The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry
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Gerry LaFemina

5/12/2025

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Roadster
 
The RPM's whine rises an octave, thus I depress the clutch, slide the car into fourth without much fuss, just throaty rumble.  At 60 it can be difficult to smell anything but burning petrol, but all of today's apple pollen fills the cockpit, some resting in my hair. Dusking sky reveals the first star to the south east, and cool air rubs back of my right hand almost seductively. Home is both ahead and behind me, just numbers on a street, really just a concept. Like responsibility. Like freedom. Like love. The passenger seat remains empty. The radio's lit up but mute, static hidden in silence. There's no song but engine roar, at least not tonight, not anymore. 

**
 
In Search of Quasimodo
 
Maybe we all walk around, the heart a silent bell in the steeple of our chests, and we’re just waiting—really waiting—for someone to pull the long, strong rope to set us tolling. These days most new churches program their bell songs, we can hear them blasting over our small town every hour, as if god is in the machine. Imagine the minister swiping left for the hymns to choose.
 
And who hasn’t felt like an abandoned church out in the sticks, dilapidated and derelict, the deacons and congregants dead or moved on. White paint peeling like strips of an old poster in the wind.
 
The loneliest among us pray just to be touched, to be heard, and, yes, I’ve lived among them in my cloister, those lean years, meditating, libidinous yet alone. Or worse, those night club Saturday nights, all of us forlorn, so many beautifully monstrous individuals, the heavy ropes from their bell towers just out of reach. We weathered those nights, those long, lonely rides home. How horrible, at breakfast to hear the Sabbath bells calling.

**
 
Creeps
 
Creeps are everywhere, my mother warned.  You know them: the neighbor scowling at every kid on a bicycle (a bat with a glove angling over a shoulder), the three-card-monte dealer & his partner who whispers doubt into your left ear, breath reeking of sexuality. Even in the mirror–I’ve been the model son, boyfriend, husband: lured you in only to bust your heart, so now I can’t stand to look at my reflection.  I’ve told lies, too, & there went another one.  The creeps creep us out, as the kids used to say, like the guy in the last car of the subway smelling like stale piss & something funkier, more primal, perilous.  Sure, there are benign creeps–the over-indulgent, the false lavishers of praise, the seductive smilers (how often did I practice that gesture). I’ve prayed to survive & preyed to survive, & what has it gotten me?  I see how you shy away now, but let’s face it, even my remorse might be a ruse. Barnum (that creep) knew a rube was born every minute, & a creep, too, Darwin might insist because isn’t that survival of the fittest?  Don’t think about it too deeply, it might just give you the creeps, might just get you to forgive me.
 
**

 Achtung Katzen!!!    
 — sign outside a house in Eschen Liechtenstein
 
The notice, no doubt, meant to caution drivers about pets on the loose. Or maybe to beg birds to be vigilant, for it’s easy to believe in this Alpine town that birds can read. We’re in serious Brothers Grimm territory, and we all know how smart crows can be. The cats in the sign are cute, cartoonish. In the windows they’re ominous, scheming, purring for pets one minute, then tonguing their chops when a collared dove or plover lands on the lawn. The warblers warble out warnings. Swifts fly by swiftly. The sign reminds us the cats know how to get outside. Maybe, they’ve killed before. Wouldn’t that explain the carrion raven who roosts nearby, talking to itself, waiting.

**
 
Groceries
 
I saw a man in the market today wearing a cape and I didn’t imagine he was Batman or some magician on his way to an audition. This was no cosplayer in costume. No, I thought James Brown. That’s right the Godfather of Soul, though this man just pushed his cart among the produce, such a sorry occupation for a man in a cape. The cape should make every floor a stage. The cape says, Amen when we say, Sock it to me. The cape says, I feel good even among the headache meds and muscles balms. The cape said to Bootsy Collins, wear me when you meet George Clinton. I know what’s good for you.You got Elvis in a jumpsuit in the juice aisle. Buddy Holly glasses by the ice cream. The cape says nothing to these two. He’s no super hero, but the man in the cape is the hardest working shopper in the supermarket. He loads groceries on the conveyor, pays his bill, loads it all in a sack. To the cashier, the cape says, Papa’s got a brand new bag.

**
 
A Pearl is the Autobiography of an Oyster
 
As with so many stories, this one starts with a singular hurt—some slight or harsh words, a profound irritant that can never be spat out. Instead it remains, a sharp sand grain held against the tongue for decades. Imagine how it sits and shifts, scratchy, cutting. Imagine how it scrapes and how, too, over time it loses its edge, gets smoothed over even as it grows and calcifies. A hurt like that defies logic. It gains luster there on the sea floor, hidden and sealed shut, waiting for the young woman who can hold her breath the longest, the one who dives down to pick from the beds, plucking mollusks ‘til she gathers a whole mesh sack of them. And later, shucking them open, that smooth and simple iridescence must astound her. Picture her rolling that small orb gently between her fingers, wide-eyed by the opalescent beauty of endurance.

**
 
In the Distance
 
Smoke stack smoke roving behind the shroud of trees; the scenic railroad with its four old-fashioned carriages moving into October. At this distance it seems so diminutive, no bigger than the models I played with as a child, those HO scale boxcars and tankers. How like God I felt after a derailment, when I’d lift the locomotive back to the tracks, set it all in line. I’d pick up the plastic people, realign the cars, return the tiny trees to their places. I had built this world after all and wanted to set it right most days, wanted to be heroic, beloved. Yes, how like God I felt. And then those days of frustration and despair came, days of hormone and heartache, days when I’d knock past the puny traffic, lift the train from its rails, and roar. How like Godzilla. 
 
**
 
In the Black Square
– Vasily Kandinsky
 
I’ve been in Columbus Circle and Times Square both on the same day, well past midnight, and still been unsurprised—the taxis, the digital billboards with all those pixels, the lonely guy walking on the other side of Broadway. I was, of course, on the other side of from him, also alone, southbound. No one remembered me in Herald Square. At Union Square the city police warned against loitering. In Washington Square they fined me for littering, throwing as I was the confetti of her last love letters to the wind. Find fault with that. I believed in so much then. Someone had planted a flag on the moon, after all, and although it went unheralded, the subways moved thousands underground every day. The night sky like a hematoma. In the black square where I lived, too many sharp edges! Too many lines I could stumble over. Careful careful, I mumbled to myself. The Circle Line circled tourists around Manhattan. I circled the squares of the calendar, never figuring out what went awry. Yes, there were any number of bridges off that Island, but in that light they seemed both crooked and askew.

**
 
Found Diary of an Unknown Adolescent
 
So many entries are entertaining entreaties to a wannabe lover, a classmate he wanted to mate with apparently. Long treatises on longing: how long the evenings were, how much longer the weekends without her. Did they ever even date? Her name like a treat, written over and over for weeks, but never tasted. The dated pages of this edition don’t say, but how he treasured (his word) her comic treatment of their math teacher in the cafeteria. The rest is mundane—the names of bands and friends, a refrain of complaints and petty slights. It’s a life I remember, a life I can’t recant, even though it’s not mine, except in the slightest ways, that handwriting, for instance, that stupid sentimentality, the way he kept sentry over his secret desire deep into the suburban night. 
 
**

Gerry LaFemina is the author of numerous collections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. His most recent collection of prose poems is Baby Steps for Doomsday Pressing and the anthology, Fantastic Imaginary Creatures, both from Madville. A noted editor, educator, and arts activist, he teaches at Frostburg State University and in the MFA program at Carlow University, and serves as President of the Board of Savage Mountain Punk Arts. In his spare time, LaFemina is also the singer and principal songwriter for Punkerton recording artists, The Downstrokes.
 
 

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Baruch November

5/5/2025

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​When All the Buildings Depart

Every building wishes to tear off from its foundation and soar upwards. They want to rise so high that they can be confused with a star in the night. It is utterly dreadful to contain people. People emit terrible odours and sounds. People do not wipe their feet. People love to say their names along with what they do, again and again, even if their only job is to relieve other people of their jobs. Do not be surprised when all the buildings of this world depart and you are left to labour in the fields—your hands calloused and the sun blistering your face. You cannot be forgiven for circling inside a revolving door even once.

**
 
The Secret Need

Many have a secret need they know nothing of. It inhabits their subconscious like the inventions of the most revered Dr. Freud. It can remain silent a whole lifetime. In heavy sleep, it can find expression in a dream that will be unremembered upon waking. Some know the secret need but have never articulated it fully to themselves or anyone else. They live what they know out in verdant jungles rarely trespassed and spend their days in the deepest meditation. It has been said the secret need is the desire to know what the animals know.   

There are those of us stumble upon the awareness of this need but deny it, keeping track of penny stocks or mutual funds all their days as a distraction. Though alive, these people have entombed themselves in ornate skyscrapers. Others, accepting of the secret need, run to the closest collection of trees, climb up as fast as possible, and shout animal names from the crowns. They hope at least one animal will explain everything. These people can shout as much as they want but the animals will not share their secret— or even a crushed acorn.
 
**
 
I Had No Idea

My hirsute friend taught me in college that cigarettes go well with drinking. At house parties, I did it a few times, wanting so badly to be like my hero Bogart or some other detective who lived in black and white and had a stunning secretary with wonderous hair that never came undone. I had no idea where to find a dark fedora. I had no idea how to inhale without choking. I had no idea how to call one of the Jewish women around me a dame without getting that great slap I would so rightfully deserve.

Across the room, my hirsute friend would smoke away like an industrial complex and between puffs, kiss a tall girl’s neck until the two of them found the perfect darkness in a room above, leaving me in my old cage of shyness. 
 
**

One Red Koi Fish is Enough to Change Your Life

One red koi fish is enough to change your life, darting into view then taking all it has changed back into the darkness below the surface, below understanding. It has found the infinite because it is beyond sight and everything is possible. In fact, the koi fish has become Schrodinger’s cat. It is both there and gone— dead and alive. 

It might surprise you to know that koi fish have become frustrated with us because we do not think of the infinite enough and our skin lacks the great lustre of the closest star.
 
**

One Jumbo, Hold Nothing 

Jumbo laboured behind the deli counter at Murray Avenue Kosher in the Squirrel Hill section of Pittsburgh. His old skin sagged with great wisdom and his lips were large with the humor of ancient days. He was a staple of the community as a staunch guardian of coleslaw and potato salad. Every morning, I liked to say hello to him this way: “Hello Jummmmbo!” He would respond “Hey Kid!” in that suave way that only men who have worked with chicken salad and chopped liver can manage. 

I asked him one day why he was called Jumbo. He looked at me for a while then took two slices of marble rye out and put them on a plate. Their spirals twirled like an exotic universe. Jumbo splashed Dijon mustard on them and piled them high with ruby red pastrami and corned beef. I thought the two thin slices of marble rye would never be able hold all the cold meat he piled up, but Jumbo mystically made it work. He squeezed it down, took a huge bite out of it, and said, “What are you, an idiot?”

**

Baruch November’s full-length book of poems is entitled Bar Mitzvah Dreams. His collection of poems, Dry Nectars of Plenty, co-won BigCityLit’s chapbook contest. His works have been featured in Tiferet Journal, Paterson Literary Review, Lumina, NewMyths.com, and The Forward. His poem “After Esav” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Baruch hosts and organizes The Jewish Poetry Reading Series for the JCC of Buffalo. He teaches literature and writing at Touro University. He has lived in too many places to count.
 
