​Illuminated
 
Like they said in art history, it isn’t the object we see, it’s the light. Impressionism and calotypes. Try to paint the pitcher using only orange, blue, white. Somehow all the hours in dark rooms staring at slides taking notes on stacks of index cards led me to you. Up close everything is geometry: giraffe spots, turtle shell segments, the pattern of mud as it dries ‘til it cracks, the intersection of soap bubbles. Your skin is as intimate to me as the skin of an orange. And as mysterious. Your skin distant as the skin of the sea. You with your ridges, rills, dimples, reaches, legions of pores. How did you ever land in my bed? We chased light as long as we could. Touched as the jet lifted off. Long gleam of beach, lace wavs spun away like the ground under a carnival ride. Breathless. Shine of a seed. You asked what those leaf things children stick on their noses are called. I said helicopters. Winged seeds. You noted the freakish drive of all things to reproduce. On Maui the divemaster zipped my breasts into neoprene. My favorite thing was watching you come out of the water. I could pick you out of a crowd. Hibiscus petals under my burned feet. Thorns hidden in sand. My eyes poured so full of light I had to close them.
 
**

This poem was first published in Rattle.
 
**
 
Big Island
 
I was going to tell your family you died happy, the documentary filmmaker says. I slog up the coarse beach at Mahukona, tugging at my orange one-piece with black squiggles, high-cut thighs. He had written Pack plenty of bathing suits. 

No documentary ever gets made, but we crew swim all the time, like clockwork. Coffee and papaya breakfast, swim. Tamari-drizzled cottage cheese on avocado lunch, swim. Beer cheers to the sunset, swim. I learn kahunas and kupunas (elders), aumakuas (family gods), how to body surf – not bad for a haole. 

One afternoon, a bale of green sea turtles. I swim next to the largest, the granddaddy, the king – not touching him coated as I am in Dr. Bronner’s castile soap and sunscreen, but I gaze into his wizened ancient eye which stares right into me. Enchantment.

Turtles head for cooler deeper water, out to sea. I follow. Sun sinks. Wind lifts. Suddenly I notice the entire bale has disappeared, shore nowhere in sight, fellow swimmers in a bar by now. I am alone in the Pacific. All I have to do is turn around, swim in the opposite direction. Against salty 4’ waves. I dream the turtle’s eye (in his realm now, not mine), alternating strokes – overhand crawl, back, breast, side stroke. Are those roadside ironwoods ahead, or clouds?

Finally, sand. My toes dig in with relish, clasping earth like hands. The filmmaker waits in the dark, jeep high beams on, relieved smile, same old coral shorts. Only later that night, in the warm burnt sugar and night blooming jasmine scented air, in somebody’s hot tub drinking flowery wine, I realize what a risk I took: almost turned forever haole – without breath. I tremble in the water, hide it. Full moon bluely lights my browned skin, asking if my mistake was innocent.
 
**

Thursday’s Fantod
 
Something happened out there. They always place the blame on drunken fishermen. Say be careful on 131, as if everybody isn’t flying doing 80 even the flatlanders, even the cops, even the salty pillars of society, even the moms in gold or silver minivans with umbrella insurance and diamonds the size of starfish in their soft white ears. Say watch out. Men howl at the moon down there. God knows what else. It’s a wonder anybody ever comes back at all, night like tonight. Undulant, hot, lightning rips black sky like claw marks. Neap tide. Heat lightning. Thunder bound and gagged. You remember things like New Orleans jazz at 3 a.m., voodoo, sazerac, how you had to lay a rose on Marie Laveau’s grave and later wished you hadn’t. Why are crypts creepier than mounds? You think of things like the veins near Cain’s carotid. How did God give him his mark? Brand? Bruise? Blemish? You ask a lot of questions, guy holding the fat yellow ferry rope says. Where you from? What you doing on the island? Painting? I don’t see no canvas. Smile only uses half his mouth. Incident on the peninsula. Eternal return. Crease of light dents horizon. Heat rises from the ground. Around the peeling clapboard corner of the ticket office coffee shop, you expect a three-headed dog.
 
**
 
This was first published in Northern New England Review and Deep Water, Maine Sunday Telegram.
 
**

My 85-year-old Mother Sells the Family Cabin to an LLC
 
No place could have been that great, that juicy holy place that was the cabin, all golden sun, all lavender shadows. Hidden from the water, hidden from the road. The dirt road also hidden, its mouth concealed by lips of wild brambles and forsythia, in late summer bulging rose hips. The old crone who once lived in the dilapidated henhouse. The henhouse bones a gatekeeper, rose tarpaper siding half blown off like stunted blushing wings. The no place place. Cabin smell of the pine trees she was born from, black tapers in my grandmother’s lead crystal candelabra, my soft powdery perfume. 

The family of racoons, blue heron, great grey owl, the loons with their haunting love and loss calls. I went into labor there, staring out at green leaves. Read Lady Chatterley’s Lover again after many years in a big brown plastic chair with a cupholder, drinking chilled chardonnay in the sun. I howled at the moon there. Stepped naked into rain and snow storms. Swam north through waxen pond lilies to the loon’s nest in the next town. Lily pad tendrils tangled my legs. Liquid layers of temperature, warm on top, shivery bottom. I cavorted. Floated boats. Dreamt of more cavorting. Always more. 

Always the liminal dream space of the shore, the lapping water, water line of ashes and untrimmed rosa rugosa. Storm broke fireplace of cement blocks. My husband would come home and we would make love, before and after supper, sometimes beans and rice or avocado toast or artichokes dipped in garlic butter with filet mignon if we had money. Sleepy love as the old inevitable sun rose over the road then field sloping down golden and slowly to butter our bodies through the wide bare dormer windows. Our loft he built with his big hands. Outside the silty water, waiting, smelling of river bottom. 
 
**

Woman in a Window from the Night Train Rome to Paris
 
 
Urban sylph, nymph, siren in her rectangle of light, cell honey-hived, swaying for the train that silver slivers through the ancient ruined night, alabaster skin in sepia silk slip – I imagine Alencon lace along her decollete – dark as new moon ocean hair in waves over her shoulders.
 
finally seeing Europe
at 32 after all that art history
frisson
 
Us in dust, paint specks after working on a milky Santorini villa, out of money ‘til we reach Boulevard Haussmann, no American-hot showers since Brindisi ferry. On the train we down crackers with Nutella, sleep on one couchette. Pretty male French steward gifts us a sleeps-six compartment all to ourselves.
 
who am I
to deserve such delight?
at home anywhere but
 
Decades later, lantern slide kaleidoscopes avalanche my mind, that woman in a window: alone, a beige man in a back room, another woman? What music does she dance to – Vivaldi La Primavera, Piaf, jazz, song of her own journey – silence? The last time she made love? Champagne angel, Bernini face, ivory apartment tower, imagined landscape of her faded lace.
 
no choice in
what memories
stay with you
 
**
 
This Isn’t One of Those Nature Poems
 
where Oliver- or Whitman-like I gape and yawp in awe and oneness. I saw God all right, all awesome summer light, Old Testament vengeance, dominion. In Maine my daughter wanted to pluck warm eggs from under chickens before taking off for Wellesley, so of course her father indulged her, prepaid for a dozen birds from the Agway down the road. I picked them up in my white SUV: all that remained, 13 meat birds, ugly teenagers the clerk said. I did not find them ugly, bird resuscitator all my life (hummingbird stuck in cabin, sparrow fallen from  garage rafter on my mother’s teased head whom I named Snickelfritz). 
 
She named the smallest Pebbles. When that one died, off its food, the next smallest became Pebbles. Darwinian, she said. Don’t get too attached, Ma. The largest she called Colonel Sanders. Dappled days grew slowly longer then suddenly shorter. Chickens moseyed in pea gravel, flame day lilies. I fed, watered, wrangled them while she dated, lifeguarded, went to concerts until 1 a.m. Near the end, a dozen heavy breasted white birds waddled after me around the yard, up the steps. I had to shut the door to keep them from tea and poetry inside the cabin. It was not a ceremonial death like she had witnessed when her nouveau hippie uncle slit the throat of a chicken who’d stopped laying with a butcher knife, kids gathered round, some kind of prayer not said in church. That was a bad death, she’d reported. Ancient soul. 
 
She and boyfriend took her chickens nonchalantly to the butcher, loaded them into doomsday car, while I madwoman wept in the doorway. I’d given the victims watermelons for their last meal, not supposed to, they soiled the vehicle. I felt like God and hated it. Did the chickens know their fate? Smell death in a hosed down cement room? Know the last moment they saw sun? I could not bring myself to cook a single one. Pointless deaths. My fault. Eve’s fault. Why did God put the forbidden tree in Eden in the first place? Controlling parent. And I’m the one supposed to make meanings out of things. You anthropomorphize, care too much, my daughter scolded, flipping her dark river of hair.
 
**

Moonflower
 
 
Weighed down by my breasts, my womb, a woman I wait watch worry from the shore, uncertain of the earth beneath my feet, unmoored as my ancestors on widows’ walks, lined eyes ablaze, a reach over tidy towns, wives in black and white obediently burning for their men. A soothsayer with no need of news, only my small pile of green stones and a moon snail shell from Cape Cod, only moonflower in watery moonlight the color of ouzo on ice, umbilicus like a pumpkin vine, only blue forget me nots, white violets, August grass so riotously green it bleeds and reeks when cut. Bad luck to have a woman on a boat. I burn but defiantly like the witches I sprang from, inside all hot white lantern. You can smell apocalypse on me. You would swear I wear long grey skirts with wet hems, dragging forests in my wake. Why did you leave me? The wife’s cry. What was it about her, the sea, her wild incandescent core? We want what we cannot possess. Limitlessness. Ecstasy on others’ graves like Mary with Percy Shelley, shooting stars, wind-shredded peonies, 3 a.m. song of the great grey owl. I am just like you, I confess. I too would sink under that bright water, miles down, nipples frozen to thimbles. I too scuba dive. I too love Romance, guilty of hanging too long too deep for one hit of the bends. Nitrogen narcosis. Night of purple quick. Unanswerable longing. Only alive within a fingertip of death. They call me crazed and crazy, but O! The forbidden flowerings and fruits that I alone have witnessed, felt! The panoply. The edge. The sea, the sea, eternally taking, eternally coming clean.
 
