Tag: parents

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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Father, after all these Years

         — I’m still waiting
for you to fade.
The way dark stars and sorrow
are known to do.
Or like the sky at dusk.
A rhyme from childhood, or a tune.

*

Eight Years Dead

—and never once coming
to me in dreams
begging forgiveness. Self-righteous
in the afterlife as you were in this one, Mother.
Only with the whole sky in yourself
approach me. The whole sky
where there may be air enough
for me to breathe.

*

Laura Ann Reed is a Contributing Editor with The Montréal Review. She holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology as well as in the performing arts. Her poems have appeared in seven anthologies, including Poetry of Presence II, as well as in numerous journals. Her most recent work is forthcoming in ONE ART, Illuminations, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM, and Main Street Rag. Her new chapbook, Homage to Kafka, was published by The Poetry Box (July 2025). https://lauraannreed.net/

Don’t Say You Never Knew Him by Paula R. Hilton

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Don’t Say You Never Knew Him

I was 27 when my mother pressed
her wedding band into my hand.
I’m so angry. I don’t want it.
Startled by venom in her voice,
I took it but told her I had no idea
what to do with it. Melt it down,
sell it, give it away. I don’t care.

Dad had dementia but hid his condition.
The man people flocked to for financial
advice died with the trunk of his Ford
stuffed with unpaid bills. Mom screamed
like a wounded animal. He’d bankrupted us.

A decade later, her memories soften.
Tells me Dad had been a great kisser.
He made my ears burn. She also shares
some advice. Don’t say you never knew him.
Say you didn’t know the extent of his illness.

I go to my room. Pull her band from
the jewelry box where it’s waited for
3,650 days, ask her if she wants it back.
She takes the gold ring from my open
palm. Slips it back on. Yes, she says, I do.

*

Paula R. Hilton explores the immediacy of memory and how our most important relationships define us. Her work has appeared in The Sunlight Press, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, Feminine Collective, The Tulane Review, and many others. Her poetry collection, At Any Given Second, was selected by Kirkus as one of its best books of 2021. She earned an MFA from the University of New Orleans. Learn more at https://paularhilton.com

Three Poems by Renee Williams

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Bad Boys and Johnny Cash

How many times can you listen
to Folsom Prison Blues
at the request of a whiny five-year-old,
on the drive home from a trip to Florida,
who’s forgotten her Tatters doll,
left at the hotel a hundred miles back,
who’s crying nonstop, still demanding
to listen to Johnny Cash,
stomping and slamming her sticky,
snot-encrusted fists against the back
of the head rest so many times
that everyone in the cars feels
like they are in prison and just wants
to toss her out on the highway?

My Dad caved, went back,
got the doll. Growing up, I’d
cut out photos of Cash,
and stick them on my bedroom walls
because I could never get enough
of the Man in Black.
Probably the start of something not good,
never any good…

My father is to blame for all of this,
for indulging me
and introducing me to motorcycles
and dragging me on the back
of that dilapidated dirt bike
into Snake Holler and having it break down
on us when we ran out of gas
and had to walk home,
Walk of Shame, clean home
to Mom, who wasn’t amused,
just wanting us to wash
off the mud, so we could
have a proper dinner.

The flurry of bad boys hit
until I straight up married a proper fellow,
who became an accountant and had tax season,
but I just wanted to party, so I found
a better one, the love of my life.

We married, and he got a bike,
and then several more,
multiplying like rabbits.
He even got me one
for my own self.

But I couldn’t tell Dad.
Because I knew he’d be jealous,
because he couldn’t ride anymore,
because he thought I was getting
CPR training to save his life,
when I was really taking
my motorcycle safety class.

But I wasn’t there
when the CPR was needed.

When I go to see Dad now,
I’m greeted by Hoss,
the sexton’s Old English bulldog pup,
who nearly knocks me down
with his 70 pounds of bad boy exuberance,
the therapy dog for the ones
who still have imprisoned pulses
who still have teary blues
who still have tattered hearts
walking among the headstones.

