Tag: children

Scapegrace by Alison Hurwitz

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Scapegrace

My son does not want Anne of Green Gables
to make any more mistakes. First, a blunder sends

her best friend stumbling into drunkenness—
the raspberry cordial which was really currant wine.

Then, the mislabeled bottle of vanilla which she,
daydreaming, did not think to sniff, resulting

in a lineament cake. He tells me it’s disproportionately
unfair, and asks me what Marilla’s word scapegrace means.

All week, he’s been trailing misery and missed
assignments, wadded bits of paper, hiding in his

long red hair, too aware of his deficiencies.
His thin frame bows and quivers—drawn.

I find another definition. Let Anne take off her apron,
walk out into the air of late October, thrill to see

a Scapegrace Loon unfurl its wings and lift across the pond,
the fire at its throat a crimson arrow in the dusk.

*

Alison Hurwitz (she/her), is a former cellist and dancer who finds music in language. Nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Alison hosts the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Published in South Dakota Review, Sky Island Journal, SWWIM and others, her work was named as a finalist for RockPaperPoem’s 2025 Poetry Prize. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorials, hikes, and dances in her kitchen with her family. Find her at alisonhurwitz.com

Three Poems by Sayantani Roy

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On the continent of mothering

At twenty-five, I stood in my kitchen
my body still being healed by turmeric-ginger
prescribed by my mother-in-law, continents afar—
boiling milk bottles and nursing guilt over bottled baby food—
listening to my daughter wail in her crib—too proud
to summon her father only a phone call away
even as I felt the great tug of worry that only
a mother can feel.

My daughter is that age now—
an entire length of continent away
on the other coast.

Sometimes, at dead of night, as her father sleeps
I awaken from dreams propelled by
some piece of news I’ve heard earlier
in the day—hearsay or authentic—

and let me tell you this—

I am alone again, in my mother-worry—
always alone on the continent of mothering.

*

Ritual

When it comes to silk sarees, elders advise
against draping them on hangers
or else gravity will pull at the zari
ruining the very ground, the field
that holds everything.
I fold them into neat squares and lay them
on top of each other on almirah shelves—
each stack a stratified rock—each layer
telling its own story. this one the day before
the wedding, this on the first trip back
to my parents’, and this, bought on a whim.
the gray and gold acquired when my taste
shifted to muted tones. and this one I’ve
yet to wear—see the zari darkened from age?
pull this one out, be gentle.
notice the brittle fabric, the deep onion color
that was popular once. how it bears
the strong naphthalene scent of my
mother’s iron chest—unfold with care
or else it might tear along the folds.
twice a year I air them out, refold them
so that the crease lines may breathe.
no crease is ever smoothed away and
old creases get in the way of new ones
like stubborn habits. and sometimes
the silk is willful and refuses to yield.
I fold and refold, coddle and corral. I wonder
how long before any ritual will prove futile.

*

The kitchen, your temple

Vivid, your kitchen, down to the way dust motes swirled
in the ray of slanted afternoon light. The lit triangle of the tablecloth.

The sweetmeat that arrived out of nowhere, which is to say
you made them without fuss. You never urged us to enjoy them

yet your silent yearning took on the curvature of the perfect
mowa and the pristine white of the coconut nadu. In midlife

I find recipes inscribed into your husband’s book of scriptures.
A scrupulous man, not devout, but who thrived on routine.

How he had taken to writing everything in that book towards
the end of his life. Names of five ancestors that preceded him –

all men. Addresses of sons and the one grandson who
became a doctor. Then ingredients started popping in between

odes to the divine. Poppyseeds and bitter melon—
banana blossom and the oddball spice. In your girlish hand

that was never invited to hold a pen. The learned man and his
unschooled wife. Empty vessel he called you once—

the woman who bore him seven children.

*

Sayantani Roy works out of the Seattle area. Her work appears or is forthcoming in several journals, including Alan Squire Publishing, Emerge Literary Journal, Gone Lawn, Heavy Feather, Grist, Ruby, TIMBER, West Trestle Review, and Wordgathering. She was a 2024 AWP fiction mentee and was placed as a semifinalist in the 2025 Adroit Journal Anthony Veasna So Scholars in Fiction. She reads poetry for Chestnut Review and Palette Poetry.