**

Marry Me
 
again, my eternal lover, my best friend! Let’s do it in Sedona’s red cathedral rocks, not the Methodist church in the green shadows of the fresh-to-salt St. George, that staid and verdant valley where my ancestors lie buried. Let’s do it by ourselves, for ourselves, and no one else. This time I won’t refuse to say obey. No white dress. We can both wear shorts. I won’t just have jetted in from work on some documentary, stuck overnight at the O’Hare Hilton where I dance with a robot as strangers drink and smile, bar tab on their company, Lake Michigan wind in the air filling my head with all the places I could go. Alone. Let us be barefoot. A few sags and wrinkles later, not the shiny-as-glass hair and faces we had then: unproven. Truth: I didn’t know what I was getting into. Did not know what I was made of. Selfish to take you, keep you. You said I never left my post. I swear I will never leave you alone again, now. No more apples, no more snakes. I have cut myself on so many edges. Licked my wounds to soul-healed. Scars kintsugi, all gold light – I am finally a character I’d like to write. Late for the Sky instead of Pachelbel’s Canon in D as we trudge together down a long high aisle of ruddy dirt. Come with me. Rut with me. Still believe we are immortal. Let me talk you into mixing both our ashes in one urn, have the kids release our bones in the Aegean off Santorini. I promise I will obey. This time. Now that you have stopped wanting me to. 
 
**

Young with My Husband in the Soufriere Hills
 
Arrival in the middle of the night
 
Volcano heart like many islands. Vulcan god of fire and forge. Long flight LA to Miami to San Juan, then puddle jumper, then long bumpy cab ride in streetlight-less Montserrat dark. Boss’s villa. Brought along two USC friends. Husband and I take the master suite. Long cock roaches in sheets. He says I can’t sleep here. I say I’ll crush any bugs when I roll over on them. 
 
Close to Venezuela
 
Wake to a circle of windows, 360 ocean views, Alp Cliff. I hate/love the pretension of houses with names. British colony. In town, head dude’s racing green Jaguar displayed on a greener lawn. Maid mad at us for bashing coconuts on the pool deck to make coconut chips, stain of the fruit’s womb like wiped blood. Crime scene. Our coconut chips come out tasteless. Stains still there if the villa still is. Volcano erupts a few years after we leave, covering everything in feet of ash.
 
Almost died at sea again
 
We visit a secluded beach via tin boat, when a storm comes. Thorns under sheltering trees, stinging red ants, ruined 35 mm Canon. On the hasty return lightning fizzes, hits the Caribbean all around us. I break the last of my mother’s commandments: stay off the water in an electrical storm. Our Charon in sunglasses in pounding rain tells us he is Danny from Walk of Life by Dire Straits. They and the Rolling Stones recorded here, at Air Studios. Like my home state, Maine, locals can’t afford to live by the ocean.
 
Moment of rare and unexpected grace
 
Hiking the Soufriere Hills, it smells hellish like sulfur, yellows our Ex Officio clothes, you can put a fingernail into the chalk chartreuse cliff face. Under the waterfall, sudden tug on my long straight wet hair: a beaming small Black boy holds onto my ponytail, simply holds it and smiles, as if it might be something beautiful as a cat’s tail. His mother telling him No stop let go of the woman’s hair. Me smiling back at him which is to say It’s okay hold on all you want isn’t hair weird.

**

Back Wall, Molokini
 
Within the atoll’s arms, a Maui postcard: crowd of boats, noise, tourists in bright clothes, pineapple and Oreos, sea bluer than sky, sheltered from weather. Back of the atoll is another country: wind, whitecaps, black-troughed waves, 300’ straight drop of rock wall. Colder darker faster water, blue grey to briny forest green to darkness. Advanced divers only. Divemaster Alain, just back from Alaska with the Cousteau group, tells us Remember your training. Keep track of your buoyancy. This is a drift dive. Your depth can vary 60’ without you even noticing, which of course can be fatal. Someone tells a story of a woman who died here because she panicked, twirled down 300’ like a doll in neoprene, when all she had to do was release her weight belt. Due to the current, the boat drops us off at one side of the atoll, will retrieve us on the other. Engine can’t stop running, or the boat will be carried away. Live entry: your right hand on the right shoulder of the person in front of you. Dive… dive… dive! Swim clear, avoid the prop. My first dive since babies have passed through my body. Ocean fast, relentless, 60’ down, 70’. The convex atoll face, its drop astonish. Plan was explore a ledge where sharks hang out. Instead, our team plastered like pinned butterflies against a solid sheet of water. Marvel movie. Not so much fear as power of the ocean. I would genuflect, incline my head at least, if I could move. We manage to unpeel ourselves from the transparent glue trap. Head count. No one missing. Ultimate affair, I surrender my flesh to the sea’s mouth, all theory and technique born anew as instinct. Cooled, coated in salt, moved by tides inside, I get what I came for: brush with the infinite. After, don’t get any higher than a barstool. Husband and I load up on carbs (hot buttered macaroni), eat and giggle in the shower. In the fancy marble bathtub our gear soaks in fresh water.
 
**

Sherry Abaldo lives with her husband Mario in Las Vegas, NV and rural Maine where she grew up. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, ONE ART (Top 10 Read, July 2024), The Ekphrastic Review, Rattle, Down East Magazine, and on The History Channel and PBS among other outlets. Her poems are forthcoming in Eunoia Review and elsewhere. She holds degrees from Wellesley College and the University of Southern California film school. She is a PADI certified advanced SCUBA diver and has a boating license from the Penobscot Bay (Maine) Sail and Power Squadron. Her website is sherryabaldo.com.

What Sleep May Bring
 
I turn in my sleep and each shimmering vignette falls into a box in the attic. The recurring child with sunflower eyes, the man with a voice from October ninth, and a gypsy gazing from a cracked mirror. There are teachers with the heads of giraffes. My uncle is a black girl with a speech impediment. At breakfast my wife says, I dreamt I was flying down the street I grew up on, and I say: Einstein told me to stand at the window to download a new god. Many dreams are shut up in that box, but do they escape after one dies. Is that why my mother died wide-eyed. Maybe she was watching picnics in the Catskills where unknown family played bocci. Was it wrong to shut her eyes like I’d seen in movies. Did that end her dreams before she flew to her familiar dead. Who’s to say we don’t wake in a previous life knowing something we aren’t supposed to know. That time I saw a note under a windshield wiper eight hours before Susan put it there, was that a dream from a life phasing in from another sleep in which I turned onto my back, waking for a moment before diving back into another life still to come.
 
**
 
Waves Dream
 
My therapist says pay attention to how I feel in dreams. Especially the strange ones. I told her I dreamt about gravity waves again. It’s said they travel at the speed of light and make invisible ripples in space. They squeeze and stretch anything in their path as they pass. That’s word for word from Wikipedia, I tell her. I wonder if that’s why I felt like I was on the other side of deja vu. Here we go, she says. If you’ve ever been in love with the wrong woman you know what I mean. Her again, she says. Yes, French kisses and arguments with the intensity of a wah-wah pedal. My therapist rolls her eyes. But it was tidal waves back then. Ever have those. They’re different than gravity waves. I had another witch doctor then. Not as sarcastic as you. Anyway, Susan sat in the break room with a cup of tea and a love letter to another guy. That night I’m at the beach on a sunny day. And here it comes, the wave, so high I can’t see the top of it. I woke up sick and white. I pissed myself. How did you feel. In the dream, I mean. Like I swallowed the moon. Men aren’t so different than women when they try to let go, she says. Let go. How do you let go of a birthmark. She was the light switch in a room full of love triangles. I’m writing this stuff down. Do you want a copy. What about now, these other waves. Well, the vertigo comes and goes, and the ripples, they’re invisible aren’t they. Sometimes I don’t even know she’s there.
 
**
 
Fame Dream
 
Orson Wells flickers at an outdoor cafe, his left hand in his hair at the back of his head. He’s pulling something out of a dream he’s had. I don’t know how I know this. He’s telling a stranger opposite him that there’s a note in the air clean as Eve before she put the world in her mouth. He says her mouth is all the art the world needs. When she spoke I could hear her, Orson says, I could hear her from the other end of a long line of oak trees on either side of a well-worn path marching to a white mansion in Louisiana. I think it was Heaven, he says. The stranger sips espresso from a demitasse made of egg shell. A bird once flew from this cup. I think of the day my mother died when I think of birds flying from cups, the stranger says. Orson and the stranger don’t seem to know I’m standing here camera in hand until the shutter clicks. Sparrows hopping under the table bounce away like electrons in a physics diagram. They look at me now, Orson, stranger, wide-eyed surprised that only sudden rain brings when it falls from an open sky so blue the sun stops on its wheels. Orson says he’d like me to join them, Have a biscotti, he says. It tastes like Greek music. I don’t know how it can, I say. But I must go. And I do. I leave. At the next cafe in an endless row of cafes, Lillian Gish is having lunch with someone who seems to be disappearing. I reach for my camera, but Lillian puts out her hand, touches mine, and I can’t stop crying. It’s ok, she says. Listen, can you hear that. It’s Charlie. A small bird flies out of her cup. 
 
**
 
Mother in a Snow Globe
 
My mother plays Beautiful Dreamer electrified in lamplight. There’s a blizzard. It’s hard not to fall asleep. I imagine I’m sitting on the milk box frozen shut on the stoop, the oaks hold out their arms trying to dance in the snow. The kitchen makes itself known, yellow wall phone wants to make a call to anyone up this late. There must be others not asleep. Perhaps the stranger from that day in the ‘40s, the man with a blonde guitar who my sister said was crying. Celia was there. Said our mother spoke to him so quietly it was like taking a bath in an empty house or crows watching people go by from the trees. The three of them stood on electrified ice. Snow stopped in an old movie, Celia said, and everyone in town sang Auld Lang Syne. She was only four so it made sense. It was hard for her not to fall asleep holding our mother’s hand. I imagine the amber glow above the stove, the mouse in the corner with its hunger, music coming undone by the chord in my mother’s hands, and the colored lights in the eaves outside making it snow all night. Trees trying to hold onto each other in the moonless yard. That look on their faces. The house is a love story from the other side of town, the piano in the air, dreaming. Outside again I watch my mother electrified in lamplight. Colored lights in the eaves, below them the window-box of black shriveled flowers burnt with snow.
 
**

Wistful Secrets
 
Cat, you call yourself the Queen of Gardens and I don’t dispute that. But I know a mockingbird who disagrees though I’m baffled by his language. Penny, you believe your cousins fell from the sky and invented starlight. Maybe, but only if they gather together in a million silver heaps if they want to be more than wishful thinking. And Train, dearest Train, you have grandeur in your whistle even if it calls to barrel fires and men sleeping in the dirt offering hubcap talismans before your flying windows. Come, my black wisdom tooth, curl up in my lap and dream of carp. Listen, my little shiny man, we have a date so be careful of pocket holes and sidewalks. And you my handsome machine, lift from your clickety-clackety click and rise. Rise into a bright blue sky and give the clouds a ride.
 
