The Making of The Witch

‘Let those who rest more deeply sleep,
Let those awake their vigils keep.
O Hand of Glory shed thy light;
Direct us to our spoil tonight.
Flash out thy blaze, O skeletal hand,
And guide the feet of our trusty band.’

            About Yorkshire (1883) by Thomas and Catherine Macquoid.


Believe me, if woken in the dead of night, in the vicinity of Gibbet Howe, by a tapping or a scratching on your window don't fling wide the shutter to take a look. Most would call it horror. Here in Yorkshire, the beggar, the parson, the milkmaid, the blacksmith, the widow and spinster all seem sinister, where those in the know rub their thresholds and sills with an unguent composed of the gall of a black cat, the fat of a white hen, the blood of a screech owl; reduced in the noontide sun during the dog days.

I would rub it on my lips. It was like a kiss from Death to say he would hold off a little longer. When I drew my curtain the Hand of Glory beckoned with its flaming fingers. At first, silly romantic that I was, I thought it had come to ask for my hand. Then I realised it had come to wake me from my walking-sleep-eating-sleep-talking-sleep-working-sleep, to show me the distance between my life and whatever stories had been spun for me. Some from the moment of my first bird-breath, some from before I was born. 

For like the hand, I too was true won having been pickled in salt, and the urine of man, woman, dog, horse and mare; smoked with herbs and hay for a month; hung on an oak tree for three nights running, buried at a crossroads for two nights, then hung on a church door for one night while my maker kept watch in the porch. It is like I am a candle made with the fat of a hanged man, my own father - God forgive him.

The Hand, out of pure love, unlocked the door to reveal my own darkly miraculous powers. Something inside my body detached itself and I heard receding footsteps as if someone was descending the spiral staircase of my spine. Free of mortal wrappings I painted my gibbous face with ash and soot, carried a quail's egg in my mouth until it hatched, then fixed my goat to my trap and rode it to the market place.


** 
​
The Clairvoyant's Claim

When the hand first rocked up in Whitby, Europe teetered, once again, on the brink of war. In cinemas Pathé News presented their flickering truth to the free peoples of the world in a home counties accent, but the crowds of tourists arriving by train were there for sun, sea and sand. The hand blended in among the swathes of nondescript gentlemen, took in the view from the top of the 199 steps, strolled along the pier, relished the smell of the smoke-house on Henrietta Street, but despite never having visited the seaside town before it experienced a disturbing sense of deja vu and an uncanny magnetism to specific locations: Bagdale Hall, Arguments Yard, the foot tunnel through the Khyber Pass - a peculiar tug as if its phalangers formed a divining rod. It pondered the footsteps of previous visitors, conjuring their musings and imaginings: Stoker's gristly visions of poor Lucy's decline into vampirism, Dodgson's curious nonsensical conundrums in a caucus race, Gaskell's projection of sibling rivalry and eventual tragedy, Cook's steely stare at the horizon as if reading a destiny that was already penned there, Scoresby's glacial glare threaded through a telescope from a crows nest scanning ice-floes for the sign of a whale - a spy hop, breach or spray, but spots, instead, a great white bear watching the ship from an iceberg and hears its bone-chilling bellow. The sensations of uncanny familiarity grew until the hand decided to pay a visit to Alita Lee in her gypsy caravan on the quay, nestled among the ganseyed fishermen, half-cut sailors, pipe-smoking skippers, herring lasses and stalls of cockles and mussels. Inside the clairvoyant's cramped scrying space, with one glance at the palm she welcomed its return and began to spin a story of the press gang riots of 1793. How this hand was the hand that hurled the brick through window of the ale house on Haggersgate where the officers sought refuge from the mob, how this hand was one of the ring leaders of the insurrection against His Majesty's Royal Navy's recruiting officials, how this hand was indeed the reanimated hand of William Atkinson who was found guilty and hanged for the crimes of unlawful assembly, unlawful violence, aggravated assault, destruction of property and endangerment of life and limb.

