Tag: Gravity

America’s Favorite Playground by John Arthur

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America’s Favorite Playground

My daughter asks if she can see
a picture of gravity.
She’s four but before I can answer,
more questions come at me,
gleaned, it seems, from the TV—
What’s a tariff? What’s a trade war?
We buy most of what we own
from the local thrift store.
Just home from work,
I sit next to her, still wearing
my new old peacoat, only $9.99,
one button missing, but warm
enough to get me through
at least the rest of this winter.
Now the anchor is saying Canadians
are expected to boycott—
no more trips this summer
to the Jersey shore.
When I was a valet in AC,
I used to count the Ontario plates,
smoking on the top floor
of the parking deck,
looking out at the gold plated facade
of the Trump Taj Mahal
before it was demolished.
It only took a couple
of well placed explosives.
I show my daughter a video
of the building imploding.
That’s gravity, I say.

*

John Arthur is a writer and musician from New Jersey. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, DIAGRAM, ONE ART, trampset, Failbetter, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best of the Net.

Two Poems by Jennifer L Freed

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Gravity

                  Grief
pulls you close.
You know it too well
to think you can live without it.
You’ve learned
it is a chair that will hold you
up and ask nothing
of you but to live
with it. And so you live

through this spring day, drifting
from bureau to bed,
table to desk, touching
the shirt, the pillow, the cup,
the book; looking
out the window,
your hand on the windowsill, the sun
on your hand. Here is the view
so changed from yesterday. Here

is the blue of the veins in your wrist.
You can do nothing
and are grateful
there is nothing you need to do.
You let yourself sink
into your chair, let
the chair
hold you.

*

Widowed

Some days, she chooses not
to eat.
She needs to let absence
fill her body, to move with it, know
that she can.

On the table, fresh strawberries, radiant
in their blue bowl.

Without meals, extra pockets of time
unfold. She turns toward
books, sketch pads, longer walks
with the dog. Hunger swells, fades, swells and fades
again.

By night, stomach growling, she feels surprisingly
strong. She looks forward
to morning, when, standing at the counter, she will inhale
the scent of toasting bread.

*

Jennifer L Freed lives in Massachusetts. Her poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, Atticus Review, Rust + Moth, West Trestle Review, The Worcester Review, Zone 3, and other journals. Her poem sequence “Cerebral Hemorrhage” was awarded the 2020 Samuel Washington Allen Prize (New England Poetry Club). She is the author of a chapbook, These Hands Still Holding, a finalist in the 2013 New Women’s Voices chapbook contest, and of a full length collection, When Light Shifts (Kelsay, 2022), based on the aftermath of her mother’s stroke.