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.
 
**
​
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.

Murmuration, a Triptych
 
I.
 
Starlings waltz above the trees in the county park. Turkey vultures tango on an abandoned chimney cap. Cardinals cha-cha on a red maple branch. A year ago, I could not open my eyes. A year ago, I could not leave my house. A year ago, I could not lift my legs. Now my maskless breath reaches out in open air, flutters feathers in a roar all my own.
 
II. 
 
She writhes in and out of consciousness. We’ve just been told her kidneys and liver are shutting down. More antibiotics. Stat. She’s in the ICU now, where they brought her when she arrived by ambulance, her blood pressure 84/42. But she will need to go into the OR later, to have a stent put in place to drain her bile duct where an infection has built up. She doesn’t know. She cries out for our dead mother. I want to take her hand the way I did when she caught her leg in a bicycle wheel. I was in high school and she was just entering kindergarten. I held her head in my lap across the bathroom counter as the doctor stitched up her knee. I want to take her hand, but I’m not wearing gloves and she’s immunocompromised by another disease she’s grappling with. Her son, her only child, came to New Brunswick from Long Island. I told him on the phone he’d better, because we don’t know if she’s going to make it. I’ve only been in the hospital to give birth. She, my baby sister, has had meningitis, all kinds of orthopedic surgeries, cancer surgery, and now this. She’ll pull through, because she always does. Because she refuses to accept the bad stuff. She mobilizes in a crisis like when our mother’s house was burgled. She came right away and kept us all sane. Like when our middle sister’s husband dropped dead during dinner at Applebee’s and she dropped everything, bought a cheesecake, and came to the hospital. Stayed with our sister for days. Wrote and delivered the eulogy the way she did for both our parents. And now here she is, under the white sheets, mumbling in Yiddish to speak to our dead mother. I want to hold her hand, but I don’t have her strength.
 
III. 
 
Waiting for Donna after I sent my son home, because he was retching from his worry about my cancer and the surgery, because I couldn’t hold him in my arms the way I did when he was little and kiss his burning keppy and made him tea with six packets of sugar, because the doctors wouldn’t tell him about my condition although he was chronologically old enough to hear, because he couldn’t handle his mommy being sick, and so I waited for Donna to come and get me, the way I waited for her a couple of years before when EMTs rushed me from my cubicle to Overlook because I couldn’t catch my breath and they thought it was a heart attack, but I knew it wasn’t, it was a gastro thing I didn’t learn about for several more years, my gall bladder not able to handle the fat in the gravy that accompanied my lunch, and I waited for Donna, who showed up at the hospital with a turkey wing in case I was hungry and she wrapped it in a surgical glove, and I had to laugh, because Donna could always make me laugh, and when Donna brought me home after cancer surgery, and my family handed me the bill for the kosher deli they brought in at my request, I wasn’t laughing anymore. 
 
**
 
Cross-Stitching
 
Fingers threading a needle, needle puncturing fabric, embellishing a canvas or stitching a seam. It’s all about self-expression through artistry of the hands with a needle. Sewing, crocheting, knitting, embroidery. And passing down the artifacts: a cross-stitched tablecloth, a knitted afghan, handmade Barbie clothes with miniature fur collars. When I began sewing in eighth grade, I did not know I came from seamstress grandmothers, a tailor great-grandfather. My ancestors have fused themselves into my skin-seams.
 
**
 
Luxury on the Half Shell
 
after Dream of Luxury, by Dorothea Tanning (USA) 1944
 
Crack open the natural oyster of your dreams. There inside the shimmering closet are rows of coveted handbags. Rare pearls to drape over your shoulder, hold in your hand. Caress each one, close your eyes as you finger the leather of Hermes, Chanel, Gucci, Leiber, Coblentz & Koret. You may be barren in the desert of materialism, but you can dream of ovaries of ownership. These gems rise from the shell like a Venus chorus. And there, in the sand, an unopened oyster. You fence it for your footwear fantasies.
 
**
 
I Will Make a Way in the Wilderness
 
after Survivor, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1938
 
I live in immuno-isolation, out here alone to wander and wonder. I wrap myself in plastic bubbles, wear a protective collar. No one can see my plumes. I stomp the ground until my feet grow numb. My discoveries go unshared. My illness and treatment have framed me tiny.  My frame is golden with embellishments in every corner. I glow survival.
 
