The Editorial Team

Spy Reprints “Her Gestures, Her Rules” by Susan Land

December 28, 2021 By The Editorial Team

Author’s note: “I once had a friend who did yoga and wrote down her dreams and earnestly informed me that she could hitchhike alone and be safe because she was special. She seemed to truly believe that nothing could hurt her. In “Her Gestures, Her Rules,” I imagined that she had a daughter who would, like most daughters, go from acolyte to critic to something in between.”

Her Gestures, Her Rules

BY THE EARLY ’80s, when the new age was still new, my mother, a local legend, operated the most popular yoga studio in Ulster County. Valley Yin Yang catered to aging hippies, rich and poor. I, conceived in 1969 at an ashram in Goa, was a significant line in her biography: an illegitimate half-Indian daughter. Her students were fascinated by me, as they were by every aspect of my mother’s life—her clothes, her diet, her true beliefs, her original religion. And, of course, her long legs and her thick hair, so dark my hair could have come from her, not from a never-named Indian father... [Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “Welcome Day” by Ronan J. Keenan

December 26, 2021 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: “Welcome Day is about a parent’s angst of how a combination of flawed genetics and a murky past will impact her child. The central character, Maria, is a single parent trying to distance her young son from her history of involvement in Irish paramilitary activity. In the story Maria watches her son begin life in a new school and worries how the ‘nature versus nurture’ dynamic will impact his development.”

Welcome Day

YOU’D SWEAR THERE’S A PIPE BOMB INSIDE, the way Maria holds the envelope at arm’s length. “The strain of fear’s gotten into ya,” Jimmy would say if he could see her now, panicked about opening a letter. This is the same Maria who’d hardly break stride when planting loaded packages near the Belfast barracks, years ago. Back then, she could create thick barriers in her mind, making it easy to categorize the soldiers as a faceless enemy from across the water rather than young lads barely out of school, homesick and frightened in strange borderlands. These days, Maria’s barriers are low and permeable, allowing fear to seep through whenever it wants. Today, it has come through her letterbox.

Sure enough, this envelope contains what she dreaded…(story continued in Spy)

Spy Reprints “The Oyster” by Jona Colson

December 26, 2021 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: “The poem began with a prompt—to show the beauty of something ugly. Having lived in the DMV all my life, and recently read a history of the Chesapeake Bay, I thought of the oyster. It is not attractive, but it is vital to the bay and, of course, delicious to eat. The poem imagines life from the oyster’s point of view.” ...[Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “At the End of His Life, William Bradford Studied Hebrew” by Margaret Mackinnon

December 26, 2021 By The Editorial Team

Author’s note: “After I saw images of the small Hebrew dictionary William Bradford created in his notebook, I was drawn to imagine his later life. And though the parallels may not seem obvious, I ... [Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “I Am the White Space” by Irene Fick

November 1, 2021 By The Editorial Team

Author’s note: “As a narrative poet, the process of creating this piece was somewhat of a departure for me. Lately, I have been intrigued by absence—what is not visible, not said, not done—even my own mental absence from much of what is going on around me. This appeal to ‘white space’ is especially strong on the page. It allows readers to fill in the blanks, interpret, create their own meaning"... [Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “Compulsion” by Susan Roney-O’Brien

November 1, 2021 By The Editorial Team

Author’s note: “Each day, a young woman runs past my home. What drives her pace, pushes her on? She runs fifteen miles a day alone, on country roads. I tried stepping into her shoes, tried to understand, imagined a past that could not be faced, a hurt that could not be undone. The repeated pounding of soles on pavement became a meditation, a saving grace"... [Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “The Leonids” by Anne Yarbrough

November 1, 2021 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: “We were driving back to Delaware from D.C. along Route 301 one night in November during the Leonid meteor shower. The Eastern Shore contains dark-sky patches along there, so I saw the shooting star. M’sing is a mysterious Lenape figure, somewhat deer and somewhat human, thought to have been a local forest guardian. The poem aims to evoke a disquieting unknowability and our human desire for some bright-lit gate (in this instance, the Delaware City Refinery) to protect us from that, even though it doesn’t, really”...[Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “Heidi the Octopus, Dreaming” by Wendy Mitman Clarke

October 12, 2021 By The Editorial Team

Author’s note: “Poetry for me is often a way to write about and cope with things that are emotionally fraught, painful, frightening, things that are too hard to approach head-on. This is one of those ... [Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “Natalie” by Anna Elin Kristiansen

October 12, 2021 By The Editorial Team

Authors Note: “‘Natalie’ plays with the concept of reality: a highly subjective and individual experience, yet a noun carrying meaning in our collective consciousness. When it loses touch with what most of us agree is the truth, we call this experience a psychosis. My unnamed narrator tells the story of existence from her point of view, and it is up to the reader to pick the version that agrees with them. I hope that I convey my compassion for this lost soul who is temporarily overwhelmed by her shame, fear and the weight of being human.”[Continue Story]

Spy Reprints “Debris” by Matthew Roth

September 26, 2021 By The Editorial Team

Author’s Note: “When I wrote “Debris” I was working on a series of poems about things we leave behind. When I started to research space junk, I was taken by the notion of something so small being capable of immense damage. The poem took off from there.”... [Continue Story]

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