Tag: Halloween

Two Poems by Rebecca Aronson

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On Working in My Son’s Room After He Has Moved Out

What does it mean that the only art you’d allow in your room is a tiny painting that blends with the blue walls, a portal through which to see two silver-haloed planets and a droplet of a moon in a star-splattered, velvety sky? They are not like earth, nor unlike earth exactly, just as the blue of this room is nothing like and very like a certain kind of sky. It’s not, I don’t think, that you dislike art in general, but you don’t like to be pinned to a single idea. There’s a book of logic puzzles on the shelf we always used to wonder at. Planets are to identity as paint is to fish. No. Space is to color as the roses blooming outside your window are to the tiny eye of a praying mantis. No? I always use wrapping paper printed with stars for your gifts. I’ve given you cards that unfold to reveal a three-dimensional paper ship, a bedspread that looks like an unmown field. That is to say, I have wanted to give you the world, but since it has never been mine to give I bought you a small portrait of imaginary planets someone else’s child painted, and hung it on your blue walls, which were not the neon green you said you wanted, but this other color, different than either of us would have chosen, but beautiful, it turns out, in all the kinds of light we have here in this little room on earth.

*

Halloween snowstorm, Minneapolis, 1991

I remember that I didn’t know my neighbors
except the man across the hall with a kitten
he let wander our hallway. On the morning D called
at dawn muttering nonsense about angels and windows
I saw the city buried in snow, white sky, white mounds,
the streets whited out and everything as still
as a held breath. The kitten man and I went from floor
to floor and at every door asked what was needed
then took a wagon that someone had and struggled
into the new white-out world where everyone lived
now to help another. We worked in pairs and coteries
to dig out cars from beneath snowbanks, to carve paths
wide enough for one person to pass
between piles which were already starting to lose their brilliant shine,
we sculpted streets where memory said streets should be,
took turns following the shovelers with bags of sand
and cannisters of coarse salt. We took turns shoveling,
throwing the heavy stuff into mounds
that fattened and grew and sweated and froze slick again.
We dragged the wagon a few blocks that took all morning
to a store that was somehow open and bought whatever we could find
that was anything like what our neighbors wanted
and heaved the wagon back another hour along our own furrows
and up the mountain where the front steps used to be
and knocked again at all the doors on all the floors
to hand out all the not-quite-what-was-asked-for sundries
and went to our own doors exhausted, as happy
as I had ever been.

*

Rebecca Aronson is the author of three books of poetry, Anchor, Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, and Creature, Creature. She has been a recipient of a Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, the Loft’s Speakeasy Poetry Prize, a Yetzirah poetry fellowship, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee writers conference. She is host of Bad Mouth, a series of words and music. She lives in Albuquerque, where she teaches writing. Her website is rebeccaaronsonpoetry.com

A Few Days After the Election I Woke Up in a Hamburg Jail Cell by Justin Karcher

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A Few Days After the Election I Woke Up in a Hamburg Jail Cell

my head throbbing as an officer handed me
a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich
like I was taking communion. He couldn’t
believe I got as far as I did on two tires.

Maybe I was trying to escape the light
because where I’m from, it can eat you alive.
A pincushion sun shining with the blood of birds.
When I black out, some friends call me
Ghost Justin. I’m just grateful nobody got hurt.

I went back to Buffalo in an Uber and as we drove
over the river, my dad’s last words to me echoed
in my head. “You’re a better man than I am.”
Suddenly I smelled lilacs and thought about
my mom who plants her garden in the gritty earth.

That night at my first A.A. meeting, nothing smelled
like flowers but people still dug up their roots
and talked about their pain. I learned that it takes
a community for any exorcism to work.

*

Justin Karcher (Twitter: @justin_karcher, Bluesky: @justinkarcher.bsky.social) is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet and playwright from Buffalo, NY. He is the author of several books, including Tailgating at the Gates of Hell (Ghost City Press, 2015). Recent playwriting credits include The Birth of Santa (American Repertory Theater of WNY) and “The Buffalo Bills Need Our Help” (Alleyway Theatre). https://www.justinkarcherauthor.com

I had a sister once. by Robbi Nester

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I had a sister once.

But she was born dead. Her eyes stayed shut.
Ten tiny moons set on her fingernails.
I didn’t ask my mother how it happened, just
imagined a wax-pale doll who never answered
to her name. All my life, I took the full weight
of my father’s rage. It blew up like a sudden storm.
For years this sister spoke to me, saying Everything
you have is mine, perched on the edge of my bed,
no longer larval, a grown ghost child. Her fingernails
were long and sharp. She would pinch my arm
until it bled.

*

Robbi Nester is a retired college educator who has never stopped teaching in one way or another. She is the author of 5 collections of poetry, the most recent being About to Disappear, an ekphrastic collection that will be published by Shanti Arts. She has also edited 3 anthologies and curates and hosts two monthly poetry readings on Zoom, Verse-Virtual Monthly Reading and Words With You, part of The Poetry Salon Online. Learn more about her work at http://www.robbinester.net.

