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William Teets

7/28/2025

Four Winds

She asks me what I do when my heart’s choir has no more songs to sing. I tell her I play Mohammed’s Radio and listen for Ray Charles’ ghost to haunt me long and hard. Drink straight from the bottle, hope to hear whispered tomorrows. Watch rising waters so I can bob, batter, and bleed against blue-white ice from Northern seas, juxtapose and dismiss the wanton West, seek the seminal Far East. Long for the return of the great god Pan, where just below the equator, we’ll buoy in Arabian salted waters of an indecent time. Against it. Against it. Always against it.

**

Resurrection in Reverse

Maybe like Johnny I’ll dress all in black. Drink in the dark with lights turned bright. Skip the obligatory mass but pray so hard, every child will be fed. Friday started good but after three days of heavy drinking my hoped-for resurrection rose with nothing but ears made from chocolate. My garbage refused by any landfill. The fucking dice were loaded from the start, yet everyone acts surprised when craps is rolled. Offended that I bought a handle of Jameson from the hot liquor store girl open on Sundays. Scowl when I announce my movable feast, my glory to thee, is a BLT on rye and a stale bag of chips. Jesus Christ, someone roll that stone back.

**

Albany Post Road

Past the Gallon Measure, past St. Christopher’s on the right. Humming streetlights paint the sidewalks with yellow hue. Arteries pump so hard, skin is hot to touch. Through the humid summer night, even perspiration above the lip cannot unboil blood. The last place to want to go is home, the only place left to go is home. A rogue car gravels by, Aqualung feeling like a dead duck. The small-town folds in on itself, a rusted birdcage without any birds. Key unlocks a quiet door, dead air inside smells of moth balls in a dusty closet. Speed Racer sheets stick like shed snakeskin. Cock in hand, slight gasp and groan, mother exhales in an adjacent bedroom. Baby is safe. Baby is home. Baby has never been so fucking far away.

**

Coliseum Bar

Fruit flies drone around the dirty bar mop. I check none are imprisoned in my ice. Hank Snow locomotives steam through secondhand smoke and spilled rye. The last payphone in Manhattan waits for diamonds and rust to call from the Midwest. Construction workers on Columbus Circle jackhammer over Fats, and not until barefoot Courtney enters the Coliseum like a conquering Cleopatra, do the lions and Christians become unwary of one another. With soft-licorice tar on the bottom of her feet, she jazzes across the blue-tiled floor and the dive-juke-joint turns into Shalimar. As shadows draw long across the scarred mahogany, I pray to every mythological god I can summon, Courtney will share.

**

Order of Operations

Homework heavy in her bookbag, empty stomach heavier. 9x12+3 doesn’t solve the past due school cafeteria bill. There is no order of operations for a missed breakfast, missed lunch, bare cupboard at home. She sits at the small folding kitchen table and dreams about Three Musketeers. The faucet drips. She doesn’t want to be president someday, she wants something to eat. To quell the hunger pain, the hurt of her classmates’ snickers. She doesn’t cry from this pain, unlike the pain from when she fell skipping double-Dutch in the church parking lot and Father Foxx gave her black licorice and a kiss on the forehead. Her tears carried her home that day, and she’s been falling ever since. Mama sits at the same folding table, head in hands. And the faucet drips. Pushes away past due bills and some math teacher’s progress report. Fiddles with the Mickey and Minnie salt and pepper shakers. Thinks about a boy she knew in school and thought she loved. A lifetime ago. And the faucet drips.

**

Baptism

I stand on the middle of the bridge while it burns from both ends. Hope the water below will cleanse me when I descend to newer and deeper depths. I look for you on the shoreline, shout your name. Wonder, if I had listened when you told me your learned truths behind the old stadium—smoothed your summer dress and said we were being watched from above—could I, too, be saved from a fall by faith-words preached in a rectory’s stale-mold basement? As blue-black crows scatter from a twisted willow, marking my time, cawing accusations, I still believe this whole Jesus thing just may be overrated. Scandalously shambled by elders who forgot how to love, who never shouted your name.

