Freshwater Literary Journal 2022

Freshwater Literary Journal 2022

Freshwater Literary Journal, 2022 2022 Editorial Board Cate Asp R.J. (Bob) Caron Brenden Pontz Susan Winters Smith Chelsea Williamson Editor and Faculty Advisor: John Sheirer Cover Photo: Kathy Caron Freshwater Literary Journal is published annually by Asnuntuck Community College. We consider poetry and prose. The upcoming reading period will be August 15, 2022, to February 15, 2023. Acceptances and rejections will be sent on a rolling basis, no later than the end of March 2023. Poetry: Three poems maximum, up to 40 lines each. Prose (prose poetry, short stories, flash/micro fiction, creative nonfiction, personal essay, memoir): One or multiple pieces up to 1,500 words total. No previously published material. Simultaneous submissions considered with proper notification. Submissions should be sent by email to Freshwater@acc.commnet.edu. The email should include a third-person biographical note (maximum fifty words), and the submission should be a Word attachment. No postal submissions, please.

The 2022-23 Freshwater Student Writing Contest will focus on poetry up to 40 lines. The contest will be open to full- and part-time undergraduate students enrolled during 2022 or 2023 at Connecticut’s community colleges and public universities. The contest entry deadline is February 15, 2023. More information about the contest and general submissions is available at https://asnuntuck.edu/about/community-engagement/freshwater-literary-journal/ We can be reached at Freshwater@acc.commnet.edu. Please follow Freshwater on Facebook: FreshwaterACC; and Instagram: @FreshwaterLiteraryJournal.

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Table of Contents 6 – Tobi Alfier 7 – Cate Asp 8 – David Banks 10 – Robert Beveridge 11 – Dmitry Blizniuk 12 – Gaylord Brewer 14 – Katley Demetria Brown 15 – Lorraine Caputo 16 – R.J. Caron 20 – Peter Neil Carroll 22 – Yuan Changming 24 – Mona Lee Clark 25 – Roy Conboy 26 – Mark Connelly 28 – Joe Cottonwood 30 – Barbara Daniels 31 – Holly Day 34 – RC deWinter 36 – Timothy Dodd 37 – William Doreski 40 – Thomas Elson 43 – Georgia Englewood 45 – Michael Estabrook 46 – Zdravka Evtimova 49 – Olivia Farrar 51 – Frank William Finney 52 – Taylor Graham 55 – RM Grant 57 – John Grey 58 – Sheryl Guterl 59 – Elisabeth Haggblade 61 – Jessica Handly 63 – T.R. Healy 66 – Mary Hickey 67 – Paul Holler 69 – Ruth Holzer 70 – Zebulon Huset 71 – James Croal Jackson 72 – Soon Jones 74 – John P. Kneal 75 – Kelli Lage 3

76 – Richard LeDue 78 – Marcia McGreevy Lewis 80 – Christopher Locke 83 – Lorraine Loiselle 85 – Katharyn Howd Machan 88 – Beverly Magid 89 – DS Maolalai 91 – Fabiana Elisa Martínez 93 – John Maurer 94 – Derek McMillan 96 – Joan McNerney 98 – Karla Linn Merrifield 99 – Heidi Miranda 101 – Debasish Mishra 102 – Rosemary Dunn Moeller 104 – Cecil Morris 106 – John Muro 107 – Zach Murphy 108 – Ben Nardolilli 109 – James B. Nicola 111 – Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer 112 – Jay Nunnery 114 – Robert K. Omura 119 – Fred Pelka 122 – Brenden Pontz 126 – Marjorie Power 127 – Ken Poyner 129 – Jean Rover 132 – Russell Rowland 134 – Kathryn Sadakierski 135 – Terry Sanville 138 – Natalie Schriefer 139 – Nancy Schumann 141 – Greg Schwartz 142 – Nolo Segundo 143 – M.N. Shand 146 – Steve Sibra 147 – Eli Slover 148 – Chris A. Smith 150 – Susan Winters Smith 153 – Amy Soricelli 155 – Matthew J. Spireng 156 – Geo. Staley 4

157 – Linda Strange 160 – Dale Stromberg 162 – Steve Straight 164 – John Sweet 166 – Vincent J. Tomeo 167 – Doug Van Hooser 169 – Reed Venrick 171 – Kathleen Wedl 173 – Sharon Whitehill 175 – Francine Witte 178 – Diana Woodcock 181 – James K. Zimmerman 184 – Contributors

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Tobi Alfier Mortise and Tenon Early dawn, and the only sounds are soft clinking noises through the walls from the soup kitchen around the corner.

There’s a dampness that hasn’t ceased since last night, when Josh reached his shoreline destination, found a kindly church and snuggled up in his jacket across an empty, narrow pew.

After a blessing of a bowl of hot oats he’ll explore, hopefully find a cheap room with sounds of the sea and some work to help him pay his own way before he returns home as promised to the woman who holds his heart. Some people need to drift into another life and never come back. Not Josh.

Josh loves to accomplish with wood what chefs are called to do with tastes—change lives from dreary to magnificent.

His hands bear scars from the work, but not enough callouses to tell anyone’s story. He’ll find that experience here, in this city he’s never before stepped foot in, along the beach he’ll call home for a while.

Josh watches the shoreline as barges fix the edge of the world to the sea, the way a neat mortise joins securely—he knows someone will be grateful for this knowledge as their weary arms rest after a humble workday. He catalogs these for future— a woman stopping mid-stride to perfect lipstick a deep shade of mahogany, sweet dark music in a polished bar and the stories heard within, the symmetrical indent of a boilermaker, glass inside glass. Most important—how these make Josh feel so he can bring them home with him. He promised he’d leave before winter because the snow here falls bitter, and white is merely the color of pine without luxury. The apprentice will leave the last room he’ll ever rent—return to his destinies.

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Cate Asp Atlantis Salt and sand and sea engulfed by a blanket too large for just me Thick, velvety, fiery red-orange, with a design I can’t see You’re bright blue and I’m lost in this scene Filled with your light laughter and comforting scent, staring at black velcro stubble scattered across your cheeks I take a short, sharp breath and splinter as you speak, Deep voice sending seaweed sentences spiraling up around my ankles Pulling me down, down into the heart of Atlantis Drowning in this green-grey kingdom I hope I never surface

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David Banks Sonnet 22.05.17 why when scanning old slides some features fade cloudlike creating faint watercolor washes scant outlines of sometime experiences paling to the scarcely recognizable pictures forever framed fixed but sliding slowly towards total whiteout when others whip back bouncing forward with frenzied clarity to squat squarely in full view flaunting vitality and fresh youthfulness years since squandered or simply slipped silently away to the faint silhouette of a washed-out slide

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David Banks Sonnet 14.07.20 just beyond spring equinox mooring buoys blossom boats cockles spawn in estuary silt wilted sprigs desiring dew burgeon ticing bumblebees sidling towards the solstice drizzle dried zenith dawdling retarding slowly shrinking daylight with hopes of late heightened heatwaves staving off the start of autumn and the gradual grounding of smaller craft fearing the ferocity of the first storm leaving buoys bobbing briskly in gently lapping winter waters

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Robert Beveridge Where Did You Get Something Like That?

It is time for the carob harvest and so we put on the red shirts and get ready to climb. Below, the cooks prepare the phyllo dough, the nuts, the Argentinian beef, even if it hasn’t yet arrived from Argentina. The fruit sellers have donated their finest wares, tables strewn with lemons and olives. Bowls of tripe soup for sustenance, courage.

Girded, we ascend, reach for the crescents that define us.

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Dmitry Blizniuk (Translated by Sergey Gerasimov) Our Souls Quietly Sing The first blizzard tries to lift the city like a small child who wants to lift a four hundred pound barbell.

Its fingers touch a lusterless bar of the black road.

The wind zigzags like Zorro; snowflakes attack each other, packs of blind, insane St. Bernard dogs.

They fence in the air like the King’s Musketeers in the fight against November’s Guards.

The snow collects on the black bones of the trees.

The white calluses of the wind are glued to them from the downwind side.

But I feel warm and light; I’m waxed with love like a duck’s feather. Your kisses still tickle my neck like cellar spiders. These are my daytime dreams.

Our body-plexus is not untangled yet.

We still sunbathe on an unsteady rock of blankets and bedsheets, while the eagles of silence shred to pieces the flat liver of the soundless plasma display.

Two sailboats hug each other, their rigging intertwined, and winter is somewhere else, in the world behind the window glass.

There are sluggish dregs of war there, a famine and a plague, and it’s totally unfair, but we couldn’t care less.

A peachy taste slowly floods the brain like a sunset or a sunrise.

Even when we scatter to our workplaces, our souls quietly sing like the Galápagos tortoises and make love from a distance, continuing the great magic action started by our bodies.

With a green marker pen, we drew domes to the unfinished temple, we decorated stones with bunches of sunrays and shadows, of birdsongs, of common interests, and crumbles of poetry.

Beads of sweat on the neck, a smile, a short rest, an inspiration for the warm muscles. See?— these are our eternal days with the eternally green tower of August.

We are going to live eternally here and meet our immortality like a sleepy dawn, like friends on a railroad platform.

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Gaylord Brewer Nocturne The storm has cooled the night, and although I read today that the month just ended was the hottest in recorded human history, I sit quietly in pleasant darkness. Summers after they vanished, a few lightning bugs have returned to chart their positions. Not the blinking skies of my childhood, but numbers sufficient to encourage.

Perhaps I focus too much on losses—those arrived, those surely coming.

Not to do so is a continual challenge. For many years I called out the clutches of baby screech owls from our woods. There was a precise shade of twilight that I came to know expertly, the tangible moment to hurry from the dinner table and begin my primitive trills at the edge of the clearing. They would arrive, swift and silent, often landing only feet above me. Keen, inquisitive, defining their merciless lives. We would do this dance every evening in summer and into autumn, until it was too dark for human eyes and I ceded to them their domain of night.

For a moment the heat has relented. I listen to my breathing and let the dark settle into me. This wounded world, this immensity, to be a small part of it but belonging no less than any other. Somewhere behind, above the crickets and katydids, a tremulous, descending wail begins, a call I once attempted to learn. Ghostly hunter returned to say hello, or goodbye, or merely to gaze at what remains.

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Gaylord Brewer The Beemer and the Doe I heard the impact from 100 yards. By the time I’d jogged to the end of Primrose Lane, the tableau of carnage was determined. Her position, 50 feet behind, on the grassy berm opposite, head lying toward the street, made no sense to me. Had she tried to run, and spun as she collapsed? The delicate legs shattered beneath her, their unnatural angles hard to witness. She looked at me, panting hard, tongue thick in her mouth. I knelt and stroked the beautiful, muscled neck, whispered what I could. My heart hammering. No way to end her pain.

The driver leaned on the fender in his pressed slacks, open shirt collar, unseasonal tan and swoop of sandy hair. Ray-Bans. Barking inconvenience into his phone, he never once looked back. I approached the BMW—a 330i sedan, Mediterranean blue, polished to a shine—and took what pleasure I could from its mangled grill, shattered headlight. This man was, of course, my enemy. I recognized him, hated him, wished him harm.

I hiked on as planned, east along Highway 96. Late afternoon. The day shimmering, palpable. It was no good. I felt dizzy. Overwhelmed with anger. I turned and walked back, past the car, past the man still animate with self-concern, back to where she lay. A pool of foam around the parted lips. The green eye a glassy marble. The chest still. The mercy of death, and no need for useless sympathy. That wild beauty gone from the earth.

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Katley Demetria Brown Modern Plagues After the seven plagues of modern times plastic, toxic algae, wildfires, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes and coronavirus killed the righteous and unrighteous alike the earth became a wasteland, devastated by global warming and pollution.

No amount of Lysol® spray or Clorox® wipes destroyed the contagion.

Chemicals were not the answer. They were the cause.

Like the angel of death, the plagues flew in the air, flowed in the water and struck unsuspecting victims.

Even the sign of blood on the door did not save them.

The meek will not inherit the earth.

Instead, it will be the bacteria and the cockroaches.

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Lorraine Caputo Río Caribe With this other morning’s rain, the waters heave & sigh.

The clouds pass into the mountains swooping down to the Caribbean.

A fisherman returns to port & lays anchor.

Pelicans bob on boats & crowd on the concrete leggings of the once-pier.

In the stone market stalls along the wharf, pescadores shout their offerings, showing today’s catch glinting in the weak sunlight.

On the tan beach rest launches green, orange or blue, trimmed in white.

Nearby boys toss in lines. With a bite, one pulls his in, silver fish writhing.

Another compañero of the cooperative comes in.

Colleagues toss down bins into which wiggling fish are scooped with thick hands.

The rain washes in waves against palm & almond trees & pools in the road.

Barefoot fishermen return home. One of seablue eyes looks at me as we pass.

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R.J. Caron Worth the Wait A tall, slim, gray-bearded man waited for the ten o’clock bus. Nils Mathers cursed the morning. “Damn cold for October first,” he complained. For once, the weatherman was right: sleet was falling. Frozen, glistening droplets bounced off Nils’s dirty Red Sox cap. And wetness penetrated his thin-soled boots.

Nils scowled while looking for his cigarettes, stashed somewhere beneath his coat. “Where the hell is it?” he grumbled, frisking himself. “All right!” he shouted, as his trembling hand located the red-and-white box. He pulled one out of the pack and stuck it between his quivering lips. After striking a damp match, a putrid sulfur smell attacked his nostrils. This sucks, thought Nils as smoke streamed past his bloodshot blue eyes, drifting toward the cloud-darkened sky.

Nils sat on the wet bus stop bench and closed his eyes, quickly noddingoff. Groaning, he dreamt of his last day in Vietnam. As a nineteen-year-old Army Private, an EVAC helicopter was coming to lift him out of the jungle.

His hip oozed blood, caused by a sniper’s bullet, and his mind screamed, Where the hell is that son-of-a-bitch pilot? From that day forward, Nils hated waiting.

Then Nils opened his eyes and saw the green-and-white transit bus splashing in his direction. It rolled to a stop, the door swung open, and Nils stumbled up the steps.

“Hey Nils! How’s it goin’?” asked Ted, the driver.

“Could be better,” Nils answered. “Where the hell ya been, Ted? Yer late!”

Nils took his usual seat, up front, directly across from Ted. “Hey! Take it easy, pal!” hollered Ted. “It’s slippery out. I almost slid into a car three blocks back!”

“Sorry,” replied Nils. “My Social Security check came late yesterday. I got no money ‘til I cash the damn thing!”

“Calm down,” said Ted. “We’ll be downtown in a little while.”

Nils sat back, staring out the window. The sleet had turned into a cold rain.

Nils noticed an elderly lady taking tiny steps, clutching a red umbrella. Oh yeah, he remembered, that lady talked to me at the diner once. He laughed, imagining her and her umbrella being lifted off the ground by a strong wind gust, like Mary Poppins. Nils stopped laughing, remembering that she told him a sad story, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was about.

The vehicle stopped at the corner of Main and Hope Streets. “Hey Nils, this where ya wanna get off?” asked Ted. It was Nils’s usual departure point.

Nils peered out the window. There stood the Freedom Savings Bank, with its brass-and-glass revolving door, imbedded beside the bus stop.

“Yeah, I’ll get out here,” answered Nils. “See ya later Ted.”

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Nils stepped into the pouring rain, hurrying past the bank entrance. He knew the tellers wouldn’t cash his check: he’d been invisible to them for years, ever since losing his job and closing his account. Halfway down the street was the only place that could offer help: The Liquor Emporium. Its glistening neon display beckoned him, as did the sign on the door that read Checks Cashed.

He looked through the store’s barred window and saw Phil, the store owner, dusting a sea of bottles. A doorbell sounded Nils’s arrival.

“What can I do for ya?” asked Phil, looking down at Nils. Phil was a big African-American guy: about 6’5”, 280 lbs. He was well-known in town, since playing linebacker for the Patriots a few years ago. Phil still looked imposing: he was all muscle, sported a thick, black beard, and his cleanly-shaved head reflected the overhead lights. Nils was amazed at Phil’s enormous hands, and wondered about the size of the Super Bowl ring he wore.

Nils gave Phil his check. “Can you cash that?” he asked.

“It’s for twelve-hundred bucks,” Phil pointed out. He thought for a minute, then said, “Okay. I just need ta see an I.D.” Nils pulled out his torn wallet and handed over his state-issued identification card, which he carried instead of a license. He hadn’t driven in years.

“Looks Okay,” Phil responded.”

“Thanks, man. Finally, somthin’ good’s happenin’” Nils mumbled, displaying something rarely seen—a smile.

“You gonna buy anything?” asked Phil.

“Yeah. Gimme a pint of vodka and a carton of Marlboro Box,” Nils replied. “And lemme have a Win Big! scratch-off ticket.”

Phil handed Nils a paper bag with the vodka and cigarettes and the remainder of the twelve-hundred-dollar check. He then took a $10 scratch-off ticket from the display case, turned to Nils and said, “Good luck, man. This game’s endin’ next week, and you got my last ticket.”

Nils said, “I might as well throw ten bucks out the door. I never win anything. Been waitin’ a long time for somethin’ ta come my way.”

“Don’t sell yerself short, man. Look at me: I never thought I’d play pro ball, but the Pats drafted me, and we won a Super Bowl!” exclaimed Phil. “Still be playin’ if it wasn’t for my dammed knee! But Coach always told me to think positively. Ya got nuthin’ to lose, but you might win.”

Phil reached into his jeans pocket and revealed a worn-out penny. “Here man, use this. It’s my lucky coin—the one I kept with me during every Patriots game.”

“Thanks, Phil,” said Nils, while taking it. “But it won’t help.”

Nils took a deep breath and drifted away for a minute. He thought back to when he was a mechanic. A Ford dealership, located on the outskirts of Boston, gave him his first job after he returned from ‘Nam. Nils made $6 per hour, which was nearly twice the pay of the average worker at the time. After paying his rent, he had nearly $600 a month spending money.

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Unfortunately, he used most of it to buy drugs, booze, and cigarettes. Nils’s addictions led to his firing after a year, and over the next twenty years, he was hired and fired six more times. Nils attributed his troubled life to bad luck, but people familiar with him knew otherwise.

“Hey man, snap out of it,” said Phil. “Scratch that freakin’ ticket!” He wanted Nils to win a few bucks, maybe even twenty-five or fifty.

Nils thought to himself All right! I’ll rub the damned thing! He did, uncovering a golden dollar sign.

“Wow! Look! I won ten bucks!” Nils said excitedly.

He kept going. “Holy crap, another dollar sign! That’s fifty bucks!”

Nils shifted his eyes to Phil, then glanced outside. The rain had stopped.

A third uncovered symbol—another golden dollar sign! That brought Nils’s winnings to $1,000. He had one scratch left. You’d swear an earthquake was hitting Beantown: both Nils and Phil were shaking.

Nils quickly rubbed-off the last symbol. He started jumping and screaming like a little boy who found a new bike under his Christmas tree. His ticket revealed a fourth golden dollar sign!

“Holy cow! I won! I won! Five thousand bucks a week for the rest of my life!” Nils shouted, feelin’ like he was going to puke.

Phil gave him a hug so hard it nearly popped off Nils’s head. “C’mon, Nils.

I’m closin’ early just for you, so we can celebrate! I’ll give ya a lift to lottery headquarters!”

“That’d be great!” Nils yelled, still in shock.

“Consider me your chauffeur and body guard!” exclaimed the big guy.

Phil hung a sign on the door that read SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED. Then the two newly established best buddies took off to get Nils’s first check.

During the ride, Nils thought about his good fortune and thanked God for giving him another chance. After all, his life had been about screw-ups and doovers. He had about a hundred second-chances, and he always felt sorry for himself. So even while he should have celebrated hitting it big, Nils actually guilted himself into feeling lousy.

“Hey Phil! Stop the car! Pull over there!”

“What’s wrong, Nils?” questioned the concerned driver.

“I see someone I know,” Nils replied. “Well, truth is, I don’t really know her. But I feel like I do!”

“What the hell ya talkin’ about?” asked Phil.

Nils pointed across the street. “Ya see that old lady, over there? I’ve seen her a few times, havin’ a hard time walkin’. She always has that red umbrella, even if it’s not raining. And now she’s carryin’ a wet bag of groceries, that looks like it’s gonna rip. I wanna talk to her.”

Phil carefully performed a U-turn, and pulled into a spot near where the lady was walking.

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Nils rolled down his window. “Excuse me, ma’am. I’m Nils, and this is Phil. It’s cold and windy, and that bag looks heavy. Can we give you a ride?”

“Have we met before?” inquired the confused woman.

“About a month ago, I sat next to you at the counter of The Dreamer’s Diner,” Nils responded. “It was early morning. You talked to me. Nobody ever says anything to me. I remember, you were sad. And you cried, telling me how lonely you were since your husband died. Sorry ta say, but I was wiped-out after a night of heavy drinkin’, so I wasn’t really listening. But I felt your pain. And since I stay away from people, loneliness was somethin’ I felt, too. Anyways, startin’ today, I wanna fix that.”

The woman was tired, and didn’t feel threatened. “Thank you, Nils. I’d love a ride,” she said.

A feeling of warmth came over Nils, and he was thankful. Not so much about the money he was to receive, but for the friendships he developed that day.

Nils got out and opened the rear door. Looking at him, with her grateful grey eyes, she said, “My name is Edna.”

“Wow, that was my mother’s name,” beamed Nils. “Nice to see you again, Edna.”

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Peter Neil Carroll Falling in Love Is it the tree that catches the light or a red-breasted robin that rubs the buds to sprout. Six days before Valentine’s, the birds are back, zipping from Magnolia’s fruit to the chartreuse willow branch, first to nibble on, then to digest and recall the spontaneous pleasure finding itself reflected in the glass at my front window, cooing to that stranger cooing back, and selfishly I think it had fallen in love with me, as another romantic robin had done last year, remembering what my religious neighbor once said, you can fall in a hole, but not in love.

Welcome home my near-sighted bird.

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Peter Neil Carroll The Gunfight (4/10/20) It’s the greatest movie ever made my pal Michael announces, naming a cowboy picture, The Ballad of somebody whose name I never heard, which would have been the end of the story but these days in confinement looking for a break in the boredom, I find the movie streaming—an escape into the mythic west, the saga of a singing gunslinger, who winds up in a gun duel with another blustering killer in the middle of Main Street in a dusty cowboy town— Unlike the usual Bang-Bang scenes, the fastest gunman does not kill his rival, but shoots off his trigger finger, halting the loser in his tracks, then with a ceremonial twist fires four more shots, each removing a single finger from that one hand, leaving five stumps before the villain is sent to eternity— and now I realize why Michael likes this movie, a reenactment of his view of the world, not as a singular calamity but a thousand small ones, nibbling at the edges of life, not tragedy, but daily weird annoyances— power failures, computer crashes, billing mistakes—that provoke feelings of helplessness and rage, a realist he is, ever wise, ever wacko.

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Yuan Changming On Another Rainy Day 1/ Me in Vancouver Rain, it’s the rain that’s been wetting my entire Selfhood inside out Reminding me Amidst all shapes to be moistured The water-drops are The dews from a paradise long lost Here is another soul fallen from above 2/ Vancouver in Rain Vancouver, how they sometimes hate you Being so wet! You could leave all Your lower content in dark & cold, with yesterday’s Newspapers, flyers, flowers, leaves & even Tales pickled in the pools or puddles full of vices & viruses Among unseen ghosts & monsters As love & pain flow along runaway rainwaters & Every wing gets too heavy to flap with whims or wishes while The whole city is taking a shower as if to prepare for a ritual, & Me? I am just standing dry close to the window Watching

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Yuan Changming Love Lost & Found: For Qi Hong 1/ Missing in Missed Moments Each time I miss you A bud begins to bloom So you are surrounded by flowers Everywhere you go Each time I miss you A dot of light pops up So you are illuminated by a whole sky Of stars through the night 2/ The Softest Power Ever What Softens A human heart is Neither money nor honey Rather, it is a good natured smile of Some dog playing with a cat, a bird Feeding her young with her broken wings Covering them against cold rain at noon The whispering of a zephyr blowing From nowhere, the mist flirting fitfully With the copse at twilight, the flower Trying to outlive its destiny, as well As the few words you actually meant To say to her but somehow you forgot In the tender of last night

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Mona Lee Clark Hatshepsut Often depicted on frescoes as a man, she was the first female Pharaoh of Egypt.

Radical, she built temples, obelisks, sphinxes, statues, to guard pyramid tombs.

In Aswan, one hundred tombs hold mummies whose face masks insured a successful afterlife.

Hatshepsut slurred her gender, to be accepted.

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Roy Conboy This Sky These clouds in my sky were Inuit clouds a few short days ago.

They floated above freezing seas and snow, growing fierce with Arctic strength.

A few more days in the jet stream and they might be European or Chinese.

The stars in my night pattern the dark with dragon and twins.

They shine down alike on other planets where other beings look up and wonder.

On different crust self-same celestials burn pictures unimagined by us.

My clouds are your clouds, my stars our shared strangers, this moment one more comet fall— flame from afar, icy traveler.

We find ourselves in its burn, we find ourselves in its song.

Heart made of journey, celestial yearning.

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Mark Connelly Karma Apple. Even Apple couldn’t remember where he picked up the name. In school, during his three-month stint in the army, community college, jail? Who cared? Apple was in a jam. A DUI on the Garden State had ended his Uber career, and his telemarketing gig was cut to part time. Two Tony (nobody knew how Andrew McDougal earned that moniker) promised to take him on a recycler, but the job didn’t start for two weeks. After paying his phone bill, Apple was four hundred short on rent. Tomorrow was the tenth. After that there was a two-hundred-dollar late fee.

Four hundred in one day. It would be a long hustle. Apple shaved carefully, polished his shoes, donned his interview suit, and hung a convention badge around his neck. The slim leather shoulder bag a hurried passenger left in his car completed his costume. He took a deep breath, practiced faces in the mirror, then headed to Penn Station. He had two crisp twenties in his pocket.

Enough to open with.

Skipping up the steps, Apple passed a trio of unshaven panhandlers with cardboard signs and Starbucks cups full of change. Sad amateurs. Labeling themselves as jobless outcasts, they might score a few quarters from people heading to work. To score bucks, you had to be one of them. Convince them they could become you.

A string of commuters was flowing through the terminal. Apple scanned the crowd, then spotted a potential score. Walking briskly, he brushed against a heavyset manager type.

“Sorry, man,” Apple apologized, rolling his eyes in distress. “Look, I was just getting out of the cab, and someone stole my wallet. Right out of my hand.

I got to get home. Look, the train home is forty-eight-fifty, I got forty,” he said, showing the twenties. “Think you could help me with the rest?”

Muttering, the man dug into his pocket and slipped Apple an orange sawbuck and ambled off. A good jump start. Apple waited as the man headed to the escalator, then crossed the concourse to catch another flow of commuters and scored another ten. Now with sixty, he had to level up and refine his game.

An old-timer in rehab had schooled him. The more you have, the more you get. Ask for odd amounts. Tell a story. Promise to pay them back.

A ticket to Schenectady was seventy-eight. Perfect. Adjusting his convention tag, he had his role down. Upstate rube rolled in the big city desperate to get home to the wife and kids. He caught a sales rep type barreling to the front of the line of commuters trooping through the station.

Waving his tens and twenties in dismay, Apple caught up with him. “Look man, I got robbed. I need to get the train to Schenectady. It’s seventy-eight dollars. I got sixty, can you help with eighteen?” he pleaded.

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The man cut him off, stopped dead in his tracks, peeled off a twenty and headed to the escalator. Schenectady. The name was magic. He scored another twenty, then five minutes later two fives. Excited, he glanced at the clock. Forty bucks in five minutes. There was a break in the traffic, and he paused to catch his breath. A line of commuters headed his way. Schenectady worked again, and he scored another twenty from a sympathetic sophomore from Cornell.

Now with one-forty in hand it was time to head higher. Chicago was a hundred and seventy-eight dollars. With one-forty in his hand, he felt safe asking for thirty-eight with a promise to PayPal when he got home.

The train for Chicago was leaving in ten minutes. A knot of passengers spilled off the escalator. In the lead, a young exec was laughing into a cell phone. “See you soon, Janey!” he said, slowing to pocket his phone.

Distraction, however slight, was like blood in the water to Apple.

