For My Mother, Who Detested Sports All Her Life but Became in Her Final Years the University of Minnesota Men’s Basketball Team’s Most Devoted Fan

February 27, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By David Thoreen
Featured Art: “Field Within a Field” by Thad DeVassie

For her, by then, the news was nonsense, names
she did not know, public policy proposals she
could not follow. Ugh, the weather girl, she’d say,
before she stopped talking altogether. What
are windows for? She still sat with a book in her lap
but rarely opened it. Why basketball, I wondered,
until I watched her watch a game. There was no plot,
no morally murky postwar setting, no confusing
characters, no Monsieur Poirot, no Miss Brodie,
no exposition, no dialogue filled with subtext
and subterfuge, no metaphors or motifs. No past
and no future, only this: ten men running full tilt
coast to coast, one catching a pass and spinning
at the top of the key, stuttering, feinting right,
then driving and in three quick steps rising and floating
to the rim, a flick of his fingers releasing the ball
that spins just so against the backboard and drops
through the hoop, riffling the net.

She couldn’t remember her husband or grown children,
but when the Golden Gophers scored and the screen filled
with close-ups of anonymous fans draped maroon
and gold, pumping fists, blowing kisses, waving their beer,
she knew it was her turn to cheer.

I Learned the Small-Town Stuff

February 26, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kathleen Loe

of trading okra for clear-eyed bass,
passed through Miss Judy’s truck window
still smelling like lake,

and of nicknames and namesakes like when Bubba’s
shut down on the blunt edge of town, the new guy
reopened as Wuz Bubba’s—what Mama called

a honky-tonk, shifting her cigarette and Scotch
for a quick spin around the kitchen with my father—
who had switched on the Glenn Miller Band

in his head. Her immaculate manicure in his
rough rancher hands, rougher with the cornmeal
and bits of fried catfish—their inspiration making us all

a little tipsy, sweeping us up in the abundance
and supper had to simmer itself for a minute.
Is it fair to say it was a setup?

All their barefoot jitterbugging and kissing
in the kitchen, late-night laughing to the light riff
of ice tinkling in their drinks. It looked . . . so easy

that rowing away from the mirror-surface
of their marriage, not without its dark spots,
its chipped silvering of drink and debt.

I never saw the mists rising—risky water
has its warnings—but tipped rock-blind over
and over the lusty falls. Still, they danced

at all three of my weddings, shimmering
in beautiful new clothes, holding
their flutes high, determined bubbles rising

behind their eyes, tired from smiling at everyone, again.

Ode to My Curls

February 26, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sally Bliumis-Dunn

I could sense their coveted power
from my mother’s daily devotions
to her thin straight hair, the pink foam
curlers she’d clip tight with white pins
until she looked less herself,
and more like an awkward
flower, her green robe like a stem.
Was this when I began to feel her
envy’s invisible rain
fall in every room? My head
was covered in curls.
I could slip a restless fingertip
into one of their magic tunnels
or straighten a stray ringlet
like the corkscrew cord on a telephone.
Scientists believe curls
grew from our early hominid heads
and cooled the scalp so the prehistoric
brain could enlarge to human size.
To this day, I am swept through
with an electric charge after a shower
as I stand before the mirror
in the wash of their waves,
the ghost of my mother’s envy
still rising from the tiled floor
in spirals of steam.

Europe

February 22, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By George Bilgere
Featured Art: “Lady Perroquet” by Ana Prundaru

I love this picture of Michael
and Alex on our visit to Scotland,
what, three, four years ago? Alex
is missing his front teeth, so I think
that makes him four, or five.

They’re standing with my wife
before a palace in what
I now realize is Düsseldorf,
not Edinburgh, although
it might also be outside Lyon,
I forget the town’s name
and the name of the palace,

but an 18th century king
built it as a gift for his wife,
who was mad—or no, the king
was mad, or possibly
they were both mad, although
it could be I’m thinking
of a palace we saw in Copenhagen,

as I recall there was something
about the way the turrets
were constructed, or the battlements,
that identify it as Danish,
I forget what century,
but I do remember

the cozy little restaurant
we stopped in afterwards,
how cold the wine was,
how delicious the mussels,

back when the boys were little
and we were all together
that sunny, long-ago afternoon
in now I’m thinking Amsterdam.

Unaccompanied Minors

February 19, 2026.Reading time 1 minute.

By Chelsea Rathburn

—San Francisco to Miami, 1951

My father recalls nothing of the flight itself, only
arriving, dazed, to meet the mother

he hadn’t seen since he was still in diapers.
He doesn’t know how they left the foster home,

or if his father was there to say goodbye,
or who paid for the tickets, only that they

flew alone, he and his sister, arguing
over just whose Ami they were headed for.

On the tarmac twelve hours later, he heard
two strangers yelling: his mother and new father,

shouting a name they’d coined for him. They seemed
surprised, even angry, he didn’t know

to answer to it. His memory stops there,
in that moment. Their anger never ended.

His sister swears now there was an engine fire
that she spotted, then an emergency landing.

More likely she remembers the stop in Dallas
to refuel, but my father’s given up correcting her.

Blue-handled Grabber

February 18, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Maura Stanton

Before her stroke, my mother used it to grab
a fallen tissue, or the newspaper crossword
when it slipped off her lap. Now it’s mine,
sitting in my study near an artist’s easel
unfolded for years. Squeeze the handles
and the grabber’s bite picks up anything light,
even a paperclip, with its magnetic lip.
Don’t want to stoop? The grabber pulls underwear
out of the dryer, or lifts the catch-and-release
mousetrap so I can see if it’s still empty.
It swipes the ceiling cobwebs, or picks up
an M&M or a grape rolled under the fridge.
On autumn walks I could use the grabber to yank
more yellow leaves off the trees to let me see
the architecture of winter below the froth,
or maybe, sitting by a window some dark night
I might grab a distant star out of the sky,
one of those little pinpricks from a galaxy
far from our own, where life’s more cheerful.
The tiny star would tremble on its way,
gleaming and giving off blue sparks as I pulled
it down with the grabber, and made it mine.

First Joy

February 12, 2026.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jana-Lee Germaine

Hard to pick the moment—first smudge
of my smile when my nephew, learning the
Earth’s age, told his teacher Grandpa’s old
as dirt! so serious, so proud to connect
eons with epochs with his own long span.

No antidote for grief, Just walk
straight through, mom always
said, don’t stop to smell the
self-pity. My heart pushing its
wheelbarrow dirt and rocks
across the overgrown lawn,

Sisyphus New England–style, until
one morning I flip through the
comic-a-day calendar and laugh,
though months and months too late.

Hard to pick where—to untangle one katydid note
from the rest in September, synchronous scrumming
legs like insect Rockettes. Easier to say it was that
first leaf in autumn to orange: unexpected flash
among reams of still-

green, precocious student of temperature
shifts you can’t unsee, can’t unfocus on once
your eye lights it, signal flare that means not
help anymore, but a spot to mark, here. The
end of something approaches,

I learn first to drop, allot each piece to
patchwork air, branches lift, shuck down to
simplest selves so you can see them stretch,
lengthen, then second: to stand,

in an attitude suggesting peace, not understood by
the ever-grinding mind, but held in the core,
learning still, learning know that I am, in a far
country, meditate on the merits of snow.

