​ 
Irish and English 

**

Craobhscaoileadh caoch
 
Chaoin an paidreachán úd – í siúd atá díograiseach dírithe ar ghabháil fhoinn faoin mbreithiúnas aithrí, ollphéisteanna dearga trasna a t-léine ag sligh peacaigh, is tintrí ó ifreann ag loisceadh a ceathrúna le fírinní, a deir sí – go bhfeabhsaíonn an Mhaighdean Mhuire gach uile bhuairt, gur cheart muinín a chur inti, go raibh fianaise faighte aici, gur gabhdán Dé a corp, soitheach na bhfíréin, is í ag soiscéalaíocht ar bhóithre ar bís, is Caoineadh na dTrí Muire á phléascadh aici as ard a cinn, dár gcroitheadh ó shuan chun machnamh a dhéanamh ar ár bpeacaí is go dtabharfadh sí ábhar do bhrionglóidí duit. Sásamh intinne. Suaimhneas anama. Síoraíocht saoil. Chaoin sí go ndéanfaí réiteach ar do chuid is do chás. Thiocfadh meabhair chucu siúd gan tuiscint, chloisfeadh an chluas bhodhar is dhúiseodh focail is glórtha iontu siúd gan smid ná siolla, nach raibh ort ach do lámh a ardú. 
 
D’iarr mé uirthi Mam a fheabhsú le díograis m’urnaí i ngol caoch le deora is bosa fuaite i bpaidir laethúil. 
 
D’imigh sí ar aon nós.  
  
*
 
Blind faith
 
That preacher woman cried – she who is intent, alert and bursting in song about repentance, red serpents on her t-shirt slaying sinners and the fires of Hell scalding her loins with truths – that the Virgin Mary cures all ails and ills, that one should put one’s faith in her, she bore witness she said, her body being a God receptacle, a vessel for the righteous, and her gospelling on roads absorbed in prayer with the Lament of the Three Marys bursting from the top of her head, awakening us to repent and reflect on our sins so she’d give us the stuff of dreams. A satisfied mind. A soulful peace. A life eternal. Your plight and people would be saved, she cried. those without mind would understand, the deaf of ear would hear, and voices and words in those without sound nor syllable would awaken, you had only to raise your hand.
 
I asked her to heal my mother with fervent words spilled through blinding tears and hands sewn in daily prayer.
 
She left anyway.
 
**
 
‘Craobhscaoileadh Caoch/Blind Faith’ has previously appeared in Cnámha Scoilte- Cnuasach prósfhilíochta/Split Bones – A collection of prose poetry (Bobtail Books, Australia 2023).
​
**
 
An t-ocras a d’fhan linn
 
Cheangail sé lámha Mhaurice suas taobh thiar dá dhroim, á bhrú in aghaidh an bhalla cloiche. Fear maol, a mhuineál mar stoc crainn, a ghuaillí mar phoc staiceáilte, a mhatáin ataithe – dealbhaithe le díogras, a chloigeann snasta faoi ghréis is céir, bícéips is tríchéips bioraithe, tatúnna de mhná gan folach orthu sínte go teannasach trasna na mealltracha is na cnapáin atá ag spuaiceadh is ag preabadh le hat, a chuid lámha ag pléascadh amach as muinchillí a t-léine. Ag fanacht leis na gardaí anois, a deir sé liom go bogásach, a chuid lámha fuaite thrí lámha Mhaurice, is Maurice scéineach is faiteach. ‘Níl sé ag tógáil a chuid leighis le gairid,’ a deireann sé, is réiteach na scéala faighte aige dhó féin. Bhí bob Mhaurice ag eitilt sa ngaoth, ag imeacht go fánach a bhí sé mar chuma liom, ina chuid éadaí codlata, ag feadaíl ar mhná na háite go drochbhéasach, ag crochadh boscaí bruscair is ag sceitheadh a gcuid putóga trasna na sráide, ag cnagadh ar dhoirse is ag clamhsán is ag cur dhó faoin gcrann iúir a gearradh síos is go raibh ordú caomhantais ar an gcrann chéanna is nár chóir lámh a leagan air dar leis.’ Éireannach?’ a deireann sé, nuair a chloiseann sé mo chanúint. Leagann sé an clamhsán go leataobh, is tosnaíonn sé ag doirteadh focail mar gheall ar a shin-seanmháthair a tháinig as Mórchuaird Chiarraí nó b’fhéidir Iarthar Chorcaí, nó áit éicint san Iarthar, áit ar tháinig an bháisteach isteach lúbtha go leataobh is plód turasóirí sa samhradh ag thóir tuiscíntí mar gheall ar a sinsir is a ndaoine, ag adhradh caisleáin leathleagtha trí phluid ceo. Tháinig siad le faic ar sé, is iad fós gan pingin rua. Ocras a deir sé. Ocras a bhí orthu. Ocras ó ocras mór a ndaoine. Is fágann an t-ocras sin lorg ar dhuine. Ghlaoigh a gcuid boilg fholamha orthu ar sé, is níorbh fhéidir leis iad a shásamh, san oíche dhorcha, le fáinne geal an lae. Is fágann an t-ocras sin lorg ar sé, is é ag osnaíl is a shúile ag ceansú is ag ciúnú le scaoileadh a scéil is faoiseamh. Fágann an t-ocras sin lorg.
 
