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

Blood Lines

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

Nothing Reminds Me of Home

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

Reddit Nothing Brings Me Joy

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

In Autumn, I Can Already Smell the Snow

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

Predators and Prey

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

Creative Destruction

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

Psychopomps

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

Blood Alcohol

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

**

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

​Matter
 
I was clattering around the kitchen this morning, and a pronouncement fell from the radio above the sink: “So, we don’t have much agency over the thermal death of the universe.” Something in the speaker’s weary voice compelled me to copy the phrase on the back of my grocery list, below mirror images of “peanut butter,” “feta,” “celery,” and “Chloe’s cold cuts” bleeding through in black Sharpie ink. It was just after New Year’s, raw and overcast outside for sure, but not exactly a harbinger of impending thermal death. The radio droned on about the Higgs boson, that “God-particle” responsible for the creation of discrete matter in those first Big Bang micro-moments, all the stuff that could coalesce into nebulae and tectonic plates and the flesh on my bones and a fibrous celery rib. Geez, NPR expects a lot of heavy lifting before first cup of coffee! Whatever pull I might exert upon the universe’s longevity, I don’t quite fathom, but I do love the word “agency,” such an exhilaration of power and autonomy.  Although these days I associate it most with women and their bodies, hard-won rights disintegrating into the current political maelstrom, much like the apparent fade of energy across the firmament. Everything gets flipped. If Leonardo Da Vinci wrote down his groceries, I could read them perfectly on the other side. What tissues of time and matter separate us from comprehending our purpose? What if I forgot to add “dish soap” to the list? 
 
**
 
Reliquary for a Dog
 
Roscoe was no saint. Shitter of carpets and shredder of backpacks left unattended on the floor. He once courted death by nipping at the heels of a State Police horse, a patient behemoth who could’ve decapitated his little Jack Russell head and golfed it halfway across the park with one hindquarter clip. But here’s the thing, his actual death was miraculous. I woke to find him half-paralyzed on the one morning of the year my grown kids and my ex were in all town for Christmas, and my step-family was away. We convened in my kitchen, and once he realized his original rescue family had all come together one last time, he peacefully checked out. How that rascal was able to time it like that, I’ll never know. His ashes are bagged in a baby shoebox on my bookshelf. I’ve thought of sprinkling him in that stand of pines on the coast of Maine where he once staggered out dragging a desiccated deer leg longer than he was. O how he radiated his inner wolf that day! Should’ve kept that leg, cremated it along with him as an accompaniment to whatever further scavenging grounds he might ascend to. I don’t believe in Doggie Purgatory, no seven-story obstacle course to climb in refinement of the canine soul. Even if there was, he’d probably dig his way out under the perimeter fence, looking for something nasty to roll around in and eat. 
 
**
 
Blame
 
The first pedestrian fatalities caused by automobiles were called “car murders.” Auto companies hated the term, and eventually they devised the misdemeanor “jaywalking,” to shift blame onto the walking public. How to arbitrate the interactions between ambulating flesh and fast-moving chunks of steel and glass? No one wants to accrue blame for a child’s brains dashed out against the curb. My brother died in his bedroom, and I was relieved to hear he was at home; that he hadn’t been ejected, drunk, through the windshield of his Porsche, and that he hadn’t taken anyone with him. This is what my gratitudes consist of nowadays. And really, blame is not a sticky-trap dragging one down into a morass of remorse, not unless it’s accompanied by a hefty jail sentence, and even then, you can play the martyr card, raise defense funds from your base, or lean into that great American tradition where everyone loves a good comeback story. My brother did several months in county lockup, and when he got out, he built three good years of sobriety. I am most grateful for that time with him. Set your mirrors with care, wear a seat belt, use your blinkers, use a designated driver. What do jays have to do with traffic flow, anyway? When I approach my polling station to vote, I always look all ways before I cross.    
 
**
 
This poem was previously published in Atticus Review.
 
**

Cause
 
I’m shivering under the filling station awning as a light wintry mix falls, watching gallons and dollars swell on the register of Pump #5, when a prompt appears on the screen: “Would you like to make a donation to St. Jude,” not specifying if the funds would go towards research for cancer-riddled kids, just Saint Jude, that unremarkable apostle pushed to the periphery in most Last Supper tableaus, the chump who got tagged as Patron Saint of Lost Causes, which doesn’t bode well for the cancer kids, and I start thinking, all right Pump, what is your lost cause; are we talking about our current hydrocarbon-burning transportation system, or more broadly, is the Grand Experiment of Humanity coming to a close and this is the only sign I’ll get that the Rapture is at hand, and if I don’t drop a healthy tithe into this gas pump card reader right now, I’m not going to make it skyward; instead I’ll get hung up on the underside of this filling island awning, my ankles tangled in a hose spewing gouts of economy grade octane all over, the fire-retardant foam nozzles kicking in too late to keep my Subaru from going up in an apocalyptic fireball; oh jeez Pump, give me a just a sec, but nothing much happens, just a slight shift in the wind pushing sleet down my neck, and I hop back in the car, buckle up, and pull out onto the highway toward home and my beloved.
 
**

This poem was previously published in Hole in the Head Review. 
 
**

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

Pinsky

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

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

This poem was previously published in What Rough Beast.
 
**

There is an “I” in “WHITE”

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

This poem was previously published in What Rough Beast.

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

Robbie Gamble (he/him) is the author of the chapbook A Can of Pinto Beans (Lily Poetry Review Press, 2022). His poems and essays have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Post Road, Salamander, The Sun, and Tahoma Literary Review. He is the poetry editor for Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices, and he divides his time between Boston and an apple orchard in Vermont.

The Venice Beach Portrait Painter

I paint exclusively in black-and-white. I pay homage to the past. I like to paint portraits of deceased iconic artists like Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo, and Giotto di Bondone. I sell my portraits on the Venice Boardwalk to tourists and locals alike. My customers are often foreigners and folks from landlocked states looking for an escape from the routine of their suburban lives. These tourists are looking to drop a little cash on bohemian souvenirs.
          There is a special connection between art, ocean mist and people-watching. Call it inspiration or living off your mind. I truly live for these southern California weekends on the boardwalk. Don’t think I’ll ever leave. Except maybe to Acapulco, Mexico. Maybe in the next life.
 