*

Unmoored

They say that grief comes in waves,
but I find it lapping at my feet
as ocean waves tease the shore,
ripples small and steady for so long,
until one plows into me,
nearly knocking me off my feet.

Bobbing like a buoy in rough surf
I’m staggering through this life
no longer chained to commitments
and now I don’t know what to do.
Maybe the saddest thing in the world
is a caregiver
who no longer
has anyone to care for.

Tears won’t stop no matter how I try,
but lies come easily.
Everyone will believe I’m just suffering
from those darned allergies, right,
or maybe raging sinuses?
It’s been over a month.
Shouldn’t I be moving on by now?

I seek messages and meaning
in feathers and foliage,
creatures and constellations.
And I am left
as befuddled as I was
when my feet hit the floor
this morning.

*

We Know You Here

Our priest asks us to step into the light,
not to hide in the darkness.
I understand the metaphor,
but the reality horrifies me.
I recoil.

The sun, beautiful muse of goodness,
is not where I belong.
Please leave me here in the dark
and let the messages
come to me. In the shaded woods
illuminated only by moonlight
I am comforted, nurtured, restored.
Deer peek at me from the brush
eyes aflame, yet they do not fear me.
The chorus of spring peepers reminds me
this is my home. Safety is here.
Yes, coyotes prowl these hills at night
but they, too, will avoid me.
Ancient opossums traipse through the lawn
and sometimes a raccoon or rabbit or two
may join them. Nuisances, annoyances,
problems to so many, but here, they have a place.

I dance with Luna moths,
letting them light on my fingertips,
precious butterflies of the night.
Stay with me, I urge them.
The light is not your friend.
It will hurt you as it has me
mutilating and maiming.

But the sunlight beckons me forth
the highest card in the Tarot
the child astride a stallion
beams of light surrounding him.
I am drawn to that beacon of warmth.
I want to bask in those soothing rays.
But it’s an illusion.

I step back into the night and breathe.
Crisp night air fills my lungs.
Stars fall from the sky, as if offering me gifts
to welcome me home.
Stay, they tell me.
We know you here.

*

Renee Williams is from Nelsonville, Ohio. She is a retired English instructor whose poetry has appeared in Of Rust and Glass, Alien Buddha Press zines, Verse-Virtual, Deep South Magazine, Panoply, Impspired, Sein und Werden, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Amethyst Review, The New Verse News, and Beatnik Cowboy among others. She has written interviews and concert reviews for Guitar Digest, as well. Her photography has been featured in the Corolla Wild Horse Fund calendars, the Santa Fe Review, Moss Piglet, Anti-Heroin Chic, Swim Press, Lumineire as well as several others. She enjoys spending time with her family and dogs; she takes orders from her cranky cat who bosses her around daily.

Two Poems by David B. Prather

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Caring for Someone Who Won’t Care for Themselves

My parents drop by again today,
and when I say today, I mean to put you in my frame
of mind, this moment. My father
              doesn’t even come into the house.
It’s the middle of summer. It’s morning,
and it’s already ninety degrees.
              He sits in the breezeway
while my mother opens the kitchen door
and enters. She’s just had her hair cut,
but she tugs on a few strands that were missed.
I get the scissors and clip the strays.
Have you ever trimmed your mother’s hair?
I foresee a time when this will be a weekly show
of affection, which will then become washing
              and toweling and brushing
every day. Putting her purse on the counter,
the one I bought her for Christmas,
she tells me my father still won’t take care of himself
the way he should. And when he’s my father, I know,
              and I’m sure you understand,
my mother is frustrated with him.
She wants him to live as long as possible.
I’ve begun to think of the world without my father.
I can’t say when the clock in my brain started
that countdown. Are you the kind of person
              who wakes before the alarm?
I have a habit of tapping the snooze button,
sleeping through those warnings.
I don’t want to imagine the worst, but I am unable to stop.
My mother says he’s troublesome, that he ignores
his own heart, the way it beats like a trapped bird.
How is your heart these days? Mine is a mourning dove.
              Mine calls out under the threat of rain.

