Nighthawks (yet another version)
 
for Edward Hopper
 
It’s late and he’s at the café counter, drinking cold coffee, worrying about how he’ll die. It could be next month or four years from now. Backpack on, he could be trudging along the mountain ridge and lose his balance, tumbling for years, it seems, to oblivion, one sudden chunk of darkness exploding in his dream.
   
He looks up, stares at the woman in a red dress sitting next to him and then stares back into his coffee cup, cream swirling like a broken question mark on a snow-covered mountain.
 
**

An Age-Old Garden Party
 
No one thought it would really happen, you know, at least, not that way. Some said it would lead to the end of civilization while others claimed it was inconsequential. The philosophers argued through the logic of probability, concluding that logic had nothing to do with myth.
            
In the end, like most things, it came down to chance. What were the odds that someone could fall that far and survive? To think that the person you loved the most would be the one, accidentally or not, to betray.
            
Some even claimed it didn’t matter. It wasn’t relevant. What happened thousands of years ago had little to no impact on our day-to-day lives. They said we’re not puppets on a string. We’re not dolls fashioned by eternal hands into flesh-coloured breakable clay.
 
Betrayal is often misunderstood and can be confused with love. The woman picked an apple and gave it to the man to eat. There was no malice, only love for her partner. Sadly, she had no idea it would result in being tossed out of the garden to work and live and suffer and die.
 
What’s strange is that only after the banishment, after walking out of the garden, did either one of them feel the desire to pray.
 
**
 
The Pretend There’s Nothing Wrong Game
 
“The optimist claims we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.”  James Cabell
 
When your sump pump fails and the basement floods, just smile. As the drunk speeds through a red light and totals your car, climb out, shake the glass from your hair and consider yourself blessed. After your girlfriend dumps you for the star quarterback, treat yourself to a hot fudge sundae with extra cherries. 
 
Whenever something bad happens, pretend nothing’s wrong, pretend it’s not worth the emotional trauma involved with resentment, anger, jealousy or fear. It’s all life and thank God you’re alive to experience it firsthand. What didn’t happen, or what should have happened, is useless. Forget it. Ignore it. The life that counts is the one you’re wading into right now. Pretend you expected this. 
 
Pretend you love every minute of it.
 
**
 
Current Karma (a distant relative to instant)
 
“…And I think I am happy enough.” 
last line from a poem by Al Basting
 
A three-quarter moon plants itself in the maple tree out back, claiming the sky as its own—not a cloud in the entire state. Temperature down in the fifties tonight but a high of seventy-nine tomorrow, October 22. I’m lucky to be playing golf with an old friend for the first time this year.
 
My wife is coming home after spending the weekend with her father, ninety-six, in hospice, and I’m looking forward to giving her a big old bear hug, seeing her new haircut up close. Later this week, we’re driving to Canada to attend a play with my brother and his wife, stay overnight, have a few good meals, and laughs together.
 
It’s safe to say we’re blessed beyond compare. For now.
 
**
 
How Do You Know When to Give Up?
 
My wife’s father has lost twenty-five pounds in three weeks. He’s at home, in hospice and can’t eat solid foods. Besides one whiskey and Coke, he’s living on two Boosts per day. At ninety-six years old, he knows his time is up, and we hope the end is soon and painless, if that’s possible.
 
He’s still able to dress himself, get around with a walker, watch the Lions beat the first-place Vikings on TV. But he can’t help feeling scared when the future looks so bleak. And we can’t ease him into the ground or give him encouragement. What the hell do we know? This is a narrow path that he has to walk alone.
 
My wife gives him a pedicure, a foot massage and lotion on his scaly legs. She sits with him as he watches The Sound of Music for the two-hundredth time, trying to stay awake. But even if he doesn’t, he knows the movie by heart, each line, each character, the songs drifting along the edge of his dreams.
 
I love her for walking with her father right up to the edge. No one can practice dying. We all get our one beautiful chance to enter that darkness. I can’t help but wonder: will I wrestle or fall or leap?
 
**
 
How Do You Know When You’re Done Grieving?
 
Some say it takes a year or more. Others say when you stop wearing black. The experts claim you’re good when the pit in your stomach is gone, and you wake up three days in a row without thinking of the deceased. Maybe it’s after you dream of the person, and in your dream you’re in a boat or at the store or walking down the street as the sun shines on both of you, talking as if nothing happened.
 
Maybe, just maybe, grief becomes a part of every day thereafter until, like so many leaves falling, you stop noticing.
 
**
 
Little Disturbances Later in the Day
 
for Grace Paley
 
One Saturday morning, I noticed that all the kids on my block were sixty-seven years old. Chloe, on her bike, complained of her bad knees and cataracts. The four Schmidt brothers played basketball but at a much slower pace. And no one could do a jump shot. Amelia and Annie were having a tea party, but instead of sitting on a blanket on the grass, they set up a card table and folding chairs. The sun glinted off their gray pigtails. When Simon, Henry and Elliot walked by, baseball gloves in hand, I heard Henry say he was seeing a surgeon next week about a left hip replacement. Cloud, the entrepreneur, was already operating his drink stand near Rolston road, serving Bloody Marys and highballs in addition to lemonade.
 
As I laid on the couch for my late morning nap, I could hear their voices, the basketball dribbling, the thwack of a baseball caught, a squeaky bicycle wheel rolling up and down the cul-de-sac. Throw in the wind, the low growl of an occasional car driving by, and the birds calling in mid-spring, and I fell asleep pretty easily. 
 
**

Smelt It, Dealt It
 
I don’t know how it happened, but I can smell colours. That glass there, that’s blue; the magazine on the TV is green. There’s a little red on the wall, a clock, and then tons of black. What’s with so much black?  Smells like licorice dipped in tar.
 
The sense of smell is so underutilized today. No one stops to “smell the roses.” No one slows down enough to smell the rain coming up from Toledo, smell the lilacs in full bloom, smell the last days of my aunt in a nursing home, praying she doesn’t die in the same room as my Uncle Darrel. I can smell him, black coffee and cigar.
 
I can smell the past like a wet basement, a couch soaking up the muddy water, a bag of dry dog food melting in the corner.
 
I’m as lost and afraid as the next guy; in fact, I smell fear. It’s a thin smoke in the room, the smell of sweat and grapefruit combined with used tea bags and oatmeal. It’s an unmistakable smell. And the older I get, the more this fear finds me—at the gym, in church, at the drugstore, in my living room. 
 
                             at night I lie down
                             and smell the end, a grey mist
                             rising in my eyes
 
 
**
 
How Do You Know Someone Hates You?
 
It’s in their eyes—a steely look of doubt and anger, maybe disgust. They squint a little. The forehead begins to wrinkle and they turn their head to dismiss you, annihilate your presence from sight.
 
Sometimes these people simply ignore you, pretend you’re not there, that you don’t exist. Or the opposite. They push and shove, trip you, willing to kick and swing anything at your body and face.
 
And every now and then, you meet the real devious ones who shake your hand, smile and show you their straight white teeth, talk like they’re interested in what you believe and experience. But as soon as you turn around, the dagger hits you squarely between the shoulder blades, twisted and pulled.
 
**
 
​David James has published nine books and has had over forty of his one-act plays produced. He’s been writing prose poems since 1974 after seeing/hearing Russell Edson read at his university.
 

Sorrow, My Middle Name
 
In high school, I became invisible, courted rebellion by dating a boy my father forbade me to see. My dad believed in perfection, austerity, turning out lights whenever you left the room. He would exit the room whenever I appeared. But, for all his harshness, he taught me to name trees, to marvel how some maples flaunt giant leaves. He could spot buttonballs on sycamore trees just as they released their seeds.
 
Now older, I am here in the dark, turning over the long list of friends and family, who’ve disappeared. Name them: Ann, Gary, Evelyn, Sonya and her grandson, 24-year-old. Elan, and others still alive with dementia, stooped, curled downward as their minds turn to vegetable soup. They know what they mean to say, but there’s a traffic jam. Frustration rules, anger, followed by surrender. Maybe, it’s then they heed the flute only they can hear.
 
