Month: July 2022

Never Been Better by J.R. Barner

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Never Been Better

Tomorrow is barely an hour old:
The dark hangs off me like a
Jacket draped around my shoulders
To fend off a chill while my date walks me home.
Streetlights play off sodium haze and smeared lipstick:
Where everything smells eternally of
Sweat, smoke, stale beer, and indolence,
And the city is a bar that never closes.
You stoop to kiss me,
Sleep still in your eyes from yesterday
As they squint to a close,
Mouth hanging open like a corpse.
I let myself get taken in,
Drawn back into the shadows,
Convincing myself that I’ll never feel this way
Ever again.

*

J.R. Barner is a writer, teacher, and musician living in Athens, Georgia. They are the author of the chapbooks Burnt Out Stars and Thirteen Poems and their forthcoming first collection, Little Eulogies. They were educated at the University of Minnesota and the University of Georgia. Their work has appeared in online and print journals Flow, Anobium, and Release. New work is available periodically at jrbarner.tumblr.com.

I Want to Hear – A collaborative poem conceived and arranged by Erin Murphy

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I Want to Hear

Hearing may indeed by one of the last senses to lose function as humans die.

                                                                                          —Scientific Reports, 2020

I want to hear the scarlet-headed woodpecker
on a distant oak tapping out agrub, agrub, agrub,

twigs crackling underfoot on a forest path
as sunlight filters onto my face,

creekwater running past and over rocks
on its way to the falls
like conversation between lovers.

I want to hear the gasping hiss of a hot iron
lifted from pressed fabric, a flood of steam
rising from each smoothed crease,

the cracking open of a Coke can,
the sizzling of soda bubbling up,

toast crunching on linoleum
as we stomp anger into crumbs,

the swish of Rob Halford’s tight-fitting leather vest.

I want to hear anything but the crow-cry pulsing
of my continuous glucose monitor.

I want to hear Bill Withers’ grandma’s hands indwell
the liturgy where my grandmother brought us,
the tall cross out front in bloom,

bagpipe notes wailing in a canyon,
sliding like trombones down cliffs,

cars passing swiftly, faint as peace.

I want to hear boots tapping on wooden floors
as my father leaves and returns from work,

the bustle of garbage collectors on the porch.

I want to hear a newborn baby crying,

the wise creak of a rocking chair,
heavy with the weight of a mother
and her cocooned child.

I want to hear the rhythmic buzz
of a spouse’s snoring,

the cackle, howl, and wheeze
of my family’s laughter,

grandkids’ shrieks weaving together
in the backseat.

The landline message calling my name
three days before Mom’s death.

A nurse leaning down and whispering
We are transferring you to the love ward.

The distant train whistle
of the words I and mine.

Voices running together like rain,
letting me know they’ll be okay.

And my mother’s voice again:
Everything will be fine.

*

A collaborative poem conceived and arranged by Erin Murphy during the 2022 West Virginia Writers’ Workshop, featuring lines by Mark Brazaitis, Joel Chineson, Gary Ciocco, Lori D’Angelo, Karen DePinto, Sarah Beth Ealy, Rebecca Ernest, Stanley Galloway, Katy Giebenhain, David Hayhurst, Georgianna Heiko, Irene Klosko, George M. Lies, Martin Malone, Erin Murphy, Renée K. Nicholson, Karen Peacock, Stan Pisle, Guy Terrell, Deborah Westin, Maryann Wolfe, and Nicole Yurcaba.

Erin Murphy, who conceptualized and arranged this collaborative poem, is the author of nine poetry collections, including Human Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry). She is professor of English at Penn State Altoona where she organized a college-wide collaborative poetry project entitled “In My America.”
Website: http://www.erin-murphy.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/erinmurphypoet
Twitter: @poet_notes

*

“I Want to Hear” Collaborative Poem Prompt

It has long been believed that hearing is the last sense to go. A recent University of British Columbia study determined that unresponsive actively dying patients continue to hear in the final hours before death. The study – “Electrophysiological evidence of preserved hearing at the end of life” – was published in the journal Scientific Reports in 2020. With this in mind, you are invited to participate in a collaborative poetry project.

• Write a list of the final sounds you’d want to hear. These could be sounds you love, sounds you find calming, a sound you miss, or words you need or want to hear. Just jot them down – don’t worry about being descriptive.
• Now go back and choose one sound to describe in detail. Make notes about all of the associations you have with this sound.
• Write one sentence that fills in this blank: “I want to hear __________________.” Be as specific and concrete as possible.

One Poem by Neva Ensminger-Holland

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Brenda Diana Duff Frazier, 1938 Debutante of the Year, At Home, 1966
           after the photograph by Diane Arbus

Do you have a light, honey? If I don’t get
a cigarette soon, I might pass out. I know,
I know, they’re downright nasty, but
it’s a nervous habit, been doing it ever since
she made me put on that god awful dress
and smile for all the pretty little rich boys

with their over-gelled hair and ugly sport
coats, looking for a wife who’ll treat them
like a child. I don’t honestly know
what she was thinking, my mother, when

she sent me down that spiral staircase.
I was sick as a dog that afternoon, but
she gave me two sips of brandy and said
that if I had to throw up, I’d better make

sure no one was around to watch. I was a wreck,
and have been ever since, it’s all the smoke, I think,
it’s fried my brain. I don’t think I’m gonna have
a cigarette after all. It’s really nothing, I’m just so tired,
honey, and it’s been so long since my mother let me sleep.

*

Neva Ensminger-Holland is a recent graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy, and is an incoming freshman at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. She is a YoungArts award winner and an American Voices nominee in the Scholastic Art and Writing Competition. Her work is published or forthcoming in the Interlochen Review, The Albion Review, and the YoungArts anthology. In her free time, she enjoys wearing ripped tights in the winter, watching Gilmore Girls with her roommate, and hot-gluing the straps back on her platform Mary-Janes.

The Sirens by Betsy Mars

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The Sirens

I am one with the sirens
singing down the avenues of the night,
taking water to whatever is on fire,
bringing breath to whatever threatens to expire.

I am one with wakefulness, vigilance,
one with the sea
and the rocks
against which I crash.