**
​
Sanctuary
 
When darkness is jumbled up in my heart I wade into your river, love, and a plane pulls an orange moon behind it, clouds write memoirs about fleeting sky on water and trees on a sunny bank lean to see themselves disappear, a weathered fence staggers through weathered hills, and three feet above rough ground some jazz in the dying sun, a parade of wildflowers, I mean, a commotion of yellow jackets thrumming for queen’s favor. When cruel things are jumbled all to hell in my heart your face reminds me of another country where saints look out from doorways in the rain. Five hundred shrines of Madonna and Child in five hundred tired streets, fountains older than some wars. You’re my home where clotheslines drip clean angels, a church stoop beneath the moon. 

**

Lenny DellaRocca is founding editor and publisher of South Florida Poetry Journal-SoFloPoJo and publisher/editor of Witchery, a place for Epoems. He has new poems in Denver Quarterly, Cimarron Review, Rattle and forthcoming in I-70 Review.

Scarborough Fair Chicken

Tulsi said, "This is a dish my dad always made for high holidays. He used to tell me that the most important part was pouring white wine over the meat after it had been baking for 30 minutes. The way he talked about the herbs made me feel like our planet was made solely for the pleasure of our taste buds."

For the Greeks, parsley symbolized death and rebirth, often used to decorate tombs. Rosemary was the herb of remembrance. Sage symbolized immortality. Thyme represented courage—Roman generals embroidered it on their togas. Legend has it that the infant Jesus's manger was filled with it. Sweetness. The "virgin's humility." Peace tied to the sheath. Arrows in the quiver. An unrequited love. "I have an aiker of good ley-land/ which lyeth low by your sea strand." Sober and grave grow merry in time.

Almost 50, Tulsi is the spice vendor at the west end of the Winter Shed. Today, she’s wearing a royal blue and cream blouse with white lace and seashell patterns, her grandmother's pearl earrings, and a razor blade necklace from her ex-husband. Her black shag is effortlessly left alone, a few dyed strands falling over her hazelwood brown eyes.

"The chicken breast must be boneless and pounded thin. Wrapped in mozzarella and prosciutto. When it’s finished, lay it on a saucer full of melted tarragon butter," she said. "You know, my dad was the biggest Simon and Garfunkel fan that ever lived. When I make this, I’m making it for all three of them," she added wistfully.

She’s a painter. The dish is a pastel of egg yolk gold, emerald globs of oil, and a long, slender wishbone hanging by the side like a chewed filet of river perch. Severed lemons barely kiss in a bed of kale, like two mollusks making love in algae. Tulsi is the person in the market who makes everything she touches more interesting. She not only knows how to cook, but she also knows how to make food mean something. She knows the stories behind the dishes and tells them like an elder describing creation myths.

"Does it make music?" I asked.

"Yeah, it does. It’s kind of funny, actually—when I hear it, it’s in the key of E Dorian. Funeral doom metal. Have you listened to that before? My ex was in a band before things got ugly with us. This dish makes me feel closer to my dad, but it also sounds like the morning I found him all alone in his bathroom... Did you know 'Scarborough Fair' comes from an old English canticle? It’s about an elfin knight who came to a beautiful woman’s window. He promised to abduct her unless she performed an impossible task."

"What was the task?" I asked.

"No one knows," she said. "Maybe that is what keeps the ballad alive."

**

Fish Mom

Clara is the "fish mom." For 25 years, she has worked every weekend at the market, running Atlantic Fresh Fish. Her family has been in the business for three generations. Boston is in her blood, the way oil is in olives or wine in grapes.

Red Snapper, Tilapia filets, New Bedford Cod, Shrimp—shell on and peeled—Salmon, Marlin, Kingfish, and Mako fill her stand. Half-filled plexiglass tubs, freeze-wrapped cutlets, and cardboard boxes shoved in ice with names carefully printed in Sharpie black all line the counter. Her father’s first scale, looking like the first computer sold out of a Silicon Valley garage, still sits in its place. And then there are the clams.

"Have you ever really looked at a clam?" Kim asks me, just as she begins to share what I’m missing. "Clams have a foot, you know. They use it to burrow into sand or mud, anchoring themselves." She notices my expression. "This little guy, where he's from, could live for over 100 years. The quahog can live for over 500 years. Just think about that. It was alive when Martin Luther got booted from the Church. Some of this guy's friends were still around when the conquistadores took down the Aztec Empire."

My disgust starts to morph into admiration. "Clams can change their gender," she continues. "They're hermaphrodites. They may start as males and transition to females as they get older. Pretty cool, huh?" My disgust coming back.

"Yeah, that is pretty cool," I have to admit. Then, half-jokingly, I ask, "Do they taste better over time?" Instantly, I regret how sexist that sounds.
​
Kim laughs it off. "I'm not sure about that. But guess what else?" She holds one up. "They may not have a brain, but they’re smarter than you’d think. They have sensory organs that let them respond to their environment. They can detect light, vibrations, even chemicals in the water." She pauses. "And they have a muscle that lets them close their shell tightly if a predator comes by. These guys know how to survive in the most dangerous places on earth."

I get the sense she could tell me just as much about tuna if I asked. I thank her for sharing all that about clams. It occurs to me that knowing what you eat is more than just knowing where it came from or how it was prepared. Knowing what you eat means truly understanding what makes it special. That takes time, curiosity, and someone like Clara.

There is no such thing as food—only organisms that we choose to eat or not eat. All organisms have value beyond our desire to consume them, even the smallest and most unassuming creatures.

**

Shepherd's Pie

Pióg an aoire, Escondidinho, Shepherd's pie—it all means using what's left over to make something edible. For the past week, that's pretty much how Samantha has approached life. She’s not the type to sulk. He left. So what? He always does. He told her she’s pathetic. So what? She doesn’t need him anyway. Unshowered, uncombed, her red, frizzled hair held by two stainless steel, dog bone-shaped barrettes, her long, pale legs shiver from the breeze coming through the kitchen window. It's 10 AM, and her glass is full of Sheldrake’s chardonnay. Rubbing—almost massaging—her bruised and tattooed left arm (bouquet garni entwined in rose bushes) and dragging on a Marlboro Light, she knows that in three hours, she will be dead. This pie will be the last thing she leaves this world.

Many believe that peasant housewives invented Shepherd’s pie as an easy way to use what was left from the Sunday roast. In Ireland, they were too poor to use beef, so they used lamb. In the northern parts of England, they couldn’t dare call it what the Irish did, so it became Cottage Pie. In North America, most workers ate their meat, potatoes, and corn separately, but some (mostly of Asian origins) combined their rations to create a more communal dish. The French-Canadian railway workers liked it and called it “pâté chinois,” which loosely translates to Chinese pie.

Well into the 20th century, the absence of refrigeration made it necessary for many domestic kitchens to store cooked meat rather than raw. In the 1940s, chef Louis Diat recalled that “When housewives bought their Sunday meat, they selected pieces large enough to make into leftover dishes for several days.”

Hot on Sunday,
Cold on Monday,
Hashed on Tuesday,
Minced on Wednesday,
Curried Thursday,
Broth on Friday,
Cottage pie Saturday.

Fidgeting into her burgundy-coloured, rubber-clog-like boots, Samantha steps outside and sits on her front steps. The world feels a little less important today. The blue jays squawk louder than usual. There’s a gentle breeze. Fall is coming. No one worries about her, just as no one worries about gravel stones on the ground; they belong there and don’t mind being stepped on. She wears black trousers and a black V-neck shirt—she never misses a shift. Inside, the pie is baking; the cheddar is beginning to drape over the little snowbanks of whipped potatoes. The carrots, peas, and lamb, all falling apart together, permeate the house. Samantha lights another cigarette and thinks about who she could give the pie to. For the first time in days, she feels herself smiling. Her mind is made up. No one at work needs to know she’s not coming in.

**

Alma-Ata

I called him Dad, though he was actually my father-in-law. For over 60 years, he worked as a gardener. He was set to go to Vietnam but chose the orchards of Mexico instead. When he finally came back, all he knew how to do for a living was grow apples. Dad could tell you everything there is to know about a Pink Lady, but he could never keep a girlfriend. He could give a lecture on Galas, but he never went to his own prom. He knew Fujis and Honeycrisps, Pacific Roses and Braeburns, Northern Spys, SnapDragons, and Jonagolds, but he never bothered to own a car or open a bank account.

He told me that apples are the oldest source of food in our history as a species. Somewhere, he read that apples originated in Kazakhstan, in Central Asia, east of the Caspian Sea. The wild apples there, Malus sieversii, have been growing for millions of years.

Dad even knew that the Jesuits were the ones who brought them to North America. The only apple here before them was the crab apple—cider for foraging bears and livestock feed for hardy pilgrims.

What most people do not know is that he saw apples as a promise from the Maker. The way we read Genesis is all wrong, he would tell me. It is not a forbidden fruit (it is not mentioned in the Bible). The fruit is forbidden to be eaten unless the person eating it is worthy. Apples were eucharistic to him. He saw in their center the aboriginal fingerprints of charcoal-black star men. For him, the skin of a well-nurtured apple was like a brick torched in a cosmic fire. To bite into one was to consume the tender, custard ochre muscle of Christ. Through his eyes, in his trees, they hung like rubies in the Garden of Babylon. Split into halves with a pocket knife, they spread their thighs like moth wings—Lepidoptera.

The Cameo was his favorite, a majestic globe of flame red and scarlet. In his hand, it felt like a ball of energy, like chi. The force of life itself pulsated through his palm to the tips of his nails. He never went to college and never studied with monks. But in Mexico, one summer, browsing a bookstore in Oaxaca, he bought a used copy of the Tao Te Ching. So simple. So urgent. So available. So kind. So happy.

**

Nervous Breakdown

"Banano! Banano! Banano!" I heard the market vendor shouting from behind a weather-worn plywood picnic table. The man wore aviator sunglasses, had bushy salt-and-pepper hair, and a shapely mustache the colour of snow fox fur. He was more excited than he should have been to be hawking bananas at 6:30 in the morning on a brisk, drizzly October Sunday in Rochester.

I kept telling myself they were just bananas. But I had already begun to lose my grip before I even got out of the car. Stalks and blades. Pesticides and sterility. Chrome yellow-fleshed corpses stacked on top of each other, seared and soldered together at the stubs like amputated fingers. Bodies bathed in pesticides, clumped together in giant pools like eels in a hatchery. Roundworm-killing injections in the ground. Dermatitis. Kidney failure. Neurotoxins. Sliced and diced beige disks, like stacked poker chips.

"Banano! Banano! Banano!" The market vendor shouted louder. One dollar! One dollar!"

My forehead was throbbing, and sweat was beginning to drip down my eyelids. The Desert Storm fatigue-tan cardboard boxes in front of him looked like ammo cartridges. Dole... Dole... Dole... The "O" in the name blasted apart like a thermonuclear reaction. Ethylene gas blasting in all directions. Hormones blasting in all directions. Rapist dragon's semen spraying everywhere. Lost children. Poisoned fields. Birth defects. Finely sharpened machetes glistening in the plantation's sunlight, sparkling light beams jumping off the edges of the knives like citrine crystals. Loads and loads of them, carried secretly through the jungle on shoulders in bright navy-blue garbage bags. God, my head hurts.