Four Poems by Rachel Beachy

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I Don’t Know How to Convince You to Care About Others

Because at some point we were all children
running toward whoever cried, asking what’s
wrong. Pretending to put Band-Aids on baby
dolls and check the temperatures of our teddy
bears. We were sad when something fell apart
and tried to make it better than before. When
we were scared, we looked for the helpers and
wanted to be one. We believed a kiss could cure
scraped knees. Just the other day, my daughter
burst into tears because we found a dead bug on
the windowsill. I wanted to say it was fine, not to
cry, but then I stopped myself. Because maybe
this is how it starts to end. And instead of being
one more person telling her it doesn’t matter, I
can be the one who makes it okay to care more.

*

Call for Submissions

The theme is rage and the deadline is
yesterday. It is too late now for all that.
Today you must get up, plant your feet
on the ground as you would a garden:
tenderly, with hope. Tilt water toward
your lips and open wide. What spills
is only an overflow of want and need
and this is a good sign, I promise.
Turn your face to the sky and submit
to the call for life – in spite of everything
undeterred and blinding.
The sun, each day,
is an uprising.

*

And Now, for My Next Trick

I will not scream when screamed at, or into the void

When everyone says we are in the handbasket, I will fill the laundry basket
with tiny socks and try not to lose one, or my mind

Everything may be burning but I will make dinner that doesn’t
for children who refuse to eat it anyway

I will sing them to sleep even though
I can’t carry a tune, or the weight of the world

When I worry, I will clench my teeth in the night without
clenching my fists when I wake

I will let go of fear and cling to hope,
put down my guilt and hold my children

For today, I will remember it is enough to be there for them
and, in spite of everything, to be here at all.

*

Not Everything Has to be a Poem

A plum could just be a plum. A window, glass –
not something to be opened to the breeze or
an opportunity seized. What you see is what you
get: the rocks in my pocket from my child are
just bits of dirty stone. While we’re at it, let me
tell her that dandelions have nothing to do with
a wish and pennies aren’t luck. She could grow
up calling the sunset red and orange instead of
a sky on fire and hearing birdsong as background
noise. None of it has to mean anything more.
But it could, right? We could take this life
and make it art.

*

Rachel Beachy lives in Kentucky with her husband and children. Her debut collection Tiny Universe will be published by Kelsay Books. Her poetry has also appeared in Ephemera, Freshwater, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Sky Island Journal, wildscape. literary journal, and others. She was shortlisted for the Central Avenue Poetry Prize 2026.

Two Poems by Gloria Heffernan

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Shopping for Sheets

100% Wrinkle Resistant
boasts the package of microfiber bed linens.
You pay extra for this feature
which promises a smooth surface,
but leaves your back sweaty
with microplastics that don’t breathe.

Bedtime is no time for resistance.
I move down the aisle to the cotton sheets
that will no doubt ball up in the dryer
and fit my bed like a 3-D map
of hills and valleys.

Wrinkled, but natural.
No artificial ingredients.
Cool in the summer,
warm in the winter.
Growing softer with time.

I take my purchase home
and wash the sheets before tucking them in
under my lumpy mattress.
As night falls, I feel no resistance
as I slide between the layers
of cool cotton fabric,
and rest in my wrinkles.

*

Love at First Sight

Forty years ago today
I looked through
the nursery window
and knew the tiny face
in the first row,
third from the left
was you.

To this day,
I don’t understand
how you made yourself known to me
in the midst of all the other babies
so indistinguishable from each other,
swaddled in their Lucite cradles
neatly arranged in even rows
like a dozen eggs in a carton,
identical in those first hours of life,
except for you whose face was yours
from the very first moment.

I don’t know what duet our DNA
sang to each other through the window.
I only know that when I looked,
I recognized you without a doubt,
the niece I would know
for the rest of my life.

A life story,
A love story,
that started with a glimpse
through the glass.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in Spring, 2025. Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. 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 work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

The Question by Sonya Rose Hartfield

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The Question

As my fertile years
fall away like
milk teeth, my
dentist asks me
again if I have kids.
“Only a fur baby,” I reply
for the second time,
promptly canceling my
next visit. My dog lies
against my womb, warm.
I photoshop his image into
ultrasound photos I show when
people ask if I have children.
“Here is my baby,” I tell them
rather than joke about
infertility, like a sociopath. In truth,
we just aren’t ready yet. I once did
a reiki session on my
sister’s womb, felt her baby
bright inside, like a nursery
nebula, felt wonder at the
kicks, as the baby became
more active, like a little
alien pushing to be
exorcised, but
still so beautiful.

*

Sonya Rose Hartfield is a poet and creative nonfiction writer who explores the intersection of femininity, chronic illness, somatic healing, poverty, and grief. She believes writing is a powerful vehicle for resilience and the radical act of reclaiming joy.

