Tag: death

Farewell with Potato Blight and Moose by Kathy Nelson

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Farewell with Potato Blight and Moose

I’m no good at saying goodbye.
Not to the water aerobics ladies bobbing
in that cool blue—I give a vague wave
to no one in particular, hoisting myself

up the ladder. Not to the boss
who told me he wished he had five more
like me. Not to my aunt the last time
I saw her alive. I chirped See you later

as she cried, knowing I lied. My father
grew cold on the bathroom floor,
behind the locked door,
while my fingers fumbled the rotary dial,

the ambulance already too late,
the setting sun’s angles stretching
across a blank wall.
I was seventeen. It was December.

The low winter sun is what I recall.
My mother’s last hours, the other end
of my life, I thought I’d finally
learned how to say goodbye.

I even practiced the words
in that overheated room,
where her bones were already lifting
from her flesh, and on the sill

an electric fan whirred.
I droned on just like that fan,
thanking her for all she’d done for me,
promising I would always miss her.

It wasn’t Goodbye, all those words
I said. It was I’m innocent.
Maybe the first loss, the worst,
the biggest grief of all is innocence.

Truth is, when her breath ceased,
I was a helium balloon released.
When my friend, over an untouched lunch,
whispered her news, two kinds

of cancer, the diagnoses arriving
like twins. I felt it then—
the straining for escape, the wish
for a magic trick, like Teller’s

or Houdini’s, to overcome death.
Moving west at 70, explaining
the need to be closer to family,
I pretended I’m not dying too.

Doesn’t moving always have its appeal?
My Irish ancestors fled potato blight,
their sights on milk and honey.
Who, I wonder, did they leave behind?

A heart can grow wooden with loss,
like a creaky old wind-up clock
grinding its gears, a machine, chiming
on schedule and ticking, ticking.

I knew a man once whose daughter
would no longer see him
after he told her he was dying.
She’s not angry he told me.

She loves me. She’s young.
It’s too hard to bear.
I too tried forgetting my father.
Twenty years after the day

I didn’t save him, my life by then
a small room of locked doors,
I crept back, unraveled and
empty-handed, to the cemetery.

Among the green mounds,
I scoured the headstones for his name.
Will I leave this world with nothing
and no one left to lose, or will I

leave it the way I leave one room,
arrive in the next with no idea
what I came there for? My friend,
her cancer three months in remission,

climbed a stepstool, lost her balance,
fell. Three days later, she was dead.
Is that how I’ll leave? Or like
a thirteen-pound terrier mix,

witless and resolute, churning
his short legs up a mountainside,
chasing a half-ton moose, heeding
only instinct and the body’s will?

Or will I leave the way I left
that job, regretting almost
everything, wishing for someone
to call me back, beg me to stay?

*

Kathy Nelson lives on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains. She is a James Dickey Prize winner, a finalist for the Orison Best Spiritual Literature Prize in Poetry, an MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, and a Nevada Arts Council grant recipient. She is author of The Ledger of Mistakes (Terrapin Books). Her work appears in About Place Journal; Atlanta Review; Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art; New Ohio Review; Pedestal Magazine; Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review; Verse Daily, and elsewhere.

Hunger by Valerie Bacharach

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Hunger

Years ago, shortly after our younger son died, my husband and I, on a trip to D.C., visited the National Gallery. Caravaggio and Monet vied for wall space with Klimt and O’Keefe while other rooms held marble statues and religious icons. We pretended to look, to scan the commentaries,
pretended we set aside sadness, left grief on the hotel’s unmade bed. My eyes wandered to families with bored teenagers, with toddlers sliding on tiled floors, tugging a parent’s hand, standing too close to a painting. Our son was neither toddler nor teenager, but a man of 26. Once upon a time, before we moved into darkness, we brought our sons here, ran after them, bribed them with treats, tried to speak with them about old masterpieces. I stared at those families surrounding us, fencing us in with their happiness, followed them from room to room, hollowed with a hunger so huge it could swallow the heavens.

*

Valerie Bacharach lives in Pittsburgh, PA and is a proud member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Workshops. She received her MFA from Carlow University in 2020. Her book, Last Glimpse, was published by Broadstone Books in August 2024. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net.

