​Illuminated
 
Like they said in art history, it isn’t the object we see, it’s the light. Impressionism and calotypes. Try to paint the pitcher using only orange, blue, white. Somehow all the hours in dark rooms staring at slides taking notes on stacks of index cards led me to you. Up close everything is geometry: giraffe spots, turtle shell segments, the pattern of mud as it dries ‘til it cracks, the intersection of soap bubbles. Your skin is as intimate to me as the skin of an orange. And as mysterious. Your skin distant as the skin of the sea. You with your ridges, rills, dimples, reaches, legions of pores. How did you ever land in my bed? We chased light as long as we could. Touched as the jet lifted off. Long gleam of beach, lace wavs spun away like the ground under a carnival ride. Breathless. Shine of a seed. You asked what those leaf things children stick on their noses are called. I said helicopters. Winged seeds. You noted the freakish drive of all things to reproduce. On Maui the divemaster zipped my breasts into neoprene. My favorite thing was watching you come out of the water. I could pick you out of a crowd. Hibiscus petals under my burned feet. Thorns hidden in sand. My eyes poured so full of light I had to close them.
 
**

This poem was first published in Rattle.
 
**
 
Big Island
 
I was going to tell your family you died happy, the documentary filmmaker says. I slog up the coarse beach at Mahukona, tugging at my orange one-piece with black squiggles, high-cut thighs. He had written Pack plenty of bathing suits. 

No documentary ever gets made, but we crew swim all the time, like clockwork. Coffee and papaya breakfast, swim. Tamari-drizzled cottage cheese on avocado lunch, swim. Beer cheers to the sunset, swim. I learn kahunas and kupunas (elders), aumakuas (family gods), how to body surf – not bad for a haole. 

One afternoon, a bale of green sea turtles. I swim next to the largest, the granddaddy, the king – not touching him coated as I am in Dr. Bronner’s castile soap and sunscreen, but I gaze into his wizened ancient eye which stares right into me. Enchantment.

Turtles head for cooler deeper water, out to sea. I follow. Sun sinks. Wind lifts. Suddenly I notice the entire bale has disappeared, shore nowhere in sight, fellow swimmers in a bar by now. I am alone in the Pacific. All I have to do is turn around, swim in the opposite direction. Against salty 4’ waves. I dream the turtle’s eye (in his realm now, not mine), alternating strokes – overhand crawl, back, breast, side stroke. Are those roadside ironwoods ahead, or clouds?

Finally, sand. My toes dig in with relish, clasping earth like hands. The filmmaker waits in the dark, jeep high beams on, relieved smile, same old coral shorts. Only later that night, in the warm burnt sugar and night blooming jasmine scented air, in somebody’s hot tub drinking flowery wine, I realize what a risk I took: almost turned forever haole – without breath. I tremble in the water, hide it. Full moon bluely lights my browned skin, asking if my mistake was innocent.
 
**

Thursday’s Fantod
 
Something happened out there. They always place the blame on drunken fishermen. Say be careful on 131, as if everybody isn’t flying doing 80 even the flatlanders, even the cops, even the salty pillars of society, even the moms in gold or silver minivans with umbrella insurance and diamonds the size of starfish in their soft white ears. Say watch out. Men howl at the moon down there. God knows what else. It’s a wonder anybody ever comes back at all, night like tonight. Undulant, hot, lightning rips black sky like claw marks. Neap tide. Heat lightning. Thunder bound and gagged. You remember things like New Orleans jazz at 3 a.m., voodoo, sazerac, how you had to lay a rose on Marie Laveau’s grave and later wished you hadn’t. Why are crypts creepier than mounds? You think of things like the veins near Cain’s carotid. How did God give him his mark? Brand? Bruise? Blemish? You ask a lot of questions, guy holding the fat yellow ferry rope says. Where you from? What you doing on the island? Painting? I don’t see no canvas. Smile only uses half his mouth. Incident on the peninsula. Eternal return. Crease of light dents horizon. Heat rises from the ground. Around the peeling clapboard corner of the ticket office coffee shop, you expect a three-headed dog.
 
**
 
This was first published in Northern New England Review and Deep Water, Maine Sunday Telegram.
 
**

My 85-year-old Mother Sells the Family Cabin to an LLC
 
No place could have been that great, that juicy holy place that was the cabin, all golden sun, all lavender shadows. Hidden from the water, hidden from the road. The dirt road also hidden, its mouth concealed by lips of wild brambles and forsythia, in late summer bulging rose hips. The old crone who once lived in the dilapidated henhouse. The henhouse bones a gatekeeper, rose tarpaper siding half blown off like stunted blushing wings. The no place place. Cabin smell of the pine trees she was born from, black tapers in my grandmother’s lead crystal candelabra, my soft powdery perfume. 

The family of racoons, blue heron, great grey owl, the loons with their haunting love and loss calls. I went into labor there, staring out at green leaves. Read Lady Chatterley’s Lover again after many years in a big brown plastic chair with a cupholder, drinking chilled chardonnay in the sun. I howled at the moon there. Stepped naked into rain and snow storms. Swam north through waxen pond lilies to the loon’s nest in the next town. Lily pad tendrils tangled my legs. Liquid layers of temperature, warm on top, shivery bottom. I cavorted. Floated boats. Dreamt of more cavorting. Always more. 

Always the liminal dream space of the shore, the lapping water, water line of ashes and untrimmed rosa rugosa. Storm broke fireplace of cement blocks. My husband would come home and we would make love, before and after supper, sometimes beans and rice or avocado toast or artichokes dipped in garlic butter with filet mignon if we had money. Sleepy love as the old inevitable sun rose over the road then field sloping down golden and slowly to butter our bodies through the wide bare dormer windows. Our loft he built with his big hands. Outside the silty water, waiting, smelling of river bottom. 
 
