​You Know What’s Next
 
The sink fills with half-rinsed plates. Any spoken word is rationed like oxygen in a diver’s tank. Silence hovers, fat with unsaid. When the kettle whistles, no one moves. When glass breaks, no one flinches. When the dog whines at the door—that’s the only honest sound in the house. The regulated air between has hardened into amber. No we, no I, no you, as the bed grows wider—just a suitcase under, ready like a parachute. The refrigerator moans secrets. No one will say it. The mirror develops static. Not yet. Every doorknob is an oracle.
 
**

Heartbeat of Steel
 
The girls knot lightly together, laughter slicing through air, skirts hiked high like flags of defiance. Smoke curls from their lips, grey ribbons unraveling toward the West Virginia evening sky. One girl, with dark feathered hair, eyes set hard like cobblestone, leans against the dim street light. Dried black smudges under her lashes contrast her pallid cheeks. She flicks her cig, the filter end rimmed with Bliss You Berry. Without a glance you see her walk past 7-Eleven, past the red convertible stacked with whistling, booming boys. Pink scrunchie on her wrist, she shifts her hips, savouring the snug fit of her favourite jeans, months in the making. The other girls pull at their tiny crop tops, sheer without imagination. She doesn’t need to look—her steps say more than her story, the rhythm of her boot heels ask no permission. Stronger than the steel they shape at the factories, harder than the radiant black pavement, she cradles dreams. You could follow but no one could dance to the music crying in her head. Here, girls live small, take what they can, stuck in summer sweat, fight for that back seat between two boys. But this girl—takes more than they ever will. She moves through the smoke and heat, shard-sharp, ignoring their stares and hooting, as they pull away. Always weighed down, she stands near where the road spits fire.
 
**
 
Stitched in Solitude
 
I reach around to peel layers of hot sewn patchwork morphing. Husk tailored to each acquaintance unique, seemingly unending, blistering bubbling fabric drapes over stuck skin. Kaleidoscope threads clamor. Collar and yoke ornate with buttons of bone weigh down to paralyze muscles stretched. Thin sheath varnished chokes connecting and expanding, pulls out lingering gasps from the lungs. Sigh capes ceaseless lament. Vast inner pockets brush steel wool to satin flesh. Scars and scabs designed to be hidden and quiet become shifty and daring blow away then return in night through inflexible cobalt seams. Cloaked, frayed hemmed edges surrender. Torment sirens my solitary robe to bolt and release stoking this hateful pattern. Ashamed to reveal smoky familiar membranes, encased years unfurl as it envelops, fitting into cavernous holes. Grief pushes me small. 
 
**
 
This was first published at Unleash Lit.
 
**
 
Here, Me Out
 
I wander among the corridors of belonging, the walls of which are both fortress and prison. Figures murmuring grey, brown and terracotta cluster behind locked doors. Echoes converse with me. Corpulent fog tumbles over lake water painting my day in the artistry of exclusion. There could be cold poetry in being unseen. Or beauty. Slivered spaces between the spoken and silent. Blow wildflower seeds. Respite in that small crack of forgotten wall winding to the damp shoreline. Milky morning tease shadows. Periwinkle blue whisper petals of longing. Dreaming vines rustle. Among the soft curved crackles of leafy memory - challenge the bristled voices buried beneath the din. It’s time to reclaim every last word as testament. 
 
**
 
The Sky is Only a Ceiling If You Touch It
 
I’ve stared long enough to see steam form letters, ghostly alphabets rising from birthdays of broth. Soup becomes a séance, summoning scents of forgotten kitchens. Echo of wooden spoons scraping grief, stuck on the bottom. Flames beneath the pot flicker like a violin string plucked in an empty room—trembling, unresolved, searching for a song that is not yet written. My hands are clocks, ticking backward into wet clay of childhood, where the moon was a spoon and the stars sugar I poured too fast—too eager to sweeten skies before night collapsed into hunger. Steam curling like a ribbon around a gift I never mean to open. Lid rattles. Quiet panic—a secret trying to escape its own heat.
 
**
 
Ascent to Perfection
 
flying blind there she is grazing treetops guessing her route stumbles upon a boy man with hands like David certain Michelangelo sparked electric as he carved and smoothed tracing each static finger up to his dimple then to his open lip spilling out whispers listen he loves into eyes iris shades marble streaks dilating pupils peaking outlines and carving bodies out of block as the shadow of divine is sought throw heads back into high renaissance in this time of perfection
 
**
 
She Calls Me Civetta
 
Her love is not loud, but beckons, as hot skies hang weighted in July. Across the Ohio border, roads tangle with gravel beneath tires, clatterpinging against wheel wells. After climbing steep switchbacks, she will hold my hand at twilight, walking back acres along the creek, narrating her land spirit. Crank up the car windows as dust streams from the station wagon’s belly. We will find textures of ancient marine life within Indiana limestone: Trilobites and Brachiopods, outlining each baffling skeleton with our fingers. Whiffs of sweet, sunbaked hay mix with billows of metallic dust. One more turn to go, past weathered signs—Hilltop Farm, AKC Registered Collies. The swollen hill captivates, barely wide enough. Gritty rocks tumble left, as the car interior dapples darker under canopies of unspoiled trees. We will sit on scratchy woolen plaid blankets, tenderly shy, absorbing her sentience. No relief, sticking to my seat in pastel seersucker shorts. Until the very last bend, back wheel of the car slips, heart thumps right in my throat, sunshine strobes at the clearing, statuesque corn on one side, red brick farmhouse ahead. At the crest of the hill, long armed iron gates and a last hand-painted board that says Honk, igniting a chorus of barking and high-pitched yelps. Streaks of gold and white, black and white, behind gates that drag dirt in an arc, bolted onto worn gray barns. We come to the altar and will linger until lightening bugs hover, streaming Milky Way beams on us. Rolling down windows as freshly cut grass jumps in my nose, reaching hands to wave hello. Counting all life as a gathering of gifts—her constant canon like moon crescents gold. These are all God’s creatures. Gossip with breeze, leave apples where they fall, at dawn, the deer come.
 
**
 
This poem first appeared in Unleash Lit.
 
**
 
ckSlack is an emerging poet currently living in Pittsburgh, PA who began writing through her journals as a young woman with a life-long love of words, nature and Thanksgiving gatherings with her family. She is influenced by Renaissance and Surrealism art and inspired by classical and alternative music. She has been published in The Ravens Perch and Unleash Press.
 