Two Poems by Anna Lowe Weber

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Elegy Before Death

It’s hard to remember and strange comfort:
when you’re gone, truly gone,
you won’t miss us at all. You won’t miss
anything. The dog’s soft jowl. Tomato pie.
A summer night’s slide into clean sheets,
that cold bliss to the feet. None of it.

My aunt, in touch with a medium
after the death of my other aunt—
she claims that her sound system
lit up with static chaos on election night.
That was Lisa—pissed about Trump.

And we shrug and nod; everyone grieves
in their own way. Believe what you need
to believe. See your loved ones in
cardinals, and hummingbirds, and hawks,
that flash of wing or song somehow
proof that they haven’t gone
after all.

But really— can you think
of anything worse for the dead?
Still concerned with that turkey
from beyond the grave? Still going off
about the everyday shit of living?

I hope you miss nothing.
Go, and do not come back.
Go, and be whatever you will be,
utterly apart from us.

A spray of galaxy debris, unfurling.
Matter disintegrated like glitter
on the floor of a distant planet’s
raging sea.

*

How terrible to bear it

The possibility that it could all be okay.
Sure, an illusion. Smoke puff, fog

blanketing the glass top of a lake
while creatures still shudder terribly

under the surface. Everything is subjective,
including hope. Especially hope.

But— it felt real, too.
Something you might tease out of the skin

and examine under dawn’s natural light.
Drag it outside to see all its flaws,

the wrinkles and puckers; the sun-freckled
arm of a hard-earned life. The stub of a leg.

A cane, tap tap tapping. A breath. A goodbye.

*

Anna Lowe Weber, originally from Louisiana, lives in Huntsville, Alabama, where she teaches at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Her poetry and fiction has been published in the Iowa Review, South Carolina Review, Gargoyle, Tar River Poetry, and the Idaho Review, among other journals.

Five Poems by Andrea Potos

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THE FRIENDSHIP

The week
when she wrote:

You and I will
explore Truth together,

my heart
signed on instantly:

Yes,
though nothing followed–

they were words
only, after all;

I who am one who believes
in words, words

have rescued my life, after all.
Some say words are cheap;

I say, they
are costlier than you know.

*

SADNESS IS ON ITS WAY

I can hear the foghorns,
skies a drizzled mist,
clouds sodden
with grey weight
as if with so much
to let go of,
so much to say.

*

THE MOMENT I SENSED MY MOTHER WAS LEAVING

Standing in the mist-
drizzled green of Connemara,
the Wild Atlantic Way thousands of miles
from my mother in the rehab home,
I called to make sure she knew
I’d be back in four days.
I needed to ask her
how she was that morning– her voice
weakened and crackling across the vastness–
Just fair, she said,
Unable, for the first time in my life,
to offer the reassurance
for the daughter she loved so well-
it was then I knew.

*

WHEN MY WIDOWER NEIGHBOR INVITES ME
TO COME AND TAKE WHATEVER I WANT
FROM HIS WIFE’S WARDROBE

Three dressing rooms of voluminous wonder,
ballroom gowns, brocaded jackets
and scarves, leather purses and shoes,
and dressers filled with nightwear and tops.
I browsed and lingered, stayed for nearly an hour.
When I opened the deepest mahogany drawer, I found
a pale pink sweater, cloud-soft,
patterned all over with lipstick prints.
I thought of my mother, all the years
of her beloved Revlon shades.
I might have felt her then
tap my shoulder: Here is some love
from me honey–take it–
and I did.

*

WHEN OUR FAVORITE RESTAURANT CLOSES
         for Mom

Though you’ve been gone
nearly ten years now,
I’d drive the eighty miles
to go there–the glass doors still
opening for both of us.
I’d order our coffee
in their thick ceramic mugs,
then slices of their legendary
blueberry pie for take-home–
heaping with plump berries,
no crust on top, cold, with clouds
of whipped cream for later.
Each bite would remind me.
Now I must find
another place for us–
I want a location to point to,
to say, here, Mom, let’s go together,
I’ll pick you up at noon.

*

Andrea Potos is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Two Emilys (Kelsay Books) and Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press). A new collection entitled The Presence of One Word is forthcoming later in 2025. Recent poems can be found in CALYX Journal, Presence, New York Times Book Review, Earth’s Daughters, and Poem. You can find her at andreapotos.com

Two Poems by John S. Eustis

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The Death Game

A couple of guys at work liked to play the Death Game.
The rules were simple. Whenever someone famous died—
like a musician, actor, or politician—the first person
to hear the news would dial his friend’s cell phone.
As soon as the call was answered, the caller uttered
the name of the deceased, then immediately hung up.