**

Woman in a Window from the Night Train Rome to Paris
 
 
Urban sylph, nymph, siren in her rectangle of light, cell honey-hived, swaying for the train that silver slivers through the ancient ruined night, alabaster skin in sepia silk slip – I imagine Alencon lace along her decollete – dark as new moon ocean hair in waves over her shoulders.
 
finally seeing Europe
at 32 after all that art history
frisson
 
Us in dust, paint specks after working on a milky Santorini villa, out of money ‘til we reach Boulevard Haussmann, no American-hot showers since Brindisi ferry. On the train we down crackers with Nutella, sleep on one couchette. Pretty male French steward gifts us a sleeps-six compartment all to ourselves.
 
who am I
to deserve such delight?
at home anywhere but
 
Decades later, lantern slide kaleidoscopes avalanche my mind, that woman in a window: alone, a beige man in a back room, another woman? What music does she dance to – Vivaldi La Primavera, Piaf, jazz, song of her own journey – silence? The last time she made love? Champagne angel, Bernini face, ivory apartment tower, imagined landscape of her faded lace.
 
no choice in
what memories
stay with you
 
**
 
This Isn’t One of Those Nature Poems
 
where Oliver- or Whitman-like I gape and yawp in awe and oneness. I saw God all right, all awesome summer light, Old Testament vengeance, dominion. In Maine my daughter wanted to pluck warm eggs from under chickens before taking off for Wellesley, so of course her father indulged her, prepaid for a dozen birds from the Agway down the road. I picked them up in my white SUV: all that remained, 13 meat birds, ugly teenagers the clerk said. I did not find them ugly, bird resuscitator all my life (hummingbird stuck in cabin, sparrow fallen from  garage rafter on my mother’s teased head whom I named Snickelfritz). 
 
She named the smallest Pebbles. When that one died, off its food, the next smallest became Pebbles. Darwinian, she said. Don’t get too attached, Ma. The largest she called Colonel Sanders. Dappled days grew slowly longer then suddenly shorter. Chickens moseyed in pea gravel, flame day lilies. I fed, watered, wrangled them while she dated, lifeguarded, went to concerts until 1 a.m. Near the end, a dozen heavy breasted white birds waddled after me around the yard, up the steps. I had to shut the door to keep them from tea and poetry inside the cabin. It was not a ceremonial death like she had witnessed when her nouveau hippie uncle slit the throat of a chicken who’d stopped laying with a butcher knife, kids gathered round, some kind of prayer not said in church. That was a bad death, she’d reported. Ancient soul. 
 
She and boyfriend took her chickens nonchalantly to the butcher, loaded them into doomsday car, while I madwoman wept in the doorway. I’d given the victims watermelons for their last meal, not supposed to, they soiled the vehicle. I felt like God and hated it. Did the chickens know their fate? Smell death in a hosed down cement room? Know the last moment they saw sun? I could not bring myself to cook a single one. Pointless deaths. My fault. Eve’s fault. Why did God put the forbidden tree in Eden in the first place? Controlling parent. And I’m the one supposed to make meanings out of things. You anthropomorphize, care too much, my daughter scolded, flipping her dark river of hair.
 
**

Moonflower
 
 
Weighed down by my breasts, my womb, a woman I wait watch worry from the shore, uncertain of the earth beneath my feet, unmoored as my ancestors on widows’ walks, lined eyes ablaze, a reach over tidy towns, wives in black and white obediently burning for their men. A soothsayer with no need of news, only my small pile of green stones and a moon snail shell from Cape Cod, only moonflower in watery moonlight the color of ouzo on ice, umbilicus like a pumpkin vine, only blue forget me nots, white violets, August grass so riotously green it bleeds and reeks when cut. Bad luck to have a woman on a boat. I burn but defiantly like the witches I sprang from, inside all hot white lantern. You can smell apocalypse on me. You would swear I wear long grey skirts with wet hems, dragging forests in my wake. Why did you leave me? The wife’s cry. What was it about her, the sea, her wild incandescent core? We want what we cannot possess. Limitlessness. Ecstasy on others’ graves like Mary with Percy Shelley, shooting stars, wind-shredded peonies, 3 a.m. song of the great grey owl. I am just like you, I confess. I too would sink under that bright water, miles down, nipples frozen to thimbles. I too scuba dive. I too love Romance, guilty of hanging too long too deep for one hit of the bends. Nitrogen narcosis. Night of purple quick. Unanswerable longing. Only alive within a fingertip of death. They call me crazed and crazy, but O! The forbidden flowerings and fruits that I alone have witnessed, felt! The panoply. The edge. The sea, the sea, eternally taking, eternally coming clean.
 
**

Marry Me
 
again, my eternal lover, my best friend! Let’s do it in Sedona’s red cathedral rocks, not the Methodist church in the green shadows of the fresh-to-salt St. George, that staid and verdant valley where my ancestors lie buried. Let’s do it by ourselves, for ourselves, and no one else. This time I won’t refuse to say obey. No white dress. We can both wear shorts. I won’t just have jetted in from work on some documentary, stuck overnight at the O’Hare Hilton where I dance with a robot as strangers drink and smile, bar tab on their company, Lake Michigan wind in the air filling my head with all the places I could go. Alone. Let us be barefoot. A few sags and wrinkles later, not the shiny-as-glass hair and faces we had then: unproven. Truth: I didn’t know what I was getting into. Did not know what I was made of. Selfish to take you, keep you. You said I never left my post. I swear I will never leave you alone again, now. No more apples, no more snakes. I have cut myself on so many edges. Licked my wounds to soul-healed. Scars kintsugi, all gold light – I am finally a character I’d like to write. Late for the Sky instead of Pachelbel’s Canon in D as we trudge together down a long high aisle of ruddy dirt. Come with me. Rut with me. Still believe we are immortal. Let me talk you into mixing both our ashes in one urn, have the kids release our bones in the Aegean off Santorini. I promise I will obey. This time. Now that you have stopped wanting me to. 
 