**

Skipping Stones

She still has the nicest looking legs of all the girls who sling morning hash and eggs at the By-Pass Diner. Gets the most look-sees from all the fellas. Still believes—must believe—that’s worth something. Remembers all the gold-plated trophies, Ms. Popularity and Homecoming Queen, shaking her hips to The Macarena. Smiles about riding the Dragon Coaster at Playland, always in the front car with Johnny D. After her shift, every night, she takes an early exit off highway 9D, drives the abandoned service road to the end, drinks Stoli airplane bottles. Tries to remember the name of the cute boy who taught her how to skip stones on Peterson’s Pond, while she throws item-two pebbles at the moon, pretending she can skip across the heavens.

**

Or the Captain’s Daughter

The main thing is, there's a dead poet woman under the bed, or the captain’s daughter. A muse from Saturn’s rings, a maiden from a sea shanty. I can’t tell the difference, and don’t care to. I’ve answered such a beautiful Siren song, slept with hags in shadows of canneries. But this isn’t that. The main thing is, there’s a dead poet woman under the bed, or the captain’s daughter.

**

Stephen XLVII

At the intersection of third and sixteenth street, south of where the best weed is sold, Stephen got so stoned he spoke with common-sense valor. The guardians of the gates became enraged. Frenzied. They killed stray dogs and small children and swore to crucify all blasphemous barkers on every corner of every block who listened to Stephen and didn’t share their magical speaks. Now, no one looks into each other’s eyes. All windows in town slam shut. God is refuted, the Devil elected mayor. And after a recount of cast lots and rolled bones, everything turns to salt.

**

One More Time

Before I finally listened to my heart, before I left you for good after too many straws busted that proverbial camel's back, you made us visit your father’s farm one more time. Proved opposites don't always attract. While you shared stories of bottle-feeding baby lambs at Catskill Game Farm, brother Joey scaring the ponies with his cap guns, I dreamed of Madame George and Cyprus Avenue. Grimaced at your father’s saccharine sayings of ducks on June bugs and everyone buttering each other’s bread, while you bowed in some false solemn silence. And I never felt so goddamn alone as when he pulled quarters from behind your ears, and you squealed like a schoolgirl. Hugging him and his smoky-ash flannel. I stared out the window, down the dirt road. Yearned for roadhouse girls and to buy rounds of tequila and cold beer for a blind bluesman at the bar. But then again, I never did believe God doesn't give us too much to bear.

**

Tie-Dye Flavoured Nicotine

A week after Suzi’s father jumped off the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge, I waited for her like a Dollar Store Romeo outside Carlini’s Bodega. Dreamed about her becoming a Rockette, marrying me, and us both calling it a day. But first, we had to go back to Suzy’s house where her mother failed to learn she better white-knuckle the wheel because Jesus ain’t grabbin’ shit. The same house where Suzy’s mom paid witchdoctors to roll bones and burn sage throughout the master suite, Suzy and me listening behind Suzy’s bedroom door to echoed pagan chants like sewer-rain sounds to our not-so-innocent ears, our not-so-virgin hearts. We smoked tie-dye flavoured nicotine and planned for a place to make a stand. Prayed for her father’s yesterday-curse to be lifted today, and hoped we’d find grace enough to not be too sentimental. At least we recognized no dead were coming home for dinner, regardless of an extra table setting, and that we better get the hell out of Tombstone while we still can. Ride hard over some hidden hide-out pass before the supper bell rings, and we can’t escape the now, or even saddle the horses.

**

William Teets, born in Peekskill, New York, has recently relocated to Southeast Michigan. He misses New York pizza, the Hudson River, and Fran, Remember the Good Times ’68. Mr. Teets’ work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Ariel Chart, Drunk Monkeys, Impspired, and New Feathers Anthology. A collection of his poetry, After the Fall, was published by Cajun Mutt Press in February 2023.