“Hey, sorry, man,” he began, “look I got robbed. The train to Chicago is leaving in ten minutes. I lost my ticket. It’s one-seventy-eight. Look, I have one- forty in cash,” he said, opening his palm to display a fan of tens and twenties. Can you loan me thirty-eight? I can PayPal soon as I get home. Hate to ask, but I’m in a jam.”

Turning, the exec smiled. “Sure, must be rough. They get your phone, too?”

“I lost everything. Lucky I had this cash in my pocket.”

“Well, no problem.”

A surge in crowd pushed them closer, and the man brushed up against Apple. Sweeping the bills from his hand, he nudged Apple to a ticket kiosk.

“No problem-o. I got an expensive account. Bump you up to business class for two hundred.”

The man tapped the screen, and Apple, stunned, watched as the machine ejected a bar-coded ticket.

“There you go, man. Gotta catch a cab.”

Apple looked at the slip of paper in his cashless hands and stormed toward the exit.

Bastard!

“Hey, pal, where are you going?” the exec laughed. “You’re going to miss your train.”

Apple pushed through the doors burning in rage. He dug into his pocket for his last smoke. Lighting up, his fingers quivered.

Noting Apple’s polished shoes, a homeless man glanced up and rattled his cup hopefully, smiling like a Jack-o-lantern.

27

Joe Cottonwood Boy Scout Knife I open a drawer and am face to face with a mama packrat who of quick instinct leaps to the floor, three newborns clinging to teats, flop-flop-flop.

Drags them to a hole. And gone.

Beneath the nest sits my old pocketknife now rusted, soaked in life’s liquids. Wrecked.

My son says “I want it.”

I say “It’s ruined.”

He says “I’ll fix it.”

“What will you do with it?”

“Cut things.”

“What things?”

“Things.’

For the inexplicable, he needs. As did I. He scrubs with steel wool, oil.

I demonstrate the whetstone. How to hold, fold.

The blade is pitted, black, but sharp.

A six-year-old with a bulging pocket, a need fulfilled, an edge that kills.

Mama rat, may your babes survive.

Thrive. My son, non-scout, gentle soul, grows tall. Uses the knife for nothing at all.

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Joe Cottonwood First Aid Timmy is skinny as a skink from a dysfunctional school, a sad father who beats him for having asthma, but for two weeks Timmy worships me, rookie counselor of Cabin 8.

First time from inner city he meets crawdads face to face.

Timmy follows me chattering with delight at the rituals of summer camp so he is right there when Jamyl tumbles like a cartwheel from a buckeye onto his wrist creating a new joint sideways like cracking a drumstick.

“Timmy!” I shout. “Run for the nurse!”

Timmy knows pain as a bird knows a cage.

Speaks not a word through raucous dining hall dinner until I question him alone and he whimpers “I didn’t help. I didn’t know how. I didn’t do anything.”

Thank you, Timmy for running to fetch the nurse who arrived so fast. It was just what we needed.

And you could take a class in first aid, Timmy, you could learn what to do. Who knows— you could be a doctor.

Doc Tim follows me chattering the remainder of camp.

Then he busses home to his old man and I can only hope.

29

Barbara Daniels The Nude in Art Why is a young man naked as he runs toward a war?

Liberty’s dress shows off bare breasts as she strides through a pile of corpses.

The cover of my baby book depicts a nude girl and striding boy, loose garment looped to cover him. The girl sleeps where she stands in a maze of pink ivy.

I look in a mirror, not at my breasts but at a scrim of dust. I want to be pictured without clothes, no blue scarf round this crumpled neck.

30

Holly Day Mirage In 1906, eager to turn back and come home, Admiral Robert Peary claimed to be able to make out the distant peaks of an ice-free land just off the coast of the North Pole. Great clouds of steam rose from this land obscuring most of the details, but through his spyglass, he declared he could see great beasts moving around, perhaps oxen, perhaps something else. The Inuit who accompanied him seemed to confirm his story with a legend of a land somewhere past the great, glacial masses of the Pole warmed by geysers and unfettered sunlight, where the seabirds stayed yearround and there was abundant game and fishing, and that was probably what he had seen through the eye of his spyglass. They went on to say that occasionally, a hunter would wander far enough out on the ice to reach this land and when he did, it was so warm and comfortable that he’d never return.

Peary, unable to see the proper outline of the land through his insufficient spyglass drew a rough outline of where he thought this place was on the maps he had made of the Arctic a small island of solid ground surrounded by a moat of melted ice named it Crocker Land, in honor of one of the financiers of his trip.

One can only imagine how the harsh, blunt consonants of “Crocker Land,” must have sounded, the random association of this land with an unknown, New York City banker to the Inuit guides, who probably had a much more beautiful name for the half-glimpsed fantasy all future aerial photographs disproved.

31

Holly Day “I Have Eaten One of Every Type of Bird in This Forest,” Said the Ornithologist He opens the wings of the bird over the nest poses her protectively around the clutch. At the last minute he rearranges the eggs so that the ends all point towards one another, instead of lying haphazardly in the basin of leaves and twigs as they did when he first found his subject.

The little bird’s head lolls to one side, glassy eye stares back up at nothing. Sighing, the ornithologist picks up the little body, sets it back down in the nest, restores the maternal pose props the head up with a bit of straw against her neck, where it can’t be seen. She could be alive now a tiny blue-green finch, patiently shading her brood against her breast, under her outspread wings.

He fills out his sketch with a backdrop of greenery surrounds his prey in platitudes, a vision of some place untouched by the fans of his books.

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Holly Day The Myth of Correspondence To fully understand the pictures I have sent you first, fill a bathtub with water and ice get into the tub with all of your clothes on.

Only then should you shake these photographs out of this careful assemblage of paper.

This is the only way you’ll be able to understand the shades of weather that separate us, the only way to separate yourself from your envelope of tropical breezes and permanent sunshine.

I will speak to you through the ice bruising your skin a frigid wraith clinging to you from too far away.

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RC deWinter braille life is on lockdown not safe to be out or have people in i’m alone with my thoughts for who knows how long during this sequestration i see no one but in dreams those i love make regular appearances to embrace me in their sheltering arms i wake reluctant to leave the only warmth in this cold barren spring unable to return the touch of love my unsaid words sleep waiting to awake in the hearts meant for them in that place where nothing need be said only felt in the soft mysterious darkness of bodiless souls

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RC deWinter the bleakness the lords of the land sit comfortable in their counting houses as we toil in their fields dawn til dark the happy times some of us remember are myths of memory best not dwelt on we do not speak of them often recollection is not a comfort but a sword slicing past from present leaving a raw bloody wound in the mind every so often strangers pass blessing us with smiles of encouragement and perhaps a coin or two before continuing on to whatever better place they’re bound this small relief fades quickly there’s not enough of this brief kindness to dust our sorry acres with redemption our children cry for us but we’re too burdened with obligation to walk away and comfort them better they cry than starve

35

Timothy Dodd Future Tense “And what do you want to be when you grow up?” Mrs. Pouch asked, bending over me with her foul, coffee breath.

“I wanna be an owl,” I answered.

Mrs. Pouch laughed, her jowls bouncing. Mother, too.

“An owl? Now why would you think to be that?”

“Because I like seeing in the dark.”

“But wouldn’t you like to be a pilot or a preacher or a baseball player?”

“No.” Mother stood to the side smiling, gripping her purse, apparently well-pleased with my first-grade teacher at Coaldale Elementary.

“How about becoming a teacher? Like me.”

“No. I want to be an owl.”

Mrs. Pouch’s face looked like she had just eaten rotten tuna salad, but was trying her fiercest to hide it.

“Honey, an owl isn’t a job. You wouldn’t be able to take care of your family. Don’t you want to take care of your family?”

“No. I want to fly away.”

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William Doreski Toxic Metal Why did I dream of massive steel I-beams dumped in my driveway and arranged into runes legible only from an airplane? Also piles of lumber and a grumbling truckload of concrete ready to spill its guts. What manner of construction does this imply?

Daylight catches me unawares.

My arm doesn’t ache from yesterday’s tetanus shot. Does this mean that it didn’t take and I’m doomed to die miserably of lockjaw, my torso arcing with agony, my teeth crushed in my grimace, unable to beg for mercy?

Do those steel girders imply that toxic metal lurks somewhere south of immediate attention?

If I could read the runes scrawled by those I-beams maybe I’d learn the name and telephone number of my fate. And what of those piles of creosote-drenched lumber?

The dream dissipates. Too late to solve the runic message I wrote myself, too late to pour that concrete over all the flaws in my thinking.

I don’t really expect tetanus to dramatize my narrative but I shouldn’t rely on my dream life to tell me how and when to die.

37

William Doreski This Day of Conscious Effect The manly stride of the mountains lengthens in yellow mist.

Despite a night of excess, tree toads continue their riot. You lean against the sunrise and debate me on the finer points of landscape, which politicians claim for themselves.

Today we need haircuts and wine, so driving downtown with purpose we’ll look like useful citizens, despite our cramped expressions and the fog of our exhaust.

The salon re-opened after months of pandemic, scissors idle as so many X-marks the spots.

The proprietor will greet us with affect as flat as Kansas.

Our trimmed hair strewn on the floor will suggest an act of flora.

We must assemble ourselves for this day of conscious effect.

We must dress so the clippings won’t show when we shop for wine among other serious drinkers.

But the landscape places a lien on us, taking advantage of our aesthetic indebtedness.

If the scenery plans to foreclose we’d better curb our spending— threats of fatal weather lurking even with the sky in repose.

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William Doreski You Consider the Apples Your apples never ripen but drop green and hard from the tree.

A lack of confidence? Spraying the flowers to fend off the deer may discourage the fruit that later dangles like Christmas ornaments.

Too much thinking. Like you pondering childhood in Poland, your father repairing scruffy autos from the Soviet Union and your mother nursing children abandoned by unwilling parents.

You breached the university in a thunder of competing tongues.

You graduated with such triumph it deflated the stark old regime, leaving a wreckage of heroes in foolish historical poses.

Now you consider the apples, their small tough size, their weak hold on the tree. You suspect that capitalist norms disfavor the old varieties of apple, modest but firm, subject to worms.

Under the full moon of summer, you swear a vegan allegiance that should move any flora to tears.

Meanwhile deep in the wormwood the eggs of subversive insects hatch with a tiny private sound.

You return to the house with a sigh the color of rotting newsprint.

Those freshly hatched subversives are plotting mindless tactics, their instincts thicker than night, advantaged by lack of language.

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Thomas Elson Her Toast Untouched Her toast sits untouched Pills not taken Orange juice glass on the counter Where they remain during the day And the next And the one after that Toast, pills, and glass untouched Not mentioned By their daughter when she visits To help To talk To assess To clean the counter To return her mother’s glass To replace her pills in their containers To leave her toast for the remaining birds To take her father to visit his wife scattered by the river.

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Thomas Elson One Morning Each Week One day a week, my family did not begin our mornings with bacon and eggs or even a bowl of cereal.

I would wake to complete silence, followed a few minutes later by mumbling, feet shuffling, then stomping across floors. Palms slapped doorjambs. Stay in bed. Stay quiet.

A few angry yawns. Throats clearing. More shuffling. But no sounds from the kitchen.

The three of us prepared separately. Then a few muttered questions.

Avoid this part. Do not respond. Do not engage.

Eyes flashed toward wall clocks.

Do not think.

More bathroom sounds. Doors closed. Teeth brushed.

Remain silent. Just do what you need to do and be quiet.

Stools flush. Water runs. Doors open. Hangers move across dowels in the closet.

Voices: Father, “Hurry up. Aren’t you ready yet?”

Mother, “Just be patient.”

Father, “We can’t be late for church.”

Mother, “It’s only a few blocks away.”

Father, shouts at me, “What the hell takes you so long?”

Pretend I don’t hear. Too busy getting ready.

Voices. Words that are forbidden where we’re going.

Father, “—damn it. You do this every week.”

Mother, “Just wait in the—damn car.”

Repress.

The kitchen door to the garage slams against the wall, does not close.

Garage door rolls open. Engine turns over. The roar of a gunned engine.

Do not feel.

Inside the house—the relative calm of an armed truce.

Do not trust.

Mother, “I’m about ready.”

Me, “Me too.”

Quiet.

Until the horn honks once.

Horn honks again.

Horn blares constantly, then stops.

Do not ask.

41

Horn honks again, twice, then again, and again.

We walk to the garage together.

There’s nothing wrong here and don’t you dare tell anyone about it.

42

Georgia Englewood Window I couldn’t believe it at first. I guess maybe that’s denial, and a lot of people go through that stage. It’s typical, expected even. But it’s not even just that I couldn’t believe she was gone. It was how it happened.

We lived in a good neighborhood. Yeah, sure bad things happen everywhere, but you still expect some neighborhoods to be less likely targets and have better security systems. Our apartment actually still had the control pad for an old system, but it wasn’t active when we moved in. And we never felt the need, or had the money, to add a new one. The door locked, and the windows locked, and that was all any place I’d ever lived in really had. I guess some larger buildings have a secured front door, but for a small building, yeah. Our unit had a front door to the outside, which I always saw as a good thing. And it did latch and lock. Except that one time it literally opened on its own. I guess it didn’t latch or somehow became unlatched on its own. Thank God she was home then. Or that door could have been open for hours. The cats would’ve bolted. God only knows.

But I was mostly shocked because she was so obsessively, annoyingly careful. She’d notice if I forgot to lock the door. One time she got a bad vibe from an Uber driver, so she asked him to take her to the restaurant next to our building at the time, and went in and got food in case he was watching. She called me to ask what I wanted and to tell me she thought the driver might have been touching himself with her in the backseat. But he was probably just tapping his leg or something, and she was probably just being paranoid. She definitely watched too much true crime Bailey Sarian nonsense.

But despite double-checking the front door and making sure we shut and locked the living room window every single time we left the house, even if it was only for a short period of time, even though the cats loved having the window open, it happened. Basically what she was trying to avoid the whole time, all she did was effectively delay it, I guess. She didn’t realize the bedroom window was unlocked. It was shut, but not locked. I guess I didn’t realize either.

I’ll never know who shut the window last. It was probably her, and she probably just forgot to lock it, and the blinds were down, so you couldn’t see from the inside that it was unlocked. But you could see from the outside.

It doesn’t matter. Somebody saw an opportunity. And it doesn’t seem like it was a burglary either because nothing was taken. Not that we had anything of value to take anyway. Laptop was in plain sight, left. Anyway. They’re not entirely sure what happened. The homicide detectives. It looks like she was not aware of anything amiss until the actual struggle, so it seems like the guy came in through the window when nobody was home, shut it behind him, and hid

43

somewhere until he felt like taking the next step. He could have been there for hours, in a closet or something.

How often do you check your closets?

44

Michael Estabrook because the workers swore they could hear screams of the poor souls stuck in hell The Kola Superdeep Borehole was a Soviet Union scientific drilling project on the Russian border with Norway the deepest man-made hole on Earth reaching down to a depth of 40,230 ft.

But drilling had to be stopped in 1989 because the heat at that depth turns rock into mud and melted the drill bits. But also—

45

Zdravka Evtimova Bavarian Style Any minute now, I expected that the man I was having dinner with would produce a letter typed on a sheet of yellow paper. I wasn’t too happy about it, yet I tried to enjoy my Hare with Chestnuts Bavarian Style, sipping at my glass of fabulous Chardonnays d’Oc. The guy who had asked me out was very attractive. His Chardonnay was excellent, his dark suit was immaculate, his blue eyes were interested in me and his name was Udo Fischgrund. He was the senior manager of the company which dealt in a wide range of French, American, and German cosmetics of worldwide repute.

I’d eaten half of my Hare Bavarian Style, yet the yellow letter I disliked with all my heart, hadn’t become a topic of our conversation so far. This made me feel uneasy and alert.

The reason why that letter gave me cold feet was, by all means, ludicrous.

My mother was at the bottom of it all. She was a woman of character, that was all there was to it. If the old fair lady had something on her mind she was sure to get what she’d bargained for.

This sort of thing had happened to me quite a few times before, so I was well aware of the trap Mother had laid for me. She was good at making everybody around her suffer.

The turn the events would take as they followed the plan my mother had drafted always hit me hard. My admirer i.e. the man expected to propose to me, at a certain point at dinner would produce a letter scrawled or typed on a yellow sheet of paper. That particular tinge of the yellow color gave me bitter headaches. It exuded smells of the drawer in which my mother stored her cosmetics.

I had the feeling the paper had absorbed the memories of all her wrinkles she had concealed under thick layers of rouge. To put it mildly, the yellow paper smelled of problems that Mother hoped cosmetics could resolve. So when my prospective husband asked, “What is this?” showing me the yellow letter, I sensed I’d lose the battle one more time.

The yellow document was the letter in which Mrs. Schwarzmuller, i.e. my mother, had thrown light upon some remarkable facts. The epistle read: Lieber Herr (Dear Sir), I doubt you have the vaguest idea about the woman you intend to share your future with. She is my only daughter, Sir, therefore I feel responsible for you. It was me who brought her up doing my best to share with her the human values of our civilization. I put in quotes the noun “civilization” because my daughter and the civilized world are totally incompatible entities. In short, she is a liar. If she says she loves you, lieber Herr, this can only mean one thing: you are a very rich man. She is after your money, believe me.

46

She is bound to squander all your assets i.e. all your hard earned savings, Sir. She will make you a beggar before you could say Jack Robinson. In short, my daughter is a spendthrift. I’ll reiterate that statement in clear conscience in any court of law as the case may be.

I’d like to add she has lax morals. I’ve written those bitter words feeling utmost pain.

You can understand that, I am her mother. I think I know what will happen to you; I have already lived through similar circumstances several times. Two other men before you, lieber Herr, were credulous enough to welcome her in their lives. Soon after that the poor guys, God bless their souls, came to me complaining of acute insomnia and lack of appetite. She’d cuckolded them. Her ex-boyfriends suffered nervous breakdown. I, being a sensitive woman, wept silently and lived in constant dread of my high blood pressure. Therefore, I ask you to put an end to your relationship with my daughter. If you do not take my advice, you are sure to land in a psychiatric institution, and I, on my part, might as well meet my Maker as a result of being hypertonic. Alas, unfaithfulness is as indispensable to my daughter as is water to a fish.

At the end of the first month of your marriage, she will have fallen in love with another man. You are a sensitive guy—I can somehow feel that. Therefore, mein lieber Herr, run away on her if your future means something to you. Run for dear life while you are still able to wrench yourself from her grip.

I wish you good luck with all my heart. Please accept the assurances of my highest consideration.

Extremely worried about you, Mrs. Elfriede Schwarzmuller, Victoria Schwarzmuller’s mother.

… At that point, the guy who had already bought an engagement ring for me would stare at the yellow letter, rendered speechless.

More often than not my prospective husbands had asked me to a romantic candlelit dinner, the usual eight candles burning mystically, Vivaldi’s “Spring” a magic in the air. However, after the young man was halfway through my mother’s epistle, his face would grow thin and long.

As my first boyfriend read the yellow letter, he looked at me, gasping in astonishment. His mother came to check what the matter was and in no time there were tears in her eyes. She pleaded with me to go away on my own accord.

The poor woman hailed a taxi for me and sent me packing while my boyfriend sighed at the window looking pitiful as I got into the taxi. My second boyfriend’s father acted in a somewhat innovative way. His son had received my mother’s letter, too. The text was identical, and it was only the date that was different. The father, having adopted a businesslike approach, informed me, “I make much more money than Friedrich (the son). I’ve been looking for a woman like you.” Those words made the son start sobbing.

After that sad event, I made a pledge I’d have nothing to do with men who sobbed. So far, I had been as good as my word. … So far, Udo Fischgrund, the senior manager, had produced no yellow letter, and that fact instead of pacifying my troubled thoughts, made me choke 47

on my Hare with Chestnuts Bavarian Style. It sounded highly improbable that Mother had let my present admirer slip unobserved from her eagle’s eye.

The yellow smell of an old drawer seemed to hover in the air above my head. Udo smiled at me, the candles burned romantically, Vivaldi’s Spring was again a magic in the air, and I suspected a trap.

“Your mother is a marvelous woman,” said the man I hoped against hope to grow old with.

Two weeks ago, Mother dropped insightful hints that I’d die all alone, an author of bestselling memoirs replete with red hot love affairs. I didn’t like that.

Finally Udo Fischgrund produced the yellow letter.

The moment of truth had come.

This time, Mother had written the following: Lieber Herr (Dear Sir), You are a fortunate man: you have met my daughter, a magnificent woman. I brought her up and I am proud of her. She is my creation, a flawless creation, Sir. Victoria would never lie to anyone even if her life depended on that. If she says she loves you it means that you are the love of her life and you will be the love of her life until she breathes her last. Loyalty is what describes best her character. Money is not of primary importance to her; however my statement should not be misunderstood: she is not a squanderer. On the contrary, Sir! Victoria is the thriftiest young lady I know.

She will successfully accompany you along the way to stable financial prosperity.

My daughter’s love for you will be your safe haven, now and for good. It is the thought of the harmony between you two that stabilizes my dangerously fluctuating blood pressure.

I feel that she can make you very happy.

Please, accept the assurances of my highest consideration.

Mrs. Elfriede Schwarzmuller, Victoria Schwarzmuller’s mother.”

P.S. Lieber Udo, Thank you for sending me the high precision blood pressure/pulse measurement Eucerine device you and I talked about last month. I received it yesterday. Now I feel healthy, energetic, and able to control my blood pressure under most untoward circumstances.

I simply adore the anti-cellulite apparatus you sent me for St. Valentine’s Day! Could you believe the miraculous thing eliminated the abominable freckles on my hands that old age had given me? You have no idea how young I feel!

I was enchanted when yesterday you told me about the fibrinogen evaporator with which a lady can delete her wrinkles for good.

You are a serious scientist. I am proud of you!

Mit herzlichen Gruessen (All my best), Elfriede

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Olivia Farrar an ode to the season of adolescence if I asked nature a question with a honey-parched tongue, I guarantee that she would whisper an answer through the tint of Russian sage, Not just the violet hue, but the muted fuzz that protects the stubborn bud; the blossom that I watch, while waiting for a reply, but all the bees that are lured by the charm of the peppery fragrance, summertime pollen— distort the lilac wisdom, so I pluck a sprig, praying for no such thing as a writhing sting, and lick its stem pairing the slimmed stalk to Scotch tape, before pressing it in the arid landscape of my journal’s lackluster garden and while I wait for someone to write a conclusion, I fall out of love with my lavender hope trading it for the qualities of Russian sage: silver plumes of pricking back a vibrant fragrance when crushed and memories of my own, archaic laughter. if nature could see my changed shape now, she’d look at me with the reverence of a hiker, stumbling upon a field ridden with paper wildflowers.

49

Olivia Farrar Painting the First Date He wears the same color as my name sounds: olive green, and his hair reminds me of an ink cartridge that broke.

He asks me to pinpoint the Pantone of the sunset on our first date, It’s harder than he thinks.

The sun turns its cheek behind the vertical hand of a mountain range, and we’re still trying to name that elusive shade of a once-in-a-lifetime yellow; this is the segue for a first kiss.

He folds like a dog-eared page, and I’m the reader in this paperback, fresh painted dream, and he tastes of Americano.

I feel the sun shoot back, up to burn-inducing high noon, and this is the part where I part from the UV sting, his face is Living Coral red.

I laugh in hues, the mind will never think to name, and his smile blinds in this dusk that envelops us, if only all loves were like this.

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Frank William Finney The Bard of Harvard Square used to curl each verse around a long-stemmed rose to hawk them from the steps of the ancient church.

Are you one of the few who stopped to buy a poem in your continuing effort to support the arts?

I didn’t think so.

51

Taylor Graham One Small Paw Print for Raven Her ears were wings unfolding as for flight when she was old enough—tired of earth, its life, its unquenched yearning after light.

So close she still was to her fact of birth.

We loved her promise of ancestral heart, her mother’s yen for wandering. And yet, herself was mystery, an unplotted start.

We’d read it in her eyes of glister-jet.

What could she know, still bumble-legs, a pup achieving balance on the stairs, and game to try the next adventure, head-tilt up— each morning new and nothing quite the same— We saw her leave us, looking straight ahead, ears like wings as out of sight they led.

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Taylor Graham Improvising on the Keys “It is hard to have hope. It is harder as you grow old.” – Wendell Berry A lady browsing the art gallery pauses to gaze at it—my old manual typewriter, with poet typing, is an oddity. Composing by pounding the keys is hard, it takes strong fingers to make imprint on paper, to have something to show for the effort; to have something worth saving.

A poem on Hope the lady wants. On the wall behind me is the photo of a hawk; it soars, eyes focused ahead. Hope, I remember, is the thing with feathers—the hawk focused harder, no doubt, by its hunger. Hope is hunger, as I’ve come to believe, a necessity. You have your own notions about hope, growing of their own accord inside you. Hope is never old.

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Taylor Graham Aspen Quake We climbed through lodgepole for a tiny lake, on the map a blue splotch like blotted ink, a sweaty hike—the rhythm of give and take of breath, a pause to let some detail sink past conscious thought, its surface ripple pool.

We reached a leveling, a gentle brink— imagine angel wing-beat soft and cool all breezy green of aspen quiver-leaves.

At water’s edge we camped, a granite stool, a stony bed. The midnight mind believes such things: stars over-watch a trick-knee’s ache mummy-bagged on rock, and breeze relieves the wakefulness. Mute murmur of lake and angel wings or was it aspen-quake?

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RM Grant Three Scenes in a Hospice i.

Working back, it wasn’t a particularly painful death in truth, you looked a little like light in an old, dusty bulb fading pale and creamy ii.

“I don’t want to have to come visit you in the hospital one day”, she yelled, while he smoked a cigarette.

Her words burned like acid on the young psychonaut’s tongue -want to have toin the end he was forced to swallow every hope of becoming the nothing he knew he was iii. when all of the heat had gone out of you when you had turned soft and cold (a fact your husband remarked upon as the wheels came round to carry you out past the bathroom where my father was hiding his tears from me; out past the dusty hospice window where early evening had come to dress herself) a young nurse turned to your son and said: “sign here, we’d like her eyes. You can keep the heart, we’ve no use for it. No use for dust or bulbs or light or salvaged memories. No use for any of it” 55

RM Grant tender//forever we danced together beneath a dimming sky and never once looked up. as if by looking we might cause the light to die a little quicker, or cause us each to vanish in the dark, as though we didn’t both already reflect one another entirely. later, as we lay on your bed in the heat of July, in the dark, pushing back against gravity, the way stars do, you handed me the ingredients for light that we crushed in our cores like hydrogen, making heavier elements; a meal cooked for eternity from temporary things

by August I’ll be as tender as an eons-cooked lamb please, never forget that night we cycled through the city and the moment I lost sight of you and forgot to feel fear; only the warmth and infinite light from the sun you baked inside my chest

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John Grey Moving to the West Coast In southern California, there is no season worthy of its name.

Winter, spring, etc. still show up on the calendar, but not in the air, not in the landscape, and barely in the clothes I wear.

I keep forgetting what the months are for.

April showers? Forget it.

It’s one long dry April Fools’ Day. The pastel colors of October?

Not if eucalyptus trees have anything to do with it.

The climate’s causing havoc with my memories.

Did snowflakes really glide down window panes?

Did robins time their arrival to the opening of the buds?

There are no more freezing birthdays.

No more blossom anniversaries.

Time still passes but its New England clock is no longer ticking.

There’s no sudden June cry of “Surf’s up.”

No after-Christmas urge to hibernate.

There’s not even Christmas.

Just fake Santas, fiberglass reindeer and cookouts.

Sure, my life is no longer ruled by the Weather Channel.

And I can bicycle in February in tee-shirt and shorts.

But people tell me all the time, “I bet you don’t miss the snow.”

That’s another thing about living here.

I let people speak for me.

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Sheryl Guterl Forest Love Dark hammerhead clouds pound silver nails of chilled rain powered by fist gusts of wind.

Fragile fern cowers under tender maple sapling bent over by nature’s rage.

They touch, brush, rub, drawn together for comfort and support through the storm.

Calmer clouds part, revealing blue, a band of blossom colors, rainbow’s blessing on battered forest.

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Elisabeth Haggblade Christmas in Tivoli A week before Christmas Vati, my foster father, brought into the kitchen a four-foot spruce he had just cut from somewhere and stood it up on a stand he had made by nailing two wooden slats together crosswise, cutting out a round opening in the middle to wedge in the tree. It smelled fresh of forest with melted frost droplets still glistening on its branches.