** 

Cave of Hands
 
Italian missionary and explorer, Alberto Maria de Agostini, goes searching for the whiskers of God in the remote mountains of Patagonia. As if it were a divining rod, he trusts the hollow feeling in his chest, the terrible and beautiful ache of grace that has existed within him since he gave his heart to Christ, back home in Pallone. Stumbling over ice fields as blue as the holy mother’s robe, skirting around sea sounds that sing the sweetest psalms of stoicism and tooth-grinding worship, he follows the shrugged-off, tobacco-spat directions of locals who confessed to having visited Cueva de las Manos as el niño, to spook one another with ghost stories and eerie tales of bargains with chthonic beings. He was the first to officially discover the site in 1941 when the breath clogged in his throat as he held aloft in a trembling fist his oil lamp to view the swirling, spiralling vortex of Early Holocene, hunter-gathering hands sweeping around him, wafting, brushing, weaving, plucking, skinning, casting, sewing, kneading, sharpening, scraping, climbing, praying, clapping, clicking, tapping, flapping up into the darkness of the roof. Executed in natural mineral pigments – iron oxides (red and purple), kaolin (white), natrojarosite (yellow), manganese oxide (black) – ground and mixed with some form of binder, Alberto felt himself drowning as if in a fire-flue or geyser. All he could do to ground himself was cover his gawping fish-gob with his own weathered hand to stop his soul from leaping out and following the spirit dance into the fabric of the rock.
 
**

Hand Over Fist

It wasn’t as if there was an overabundance of animate dismembered hands in the film industry, but then there was always going to be a limited number of parts to play. Back in ’73, pre-empting Stan Lee’s cameo appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the hand played itself in all its flaming abomination with the intent to send Sergeant Neil Howie to sleep in the folk horror classic. In ‘81 Oliver Stone cast the hand as a murderous marauder on a killing spree in a mediocre psychological thriller, starring opposite Michael Caine. In Happy Gilmore, 1996, the hand blacked up to blend in with Carl Weathers’ skin tone after an alligator supposedly snapped his real hand off while playing golf. While the movie was a commercial success it was not a versatile nor rewarding role and the hand caught some flak from critics linking it to the racist history of blackface in cinema, pointing out how often black characters are portrayed as stiff stereotypes and how black actors are so regularly overlooked. Afterwards, the mainstream movie work vanished like a line of nose candy at an after-show party in Santa Monica. In 2000, during a brief come-back to the public eye, London Fashion Week saw the hand sauntering sassy along the catwalk to The Smiths in a variety of swanky, nifty, swinging, ritzy full-fingered and fingerless gloves,  and if the people stare, then the people stare, oh, I really don't know and I really don't care…Then came a spot of nude modelling which led it into the seedy, Soho-centred world of the disembodied hand fetish, a specialist sub-genre of pornography which brought in some bread and butter for a while until the hand found itself bang on the zeitgeist with the stratospheric rise of social media. There it was cast in a brand-new role, as a symbol of artisanal craftsmanship and entrepreneurial zeal. There it became the helping hand, influencer extraordinaire, demonstrating its dexterities in countless instructional videos for cooking, DIY, crafting and inventive money-saving household hacks. In a world saturated by pouting lip-plumped pseudo-celebrity selfies the hand-only video sooths through its anonymity. The hand appears as a ubiquitous stand-in for everyone’s true creative self, even emerging as an icon of YouTube children’s content: toy unboxing footage, where playthings are removed from their packages and taken for a spin. In the small screen era of the “Thumbelina Generation” the world witnessed the long-awaited re-enchantment of the hand.
 
**

The Red Hand of Ulaid
 
O Sing unto the Lord a new song;
For he hath done marvellous things:
His right hand and his holy arm,
Hath gotten him the Victory
 
Psalm 98:1
 
Forced into a corner by a staged intervention where the unmistakable evidence of its condition was presented calmly and uncontroversially, the hand had to admit the damage to its psyche from the dark-side of fame, wealth and celebrity. You're not the first and won't be the last to go off the rails and lose a grip on reality, said Nicola McChiaveli, the hand's trusted agent, Hell, she added, its part of the course for so many stars on my list, but darling, I have the perfect therapist in mind.
 