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Best of the Net Nominations 2026

7/25/2025

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Best of the Net awards are an annual anthology of outstanding poems and stories from online literary journals honouring online publishing, hosted by Sundress Publications.

We are proud to nominate fine writers for this fine anthology.

You can learn more at this link:

https://bestofthenetanthology.com/

Huge congratulations to this year's nominations in The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry.

Big Island, by Sherry Abaldo
The Urn, by Carol W. Bachofner
The Old Men at Walmart, by Paul Juhasz
Blood Sisters, by Wendy Kagan
Kintsugi, by Barbara Krasner
A Pearl is the Autobiography of an Oyster, by Gerry LaFemina
Lost Cord, by Brooke Martin
One Red Koi Fish is Enough to Change Your Life, by Baruch November

**

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.

Sherry Abaldo

**

The Urn

She sits in the back pew and listens. His voice is a jet of blood, a tribal uttering, a startled song. It is a tongue no language can translate. God’s five senses magnified. The invitation had been forged. None of the usual mourners are present, the ones with faux hearts bleeding at the wake. No. But she, nearly consumed by algor, will dance for the burned, the ashed, the damned. It’s been said: someone dances for the damned to cast a spell on the living. She waits. She has a gift for shadow: a violet fragrance shaking from her hair confirms it. She had died in childbirth. She had crossed the Pyrenees by elephant. She had run along the bottom of the sea. She had climbed into her own womb to wait for this moment. It is her turn. The ashes shift ever so slightly. Her dance begins with a low fever. The tide stands on its hind legs, a cat flies into the moon.

Carol W. Bachofner

**

The Old Men at Walmart

It is not the witching hour, nor anything akin to that, for there is no magic here. Still, there is something solemn about these early Saturday hours; an indifferent gathering, like a storm drain assemblage, when the single old men do their shopping away from the glares and stares, from the wonderous judgment of community. They wander down their lonely aisles, wondering how it came to this, while silently assembling a paltry pile of items. Barely enough to justify a cart, but pride still keeps them away from the finality of baskets. There are no children, begging for candy or toys, at this hour. No wives or partners parsing through future-laden lists and dinner plan promises. There are just the old men.

They do not buy much for they have lost most of it already. They wander down their lonely aisles, wondering how it came to this, wondering whether they should count out their days in microwave burritos or in pot pies. The hardware section nothing but a vague, shadowy echo of days as distant as the Cretaceous, as mythologized as Valhalla. The clothes section sped through, a forced and fated indifference grabbing for shelves (for it no longer matters whether boxers or briefs). Some stay outside, huddled in the lea of the storefront, furtively smoking in passive suicide, but most shuffle, fatigued and silent, within; wandering down their lonely aisles, wondering how it came to this.

Paul Juhasz

**

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.

Wendy Kagan

**

Kintsugi

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

Barbara Krasner

**

A Pearl is the Autobiography of an Oyster

As with so many stories, this one starts with a singular hurt—some slight or harsh words, a profound irritant that can never be spat out. Instead it remains, a sharp sand grain held against the tongue for decades. Imagine how it sits and shifts, scratchy, cutting. Imagine how it scrapes and how, too, over time it loses its edge, gets smoothed over even as it grows and calcifies. A hurt like that defies logic. It gains luster there on the sea floor, hidden and sealed shut, waiting for the young woman who can hold her breath the longest, the one who dives down to pick from the beds, plucking mollusks ‘til she gathers a whole mesh sack of them. And later, shucking them open, that smooth and simple iridescence must astound her. Picture her rolling that small orb gently between her fingers, wide-eyed by the opalescent beauty of endurance.