*
 
The hunger that stayed with us
 
He held Maurice’s arms up against his back, pushing him up against the stone wall. A bald man, his neck a trunk, shoulders like a stacked buck, swollen muscles – sculpted through sheer will of force, his head sheened with grooming and grease, biceps and triceps cocked, tattoos of naked women tensed across the lumps and bumps that are blistering and throbbing in swell, his arms bursting for release from the sleeves of his t-shirt. Waiting for the police now, he smugly told me, his arms wrapped through Maurice’s, holding him stiff and scared. Off his meds, he added, nodding in his conclusion of today’s outburst. Maurice’s fringe was flaying, wandering he was in his pyjamas, making lewd comments to passing women, lifting the neighbours bins and spewing their guts across the street, knocking on doors griping and bleating about how the yew had been lopped and was under conservation.. ‘Ah, Irish’ he says referring to my polite retort about his complaint, sitting the grumbling about the yew aside, as he begins to spill his story about his immigrant grandmother from the Ring of Kerry or was it West Cork, or somewhere west he added, where the rain skulked in sideways and tourist thronged of a summer seeking understandings of origin and root, admiring crumbling castles through the fog. Came with nothing he added, still with nothing. Hungry, he said they were. Hungry. Hungry from the big hunger of their people. And hunger does things to the mind. Their empty bellies called to him he said, and he couldn’t shake them off of a night, or a day. And hunger does things to a mind he sighed, calming, his pupils sinking. Hunger does things to a mind.
 
**
  
‘‘An t-Ocras a d’fhan linn/The hunger that stayed with us,’  has been published in Aneas, an Irish language literary journal published by the Munster Literature Centre, Ireland.
 
**
 
Colg Hans is Mariella
 
Shnámh siad go faillíoch ar bhruach an chladaigh i bhfad i ndiaidh na scléipe, grabhróga an ghleo. Lobaí cupáin phoircealláin is cluasa crúscaí le rósanna dearga deilgneacha. Imeall óir ar photaí tae, is féinics coscrach ag ardú ó lasracha tintrí dearga ar shásair. ‘An Royal Albert,’ a chaoin Mam go haiféalach, ag croitheadh a cinn. ‘Old Country Roses,’ a bhí spáráilte go dtiocfadh Meiriceánaigh nó fear na bpaidríní ar cuairt nó duine éigin a thuill iad dar léi, ach gan iad a chur amú ar na gasúir. Shín sí i línte ar sheilf an drisiúir iad mar dhuais.
 
Tháinig siad i ndubh na hoíche, méarcheangailte le grá is drúis, a cheap sí. Féasóg fhada ghiobach ag searradh ó smig Hans, is Mariella gealgháireach giodamach, gur fhág siad leis an maidneachan i gciúnas reoite is clabhta eascainí m’athar. Scuab Mam na smidiríní, is síscéal gan insint i ngach píosa. ‘Colg is dócha,’ a dúirt sí, ‘spriúchadh is stoirm.’ Is cheangail dlaíóga feamainne thart orthu ina snaidhm mar bharróg gan fáilte, á dtachtadh, is mheall faochain na mara chun na bhfarraigí fairsinge iad mar chomhluadar. Go dtí a mbailte nua gan chion, colg ná máthair.
 
*
 
The rage of Hans and Mariella
 
Neglected they swam, at the edge of the shore, long after the furore, the crumbs of chaos. Porcelain cup lobes and jars adorned with thorny red roses. Gold-rimmed teapots and saucers with triumphant phoenixes rising from red flames of fire. ‘The Royal Albert,’ my mother cried regretfully, shaking her head. Old Country Roses, spared for Americans or priests or visitors or someone who deserved them but not to waste them on the children. She stretched them across the shelf of the dresser like a prize displayed.
 
They came, in the black of night, finger-wrapped full of love and adultery, she thought. Hans’ chin heavy-bearded and ragged, Mariella jolly and giddy. They left at dawn amidst a frosted silence and a cloud of my father’s curses. My mother swept the smithereens, each its own fairytale untold. ‘Rage I suppose,’ she said, ‘a stormy splutter, I’d say.’ Locks of seaweed entangled them, smothered them like an unwelcome embrace and the winkles enticed them out to join them in the depths of the ocean for company. To their new homes without love, rage, nor mother.
 
