NELLE

By 47 Journals LLC

NELLE is an annual publication open to submissions from any female-identifying writer. We publish poetry, memoirs, and stories from across the globe. This issue features works by Lauren Camp, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Rachel Hall, and many others. NELLE is edited by Lauren Slaughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: 47 Journals LLC
• Release date: Jan 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781943661497

Book preview

Patrons

College of Arts and Sciences

The University of Alabama at Birmingham

The Department of English,

The University of Alabama at Birmingham

Margaret Harrill

Robert Morris, M.D.

Tamra Thomas

C. Douglas Witherspoon, M.D.

Friends

Sandra Agricola

Daniel Anderson

Rebecca Bach

Diane Baker

George W. Bates

Peter and Miriam Bellis

Claude and Nancy Bennett

Randy Blythe

James Bonner

F.M. Bradley

Mary Flowers Braswell

Jim Braziel

Karen Brookshaw

Bert Brouwer

Edwin L. Brown

Donna Burgess

Linda Casebeer

Alicia K. Clavell

John E. Collins

Robert Collins

Catherine Danielou

Jim L. Davidson

Michael Davis

Denise Duhamel

Charles Faust

Grace Finkel

Edward M. Friend III

Stuart Flynn

Andrew Glaze

Robert P. Glaze

Randa Graves

Ron Guthrie

Ward Haarbauer

Ted Haddin

John Haggerty

Richard Hague

Sang Y. Han

Jeff Hansen

Tina Harris

Jessica Heflin

Patti Callahan Henry

Pamela Horn

Jennifer Horne

William Hutchings

Mary Kaiser

Lanier Scott Isom

Joey Kennedy

Sue Kim

Marilyn Kurata

Ruth and Edward Lamonte

Beverly Lebouef

Ada Long

Susan Luther

John C. Mayer

James Mersmann

Will Miles

Dail W. Mullins Jr.

Michael R. Payne

Robert Lynn Penny

Lee and Pam Person

William Pogue

Kieran Quinlan

Jim Reed

Steven M. Rudd

Rusty Rushton

John Sartain

Janet Sharp

Danny Siegel

Juanita Sizemore

Martha Ann Stevenson

Lou Suarez

Susan Swagler

Jeane Thompson

Drucilla Tyler

Maria Vargas

Adam Vines

Daniel Vines

Larry Wharton

Elaine Whitaker

Jacqueline Wood

John M. Yozzo

Carol Prejean Zippert

Staff

editor-in-chief

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter

managing editor

Anamaria Santiago

assistant managing editor

Mandy Riggs

senior editors

Halley Cotton, Poetry

assistant editors

Taylor Byas

Shelly Cato

Kristin Entler

Emily Krawczyk

Scot Langland

Mandy Riggs

business manager

Karen Ann Coggin

intern and social media

Miranda Riggs

cover art

St. Clair by Debra Eubanks Riffe

production/printing

47 Journals, LLC

From the Editor

Dear Readers,

How would you describe that look staring back at you from the cover of NELLE, issue three?

Those eyes: are they daring or summoning you? Is the gaze one of protest or power?

Perhaps it’s all of the above and more. Each inspection of this stunning block print by Debra Eubanks Riffe reveals something new; the way floral shapes within that doily gag suggest howling, the dark flicks in the right eye. It’s the same with the writing in this issue—each piece wants your clear attention. Look, they challenge. Look closer. I dare you.

We are privileged at NELLE to host The Three Sisters Prizes, which the editors annually award to one work each in the categories of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. It was especially difficult to make our selections this year. Our choice in nonfiction, Virginia Bell’s lyric essay, Chicken, reflects on the contradictory elements of a father’s identity, especially regarding his sexuality. What does it mean to come out, Bell asks, and what does a lifelong game of chicken look like? In Jane Doe, our fiction recipient, Susan Taylor Chehak, explores—against a seemingly ordinary Midwestern landscape—the most brutal forms of female erasure for a girl who seems to have lost everything, including her name. Natasha Deonarain’s poem, Pretoria, South Africa, 1945, expresses moments of whimsy and beauty in a look at a mother’s white privilege and a multiracial daughter’s struggle under Apartheid. These works, along with many others in this issue, engage with the themes suggested by the cover. Who in our culture is permitted to speak and be visible? Whose voices and bodies are systematically silenced or shamed? These themes appear so persistently, it’s almost as if we’d planned it (we didn’t). I could go on, but let’s skip to the good part: the authors’ own words.