Gerry Lafemina

**

Lost Cord

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

umbilical cord
incinerated remains
tethered to my heart

Brooke Martin

**

One Red Koi Fish is Enough to Change Your Life

One red koi fish is enough to change your life, darting into view then taking all it has changed back into the darkness below the surface, below understanding. It has found the infinite because it is beyond sight and everything is possible. In fact, the koi fish has become Schrodinger’s cat. It is both there and gone— dead and alive.

It might surprise you to know that koi fish have become frustrated with us because we do not think of the infinite enough and our skin lacks the great lustre of the closest star.

Baruch November

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Steven Fraccaro

7/21/2025

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The Reappearance of Essence

The return is not what any of us thought it would be, it never is. Return to what, you may ask, the past, the future? No one can return to a former place, or to a former self.

The discovery of the disappearance is the essence of dissolution. To disappear is to disperse the specifics of meaning. The result is the requisite oblivion. At a certain point, too late, one realizes that living is more important than writing. The epiphany of the polygraph is thus multiplied by perplexity, epitope and episteme, a conflation of causes and effects. The repercussions of the dissonance are exaggerated. He died in police custody after demonstrating antiviral tendencies.

Shadow walls and shadow walks, fragments of desire. The disposition of the dimorphic principle is not unalloyed with the descension of its own negation. Further research is required.

**

Nothing Like the Present

Not easy to live in the moment, this very moment, to define precisely what is in one’s mind. Regard the landscape, watch it minutely—try to enter the landscape, if only for a second.

“The mind is a monkey…”

Across the night, across the sky, there are things that cannot be said. Dead branches stretch above the lake. An imagination of essence that is never present, a prolonged elaboration of existence, what in the nineteenth century might been have termed desire but is something more, a reaching with the mind towards an equivalence, a placement within what you are observing. Mind? Body? Can you define the difference? Is there no distinction at all, or is it that the distinction is simplified, described inaccurately? What if you could project your consciousness into another physical object? Not for any useful purpose but simply as a meditation, a consideration of existence.

Experiments of this sort lead to a different way of seeing. Not controlled experiments, you might reply. No, it makes no sense to say to oneself, “I am the lamp I am staring at.” If you close your eyes, can you become someone else, can you experience their emotions in full? Is this intense imagination, a form of presumption, or simply a fantasy?

Let the mind fade, if only for a short time. Then return to what you think is the present.

**

Drosselmeyer, 1830

The story is, he lost an eye in the wars. There are others who say it was in a duel, that a woman was involved. We note an older gentleman in a black cloak who wears an eyepatch; he’s spry, slightly disreputable, if only because his motives are unclear. When he lifts Marie’s arm to return the Nutcracker as she sleeps, he is careful not to wake her. And yet, it is he who summons the nightmares that afflict her, until she learns to overcome them.

One can devise a multitude of stories, stories to discredit one’s enemies, stories to enhance the reputations of one’s friends, stories to instruct, to entertain, to perplex. Narrative constitutes a function, a means for derailing reality, a way to disrupt the accustomed flow of events. Unlike a train, a narrative does not have a fixed destination. Even the most innocent story has the potential to offend, particularly those who have been erased from the narrative.

Drosselmeyer went on to have many adventures. As did Marie. In some, he appeared aged, in others younger. For some of us, rising in the morning and facing the day is an adventure. This is entirely appropriate, and to be expected.

**

John Berryman

For those who remember, and for those who forget, it was a strange time. A revolution had exploded and shattered, wildness had been suppressed, there was a pretense of normalcy. No one talked about the war. The auditorium was situated in an enclave of what presumed to be civilization, and was filled with professors, graduate students, a scattering of younger students. The famous writer, a friend of the poet’s, arrived with his glamorous wife, a murmur as they took their seats in the front row. It was indeed December for the dean, even though it was February. A young man had brought a fellow student, a young woman from California who was less than interested in the young man.

