My Father as a Shadowbox with Six Compartments

after Joseph Cornell
 
I.
A crib to hold him as a baby, his chubby and wobbly legs held steady by outstretched hands His straight blond hair newly cut with the help of a bowl. That same crib holds him as a toddler, his straight blond hair still cut with an upside-down bowl. still dressed in all white but this time with a sailor bow at the neck. Here he is as a toddler standing on a chair. In the same box he appears with his first bowl haircut, dressed all in white with his high-button black shoes. 
 
II.
A crate to corral him as he takes charge of his younger brothers. Now dark-haired, he is dressed in a plaid shirt and plaid socks. He wears short pants, not yet old enough despite his protests to wear long pants, a rite of passage into manhood.  
 
III.
A barrack, long and skinny, his home while training in the US Army Air Corps. From his lips dangles a cigar as he sits on the steps of the Mississippi bunk. 
 
IV.
An aircraft carrier that radios its equipment needs to him as supply sergeant. He sits for his official military photograph, the eagle prominent on his cap.
 
V.
A concrete and brick structure, his nine-to-five home at the supermarket he and his brothers established in 1953. The signage proudly announces [last name], a legacy continuing from his parents’ general store next door.
 
VI.
A casket that anticipates his heart failure from dialysis even as he sits in gray-haired retirement at the family reunion table, his glasses tucked into his plaid shirt pockets, his lips dangling a grin.
 
**

On the Anniversary of Your Death, 1 Av 5711 (August 3, 1951)
 
I give you a larger ladle to cook the Shabbos cholent so I can taste it along with your Galitizian Yiddish vowels. I show you how to use a glucose meter and I will schedule your appointment with the endocrinologist and drive you there myself. With my help, you will live longer so your grandchildren will know how it feels to hold your hand and crawl into your lap, taste your stuffed cabbage in white sauce with raisins. I will hand you sturdy handkerchiefs when you learn your brothers and sisters have been gassed at Belzec. I have filled out and submitted Pages of Testimony to Yad Vashem to remember them all by name. I am your mouthpiece, your eynekel of eyneklikh, not the eldest or the shrewdest, but the one who will always stay by your side no matter what. I offer you the family tree that Cousin Izzy kept on a window shade until someone threw away. I reconnect your family as much as they are willing, even Cousin Blanche’s nieces who don’t know of the fight you and Blanche had. But I do, because Blanche wouldn’t talk to me when she found out I am your granddaughter. I am not named for you, unlike my sister and two cousins. But you know I have the mettle to cross that chasm between here and there, between past and present, between our generations. Eva, I bear witness to your life, stand in your spaces. I give you zakhor, remembrance, visit your gravesite because my father, your eldest, showed me where it was, and light the Yahrzeit candle in your memory.
 
**
 
The Prodigal Granddaughter Comes to Zaromb (Zaręby Kościelne)
 
I stand in the place my grandfather deserted, the place where his father disowned him, where his ancestors lived for generations in lopsided wooden houses, sinking into the Brok River bed, where they hid in root cellars when the Polish or Russian raiders came thrashing over the shtetl’s four gravel roads, where wedding processions marched through the marketplace to get to the brick synagogue guarded by carved lions of Judah, where Soviets dug surveillance trenches in Leshner Forest at the end of no-name road, where I visited in 2008, and nearly kissed the ground, grateful my grandfather left in 1913.
 
**

Barbarossa
 
Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa had a red beard and lived in a cliff called Kyffhäuser. I had a red beard, too, as I performed my German class play I wrote about Barbarossa. I was meant to write about him, our names so similar. Tom, a member of my cast, made a sword of foil and lunged at the district superintendent observing the class, mortifying our German teacher worried about tenure. Legend has it that Barbarossa never died. He remains in Kyffhäuser awaiting the call with his knights to restore Germany to its greatness.  He led several twelfth-century Crusades. Nazi leaders chose to honour his legacy by naming their June 1941 attack on the Soviet Union as Operation Barbarossa. My Belarusian cousins were rounded up and eventually murdered just like their Rhineland ancestors during the Crusades. My German 3 textbook did not mention the medieval massacres or Operation Barbarossa. I tossed my red wig and beard into the trash. I burned the script.
 
**

Erasure
 
I didn’t notice building façades, meticulous frescoes, extreme Fraktur serifs above doorways, barbed church spires, medieval watchtower gates, upper market alleys of pattern-painted homes, Stockwerk labyrinth to remind centuries of passersby they were in Germany. I didn’t notice blueprints of intercultural friendships, construction of alliances or architecture of camaraderie.
 
I knew how to take the red accordion bus downtown on my student pass. I knew how to trek through the valley, past sheep, to university. I knew how to listen in class and eat in the student Mensa to save money.
 
Through Facebook, I reach out to Debbie from my Junior Year Abroad in Germany cohort. She says she has no memory of me. I’d been the ghost of Haus R dorm, the American student who didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. who buried agoraphobia in words and pages, who hid ink-stained hands in aerogram folds, who protected herself.

 
**

Jam Session Syncopation
 
after Jazz by Man Ray (USA) 1919
 
It’s all about the beat, the burnt sienna of the saxophone, the eel-silver of the trumpet, the guitar’s hazy hollow sliding through barren white into tangerine, all swirling in swing, harmonizing with harmonica, bebopping the blues to slip into the groove. The conductor drives rhythm’s key as we scoo-bee-doo-bee-do along.
 
**
  
All That Jazz
 
after Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) by Jackson Pollock (USA) 1950
 
Falling leaves drop their chaotic chords as they swirl in the wind from branch to ground. The daytime clarinet growls its shrinking hours while the piano percusses September’s light to December’s darkness. And in between the rain, fog, and sometimes snow, the trumpet shouts celebration, the drum cracks time, and the saxophone wails yet another loss.
 
**
 
Barbara Krasner became enamored with the prose poem through Lorette C. Luzajic's WOW workshop. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, Cimarron Review, Nimrod, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.

​Chicago Jazz Club
 
The place is packed, but we find hard seats in the back. Joe pays for a bottle of Macallan 18 with a couple of C notes and from our new, soft seats in front of the stage, we can talk to the musicians. The trumpet player tells me he bought his horn from Wynton Marsalis. Me and the Macallan believe him. The band finishes with “When It’s Sleepytime Down South” and “Embraceable You.” The next day I can’t remember the name of the club, but I can’t forget the jazzed trumpeter who loves his horn with a calligraphy WM engraved on its bell.