A Toast to My Son’s Last Drink

November 20, 2025.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rodd Whelpley

His mom and I are slow to form attachments.
(We have met your kind before—juniper
on pulse points, malt-conditioned hair.) But if
you are his last last drink, then welcome
to the family.
We’ll receive your gifts
beneath the tree, set white meat on your plate.
There will be no politics at dinner, and
I’ll fight to forget you as the Danube—
a frothy current pushing those swan-boat
kill-me pills across his lips, which landed,
by grace, hapless,
like a drift of cygnets
tickling his gut. If you swear you are
his last last drink, then I will pay a cantor
and a priest. Father you, as I have failed
to father him. Take you at the elbow.
wedding march you as my dire daughter,
and let him lift the veil.

Wall of Clocks

June 1, 2025.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathleen McCoy

“We rarely hear ‘truth and reconciliation’—just ‘truth and justice.'”
—David Park, author of The Truth Commissioner

On this wall tick your childhood and mine, your loves
and mine, your regrets, cacophonies of memory

and harmonies in your ear, coagulations of unuttered grief,
relentless news from a grittier Belfast, our cousins

going at each other in the streets, Molotov cocktails and hurled
rocks. Rifles. Truth without whisper of reconciliation.

But this is not the Belfast we have read about. Now the streets
are clean, the bricks new. Twenty-seven percent check

the “no religion” box. Yet boxes there still be. With Barry’s tea
I toast a thing that is not a thing, a thought that is not

singular beneath rolling gray clouds that siphon the self,
that challenge perception, angle and taste, domesticity,

violence, numinousness. Dozens of clocks stand at attention,
unseeing eyes fixed on the observer, no two declaring

the same time. None advance; all compel stares: one moon-
faced grandfather clock painted blue, grannies’ broken

clocks, wooden clocks with cats or hens or roosters or sheep or
horses or farmers and their wives with mice that once spun

in small circles to children’s delight, oak clocks, clocks of ivory
irony, aluminum alarm, plastic grace, yellowed whites

like tired eyes, grays like boards left out too long in rain—all stand
in pleasing array—but this signpost points in thirty directions.

No wonder I never know what time it is!
This liminal Belfast in earliest glimmer of spring

wriggles into the raincoat and, despite its bloody past,
could be nearly anywhere within the body or the earth.

Sitting before this monument to time, its silent mellifluence of green,
its threat or promise of birdsong or the sound of striking, I note

how milky tea grows cool, limbs warm. In my absence, here. I am.

Watching Football with My Dad

June 1, 2025.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Williams

Saturday night, fourth quarter underway
of a close Packers game. Bart Starr era.
My dad and I were sitting on the couch
in my Grandma Mabel’s apartment.
My legs barely reached the footstool
that my great-grandmother and I
played Chinese Checkers on. But that night,
I was watching football with my dad.

He played left end in high school.
Leather helmet. No face-guard.
When I was seven or eight,
he bought a white football
so we could play catch in the dark.
He taught me how to throw a spiral.
Fingers here. Thumb there. But that night,
I was watching football with my dad.

It must have been near seven o’clock,
Vince Lombardi on the sideline, when
we heard footsteps coming down the hall.
It’s time for the Welk show! Grandma shouts
before she, my great-grandmother Torsie,
and my great-aunt Pauline entered
the room like an offensive line. That night,
my dad and I stopped watching football

so they could watch Lawrence (an’ a one,
an’ a two . . . ), his Champagne Music Makers,
The Lennon Sisters, and Myron Floren
as, no doubt, Jim Taylor went for ten
and Max McGee went deep. I never played football,
though sometimes when I think about the past
I feel like I’ve been hit. But on nights like this,
I am watching football with my dad.

Paprika

March 3, 2025.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Lory Bedikian

Not every song on the radio is a great song. Usually
it airs because someone knows someone knows someone.

There are most likely a million songs that will never
make it to any Billboard top chart ranking yet will

kick the amp, graze the sound factor with tonal bliss.
I like calling it phenomenal. To give examples would be

dangerous. So instead, one could say, a song needs
to be a bit like paprika. Before we go there, let’s imagine

a punk band named Paprika. Perfect. Even better,
a vocal artist who goes by just: Paprika. Catchy.

We never really knew where it came from. Maybe
just another ground red pepper, but it was what

we always fell back on. Sometimes spicy, sometimes
smoked, sweet. Music. It’s what we are all looking for

all of our lives, just in different incarnations.
Let’s forget the song or I’ll never tell you the story

of how paprika was my mother’s diva and crooner both,
the spice she believed, with all her soul and lashes,

could save any cooked dish from ruin. Paprikah tuhrehk!
Meaning “put paprika on it!” However, in Armenian

addressing you in the second-person, plural, formal,
sounds like, although only two words: all of you, listen to me,

before it all gets thrown out, get the paprika, sprinkle it on, damn
you all! My mother. A woman who saved nothing,

but thought almost anything could be saved from ruin.
Mended socks, shortened the cocktail dress because

she never went anywhere really, but shorter she could
wear it to work, to her job selling formaldehyde-filled

furniture at Montgomery Ward, waited for commission
checks, came home late because it was her turn to close

the register, waiting for her between asphalt and neon
lights. Almost forgot we were talking about the belief

that one could save things from ruin. Last night I almost
forgot that my mother was dead, gone for four months now.

I know paprika is not my style. At least as a spice. Just as
I’m certain that there are too many songs not being heard

because someone’s got to know someone and someone
else has got to close the register before the walk home.

It’s Better This Way

November 22, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Madalyn Hochendoner

When a potato you’re frying
hops out of the pan
into the unknown space
between the wall
and the oven
you know it’s gone
forever.
And sure you could
get the broom
and do a blind sweep,
see if you could rustle-up
more than a disturbing
amount of hair,
but you won’t.
At least not today, but really
not ever
because you’ve already moved on.
The phone rings, it’s your dad
telling you you need
to pick up
the snowshoes
for your trip
and he’s making
white bean soup
with the ham hock
he’s been saving
in the freezer
for this moment
said he thought
he could throw it in
whole
but mum said no
no you need to cut it off the bone
and he sees now how right she is
sees now that it’s better this way
like the beans he soaked overnight
you still have to cook them he says
I say yes, I know, the soaking
only reduces the cooking time
but what I think he means is
separately, you still have to cook them
separately from the rest of the soup
which is another truth. Now,
it’s tomorrow and I’m thinking
I need to ask him how
the soup turned out.

Visiting the Natural History Museum with My 97-Year-Old Dad

July 19, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Michael Mark

In the photograph that my father has
me take of him with the woolly mammoth,
he’s pointing to himself. He asks

to see the selfie. I don’t correct
his terminology. Next, the triceratops, then
the sabertooth tiger. He takes the same stance

throughout the Extinction Exhibit. With the 4000-
year-old beetle, 300-million-year-old coelacanth,
the dodo. She was beautiful,

he sighs at the butterfly, and I get the sense
he’s thinking about Mom. Earlier, in his kitchen,
he posed with a jar of mayonnaise

with the expiration date from 1998, also pointing
to himself. At the cemetery, he stands on his plot,
next to my mother, because I refuse to let him

lie down. Back at his apartment, he says it’s nice
to have some company. I know
he’s referring to his defunct card game, so we go

down to the game room. He sits at their once
regular table and points around the empty chairs,
Billy, Dick, Harold, Nat, Frank, hey Joe. He deals

them in. I take the picture of him squinting at the cards, fanned
tight to his chest. He tosses a chip to the center
of the felt. In the shot, it really looks like

he’s waiting for someone to call his bet.

