Tag: elegy

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.

Bardot and Me by James Penha

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Bardot and Me

I must have been only twelve—no more
when she came to our local movie house:
Bardot. Love Is My Profession. Somehow
they sold us tickets, Ricky and me. Over
popcorn and Jujubes we giggled to see
the naked actress. She was beautiful. We
loved her. The Catholic Church did not.
It had condemned the film making it a sin
to watch it. So I went to Confession to ask
God’s forgiveness. I did not tell the priest
that Ricky and I jerked each other off
in the theatre toilet. That had nothing to do
with Brigitte. We did it all the time. Oh,
she would have loved us. We were animals.

*

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. His story collection Queer As Folk Tales was published by Deep Desires Press in October 2025. His chapbook of poems American Daguerreotypes is available for Kindle. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Bluesky: @jamespenha.bsky.social

Toward an All-Purpose Elegy by Sydney Lea

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Toward an All-Purpose Elegy

        –at Bear Ridge Speedway, Vermont

What if I wrote a reusable elegy?
I’d have chances enough to apply it. For some reason the thought
occurs to me here. I sit with two small grandsons,
a gale of dust blowing up from the dirt-track oval.
It coats our greasy French fries just as it did
back forty years when I came to this place with their father,
and much before, when I watched snarling cars

slide around an identical eighth-mile circuit.
Far south of here, that was, but the scene hasn’t changed,
unlike everything else, it appears, in the rest of my world.
Two bats flit over moth-clotted infield lights.
There used to be scores. I liken those vanished clouds
to my corps of friends, which seems to shrink by the hour.
Just this morning, another stab of bad news–

an old friend dying, one incredibly brave
through years of struggle with and after cancer.
He was the smallest but toughest boy on our football team
yet always tender toward others even back then.
Thinking of him, I can blame this dust for my tears.
With an elegy on hand for every occasion,
I wouldn’t need to fetch fresh metaphors

for any future bereavement or for solace.
My griefs, after all, are increasingly the same.
I’d try to devise some elegiac conclusion,
to offer the sense of completion these boys have known–
like their father before them and their father’s father as well–
those times when they bet on the battered car that would pass
the checkered flag into transitory triumph.

The grandsons, of course, lost more than they won tonight.
So just as for any imagined reader I’d honor
the elegiac custom of consolation,
for these little children I’ll offer some little comfort.
We’ll stop by the vendor’s stand where I can buy them
Bear Ridge caps and undented model cars.
Then, our races ended, we’ll head for the exit.

*

Sydney Lea is a Pulitzer finalist in poetry, founder of New England Review, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-15), and recipient of his state’s highest artistic distinction, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published two novels (most recently Now Look, 2024), eight volumes of personal essays (most recently, Such Dancing as We Can, 2024), a hybrid mock epic with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka called Wormboy (2020), and sixteen poetry collections (most recently What Shines, 2023). His new and selected poems is due in early 2027.

Three Poems by Abby McCartney

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Self Portrait as Crossword Puzzle

The sign of a beginner is their loyalty
to their first answer. Once you’ve banged
your head against the grid for four
or six months, trying to earn sleep,
you realize: do it in pencil.
Most days I try to pack too many letters
in the same box. Sometimes
that’s allowed – another thing I
had to learn the hard way. I remember
the first time I realized the answer
could spill over the edge, up the sides.
I want the gold star, the answers
clicking into place like a seatbelt.
My favorites, though, are the puzzles
that make their own rules, crossing
YELLOW down with RED across to
make the Orange Bowl. My grandmother
did a Monday crossword every night
before bed, one family pattern
I don’t mind repeating. When she
fought with my mother, it was always
in pen. It’s the work of a lifetime
to learn to erase.

*

Elegy with Summer Rain

The thing about an untimely death is
overnight your recipes became holy.
Your voicemails are relics, your
Cowboys sweatshirt a talisman.
Now I can say your name without
crying. Usually. Sometimes I want
to complain about you as my friends
complain about their mothers:
She never called me, but she assumed
I had been kidnapped if I didn’t call home
by Sunday noon. Sometimes
I want the last book you gave me
to be a book and nothing
more. After the summer storm
the city is bathed in an eerie pink
light, even past sunset, refracting
off the bouldering clouds, making
the bricks glow like jewels,
making everything look wrong.

*

When my mother visits my dreams

When my mother visits my dreams
she wants to know what happened
to all her stuff.
We gave your loaf pans away, I say.
Sorry. Why did you have four of them?
We sent one to my cousin
for their first apartment, I tell her.
She nods. She is glad.

