Tag: son

Hunger by Valerie Bacharach

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Hunger

Years ago, shortly after our younger son died, my husband and I, on a trip to D.C., visited the National Gallery. Caravaggio and Monet vied for wall space with Klimt and O’Keefe while other rooms held marble statues and religious icons. We pretended to look, to scan the commentaries,
pretended we set aside sadness, left grief on the hotel’s unmade bed. My eyes wandered to families with bored teenagers, with toddlers sliding on tiled floors, tugging a parent’s hand, standing too close to a painting. Our son was neither toddler nor teenager, but a man of 26. Once upon a time, before we moved into darkness, we brought our sons here, ran after them, bribed them with treats, tried to speak with them about old masterpieces. I stared at those families surrounding us, fencing us in with their happiness, followed them from room to room, hollowed with a hunger so huge it could swallow the heavens.

*

Valerie Bacharach lives in Pittsburgh, PA and is a proud member of Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic Workshops. She received her MFA from Carlow University in 2020. Her book, Last Glimpse, was published by Broadstone Books in August 2024. She has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net.

Scapegrace by Alison Hurwitz

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Scapegrace

My son does not want Anne of Green Gables
to make any more mistakes. First, a blunder sends

her best friend stumbling into drunkenness—
the raspberry cordial which was really currant wine.

Then, the mislabeled bottle of vanilla which she,
daydreaming, did not think to sniff, resulting

in a lineament cake. He tells me it’s disproportionately
unfair, and asks me what Marilla’s word scapegrace means.

All week, he’s been trailing misery and missed
assignments, wadded bits of paper, hiding in his

long red hair, too aware of his deficiencies.
His thin frame bows and quivers—drawn.

I find another definition. Let Anne take off her apron,
walk out into the air of late October, thrill to see

a Scapegrace Loon unfurl its wings and lift across the pond,
the fire at its throat a crimson arrow in the dusk.

*

Alison Hurwitz (she/her), is a former cellist and dancer who finds music in language. Nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Alison hosts the monthly online reading, Well-Versed Words. Published in South Dakota Review, Sky Island Journal, SWWIM and others, her work was named as a finalist for RockPaperPoem’s 2025 Poetry Prize. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorials, hikes, and dances in her kitchen with her family. Find her at alisonhurwitz.com

Dear Son by Julie Weiss

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Dear Son

I see you crouched behind a bush,
hands cupped around some countryside
bug, whose name and composition
you´ll pull out of the air as if the sky
was a library, earth´s most bizarre
curiosities housed on its shelves.
I used to fret over stings and bites.
Poison. By now, I´ve learned to trust
the knowledge hived in your mind.
I see you, sitting alone on a bench,
your bicycle flung on its side like
an argument you refused to lose.
The park is abuzz. Other eight-year-olds
wham soccer balls, somersault
off bars, play tag or play-wrestle,
but you stare at the grass, building
Lego towns inside dew drops.
Or maybe you´re mapping out
uncharted paths in maple leaf veins.
I see you on deep-read days, the way
your name doesn´t catch the sound
waves travelling to your eardrum.
I, too, know what it´s like to journey
to the center of the story, the red-hot
plot scorching any urge to return.
Sometimes, nothing temporal matters,
does it? Not your unmade bed or half-
reassembled gadget parts scattered
across the floor, not even your meal,
whose flavors have vacated the plate
like a reunion gone awry. At school,
you discover a galaxy in every lesson,
chase comets through your teacher´s
explanations. I foresee the consequences
of your cosmic-quick wit, the jokes
and jabs you´ll have to dodge,
the laughter. Corners you´ll color
in camouflage, quiet as a phasmid.
The asteroidal scars you´ll bring home.
Dear son, rise above the bullies!
Grand Marshal our town´s first bug
parade, naysayers be damned. Build
a road network rooted in leaf patterns,
a rocket ship powered by dew drops.
When time writes your story, know
that every word of it will shine.

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, her debut collection published by Kelsay Books and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II, published by Bottlecap Press. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, is forthcoming in 2025 with Kelsay Books. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was selected as a 2023 finalist for Best of the Net, she won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja,” and she was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Burningword Journal, Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and others. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at julieweisspoet.com

At the Crosswalk by Patrick Vala-Haynes

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At the Crosswalk

The cigarette butt
Smoldering
Like an uncut jewel

A mother shielding her son
From the spectacle
Of a man who stoops

The ember lighting his face
As he takes the boy’s hand
And waits for the threat to pass

*

Patrick Vala-Haynes lives within shouting distance of the Oregon Coast Range. His writing has appeared in Dulcet Literary Magazine, Sand, Split Rock Review, Sheepshead Review, Slate and elsewhere.

