Tag: childhood

Three Poems by Jeanne Wagner

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Because My Memory Began Too Soon

        Adults rarely remember events from before the age of three.
        It’s a phenomenon known as ‘infantile amnesia.’

                ―Queensland Brain Institute

I’m the one who’s cursed with remembering it all.
My first sight, the light bleeding through the blinds.

What I felt, what she felt, in the moments after birth.
We were a woman in pain, turning towards the wall.

Memory, the attic that enters you, is never cleaned.
Memory is like furniture you can’t take back.

The light, when it flowed, was like milk for the eyes.
I knew myself only as the seer then, and not the seen.

*

Birthstone

When I was thirteen, everything was a metaphor―maybe
half a metaphor, the other half still a riddle in the heart.

Money, another metaphor, was everywhere in our house.
Scattered in kitchen drawers and on countertops.

In discarded dishes where we kept those unwanted coins
we call change. “Take what you need,” my mother said.

Who knew what I needed the day I went to the neighbor’s
auction and found, displayed, a pair of amethyst geodes.

Stones with smaller stones gestating inside of them.
I thought it must be what they meant by a motherlode.

Stones sliced open like soft Anjou pears, exposing their litter
of lilac crystals. Shards of purple light rising like stalagmites,

or like the glistening booty tumbling from pirate chests
in comic books, their lids agape, their gems laid bare.

Someone at the auction must have driven up the price
that day. Must have loved them as much as I did.

How eagerly I shelled out my two dollars and fifty cents,
innocent of whole new anxieties heading my way.

Over dinner, my father told me I was an easy mark. A girl
who’s taken advantage of―who splurges on the first

garish rocks that come her way― unpolished and raw.
The day after the auction, I had to knock on our neighbor’s

door and beg for my money back. I had to learn even
beauty can be a commodity: can be mounted,
carved into facets, twisted around a finger or delicately
broached, those little gold prongs pinning it down.

*

A Thousand Doors

Who said, The day opens with a thousand doors?
An image conceived by some compulsive smiler who
springs from her bed each morning like a startled doe.

Someone who doesn’t wake slowly, as I do,
a half-forgotten dream roving up my shins.
The door a stage mother ready to steer a sleeper

like me into the troubled world. Tell me the image
of a thousand doors isn’t the nightmare you’d get
from being forced to watch that old game show,

the one with three doors, repeating in a perpetual loop,
or those scenes from old movies where the Nazis
or the Stasi are beating down doors.

Or that photo of a bombed-out building,
its one remaining door opening onto empty air.
And then there’s the door I almost overlooked,

the one in the Velázquez’s painting, Las Meninas,
The way it reveals a lone courtier standing
in a slender flag of light, the only one seeing

the room from the rear, as if in freeze-frame,
because we know time stops for a second
whenever you open a door. Or close it.

That man in the back of the room reminding me
of my father in those sweet childhood goodnights
of ours. How he stood in the door light

as it framed a silhouette of a round head,
ears with small, furled tips, his slender form
familiar yet otherworldly in the dark,

lingering there long enough to show me
that there is only one safe door in the world.
And I left it long ago.

*

Jeanne Wagner’s book, One Needful Song, was the winner of the 2024 Catamaran Prize. She is also the author of four chapbooks and three previous full-length collections. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and The Southern Review. A retired tax accountant, she lives in Kensington, California.

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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Father, after all these Years

         — I’m still waiting
for you to fade.
The way dark stars and sorrow
are known to do.
Or like the sky at dusk.
A rhyme from childhood, or a tune.

*

Eight Years Dead

—and never once coming
to me in dreams
begging forgiveness. Self-righteous
in the afterlife as you were in this one, Mother.
Only with the whole sky in yourself
approach me. The whole sky
where there may be air enough
for me to breathe.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her new chapbook, Homage to Kafka, was published by The Poetry Box (July 2025). https://lauraannreed.net/

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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Photograph

His back to the camera
my father stands at the ocean’s edge.
Hands in his pockets, the flannel lining
thin as the hospital-issue robe
his own father wore over his pajamas.
“Go out to the hallway,”
he was told, “if you’re going to cry.”
Today, a moth stirs the air
near the dogwood. Circling and reversing.
Searching for more than is there.
The unopened leaf buds like half-said things.
At what edge does my father now stand?