**

Young with My Husband in the Soufriere Hills
 
Arrival in the middle of the night
 
Volcano heart like many islands. Vulcan god of fire and forge. Long flight LA to Miami to San Juan, then puddle jumper, then long bumpy cab ride in streetlight-less Montserrat dark. Boss’s villa. Brought along two USC friends. Husband and I take the master suite. Long cock roaches in sheets. He says I can’t sleep here. I say I’ll crush any bugs when I roll over on them. 
 
Close to Venezuela
 
Wake to a circle of windows, 360 ocean views, Alp Cliff. I hate/love the pretension of houses with names. British colony. In town, head dude’s racing green Jaguar displayed on a greener lawn. Maid mad at us for bashing coconuts on the pool deck to make coconut chips, stain of the fruit’s womb like wiped blood. Crime scene. Our coconut chips come out tasteless. Stains still there if the villa still is. Volcano erupts a few years after we leave, covering everything in feet of ash.
 
Almost died at sea again
 
We visit a secluded beach via tin boat, when a storm comes. Thorns under sheltering trees, stinging red ants, ruined 35 mm Canon. On the hasty return lightning fizzes, hits the Caribbean all around us. I break the last of my mother’s commandments: stay off the water in an electrical storm. Our Charon in sunglasses in pounding rain tells us he is Danny from Walk of Life by Dire Straits. They and the Rolling Stones recorded here, at Air Studios. Like my home state, Maine, locals can’t afford to live by the ocean.
 
Moment of rare and unexpected grace
 
Hiking the Soufriere Hills, it smells hellish like sulfur, yellows our Ex Officio clothes, you can put a fingernail into the chalk chartreuse cliff face. Under the waterfall, sudden tug on my long straight wet hair: a beaming small Black boy holds onto my ponytail, simply holds it and smiles, as if it might be something beautiful as a cat’s tail. His mother telling him No stop let go of the woman’s hair. Me smiling back at him which is to say It’s okay hold on all you want isn’t hair weird.

**

Back Wall, Molokini
 
Within the atoll’s arms, a Maui postcard: crowd of boats, noise, tourists in bright clothes, pineapple and Oreos, sea bluer than sky, sheltered from weather. Back of the atoll is another country: wind, whitecaps, black-troughed waves, 300’ straight drop of rock wall. Colder darker faster water, blue grey to briny forest green to darkness. Advanced divers only. Divemaster Alain, just back from Alaska with the Cousteau group, tells us Remember your training. Keep track of your buoyancy. This is a drift dive. Your depth can vary 60’ without you even noticing, which of course can be fatal. Someone tells a story of a woman who died here because she panicked, twirled down 300’ like a doll in neoprene, when all she had to do was release her weight belt. Due to the current, the boat drops us off at one side of the atoll, will retrieve us on the other. Engine can’t stop running, or the boat will be carried away. Live entry: your right hand on the right shoulder of the person in front of you. Dive… dive… dive! Swim clear, avoid the prop. My first dive since babies have passed through my body. Ocean fast, relentless, 60’ down, 70’. The convex atoll face, its drop astonish. Plan was explore a ledge where sharks hang out. Instead, our team plastered like pinned butterflies against a solid sheet of water. Marvel movie. Not so much fear as power of the ocean. I would genuflect, incline my head at least, if I could move. We manage to unpeel ourselves from the transparent glue trap. Head count. No one missing. Ultimate affair, I surrender my flesh to the sea’s mouth, all theory and technique born anew as instinct. Cooled, coated in salt, moved by tides inside, I get what I came for: brush with the infinite. After, don’t get any higher than a barstool. Husband and I load up on carbs (hot buttered macaroni), eat and giggle in the shower. In the fancy marble bathtub our gear soaks in fresh water.
 
**

Sherry Abaldo lives with her husband Mario in Las Vegas, NV and rural Maine where she grew up. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, ONE ART (Top 10 Read, July 2024), The Ekphrastic Review, Rattle, Down East Magazine, and on The History Channel and PBS among other outlets. Her poems are forthcoming in Eunoia Review and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Southern California film school. She is a PADI certified advanced SCUBA diver and has a boating license from the Penobscot Bay (Maine) Sail and Power Squadron. Her website is sherryabaldo.com.

What Sleep May Bring
 
I turn in my sleep and each shimmering vignette falls into a box in the attic. The recurring child with sunflower eyes, the man with a voice from October ninth, and a gypsy gazing from a cracked mirror. There are teachers with the heads of giraffes. My uncle is a black girl with a speech impediment. At breakfast my wife says, I dreamt I was flying down the street I grew up on, and I say: Einstein told me to stand at the window to download a new god. Many dreams are shut up in that box, but do they escape after one dies. Is that why my mother died wide-eyed. Maybe she was watching picnics in the Catskills where unknown family played bocci. Was it wrong to shut her eyes like I’d seen in movies. Did that end her dreams before she flew to her familiar dead. Who’s to say we don’t wake in a previous life knowing something we aren’t supposed to know. That time I saw a note under a windshield wiper eight hours before Susan put it there, was that a dream from a life phasing in from another sleep in which I turned onto my back, waking for a moment before diving back into another life still to come.
 
**
 
Waves Dream
 
My therapist says pay attention to how I feel in dreams. Especially the strange ones. I told her I dreamt about gravity waves again. It’s said they travel at the speed of light and make invisible ripples in space. They squeeze and stretch anything in their path as they pass. That’s word for word from Wikipedia, I tell her. I wonder if that’s why I felt like I was on the other side of deja vu. Here we go, she says. If you’ve ever been in love with the wrong woman you know what I mean. Her again, she says. Yes, French kisses and arguments with the intensity of a wah-wah pedal. My therapist rolls her eyes. But it was tidal waves back then. Ever have those. They’re different than gravity waves. I had another witch doctor then. Not as sarcastic as you. Anyway, Susan sat in the break room with a cup of tea and a love letter to another guy. That night I’m at the beach on a sunny day. And here it comes, the wave, so high I can’t see the top of it. I woke up sick and white. I pissed myself. How did you feel. In the dream, I mean. Like I swallowed the moon. Men aren’t so different than women when they try to let go, she says. Let go. How do you let go of a birthmark. She was the light switch in a room full of love triangles. I’m writing this stuff down. Do you want a copy. What about now, these other waves. Well, the vertigo comes and goes, and the ripples, they’re invisible aren’t they. Sometimes I don’t even know she’s there.
 