 
 
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Erin Murphy

4/28/2025

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Insomnia Chronicles V
 
The night is full of insomniacs Googling insomnia. Our friend is more hunched since we saw him, pre-COVID, at his 90th birthday party. His kids and grandkids and kids-in-law flew in from all corners of the country where they teach kindergarten and brew beer and play violin. Or was it viola? The cake was all candles, all flame. Now it looks like he’s always reaching for something he dropped on the floor. Where does the expression have a hunch come from, that feeling of being nudged by an invisible force? My phone says origin unknown. So no one has a hunch about the derivation of hunch. Huh. Notre Dame just reopened after the fire. The cathedral, not the school. A woman I know was living in Paris when it burned. Earlier that year, she hired a photographer to capture her walking her large dog against backdrops of the Seine, the Eiffel Tower, the Musee d’Orsay’s window clock, block after block of wrought iron and stone façades. In one shot, taken at street level, the spires look tiny behind her and her Newfoundland. She’s wearing a red wool coat. The sky is blue. She and the dog stare wistfully beyond the frame. It could be an image from an in-flight magazine or a celebrity profile for Harper’s Bazaar. I’m fascinated by her urge to preserve how she wants to be seen, architect of her own star. My father went to Notre Dame. The school, not the cathedral. For years he lived inside a fortress of anger and illness no one could scale. He died alone. Never even saw 70. A real pisser, he might have said if he’d lived to witness it himself. A real pissoir. On the way home from visiting our friend, wind on the Susquehanna River bridge picked up our car and dropped it in another lane, like we were a toy in some giant’s clumsy hands. Which, I suppose, we are.
 
**
 
Insomnia Chronicles VII
 
The night is full of insomniacs googling insomnia. We can’t find our car in an airport parking garage. This sounds like a recurring nightmare or a Seinfeld episode, but it was my husband and I yesterday in Baltimore. I sounds so cloth-napkin-in-lap formal here. Even at 2 AM, I can’t make a subject/object error. We were subjects searching for our object, a black SUV that looks like every other black SUV—part Uber, part hearse. An Uber Hearse. My parents’ best friends from college had a ’62 hearse. They drove from Connecticut to Florida one spring break, Barbara and Jeff up front, Mom and Dad rattling around in the back where the casket belonged. None of them were what they’d become. After my folks split, my father took my brother and me to visit Barbara and Jeff unannounced on one of his every-other weekends. We sat on the white sofas in their front living room, and they smiled like there was sand between their teeth. Even though I was just a kid, I could tell my father was realizing he’d lost them in the divorce. We lost our car in the garage. We’d parked in 5E but when we returned, we rolled our luggage up and down the labyrinth of level five, spilling into D on one side, F on the other. No sign of our car. Maybe it was stolen? A comedian once joked that we were obviously not an advanced species because we put a man on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. My aunt visited me in London with her $29.99 rolling bag from a big box store. By the time we got to my flat, her round wheels were well, flat. Jeff died suddenly last month. For days I felt a pang I couldn’t explain. There should be a word for the death of someone who isn’t recognized in the public sphere of grief. He was my mother’s best friend from college. The co-host of our annual Friendsgiving meal. One half of my only role model for a long, functional marriage: 58 years. 6,732. That’s how many steps we logged before we found our car in Baltimore. But not before we called a helpline number posted in the stairwell. Turns out there were four towers with four different 5E sections, like an architect’s practical joke. The name BWI—Baltimore Washington International—is logical. But some airport abbreviations seem random, like EWR for Newark or ORD for Chicago. I have dozens sloshing around in my brain: DCA, MCO, PHF, FAI, LHR. I kind of like that they don’t quite make sense. I like when letters and words are liberated from the jobs we think they should do. An engineer friend of mine invented a device for injecting medication during heart surgery. She has a patent and a startup company. Some retailer invented the .99 price tag, a decrease that increases sales. Google tracks it back to Chicago, 1875. According to the comedy rule of three, I need a third example here, another tick on the existential spreadsheet of what we value above all else. What does it mean to want to make something in a country that tells you to make something of yourself?
 
**

Insomnia Chronicles XIII
 
The night is full of insomniacs Googling insomnia. People slept in two shifts in medieval times, a colleague mentioned at a work party last night. First sleep and second sleep. In the wee hours between, they’d stumble to taverns and drink mead and play—what? the hurdy-gurdy?—then return to straw-stuffed mattresses for second sleep. It’s 3:22 AM. I could knock on my neighbors’ doors and invite them over for a beer. The retired couple next door has an early pickleball practice. On the other side is the physical therapist who says middle-aged pickleball players keep her in business. The man in the green house would probably shoot me in the face. During the last election, his lawn sign said Four more years of liberal tears.The only taker might be the divorced guy on the corner. Every weekend, he and his buddies close the local bars and continue their shenanigans in his back porch hot tub. Summer nights when our windows are open, Led Zeppelin drifts into our dreams. Mellow is the man who knows what he’s been missing. I rarely see the other neighbors. One converted a school bus into a mobile gymnastics studio. Another carries her toy poodles on walks. They say Americans live isolated lives, so I was surprised on a trip to New Zealand to see that they fence in their front yards. I’m not talking little decorative white picket fences. I’m talking barricades topped with shrubbery so thick you can’t see the houses. Not exactly neighborly. A medievalist researcher learned about second sleep from court records. After a woman disappeared one night, her daughter testified that she’d run off with two men after first sleep, telling her daughter to lye still, and shee would come againe in the morning. I wonder what future humans will use to learn about our ways. Text messages, selfies, grocery lists? Once when I typed Tilex bathroom cleaner on my shopping list, AutoCorrect changed it to Rolex. Yes, I needed eggs, toilet paper, and a $10,000 watch. What would that list say about me? What would we learn about each other if we caroused between sleeps? At the work party, a stiff administrator who’s typically zipped up in a suit did an alarmingly realistic imitation of a peacock mating dance. Who knows what he’d do at 2 AM. What else are we missing? What’s the cost of the cost of living?

**

Insomnia Chronicles XV
 
The night is full of insomniacs Googling insomnia. Those suffering a loss should write in their grief journal before bed. Tony Hoagland said We’ll end up at a funeral parlor run by somebody’s brother. I ask AI to write my bio. It is just vanilla wrong, not 180 degrees wrong. Has me born in Illinois instead of Connecticut. Says I went to grad school in Washington state instead of Massachusetts. Gives me an NEA, which would be nice. This week I learned a woman I worked with in the 90s died in a car accident thirteen years ago. She added an i to the end of her last name to make it sound Italian and maxed out five credit cards to put a down payment on a house. No one knows the difference between wary and weary. A man in Pittsburgh is trying to find the descendants of whoever owned a circa 1920 suitcase. Does it matter where I was born or went to school? The captain of the boys’ soccer team rescued from the Thai cave died at 17. When I worked at a newspaper, the editor used to say everyone dies of heart failure. It was at the peak of the AIDS epidemic and families feared discrimination. Peter Orner says You can’t pre-break your heart. Yesterday on continuous loop: the latest video of another mother’s son beaten to death by police. We say latest, not last.
 
**

​Erin Murphy’s work has appeared in such journals as Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Best of Brevity, Best Microfictions 2024, and anthologies from Random House, Bloomsbury, and Bedford/St. Martin's. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently Fluent in Blue (2024) andHuman Resources (forthcoming from Salmon Poetry). She is Professor of English at Penn State Altoona and poetry editor of The Summerset Review.
 
 
 

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Interview with Nin Andrews: Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poetry

4/25/2025

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Picture
Son of a Bird, by Nin Andrews, Etruscan Press, 2025. Click image to view or purchase on Amazon.

Interview with Nin Andrews: Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poetry
 
The Mackinaw: Tell us something about your relationship with prose poetry. When and how did you become interested in this form? What was its appeal to
you?

 
Nin Andrews: I’ve always wished I could stop time. Even as a child. Or maybe especially as a child, living on a farm. I remember one of the first times I had this thought—I was given a pure white calf for my eighth birthday. I was smitten. I want to keep her like this forever, I wrote in loopy script in my journal. Calves, after all, are like puppies—sweet and affectionate, galloping in circles when they see you and sucking your hands and pants. I named her Nathalie after myself. A week later she came down with bovine pneumonia and had to be put down. After that, I was Nin. Nathalie was dead.  
 
Reading books, I had the same wish to stay in one place. I’d find a paragraph I loved, a moment in the story, and read it over and over. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe for example, I ear-marked the page where Lucy first steps out of the wardrobe into snowy Narnia. Less interested in the plot, the battle between good and evil, I was fascinated by the idea that there are portals to other worlds. I liked to think about the instant when magic happens, when the impossible becomes a reality. When everything shines—as when a matchstick bursts into flame. I wanted to linger right there, in that moment. At the high point. Maybe that’s why my first book of poetry was The Book of Orgasms.
 
Also, my parents were major influences on my literary development. My mother, a dairy farmer, studied Ancient Greek and Archeology at Bryn Mawr College. She raised me on the Greek myths and was forever reading aloud to her children. I used to think nobody could read as beautifully as my mother.  But she read what she wanted to read—the Odyssey, for example, translated by Richard Lattimore, her favorite college professor. She also read aloud the original Grimm fairy tales, the Bible, fables and the Legends of King Arthur. We named our animals after characters from books. Merwin was a canister of prize bull semen. His offspring included Medusa, Methuselah, Moses, and Muse—the first letter of a name helped us keep track of bloodlines.  ​

If I were sick or recovering from eye surgery with one eye patched, my mother would enter my room without a hello or a how are you, sit in the corner rocking chair, and begin to read aloud. She didn’t read children’s stories or fairy tales (unless they were the original Brothers Grimm)—she couldn’t tolerate “those ghastly saccharine endings.” Instead, a Classics scholar, she usually chose a passage from the Iliad or the Odyssey, a Greek myth, or a tale of Ancient Athens and Sparta. “The Greek gods were just as unreasonable and cruel as our own,” she would announce happily as Odysseus sailed further and further from his beloved Penelope who spent her life weaving and unravelling her husband’s burial shroud. “Now that’s a woman’s life for you,” she would sigh, adding “devotion is clearly over-rated.” Sometimes, when she thought I wasn’t listening, she would recite passages in Ancient Greek, the strange words like insects crawling into my thoughts and nesting in the dark hollows of my bones. ​

My father, from Tennessee and North Carolina, was a gifted raconteur in the true southern style.  He loved to tell stories to entertain guests, beginning his stories with sentences like: “It happened on a day like no other day. Not a bird singing, not a leaf fluttering . . .”   Every time he told a story, he added or subtracted salient details, occasionally changed the endings. The truth was of limited importance to him. My mother liked to correct him. “That’s not the way you told it last time.” Or, “There was nothing unusual about that day.” My father would flush with anger and tell her to hush up and listen.  “Who cares what I said last time?” he’d ask.  Sometimes I hear his voice when I’m writing, as in the poem below. 

There hadn’t been a drop of rain since April when a hot wind blew into town after the dogwood blossom festival and coated the streets in white petals. If you had been riding in a plane and just happened to look down, you might have thought it was snow, but in a few days all the petals turned brown and smelled like rotten apricots. I’d never smelled rotten apricots before then, but when I smell them now, I think of that year when I turned twelve, when everything went south, the year I first understood my parents’ marriage wasn’t like everyone else’s, the year the chickens stopped laying, the cows’ milk soured before it reached the table, and the corn barely came out of the ground before the earworms and the Japanese beetles moved in, and all their tassels turned to slime. It was year folks called a good year to die since no one was having any fun being alive. In fact, the local paper had to hire extra staff just to cover the obituaries. Or that’s what my father said. My mother said, “The man exaggerates. You can’t believe a word he says.” My father just sat in the corner chair, rocking, staring into space, the rhythmic squeak-squeak of the screws coming loose, his only response.

I came across prose poetry when I was assigned Michale Benedikt’s anthology, The Prose Poem, an International Anthology. I was instantly mesmerized. Here was a form that did what my mind naturally wished to do—it stayed on one page, often one paragraph. It could tell a tale in no time at all. It sometimes tipped its hat to myths and fairy tales and fables. It sometimes twisted the truth in order to entertain the reader and offer yet a different kind of truth. It offered surprises at every turn, and small moments of bliss and insight. It was something extraordinary masquerading as the ordinary. I thought, This is something I want to do . . . 
 
