Murmuration, a Triptych
 
I.
 
Starlings waltz above the trees in the county park. Turkey vultures tango on an abandoned chimney cap. Cardinals cha-cha on a red maple branch. A year ago, I could not open my eyes. A year ago, I could not leave my house. A year ago, I could not lift my legs. Now my maskless breath reaches out in open air, flutters feathers in a roar all my own.
 
II. 
 
She writhes in and out of consciousness. We’ve just been told her kidneys and liver are shutting down. More antibiotics. Stat. She’s in the ICU now, where they brought her when she arrived by ambulance, her blood pressure 84/42. But she will need to go into the OR later, to have a stent put in place to drain her bile duct where an infection has built up. She doesn’t know. She cries out for our dead mother. I want to take her hand the way I did when she caught her leg in a bicycle wheel. I was in high school and she was just entering kindergarten. I held her head in my lap across the bathroom counter as the doctor stitched up her knee. I want to take her hand, but I’m not wearing gloves and she’s immunocompromised by another disease she’s grappling with. Her son, her only child, came to New Brunswick from Long Island. I told him on the phone he’d better, because we don’t know if she’s going to make it. I’ve only been in the hospital to give birth. She, my baby sister, has had meningitis, all kinds of orthopedic surgeries, cancer surgery, and now this. She’ll pull through, because she always does. Because she refuses to accept the bad stuff. She mobilizes in a crisis like when our mother’s house was burgled. She came right away and kept us all sane. Like when our middle sister’s husband dropped dead during dinner at Applebee’s and she dropped everything, bought a cheesecake, and came to the hospital. Stayed with our sister for days. Wrote and delivered the eulogy the way she did for both our parents. And now here she is, under the white sheets, mumbling in Yiddish to speak to our dead mother. I want to hold her hand, but I don’t have her strength.
 
III. 
 
Waiting for Donna after I sent my son home, because he was retching from his worry about my cancer and the surgery, because I couldn’t hold him in my arms the way I did when he was little and kiss his burning keppy and made him tea with six packets of sugar, because the doctors wouldn’t tell him about my condition although he was chronologically old enough to hear, because he couldn’t handle his mommy being sick, and so I waited for Donna to come and get me, the way I waited for her a couple of years before when EMTs rushed me from my cubicle to Overlook because I couldn’t catch my breath and they thought it was a heart attack, but I knew it wasn’t, it was a gastro thing I didn’t learn about for several more years, my gall bladder not able to handle the fat in the gravy that accompanied my lunch, and I waited for Donna, who showed up at the hospital with a turkey wing in case I was hungry and she wrapped it in a surgical glove, and I had to laugh, because Donna could always make me laugh, and when Donna brought me home after cancer surgery, and my family handed me the bill for the kosher deli they brought in at my request, I wasn’t laughing anymore. 
 
**
 
Cross-Stitching
 
Fingers threading a needle, needle puncturing fabric, embellishing a canvas or stitching a seam. It’s all about self-expression through artistry of the hands with a needle. Sewing, crocheting, knitting, embroidery. And passing down the artifacts: a cross-stitched tablecloth, a knitted afghan, handmade Barbie clothes with miniature fur collars. When I began sewing in eighth grade, I did not know I came from seamstress grandmothers, a tailor great-grandfather. My ancestors have fused themselves into my skin-seams.
 
**
 
Luxury on the Half Shell
 
after Dream of Luxury, by Dorothea Tanning (USA) 1944
 
Crack open the natural oyster of your dreams. There inside the shimmering closet are rows of coveted handbags. Rare pearls to drape over your shoulder, hold in your hand. Caress each one, close your eyes as you finger the leather of Hermes, Chanel, Gucci, Leiber, Coblentz & Koret. You may be barren in the desert of materialism, but you can dream of ovaries of ownership. These gems rise from the shell like a Venus chorus. And there, in the sand, an unopened oyster. You fence it for your footwear fantasies.
 
**
 
I Will Make a Way in the Wilderness
 
after Survivor, by Frida Kahlo (Mexico) 1938
 
I live in immuno-isolation, out here alone to wander and wonder. I wrap myself in plastic bubbles, wear a protective collar. No one can see my plumes. I stomp the ground until my feet grow numb. My discoveries go unshared. My illness and treatment have framed me tiny.  My frame is golden with embellishments in every corner. I glow survival.
 