​**

Exports
 
The world says we want it, if it comes from America. Send us hot dogs, ice cream cones, and Big Macs, complete with obesity and Type 2 Diabetes. And tacos too, even though they came from Mexico. Send us American jazz and Satchmo with his raspy New Orleans French and Coltrane blowing his American brass saxophone. Baseball  speaks Spanish, Japanese, and hundreds of other languages. The game is played in Cuba and North Korea, the only two countries in the world that do not sell Coca Cola. In 1990s Poland, people paid rent with Levi denim jeans. American vaccines traveled the Earth, all but ending smallpox, polio, measles, and mumps. Frisbees fly around the globe and there are Costcos  in 14 countries. 
 
 
                         A man in Hamburg
                         shot people in church
                         just like in America 
 
 **
 
Public Dog 

This two-dimensional dog looks friendly with a red bullseye circle around one eye. You can click on anything you want, and it disappears for an instant, as if to fetch your purchase, then comes back, center screen, to help you find something else. This dog is smart. It will show you how to pay with PayPal, Visa, or Venmo, or help you complete a store credit application. It will show you how to find past purchases and offers new, similar merchandise. Just yesterday, the dog got me a quart of half and half and, although I did not ask for it,  offered coffee beans. It is a compassionate canine that suggests contributions to local and international causes. Nobody seems to take care of the dog, but it appears well-fed and cheerful all the time. It is becoming an American Icon.
 
**
 
A Guy I Used to Work For
 
If it appears I am not paying attention, he says at a teacher meeting, it’s most likely because I am multitasking. I recall a recent visit to his office, at  his request, when I waited for eye contact. As I stood there, I observed the icons in his office: diplomas, awards, a Chivas poster, and Tommy Lasorda and Vin Scully bobble heads. I watched him undress his secretary. He remanded me without looking up. I promised to improve and left. At the end of the teacher talk he adds, Though I will be multitasking, please know you will have my undivided attention.
 
**

Baby Jesus Overwhelms Virgin Mary 
 
Months after the birth of Jesus Christ, Mary and Joseph are settling into parenthood at their small house in Nazareth. Mary contemplates Joseph as he planes a rail for Jesus’ bed and admits aloud the Son of God is pushing her to her limits. The boy cannot yet walk but speaks fluent Aramaic and wants to talk about nothing but ethics, religion, and God. Jesus has figured out that the census is a tax tool for Rome and says he doesn’t think his mother and Joseph should have headed down to Bethlehem so close to her time, especially because they had no prearranged accommodations. He has forgiven them, but Mary adds, He forgives everybody for everything. 
 
**

This poem first appeared in Loch Raven Review.
 
**

Catch
 
I sit with my father, looking out at the swimming pool he played in with grandchildren he no longer knows. When I tell him he should have paid me more to clean it in the sixties, he shrugs his shoulders. I pick up an Abraham Lincoln biography and notice he’s on the same page he was last week. It’s interesting how Abe picked his cabinet, I say. My father wrinkles his nose and chuckles. Setting sunlight reflects off the glass-covered photo of my father with his mixed-doubles tennis partner and sparkles in the diamonds set into the gold ring my mom insisted he buy to replace his simple wedding band, when they moved to Palm Springs. Hanging beside a letter from Ronald Reagan, he swears carries the President’s wet signature, is an appreciation award from the Southern California Lumbermen’s Association and an old photo of my mother wearing a bathing suit. My dad catches the ball I throw, looking at me with eyes I’ve never seen and slightly parted lips, his tongue flicking in and out of his mouth, like a lizard.
 
**
​                                                                                                                                           
Cultural Ignorance 
                                                                                                         
The assignment was difficult, especially for English learners. Compare and contrast: Many students could not understand it, let alone do it. I had imagined my teaching experience would be like Robin William’s in The Dead Poets Society, but I was teaching in a public school. My students were not all white boys, but diverse, representing more than a dozen cultures. I was not teaching English literature, but English as a second language to teenagers, many of whom were reluctant to learn it. I am well-versed in English grammar and teaching strategies but knew little about my students’ cultures. Tram Nguyen submitted an exemplary essay. Not only did she compare and contrast, her paper contained an introduction that clearly stated her purpose, followed by claims and plenty of evidence. Her conclusion was complete, restating her findings with no surprises. In class, before I returned students papers, I stood beside Tram’s desk. I held her work up and explained why her writing was so successful, my right hand rested on her black hair. When I finished, I looked for a reaction. She turned to her friend and mouthed, He touched my head.
 
**
                                                                         Downtown Rodeo
 
Petco Park bright lights flood any event that pays rent, and on this cool, January night, they shine on a rodeo. Fans can buy fourteen-dollar hot dogs and eighteen-dollar beers, sold in the stands by employees of phony charities. On imported dirt, an unbroken horse leaps and bucks to throw its rider on about the same spot Tatis Jr. missed a National’s grounder  that rolled into the outfield and let a winning run cross the plate. A lot of people are drunk because they brought plenty of money and there is no seventh inning at a rodeo. About four hundred feet from home plate, where Elton John played pian in his concert last year, a RAM pickup hauls a Brahma in an open trailer, to a pen down in front of the stands. A cowboy tries to ride it for eight seconds, as me and the beer cheer for the bull. 
 
**
 
Trombone is the French Word for Paperclip
 
Ron Salisbury holds up a paperclip and informs the class the French word for it is trombone. I recognize the similar curves found in the wire clip and the horn’s tubing and have heard trombone players can goose the marcher in front of them by extending the slide to its seventh position. I can also imagine an errant clip dropping an internationally important document in Versailles mud. But then I think of Salisbury talking to the clip and the trombone in terms of numbered positions, as if he is trying to teach them ballet.
 
**

This poem first appeared in the San Diego Poetry Annual.
 