And it turns out, it’s something many of my favorite poets wanted to do as well. Poets like Rick Bursky, Charles Simic, James Tate, Russell Edson, David Keplinger, Peter Johnson, Gary Young, Kathleen McGookey, Amy Gerstler, Mary A. Koncel, Sally Ashton, James Tate, Louis Jenkins, Meg Pokrass, Jeff Friedman, and I could keep going.  

I’ll give a special mention to Peter Johnson who has always been one of my guiding lights. He continues to write and edit prose poetry collections that I return to again and again. The Australian prose poet, Cassandra Atherton, brings a whole new magic to the form, especially with her ekphrastic prose poems. Claire Bateman is a mystic from another world. And Shivani Mehta—she also has a unique and surreal voice, unlike any other poet I know.  Her book, The Required Assembly, is coming out in March, 2025.

How did you decide to write your memoirs? And to use prose poetry as a vehicle? Tell us about the journey to Son of a Bird.

I can’t remember not wanting to be a writer. And I always thought I would one day tell my story.  

I love putting words on a page, the physical act of composing a list, a thought, a dream, a memory, a letter.  Every aspect of writing is magic. As a child, I collected ink pens, crayons, chalk, paint, lined paper, unlined paper—I had a special attachment to the fat-lined paper we used in first grade, paper so thick and grainy, it looked like oatmeal and banana peels were ground into it. I remember Elly, the girl who sat in the desk beside me, liked to eat it.  She’d stick out her tongue to show me a wad of spit-soaked paper.  I’d look cross-eyed back at her, first with one eyeball looking at my nose, then the other, then both. “Do that again!” she’d say, and I would. 

Writing, art, and Elly were things I liked about first grade. There was also Tommy, who was usually bald. His stepfather wouldn’t take him to the barber. Instead, he shaved his head. Elly, Tommy, and I were three weirdos. Three future writers. But I digress. 

I loved penmanship, script, drawing. I loved words, pictures, clay. Anything that I could use to represent what was in the mind. But words were my favorite. My mother would ask, “In the beginning was the word? Or was it the apple of discord,” meaning does a story begin suddenly with God or in a flash of light, or does it begin with a conflict? I always voted for words. “Apple is a word,” I’d answer. “A shiny red word.”  (I didn’t know then that she was quoting the New Testament and comparing it to the Iliad, that this was a variation on a question from one of her college exams.) 

My mother chose discord. Why discord? I would ask. Why does every great story include a poisonous apple? An evil king or thirteenth fairy or a fall from glory? Why did King David have to see Bathsheba in the bathtub? Why did Odysseus take so long to get home?  Just as, why did my white calf have to get sick and die? But my mother argued that discord was key. It was character-building. Without it, there is no story.  She liked to add that most once-upon-a-times end unhappily-ever after. It was years before I fully understood she might have been thinking about her own life.

It was also years before I gave up on the idea that I could write a memoir that only talked about the memories I wanted to frame, the funny stories I love to tell—the light in my life and not the shadows.  Years before I fully understood and wanted to talk about how much “character building” I had endured. And why my father hoped I would never write about my childhood.  A therapist, too, advised me not to look back.

As lucky as I was to have the educated and unusual parents I had (and I do think they are ideal parents for a writer), I was equally unlucky. I grew up as a feral cross-eyed farmgirl, the last child of six born in nine years. By the time I was born, my parents were tuckered out. “I was 41, like an old heifer by the time you were born,” my mother explained. “And you were such a sickly child. My gene pool must have been wiped out.”  On the spectrum, my mother told it like it was. And she always compared our family to cows. 

Also, by the time I arrived, my parents’ marriage had begun to fray. My father was a gay man, and my mother had never had any other marital prospects. She wanted children, and he wanted to pass as heterosexual.  In their early years of marriage and parenthood, they put on a good show, a show I never saw.  My happiest times with them were when they were not in the same place at the same time, like the summer I stayed at home with my father when my mother was in Maine, when my father and I drank whiskey and watched the sunset night after night. 

My parents left me to my own devices. I was raised by farmhands, siblings and the wind.  My name, Nin, came from a southern ditty, Where’s Nellie Paw Paw? She’s down by the river picking up pawpaws putting them in her pocket. According to my father, I was always wandering off into the fields and woods and getting into trouble. They often didn’t know where I was. One day, when they couldn’t find me, one of the farmhands discovered me by the creek, a pawpaw in one hand, a copperhead sunning on the rock beside me. “She’s a little ninny, that one,” the farmhand said. “A little Ninny Paw Paw.”  I was three years old.

Thanks to parental neglect, I almost died on several occasions. At four, I ate two bottles of children’s aspirin and had my stomach pumped; at six, I was swept away by a riptide on a family vacation and almost drowned. At twelve, I was hit by a car on a bike and delivered to the ER by a stranger. I was in the ER for hours before a doctor recognized me and called my father to ask if he was missing a daughter. And I’m not including the times I was bucked from ponies, butted by a young bull (okay, he was my pet, and I was playing matador), bitten by a stray dog. Or the eye surgery I almost didn’t wake from, and the surgeries that followed when I was sure I would never wake again. I spent time alone in hospitals, either waiting for or recovering from tests or surgery, wondering where my mother was.
 
According to my mother, her children were much stronger than their suburban classmates—just as her Ayrshire cows were healthier than the Holsteins on neighboring farms. Never mind that I suffered from frequent fevers, flus, sore throats, night sweats, hallucinations, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, mumps, measles, pin worms, chicken pox and some unidentified illness that kept me home from school for weeks at a time. Or that I was “a bit accident prone,” as she put it.  I was stung by swarms of bees, bitten by stray dogs, clawed by feral cats, bucked from horses, butted by a bull, and one morning, found unconscious on the side of the road by a truck driver who delivered me and my bicycle to the hospital.  That afternoon, a doctor called my father and reported that an unidentified girl, who looked suspiciously like one of his was out cold in the ER. Was he, by chance, missing a daughter?

But, according to my parents, I was also lucky to be operated on by a world-class eye surgeon, lucky that one day my eyes would be fixed, and I would pass for a normal girl and maybe attract a man. 
  
Not surprisingly, I became hospital-phobic and was haunted by nightmares and visions of death. Death appeared to me as a giant bird. It was a presence I saw at night, and I felt it during the day. Am I crazy? I wondered. An insomniac, I paced the halls of sock feet and suffered from bouts of nausea and high fevers. My mother slept soundly, no matter how sick her children were, but my father stayed awake and bathed me in ice cubes. He gave me so much aspirin and Sominex, after a while the pills didn’t work. Nothing did. I used to pray on my knees for the vision of death to go away. 

Try as I might, for years I could not write about these experiences.  I didn’t understand what had happened to me. My story felt overwhelming, inexplicable, and embarrassing. I didn’t want to talk about what my mother called “my weakness,”  my physical and mental illnesses—my apples of discord. And a part of me wondered, Who would want to hear all this?   
 
Then, in 2020, my son became seriously ill. Several times he came close to death. For two years he was in and out of hospitals. He spent nights in the ER, days in doctor’s offices, a week in the ICU, and weeks and weeks in hospital rooms. Sitting by his bedside, I remembered my own childhood medical experiences and brushes with death. Also, in our many hours together, my son asked me about my childhood, about the farm, my parents, and siblings. And I began to write this memoir. 

Perhaps it’s cliché to say this, but I felt, as I sat beside my son when he was hooked up to tubes and IVs in hospital rooms and ICUs, when I insisted on accompanying him to surgeries even during Covid when it was a battle to be allowed to so, that I was also sitting beside my childhood self, the girl who slept alone in hospital rooms. 

Initially, I tried writing a memoir in straight prose, but I find prose boring. Slow. Like writing in pencil. There’s something about the prose poem that holds the intensity of my memories. 
 
In your book, you recall telling your father you would be a writer, and getting a list of things not to write about. Does writing and sharing a memoir make you feel vulnerable or liberated?
 
My father gave me all kinds of instructions on what and how I should and should not write. He didn’t want me to smear our family name. But, what was not on his list, what he really wanted to ask, that I not to write about his homosexuality. In order to dissuade me from trying, he often opined that no one can really write about the past.


 “The past is gone and you can’t get it back,” my father always said. But I want to tell him, you can still visit. The farmland is there, and my mother’s shadow lingers in the doorway of the stone house. I can see her now, tilting her head, as if listening for the songs of the heifers in the fields, the horses in the stalls, the Rottweilers and beagles in the front yard under the tulip poplars, the thirty stray cats in the hayloft or sleeping in the sun, the six sows in the sty before we ate them, one by one, the bantam rooster and his nine hens before the red fox picked them off, running across the alfalfa field each morning with a fresh kill in his mouth. Gone, too, is the parakeet my father kept in the tack room, the parakeet that died from heatstroke or lack of water and once, a peanut, and was always replaced by an identical yellow-green budgie who dehydrated or was cooked on a July day so hot, the barn was a frying pan with the lid on tight. (After a while, I never knew which parakeet was in the cage—Tony or Tanya or Tina or Teensy or Tallulah.) And the bees my father kept in wooden hives that flew through the holes in our screens and drowned in our cocktail glasses. The black racers and rat snakes that slithered across the floorboards in our attic. Snakes, according to my mother, were better than the Orkin man at keeping the rodent population down. I lay awake at night, listening to the swish-swish overhead, the sound like ladies’ skirts sweeping the floor as they danced.  

My father believed in privacy. In hiding your true self.   He taught me to be Nathalie in the world, and Nin at home. To be polite and mannerly in public, always say “yes ma’am” and “yes sir” and “I’m just fine, thank you so much.” But if he asked how I was, he didn’t want me just to say, “fine thank you” to him.  “Don’t bore me with pleasantries,” he’d say. He presented himself as heterosexual pillar of society in, but he invited gay “friends” to our farm. He would ask my mother not to talk about heifers at cocktail parties, but at home she could discuss whatever she wanted. Once, at a party, much to my father’s chagrin, she compared my father to a good bull—said she timed every one of her children’s birthdates.  
 
And yes, I feel vulnerable. I have exposed our family in exactly the way my father feared I would. People still remember and respect my parents and talk to me about them. But I didn’t write this book to expose anyone. I wanted to gain some clarity about my past. 

What kind of revelations, epiphanies, or understandings did you come to while writing your book?

I thought if I wrote this memoir, I’d come away disliking my parents.  Instead, I realized how much I love them. My mother taught me about nature, plants, farm animals, Greek mythology, fables, fairy tales, words—so many profound loves she passed on to me.   

And my father, thanks to his homosexuality, was unlike other dads. Artistic and imaginative and funny and irreverent, to see the façade of society. “Pretensions,” he once said, “is all we are.” 

He also taught me to love whiskey.
 
Whiskey on the rocks, my father’s evening drink. Mine, whiskey sours: whiskey, lemon, sugar. “Lots of sugar,” I’d say as my father poured and stirred it in with his finger. My first drink, I was four. “Just a small glass,” my father said as my mother looked on. I pressed the cold tumbler against my forehead and held it up to see the light coming through the liquid, golden like the meadow in August, like Triscuits, like the halo in paintings of Christ.  I tilted my head back and sipped. It was love at first taste: the sweetness, the burn, the glow inside my head.
 
You write frankly about eternal human issues like gender, race, sexuality, and family dynamics. Were there specific parts of the book where you had trouble finding the words? Tell us about some of the
challenges you faced in telling your story.

 
I find it very difficult to write about the past, but not because of any eternal human issues. It’s hard to bring what feels as huge as the sky onto a single page or into a prose poem.  Race, gender, sexuality, family—they are the air I breathe and breathed.  They are the vocabulary of my life. 

What was hardest? I felt my parents watching from the other side, especially my father. “Don’t write that down,” he’d say, and I would. Both parents wanted the family to be as unreal and unknowable as the words, happily ever after. 
 
Were there other poets, writers, or specific books that inspired you to write yours?