**
 
Fame Dream
 
Orson Wells flickers at an outdoor cafe, his left hand in his hair at the back of his head. He’s pulling something out of a dream he’s had. I don’t know how I know this. He’s telling a stranger opposite him that there’s a note in the air clean as Eve before she put the world in her mouth. He says her mouth is all the art the world needs. When she spoke I could hear her, Orson says, I could hear her from the other end of a long line of oak trees on either side of a well-worn path marching to a white mansion in Louisiana. I think it was Heaven, he says. The stranger sips espresso from a demitasse made of egg shell. A bird once flew from this cup. I think of the day my mother died when I think of birds flying from cups, the stranger says. Orson and the stranger don’t seem to know I’m standing here camera in hand until the shutter clicks. Sparrows hopping under the table bounce away like electrons in a physics diagram. They look at me now, Orson, stranger, wide-eyed surprised that only sudden rain brings when it falls from an open sky so blue the sun stops on its wheels. Orson says he’d like me to join them, Have a biscotti, he says. It tastes like Greek music. I don’t know how it can, I say. But I must go. And I do. I leave. At the next cafe in an endless row of cafes, Lillian Gish is having lunch with someone who seems to be disappearing. I reach for my camera, but Lillian puts out her hand, touches mine, and I can’t stop crying. It’s ok, she says. Listen, can you hear that. It’s Charlie. A small bird flies out of her cup. 
 
**
 
Mother in a Snow Globe
 
My mother plays Beautiful Dreamer electrified in lamplight. There’s a blizzard. It’s hard not to fall asleep. I imagine I’m sitting on the milk box frozen shut on the stoop, the oaks hold out their arms trying to dance in the snow. The kitchen makes itself known, yellow wall phone wants to make a call to anyone up this late. There must be others not asleep. Perhaps the stranger from that day in the ‘40s, the man with a blonde guitar who my sister said was crying. Celia was there. Said our mother spoke to him so quietly it was like taking a bath in an empty house or crows watching people go by from the trees. The three of them stood on electrified ice. Snow stopped in an old movie, Celia said, and everyone in town sang Auld Lang Syne. She was only four so it made sense. It was hard for her not to fall asleep holding our mother’s hand. I imagine the amber glow above the stove, the mouse in the corner with its hunger, music coming undone by the chord in my mother’s hands, and the colored lights in the eaves outside making it snow all night. Trees trying to hold onto each other in the moonless yard. That look on their faces. The house is a love story from the other side of town, the piano in the air, dreaming. Outside again I watch my mother electrified in lamplight. Colored lights in the eaves, below them the window-box of black shriveled flowers burnt with snow.
 
**

Wistful Secrets
 
Cat, you call yourself the Queen of Gardens and I don’t dispute that. But I know a mockingbird who disagrees though I’m baffled by his language. Penny, you believe your cousins fell from the sky and invented starlight. Maybe, but only if they gather together in a million silver heaps if they want to be more than wishful thinking. And Train, dearest Train, you have grandeur in your whistle even if it calls to barrel fires and men sleeping in the dirt offering hubcap talismans before your flying windows. Come, my black wisdom tooth, curl up in my lap and dream of carp. Listen, my little shiny man, we have a date so be careful of pocket holes and sidewalks. And you my handsome machine, lift from your clickety-clackety click and rise. Rise into a bright blue sky and give the clouds a ride.
 
**
​
Sanctuary
 
When darkness is jumbled up in my heart I wade into your river, love, and a plane pulls an orange moon behind it, clouds write memoirs about fleeting sky on water and trees on a sunny bank lean to see themselves disappear, a weathered fence staggers through weathered hills, and three feet above rough ground some jazz in the dying sun, a parade of wildflowers, I mean, a commotion of yellow jackets thrumming for queen’s favor. When cruel things are jumbled all to hell in my heart your face reminds me of another country where saints look out from doorways in the rain. Five hundred shrines of Madonna and Child in five hundred tired streets, fountains older than some wars. You’re my home where clotheslines drip clean angels, a church stoop beneath the moon. 

**

Lenny DellaRocca is founding editor and publisher of South Florida Poetry Journal-SoFloPoJo and publisher/editor of Witchery, a place for Epoems. He has new poems in Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Rattle and forthcoming in I-70 Review.

Scarborough Fair Chicken

Tulsi said, "This is a dish my dad always made for high holidays. He used to tell me that the most important part was pouring white wine over the meat after it had been baking for 30 minutes. The way he talked about the herbs made me feel like our planet was made solely for the pleasure of our taste buds."

For the Greeks, parsley symbolized death and rebirth, often used to decorate tombs. Rosemary was the herb of remembrance. Sage symbolized immortality. Thyme represented courage—Roman generals embroidered it on their togas. Legend has it that the infant Jesus's manger was filled with it. Sweetness. The "virgin's humility." Peace tied to the sheath. Arrows in the quiver. An unrequited love. "I have an aiker of good ley-land/ which lyeth low by your sea strand." Sober and grave grow merry in time.

Almost 50, Tulsi is the spice vendor at the west end of the Winter Shed. Today, she’s wearing a royal blue and cream blouse with white lace and seashell patterns, her grandmother's pearl earrings, and a razor blade necklace from her ex-husband. Her black shag is effortlessly left alone, a few dyed strands falling over her hazelwood brown eyes.

"The chicken breast must be boneless and pounded thin. Wrapped in mozzarella and prosciutto. When it’s finished, lay it on a saucer full of melted tarragon butter," she said. "You know, my dad was the biggest Simon and Garfunkel fan that ever lived. When I make this, I’m making it for all three of them," she added wistfully.

