not my loss but lost by trying to try by singing praise songs for the body that keeps me.

Stevie Edwards is a poet, editor, and educator. Her first book, Good Grief, received the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil's Kitchen Reading Award. Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Rattle, Indiana Review, Devil's Lake, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Muzzle Magazine and an Assistant Editor at YesYes Books. She is currently a Lecturer at Cornell University, where she recently completed her MFA in creative writing. She can be found online at www.stevietheclumsy.com. Her favorite confection is tiramisu.