Tag: summer

Three Poems by Abby McCartney

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Self Portrait as Crossword Puzzle

The sign of a beginner is their loyalty
to their first answer. Once you’ve banged
your head against the grid for four
or six months, trying to earn sleep,
you realize: do it in pencil.
Most days I try to pack too many letters
in the same box. Sometimes
that’s allowed – another thing I
had to learn the hard way. I remember
the first time I realized the answer
could spill over the edge, up the sides.
I want the gold star, the answers
clicking into place like a seatbelt.
My favorites, though, are the puzzles
that make their own rules, crossing
YELLOW down with RED across to
make the Orange Bowl. My grandmother
did a Monday crossword every night
before bed, one family pattern
I don’t mind repeating. When she
fought with my mother, it was always
in pen. It’s the work of a lifetime
to learn to erase.

*

Elegy with Summer Rain

The thing about an untimely death is
overnight your recipes became holy.
Your voicemails are relics, your
Cowboys sweatshirt a talisman.
Now I can say your name without
crying. Usually. Sometimes I want
to complain about you as my friends
complain about their mothers:
She never called me, but she assumed
I had been kidnapped if I didn’t call home
by Sunday noon. Sometimes
I want the last book you gave me
to be a book and nothing
more. After the summer storm
the city is bathed in an eerie pink
light, even past sunset, refracting
off the bouldering clouds, making
the bricks glow like jewels,
making everything look wrong.

*

When my mother visits my dreams

When my mother visits my dreams
she wants to know what happened
to all her stuff.
We gave your loaf pans away, I say.
Sorry. Why did you have four of them?
We sent one to my cousin
for their first apartment, I tell her.
She nods. She is glad.

I worry how I will explain the rest:
TikTok, hybrid meetings, Wordle,
The new house my dad lives in
full of a woman she barely knows.
You were gone a long time,
I say.
We didn’t think you were coming back.

I wake and remember
all the things I forgot to ask.

*

Abby McCartney (she/her) is an emerging poet based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her work explores themes of grief, motherhood, and lineage. She spends her days working on education finance policy at the state and local levels and previously served as an aide to Senator Elizabeth Warren. She is also an active lay leader at Kol Tzedek Synagogue. In her spare time, she enjoys baking, reading, crossword puzzles, and walking her dog around South Philly. She holds an M.P.A. from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and a B.A. from Yale University, where she was a Truman Scholar.

SUMMER HEAT by Doug Fritock

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SUMMER HEAT

— after ‘When I Was Conceived’ by Michael Ryan

It was 1976, and July. America
was celebrating its birthday.
Bicentennial flags were draped
from porches, and our national bird
had been liberated from the quarter,
set free by the Treasury,
while a Continental drummer
wearing a tricorn hat had taken
its place, although whether
he was playing a drumroll or hitting
a rimshot still remained to be seen,
at least as far as I was concerned.
My father was working in a lab
in Glenolden, my mother taking
the train to her job in the city.
They used to argue about breakfast.
Whether my mother should rise
early and have it ready on the table—
eggs and bacon, coffee and juice—
like the wives of my father’s
colleagues, or whether my father
could toast his own damn slice
of bread. On Sundays, they watched
Alice on their new Sony Trinitron,
my mother telling my father
to Kiss my grits and my father
responding Stow it, a subtle smirk
curling beneath his moustache.
In three years’ time, they’d be
divorced. But still, buried deep
in this shoebox in my father’s garage,
there’s a polaroid of my mother
reclining on a chaise lounge
in the backyard, her blouse un-
buttoned, her hair mussed, her shorts
shorter than any I’ve ever seen
gracing her thighs. I guess it was
a real scorcher in the suburbs
of Philadelphia that summer.
Steamy. Sultry. Oppressive.
And the house didn’t have A/C.

*

Doug Fritock is a writer, husband, and father of 4 living in Redondo Beach, California. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Prime Number Magazine, and Whale Road Review among others. He is an active member of Maya C. Popa’s Conscious Writers Collective.

No Official Song This Summer by Tammy Smith

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No Official Song This Summer

Not one crowd-pleasing hit blares
from car windows. No chorus of
cool breezes serenades beachcombers.
No anthem hot enough to climb
to the top of Billboard’s chart.
Gayle sings “misty taste of moonshine,
teardrop in my eye,” an old tune
we once hummed at the park, pumping
our legs toward the sky on a rickety
swing. The lyrics are so catchy,
I can smell the Blue Ridge Mountain air
and hear the rushing Shenandoah roll by.
For a moment, I consider moving to
West Virginia. My playlist is a fusion
of every high school heartbreak—
bitter, broken, stuck on replay, caught
between the advent of AI and the patience
it once took to send snail mail, to wait
in line for concert tickets my parents swore
would ruin my hearing. Remember tossing
pennies into mall fountains, or feeding
tokens at toll booths—the plunking swish,
cha-ching! when loose change landed.
Music isn’t dead, I tell Gayle’s girls,
but the oldest—who laughed at us for
fixing a cassette tape with a pencil—
slips in her earbuds when I compare
algorithms to streaming tides. Don’t mix
music with politics and ditch the expired
sunscreen, Gayle reminds me.
Hawaiian Tropic is too expensive now.
She sprays her three kids with the
CVS brand, because inflation means more
than just blowing up floats and hoping
they’ll last the whole season.

