Issue #32.7 A Double Issue: Nikki Ummel and Paige Stephens
Three Poems by Nikki Ummel
Dream Where I Am Nana, the Mother of Attis
after reading Catallus’ 63
I bit through the stick of willow’s bark. You were quiet (so quiet, I thought my prayers answered). But the crying came, and you, blue, eyes wide and skin slick: a protest. Attis, I did not ask for this. I did not ask to nurse you or watch you seed the world.
I heard my father scour the field, he called me and I left you, splayed on almond husks afterbirth-sticky, left you shell-shrouded in swaddled silence, to seek my father, to hold his hand in the dying light, too dim to see my spurned milk bloom, my choice, this poem, my own.
long day
cotton tongued & cheeks clawed, i am trapped in terminal restlessness / its clanging cymbals. this body a living current / my meds popping buttons to keep the electricity contained. lamictal comes dragging her rope / scorches my fields. where are my brave? my cousin texts me from jail, says he can’t sleep / demands, am i a ghost? then tells me i am not real. two different words in my mouth: living / alive. time is a puddle in my hands. i keep living because i don’t know what else to do.
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Nikki Ummel is a queer artist, editor, and educator in New Orleans. She has been published or has work forthcoming with Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, Texas Review Press, Black Lawrence Press, and others. Her debut poetry collection, Swamp Elegies, is the 2025 winner of the New American Poetry Award and will be published in late 2026. Nikki is the Executive Director and co-founder of LMNL, an arts organization focused on providing free and accessible workshops, readings, community events, and more. She has two poetry chapbooks, Hush (Belle Point Press, 2022) and Bayou Sonata (NOJHF, 2023), funded by the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation. You can find her on the web at www.nikkiummel.com
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A Poem by Paige Stephens
Check the Trash Can for a Condom
My sister can’t get pregnant. She never started bleeding, and she can’t get cramps like I do. I think about this as I slide out of his bed, stalling to remember where I left my things. I tiptoe to his bathroom and check the trash can for a condom. My skin feels wrong. Like there were sand grains in my sunscreen and somebody made me rub it in anyway. They’ll all be able to tell—that I’ve added another tick mark to the mirror in my bathroom.
***
He grumbles something in my general direction when I walk back into the bedroom. He calls me Brittany. And I don’t even look like a Brittany. A Brittany would have blonde hair and cherry-colored little lips and would never wear toe socks with flip-flops. I grab my shoes and leave without bothering to slip them on.
***
As little girls, my sister and I played husband and wife. We took turns taking care of the baby, washing the dishes, doing the laundry—pretending the future was something you could rehearse. Now she lives in a cute cottage with her understanding husband, Rick. They have a garden and flower boxes under their windows. I rent a run-down townhome from a sketchy real estate company that fixes things only when they’re already broken. I don’t live with my mother. She lives with me—downstairs, in the room that used to be my office.
***
She pretends that when I come home early in the morning it’s because I’ve been out getting coffee or sitting on the patio talking to a friend. But she knows. She knows I’m going to stand in my bathroom with lipstick and do math with my body. She thinks she counts my birth control pills every week, secretly. She says it like it’s concern, like it’s love: I just don’t want any illegitimate grandchildren. But I see her sitting at the tiny breakfast nook, helping herself to the intimacies of my life. I guess that’s why she moved in with me—because I’m the daughter who might get pregnant.
***
I’ve only had one real relationship. He was handsome, but not in the prince charming kind of way. He had a nice face and broad shoulders, but he wore wife beaters and flat-billed baseball caps and called himself a poet. He didn’t want his work read—only said out loud to music. I called him a rapper. We argued about that a lot. He changed his name often to give himself “character,” like Eminem. He was BJ when I met him, and by the time we broke up he had evolved into Zenzo. My friends used to tell me stories about him after it ended. Now, even if someone tried, I wouldn’t know who they were talking about. He’s probably changed his name again.
***
After my shower, I stand in front of the mirror and study the tick marks—lipstick, bright as a bruise—like they’re proof and not a plea. Fourteen. I always thought a man wouldn’t notice. That he wouldn’t know what he was adding to.
***
The next one will be a long tick mark—one that goes across the whole line.
Not a tally.
A sentence.
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Paige Stephens is a writer and middle school teacher from South Mississippi. She writes flash fiction and poetry with Southern bones—voice-driven work that leans tender, sharp, and occasionally sideways.
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