Tag: aging

Five Poems by Faith Shearin

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Poem for the Recluses

In this poem Charles Darwin installs a mirror
outside his study window, so he can glimpse
visitors making their way up his driveway.

And Shirley Jackson, ostracized
by the citizens of Bennington,
stays inside with her typewriter

and tranquilizers. Let us leave
Emily Dickinson in the company
of her hills, and her big dog, Carlo, pressing

ghost pipe into a thick herbarium.
Edward Gorey wears a long fur coat
and disappears into a Cape Cod cottage

where he collects doorknobs, and photographs
of dead Victorian babies, and daydreams
amid the raccoons who drift down from his attic.

JD Salinger publishes The Catcher in the Rye,
then slips into the woods
of New Hampshire and refuses

to give interviews, while Harper Lee explains
that it’s better to be silent than to be a fool.
Emily Brontë, thin and fevered,

avoids the poisoning doctors
and wanders alone through the marshes
that follow the bend of a glen

through the misty darkness
past chapel bells ringing
and a murmur of trees.

*

At Ninety-Nine My Grandmother Refuses to Put Away her Winter Clothes

When my aunt came to haul the winter clothes
up to the attic my grandmother folded her hands
in her lap and shook her head
for she did not want to pack away

all the winters of her life: her childhood in the Victorian
on Queen Street where the water froze in the basin
and a pot of oatmeal bubbled on a wood stove,
the night when my grandfather drove her home

from a New Year’s Eve party, his hand
in hers, the stars cold. She didn’t want to fold up
that first Christmas after the war when the pond
filled with ice skaters and a distant cousin played

Silent Night on an upright piano in the parlor,
or the one afterward, when she felt my mother
quickening beneath her ribs. She did not
want the season to change, did not admire

the whitening dogwoods or the papery petals
of the crape myrtles. The longer light,
she knew, was not for her.

*

The Realtor

His last name was Loveless and he had been married three times,
each of his wives dying young, leaving him

perpetually widowed. He was a patient, handsome man
who did not mind driving all day to see houses

we were unlikely to buy. He took us to see remote homesteads
and farmhouses with barns and cellars, ushered

us down shadowy, abandoned dirt roads.
When I tried to send him a Christmas card

the year after we signed our closing papers
I called his office and discovered

he had died. But that dappled afternoon
when he first showed us the cabin — the last

earthly realm where we would dwell together — we stood
in a living room with floor to ceiling windows

and looked out at the glittering valley and the outline
of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which were lush and green

by day but, at night, turned cold and bony
and floated in a lake of stars.

*

Across a Bridge

One night, when I was nineteen, I drove across a bridge
with both the men I would love

in my back seat, the Connecticut River slithering
beneath us. This was early winter — first snow

of the season blown over the road — and we were
on our way to eat pizza in a dark booth with a Wurlitzer.

These were the same streets I’d walk again as a widow
thirty years later — still winter —

as if there had never been any other season.

*

We Were a Bachelor and a Widow

We were a bachelor and a widow renting a studio
across from an inn that hosted weddings.
For two mild years, while we read Sebastian Barry

by lantern light and cooked fried fish with potatoes,
we watched brides and grooms come and go
until they became interchangeable — hydrangeas,

veils, towering ivory cakes, bridesmaids.
He never wanted marriage — that mingling
of money and love — and my own union had ended

sadly, in a windowless hospital room —
my husband’s wedding ring removed
by surgeons — and, still, men with champagne flutes

relieved themselves in our forest, and the big band music
went on, wafting out of the tent, in summer
and early fall, before the long darkness.

*

Faith Shearin’s seven books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). Her poems have been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her essays and short stories have appeared in: The Sun, New Ohio Review, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review, and Literal Latte, among others. Her novel, Lost River, 1918 won the YA Global Fiction Prize and has been published in the US and UK by Leapfrog Press. A new novel, One Life on Land, won the Uplift Voices Award and is forthcoming in October 2026 from Jaded Ibis Press.

Three Poems by Louisa Muniz

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About-Face on Smith Street

In the window at Hamilton’s Shop,
the mannequin wore

bell bottoms,
a suede fringe belt,
a multicolored vest.

