Tag: trauma

Three Poems by Dana Henry Martin

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No Mental-Health Narrative in My Town

There is no narrative in my town. Just lights
near the bridge that’s been dubbed a suicide
hot spot. Every weekend, nearly, those lights.
Adults. Teens. Nobody who makes the news.
Locals expect the living prophet who speaks
to and for God to fix us here in canyon country,
in cliff country. People on vacation slip while
taking pictures, while hiking and, sometimes,
alongside the person they love or their pet.
People slip. People fall. When I was in a state
of high mania, which meant I thought I might be
the devil, my therapist had me sit in a chair.
She started touching me to release the pain.
Her hands traveled over my neck, across
my shoulders. You’re in the glass house,
she said, the one above the creek, before you
were raped. God can see everything you do.
He sees you now. She wiped my arms
downward as if sloughing death from me.
Let God touch you. Let him wash through you.
Jesus is calling you to him. Don’t resist.
Two days later, I was in the psychiatric ward
at the hospital. They call it B Med.
Until I was admitted, I knew it as the name
a local poet used because he struggled
with depression. B Med. A joke. People
who are manic run in circles like animals
in the zoo or patients in B Med. That’s what
a doctor said during my appointment
when I told him I live with bipolar.
Sometimes there aren’t sirens. Just flowers
and signs that say things in threes, like
It’s not over and We love you and Don’t give up.
The city tears it all down, doesn’t want tourists
to know what happens here, what God either
can’t say or isn’t able to hear. When I stand,
the therapist is crying. This is love, she says.
Can’t you feel it? There’s no narrative
in my town. There’s just whatever this is.

*

The Knave

What if instead of talking in tongues, they’d called it
Voicing what the body needs that can’t be held in language.

What if instead of saying This is proof you love God,
they’d muttered, No matter what they do to us, every little girl

wails when her father dies. Sounds rushed from my mouth
like bees, swarming the nave. The girl of me escaped,

like so many cast-off clones, and stung congregants
whose hands were touching me, an everywhere touch

like his fingers on my back, my shirt pulled up at his orders,
the skin between us shared, mine belonging to him first,

my flesh his flesh, my fingers, my nails. We were nailed
together in life and in death, him in his anthropoid coffin,

me in the one place where I thought I might loosen his hold,
this inverted Pandora’s box of wood and fancy glass. What if

instead of talking about eternity or the trinity, they’d confessed
We knew we knew we’re sorry before drowning me in their despair?

*

I’m a Wake

I’m a wake, funerary. They prop me up
between expensive flowers and
the cheapened dead. I’m open casket,

open book, brittle as paper, lonely
as the printed word. I’m a thesaurus
of blessings and condolences,

pencil skirts and skinny, filtered
cigarettes. I’m pacing and handshakes.
I’m shuffling and stammering.

I’m satin, mahogany, charcuterie boards.
I’m the death announcement and
the estate sale. Oh, what I wouldn’t give

to be the wedding or the graduation,
even the birth with all its blood
and feces, and the bated everlastingness

of the moment before the first breath.
I’m a wake. Let me sit beside you.
There, there. It’s all right. Here I am.

*

Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, CALYX, Cider Press Review, Laurel Review, Meat for Tea, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble Literary Magazine, Trampoline, and other journals. Their chapbooks include Love and Cruelty (Meat for Tea, forthcoming), No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press), and Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books).

Five Poems by Erin Hoover

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The Poem I Wrote for Our Life Together

Born on a bed of eggshells, I broke them
by virtue of my body’s weight, by moving.
Soon I grew used to their give and crack.

My parents fed me eggshells. My tongue
licked the hard protective bloom. My teeth
ground down thin layers of calcium carbonate.

Those proteins were all I had. With a brush
and albumen glue, I painted the crystals
from crushed shells on the mold of my body.

The clothes I made creased and fractured
at my elbows and knees, split when I sat,
so I learned to stay still, straight leg standing.

Beneath me, the eggshell floor splintered
with each step. Helpless, I called my lover
who climbed through the jagged holes

we called windows. I could have predicted
he would break everything he touched
and then accuse me of carelessness, and he did.

