By Susan Browne
Featured Art: In a Café Called The Corral, in New Mexico” by Rebecca Pyle

I was lying in a hammock
in Fred’s backyard, trying not to be so stoned.
Someone put hashish in the brownies
& I’d eaten three.
Putting stuff in the punch & the brownies
was old hat, something we did in 1975.
I stared at the stars as if I could see through them
& beyond the edge of the universe.
With every ounce of my atoms,
I wanted to know what was there.
As if that would help. I wanted help.
I’d recently learned about stars being dead,
but I was too obliterated for science & missing Jack.
All I knew was, like a dead star, love still emitted light.
Maybe I should go to Alaska & find him
on a boat juggling salmon, was one idea
except I couldn’t move.
“Tiny Dancer” played somewhere in the house,
oh how it feels so real & it had felt real with Jack
until it changed & felt even more real with Mike.
Everything’s in flux was another idea except
my body stuck in the hammock seemed eternal.
Blurry figures passed by like in Plato’s cave.
I was majoring in philosophy.
I thought it would save my life.
I thought Mike & Jack would save my life.
Elton John, too. Even the dancer in my jewelry box
when I was a child. What was a life?
Tiny. Wearing a sparkling tutu. Diaphanous.
Electrified air appareled in tulle.
The shadows on the patio wall asked
if I wanted a hit off their doobie.
I said, “Take me to the hospital.”
They laughed & disappeared.
Salvation wasn’t high on anyone’s list that evening.
I rolled over & fell out of the hammock. Like Sartre,
I would take full responsibility for my existence.
If he could survive hallucinations of crustaceans
following him after a bad trip on mescaline,
I could get my face out of the flowerbed.
When the crabs & lobsters finally went away,
Sartre felt only loss. Slowly, I wiped the petals off
trying not to hurt them.

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Susan Browne is the author of four poetry collections, including Monster Mash (Four Way Books, 2025); Just Living (Catamaran Literary Reader, 2019), winner of the 2019 Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Buddha’s Dogs (Four Way Books, 2002), winner of Four Way Books Intro Prize. She was an English Professor for 34 years and currently teaches poetry workshops online. http://www.susanbrownepoems.com