Lost Cord
 
Give me my baby  I beseech you  It’s not good for you to touch him scolds the doctor  or for that matter even see him   The sheet splattered in blood blocks my view It covers my legs held in stirrups Your forceful kicks ceased yesterday I already knew       The scent of cherry tobacco drifts into the operatory In the doorway Otto puffs on his pipe   Agnes he barks Get on with it dear Lord    I am convalescing on the maternity ward where days dissolve into nights It is time for feeding every two hours The nurse hands out pink faced bundles left and right to the new mothers She walks with dispatch past my bed  averting her gaze  Home at last I step into the nursery   Empty   Your cradle   The oak rocker  Gone     Even the circus wallpaper  stripped away   Where’s the maple dresser  Each drawer neatly stacked with your embroidered baby gowns   I used a fine gauge needle and silk thread to stitch you an entire menagerie  I was most proud of my needlework on your duckie smock   Although it ended up in the bottom drawer  to hide the unsightly stain from my pricked finger    At breakfast Otto barricades himself behind newspapers On weeknights dines at his mother’s in the village On weekends flyfishes in the stream      withdraws to his workbench to perfect his lures     All day I hear the hollow sound of my footsteps pace the wooden nursery floor Or the rhythmic creaking as I sit on the rigid chair  rocking   rocking   Weeks go by   I implore Stanley our coachman to drive me to the village  People stare as I  alight from the carriage  cocooned in black   I hear a baby wail behind me in line at the mercantile exchange I turn around   There    a young mother soothing her little one who’s dressed in chalk-white linen      An unquiet sensation rushes into my breasts   There    I found it  Your delicate smock     A faded splotch of my blood mars the duckies on parade
 
umbilical cord
incinerated remains
tethered to my heart

​**

September Smoke

“Now, we know we all favour our own children, and I wondered, could Douglas fir recognize its own kin, like mama grizzly and her cub? So we set an experiment…and it turns out they do recognize their kin…they even reduce their own root competition to make elbow room for their kids. When mother trees are injured or dying, they also send messages of wisdom on to the next generation of seedlings.”  

Suzanne Simard, Forest Ecologist, University of British Columbia 

“.. human grandmothers have played a central role in the life history of Homo sapiens. ..grandmothers are a driving force behind the increased longevity of our species compared to other primates.”  

Kristin Hawkes, Ph.D. Professor of Anthropology, University of Utah 
​
I am told that in the mountains, the regal Douglas firs are ablaze with wildfire.  With their sturdy roots interlaced, entire tree families are being sacrificed in place of Abraham’s son. Who hasn’t seen images of wildfires consuming trees? But I learned they also combust gas stations, melt scrap metal heaped in junkyards, explode appliances, destroy power lines. The toxic substances released are carried downwind to where we live in the valley. Sepia smoke blankets our rented bungalow. Thick ash coats the tomatoes and kale in my landlady’s garden. Acrid smoke chokes my breathing; smothers hope in my lungs.

I babysit my daughter’s chubby toddler who’s in the bathtub while she’s out foraging for breathable air to feed him. Over and over, the little guy empties and refills a crinkled discarded plastic bottle. He submerges it in the soapy bathwater, riveted to the glug glug sound of bubbles. Then he pours the tepid water down his pudgy chest. With utmost concentration, he repeats the cycle. He attends to his pretend world. From my squat stool beside the tub, I glance out at the afternoon haze through the sooty window. There is no sun to warm him. There is no horizon to scan for a glimpse of his future. I turn back to him. Is the world habitable? Let it be so. I long to give my grandson time to absorb the knowledge I pour more and more into his still tender shoots. I yearn to bathe him in hardiness so that his roots take a firm hold deep in the verdant earth.  