**
​
Jobsite Talk 1960s
 
Bobby Gongora was a fast framer, but I remember him more for his skill of climbing framed walls, like an animal, using only his fingers and toes. He rarely spoke and when he did, it was about sex or carpentry. I can’t remember the name of the joister who got fried in Alpine when a strand of his long, sweat-wet hair fell into the connection of his Skilsaw plug and an extension cord. The superintendent was always called a name similar to shit-for-brains. Bill Knauer ended an argument with his wife by firing a round through a TV and shouting, Who’s next? Spider could never find his tape measure and Hog Man told him if it was up his ass, he’d know where it was. Older guys talked about local magnates like Trepte, Golden, and Hazard, who we thought were building the world, and Ronnie Thomas kissed their asses by saying he would like to see solid concrete from La Jolla to El Centro. There seemed to be unlimited resources, like when a customer used fifty cents worth of electricity to cut four inches off a perfectly good stud and wrote with a too-big carpenter pencil, Meet me at Vaquero’s, 6 am. Everybody talked about Tony Rosenlund, the golf pro developer who set his secretary up in a Santee apartment to take care of his favorite subcontractors. He took me up in his Citabria where we did everything but crash and scraped a wingtip landing at Gillespie Field. The FAA was still investigating the incident when he blew his brains out. A lot of days, after crews rolled up, we went to the Doll House and watched Jake’s girlfriend dance.
 
 **

This poem first appeared in Loch Raven Review.

**

Ron Lauderbach a San Diego poet who writes poetry to entertain and preserve memories. He is a retired English/journalism teacher with an MFA poetry from San Diego State University. His work is in several journals including: Mudfish, The Chiron Review, I70 Review, The MacGuffin, San Diego Union, Saturday Evening Post, Reader's Digest, San Diego Poetry Annual, Loch Raven Review, and more. He won honourable mention in the Steve Kowit Poetry contest and has a chapbook entitled Snapshots.

Ode to Blue
 
Why do I find the colour blue so exquisite? Viewing blue make me feel serene, happy, soft and kind, full of wonder. Turns out the clear day sky, deep sea, and blue eyes are only optical effects. Historically, blue was the most expensive pigment, created from the rare lapis lazuli gemstone. The Blessed Virgin Mary usually wears blue, and it came to suggest holiness, humility, virtue, but it’s also associated with harmony, infinity, imagination, sadness, the cold. Blue appears in some of my favorite flowers: clematis, columbine, hydrangea, iris, forget-me-nots, love-in-a-mist. In ancient Egypt, blue was used in burials to protect the dead in the afterlife. And why is blue on white so pleasing, as in Chinese porcelain, Delft earthenware, British Wedgewood. Some believe blue improves blood pressure, heart rate, mental clarity, spiritual growth. My husband and I meditated on blue. Blue leaves me dreamy, as if gazing into Van Gogh’s night skies, Monet’s blue water lilies—buoyant. 
 
**
 
Do You Remember
 
Sucrets Antiseptic Throat Lozenges that came in a 3 ¼ by 2 ½-inch beige & navy hinged metal tin with rounded corners? In the 1950s, 45 cents for 24 individually wrapped—minty menthol that cooled, soothed your mouth & throat. Mom filled the emptied tins with buttons sorted by colour, labeled in all caps on a strip of masking tape, kept them in the sewing room built in our lower-level stairwell—a small, cool, secret space I adored.
 
She taught me to sew at the age of eight, at ten the special stitch to create the hole a button would be pushed through to secure a garment on one’s body. 
 
O, to hold each tin in my palm, shake it lightly left to right, echoey sound, click it open, finger each jewel—flat to shank to stud to toggle types, with two to five holes, tiny to oversized—circle, oval, square, rectangle, triangle; made of plastic, glass, wood, metal, shell, bone, leather, fabric.
 
O, to touch those buttons nestled in tins as I dreamt of fabrics they might be attached to: mother-of-pearl on a silk blouse with lace collar, gold anchor buttons on a navy wool pea jacket with epaulets, tortoiseshell ones on a double-breasted ivory linen blazer. But what buttons did Mom sew to the wool tartan plaid skirt she planned—purple crossed with fuchsia, turquoise, amber? 
 
**

The Outside Bleeds In
 
In dreams, I walk many houses, beginning with the home I lived in until the age of five, the one my father and nine siblings grew up in, rooms I barely recall but for one with sheet-covered furniture, another with wallpaper of tiny roses, me standing bedside for a last visit with Grandma Alma, her pinned-up braids framing her face. 
 
Houses I never lived in haunt me—old, many-storied ones unoccupied for decades—version of a home I once occupied, but the décor doesn’t match my memory, as if a surrogate of me lives there.
 
Ceilings, walls, floors breached—bleeding the outside in. Kudzu creeps across floors, ceilings. Paint peels off walls in surreal patterns. Dusty, discoloured floor tiles. In my dreams, I don’t suffer from allergies. I’ve entered a parallel world.  
 
A central courtyard holds massive palms, kapok, banana trees. Level with my eyes, a nest of three naked hatchlings, beaks stretched open in bloodcurdling screeches—lurid yellow mouths jarring.
 
**
 
What Sparks a Memory
 
A lark of the eye, an illusion of the moment, as when you take a photo of the full moon perched on your roof peak or centered in your bedroom windowpane cradled in the arms of a winter sycamore—moments that nourish, enchant you. As when in a darkened theatre, a man with long gray hair reading poetry reminds you of your grandmother Clara, gone thirty years—his face, his voice, morphed to her telling me a story.
 
When you open a friend’s latest novel, you meet a feisty older character Vivian, the name of your mother who died at the pandemic’s onset, how you loved seeing, reading her name and adventures, the way the novel carried her back to you.
 
The server at the restaurant where your fiction group meets is named Vivian, and when you or others say her name, a nudge of joy rises in you. This Vivian is young and lovely, makes you picture how beautiful your mother was. Your surprise when posted images of her return as Facebook memories—a jab of sadness quelled with bliss. You share them again, so they’ll spiral back next year.
 
When you read a friend’s poem that mentions seeds of Vivian lettuce, an heirloom romaine you’ve never heard of, a hum of comfort thrums through you, blooms a memory of the lettuce your mother’s mother Clara grew near her porch—the day she uprooted a head, how it tasted exquisitely crisp, bursting in your mouth like the vivid rhythm of her name, Clara, and her daughter’s, Vivian.
 
**
 
Raven at Red River Gorge
 
Perched high in a hemlock, deep shade punctured by needles of sunlight, the raven grooms, cranes its neck, plunges beak in glossy blue-black feathers, extends a wing to reach under. I’m fifteen feet away on a lodge’s second story balcony overlooking the Red River. When other birds tweet, the raven’s head jerks in that direction, beak agape as a child’s mouth lapses open when rapt in a task. 
            
Midday thickens around me. Through my camera zoom lens, I watch the raven scan left and right before cawing. It repeats the sequence, tail bobbing, body puffed up with the effort of four deep notes that echo through the canopy. Cicadas’ crescendo rises and falls as if in applause. Another raven, further away, answers. I await the moment the raven lifts off, the wings clap air.
 