**

Life in the Hood 
 
The moon this morning lost her full-bodied shape, as if someone had taken a bite from her neck. Shrouded in clouds, fog down below, caused the ferry to constantly blow her horn. The man down the street installed eight huge skeletons on his front lawn for Halloween, then dressed them for Christmas in red caps and mittens, left them out in the dead of winter. It’s now February and they are still there. His neighbor has a flamboyance of pink plastic flamingos, sporting Mardi Gras beads. He dresses them for every holiday, St. Patrick’s in green, Valentine’s Day in red hearts. Neighbours line up books in their Free Library. Lost soccer balls and basketball nets stand idly by as cars speed down the narrow street, ignoring signs to Slow the Flock Down. And we, become the gawkers, who walk by, commenting on this colourful, eccentric assemblage. 
 
**

Beach Walk at Lincoln Park
 
Driftwood captures me every time. There’s camouflage wood, spotted with amber patches, madrona branches flashing burgundy, and brilliant yellow logs with their skin scraped smooth. Farther down the path, holes, like eyes from severed branches, grasp me in their unflinching gaze. Others make me smile, like the large log whose tangled roots are having a bad hair day. I can’t help myself for inventing love duos from sculptured forms as two thin branches lean together, reach for the sky. Ancient bark rests next to young upstarts. Older logs prefer to slumber undisturbed, cradled by rocking waves.

**

Tracking Almost Full Moon
 
So much is invisible in northwest night skies, cloud-studded and overcast most of the time. We miss whole constellations; we miss the moon, and yet, when the sky clears, like this morning, there she is, tracking across the sky, almost winking to acknowledge Artemis, man’s space mission. I keep looking out the windows to see if she’s still there with her magic curtain of light thrown across the water. Even in darkness, her beam is solid, straightforward, full-bodied.
 
**

Last Orange Glow
 
I woke later than usual. Odds are, I missed that last maneuver. Moon low on the horizon. Clear sky. Blue and orange, complementary colours. Ten minutes later, the moon transformed into a transparent veil. Tissue-paper moon. In this light, hard to see her as three-dimensional. A disc, nothing more or less, but still so compelling.
 
**

Bolder Still
 
There you are, an imprint in the sky, hanging low, a painting in deep blue and cerulean. A certain stillness, you, as punctuation. Nothing in motion beyond one blackbird. I prize these mornings. So often, you are lost to me behind a clotted sky filled with dense clouds.
 
**

​Though originally from the east coast, Miriam Bassuk treasures her life in the Northwest.  Her daily walks inspire her with the teeming life of eagles, herons, and the occasional sighting of Orcas. She has been published in The Journal of Sacred Feminine Wisdom, Raven Chronicles, Borderless, and 3 Elements Review. She was one of the featured poets in the digital portion of the WA 129 project sponsored by Tod Marshall, the Washington State poet laureate.
 
 

​To You, America  

Because the museum is in the middle of the Pine Barrens. Because there is a sculpture called Chicken Man which is a chicken with thick human legs and a penis, and Deer Woman which is a deer head with breasts, but with antlers. Because the sculpture I’m standing in front of now is a map of you made of latex gloves that hang like condoms, and I was disappointed  that it wasn't actually made of condoms. Because my late mother-in-law picked up Popsicle sticks, made pencil cases out of yogurt cups with old yarn because Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Because she'd have laughed I think, appreciated a map of you made of used condoms, though  I doubt she'd have touched them herself. Because this sculpture is beautiful and weird like you, and what if it was condoms and beautiful, even close up? Because at the school in NY City all the kids wore hoodies for Trayvon, colours glowing over Facebook, softening the ugliness of posted comments below. Because you're the terrified people who wanted to cut down all the trees on the island after the hurricane because they might fall on the house, and the guy on my street who built his deck around the double birch in his yard. Leaves in the barbecue? he says, fuck yeah, whatever. Because leave my goddamn guns alone, but wait, are you ok? Does your car need a jump, a tow? Here, I brought you dinner. Because you’re the 24 hour drugstore when my son had a fever—103  at 3 AM, and the little old lady who saw my pajamas and children’s Advil and let me cut in line, but you’re also the poor people who shop at Walmart, ignoring the poor people who work at Walmart. Because Hurricane Sandy. 9-11. Sandy Hook. Because George Floyd, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti. Tornado Alley. Because rainbow flags and Donald Trump. Because the Debt ceiling. Taxes. Because fresh peaches. Because fresh sweet corn in a basket on a table beside the road in upstate NY, next to a box with cash sitting next to a handwritten sign: Please Pay What You Can.  Thanks.

**

This piece previously appeared in Rat's Ass Review.

**

The Dream: At the Old House Where I Grew Up

I was using the one bathroom upstairs and my dead mom walked right in and calmly spoke to me as I tried to wipe use as much toilet paper as you want your dad doesn’t understand my sister and girl cousins all walked in too and I tried to wash my hands but the sink wasn’t working it had paint all over it all fluorescent colours I barely got clean as the others waited to use it  in the pink bedroom with its slanted ceilings Rich tucked a pillow under my side of the bed I said you should do that at our house and the bed won’t slant down so much two AC units blasted one from each window turned into old radio tape player boom boxes I couldn’t figure out how to turn them off I couldn’t find my phone I stepped out the bedroom door  into a receiving line to say good bye to a mafia dude after having dinner at his house with my ex who’d left me alone several times to go and change his clothes I was almost last in line I wore two different earrings each from a pair of my mom’s I was pissed at myself for losing them in the dream I was afraid I would fall as the line of people wound downhill on a slippery sidewalk in December and powder sugar snow as Mom called it covered the ice like the day my dad broke his hip on the driveway. Where was Rich? He always held my hand, held me up. My ex was ten people ahead of me in line already I reached for the next hand to shake it was my dead father he squeezed my hand in both of his and said I told you, my mother put up with my dad for too long, if he’s not going to change you need to leave him. Then my brother, the one who’s a guidance counselor at my old high school, pulled up next to me in the little old yellow Honda Fit I used to drive and opened the door. People don’t change, he said, get in, I’ll take you home.  

**

Revealing

God appeared to me in the bathtub.
Hugh Findlay

If God appeared to me in the bathtub I’d scream. First of all I seldom take baths, preferring a quick shower on my slip proof mat since falling on ice and re-injuring that knee twice already. So If I’m in the tub it’s due to a special need for relaxation, and if God is an old man with a white beard like in the paintings, why is He staring like a perve at a 61 year old overweight woman naked in her bath?  

If God is a She it’s still a problem, as I don't like changing in women’s locker rooms either, I could never be a nudist, I don’t even walk around naked in front of my cats. And even if, more likely, God is gender neutral, what a seriously weird-ass way to appear to anyone. Why not just be a voice in my head? OK, yeah, I might think I was losing my shit hearing voices. Better yet, appear to me in a field of daisies in spring, or under an orange oak in the fall, or even on my balcony overlooking the parking lot–anywhere clothing isn't optional. 

Not sure what I’d say to Her anyway: Hey, God? What the hell about letting my son die 30 years ago? Was there a point to that? And thanks for my other three sons, they’re great, and the second husband is perfect, even though everyone told me you weren’t fond of divorce. 

So why here, God? If it’s news of an early stairway to heaven, why not send an angel? I hope You don’t have any great expectations of me at my age, because after my 35 years of helping high school kids understand themselves and being a second mom to a lot of them, and after a dead child, a divorce, a dead mom, a brother with cancer, a disabled dad, and the loss of three sweet dogs and a cat, I thought I might be in line for a little rest. 

I’m still helping my youngest with money and all the kids with visits and laundry and late night chats, and we’re moving north to be closer to my dad, so maybe, get out of my bathroom?  Cause I’m one of those people who really like their privacy, and I would have expected You to know that. 

**

Records

after watching a woman make snack bowls and bookends by melting and molding old vinyl records

When we had a little extra money Dad would buy records for the little machine we used to keep in the dining room--Connie Frances, Big Bands, Harry Belafonte, soundtrack from The Jungle Book. Once when I was twelve he bought the album from Hair.  Mom hid it, said it wasn’t appropriate for us kids, but my brother, who was thirteen, found it on the top shelf of the upstairs linen closet, under the lace table cloth only used for Thanksgiving. Some of the songs were pretty, like "Good Morning Starshine." The one she didn’t want us to hear had lots of strange words. “Masturbation” was the only one I knew. If my brother knew any others, he didn't say.