You Must Act as Though You’ll Live

July 18, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By David O’Connell

You must act as though you’ll live,
though you will not live

and can imagine when you’re gone
the few stories that will be told

about your life, each a bright thread
that, in time, will fade

until all that’s said about your life
is genealogy, your name

or only your initials
beside those of the ones you love

and call by name
and struggle to understand.

It is for them that you must trust
when there is so little to win your trust

that it matters. Not just this rain
you feel falling

but knowing it’s fallen before
far from here under this same sun.

If I’m Honest

July 18, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jaya Tripathi

this cheery fever feels
like a temporary insanity        I was safer
in the country of control         doling out small pleasures
to myself          like a wily jailer            like a loosie peddler
like a guppy’s sphincter           this morning
I washed tiny newborn bloomers          there were no fates
scuttling in the washing machine          no sheep livers
on the drying rack                     later in the shower when I felt her
moving like a bag of cats           between my hip bone
and my heart              I painted a cobweb of Silly String
around my fat belly   cupped my veiny breasts
and crowed     not long ago I grew my certainty
fresh every day like a liver       asked the doctors to look deep
at the pieces of my child sparkling in my blood
her stars            her tattoo      I hummed a boy scout
is always prepared        my daughter heard me
through my navel and laughed                lying
slathered in aspic I clutched at every skeletal preview
each glimpse of augury             fading too fast
a stick of incense on a dark stair           I always wanted
to be a mother but I thought I’d be
an armory          a phalanx        her stillsuit
in a gray shitty world                 instead
I see her hiccup on a monitor
and I break open into sunshine
completely

Evicted

July 18, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mary Jo Firth Gillet

Before the suck and stutter of the first breath, even
before the first cells hook up for an amniotic float in
if not primordial bliss then something just this side of it,
there was the want, the desire that begat the pre-child
then stuck in a world impossible to remember, impossible
not to feel sorrow mixed with joy over my newborn’s
eviction from her Eden, her tenderest of faultless flesh
now to know the endless hunger, the deep cold of alone,
the body a riot of wants, wants unto the last gasp
of my mother’s four-foot-nine-inch fierce frame, every inch
railing railing against the bait-and-switch trickster’s scythe,
her only wish the hunger for more days, more life, and so
someone from hospice calls me to come get this inconvenient,
angry woman who will not go gentle into that good night.

LinkedIn Said Your Dad Visited My Profile

July 18, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Chrys Tobey

Maybe he wanted to ask about our cats
and dog. Maybe he was curious about how many
colleges I now teach for, curious about my job prospects
as a poet in a pandemic. I didn’t send him a message—
didn’t tell him I saw you on the beach this summer
walking with your new partner, didn’t tell him how
you looked somewhat happy, how I felt excited for you—
I almost ran up to say hi, but I was in my bathing suit
and it was our anniversary, or what would have been
our anniversary, anyway. Maybe I should write
your dad, I’m okay. I don’t know if he would care that our
old man cat is dying, that I give him IV fluids, or that I finally fell
in love with someone, but she broke like the coffee
cup I once threw on the kitchen floor in front of you.
Perhaps he’d like to know that I had a biopsy in my vagina
and even though I felt like a plank of wood was on my chest
with someone standing on it while I waited for the results,
it came back fine. I could share how some days
I feel this sadness that can make it difficult
to bake a potato or how, once, I almost burned your ear
with a wax candle or how I still think about the time
you gave me a bag of socks with grips on the bottom
because I kept falling down our bedroom stairs.
You were so afraid I’d break my leg or hit my head
or worse, especially after I bruised my butt purple,
but love, I knew then what I’d tell your dad now—I’ll be all right.

Distant Shore

July 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steve Coughlin

You remember the evening chill
of New Hampshire
in the middle of summer
and your parents
not fighting—your father
not packing a suitcase
to spend three months
among stained carpets
at the Willow Motel—
but sitting with your mother
on the front porch
of the small A-frame cabin
by Echo Lake
where the water was not dangerous
and the gathering clouds
remained rumbling
upon a distant shore
while from inside
a radio played big band music
as your father shuffled cards
and your mother tapped her foot
and you knew
as long as you sat
on the front porch swing—
as long as you continued rocking
with quiet ease—
there’d be no cracks
in the safety
of this feeling that promised
if you moved through life
so lightly—if you stepped
with care
upon the thinnest layers of discontent—
your parents’ shadows
gently cast by the porch light
would remain distinct
and real
and forever before you.

Unifying Theory

July 17, 2024.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Steve Coughlin

When John Coughlin sings
Joey and Steven are tigers
while driving the backroads
of Hingham, Massachusetts
it is of particular significance
because Joe has been dead
three years
and his name has not been mentioned
in any of John Coughlin’s
invented songs
with borrowed melodies
since his oldest son
was murdered.
But of similar significance
is that as John Coughlin
continues to sing
in the fading twilight
with his still-living son Steven
beside him
there’s a sudden understanding—
a distinct comprehension—
that if they keep driving
with the windows down—
if John Coughlin keeps singing
the names of his sons—
the winding road before them
will never end.

My Sister

July 17, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Veronica Kornberg

The four of us—Kathie, Ruth,
our mom, and I—drove down
to Maryland to visit Annie
in the coma hospital where
she’d been sent after she
opened her eyes and moved
one finger. The place
was great—therapy
six hours a day and nurses
like strong, funny angels
swooping around her railed bed.
One terrifying thing—
every week, the team tested Annie
to see if she’d made
enough progress to stay
another week, and if she hadn’t
she’d be moved elsewhere,
somewhere not so great
but nobody knew where,
there was no where—we should call
our congressman and tell him
to do something.

That day was bright
and cold. We wheeled Annie
outside and sat on a bench by
the parking lot, squinting into
the winter-low sun amid
pocked mounds of plowed snow
that had hardened to ice.
We chatted in Annie’s direction—
about a cardinal in the naked dogwood,
about mom’s poodle barking hysterically at
a snow woman in the yard,
about the balls of yarn slowly morphing
into a crocheted afghan on the recliner.
I heard us packing the silent spaces,
cramming them full of news and pictures.
Annie didn’t have many words
but she could still make her famous
bird face to show a little sarcasm
so that made the conversation feel
familiar and less desperate. Annie began
to fixate on our mother. “She is scary,”
she stammered. A kind of miracle—
Annie speaking a complete sentence.
Our mother blanched,
then made a goofy-ugly face.
“Scary,” she chimed, waving her
gloved fingers. It was the most
adult thing I’ve ever seen,
the way she swallowed that pain
and turned it into a sweet
lick of icing, a joke, a little nothing.
God it was awful.