**

The New Yoga Pose
 
after Woman with Egg, by Leonora Carrington (UK/Mexico) 1960
 
Ascend to the heavens, where you can kneel, rest, give gratitude for climbing the iron rails. The egg remains unbroken, the egg of rebirth, the egg of nirvana perfection. Joining you is the resting place of those who came before you, those who breathed life into the heavens, into the pantheon of gods who paved your way, gave you the dove-led path along which the egg glided. The archway is everything, no in, no out, just through, artifacts resting on the shelves like canned preserves, keeping myths alive for posterity. You are the bird who has found its rightful nest, black and white among the blue and white, your head-egg tethered to the heavens, your body in servitude. 
 
**
 
The Genus of Georgia
 
after Inside Red Canna, by Georgia O’Keeffe (US) 1919
 
Yayoi Kusama hides within the deep, dark polka dot of Georgia’s fierce protection, cradled by the curves that layer her fortress. Frida Kahlo grasps the edges and slides along Georgia’s waves. She cannot make it to the other side without an extra push. Georgia brushes her upward, lifts her into accomplishment. Inside Georgia’s red canna lily lays the stamen of friendship, the petals of patronage in the genus of generosity.
 
**
 
The Tuskegee Man
 
Like me, he walks through Colonial Park every day. I imagine his story. This tall gentleman is a World War II veteran. His posture tells me he was and is a disciplined military man. He wills himself into the daily routine of this walk, noting how important it is to keep up one’s strength, endurance, and health. He was a Tuskegee man, not a native to New Jersey. Flew with the best of them, because they were the best. That’s why he strides with a puffed chest. I watch him every day, impressed with his commitment. But one day, he sits on a wooden bench, just staring at the mockingbirds flying between the oak and elm trees. His coat is open. He still wears his CWA cap, which I know to be the Communications Workers of America, a union of the telecommunications industry, once so prevalent in New Jersey. He has done his time. He deserves his rest. As I pass him, I tip my own cap and say “Hello.” He does the same. 
 
**

V for Victory
 
They crowd themselves into the crux of the V for victory. It will take all of them working together—the veterans, the flyers, the navy, the marines, the infantry, the scientists, reporters, and filmmakers—to fight against the sheets of prejudice and hatred. Liberty is on their side as are FDR’s Four Freedoms—freedom of speech and expression, freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of worship. They come from all nationalities in solidarity, hammering their stake into victory.
 
**
 
Twisted Jazz
 
We, the Mad Hatter Musicians, find our groove in Central Park, our tenor and bass sax and bass dangling. We’re not into violins. We bend our bodies to the improv notes, limbering up those limbs we’ll entangle barefooted on the dotted Twister canvas on the knoll. A crowd gathers to watch us wrangle, hear us syncopate. Some sit, some kneel. Another pushes a dollar bill into the bell of my sax, mangling the sound. We play a bit, lay down our instruments and spin the wheel to play. Our legs take odd angles, our hands tangle. We laugh until we pick up our instruments and let the notes jangle all through the night.
 
**
 
Barbara Krasner is addicted to the prose poetry form. She is the author of seven poetry collections, and her poetry has been featured in more than seventy literary journals, earning her multiple Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction nominations. She lives and teaches in New Jersey. Visit her website at www.barbarakrasner.com
 

​
The Hill

The man takes the earthen path up the great hill in the woods. He wonders what view will greet him when he reaches the top. He fills with anticipation. The trees seem to brace with tension in their shaded limbs. The pine stretches its boughs as if to receive the wind. The leaves on the maple blaze in the sun, their light fresh and exciting. The man climbs as birds in the farther woods beckon with their calls. The green faces of the trees offer encouragement, and the stones and roots in the path no longer impede him. Then he reaches the last stretch before the hillcrest. He pictures, over the hilltop, a long road winding through the trees. He knows just as well, though, that there might be an open countryside of hills rolling into the distance, the clearest sky overhead. He stands, feeling either idea might be true with an electric sense of possibility. 

** 

Departure

The farmer has waited for him and a few others in a horse-drawn cart at the meadow by the wood side. The hikers get into the back of the cart, the young man taking a seat near its tail end. He looks out at the maples that make the edge of the woods a short distance from the meadow grass. A stream of thoughts come to him of his long walk that day. There had been a doe that tread amid the sapling tees and ate from their new, green leaves. The river rushed over the rocks midstream and spilled away, smooth and white. He had heard the wood thrush sing in the treetops and the warbler in the dark heart of the pines. It all makes him marvel, and warm feelings stir within him. The world seems wonderful.