*

Tammy Smith is a poet and licensed clinical social worker from New Jersey. Her work, shaped by professional and lived experience in mental health, has appeared in Grand Little Things, Merion West, The New Verse News, and Eunoia Review.

Two Poems by Michelle Menting

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When the Dewpoint is High

July becomes a box of water,
one made of cardboard that seeps,

inside out, outside in. If August
is the Sunday of summer, July

is Wednesday—middle child
simmering. There is no Thursday

month-summer. I forget the gods
whose names we’ve borrowed

for time. I forget which people
created them. But I know

in summer, I pine for waves—
water over land impartial: rocks

eroded to sandy tears, mud
the mating of silt & clay,

humus an orgy of oak & ash,
buckthorn & maple, all dead,

all resting. I’ll float above
them all, that plethora of textures

bottoming waters—those lakes,
& ponds, rivers & oceans holding

us in. Submerge and resurface.
Maybe all gods are swimmers—

so much closer are we to holiness
in the depths of the bodies we choose.

*

The Gusts Reached 60mph

and then the power went out. Leaving us
in a darkness resembling our lives, the pitch

of your voice when it drives to cut, to fissure
a wound as deep as the temper that craves

to carve it. There is rain in December
in Maine, a downpour of confusion

as much spectacle as menace. We kept
waiting: for the lights to flicker,

for the hum of white noise to fade,
for that power to finally go out.

I no longer set aside candles. The matches
stay in the drawer. I’m used to these storms.

I know how to prepare, but I’m tired.
This one too will pass. The sun will return,

heating too hot a ground that should be
dormant. Frozen. Listen, I know now: night

is a shield of darkness that I’ve learned
to rest with. To hide within its corners.

To wait. Then walk in the thick mud
of another season’s morning.

*

Michelle Menting lives across a questionable bridge in rural Maine. Her poems, flash fictions, and flash nonfictions have appeared in Passages North, Cincinnati Review, Diagram, Tar River Poetry, and other places. She teaches at the University of Southern Maine and directs a small-town library in midcoast Maine.

Two Poems by Brooke Herter James

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When Everything Everywhere Seems So Grim

along comes the tatted-up guy
who beckons me into bay 2 at Jiffy Lube,
waving rag flags in both hands,
sleeves rolled high, cap to the side,
grinning and whistling to the tunes
rising from the well below.
The way he asks which oil I prefer
and How your wipers doin’?
makes something turn over inside me
like a hard tug on the rototiller
that’s been rusting in the barn all winter
and suddenly, surprisingly, restarts.
Anyway, that’s how I feel
when he shouts to his crew
No extras in Bay 2,
let’s get this lady through!
And now there’s three of them
hovering over my engine with hoses
and dipsticks, banging and clanging,
like the pit stop crew at the Indy 500.
Ten minutes later, just like the sign says,
they clunk shut my hood, give the thumbs up
and wave me out into midday traffic
amidst the smell of burgers, hot tar, and lilacs.
It’s the first Saturday of summer.
I think I might just be feeling it.

*

How My Father Taught Me to Wade Across the River

The trick, he said,
is to be afraid—
first of moving forward,
then of turning back.

*

Brooke Herter James’s poetry has appeared in online and printed journals, including ONE ART, Rattle, Bloodroot Literary and Orbis. She is the author of several poetry chapbooks and one children’s picture book. She lives in Vermont.

The God of Late Summer by Melinda Burns

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The God of Late Summer

         after Lorna Crozier

The God of Late Summer
makes no apology as she sweeps up
the last of the long lazy days,
pulls the sun down ever earlier,
tips the top of the maple tree
with a hint of radiance to come

She sprinkles finches on the goldenrod
singing their little flute songs even
as their colour starts to fade
She brings you peaches,
heaped in bowls, sun-blessed
sweetness rising with every bite

She still brings heat but cooler
nights and promise of respite
from barbecues, picnics, family reunions
And downpours to make
you stay inside, looking out
the windows, listening
for the thunder

*

Melinda Burns is a poet in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Her poems have appeared in Fiddlehead, the New Quarterly, and One Art. Melinda is the author of “Homecoming” (forthcoming in 2025, Bookland Press).

