My Sister’s Secrets

January 2020 | poetry

—musty smell

a ball of bloody underpants

under her bed

cigarette butts in a jam jar

a half empty bottle of gin

wrapped in an old wool sweater

two tins of spearmint Tic Tacs

the pearl earrings my mother

lost last week

a DO NOT READ UNDER PENALTY

OF DEATH diary

rows of Leslie Richards

followed by rows of Leslie Fisher

& rows of Leslie Pearson

in slanted pink script

a dog-eared copy of Peyton Place

untie the top of your bathing suit

a condom curled in her wallet

I tiptoe away from tomorrow—

Claire Scott

Claire Scott is an award winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has been accepted by the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.

No Waiting Room

January 2020 | poetry

The only way is through.

At the moment it seems impossible:

No thoroughfare.

I mean how do you trust yourself?

And your neurotransmitters?

And that’s just one of many

Things to worry about.

Why wake up in the morning?

There must be something that makes it worthwhile.

There must be something

To fix or shrink.

I’ve never seen one

That didn’t make me worse.

And there’s something to drink

On the top shelf.

“Not the cause, just the symptoms.”

You want to know about my mother?

I’ll tell you about my mother.

[Violence ensues,]

And watch out

For charged particles.

They can be very aggressive.

This page is intentionally left blank,

And the one behind it

Is unintelligible.

Ian Ganassi

Ian Ganassi’s work has appeared or will appear in numerous literary magazines, including, New American Writing; The American Journal of Poetry; First Literary Review-East; Clockwise Cat; and The Yale Review; among many others. His poetry collection Mean Numbers was published in 2016. His new collection, True for the Moment, is forthcoming from MadHat Press. Selections from an ongoing collaboration with a painter can be found at www.thecorpses.com.