*

On Suffering

Studying my reflection in the blossoming plums
I stumbled and fell.
My mother, who could never forgive my beauty
leaned over the examination table.
“Now you know how it feels,” she said.
It meaning life, I supposed.
The nurse gave me a tender look, her face radiant
with the world’s pain. A shoulder blade
was eased back into place.
Gravel removed with a surgical blade.
I imagined myself as the rock before it was crushed
and made into pavement. This was consolation.
I sensed all my troubles dropping away.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her forthcoming chapbook, Homage to Kafka, will be published in July 2025. https://lauraannreed.net/

Five Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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April’s Graveyard

My thoughts flee toward the margins.
Chasing after them is one kind of start.
                                    Another is burrowing
deeper into the bewilderment.
As on the day of my grandfather’s funeral.
The girl I was at fourteen in a borrowed
black, tight-fitting skirt who flirted
outside the graveyard gates
with the boy on a bike. Thinking of him
at the graveside.
                                    All these years later
something remains, unformulated.
A speechless undertow
of the loneliness that washes through me.

*

Childhood

In the back garden, diagonals
of late afternoon light. A few yard tools rest
against the fence. My father is cleaning the blade
of a hoe. He is probably whistling.
I think about my father all the time.
In part from a need like the pull to unravel
a recurring dream. In part because he was my father.
But now it is dusk. Under their tent of branches
the doves ask a question again and again.
Their patience is infinite. Below the silvering sky
the light is the color of an old coin.

*

Ladybugs

Not yet full spring. Mistrust among the tulip bulbs.
The girl pedals furiously, nevertheless.
Flight from childhood? A memory.
“Don’t be in such a rush to grow up, dear,” my father said.
We were in the grove of redwoods when I saw them.
Billions of them. Inches thick along the dark limbs.
The startling intimacy of the small bodies
one atop the other.

*

Beauty

                  —”is the subject of art,”
says Agnes Martin.

My mother wanted to be the child.
Wanted her beautiful future.
Wanted her infants who didn’t live.

I wanted to be the child.
Wanted the reddening leaves.
Wanted to burrow under the canopy of branches.

                  *

At opposite ends of a sandbox: two children
engaged in parallel play.

One with a bucket of water.
Building a castle. Filling a moat.

The other digging holes with a shovel.
Hunting for the delicate bones.

*

Early Memory

The doves summon me into the day.
I call back through the half-opened window.
The sunlight, too, is reaching for me
through the bars of the crib. Then my mother is there
in the way that the room is. Lifted and held, I understand
while the foghorns moan on the San Francisco Bay
that my mother needs to believe she is adored.
More than the doves. More than the sunlight.
Good girl that I am, I press my head
against her breast. Now look at the boat
of her dying, rocking softly
on the water.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her forthcoming chapbook, Homage to Kafka, will be published in July 2025. https://lauraannreed.net/

Four Poems by Kimberly Ann Priest

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In the News, December 31, 1980