I am the rock, sometimes
the rockslide, sometimes
the sand— rock pounded
by my own hand,
sometimes I am the crash,
sometimes the victim.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, a photographer, and publishes an occasional anthology through Kingly Street Press. She is an assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Poetry publications include Rise Up Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, New Verse News, Sky Island, and Minyan. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee. Betsy’s photos have been featured in RATTLE’s Ekphrastic Challenge, Spank the Carp, Praxis, and Redheaded Stepchild. She is the author of Alinea and co-author of In the Muddle of the Night with Alan Walowitz.

Waiting Beside My Father by Andrea Potos

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WAITING BESIDE MY FATHER

In the ICU room, ten days
where he coma-slept, arranged by the doctor
to rest his brain after the fall,
I sat beside him. I remember wearing
my slate-blue jacket with the big ruffle
at the collar, its cotton soft and somehow
reassuring on my body as I watched
the nurses glide by in the gleaming hallways,
and the kind hospitalist arrived with a lift
of hope in his voice. Inside me, I felt a small, carved
chapel of patience I didn’t know I possessed.
I closed my eyes, apologized to my father
for years of crabbiness between us.
I felt his brain smoothing out its frenzy, as if floating
on a long journey, as if a river
was carrying us, though
I had never learned to swim.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several poetry collections, including Marrow of Summer and Mothershell, both from Kelsay Books; and A Stone to Carry Home from Salmon Poetry. A new collection entitled Her Joy Becomes is forthcoming from Fernwood Press this November. Recent poems appear in The Sun, Poetry East, and Lyric. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Five Poems by Kari Gunter-Seymour

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Amesville Girls

sip Squirt soda from lime green
returnable glass bottles pulled ice cold from
the chest cooler at Kasler’s corner grocery,
retrieve the dime, stuff it in the jukebox
at Fanny’s Family Diner, dance

The Bus Stop or The Sprinkler
to AC/DC, say words like warsh
and fixin’ to go, spit watermelon seeds
good as the boys, swim naked in the crick,

sneak out to sleep in the graveyard
to be closer to their grannies,
ink ballpoint tattoos on each other’s biceps,
wear fruit-flavored lip gloss to softball practice,

dream Guns N’ Roses’ tour bus
stops for lunch at the diner
and Slash or Duff McKagan
kiss their cherry mouths, finger
their buttons, white-knight them away.

*

Where We Come from Can Break Us

She was curious, always questions
from that one, a nine-year-old
going on twenty, sneaking
the backwoods to my porch swing,
earless to her mama’s played-out rebukes.

I was a new mother, alone
more than was fit.
The baby loved her singing
and she would brush my hair
for hours, jawing tales
about her made up life.

I often think of her hangdog
eyes and heavy lashes,
hope she was able to save herself
from that broke down place.
Who’m I trying to kid?

*

How Could a Woman

He could not climb in the driver’s
seat without lighting up a joint.
There I’d be, juggling bunting, bottle,
binky, strapping the baby in his car seat,
while my husband sat, rolling a fat one,
lip-syncing whatever was blasting
from the radio, sealing the deal
with nimble finger work,
a slick slip of the tongue.
He would key the ignition, flip open
a lighter, take a long slow toke,
cough hard enough to crack a rib,
ease into gear. What soured me most
was how pleased he was with himself,
that and the fact I stuck with him
for close on two years.

*

True Grit

Sweet Child O’Mine
spun throaty on the boombox,
only CD I owned. The baby
squatted in his second-hand
jolly jumper, clipped at the top
of the door frame—bouncing
as if the floor was a trampoline,
he an Olympic trainer.

I took the afternoon off work
to have my wisdom teeth pulled,
groggy from the laughing gas,
ticked off at my spouse,
who’d obviously been rolling joints,
leaving behind a whole mess
of seeds and stems, brushed
from coffee table to shoddy carpet.

Behind on the electric bill,
car tires bald, the twit once
hocked my high school class ring
to buy an ounce of pot.

I admit it. I allowed myself
to be diminished way too long.
I might never have culled my courage
had it not been for the baby,
the way he carefully cupped my jaw
as I lifted him from the jumper.
Love is or it ain’t.

*

Hanky-Panky Poker

We women dressed as if headed
to the French Riviera—frilly skirts,
teased-up hairdos, shiny lip gloss.
The men wore flannel shirts,
stunk of sour mash and tobacco.

It got intense. Five Card Draw,
nickel ante, quarter limit—
Texas Hold’em if we drank tequila shots.
There were some shining moments
before the whole shebang went briny.

Sarah Sipple called a nature break,
gone too long to the facilities
and Danny Munford who’d stepped outside
to do the same, got caught bare-assed,
Levi’s around his ankles, rutting Sarah
like some randied white tail buck.

All things considered, we switched
to Euchre, less hard liquor,
more chips and dip.
Danny Munford went tail-ass-tits to the wind.
Phil Sipple got hisself a new partner.

*

Kari Gunter-Seymour is the Poet Laureate of Ohio. Her poetry collections include Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press, 2022) and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila Na Gig Editions, 2020), winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award. Her work has been featured on Verse Daily, Cultural Daily, World Literature Today, the New York Times and Poets.org. A ninth generation Appalachian, she is the editor of I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices, funded by the Academy of American Poets and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Women of Appalachia Project’s anthology series, Women Speak. Gunter-Seymour is a retired instructor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University; the founder, curator, and host of Spoken & Heard, a seasonal performance series featuring poets, writers, and musicians from across the country; an artist in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts and a 2022 Pillar of Prosperity Fellow for the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio.

www.karigunterseymourpoet.com
@KGunterSeymour

Three Poems by Robert Okaji

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Neither Grace nor Body

What is ash but death
lightened, emptied into air.

A hand released
from the making of soap,
the washing of limbs.
Unfinished prayers.

Neither grace nor body recovers.

A father sacrifices himself
that his boy may live.
No one hears, but someone
digs through the rubble,
uncovering. Later. Much later.

*

Beyond Accidental

I think of you as my nightshade,
a figure standing between ornamental
and poison, between flower and blade
or moonlight and black confetti sifting
through the day’s last seconds. How
is that sound shaped by never
and the tongue’s reluctant tip? I listen
as you chamber a round and promise
guilt and years of incomplete deeds.
I do not accept your venom. I cannot.