After All These Years by Gloria Heffernan

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After All These Years

In another room,
at the other end of the house,
my husband talks on the phone
for an hour with his ex-wife
discussing the joys and sorrows,
wonders and worries of their children,
the oldest of whom is fifty-four.

A frequent enough occurrence,
I have grown so accustomed
to their conversations
that I sometimes forget to marvel
at the way they navigate
the geography of family.

Even now, thirty years after they ceased
being husband and wife,
they have never stopped being curators
of what they co-created,
parents, separate but together,
like the coiled strands of DNA
that course through
the generations.

“Your divorce is better
than most marriages,” I tease,
when the three of us find ourselves
together at the holiday dinner table.
They laugh good-naturedly at the quip,
but it’s really not a joke.

It’s a testament to harmony,
to the way voices blend different notes
to create a more complex music.
I listen and am quietly awestruck as I think,
This is what peace sounds like.

*

Gloria Heffernan’s forthcoming book Fused will be published by Shanti Arts Books in Spring, 2025. Her craft book, Exploring Poetry of Presence (Back Porch Productions) won the 2021 CNY Book Award for Nonfiction. 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 work has appeared in over 100 publications including Poetry of Presence (vol. 2). To learn more, visit: www.gloriaheffernan.wordpress.com.

Three Poems by Joseph Fasano

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To the Insurance Executive Who Denied My Heart Procedure

You may not think it is worth it
but at night, in the dark
before morning,
my son lays his ear on my gnarled heart
and tells me it is beautiful music.
He doesn’t fathom
what you did to me,
that you’ve traded our days of playing
for a few small pieces of silver.
All he thinks
is my father’s heart is music.
I hear. I hear. I knew.
Ruler, the children
will outlive you.
I wish you
a long, long life of silences
while dreamers hear the living world is singing.
The one you have denied a life is you.

*

The Reckoning

All your life you’ve tried to prove
your beauty. You have handed over
the locked harp of your darkened heart,
believing love a shelter from immensity.
Alone, in the clothes of old ghosts,
you have touched the face
of the mirrors of childhood
like lakes that hold the gold rings
of the wronged.

Listen. It is time. It is time now.
You cannot live in two worlds forever.
Rise up
and walk the way of changes,
deep through the wilds
of childhood, deep
through the cities of the living,
and tap your hand on the great weight
of love’s door
and say it, say the proof
is useless.
Fall into the arms that hear your song.

*

Lazarus

You ask what death was like.
It was like falling into water
as water.
My father was a dark ship
falling through me,
loaded with plum-wine and honey.
My mother moved the sea of me,
its stars.

I tell you
the new life is permitted.
A hand comes
and lifts you by the fingers,
and there you are,
blinking in the morning light,
the graveclothes falling from your shoulders,
a soft touch saying
start again, start again.
This time be the miracle you are.

*

Joseph Fasano is the author of ten books, including The Last Song of the World (BOA Editions). His work has been widely anthologized and translated into more than a dozen languages. His honors include The Cider Press Review Book Award, The Wordview Prize from the Poetry Archive, and a nomination by Linda Pastan for the Poets’ Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living poet years prior to the award year.” He is the Founder of Fasano Academy, which offers instruction in several fields of study, including poetry, philosophy, and theology.

Dear Daughter, by Julie Weiss

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Dear Daughter,

I see you in the store, rummaging
through a display of tacky hibiscus
hairclips, our town´s new fad
among fourth graders. You ask me
which color bedazzles above
all the rest. I was nine once, too.
I know you want to buy the one
that will garner the most compliments
on the playground, or a nod from a girl
who swatted you out of her path
like a delirious September wasp.
I know the stings you´ll bring home
again and again, deem unbearable.
I see you, shushing me when I speak
too loudly in the language everyone
in Spain is trying to learn. Tweaking
your American accent in English class
to sound like your friends. I know
all the gifts you´ll toss in your closet,
the smile you´ll wipe off your cheeks
like a ruby red lipstick print
when I drop you off half a block
from the school gate. At your age
I, too, tried on seven different attitudes
a week, all of them as becoming
as an elephant beetle. I see the gluten-thick
birthday cakes you can´t taste,
the gapes when you mention your two
moms. I know how you regard your
differences—a weird gang of gargoyles
marring an otherwise beautiful garden.
I want to shout, “You´re wrong!”
Dear daughter, slam the fads
on the counter and tornado away. Wild
your hair into a style that will drop
this decade´s jaw. Catwalk through town
in a hodgepodge, expletives be damned.
Cartwheel past the gatekeepers like
a carnival act. Learn the word for perfection
in 7000 different languages.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay books, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II, published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, is forthcoming in 2025 with Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a 2023 finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja,” was named a finalist for the 2022 Saguaro Prize, and was shortlisted for Kissing Dynamite´s 2021 Microchap Series. Her work appears in Chestnut Review, ONE ART, Rust + Moth, and Sky Island Journal, among others. Originally from California, she lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at https://www.julieweisspoet.com/.