Reluctantly the hand began a course of talking therapy with Dr Galvez, who asked about the panic attacks, the paranoia, the slide into reclusiveness, the sudden pangs of jealousy, the violent outbursts. Initially, the hand was guarded, evasive, distracted and resistant but Dr Galvez's patience and soft, comforting voice, her apparent, genuine interest in who the hand was beneath the trappings of stardom and sexual fetish opened a chink in its gauntlet of protective withdrawal. Before long the hand became fixated on the way Dr Galvez licked her lower lip then swallowed before following up with a particularly penetrating question, how she did not look away when the hand wrestled with the complex feelings of addiction and revulsion to the lifestyle of unbridled entitlement and comfort to which it had grown accustomed to. The consultancy room began to swill in undercurrents of transference and projection. The hand began to recount rose-tinted stories of the days when it had nothing, those lean-times, those hard-times, those scraping-by-on-torn-fingernails-times, and long dormant memories sprang up from nowhere, vivid, desperate and bloody:
 
The lush green embrace of Inis Fáil in the distance, hills rolling like the waves, the longboat rocking under a square, woollen sail. Salted lips, eyes squinting from the sun, hungry for the rich monasteries just waiting to be pillaged. Old Turgesius, with a voice like a strangled crow yells, The first to touch the soil shall be granted kingship over this land! Whereupon, the Irish mercenary Heremon O'Neill raises his battle axe and hacks off his own hand, then, still pumping spurts of blood, fingers writhing in shock, hurls it out across the bay's sparkling waters to thud onto the shingle like a skinned seal pup. A triumph which, through cunning and unflinching sacrifice that extends human reach beyond physical limits, transformed the turn-coat hireling into the first King of Ulster.

**
 
Nemesis

The undoing was inevitable. The good life with its exotic pleasures and ever-diminishing returns of happiness, dulls the savage acumen that first secured the position. Cadillacs, a Rothko ‘Sectional’, Faberge eggs, gold leaf etched glassware and cocaine snorted off genitals. The cracks weren’t even noticed at first, then they were covered by denial. Hubris was a pair of slippers once worn by Sher-e-Mysore or "Tiger of Mysore” with leather soles and red velvet uppers, densely ornamented with salma sitara work, in gold and silver wire, with spangles and glass beads. By then things had got sloppy, coyotes were sniffing around the territory, they padded around the four posted bed at the dead at night. The dissolution of the short marriage was anything but amicable, involving accusations of mistreatment, allegations of abuse, public denouncements, open letters and restraining orders. The hand punched a mirror, paranoid of its own reflection, and it was only a surprise to itself that it was caught in flagrante delicto in the cookie jar. Publicly exposed and indefensible, the press had a field day, the distracted boyfriend meme resurfaced, and all the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten this little hand.
 
**

Disclaimer

Given the highly publicised separation and bitter divorce wranglings between the contesting parties, the doubling down of victimhood, the unprofessional and mutually malicious character assassinations, and the resultant speculation over the hand’s involvement in previous unsavoury incidents The Hand of Glory™ firmly and legally assert that the hand, despite its supposed, although unsubstantiated longevity, was not connected in any way to The Black Hand (Serbian: Crna ruka), the covert military society formed in 1901 by officers in the Army of the Kingdom of Serbia, which gained global notoriety for its alleged involvement in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which triggered the start of World War I. Nor was our friend and principle client in any way connected to the Black Hand Society (Italian: La Mano Nera), and its heinous methods of extortion in major US cities during the early years of the 20th century, including Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Detroit. There is no provable association between our client and the formation of the original Black Hand Society in the Kingdom of Naples in the 1750s. Nor does there exist any evidence of involvement with The Society of the Black Hand (Spanish: La Mano Negra), the secret, organization based in Andalusia during the 1880s, best known as perpetrators of murders, arson, and crop fires amidst the period of class struggle, and the spread of anarcho-communism, with its differences from collectivist-anarchism, and the conflict between’ legalists’ and ‘illegalists’ in The Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region; and which quickly transformed into a network of desperadoes involved in the black market. While it became an extensive and numerous society, especially in the provinces, each having its own centre and out branches with a total of affiliated members exceeding 40,000, The Hand of Glory™ once again vehemently asserts no affiliation whatsoever with this or with any of the other historic organisations listed above. Any slur, slander or libel against the good name of our patron will be met by immediate legal action.
 