​All Hail the Conductor

Spring nights ring first with the shrill cacophony of the peepers, nature’s orchestra warming up in the highest registers.  Weeks later, the bullfrogs enter, deep bass strings, unseen: plomp plomp plomp.  As the slumbery days lengthen, a beaver’s furry slap on the water punctuates a silence.  The great blue heron takes off with a hard flap, then a honk.  Dark clouds gather and rumble in growls that crash, releasing a fizzy downpour.  Finally a lumbering bear splashes into the marsh.  It can swim!  Its paddling barely pings as wasps, bees and hummingbirds chitter a melody that promises fragrances and stings.
 
**

Encounter

Ahead of me as I run on our narrow road, a black blob a bit bigger than a bowling ball humps from asphalt onto a neighbour’s gravel drive.

As I near, the porcupine maintains its ponderous pace, but snaky-squiggly, as if woozy from drinking something it shouldn’t have.  It’s a walking weapon, capable of wounding a curious dog or mountain lion.

Close up, quills lay smooth on its furry exterior, glistening with silver.  The creature’s plump, rounded shape seems adorable as a waddling baby while it wanders into shin-high weeds and vanishes from sight.

So prickly, so cuddly – such a mixed-up apparition on a morning when the school buses, the fix-it trucks, the still sleepy drivers have rumbled away to their urgent business. 

**

Drought 

Forty days and forty nights now, we haven’t had what WTVV calls a “soaking rain.”  The spillway at the end of our lake glistens with a mere trickle in the middle, and fallen leaf heaps along the roadsides crackle, papery and brittle.

Our well goes 400 feet down to a rocky water table, so no worries for our faucets going dry.  But Red Flag warnings blink neon don’ts on town-line signs.  On our remote road, a not-snuffed cigarette tossed, like the drunk-up beer cans I round up, can spark apocalyptic havoc.

As cloudbursts, lightning storms and even drizzles stay away, I needn’t time my run by the weather forecast.  With tepid day and night-time temperatures, it feels like a Sun Belt holiday.  So long as it passes, is this parch so bad?  I watch for moose, deer and foxes wandering down the hill to drink what remains in the creek.

A ferocious plague or a mild reprieve: Like debaters arguing both sides of a room, delight and danger battle.  

**

Threading the Pain
 
While he burned bacteria off the needle with matches, I shifted the sticks and leaves beneath me into a lumpy-carpet bed. What had my meditation teacher said?  Without thoughts, beliefs and expectations, pain doesn’t become suffering.  One-pointed attention – the now, now, only now – sounded then like a trick, a myth, a poof-it’s-gone sleight of mind.
 
As James bent over my mashed-arm wound, I shut my eyes and opened to the moment.  Amidst the prick, push, tug, I concentrated everything I had on steel, skin and thread.  Prick, push, tug, amidst a tuneless hum, an ashy smell, flames flaring on the screen of my closed lids.  Don’t resist!  Prick, push, tug.  Tug, tug.  At last, a blessed pause.
 
Opening out of the darkness, I saw the red-streaked stitching.  It throbbed, a pendulum clock striking the hours from under my surface.  James’s solemn, sorry face reverberated with that rhythm.  Had I vanquished pain?  Already I couldn’t remember.

**

The Killing Season 

December’s first two weeks: where I live, the season of orange.  I wear a slippery blaze-bright vest outdoors.  It’s one-size-fits-all, but without the metal clip I add, it droops.  The vest keeps deer hunters from shooting me – for their sake and mine.  No hunting within 500 feet of a dwelling, say the rules.  No hunting within 150 feet of a public road.  

It’s just two weeks, I tell myself.  Let them have their sport.

I’ve seen dead deer roped onto an SUV roof.  A fresh carcass hanging from a crosspiece between two trees.  A stranger with a shotgun stepping briskly into woods where I normally wander.  Pickup trucks parked along dirt roads where usually no one stops.

It’s meat for the rest of their year, I tell myself.  Let them have their sport.

Once during hunting season, my husband came home from a run. “A hunter shot a deer on our land.  They’re by the brook, halfway to Sam’s house.”  I grabbed my vest and strode righteously until I spotted the man, stroking a downed deer.  Just 50 feet from the road, above the brook.  “Hey,” I called down.  “You’re on our property.  And you’re way too close to houses.”  

Stupid, stupid, I tell myself.  He has a gun.

On a bed of crinkled leaves, he stroked the deer, whispering to her, gentle as a mother.  “I shot her up the hill and followed her,” he finally said, not an ounce of belligerence in his voice.  “She was badly wounded, looking for water.  Half an hour and we’ll be gone.”  In his orange hat and jacket, he kept his gaze on the deer, murmuring and stroking.  I watched, an onlooker at a funeral.

He’s incredibly respectful, I tell myself.  Let them have their sport.
 
**
 
The author of fiction in Yankee, Writers Forum, Flash Fiction, Bright Flash Literary Review and New Stories from New England, Marcia Yudkin advocates for introverts through her newsletter, Introvert UpThink (https://www.introvertupthink.com/).  Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Ms., Next Avenue, Flash Boulevard and NPR.  She lives in Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960).
 
 