Behind him, the farmer lashes the horse to go. The cart pulls from the wood side and the leafy trees begin slipping away. The heads of the maples shrink and lower; the sky shows dim with dusk.  Watching the forest go, the young man knows the birds, calling to one another, will grow quiet as the dark arrives. Night will dim the rushing river. The deer will amble through the clearing towards its place of rest. The thought that it all will happen without him quiets the man. The trees crinkle down further, their heads seeming to darken and bunch as the cart puts distance on them. The forest becomes a dark wall, sealing off that day's memories.

**

Taking the Trail

He walks with face bent, looking down at the trail to avoid tripping on its stones and roots. He steps over a gnarled root, next a dark mound of feldspar. More stone and roots appear as he plods on. Then he turns toward the long, stone wall, where he catches the scent of sweet fern. A great colony of it spreads, fronds raised high, going back into the forest. The scent from it is like honey and comes in a great wave. He stops to breathe it and look on the ferns in their green, open sweep. He had hoped to have breaks like these during his walk and hopes for others as he resumes the trail.

Once again, stones strew the way ahead, and he finds he is watching his every step. He walks, slowing. Then, not far up the path, a butterfly alights on a stone. His wings open and close as he suns himself while the young man looks on, wide-eyed. He waits, keeping very still, until he sees the butterfly lift and depart, jagging through the air.

After half a mile, the man reaches a stretch of leafy, short trees cast in shade. Among the trees, he spots a doe. She steps gracefully raising and bending her slender legs. Near a tree, she stops to listen to the surrounding woods. She rolls her long ears, then goes to eat from the leaves on the low-hanging boughs of the trees. He watches quietly without moving. He forgets the dullness of keeping the trail in the simple act of observing the here and now.

**

Riverside

Passing through the shady trees lining the path, the man arrives at the river rapids. He watches the water flowing white over the stones in its midst. The water roars as it rolls over the stones. The white seems to hold on the stone like ice. The crashing roar fills his ears, and his mind numbs. He considers that the water flowing through the rapids may last as long as the stones over which they roll. The roar of its crash will sound as long as the current runs. As it does, he knows the trees and rocks on the riverbank will stand quietly before the river, witnessing its ceaseless flow. He only can wish to do the same with as much self-surrender.

**

Listening for Birds

The man hears the chickadee's sad hee-who from the woodland trees. He considers its tune for a moment before the monologue in his head resumes. It is the same litany of ideas he has heard a thousand times: idle grievance, unlikely hopes, dull imaginings. He walks on, dumbly, but does not go far before he hears the chickadee again. The bird's notes are more interesting now he recognizes them. He decides to stop where he is and listen. He shuts down the monologue in his head, even though he feels barren without the sound of his rambling thoughts. He listens. He catches new parts of the chickadee’s song; each dulcet fragment takes more than one hearing for him to catch. But once he does, he feels that he gets the flow of the beautiful line. He listens to decide if he has it right. The chickadee holds quiet, and he instead hears other birds, a smart tu-whit, the robin's eager cheerup-cheerupcheerupcheerup, an energetic who-a-woo. He listens to the new birds’ songs, hoping for their beauty. Holding perfectly still, he catches them. The robin's song comes from the trees overhead. The wood thrush sounds from afar. The chickadee calls from the shade. The entire forest pulses with song. Beside himself, the man considers that, if he’d paid attention only to the world in his head, he would scarcely have imagined the birds’ music could be real.

**
​
Norbert Kovacs lives and writes in Hartford, Connecticut. He has published fiction recently in Blink-Ink, Worthing Flash, and The Ekphrastic Review. His website: http://www.norbertkovacs.net.

​Angles
 
Sometimes I am the omniscient overhead camera, sometimes I'm him or me or both of us shot at an angle, any angle. Shoot from the hip, around an elbow. Or I lock eyes with him, wondering. A sweet exchange, empathic, compassionate. Not what it was before. I miss that so I re-examine, looking for some tell, a hint that he too tests the waters. I stretch like putty or blow up up up, a balloon that soon pops, leaving a sticky film I attempt to wipe off as I move on. Nothing to reconsider. Yet later I replay it from every angle.
 
**
 
How I Came to Be at Walmart Superstore          
 
Starting out small enough, just six inches of smooth glimmering foil, blemish-free, I yank. The Dollar Store’s best brand wobbles and warps, the flimsy box losing its shape. So much for a buck twenty-five. The hypnotic shimmer in my grip wrinkles as if sat on. I tear off that part, begin anew, my need for perfection steadying my grip as I unfurl the last bit, about twelve inches that, if need be, I could trim. I decide to, tracing an outline of the maligned box. Tiny blemishes surface, lines one wouldn’t want to discover in a hand mirror. They fracture, spreading like the legendary Cascadia fault. With a steady grip I unfurl sixteen inches along the cleared countertop designated for pure art. Maybe I could frame this, my attempt at human intervention. Just as I turn away, the sheet catches on my sleeve then glides to the floor. Another crease spreads. Scooping up the car keys I head for the door.  
 
