An Intro to Zen, 1989
 
Today, the rock garden’s viewing platform is uncrowded. It’s nothing like the conga line encircling nearby Kinkaku-ji, with its gold leaf exterior and photogenic pond reflection. And maybe that’s the problem: some travelers visit these temples on the outskirts of Kyoto as a twofer. After basking in the glow of the Golden Temple, foreign tourists fail to appreciate Ryōan-ji’s Zen subtlety. Like the young man slouched against one of the columns, grumbling about how bored he is. If this were two decades later, he’d have a digital device to rescue him from quiet contemplation. He could view the rock garden’s fifteen boulders from different angles with a quick swipe of a screen. Without having to explore the viewing platform, where each vantage point obscures a new rock. No matter where you stand, only fourteen can be seen at any one time. Unless, as some believe, you’ve attained enlightenment. No danger of that today, as this guy sighs and says he’s ready to go, c’mon let’s go already.
 
 
that is the sound
of one man
yapping
 
** 
 
The Happy Couple Didn’t Register at Macy’s 
 
The groom’s favourite shop is everything I’d expected: dimly lit, a little dusty, and crammed with curiosities. I peruse a tray of memento mori rings and a set of lobotomy tools, then head for a steel cabinet, its top drawer ajar. Flipping through its contents, I’m tempted by a vintage anatomical chart of the human heart until one embrittled corner crumbles in my hand. 
 
Halloween wedding
werewolf and vampire
lock talons
 
**
  
Early Education
 
My accuser is either lying or mistaken: I did not break her crayon. Regardless, her frog-faced friend seizes my box of Crayolas. She selects one, holding it aloft before snapping it in two. Tossing its broken body aside, she decapitates another. Where is the teacher? No help arrives. Soon I am left with a hollow box and a mass of mangled wax. 
 
After school, tears streaming, I tell Mommy everything. “I’m sure she didn’t do it on purpose,” my mother says, never suspecting she has just laid the foundation for a lifetime of omissions. For the next forty-four years, I’ll conceal every wound. 
 
**
 
Upward
 
Between final exams, I sit on this secluded bench, inscribed Trees of 1931. The stone surface is smooth and cool beneath me. Above are two towering Himalayan cedars, planted as saplings by that long-ago graduating class, a gift to symbolize the new university’s growth. There is life in these limbs, the birds trilling spring. I cradle my bag of walnuts, knowing I won’t have long to wait.
 
And here comes my little learner, approaching along the walkway, twitching with ambition. He advances in bursts, his progress punctuated by periods of wary stillness as he studies me beneath tall trees. Coming close, he hesitates, then makes the leap. Now the tiny climber clings to my denim as I slowly elevate my calf. This squirrel is on an upward trajectory, riding high on the leg-o-vator, eyes trained on the walnuts. Paws extended, he reaches for the prize in my lap, reaches like this year’s graduating class soon will as we rise for our own rewards. We, who are eager to move up in the world.
 
 **
   
Meeting With the Counselor at the Cancer Support Centre
 
She looks up from my intake form and says, Have you asked your oncologist whether he can save your ovaries? 
 
after the excision
how deep
the wound
 
**
 
Hard Stick 
 
You flinched, the nurse says, his mouth puckering as he withdraws the needle. Your vein moved. At this point, I’ve heard it all: I need to drink even more water before getting my blood drawn, I have bad veins, and of course, the classic: You’re a hard stick. 
 
The day of the surgery they will take everything: my uterus, cervix, ovaries, a baker’s dozen of lymph nodes. And of course, the cancer. But they still can’t get the damn needle in. Only after the third clinician arrives with a syringe and a modicum of skill, only then will I finally get some relief. 
 
the phlebotomist calls me honey
I have no trouble 
making a fist
 
**
 
This was previously published in a different form in contemporary haibun online.
 
