Chuka Susan Chesney

Post Mastectomy Shoppe

On Brand Boulevard in a suburb of Angels

is a corset shop a lingerie store

Inside you’ll find along with sexy bras

a full array of breast prostheses

I visit the shop with my friend Alexis

after her mastectomy

as she recovers

The breast forms have nipples

made of plastic

Alexis tries one on behind a curtain

The form fits neatly

into the pocket

of a wire-free bra

beneath her blouse

The owner steps inside to assist Alexis

who’s sobbing as she fastens

the hooks into eyes

The owner says Don’t cry

or I’ll start crying

While Alexis swipes her card for bras and plastic

we noticed nipple labels in the case below

peony and rosewood-tinged areolae

similar to wreaths

and other stickers

Alexis pastes on backs

of Christmas envelopes

After a while

Alexis decides

her new breast forms

protrude like ping pong balls

She drives to Nordstrom and purchases

some more

says the new ones

are homey like

squishy bean bags

Chuka Susan Chesney, a graduate of Art Center College of Design, is an artist, poet, short-story writer, and editor. Her award-winning paintings and sculpture have been shown in galleries across the country. Her poems and short stories have been published on three continents. Chesney's anthology of poetry and art "Lottery Blues", coedited by Ulrica Perkins will be published by Little Red Tree in 2020.

Comments

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Jim Daniels

Half Days My daughter, thirteen, pale shred of herself, fought an unidentified infection in her spine as it softened her discs into disappearance. I’d unread that story if she were young and still listened to lullabies. After she got discharged, I set an alarm for two a.m. each night to shoot antibiotics into her port while she slept, her limp arm resting in my hand. Her return to school: half days—follow my dotted line smearing across months of sleepless breadcrumbs— at noon I idled high, anxious in the school driveway rattling off the latest test results in the zero gravity of fear. She startled me with the brittle thunk of the car door slam, then snapped at me for staring at her friends as they strolled across the street to the cafeteria, creeping them out, she said, embarrassed by illness like hard acne or a blooming hickey, wrong music or flakey hair, or the tacky middle-school jumper she no longer had to wear. I was there to drive her to

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I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful. I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose. I was lonely. I was too loose. I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you. If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

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