During Stalin’s rule, poet Anna Akhmatova memorized her poems because she was afraid to commit them to paper. The written poem was evidence of a crime—the insistence on thinking and feeling for herself. To write joy in a time of fear is an act of resistance and repudiation.

Read the full guest editor letter from Alina Stefanescu

Guest Editor’s Spotlight:
Impressionable by Norah Priest

Mushrooms and Dew by Anastasia Cojocaru

Birth Night Pantoum by Jeanie Thompson

Bad Trip by Meg Tuite

Trail: Easter’s Eve, 2015 by Heidi Lynn Staples

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Kookaburra by Melinda Jane – The Poet Mj

Queynte by John Repp

Divorcees by Jasmine Don

Tasha Yar At Her Best by Shanti Weiland

I Want To Be a Drag Queen Diva by Steven A. Gillis

On Your Way to and Mostly After a Car Wreck by Marvin Shackelford

In Death They Bloom by Cover Artist Sarah Shields

This Is How Two Women Have Sex [2] by Emily Blair

Encircled by Meg Drummond-Wilson

The Girl in the Boat by Larry Blazek

Rachel Nix Interviews Jeanie Thompson of Alabama Writers’ Forum

Rachel Nix Interviews Alina Stefanescu

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About Our Guest Editor
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Alabama with four incredible mammals. Find her poems and prose in recent issues of Juked, DIAGRAM, New South, Mantis, VOLT, Cloudbank, New Orleans Review Online, and others. Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize in Short Fiction. She serves as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes and President of the Alabama State Poetry Society. More arcana online at www.alinastefanescuwriter.com or @aliner.