Taiga copyright © 2019 by Clare MacQueen. All rights reserved.*

through childhood we kissed
our mother’s soft cheeks good-night...
our lips could not see
her silky skin a fine sleeve:
membrane of steel between us

* Photograph of Edna St. Vincent Millay was shot by Arnold Genthe in 1914 at Mitchell Kennerly’s house in Mamaroneck, New York. Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division in Washington, D.C. (link retrieved on 20 June 2019).

Taiga copyright © 2019 by Clare MacQueen. All rights reserved.*

Meiwa the kumquat
fragrant golden gem of June
tempts without mercy
we cannot help but oblige
slowly peeling her alive

* Photograph of Nagami Kumquat from Tasty Landscape (21 June 2013); used with permission.

—Both poems above (“through childhood we kissed” and “Meiwa the kumquat”) were published previously in Skylark: A Tanka Journal (Summer 2016: Volume 4, Number 1).

Clare MacQueen

is founding editor and publisher of the KYSO Flash online literary journal, and served as webmaster and associate editor for Serving House Journal from its inception in January 2010 through its retirement in May 2018, after publishing 18 issues. She is a co-editor of Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life (Serving House Books, 2015), and the editor, designer, and publisher of 14 books for her KYSO Flash micro-press.

She serves on the General Advisory Board for The Best Small Fictions, published by Sonder Press (2019) and Braddock Avenue Books (2018 and 2017). For the 2016 edition, published by Queen’s Ferry Press, she served as Assistant Editor, Domestic.

MacQueen’s short fiction, essays, and poetry appear in Firstdraft, Bricolage, New Flash Fiction Review, Serving House Journal, and Skylark, among others; and her essays appear in the anthologies Best New Writing 2007 and Winter Tales II: Women on the Art of Aging. Her nonfiction won an Eric Hoffer Best New Writing Editor’s Choice Award and was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ The Fortune You Seek Lies in a Different Cookie, fiction in New Flash Fiction Review (Issue 10, January 2018)

⚡ Tasting the New, micro-fiction in Serving House Journal (Issue 1, Spring 2010)

⚡ A Visit with the Bee-Headed Monster of the Black Lagoon, an article in Beelines (May 2013, pp. 5–7) based on MacQueen’s phone interview with author and retired English teacher, Terry Johnson, who has kept bees for more than 50 years

⚡ Clan Apis: A “Comic Book” by Jay Hostler, MacQueen’s review of the remarkable, genre-bending, award-winning book in Beelines (July 2013, pg. 8); also appearing on page 8 of that issue, photos of her bees feeding on honey