**

Solitary

The steep part of Hawthorne Hill starts smack dab in front of my house. Two fit women in a tête-à-tête trek up it clad in leggings and sleek vests. I sit at the bay window whose double pane shuts out their voices. They don’t seem to spot me eyeing their talk. How seamlessly their scuttlebutt flows uphill in a cadence like a pair of bridled mares. Uninterrupted, they shift their gait to match the gradient while not missing a beat of animated chat. And I, for lack of a confidante, am seemingly vested in my solitary tasks whilst my unquiet heart splits apart at the seams. For oh, how I long for such a friend.

​**

Pensive Warrior  
 
Metallic taste in Clara’s mouth like she’s devoured a revolver  she’s startled to hear herself asking her grown son point blank if he owns a gun   
  
Yes   he answers a beat too fast     
 
She detects his relief in finally divulging this secret    Standing in her kitchen her left-hand aches gripping her cellphone damn arthritis her jaw locks thoughts whirl  Sure enough  she heard him right  between then and now he’s become a gun owner  Clara attempts to mask her shock getting this news   she falls back on her skill to mirror her son’s nonchalance as if this weaponry conversation is commonplace for them  She grabs for a safe question from the jumble piling up in her mind   
 
Where did you learn to shoot it  Clara conjures a firing range in a drafty industrial warehouse outside of Philadelphia In the next space she imagines Mafia guys sitting around playing poker    
  
Here in Philly I keep it under our bed It’s a handgun 
 
Back then on January 6 2021 IT’LL BE WILD!  became the rallying call to arms Look what happened In the wee hours after the Presidential Election November 6 2024 Clara awoke from a nightmare where  the front page of the New York Times declared the winner in bold  She fumbled to open her phone the NYT  app confirmed it  Terror welled up in her like the time in high school this devilishly handsome boy picked her up for a date in his father’s shiny black Lincoln Continental    driving her home he impulsively gunned it across the railroad tracks as the warning bell pierced the still night and the gate came down  scared out of her wits strapped in her seat trapped in his mania  
 
 
Clara and her son live on opposite coasts in the US 
 
Mom you remember Jamal my friend from stand-up comedy he taught me a lot about handling guns He grew up in North Philly  remember     from a rough neighbourhood  Jamal said never pull a gun out just to scare someone that’ll backfire good chance the bad guy will have a loaded gun He’ll kill you first 
 
Clara’s toddler was one of those sweet thumb suckers who  wide-eyed  watched the rough and tumbled boys go up and down up and down the plastic slide until he had completely figured out how to tackle the work      Then he joined the line climbed the ladder with one hand on the rail while the other clutched his bunched-up Bear blankey     At the top he carefully twisted his pudgy body into position as the other boys yelled hurry up    He launched but his Bear blankey got stuck under his bottom Swaddled in quilt batting he inched down the slide reached the bottom only to dash back to the line bolt up the ladder and time after time slide down with abandon blankey tossed aside 
 
When did you buy it        A while ago      
  
Wasn’t he in prison your friend Jamal 
 
She’d been out for the evening with her husband on a school night  Home now she enters her son’s bedroom to check on him It’s dank and smelly She inhales the acrid odour of her preteen boy fast asleep his lanky body twisted in his comforter      the scraps of his Bear blankey wrapped around his damp head    silence but for his breathing     She sees that he laid out his entire specialty knife collection on his desk Clara smiles  she catches the glint of the blades in the glow of the nightlight revealing the precision of his strategy to protect himself against a would-be intruder 
 
Not prison   Jail  For a year For a break in   stealing some cash   from his grandma’s sock drawer 
 
Her son lives in a row house in Philly with his Ethiopian wife two cats and an occasional boarder Their working-class neighbourhood borders pricey condos to the west   empty storefronts and panhandlers to the east   
 
Jamal told me you want to talk the bad guy down Deescalate the situation You pull out the gun as a last resort Her son let loose his infectious stand- up laugh  Really mom I gotta tell you I’ve seen Jamal in some tense situations and truth is he doesn’t back down   Clara hears a line from a John Lennon song pulsing in her head BANG BANG SHOOT SHOOT 
 
