Vol. 1 / Issue 1
A literary and cultural review journal
May, 2025
Abiquiú
How is it I am with a man who cleans the Airbnb
in the last few hours before we leave
while I sit
on a porch overlooking the prostrate mesa
where Georgia O’Keeffe’s ashes lie, scribbling
in my drunken cat notebook?
Go read, go write, he says with a kiss without
Resentment
as he begins plucking burner covers from
the antique electric blue
stove. But I am used
to being the Bitch who didn’t sweep the floor, didn’t bear the right
fruit, didn’t know she was only pretty
when she cried.
Is this joy?
His dog leaps in the desert grass, her reddish brown
brindle flashing through the scrub
as she chases whiptails, dragonflies, violet-green swallows,
other unseen desert creatures. To trust the landscape,
to love a man is not something
she considers, just does
as breathing.
You are not a burden, he never says, but I feel
in the way he dotes
in the kitchen, in bed. The way he smoothes the tangled blue
of my hair, reads me to sleep with Grimms’ Fairytales, A Song of
Ice and Fire. I know how to be Tolerated not
enjoyed, worshipped.
A rock pile rests on the stone rail of the porch—
quartz and agate other travelers have collected. I wonder
at those who gathered them, people from Minneapolis and Toronto
wandering the desert, pockets heavying
with stones
like Virginia Woolf, only there is no
Water here.
I did not expect to love the bone-blue
scrape
of the desert more than
myself and myself
more than the splintered blue
bones of ‘I do.’
My body calls for the monsoon, and she comes
unburdened.
Maiden Name
Your mother has never considered herself
a maiden
even when she might have been classified as such.
As a child, an adolescent, the label that
sucked her down was Old Soul,
which really was a Trojan horse, a training ground
for using her body to carry others’ trauma, food-crusted dishes, offspring.
Top Secret Knowledge:
What your mother’s damsel name might have been
back when she thought she needed saving, needed
a man to bracket her in his arms
and kiss the tracks of her tears the way they
did in all those romance novels
she devoured
in middle school at the library.
Who can know who she was
before she slipped on a ring, sloughed off her former life,
birthed A New Her before birthing
you.
What is Maiden?
What is Mother?
She is built of names
that cannot be broken, tamed—
counterculture sixties singer/Supreme Court trailblazer/unquietable, disruptive German.
Boys,
when someone asks you
what your mother’s maiden name is,
I hope you sing
the one she reclaimed, that she was born and will die with,
the name that howls
in her bones, that professes she belongs only to herself,
that she is someone you love but may never understand.
Body as Resume
Summary
What if I body my resume,
em dash at it full force, commas swinging
like
errant limbs,
and throw the mistempered weapon of my flesh
to the ground?
Education
Though I’ll never be done paying for it,
I can read Neruda in Spanish, create a
short story about broken
families, write
an etymology of the word
Doom.
Skills
Shall I mash the figure down into
a more pleasing shape—
an even-tempered,
neutral-dressing,
ego-stroking,
money maker
who knows when to open
her mouth
and swallow
a man
and when to shut
the fuck up?
Experience
If it’s capability you want, the hell am I doing here?
My whole life checking boxes,
making
myself
small
to be more palatable for men,
for income, for society’s unrelenting gaze.
In my experience, I wander
the fragmented hallways of my mind, poking
at outlines of addiction and mental illness that
plagued my ancestors
and ravages those
still living.
References
The ex-lovers are forming a restless queue—
And I don’t know if I’m the one
who got away or the one who
is the cautionary tale,
so brace yourself
and please consider the value
of my softest skills.
Jeff Goldblum Was Never Going to Save Us Anyway
It is the summer
where the end of the world tastes
closer. As a woman, there is no incentive to survive
the apocalypse because rotting in a ditch is preferrable to what comes
next, what we’ve already turned our eyes from in countries we couldn’t
point to on a map.
Heat dome cups us, insects under a glass; squash and pomegranate
shrivel in a monsoon with no rain; a recycling plant burns, its black and purple
smoke helixing along the city’s border with a reservation. But it is
the summer of bedrotting, of Barbenheimer, reveling in death and delusioning over
an all-women Supreme Court, so just ignore
at the air quality index.
Pregnant people carry the dead and dying well
before viability beyond expiration. Vomit stains the podium
where she recounts birthing a partial-skulled fetus; a Black woman’s miscarriage
labeled a crime—the punishment fits the punishment.
Politicians won’t admit the end
is no longer abstract, that Bo Burnham was onto something, so in the meantime,
let’s keep those uteruses full, even in death.
Aliens circle the planet, hiding in the guise of a grotesque billionaire’s satellite,
their derision for us and our boiling, poisoned sphere
evident in their refusal to contact, to re-enact
the doomsday films of our youth. We joke extraterrestrial colonization would
be preferable, but the words sit heavy in our microplastic-lined
bellies. Jeff Goldblum was never going to save us anyway.
It is the summer
where the end of the world tastes
like me. I build my flavor profile, microdose joy
from brown sugar boba, necromantic romance novels, shriveled hours
in the bath, divorce poetry, and fucking. The man who consumes me says I taste
good, and I want to tell him to savor it because we aren’t long
for this world.
Melanie Unruh earned an MFA in fiction from The University of New Mexico. Her writing has appeared in Emerald City, Apricity, Barren, The Meadow, The Boiler, Post Road, Philadelphia Stories, New Ohio Review, and Cutthroat, among others. At present, she’s working on a romance novel and weird little poems about bones and feminism. When she’s not writing or teaching, she enjoys drinking a good cup of chai or boba, listening to audiobooks, smashing the patriarchy, and spending time with her family.
You can find her on Instagram @melunwritten or on her website: melanieunruhwriter.wordpress.com