I worry how I will explain the rest:
TikTok, hybrid meetings, Wordle,
The new house my dad lives in
full of a woman she barely knows.
You were gone a long time,
I say.
We didn’t think you were coming back.

I wake and remember
all the things I forgot to ask.

*

Abby McCartney (she/her) is an emerging poet based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her work explores themes of grief, motherhood, and lineage. She spends her days working on education finance policy at the state and local levels and previously served as an aide to Senator Elizabeth Warren. She is also an active lay leader at Kol Tzedek Synagogue. In her spare time, she enjoys baking, reading, crossword puzzles, and walking her dog around South Philly. She holds an M.P.A. from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and a B.A. from Yale University, where she was a Truman Scholar.

Two Poems by Francine Witte

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Elegy for Waiting for You

The dark clock by the old train station
where the people come and go and me,
I’d stand there and I’d see that clock
with its hands that wouldn’t stop
even though you’d think they’d be too
weighted down with all the time
those hands were holding.

It’s easy to wait for love when you
know it’s on the next train or even
the one after that. But that was the problem.
You were never on any of those. I must have

known that but sometimes we will do anything
to breathe love alive. We will stand there
in a too-thin coat, shivering in the almost
dark, waiting forever for the train I wanted
so much for you to be on and which always
seemed moments away.

*

That night, moonless,

there was enough room Inside me
for my heart to bulge up, rocket
up to the space where I could still
see your goodbye eyes, flat as a galaxy map
Where stars are pressed against black velvet.
And like a galaxy, remembering you went into
The billions, of matter, of time, of how
Many years do the light from any of those
Dull, finished stars take to reach the earth.

*

Francine Witte is a flash fiction writer and poet, and the author of the flash collection RADIO WATER. Her newest poetry book, Some Distant Pin of Light, has just been published by Cervena Barva Press. Her work has been widely published, and she is a recent recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City. Please visit her website francinewitte.com. She can be found on social media @francinewitte.

Elegy at the 7-Eleven by Jeff Cove

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Elegy at the 7-Eleven

The man at the register
doesn’t look up.
A forty-ounce beer in one hand,
cheap flowers in the other—
pink lilies curled like smoke,
wrapped in plastic.

For a moment,
he stands there holding both
like he isn’t sure
which one the night is for.

He sets the flowers down—
not with anger,
not regret,
just
a quiet return.

The cashier scans the bottle.
Outside, the light flickers.
There’s no one to bring flowers to.
Not tonight.

*

Jeff Cove lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He has been writing haiku since high school—seventeen syllables taught him how to compress meaning and leave space for silence. He works as a translator between the technical and the emotional, finding poetry in systems, silence, and the absurd. His work is forthcoming in Pictura Journal and has appeared in The Daily Drunk. He writes at https://jeffcove.com/

Elegy for Jim Cory by Sean Lynch

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Elegy for Jim Cory

Above a horse cemetery
on a wall that is no longer there

were faces meant to be immortalized.
Faces of literary giants in art deco style

whether apropos or not including
Shaw, Joyce, Dickinson, Frost

and I would stare at the mural as I would steam
dozens of lattes and cappuccinos for minimum wage

and on smoke breaks in Rittenhouse Square
I would listen to Jim tell me of a mythical Philly

from the 80’s and 90’s not knowing that the twenty teens
would one day become ancient history

that the bookstore would be gutted
replaced by another expensive star

that the wall of literary giants would no longer be there
and those moments under trees fed

by bones of colonial steeds would transform into memories.
Yet somehow, somewhere he’s still there,

perhaps as a kind of bird flying between canopies
like a train cutting through rays of light on the landscape.

*

Sean Lynch is a writer and editor who lives in Philadelphia. His latest poetry collection, Halo Nest: Poems on Grief is available for purchase here. Previous books are, the city of your mind (Whirlwind Press, 2013), Broad Street Line (Moonstone Press, 2016), 100 Haiku (Moonstone Press, 2017), and On Violence (Radical Paper Press, 2019). He is the founding editor of Serotonin Press and has been the editor of various magazines, journals, anthologies, and books, including Rocky Wilson’s The Last Bus to Camden, Chidi Ezeobi’s Remind the World: Poems from Prison, and Beyond the White Stone Lions by Lamont Steptoe. He’s also worked for non-profit literary organizations such as Moonstone Arts Center and the Nick Virgilio Haiku Association.