**
 
Tracy Royce’s writing appears in contemporary haibun online, The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, Scrawl Place, and elsewhere. She lives in Southern California, where she hikes, plays board games, and obsesses over Richard Widmark movies. Her current favorite is Night and the City. You can find her on Bluesky. 

​The Four Seasons According to My American-Born Grandmother

Winter

When I remove my clothes by the radiator before stepping into the bath, I’m white paint, a siren of clay. The world is too busy to notice my shape. My father works all day and night in the upholstery shop. My mother, a warm sponge, gives us sustenance, tongue, taste. We never have a conversation, only pass through the house like slips of paper scraping the walls. I'm wrap myself in a slate blue towel when a crow lands on the fire escape, caws and caws until I’m dry, but I have no idea what he wants to say.

Spring

Blooms and doves populate the oak tree outside my window. Simcha, the neighborhood cat, swipes his tail, watching from the stoop, always alert, always waiting. I wonder what I’ll do when I grow up – become a stenographer, watch the willow brush the side of a building, find a husband. Only a few paths are open to me, a girl not yet broken, but I’d rather lie on the beach at Coney Island and watch the sky turn apple pink. There’s little time left until I merge into another being I do not recognize.

Summer

I am the defanged bride. He’s my second cousin from the old country. When we meet, I bite my lower lip every time I try to speak. I have no choice but to agree to this union, bondage sweet with rind. As a child he lived near a forest, pine trees bowing in the breeze. Occasionally a fox or badger would leave claw marks on the dirt path outside his village. When the claws grew and were possessed by humans, his mother decided it was time to leave. He keeps his trauma inside him like a black seed that you sprinkle on rye bread. It appears ever so often like a wink, then burrows back to its hiding place underground.

Fall

Colourful leaves are the most striking things to witness on my block. I count how many are mahogany, amber, violet. When I type letters, they are like little mouths dancing in straight lines. I never learned the Hebrew alphabet, but when I hear my parents speak Yiddish with my grandparents, I understand everything. Where there’s Yiddish in the air I can exist, even when I don’t know what to say. After I marry, my sister-in-law moves in with us, but she’s half blind and clumsy, and always gets to use the bathroom first. Things never fall apart all at once. Soon, I will tell her to leave. Soon, the soles of my feet will be chapped. My babies will arrive and I will bathe them in the dark.
 
**
 
Omen 
 
My Ukrainian grandmother used to say that if you see a nun walking alone, it’s bad luck, but if you see a pair of sisters, good news is coming. One morning on the elevator on the way up to our 29th-floor apartment, she saw a lone nun. As soon as she arrived, the birds spoke to her, winged omens whipping outside our kitchen window. The sky hollowed to cobalt. The flock circled and circled.
 
When something was wrong, she felt it in her bones – like the weather and the salt of the sea rising into the crevices of her doubts. Immediately she announced that something had happened to my step-grandfather Jack, who was at their apartment a few blocks away. With furrowed brow, she pursed her salmon lips at the sky, tangling her hands in the fat alabaster beads around her neck. When Jack didn’t answer the phone, the lilies on the kitchen wallpaper shuddered and she dropped the receiver. The long yellow cord dangled and twisted. Danger in this dangling, this curlicued concern. It fell like a stone on the linoleum floor and she howled like a sinking ship. 
 
Pointing toward home, she grabbed her large patent-leather pocketbook and fled into the wind. When she called to confirm that Jack had collapsed and died of sudden cardiac arrest, we stepped away from the shadows on the walls and dipped our bread into large bowls of milk. We waited for her to return wearing a baby-powdered dress and styled blonde wig, chunky jewelry with a side of prophecy. We knew she’d be back soon. We sang to the sky. We sang to the birds who told us things we already knew.
 