​Stealthy
 
Every now and then, when the lights go dim and no one else is around, when thoughts of the bloody morrow cease to exist (for at least a couple minutes), I find myself jumping the useless corporate firewall into Google Earth, all aglow, like a kid, hands electrified, heading for the street where I used to live. I’m still blown by the mere technical feat: equipped with nothing but a box of wires and chips, you have the power to call forth the magic realm where all your childhood stories played themselves out. Fingers dancing on keys, our blue-and-green planet smoothly rotating, your cells pick up the gravitational waves from those wonderfully delirious street-hockey games. Hands that perform the impossible. Double click, and the eerie process of zooming in begins. You almost falter as the city--your city—comes into view. There it rises, like a snagged fish, legendary, shimmering: all at once you are a spaceman, a time-travelling angler reeling in a golden species. Or better still: some weary god in a business suit, grown numb through distance and habit, burdened with the weight of his twelve or so labours, dropped into this virtual life. The lilting cadence of a half-remembered song. A street grid blossoms and fills the screen. Animated by past glories, you hone in on your neighbourhood, where the street names appear out of nowhere. As though in your absence this world has become terribly verbatim. You see the ghost of your mother stepping out the front door with a piece of chalk in one hand, halting the traffic with the other. See her carefully inscribe the names on the cracked pot-holed asphalt. So much like her. Heart full of yearning, hands motioning, drawing you back to the hearth--to her. Bustling Hermes always on the go; serene Hestia tending the fire. Having glimpsed your mother, how can you not hear that bright sing-songy voice beckoning you in for dinner? How not recall, with the streets and the driveway of your own house now in plain view, that odd tug in the side, as the game, winding down in the blessed dusk—like the Battle of Troy—is about to be called? Or feel that nudge, like a premonition, that this universe you’ve fashioned for yourself cannot go on forever. The slapshots and wristers. The brilliant saves. Feathery pass! Flashing the leather! The perennial dekes and poke checks, the dazzling head fakes and lurches. Moves like The Rocket! No, like The Flower! No, like The Great One! The doubling over with laughter. The burning lungs. And, between plays, the staring off into the purple-blue distance: as though, even then, something mysterious is being whispered into the ear of this elated brazenfaced boy with the grand, foolish dreams; something about another kind of move that will one day be required—a conjurer’s feint, a maestro’s flick of the baton—to bridge these moments of freedom and remember what it’s like to live with every fibre of the body, in the place that remains, irrevocably, and for so long, the here and now. 
 
**

Greatness
 
Watching it on replay, I thought Ohtani kind of a jailbreak
screen and he’s three-point something down the line. I think
he’s safe anyways.
                     Brandon Hyde (Baltimore Orioles manager), August 2023, talking about the speed of Angels star Shohei Ohtani
 
In fact, it took him four-point-Oh-two seconds to get from the batter’s box to first base. The bum. But he still beat out the throw. And that burst of speed, his arm-and-leg pistons on that big sturdy frame smoothly pumping ninety feet down the Maginot line, the full-stretched lunge, the foot on the bag, and the heads shaking all through the dugouts of both squads—well, it won the game for his team. And to no one in particular I ask: who--or what--is this interplanetary being?! My daughter, who’s doing her homework in the same room (and is therefore smarter than me), pipes in: Yes, but did he paint the Mona Lisa? Did he perform dissections on human bodies and then sketch with unparalleled precision tendons, arteries and the human heart? Did he design the first parachute and all manner of flying machines? Ah, I see. Okay. But consider this (I mutter in my diamond-shaped mind): after a late cognac and smoke, tired of his flying machines and rotting cadavers, I bet he secretly doodled the dimensions and rules of a game played with thick oaken branches and a ball made from the bottle’s cork, from the loose thread in his tunic, and from his leather tobacco pouch. Baseball is a game for the ages. And today, yes, I witness true genius: this fêted phenom who not only hits homeruns like he’s swatting flies, but can throw fastballs and sliders that bedevil the savviest hitters in the league. And run! 
 
Bedeviled myself, I’m in the kitchen juggling two eggs for our post-game Benedict-flapjacks-dinner. Two more eggs rest on the counter like rookies waiting eagerly on the bench. She walks in, looks at me, and declares: According to Marcus Aurelius, if a thing is difficult for you, do not therefore suppose it to be beyond mortal power. Famished from her learning, she eyes the airborne objects warily, adding: By the way, he was leading a fast-fading empire on his favourite horse while surrounded by Iron Age barbarians AND AT THE SAME TIME coming up with reams of these shrewd stoic lines.
 
Before going to bed, I pop my head into her room to say goodnight. Like a minuet in an endless suite, she croons so beautifully: Did you know that Antoine de St Exupéry wrote The Little Prince after crashing his plane in the Libyan Desert? For days he was in a delirium when the idea came to him. He was trying to break the Paris-Saigon speed record.
 
So, naturally, that night, what happens is I dream of Marcus Aurelius on his galloping horse and Leonardo in his flapping ornithopter. The renaissance hippy descends and hauls the brawny Stoic into his craft. His grimy hands pulling levers and turning dials like a manager flashing signals, he nods to the third genius, who promptly steps out of a cirrocumulus dugout, hard-nosed, eyes peeled: oui, c’est lui, Antoine da man de St-Exupéry, clutch pinch-hitting aviator par excellence, face smeared with engine oil, tongue dry as sand. And lo! my flapjacks now rise imperially as this visionary trio soar through the stratosphere and land safely on the moon. They head straight for the lunar bleachers with cheese dogs and beers in hand (and dog-eared copies of Meditations in their pockets). Their Angels caps tilted at a jaunty angle, there they sit pointing three da Vinci-designed telescopes towards Angels Stadium, enlightened Angels with their eyes on the Angels, each with a Rawlings glove resting on his lap, just in case—yes, of course, just in case the great Shohei hits one out here and shows what mortal power can do.    
 
**
 
Last Call
 
Old friends cannot be created out of hand [...]
It is idle, having planted  an acorn in the morning,
​to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade  of the oak. 
                      Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Wind, Sand and Stars) 
 
Those times we shared a whiskey and you spoke of the many skies you knew, man how your eyes would sparkle. Like that Bedouin who, with the first morning light, and with a proffered cup, delivered Saint-Exupéry from his lonely exile. Sure, we don’t live forever. But those glasses, my friend, with your reflections and golden lessons, the rambling lines and silly jokes—well, they did their share to break life’s petty pace.
 
I dreamt of you last night, you see—without truly seeing you. You were nowhere to be seen, or heard. Only the wisp of a smirk, your laugh dissolved in heady wind. But I just knew—on account of the flying. Well, at least the feel of it: the great height, and knowing there's nothing between you and the ground, nothing to hold you in place. Yeah, you were out there. Somewhere just beyond the senses, beyond all this: the incessant motion, the swooping, the hovering, the freedom of being. You filled the unseen and unheard. While, believe it or not, garrotted landscapes, charred trees, splintered wings and ailerons—all that shit—sprung off the reels, sifting through the clockwork of time and memory. Still, I felt your presence, bro. There it is. As though the evidence of your flight: atoms and molecules, even the tiny glitch—that causal detail, the seed inside your final day—as if the whole bloody package had landed in some wondrous children’s fable: as light and ephemeral as the snow-dusted ashes now molding my steps.   
 