Elegy for Dewey Stone by Bonnie Proudfoot

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Elegy for Dewey Stone

Last May, Dewey died from diabetes after
a slide into dementia, not fully, just enough
to lose nouns, verbs, to ache with the loss.
Did I mention his name was not really Dewey?
That once, hitchhiking from Buffalo to Woodstock,
someone named Louie picked him up, and
in the car was another guy named Hughie.
“I’m Dewey,” he said, and then he was. We
rolled joints on album jackets, listened to Santana
and watched cartoons. He sang, “I got a black
magic marker.” Did I mention that once when he
was away, while I was watching his husky, she
darted across the road into an oncoming car.
I held her broken body, watched her blue eyes
go blank. Didn’t Roadrunner take a magic marker
out of his invisible pocket and draw a tunnel
into a mountain? Is that where the dog is?
Are they together, with their shining blue eyes?
Does he still stop on the sidewalk every time
a girl says, “Beautiful dog.” Does he say, “yes,
I know. Her name is Yahweh.” I still listen to Santana.
If I had a black magic marker, I could block out
a portal through time and gravity, someplace between
11:30 and midnight. He called from the hospital.
“It’s fucked up,” Dewey said. “I cry a little every day.”
I never asked whether he forgave me for killing
his dog. I never wanted to hear him say he did.
Did I mention how much we used to laugh?

*

Bonnie Proudfoot’s fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies. Her novel, Goshen Road (Swallow 2020) received WCONA’s Book of the Year and was long-listed for the PEN/ Hemingway. Her poetry chapbook, Household Gods, can be found on Sheila-Na-Gig editions, along with a forthcoming book of short stories, Camp Probable. She resides in Athens, Ohio. bonnieproudfootblog.wordpress.com/

ELEGY FOR A BASSOONIST by Jane McKinley

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ELEGY FOR A BASSOONIST

for J. B. (June 3, 1952 – June 4, 2004)

I woke up with your number on my tongue,
still dreaming, fingers reaching for a phone.
Some contractor had needed a bassoon—
Rameau’s Les Indes galantes. And then it stung
me, you were dead, had died while fairy roses
bloomed by your back door. You’d blown out candles
hours before, left jobs to colleagues—Handel’s
Fireworks, a Rite of Spring—loath to expose
how sick you were. You’d wished to fade away
on your own terms, had hoped to spare us yet
another death. Last night I heard the fourth
Bach suite and felt regret—sassy bourrée
with your part rumbling down below. I’ll bet
it’s swell to hobnob with the reed god at his court.

*

Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble. She is the author of Vanitas (Texas Tech University Press, 2011), which won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize, and Mudman, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Baltimore Review, ONE ART, on Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In 2023 she was awarded a poetry fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Five Poems by Ann E. Wallace

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The Empty Casing

Imagine this: if you have planters
of parsley or dill growing outside
in a sunny spot, odds are good
that you have tossed butterfly eggs
onto your pasta with the garnish
or mixed them into your salad.

Just imagine.

Have you ever seen the egg
of a butterfly? Before caterpillar,
before chrysalis. The miniscule sphere,
a perfect glassy orb deposited
by swallowtail or monarch or fritillary,
and perched so delicately on a leaf
or the whisper-thin stem
of your garden herbs.

I saw my first last summer.
I watched as the brilliant swallowtail—
she visited daily for a spell—found
my bed of parsley. I searched
for a week, leaf by leaf until
I spotted it: one perfect egg.

How small, how fragile.
How large my hands,
my garden shears—the egg stood
such small chance against a quick
snip at mealtime. Small chance
against hot sun that can wither
a wispy herb into the parched earth
over a few dry days of drought.

It is truly a wonder
we have any butterflies at all.
But my patio egg, it defied the odds—
it hatched under my protective gaze,
grew fat off the parsley I did not eat,
spun a home around itself.

I watched and waited as it grew strong
Then one morning I found
the empty dry casing still stuck
to the side of my clay planter.
The butterfly—it was gone, flown
away into its new life.

*

Note to Self: Two Kindnesses, or One

Do you get as frustrated as I
that some lessons do not come easy
or fast, that there are things we know
deep in our bodies, that we have learned
through trial and error and error
and error, and yet
we must learn them again?

I think you know,
this feeling of carving
out space, of creating
sanctuary within your home,
your body, of finding
the necessary beauty of silence,
but then inviting the noise to rush in
when a friend calls for help.

I struggle here, to find
the line between kindnesses—
between being a good human
and being good to myself. And truly,
why do those things feel at odds,
and how might I lift my eyes
upon myself if I held a line
here, between you and me?

But what I really want to say
is that I think our needs
are mutual and that maybe
this note to self is a reminder
to ask for help in claiming
silence.

*

Practice

I think I had the whole thing
wrong.

