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Issue # 47 Fall 2022
Poetry
Edited by Kevin Stein
Ralph Burns
Snow in Beta MoonlightAfter When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone --Galway Kinnell
1
When the mind goes to be alone
along a seam below thin planks
in a season when snow disfigures,
sometimes you can see
to where they’re working
on the street. Cables, pipes,
hollow placement, barriers.
This and that is a cause
of leakage. Petroleum red,
maybe old grey rock
smoothed to sea-glass, something
people made at the Pepsi plant. Smooth,
clean from sand and water, all sins washed.
When the mind goes to be alone.
2
When the mind goes to be alone,
maybe there’s a tangle, amyloid
and tau, like blackberry vines. I saw him once,
the woodchuck climbing chain link
yanking vines, chewing through to an idea
of escape when a door slammed shut.
That was what sound was
when she tried to say words.
And the mystery of words
were the ghosts – you’ve seen them,
names and faces going through
a daylight pass, then an embrace,
when the mind goes to be alone.
3
When the mind goes gravel piles up
on the byway, people look down,
a steam shovel digs. Red beeps
from a truck backing up --
sometimes early in the day
but he goes back to sleep because
it’s late in other ways. Bills due,
utilities, tv noise that keeps him
company even though he doesn’t want it
or claims not to. That’s another thing.
Why and when they start when it’s illegal.
They say and say you can’t complain
when the mind goes to be alone.
4
When the mind goes to be alone
maybe it doesn’t return.
In a home with handrailed corridors I walked back
to her room and heard a cat,
a clinical sound someone later said, cri
du chat. All night back home a cat
circled the porch, sub-zero, wanting in.
I set out milk, opened
the front door. Nothing entered
but blowing snow. I kept asking
if it knew me. Washing face and feet.
Something cameled its back, hopped sideways.
Purring machinery in the wall.
Where the mind goes to be alone.
5
When the mind goes to be alone
an aria from a Texas wedding
drifts through pecan trees.
White petals of her voice cracking.
We didn’t know why chairs
were marked with ribbons
so we sat anywhere.
Her sound carried her somewhere
I could never be, without doubt, alone
and everywhere.
Si, si, ci voglio andere!
Yes, yes, I want to go there!
When the mind goes to be alone.
6
When the mind lays down a back beat,
steel guitar, auto-harp, I see
Sonny Payne, his spurred roosters
standing on top of doghouses.
Witness Tree, line of demarcation east to west,
leaves like Shelley’s leaves, yellow,
and black, and pale, hectic red, wave
rolled up,where the surface of water
lets something land.I get
to the barbecue stand
a day or so either side of beta moonlight,
Buddy Guy on radio–
When my left eye get to jumpin
I don’t know which way to go.
7
When the mind goes to be alone
the body follows, replaces
appetite for shame, steps off in air,
ties dry flies, drops a magnifying glass,
goes to a time, stays. It might remember
blue line like human hair
so hollow it floats --
in bed in the dark, her hair.
Feel it on the face,
fall through, go back to the dark,
smell air sleep on the bed,
go back to where she turns
her back in sleep, the ordinary stirring.
8
When the mind goes to be alone
dendritic snow falls on highways,
silvers machinery, locks up gears.
Turning, blown south
containing rime, now graupel, soft hail.
Ice enamels the flowers,
burden and bloom make a furnace –
come here please,
next to me – can we look a long time
before juniper loosens bark and fire
snaps, and snow and sap hiss
making signals?
When we look up before
things break the age is our age.
Michael Hettich
Winter Light
…no way to tell the darkness outside
from the darkness within.
--Jane Mead
1.
Meaning, by then, was just another form of feeling,
another shard of story,
as the snow fell through the night. It was falling, still,
in the morning, when I woke to tell you something
important--or maybe just frivolous, some myth--
but you were out walking, already, through the snow.
I wanted you to touch me, to hold me close
and tight enough to hurt a little, to lose myself in you.
2.
Many years ago, we walked across a pond
of slushy ice, past midnight,
at the ashy end of winter.
When we stopped for a moment to look up at the stars,
something in that gesture—the tilting of our heads—
caused the ice to crack. We fell through, first
you, then me, laughing. The pond
was shallow, and the night was silent
so we stood there, up to our waists in the freezing
funky water, and named the constellations
we thought we could identify. Teeth chattering,
we pointed up into the sky, debating what we saw.