I wish. I tried to find books to use as models, but I didn’t find them. I saw other books that were supposed to be memoirs in prose poetry, but they seemed to be collections of prose poems or memoirs. Not both. I suspect I was influence by my earliest loves: southern women writers like   Eudora Welty, Flanner O’Connor, Harper Lee, Frank Stanford. And later Dorothy Alison. But I didn’t read them while I was writing this book. 

What’s next for Nin Andrews?
 
I am taking a little break and letting the dust settle after writing Son of Bird. This book took the wind out of my sails.  But I have been working on a few loose ends and occasional poems and writing blog posts for Best American Poetry. I am waiting for my next theme to announce itself. 
 
 ​
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Jane Frank

4/21/2025

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​ 
Circuit
 
Strange shapes bend in lukewarm greeting: leaves of wax, spotted red beneath, boards curving across a thicket, over a root maze, a wall of spikes protruding through silt. I frame abstract patterns in this fractal-lace realm while benthic creatures sway in half-clear water as if painting themselves. In a bird hide, a brown honeyeater sings. This is the place of salt (it said on the sign), also mudskipper, mangrove jack, blue thread-fin, bream. Mangroves exhale poison, saline through cork-brown pores: dark capsule fruit feed on what washes to them. Far out, a cobalt-striped strap of sea & crab colonies to the horizon.  Below: ankle-deep inundation, crustaceans scurrying along a narrow stretch of sand to a tight meander where boardwalk juts over creek mouth. Mangrove lips smile up between the palings from where it is still, dark & busy with growth. Ahead a ghost grove of paperbarks with rusty ankles. No more boards. Instead, a crunch of red clay-pan, crumpled shell. Now a ti-tree copse. Against a diamond of blue sky, a brahminy kite curls high on a thermal, circles that hypnotise me all the way back to the asphalt road.
 
**
 
From the West Wing
 
The hospital sits within a concentric circle of time: through the window a black bird sits in a white-trunked tree, a vacant car park sprawls, a train hurtles by. A sunless day sucked of joy is suspended grey on a hanger. I have special powers: can see forward and back, remember the future in fine cartographic lines — jigsaws of boats that blur to become animals drawn with fingers on hot sand. There are coastlines of touch, a vulnerability in the face of sharp pointed instruments — I am reminded of miracles: the small happy cloud I lived on mothering two small boys. You scroll endlessly on your phone and I turn the pages of a book with images of temporal sculptures from water, ice, leaves, feathers. It occurs to me that we live in a world that is both hard and soft: not easy to distinguish between them. The magenta wall of this room is an unkind industrial colour. You sleep, half-turned away and your lashes sweep a cheek that moments ago was an angry red. Time is a stretch of nerve fibres: anticipation and regret. Across the river, first lights blink.
 
**
 
After a Storm

Beach turned malachite late afternoon. There was a storm last night: the rockpools were disturbed. The day before I’d found blue periwinkles, zebra shells, limpets, mulberry whelks. Today: foam, dark rags of weed, piles of fine broken shell the colour of aubergines. Sand mosaiced, a savage surf carving crenulations in hard wet ochre, a return to ancient chaos. And at the bend in the beach, a strange solid shape in silhouette against the shoulder of the dune. An armchair? High round back, sand encrusted in ornate quilting, rusted studs, shredded velvet oblivious of light spray. Three exhausted butterflies blown by the wind, cowering under its wings, trying to dry their own. And over its back the sea: the inexplicable: the unconscious. One lone cruise ship passing across its eyeball. A forest of furniture growing beneath the frazzled surface? An aquarium of 1950s living rooms, sea creatures gathered around their wirelesses? Lettuces— so familiar — growing in rows.  On the unperturbed sea bed? A quiet intertidal holding together, or some kind of reprieve in evolution? The chair’s beautiful forlornness: a comfortable place to sit out a sudden heavy scud of rain.
 
**
 
Your Soul in Five Parts
 
Heart — So many hearts are thrown into a lake of fire, yours light as a feather of Egyptian blue, your Negative Confession long, compelling; your spirit still skipping between good deeds         Name —             I say your name aloud at the end of the garden to remember its sound. Repeat it in a whisper like a secret. A gift that rises from dull green switchgrass to ears of deep orange cloud. The word written in hieroglyph wisps         Twin —              A black and white bird with your face. On its way to different places at once: the creek on the island’s inside beach, the triad of gums you planted, the lawn of your childhood home. Soaring through every sunrise    Persona —      I watch the birds for facial expressions. To the one that swoops with drama: you don’t need to remind us to remember you. I often feel warm wings around our house when the stars come out          Shadow —        Your mouth fell open and your essence flew to join the others. I find myself asking if I please you. Seeking approval from shadows. Questioning if the colours I’ve chosen will ever be strong enough
 
**

Author's note: The ancient Egyptians believed the human soul consisted of separate parts, each with its own role to play in the afterlife.
 
**

Strawberry Farm 
 
On the road to the weir just past the farm where we buy the pullet’s eggs, a turn right at a faded sign with dancing red fruit. Trees scribbled beside car tracks, at the end a green opening like an island: a strawberry island. Ram-shackle house of weatherboards: caterpillars hang on gold threads from poinciana boughs, sway in a breeze. Puddles of rainbow after rain. Red beds of earth between a labyrinth of sunshine paths. Voices that call from behind—my mother, my brother—are submerged in blur. I run among runners, my lungs full of sweet air. The farm is concave—its edges sewn onto a tall eucalypt fringe. Sky a parachute. Flat round mountain my conscience: a solemn dark lump against the horizon behind me. But I ignore it, swing my bucket. Choose a row to start where I can see the jewels glistening, in among white star flowers, leaves of fur. I run up the row, haphazardly picking the crimson fruit—knowing to skip half-green berries. The morning shakes like a snow globe. And the day is curly, not straight, with ladybirds that can’t tell time. Now and then, as I pluck the berries, I look casually around for beanstalks, straining up through glare at the clouds for places they might grow to. There is a moon as well as a sun. I like the way the berries crouch, not always easy to see. You two are dolls, the strawberry lady said to my brother and I and I imagine us with porcelain faces. He is in the next row with my mother. His blonde hair almost white. But I hide from them. The after-dinner mint she gave me in the brown silk sleeve has melted in my pocket. Sometimes I eat a berry. A whiskery horse leans over the fence when we return to the car with our tubs over-flowing. I am allowed to reach up to pat his cheek. He is very old. My hands smell of strawberry juice. Of rain. Of sunshine. Of mud. Of horse. I wonder if the taste of horse is poisonous. But I don’t die when I forget and put my fingers in my mouth. Going home, we cross the Lamington Bridge and I search for crocodiles in the muddy water. I often worry when my cousins jump from the rope swing. I search for children floating in the water, too. 
 
 **

​This first appeared in Ghosts Struggle to Swim, Calanthe Press, 2023, Australia.

**

 
Dreams aren’t Diaphanous
 
The truth is diaphanous but dreams aren’t. They are lexemes for a language of impossible beauty. Time is scrambled so jonquils sit in pots on window ledges—tropical temperatures outside—while ghosts from decades past read cryptic crossword clues.  There is time to think, as you sip, of something cold and exotic you remember from a bar down a laneway in that city of spires. Through a window, you watch appaloosas grazing in butterscotch fields. You are inside the house with the steep turret you painted as a child where you must now live, your library lining the shelves that wrap a spiral staircase. You are arranging yellow roses, making conversation with a marine biologist you once met on a plane who told you he was bewildered by the colour of your eyes. Your dead father’s pet birds swoop from the silky oak tree to your outstretched hand, and you are able to tell them that he is in his studio painting. Later, you will watch the moon rise over the bay: it has never been so vigorous, so white.
 
**
 
Sgraffito
 
Decades of scratching into days as if the colour is waiting to be dug up. I suppose it started with a bobby pin dipping, earth black, into red cray-pas squares, triangles and hearts; a yellow submarine’s wide-eyed windows; octopi with multi-coloured legs as the song played. Outside: warnings of an eclipse but it was like scraping off the afternoon to see the hollow core of the sun so nothing made sense except that we would go blind because we mined too deep into the sky. I use sharper implements now but sometimes I can scrape whole weekends away without finding a single purple flower or close blue outline of his face so I ask myself if the dark layer is deeper? Children at the gallery drove short words into their sgraffito paintings today between rainbows & m shaped birds & whales so nothing was left hidden. 
 
**
 
Face of the Dune
 
You are at the beginning of eternity. I wonder about the timeless view but have stopped asking you for anything: a note in cloud wisp, a red glint of rock at midday, a wave that curls to ruffle a calm sea, so I suppose that is a kind of faith? The sky was blood orange last night adorned with an outlandish pink moon and I drew you at the top of it as if the universe was the tall dune that time you sketched the sand blow and we counted the striated colours that merged with the sky. Are the pigments brighter? We ran down the dune’s shifting face into the trust of the wind.
 
**
 
I Only Photograph the Beautiful Bits 
 
Figures shouldn’t face outside the frame, but I do. The sky is darkening, the call of birds insistent in a cold dusk— jealous is the word you use when you see my photos of amethyst light over the river. A twig snaps underfoot, intricate like a caught breath, breaking the sound of absence: everywhere speech bubbles. What was said here? done there? I only photograph the beautiful bits: cameos between mangrove clumps, masts lined up with the moon, satiny expanses of blue-black wash, a light grind of pepper where water meets cloud.
 
**

Bad Phase
 
I visit your photograph every night as you sleep, the moon draped round my shoulders, reflected in the coins of your eyes. Through the window, water reflects the wax, the wane, a rippled repeat of days. Phases that will pass, I can hear you say. An anchor for my thoughts when I can’t sleep, a silent listener, strung on gold thread with a hare’s legs and face, making stained glass of the trees while the world’s evil gallops in darkness. I can hear bats in the palms, see an owl perched on the neighbour’s roof, a single tear falling from its eye. A photomontage of devastation each night on the news, the planet draped in web, preyed on by a turnskin: half spider, half wolf. The sky sometimes swirling with lunacy. Tonight the moon is a page in a storybook— the accompanying voice, yours. Light stars speckle my urban nocturne, a calm salve in a tense terrestrial life. Timekeeper. Anchor. Silver mirror. I will try not to use you as a prop, measure contentment by your light.

**

​This first appeared in Ghosts Struggle to Swim, Calanthe Press, 2023, Australia.

**

​Jane Frank is an award-winning Australian poet, editor and academic. Her debut poetry collection 
Ghosts Struggle to Swim was published by Calanthe Press in May 2023, and she is the author of two previous chapbooks. Her work regularly appears in journals and anthologies in Australia and internationally— most recently in The Memory Palace (The Ekphrastic Review, 2024, and Poetry of Change: The Liquid Amber Prize Anthology, 2024.  She is Reviews Editor for StylusLit Literary Journal, enjoys reading her work at festivals and events and teaches in communication and creative industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast’s Moreton Bay campus in south east Queensland.
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D. R. James

4/14/2025

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The Truest Thing
 
What if there were just one in each woman, each man? Many true (and untrue, which fact could be the truest), but only the one. And if it could testify? Not to land us in some trouble or to shame us or blame us into changing. Just to show us, anomalous honesty, what greatest truth resides within us, for better or worse, best, worst. Would the telling then become the truest—but then no longer in us, et cetera? Or would the telling, being telling, withhold more than it really told, with motive behind motive no telling could ever tell?

