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What the Wire Hangers Say
by Kate Peper

March 14, 2022 Contributed By: Ann Calandro, Kate Peper

Mirror by Ann Calandro
Mirror by Ann Calandro

Over and over

our thin necks

hang the likeness 

of your unfilled 

body

 

We’ve known you for so long

We just want

to get closer

 

Call us flimsy    cheap

when you discard us 

in your 

seasonal raids  

toss us

back

to the dry cleaners

 

Yet open the closet door

     

there are even more of us

 

Those plastic or wooden 

others 

with their sturdy bones

can’t       keep       up 

 

Our slender shoulders     are    your shoulders

 

We grow tender 

just having you near

 

The weight of you 

is moth 

light

 


Besides writing, KATE PEPER loves to paint watercolors, garden obsessively and walk with her husband and semi-feral dog, Hannah, in Northern California. Her chapbook, Dipped In Black Water, won the New Women’s Voices Award from Finishing Line Press, 2016 and her poems can be found in The American Journal of Poetry, Baltimore Review, Cimarron Review, Potomac Review, Rattle, Tar River Review and others.

ANN CALANDRO is a writer, mixed media collage artist, and classical piano student. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have been published in print and online literary journals and included in two print anthologies. Her artwork has been published in print and online journals, exhibited in galleries, and awarded prizes. See more artwork at www.anncalandro.webs.com.

Filed Under: Featured Content, Featured Poetry, Poetry Posted On: March 14, 2022

Further Reading

A Footprint in the Ashes of Time
by Dmitry Blizniuk, translated from the Russian by Sergey Gerasimov

If it wasn’t for our inborn optimism –
we drop coins into the sea, plant pear trees that are going to grow for centuries –
understanding of reality would burn us
like a match may burn poplar fluff

JAM MADE OF LOVERBERRY from recipes of metamtextosis by Serge Segay (translated by Alex Cigale)

carefully comb over the loverberry sew as to seminally manhandle bare-breast. ectomize the pit-joints and the unripe bare-breasts prepare the scratch-pot and carefully immerse in it the loverberries lightly stir the com-pot and let it loverrise. remove the lidlove and squeezelove to loveliness per 1 loverton of loverberries 1 lovegram of sugarlaugh, ½ glasstick bitchbrew. […]

Sons of The Confederacy 2.0: Not Just a Few Bad Apples
by Laketa Smith

Finally, after one of the most suspenseful and unnerving elections of my lifetime, the United States Congress was poised on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, to certify Electoral College votes, a long-held ceremonial element of every incoming presidential cabinet. Instead, mayhem descended on the capital city, and Congress itself, as a mob of Trump supporters laid […]

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