3.
Sometimes we sing without thinking, to feel
the echoing ache in our bodies
while outside a gentle
wind carries
the scent of something you might once have loved,
a perfume that made you feel for a moment
you could reach out and touch what you’d lost, all those
people and dreams, all those other stories
wandering off, even now, through the snow—
sometimes glancing back, never waving.
Song
Across the summer field, a man is burning
though I don’t see any flames, just a shimmering
figure waving his hands at the birds
in the trees, scaring them up into the sky.
I know I should go there and help him, but now
the field is burning: the grass flares up--
the flash of a mirror in the sun--then it lies down
and whispers the kind of dream in which
your life has been lived by someone else,
who walks away now toward dusk, without
saying goodbye, though you call out
to bring him into focus, this man you must love
you think as you struggle awake, this man
like a sound from deep underwater, or a tree
in the wind of the future, a dance with the dead
and the sky, that shakes you alert to the smell
of cinders on you own breath, and a wide-open window
where your mirror used to be. Maybe you’ll get up
and climb out that window, but the fields are all burned
and someone is singing in the kitchen, as though
everything were just as it should be; you listen
and realize it’s a sweet song, and you start to sing along,
quietly at first, as though your life
were a secret to be discovered and retold,
though of course you don’t think this. You just sing along
with that wonderful voice, and your hunger.
Erin Wilson
Midnight Solved as Snow
Alone with the empty page,
I discover I am less verblike (as is the flower)
and more like a single grain of sand,
a small noun temporarily in motion.
Troubling? Bah!
Go to the desert and ask a grain of sand
if it is struggling.
Now I can hold the beggar's bowl, still and silent.
Now I can laugh with the spider's face.
Beckian Fritz Goldberg
My Rain
I miss the rain we had days ago
I want it to come back, I want it to
bring the smells it used to bring
when I lived in the desert. But it is not
that rain and it smells like the little streets
and winter lawns and the secret cafes
that lurk in closed cars. Give me
a cigarette. No, don't. The day is clear,
cold as the floor, cold as doorknobs, and
memory is walking in and out of every room
not sure what it's looking for, not sure
who's there. The apple tree in the yard has
lost all its leaves. Who knows if it will
bloom again come warm weather?
Who knows how to grow old? Tonight
the year ends. Late I hear the sh shhh of
the ocean, coming, going, coming,
going, an ancient sound known by all men
like a lover's sleep. The cats patrol the house,
sniffing for ghosts. Midnight the neighborhood
pops with firecrackers for at least
ten minutes, falls back into a hush
where you can imagine staying here,
out of sight in some corner, hidden from
death so it passes you over. No one
would ever know unless you came out of
the house. Then the rain would bring
any smell you wanted, the resiny
sweetness of the desert, the savor of
gasoline, the smell of the sheets
after lovemaking...as long as you didn't
give yourself away. But even this
couldn't stop the longing that grows
every day of your life till your arms
reach out from your stomach
and your lips spill from your ears
into the sea. Be kind to the night with
the new year on its breath and carrying
the dreams of everyone where we
are naked, or lost, or pursued by
murderous men. For rain, that old
business, will raise the present from the earth
like incense and tonight the neighbor's
Christmas lights glow into my room,
red, green, gold, blue, jeweling my sleep.
Motherland
Mother painted blackbirds on the vaulted ceiling, a flock overhead against a light blue sky. The Romans used to paint their dining rooms, she told the girl. I’m starting a cornfield there on the north wall, she said pointing. As she pointed she slowly turned until she was facing the west wall. The woods will start here. I’ll have deer in it.
Each night the family had dinner, there was a little more countryside. The girl learned to eat with a deer staring at her from among the greenery.
It’s like a picnic, Mother said, though the sky that showed above the trees was a darker blue, the color of morning glories, and Mother had painted a faint silver crescent moon. So the cornfield was day and the woods was evening and the east wall with the window was grazing land for the cows, black and white, as Mother had painted them, their heads lowered to the grass behind the electric fence.
Father said, If you keep this up, Mother, soon we’ll have mosquitos. It’ll rain too much.
I’ve always wanted to live here, said Mother spreading her arms out and turning around in a circle.