How (Not) to Die by Abby E. Murray

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How (Not) to Die

She says that today, during recess,
they played dying. Basically, she says,
dying is when all the kids crowd

onto the slide until someone falls
over its side, and you cling to the edge
because the chipped rubber turf below

is death. A friend has to save you,
she says, and if they fail—if you’re lost
to the ground despite the hands

of your friend outstretched—you die.
But, she adds, if you die, you get
to come back as a ghost, climb

up the slide, and pull the socks off
your friend. In other words, you get
to haunt the one who tried hardest

to prevent your demise, take a little
of their warmth with you, leave them
less complete than they were, set

a fraction of their own body beyond
their understanding. And this strikes me
as unfair before it registers as accurate

too—so true, in fact, that it explains
survivor’s guilt in a way that makes
humans seem reasonable. Every ghost

will have its due. No one who lives
will remain completely whole. Friends,
who needs dreams or the cryptic ways

of the unconscious mind when there are
children on playgrounds, processing
what it is to exist in a world built

only by hands that cannot survive
or save it? When I tell my daughter
what I, a grownup, think is fair in life

and death, she looks at me with the same
pity any god might show me, as if to say
thinking has only ever gotten us so far.

*

Abby E. Murray (they/them) is the editor of Collateral, a literary journal concerned with the impact of violent conflict and military service beyond the combat zone. Their book, Hail and Farewell, won the Perugia Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Abby served as the 2019-2021 poet laureate for the city of Tacoma, Washington, and currently teaches rhetoric in military strategy to Army War College fellows at the University of Washington.

Three Poems by Renee Williams

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Bad Boys and Johnny Cash

How many times can you listen
to Folsom Prison Blues
at the request of a whiny five-year-old,
on the drive home from a trip to Florida,
who’s forgotten her Tatters doll,
left at the hotel a hundred miles back,
who’s crying nonstop, still demanding
to listen to Johnny Cash,
stomping and slamming her sticky,
snot-encrusted fists against the back
of the head rest so many times
that everyone in the cars feels
like they are in prison and just wants
to toss her out on the highway?

My Dad caved, went back,
got the doll. Growing up, I’d
cut out photos of Cash,
and stick them on my bedroom walls
because I could never get enough
of the Man in Black.
Probably the start of something not good,
never any good…

My father is to blame for all of this,
for indulging me
and introducing me to motorcycles
and dragging me on the back
of that dilapidated dirt bike
into Snake Holler and having it break down
on us when we ran out of gas
and had to walk home,
Walk of Shame, clean home
to Mom, who wasn’t amused,
just wanting us to wash
off the mud, so we could
have a proper dinner.

The flurry of bad boys hit
until I straight up married a proper fellow,
who became an accountant and had tax season,
but I just wanted to party, so I found
a better one, the love of my life.

We married, and he got a bike,
and then several more,
multiplying like rabbits.
He even got me one
for my own self.

But I couldn’t tell Dad.
Because I knew he’d be jealous,
because he couldn’t ride anymore,
because he thought I was getting
CPR training to save his life,
when I was really taking
my motorcycle safety class.

But I wasn’t there
when the CPR was needed.

When I go to see Dad now,
I’m greeted by Hoss,
the sexton’s Old English bulldog pup,
who nearly knocks me down
with his 70 pounds of bad boy exuberance,
the therapy dog for the ones
who still have imprisoned pulses
who still have teary blues
who still have tattered hearts
walking among the headstones.

*

Unmoored

They say that grief comes in waves,
but I find it lapping at my feet
as ocean waves tease the shore,
ripples small and steady for so long,
until one plows into me,
nearly knocking me off my feet.

Bobbing like a buoy in rough surf
I’m staggering through this life
no longer chained to commitments
and now I don’t know what to do.
Maybe the saddest thing in the world
is a caregiver
who no longer
has anyone to care for.

Tears won’t stop no matter how I try,
but lies come easily.
Everyone will believe I’m just suffering
from those darned allergies, right,
or maybe raging sinuses?
It’s been over a month.
Shouldn’t I be moving on by now?

I seek messages and meaning
in feathers and foliage,
creatures and constellations.
And I am left
as befuddled as I was
when my feet hit the floor
this morning.