He placed it in the corner next to the buffet and began decorating it with apples, oranges, and walnuts. Vati took thin copper wire he had cut into fiveinch lengths and pushed one through the center of each fruit, bending the protruding end so that the fruit held. He shaped the upper extension into a hook to hang the apples and oranges onto the tree branches. He tried the same method with the walnuts with somewhat less success because of their hard shells.

Aunt Meta and I helped by wiring four-inch-tall white candles to the ends of the branches. We did not have little candle holders that came with clip-on snaps for that purpose. Fruit and candles were all we had for decorations. I thought our tree rather festive once the candles were burning, warming the resiny fruity air.

With his sonorous bass voice Vati, the old WWI and WWII warrior, slowly intoned Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen (“Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming”), a melody that still resonates deeply with me today. He also played the harmonica quite well. Adi chimed in with more songs of the season. Vati and Aunt Meta knew by heart all the verses of the old songs, while I could only hum along after the first one. The blending of voices rendered our little hut almost reverential, conjuring in my mind thoughts of Christmas angels like those depicted on Advent chocolates and candy wrappers.

We munched on some cookies or a piece of Guglhopf (a type of pound cake)—quite tasty when Aunt Meta baked it. Maybe we even had a cup of real coffee. The men drank beer and stronger stuff that I don’t recall.

The treats must have reminded Vati of his youth in Thuringia. In telling his stories, his voice became more and more gravelly with drinking as he segued into his war experiences.

He told of the time he was riding his bike along a country road in the east in 1944 when he was approached by a Polish man who stopped him, motioning to turn over the bike to him with the few German words: “Das ist mein. Jetzt kannst Du laufen” ([the bike] is mine. Now it’s your turn to walk). Vati thought it best to do as told because he was on Polish territory, land that had been traded back and forth between Germany and Russia.

Adi, my foster brother, then followed with his story of being in the German infantry in 1943. It was Christmas Eve. The soldiers decided to fry a stack of 59

pancakes for supper when their guard came running in warning of an approaching enemy patrol. They hurried out of the tents and hid in the surrounding forest. When it was quiet again, they returned. The pancakes had gone missing.

The Brits had absconded with them. In exchange, they had left a box of cigarettes with a thank-you-note and a Merry Christmas wish.

With thoughts of war on their minds, Vati and Adi shifted to singing wartime pop songs like “Lili Marleen.”

The air in our hut had thickened with wafts of cigarette smoke and fumes of alcohol. The men’s pitch rose, arms started to gesticulate. There was nothing stopping Vati now as he worked up a sweat ranting and raving about the war, about what would have been, could have been, should have been.

The tone in our kitchen started to get serious. Adi tried to steady Vati as he lurched toward him wielding a large kitchen knife. When Adi caused him to drop it, Vati in his rage lunged for the few dishes we had, smashing every plate, bowl, and glass within reach to smithereens. Aunt Meta and I were crouching in a corner by the stove trying to avoid the shards raining off the wall.

Vati’s thunderous stream of consciousness began to dissolve into grunts.

He was done. He lumbered, head bent, shoulders sagging, toward his bed, a broken man acknowledging his entire family destroyed by war and self-destructed by disappointment, anger, and alcohol.

The burning candle wicks on the Christmas tree began to spat, sizzle, and crackle as they neared the end of their life, warm melting wax dripping from the branches. It was time to extinguish what was left of them. The fruity tree decorations, too, were on the wane, the apples dropping in pieces, the oranges into mush on the floor. Even the hardy walnuts were showing the first dark brown spot of decay.

Another Christmas had passed with thoughts of past Christmases ghosting about.

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Jessica Handly Star Wars Day I was born in 1977. The year Star Wars was born.

As a child, my imagination was captivated by all things Star Wars. I have very fond memories of playing with my younger brother; every snowdrift was a scene from Empire Strikes Back. Every bicycle ride was a speeder race away from Stormtroopers on Endor. I was Leia. My brother was Luke. We loved Star Wars, and though life intervened sooner rather than later, and we drifted away into other worlds of our own choosing, Star Wars was always with us. It was a place we always returned to, grabbing those old VHS tapes, and later DVDs, when we felt the need to stay inside and watch the snow drift down on the world of Hoth outside our windows.

Fast forward to 2009.

As an adult, I chose to become a teacher. I loved writing, books, mythology, literature. The most exciting day in my career was the first time I was asked to teach a Literature class. Shakespeare, Frost, Chopin, what wasn’t to love?

These were literary gems to me, authors who had created beautiful worlds, using words as a paintbrush over the canvas of the mind. I could stand there for hours talking about literature, and so I did. But this foray into literature was not as easy as I’d hoped. I had thought my love of the written word would spill from me into my students. They would drink it up as I did, once, when I sat at the desk in their place. But to their young minds, Shakespeare seemed like a foreign language. Frost and Chopin? Antiques someone brought down from a dusty shelf.

How to reach them?

I remember quite clearly that late autumn evening, feeling frustrated and bent over my lesson, struggling to find a way. The television played on low, as was often the case while hashing through lesson plans late into the night. Suddenly, a familiar theme. Something that struck a chord from my childhood.

Something pushed aside but never forgotten. I looked up … and two hours later, I knew what to do.

2021. I’ve been teaching for twelve years. I’ve taught hundreds of students English Composition, Creative Writing, Reading, and Literature. Of all those classes, my most favorite lesson is what my students have come to call Star Wars Day. It is the most engaging, most thought-provoking, inspiring lesson I have developed in all twelve years of my career. It is engaging to my students, who learn about the Quest, the Hero’s Journey, and Mythic Archetypes without falling asleep in their lattes and bagels.

It is thought-provoking, as they make connections between the journeys of Luke, Rey, Anakin, and Kylo-Ren, and how they are very much like other characters they know from other movies and stories. They raise their hands and 61

call out in class (I truly don’t mind), and they tell me, that’s like Moana … King Arthur … Hercules … Iron Man. They make connections between what they know and draw on previous experience to explore what they don’t know. They learn about the hero’s call to action, and perhaps our hero doesn’t initially want to go, but leaves the safety of their home to find a better way, a new world, a treasure. And when I tell my students that they are on a quest, and that they are the hero, and that they have to face challenges and find the treasure, their eyes widen. Yes. The lights go on. Yes. Facing the challenge of classes. Yes. Education is their treasure. Yes. I tell my students about Joseph Campbell, who wrote The Hero of a Thousand Faces and inspired George Lucas himself. They tell me they’ve heard about Campbell in this book or that movie, and didn’t realize he was connected to Lucas, but of course it all makes sense. My students in turn, inspire me. They tell me I should read these books and those movies, and I do, learning about their world as they learn about mine. It is a shared inspiration, and it all comes together because of a series of movies that was born the same year as I was, and has given so much to my life. I now pass that gift on to my students.

Someday, my students will look at this lesson I created for them, this Star Wars Day. They will look back on it as I look on my own youth and the world Lucas built. My classroom became for them a place they could live in the moment, in a galaxy far, far away. There, they learned about quests and archetypes in a way that hardly seemed like learning at all. There, they could make connections and feel like they were a part of something bigger, even if it was just for a little while.

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T.R. Healy Slow Shivers of Light Anxiously rapping his thumbs against the steering wheel of his car, Fallows slowly drove toward the large van parked behind the downtown branch of the public library. It was impossible to miss, checkered with small red-and-white squares that made it appear it was covered with a table cloth from an Italian restaurant. For a minute, he idled beside the passenger window and peered inside and saw two chairs on either side of a small metal table.

That must be where the recording would be conducted, he thought, continuing past the van. That was where he was scheduled to be at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, and he still didn’t know if he would keep the appointment. * For the past two and a half months, since the financial services firm he worked for moved to the opposite end of town from his apartment building, Fallows had been riding the train to the office. There was just so much traffic congestion to contend with in his car that he decided to take the train. Though considerably faster, it was quite a bit more expensive. And it was always packed with passengers so he never bothered to bring along anything to read because it was rare that he found a place to sit. Some mornings it was so crowded he wasn’t sure if he had made the right decision. And today was one of those mornings because he could hardly turn around without bumping into someone.

“Do you think it’ll ever stop?” a young woman standing next to him asked, tightly gripping the strap above her head. A soaked umbrella rested against her right knee.

“What’s that?”

She glanced at the raindrops pelting the windows. “It’s been going on like this for six days straight.”

“It’s been a wet month. That’s for sure.”

“I don’t know how many times I’ve told myself I’m going to leave this dreadful weather and go somewhere warm and dry but I never do.”

“I hear you,” he said, sharing her frustration with the constant rainfall.

“One day I’m going to do it,” she insisted. “One day I am—” Suddenly she was in his arms, her head pressed against his shoulders, then together they slammed into a window, causing it to crack in several places. At once, his hands felt damp, and he assumed it was rain seeping through the cracks and looked down and saw blood in his hands. Mortified, he let go of the woman and stepped back from the smashed window and nearly tumbled over another woman who was on the floor on her hands and knees. Beside her was an elderly man whose left arm was so twisted behind his back it appeared as if 63

he were trying to scratch himself in some obscure spot. All he heard for a moment were screams, including his own, then he heard someone say the train had gone off the tracks.

“Come on!” he urged himself, pushing other passengers out of the way.

“You have to get out of here!”

Someone grabbed the sleeve of his raincoat and he swatted his hand away then someone else reached for the cuff of his trousers but adroitly he dodged around her. All he thought about was reaching the door that some passengers had managed to push open. He knew it was callous but he couldn’t be bothered with anyone between him and the door.

“You have to get out of here! You have to!”

Outside, he lifted his head back, letting the rain rinse his face, then lifted up his hands to rinse off the blood. He was so exhausted he had to take several deep breaths, as if he were a runner who had just crossed the finish line of a long, grueling race.

“Hey, fella, how about giving us a hand?” a guy with a nasty gash on his left forearm asked him.

Fallows nodded, still out of breath, and walked over to where the guy and another man knelt beside a woman with a badly lacerated knee.

“We need to get this lady on a backboard,” he said. “So if you’ll take one end we can get it done.”

“Sure thing.”

On the count of three they lifted her onto the board and carried her away from all the wreckage to an area behind the tracks where several other passengers awaited medical attention. * The next morning Fallows was stunned to see a picture of him and the other two men carrying the injured woman on the front page of the sunrise edition of the newspaper. The headline above the photograph said: “Good Samaritans To The Rescue.” He couldn’t believe it, thought for a moment he was imagining what was there and set the paper aside while he finished his breakfast.

When he looked again, it was there all right, nearly as large as his hand. It was still hard to fathom. All he did was help carry a woman away from the scene of the accident then he left. He knew, if that guy hadn’t asked for his help, he would have left even sooner because he was so eager to get away from all the pain and destruction.

He was not a Good Samaritan, and he was certainly not a hero, but he was treated as one. Numerous people congratulated him over the next few days, some of whom he didn’t know, and several at the office asked to have their picture taken with him.

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“You’re the man!” perfect strangers shouted at him on the street and, always, he acknowledged them with a raised thumb.

There were many passengers injured that morning whose picture didn’t appear in the newspaper but it turned out the woman he helped carry to safety was the sister of a city councilman which was why hers did appear. Still, he enjoyed the attention he received even though he knew he didn’t deserve it.

But it was something that was more than due, he believed, because he seldom ever felt he was appreciated enough for the things he did.

Years ago, in high school, he ran for student body president, against a prince and a clown, even though he was sure he would lose because they were much better known. He did indeed lose but he gained some of the recognition he craved. He was tired of being ignored. He wanted others in the school to know he was there and know, too, he was as worthy of being elected as either of his opponents. * Three weeks ago, over the phone, Fallows was invited to participate in an oral history project conducted by members of the library staff about ordinary people who did extraordinary things during the past year.

“Why are you inviting me?” he asked the staffer who called.

“Because of the picture printed of you in the paper the day after that train derailment last fall.”

“Oh.” “We’d very much like to record your memories of what transpired that day.”

“That was quite a while ago.”

“I know, sir, but whatever you can recall would be much appreciated.”

“I see.”

“So can we make an appointment for an interview?”

He didn’t know why but he agreed to participate in the project. But now, as he drove to the appointment, he wished he hadn’t because he felt he would be obliged to tell whoever was recording him that he had ignored the woman with the umbrella who bled all over his hands as well as several others who needed assistance as he pushed and clawed his way out of the rail car.

He was a fraud, he knew it, but he didn’t know why anyone else needed to know it so, abruptly, he turned around and headed back to his apartment.

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Mary Hickey Life’s Work That tapping sound, so faint when I first heard it, now echoes in my mind louder than the roar of the excavation equipment’s engines, or the undulating whine of the new drill the mine owners brought here yesterday. We have to get them out! was my only thought as we set the drill in place when it arrived and readied it to run through the long night ahead. A storm was predicted for later on and a light rain was already falling, but that was no reason for us to stop the search, or delay the drilling.

Every so often the drill stalls, and we have to pull it up, and then un-jam whatever has blocked its progress. During these times while the engine is throttled down, I can still hear that tapping sound emanating from the depths of the flooded mine. I hear it especially clearly while the miners’ families are here with me. Tonight they bring me hot coffee and fresh biscuits in the wee hours, and one of them also hands me an umbrella, though my work coat is rugged and weatherproof enough that I don’t need it. I thank them, they thank me, and then they hug me and one another silently beneath the storm-clouded sky, black as coal over the mountains and the mines.

The police and the many volunteers who came to help us in the beginning have drifted away one by one, saying they can no longer hear the tapping. The newspaper reports have shrunk to a couple of paragraphs on the inside pages.

Their writers say it’s been days, maybe even weeks, since any sound came from that hellish chamber where the miners were buried alive when the great wall of water breached its man-imposed boundaries and overwhelmed them.

But I stay on, and keep digging, drilling and hoping. I can stay as long as I want, because I’m the foreman and it’s my job to rescue my men if I can. The mine’s owners tried to stop me by reassigning the people working with me, but the howls of protest from the families, the town, and the press were probably heard all the way to Charleston, the home of their home office. So I’m still here, with equipment and a crew.

The decision to send those miners down that deep shaft was made by men above me in the chain of command, but their fate is partly my responsibility. I suspected the shaft was unstable and that a flood was a real possibility, but I didn’t protest or object to the orders from on high. In similar fashion, none of the miners questioned my order that they descend into that dark hole which they had good reason to fear could become their final resting place.

I will never abandon them, and their families know that. I can rightly be accused of complicity with those who hold the keys of money and power, but it will never be said that I left those men down there to die.

I stay because I still hear that tapping. The mine’s owners no longer try to stop me or send me home, because they know I always will.

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Paul Holler The Loon’s Return From the loon’s altitude, the land below him appeared as a net of rivers cast over a wide and featureless space. The loon followed the threads of the individual rivers, looking for one that would take him to a place he knew.

Aligning himself with a narrow thread, the loon descended with his feet behind him, holding his body at an angle to the surface he approached. But then he felt the hard surface of a paved road slamming into his chest. Dazed, he tucked in his wings, rolled like a log, and slipped off the pavement and onto the road’s gravel shoulder. For a moment he could not move. Then he kicked his feet back and forth, but with no water to push behind him, he could not move forward. With no water in which to remain buoyant, he could not stand up. His head, wings, and feet were free, but he remained unmoving, trapped.

Then he felt the footsteps of a man nearby. He cried out and tried to take to the air, but he could only spin in a wild circle. The man stopped before him and bent down, resting his hands on his knees. The loon cried out again, flapping his wings and kicking his feet. The man slipped out of his jacket and lowered himself to his hands and knees. The loon cried out again. The man lay flat on the ground and looked into the loon’s eyes. The loon cooed and tried to rise up but, failing, folded his wings by his side and tucked his feet beneath him.

With one long sweep of his arm, the man covered the loon with his jacket.

Then he got to his knees, swaddled the loon, and rose to his feet.

The man held the swaddled loon to his chest. In time, the road he walked faded to an unpaved trail. The footprints he left behind him were even and centered, forming a direct line between the road and the river that ran beside it.

The man walked in time with his heartbeat. The loon stopped his struggle and remained quiet within the jacket. Then the man’s pace slowed when he heard the chant of cicadas to the north. The wind carried their sound like the roar of waves crashing on a shoreline. The man’s breathing became a part of that chant and the loon moved to the rhythm of the wind, the cicadas, and the man’s footsteps.

When he came to the river, the man stopped and looked down at the loon, still tightly wrapped in his jacket and peering into the sky. Without losing his hold on the loon, the man bent down, untied his shoes, and kicked them off.

Then, with his free hand, he took off his socks and rolled up the cuffs of his pants. He waded into the river, unwrapped the jacket, and lifted the loon toward the sky. Then he set the loon gently on the water and watched him swim away and wash the road dirt from his indigo feathers.

The man stepped onto the river bank, sat down, and rested his feet on a large stone. After his feet had dried, he put on his socks and shoes and started 67

down the path away from the river. The loon gave a long and solemn call like four long notes played on a wooden flute.

“Amen.” the man answered. As he walked away from the river, he heard the sound of wings slapping water followed by the silence of the loon’s flight.

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Ruth Holzer Poorhouse Woman at the Duck Pond After the painting by Paula Modersohn-Becker, 1905 She may be somebody’s mother, the woman leaning on her cane in the tired light of late afternoon.

Her shirt is the shade of an old pumpkin stored in the cellar and forgotten.

She’s knotted a kerchief under her chin and wears her usual brown felt hat.

Her lips are pressed against complaint as she cradles her stomach where there’s a pain.

The white ducks paddle and dabble in their shallow circle.

Some come waddling right up to her big feet, looking for the breadcrumbs that aren’t there.

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Zebulon Huset Toad, Drunk on Flower Power, Speaks of His Sister I never claimed my sister was smart but she has a huge heart beneath that careless, fungi-appearance.

She just doesn’t know any better— when that big bully Koopa coos to her, plays the bad boy with the heart of gold, and maybe he is that sometimes— but then Mario comes in like a jerk and drags my hapless sister away, smitten again.

I know, I know, don’t criticize the Golden boys, but she never asked for a flaming rescue from a vigilante plumber.

He storms the estate then cusses her out— she’s told me what he really says— for not being Peach. Always only after Peach.

So of course he leaves her on any corner in Mushroom City as a rebounding Koopa speeds by laughing with that skank dangling her tiara in the wake of their balloon exhaust. Both of them laughing hysterically. She’s not so pretty.

You should have seen her before her pixel reduction surgery. Plus she’s as vain and mean as Red—Princess indeed.

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James Croal Jackson Bananagrams Hard to say goodbye a bunch of jumbled words this freeform scrabble of knowing our ups and downs two poets at the game café hovering over August and detonate this limited time we have cloaked ourselves we slap plastic tiles and yell peel racing not to say goodbye I’ve got a few days left in the parking lot after we clutch each other unsure whether to cry in the authentic light of sunset

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Soon Jones Canis Minor the smell of dried, pressed grass tickles my nose as i march across the twenty acre field to my favorite bale from this season. i’ve carved a step into its center coil with the tip of my boot from a hundred nights of hoisting myself up. buddy, my black border collie mutt who i proudly stole as a pup from owners that thought kicking his tiny furry body was fun, jumps up ahead of me, tongue lolling out in contentment. under the stars, a thousand frogs exchange gossip, crickets restlessly sing to each other, and birds call out into the night for their own. out here, i can track the rotation of the earth by the constellations emerging from the shadows of the treeline. sometimes a river rock from the universe skips across our atmosphere. jonesy, the old family golden retriever, runt of her litter, yet never once afraid of the coyotes who test our territory, can’t jump anymore, so when she puts her paw on the side of the haybale, i pick her up and put her in the middle. later, i’ll jump down first, catch her, and let the dogs guide me home.

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Soon Jones You Could Be Pretty When my breasts betrayed me the first time by arriving before I was ten, my stepmother forced me to wear lacey bras and satin underwear, telling me not to be a whore as she threw me at any boy or grown man who looked, hoping for a shotgun marriage.

So I stopped wearing dresses outside of church and at weddings of people I didn’t know. I stopped wanting to be pretty.

I wore thrifted Timberland boots and oversized shirts, carried knives.

I treated makeup like an exotic curiosity and yes, it makes me pretty.

Creates someone new and vulnerable, someone who looks safe. Instead I learned to throw a punch without breaking my wrists. Learned to throw grown men over my hip like fussy children.

Developed an early eye for tight groupings, center mass.

Learned to hold a rifle as close as a lover to my shoulder, and open my bones to each bullet’s shockwave, to the unrelenting hunger of the world.

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John P. Kneal Patient Tutor Through its long-tested catalyst, Nature, this planet spins an ever-thickening web that for us blossoms into lessons and knowledge.

Even in the harshest conditions, like hope, life emerges and persists— worms wriggling inside Arctic ice weeds wiggling through driveway cracks trees torturously rooting around rocks tigers trekking from deforested domains.

What so often seems worthless or destroyed somehow replenishes— like Sahara sands hoisted by trade winds to enrich Amazon jungle, volcanic wasteland transformed into soil for abundant nourishment or dying coral reefs that still sport a teeming array of denizens.

Even in pandemics we see members care— like ailing finches, mandrills, or spiny lobsters that socially-distance to protect the greater whole.

Nature has no bias, forgives but does not forget, and fashions portals through which life’s sprigs and towers proceed in an ever-changing cornucopia of length, weight, color, frequency, texture, and even style.

And buried in Her bowels are the past’s brilliant blasts and subtle shades, proof that excesses, even if minor or human, revert back to harmony.

We have the senses to appreciate our biosphere, both in splendor and in need— like the lilac’s fragrance, redwood’s length, elephant’s wrinkly skin, crane’s warning whoop, and peaches and salmon to savor.

But will we have the sense to inhale and preserve this diverse bounty, both around us and in the far reaches of our minds?

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Kelli Lage Made Up Of I am made up of those who taught me.

The ones who made me laugh those who made me roll my eyes those who helped me see life within myself.

I am made up of early mornings and watching cartoons before trotting onto the school bus.

I am made up of kicking my legs while swinging, to reach the sky during recess.

I am made up of checking books out from the library.

I am made up of longstanding anger to get rid of strawberry milk in the cafeteria.

I am made up of playing the clarinet when I didn’t care about the clarinet.

I am made up of non-aesthetically pleasing outside of the lines art projects, that made my heart happy to create.

I am made up of days of Shakespeare lessons.

Counting my row of classmates, to see what page my turn to read aloud would fall on.

Making sure I know each word, missing the story entirely.

I am made up of looking out the window during lessons.

Picturing the world outside, longing for adulthood.

Only to grow, and step back into the school hallways.

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Richard LeDue The Most Unfunny Joke The fact we’re all going to die has become the most unfunny jokeorganized in a cupboard, canned goods don’t even whisper about their expiration dates, like good children we never were, who sit quietly, waiting their turn (the can opener rusted, but still works).

Hands silenced by their own rough edges, hands once happy to play in mud, or feel a melted Popsicle run down fingers on a summer day, that sticky juice warning of old age, yet completely ignored in favor of sun burned legs chasing each other in a game we never named, only to end up laughingnow, it’s all faded into a memory, while we double check grocery lists.

The scratch of a pencil deciding against rutabagas (or was it turnips?) sounding louder than it ever should.

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Richard LeDue What Goes Unsaid Her liver gave out after three dead husbands: bootlegging to pay the bills, slurred conversations with cats because there’s no such thing as ghosts.

The doctor phoned my mother telling her her mother was dying, so she better come to the hospital (My father speeded the whole way, while reassuring us of all the times he had gotten “the call” before his father actually died).

My grandmother was staring at the ceiling when we ran in: her uneven breathing the only greeting, until her eyes glanced at us with a wordless goodbye.

We held her hands like one might grasp at silence for meaning.

My mother sobbing as the patient who shared the room ate a hamburger, and down the hall, a woman still quacked (we were never told their stories).

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Marcia McGreevy Lewis A Cold, Dark Walk in the Moonlight We always wondered if there were ghosts at the log cabin where we spent summers when I was growing up in the 40s and 50s. The former owners of our summer cabin at Priest Lake in Idaho had long since abandoned it, but they left behind the detritus of their lives after their mysterious disappearance.

There was the weathered black leather couch with its clumpy horsehair stuffing and river of cracks. There was the screened cooling window for produce, the hand pump to get our water, and the ice box into which we manhandled with immense tongs mammoth blocks of ice. We loaded these ice blocks into our boat at the resort before we crossed the lake to our otherwise inaccessible cabin. There was no electricity and no indoor plumbing, but the woodburning stove was our greatest challenge. We seldom digested (almost) a meal less than charbroiled.

It was the little things, though, that made us feel our predecessors’ ghostlike presence. They left behind mustache cups for drinking mugs, so we pictured them as swarthy with dense mustaches. There was a foot-peddled grinding wheel for sharpening knives and axes that led us to imagine them as swashbuckling pirates posturing their swords or perhaps Natives hoisting their hatchets. The chamber pots they left received lots of use since the outhouse was a cold, dark walk in the moonlight. We spent hours with the stereoscope they left, holding it in one hand to look through the lenses at side-by-side pictures.

The pictures morphed into one 3D image, showing elegant ladies in bustled gowns and gentlemen driving Model Ts. We were endlessly curious about who left these things. My siblings and I terrified each other with stories about their ghosts haunting us. Every one of us found those ghosts petrifying. Did we scare them away? Had they left on their own, leaving everything behind, because of some trauma? Did they blame us for having displaced them? Were they angry enough that they sent the pack rats that dominated the attic, the daddy long legs that spun webs in our suitcases and the bugs that bit our ears while we slept? It’s undoubtedly the ghosts who the skunks spray when these apparitions roam at night. When we smelled that gag-inducing stink at night, we knew our predecessors were just outside the door hunting for us to make us pay for taking over their lives.

I was about eight when I realized my worst fears as I sat in the two-hole “Rose Room,” the outhouse, ironically named because it smelled nothing like a rose. I had waited until the last minute to make the scary trip because the outhouse was a perfect place for a ghost to catch us. When I could wait no longer, I streaked outside. Dusk, the haunting hour, had settled in. I latched the door, so it was only the odiferous lye spread we used for disinfecting our

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excrements, the flies, and me. Believe me, the lye smelled not only unlike a rose, but totally unlike any perfumed soap in which it is often used.

Then I heard whistling, which I hoped was the wind, followed by crunching that could be porcupines, but then there was creaking. I held my breath and prayed the noise was the ever-present brown bears, not ghosts. I’d never prayed for bears before, but I was desperate. It didn’t work.

Now there was the definite sound of scratching. I pulled up my pants, rolled up the Sears and Roebuck catalog as my weapon and climbed stealthily on top of the toilet seat. I hesitated to show my eyes through the air vent that circled the ceiling, and I was barely tall enough to stretch that far, but I needed to eyeball the enemy. I stretched, gripped my cudgel, and readied myself to at least stare the ghost down. I was delirious enough to think I could even bludgeon the stalker if necessary. I saw nothing, so I silently rotated 360 degrees, not once, not twice, but three times before I ascertained there was no one there.

The next step was the hardest. I needed to “screw my courage to the sticking-place” as Lady Macbeth determined so she would not fail. I wasn’t into quoting Shakespeare at that very moment, but I did appreciate his prodding, so I jumped from the seat, jammed open the door, and raced for the cabin at Mach speed.

Outwitting the ghosts was successful once again. If only I could talk to them I’d tell them that they don’t need to scare us into listening. I want to ask them who planted the apple trees, if they caught lots of trout and who left the shipping crate-sized salt lick for the deer. I would listen if they could find a more appropriate way to tell us.

79

Christopher Locke Still Lives With Green Dress The throng of beautiful people decorated in Prada bags and Thom Browne blazers didn’t notice the air had cooled. But once the light surrounding the Los Angeles hills dipped into muted grays, and the temperature collapsed into the 60s, Bill Wenz herded his guests back through the sliding glass doors.

After a bit of cajoling and bright laughter, the caterers shooing themselves back into the kitchen, Bill rounded everyone into a manageable bunch: filmmakers, artists, real estate addicts, and miserable divorcees. Bill stepped up onto the marble hearth and slightly grimaced; an MCL injury he’s ignored for years. He raised his glass high. Others followed suit. Bill looked to his maid Marie and she cut the music.