**

Mettle
​
From the top of the ladder he says offhandedly, I've been having these blackouts. I say, What? He enunciates like I can't hear him. Fell out of bed the other day. It's then I notice a long Band-Aid across his temple. Just as I rolled over and swung my leg off the side of the bed, I grew dizzy. Hit my head on the corner frame, he shares. Metal, I ask?  He says, What? missing a step.
 
**

How Far One Will Go
 
Too small even for a child's tooth, uneven, not very deep. A mouse attracted to a Golden Delicious that will not hold up to its name? The one carefully chosen in the grocery, without bruises, as if it were all together never touched by anyone except a picker risking the ladder, carefully placing it in the grocery just as I placed it on my countertop with one hand. I even rotated it a bit so that it's prettier side faces me whenever I walk in or out of the room. Its other side was a faint yellow-red phase I would eat soon enough. Will I? Will I excise indentation and enjoy the remainder? Perhaps the nibble is not a mouse bite. Had I bumped it with the tip of a steak knife? The scissors perhaps. Or did I clip it with the edge of a carton? This is how one tricks the self into accepting less than what one envisions. Not self-delusion so much as a forethought compromise. And if I cut into it, bite only to discover there is a deep bruise, near the core— what then?
 
**
 
Going Live
 
Alan clasps my elbow as we stumble through two blocks of idling cars approaching the cul de sac where the fried chicken magnate resides. It’s Christmas week, when our local electric provider doubles its annual profits. Twelve floodlights face off like sentry men. Everyone's here or was earlier or what's wrong with them. Divine excess without Mardi Gras beads or pitch-imperfect brass bands. Elvis croons about his blue-blue-blue. Alan squeezes my elbow, stabilizing me, otherwise I would tip into the floodlights, into faux snow, into cars bleached white as Pensacola beach had once been. All the lit affiliates are here. Three-quarters of the locals, lit as well. A local station pans the crowds, lingering on us, the middle-aged couple strolling rather than revving our engine. We stare back at a bulky camera lens. You're luminous, Alan says. You’re blindsided, I laugh. First date recorded live, I add. Smacking his forehead, he mimics Joe from accounting tipping back on a barstool during the 10 o’clock news: That Alan, wrecking his marriage for an older woman.
 
**
​
What I recall from a four-hour Alzheimer’s exam
 
is only the strain, what wrestled me to the tile floor, like the relationship between six random words. Or not. What’s ODD about this grouping, they intimate? Or being asked to repeat eight unrelated words heard maybe a half hour before. One slides off the cliff while another dangles in the overgrown shrub, making me childish at best as I stare openly at the tail of a g, maybe a y. Why does any of this matter? Oh. I’d forgotten, my matter, grey matter, is why these serious games continue. Per my request. Don’t I know enough to tell what I don’t / won’t want to hear? An earful of assaults in half or slant rhyme times me out long enough to regroup for more abuse. If I refuse? I’m worse off than anyone thought.
 
**
​
Margo Davis defends writing as a socially acceptable form of talking to herself. Perhaps subject to what’s said. Or overheard.~  A three-time Pushcart nominee, her poems have appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, Passager, Verse Daily, Equinox, Panoply, and numerous anthologies including Dos Gatos Press's recent Notes of Light and Dark. Her chapbook Quicksilver is available on Amazon. Uncoupling (LULP) is to appear in early 2026, seven come eleven. Poised for her spring fellowship in the Pacific Northwest, Margo hovers in Houston, packed bag beneath the bed.

​Tall Tales
 
My great-grandmother had Scottish roots. Her maiden name was Bothwell. My grandfather told my mother that she and her sisters descended from a Scottish earl, Lord Bothwell, who kidnapped and married Mary, Queen of Scots. We took a family trip and toured the country in a minivan. We visited Bothwell Castle and learned the history. Mary, Queen of Scots’ third and final husband—James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell—was not our ancestor. It was one of my grandfather’s tall tales.
 
My mother’s father used to hold up a photo of his grandfather in buckskin leaning against his rifle and say that he was an Indian scout who married a Native American woman. When mother did genealogical research for family albums she created, she discovered that the story might be fiction. She took a DNA test and learned that she was mostly Scottish and English, with some Irish, Welsh, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and German. She was disappointed to find that my grandfather’s tale of descending from a Native American was a myth.
 
