Tag: fear

Fear of a House Fire by Sara Letourneau

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Fear of a House Fire

you never wanted to be acquainted with / its slow slithering / its sulfur stench / the thin molten orange tearing across a room / the existential threat / the destruction of what you hold dear / a neighbor heard the bang / in the apartment below hers / moments later / incessant beeping / do you hear that? she texts you / you do / and you smell it / you know you should not go looking / should not open the locked door / no one answers when you knock / the owner texts you her door lock’s passcode / you wonder whether your neighbors would do this / if they heard your smoke alarm screaming / you open that door / your body tenses / black smoke / tendrils rising down the hall / you wonder whether curiosity and stupidity are cousins / in the boy’s bedroom / flames swallow carpet / later you’ll learn / a battery in a charging nightlight / overheated / exploded / catching the closest stuffed animal / but right now / you turn around / order everyone out / out / out of the building / your fingers flurry / against smartphone screen / 9-1-1 / your mouth moves / tells the operator / there’s a fire / where it is / how you know / as memory engulfs you / you were eleven / at a sleepover / you played Nightmare with your friends / on the VHS tape / the Gatekeeper ordered / what is your greatest fear? / write it now on this slip of paper / thirty years later / your answer is taunting you / licking its lips at you / as you run out of the building / pocketbook and laptop in your arms / phone cradled against your ear / wailing sirens down the street / do not calm you / do not reassure you / that you have saved lives / that you have saved your home / that you are safe

*

Sara Letourneau is the author of Wild Gardens (Kelsay Books, 2024). She is also a book editor and writing coach at Heart of the Story Editorial & Coaching Services; the cofounder and cohost of the Pour Me a Poem open mic in Mansfield, Massachusetts; and the co-editor of the Pour Me a Poem anthology. Her poetry has won the 2023 Beals Prize for Poetry. Her latest work can be found in The Ekphrastic Review, Ibbetson Street, Moss Puppy Magazine, Silver Birch Press, and WAVES: A Confluence of Women’s Voices. Sara is also the author of the Substack column The Wild Garden of Poetry (and Life), which you can read at https://saraheartofthestory.substack.com/. Visit Sara online at her website, on Facebook @heartofthestoryeditorial, on Instagram @sara_heartofthestory, and on LinkedIn @sara-letourneau.

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.

Three Poems by Edie Meade

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Coming Storm

fleeced inside the cell, undefined violence flashes purple.
still chain-smoking on his balcony as windows close for bed,
the new neighbor, a slapping flag, a Marine retiree vanity plate.
I know the barometric plunge, whipping white the maple leaves.
he snaps beer tabs, snaps at a family unseen, snaps at his dog.
lightning takes a long time lacing its boots downriver to us.
he’s not much older than me, and how I remember Fallujah,
old men and boys crying on the curb, the forbidden from leaving,
who never left. and rags after. low-res red. phosphorous Pompeii.
does he still feel under-boot the crushed chalk bone, insensible
explosions wherever he goes? snapping. memory a flash bang.
from my bedroom I monitor the first-degree face, mulch-pile
chest smoking uncontrollably, turned by pitchfork, drifting
wind over water. the storm rolls in on caissons of thunder.

*

February 14

I lay on the floor trying to unhear screams, the city
screaming into its elbows to stifle what it knows.
The neighbors rise fighting, and I’m afraid
to seek answers to the questions I have. Google,
can AR-15 bullets pierce a brick wall? How
do hiding mothers keep their children quiet?
Is the screaming in my middle ear or a fold
of nervous tissue? Is it me? Is it only me?
Car doors slam and engines ignite and I remain
on the floor, keeping close to the world without
beds, those born and born again shivering pink
each morning waiting to receive spring’s augurs.
Geese shadows labor over the window so low
I hear their wings threshing. None cry out.

*

Two-star Hotel, Myrtle Beach

look I don’t want to catch anything
don’t want to kill the ocean
creatures, only stare at my feet
for hours, collecting beautiful bones

be first, or fiftieth, to comb the dawn
beach while the water’s out
taking care of its salty business
is that too much to ask?

a domestic situation ends in handcuffs
pleas break the boardwalk
crowd outside the Bermuda Sands
but the lazy river goes on

Black & Milds in the kiddie pool, sandy beds
I rate this hotel five stars for the riff-raff
for they come by it honestly, no bugs
in my room— no, spiders do not count

barnacles barnacle, I shell shells, terns turn
over a pink plastic carnation decoy
bright as sushi, what once was
a revolution, plastic, now an island

in a vortex visible from space
how must it loom to turtles below
a jellyfish or ominous mushroom
cloud, the manmade tropical depression

named for each of us in time,
we’re attached to our disasters
if not multitudes, we contain
teaspoons of colorful beads

in our brains, micro-plastic’d, sad,
bedraggled as the streets after Mardi Gras
a man in the lazy river laughs like a cough
or coughs like a laugh, what’s the difference

at rock-bottom, where the party is a sickness
the sickness is a party

*

Edie Meade is a writer in Petersburg, Virginia. She has been recently published in Room Magazine, Invisible City, The Harvard Advocate, JMWW, The Normal School, and Litro.

Five Poems by Jane McKinley

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Small Talk

In 7th grade we learned the art
of talking small, avoiding
what loomed largest in our minds—
the river one girl’s older brother
walked into, tired of holding
everything together while their father
fell apart. Their mother had died
the year before. In 5th grade
we found out that one girl’s dad
had killed himself when she was two.
Rumors grew. A rope or a revolver?
The Clue game didn’t have a barn.
Our teacher wisely nipped us
in the bud. We never spoke of it again.
In 7th grade, the same girl’s older sister
was discovered—floating in a lake,
half-clothed, face down. A mystery.
That year my boyfriend’s mother died
of cancer. We laughed because his Jell-O
flopped. He hadn’t read directions, didn’t stir.
Our first-chair clarinetist lost her mother
late that spring. A diabetic, her sores
had turned to gangrene. Wasn’t that
what soldiers died from in the Civil War?
One evening that fall I overheard
two 8th-grade girls. I couldn’t help it.
I was curled up on our porch swing
with a book when they walked by.
One said my name. I raised my head
to peek through flames of burning bush,
saw her pointing toward our house,
heard the other answer,
But she wouldn’t have been chosen
if her sister hadn’t died.