** 

Author's note: "These prose poems are from The Hand of Glory: a biography, an absurdist imagining of the exploits and adventures of the Hand of Glory which is on display in Whitby Museum and purports to be one of the last surviving examples of theses arcane, macabre and enchanted artifacts. The collection will be released in Autumn 2025 by Yaffle Press."
​
Bob Beagrie (PhD) lives in Middlesbrough, in Northeast England and has published numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Romanceros (Drunk Muse Press 2024), Kō (Black Light Engine Room Press’ 2023), Eftwyrd (Smokestack Books 2023), The Last Almanac (Yaffle Press 2023). When We Wake We Think We’re Whalers from Eden (Stairwell Books 2021). His work has appeared in numerous international anthologies, journals and magazines and has been translated into Finnish, Urdu, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Estonian, Tamil, Gaelic and Karelian. He also writes short stories and plays.

Noing It All
 
As I try to express myself, words fail. As words fail I go to pictures. As pictures arrive, words come to mind. As the mind goes, so goes the reason to express anything. As anything happens, everything takes on new meaning. As new meaning settles, definition takes shape. As definition takes shape, the lines of communication are drawn. As communication draws to a close, it overlaps and becomes the means to an end. As the ends approach, a new mean begins. As the new mean begins, it means new beginnings lie between the extremes. As the extremes lie, they close in on the truth. As the truth opens, I try to express myself. 

**

The Water's Edge
 
inside the depths of flamboyancy and the original floatation lies the muscle of the resistance to the water's lure. The sun's mirror remembers to reflect inside the earth's deepest concerns where the beginnings of life still lie in an affluent suspension of disbelief, still move their crestfallen dream to the moon's rhythmic lunacy and still push against its future flesh with a sorcerer's dripping pulse. It is into this landscape of foaming mountains that time comes crashing up against the moist dream of a swimmer's thirst and then crawls back onto the beach with its wet, seductive fingers, drawing our evolution into its magic. We follow in our own footsteps, back through the liquid windows and into the crisp origin of lungs. Our body remembers the substance of what matters and in our joy, we return to the moment before.  
 
**
 
The Principles of Obstruction

the principles of obstruction begin at 9 am. they take turns minding their own business and then get involved in petty agreements. I'm nowhere to be seen. but I'm always present and greatly affected by their constant badgering. they raise their voices and rise to each occasion like a wave. it is virtually impossible. coming or going become moot points. standing still is out of the question. doing something or not doing it, intersect, coincide, overlap, and eventually go back home to sleep. even the differences don't make a difference. all the words in my thoughts are lower case. I remain in the upper regions with nothing more than a backpack and a cup of snow. yet the life goes on and on. never touching itself. like a wind that never meets its match. moving in the inner circles with a carefree whistle following close behind. going nowhere with determination. 
 
**
 
Prose and Con Sequences
 
A prose poem writes itself and presents sunflowers growing on the surface of the sun. It breaks glass that is already an abstract reflection of the concrete and a particle of sand on the beach. The prose and con sequences talk in highfalutin whispers and screams for attention. Nonsensical is all the rage. It accomplishes being more than what is said.
 
**
 
Memory's Forgotten Future
 
The aggressive innocence of his childhood along with the interference of broken words spoken through the sliver of silver painted on the window, blocks the sunlight from streaming onto the river of sleepy consciousness. It is imbedded in memory’s forgotten future. He is trying hard to be a wise old man but the years are stacked against him, leaning on his swollen mirror creating a wide angle that enraptures too many done deals. The choices, themselves, are winging it. Certain flight patterns don’t exist anymore but are still offered as the echoes of the most enticing choices. The wind changes its mind and becomes a falling leaf. His whole body is so tired of not talking that it’s beginning to shut up and disappear in a pile of color. When the Time comes it makes believe there is more to come. So he comes to believe in an immortal continuum that cradles mortality in its embrace as it is dying to know if this is the end.
 
He misconstrues the last straw as another pathway to breathing.  He views the sunrise as a major umbilical chord that ushers in the fanfare of the afterbirth of waking up. He, alone, hears the empty sound of the yawning new beginning that is prone to rely on its back and forth. He moves through this next moment like a blind visionary hoping to bump into truth, stop for a split second, and then stumble into eternity. 
 
