Two Poems by Jacqueline Jules

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Sleeping Swans

I pause by the water to stare
at white feathered bodies
floating so peacefully limp
they appear to be dead.

How can swans sleep
with their heads tucked
beneath their wings?

Another question I can’t answer
as I amble along a path
winding past boats on one side
and cruising cars on the other.

The day is dense with clouds
consuming the light I need
to see what lies ahead.

How long will the sky remain
overcast without pouring rain?

I don’t even know if my legs
will last another mile.

I could trip or get a cramp,
anything could happen
between now and the time
I reach my favorite bench
to view the missing horizon.

Just like my beloved could fall
again or have another fever
in the house where he waits for me,
too frail to join my walks.

When he drifts off during the day,
I watch him like these swans, afraid
his awkward slouch means
he will not wake from his chair.

*

I’ll Be There Now

“Are you afraid of lice?” my son asks,
informing me he just treated the kids
he needs me to babysit.

Am I? Afraid of bugs a shampoo can kill
after three years of dodging an airborne virus
which shut down the world for months on end?

Keeping six feet apart was sensible once.
Until isolation became an ingrained habit.

At the height of it, I asked for
backwards hugs, avoiding droplets
from little noses and mouths

So now that they’re back in school,
kissing hair, not cheeks is risky too.

I’m at an age when the muscle that pumps
my blood could fail with less warning
than a sore throat progressing to a cough.

How long can I wait to embrace the life
I stayed alone in my house to protect?

“Don’t worry,” I tell my son.
“I’ll be there as planned at 6.”

*

Jacqueline Jules is the author of Manna in the Morning (Kelsay Books, 2021), Itzhak Perlman’s Broken String, winner of the 2016 Helen Kay Chapbook Prize from Evening Street Press, and Smoke at the Pentagon: Poems to Remember (Bushel & Peck, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in over 100 publications. jacquelinejules.com

Immune to Nostalgia by Joan Mazza

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Immune to Nostalgia

I’m not. I go back to ride
memories as if they were
peak experiences
of transcendence, pleasure—
the old summer bungalow
in Sound Beach, alone
with mother,
unlimited time to read
and read, and walk
the wooded paths
that are no longer.
Time to linger and watch
squirrels. No car or phone,
nowhere to be
except home for supper
and my mother’s cooking.
Clams or scungilli,
fresh from the sea,
over linguine. Wild
raspberries picked
in a thicket on the next
property, boiled into jam
and jarred for sweetness
during Brooklyn winters.
Even now, I try to grasp
that flavor in the air.
Some insomniac nights,
from the screened porch
I ride the thermals,
inhale the warm scent
of wet summer’s dark
and watch fireflies
flash in synchrony.
My button pendant
Life Protect 24/7
blinks back
with equal ardor.

*

Joan Mazza worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and taught workshops on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam). Her poetry has appeared in The Comstock Review, Prairie Schooner, Slant, Poet Lore, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia.

MOURNING THE DEATH OF MY SON by Stephen Ruffus

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MOURNING THE DEATH OF MY SON

This is not the world.
No longer so green
and sweet.

Memory is a contusion,
an enlarged heart, blood
rampant against the vein.

This is not the world
without him in it.
Nor will it ever be or was.

*

Stephen Ruffus’ work has appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, 3rd Wednesday, the American Journal of Poetry, The Shore, Poetica Review, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, and Stone Poetry Quarterly, among others. Also, he will have a piece in a forthcoming issue of the I-70 Review and in Hanging Loose Magazine. Ruffus was a semifinalist for the 2022 Morgenthau Prize sponsored by Passenger Books, and has had two poems nominated in 2023 for a Pushcart Prize. He was a founding poetry editor of Quarterly West and twice a recipient of a Utah Original Writing Competition Award. While he has lived in Colorado, California, and Utah where he studied writing at major universities and held fellowships and teaching positions, he is originally from New York City and still considers himself a New Yorker in many respects. Currently, he lives in Salt Lake City with his wife.

Two Poems by A. Kahn

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Pressure

to play with boys instead of dolls
or pressure from boys
who treated me
like a doll instead of a person

*

Carry

I am sorry
I could not carry you
in my arms
because
I could not carry you
in my body.