Her body posed,
mine falling as I ran
to catch up to him.

It had been months.

I tripped on the uneven sidewalk.

I feigned calm
as the woman hurrying past
asked if I was hurt.

Hurt? Let me stitch the frayed hem
of a daughter’s heart.

The only time I remember
my father laughing

was watching The Honeymooners…
to the moon, Alice, to the moon.

Laughter ashed in his throat,
moved jagged through me.

I picked myself up before he turned.
His shadow oblivious to mine.

Unscathed, the mannequin stared
straight ahead.

I turned and walked the opposite way.

*

I Ask God to Lend a Hand

The morning stirs its cup
into the bowl of day.
I wake to hay in my head.

In the kitchen I gently rub
the money tree’s leaves
between my palms.

Through the window,
the rabbit’s stillness
mesmerizes.

Outside, I draw the dogwood’s
white blossoms to my face.

Its branches bob back & forth.
I give her the attention I need.

There were times I gave away everything:
my secrets, my clothes, even my time.

Now I give in to silence.
Listen for God’s guidance.

God trills like a blackbird,
chirps like a sparrow.

During the hour of tenderness
the sun gathers on my shoulders.

Purple self-seeding flowers
sprout between stones.

I open my hands.
Put down the sword.

Let what’s good in.

*

Keeping the Faith

My husband’s car sits unused for weeks.
He asks me to start it.

To his surprise, it starts immediately.

See… you have to have faith, I say.
Faith is a key and a good battery, he replies.

I smile & wonder after all this time
how we see things so differently.

It’s June. Jasmine pinwheels perfume the air.

The dogwood tree outside our window
strews blossoms across the pavement.

I point out how beautiful the tree looks.
He glances, grunts. Uh-huh.

At the supermarket I meet an old colleague.
She tells me her husband died four years ago.
Being alone is really, really terrible.

After weeks of caring for an ill husband,
I’m filled with gratitude.

At home, I lean into his moss-sweet heart.

Come sit with me, tough guy.
I’ll keep the faith.
You keep it running.

The wild horse in him breaks through.

*

Louisa Muniz lives in Sayreville, N.J. She holds a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction from Kean University. Her work has appeared in ONE ART, Tinderbox Journal, Palette Poetry, SWWIM, Jelly Bucket, PANK Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Her debut chapbook, After Heavy Rains was released in December, 2020. Her chapbook, The Body is More Than a Greening Thing was published in June of 2025 by Finishing Line Press.

Two Poems by Tony Magistrale

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Aging

After I gave the old woman an overdue shower—
forced her under water might be the truer fact
as she had not wished to be bathed,
her hair matted, sour bits of dead skin flaking off
legs and arms, she emerged not with gratitude
but meanness: why did you do this to me?

After I dressed her in fresh linens
and fluffed her white hair with warm currents of air,
it occurred to me I had performed this task
forty years ago, helping to arrange a pregnant
version of her for our date night together,
finishing the evening’s preparation
with a wisp of perfume.

*

View from My Train

In open fields west of Venice,
olive-clad hunters wait patiently for game

eyes averted from the ground and its trail
only long enough to acknowledge

the sound of this passing train. Crows
seek their breakfast in the aftermath of human threshing

scouring corn fields, swooping low,
dropping sharply to disappear

among ravaged pale-yellow stalks.
In the cool breath of late autumn,

the sky slate gray horizon to horizon
blackened trees shorn of all color,

I trace again the deathless patterns of repetition
the inexorable journey into winter.

*

Tony Magistrale is professor of English at the University of Vermont. He is the author of three books of poetry, the most recently published is titled More Fun Than Pretty (Moon Pie Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Spillway, Chiron Review, Green Mountains Review, South Florida Poetry Review, The Cape Rock, Slipstream, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among other places.

Three Poems by Clint Margrave

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House Hunters

Always at dinner, we watch
an episode of House Hunters International,
dream about leaving our jobs
and moving abroad:
Prague, Costa Rica, Helsinki,
Australia, Mexico.

We guess which of the three places offered
the featured couple will pick.
Make our own selections.
We always agree
we like the best one
and are often wrong
about the one they choose.