They didn’t keep any kind of score, it was just a way
of showing who was more in touch, or had quicker reflexes.
The news had to be delivered in real time right to the ear.
Leaving a message was not allowed, as there was no way
to determine who was first with the ghoulish news.
Nor was there any conversation beyond the person’s name.

Although the game could easily be adapted to texting,
it just wouldn’t be the same as hearing Death’s human voice.

*

The House We Almost Bought

I drive by it now and then
to remind myself how different
life would be right now if we
had gone through with it.
Tina absolutely wanted to buy
and was willing to bid above
the asking price, but I said no.

Our marriage was in trouble
and purchasing a house would not
have helped the situation. Instead,
it would have simply added the stress
of a huge debt to our already fragile
circumstance. Less than a year later
we were moving into our divorce,
and she was physically moving
to a new apartment. I stayed
in the house we rented, which I
could barely afford at the time.

If we had bought that property,
we would have inevitably had to
sell it and both look for places.
Or worse, I would have ended up
buying her a house. Probably not,
but you can never be too sure.

*

John S. Eustis is a retired librarian living in Virginia with his wife, after a long, quiet federal career. His poetry has appeared in One Art, Atlanta Review, Gargoyle, North Dakota Quarterly, Pirene’s Fountain, Sheila-Na-Gig, Slipstream, & Tar River Poetry.

Waiting for My Medicine by Judy Kronenfeld

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Waiting for My Medicine

In the pharmacy a man sits down across from me,
dragging a long green tube of oxygen
on little wheels; it looks like a torpedo on one of those
collapsible shopping carts or luggage carriers.

He’s got transparent tubing stapling
his nostrils, like the fangs of a snake,
but, as if leaning over a fence, nattering,
he strikes up a conversation with another customer.
He’s not out of breath. He laughs. He jokes.

I want him to stay like that, talking unthroatily,
his long still young legs blazing in front of him,
to prove that things aren’t always
how they seem. But he hears his name.
He shuffles to the pharmacist’s window,
takes out his wallet, shakes his head.
“Costs a hell of a lot to die,” he says.

*

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, 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).

Mango Languages by John Arthur

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Mango Languages

on his deathbed he lay
learning Italian one phrase
at a time from a free app
I downloaded for him
from the public library.

my daughter asked him why
learn something new now, grandpa?
what’s the point?
I think you mean perché he said
and that was his final word.

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. He is the 2025 Grand Prize winner of The Poetry Box’s chapbook contest for Lucy the Elephant Wins in a Landslide, which will be released early in 2026. His work has appeared in Rattle, DIAGRAM, Failbetter, trampset, ONE ART, Frogpond, and many other places.

Two Poems by Christina Daub

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People are Dying, But

I’m in my fifties when the officer informs me,
houses are for kissing, not parks and especially
not parks after dark, never mind that’s where
the moonlight and the stars hang out. She bores
her blinding headlights into us and barks,
are you clothed, why are your seats reclined,
what are you doing–we terrible criminals trying
to steal a little romance under Orion and Mars.
She demands to know where we live and why
we don’t go home, because houses are for kissing,
she repeats, as if I’d never thought I might kiss
you over the sink, or while paused in the doorway
handing you a book. Never mind the loveseat,
the corners, or the infamous nooks. As if I’d never
imagined the whole house being one big kisseria,
because that’s how it is when you’re in love
and want to kiss everywhere. But it’s a rough
night for the thin-lipped park policewoman
who looks like she hasn’t kissed in years, she
with the deadest beat, her short arm of the law
stretching only from her high beams to random
parked cars, as she makes her rounds in Rock Creek
Park, driving from playground to playground after dark.

*

Grief is like that

the plovers ticking this way and that, threading
the shore with their disappearing tracks,
the waves relentless, lulling, the wake
as temporary as our own wakes will be.

When they took your body away, the quarters
that weighed your eyes shut dropped
to the floor. No one wanted to touch them.

Cards stacked up by the hothouse flowers.
We’d held it together all day. Then the sky broke
open, and we were gutted like fish. Someone
brought over ice cream. I don’t remember who.

*

Christina Daub is a poet from Maryland. Her poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Stone Circle Review and others. She has been a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee.