*

A. Kahn creates raw, emotional poetry and creative nonfiction. Her prose has been published in Of Rust and Glass, and artwork in the horror anthology Café Macabre II.

Two Poems by Katey Funderburgh

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Babycake

Winter sun taunted tendrils through my mother’s blinds
on the day she brought me home to no one but herself.
Pressing me to her, peeling back another daughter
with worry coiled in her chest, eyes that saw and saw
each other. Women are snakes: you inside me inside
her inside her mother who died on purpose before
the snows came. I handfed bits of cake to mine, slept
against her until the mirage left her eyelids,
until she started making the coffee again.
Unending rain the whole summer we poured concrete
into the holes we dug in the backyard, erecting
a barn where once there stood nothing but a field and
my mother’s heatvisions of horses we would feed
every morning. This is what saved her— not the bedsheets
I changed but the buckets of grain and hot water
steaming in each stall. She put me in a saddle
when I was still diapered. You were already burrowed
at my spinal center, watching how we almost broke
the tether, severed and sighed in the grass between
the teeth of our horses— the heads always growing back,
the shed skin always returning its need to blink us
back open into ourselves, every daughter
mixing the batter with her hands. I do, she does,
she did, you will— worry it’s not enough.

*

Sappho at the Gay Bar

Here, the Gods are kin to ink on a girl’s arm.
Love, I hear your voice on their tongues.
They print fauna on their bodies. Flora
speaks between fingers

of thin-skinned girls who ask about you.
I have read what remains of us. The same
fire under my skin, the same anger.
I am taught sin.

Here, they are named of me.
Their unmade beds, their grass-gentle hands—
they hold my undead body.
Body I wrote

to worship you, yet here we breathe, among them—

*

Katey Funderburgh is an emerging poet from Colorado. She is a current MFA Poetry student at George Mason University, where she is also a reader for phoebe and SoToSpeak literary journals, as well as for Poetry Daily. Katey’s earlier work has appeared in Josephine Quarterly, samfiftyfour, and Jet Fuel Review, among others. When she isn’t toiling over poems, Katey can be found laying in the sun with her cat, Thistle.

Allure by Clela Reed

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Allure

“A domesticated cow [French Limousine]
has been found living among a herd
of gigantic bison in a Polish forest.”
       — Ornithologist Adam Zbyryt

Maybe what first caught her eye
were the elegant black noses, sculpted,
with the oiled sheen of crow feathers
so unlike the pale, flat ones of her herd
whose insipid brownness filled her days.

Or perhaps, it was the way they stood
silently at the edge of the field, watching,
their stoic eyes shining like berries tucked into fur.
Maybe it was their ancient forms—muscular, dark—
or the beautiful upward curve of their horns.

It could have been the way they kicked away
the wolves at the edge of the primeval forest.
Maybe it was musk. Or the curly coats
or the shaggy beards their proud heads tossed
as they turned to go. No one knows, but something

urged her to follow the mystery that stirred
and called, leave the old familiars to chew
blandness, to blink their stolid, long-lashed eyes
as they watched her walk away
and not look back.

*

Clela Reed is the author of seven collections of poetry. The most recent, Silk (Evening Street Press, 2019), won the Helen Kay Chapbook Prize and then a 2020 Georgia Author of the Year award. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she has had poems published in The Cortland Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Atlanta Review, Valparaiso Review, The Literati Review, Clapboard House, Red Door, and many others. A former English teacher and Peace Corps volunteer, when not traveling or chasing deer from her garden, she lives and writes with her husband in their woodland home near Athens, Georgia.

Letter to Earth by Tamara Madison

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Letter to Earth

I know you suffer. It’s an old story.
But I believe the day will come

when your rivers will run pure again,
when your seas will be clean and dazzled

with fish. Nights will be black again
and crackle with starlight. For every

living thing that went extinct, new ones
will take their place. In your marrow,

the memory of us will turn again to carbon
and remain there, finally harmless.