*

Perfect Paul

My sister has signed on to match.com
to find a companion for Saturday nights,
but what her profile fails to mention
is that she cannot see, that she has lost
her appetite for light and shadow, that,
in a word, she is completely blind.

She fires off e-mails to prospective dates,
the ones who’ve caught her knowing ear
as she listens to replies. Their letters, turned
to speech, sped up, sound all alike
in Perfect Paul, a voice on her computer,
the only choice that she can stand.

The beauty is that none of them
have guessed the truth—or even part of it.
(Her history alone could occupy
a dozen writers for a lifetime.) Somehow
they can’t imagine that a wit who’s so
articulate is typing by touch alone.

There’s no photo posted. She hasn’t
seen herself for over twenty years so why
should they be privy to a visual. Besides,
the playing field would be uneven then.
She keeps her lack of vision to herself
until she knows she’s piqued their interest.

Anyway, it’s not something you’d blurt out
in an e-mail. Timing is everything,
so she waits until she’s drawn them in,
seduced them with her voice, her laugh,
until she feels secure, their fingers wrapped
around their cells or cordless phones.

A writer of memoirs, she keeps a log
of their reactions, which range from silence
so awkward the conversation stops to You
must be joking! to a sort of itching curiosity,
but what is strange is that not one of them
has ever known a person who was blind.

* 

Marcescent

I never knew there was a word for dead leaves,
for the way they hang on beeches and oaks
long after the raking is done, flying in the face
of deciduous—meaning falling down. Some trees
let go in a timely fashion, showing their true
colors once the chlorophyll’s gone, sealing off
the exit wounds before they drop their leaves.
Not this year. The maples kept their cool
green till the 10th of November when a cold snap
zapped them overnight, drying their leaves to a crisp
brown. As if that weren’t bad enough, these dead
leaves are stuck. The trees had no warning, no mild
early frost to trigger the process of letting go.
Sudden death is like that. No time to prepare
for the loss so the dead keep rattling on.

*

Fear

In what would become her final years,
she had a gig at the medical school,

discussing the complications of diabetes
with students in their 2nd year. She knew

her history inside out—oversized binders
filled two carts. She’d triumphed over

blindness, two kidney transplants,
three heart attacks, the loss of a foot.

Near the end of one class, an earnest,
twenty-something student asked,

“What are your fears for the future?”
“My match.com date on Saturday night!”

After the students left, the professor said,
“You know, you really shouldn’t be here.”

“What? In this room? Or on this planet?”

*

Patient is Blind

My old flip phone
used to open to a photo
I took of my sister
on the eve of
her amputation.
It never failed
to make me smile.
She’d complained
that some nurses
and doctors would enter
her room without
announcing themselves
and begin to touch her—
checking on her already
filleted foot or taking
her vitals—without
telling her what
they were doing,
so someone posted
a laminated sign outside
her room that read:
Patient is Blind.
My sister, afraid
it might tip off
would-be thieves,
asked me to take it down
and hang it beside
the white board near her bed.
That way, it was visible
to those who needed
a reminder, but not to passersby.
She asked, Which nurse
is on the board for tonight?
When I told her the name,
she said, Quick! Tape that sign
to my forehead. Apparently,
this nurse was the worst
offender. Minutes later,
without saying a word
or cracking a smile,
in she walked to take
my sister’s blood pressure
and hand her some meds,
as if she were the one
who couldn’t see
the sign. It was all
we could do not to laugh.

*

Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble, a professional chamber music group based in Princeton, New Jersey. Her poetry collection, Vanitas, won the 2011 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize and was published by Texas Tech University Press. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Great River Review, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, On the Seawall, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In March she received a 2023 Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She lives with her husband in Hopewell, New Jersey.

Three Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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What She Wanted

She chides her father’s ghost
for his failure
to outlive her mother.
For going along
with her mother’s decision
that what the furnace refused to take of him
would be carried out in a boat
and scattered in the bay under the Golden Gate.
She’d wanted to have a metal vessel filled
with what remained of her father
to empty into the waters near her home.
She knows that to let go of these grievances
would be to lose him. (I only
wanted, she tells him, to hold onto you,
only wished you’d let
me be the one to know you.)

*

Ostinato

Let me go, my father says.
And when his doctor pulls the tubes
he’s a fish flailing on a riverbank.
How strange it is to stand
so close to this.
When wrenched from its world
does a fish know sorrow?
That summer at the lake
I reeled in a bluegill,
a single fin pinned by the hook.
I couldn’t bear the beauty,
the staring eye. Its belly cool
against my palm I lifted
out the barb, felt the heart’s alarm.
Then I watched the disturbance
on the water’s surface
disappear. Absence holds the music
of a lake lapping at the shore—
a low note that goes on and on.

*

Fear

Older now, what she fears
is the gate swinging open
in a distant field grown nearer.
It’s not her own footsteps
across the stones and windblown grass
that fill her with dread, but those
of the man who positions
his chair next to hers on the porch
to look at the moon.
She can’t say what frightens her more—
the thought of seeing him approach
the weathered boards,
or the vision of herself alone
under an uncertain sky.

*

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as a leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown, (Sungold Editions, 2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.