*

Less Than Absence

How loneliness greets me
with its dispassionate gaze
focused on the dead elm
at the crest of the neighbor’s
hill, reminding me that I
am the phrase not remembered,
lying just beyond the stone
fence, tucked out of sight,
but within reach, if only
your absence were less
than absence. If only.

*

Robert Okaji lives in Indiana. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Evergreen Review, riverSedge, Eclectica, Threepenny Review and elsewhere.

Grief by Mike James

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Grief

Bitter at the calendar, those red-marked days and
Turned pages, bitter at the window’s light and
The light switch in an empty room, bitter at the moon
And Taurus and Cancer and astrology’s best guesses,
Bitter at a broken dial radio and a working faucet
And soap not strong enough for every stain

*

Mike James makes his home outside Nashville, Tennessee. He has published in numerous magazines, large and small, throughout the country. His many poetry collections include: Leftover Distances (Luchador), Parades (Alien Buddha), Jumping Drawbridges in Technicolor (Blue Horse), and Crows in the Jukebox (Bottom Dog.)

Remnants by Sean Hanrahan

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Remnants

Boxed up remnants of their wedding,
a surprisingly full set of china except
a missing water glass. It may have shattered
twenty years ago. We uncover
an alternating silver rim and floral
pattern I can only faintly remember
using once or twice at Thanksgiving
dinner when my grandparents came,
and my sister and I were allowed wine.

Should I be concerned how my parents
are giving pieces of themselves away,
before death? Every time we visit,
they get lighter and my husband
and I get heavier with objects
we can’t use, but accept out of an
obligation to remember their taste
becoming superimposed upon our own.
An odd number of nearly everything
as if my parents’ possessions have a sentient
need to be incomplete or ill-sorted.

We store my parents’ lifelines,
unceremoniously, in our basement
for the amusement of spiders. I should be
grateful my parents are, in their way,
preparing me for their eventual demise,
but instead of spending time with my
husband and me when we are visiting,
they haphazardly clean out their
closets as if to ward off mortality
with needless tasks. They subtract
time for the preservation of objects,
a familial archaeology. We all huff
and sigh as we consign second-
hand memories to unswept darkness.

*

Sean Hanrahan is a Philadelphian poet originally hailing from Dale City, Virginia. He is the author of the full-length collection Safer Behind Popcorn (2019 Cajun Mutt) and the chapbooks Hardened Eyes on the Scan (2018 Moonstone) and Gay Cake (2020 Toho). His work has also been included in several anthologies, including Moonstone Featured Poets, Queer Around the World, and Stonewall’s Legacy, and several journals, including Impossible Archetype, Poetica Review, and Voicemail Poems. He has taught classes titled A Chapbook in 49 Days and Ekphrastic Poetry and hosted poetry events throughout Philadelphia.

Palms Up by Steven Concert

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Palms Up

Memories lashed together with lifelines,
I still hold love in my hands
three years since he was eaten alive.

Hidden monster gnawed from within,
its victory wore my defeat.

Time’s distance dims,
I still hear his voice echo

its reason and explanation
inside my head—

made him crazy every time
I peeled vegetables
pulling the peeler toward my wrist.

Life moves away from tragedy
while invisible tethers come undone.

*

Steven Concert, a gay American poet, is a native of upstate New York who was transplanted to northeastern Pennsylvania at a very young age. His manuscript was named a finalist in the 2021 Stevens Manuscript Poetry competition (NFSPS Press), and his poetry was awarded first place in Creative York’s 2021 Writer’s Eye Competition. Steven serves on the Executive Boards of both the Pennsylvania Poetry Society and National Federation of State Poetry Societies. He is current editor of the Mad Poet Society’s digital quarterly newsletter, the Pulse. He can be found on Facebook @ Paperless Poets.

Three Poems by Arlene Weiner

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For Loneliness

                  —The Prime Minister of the U.K. has appointed a Minister for Loneliness

I know a woman who in widowhood
became enamored of a pet fish,
and a woman, long divorced,
who delights in seven fish,
each in his bowl.

During a time when I lived alone
I would hear a cricket chirping at night.
It fell silent as I passed through the room,
so I knew it knew me. And I grieved
when it no longer sang.

Minister for Loneliness, we have to sing
the angels back, we have to cherish
the creatures, even the smallest,
whose wings make song,
who may be the angels themselves.

*

Mantis

Far from any tree or blade of grass
on a street where sparrows
chirped above a storefront
it appeared in my bedroom

We children believed there was
a two hundred dollar fine
for killing a mantis
but who would have hurt it

so green and large and human
so upright and grasping
surely an ambassador
to me in that room

where my mother drew down
the dark green shade
that in summer admitted
pinpoints of light

my first constellations

*

In the Night

Someone is sitting beside you reciting.
The room must be cold, to hold you
from Friday to Sunday. All night
someone is near you, reading psalms,
as your mother read to you in your bed.
You do not hear. Outside this morning
I heard a bird say keep, keep, keep,
but we cannot keep you, cannot hold you.
You are still but you do not sleep.

*

Arlene Weiner lives in Pittsburgh. She has been a Shakespeare scholar, a cardiology technician, an editor, a den mother, and a member of a group developing computer applications for education. Her poems have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Pleaides, Poet Lore, and Paterson Literary Review. She held a MacDowell fellowship. Ragged Sky published two collections of her poetry: Escape Velocity (2006) and City Bird (2016). She also writes plays.

Two Poems by Margaret Dornaus

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The Heart is Not a Stone

             after Danusha Laméris

You cannot hold it in your hands,
or kick it to one side to clear your path.
Or toss it in the air to see how far
it travels . . . skipping as it does
across still water. It is neither this
nor that, but by its nature soft
though not without sharp
edges. It is a dozen songbirds
singing as the light returns, a child
at play, a lover calling out
your name: a reminder there is
no love without the loss. No poetry.
Perhaps then it’s enough to speak
of smaller things—a pocket,
say, a stone—until you also find
your heart. Holding on. Letting
go. Speaking before daring
to be spoken for.

*

But You Don’t Die from It

             “The yellow star? Oh, what of it? You don’t die from it.”
                         —from Night, Chapter One, by Elie Wiesel

At Buchenwald, Liliane takes two stones from her pocket.
Small specimens collected from a desecrated cemetery in Potsdam.