“Um, well, I’m not so good with speeches,” he said. Polite chuckles: Bill was a speech writer for the governor. “So I’ll keep this brief.”

And then Bill gave one of his very best speeches. The kind a doting father gives to his only daughter. The kind that makes others wish it was recited to them. And though it was thoroughly rehearsed, the speech was imbued with the magic feel of spontaneity.

Looking at Jill and her new wife Katrin as he spoke, Bill felt that the only thing missing was Jill’s mother, Dorian—dead now five years from breast cancer. When he came to the end of what he had to say, his breath settled like a feather and not a single body stirred.

“To Jill and Katrin,” Bill said, and he raised his glass higher.

The guests applauded and cheered. The florist Bill had been sleeping with, Brooke, put a monogrammed napkin to the corner of her left eye and dabbed, her mouth a perfect ‘O’.

“Hear, hear,” the Argentinian phlebologist barked to Bill’s left. Bill couldn’t stand him. Or his wife. But Bill served with them on the board of the California Arts Council, so that was that.

Jill beamed, sensing this was the moment her life would finally begin. Her long red hair twisted in a braid down the back of her green organza dress. Katrin held Jill’s hand and smiled and waved quickly, then ran her fingers through her dark bob cut.

Jill was not good at public speaking, and as the daughter of a speech writer the irony was not lost on her. Before she addressed everyone, she cleared her throat; the green silk of her dress looked almost chartreuse in the light. Katrin worried the guests might think appropriation due to the antique, far eastern style of what Jill wore, the way its stitching flickered with tiny songbirds throughout.

80

“I don’t want to be cancelled before I’ve even had the chance to start my career,” she told Jill as they were getting ready earlier. Jill laughed and threw a pillow at her, told her not to jinx everything.

But the dress did have an exotic charm, a kind of 1950s Vietnam postcolonial feel, like Jill just stepped from a Graham Greene novel with incense rising through her hair, a wry smile on her lips before she brings the protagonist to ruin.

As Jill spoke, she realized she did not sound as formal and stiff as she feared; she never felt so natural in front of so many. Everyone was held by a combination of her lilting voice and humble words.

When Jill finished everyone cheered once more. Bill looked to his maid and she restarted the music. More bottles of Veuve Cliquot were popped and everyone drank their fill. Later, the Argentinian phlebologist mercifully left without saying a word and the florist Brooke said she changed her mind and didn’t want to spend the night. Bill was demure and did not protest and Brooke went home wondering if she’d made the right decision.

Jill and Katrin left before any of that, hugging and re-hugging Bill in the cul-de-sac. Bill’s cheeks were wet, and Jill never liked when he cried—it reminded her of her mother. Afterward, back at their hotel on Wilshire, the couple clamored into their room laughing and a little drunk, and realized they forgot to close the curtains; their windows captured every gaudy detail of L.A. at midnight. It was as artificial as it was breathtaking.

Katrin decided to raid the minibar and Jill closed the drapes with the remote by the bed. Jill then peeled her dress off her shoulders and shimmied it down past her hips to her ankles; she kicked the dress over the settee and turned to Katrin. Katrin smiled and finished her Grey Goose, and then slowly, firmly, pulled Jill down into the sheets which were also made of silk. They would check out the following afternoon and forget the dress entirely and Jill would think on the flight home that maybe they could get the hotel to ship it to them if it wasn’t too expensive and Katrin would tell Jill she worried too much and didn’t she want a Bloody Mary?

Housekeeping discovered the dress and Isabella said she would deliver it to lost and found but never did, instead hiding it in her work bag during a meal break and bringing it home to her 4-year-old daughter Jasmine, who immediately made it her favorite play dress and wore it every day for almost two weeks until finally Isabella had to take it by force so she could wash the peanut butter and grape juice and other crud from it and Jasmine cried saying her mom would rinse all the magic out. But Isabella tugged harder and said she didn’t care because no daughter of hers was going to play in filthy clothes. Isabella didn’t know the wash rules regarding fancy dresses and tossed it in with the lights, hoping for the best. Later, when she extracted it from the machine, Isabella shook it twice and held it ruined at eye level. She frowned and hid it in the cupboard above the Maytag, hoping Jasmine would forget she ever had it.

81

It was not the kind of ignoble end that Chu Hua imagined when she originally harvested the silk, everyday dunking thousands of cocoons into long troughs of boiling water to remove the outer gum before extraction was possible; she pictured Lady Gaga or Beyonce forever lounging in the garments made with the silk she provided. Chu Hua worked 11 hours a day at that new factory on the Yangtze River, stirring the cocoons into a thick slurry as she pulled and separated them, lifted them steaming into the light. The air smelled primal, like breath and concrete.

Chu Hua used to feed the silkworms mulberry leaves and that was a job she loved the most; it was so peaceful. Now that job was automated, and her hands were blotched in burns and scars from the endless boiling water. But she didn’t have time to think about that. Only later, as she sat scrolling on her phone during break, smoking and reading new posts on WeChat did she feel most herself.

Then the long bus ride home to her two-room apartment where she’d first check on her father, in bed and slowly dying of a disease the doctors couldn’t identify, only that it was killing him. Chu Hua liked to hum as she prepared dinner for them both and this was her father’s favorite part of the day—he would listen from his bed and smile at the ceiling.

On Sundays, before her father was awake, Chu Hua liked to read magazines that displayed colorful photos of Paris, London, New York. But her favorites were ones of Los Angeles: all that money and fame and California heat.

“I’m going to go there one day,” she said to her friend Ai at work during a break.

“Oh, I’m sure,” her friend countered. “You and your crippled father will be in all the movies, won’t you?”

The following Sunday, as her father woke spitting blood into a handkerchief he kept secret under his pillow, Chu Hua cut out a picture of the Hollywood Hills from one of her magazines and drew a red heart in the middle. She taped it to a cabinet over the kitchen stove. It stayed up that day and the following night, through the brisk weeks of winter and then into spring. It stayed up even after her father died unannounced one Tuesday morning. And then it stayed up the next day too, after Chu Hua woke up alone for the first time in her life.

82

Lorraine Loiselle Escape Sleep, once her steady companion, has become a fickle eloper leaving her with muscular sighs.

She enters the kitchen, starts the dishwasher, thaws out a chocolate cookie, self-prescribed for excising demons, and plugs in the percolator for her 2:00 a.m. cup of decaf.

Fitting herself into the captain’s chair, she chews the cookie slowly, returns the room to dark infinity to sense the control panel better: small red and blue lights gleaming.

The spaceship is in cruise mode.

Gurgling sounds from the percolator, the whoosh and hum from the dishwasher the burble of the fridge and even her calm breaths tell her all systems are working.

She is traveling among stars, on course to a distant exoplanet, her coffee cup steady.

83

Lorraine Loiselle Dumpster Building 400 has a new dumpster, a glossy forest green.

No peeling paint, scratches or dents, No map-shaped patches of rust.

Huge, a cover that lifts easily.

It’ll swallow a sofa or a mattress.

No more overflow disgracing the neighborhood although I can’t say about holidays.

This minimalist sculpture Is unlikely to find a museum.

Perhaps the vanquished one will become installation art provoking conversation, causing visitors to scratch heads.

84

Katharyn Howd Machan Somehow I Always Knew church wine would never be mine.

I was raised on purple grape juice— or, let me say, the lust for it, me in my sober navy dress, flat shoes, my grandmother shoving me into hymns while she readied her thighs to rise.

I had to remain alone on the hard wooden pew devoid of sinful cushions that shaped other churches’ prayers for soul’s redemption.

But how I longed for God’s permission to stand and step and kneel and taste sweet forgiveness on my tongue after what my little body had allowed a devil grandson to do to it, and me so very young.

85

Katharyn Howd Machan Sunday Morning, Key West Sean’s brought us hot Cuban coffee from where the locals go; I offer chocolate-filled croissants from Fausto’s warmed on a small white sturdy plate.

Elizabeth Street: Nancy Forrester’s tall gumbo limbo shading her yard, pink bicycle, smooth orchids hanging.

Steve is working in the back, carrying parrots one by one to rest on perches in safe cages the hawks and snakes can’t reach.

For eighteen years The Secret Garden has opened its gate on Free School Lane to offer this island’s last green acre of land beyond world’s metal greed.

In twenty days that gate will be locked by the man who’s slathered this city with gold, declaring development divine as he destroys what’s sacred.

Tomorrow, what will I say to the others who’ll gather with me to write stories and poems expecting a lasting haven of palms, roots deep in mulch, seeds ripe to rise?

Sometimes the devil has God’s blue eyes when he flies in as smiling savior, promising rescue, paying time’s taxes, offering thin and holy lies …

Sunday morning. Key West.

A rooster crows; a small cat wanders; con leche in our cups is strong.

Dede pours us peach and mango juice from the organic co-op.

How to face the shape of darkness without letting its shadow in?

Nancy’s surviving. We’ll work to survive.

Holding on to why she lives: nurture of blue and crimson wings, replenishment of good black earth.

86

Katharyn Howd Machan Myrrh and Cinnamon Are in the Fairy Tale but my daughter chose cocaine instead and heroin in midnight’s cry for her phoenix nest of what she loved or what she felt she needed.

Maybe she thought if she could burn her father’s ghost would turn to smoke, his fingers as he reached for her thin fragments of wide dream.

Maybe she thought she could be the egg my love had tried to save and shape beyond the shadow of the man who’d raped me towards her breath.

Ashes tinged with sharp tomorrow.

Ashes dark with all hope fled.

My beautiful child so close to living.

My heart’s rose the shape of sorrow.

Bird, bird, vast mythical bird promising new flaming flight can rise from what this fluttering world knows is truly dead.

87

Beverly Magid James Webb Space Telescope A flash, an explosion and the trip begins.

Off to find the morning of the universe, when the world was diapered against exploding stars.

Black holes filled with empty darkness, memories of a big bang before everything was anything, before fish swam, or birds flew, before you and I decided to walk upright.

Pictures of our past before there was a beginning.

Light and darkness swirling together.

No stars yet to wish upon, No answers given, no questions offered, no voice booming “Let there be light.”

Is there collective memory, dreams of a past before knowledge, a world without form, a longing to belong?

Fire will be discovered.

We will come down from the trees.

We will build houses reaching the skies.

We will hold each other close to our skin.

We will learn the ways of evil and try to remember the good.

We will shoot past the moon In search of all our yesterdays.

88

DS Maolalai Immortality less important drinking wine, typing poems at our flat’s kitchen table. my girlfriend has taken the office away. she works late sometimes and I can’t really argue—my chance at immortality less important than paying our bills. so if poems are different then that’s why tonight: I’m writing now somewhere unusual—not that you’ll know it; they’ll go out just the same to the editors—mixed in with old ones, ones written later on. the extractor fan glows with a warmth of a campsite and fireplace. tile floors and wood cupboards reflect back the keyboard like marching and hesitant ants.

89

DS Maolalai Visiting my grandmother the trees, blue as teeth, bite the hills to small pieces, and the grass melts like butter being laid across toast. we are visiting my grandmother. ‘97: I’m six. sitting on the windowsill of this damp winter house, with its plaster-cast saints and its plasterflaked corners. sky tipping darkness like a poured cup of tea. the moaning of cows rolling in through the windows; they sound terrible, and this morning my uncle had me touch one; I hated it, and also the taste of their milk. it’s different at home: it’s much colder and fresher. here I am six and the world sitting inside a tennis ball; it is dark and it smells very musty.

90

Fabiana Elisa Martínez Conquered by Fog The large woman carrying a chihuahua came in between Rita’s eyes and the informative signs. The little dog growled terrified while its owner rattled the clinic door with hands too round or too clumsy. When she finally mastered the proper motions and left, the glass panel diverged a ray of sun toward Rita’s pupils illuminating the long-time silenced memory the posters on the wall had already triggered.

The problem was not that they did not know. The problem was that when they got to know, when the only enlightened one had come back to unveil the truth for them, they had chosen to remain inside the cave, mesmerized by the shadows, engulfed by darkness. As if they had chosen not to see. What people choose not to believe is usually more interesting and ironic than whatever fantasy they decide to follow for life. Rita had always interpreted the drama of Plato’s allegory that way. And she wondered often what strange switch makes souls turn into the rocky surface instead of accepting the blinding truth of the sun. To her, it was the allegory of choosing a lie even when confronted by clear evidence, the most voluntary and tenacious form of belief. The acceptance of the unreal, dancing shadows coming off the wall because the fear of the real light might show our own disgusting insignificance. She could still see the look of offended pride from Professor Lauret when she dared to express the thought, followed by some regards of disdain and boredom from her classmates in Introduction to Philosophy. As a freshman, taking one of those proemial classes that a pompous hunger for intellectuality had pushed her to attend, Rita had defied her professor, who had reacted in a belligerent manner probably more out of tiredness than defeat.

“Mrs. Thielemann, the doctor is ready. Second room to your right, please.”

Rita’s mind crawled back from the safety of the images on the clinic walls and her early years untangling Plato’s myth of caves and fires. All those posters of dog eyes, the naked anatomy wisely hidden under the furry lids, those cavernous pupils, open wells of black depth surrounded by caramel irises. Magic lanterns of wonder and love. Piper’s pupils had long ago stopped being such mirrors of the night. Nowadays, her eyes seem more like the highest caverns that Rita had seen in Granada, in the Gardens of Sacromonte, the ones far up in the hills where the gypsies lived, curtained by clouds to veil the entrance of their abode made of rock and stalagmites. Milky and hollow were the eyes of Rita’s dog today, the happy eyes about to get a verdict from Dr. Douglas in Lexington, the eminence in veterinarian ophthalmology. Seven miles away from home to hear the death sentence of a Labrador’s sight, Piper’s panting had started accelerating, echoing the anxiety of the animal and the dread of a woman’s heart.

91

“Mrs. Thielemann? Piper?” Dr. Douglas petted the dog’s left ear, the one that always looked a little tired, crooked. “Very nice to meet you. We have some news …”

“Hello …” Rita put her purse on a low chair and looked up at the doctor with straightened lips that wanted to mock a smile. “So …”

“Well, as Dr. Reed suspected … and she was right to refer you to our office, Piper has become totally blind. She may have been this way for the last four to six months.”

Rita squeezed Piper’s blue leash as if the pressure of her hand on the leather could restrain imminent sobs. “Totally? Not even shadows? Is there anything she can see? I swear she …”

“Yes, I know.” Dr. Douglas said very matter-of-factly while Rita frowned.

“We hear that all the time. She is not stumbling upon things, she knows where everything is. But animals are very good at hiding their losses, at compensating, you know. Much better than humans, to tell you the truth.”

Rita did not like the pedagogic tone. She felt the same pang of disgust that Professor Lauret had seeded so many years ago.

“Will she be okay? How can I help her? Do we need to prepare the house in a certain way?”

“There’s nothing you can do. First, because you didn’t when you didn’t know and Piper was fine. Sometimes we’re wiser when we don’t know. Second because dogs see with their noses more than with their eyes. Smells are her colors. For her, every object, every being, is the added olfactory trails provoked by every one of its atoms.”

“I’m not sure I follow you.”

“For her, you are the fragrance of your hair, the sweat of your hands, the scent of grass in the hem of your skirt. She can also smell your emotions. She can see you and me, much deeper than with her eyes. She will be fine, Mrs. Thielemann. But remember, she can also sense your sorrow. Just give her two extra treats every day in memory of her beautiful eyes conquered by fog.”

Driving back to Concord, grabbing the wheel with the same desperation as she had held her dog’s leash, Rita wondered if Piper could smell the salt in then tears falling on her green skirt. And against all the platonic rules, Rita chose to believe that everything was as it has always been, that her old dog was not blind and that she would never die. Piper, released from the mythological labyrinths of wisdom, did not have to choose. She kept snoring in the back seat, her left ear canopying over one dead caramel eye.

92

John Maurer Polarized Ends My soul is not kindred, it is imaginary Like the vision in the concentric circle of dots It is not solar exclusive, stare at anything too long and you go blind The page turning and sage burning has me unlearning the words I once hoarded— Like what for? Who for? No amount of beauty or love sustains the flower Abstract concepts do not grow the grass; that is sun and water That is the son and daughter who eat your dreams in front of your face Not I, I spot a spy in my circle and show him the use of a circular saw Show him how stable a table can be with three legs No horses but the fields get plowed, no need to be proud The process is enough, the work is the reward

93

Derek McMillan A Likely Story “I spoke with my father last night, er, and my mother,” I said.

“Er, indeed,” said Martin. “You realize they are both dead?”

“Yes and no.”

“What do you mean, ‘yes and no.’ You don’t believe in ghosts, do you? And if you say ‘yes and no’ again, this conversation is at an end.”

“My father explained to me about ghosts.”

Martin waited.

“This was sixty-five years ago, so I may not be word perfect. Ghosts, he said, are ideas in your head. When people die, their souls either cease to exist or they go to heaven. In dreams and reveries, nobody really dies. I revisited my childhood home.”

“In a dream?”

“Mmm, hmm.”

“For the tape, Derek nodded.” I think my old friend Martin watches way too much detective fiction.

“My father—” “Who died when you were seven?”

“Yes, that father. I only had the one. He was there, my mother was in the scullery. I didn’t look at myself, so I can’t tell you how old I was, but I was a precocious little whatsit. My wife, who was two when he died, she was there too, so I had to introduce her. She was the same age she is now. Mum offered her tea and had two stabs at her name, but got there in the end with some prompting.”

“What a complex world you live in.”

“Not when I’m awake.”

“So, what did he say?”

“That was the funny thing. He died in 1959, but he seemed to know everything which had happened after that event. We talked about LGBTQ+ equality, and I expected to have to argue down his 1950s attitudes but not a bit of it.

‘Homophobia is fascist,’ he said. ‘Full stop.’”

“He wasn’t happy with the Labour Party he had supported all his life but he wasn’t particularly surprised either. ‘Betrayal is implicit in reformism,’ he said, adding, “If things don’t alter they’ll, stop as they are.’ The last bit was just an old family joke.”

“Hilarious,” said Martin, “Did he say anything else.”

“He told me how to find you.”

Martin was unusually silent at this point. He went to the window and looked out at the rain.

“He told you how to find me?”

94

“Hmm, mmm,” “Well, I’m damned.”

“Probably,” I said. That would have amused the old Martin. He essayed a smile as watery as the weather.

We chatted for a while, mainly about the past. We had been to the same school. It no longer existed, but that didn’t stop us talking as though old Badger was still alive and still had the school bully waiting outside his office for the cane.

“Of course, he never stopped being a bully, just a bully with a sore backside,” said Martin. I agreed.

We shared a bottle of claret and, in due course, it was time for me to take my leave.

The next day, I had a journey to Pawsons’ Road, the old cemetery where we used to go to smoke during the lunch break.

I found my way to Martin’s grave by trial and error, mainly error.

I lay the flowers down and said my goodbyes.

I knew it was only “au revoir,” of course.

95

Joan McNerney Blur this blur of hours, this waking sleep sometimes in & then out of this world we are dragged across another night black wells roll thru eyes … trains whizzing at 11 o’clock 1 o’clock winds trace tree shadows over walls on that white trapeze afraid to let go afraid to drop to nightmares lodged in corners shrunken wide-mouthed cars creep down streets as first weak light s t r e t c h e s over roofs & the radio provides some likely song there is no time to find what is lost we march like tin soldiers in an ungodly war with eyes slit at 6 o’clock dry mouths, throats burning, dazed as sirens screech past another morning warning of another day of quiet storms

96

Joan McNerney on most days i just want to crawl back to bed, never come out become a turtle covered by my hard shell nothing appeals to me not even food, just coffee coffee more coffee to keep awake another hermit crab who carries its home sickened by shorelines poisoned by oceans after all those storms diseases, accidents climbing through menacing years … dumb-struck i must keep going can’t quit but would rather slither off into some dark cave like the spotted salamander

97

Karla Linn Merrifield Overdue You’re overdue for a muse like a book running up nickel fees from that library of inspiration.

But there are UFOs, there are our fates, there is karma— reincarnation, you betcha, baby— And mind melds are possible.

Yes, there are auras; yes, there are chakras— quantum entanglement, for sure, lover— and possible astrology.

There’s a certainty in Tarot; we’ll cast the I Ching.

Golden ratio ubiquity, amen, old soul.

For I’m overdue for a muse, too, like a VHS from Blockbuster, hoping that a Luddite will come along to watch.

Come, let’s toss the coin, flip the card.

Lo, let us be unexplained phenomena with Erato.

98

Heidi Miranda Stepping Stones Forgive me For I don’t mean to scare the little birds when I walk.

It’s just something that happens; A consequence of being human Is having the ability to intrude And scare all the little things Going about their day.

99

Heidi Miranda RE: the grove We were in the clearing of those trees; two does fawning over the other sitting on damp ground in the cold shade.

It was all perfect—my hair tied up in your favorite braids and you in my favorite shirt on you.

Two does dancing around the other playfully moving closer and then backing away never running out of things to say; the sound of the breeze an encouragement that things were meant to be this way.

100

Debasish Mishra An Evening at Puri The sea of faith armed with the waves of maddening devotion overwhelms me A lady dances frantically lost in a strange trance while onlookers chant holy hymns to the beats of the cymbals Hands raised in surrender hypnotized, blessed, walk towards the Big Eyes two gilded globes in a glimpse and return with the memory of a lifetime kissing the walls and touching the steps on their way back Outside, an emaciated woman probably a leper sleeps in isolation clinging to some dream which, perhaps, only the Big Eyes can see!

101

Rosemary Dunn Moeller In the Shadow of the Church in Manou, La Perche, “All Things That Rise Must Converge” –Pierre Teilard de Chardin, S.J. Genealogy takes me on travels, family traced back to Louis Houle, an indentured servant, emigrant to Quebec 1647, once of Manou.

I had to go and search, I needed to find tendrils to streets along the River Eure, fields where wheat grew, now horse trails for Percherons.

Looking at farmland, goats, calves, I found the usual: a small rural village post office, city hall, church.

My owned-indentured-seventeenth century ancestors, Louis’ parents, having seen their son off to the New World, death-like, might have been ordered on errands, never free to sell themselves for passage, too old, infirm, attached to the village and the farm where they labored.

I make up stories, excuses, causes for their staying rooted.

I’m glad for connected bits of DNA from Louis who climbed on board as neither Pioneer nor Founder, just an emigrant, then onto land to work off passage.

He labored, bought farmland, returned to Manou to take a girl-bride, Matilda, multiplying fruitfully, so I can return to smell the sweet grass here, now, wondering how bad it would be to just stay in this lovely place beneath these maples and oaks.

Louis left his life behind, not his homeland.

I’ve another home. My life expanded.

102

Rosemary Dunn Moeller Long Light Summer Skirts I usually swam alone in the lake on hot afternoons at our camp, not so far out, not terribly deep.

I would grow gills if I knew how, but never learned.

Nor did I learn to feel disgust from feet sinking in mud or weeds brushing my arms and legs. Friends from town who came to visit were repulsed by littoral smells of dried weeds dead mollusks.

I stroked and glanced down to glittering fish, their scales reflecting the direct sunlight, colors changing, flickering.

I questioned the hornwort I swam through. Beautiful, fluttery, bright green, gentle stemmed. How deep do you grow? No answer.

Once, for attention, with others, I lied that I was caught in the feathery grass just to feel it twist round my knees, as I pulled it loose from the bottom. Fragile hornwort could never be trouble, but I pretended. She believed and “rescued” me. For penance, I did nothing.

I still feel the weedy wet strands with pleasure when I wear long light skirts in summer.

Pond bottoms feel more dangerous now, clear water holds contaminants.

If I could re-wade into waters with my mind of nine summers I would.

103

Cecil Morris Me in Mind I like to imagine myself an impulse leaping neuron to neuron from your eye or ear or lip—an ionized humming zooming down axons, dividing, multiplying as axons fork and fork again. I like to imagine myself invisible, unbodied electromotive force jumping synaptic gaps, descending dendritic trees—a vaulting volt charging along your neural network, a charged idea you have not yet thought, a shock almost felt.

I like to imagine myself surging (nearly fast as light) into your four lobes at once—and on—to thalamus and hypothalamus, to amygdala and hippocampus—and right to your stem— where I change you—your breath, your pulse, your heat— and you (o magic potentiator) convert that current into me—idea to actual. You make me who I am.

104

Cecil Morris Good News, Bad News When this fourteen-year-old freshman announced that she was pregnant, I had just endured my fourth miscarriage, early this time so no one knew except my husband.

We’d had eight weeks of guarded joy and fear, of silent, private prayers and babying my belly as if I might be carrying nitroglycerin or bowl overfilled with water before cramps and blood and tears.

Two days off school then back to my classroom: freshmen like puppies with squirrels dropping by and me, a lesser teacher than before, exhausted, aching, crushed by hope’s hard work.

And she—this waif, this slip, this hip-less child who looks more like 12 or even 11— she beamed to a gaggle of girls who gathered around her desk and shared her news while I bit back tears. I won’t look pregnant for weeks and weeks, she said to a doubter’s whisper, and then, like a magician revealing the chosen card, she produced the test stick and explained the two red stripes. Speechless, I watched her narrow face, her smiling teeth, her eyes. Somehow my baby had become her baby, and I had to squeeze the edges of my lectern to keep my feet, to keep my hands from slapping her stupid happy face, from clutching my failing, incapable, useless uterus. In that moment I wished her morning sickness and stretch marks, a boyfriend who would flee her and her joy, and agonizing hours of labor.

105

John Muro Bird’s Eye I’m referring to the clusters Of constellations that leopard Certain planks of maple— Sensuous aureoles of palest Gold that you might see floating Like candles in windows near dusk.

Whorled turbulence embedded in The loose splatter of caramelized Grain without the oval thumbprint Of burl. Peacock veneer for rifle-stock, Stringed instruments, canes, cues And even humidors. Its murky Wombs often interwoven with The rippled ruin of flame-maple, Arcing like the cursive fonds That mottle the orbed shell of A hazelnut. Yet its lush calligraphy Tells us how grandeur is but a State of constant erosion and a Series of harsh diminishings, Since the wood’s delirious, Otherworldly splutter; its lavish Sprawl and erratic excess of eyes; And its feathered homage to plumes Of steam and pools of looping Water also serve to weaken The integrity of the wood.

106

Zach Murphy The Most Beautiful Things Could End Us My family has the luck of a penniless black cat at a high-stakes casino.

When I was twelve, my mother, my father, and my older brother Jeffrey took a vacation to Hawaii. Jeffrey went surfing in the deep, blue ocean while I stayed ashore and observed jittery sand crabs as they popped in and out of the warm sand. I’ll never get the screams out of my head that I heard before I gazed out and saw the top of Jeffrey’s head and flailing arms sink into the water and never come back. When the paramedics recovered his body, his legs were painted with jellyfish stings.

After my brother was gone, my dog Sylvia became my only friend. She slept soundly by my feet every single night, licked my face in the morning, and longingly waited by the front door each day for me to come home from my soul-crushing days of high school. One day, when I was walking her around the neighborhood, she chased a squirrel into a colorful flower bed and ate a chunk from a Lily of the Valley. She never did come back from that, and I still haven’t decided where to put her ashes.

I truly admired the sun for a good portion of my existence. The sun makes the days brighter. The sun brings colors to life. The sun helps vegetables and fruits grow into their most nourishing forms. The sun also took my mother away. I still can’t comprehend how one tiny, unassuming mole could completely rob someone of their smile.

My father had a midlife crisis before he hit midlife, and I didn’t blame him.

I just wish his parachute would’ve worked properly when he went skydiving over the Poconos Mountains. People at his funeral would say “At least he died doing something he loved,” and I would think to myself, that makes it even worse.

As for me, these days, I attempt to surround myself with the ugly things instead of the beautiful things. I just always worry that I’ll never be able to figure out the difference between them.

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Ben Nardolilli Space Opera Drifting in outer space, but with a place for myself in this station, a destination is supposed to be programmed in, and yet it only seems like I am stuck in an orbit around a planet, or is it one of its moons? maybe I am a moon of a moon now, completely on the periphery of the spheres Back on the solid ground of earth, I was sold a dream of adventure and exploring, lasers and lightspeed and all that, up in the stars I would liberate colonies and fight pirates seeking valuable glowing cargoes but if those dramas existed now they are gone, all trajectories are peaceful The machine guides the rockets, and inside the capsule all is stabilized thanks to controls set by the algorithms back home, maybe there is a spice to be found through a brief mutiny, or better yet, an affair, but not with the droids or drones, only a rebellious human crew member will do

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James B. Nicola Define Divine Once we define God as the unexplained and unexplainable, we apprehend, a little, Scripture, you, the human mind, the random paths of leaves or bags the wind tosses around, my reactions to you, the course that a tornado takes, you, the origin of everything, you, its end, i.e., the meaning of life, you, the unpredictability of you, and so forth. Science, on the other hand, may tell me how you got your skin, your eyes, your voice, perhaps your personality.