Halfway home we stopped for the night
at a freeway motel, the four of us
in one room. In the lobby, we scarfed down
a buffet—honeyed ham
and gloppy macaroni salad,
dinner rolls spongy and soft as
an old man’s belly. There were two double
beds in the room and when I plopped
on the corner of one, the whole mattress
flew up toward the ceiling in a way
that I cannot explain the physics of
to this day. But I kept doing it,
the mattress jack-knifing in the dim room
until we were all laughing
and laughing—we laughed until
we cried we were laughing so hard.

Go, Went, Gone

July 17, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sara T. Baker

Communication, never our forte:
in the ER, I tell you you will be admitted
upstairs for observation. You let out
an anguished cry worthy of the London stage—
This is it, Sara, I’m going upstairs!
Your forefinger points up as you give me that knowing eye.
It takes me a minute. Not that upstairs!
But you swear, this is it, your curtain call,
your swan song, the end of your road,
your bucket kicked. Still, once on that heavenly
floor, you cow the nurses, charm the doctor,
vacuum up every last crumb
of hamburger and fries.

Years later, on your actual deathbed,
you turn red-rimmed eyes to me, barely
managing to mouth, I have to go!
You can go, Mom, we rush to assure you.
Leaning over, I whisper, We’ll be okay.
Your face gathers into the shadow of a glare
as you try to swing your legs out of bed.
The toilet, you gasp, not having the strength
to say you idiot. But we can’t let you out of bed;
we’ve become de facto jailers, your most private
functions now public property, input and output
duly recorded, your dignity the last casualty
of this war. You give no easy victory
to thieving death; not used to losing,
you snatch back the breath we think
has left you. Laboring for days,
your sunken chest rises again and again,
while we, your children, fall around
you, exhausted. Then you are gone,
giving us the slip at the devil’s hour.
As we wash your cooling body,
your hazel eyes pop open like a doll’s,
as if you want to see, as if to insist
you are still a part of things.

My Mother’s Breast Prosthesis Falls Out

July 17, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sara T. Baker

as she takes off her bra to put on a hospital gown.
She motions for me to pick it up off the floor,
which still has spots of blood or plasma
on it. I glance at her breasts, small-nippled
like my own, although one is dented
where they did the biopsy. She tells me
about that every time, how they deformed
her. Then she climbs, regal, into the hospital bed.
In the bed, she is pale under the fluorescent
lights, although her diamonds wink on either side
of her face. Her bedazzling smile is at rest,
her cheekbones rise over sunken cheeks,
her brow is furrowed, her hazel eyes flutter
behind purple lids, her roots need touching up.
She’s had work done, but dementia has
elided that fact, which seems to me
the best of all possible worlds.
The gorgeous male doctor comes in
with a homely male nurse to report
The tumor is bigger and you have to do
something. His cobalt eyes lock intently
on mine across my mother’s supine body.
I imagine swimming in that blue, freestyling,
one rhythmic stroke after the other. My weary
voice explains We have been waiting weeks
to see the oncologist, even as my body is flipturning
in his eyes, my nostrils full of chlorine
and Coppertone.

None of which my mother hears, as, mercifully,
she isn’t wearing her hearing aids. But when
the men leave, she slides her eyes over to me
and asks Which one was the doctor?
The tall one, I answer.
She cocks an eyebrow.
Fit? The bluest eyes?
Yes, I say, that one.

Not that I noticed, she adds,
with a shrug and a laugh.

Wisteria

July 17, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sara T. Baker

Fifty years ago, a tramp came to our door.
I didn’t see him, just heard the rumor
ascend the stairs with my clamoring brothers;
by the time the three of us thundered down
again, there were only wet footprints
leading from door to kitchen and back.
My mother had fed him, a woman alone
with six children in an alien land, wisteria
dripping from the porch roof, a green April rain
drenching everything. It is the grape-like must
of blooming wisteria, its decadence, and the dark
empty house, and those glistening tracks
that I remember, and the woman with her fierce,
generous heart, so that when my doorbell rings
today and a large man looms on my porch
with his empty belly and full story,
I do not hesitate.

Safety Deposit

July 17, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By John Bargowski

She was going in for new valves
and a bypass later that week,
so my mother asked me to drive her
to the bank where she signed a log
the branch manager initialed
before he swung the vault open
and let us into that metallic space
walled with rows of numbered doors.
His key first in the one with her number,
then hers in the other slot,
and the steel box she’d earned
by her loyalty slid from its shelf.
He led us to a private closet
with a chair and small table,
and when she lifted the box lid
there they were—the deed for a remnant
of the family farm, the cancelled
house mortgage, a copy of the title
for the last car my father owned,
his 30-year plaque from the slaughterhouse,
and a pinky ring with his initials,
a certificate for a stock gone bust,
her mother’s gold wedding band,
the Silver Anniversary bracelet
she wore only to weddings,
a lock of hair from my first haircut,
and under it all, her bridal corsage,
wrapped in yellowed cellophane,
and while I stood near she peered
inside the manila envelopes
that held the legal papers,
touched each piece of jewelry,
the curl of hair, and tattered remains
of the corsage she’d worn
just above her heart, a desiccated
rosebud pierced with a rusted pin.

A Good Review

July 16, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By A. J. Bermudez

My uncle
(great uncle, great)
born in ’38

was a baby in the war,
later, a reverend, who,

when he reads the book
in which it is glaringly clear
that I am not straight
nor narrow

praises
with joy too big for afterthought
with only yes,

and it’s the springing open of a fist
the candybar that might have been a knife

the fountain, drained, not empty
but carpeted in pennies.

Kintsugi as Bob Marley, Yo La Tengo, Thelonious Monk, and Over the Rhine

July 16, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Becca J. R. Lachman

When you couldn’t hold your head up, we all sat
at the black keys, your 6-pound frame swallowed
by a nightgown. New to all this, how’d we know
exactly which intervals would hum you back into sleep
at 8, midnight, 5:25? Verses we’d shrieked or whispered
as kids surfaced, out of nowhere. For our own sanity,

            we grew our daily rituals: I love coffee, I love
            tea-eeeee, crooned into morning through
            bluetooth speakers until we had it memorized.
            Dance parties to shake off the electricity of
            worry or bliss, drowning out the refrain where
            you might really leave us. I fell again

for your foster Da then, how vast his inner library
was, finding the song to make you stop crying.
Your toothless grin was wide as your face when
the trio of us swayed. Soon, you reached toward
mouths, added rhythm at the Baldwin with
an atonal foot, moan-humming along like

            you knew, already, what breath and sound could do
            inside a body. I can believe in a God who thought up
            music, can sit down at a piano in an empty house
            and be saved by something again. I wonder what
            Japanese artists would say about our old grand,
            jagged cracks in its lid where a contractor had

a very bad day. Or about your story and ours,
no doubt too much in this house and beyond it
to lacquer completely with silver or gold.

My Darling, You Aren’t Mine

July 16, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Becca J. R. Lachman

but in this moment, from your ginger head dipped
toward the song of the faucet to your pinked
glossy landscape showing off its recent growth rings,
what could I be but yours? “To bring up”—

that’s what fostering can mean. And it’s like this: a poem
I knew by heart once, framed or carried in the wallets of priests and
au pairs and waitresses dared “let the soft animal of your body /
love what it loves.” It was written as a simple exercise, not as any
lifeline—meant to show a friend how a breath can choose

to break open or rest at the end of a line. Just think
            what that means for any of us: our beginning can
be what we need to keep swimming,   or
            our bodies themselves can turn
                                             into dry land.