**

‘Colg Hans is Mariella/The rage of Hans and Mariella,’  has previously appeared in Cnámha Scoilte - Cnuasach prósfhilíochta/Split Bones – A collection of prose poetry (Bobtail Books, Australia 2023)
 
**

Póiríní
-do Colette
 
                                                                 Ní maith liomsa
                                                                Boladh na gcoinnle
 
                                                                Mise Éire
                                                                Colette Ní Ghallchóir
 
 
Bheadh cúr mar phrislíní ag sileadh óna bhéal ar an Domhnach, is é ag greadadh an leachtáin lena bhos, bís air le díograis, a chuid súile beagnach ag cur fola le dúthracht is pléascadh a phraeitseála, a chulaith ag clupaideach is a lámha ag slapar leis an mbíoblóireacht. Stiogma ó ghloine dhaite an tseipéil le feiceáil mar scáthán i snas a chuid bróga. Cléirigh óga ar chlé, scéineach is bánghnúiseach, airdeallach le faitíos, a gcuid bosa fuaite i bpaidir. Déanaim filleadh isteach orm fhéin le haghaidh síocháin a fháil, ón tseanmóireacht is ón tsoiscéalaíocht, mo lámha trasna mo choirp mar chosaint, ar fhaitíos go n-iompódh a dhíograis ormsa nó chugamsa, ar fhaitíos go ndéanfadh a shúil dhearg ceangal liomsa is mé go míthráthúil sa suíochán tosaigh. Déanaim tréigean ar a ghlór láidir is isteach liom i gciúnas mo phóca chun na póiríní a thógas ón gcladach a shleamhnú idir mo mhéara. Trí cinn a fuarthas, iad mín is snasta, lán mo ghlaic glan, go bhféadfainn iad a chasadh is a chuimilt. Nuair a tháinig sé ar cuairt chugainn níos déanaí, ligeas isteach é gan súil a chur ar a aghaidh, a mhuineál corcra, an craiceann teannta trasna a chuid ailte, meáchan fós ina anáil. Thóg mo mháthair na soithí deasa amach dó, is údarás a ghlóir is a chabála fós liom. Déanaim cúlú chun seomra na leapa ar thóir mo chuid póiríní, go bhfágann sé. Nuair a d’fhág, dúirt mo mháthair nach raibh an colg sin go maith ag a shláinte, is nár ghá dó a ghlór a ardú ar chor ar bith, mar go dtuigfeadh muid chomh maith céanna dá labhródh sé go bog. Chaith sí súil orm is faona hanáil go cogarnach, dúirt sí nach raibh sé go maith againne ach an oiread.
 
*
 
Pebbles
- for Colette

                                                            Ní maith liomsa 
                                                           Boladh na gcoinnle
 
                                                           I do not like 
                                                           The smell of candles
 
                                                           Mise Éire
                                                           I am Ireland
                                                                                        
                                                           Colette Ní Ghallchóir
 
He’d froth at the mouth of a Sunday, smacking lecterns with the palm of his hands, going hammer and tongs with the fire and brimstone, his eyes almost bleeding with the fervour and  puffing of his pulpitry, his stole flapping as he swung his arms with the proselytising. The sheen of his shoes glinting with the stained glass reflections of stigmata. Altar boys kneeling left, pale-faced and alert with terror, palms sewn in prayer. I fold into myself for silence, from the preaching and gospelling, cross-armed to protect my body should his enthusiasm turn towards me or on me, should his bloodied eyes meet mine, positioned haplessly in a front pew. I fade the thundering into the distance and shrink into the safety of my pocket, twirling the pebbles borrowed from the mire, smooth as glass now, three of them forming a perfect fist-full to roll and twirl between my fingers in turn. On his visit later that day, I let him in without meeting his raging eyes. His neck and hands were purple, the skin across his knuckles taut, his breathing still weighted and heavy. My mother got the good china out for him, the clamour of his collar on show. His presence hefty, I revert to my pebbles and twirl. She watched him leave and said all that rage wasn’t good for his health and we’d get the message just as well, had he spoken gently. She glanced towards me, acknowledging his impact, and quietly added under her breath that it wasn’t good for us either.
 
**
 
‘Pebbles’ is taken from Julie’s upcoming bilingual collection of prose poetry hypnagogia/hiopnagóige, due for release in 2025 by Pierian Springs Press, US. This prose poem has also appeared in The Literary Times. It is dedicated to the Irish language poet Colette Ní Ghallchóir.
 