She places one stone on a cairn overlooking Buchenwald’s
courtyard, where tourists are snapping pictures off

their bucket list: the frozen watchtower clock displaying
the time of liberation; the arched entryway gates

proclaiming Arbeit Macht Frei without a shred
of irony; the lightning-struck oak where Goethe sat

on this hillside above Weimar’s cobblestoned ode
to life and literature and music. A month ago

when Liliane and I met in a New York restaurant
that served schnitzel, she asked if I was Jewish.

It’s your name, she said, explaining she’d studied
surnames given Jews by their oppressors.

I told her that my name had haunted me since
childhood. How my classmates taunted

me with nicknames: dormouse; doormat; doornail,
as in dead as . . . How at night I’d wished

for a name that sounded more American, less
German. It’s just a name, I said that day

Liliane and I became friends. Long before
she placed her second stone in my left hand.

*

Margaret Dornaus holds an MFA in the translation of poetry from the University of Arkansas. A semifinalist in Naugatuck River Review’s 13th annual Narrative Poetry Contest, she had the privilege of editing and publishing a pandemic-themed anthology—behind the mask: haiku in the time of Covid-19—through her small literary press Singing Moon in 2020. Her first book of poetry, Prayer for the Dead: Collected Haibun & Tanka Prose, won a 2017 Merit Book Award from the Haiku Society of America. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in I-70 Review, MacQueen’s, Minyan Magazine, MockingHeart Review, Red Earth Review, Silver Birch Press, and The Ekphrastic Review.

Preservation by Nancy Huggett

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Preservation

I confess to keeping those first roses dead
and dried, in the closet in a box I forgot
then found again today. Never
quite purging. The romance,
fresh and red with passion,
soft with desire. Saved
and savored for some future
that shook us by the scruff,
dust and petals flung
into the heavens, stars
realigning. So many beautiful
dead things shedding light.

*

Nancy Huggett is a writer, caregiver, and settler descendant who lives in Ottawa, Canada on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people.

Ritual by William DeGenaro

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RITUAL

At Nice Coffee in Amman,
a video plays on repeat:
pilgrims in the holy city
of Mecca circling the Kabba.

Nice Coffee serves tea,
Turkish coffee, Nescafe,
the same barista always
twisting the knobs,
fiddling with the three
open flames from the three
gas tanks below the counter.
They boil water with
improbable speed.

Two teen boys work the cars.
Morning commuters pull
to the side of the busy road,
roll down their windows,
place their orders, maybe
a tea with lots of sugar
and a pack of cigarettes,
and their order is brought
to their window.

All that is to say
blessings on the man
whose tea needed something more
and, since the delivery boys
were busy, left the car running,
dashed into Nice Coffee
and snipped three mint leaves
from the plant on the counter.

*

William DeGenaro is a Michigan-based teacher and writer and a two-time Fulbright scholar. His creative work has appeared most recently in Windsor Review, Literary Orphans, and Shot Glass Journal.

When I Have My Own Place by Ranney Campbell

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When I Have My Own Place

it will be so quiet
                     I will be able
to hear three sunflowers

in a straight glass vase

on my dining room table
picked up bare and painted

blue and sanded and ash
stained or calla

lilies, that they pull

like weeds, I hear
in Australia

*

Ranney Campbell is from St. Louis, Missouri, but lives in Southern California. Her chapbook, “Pimp,” is published by Arroyo Seco Press. Campbell’s work has appeared in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem, Third Wednesday, Eastern Iowa Review, and elsewhere. 

One Poem by Donna Hilbert

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Walk Before Coffee, After a Glance at the Times

I say good morning to a passerby
but hear, instead, good mourning
in my head, and I am dazed
by the ambiguity of homophones.

And, on the turntable of my brain
spins a melody I hum, but can’t abide:
Morning has broken. No. Morning
is broken. In present tense, it sings.

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is the just released Threnody, from Moon Tide Press. Earlier books include Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018. She is a monthly contributing writer to the on-line journal Verse-Virtual. Work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Braided Way, Chiron Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Rattle, Zocalo Public Square, One Art, and numerous anthologies. Poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and on Lyric Life. She writes and leads private workshops in Southern California, where she makes her home, and during residencies at Write On Door County. Learn more at www.donnahilbert.com

Two Poems by Bruce Morton

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Little Debbie Begs the Existential Question

So there it was, the existential question
Of my childhood. Each morning I would answer
The same question—“peanut butter and jelly
Or baloney?” No choice as to bread. Wonder
Bread, no wonder, it was fortified and white.

But the real moment of existential crisis
Was whether to eat, the sandwich that is,
For there was sweet Little Debbie smiling
On a transparent wrapper over a Swiss Roll,
Or Hostess offering cupcakes and Twinkies,
Or perhaps HoHos, Ding Dongs, and Devil
Dogs. These treats, only just deserts perhaps,
Temptations sweet to a fault, enthralled.

Then to go home to the inevitable inquisition,
“Did you eat your lunch?” There it was, parental
Disbelief, as I explained solemnly that I was
An existential victim of a shift of judgment
From prefrontal cortex to amygdala, yes,
That I was betrayed by basal ganglia, and ho ho,
Ding dong, Little Debbie seduced me, I confessed,
Conjuring a sincerity emboldened by surging sugar.

*

Motel: Spearfish, South Dakota

Early riser that I am
I have risen quietly
Sneaking out of our room
So as not to wake her
To nest in the lounge
Vending machine hum
And paper-cup drip
Of too-hot too-weak coffee
To play my word games
And write about the fat cat
Who has climbed over the front
Desk and up onto my couch
To closely check me out
With a mew of approval.

*

Bruce Morton divides his time between Montana and Arizona. His poems have recently appeared in Ibbetson Street, Grey Sparrow Journal, London Grip, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Sheila-Na-Gig. He was formerly dean at the Montana State University library.

Things we Remove by Hannah Schoettmer

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Things we Remove

This hell must have a name or a place to come
from. Maybe that’s why they take out
the appendix–create a space for the hot coal
we make of our lives and lay to rest in our
bellies. There could be gain–the resin
of burnt body parts could thatch the roof
in a pinch. Or maybe this is the reason,
the reason I’m kneeling before you
god of memory. Maybe I drive the hot poker
into my own belly, and nothing’s there but a hole.