**

The New Yoga Pose
 
after Woman with Egg, by Leonora Carrington (UK/Mexico) 1960
 
Ascend to the heavens, where you can kneel, rest, give gratitude for climbing the iron rails. The egg remains unbroken, the egg of rebirth, the egg of nirvana perfection. Joining you is the resting place of those who came before you, those who breathed life into the heavens, into the pantheon of gods who paved your way, gave you the dove-led path along which the egg glided. The archway is everything, no in, no out, just through, artifacts resting on the shelves like canned preserves, keeping myths alive for posterity. You are the bird who has found its rightful nest, black and white among the blue and white, your head-egg tethered to the heavens, your body in servitude. 
 
**
 
The Genus of Georgia
 
after Inside Red Canna, by Georgia O’Keeffe (US) 1919
 
Yayoi Kusama hides within the deep, dark polka dot of Georgia’s fierce protection, cradled by the curves that layer her fortress. Frida Kahlo grasps the edges and slides along Georgia’s waves. She cannot make it to the other side without an extra push. Georgia brushes her upward, lifts her into accomplishment. Inside Georgia’s red canna lily lays the stamen of friendship, the petals of patronage in the genus of generosity.
 
**
 
The Tuskegee Man
 
Like me, he walks through Colonial Park every day. I imagine his story. This tall gentleman is a World War II veteran. His posture tells me he was and is a disciplined military man. He wills himself into the daily routine of this walk, noting how important it is to keep up one’s strength, endurance, and health. He was a Tuskegee man, not a native to New Jersey. Flew with the best of them, because they were the best. That’s why he strides with a puffed chest. I watch him every day, impressed with his commitment. But one day, he sits on a wooden bench, just staring at the mockingbirds flying between the oak and elm trees. His coat is open. He still wears his CWA cap, which I know to be the Communications Workers of America, a union of the telecommunications industry, once so prevalent in New Jersey. He has done his time. He deserves his rest. As I pass him, I tip my own cap and say “Hello.” He does the same. 
 
**

V for Victory
 
They crowd themselves into the crux of the V for victory. It will take all of them working together—the veterans, the flyers, the navy, the marines, the infantry, the scientists, reporters, and filmmakers—to fight against the sheets of prejudice and hatred. Liberty is on their side as are FDR’s Four Freedoms—freedom of speech and expression, freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of worship. They come from all nationalities in solidarity, hammering their stake into victory.
 
**
 
Twisted Jazz
 
We, the Mad Hatter Musicians, find our groove in Central Park, our tenor and bass sax and bass dangling. We’re not into violins. We bend our bodies to the improv notes, limbering up those limbs we’ll entangle barefooted on the dotted Twister canvas on the knoll. A crowd gathers to watch us wrangle, hear us syncopate. Some sit, some kneel. Another pushes a dollar bill into the bell of my sax, mangling the sound. We play a bit, lay down our instruments and spin the wheel to play. Our legs take odd angles, our hands tangle. We laugh until we pick up our instruments and let the notes jangle all through the night.
 
**
 
Barbara Krasner is addicted to the prose poetry form. She is the author of seven poetry collections, and her poetry has been featured in more than seventy literary journals, earning her multiple Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction nominations. She lives and teaches in New Jersey. Visit her website at www.barbarakrasner.com
 

​
The Hill

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

** 

Departure

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

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

**

Taking the Trail

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

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

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

**

Riverside

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

**

Listening for Birds

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Portrait as a Burned-Out Porch Light

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

**

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

They Promised That You Were Set Apart for Something Holy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exodus

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

**

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

**

Subjects to Consider for Both Painting and Writing

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

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

In Your Soul Hafiz

“Admit something: everyone you see, you say to them, ‘Love me.’”
Hafiz (1320-1389)
 
In your soul Hafiz there must have been a passionate lover of plumped purple figs, red ruby seeds of pomegranate, wine on lips welcoming a mauve dusk alone. You must have cried out of deep sorrow and known loss not just of the departed but of someone alive beneath the sun, where you could see her stroll hand in hand with another by a river. Her cheek brushed with a pink rose not one you offered; her smile beamed not by your romantic verses. You let her be, turned to the divine, and your soul sang.
​
**

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

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

​sense memory
 
Waking without you, the dog and I head out for her morning walk. I squeeze the phone so tightly my ring finger bruises. Waiting, for the call about your surgery. Returning, still no word. I enter our bedroom and open your closet doors. Pants, shorts, shirts--stacked neatly by garment type and colour—confront me.
 
precision folds
your attention to detail
pieces of you
 
I cover my face with your pajama bottoms, inhale your light cedar scent, traces of our streamside sauna just one week ago. 
 