The final day of the year before my sister is born,
two people die in a local gas station explosion that no one
can explain, as winter warms up her roar from the Ohio Valley
to overpower all the Northeast, and five Connecticut men,
employees of City Printing Co., go missing in a small plane
over Lake Michigan. Governor Milliken has signed new bills
into law to restructure Blue Cross Blue Shield,
a massive tax-exempt, non-profit health insurer created
forty-one years prior. “We made more progress in six days,”
says the Governor, “than we did in the past six years,”
addressing employee complaints concerning injured and laid-off
workers who weren’t receiving benefits, as well as employer
complaints of system abuse and expense. Still,
the sun will be shinning tomorrow morning, temperatures mild
even as energy audits roll out for home dwellers to cut
heating costs. Which is good because tonight we are getting
two to four inches of snow as bright Jupiter and Saturn cozy up,
appearing merely two moon-widths apart by pre-dawn
when you can view them if you want to. Next month,
Reagan will be our nation’s president, and I think my parents
are happy. A volcano has erupted in Vancouver, Washington,
and the Communist Party has announced to the Polish
that this new year will not be prosperous as the country
continues its path toward socialist development. There are deaths
on the streets of California again due to the introduction
of a new illicit drug that is not “White China,” but almost the same,
while X-rated gingerbread women and men are sold
at a shop in Maryland featuring prominent sex organs
as well as big smiles. They aren’t illegal so the Moral Majority
can’t do a damn thing to stop them being sold. What is it
my mother keeps saying? There’s nothing new under the sun.
The Beach Boys have a star in Hollywood now—been a band
twenty years. Bright Jupiter and Saturn won’t be this close again
until 2020 when I’ll miss them again. Dad’s part-time job
pays some of the bills and gifts us Blue Cross Blue Shield.
Our home is barely warm enough to insulate bodies from winter,
but I’ve got a hot water bottle and Pooh Bear in bed.

*

Recession [early 80s]

          Birch Run, Michigan

Childhood
was good.

I didn’t know my parent’s poverty. Didn’t know
we rationed food because

I was out buzzing with bees—
white bursts of pollen floating

and the farmhouse
a yellow brushstroke against the corn-pierced sky.

Mother put the baby on the floor
before the car careened and spun. Summer

swooped like a starling around heads
protecting, the grasses bowing to breeze

like old Moses in Genesis leaning against his cane,
surrendering causes to a new generation.

I remember wild eyes and lore,
before seatbelts were lawful,

mother panting with miracle after arriving home safe,
no car or human damage, the baby

quieted and falling asleep.
She pointed to heaven, to Jesus,

when a rash of needle pricks covered my back—allergies
demanding so much medication. Cattails

grew thick and tall in the ditches, their inches
of stalk below the plateau

assuring I was just the same height. These days,
one must like apples

or applesauce,
or mustard shag carpet—something yellow

such as forsook corn hardened for crows,
or Queen Bee bushy all over pollinating red clover,

hovering the spiney pink globes,
deciding, asserting you, you, you,

you must like applesauce,
eat every last bite, to not taste the bitter white sprinkles

un-capsuled and tossed
into the sweetest luxury food stamps allowed.

I wished it could have been ice cream. It wasn’t.
Yellow ball of daytime sun gone down

as I ate the coveted portion, with spoon,
that no one else got, bees

all tired and sleeping, the baby
bundled for night.

*

After My Father Losses His Job, My Medicine Runs Out

And we lose our healthcare
          like most unemployed families do,
so my mother lifts the empty bottle
          of allergy medication
that keeps me breathing during the greener seasons
          toward heaven (toward
our farmhouse kitchen ceiling) one late
          Wednesday evening after mid-week church
and after the last pill is broke open
          into my applesauce where I, a four-year-old child,
am willing to consume it. She has
          no other option and a little girl
who loves to go outside: it’s Jesus
          or nothing. Oh Lord, she intones, be good to me
throwing the bottle away. She will still
          give me applesauce each evening without
the white medicinal sprinkles, still
          pray nervously, still wake each morning
to feed me breakfast and watch me rush
          out our front door
like an anxious little bee difficult
          to contain. Some kids, I have learned,
grow out of seasonal allergies. Who knows?
          Maybe that was me. Oh Lord
be good my mother prayed
          as I rolled in the summer grass like a skinny cat
fighting off its fleas. As I marched
          into the woodland’s verdant trees.
As I ate my applesauce; in return, offering my mother
          sticks, pretty stones, dead leaves.

*

Locusts

          1981

We searched for wild honey and found it late March
          oozing from maple trees, declaring our woodlands
miraculous. Miracles! Miracles! we hollered,
          demanding the wind turn north or south
at our command. My little brother lifts a stick and strikes a rock.
          Water! he proclaims, hitting the rock
harder, promising a gusher and sputtering noises to mimic
          its fake flow. We drank
from that rock and the wind and the trees. We imagined
          meaty bugs and ate them, pretending their winged bodies
wriggled in our teeth. We listened for the forest,
          pausing along a well-worn path to stand very still
and discern its murmur. Follow, follow, it said.
          So we followed the inspirited tickle of leaves
in gentle breeze above us, limbs swaying and guiding west
          then east. We were such good pantheists
wandering a wilderness like John the Baptist on transcendental
          mission, stalking our Bible’s feral God.

