​Outlier

every morning edgar allen crow wakes me, him and his committee, loud and belligerent and brilliant, and outlier the turkey who has decided she is also a crow. then there’s you, b, who set the coffee up the night before, grinding the beans in some particular ratio, always a little different, dubai chocolate lately, a favourite, and you bring it to me. birdie, you say, or sometimes babycakes. we drink from our mugs, yours nasa, mine write drunk, edit sober, and outside the window the committee is still at it, outlier moving through them like she was born to it, like there was never any question. the crows have no idea what they’ve done.

 **

September 5, 2024

B makes the coffee. I read the Times. Every morning, same order. This morning Maxx is in her sunspot, Teddy wedged behind my back, Jake draped over the couch, Mitzi on B’s knee. Headlines first, just to make sure. Then culture. Then the obits. That’s where I find him: Sérgio Mendes, dead at 83. And I’m thirteen in Ithaca. Landlocked, gray, nothing like anywhere the radio promised. "Girl from Ipanema" is playing, and something in it is telling me about sunlight, about bathing suits, about the specific gravity of a body moving past you on a beach. I had never seen that beach. I had never felt that sun. I didn’t know yet what I wanted, or that wanting was allowed, or that a body could move like that and undo you completely. Now I’m in Delaware County and it’s September and the obituaries come faster every year. All these people who were young when I was young. The background noise of my life, going quiet. I scroll on. The coffee is cold.

 **

Jonathan Rosen

after Diana Marie Delgado

Jonathan Rosen is dead. I learned this the way you learn things now, a name typed into a search bar, a small notice, no photograph. We were five outliers in a living room in seventh grade, a playwright, a musician, a writer, and me, and Jonathan, who vamped and played Mae West and re-enacted love scenes from old movies, playing both parts, knowing every line by heart. There was a baby grand piano in that room that didn’t belong to any of us. Jonathan would resist it the way you resist something you need too much. But eventually he’d sit down and something would leave him (the performance, the armor) and he’d launch into Chopin and the room would go quiet. We’d sit on the floor and not move. He got a scholarship to Juilliard. He was one of many there, not the one, and something in him couldn’t hold that. The drugs came first, then the school was gone, then the home, then we were gone too, because he always needed money and it was too painful and we were young and didn’t know how to stay. I have thought about that ever since. We were young and didn’t know how to stay and I am still sorry for that. He was so talented. I wanted us all to make it: the playwright, the musician, the writer, and Jonathan most of all. I did not want him to become someone I wouldn’t recognize. I don’t know what he was looking for in those last years. I think he was looking for that room.

**
 
Time Travel in Treadwell

Friday. The children have read their poems to the parents, loudly, the way I taught them, voices thrown out into the summer air, shown the dioramas, the clay, the papier mâché, and carried everything home. I took them to the playground between sessions, watched them run. Now they’ve all gone. I’m left with the railway bench on Bright Hill’s porch, staring across at the rectory. No lawnmowers. No cars. Just quiet, and the buildings, and the dead-end street, and it could be a set for a film about 1900. Every building here breathed the same air then: the church, the rectory, Bright Hill itself, all of it still standing, still doing what it was built to do. 1900 sashayed in wearing button-up boots. Too tired to argue, I let her.

Something about the cusp: porches mattering, time moving at the pace of rocking chairs. A distant airplane stitches the sky, pulls me back. This bench. This century. I would trade all of it for one real conversation that lasted until stars appeared without fanfare, until time forgot to count itself.

 **

No. I. Don’t.

Every weekend I came home. By then we had the hospital bed in what they used to call the sun room: pine paneling, dark green curtains, a ramp where the one step down used to be. My father was still trying to do everything. She confused him with her own father sometimes. There had been an affair, a small town, everyone knew. My grandmother never said a word. Not once. Mom was angry that day. I said: you don’t know who I am, do you. Not a question. I already knew. No. I. Don’t. Four words, each one a door closing. I bent over to catch my breath. That’s all I remember after that.