Not knowing.
 
unleashed floods
                    waters rage
holding onto you
 
**

sheer beauty 
 
rough and ready
clarity of the Sky Lakes
we swim with frogs
 
Acquiring our property upstate in 1990 secures our future salvation. Over time we adorn the house with classic Adirondack features to create our own “great camp.” We hike from it along nature’s trails, top the ridge, wind down to the Saunderskill stream and end up at our sauna.   
 
a fork in the birch
deer and wild turkey 
our nosy neighbours
 
I study you over time as you examine nature. Your fascination dates back to childhood when your oldest brother, high school science teacher and mycologist, lures you into the world of fungi and slime molds.  Our moist forested floor sends you back to an exciting, simpler time.
 
rich decay
your outdoor experiment
the cycle of life 
 
With your accident—and with the COVID-19 pandemic brewing around us—images of woodlands become an even more sustaining reserve. 
 
to stand with trees
mychorrizal networks
and glacial scratches
 
**

honour the front line 
 
Walks to the hospital offer miles of mindful meditation. Time to reflect on our many years together. As I journey across town in an unfolding pandemic horror film, I pass through the theatre district, where we have together been entertained by live performance. 
 
the drama of contagion
and marquees extinguished
Broadway shut tight
 
Each time I pass the entrance of the hospital, my eyes land on powerful multi-colored sentiments. Chalked on sidewalks by fans of healthcare workers, simple truths and uplifting calls to action:
​ 
                                              behind each dark cloud
                                           the sun waiting to break free
 
This intentional community of hope raises my spirits.
 
                                        if you don’t see light, be light
 
At 7 pm each evening, NYC steps outside onto sidewalks, balconies, and terraces to herald healthcare workers who show up, take care of the ill and put themselves at risk. As New Yorkers clang pots, clap and shout, I think of you. My husband-doctor, now intensive care patient.
 
a call to heal 
din of metal colanders
ad-hoc orchestra
 
**
 
Keeping Score
 
Has it all come down to this? After a lifetime of quantifying success against an arbitrary goal. To achieve, whatever the cost. A competitive nature, I prefer victory to failure.
 
Retired and sixty-six, I see my oncologist monthly. Just when I’d hoped to be free from success by someone else’s calculation, I’m checking for lab results in my electronic medical record to forecast the future. 
 
Yesterday I learn that my numbers are climbing up.
 
heads or tails 
win, lose or draw
the taste of sky
 
Today we enjoy a leisurely lunch at a trattoria on Restaurant Row in New York. Then stroll to our Broadway Matinee through a frenetic Times Square. A friend eagerly asks the question, one that feels more like an indictment.
 
Everything good with your cancer? 
 
I shut down.
 
Don’t want to talk about it.
 
skimming stones
bounce across the surface
then sink
 
Even at this point in life, I am still not sure what counts.  In spite of illness, I refuse to be defined by it. I remind myself often that my husband and I have built a wonderful life together.
 
touched by rain drops
and mountain laurel blossoms
moss shifts underfoot
 
**
 
This poem was first published in Pulse Voices.

**

I recount, we re-live
 
We acquire our upstate woodland property in 1990. As we meander with abandon through the forest, we grow through shared wonder. Discover local flora and fauna, as if walking through the lens of Ansel Adams. Our shoulders brush wispy white northern pines while moss-capped rocks point the way. Lulled by the percussive timpani of a woodpecker’s swift beat on a felled oak, we are cleansed by sounds of the Saunderskill streambed. Waters dance around rocks, down granite chutes and beckon us onwards. And often inwards.
 
We lose sight of each other. I turn to find you, on hands and knees, examining slime molds. Dangling a red newt, as if to lower its tail into your wide-open grin, eyeballs crossing. Or sniffing the wintergreen leaf you’ve just torn in two, making me a scented offering. You study a pink and chartreuse jack-in-the-pulpit and its champagne-flute contours. 
 