**
 
Funnel Tide Green
 
Words you say as you wake from the eye of the hurricane, the lull before the back side. How a dream, and sometimes life, is like a funnel, a tunnel you fall into, climb out of. Nightmares Mom couldn’t escape. All she wanted was sleep, but feared what would come for her. Began checking her watch, hours beforehand, panic rising like a tidal wave, the thick slick of it. What overcame you right before they started anesthesia for your knee replacement. Something told you no, a voice, an instinct you wished you’d followed.
 
Your thoughts funnel, spiraling, hard to break from. You try to fall back asleep, way too early to rise for the day. Your shoulder aches, your hip, back. In one more day you’ll head for the Florida Panhandle, the gulf that gathered the water, induced by heat, to create the vortex.
 
How a body makes its own tide—the water aerobics class where we strode around the pool perimeter, faster, faster, making a riptide that carried you along until the instructor yelled reverse, when you turned the opposite direction, you hit a brick wall of water.
 
You learned to swim at five, loved it, but learned its power when your family visited the ocean,  waves knocked you down, tumbled you onto shore. The time at the waterpark slide, another child followed too fast behind you, landed on top of you, arms and legs not yours, you out of breath, unable to find air.
 
Was that how sleep was for Mom those last years of depression and worsening COPD? You vowed to make her life the best you could after Dad died. You still wonder if you could have done more, eased those final years. Depression you couldn’t control any more than she could.
 
a tunnel, a funnel, 
an open, grasping maw,
a gaping gullet.
 
**
 
Karen George is author of the poetry collections Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021), Caught in the Trembling Net (2024), and forthcoming Delight Is a Field (Shanti Arts). She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her award-winning short story collection, How We Fracture, was released by Minerva Rising Press in January 2024. Her poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lily Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. Her website is https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.

You’re Lingering in All the Right Places

My heart knows all, used to extinguishing any flame it didn’t ignite, but it stills when it comes to you. You and the waves that split me apart in the best of ways—right down the middle, where fire transpires into bliss. Right where my body is no longer whole or halved, but empty; drained willingly, fully, fortunately to you. Your tongue on a platter, this seat’s taken. I’ve booked the whole restaurant, and you’re the only thing on the menu.

Your high tides lap out any flames left to devour, the ones still burning cigarette scars on my heart. You didn’t start the fires, but you’re the firefighter, and I’m the burning house. It’s your job. Here, I don’t worry or scream or sob over the ashes of what could have been. I do not wonder how many more fires I will have to smother when I didn’t spark the flint and steel to begin with.

With you, there is no way to ignite, no fire to light, when you are drenched in me. Coated at the mouth, where I become you, and you becomes ours. Ours. Ours. Ours everything.

Your skin—hot like honey in the sweet parts of July—trailing down my back like you’ve traveled the path a million and one times and know exactly where you’re heading. Home. It’s the curvature of my spine, the dip where my side slides into my hip, the valley along my chest, and the bone-sickened fingers that long for yours.

Touch me here, grab me there, but my heart is the only thing you ever truly hold. You keep me safe, like a pocket watch graced to you by generations. You palm me like a newborn baby, fresh from the womb, gawking at the breast, and introduce me to the sun. Show me off to the world—the pearl in your oyster, the moonlight in your tide.

My heart knows all, wishing it would have found you first in its attempt to swim. Perhaps it would not have drowned so many times.
 
**
 
Tales of a Liar
 
I have spent many years plucking bits and pieces of liar’s skin out from beneath my fingertips. Where I once held on for life, moon creases at the shelter of shoulder blades, fearing a life alone rather than a life I deserved. I have emptied my hands, though. A type of withering that has sunk deep down into the marrow of my bones, eating away at the rot with a shriveled tongue until I was licked clean. So much time spent digging farther back into the ivory and crimson vessels, that I forgot to be on the lookout for a new set, finer flesh, one that would treat me right. 
 
You stumbled onto me like water finally flooding into parched earth; slow, right where it belonged, missing in action for far too long. I’d been known to believe that your kind had reached extinction long before I had a chance to delve in. A heart pure from the morning’s intentions, struck down into dusk’s promises, I had stopped bleeding myself dry over the hunt for an old wive’s tale better left untouched. Perhaps I didn’t know at the time how many slips of eternities had surrendered in my suffering, tempting me to go without, much longer than I needed. With one look into the misery, you snapped your fingers against the wick and reignited the flame.
 
There was a time where I feared the chill in my bones would never leave me, the remnants of a premature ache I was born with. That flame feeding off the pads of your fingers burned up into the center of me, branching out until I no longer felt the shake I had grown used to. I was handpicked from a void no other dared to enter before, fished out by the tips of slender digits, by the palms of your hands fleshed out along the curvature of my spine, raising me until I could taste the sun on a suit of flesh that was not made for the darkness it grew accustomed to.
 
I have washed these hands clean from a liar’s disease, peeled back skin by the layers until I could no longer catch a glimpse of the girl I’d been forced to turn into a while before. You wouldn’t even recognize her. By an act of unknown nurture, fortunate soil falling free from my neckline, you found me at the right time, just before earth spilled that very soil over my head. I cannot recall a time I could breathe clearly, let alone a time where there was not cotton and mud caked at the back of my throat. Now, though, the air is easy and a breath passes between the two of us, single in its arrival, spared by two sets of lungs working their way through chests for the same heart beat. 
 
You have wrung the tales of liars right out of my mouth.

**
 
When I Think of You, I Die, Too
 
When I think of you, I die, too.
 
You open me up like I have always been yours to touch. A flick of the finger, milking at the palm, you see all of me before you even know me. A withered flame too weak to set fire to your hands, what is there to fear about me? Me and the way my heart fades away. Farther and farther until I can no longer feel the warmth in my chest.
 
A hollow, rigid way of living, so I do not have to heave after you. Sob and spit, and cry for you, but you never wanted me anyway. A soul who cannot see me outside of the figure I cross. You want the crease of my lips, the valley along my chest, but you forget the heart that is beating underneath. 
 
I do good, but all this world feeds me is red. This heart bleeds for others, but no one is seeping for me. I can scream for hours on every ounce of hate I hold for you, but it’s never enough to keep it from fading. You dig your way in, knee deep, until I breathe you back in. A kiss of the lips, a pull at the wrist, love me until the world turns back on, forget me the second the night fades. 
 