 **

The North Forty

This morning: my black squirrel, a gray one, three wild turkeys working the torn-up grass for whatever the night left behind. No crows yet. One blue jay passing through without stopping, which is what blue jays do. The turkeys don’t look up. They never look up. They trust the north forty the way you trust a place you’ve always known, head down, feet moving, the whole body certain there’s something worth finding. The grass won’t recover until June. Maybe July. The turkeys will see to that. I look out the window. My friends are accounted for, an excellent way to start a Friday morning in May. It’s still cold, spring doesn’t feel quite real yet.
 
**
​
Lynne Kemen is the author of Shoes for Lucy (SCE Press, 2023) and More Than a Handful (Woodland Arts Editions, 2020). Her work has appeared in One Art, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, and elsewhere. She received a 2024 Pushcart Prize nomination and serves as Editor/Interviewer for The Blue Mountain Review. She lives and writes in an 1830s farmhouse in rural Delaware County, New York, where she shares her property with a murder of crows, one of whom she has named Edgar Allen Crow. https://lynnekemen.com/
 

Privyet! Welcome to Little Odessa

after Ocean Park 116, by Richard Diebenkorn (USA) 1979
 
The El rumbles across Ocean Parkway, the traffic huddled below in rail shadows. Brighton Beach pedestrians rush along in their black coats, black hats, black kerchiefs, black pants and skirts, black shoes. Ocean Parkway has become Deribasovskaya Ulitza, Odessa’s main thoroughfare. I drive through with my Odessa-born husband and say, When did we get to Ukraine from New Jersey? He parks the car and we enter one of the many so-called Russian restaurants. You know the type. The ones where flaming skewers of shashlik burst out of the kitchen at midnight by tunicked staff. The ones that serve food on tapas-like plates: stuffed vareniki dumplings (choose from potato, cheese, cherries, liver), pickled vegetables, smoked fishes. Until the shashlik comes. I can never stay awake all that long after that and fall asleep in the long car ride over the Verrazano and Outerbridge Crossing back to America, back to Jersey.

**

My Grandfather Papered the Empire State Building

after Untitled, by Carmen Herrera (USA, b. Cuba) 2013
 
Its silhouette shadows a sunlit sky as only a Manhattan skyscraper can do. With its distinctive lines, the Empire State Building satisfies an architect’s heart. And appeals to artists like Carmen Herrera or my paperhanger grandfather, trained in the precise measurements of architecture and carpentry. Where we see curves and possibilities, they saw angles and mathematical calculations. A pedestrian on Thirty-Fourth Steet or even Fifth Avenue cannot see the radio spire unless he flattens himself on the sidewalk. The scope is too large to absorb. Herrera captured part of it. My grandfather stayed indoors, focused on the interiors with his paperhanging tools. But as he slathered the backside of paper with paste, slapped the paper to the wall, he marveled at the architecture. What if he had come to America sooner, before he completed his joiner apprenticeship in Poland? Could he have learned architecture? Could he have planned a better American future? As he smoothed out the paper with his brush, he considered his assets: a wife and children, his hometown cousins and friends, money in his pocket to buy a Brooklyn apartment building. He already reached the pinnacle of the American Dream. 

**

The Holodomor

after Feed Me, by Maria Prymachenko (Ukraine) 1930s?
 
They’re back. The Soviet soldiers, collecting the wheat, storing it in warehouses we cannot access. They come to each collective, swipe us aside, and snatch our harvest with their rat-like claws and snake-like tongues. They scurry, slither through the fields with their scythes, claiming what’s ours as theirs. They each have three eyes, always watching, waiting. The Soviet machine will not stop until each of us drops from The Hunger.
 
Surplus grain piled high
Soft cushion for our dead
Vodka, anyone?