15 by Clint Margrave

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15

Your death is a teenager now.
Your death has acne,
is insecure,
has possibly even kissed someone.

In another year, your death
can get its driver’s license.
And after that,
your death will graduate high school
and I’ll have to ask it
if it ever plans to move out
and find a place to live.

But your death knows
it isn’t going anywhere.
Your death knows it’ll
stay here no matter
how much I try to kick it out.

Your death has mostly
been a good guest,
quiet, respectful,
staying out of my way
especially now that it’s older,
to the point where sometimes
I almost forget it’s there,
unlike the infant who used
to kick and scream
and keep me up all night.

Your death stays in its room
with the door shut
most of the time now,
like I used to do to you
when I was a teenager,

when I’d threaten to kill myself,
and light candles in my room,
sit on the floor,
thinking about how lonely I was,
your death, I’m sure,
is lonely too.

*

Clint Margrave is the author of several books of fiction and poetry, including the poetry collections Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and Visitor, all from NYQ Books. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Sun, Rattle, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. He is currently a 2024-2025 U.S. Fulbright Scholar living in Sofia, Bulgaria. When not abroad, he lives in Los Angeles, CA.

There’s Always Something by Carlin Corsino

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There’s Always Something

            After his near death experience,
Al Pacino confirms “there’s nothing there” after we die –
            “you’re gone”

He confirms as if
we’d all already agreed
the afterlife didn’t rock a little bit
like a chair on the porch
of a country store, air
smelling softly of apple spice
straw brooms and the candle
whose wax drips slowly
onto the floor pressing
its seal on the stamped
envelope of our lives. As if
we all already believe that
when we depart we will not
enter a foyer and hear
a knock when answered
the stomping heels
of flamenco dancers
and brass band
hung brightly all night above
us like string lanterns.
How may we believe you,
carte blanche, Al Pacino
who visited death
like a factory tour
and returned like a door
to door salesman peddling
an end to the miracle akin
to that nothing of when
we were children hiding
quietly under old blankets
in grandmother’s attic so long
we feared they forgot about us
in that pitch black as lungs
filled with must and all
we could hear was that empty
suck in the walled pipes
as the last little bit of liquid
light slipped in its vortex
down the claw foot tub of life.
So how can we believe you, Al
because even that nothing
was something, right?

*

Carlin Corsino is a poet from North Carolina who writes about the everyday and absurdities of American life. They are recently featured or forthcoming in 3ELEMENTS and KAKALAK.

Life Span by Ann E. Michael

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Life Span

Isn’t it a fine strange thing
how little information we can glean
about our future surely-numbered days?
How many snowfalls? How many
restless nights, or long drives
to how many friends’ homes?
Is it possible to count
the scores of leaves that fell
in each of the witnessed autumns?
Can these be measured: the light
sun shower that startles midday,
fox leaping like a lamb in the meadow,
someone’s recording of Rigoletto
distantly woven into the drone
of a diesel engine?

We are born and find that we live
in a world of water-bears and
wolverines, tire irons and railroad
tracks, shale, gas, stem cells,
sycamore trees. We categorize.
We kiss. We weather our own climate,
mark out our joys. We span everything
resembling a ravine, pleased with our
ingenuity. And then comes death,
which, like the hermit thrush,
has whistled all along, half-hidden,
as though it knew a fine strange thing.

*

Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her book The Red Queen Hypothesis won the 2022 Prairie State Poetry Prize; she’s the author of Water-Rites (2012) and six chapbooks. She is a hospice volunteer, writing tutor, and chronicler of her own backyard who maintains a long-running blog at https://annemichael.blog/

 

Three Poems by Michelle Meyer

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We Were Just Getting to Know Each Other

And then you died.
It was September. When I saw you
in April we put on your dresses,
adorned our bare necks
with your handmade scarves
and drove, windows down,
to a concert.
Before we left
I took your picture.
You were seated
in the dining room
looking out the window,
face turned, legs crossed,
the sun, a halo
circling your body.
There was one photo that you liked
best. In it, your image was blurred,
hazy around the edges, faint
as your ghost.

*

The Way It Is

I’m running. It’s the anniversary
of my mother’s death
and I’m a few miles out when I stop
to take in the view.
Somewhere I hear a rooster crowing
and somewhere else a siren
is wailing.