The disheveled poet screamed from the podium, then whispered, waved his arms, then screamed again. None of it made sense. None of it was audible, just a stray word here and there, enunciated or declaimed in mock Shakespearean tones. He was very, very drunk.

Huffy Henry hid, hideously close to himself.

Afterwards, the young woman turned to her companion, “So that’s what poetry is.” She later became a philosophy professor. The next day, in the corridors of academe, you could hear the comments, ”It’s really an illness, you know.”

Berryman had his demons. Let us leave it to his biographers to catalog them. Precisely why he took his own life a year later is unknown. No doubt many reasons are available. I will offer only this: Perhaps he was tired of playing the clown to an audience of very proper people, the assembled professors and their wives. Perhaps the figure who waved his arms and ranted was the only honest person in the room that evening.

**

Steven Fraccaro is the author of two novels, Dark Angels and Gainsborough’s Revenge, as well as of a book of essays, The Recalcitrant Scrivener. His most recent book is Skeleton Keys, published by Chax Press in 2023, a hybrid work intended to inhabit the space between poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction. His pieces on Hans Holbein and Gustav Courbet appeared in The Ekphrastic Review in 2019 and 2024, respectively.

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Rose Mary Boehm

7/14/2025

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My Mother the Alchemist

I’d watch her transform stingy nettles into spinach soup after we picked them carefully, trying to touch only the underside of the leaves. We had no gloves. Dandelion shoots became salad with a bit of vinegar and salt. She magically metamorphosed a box of our silver flatware into a hundredweight of potatoes, her last damask tablecloth somehow converted itself into another hundredweight of carrots.

She brought water from the pump in two heavy buckets up to the second floor on stone stairs. That became soup, drinking water, and a bird bath for my budgie.

After picking up the left-over stalks from fields the farmers had finished harvesting, mother dried the wheat and ground it in the coffee mill for a chunky morning porridge.

One day’s worth of sewing underpants for the Russian army mutated miraculously into bread and sometimes butter.

And at the end of the day, mother made the best magic of all: with a book on her lap, by the light of a glowing fire in the wood stove, she transformed a different hunger into possibilities.

Sentries and markers
The hinterland of dreams
Deliverance

**

This was first publishes in Silverbirch.

**

They Will Never Again Be As Now

Finland 1957

Huge tree trunks float downstream, bobbing giants. As matches they'll soon light advent candles in Stockholm, a fuse for a mining project in the Urals, or a cigarette from which the soldier at the heavily mined East-West German border will take a deep drag in the cold night of a cold war. From the old trenches I take a bayonet. Whose bloodstain on the stainless steel? In the farmhouse, the table coated with years of dust, a saltshaker, the knife black and sticky, the plate filled with shells of dead insects, a glass turned over, a crocheted doily crumbling. A tightly shut drawer finally gives in and spills tens of small black & white photographs: family reunions, women with aprons, men with awkward suits and big hands, children smiling or hiding from the camera.

They jumped from the trees
Halting the Russian advance
White suits like the snow

**

La Movida

The old portera gives her the stink eye. That cast-iron wrought ascensor door rattles shut, her heels click-clack down those last fake marble stairs. "Slut’," the old woman mumbles under her breath. Dolores wraps her fake fur a little closer, Madrid in October at night hints at the cold that’s to come. The chauffeur is waiting. Don Martín is a generous man. Dolores gets into the back of the beige and brown Citroën, falling into the luxurious, leather-covered seat. Their table is reserved at the Casino de Madrid.

In the entrance hall she looks around her: like moths around the light - her fellow phalaenas who sold their bodies for the fake jewels, rent paid, and the occasional pocket money bestowed from the rare winnings at the roulette tables, blackjack, baccarat, or poker. For a brief moment Dolores remembers a small stone bridge over a fast-flowing brook, the olive trees, and an orchard. Then she walks up those carpeted stairs, head held high, Don Martín waiting for her – or for anyone who is young and willing.