I felt myself cleave under him in the way
I was taught to want. The membranes
of my body collapsing, reminding me of birth.

Our gentle thrashing destroyed the house.
I no longer cared for the bed, the clothes
whose delicate remnants I stuffed in my mouth.

After, I woke up naked, alone, and hungry.
Of course, I wear regular clothes and live
in a regular house, my diet varies, and I leave

when I please. I was never crushed, not
like this, but the eggshells say what I mean:
that no matter how careful I am, grief will come.

* 

The Apartment

              after “Dream House as World Building,”
              from In the Dream House: A Memoir
              by Carmen Maria Machado

My unit looked like every other unit, or close,
more than one hundred copies, but to explain,
it was on the third floor, new apartment in a brand-new
building. Safer, I thought, before I understood
being unsafe. It was the first new place I’d ever lived.
No broken plumbing or fat roaches scuttling
from kitchen drawers, scaring my daughter, our first
like that. You need to know that I cried happy tears
when we moved in, not everyone would rejoice,
but we did. My daughter did. Two floors below,
his apartment was laid out exactly the same. When
he first moved in under me, I felt déjà vu
in those bare rooms. A tenant for years, I’d known
the families in that place before him, but it must
be said, I hardly knew him when he moved in
as my boyfriend, this close proximity never
my wish, whatever you want to believe. Our primary
bedrooms had four large windows, and mine
on the third floor overlooked a small engineering firm
whose employees took lunch hour walks or on cold days,
dusted snow from their windshields in the parking lot,
warm exhaust plumes, visible puffs of breath.
I don’t know if he ever looked out his windows
except at me, but I kept my blinds open, so anything
I felt—my fear—I projected on this scene. Visitors
doted on the size of my primary bedroom, spacious
like the bedroom of a house. Like his bedroom,
this space would become a site of violence. I tried
to describe to my lawyers, to the judge, the suffocating
closeness of the landing and stairs, too narrow
for two-way traffic. We could only walk single file
as I held my daughter’s hand, shushing her,
because we lived on top of each other, tripping over
one another, peering inside one other’s units,
and I had no way to bypass the lower doors,
his door, but he could have avoided coming upstairs
to mine. Nobody asked him to treat those stairs
or my door like an extension of his home. Outside,
a walkway led from the building to our cars,
situated so no one approached our building without
being seen. It was grand—to the degree that it could be—
but it afforded no privacy. We all knew who came
or went. After I left him, that walkway became
a problem, like the pet waste stations, excuse
for anyone, but especially him holding his leashed dog,
to stand staring up at my balcony. When I imagine
him, and I sometimes still do, he is looking up.

* 

You Need to Connect with the Heroine of Your Story

The cards say it. The pointer on every spinning wheel.

What’s that meme? You are the one who is coming to save you.

Inside me lives a connoisseur of risk that for a time I chose not to heed.

Such finely tuned intuition moves beyond awareness of predator or prey.

I’m not innocent but I forget catalogues of lessons in order

to get through the day. She never left me. Rather I turned

from knowing. I thought I chose love, but it was a facsimile, a pack

of torture devices bundled in gauze. The heroine says one day you’ll see

this relationship as a vehicle for creative growth. We could have gone

on longer, my friends know. I stopped us. His friends might

have scoffed, he wouldn’t hurt you, but he had no friends and he had already

hurt me. The heroine isn’t writing about bruises but a topography of pain.

What is it they say? Some things you can’t unsee. You can’t unfeel.

The low voice at the table, wise hands on my shoulders.

The heroine says don’t think about all you ignored, but that you finally saw.