I’ve always wanted to live in San Francisco but you don’t see me painting the bedroom with little cable cars and Chinese restaurants, Father muttered.
Maybe we could keep one cow there by the buffet, Mother was saying. They each had a way of ignoring each other’s part in the conversation the way married people do.
You can’t eat the corn, Father said, so what’s the point?
He could have his own door to go in and out. I’d spread a little straw on the floor…
Father heard her this time. You are not, he said, turning our dining room into a barn.
Mother replied, You turned our basement into a man-cave. I didn’t object.
I wasn’t bringing in livestock, he said.
Maybe a chicken. Or a rooster…
So the girl learned to eat dinner with a rooster pecking at her feet, with blackbirds painted on the ceiling, with rows of cornstalks in perfect perspective, with daylight on one wall and evening on the other, with one sad-eyed doe gazing out from the dark woods while Mother—Mother grew younger and more radiant, painted the window shade with lilac boughs and scattered seed on the floor for the rooster each morning and bought a little piglet who she suckled like an infant.
Little Dunes
Refrigerated trucks outside the morgues--there's an overpopulation of the dead,
stubborn world where the wind
blows cold and hard today. The air is so small really,
a few miles wrapped around the earth. So many questions--
do we have the only birds? Where else does fragrance carry
the flower, the rotten things? The wind blows sand from the ocean
onto the streets, sometimes making little dunes. The King of Chaos
has been deposed but he denies it. Next he will decree that
rain comes up, it does not
fall down and the people will believe it. You and I
will be the only ones who believe the truth, the rest
feel drops trickle up their bodies and wet their hair.
The hospitals are running out of beds. The Santa Anas
toss everything and you can hear them moaning. O,
the world is in a state--but when has it not been? Pick a day,
any day, one you remember clearly. Isn't it now like a dream, isn't
it now like something you imagined, the blue air only
your blue, that kitchen shining in a house you no longer own,
that father no longer there, no longer anywhere. Weren't there
cups in the sink, a field in the window, a field stubbled with
dry corn stalks? And isn't memory the purest
loneliness--while the wind today questions everything,
torturing the palm trees, throwing your own hair in your face?
Kelsey Phillis
Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing
This summer we’ve decided to save the Monarchs, my son & I.
With careful fingers we comb the milkweed, searching
for impossibly small, white dots. He is loud, excited - I wince
as I try to trust his tiny hands with the even tinier monarch eggs.
It is necessary to trust the child so the child learns to trust himself.
I grit my teeth. It is possible to know something is true and not believe it.
We put the egg ridden leaves in their mesh enclosures and wait.
Everyone wants a front row seat for the finale. Everyone wants to say
they knew the girl was beautiful long before she took her glasses off.
Everyone wants to feel like they were part of the metamorphosis.
Nobody wants to wait. Even my son abandons his view of a miracle
for some shiny plastic trucks he can smash together. The wheels
might spin if you drag them backwards fast enough but they’ll never
sprout wings and fly. It’s becoming clear to me that I’m the only one
interested in this endeavor. I don’t know why these eggs have such
a hold on me. It’s a cycle that even my three-year-old accepts
as fact: Egg, caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly. It’s not a new concept
to me, but I find it incredibly difficult to believe. I’ve read the books.
One day, the caterpillar decides its had its fill and hangs itself
off limb, cocoons, and starts digesting itself. Does it know dangling
what is to come? Is cocoon just another word for coffin? Does it know
about rebirth? Rebirth is messy. Enzymes break down the caterpillar,
melting away its form. Destruction of self is always the first step.
Imaginal disks become leg, antennae, wing. Eventually it shimmies
out of what is now a paper-thin casing completely changed.
Wings too wet and flimsy to fly, but there they are, brilliant with color,
almost ready for flight. I read once that caterpillars have memory.
That caterpillars exposed to the scent of ethyl acetate and given a shock
still recoil at the scent as butterflies. Somehow memory survives
that transformation. Somehow between caterpillar and butterfly
when neither truly is, memory remains. Maybe that’s why I sit
on that couch every other week, buzzers pulsating palms, blue light
dancing back and forth, back and forth, back and forth as I tell a stranger
my earliest memories. I try to conjure up the sights, the smells. I notice
the tension in my body. I wrap myself up in these moments, waiting
to be transformed. Maybe that’s why I’m trying to save the Monarchs.