We gasp at the deals you can get
on a spacious apartment
in Spain, Portugal
or just about anywhere
outside of LA.

Last night it was Lyon
and we dreamt of sipping
a bold Bordeaux
on the tiled terrace of a house
the couple considers
then rejects.

Nearly all the couples
are younger than us,
mostly in their late twenties
or early thirties,
some with kids,
some without.

Both of us over fifty,
we wonder if it’s too late
to pack up and leave
for another country.

We know this is the youngest
we’ll ever be again.
We met when we were
no longer kids and too old
to have kids
which sometimes we regret.

And, of course, not once in 150 episodes
has anyone ever said,

“We hate this place,”
“the biggest mistake of our lives,”
“we are getting divorced.”

And I suppose it’s better
that way. We don’t always want
to see too much reality
in a reality show.
I suppose it’s better to just dream
of living a different life,
as we finish our plates.

*

The Timeless Café, Sofia

It can be a bit mysterious to find,
Tom says. The entrance is down a ramp
behind a building, by an empty garden.

At the door, no hours are posted. Inside,
the lights are kept low, candles flicker
on wobbly tables, chairs old and rickety

like the grandmothers with canes
you pass on the streets, backs bent,
carrying bags of vegetables and yogurt.

On the menu, no extra sides of time
or desserts sweetened by the promise
of eternity, just the usual fare.

* 

Night Guard

The dentist suggests I wear
a night guard on my teeth.
She can see little cracks forming.

She pulls up an image
of the inside of my mouth
and projects it on a screen.

I’m here for a routine checkup,
after months of cancelling
and rescheduling appointments.

“It’s important to take care
of your teeth as you age,” she says.

I don’t argue. I know she’s right.
There is a lot to take care of as I age,
a lot of little cracks forming.

Not to mention the need
for something to guard me
against the night.

*

Clint Margrave is the author of three poetry collections: The Early Death of Men, Salute the Wreckage, and Visitor, all from NYQ Books. He is also the author of the novel Lying Bastard (Run Amok Books) and editor of Requiem for the Toad: Selected Poems of Gerald Locklin (NYQ Books). Some of his poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Rattle, B O D Y, and New York Quarterly, with nonfiction in The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review and Los Angeles Review of Books. He recently served as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Bulgaria, living in Sofia, and teaching creative writing at Sofia University.

Evening News by Jeff McRae

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Evening News

Mother spent the last years throwing
out family objects. You’ll have less to
suffer over when the time for suffering
comes, she says like she’s describing
the good sense of cleaning your pots
and pans while cooking. When I visit
we wash and dry the dishes after dinner
then drink tea on the couch, feet sharing
the tiny table her father made she found
when they emptied out her childhood
home in 1977. Her parents were dead
before she turned thirty. You never get
to know them as adults, she says and still
calls them Mumma and Daddy. Now
she says things like, Area rugs are the
bane of the elderly. She says, I love you,
to her old friend when she calls to say
her husband has decided to drink
the juice the doctor gave that will put
him to sleep for good. I am a stranger
to her life of friends falling in the living
room, fracturing femurs; friends who
can’t remember their meds or take a
deep breath; friends calling it quits,
who can’t do it even one more day.

*

Jeff McRae lives in Vermont and is a general news reporter for Vermont News and Media. His collection, The Kingdom Where No One Dies, published by Pulley Press, is a finalist for the Vermont Book Award for poetry.

Two Poems by Judy Kronenfeld

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“Senior Living”

Sometimes it seems like a Dantean limbo
of the walking dead—the bent at 90 degrees,
the shaking whose forks trip on the way
to their lips, the halt who shuffle tortoise-pace,
and those whose maladies escape
naming—the tongue rolled upwards
spasmodically filling a mouth,
like pink porridge in a pot
rising over and over to a boil.

Sometimes it feels like
the theater of redemption.

Here, in the crepuscular hour,
where skin gathers
on the face in crepey folds,
hair withers like leaves
revealing bareness underneath,
I rush to carry a new friend’s
laden plate from the buffet
while she Rollators back to our table;
I offer her my water
when the waiter’s late.
Here HELLO! follows Hi!
Everyone greets unknown others
in the halls—like bonded passengers
in the same relentless boat, traversing
the pitch-dark river.