* 

The Universe Wants

The universe wants me to change the locks.
The universe wants me to take his things to Goodwill.
The universe wants me to wipe his fuck off with a guy I meet online.
The universe wants this story to be personal but not too personal.
The universe wants me to petition the court.
The universe wants the police to be unable to enforce the order due to proximity.
The universe wanted him to be my neighbor though I never wanted it.
The universe wants every lawyer I meet to tell me I’m fortunate we aren’t married. That we have
                            no children or property together.
The universe wants his new girlfriend to smudge stick his apartment.
The universe wants him to subpoena our neighbors.
The universe wants all of the people he subpoenaed to have nothing to say.
The universe wants me to have to move because I am truly afraid and the order is unenforceable.
The universe wants me to apply for tenure and submit my application while moving.
The universe wants me to lose two dress sizes walking off my anger for hours a day.
The universe wants my telogen effluvium.
The universe wants this story to be relatable.
The universe wants our hearing continually delayed.
The universe wants my nervous breakdown outside the courthouse.
The universe wants my dosage doubled.
The universe wants my mother to break her back when visiting me for the hearing he delayed.
The universe wants my mother to do the nine hour car ride again on a broken back.
The universe wants my father to ask to try reasoning with my abuser and for me to stop him.
The universe wants me to help others understand the threat is actual.
The universe wants the hearing—is ravenous for the hearing.
The universe wants my neighbor who was going to testify for me to get Covid.
The universe wants my best friend to have laryngitis during her testimony.
The universe wants people to keep telling me they know this will teach my abuser a lesson.
The universe knows I didn’t want the order to punish him.
The universe knows what happened between us.
The universe knows what love is and is not.
The universe wants the judge to grant the order without a scratch on me.
The universe wants my abuser to have to pay my lawyer’s fees.
The universe wants him to move away.
The universe wants my head to begin to clear.
The universe wants to know whether this story will save anybody.
The universe tells me I am watched over by ancestors.
The universe wants me to feel creative.
The universe wants this story reborn into another form.
The universe wants me to transform.
The universe has been telling me all along. I am close.

*

A Year Out

I woke and showered and readied for work,
but I don’t remember what I ate or whether
I ate. I think I was bracing myself, knew
what was coming, but who can know,
and I can only speak from retrospect, it’s all
I have in this moment. I might not have eaten.
I might have dreamed the night before,
but that I don’t know that, either. So much
of this process is understanding which facts
matter. It matters that my daughter was in
her second week of second grade, precise age
she’ll never know again. Does it matter
that she carried the bag she wore to school
before that morning, and for many days after,
and that he bought it for her? I might recall
the bag bouncing against her legs as she ran,
the sun reflected white on her blond skull,
or I might have made it up, but regardless,
I know that one morning about a year ago
after my former partner tried to assault us,
I went to a shelter, and then, I told my story
to a judge, and more, I said what happened
to anyone who would listen. It’s true, of course,
but so much more is true, like any big feeling
barely contained, there is this tenuous
courting of disaster behind it. Even so,
a story took shape, solidified. So what
if it was only adrenaline, the heat I felt course
through me, my arms frozen to the chair,
my legs crossed, for months, the shallow
breaths I took as I loaded the dishwasher
or taught a class, packed a sandwich or applied
for tenure. I gave up my words to advocates
a few hours after it happened, offered them forth
to build a story, in the rounded longhand
of the woman who wrote it down for me, for
the judge, yes, but also the person in the chair
who had to go home that night and protect
her daughter. I’m no fool. What really happened
is true but also manufactured. A document.
A year since I first began that delicate
piecework, that shaping, I can bend my story
at will. Flimsy, made up of sensations I pulled
from my deeper parts, and a year out, I want
to access that realm of my body, my insensible,
living-outside-of-narrative self, more than
posture or breath but the part of me that
moves or stays still, that acts. The self
returned from elsewhere that says, you are safe.
It’s August, a year later, and broiling hot.
Before sense retreats, I let the sun touch me.

*

Erin Hoover is the author of three poetry collections: Barnburner (Elixir, 2018), No Spare People (Black Lawrence, 2023), and Consent (Black Lawrence, 2027). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and in journals such as Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and The Sun. Hoover lives in Tennessee and teaches creative writing at Tennessee Tech University. She curates and hosts a poetry reading series, Sawmill Poetry, and serves as the Poet Laureate of Cookeville, Tennessee, in 2026-2027.