 
At bedtime Clara reads Where the Wild Things Are aloud to her toddler son   he presses close to her like he wants to crawl back inside      his breathing slows as the story moves closer closer to the well-thumbed illustrations of Max and the partying monsters cutting loose    taking leave of their senses 
 
On Election night that one who roared his terrible roar and gnashed his terrible teeth unleashed a Wild Rumpus with his Party of Rascals       She wonders if those monstrous dybbuks won’t back down until she herself has finally slid off the edge  
 
Mom the gun is not like a hammer I use for all sorts of things  The gun’s for one purpose  To kill a bad guy  I bought the kind that makes a lot of noise when I load it so a robber will hear me loading it Jamal said that’s a deterrent right there      
 
Pensive warrior 
Deep sleep Plate glass breaks 
Happiness is a warm gun 
 
** 
 
The last line of this piece is from the song title, "Happiness is a Warm Gun," by The Beatles, a song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The song title was inspired by the same phrase when  John saw it in American Rifleman magazine. 

**

As a baby, Brooke Martin camped out in an oxygen tent with pneumonia. In kindergarten, she contracted mononucleosis, in grad school Rocky Mountain Spotted fever, as a young mother pharyngal conjunctival fever virus then Legionnaire’s disease a couple years later. She never got Covid. Go figure. Becoming a grandma was the impetus to write her stories. Brooke backed into an ekphrastic poetry class because flash fiction was full. Now she’s inventing ways to break walls between forms and create new ones. She spent ten years as a docent at the Chazen Museum of Art. Her chapter “Ardent Rivals: Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin” was published in Creativity and Madness: Psychological Studies of Art and Artists Vol 3 AIMED press. She divides her time between Madison, WI, Eugene, OR and traveling with her Argentine tango dance shoes. 

Parable of the Foolish Virgins Revised

“Then the kingdom of heaven shall be likened to ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Now five of them were wise, and five were foolish.”  Matthew 25, New King James Bible
 
Ten old women steered their wooden boat out to meet the sunset. There were those among them whose bodies knew ecstasy, those who knew violation, those who felt the fine thread of love stitching together their cells. Women who had lived on the few slips of earth where they were allowed to read had taken vast journeys of the mind. Others learned from stones and rivers and the deep pain of hunger and their children’s hunger, and some learned from both. They were, then, neither ignorant nor innocent. All of them sometimes felt wisdom stir in their bones, but since none had found the path to ending cruelty in the world, none claimed to be wise. They were wise enough, though, to take turns at the helm. They had seen such transformations many times, but still they marveled at how the sun nudged the mountains into fire, painted the river tones as varied as their own skins. Some had brought provisions – bread, oranges, lanterns, sweaters stretched from wear. Others had departed hastily with only their clothing, and some had nothing left to bring. When they reached the portal to their destination, they breathed relief that no one commanded them, only you can enter, you cannot, you must bring this or that. Those with knowledge from books had prepared them for such orders, and the ones who had studied the patterns of roots of trees and the touch of sun on every leaf were confident no such command would come. They were ready though and agreed they would entwine their fingers to basket themselves, shelter one another in their arms, enter by the strength of their dimming light.

**
 
This was first published in Litmosphere.

**

Synagogue 1962  
 
Sanctuary of green linoleum floors, clang of gray metal folding chairs stacked away after every service. Drab brick building, no stained glass to softly scatter light, only a purple velvet Torah cover, heavy silver pointer. A rabbi chants ancient prayers I can’t translate but power I understand. No voices touch the present, but numbers burned into arms of men in yarmulkes, women in shawls, sear unspoken. In public school the teacher casually commands, All the Jewish children and all the Negro children raise your hands, and we do, the four of us and one of him, at least once a week the whole year. Never question the pretense for her attention, no resentment registers, wrapped so tightly in expectations gathered from otherness, not in velvet like the Torah but in a kind of scratchy burlap that nonetheless keeps me from speaking of it for decades, through Friday nights and Yom Kippurs and Succahs in the muddy grass, long after I busily collected brightly coloured Bible story stickers in a little book that looked like a passport. 
 
