NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

This issue contains a good selection of poems and a few short stories. This well-written extract is from DUMB CAKE by Ranylt Richildis:

She walked back and forth in front of the mirror, circling a little at times like the carol dancers back home during festival. Her legs were draped in wide black gabardine trousers, cut so long she needed shoes on her feet to hitch the cuffs off the ground. Her torso was wrapped in a fitted, white broadcloth shirt with trailing sleeves. She knew the outfit worked superficially and loved how it tailored up her figure, but it was too much like the cactus fruit, too bold, too now and devoutly individual. What was needed this evening, for John, was something a little more accustomed.

	The gap teeth of an arctic inlet
	are closing.  Freak
	weather's trapped belugas;
	they're sucking air
	from one icy breach, a
	season's last cutout.

	With too little room for your teeth,
	your pleating jaw folds on itself.
	Molars grinding the bone beneath
	where too little room for your teeth
	makes the mandible shear the sheath
	of gums, shatter the tooth-root's shelf.
	With too little room for your teeth,
	your pleading jaw folds on itself.