*

Moment, Registered

On a stark strange-to-us
persistently clouded day
in our new still alien
senior home we don’t yet
call home, my husband,
with his sieve memory, and I—
bundled in the “winter clothes”
once kept at the back of our closets
“back home in California”—
hold gloved hands for a short walk.

Just ahead of us on the path,
a chubby gray squirrel
velvet-white of chest sprints
down a brown grassy hill and leaps
into a bare tree, balancing
on a jiggling twig-thin branch.
We both watch, but only I file.

Then the round bundle bounds up
into the air again, springing
from one bouncing spindly limb
to another, as if for the sheer green
glee of it—like a kid on a trampoline—
and my husband claps his hands.

Joy! For the present-minded,
even among the beasts.
If not in my heart
just yet.

*

Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Judy’s poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, One (Jacar Press), ONE ART, Rattle, Sheila-Na-Gig, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad. Her newest book is Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems (Inlandia Institute, 2025). Judy is Lecturer Emerita, Department of Creative Writing, UC Riverside. In another life, she produced scholarship on her English Renaissance loves, George Herbert, John Donne, and Shakespeare, including King Lear and the Naked Truth: Rethinking the Language of Religion and Resistance (Duke UP, 1998).

At Home in the Body by Robbi Nester

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At Home in the Body

My cousin is a dancer, while I have always
lived too much in my mind. When I visited,
she dragged me to a belly-dancing lesson.
In the dim light, women in clouds of scented oil
swayed like palm trees, cymbals crashing
on each finger, arms coiling overhead.
They could say so much with just the slightest
bird-tilt of the head, move as though each muscle
had a mind—rictus abdominus, obliques, erector
spinae, pelvic floor, and more. At the sight, my body
stalled, so my cousin tied a folded scarf over my eyes,
blinding me to faltering. I became a leopard, muscles
a rippling stream beneath the skin.

*

Robbi Nester is the author of 5 books of poetry and editor of 3 anthologies. She currently curates and hosts two monthly poetry reading series on Zoom and acts as contributing editor on a new journal, The Odd Pocket Review. Learn more about her work at robbinester.net

Idioms by John Amen

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Idioms

My mother loved that saying, the devil’s in the details.
As a kid, I somehow figured that if the devil’s there,
god must be there, too. That would mean, as I saw it,
that the holy & unholy are tucked into the invisible,
playing tug of war or wrestling or high-fiving in the atoms,
in the sprawling fog you find when you
twist & twist that knob on a microscope,
infinite white sea emerging.
I asked my father about it once.
I’m not sure about devils & gods, he said,
that’s more your mother’s department.
Which didn’t tell me much, other than
highlighting the difference between my parents:
my mother who read a poem each morning,
my father who once told me that mythology annoyed him.
What peninsula did they meet on,
waltzing a thin line before veering
to opposite sides of the world,
stamping in their own private tides?
I pray, but I don’t know to whom,
perhaps some cauterized sense of self, a mind removed
from memory & habit. I still dream a small room
where my parents share a kiss & drop their weapons,
my father tossing his boxcutter, my mother her paring knife.
They could both land a cut that didn’t heal easily.
I have the scars from their respective
swipes, & I’m sure my own blade is a cross
between the two: a prop you can dice
logic with, retractable steel you can deny
having used when your lover is bleeding in the sheets.
& speaking of logic, a throatful of proofs
is gathering dust in a bathtub. On the other
side of the house, tomes, magazines never read,
tapped for the yard sale. I’m culling, clearing,
fattening a dumpster that stretches in the backyard,
a black hole oozing its own sensible music.
My parents would be dismayed & proud, they’d
hover over my shoulder, each telling me what I
should keep & discard. These decades later,
I still pace a line between my mother
lost in her galloping verse & my father
muttering over a blueprint. But something,
yes, something writhes in that white streak,
that mist I dive & dive into, groping to find
the silver dollar, the hidden gem. If a god’s there,
so is a devil, & now look, the three of us
splashing like tourists in an empty pool.
Or maybe it’s just me, in the depths, the heights,
alone, thinking the universe is mine.