That’s why I care so much, these damn eggs. Maybe I’m hoping
that one day I’ll rise from the beige couch and emerge from the office
some impossibly beautiful creature. I’ll unfurl my wings. I’ll fly home.
Maggie Kennedy
Writing for the Man
When my voice becomes co-opted.
After they tell me what to pen
and where to forfeit.
When I come home and everyone
wants the last little bit of me,
I take the remains of the day
to the alley. I heave our bulging
bag of composting fragrances
as I would an offering,
flies gathered greedily
about the mouth of the steel bin
that emphatically snaps
our uneaten leftovers, chip bags
emptied on sly, stockings with a run in
the thigh, swept-up crumbs and spills.
This middle-class conjecture,
fata morgana: our garbage
disappears every Thursday
as if it never happened.
Out here, fences on either side,
I have only so many choices.
South past a tom eying sparrows
splashing. North where the sullen
goth kid tinkers with an engine.
Or up — westward over cascading
recyclables, baseball floating in a
window, screech of a newborn learning
to sleep — to the sycamores,
seven in a row rising above it all,
their bark stripped from them as they grew,
and all they have to present
to the setting sun is bone, bleached
calcified branches beginning to leaf.
It’s a divesture of artifice,
chicanery, avarice, blood thirst
for a return.
It’s a prayer for a breath
rinsed of the bottom line, distilled
of my hems and haws, knuckles
scraped by constant compromise.
The tom is making his move.
The babe is quiet.
Back east across our untilled garden,
the kitchen light turns on.
A buoyancy unbolts my throat.
Every day should shed
its pretense like the sycamores
naked and reaching.
Claire Scott
Dinner Roll
I found a dinner roll in her top drawer
under some gray underpants and
old lady bras strung with safety pins
My aunt who was in a Japanese prison camp
in Manilla for two years
my aunt who didn’t see her husband
for those two long drawn-out years
who scrinched and scrabbled and saved
to feed three little boys
on a few slices of bread a day
teaching them to read, scribbling
with a stick in the sand
when there were no pens
carts rumbled daily, the dead
silent under gray sheets
when the camp was liberated
some stared blankly
some refused to leave
all skeletal, like forks
The boys grew tall, helping
on the farm, milking refractory goats,
weeding carrots and potatoes
a family of five, putting the past behind
my aunt went back to nursing, my uncle
to his corner office at the bank
my aunt sewed me a life-sized doll
I named Topsy and I took her
to my secret hideout behind the house
where we played prisoners of war
with my stuffed animals
then my aunt started mixing up names,
forgot to eat and moved to the Montgomery Inn
breakfast at seven, dinner at five
where I visited her after school
where I found the dinner roll in her drawer
next to a photo of her no-longer-here husband
with three handsome boys
L. Henry Farrell
in this sweet peach new jersey light
I
i stood directly
on top and over
a manhole cover
II
i read MUNICIPAL
DETROIT
and some instructions
III
i had neither the socket
wrench, driver nor likely
the ability to open this in the prescribed every other, opposite bolt manner
IV
that was mostly because
i was eight
and looking down astride my prized chrome Schwinn Sting and just attracted to this big steel
V
but what gray and wet
and what gross fantastic
world lay below with bodies and Gollums and jars of quarters
VI
my mother would whistle me home about this time
that kind of whistle with two fingers
super loud and i can’t even get close to it today
VII
and i would spin
my bike and bony pink knees
around the corner and smell mom’s Hamburger Helper even by Mrs. Bentzel’s house
VIII
half a block away
and later that year (or early next) that same sweet old woman
would offer me $100 for the 10 minutes
i spent shoveling her driveway and walk out and ask
“is this enough?”
IX
(try finding one of those bikes on eBay or anywhere. stupid expensive.)
Jen Karetnick
Do Over
Vivid and glaring as conception, today’s gas prices are
odes to my preschool past, when I would quickly
erupt, volcano of sweat droplets, on the vinyl back car seat
from August heat as I waited in line with my mother at
the pumps. Smaller than average, I could only view
sky through the quarter-closed safety window, smudged
as a chalkboard from the Collie’s nose and my finger, tracing
planes as they vivisected clouds on their way to a nearby
runway. Sometimes afterward we’d go to Welsh Farms,
circle the executive airfield and find a spot to watch those jets
land while I drank an ice cream soda. Starting home, I’d feel it rise
again. That both-way burn. These days—they’re just as hard to keep down.
