Michael Hettich
The Distant Music
As we drive to town this sunny winter afternoon we keep passing animals squashed
on the highway or torn-apart swollen on the shoulders and in the ditches. The body of a deer
is draped across the median. The mountains loom close, dusted a glittering white. Coyote,
raccoon. What looks like a skunk and a pet dog. The radio chatters: How do we portray
ourselves to others? How do we create who we seem to be? Now it cuts to Gaza; Ukraine. On the
highway: squashed birds. I think of the red-shouldered hawk we pass on our walk to the meadow.
Perched on a wire, she leans to swoop across the field as we approach. By now we’ve started
talking about finding our authentic selves, whoever the heck they may be, and I’m wondering
again why we never come across dead animals in the woods. The radio host has moved on to
climate change. Bears must get killed on the highway too, which is shocking even to imagine:
Like seeing a mangled person in the grass. I wonder now if they’re still winter-napping and if so
what they might be dreaming. Spring and summer mornings before we wake up, deer move
through our clearing eating the flowers and greens we’ve planted. We rarely see them, though
sometimes I imagine the smell of damp fur and sometimes the garden seems to be quivering a
little when I walk out, first thing, with my coffee and the last of my sleep. Humming with
something other than the bees, who won’t start their work until later. But the spiders have been
working. Their webs gleam and buzz with dew and helpless insects. I love to stand still and listen
to that music. Sometimes I glimpse the tawny bodies of deer through the trees, watching me,
ready to run.
A Kind of Happiness
It’s a relief of sorts to admit I’m a simple
fool when it comes to most practical matters,
balancing the checkbook, let’s say, or making
sure my phone is silenced when I’m sitting
in a concert. It’s a whole different kind
of relief to hear the wood frogs singing
at the mid-winter thaw, to wonder at the sheer
cacophony of voices, to try to sneak up
to their pond unnoticed and watch them thrash
in their mating. It feels like disappearing
then coming back renewed. Just yesterday, someone
was singing in the distance, down the hill, a woman
whose voice I didn’t recognize, though
I knew the song she was singing, as she
walked off into silence. I sang it all day,
to myself, and it filled me with a kind of happiness,
small but authentic. I harmonized with her
as I moved the stones I had gathered, cradled
like babies in my arms, one after the other,
set them down beside each other,
and drew a new path through the garden.
J.R. Solonche
The Horses
Eight million died in World War I.
They would have needed 8,000,000 men
for one man to apologize to one horse.
When the men did not do so to one another,
where would they have found men to apologize to the horses?
It would have taken 8,000,000 Picassos
to do justice to the death agony of 8,000,000 horses.
Of the 8,000,000 horses, how many had names?
The Germans in particular targeted the horses.
When a British soldier’s was killed or died,
he was required to cut off a hoof from his horse
to prove to his commanding officer that they
had not simply been separated, he and his horse.
Too tired to lift their heads high enough to breathe,
they drowned in the deep mud, thousands of the horses.
Because they were used to draw the artillery,
the most losses were suffered by the Clydesdale horses.
For some countries, the largest commodity
shipped to the front was fodder for the horses.
Because saw dust was mixed with their food,
they starved to death, thousands of the horses.
Gasmasks were issued for the horses,
but they destroyed them, mistaking them for feed bags.
The better-bred horses suffered from shell shock
more than the less well-bred horses.
These learned to lie down at the sound of the guns.
They were sold to the French butchers, the surviving horses.
Claire Scott
IN THE ICU
I woke in the dark.
The sheets were rough and smelled
of Clorox. White curtains around my bed,
ghosts with thin hearts.
The woman next to me had a rasping cough.
I was seventeen.
Seventy-five pounds.
My best.
I had overheard the doctor tell my father I might die.
Heart muscle damaged. Heart barely beating.
I didn’t care. I waited in the dark.
A nurse came and insisted that I get up.
I tried and fainted.
So there.
They let me stay in bed.
I refused food. Said I wasn’t hungry.
A familiar refrain.
I spoke a few words to the woman
on the other side of the curtain.
I told her my name.
Hers sounded something like Emily,
but her voice was weak, barely a whisper.
I missed my parents.
Why weren’t they there?
A commotion around the woman’s bed.
Doctors, nurses scurrying. Equipment rolling on
squeaky wheels. Hushed voices like a library.
Or a white-walled chapel.
After, they opened the curtain between our beds.
Her bed was empty.
Starched sheets, plumped pillows.
And I knew that wasn’t what I wanted.
To be a ghost with a thin heart.
To disappear. Forever.
I eyed the scrambled eggs on my tray.
To this day I pray for the woman
who saved my life.
I think her name was Emily.
Karen Weyant
Little Girls in Factory Towns
play house in plastic toy kitchens,
where plates and silverware match,
and coffee cups never chip or crack.