*

Hannah Schoettmer’s writing has appeared in The Louisville Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.

Periwinkle blue, a spring night’s by M.J. Iuppa

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Periwinkle blue, a spring night’s

slow awakening— a steady drag &
           lift through depths of iciness

hearing the shrill whine of a lone
           tractor spraying the orchard’s

shadows before daylight & bees’ due
           diligence, only the cab’s lantern

casting a line of sight for the lonesome
           farmer who steadies the wheel

of this hour, moving forward, willing
           to carry his father’s obsessiveness

as if it were his own.

*

M.J. Iuppa’s forthcoming fifth full length poetry collection The Weight of Air from Kelsay Books and a chapbook of 24 100-word stories, Rock. Paper. Scissors. from Foothills Publishing, in 2022. For the past 33 years, she has lived on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. Check out her blog: mjiuppa.blogspot.com for her musings on writing, sustainability & life’s stew.

Two Poems by William Palmer

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

A Green Veil

In college I bought a Casio
watch for a few bucks,
cut off its rubber straps,
and put it in my pocket,
pulling it out when needed.
It felt good in my hand like a stone.

When I taught, before
cell phones, I imagined
a green veil
over the clock
that lowered when class began
and rose when class ended.

I wanted time to disappear
for students
the way page numbers do
with a book
they discover
they love.

*

Cleaning the Picture Window

The disease, I say,
is shutting down parts of me
like bedrooms no one uses
in an old farmhouse.

I’m less a man
now, lacking the stamina
to mow the damn lawn
or clean the picture window.

Sometimes I want to go
into East Bay past the shelf
where the water turns dark
and sink.

Kevin, my therapist, asks,
“When your fatigue hits,
can you accept it and not judge
your life as worthless?”

Later,
sitting in my car,
I feel as if an abandoned garden
has been plowed—

something is being tilled.

*

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared recently in Cold Mountain Review, J Journal, One Art, On the Seawall, and Poetry East. He has published two chapbooks: A String of Blue Lights, and Humble. A retired professor of English at Alma College, he lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

Three Poems by Michael Simms

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Sidewalk Drain with Moss and String

If it’s human
to put things in categories
like putting them in a bag
a few pebbles collected in the alley
for their odd striations of color
you imagine forged in a volcano
when volcanos were a thing around here
a tattered notebook with a few scribbles
you wrote after your mother died
a hatband, a rubber band, a hairclip
dropped by a girl you were afraid to speak to
and out of the whole deck you saved only
this Jack of Spades winking at you knowing
something about you that keeps changing
if this hoarding of memories
is what makes you human then
are crows our cousins
carrying bits of yarn and bottle caps
to their nests weaving shiny things
into their homes the way
you brought home a photo
of a sidewalk drain full of green moss
and two pink roots curving onto the aggregate
and on one of the roots a piece of string
with three pieces of red brick beside the moss
because happiness clings to small things?

***

America

Beside the highway outside McKeesport PA
a state trooper has pulled over a black man
who leans against his rusty Ford
palms flat, feet apart
assuming the position
as we say in America.

The smokey in his broad brimmed hat
and menacing chin strap
which is leather, like the leather of his boots
and belt and holster, wears his hat
low, his face in shadow.

Beside us, the Monongahela River
quickens, making its way
through abandoned pastures
and ruined river towns
on its way to the Ohio.

As the smokey rummages through
the car, the man shrinks in his clothes,
catches my eye, then looks down
ashamed. What’s he done? I wonder
What’s the trooper done?

What have I done,
what have I ever done
but look away / up the road
toward the beautiful Laurel Highlands
hidden in the white mist of America?

***

A Cowboy in the Chapel of Bones

Baby Head Cemetery, Llano Texas

Where I come from
it’s bad manners to speak of death
except in dead metaphors. Kick the bucket. Bite the Dust.
Give up the ghost. Swan song – a pretty phrase, but bad ornithology.
I once heard a lady from London call dying Popping your clogs
as if we throw off a pair of muddy shoes after a long walk in the rain,
appropriate no doubt in London but not in the dusty streets of Llano Texas
where tooled boots Death might wear are the rage.

Cowboys are Calvinists.
We like the dead to stay dead,
ashes to ashes with no dust left over, no grave to visit.
Ancient cemeteries are just grazing land, undeveloped real-estate
waiting its turn to be turned over to developers
of green and gold towers rising above the dry plains.
Capitalism meets fantasy, and death plays no part in the story.

But our dead metaphors are a dead giveaway
that once we had more respect for the dead.
After all, a cliché is simply a beautiful phrase
we ride hot and put away wet until it weakens and dies.

*

On Día de los Muertos
my ex-in-laws visit the cemetery to pray and party
with the dead, a celebration of mortality.
They laugh, eat, drink, wear tall masks of demons,
make gifts to the dead and the living alike,
skulls made of sugar and pan de muerto with frosting shaped like bones.

I love the calaveras literarias, irreverent epitaphs dedicated to the living.
Mourning his mother who stands alive in front of him, Rudolfo recites
Como extraño sus tamales, empanadas y atolito;
voy a tener que aprender a cocinar yo solito.
(He misses his mother because he hates his own cooking.)

Joking with death reminds us
it’s the only imperative, the one necessity
giving urgency to our lives.
When we remember what we’d rather forget
we see and speak more clearly,
every day becomes an emergency, an emergence, an aparición
forcing us to become fierce about our faith,
to taste the chocolate before it’s gone,
to love the lover before the body fades
and to honor the body with marigold before it rots.

*

I remember years ago in Portugal
walking into the Chapel of Bones as if in a dream,
skulls, femurs, vertebrae cemented into walls,
three high windows casting a skeleton of light on the floor.
Our guide Virgilio told us the Capela dos Ossos
reminds us of the swift passage of life on earth.

No shit, I thought. 5,000 corpses, he said,
peasants exhumed from Évora’s medieval cemeteries,
bones arranged by the Franciscans in squares, spirals, pyramids,
a ceiling of white brick painted with black motifs.
Skulls scribbled with graffiti. Skeletons hanging from ropes.
Two desiccated corpses, one a child, in glass cases.
Aonde vais, caminhante, acelerado?
Where are you going in such a hurry, traveler?