The Quality Time of Slow Travel
Xenial, from the word xenos, or guest, means hospitable, quaint
custom from ancient Greeks of different cities, who had to caravan
for weeks to reach each other. You reflect on this as air travel is put off for
future purposes, as you road-trip instead the way you did in the past, when
pandemics were children vomiting in the back seat of a station wagon.
Bring bags—your mother’s motto, so your father wouldn’t have to pull over.
Your inclination now is also to always have something disposable in your
own vehicle, where your kids, too, have puked on floor mats, leaving
forks of rust that have never washed out, on each other’s unreceptive laps,
and once, on the just-purchased cage of Key West hermit crabs, pincers like
knives sawing toward a thwarted escape just as your car bit the lip of the island.
Richard Weaver
When my feet walked away one sunless day
my legs despaired, said the woman to her neglected sandals.
How shall I ever find my way home without them leading me
step after another into the waiting dark? What am I to do
sitting here in this sad chair, my swollen ankles dangling
above the stone floor, poorly swept and unkempt as it is?
I supposed I could be carried by 4 strong and swarthy men,
back to the house where I lived when feet were mine, properly
attached. I doubt my perplexed neighbors would pity my condition.
Most have misplaced their eyes. A lesser few are conveniently deaf
and do nothing except talk. It’s a fictive community of the lost
and missing, the maimed and mangled. One devoted couple have
only their heads remaining, having severed contact with what
hung below. Had a falling out, or off, true to speak. I shouldn’t
wonder if and when my hands detach one night, covers pulled
tight under my chin, and strut away like 5-legged spiders across
the bed, spin themselves downward to the floor, and there cross
to the wall, and upwards to the window left open for the healing air.
From there I’m sure they’ll make their spidery way back to this
miserable bar with its moribund furniture, demented lights, and cold,
horrid floor. And there make with sign language a large order
of call-brand drinks to be added to my outstanding tab. It’s the devil’s
work this is. Nothing to do with me, my feet, my tongue numb from rum,
or my eyes, locked on the absence that is now beneath me. I’ve not
mislaid my heart or dutiful kidneys. The ancient sun remains well hung
in the same sky, although unseen, where a shy cloud smiles back at me,
as if to say, this too passes kidney stone-like. As a moon connoisseur
I celebrate its singularity. As singular as the stone beneath my errant feet.
I too will rise, if diminished. And waltz wildly outdoors. Ablaze
in moonlight. Chosen. Indifferent to featherless angels.
Kathleen Hellen
when spring abandoned us
we were un-
ruly. De-
capitated clover. Pillaged blue-black berries of the poke, trampled
milky stalks the height of toddlers
the pink or purple umbels that we yoked, the horn-shaped pods
split open with our thumbs
we were wild
and careless with the tufts. Careless
with the sticks that ambushed chicory, dandelion
damaged bittercress and spurge, whipped ivy
we stripped
from common daisies
the fallacy:
you loved us, you loved us not
Barry Seiler
The Coffin Desk
He made a writing desk
From the lid of an old pine coffin.
He was handy that way.
Dying, he gave things away
To his friends, mostly poets,
Former lovers, former students.
The books were easy.
Poets love piles of books:
Collected, Selected, or those
Soon forgotten volumes
The university presses publish.
But the desk—the desk was another matter.
No one wanted the desk.
It sat opposite his deathbed
Under the window, now always closed.
Maybe they thought he would haunt the desk.
Maybe they believed he had coaxed the best poems
Out from the repurposed coffin
And left the middling ones for future owners.
That would explain his beautiful late work.
But it saddened him and held him here
A bit longer than he desired to think
He had made the desk with his own two hands.
And it had come to this.
Bed
The coffin’s stand in
While the coffin preens
Before the mirror
In its dressing room
Waiting for its close-up.
Toti O’Brien
Cormorants
The tall steps leading to the temple up there
will make your legs strong. No one notices
the fault line misaligning your childish
calves and thighs. No one sees how knees
and ankles wobble and shake—and the dull
injection of pain with each lift, each landing.