My Grandma used to smoke Marlboro’s,
drink Manhattan’s and say,
That’s the way it is. A lazy answer
to her bruises, the world’s bruises,
but then again, she could only bear to live
in the moment and in those moments
she wasn’t wrong.

I run further, see a purple morning glory
blooming near a discarded styrofoam cup,
an overstory of green shimmering
above an understory of brown.
There is a visible line
where the chemicals end, where life hovers
above death.

Everything is straddling some kind of line.

Mom is dead. Grandma is dead.
The tiny, nearly translucent spider
that I squashed with the tip of my thumb
is dead.
I had no right.
I am full of shame
but that’s the way it is.

* 

The Question of Whether or Not We Should Sell Our House

One day it feels like we should
and the next day it feels like we shouldn’t.
We speak of the pros and cons,
but logic has never lived here.
This is a place of romance and charm
say all of the eager realtors
whose calls we never return.
My dark-haired ambition has gone gray.
I’ve lost control
of two out of the five flower gardens.
It’s your prairie, says a friend,
and I remember how the goldenrod bloomed
at our wedding. My anxiety wilts.
I’m the only one who can see it
turning to seed, drifting away,
replanting itself in a daydream.
The one where I am sitting by a lake,
reading a book and all the sailboats
are unmoored.

*

Michelle Meyer is the author of The Trouble with Being a Childless Only Child (2024, Cornerstone Press) and The Book of She (2021), a collection of persona poems devoted to women. Recent work appears in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Humana Obscura, Remington Review, Under Her Eye: A Blackspot Books Anthology, and Welter among others. She is one of those people who loves kale.

Two Poems by Tom Snarsky

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Fast Talk

I heard
a beautiful bird
while I was loading
the trash into
the back of the truck

as I turned
to find the bird
whose song sounded
like nothing I
had ever heard

I realized
it was my
zipper against
the metal
of the wheel well

oh well
will you sing it again

*

Death, or the Chromaticism of Elliott Smith

There’s always the Bitter Tears
of Petra von Kant problem: we want them
to think of us, more than anything

else, but if they do—if they add even a layer
of aragonite to the sandgrain idea
they might care back,

it’s bags packed & off
wordless into the night. An adjudicator
moon stays for a few

daylight hours, just to hear
both sides. You can’t hide
a horse in a closet, the mother

of a little girl quotes her on TikTok
as saying. This is the reason
she gives for why her horse cannot be

the school pet, in the event her class
actually needs to use that
locked-away bucket, their hands

full of things to throw: I wouldn’t be able to
protect him. I don’t want him
to die. Why

lie to a child
when the truth is right there,
all its collisions

& day-drinking insurance
assessors, pretending they remember
what to do. In “Alameda” Elliott sings

Shuffling your deck of trick cards
Over everyone,
Over, like the verb was Lord

or Hang rather than Shuffle—
a random act
you can lie about, like anything.
*

Tom Snarsky is the author of the chapbooks Threshold (Another New Calligraphy) & Complete Sentences (Broken Sleep Books), as well as the full-length collections Light-Up Swan & Reclaimed Water (both from Ornithopter Press). His book A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems is forthcoming from Animal Heart Press in 2025, and the title poem is available to read on Metatron Press’s GLYPHÖRIA platform. He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats. You can find him on Twitter, Instagram, & Bluesky @tomsnarsky.

I Text My Friend with Cancer “How are you doing?” by Karen Paul Holmes

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I Text My Friend with Cancer “How are you doing?”

He answers I am dying.
I can’t imagine typing I am dying,
like stating I’m finishing War and Peace.

Calendars full of treatments, ending.
Two surgeries nearly taking him.
He told me last year he had three years left—
maybe—but was fighting to see
his last child graduate.

Today, he says his last reading next month—
in a state where he used to live—
is a chance to say goodbye.
He lists all he’s grateful for. A big list,
and it comforts me. I’m a faraway friend,
and this dying man is comforting me.
I want to ask Has knowing been better
than not knowing?

It seems unbearably real to say
I am dying. To be on the other side of hope,
no longer seeing past the earth’s edge.
Do we all have that kind of brave in us?

Or is there still hope, but of a different kind?
A hope for the light at a shaded path’s end—
like those near-death have seen.
A glimpse of that shining.
That beautiful beaconing.

*

Karen Paul Holmes won the 2023 Lascaux Poetry Prize and received a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her two books are: No Such Thing as Distance and Untying the Knot. Poetry credits include The Writer’s Almanac, The Slowdown, Verse Daily, Diode, and Plume.