*

Kimberly Ann Priest (she/her) is a neurodivergent writer and the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press for her book Wolves in Shells. She is the author of tether & lung (Texas Review Press 2025) and Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications 2021, finalist for the American Best Book Awards. A professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, she lives with her husband in Maine.

Picture Day, First Grade by Julie Barton

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Picture Day, First Grade

This photo still evokes in me,
forty-five years later, a frail
sorrow–the little girl wanting
only to get it right, to do it well.
The arched rainbow design
on the dress I picked myself.
The hair disheveled as always
because mom left for work so early
and dad claimed no skill at hairdos.
My tooth missing, my smile unsure,
unconvincing. Sometimes when
I can’t sleep, I look at that photo
in my mind’s eye and whisper,
“You’re doing great. Nothing
you are doing is wrong. I love you.”
It’s nice to imagine little me
hearing that future me thinks of
this day so often, how I didn’t
understand why I felt so wrong.
Standing in the gymnasium,
waiting my turn to be photographed,
the thin black comb they handed out
only to the kids who had
something to fix.

*

Julie Barton is the New York Times Bestselling author of Dog Medicine, How My Dog Saved Me From Myself (Penguin, 2016). She publishes a poem every day at juliebarton.substack.com and can be found online at juliebarton.com. Her poems have appeared in The South Carolina Review, Caduceus, Art Place at Yale Medical School.

Buddy & Skippy by John Dorsey

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Buddy & Skippy

as a boy
my cousin steve
had a pair of imaginary friends
just in case
one of them
was ever out sick
just so neither of them
would ever have to feel lonely
35 years later
i think about how
none of us
have any friends at 3 am
unless we’re dying
& at a certain point
we all grapple with loneliness
& i wonder if steve’s imaginary friends
had imaginary friends of their own
the kind you can call
any time
for any reason
day or night.

*

John Dorsey is the former Poet Laureate of Belle, MO. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Which Way to the River: Selected Poems: 2016-2020 (OAC Books, 2020), Sundown at the Redneck Carnival, (Spartan Press, 2022, and Pocatello Wildflower, (Crisis Chronicles Press, 2023). He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.

Two Poems by Mary Lou Buschi

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Fire

            After Marianne Moore

Burned you didn’t it, my mother used to say.
Nowhere near a stove or flame but the accusation
hung there, in the air like refraction waves.
Burned you, you who should have known better.
You who stuffed a short skirt, two panties
in your purse after tracing Kit Fever, not your name
on a frequent flyer ticket. You who barely flew – came
the minute he said so.
No phone, no media, no way to track
the Landcruiser bouncing
over the Grand Tetons. Burned you.
Once. Twice. Shame on you.
Love, was it? Girl alone on a barstool at the Gaslight Saloon.
A dog with three legs curled under the rungs.

*

To the Ninth Grade Girl Crying in the Nurse’s Office During Lunch

You will be invisible in your 50s. Cheese will always be delicious. One day you will drive past a row of trees and name them: Sumac, Walnut, Tulip, and know which ones are invasive. You will become concerned with all things invasive as you stare out the window at a yard too large for your diminishing energy. People will be less interesting, but you will love more of them than you ever thought you could, deeply, finding flaws that enact that velvet kind of love that softens your eyes and warms the curves of your ears. Let–it–go. All of it. Not much matters. Not the stop sign you hit during your driving test. Not the Great Lash you lifted in middle school, or the date you ditched at Lucky Strike. Not the way you organize your closet by color, bookshelves by imagined dinner parties. It all gets left behind for someone to sort. It may be an unassuming couple that throws what you held dear into a rented dumpster. Dear Ninth Grade Girl, you will try to step off this world many times. Many times, I hope you fail.