No one, because they are nearer to the top.
In their Sunday best, they are reaching
the archway where a shaven monk with
pinched lips swings a thurible. They dash
towards the door that lurks like a grinning
mouth, lidding a cave of dark.
Sounds like din of silverware, like banging
of ladles in the kitchen, peer out of the
chamber. Voices wane and wax like tides,
sometimes peak—like the pyramid you are
climbing—into a piercing note, like the call
of a frantic, frightened bird.
You are dragging behind, hands deep in
your pockets—the right toys with a kerchief,
the left fumbles a rosary, craving the cool
surface of the beads. You always swallow
hard when the incline of the stairs makes
your parents, your siblings disappear.
That is when you crane your neck, stiff
with effort, squint your eyes and spot
the large birds—broad-winged, like angels,
white or black. They fly rapidly, alone or
in pairs, to the lake that lies beyond
the tower, beyond the plain of dust.
They fly towards the softness of water and
the soothing litany of reeds. Black and white,
like a game of chess freely scattered on the
board, with pawns mixed and mingled. You
feel a pleasant itch in your sternum, each time.
A bell rings. You’ll arrive last, as always.
Jeff Newberry
ErklärungsnotFrom the German, a word that means being put on the spot without anexplanation for one’s actions. The literal translation is “explanation emergency” or“explanation poverty.”
In life’s grand cookie jar, we’ve all been caught,
our hands half-in, dough-stained arms naked
in the kitchen’s bright light, as we look out at fate
and say like a bad movie villain, “Well, well, well,
if it isn’t the consequences of my actions.” Tell
me the worst thing that’s ever happened to you—
the ultimate conversation starter. Then, obliged
to listen, you hear a tale not so different from
your own. The actors change. Scenery, setting,
all rearranged. Still, here is X in the middle of Y
doing Z, which X knows damn well leads nowhere
good—excess, maybe. A bad bet. A last-minute
promise to get gas in the morning. The certainty
you turned the burner off before you left for work.
It all goes south, doesn’t it? Always. Then—
what’s the word? Peripetia. Oedipus slept
with his mother despite Laius’s careful plans.
“Bullshit’s relative,” a friend told me once,
while we compared shitty lives over cold beer.
Son of a suicide and cancer victim, he leaned near
and whispered, “We’re all just waiting our turn.”
Uitwaaien
From the Dutch, meaning to walk into the wind to feel invigorated or to relieve stress
Some moments, you head down into, like the bad news
you knew would come, the turnaround in the blues,
the final act that leaves you alone in a dark theater,
wondering what just happened. “Where are they?”
you might wonder aloud, meaning the shadows
who were just on stage, the people you’ve grown
to love these past two hours. Walk into it. Feel the loss.
The old mill shut down last week. My friend tells me
he heard the final whistle for the final shift change.
The gray-faced men and women drove home one
more time, their windows down, the faces aged
and lined. My mother had a plaque on her wall
that read, “May the wind always be at your back.”
I like the feel of a breeze on my face in hot weather.
It cools the sweat, dries my eyes, reminds me
that even in the burning, you find relief. Accept it.
Cortney Davis
Drinking Tea from the Cup My Daughter Gave Me
It's raining today, a violent rain after weeks
of drought, my drive to the eye doctor's
this morning through flooded side roads
and downed tree limbs. In the news, Pakistan
is drowning, people and homes washed away―
even so I'm grateful for the downpour
that's swept my deck and saved my garden.
Safely home, I drink peach tea in the cup
my daughter gave me―it's lovely to hold,
glazed aqua, violet, spring green.
It warms my hands. Still, my nurse's mind
keeps count of bodies, homes destroyed,
the vast distance of those who are lost.
Later, washing the cup, warm soapy water
filling the bowl, slipped around the rim,
I don't want a sponge or cloth to separate
her gift from my touch, as if she were
an infant again, the bath water and her skin,
my hands and the rain that will not stop
streaming down, will not stop ruining or refreshing,
seeping too into the earth over her beautiful coffin.
Jan Ball
Crochet
Grandma crocheted doilies
to cover the frayed arms
of her sofa.
She crocheted little coasters
for wooden end-table tops
that absorbed the water drips
from our coca-cola
and later highball glasses.