**

Moon, Wind, Eternity

A man in a “Baudelaire for President” shirt walked in the city at midnight. He wasn’t drunk on absinthe, more like a late black coffee which had him over-stimulated. He saw the moon in the distance, alone like a scholarly monk. He saw the stars bright in the night sky: owl eyes. The man in a “Baudelaire for President” shirt had given up cigarettes when he turned thirty-five, but he couldn’t give up caffeine. He sat on a graffitied park bench and wrote a poem. It was about the miracle of the night sky and the chill of the wind. He titled it, “Moon, Wind, Eternity.” When he got home from his midnight stroll, he edited the poem. He submitted it to a few of his favourite literary magazines before drifting away to the ether of sleep.

**

New Year’s Resolution
 
A man jumped into a lake. It was the beginning of the new year. He’d never been up close to a lake before. He’d driven by Pyramid Lake on the way to Los Angeles or the Bay Area but never took a dip. He didn’t get out much. The man knew how to swim from childhood lessons, but not formal ones. Just testing it out: sink or swim. His family was kind of crazy, but they were also tough. He couldn’t take that away from them. Tough as Canelo or any working-class boxer, really. As he floated in the lake, it occurred to him that his new year’s resolution was to swim more: lakes, ocean, the gym. He would even take up surfing lessons. Start from the beginning, humble himself, crawling, until he could surf with ease. For now, he rested and thought about the Rose Parade earlier that morning. What a gorgeous concept, he thought, flowers on parade.
 
**
 
Confessions of a Failed Abstract-Expressionist Painter
 
I’m a painter who often fears a lack of money in life. I’m okay, for now, but will I ever own a house? Perhaps I can venture out to teach art soon? Perhaps I’ll find another occupation? There is also the fear of lack of fame. Mostly ego, of course, but every artist wants to be appreciated, especially while we’re still alive, right? I guess I’m already unknown, and it’s not the end of the world. Perhaps I can tough it out as a mere pedestrian in this vast, indifferent world. The next case scenario is lack of love. Certainly, the worst of the scenarios. Perhaps a result of lack of money or lack of fame. Lack of love cuts deepest, like a samurai sword to the gut. A life lived in isolation, like a drifting island, floating at sea, at midnight.
 
**                
 
The Garden of Lilacs
 
A man in a Deftones shirt walked in a garden of lilacs. He looked up at the sky; rain was on the way. Baptism? When he was a child, he was baptized along with his twin brother. His twin brother was named after pointing randomly to a page in the Bible. He was also named this way. Later, he left the church to watch football and basketball on Sunday mornings. When he was a teenager, the man in a Deftones shirt used to surf the concrete on a longboard, headphones, sunglasses and all. Now, the man in a Deftones shirt, walking in a field of lilacs, is a professional photographer. His favourite photos are of his Abuelo, who worked the fields in Mexico and the U.S. as a Bracero. The man in a Deftones shirt shared the photos of his Abuelo and family in Mexico as part of a canvas exhibition on collage style painting. The name of the exhibition: Arguments, Baptisms and Other Epiphanies.

**

Jose Hernandez Diaz (he, him, his) is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024) The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025) and the forthcoming, The Lighthouse Tattoo (Acre Books, 2026). He has taught creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, and at the University of Tennessee where he was the Poet in Residence.

The War, Photos by Robert Doisneau

To know when your mother was born is to know when you were born. To know when the clock struck noon was to know that time dies in an abandoned castle where all floors look crooked from an opposite doorway. You were the tallest boy in the class. You wiped your tears with your teacher’s kerchief after the priest punished you for running when you should have been walking to the lavatory line. Among the girls posed side-saddle on the metal chairs between two rows of chestnut trees about to dosey doe, your hair was the shortest. In a shop window, a doll’s head, like an apparition, rests on her own head; champagne bottles in tuxedos; un chat endormi. One wall displays boys playing war. Socks pulled up below the knee. Metal, barrel hoops—foxhole slingshot. A white pigeon or a white dove? Her boots are drowning in puddles of milk. The exit from the exhibit is through a curtain holding two lovers kissing before a sculpture of a naked woman in repose. The heft and the sheath secured around my own body sets off the museum’s alarm twice. I’m always getting too close to what I’m not allowed to touch.
 
 **

The Buck Stops Here
  
If the deer looks back, there are children behind her. If the deer looks at you there is no one else but you and the deer. I’m crossing this island on a road called Old Milk Route near Chaos Corner. On this island we match our colours, we match the palette of ourselves to the granite and cobblestone and shingles. Exceptions are found in mid-August where some trees start to colour, the Burning Bush and the hydrangea’s blossoms, as big as cotton candy, with the hue of summer pastels still living in their branches. I recite these words into my phone; these words will soon become this poem. I do this in my poetry voice as if the universe were listening, as if I'm talking to somebody, but lately the only person I talk to is you. You, a month and a half dead. You, who fixed my house, who became a man I loved for a very short time. A man who wore his black shirt with Banksy’s Butterfly Girl Suicide iron-on, the day he turned science into magic. At my new house in my new yard, I leave all the milkweed for the Monarchs. And when they bloom and find the air and pastures and meadows and flowers, I will call them by your name. After all that time in the cocoon, after the opening and the stretching and the transformation, like you, each will be called to another world too quickly. Called to the dark, distant heat of a sunless day that is halfway through billions of years of its own life cycle. We sometimes fought about money and I can’t figure out if there is any currency, any promise, any bargain, any stone I could use as payment to start over. 
 
** 

Selling Our Mother’s House 
 
When I think of California, I remember my mid 30s, West Hollywood’s haze burning into sun. This was before I knew what I was or what I was becoming. The truth? Not much, and not much more. 25 years have passed since I last visited Santa Monica. Then, my spirit drifted over the cliff’s edge and created circles of refuge like a fog over the right hand of the mountains. I return to reconcile the dread and the heart’s insistence that my years of mourning require reprieve. I photograph birds of prey and birds of paradise, cacti and waving palms. I settle into the green, wooden pagoda I photographed years ago with film that had to be developed through the mail. I descend the steps to face the vast Pacific and baptize the beginning of the last third of my life in water and sand. I leave some of my pain behind, some of your death, some of the weight of the bricks called, “Goodbye.” Now, airborne, fear not sister, I return with most of you with me. But, it’s time — it’s time for spring to break me open instead of grief. This will mark the last year of picking blackberries in our mother’s yard. From their flowers, bees will make a honey so sweet, it will whet and wake the tongue of my need for forgiveness from my guilt for the wounds that took you from me. I’ll be leaving our former home before the bruised, grainy, bulbs appear—a bird’s delicate sustenance. With only one song left to sing, I sing to thee:

I’m sorry, my own sweet, beloved fruit; I’m sorry, my heart-drenched succulent --

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
 
** 
 
 Denied Access
 
I am the blood borne pathogen of a fish-eyed ferry. Crossing a sound that zips its lips. We reach an island with a train. I board and find my seat, wear a mask so no one will sit near me. I’m not sick, but the abdomen is congested—belly fat, belly flop. Ask the instructor who taught me to swim, held my back, let me sink. The water became a surface; my back became the footsteps of Peter, the apostle. Having long been betrayed, which of you will deny me? The geese form a V, fly south—down, down, down, descent and indecent. We all learn to love by being held and being let go.
 