 **

Crystallization

​after A Panel of Experts, by Jean-Michel Basquiat (USA) 1982
 
In the 1960s, John and Faith Hubley produced an animated film and wrote a comic book: Zuckerkandl!  In this film, Zuckerkandl comes from the Austrian village of Adol and is therefore an Adolescent. No interview with the Hubleys, no panel of experts, reveals why they called this character Zuckerkandl. My grandmother’s maiden name was Zuckerkandl. Translation: rock candy. I can only surmise they might have seen articles about my grandmother’s distant cousins, Dr. Emil Zuckerkandl, once head of the University of Vienna’s medical faculty, or his grandson, Emile, who worked with Linus Pauling on the molecular clock. Zuckerkandl. It is a funny name, a conglomeration of craggy sounds that gets stuck in the throat. An ironic name for a family of diabetics.

 **

I Named My Son Matthew

after The Calling of St. Matthew, by Caravaggio (Italy) ca 1600
 
If I had been there, if I had sat at the tavern table on one of those benches, would I have believed? Would I have sat in wonder at this red-robed young man, the one on whose face heavenly light shone? Would I have felt planted, unable to move in such a presence? Would I have leaned into Mattiyahu, poked him in the shoulder and said, This man wants you? Or, would I have advised him to keep counting the taxes he collected, that the only G-d is G-d, and there is no son of G-d. Millennia later, I follow the decisions my ancestors made. 

 **

Winter Break

after Still Life with Books and Candle, by Henri Matisse (France) 1890
 
I wait until everyone is asleep. I sit at the desk in my bedroom, my books piled high. My paper ready. I write. My senior honors thesis about the portrayal of society in Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther and the East German version written two hundred years later, with a bit of Holden Caulfield thrown in. I write longhand with a Flair. This is my drafting method. I write for hours. I have a plan. One chapter every two nights. If I had a candle instead of a single-bulb lamp, the wax would drip onto the desk. If I had a candle, I could imagine myself as Goethe writing in the wee hours, unable to sleep. The books now lay flayed to particular passages I want to quote. The air is still. I write. I write about unrequited love. This is something I’m an expert in, something I share with no one. I just write quotations from German literature in a tiny notebook I picked up in a Hallmark card store. I write now, the thick ink covering the paper. I know my best writing comes in a flurry, a fury, a fever. My words, all in German, may make no sense tomorrow. I write, getting my thoughts down between the lines. Writing longhand will not awaken anyone, not like the typewriter. Once drafted, I’ll get the thesis sit for a while before typing it up, which will also be a marathon, best done to the stylings of the Four Seasons.

 **

At the Palais Garnier

after In the Loge, by Mary Cassatt (France, b. USA) 1878
 
I sit up taller, strategize my every move when I know he is watching me. I’ve come to see Gounod’s “Faust,” and now I’m distracted by my own Mephistopheles, my dead husband’s creditor who will not stop stalking me to pay the debts owed him. Can’t he see this is not the time? I am still in mourning. Yes, I am at the opera, but only because we already had these seats in the loge, and they are hard to come by. I tried to sell them to others, explaining my situation. I even tried to give them away, but Faust is not a happy story for anyone but Mephistopheles. I can spot my Beelzebub out of the corner of my eye, his eyes behind his opera glasses searing my skin. I am burning. Elle est sauvée! a celestial voice announces. She is saved! I snap my fan to action. It cannot extinguish
 
**
 
Ninety Minutes at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
 
I.
I lean on my blue metallic cane as I walk through the museum’s accessibility entrance. I head into the Mary Cassatt exhibit, the reason for my visit. The oils and pastels, bursting with yellows and oranges, bring a lightness to my step. That exasperated young girl in tartan plaid seated on the blue divan. The two young children engrossed in filling their pails with beach sand remind me of my granddaughters. The portrait of a young woman in a red velvet chair as she embroiders, two young women sharing gossip, a woman in her private theater box unaware of a man viewing her through his binoculars. 
 
II.
My blue metallic cane rests on my wrist as amble into the European wing. Why have I never seen Pissarro’s city scene of Pont Neuf before? Or Van Gogh’s Rain with scratched-out droplets like a kindergartener’s Crayola drawing? Or forlorn Madame Cezanne in black and white stripes? But wait! What’s this across the room? Matisse’s The Screen Room, rich with Downton Abbey texture and blues. And why do I not know the vibrant, modernist work of Joan Miro, Faust and Marguerite by Belgian Hendrik van August Leys or the wet day in Liverpool from Wapping by John Atkinson Grimshaw? I zigzag from wall to wall, gallery to gallery. Where my eyes lead, my legs follow. 
 
