V

Volume 12.1

by Blood Orange Review

POETRY

A
Nikky Finney

Abalone 2

It was a family meeting under the singing pines in 1972. / The look-alike humans were breathing hard and moving / up the hill to their meeting spot. What would soon be said / would soon be lost to my ears for twenty years but never / leave the hippocampus of my eyes.
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F
Nikky Finney

From the Washhouse Files

In your country, where you are from, I don’t know what / your people say to you, when they recognize you for the // first time, looking like all the rest, with your dirty sack of / laundry and your pencil dangling like a spider on your ear.
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T
Geula Geurts

Ten Months Postpartum

In a dream my nipples have been cut / open along the seams of my areola. A perfect dark circle, // the cavern of my breast. There, against the rims / clings a white paste, dried-up milk. // Elation. I have it in me after all.
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A
Geula Geurts

A Year Postpartum

Inside my hip a mother bird / is still constructing her nest— // beak against pelvic bone, scraping / as she arranges twig upon twig, little // splinters in the hollow where / once my own child ripened.
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M
Troy Osaki

My Middle Name is Susumu

In a backyard suburb east of the Willamette river / my grandma sat my cousins & me around a well / waxed wooden table, had us pronounce each other’s / middle names until we could do so without stumbling.
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W
Dakota Reed

While Housesitting for a Family Visiting Bordeaux

I am rinsing mango juice off my / thighs when I notice its slim // body shimmying before me, / slicing through the crisp, // chlorinated water with ease.
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P
Theadora Siranian

Pet Ghost

An idea so fleeting it’s mere outline, dim constellation. / I think of abducting you— // a consideration as gentle and banal as what fruit to buy / for the week. It’s really only the word that compels, // abduct, abducere, to lead away as if by the hand, lovingly.
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NONFICTION

B
Brittany Ackerman

Baby

My grandma was kind of a pill. I wasn’t sure what to feel when you told me she died. I had just gotten home from work. I was still wearing my apron.
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I
Nikky Finney

Inquisitor and Insurgent: Black Woman with Pencil, Sharpened

At the young age of twenty-nine, Lorraine Hansberry was an activist, intellectual, and acclaimed American writer. A triptych that made me lick the tip of my pencil.
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A
Kristine Langley Mahler

Alignment

I have begun collecting gemstones and leaving them in melamine bowls on my deck when the astrological signs are changing, or when the moon is full, or when rain is expected so I can cleanse them.
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L
Rosanna Staffa

Lucretius

One day Bindi, the one in our radical group in Milan we all looked up to, held me back after we were done giving out flyers for the Desaparecidos in Argentina.
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FICTION

T
Kelle Clarke

The Winemaker Has A Story He’s Going To Tell You Whether You Like It or Not

The tasting room is a dozen steps down from the tourist-packed street and at least ten degrees cooler. Abby lets out a relieved sigh and flaps her arms at the elbow to dry the pit sweat from her dark t-shirt.
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A
Siamak Vossoughi

A Family Thing

And he thought of his father, and of how he had always thought as a boy that a man was a family thing, and he thought that the next time he went home, he would tell his father that he knew now that a man was not a family thing, that he was not firstly a family thing at least.
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L
Janelle Ward

Like Family

During the spring semester of my international graduate program, I responded to an ad for a babysitter. The father wrote back and invited me for an interview. I consulted my Amsterdam map, hopped on my bike, and found their address, a house somewhere on the edges of affluence.
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HOTBED

H
Nikky Finney

Hotbed 11

There are women who wait at the door until you arrive like you said you would. Women who stand at the screen with their elbows poking in at the wire like original tuning knobs made of fossilized walrus bone.
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H
Nikky Finney

Hotbed 24

You can’t prove it. Nobody can. Still I believe she never repeated herself. I have read her words while sitting down or standing up or flat on my back. I have leaned on pillows and read them over and over again and every time they sound different depending on the ache and altitude of my day and desire.
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H
Nikky Finney

Hotbed 57

Traveling a West Texas highway in a baby-blue Prius. The driver picked me up at the El Paso airport. He doesn’t talk much. He picks up writers all the time and drives them to another lonely desk.
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