 **

A Hymn for You Not Me
 
He is the unknown in the equation that is unequaled. He is ashamed and delighted. Once lit, now as dark as mourning in winter skipping through a dream keeping in time with a long moment that is shattered. The broken notes that this microscopic organist plays is a silent music of noise that ripples in a small pond of insects. It’s a popular spiritual dogma that clogs the air with a certainty that is certain to fail and is unsure of what success sounds like. He is quite okay with thisis, even though it is an is that is not today or tomorrow, it is an is that still is a promise that the sun makes by poking its light into the dark corners of yesterday where it shows its true colours as a never-ending spectrum of beginnings. This is the hymn of this unsung hero, a bird humming without wings or twigs. It is a prayer offered to a nest of possible feeding positions each chirping for sustenance. Keep in mind, that this hymn is not addressed to me and that’s all that really counts in this numb realm of mathematic subtractions that includes you and all your variables…………….
 
**

Phil Demise Smith: Poet, musician, artist, and teacher. Editor /publisher of Gegenschein Press (1971-1987). Owner/producer of  NYC performance loft- The Gegenschein Vaudeville Placenter from 1976-1978.  Published in numerous small press magazines. Chapbook What I Don’t Know For Sure (Burning Deck) and Periods,selected writings 1972-1987 (Gegenschein). Poetry readings in the U.S. and Europe. Has written/ performed his own songs with AnDna. Recent vinyl album Growing in the Dark. Numerous one person and group art shows in the U.S. / Europe including The Musée Création Franche in Bégles, France. Paintings are in many private collections.

Kintsugi
 
If only I could fill the chasms of my life with silver or gold. The open veins caused by lack of companionship, the silences of no one to listen. If only I could mortar the space between tesserae with granddaughter giggles and hugs around the neck. If only I could batten the noise with the softness of stuffed animals and the ankle socks my mother used to fill with kosher salt to cure an earache. If only I could breathe deeply with Vicks VapoRub® to unlock my nasal passages and feel the mentholated heat on my chest. If only I could pour my mother’s chicken soup with mashed up matzoh balls into the skeins of my memory, loosen the phlegm in my throat when I cry out for her, seventeen years after her death. If only I could back out of the garage without hitting the goddamn plastic garbage can and without taking out half the weather-stripping of the door frame. If only I could make myself whole once again, stitch together that skin that’s eating me alive since the Moderna booster fool’s gold. 

**

The Memory Collectors 

I save my father. His voice mail words before his 1997 death, “This is your father.” 
 
Like my father, I collected stamps: He gave me a U.S. stamp album. I insisted on a Poland album, too, because my mother’s parents came from there. I sat down at vendor tables at stamp shows in Atlantic City, Manhattan, and upstate New York with money my father gave me, trying to fill the gaps on album pages. I learned names of colours like vermilion, ultramarine, and carmine and names of philately tools like glassine envelopes, adhesive hinges, and tongs. I gathered free stock books at my father’s instruction. I paged through the Stamp News and watched my father ink his Emkay Stamp Service rubber stamp onto glue-white envelopes holding his many inquiries.
 
Like my father, I collected books. His metal-framed racks and wooden tables bursting with volumes about wine, publishing, and media moguls. My shelves exploding about the Holocaust and shtetl and immigrant life. In the city, we haunted the stacks of The Strand on Broadway. We came home, emptied our bags on the dining room table, picked a book each and started reading over Burger King salads in the kitchen. We didn’t say a word.  
 
I stockpile my father’s memorabilia: I cleared out his basement desk after his death, tucking away his folders in my bag before my sisters noticed anything. His hidden treasures became mine. His 1937 Chrysalis high school yearbook, his senior portrait of slick-backed hair with the nickname “Moxie,” and the caption, “He’ll find a way or make it,” as a member of North Arlington High School’s first graduating class. His high school ring. The aerial photographs he took in the Army Air Force while stationed outside London in Nuthampstead, G-d’s canvas of B-17 Flying Fortresses, his World War II prayer book for those of the Jewish faith. His 1946 address book, a shared asset with his new bride, my mother. His father’s knotted silk sock preserving a laminated pin of my grandfather’s deceased sister, Malka. 
 
