By Joyce Schmid
Featured Art: “The Call” by Lesley Weston

When Rock ‘n’ Roll was all sh-boom, 
my best friend rocked around the clock  
and I did too  
in my attempt to be a teen— 
just three chords, 
tonic, dominant, subdominant— 

but what I really loved 
was Debussy— 
inchoate like the early earth, 
like me. 

At eighty-three, I love Bach fugues— 
a single theme repeated 
through a piece as tightly woven  
as a Miwok basket capable of holding water, 

though in German, “Bach”  
means brook or stream— 
flow, uncontained—  
no certainty on earth  
except, and momentarily, in art— 
the kind aspiring to certainty and form, 
not trying to reflect the way things are— 

my friend shape-changing 
like a flock of starlings 
from a biker on a ten-speed in the morning 
to a wheelchair patient 
barely strong enough to speak, 
to a hiker on the cover  
of his own memorial,  
his right hand on the guardrails  
of a wooden bridge, 
his left hand resting easy on his hip, 
white water under him. 
He stands a moment, 
with the whole high country at his back, 
then turns, 
heads into it.  

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Joyce Schmid’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Connecticut River Review, The Hudson Review, Bridport Prize Anthology 2025, Passager, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks: “Natural Science” (Glass Lyre Press, 2025) and Superbloom (Kelsay Books, 2026).