*

We Know You Here

Our priest asks us to step into the light,
not to hide in the darkness.
I understand the metaphor,
but the reality horrifies me.
I recoil.

The sun, beautiful muse of goodness,
is not where I belong.
Please leave me here in the dark
and let the messages
come to me. In the shaded woods
illuminated only by moonlight
I am comforted, nurtured, restored.
Deer peek at me from the brush
eyes aflame, yet they do not fear me.
The chorus of spring peepers reminds me
this is my home. Safety is here.
Yes, coyotes prowl these hills at night
but they, too, will avoid me.
Ancient opossums traipse through the lawn
and sometimes a raccoon or rabbit or two
may join them. Nuisances, annoyances,
problems to so many, but here, they have a place.

I dance with Luna moths,
letting them light on my fingertips,
precious butterflies of the night.
Stay with me, I urge them.
The light is not your friend.
It will hurt you as it has me
mutilating and maiming.

But the sunlight beckons me forth
the highest card in the Tarot
the child astride a stallion
beams of light surrounding him.
I am drawn to that beacon of warmth.
I want to bask in those soothing rays.
But it’s an illusion.

I step back into the night and breathe.
Crisp night air fills my lungs.
Stars fall from the sky, as if offering me gifts
to welcome me home.
Stay, they tell me.
We know you here.

*

Renee Williams is from Nelsonville, Ohio. She is a retired English instructor whose poetry has appeared in Of Rust and Glass, Alien Buddha Press zines, Verse-Virtual, Deep South Magazine, Panoply, Impspired, Sein und Werden, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Amethyst Review, The New Verse News, and Beatnik Cowboy among others. She has written interviews and concert reviews for Guitar Digest, as well. Her photography has been featured in the Corolla Wild Horse Fund calendars, the Santa Fe Review, Moss Piglet, Anti-Heroin Chic, Swim Press, Lumineire as well as several others. She enjoys spending time with her family and dogs; she takes orders from her cranky cat who bosses her around daily.

Two Poems by Jean Voneman Mikhail

~ ONE ART ~ 5 Comments

Breath

Tent of my kid pitched in the backyard,
blown over, collapsing in on himself.
Tent stake through his heart.

I’ve left him to the rain, again,
grass blades stuck to his back,
huffing a billowy paper bag of breath.

A baggie of cut triangular sandwiches.
A baggie of blow. A baggie of weed.
Holy trinity of school lunches.

I have fed him to live to build
fingers for sandwiches and fiddle.
I have opened his Oreo black eyes

when they wouldn’t open.
I’ve unscrewed the lids,
and looked into the frosted eye whites

and scraped him of sweetness.
I fear I’ve made a mess of him.

I gave him sippy cups with blow holes.
Juice boxes with snorting straws.
Straws to stick up a turtle’s nose.

Once, he cared about
all the animals.

He cried for the neighbor’s kitten dead
in winter, fed on snowy moonlit milk.

He wanted the world to be kinder.

Is there any way to save him, now,
from chasing that washed up baggie
turning inside out in the waves

long ago down a stretch of beach,
a baggie filled with ocean water,
safety locked, zipped full of air?
His breath.

* 

LGLG

Dear God, with your capital G,
I see what you’re up to,
counting bodies down in Portsmouth,

Ohio, of all places to leave him.
God, listen to me, you can’t
have him all to yourself in an alley.

Your wrought iron doors,
windowless eyes bricked in,
having ceased watching over him,
haven’t you? How

would I ever know? Quietly,
cable wires cross this city,
trains rock themselves
to sleep at the end of the line.

But where is he, where is my son?

If he must die, if he must die,
how with dignity, how—
with forgiveness, how without shame?
How do I keep him from death
if death is what he chooses?

Should I lie down with him
and die, too, on the crescent moon
sidewalk of what was to be
our first total solar eclipse,

For my son, for my son’s life,
I’d give just about anything
except what I can no longer give.
No shelter. No food. No more.

God, no.

What kind of insanity is this?
Let go, let God. LGLG.
Give me a break.
I’ve given enough.

*

Jean Voneman Mikhail lives in Athens, Ohio, where she first came to study for a Masters in Creative Writing. Many years and a few kids later, she now writes more than ever. She has published in Sheila Na Gig Online, The Northern Appalachian Review, Pudding Magazine and other poetry journals and anthologies.

The Muse Commands by Tamara Madison

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Muse Commands

We stop at the end of the pier,
where the full moon spreads its path
across the sea. Our little son gasps
at the sight, claps his hands, looks up at us
and says in a voice that is like a swoon
I want to draw that! I have to draw that now!