**

This poem is from To Drink from a Wider Bowl, Evening Street Press, 2022.

​**

Carpool Politics 1966
 
I’m sixteen, carpooling to my summer typing job in DC with three middle-aged white men from my suburb. I live two miles outside the nation’s political centre, but my world is a tightly wound ball of wishes and worries about whether I’ll ever go out with Mitch again, who I’ll see at the neighborhood pool, and visions of myself someday as a famous author. Politics to me is nothing more than the year-long notebook on the Kennedy/Nixon election I made in fifth grade without a clue what their differences were, except Kennedy had that great Boston accent and Nixon always frowned. But I’m crammed into this echo chamber of a car with these men’s chatter -– fur show last night, Joe, furs for men too this year, but looked better on those doll-baby models (he winks at me) then they ruin it bring on the n____s even holding hands with the white girls…they ought to clean up this city, make those lazy bums get a job…and before I know it, I’m arguing with them, skinny white teenager in a sleeveless dress I’d learned to sew in Home Ec., conscious as much about racism and the economy as a baby taking her first breath out of the womb, but it’s clear to me that nobody would hang around on the sidewalk all day in pore-drenching humidity if they had anything better to do. I lose all the arguments, if losing means they assure me I’m too young to have an opinion worth listening to, but they’ve unplugged a hole in my gut, and I think for the first time that the world is a giant jigsaw puzzle and someone has hidden the picture on the cover of the box so nobody can agree on where to put the pieces, but right then and there I decide I’m not going to get as old as the car poolers without finding a better way to fit it together. 
 
**

This poem is from To Drink from a Wider Bowl, Evening Street Press, 2022.

** 

The Beach Reopens, April 27, 2020
 
We emerge from every walkway, not sure of our footing in this liminal space. A whole month, no humans. No footprints. No forgotten flipflops, shrieking toddlers, wind-shredded umbrellas swept into the dunes. Seagulls wondered into stillness, isopods beneath smooth skin of sand scavenged undisturbed. We don’t yet conceive of two years of masked faces, how this beach will give us breath. I scoop up a scallop shell, worn and cracked, to fossilize this moment. Sand slips between my toes, silk and grit. I follow the shifting whisper of the shore, admire the trail I leave behind me, ten thousand creatures alive beneath each footprint. I can only name a few, but I keep walking, trusting the unknown to hold me. 
 
**

This was first published in Kelp Ocean Anthology, 2024.

**

Thanksgiving
 
The sturdy mahogany table so long I could barely see who was at the head from the children’s folding table attached discreetly under the white laced cloth. China plates with rosebuds and silverware my sister and I were tasked to polish. The youngest of my great grandmother’s seven children the same age as my father, all blended into a bond called aunts and uncles. My brain tries to run like a backwards clock, ticking off their names - Aunt Ida, Aunt Eva, Uncle Harry… There must have been cousins –Uncle Gersh and Aunt I-can’t-remember-her-name’s kids my age. Their last name was Weil, surely shortened at Ellis Island, and a wooden wheel with real spokes that turned on their mailbox. I envied them having a name with a double meaning. Maybe that’s why I loved poetry even then – if you can’t find exactly the right word, you can always work your way around the alphabet of your life and find another way to say it.  Maybe I just want names to claim them, to know the thread between them and me still holds, like the rope that holds an anchor steady, a way to pull yourself back to shore when you aren’t sure where you’re headed, but at least you know where you came from. 
 