*

John Amen was a finalist for the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Award and the 2018 Dana Award. He was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems and prose have appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by New York Quarterly Books in May 2024.

Speaking To & Listening To Our Aging Bodies: A Workshop with Amy Small-McKinney

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Speaking To & Listening To Our Aging Bodies: A Workshop with Amy Small-McKinney

Workshop Leader: Amy Small-McKinney
Date: Tuesday, January 13
Time: 6:00-8:00pm Eastern – Please check your local times.
Duration: 2-hours
Cost: $25 (sliding scale)

>>> Register Here <<<

About The Workshop:

Aging does not mean becoming invisible. It is a transition with its own pain and gorgeousness. By letting poems surprise us, without censoring, we will listen to our aging bodies and speak to them.

About The Workshop Leader:

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus. She is the author of six poetry books, including three full-length books and three chapbooks. & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre Press), her newest full-length book, was released in March 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tahoma Review and Verse Daily, among others.  She has contributed to many anthologies, for example, Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press). Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian.

Three Poems by Amy Small-McKinney

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We Are / I Am

How often did I sit beside
an older woman and ignore her?
What kind of tree

produces seeds encased in pealike
pods? I am searching
for its name. Call me if you know.

Call me if you are learning to love yourself,
your body that has lived through
seventy turns, at least.

At the park, the pond’s water appears textured
because of how the wind moves.
Wind, that body we don’t see,

except when it forces us to lose
what we love, a hat or—
We begin and we end.

Somewhere in between—
today—a young woman turned away.
I am her old woman.

Call me if you know
how to trace the blossoms’ origins.
How to look closely

to find the solid seedcoat
that must be broken
before another Redbud tree is born.

*

Paper, Tree, Ascension

On the mountain edge my daughter
talked me down.
My body, a slip of paper.
Why would I want to rise?
I’m afraid of heights.
Nothing but clouds and the sun
coming and going.

Romantics adore sunset.
I don’t like it.
It means opening to the arrogance
of the dark forcing its way through light.
It means remembering my husband
does not remember,
confuses day and night.

I love those mornings
when I am the only one awake,
when silence is my audience,
my consolation. This is my heaven.

If I had to ascend, I would become a tree.
Solid, I would not drift away.
Only my topmost limbs rising.
The slim document of my life would remain.
Beneath me, a woman would rest.

*

Missing Sock

uncovered from inside
my aging body

beneath mounds of carping voices
and a lifetime of a killdeer’s

displays of distraction
intent on staying safe.

I am grateful to have found it—
this softer self—as though another

heart unlocked.
How long have we been lost?

Very nearly forever.

*

Amy Small-McKinney is a Montgomery County PA Poet Laureate Emeritus. She is the author of six poetry books, including three full-length books and three chapbooks. & You Think It Ends (Glass Lyre Press), her newest full-length book, was released in March 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tahoma Review and Verse Daily, among others. She has contributed to many anthologies, for example, Rumors, Secrets, & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion, & Choice (Anhinga Press, 2022) and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press). Her poems have also been translated into Korean and Romanian.

Two Poems by Jacqueline Jules

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Water Lilies

Large pancake-shaped leaves
hover in clusters on water
as still as an oil painting.

Monet spent years in a garden
like this, capturing the light
and the color on canvas.

I stand on a stone bridge,
remembering Monet,
and wishing I could paint myself
as a floating flower, anchored
by a long stem firmly rooted
beneath a surface
that never ripples.

*

I’ve Never Liked Roller Coasters

So I shouldn’t be surprised
by how miserable I am
riding with him now
in a rickety car destined
to plunge at high speed.

His cancer twists and turns
at 300 feet above the ground.
Each time it slows, the pace picks up,
and we’re tossed from side to side,
too dizzy to scream.

“Be grateful,” my cousin says.
“He’s doing better.”

For how long?

Will we have a full week this time?
Each day delighting us, by eating more,
walking more, staying alert longer,
before he’s suddenly feverish again.

No, I’ve never liked roller coasters,
never found a racing heart to be a thrill,
not even the relief of stepping out of the car,
shaken but okay, has ever pleased me.

So my knuckles stay white
as I grip the safety bar, wishing—
not wishing—for the ride to end.

