​
The Hill

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

** 

Departure

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

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

**

Taking the Trail

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

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

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

**

Riverside

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

**

Listening for Birds

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Portrait as a Burned-Out Porch Light

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

**

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

They Promised That You Were Set Apart for Something Holy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exodus

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

**

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

**

Subjects to Consider for Both Painting and Writing

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

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

In Your Soul Hafiz

“Admit something: everyone you see, you say to them, ‘Love me.’”
Hafiz (1320-1389)
 
In your soul Hafiz there must have been a passionate lover of plumped purple figs, red ruby seeds of pomegranate, wine on lips welcoming a mauve dusk alone. You must have cried out of deep sorrow and known loss not just of the departed but of someone alive beneath the sun, where you could see her stroll hand in hand with another by a river. Her cheek brushed with a pink rose not one you offered; her smile beamed not by your romantic verses. You let her be, turned to the divine, and your soul sang.
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Spring Hike
 
She travels light. A miniature emerald-coloured knapsack on her back holds a Ziplock bag of granola with red dried raspberries, sunflower seeds, and shaved almonds to eat when she reaches the mountaintop. A sixteen-ounce bottle of ice mint tea to sip, hanging on the pouch of the knapsack as she hikes. Scented lavender towelettes to wipe her armpits. A white t-shirt with three quarter sleeves to change into when the sweat has dripped down her spine to her coccyx bone. She travels light, smiling at birdsongs filtering through her eardrums, caressing her mind. Absorbing colours of yellow forsythia in early spring, goldenrods, daisies and Queen Ann’s lace growing on the side of the mountain. Buries her nose in purple lilac bushes in early June, she inhales their scent as their branches sway. She babbles with the brook as her eyes follow its path down the mountainside, singing its melody. She mimics the wings of the eagle, zig-zagging her arms in flight. A butterfly kissing fuchsia flower to flower. A bee suckling the nectar centre’s breast of a sunflower. She’s glowing sunlight in midst of a summer’s poem. 
 
**
 
Savour
 
It has been pouring for three days. Purple orchids, and pink hibiscus are gone with the island. Gone with harsh winds that tremble lips, skull and heart.  Where to take refuge?  I hear the news of flooding from uncle. Row boats needed to traverse from street to street. In my safe home in the US, I peel an orange in circular motion, zest tickle nostrils and I savor each segment as if it were my last. I can’t stop thinking of the famine in my country, and the sea that rises, the erosion of land, the trees sliding inches forward towards the final turquoise crystal of life. My abundance is a joy and a guilt. Red blood oranges becoming rare, disappearing in the daylight with rain drops on tin roofs, makeshift homes and cobalt blue tent slums blown by harsh winds. 
 
My abundance is a joy and a guilt. The last time I visited the island, the disaster was an earthquake where bodies were buried under rubble. Partial living rooms and kitchens had collapsed. I could picture the neighbours sitting for their last meals of malanga, plantains, okra with mushroom, silky black rice perhaps a fried red snapper in creole sauce.  A stiff leg or and an arm jolted my heart under rubble as uncle and I walked the neighborhood looking for friends and peeking inside partial houses, the way you look inside a magenta doll house where the purple paisley couch still stands in the corner. Except, this wasn’t a play. One grey cloud hung over the city. It was a place of oat and mahogany-coloured coffins and funerals. One grey cloud hangs now with the hurricane. Uncle tells me, “Hurricanes will wash away the island. We can’t take any more.” I whisper a prayer and a blessing. I pick up another orange, peel it in circular motion & savour each segment.
 
**
 
When The Ruler Strikes
 
My spine elongates when she walks down the aisle with her wooden ruler in hand. The red chambers of my heart jolt when her shadow roams from the back of the third-grade classroom to arrive at the front.  Her lemon scent from the bottle of Jean-Naté permeates the air.  Hermance’s scent approaches my desk that squeaks. I quickly switch from writing with my left hand to writing with my right hand.  Her wooden yellow ruler smacks my hands. “You think I didn’t see you switch hands? Huh?” My shame for being caught lowers my gaze.  My heart jumps like a race horse over hurdles. “Look at me when I’m talking to you, Jean Baptiste.”  I pick up my head to see Hermance’s face protruding from her black and white veil.  Her light caramel-coloured skin seems to age each day without any compassion. Did she ever cry? Did she ever know loss, fear, suffering?

Near her eyes are crows’ feet resembling small pleats on my pink school uniform. Hermance strolls the aisles with pride that her skin color is better than my mocha skin tone. The school girls with light skin were not hit on their hands. Each night, I prayed for the awful school building to be torched by someone who carried the viridian green rage in their arthritic fingers. 
 
**
 
Black Summer Peach
 
I had fallen far from the peach tree. Washed by rain drops on a bed of green fervent summer leaves, carried by the wild wind. My stem and pit don’t resemble other peaches. They remain un-plucked by fingers; small toes have pointed unable to reach my twin.  You and I are not from the same branch, or the same family of flesh and seeds. I wait for the tumbling of your round body and you do not fall to join me in the grass. The soil from which we grew has given you all the pigmentation, and I pale and fuzzy, rinsed again by the rain, soak and shiver with morning dew drops. My complaint has only reached you from where you are, up high in the tree with the tenderness of a breeze.  Maybe, I will become the first black peach when the mud coats my uneven skin. Yours will glisten in the sun on a curved branch hanging over the ripples of the creek. The tourists sailing will capture your perfect circumference, peach colour and texture in their photographs. I would’ve been too far from the tree that birth us to be noticed. They will rave “Oh how beautiful, the shimmer of this perfect peach in sunlight.” Then, you will be placed in a pearl frame on a windowsill.  I would’ve been coated in dry mud and only rain boots crushing my body will free my feathered soul. At the sound of tourists dragging their feet, my segments will smear the ground of the orchard. Maybe, I will be noticed when one lifts up their foot to look in the grooves, asking, “What’s that?”           
 
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Jerrice J Baptiste is an artist, poet, author of nine books. Her most recent book titled, Coral in The Diaspora, was published by Abode Press (August 2024). She’s been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize by Jerry Jazz Musician 2024 & Abode Press 2025, and as Best of The Net in 2022 by Blue Stem. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Mantis, One Art: Poetry Journal, Neologism Poetry Journal, The Write Launch, The Banyan Review, Ecotheo Review, The Yale Review, The Lake, Artemis Journal and hundreds of others. She facilitates poetry as a returning teaching artist at The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY. Her poems & collaborative songwriting are featured on the Grammy nominated album-Many Hands: Family Music for Haiti.