Bling and jazz –
Nights of laughter and lust.
Love not on sale.

**

The Gifts

I admired her from when we were thirteen. Mixed into the admiration where some sharp little needles of envy. She had the gift. She was Marylin Monroe, Rita Hayworth, Brigitte Bardot, Raquel Welch. No sooner than a man turned his eyes on her, sparkly lights ignited. She made a man hungry.

Her mother was “Marlene Dietrich,” penciled eyebrows, blood-red lips and fingernails, a long cigarette holder, vertiginous heels, a black Mercedes. Her father, a fat autocratic patriarch with a loud voice who commanded and provided. Her clothes from boutiques, holidays on Capri.

She’d told me about having been stashed away on her granny’s farm during the war. Her grandmother would eat all by herself until there was nothing left. Her father soldiered at the front, her mother ran the business.

Husband number one: alcoholic, abusive. Beat her in drunken bouts of rage. Forced her to abort twice in back-street procedures. That was the end of kids for her.

Husband number two: couldn’t get it up for her, fucked at least 40 other women, never worked, made sure she believed she couldn’t survive without him.

Now—mercifully—she doesn’t remember, barely remembers me. She knows, however, that I am benign. She is incontinent, can’t walk, delusional, paranoid, and I am grateful for gifts not given.

**

The Music I Used to Play

Chopin’s “Nocturnes,” Schubert’s “Kinderlieder,” the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” Bach’s “Two-Part Inventions,” Bela Bartók, Stravinsky, Britten… My teenage years were filled with music that lived under my fingers and the piano keys. My mother made requests for her ‘helping-her-fall-asleep’ pleasure.  My first solo performance at a youth concert showed me that I wasn’t cut out for a musical solo career. Cold sweat dripped from my fingers, making them almost slip from the ivories.

Still, even though there were breaks during my travels, a piano accompanied me wherever I settled, my musical interests widened, I lived in b-flats, d-minors, soared with rising chords or the secret sin of a grace note that winked at me.

Then my music slowly died. My left hand needed an operation, one finger didn’t bend easily anymore— limiting what I could play and how well I could play what was left—my need to play diminishing together with the lack of soaring and the grace notes on crutches, neighbours incensed if I dared to play outside the strictly enforced hours for making noise… I gave my last upright to a school in a poor neighbourhood of Lima. They sent me photos of happy faces singing around the instrument that had sustained me for many years. And now I have learned to love my silence.

**

When Everyone on Earth Went to Mars

At first there were only the billionaires. Their money would be useless where they were going but they paid for the rockets and took their gold. On Mars were pioneers who’d already prepared the ecospheres for the less able to survive. The earthlings asked themselves why their rich would invest in emigration to a hostile planet instead of delighting in the most magnificent place they had been privileged to call home. Then the billionaires hopped on the next rocket and the rest of us became radio-active shadows on stone. Once Gaia was cancer-free, she rejoiced, plants and animals thrived.

**

Ode to Modern Times

I never went to a mailbox by the road to retrieve my letter, catalogues, and the assorted publicity produced for the rubbish bin. My letterboxes where inside my house or apartment door, or someone had already sorted through the mail and put mine on the shelf that was gaining purpose.

Palpable excitement, disappointment, deciding what was for opening, what was for later (suspected bills and reminders for payment). The catalogues were for leafing through their pages longingly or often snorting with disgust. What was it today? A nest of shiny stainless-steel saucepans, the latest small hoover that fit into any broom cupboard, the Dior-inspired read A-line dress, a set of knickers for five pounds. Oh, and that beige coat that made an elegant wave at the back… The rest went into the bin. How much trees did we cut down in those days?

Letters took up to five days from London to Düsseldorf, responses were slow in coming. By the time they got to me my problems were usually solved. Mum would ring once a week and spend a fortune (I couldn’t afford it, the kids were too expensive, the mortgage to high, the income too small. She’d worry that I divorce, that the IRA bombs would get us, cried, and when I asked her, she said, “I have remained sixteen inside, and every time I pass that mirror there is this old woman looking back at me.”)