Your laughter never fails, though, to surprise.

That humor/human link I understand, but not how yours appears divine to me.

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James B. Nicola Going When they go before they’re gone, And right in front of you, They lend a life to dote upon And tear your heart in two.

And then they’re gone before they go: You don’t know what to say Or think or feel; nor do you know The proper prayer to pray.

Friends say it was, for them, release, But you, they do not sway.

You want yours so to be at peace But please, please not today!

When, then? and how? Will you be there When they at last are gone?

But if you were some other where, O, how would you go on?

Let it be not for weeks, but years: Because you love them so, You’ll gladly shed a life of tears As long as they don’t go— *** For George and me the years were four, The months, then, forty-eight.

We could have taken many more, But heaven would not wait.

But all that heaven takes is also, strangely, heaven-sent: How clearly we have heard her call Ever since she went.

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Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer Ode to Sturgeon Two hundred aquatic light years deep in an act of negative phototaxis flat darkness seeks the sturgeon pure sense stirs sediment suction of burgeoning eons under the glacial lake spurned into turbidity stunned and hunted churned into steam journeys the sturgeon gentle and pelagic hero in the sludge bed woebegone timekeeper attacks the goby with surgical precision turning slowly on an axis sleeping cold and gray and old and urgent

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Jay Nunnery A Visitation First, they heard it. Reginald would say he heard it breathing even though it couldn’t. It spoke and that’s how they believed—it could only be their mother—if they hadn’t already known it to be real. Through that haze’s enrapturing devotion, the taste of bitter grains on their numbing tongues. “Mother,” Reginald said, staring at the room’s corner, not in disbelief, at the wall’s red paint visible through her and the waning sunlight shining through the smudged, wood-framed window onto her like he’d seen it shine onto dust particles in the air. Then he said, “Louis, Louis, do you see?”

Louis said that he did. As solacing as their mother, she said, “I been called home at last and done seen what I known to be the good Lord. I walked right through that light. But it all went away.” She looked down at her hands like they were no longer holding the one thing she felt she never could have lost.

“Everything got all dark like I’d just woke up from a dream into darkness. But see, the only thing I could think about was finding you. Think ain’t the right word though. It was more as if that was my purpose, and I was well aware of that being my purpose.”

She moved closer. Those root-like veins, diverged all over her face, and the indentation that the rope had left above her sundress’s neckline became visible to them. She moved as if she had never considered movement. Her focus on where she was going. Forward in time. Her arms were out, openhanded, the airspace around her acquiescing; while each time Louis blinked, she seemed to get willed closer. Louis reached out and reached further again, his thoughts drowning, and then he felt her, that familiar touch, how synapses fire for even the artificial, the warmth, as if pleading moved along the blood in his vessels, each blink changing the distance of everything. “Louis, my God, Louis,” he heard Reginald say through gasps like Reginald had been running and had only then stopped. That sort of adrenaline pumped through Reginald and caused him to speak to her. “Mother, I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Reginald said.

She knew he would apologize. He’d have to before any of it could begin.

What he expected to be revelatory and absolving, this confession that escaped from him, was nothing more than another step. She knew that Louis would say as few words as he could get away with saying because she knew her boys and that none of those words would be apologetic, more time compiling more remorse.

“Sorry’s not important right now. What’s important is us and that I need you.”

“What you mean, Mother?” Reginald said, breathless again, like he’d started running once more. Urgent as perceived matters of survival can make anyone.

“What you need us for?”

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“I need to get squared away. The good Lord let me know. My soul and my spirit and all them weightless things left my body. But my body—you see the body is significant just as the rest is and it warrants and deserves certain things as well.” She stopped talking and gazed at them in that way she had so many times before, when she told them something experience had taught her, teaching them these things that had become so ingrained that she had forgotten she had ever learned them and supposed everyone had just been born with complete understanding, and then she caught herself as she always did in that gazing, her sons’ confused and trying and to her forever children faces staring back on the cusp of innocence, and she smiled that nonjudgmental smile and as they had initially felt her, they felt her again. “My body ain’t got what my soul and spirit feel they deserve. That’s why I’m here because I can’t go. They won’t go.

I’d do it myself. But I can’t. There’s no way in hell.”

“You can’t what, Mother?”

“She can’t never do nothing with herself.” Louis said, blurting it out as though it were a fact of life that upset him.

“Louis. Life ain’t nobody’s fault. I need you. Go find me. Put me in the earth. The Lord hisself said so. I done got to feelin like I was part of the kingdom already. They ain’t want nobody to see me like it is and have that be how I’m remembered. You see the Lord said I was exalted on account of how I forgave.”

Louis remembered she told him, You gotta forgive since forgiveness has to do with your soul and spirit and neither of them need to be carryin all that weight. He heard her voice like it was unfolding. Youth revealing itself to a baby boy. But you not supposed to forget since forgettin has to do with your mind and your mind is made to have as much in it as it can. His thoughts fading from seen to heard, seeing it all as his mother’s hopeful and trusting gaze, her big, tired brown eyes refusing to blink as her voice failed her that night. Not wanting to betray, obscure, or hinder that lesson’s passage through her since she believed everything one said went from one’s heart to one’s mind, gathered habitually, and she had faith in the process that she did not understand all the way.

She said her body was in the forest. Then she was gone, gone like she’d never been there, like the sun had been shining on those dust particles the whole time.

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Robert K. Omura Failing to Find the Words on an October Day I don’t remember birds singing, tori no uta or the hum of power lines overhead or if the leaves had fled the trees yet— but mornings left a thin veneer on glass and a mist underscored every word puffed from my lips, so I conserved them to keep them real in a world that borrowed and overtaxed them.

I spent the day keeping them down like wrestling finches that longed for sky held them close to my chest, under my breath, so they had nowhere to go.

I struggled to leave them to drive to our appointment, but I went straight over.

The smell of car fumes, turn after turn, burned my eyes red, but I had no words low sun made it hard to read depth, washed out color, but I still had no words.

I remember how you loved fresh flowers, laughed at my silly jokes, okaasan how you left a voicemail reminder for me to pick up on my birthday how your eyes brightened, you smiled, when I came to visit during covid.

Masked up, I signed for you, walked in, head bowed, silent as a monk come to pray.

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You seemed fragile as porcelain asleep beneath a white sheet, dreaming of your garden I said, goodbye, I miss you, because words failed to express ōkina kanashimi.

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Robert K. Omura On the Occasion of the Return to Her Childhood Home We disembarked not as pilgrims but hens, the bouldered shore barnacled, the unbridled ferry frothing in its berth, wreaths of white orchids rising from the water, light sparks electric across the cove, flashing anagrams.

An anarchy of angry gulls demurred the out-tiding cars, as if loud voices ever drown a wave, broken pavement blistered, tired at the edges no one cared, they rolled right over it.

Seven years sobriety made her skin itch, brought clarity without peace. Still she laughed freely, shoulders loosen at the joint, opening to let out a sigh.

Though away from the island half her life the trails from a child’s wet feet crisscrossing her palm, wider, but still the same.

Evening tide foamed two full anklets brought tiny crabs out from hiding under stones, red blossoms spread, then dissolved, in tidal pools uncovering the gold lockets in the sunset.

We held onto them with both hands. We held onto them like they were real.

We held onto the buffeted shores for a week, excavating tiny bones from the anthracite with a trowel and a fine white brush.

Under the fortuitous fronds of an old cedar tree, she found a cat’s eye marble.

With the rhythm of cricket song a lullaby for the ear, we lay on the cold ground, looked up, 116

watched Perseids rain down from a cloudless sky.

Some things lost can be found; some things lost are gone forever.

We refused to make promises— promises are delicate things, soft as eggshells, fragile as dragonfly wings, held together by the hope they might hatch one day.

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Robert K. Omura Curled in the Arms of a Sleeping Dragon, We The Venice night, a cross wind, her hair limp, the dampness in the air; everything here is small, and the walls angular and hard as her smile.

Those browns and reds and the window boxes green as algae-stains along the banks of the canal and the town, the curled tail of a sleeping dragon.

Porcelain masks filled shop windows, and I thought, why, when the human face, with forty-three muscles, could hide an elephant behind 10,000 expressions.

Neglect had left scars on the façade where the plaster fell away, and I reached out, clasped her hand in mine but she pulled away and strolled a little ahead.

It is said that before the bones of St. Mark were secreted out of Egypt and sealed in a box in the Basilica, St. Theodore, the dragon-slayer, was patron saint.

There are no straight lines here, no easy routes nothing is direct, not even the language.

So, we strolled down the alleys to find our way.

I’m trying to remember if she wore a smile with her green jacket and if it made a difference and how the empty square let the voices fall and I’m trying to understand if speaking those words and if reaching out could somehow close the gap or if too much distance had grown between us and I’m trying to find answers in a field of gold stars searching for a flicker of truth in the faces of the saints but San Marco is as impotent as a eunuch tonight.

We two sleeping dragons, coiled in opposition, wait for St. Theodore’s return; stuck in the past, we, until everything, all that’s built, succumbs to the sea.

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Fred Pelka About Jadranka That wartime summer she was my guide and translator, the search for particular words rippling across her face as refugee torture genocide were pulled through the surface of troubled waters. And when they wouldn’t rise— Jesus Christ what is the word?— laughing in embarrassment, her smile also multi-lingual.

But then there are riddles that travel a thousand years before finding their proper home.

Like how, every morning, I saw my neighbors across the courtyard greet each other, the one asking some question I never understood the other laughing as he drew his index finger across his Adam’s apple.

I ask Jadranka the meaning of this and she tells me— It’s old Croatian custom, also Bosnian, also Serb.

You ask your neighbor, ‘How did you sleep last night?’ and he answers ‘Like my throat was slit.’”

There was the scent of UN peacekeepers on Vlaska Street trying to pick up girls, and how at Dugo Selo this one child—maybe ten, maybe twelve— cowered when I entered the room.

She’s like that with all men, Jadranka told me, not having to tell me why.

On Sundays she took me sightseeing— I don’t want you to remember only sad things about my country— once to the cobblestones of the Strossmayer Promenade, once to a cafe near Zagreb center Where in peacetime all the poets used to sit.

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Fred Pelka A Tin Man’s Confession for Denise Back in the day when I could still raise my arms I thought I could see my own reflection, not perfectly, but with a certain shimmer more silver than tin.

I could tell you more about that but I was so easily distracted, shaped as I was by hammer blows on this anvil of circumstance.

Which is why, I suppose, I could never feel my own heart ticking even as my face turned into a garden trowel.

If you’ve ever rusted in place you’ll know what I mean, how there’s a certain stupor that comes with standing in the same spot for years and years.

It got to the point where every hinge soldered into place was an allegory waiting to be twisted to some devious purpose, with me not understanding how the field where I was crafted was itself an acre of hinges waiting to be turned.

What burned in this empty cauldron was the tinder of all that yearning for emotion.

The bottom lip of the world, the top lip of the clouds had come together to swallow me whole as I stood abandoned to inclement weather.

But then what light came shining through the eyes of my enchantress in gingham!

She who was borne by the tornado and whose voice became the heart beating in my empty chest.

I can still hear her singing, see the basket swinging in the crook of her arm.

Pick up your axe, she told me, and find your own oil can, then dance until your joints no longer squeak.

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Fred Pelka Water Works #6 I owe the universe an apology.

As if I or anyone could talk to the universe even if it has large ears.

Somewhere there’s a night sky containing stars in the shape of an elephant.

Somewhere there’s an elephant looking up thinking: Those stars are arranged precisely in the shape of one of those absurd talking apes.

We used to have tails, us talking apes, our spines curved at the end like upside down question marks asking this silent existence, Say what?

I’ve heard that elephants and apes contemplate their own reflections, how on a clear night a lake might toss starlight back at the sky.

I’ve been known to stand on the beach and watch lines of waves roll in like sentences, a paragraph of near infinite length.

Light they say can be both wave and particle and the ocean is both a swelling against earth’s hip and single drops spilling into octopus eyes.

And so the universe sends me its continual invitation, but I’ve been so remiss in my RSVP. No elephant would ever be so rude.

Tell me that the human body is 90 percent water, and I’ll tell you this is why I’ve spent so much of my life drowning inside myself.

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Brenden Pontz The Man of Tomorrow Dedicated to Alaine Nitch-Ball It was 6:00 a.m. on the North American west coast, and Haroon Wilson was getting ready for school. He had no idea why the professor insisted they start class so early, but Professor Barnett was several time zones ahead of most of his students. It made the young man regret picking Ancient History as his major, but with his father as a history professor himself, Haroon didn’t have much of a choice. Sighing, and wishing for the umpteenth time that he had just become a mechanic instead, Haroon woke up from his sleep pod and pressed the button that lifted the pod’s cover with an audible hissing sound. He climbed out of the pod, cursing the machine’s pre-wired schedule that pumped adrenaline into his veins in this early hour of the day.

After climbing out of the pod and putting on the silver bodysuit that served as his school’s uniform, Haroon began making something that vaguely resembled breakfast. The dehydrated package of toast and eggs was poor quality compared to what the average person ate, but being a student meant living in perpetual poverty. As he put his meal in the rehydrator, taking the gray cubes inside the packaging and turning it into proper breakfast food, Haroon killed time by surfing the web.

Haroon turned on the neural link that hooked his mind up with the Extranet, and started browsing articles. The news was the usual mess of politicians screaming at each other. The media was ranting about the famine in central Africa, the crime wave entering its fourth year in South America, and tensions between Earth and the Martian colonies that could possibly lead to war. Why is there always bad news on? he thought to himself. It seemed like a universal truth as permanent as gravity that the media would always obsess over the worst parts about life. A loud chirping noise snapped Haroon back to the physical world, indicating his breakfast had finished hydrating. The food had a similar taste and texture as sand, but at least it was edible. After brushing his teeth and ridding himself of the unpleasant grainy feeling, Haroon took another look at the clock and figured it was time to get it over with. College had started.

He pressed two of his fingers onto his forehead and activated the link that connected him to everyone else in his Ancient Mythology class. His mind conjured up a digital image of the lecture hall; a cramped, sparse room in Central Quinnequt University. The room held no desks or chairs save the professor’s, as very few students chose to attend physically. Behind said desk was Professor Barnett himself, a white-haired, overweight man wearing a suit that probably went out of fashion a couple centuries ago.

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“Good morning everyone,” the professor said, his voice a dull monotone, “I see most of you have logged on. For those of you who are linking from the Martian colonies, remember to record and download this lecture, as usual. I swear, the service off-world gets worse every day.” A small smile crept onto Barnett’s face with that last sentence, he obviously intended it to be a joke. No one laughed. No one really participated in this class as is; for Haroon, it was just a cheap shot at getting more credits.

Unbothered by his passive audience, Professor Barnett continued. “This week, we’ll be discussing mythological heroes of the 21st century. Now, unlike our previous studies on myths of the second millennium, there are few records of 21st century legends. People nine hundred years ago stored their information on an early version of the Extranet, and most of their records were deleted after prototype neural links were invented in 2456. That being said, what modern digiologists could find was rather … colorful.”

The professor pulled up an image on the neural link, and Haroon’s mind was hit with one of the strangest pictures he had seen all semester. It was of a man wearing a blue bodysuit, red boots, and a red cape. On the man’s chest was a symbol that looked similar to the old English letter “S.” He was lifting a hulking mass of green metal above his head that Haroon vaguely recognized as a “car.” “This,” Barnett said, “is the Steel Man. He was a legendary hero from ancient America, a predecessor state to modern-day Usona. Besides their mythology, the Americans have given us much in the way of culture, politics, and language.”

That’s when a female voice spoke up. Haroon couldn’t see her on his neural link, but he figured it was Aeryn Vaughn, the class’s resident high-marking student, and one of the few in their class hailing from Mars. “Professor?” Aeryn asked, “Wasn’t Central Quinnequt built where an American institute used to be?”

Barnett let out a genuine smile at the sound of actual participation. “Why, yes, Aeryn, this building is on the same grounds where a state-wide school once stood. Excellent observation.” Haroon rolled his eyes, did she have to be such a suck-up? All the Martian kids seemed to have that attitude, as if they were trying to bridge the gap between the two worlds through the power of overachieving. Haroon considered it a pointless exercise. After all, how could so few people stand against such a massive conflict? Better to just keep your head down and move along like the rest of humanity.

Thankfully, Barnett managed to keep the lecture going. “Now, back to the Steel Man. According to the earliest tales of his existence, the Steel Man was an alien sent to Earth from a doomed planet. On our world, or mother world for those of you on Mars, he developed supernatural powers. Much like the legend of Hercules, the Steel Man was known for his feats of great strength. As you can see from your neural link image, he could lift objects that weighed multiple

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tons. He was immune to virtually all weapons and could fly in a manner similar to our 31st century gravity augmenters.

The Steel Man used his gifts to protect the people of Earth from crime and terrorism. His greatest enemy was a scientist named Lexthor, who grew paranoid that the Steel Man would turn against his adopted world. Lexthor used his intelligence to combat the Steel Man’s strength.”

“Professor Barnett?” Aeryn asked.

Not again, Haroon thought. The rest of us have lives outside this class. Sadly, Aeryn didn’t hear his mental plea for silence and continued with her question.

“If stories about the Steel Man depict Lexthor as the villain, would that mean America was anti-intellectual?”

Once again, the professor beamed. “I’m glad you asked,” he said. “Stories about the Steel Man did in fact represent the values of ancient America, but not quite the one you mentioned. The Steel Man himself personified everything Americans held dear: bravery, honor, truth, and justice. His origin of being cast to Earth from a dying world represented America’s long history of taking in immigrants. But above all, he represented the ancient Americans’ sense of optimism and hope.” At this, Barnett’s voice started to gain some emotion, and he sounded almost excited. “To this day, no one knows how much of the Steel Man’s legend is true. He could be entirely fictional, or he could be a historical figure shrouded in myth, like the tale of King Arthur. But that didn’t matter to the Americans. To them, what the Steel Man stood for was as real as Earth or Mars. The idea that one man could make a brighter future. That’s why, according to digiologist records, he had another name: The Man of Tomorrow.”

Professor Barnett paused, a slight faraway look in his eyes. Haroon wondered if Barnett expected a light show to go along with his speech. Underneath his dull surface, that guy loved history in a way that some would describe as “passionate.” Haroon preferred the term “obsessive.”

After a few seconds of silence, Barnett seemed to snap out of it. Maybe he realized that no one was clapping for him? Haroon speculated.

“It seems that we’re almost out of class time,” the professor said, “I hope you were taking notes during this lecture, as much of it is going on your midterm.” Notes? At this, a whole string of frustrated curses ran through Haroon’s head; why did it have to be on the midterm?! He silently hoped he could find some answers on the Extranet.

Oblivious to his mental agony, Barnett made some closing statements. “In the next few days, we should be covering more heroic myths, specifically the tales of the Man-Spider and the Dark Knight. Both are very fascinating. And remember class, take a lesson from the Man of Tomorrow. Never give up on trying to make a brighter future. Class dismissed.”

With that, Haroon pressed his fingers against his forehead and disconnected the neural link. He instantly jumped onto the Extranet to download a few files on the Steel Man, hoping he could copy off of them during the test.

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With that, Haroon wandered back to bed. His next class was two hours from now, and it was a good time to catch up on sleep. Yet as he headed back to his sleep pod, Barnett’s words still echoed in the back of Haroon’s head. Make a brighter future. Thoughts of Aeryn and the Martian students rose to the surface of his mind. Maybe they were onto something after all? The Americans certainly would have agreed. Though they were all long gone, the people of the 21st century would be proud to see their ideals survive into the next millennium. The thought made him pause for a moment before reactivating the sleep pod. For once, history began to sound a bit interesting.

Haroon drifted off, lost in visions of ancient heroes. Heroes who were born from a forgotten past, whose legacy could be used to help fix an imperfect present. The Steel Man would prevail across this vast void of time, always ready for another adventure. The Americans would have smiled seeing that Superman still lived.

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Marjorie Power Return Crawled out of the woodwork as the saying goes.

Last I knew he was a peacock, tail spread wide.

He seems to need me now—not something he chose but a weed of truth sprung from the death of pride.

Last I knew he was a peacock, tail spread wide.

I left his yard, doubt that he noticed or cared.

A weed of truth sprung from the death of pride: who’d foresee this, in soft summer air?

I left his yard, doubt that he noticed or cared.

In time I forgot him altogether and he, me, I’d have guessed, in soft summer air.

(In time the world went mad. We lost forever.)

In time I forgot him altogether.

Life lost its punctuation, its gentler tones.

Many lost heart, remembering forever.

In every new glass house a supply of stones.

Life lost its punctuation, its gentler tones.

Still, a fresh breeze floats through his request of me.

In every new glass house a supply of stones.

He brings a chance to counter that. So I agree.

I receive bedraggled feathers for my task.

He seems to need me now—not something he chose but he can’t fly and it doesn’t hurt to ask.

Crawled out of the woodwork as the saying goes.

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Ken Poyner Family You consider your options.

The sudden onset Of the zombie apocalypse Has put a hold on your Plans for the afternoon picnic. $8.99 a pound for the special Spiced, shaved turkey, and likely It is going to waste. So much For potato salad and deviled Eggs. Just time to wolf a few Down in the front room, Place the kids with the remainder In the attic, retrieve your axe From the utility room, get on With business. Oh look, There is uncle James. He Was the reason you never got That puppy, and now he is Dead but undead. Surely He goes first.

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Ken Poyner Feral You are not going to believe this, But last night I found what must be at least Twenty gallons of abandoned water Resting just beyond my back door.

I had no thought such might be there.

I followed no series of two And three-part equations to find myself Driven by a higher finite factor To find this water. I am not Complaining. No. I wish it had been Forty gallons, or fifty. All morning In the rain I will be bringing it in, Preparing to announce my good fortune, To warble the praise of hydration happenstance.

At my next party I will open it A sly gallon at a time, look conspiratorially to each side As I remind my tempted guests This is no ordinary party, This is no ordinary water.

This is abandoned water.

Sip only as much as you might sacrifice.

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Jean Rover Smart This, Smart That Tracy plopped down on her sofa pleased with the great deal she got on a new Smart-Tek furnace and air conditioning system. Sure it was expensive, but after enjoying cooled air for the last few days of a too hot summer, she was ready for the blustery weather that would follow.

Not only was Bret, the HVAC installer cute—jet black curly hair, muscles popping out of his tight-fitting T-shirt, Johnny Depp eyes, and gold chain adorning his neck—but her new system had a programmable thermostat. The house would automatically heat before she got up and be toasty by the time she returned from work. How good was that? Tracy was like a delighted child with the latest electronic toy.

In no time, wind and cold rain arrived, but Tracy was cozy. Sitting in her chenille robe, she sipped a cup of freshly brewed coffee, savoring the aroma, letting fragrant steam open her sinuses, when she noticed the furnace thermostat lit up. The touch screen said: You have an alert.

Ah, clever. Tracy tapped the message button.

You are no longer connected to the Internet.

Tracy grabbed her user guide, hit the settings button, and followed the instructions. Next she selected Wi-Fi, entered her network password, and hit connect.

You did it! the message screen said.

Yay! Technology was wonderful, and so-o-o convenient.

The next day the sky dropped three inches of snow. The thermostat touch screen lit up. You have an alert.

The message said: Turn me up. It’s too cold in here.

How cool, Tracy thought—a furnace that talks to you. Bret, The HVAC man was right. Smart-Tek systems were cutting-edge, not to mention, bold, reliable, and fun.

Each day, while her furnace cheerfully hummed, she checked for another message.

Turn me down when you leave. How thoughtful.

I love warming you. Sweet.

You’re so cute when you wake up. Wait. What?

Was she losing it or was the furnace getting too personal? Unfortunately, there was no way to type a response, so how could she tell it to back off?

The messages continued.

You’re hot, it said one morning. Just sayin’.

How could this be? And, who could you talk to about a cheeky furnace?

The next message was the last straw. Let’s meet. Be at the Court Street Coffee Shop at three p.m. I know you like coffee, and you turn me on. No pun intended. Heh. Heh. 129

Tracy’s hand trembled. She immediately set down her cup. Maybe she should have gotten a space heater. She jerked out her cell phone and dialed the HVAC man. “Come and take this thing out,” she screamed. “I think it’s watching me.”

Handsome Bret, in slim-fit jeans and blue work shirt, was at her door in a New York minute. “What seems to be the problem?” he asked, his face innocent.

“It’s after me,” she exclaimed.

“What is?” the startled man asked.

“The furnace—it’s, uh, coming on to me.”

Bret’s dark eyes widened.

Tracy’s hands held her forehead. “I just want warmth. I don’t want to date it.”

He laughed. “Were you flirting with it?”

Had the whole world gone crazy? Was this service guy in cahoots with the furnace?

Bret approached the thermostat. “Let’s take a look.” He removed the cover. Touch. Touch. Zip. Zip. After he finished, he stood there staring at the tiny screen. “Huh.” He scratched his head. “I’ll be darned.”

“Well?” She tapped her foot, and folded her arms.

He smiled. “I disconnected your device from the Internet.”

“You disconnected me? But what about all that convenience I paid for?”

“You’ve been hacked.”

Her hands cupped her cheeks. “Hacked?”

“Yeah. You know, someone used a computer to gain unauthorized access to your system here.”

Tracy twisted the ends of her blond hair between her fingers. “Who would hack a furnace? I mean like it’s not a bank.”

“It’s happening a lot,” Bret said knowingly. “Technology. It’s everywhere.

Think about it. Those new-fangled garage door openers folks buy track every time they enter or leave. Those automatic light thingies know when a person goes to bed or does almost anything else.”

“Everything?” Tracy gasped.

Bret continued. “Then there are smart clocks, speakers, doorbells, coffee pots, window blinds, hot water heaters, and garbage cans that monitor what you throw away and generate online orders for replacements. Did I even mention smart phones? They all take your commands, but they also know things about you … personal things. Yep, smart homes, they’re the new frontier for hackers.”

Tracy pushed a curl from her face and shuddered. She reached into her pocket and fingered her cell phone. What did it know about her, and how could a poor defenseless girl protect herself from a world that was becoming overly technical and too invasive? Bret was a furnace ninja, a sun in a bleak night, and 130

so-o-o-o knowledgeable. “Now what?” she asked, her demeanor like a wilting bouquet of violets.

“My best advice when it comes to the Internet of Things and the sprawl of smart devices,” Bret said, gazing into her soulful blue eyes over coffee at the Court Street Coffee Shop at about three p.m., “is stick to the good ol’ on and off switch.”

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Russell Rowland Leaf-Peepers Tour busses passing rock our Corolla, sweet chariot, as it swings low along the road to glory. Pilgrims seek the place we live, where in autumn the Holy City comes down like a bride adorned for her husband.

If we squint, we can even see a parable in those swamp maples circling the wetlands with heatless fire, oaks aflame that don’t stop burning just because the day ends early.

It is as if someone found a treasure hidden in the hills, covered it up, then went and sold everything in order to own the hills.

Long coaches leave southward with photos that freeze a frame. We stay to watch the relinquishment and the sweeping-away, the stealing from tentative saplings that have little, that little that they have— see it through to November and beyond, as we see children grow up and take our love with them, parent and grandparent mistake us in the aging of their minds.

Grandpa would be stacking firewood now.

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Russell Rowland Leaving No Trace Wet on the trail. My boot-prints fill in quickly and fade—like all memory of my passing, from the preoccupations of red-eyed vireo, furtive fox.

Certain walkers of the world’s woods leave things behind they shouldn’t.

Others possibly something good— for the forest, for what live in trees and burrows, for visitors of my sort.

A waddling porcupine doesn’t need to know your brand of takeout coffee.

Neither do nestling and mother bird have to eat seed from the human hand to feel my love of singers, flutterers.

Love that would not intrude might have prolonged a song, left feathers unruffled—but didn’t insist on the tune, or call a fledgling down from where God sits in the sky.