*

When my mother asks why

I spend the entire day in bed,
I tell her I’m a dog who’s lost
his master, my paws stretched

across the grave, unmoved
when called by name, unresponsive
to that come-home whistle.

I tell her I am a tree fallen
in the forest, heartwood rotted out,
food for the parasites that brought me down.

I tell her the blankets are too heavy,
made of an element so dense
they drag me down

to the center of the earth.
I tell her the air is so oppressive, a giant
pressing down on my body, this body

I don’t even know anymore.
I tell her I want to be done
with this life, but I don’t want to be done,

but I do, then I don’t, and I do, I don’t.
I tell her I don’t know anyone
who wouldn’t want a day alone

under the covers with their dreams
tangled up in the sheets.
I tell her I’m adrift on a raft

over the deepest trench in the ocean,
and all around me is only horizon,
the line that divides one life from another.

*

David B. Prather is the author of three poetry collections: We Were Birds (Main Street Rag, 2019), Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2023), and the forthcoming Bending Light with Bare Hands (Fernwood Press). His work has appeared in many publications, including New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, Gyroscope Review, etc. He lives in Parkersburg, WV. Website: www.davidbprather.com

Two Poems by Mary Lou Buschi

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Fire

            After Marianne Moore

Burned you didn’t it, my mother used to say.
Nowhere near a stove or flame but the accusation
hung there, in the air like refraction waves.
Burned you, you who should have known better.
You who stuffed a short skirt, two panties
in your purse after tracing Kit Fever, not your name
on a frequent flyer ticket. You who barely flew – came
the minute he said so.
No phone, no media, no way to track
the Landcruiser bouncing
over the Grand Tetons. Burned you.
Once. Twice. Shame on you.
Love, was it? Girl alone on a barstool at the Gaslight Saloon.
A dog with three legs curled under the rungs.

*

To the Ninth Grade Girl Crying in the Nurse’s Office During Lunch

You will be invisible in your 50s. Cheese will always be delicious. One day you will drive past a row of trees and name them: Sumac, Walnut, Tulip, and know which ones are invasive. You will become concerned with all things invasive as you stare out the window at a yard too large for your diminishing energy. People will be less interesting, but you will love more of them than you ever thought you could, deeply, finding flaws that enact that velvet kind of love that softens your eyes and warms the curves of your ears. Let–it–go. All of it. Not much matters. Not the stop sign you hit during your driving test. Not the Great Lash you lifted in middle school, or the date you ditched at Lucky Strike. Not the way you organize your closet by color, bookshelves by imagined dinner parties. It all gets left behind for someone to sort. It may be an unassuming couple that throws what you held dear into a rented dumpster. Dear Ninth Grade Girl, you will try to step off this world many times. Many times, I hope you fail.

*

Mary Lou Buschi (she/her) is the author of 3 chapbooks and 3 full length poetry collections. Her 3rd book, BLUE PHYSICS was published in February 2024. (Lily Poetry Review books). PADDOCK, her second book was also published by (LPR). Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Ploughshares, Glacier, Willow Springs, On the Seawall, among many others. Mary Lou is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and holds an MS in Urban Education from Mercy University. Currently, she is a special education teacher working with students on the spectrum in the Bronx.

Two Poems by Jackleen Holton

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In the Recovery Room After the Biopsy

Once, a friend told me that his mother’s
hospice agency offered an early exit
option, though they didn’t call it that,
or use the phrase assisted suicide.
I was surprised, so I wrote it down,
the name they gave it, something
transition, maybe? Peaceful
departure? No, but something to do
with travel, velocity.
Not exactly pre-boarding,
but that’s the gist of it. His mom
said no, it was too expensive,
and they’d already gone
through all her money,
so they waited, though he
had started to say he’d be happy
to pick up the tab, but stopped himself
because he was already thinking
about the curtains, how he’d replace
them with something lighter,
maybe a new coat of paint.
My mother’s already gone.
She spared us the long drawn-out adieu,
tubes and sunken eyes.
So why did I need to know the name?
Had I been stroking my cancer scar
again as he spoke, thinking
about my nine-year-old who came home
from school the other day, angry
that all her friends’ parents were thirty,
not fifty like us. I wrote down the price,
too, I’m sure of it. Twenty-five hundred?
That’s not so bad for an upgrade.
How to say it? Put me on the redeye
to L.A. I’ll be there before
I open my eyes, the flight
attendant making the rounds, leaning
in to whisper we’re here, gently
touching my arm as if to wake me.

