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
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.