**
 
 
An síneadh ó dheas go Ross
 
Molann an Cosán Oidhreachta dúinn síneadh a dhéanamh ó dheas go Ross. Déan suntas d’oidhreacht ghleoite a deireann sé. Déan tagairt d’ár mbaile beag galánta. Ag béal an bhaile tá na gunnaí móra béaloscailte prislíneach á ndíriú féin ar lár na sráide. Sráid breactha le crainnte móra glasa ar gach taobh, ag leathnú mar a bheadh zip á oscailt is á ghearradh ina dhá leath i bhfad uait. Vearanda á gcasadh thart fá na dtithe beaga le craiceann pleancanna adhmaid péinteáilte, i ndathanna pastalacha boga is síochánta. Tithe poist a thugann compord lena dteanntán. A gcraiceann gaineamhchloch, malaí a gcuid fuinneoga dairdhonna, pánaí mar a bheadh tóin buidéil, cuair a gcuid sean-rachtaí - lorg fiacla na sábha fós mar phatrún trasna orthu – is iad faoi mheáchan díonta nua-aimseartha. Parlúis ghleoite is tithe beaga leagtha amach le haghaidh tae na maidine, scónaí is pluideanna plúirfós ar a gcoróin, i gcnocáin caite go ciotach is ag doirteadh óna plátaí, hata gléas páiseoige – buí is breactha le síol dubh – ag lonnrú ar chacaí cáise is iad sínte, mar ornáidí poircealláin i gcásaí gloine. Tithe, a bhí mar theaghlaigh uair, do na fir stoic úd, na fir leis na muscaeidí meirgeacha sin, na fir fhaiteacha, hata leathana orthu is iad deargtha le grian, guailleáin a mbrístí ag fágáil gleannta ina nguaillí. Is anois reoite, i scrólanna dubha is bána, ag insint scéalta mar gheall ar chrainnte gearrtha is dambaí caidhilte. A gcuid buataisí fillte síos, dubh le puiteach, ar an bhfoscadh taobh thiar de mhuscaeidí is urchair, oird is piocoird. Is na picoirdí is na gunnaí móra sin gnóthach, ag tógail bailte as an mbaile, is iad ag múnlú críocha, ag cruthú scéalta nua is ag dealbhú tíortha nua.  Luaith na bpíopaí cuachacha leáite i ngrátaí, is na sleánna adhmaid ag lobhadh sna cúlgharrantaí. Go n-ídíonn oidhreacht amháin iomlán oidhreacht eile.
 
*

Right stretch towards Ross
 
The Heritage trail suggested a stop at Ross. Admire the quaint features of our Heritage and past lives it screams, observe the quirky village. A large black cannon on entry, open-mouthed anddrooling, pointing towards the centre of a tree-lined street, a zipper opening and slicing the town in two into the distance. Wrap-around verandahs encasing cladded houses and stone post offices comfort me with their familiar aesthetic. Their sandstone skins, the bottle-bottom panes of their oak-browed windows, the slight curve of old rafters – the saw’s teeth marks still patterend along its curves – bending under modern roofs. Quaint ice cream parlours and morning tea shops, scones still crowned with a blanket of flour, piled clumsily and spilling off cake stands, the yellow and seedful passion fruit glaze reflecting off baked cheese cake slices arranged like china ornaments behind glass cases. Houses, once homes of the fearful, rifled stock men, broad-hatted and reddened by sun, the braces of their breeches creative indents in their shoulders. Now frozen in black and white Heritage scrolls, telling tales of tree lopping and dam piling. Their boots curled and muddied. Cowering behind bullets and muskets, sledge hammers and pickaxes, busying themsleves creating there here. Those pistols and cannons, shaping landscapes, forming alternative narratives and sculpting familiar worlds. Rosing and fencing front gardens, shaping and moulding into boundaries only understood by them. The ashes of the hollowed pipes smouldering in backyard grates. The wooden spears rotting in back gardens. Until one Heritage completely consumes and fully digests another.
 
**
 
Julie Breathnach-Banwait is a bilingual writer and visual artist. She has published four volumes of poetry/prose poetry and her fifth collection - hypnagogia/hiopnagóige - is imminent from Pierian Springs Press. She has published many pieces in literary magazines, journals and newspapers internationally. She is part of the Tinteán (Australia) Editorial Team and currently lives on Turrbal Country.

An Intro to Zen, 1989
 
Today, the rock garden’s viewing platform is uncrowded. It’s nothing like the conga line encircling nearby Kinkaku-ji, with its gold leaf exterior and photogenic pond reflection. And maybe that’s the problem: some travelers visit these temples on the outskirts of Kyoto as a twofer. After basking in the glow of the Golden Temple, foreign tourists fail to appreciate Ryōan-ji’s Zen subtlety. Like the young man slouched against one of the columns, grumbling about how bored he is. If this were two decades later, he’d have a digital device to rescue him from quiet contemplation. He could view the rock garden’s fifteen boulders from different angles with a quick swipe of a screen. Without having to explore the viewing platform, where each vantage point obscures a new rock. No matter where you stand, only fourteen can be seen at any one time. Unless, as some believe, you’ve attained enlightenment. No danger of that today, as this guy sighs and says he’s ready to go, c’mon let’s go already.
 
 
that is the sound
of one man
yapping
 
** 
 
The Happy Couple Didn’t Register at Macy’s 
 
The groom’s favourite shop is everything I’d expected: dimly lit, a little dusty, and crammed with curiosities. I peruse a tray of memento mori rings and a set of lobotomy tools, then head for a steel cabinet, its top drawer ajar. Flipping through its contents, I’m tempted by a vintage anatomical chart of the human heart until one embrittled corner crumbles in my hand. 
 