**

​Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022) and the chapbook, On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books 2023). Recent awards include Third Wednesday Magazine's Annual Poetry Contest, the Mary Ruffin Poole Prize, and 2022 and 2023 Pushcart nominations. Her poetry appears in Poetry South, Poetry East, NC Literary Review, CALYX, The Ekphrastic Review, Vox Populi and many other journals and anthologies. She teaches poetry workshops in person and online. She lives on the North Carolina coast, USA, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. Visit her at https://www.joannedurham.com.
​

Meadow
 
In the dew-drenched dappled meadow of bad poetry we lay down and kissed the day away. Drunk on wine, we rolled over each other, covering ourselves in pollen until our eyes were red and weeping, our skin sore and itchy. The sky smiled upon our pale pigmentation and the sunlight bestowed double-vision as we rolled down the hillside crushing flowers we were too naive to call weeds, across the paint factory’s soybean fields, down through the haunted olive orchards where widowed mothers once tried to marry off their daughters, over stubble stabbing our backs and down to the river slick with gasoline, rolling over each other and into the city, kissing the day away, down streets where traffic dissolved into clouds of starlings whose flight described poems no one could translate. Still we kept kissing in the twilight of skyscrapers, nothing breaking our embrace, not the weather, the news, five-star reviews, the tents of the homeless, the line-ups at the food bank, the limos double-parked by the courthouse, as we crashed through crosswalks, rolling over empties no one recycled, rain blurring our sight, the afternoon digging its shadows into our folds, scarring us with darkness until night blossomed in our eyes, and still we kept kissing, mouths empty and dry, afraid if we stopped of what we might say.
 
**
 
The Undertaking

The undertaking was daunting. The thought of it gave us pause, an awkward pause filled with nervous coughing. The patter of bedtime stories assuaged some of our fears. Other fears stayed awake listening to rain on the roof. Murmured misgivings gave way to concerted effort. We wore our failures proudly, displaying our wounds at family gatherings. “Button up your shirt,” clucked Mother, her disapproval thinly masking her admiration. Excusing ourselves when no one was paying attention, we paid ourselves in currency plummeting earthward. Our knees, still bleeding from years of crawling, clicked with each faltering step. Upright postures became less so as we leaned into our own bitterness. Frost coated our patchy fur. We fumbled in the dark, searching for lost keys, progressive eyeglasses, outcomes that eluded us.
 
**
 
Symphony
 
It smells like the summer the symphony got cancelled. Workers carrying black instrument cases lining the stairs leading to the back door. Me telling our disgruntled neighbour it’s nothing to worry about, not a break-in, and she pretending not to hear. The kitchen filling with woodwinds prepping food. Sauce smeared everywhere like a crime scene. String players huddling around the living room stereo waiting for the needle to drop. Muted brass speaking in hushed undertones, keeping their distance from what once mattered, spotting threats tucked in the corners of eyes. Percussionists’ abandoned cars parked in makeshift sanctuaries, horns silently seeking shelter. Alarms lodged in the throat like fish bones. Traffic swarming upstream to spawn in what’s left of the river’s source. Composers, coming down from the tree-line, transcribing the sound of foothills on fire. Notes difficult to sustain erased from the score.
 
**

Convictions

An intentional community springs up in the desert and pollutes all remaining groundwater. Convictions held tightly to chests are overturned by years of hard work and folders of indisputable stats; graphs rising precipitously like adolescent mountain ranges, algorithms abandoning the numerical in search of the Arabic source of their name. Predictions blown off-course by rogue currents prove fruitless as pollinators succumb. Ideals plunge earthward, are recovered, reassembled and enshrined.

**

Compose
 
You seem very composed. And by that I don’t mean the sharps and flats in your body of work. Why not body of play? Maybe it’s the way your days, or at least Monday-Friday, stretch out like the five parallel power lines in the alley behind the house; an avian musical staff dotted with quarter-note crows, half-note gulls, eighth-note birds too small to identify sans binocs, their coming and going a feathery tune rewritten on the fly. But you’re not musical. Maybe it’s the indented paragraphs in your conversation, or the thoughts you’ve submitted to an editor you’ve never met prior to publication in The Tip of the Tongue. I really enjoyed your piece in The Teeth and The Lips, by the way. No, I was wrong, you are musical. It’s like there’s a little deaf Beethoven wandering around in your cortex who has to be tapped on the shoulder and turned around so he can see the audience applauding. Of course, with the word composed comes its double, decomposed, trailing behind like a cadaverous shadow devouring flesh and welcoming worms; holes torn in the paper by countless erasures, letters worn off the delete button, a hundred aborted melodies circling the air like unborn souls.