I brought all my records to college--so much weight and space--milk crates full. Turntable and speakers I bought myself from babysitting. Debbie from Long Island, across the hall, played hers and then threw them on the floor where they skidded across other naked vinyl. Terry, the thin boy from Kansas, alphabetized his shelved collection, cleaned them with a special brush before and after he played them, every time. Boys in our dorm broke into his room, took every record out and put them all back in the wrong jackets. When he discovered this Terry closed his eyes like someone had died.

Last week Dad suddenly wanted his record player down from the attic. In the video my sister sent, Dad’s in his wheelchair, hands clasped in his lap, head bent towards the record which is playing the music from Carmen. His eighty-eight year old knees pop up and down with the beat.  Dad’s puffy cat, Pushkin, sits next to the turntable, stubby tail flicking, head tilted, attentive. She could be listening too, or ready to pounce on the spinning disc.

**

This poem previously appeared in Edison Literary Review.

**

I used to believe nothing really bad could ever happen to me. 

I used to dream of three story Victorian houses with towers and canopy beds and a fireplace in every room that would light whenever I wanted. Once when I was twelve, at a garage sale, my mother said I could pick one thing she would buy for me, and I found a pair of pure silk kimono pajamas. I had chosen the one thing we couldn’t afford. 

These days I’m happy picking up three smooth stones if we go to the shore, one for each of my living sons. I don’t even look at the shops with the boho dresses and sea glass necklaces I used to drool for. 

I used to be this innocent person, in college I didn’t drink for the first three years.  I used to trust people more, used to trust the world, trust myself. Then I tried to ski and messed up my knee. Tried marriage and got a divorce the first time. Had babies and the first one died. Voted every time.

My father slipped on the ice in his driveway and broke his hip, ended his life in a wheelchair. My mother got cancer and died within two months. My first son was born with a fatal heart condition. Now I worry about my grown sons all the time, don’t blame them for wondering if they should have any kids in this world, walk holding onto my husband’s hand, buy spikes for my boots for days like today when the ice coats everything and the wind wants one of our giant maples.

But my husband chipped away at the thick bubbled ice on our driveway for almost three hours. And we lost internet and cable but the lights are still on so far and the mail man just crunched through the ice coated snow in our front yard to deliver a package from one of my sons. And the crows are flying in for the night again, tens of dozens of hundreds of them, storm or no storm they’re flying in to roost in our trees and the terrible wind can’t cover the beautiful shrill survival I hear in their calls.

**

Svea Barrett is retired after teaching public high school English in New Jersey for 35 years, now living in Central NY with her husband and three cats. Her poems have appeared or will appear in The Comstock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Lips, Griffel, The Kelsey Review, Edison Literary Review, The Rat’s Ass Review, Exit 13, Molecule– A Tiny lit Mag, and others. Her chapbook Why I Collect Moose won the Poets Corner Press Chapbook Competition in 2005, and her book I Tell Random People About You won the 2010 Spire Poetry Award. She tied for first place in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry contest in 2013, and her  manuscript, Before There Was So Much Sky, was a finalist in the 2022 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Book Contest.

​Rare Sour Animals 
 
BC. Before cellphones. Row houses shedding plaster, clouds slapping rough skies. She got yanked by the shoulder & spanked, dragged into the vestibule  while we stood there, dumb dew worms squirming inside our pockets. We’d lured this friend into late afternoon play. We heard bawling through an open window—maybe it was some other schoolgirl, but same story, we called her stoopid as a donkey, whipped each other with weeping willow sprigs, pantomimed parenthood. Late summer, in early morning’s flat cool light, I sat on a bee. A flashing throb. The bee, spent, writhed away, trailing innards. Her lancet, still in my foot. 
 
AD. After digital. The snapshot goes around the village chat. A warning. The wolf lurking around our yards. I await a muscular creature with cunning eyes. Something worthy of fear.  The animal’s puny, the colour of dishrags. Tottering. Half lidded eyes, half starved. 

**
​
Sandwich
 
They call us the sandwich generation. Stacked between ailing parents and young kids of our own. We’re the bread. Slices bookending bitter demands. The sour sweet seafoam in yeast, rising. But really, I feel more like butter spread thin. Better yet, mustard made tang: a seed not unlike such miniscule planet to hold us. What kind of sandwich? No one specifies. A BLT? That nightshade tongue soft on bacon crackle. In any case, they say I’m living in-between. The rootstocked fist of a lettuce, the open eyes of Swiss cheese?
             
At the 11th hour, Earl Montagu of Sandwich called for roast beef between bread slices. To keep one hand free for gambling. Cards, toast, lice and bad wigs. Whatever–it happened over three hundred years ago. I bet he didn’t have to change diapers.    
                        
A friend once confessed: I dreamt I was homeless throwing sandwiches at passing cars. It’s an Aries thing. A desire to shirk responsibilities. An astral sandwich is a night crammed with stars, moons salting us to sleep. Do angels eat sandwiches? My little one doesn’t. She just eats bread. Only Mortadella. Only cheese. Never together.

Her bright face squeezed in my hands, she is a sunny psalm. Heavenly swaths of sourdough. What is life but all living things mewling for food, eager faces begging through my deck’s French doors. Baguette? Croissant. Now we’re talking. Jam lots of butter into everything. I don’t long for lobbing sandwiches across the road, but I do long to sit in a patisserie, legs crossed, add a friend—lounging Paris bums, all the days…down on earth. Keep the dough aerated, patted, rising, feeding a crowd. What about that longing? Nah. Maybe I’d rather be shorting. A short order cook, hand to mouth, cow to table. One thing: I will never use shortening. Pleasure? Living inside my home-cooked hours. 

**

Ghosts and Other Domestic Animals
 
My language is full of them. An errant charge runs through it. All is deceptive. Behind the Iron Curtain, even animals were reassigned. Our eagle lost its crown, my father’s father swallowed bullets, worked his fingers to the bone setting balloons on fire, digging holes. Our moon got its pockmarks dodging comets. That’s love. Rocks flung at the skin of night, mother-of-pearl. One dawn my lawn so spectral I mistook it for floodlights. My eyes half-moon. My joints are loose or my fascia, too tight. This Halloween my fingers slow. Greying human skulls and femurs rest crosswise on our frost-silvered porch. Consider joy. We drape sheets over our heads, boo like ghosts. I am on my knees, Crawl, horsie, crawl. My girl squeals. I am a beast of many tongues, gill to lung. 
 
**
 
Escape Plan

(found prose in a home developer’s brochure)

Thoughtful design vanities. These images are not to be construed as promises. Discover Wolfberry. A charming bridge, a tranquil pond, warm wood soft-close. Welcome to our generic guidebook—subject to variation. A future home for your child. Experience the magic of high-arc pull-down chrome quartz toilet.

Alter, amend, revise.

Stand the test of time. Explore options such as detachable seats, stone, brick defects. Sharp kitchen islands fostering a sense of belonging and spiritual growth. Convenience store filled with long-lasting protection. Our signature on your journey.
 
**

*Source material: Discover Wolfberry Aspen (https://wolfberryaspen.ca/). Extracted, cut, and re-sequenced.

**

Molotov Mixology
 
Rations on Saturday mornings at the brew shack. Sweaty pee-sample beer at noon. Drunks pepper the floor: in situ sculptures, reclining comrades, mammals in shut-down. Bored, us kids run through the pines, leap, throw pinecones at the bums. Will they move? Then the cull. Police issue bulldozers, push this way and that. We giggle. No one sees us. The warm sun drying needle tips, beach sand kissing tourists’ boots. Nowadays, I return for photo ops, teal fishing boats, my dress a mermaid hugging Baltic waves. We tip our botanical cocktails at passersby. Crème de menthe Neptune martinis, trident stir sticks, sea salt rim. Servers nod and smile. Offer forks for pizza slices. Don’t you wish for a Molotov? Corrugated aluminum, hot tin vodka. Dash of benzene, crushed glass for a dead-on twinkle. 
 
**

Aldona Dziedziejko is an immigrant writer and educator living in Clearwater Country, Canada. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in CV2, PRISM international, The Capilano Review, subTerrain, Poetry Is Dead, Fiction Southeast, and Pulp Literature, among others. Her work has been recognized by the Lina Chartrand Poetry Award, the Lush Triumphant Literary Prize, and the Magpie Poetry Contest, and has been shortlisted for the Disquiet Prize, the Jon Whyte Memorial Essay Award, and Fractured Lit’s Fractured & Fused Prize.