Two Poems by Vincent Casaregola

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Night at the Convenience Store

It’s not like there’s something wrong,
not like you’d think—no inner demon
willing me to kill or be killed, inspiring
some direct-to-video tragedy—

what I hear is softer, a whisper
of secrets and the sound of shadows
sliding slowly over hollow space,
someone else’s ghosts, not mine.

Some people broadcast themselves,
and I, despite myself, receive
an endless chain of repetitious fears,
the plainsong of pathetic histories.

At home, at night, the soft sounds
of furnaced air surrounding me,
I’d still find no peace, deafened almost
by the family’s atonal dreams.

So now I work the graveyard shift at the
convenience store, as ghosts come and go,
some in awkward bodies, some in minds,
and a few, just a few, carried on the wind.

*

In the Sunlight

Black letters, “Do Not Cross,”
on shiny yellow tape, rising and
falling on the afternoon breeze,
rustling, surrounding the site

Bright yellow, with black numbers,
the bent plastic markers, just like
what restaurants use to tag the order,
scattered randomly on black asphalt

Brass casings, cast like seed
on hard ground, some still smooth,
some dented, but each one shining
in the hot, late-summer sun.

*

Vincent Casaregola teaches American literature and film, creative writing, and rhetorical studies at Saint Louis University. He has published poetry in a number of journals, including 2River, The Bellevue Literary Review, Blood and Thunder, The Closed Eye Open, Dappled Things, The Examined Life, La Piccioletta Barca, Lifelines, Natural Bridge, Please See Me, WLA, Work, and The Write Launch. He has also published creative nonfiction in New Letters and The North American Review. He has recently completed a book-length manuscript of poetry dealing with issues of medicine, illness, and loss (Vital Signs) that has been accepted by Finishing Line Press.

EASTHAM by Royal Rhodes

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EASTHAM

Here on the outer Cape
near the last windmill
are scrub pine and sand bars
near tide pools we walked
in ankle-deep warm water,
and found horseshoe crabs,
moon snails, razor clams,
and tangled knots of seaweed.
This is the flung-out arm
of the bay that beckoned
the hungry pilgrims and Nauset
in their first encounter,
where both, surprised,
ran off, over round stones
rubbed smooth by tides.
The gray heavens or clouded
blue air fills with low
flotillas of observant gulls,
as if visiting ghosts
from some invisible realm.
Here understanding grows
and stuttering love
outlasts the soon altered.
In each summer season
mourning doves croon
love from the few trees
with hours wearing away
where we have sat still,
here with the world’s weight
as night comes too soon.

*

Royal Rhodes is a poet who lives in retirement in rural Ohio. His poems have appeared in: ONE ART, Last Stanza, Amethyst, Ekphrastic Review, The Montreal Review, and others. His poem, “Solstice”, was issued as a poetry and art collaboration broadsheet by The Catbird [on the Yadkin] Press in North Carolina.

Two Poems by Steve Deutsch

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Syzygies

There was a full moon
the night you died.
You would have wanted that.

When we were 8
and 10, we snuck
down the fire escape

one night to walk
the length of Church Avenue.
From the first rise

we looked out
on the near
perfect alignment

of street lights.
The moon was full
and we told each other stories

of how the planets aligned
like streetlights
and the pull of gravity

animated the vampires
the werewolves and the creature
from the Black Lagoon.

You said you could see them—
crouched like ravenous tigers
on the streetlight stanchions.

But we were young
then and only afraid
of make believe.

*

Halloween

They came for candy
this evening from 6
to 8, as the city allows.
Their parents trailed

with flash lights, bottled water
and warm clothing.
Costumed for cute
they dangled decorated

bags or plastic
Jack-o-lanterns
to carry home
hermetically sealed chocolate candies.

In Brooklyn, we dressed
for combat, ready to do battle
with the feisty folks
in poorly lit tenement halls

that smelled of cabbage
and kippered herring.
Remember when old lady
Blocker baptized Pete

with a pot of boiling water
rather than part with a penny
sweet. Outside it was mayhem.
The older kids blowing

the covers off manholes
with cherry bombs—
screaming like banshees
on sugar highs

until someone got too close
and spent the evening
being stitched at Beth-el.
They lit things up—

my brother was the star
of the show
with dad’s zippo and a paper bag
of puppy poop.

Our parents ignored us—
preferring Sgt. Bilko on TV
to refereeing the goody wars.
But the candy was sweeter then—

as if it were stolen fruit.
As if we had earned the right
to ruin our teeth on jelly
beans and turkish taffy.

*

Steve Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and is poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. Steve was nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. His Chapbook, Perhaps You Can, was published in 2019 by Kelsay Press. His full length books, Persistence of Memory and Going, Going, Gone, were published by Kelsay. Slipping Away will be published this spring. Brooklyn was awarded the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press and has just been published.