**

The Dramaturge and the Cougar
 
The irony of a job title that shares etymology with the word “turgid” was not lost on her as she walked home. Alone. At night. In the woods.  She clutched a bundle of manuscripts — fresh dreams waiting to be crushed — tightly against her breast.  Somewhere near here a cougar killed and ate a deer last year. She was not a ruminant, but would a hungry predator draw such fine distinctions? And if the cougar had good manners, wore a rented tux, dined while listening to Puccini, wouldn’t these plays make handsome napkins with which to dab the blood from its paws. “Pardon me,” he said as he dropped from a tree branch and landed suddenly in front of her. “Does this path go to town?” For such a large animal he spoke very softly. She nodded once, trying to look casual, hoping the beating of her heart did not trigger some primitive instinct in her questioner. “Thank you,” he replied and disappeared in the darkness, like the draft of a play one gets rid of after admitting, finally, that it is going nowhere.

**
 
Slogans

The slogans lay scattered on the pavement, an exploded checkerboard of placards. The punchy words scrawled with Sharpies have been committed to memory and put to music, accompanied by bagpipes fashioned from bladders of the fallen. Disembodied voices, perching next to pigeons on windowsills, timidly join the celebratory shouts before turning down side-streets where they fade and die in the mournful hum of air conditioners. Echos reverberate where scuffles interrupt the progress of shuffling feet. The crowd, a sluggish river moving slowly through the city, picks up onlookers like houses in a flood. The angriest surge forward seeking solutions buried under makeshift dams of sandbags. As arms grow tired, the last remaining signs fall to earth. Years later, the day’s slogans, rebranded and marketed by corporate interests, stream into the world unimpeded.

**
 
Meat

This is it without the packaging or presentation, plastic and styrofoam removed and escorted from the building by security, stripped of makeup, no more concealer, glances skinned of all history, social cues rendered harmless, stranded filaments knotted, loose threads braided, stray hair clipped, surface details erased, tender parts exposed to air, chemicals that rushed in to repair torn muscles drained away, cleaning complete, seasoning begun, salted with desire, peppered with questions.  You’re standing in the slippery mess of what’s been discarded, close to the heart of it, only to find it’s eloped with your hunger. Once a year you get a postcard from some exotic place and try to digest what’s written on the back but the words wish you were here have been smeared in transit, leaving you yearning for more, your new diet a failure.
 
**

Looting

Apologies, sir, I am a Viking and know no better. The TV in the window of the neighbourhood electronics store was just asking for it. Snakes eat eggs from the nest, one work of art from your museum could feed thousands, some people work so hard they can’t think when the day is done, let alone form intricate sentences, so who are you to pass sentence from the safety of your private collection? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to spray-paint profanities, redistribute wealth, or proclaim that right and wrong are relative terms. The truth is I’m not a Viking, that was a lie, I have passed myself off as one for many years, wracked with shame as I plundered coastline villages. I am, genetically-speaking, a pirate. A whole bank of television sets just sitting there, all tuned to the same nature channel. A weasel making off with its prey. When the window broke it was exhilarating. And then I acted instinctively, like a primate beating in the skull of an old friend who’d joined a neighbouring tribe. The primate might feel sad after the fact but with no words to express their emotions no apology is forthcoming. I, however, am very sorry. Which is not to say I wouldn’t do it again. I am not, however, a pirate. That too was a lie. I get seasick easily.