Three Poems by Joanne Leva

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Lobster

You could crack my lobster or pitch a tent,
festoon it with pirates’ flags and shiny
things flapping in the wind. Stinging wind off
the Atlantic bluster but only half
a block from the hotel where we would stay
year after year. You’d walk for our pizza.
You, with outstretched, undeniable arms.
And, dutiful you, you’d deliver the hot
pepperoni and cheese to our sea mist
balcony overlooking the Sea Foam
Arcade, which overlooks the famous Love
Locks Park where large glycerin bubbles float
buoyant in transitioning summer sky.

*

Daily Routine in Lansdale, PA

Remember you are all people and all people are you.
—Joy Harjo

Remember the bed beneath your body,
the arrival of dawn. How peach color
reveals and illuminates the good sky.
How the reliable sun is mercy.
Remember how you walk on maple wood
floors. How the spirit goes along with you.
Remember your mornings, alone. The way
you remember the cat. How he adores
your lap. Remember your daily work. How
you step up. Remember your voice. Use it.
How green shoots start to show in early spring
and the hardened earth under the feeder
crumbles when you cross the yard. Remember

*

Final Arrangement

Let me tell you it wasn’t all bad, yes
it was Alcoholics Anonymous
on so many nights, car wrecks, chain smoking,
and tripping on acid in our house. Or
the night you left our bed and never came
back, set up a make-shift boudoir complete
with a large screen TV, CDs galore,
tobacco for rolling cigarettes. But,
it wasn’t all bad, there were good times too.
There was kindness in the middle of it.
Odd little kindnesses on my birthday,
our anniversary, Mother’s Day, and
that surf-tumbled, deep-purple sea glass ring.

*

An advocate for creative writing and community service, Joanne Leva is the founder and executive director of the Montgomery County Poet Laureate Program (MCPL), founder and coordinator of the Forgotten Voices Poetry Group out of the Indian Valley Public Library in Telford, PA, and author of the poetry collections Eve Would Know (2017) and Eve Heads Back (2020) published by Kelsay Books.

Leva’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Peace Is a Haiku Song, 50 Over Fifty, Apiary, E-Verse Radio, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Rag Queen Periodical, Bucks County Writer, Transcendent Visions, WILDsound Festival of Poetry and elsewhere. Her poem, “God Walks into a Bar,” was featured in a Philadelphia Calligraphers’ Society Poetry Reading & Exhibit and companion publication.

Miracle Girl by Julie Weiss

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Miracle Girl
              –Adamuz, Córdoba, January 18th, 2026

Six and barefoot, you falter
along the rails like a phantom

in limbo, though you´re very
much alive. Virtually unscathed,

reporters will say, despite
the wreckage around you.

Despite the bodies, writhing
like unanswered questions,

or still as a billion-year-old
mountain. The bewilderment

of limbs you crawled over
to reach the broken window.

At what point in your search
for your family does your mind

ramshackle, fracture under
the dead weight of despair?

At what point are your thoughts
launched off their tracks?

Maybe when a barn owl
screeches, or a big rig thunders

past the tragedy that will define
the rest of your life. Soon,

all of Spain will illuminate you
in halo. Miracle girl, they´ll say.

As a civil guard leads you
away, maybe you hear voices

among the debris—your cousin,
your brother, mostly mamá

and papá. At what point will you
understand they´re phantoms

now, crashing towards you
from the wrong side of the divide?

*

Julie Weiss (she/her) is the author of The Places We Empty, and two chapbooks, The Jolt and Breath Ablaze: Twenty-One Love Poems in Homage to Adrienne Rich, Volumes I and II. Her second collection, Rooming with Elephants, was published in 2025. “Poem Written in the Eight Seconds I Lost Sight of My Children” was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won Sheila-Na-Gig´s editor´s choice award for “Cumbre Vieja” and was a finalist for the Saguaro Prize. Her recent work appears in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Gyroscope Review, ONE ART, and is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, The Indianapolis Review, and MER. She lives with her wife and children in Spain. You can find her at julieweisspoet.com

Two Poems by Laura Ann Reed

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Photograph

His back to the camera
my father stands at the ocean’s edge.
Hands in his pockets, the flannel lining
thin as the hospital-issue robe
his own father wore over his pajamas.
“Go out to the hallway,”
he was told, “if you’re going to cry.”
Today, a moth stirs the air
near the dogwood. Circling and reversing.
Searching for more than is there.
The unopened leaf buds like half-said things.
At what edge does my father now stand?