Still, I curate my own collection: Snippets of his handwriting scratched on notepad scraps, the phone number of his personal buyer at The Strand, the phone number of the Fallsview Hotel in the Catskills. I stash the artifacts in a basket-weave trunk at the foot of my bed, keeping them safe for the next generation. 

**
 
Shock
 
Shock is when your sister calls and says her husband, 56, died of a heart attack while eating salad at Applebee’s. Shock is the look on the soon-to-be ex-husband’s face when you tell him you’re filing for divorce. Shock is the set of financial demands he makes of you, because it’s always been about the money for him. Shock sings. Shock stings. Shock is what you wish the medical team had applied to get your father’s shunted heart pumping again. Shock is seeing a photo of your Methuselah grandfather with actual hair and learning your great-grandparents had immigrated to America and lived in Newark’s Third Ward. Shock is when you find out all the irreplaceable photos from the Old Country were ruined and tossed away when the boiler burst. Shock wails. Shock mourns. Shock is what you go into when a Chevy Equinox rear-ends your beloved Infiniti on the parkway, shattering all windows and deploying three airbags. Shock is the litmus test to assure you you’re still alive.
 
 **

Alphabet Vulgaris
 
The outline of a pemphigus vulgaris lesion, the white crust a picture frame of inherited disease sits on my computer. I stare at it, this tiny container reminding me of maybe centuries of pain and stain. I call it the P-stain. Just one of many autoimmune manifestations in the family like alopecia and psoriasis and, of course, the Big D, diabetes.
 
A tiny universe sits within the crusted legion, Russian leather boots or maybe Polish depending on the year, or maybe Austrian or Austro-Hungarian, Polish before or after, also depending on the year.
 
I unleash my P-stain into the S-curves along imagined Ukrainian roads where my grandmother’s grandmother fell off of a bridge in May 1890 into the Vysushka or the Tsutsirka River and died. It was Austria then. I suppose there was no room to make a K-turn in a wooden wagon on a narrow wooden bridge. I was never good at K-turns. I could refer to the S-curve, because my grandmother’s grandparents bore the name Seife, or soap. Soap, that slithery, slippery stuff, might have caused the horses to slide.
 
I unleash my P-stain into the Big D, rock candy crystals so enormous that pockmark my legs like misshaped stacks of harvested wheat in the breadbasket that is Ukraine, where my grandmother’s shtetl has planted itself since 1939.
 
But what I’m looking for is a U-turn, a way back to mobility without walker or cane, a return to normalcy, to not having to strategize how to pull my legs onto the bed or how to position my swollen foot on the stair to pull myself up with two hands. U-turns don’t exist. You can never go back the way you came even when following the same road. Atoms move on their own accord. They cannot be harvested or unleashed. They like to bang into each other and make new creations. You are one of them. 

**

Perseus in the Fourth Grade
 
How hard could it be to lop off the Gorgon’s head, with a snip here, well, all right, a massive incision across the neck, against the jugular, and all would be well with the world, such is the head of an old witch whose thoughts writhe with snakes getting all up into each other, biting each other with those rabid fangs, and as the boy sits in history class and watches that old nasty he’s come to hate, that old woman who scratches red ink to blot out his best work, that old woman who is older than Zeus himself, well, her head’s got to go, metaphorically speaking, and so the boy thinks if only he had Athena’s gifts of the golden shield and the invisibility helmet, he could rid his fourth-grade classroom of Medusa, but though she’s got eyes in the back of her head, she’s known to use the cabinet windows to reflect who is throwing spitballs, but if the boy had a magic shield he could avoid her failing him, that is, turning all his hard work into stone, if he could wear the helmet and sneak up on her, if he could just raise the shield and prevent that awful stare of hers that makes him and his classmates freeze on the spot, well, that and her constant threat to chain them to rock, watch them wriggle as they await the wrath  of Principal Kraken, and if the boy could use the shield and the helmet, maybe he’d get to feed Pegasus and fly that winged horse above the raging sea to his wildest dreams.