Grandma also crocheted
handkerchiefs in various colors
especially angelic white (I used
a blue one for the “something old”
at my wedding.) Those old hankies
have resided in the back of my sock
drawer since Kleenex came marching in.
She knit baby clothes in yellow yarn,
sweater and cap sets with ribbon
sewn on to tie the cap under
the baby’s chin (but it always came off),
booties for our newborns and later mittens
that we lost in the Chicago snow or attached
on sticks for snowmen hands.
Grandma gave us a quarter
every time we visited so I biked
to see her often as a teen-ager
with friends and took my fiancé
to meet her when we brought
Chinese food from local Wang’s
at Montrose and Kedzie.
I didn’t get to see her
when she died
in the Alzheimer’s facility
where the disease crocheted
its amyloid plaques.
Tony Beyer
Albert Ross
in a footnote
Robert Macfarlane informs us
this specimen
with a punning name
was the only black-browed
albatross in the northern hemisphere
flying dispiritedly
for decades above Scotland
in quest of a mate
even among the hundreds
of thousands of gannets
he may have mistaken
for his kind
the rest of which
unfortunately for him
resided below the equator
his jangled reckoning
could no longer trace
and yet there seems more
than a touching
anecdote here
the cruciform shadow
dire as his fate
gliding over the skerries
something from before
human language
or measurable time
heralding the Anthropocene
and the whole planet
out of joint
Jo Angela Edwins
Earth Is Mostly Water, And So Are Wefrom a conversation with W.M. Epes
and a friend tells me that for all of this new year
she’s only reading books with water in the title
and last week a man working on the house next door
hit a pipe with a backhoe, and my yard was under water,
and another friend has started a special diet
and must drink two glasses of water before each meal
and this morning I forgot to fill the strays’ water bowl,
and when I did, two hours late, the cats were gone, and I felt guilty
and another friend shares photos of his small French town,
streets covered in six feet of river water
and yesterday I read that Flint’s water is now drinkable,
but after six years of poison, no one wants to drink it
and I watch a mob storm the Capitol but see no water hoses,
and I think of Standing Rock, and I think of Birmingham
and a couple down the street have a pink bow on the mailbox.
What was the mother thinking, the moment her water broke?
L. Annette Binder
Lethe
Their husbands fall away
their wives and parents and
children, and it’s a fire,
this forgetting. It burns away
every beautiful thing they ever
saw. The forgetting breeds
restlessness, an acute desire
to go home though they don’t know where
home is or what it might have looked like
years or months or days ago,
when they were themselves and knew
every face around their table.
The forgetting brings sleep, too, the quiet hours
nodding in chairs angled toward the window
while families stroll outside and
sit together on peeling benches and wait
for their waffle cones. How easy
it would be to lie, to look at the lax faces
and say oblivion is better
than remembering what they’ve lost,
how easy to wait for the fire
to finish burning, to walk through
the charred fields and call it peace.
J.R. Solonche
Dementia
Her left hand is a claw
so tightly clenched it
takes one of us to unfold
the fingers, the other to cut
the nails, useless unless
she holds the memories
there, but with the right
she eats, and in bed, at
night or in the afternoon,
asleep or awake or between,
she plays Bach or Chopin or
something never known before
and never to be known again.
Lynn Gilbert
Tiresome News from a Minor War
It seems the Armenians are busy
starving again, just when
I’d managed to uproot
"the starving Armenians"
from my vocabulary, that phrase
left over from their much-trumpeted
exile and sufferings circa 1915.
On radio news the lugubrious twang
of their bouzoukis, banjos from hell,
alerts us that once again they're
out of gas, out of food; they're
cutting up trees in the park
and feeding them to improvised
wood stoves in freezing apartments.
The electricity runs, we hear,
now and then for a couple of hours;
surely they could be better organized.
The bone-and-joint surgeons
treating casualties in Yerevan,
the squalid capital, have to
operate at zero degrees Celsius, when
they can get anesthesia. Afterwards
their patients expire of pneumonia.
Soon the tedious Armenians
will be eating stewed grass
or when they're lucky
the meat of dead horses
like all the other unfortunates
we have to hear about ad nauseam.
Why can't they just die
and get off the airwaves?
Why must they make us
suffer like this,
letting fall their grimy bundles
once again on our doorsteps?