As years pass, we grow wiser and older. Steep climbs, leaps and deep dives become careful steps along the path and toes into the water. Then your mountain bike accident, five years ago. Both of us stopped us in our tracks.
 
glacial scratches
      up and down my spine
a lone eagle soaring
 
Our woods off-limits to you, I lose my bearings. Cannot or will not witness such wonder alone. It’s as though my senses for the cliffs, streambed, trails, wildlife have all been muted. I deny myself pleasure where you have lost feeling. 
 
blinded 
    you urge me 
to wander
 
Until we adopt a dog. Leo and I hike nearly each day. Spry and strong, he leaps and lurches, snapping me into right here, right now. Forces me to attend to branches that might scratch, roots that might trip. 
 
I return with photos and videos to share. Our rediscovered joy.
 
together we find
     our place  
on this earth
 
**
​
passing through
 
Our first day of vacation, we walk through the town to get to the trailhead. Past tiny street-side stores and family-run limoncello laboratori. Next, a thirteenth century paper mill, the first in Italy to produce hand-printed paper. The ascent to Ravello includes more than a kilometre of stone steps. Connected by paths through scented lemon and silvery olive groves. Each view offers Mediterranean cliffs, sea and shade from burning mid-day sun. Just past mid-point, we stop to complain of unexpected fatigue and are passed by a nonna forging up a long flight of stone steps. Carrying three bags of groceries, she offers buongiorno as she speeds by. Later we enjoy a good laugh and a glass wine at a trattoria in Ravello. For the return, a guilt-free taxi. 
 
to trod
civilizations
we two
one step 
at a time
 
The next day we walk down to the hotel’s spiaggia, which involves hundreds of steps winding through the terraced landscape. We pass flower gardens filled with blooming wisteria and oleander until we stumble upon the kitchen’s vegetable garden. Admiring tomatoes, spinaci, beans, lemon trees, our eyes land on the arugula. We pick a stem and seconds later hear “Bah.” A moment after that, “Baaaaaah.” As we proceed, we are greeted by two sturdy goats nestled in the rock, behind a rustic gate. To express our gratitude, we pick a few more leafy morsels, careful to leave enough for the pizza con rucola, mozzarella e prosciutto we intend to order for lunch later that day at the seaside al fresco trattoria. 
 
to roam and forage
                          a la carte
each of us bleating
 
One calm, sunny morning at the port of Amalfi, we rent a boat with captain and cruise la costeria amalfitana. Speeding over Mediterranean seas, the motor’s blades spew and spit up a hearty wake on either side of its sleek hull. Our bodies rise and fall in syncopation as we glide over the choppy surface. We gaze in wonder at the coastline’s uninterrupted cliffs and recall our very own mountainous Shawangunk cliffs surrounding our country home. In both locales, prehistoric rock formed millions of years before us, the result of tectonic shifts. Almost imperceptibly, we become part of the landscape.
 
audacious
     the alchemy of geography
a life at sea
 
Our last day. Never mind its fancy shops, our interest in Capri was mainly the brisk walk from the Marina Grande to its southeastern corner, escaping glitz for beach. And our lunch stop, Trattoria da Luigi. In full view of i Faraglioni, three spurs of rock shooting up out of the sea. Like a massive whale that stands erect just before crashing down. 
 
We descend our final stone pathway to Da Luigi, its own wonder awaiting. A beachside family enterprise going back decades. Seated outdoors, the beach and monolithic rocks just beyond reach, we will always remember Italiani promenading waist high in azure waters and Spaghetti alle Vongole with a glass of Vermentino. 
 
to linger 
in the company of seagulls
over time
 
**
​
Kirk Lawson lives Ulster County, New York, surrounded by the Shawangunk mountains. 
 He enjoys poetry as a creative outlet to enhance meaning in living. Published in Discretionary Love, Months to Years, Thorn and Bloom. Grateful to his husband Jim and dog Leo for all they teach him each day.

     

​ 
Pupa Dreaming
 
I put my ear to the monarch larva munching milkweed because it must be making noise the way it’s chomping—like a typewriter bangs out letters to make words, or like my grandfather would eat corn on the cob, butter dripping down his chin, flecks of yellow corn flying from his mouth and us grinning behind our hands. I get so close I can hear the little guy chewing. Is this its voice? The larva think we are so stupid with our imaginations and equations. Why would they need to talk? With each move, their sets of legs follow along. Look at them crawling upside down on the bottom of a leaf! Heads and tails nearly identical. They don’t know whether they’re coming or going. What bugs do have voices? What about crickets? Their song is a kind of voice but not from any mouth. Their legs the viola and bow singing love songs. And cicadas too, with their little horny tymbal membranes of desire. The monarch caterpillars work hard at being metaphors for poems and sermons. Growing faster than weeds and messing with our minds at transformation time. Do we believe it because it’s true or is it true because we believe it? They are really harping on their status as miracles. Now they’ve lost their skins and become little green pods hanging from the rafters like sleeping vampires. They dream of stained glass windows and the purple-gold taste of sugar, of sailing to the silence of Mexico for rekindling the aerial dance of their love. 
 