As I looked up, a twenty-something RIT environmental studies major with a Columbia windbreaker, hemp sandals, and a frohawk of saffron-orange hair leaned over and told me that bananas are shaped to retrieve sunlight. "They go through a process called negative geotropism—they grow against gravity," he said while tossing several bushels into a small Wegmans tote bag. I had already begun to forget why I had come here in the first place. The sun was finally rising, a school-bus-yellow ball of information punishing my retinas to death.

**

​George Cassidy Payne is a writer, philosopher, and crisis counselor whose work focuses on mental health, social justice, and ethical reflection. With a background in philosophy and humanities, George has taught a wide range of courses and contributed to various community initiatives. His writing explores themes of resilience, the human experience, and the intersection of technology and well-being. George is also a 988 Crisis Text/Chat counselor and specializes in suicide prevention. His passion for fostering meaningful dialogue and promoting mental wellness shapes both his writing and his work in public service.

​Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board
  
Hungry for black magic, for divination in the suburban dark, we’d pick the slightest among us & lay her down supple as a new spring shoot. She’d shut her dandelion eyes & slack her limbs like the dead as we kneeled round, loose-slid our fingers under her butterfly-wing shoulders, hips, knees, feet. Queen bee among us held the scalp’s weighted cradle. Soon our whisper-chants began as we summoned the occult in nighties & PJs on a slumber-party floor. Once we did it in a cemetery, laid her fearless head by a stone. Flexed our spells until we swore she became weightless, swore we saw light under her hover-held body. We had lift-off. Better than NASA & its moonwalker men, we gave gravity the slip. Practice-kissed Death on the lips, turned Earth on her axis, dawned worlds. We were girls. Nothing we charmed wouldn’t do our bidding.
 
**
 
Ouija
 
In frilly bedrooms of dusty rose, we set fairy tables for the undead. They arrived on phosphorescent wings as we laid out our divining tools. Never mind it was a parlor game, trademarked by Hasbro. We trafficked in esoterica; our small hands skittered across the surface with witchy ease. Spirits moved them—can you feel it? Plied with questions, they plucked out answers letter by letter. Plath & Hughes made their own talking board with an overturned brandy glass as a planchette. Channeled their hot subconscious. Dabbled in necromancy. What we really wanted: to gash the veneer of the ordinary with polished fingernails. Chip away chemical lawns, driveway newspapers, the music-box tinkle of ice cream trucks. Yank a portal to the unborn. Make ourselves mouthpieces. Become oracles.
 
**
 
Blood Sisters
 
We coveted cuts, self-inflicted pinpricks. A picked scab was kismet, a chance to press our crimson together. By mingling plasma, we sealed our sisterhood. Mere friendship wasn’t enough—we needed that bloodbond written in the skin. Just before AIDS made everyone afraid, we solemnly merged cells: For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Our schoolyard romps revolved around a set of twins, blonde & Gothic, in matching hair bobbles. A mythic closeness we could only imagine. Fate gave us brothers with dirt bikes & cowlicks & smoldering silences. We craved doubleness. Bubble-lettered our longing on scented stationary at sleepaway camp, along the ruffled edges of Maine lakes where the loon would call her lonely call. Bloodoath unbroken. Wounds reaching for each other, soft as pines across the wilderness.
 
**

Self-Defense for Celestial Bodies
 
On the radio they speak of dark matter as I comb the Web, untangle its dark filaments to find pepper spray for my daughters—protector saint of habanero, lachrymose evil-eye friend to clip on a belt or fist-grip, running. They speak of bits that don’t interact with light, early-universe particles, scaffolding of galaxies. Some come pocked with rhinestones, others lethal pink & lipstick-shaped. Daphne could’ve hazed Apollo’s face instead of morphing into a laurel tree, frozen in bark as he groped her. I put my faith into this cloak of cayenne, put pepper spray in my cart for my daughters. We watch how-to videos & practice wielding the invisible: point nozzle out, flick safety switch & thumb-click trigger. Talisman of temporary blindness, swifter than prayer. Dark matter bends light across the cosmos—we can’t see its dark hand, though stars at spiraled edges spin away from us.
 
**
 
Young Love
 
The windshield is a crisscrossed geometry of frost as we wait for the school bus, 6:30, 13 degrees in the just-started car & my daughter has been asking questions all week, how old was I for my first boyfriend, first kiss, is she running late at 14, & I tell her there is time, love’s not a 100-meter dash & young love is awkward anyway, a practice run for when two people, easy in their skin, can be easy around another’s skin—& we are idling in our own breath-clouds when a song comes on the radio, rock anthem portal to youth, & like a garland of birds that lifts from the powerline all at once & sashays into flight, I’m in a dorm bed where a boy & I lie next to stereo speakers, upswell of violin & electric guitar star-shooting through us, body to body barely touched, bridged by the bridge of a song & fresh as a lake cracking open in spring. In spring.
 
**
 
Self-Love
 
After the doctor slit my belly open, a hooked fish, a purse unzipped & spilled onto the OR table—ripped cinema tickets, pens drained of ink, unlucky pennies—after he took the sick part out & stitched a jagged seam up my middle, every day I asked a nurse to fill the Pepto-pink bedside basin with hot water & baby soap that crested like egg foam, new life, then I dipped the rough terry in & wrung it out steam-wreathing to rub one moon-pale segment at a time, forearm, sternum, calf, hip, the way a cat runs the rasp of her tongue, until I could no longer avoid the very centre of the centre of myself—red rutted road, flaming abyss, solar plexus radioactive—& I dabbed that barbed-wire zone, rooting for the torn edges to find each other again, come together skin to skin like dancers or lovers, reaching for wholeness like any broken thing.
 
**
 
Campsite, Block Island
 
We plunged through brush & bramble to get there, thorn of wild sea-rose tracing thin red scabs on our shins. We scaled low stone wall, found moss-cupped clearance between scrub tree & bush where we raised a tent for the night. Within ripstop nylon walls, we tumbled orbits round muscle & skin, sought out bluffs & hollows of each other. July’s damp breath between us as we lay spine to spine with earth, its sinuous roots. Above: leaf & star. I’ve made a green altar there, Shinto shrine where I go sometimes to love’s early days, ours, among crickets & katydids, musk of bayberry & blown salt. How long would it last, this rigged-up joy? We zipped a membrane between ourselves & coming storm, slam of waves in the distance. Next morning, tent’s a lantern, blazing light. Fragile scrim still standing. Us sun-dazzled inside it.
 
**

This poem first appeared in First Literary Review-East.

​**
 
Wendy Kagan writes in a converted barn in the Catskill Mountain foothills, preferably on a loveseat by her wood stove with a cup of creamy British tea. Her poems have appeared in ONE ART, Eunoia Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Blood Moon Aria was long-listed for the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2024 chapbook competition and is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks. More at wendykagan.com.
 

​After Safe Harbor
 
She drives home in the late afternoon sun, the sun falling like warm copper 
on her white convertible, past the city’s dazzling new soccer stadium, past
the pricey restaurants, the shops on Main, on past the Peace Center where 
someone is doing Legally Blond, this woman, hungry for a pleasant dinner 
with her husband, decides she will come back to this house, volunteer again 
to teach poetry for a few days, back for the dozen or so women boarding 
here, cajoling them to write something—anything— the very young holding 
their dazed toddlers, staring down at the empty notepads on their laps, others 
holding their thirty- or forty- or even fifty-something-year-old breath when she
asks who wants to read, as if they did not know their breath was all they had 
they could count on, they wanting to know but never asking what she knew 
about life, whatever the hell she could understand about rage, and she trying 
to get them to write a poem about what love means—love!—about what regret 
feels like, tastes like, those long-playing bass notes of grief, what forgiveness
means; telling them not to overwrite, to go for the suggestion, allusion; to reach
deep within themselves for what she likes to call that perfect, muted metaphor.
 
**
 
That Fast-Breaking Water Line
 
We wonder now where they’ve gone, those winsome, casual neighbours,
a somewhat older couple—not unlike us, visiting their daughter—all
sharing an upscale resort with pool in the Low Country of South Carolina. 
Having forgotten their real names, if we ever knew them, we’ve settled
on Pete and Ginger. And having misplaced as well where they might live,
I’ve assigned them a stylish white brick townhouse in one of the prettier 
sections of coastal south Jersey. Let’s agree to Asbury Park, home of the
Stone Pony, where most mornings anyone of us might catch them walking 
along Brady Cove Beach, to watch a potpourri of dogs racing along the 
fast-breaking water line, pups meeting up with one another: young and hale,
or perhaps hobbled—fat, short, white-muzzled old timers— none of them 
harboring biases or agendas for or against much of anything. There, just to 
take the air, the briny water to cool them. Barking at whatever comes along
or runs away. For some reason I have to think the long, bony brown one 
is named Thurman. Another, a mottled Bichon Frise, will be called Adèle, 
although no one can say if she’d be happy with the appellation, little tease
that she is. Their owners, tanned and toned, along with one portly bald fellow
I’ll call Carl, nodding and smiling knowingly to one another, yet all keen to 
move along because a latté, or maybe a draft beer, would be ever so diverting 
just now, the tawny lifeguard taking it all in, perhaps anticipating what he 
and Gloria will be getting up to later that night, after a pizza. Although I have 
no idea if that is her real name. Gloria. Nor could I begin to tell you how she 
worries about her aging parents up in Tom’s River, dad just home from a scary
bout with some respiratory disease. Meanwhile, not much chance we’ll ever 
run into old Pete and Ginger again. Or the distracted lifeguard and Gloria, or 
Carl. or Thurman and that scampish Adèle. Not that we’d miss them all that
much, in truth. And yet we wonder, don’t we, just where they have all gone. 
 
**
 
One Hundred and Twenty-Seven Presbyterians   
 
a parcel of them under the age of four, plus one infant girl clinging to the neck 
of her distracted mother, listen, enraptured, to their deep-voiced minister, he
dressed today in a white golf shirt and tan slacks, all settled well into aluminum 
chairs on the shady church lawn facing him and his bearded, guitar playing 
accompanist this bright summer Sunday, the heavens above the truest blue; 
plus, smack in the center of it all, maybe twenty feet from the preacher, sits 
one attractive woman in a floral-print dress with her impatient French bulldog, 
he nosing for something winsome in the long grass, pretty much everyone else
taking up the tune, and not dispiritedly, about saving their oh-so anxious souls,
when the dog spots a squirrel, barks like hell, and rips loose from the woman
to give chase, the startled squirrel scooting away and up the giant oak that has 
uncompromisingly given us all shade, surprising the much-admired minister 
and his irritated guitarist, one hundred and twenty-seven, much perturbed 
Presbyterians and their bevy of kids, the woman with the infant girl, and no 
doubt the agitated dog, as well as my wife and me, as if to suggest there’s a 
not so-subtle lesson here, for all of us, about temptation, about salvation.