**
 
Cave Painting
 
They found her body on the path, splattered with mud and blood. A life-size canvas, all crumpled, as if ripped out of the frame and left there to shrivel and rot under the elements. I know the path. It skirts a huge dark field along the forest. I take it on my evening runs, under the stars. I must have just missed the terrible moment. Or maybe that night I skipped my routine, I'm not sure. I only know that one night a section was taped off and I had to change my route. Then, some nights later: a collection of wreaths, bouquets and burning candles under a tree, a few feet from the path. The winter-hard ground and wet foliage, and that one tree. It was strange to come across this memorial so late, with no one around but me. 
 
One of the students has heard the story on the news. In class, everyone is focused on what he says. A crime of passion, apparently. Love turned to rage, rage to action—and then this: the bloodlust, the violence. They are keen to speculate on the details. Except her. She doodles silently, sometimes raising her head and looking vaguely to the front, but not at me. They are a mix of immigrants from all sorts of places. Kazakhstan, Iran, Syria, Ukraine, Bulgaria. Everyone has their two cents’ worth on the craziness, the savagery, the uncontrollable blaze consuming the mind behind such a crime. I know they’re holding back, though. I can feel it. They harbour their own personal tragedies. Some things cannot be bandied about like mere gossip. Still, they are wide-eyed and curious. They express themselves in a language that is not their own. They are here to learn another culture’s language, to fit in, find work, and become part of society. Obey the rules. I listen for the syntax and grammar, this is true—it’s part of the job. But also for the little scintillating bits that reveal something about them. I can’t help it. That’s how I met her. Of course, running in the evenings, after dark, is fine. Necessary even. I once spotted a fox tearing across a snow-covered field in the dead of winter: my heart was racing from my own run, and my eyes followed the streaking bushy tail over the white ground, and I felt my heart beating in my chest and marvelled at this apparition. When I was young, I always thought death was so far away. And yet it is always very close. The wild and unrestrained; but also death. And the world is made up of people who all have their own take on what the hell we're doing here. And part of my job is to pay attention. Now, practicing the conditional mood, I speculate openly about what might have happened had I come across the altercation during my run. They ask me why it is I run in such a place after dark in the first place. Not her, though. She keeps to herself, immersed in her lone sketching. There are no ifs in some lives. I guess I shouldn’t have said what I said the last time we spoke. Clearly, it’s over. The others press on and ask me if it’s smart to go running after dark. Smart? When was I ever smart? Out loud, I joke: Well, if it’s something of mine they want, all I have are my shoes. So the worst that can happen is I finish my run barefoot, perhaps slightly frostbit, counting my lucky stars. I recall that in German it’s not a plurality of stars you are favoured with, but just the one: deinem Glückstern danken. I ask them for the equivalent in their own languages. It turns out (rather unsurprisingly) that star is pretty much universal. Yes. Of course. All of us, no matter where we come from, go back to frumpy, sweaty, star-gazing cave-dwellers. Uncouth sapiens who were surely grateful to make it through the day and share their kill while sitting around a warm fire after dark. Sitting together, chilling, admiring the stars, and telling gruesome stories of the hunt—maybe even a famous homicide thrown in for good measure—with an odd tingling inside the chest, a stirring, the way a song starts, or a poem, or the electric impulse to get up, grab a bit of charcoal and clay and start adorning the inside walls of the cave—their home, their ark—before the night came crashing down and their time, quick as lightning, quick as a knife to the heart, ceased for all eternity. 
 
**
 
Home and Away
 
A 1 a.m. puck drop meant I was up until four watching the game. Hence this late-morning workout. The biochemical confusion calling for the wild extremes of Glenn Gould’s Mozart. The first six piano sonatas. Their brilliant oddity eggs me on. Gould ridiculed the boy composer, yet still recorded these early works.  Aren’t we full of bloody contradictions? Like this holiday. May 1st. Here in Germany: International Workers’ Day. A time for demonstrations. Instead here I am honouring this factory of sweat and adrenaline we lug through the world—the one housed inside our skin, vying with longings and duties for existential salvation. My grandfather, for his part, never openly demonstrated against the Nazis. He loathed their ideology but was forced to join the party to protect his business. The company did help support writers who got under the skin of the SS. Mainly, it manufactured a special kind of electric lighting for highway tunnels. The Autobahn. The great project. Plans for the Autobahn preceded Hitler, and yet the Nazi propaganda machine sold the idea as the Straßen des Führers. The real skin of fascist dictators: blatant lies. Truth be told, I might have settled onGould’s Wagner (Siegfried-Idyll, Die Meistersinger), but this morning’s sun felt more Mozartian. Spring’s magic sheen: the excitement of playoff hockey. Last night the Habs were eliminated by the Capitals. But they’re a promising young bunch of no-quitters who surprised everyone this year. My mother never understood hockey. Its brutality an enigma: repellent stick-slashing and fighting as mere tribal warfare. It’s weird, I grew up in a peaceful country that tolerates fighting in hockey, and now I live in hers, where she cowered in bomb shelters as a little girl. It wasn’t until coming here that I truly understood Gould and his piano. Something about the architecture and the forests of pine that turns you on to classical music. Or possibly just my mother who had played Bach and Mendelssohn through the seasons of my youth. Who spread her good cheer like a Vivaldi or Telemann Sonata flowering in all our rooms. She would gush about how Gould was the first North American to perform in the Soviet Union; whereas I agonized over beating the Russians on the ice. When she died in January and I flew back for the funeral, the cold was galling. I used to play hockey in arctic conditions for hours on end, yet at her grave I couldn’t last a few minutes without my toes freezing. I’ve softened over the years—as my father pointed out. I miss the winters but my compromised circulation doesn’t. The morning workouts help get the blood flowing. I do push-ups and pull-ups and even some yoga poses. I avoid bringing up the yoga with my father. Speaking of which, the first time I saw a Wagner opera was when I took my mother to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. She was visiting, and since this was her own country I wasn’t going to mention hockey. We sat in the balcony and in the intermission sipped on wine and ate large pretzels. The recording I bought afterwards led me to Gould’s solo version of the Overture. The story is about an outsider knight who defies the traditions of a burghers’ music guild and ends up winning both a song contest as well as the hand of the goldsmith’s daughter. A sly lock-picker. I told her she shouldn’t mention the opera to my father. It was his favourite. In Canada it’s almost never staged, and he won’t cross the ocean. She saw this as her chance to convince me once and for all to settle down. As in: stop fooling myself, maybe even get married. She too had been an operative. An expert at breaking the codes of repressive regimes. Which meant she easily saw through me--and knew my pedigree wasn’t enough. Still, they gave me easy jobs. Like watching the country’s top league players from Latvia or Hungary, suspected as moles. My mother had been admired. I think the link between her father’s fortune and the Gestapo preyed on her conscience. My callowness, on the other hand, is what’s always kept me from getting better assignments. An example of how my petty mind works: Much is being made this season of the Capitals’ Ovechkin and his breaking Gretzky’s all-time goal-scoring record. Well, all I can do is diminish his feat by pointing to Gretzky’s near two thousand assists. Next to that, Ovechkin’s paltry seven hundred assists proves who was the better player. I’m not bitter because the Capitals ousted the Habs. It’s not about Ovechkin being Russian and supporting Putin, a ruthless despot. Or that the Capitals are based in Washington, where certain luminaries recently made overtures for Canada’s annexation. It’s just a fact. When I was a boy, I hated Gretzky and the Oilers. They usurped the Habs as Canada’s team. In all my years abroad, the Habs have never won the Cup. This is sad. Maybe my exile and this Cup Drought are connected. My mother is gone now and I have no one to argue with anymore. (My father and I cautiously sidestep discord.) Forget subterfuge. Forget statistics. To be honest, what I miss is the sharp clapping sound of pucks on the boards. The smell of the snow around the rink and snowflakes landing on my face. And I miss the way she used to come to the park in minus fifteen and call us in for dinner. The game wouldn’t break up as a result of our leaving. Only, there was a moment when it paused and everyone else watched us exit the rink. Watched and listened to my mother, who never lost her German accent—or that aura of kindness and detachment that many former secret agents cultivate. Maybe, as a boy, I was embarrassed. Or proud, in a complicated way. But today, remembering this moment, I can’t help being moved by our long journey home from the rink. Anyway, what it essentially comes down to is this: even if Washington, or some other team south of the border, go on to lift the Cup; even with me here, in this self-imposed exile; even if it’s a fact that Glenn Gould—or my grandfather for that matter—detested competitive sports—well, hockey will always be a momentous game. And chances are, I’ll always lose sleep over it.  

