Tag: Regret

Three Poems by LeeAnn Pickrell

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Regret

         “You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake.”

                           From “Antilamentation,” Dorianne Laux

Embrace the lovers too quickly
balled up and tossed away
like that first draft. When a gasp
of wind sweeps the tree
and you want only the feeling
of falling, know nothing of time
spent raking, gathering, bagging,
clearing gutters of detritus
so water flows again. Admire
the metaphors that never
should have mixed. Some-
times you must blow
up your life to change,
watch embers smoulder,
the image others had of you
turn to ash. Every choice
brought you here, where you
sit now, having learned
the only way you could have—
the hard way—to clear the yard.

*

At the Equinox

For a moment day equals night
before the sun slips toward winter,
shadows reach farther each day.

The cat who’s blind still thinks he’s
an explorer darting toward the door
opened where we scoop him close.

Inside, the world stands still. How
many days I forget to step
outside the door and all I see

are corners. Turn around,
a friend used to say,
there’s a whole world

just outside. Autumn
for instance is a sigh, a breath
let out through pursed lips.

Yesterday, I held the cat against
my chest as if that could soften
the hurt of a broken world.

*

Solitary

Always the first to bed, she pulls
the covers over her shoulders.

She lives on a street of houses
built in the fifties. Eyes closed,

she travels to those other homes,
sees her neighbors in their own rooms:

a girl dreams of what she can’t yet
see around the bend of a life,

a boy plays video games
in his bedroom’s darkness, a man

watches a show about smugglers
while his partner sleeps, a book

falls onto a woman’s chest as she reads,
a baby fusses in a crib.

Next door a woman who lived
a whole life in that one house

shuffles her walker toward the bed.
Across the street the man who had

a stroke still leaves his lights on late.
All of them invisibly bound,

as the day’s eyes close,
by one asphalt ribbon of road.

*

LeeAnn Pickrell’s first collection Gathering the Pieces of Days was published in April 2025. Tsunami, a memoir about her experience in the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, will be out in August 2026, also from Unsolicited Press. See more at leeannpickrell.com.

INSOMNIA by Mary Donnelly

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INSOMNIA

As a child, I was
not strong enough
to be kind.
Fear made me
cruel. Made me lazy.

And so I said
things—not often,
though frequent
enough—that now
keep me up at night

as I slowly age
on a long blue couch.
Things I can’t
take back. Un-
breakable things.

*

Mary Donnelly is a Brooklyn-based educator and video producer whose poems have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Hanging Loose, Prairie Schooner, The Literary Review, and The Yale Review, and in the chapbook Mad World Colored Oil (Dancing Girl Press). She teaches through Gotham Writers Workshop and is a senior editor for DMQ Review.

3 Poems by Stan Sanvel Rubin

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Code

Pish-Posh, Pish-Posh,
pebble rain at the window
calls in rhythm

the sound of a name
you have to decipher
to spell it in air.

Each drizzle of water,
each slap of wind
makes the cold inside colder.

It’s the thin signature
of leaving. It’s
the meaning of left.

 

Regarding Nature

The simple part
is the argument of flesh
we cannot leave behind

except in the world of dreams
where you become any animal
and roam any forest

or jungle or wide plain,
free as the wind
ricocheting off the cliffs,

innumerable scents in the air
under a blood moon,
hunting or hunted.

 

Regret

There’s no reason for the regret I feel
on a beautiful July morning

or if there is, I can’t see it
behind the sun on the leaves,

or the leaves themselves,
sprinkled with Summer.

If it’s out there I can’t find it,
lost like the squirrel that was here

just a minute ago, dancing on the deck
before disappearing into a shrub.

If you want to take this further,
and maybe I have to,

you and I both know that regret
comes with the world, comes with being

in the world, comes with being yourself
in a world you didn’t make and must leave,

whether you want to or not,
the way light leaves the trees,

when all I want to do
is dance.

 

Stan Sanvel Rubin’s fourth full collection, There. Here., was published by Lost Horse Press, his third, Hidden Sequel, won the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. Poems in numerous journals including Agni, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, Kenyon Review, One, etc. plus two recent anthologies, the 25th Anniversary of Atlanta Review and Nautilus Book Award winner, For Love of Orca. He lives on the north Olympic Peninsula of Washington State.