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Kathryn Sadakierski localism A rose-colored flame of cloud Smolders in the orange rind of sky Behind the fire department, Next to the white church With its bell-shaped dome In the cupped palms Of the blue mountains, Hands open to prayer.

Up the hill beside the church, Ribbon-ropes of white fences, Meandering porches strung with lights at night, Curve around riding trails, stables, And a barn with a green shamrock painted on it.

The tree bent in half, in the woods surrounding, With its leaves touching the ground, Is like someone stretching, Trying to reach their toes, While the girl learning to climb a tree In her backyard Lifts her eyes above, Finding answers in the branches Where she places her feet and her hopes.

Streams and stone, Fields and farms, Cows and colonial homes, Horses, and all-seeing apple trees Yielding fruit for many moons Are in this town I know.

Sometimes where you’re from Is where you’ll go, And you find your way back Through the topography of tree roots That almost trip you, But also lead you home.

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Terry Sanville Alan Luckton The beautiful woman takes strident steps next to me. We approach the traffic signal. It turns red before we can cross. But she doesn’t stop and is nearly sideswiped by a U-Haul truck. She yells into an old-style flip phone pressed to her ear. Her shouts echo down the busy downtown corridor, “ALAN LUCKTON, ALAN LUCKTON. FUCK ALAN LUCKTON.” The woman flings the phone into the street and hustles across the intersection on the red. Horns blare and brakes squeal. A UPS van noses into the curb. Some of the pedestrians laugh.

When the light turns green, I follow her down the boulevard. Her hands and arms pantomime an angry air drama. She soon outdistances me.

A homeless man passes, pushing his life’s belongings in a rusted shopping cart at breakneck speed. He mutters, “Alan Luckton, Alan Luckton, Fuck Alan Luckton.”

Like an earworm, Alan Luckton won’t leave me. Who the hell is this idiot?

Why should I care? Maybe I should Google him? Watch the evening news for hints? Smoke some pot and let him fade from my mind? I try thinking about today’s work, about meeting Marjorie at home, the kids yelling their welcomes along with the eternal question: “What did you bring me?” But Alan Luckton prefaces all my thoughts.

It takes me a half hour to walk home from my downtown office job. As I pass the Marsh Street Bridge that crosses the river, I hear a strange low rumble over the traffic noise. It sounds like voices in church, sleepily reciting a prayer at a dawn service.

I step off the sidewalk and inch my way down the bank next to the bridge abutments, my leather shoes slipping in the wet grass. The river flows full but quiet, the late afternoon sun turning it golden chrome. Near the base of the bridge, I peer around the corner. The flickering sunlight off the water reflects onto the concrete ceiling, wavering, ghostly. A group of drifters, some with families, sit at water’s edge. They chant, “Alan Luckton, Alan Luckton, Fuck Alan Luckton,” like the response to a Catholic litany.

One of them sees me and waves me forward. But I flee up the bank and down the street, arriving home in time to see my wife pull into the driveway with the kids and that night’s takeout.

She climbs from our SUV and kisses me on the lips. My daughters giggle, my son makes a face. We move inside our split-level ranch.

“How was your day?” she asks.

I lay out the plates for dinner. “Like any other . . . boring, except for this thing that happened on the way home.”

“Boring? Really? No cake? No good luck card signed by everyone?”

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“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say and mean it.

Marjorie stares at me for a moment. “Did you stop at Sully’s on the way home for a couple shots? I know you like their barmaid. I can smell her on you every time you pop in for a quick one.” She grins and inhales a deep whiff.

“No . . . no. But there was this woman . . . “ “Ah ha, I knew it.”

“Relax, will ya. She was walking down Higuera Street yelling, “Alan Luckton, Alan Luckton, Fuck Alan Luckton.”

My kids laugh.

“Watch your language,” Marjorie scolds. “So who’s Alan Luckton? Should I know him?”

“Beats me. But his name’s stuck in my head and I can’t get it out.”

My wife moves in back of me and massages my shoulders. “Just relax, hon.

Later, after I put the kids down, I know a way to fix your problem.” She kisses me behind the ear, sending a shiver down my spine.

“Can’t wait,” I murmur.

In the morning, I wake fresh and enjoy every step of my walk to work. But when I arrive at the office it feels abandoned, as if I’ve mistakenly come in on the weekend. The phones stay quiet and there’s no activity in the cubicles. I hang my coat over the back of a chair and sit at my desk, turn on my computer, check emails, watch the latest YouTube cat videos, then open a file.

I lean back in my chair and study the screen. But instead of the monotonous sea of black words on white, the monitor stays dark with a red crawler slowly moving from right to left, “Alan Luckton, Alan Luckton, Fuck Alan Luckton.”

“Shit,” I mutter and close the file. Didn’t really want to edit that contract anyway.

Two men appear as eerie reflections in my screen. I turn to find my boss, Ethan, standing next to a man I’ve never seen before.

“I’m glad you came in today, Jim,” Ethan says. “I hope there’s no hard feelings.”

I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about. The stranger shuffles his feet, a smarmy little smile creasing his face.

Ethan clears his throat. “I thought that since this is your last day, you could show your replacement your working files, brief him on what needs to be completed.”

I rise slowly from my chair, the back of my neck numb. I stare at the replacement decked out in a narrow-lapelled suit and tie. “And who the fuck is this guy?”

Still smiling, the man sticks out his hand. “My name’s Alan Luckton.”

“ALAN LUCKTON, ALAN LUCKTON, FUCK ALAN LUCKTON,” I scream, grab my coat and escape.

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From the sea of cubicles, a low rumble of voices begins to chant, “Alan Luckton, Alan Luckton, Fuck Alan Luckton.” It grows louder as I make my way through the maze and push outside. The heavy door closes behind me, cutting off the clamor. My mind clears. The pain in my chest subsides. I stare in wonder at the beautiful city in the morning light, grateful for this well-deserved freedom.

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Natalie Schriefer Fog Foggy windows. One AM. Laughing as we ride the interstate at eighty, windows down, radio up.

If we parked we talked for hours: music, family, near-death experiences— the time I had pneumonia and the day you almost drowned—and though the memories have faded in spots, the terror never goes away.

When you start the car, windows foggy with the cloud of our breath, you turned on the defroster— and the heart you drew on the windshield melted away.

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Nancy Schumann Alice at Leicester Square I met her in this ice-cream place at Leicester Square. Well, where else would you expect to meet Alice if not in a Häagen Daaz café? I recognized her at once, or rather she met my expectations of Alice in Wonderland. Older than in the book, obviously, but apart from that—Alice. At first, I had no intention to talk to her. I just dwelled on the thought that I had met, that is seen, the real Alice and kept watching her.

Suddenly, she approached me. Holding a cigarette, she asked me for a lighter. Who would have guessed that Alice in Wonderland does actually smoke in a London café? I had a lighter. That is the reason why we came to talk. She offered me a cigarette but I don’t smoke. So Alice thought it funny that I carry around a lighter anyway. The answer is easy: When I was about 16 it happened several times that guys asked for a lighter and, not smoking myself, I never had one. So, as that seemed to be the usual chat-up-line at that time, I put one in every handbag and never took them out again. Naturally, I was never asked again till that very day.

Then I found myself sitting at a table with Alice. After a while, I just had to ask whether she was the Alice or not. She smiled and said she was Alice in Wonderland, obviously quite flattered I had recognized her. “Guess what? I have a course on Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass this term,” I said. “We’re just through discussing the first book.”

“I wouldn’t have thought that after such a long time people still read the book,” replied Alice. “Actually, come to think of it, I’d never have thought it would make it to university either. Now, what do you discuss about the book?”

So I told her our ideas on the language, space, time, and identity. She listened to me smiling. Alice said that the height transformation in the first story is really a reflection of the changing self-definition due to the rise of the empire in Victorianism, though she hadn’t used those words at the time. On the one hand, there was the island of Britain, which is not the biggest country ever. On the other hand, the empire was massive—one tried to understand that India was British; a part of the country. Nowadays, it is hard enough for non-Brits to comprehend why Northern Ireland is part of the UK when they listen to the news.

Then we spoke about the language part. She made me see that language is utterly confusing to a child but not half as complicated as it is to a student of linguistics. Actually, when I was little, questions such as why bread is called bread, not anything else, came to me quite naturally. Now I think that question silly, don’t try to answer it anymore and, if I have to do so in lectures, tend to find these extremely hard to follow. This all looks very different in the eyes of a child. Alice told me with great enthusiasm how she had raised the questions, 139

choosing words according to which sounded best in the context, and how Carroll had just written that down. Well, he added some more, as he could perfectly understand a child’s mind and combine it with grown-up humor. As she told me all this, I came to think that she seemed like a child. The way she said it showed that she still had the same attitude to language that I myself had had when I was seven.

So I began to think that maybe Alice hadn’t actually grown up, but only grown to adult height. She looked at me as if she could see my thoughts. She smiled with her eyes and it was like she agreed. An hour passed and we said goodbye, both heading off. I understood that the trick to understand seemingly complicated things sometimes lies in looking through the eyes of a child. Alice had not grown up and could, therefore, still see the magic of Wonderland. It didn’t take more than a white rabbit or a simple mirror to enter it. I saw her vanishing in the crowd and suddenly asked myself whether she was like a fairy, and one could only see her if one believed in her.

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Greg Schwartz Three Untitled Haiku #832 late summer crabs tumble from the upturned bag #750 low moon— a gull’s cry hangs in the night #322 truck stop diner everyone but the waitress just passing through

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Nolo Segundo The Time of Nostalgia We went to visit our old neighbor after they moved her to a nursing home, an old English lady of ninety-one, still with that accent of east-end London and the sweet pleasantness of the kind.

She was too old, too alone to live alone.

She would forget to turn off the gas range or how to turn on the thermostat or TV, She had trouble following a simple talk, but remembered the Blitz, 75 years past, as if the Nazi bastards were still at the door, and London was in turmoil: as though Hell had crashed through the gates of Heaven.

So her family moved her, leaving empty the house next door, empty of our friend of 30 some years, empty of her lilting English accent and her sharp sense of good old fashioned English humor … and it seemed like someone had died.

After a few weeks we went to visit her, my wife and I, taking some sweets and a small plant—oh yes, and our sadness too—though we made sure to leave it outside, unattended to for the moment.

We entered a very large and rambling sort of building, with pleasant lawns and locked doors and intercoms for some voice to decide if you can enter.

It was like sort of a prison, you think, but a very nice and very clean prison.

Our neighbor was in a special wing, called rather romantically, ‘Cedar Cove’ and as we entered through yet another set of stout doors, we greeted her and she smiled back, but very much as one might greet a total stranger …

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M.N. Shand Woodland Preserve: Homes in the High 800s I don’t know much about a lot of things. I don’t know about construction, or housing developments, or zoning regulations. I don’t know how much it costs to bulldoze a forest, to terraform the surface of the Earth, to consult with landscape architects to build terraced pedestals for eight hundred thousand dollar homes. I’ve seen it happen though, just around the corner from my apartment complex.

Someone, probably some rich old white guy named John Wieland (credited with inventing McMansionized suburbia in the southeast) must have gone to city hall or something with a big bag with a dollar sign on the outside, and in exchange got a piece of paper with some words on it that more or less gave him permission to do whatever he wanted with one of the last little shreds of wild-ish space around here.

I didn’t see that part happen. What I saw was the next part, the part where giant yellow destruction rigs roared around the woods, tearing stuff down, tearing stuff up, moving massive quantities of earth around. Who knows how many insects they displaced? How many different types? How many thousands, maybe millions, maybe more, scrabbling through raw dirt exposed to the baking sun in heaps that get slapped with tools to shape it suitably for human homes.

Well, that was probably the plan, anyway. They finished the development half a year ago, but not a single house has gone up.

Maybe it has to do with the very active railroad next door? Or maybe it has to do with how many other empty developments there are now, scattered around metro Atlanta? Maybe it’s an inflated housing market, another bubble waiting to pop? Maybe it’s stagnant wages or millennials who don’t want to live and work and die in the same spot over the next 40-50 years? Instead of eight hundred thousand dollar homes, there’s empty streets marked with spray paint glyphs I cannot decipher. There are poles and bundles of cable protruding from the ground, sewer covers that tell you the storm water drains into local waterways, so don’t dump here. There are lumps of dog poop, half-buried styrofoam cups, and single-use plastic water bottles left over from the mercenaries who wrecked this place. There are stop signs that don’t stop anyone, and street signs letting you know the name of the empty, untrafficked stretch of concrete you’re walking on.

I walk here a few times a week, towards the end of the day, when the heat is draining out of the world and the sun is collapsing behind a line of trees that haven’t yet been sundered. I come at dusk, hoping to catch sight of some of the refugees that linger around this place, wandering around the scars of what used to be their home. I catch a glimpse of white-tailed deer, scampering at the

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sight of me, and I can’t blame them. People that look like me did this, hairless upright apes just following orders for a paycheck. I can’t blame them either.

The front of the place is built up with fancy fake brick buildings that must house generators or something, because they’re too small for anything else.

Where did the stone come from that built these? How far did it have to travel, from where it was quarried, to where it was cut, to where it was sold, then laid down to form this ostentatious entryway to a woodland preserve that didn’t preserve shit? I don’t know the answer to that. I just walk past it all, looking at the pale white paving cement of the sidewalk, watching hunter spiders scurry away from my feet. I duck under a cable stretched across the road, meant to keep vehicles out of here I guess. Why? I don’t know. What more could humans do here that hasn’t already been done?

I pause at the stormwater collection retaining pond, where dragonflies laze across the surface of the stagnant green water. It’s surrounded in black chain link, otherwise I would go down to the water’s edge in search of frogs or other living things that might call this place home now. I keep going, deeper into the devastation, finding a puddle formed from the hammering rains of the past week. There’s a broken hand mirror at the bottom, but the water is teeming with tadpoles, tiny inky circles with squiggly little tails. There must be a hundred, maybe more. Do frogs know that puddles go away? Will these things survive? I don’t know. I feel like I’m looking through the window of a nursery, a hundred cribs with a hundred babies, knowing full well a bomb is about to hit the place in a couple of days, and all these babies are going to be dust. But these aren’t human babies, they’re just tadpoles. So I walk away, over to inspect a mega mailbox tucked into the corner of a rectangular patch of blacktop. One of the doors is open, a hornet’s nest hanging precariously from the inside. At least someone has moved in around here.

All around me, the grasses and plants are thriving, mini-meadows, islands of green separated by a baking black river. A flight of birds kicks up as I walk past, their sudden chirping and flapping wings almost exploding my heart.

Laughing and clutching my pounding ribs, I watch butterflies flit through the weeds on gossamer wings, as songbirds perched on needless lampposts sing lovely little tunes.

There are gaps in the wrought iron fence that line the perimeter of the preserve, through which you can see the rest of the forest this place once belonged to. There are paths into the dark wood beyond. Maybe someday the people that live here will walk those paths, glancing between and up into the trees for signs of life, life that they didn’t want to live among, else they wouldn’t have clear cut it away and put up fences to keep it all out.

I usually don’t see other humans when I walk here, but today is different.

There’s a guy walking his dog, and he says “Evening” as he strolls past. I want to say “A shame about this place, huh?” or something like “This reminds me of when I visited Hiroshima.” But instead I just wave and say “Hi.” When he’s 144

gone, I skip rocks off the road, listening to cicadas and birds and the rumble of the train as it goes by. One of the cul-de-sacs literally butts right up next to it.

If I had eight hundred thousand dollars, I would not build a McMansion next to a railroad. I wonder if John Wieland thought about that before he destroyed this place? I don’t know.

On my way out, I see cracks between the curb and the road, where ants march in imperial lines. Beneath me, there’s probably whole empires of the little guys, along with all sorts of other things that live in the dirt, or reside there temporarily in burrows and tunnels. I see a large, fragrant plant, with three different types of wasps or hornets crawling all over its leaves, gathering food or whatever it is wasps or hornets crawl on plants for. I want to know their species names, to know what this plant is called, but I don’t have my phone, so I can’t take a photo or look it up. I want to remember them. I want to remember what this place looks like now, how nature rebounded to begin to reclaim what was lost. I hope it gets a chance, that trees return, that their roots crack the concrete and rip through the pipes the humans buried here to push their shit around underground. I want to come back in the spring, to see wildflowers lining the terraced hills, to see bunnies and butterflies and bumblebees.

My fear is that the next time I come here, I will see wooden scaffolding sprouting from the ground. I will see white tyvek nailed up to the skeletons of homes. I will see pickup trucks full of empty soda bottles, hairless upright apes walking around with shiny plastic hats. My fear is that this little ecosystem, this little scab of life, is going to be picked off for profit. That this woodland preserve will finally get built. That humans will spend eight hundred thousand dollars to live next to a railroad.

Then I will have to find somewhere else to walk, some other little patch of wild-ish space to look for living things. Until then, I’ve got Woodland Preserve.

Thanks, John Wieland.

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Steve Sibra When I Found Your Body When I found your body it was dead. I mean it was a body life had left nobody had buried you beneath a cypress tree. Like anybody who had just found a body, I was torn—I mean I felt bad and all I mean I never really liked spending time with you, you were sometimes mean is what I mean. Not every body which everybody finds is going to be a friend, I mean dead bodies they come and go as we go through our lives it’s not as though we can pick and choose who we will find as friends, as lovers, as enemies most intense or sublime we get what we get. When I came upon your body I was shocked to find the first thing I thought about was to say Thank God this dead body is yours, not mine.

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Eli Slover Haze This is what I mean when I say haze.

We don’t talk much anymore, clouded in inky fear, swimming through evanescence, diving down to the black-and-blue abyss.

The velvet sediment floor churns with our arrival, our broken pieces sinking into the lurking depths.

Decades will likely pass before all the wreckage is found.

The cargo alone will cost a fortune; this is to say nothing of the furniture, equipment, mountains of coal, surplus food, the pounds of mail, the people.

It all finds its way to the bottom.

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Chris A. Smith The Last Afternoon When the last afternoon arrives, we walk out to the dock, the sky flat and white, the breeze barely troubling the water.

We settle onto the bench, sturdily rebuilt of treated wood after the last hurricane rolled through, and set about seeing what we can see.

One dock over there’s an osprey, straddling a pole like some minor potentate, wings spread wide, chest puffed out, stark black and white in the dazzling light, keening for who knows what.

He watches the bird and I wonder what he’s thinking, but there’s no point in asking.

Finally he says, That’s a noisy one, then lapses back into silence.

He’s in three-quarters profile, unshaven and sunspotted, lines around his mouth carved like dry riverbeds, inscrutable behind polarized lenses.

Then three sparrows spiral by, chittering, jabbering, they spin and dive and chase.

He turns to watch, mouth pursed, and I think he’s about to speak again, but no words come.

Instead we sit in silence, the world in suspension, and I think: remember this, because it will not come again.

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Chris A. Smith Singing Black Sabbath Songs with Strangers The room is humid like a cave, pungent with the smell of beer and crusty denim, our heads wreathed in low-hanging clouds of weed smoke.

The first chords toll, airless and doomy, ominous like an approaching storm, and we shiver in anticipation.

Yes, we all know this song.

The singer emerges from stage right in a three-piece suit and a pig mask— “War Pigs,” get it?— and we enjoy the joke, there are no haters here.

We shout along to every lyric, every “Oh lord, yeah,” our voices hoarse, foreheads sweat-sheened, reeling with the effort, shoulder to shoulder, a dervish mass of pumping fists and windmilling hair, The song rises to its finale, chiming, pentatonic, elegiac, and we understand that the world is fallen, always has been.

But here in front of the stage, we are together, we are one, in ecstatic communion.

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Susan Winters Smith The Other I told her I didn’t want to go to the beach, but Darcy insisted, so of course we got badly sunburned and I had to listen to her complain all night that she hurt more than I did.

“Well, silly, you know better, but it’s your own fault,” I said, “That’s what happens to blondes, especially when they wear teeny bikinis.”

“Well, you look like a pink grapefruit with a few white lines,” she answered.

“Well, maybe so, but I’m not in pain.”

“Go ahead, rub it in, Marcy,” she said. “You always do. You have to be selfrighteous.”

“I don’t know why I bother, because you never learn.”

I made her a healthy breakfast-a poached egg, dry rye toast, and a fruit cup, but she whined and slammed the table. “I wanted blueberry pancakes! I told you that last night, but you don’t care what I want, do you? You have to be controlling. I always win in the end, though,” she grinned.

“Honey, I knew you would want sausage and lots of butter, but I seriously care about your health.”

“Yeah, right, Marcy,” she snarled. “You only care about your own health, not mine, or my happiness.”

“Well, I eat whatever you eat, and if you’re happy and healthy, it’s easier for me to be, so shut up and eat.”

“Oh alright, but will you put some of that pure aloe lotion on my back and shoulders?”

“Indeed I will, after breakfast, Darcy. We can’t have our skin falling off or causing cancer.”

“Well, don’t hurry or anything,” she whined. “After all, I’m the one in pain, and could you please give me some aspirin?”

I laughed. I have no way to get through to her, and Lord knows I’ve tried. Her compulsions have caused us to gain weight, and take frequent trips to the doctor, and the dentist has a chair with our name on it. At least I can doze off in the chair, and she can’t.

“Are we going to the boardwalk today?” Darcy asked. “You promised.”

“Yeah, I know I did, but it’s out in the sun again. I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”

“Sun, schmun. We’ll get one of those strawberry soft serves that you love, Marcy dear. Remember that feeling of the cool creaminess sliding down your throat on a hot day, and the flavor of fresh strawberries. Ahh, that’s to die for.”

“Stop that, Darcy! Yes, it’s delicious, but we don’t want to die now, do we?

I’m not getting sweets today, I’m determined.”

“Well, we could die happy!” she laughed. “That reminds me. I think I need a haircut. How about we go to Lulu’s Doos? We can get two for the price of one,” she laughed.

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“No. We don’t need a haircut! I hate when you do that. It looks terrible.”

“Says you! I like the rough look,” said Darcy, laughing.

“Yeah, well rough this, Darcy,” I said, wondering why I ever let her in. Living alone had its perks.

“You know I’ll get you to go.”

“No. None of your tricks. You do that and it will be a long time before you go to the boardwalk again,” Later that evening I kept looking in the mirror at my horrible haircut and wished I were bald. My skin was a bit redder, and my belly felt bloated from ice cream and pizza. At least she didn’t get me to the casino.

“Marcy, my love,” called Darcy, “I’m going to order some Chinese takeout while we watch TV. Join me, SVU is coming on.”

I stormed off to the living room and yelled at Darcy.

“Did you change my programming? I set Grey’s Anatomy to record last night, and it’s not here.”

“It’s so boring!” Marcy said. “You’re killing me with boredom. I recorded Special Victim’s Unit instead. We need a little excitement, some blood and gore, not that hospital stuff where they save everybody. We need to get a little wilder around here. Tomorrow we’ll skip the boardwalk and go to the casino.”

“No, Darcy, not that again. We’re not going to the casino. I’ll take you to the boardwalk and we’ll get ice cream, but no casino. Last time you blew our rent money.” I found myself steaming.

“Well, Marcy dear, we’ll see who’s in charge tomorrow. I can find a way to get you to do anything I want.”

“We’ll see about that, Darcy. I’m going to bed. Don’t bother me all night!”

“Wait, aren’t you going to turn off the TV on me, like you always do?”

Darcy laughed.

“Turn it off yourself. I don’t care. I’m taking sleeping pills.” What a mistake to think this would work with her.

“No, no, don’t. No pills,” Darcy begged.

“If I hear your voice again tonight, there will be a few of those blue pills you hate.”

In the morning, Darcy was awake making blueberry pancakes in her cowgirl outfit to wear to the casino. She ordered me to sit, and then poured the coffee. I ate in silence while she babbled on.

“I figure we’ll go to the boardwalk first, and then the casino a bit later, after we get some spicy tacos for lunch, with chocolate milkshakes.” Darcy laughed, dancing around the kitchen, bouncing her cowgirl fringe.

“I’d rather just stay home,” I said, “I’ll make a great lunch and watch TV violence with you later.”

“Nope, too late, Marcy dear. We’re going to have a fun Darcy kind of day.

You better wear some bling.”

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“Fine, you win. Just let me finish my pancakes, but I can’t take much more of this wild frenzied life, Darcy!”

I put my head down on the table to think about what I wanted to do, then reached into my pocket for the blue pills and put them in the coffee.

Darcy screamed. “Nooooooooo! You bitch! What did you do to me?”

Darcy squirmed and thrashed, but she couldn’t win. Soon it was quiet. This is peace. I guess I’d rather just be single.

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Amy Soricelli Dance to the Music The Bronx is a radio from an open car window.

It fills your hair with bits of grass from that park where the kids used to leave beer cans and crack pipes.

Now it’s service dogs with little jackets.

They have human names and sleep with their paws under their chins.

It wasn’t always that.

Before I was in high school the Bronx was one flat shade of beige. It was watered-down lunch on paper plates.

It was broken textbook spines and nasty margin notes.

The Bronx was what you remembered when the dentist said open wide and only fear was left on your tongue.

That was mostly how it was.

Some summer nights the Bronx was a garbage-can fire and someone’s uncle calling ‘hey flaca’ from his broken stoop across the street.

Some summer days the Bronx was one long whistle from Hector when someone brought around a new bike.

But the Bronx will always be a random gunshot and Sly and the Family Stone from the front seat.

It will always be that.

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Amy Soricelli Submission Guidelines I had a dream about Indiana once.

I was wearing a straw hat and had one toe in a lake.

Someone from camp was born there, and she followed me into my sleep.

I never lived there though, but I sense what it might be like.

I am not from Puerto Rico, but my best friend from third grade had a grandmother who cooked rice in a pot that made me cry.

Her lace curtains came from her aunt, and had photographs woven into the seams.

I don’t speak Spanish, but I dream in bright colors.

I kissed a girl once in the back of the camp pick-up truck, but she liked it more than I did.

She sat next to me for a whole week at the end of the summer, and then told me she hated me on the bus ride home.

I never actually dated a girl, but I can imagine how that would be.

Sometimes there are just a few cans in the cupboard, and nothing anyone is interested in can be found in the icebox.

I struggle with the covers like a boxer, and often end up on the floor.

I never lived in a hut, in my car, down South by a train I was never lost, but if it helps, I can be lonelier than you.

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Matthew J. Spireng Cleaning Up The cast and crew are gone after three days of filming. I’m cleaning the porch where they shot several scenes. Kurt Russell walked there after being out in the plowed field last week.

Actors Beau Knapp and Luke Hemsworth walked there more recently. I’m wiping away a boot print on the floor. Kurt Russell wore work boots and maybe it is his. Maybe I should preserve it. Luke Hemsworth, who was there just two days ago wore work boots too.

Beau Knapp did not. I wonder if I’m destroying a boot print made by Russell or Hemsworth.

But the workers who took down the fake wall just yesterday stepped there more recently.

Art Department Leadman Alex McCarron and painter and cast member Noël Ramos both wore work boots as well, so maybe the boot print is one of theirs. Maybe I should save the boot print to remember them by. But now it’s done, cleaned away. Kurt Russell is gone. Luke Hemsworth is gone.

Alex McCarron is gone. Noël Ramos is gone.

The cast and crew of fifty are gone. Maybe it was my boot print, the last to step there.

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Geo. Staley We Are Here Standing beside the solitary Custer obelisk early one clear fall morning, I looked down the hillside random markers of 7th Cavalry dead and beyond to the endless rolling terrain.

My gaze melded with the lingering essence of the long dead and what they faced that June 25th afternoon too many mounted Indian warriors the roar of guns and horse hooves dust and smoke no help to be seen no escape.

Would it have eased their panicked minds to know they’d become, collectively, famous?

Did they wonder why they’d been sent?

Did even one of them consider he was dying for America’s sins?

That fall morning, how could I not understand if each only had this thought: I am going to die.

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Linda Strange The Longest Day Midway through the morning, a teacher appeared in the doorway of Gee’s fourth-grade classroom. She was white and had red hair that flowed in soft waves down her back. The teacher came into the room, nodded, and said something to Mrs. Pirelli, Gee’s teacher. Mrs. Pirelli pointed at Gee and the redhaired teacher nodded and turned in Gee’s direction, making her way through the crowded tables. Gee understood that she was about to be saved.