*

On Suffering

Studying my reflection in the blossoming plums
I stumbled and fell.
My mother, who could never forgive my beauty
leaned over the examination table.
“Now you know how it feels,” she said.
It meaning life, I supposed.
The nurse gave me a tender look, her face radiant
with the world’s pain. A shoulder blade
was eased back into place.
Gravel removed with a surgical blade.
I imagined myself as the rock before it was crushed
and made into pavement. This was consolation.
I sensed all my troubles dropping away.

*

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 forthcoming chapbook, Homage to Kafka, will be published in July 2025. https://lauraannreed.net/

Three Poems by Martin Willitts Jr

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Emptying Time

While I was asleep, my father died,
slipped into that great coda, when memory passes
from one person to another person,
and I became a gatekeeper of his life.

And since there were gaps in his history,
I began filling them.

On my way to my father’s funeral,
a large whooping crane wafts across the bay
where a lavender light floats on water.

Before the dead releases,
breath becomes one door closing,

another one opening.
That strange lyric
of a life that continues
when someone starts sharing a memory.

I wasn’t there when he died,
but I have witnessed others at their last sigh
as a field medic in Vietnam. I remember
each of them like a slick country road
I must maneuver/drive in the dark.

The crane lifts its impossible weight,
its head matching crimson morning-break,
its whoop-whoop trumpets my loss.

How heavy a crane looks, large wingspan
almost tipping both edges of the sky,

endlessly suspended in air,
an aimless cloud, always present,
untouchable as thought.

*

I Had Been Expecting This Phone Call Since January

I hoped I was wrong.
Unfortunately, his voice on the other end
confirmed what I knew had to be true.

“Mom died in her sleep.”

I felt sorry for my son
passing on this information.

At least she died in her sleep,
someone would say, eventually. This
kind of news I expected.

Some would say
it was a relief she died;
painless, in her sleep.

People always say this
when they do not know what else to say.

I do not know what to say to my son
to ease his pain,
when often I lack the necessary words.
Some experiences in life
are not explained easily.

Life’s hardest lessons
leave no rational justifications.

We muddle through trauma
hoping sadness eventually fades away.
And it’s hard work;
often memory-pain returns at the worst moments.

Yes, she died in her sleep.
It was expected, and then
it happened, quietly.

Unfortunately, my son witnessed her death.
It will hover in his heart for a long time.

I cannot tell him how long his sadness will last,
or how sadness ebbs and flows,
boomerangs back,
because each person enters grief differently,
and it has no set time limit
how long suffering will last.

There’s no manual to explain how grief works.
Loss is experiential.

I held onto the silence in the telephone call
like a lifeline to my son.
I knew he was drowning
and there are no words
to soothe this kind of pain.

Silence lasted for a long time.

*

Lastness of Silence

This world does not know true meaning of silence:
it disturbs, tears hearts. My son, my son,
where are you in this orange-red world? You left

         unsettling news. What could I do differently
         to change this terrible mockingbird song?

How could I have placed my thumb on these scales?
I find a distance between snapped hearts and no maps.
I walk as silent as this night, searching, searching,

         and you are not there. My son, my lost son,

lost within his own explanations. Answers are not here,
or in blank places in this sad jazz. My world empties.

You have not spoken to me since, my son, my son
of awful distances. This world cannot explain
true meaning of this silence, its haunting melody.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is an editor of Comstock Review. He won 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. His 21 full-length collections include the Blue Light Award 2019, “The Temporary World”. His recent books are “Harvest Time” (Deerbrook Editions, 2021); “All Wars Are the Same War” (FutureCycle Press, 2022); “Not Only the Extraordinary are Exiting the Dream World (Flowstone Press, 2022); “Ethereal Flowers” (Shanti Arts Press, 2023); “Rain Followed Me Home” (Glass Lyre Press, 2023); “Leaving Nothing Behind” (Fernwood Press, 2023); “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” including all 36 color pictures (Shanti Arts Press, 2024); and “All Beautiful Things Need Not Fly” (Silver Bowl Press, 2024).