**
 
 
The Dream Act Explained
 
There is no somnolent village. The brain’s wires can turn against the somatic as well as the soul and torment the body of the afflicted. A lycanthrope is institutionalized when visions of demons cause violent acts. In my nightly visitations I feel sorrow and anger more fervently than when I am awake. The village in my vision is no fairy tale illustration. No church steeple. No quiet mattresses of homes or cypress trees spiralling toward the clouds. Souls I meet there are in airports needing care. I take on other strange shapes. My baby disappears when I drop her down a hole to a better life. There is no one that will help me locate her without revealing I do not belong. She was a “dreamer.” Her body fell through the air and shimmered and was gone. I had trusted she would be safe before I could follow. Women on the floors below wanted her for her black eyes. My body was too large to fit. Hair sprouted from my chin and I roared.
 
**
 
Gratitude List
 
At bedtime I make a list of ailments     body parts that hurt     at night I wake myself with a full body lunge away from the nightmare abductor coming     at me through that thin dissolving membrane     at dawn I wonder what color the sky is     at ten I thought double digits     at once I must combine all I’ve consumed and form it like clay     at my desk I put my head down and sob     at school my teacher would turn out the lights and make us put our heads down     at school I longed     at dinner     at church     at home     was I ever in charge at all     at times I was seven and scared     at other times I was 18 and looking over my shoulder     at bedtime I make a list of gratitudes     stuff the headphones in my ears against anyone’s noises     at my own noise     the gears in my head     at my friend’s house we listened to music and     at the pond we smoked     at lunch we gathered in the courtyard     at bedtime I make a list of ailments     at the top of my head     at the bottom of my feet     at no time am I ever     at no time am I ever     at once old and young and     at bedtime I make a list of gratitudes leaking in like music that won’t die     at the hooks that dig in and sing until I’m sick with it     at night I leak like music     at church     at the dance     at memory     at all at all at all
 
**
 
I Dream My Daughter and I Are on Vacation
 
I tell her I will buy all the thrift shop dresses she loves. The ribbon dresses, the chiffon, and the denim. I tell her she can walk at night freely in transparent plum colours. She can slide down the cleft of a landslide into the ocean if she wants. She can click her heels down any aisle or forest path. She can fill her lungs with smoke or clean mountain air. Her teeth can grind the hardest diamonds into speech. Her tongue can taste, ingest, or detest wine. Still she will be safe. She will know her ideas are the changing sky we worship.
 
**
 
On A Morning White as Cotton Batting
 
I’m coming out of dreams of a before-life, belly crawling. My arms drag me over the dirt, legs trailing. Belongings held in caches along the way. I’m showing my son the bed I shared with his father. (Was this our room?) And my pregnancy belly up against the brick walls. What lighting! And I can’t remember if this was where we ate. What I thought was coming next. I’m telling my son this is where we slept, but the light is on, and there are no windows. What does he expect of his next steps? Our cat’s dying is when he first learned that death rests in mulch in the shadow of the house with flies in its eyes. What about your great grandma dying? He can only remember sitting on her lap and being afraid of her wattle. She was kind and quiet. You used to pretend to be her, I tell him. Shuffled along with her walker wearing her slippers. He asks, Is that when you knew your boy was gay? Were you disappointed when you found out? Of course not, I say. I was terrified for your safety. I am on the ground with my face in doll guts. Watching my breath. My heart sounds too close, gunning against the what-ifs.
 