When the woman knelt in front of her, Gee couldn’t keep her eyes off her hair. Princess hair, like in the movies. But when she said Gee’s whole name, Germana Francisca Silva, Gee stopped staring at her hair and met her eyes.

They were kind, welcoming. This must be the English teacher, Mrs. Kennedy, the one Gee’s cousin, Nelida, had told her spoke a little Portuguese.

Mrs. Kennedy beckoned for Gee to rise and Gee did, knowing that she was finally going to leave the room she’d been trapped in all morning. She saw the look of relief on Mrs. Pirelli’s face. She felt everyone’s eyes on her as she walked beside Mrs. Kennedy toward the door. She was embarrassed but also grateful to be selected even if she had been selected because she couldn’t speak English.

Gee followed Mrs. Kennedy down the hall to a small classroom where she stopped to point to the door and then at herself and Gee understood that this was her room where the sounds of the new language would begin to make sense. There was a picture of a globe on the door with a poster of smiling children saying welcome in several languages. Gee could read the Spanish and Italian greetings. There were characters for Chinese and Japanese. There was no Portuguese or Kriolu.

Gee assumed they would go inside, but instead Mrs. Kennedy pushed open the door to the stairwell and motioned for Gee to follow. They descended to the basement and began to walk down a long hall. The air was cool and damp on the lower level and smelled strongly of mold. Exposed pipes stretched overhead. Very young children were singing in the classrooms.

She wants me to see the whole school.

Or maybe she just wants to give me a chance to get out of my chair.

All morning Gee had felt as if someone were sitting on her chest and wouldn’t get off no matter how much she pleaded.

Mrs. Kennedy’s voice eased this tightness. Unlike Mrs. Pirelli, she spoke quietly. She also pointed at things and repeated words several times.

“Floor,” Mrs. Kennedy tapped her foot playfully on the tiles and held her lips for a long time in the shape of the final “r.”

“Floor.” Gee tried to make this shape with her lips as well, but couldn’t.

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Mrs. Kennedy waved her hand as if to say Gee shouldn’t worry. Then she turned sideways and extended her arms like a bird about to take flight.

“Hallway,” she said, her fingers stretching toward the doors at each end of the hall.

Gee opened her arms as well, trying to feel some of Mrs. Kennedy’s joy.

She couldn’t feel the lift. She didn’t know why she thought coming to America would be easy.

“Hallway,” she muttered, knowing it wasn’t right.

Mrs. Kennedy dropped her arms to touch a scarred wooden door behind her.

“Porta,” she said in Portuguese. “Door.”

“Porta,” Gee repeated, happy to hear her language.

But then she felt herself suddenly start to shake.

Not because Mrs. Kennedy had spoken in Portuguese. That had been soothing. No, Gee was shaking because suddenly hearing a word she knew had made her realize all the ones she did not. When she had arrived in Connecticut a few weeks ago, hearing the unknown language all around her had felt pleasant, like at home when the sound of the waves crashing onto the Sâo Nicolau beaches was a constant and comforting wall of noise. That noise had also held within it the joy of anticipation, the magical moment when you would run down the sand and dive into the swirling surf. Gee, however, had been unprepared for what it would feel like when she did finally leap into the new language, when the shock of trying to separate one sound from another made her feel as if she were drowning.

Gee closed her eyes and imagined she could smell her mother, her unique scent of perfume, cooking oil, and sweat. Ever since Gee could remember, this smell had comforted her both when she was with her mother and when she wasn’t but today its power to console had vanished.

She covered her eyes with her hands. She was determined not to cry, but when Mrs. Kennedy reached out to pat Gee’s shoulder, this simple human touch, the last one since her cousin Nelida had guided her toward the school that morning, made any possibility of Gee composing herself impossible.

Crying isn’t going to make you speak English.

But not crying wasn’t going to make her speak English either. The tears were pouring down over Gee’s cheeks. She tried to take a deep breath and couldn’t.

Mrs. Kennedy pushed open the door they had just named, pulled Gee into a room not much bigger than a closet, and placed her in an empty chair. Then she grabbed a tissue box from the teacher’s desk, placed it in front of Gee, and lowered herself into the other chair.

Gee looked into the older woman’s face. Her eyes were clear and blue.

She’s going to tell me not to cry.

She’s going to tell me everything will be ok.

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But instead Mrs. Kennedy took Gee’s hand and said something about her cousin. Of course, Gee didn’t know what she had said, only that amongst all the unknown words, Nelida’s name was repeated several times.

She’s telling me that it was the same for Nelida when she came two years ago, Gee could hear herself snuffle. She’s telling me that Nelida suffered just as much as me.

Except that wasn’t possible. Nelida didn’t suffer. She took situations and twisted them to her desires.

“Pergunta a Nelida.”

“Ask Nelida.”

“But I can’t …” Gee started to protest. “Mas eu nâo posso …”

And then stopped and wondered why. Because she was afraid Nelida would laugh at her? Because she didn’t think Nelida would understand?

“Pergunta a Nelida,” Mrs. Kennedy repeated, smiling as if she knew how different the girls were, but believed that in this one thing they might find connection.

“I’ll ask her,” Gee promised. She raised her eyes to the clock above the door. Four more hours before the longest day of her life was done.

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Dale Stromberg Apple Smoke The last moments of my life were spent in my father’s arms as we waited for your drones to arrive. My small body was pressed against his chest, and my childish mind lay untroubled: his forearm propping up my backside, his other arm hugging my torso, and his palm cupping my forehead imparted that total serenity which few who are not children can know. My mother and baby brother were gone already, borne off by an open-sided transport too overladen to accept another child. “We’ll be on the next one,” my father had gently lied to her as they left us, speaking a language I never lived long enough to learn; what he meant was, “Save one if we can’t save both.” As the transport’s vernier thrusters had fired and it juddered into the air and drew off, my mother had wailed pitiably and frightened me. Now I was no longer frightened, with my cheek leaning against my father’s shoulder, his breath tickling my ear. He stood cradling me between two ventilation funnels on the roof of the coders’ dormitory since, as he said, death was death so we would die with our eyes on the open sky.

The clouds at sunset were the purple of sweet potatoes, with a smudge of apricot at the horizon. Light savory smoke coiled from below as the compound’s apple orchard burnt. In a moment the next missiles would hit. These triumphs of technological cleverness were really only blameless instruments, as were the AI-piloted drones your corporation sent to fire them. As for those of you who launched the drones, and those who transferred orders from one mouth to the next to bring this to pass, you had also, imagining it would render you likewise blameless, reduced yourselves to machine parts, an awful achievement in which humans take pride. In building something greater than yourselves, you confirmed your own insignificance. Soon the warheads, flashing into shockwave and flame, would fling us round and burn our flesh, but even this would end in an instant, too swiftly for me to feel fright before it was done.

All your cleverness and pomp, only to fashion a death we would barely note. If I could return as a vengeful ghost, it is a plain fact that I would suck your eyeballs from their sockets.

There on the roof, I nestled against my father in a childish stasis, a perfect neutral contentment that he was mine and I his. As for my father, who powerlessly awaited the dumb mechanisms coming to eradicate what he loved more than himself, he watched the majestic sky through sable eyes brimming with an emotion which I will not describe. You could never fathom it. The drones hunted everyone down, even the fleeing transports, and no one who knew us is alive—no one now living knows what our lives meant. You never asked our names when you could have, and our history is unrecorded in your documents or your videos. So you have no right to know what roiled in my father’s breast.

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You know what was in mine: I have told you already that I was calm, which means your searing hatred never reached me. But his heart at the end shall remain solely his own.

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Steve Straight Mowing “One man in ten thinks it’s a privilege to push his own lawn mower.” –Thornton Wilder, Our Town Marching behind a Briggs & Stratton-powered push mower, earmuffs muffling the roar and inducing a kind of tunnel, I notice today’s earworm, which could be anything in 4/4 time, is thankfully a Randy Newman hook that will follow me for the whole afternoon.

It is a long walk, some nine thousand five hundred steps, my Fitbit will tell me, in an order so prescribed after twenty-one years that I can hardly vary it, like writing the same short story line by line every five or six days.

As all who mow know, the half loops around trees, the hillsides, the aggressive vines and wild roses at the edge are the work, eventually yielding to the great back and forth, two hundred feet south, the two-wheel pivot, then north the same distance, shaving twenty-two inches of lawn each row, in either somnambulance or the kinhin of fine observation.

When the grass is tall after a week of rain or vacation I scour the forest below, worried for the toad leaping for the daylilies or the garter snake escaping down a chipmunk hole, all of this traced to the time I hurtled the mower on the first tall mow of spring, when the deck passed over a slight depression and revealed below me a wrack of rabbits, days old, safe only because I set the deck high.

All are welcome in our lawn, the purple veronica spikes I mow around for three weeks, the rolling spring carpet of violets and buttercups, even that enemy of many, the dandelion, sunflower of the turf. In fact, every time I hear the neighbors’ homogenized swaths of green lauded as “perfect” I wince, cannot imagine purging from either my lawn or my vocabulary clover and quackgrass, henbit and mallow, mugwort and dwarf cinquefoil, chickweed and snowdrops and spotted spurge, not to mention Johnny jump-up, Jack-in-the-pulpit, and even creeping Charlie.

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Steve Straight Telling the Bees Traditionally if there is a death in the family or some other sad event, bees in hives are informed by their keepers, in part to keep something worse from happening.

In my vented full-body suit with helmet and veil, gaiters covering my ankles, long goatskin gloves, I approach the hive.

Some say this should be done at midnight but I have come in early morning, a light dew on the grass and mist rising off the long river in the valley below.

I drape the hive with black crepe, then knock gently, once, to tell them I have come.

I listen to their electric buzz.

How to tell them how much trouble we are in, how close we are to ruin, how very much we need their help.

In a little rhyme, perhaps, as is tradition: The earth still spins, little bees, but we dread what lies ahead.

Save yourselves, and save us, please, before our global hive is dead.

Bees know the world is round, what zero is, how to dance the angle of the sun even when it’s on the other side of the world, how to make food that lasts for thousands of years.

I, on the other hand, don’t know anything.

Exhausted by the smoke of doubt and fear I long instead to be stung again by wonder, by joy.

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John Sweet a lifetime filled with clocks running backwards or my own lies which i cherish a lifetime taking small breaths of poison laughter both heartfelt and hollow and that we will die separated by years, by thousands of miles, and each of us alone and forgotten by the other that there are open windows in maria’s house through which the ghosts travel freely doors locked against obvious violence walls painted white, rugs thick with dust and how many months do you spend there waiting for a message from your father? how much silence does it take to fill an empty room? don’t answer that

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John Sweet caelum not a fear of death, not yet or at least not while awake but desperate times call for stronger drugs and all the burned girls standing laughing out in the rain all the reasons the heart has to betray the body the o.d. and the car crash a sleight of hand where everything you love is no longer anything that matters so grab a shovel dig a tunnel down to christ’s back yard watch cobain turn blue at the foot of the bed spent your whole life believing in magic but there is no magic here

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Vincent J. Tomeo An Untitled Poem My jaw is locked in anxiety.

My brain is throbbing as my nerves are grated into separate pieces of reality.

I called a friend to quell my anxieties.

She was on her cellphone in McDonald’s: screaming out her order, as her husband argues over French Fries or Onion Rings.

I told them I had Cancer.

A voice yelled two large Cokes.

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Doug Van Hooser Kettle Moraine Lake Dawn stretches over the plateau curling light through the oak, cherry, and hickory trees to the simmering ripples on the glacial formed lake.

The damp and dark take a deep breath and leave over the western ridge.

Yesterday has marched out the front door disgruntled with its accomplishments.

Today is eager but sits through the woodpecker’s announcements.

Squirrels leap tree to tree, branches reach out to them.

A hummingbird darts like one thought to another.

The joy of nectar beckons.

A red burst, a cardinal, whistles for its mate.

The breeze mixes with the sun’s heat.

A recipe for temptation.

Ask the wild turkeys lost in their chatter, sauntering across the road.

A blue jay skips from one tree to another, inspecting from a distance.

Lunaria, purple with bloom, act like they belong everywhere.

The silver dollar seeds, yet to come, to be spent in the fall.

A bullfrog insists on telling his story, hoping a special someone will listen.

Sunfish lollygag in the warm shallows, patient for a damselfly skimming the surface to touch down.

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Doug Van Hooser Hip Boots No need to repeat mistakes.

Their ghosts sit behind me, lay next to me in bed, hand me tissues.

The past unable to pass gnaws at my wires, causes sparks, flickering images, short-term outages.

A person, an event, something I said or should have said become loud colors, shout remember me.

Whispers I can’t elude or elucidate echo in my mind’s cavern.

Water rushes over the path of slick stones I trek.

Unable to decide which side of the river to fish from I stand in the river and shiver as the water rises over my knees, above my waist, surrounds my chest where the heart’s metronome thumps.

Today’s lyrics give way to the chorus I can’t escape.

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Reed Venrick Foggy Night off Marathon Key One Windward across the island tonight, a rare chill in this gusty Atlantic breeze.

I grab my parka and turn my little dinghy to the side to block the wind, then cast another line, but so far only catching the incoming tide under a night of slurry, foggy stars and lapping waves, nagging at me, slapping the side of my inflated rubber craft that I keep in sight of home.

I gaze beyond the mystery of oceans and hear my own words before they speak: “Watch your buoy, mate, you may lose faith in your compass with that fog bank drifting in from the mangrove thicket, east of Mullet Sound and best not forget those oyster beds that once sliced the port side during that 2017 hurricane.”

I nudge on round the dark, foggy island, I call it Bantam Key. What’s it matter what the tourist maps say? I’m the one out here most nights and sometimes days when I don’t need to dock for supplies. But now from the south, cumulus clouds moving in low from Cuba, and behind, a yellow moon waning, soon to dip into the Gulf of Mexico, as I suddenly hear a weird noise, then duck to avoid a pelican gliding too low, landing so close, I feel the spray of cold, salt water.

If the fog doesn’t mush up more, I’ll linger on past the 2 a.m. hour—maybe even 169

stay ‘til dawn cause there’s lots of time to catch tomorrow’s dinner. Meanwhile, sipping my Cuban “buchi” coffee, still warm in my thermos, made at sundown.

Two But mostly I’ll sit and contemplate these morning temperatures cooling down, listen to waves lap the side, ‘cause I find my perceptions are clearest on night waters—clarity I never had on land.

Some old salts in this harbor say that living on water, such as I do, proves nothing is real until we are caught in a hurricane or until we actively live our sailor dreams, and how different was it from those times when I tried to make marriage work on stable ground.

Now looking back across the red tides, I see the shore and dock was never more than a place to supply and stock up from grocery and marine stores.

But now living another season on this floating world of stars and moons, while keeping my lungs full of salty ocean air, I’ll continue my journey on in a few days, when I weigh anchor from here on Marathon Key and head across in a convoy for the winter months in the Bahama Isles. Such is the life I chose, though some from the old, family cloth cannot understand why I invested all that I ever earned to call a 30 foot sailboat my last home.

Yet I never desired nor needed a house on land to call my legal own, and on ocean nights like this, I’m reminded—never needed none.

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Kathleen Wedl A Full Moon and its Mischief cheetahs need the moon to illuminate their hunt lions too & night blooming cacti need its light to romance bats & tides time mating rites of grunions lunging to shore dung beetles orient to polarized moonlight & zooplankton’s biological clock sets to the light of the moon tonight when you find your way in the dark—as you circle my waist & hope silvers your eyes is it luna with her vast to do list aiming her torch our way

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Kathleen Wedl On Advice of the Wedding Planner They jump over brooms to the rhythm of drums.

Bound by red strings, they drink wine and honey from a two-handled cup—nine sips.

Church records are consulted, for to be conceived of the same mother is an abomination. In her pocket a sprinkle of salt, a chunk of bread. His brother showers their heads with anemone petals while friends gird them in a heart-shaped ring. With a phallus-shaped summer squash they whack a piñata, releasing doves—a sign of fertility.

She wears a crown of rosemary leaves, a white hood meant to hide a woman’s horns. A fat pig is drawn, quartered, roasted—another sign of something— incantations and execrations against evil. He circles her finger with a ring of iron. Ten witnesses sign.

For this day alone they are stars in a galaxy yet unborn.

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Sharon Whitehill Court Date in Three Acts Act 1 Unable to find either license or the certificate of her birth for her court date, Dawn is crying and I am fuming.

Let her face the consequences, I want to say, but it’s the teenager’s parent who pays in the end.

Act 2 Did you drink the beer? the juvenile officer asks.

Her denial forthright, firm: The driver gave it to me and told me to pour it out.

Does that still count as possession?

No trace of snippy teen in her query, Her voice trembles, tears brim, red blotches appear on her neck.

My anger dwindles, respect and tenderness rise.

Act 3 I watch her fill out new forms for a duplicate license, stare at her silly shoes, at the blouse untucked from her skirt, at the hair caught under her collar, and I’m engulfed by a love that feels almost like grief, as if I’ve breathed water.

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Sharon Whitehill Scientists Marvel at How Resourceful the Elephant’s Trunk When the African elephant floats the tortilla chip from the end of her trunk to her mouth, the scientists cheer: an item so fragile it crumbles in salsa and a beast who weighs more than a spinet piano.

A match designed to gauge an appendage that can seize chunks of fruit like a fist or fling predators over her shoulder, yet be worked like a soft-bristled brush to sweep seeds in a heap and suck them up like a child slurping noodles.

A singular limb: an expandable carrier for the transport of gallons of water, a flexible hose to deliver a drink, or a snorkel when rivers are deep.

A Swiss Army knife of a nose tipped with two dainty fingers she wields to probe or to pinch or to pick up a delicate chip: just inhale enough air to clamp it in place, and convey it unbroken into her mouth.

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Francine Witte Broken Sun The clouds drifting across. Light, then dark, then light. The rain in the clouds stuffed up like anger since you left. Wait, I wanted to tell you, you left but you forgot to take me. The wash of yellow on the sky canvas. Those are the good days.

Other days, the clouds scrunch the rain out, spongelike. A little at a time. In a line at the supermarket, or later, driving, my knucklehands squeezing the wheel, or later than that, in sleep, seconds before a dream.

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Francine Witte Rowboat, rowboat Look at the hole. The width of a straw but we didn’t see. Like a night-whispered name I chose not to hear. Me and you out there on the lake, Hot day, sun bake.

Sun above, the width of our thumb. It was her name you said in your sleep last night as you dreamed, as you slept, as love crept out the door that was open the width of a heart. And now, hours later we are out in this boat, all rock and clunk and we notice the hole, the lake inching in. You tell me the shore is near enough. The width of a swim. Water eating our shoes, and I climb on you, last time on you. In the water, we float to shore like a two-person stone. The boat and ghost of us sinking slowly behind.

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Francine Witte You took The sky itself, the sun, the stars, the moon. You took the speech from off my tongue. You took the smooth of satin when I touch it. You took the pull of trees in a windstorm. You took the candle burning inside me, the wax collecting and reburning. Nothing left but puddle now. You’d take that if you could. You took the hand of summer, featherstroke on my back as I lay in the sun, the waves a crush nearby. You took the brush of August into September, that moment of twist, one month to the next. You took that moment, that day, that month. You took. You took. You took.

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Diana Woodcock Indistinguishable I’m a tad bit like the Orange Tip— in day flight quite conspicuous. But come night, settled in on a flower head— wings folded—I blend in to my background, sound of jazz, become nearly indistinguishable.

No longer pressing myself into everything—stressing and obsessing—no longer devouring, I’m allowing life to be enough—simply breathing and being. I become light, weightless, and in the darkness mysteriously bright from the radiance and presence of something(one) immortal in the portal of silence.

Tranquillité d’esprit. I am free.

No longer in a whirlwind, I blend in.

Alone, I listen to the music of saxophone or trumpet, and realize there’s nowhere I’d rather be save perhaps in the company of a family of elephants, with its wise matriarch like an angel holding all the knowledge needed for survival.

In the darkness, blending in, I pray for those who sin against the elephants and earth, who kill and do irredeemable harm, and I search for words to trumpet the alarm.

Indistinguishable from the depth, I hold my breath and wait in the darkness, longing to hibernate through the oncoming winter.

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Diana Woodcock What Could Be More Sublime?

Forget attempting to accomplish great things today or even completing just one item on the list. Let’s just attempt to do nothing. No haste, no worry about the waste of time. Just be.

Hard can that be? Be silent and desire only to be aware of the faraway star igniting Earth with its fire.

For a brief spell, set aside annihilating grief, all getting and spending to see in Nature what is ours* Be still for a while and feel reconciled with Earth. Do nothing— not even prising chestnuts from their shells. Be with the bracts of bougainvillea, the bulbul and feral cats.

Though shadowed by death and conscious of mankind’s cruelty, sit quietly in the midst of what is boundless and unknown. Be at home there as in a cozy well-worn armchair. Put aside politics and history—all the misery— and be only with poetry and music, perhaps Gregorian chants. Observe the ants, the trees stirred by a breeze. Be both in the temporal and eternal—believe it is possible. Be as quiet as the dragonfly with her noiseless wings. Be invisible, motionless—the to-do list lost or tossed in the trash—as you take your time to just be. What could be more sublime and more needed in these chaotic times?

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*Wordsworth

Diana Woodcock Rejection, Rock Dove-Style He catches my eye as I walk by—he is doing his best to impress, flashing his iridescent neck, fluffing out his feathers till he appears twice his actual size.

I laugh as she turns her back on him, as if to say, In your dreams, buster!

Then I feel a stab of pity; he is, after all, quite pretty as pigeons go.

Further along the corniche, I get my chance to follow her lead.

He approaches from the east, I from the west. I do my best to avoid eye contact—his as blue as the sea and sky just now.

Using the oldest line in the book, he says he’s lost, a stranger here, could I tell him, please, if he’s heading to the Sheraton. I smile and point to the pyramid. Of course, he laughs, how could he miss it, its unique shape so obvious. Would I care to join him for a drink? Before I can think, I turn my back on him and say with a laugh, In your dreams, mister! as I lift off, following sister Rock dove’s* foxy lead. *ancestor of the domestic pigeon

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James K. Zimmerman Corona (November 2020 Redux) snug in jackets, burrowing hands in gloves, we pass a curved stone wall, finialcapped, two lions at a gate eroded manes and teeth perhaps the entrance to an English garden, you say but there are no lanes laden with lavender or rows of irises no patchwork quilt of roses rising from beds of moss poison ivy tendrils snake their way up the lions’ haunches barren sinews of wisteria drape the wall, veins on the back of an old man’s hands or the path to a portico, you say we imagine a mansion reigned here before condos invaded across the shaded lane it’s so quiet, you say no children play among maples no dogs plead for a walk no one sings from a window only droplets of a vireo’s song, the arid wheeze of a red-tail hawk, liquid arpeggios of a robin

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like a cemetery, you say cars at the condos in neat rows no one idling in them no one behind the wheel wondering when warmth will rise from hibernation

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James K. Zimmerman A Supplicant’s Prayer in the Anthropocene All-Powerful Gods of Cyberspace I hereby declare undying faith in you in this time of clouded vision.

I pray you, show me the Word: O ubiquitous Google, keep me logged in until my search beholds eternal truth!

O Android and iOS, lead me without reboots through the labyrinthine web!

O Alexa, hear me, I beseech you be my bff, my servant and my sage!

O App Store, bring me celestial delights, the tools of my salvation!

O Twitter, O Instagram, connect me to the OMGs and ROFLs of friendship!

O Zoom, O Skype, grant me room for vidchats to uplift my wretched soul!

O Amazon, sate my deepest cravings with every click and touch of screen!

O Activision, let me master blood and death with pixelated thumbs!

O Peloton, take my legs, my arms my heart to lower BMI, to immortality!

O mighty Waze, speak to me, GPS me to a place of sacred ground!

I boot up my faith in you, Omniscient All-Powerful Gods of Cyberspace— Track me, embed your cookies, sell to me!

O TikTok, let me hear you say: “Amen!”

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Contributors Tobi Alfier is well-published nationally and internationally. Credits include War, Literature and the Arts, The American Journal of Poetry, KGB Bar Lit Mag, Cholla Needles, Galway Review, The Ogham Stone, Permafrost, Gargoyle, Arkansas Review, and others. She is co-editor of San Pedro River Review (www.bluehorsepress.com).

Cate Asp has had work accepted into Penultimate Peanut Magazine. She has been writing her whole life, having taken creative writing courses since she was seventeen years old.

Now, at twnty-two, Cate is currently looking forward. After graduating with a Bachelor’s in Economics and a Master’s in Public Policy, she plans to switch courses and get her MFA in Creative Writing.

David Banks was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1943. He has been living abroad since 1975, for a short time in Iraq and since then in France, where he is now Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale. He lives in the village of Plougonvelin on the western coast of Britanny, not far from the most westerly point of the French mainland. He has been writing and publishing poetry since the early 1970s, and his first published poem appeared in the magazine Ludd’s Mill; his writing incorporates the influence of Basil Bunting, and of Old English poetry. His publications include Celt Seed: Selected Poems (Poetry Salzburg, 2003) and Radicals: Poems 2002-2008, (Poetry Monthly, 2009). His academic publication, The Development of Scientific English: Linguistic Features and Historical Context (Equinox), won the ESSE Language and Linguistics book award 2010. His other interests include choral singing and coastal rowing.

Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, Ohio. Recent/upcoming appearances in Eternal Haunted Summer, Pulsebeat, and Corvus Review, among others.

Dmitry Blizniuk is an author from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Poet Lore, The Pinch, Salamander, Willow Springs, Grub Street, Magma Poetry, and many others. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is also the author of The Red Fоrest (Fowlpox Press, 2018). He lives in Kharkov, Ukraine. Member of PEN America. Poets & Writers Directory: www.pw.org/directory/writers/dmitry_blizniuk.

Gaylord Brewer is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, where he founded and for 20-plus years edited the journal Poems & Plays. The most recent of his 16 books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and cookery are two collections of poems, The Feral Condition (Negative Capability, 2018) and Worship the Pig (Red Hen, 2020).

Katley Demetria Brown is the pen name for Carol Marrone, who was born in New York City. She grew up in a housing project in the South Bronx and has lived in a number of places including Minot, North Dakota, Kastellaun, Germany, and Springfield, Massachusetts. She enjoys writing about people, places, nature, and her large tabby cat, Munchie. She watches the “Gloom and Doom” reports every night at 6:30 and visits the chiropractor regularly.

Lorraine Caputo is a documentary poet, translator and travel writer. Her works appear in over 250 journals in Canada, the US, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa; and 18 collections of poetry, including On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl press,

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2019) and Escape to the Sea (Origami Poems Project, 2021). In 2011, the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada chose her verse as poem of the month. Caputo has done over 200 literary readings, from Alaska to the Patagonia. She travels through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth. Follow her travels at: www.facebook.com/lorrainecaputo.wanderer and latinamericawanderer.wordpress.com.

R.J. “Bob” Caron is a student at Asnuntuck Community College, taking primarily English/Writing classes. His hometown is Enfield, Connecticut, where he shares a condo with his wife, Kathy, two cats, and four parrots. Bob has always wanted to be an artist; however, he says he can’t draw to save his life. So he uses words to paint pictures.

Peter Neil Carroll is currently Poetry Moderator of Portside.org. His latest collections of poetry, Talking to Strangers (Turning Point Press) and This Land, These People: 50 States of the Nation, which has won the Prize Americana, will be published in 2022. Earlier titles include Something is Bound to Break and Fracking Dakota. He is also the author of a memoir, Keeping Time (Georgia).

Yuan Changming started to learn the English alphabet in Shanghai at age nineteen and published monographs on translation before leaving China. With a Canadian PhD in English, Yuan currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver. Credits include eleven Pushcart nominations besides appearances in the Best of Best Canadian Poetry & BestNewPoemsOnline, among 1,859 others across forty-seven countries. Recently, Yuan published his eleventh chapbook Limerence, and served on the jury for Canada’s 44th National Magazine Awards (poetry category).

Mona Lee Clark (St. George, Utah) lives in a desert of red rocks. She edits a nonprofit poetry journal.

Roy Conboy is a Latino/Irish/Indigenous writer and teacher whose poetic plays have been seen in the struggling black boxes on the edges of the mainstream theatre in Los Angeles, Santa Ana, San Francisco, San Antonio, Denver, and more; and whose musical plays for young people have toured extensively in California. His poetry has been seen in Green Hills Literary Lantern, Orphic Lute, and Third Estate Art’s Quaranzine. His poetic radio drama “Hue” can be heard online at Barewire Theatre Company. As an educator, he taught for thirty-five years, twenty-nine as the head of the San Francisco State University playwrighting program.