**

Francis Fernandes grew up and studied in Montréal, Canada. Since spring 2020, his writing has appeared in many literary journals, including Jerry Jazz Musician, Saint Katherine Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Third Wednesday, and The Brussels Review. He lives in Frankfurt, Germany, where he devotes his time to writing and teaching.

In the Morning There Were Lovers
 
She knows this from the way the sheets are rumpled, spots still damp, shower sequined in mist, two sets of footprints in the plush cream of the Pension Zipser bath rug, the smaller in-turned between the larger, a kiss for cleanliness, yes, hungry tongues groping, trail dripping quickly across hardwood—so hungry—the way the drapes are pulled to one side, balcony door ajar, as if, maybe, three stories above the lavender and hydrangea, sun birthing on glistening flesh, they’d done it even there, yes, see the beads, trivial to other eyes, evidence enough for her, dregs at the bottoms of the Viennese Rose cups on the mahogany table, she is a reader of tea leaves and coffee grounds, a diviner of long standing, a connoisseur of beginnings and endings and the ways between—right now, at the sidewalk café on the corner, the lovers are brunching on apfelstrudel and Riesling, she knows this, she could see them if she went down and out the lobby door, looked up the Lange Gasse toward that place with the bright umbrellas, rain or shine.
 
What she does not know is that, as we pay the waiter and board the tram, hand in hand, for the Reisenrad, the big wheel where Harry Lime compared people to dots while etching an arrow-pierced heart in the fog on the glass, we wonder, as we anticipate the fresh-laundered art of the turned-down bed, guess at the color of the tulip in the cut-glass vase on the nightstand when we get back—at least for a heartbeat—if we left enough Euros to take her family to the comedy at Die Josefstadt this evening.
 
**
 
This poem was first published in October Hill Magazine.
 
**

Still Life with Roman Noir
 
So, this is how it ends. Which one of us pulled the trigger, which one of us is bleeding, doesn’t matter. What matters is the dark, how it lasts forever, how it’s been there all along, finger twitching on cold metal, how we both rushed to meet it, how it anticipates the second, final, shot.
 
That September day I stepped out of the Parisian rain into the little bistro on Rue des Martyrs and found you sitting in the corner shadows drinking absinthe, how our eyes first met, yours deep as wells, I like a pebble, falling, falling, it was there then, while we talked about nothing in particular, there while we walked under your red umbrella up the Montmartre steps to Sacré Coeur as you told me the story of Saint Denis, who, decapitated by the Romans, carried his head the length of the street before dying, there as you dipped slender red-nailed fingers into the holy water font, signed the cross over your head and breast, whispered God the Son, Redeemer of the World, have mercy on us, there at Cimitière de Montmartre as you pointed out Falconetti’s grave, told me I want to burn like her, something I did not understand until days later, when, at your logement in Avenue Victor Hugo, you played the DVD of Dryer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, and I saw the burning, the terrible burning, the much too realistic burning, and remembered you had told me on the way down the steps from the basilica There is no God, no redemption in this world or the next, the rain spattering like muted bullets on the arched pongee dome you held us under, and how I’d wondered at the contradiction in your words and actions for a moment only.
 
And that night—this night—after I have entered you for the second time, you take the Beretta from your nightstand, momentarily dazzling in the undraped moonlight, and say, matter-of-factly: One of us will want this someday, don’t you think?
 
How prophetic you can be. How well you know me. How little time it took.
 
You lay the Beretta on the sheet between us, release the safety, say, Tell me about them. And I do. All those loved and lost. Discarded like so many decapitated heads. All the funeral pyres I’ve lit: London, Rome, New York. All the saints I’ve slaughtered. How the darkness never leaves.
 
The moon slips behind a cloud and you look at me and a shadow something like a smile passes over your face and you say, your breath a flame licking my ear: They are here, now. Yours. Mine. They will never show us mercy. Never leave us. This is where it ends. Fire that sheds no light is a cold, dead, thing. And, as always—as you were in London, Rome, New York—you are right.
 
I reach for the gun, find your hand already there. For less time than it takes an angel to fall, fire lights the night.
 