*

Al-Anon

There’s a church down the street
where I can go when I start to feel
those little pangs of judgment
about all the ways that other people
choose to lick their wounds.
For example, my childhood friend whose liver
must scream in that high-pitched way
that neglected plants do, a friend last seen
on Facebook, perched on the rim
of a birdbath-sized margarita.
Or my husband, coughing up pieces of lung,
then sticking another goddamn
cigarette in his gob
first thing every morning.
See, I’m doing it in real time.
I need another meeting.
Because there’s something
comforting about the aroma of burnt
coffee well past my caffeine curfew,
and the little wicker basket
that goes around, only asking
for a dollar, the clichés and rhymes
we read aloud, and the ones we say
to one another absent any sense of irony,
after all it’s not a poetry reading,
no pressure to be dazzling.
And then there are the stories.
People’s kids who’ve overdosed,
terrible spouses coming home blotto,
most of the stories so much sadder
than mine, that I’d feel a little better,
if there weren’t this competing need
to fit in, or one-up that sometimes
makes me feel duty-bound
to dramatize. Like the one time
I narrated my friend into the hospital
on the liver transplant list.
And usually someone brings a box
of donuts or store-bought sugar
cookies, and if there’s a few
that nobody else has eaten, I fold
them up in a napkin, tuck it
into my purse for later.
And then there’s the end of the meeting,
the circle, holding hands with strangers,
repeating the incantation, then raising
our clasped hands up to send the spell
out into the ethers, the exodus
to the dark parking lot, buzzing
with hope, and a little more
of that coveted serenity, a firefly
light in my soul as I let go and let
my headlights float me all the way home.

*

Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies The Giant Book of Poetry, California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology, and Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life. Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Florida Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Slipstream, The Sun and others.

Daddy’s Girl by Julie Benesh

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DADDY’S GIRL

I wanted to run away
with my mother.
She and I could date
around, compare (love)
notes, and always
have each other.

But she and my father
stayed together.
I grew up, went to college,
got married. Since her death

we’ve grown apart. The world
has changed yet part of me
is stuck at 26, the age
I was when I lost her.

I monitored my female body
for mother’s ailments: glaucoma,
arthritis, metastatic tumors,
but I got instead his bad skin
and silent reflux, his work anxiety,
things of his I’d once blamed
on alcohol and cigarettes
that I eschewed.

My father lived another 18 years.
One time with relatives, we looked
at each other and knew we’d both
had enough of the chatter.
and fled like adolescents.

With my rival and nemesis
I had more in common
than I knew, but why
was I surprised?

We had
the same
great love.

*

Julie Benesh (juliebenesh.com) authored the chapbook ABOUT TIME from Cathexis Northwest Press. She published work in Tin House, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, Another Chicago Magazine, New World Writing, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program and recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant and her full-length poetry collection, INITIAL CONDITIONS, is forthcoming from Saddle Road Press.

Math for Older Parents by Liona T. Burnham

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Math for Older Parents

Take the age at which your husband’s father died.
Young, yes, young.
Now, subtract your age from it.
Now, add the age of your preschooler
to the difference.
That age is the reason
you’re out running around the lake
on a fall day, tennis shoes splashing through puddles.
Red leaves rustle in the warm wind,
and the ducks stretch out straight
as they flap their wings and skim across the water.
You can feel the effort in your shoulder blades,
as if you, too, are putting the work into flying.

*

Liona T. Burnham teaches writing to community college students in the Pacific Northwest and Northern Virginia. She has poems published or forthcoming in Stone Poetry Quarterly, Sky Island Journal, and The Northern Virginia Review.