**

Sentence
 
Sure my condition upon (recommendation so my existence isn’t brief and no longer privatized) proposes an opportunity (inspired both by fear and a firmer resolve not to over-focus on myself) not only to exemplify my survival to every middle-aged male of my heart-attack class but also to sink not into obsolescence like paper due to the computer following a situation not unlike Kafka’s Gregor Samsa’s coleopterous transformation (no doubt no thanks in part to that furnished apartment he imparted, which makes the family minus Gregor, who’s deflated, take a tram, their car full of sunshine, into the country to count their blessings and consider his sister’s own metamorphosis), but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

**
 
Evolution
 
The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.  —Ralph Waldo Emerson
 
As the old century closed and I resigned myself to climb the acclivity of the new – like a muzhik forever fixed in his lower track, or how a withdrawn Australian cattle dog can still herd stock as apt and insistent as instinct – my conscription in this Argive-like quest continued: oracled, unquestioned, acyclic, amaranthine, no aah emanating from any tower of babble. Thus classified acclimatizer, fated never to upbraid my elders or disobey my betters, how, Waldo, will I ever become more conscious? As ungainly, as audacious, as an amateur, as dicey as a tyro? So awkward, awakened? So goddamned sapient?

**
 
Epigraph
 
Poems are never completed—they are only abandoned
—Paul Valéry
 
So as I begin this one—vowing as an experiment not to give in to the vice of revision, that sumo of manipulation I so try to apply to my life— I wonder where I’ll leave it. Will it be in some sun-warmed clearing, a rocky outcropping in an old pine forest? And will I have set out this morning with getting there in mind? Or will it fall out of my pocket along a downtown sidewalk and blow a few feet until it lodges under a parked car, the puddle there and the dark intensifying the metaphor: a poem’s being abandoned? Thus bookended by country and city, both speculations in future tense, the claim neglects the unfolding—as if completion weren’t every word as it emerges, means and ends at once. The cone is not container of future tree. It is cone. Nor is an old cone empty.

**
 
 Bad Mood in Holding Room 2
 
Despite intimidation it has its way. Still, from a closet with a one-way window, you scrutinize that self—helpless, though reluctant to crack the door, peel off into that space, fisticuff that thief into submission, some admission, since if you did, there’d always be a next you, back in the dark, seizing the emptied seat opposing the pane of introspection.

**
 
At the Coffee Shop
 
Outside, a window washer watches me watching him, works his rhythm, window after window, simulating a seamlessness, tipping his squeegee after every-other downward stroke, coercing the water to run like blood from each overlapping pass, though of course he can’t touch my shining smudges, the smeared prints inside, five-eighths of a glinting inch away.

** 
 
Then
 
I was as bottled as limbless parents in an Irish ash bin. Beckett had
bidded it in ’56, but I didn’t git it till two kids, four kids, six bits, a holler from deep within my deepest of deeps, the shallow-valley shadows of my shrunken eyes, drunken with whys I wasn’t aware of. From above, hovering like a blackened, happy-faced, balloon-a-palooka, I saw the symptoms—my simpering, my sympathetic rhetoric—but no knowing, no being known, no being knew. No thing new! Then a glitch: I was thirteen-plus past a persistent seven-year itch. And rich that my dismissal, like a missile, was a launch not just a wash, let alone a squashing from the fling, the being flungness of it all. And the landing—Lord, the trashing, the dashing de-live-ring unto who knew whom? At least to myself. Almost myself. Almost yay. Yeah, yay!
 
**
 
Notebook Flurries
 
It’s snowing sideways, flakes like atoms with no place to go, papery petals that parallel the gusty earth. Always the guest, I have always a question, a dream welling upside down from the veiled sheet of stars: it’s wild, I know, but the answer hasn’t been to praise it like you would a lean train of coyotes loping across the road, or daffodils if they could grow by moonlight, thumbing their frilly noses at the centuries of human sacrifice and bloody cargo, or stones cracking in the absence and failure of trees to fashion language from water and light. No, it’s the old song’s old story: the farmer in his field, the family at their morning table, the spider plucking her eight steps to the kill, wood, dirt, blanket, leaf, even thighs—even eyebrows over open lashes that fan the face that bars the door that says goodbye. Now only flecks that nevertheless fly like phrases, the snow joins the ground around the house, all the little letters piling like books, vowels like birdsong marking this digression into early spring.
 
**

This poem first appeared in Dunes Review.

** 
 
Song of the Sirens of Life
 
The domestic smile of snow, the anonymous kindness of white, the imagination of the mouth, the grains of ebbing desire, those inaudible explosions, those nominal pleasures, the churches of the vapor—my tired mother finally flew; what she had chosen mimicked a parachute. Not a soul had bewitched her, but signaled safety, so sure.

**
 
Easter Basket
 
The chalked branch bisecting the window plays temporary dead but supports the breezy life of early birds, who fly in, stilts first, like fuzzy kettles. I could look it up: Why eggs? I don’t need to know: Why not? The sun will shine or it won’t. In Michigan, gray and twenty-eight. In Daytona, eighty-two. Puny shoots here, fields of flowers, spring mice, or sun, sand, and breathy skin there. Cloudburst or late-winter stone. The garden awaits its orange day lilies, their uniform blooms, and ducks’ return to the complex’s phony pond is like friends dredging courtesy from their mouths back at work. Children will hunt outside, or in: Jesus, hardboiled and then deviled.

**
 
This poem first appeared in Alexandria Quarterly.
​
**
​
D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections is Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press, 2021).
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Philip Wexler

4/7/2025

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Jumpy                           
 
I don’t know why she was so jumpy, but it got to a point where I couldn’t say a blessed thing before she’d be at me.  This morning took the cake. “Well, my dear, you do look lovely today, lovely as dawn.” and what I got was, “I’ll give you lovely, so all of a sudden I’m lovely, after years of ignoring me, not paying me the slightest compliment, deceiving me with those underage tramps, refusing to part with a couple of dollars, like last week, so I can buy a new pair of stockings, so why, tell me why, out of the blue, am I lovely?  I’ve heard it all, now really heard it all.”  “But my dear darling.”  “But, but.  You’re always with you but buts.  How much more of this do you expect me to listen to?  How much more can I take?  And your calling me a cow the other day!  What unbridled nerve!”  “My sweet, you misunderstood.  I know I may have been too forward in my reaction at the time of our disagreement but all I said was the I’d rather not be cowed.  But my honeypot, what’s making you so jumpy?” And here she let it all out.  “Jumpy?  I’ll show you jumpy, you failure, you dirty tissue, you undercooked woodcock.”  And at that she began to physically jump.  “So, you want to see jumpy, do you?”  He was stunned by her vehemence and couldn’t guess what brought on such a tantrum.  He stepped forward, extended his arm to calm her, to offer solace but tripped on her skip rope. The minute she saw him down, flat on his back, she jumped on his belly, taking the wind quite out of him, and didn’t let up, up and down, up and down.  “But, pumpkin,” he gasped.  “The nerve, calling me jumpy, you lout, you poor, poor excuse for a trampoline.”  And she kept at it until the cows came home.

**

Any Moment Now                  
 
The conference ballroom jam-packed, anxious expectation in the air, 5 minutes to showtime.  What would he say?  How would he stir their souls?  But showtime came and went and the stage remained empty.  A massive blue screen displayed, in an ornate but miniscule, and almost unreadable, font the white-lettered words, Program to Begin Momentarily.  After 15 minutes of nothingness, we began looking at each other uncomfortably.  Had something happened to the speaker? A young kid with a mop over one shoulder came up to adjust the mic.  Aside from annoying buzzing sounds and echoes and his coughing into it, intentionally it appeared, he brought no news about the missing speaker.  People gradually started to leave.  After ½ hour, only ½ the audience remained in their seats, fidgeting. The lights were finally dimmed, and everyone applauded, assuming the show was ready to begin but through the sound system, a distinctly Irish-accented voice boomed, asking people to hold tight for a few more moments.  The exodus continued.  Figuring I had nothing to lose, I jumped up on the stage, “Welcome, friends,” I said, “forgive the delay.  I was just making some last-minute notes.”  ½ the remaining people applauded and ½ booed but I was not deterred and continued at length about The Great Alternative, the advertised subject of the evening.  The heretofore apathetic crowd began perking up their ears, nodding their heads, interrupting me frequently with applause.  How outsiders different from the people who abandoned their seats got wind of what was happening, I don’t know, but the ballroom filled up again, and to overflowing.  Although I thought I carried it off passably well, I was astounded by the favorable reception I received.  I was rushed by well-wishers.  My wrist is still sore from giving autographs and my shoulders from being slapped in congratulations. The bouquets of roses were more than I deserved but I gladly accepted all.  On my way out with several hangers-on who insisted on feting me at a five-star restaurant, the announcement on the screen changed to We are Ready to Begin.  We all had a good laugh at that one. 

**

Winnings     
 
Seated around the table with an empty spot at its head, four players anxiously awaited the tall no-nonsense shuffler, a welder’s visor concealing his eyes, who finally arrived and slid into his designated spot without delay.  He was accompanied by a young boy with a leather satchel over his shoulder.  The boy removed and opened a collapsible stool and took a seat next to the shuffler who impassively said “red.”  The boy pulled out a fresh deck of red cards.  The shuffler ripped the seal off the package with his teeth.
 
He shuffled slowly before gathering steam, quickening the pace, and interleaving the cards so quickly that no more than a blur was visible.  The players eyed each other nervously.  All at once, he squared up the deck and slapped it smack in the center of the table, reverberating from the impact.  Up went his visor.  “Cut,” he ordered.  No one knew whom he was addressing.  The confusion was laid to rest when the boy cut the cards.  “Ready, gents?” he asked, though there was a woman in the group.  Silently but in unison they gulped and, all of one mind, started to bolt for the door.

“Pansies!” he derided them, “get back to your positions,” and they did.  “The boy will deal.”  He relinquished his seat to the youth, and everyone relaxed.  The game proceeded as he retired to a workbench in a corner where he sharpened and honed an ultra-sharp, case-hardened knife.  “Won’t be but a moment” he shouted over the din and sparks.  Everyone was dealt two cards face down, instructed to look at them, put one in each hand, and place their hands behind their chair backs.  Lickety-split, the boy circled the table and handcuffed them all.  
 
“All right, chaps, let’s have at it,” announced the shuffler.  It was a festive scene as he went from one to the next, slitting throats and watching them slump forward on the table and drop their cards behind them.  He flung away his visor and emptied their wallets one by one.  As he added up his winnings, the boy crept up behind him and used a length of copper wire to strangle the shuffler.  He tucked the ace of spades behind his right ear, pocketed the cash, wished everyone a pleasant eternity, and whistled with youthful delight as he shuffled off.
 
** 
 
The Pineapple Under the Umbrella or He’s Shy     
 
I was concerned, as any sympathetic passerby would be, seeing the slightly dented and off-balance pineapple on the ground, under the open but bent, tattered, and leaking umbrella, the both of them unprotected from the pouring rain flooding through the abandoned elevated tracks.  “What’s the news, friend?”  I asked the pineapple, “you look soaked to the bone.  You must be chilled.  I’d rescue you, you know, but I’m homeless myself.  Is there anything I can do to help?  I can spare you a towel.”  The pineapple didn’t say a word.  “Don’t hesitate, please.  I see you’re losing your juice.  That must be painful.  Should I call 911?  Please, say something.”  The pineapple was silent.  “Tell you what.  I’ve got a pal.  He’s got a tent.  Let’s me sleep in it now and then when it’s not filled with the junk he gathers to sell.  I bet he could find a spot for you.  Just give me your okay.  Why don’t you say anything?”  At that, the umbrella interjected, “Don’t take offense, sir, he’s shy.”  I scooped it up and held it against my body, under my frayed raincoat.  Inside the dry tent, it gained enough courage to thank me and even ask why I didn’t bring along the umbrella while I was at it.  It’s true, I put a lower value on the bumbershoot, a manmade construct, and also assumed it was comfortable in its element but answered sincerely that I would have rescued his friend just as well.  I wondered why the umbrella didn’t ask for my assistance.  “Well, you see,” the pineapple stuttered, “he’s shy.”