Reading Shackleton During My Husband’s Cancer Treatment

July 16, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Michele Bombardier

Selected as winner of the 2024 NORward Prize for Poetry by a panel of previous poetry contributors

After tucking in the kids, we tucked in the house—
dishes, laundry, prepping the next day’s meals.
When the hush finally settled, we’d get in bed
read Endurance out loud to each other.

The ship became trapped in ice
the night before his surgery. All that week I tried
to get back from the hospital in time to kiss the boys
but I failed. I sat on their beds, watched them sleep.
The day we got the pathology report,

the men, running low on food, put down their dogs.
Radiation all summer. The boys played soccer.
The oncologist told him to join a gym, get a trainer,
go hard because she was going off-label,
tripling the usual dose.

They threw everything overboard, but the ship sank anyway.
Anemia turned his skin yellow-gray. His body
became smooth as a seal. I watched
as he denied fatigue, struggled to untie his shoes,
get up the stairs.

Shackleton split the crew, sought help: everyone survived.
After we finished the book, we never opened it again.
I wonder where it went. Years it sat on the bedside table
under the clock: last thing we saw at night,
first thing every morning.

Third foster placement: age two

July 16, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By August Green

He could sit on a couch for hours, just
watching. Ripping

callused skin from the corners
of a thumb with his teeth. He puts his mouth

to the meat of his hand
and bites. Baby-doll hands

marked by the blood-red spots
of bedbugs, circle burns

from cigarettes, scars
from unattended can lids,

a missing nail.
Hands conditioned to destroy.

Everything he touches
turns to rubble.

A lined piece of paper in bits,
a car with no wheels, the door

of a treasured dollhouse, snapped.
In the tub, he rips the head from an action figure,

kneels over its body,
and pees.

Social workers, foster parents,
teachers. Each adult a reminder

of the ones who let him down.
Yet you learn to keep things away.

Spend days where time passes
in increments of time-out.

He slaps me on the face, leaves a mark.
Pulls fistfuls of hair

from the other children’s heads.
I learn to keep myself away.

And yet.
His chubby legs over my shoulders, calves

dangling loosely over my chest. His chin
a gentle pressure on my scalp.

He skims the hairline of my jaw, absentmindedly,
lightly, with his fingertips.

Pop Cooler

July 16, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Ted Kooser

Perhaps the last two or three of the type I remember—
a tank for the water and ice, and a labyrinthine
steel rack to hold the necks of the bottles, a cold flap
that a nickel would unlock so you could pull out a bottle—
haven’t been placed on prominent display in one of those
sadly under-funded, just-off-the-highway, Butler-tin
county museums, but, on their broken-down casters
have been shoved and scraped over the floor to the back
to be stored with a surplus of other heartfelt donations,
none really rare, and none of much historical interest—
the one-hill-at-a-time hand-operated corn planters,
grease-stained lard presses and treadle sewing machines—
the pop coolers’ heavy lids closed over stale summer air
from the late Forties, their bottle openers still functional,
cap receptacles hanging below, though containing no
pop caps—no Oh-So Grape, Nehi Orange, Cream Soda—
all of those caps pitched up onto the top of the bluff
that casts a cool shadow over the Standard Oil station
owned by my Grandfather Moser, who as a young man
played ball for the township team, who is still throwing
those bottle caps, one after another, from the oil-spotted
cracked pavement in front of the station, showing off,
showing his grandchildren his pitching arm, winding up,
lifting a knee, then sailing a cap high into a lost world,
partially sealed by the dried rubber strips in the cooler.

Transitioning Glasses

April 9, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lauren Camp

Featured Art by Mitzi Klaiber

When I come in after shoveling
that last round of snow—an exquisite parliament
of low-slung brightness
even in its groaning down toward the ground,
I see my sister
has texted QUICK
THING. So easy to send such airy
unplanned balloons. The ordinary
flakes saunter down, will not let go, the white
weather not yet leaving its filthy
will with car tracks and time. I am her
shelter. The snow falls as spheres.
I like being inside now watching it.
I think of the weight of it, the pile-up
as it further neatens. The white at its best
is a blur. My eyesight is off. It has been two years
and seven months since I peered
through one of those devices that brush
eyelashes. I haven’t heard a doctor
circle those disks and ask this one
or that one, this one or that. What I see
is another day, the wind sucking about.
A coyote walks behind the junipers
And now its shadow has become an action.
The snow comes down, side by side.
I am hardly paying attention;
my eye no longer holds what it touches.
There is so much noise in life.
As children, my sister and I played tag
during sermons. I could go on
about how her notes bother me.
The snowflakes are an arm’s length off.
It could be the only thing I do:
answering her, filling the white void
in my hand. Everything comes from further up.
When I respond I can talk now,
I am saying no one realizes
love without feeling this urgency.

Steal a Grape

April 1, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By David B. Prather

Featured Art by Paulette Hall

Three years now,
I still resurrect my grandmother,
pull her out of that mausoleum vault
and bring her back to life.
My life, that is.
I know she’s tired and wants to rest,
but grief is greedy
and tireless. When I pull her back,
she wears red,
which, for now, is symbolic of Paradise.
Sometimes, she is a cardinal,
especially in winter
when the world needs to be reminded
of whatever it wants most.
What I want is to take her to Kroger,
so she can steal a grape or two.
I want to take her to a doctor’s appointment
so she can complain about the wait.
I want to take her to see a movie
so dramatic she will pretend not to notice
that it hitches my breath
and stings my eyes. Three years from now
is unpredictable at best.
And resurrection
is only a way to drag the past with us,
lest we forget. Yes,
we forget.

The Grandmother Tree

March 26, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Pam Baggett

My sister named this venerable maple
growing at the edge of the mountain’s gravel road,
main trunk long broken, pocked with holes,
a once-mighty tree now slowly failing.
She’s lost her apical dominance, I say, meaning
that when the top broke off, side branches
shot up past the injured trunk like raised arms.
On the left, one wide kind eye, an open mouth
framed by credible lips. Step right, a second eye
squinted shut, mouth twisted up, as if she’s yelling
at us the way our father’s mother did: imagined slights,
our insufferable rudeness, which she thought
should be spanked out of us. Mom never laid a hand,
which says a lot about her mother, gone too soon
for my sister and me to have known. Grandma Baggett
and her snarling chihuahuas gone, too, when our parents divorced.
No wonder my sister imagines a tree could be a grandmother;
she’s been hiding in stories since we were small.
I anchored to the safety of science, to cold fact: Trees break.
A grandmother can call you Sugar one minute,
rage at you the next. Can die without you ever once
hearing her voice.

Leave rocks here

March 22, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Georgina McKay Lodge

Featured Art by Glenna Parry

Annoyed at rocks
in shoes
in laundry
in little piles at dinner,
she has placed a box
in the hall.

-> Leave rocks here

Hold my rock,
her son says
when they are out,
and squats down
to select another.

Be my rock

The smooth
pebbles,
dove-colored,
worn to wisdom,
she will gladly
carry home, but

his favorite find is
the jagged
saw-toothed
ugly rock,

scraped knee
stung by a bee
broken-armed
heart-choked rock.