She’s a painter. The dish is a pastel of egg yolk gold, emerald globs of oil, and a long, slender wishbone hanging by the side like a chewed filet of river perch. Severed lemons barely kiss in a bed of kale, like two mollusks making love in algae. Tulsi is the person in the market who makes everything she touches more interesting. She not only knows how to cook, but she also knows how to make food mean something. She knows the stories behind the dishes and tells them like an elder describing creation myths.

"Does it make music?" I asked.

"Yeah, it does. It’s kind of funny, actually—when I hear it, it’s in the key of E Dorian. Funeral doom metal. Have you listened to that before? My ex was in a band before things got ugly with us. This dish makes me feel closer to my dad, but it also sounds like the morning I found him all alone in his bathroom... Did you know 'Scarborough Fair' comes from an old English canticle? It’s about an elfin knight who came to a beautiful woman’s window. He promised to abduct her unless she performed an impossible task."

"What was the task?" I asked.

"No one knows," she said. "Maybe that is what keeps the ballad alive."

**

Fish Mom

Clara is the "fish mom." For 25 years, she has worked every weekend at the market, running Atlantic Fresh Fish. Her family has been in the business for three generations. Boston is in her blood, the way oil is in olives or wine in grapes.

Red Snapper, Tilapia filets, New Bedford Cod, Shrimp—shell on and peeled—Salmon, Marlin, Kingfish, and Mako fill her stand. Half-filled plexiglass tubs, freeze-wrapped cutlets, and cardboard boxes shoved in ice with names carefully printed in Sharpie black all line the counter. Her father’s first scale, looking like the first computer sold out of a Silicon Valley garage, still sits in its place. And then there are the clams.

"Have you ever really looked at a clam?" Kim asks me, just as she begins to share what I’m missing. "Clams have a foot, you know. They use it to burrow into sand or mud, anchoring themselves." She notices my expression. "This little guy, where he's from, could live for over 100 years. The quahog can live for over 500 years. Just think about that. It was alive when Martin Luther got booted from the Church. Some of this guy's friends were still around when the conquistadores took down the Aztec Empire."

My disgust starts to morph into admiration. "Clams can change their gender," she continues. "They're hermaphrodites. They may start as males and transition to females as they get older. Pretty cool, huh?" My disgust coming back.

"Yeah, that is pretty cool," I have to admit. Then, half-jokingly, I ask, "Do they taste better over time?" Instantly, I regret how sexist that sounds.
​
Kim laughs it off. "I'm not sure about that. But guess what else?" She holds one up. "They may not have a brain, but they’re smarter than you’d think. They have sensory organs that let them respond to their environment. They can detect light, vibrations, even chemicals in the water." She pauses. "And they have a muscle that lets them close their shell tightly if a predator comes by. These guys know how to survive in the most dangerous places on earth."

I get the sense she could tell me just as much about tuna if I asked. I thank her for sharing all that about clams. It occurs to me that knowing what you eat is more than just knowing where it came from or how it was prepared. Knowing what you eat means truly understanding what makes it special. That takes time, curiosity, and someone like Clara.

There is no such thing as food—only organisms that we choose to eat or not eat. All organisms have value beyond our desire to consume them, even the smallest and most unassuming creatures.

**

Shepherd's Pie

Pióg an aoire, Escondidinho, Shepherd's pie—it all means using what's left over to make something edible. For the past week, that's pretty much how Samantha has approached life. She’s not the type to sulk. He left. So what? He always does. He told her she’s pathetic. So what? She doesn’t need him anyway. Unshowered, uncombed, her red, frizzled hair held by two stainless steel, dog bone-shaped barrettes, her long, pale legs shiver from the breeze coming through the kitchen window. It's 10 AM, and her glass is full of Sheldrake’s chardonnay. Rubbing—almost massaging—her bruised and tattooed left arm (bouquet garni entwined in rose bushes) and dragging on a Marlboro Light, she knows that in three hours, she will be dead. This pie will be the last thing she leaves this world.

Many believe that peasant housewives invented Shepherd’s pie as an easy way to use what was left from the Sunday roast. In Ireland, they were too poor to use beef, so they used lamb. In the northern parts of England, they couldn’t dare call it what the Irish did, so it became Cottage Pie. In North America, most workers ate their meat, potatoes, and corn separately, but some (mostly of Asian origins) combined their rations to create a more communal dish. The French-Canadian railway workers liked it and called it “pâté chinois,” which loosely translates to Chinese pie.

Well into the 20th century, the absence of refrigeration made it necessary for many domestic kitchens to store cooked meat rather than raw. In the 1940s, chef Louis Diat recalled that “When housewives bought their Sunday meat, they selected pieces large enough to make into leftover dishes for several days.”

Hot on Sunday,
Cold on Monday,
Hashed on Tuesday,
Minced on Wednesday,
Curried Thursday,
Broth on Friday,
Cottage pie Saturday.

Fidgeting into her burgundy-coloured, rubber-clog-like boots, Samantha steps outside and sits on her front steps. The world feels a little less important today. The blue jays squawk louder than usual. There’s a gentle breeze. Fall is coming. No one worries about her, just as no one worries about gravel stones on the ground; they belong there and don’t mind being stepped on. She wears black trousers and a black V-neck shirt—she never misses a shift. Inside, the pie is baking; the cheddar is beginning to drape over the little snowbanks of whipped potatoes. The carrots, peas, and lamb, all falling apart together, permeate the house. Samantha lights another cigarette and thinks about who she could give the pie to. For the first time in days, she feels herself smiling. Her mind is made up. No one at work needs to know she’s not coming in.