**

Squirrel Dilemmas     
 
A dead and a live squirrel were conversing.  From the branch of the maple, the live squirrel shouted down to the stiff, splayed squirrel next to the storm drain, “How did it happen, friend?”  “Food poisoning,” I think, answered the dead squirrel.  “This kid threw me a peanut butter cracker.  God knows what it was laced with.”  “You must mean Freddie down the street; I’ve been wise to that 10-year-old for quite a while.  “I wish I had the sense to resist,” said the dead squirrel, “but you know how it is …” “Anything I can do for you?” asked the live squirrel.”  “I guess a proper burial is too much to ask for?”  “I’m afraid so, given our cultural climate,” said the live squirrel, “but I should be able to manage something.”  So, he climbed down, off the tree, and nudged the dead squirrel into the storm drain.  “My eternal thanks,” he heard its voice echo on the way down.  Just then, Freddie was meandering down the street and casually taking peanut butter crackers, one by one, out of his coat pocket and dropping them onto the street every fifty of so paces. “But I’m so hungry,” reflected the live squirrel.

**
 
The Teeny Tinies               
 
They were neither people nor animals nor anything one could grasp or lay hold of, neither spirits nor sprites, but real, nonetheless.  An individual one is too small to see with the naked eye. It’s in their conglomeration as they glob together, one overlapping another, and spread out, in their multitudes, and swell in their vastness, only then do they turn from teeny tiny to just tiny.  At that point, if certain meteorological conditions are favorable, they turn visible, but just barely with the help of an electron microscope.  And yes, their movement, when viewed with such an aid, is not entirely negligible.  Indeed, to them, at their diminutive level, though you wouldn’t know it, they might be swirling with devotion.  And wait, is that music they are cavorting to?  The audio equipment seems to be detecting a faint buzz suggesting, on top of everything else, that they may be desperately trying to communicate from their teeny-weeny cosmos.  They may be in danger, threatened, on the verge of collapse or extinction or, maybe, they just want to say, “Greetings, we come in pieces.”
 
**
 
Philip Wexler lives in Bethesda, Maryland.  Well over 200 0f his poems have appeared in magazines. His poetry books include The Sad Parade (prose poems), and The Burning Moustache, both published by Adelaide Books, The Lesser Light by Finishing Line Press, With Something Like Hope (Silver Bow Publishing) and I Would be the Purple (Kelsay Books), the latter three all published in 2022.  Bozo's Obstacle is due for release later in 2024 by In Case of Emergency Press.  He also organizes and hosts Words out Loud, a monthly spoken word series convened at the Compass Art Center in Kensington, Maryland.
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Sherry Abaldo

3/31/2025

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​Illuminated
 
Like they said in art history, it isn’t the object we see, it’s the light. Impressionism and calotypes. Try to paint the pitcher using only orange, blue, white. Somehow all the hours in dark rooms staring at slides taking notes on stacks of index cards led me to you. Up close everything is geometry: giraffe spots, turtle shell segments, the pattern of mud as it dries ‘til it cracks, the intersection of soap bubbles. Your skin is as intimate to me as the skin of an orange. And as mysterious. Your skin distant as the skin of the sea. You with your ridges, rills, dimples, reaches, legions of pores. How did you ever land in my bed? We chased light as long as we could. Touched as the jet lifted off. Long gleam of beach, lace wavs spun away like the ground under a carnival ride. Breathless. Shine of a seed. You asked what those leaf things children stick on their noses are called. I said helicopters. Winged seeds. You noted the freakish drive of all things to reproduce. On Maui the divemaster zipped my breasts into neoprene. My favorite thing was watching you come out of the water. I could pick you out of a crowd. Hibiscus petals under my burned feet. Thorns hidden in sand. My eyes poured so full of light I had to close them.
 
**

This poem was first published in Rattle.
 
**
 
Big Island
 
I was going to tell your family you died happy, the documentary filmmaker says. I slog up the coarse beach at Mahukona, tugging at my orange one-piece with black squiggles, high-cut thighs. He had written Pack plenty of bathing suits. 

No documentary ever gets made, but we crew swim all the time, like clockwork. Coffee and papaya breakfast, swim. Tamari-drizzled cottage cheese on avocado lunch, swim. Beer cheers to the sunset, swim. I learn kahunas and kupunas (elders), aumakuas (family gods), how to body surf – not bad for a haole. 

One afternoon, a bale of green sea turtles. I swim next to the largest, the granddaddy, the king – not touching him coated as I am in Dr. Bronner’s castile soap and sunscreen, but I gaze into his wizened ancient eye which stares right into me. Enchantment.

Turtles head for cooler deeper water, out to sea. I follow. Sun sinks. Wind lifts. Suddenly I notice the entire bale has disappeared, shore nowhere in sight, fellow swimmers in a bar by now. I am alone in the Pacific. All I have to do is turn around, swim in the opposite direction. Against salty 4’ waves. I dream the turtle’s eye (in his realm now, not mine), alternating strokes – overhand crawl, back, breast, side stroke. Are those roadside ironwoods ahead, or clouds?

Finally, sand. My toes dig in with relish, clasping earth like hands. The filmmaker waits in the dark, jeep high beams on, relieved smile, same old coral shorts. Only later that night, in the warm burnt sugar and night blooming jasmine scented air, in somebody’s hot tub drinking flowery wine, I realize what a risk I took: almost turned forever haole – without breath. I tremble in the water, hide it. Full moon bluely lights my browned skin, asking if my mistake was innocent.
 
**

Thursday’s Fantod
 
Something happened out there. They always place the blame on drunken fishermen. Say be careful on 131, as if everybody isn’t flying doing 80 even the flatlanders, even the cops, even the salty pillars of society, even the moms in gold or silver minivans with umbrella insurance and diamonds the size of starfish in their soft white ears. Say watch out. Men howl at the moon down there. God knows what else. It’s a wonder anybody ever comes back at all, night like tonight. Undulant, hot, lightning rips black sky like claw marks. Neap tide. Heat lightning. Thunder bound and gagged. You remember things like New Orleans jazz at 3 a.m., voodoo, sazerac, how you had to lay a rose on Marie Laveau’s grave and later wished you hadn’t. Why are crypts creepier than mounds? You think of things like the veins near Cain’s carotid. How did God give him his mark? Brand? Bruise? Blemish? You ask a lot of questions, guy holding the fat yellow ferry rope says. Where you from? What you doing on the island? Painting? I don’t see no canvas. Smile only uses half his mouth. Incident on the peninsula. Eternal return. Crease of light dents horizon. Heat rises from the ground. Around the peeling clapboard corner of the ticket office coffee shop, you expect a three-headed dog.
 
**
 
This was first published in Northern New England Review and Deep Water, Maine Sunday Telegram.
 
**

My 85-year-old Mother Sells the Family Cabin to an LLC
 
No place could have been that great, that juicy holy place that was the cabin, all golden sun, all lavender shadows. Hidden from the water, hidden from the road. The dirt road also hidden, its mouth concealed by lips of wild brambles and forsythia, in late summer bulging rose hips. The old crone who once lived in the dilapidated henhouse. The henhouse bones a gatekeeper, rose tarpaper siding half blown off like stunted blushing wings. The no place place. Cabin smell of the pine trees she was born from, black tapers in my grandmother’s lead crystal candelabra, my soft powdery perfume. 

The family of racoons, blue heron, great grey owl, the loons with their haunting love and loss calls. I went into labor there, staring out at green leaves. Read Lady Chatterley’s Lover again after many years in a big brown plastic chair with a cupholder, drinking chilled chardonnay in the sun. I howled at the moon there. Stepped naked into rain and snow storms. Swam north through waxen pond lilies to the loon’s nest in the next town. Lily pad tendrils tangled my legs. Liquid layers of temperature, warm on top, shivery bottom. I cavorted. Floated boats. Dreamt of more cavorting. Always more. 

Always the liminal dream space of the shore, the lapping water, water line of ashes and untrimmed rosa rugosa. Storm broke fireplace of cement blocks. My husband would come home and we would make love, before and after supper, sometimes beans and rice or avocado toast or artichokes dipped in garlic butter with filet mignon if we had money. Sleepy love as the old inevitable sun rose over the road then field sloping down golden and slowly to butter our bodies through the wide bare dormer windows. Our loft he built with his big hands. Outside the silty water, waiting, smelling of river bottom. 
 
**

Woman in a Window from the Night Train Rome to Paris
 
 
Urban sylph, nymph, siren in her rectangle of light, cell honey-hived, swaying for the train that silver slivers through the ancient ruined night, alabaster skin in sepia silk slip – I imagine Alencon lace along her decollete – dark as new moon ocean hair in waves over her shoulders.
 
finally seeing Europe
at 32 after all that art history
frisson
 
Us in dust, paint specks after working on a milky Santorini villa, out of money ‘til we reach Boulevard Haussmann, no American-hot showers since Brindisi ferry. On the train we down crackers with Nutella, sleep on one couchette. Pretty male French steward gifts us a sleeps-six compartment all to ourselves.
 
who am I
to deserve such delight?
at home anywhere but
 
Decades later, lantern slide kaleidoscopes avalanche my mind, that woman in a window: alone, a beige man in a back room, another woman? What music does she dance to – Vivaldi La Primavera, Piaf, jazz, song of her own journey – silence? The last time she made love? Champagne angel, Bernini face, ivory apartment tower, imagined landscape of her faded lace.
 
no choice in
what memories
stay with you
 
**
 
This Isn’t One of Those Nature Poems
 
where Oliver- or Whitman-like I gape and yawp in awe and oneness. I saw God all right, all awesome summer light, Old Testament vengeance, dominion. In Maine my daughter wanted to pluck warm eggs from under chickens before taking off for Wellesley, so of course her father indulged her, prepaid for a dozen birds from the Agway down the road. I picked them up in my white SUV: all that remained, 13 meat birds, ugly teenagers the clerk said. I did not find them ugly, bird resuscitator all my life (hummingbird stuck in cabin, sparrow fallen from  garage rafter on my mother’s teased head whom I named Snickelfritz). 
 
She named the smallest Pebbles. When that one died, off its food, the next smallest became Pebbles. Darwinian, she said. Don’t get too attached, Ma. The largest she called Colonel Sanders. Dappled days grew slowly longer then suddenly shorter. Chickens moseyed in pea gravel, flame day lilies. I fed, watered, wrangled them while she dated, lifeguarded, went to concerts until 1 a.m. Near the end, a dozen heavy breasted white birds waddled after me around the yard, up the steps. I had to shut the door to keep them from tea and poetry inside the cabin. It was not a ceremonial death like she had witnessed when her nouveau hippie uncle slit the throat of a chicken who’d stopped laying with a butcher knife, kids gathered round, some kind of prayer not said in church. That was a bad death, she’d reported. Ancient soul. 
 
She and boyfriend took her chickens nonchalantly to the butcher, loaded them into doomsday car, while I madwoman wept in the doorway. I’d given the victims watermelons for their last meal, not supposed to, they soiled the vehicle. I felt like God and hated it. Did the chickens know their fate? Smell death in a hosed down cement room? Know the last moment they saw sun? I could not bring myself to cook a single one. Pointless deaths. My fault. Eve’s fault. Why did God put the forbidden tree in Eden in the first place? Controlling parent. And I’m the one supposed to make meanings out of things. You anthropomorphize, care too much, my daughter scolded, flipping her dark river of hair.
 
**

Moonflower
 
 
Weighed down by my breasts, my womb, a woman I wait watch worry from the shore, uncertain of the earth beneath my feet, unmoored as my ancestors on widows’ walks, lined eyes ablaze, a reach over tidy towns, wives in black and white obediently burning for their men. A soothsayer with no need of news, only my small pile of green stones and a moon snail shell from Cape Cod, only moonflower in watery moonlight the color of ouzo on ice, umbilicus like a pumpkin vine, only blue forget me nots, white violets, August grass so riotously green it bleeds and reeks when cut. Bad luck to have a woman on a boat. I burn but defiantly like the witches I sprang from, inside all hot white lantern. You can smell apocalypse on me. You would swear I wear long grey skirts with wet hems, dragging forests in my wake. Why did you leave me? The wife’s cry. What was it about her, the sea, her wild incandescent core? We want what we cannot possess. Limitlessness. Ecstasy on others’ graves like Mary with Percy Shelley, shooting stars, wind-shredded peonies, 3 a.m. song of the great grey owl. I am just like you, I confess. I too would sink under that bright water, miles down, nipples frozen to thimbles. I too scuba dive. I too love Romance, guilty of hanging too long too deep for one hit of the bends. Nitrogen narcosis. Night of purple quick. Unanswerable longing. Only alive within a fingertip of death. They call me crazed and crazy, but O! The forbidden flowerings and fruits that I alone have witnessed, felt! The panoply. The edge. The sea, the sea, eternally taking, eternally coming clean.
 