It was not one of my grandfather’s tall tales that his mother’s first cousin once removed was Albert Bothwell, an infamous cattle rancher in Wyoming who lynched Cattle Kate and her husband after falsely accusing the homesteaders of cattle rustling. Witnesses to the murder all died mysteriously. These events, known as the Johnson County War between ranchers and settlers, inspired the Jack Schaefer novel Shane and the movie that followed about a fictional gunfighter who defends the homesteaders against the cattle barons.
 
**
 
A Thug Like That
 
I still think about the French girl on the kibbutz. A dancer with chestnut curls and alabaster skin. Delicate, taken by the British guy with dark chocolate waves and big blue eyes—a real movie-star kind of guy. Friends, alone in our room. Everyone would blame her, she said. Didn’t want to tell. So we dumped cow dung in his boots.
 
Sometimes, I think about the girl from Penn, gang banged by fraternity boys before my freshman year. Didn’t think that kind of thing happened in the Ivy League, such a fine Philadelphia campus. The big red-brick frat house loomed empty all year, their sentence.
 
Can’t forget Sandy Hoyt. Raped, strangled, dumped in leafy Connecticut woods when I was a girl. Pretty Sandy with her curvy hips and long blonde hair. All the boys had crushes on her.  That man who did those awful things lived down the hill from our small brown colonial.
 
Wonder about that woman from work who shot her fiancé at the front door. He survived; she went to prison. A pretty girl, Filipina with nice tanned skin, petite and boyish but dainty, too. She could sport John Lennon frames and still look feminine cute. Funny, she’d gone to Los Angeles to study law of all things.
 
Remembered something about a mass murder my parents talked about when reading In Cold Blood. Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel about Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, Midwestern boys who killed four people out on a Kansas farm in ’66. Perry did all the killings, calling Dick’s bluff. Both sent to death row—The Corner—then the gallows.
 
Asked my mother, and she said it was Charlie Starkweather instead. Went on a shooting spree back in ’58 with his 14-year-old girlfriend, Caril Ann Fugate. Charlie killed a gas station attendant, Caril Ann’s mother, stepfather, toddler sister, and seven more. Men went looking for Charlie, and my grandfather taught my mother how to use a gun. 
 
Charlie got the electric chair, and his girlfriend, Caril Ann, got life and parole in ’76. Made movies about that couple: Badlands, Natural Born Killers. Charlie played football with my father in junior high. A clean-cut Nebraska boy, my dad; who’d have ever thought he’d know a thug like that.
 
**
 
Wilson
 
My father choked up when he found Wilson’s name among the dead on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall. Wilson was a hillbilly from the South who was going to be court martialed. My father’s job was to straighten him out. Wilson was always joking around and he and my father became friends. When my mother sent popcorn to my father, he shared it with Wilson. Eventually, Wilson began to report to a new commanding officer in the artillery battery. He took pity on his men one night and didn’t make them dig in. Wilson slept in the fire direction tent with all the maps laid out. When the North Vietnamese Army ambushed the battery before dawn, my father rolled out of his cot and rushed to one of the big guns. He ordered an anti-personnel round of fleshettes and repelled the attack. When it was over, he found Wilson lying in the fire direction tent. He told him to hang on, but he realized later that Wilson was probably already dead. My father won the Bronze Star for valour in battle. He said he wasn’t trying to be a hero; he was just doing his job.
 
**
 
Highway Hero
 
In the early 1990s, I worked as a journalist at a weekly newspaper in the Bronx. I needed a car to get to reporting assignments. My father drove my grandmother’s 1967 Dodge Coronet back from Lincoln, Nebraska and gave the car to me. My grandmother didn’t drive anymore and she was glad her car would be useful. 
 
I lived in Larchmont and parked by the train station. Two weeks after my father installed a new radio in the car, thieves chopped up the whole dashboard to get the radio. The car had to be junked. My father bought me a used Mercury Sable.
 
I moved back to Manhattan and started dating an artist in my building on the Upper West Side. He was extremely frugal and he convinced me to give up my Sable with full collision and liability insurance. He offered to let me drive his old Honda Civic and pay the liability insurance. 
 
One day, the car came to a dead stop on the West Side Highway on my way to work. A man behind me offered to help. He drove behind me and pushed my car with his all the way to a repair shop in the South Bronx. He was my hero.
 
After that car was junked, I road the subway and my boyfriend’s beater bike around the Bronx.
 