I know the feeling. We hurry to the market
before it closes, buy the only art supplies there.
Back at the hotel he sets to work, pink tongue
peeking from the corner of his mouth.
But crayons and rough paper are not enough
to capture his sense of it, the way the moon
stroked the water like a mother.

And I remember the time my brother
found me writing and insisted I share
my poem with him. Who could be closer
to you than me, your own brother?
Because he was older, I handed it over.
He read it silently, then left the room.
I read it again, but the feeling was gone.

*

Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbooks “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions) and “Along the Fault Line” (Picture Show Press), and three full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic” and “Moraine” (Pearl Editions) and “Morpheus Dips His Oar (Sheila-Na-Gig). Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, the Worcester Review, A Year of Being Here, One Art, 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.

I CAN’T BE THE ONE by Phyllis Cole-Dai

~ ONE ART ~ 3 Comments

I CAN’T BE THE ONE

to welcome you home, but when you arrive
tonight, the faithful trees keeping watch
in the yard curl their toes in pleasure, and all
the doors of the house throw their arms wide
to receive you, and all the curtains draw apart
to lighten the dark as you enter, and all
the chairs scrape back from the kitchen table,
bidding you to sit, and the stew ladles itself
into a bowl beside the candle that lit its own wick
for joy, and the crusty loaf breaks itself open,
to rest upon the wooden board for a dab
of butter, of jam, of honey, any sweetness you
might desire, and each empty bed turns down
its sheets and plumps up its pillows, hoping
to hold you in your sleep—while in one lonely
corner, hugging the wall, the patient piano
waits her turn, soft ache in her taut strings,
ready to play every loving song she’s learned
between the last time you left and this return.

                      for my son, Nathan

*

Phyllis Cole-Dai is a multi-genre writer in South Dakota, soon to relocate to Maryland. The author of more than a dozen books, she co-edited both volumes of the popular anthologies of mindfulness poems. Poetry of Presence. Learn more about her work at her website (phylliscoledai.com). Join The Raft, her online community, and ride the river of the creative life, buoyed by the arts and open spirituality (phylliscoledai.substack.com)

What I’m Thinking About this Morning by Valerie Bacharach

~ ONE ART ~ 2 Comments

What I’m Thinking About this Morning

That I have outlived my younger son.

That when I rise, the tendon
or ligament or muscle
behind my left knee hurts,
which makes me think about my mother
and her arthritic knees.

That the holidays hold too many memories, too many ghosts.

That my older son has outlived his brother,
and I worry about his grief,
but don’t ask because then he worries
about mine, and my husband
doesn’t ask because he too worries.
All this unshared grief
will crush us, flatten us,
so we move in quiet shadows
around each other.

That I am so tired, even after sleeping through the night.

That my husband moans
in his dreams, despairing,
searching for ways
to alter time,
bend it,
plant a different ending.

*

Valerie Bacharach’s book, Last Glimpse, will be published by Broadstone Books. Her chapbook After/Life will be published by Finishing Line Press. Her poem Birthday Portrait, Son, published by the Ilanot Review, was selected for inclusion in 2023 Best Small Fictions. Her poem Shavli has been nominated for Best of the Net 2023 and a Pushcart Prize by Minyan Magazine. Her poem Deadbolt has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by RockPaperPoem.

‘Aubade For My 18-Year-Old Son As I Wonder What He Will Do With His Life Besides Playing Video Games’ by Susan Michele Coronel

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Aubade For My 18-Year-Old Son As I Wonder What He Will Do With His Life Besides Playing Video Games

He says college is a waste of time,
& maybe it’s true if it takes ten hours
to write a paragraph about why college
is valuable. The irony. But he stays up
all night to make a hundred bucks helping
others level up on Destiny. I want him to
level up in life, but the keyboard is glued
to his fingers, mouse clicking like termites
scratching under the floor. Brain pulses
confine him to his room, warmed not by
electricity or the moon’s afterglow, but
by dopamine hits every game bestows. The sun
streams in, but can’t interrupt the divine blue
that soothes, that affirms I know, I know.

*

Susan Michele Coronel was nominated twice for a Pushcart. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including Spillway 29, TAB Journal, Inflectionist Review, Gyroscope Review, Prometheus Dreaming, and Thimble. Her first full-length manuscript was a finalist in Harbor Editions’ 2021 Laureate Prize. She lives in New York City with her children.

