Gnashing Teeth Publishing

| words that get in your teeth

Rag Pickings by Rebecca Dempsey

Let me tell you about the linen to wrap the dead / see how you can unbind desiccated limbs / pull apart the fibers / soak and flatten / turning cloth of death into a different kind of matter / imagine art from cast off waste / the knowledge we wear opens pages / material that clothed bodies in three dimensions / opens minds in all of them in libraries of patchwork ideas / Penelope unwinding and weaving the story of her endurance / scroll through the book of her life / so many old stories laid threadbare to sewn into new tales / yarns taken from pulling apart the work of generations / distressed thematic oddments / orphaned embellishments / I’m as guilty as any rag picker poking through frayed old works like experiences I outgrew / to reuse them as darts to give shape to personal history on the page / to become cloth to become pulped mush turned to paper processed for ink impressed upon them / decades later I cut them up and create an applique of recombined words / endlessly addressing how fibers became clothes became books became art / object then subject / interchangeably once we read what we wore and clothed ourselves in what we read

BIO: Rebecca Dempsey lives in Melbourne / Naarm, Australia. Her work has featured in The Ekphrastic Review, Mocking Owl Roost and Triggerfish Critical Review. Rebecca can be found at WritingBec.com

Goodnight, Taj Mahal by Andre Peltier

Deep below earth, clay and sand, deep below roots and aquifers, it lies in wait. Like that silent coyote stalking her white-tailed deer through the brush, it waits patiently and

contain by Megan Cartwright

verb past tense: contained; past participle: contained 1. have or hold (someone or something) within. Similar: hold carry To have and to hold in our own microcosm, constructed of hope.

Listening to Words by Mona Mehas

Listening to words out of touch cross lily pads, one to the next my rules, a tiny picture frame debt of honor, repay the gift. Headlights illuminate the path listening

Blooming by Elizabeth Gade

Some days are easy and some days are exhausting the days you have to dig through the muck inside take more hits than a heavyweight prize fighter cling to life

Pomegranate Rose by Laura Peña

I want to feed this delicacy To my concubine A tiny spoonful at a time I want to watch the luscious sorbet Linger on the tip of her tongue Melt

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