**
 
Old Mentor
 
I was newly divorced in my late 20s when my mentor said, “You won’t miss the children.” It seemed extreme when I was so young and uncertain about the future. I had a boyfriend who sent me off to work every day with a thermos of coffee and a turkey sandwich with homemade pesto. My mentor met him once and declared—“Handsome men don’t know how to take care of themselves.” Another harsh assessment when I was still impressionable. She had a PhD in chemistry, with an impressive record of an epoxy resin invention. She was also a beautiful writer, with autobiographical fiction honoured in The Best American Short Stories. She wrote about her bisexual finance who rode off on a motorcycle when they were done. She soured on marriage and wrote an unpublishable novel full of purple prose about her distaste for the institution. 
 
She was a columnist for the Bronx weekly newspaper that hired me as managing editor right out of journalism school. I showed her an early draft of my memoir and she said, “It has to be fiction!” She ran a Great Books reading club and invited me to join. I worshipped her, but I dropped out after the group collectively dissed Dostoyevsky for his “weak” chapter questioning free will in The Brothers Karamazov. It hurt to hear one of my idols mercilessly critiqued in this way. But I was not done with my mentor. 
 
The parting came after I published my first memoir about my troubled engagement to an Israeli man during the Gulf War and the emotional fallout that led to our divorce. I sent her the book which included chapters named as notables in The Best American Essays, and she wrote me a letter saying she would get to my book after she finished rereading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I never heard from her again. She was a chainsmoker who died of lung cancer. She once told me a story about chemical plant workers who never got sick. She took a drag on her cigarette and said that she always had someone but never wanted to marry because she loved her freedom.
 
**
 
No Pants Subway Ride
 
On my way home from a poetry reading in the East Village, I noticed a group of men in their underwear. It was the middle of winter but it was an unusually warm, spring-like day, so at first I mistook their underwear for shorts. I hurried up so I could get a closer look. Yep, definitely underwear. I watched them enter a bar with a crowd of men in their underwear. One man provocatively wore sheer black underwear. Later, I discovered that it was the No Pants Subway Ride, started as a joke by an improv comedy group. Participants take off their pants before their subway stop and, if asked why, they say they were getting uncomfortable.
 
**
 
Work
 
I write evaluations for work visa applicants in the name of professors of computer science, engineering, chemistry, biology, finance, accounting, marketing, fashion design, graphic design, food science, law. I am a ghost writer, using templates created by other writers, shaping and adapting them to the particulars of the case. The paycheck comes direct deposit every two weeks, and finally I have savings. During my long years as a journalist, under constant pressure to keep sources from complaining about my work despite its accuracy, I never had savings. When I became a writing teacher and editor it was never enough. I rarely traveled, too poor most of the time, but I wrote and wrote. Now I struggle to say something poetic on my lunch break. It goes too fast.
 
**
 
Mercedes
 
I used to run into our cleaner at my midtown Manhattan office almost every day. She often was starting her shift and changing into her uniform in the ladies’ room as I made a pit stop before the end of the day. I always said hello and she always gave me a big smile. She spoke little English, but it was always a delightful moment.
 
Suddenly, I stopped running into her. Months went by. I asked around but nobody knew what happened. Then suddenly she reappeared as I was taking the elevator to the lobby. I said hello and she beamed as she got into the elevator on a lower floor. I asked, “Has your schedule changed?” She gave me a puzzled look and asked, “Good?” I said, “Si.” She lit up! 
 
I explained in Spanish that I lived in Argentina but a long time ago. She said I spoke well and asked my name. I said Karol with the Midwestern accent I inherited from my parents. She gave me another puzzled look. So I said my name the way I learned to say it in Argentina—with a long, drawn out a. That did the trick. 
 
She beamed and told me her name—Mercedes. I already knew. Our floor gave her a holiday card and tip. Mercedes got off on another floor and we said our goodbyes—“buenos noches,” then “ciao.” Next time I will try to remember how to ask, “Has your schedule changed?”
 
**
 
A Poem Doesn't Do Everything for You
 
Morning sunshine stretched a long shadow of my legs across the sidewalk on my way to work near the New York Public Library. I stopped, transfixed by the lines by my feet. “A poem doesn’t do everything for you,” wrote Gwendolyn Brooks. Her words fed my hunger for inspiration like a starving beggar. I wanted to answer her wisdom with a poem.
 