**
 
This first appeared in The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing, by Robert L. Dean (Turning Plow Press).
 
**

City of the Fallen
 
There are no footfalls here, but, if one listens closely, one can hear the absence of wings. We move about like shadows, crawling across the landscape in two dimensions, arms and legs akimbo, time pointers with no time to point to. We are unsprung watches, clocks with no sense of chronology, false memories of false events. We do not nod in passing. Eye avoidance is an art. No one looks up because
that’s where we’ve been.
 
I move across the face of a building. I do not slide inside. No one goes inside here. Inside, we disappear. Cloudy days are hell. Nights pandemonium, terror, loss. We think sometimes of ending it, those dark periods, but there is no stone we can grasp, no trigger we can pull, no rooftop we can throw ourselves from and not survive. No bones to smash, no blood to let, no breath to extinguish.
 
Once, I think I see you. I open my mouth but no name comes out. Names, like memories, like actions—like love—require depth. The feathers of you scatter, leaves in sympathy with the coming snow. A blight drips from my eyes. Beneath me, footsteps stumble. Regret echoes.
 
I’ve made a mistake. I’ve looked up.
 
**
 
This first appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly.
 
**

The Boxer
 
He lunges. Misses. Never lays a glove on anybody. Nickname growing up, punching bag. And it stuck. They can knock him to kingdom come but they can’t knock him down. His face and the canvas have never been intimate. Nine rounds and he is pulp, standing. Or fight called, TKO, squeamish ref.
 
In demand, always. Guaranteed notch in the other guy’s belt. Doesn’t take a dive, never. Freddie tells him Hang it up, sport, your brain’s gonna be mush, but Freddie hasn’t, Freddie still manages him, Freddie’s brain is mush, hasta be. Nothin’s the percentage on nothin’.
 
So there’s gotta be somethin’. Something worth hanging in for. Taking lumps. Spitting teeth. Stitching skin. Mopping blood off shoes. Waiting for the world to bobble back in place.
 
Next marquee, his name at the bottom: Dad behind a desk, name tag askew on Robert Hall shirt, actuary fingers rattling risk and percentage, don’t let ‘em knock you down, son, don’t let ‘em knock you
 
**

This first appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly.
 
**

Laughing and Crying and Other Martial Arts
 
Each tear you shed pierces my heart. Because you laughed, you say. And I have no answer. It had seemed trivial, in that moment. What you always do in similar small crises. Don’t you ever cry? you say. Many times, I think, but the drops are kung fued into chuckles, snickers, guffaws. I am from the Emmett Kelly school of tears. I sweep the spotlight around the arena, blow up the balloon till it pops, bury the aftermath in the sawdust. You are from the Annie Oakley Shaolin School, calmly shooting backwards over your shoulder with a hand mirror, bullseye every time.
 
We consult the Wallendas. Use a harness, they say. Look how many of us we lost before we learned. Pride goeth before the fall. Bodhidharma advises wall-gazing to achieve the absence of self and other. Bodhidharma sat in front of a wall for nine years and what did it get him? He cut his eyelids off to keep from falling asleep. We decide we are lovers, not pack animals, and decline to be harnessed.
 
You pull out the blades, I burn the balloons. We found a new school. No walls. No safety nets. If we fall, we fall as one. Ringling offers us a contract. We laugh until we cry.
 
**
​
This first appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly.

**

Crosswalk Jesus: a Moment in Four Facets
 
This is the stretch of the expressway which is depressed and I look up, as I always do, approaching the chicken-wire pedestrian overpass, expecting to see, as I always have, nobody crossing. But there he is, back-lit by the end of the day into which I am driving, a small black X, hanging. And at first I think someone’s got a jump on Halloween, like one of those straw-stuffed dummies dangling from a gutter with the ladder kicked sideways beneath them, because X-Man doesn’t move, he just clings there, looking down upon us, poor, lost voyagers that we are, some of us already turning on headlights as the line of the hour between light and dark begins to blur.
 
*

How Christ-like he looks, or like the shadow of a Christ, dying. A forsaken smudge of God, splayed against the cage of deity, sacrificing himself for the souls of the metallic river of sheep which flows, not knowing that which we do, beneath him, not knowing that which we do not do: look up this one evening when he makes himself known--Here, take me, take me—watching over us even as he fades into the twilight of the autumn of our lives, not knowing what it is that he bestows on us as we cut and swerve and tailgate one another. It’s a miracle we are not all killed, that everyone makes it to the football game, the grocery store, the movie theater, aerobics class, home in time to walk the dog, feed the kids, hug someone. O bless us X-Man, for we have eyes but do not see.
 
*

Dustin Hoffman arrives too late, crucifies himself upon the church window. A blatant symbolist image on the part of the filmmaker. But not so for Hoffman’s character, who suddenly cries out Elaine! the glass pattering like cold autumn rain beneath his fists Elaine! expecting her, in all her bridal finery, to turn and look up as she’s always done before, to rip his name from the very bottom of her lungs, the very pit of her soul, Bennnnnnnnn!!!! But this time she doesn’t. This time she’s determined to escape the director’s awkward ending. This time the organ plays her out on the arm of what she’s married herself to, and there is no bus in this rewrite, only the limo, waiting. She gets in, laughing, knows now that all she has to do is never look up. And we cut/
 
/out of the depths of her pillow, Katherine Ross stares into the darkness of the cruise ship stateroom, the Christ of her character’s choosing snoring soundly beside her. Cold rain patters the porthole. Camera rolling, the director captures that awkward look anyway.
  
*
 
The chicken-wire cage is warm between your fingers, a parting gift from a dying sun. You don’t know why you have chosen this particular evening, this particular spot to stop. What was it you had set out to do?  Had you intended to cross on over? One side is very much like the other, after all. Darkness begets darkness. Below you, the cars. What are they afraid of? That you’ll throw something? A rock? A bottle? Your hands grip the wire more tightly. That you’ll jump? If you did—if you could—would they stop? Could they save you? That car, there. A dim, featureless face glancing up. He would--
 
but no, he passes right on beneath you, flowing with the rest of the sheep. You hang until all the car lights are on, until all the wire Xes slice deep into your flesh. Cigarettes. What you had gone out for. You turn up your collar against a sudden autumn chill. As you cross on over you listen for that tiniest of little pattering sounds, your life’s blood dripping, fingertips to pavement. It’s all that keeps you from fading into
 
**
 
This was first published in MacQueen’s Quinterly, and was nominated for Best Small Fictions.
 
