Flying Island

Epithalamion from the ferris wheel, with birds Which summer was it I lost    my kid brother at the carnival? I spent                        my quarters like clouds spend rain. When I could not find him, fire-slaught sluiced through me, his name from my throat like the sounds           rising off the tilt-a-whirl, lifted higher than the carriage            of the ferris wheel. I ran the fairway. Please , I panted,                          and this is the part repeating in me like a robin’s song. Lover, I’m still greedy, still at the trickster’s stand trying              for th...

O, Susanna Twelve and my breasts           begin their slow swell, moon-bright in the seventh month of my slumber. This strange sheen, as within the begonia’s waxy              heart, my neck a spreading alpenglow            when, in front of the boy from Glasgow County, Norah Clond snaps my training bra. Small discs of turquoise hang        from my ears like fingerprints, the shape pressed into my chest like Ms. Smoots taught us to find lumps    grain-thick in the paddy of some temerarious fright, that dim    scepter, womanhood . Mornings she brushes the tops                of strawberry plants with her palms to find the dark pebbles of fruit. After P.E.    girls fold their...

Harbinger      by Susanna Childress The child came slick and fast and split her skin in the water where she bobbed and breathed him down, in the tub of true water, the woman saying, That’s it, That’s it . A man caught this baby’s body with his palms, held up the thing they call Son and inside her heart the boar with its tusks speared a star and nobody on this planet spoke its sorrow, its gobs of light pooling in her mouth. Susanna Childress has published two collections of poetry and is now at work on a book of creative nonfiction titled "Extremely Yours." Her work can be found or is forthcoming from The Rumpus , Fourteen Hills , Crazyhorse , Iron Horse Literary Press , Rhino , Relief, and Oakland Review . She grew up in southern Indiana.