***

Michael Simms has worked as a squire to a Hungarian fencing master, a stable hand, a gardener, a forager, an estate agent, a college teacher, an editor, a publisher, a technical writer, and a literary impresario. He identifies as being on the spectrum and a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who didn’t speak until he was five years old. He is the founding editor of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi. A resident of Pittsburgh, in 2011 he was recognized by the Pennsylvania Senate for his contribution to the arts. His most recent books include two poetry collections — American Ash and Nightjar – published by Ragged Sky; and two novels — Bicycles of the Gods: A Divine Comedy and The Green Mage, both published by Madville.

Three Poems by Kelly Grace Thomas

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Sharks have Survived 4 out of 5 Mass Extinctions

As the world kills
and remakes

who it can. The riptide
of revision. They fin through

our mistakes, tsunamis
of trash, plagues

of plastic. Witness the reef
once busy with rainbow.

Now bleached. Barren.
The ocean, a eulogy. Sharks don’t die

like the rest of us. Can’t cancer
or catch a cold. Heal faster

than any manmade hurt.
All cartilage, they fail to fossil.

Humans don’t own history. Sharks do.
Began their rule 100 million years

before the first tree. Dear Shark,
I know everything ends

but you.
You are still here.

So let the willows
weep. The oak question

its roots. Let time rest
inside these jaws.

*

Ants Don’t Sleep but Take 8-minute naps Twice a Day

Because there is always a queen // somewhere a clock // to punch
Capital // to chase // The workers // mostly female // tunnel to prove
their worth // Place // They labor // lugging 20 times //their weight // Wait
for exhaustion // to break // The midnight of work // never done // Minutes
soldiered // for an empire they will build // but never own // The colony
never complete // The slow business // of putting yourself last

*

A Cockroach Can Live for a Week Without its Head

Infamous for their ugly,
can spend a month without

sustenance. (No food.
No water.) Midnight body.

Blood built without
vessels, they bunker. Camp

in each crevice, forage
at night. Survive off scraps

of darkness. In Hiroshima,
cockroaches were found

feasting, 1000 feet from
where man was remade

to dust. A taunting continuation.
A rash you can’t out-scratch. Even when

severed, the cockroach head lingers,
waves its antennae. As if to say, go ahead,

call me a stain. A creature
dancing in your ruins. But look

at how long we’ve lasted
eating at the edges

of everything
you earned.

*

Kelly Grace Thomas is an ocean-obsessed Aries from Jersey. She is a self-taught poet, editor, educator and author. Kelly is the winner of the 2020 Jane Underwood Poetry Prize and 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award and a multiple pushcart prize nominee. Her first full-length collection, Boat Burned, was released with YesYes Books in January 2020. Kelly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Best New Poets 2019, Los Angeles Review, Redivider, Muzzle, Sixth Finch and more. Kelly is the Director of Education for Get Lit and the co-author of Words Ignite. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband Omid. www.kellygracethomas.com

Waiting for foxes by Rachel R. Baum

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Waiting for foxes

You tried not to kill any fish today.

       Then the vortex blasted the waves grey blue
       Layered with fault, their edges sharp and white foamed

The pebbled shore is respite from the wild water

       You wait there, though foxes hide in the brush.
       Once, one crossed the road, a sleek orange blur.

Not the sweet eared, red gold creature,

       Plush toyed into pretty rhyming books,
       Sharing tea with soft lipped llamas.

Consider the safety of your fragile boat on the ragged lake,

       Or perching warily on this narrow beach,
       Watched by foxes not seen in a child’s story or shelf

Though there is danger in the light,

       Fear hides in the crevices of the dark,
       Because the animal is everywhere and nowhere.

Defy nature to slip ungracefully through the maelstrom,

       Find a tenuous landing among the slippery boulders,
       And the bumpy hides of next year’s frogs.

Extract the hooks with care, feed the fish back to their source.

       Then plunge the paddle into the surface.
       There is no forgiveness for the murderer of fish.

*

Rachel R. Baum writes poetry and fishes for bass. She is the editor of Funeral and Memorial Service Readings Poems and Tributes (McFarland, 1999) which is not as morose as it sounds. She lives in upstate New York with her dog Tennyson.

One Poem by Tresha Faye Haefner

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What I Loved About Finding the Man Trying to Steal My Purse Out of the Closet When I Came Home Early in the Middle of the Day

                  After Ellen Bass… Sort of.

The suddenness of his surprised face, as I entered the bedroom.
The way a movie starts half-way through the action,
The hero already bleeding.
The smell of his body so close to mine as he tried
To get past the door. His jaw hard as the FBI building
shoulders square as the edges of Table Mountain in Colorado.
He held my bag, close as I wanted to be held.
The room smelled like lemon bleach.
The tile green as a field of serpents.
My arms felt like two feathers, plastered with rain.
Something he could wipe away with his thumb.
I loved the feel of my purse as I tried to take it back.
The tug, as we struggled, like a roller coaster when it stalls and jerks forward.
How he could have killed me.
How he pulled the pink strap from my fingers
and ran from my terrible mouth instead.

*

Tresha Faye Haefner’s poetry appears, or is forthcoming in several journals and magazines, most notably Blood Lotus, Blue Mesa Review, The Cincinnati Review, Five South, Hunger Mountain, Mid-America Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Radar, Rattle, TinderBox and Up the Staircase Quarterly. Her work has garnered several accolades, including the 2011 Robert and Adele Schiff Poetry Prize, and a 2012, 2020, and 2021 nomination for a Pushcart. Her first manuscript, “Pleasures of the Bear” was a finalist for prizes from both Moon City Press and Glass Lyre Press. It is still looking for a publisher. Find her at http://www.thepoetrysalon.com/.