Singularity

The first star mattered only to the second star, and then it was gone. The second star mattered only to the first star, and then it was alone. After the Big Bang flare exhaled to a hiss from its singularity, everything fell dark again as the dust motes drifted. The only hints of change were virtual particles playing their games with antimatter, as they always had—always will. The difference is in the before, spacetime didn’t exist. There was only the void, and in the void, self-annihilation. No time. No aging. No loss. No stars forming. No first kisses. No dancing. In the after, everything expanded, more and more distant. Growing apart is a breath that never fills the lungs.

**

Song

Can’t we just let the song play, she said, and dance through the end. Part of her feels like she let go of him before they ever met, like their meeting was fate’s way of announcing that the world isn’t perfect and that’s just something to accept. There’s another part of her that feels if she had never met him she would have felt his absence, a nagging pull like the back of the brain taptaptap of having left the oven on even when she hasn’t used the oven in months.

**

Empty

Before even the earliest days of the universe, everything was nothing and nothing was everything. A vacuum of emptiness, a nothing as a pure as could be, and that pureness, before the Big Bang, was everything. Quantum filed mechanics. Even in nothingness virtual particles flecked into existence, spots of nothing dotted the tapestry of nothing, and their opposites, antiparticles also emerged in nothingness, flares that danced this way, a pop and spring into the void and pinched out, something from nothing and back again, a question about loneliness, the negation of each the other in bursts of nano-explosions, tiny needles pricking into a lifeless heart. 

**

Tingles

The newness tingles the belly. First kiss. Endless possibilities origamied into existence, if only for an instant. She’s reminded of the time they met unexpectedly at the grocery store, him with pears in his carry basket and her with peanut butter, jelly, bread, and pads in her cart. There are moments when everything seems possible, when just a glance can make all the tediousness of the day fade, the way pain medication pulls the bite out of a broken tooth—pain is still there, but we care about it less. 

**

Warmth

A hint of warmth for the first time since time began and that lasted for only a quick second. When the Big Bang released its explosion of molecules, swirls of colorful gas clouds in pockets of helium and hydrogen, heat curled in hazy waves around particles in spotty darkness upon which streams of violet, turquoise, and fuchsia that extended out like fingers searching for a hand to hold, which lit the canopy of blackness and showed nothing but more darkness.

**

Clichéd

The couch. Again. Netflix and chill—with the cat. Again. If there weren’t a pandemic, she’s sure she wouldn’t be alone, even though she felt alone before the pandemic started even when he was there. Sometimes the distance is in the touch. He could have called, she thinks. He could have said that it doesn’t matter what happened, and that she isn’t going through this alone. Maybe she should just call him. Reach out. Be the bigger person, as they say. Connect. Maybe say she’s sorry—and mean it this time. Or, maybe enough of Netflix and she should see what’s on Prime. 

**

Drift

The drifting continued for millennia. The coziness of the pre-Big Bang womb followed by the clock of heat that ticked through molecules to their neutrons, continued residually for millennia as they formed gasses and clouds, became dense enough to pull gravity. And the clouds packed tighter, holding onto themselves, their atomic memory of fetal seed bed compressed oneness. One instance, singular, no difference between electrons or protons or hydrogen or oxygen or me or you. Everything and all things one thing and one thing nothing or everything that mattered or anti-mattered.

**

Found

Over time molecules began to find each other again. Hydrogen atoms began to collect around other hydrogen atoms. Large groups of helium joined in. Oxygen. The cooling effect of time, a new construct, led them to find each other, to huddle together in their soupy clouds to stay warm. And even when packed together still there was space for virtual particles to continue their snap into and pirouette out of existence with corresponding anti-particles, the universe’s second hand ticking before time and during and one day after. Micro Big Bangs. Nano Big Bangs. Each the bursting possibility of spacetime, again and again spacetime, again and again hope, connection.

**

Seen

She saw herself in his eyes and wished she could only see his eyelids. It’s hard to work on ourselves, but she tries. Forces a laugh when a smile might do. Harder when Zoom is the COVID sounding board for socializing, and she isn’t social anyway and would rather zoom to the other side of the universe than keep trying to be something that doesn’t make sense.

​**

Rodger LeGrand has been nominated for the Pushcart twice, and is the author of several collections of poetry, including Bells, (Finishing Line Press 2025), Studies for a Self-Portrait (Big Table 2019) and Two Thirds Water (Flutter Press 2018). Next year, his short story collection titled Ashes (2026) will be published by Finishing Line Press. His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Ravens Perch, Evening Street Review, The Cortland Review, and the Boston Literary Magazine. He has taught writing at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, he designs curriculum for humanitarian courses for the United Nations and international NGOs at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

​
I’ve Never Been Cut Short 

like a bird at its last landing, eye wet and alive with pain, reflecting winter sky over the lake, flat white plain of downtown that makes me want to reach out to close it, but there’s no time, traffic keeps me moving beyond the dying bird, beyond even the man who says can I ask you a question? and before I can stop myself I say no, thank you like he’s offered me a gum wrapper, a shoulder, what it means to want what one has and be content, as though he’s handing me the brilliance of new flight or the tight pinch of the lungs’ thrill right before freezing, right before I step off the curb

**

This is Here, Too

(threnody for Erik)

it’s raining when my brother calls from a payphone in Milwaukee, right outside a prison, to ask me if I am a bitch. that’s the word he uses when I let the voicemail record his holiday greeting, his wet coil of empty vein unspooling in brittle reverie of what I must be doing instead of rushing, jumping to pick up the call before it slides to the automated bliss of a one-sided conversation. I eat an apple and play his message, drink some milk and listen to the words, I chew a piece of bread and wipe my mouth with the sharp of my hand just as he really gets going with the screw you and do you really think you can do this to me you stupid cunt. later I play it on speakerphone so I can understand where he’s coming from, his perfect penal dialect, that’s some shit right there. just as he tells me to fuck myself, no, get that dyke wife to do it for you, he slips, unsteady, now a low machine spitting curls of blond childhood: airborne, snapping a wrist on the curb, another time his elbow, then his chin split like a seed, red stream as he runs up the carpeted stairs to the kitchen, our mother’s head lolling on a thin stick of neck while I clean up the blood, tend the fracture, how can I not answer the phone

his messages play on a loop, tell the bruises, the audible map of the same neighbourhoods, the same spaces, the same faces cupping our adolescence until it spills over the brim and we are lost riding the steadfast boats of our bodies to our respective places: knocked up, in jail, dead. no visible lines stretch these threads to clutch at a needleless eye, to slip past and lie groundless until we are all that we have left, until one of us lets go and there is only one, listening, again, turning up the volume on a recorded message with no audience

**

American Summer

unfortunate age without a name, each of us romantic. this bleak dialect stammers home beneath blue-green longing, bright flash of midsummer in this two-winter town. budge me, and budge me with a thousand would-be could-bes, each of them a slow burn of never mind, of possibility, finally, and yes. now put me back in, unmoored from gratitude, introduce me to the faint sped whisper of trees, the bulging bridge underneath this gray gate and dead air. we know the conclusion, so tell me its first lines, unrumple the glasses’ fat cooling and surface, the space of yesterday, the forgetting tomorrow

**

Composition

we are splintered deep glassine-flickered surface, to tell. the lights glare in these hotel windows, fogged with a noonday malaise, a rush-fine swelter to be gone from. I can feel your mouthful at the sink, at my brush-halted lip (one pink soapflake curling in the dish), my eyes still, dry in the moist empty of. I won’t give this, but keep it close, watching the steam rise, I won’t give this, crooning over blanks, willing stones, I won’t give this, flight after blanch and scatter, I won’t give this, nothing, words whispered in a paper cup

**

Photographs

It’s Wednesday, I’m dressing the kids for school, so I think he’s joking, an old joke, one he’s told before, at gas stations and in long-distance calls, your mother’s dead, he says to the machine, and then, later, bad luck, the sergeant says to me, as though I’ve a worm in my shoe, or a pebble, and this is a race, my aunt demanding, cheering me on, saying take photos of every naked inch and send them to me for psychic interpretation, to divine the spaces between my father’s intentions, and we will not compare our grief, she says, but be objective: a sister, a daughter, don’t forget between the toes as I’m in the grocery store now looking at cans of beans, so many beans, and instead I send the undertaker, my mother’s floating head unzipped, crushed pillow of dyed blonde hair, he emails me a picture, the subject line a number so that I am startled when I see her appear, as large as any photo in the news of bodies under bloodied sheets, her head on my screen, though I can’t take possession of her body without my father’s approval, just one condition, as a uniformed officer takes him to the morgue: “She looks terrible,” he says to me, the first time we’ve spoken in years, “she looks terrible,” he says, the line receding, “you can have her.”