*

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. Visit her online at www.jacquelinejules.com

Two Poems by Betsy Mars

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Gone to the Dogs

My body riddled with dot-to-dot
blood bursting through the thinning skin,
already a map of bruises on my shins
from who knows where. My scalp now visible
with all its lumps and bumps
formerly hidden beneath the glory of my hair—
the hair I once saw as a misbehaving dog
scampering here and there. My fingers locked,
unable to grip—who will open my jars,
write my words when my hands begin to slip?
Feet flattened by too much weight,
bones bulging where they don’t belong,
metatarsals over-marched. Who will piggyback
me when I can no longer walk and I slump
benignly in my bed? When my wants
are few and my needs are many, who
will diaper me, spoon me soft food
between my toothless gums, read me a story,
carry me through my second infancy?

* 

Density

My feet, strapped at an awkward slant,
make a triangle with the base of the exam table,
childbearing hips flat, scanned
as the machine shoots its x beams at my bones.
I imagine my brain in full swing: osteoporosis
of the mind, gray matter crumbling, the spine
of my brain leaking essentials: fluids, sanity.
The cheap construction I built swept away
on a tide of shame, desiccated hope,
structural failure, vanity.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Recent poems can be found in Minyan, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Her photos have appeared online and in print, including one which served as the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge prompt in 2019. She has two books, Alinea, and her most recent, co-written with Alan Walowitz, In the Muddle of the Night. In addition, she also frequently collaborates with San Diego artist Judith Christensen, most recently on an installation entitled “Mapping Our Future Selves.”

The Giveaway by Gloria Heffernan

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The Giveaway

Some people call it downsizing.
Barbara simply calls it the next step
as she lightens the load she will carry
to the assisted living community
down the road from her home of thirty years.

She extends an invitation to loved ones
to come and choose items
from the living gallery she has curated
throughout her eighty-three years.

She gives me a quilt she made by hand.
To her daughter, the collection
of blown glass paperweights collected
with Charlie during their three-decade marriage.
To her brother, all the tools and gardening supplies
used for a lifetime of spring plantings,
and their mom’s mixing bowl that he cherishes
even though he never bakes.

Every gift comes wrapped in a story,
and as they are carried out to various cars,
she smiles and nods approval,
each item a liberation.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. She received the 2022 Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Prize. Gloria is the author of the collections Peregrinatio: Poems for Antarctica (Kelsay Books), and What the Gratitude List Said to the Bucket List, (New York Quarterly Books). Her forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in 2025. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

Two Poems by Michael J. LaFrancis

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Assisted Living

Nan’s mother told her
she would not die from rust;

rather, she will pass away
when her life is all used up.

Her mother would live on
in her own home until she fell

out of it at ninety-three,
more than twenty years later.

Nan always said advice has to fit
the stage of life you are living in. Now

a nonagenarian herself, these words
are inspiring her. Nan has taken up

oil painting, bead making, praying on
rosary beads, calling neighbors by name.

After her husband of sixty-two years
gave up his spirit, she went to the cafeteria

at breakfast; the whole room came over
to extend condolences. Her heart heard

God’s promise—my house has many rooms,
I will prepare a place for you.

*

Cathedrals

We are centered,
in an ancient ecosystem,
of towering columns and spires
that seem to open heaven’s gate.

They are wearing a course red bark,
that can be one to two feet thick,
protecting their heartwood from fire,
Lucifer’s or anyone else’s.

They are fulfilling their promise,
with a quiet reverence, like apostles.
Their dark green and white ceilings
filter light, like stained glass windows.

Their parish is a connected community,
families surrounding proud parents;
some that have passed away.
Each is a resurrection from ashes and soot.

*

Michael J. LaFrancis is a trusted advisor, advocate, author and connector supporting individuals, groups and organizations aligning purpose and capabilities in service of their highest ideals. Writing poetry is a contemplative practice providing him with insight and inspiration for living a creative life. His poems are appearing in The City Key, Mocking Owl and Amethyst Review in the coming months.

LaFrancis’ hobbies include landscape gardening, nature walks, collecting fine art and writing. He and his partner Sharon are co-authors of their autobiography: Our Wonderful Life. They have two sons and have recently been promoted to being grandparents.