**
 
Baptism By Fire
 
There’s no tell-tale heart beneath her floorboards. And by that, I mean her chest. It was strong and clean until the chemo: my heart's fine, she always said, but I knew this wasn’t true. What caused or revealed the thickness in the chambers? What caused the attack? Rushed in an ambulance on I-95 South a couple of hours before midnight, where they claim the best cardiologist is. A pandemic burning through the city, no visitors allowed, my 81-years-old mother in New Haven alone. She never ate that day, that’s what bothered her most. And the guy near her room tainted the hallway with rage swearing so she couldn’t sleep, but insomnia was common. At 1 a.m. tests and images that revealed blockages, calcifications, tunnels tightened with milk’s hard extractions. They drilled just enough not to kill her—enough for blood to re-activate her heart. The heart I’d never seen. She saved her gloom only for me; her cusp of evening dark glowed like headlamps on black ice. Others, instead, witnessed the lights in her windows, the ones she taped to the sill from the boxes labeled “Christmas.” In the gloaming of her final week, she deemed this Earth suddenly good, this life suddenly worth living: “I don’t want to leave,” she said, too quietly, too late. Alone, I escorted her down death’s aisle across the constellations; I left her at the threshold of her former home. Despite all her fears, no one was waiting there to punish her, even for leaving me years ago, not that she considered that a crime, her own mother had done the same to both of us. I remember my grandmother’s red nails stirring the rocks in her afternoon bourbon—she'd dab a little on my lips— as I licked them it burned my tongue like a slap.
 
 **
 
The Nobel Prize Museum, Stockholm
 
A pair of pigeons lived in the antenna. In the name of science, we shot the pigeons to challenge The Big Bang theory against The Steady State. The Big Bang won. It was vice versus versa, it was residue of light and waves, the expansion of collateral damage. Did Neil’s Bohr fret about his body? Did he have to look at himself under a microscope and apologize for every flaw? Did he hold a mirror up to his penis and scrotum, in a circle of men, and say— “I can name the three chambers under my foreskin, I can trace the line on my testicles and call it by its Latin name.”? In Stockholm there are too many steeples steeped in fog. Even the magpie, in its coat & tails, stops looking for gilt around the graves, recognizes itself in the stone’s reflective surface and flies offstage singing I want to be loved for my mind.
 
 **

How We Keep What We Name
  
I am feeling sullen. If a bench were placed beside me, I’d sit on the cold ground instead and break every rule I set. For instance, I’m supposed to walk outside for two miles if it’s over 40 degrees. I’m supposed to get my steps in before dark. But instead, I plop on the couch and binge-watch videos on my phone I made about death. I could be a nomad; I could have a donkey. In fact, I do have a donkey, it followed me to the desert with a few years’ worth of surgical masks and a canteen filled with sanitizer for the pandemic that was only a mirage about death. Not everyone’s, but yours. I know it’s time to sell the donkey. But what would he do, what would he carry? Plus, I’ve named him already, I call him Melvin, and he calls me Story because I’m a big talker. He listens to every word I mutter about death while I lie on the cold desert floor. I dream that Melvin is an insomniac, and I have sleep apnea. In the dream he tells me that I was dreaming about you again, dear sister, and I told him, not that he asked, that you were sitting on the bench beside me and that is why I was sitting on the ground. That this dream is not a mirage and there is a distance where my sister and I are still in it counting the white sails on the white boats between us.
 
 **
 
Sea Glass
  
There was not much my mom and I liked to do together, but since I was very young she taught me how to hunt; how to toughen the soles of my feet to endure the pain; how to stand over a wide-spread assemblage; how to look and look and look; how to never give up; how to shade the light when it blinded everything into blending; how to weigh down my pockets with things that were once whole and clear; how to curate the fragments inside glass cylinders and stand them in the light; how the glass became light; how the beams became glass; how she protected and carried her collection, her years of genuflection and reverence, a bending toward the shore. A life’s work, the slight roughness from salt and churning; a legacy. She separated each by colour. These are passed to me. Some she found by my side. I’d often keep the bigger ones and hand her what I felt was too small. From me, she would take anything she could get.
 
**

Dianne Bilyak is a Pushcart-prize nominated writer and a CT disability rights advocate. Her book of poems, Against the Turning, was published in 2011, and her work has also been featured in America Magazine, Drunken Boat, The Massachusetts Review, and The Tampa Review. In 2021, Bilyak's memoir was published by Wesleyan University Press. It was a finalist for the Gilda Award. The book is titled, Nothing Special: The Mostly True, Sometimes Funny Tales of Two Sisters. She enjoys staring into space and eating chocolate. ​

 
I am Broken / 
Heart
 
Line breaks have a bad rep: wildfire flames lick over the crest of the Pasadena hillsides. Firefighters breathe plastics and melted tires. Here in Vermont line breaks mean power outages. Wind. Snow too heavy for trees to hold up their heads. Pick-up-stick trees crossing down wires along the unplowed two-lane road to some small village. In the kitchen, cold soup. Grabbed candles that smell of tea tree, bergamot, and soy wax. A dead lamp where I want to read police procedural mysteries. No light over my mirror. A nine-battery flashlight.  The rhythm for the line? I’m the Mimer Clapper in the gospel service that waits for someone else to clap first so I can dance and clap with them. Someone always goes first. On the beat. As for poetry, I faked my way through a master’s degree as if I could parse rhythms other than iambic. Even now I break an adjective from its noun. 
 
