Life Skills by Kathy Gee

Small hand in large,

they run along the shallows,

turn and dip for full immersion.

Stretch your newly upright legs apart

and drop towards the water, let it go.

Now cup a fist of water, front and back.

A mother teaches her pretty toddler

how to pee in the sea.

---

Kathy Gee’s career was in heritage. Her poetry collection was published by V. Press and she wrote the spoken word elements for http://suiteforthefallensoldier.com/. Her next small collection – Checkout - is due out in March 2019.

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Home by Jessa Forest

Home scratches at her shingles with tree branch fingers, pulls the air conditioning unit close to her grimy aluminum siding, and keens an empty song of mourning. We found her wandering the tornado snarled wild three months ago, starved and lonely. She doesn’t know how to take care of herself, you see? We fed her shards of dining room tables, kindling for the fireplace, and cast iron bathtubs clawed feet first. She was slow to recover so we gutted her plumbing, ripped out her nerves, and rewired the electricity. She let the water in every time it rained so we put a new roof on her and let her out for regular walks around the wolf pen. Let her mingle with the vultures, I said, let her feel useful and clean up the dead but no one wanted to listen. We found rot an mold in her corners, infused her insulation with antibiotics, and quarantined her for two weeks while she belched ladderback chairs, sofa cushions, wind chimes, and broken bookcases. She still has her bad days. After feeding time...

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A child’s mark before letters— sticky red palms, ten tiny petals, two flowers patted on white. Already they’re telling her story— the whorls of the thumbs, the dips and stretches of lines of life, of the heart. She’ll leave them everywhere— on the skin of lovers, knives in the kitchen, the riffled pages of library books, on window glass, wiping raindrops. Will she reach out to touch things no longer there, make her mark for others to find like her sisters whose hands were caught in crushed ochre on cave walls, among running horses, the haunches of bison, 35,000 years ago?* *It’s now believed that many cave paintings were made by women, judging by the size of the handprints. --- Penny Ayers lives in Cheltenham. She has been published online and in various magazines, most recently in ‘Ink, Sweat & Tears’, ‘Snakeskin’ and the summer edition of ‘Spelt’. She helps run the Gloucestershire Writers’ Network.

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