Of course
she will carry that one too;
to the end of the world
she would carry it.

Should You Choose To Accept It

November 23, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Blair

I couldn’t wait to leave town when I was young.
After that, I’m not sure I have much of a story.
It’s true I met someone. We had a child together.
In between I walked across a frozen lake.
I drove over a frozen mountain.
I ran up a hill to find a pay phone.
I closed down the city for extended action scenes
to the tune of 290 million dollars. No—
I’m thinking of the latest Mission Impossible movie
with Tom Cruise. I get confused.
I should be writing domestic poetry,
but I don’t want to. What more do you need to know?
Our family of three live in a third floor apartment.
Sometimes we also meet up outside. I guess leaving town
is still the most exciting thing I’ve done. The other day
I asked another mother on the playground how to clean
bathroom grout. I said Stephanie, what’s your secret?
Then we ripped off our latex masks,
revealing our true identities. No—
that mask thing happened in the first Mission Impossible movie,
the one I saw with my friend Michelle. I leaned over
to say something snarky, but she was fast asleep.
It must have been the whirring of the helicopter blades.
There’s nothing duller than an overblown action sequence.
The secret to having an exciting life is the people you meet.
The secret to battling a helicopter in a tunnel
is explosive chewing gum. The secret to cleaning grout
is a magic eraser from Mr. Clean.

Horses in a Field

November 19, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Blair

I am reading my book manuscript to my mother
in her backyard. She tells me that was probably a catbird
I saw earlier. She tells me bleach is the real way
to get stains out of grout. The narrative urge is a strong one,
she says. She had an invisible horse, but never said
she wanted to be one. On that last point, we disagree.
Perhaps it was only a feeling I had
when we were watching horses in a field. That blurring of beings.
Like the colors in a Vuillard painting. A dress turning into
a table or an orchard. My college painting teacher said edges
are important, but never explained how best to create them.
I wanted us to be old ladies together, I say to my mother,
meaning me and her. Now we know it isn’t going to happen.
But she says she was dreading it—she didn’t want to be here
to see me grow old. We decide death comes too soon,
in the second section of my manuscript—
And speaking of death, how can the deck chair cushions
still have a cat hair side, I ask her,
now that the cats have been dead for years.
Because we’re disgusting old people, she replies
with a laugh, meaning herself and my stepfather.
Though the truth is I’m the sloppy one. This redbud tree
is a new redbud tree and I didn’t even notice.
I didn’t notice the new flowers she potted either, lined up
with their brilliant blossoms, waiting
to be put on the front porch. It’s all one to me:
the backyard, the flowers, my mother, me.
How can any of it exist without the rest?
We agree that I’ve written too many poems,
and they don’t go together.

What’s With All These Foxes

October 14, 2023.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Gwendolyn Soper

First I found the trapped fox and then we let it go
and I wrote a poem about that and then in my weekly
online writing group Pamela in Scotland says your fox
poem reminds me of Ted Hughes’ animal poems
and I think cool and then I read a poem in the LRB
written by Nick Laird about praying with his little boy
and I like it so much I order his book Go Giants and
I print up his bio admiring his amazing hair envious

that his hair’s thicker than mine and then my brother dies
and it’s the second worst day of my life and I need to think
I have to think the fox that gorgeous beast appeared
a few days earlier to guide him to an afterlife and I
keep thinking of metaphors about cages and freedom
from his schizophrenia and then my husband’s employer
sends me sympathy flowers from a company named
Foxglove see another fox and then

I solve a Wordle to subdue my traumatic responses
to my brother’s death and the word is SNARL
which is what I thought that trapped fox would have done
like a dog but didn’t but it is what I feel like doing
some of the time or bingeing shows or snacking or doing
nothing and then I see a book by Julian Barnes on top
of my stack of books at the top of the stairs so I start
to read it since I’d meant to for years because
I love his books and Ted Hughes

is mentioned in the first chapter now more Ted Hughes
so I figure it is high time I read more of his poetry but
his collected work is so thick it’s a brick on my shelf
instead I look up his work online and the first poem
is about a fox what
what’s with all these foxes and there’s a hyphen
in his title so I add one to mine because it needed one
I see that now and then I receive that book by Nick Laird
in the mail and he gives credit to Julian Barnes for a couple
of lines and then I receive an unexpected parcel

in the mail with Billy Collins’ new book Musical Tables
inside and in the front he quotes a line by
Nick Laird more Nick see these mystifying links between
Hughes Barnes Laird and Collins and then my friend
in Manhattan texts me a photo he took of a window display
full of stuffed toy foxes see more foxes but these are dressed
in plaid after Macy’s unveiled their windows for Christmas ’22

and then I see a new photo online of Billy Collins
giving a reading for his new book wearing a scarf with
illustrated foxes on it more Collins more foxes and
a few days later he mentioned on his poetry broadcast
that the Prairie Home Companion Christmas Show would be
playing that night so I tune in virtually and Garrison Keillor
welcomes everyone to The Fabulous Fox Theater more foxes

still plus the brass fox door knocker Ada Limón just posted
on Insta my God how many more fox sightings are there
going to be in my future it wasn’t my brother’s style
to pester me like this I have no answers and yet I thank
the gods for each and every reminder of that
living warm animal my husband and I let go which may
who knows be the thing that peacefully accompanied him

to some afterlife and now it’s 3AM where all this stuff is
swirling in my thoughts like pistachio-colored seed saucers
that I used to watch from a bridge caught in the local river’s eddy
on my early morning walks hoping to clear my head which
sometimes worked or didn’t and I just lie here thinking
about pistachio-green and how its complementary color
is a certain shade of purple and then I think of purple hearts

and how valiant my brother was see my brother and then
I recall the framed album cover I gave him of a vinyl record
we used to play The Valiant Little Tailor because Taylor is
our family name and I remember how he was his own kind
of sixty-three-year-old soldier rescuing his other
selves for decades from battlefields that were visible
to him but not to me no matter how hard I squinted.

Cheap thrill

May 31, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mike Santora

Featured Art: Chroma S4 Blue River by John Sabraw

I don’t care what the tastemakers say —
you can’t beat nostalgia
for a flightless bird worth riding
a little.

It’s still a hayabusa running the underbelly
of thunderheads or weaving
through the innerbelt.
Or it’s the corner kid
freestyling through a smile
as silly and joyful as a French horn
solo.

What I’m saying is
I’ll run with any good thing,
and now I’m reckless
in my empathy.
I’m more than a budding corpse in the wild
waiting to be born
into this ceremony of dust.

For tonight,
my heart’s the size of a wedding
and I’m in league with the last
of the lamplighters
because my son
is still alive
and nothing’s coming for his lungs
as I slow dance
him to sleep.

History of Desire

May 17, 2023.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Lisa C. Krueger

Featured Art: Day 7 by John Sabraw

In the photograph
my mother is ten;
she poses in a ruffled dress
and hand-me-down coat
that swallows her arms
the way shame swallows
people whole.

Lost in the oversize. Standing
near a clapboard porch.
She knows she is poor,
one of the poorest; her shoes
are too tight. Other children
tease her about the key
around her neck.

My mother makes drawings
of what she can’t buy;
it will take years, and
thousands of dollars,
for her to learn that money
does not make her happy.