**
 
Lace on Sunday
 
I wake up as lace. Like fresh snow that lines every twig. No black or scarlet mantillas. Handmade. Like the tablecloth my mother crocheted when she was pregnant with me, nine months of forever. Her work fits the longest dinner table I’ve ever seen. I’ve washed red wine stains from it. Beef blood. Blue birthday cake frosting. Now I’m white lace. Too old for lingerie, weddings or baptisms. I am intricacy, open spaces, and symmetry – inklings of what to expect in complex knots. I will not surround a neck like Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s signature collar to remind everyone she was a woman – not a person of coat and tie, a person of lace. Imagine how I felt to realize I am only slightly bigger than a doily. An antimacassar sized to protect the back of a chair from male hair oil. Unacceptable! I reinvent myself.  I am prayer flag hung on a tree to let wind taste lace, wash with rain. I flutter in the breeze until longing spreads. Til I unravel.
 
**
 
Cosmic Latte
 
Astronomers at Johns Hopkins studied 200,000 galaxies. They determined cosmic latte is the average color of the universe in stars, galaxies, clouds of dust and gas.  To be specific: HEX #FFF8E7 if you want to dip your computer’s eyedropper into it and fill your image. Think Milky Way. Color of great espresso stirred with cream. No cinnamon on top. Sugar optional. I can’t overstate how comforting I found this. Fleshed out with the hums and whirs of espresso machines, the shuffling feet of people waiting for a paper cup with a siren wearing a crown to appear on the counter with their initials on it. When an endless night of beyond falls below the horizon, each sip feeds a star nature.
 
**
 
The Immortelles
 
Three story ingredients: man, horse and death. Siddhartha rode the white stallion Kinthaka when he escaped from the palace and left the horse behind on his path to the lotus and enlightenment. Kinthaka’s heart broke – to be reborn in what was said to be a heaven.  
 
Ulysses S. Grant, horse whisperer, and his famed stallion Cincinnati. Grant rode Cincinnati to the Appomatox Courthouse to negotiate General Lee’s surrender. He allowed Abraham Lincoln to ride Cincinnati, breaking his rule that no one else rode the magnificent horse. Grant died in 1885 of throat cancer in his cottage in Moreau, New York three days after completing a memoir he hoped would provide funds for his impoverished wife and family. His son stopped the clock at 8:08. The U.S. Grant Cottage National Landmark preserves decorations from his funeral – bouquets of immortelles, pearly everlastings, a six-foot floral gate, a cross and a sword. Blooms browned with time, tinged with grime. 
 
Friends of Grant Cottage who seek to preserve those floral arrangements study how. Spray glue? Wax? Replicas? Switch to framed photos? 
 
How long does a story last? See Buddha and Kinthaka painted on silk scrolls and carved on stupas. Alexander the Great and Bucephalus grace a mosaic from Pompeii, coins and sculptures and a Degas painting. Grant and Cincinnati in paintings. Roy Rogers’ taxidermied Trigger rears up in the John Wayne Museum.  
 
The Buddha said what rises also ceases. Lotus. Bread. Storm. Shadow. Mountain. Flood. Fire. Breath. Friends, followers and flowers for the dead. 
 
**
 
The Ark of Words
 
When scientists determine what to put in the next ark launched to save us, I hope there’s room for all languages, even almost-dead ones. Including words for corn or water disputed in footnotes. Once even tea enflamed war. Poems hidden in a cloud with no water vapor. The ship’s manifest may trail out as long as the scribe’s beard. On the loading dock, may a stevedore separate words that float from what doesn’t, what needs cotton buffers in an oak chest, is glass-fragile or soft as baby flesh. After linguists separate love from loss, war from military operations, what’s renamed as original. Then let longshoremen shift the weight onboard. Some words will get tucked into crannies with fudgel, snollygoster and woofit, too good to lose. Others share wisdom from ten thousand languages – mother, kindness, mercy, justice– even their variants of abuse. Lies aspire to be the ship’s figurehead until they fall off, food for the dragonfish. Where the ship sails, its ports of call, what flag it flies, we can speculate. If the ship sinks, let its treasure float off to wings of the ever-flying albatross and gentle dove, wind, rain, stars, and a following sea. 
 
**
 
Pulling Down the Stars
 
On the first cold midnight in October, I stare into the cloudless sky at star glitter. I want to see the smudge of Comet Lemmon as it zooms by and away for the next 1,350 years. Let this night sky plant a dream seed. Pull down the space frontier. Excite a sleep spindle.  Hook a sparkle from Orion’s belt into my ear lobe. But during tonight’s REM I yank the letter A off a dark-red marquee resting in the dusty backlot of a resale store. An antique sign hauled from a theater now retrofitted as a brewery. The salesperson said I couldn’t take the A; someone might want the whole sign which reads THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS.  I don’t know why I want only the A. I’ve aged beyond my Scarlet Letter irritation at Reverend Dimmesdale. But the blue sub-giant star Algenib marks where Pegasus’ wing rubs his hindquarters, the bareback seat. Bridling up to ride the wild stallion: relive a blue-ribbon ending to my race, drink the Milky Way. Let his hooves strike up lightning. My what’s-up ache to fly beyond the bitter first frost. To the edge of asylum, the boundaries where angels applaud, tomorrow’s awestruck.  
 
**
 
To The Motherboard on Our Mother Ship
 
Please. Power up with sunshine to share your memory of antidotes for the grievous mistakes the captains of our earth ship make. Share the  wisdom of gentle goddesses known and unknown. The She who heals mothers and children. Who softens mourning. Brings the lost home. Guards against scorpions, restores life to the gardens in Gaza, cradles babies and gives them bread. Start way back. All the Mary’s. Ask us to give Oshun gifts of honey and oranges for blessings. Help me name whose hand rests on my shoulder when I get stuck in cul-de-sacs of rubble, quack grass, and broken promises. Help me breathe into the Pieta’s grief. Loan me Antigone as my nails scratch droughted soil to bury the dread of love lost in onboard leadership mutinies. Offer us more than war-torn and refugees. Guanyin’s compassion. St. Brigid of poetry. The vision of Lakshmi. Urge us to right this ship and withstand the crash that looms under our star. Be AI-leen, voicing patterns and predictions that lead to hopepunk. Use the widest possible interpretation of ancestor to define action. Translate what the whales have been saying for millions of years. Shift, sift and splice something that shimmers in this creeping darkness. Help. Now. 
 