The end of childhood by Ellen Stone

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The end of childhood

Your parent’s tightened
lips, their narrow love—
how it tipped & tilted
like the summer Ferris wheel
all smoke and burnt candy.
You, leaning over the edge
to see it all – old ball field,
swirling night bats, dogs
& beer faced fathers. Where
is your mother? Gone, again?
That question slow burning,
but here the lights
are twinkly, everyone
is gathering, rippled
& holding something
spooled loosely –
giant blue bears, a pinwheel,
caramel apples on sticks, silvery
balloons hovering on the midway.
Empty in this moistness, you
circling around, swooping
& knotted, your stomach,
your sinking heart.

*

Ellen Stone advises a poetry club at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She is a co-host for the monthly poetry series, Skazat! and an editor at Public School Poetry which debuts in the fall of 2023. Ellen’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Third Coast, Cold Mountain Review, The Museum of Americana, and River Heron Review. She is the author of The Solid Living World, Michigan Cooperative Press, 2013, and What Is in the Blood, Mayapple Press, 2020.

Five Poems by Jennifer L Freed

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How to Pack for the Move to Assisted Living

Feel once more the weight
of the little brass elephant
with the missing tusks.
Run your fingers along
the banister, the bedroom curtains. Listen
for the ticking of the antique clock
at the end of the hall.

*

Yellow Tags

At the parting edge
of ninety-four, my father
wonders what’s the point,
this accumulation of life
unspooling in Assisted Living,
while his home, so close,
a mere two streets away—
its wooded yard, its rooms
lined with books
and treasures—his home
is packed full

of people this very day, strangers
browsing shelves and closets,
burrowing in drawers, finding
the antique clocks and pewter mugs,
the Nikon camera he bought
in 1969, the Navy blanket
and hammock, boxed
in the basement, saved
for who knows what
but saved, nonetheless, a part
of his passing through
this life, and he wonders
how he got here—his past
now stickered with yellow tags.

*

My Father Helps My Mother with Her Compression Socks

He asks if she’s ready.
She sets her wheelchair brakes.
He kneels and she extends one leg.
He guides her foot to his knee, slides
the cuff of nylon over her heel, then yanks, hard.
The wheelchair wobbles.
Extra material hangs over her toes.
She does not offer her expertise
from years of putting on panty hose: how to
gather the nylon, pull gently, doling out fabric
through delicate fingers.
She thanks him.
He pats her leg, asks if the sock is too tight
below her knee. She always says it’s just fine.
Then they switch—her left foot on his right leg.
Sometimes he helps slide her feet into shoes,
the boxy, wide-mouthed pair with space
for swelling, before putting his hands on her
wheelchair arms, using them to tug himself back
up to standing. She pats his shirt into place
around his belt, makes sure he’s not dizzy
from rising too fast. Then he turns right, to the desk
with his computer, and she wheels herself left, to gaze
out the window while listening to the news.

*

Remote Control

My father, now 96—still spry, bright, quick-witted,
still learning yoga, climbing stairs, using his computer
to find etymologies, stock prices, names
of temples in ancient Greece—now

he asks me if—and this is not an urgent
request, he adds—but if, as my husband and I pack up
our home of 21 years, we should happen upon
the spare remote control for my parents’ TV,

which, my father explains, I would have found in the drawer
of the hutch by the den door of the house my parents left
two years ago, the house I emptied for them
when they moved into assisted living—

if I should come across that remote control now (I might not
have known it worked, my father says,
since it shared that drawer with other, outdated
remotes and garage door openers), or if I find it

in a few weeks, when my husband and I are unpacking
our lives in new, downsized rooms, then
could I please bring it next time I visit,
since the remote they’ve been using till now

isn’t responding anymore when he presses the buttons,
and he doesn’t think it’s the batteries, but
he’s ordering new batteries on-line, in case that’s all
that’s wrong.