One Poem by Leigh Chadwick

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Millennial Poem or: How I Learned to Stop Drinking Starbucks and Wait Patiently for My Parents to Die so I Can Cash in on My Inheritance

I put another avocado in my safety deposit box.
I sell my plasma and save half the cookie
the nurse gives me for breakfast the next morning.
I am poor and so are you and if you’re not poor
then who did you kill. My loans have loans.
My daughter is growing up to be a history
lesson in debt. I own a house and I don’t
know why. Soon I will not own a house
and I will know exactly why. I’ve never eaten
avocado toast but I drink milk without the lactose
and it’s like forty-two cents more a gallon
than regular milk. I type stock market into
Google Maps. It takes me to a set of train tracks.
I park my car in the middle of the tracks, turn
off the engine and wait.

*

Leigh Chadwick is the author of the chapbook, Daughters of the State (Bottlecap Press, 2021), the poetry coloring book, This Is How We Learn How to Pray (ELJ Editions, 2021), and the full-length collection, Wound Channels (ELJ Edition, 2022). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Heavy Feather Review, Indianapolis Review, and Olney Magazine, among others. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.

My Heart is a Shattered Windshield by Victoria Melekian

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My Heart is a Shattered Windshield

Four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, I’ve driven
three hours to a Best Western in the crappy part of town
for my son’s doctor appointment in the morning.
The desk clerk asks if I’m here on business or pleasure.

I look at the mangled Von’s grocery cart in the empty parking lot
through smudges on the glass lobby door. “Pleasure,” I say,
but the truth is neither. Untreated, my son’s life expectancy
is two point eight years. His disease can be managed,

but not cured, and the cost of medication is near impossible.
The truth is we’ve waited thirteen months for insurance
approval to see this specialist. The truth is I’m a howling
windstorm of fear—my boy is thirty-seven, not even middle aged.

I don’t yet know there is hope, that tomorrow the doctor will reach
into a drawer and toss my son a six-thousand-dollar miracle drug,
a bottle of pills lobbed across his desk like a red and yellow
beach ball sailing through a shimmering summer sky.

*

Victoria Melekian lives in Carlsbad, California where the weather is almost always perfect. She writes poetry and short fiction. You can read her work here: www.victoriamelekian.com

After My Father Died by Sara Backer

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After My Father Died

I longed to spend time with him in a dream
but over two years passed without one. I’m afraid I’ll forget
how he whistled Cole Porter and the way he squeezed
his eyes when he stuttered on Ws. When a dream came at last,
I heard his voice—but couldn’t see him.
I looked around: an outdoor festival, stage tents, musicians.
My sister waited in one of the tents. My father, invisible,
said I could continue to hear him or I could be with my sister.
The choice was presented like chicken or fish—no other options,
I couldn’t have both, and it was up to me.
I looked beyond stages to overlapping hills streaked with mist.
Too far to see, I knew a weighty ocean rolled indifferent through its tides.
Nothing more was voiced. As I walked to the tent,
I saw my sister’s thick blue sweater on the seat beside her,
saved for me.

*
Sara Backer’s first book of poetry, Such Luck (Flowstone Press 2019) follows two poetry chapbooks: Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press) and Bicycle Lotus which won the 2015 Turtle Island chapbook award. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Art and reads for The Maine Review. Recent publications include The Pedestal Magazine, Tar River Poetry, Slant, CutBank and Kenyon Review.

It Takes a Calculator to Count the Dead by Leigh Chadwick

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It Takes a Calculator to Count the Dead

The sun bakes an island on the concrete.
I wake up to the smell of sulfur.
The magnolias in the yard are refusing to bloom.
I never know where to rest my hands anymore.
Between starting this poem on a Friday
and finishing it on a Monday, there have been
at least eleven more mass shootings.
I consider praying, but I was never taught how.
I dress my daughter in camouflage
and carry her from room to room. I tell her,
I’m sorry I brought you into this.
I tell her, Pretend a miracle is on its way.
I tell her, Maybe this is how we
learn how to pray.

Leigh Chadwick’s poetry and prose has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Milk Candy Review, Olney Magazine, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and Bear Creek Gazette, among others. Her debut poetry collection, Wound Channels, will be published by ELJ Editions in February of 2022. Find her on Twitter at @LeighChadwick5.

One Poem by Patricia Davis-Muffett

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What to do with your grief
       for Dionne, June 2020

Butter. Sugar. Flour. Salt.
I am doing what I know.

Nineteen, I call my mother crying:
“I can’t make the pie crust work,”
“Come home,” she says. “We’ll fix it.”
The ice in the water,
the fork used to mix,
the way she floured the board.
It’s chemistry, yes–
but also this:
the things you pass
from hand to hand.