**

Marry Me
 
again, my eternal lover, my best friend! Let’s do it in Sedona’s red cathedral rocks, not the Methodist church in the green shadows of the fresh-to-salt St. George, that staid and verdant valley where my ancestors lie buried. Let’s do it by ourselves, for ourselves, and no one else. This time I won’t refuse to say obey. No white dress. We can both wear shorts. I won’t just have jetted in from work on some documentary, stuck overnight at the O’Hare Hilton where I dance with a robot as strangers drink and smile, bar tab on their company, Lake Michigan wind in the air filling my head with all the places I could go. Alone. Let us be barefoot. A few sags and wrinkles later, not the shiny-as-glass hair and faces we had then: unproven. Truth: I didn’t know what I was getting into. Did not know what I was made of. Selfish to take you, keep you. You said I never left my post. I swear I will never leave you alone again, now. No more apples, no more snakes. I have cut myself on so many edges. Licked my wounds to soul-healed. Scars kintsugi, all gold light – I am finally a character I’d like to write. Late for the Sky instead of Pachelbel’s Canon in D as we trudge together down a long high aisle of ruddy dirt. Come with me. Rut with me. Still believe we are immortal. Let me talk you into mixing both our ashes in one urn, have the kids release our bones in the Aegean off Santorini. I promise I will obey. This time. Now that you have stopped wanting me to. 
 
**

Young with My Husband in the Soufriere Hills
 
Arrival in the middle of the night
 
Volcano heart like many islands. Vulcan god of fire and forge. Long flight LA to Miami to San Juan, then puddle jumper, then long bumpy cab ride in streetlight-less Montserrat dark. Boss’s villa. Brought along two USC friends. Husband and I take the master suite. Long cock roaches in sheets. He says I can’t sleep here. I say I’ll crush any bugs when I roll over on them. 
 
Close to Venezuela
 
Wake to a circle of windows, 360 ocean views, Alp Cliff. I hate/love the pretension of houses with names. British colony. In town, head dude’s racing green Jaguar displayed on a greener lawn. Maid mad at us for bashing coconuts on the pool deck to make coconut chips, stain of the fruit’s womb like wiped blood. Crime scene. Our coconut chips come out tasteless. Stains still there if the villa still is. Volcano erupts a few years after we leave, covering everything in feet of ash.
 
Almost died at sea again
 
We visit a secluded beach via tin boat, when a storm comes. Thorns under sheltering trees, stinging red ants, ruined 35 mm Canon. On the hasty return lightning fizzes, hits the Caribbean all around us. I break the last of my mother’s commandments: stay off the water in an electrical storm. Our Charon in sunglasses in pounding rain tells us he is Danny from Walk of Life by Dire Straits. They and the Rolling Stones recorded here, at Air Studios. Like my home state, Maine, locals can’t afford to live by the ocean.
 
Moment of rare and unexpected grace
 
Hiking the Soufriere Hills, it smells hellish like sulfur, yellows our Ex Officio clothes, you can put a fingernail into the chalk chartreuse cliff face. Under the waterfall, sudden tug on my long straight wet hair: a beaming small Black boy holds onto my ponytail, simply holds it and smiles, as if it might be something beautiful as a cat’s tail. His mother telling him No stop let go of the woman’s hair. Me smiling back at him which is to say It’s okay hold on all you want isn’t hair weird.

**

Back Wall, Molokini
 
Within the atoll’s arms, a Maui postcard: crowd of boats, noise, tourists in bright clothes, pineapple and Oreos, sea bluer than sky, sheltered from weather. Back of the atoll is another country: wind, whitecaps, black-troughed waves, 300’ straight drop of rock wall. Colder darker faster water, blue grey to briny forest green to darkness. Advanced divers only. Divemaster Alain, just back from Alaska with the Cousteau group, tells us Remember your training. Keep track of your buoyancy. This is a drift dive. Your depth can vary 60’ without you even noticing, which of course can be fatal. Someone tells a story of a woman who died here because she panicked, twirled down 300’ like a doll in neoprene, when all she had to do was release her weight belt. Due to the current, the boat drops us off at one side of the atoll, will retrieve us on the other. Engine can’t stop running, or the boat will be carried away. Live entry: your right hand on the right shoulder of the person in front of you. Dive… dive… dive! Swim clear, avoid the prop. My first dive since babies have passed through my body. Ocean fast, relentless, 60’ down, 70’. The convex atoll face, its drop astonish. Plan was explore a ledge where sharks hang out. Instead, our team plastered like pinned butterflies against a solid sheet of water. Marvel movie. Not so much fear as power of the ocean. I would genuflect, incline my head at least, if I could move. We manage to unpeel ourselves from the transparent glue trap. Head count. No one missing. Ultimate affair, I surrender my flesh to the sea’s mouth, all theory and technique born anew as instinct. Cooled, coated in salt, moved by tides inside, I get what I came for: brush with the infinite. After, don’t get any higher than a barstool. Husband and I load up on carbs (hot buttered macaroni), eat and giggle in the shower. In the fancy marble bathtub our gear soaks in fresh water.
 
**

Sherry Abaldo lives with her husband Mario in Las Vegas, NV and rural Maine where she grew up. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, ONE ART (Top 10 Read, July 2024), The Ekphrastic Review, Rattle, Down East Magazine, and on The History Channel and PBS among other outlets. Her poems are forthcoming in Eunoia Review and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Southern California film school. She is a PADI certified advanced SCUBA diver and has a boating license from the Penobscot Bay (Maine) Sail and Power Squadron. Her website is sherryabaldo.com.
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Lenny DellaRocca

3/24/2025

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What Sleep May Bring
 
I turn in my sleep and each shimmering vignette falls into a box in the attic. The recurring child with sunflower eyes, the man with a voice from October ninth, and a gypsy gazing from a cracked mirror. There are teachers with the heads of giraffes. My uncle is a black girl with a speech impediment. At breakfast my wife says, I dreamt I was flying down the street I grew up on, and I say: Einstein told me to stand at the window to download a new god. Many dreams are shut up in that box, but do they escape after one dies. Is that why my mother died wide-eyed. Maybe she was watching picnics in the Catskills where unknown family played bocci. Was it wrong to shut her eyes like I’d seen in movies. Did that end her dreams before she flew to her familiar dead. Who’s to say we don’t wake in a previous life knowing something we aren’t supposed to know. That time I saw a note under a windshield wiper eight hours before Susan put it there, was that a dream from a life phasing in from another sleep in which I turned onto my back, waking for a moment before diving back into another life still to come.
 
**
 
Waves Dream
 
My therapist says pay attention to how I feel in dreams. Especially the strange ones. I told her I dreamt about gravity waves again. It’s said they travel at the speed of light and make invisible ripples in space. They squeeze and stretch anything in their path as they pass. That’s word for word from Wikipedia, I tell her. I wonder if that’s why I felt like I was on the other side of deja vu. Here we go, she says. If you’ve ever been in love with the wrong woman you know what I mean. Her again, she says. Yes, French kisses and arguments with the intensity of a wah-wah pedal. My therapist rolls her eyes. But it was tidal waves back then. Ever have those. They’re different than gravity waves. I had another witch doctor then. Not as sarcastic as you. Anyway, Susan sat in the break room with a cup of tea and a love letter to another guy. That night I’m at the beach on a sunny day. And here it comes, the wave, so high I can’t see the top of it. I woke up sick and white. I pissed myself. How did you feel. In the dream, I mean. Like I swallowed the moon. Men aren’t so different than women when they try to let go, she says. Let go. How do you let go of a birthmark. She was the light switch in a room full of love triangles. I’m writing this stuff down. Do you want a copy. What about now, these other waves. Well, the vertigo comes and goes, and the ripples, they’re invisible aren’t they. Sometimes I don’t even know she’s there.
 
**
 
Fame Dream
 
Orson Wells flickers at an outdoor cafe, his left hand in his hair at the back of his head. He’s pulling something out of a dream he’s had. I don’t know how I know this. He’s telling a stranger opposite him that there’s a note in the air clean as Eve before she put the world in her mouth. He says her mouth is all the art the world needs. When she spoke I could hear her, Orson says, I could hear her from the other end of a long line of oak trees on either side of a well-worn path marching to a white mansion in Louisiana. I think it was Heaven, he says. The stranger sips espresso from a demitasse made of egg shell. A bird once flew from this cup. I think of the day my mother died when I think of birds flying from cups, the stranger says. Orson and the stranger don’t seem to know I’m standing here camera in hand until the shutter clicks. Sparrows hopping under the table bounce away like electrons in a physics diagram. They look at me now, Orson, stranger, wide-eyed surprised that only sudden rain brings when it falls from an open sky so blue the sun stops on its wheels. Orson says he’d like me to join them, Have a biscotti, he says. It tastes like Greek music. I don’t know how it can, I say. But I must go. And I do. I leave. At the next cafe in an endless row of cafes, Lillian Gish is having lunch with someone who seems to be disappearing. I reach for my camera, but Lillian puts out her hand, touches mine, and I can’t stop crying. It’s ok, she says. Listen, can you hear that. It’s Charlie. A small bird flies out of her cup. 
 
**
 
Mother in a Snow Globe
 
My mother plays Beautiful Dreamer electrified in lamplight. There’s a blizzard. It’s hard not to fall asleep. I imagine I’m sitting on the milk box frozen shut on the stoop, the oaks hold out their arms trying to dance in the snow. The kitchen makes itself known, yellow wall phone wants to make a call to anyone up this late. There must be others not asleep. Perhaps the stranger from that day in the ‘40s, the man with a blonde guitar who my sister said was crying. Celia was there. Said our mother spoke to him so quietly it was like taking a bath in an empty house or crows watching people go by from the trees. The three of them stood on electrified ice. Snow stopped in an old movie, Celia said, and everyone in town sang Auld Lang Syne. She was only four so it made sense. It was hard for her not to fall asleep holding our mother’s hand. I imagine the amber glow above the stove, the mouse in the corner with its hunger, music coming undone by the chord in my mother’s hands, and the colored lights in the eaves outside making it snow all night. Trees trying to hold onto each other in the moonless yard. That look on their faces. The house is a love story from the other side of town, the piano in the air, dreaming. Outside again I watch my mother electrified in lamplight. Colored lights in the eaves, below them the window-box of black shriveled flowers burnt with snow.
 
**

Wistful Secrets
 
Cat, you call yourself the Queen of Gardens and I don’t dispute that. But I know a mockingbird who disagrees though I’m baffled by his language. Penny, you believe your cousins fell from the sky and invented starlight. Maybe, but only if they gather together in a million silver heaps if they want to be more than wishful thinking. And Train, dearest Train, you have grandeur in your whistle even if it calls to barrel fires and men sleeping in the dirt offering hubcap talismans before your flying windows. Come, my black wisdom tooth, curl up in my lap and dream of carp. Listen, my little shiny man, we have a date so be careful of pocket holes and sidewalks. And you my handsome machine, lift from your clickety-clackety click and rise. Rise into a bright blue sky and give the clouds a ride.
 