The Singing Birds by Marianne Worthington

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The Singing Birds

In the graveyard the singing birds were all
you thought you needed. Grief makes you

want to rend your clothes like some histrionic
character from the Old Testament.

There is a violence to sadness: the force
of sorrow unwashed from the body, penetrating

your very scalp. Yet decorum dictates that you hold
it together while you stand over the dead when we

should be smashing our doubts and slapping each
other’s faces. Wake up. This is the hammering

injury that never heals. This is the time of day
when people should have tea, not bury their dead.

This is the moment when the singing birds follow
the wind and leave us stranded on a hill too big

to scale down without ropes and life support.
This is when you must face it: your loved one

in a box in the ground instead of dancing
with you on a Saturday night at the VFW.

Tonight, even the moon will be too cold to come out.

*

Marianne Worthington is author of The Girl Singer (University Press of Kentucky, 2021), winner of the 2022 Weatherford Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, CALYX, Zone 3, and Swing, among other places. She cofounded and is poetry editor of Still: The Journal, an online literary magazine publishing writers, artists, and musicians with ties to Appalachia since 2009. She grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and lives, writes, and teaches in southeastern Kentucky.

Of Course the World Still Spins by Hillary Nguyen

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Of Course the World Still Spins

But grief will latch onto bone once
Crossing the threshold one last time
These heavy wooden doors citadel
Threshold fortress protectors of home
How many sobs kisses deep belly laughs
Settled into these textured walls
The dust of dead skin in this grout
And windowsills know more
Of your memories than your skin
That renews itself every blind
Month or two this home has
You in its every nook– How
Could you leave like this?

*

Hillary Nguyen (she/her) is Vietnamese-American writer from the Bay Area who enjoys experimenting with new creative mediums (such as poetry, photography, and fiber arts), and exploring eclectic places. She creates spoken word as well as written poetry, and her work has been featured in LL Anthology: Circles, Hot Pot Magazine, and erato magazine.

Two Poems by Karen A VandenBos

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Even Loss Can Be Beautiful

Loss comes quietly.
It surprises us as we look in the mirror, turn on the news,
answer the phone, open an email, look out the window
or spin around.
What was once a forest of golden leaves has faded into a
grove of muted browns and empty cathedrals.
The pure white of snow has been stained by the mud of
spring, no longer inviting.
Some lost things are found to have taken on new shapes:
a mitten without a thumb, a feather with a broken spine,
ashes with no fire.
They ask us to see the beauty in being broken, messy. Let
them surprise you with what they have to offer.
Let once shining blue eyes, now dulled by all they have
witnessed reopen in wonder.
Loss becomes rivers accepting the melting ice, forests
resurrecting into sanctuaries of green light and new life
awakening from a long winter nap.
In the way of the seasons, there is no word for loss, only
a continuous ebb and flow, a cycle of death and rebirth
where beauty can be found in the tiniest flaws.

*

Autumn in the Rear View Mirror

Our small lives rise and fall as
another November recedes in the
rear view mirror.

It has been a season of few mercies.
Bones worn down to the marrow and
hope vanishing like smoke from an
extinguished match.

The sun’s light grows softer as
the days grow shorter and shadows
lengthen. There is a new chill in
the air.

Night drapes us in her black robe
before the chime of the evening
church bells ring a call to vespers.

The trees are bare and the north
wind carries us inside.
Inside where we sit by the fire
dreaming of things that cannot last.

*

Karen A VandenBos was born on a warm July morn in Kalamazoo, MI. She can be found unleashing her imagination in three online writing groups and her writing has been published in Lothlorien Poetry Journal, The Rye Whiskey Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Blue Heron Review and others.

Three Poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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In the Garden, Again

After breaking, after kneeling,
after raising my ripe fist, after
opening my palm, after
clenching it again, after running,
after hiding, after taking off
my masks, after stilling,
after shouting, after bargaining
with God, after crumpling
and cursing, after losing,
after song, after seeking,
after breath, after breath,
after breath,
I stand in the sunflowers
of early September
and watch as the bees weave
from one giant bloom to another,
and I, too, am sunflower,
tall-stemmed and face lifted,
shaped by the love of light
and the need for rain.
I stand here until some part of me
is again more woman than sunflower,
and she notices how,
for a few moments,
it was enough just to be alive.
Just to be alive, it was enough.