Halloween wedding
werewolf and vampire
lock talons
 
**
  
Early Education
 
My accuser is either lying or mistaken: I did not break her crayon. Regardless, her frog-faced friend seizes my box of Crayolas. She selects one, holding it aloft before snapping it in two. Tossing its broken body aside, she decapitates another. Where is the teacher? No help arrives. Soon I am left with a hollow box and a mass of mangled wax. 
 
After school, tears streaming, I tell Mommy everything. “I’m sure she didn’t do it on purpose,” my mother says, never suspecting she has just laid the foundation for a lifetime of omissions. For the next forty-four years, I’ll conceal every wound. 
 
**
 
Upward
 
Between final exams, I sit on this secluded bench, inscribed Trees of 1931. The stone surface is smooth and cool beneath me. Above are two towering Himalayan cedars, planted as saplings by that long-ago graduating class, a gift to symbolize the new university’s growth. There is life in these limbs, the birds trilling spring. I cradle my bag of walnuts, knowing I won’t have long to wait.
 
And here comes my little learner, approaching along the walkway, twitching with ambition. He advances in bursts, his progress punctuated by periods of wary stillness as he studies me beneath tall trees. Coming close, he hesitates, then makes the leap. Now the tiny climber clings to my denim as I slowly elevate my calf. This squirrel is on an upward trajectory, riding high on the leg-o-vator, eyes trained on the walnuts. Paws extended, he reaches for the prize in my lap, reaches like this year’s graduating class soon will as we rise for our own rewards. We, who are eager to move up in the world.
 
 **
   
Meeting With the Counselor at the Cancer Support Centre
 
She looks up from my intake form and says, Have you asked your oncologist whether he can save your ovaries? 
 
after the excision
how deep
the wound
 
**
 
Hard Stick 
 
You flinched, the nurse says, his mouth puckering as he withdraws the needle. Your vein moved. At this point, I’ve heard it all: I need to drink even more water before getting my blood drawn, I have bad veins, and of course, the classic: You’re a hard stick. 
 
The day of the surgery they will take everything: my uterus, cervix, ovaries, a baker’s dozen of lymph nodes. And of course, the cancer. But they still can’t get the damn needle in. Only after the third clinician arrives with a syringe and a modicum of skill, only then will I finally get some relief. 
 
the phlebotomist calls me honey
I have no trouble 
making a fist
 
**
 
This was previously published in a different form in contemporary haibun online.
 
**
 
Tracy Royce’s writing appears in contemporary haibun online, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, Scrawl Place, and elsewhere. She lives in Southern California, where she hikes, plays board games, and obsesses over Richard Widmark movies. Her current favorite is Night and the City. You can find her on Bluesky. 

​The Four Seasons According to My American-Born Grandmother

Winter

When I remove my clothes by the radiator before stepping into the bath, I’m white paint, a siren of clay. The world is too busy to notice my shape. My father works all day and night in the upholstery shop. My mother, a warm sponge, gives us sustenance, tongue, taste. We never have a conversation, only pass through the house like slips of paper scraping the walls. I'm wrap myself in a slate blue towel when a crow lands on the fire escape, caws and caws until I’m dry, but I have no idea what he wants to say.

Spring

Blooms and doves populate the oak tree outside my window. Simcha, the neighborhood cat, swipes his tail, watching from the stoop, always alert, always waiting. I wonder what I’ll do when I grow up – become a stenographer, watch the willow brush the side of a building, find a husband. Only a few paths are open to me, a girl not yet broken, but I’d rather lie on the beach at Coney Island and watch the sky turn apple pink. There’s little time left until I merge into another being I do not recognize.

Summer

I am the defanged bride. He’s my second cousin from the old country. When we meet, I bite my lower lip every time I try to speak. I have no choice but to agree to this union, bondage sweet with rind. As a child he lived near a forest, pine trees bowing in the breeze. Occasionally a fox or badger would leave claw marks on the dirt path outside his village. When the claws grew and were possessed by humans, his mother decided it was time to leave. He keeps his trauma inside him like a black seed that you sprinkle on rye bread. It appears ever so often like a wink, then burrows back to its hiding place underground.

Fall

Colourful leaves are the most striking things to witness on my block. I count how many are mahogany, amber, violet. When I type letters, they are like little mouths dancing in straight lines. I never learned the Hebrew alphabet, but when I hear my parents speak Yiddish with my grandparents, I understand everything. Where there’s Yiddish in the air I can exist, even when I don’t know what to say. After I marry, my sister-in-law moves in with us, but she’s half blind and clumsy, and always gets to use the bathroom first. Things never fall apart all at once. Soon, I will tell her to leave. Soon, the soles of my feet will be chapped. My babies will arrive and I will bathe them in the dark.
 