*

Mary Lou Buschi (she/her) is the author of 3 chapbooks and 3 full length poetry collections. Her 3rd book, BLUE PHYSICS was published in February 2024. (Lily Poetry Review books). PADDOCK, her second book was also published by (LPR). Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Ploughshares, Glacier, Willow Springs, On the Seawall, among many others. Mary Lou is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and holds an MS in Urban Education from Mercy University. Currently, she is a special education teacher working with students on the spectrum in the Bronx.

Four Poems by Linda Laderman

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My Mother Holds Her Grief

like a collection of precious stones in a plum pouch. I watch her untie its silk strings & spread the stones across her satin sheets. She separates them by color & holds a cerulean blue with faceted edges up to the light. She rubs it over her body & lingers on her thigh, then takes a red thread & wraps it around. She hangs it from her neck, an amulet to hold her grief. She teaches me to hold her grief too, says it’s as easy as making a bed. Hold it there, fold it here, tuck the corners under. Always tuck the corners under. I sit beside her bed. She gives me a turquoise, cool and smooth. When she turns away, I rub it on my thigh & tuck it under the corner.

*

I should have left you first

but I waited until autumn’s red birds scattered
their seeds, giving way to a bitter winter, expected,

but holding out for a thaw. I waited for the peony,
pale pink, to emerge from the mound of dirt

near our doorstep, dependable, a return to life.
I waited for the blood moon to reveal itself, hopeful

it could be seen through earth’s hazy gaze—
I waited for spring’s rainy season to clear,

though June, being unseasonably stingy,
refused to cede a day without a downpour.

on summer’s cusp, I woke from a half sleep,
my skin drenched in knowing. still, my eyes

stayed shut, until the blue-black night found me.
I waited until the days stretched, the sun set late,

temperatures rose, and the duck in the Hosta
vanished, leaving a gap strewn with leaves and grass,

her batch of eggs hatched and ready to fly. I waited
until the children left, filled with illusions of time,

as if life was forever—a chance to do what I couldn’t.
I waited for your infatuations to wane, but they didn’t.

I waited for the first freeze, then blew my breath
into the icy vapor, kissing winter’s frosted air.

thinking, if I waited long enough, my haunted dreams
would disappear. and you did.

*

When We Dance

We dance on the hardwood floor. His white hair lays
        bare my memories. The nights that lasted until morning.

The sound of Detroit Jazz pushes us. Belgrave, Franklin, Carter.
        I turn it up. I’m wound. Our arms zig and zag, two old saws.

I hip bump him, snap my fingers. He lets out a surprised
        laugh and twists me around our kitchen. I let him do it.

We twirl. His face is red, shy, like a boy. I want to seduce him,
        but I don’t know. I’ve gotten used to not having.

My breath is hard. My hands sweat. I wonder if he took a Viagra.
        I take his arm. Purple blotches stain his skin. Mottled by time.

In the morning, I ask if he remembers when each day took its time.
        How we craved a chance to hear the silence.

Now, I store time in a stone. I step over its power to fool.
        When I feel regret, I sink into a place with no light.

*

Fine China

I worry that my last poem will be my last poem. Let’s talk about quatrains. I create a series of prompts, a list of lines. I’m exhausted from nothing. I list nothings. Nothing good can come from this. Can all this be for nothing? She has nothing on you, You know nothing about me. Only lines stacked, like my fine china, packed away, forgotten as the drop of dried cranberry stuck under the rim. I take the place settings out of the basement cabinet, sit on the cold concrete floor, and remove the felt separators. Nothing. I focus on the memories the dishes hold. An ekphrastic after the matching teapot? Nothing. Empty, like the dishes. I bring two place settings upstairs to soak. I shop for a roasting chicken, red potatoes, baby carrots, and a brown sugar pecan pie. If I can’t write, I’ll fill the damn plates.