**

Tasia M Hane spends much of her time navigating liminal spaces. You can find her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in Baltimore Review, Tar River Poetry, New York Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Quarter after Eight, Hippocampus Magazine, Sou’wester, and Third Coast, among other journals. She holds a PhD from Case Western Reserve University.

​Immunities
 
The animals have always suggested cures--skin of frog, gut of pig, airway of cow. “There now,” the nurses say, “You’re doing fine,” needle in their hands, bringing sorcery to the blood. Today, the overhead lights shingle this house of water where spiny dogfish sharks slide forward, antibiotics, according to the news, in all of their tissues. Do fish sleep? We think, and press the glass like an infected world. All of the places in ourselves where death begins are humming. The incurables are foraging through the animals. Full vowels swim up our throats, repeating themselves like these sharks that turn left, follow two sides of glass, plunge, face forward, and drive upward again, to our stare.
 
**
 
The Danger of Yawning
 
Surely, long odds for death by yawning, but you should know that over a thousand drivers per year die that way, distracted by the language for the need to sleep.  Yes, like anyone, you might question how such claims are verified, survivors necessarily testifying to cause, though who doesn’t yawn while traveling the freeways that hurry us long distance, the radio tuned to news of a war so lengthy it sounds like songs dripping from the dropped ceilings of dentists? And who am I, this afternoon, marveling at the oddities of death, free to guess how large a yawn might shutter sight because every victim has an unfamiliar name? But imagine, for a moment, how once, in Australia, a dwarf somersaulted from a circus trampoline and plummeted, clown-costumed, into the incredible yawn of a hippopotamus, swallowed whole while the audience applauded, then paused, waiting with disbelief, like the parents of soldiers receiving new, perfectly folded flags, impossibility laid precisely down upon the mothers’ quiet, unfurled hands.
 
**
 
Orbits
 
Since the funeral, snow has fallen thick and packable. Her brother begins to roll balls for a solar system in his yard, shaping the huge mass of Jupiter, the extraordinary sphere of the sun. He works the planets to scale, measures circumference and the distances from ball to ball. When the planets seem unfinished, he gives them moons to scale, snow berries and packed pebbles of ice. At last, he needs the neighbour’s yard for Pluto, clearing a space for that small sphere before he walks down the street to form the nearest star, nowhere far enough to reach her.
 
**
 
Senescence
 
The falling-away, my grandmother called it, claiming it could be cured by rain, as long as the shower is caught in a pan before sunrise. In that water, she said, boil an egg.  Through its shell, bore three holes, then set it upon an anthill and wait for the hunger of ants to end weakness, weight loss, or persistent decline. Like all of the dead, she repeats herself now, sometimes shaking me awake in the dark to say it’s raining, to suggest an egg. Pay attention, she says, there are hundreds of versions of falling-away, the skin and bones, the heart’s flicker, the mute surprise at the cloudless noon of embolism. And lately, there are certainly evenings of weakness, a daily log of general decline. A vague pressure turns to pain and swelling. In the kitchen, the bleak jingle of knives is a barely heard phone. My wife showers for so long I worry that she’s fainted. I scroll through sixteen reels. Yesterday, I met a student who has inhaled two kinds of household products to alter an hour. Outside, the late morning rain compresses the anthill near the crown vetch to the cyst of a child’s castle swirled sodden by tide, bubbles forming in the sand’s needled holes to reveal something alive lies beneath them.
  
**
 
Coveting                                                                                                                   
 
Sometimes, we allow others to name us. Just yesterday, a man I know boasted about how hot his young daughter had become and laughed as if confident I would be eager to see photographs of her, somebody who might confess to coveting with the ancient, carnal words. By not speaking, what I appeared to be was a small, neutral, defenseless country. I remembered and said nothing about how my wife, hours from delivery the morning our daughter was born, answered a call that came so early it sounded like emergency until a man’s voice hoarsely insisted how hard he wanted to penetrate her soft, luscious body. Over forty years now, our small kitchen’s rotary phone an antique, my daughter with three girls of her own, but that morning, between contractions, my wife said, “I think I recognized his voice,” naming a man who worked for her, somebody she had hired, not our neighbour who, even the day before, had watched her cross our just-mown lawn from what I knew was his bedroom window. Or how, for months, I’d noticed that habit of his, so often pleased that he surely coveted his neighbour’s wife that I might as well have been calling her myself to spew that I needed men to desire her.
 
**
 
A History of When
 
When my mother stopped holding her head, she carried canning jars up from the cellar. When she sat at the table, catching her breath, she snapped the ends off green beans, an hour to recover, whether the pills kicked in or not. Because who else would preserve the beans or later, the tomatoes and peaches, arranging the filled, sealed jars for winter? Who else would cook and clean, strip the beds and remake them when her headaches only simmered like soup she reheated, sipping the broth because she could keep that down and work? When she stopped moaning into her pillow. When she came out of her darkened bedroom. When she could do what needed to be done. When she could save things that needed saving until October sighed, ready to close, Castro and Kennedy rerunning on the nostalgia network, romanticized while kidney failure overwhelmed her in the bedroom with no mirrors and one radio, its clock set so far ahead that she, accordingly, outlived herself.
 
**
 
The Abilities of Birds
 
Sometimes, a mother hen’s screeching wakes her chicks unhatched in eggs. Ravens remember past relationships. Crows recognize the voices of birds of other species, and, in Australia, lyrebirds, the males, mimic any sound they hear, from cameras to car alarms, to attract quiet females for mating. Such shrieking as prelude to joy, but here, for the third consecutive year, doves have chosen the central crotch of his weeping cherry, fluttering, more often than hourly, from the lawnmower and slammed car doors in the driveway. Last night, for the third consecutive year, the nest has collapsed during a storm, eggs strewn beneath the hapless veil of drooping branches. So persistent, those doves, remarkable as the couple next door who are paying for pregnancy, the wife acknowledging, yesterday, their third failure, her voice, from where she now stands beside his tree, keening into the knotted wail of unendurable.
 
**
 
The Dim Light
 
What his mother sewed by, the one shaded bulb over her left shoulder, her chair drawn close, teaching sacrifice in the hours between opening the vials labeled four times a day or as needed, and because it is 1961, the radio emits light with its music, the tubes glowing while she sighs so often it sounds like breathing broken only by the brief brilliance of her cry when her body shifted as she put one thing aside and reached for another. This light, a flightless bird, has always lived in a foster home where myths become biographies. In the museum of memory, he inspects webbed footprints sunk so far into the earth he nearly remembers the shape of a bird so large it believed there was nothing it need fear. Like an approaching search party, the world is a face of lights.
 
 **

Gary Fincke's latest collection is The History of the Baker's Dozen (Pelekinesis 2024). He is co-editor of the annual anthology Best Microfiction.
 

In the Afterlife, My Father Is Finally Content
​
I can just make him out, standing in one of his beloved fields, probably McIntosh’s Park. The sun is shining and clouds are drifting overhead, casting their shadows on the fields of barley on the other side of the glen. My father is moving a flock of sheep from one field to another. In the afterlife, his dog is perfectly trained and obeys his commands, anticipating each new action with keen intelligence. The ewes flow effortlessly through the gate, just like in the sheepdog trials on TV. It never went so smoothly in real life. My father cups his hand around his pipe and holds his Zippo to the wooden bowl. There’s no wind, so it lights easily at the first attempt. I see him smile as he watches something in the distance. Maybe he’s spotted a buzzard, or he’s listening to the call of a curlew. Or perhaps he’s just content because for once he’s finished his work early and can head back to the farmhouse, sit in his shabby leather armchair next to the Rayburn and listen to Radio 4, possibly take a nap. I move closer, call out “Dad.” There are so many things I want to ask him. How did he decide when he was finished for the day? Did he feel satisfied in the evenings, or did he fret about the next day’s tasks? But he just stares into the distance. He takes a final puff on his pipe, whistles for the dog, and starts walking in the direction of home. There’s no way to get through to him. No way at all.
 