III.
Only when I climb into the backseat of the Chevy Uber to return to my hotel do I remember I even had a blue metallic cane.
 
 **

Constellation
 
I am at The Met, surprised by Finnish artist Helene Schjerfbeck’s painting, Fete Juive or Feast of Tabernacles, 1883. I understand this painting of the holiday Sukkot (in Hebrew) or Sukkos (in Yiddish). I note the vertical lines of the floorboards, ninety-degree angles of the oriental rug. The round metal plate with either a candle or incense. The father’s long black coat and his stovepipe hat on the chair. The daughter in pink, her head cushioned in her father’s confidence and thoughtfulness. 
 
I remember those days, enjoying a special moment with my father. Perhaps in the book department of Korvette’s in West Orange or perusing records at Sam Goody’s in Paramus. Later, meandering the stacked stacks at The Strand in New York City. His taking my hand to cross the Manhattan streets, although I was in my thirties. The drive to his parents’ graves at Oheb Shalom Cemetery in Hillside or his grandparents’ graves on Grove St. in Newark. Drives along Ridge Road in North Arlington and Lyndhurst, pointing out to me where the Steinlaufs once lived. He had lived in North Arlington and Kearny all his life except during the war years that took him to the Deep South for training and then across the pond to England for service in the US Army Air Corps. His temporary assignment cast him into his own sukkah, into the unknown outside his provincial life. After the war, he returned to limits. When what he really wanted were the stars beyond his reach.

 **

Eight-Minute Pictures of the Heart 
  
My hands overhead in contortion, I close my eyes. Four songs? Three? “Midnight Confessions” takes me back to the bedroom and record player I shared with my twin sister. Beautiful. I am dancing in my head. Will that affect the cardio depictions? “Ventura Highway” uses my muscle memory to recall each line. Recall moving into my own room, a new highway separating my twin and me, a new path as she traveled toward math and I toward languages. Earth, Wind & Fire “Do You Remember?” My signature song during college. The song I danced to with my son at his wedding. Songs were longer then.
 
**

Barbara Krasner is a New Jersey-based poet and historian. She is the author of ten poetry collections, including The Night Watch (Kelsay Books, 2025), and the forthcoming The Wanderers (Shanti Arts, 2026). Her work has appeared in more than seventy journals, earning her multiple Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and Pushcart Prize nominations. Barbara hosts The Ekphrastic Review’s Ekphrastic Book Club. Visit her author website at www.barbarakrasner.com.

What’s in my Dream Journal

Colours, mainly reds and yellows.Once it was a vibrant room inlaid with mosaics; a room in another realm I visited while dream-walking. Other times I can fly, those are the best dreams.

Flying overhead, arms out-stretched like a Christ figure and people below me are running in terror and screaming. Most often it’s me in houses that never end and I can’t find the exit. Room after room opens before me cluttered, filled with objects, sometimes people are there sleeping in their beds. I never feel like I am invading their space. On the contrary they are taking up valuable real estate in mine. One house had stairs that led up, up, up…I climbed and climbed, and never reached the top. Violence only when necessary like the time I dreamed a thief stole my backpack containing my poetry journal and personal journal. I chased him down, wrenched my backpack from his hands, screamed at him ‘No! This is mine! You can’t have it!” and I threw him off an overpass; that dream was filled with orange lights and death. I took back what was stolen and woke up with a smile on my face. 