*

Linda Laderman is a Michigan writer and poet. She is the 2023 recipient of The Jewish Woman’s Prize from Harbor Review. Her micro-chapbook, “What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know” will be published online at Harbor Review in September, 2023. Her poetry has appeared in The Gyroscope Review, The Jewish Literary Journal, SWWIM, ONE ART, Poetica Magazine, and Rust & Moth, among others. She has work forthcoming in Thimble Literary Magazine and Minyan Magazine. For nearly a decade, she volunteered as a docent at the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. Find her at lindaladerman.com

The end of childhood by Ellen Stone

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The end of childhood

Your parent’s tightened
lips, their narrow love—
how it tipped & tilted
like the summer Ferris wheel
all smoke and burnt candy.
You, leaning over the edge
to see it all – old ball field,
swirling night bats, dogs
& beer faced fathers. Where
is your mother? Gone, again?
That question slow burning,
but here the lights
are twinkly, everyone
is gathering, rippled
& holding something
spooled loosely –
giant blue bears, a pinwheel,
caramel apples on sticks, silvery
balloons hovering on the midway.
Empty in this moistness, you
circling around, swooping
& knotted, your stomach,
your sinking heart.

*

Ellen Stone advises a poetry club at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is a co-host for the monthly poetry series, Skazat! and an editor at Public School Poetry which debuts in the fall of 2023. Ellen’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, Cold Mountain Review, The Museum of Americana, and River Heron Review. She is the author of The Solid Living World, Michigan Cooperative Press, 2013, and What Is in the Blood, Mayapple Press, 2020.

What I Loved by Robbi Nester

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What I Loved

As a child, I often visited my grandmother and cousins
in West Oak Lane, straight lines of dark brick rowhomes,
old trees, so wide you couldn’t get your arms around them.
In summer, people sat out on the stoop and watched
neighbors in their somber suits and hats parade
to service in the tiny synagogue where my uncle
served as sexton. In the back of each house, there was
an open space, a paradise of gardens, some gated.
I loved the ones with a reflecting ball, precisely
in the center, mirroring the bees and sulfur yellow
butterflies. I thought I saw some other country
there, one that I’d explore on some dull day
when my cousins were busy with their chores
or their piano lessons, and I was left to roller
skate for hours on the cracked concrete behind
their house. I didn’t like the other decorations—
plastic flamingos or painted plaster gnomes,
objects with no mystery about them, far preferred
to peer between the iron filagree or wooden slats,
pretending that I stood on soft green grass
instead of forever banished, on the other side.

*

Robbi Nester is the author of four books of poetry and editor of three anthologies. She is a retired college educator and elected member of the Academy of American Poets. Her website is at http://www.RobbiNester.net

A PHOTOGRAPH OF A BOY’S LESSON IN MANHOOD by John Grey

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A PHOTOGRAPH OF A BOY’S LESSON IN MANHOOD

That’s me behind the lawn mower.
My father is in the background,
shouting orders.
“Hold down the bar!
Pull the cord!”
The grass is not high
but that’s not the point
of this exercise.
Though my head
barely rises over the handle,
he figures I’m old enough
to start the machine
and push it up and down
the back yard.
It’s his job normally.
But, in this photograph,
he’s working at his other job –
making me into
a miniature version of himself.
We’ve done the fishing-rod ritual.
We’ve played catch so much
I feel like a retriever.
And I’ve hammered a nail.
I’ve wielded a screwdriver.
And now it’s time
to mow the lawn.
This picture shows neither
triumph nor failure.
It’s the moment before
both things are possible.
So what happened?
As far as I know,
I did.

*

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review and Rathalla Review. Latest books, “Covert” “Memory Outside The Head” and “Guest Of Myself” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review and Open Ceilings.

Elegy for Debbie of My Childhood by Susana Gonzales

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Elegy for Debbie of My Childhood

You of the frilly floral dresses
chosen by your mother
before you were old enough
bold enough to say enough
of dresses. You of the silly smiles
and sleep overs over at my house
or yours before time took
over and grew us into women.
You of the popsicle summers
and swimming pools pulling
on rubber bathing caps pulling off
tricks off the diving board.
You I sing you nine years old.
You I praise you fearless running in rain.
You I laugh you cheerless. Who dared
to be the first to try, to climb,
to jump from. So brave the first
to enter the dark. So clever
to hide where I could not seek.