**
​
Karol Nielsen is the author of the memoirs Raising the Price of the House, Walking A&P, and Black Elephants and three poetry chapbooks. Her first memoir was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Excerpts were named notable essays in The Best American Essays. Her full-length poetry collection was a finalist for the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her poem “This New Manhattan” was a finalist for the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Epiphany, Guernica, North Dakota Quarterly, Permafrost, and elsewhere.

Self-Portrait as a Burned-Out Porch Light

A tree crammed with bluebirds, snow. A forklift slips from a hill. The neighbour shoots his rifle to avalanche. A taste of rust. It’s all a love poem. Even the owl’s grief—how it spoons the dark. The open mouth of cold. I wanted it to be wistful. Forgive me, I am not telling this well. I forgot where to place the beginning—how I broke on the back porch, never told a soul. His eyes—smoked herring and blue. I plugged them into a different life. Then, morning. Garbage men collecting bins of dead birds, fish scales like glitter. Wax paper. String. An orchestra of leaving. I could never make sense of the way the trees glow, are backlit by kitchen windows, the silhouettes of wives in the dulled-quiet, scraping, rinsing, where they end and I 

**

From Hortensia, in winter (New Amercian Press, 2024). First published in Barzakh Magazine, Spring 2021.
 
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Psithuris
 
It is said that Orpheus could silence the wind. This is a praise of abstraction. I am looking for a word that means the sound wind makes through the trees before it reaches my body. I stand in the night-yard wanting to be included in a definition, rattling language for what moves against my skin, the small constellation of scars along my arms. The Greeks call it psithuris, but even that falls short. Someone hung an oil painting in the bank lobby, gold-encrusted, large-scale, Hades depicted with a bird-tipped sceptre. A nightjar without star clusters to guide it. Stuck. It is said that Eurydice wasn’t angry because she felt loved. But wind is a distortion of sound. The further away, the slower it arrives. I can hear her, the way grief isn’t squalor or complacency, but cleaves into a body, leaves a woman wingless. Her hair shedding into nests that birds will never warm. 
 
**

They Promised That You Were Set Apart for Something Holy

Did you dream about oceans while you were mud-stuck in the Mississippi, something you couldn’t see the banks of, like faith? Salt, birdwing, a weekday sneak of sour wine. You were all scripture and scrub oak, miracles that profited man. On Sundays, I open the dictionary, look for words you might have hummed, words that will peel the generations between us. Are your eyes hazel, do they shift in the onslaught of spring? The blue of needing another body to remind you of your own? Did you feel desire but give it your husband’s name? 

**
 
From Hortensia, in winter ( New American Press, 2024) and first published in Birdcoat Quarterly, Spring 2023.) 
 
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Helpmeet: 

to make man “comfortable...to dress his food...be pleasing to his sight, and...be in all respects...entirely answerable to his...wants and wishes.” john gill, 18-century biblical scholar 

There are days I feel porous. Drool paint through a tea strainer onto linen. Others, I walk the dog, plunge stones in the creek with insults. To be all things at once while still being yourself—isn’t that the goal? Hortensia, were you given the smallest room in the house of your own life? I am gifted a single window. Winter crammed in the way that only a cat could skuttle through. You are my periscope, the law of reflection at play, these poems—the surface. Teach me how to dismantle desire. The roots of it. De sidere, meaning from the stars. I hear deciduous--the dropping of a part that is no longer needed or useful. Chokecherry, lilac, maple. At the first bend of cold, I imagine the small flush of your garden plot in bloom, how such tedious keeping was meant to bring delight, only to wake each morning and find it flooded with flightless birds. 

**
 
From Hortensia, in winter (New American Press, 2024).
 
**

Sealing
 
(for Hortensia Patrick Merchant, March 1824-April 1905)
 
silk sutures link us like marionettes / drips that freeze over bark before descending / you can’t hear the water’s urge unless it’s rushing / you are my flood subject now / I scrub a blue bowl in a chipped basin / drip my hair with lavender / dream about sterile rooms / a salpingectomy / slender trunk / how did you carry, was it low / a diviner whispered my daughter’s names into my palms / a pit from a sweet rotted fruit appeared under the juniper / I would like to have one of your early apples, you wrote / was that prayer / on the coldest days mountain lions grit their teeth outside my window / their chatter sounds like church bells / after a hard freeze , did you stand on the Mississippi and not think of drowning / your nightgown floating white and clean as wind / did you listen
 
**
 
From Hortensia, in winter ( New American Press, 2024) and first published in Birdcoat Quarterly, Spring 2023.) 
 