**
 
Colonel Mustard  
                      
was found not guilty in a Jersey City court yesterday of offing Mrs. White and
released from prison, largely on a technicality involving forensics. No one was 
in any way happy about the old coot getting out, as he always smelt just a bit off, 
sour—his very presence like a stain you struggle to get out of your bowling shirt. 
And let’s not forget his family’s history of weaponizing gas, some hundred years
ago. Recall as well that the man had always had an eye on Miss Scarlet—but then
what man had not? Her so-called “scarlet ways with men;” her “Hey, what are you 
looking at?” look she practiced before the mirror, in the library, not to mention 
her grand sense of entitlement; while White, ever so bland, had long had a kind of 
love/hate thing for colourful men. Hmm. Now, back to Mustard: The work of one 
über-liberal judicial defense team in the city destroyed the prosecution’s chain
of custody case when it was shown that Professor Plum’s DNA was on the knife
found in Mustard’s possession. Coincidental? This whole shebang now gets pretty 
complicated: who, where, and with what awful tool? Figure Plum knows something 
and he’s not talking, duplicitous guy that he can be. Put the clues together any way 
you can, but recall that Mr. Green has not been seen for days. Okay, maybe Plum 
(the old fruit!) killed White, and planted the shiv on Mustard, he going down for 
the crime, but was it Plum? Or Green? Maybe the preening Mrs. Peacock, who was
pissed at all of them, tipped off the fuzz about seeing Mustard and White together 
in the conservatory minutes before that scream in the hall: poor, wan Mrs. White,
dead—or mostly dead—and old Mustard insisting he’d never seen that five-inch 
butter knife, like the sharp-tongued bastard had not spent his whole messy life 
around just such knives. And what about Green? Always fiddling with the rope
and those creepy candlesticks. White had jilted the dude just months ago when she 
learned he did not like board games. Her favorite pastime. So, who? Plum? Green? 
Mustard? Or Miss Scarlet herself, vamping in the billiard room, oh so hoity toity? 

**
 
My Grandmother was Born with Only Two Hands
 
yet, at barely nineteen years of age, the young woman began raising up six 
strong kids, one year after the next, my own father being the first—and he, 
I suspect, something of a surprise. The couple’s ardor not to be slaked: three 
boys and three girls, each with their own ideas, urges, Grandmother pruning 
and pushing them into shape, into their school work and household chores, 
guiding them through so many common fears and into whatever they’d set 
their minds to. Two young people determined to make those rails, ties, and 
cinders fit; her hard-bodied, ambitious husband, a twenty-year-old telegrapher
working the Delaware and Lackawanna line. He, following there his own dad, 
a brakeman, both far too weary from the commonplace struggles of coal-mining 
in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania to be overly concerned with what was going on 
that year in war-torn rural France, or in the raging fire fields of Belgium--
Passchendaele and Ypres burning in the daily papers—though that one brought 
about by a graver, far more pernicious kind of heat. One which may be returning. 
 
**

Arthur McMaster has enjoyed two careers, one in federal service, where he spent time in Europe. The second, as a university professor of English, creative writing and literature. He is a great fan of Robertson Davies, and likes to think he has learned something useful from him in his own fiction writing. His debut novel, In the Orchards of Our Mothers, taken from a line in a poem by W.H. Auden, was recently released. He has three published volumes of poems, the most recent, The Whole Picture Show, from a small press in Limerick, Ireland. He enjoys the prose poem form for the freedom it offers to the narrator. To the story-teller working with allusion and fresh use of language. 
​

The Making of The Witch

‘Let those who rest more deeply sleep,
Let those awake their vigils keep.
O Hand of Glory shed thy light;
Direct us to our spoil tonight.
Flash out thy blaze, O skeletal hand,
And guide the feet of our trusty band.’

            About Yorkshire (1883) by Thomas and Catherine Macquoid.


Believe me, if woken in the dead of night, in the vicinity of Gibbet Howe, by a tapping or a scratching on your window don't fling wide the shutter to take a look. Most would call it horror. Here in Yorkshire, the beggar, the parson, the milkmaid, the blacksmith, the widow and spinster all seem sinister, where those in the know rub their thresholds and sills with an unguent composed of the gall of a black cat, the fat of a white hen, the blood of a screech owl; reduced in the noontide sun during the dog days.

I would rub it on my lips. It was like a kiss from Death to say he would hold off a little longer. When I drew my curtain the Hand of Glory beckoned with its flaming fingers. At first, silly romantic that I was, I thought it had come to ask for my hand. Then I realised it had come to wake me from my walking-sleep-eating-sleep-talking-sleep-working-sleep, to show me the distance between my life and whatever stories had been spun for me. Some from the moment of my first bird-breath, some from before I was born. 

For like the hand, I too was true won having been pickled in salt, and the urine of man, woman, dog, horse and mare; smoked with herbs and hay for a month; hung on an oak tree for three nights running, buried at a crossroads for two nights, then hung on a church door for one night while my maker kept watch in the porch. It is like I am a candle made with the fat of a hanged man, my own father - God forgive him.

The Hand, out of pure love, unlocked the door to reveal my own darkly miraculous powers. Something inside my body detached itself and I heard receding footsteps as if someone was descending the spiral staircase of my spine. Free of mortal wrappings I painted my gibbous face with ash and soot, carried a quail's egg in my mouth until it hatched, then fixed my goat to my trap and rode it to the market place.


** 
​
The Clairvoyant's Claim

When the hand first rocked up in Whitby, Europe teetered, once again, on the brink of war. In cinemas Pathé News presented their flickering truth to the free peoples of the world in a home counties accent, but the crowds of tourists arriving by train were there for sun, sea and sand. The hand blended in among the swathes of nondescript gentlemen, took in the view from the top of the 199 steps, strolled along the pier, relished the smell of the smoke-house on Henrietta Street, but despite never having visited the seaside town before it experienced a disturbing sense of deja vu and an uncanny magnetism to specific locations: Bagdale Hall, Arguments Yard, the foot tunnel through the Khyber Pass - a peculiar tug as if its phalangers formed a divining rod. It pondered the footsteps of previous visitors, conjuring their musings and imaginings: Stoker's gristly visions of poor Lucy's decline into vampirism, Dodgson's curious nonsensical conundrums in a caucus race, Gaskell's projection of sibling rivalry and eventual tragedy, Cook's steely stare at the horizon as if reading a destiny that was already penned there, Scoresby's glacial glare threaded through a telescope from a crows nest scanning ice-floes for the sign of a whale - a spy hop, breach or spray, but spots, instead, a great white bear watching the ship from an iceberg and hears its bone-chilling bellow. The sensations of uncanny familiarity grew until the hand decided to pay a visit to Alita Lee in her gypsy caravan on the quay, nestled among the ganseyed fishermen, half-cut sailors, pipe-smoking skippers, herring lasses and stalls of cockles and mussels. Inside the clairvoyant's cramped scrying space, with one glance at the palm she welcomed its return and began to spin a story of the press gang riots of 1793. How this hand was the hand that hurled the brick through window of the ale house on Haggersgate where the officers sought refuge from the mob, how this hand was one of the ring leaders of the insurrection against His Majesty's Royal Navy's recruiting officials, how this hand was indeed the reanimated hand of William Atkinson who was found guilty and hanged for the crimes of unlawful assembly, unlawful violence, aggravated assault, destruction of property and endangerment of life and limb.

** 

Cave of Hands
 
Italian missionary and explorer, Alberto Maria de Agostini, goes searching for the whiskers of God in the remote mountains of Patagonia. As if it were a divining rod, he trusts the hollow feeling in his chest, the terrible and beautiful ache of grace that has existed within him since he gave his heart to Christ, back home in Pallone. Stumbling over ice fields as blue as the holy mother’s robe, skirting around sea sounds that sing the sweetest psalms of stoicism and tooth-grinding worship, he follows the shrugged-off, tobacco-spat directions of locals who confessed to having visited Cueva de las Manos as el niño, to spook one another with ghost stories and eerie tales of bargains with chthonic beings. He was the first to officially discover the site in 1941 when the breath clogged in his throat as he held aloft in a trembling fist his oil lamp to view the swirling, spiralling vortex of Early Holocene, hunter-gathering hands sweeping around him, wafting, brushing, weaving, plucking, skinning, casting, sewing, kneading, sharpening, scraping, climbing, praying, clapping, clicking, tapping, flapping up into the darkness of the roof. Executed in natural mineral pigments – iron oxides (red and purple), kaolin (white), natrojarosite (yellow), manganese oxide (black) – ground and mixed with some form of binder, Alberto felt himself drowning as if in a fire-flue or geyser. All he could do to ground himself was cover his gawping fish-gob with his own weathered hand to stop his soul from leaping out and following the spirit dance into the fabric of the rock.
 
**

Hand Over Fist

It wasn’t as if there was an overabundance of animate dismembered hands in the film industry, but then there was always going to be a limited number of parts to play. Back in ’73, pre-empting Stan Lee’s cameo appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the hand played itself in all its flaming abomination with the intent to send Sergeant Neil Howie to sleep in the folk horror classic. In ‘81 Oliver Stone cast the hand as a murderous marauder on a killing spree in a mediocre psychological thriller, starring opposite Michael Caine. In Happy Gilmore, 1996, the hand blacked up to blend in with Carl Weathers’ skin tone after an alligator supposedly snapped his real hand off while playing golf. While the movie was a commercial success it was not a versatile nor rewarding role and the hand caught some flak from critics linking it to the racist history of blackface in cinema, pointing out how often black characters are portrayed as stiff stereotypes and how black actors are so regularly overlooked. Afterwards, the mainstream movie work vanished like a line of nose candy at an after-show party in Santa Monica. In 2000, during a brief come-back to the public eye, London Fashion Week saw the hand sauntering sassy along the catwalk to The Smiths in a variety of swanky, nifty, swinging, ritzy full-fingered and fingerless gloves,  and if the people stare, then the people stare, oh, I really don't know and I really don't care…Then came a spot of nude modelling which led it into the seedy, Soho-centred world of the disembodied hand fetish, a specialist sub-genre of pornography which brought in some bread and butter for a while until the hand found itself bang on the zeitgeist with the stratospheric rise of social media. There it was cast in a brand-new role, as a symbol of artisanal craftsmanship and entrepreneurial zeal. There it became the helping hand, influencer extraordinaire, demonstrating its dexterities in countless instructional videos for cooking, DIY, crafting and inventive money-saving household hacks. In a world saturated by pouting lip-plumped pseudo-celebrity selfies the hand-only video sooths through its anonymity. The hand appears as a ubiquitous stand-in for everyone’s true creative self, even emerging as an icon of YouTube children’s content: toy unboxing footage, where playthings are removed from their packages and taken for a spin. In the small screen era of the “Thumbelina Generation” the world witnessed the long-awaited re-enchantment of the hand.
 