These sides ache, crevices unknown, all ruined by you. A girl who grinned and laughed, and breathed for you, killed by you. Who was she and why can I not find her? Scream for her, but she won’t answer. She’s somewhere buried inside you, where she falls silent forever. You took her from me, a girl who knew no better. And now, I’m left with a shell of use. A monster who kills herself daily, just to be enough for you to grab onto, use as you please, toss away when you’re done. A routine I take in like air, one I cannot let go of. 
 
How have you become my lover, when all you have ever been is a liar?
 
**
 
Ashes
  
I’ll burn myself alive if it’ll treat you well in the end. The flames are always there. They’ve always been there, fuming right in the center of my chest, waiting to be put to use, waiting to set fire to the misery. I haven’t needed them, didn’t want them, but now, it seems I don’t have a choice. If it’ll do you good, if it’s what you want, if you’ll tell me you love me right before the ignition clicks. I’ll unleash them myself. 
 
My hands are strong, they house bold fingers, and there, under the nip of the night light, they find the purpose that’s been waiting for them. They’ll dig their way into the valley along my chest, peeling back flesh like the skin of a ripe and able fruit; that isn’t how you see me. I can spend hours here, thumbing through layers with a hangnail and a crooked smile. Pull and pluck, snap back the bones like nut shells and stems, until my fingers feel the warmth, too. Until they’ve caught on fire, too.
 
I wonder if you like seeing me this way, if this is what you wanted all along; doing what’s best for the sake of you. I’ll dissect my own self for you, dig where you see fit, dye my wrists burgundy if it helps you out. That fire, the one I didn’t start on my own, began in the heart and bleeds out onto these hands. Gnawing, snipping, grinding until each fingerprint is burned away and my identity is melted down into ivory and burnt bone. Just like you wanted me, all that needed from me; all yours.
 
I wither and you watch, we both sit through this game of haze. The smoke travels up through veins and billows out of my mouth. A pipeline of all of my whispers for you, all of my pleads, washed down in ash. The fire travels, too, eating away at my arms and their worth, up to my shoulder blades. I can’t reach for you, you don’t try to catch me; there is a difference.
 
It ransacks down my sides, taking me for what I’m worth, poor in its findings, gutting me again, but the fire finds me empty; you’ve already had your hands there, too. Down to my soles, a burnt path until I can no longer stand, the flames are still burning, still burning, still burning when they find my face. Right before it swallows me whole, I ask if you’re proud, if you’re happy, if this was what you wanted. Where’s your gratitude? Where’s your simple smile?
 
You only shake your head and watch the ash. “I never asked you to.”
 
**

Marrow Between My Teeth
 
In the crack of the mirror, I am the woman I’ve crawled into, but in my heart, I’m still the young girl, startled by her own shadow. There is no way to reach her, not where I am now. Even if my hands were to delve into myself, through thick flesh grown through years of torture, I wouldn’t find her there; only the crumbs of her mistakes left behind. Together, we are one, but in different life times, we are alone; all the same.
 
If I were to find her, though, I wonder if she would ask me if the pain was worth it. If the sacrifices and bloodied hands she owns make it right in some other way for her and I. There is a wonder if my heart will break when I allow the syllables to slip by, unleashing the truth that we’re still just as broken as she was, that no amount of glue or gentle handling can mend bones that have been snapped with misery in mind. 
 
The life she was given had already been soaked in melancholy far before she had a chance of delving into it, but now, my hands are messy and there is marrow between my teeth. All from years worth of digging and prying, and chewing my way free; I never made it through. I can only hope another lifetime of myself is staring back at me, decades down the line, grit gone and fingertips clean, free from the chains that never held mercy in their taking.
 
Who I once was deserves it, who I am now needs it.
 
**

Melancholy Mother

I am always told I do not resemble my mother, but I would if they asked the right questions. If they would, they would know we are the very same, identical, only on the inside.
 
Where do you get your selflessness? My mother. And where do you get your greed? My mother, as well. We are both hungry for things we don’t have, things out of reach, ways of living we will never know. We make the most out of the suffering we have, though. And we always will.
 
Where do you get your heart and the ache that goes with it? My mother must’ve pried hers apart and into two, given half to me when I tore my way into the world. Why should she be the only one to feel the ache, after all? I’ve never known a life without it.
 
Who helped feed the sadness living inside you, and who unleashes it? My mother’s hands planted the seed and they pluck it out from time to time, a hobby in mind, just to ensure my tear ducts still work.
 
Do you know who gave you the fire in your belly? She gave me that, too. Sometimes, the flames grow so heavy and I have no right mind to deal with them, that they eat right through my flesh, right into sight. No such wound can be easily stitched back into place.
 
I wonder if she knows I’m just like her, if she’s happy with her craft. A project she’s been mending together for twenty odd years now, so she can sit back and watch it. I wonder if she’s happy with the melancholy in my eyes, how it mirrors the ones she owns. I wonder if she is aware I will wither over time, just like she has. 
 
I wonder if she cares.
 
**

The Fire I Didn’t Ignite

My presence doesn’t echo anymore. You’d miss me without even trying. My heart beat is a knock that keeps pounding, but no one is there to answer the door. I am a glass body, translucent vases in place of organs; all that makes me who I am on full display. I’m a set of see through flesh, the kind that hides well in between the floorboards where you walk. Invisible. 

You swear you saw me a time or two before, but I am nothing more than dust in a crowded corner. You say you still whisper for me at night, but you don’t remember the syllables that make up my name. You recall that you heard me, but you pass the hour without a word to me. Does your heart still remember why you love me? Is it any better than mine?

I try to drown the reason to speak, but the glass shows all. Every ounce of water filtering in until my vases are full and overflowing. The empty echo, the heart beat that goes without answering, the floorboards I take shelter in, absorbs all of it and learns how to float, how to swim through the darkness I’m continuously left in. 

I want you to know how it feels to be left in utter silence, in a vast pit of darkness you didn’t ask for. I want you to relive the hard parts of my nights, the burdens I was born into, and the fire I didn’t start. Why should I be held responsible to set ease to flames I never set a match to in the first place? 

I am tired of crowding corners, shrinking myself so I won’t be moved elsewhere when I get in the way. I want to be wanted, want to be seen, want to be more than my skin makes me believe. My head tells me not to worry, that I have myself and myself cares, and myself listens, but sometimes, myself is not enough for myself. 