Two Poems by Michael Simms

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The Dark Undercarriage of the Purple Packard

If I were to pray for my father
it wouldn’t be for him exactly
but for the shadow beneath
the purple Packard where
he crawled when I was six.
I followed him into the darkness
of machinery, a mystery
men love though he in particular
knew nothing about what drives
things forward, power
carried from the engine to
the strange wheels and wires
of this life. Men love certainty,
rules and laws that determine
how things work, but the stories
we live by end too quickly
with a moral almost always
wrong. He wanted me to be
the man men pretend to be,
a lion of fire, the man men
imagine their leaders to be.
The voice that held my father
was his father’s, a burly man
who wrestled in high school,
worked on derricks and settled
in a career as a statistician
for Illinois Power and Light.
A lost photograph comes to mind
of three men in gray suits and
fedoras walking toward the lens
believing they owned the world
because they kind of did.
Before smoking himself to death,
he gave his son a 1949 purple Packard
fading to gray. My father and I lay
on the driveway of the very house
I remember in the shadow
of the memory of his father
whose son pointed at the dark
undercarriage, explaining
things he knew nothing about

* 

Rippling Waves of Heat over the Wheat Fields of Kansas

Somewhere north of Kansas City,
my father disappeared in himself
as he often did
then returned and noticed the blacktop rolling through
the roiling center of America which he loved
with unquestioning ardor. In the long journey away
from my father, I’ve often remembered
the way he drove in a trance
and suddenly woke
surprised to be in his life, and I promised myself
to be here, wherever here is

We were passing through a dead zone
where Jack Brickhouse, the Voice of the Chicago Cubs,
was telling my dad the pain he feels at his mother abandoning him
is alright because he’s about to steal second

An Oldsmobile like ours, driven by
a middle-aged white man, passed us
his wife beside him, eyes wide in terror.
Dad stepped on the gas and we flew down the road, passing them,
so the other man stepped on the gas passing us,
his wife yelling at him to slow down. And my father
going over a hundred miles an hour roared past them
again. Dad smiled. He’d won. I turned to watch
the Oldsmobile shrinking in the distance

Then, as we drove through the dry shadow of a cloud
Dad wiped the sweat from his face
and pointed at a large burial mound ahead of us
beautiful in the piercing light

He was delivering me to a life he disapproved of.
He expected gratitude
but I was the son who aspired to be a poet
and kindness from this rough man was like a stone in my throat

*

Michael Simms lives in the old Mount Washington neighborhood of Pittsburgh. His poetry collections include Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2025.) His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Plume, Scientific American and Poem a Day (Academy of American Poetry). He is the founding editor of Autumn House Press and Vox Populi. In 2011, the Pennsylvania legislature awarded Simms a Certificate of Recognition for his service to the arts.

Scattering by Rob Spillman

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Scattering

Like gods gathering
tiny psychedelic planets,
we brim the red bucket
with superballs

I and my boy, now a man,
just shy of twenty-three,
scoop up balls cracked
with age and love

On three we hurl the planets,
the superballs pinging
off white worn tiles,
tub, ceiling, ricocheting madly,
my boy a boy again,
bathtime chaos and joy

We will not miss
this small, crumbling space,
but see how we sob,
the decrescendoing superballs
slowly rolling to silence
one last time
in the only home
we’ve known
*

Rob Spillman was the editor of Tin House from 1999-2019. He is the author of the memoir All Tomorrow’s Parties.

Letter to My Son, Over Three Years Since He’s Gone by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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Letter to My Son, Over Three Years Since He’s Gone

You would be jealous, I think,
of how your sister is learning trig,
speaking Spanish, playing bridge.
You’d probably tease her, but really,
what you’d be thinking is, She is so cool.
And she is, sweetheart. She’s fun
and silly. Like you. Only like her.
We talk about you, of course.
Just this weekend, we remembered
how once you said if a 99-pound person
ate a one-pound burger, they
would be one percent burger.
I wonder what percent of your sister
is grief? And what percentage love?
Tonight a girl asked her if she had any siblings.
She said, yes, a brother. When the girl
asked her how old you were, she told her
the truth. That you were seventeen
when you died. What a terrible gift
to learn how to say the hardest things straight.
I can’t help but think if you are watching her,
you, too, must be in awe of who she’s becoming.
Oh, how we learn to grow from whatever soil
we’ve been given. I do not pretend to know
how this works. I only know she
is learning to transform ache into beauty,
nightmare into dream. I only know
I long for her to know love from you
the way a garden feels loved by sun, by rain.

*

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is poet laureate for Evermore. She co-hosts the Emerging Form podcast. Her daily audio series, The Poetic Path, is on the Ritual app. Her poems have appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, American Life in Poetry, and Carnegie Hall stage. Her newest collection is The Unfolding. One-word mantra: Adjust.