**
 
Omen 
 
My Ukrainian grandmother used to say that if you see a nun walking alone, it’s bad luck, but if you see a pair of sisters, good news is coming. One morning on the elevator on the way up to our 29th-floor apartment, she saw a lone nun. As soon as she arrived, the birds spoke to her, winged omens whipping outside our kitchen window. The sky hollowed to cobalt. The flock circled and circled.
 
When something was wrong, she felt it in her bones – like the weather and the salt of the sea rising into the crevices of her doubts. Immediately she announced that something had happened to my step-grandfather Jack, who was at their apartment a few blocks away. With furrowed brow, she pursed her salmon lips at the sky, tangling her hands in the fat alabaster beads around her neck. When Jack didn’t answer the phone, the lilies on the kitchen wallpaper shuddered and she dropped the receiver. The long yellow cord dangled and twisted. Danger in this dangling, this curlicued concern. It fell like a stone on the linoleum floor and she howled like a sinking ship. 
 
Pointing toward home, she grabbed her large patent-leather pocketbook and fled into the wind. When she called to confirm that Jack had collapsed and died of sudden cardiac arrest, we stepped away from the shadows on the walls and dipped our bread into large bowls of milk. We waited for her to return wearing a baby-powdered dress and styled blonde wig, chunky jewelry with a side of prophecy. We knew she’d be back soon. We sang to the sky. We sang to the birds who told us things we already knew.
 
**
 
Loss Swept In
 
To find an escape route and rectify wrongs, the dolls swallowed tiny pink pills and binge watched Bridgerton, then dusted tables and chairs as if to bless them. They unlatched windows and doors, waiting for a breeze to arrive through low-hanging willows. A breeze never came,  but Loss swept in like a Bichon puppy seeking a chew toy. After releasing the hems of their pants, the dolls proceeded to wrap themselves in aluminum foil, then promptly escorted Loss to the sunroom, where Mother served sponge cake and cherry tea. They proceeded into the garage, where Father demonstrated power tools. The dolls excelled at their waltz lessons, but only when spinning counterclockwise. 
 
Welcoming Loss meant the dolls no longer had to rage or flee. They shared their beds, books, and pantry. They topped Loss’ head with a porridge bowl, rubbing in the grains to exfoliate.  The heft of their bodies sank into the floorboards, and they chased their fears for hours until they placed them on the clothesline to sway, recast as undershirts and ruffled skirts. The dolls spent  a night in the garden of hydrangeas and roses, but when thorns began to sprout from their ears, they extracted them and fled. Over time, Loss became more tolerable. The dolls agreed to co-occupy space with Loss for as long as they could draw breath. 
 
**

A Tale of Girlhood

One day Girl wakes to find she has hooded eyes and rotten teeth, her skin covered in scales and feathers. She knows she can’t live under her mother’s roof, so she runs away.
 
She enters nightclubs to search for those who can heal her, even though she knows she’s really seeking herself. She grabs the arm of a tall man with pale flesh and green spiky hair. After he forces his tongue down her throat, she flees, crashing into a woman with long blonde hair and black fishnets sitting on a velvet couch. She begs the woman to capture him. The woman removes her stockings and wraps them around the tall man’s  neck until he can’t breathe.
 
Next to the bathroom, Girl finds a black painted door and walks through it, entering a forest.  She finds her mother there. Chicken blood stains the leaves. Girl loves the smell of soil. Her tongue flaps, licking the blackness from her mother’s heart, trapped like a tethered deer, and spits it back to the ground. She tells her mother Fairytales lied while you rocked me  in your lap. For her entire life she was ashamed to look in mirrors, flashed eyes sideways  while on camera. She wore a pink wig so she could glow more than her mother, make herself known, not become a disappearing swirl down a gray drain.
 
Girl’s skin thirsts for rainwater. For miles she carries a stack of plastic cups and small water jug, until she finds a raft in the wavering dark. She sails along the Hudson, where she becomes a sly leviathan ripping false eyelashes and lips from her face as the river carries her downstream.
 
When Girl reaches shore, she finally comprehends that she is not dirty, ugly, or mean.  She feels pleasure when she shakes the trunk of a plum tree with her thumbs. Without opening her mouth, she holds a piece fruit in her hand and is full, fed and nourished.  She squeezes it until the skin breaks and the juice dribbles down her fingers.
 
**

Birthday


In the days leading up to September, light hurls itself against the body’s cracks. It can’t enter directly, so looks for tiny breaks in skin. Hydrants are sealed off from loose strands of hair. No exit for swirling water. A field mouse tunnels deeper into its burrow as the forest floor hardens. Nights are becoming shorter, wintering for the coming chill. The edges of leaves turn purple and curl before shattering like confetti. My sagging face can’t reverse time. The months creep faster, like spiders or rips in pantyhose. Summer means all the light your mouth can hold. My birthday month means I will disappear.