Mark Connelly’s fiction has appeared in Indiana Review, Milwaukee Magazine, Cream City Review, The Ledge, The Great American Literary Magazine, Home Planet News, Smoky Blue Arts and Literary Magazine, Change Seven, Light and Dark, 34th Parallel, and Digital Papercut. He received an Editor’s Choice Award in Carve Magazine’s Raymond Carver Short Story Contest in 2014; in 2015 he received Third Place in Red Savina Review’s Albert Camus Prize for Short Fiction. In 2005, Texas Review Press published his novella Fifteen Minutes, which received the Clay Reynolds Prize.

Joe Cottonwood has repaired hundreds of houses to support his writing habit in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. His latest book of poetry is Random Saints.

Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared in Lake Effect, Cleaver, Faultline, Small Orange, Meridian,

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and elsewhere. She received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, Earth’s Daughters, and Appalachian Journal, and her recent book publications include Music Composition for Dummies, The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body, and Bound in Ice. She teaches creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and Hugo House in Seattle.

RC deWinter’s poetry is widely anthologized, notably in New York City Haiku (NY Times,/2017), Now We Heal: An Anthology of Hope (Wellworth Publishing, 2020) in print: 2River, Event, Gargoyle Magazine, Genre Urban Arts, the minnesota review, Night Picnic Journal, Plainsongs, Prairie Schooner, Southword, The Ogham Stone, Twelve Mile Review, York Literary Review, among many others and appears in numerous online literary journals. She’s also a winner of the 2021 Connecticut Shakespeare Festival Sonnet Contest, with anthology publication forthcoming.

Timothy Dodd is from Mink Shoals, West Virginia, and is the author of Fissures, and Other Stories (Bottom Dog Press). His stories have appeared in Yemassee, Broad River Review, Glassworks Magazine, and Anthology of Appalachian Writers; his poetry in The Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, Roanoke Review, and elsewhere. His second collection of stories, Men in Midnight Bloom, is forthcoming (Cowboy Jamboree Press), as are Mortality Birds (with Steve Lambert, Southernmost Books) and his first collection of poetry, Modern Ancient (High Window Press). Find him at timothybdodd.wordpress.com (when it’s finally up and running).

William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at Emerson, Goddard, Boston University, and Keene State College. His most recent collection of poetry is Stirring the Soup (2020). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in many journals.

Thomas Elson’s writing has been published in numerous venues, including Ellipsis, Better Than Starbucks, Cabinet of Heed, Flash Frontier, Short Édition, Sandy River Review, Bull, Litro, Journal of Expressive Writing, Dead Mule School, Selkie, New Ulster, Lampeter, and Adelaide. He divides his time between Northern California and Western Kansas.

Georgia Englewood is a writer, cat enthusiast, anarchist, and TV watcher who lives in the Midwest with her cats and her boyfriend. She is working on several short pieces that may or may not ever see the light of day. You can find her on Instagram @georgiaenglewood.

Michael Estabrook has been publishing his poetry in the small press since the 1980s.

He has published more than twenty collections, a recent one being The Poet’s Curse, A Miscellany (The Poetry Box, 2019). He lives in Acton, Massachusetts.

Zdravka Evtimova is a literary translator from English, German, and French, and a fiction writer living in Bulgaria. Her short stories have been published in Bulgaria, the US, France, Germany, Italy, and Greece.

Olivia “Liv” Farrar writes in hopes that the unarticulated can take a vacation from her brain. She’s been published in several literary magazines, including Foothills

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Magazine. When she’s not writing or editing, she’s usually hammocking and fishing.

Check out her website at: livfwrites.journoportfolio.com.

Frank William Finney is an American poet who taught in Thailand from 1995 to 2020. Some of his work can be found in The Plentitudes, Slipstream, Stone Poetry Journal, and The Thieving Magpie. His chapbook The Folding of the Wings is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the California Sierra and served as inaugural Poet Laureate of El Dorado County. Her poems have appeared in the anthologies Villanelles (Everyman’s Library), California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University), and California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology. Her latest book is Windows of Time and Place: Poems of El Dorado County (Cold River Press, 2019).

RM Grant is a poet and English literature teacher living in Shanghai, China. He moved to China from South Africa, his place of birth, in 2018. His work has been published in A Shanghai Poetry Zine, Literary Shanghai’s Alluvium journal, and The Mignolo Arts Centre’s Pinky Thinker Press.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Penumbra, Poetry Salzburg Review and Hollins Critic. Latest books, Leaves On Pages and Memory Outside The Head are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Lana Turner and Held.

Sheryl Guterl writes from New Mexico and New Hampshire. Retiring to the Southwest after a career as an educator in New Jersey, she appreciates more sunshine, higher mountains, and less winter ice. Her cabin on a lake in wooded New England provides inspiration and refreshment with cooler summers.

Elisabeth Haggblade was born in 1942 in Munich, Germany. She immigrated to the United States in 1961. Her academic credentials are, BA in German, MA in Russian, Master’s in Linguistics from the California State University, Fresno; PhD in English Philology from the Free University Berlin. Retired from teaching part-time English and Linguistics at California State Universities and the Free University Berlin, she is currently living in Santa Barbara, California.

Jessica Handly is an educator, an avid reader and writer, and mother of a seven-yearold warrior princess.

T.R. Healy was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest and recent stories have appeared in October Hill and Piker Press.

Mary Hickey’s literary fiction has appeared in The Griffin, Happy, Kalliope, Dark Starr, Potato Soup Journal, and other publications. She talks a good game about eating healthy, but sneaks out to the Duncan Donut Express at the gas station at 6 a.m. for a large Midnight Blend and a jelly donut if she’s sure nobody’s looking.

Paul Holler is a writer of short stories, poems, articles and interviews with noted authors. His work has appeared in The Freshwater Literary Journal, Flash, The MacGuffin, Eclectica, Ekphrastic Review, Write City Magazine, Bookslut, Critique Magazine, Flash Fiction Podcast, and other journals.

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Ruth Holzer is the author of eight chapbooks, most recently, Living in Laconia (Gyroscope Press) and Among the Missing (Kelsay Books). Her poems have appeared previously in Freshwater Literary Journal as well as in Blue Unicorn, Faultline, Slant, Poet Lore, Connecticut River Review and Plainsongs, among others. She has received several Pushcart Prize nominations.

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Freshwater Literary Journal, Meridian, The Southern Review, Fence, Texas Review, and many others. He publishes the prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the journals Coastal Shelf and Sparked.

James Croal Jackson (he/him) is a Filipino-American poet who works in film production. He has two chapbooks, Our Past Leaves (Kelsay Books, 2021) and The Frayed Edge of Memory (Writing Knights Press, 2017). He edits The Mantle Poetry from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (jamescroaljackson.com).

Soon Jones is a poet and fiction writer from the rural countryside of the American South. Their work has been published or is forthcoming in Westerly, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Moon City Review, and Emerge: Lambda Literary Fellows Anthology. They can be found at soonjones.com.

John P. Kneal, pen name for John A. Willoughby, has had over eighty-five poems published in poetry journals, company newsletters, anthologies, and fee-free public web sites. In addition, his first book of poetry, Everyday Poems, was published in late 2017.

Samples of his work are also available at www.JohnPKneal.com.

Kelli Lage lives in the Midwest countryside. Lage is currently earning her degree in Secondary English Education and works as a substitute teacher. Awards: Special Award for First-time Entrant, Iowa Poetry Association, 2020. Website: www.KelliLage.com.

Richard LeDue (he/him) currently lives in Norway House, Manitoba with his wife and son. He is a Best of the Net nominee, and has been published in various places throughout 2021. His first chapbook was released in 2020, and a second chapbook in 2021. As well, his third chapbook, The Kind of Noise Worth Writing Down, is forthcoming in early 2022 from Kelsay Books.

Marcia McGreevy Lewis lives in Seattle and is a retired feature writer for a major Washington newspaper. She was the Director of Communications at an independent school where she founded the school’s magazine. Printed in Travel: GO World Travel, ROVA Magazine/ Literary Magazines: F3LL Literary, Life in Lit/ Magazines: Third Act, Preservation Foundation (2 pieces). Books: Blink-It, Wingless Dreamer. Reach her on Facebook, Instagram: marcialewis25, Twitter: @McGreevyLewis and linkedin: Marcia Lewis.

Christopher Locke is the author of twelve books and chapbooks. His new collection of poetry Music for Ghosts (New York Quarterly Books) and memoir Without Saints (Black Lawrence Press) are both due in 2022. He teaches creative writing at North Country Community College and SUNY Plattsburgh, both in the Adirondacks. He can be reached at chrisplocke@hotmail.com.

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Lorraine Loiselle began her writing career after retiring from teaching. Her publication credits include several dozen poems, twelve fiction pieces, two memoirs, and two children’s stories.

Katharyn Howd Machan’s most recent publications are A Slow Bottle of Wine (The Comstock Writers, Inc., 2020) and What the Piper Promised (Alexandria Quarterly Press, 2018), both winners in national chapbook competitions. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature and Sound and Sense. A professor in the Writing Department at Ithaca College in central New York State, she served as Tompkins County’s first poet laureate.

Beverly Magid has been a journalist, publicist, and novelist, having written Flying Out of Brooklyn, Sown in Tears, and Where Do I Go. Her poems have been published in the On the Bus Journal and the newly published Side-Eye on the Apocalypse an anthology of poems and prose from the Los Angeles Poets and Writers Collective. She has been a longtime resident of Los Angeles, but her heart still commutes between LA and New York.

DS Maolalai has been nominated nine times for Best of the Net and five times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019).

Fabiana Elisa Martínez was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she graduated from the UCA University with a degree of Linguistics and World Literature. She is a linguist, a language teacher, and a writer. She speaks English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian. She has lived in Dallas, Texas, for almost twenty years. She is the author of the short story collection 12 Random Words, her first work of fiction, the short story Stupidity, published as an independent book by Pierre Turcotte Editor, and the grammar book Spanish 360 with Fabiana. Other short stories of hers have been published or are forthcoming in Rigorous Magazine, The Closed Eye Open, Ponder Review, Hindsight Magazine, The Good Life Review (UK), The Halcyone, Rhodora Magazine (India), Mediterranean Poetry, Writers and Readers Magazine (UK), Libretto Magazine (Nigeria), Automatic Pilot (Ireland), Lusitania (Buenos Aires), Heartland Society of Women Writers, and the anthologies Writers of Tomorrow and the 2022 Wordrunner Anthology. She is currently working on her first novel.

John Maurer is a 26-year-old writer from Pittsburgh who writes fiction, poetry, and everything in between, but his work always strives to portray that what is true is beautiful. He has been previously published in Claudius Speaks, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Thought Catalog, and more than sixty others. @JohnPMaurer (johnpmaurer.com) .

Derek McMillan lives in Durrington, UK, with his wife, Angela, who is also his editor.

He writes for publications in the UK, USA, and Canada, His latest book is the audiobook, Brevity, which is available on eBay. He also runs Worthing Flash, a blog for short stories.

Joan McNerney’s poetry is found in many literary magazines such as Seven Circle Press, Dinner with the Muse, Poet Warriors, Blueline, and Halcyon Days. Four Bright Hills Press Anthologies, several Poppy Road Journals, and numerous Poets’ Espresso Reviews have accepted her work. She has four Best of the Net nominations. Her latest titles are The Muse in Miniature and Love Poems for Michael both available on Amazon.com and Cyberwit.net/

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Karla Linn Merrifield, a nine-time Pushcart-Prize nominee and National Park Artistin-Residence, has had 1000+ poems appear in dozens of journals and anthologies. She has 15 books to her credit. Following her 2018 Psyche’s Scroll (Poetry Box Select) is the 2019 full-length book Athabaskan Fractal: Poems of the Far North, from Cirque Press. Her newest poetry collection is My Body the Guitar, inspired by famous guitarists and their guitars, and published in January 2022 by Before Your Quiet Eyes Publications Holograph Series. Her Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing) received the Eiseman Award for Poetry. She is a frequent contributor to The Songs of Eretz Poetry Review, and assistant editor and poetry book reviewer emerita for The Centrifugal Eye. Web site: www.karlalinnmerrifield.org/; blog at karlalinnmerrifeld.wordpress.com; Tweet @LinnMerrifiel; Instagram: karlalinnm; Facebook: karlalinn.merrifield.

Heidi Miranda is a Mexican poet and literature student. Her poems appear in numerous online and in print journals. She can be found on Twitter (@blueberrypoet) and Instagram (@weepingblueberry) sharing original photography and quotes from her favorite poets. In her free time, she enjoys learning languages, taking landscape photos, reading prose and poetry, and collecting stationary.

Debasish Mishra, a native of Bhawanipatna, Odisha, India, is the recipient of The Bharat Award for Literature in 2019 and The Reuel International Best Upcoming Poet Prize in 2017. His recent poems have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Penumbra, trampset, Star*Line, Enchanted Conversation, Spaceports & Spidersilk, and elsewhere. His work is also forthcoming in Amsterdam Quarterly, The Headlight Review, Space & Time, Bez & Co, parABnormal, Penumbric Speculative Magazine, Writer’s Resist, Liquid Imagination, and Quadrant. A former banker with United Bank of India, he is presently engaged as a Senior Research Fellow at National Institute of Science Education and Research, HBNI, Bhubaneswar, India.

Rosemary Dunn Moeller writes to connect to others, reflect on experiences and hold onto meaningful moments. Her poems have been published in Scurfpea, SD Magazine, Cape Cod Times, Freshwater Literary Journal, The Alembic, The Penman, Aurorean, and many other anthologies. She divides her time between the farm on the prairie and the house on the ocean, both flat rolling expanses with the occasional sail mast or tree, and glorious night skies.

Cecil Morris retired after thirty-seven years of teaching high school English, and now he tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and enjoy. He likes ice cream too much and cruciferous vegetables too little. He has had a handful of poems published in 2River View, Cobalt Review, English Journal, The Ekphrastic Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poem, and other literary magazines.

A life-long resident of Connecticut, John Muro is a graduate of Trinity College, Wesleyan University, and the University of Connecticut. His professional career has been dedicated to environmental stewardship and conservation. In the Lilac Hour, his first volume of poems, was published last fall by Antrim House, and it is available on Amazon. John’s poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Freshwater Literary Journal, River Heron, Moria, Sheepshead, Third Wednesday, Ekphrastic, and The French Literary Review.

Zach Murphy is a Hawaii-born writer with a background in cinema. His stories appear in Reed Magazine, The Coachella Review, Maudlin House, B O D Y, Ruminate, Wilderness House

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Literary Review, Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine, and more. His debut chapbook Tiny Universes (Selcouth Station Press, 2021) is available in paperback and ebook. He lives with his wonderful wife Kelly in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Ben Nardolilli currently lives in New York City. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Red Fez, Danse Macabre, The 22 Magazine, Quail Bell Magazine, Elimae, The Northampton Review, Local Train Magazine, The Minetta Review, and Yes Poetry. He blogs at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com and is trying to publish his novels.

James B. Nicola’s poetry has garnered two Willow Review awards, a Dana Literary award, eight Pushcart nominations, and one Best of the Net nom. His full-length collections include Manhattan Plaza (2014), Stage to Page: Poems from the Theater (2016), Wind in the Cave (2017), Out of Nothing: Poems of Art and Artists (2018), Quickening: Poems from Before and Beyond (2019), and Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense (2021). A Yale grad and returning contributor, he also has enjoyed a career as a stage director, culminating in the nonfiction book Playing the Audience: The Practical Guide to Live Performance, which won a Choice award.

Thomas Winfield Marie Nuhfer (he/him and she/her) is a biologist and poet. After growing up in Tucker, Georgia, Thomas moved to Vermont where he received a BA in Biology & History from Marlboro College. Her work has been previously published

by Tiny Seed Literary Magazine and is forthcoming in GenControlZ Magazine and River Heron Review.

Jay Nunnery is a writer, teacher, and musician, who calls many places home: Wisconsin, New York, Louisiana, and California. Recently, he completed a collection of interrelated stories, Alms, Louisiana. Currently, he is working on a screenplay called The Circuses when he is not teaching high schoolers or making music.

Robert K. Omura calls Calgary, Alberta, Canada home where he lives with his common law wife and three too many cats. He has resigned himself to finding cat fur in everything he eats. His fiction and poetry appears or is forthcoming in journals in the U.S., Canada, and abroad including the New York Quarterly, 34thParallel, barnstorm, Copperfield Review, Brink, and Blues Skies Poetry. He has been nominated for the Pushcarts.

Fred Pelka’s non-fiction has appeared in the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, the Humanist, Poets and Writers, and elsewhere. He is the author of three books of history: The ABC-CLIO Guide to the Disability Rights Movement (ABC-CLIO, 1997); The Civil War Letters of Charles F. Johnson, Invalid Corps (University of Massachusetts Press, 2004); What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012) and one book of poetry: A Different Blaze (Hedgerow Books, 2014).

His poetry has recently appeared in Triggerfish Critical Review and the Straw Dog Writers Project on COVID. Pelka was a 2004 Guggenheim Fellow.

Brenden Pontz is a college student from Connecticut and former attendee of Asnuntuck Community College. He’s a history major, ultramarathon runner, and aspiring novelist who has been published before in Fleas on the Dog magazine. Brenden is a lifelong fan of superhero stories, science fiction, and all things weird.

Marjorie Power’s newest poetry collection is Sufficient Emptiness, Deerbrook Editions, 2021. A chapbook, Refuses to Suffocate, appeared in 2019 from Blue Lyra Press. Publications which have taken her work recently include Southern Poetry Review, Barrow Street,

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Commonweal, and Main Street Rag. She lives in Rochester, New York, after many years in various western states and can be found at www.marjoriepowerpoet.com.

Ken Poyner’s four collections of brief fictions and four collections of poetry can be found at Amazon and most online booksellers. He spent thirty-three years in information system management, is married to a world record holding female power lifter, and has a family of several cats and betta fish. Individual works have appeared in Café Irreal, Analog, Danse Macabre, The Cincinnati Review, and several hundred other places. www.kpoyner.com.

Jean Rover’s short fiction has received awards or recognition from Writer’s Digest, Short Story America, Willamette Writers, and Oregon Writers Colony. Her work has appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies, including The Saturday Evening Post’s Great American Fiction Contest Anthology. Other stories were performed at Liars’ League events in London, England, and Portland, Oregon. She had also authored a chapbook, Beneath the Boughs Unseen, featuring holiday stories about society’s invisible people, and her novel manuscript, Ready or Not, was a semi-finalist in Chanticleer’s Mystery and Mayhem International Book Awards contest. She lives and writes in Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley.

Seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions. His work appears in Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall (Encircle Publications), and Covid Spring, Vol. 2 (Hobblebush Books). His latest poetry book, Wooden Nutmegs, is available from Encircle Publications.

Kathryn Sadakierski is a 22-year-old writer whose work has been published in anthologies, magazines, and literary journals around the world, including Critical Read, Halfway Down the Stairs, Literature Today, NewPages Blog, Northern New England Review, seashores: an international journal to share the spirit of haiku, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing, Yellow Arrow Journal, and elsewhere. Her micro-chapbook, Travels through New York was published by Origami Poems Project (2020). She graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. and M.S. from Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts.

Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his artist-poet wife (his inhouse editor) and two plump cats (his in-house critics). He writes full time, producing short stories, essays, and novels. His short stories have been accepted more than 450 times by journals, magazines, and anthologies including The Potomac Review, The Bryant Literary Review, and Shenandoah. He was nominated twice for Pushcart Prizes and once for inclusion in Best of the Net anthology. Terry is a retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist who once played with a symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George Shearing.

Natalie Schriefer often writes about shame, sexuality, and coming of age. She received her MFA from Southern Connecticut State University and works as a freelance writer and editor. Say hi on Twitter @schriefern1!

Nancy Schumann is a German writer, based in London, UK. She writes poetry, short stories and novels in English and German. Her works have been published in both languages. Nancy holds a master’s degree in English Literature. Her MA thesis on female vampires through the ages formed the basis to Take A Bite, which traces female

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vampire characters in folklore and literature from Lilith to Bella Swan. Various poems have been published in books and magazines, such as the Frankfurter Bibliothek des zeitgenössischen Gedichts, annual German poetry collection from 2000 to present, or Gothic II and III. Short stories include The Hostel published by Hic Dragones in the Impossible Spaces anthology. Visit Nancy on the web at www.bookswithbite.in or on Twitter @TweetsWithBite.

Greg Schwartz has held many jobs, from copier repairman to title insurance agent and much in between. Some of his poems have appeared in New York Quarterly, Modern Haiku, and Birmingham Arts Journal. In a pre-fatherhood life, he was the staff cartoonist for SP Quill Magazine and a book/magazine reviewer for Whispers of Wickedness.

Nolo Segundo, pen name of L.J. Carber, 74, has in his eighth decade become a published poet with poems and essays in forty-five online/in print literary journals in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Romania, and India; in 2020 a trade publisher released a booklength collection of poems titled The Enormity Of Existence and in 2021 a second book, Of Ether And Earth. His themes are the not so brave new world of aging, the inscrutable emotion called love, and the sense he’s had for fifty years since having a near-death experience whilst almost drowning in a Vermont river that there is a reality both permeating and “beyond” the reality our limited minds comprehend, and we are all actually sharing a long dream with thousands awakening every day as thousands more fall asleep.

M.N. Shand is a writer, jiu-jitsu competitor, urban farmer, drummer, anarchist, and hobby ecologist living in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife. He is currently working on a debut fantasy novel. You can find him on Facebook: facebook.com/m.n.shand.writer.

Steve Sibra grew up on a small wheat farm in eastern Montana. He has spent most of his adult years in the Pacific Northwest where he has worked as a writer, an editor, and a historian. His poetry and prose have been widely published in the small literary press with recent and forthcoming work from Dead Fern Press, Flint Hills Review, Chiron Review, LILIPOH, Big Sandy Mountaineer, and elsewhere. A book of poetry is forthcoming from Swallow Publishing in 2022.

Eli Slover is a poet and student at Missouri State University. His work has appeared in Black Fox, The Albion Review, Page & Spine, Go Anywhere, and elsewhere. He serves as an assistant poetry editor for Moon City Review.

Chris A. Smith is a writer in San Francisco. Though trained as a journalist—he’s reported on everything from African acid rock to killer asteroids to revolutionary movements—he also writes fiction and poetry. Find him at chrisasmith.net.

Susan Winters Smith was born near Boston, grew up in Vermont and has lived in Connecticut with her husband Stephen for most of her adult life. She has a B.S. in Psychology and an M.A. in education. She has written all her life and has had many published articles in workplace newsletters, newspapers, and genealogy journals, and has had several poems published. She has self-published eight books and continues to write every day. Her website is www.wintersmithbooks.com.

Amy Soricelli has been published in numerous publications and anthologies including Remington Review, Corvus Review, The Westchester Review, Deadbeats, Long Island Quarterly, Voice of Eve, Yellow Arrow, Literati Magazine, The Muddy River Poetry Review, Pure Slush,

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Glimpse Poetry Magazine. Her books include Carmen has No Umbrella but Went for Cigarettes Anyway (chapbook, Dancing Girl Press) Sail Me Away (chapbook, Dancing Girl Press, 2019). Nominated by Billy Collins for Aspen Words Emerging Writer’s Fellowship 2019 and for Sundress Publications “Best of the Net” 2020, 2013. Recipient of the Grace C. Croff Poetry Award, Herbert H. Lehman College, 1975.

Matthew J. Spireng’s 2019 Sinclair Prize-winning book Good Work was published in 2020 by Evening Street Press. An eleven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he is the author of two other full-length poetry books, What Focus Is and Out of Body, winner of the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award, and five chapbooks.

Geo. Staley is retired from teaching writing and literature at Portland Community College. His poetry has appeared in Literary Accents, Evening Street Review, Cafe Review, Trajectory, Naugatuck River Review, Blue Collar Review, Paddock Review, and others. He has a short story in a recent issue of Plainsongs.

Linda Strange is a writer and teacher of English as a Second Language in an innercity public school in Waterbury, Connecticut. She lives in Southbury, Connecticut, with her husband and a silver Himalayan called Quince.

Dale Stromberg grew up not far from Sacramento before moving to Tokyo, where he had a brief music career. Now he lives near Kuala Lumpur and makes ends meet as an editor and translator. His work has been published here and there.

Steve Straight’s books include Affirmation (Grayson Books, 2022), The Almanac (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2012) The Water Carrier (Curbstone, 2002). He was professor of English and director of the poetry program at Manchester Community College, in Connecticut.

John Sweet sends greetings from the rural wastelands of upstate New York. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in the continuous search for an unattainable and constantly evolving absolute truth. His latest poetry collections include A Flag On Fire is a Song of Hope (2019 Scars Publications) and A Dead Man, Either Way (2020 Kung Fu Treachery Press).

Vincent J. Tomeo is a poet who was nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, archivist, historian, and community activist. Vincent is published in the New York Times, Evening Street Review, Comstock Review, Mid-America Poetry Review, Edgz, Spires, Tiger’s Eye, By Line, Mudfish, The Blind Man’s Rainbow, The Neo Victorian/Cochlea, The Latin Staff Review, and Grandmother Earth (VII through XI), etc. To date, Vincent has 991 published poems/essays; winner of 106 awards; 141 public readings. Author of My Cemetery Friends: A Garden of Encounters at Mount Saint Mary in Queens, New York.

Doug Van Hooser’s poetry has appeared in Roanoke Review, The Courtship of Winds, After Hours, Wild Roof Journal, and Poetry Quarterly, among other publications. His fiction can be found in Red Earth Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Bending Genres Journal.

Doug’s plays have received readings at Chicago Dramatist Theatre and Three Cat Productions. More at dougvanhooser.com.

Reed Venrick lives in Florida and usually writes poems with nature or nautical themes.

Kathleen Wedl has enjoyed a career in health care and increasingly, sees poetry as a vital channel to shared vision and understanding. Look for her work in recent editions

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of *82 Review, High Shelf Press, and South 85 Journal. She is a first-place winner in the League of Minnesota Annual Poetry Contest and was selected for the 2021 year-long poetry mentorship at the Loft Literary Center. When not reading, writing, and enjoying nature, you may find her studying the pairings of good food and music, especially in the company of family and friends.

Sharon Whitehill is a retired English professor from West Michigan now living in Port Charlotte, Florida. In addition to poems published in various literary magazines, her publications include two biographies, two memoirs, two poetry chapbooks, and a full collection of poems.

Francine Witte’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, MidAmerican Review, and Passages North. Her latest books are Dressed All Wrong for This (Blue Light Press,) The Way of the Wind (AdHoc fiction,) and The Theory of Flesh (Kelsay Books.) Her chapbook, The Cake, The Smoke, The Moon (flash fiction) was published by ELJ in Fall 2021. She is flash fiction editor for Flash Boulevard and The South Florida Poetry Journal.

She lives in New York City.

Diana Woodcock is the author of seven chapbooks and four poetry collections, most recently Facing Aridity (a finalist for the 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature). Forthcoming in 2023 is Holy Sparks (a finalist for the 2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award).

Recipient of the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders, her work appears in Best New Poets 2008 and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Currently teaching at VCUarts Qatar, she holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where her research was an inquiry into the role of poetry in the search for an environmental ethic.

James K. Zimmerman’s writing appears in Carolina Quarterly, Chautauqua, Nimrod, Pleiades, Rattle, Salamander, and Vallum, among others. He is author of Little Miracles (Passager, 2015) and Family Cookout (Comstock, 2016), winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Prize.

Asnuntuck Community College does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religious creed, age, sex, national origin, marital status, ancestry, past or present history of mental disorder, learning disability or physical disability, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, or genetic information in its programs and activities. In addition, Asnuntuck Community College does not discriminate in employment on the basis of veteran status or criminal record. The following individuals have been designated to handle inquiries regarding non-discrimination policies: Timothy St. James, 504/ADA Coordinator, tstjames@asnuntuck.edu, (860)-253-3011, Dawn Bryden, Title IX Deputy, dbryden@asnuntuck.edu, 860-253-1273, Asnuntuck Community College, 170 Elm Street, Enfield, CT 06082.

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