**

Blades of Memory Grass
 
after Christina’s World, Andrew Wyeth (USA) 1948
 
I sit in the kitchen after staging’s complete, the house ready for sale. The walls scream for me to hold onto them. The wall phone where my father taped photos of my mother’s hands, rings in my ears. The stovetop diagrams erased by decades of Brillo call for me to ignite the burners. The textured tile floor no longer awaits bare feet and cartwheels. The staging people ripped up the navy carpeting in the dining room revealing a century-old hardwood floor. But frame shadows on tufted wallpaper suggest abandoned wedding photos except for mine, which was banished to the basement. Inside yet outside, yearning for a place I can’t have. I remember the day in 1965 I wear ankle socks with new black patent leather shoes from Levy’s, run down the front brick stairs to show our neighbor across the street. I trip, and my sister holds my head in her lap while the doctor stitches my knee. Another day, 1968: I lie on the front lawn after running through the sprinkler, contemplating my future as cloud shapes suggest. My body crunches the plastic-like grass and I pull at milkweed and dandelions. I find a buttercup and place it under my chin. I cannot see its reflection. 

**

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and short fiction writer, she is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Chicken Fat (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and Pounding Cobblestone (Kelsay Books, 2018), Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry, Caesura, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. She can be found at www.barbarakrasner.com.

Spring in the Air
 
In checkout lane three at the grocery, I feel my nose twitch inside my mask. The two carts closest to the cashier are six-feet apart, but the rest of us are much closer together. While some shoppers chat briefly, laughing at jokes, while some lean over their carts for support, and some pull out hand sanitizer, rubbing their hands briskly, I scrunch my face to hold back a sneeze. When the guy in the next lane asks me a question, I begin to answer and without warning, the sneeze escapes. I’m shaken, but quickly hold up my hands and shout into my mask, “Allergies—I’m not sick,” but the other shoppers look at me as if I’m dangerous. Before I can do anything about it, I sneeze again, and my mask sails off like a large butterfly, floating over heads until it lands on a grocery conveyor belt two lanes away, touching an avocado. The cashier removes the mask with her gloved hand…The shopper says “no” to the avocado, which the cashier places near her register. The other shoppers move as far away from me as they can.  I try to reassure them, but a third even more powerful sneeze explodes from my mouth and nose. The automatic doors open. The plexiglass windows shake. The shoppers hit the floor, holding their breath, their heads buried in their hands. A sea of droplets and aerosols hangs over them. There’s no way for me to clear the air now. For a long moment the store is silent. The only other person standing is the cashier in lane five. She smiles and signals me to come ahead. “But I’m not next in line,” I say. “You go!” the other shoppers shout from the floor, so I wheel around them, pay for my groceries quickly, and leave the store without another sneeze.

**

This first appeared in the anthology Alcatraz, edited by Cassandra Atherton, Paul Hetherington, and Phil Day, and then in Ashes in Paradise by Jeff Friedman (Madhat Press, 2023)

**
 
Horse
 
Give me a horse, he said, so we gave him a horse; only now he needed a paddock so he could parade the horse, so we gave him a paddock; only now he needed a saddle, so we gave him a saddle; only now he needed a leg up, so we lifted him by his boot; only now he needed a racetrack, competition—other jockeys and horses— and a crowd, so we gave him all of it, and he took off flying around the track at a record pace; only now he needed a finish line and cameras flashing, so we gave him a finish line and the cameras aimed in his eyes; only now he needed a trophy to lift over his head and a big pay off, so we gave him the trophy and a big pay off to boot; when he turned around, the money was gone. He pawned the trophy for pennies. When he returned to the track, it wasn’t there. Give me a horse, he said; so we stuffed a bit in his mouth and spurred his sides until he took off in a mad gallop; now he didn’t even need us. 

**

This was first published in Floating Tales, by Jeff Friedman (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017).

