Love Song for June Cleaver by Rachel Bunting

June. Just your name is enough to make a girl
sweat.  We can only imagine what waits beneath
your full skirts. Don’t play coy, June, we’re not
living in the 50s anymore. Welcome to the brand
new century, a sex positive culture of vibrators
and feminists who wear lipstick and shave their
armpits. We’re not the troublemakers you once
thought we were, June. We talk about the problems
with our partners in public, we strap on and play
all the roles. We have opinions, we vote because
that’s what good girls do. We throw elbows
and wear fishnets, jump over each other in skates
at roller derby bouts while the needlepoint stays
home. We wear pants to the office, we answer
our own phones, we make the decisions that affect
the bottom line, we profit share, we pick up the kids
and drive through McDonald’s, we coif our hair
and line our eyes with black or brown or purple,
we watch tv shows about sex and enjoy it. We scream,
June, we scream when we come. We expect to come.
We vajazzle, we make our bodies sparkle, we ink them,
we work out, we show cleavage, we eat ice cream
in the morning, in bed, in the bathtub. We do it all
because we can, and we don’t wear aprons while
we cook. We can teach you everything you need
to know, June. Take our hand. Don’t let go.

O Desire by Joanna Grant

Mother of All Poems by Dylan Barmmer

Emily Dickinson’s Tree by Julie Jordan Scott

Shadow paints the grass, darker
Locks itself inside the grey
which whispers insistently “stay small”

I wonder, sometimes, what would have happened
If you had let yourself out more?
Would your specialness have been vacuumed

from your words or would it have been
magnified? We’ll never know, of course.
But I sit beside this tree, one of

your trees and I stare into the
shadow it leaves and I think
about you

Check out the Contributors page for an explanation of the poem and to learn more about Julie.