**
 
May Garner is an author and poet based outside of Dayton, Ohio. She has been dedicated to crafting and sharing her work online for over a decade. She is the author of two poetry collections, Withered Rising, and Melancholic Muse. Her work has also been featured in several magazines and anthologies, including ones by Querencia Press, Cozy Ink Press, and the Ohio Bards. You can find more of her work on Instagram (@crimson.hands).
 

​After the Funeral

There weren’t many in the funeral home. The hall smelled like jasmine and looked like a chapel. You were done up in a red sari - your skin rouged to hide the pallor of your long sickness. Your son, my cousin, sat on the floor with the Brahmin in the shadow of your oak casket, repeating, as best he could, the mantras. He tried not to well up, I noticed, and once told me at times like this you had to be strong. We all drank coffee and looked on solemnly. Your sister burst into tears.

After, we drove to the suburbs to your son’s house, where held a lunch. I partook of the ancestral dishes, one of garlic cloves doused in tamarind and sesame oil. “These are old recipes,” you said. I started. “Why are you here?” “To help,” you said.

And you carried soft drinks to your children and your friends, but they did not notice you, lost as they were in memories of you. You sat quietly by your disconsolate sister, still spinning with grief. You dusted the Commander’s old medals from the war, then took your hand to his photo and kissed your fingers. You once said you were endlessly drifting long after he died. “Why here and not there,” I wondered. She looked so beautiful, my aunt – her spine straight, her pallor overwhelmed by a radiant red – the blood coursing through her.
 
**
 
Varanasi

After a drink at Prinseps, I decided it was time. I clutched the small bag of father’s remains, his flaky white remnants clouding the plastic. We lumbered in my guide’s van along the narrow, ancient roads. It was a dark, cloud-covered afternoon, but soon the sun bore itself onto the shanties and hordes of pilgrims. “How long have I searched,” I thought.

We disembarked and took a winding gulley – past sadhus begging for alms, fly-ridden tea stalls, and makeshift temples to the goddess, the flare of bright waving lamps erupting through doorways. We waded through the pilgrims, past old women clutching sticks. “They have come to die,” my guide said. We reached the hot still point, reeking of camphor and flames. And there I saw the Manikarnika ghat alive with corpses resting on pyres.

Manikarnika ghat, the granter of moksha, its eternal flames tended by Dalits. I felt the flames summon me, the hot stench of crackling flesh, the Ganges murmuring in the distance, Shiva skipping between charred bones.
 
**
 
At the Psych Ward

Really, I was in love with an insane woman, and you were never going to approve. What, with my disappearances for days, finally coming home reeking of reefer and whisky, I cannot blame you for what you did.

You took me to hakims, pandits and one long-fingered priest, but despite hopeful talks amid wafting censers, nothing worked. So you got me on lithium and put me in the psych ward.

I wore a loose-fitting gown that billowed in the airy hallways. I enjoyed talking to the nurses who called me “sweetie,” who wheeled over my meals - turkey meat loaf or chicken with powdered mash potatoes, always with apple juice in plastic containers with foil lids.

Sometimes I would hear screams, moans, and a cacophony of restless voices from across the hall. “Maybe they live in a different world,” my roommate claimed, who never heard anything.

They let those of us who required no physical restraints to play three-card poker in the evenings. One day, I burst into song because I missed my father. “You sing like Bing Crosby,” one of them said. I blushed as my father is a man who loves old singers.

From the one window I could see the sky painting itself a dusky red while the byroad filled with cars. Oh, the burden of their monotonous low hum, their squawking horns.
 
**
 
Cavafy Indica

I discovered him by chance, after reading one of his poems dangling from a notice board in the university hostel.  Titled “Days of 1905,” it limned a forbidden love.  The students hung it as a provocation.  “An imitation,” I thought, but the turn of phrase in a punchy Indian English, the varied meter, the subtle enjambment, the setting in a parlor at the port of Aden, where bodies lurked, hungry for love, made me long for more. Perhaps now I could go home having discovered something.

I made discreet enquiries and learned that he lived in a small flat in the old Jewish quarter, in the shadow of Magen David Synagogue.  He eyed me from behind his rusting metal door and reluctantly let me enter.  He had thick glasses, a pencil mustache, and white, close-cropped hair.  Along the wall, he kept old books no one reads in India anymore -- Keats and Tennyson, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and Johnson’s Rasselas. He brought tea, reeking of cardamom and asked, “what is poetry, after all?” as he unclasped a blue folder with a sheaf of typewritten poems. 
 
I spent the afternoon reading -- of palace intrigues among the Kanishkas, of the philosophical glories of the Satavahana Empire, of the port of Muziris with swelling mounds of black pepper along the shore, of the colonies in Sri Vijaya shadowed with imposing figures of Siva, and also of boys, so many boys, lolling in the tropical overgrowth, glimpsed shirtless as the wheat stalks swayed in the monsoon wind.  “Extraordinary,” I said. “May I submit a few to small journals?”  “Why?” he asked.  “I ache to bring something new to the world,” I said.  He clasped the folder and handed them to me.  Outside, the first monsoon rumbled in the Arabian sea.  I unclasped the folder triumphantly as I looked for a rickshaw, and to my horror the poems were fading, the whole sheaf turning blank. One page folded into a bird and took flight, fluttering hopelessly as the rain grew thick. 
 
**
 
The Dream
​
And there he lay, hooked to the pulsing monitor that blurted warnings with beeps. The riverine flow of protein wended through the nasogastric tube into his gut. There would be no more joy in food. What’s more, he hadn’t been awake for days, and she, frail herself, sat on the fraying hospital chair, her knees bunched against her chest, weeping, clutching at her prayer beads. 
How it all ends, I thought, a summation of blood, urine, and wasted limbs… what of the man, all his accomplishments? That night at home I slept on a couch and saw his mother, my grandmother, in a dream. She was young and beautiful, draped in a white sari. She stood before me as if posing for a portrait. An auriferous glow framed itself around her. There were other women in the dream’s distance -- giggling softly at each other, cavorting in a rush of hibiscus and peepal trees – but the set only served as an enhancement of her singular beauty. What joy, I thought, as she transmuted from flesh (flesh I swore I could touch, its suppleness and heat) to portrait, fixed forever in the prime of her life: resplendent, eternal.
 
**
 
Vikram Masson writes at the intersection of faith, identity and culture. His work has been featured in TriQuarterly, The Denver Quarterly, Glass, Juked, and Rust + Moth. His chapbook, A Scattering of Voices, is published by Kelsay Books.
 