**

Alma-Ata

I called him Dad, though he was actually my father-in-law. For over 60 years, he worked as a gardener. He was set to go to Vietnam but chose the orchards of Mexico instead. When he finally came back, all he knew how to do for a living was grow apples. Dad could tell you everything there is to know about a Pink Lady, but he could never keep a girlfriend. He could give a lecture on Galas, but he never went to his own prom. He knew Fujis and Honeycrisps, Pacific Roses and Braeburns, Northern Spys, SnapDragons, and Jonagolds, but he never bothered to own a car or open a bank account.

He told me that apples are the oldest source of food in our history as a species. Somewhere, he read that apples originated in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, east of the Caspian Sea. The wild apples there, Malus sieversii, have been growing for millions of years.

Dad even knew that the Jesuits were the ones who brought them to North America. The only apple here before them was the crab apple—cider for foraging bears and livestock feed for hardy pilgrims.

What most people do not know is that he saw apples as a promise from the Maker. The way we read Genesis is all wrong, he would tell me. It is not a forbidden fruit (it is not mentioned in the Bible). The fruit is forbidden to be eaten unless the person eating it is worthy. Apples were eucharistic to him. He saw in their center the aboriginal fingerprints of charcoal-black star men. For him, the skin of a well-nurtured apple was like a brick torched in a cosmic fire. To bite into one was to consume the tender, custard ochre muscle of Christ. Through his eyes, in his trees, they hung like rubies in the Garden of Babylon. Split into halves with a pocket knife, they spread their thighs like moth wings—Lepidoptera.

The Cameo was his favorite, a majestic globe of flame red and scarlet. In his hand, it felt like a ball of energy, like chi. The force of life itself pulsated through his palm to the tips of his nails. He never went to college and never studied with monks. But in Mexico, one summer, browsing a bookstore in Oaxaca, he bought a used copy of the Tao Te Ching. So simple. So urgent. So available. So kind. So happy.

**

Nervous Breakdown

"Banano! Banano! Banano!" I heard the market vendor shouting from behind a weather-worn plywood picnic table. The man wore aviator sunglasses, had bushy salt-and-pepper hair, and a shapely mustache the colour of snow fox fur. He was more excited than he should have been to be hawking bananas at 6:30 in the morning on a brisk, drizzly October Sunday in Rochester.

I kept telling myself they were just bananas. But I had already begun to lose my grip before I even got out of the car. Stalks and blades. Pesticides and sterility. Chrome yellow-fleshed corpses stacked on top of each other, seared and soldered together at the stubs like amputated fingers. Bodies bathed in pesticides, clumped together in giant pools like eels in a hatchery. Roundworm-killing injections in the ground. Dermatitis. Kidney failure. Neurotoxins. Sliced and diced beige disks, like stacked poker chips.

"Banano! Banano! Banano!" The market vendor shouted louder. One dollar! One dollar!"

My forehead was throbbing, and sweat was beginning to drip down my eyelids. The Desert Storm fatigue-tan cardboard boxes in front of him looked like ammo cartridges. Dole... Dole... Dole... The "O" in the name blasted apart like a thermonuclear reaction. Ethylene gas blasting in all directions. Hormones blasting in all directions. Rapist dragon's semen spraying everywhere. Lost children. Poisoned fields. Birth defects. Finely sharpened machetes glistening in the plantation's sunlight, sparkling light beams jumping off the edges of the knives like citrine crystals. Loads and loads of them, carried secretly through the jungle on shoulders in bright navy-blue garbage bags. God, my head hurts.

As I looked up, a twenty-something RIT environmental studies major with a Columbia windbreaker, hemp sandals, and a frohawk of saffron-orange hair leaned over and told me that bananas are shaped to retrieve sunlight. "They go through a process called negative geotropism—they grow against gravity," he said while tossing several bushels into a small Wegmans tote bag. I had already begun to forget why I had come here in the first place. The sun was finally rising, a school-bus-yellow ball of information punishing my retinas to death.

**

​George Cassidy Payne is a writer, philosopher, and crisis counselor whose work focuses on mental health, social justice, and ethical reflection. With a background in philosophy and humanities, George has taught a wide range of courses and contributed to various community initiatives. His writing explores themes of resilience, the human experience, and the intersection of technology and well-being. George is also a 988 Crisis Text/Chat counselor and specializes in suicide prevention. His passion for fostering meaningful dialogue and promoting mental wellness shapes both his writing and his work in public service.

​Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board
  
Hungry for black magic, for divination in the suburban dark, we’d pick the slightest among us & lay her down supple as a new spring shoot. She’d shut her dandelion eyes & slack her limbs like the dead as we kneeled round, loose-slid our fingers under her butterfly-wing shoulders, hips, knees, feet. Queen bee among us held the scalp’s weighted cradle. Soon our whisper-chants began as we summoned the occult in nighties & PJs on a slumber-party floor. Once we did it in a cemetery, laid her fearless head by a stone. Flexed our spells until we swore she became weightless, swore we saw light under her hover-held body. We had lift-off. Better than NASA & its moonwalker men, we gave gravity the slip. Practice-kissed Death on the lips, turned Earth on her axis, dawned worlds. We were girls. Nothing we charmed wouldn’t do our bidding.
 
**
 
Ouija
 
In frilly bedrooms of dusty rose, we set fairy tables for the undead. They arrived on phosphorescent wings as we laid out our divining tools. Never mind it was a parlor game, trademarked by Hasbro. We trafficked in esoterica; our small hands skittered across the surface with witchy ease. Spirits moved them—can you feel it? Plied with questions, they plucked out answers letter by letter. Plath & Hughes made their own talking board with an overturned brandy glass as a planchette. Channeled their hot subconscious. Dabbled in necromancy. What we really wanted: to gash the veneer of the ordinary with polished fingernails. Chip away chemical lawns, driveway newspapers, the music-box tinkle of ice cream trucks. Yank a portal to the unborn. Make ourselves mouthpieces. Become oracles.
 