**

Blood Lines

My father and I sat in the tattoo studio flipping through the folders. There was a strong smell of disinfectant and a faint aroma of ink. Dad kept looking up and frowning at the tattoo artists with their multiple piercings. It had taken a lot of work, but I’d managed to persuade him to get matching tattoos. I told him it would bring us closer together. I told him Mum would have wanted it. “See anything you like?” I asked, pointing at the images in their clear sleeves. “I was hoping I might find something with personal significance,” he said. “Like the Massey Ferguson I had when I first took over the farm, or the Aberdeen Angus bull my father sold to the Argentine.” I flicked through another couple of pages. “How about this one?” I said, pointing at an illustration of the Pictish symbol that was carved into the standing stone in my parents’ village. “Or this?” The design showed a map of Scotland with a red dot marking the location of the farm where my father grew up. Dad shook his head and returned his attention to the newspaper crossword. Leafing through the designs, searching for something that held significance for both of us, I thought of the flap of inked skin I’d once seen in a formaldehyde jar in Berlin’s Charité museum. I wondered if, after my father’s eventual death, the doctor would ask if I wanted to hold on to the tattoo as a keepsake. I recalled how my father would skin a dead newborn lamb and tie the fleece around an orphan, so the familiar smell would fool the mother ewe into accepting the stray. As a child, I too sometimes thought I must be adopted.
 
**

Nothing Reminds Me of Home

like the sickly smell of an animal corpse. I grew up surrounded by dead lambs, eye sockets hollowed out by crows. When I saw my father take his rifle from the cupboard under the stairs, where we kept tinned food and candles for blackouts, I knew a beast was so ill there was no point calling the vet. My father would be sombre when he returned. He’d eat his supper in silence, write in his farm diary instead of listening to the radio. Our livelihood depended on death, yet he didn’t like killing animals. When, years later, he was bed-ridden and dying, I couldn’t help thinking: if you were a cow, you’d have shot yourself by now.
 
**

Reddit Nothing Brings Me Joy

It’s impossible to hit middle age and not feel relief. Finding ourselves somewhere solid. Wasn’t that the point? You might ask whatever happened to our shattered dreams, but some stories are meant to be unfinished: the rental car, the gas station restroom. It makes for good material. At the end of the day, I know my place. Turns out the spheres were playing music all along. We just weren’t listening. 
 
**

In Autumn, I Can Already Smell the Snow

I investigate the limits of the city, seek out painted facades. They say the winters here are moderate, but I fear an early frost. I miss pleasant sounds. I crave sandstone and clear skies. I come to the lake and ask for forgiveness. I practise nocturnes on the piano. I watch for urban wildlife. I write postcards to friends, but fail to post them. The buses here never arrive, and the old men wear too much make-up. My dreams are full of car accidents and births. I have seldom seen so many ruins, and I am tired of orchards. I watch through uncurtained windows as my neighbours play video games. I worry about the locked compartments in the public library. I pray to a different saint each day. 
 
 **

Predators and Prey

We were all excited about going to see the swans at the Centre. None of us had ever seen a real one before. They’d advertised it for weeks in advance on the screens. My dad warned us not to get too close. “They’ll break your arm with a swipe of their wing.” Mum said in the old days all the swans belonged to the monarch. We asked her what a monarch was and she started talking about something called a queen, but we were none the wiser. When we got there and saw the three birds swimming around the artificial pool in the Centre’s main plaza, a chill ran through me. It was eerie to see a real animal, even though I knew it was all bioengineering. There was a smell I’d never experienced before, like rotting food. The swans drifted around the surface of the water like white ghosts. They looked like they knew where they were going, but how could they? When I held my appliance in front of one to make a recording, the bird hissed at me, as if it could tell what I was thinking. I’d read about animals, of course, and even seen old videos of them, but I never imagined they would be conscious. That they might want something.
 
**

Creative Destruction

At the office, my team was forced to take part in a workshop where we had to build Lego creations representing the biggest challenges we faced. Emma made a model of our boss blocking her ideas. Steve’s structure illustrated the challenges of combining office work with child care. The works were a bit on the nose, what with the little desks and Lego people raising their arms and everything. I wasn’t sure how to depict a creeping sense of existential angst, so I built a representation of my future poetry collection instead. Everybody crowded around to get a better look. “What on earth is that?” asked Fiona. “It’s a representation of my future poetry collection,” I said. “I didn’t know you wrote poetry,” she said. “I don’t,” I said quickly, realising I shouldn’t have admitted my literary ambitions at work. “It’s so … beautiful,” someone said. “So fragile, and yet strong,” another person added. “What do you think, Glen?” the workshop facilitator asked. Glen was staring at my model. Instead of answering, he broke off the top of my structure with a doughy hand. “Stop,” I said, lunging towards him. Several pairs of hands held me back. I strained at their grip but was unable to prevent Glen from tearing apart my model piece by piece. As I watched, I realised my co-worker was the same Glen who’d smashed my beloved Lego castle when he came for a playdate at the age of six. Robert, the farm worker from New Zealand who lived with us for a summer, had built the castle with me. It was so intricate, packed with turrets, balconies and secret passageways.
 
**

Psychopomps

And here we are again, making small talk about God. You tell me private equity is discovering the afterlife. You’re concerned about a lack of psychopomps. I extract an egg sandwich from the tray, you accept a top-up. You point at my father’s Rotary. Don’t see many young people wearing watches these days. I’m not young, but I nod. He knew the old prayers by heart. My daughter bounds over, hugging her soft toy like a floatation device. Foxy needs to go to the loo. I follow as she skips along the corridor. My heavy brogues sink into the mossy carpet. You are new now, blessed by God.
 
**

Blood Alcohol

And here you are again, on the edge of the woods at dusk. These fields had names once. A fox skulks in the undergrowth. The petrol station lights were the last thing he saw. Your coffee is cold now. Recorded chatter the only kind you can stand. Amidst the hogweed, the sodden remains of a stuffed bear. Parallel ogees smear the road. Plastic wrap tourniquets your arm; the addition of a date. He’s riding his bike in the evening sun, endless circles around the barn. He is four years old. He will always be four years old. 

**

Daniel Addercouth grew up on a remote farm in the north of Scotland but now lives in Germany. His work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, The London Magazine and Vestal Review, among other places.

​Mount St Helens 1976
 
I was sixteen years old, driving to California with a boy I’d marry when I turned eighteen. Born on the prairie, most comfortable in college towns—Bozeman, Missoula—I disliked cities, but the car’s windshield framed an urban view that called me like a siren. Was it the bridges soaring over the river’s wide division? The curling ferns on hillsides cascading with greenery? The snowy peaks of Mount St. Helens and Mt. Hood presiding over the skyline? I barely said it out loud, the mildest expression of a conviction that only grew stronger as we passed through Portland on our way to parts south. “I hate cities, but if I had to live in one, I think I could live here.” He smiled and said nothing. I knew he loved Montana. That’s where we would move after I graduated high school. That’s where he thought we would live forever. 
 
mountains capped with snow
two extinct volcanic peaks
only one will blow 

**

The Astral Plain 1978
 
I tried so hard to believe. I wanted to read palms and lay out tarot cards. I wanted to experience ESP and levitation. And more than anything else, I want to travel the astral plain. Every night before I went to sleep, I tried to cast my—soul?—or whatever it is you’re supposed to send out via astral projection. Every morning, I would wake up and record what I could remember of my dreams, hoping to find evidence that I’d actually done it. My goal was to send my disembodied self out on the astral plain to find intelligent people, funny people, maybe even a few famous people—the people I was having trouble finding in Missoula, Montana, as the 18 year-old wife of an auto mechanic. 
 