Air will flow sweet around the trunks
of trees, waterfalls will pound

the river rocks, and the sky will fill
with insects and birds, wild and loud

*

Tamara Madison is the author of three full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic”, “Moraine” (both from Pearl Editions) and “Morpheus Dips His Oar” (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), and two chapbooks, “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions) and “Along the Fault Line” (Picture Show Press). Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, Your Daily Poem, the Writer’s Almanac, Sheila-Na-Gig, Worcester Review, ONE ART, and many other publications. More about Tamara can be found at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Two Poems by David O’Connell

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Starter Home

Before us, others called our house our house.
We know their names, met their grown children.
At the closing, they said mom’s house, dad’s house,

but we were not confused. In one day, our house
was empty, full. If possible, it was more our house

because we thought, these walls should be blue,
not green, and we were right. Later, we returned
with the baby, and then years became these rooms

where she once and the times that we all. Now,
there is our house, and our house, and our house,

so that often when we speak, three doors open
on three rooms where what happened happens
almost as it happened in our house, which we agree

will always be our house, even when it’s theirs.

*

How to Tell the One About Fatherhood

A man and his daughter walk into a drugstore.
That he won’t know best is the twist. The setup
relies on a tacky Grim Reaper, its skull white

as disposable utensils, a plastic black cowl
hiding the wire it hangs from above them.
Explain it’s October and how the decoration,

triggered by their entrance, shimmies and moans
so that the daughter, just four, buries her face
in her palms. Jump then to bedtime: the girl

in tears, afraid of the dark, the man at a loss.
Understand that the story you’re telling
is less joke than trial, that its outcome

will mean one thing to the man and another
to this girl who’ll remember her whole life
what comes next. It’s death, of course,

that upset her, though she doesn’t know one day
she’ll die. As will her father. And the father,
through all his It can’t hurt you, I’d never let…

doesn’t think he’s lying. This is the time now
to pause, leaving space for your listener
to feel for a man who struggles for answers

as he gets in the car and drives his daughter
back to the store in her pajamas. Nearing
the end, take time to sketch the empty aisles,

the long fluorescents humming as if angry
with the night. Take care. Bring them
to this moment cautiously. Not so much

allegory as anecdote. Less anecdote than
ephemera: a father lifting up his child,
saying, trust me, there’s nothing to fear.

*

David O’Connell is the author of Our Best Defense (Červená Barva Press) and the chapbook A Better Way to Fall (The Poet’s Press). His work has appeared in Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, and Southern Poetry Review, among other journals. More of his work can be found at davidoconnellpoet.com.

Four Poems by Ann Kammerer

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Red Coat

The night I went to find her
she was wearing the red coat,
the one she got
at Burlington Coat Factory
for her 40th class reunion.

“I always wanted a red coat,”
Mom had said.
“They’re so youthful.”

She wore it proudly,
tossing it over pilled sweaters
and filthy sweatpants,
cinching the belt
to accent a waistline
starved by gin
and Percocet.

Now, under streetlamp,
she was vibrant,
the coat ever dazzling.
Seated on a frayed blanket,
wedged between wizened men,
Mom broke through the clutter
of black bags and bottles,
her coat a billboard
amidst cardboard signs.

“Time to go Mom.”
I nudged her peeling flats
and lifted her face
from a man’s nubby shoulder.
Her eyes quivered,
her irises soft pink.

“They need cigarettes.”
She groaned as I pulled her up,
her body a collapse
of boney arms and legs.
“Give them some.”

“I quit,” I said.

She swatted me
with limp paper hands.

“You would,
Wouldn’t you?”

Lowering her into the car,
I drove away,
passing weedy lots,
a Rite-Aid,
then a McDonald’s,
two blocks from a burned-out house.

“I always loved Chicken McNuggets,”
she mumbled,
the glow from the Golden Arches
striping her coat.
“You know I wouldn’t be like this
if your dad had just got me
what I wanted.”

*

Pancakes

Mom was propped up
with pillows
the last day I visited
the hospital.

She was leaning,
her balding head
touching the bed rail.
One leg was covered
with bleached white sheets,
the other bony and extended
with a sock hanging
from the toe.
Clutching a rosary
in her bent lumpy hand,
she stared at the TV,
her mouth gaping
over her brown stubby teeth.

“Put your toys down,” Mom said.
“Get to the table now.”

I set my purse
on the floor
and laid my coat
across the back
of a red vinyl chair.
Stepping to her bedside,
I pulled the sock back
around her crusted heel,
and smoothed the sheet
over her cold, grey legs.
I sat down and slipped off
my work shoes,
the smell of hospital food
from a hallway cart
seeping into her room.