In the photo, my mother smiles
upward like the glamorous people
in magazines. She tapes sketches
of stars to her wall, studies them
before she falls asleep.

II.

My grandmother sews clothes
for my mother; she doesn’t
need patterns, she has learned
to make things on her own
from what her mind can see.
My grandmother is a bank teller,
on her feet all day; tellers
are not allowed to sit. Only night
belongs to her. My mother
hears the machine, an animal
that growls in the dark.

III.

My mother’s walls are rich
in the way my daughter’s walls
will be, covered in desire.
My daughter will labor
over vision boards, collage
pictures of people and places
to help dreams come true,
what vision boards can do.

My daughter will stack magazines
by her bed, take scissors
to girls playing sports
with those beautiful bodies,
magnificent boys with interested eyes.
Picnics – dances – all the weddings –
cut out –

IV.

Sometimes, awake
with my own futility,
what I can’t do for my child,
I will picture the grandmother
I never knew,
bent over small light,
laboring. How many hours
to stitch ruffles?

Standing, my mother crosses
her legs, an awkward pose,
perhaps one she has seen
in a star. Balanced forever.
Pinned to a wall.

Triage

May 17, 2022.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Lance Larsen

Featured Art: Fresh Air, by John Schriner

My job is to mow. My job is to coax the prairie
around my mother-in-law’s house into green
chaos, then decapitate it on Friday till it looks
like carpet. My other job is to say dang
it’s hot and enter the kitchen and sip juice
and nuzzle my beloved at the stove when her
mother’s back is turned—an eighty-seven-year-old
back but still super quick. My beloved
has her own job—open and close the fridge,
push me away, and keep some things
cold like cucumbers and Gouda and yogurt,
and others hot like caramelized onions
and yesterday’s sweet and sour, and pretend
her mother’s Alzheimer’s is a shrine we’ll visit
someday like the Taj Mahal and not daily triage.
I still have other jobs, like having cancer cells
burned from my face at 3:00. Or is it 3:30?
I check my phone. Oh good, 3:30, more time
to decapitate the prairie and sip juice
and maybe swim slippery laps at the rec center.

If the manufacturer’s promise holds true, the new roof will outlast my father

November 30, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jessica Pierce

And he admires that probability. It’s far more likely
than the chance of us being here as who we are; someone calculated that
as about 400 trillion to one. He admires this, too, and how the sun

sits on our shoulders right now. Under the eaves of that sturdy-as-hell roof,
the common ariel hornet tucked her nest for the summer.
I was about to describe the season as brief,

but that is only how my stuttering synapses
process time. So, I assure myself that my father will live damn close
to forever, with a quick sidestep to knock on the closest tree and shush

any wisp of a god still hovering nearby. The bit of sun moves,
so we move. Dolichovespula arenaria probably notes
where our ungainly grounded bodies take up space

Clue Junior

November 29, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Luciana Arbus-Scandiffio

I cut the crowd loose, I stack the deck twice
I feed you shrimp cocktail
I sort through the loose mail
When it rains, it worms and we blow the house down
Wishing on the wick
I am the boss of this clique!

My uniform is a pebble, my mouth
Hums trouble. All I do is stay inside
One-legged, I hide
In the clutter of my mothers
Turning red with permanent marker
Wasting hours with Colonel Mustard

Eating ring-dings for dinner
Singing happy birthday forever
On Facebook, searching father
Then deleting my browser
Faceless, I cower and wave to the mirror
Eating the angel hair of the dog

I Had an Aunt

May 13, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joe Woodward

Featured art: Soul Released From Captivity by Chloe McLaughlin

I had an aunt
From Apalachicola
Who retired from
The Kash n’ Karry

Her feet hurt and
Something about
Varicose veins
After that she just
Sang Jesus hymns

In the church choir
And worried about
Those fall storms
Coming up in the gulf

She believed in pairs
Of black cat glasses
Her hair curled
In half dollars

And particularly
The 4^th of July
When she told me
Once while we ate
Our fried chicken

Don’t write your
Whole life story
At the top of
The Ferris wheel Read More

Cursing Lessons

May 13, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jackie Craven

Featured art: look, quick by Emma Stefanoff

I am learning to bake curses
the way my mother did
with paprika and clotted cream.
Her recipe book lists fifteen steps
and she’s added three more,
her instructions scrawled
on pages brittle as phyllo dough.
I trace my fingers over every word
and try to understand the significance
of Simmer on Low. I’ve heard
that if you heat a kettle gently,
a frog can’t feel the water boil. But
what to do about the grumble
from the dining room, the hungry command
to hurry up? Nothing my mother served
could please my father,
who poured Tabasco into a slow-cooked stifatho
and called her a stupid cow.
I lean against the round shoulders
of the old refrigerator and listen
to her murmur. I’m grown now
and married and need to know––
When is it time to whisk, when to fold,
when to toss with newts and toads?

Artist with Newborn

May 13, 2021.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Riley Kross

Featured art: Jezebel’s Daughters by Chloe McLaughlin

– for Amy

The baby
finally sleeps

so she
paints her

toenails bright
red with

practiced strokes
so later

she can
see her

bare feet
pacing the

dark kitchen
and remember

while breastfeeding
again again

feet propped
remember how

small all
art begins Read More

Superpowers

May 13, 2021.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Bonnie Proudfoot

If all of my thoughts have been thought before, who was the one

who thought them? Probably it was some stranger, but maybe not,

maybe it was someone I knew or maybe someone I loved so hard

that she is actually a part of me, like my grandmother,

who came by on poker nights, maybe I inhaled her like the smoke

from the tip of her Parliament, or I ate her up like a slice

of her poundcake with lemon drizzle icing. And my superpowers? Read More

Live From the Met

November 15, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Miriam Flock

Not the baby but the baby’s clothes defeat me—
the cunning socks, the piles of onesies.
A descant to the washer’s thrum, the strains
of Pagliacci drift in from the study,
dislodging a memory: a stormy weekend
stranded at my cousin’s, the window wells filling
with snow like the heaps of dirty laundry
my aunt was sorting in the other room.
Around us spread the scraps of paper dolls
we’d wangled in the market, peeled now,
and finished like our tangerines.
We’d tired of mimicking Corelli
whose whooping rose above the drone of the dryer
where my aunt and uncle’s shirts embraced.
“There isn’t anything to do,” I whined
until my aunt emerged, a bar of Naptha
gripped in her raw hand. What struck me
was not her slap, nor even the stunned giggle
before my cousin got hers like a portion,
but the tenor’s voice dissolving in sobs,
and the Clorox, smelling as a perfume might,
if she had splashed it against her wrist.