 **

Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. More than 300 of her poems have appeared in journals as diverse as Kenyon Review and New Verse News and nine collections, full-length or chapbook. Wild Apples, out in 2024 from Fernwood Press, details downsizing with aging and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. After 18 years of working with free verse, she is now writing mostly prose poems. She serves as a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual. Website: triciaknoll.com

Drop by Drop
 
My temples stream with cold sweat like the walls of a subterranean cave, I need air, my heart spins, grows into a spiral, becomes petrified into a shell sealed around a Mayan cenote, a deep green pool filled with the mute echo of sacrificial virgins’ sighs: my dreams drown within the ashes of my memories, with dry eyes, I taste the salt of swollen tears as they flow away in an eternal drip, infiltrating through the fissures of mother of pearl: valves burst into a gigantic wave, propelling me out of myself over foam-covered dunes.
 
**
 
First published by The Bitter Oleander
From Under Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015)
 
**
 
Unborn
 
I have no eyes, no ears, no lips, a flower drawn from the wild seed of their eyes, elytra’s spark in the darkening riverbed, a trembling protean flame rising from an elusive space where skin meets skin. Hand in hand, they watch me grow tongues of flame licking the warm air, extending like fingers in a glove, intertwined vines blossoming in fiery petals. They hear the rustling of dry leaves nearby, a droplet bursting on a tin gutter, a crack in the icy roof, a tear of melting snow, read the sudden silence of wind chimes, hear me whisper: yes, I am, I know . . .
 
**
 
First published by GraFemas: Letras Femeninas
From Under Brushstrokes (Press 53 2015)
 
**
 
Visiting the Generalife
 
I linger along the rose orchard cooled by water fountains. A suspension of iridescent droplets rises and falls in splashing loops, trickles through inlaid channels. Here, air speaks with caressing syllables and fragrant language; each lemon tree heavy with golden globes, its crisp shiny leaf ready to break under my fingers’ slightest touch, oozes essential oils. Each rose speaks of the harvest of rose petals and orange blossoms my mother distilled in alembics in the vast white-tiled bathroom, the transparent essence imprisoned in a row of bottles stored in the sandara, that secret room above the kitchen, hosting a microcosm of flavours gathered from faraway plantations and mountain slopes.
 
Boabdil’s heart shrunk
eyes fixed at the Alhambra
a fragile star falls
 
**
 
First published by Dashboard Horus
From The Taste of the Earth (Press 53 2019)
 
**
 
Jacaranda
 
      Voy a construir una ventana en medio
            de la calle para no sentirme solo.
                                    —Miguel Ángel Zapata
 
 
The poet would like to build a window in the middle of the street so that he won’t feel lonely. I also want to build a window in the middle of the street, plant a jacaranda and then wake up at the trills of the songbirds nested in its branches. I will drink my morning coffee seated on the ground carpeted with the purple petals of my youth and every night feel its foliage tremble under the faraway breeze that blows in Beirut along the Corniche, bringing a mist of fragrant echoes through half-open shutters. Night is woven with the flutter of wings.
 
Windblown words travel
through thought’s countless corridors
turn daydreams ablaze
 
**
 
First published by ArLiJo 54: Arlington Literary Journal
From The Taste of the Earth (Press 53 2019)
 
**

The Burma Pearl
 
In my chest there is a dot that is a hole where I could hear my heartbeat as I stepped into the Burma store while you picked a pearl pendant just for me. That morning, dew was barely brushing the petals of the budding spring. I handed you my gold medal carved with the crowned Virgin and child, my grandmother’s gift at my baptism. I still have the oval-shaped pearl in my jewelry box; it has escaped looting, known so many homes in different latitudes and languages. It has never touched my skin since but remains filled with words said and unsaid, suffused within the music of a light that once ran over my cheeks.
 
Cicadas sing songs
hum a threnody for life
empty shells over bark
 
**
 
First published by Sukoon Literary Journal
From The Taste of the Earth (Press 53 2019)
 
**
 
Or How I Still Turn My Turkish Coffee Cup Upside Down
 
When I was single, mom, you used to bend over the dregs’ configurations, conjuring up budding shapes, intricate encounters rising along the porcelain walls. You’d ask me to press my thumb inside the murky bottom to petrify an incipient evil eye. After I got married, how you laughed at me: you already know your luck! We could foresee trips, reunions, question the cornucopia of inked silhouettes, hollowed tree trunks, animals whispering messages or bearing pearls in their mouths. After you were gone, twenty years ago, I have been reading my own luck every day, projecting my hopes and calming my fears. During the past ninety days at home I’ve maintained the ritual, defying all odds. What am I hoping to find in the cup? I know I won’t be able to travel to California to hold my son’s first baby boy in my arms.
 
**
 
First published by Cuthroat: A Journal of The Arts
From Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53 2023)
 
**

Or Why Do I Fast-Forward Lovers’ Encounters On TV Shows?
 
What are elusive lovers if not erratic paths, mediocrity encountered at every major crossing when we get lost as we try to hold on tight to the wheel of fortune, lest it bends on the other side, tree stumps on which to stop and rest for a while, hoping they’ll grow into a maple, or an oak, become strong enough so that we could stretch a hammock between their branches, rest while reading, swayed by the wind humming Aeolian tunes, maybe find a shoulder to help cross a stream of discontent or uncertainty, a staff, a shaft, a wooden crutch once meant to grow twigs bearing buds but instead dries up and breaks under our weight as an illusory axis mundi? What of the inanity of such quest, of attempting to create with a deck of cards a story, our story, the way some weave fleeting tales with Tarots, aligning them in vertical or horizontal lines, inventing new signs and symbols
 
**
 
First published by Fifth Wednesday Journal
From Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53 2023)
 
**
 
Waiting in a Field of Melted Honey
 
I am waiting in a field of melted honey, hiding behind a blue tree that is not really a tree, a root Vincent chose to paint as a tree, you know, the painting where roots are the size of trees, gnarled trees with severed limbs, sterile against the golden field swaying, the tall grass bending, and of course no one can tell, but l feel the wind too, swelling my blue-flowered dress, you won’t see none of it, for I am behind the huge roots that look like trees and you can only feel the wind in the brush strokes. You will mistake my dress bulging on the side for a knot as if I were a distortion of the oversized joints, leaning against the bark as if against one of his fingers, my space so
restricted I can barely move.
 