**
 
Loss Swept In
 
To find an escape route and rectify wrongs, the dolls swallowed tiny pink pills and binge watched Bridgerton, then dusted tables and chairs as if to bless them. They unlatched windows and doors, waiting for a breeze to arrive through low-hanging willows. A breeze never came,  but Loss swept in like a Bichon puppy seeking a chew toy. After releasing the hems of their pants, the dolls proceeded to wrap themselves in aluminum foil, then promptly escorted Loss to the sunroom, where Mother served sponge cake and cherry tea. They proceeded into the garage, where Father demonstrated power tools. The dolls excelled at their waltz lessons, but only when spinning counterclockwise. 
 
Welcoming Loss meant the dolls no longer had to rage or flee. They shared their beds, books, and pantry. They topped Loss’ head with a porridge bowl, rubbing in the grains to exfoliate.  The heft of their bodies sank into the floorboards, and they chased their fears for hours until they placed them on the clothesline to sway, recast as undershirts and ruffled skirts. The dolls spent  a night in the garden of hydrangeas and roses, but when thorns began to sprout from their ears, they extracted them and fled. Over time, Loss became more tolerable. The dolls agreed to co-occupy space with Loss for as long as they could draw breath. 
 
**

A Tale of Girlhood

One day Girl wakes to find she has hooded eyes and rotten teeth, her skin covered in scales and feathers. She knows she can’t live under her mother’s roof, so she runs away.
 
She enters nightclubs to search for those who can heal her, even though she knows she’s really seeking herself. She grabs the arm of a tall man with pale flesh and green spiky hair. After he forces his tongue down her throat, she flees, crashing into a woman with long blonde hair and black fishnets sitting on a velvet couch. She begs the woman to capture him. The woman removes her stockings and wraps them around the tall man’s  neck until he can’t breathe.
 
Next to the bathroom, Girl finds a black painted door and walks through it, entering a forest.  She finds her mother there. Chicken blood stains the leaves. Girl loves the smell of soil. Her tongue flaps, licking the blackness from her mother’s heart, trapped like a tethered deer, and spits it back to the ground. She tells her mother Fairytales lied while you rocked me  in your lap. For her entire life she was ashamed to look in mirrors, flashed eyes sideways  while on camera. She wore a pink wig so she could glow more than her mother, make herself known, not become a disappearing swirl down a gray drain.
 
Girl’s skin thirsts for rainwater. For miles she carries a stack of plastic cups and small water jug, until she finds a raft in the wavering dark. She sails along the Hudson, where she becomes a sly leviathan ripping false eyelashes and lips from her face as the river carries her downstream.
 
When Girl reaches shore, she finally comprehends that she is not dirty, ugly, or mean.  She feels pleasure when she shakes the trunk of a plum tree with her thumbs. Without opening her mouth, she holds a piece fruit in her hand and is full, fed and nourished.  She squeezes it until the skin breaks and the juice dribbles down her fingers.
 
**

Birthday


In the days leading up to September, light hurls itself against the body’s cracks. It can’t enter directly, so looks for tiny breaks in skin. Hydrants are sealed off from loose strands of hair. No exit for swirling water. A field mouse tunnels deeper into its burrow as the forest floor hardens. Nights are becoming shorter, wintering for the coming chill. The edges of leaves turn purple and curl before shattering like confetti. My sagging face can’t reverse time. The months creep faster, like spiders or rips in pantyhose. Summer means all the light your mouth can hold. My birthday month means I will disappear.

**
 
Blue Village

When the enormous fish arrived, we knew it was only a matter of time before we'd live underwater, when the blue cave where our homes were nestled would become ocean. The gigantic fish were white and faceless like airplanes, but we didn't question their presence. Our parents and teachers had forever prepared us for their arrival from as soon as we could understand language. Their presence was foretold in our bedtime stories, our folklore, our TV shows. As water started trickling through the ravine, the Italian cypresses transformed into a deep cobalt like the centre of an apple after you chew through its centre.