**
 
Blue Village

When the enormous fish arrived, we knew it was only a matter of time before we'd live underwater, when the blue cave where our homes were nestled would become ocean. The gigantic fish were white and faceless like airplanes, but we didn't question their presence. Our parents and teachers had forever prepared us for their arrival from as soon as we could understand language. Their presence was foretold in our bedtime stories, our folklore, our TV shows. As water started trickling through the ravine, the Italian cypresses transformed into a deep cobalt like the centre of an apple after you chew through its centre.

Weeks before their arrival, we coated our homes in assorted colours, to waterproof them before our bodies grew scales, before our lungs shrank to make room for gills. A fleet of sailboats arrived, to transport those who chose to leave for good. I knew I'd remain, long after the white water blasted through the rocks, long after the cranberry, yellow, and lime-green homes were blurred like a spirograph. I learned to taste the umbrella of my body, to smell food and death with a tail. I grew accustomed to swim forever. 

**
 
Older Daughter as Persephone

I. How Persephone Leaves
 
Persephone says she loves both parents and cannot choose one over the other. But Hades says, Choose me because I’m your father and you know who loves you more.

Hades says Persephone’s lips are like milk chocolate and that she’s a gorgeous sugarplum, his one true love.

Persephone tells Demeter: I just want to spend more time with my father. What’s wrong with that? First it’s once a week, then half a week, then every week, then a spray of gold dust on the windowpane. 

As Persephone picks narcissus flowers by the plaza, Hades absconds with her in his black SUV. There’s no struggle. He plasters white copy paper all over his vehicle with her name and I love yous written in red permanent marker.

The gap in the earth closes after them. Persephone resides in a tunnel under Rockefeller Center. Demeter hardly sees Persephone, maybe an occasional weekend, on Christmas, or her birthday.

II. Hades’ Magic
 
Hades’ alter ego is Hector, who sings in a mariachi band called Quien Me Gusta La Mejor. His microphone is the wrinkled plum of midnight.

Hades wanted to be a priest, but because he loved women too much, he fled the seminary. 

Hades enlists Persephone to cook enchiladas de carne, horchata and eggs over easy.

Hades teaches Persephone how to clean toilets and make windows sparkle like dragonfly wings.

Hades confides in Persephone that his second wife was a witch, only good in the bedroom.

Hades’ second wife becomes a bird and lives in a treehouse in Texas.

III.  The Separation of Demeter and Persephone

When Persephone was in kindergarten, she made drawings for Demeter and wrote I love you so much fifty times. Sometimes she scrawled so many sos, they climbed off the page.

Now when Persephone texts Demeter, she says she loves her as a mother, because she gave birth to her, but that her influence is not part of her identity. When Persephone gets angry, she tells Demeter she is a toxic parent and that she has a special relationship with Hades, that he’s made her the person she is today.

When a judge asks Persephone where she would like to live, she chooses the obvious answer. The judge says it’s not such a bad thing if Persephone pledges her loyalty to Hades and becomes Queen of the Dead. 

Sometimes Persephone misses her mother and siblings. Hades says she can visit them anytime, but before he lets her leave, he layers pomegranate seeds over vanilla ice cream, presents the dessert to her in a scalloped dish, garnished with a purple orchid.

An anguished Demeter visits Zeus and Hera. She threatens to speed up global warming, lay waste to the crops of North America. 

Zeus and Hera resolve the matter by ruling that Persephone can spend more time with Demeter in the warmer months, when roses and lilac quiver on their stems, when the sun burns the meadow grasses where meadowlarks roam.

The rest of the year she will remain under Hades’ spell.

IV. Demeter’s Forgotten Daughter
 
Not many know about Selena, Persephone’s sister, whose name means moon. How many moons has Selena not seen Persephone? She yearns to inhale her perfume, emulate her by taking selfies, wearing crop tops and short shorts from Aeropostale.
 
Persephone constantly calls and video chats with Selena. She tells her that she cannot live without her and that she’s her queen, her love, her cream puff. Persephone and Hades shower her with wet kisses, extravagant gifts, and sometimes speak disparagingly of Demeter.

One day Selena becomes a young woman and tells Demeter: I want to live with Persephone and Hades. Mother, you’ll never compete with the king and queen of the underworld.

Demeter shrieks, douses her breasts with salt. Demeter wants sleep to dampen the pain Hades has caused, the sensation of ripping off her ears and casting them into the sea.

Demeter’s tears water the sheaves of wheat and barley that she cradles in her arms. She lays them on the ground next to her basket, which brims with bright orange and magenta poppies. She inhales their fragrance until sunrise casts light over the fallow fields.

**
 
Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. Her first full-length collection, In the Needle, A Woman, won the 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Prize, and is forthcoming Finishing Line Press. A two-time Pushcart nominee, she has had poems published in numerous journals including MOM Egg Review, Spillway 29, Funicular, Redivider, and One Art. In 2023, she won the Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s First Poem Award. Versions of her book were named finalists for Harbor Editions' Laureate Prize (2021), the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award (2023), the C&R Press Poetry Award (2023), and the Louise Bogan Award (2024).
 