**
 
Walking Ms. Dog
 
Ms. Dog stands on the shore
and the sea keeps rocking in
and she wants to talk to God.
—Anne Sexton, Hurry Up Please It’s Time
 
 
dark and stormy night but Ms. Dog must go out my living room cypresses sway Ms. Dog keeps me on a short leash her bleached bones clatter in the cold wind I ask her why the carbon-monoxide-locked-garage-door thing ah Bobby she says using my puppyhood name that’s the easy part the tough part Mommy’s fur coat I’d never be caught dead wearing pause sofa I hike a leg in the end I say you just couldn’t let go life still meant something Ms. Dog jerks the leash I was a failed abortion Bobby in the night in the kitchen above the butcher block counter top Vinnie One Ear making swirling motions always knew Ms. Dog says that candle-hat thing was baloney don’t you piss on the canvases Bobby I nearly choke she yanks so hard only the dishwasher I whimper she studies Vinnie’s bloodless face you’ve almost got it she says pulls a gun a little shot of this’ll do it stars burst from Vinnie’s belly light years back to my office God I say I want to die like that Ms. Dog flips her femur onto my desk well then Bobby she aims the gun cocks the hammer up on your hind paws slit your wrists let the ink flow I pluck a galaxy from the sky flesh implodes the universe big-bangs I crack the bone how sweet the marrow
 
**
 
This first appeared in Red River Review.
 
**
 
Robert L. Dean, Jr. is the author of Pulp (Finishing Line Press, 2022); The Aerialist Will not be Performing: ekphrastic poems and short fictions to the art of Steven Schroeder (Turning Plow Press, 2020); and At the Lake with Heisenberg(Spartan Press, 2018), and the forthcoming ekphrastic book of poems and flash fictions The Night Window written to photos by Jason Baldinger. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, Dean’s work has appeared in many literary journals. He lives in Augusta, Kansas, midway between the Air Capitol of the World and the Flint Hills.

​Pushing Eighty
 
Well over the hump now. Each threshold a tiny timer light goes beep. More friends lost to dementia or cancer or the heart forgetting how to strum. I would never wish to live life backward. That’s where the potholes are, my father looming like an ancient devil. I forgive him for all the labored abuse and neglect, but there he is, a pop-up for me to wrestle down once again. Where is this going? I’ve lost the thread. Herein lies madness, the sucked back sounds, still trained on polite. Fear holds a bookmark when I imagine a future without my husband. He’s my lifeline, my support, my best friend, but someday, he will be…or I will be…
 
**
 
Touching Back to My Father, Long Since Gone 
 
I rarely seek him out, he of such flame and fury, that I more often choose to distance myself. Taught me the beauty of numbers, how to solve math problems in elementary school, the magic of the Mobius strip. I recall his books, his lined notepad, his fondness for study, how he kept such odd hours, asleep after supper, awake at 5am. He knew all the subway stops in Philadelphia and which side the doors would open. I think back to the train ride we took together from Baltimore to Philadelphia, the chant of the conductor: Aberdeen,  Havre de Grace, Wilmington. Taught my brother and me the whole history of the Conowingo Dam as we crossed the Susquehanna River on the ride to his parent’s home. I slept through most of that lecture to block the drone of his teaching voice. Here, the razor’s edge of his temper and later abandonment almost gets forgotten. I believed in him. His words were law, emblazoned rules that set such tight boundaries. Never waste anything. Turn off the tap when you wash your hands. Never litter. I could never get it right, and now in my later years, I find we are so much alike. 
 
**
 
Resilience
 
Mount St. Helens, 1980. I wasn’t around for that grand eruption that blanketed the region with ash, 540 million tons, over 22,000 square miles, buff-colored powder that blighted the sun. We visited the region shortly after that, coming from the east coast, where the air was still clear and crisp. All quiet on slopes that appeared like dark stubble from a man’s beard, frail tree trunks, leaning cliffside. It looked like a war zone, barren, bereft of life. The mind can’t grasp results like this from such cataclysmic force, but it mistakes barren landscape for sterile ground. Life force always regenerates. Pulses of new growth at work, like breath. Several years later, we returned. Same place, now so alive with green undergrowth, birds, chipmunks, green foliage, fertile, easy on the eyes.
 
**
 
That mulberry tree 
 
flourished, florid with its full heart-shaped green leaves, tiny berries, too sour for sampling. Deep burgundy purple berries fell, stuck to the soles of our shoes and stained our gray dining room carpet. White sheets, hung on the clothesline with tight wooden pins, came back stained in the rain of bird poop. Blood on the seat of my shorts when I sat on the swing in her backyard, foreshadowed future blood. In all of this, such little concern for my mother’s constant cleaning.
 
**
 
Piano Fingers
 
or so my mom called my lengthening fingers, their form long and lean, some might say, even skinny. I never played piano, never learned to read music. My fingers good for drumming, clapping, stroking, nestling against my husband’s body, sparking sensory pzazz from his soft skin. Serviceable fingers, until I contracted Raynaud’s syndrome, turning my fingers stiff blue, throbbing in cold weather. No amount of warm water could coax the circulation back until they loosened on their own. Winter finds my fingers balled into a fist to warm themselves in gloves, leaving empty knitted slots flapping in the breeze.
 
**
 
Black Square 
 
after a painting by Patrick Wright
 
bounded by white frame evokes emptiness, depth of a black hole, an endless tunnel funneling down and down until you become Alice tumbling. Danger diverts you away from the final end-stop, or are you lost, memory limping and losing cells by the hour to avoid the terror of the unknown? Lurch for the border. sharp, edgy, not readily offering a hand-hold. Grip tighter, reach up, clutch the rim.
 
**
 
Though originally from the east coast, Miriam Bassuk treasures her life in the Northwest.  Her daily walks inspire her with the teeming life of eagles, herons, and the occasional  sighting of Orcas. She has been published in The Journal of Sacred Feminine Wisdom,  Raven Chronicles, Borderless, and 3 Elements Review. She was one of the featured poets in the digital portion of the WA 129 project sponsored by Tod Marshall, the Washington State poet laureate.
 