**

Why Can’t You Be a Normal Girl

It was expected of me to grow up, get married, and have babies. It's what mama did. My abuelas too. All my tias. Even my primas. Not too much education. Just enough to know reading, writing and arithmetic. Have some extra-curricular activities. Piano lessons? Sure, but I wasn't musically inclined. Ballet and gymnastics? It was fun for a summer but my big breasts got in the way. Plus I was as graceful as an elk walking through a porcelain doll museum. Writing? I could do that well, with my eyes closed, reams of notebook paper filled with every whimsical thought in my head. That’s nice. It’s a hobby. Like reading. Nothing serious. College after high-school graduation? Sure, as a back-up plan in case husband hunting took a little longer. I just wanted to express myself. I did it wrong. 

I gave up on those
expectations not mine  I 
rebelled  so worth it 

**

No Account In That Bank

I keep thinking about mom’s car. It’s been sitting in her driveway undriven for a decade. I imagine the oil is thick, black, tar coating the engine; four flat, dry-rot tires, and chipping paint blistering in the sun year after year; rust is replacing the metallic tan. I keep thinking of the piles of books she wants to read taking up space on the floors; the broken fence that resembles a mouth in decay, the yellow, dusty newspapers crumbling in the garage; and all the hundreds of other objects crammed into every corner of her house. I keep thinking she’ll one day tell us to take it all away, burn it, sell it, store it, just get it out of my sight so I won't have to stress about it anymore. I know that day will never come while she’s alive. I keep thinking I need to put my heart in a safety deposit box so it won’t be moved by tears, threats, screams, ER visits, and guilt trips. My heart will be locked away in a steel coffin and feel nothing. My mother’s heart will break one final time when her hoard is removed and she’s left with only memories; yellow, dusty, and crumbling.

**

Conjuring the Mythic Superhighway of My Unconscious Mind

after Sonnet, by Stephanie Grainger (England) 2018-2019

I set out on my journey, packing light as I only plan on being gone a few hours; sensible shoes for walking, breathable pants to move in, long-sleeved shirt for the cold patches along the way, and the blindfold; I am walking inwards along the black-lined, curving paths; I put my hands in front of me feeling my way through wisps, filaments, gossamer silk threads; one foot in front of the other, sure, sure of my steps; unsure, unsure of who I will meet; ghosts from the past: who I was at 15, I don’t recognize her anymore, she remains frozen in time; me at 25 already brittle from the strain of a bad marriage; 35 years old, single mother, still counting footsteps one in front of the other; at 45 reborn into another body and mindset; here I’ve stopped at 55 to take a breather, exhaling 40 years of experience, watch it swirl up like a gyre trying to reach heaven; not yet, not yet, heaven can wait a little while longer for me; I wake in the tundra and I know if I’ve survived this long the rest of my life-story, like the sonnets of Shakespeare, will endure for generations.

*
This poem was first published by The Ekphrastic Review.

​**

Zero Requirement

Writing is done alone whether in a group or at home; writing is lonely work; brain being pummeled, battered, and misshapen from hours spent crafting symmetry. Craft demands zero requirement; make things out of materials at hand like nests from your hair for word birds flying around; stones gathered from the garden and placed into a labyrinth; eggs filled with weight and hatching stanzas, rhymes, meters, and metaphors; learning everything about craft then unlearning it so the thoughts flow from different pipes like dreams. I hang my words from light fixtures. I make a museum of ordinary objects and let the viewer decipher the meaning; a melted candle, a broken dish, an open wasp’s nest. Observe the hollows for wriggly bodies and how they squeeze themselves to fit their space much like a writer who has to make herself whatever size she needs. I love all my poems, my offerings; they don’t all have to fly; they remain in some shape or form; concrete, tangible, and edible.

**

Power of Belonging

perks, awards, recognition, monetary rewards, pictures, glossy spread in magazines, people talking about me, presentations can be exhilarating and scary, feet to the fire, what have I done to deserve such applause; imposter syndrome is rearing its ugly, scaly head, and laughing at me; power struggles, I dream I’m stuffing the imposter in a box to shut out her noise in my head, I’m the real one so if she told she’s me she’s lying I belong here listen to my voice….