**
 
Blood Sisters
 
We coveted cuts, self-inflicted pinpricks. A picked scab was kismet, a chance to press our crimson together. By mingling plasma, we sealed our sisterhood. Mere friendship wasn’t enough—we needed that bloodbond written in the skin. Just before AIDS made everyone afraid, we solemnly merged cells: For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Our schoolyard romps revolved around a set of twins, blonde & Gothic, in matching hair bobbles. A mythic closeness we could only imagine. Fate gave us brothers with dirt bikes & cowlicks & smoldering silences. We craved doubleness. Bubble-lettered our longing on scented stationary at sleepaway camp, along the ruffled edges of Maine lakes where the loon would call her lonely call. Bloodoath unbroken. Wounds reaching for each other, soft as pines across the wilderness.
 
**

Self-Defense for Celestial Bodies
 
On the radio they speak of dark matter as I comb the Web, untangle its dark filaments to find pepper spray for my daughters—protector saint of habanero, lachrymose evil-eye friend to clip on a belt or fist-grip, running. They speak of bits that don’t interact with light, early-universe particles, scaffolding of galaxies. Some come pocked with rhinestones, others lethal pink & lipstick-shaped. Daphne could’ve hazed Apollo’s face instead of morphing into a laurel tree, frozen in bark as he groped her. I put my faith into this cloak of cayenne, put pepper spray in my cart for my daughters. We watch how-to videos & practice wielding the invisible: point nozzle out, flick safety switch & thumb-click trigger. Talisman of temporary blindness, swifter than prayer. Dark matter bends light across the cosmos—we can’t see its dark hand, though stars at spiraled edges spin away from us.
 
**
 
Young Love
 
The windshield is a crisscrossed geometry of frost as we wait for the school bus, 6:30, 13 degrees in the just-started car & my daughter has been asking questions all week, how old was I for my first boyfriend, first kiss, is she running late at 14, & I tell her there is time, love’s not a 100-meter dash & young love is awkward anyway, a practice run for when two people, easy in their skin, can be easy around another’s skin—& we are idling in our own breath-clouds when a song comes on the radio, rock anthem portal to youth, & like a garland of birds that lifts from the powerline all at once & sashays into flight, I’m in a dorm bed where a boy & I lie next to stereo speakers, upswell of violin & electric guitar star-shooting through us, body to body barely touched, bridged by the bridge of a song & fresh as a lake cracking open in spring. In spring.
 
**
 
Self-Love
 
After the doctor slit my belly open, a hooked fish, a purse unzipped & spilled onto the OR table—ripped cinema tickets, pens drained of ink, unlucky pennies—after he took the sick part out & stitched a jagged seam up my middle, every day I asked a nurse to fill the Pepto-pink bedside basin with hot water & baby soap that crested like egg foam, new life, then I dipped the rough terry in & wrung it out steam-wreathing to rub one moon-pale segment at a time, forearm, sternum, calf, hip, the way a cat runs the rasp of her tongue, until I could no longer avoid the very centre of the centre of myself—red rutted road, flaming abyss, solar plexus radioactive—& I dabbed that barbed-wire zone, rooting for the torn edges to find each other again, come together skin to skin like dancers or lovers, reaching for wholeness like any broken thing.
 
**
 
Campsite, Block Island
 
We plunged through brush & bramble to get there, thorn of wild sea-rose tracing thin red scabs on our shins. We scaled low stone wall, found moss-cupped clearance between scrub tree & bush where we raised a tent for the night. Within ripstop nylon walls, we tumbled orbits round muscle & skin, sought out bluffs & hollows of each other. July’s damp breath between us as we lay spine to spine with earth, its sinuous roots. Above: leaf & star. I’ve made a green altar there, Shinto shrine where I go sometimes to love’s early days, ours, among crickets & katydids, musk of bayberry & blown salt. How long would it last, this rigged-up joy? We zipped a membrane between ourselves & coming storm, slam of waves in the distance. Next morning, tent’s a lantern, blazing light. Fragile scrim still standing. Us sun-dazzled inside it.
 
**

This poem first appeared in First Literary Review-East.

​**
 
Wendy Kagan writes in a converted barn in the Catskill Mountain foothills, preferably on a loveseat by her wood stove with a cup of creamy British tea. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Eunoia Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Blood Moon Aria was long-listed for the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2024 chapbook competition and is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. More at wendykagan.com.
 

​After Safe Harbor
 
She drives home in the late afternoon sun, the sun falling like warm copper 
on her white convertible, past the city’s dazzling new soccer stadium, past
the pricey restaurants, the shops on Main, on past the Peace Center where 
someone is doing Legally Blond, this woman, hungry for a pleasant dinner 
with her husband, decides she will come back to this house, volunteer again 
to teach poetry for a few days, back for the dozen or so women boarding 
here, cajoling them to write something—anything— the very young holding 
their dazed toddlers, staring down at the empty notepads on their laps, others 
holding their thirty- or forty- or even fifty-something-year-old breath when she
asks who wants to read, as if they did not know their breath was all they had 
they could count on, they wanting to know but never asking what she knew 
about life, whatever the hell she could understand about rage, and she trying 
to get them to write a poem about what love means—love!—about what regret 
feels like, tastes like, those long-playing bass notes of grief, what forgiveness
means; telling them not to overwrite, to go for the suggestion, allusion; to reach
deep within themselves for what she likes to call that perfect, muted metaphor.
 