 
**
 
concerned I might have a doubt about it my swan arranges a seance at the wedding 
 
no weeding of geese //  somnambulist trains //  and nuances pertain to anything aware of ascots and veins protruding //  as if blood dries like paint and the puddles form pearls of lists //  as if the culprit is in the culvert with the bones of the child left wrapped in his blanket of lies //  the blue of the soft felt against the wisp of his wishbone cheek //  the satin edge deckled as paper in a lint of books //  the lilt of lit fuses //  also ranging as a motorbike //  rattle and fart blast of air and mortgage of sunshine //  only the masters can mediate //  for all along the wall was art and music //  much music of lies //  of laughter and mores and morass //  where all the bugs you could encounter //  what was this beetle with the glass wings //  what was this machine of dirt  // where all that can be named is metaphor and brittle laughter //  and enemies designing cheap concert tee shirts //  all along the fevered walls the tomato bugs swarm //  the ants and their armies //  their black bodies glinting like guns //  flint of lighter snicking from the wheel against the grain //  the grind and gird of concrete and steel beams //  the sun and how hot metal sears the skin that grazes it //  even the fork //  even the suit the spoon //  the shine of a steer //  of an iconoclast in sunglasses //  ideas of heaven and earth that leave even the brightest smile a smirk //  the landing of stairs twenty feet up //  the bodies found there bludgeoned //  their portraits above them hanging from nails
 
**
  
What Nobody Tells You About Sleep
 
It has common demons as far back as 2400 BC, incubi and succubi, witches, Liliths, Old Hags, and horned gods who sit on your chest to stop your breathing. Sleep paralysis – a witch who smirks at you while licking the mouth of another woman; it is a bat that lands on your petrified chest; it is the ghost of a boy who died by suicide. It has hypnagogic hallucinations as you are falling asleep – the plunge off a cliff which wakes you up with a jerk. Hypnopompic hallucinations in the transition to wakefulness – visions of black letters, of grainy footage, frottage. It has sleep misperception, aka paradoxical insomnia – you think you are awake all night, but really you were asleep. There are lucid dream vibrations – buzzing sounds; a feeling of hands curling into claws; an electric current running in the veins. If you dream of death you are undergoing a life transition. The part of your brain that deals with language shuts off when you sleep. Only poets can read words in their dreams.
 
**
 
Jessica Purdy is the author of STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House (Nixes Mate, 2017 and 2018), The Adorable Knife (Grey Book Press, 2023), and You’re Never the Same (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023). Her poems and micro-fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Spiritual Literature, Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Best Micro-Fiction. Her poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review, About Place, On the Seawall, Radar, SoFloPoJo, Gone Lawn, and elsewhere. She lives in Exeter, NH.
 
 
 
 

​You Know What’s Next
 
The sink fills with half-rinsed plates. Any spoken word is rationed like oxygen in a diver’s tank. Silence hovers, fat with unsaid. When the kettle whistles, no one moves. When glass breaks, no one flinches. When the dog whines at the door—that’s the only honest sound in the house. The regulated air between has hardened into amber. No we, no I, no you, as the bed grows wider—just a suitcase under, ready like a parachute. The refrigerator moans secrets. No one will say it. The mirror develops static. Not yet. Every doorknob is an oracle.
 
**

Heartbeat of Steel
 
The girls knot lightly together, laughter slicing through air, skirts hiked high like flags of defiance. Smoke curls from their lips, grey ribbons unraveling toward the West Virginia evening sky. One girl, with dark feathered hair, eyes set hard like cobblestone, leans against the dim street light. Dried black smudges under her lashes contrast her pallid cheeks. She flicks her cig, the filter end rimmed with Bliss You Berry. Without a glance you see her walk past 7-Eleven, past the red convertible stacked with whistling, booming boys. Pink scrunchie on her wrist, she shifts her hips, savouring the snug fit of her favourite jeans, months in the making. The other girls pull at their tiny crop tops, sheer without imagination. She doesn’t need to look—her steps say more than her story, the rhythm of her boot heels ask no permission. Stronger than the steel they shape at the factories, harder than the radiant black pavement, she cradles dreams. You could follow but no one could dance to the music crying in her head. Here, girls live small, take what they can, stuck in summer sweat, fight for that back seat between two boys. But this girl—takes more than they ever will. She moves through the smoke and heat, shard-sharp, ignoring their stares and hooting, as they pull away. Always weighed down, she stands near where the road spits fire.
 