Wonky Sonnet on Death by Bob Lucky

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Wonky Sonnet on Death

What a responsibility to be alive,
and then we start looking for a purpose.

We want to save something
thinking it will save our souls — whales,
stray dogs, turtles, antique quilts, bottle caps,
comic books, owls, condors, any number
of frogs, family recipes, photo albums.
I could go on — elephants and tigers too.

Watching the news, it’s clear
everyone’s on trial and our souls
are the least of our worries.
How many of us fail to turn in
the room key when we check out?

We’ve forgotten how to die,
and what a responsibility that is.

*

Bob Lucky lives in Portugal. He is the author of Ethiopian Time (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014), Conversation Starters in a Language No One Speaks (SurVision Books, 2018), and My Thology: Not Always True But Always Truth (Cyberwit, 2019).

Two Poems by Callie Little

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Headstone

The text was three words:
Your mom passed.

My fifteen minute break.
Break like: my last baby tooth hits cement.

And then I was
back on the sales floor
where everything was plastic-wrapped perfection
where I did my best have-a-great-day smiling
impression of myself.

My coworker said they’d just gotten the worst text.
I wanted to say I bet I can top it, but I folded the tissue
paper behind the register, instead. Buried it.
And you might think that I wanted to go home,
but I wanted to stay tucked into the name tag
that was holding me together.

And then I was
outside.
It isn’t beautiful and poetic to tell you it was raining—
it just was. The rain pours in Seattle no matter how you feel.
I said the impossible words into my phone
The my and the mom and the died
And my spouse came to me.

And then I was
at a restaurant.
I bought us dinner. I bought us drinks.
I spent every minimum-wage dollar I had
and bought every appetizer on the menu
and too much dessert. A mudslide.
A warm apple pie a la mode,
the all-American mother ice cream dream.
I wanted to say, your mom only dies once
to the waiter but I didn’t feel like seeing him hurt for me
so I just said it to the person who loves me most.

And then I was
home.
And the grief only sat beside me, waiting.
I thought it might leave me in the night
like I might wake up
and it would just be another day.
I’d gone two years without hearing her voice
so it wouldn’t be any different.

And then I was
awake
and it was
cement.

*

Every Other Tuesday

Therapy begins at the same time as it always does
this morning, and it’s not the first time my voice
is all stone truth: “I think I might be cursed.”

My licensed therapist who is also secretly a witch
sees the light in my eyes flicker, and their hair stands on end.
They say, “that’s a sign that there’s truth there.”

This is how it works, therapy: I hand them a tangle
made of all my smallest pieces, they point to it
and say, “what a mess.”

Sometimes, this is enough magic to feel
a little bit like sanity— just being told
I’m not imagining it all.

*

Callie Little (she/they) is an artist and author from the Pacific Northwest. Her writing has appeared in VICE, Harper’s BAZAAR, Architectural Digest, and many more fine publications. Her debut non-fiction book, Every Little Thing You Do Is Magic, and its coordinating tarot deck featuring her illustrations will be published by Clarkson Potter in August 2024.

Two Poems by James Feichthaler

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All prayers that go unheard won’t go unanswered

As conscience rummages through the trash of life
The young me wrestled to ambition’s curb —
Used notebooks, empty beer cans, microphones,
Old Nikes, several basketballs, and a blurb
(I penned way back) about some rapper’s beef –
The world is wakening to its usual sins
Of self-importance, self-neglect, self-hate,
While dead men slump into their freezing cars
And start their engines up, reluctantly;
On last legs, weeping at eternity’s gate.
Like them, I’ve longed for something better, to be free
Of bosses’ snarls and hope-starved stressful hours
That fill with meaningless and menial work,
Having screamed my silent prayers into the deaf-eared dark.

*

From their perspective, everything looks dead

Most here won’t notice Nature’s handiwork,
Despite an office window-seat, which looks
Out on the wintry beauty of a park,
The shimmering lake that’s just beyond their books;
Ignoring the many geese that gather there
To pluck away the remnants of a season,
The brown-leaved trees, the breeze that’s blown them bare,
As though their noting them requires a reason.
Face down in paperwork, or scrolling up
To see what TikTok star’s destroying her rivals,
Their short attention spans prefer the slop
Society offers, drawn to glowing idols
Of soulless nonsense; making extra time
For things that don’t exist in the sublime.