Weeks before their arrival, we coated our homes in assorted colours, to waterproof them before our bodies grew scales, before our lungs shrank to make room for gills. A fleet of sailboats arrived, to transport those who chose to leave for good. I knew I'd remain, long after the white water blasted through the rocks, long after the cranberry, yellow, and lime-green homes were blurred like a spirograph. I learned to taste the umbrella of my body, to smell food and death with a tail. I grew accustomed to swim forever. 

**
 
Older Daughter as Persephone

I. How Persephone Leaves
 
Persephone says she loves both parents and cannot choose one over the other. But Hades says, Choose me because I’m your father and you know who loves you more.

Hades says Persephone’s lips are like milk chocolate and that she’s a gorgeous sugarplum, his one true love.

Persephone tells Demeter: I just want to spend more time with my father. What’s wrong with that? First it’s once a week, then half a week, then every week, then a spray of gold dust on the windowpane. 

As Persephone picks narcissus flowers by the plaza, Hades absconds with her in his black SUV. There’s no struggle. He plasters white copy paper all over his vehicle with her name and I love yous written in red permanent marker.

The gap in the earth closes after them. Persephone resides in a tunnel under Rockefeller Center. Demeter hardly sees Persephone, maybe an occasional weekend, on Christmas, or her birthday.

II. Hades’ Magic
 
Hades’ alter ego is Hector, who sings in a mariachi band called Quien Me Gusta La Mejor. His microphone is the wrinkled plum of midnight.

Hades wanted to be a priest, but because he loved women too much, he fled the seminary. 

Hades enlists Persephone to cook enchiladas de carne, horchata and eggs over easy.

Hades teaches Persephone how to clean toilets and make windows sparkle like dragonfly wings.

Hades confides in Persephone that his second wife was a witch, only good in the bedroom.

Hades’ second wife becomes a bird and lives in a treehouse in Texas.

III.  The Separation of Demeter and Persephone

When Persephone was in kindergarten, she made drawings for Demeter and wrote I love you so much fifty times. Sometimes she scrawled so many sos, they climbed off the page.

Now when Persephone texts Demeter, she says she loves her as a mother, because she gave birth to her, but that her influence is not part of her identity. When Persephone gets angry, she tells Demeter she is a toxic parent and that she has a special relationship with Hades, that he’s made her the person she is today.

When a judge asks Persephone where she would like to live, she chooses the obvious answer. The judge says it’s not such a bad thing if Persephone pledges her loyalty to Hades and becomes Queen of the Dead. 

Sometimes Persephone misses her mother and siblings. Hades says she can visit them anytime, but before he lets her leave, he layers pomegranate seeds over vanilla ice cream, presents the dessert to her in a scalloped dish, garnished with a purple orchid.

An anguished Demeter visits Zeus and Hera. She threatens to speed up global warming, lay waste to the crops of North America. 

Zeus and Hera resolve the matter by ruling that Persephone can spend more time with Demeter in the warmer months, when roses and lilac quiver on their stems, when the sun burns the meadow grasses where meadowlarks roam.

The rest of the year she will remain under Hades’ spell.

IV. Demeter’s Forgotten Daughter
 
Not many know about Selena, Persephone’s sister, whose name means moon. How many moons has Selena not seen Persephone? She yearns to inhale her perfume, emulate her by taking selfies, wearing crop tops and short shorts from Aeropostale.
 
Persephone constantly calls and video chats with Selena. She tells her that she cannot live without her and that she’s her queen, her love, her cream puff. Persephone and Hades shower her with wet kisses, extravagant gifts, and sometimes speak disparagingly of Demeter.

One day Selena becomes a young woman and tells Demeter: I want to live with Persephone and Hades. Mother, you’ll never compete with the king and queen of the underworld.

Demeter shrieks, douses her breasts with salt. Demeter wants sleep to dampen the pain Hades has caused, the sensation of ripping off her ears and casting them into the sea.

Demeter’s tears water the sheaves of wheat and barley that she cradles in her arms. She lays them on the ground next to her basket, which brims with bright orange and magenta poppies. She inhales their fragrance until sunrise casts light over the fallow fields.