The master knows I am waiting for him, eyes filled with the beauty pouring from his vision. I know he will take these roots and me with them, trees growing into rising clouds at nightfall, and he will show me the city lights everything around us becoming waves of light. When he remembers me, the tip of his brush releasing me, I will tell him how hot it was behind the root that was like a tree, how the bright rays made me dizzy. He will take me into his brush, cool me down with linseed oil and in another field show me the evening sky. I come to life again, but no one knows I’m here, the gold of my hair, the blue of my dress broken into lines, narrow paths of colour spiralling among the stars on a warm blue night, the moon and the sun becoming one and I and him, the field and the sky circling endlessly. I feel the ripples of the wind, the ocean’s foam, my dress flows domelike, its flowers brighter and brighter, I am everywhere, hear our voices and you now understand what lies in each swirl, your life, mine, his, together in the dance of the stars.
 
**
 
First published by Puerto del Sol
From Tea in Heliopolis (Press 53 2013)
 
**
 
Last Night I Saw Mom at a Party 
 
She wore a brightly-coloured dress but her head was covered by a pharaonic double veil; the first in silk gauze was visible over her temples underneath the black velvet. I kept watching her from afar and couldn't understand this headdress a la Tutankhamun! Unlike her mom who never left the house without a hat and gloves, she seldom used her black lace veil during mass. When I approached her, she disappeared towards the restrooms and came out in a black spindle dress, her hair pulled back in a low bun a la Farah Diba. Stunned, I wanted to ask her, where did you find such beautiful clothes? I'd like to go shopping with you! But people kept cutting in before I could utter a word and with her usual stern expression, she joined other guests at the dinner table. I opted for resting in the living room that was suddenly surrounded with babies and several ladies flocked around them with doting expressions. Before I could get up from the sofa, a plump baby landed on my lap! I didn't know what to do with him. I put him in a nearby stroller and placed a soft beanie cushion under his head oblivious of what was going on around me,  all the while thinking of mom's stunning transformation and kept wondering why I could never find anything decent to wear. 
 
**
 
First published  by On the Seawall
 
**
 
Finding My Way to My Old House
 
I'm wandering aimlessly through Cairo's downtown avenues. I end up finding my way to the tramway station leading to Heliopolis. It's night when we reach the arcades bathed in streetlights where we used to shop and stroll with friends. Past Midan Ismailia, the next stop is Midan Saphir, my final destination. Only a few blocks away, on 12, Rushdy Street, our house still stands with its shining brass plaque on the front arch's stone pillar. Why come here since we've all left for other continents over half a century ago? Has it been twenty years now since mom died? Yet she still inhabits my dreams and I long to see her welcoming me back. I enter the hallway as a ghost visiting an empty tomb once filled with memory's faint echoes. The same Queen Ann carved furniture of the entry hall welcomes me with its worn out pink velvet upholstery. How come I still remember our phone number, 63869? 
 
**
 
First published by MockingHeart Review
 
**

Hedy Habra is a poet, artist, and essayist. Her latest poetry collection, Or Did You Ever See The Other Side? (Press 53 2023), won the 2024 International Poetry Book Awards and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer and USA Best Book Awards. The Taste of the Earth, won the Silver Nautilus Book Award and Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Tea in Heliopolis won the Best Book Award, and Under Brushstrokes was a finalist for the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. She is a twenty-five-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net https://www.hedyhabra.com/
​
 
 

Numbers 
 
I woke up, and the number nine was green. That really pissed me off, as the New York skies were fragrant with fish wafting over pine trees. Presently, I dipped into the ocean and washed myself of all my transgressions before repudiating the number nine, which rusted right before my eyes. If only numbers knew how much the soil needs them to stay put, and not wander off with crayons in the night. 
 
**

Echo Echo 
 
I am an echo of my shadow. I am empty of time. I walk through mazes of darkness, blindfolded. I howl into a hollow mirror. I am a voiceless void.
 
**
 
Dialects of Clocks 
 
He swallows a clock and exhales an eternity of ashes. The world burns and she gulps gasoline to quench the fire. His thirst rusts his throat and he thaws into a sculpture of the sea. 
 
She merges with the mountains and spits scripts of sand.
 
**

Sète
 
The wind sliced the day in two. One half was ocean; the other half was sky. The sun refused to take sides and dripped its yolk into the sea; setting the sky aflame, it extinguished itself, and the world was black, and windless. 
 
**
 
Mirror Mirror 
 
The mirror multiplies the labyrinths of time into infinities of oblivion multiplies the mirrors of time into labyrinths of infinity multiplies the mirrors of oblivion into a time of labyrinths 
 
**
​
I Spy Eyes 
 
The spy eyes what lies beyond the eyes. But the eyes spy the spy’s lies. The lies lie beyond the spy’s eyes. The spy’s eyes lie. ​

**

Clockwise Cat publisher and editor Alison Ross pioneered the genre and tenets of Zen-Surrealism, and uses those as her guiding aesthetic. She has published poetry in journals such as Chiron Review, Otoliths, Maintenant, and First Literary Review - East. She also writes reviews for PopMatters. Clockwise Cat is thrilled to announce a new focus on prose poetry, so please do take a gander and submit your creations.

 
Manifesting 

After I anesthetized my robot manifestation coach, I took the dream elevator up to the top floor of the basement. Have you spent weeks, or even years, of your life wondering why theme parks are so remorseless? I even bought two front row seats on the Devil’s Details roller coaster, just to see if Satan has an innie or an outie belly button. While not a complete catastrophe, that nearly ruined my fiscal quarter. Even when dressed in my regulation summer pastels and cartoon dress shoes, I can’t help but wonder if I’m quite the Don Juan I like to think I am?  So, after I got home, I immediately enrolled in a top-flight—although low-cost—flirting class at Madame Tussaud’s drive-thru Museum of the World’s Best Osculators. You’ve got to be sure to flirt just the right way. Of course, a better life is possible, but only if you’re unconscious. Flight attendants: prepare for arrival. 

**   

Relief Jester

While styling around town in my multi-coloured clown costume, I fell into a polarizing force field. I don’t think it was just a publicity stunt, because the sticker shock nearly electrocuted me. Of course, my zesty neo-lumberjack outfit would have looked better on a real model, but I was elected by secret ballot. I’m a man of the people, so, out of the gooeyness of my heart and the promise of a 79% pay raise, I agreed to play the part—at least until a relief jester could be located.  Big mistake. 

**

Who Could Ask for More?