Again, again, again.
I thought it was about me,

that I was the end point
of these battles

through chemo and vertigo,
that three decades of knowledge

were meant to save
me.

Turns out, my dry run
held a different purpose:

when first one daughter,
and then a second,

fell sick and sicker,
I should have been ready.

*

Water World

The dreamy images flashed
in quick succession, on and on,
recognizable but too fast
for reading the endless
pages of fine print.

Awake, but not, I thought
I’d caught myself dreaming,
was sure that this medical flipbook
must be rapid eye movement.
Drifting back to sleep, I told myself,
I must remember this.

My next thought, upon waking—
do other people see medical bills,
one after the other, after the other,
inscribed within their eyes
while they try to sleep,
Do they dream of static images,
of text and debts?

While the numbers
and the fine print spread
before me,
my daughter, still sick
in her bed, dreamed
in fear and senses,
of waking to the pressure
of water trapped within her walls,
of the sheetrock growing soft
and moist to the touch,
of hazy thoughts that she could rest
just a few minutes longer, that she had
more time to act, more time
before the liquid pocket burst
like a balloon all over her bed,
soaking her, as she recounted later,
in dirty wall water.

But she was wrong, time was short,
and the walls in her dream gave way
before she could get out of bed.
And the documents in mine kept scrolling.

*

In Anticipation of an Elegy

I began mourning
my trees last year
with the first news
of the tall building
to rise behind my yard.

Neighbors fought
for our yards, and won
a stay of execution—
I mean, a rejection
by the planning board

But it was only a matter
of time, and they did not
actually understand
that trees and plants
mean life in this city,

sustain birds and other
creatures but also humans
who cannot fly from yard
to yard in search of sun
but must make do

with the patch of earth
in our small backyards
and beg the planners
to vote as if our lives
depend on the trees.

*

Ann E. Wallace is Poet Laureate of Jersey City, New Jersey. Her collection Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul is forthcoming from Kelsay Books in 2024. She is author of Counting by Sevens (Main Street Rag) and has published work in Huffington Post, Wordgathering, Gyroscope Review, Snapdragon and many other journals. You can follow her online at AnnWallacePhD.com and on Instagram @annwallace409.

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.

Four Poems by Todd Davis

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A Very Small History

Fire burns inside the stones
unearthed with a plow. Long dead
is the horse that dragged them
to the cellar hole where the farmer’s sons
stacked a foundation that still clings
to the hillside and the hearth
and chimney where smoke curls
into night. He tells the chair, the one
his wife sat in each morning
as they had coffee, that he’s gathered
this wood from a windthrow
pitched over in a spring storm.
After running the saw all afternoon,
silence is a comfort, and the warmth
of this old flickering calms his mind.
Above the eaves cold descends, helping
to cure five cord he stacked in October.
The moon is absent. The dispassionate stars
provide little light to count the rings.

*

Angry Elegy

All summer long the forest burns
and the stream above and below frays
like a broken thread.

In the deepest water along the dam
trout settle like silt, just enough cold
to survive beneath ash.

With each step a cloud of cremated bone:
elk and deer who couldn’t outrun fire,
bear engulfed in a den of flame.

Through the open furnace door
wind blows down the valley
and the tyrant says to rake the gold,

to pry it from the teeth
of our fallen dead.

*

Orphaned

Sky descending
toward black.

Last pink
at the brink
of the western-
most mountain.

A star
brightening.

A mother’s voice.

Like the sound
of water
at the seep
before it continues
the work
of wearing away
the gap
in the stone.

Saying
Lodestar.

Saying
This is how
you find
your way
home.

*

The Crabber’s Mother Tells Him about His Birth

Your face looking up
through the water, breaking
the water’s surface,
and your eyes opening,
the sky reflected there,
and also the limbs of trees
that hang over the river,
and the flying bodies
of heron and osprey,
the wing-beats of migrating
thrushes, and the water
washing around
your cheekbones,
the water dripping
from your chin
as you open your mouth
to cry for the first time,
dark hair matted to the skull,
current dragging you
gracefully out
into the estuary,
floating your small body
to the coastal town
where you will be born.

*

Todd Davis is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, most recently Native Species, Winterkill, and In the Kingdom of the Ditch, all published by Michigan State University Press. His seventh book, Coffin Honey, will be published by Michigan State in February 2022. He has won the Midwest Book Award, the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Bronze and Silver Awards, the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Editors Prize, and the Bloomsburg University Book Prize. His poems appear in such noted journals and magazines as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, Orion, and Poetry Northwest. He teaches environmental studies, American literature, and creative writing at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College. http://www.todddavispoet.com/