Just one final note inspired by the cover art and by so many pieces in this issue: even muzzled, we can find holes through which to breathe. Or scream. Or sing.

Thanks, as always. Take care.

Yours,

Lauren Slaughter

Editor-in-chief

Francesca Bell

The Dentist Says It’s from Some Earlier Damage

In my head, a dead tooth

is lodged among the living

as I am lodged in this life.

How can I tell

one thing

from another?

How can I explain I feel

like the tooth feels

now that it doesn’t?

Dead or alive,

it gleams

in every picture,

only faintly discolored.

I appear smiling

in every moment

at the center of the family

while I house

some real thing

in a state of slow decay.

The pulp in my tooth

has nearly calcified

as I have nearly hardened

before the stove,

fixed, fastened,

a dead thing

no one realized

was dying.

I carry this tooth

in my mouth,

like a sentence

I cannot speak.

Francesca Bell

Dusk, the Day I Drove My Child to the Partial Hospitalization Program

The trees’ branched openwork is bare, exposed

by autumn’s fretsaw. Color shines through

the blank spaces, color of days closing like doors,

one by one, against me.

I pause, having emptied properly my little bucket

of food scraps, and wheeled the trashcans, relieved

of their stinking loads, back in place, snug

against our house.

I think of how succulents compost their own bodies, hold water

in each thick leaf, sit tidy in pots I’ve placed carefully on my

clean-swept porch. And did I tell you how useless it all is

before the ravages

of the starved synapse? Even the bread I bake doesn’t help,

despite its wild rising, its very fine crumb.

Orchids on their bright sill open reliably

their freckled faces.

No small feat, this reblooming, when too much care

is as dooming as too little. I do everything meticulously,

walk motherhood’s narrow ledge, and still stand

watching light fade

through the oaks’ snarled tracery, seeing it wane as the sky goes

from rose to pink to pale. It ends up black no matter,

the trees’ outlines engulfed each night

by the dark.

Francesca Bell

Deciduous

I want to be the tree

when cold has come,

after rain has run

like lovers’ fingers down

my thick body, and my leaves

have burst into burning.

I want to glow like embers

that are the fire dying,

growing hotter and hotter

until it’s gone.

I want my branching

darkness exposed

by the wind’s

transparent insistence

as it pulls, piece by piece,

my bright raiment off.

I want to feel what’s next

curled tight as fists inside me.

Lynne Thompson

A Birth Mother Wears A Costume Her Daughter Will Never Fit In

Some thought the mother said taproot

Some thought that woman said resigned

but her daughter mouthed immaculately conceived

Some thought the mother said perdition

Some thought she said hocus pocus

while her daughter wrote parables wrote charms

Some hoped the daughter would say yes, honey

(although they suspected the daughter said wishbone—

knew she would deny everything, slipping into, out of)

Some never understood the daughter’s need

to be alone, her fear of sorcery—they only knew

her as braid of ginger & sea salt

as weightless darling & origami

Some have heard her bark & bark & bark

Some have heard her arrange a resistance

Lynne Thompson

sometimes, the light

—Joni Mitchell’s Ode

Blue, here is a shell for you,

and sometimes, there will be sorrow

but I have no regrets, Coyote.

We’re captive on this carousel of time,

oh, but sometimes the light.

Blue, here is a shell for you and

varnished weeds in window jars.

Why did you pick me and

do you have any regrets, Coyote?

Buy your dreams a dollar down.

Heed the trumpets’ call all night.

Blue, here is a shell for you because

the more I’m with you, pretty baby,

I’m like a black crow, flying,

dark and ragged and no regrets.

Until love sucks me back that way,

dreams…dreams and false alarms

but Blue, I’ve got a shell for you.

What point regrets, Coyote?

Amanda Moore

Morning Haibun with Tween

The girl can sleep now, hours and hours at a time…years since the last 2 a.m. tiptoe down the hall to fold herself between us like a warm sheet. She sleeps now until noon if undisturbed, later even, forgoing the waking world while her body in sleep is making a woman. School days she sets an alarm, but it can’t break the caul of her slumber—I crack the door, peel back the covers, count the minutes: It’s almost 7 I call, careful. Whether delay tactic or that her teen self has fallen away, she is cuddles and sweetness, grasping for me, I love you, Mama in her soft low voice. Five more minutes, please. Sometimes I can’t help it—I climb in the bed, look at the unguarded face, so ancient and dear and dangerous: it is like looking at fire. And her hair, the feel of it as I brush, push it back from the sweet sleeping countenance I have watched her whole