Like medieval combat in the antique future, I’m doing all the right things, wrongly. Fortunately, thanks to the canned laughter and fast-frozen giggles, I’m living the Dreamsicle, but just to be on the safe side, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the giraffes for being so tall and the sharks for keeping their distance. I may be approaching the 11th hour, but I’m looking forward to getting a leg up on the competition. After four marriages, and two divorces, I’m confident that I’m starting to get the hang of it. In fact, soon I’ll be able to decapitate the hidden hierarchy without so much as popping a single bubble on the bubble wrap. Of course, one day, everyone will inevitably lose everything, but like the executioner’s reply to his job-satisfaction survey, who could ask for more.

**

Shoulder Season

It’s shoulder season, so I need to sharpen the blades on my backyard Guillotine. The best defense is an extremely succinct offense. It’s an uphill battle, but luckily, it’s the greatest thing in the world for your brain. Also, it looks impressive on your resume. Of course, there’s only so much a sentient being can be expected to withstand. Here’s a list of some of the recent winners. No, I don’t speak French, but I have a beautiful Parisian accent. In fact, I’ve been training my hair to look the part—you know, existentially New Wave. When you do it yourself, you never know for sure what you’re going to get, but I like to leave the door open. Besides, no one knows where the bodies are buried.

**

My Cabinet of Mysterious Oddities

Do they make streets where the houses are, or build houses where the streets are? Personally, I’m opposed to any opposition that opposes me, but my effortless savoir faire usually saves the day. Tomorrow, I’m going to ask the mustachioed concierge for the key to my little pied-à-terre and a couple of hundred thousand francs in unmarked bills. He’s a real gentleman. Of course, I wouldn’t be in this desperate situation if it weren’t for the untimely discovery of the burning skeletons and the smoking gun. Thank goodness I was wearing my survival socks. At least the murder trial has been postponed. 

Come over here. I want to show you something.

**

Safety First

One of my favourite authors is Dr. Wow. I guess that’s no big surprise. I especially love how he writes just like everybody else. Suitable for any occasion. Needless to say, it’s always the dead of night in outer space. Fortunately, I’m on a secret mission. Although I’m not a liberty to say, I can tell you that my advanced prankster class instructor says I’m having the wrong kind of fun. If I was more coordinated, I’d enroll in a synchronized swimming class. There’s no limit to what you can do when you’re wearing hydraulic water wings and matching alligator flippers. Of course, there’s a boatload of things that can kill you. In fact, one of these days I’m going to get exactly what I deserve. Until then, you don’t mind holding this thing, do you? No, I guarantee it’s not loaded. 

**
​
Brad Rose was born and raised in Los Angeles, and lives in Boston. He is the author of eight collections of poetry and flash fiction: Or Words to that Effect, I Wouldn’t Say That, Exactly, WordInEdgeWise, Lucky Animals, No. Wait. I Can Explain, Pink X-Ray, de/tonations, and Momentary Turbulence. Brad’s poetry and fiction have appeared in: 45th Parallel, Baltimore Review, New York Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Puerto del Sol, Clockhouse, Folio, Best Microfiction (2019), Action Spectacle, The Los Angeles Times, Hunger Mountain, Right Hand Pointing, and other journals and anthologies. His website is www.bradrosepoetry.com Selected audio readings: https://soundcloud.com/bradrose1
 

​
Guillotine Girl
 
after Shivani Mehta
 
wants to smile more. She wants to wear a different gown, a brighter perfume, less like the scent of endings. God will make her different the next time around, but she must make the most of her oblique life, of her innate ability to kiss bodies goodbye. She is well-versed in the tenderness of necks, like a mother who has memorized the veins, and folds, and hinges of the pearled bones of her newborn. She most likes to rest in the first light of sunrise and reflect on her tailored potential. She doesn’t always think of herself as a threat or a warning, although she understands the worth of having those qualities hidden under her petticoat. In this life, Guillotine Girl asks forgiveness for how men use her. In another version of her body, she shaves men’s facial hair so close, their cheeks gleam like a baby’s bottom. She dreams of a life with a musical score that doesn’t end with a thud. 

**
 
The Devil, the Dahlias, and The Baby
 
I ran into the devil at the flower shop. I was picking up a bouquet for my friend who just gave birth to a baby boy. The devil was deeply sniffing each bunch of flowers like it was his last hurrah. “Hey, funny seeing you here,” I said. He appeared hurt or offended, like he didn’t deserve beauty. His cheeks looked like fireball candies that everyone would like to lick. “Doesn’t everyone deserve the smell of beginnings?” He asked. “I thought you’d be smelling those in the cemetery, if anything,” I scoffed. “Even flowers get sad,” he said. “And the ones at the cemetery smell like tears,” he said. “I’ve got enough sadness.” “Oh, I had no idea that everything depends on context, even when it comes to flowers,” I said. “They smell like the awful tears-sobby, salty ones.” He dropped his head. “Want to help me pick a bouquet?” I asked to mend my offense. The devil’s eyes brightened like imploding planets. “I’d love to.” He smiled a toothy smile that was both enchanting and more magnetic because he was filled with hope. “These are the first flowers that the baby will ever smell,” I said. “The flowers can’t wait,” he said, and his eyes grew glossy, but he held back the tears so the flowers wouldn’t catch his perpetual gloom. He led me to the Dahlia’s. “My treat,” he said. They were the color of fresh blood. For a fleeting second, there was no death, only the smell of new babies, and the type of blossoms that unravel sadness.
 
**
 
The Invisible Horses

The invisible horses arrived when we ran out of food. My father said, “The moon ate it all, just look how fat he is.” The invisible horses ran through the house and knocked over every ugly, naked baby sculpture my mother had collected at yard sales. There is no way to be sad when you have a stable of invisible horses. Sometimes their stable is the empty fridge, and the invisible horses shrink and whinny in the fluorescent light. We eat hay together in the night hours when the crickets don’t know how beautiful their legs are. The invisible horses tell me I am a constellation, and that is why I am so frail. Tomorrow, there may be milk the color of the Camarillo horse. I will wish on the falling stars of my body for chocolate the color of the Paso Fino. The myth of the invisible horses is about outrunning hunger.
 
**

Acting Drunk
 
When I was sober, when I wanted to talk like an intrigued sense of starlight to strangers, when the strippers sliding through the strobes didn’t butter me bothered, when I sat like a wife, like a wide-legged unbothered man, when I cowboyed, when I sank into the blur like a barrel slug, I pretended I was drink, pretending I was drunk, when I floated new I remembered my first tethering, when I swung umbilical, when I shamed my mother and disappeared into her hope, when I slung myself over my own shoulder and sloppily made love to my wasted flesh, when I was a hungover art film I always watched the first half second, drunk-slept the second half first. I woke up, I tell you, but sometimes I pretend I’m drunk, a new kind, where you cry to fill the dried rivers, and wake up like a Macy’s day parade, where you blister under a fiery ghost of beginning, the kind of drunk where every season you’ve been waiting for finally sings your name.
 