*

Susana Gonzales was raised in the Air Force and has grown to see the world through multiple lenses. She lives in southern California with her wife Suzanne and German Shepard Kennedy. She has been published in Sheila Na Gig, Gyroscope Review, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Drunk Monkeys and As You Were: The Military Review.

HALF A CENTURY AGO by Kenneth Pobo

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HALF A CENTURY AGO

Tom bullied me. Has he
forgotten the cruelty?
Graduation was an eraser.
Maybe he plays with his grandkids,
tells them stories of his childhood.
When he gave his friends
candy cigarettes and licorice whips.

*

Kenneth Pobo is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), and Uneven Steven (Assure Press). Opening is forthcoming from Rectos Y Versos Editions. Lavender Fire, Lavender Rose is forthcoming from Brick/House Books.

Four Poems by Sandra Kohler

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Having lost it…

When I tell my therapist about having lost it completely three days ago
when my husband gets angry at me because I’ve left a cabinet door open
and he bangs his head on it, says it’s something I’ve done before, I
tell her I don’t understand what set me off so completely, so that
I scream I can’t stand it, threaten to leave, to kill myself, outrageous
unforgivable behavior, and why, all because of his understandable
irritation at the end of a long siege of frustrations, stress, anxiety
in these awful pandemic days.

What was this about, I ask, and she asks me. “My mother,” I say. That
answer that we all come up with in the end, unless it’s “my father.” But
for me, it was her, not him. And somehow, I don’t know how, I have
reached, in these days, a kind of grim unrecognized decision: I reject
her definition of me, my life. I don’t want ever again to feel guilty or
unworthy or incompetent, I am done, finally, with apologizing for my
existence.

*

Recognition

I’m thinking this morning, as I often
do, of my wish that my husband and I
had known each other decades earlier,
ages before we met, middle-aged, with
years of living behind each of us. But
today for the first time I realize I’ve been
wrong, we do have that knowledge.

Each of us still carries the young self
we were inside, bringing a childhood,
a parentage, family, first marriage, years
of living adult lives. Here and now, in
the present, we see, hear, feel aspects of
that life, that person in the other. Here
and now, in this relationship, we are
each all the selves we’ve ever been.

*

Vanishing

Climbing a steep hill of iced-over
snow in front of a public building,
library of some kind, I know I have
to extract one book from the depths
of the mound, it’s what I’m here for.
The rest has vanished. We vanish
and don’t. We are alive in the dreams
of others, or dead, dreams which may
be closer to nightmare than dream,
or not. We are strange familiar ghosts
becoming apparitions, visitations.

I lose a hearing aid, the key to my
house, an hour, a morning, a slip of
paper with the name of the nostrum
that could save me, a child’s first all-
accepting love, a friendship that was
never whole but whose fractures still
beckoned. I lose my sense of humor,
my sense of proportion, my way,
my whereabouts, my why.

Do I have anything left to say? Of
course. Do I know how to say it? Of
course not. It’s the not which gives me
the knot to unpick, whose threads can
be woven into patches, forming a
patchwork which can be sewn into
a fabric which will be a statement
of something I don’t know I know.

*

What Follows

After ten years of living here, I still
don’t know the weather, its patterns,
where it comes from. Or the domestic
weather: my daughter-in-law’s moods.

Talking to her about the garden, I get
what I’ve asked for and then don’t know
what to do with it. I can accept or reject
it. Whatever. What would whatever be?

There are grave limits not on what I
can want but on how much I can have.
The sky says anything can come along
and will, but not what or where. Our

roses are blossoming today as if there
is no tomorrow. If they’re right I should
be attending not to weather but whether:
what can I create from today’s offerings?

*

Sandra Kohler’s third collection of poems, Improbable Music, (Word
Press) appeared in May, 2011. Earlier collections are The Country of
Women (Calyx, 1995) and The Ceremonies of Longing, (University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals, including
The New Republic, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Prairie Schooner, and many
others over the past 45 years. In 2018, a poem of hers was chosen to be
part of Jenny Holzer’s permanent installation at the new Comcast
Technology Center in Philadelphia.