Contributor: Samara Golabuk

- -
Tip the dire ferment of my thoughts on edge
a spinning dime that slows and rests,
at tension with insistent gravity
(an unreasoning beast at best
and almost always right).

Where's this vaunted spell,
the perfect synchronicity of uncertainty and atomic structure
to let me bandit away on a thermal,
laughing breezily among the convections of clouds?
Unbidden skylark am I,
a would-be immigrant of the firmament—
the vault that hoards no windows, only stars.


- - -
Samara is a Pushcart nominee whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Inklette, Eyedrum Periodically, Anti-Heroin Chic, Eunoia Review and others. She has two children, works in marketing and design, and has returned to university to complete her BA in Poetry.

Contributor: Samara Golabuk

- -
demand your grief,
possess it like a lug
from the Jersey Shore
possesses a woman.
Require its fulness,
command it to shred its way
into your heart muscle,
fracture its way into your bones,
order it to choke your blood
to standstill, valves fluttering.
Roar its ferment, whole-live being,
the black ink of it, swallow
not willingly, but gorgeously,
feverishly, starvingly,
inhale it whole,
so you can begin
to digest its pieces,
the molecules alter,
one after another,
becoming us, but brilliant,
soon enough


- - -
Samara is a Pushcart nominee whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Inklette, Eyedrum Periodically, Anti-Heroin Chic, Eunoia Review and others. She has two children, works in marketing and design, and has returned to university to complete her BA in Poetry.

Contributor: Samara Golabuk

- -
A woman

knows about blood.
Pain is in her nature,
the kiss and pull of it,
the binding wisdom of it.

First,
we are perfect salt crystals,
bromide bald and frilled
with skirts and comfort.
The wild dogs
of puberty petrify us—,
we walked slow so life
will not scent us, send
us its feral hounds to ram
quick-gust snouts at our heels.
Those dogs are eager
for a taste of Achilles,
the white soft bar of it snapping
and wet in their grinning jaws
that drip and wolf at moons.

Mars, the crone—her red battle surface
gone to dust—scuffs and chortles
at us, our ample emptiness,
our shying, a florist of it flourishing
young girls — cherished blue dew-blossoms,
fragile and succulent to be held
so near the sun.


- - -
Samara is a Pushcart nominee whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Inklette, Eyedrum Periodically, Anti-Heroin Chic, Eunoia Review and others. She has two children, works in marketing and design, and has returned to university to complete her BA in Poetry.