**

The White Bird

Flies across the black forest of my nightmares. Pierces my heart before flying away. You and I just shared this intimate moment fitting together like geometric shapes; your yellow and my blue triangles perfectly aligned; then we slept. The white bird is flying overhead again and he feeds  me crabapples from a silver platter. I know they’re grown from cursed land where farmers weep from the toil and effort it takes to make blood flow from rocks. You sleep soundly, floating, as if on a blue ocean, and I want to swim out to you until I can’t feel my legs. I’ve lost my face and I can’t summon the white bird to me. My head explodes, blue hands extend from my skull, reaching up, up to pull down the sky. In my sleep I pull the covers to my chin tattooed with terror. Your quiet, soft breathing beside me soothes me back into dreams. I’m a lamplighter wandering the streets of an old village until I come to a house with an open door. I walk in and see a dinner table laid out, children and animals milling around it. I walk outside and find myself at the base of a holy mountain asking it permission to ascend its zenith. The white bird lands on my shoulder and whispers welcome home.

**

The Castle of Unfinished Business

after A Mrs. Radcliffe Called Today, by Dorothea Tanning (USA) 1952

The arches fill with hanging, floating bodies, resembling ornate curtain tassels; blue, yellow, red, and my hair on fire as I walk among them. I glide through the frames, stop to speak to each body; get its story. My jealous husband believed me unfaithful; my parents sent me here when they found out I was with child; my lover abandoned me. Suicides, unfortunate victims, cast-away children, they ended up here in the castle of unfinished business. As for me, with my hair on fire, I murdered my lover and her new mistress. 

love demands reward
sacrifice, loyalty, souls 
only way out  death 

**

Viridian Mountains Stained Black

You and I set out to climb the mountains making bets along the way. If I reach the top first I get to stay in your house and slowly work up the courage to ask your sister for a date. If you reach the top first I have to shave off all my body hair and ink red lips with yellow x’s on my bald head. We stop along the way to eat apples, peaches, grapes, and pears. As we continue climbing the conversation lulls; I think of your sister’s long, dark hair, and the date I’ve planned for us at The Museum of Vibrant Colours. You’re remembering your childhood and the toys you used to play with like a wooden top and a plastic cowboy with a lasso. Blue lizards and red and yellow bugs scurry out from between the rocks. We’re nearing the top. I’m getting tired. I’m hot, thirsty, and I want to strip off my clothes and lie in the shade of a willow tree. I barely noticed the woman ahead of us on the trail wearing a muti-coloured suit of serpent's eyes and bird’s beaks. Her voice squawks and screeches at unseen things flying around her. Maybe I’ll take your sister out on the lake in a row-boat, I say out loud. I imagine taking her in my arms and kissing her in the waning afternoon light. We’re nearing the top of the mountain where the empty house waits for us. You’re lagging behind. I will enter The Nocturne House and it will offer me a choice. Return to the living; or remain inside acquiring all the knowledge of the world which I will promptly forget once I leave. I think of your sister's long dark hair. I think I should have brought a notebook to compose a poem to read to her on the lake.       

**

An Ocean Captured on Canvas

after California, by Yves Klein (France) 1961

I drive west through the expanse of Texas; along I-10 and the flatness of the west with its scrub-land; giving way to deserts; the beauty of desolation along four lane-highways where you don’t see another soul for at least 100 miles. At the borders of Texas, Arizona, and California with Mexico underneath them, cultures, language, and identities converge; smells from factories, mercados, sweat, and heat rise. Onwards and onwards I drive; it’s a long way to go until the Klein Blue of the Pacific comes into view. Leave the cities behind, the noise of car-horns, sirens, frenetic voices rushing from one encounter to another as they discuss their everyday lives on smart-phones over bluetooth. The Pacific Coast Highway extends before me; an immense ocean greets me; sea-gulls diving for fish, palm trees rustling in the breeze. I’ve arrived at the edge of the canvas where I leave the confines of my car and walk into the ocean, un-boxed by limitations, obligations; and I can swim in the rich, cobalt, weight of memories and emotions. I lie on my back, spread my arms, and let the waves carry me further into the middle of the painting and I fill the space with my breath.  My hair floats in the translucent waters; the salt in my body merges with the salt of the Pacific. I am both painting and human being alive with textured surfaces and layers of meaning.