GLOBAL MUSTARD SHORTAGE LOOMS AHEAD OF SUMMER BARBEQUES by B.L. Pike

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GLOBAL MUSTARD SHORTAGE LOOMS
AHEAD OF SUMMER BARBEQUES

We’re short of everything these days—
grace for instance, reason, joy.
And now it’s mustard.

Smooth or grainy, Cajun style, dilled,
neon yellow, brown, that Grey Poupon.
We used to slap it freely on

most anything. Burgers, dogs,
our griefs and grievances,
the brutal, constant pain of our discordance.

Or was that all some other salve we used to slather?
I don’t remember anymore.
The taste is gone—that zing.
That mustard.

*

B.L. Pike is a poet from Arizona. Being new to all this, her poetry has only appeared on Rattle’s Critique of the Week and Tim Green’s submission pile, where it has earned any number of helpful suggestions that I trust are reflected in this poem.

Summer by Donna Hilbert

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Summer
          for T.E.

Solstice again. One year, we waded into the sea
to wash crystals. (It was all about feng shui.)
The water was cold, the sky, cloud gray.

Back in the house, you fingered your name
onto the foggy windows, with hearts for O’s,
frames, and punctuation.

I took a photo of this.
Now, it’s proof you were here,
and for a time, happy.

*

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Threnody, from Moon Tide Press. Earlier books include Gravity: New & Selected Poems, Tebot Bach, 2018. She is a monthly contributing writer to the on-line journal Verse-Virtual. Work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Braided Way, Chiron Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Rattle, Zocalo Public Square, One Art, and numerous anthologies. Poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and on Lyric Life. She writes and leads private workshops in Southern California, where she makes her home, and during residencies at Write On Door County. Learn more at www.donnahilbert.com

Summer by Valerie Bacharach

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Summer
           for Paul

Suppose I said summer, wrote “heat” on a notecard,
slipped it into your pocket.
Would you think of Rome?

Frozen bottles of water from street vendors
held against foreheads, the back of our necks,
a shield against wet, thick air as we wandered
among ruins and gardens.

We stopped at any store with air-conditioning,
took three showers a day, never again so clean.
And oh, that restaurant in Trastevere,
zucchini flowers stuffed with cheese, one salty anchovy,
fried to crisp decadence.

You bought me a necklace in the old Jewish ghetto
so intricate it was like holding liquid silver.
We kissed as clerks and customers applauded.

Sometimes life is so hard it seems made of stone.
But think of our last evening in that ancient city.
We strolled cobbled streets in warm night air,
the two of us slipping into each other’s heat.

*

Valerie Bacharach’s writing has appeared or will appear in: Vox Populi, Whale Road Review, The Blue Mountain Review, EcoTheo Review, Kosmos Quarterly Journal, Amethyst Review, On the Seawall, Poetica. Minyon Magazine, One Art, and Writer’s Foundry Review. Her chapbook Fireweed was published by Main Street Rag in 2018 and her chapbook Ghost-Mother was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

Procrastination by Susan Cossette

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Procrastination

Next summer I will plant flowers
in a perfect circle around the towering pine–

Carve tiny cradles for each pink impatiens,
pat flat the cool damp mulch.

Next summer I will tame wild ivy
on the hundred-year wall,
coerce it into tidy compliance.

The soaring rhododendrons stand guard,
old wise, twisted roots.
The stories they can tell.

Next summer I will hang a suet feeder
outside the kitchen window and await red cardinals.

It is August, and next summer is a long way off.

*

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Vita Brevis, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Tuesdays at Curley’s and After the Equinox.

Summer Speaking in Turn by Vivian Eyre

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Summer Speaking in Turn

On the beach, a whale looks up at me
in blue crayon, drawn on a heart-shaped stone.
My finger traces the thick-lined body,
just as I did in my whale book at ten,
certain about their signs of happiness —
when flukes were held high,
just like the flukes on the stone I hold now.
It’s July. High season for out-of-towners
when I face the bay only in early morning.
Why are you here? I ask the heart stone.
I don’t know. Maybe the stone is a valentine
to be delivered by tidal whims to a whale
with a heart the size of a Harley. I pocket
the stone heart, the smile, the whale’s face.

~

You’ve Got This—written with a red paint-pen
on a rock, then deliberately planted
on Race Point beach by the artist.
Later that week, a woman finds the rock,
and in this loose communion, her smile
dolphins up. No longer was she a small raft,
a speck floating. She leaves
the rock in its sand bed hoping
children would discover it. Imagine
this kind of day when you don’t expect to
find a friend. Yet you find one, featureless,
as alive as July. The beach is pulsing.