 

​When I Meet The New Chiropractor 
 
I lay on the chiropractic table, a new doc getting trained in. This one is complicated I hear because her body is very creative. She directs my fingers to rest gently on my neck, a familiar place full of sinew and hardness,whiplash, whiplash, whiplash. She muscle-tests words and phrases. I’ve been peeling layers for years like an onion that should be dried up and powder by now.  Fear of dying she says and my arm goes limp, then up from the belly, a water stream seeking immediate exit through my eyes and the dark forest of imagination. I want to see through the trees. More words, the same effect. There is a slight convulsing as my body searches memory. I think I have learned to squeeze lemons into lemonade, that I have mastered self-care which I realize isn’t the same as healing. Suddenly, exhaustion and I’m quiet, feeling drugged inside a small constructed room. A many layered sleep transfuses me until I am nothing but a shell.
 
**
 
A Model Citizen
 
She wakes slowly from the king bed, the down comforter bunched about her. Legs stretch, hips flatten, neck reaches towards the pillow top. It’s a comfortable minute. She rises without thought. No ghosts from yesterday visit, no predictions guide her thoughts, no restraint to her habits. First things first.
 
Outdoors, a deep breath -- 
            lungs clear (check)
            neighbours surveyed (check) 
            bladder empty (check)
 
Routine has no boredom including breakfast at eight. Alert without stimulants, her energy is stored for the right activity as she shakes the morning loose, then rests on the chair patiently facing the windows. What might rock her off cue, have her awaken on the wrong side of the bed, exasperate the purity of her presence, stoke doubt in her desires? There have never been answers to these vexing questions. The cues are so well rehearsed as with all obedient beings. Right? What a good girl I say as I do every day at least two dozen times. Simple praise keeps her white-tipped tail in motion, eyes on her master; keeps her a model citizen.
 
**

The New Metrosexual is Female and She is a Madamsexual
 
A woman wearing red plaid flannel and unbranded boots appears asleep in her salon chair. She doesn’t wonder what to do with her locks one day when the dreads are gone. Her hair dresser stands on a two- foot stool and reaches in like a slow hand mixer, twisting and bunching to the rhythm of chewing gum while the woman’s eyes stay closed. She’s too strong to wince. Her arm tats creep out the cuffs of her double-layered shirt but seem afraid of the light and retreat. She has a natural immunity to excitement but if summer, she’d dream of driving a pearlescent two-wheeled chopper chariot, but it’s her steel-blue Prius out front. It’s sexy and righteous, efficient -- unlike the dreadlocks which are worth a wait while the snow bends sideways. At the right time, her flannel is ready for business. She steals a glimpse at a woman in the next chair who is losing her hair when the hairdresser says she gets stress-induced alopecia and castor oil is her go-to. The plaid woman nods because it’s a plant-based solution, but her carb-load is heavy like a front engine. She is four-seasons flannel, seasoned with ketchup over sweet potatoes. Organic all the way. She is the new metrosexual and she is a madamsexual. 
 
**
 
The In-Coming
 
He arrived to the emergency room in death’s breath just as she arrived with the still warm heart ready to rehome in his sunken chest. She noted his youthful appearance, tautness of arms, unwed finger, the life he should be living, instead… She noted him in a waning summer as he lay, weeks in a coma, taking his vitals daily, making chit-chat out of the air. Found herself sharing why she became a nurse, when she married then divorced, her life tilting on a new axis, family in Oklahoma who couldn’t comprehend her choices. She reminded his unmoved ears that he’d walk out of there one day, out to a world beating in rhythm. The day came when she found his room empty, his discharge verified. She blew what memory dust there was from off the bed, imagined a homecoming sign hanging at his door, family arms around his neck. Weeks later a youthful man approached her in the hospital corridor greeting her by name. “These flowers are for you. I heard everything you said.” 
 
**

When I Had to Read Little Women
 
My 6th grade reading teacher smelled of strong perfume, so strong I barely noticed her only the foul air strike that followed her, like Pig Pen’s cloud of dust but fragranced. She asked What did you think of that passage? I froze, choking on her Estee Lauder, my eyes fixed on her too large eye frames, wrinkled skin, disco pink lipstick, thinking about her extra toe. I thought it was punishment when she assigned Little Women, unabridged.  We had two months and 500 pages of compound sentences, sentences I had to be still for.  Meg, Jo, Amy, Beth slowly taking shape, my imagination keeping up with them. It was Jo for me. My feminist crush, caught in social expectation but armed with wit and courage. When Beth died, I imagined my grandmother’s sister passing at 16, lovely as a bird. I never told my teacher, who was mysteriously a Ms., that I too dreamed of Vanity Fair and art, books, and Paris.  That I would read it again two years later. That I would see every version brought to screen, think of my grandmother writing with her sixth-grade education, sending it off, handwritten, to the Belgian Gazette. That I would never change my name after getting married. That I would find a small mold enough to craft a wild life within or how my sisters used to call me Josephine.
 
**
 
Ice Growths
 
Ice came during the night downing wires, coating them thick as jump ropes. We kids jump to keep warm in one room with a fireplace. The six of us, huddle as mice into chairs, the rug, and every blanket. Outside, frost fields glisten, the trees droop as if in prayer, entombed in crystals.
 
On day three I enter a candle-lit bathroom with my oldest sister under the tall expressive shower head, a shock of cold buries me in terror. It is like ice flow encasing my young, small frame; those trees and I both struggling to be free.  We are preparing for a send-off until lines and heat are restored. Several white hours to Detroit, my brother and I plop on worn sofas and the smell of my four older male cousins, aunt and uncle. I sleep through breakfast and Sesame Street. In the middle of night two I learn about seats up and seats down as I fumble to the bathroom to pee, sitting carefully, gathering my little night gown but suddenly slipping through an open seat, soaked. I strip then wrap my shame into someone’s shirt on the floor. No one notices my change of appearance in the morning, my cousin’s shirt over me, wet nightgown on the floor of the bathroom, the smell of pee on my skin. I am invisible. No one wonders about a four-year-old insisting she needs to take a shower, which happens, alone, breath held under an ice-like spray because the handles only seem to go to C. For Cold. 
 
**
 
Rebecca Surmont lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She has a love of corn fields, funk, and tiny things. Her written work has been featured in publications such as RockPaperPoem, Lothlorien Poetry Journal,  Amethyst Review, Steel Jackdaw, Hare’s Paw Literary, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Eunoia Review, Crowstep Poetry Journal, Ekphrastic Review, and Tiny Seed Literary Journal. She is a leadership consultant and coach and has worked as a physical theater actor and voice over talent.
 