curled cats sleeping near
mountain night, chilly air
sleep allows escape
 
**

Laundry Day 1979
 
When we lived in Missoula, there was no laundry room at our apartment. I owned only one pair of jeans, so going to the laundromat was his job. He saved up loose change in a basket, and off he went on Saturday mornings while I lounged around the house in sleep clothes. He did the laundry well, never ruining a single garment of mine. He even seemed to enjoy it. I went with him once. I didn’t understand the appeal of all those humming, agitating, spinning, tumbling washers and dryers. But he loved motors, engines, anything that ran. Even me, after I ran.
 
battered brown basket
three tank tops, one pair of jeans
it’s clothesline weather

**
 
Escape 1980
 
I remember the edges, ends and borders. Railings giving way to terror. Roadmaps you read and refolded, roads you followed. Colt 40 ouncers. Leaning into the train as it passed, screaming. The air pressure gauge for tires you carried in your front pocket. The grease under your fingernails that you cleaned every night with the pocketknife my parents gave you for your 18th birthday. Always being a passenger, in this car, in that car, up mountain trails and down. Ghost towns of no more than piles of reddish, collapsed lumber. Every national park. Every roadside marker. Your cigarette breath, the precise way you cleaned your glasses. Your mute love for me, as crushing as if it had been dropped on you from a great height. All those crumbling apartments, leaking heat and anger. Ants. Running out of fuel oil. Top Ramen. Concerned teachers. Calling my parents from phone booths and crying, wanting to come home. One pair of shoes in three years. A cat with leukemia. No tv. The night your mother called to tell you about your dad, the way you stood in that tiny kitchen and curved your body around the conversation, shrugging away my hand when I tried to touch you. The university chapel full of flowers and Bartok at his memorial service. Your mother in navy blue. My black eye. The moan of the cello. I left the week after his funeral. You forgave me. 
 
Drink the cheap green beer 
Gather boxes secretly
Load the van and drive 
 
**

Glioblastoma Multiforme Return
 
In this dream, we were still pretending to be together, as we did that last bit of time with your parents before your father died. A painful but necessary façade, hiding my imminent flight for your mother’s sake. In life, it was less than a year. In the dream, we’d somehow done it for forty years. Your mother was ignorant and inside with your not-dead father, who was not shaking, not gasping out his last breaths in a convalescent center. No tumor had made a meal of his brilliant mind. 
 
A dream or nightmare 
I’ve had both, my own mother 
alive dead at the same time
 
We hardly knew each other, two strangers in a parked car, exhaled breath floating like smoke in the cold. Putting on our false marriage, wearing it as a mask. Your three brothers entered the house before us, rough hands stuffed deeply in the pockets of their Levi’s, hiking boots crunching through the Montana midwinter snow.  You joined them. As the four of you walked before me, I thought how you all formed a perfect scale on the spectrum, from barely affected to functionally autistic. 
 
All your mother’s sons 
athletic, nodding heads 
coarse and curling hair 
 
We trooped into a home I didn’t know, displacing the silence and that strange smell of a cold and empty house. Your once-disapproving mother welcomed me, finally, the child-bride stranger, a too-tall rebuke of all she was. I congratulated your not-dead father on beating his unbeatable cancer, on his unexpected and extended life, on drawing breath even though he was dead, even though it had trapped me with you. I’d promised to stay until he died—but he hadn’t. So I’d never left you. 
 
My own life was gone
never lived, never known 
erased by a dream.
 
I felt my way along in this different reality, like a blind woman with hands on walls, finding a safe place to stand. Why was I summoned back to this family of strangers who thought they knew me? None of you had children. Your mother asked me if we were we going to try, finally. I couldn’t bear to tell her that the ruse of our marriage had stretched long past my menopause. 
 
Oh yes, I said. We will. 
Good, she said. I have always 
wanted grandchildren.
 
I excused myself to take a walk, and that’s what I did. I walked until I found a long concrete path that cut through Bozeman, straight to Four Corners. I knew that beside me ran a parallel path, also concrete, hidden behind a fence. I knew it had to be there. It wasn’t far.
 
It ran like a track, 
knifing through that empty town, 
and out of it.
 
**

Karen G. Berry lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She is interested in micro-societies, the strange and secret lives of children, and the heroic nature of everyday living. Karen's work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and published by Persimmon Tree, Open Secrets, Inknest, The Offing, Pasager, HerStry, Flash Fiction, Thin Skin, Rust & Moth, The Gilded Weathervane, The Ekphrastic Review, and many other journals and anthologies, online and in print. You can learn more about Karen at her blog, I am Not a Pie. ​

​Matter
 
I was clattering around the kitchen this morning, and a pronouncement fell from the radio above the sink: “So, we don’t have much agency over the thermal death of the universe.” Something in the speaker’s weary voice compelled me to copy the phrase on the back of my grocery list, below mirror images of “peanut butter,” “feta,” “celery,” and “Chloe’s cold cuts” bleeding through in black Sharpie ink. It was just after New Year’s, raw and overcast outside for sure, but not exactly a harbinger of impending thermal death. The radio droned on about the Higgs boson, that “God-particle” responsible for the creation of discrete matter in those first Big Bang micro-moments, all the stuff that could coalesce into nebulae and tectonic plates and the flesh on my bones and a fibrous celery rib. Geez, NPR expects a lot of heavy lifting before first cup of coffee! Whatever pull I might exert upon the universe’s longevity, I don’t quite fathom, but I do love the word “agency,” such an exhilaration of power and autonomy.  Although these days I associate it most with women and their bodies, hard-won rights disintegrating into the current political maelstrom, much like the apparent fade of energy across the firmament. Everything gets flipped. If Leonardo Da Vinci wrote down his groceries, I could read them perfectly on the other side. What tissues of time and matter separate us from comprehending our purpose? What if I forgot to add “dish soap” to the list? 
 
**
 
Reliquary for a Dog
 
Roscoe was no saint. Shitter of carpets and shredder of backpacks left unattended on the floor. He once courted death by nipping at the heels of a State Police horse, a patient behemoth who could’ve decapitated his little Jack Russell head and golfed it halfway across the park with one hindquarter clip. But here’s the thing, his actual death was miraculous. I woke to find him half-paralyzed on the one morning of the year my grown kids and my ex were in all town for Christmas, and my step-family was away. We convened in my kitchen, and once he realized his original rescue family had all come together one last time, he peacefully checked out. How that rascal was able to time it like that, I’ll never know. His ashes are bagged in a baby shoebox on my bookshelf. I’ve thought of sprinkling him in that stand of pines on the coast of Maine where he once staggered out dragging a desiccated deer leg longer than he was. O how he radiated his inner wolf that day! Should’ve kept that leg, cremated it along with him as an accompaniment to whatever further scavenging grounds he might ascend to. I don’t believe in Doggie Purgatory, no seven-story obstacle course to climb in refinement of the canine soul. Even if there was, he’d probably dig his way out under the perimeter fence, looking for something nasty to roll around in and eat. 
 
**
 
Blame
 
The first pedestrian fatalities caused by automobiles were called “car murders.” Auto companies hated the term, and eventually they devised the misdemeanor “jaywalking,” to shift blame onto the walking public. How to arbitrate the interactions between ambulating flesh and fast-moving chunks of steel and glass? No one wants to accrue blame for a child’s brains dashed out against the curb. My brother died in his bedroom, and I was relieved to hear he was at home; that he hadn’t been ejected, drunk, through the windshield of his Porsche, and that he hadn’t taken anyone with him. This is what my gratitudes consist of nowadays. And really, blame is not a sticky-trap dragging one down into a morass of remorse, not unless it’s accompanied by a hefty jail sentence, and even then, you can play the martyr card, raise defense funds from your base, or lean into that great American tradition where everyone loves a good comeback story. My brother did several months in county lockup, and when he got out, he built three good years of sobriety. I am most grateful for that time with him. Set your mirrors with care, wear a seat belt, use your blinkers, use a designated driver. What do jays have to do with traffic flow, anyway? When I approach my polling station to vote, I always look all ways before I cross.    
 
**
 
This poem was previously published in Atticus Review.
 