Nasturtiums by Anne Archer

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Nasturtiums

among impatiens
in my flower boxes,
their leaves a canopy

of open palms, green
platters for sun and
rain and wasps. Dew

pools in the centre,
stems and flowers taste
of summer, pepper-hot.

Squash blossoms yellow
in the abandoned raised bed
like a lesson never learned.

Someone I know has
just died yet I am as
confused by compost

as I am by death. I
remember we laughed
late into the night. My

son, so much like me,
is more comfortable
with metaphor than

with last week’s tulips
splayed in the vase,
their stamens on show.

Leaf and blossom
speak a language
I’m dying to understand.

*

Anne Archer (aka Archer Lundy) is a musician and poet who lives on unceded Algonquin Territory near Sharbot Lake, Ontario. Her recent poems appear in various Canadian and international journals and anthologies including Anti-Heroin Chic, Yolk, Pinhole, The Lothlorien Poetry Journal, In The Mood Magazine, and Otherwise Engaged. Her most recent book of poetry, EMMALINE/EVANGELINE (Woodpecker Lane Press, 2023) is an ekphrastic study based on her mother-in-law’s art; her family is equal parts chuffed and disgruntled. PROMPTED, another take on family and friends, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books.

I CAN’T BE THE ONE by Phyllis Cole-Dai

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I CAN’T BE THE ONE

to welcome you home, but when you arrive
tonight, the faithful trees keeping watch
in the yard curl their toes in pleasure, and all
the doors of the house throw their arms wide
to receive you, and all the curtains draw apart
to lighten the dark as you enter, and all
the chairs scrape back from the kitchen table,
bidding you to sit, and the stew ladles itself
into a bowl beside the candle that lit its own wick
for joy, and the crusty loaf breaks itself open,
to rest upon the wooden board for a dab
of butter, of jam, of honey, any sweetness you
might desire, and each empty bed turns down
its sheets and plumps up its pillows, hoping
to hold you in your sleep—while in one lonely
corner, hugging the wall, the patient piano
waits her turn, soft ache in her taut strings,
ready to play every loving song she’s learned
between the last time you left and this return.

                      for my son, Nathan

*

Phyllis Cole-Dai is a multi-genre writer in South Dakota, soon to relocate to Maryland. The author of more than a dozen books, she co-edited both volumes of the popular anthologies of mindfulness poems. Poetry of Presence. Learn more about her work at her website (phylliscoledai.com). Join The Raft, her online community, and ride the river of the creative life, buoyed by the arts and open spirituality (phylliscoledai.substack.com)

MOURNING THE DEATH OF MY SON by Stephen Ruffus

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MOURNING THE DEATH OF MY SON

This is not the world.
No longer so green
and sweet.

Memory is a contusion,
an enlarged heart, blood
rampant against the vein.

This is not the world
without him in it.
Nor will it ever be or was.

*

Stephen Ruffus’ work has appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, 3rd Wednesday, the American Journal of Poetry, The Shore, Poetica Review, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, and Stone Poetry Quarterly, among others. Also, he will have a piece in a forthcoming issue of the I-70 Review and in Hanging Loose Magazine. Ruffus was a semifinalist for the 2022 Morgenthau Prize sponsored by Passenger Books, and has had two poems nominated in 2023 for a Pushcart Prize. He was a founding poetry editor of Quarterly West and twice a recipient of a Utah Original Writing Competition Award. While he has lived in Colorado, California, and Utah where he studied writing at major universities and held fellowships and teaching positions, he is originally from New York City and still considers himself a New Yorker in many respects. Currently, he lives in Salt Lake City with his wife.

Replacements by Robert Carr

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Replacements

I can’t do a dog, so my son’s first pet at my house
is a goldfish he names Zippy. I decorate the glass lung
of our separation. In the kitchen, orange circles –

flamingo pink pea gravel lines the bowl. Fake ferns
and a treasure chest hide a bottom feeder, the dull sucker
keeps it clean. Zippy tends to die on Fridays.

The sucker lives forever, but doesn’t have a name.
Because my son is with me twice a week,
I run out to replace Zippies before his next visit.

Whenever one goes belly up, double fins whitened
at the ends, I do my best to match the latest fish,
pray my boy won’t notice. Before we sit for supper,

Noah always asks to visit his fish friend.
I sit him on the counter, How’s Daddy doing, Zippy?
On Zippy number four, Noah cries out Daddy, look!

Zippy has a black spot on his nose! I gaze through
the far side, over a pink stone carpet. Wow! Some things
can’t be explained, I answer: He must be growing up.

*

Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published in 2016 by Indolent Books and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length 2019 collection from 3: A Taos Press. Among other publications his poetry appears in the American Journal of Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Rattle, Shenandoah and Tar River Poetry. Robert is a poetry editor with Indolent Books and recently retired from a career as Deputy Director for the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Additional information can be found at robertcarr.org