They never get burned on a hot stove,
or get cut on knives. Bubbling
spaghetti sauce never splatters.
Ketchup bottles never spurt.
Fruit flies never hover near
the sink drain or cling
to forgotten rotting potatoes.
When the refrigerator door
is left open, the butter never melts,
the milk doesn’t sour.
Eggs in frying pans have perfect yolks,
bread is always toasted, not burnt.
The faucet never drips, the dishes
are always clean, even when left
in the sink overnight.
Lunches are never packed
in brown paper bags or metal lunchboxes
but there is always enough food.
There are peas, carrots, peppers
and radishes. There are strawberries
and oranges. There is even a steak
thrown in a cold, but somehow sizzling, skillet.
The Summer of Cigarette Butts
We had left behind candy cigarettes years before,
but we were not yet brave enough to steal
the real thing from our mothers’ purses
or our older sisters’ secret stashes. Instead,
we spent our summer days looking
for cigarette butts. The easiest to find
were in living room ashtrays designed
by our brothers in their shop classes.
But we found others. Some were smashed
on curbs by the local pool hall or in the corners
of the few phone booths left standing in town.
Others floated in parking lot potholes
filled with water and rainbows of leaking
car oil. Still, we found the best ones behind
the last open factory on South Street Extension.
There, the women on second shift
took smoke breaks while standing just outside
the back doors. They never seemed
to have enough time to finish a cigarette,
sometimes crushing discarded smoke
and ashes with their sneakers, but often
throwing the stubs into the weeds.
We dared each other to retrieve the remnants,
to smoke what was left behind.
Once, I was brave enough to try.
I reached for a butt that was still smoking,
placed it between my lips and inhaled.
I couldn’t describe what I tasted –
a bit of smoke and spearmint gum,
a bit of Dr. Pepper lip smacker.
Tony Beyer
An unwritten poem
the best story I’ve heard
about the poet Robert Desnos
is that in the camp where he
was selected among a group
of prisoners for execution
he offered to read his
fellow condemned men’s fortunes
from their palms and predicted
for each of them such a long
and prosperous future they all laughed
until their hilarity
so disconcerted the guards
the firing-squad was stood down
and though he died later anyway
as most of the others probably did
there had been light before the dark
John S. Eustis
My Forever Friends
I only have a couple hundred friends
on Facebook. Quite a few of these are folks
I’ve never met in person. Now a small
but growing number of them are deceased.
Just the other day a daughter wrote about
her father’s passing on his Facebook page,
which more and more is how we are informed
of life events like weddings, births and deaths.
They linger on long past their time on Earth
and once a year Facebook still reminds me
when their birthdays roll around. Some people
send them happy wishes on their pages,
the new equivalent of laying wreaths.
These, too, remain in perpetuity.
Phillip Sterling
Words Frequently Confused: Forlorn, Forsaken
Today I’m burning slabs of bark
scrapped from winter's woodpile
when the wind begins to speak in
a language some of the oldest trees
may recall, the Greek of their schooling,
retelling fables that Aesop himself
may have spoken to other slaves
as a way of elucidating certain
natural behaviors—like how
hot air from my fire pit scolds
the last of last years’ stubborn leaves
clinging to the oak, or why the owl
in a nearby tree mourns wistfully
in reply to the distant hoot and whistle
of what is surely a diesel locomotive.
Nature’s Kindness in Reminding Us
The trees beyond the fence line slurry
the horizon in shades of India ink, blurry
and indistinct as a raccoon hiding in kudzu.
The sky beyond is dark, darker than usual
at this hour, a darkness I’m familiar with,
having once spent a bleery afternoon
in a junior high art room trying to undue
the mess of a black-and-white landscape
I’d scribbled over during 6th period until
what should have been trees was little more
than a dark lake, the depth of which no sane
person could have fathomed. Nobody
loved me then, and I was certain nobody
ever would, and yet for some reason—
the assertion of trees, perhaps—I stayed
well past dark, erasing, until enough white
showed that—in a certain light—someone
like you would think it was the moon.
Julia Wendell
Siren
We limbed up trees
and herringboned a pile behind the barn,
then waited for the wind to ease.
Carolina wrens had a field day
in their knotty stockade,
rasping and chattering and cheering.
Bradford pear and dogwood
opened their truce-colored blooms
along the winding path.
Pisces went by. Then Aries.
The branches settled.
When we took a match to them and they went up,
they went up fast; flames, gulping the brisk spring air.
I don’t know much about the language of fire, but I do know
it sucks you in. It spits you out.
They say there’s a hum at the edge of the universe,
as if someone that far away,
not quite knowing what they’re doing,
were waving their hands and singing to us.
Neither attractive nor dangerous, just a lonely, velvet purr.