*

A New Kind of Conversation

It is possible to be with someone who is gone.
—Linda Gregg, “The Presence in Absence”

I have no phone receiver to connect me to the other side,
but every day I speak to my beloveds through candle flame.
Every night, I speak to them through the dark before sleep.
I speak to them in the car when I am alone.
I speak to them when I walk beneath stars,
when I walk in the woods, when I walk in the rain.
It is possible to be with someone who is gone.
It is possible to feel what cannot be seen,
to sense what cannot be heard,
to be held by what cannot be touched.
It is possible for love to grow after death.
If there is a secret language, it is, perhaps, openness.
The way air lets light move through.
The way a window invites in the scent of grass.
The way sand receives the ocean,
then, rearranged, lets it pass.

*

Mycelial

Now I understand how grief
is like a mushroom—
how it thrives in dark conditions.
How it springs directly
from what is dead.
Such a curious blossoming thing,
how it rises and unfurls
in spontaneous bourgeoning,
a kingdom all its own.

Like a mushroom,
most of grief is never seen.
It grows and expands beneath everything.
Sometimes it stays dormant for years.

Grief, like a mushroom,
can be almost unbearably beautiful,
even exotic, delicate, veiled,
can arrive in any shape and hue.
It pulls me closer in.

Like a mushroom, grief
asks me to travel to regions
of shadow and dim.
I’m astonished by what I find—
mystery, abundance, insight.
Like a mushroom, grief
can be wildly generative.
Not all growth takes place
in the light.

*

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer co-hosts Emerging Form podcast on creative process, Secret Agents of Change (a surreptitious kindness cabal) and Soul Writers Circle. Her poetry has appeared on A Prairie Home Companion, PBS News Hour, O Magazine, Rattle, American Life in Poetry and her daily poetry blog, A Hundred Falling Veils. Her most recent collection, Hush, won the Halcyon Prize. Naked for Tea was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. One-word mantra: Adjust.

Passover by Ann E. Michael

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Passover

The first holiday without,
grief burns like anger.
Irritant. Tough fibers
scraping at skin raise a rash,
sore during celebration.
Empty ritual this year.
Empty place at the table–
bitter, bitter herbs.

*

Ann E. Michael’s upcoming chapbook is Strange Ladies, slated for publication in 2022 (Moonstone Poetry); she is the author of Water-Rites and six other chapbooks. She lives in eastern Pennsylvania and blogs at https://annemichael.blog.

HALF A CENTURY AGO by Kenneth Pobo

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HALF A CENTURY AGO

Tom bullied me. Has he
forgotten the cruelty?
Graduation was an eraser.
Maybe he plays with his grandkids,
tells them stories of his childhood.
When he gave his friends
candy cigarettes and licorice whips.

*

Kenneth Pobo is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), and Uneven Steven (Assure Press). Opening is forthcoming from Rectos Y Versos Editions. Lavender Fire, Lavender Rose is forthcoming from Brick/House Books.

Two Poems by Kara Knickerbocker

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Grief Animal

Some days it is a pair of pearl earrings
I pick from my jewelry box
and put on like I’ve been taught.

But most days,
like today,
my grief breathes on its own,

chews through its leash—

carries me in its large mouth into
yet another ruthless month.

*

Hues of Havana
Cuba, August 2018

I can tell you how the golden hour is different here—
burnt heat cakes sidewalk streets,
swirled grit of city minutes
rush by in a cherry Chevy convertible.

In pastel facades, where laundry lines connect worn fabrics to faces
Havana beats blues back in time,
history written slow into this Saturday morning;
she beats on, ribcaged between all of us.

*

Kara Knickerbocker is the author of the chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell (dancing girl press, 2018) and Next to Everything that is Breakable (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from: Poet Lore, Hobart, Levee Magazine, and more. She currently lives in Pennsylvania and writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Find her online: http://www.karaknickerbocker.com.