@michaeljlafrancis on Instagram

Phone Visit with Jenny by José Chávez

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Phone Visit with Jenny

Approximately 5 percent of people aged 65 to 74 years and 40 percent of people older than 85 have some form of dementia, according to the Merck Manual.

My sister Jenny calls from the facility
where she’s been living for four years
& I move to our living room couch
to get comfortable.

It becomes a three-way conversation
when my older sister joins in
& I ask Jenny how she’s doing.

She says she’s OK
but she’s too warm—
Why is it so hot in here?

We remind her that it’s
January & very cold outside
In Albuquerque.

But she’s still too hot
& there are no lights
on the Christmas tree downstairs.

Maybe they unplugged them
my older sister says
now that the holiday passed.

Jenny says they taped off
the living room by the tree
so you can’t sit there
on that soft blue couch.

We say it’s probably due to
the need for social distance
but she’s adamant—still too warm down there
& she can’t find her son.

He was just here & left she says
he’s at the airport now
maybe it’s due to the virus we say
maybe he had to go back home.

My older sister & I know
he passed ten years ago
& they had been living together.

She pauses . . . wants us to know
that all is well with him
& reveals more of her expansive truth
that percolates often amid a crush of anxiety.

I know it doesn’t seem real
she tells us—
But      He      Was      Here     
I don’t know where he is now.

Her words envelope our hearts
& we pause for a few moments.
My older sister asks if she was able to sign
the Christmas cards with stamps ready
to be mailed out last week.

I don’t know where they are—
Why is it so hot in here?

*

José Chávez dedicates his life to writing. He’s had poetry published in the Multilingual Educator Journal, Acentos Review, and the Inlandia Anthology. José is the author of two bilingual poetry books for children: Little Stars and Cactus and Dancing Fruit, Singing Rivers.

my body as youth by john compton

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my body as youth

my hair is thinning. my eyes depend
on lenses. my noise is feeble.
my ears no longer understand sound.
my lips have shriveled, small & weak.
my mouth is still scared
to eat. my neck has almost given up
its strength. my shoulders lug around dead weight.
my elbows burn like a gas stove.
my wrists tunnel into my hands. my fingers are cracked
at each bend. my heart
is wrapped in onion. my lungs have been beaten
beyond repair. my stomach is no more a victim
than the tongue itself. my liver has always been
a failure. my kidneys compete like strangers.
my intestines are knotted with agony.
my bladder has no hold, lets it all go.
my colon stores without payment.
my penis is slack. my ass sags.
my hips are on the verge of displacement.
my thighs still contain proof of stretched skin.
my knees are crippled as are my ankles.
my feet are islands sinking. my toes are their navigator.

*

john compton (he/him) is a gay poet who lives with his husband josh and their dogs and cats. his latest book: my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store (Flowersong Press; dec 2024) and latest chapbook: melancholy arcadia (Harbor Editions; april 2024).

Turning Seventy-five by W. D. Ehrhart

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Turning Seventy-five

It isn’t that I fear
growing older—such things as fear,
reluctance or desire
play no part at all
except as light and shadow sweep a hillside
on a Sunday afternoon,
astonishing the eye but passing on
at sunset with the land
still unchanged: the same rocks,
the same trees, tall grass gently drifting—
merely that I do not understand
how my age has come to me
or what it means.

It’s almost like some small
forest creature one might find
outside the door some frosty autumn morning,
tired, lame, uncomprehending,
almost calm.
You want to stroke its fur,
pick it up, mend the leg and send it
scampering away—but something
in its eyes says, “No,
this is how I live, and how I die.”
And so, a little sad, you let it be.
Later when you look,
the thing is gone.

And just like that these
seventy-five years
have come and gone,
and I do not understand at all
why I see an old gray-haired man
inside the mirror when a small
boy still lives inside this body
wondering
what causes laughter, why
nations go to war, who paints the startling
colors of the rainbow on a gray vaulted sky,
and when I will be old enough
to know.

*

W. D. Ehrhart is author of Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems (McFarland). His most recent collection is At Smedley Butler’s Grave (Moonstone).