**

Laura Peña is an award-winning poet born and raised in Houston, TX. She holds a BA in English Literature and an MA in Education. She is a primary bilingual teacher and a translator of poetry into Spanish. Laura has been a featured poet at Valley International Poetry Festival, Inprint First Fridays, and Public Poetry. She has presented workshops at VIPF in the Rio Grande Valley, TX. and People's Literary Festival in Corpus Christi, TX. Laura  writes ekphrastic poetry and has many pieces published at The Ekphrastic Review. She has also been published in Equinox, Boundless, Synkroniciti, Point Clear Press, Voices, and Four Tulips.

​Treacherous Spring
 
First, rain. Then, ice (the lilacs frozen mid-bloom), then, rain. April the cruelest, the erratic, the month I was born. It disorients and confounds. We travel westward to leave flowers at a grave, a small smooth stone someone will pocket and palm. All the fields look ravaged, chewed at by wind. When I was seven…when I was nine…, back we go the way we came, veering north in time to where the lakes resemble ponds, more like, and the geese saunter as if swans.

**

If Living, Somewhere
 
Even if prone on the couch, in the bath, near the lilacs with their burnt curled leaves, there is, always, a location. It cannot be helped. Sometimes, I am elsewhere: north, where the weather patterns differ in noticeable ways sometimes. Nevertheless, I do not feel weightless. There are walls and the rough nap of the rug underfoot. There is where they cut and burned, as they termed it, just above my left knee, now bandaged. Little clouds pass outside the window. The ruinous sun dutifully shines. No one, here, steals the street signs; they announce themselves to anyone who bothers to notice. Vine or Pine. Avenue or Drive. It was difficult to recall in May, back when we were elsewhere, even more north, with snow. Elsewhere-elsewhere, the windmill’s blades turn again with much rejoicing.

**

Still Owls, Here
 
Though the swans have driven out the herons, and the rooks…well, let us not speak of the rooks. It doesn’t take long to disrupt wherever we are. We can clap our hands, calling high-pitched. Clear the grove. We can announce how the minutes add up to a year and we should hustle it along, swiftly departing for other more pleasurable climes. Though it takes six months for fingernails to fully regrow and over twice that for those others we so often keep shod. So, there. He reported as we age, everything takes longer to heal, and I was not to go out in the sun. I was to avoid higher elevations. When I asked which way to the sea, he shrugged, as if the question was strange and inland was preferable and not to be shunned or disparaged.

**

Beginning in the Middle
 
It’s a pity, and I heartily agree most days come evening. Come the breeze dying down as it does. Where I’m found, that matters. The room grows stale and nothing can be done about it. I pace to generate motion. I search for houses near large bodies of water. I miss the herons and even the cantankerous swans.

**

Ringing Bell
 
What’s that bell ringing, she asked. I did not know, still do not know. And what of the ship’s remains discovered on the seafloor after all these years? What are we to do with them? Salvage or let rest? I might have always been displaced, and this is why I could not/cannot recognize the bell and its tolling. It does not come from the south where the cathedral has stood for over sixty years, of limestone, its steeple’s stones dropping, in need of repair. Maybe northward? Maybe I am past the middle of my life having never really begun and this is explanation for everything.

**

Settling
 
Anywhere, she said, would seem strange to me that did not. Which is why we pace and sit and then rise and take a drive to consider the lake, however stagnant and lacking tides it is. A thorough disappointment. Settle, I was told. Settle your tail feathers, breathe. Now is the quiet time. Listen: our molecular levels shift, suddenly, at 44, at 60, roughly, on average, every one of us. We are not what we once were. And where are the swans? Gone.  
      
**
 
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of two poetry collections and five chapbooks—the most recent Oblivescence, a finalist for the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award (Red Sweater Press, 2024), and The Sailing Place (Bottlecap Press, 2026.) She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in Blue Earth Review, Denver Quarterly, Laurel Review, and The Glacier. She lives in the Upper Midwest. 

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.