**
 
Dusk
 
When her hair thinned, when her skin grew paler, I brought her medicine and hot vegetable soup. She wrapped herself in an afghan because she couldn’t shake the chill from her body. I sat down next to her and picked up the soup bowl to feed her the rest of the soup, but she was no longer hungry. The sun streaked the violet sky a burning pink. The light blazed in her cheek for a moment and then faded. I rubbed her feet and hands to restore their heat; still she shivered. The room darkened. Though I sat next to her, she seemed further and further away, as if islands had drifted between us. She was disappearing, a memory blinking out in the mind. I closed my eyes and imagined her voice, warm as cinnamon at dusk. “I’m here,” she said, “here, here, here…” and now there were lights coming on in windows and houses, spangles glittering in the filaments of her hair. 
 
**

This was first published in Floating Tales, by Jeff Friedman (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017).

**
 
White Feather
 
After Alexsandra kissed me, a white feather flew out of my mouth. I pretended that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, though the feather floated between us for a long while before it fell on the carpet. The feather was long and bowed with soft fringe. I wanted to pick it up and twirl it, but Alexsandra seemed concerned. “Did you eat a white bird?” she asked. I shook my head. “It’s only one feather,” I answered. She eyed me suspiciously, though a moment before she had seemed perfectly happy to be kissing me. To prove that there was no problem, I kissed her, and everything was fine. Our lips met, our tongues touched and tangled as they had a thousand times before. Then another feather floated from my mouth and stuck in her thick black hair. She pulled it out and scrutinized the feather for a long time. “There’s something inside you trying to get out,” she said. “You have to do something about it.” “What can I do?” I said. “It’s only two feathers.” She picked up her journal and began writing. Now I was alarmed. Had I done something to deserve this? Had a bird flown into my mouth in a dream? I thought about my dreams, but couldn’t remember anything particular. “Let’s try one more kiss,” I said, but this time, a white dove flung itself from my mouth, flying wildly around the room until it hit the window and fell on the floor. “Is it dead?” I asked. She kneeled and cradled the dove in her arms. Then she carried it outside—I thought to bury it, but instead she threw it in air. The dove caught itself before plummeting into the pavement and landed on a branch above us.  “We’ll figure this out,” she said, squeezing my hand, but I could already feel a tickling in my throat as the dove began singing.  

**

This was first published in Floating Tales, by Jeff Friedman (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017).

**
 
Old Men
 
In the middle of the afternoon, old men lose their gravity, floating off the sidewalks. Some bump their heads against tree trunks. Some collide with birds, who resent the intruders in their air space. Some old men get their filaments of hair tangled in branches while others wisely latch onto clouds and kick their way through the sky. Some old men turn over and over in space, their wallets and keys dropping from their pockets. And others shoot up like hot air balloons.  But on the ground, two old men clutch fire hydrants as if they were lovers and won’t let go.

**

This was first published in 100-Word Story and then in in Floating Tales, by Jeff Friedman (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017).

**
 
Parrot
 
“Nothing to it,” I said. “Just lift your wings and let go,” but the parrot refused to budge from the floor. “If it’s so easy why don’t you do it?” he asked. I lunged at the parrot with my hand cupped, thinking I would toss him in the air, but he was too quick, hopping ahead of me. Then my wife stepped in, pushing her palm in front of my face to stop me. “We learn by imitation,” she said. “Imitation, limitation…” the parrot mocked.  I lunged again, but he evaded me, finding a safe place under the couch.  “Watch and learn,” my wife interrupted, apparently talking to both of us.  She began running through the room flapping her arms quickly to show the parrot what to do. “Gringa es loca,” the parrot said. “Pay attention, and you might learn what it takes to be a bird,” I replied, wondering when our parrot had become bilingual. “Be a bird, be-a-bird, be-a-bird,” he sang.  My wife beat her wings faster and faster and suddenly she rose off the ground floating up to the light fixtures. “Damn,” I said. “Damn, the parrot repeated, waddling out of its shelter, holding up a wing in admiration. 

 **

This was first published in The Red Wheelbarrow, and then in Floating Tales, by Jeff Friedman (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017).

**

Jeff Friedman's eleventh book, Broken Signals was published by Bamboo Dart Press in August 2024. Friedman’s poems and mini stories have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Poetry International, New England Review, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, Smokelong Quarterly, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Anthology, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium, Best Microfiction 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, and The New Republic. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, two individual artist grants from the New Hampshire Arts Council, and numerous other awards.