*

James Feichthaler’s poems and essays have appeared in numerous print journals and e-zines throughout the years; most recently in One Art, Schuylkill Valley Journal, E-Verse Radio, and the Mad Poets Society’s Local Lyrics series. His first book The Rise of the COVFEFE was published by Parnilis Media in autumn 2020. For the past ten years or so, he has been the host of an open mic poetry series in Manayunk, PA called The Dead Bards of Philadelphia. He is also a hip-hop artist (Taliesin aka Big Tal) with a couple of albums under his belt and dozens of songs and music videos up on YouTube.

To My Sister on the Anniversary of Her Death from Covid by Margaret Dornaus

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To My Sister on the Anniversary
of Her Death from Covid

It’s been two years, and there are
those who still ask me to believe
you’re in a better place. Or
that we all are now that all is
said and done. Now that life is
back to normal, or at least
back to a semblance of the life
we once knew. Remember
how you liked to say you were

our mother? How you’d take us all
on weekend outings to bowling
alleys and drive-ins. The larger than
life images of good and evil projected
on a big screen. How we’d watch
Kong battling Godzilla, wide-eyed,
sure of nothing more than our own story.
The way summer nights embraced us,
the way starshine followed us home.

*

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

Unwelcome by Ann E. Michael

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Unwelcome

The caller
was
a stranger
soliciting
I don’t
know what
I told her
this
is not
a good time
my father
is dying
and
I hung up.
Now
as night
recedes
I find my
self awake
I think of
him
dying
and how
I was
unkind
to that young
woman
in a call
center
a stranger
I failed
to welcome
into
my heart.

*
Ann E. Michael lives in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, slightly west of where the Lehigh River meets the Delaware. Her most recent collection of poems is Barefoot Girls. Her next book, The Red Queen Hypothesis, will be published sometime in 2021. More info at www.annemichael.wordpress.com

Two Poems by Faith Paulsen

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Mother-in-Law

Invited to call her Mom, silently I called her Umbrella in Sunshine
Flea-Market Wristwatch Three Phone Calls A Day
Flash Flood Warning.
Why take a chance?
The cat will suck the breath out of the baby.
Spare Room Hoarder of get-well cards and flashlights
bottles of sleeping pills. (They’re not habit-forming – I should know,
I’ve been taking them for years.)
She called me Broken Eggs Hamster in a Plastic Ball.
Half-hour Early/Ten Minutes Late
She called me Barefoot in Snow–
That name I kept.
Years after her death
I wake stunned
when others call me Worry and I respond Be Safe.
Please don’t do
anything stupid.
Call it Poetic Justice. Call me So soon?
I call myself, I Didn’t Know—

*

My Mother’s Pessary *

Was she buried with it, I wonder?
That pinky-ball that for years supported
the vault over my begetting? My fault,
we used to joke.
Large baby, traumatic birth,
long-awaited longed-for,
late, costly.

Decades later, I witnessed
the price paid in her halting gait,
weary eyes (blue green like mine)
seeking a bench so she could sit down.
This is not like you, Mom.

Then it was I who supported
undressed, lifted. Even though
I was by then several times a mother —
I did not know this secret toll
that there could be this
late-in-life weight in the pelvis
pregnancy of years
this falling through
her overstretched muscles
falter, fail, a curtain’s elasticity lost
turned inside-out like a sock.

Attended, midwife to my mother’s aging
counted her breaths
an inexorable roller coaster inverted
dangles on the verge of dive-drop,
ripening
her tummy measured to house this blushing little thing
that for the last years of her life plugged up the dam
and kept the sky from falling.

* A therapeutic pessary is a medical device most commonly used to treat prolapse of the uterus.

*

Faith Paulsen’s work has appeared in Ghost City Press, Seaborne, and Book of Matches, as well as Thimble Literary Magazine, Evansville Review, Mantis, Psaltery and Lyre, and Terra Preta, among others. Her work also appears in the anthologies Is it Hot in Here or Is It Just Me? (Social Justice Anthologies) and 50/50: Poems & Translations by Womxn over 50 (QuillsEdge). She has been nominated for a Pushcart, and her chapbook A Color Called Harvest (Finishing Line Press) was published in 2016. A second chapbook, Cyanometer, is expected in 2021.