“We’re almost ready
for dinner,” Mom said.
“The frying pan.
It should be
nice and hot.”

Mom dropped her rosary.
She centered her head
on her brittle neck,
her eyes rolling
behind half-closed lids.
Lifting one arm in a semi-circle,
she rotated the other in mid-air,
thin folds of transparent skin
dangling from her underarm.

“We’re having pancakes tonight.”
Her swollen tongue clacked,
elastic bands of spit
forming on the sides
of her mouth.
“Just like every Monday.”

Mom blended batter,
her withered fist spiraling.

“Come on,” she said.
“Set the table now.
We’re almost ready.”

The more she stirred,
the more her hospital gown
slid from one shoulder,
revealing a purple hole
near her breastbone
where nurses dribbled medicine
through plastic tubes.

“Come on,” she said.
“Be a good girl and help.”

I reached over the bed rail,
touching her bony arm.

“Mom.
How’s it going?”

Her arms collapsed
on her distended belly.

“Is that you?”
Her voice warbled
as her cheek pulsed.

“Yes. It’s me Mom.”

Mom looked past me
with glassy yellowed eyes.

“Did you come for dinner?”
Her breath pushed her words
through papery lips.

“Yes,” I said.
You were making pancakes,
weren’t you?”

Mom blinked.
Her head tilted
as if she heard something
faint and far away.

“You like pancakes,
don’t you?”

I stroked a wisp of hair
on her temple.

“Yes.
I love pancakes.”

Mom’s mouth curved,
breaking the stillness
of her face.
Her eyes shuttered
and she began to shake,
her arms fluttering
as her legs
made the sheets
move like ghosts.

*

Candy Counter

I always thought
I’d go to college,
but when the time came,
I didn’t.

After high school,
my only ambitions
were to get an apartment
and do something aside
from selling hotdogs
at a mall kiosk.
Teachers said
I was good at math
and science
and even writing.
Mr. Bonfiglio said
my future was bright.
I didn’t see that,
and figured he was just
trying to get me
to stay after school,
go out to some park,
drink wine,
and run his hands
all over me
like he had
with my friend Mary.

Mom wasn’t big
on jobs or college
and wasn’t much help.
She had gone straight
from high school
to work the candy counter
at a department store.
Dad had worked there, too,
selling appliances.
They double-dated for a while
with a guy from automotive
and a girl from lingerie.
Shortly after they married,
Dad made her quit,
saying no wife of his
was going to sell sweet things
for a living.

“Just work a while,” Mom told me.
“Maybe you’ll be lucky
and meet Mr. Wonderful.
You could quit then,
have a kid.”

I told Mom
that wasn’t my plan,
that I wanted to do more,
that people said
I was smart.

“I’m thinking about
getting a better job,” I said.
“You know, maybe down
at the dry cleaners,
make a little more money,
see if they’ll teach me
how to tailor,
or something like that.”

Mom poured a drink
and sat down
at the kitchen table.
She lit a cigarette
and called me smarty-pants.
Crossing her legs,
she smoothed her bare calf,
kicking off one shoe
to rub her foot.

“Better watch your fanny
if you do that,” Mom said.
“I hear that Rod guy
who runs the place
gets pretty friendly
with counter girls.
Customers, too.”

I took one of her Viceroys
and slumped on the couch
to watch reruns of “Medical Center.”
Chad Everett filled the screen,
the scene cutting
between him and a blonde nurse,
his eyes technicolor blue,
his bangs gelled
in a perfect crescent,
his lean body draped
in a white doctor coat.

“Well look at him.”
Mom drew on her cigarette,
her lipstick ringing the filter.
She recrossed her legs
and ran her fingertips
over her other calf.
“He can take my pulse any day.”

*

Fugue

A cloud of swearing
seeped into my room
a few hours after
I went to bed.
Dad had missed dinner,
never calling,
coming home late,
making Mom mad,
both of them drunk,
Dad throwing things
and punching walls,
making her yell
and break things, too.

Their shouts rose
in vicious rhapsody,
fading in somber fugue.
Falling asleep,
I woke to the lapping
of curtains on the sill,
a slice of pink sun
spilling on the sheets.