**

The Red Hand of Ulaid
 
O Sing unto the Lord a new song;
For he hath done marvellous things:
His right hand and his holy arm,
Hath gotten him the Victory
 
Psalm 98:1
 
Forced into a corner by a staged intervention where the unmistakable evidence of its condition was presented calmly and uncontroversially, the hand had to admit the damage to its psyche from the dark-side of fame, wealth and celebrity. You're not the first and won't be the last to go off the rails and lose a grip on reality, said Nicola McChiaveli, the hand's trusted agent, Hell, she added, its part of the course for so many stars on my list, but darling, I have the perfect therapist in mind.
 
Reluctantly the hand began a course of talking therapy with Dr Galvez, who asked about the panic attacks, the paranoia, the slide into reclusiveness, the sudden pangs of jealousy, the violent outbursts. Initially, the hand was guarded, evasive, distracted and resistant but Dr Galvez's patience and soft, comforting voice, her apparent, genuine interest in who the hand was beneath the trappings of stardom and sexual fetish opened a chink in its gauntlet of protective withdrawal. Before long the hand became fixated on the way Dr Galvez licked her lower lip then swallowed before following up with a particularly penetrating question, how she did not look away when the hand wrestled with the complex feelings of addiction and revulsion to the lifestyle of unbridled entitlement and comfort to which it had grown accustomed to. The consultancy room began to swill in undercurrents of transference and projection. The hand began to recount rose-tinted stories of the days when it had nothing, those lean-times, those hard-times, those scraping-by-on-torn-fingernails-times, and long dormant memories sprang up from nowhere, vivid, desperate and bloody:
 
The lush green embrace of Inis Fáil in the distance, hills rolling like the waves, the longboat rocking under a square, woollen sail. Salted lips, eyes squinting from the sun, hungry for the rich monasteries just waiting to be pillaged. Old Turgesius, with a voice like a strangled crow yells, The first to touch the soil shall be granted kingship over this land! Whereupon, the Irish mercenary Heremon O'Neill raises his battle axe and hacks off his own hand, then, still pumping spurts of blood, fingers writhing in shock, hurls it out across the bay's sparkling waters to thud onto the shingle like a skinned seal pup. A triumph which, through cunning and unflinching sacrifice that extends human reach beyond physical limits, transformed the turn-coat hireling into the first King of Ulster.

**
 
Nemesis

The undoing was inevitable. The good life with its exotic pleasures and ever-diminishing returns of happiness, dulls the savage acumen that first secured the position. Cadillacs, a Rothko ‘Sectional’, Faberge eggs, gold leaf etched glassware and cocaine snorted off genitals. The cracks weren’t even noticed at first, then they were covered by denial. Hubris was a pair of slippers once worn by Sher-e-Mysore or "Tiger of Mysore” with leather soles and red velvet uppers, densely ornamented with salma sitara work, in gold and silver wire, with spangles and glass beads. By then things had got sloppy, coyotes were sniffing around the territory, they padded around the four posted bed at the dead at night. The dissolution of the short marriage was anything but amicable, involving accusations of mistreatment, allegations of abuse, public denouncements, open letters and restraining orders. The hand punched a mirror, paranoid of its own reflection, and it was only a surprise to itself that it was caught in flagrante delicto in the cookie jar. Publicly exposed and indefensible, the press had a field day, the distracted boyfriend meme resurfaced, and all the perfumes of Arabia could not sweeten this little hand.
 
**

Disclaimer

Given the highly publicised separation and bitter divorce wranglings between the contesting parties, the doubling down of victimhood, the unprofessional and mutually malicious character assassinations, and the resultant speculation over the hand’s involvement in previous unsavoury incidents The Hand of Glory™ firmly and legally assert that the hand, despite its supposed, although unsubstantiated longevity, was not connected in any way to The Black Hand (Serbian: Crna ruka), the covert military society formed in 1901 by officers in the Army of the Kingdom of Serbia, which gained global notoriety for its alleged involvement in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, which triggered the start of World War I. Nor was our friend and principle client in any way connected to the Black Hand Society (Italian: La Mano Nera), and its heinous methods of extortion in major US cities during the early years of the 20th century, including Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Detroit. There is no provable association between our client and the formation of the original Black Hand Society in the Kingdom of Naples in the 1750s. Nor does there exist any evidence of involvement with The Society of the Black Hand (Spanish: La Mano Negra), the secret, organization based in Andalusia during the 1880s, best known as perpetrators of murders, arson, and crop fires amidst the period of class struggle, and the spread of anarcho-communism, with its differences from collectivist-anarchism, and the conflict between’ legalists’ and ‘illegalists’ in The Federation of Workers of the Spanish Region; and which quickly transformed into a network of desperadoes involved in the black market. While it became an extensive and numerous society, especially in the provinces, each having its own centre and out branches with a total of affiliated members exceeding 40,000, The Hand of Glory™ once again vehemently asserts no affiliation whatsoever with this or with any of the other historic organisations listed above. Any slur, slander or libel against the good name of our patron will be met by immediate legal action.
 
** 

Author's note: "These prose poems are from The Hand of Glory: a biography, an absurdist imagining of the exploits and adventures of the Hand of Glory which is on display in Whitby Museum and purports to be one of the last surviving examples of theses arcane, macabre and enchanted artifacts. The collection will be released in Autumn 2025 by Yaffle Press."
​
Bob Beagrie (PhD) lives in Middlesbrough, in Northeast England and has published numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Romanceros (Drunk Muse Press 2024), Kō (Black Light Engine Room Press’ 2023), Eftwyrd (Smokestack Books 2023), The Last Almanac (Yaffle Press 2023). When We Wake We Think We’re Whalers from Eden (Stairwell Books 2021). His work has appeared in numerous international anthologies, journals and magazines and has been translated into Finnish, Urdu, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Estonian, Tamil, Gaelic and Karelian. He also writes short stories and plays.

Noing It All
 
As I try to express myself, words fail. As words fail I go to pictures. As pictures arrive, words come to mind. As the mind goes, so goes the reason to express anything. As anything happens, everything takes on new meaning. As new meaning settles, definition takes shape. As definition takes shape, the lines of communication are drawn. As communication draws to a close, it overlaps and becomes the means to an end. As the ends approach, a new mean begins. As the new mean begins, it means new beginnings lie between the extremes. As the extremes lie, they close in on the truth. As the truth opens, I try to express myself. 

**

The Water's Edge
 
inside the depths of flamboyancy and the original floatation lies the muscle of the resistance to the water's lure. The sun's mirror remembers to reflect inside the earth's deepest concerns where the beginnings of life still lie in an affluent suspension of disbelief, still move their crestfallen dream to the moon's rhythmic lunacy and still push against its future flesh with a sorcerer's dripping pulse. It is into this landscape of foaming mountains that time comes crashing up against the moist dream of a swimmer's thirst and then crawls back onto the beach with its wet, seductive fingers, drawing our evolution into its magic. We follow in our own footsteps, back through the liquid windows and into the crisp origin of lungs. Our body remembers the substance of what matters and in our joy, we return to the moment before.  
 
**
 
The Principles of Obstruction

the principles of obstruction begin at 9 am. they take turns minding their own business and then get involved in petty agreements. I'm nowhere to be seen. but I'm always present and greatly affected by their constant badgering. they raise their voices and rise to each occasion like a wave. it is virtually impossible. coming or going become moot points. standing still is out of the question. doing something or not doing it, intersect, coincide, overlap, and eventually go back home to sleep. even the differences don't make a difference. all the words in my thoughts are lower case. I remain in the upper regions with nothing more than a backpack and a cup of snow. yet the life goes on and on. never touching itself. like a wind that never meets its match. moving in the inner circles with a carefree whistle following close behind. going nowhere with determination. 
 
**
 
Prose and Con Sequences
 
A prose poem writes itself and presents sunflowers growing on the surface of the sun. It breaks glass that is already an abstract reflection of the concrete and a particle of sand on the beach. The prose and con sequences talk in highfalutin whispers and screams for attention. Nonsensical is all the rage. It accomplishes being more than what is said.
 
**
 
Memory's Forgotten Future
 
The aggressive innocence of his childhood along with the interference of broken words spoken through the sliver of silver painted on the window, blocks the sunlight from streaming onto the river of sleepy consciousness. It is imbedded in memory’s forgotten future. He is trying hard to be a wise old man but the years are stacked against him, leaning on his swollen mirror creating a wide angle that enraptures too many done deals. The choices, themselves, are winging it. Certain flight patterns don’t exist anymore but are still offered as the echoes of the most enticing choices. The wind changes its mind and becomes a falling leaf. His whole body is so tired of not talking that it’s beginning to shut up and disappear in a pile of color. When the Time comes it makes believe there is more to come. So he comes to believe in an immortal continuum that cradles mortality in its embrace as it is dying to know if this is the end.
 
He misconstrues the last straw as another pathway to breathing.  He views the sunrise as a major umbilical chord that ushers in the fanfare of the afterbirth of waking up. He, alone, hears the empty sound of the yawning new beginning that is prone to rely on its back and forth. He moves through this next moment like a blind visionary hoping to bump into truth, stop for a split second, and then stumble into eternity. 
 
 **

A Hymn for You Not Me
 
He is the unknown in the equation that is unequaled. He is ashamed and delighted. Once lit, now as dark as mourning in winter skipping through a dream keeping in time with a long moment that is shattered. The broken notes that this microscopic organist plays is a silent music of noise that ripples in a small pond of insects. It’s a popular spiritual dogma that clogs the air with a certainty that is certain to fail and is unsure of what success sounds like. He is quite okay with thisis, even though it is an is that is not today or tomorrow, it is an is that still is a promise that the sun makes by poking its light into the dark corners of yesterday where it shows its true colours as a never-ending spectrum of beginnings. This is the hymn of this unsung hero, a bird humming without wings or twigs. It is a prayer offered to a nest of possible feeding positions each chirping for sustenance. Keep in mind, that this hymn is not addressed to me and that’s all that really counts in this numb realm of mathematic subtractions that includes you and all your variables…………….
 
**

Phil Demise Smith: Poet, musician, artist, and teacher. Editor /publisher of Gegenschein Press (1971-1987). Owner/producer of  NYC performance loft- The Gegenschein Vaudeville Placenter from 1976-1978.  Published in numerous small press magazines. Chapbook What I Don’t Know For Sure (Burning Deck) and Periods,selected writings 1972-1987 (Gegenschein). Poetry readings in the U.S. and Europe. Has written/ performed his own songs with AnDna. Recent vinyl album Growing in the Dark. Numerous one person and group art shows in the U.S. / Europe including The Musée Création Franche in Bégles, France. Paintings are in many private collections.