Levitating Mothers by Lindsay Clark

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Levitating Mothers

More and more I’m a spider
dropping from the ceiling, silent,
battered
in a draft
the dragline I milk
from my liquid core
becoming microscopic in the
melting rays of early afternoon.
To my eyes the kaleidoscoped
child inscrutable: many-faced
elf crawled from burnt leaves
driven indoors by the heat
wondering perhaps do
spiders fly an instant
before the fickle
fist crunches.
When I had a body fit for
empire—before I cast
organics from my
abdomen—I spilled with other
jumping spiders from the belly
of military planes. In a crowded
column of air, the lower chute
has right of way; now,
swaying in a thermal, I
see my own spider-mother
revolving below and I
will her to climb.
But her legs are weary. She is
still pulling
still hurling
up
up
a silken lifeline—to my eyes no longer
invisible, but a thick vessel pulsing
with light, umbilical cord drinking
the womb of the sun.

*

Lindsay Clark is a medical student in NYC, where she lives with her partner and daughter. She previously served as an army paratrooper and studied biology at the University of Maryland.

Mourning Doves by Audrey Hackett

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Mourning Doves

Morning and evening
they coo for each other and us
from the white pine.

Their speech is kind
as a cool day
when the wind quietly touches.

The young, nearly adult, still drink
from each parent’s open throat.

Is it the milk that gives
them their mild lives and cries?

They do not fear the owl
or hawk. They do not
hear our sadness in their talk.

*

Audrey Hackett lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Winner of a 2022 Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, she holds an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Recent poems have appeared in Twelve Mile Review, Green Ink and ONE ART.

While Teaching Line Dancing at a Senior Center… by Pauli Dutton

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

While Teaching Line Dancing at a Senior Center,
Someone Accuses Me of Always Being Happy

But who isn’t happy dancing?
When I read a book where the hero gives his life away
out of love, I cry for three days.
At the movies when the girl is attacked then tossed
from the high window, I run to the restroom.
I’ve been unhappy and terrified.
I’ve tried to escape the mind— scenes of mother’s
schizophrenia and its ricocheting effects
through a kaleidoscope of bustle.
Now, I teach myself to dance like a flower
to savor the fragrance of rosemary in the stew,
the chords of my husband’s proof-of-life snore,
and the satisfaction of each communal
kick and clap to an electric slide.
This keeps me bursting like a sky of fireworks,
which you mistake for joy.

*

Pauli Dutton has been published in Writing In A Woman’s Voice, Verse Virtual, The Pangolin Review, Better Than Starbucks, Altadena Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She was a librarian for 40 years, where she founded, coordinated, and led a public reading series from 2003 – 2014. She has served on the Selection Committees for The Altadena Literary Review in 2020 and The Altadena Poetry Review from 2015 – 2019. She also co-edited the 2017 and 2018 editions. Pauli holds an MLIS from the University of Southern California.

His Shoes by Garrett Phelan

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His Shoes

After his death from traumatic brain injury
I took some of his clothes, particularly his blue jeans,
that I was surprised fit me. I hadn’t realized
how small my brother had become being a giant to me.
I guess that’s what alcohol and loneliness can do,
shrink you, slowly eat away at you. But the shoes,
I remember the cordovan shoes I took, almost new,
and wore them as if I were a living cliché walking
in his shoes. But the left shoe never felt his real left foot
like it felt my left foot. Years before, that foot
with most of his left leg was torn off on a hillside
when a motorcycle crash threw him through the woods.
But he didn’t die, he limped through the rest of his short time
and I tried to keep him walking by walking in those shoes.
I walked and walked and walked so far that the shoes wore out.

*

Garrett Phelan is the author of two micro-chapbooks Unfixed Marks and Standing where I am (Origami Poem Project). His poems have appeared in numerous publications including Harpy Hybrid, Slipstream, Potomac Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Connecticut River Review, Third Wednesday, and Off the Coast. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

Yahrzeit by Anne Whitehouse

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Yahrzeit

My parents were rarely on the same wavelength.
Most of the time they talked at each other,
not to each other. But here they are,
by a quirk of the Hebrew calendar,
yoked forever and forever,
until the end of time,
sharing the same Yahrzeit,
although one died in February
and the other in March,
two years apart.

Every year I pray for them together
and speak their names together,
before my congregation.

*

Anne Whitehouse’s most recent poetry collection is Outside from the Inside (Dos Madres Press, 2020), and her most recent chapbook is Escaping Lee Miller (Ethel Zine and Micro Press, 2021). She is also the author of a novel, Fall Love, and has recently published several essays about Edgar Allan Poe. www.annewhitehouse.com

A Body That Is Shared by Jen Gayda Gupta

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A Body That Is Shared

It is not my body, ketamine and acid infused,
mushroom bathed, dopamine depleted. I am on
the other side of the country, laying in bed while
my sister sobs into the light, watches the cacti bleed
by her car window as a man who refuses to love her
all the way drives them to a home I have never seen.

The phone chimes black and white shapes that mean
I’m okay but I am already there, each bump under
their tire vibrates through my skull. She is crying
one thousand seven hundred miles away and her tears
sweat out of my palms. After she brushes her teeth,
she blows her nose and a sneeze wakes me.

In the morning we are drained, our chests house
depleted balloons. She puts on a pair of scrubs, packs
her things and lifts a mask to her face while I raise
my computer screen. Our hands reach our coffee mugs
and her cuticles bleed, my finger wrapped
for a moment in her silver ivy ring.

Yesterday, I had a good day until she didn’t,
migraine blooming long before she called.
This never being alone is nice until it’s sad and then
it’s just sad for two. We feel like breaking a table,
like opening the earth, like chewing our own skin.

I tell her she should lay off the drugs,
that they don’t help, but I leave out the way they depress
me. It’s annoying to tell someone what to do
with their body even if it’s a body that is shared.

The moment my sister was born, my throat opened
like I finally figured out how to breathe. Today we wait
for the stomachs to settle, the invincible hum to pass.
I lay my head on a pillow and feel the curves of her lap.

*

Jen Gayda Gupta is currently on the run from responsibility, living nowhere at all with her husband and their dog. She enjoys big mountains and tiny spoons. Her work has been published in Dodging the Rain, Jellyfish Review, Sky Island Journal, The Shore, Wrongdoing and others. You can find her @jengaydagupta and jengaydagupta.com.

post abortion interview by Carla Sarett

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

post abortion interview

no there wasn’t
love
or it got lost

no I wasn’t
drunk
but I forgot

what happens to women’s
bodies
on unimportant nights

no there wasn’t much
pain
or it didn’t last

no there wasn’t
shame
except I had

to ask a man for
money
& I counted it

*

Carla Sarett is a poet and fiction writer based in San Francisco. She Has Visions, her debut poetry collection, will be published in Fall 2022 (Main Street Rag), and her novel, A Closet Feminist (Unsolicited) appeared earlier this year.