That was the time when I lost all my friends, well almost all. They married, moved away, no address, no telephone number, working hard or having small kids that took up all their letter-writing time. I learned only at a 50-year class reunion (organized through email) that my best friend had years ago died of cancer.

In these electronic days I set aside a time after breakfast. I made a lot of new friends on my journey and open my email with anticipation, happy for friends who write to tell me they are well, that their husbands have recovered from the open-heart surgery, stroke, COVID, that their hip replacement went like a dream, that their son is getting married. Quick WhatsApp notes to send me a meme to start my day smiling. Short posts about their mum who is losing it, the pain they feel, the kids on drugs, or getting their PhD, the jokes about the ‘old’ days, the love, the hugs, the poems, the pix. This is my sacred time of the day, and I can respond immediately, sending hugs and kisses to those who need them.

**

Rose Mary Boehm is a German-born British national living and writing in Lima, Peru, and author of two novels as well as eight poetry collections. Her poetry has been published widely in mostly US poetry reviews (online and print). She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of Net nominee. The most recent poetry collections: Do Oceans Have Underwater Borders?(Kelsay Books July 2022), Whistling in the Dark (Cyberwit July 2022), Saudade (December 2022), and Life Stuff (Kelsay Books November 2023) are available on Amazon. A new manuscript is brewing, and a new fun chapbook has been scheduled for publishing summer of 2025 (Kelsay Books).  https://www.rose-mary-boehm-poet.com/

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Kalliopy Paleos

7/7/2025

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Humans in the Water Cycle

I wanted to say something to you, and you wanted to say something to me and you’re in a plastic bag and I’m in a plastic bag, and both of us are rain and all of us are rain and the plastic bag of my raindrop is my watertight skin, and your watertight skin has webbed your mouth over, so you can’t say anything to me, and I can’t say anything to you and when we roll into the ground it will be the very plink of the stream of hot water first touching the dry floor of the teacup, and I will blossom open into the dirt and you shall do the same and we will roll into one ball together in the ground and so will everyone else and we will roar as an ocean sluicing through the soil and we will rise again like kids going up the cold metal ladder of the diving board, blue-and-rough bouncing under our feet, and I won’t be able to hold your hand anymore and you won’t be able to hold my hand anymore as we’d planned but we love all things vertiginous and tumble forth again without a word.

**

Praise for the Adversary

No matter what else I might pretend you are brilliant as the velvet black fish glancing at me under the green water I saw in my dream last night staring forward each time I woke and slipped back down into the depths. Your glossy black head your feathery black hair faintly undulating your gills plucking oxygen from the mossy water. Eyes moving left and right like rough stones. I have caught you in the net of my lymph seeing you everywhere as I stare down from my half-waking days. New leaves on the tree I thought was dead but now gladly see among the living birches. The dog content on my knee sitting among the pines smelling twigs at leisure. You are all of this and my broken ribs too.

Or maybe last night in my dream there was no water but I waded through the grasses carrying bulbs of glass that had been my liver and my kidneys and my lungs to give them to you as you neither took nor spurned them but looked forward toward something else eyelashes tingling with messages received from abroad. I can hear them crackling a bit too now. I shall sit beneath you like a curious rabbit under a great black tree and I shall watch the sun come and watch the sun go and I will lie here sweetly now too, smelling lichen and mosses at leisure until you have finally become you and I have finally become I and the tree the tree, the dirt the dirt and the fish swims away freely without a sound.

**

What is Left on the Table When My Father Doesn’t Come Home Anymore

It wouldn’t have been possible for you to say that by the time I was in your body everything was terrible. By the time I was there, cells splitting, your mouth was choking on the terrible traces of other women’s flesh, nostrils stoppered with their drugstore perfume. The flesh of women, traces of natural scent thrumming stronger without washing. My flesh in yours, amniotic and all-knowing if we believe the sages. Throughout the ages the sages know that belly waters are the safest. Which might be why some days, now, I don’t wash.