*

Vivian Eyre is a Rhode Island-based poet, and the author of the poetry chapbook, To the Sound (Finishing Line Press 2013). Her poems have been in The Massachusetts Review,J Journal, The Fourth River, Quiddity, Spire, Pangyrus, Book of Matches, Bellingham Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Twelve Mile Journal, The Sandy River Review. She served as the guest curator for the Whale House (Southold, NY), and as a rescue volunteer for cold stun sea turtles on the eastern shores of Long Island.

Three Poems by Meg Freer

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Grief Has a Name

A full ten minutes at sunset, hundreds
of crows fly south over the woods.
Moments after the last one,
snow blows in from the north.

I follow sheep trails across the fields,
unwind details I have been avoiding,
mental terrain more suited
for moose than human.

Mom’s two birthday balloons cling
together in her dining room for a day,
before one migrates to the kitchen
and the other moves into her bedroom.

A day later, the bedroom balloon
floats into Dad’s study to stay
just above the books. Dad must be
directing this scene from beyond.

In my dream, he fades into view
in the doorway holding a basketball,
says nothing, watches while I read
on the sofa, then drifts away.

Grief wants me to call it by name,
knows all 360 joints in my body,
tapes their seams to keep itself
from floating into oblivion.

*

All the Sounds of Summer

As gently as he once held a fledgling blue jay,
he cradles his sister’s arm, traces each of the thin,
horizontal lines he never knew were there,
saddened by scars not yet faded to white.

All the sounds of summer vanish
as he enters into her night and wonders at the fluency
of hands that treat the body in such disparate ways.
How to fathom the plight of molecules gone awry?

Ever distressed at the sight of his own blood,
though he understands artery over vein, he can’t
understand pain that calls out for more pain and hopes
his sister will fly, as the fledgling he buried never did.

*

New Mother
        for Mary P. and Minnow

I offer to walk with her on the nearby trail,
get her out of the house for a while.
We greet Archie and Jughead, the goats
with curly horns, as we pass their pen.
I pick up a guinea hen feather to bring home.
She sets a brisk pace as we leave the farm.
It hasn’t hit her yet, this unexpected freedom.

She stops short, as if she’s seen an apparition.
A cow stares at us through the brush.
What are you doing way over here by the fence?
Shouldn’t you be over with the horses?
This moody cow moves around the horse pasture
every day, rarely spends time with the other cows,
sometimes goes off by herself to figure things out.

We leave the cow to her moping, resume walking,
then she stops, looks back down the trail.
Wait. Am I even supposed to leave the farm?
I have babies back there, you know.
I reassure her that it’s fine to take a break,
she nursed her puppies, she needs fresh air.
She catches a whiff of spring and trots off.

The robins and redwing blackbirds are singing,
the stream is flowing, the spring scents
keep enticing, we continue our walk.
A bit further and she stops again, looks back
the way we’ve come, looks up at me.
Are you sure I was supposed to leave?
My puppies might need me, you know.

I try to persuade her to keep walking,
but no luck. We turn back, the cow
is still at the fence, but she doesn’t notice,
she is so excited to return to her seven pups—
lick them all over, move them around
with her paws and nose so they all
get a turn to nurse—be a good mother.

*

Meg Freer grew up in Montana and now teaches piano in Kingston, Ontario, where she enjoys the outdoors year-round. Her prose, photos, and poems have won awards in North America and overseas and have been published in journals such as Ruminate, Juniper Poetry, Vallum Contemporary Poetry, Arc Poetry, Eastern Iowa Review, and Borrowed Solace.

Winter’s Toll by Melanie Figg

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Winter’s Toll

The deer are starving.
Summer was too dry and snow came too soon
and too thick. They usually don’t come out
of the woods until February. It’s almost Christmas
and they’re in the trailer park by ten.

My mother died a week ago.
We cleaned out her refrigerator,
found two bins of apples
she had no energy to can
and left them for the deer.

After bar close I drive in slow: two doe and a fawn.
For a minute I feel lucky—to see animals so hungry
they’re at front doors eating
Christmas wreaths. One doe swings her head,
watches me park and go inside
my mother’s house. They keep walking,
looking for apples on the snow-covered lawns.

*

Melanie Figg’s debut poetry collection, Trace (New Rivers Press) was named one of the 100 Best Indie Books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. Melanie has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The McKnight and Jerome Foundations, the Maryland State Arts Council, and others. Her poems, personal essays, and book reviews can be found in dozens of literary journals including The Iowa Review, Nimrod, and The Rumpus. As a certified professional coach, Melanie teaches creative writing, offers women’s writing retreats, and works one-on-one with writers and others. http://www.melaniefigg.net