The morning was still,
the living room
strewn with bottles
and upended chairs.
The TV was on,
Phil Donahue
caressing a mic,
immersed in a sea
of middle-aged women
in double knits
and stretch floral shirts,
their necklines bridled
with ascots.

I stood and watched,
drinking warm Coke
and eating cereal from the box.
The sink was jammed
with crusted-over plates,
so I loaded the dishwasher
then got ready
for my 10 o’clock shift
at the dry cleaners.

Walking to work,
I tried not to think
about where Dad went
most nights,
or why Mom didn’t
call her friend Ruth Ann
like she used to.
She was happier then,
or maybe I was littler,
not understanding their exchanges
over Jim Beam and cigarettes,
bemoaning how men
could slip around
and they couldn’t,
that it just wasn’t fair
that they caught a raw deal.

“Men,” Mom would say.
“They’re either obsessed
or they’re womanizers.”

She took a drink
and slammed her glass.

“Well how about this?”
Ruth Ann slapped the table.
“You could just shorten it,
say ‘All men are obsessed.’
That ‘bout says it.”

They’d laugh and smirk
and clink their glasses.
I’d laugh, too,
jumping and twirling,
half-repeating their words,
mom grabbing my ponytail,
telling me to go play.

“Quit listening,” she’d say.
“Go away. Be a good girl.”

When I got to the cleaners,
my boss Rod
was at the front counter,
leaning close and talking
to an olive-skinned woman
in a filigreed dress.
His mom Ruby
was there, too,
finishing up orders,
getting ready to go
for the day.

“Good morning.”
Rod stood up straight.
So did the woman.
Ruby peered over her glasses
as she ran a tape
on the calculator.

“This is Mrs. Carras.”
Rod gazed at Mrs. Carras
but talked to me.
“She’s, well, one of our regulars.”

Mrs. Carras held out
her slim hand,
her rings sparkling
with fluorescent light.

“Are you Rod’s new girl?”
Her sleek red lips broke a smile.
“You’re Millie and Frank’s
daughter, right?”

I said yes.
She squeezed my forearm,
her touch silky,
her eyes traveling
up the center of my blouse,
descending to the hemline
of my skirt.

“You’re a perfect doll.”
Her fingertips lingered
as she pulled her hand away.
“I’m sure we’ll talk more
someday.”

*

Ann Kammerer lives in Oak Park, Illinois, having relocated from her home state of Michigan with her husband and daughter. Her work has appeared in Fictive Dream, ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry, Open Arts Forum, Bright Flash Literary Review, Thoughtful Dog, The Ekphrastic Review, and anthologies by Crow Woods Publishing and Querencia Press. She has received top honors and made the short list in several writing contests. Her chapbook collections of narrative poetry include “Yesterday’s Playlist” (Bottlecap Press 2023), “Beaut” (forthcoming 2024 from Kelsay Books), and “Friends Once There (forthcoming 2024 from Impspired).

My Mother Gets a Can Opener and Roses for Her Birthday by Marjorie Maddox

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My Mother Gets a Can Opener and Roses for Her Birthday

The man she loves surprises her
by not giving what she needs
around her finger. On her birthday, the metal ring
from the green bean can
clangs on the counter. She laughs
nervously, runs her finger
along the long stems of new roses
arranged traditionally in the vase
my dead father gave her,
though she would never take his flowers, expensively bought.
And this love, spontaneous in its practicality,
practical in its spontaneity, she wears proudly
everywhere, polished, shiny
as the kitchen her cans still whir in
while the two cook, hungrily, together.

*

Professor of English at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 16 collections of poetry—including Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (Yellowglen Prize); Begin with a Question (International Book and Illumination Book Award Winners); and the Shanti Arts ekphrastic collaborations Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For (with photographer Karen Elias) and In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind, a collaboration with her artist daughter, Anna Lee Hafer (www.hafer.work) and others. How Can I Look It Up When I Don’t Know How It’s Spelled? Spelling Mnemonics and Grammar Tricks (Kelsay) and Seeing Things (Wildhouse) will be available in 2024. In addition, she has published the story collection What She Was Saying (Fomite) and 4 children’s and YA books. With Jerry Wemple, she is co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania and the forthcoming Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (PSU Press) and is assistant editor of Presence. She hosts Poetry Moment at WPSU. See marjoriemaddox.com