9/11. Child dropped at preschool.
Traffic grinds near the White House.
A plane overhead. The Pentagon burns.
The long trek home to reclaim our child.
We are told to stay in. I venture out.
Blueberries to make a pie.

My mother, so sick. Not hungry.
For a time, she is tempted by pies.
I bring them long after taste flees.

New baby. Death. Any crisis.
I do what my mother taught me.
Butter. Sugar. Flour. Salt.
I bring this to you–this work of my hands,
this piece of my day, this sweetness,
all I can offer.

Today, Minneapolis burns
And sparks catch fire in New York,
Atlanta, here in DC.
My friend’s voice says
what I know but can’t know:
“This is my fear every time they leave me.”
Three beautiful sons, brilliant, alive.
I have little to offer. I do what I know.

*

Patricia Davis-Muffett (she/her) holds an MFA from the University of Minnesota. She was a 2020 Julia Darling Poetry Prize finalist and received First Honorable Mention in the 2021 Joe Gouveia OuterMost Poetry Contest. Her work has appeared in Limestone, Coal City Review, Neologism, The Orchards, One Art, Pretty Owl Poetry, di-verse-city (anthology of the Austin International Poetry Festival), The Blue Nib and Amethyst Review, among others. She lives in Rockville, Maryland, with her husband and three children and makes her living in technology marketing.

Two Poems by Nicole Caruso Garcia

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In Praise of Gray

My graying hair, for now, is free of dye.
There’s darkness plenty in my alibi,
No rage against the youth-obsessed. (I’m vain.)

       I’ve reached the age my mother was if she’d been
       Roused from sleep to go identify
       My body, had I bled it. In sterile light,
       She would have clutched my father as they cried,
       Their firstborn’s hair forever chestnut brown.

My graying hair—
Hurrah!— it grows more wiry and defiant,
A crown to celebrate and testify
I’m here. And though I never can atone
For the crush of dawn they’d nearly known,
Just look: the sunlight can’t deny
My graying hair.

*

Easy Money

The mother made a point of telling me
that she would leave for work before the dad.
Before he left for work, we’d be alone.
So what? I’d been alone with dads before.
They’d drive me home and wave goodbye.

Easy money, and I knew the drill:
Just watch the kids. Give piggybacks.
Cut crust off PBJs. Tie shoes.
No diaper changing. Kids both potty-trained.
Braid Barbie’s hair and settle squabbles.

The mom and dad stood opposite the sofa,
gestured, Sit. The standard interview,
except arm’s length from where I sat there was
a year of Playboy fanned out on the table.
A cache of skin mags spread out like hors d’oeuvres

unnerves. Like bath time in the Barbie Dreamhouse,
there lay a mansionful of plastic flesh tones,
soaped and oiled. Act casual, I thought.
This was not my parents’ coffee table—
not Family Circle, Road & Track.

The summer of the naked harbingers.
I’d seen the whisper-pouts of lacquered mouths
and faintly heard them: Run.

*

Nicole Caruso Garcia is Associate Poetry Editor at Able Muse and a Board member at Poetry by the Sea: A Global Conference. Her poems appear in Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Light, Measure, Mezzo Cammin, PANK, Plume, The Raintown Review, Rattle, RHINO, Sonora Review, Spillway, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Visit her at nicolecarusogarcia.com.

Replacements by Robert Carr

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Replacements

I can’t do a dog, so my son’s first pet at my house
is a goldfish he names Zippy. I decorate the glass lung
of our separation. In the kitchen, orange circles –

flamingo pink pea gravel lines the bowl. Fake ferns
and a treasure chest hide a bottom feeder, the dull sucker
keeps it clean. Zippy tends to die on Fridays.

The sucker lives forever, but doesn’t have a name.
Because my son is with me twice a week,
I run out to replace Zippies before his next visit.

Whenever one goes belly up, double fins whitened
at the ends, I do my best to match the latest fish,
pray my boy won’t notice. Before we sit for supper,

Noah always asks to visit his fish friend.
I sit him on the counter, How’s Daddy doing, Zippy?
On Zippy number four, Noah cries out Daddy, look!

Zippy has a black spot on his nose! I gaze through
the far side, over a pink stone carpet. Wow! Some things
can’t be explained, I answer: He must be growing up.

*

Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published in 2016 by Indolent Books and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length 2019 collection from 3: A Taos Press. Among other publications his poetry appears in the American Journal of Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Rattle, Shenandoah and Tar River Poetry. Robert is a poetry editor with Indolent Books and recently retired from a career as Deputy Director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Additional information can be found at robertcarr.org