**
 
Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. Her first full-length collection, In the Needle, A Woman, won the 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Prize, and is forthcoming Finishing Line Press. A two-time Pushcart nominee, she has had poems published in numerous journals including MOM Egg Review, Spillway 29, Funicular, Redivider, and One Art. In 2023, she won the Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s First Poem Award. Versions of her book were named finalists for Harbor Editions' Laureate Prize (2021), the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award (2023), the C&R Press Poetry Award (2023), and the Louise Bogan Award (2024).
 

​Odysseus and the Early Commute
 
In the damp silence before dawn, the mermaids swim to work. Before the first bus, before the trams and underground trains, they shimmer and glide between tidy gardens, singing their songs of morning. They sweep in shoals up desolate streets, undulating like light itself, the sleeping shop windows glittering back their kaleidoscopic scales. Then, as the first alarm clocks call to the city, they ease themselves into elegant limbs and smooth down their fashionable frocks. The first bus coughs into life, and stations open their eyes to gold light in the East. Shop shutters rise, offices jolt awake, and down the broad parade, dazed sailors with long coats and rolled umbrellas stagger with the weight of half-remembered songs.
 
**
 
Urban Redevelopment and the Moral Imperative
 
To dodge the consequences of my indiscretions, I pulled the house down around me, just another wreck in a street still trembling from war. Kids would come by, picking through the rubble for souvenirs – brass trinkets and cracked plastic dolls – and I’d hold my breath so they didn’t know I was there. Grass grew from all my cracks, then scrubby flowers and the occasional wild strawberry that the kids would be excited to find, though a little disappointed with its bitter taste. A tree grew, stiff and uneven, and birds gathered at its lopsided crown, shouting at the sky for more sun, more rain. And in all this time, I forgot what I’d done that had once been so terrible. More trees grew, and the kids became adults who, for all I know, became birds. I sometimes dream about a house, but I can never picture myself within its walls. 
 
**
 
The Last Midsummer
 
Words slip on their dancing shoes and sneak out down the ivy. A parched field. A rainbow marquee with boards laid out for the summer night tap-and-shuffle. A string band strikes up with a tune my mother would hum while she hand-washed my first school uniform and the words bow in lines on the point of making sense. A red-haired girl in pale blue lace spins barefoot in between, her hands high with fruit and sharp pencils, her head a hive of buzzing ideas, her heart a home of heroes-in-waiting. She inclines her face, just so. And now the words are tapping their toes, lacing their fingers into a processional arch for the swaying line that reaches back to the first capital and disappears towards the shimmer of the full stop at the end of the universe. I know this story of births and deaths; I know this song and its chorus of love lost and found, and I kick off my threadbare slippers. Once upon a time there was a red-haired girl. 1,2,3 – 1,2,3. I want to tell you a story. 
 
**
 
Redirecting the Male Gaze
 
Cross your arms, says the photographer, and she does without question, as she does everything without question. It’s like that time when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, one million years BC, making primitive promises. Cross your heart and hope to die, said the hunter-gatherer, and she did, even though her sense of anatomy was fairly rudimentary, her conception of an afterlife or eternal nothingness was more fear than faith, and, besides, she could not be completely certain of anything in a language based on little but grunts and the angle of crudely knapped flint. It’s just like in the movies, she thinks, though she knows there’s no comparison, and deep down she understands that it is just a movie, storyboarded by cynical committee, then cut and shaped to the focus group’s passing whim. Why so cross? smirks the photographer, tangled in her tight brow, and he reaches to touch. 125th of a second. Flash. She leaves him beside a bloodstained club. Perhaps there will be consequences, perhaps not. It may take a million years. Jesus, she scrawls on a makeshift intertitle, haughty as Jacqueline Logan. It’s a cross we all must bear. 
​ 
**
 