 
 
 
 

 
Primrose Hill
 
I could close out my time here, beckon to the summit all my unmade life, addresses mistaken for home. Foreign years spiraled with those in slim New England lanes unwind only in deserts of late middle age; too early for triumph, or even regret. Returned, sparked days that reached their noon over the span of London: seagulls in arpeggioed screech over Queen Anne’s Grove; popped echoes of cricket bats rolled over distant rectangled greens; anonymous grey birds soaring under aviary nets; intricate minor third Beatles’ harmony; the gruff declamation of the music shop ex-pat, doncha know, guitar is in the blood an’ ain’t really learned. I’d feel an old heaviness lift then, wander the hushed-down streets to retrieve all I did not do, yet still doubt that imperatives of words were ever fed by my blood, if any exigency throbbed enough to carve some sluice, some sign other adrift ones would read me by.
 
**
 
In the Wirral
 
Blind Harry daily taps along thick slate to the trolley’s round-about, tunes his ear toward the canal where wharfmen sing gruffly out, slap twined leads to shore. Made redundant from city planning, knew how many went down the sluice, borne to sea from Liverpool, where liver birds swoop to pick drowned men’s bones. Still got me travelling legs, he vows, and turns his good ear out over all Wirral, a place moored enough to drift home to. 
 
**
 
Mr Bleaney's Redemption
 
in response to Philip Larkin’s “Mr Bleaney”
 
Buggering critics, all of them, he hissed, folding The Sun’s Page Three girl over his knee. Floral chintz curtains did, after a while, sort of match the mustard walls, the beige tweed settee. What bloody good's a home if you can't compose your own colour scheme, he questioned the cat as it etched the tea table. Don't people realise interior decorating's an Art, not just pretty bric-a-brac strewn about? The surface of things is only the beginning; take yourself below, through to the grain! There's the whole texture, he insisted to last week’s vests still grey and limp on the back garden clothesline. What's wrong with a romp through the jumble sales just for me jollies? So what if nothing in this grotty box was made after ’68? Can't a man be left on a musty daybed wrapped in some grammy's duvet, finding all that was his life listening to The Beatles? Let me take you down to the off-licence round the corner, buy me weekend shandys, have a good think about that wandering-rose wall-paper, spot-on and safe enough so you can get some sleep.
 
**
 
Iced Coffee at the Diner
 
I’d left the exacto knife and the pills on the bathroom counter. If this is the morning to give up, why not a diner coffee first. Out of habit I’d brought a book of poems by someone more gifted, smart, thinner, and male than I’d ever be. It comforted me that the poems were sweeping in their aesthetic vision, bold experiences I could feel, even in the collapsed mine of my heart. I patted the cover. Good book, I thought, that you are here and I will not be. It is right to step back, let gift instead of effort claim the lineage. I thumbed my paper daybook, jumping ahead to a month that would survive me, and noticed a famous poet I admired would read. Then I pictured the spent lilacs no one would replace at my grandmother’s lichen-frilled grave. So much poetry, so much language can never translate. My iced coffee came in a retro-green fluted glass on a saucer lined with a doily, and a silverplate long-handled spoon. I vowed the last iced coffee; be brave and belt it down black to myself as I bent for the first sip. “Dégueulasse,” I spat, hoping no nearby table understood the French word for “disgusting.” Who can drink this dark bitterness straight? I poured in cream from a dented plastic container whose paper top tore moistly down the middle instead of smoothly off. There’s barely a full teaspoon in these, I raged silently. I emptied five more and stirred until the liquid appeared as soft linen the shade of our kitchen curtains when daddy was still alive. No coffee for me back then since I was only seven. But I’m sure I would have loved the surf of light that swirled into the murky cocoa-black while unmoored buoys of ice cubes fought to still on the surface. When the check came, a sun shower startled the outdoor eaters, who scrambled inside. I left double my usual tip and noticed, on the walk home in the ceasing rain, how plush the drops can feel on parched skin, and decided to stay.
 
**
 
A version of this poem first appeared in Orlando, a single issue mini-zine edited by Naomi Ovrutsky.
 
**
Two Dreams on the Theme of Love

Drunk on spiked peach crunch Rupert dreamt the moon lathered up with diamond juices, spilled down the front of Esmé’s purple gown, less like the fall of a dress than the silk shadows drooling across the trees. O frantic light, he cried, smear fast across my sleep, sing the music only love, its thousand floods beneath the skin, could wake. Esmé’s hands languid through her lover’s hair smoothed away the need of shadow. All that delirious autumn they traveled most together when tasting bitter sweat under rusting sky, two simple women scrubbing off the winter smell of death, clean as the silver edge of knife, deep as the cut and just as delicate.
 
**

A version of this poem was originally published in CT River Review.
 
**
 
Leaving

The curtain was drawn with that certain seep just short of the end of things, like the way you turned your back to begin the ascent outside our life in this room. We notice, then that cups and chairs and lamps speak in a language beyond the meaning we attach; when cast off, they set to chanting lamentamini, like gnomes in Ereshkigal’s cave, doubling her sorrow.
 
**

A version of this poem appeared in Northeast Corridor.
 
**

On the Disappearance of William Bradford’s Wife and Other Women
​
“Lost without a trace,” the official comment on Mrs. William Bradford’s disappearance from history. Perhaps overboard on one of her husband’s ships accosted by storm; perhaps run off with a more accessible spouse on the predictable shore; or perhaps took her own life in an English garret at first news Mr. Bradford would sail to the colonies. William Bradford had a wife, Shakespeare, a sister, Michelangelo, a mother. Across all tenses and times absent women: absence of genesis. How can we ever say “In the beginning” and mean it?
 
**
 
A version of this poem was first publish in Invert.
 
**
 
Alexandra Burack, American poet and author of On the Verge, has lived in England and Switzerland, and resides currently in Arizona, USA. Her recent work appeared in The Sewanee Review, Metphrastics, and Bulb Culture Collective, and is forthcoming as an author feature in Ucity Review. She serves as a Poetry Editor for Iron Oak Editions, and a Poetry Reader for The Los Angeles Review, The Adroit Journal, and $ Poetry is Currency. She enjoyed a 45-year career as a college multi-genre creative writing professor, and currently works as a freelance editor, writing coach, and tutor. Her new website is: https://www.alexandraburack.com.