James Webb Takes Flight by Weslea Sidon

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James Webb Takes Flight

Our local universe grows:
the unknown becomes a destination
the destination becomes an event
with consequence unknown.
We seek the proof that what we want
to know is worthy.

Our local universe
has peopled our imaginings
with beings unlike us,
and now we need know
the what, if not the who.

We hope we are not alone.
We hope we are.

*

Weslea Sidon is a poet and musician living in West Tremont, Maine. Her poems have appeared in several literary publications and anthologies, most recently Paumanok Transition. She is the author of The Fool Sings, published by Rain Chain Press.

Drawer by Tamara Madison

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Drawer
                              UCSB, 1973

A few days after the seduction
he decides to talk to me,
asks me to go to the clinic.
Make sure there is no growth,
he says.

Now I am looking up at the light.
My knees are spread and two women
sit at the foot of my table.
They carry on a lively conversation
as they work. I’m not listening.
I feel the warm light
on my newly-wakened
nether world,
and the women begin
to search inside me
as in a drawer.

I imagine them pulling things out –
bottle caps, old tires, tampons of course,
lipstick tubes, wrappers, leaves,
a shred from Seventeen magazine…
But I’m not so old, I want to protest,
I’ve barely begun my collection!

You’re fine, they tell me
and hand me a prescription
to make me bleed. Outside
it’s raining. I sit in French class
staring out at the rows
of eucalyptus dripping
in their ragged bark,
at the stream of bicycles
hissing on the wet path.
I watch him round the corner
as always at this time:
brown bike
violin tucked under one arm
beard trimmed
too old to be a student.

*

Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbook “The Belly Remembers”, and two full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic” and “Moraine”, all published by Pearl Editions. Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, the Worcester Review, A Year of Being Here, Nerve Cowboy, the Writer’s Almanac and many other publications. A swimmer, dog lover and native of the southern California desert, she has recently retired from teaching English and French in a Los Angeles high school. Read more about her at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Crow on Lincoln Street by Marianne Szlyk

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Crow on Lincoln Street

Here no one watches the short, stout crow swagger
past pickups, past brittle trees, past brick houses

where crow-like men work on their yards. Not even
dogs bark from behind screen doors as he passes.

He keeps to the street, does not break into flight.
No cars brave speed bumps, slide past walls of work trucks,

scare or dare the crow who would sense them anyway.
But he avoids the park where box turtles bask,

pitbulls parade on leashes, boys play soccer,
red-winged blackbirds perch one moment on ghost-reeds

before breaking into song, then into flight.

*

Marianne Szlyk is a professor at Montgomery College. Her poems have appeared in of/with, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Setu, Verse-Virtual, Sequoyah Cherokee River Journal, Bourgeon, Muddy River Poetry Review, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, the Sligo Review, and Spectrum as well as the anthologies The Forgotten River and Resurrection of a Sunflower. Her books On the Other Side of the Window and Poetry en Plein Air are available from Amazon and Bookshop. She has also led workshops where poets write tributes to both survivors of COVID-19 and those whom we have lost.

Two Poems by Rose Schachner

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

When I Am Dead, My Dearest
(after Christina Rosetti’s “Song”)

When I am dead, my dearest,
don’t marry one who loves
to camp, canoe, and hike
in dark forests in August
when everywhere else is bright.

And if you will, forget
the concerts through which
I dozed, the fuss I made
the times you left the knife
on the counter in summer,
sticky with jam and ants galore.

Or else you may remember
how much you do not miss me.
And I want you to miss me
loudly and largely —

a staggering amount,
the number of atoms in a mole.
All those moles I had
that you likened to stars.

And if you will, remember,
it will be only half as much
as I will miss you.

*

Wet Cement

We had it in Brooklyn,
down the block from our house.
The boys wrote: Pete the Cheat;
Chuck the F—-. We were children.
No one spelled out the F word.
Down the opposite way, a new sidewalk
was laid in front of the house
where the twins lived
with their older sister
who wasn’t quite right.
One day, my brother called me
excitedly — come see this extraordinary sight.
I took his hand, and we flew down the street.
I would fly anywhere with him.
His world was always so much more
exciting than mine. When we arrived,
he pointed to small bits of quartz
glistening on the newly paved slabs.
Look, diamonds, he said. I grinned.
I didn’t want to seem unimpressed,
and I wasn’t. It was just that then
I knew we would always see the world differently,
and care about different things.
And worse, that I might even see the world
more accurately than he would.
And he would be happy, and I would not.
And to this day I wonder:
What happened to that girl?

*

Rose Schachner’s poetry, fiction and reviews have been published in The Nation, The New York Times, the North American Review and other publications. John Keats and Elizabeth Bishop first inspired her love of poetry. Now she is inspired by too many others to name.

Shade by Ted Kooser

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

SHADE

When the weather was pleasant I’d see him
parked on a straight chair in the shade
of their open porch, just the shape of a man
in the shadows, the chair pushed back against
the siding, his face indistinguishable,
seated not with his legs casually crossed,
one foot free in the air, but with both shoes
flat on the slab, his hands cupping his knees,
like someone who’d waited a long time
to be called to another room. Each morning
his wife would help him down onto the chair,
his hands in her hands, easing him back,
and he’d stay there all day. There were birds
at the feeder to watch, a few nuthatches
coming and going—juncos and goldfinches,
bluejays, cardinals, sparrows—and trucks
rolling past on their way to the co-op,
their muscly young drivers in sunglasses,
just the one hand on the wheel, not one
glancing over to see him there under his roof,
just a shape among shapes among shadows,
a few feet back from the light at the edge.

*

Ted Kooser is, at 83, fully retired from teaching and public appearances but writing every day at his home in rural Nebraska. His most recent collection of poems is a fine letterpress limited printing of A SUITE OF MOONS, from Gibraltar Editions in Omaha. He is a former U. S. Poet Laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize.