Sorrow, My Middle Name
 
In high school, I became invisible, courted rebellion by dating a boy my father forbade me to see. My dad believed in perfection, austerity, turning out lights whenever you left the room. He would exit the room whenever I appeared. But, for all his harshness, he taught me to name trees, to marvel how some maples flaunt giant leaves. He could spot buttonballs on sycamore trees just as they released their seeds.
 
Now older, I am here in the dark, turning over the long list of friends and family, who’ve disappeared. Name them: Ann, Gary, Evelyn, Sonya and her grandson, 24-year-old. Elan, and others still alive with dementia, stooped, curled downward as their minds turn to vegetable soup. They know what they mean to say, but there’s a traffic jam. Frustration rules, anger, followed by surrender. Maybe, it’s then they heed the flute only they can hear.
 
**

Life in the Hood 
 
The moon this morning lost her full-bodied shape, as if someone had taken a bite from her neck. Shrouded in clouds, fog down below, caused the ferry to constantly blow her horn. The man down the street installed eight huge skeletons on his front lawn for Halloween, then dressed them for Christmas in red caps and mittens, left them out in the dead of winter. It’s now February and they are still there. His neighbor has a flamboyance of pink plastic flamingos, sporting Mardi Gras beads. He dresses them for every holiday, St. Patrick’s in green, Valentine’s Day in red hearts. Neighbours line up books in their Free Library. Lost soccer balls and basketball nets stand idly by as cars speed down the narrow street, ignoring signs to Slow the Flock Down. And we, become the gawkers, who walk by, commenting on this colourful, eccentric assemblage. 
 
**

Beach Walk at Lincoln Park
 
Driftwood captures me every time. There’s camouflage wood, spotted with amber patches, madrona branches flashing burgundy, and brilliant yellow logs with their skin scraped smooth. Farther down the path, holes, like eyes from severed branches, grasp me in their unflinching gaze. Others make me smile, like the large log whose tangled roots are having a bad hair day. I can’t help myself for inventing love duos from sculptured forms as two thin branches lean together, reach for the sky. Ancient bark rests next to young upstarts. Older logs prefer to slumber undisturbed, cradled by rocking waves.

**

Tracking Almost Full Moon
 
So much is invisible in northwest night skies, cloud-studded and overcast most of the time. We miss whole constellations; we miss the moon, and yet, when the sky clears, like this morning, there she is, tracking across the sky, almost winking to acknowledge Artemis, man’s space mission. I keep looking out the windows to see if she’s still there with her magic curtain of light thrown across the water. Even in darkness, her beam is solid, straightforward, full-bodied.
 
**

Last Orange Glow
 
I woke later than usual. Odds are, I missed that last maneuver. Moon low on the horizon. Clear sky. Blue and orange, complementary colours. Ten minutes later, the moon transformed into a transparent veil. Tissue-paper moon. In this light, hard to see her as three-dimensional. A disc, nothing more or less, but still so compelling.
 
**

Bolder Still
 
There you are, an imprint in the sky, hanging low, a painting in deep blue and cerulean. A certain stillness, you, as punctuation. Nothing in motion beyond one blackbird. I prize these mornings. So often, you are lost to me behind a clotted sky filled with dense clouds.
 
**

​Though originally from the east coast, Miriam Bassuk treasures her life in the Northwest.  Her daily walks inspire her with the teeming life of eagles, herons, and the occasional sighting of Orcas. She has been published in The Journal of Sacred Feminine Wisdom, Raven Chronicles, Borderless, and 3 Elements Review. She was one of the featured poets in the digital portion of the WA 129 project sponsored by Tod Marshall, the Washington State poet laureate.
 
 

​To You, America  

Because the museum is in the middle of the Pine Barrens. Because there is a sculpture called Chicken Man which is a chicken with thick human legs and a penis, and Deer Woman which is a deer head with breasts, but with antlers. Because the sculpture I’m standing in front of now is a map of you made of latex gloves that hang like condoms, and I was disappointed  that it wasn't actually made of condoms. Because my late mother-in-law picked up Popsicle sticks, made pencil cases out of yogurt cups with old yarn because Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Because she'd have laughed I think, appreciated a map of you made of used condoms, though  I doubt she'd have touched them herself. Because this sculpture is beautiful and weird like you, and what if it was condoms and beautiful, even close up? Because at the school in NY City all the kids wore hoodies for Trayvon, colours glowing over Facebook, softening the ugliness of posted comments below. Because you're the terrified people who wanted to cut down all the trees on the island after the hurricane because they might fall on the house, and the guy on my street who built his deck around the double birch in his yard. Leaves in the barbecue? he says, fuck yeah, whatever. Because leave my goddamn guns alone, but wait, are you ok? Does your car need a jump, a tow? Here, I brought you dinner. Because you’re the 24 hour drugstore when my son had a fever—103  at 3 AM, and the little old lady who saw my pajamas and children’s Advil and let me cut in line, but you’re also the poor people who shop at Walmart, ignoring the poor people who work at Walmart. Because Hurricane Sandy. 9-11. Sandy Hook. Because George Floyd, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti. Tornado Alley. Because rainbow flags and Donald Trump. Because the Debt ceiling. Taxes. Because fresh peaches. Because fresh sweet corn in a basket on a table beside the road in upstate NY, next to a box with cash sitting next to a handwritten sign: Please Pay What You Can.  Thanks.

**

This piece previously appeared in Rat's Ass Review.

**

The Dream: At the Old House Where I Grew Up

I was using the one bathroom upstairs and my dead mom walked right in and calmly spoke to me as I tried to wipe use as much toilet paper as you want your dad doesn’t understand my sister and girl cousins all walked in too and I tried to wash my hands but the sink wasn’t working it had paint all over it all fluorescent colours I barely got clean as the others waited to use it  in the pink bedroom with its slanted ceilings Rich tucked a pillow under my side of the bed I said you should do that at our house and the bed won’t slant down so much two AC units blasted one from each window turned into old radio tape player boom boxes I couldn’t figure out how to turn them off I couldn’t find my phone I stepped out the bedroom door  into a receiving line to say good bye to a mafia dude after having dinner at his house with my ex who’d left me alone several times to go and change his clothes I was almost last in line I wore two different earrings each from a pair of my mom’s I was pissed at myself for losing them in the dream I was afraid I would fall as the line of people wound downhill on a slippery sidewalk in December and powder sugar snow as Mom called it covered the ice like the day my dad broke his hip on the driveway. Where was Rich? He always held my hand, held me up. My ex was ten people ahead of me in line already I reached for the next hand to shake it was my dead father he squeezed my hand in both of his and said I told you, my mother put up with my dad for too long, if he’s not going to change you need to leave him. Then my brother, the one who’s a guidance counselor at my old high school, pulled up next to me in the little old yellow Honda Fit I used to drive and opened the door. People don’t change, he said, get in, I’ll take you home.  

**

Revealing

God appeared to me in the bathtub.
Hugh Findlay

If God appeared to me in the bathtub I’d scream. First of all I seldom take baths, preferring a quick shower on my slip proof mat since falling on ice and re-injuring that knee twice already. So If I’m in the tub it’s due to a special need for relaxation, and if God is an old man with a white beard like in the paintings, why is He staring like a perve at a 61 year old overweight woman naked in her bath?  

If God is a She it’s still a problem, as I don't like changing in women’s locker rooms either, I could never be a nudist, I don’t even walk around naked in front of my cats. And even if, more likely, God is gender neutral, what a seriously weird-ass way to appear to anyone. Why not just be a voice in my head? OK, yeah, I might think I was losing my shit hearing voices. Better yet, appear to me in a field of daisies in spring, or under an orange oak in the fall, or even on my balcony overlooking the parking lot–anywhere clothing isn't optional. 

Not sure what I’d say to Her anyway: Hey, God? What the hell about letting my son die 30 years ago? Was there a point to that? And thanks for my other three sons, they’re great, and the second husband is perfect, even though everyone told me you weren’t fond of divorce. 

So why here, God? If it’s news of an early stairway to heaven, why not send an angel? I hope You don’t have any great expectations of me at my age, because after my 35 years of helping high school kids understand themselves and being a second mom to a lot of them, and after a dead child, a divorce, a dead mom, a brother with cancer, a disabled dad, and the loss of three sweet dogs and a cat, I thought I might be in line for a little rest. 

I’m still helping my youngest with money and all the kids with visits and laundry and late night chats, and we’re moving north to be closer to my dad, so maybe, get out of my bathroom?  Cause I’m one of those people who really like their privacy, and I would have expected You to know that. 

**

Records

after watching a woman make snack bowls and bookends by melting and molding old vinyl records

When we had a little extra money Dad would buy records for the little machine we used to keep in the dining room--Connie Frances, Big Bands, Harry Belafonte, soundtrack from The Jungle Book. Once when I was twelve he bought the album from Hair.  Mom hid it, said it wasn’t appropriate for us kids, but my brother, who was thirteen, found it on the top shelf of the upstairs linen closet, under the lace table cloth only used for Thanksgiving. Some of the songs were pretty, like "Good Morning Starshine." The one she didn’t want us to hear had lots of strange words. “Masturbation” was the only one I knew. If my brother knew any others, he didn't say.

I brought all my records to college--so much weight and space--milk crates full. Turntable and speakers I bought myself from babysitting. Debbie from Long Island, across the hall, played hers and then threw them on the floor where they skidded across other naked vinyl. Terry, the thin boy from Kansas, alphabetized his shelved collection, cleaned them with a special brush before and after he played them, every time. Boys in our dorm broke into his room, took every record out and put them all back in the wrong jackets. When he discovered this Terry closed his eyes like someone had died.

Last week Dad suddenly wanted his record player down from the attic. In the video my sister sent, Dad’s in his wheelchair, hands clasped in his lap, head bent towards the record which is playing the music from Carmen. His eighty-eight year old knees pop up and down with the beat.  Dad’s puffy cat, Pushkin, sits next to the turntable, stubby tail flicking, head tilted, attentive. She could be listening too, or ready to pounce on the spinning disc.

**

This poem previously appeared in Edison Literary Review.

**

I used to believe nothing really bad could ever happen to me. 

I used to dream of three story Victorian houses with towers and canopy beds and a fireplace in every room that would light whenever I wanted. Once when I was twelve, at a garage sale, my mother said I could pick one thing she would buy for me, and I found a pair of pure silk kimono pajamas. I had chosen the one thing we couldn’t afford. 

These days I’m happy picking up three smooth stones if we go to the shore, one for each of my living sons. I don’t even look at the shops with the boho dresses and sea glass necklaces I used to drool for. 

I used to be this innocent person, in college I didn’t drink for the first three years.  I used to trust people more, used to trust the world, trust myself. Then I tried to ski and messed up my knee. Tried marriage and got a divorce the first time. Had babies and the first one died. Voted every time.

My father slipped on the ice in his driveway and broke his hip, ended his life in a wheelchair. My mother got cancer and died within two months. My first son was born with a fatal heart condition. Now I worry about my grown sons all the time, don’t blame them for wondering if they should have any kids in this world, walk holding onto my husband’s hand, buy spikes for my boots for days like today when the ice coats everything and the wind wants one of our giant maples.

But my husband chipped away at the thick bubbled ice on our driveway for almost three hours. And we lost internet and cable but the lights are still on so far and the mail man just crunched through the ice coated snow in our front yard to deliver a package from one of my sons. And the crows are flying in for the night again, tens of dozens of hundreds of them, storm or no storm they’re flying in to roost in our trees and the terrible wind can’t cover the beautiful shrill survival I hear in their calls.

**

Svea Barrett is retired after teaching public high school English in New Jersey for 35 years, now living in Central NY with her husband and three cats. Her poems have appeared or will appear in The Comstock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Lips, Griffel, The Kelsey Review, Edison Literary Review, The Rat’s Ass Review, Exit 13, Molecule– A Tiny lit Mag, and others. Her chapbook Why I Collect Moose won the Poets Corner Press Chapbook Competition in 2005, and her book I Tell Random People About You won the 2010 Spire Poetry Award. She tied for first place in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry contest in 2013, and her  manuscript, Before There Was So Much Sky, was a finalist in the 2022 Laura Boss Narrative Poetry Book Contest.

​Rare Sour Animals 
 
BC. Before cellphones. Row houses shedding plaster, clouds slapping rough skies. She got yanked by the shoulder & spanked, dragged into the vestibule  while we stood there, dumb dew worms squirming inside our pockets. We’d lured this friend into late afternoon play. We heard bawling through an open window—maybe it was some other schoolgirl, but same story, we called her stoopid as a donkey, whipped each other with weeping willow sprigs, pantomimed parenthood. Late summer, in early morning’s flat cool light, I sat on a bee. A flashing throb. The bee, spent, writhed away, trailing innards. Her lancet, still in my foot. 
 
AD. After digital. The snapshot goes around the village chat. A warning. The wolf lurking around our yards. I await a muscular creature with cunning eyes. Something worthy of fear.  The animal’s puny, the colour of dishrags. Tottering. Half lidded eyes, half starved. 

**
​
Sandwich
 
They call us the sandwich generation. Stacked between ailing parents and young kids of our own. We’re the bread. Slices bookending bitter demands. The sour sweet seafoam in yeast, rising. But really, I feel more like butter spread thin. Better yet, mustard made tang: a seed not unlike such miniscule planet to hold us. What kind of sandwich? No one specifies. A BLT? That nightshade tongue soft on bacon crackle. In any case, they say I’m living in-between. The rootstocked fist of a lettuce, the open eyes of Swiss cheese?
             
At the 11th hour, Earl Montagu of Sandwich called for roast beef between bread slices. To keep one hand free for gambling. Cards, toast, lice and bad wigs. Whatever–it happened over three hundred years ago. I bet he didn’t have to change diapers.    
                        
A friend once confessed: I dreamt I was homeless throwing sandwiches at passing cars. It’s an Aries thing. A desire to shirk responsibilities. An astral sandwich is a night crammed with stars, moons salting us to sleep. Do angels eat sandwiches? My little one doesn’t. She just eats bread. Only Mortadella. Only cheese. Never together.

Her bright face squeezed in my hands, she is a sunny psalm. Heavenly swaths of sourdough. What is life but all living things mewling for food, eager faces begging through my deck’s French doors. Baguette? Croissant. Now we’re talking. Jam lots of butter into everything. I don’t long for lobbing sandwiches across the road, but I do long to sit in a patisserie, legs crossed, add a friend—lounging Paris bums, all the days…down on earth. Keep the dough aerated, patted, rising, feeding a crowd. What about that longing? Nah. Maybe I’d rather be shorting. A short order cook, hand to mouth, cow to table. One thing: I will never use shortening. Pleasure? Living inside my home-cooked hours. 

**

Ghosts and Other Domestic Animals
 
My language is full of them. An errant charge runs through it. All is deceptive. Behind the Iron Curtain, even animals were reassigned. Our eagle lost its crown, my father’s father swallowed bullets, worked his fingers to the bone setting balloons on fire, digging holes. Our moon got its pockmarks dodging comets. That’s love. Rocks flung at the skin of night, mother-of-pearl. One dawn my lawn so spectral I mistook it for floodlights. My eyes half-moon. My joints are loose or my fascia, too tight. This Halloween my fingers slow. Greying human skulls and femurs rest crosswise on our frost-silvered porch. Consider joy. We drape sheets over our heads, boo like ghosts. I am on my knees, Crawl, horsie, crawl. My girl squeals. I am a beast of many tongues, gill to lung. 
 
**
 
Escape Plan

(found prose in a home developer’s brochure)

Thoughtful design vanities. These images are not to be construed as promises. Discover Wolfberry. A charming bridge, a tranquil pond, warm wood soft-close. Welcome to our generic guidebook—subject to variation. A future home for your child. Experience the magic of high-arc pull-down chrome quartz toilet.

Alter, amend, revise.

Stand the test of time. Explore options such as detachable seats, stone, brick defects. Sharp kitchen islands fostering a sense of belonging and spiritual growth. Convenience store filled with long-lasting protection. Our signature on your journey.
 
**

*Source material: Discover Wolfberry Aspen (https://wolfberryaspen.ca/). Extracted, cut, and re-sequenced.

**

Molotov Mixology
 
Rations on Saturday mornings at the brew shack. Sweaty pee-sample beer at noon. Drunks pepper the floor: in situ sculptures, reclining comrades, mammals in shut-down. Bored, us kids run through the pines, leap, throw pinecones at the bums. Will they move? Then the cull. Police issue bulldozers, push this way and that. We giggle. No one sees us. The warm sun drying needle tips, beach sand kissing tourists’ boots. Nowadays, I return for photo ops, teal fishing boats, my dress a mermaid hugging Baltic waves. We tip our botanical cocktails at passersby. Crème de menthe Neptune martinis, trident stir sticks, sea salt rim. Servers nod and smile. Offer forks for pizza slices. Don’t you wish for a Molotov? Corrugated aluminum, hot tin vodka. Dash of benzene, crushed glass for a dead-on twinkle. 
 
**

Aldona Dziedziejko is an immigrant writer and educator living in Clearwater Country, Canada. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in CV2, PRISM international, The Capilano Review, subTerrain, Poetry Is Dead, Fiction Southeast, and Pulp Literature, among others. Her work has been recognized by the Lina Chartrand Poetry Award, the Lush Triumphant Literary Prize, and the Magpie Poetry Contest, and has been shortlisted for the Disquiet Prize, the Jon Whyte Memorial Essay Award, and Fractured Lit’s Fractured & Fused Prize.