Five Poems by Ron Riekki

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

The Kid Who Drank Himself to Death During the War

lived in the barracks right across from mine.
His face was all brilliant with light, like
the sun hitting the ocean. And they hit us
in boot camp, the revelation of that, how
the recruiters don’t mention this little fact,

or they did—unsure if they still do it now,
but my suspicion is yes, the fists all bone
and temple, the church of war. I remember
my mind before the explosions, how it used
to think properly, or maybe it didn’t, the river

near my home owned by the mines now,
oranged. I walked to it yesterday, stared
down into the deranged red, so close to
the color of blood. I pulled up my hood
and walked home. I can walk though.

*

I Worked in Prison

My jobs have all been fist fights for cash.
When I was a boxer, I started getting tremors,
the doctor telling me to stop or they’d become
permanent. I stopped. They stayed. I thought
about how I’d been a boxer my whole life,
even before I was boxing, how the military
takes your skull and kills it. Sure, you can
still live, but it’s a bit like your body is
a house that’s been built, but abandoned,
foreclosed, possessed, a sort of Satanism
to corporation, a sort of corpse-creation,
that reminds me so much of prison, how
there were all these sons in there, no sun,
the paleness of their skin, everyone, no
matter your race, how it looked like they
were all fading, their psyches, their souls,
the violence where if they ever got out
I knew they’d be changed, how violence
stays in your veins, how a bloody life
stays in your blood, how we really,
honestly, could do anything else other
than what we’re doing and it’d be
better, but we’re promised to this cash.

*

(lucky) I Work in Medical

Which means medical works
me, because medical doesn’t
work, because of this equation:
politics + medicine = politics,
and the nursing homes aren’t
homes and there isn’t nursing
there, because the CNAs and
the med techs and the EMTs
are all making minimum wage,
which means my partner fell
asleep driving the ambulance,
turning it upside-down, just
like his life, trying to make

the torment of rent, how it
tore into us, you, me, every-
one when even the EMTs
don’t have health insurance,
and we know that the word
minus ends with US, because
it’s all about erasers, melting
pots where the kids come in
overdosing on marijuana and
one of them says, But you can’t
overdose on pot and I tell him
Well, you are right now and
it’s beautiful—hyperemesis,

how it is, this existence where
the overdoses are normalized,
where my uncle, his heroin
addiction in a hick town, how
I call him and he answers,
voice in slow motion, the ice
outside his window so loud
that I can hear it, the blizzards
of poverty (the anti-poetry),
A Cell of One’s Own and
we’re owned and I’m ranting
about the renting because I
am worried as hell about home-

lessness because the word virus
ends with US and this won’t
get published unless the editor
has been to the pub and is OK
with saying f- censorship—too
afraid to write the word, too
afraid to talk about how when
they play the sexual harassment
training videos at work, everyone
does a play-by-play commentary
like Misery Science Theater 2021,
how we’re all Orwelled and all it
takes is one hospital bill to end a life.

*

In This Poem, I Am Happy and Blessed

but it’s a short poem. It’s a poem where God
gives me a bird, walking, at my feet, how I
almost didn’t see it, the thing rainbowed as
all hell. Who makes something that beautiful?

I snuff out my clove, hurry inside to my cubicle.

*

I Can’t Stop Winking

It’s a defective muscle. My trauma-head
all butchered. But people misread it, think
I’m flirty. Or that I’m sharing some sort
of secret with them. They look directly
in my eyes with a look like yes, I under-
stand too or yes, I saw it as well. Saw
what? The occasional frown, sometimes
a wink back, sexy. But I’m twice
their age. I want to apologize, say
that my eye is owned by history, but
they just move on, their bodies so
perfect, able to control everything.
How do they do that? How?

*

Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press). Riekki co-edited Undocumented (Michigan State University Press) and The Many Lives of The Evil Dead (McFarland), and edited The Many Lives of It (McFarland), And Here (MSU Press), Here (MSU Press, Independent Publisher Book Award), and The Way North (Wayne State University Press, Michigan Notable Book).