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

**

The Memory Collectors 

I save my father. His voice mail words before his 1997 death, “This is your father.” 
 
Like my father, I collected stamps: He gave me a U.S. stamp album. I insisted on a Poland album, too, because my mother’s parents came from there. I sat down at vendor tables at stamp shows in Atlantic City, Manhattan, and upstate New York with money my father gave me, trying to fill the gaps on album pages. I learned names of colours like vermilion, ultramarine, and carmine and names of philately tools like glassine envelopes, adhesive hinges, and tongs. I gathered free stock books at my father’s instruction. I paged through the Stamp News and watched my father ink his Emkay Stamp Service rubber stamp onto glue-white envelopes holding his many inquiries.
 
Like my father, I collected books. His metal-framed racks and wooden tables bursting with volumes about wine, publishing, and media moguls. My shelves exploding about the Holocaust and shtetl and immigrant life. In the city, we haunted the stacks of The Strand on Broadway. We came home, emptied our bags on the dining room table, picked a book each and started reading over Burger King salads in the kitchen. We didn’t say a word.  
 
I stockpile my father’s memorabilia: I cleared out his basement desk after his death, tucking away his folders in my bag before my sisters noticed anything. His hidden treasures became mine. His 1937 Chrysalis high school yearbook, his senior portrait of slick-backed hair with the nickname “Moxie,” and the caption, “He’ll find a way or make it,” as a member of North Arlington High School’s first graduating class. His high school ring. The aerial photographs he took in the Army Air Force while stationed outside London in Nuthampstead, G-d’s canvas of B-17 Flying Fortresses, his World War II prayer book for those of the Jewish faith. His 1946 address book, a shared asset with his new bride, my mother. His father’s knotted silk sock preserving a laminated pin of my grandfather’s deceased sister, Malka. 
 
Still, I curate my own collection: Snippets of his handwriting scratched on notepad scraps, the phone number of his personal buyer at The Strand, the phone number of the Fallsview Hotel in the Catskills. I stash the artifacts in a basket-weave trunk at the foot of my bed, keeping them safe for the next generation. 

**
 
Shock
 
Shock is when your sister calls and says her husband, 56, died of a heart attack while eating salad at Applebee’s. Shock is the look on the soon-to-be ex-husband’s face when you tell him you’re filing for divorce. Shock is the set of financial demands he makes of you, because it’s always been about the money for him. Shock sings. Shock stings. Shock is what you wish the medical team had applied to get your father’s shunted heart pumping again. Shock is seeing a photo of your Methuselah grandfather with actual hair and learning your great-grandparents had immigrated to America and lived in Newark’s Third Ward. Shock is when you find out all the irreplaceable photos from the Old Country were ruined and tossed away when the boiler burst. Shock wails. Shock mourns. Shock is what you go into when a Chevy Equinox rear-ends your beloved Infiniti on the parkway, shattering all windows and deploying three airbags. Shock is the litmus test to assure you you’re still alive.
 
 **

Alphabet Vulgaris
 
The outline of a pemphigus vulgaris lesion, the white crust a picture frame of inherited disease sits on my computer. I stare at it, this tiny container reminding me of maybe centuries of pain and stain. I call it the P-stain. Just one of many autoimmune manifestations in the family like alopecia and psoriasis and, of course, the Big D, diabetes.
 
A tiny universe sits within the crusted legion, Russian leather boots or maybe Polish depending on the year, or maybe Austrian or Austro-Hungarian, Polish before or after, also depending on the year.
 
I unleash my P-stain into the S-curves along imagined Ukrainian roads where my grandmother’s grandmother fell off of a bridge in May 1890 into the Vysushka or the Tsutsirka River and died. It was Austria then. I suppose there was no room to make a K-turn in a wooden wagon on a narrow wooden bridge. I was never good at K-turns. I could refer to the S-curve, because my grandmother’s grandparents bore the name Seife, or soap. Soap, that slithery, slippery stuff, might have caused the horses to slide.
 
I unleash my P-stain into the Big D, rock candy crystals so enormous that pockmark my legs like misshaped stacks of harvested wheat in the breadbasket that is Ukraine, where my grandmother’s shtetl has planted itself since 1939.
 
But what I’m looking for is a U-turn, a way back to mobility without walker or cane, a return to normalcy, to not having to strategize how to pull my legs onto the bed or how to position my swollen foot on the stair to pull myself up with two hands. U-turns don’t exist. You can never go back the way you came even when following the same road. Atoms move on their own accord. They cannot be harvested or unleashed. They like to bang into each other and make new creations. You are one of them. 

**

Perseus in the Fourth Grade
 
How hard could it be to lop off the Gorgon’s head, with a snip here, well, all right, a massive incision across the neck, against the jugular, and all would be well with the world, such is the head of an old witch whose thoughts writhe with snakes getting all up into each other, biting each other with those rabid fangs, and as the boy sits in history class and watches that old nasty he’s come to hate, that old woman who scratches red ink to blot out his best work, that old woman who is older than Zeus himself, well, her head’s got to go, metaphorically speaking, and so the boy thinks if only he had Athena’s gifts of the golden shield and the invisibility helmet, he could rid his fourth-grade classroom of Medusa, but though she’s got eyes in the back of her head, she’s known to use the cabinet windows to reflect who is throwing spitballs, but if the boy had a magic shield he could avoid her failing him, that is, turning all his hard work into stone, if he could wear the helmet and sneak up on her, if he could just raise the shield and prevent that awful stare of hers that makes him and his classmates freeze on the spot, well, that and her constant threat to chain them to rock, watch them wriggle as they await the wrath  of Principal Kraken, and if the boy could use the shield and the helmet, maybe he’d get to feed Pegasus and fly that winged horse above the raging sea to his wildest dreams.

**

Blades of Memory Grass
 
after Christina’s World, Andrew Wyeth (USA) 1948
 
I sit in the kitchen after staging’s complete, the house ready for sale. The walls scream for me to hold onto them. The wall phone where my father taped photos of my mother’s hands, rings in my ears. The stovetop diagrams erased by decades of Brillo call for me to ignite the burners. The textured tile floor no longer awaits bare feet and cartwheels. The staging people ripped up the navy carpeting in the dining room revealing a century-old hardwood floor. But frame shadows on tufted wallpaper suggest abandoned wedding photos except for mine, which was banished to the basement. Inside yet outside, yearning for a place I can’t have. I remember the day in 1965 I wear ankle socks with new black patent leather shoes from Levy’s, run down the front brick stairs to show our neighbor across the street. I trip, and my sister holds my head in her lap while the doctor stitches my knee. Another day, 1968: I lie on the front lawn after running through the sprinkler, contemplating my future as cloud shapes suggest. My body crunches the plastic-like grass and I pull at milkweed and dandelions. I find a buttercup and place it under my chin. I cannot see its reflection. 

**

Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and short fiction writer, she is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Chicken Fat (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and Pounding Cobblestone (Kelsay Books, 2018), Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, ONE ART: A Journal of Poetry, Caesura, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. She can be found at www.barbarakrasner.com.

Spring in the Air
 
In checkout lane three at the grocery, I feel my nose twitch inside my mask. The two carts closest to the cashier are six-feet apart, but the rest of us are much closer together. While some shoppers chat briefly, laughing at jokes, while some lean over their carts for support, and some pull out hand sanitizer, rubbing their hands briskly, I scrunch my face to hold back a sneeze. When the guy in the next lane asks me a question, I begin to answer and without warning, the sneeze escapes. I’m shaken, but quickly hold up my hands and shout into my mask, “Allergies—I’m not sick,” but the other shoppers look at me as if I’m dangerous. Before I can do anything about it, I sneeze again, and my mask sails off like a large butterfly, floating over heads until it lands on a grocery conveyor belt two lanes away, touching an avocado. The cashier removes the mask with her gloved hand…The shopper says “no” to the avocado, which the cashier places near her register. The other shoppers move as far away from me as they can.  I try to reassure them, but a third even more powerful sneeze explodes from my mouth and nose. The automatic doors open. The plexiglass windows shake. The shoppers hit the floor, holding their breath, their heads buried in their hands. A sea of droplets and aerosols hangs over them. There’s no way for me to clear the air now. For a long moment the store is silent. The only other person standing is the cashier in lane five. She smiles and signals me to come ahead. “But I’m not next in line,” I say. “You go!” the other shoppers shout from the floor, so I wheel around them, pay for my groceries quickly, and leave the store without another sneeze.

**

This first appeared in the anthology Alcatraz, edited by Cassandra Atherton, Paul Hetherington, and Phil Day, and then in Ashes in Paradise by Jeff Friedman (Madhat Press, 2023)

**
 
Horse
 
Give me a horse, he said, so we gave him a horse; only now he needed a paddock so he could parade the horse, so we gave him a paddock; only now he needed a saddle, so we gave him a saddle; only now he needed a leg up, so we lifted him by his boot; only now he needed a racetrack, competition—other jockeys and horses— and a crowd, so we gave him all of it, and he took off flying around the track at a record pace; only now he needed a finish line and cameras flashing, so we gave him a finish line and the cameras aimed in his eyes; only now he needed a trophy to lift over his head and a big pay off, so we gave him the trophy and a big pay off to boot; when he turned around, the money was gone. He pawned the trophy for pennies. When he returned to the track, it wasn’t there. Give me a horse, he said; so we stuffed a bit in his mouth and spurred his sides until he took off in a mad gallop; now he didn’t even need us. 

**

This was first published in Floating Tales, by Jeff Friedman (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017).

**
 
Dusk
 
When her hair thinned, when her skin grew paler, I brought her medicine and hot vegetable soup. She wrapped herself in an afghan because she couldn’t shake the chill from her body. I sat down next to her and picked up the soup bowl to feed her the rest of the soup, but she was no longer hungry. The sun streaked the violet sky a burning pink. The light blazed in her cheek for a moment and then faded. I rubbed her feet and hands to restore their heat; still she shivered. The room darkened. Though I sat next to her, she seemed further and further away, as if islands had drifted between us. She was disappearing, a memory blinking out in the mind. I closed my eyes and imagined her voice, warm as cinnamon at dusk. “I’m here,” she said, “here, here, here…” and now there were lights coming on in windows and houses, spangles glittering in the filaments of her hair. 
 
**

This was first published in Floating Tales, by Jeff Friedman (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017).