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Divining Rod

A hairline fracture. A lyre snake bedded in my underwear drawer. Curdled dream. Blade snapped from the handle. Hortensia, teach me how to read the signs—before dawn, I stumbled onto antlers shed well before March. They grew behind its body, closest to god. I know things and not—that honeycomb sealed in a jar can last a year, at best. That the river can run itself backwards. It takes a natural disaster. What would you do? Did you know that the stillest waters can secret whirlpools? The downdraft happens when bodies collide. A maelstrom. The way he cupped my chin—asked me to look— was not at, but through. As if there was a way out. 

**
 
From Hortensia, in winter (New American Press, 2024). 
 
**

Exodus

Milk froths over, feathery in a glazed mug. I watch a woodpecker forget the geography of air—churn in the invisible. Then flee. I feel silence to mean what’s missing, never shapeless. Some days love. Another round of snow arriving, another mistake I’ll settle into as understanding more about what I’ve become. I am looking for the word that falls between almost and touch. That consideration. It has its own airspace. The gap where the juniper was chopped is a frame now. If only the light would enter, I could trick myself into believing it was heat. 

**

From Hortensia, in winter (New American Press, 2024). First published in CALYX, Summer/ Fall 2023.

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Subjects to Consider for Both Painting and Writing

Film on my teeth after eating a hard-boiled egg. Why anyone would call blood crimson. Chopping wood on a day you can see your breath. The clicking sound that Mahjong tiles make. The speed at which they are placed. A windchime strung with bones. The way winter light feels most earnest in the morning. His chin, as it pressed against my shoulder blade. The muscles of grief that cramp without warning. Why men are allowed to age—the absence of a societal tantrum. The Farmer’s Almanac that everyone in town is mumbling about. Radishes in a white bowl. Glue, hardened, on the window that looks like frost. Scratches on old records that are a kind of music. Gray hairs in the sink. How he unhooked the curtains and wrapped me, naked, in what light they still held. 

**
 
From Hortensia, in winter (New Amercian Press, 2024). First published in Psaltry & Lyre, December 2022.
 
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Consent Form 
 
I spend days not sleeping in a sterile room contemplating the internal organs a surgeon has removed joking I'm shocked it wasn't some motel bathtub after a heavy night of whiskey & heat for black market organs. My skin zipped with fishing line and infection. Those were the horror stories of my teenage years. Waking with parts of me removed without consent. But now, it’s the uterus & tubes, one ovary, my cervix—organs that made me ripest. I'm in awe that I don’t feel shriveled the way society has pinned my age bracket and gender, and that there is any conversation that begins with I'm supposed to feel. I've signed more than a handful of consent forms, given permission each time a pill is presented, erased blame for human error. I'm navigating the loose ends of a twenty-year marriage where I did not do the same. In therapy, I've learned to accept an absence of control by repeating I do not love this. This way, it is not a loss. Instead, a silhouette. Right now, I do not love the bleeping cycle of sharps & IV drips. The abdominal binder. The internal stitches I'm afraid of tearing. The riddled pain that pills solve. But catch the way the flowers a man I can’t stop thinking about has sent to my room, how they greedily reopen when a nurse is kind enough to move the vase closest to the window, to recover what light has squared through.
 
**
​
I have not yet met all of the people who will love me
 
I carve out tenderness with a hairpin made of bone. Little red fox in my brain-fog. I’d hack the weed sprouts below my knees to find you. Amongst ant hills and rabbit fur. Floozy sunflowers that line the ditch. I’ve turned stone after stone in my palm imagining the dip of your back. I’m growing weary of waiting whistling a banjo tune in the eye of the storm. As offering, I’ve left mason jars with two fingers of whiskey for you on the front porch. All wasp-flick and stink beetles. I imagine you as dusk, pressing your mouth to my shin. Saying, salt. Saying, aftermath. An equation I’m inventing just to solve you in. I am writing to you as cracks in the window. The mourning doves try to pierce their beaks through. A litany of cicada sheds piled underneath. Bodies unzipped. I’m waiting, needful as spoons that heavy in the drawer. Wanting to be taken out, to be glint and useful. To press cold against the small cut on your lip.
 
**
 
First published in Rhino 2024. 
 
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Megan Merchant (she/her) is author of six full-length poetry collections, a children’s book with Penguin Random House, and a handful of chapbooks. She is a board member for the Northern Arizona Book Festival, the owner of the editing, mentoring, and manuscript consultation business www.shiversong.com and holds an M.F.A. degree from UNLV. She is a visual artist and, most recently, won the New American Poetry Prize for her collection Hortensia, in winter. You can find her work at  https://meganmerchant.wixsite.com/poet