**
 
The Suicide Expert

No one wanted to hang out with the suicide expert. His conversations began as weather forecasts and ended in tutorials on knots. I’m not saying I don’t respect the expertise. I’m saying all the darkness has a brick-feel, and I’m going for wing-feel these days. He is a “special kind of church of individual empowerment,” he says. I want instead to know about waking up from hypnosis, about jumping from optical illusions, about being doubly inside and outside the thing. He listens well about my expertise of birds and the quality of feathers and bones, light and brittle. There can be flight in fragility. We go on a date at one of those places where you dine in the dark. They call it the “blindfolded restaurant experience.” We understand the facial structures of each other over charcuterie and touch. I didn’t love him, but I love his longing for the idea of being lost. We were two wings from the same macaw.

**
 
My Ex-Boyfriend’s Memory is a Broken Mirror

I fall off a truck bed every time he dreams of me. I can tell because the bruises look the same-like overgrown plums that stain your hands with psychotherapy ink blotches meant to unveil your daddy issues. My dead father is knocking on the door of this poem now, and he says he’s all better now. I will be too. I interrupt this previously scheduled broadcast for a crying fit without the glory of baptismal tears. The disease of love will wear you shatter-sharp. If a man slaps your mosquito bites so hard it starts a wildfire, for better or worse, he must be sacrificed to the wolves. I hold vigil for the charred life swallowed up by my desire. I disappear into the gift of my ex-boyfriend’s violent smoke blur. I am the blood-red aftermath horizon. Yes, it’s like that when you are born again. I’m hanging up now.

**

This poem first appeared in Anacapa Review, 2024.

**

Pumpkin Soup with Van Gogh

I whispered in the ear he eventually cut off. Van Gogh was nothing like the books say. He had this ravenous style of eating. “Slophouse,” he called it. “I like gravy and sauce because it reminds me of paint,” he said. At brunch the hollandaise looks like a dash of buttery sunrise on his upper lip. I told him Everlee was no good for him. She was rumored as a ruiner; dead-crow in-a-dream-like, but who really listens to a bearded lady. I do embrace my lot of hair prickling from my chin down round my turkey neck. Beauty is in the eyes. I thought Van Gogh loved me because he would often startle me alive from behind corners or in dark rooms. “You could be brilliantly present,” he said.  Van Gogh liked sex limericks, so I memorized a few for our date, but he ended up crying into his pumpkin soup and leaving me high and dry to pay the tab. I drank his soup riddled with his salty tears. I still remember the used pillowcase smell of his frazzled hair and the moonlit taste of his sadness.

**

This poem was first published in Sho Journal, 2024. 

**

Marilyn Monroe Wants to Listen to the Birds

Marilyn Monroe was pacing the rockery. I was glad she wasn’t in the iconic white dress because I’d have to find wind. I was dressed like a messy bed, and my phone was thankfully dead, or I’d otherwise be obligated to my persona, consumerism, and dressing up some Insta- reel. I wanted to touch her hair, but you can’t go around giving your hands this type of permission. “I’m paving a walkway,” I said. “You?” “Patio,” she said. “I want a clear path to heaven,” I said. “I want a place to sit and listen to the birds,” she said. “I read they only sing when there are no predators around,” I said. “I’m lonely,” she said. The rain came on quickly, then like a miracle, and we aimed for a thicket like birds do. Her mascara was running, and my wings were wet. Rain makes it all right to cry. We both felt like singing in the pitter-patter.

**

This was first published in Sho Journal, 2024.

**

Peace Be With You, Pee-wee Herman 

I put it in reverse and become a cartoon. I can be smashed and exploded and spring back to life anew. It was a hoot, but then, the cops arrested me for stealing, which I’d only stole my own body. It was mine after all, but they gave me a felony, and I had to be housed with a clown who cried nonstop because his mother never brought the cake make-up she’d promised. I read to find a way home and I regret to say the Bible didn’t get me there. I wanted it, the liberation. Please don’t jump on your white horse and hang me. We are all acting our way toward wholeness. I found the neck tattoos had repaired me well to move through the gates, and I could again be propelled from oven to table. In Peewee Herman’s Big Holiday, they asked him at dinner to say a word, and he said, Encyclopedia, Pimple, and Hairball. Pray for the holy ability to find your own cherry red convertible to draw you toward your supreme sherbet-coloured sunset.

**

This poem first appeared in The Tiny Journal, 2024.

**

Bad Mothering Starts with Sugar and Ends with Salt

Don’t get therapy, so you can be a carnival of repeated mistakes. Keep winning the goldfish that will die in a week and don’t teach the children about prayer or proper burial. Grow yourself a cinderblock fence around your heart, the kind that encircled your house on the westside where your mother lived between the ink blotches in books, afraid of who would break in this time. Bad mothering begins with sugar and ends with salt, and don’t forget the food, so fast the children are transported angrily into adolescence. Provide the right malnutrition. Famish them. Tell them rich lies for dinner. You should be drunk too- on whatever makes you blind. Don’t ever listen, not to their heartbeats or tears, or wonderings, and god forbid you keep the lie of magic alive. Get them walking quickly, send them out the door into the wastelands. Deadbolt their dreams. Talk about orphans and war, and how many monsters the darkness holds. Remind them how much beasts drool. Never, never let them sleep in your bed because they sleep like sweet-smelling starfish, like big cracker crumbs. Leave a packed bag for them by the door so they never have peace.

**

This poem first appeared in The Tiny Journal, 2024.
 
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​
Amanda Chiado is a writer, poet, teacher, and arts advocate. She holds degrees from the University of New Mexico, California College of the Arts, and Grand Canyon University. Amanda won the Press 53 Poetry Award 2026 for her prose poetry collection Today I Wear the Bear Head, and is the author of the chapbook Prime Cuts (Bottlecap Press, 2025) and Vitiligod: The Ascension of Michael Jackson (Dancing Girl Press, 2016). Her poetry and fiction have been published in DMQ Review, The Account, Southeast Review, RHINO, and others. She lives and works in Hollister, California.