*

Cutting My Father’s Hair

He’s still tough as leather, but so much shorter now.
He wobbles when he stands too quickly.
Why didn’t I realize sooner?
When I comment on his fringe of hair—a little fluffy,
I say—he waves a crooked hand
toward my mother, now maneuvering from wheelchair
to couch: She likes it that way.
Then, The damned clipper. Can’t get it to work right anyway.
And so I offer.
Why am I surprised that he agrees
so readily? That he brings out the electric clipper
almost immediately? He hands it over,
small and black with its little pronged comb, asks
if I know how to use it, then warns,
You might find it hard though.
It doesn’t cut as well as it used to.
And you can’t even find the damn power button.
Of course. The worsening neuropathy
in his fingers. His failing eyes.
They have the hairdresser here, but
I don’t know her, and why would I pay
all that money? I don’t even have that much hair.
He glances over at my mother, who catches my eye,
and winks. Your Mum always did it, he says. Before
her stroke.
So I sit him in the living room, under the light,
and he lets me turn his head this way and that.
I trim the patchy beard along his jaw, the grey scruff
brushing the back of his collar. He asks me
to thin his moustache, says the hair
curls into his mouth. I use a tiny scissors
for this, my fingers humming along smoothly
between nostril and lip. I think of the fine tuning
of my muscles, joints, nerves. How much
I have not yet lost. My mother
lies on the couch, watching us, smiling. My dead brother
hovers in my father’s face. My father’s eyes close
as I snip the long hairs of his eyebrows,
the fine whisps crowning his skull.

*

Jennifer L Freed’s full-length collection When Light Shifts (finalist, 2022 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize) explores the aftermath of her mother’s cerebral hemorrhage and the altered relationships that emerge in a family crisis. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Orison Anthology. Other awards include the 2022 Frank O’Hara prize (Worcester County Poetry Association), the 2020 Samuel Washington Allen Prize (New England Poetry Club), and honorable mention for the 2022 Connecticut Poetry Award. Please visit jfreed.weebly.com to learn more.

Everyone Has Better Parents by Robert Darken

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Everyone Has Better Parents

I drive with you beside me after you’ve bombed a math test.
You’re still and cold, like city statues after dark under street lamps,
the way public art at night shapes itself into familiar monsters.

You still want to go to college but maybe not engineering, you say,
feeling carefully for safe ground between us.

At the stoplight on Black Rock, birds pass over our car
and are gone forever.
The car engine hums, listening.

I’m taking you to a therapist. You asked Mom for someone new,
someone who is not a family friend so you can tell the truth
about us: the current of my fury that crackles
through our walls,

your mother’s shackling invasion of privacy,
her way of transmuting all experiences into life lessons
like the perpetual ringing of a hammer.

At two years old your eyes were blue as berries, your hair
platinum and fine at the temples, like a halo.
What if that was the time to impart wisdom,
Before you darkened into this baffling stranger?
What if it’s now–this moment
before the traffic light blinks green?

As we drive past the bank, sunset blazes in its windows–
your face lit like red gold–and it’s like a door opening
to welcome us: some other father, some other son.

*

Originally from the Midwest, Robert Darken now resides in Connecticut, where he teaches high-school English. His poems have appeared in The Orchards, Red Eft Review, and New Verse News.

Midwinter & my father wants to know by Amy Williams

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Midwinter & my father wants to know

if I can forgive him. Brow
furrowed, I know it’s just

a matter of time. Unstable
blood vessels & his hazel

iris failing to control
light. It’s natural, the way

Mercury changes position
when it approaches the sun.

It’s natural, the way
tissues decay & my blurred

face when the optic nerve
sparks images in his brain.

He’s sixty-six years old
& my body tenses still

at the sound of his heels
in a quiet room.

I swear I still can feel his fingers
curving the base of my

girl neck. Darkening
my mind. Darkening

stars that rupture
in a black hole’s gravity.

You know how dust
glitters in the sunlight

before it’s pulled to the ground?
I want to know the mathematics

of it. I want to know
how he outlived my mother.

I want to know
what he remembers.

I want to know
how much I’ll regret.

