Resilient Pieholes

“Xetery!” Joyce shrieked, hurling Great Grub magazine the length of her spacious kitchen. The cover shot of her own airbrushed face sailed over the breakfast bar and her husband Roger then hit the wall and crumpled onto the spotless floor. Roger looked up from his croissant. “What the…?” “Xetery!” Joyce barked and stormed out. “Xetery?” …

Jeanne Yu is an emerging poet, life-long environmentalist, an engineer and a mom who loves to hike in the beautiful Pacific Northwest forests. She completed her MFA at Pacific University in January 2023. Jeanne’s work can be found in Rattle, Breakwater Review, Paper Dragon, Intima, The Inflectionist Review, New Letters, Otterhouse Arts, and the Oregon …

Absent billions, conjure dumplings: eggs, flour, gleaming hands interlaced, jam jars kept loose-lidded. Muster nectar. Open piquant quinces. Ribbons strung through unlatched vaulted windows,wind-waved, violet, umber, turquoise. Read, reread. Quote poets on needful matters, lunar kennings. Jump into handsprings, giddy for everything—drifting, clapping bells, alleluias. Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner …

Please put the hearts on a skewer—you can call theman appetizer if you want to, charge me more than they are worth. I’ll buy it. I only have an appetite for what’s unwanted;all the foods I grew up on now made gourmet.It’s the fish collar I want, bony triangle of tendertucked between the gills, a …

the golden oak kitchen cabinet crashed to the floor this morning just as I was simmering a dream of caribou and wolves nearly clipped the corner off the sleepfog swirling like eggs in a teflon frypan a mug of tea splattered when it slipped my grip shocked by the shriek of the cabinet’s unhinging now …

Only you would exit that way, your cashmere sweater draped on a chair, a lemon you nicked in your pocket. Only you could say when you don’t spend money on yourself, people notice, and leave me believing it was sage advice. Only you served up the perfect cappuccino – at Marco’s, at Besaw’s, and in …

Marianne von Willemer to Goethe, circa 1816 I sent one to you while you were at work— as if an artichoke could make a wife of me—a thistle for your fork, Cynara cardunculus, after a quick dip in olive oil and lemon. “Poison,” you once wrote, was not some Secret Thief, but “the intensity of …

My stomach and mouth are furious. My eye is misbehaving, and the doctor says, “Do not fly.” This also translates to: You cannot fly . . . to New Jersey . . . to eat! She is Asian, like me; a food freak, like me. She knows the enormity of her words. Covid did this …

Bellingham Review is so excited to share with you a folio of poetry that emerged from the 50th Association for Ethnic Studies Conference at California State University, Los Angeles, in 2022. This poetry folio on home, nourishment, and community features the creative work of Shayda Kafai, María I. Morales-Sánchez, Nicole Leopardo, and Pau Abustan. Poetry …

After my husband’s death, grief blinded me, perhaps, mercifully, so that I could not see how it would strip from me even the simplest of pleasures. In the spring, when once I had wandered the forest still wet with rain, and greedily plucked wild chanterelles, I found myself walking past them, leaving them to the …