Singularity

The first star mattered only to the second star, and then it was gone. The second star mattered only to the first star, and then it was alone. After the Big Bang flare exhaled to a hiss from its singularity, everything fell dark again as the dust motes drifted. The only hints of change were virtual particles playing their games with antimatter, as they always had—always will. The difference is in the before, spacetime didn’t exist. There was only the void, and in the void, self-annihilation. No time. No aging. No loss. No stars forming. No first kisses. No dancing. In the after, everything expanded, more and more distant. Growing apart is a breath that never fills the lungs.

**

Song

Can’t we just let the song play, she said, and dance through the end. Part of her feels like she let go of him before they ever met, like their meeting was fate’s way of announcing that the world isn’t perfect and that’s just something to accept. There’s another part of her that feels if she had never met him she would have felt his absence, a nagging pull like the back of the brain taptaptap of having left the oven on even when she hasn’t used the oven in months.

**

Empty

Before even the earliest days of the universe, everything was nothing and nothing was everything. A vacuum of emptiness, a nothing as a pure as could be, and that pureness, before the Big Bang, was everything. Quantum filed mechanics. Even in nothingness virtual particles flecked into existence, spots of nothing dotted the tapestry of nothing, and their opposites, antiparticles also emerged in nothingness, flares that danced this way, a pop and spring into the void and pinched out, something from nothing and back again, a question about loneliness, the negation of each the other in bursts of nano-explosions, tiny needles pricking into a lifeless heart. 

**

Tingles

The newness tingles the belly. First kiss. Endless possibilities origamied into existence, if only for an instant. She’s reminded of the time they met unexpectedly at the grocery store, him with pears in his carry basket and her with peanut butter, jelly, bread, and pads in her cart. There are moments when everything seems possible, when just a glance can make all the tediousness of the day fade, the way pain medication pulls the bite out of a broken tooth—pain is still there, but we care about it less. 

**

Warmth

A hint of warmth for the first time since time began and that lasted for only a quick second. When the Big Bang released its explosion of molecules, swirls of colorful gas clouds in pockets of helium and hydrogen, heat curled in hazy waves around particles in spotty darkness upon which streams of violet, turquoise, and fuchsia that extended out like fingers searching for a hand to hold, which lit the canopy of blackness and showed nothing but more darkness.

**

Clichéd

The couch. Again. Netflix and chill—with the cat. Again. If there weren’t a pandemic, she’s sure she wouldn’t be alone, even though she felt alone before the pandemic started even when he was there. Sometimes the distance is in the touch. He could have called, she thinks. He could have said that it doesn’t matter what happened, and that she isn’t going through this alone. Maybe she should just call him. Reach out. Be the bigger person, as they say. Connect. Maybe say she’s sorry—and mean it this time. Or, maybe enough of Netflix and she should see what’s on Prime. 

**

Drift

The drifting continued for millennia. The coziness of the pre-Big Bang womb followed by the clock of heat that ticked through molecules to their neutrons, continued residually for millennia as they formed gasses and clouds, became dense enough to pull gravity. And the clouds packed tighter, holding onto themselves, their atomic memory of fetal seed bed compressed oneness. One instance, singular, no difference between electrons or protons or hydrogen or oxygen or me or you. Everything and all things one thing and one thing nothing or everything that mattered or anti-mattered.

**

Found

Over time molecules began to find each other again. Hydrogen atoms began to collect around other hydrogen atoms. Large groups of helium joined in. Oxygen. The cooling effect of time, a new construct, led them to find each other, to huddle together in their soupy clouds to stay warm. And even when packed together still there was space for virtual particles to continue their snap into and pirouette out of existence with corresponding anti-particles, the universe’s second hand ticking before time and during and one day after. Micro Big Bangs. Nano Big Bangs. Each the bursting possibility of spacetime, again and again spacetime, again and again hope, connection.

**

Seen

She saw herself in his eyes and wished she could only see his eyelids. It’s hard to work on ourselves, but she tries. Forces a laugh when a smile might do. Harder when Zoom is the COVID sounding board for socializing, and she isn’t social anyway and would rather zoom to the other side of the universe than keep trying to be something that doesn’t make sense.

​**

Rodger LeGrand has been nominated for the Pushcart twice, and is the author of several collections of poetry, including Bells, (Finishing Line Press 2025), Studies for a Self-Portrait (Big Table 2019) and Two Thirds Water (Flutter Press 2018). Next year, his short story collection titled Ashes (2026) will be published by Finishing Line Press. His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Ravens Perch, Evening Street Review, The Cortland Review, and the Boston Literary Magazine. He has taught writing at MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, he designs curriculum for humanitarian courses for the United Nations and international NGOs at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.