​Odysseus and the Early Commute
 
In the damp silence before dawn, the mermaids swim to work. Before the first bus, before the trams and underground trains, they shimmer and glide between tidy gardens, singing their songs of morning. They sweep in shoals up desolate streets, undulating like light itself, the sleeping shop windows glittering back their kaleidoscopic scales. Then, as the first alarm clocks call to the city, they ease themselves into elegant limbs and smooth down their fashionable frocks. The first bus coughs into life, and stations open their eyes to gold light in the East. Shop shutters rise, offices jolt awake, and down the broad parade, dazed sailors with long coats and rolled umbrellas stagger with the weight of half-remembered songs.
 
**
 
Urban Redevelopment and the Moral Imperative
 
To dodge the consequences of my indiscretions, I pulled the house down around me, just another wreck in a street still trembling from war. Kids would come by, picking through the rubble for souvenirs – brass trinkets and cracked plastic dolls – and I’d hold my breath so they didn’t know I was there. Grass grew from all my cracks, then scrubby flowers and the occasional wild strawberry that the kids would be excited to find, though a little disappointed with its bitter taste. A tree grew, stiff and uneven, and birds gathered at its lopsided crown, shouting at the sky for more sun, more rain. And in all this time, I forgot what I’d done that had once been so terrible. More trees grew, and the kids became adults who, for all I know, became birds. I sometimes dream about a house, but I can never picture myself within its walls. 
 
**
 
The Last Midsummer
 
Words slip on their dancing shoes and sneak out down the ivy. A parched field. A rainbow marquee with boards laid out for the summer night tap-and-shuffle. A string band strikes up with a tune my mother would hum while she hand-washed my first school uniform and the words bow in lines on the point of making sense. A red-haired girl in pale blue lace spins barefoot in between, her hands high with fruit and sharp pencils, her head a hive of buzzing ideas, her heart a home of heroes-in-waiting. She inclines her face, just so. And now the words are tapping their toes, lacing their fingers into a processional arch for the swaying line that reaches back to the first capital and disappears towards the shimmer of the full stop at the end of the universe. I know this story of births and deaths; I know this song and its chorus of love lost and found, and I kick off my threadbare slippers. Once upon a time there was a red-haired girl. 1,2,3 – 1,2,3. I want to tell you a story. 
 
**
 
Redirecting the Male Gaze
 
Cross your arms, says the photographer, and she does without question, as she does everything without question. It’s like that time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, one million years BC, making primitive promises. Cross your heart and hope to die, said the hunter-gatherer, and she did, even though her sense of anatomy was fairly rudimentary, her conception of an afterlife or eternal nothingness was more fear than faith, and, besides, she could not be completely certain of anything in a language based on little but grunts and the angle of crudely knapped flint. It’s just like in the movies, she thinks, though she knows there’s no comparison, and deep down she understands that it is just a movie, storyboarded by cynical committee, then cut and shaped to the focus group’s passing whim. Why so cross? smirks the photographer, tangled in her tight brow, and he reaches to touch. 125th of a second. Flash. She leaves him beside a bloodstained club. Perhaps there will be consequences, perhaps not. It may take a million years. Jesus, she scrawls on a makeshift intertitle, haughty as Jacqueline Logan. It’s a cross we all must bear. 
​ 
**
 
The Willow Initiative
 
It being a time for wings, I step behind the screen to shed my skin. I’m a moth, taking my bearings from anything that resembles the Moon; I’m a crane, asking whistling policemen the quickest way South; I’m a cheaply animated superhero going through the same motions, week after week; and I’m a 1:48 scale biplane with adhesive not supplied. The screen resembles Japanese lacquer, but is Victorian pastiche, a varnished découpage of problematic cultural stereotypes and extinct lepidopterae: British large copper, Danish clouded Apollo, Polydamas swallowtail, Dutch Alcon blue. And there are secret lovers on the delicate bridge between yesterday and tomorrow, their warm hands clasped, their soft skin feathering beneath long winter coats.
 
**
 
Soul Cakes
 
Coffee fills the gaps in everyone’s story. A girl reads recipes like choose-your-own-adventure books, skipping implicit hyperlinks through weight and process, folding herself into the stiffening mix as she thumbs thumbs thumbs steep crimps into everything raw. It’s 4am, and her bed bakes in summer’s mouth, gaping like the stove she saw carved in a Belgian church, the day they loaded coffins through the open top of a 2 CV with Boschian birds pecking at the windscreen. On balance, she knows it’s a blend of coffee and cookery, the kick and the heat, the sentence and solace, that fills her with weight or wings; so, she chooses her fresh ingredients carefully, lays them out like evidence. Presently, timers will sift and tick, sift and tick, as soul cakes rise, awaiting taste, and she will slip away into Java steam that fingers her throat and runs its tongue down her spine.
 
**
 
Oz Hardwick is an award-winning prose poet, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “a dozen or so” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog, 2024). Oz has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in tiny coffee shops. In 2022, he was awarded the ARC Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry”. Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University (UK).
 

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).