**
 
White Feather
 
After Alexsandra kissed me, a white feather flew out of my mouth. I pretended that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, though the feather floated between us for a long while before it fell on the carpet. The feather was long and bowed with soft fringe. I wanted to pick it up and twirl it, but Alexsandra seemed concerned. “Did you eat a white bird?” she asked. I shook my head. “It’s only one feather,” I answered. She eyed me suspiciously, though a moment before she had seemed perfectly happy to be kissing me. To prove that there was no problem, I kissed her, and everything was fine. Our lips met, our tongues touched and tangled as they had a thousand times before. Then another feather floated from my mouth and stuck in her thick black hair. She pulled it out and scrutinized the feather for a long time. “There’s something inside you trying to get out,” she said. “You have to do something about it.” “What can I do?” I said. “It’s only two feathers.” She picked up her journal and began writing. Now I was alarmed. Had I done something to deserve this? Had a bird flown into my mouth in a dream? I thought about my dreams, but couldn’t remember anything particular. “Let’s try one more kiss,” I said, but this time, a white dove flung itself from my mouth, flying wildly around the room until it hit the window and fell on the floor. “Is it dead?” I asked. She kneeled and cradled the dove in her arms. Then she carried it outside—I thought to bury it, but instead she threw it in air. The dove caught itself before plummeting into the pavement and landed on a branch above us.  “We’ll figure this out,” she said, squeezing my hand, but I could already feel a tickling in my throat as the dove began singing.  

**

This was first published in Floating Tales, by Jeff Friedman (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017).

**
 
Old Men
 
In the middle of the afternoon, old men lose their gravity, floating off the sidewalks. Some bump their heads against tree trunks. Some collide with birds, who resent the intruders in their air space. Some old men get their filaments of hair tangled in branches while others wisely latch onto clouds and kick their way through the sky. Some old men turn over and over in space, their wallets and keys dropping from their pockets. And others shoot up like hot air balloons.  But on the ground, two old men clutch fire hydrants as if they were lovers and won’t let go.

**

This was first published in 100-Word Story and then in in Floating Tales, by Jeff Friedman (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017).

**
 
Parrot
 
“Nothing to it,” I said. “Just lift your wings and let go,” but the parrot refused to budge from the floor. “If it’s so easy why don’t you do it?” he asked. I lunged at the parrot with my hand cupped, thinking I would toss him in the air, but he was too quick, hopping ahead of me. Then my wife stepped in, pushing her palm in front of my face to stop me. “We learn by imitation,” she said. “Imitation, limitation…” the parrot mocked.  I lunged again, but he evaded me, finding a safe place under the couch.  “Watch and learn,” my wife interrupted, apparently talking to both of us.  She began running through the room flapping her arms quickly to show the parrot what to do. “Gringa es loca,” the parrot said. “Pay attention, and you might learn what it takes to be a bird,” I replied, wondering when our parrot had become bilingual. “Be a bird, be-a-bird, be-a-bird,” he sang.  My wife beat her wings faster and faster and suddenly she rose off the ground floating up to the light fixtures. “Damn,” I said. “Damn, the parrot repeated, waddling out of its shelter, holding up a wing in admiration. 

 **

This was first published in The Red Wheelbarrow, and then in Floating Tales, by Jeff Friedman (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017).

**

Jeff Friedman's eleventh book, Broken Signals was published by Bamboo Dart Press in August 2024. Friedman’s poems and mini stories have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Poetry International, New England Review, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, Smokelong Quarterly, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Contemporary Surrealist and Magical Realist Anthology, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium, Best Microfiction 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, and The New Republic. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, two individual artist grants from the New Hampshire Arts Council, and numerous other awards.
 

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

​**

September Smoke

“Now, we know we all favour our own children, and I wondered, could Douglas fir recognize its own kin, like mama grizzly and her cub? So we set an experiment…and it turns out they do recognize their kin…they even reduce their own root competition to make elbow room for their kids. When mother trees are injured or dying, they also send messages of wisdom on to the next generation of seedlings.”  

Suzanne Simard, Forest Ecologist, University of British Columbia 

“.. human grandmothers have played a central role in the life history of Homo sapiens. ..grandmothers are a driving force behind the increased longevity of our species compared to other primates.”  

Kristin Hawkes, Ph.D. Professor of Anthropology, University of Utah 
​
I am told that in the mountains, the regal Douglas firs are ablaze with wildfire.  With their sturdy roots interlaced, entire tree families are being sacrificed in place of Abraham’s son. Who hasn’t seen images of wildfires consuming trees? But I learned they also combust gas stations, melt scrap metal heaped in junkyards, explode appliances, destroy power lines. The toxic substances released are carried downwind to where we live in the valley. Sepia smoke blankets our rented bungalow. Thick ash coats the tomatoes and kale in my landlady’s garden. Acrid smoke chokes my breathing; smothers hope in my lungs.

I babysit my daughter’s chubby toddler who’s in the bathtub while she’s out foraging for breathable air to feed him. Over and over, the little guy empties and refills a crinkled discarded plastic bottle. He submerges it in the soapy bathwater, riveted to the glug glug sound of bubbles. Then he pours the tepid water down his pudgy chest. With utmost concentration, he repeats the cycle. He attends to his pretend world. From my squat stool beside the tub, I glance out at the afternoon haze through the sooty window. There is no sun to warm him. There is no horizon to scan for a glimpse of his future. I turn back to him. Is the world habitable? Let it be so. I long to give my grandson time to absorb the knowledge I pour more and more into his still tender shoots. I yearn to bathe him in hardiness so that his roots take a firm hold deep in the verdant earth.  

**

Solitary

The steep part of Hawthorne Hill starts smack dab in front of my house. Two fit women in a tête-à-tête trek up it clad in leggings and sleek vests. I sit at the bay window whose double pane shuts out their voices. They don’t seem to spot me eyeing their talk. How seamlessly their scuttlebutt flows uphill in a cadence like a pair of bridled mares. Uninterrupted, they shift their gait to match the gradient while not missing a beat of animated chat. And I, for lack of a confidante, am seemingly vested in my solitary tasks whilst my unquiet heart splits apart at the seams. For oh, how I long for such a friend.

​**

Pensive Warrior  
 
Metallic taste in Clara’s mouth like she’s devoured a revolver  she’s startled to hear herself asking her grown son point blank if he owns a gun   
  
Yes   he answers a beat too fast     
 
She detects his relief in finally divulging this secret    Standing in her kitchen her left-hand aches gripping her cellphone damn arthritis her jaw locks thoughts whirl  Sure enough  she heard him right  between then and now he’s become a gun owner  Clara attempts to mask her shock getting this news   she falls back on her skill to mirror her son’s nonchalance as if this weaponry conversation is commonplace for them  She grabs for a safe question from the jumble piling up in her mind   
 
Where did you learn to shoot it  Clara conjures a firing range in a drafty industrial warehouse outside of Philadelphia In the next space she imagines Mafia guys sitting around playing poker    
  
Here in Philly I keep it under our bed It’s a handgun 
 
Back then on January 6 2021 IT’LL BE WILD!  became the rallying call to arms Look what happened In the wee hours after the Presidential Election November 6 2024 Clara awoke from a nightmare where  the front page of the New York Times declared the winner in bold  She fumbled to open her phone the NYT  app confirmed it  Terror welled up in her like the time in high school this devilishly handsome boy picked her up for a date in his father’s shiny black Lincoln Continental    driving her home he impulsively gunned it across the railroad tracks as the warning bell pierced the still night and the gate came down  scared out of her wits strapped in her seat trapped in his mania  
 
 
Clara and her son live on opposite coasts in the US 
 
Mom you remember Jamal my friend from stand-up comedy he taught me a lot about handling guns He grew up in North Philly  remember     from a rough neighbourhood  Jamal said never pull a gun out just to scare someone that’ll backfire good chance the bad guy will have a loaded gun He’ll kill you first 
 
Clara’s toddler was one of those sweet thumb suckers who  wide-eyed  watched the rough and tumbled boys go up and down up and down the plastic slide until he had completely figured out how to tackle the work      Then he joined the line climbed the ladder with one hand on the rail while the other clutched his bunched-up Bear blankey     At the top he carefully twisted his pudgy body into position as the other boys yelled hurry up    He launched but his Bear blankey got stuck under his bottom Swaddled in quilt batting he inched down the slide reached the bottom only to dash back to the line bolt up the ladder and time after time slide down with abandon blankey tossed aside 
 
When did you buy it        A while ago      
  
Wasn’t he in prison your friend Jamal 
 
She’d been out for the evening with her husband on a school night  Home now she enters her son’s bedroom to check on him It’s dank and smelly She inhales the acrid odour of her preteen boy fast asleep his lanky body twisted in his comforter      the scraps of his Bear blankey wrapped around his damp head    silence but for his breathing     She sees that he laid out his entire specialty knife collection on his desk Clara smiles  she catches the glint of the blades in the glow of the nightlight revealing the precision of his strategy to protect himself against a would-be intruder 
 
Not prison   Jail  For a year For a break in   stealing some cash   from his grandma’s sock drawer 
 
Her son lives in a row house in Philly with his Ethiopian wife two cats and an occasional boarder Their working-class neighbourhood borders pricey condos to the west   empty storefronts and panhandlers to the east   
 
Jamal told me you want to talk the bad guy down Deescalate the situation You pull out the gun as a last resort Her son let loose his infectious stand- up laugh  Really mom I gotta tell you I’ve seen Jamal in some tense situations and truth is he doesn’t back down   Clara hears a line from a John Lennon song pulsing in her head BANG BANG SHOOT SHOOT 
 
 
At bedtime Clara reads Where the Wild Things Are aloud to her toddler son   he presses close to her like he wants to crawl back inside      his breathing slows as the story moves closer closer to the well-thumbed illustrations of Max and the partying monsters cutting loose    taking leave of their senses 
 
On Election night that one who roared his terrible roar and gnashed his terrible teeth unleashed a Wild Rumpus with his Party of Rascals       She wonders if those monstrous dybbuks won’t back down until she herself has finally slid off the edge  
 
Mom the gun is not like a hammer I use for all sorts of things  The gun’s for one purpose  To kill a bad guy  I bought the kind that makes a lot of noise when I load it so a robber will hear me loading it Jamal said that’s a deterrent right there      
 
Pensive warrior 
Deep sleep Plate glass breaks 
Happiness is a warm gun 
 
** 
 
The last line of this piece is from the song title, "Happiness is a Warm Gun," by The Beatles, a song written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The song title was inspired by the same phrase when  John saw it in American Rifleman magazine. 

**

As a baby, Brooke Martin camped out in an oxygen tent with pneumonia. In kindergarten, she contracted mononucleosis, in grad school Rocky Mountain Spotted fever, as a young mother pharyngal conjunctival fever virus then Legionnaire’s disease a couple years later. She never got Covid. Go figure. Becoming a grandma was the impetus to write her stories. Brooke backed into an ekphrastic poetry class because flash fiction was full. Now she’s inventing ways to break walls between forms and create new ones. She spent ten years as a docent at the Chazen Museum of Art. Her chapter “Ardent Rivals: Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin” was published in Creativity and Madness: Psychological Studies of Art and Artists Vol 3 AIMED press. She divides her time between Madison, WI, Eugene, OR and traveling with her Argentine tango dance shoes.