**
 
Stitched in Solitude
 
I reach around to peel layers of hot sewn patchwork morphing. Husk tailored to each acquaintance unique, seemingly unending, blistering bubbling fabric drapes over stuck skin. Kaleidoscope threads clamor. Collar and yoke ornate with buttons of bone weigh down to paralyze muscles stretched. Thin sheath varnished chokes connecting and expanding, pulls out lingering gasps from the lungs. Sigh capes ceaseless lament. Vast inner pockets brush steel wool to satin flesh. Scars and scabs designed to be hidden and quiet become shifty and daring blow away then return in night through inflexible cobalt seams. Cloaked, frayed hemmed edges surrender. Torment sirens my solitary robe to bolt and release stoking this hateful pattern. Ashamed to reveal smoky familiar membranes, encased years unfurl as it envelops, fitting into cavernous holes. Grief pushes me small. 
 
**
 
This was first published at Unleash Lit.
 
**
 
Here, Me Out
 
I wander among the corridors of belonging, the walls of which are both fortress and prison. Figures murmuring grey, brown and terracotta cluster behind locked doors. Echoes converse with me. Corpulent fog tumbles over lake water painting my day in the artistry of exclusion. There could be cold poetry in being unseen. Or beauty. Slivered spaces between the spoken and silent. Blow wildflower seeds. Respite in that small crack of forgotten wall winding to the damp shoreline. Milky morning tease shadows. Periwinkle blue whisper petals of longing. Dreaming vines rustle. Among the soft curved crackles of leafy memory - challenge the bristled voices buried beneath the din. It’s time to reclaim every last word as testament. 
 
**
 
The Sky is Only a Ceiling If You Touch It
 
I’ve stared long enough to see steam form letters, ghostly alphabets rising from birthdays of broth. Soup becomes a séance, summoning scents of forgotten kitchens. Echo of wooden spoons scraping grief, stuck on the bottom. Flames beneath the pot flicker like a violin string plucked in an empty room—trembling, unresolved, searching for a song that is not yet written. My hands are clocks, ticking backward into wet clay of childhood, where the moon was a spoon and the stars sugar I poured too fast—too eager to sweeten skies before night collapsed into hunger. Steam curling like a ribbon around a gift I never mean to open. Lid rattles. Quiet panic—a secret trying to escape its own heat.
 
**
 
Ascent to Perfection
 
flying blind there she is grazing treetops guessing her route stumbles upon a boy man with hands like David certain Michelangelo sparked electric as he carved and smoothed tracing each static finger up to his dimple then to his open lip spilling out whispers listen he loves into eyes iris shades marble streaks dilating pupils peaking outlines and carving bodies out of block as the shadow of divine is sought throw heads back into high renaissance in this time of perfection
 
**
 
She Calls Me Civetta
 
Her love is not loud, but beckons, as hot skies hang weighted in July. Across the Ohio border, roads tangle with gravel beneath tires, clatterpinging against wheel wells. After climbing steep switchbacks, she will hold my hand at twilight, walking back acres along the creek, narrating her land spirit. Crank up the car windows as dust streams from the station wagon’s belly. We will find textures of ancient marine life within Indiana limestone: Trilobites and Brachiopods, outlining each baffling skeleton with our fingers. Whiffs of sweet, sunbaked hay mix with billows of metallic dust. One more turn to go, past weathered signs—Hilltop Farm, AKC Registered Collies. The swollen hill captivates, barely wide enough. Gritty rocks tumble left, as the car interior dapples darker under canopies of unspoiled trees. We will sit on scratchy woolen plaid blankets, tenderly shy, absorbing her sentience. No relief, sticking to my seat in pastel seersucker shorts. Until the very last bend, back wheel of the car slips, heart thumps right in my throat, sunshine strobes at the clearing, statuesque corn on one side, red brick farmhouse ahead. At the crest of the hill, long armed iron gates and a last hand-painted board that says Honk, igniting a chorus of barking and high-pitched yelps. Streaks of gold and white, black and white, behind gates that drag dirt in an arc, bolted onto worn gray barns. We come to the altar and will linger until lightening bugs hover, streaming Milky Way beams on us. Rolling down windows as freshly cut grass jumps in my nose, reaching hands to wave hello. Counting all life as a gathering of gifts—her constant canon like moon crescents gold. These are all God’s creatures. Gossip with breeze, leave apples where they fall, at dawn, the deer come.
 
**
 
This poem first appeared in Unleash Lit.
 
**
 
ckSlack is an emerging poet currently living in Pittsburgh, PA who began writing through her journals as a young woman with a life-long love of words, nature and Thanksgiving gatherings with her family. She is influenced by Renaissance and Surrealism art and inspired by classical and alternative music. She has been published in The Ravens Perch and Unleash Press.