Sand and Palmettos and Drab Winters That Bring Grey Rain
I don’t want to waste one morsel of my life
on Hestia’s house-bound thinking.
I want to be outside, wielding my trident.
But this wash has me stumped.
Unlike the Allegheny snows of my childhood—
dig out the snowshoes, douse the hearth,
there was plenty for a girl to do.
Do, the operative word in order to be blessed.
Even the camellias are confused,
crimson blossoms ripped from their branches
lying wrinkled and sated like small torn hearts
on the saturated planet,
until one faded flower leaps back up to her bush
and bright sun stabs this miraculous wound.
Carol V. Davis
Of Course
You understand
my wish, a husband
with Alzheimer’s, his demands
as numerous as pricks of light.
Once on a Petersburg night
between late fall and the threat
of first snow,
a student urged me
up a rickety wooden ladder
missing rungs, to a door
jammed shut but pushable.
We emerged onto the roof
of a pre-revolution four-story.
Streets and skyline stretched
out like branches of spruce.
This city I’d mostly traversed
underground, knew by number
of minutes between metro stops.
With no railing, the view
terrifying, too easy to step off.
Later that week at an exhibit
of Marc Chagall’s sets for the
Moscow Jewish Theater
(now an impossibility),
one canvas took up a whole wall.
The sketched figure, pale,
as if he knew, flying from a roof
was his only chance.
This was 1921, before Chagall
himself had to flee Europe.
Now back in the United States,
I think of that figure,
wishing I too could launch
into a swirl of sky,
my own escape.
Ace Boggess
Looking Back
Days of nothing blended with days of grumbling wonder.
Around me, the pandemic emptied streets or instigated conflicts.
I was like a sea monster hunched on a seat at the bar,
pining for its life at sea so long ago it seemed like yesterday.
There was fun, sure, like squirrels chasing each other
around a tree, repetitive until newness grew old as a diamond.
It was the bleached of times, the wishy-washy times,
counting blinks between messages, discovering new occasions
for a meal. Prison without the prisoners, I thought.
A prison of one. On occasion, two—
how I survived, having locked myself in that cell
long before the virus could break through.
“I Mean Who Really Cares About Another Person’s Dog?"
—Billy Collins, “Walking My Seventy-Five-Year-Old Dog”I’m a cat person.
Don’t have cats,
did years ago
before I let myself be shackled
by wrestling with insignificance.
I believe I loved those cats,
although I wasn’t around
to watch them die
of old age,
which must be the test
of whether one is a cat person.
Dogs unnerve me:
their slobbery mouths
like the alien’s in Alien;
their barking at me
as I walk past a neighbor’s house,
even at some distance;
their scent like old shoes
that gets on everything;
their constant pleading
for whatever snack I’m eating.
Yet here I am
taking care of Grace’s pug
while she’s off visiting her father
for the weekend.
I give it water, food, & treats,
change its soiled pads.
At least it needs no walking:
chubby, sedentary beast
like me. I’ve offered this dog
more attention
than all the roaming
neighborhood cats
I stroked or scratched
behind the ear.
Stephen Gibson
Night Game—Yankee Stadium, 1981
Night Game—Yankee Stadium, 1981
Ralph Fasanella (1914-1997)
Oil on canvas
Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York
When I was a kid, you’d look into the old stadium
between right-outfield seats and center bleachers
from the 161st Street El station platform, see them
on the brown infield and the green outfield pasture
greener than anything. I’d never heard of Malcolm
until he was assassinated in a Daily News newspaper
front page with a photo of him in his dark-rimmed
eyeglasses, him dead on stage, and overturned chairs
in the Audubon Ballroom. My bud, Daryl, knew him—
Daryl lived in Washington Heights (he wasn’t there
at Malcolm X’s assassination), like he knew of prison
(when I knew Daryl, his older brother was in Riker’s)—
Fasanella crane graffiti refers to Dr. King and Malcolm;
the building at left is a jail filled with African Americans.
Tim Suermondt
Going to the Burial
She was our friend,
which is perhaps the noblest thing
any of us can say about another.
Brooklyn had the longest claim on her
and now a slip of a town upstate
will share a bit of it.
I’ll fidget while the coffin
is lowered into the thawing earth,
my wife and I holding on
to each other, and my eyes averted
by the weeping willows
almost dipping themselves in the creek,
if such a tree is there, such a creek.
I believe there will be, you’ll see.
Dana Yost
Let Us
Let us share jokes as brothers, simple laughter
and easy handshakes, playing a quiet game
of cards at a table in the garage while rain
falls on the concrete driveway, on the lawn,
in the boughs of the evergreen.
Troy Schoultz
Tarot Reading in the Canning Plant Break-Room
She gave break-room readings
During seasonal employment at the canning factory.
