Mother Leaves Post-it Notes on my Pillow and Signs with a Smiley

I grew up on a farm so I should know all about expensive cows and free milk. You’re taking being a debutante much too literally. We only meant to give permission for you to make a good match, not flit among the suitable boys like some drunken bee. Fun is fine, but remember that your chickens will come home to roost eventually. You’ve been stringing both Rick and Rob along for months now. You crisscross one with the other so furiously we can’t tell which boy is your rebound. It’s so unseemly! Don’t embarrass us further– fish or cut bait!

Cheryl Snell’s books include poetry and fiction. Her most recent writing has appeared in Maudlin House, Ghost Parachute, Flash Boulevard, Midway Journal, Boudin, the 2025 Best Small Fictions, 2025 and 2026 Best Microfiction, Dribble Drabble Review, Mad Swirl and Eclectica anthologies.

Love Began as Hunger

It didn’t start with loss.
It started in rooms that smelled
like salty waters and heavy traditions,
held standing by mothers unable to say
“I love you” and fathers who spoke
only when the world demanded it.

It didn’t start with missing caresses,
it started with learning
how to long for affection
in a South Italian kitchen
where girls memorize quickly
how to sit and stand composed
like antique chairs.

Silence was the first language
I learned, stronger than dialect,
harder than old bread.
It sat beside me, at the kitchen table,
like an older sibling, who taught me
how to speak.

So I raised a heart, who knew from birth
how to beat slowly to avoid being noticed,
how to bend to receive kindness and
how to satisfy its hunger with crumbs.
The genesis of this hurt was not loss,
it was everything I called “love”
out of fear
that I did not deserve a real one.

Alice Gregorio is an Italian writer and poet completing an MA in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University. Her work explores memory, mental health, intimacy, and survival through lyrical, image-driven language shaped by both English and Italian literary traditions.

INDEX

How do we go on despite our waning cells
replaced every seven years,
yet passing on shape and form,
even the scars are copied and remembered —
like a mistake in translated scripture,
shaping the malpractice
of an entire denomination.

And you still have the scar on your finger
from the suction blister
you gave yourself in the womb —
it has grown with your digits, that pushed through
mittens, but you are not yet seven.
Perhaps those cells will be the very last
to be displaced in your perpetual renewal.

Peter Lilly is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated poet from Gloucestershire, England. He lives in rural France with his family, focusing on writing, community work, and English teaching. Author of A Handful of Prayers (2024).
Bluesky: @plpoetry.bsky.social Twitter: @peterlillypoems