Five poems by Joanna Milstein

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Halloween Party

When you called I told you all about the party on Halloween.

About the cape and the pearls and the fishnets and the fangs.

About the men who asked me to dance to the slow songs.
The handsome one who showed me around the haunted house and let me, tender me, spooked by suspended skeletons and disposable ghouls, grab his arm.

That I woke up at 6 a.m. the next morning
between the grey satin sheets of a stranger.

What I didn’t say is that I stayed at home alone on Halloween.
Listening to public radio in my pjs.
That at midnight I ate the last bag of candy that the trick-or-treaters hadn’t picked up outside my door.

That yours was the last number I’ve dialed in weeks.

That I’ve been sick all autumn.

*

Red birds

The voices of the red birds invade my house at dawn chirping and fluttering.
They ask so many questions that I cannot answer.
I am mute until dusk.
I have a mouth but not until the inky darkness does it dare to whisper.
I want to chant the quiet things but I am tone-deaf.
I long for a new voice.
A voice content to be alive.
Grateful to hear the birds hum each morning.
With that voice I could join the dawn chorus
I could soar like the immortal birds.
I could respond instead of just listening.
And with that voice I could sing.
With that voice I could sing you a song.

*

Beach witness

I walk for the wet silence
And the non-manmade noises
The unheard and the untranslatable.
Only available Tuesday evenings after seven.
But please don’t tell.
Families have gone home and it is just me and the vanishing light and the roll of the short waves up and down and up again.
I step over electric blue latex gloves and a plastic fork and a razor blade and a supermarket bag and a Barbie doll and an empty bottle of bleach.
A soaked branch decays. A black feather shivers.
Nature kills nature all the time and no one complains.
Fingerprints and footprints dissolve when the tide rises.
Scars fade but never disappear.
The gulls are crying and the prehistoric birds extend their wings to dry as washed linen on a clothesline.
You told me once that horseshoe crabs cure leprosy but their carcasses also listen when you tell them your secrets.
Dead things make great confidants.
Green sea glass sparkles, edges softened by the hand of time.
Crabs like spiders crawl on fuzzy rocks.
Did you know that female spiders kill their male partners after mating? I learned this in biology.
You always told me I was bad at science.
The tide is low and the sea has hemorrhaged rusty red seaweed and artificial possessions and the blue-grey detritus of dreams.
The ocean breathes in and out
I try to breathe like that, I like how it makes me feel.
Tide pools brim with new life, things are reincarnated there.
Streams feed a thirsting sea.
Maybe you were a brilliant scientist,
but you were a terrible father.
My sandals gently crush a graveyard of white seashells.
They crackle under my feet like crepitation in the bony joints of cruel old men.
The sand flies hum, shells become sand.
The flecks live forever. Their tiny ears hear everything and their little eyes have seen the manmade deeds that lie at the foot of the wakeful seabed.
Teeth eat flesh but hard things disintegrate, too.
Everything devolves.
Everything becomes wet dust.
I believe in the eternal silence of beaches.
So many secrets shared between me and infinite particles.
They whisper:
We know we know we know we know we know we know we know we know we know.

*

Night traveler

Last night I traveled to Brazil
forced to navigate the rainforest
I stopped a friendly stranger for directions
struggling with a guide to basic Portuguese.
The heat nearly felled me, the thirst torturous, I opened my mouth and let the rain drip past my tongue down to my parched tonsils.
You were there, too.
Arm in arm we penetrated the forest’s dark canopy.
Together we wrestled man-eating tropical plants and gargantuan snakes,
You stole perspiry kisses, pushing my back against king-sized kapoks.

I awake covered in sweat.
Not from struggling with anacondas but from this miserable cold
my passport still in the drawer next to the four-poster bed.
I reach instead for Robitussin to soothe my throat, Advil to cool my torrid temperature.
No need to brush up my Portuguese.
I’m not sure which is farther, you or Brazil.
I don’t even like hiking.
And I lost you a long time ago.

*

Scheherazade for one night

If you stay I won’t ask questions. I’ll tell you stories, she said.
I’ll weave a quilt with them, I’ll tattoo our earth with rainbows.

And so she told him about mythical creatures and cold seas and spirits who haunt and others who don’t and kings and traveling salesmen and warm-blooded fish and fishermen and manipulative genies and healing herbs and poisons and stone souls and mermaids and an automaton and grief and prophetic dreams and blooming jasmine and secret languages and purple skies and apple trees and lovers and peripatetic courtiers and long suppers in the fourteenth century. About rewards. About women who lie with men and those who lie to them. About so many selves.

But in the morning he left anyway.

She stayed home, listening to their music, her footsteps caressing the carpet where his soles once danced.

*

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Joanna Milstein is a New York-based writer. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2019. She holds a PhD in History from the University of St Andrews. Her most recent short story is included in the winter 2021 issue of The Writing Disorder. She is currently working on her first novel.