*

Amy Williams is a writer and educator based in New Delhi. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, Rust + Moth, Bodega Magazine, The Shore, Redivider, Sweet Tree Review and Contrary Magazine.

The Choice by Sharon Waller Knutson

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The Choice

He has no choice when his mother
dies giving him life with his father’s
name sealed on her blue lips.

He has no choice when his adopted
mother chooses him and sits
with him during sickness and nightmares.

Walks him to school, makes him peanut
butter sandwiches, kisses his bruises
and laughs at his silly jokes.

But when he is ten, he is asked
to make a choice at the Rose
Ceremony on Mother’s Day.

White if your mother is dead.
Red if she is alive. The only mother
he has known is sitting stiff

on a folding chair and he knows
she wants to jump up and say,
It’s okay if you choose her.

And he knows his birthmother
who is watching over him
wouldn’t mind if he chose red.

But it is his choice. With his right
hand he reaches for the red rose
and with the left hand he picks the white,

sticks them in his buttonholes
and marches off with the scout troop
to salute their mothers.

*

Sharon Waller Knutson is a retired journalist who lives in Arizona. She has published several poetry books including My Grandmother Smokes Chesterfields (Flutter Press 2014,) What the Clairvoyant Doesn’t Say and Trials & Tribulations of Sports Bob (Kelsay Books 2021) and Survivors, Saints and Sinners (Cyberwit 2022.) Her work has also appeared recently in GAS Poetry, Art and Music, The Rye Whiskey Review, Black Coffee Review, Terror House Review, Trouvaille Review, ONE ART, Mad Swirl, The Drabble, Gleam, Spillwords, Muddy River Review, Verse-Virtual, Your Daily Poem, Red Eft Review and The Five-Two.

The Day Your Father Dies by Gary Fincke

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The Day Your Father Dies

Three time zones east, while you sleep
in your travel-vouchered hotel suite,
the ambulance, pulsing red, but mute,
arrives for your father. Your sister,
discreet, waits for what she believes
is a decent hour, her morning nearly
ended before she places her call.

Because you mark this moment,
you will always know that the first
of six job-candidate interviews,
right then, is eight minutes away.
While you fix on absence, your colleague
carries three morning conversations;
you make phone calls during lunch.

When, during the afternoon, you begin
to season your questions with banter,
the candidates are quick to smile.
Your rooms are swept and scoured while
you overhear strangers toast each other
before dinner in an expensive restaurant
so close you can walk there, then back

to where the hours, their voices hushed,
reuse their condolences throughout
your all-night sleeplessness. A plane
taxis to its gate with no plans but waiting
for you to board just after sunrise, exiting,
then entering two versions of winter, light
about to be altered by accumulated snow.

*

Gary Fincke’s collections have won what is now the Wheeler Prize (Ohio State) and the Wheelbarrow Books Prize (Michigan State). His latest collection, The Mussolini Diaries was published by Serving House in 2020.

After My Father Died by Sara Backer

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After My Father Died

I longed to spend time with him in a dream
but over two years passed without one. I’m afraid I’ll forget
how he whistled Cole Porter and the way he squeezed
his eyes when he stuttered on Ws. When a dream came at last,
I heard his voice—but couldn’t see him.
I looked around: an outdoor festival, stage tents, musicians.
My sister waited in one of the tents. My father, invisible,
said I could continue to hear him or I could be with my sister.
The choice was presented like chicken or fish—no other options,
I couldn’t have both, and it was up to me.
I looked beyond stages to overlapping hills streaked with mist.
Too far to see, I knew a weighty ocean rolled indifferent through its tides.
Nothing more was voiced. As I walked to the tent,
I saw my sister’s thick blue sweater on the seat beside her,
saved for me.

*
Sara Backer’s first book of poetry, Such Luck (Flowstone Press 2019) follows two poetry chapbooks: Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press) and Bicycle Lotus which won the 2015 Turtle Island chapbook award. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Art and reads for The Maine Review. Recent publications include The Pedestal Magazine, Tar River Poetry, Slant, CutBank and Kenyon Review.