CLEFT
by Megan Stolz
[audio:http://www.hootreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Cleft.mp3]

A cleft, caused by
a cleave, which can mean
to cling or to split.
For her, it means both.
She clings to her mother’s
skirt, to the veil, to the hope
that no one will see her.
The split, which looks like
an eternal smile, but grotesque,
a word she doesn’t know,
not now but maybe later,
and may never be able to say.

 

 

SHRIMP
by Amy Anderson
Artwork by Elizabeth Conger
[audio:http://www.hootreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Shrimp.mp3]

Shrimp appear to be fetuses
with jagged orange feet
and dark remnants of excreta
where the beginnings of eyes might be
fishy pre-people with
naked translucent inches of flesh
readying to slide into the next world
dipping into a chunky red sauce with my bare fingers,
how will I ever be able to savor you properly again?

 

 

 

TO THE VELOCIRAPTOR AT THE STOPLIGHT
(IN THE VOICE OF SEAN CONNERY):
by Kyle P. Laws
Artwork by Kelly Meissner
[audio:http://www.hootreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/to-the-velociraptor-at-the-stoplight-audio.mp3]

o gerrymander me your dandy daddy long legs please
to smooth the craggy shingle sand atop my pagodal awn.
swept across a giant traject-o-sky, eight acupunctural fingertips
trace the jetlines arced towards the chasm of your eyelid
where the veined rocks of carpalled tunnel lanes
topples down this gutter bug’s old downspout.
o won’t you honey me a drink of mead
between the metronomy of my left turn signal.

 

—

 

Megan Stolz is an MFA candidate at the University of Baltimore. When not writing, she likes to spin yarns via knitting, drink lots of tea, and travel to places which require mosquito nets.

Amy Anderson is a high school English teacher who has just completed her MA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan-Flint.  She’s currently writing a novella in verse entitled April in November.

Kyle P. Laws prefers bicycles to brake lights, marbles to paperweights, and getting lost to going nowhere. He is a senior at the University of Iowa studying English.

 

—