Myfanwy Williams

October 2025 | poetry

The Women Who Carry

I.

A woman carries her uterus in a plastic grocery bag

floating in formaldehyde, stoppered in a bell jar:

inside her, the void sewn tight to stop her organs

from migrating, where the blue whales churning

in that black hole of hunger have ceased singing

and the holy land infants wade, voiceless nouns

into an empty red sea: she carries.

II.

And when the meteor, thirty-three years in transit

tore clean from course, right ovary a projectile

of cyst upon cyst, of the stuff made of star dust,

the doctor said what do you modern women expect

this biblical reckoning as she carries two truths

as one gnawing guilt- in her morning coffee cones

packed with grass: she carries.

III.

She carries an algal bloom eating the faces clean

to the jawbone, ripping the fish gills to streamers-

each follicle, bleached coral retreating from the waves:

beyond a certain depth is stillness. Imagine an event

horizon in warming red waters- a void surface

where choices cease. Still, she carries cetacean choirs

and iron from the stars, birthing toxic pigment

into a wild toothed sea.

Myfanwy Williams

Myfanwy Williams (she/her) is a Sydney-based queer poet and writer of Filipino Welsh heritage. Her writing explores themes of identity, ecology, and intersectional justice. Her poetry and writing have been published in Plumwood Mountain Journal, About Place Journal, Wild Roof Journal, Panorama Journal of Travel and Place, Alocasia, AAWP Meniscus Literary Journal, Clarion Poetry, The Winged Moon Literary Journal, The Madrigal Literary Journal, The Crank, Crow & Crosskeys, Querencia Press, and others. She was nominated for the 2024 Pushcart Prize and holds degrees in literature, psychology and social science.

Frederick Wilbur

October 2025 | poetry

Aubade for Aurora

Before that late hour of blue cheese

and ruddy-skinned pears, white wine,

she asks me questions I cannot answer simply:

forget night’s history, the weight of excuse?

I cannot ignore her briberies of pink and gold.

Will salutations tangle into word games

and betray the desire to love a while longer?

Her naked confidence is as unabashed as arrogance forgiven.

Her gown sweeps the spiders’ dew:

lint of wherewithal, might-have-been, the else to do.

At the window, she does not have to guess

the dreams of this world, its humble corners.

She walks through orchards: they buzz to bloom,

shadows jump stone walls in glee, the moon sinks to pale regret.

She walks trails with no stumbles or switchbacks,

coaxes crows across a frontiered sky.

Early coffee to wake, scones in their sacrifice;

I plead with her stay, stay, but she does not look back

at the bed we shared: I hear only whispers

of hinge pins swinging their partners away.

Frederick Wilbur

Frederick Wilbur’s poetry collections are As Pus Floats the Splinter Out, Conjugation of Perhaps, and The Heft of Promise. His work appears in many periodicals, including The Atlanta Review, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New Verse News, One Art: a journal of poetry, Shenandoah, The South Carolina Review, and The Southern Poetry Review. He is poetry co-editor for Streetlight Magazine. He was awarded the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize for best poem of the year by Midwest Quarterly (2018).