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Cause
 
I’m shivering under the filling station awning as a light wintry mix falls, watching gallons and dollars swell on the register of Pump #5, when a prompt appears on the screen: “Would you like to make a donation to St. Jude,” not specifying if the funds would go towards research for cancer-riddled kids, just Saint Jude, that unremarkable apostle pushed to the periphery in most Last Supper tableaus, the chump who got tagged as Patron Saint of Lost Causes, which doesn’t bode well for the cancer kids, and I start thinking, all right Pump, what is your lost cause; are we talking about our current hydrocarbon-burning transportation system, or more broadly, is the Grand Experiment of Humanity coming to a close and this is the only sign I’ll get that the Rapture is at hand, and if I don’t drop a healthy tithe into this gas pump card reader right now, I’m not going to make it skyward; instead I’ll get hung up on the underside of this filling island awning, my ankles tangled in a hose spewing gouts of economy grade octane all over, the fire-retardant foam nozzles kicking in too late to keep my Subaru from going up in an apocalyptic fireball; oh jeez Pump, give me a just a sec, but nothing much happens, just a slight shift in the wind pushing sleet down my neck, and I hop back in the car, buckle up, and pull out onto the highway toward home and my beloved.
 
**

This poem was previously published in Hole in the Head Review. 
 
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Maine Aubade
 
Dawn unfolds, with rose-capped breakers murmuring the shoreline, and I am haunted out of sleep by a specter wafting in from across the ocean, tumbling into my newsfeeds and dreams, images of shredded, amputated arms and legs, many of them tiny; huge horrific piles of them accumulating, crusted in pus and dust, and as the sun shatters the horizon onto this outpost edge of America, the remaining trunk of my empathy squirms a question: does a phantom limb feel the agony of its lingering phantom pain in proportion to the butchery inflicted on the severed appendage?  
 
slack tide
crab carcass
drifting 
 
** 

Pinsky

I was waiting for a train in Penn Station, maintaining my little island of space within the flow of humans on the move, and I looked up from my book to see, right in front of me, the unmistakable profile of Robert Pinsky, staring up at the trackboard, trying to locate his train, and for a brief moment I had this urge to introduce myself, which flared and snapped shut like a Zippo lighter; I mean, what was I going to say?— “Gee, Mr. Pinsky, I’m not just a fellow traveler, I’m actually an emerging poet, and I love your work; in fact, I was thinking about the strings of inventory in “Shirt” just the other night, such an awesome poem!” – and he would have to shake himself free from the anxiety of missing his connection, tuck away his formidable mental to-do list, mumble some gracious pleasantries, maybe ask a question or two about my own influences and trajectory, all while keeping an ear out for the overhead PA track announcement, as commuters shouldered by us all around; all that work I did for him in my head before returning to my book, staring down at some random phrase until I sensed he had moved on into the cavernous bustling, just another guy trying to get to somewhere else. 
 
**
 
This was previously published in Complete Sentence.  
 
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Post-Election Postcard: Montreal
 
By chance, we had planned a short getaway to Montreal for the weekend after the presidential election, and the lingering grief for the just-deceased Leonard Cohen was as unavoidable in the raw swirling November air as the post-election turmoil that followed us north across the border. The Canadian newspapers held a generous balance between elegies for Leonard, and tremulous projections for the impending Trump era and its sinister ripples the world over. We heard that the entryway to Leonard’s ancestral home in Westmount had been transformed into a shrine of treasured lyrics, but we didn’t visit. This morning, I walked the few blocks down from our hotel to the chapel of Notre Dame de Bon Secours, the sacred space where Leonard was reputed to draw inspiration for his first successful song, “Suzanne.” The Sunday streets were peaceful in the absence of weekday road repairs, the usual Old Port crowds were reduced to a few early wandering tourists like myself, and a scattering of well-bundled homeless folks circling while waiting for a food pantry to let them in. The chapel was open, and a sparsely attended Mass was underway. I slipped into a back pew and tried to mark my place in the liturgy with my minimal French. The famous ship models hanging from the chapel vault were pointing aimlessly every which way, as if they had been tossed in a recent storm. Brilliant diagonals of colour beamed down through the east transept windows. I offered a prayer of gratitude, and a plea for guidance in the coming turbulent times, then re-emerged into the ripped-up cobblestone streets and the cold cloudless morning light. 
 
Later in the day, sitting in a line of cars at the border, creeping through Customs to pass back into the States, we saw the Canadian flag, flying at half-mast. For a moment I lost it, and wept behind the wheel, as a tender bubble of hope welled up in the realization that we are still neighbours with a nation that can publicly mourn a singer and a poet. 
 
**
 
Ars Protectica: A Monosyllabus

We will need lots of words, big words. Not big as in long, but big as in words that feel big, words that are clear, words like “strong” and “win” and “fight back” and “they will pay.” Don’t say “black” or “brown,” just say “them,” and we will know what we mean. Save the weak words for them, words like “fail” and “thug” and “sad.” Words that will keep them far from us. For they are not like us. No, not at all. Think of the words that will keep us safe from them: “lock ‘em up” and “lock and load” and “stand your ground.” Great words. And “safe,” such a fine word, too. One of the best. Now then, think of things we need to buy more of: bombs, jets, ships, tanks. We can buy more of them if we don’t pay a lot for things we don’t need so much, like health care and clean air and meals on wheels and the arts. These things won’t keep us safe, so why waste funds on them? Think of all the threats in the world. The world is not a safe place now, but we can make it safe, just for us, if we stick to my plan. Trust me.
 
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This poem was previously published in What Rough Beast.
 
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There is an “I” in “WHITE”

right at the centre, all sounds radiating outward from its core, the long vowel sound creating proud space for the architecture of the word. Tall and slender, lucid, perfect in its upright stance at the hub of all things. The word could not exist without the voweled sonic reach of the “I,” as the remaining letters on their own would just eke out a damp puff crossing the lips with a “whtt!,” barely audible. Notice the letters relegated to the periphery, the “W” and the “E,” which could spell out the collective “WE” if they were not separated. These letters are complex, with angles and branches facing out in many different directions. The components of the “WE” are barricaded from the “I” by the henchmen letters “H” and “T,” erect and vigilant, vertical strokes protecting the “I,” with horizontal spacers to keep the outside world at bay. There is potential here: the “H” introduces a turbulence, a sense of living breath to the word; it could be moving into the profound question, “Why?” But the “T” cuts off that possibility by dropping its consonant chop. It might just have concluded a “Whit,” an inconsequential trifle, were it not for the unappreciated labor of the trailing “E” straining to hoist the “I” skyward into all of its long-vowel glory. And the “I” just stands there, insulated from the tensions swirling all around it, blissful in its singularity. “I” does not feel alone, attended to by its acolytes, but I will never know the “WE” in all of their painful complexity, and they will never be able to reach through and disturb my safeguarded ego. 
 
**

This poem was previously published in What Rough Beast.

** 
 
Bonerville
 
When I wake up in Bonerville, my watch announces it’s only three a.m., while my crotch insists I’m thirteen again, endowed with an organ that drives through my days by announcing its desires at the most inconvenient moments, say, right at the end of math class. And I’d have to crabwalk my way between classrooms with a textbook wedged across the tent of my jeans, knowing the whole world must know how incapable I am of owning my feelings, as if I could ever articulate what wells in my heart and elsewhere, intimacy being a world as alien as the scarred and seething surface of Venus. The penis wants, it wants, oh how it wants, and yet brooks no responsibility in mixed company. Freud is unhelpful. Playboy explains nothing. So, I am left to rotisserie through these sweaty sheets, a pouty engorged bewilderment. 
 
Now I’m deaccelerating down the onramp of my Medicare application when a routine blood test flags something tumorous permeating my prostate—erectile prospects pending—which might or might not be a big deal because who really cares about the antics of a graying cis-het retiree, and indeed it’s nobody’s business what goes down in our bedroom, only I will tell you this: we are generous and by times glorious and always grateful for good enough, good enough being the miracle that our hearts washed up on each other’s shores some fourteen years ago when we each thought we were submerged and sinking, and the world right now is metastatic with hate; there is so much burden to shoulder and we will try to heft our part, but we also have by times the blessed bedroom and spring is wheeling round again with its bone-warming swaths of sunbeam on the deck and rafts of daffodils and a beurre blanc lingering piquant on the tongue longer than we ever would have imagined possible.
 
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Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of the chapbook A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems and essays have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Post Road, Salamander, The Sun, and Tahoma Literary Review. He is the poetry editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, and he divides his time between Boston and an apple orchard in Vermont.