COUNTERCLAIM REVIEW
Issue 5: LABOR
2025
published by counterclaim (c-c)
image: “Freedom to Want” by Taylor Thomas
Ophelia
by Ivy Hoffman
He lays his head in my lap,
and his tongue drops out, and with it
that foul-smelling ghost
of all the words he had thrown upon me.
I can only tense my leg,
and allow his cheek to bed there.
My wrist still is marked
from another night’s terror,
when he held me hard in the moonlight,
his pants around his ankles,
and sighed so I felt the whole world
trembling. His face was soft
and his grip like the talons
of a preying bird. Though he spoke
all of light, I felt within me
darkness kicking.
Some fool I must be
to act so wise a woman.
He smiles like a player
making himself, rolls his wide eyes
back to white, and fiddles with the hem
of my skirt in his fingers.
The show begins, though we have sat
in our parts long before
the curtain opens. He directs
so beautifully and plays so well
that I can barely remember him close
to a kiss, lips almost
parted, and a look on his face
as though he had seen me
for the first time
as something other
than himself. Sorrow like I
have never known.
Everything I had been promised
sits undelivered
at my feet. I struggle to think
the moment it was
that I ceased to be
a child. His head in my lap.
His fingers at the hem
of my skirt. All the words
that I forgive of him,
and there again, in some shadowed corner
of my body, like a blacksmith's hammer
coming down,
is darkness kicking.
—
Ivy Hoffman is a poet from Wilmington, Delaware, whose work has appeared in publications such as RATTLE, HOOT Review, and the American Poetry Review. She is currently studying literature at Swarthmore College, where she received the 2024 Nathalie F. Anderson Prize for poetry.
Shrinking
Her mind is spring —
Showers release, never seen
as golden hours.
—
Courtney Fussell is currently an English teacher and pursuing a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of South Alabama. She has self-published work, The Other Side of the Table: Poetry Affirmations for the Unseen. Her selected poems have been published in Bellum Creative, Calla Press Publishing, Soul Poetry, Prose & Arts Magazine, as well as the anthology We Did It First: Poems from Poets of Mobile, Alabama.
recovery by Sarah Esmi
Thank you for coming upstairs at such short notice
by Eric Braude
The cut of his suit,
its bluish gray, the way
he stooped a bit as he
loped around his desk,
manila folder clasped
to chest—me
in the comfortable chair—
his hair going gray, although
he wasn't old.
You know I stop
listening the company
has flattened its
How long management
chart. to get a job,
Your level, what to do
in the meantime unfortunately,
—
Eric Braude grew up in South Africa and is currently a professor of computer science. He won the 27th annual Eagle-Tribune/Robert Frost Foundation Spring Poetry Contest and wrote the front matter poem for the Grey Court Poets’ anthology Songs from the Castle’s Remains, which was published in 2013. Braude’s poetry has previously appeared in Poetica, South Florida Poetry Journal, Apple Valley Review, Constellations, I-70 Review, and J Journal.
Tomato poem
by Julianna Kummer
August in my mouth the red
the sweat
my grandmother’s hands
the soil she fertilizes all things
turn
over and over
the garden’s
ornaments in my hands
clean
of it all cry summer
between teeth
Another
batch tomorrow imagine that the balmy
fruits imagine
all things in the garden
slowing down like August
nights always stealing the day imagine heavy
branches and bodies
in the earth imagine
cause
effect
imagine the dead never
exhausted with their work never
finished with it
—
Julianna Kummer is a Midwestern poet inspired by her natural surroundings, the changing of seasons, and relationships: platonic, romantic, and familial. Themes of her work often include grief, childhood, and regret.
Atlas to Atlas
by Laura Cronk
What if a poem became a tortoise
capable of carrying great weight on her back?
And what if that tortoise grew to find satisfaction
in moving forward, slowly, with her slab of stone?
She would meet others along the way:
a weed with a swaying blossom
a sparrow looking for food
What if, before the sparrow, she met an ant?
An ant keeping pace in her long single file
A look of recognition, actually of love
passing between tortoise and ant
Atlas to Atlas
the tortoise bearing her slab of stone
the ant with her boulder of dust
Just two girls doing what they’re told
before being seized or crushed
—
Laura Cronk, author of Ghost Hour and Having Been an Accomplice from Persea Books. Member of The Matrix poetry collective. Recent work in the American Poetry Review, Iterant, Lit Hub, Poets & Writers. Originally from rural Indiana, currently poetry chair of the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School in NYC.
Blue Tuesday by Taylor Thomas
Visual Art
Taylor Thomas is a Black artist based out of Los Angeles. After spending six years developing feature films, she left Hollywood to have more agency in the creation of representational imagery in the visual arts. She received her MFA from CalArts in 2025.
Sarah Esmi is a mother, poet, and artist living in Los Angeles.
2025
counterclaim is committed to producing work that counters normative and traditional forms