I won’t wash, and I let the perfume of my skin thrum stronger every day because there is no water, there is no oil or clay or soap that could clean us then, during those days when the terrible engulfed you and therefore me. And so how could you possibly say it, howsoever I, grown and all-knowing, might interrogate you. Howsoever I might berate you and hate you for hiding it, how could you breathe it. That by the time everything was terrible I was only growing because you could not stop me. Because it is terrible, and it engulfs us, that it is possible for it to be impossible to love what grows inside you. Impossible to clean it, impossible to wash from it the traces of other women’s flesh, the clinging smell of perfume in plastic bottles. Bottles on the dirty table, unclean with pearling milk, hoping to be picked up and washed, and filled.

**

Why I Never Order Cappuccino

Because I didn’t like how our tour guide handed me the plastic cup. Because my then-husband took it down in one gulp and told me I was being a bitch to the guy. Because I didn’t care about the Napoleon pistols he promised us cheap. Because I wanted dinner at the old hotel instead, to dine on its prewar china. Because as we walked to the secret antique market our guide kept winking at my ex, saying She doesn’t understand, eh? Women . . . Because our guide had growled, drink it. Because after just one sip, all the bitterness was too much & I spilled it onto the ground. Because the market was just a big field with no end in sight and now it was pitch black out. Because plodding past me, my ex had grunted, You’re so predictable. Because once again in the darkness they wouldn’t turn back to me. Because when I finally caught up my ex was flat on his face, the little white cup loose in the grass. Because I was getting tired now too, and the ground felt soft and strangely wonderful under my heavy granite legs. Because I tried to call my ex’s name but there was a small warm shell instead of a tongue in my mouth. Because I could just make out the little silver knife in our tour guide’s hand. Because he was tugging the rubles from my ex’s wallet, then turned towards me.

**

What the King Wants and What the King Gets

Those years when Louis XIV housed his three mistresses in adjacent royal suites at Versailles, the women’s doors gazed at each other across the marble floor. Her majesty the queen his wife had a pretty set of rooms, elsewhere in the palace.

Look, she doesn’t seem to be whining for a baby, he mumbles into her ear when a tall blonde passes their café booth. At CVS getting a birthday card for his mother, he steers her to the diet pills and stares at her.

In the first suite, Louis visits Louise, Marquise de la Vallière, whose four pregnancies have taken their toll. Louis pets her English spaniels, teasing that the little beasts’ affection will make up for his waning love. He nestles his plumed hat on his wig, crossing the vestibule to the bejeweled Madame de Montespan, radiantly expecting for the second time.

On their second abortion, staying in his parents’ basement, he won’t stay with her as she inserts the tablets. She won’t remember, years later, why they got into a screaming match as she lay there, but it was likely for her to hurry up and stop crying. Possibly also her throwing up when his mother needed the bathroom.

Having already buried half of his children and all but one grandchild, Louis secretly marries the Marquise de Maintenon. They read together by the fire, squabbling about keeping the windows open or shut against the palace drafts. She longs for separate beds, but her confessor thinks it unwise, since she has no child.

At their old café booth, he says his mother’s happy to have him back home. Might even cough up and pay his taxes for the year. He asks her what she will do, now the divorce is final. Probably go overseas as they’d planned, but alone. A new country every two years or so. Above all, nothing confining.

**

Kalliopy Paleos studied contemporary American poetry at SUNY Brockport. She recently completed her third full-length novel translation from Greek. Poetry publications include pieces in Mediterranean Poetry and Gnashing Teeth Press; her prose has been included in ERGON Magazine for Greek-American Arts and Letters, The Ekphrastic Review and Flash Boulevard.

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