Jessie Wingate

July 2025 | poetry

My Body, Your Choice

Chromatic prism, ultraviolet light
waves toward my flat black pupil

a record
shuffling the same few songs.

Isn’t that what womanness has been about?
Repeated scenes:

the bonnet-donned bonnie
forking at the hay bail

the fish wife catching
her baby born under the stall

the silken onion skin
of the matron’s hands

as she uses a needle to connect
loop after loop.

“Our own” rotating square of green or taupe, mist, ash,
tobacco, brick, ultramarine, coal, pitch, straw–

is a boundary–tethered by the leather strings
of a coin purse held in someone else’s name.

The record changes its vessel:
cassette-compact disc-digital-multimedia.

A teen is taken
on a hill of quilted covers

the administrative assistant
pumps milk at her desk

a woman with a coif like a dollop of cream
greets you at WalMart.

Can anyone stammer blame if we wish
to pluck out our eyes like grapes?

Scratch, dent, break the cruel circle over our knee

Jessie Wingate

Jessie is a florist by day, poet by night, and round-the-clock mom living on unceded Ohlone land in California. She holds an MA in Art History. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in F(r)iction, CALYX, Chestnut Review, Mother Mag, California Quarterly, Kestrel, The Berkeley Poetry Review, The Bold Italic, and others.

VA Smith

July 2025 | poetry

Wheels

It began in our bodies, parts of us craving release, the Let It Go of Elsa’s
icy power, the freedom of her frozen solitude. You, car-seated chanteuse,

fresh from Montessori Pre-K, I, your chauffeur grandmother joining you
in a ramped-up CD sing along, chanted Idina Menzel’s “the cold never

bothered me anyway,” a mantra rendered comic opera by the red flashing
lights in my rearview mirror. The cop’s pull over, the letting things go

speeding ticket on my dashboard you soon narrated hungrily through lunch,
Barnes & Noble’s story hour. You named it Bin-Bin’s Big arrest, wondered

with me if Elsa’s dominance would preclude humiliations like mine for our
heroine. We believed it would, you noting that “Arendelle has no cars,” me

not knowing then that our duets would continue for years. You grew lovely,
long-haired, towering in mid-field, shining like the magnolia in your mother’s

garden, folding your legginess into my child-sized FIAT 500, plugging in your
play list the summer of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie, both of us breathy with

Billie Elish, longing to What Am I Made For? Understood its existential subtext without your knowing those words, and then also, vibing with the manufactured

prettiness theme we both—soccer girl, poet—cared too fucking much about.
When Luke Combs’ cover of Chapman’s Fast Car dropped, I held back on our way

to Giant about how it took a straight, white male to bring Traci’s 20^th century queer, black lyrics about “getting out of here” to win Country’s 2023 Song of the Year,

both of us singing sad folksy at first then twanging on “I-I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone be someone, tossed “I get you” eyes at one another, reached

into our own yearning caves of becoming someone before landing at Playa Bowl, frozen acai burning sweet-sour in our throats, coconut flakes curling on our t-shirts.

Just last week, on the way to Chipotle, we both craved Landslide, wailed about our reflections in “snow-covered hills,” Stevie’s song now covered as deep and wide as those snowy mountains, our own changes stirring our insides as Nicks lullabied “even children get older, and I’m getting older too.” So I tell you now, sylvan child,

Sylvia girl, how time, like gears, shifts to reverse, cycles forward and back. As teens your father, your grandfather, in separate centuries, on cassette then CD, played

Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, sang “Box of Rain” with me as America unfurled around us. That’s the sweet-sour thing about time, lovey. It all ends and

continues

VA Smith

A frequent Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, VA Smith’s work has appeared in several anthologies and in dozens of literary journals, among them: Southern Review, Calyx, Crab Creek Review, West Trade Review, Third Wednesday, After Happy Hour Review, and SWIMM. Her first two books, Biking Through the Stone Age and American Daughters, were published by Kelsay Books in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Her third collection, Adaptations, will be published by Green Writers Press in September 2025. VA’s bliss is traveling, cooking, hiking, and loving on friends and family. Visit her website at vasmithpoetry.com and her Instagram and YouTube @vasmithpoetry.