**
​
Sanctuary
 
When darkness is jumbled up in my heart I wade into your river, love, and a plane pulls an orange moon behind it, clouds write memoirs about fleeting sky on water and trees on a sunny bank lean to see themselves disappear, a weathered fence staggers through weathered hills, and three feet above rough ground some jazz in the dying sun, a parade of wildflowers, I mean, a commotion of yellow jackets thrumming for queen’s favor. When cruel things are jumbled all to hell in my heart your face reminds me of another country where saints look out from doorways in the rain. Five hundred shrines of Madonna and Child in five hundred tired streets, fountains older than some wars. You’re my home where clotheslines drip clean angels, a church stoop beneath the moon. 

**

Lenny DellaRocca is founding editor and publisher of South Florida Poetry Journal-SoFloPoJo and publisher/editor of Witchery, a place for Epoems. He has new poems in Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Rattle and forthcoming in I-70 Review.

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George Cassidy Payne

3/17/2025

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Scarborough Fair Chicken

Tulsi said, "This is a dish my dad always made for high holidays. He used to tell me that the most important part was pouring white wine over the meat after it had been baking for 30 minutes. The way he talked about the herbs made me feel like our planet was made solely for the pleasure of our taste buds."

For the Greeks, parsley symbolized death and rebirth, often used to decorate tombs. Rosemary was the herb of remembrance. Sage symbolized immortality. Thyme represented courage—Roman generals embroidered it on their togas. Legend has it that the infant Jesus's manger was filled with it. Sweetness. The "virgin's humility." Peace tied to the sheath. Arrows in the quiver. An unrequited love. "I have an aiker of good ley-land/ which lyeth low by your sea strand." Sober and grave grow merry in time.

Almost 50, Tulsi is the spice vendor at the west end of the Winter Shed. Today, she’s wearing a royal blue and cream blouse with white lace and seashell patterns, her grandmother's pearl earrings, and a razor blade necklace from her ex-husband. Her black shag is effortlessly left alone, a few dyed strands falling over her hazelwood brown eyes.

"The chicken breast must be boneless and pounded thin. Wrapped in mozzarella and prosciutto. When it’s finished, lay it on a saucer full of melted tarragon butter," she said. "You know, my dad was the biggest Simon and Garfunkel fan that ever lived. When I make this, I’m making it for all three of them," she added wistfully.

She’s a painter. The dish is a pastel of egg yolk gold, emerald globs of oil, and a long, slender wishbone hanging by the side like a chewed filet of river perch. Severed lemons barely kiss in a bed of kale, like two mollusks making love in algae. Tulsi is the person in the market who makes everything she touches more interesting. She not only knows how to cook, but she also knows how to make food mean something. She knows the stories behind the dishes and tells them like an elder describing creation myths.

"Does it make music?" I asked.

"Yeah, it does. It’s kind of funny, actually—when I hear it, it’s in the key of E Dorian. Funeral doom metal. Have you listened to that before? My ex was in a band before things got ugly with us. This dish makes me feel closer to my dad, but it also sounds like the morning I found him all alone in his bathroom... Did you know 'Scarborough Fair' comes from an old English canticle? It’s about an elfin knight who came to a beautiful woman’s window. He promised to abduct her unless she performed an impossible task."

"What was the task?" I asked.

"No one knows," she said. "Maybe that is what keeps the ballad alive."


**

Fish Mom

Clara is the "fish mom." For 25 years, she has worked every weekend at the market, running Atlantic Fresh Fish. Her family has been in the business for three generations. Boston is in her blood, the way oil is in olives or wine in grapes.

Red Snapper, Tilapia filets, New Bedford Cod, Shrimp—shell on and peeled—Salmon, Marlin, Kingfish, and Mako fill her stand. Half-filled plexiglass tubs, freeze-wrapped cutlets, and cardboard boxes shoved in ice with names carefully printed in Sharpie black all line the counter. Her father’s first scale, looking like the first computer sold out of a Silicon Valley garage, still sits in its place. And then there are the clams.

"Have you ever really looked at a clam?" Kim asks me, just as she begins to share what I’m missing. "Clams have a foot, you know. They use it to burrow into sand or mud, anchoring themselves." She notices my expression. "This little guy, where he's from, could live for over 100 years. The quahog can live for over 500 years. Just think about that. It was alive when Martin Luther got booted from the Church. Some of this guy's friends were still around when the conquistadores took down the Aztec Empire."

My disgust starts to morph into admiration. "Clams can change their gender," she continues. "They're hermaphrodites. They may start as males and transition to females as they get older. Pretty cool, huh?" My disgust coming back.

"Yeah, that is pretty cool," I have to admit. Then, half-jokingly, I ask, "Do they taste better over time?" Instantly, I regret how sexist that sounds.
​

Kim laughs it off. "I'm not sure about that. But guess what else?" She holds one up. "They may not have a brain, but they’re smarter than you’d think. They have sensory organs that let them respond to their environment. They can detect light, vibrations, even chemicals in the water." She pauses. "And they have a muscle that lets them close their shell tightly if a predator comes by. These guys know how to survive in the most dangerous places on earth."

I get the sense she could tell me just as much about tuna if I asked. I thank her for sharing all that about clams. It occurs to me that knowing what you eat is more than just knowing where it came from or how it was prepared. Knowing what you eat means truly understanding what makes it special. That takes time, curiosity, and someone like Clara.

There is no such thing as food—only organisms that we choose to eat or not eat. All organisms have value beyond our desire to consume them, even the smallest and most unassuming creatures.

**

Shepherd's Pie

Pióg an aoire, Escondidinho, Shepherd's pie—it all means using what's left over to make something edible. For the past week, that's pretty much how Samantha has approached life. She’s not the type to sulk. He left. So what? He always does. He told her she’s pathetic. So what? She doesn’t need him anyway. Unshowered, uncombed, her red, frizzled hair held by two stainless steel, dog bone-shaped barrettes, her long, pale legs shiver from the breeze coming through the kitchen window. It's 10 AM, and her glass is full of Sheldrake’s chardonnay. Rubbing—almost massaging—her bruised and tattooed left arm (bouquet garni entwined in rose bushes) and dragging on a Marlboro Light, she knows that in three hours, she will be dead. This pie will be the last thing she leaves this world.

Many believe that peasant housewives invented Shepherd’s pie as an easy way to use what was left from the Sunday roast. In Ireland, they were too poor to use beef, so they used lamb. In the northern parts of England, they couldn’t dare call it what the Irish did, so it became Cottage Pie. In North America, most workers ate their meat, potatoes, and corn separately, but some (mostly of Asian origins) combined their rations to create a more communal dish. The French-Canadian railway workers liked it and called it “pâté chinois,” which loosely translates to Chinese pie.

Well into the 20th century, the absence of refrigeration made it necessary for many domestic kitchens to store cooked meat rather than raw. In the 1940s, chef Louis Diat recalled that “When housewives bought their Sunday meat, they selected pieces large enough to make into leftover dishes for several days.”

Hot on Sunday,
Cold on Monday,
Hashed on Tuesday,
Minced on Wednesday,
Curried Thursday,
Broth on Friday,
Cottage pie Saturday.

Fidgeting into her burgundy-coloured, rubber-clog-like boots, Samantha steps outside and sits on her front steps. The world feels a little less important today. The blue jays squawk louder than usual. There’s a gentle breeze. Fall is coming. No one worries about her, just as no one worries about gravel stones on the ground; they belong there and don’t mind being stepped on. She wears black trousers and a black V-neck shirt—she never misses a shift. Inside, the pie is baking; the cheddar is beginning to drape over the little snowbanks of whipped potatoes. The carrots, peas, and lamb, all falling apart together, permeate the house. Samantha lights another cigarette and thinks about who she could give the pie to. For the first time in days, she feels herself smiling. Her mind is made up. No one at work needs to know she’s not coming in.

**

Alma-Ata

I called him Dad, though he was actually my father-in-law. For over 60 years, he worked as a gardener. He was set to go to Vietnam but chose the orchards of Mexico instead. When he finally came back, all he knew how to do for a living was grow apples. Dad could tell you everything there is to know about a Pink Lady, but he could never keep a girlfriend. He could give a lecture on Galas, but he never went to his own prom. He knew Fujis and Honeycrisps, Pacific Roses and Braeburns, Northern Spys, SnapDragons, and Jonagolds, but he never bothered to own a car or open a bank account.

He told me that apples are the oldest source of food in our history as a species. Somewhere, he read that apples originated in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, east of the Caspian Sea. The wild apples there, Malus sieversii, have been growing for millions of years.

Dad even knew that the Jesuits were the ones who brought them to North America. The only apple here before them was the crab apple—cider for foraging bears and livestock feed for hardy pilgrims.

What most people do not know is that he saw apples as a promise from the Maker. The way we read Genesis is all wrong, he would tell me. It is not a forbidden fruit (it is not mentioned in the Bible). The fruit is forbidden to be eaten unless the person eating it is worthy. Apples were eucharistic to him. He saw in their center the aboriginal fingerprints of charcoal-black star men. For him, the skin of a well-nurtured apple was like a brick torched in a cosmic fire. To bite into one was to consume the tender, custard ochre muscle of Christ. Through his eyes, in his trees, they hung like rubies in the Garden of Babylon. Split into halves with a pocket knife, they spread their thighs like moth wings—Lepidoptera.

The Cameo was his favorite, a majestic globe of flame red and scarlet. In his hand, it felt like a ball of energy, like chi. The force of life itself pulsated through his palm to the tips of his nails. He never went to college and never studied with monks. But in Mexico, one summer, browsing a bookstore in Oaxaca, he bought a used copy of the Tao Te Ching. So simple. So urgent. So available. So kind. So happy.

**

Nervous Breakdown

"Banano! Banano! Banano!" I heard the market vendor shouting from behind a weather-worn plywood picnic table. The man wore aviator sunglasses, had bushy salt-and-pepper hair, and a shapely mustache the colour of snow fox fur. He was more excited than he should have been to be hawking bananas at 6:30 in the morning on a brisk, drizzly October Sunday in Rochester.

I kept telling myself they were just bananas. But I had already begun to lose my grip before I even got out of the car. Stalks and blades. Pesticides and sterility. Chrome yellow-fleshed corpses stacked on top of each other, seared and soldered together at the stubs like amputated fingers. Bodies bathed in pesticides, clumped together in giant pools like eels in a hatchery. Roundworm-killing injections in the ground. Dermatitis. Kidney failure. Neurotoxins. Sliced and diced beige disks, like stacked poker chips.

"Banano! Banano! Banano!" The market vendor shouted louder. One dollar! One dollar!"

My forehead was throbbing, and sweat was beginning to drip down my eyelids. The Desert Storm fatigue-tan cardboard boxes in front of him looked like ammo cartridges. Dole... Dole... Dole... The "O" in the name blasted apart like a thermonuclear reaction. Ethylene gas blasting in all directions. Hormones blasting in all directions. Rapist dragon's semen spraying everywhere. Lost children. Poisoned fields. Birth defects. Finely sharpened machetes glistening in the plantation's sunlight, sparkling light beams jumping off the edges of the knives like citrine crystals. Loads and loads of them, carried secretly through the jungle on shoulders in bright navy-blue garbage bags. God, my head hurts.

As I looked up, a twenty-something RIT environmental studies major with a Columbia windbreaker, hemp sandals, and a frohawk of saffron-orange hair leaned over and told me that bananas are shaped to retrieve sunlight. "They go through a process called negative geotropism—they grow against gravity," he said while tossing several bushels into a small Wegmans tote bag. I had already begun to forget why I had come here in the first place. The sun was finally rising, a school-bus-yellow ball of information punishing my retinas to death.

**

​
George Cassidy Payne is a writer, philosopher, and crisis counselor whose work focuses on mental health, social justice, and ethical reflection. With a background in philosophy and humanities, George has taught a wide range of courses and contributed to various community initiatives. His writing explores themes of resilience, the human experience, and the intersection of technology and well-being. George is also a 988 Crisis Text/Chat counselor and specializes in suicide prevention. His passion for fostering meaningful dialogue and promoting mental wellness shapes both his writing and his work in public service.
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