Fellow employees would forgo their watery machine
Served coffee and sandwiches wrapped in wax paper
To see their possible tomorrows.
I worked sanitation, my hours up, sweating through the papery
Suit and rubber boots, smelling of chemicals.
The August sunrise leaked in through
The tall windows. The women who swept the offices
Sang along to Billy Joel on the overhead radio,
Their broom and mop handles for mic stands,
While two metalheads heatedly discussed
The genius of Yngwie Malmsteen.
I approached the woman to my own surprise.
She shuffled and spread the cards.
I noticed the Fool, dog at heels,
Confidently walking towards the cliffs edge.
I noticed the Hanged Man, red tights and halo,
Hanging by a heel from the tree.
Her forehead creased. “It’s all white noise
And static in my head.” After a pause
She assured me a life of health,
Free of disaster and disease.
There was a bar on the way home
That opened at 6am where I met
Some of the other third shifters for shots and chasers
And pickled eggs. I sat down, stared at the mirror
Behind the bar, knowing before I downed
The first twenty-five cent tapper
That the tarot reader was a terrible, beautiful liar.
Craig Kirchner
Somebody ElseIt was the sixties,
my group like most, I thought,
was always looking to get high, first.
Before other activities,
nightclubs, dances, parties - it was
like if we don’t get high, why go.
There was a myriad of choices,
speeds, downers, psychedelics, and pot.
I saw myself as more particular than most.
I produced enough benny on my own,
that I never slept well, ingesting someone else’s,
would keep me up a week.
I snorted heroin once, threw up,
went on the nod, and realized,
I wasn’t looking for total disassociation.
I was looking to be someone else,
for a while, another version of,
more relaxed, but more aware, creative.
Downers, I liked Nembutal and Valium,
unlike heroin which made me nobody
were a somebody else, very chilled.
Cocaine and Quaaludes were exciting,
but I wrecked cars, got arrested,
not a fun somebody else and not inspiring.
When I first smoked pot,
I was elated, this was it,
like a prescription from a muse.
I started paying attention to the weeds,
growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk,
the way the dirt danced with the rain.
Psychedelics, were this other guy on steroids,
pushing to see just where he could get to,
enlightened often, but also afraid.
It seems only now, 50 years later, that me
and somebody else can get together, write it down,
and mutually pretend to be closer to infinity.
John Savoie
Thank You Note Gone Awry
This season of dying recalls the day of my birth.
This time of dwindling has always brought me gifts,
such as this black hoodie, given by my daughter,
made from smart fabrics that had not yet been
perfected when I—nay, when she—was born.
Light, sleek, yet cozy, I will wear it
raking leaves, walking dogs, walking alone
the confetti woods remembering dogs long gone,
but in this age when black is both
the new black and the old black,
in this black jacket I could as easily
spit into my palms and hoist the pirate flag,
or skulk at night along shadowy fences
jiggling locks on porches and cars.
And as my hands tunnel down one sleeve
and then another (a journey each must
travel alone) to emerge pale and estranged,
dazed with duende, no longer my own,
I wonder will I take to constructing clever
bombs and scrawling unshaven manifestos.
And as I pull the cowling hood over my ears,
where most of my hair grows these days,
I can see myself, thin-lipped, ashen-faced,
masterminding the subjection of free people
everywhere, under dark imperial rule.
O daughter of mine, kind and generous,
O bewildered dog patient by my side,
O water-resistant jacket, always warm,
never hot, what madness have we begun?
Sandy Vrana
The Other House
So much distance to cross, fields of corn,
black top roads lined with trees, so lonely
you must take a companion, or invent one.
What use childhood’s grasses or streams?
Or a rose plucked from a dark garden
to carry, forbidden, into the mind’s bower?
Whispers and laments; pearls and bleached
bones carried in the same small chest, the latch
a word not remembered, not quite lost.
Look! The footpath, the wooden swing
on the long porch, shadowy as photos in half-light.
The breath-held walk to the weathered door.
But inside, stillness. The hook with no hat;
a woman framed like an empress on
the wall; a white-draped table, the glasses empty
and staring. At an open window, a curtain’s sudden
flutter, first fugue of autumn, joy and melancholy.
Beyond, the beautiful red thorn bush, waiting.
Sally Zakariya
Implacable Wheel
The moon watches as you fall asleep
also the stars that shine despite
our human lights
When the sun rises, birds wake, tune up
their avian chorus
then you wake and the neighbors wake
But outside, the chickens next door
do not wake
The implacable wheel of nature
stopped turning for them
so the fox could eat
Fine fowl they were, with their
squawking and scratching, their
bounty of fresh eggs
Gone now, the chickens leave a rich
legacy of feathers on the lawn
Earth turns, and all’s well