**
 
That Fast-Breaking Water Line
 
We wonder now where they’ve gone, those winsome, casual neighbours,
a somewhat older couple—not unlike us, visiting their daughter—all
sharing an upscale resort with pool in the Low Country of South Carolina. 
Having forgotten their real names, if we ever knew them, we’ve settled
on Pete and Ginger. And having misplaced as well where they might live,
I’ve assigned them a stylish white brick townhouse in one of the prettier 
sections of coastal south Jersey. Let’s agree to Asbury Park, home of the
Stone Pony, where most mornings anyone of us might catch them walking 
along Brady Cove Beach, to watch a potpourri of dogs racing along the 
fast-breaking water line, pups meeting up with one another: young and hale,
or perhaps hobbled—fat, short, white-muzzled old timers— none of them 
harboring biases or agendas for or against much of anything. There, just to 
take the air, the briny water to cool them. Barking at whatever comes along
or runs away. For some reason I have to think the long, bony brown one 
is named Thurman. Another, a mottled Bichon Frise, will be called Adèle, 
although no one can say if she’d be happy with the appellation, little tease
that she is. Their owners, tanned and toned, along with one portly bald fellow
I’ll call Carl, nodding and smiling knowingly to one another, yet all keen to 
move along because a latté, or maybe a draft beer, would be ever so diverting 
just now, the tawny lifeguard taking it all in, perhaps anticipating what he 
and Gloria will be getting up to later that night, after a pizza. Although I have 
no idea if that is her real name. Gloria. Nor could I begin to tell you how she 
worries about her aging parents up in Tom’s River, dad just home from a scary
bout with some respiratory disease. Meanwhile, not much chance we’ll ever 
run into old Pete and Ginger again. Or the distracted lifeguard and Gloria, or 
Carl. or Thurman and that scampish Adèle. Not that we’d miss them all that
much, in truth. And yet we wonder, don’t we, just where they have all gone. 
 
**
 
One Hundred and Twenty-Seven Presbyterians   
 
a parcel of them under the age of four, plus one infant girl clinging to the neck 
of her distracted mother, listen, enraptured, to their deep-voiced minister, he
dressed today in a white golf shirt and tan slacks, all settled well into aluminum 
chairs on the shady church lawn facing him and his bearded, guitar playing 
accompanist this bright summer Sunday, the heavens above the truest blue; 
plus, smack in the center of it all, maybe twenty feet from the preacher, sits 
one attractive woman in a floral-print dress with her impatient French bulldog, 
he nosing for something winsome in the long grass, pretty much everyone else
taking up the tune, and not dispiritedly, about saving their oh-so anxious souls,
when the dog spots a squirrel, barks like hell, and rips loose from the woman
to give chase, the startled squirrel scooting away and up the giant oak that has 
uncompromisingly given us all shade, surprising the much-admired minister 
and his irritated guitarist, one hundred and twenty-seven, much perturbed 
Presbyterians and their bevy of kids, the woman with the infant girl, and no 
doubt the agitated dog, as well as my wife and me, as if to suggest there’s a 
not so-subtle lesson here, for all of us, about temptation, about salvation.

**
 
Colonel Mustard  
                      
was found not guilty in a Jersey City court yesterday of offing Mrs. White and
released from prison, largely on a technicality involving forensics. No one was 
in any way happy about the old coot getting out, as he always smelt just a bit off, 
sour—his very presence like a stain you struggle to get out of your bowling shirt. 
And let’s not forget his family’s history of weaponizing gas, some hundred years
ago. Recall as well that the man had always had an eye on Miss Scarlet—but then
what man had not? Her so-called “scarlet ways with men;” her “Hey, what are you 
looking at?” look she practiced before the mirror, in the library, not to mention 
her grand sense of entitlement; while White, ever so bland, had long had a kind of 
love/hate thing for colourful men. Hmm. Now, back to Mustard: The work of one 
über-liberal judicial defense team in the city destroyed the prosecution’s chain
of custody case when it was shown that Professor Plum’s DNA was on the knife
found in Mustard’s possession. Coincidental? This whole shebang now gets pretty 
complicated: who, where, and with what awful tool? Figure Plum knows something 
and he’s not talking, duplicitous guy that he can be. Put the clues together any way 
you can, but recall that Mr. Green has not been seen for days. Okay, maybe Plum 
(the old fruit!) killed White, and planted the shiv on Mustard, he going down for 
the crime, but was it Plum? Or Green? Maybe the preening Mrs. Peacock, who was
pissed at all of them, tipped off the fuzz about seeing Mustard and White together 
in the conservatory minutes before that scream in the hall: poor, wan Mrs. White,
dead—or mostly dead—and old Mustard insisting he’d never seen that five-inch 
butter knife, like the sharp-tongued bastard had not spent his whole messy life 
around just such knives. And what about Green? Always fiddling with the rope
and those creepy candlesticks. White had jilted the dude just months ago when she 
learned he did not like board games. Her favorite pastime. So, who? Plum? Green? 
Mustard? Or Miss Scarlet herself, vamping in the billiard room, oh so hoity toity? 

**
 
My Grandmother was Born with Only Two Hands
 
yet, at barely nineteen years of age, the young woman began raising up six 
strong kids, one year after the next, my own father being the first—and he, 
I suspect, something of a surprise. The couple’s ardor not to be slaked: three 
boys and three girls, each with their own ideas, urges, Grandmother pruning 
and pushing them into shape, into their school work and household chores, 
guiding them through so many common fears and into whatever they’d set 
their minds to. Two young people determined to make those rails, ties, and 
cinders fit; her hard-bodied, ambitious husband, a twenty-year-old telegrapher
working the Delaware and Lackawanna line. He, following there his own dad, 
a brakeman, both far too weary from the commonplace struggles of coal-mining 
in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania to be overly concerned with what was going on 
that year in war-torn rural France, or in the raging fire fields of Belgium--
Passchendaele and Ypres burning in the daily papers—though that one brought 
about by a graver, far more pernicious kind of heat. One which may be returning. 
 
**

Arthur McMaster has enjoyed two careers, one in federal service, where he spent time in Europe. The second, as a university professor of English, creative writing and literature. He is a great fan of Robertson Davies, and likes to think he has learned something useful from him in his own fiction writing. His debut novel, In the Orchards of Our Mothers, taken from a line in a poem by W.H. Auden, was recently released. He has three published volumes of poems, the most recent, The Whole Picture Show, from a small press in Limerick, Ireland. He enjoys the prose poem form for the freedom it offers to the narrator. To the story-teller working with allusion and fresh use of language. 
​