The Willow Initiative
 
It being a time for wings, I step behind the screen to shed my skin. I’m a moth, taking my bearings from anything that resembles the Moon; I’m a crane, asking whistling policemen the quickest way South; I’m a cheaply animated superhero going through the same motions, week after week; and I’m a 1:48 scale biplane with adhesive not supplied. The screen resembles Japanese lacquer, but is Victorian pastiche, a varnished découpage of problematic cultural stereotypes and extinct lepidopterae: British large copper, Danish clouded Apollo, Polydamas swallowtail, Dutch Alcon blue. And there are secret lovers on the delicate bridge between yesterday and tomorrow, their warm hands clasped, their soft skin feathering beneath long winter coats.
 
**
 
Soul Cakes
 
Coffee fills the gaps in everyone’s story. A girl reads recipes like choose-your-own-adventure books, skipping implicit hyperlinks through weight and process, folding herself into the stiffening mix as she thumbs thumbs thumbs steep crimps into everything raw. It’s 4am, and her bed bakes in summer’s mouth, gaping like the stove she saw carved in a Belgian church, the day they loaded coffins through the open top of a 2 CV with Boschian birds pecking at the windscreen. On balance, she knows it’s a blend of coffee and cookery, the kick and the heat, the sentence and solace, that fills her with weight or wings; so, she chooses her fresh ingredients carefully, lays them out like evidence. Presently, timers will sift and tick, sift and tick, as soul cakes rise, awaiting taste, and she will slip away into Java steam that fingers her throat and runs its tongue down her spine.
 
**
 
Oz Hardwick is an award-winning prose poet, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “a dozen or so” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog, 2024). Oz has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in tiny coffee shops. In 2022, he was awarded the ARC Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry”. Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University (UK).
 

My Father as a Shadowbox with Six Compartments

after Joseph Cornell
 
I.
A crib to hold him as a baby, his chubby and wobbly legs held steady by outstretched hands His straight blond hair newly cut with the help of a bowl. That same crib holds him as a toddler, his straight blond hair still cut with an upside-down bowl. still dressed in all white but this time with a sailor bow at the neck. Here he is as a toddler standing on a chair. In the same box he appears with his first bowl haircut, dressed all in white with his high-button black shoes. 
 
II.
A crate to corral him as he takes charge of his younger brothers. Now dark-haired, he is dressed in a plaid shirt and plaid socks. He wears short pants, not yet old enough despite his protests to wear long pants, a rite of passage into manhood.  
 
III.
A barrack, long and skinny, his home while training in the US Army Air Corps. From his lips dangles a cigar as he sits on the steps of the Mississippi bunk. 
 
IV.
An aircraft carrier that radios its equipment needs to him as supply sergeant. He sits for his official military photograph, the eagle prominent on his cap.
 
V.
A concrete and brick structure, his nine-to-five home at the supermarket he and his brothers established in 1953. The signage proudly announces [last name], a legacy continuing from his parents’ general store next door.
 
VI.
A casket that anticipates his heart failure from dialysis even as he sits in gray-haired retirement at the family reunion table, his glasses tucked into his plaid shirt pockets, his lips dangling a grin.
 
**

On the Anniversary of Your Death, 1 Av 5711 (August 3, 1951)
 
I give you a larger ladle to cook the Shabbos cholent so I can taste it along with your Galitizian Yiddish vowels. I show you how to use a glucose meter and I will schedule your appointment with the endocrinologist and drive you there myself. With my help, you will live longer so your grandchildren will know how it feels to hold your hand and crawl into your lap, taste your stuffed cabbage in white sauce with raisins. I will hand you sturdy handkerchiefs when you learn your brothers and sisters have been gassed at Belzec. I have filled out and submitted Pages of Testimony to Yad Vashem to remember them all by name. I am your mouthpiece, your eynekel of eyneklikh, not the eldest or the shrewdest, but the one who will always stay by your side no matter what. I offer you the family tree that Cousin Izzy kept on a window shade until someone threw away. I reconnect your family as much as they are willing, even Cousin Blanche’s nieces who don’t know of the fight you and Blanche had. But I do, because Blanche wouldn’t talk to me when she found out I am your granddaughter. I am not named for you, unlike my sister and two cousins. But you know I have the mettle to cross that chasm between here and there, between past and present, between our generations. Eva, I bear witness to your life, stand in your spaces. I give you zakhor, remembrance, visit your gravesite because my father, your eldest, showed me where it was, and light the Yahrzeit candle in your memory.
 