**

Escape of the Prose Poem

Who can justify these borders? Smuggling blocks of text past the guards, leaving the rhymed life behind. Iambic pentameter of the heart giving way to troubling fibrillation. Climbing the chainlink fence, shirt torn on barbed wire, jumping down, spraining an ankle. Limping da-dum da-dum through underbrush, bricks of crushed words weighing down pockets, rhetorical tools rendered useless by rust. Wondering why we traded the groomed courtyard’s clean grid for this pockmarked landscape. Potholes filled with rainwater. Careful schemes upended in the failing light, going in circles, bleeding but unbroken…

**

​Peter Anderson is a poet, performer and playwright living in Vancouver on the unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples. He was a finalist in the 2023 Raven Poetry Chapbook contest and his work has appeared in Unbroken, Sublunary Review, Frigg, SORTES, duality, Best Microfictions 2022, and elsewhere. His plays are available at Canadian Play Outlet.

A Poem Is a Little Church, Remember?
 
Where peach trees flourish year-round, heavy with fruit.  Where bluebirds perch in the branches, then swoop down to eat from our hands.  Where the barn owl’s eyes are yellow as flame and do not flicker, but the river flickers alive because we’ve put peaches, those tender jewels, inside it, and the current carries them away.  We don’t name the river, whose banks glisten with dragonflies that emerge from the water, then practice opening and closing their glassy wings.  In the little church, a door opens.  The door is red, the door is wood, the door is wrought iron and we have the skeleton key.  It opens onto a courtyard with a fountain that sounds like the river, tamed, whose only business is wishes.  What’s better than a held breath, a tossed coin?  A pocket, freshly mended, or a crop of lost pennies scattered on the path, their coppery, ridged faces reflecting the sun.

**
 
This poem is from the author's book, Paper Sky (Press 53, 2024.)

**

Cloud Report, 1/18/23
 
Now the angels are in my kitchen, whipping cream in big silver bowls.  I am tired of being afraid.  When they look at the sky, an airplane slowly disappears into sweet white chiffon, bare wet trees stark against it.  I didn’t invite them, but like clouds, a few arrived anyway.  They gaze over my shoulder toward the horizon when I ask, What happens now?  They offer me a soft chair with the best view and a cup of hot chocolate, but the clouds form a wall as far as I can see.  So the angels curl on the couch, then tuck their robes around their knees.  Clearly, they have time.
 
**
 
This poem first appeared in Cloud Reports (Celery City Chapbooks, 2024) and was reprinted in Paper Sky (Press 53, 2024.)

**

​Still
 
Two layers of clouds sheer as bridal veils glide fast in opposite directions, edges blurred, swirling me in white and blue, even though I’m below all that motion, sitting still.  Remind me, was there still snow on the ground when the world stopped, churches and bars and schools closed, everything canceled?  Was there wind?  Each day stretched three times its usual size.  In our house, no one sang, though many nights we played euchre at the kitchen table.  Once, the lights flickered out.  The next morning, the well pump quit.  Our house became an island, shuttered tight against the news.  But it still leaked in.  Night and day behaved themselves, at least, and lined up to walk on sock feet down the hall.  From time to time I sat in the attic, wrapped in blankets, and watched the aspen’s branches scrape the gray horizon.  We fed our worry to the bluebirds which nested just inside our yard.  Our supply was abundant.  The young birds grew strong and practiced flying among the branches, then perched next to each other, briefly, three on one branch, two on another, like bright scraps of sky.  
 
**

This poem first appeared in Dreaming Awake:  New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, and was  reprinted in Paper Sky (Press 53, 2024.)

**
 
Aubade with Selfies
 
I’m waiting for the swirling snow to stop and finally reveal the horizon.  Right this minute, I’m caught in a cloud:  I can’t see the field beyond the trees and if I could, it would also be white.  My niece has just landed in Paris, and sits in a silver chair in front of a gilt-framed mirror, sipping coffee.  Her updates find me almost instantly, here in the midst of the snow.  Now I can’t even see the trees.