 

Khan Yunis: Sisters
 
a poem for Sama, Lama, Saja, Leen, Nada, Layan
 
And just today they mingled hands, a round of sister kisses, hugs. Sama, Saja, and Layan unrolled prayer rugs and spread them smooth beneath their knees. A day like every other day, six sisters bent their heads to pray, nothing unique. All lost in faith, no one aware  their world would end when men dispatched death on their heads, its carapace rent spaces through a clouded sky. Shrapnel embraced them as they prayed, demolished faces, blistered eyes. Did Nada cry for life unlived? Was gentle Saja first to die? Six daughters, six identities erased by faceless enemies, weapons provided happily by countries half a world away. Gaza’s become a place of ghosts and tombs, and drone dropped bombs and  masked platoons. Revenge has no integrity and cruelty trumps passivity. This split did not start yesterday, angers passed down to progeny,  grim fables born by ancestry and nurtured very carefully, assuring bloodshed tramples peace.  Six daughters left the world today. Six daughters who will never be doctors, teachers, peacemakers, friends, six candles snuffed before they  flamed with beauty, art, intelligence. Stone rubble blots out history, six girls have met death’s mystery as shadows shroud the land where they were born. Young lives were shorn like hair that’s torn from prisoners’ heads in Sde Teiman and cries of amputated  men in Megiddo, perhaps Ofer, or Tribe of Nova sufferers. No matter where torture occurs, each screaming  throat begs pity just the same. Today this house crushed on this street sheds shreds of thoughts six sisters dreamed --bright images of who they were and who someday their daughters might have been.
 
**
​
The Belly of the Beast
 
I ask permission of the state to enter through this prison gate. Next, latex pats my outer thighs, an action I might criticize since I am sixty-two and haven’t packed my clothes with guns or knives. I pass through four electric fences, walk a white hall far too long that’s frightening to walk alone. Ceiling fluorescents wink and buzz, my footfall ricochets their noise against the blackened window, just ahead. The guard’s instructions flatten me with dread.
 
Transparent walls reveal my son. Plexiglas separates our hands, making a joke of family bonds. I grab a handset, smell perfume. The plastic’s scratches cannot match the slashes scabbed beneath his sleeves. Prison’s a fetter; cutting makes control less distant, begs release.
 
A lovely child when he was young, he flew before I knew he’d gone. Defiance lit bright tongues of ire and opposition drove him on. He cursed me as he lost his way, he spit-shined every clever lie. Around sixteen the boy he’d been just disappeared.
 
The wounds ballooned from baseboard kicks to broken phones to windshields scattered over ground. Police began to ring the bell, inquiring, “Is your son at home?” In bed at night, I’d cringe each time I heard a ringing telephone.
 
Denial became a stock response; his anger chipped his friends away. He plunged from cliffs to fall, not fly. My Icarus, my stubborn boy was sure his waxen wings would hold, his life a bold trajectory aimed straight toward Pyrrhic victory. He lost control to alcohol. Xanax and whiskey filled each hole, except those punched in bedroom walls.
 
His twenties passed, sometimes in jail. I bailed him out. After a while, I didn’t even find it odd when shame and anger outstripped mother love. At twenty-eight, we were estranged when he exchanged a local jail for federal.
 
My felon fell into the maw that loves its role as carnivore and never shuts its trolling jaws that feed the lawyers, judges, and bulls who stroll the system’s desperate halls.
 
He’s caged himself and must comply with rules worse than I ever made. A cell of steel, no open doors for criminals; his body’s now the property of jaded men in uniform. He’s learning fast that inside bars whatever choice he has is voiceless.
 
He’ll be the prey of alpha males who mean him existential harm. One bend, one grasp of thin white skin, he’ll be a nightfly on a chain, an amber trinket others wear. All fear unpacks to linger here. I smell it on the prison air, and when I ask, his answer is avoidance and a blind man’s stare.
 
I know he’s reached a stopping place, each felony assigned and weighed. No supplication serves him now, no Cheshiresmile, no blue-eyed wink. He learns each jailer’s rights and wrongs, where “walk,” and “stop,” or “do not talk” compose his swelling prison song. He hangs each verse on hooks of bone, examines them when he’s alone.
 
Outside the gate, cold rain a cape. Slick chunks of hail begin to pound; they scarify this prison ground. I reach the car, I take a breath and aim the wheel four hours north toward home. No matter how the tale begins, this denouement is how it ends. My boy in feathered armour falls. Sad Icarus, we’re human, after all.
 
**
 
Father Poem, Cracked Prose
 
Most poets swear dad poems are much too twee; I respond to that genre differently. I write about my dad's dry martinis, try hard to chronicle myriad ways his alcohol consumption chased away those normal anchors that compose most lives. I can't ignore the rage that went awry, au contraire, fury's useful because strife creates poems in which truth is written slant. As long as rage does not move in to stay or make me write like a whiney baby, my violent inner-child-tales spice the mix, add in some grief--these babies write themselves. 

Break manacles that bind my stumbling thoughts. This word catharsis really can’t be beat. Sometimes a memory shared unsuitably sends reems of lifelong demons on their way. Like perfect drinks, poems should deliberately mix kind words with sharpened knives, acrimony. Toss in olives or cocktail onions, you can serve the truth straight up, ditch the vermouth. That's how my father drank martinis, dry--never dilute a drop, spilled vodka may ruin even the most auspicious day. 

A patriarchal drunk can be okay, or even rather useful in his way – comparing notes may alter family views, question kids' recollections of abuse from parents who glance dimly at the past, denying children’s negative reviews. Sometimes when anguished honesty's at play, exposing truth is healthy for a child. Although I'm 68, I have to say, I eat feelings like shrimp at a buffet. 
​
Sometimes harm is extinguished in the play of language that uncomplicates the knots tied inch by inch, and tightened day by day. Perhaps, when polished, poems expose a truth while casualties remain unscathed, removed. Works may not even need overt display of art, just bring allusion into play. The irony of life is that this booze is like a dancer, spinning on repeat, entangling a child's running feet. That child grows up to recognize deep loss, mend every forfeit memory with words. Some evenings, when she can’t summon the muse, the poet dances in her father’s shoes.

**

Joani Reese is a poet and flash fiction writer who lives and works in North Texas.  Her most recent book, Night Chorus, is a hybrid of flash and poetry.  Reese has won awards for her work and also curates the underground AWP off-site reading series, Hot Pillow, now in its 13th year.