**
 
The Prodigal Granddaughter Comes to Zaromb (Zaręby Kościelne)
 
I stand in the place my grandfather deserted, the place where his father disowned him, where his ancestors lived for generations in lopsided wooden houses, sinking into the Brok River bed, where they hid in root cellars when the Polish or Russian raiders came thrashing over the shtetl’s four gravel roads, where wedding processions marched through the marketplace to get to the brick synagogue guarded by carved lions of Judah, where Soviets dug surveillance trenches in Leshner Forest at the end of no-name road, where I visited in 2008, and nearly kissed the ground, grateful my grandfather left in 1913.
 
**

Barbarossa
 
Holy Roman Emperor Barbarossa had a red beard and lived in a cliff called Kyffhäuser. I had a red beard, too, as I performed my German class play I wrote about Barbarossa. I was meant to write about him, our names so similar. Tom, a member of my cast, made a sword of foil and lunged at the district superintendent observing the class, mortifying our German teacher worried about tenure. Legend has it that Barbarossa never died. He remains in Kyffhäuser awaiting the call with his knights to restore Germany to its greatness.  He led several twelfth-century Crusades. Nazi leaders chose to honour his legacy by naming their June 1941 attack on the Soviet Union as Operation Barbarossa. My Belarusian cousins were rounded up and eventually murdered just like their Rhineland ancestors during the Crusades. My German 3 textbook did not mention the medieval massacres or Operation Barbarossa. I tossed my red wig and beard into the trash. I burned the script.
 
**

Erasure
 
I didn’t notice building façades, meticulous frescoes, extreme Fraktur serifs above doorways, barbed church spires, medieval watchtower gates, upper market alleys of pattern-painted homes, Stockwerk labyrinth to remind centuries of passersby they were in Germany. I didn’t notice blueprints of intercultural friendships, construction of alliances or architecture of camaraderie.
 
I knew how to take the red accordion bus downtown on my student pass. I knew how to trek through the valley, past sheep, to university. I knew how to listen in class and eat in the student Mensa to save money.
 
Through Facebook, I reach out to Debbie from my Junior Year Abroad in Germany cohort. She says she has no memory of me. I’d been the ghost of Haus R dorm, the American student who didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. who buried agoraphobia in words and pages, who hid ink-stained hands in aerogram folds, who protected herself.

 
**

Jam Session Syncopation
 
after Jazz by Man Ray (USA) 1919
 
It’s all about the beat, the burnt sienna of the saxophone, the eel-silver of the trumpet, the guitar’s hazy hollow sliding through barren white into tangerine, all swirling in swing, harmonizing with harmonica, bebopping the blues to slip into the groove. The conductor drives rhythm’s key as we scoo-bee-doo-bee-do along.
 
**
  
All That Jazz
 
after Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) by Jackson Pollock (USA) 1950
 
Falling leaves drop their chaotic chords as they swirl in the wind from branch to ground. The daytime clarinet growls its shrinking hours while the piano percusses September’s light to December’s darkness. And in between the rain, fog, and sometimes snow, the trumpet shouts celebration, the drum cracks time, and the saxophone wails yet another loss.
 
**
 
Barbara Krasner became enamored with the prose poem through Lorette C. Luzajic's WOW workshop. She holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, MacQueen's Quinterly, Cimarron Review, Nimrod, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in New Jersey.