**

This poem first appeared in On the Seawall and was reprinted in Paper Sky (Press 53, 2024.)

**
 
Junior Year Abroad
 
I intended to live one significant moment after another, beginning with that tiny bottle of Dior cologne in the cramped bathroom of my Air France flight.  This was the before.  Before the man next to me sighed and scribbled apologies to his beloved all night long.  Before I rode the train carrying a bouquet of violets.  Before I sat in cemeteries at noon, chewing my baguette.  Before the lost passport, the bad haircut, the tripped fuse that knocked out power to a whole apartment building.  Before my teacher burst into our classroom, clutching the novel she assigned, and pointed at me.  Of course I confused key points:  Did the piano really mix cocktails each time it was played?  Did the young woman grow a water lily in her lung?  Yes, she was tragically beautiful, red-haired and pale.  Yes, the owner of that wondrous piano briefly married her.  But understanding the book was like trying to touch a whitecap on an ocean wave as it washed back out to sea.  Even now, I still hope to stumble across the definitive English translation.
 
**
 
This first appeared in New Flash Fiction Review and was reprinted in Paper Sky (Press 53, 2024.)

**

Inside Out
 
The girl turns the house inside out.  Does it matter what she’s looking for?  She turns herself inside out.  She turns the lake and the sky and the clouds inside out.  Inside out, they are not much different.  But the girl is tireless.  She has only one assistant, a loyal dog the colour of flame, and so much ground to cover.  Behind her eyes, two swans drift among the lily pads, dripping with rain.  Two more join them, then two more.  She blinks away their slick feathers and black bills full of seaweed, then turns toward the constellations and the moon, which grows thinner every day.  What difference will it make if she turns those things inside out?  Dark is dark.  And she is caught in its throat.

** 

This poem first appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly and was reprinted in Paper Sky (Press 53, 2024.)

**

Eight to Ten Inches by Nightfall
 
My daughter built a woman from snow on our front step, then added a red apron and a witch’s stringy wig.  It is anatomically correct.  Now I am surprised by unexpected company when I glimpse it, chalky and gleaming, through the window.  But no one’s really there.  No one’s coming, either, though we’ve shoveled a path to the garage.  We’ve sent our little griefs to sleep under the maple, and a gust has erased their tracks.  Near the feeder, a wild turkey flaps to clear the drift that has built itself, hour by hour, tall as a girl.  The field and sky are white mirrors that make us dizzy, twins who aren’t at all lonely for the touch of a hand or wing.
 
**
 
This first appeared in Poetry East and was reprinted in Paper Sky (Press 53, 2024.)

 **
 
Pandemic Ode
 
Oh gray horizon, gather me up.  I am tired of learning to walk nicely on a leash.  Soon the day will snatch me in its jaws—I never know exactly when.  Its teeth are white and sharp as stars.  I’d be your pet in exchange for the kind of sleep that doesn’t strand me on my knees in a warehouse full of wedding dresses, searching for sequins and needles and lace. I’m happy to drink from puddles on the street.  Happy to fetch sticks, or not, and drop them at your feet.  Oh cloudless sky, gather me up and let me stay awhile, say you’ll keep me safe.  Safe from that breeze across my sweaty neck.  Safe from that other self, snapping and growling inside her cage of bones.
 
**

This first appeared in Prairie Schooner and was reprinted in Paper Sky (Press 53, 2024.)
 
**

​​Kathleen McGookey has published five books and four chapbooks of prose poems, most recently Paper Sky (Press 53) and Cloud Reports (Celery City Chapbooks).  Her work has appeared in journals including Copper Nickel, December, Epoch, Field, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, On the Seawall, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Tupelo Quarterly, as well as in the anthologies Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and New Micro:  Exceptionally Small Fiction.  She lives in Middleville, Michigan, with her family.  Depending on the season, she waterskis, downhill skis, walks, and bakes pies.