Tag: August

Three Poems by Eric Goldfarb

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Discharge Instructions

At the hospital exit the nurse handed me six pages of things that could go wrong. She said most of them would not. This was meant to calm me.

Outside, a man in a blazer argued with the parking machine as if it had taken a side.

I signed where they told me, initialed the smaller lies— yes I understood the wound, yes I understood the pills, yes I understood how a body could be sent home with instructions.

In the car you held the plastic basin in your lap, pale and royal, like somebody being carried from a bad hotel.

We stopped at CVS. I bought gauze, ginger ale, the good crackers—the ones that cost too much, because illness has a lobby, a gift shop, a way of making saltines look like mercy.

At home I put the pages under a magnet shaped like Maine.

For three days I read them the way some people read scripture.

At midnight I touched your forehead. At two I touched it again.

Nothing happened.

Which is also a thing that happens.

*

Booth Four, 11:15

She slides the toast across before he asks.
He tips the creamer into her cup first,
though she has not yet lifted it. Then come
the pills: four of his beside the spoon, two
of hers beside the salt, sorted last night
and carried in the same green mint tin
they have used since the pharmacy changed bags.
A refill comes. He lays his hand flat on
the table so the waitress will not splash her.
When the strawberry arrives, one on the plate,
he moves it to her side without remark.
She eats half, then returns what is left to his.
Outside the window, a bus pulls to a stop.
Nobody gets off.

*

Peaches, Late August

At the peach stand, we both reach toward the bin
and press our thumbs against the ones that give,
not for ourselves. I find one soft and warm,
the kind that bruises looking at it, pass it
to your side of the table without comment.
You have chosen mine already. Farther down,
the farmer stacks his last few empty crates.
A woman holds a melon to the light.
You weigh three peaches in your open palm,
set two aside, and hand me back the one
I would have wanted. It is almost too ripe.
We pay. We walk. You take the paper bag
and hold it slightly out from your body
so the weight will not swing against my hip
the whole way home.

*

Eric Goldfarb writes poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction. His work has appeared in Rattle, Hippocampus Magazine, Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature, Sky Island Journal, Third Wednesday, The New Verse News, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Atlanta, Georgia. More at eric-goldfarb.com.

Two Poems by Michelle Menting

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When the Dewpoint is High

July becomes a box of water,
one made of cardboard that seeps,

inside out, outside in. If August
is the Sunday of summer, July

is Wednesday—middle child
simmering. There is no Thursday

month-summer. I forget the gods
whose names we’ve borrowed

for time. I forget which people
created them. But I know

in summer, I pine for waves—
water over land impartial: rocks

eroded to sandy tears, mud
the mating of silt & clay,

humus an orgy of oak & ash,
buckthorn & maple, all dead,

all resting. I’ll float above
them all, that plethora of textures

bottoming waters—those lakes,
& ponds, rivers & oceans holding

us in. Submerge and resurface.
Maybe all gods are swimmers—

so much closer are we to holiness
in the depths of the bodies we choose.

*

The Gusts Reached 60mph

and then the power went out. Leaving us
in a darkness resembling our lives, the pitch

of your voice when it drives to cut, to fissure
a wound as deep as the temper that craves

to carve it. There is rain in December
in Maine, a downpour of confusion

as much spectacle as menace. We kept
waiting: for the lights to flicker,

for the hum of white noise to fade,
for that power to finally go out.

I no longer set aside candles. The matches
stay in the drawer. I’m used to these storms.

I know how to prepare, but I’m tired.
This one too will pass. The sun will return,

heating too hot a ground that should be
dormant. Frozen. Listen, I know now: night

is a shield of darkness that I’ve learned
to rest with. To hide within its corners.

To wait. Then walk in the thick mud
of another season’s morning.

*

Michelle Menting lives across a questionable bridge in rural Maine. Her poems, flash fictions, and flash nonfictions have appeared in Passages North, Cincinnati Review, Diagram, Tar River Poetry, and other places. She teaches at the University of Southern Maine and directs a small-town library in midcoast Maine.

Procrastination by Susan Cossette

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Procrastination

Next summer I will plant flowers
in a perfect circle around the towering pine–

Carve tiny cradles for each pink impatiens,
pat flat the cool damp mulch.

Next summer I will tame wild ivy
on the hundred-year wall,
coerce it into tidy compliance.

The soaring rhododendrons stand guard,
old wise, twisted roots.
The stories they can tell.

Next summer I will hang a suet feeder
outside the kitchen window and await red cardinals.

It is August, and next summer is a long way off.

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.