Icarus

November 15, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Cording

After our son died, my wife found him
in coincidences—sightings of hawks, mostly,
at the oddest of times and places, and then
in a pair of redtails that took up residence,
nesting in a larch above our barn, and how
their low, frequent sweeps just a few feet above us
before rising over our kitchen roof
made it seem as if they were looking in on us.
In a way, it all made sense, our son so at home
in high places—the edges of mountain trails,
walking on a roof, or later, after he became
a house painter, at the top of a forty-foot ladder.
So many mornings we woke to the redtails’
jolting screeches and, even if I was a casual believer,
their presence multiplied my love
for the ordinary more every day. We never thought,
of course, any of those hawks was our son—
who would ever want that?—but, once,
watching one rise and rise on a draft of air,
I thought of Icarus soaring toward the sun—
as if an old story could provide the distance
I needed—waxed and feathered, his arms winged,
and remembered a babysitter’s frantic call
to come home, immediately, after she’d found
our ten-year-old nearly forty feet up
in an oak tree. I can almost hear him again, laughing
high up in the sky, throned on a branch,
his feet dangling, knowing nothing but the promise
of heights as he waved to me—
and I must have looked very small
calling up to him, staying calm
so falsely as I pleaded with him
to come down, to come down now.

Blue Camaro

November 15, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Owen McLeod

I’m up at 6 A.M. to write, but all I do is stare
at the rain and the trees and watch the wind
strip away what remains of November’s leaves.
Somewhere in Virginia, my father is dying.
Not on the sidewalk of a sudden heart attack
from shoveling snow, or in a hospital room
monitored by nurses and beeping machines,
but at home, alone, and almost imperceptibly
from a sluggish, inoperable form of cancer.
That man was never satisfied with anything.
When leaves were green he wanted them red,
when red then brown, when brown then fallen
and gone. Once, after making me rake them
into a curbside pile, he tossed in a cinderblock
meant for the local punk who’d been plowing
his 1982 Camaro through the heaped up leaves
of our neighborhood. Two days later, the kid
blew through our pile without suffering a scratch.
My father didn’t realize that I, fearing for him
as much as for the boy, had fished out the brick
and chucked it in the ravine behind our house.
As punishment, I had to climb down in there,
retrieve the cinderblock, and bury it in the leaves
after I’d raked them back into a mound. My dad
said that was nothing if I dared to take it out.
I can still see him, stationed at the window,
watching and waiting for that boy to return—
but he never did, because I tipped him off
the next day after spotting him at 7-Eleven.
Decades later and hundreds of miles away,
a malignant brick buried deep inside him,
my father still waits at the living room window,
listening for the death rumble of that blue Camaro.

The Elks at the Watering Hole

November 15, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Steve Myers

Sundays they’d meander down from surrounding hills
to the watering hole
just south of French Creek, where it joins the Allegheny, maybe twenty,
thirty on a good day in summer, the fog in no hurry to lift off the river,
& if I were visiting,
my father-in-law would take me along, because
this was the rhythm of Venango County men, week after week, season
on season, for the members who hadn’t lost wives to dementia, cancer,
or a cheating heart,
a chance to get away from the women, bullshit, maybe
win some money in the big drawing,

the Iron City flowing & Wild Turkey,
not yet noon, a thumb-flicked Zippo, cover clicking back, scratchy rachet
of the wheel, flame-sputter, flame, head bowing, a face
sudden, illuminated,
the long fhhhhhhhhhhh, with smoke stream, & a story would begin:

an Army jeep bouncing into a bombed-out Rhineland town, & in an old church
cellar, great shattered wine casks, you drank as you sloshed through it, dark,
fuck-cold;
someone’s uncle down the Mon Valley, the Gold Gloves boxer
who lost an arm; a lieutenant’s first whorehouse.
That was the talk,
and everything was Eddie, almost whispered, a shibboleth:
duck boots, fly rods, the Eddie Bauer Ford Bronco—Elks Masonic
to the nth degree.

Laugh, move among them, wear the flannel, stand them
a round—still, I carried the scent of a distant country. One slight shift
of wind & heads would lift, the circle tighten.

The Measuring

November 8, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Veronica Corpuz

Featured Art: Vintage notebook among photo cameras on table by Rachel Claire

A married life is measured:
each grain of rice, coffee bean, and tea leaf,

ice cubes crackling in a glass of water upon the nightstand,
even the pinheads of steamed broccoli,

every hour of sleep lost when the baby is born
each hour you slept in before him,

the time you say, I am going to remember this walk forever—
the neon color of lichen after a long, hard winter,

how your son wobbles, falls down,
how you swoop him off the ground.

Until you walk into the Social Security office,
until you see the words printed in dot matrix—

the date your marriage begins, the date your spouse dies—
until you see what you did not know declared in writing,

then, you have new language for this feeling—
how your heart has become a singularity:

Your marriage has ended in death.

The Bees

November 8, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rick Viar

Featured Art: Bees on Purple Flower by Pixabay

My sister says I greeted the swarm
along the backyard slope, crawling, fat mouth slack,
sodden Pampers saggy with supplication.
Evidently, she scooped me up while they chased us
through our father’s lavender azaleas
where he dropped his shears and smashed yellow
jackets against my skin, yanking off the diaper
and waving it around his head like a lasso.
We won’t get spanked again until winter.
Everyone watches my sister declaim
the tragic tale at family gatherings for decades
as if she’s Dame Judi Dench. They love her
nuanced performance, the lively hand gestures
and operatic voice, how she tousles my hair
before her triumphant finale: I got stung
on my mouth, but he got stung in his asshole!
I’m always grateful Dad isn’t here to witness
this, or my marriage, or my career,
or my incompetent gardening, the limp cosmos.
I can’t believe you, a cousin smiles, shaking his head.
Me neither, I reply. I don’t even know what I did.

sisters

November 8, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By James Lineberger

Featured Art: Children Playing on the Beach (1884) by Mary Cassatt

As I get you down from the closet shelf
and unwrap the brown shipping paper
to the square white box inside
I lift the lid for the first time and stick my fingers
deep inside you /
What does she feel like Barbara says and I say go on
see for yourself but she shushes me
and leads the way out back
to where the creek used to run
and we just do it quickly without any words
because words are a foolish way of asking forgiveness
for these five years we’ve left you
up there stacked amid the empty shoe boxes
and children’s playthings /
But now with both hands
I swing the box like sand in a pail
and scatter you
into the overhead cave of the old Judas tree
where your tiny parts
glow for a flickering moment
like early snow /
And Barbara whispers
yes Patsy I know
still trying to find your way home again
just like the whole rest
of your life
without somebody’s arm to hold on to

Long Division

November 8, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jessica Tanck

Featured Art: Green and White Press Drill on Table by Lisa Fotios

We have split the phone plan,
emptied the safety deposit box.

My dad is moving out of the house:
gone, the sentinel from his office

in the basement, plastic Star Wars
figurines tipped into a box.

It is hard not to imagine all of us
in our old places, hard not to fill

the house with past. Alesha (sister,
I still think, not ex-. ex-step.)

cross-legged on the futon, remote
in hand, a bowl of macaroni

in her lap. She peels home
on repeat, inside in a jangle

of keys, stays up with me all night,
perpetually lights and leaves.

Myranda (blood sister) half-absent
in her eyrie, moves from floor to desk,

floor to desk. My stepmom flickers
in the dark bedroom, in the mirrors,

on the stairs, in the corners of halls.
I am always underneath all of this,

in the skin of the basement or crossing
the yard. How many times do I tread that

bed of needles, climb to the freshly sawn-off
branches, wish a kinder mending, wish

an absence gone? Press my hands to trace
the drip of sap, what cannot be divided,

to touch what bubbles forth, what empties,
amber, from the knotted heart.

Polar Bear

November 6, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By George Bilgere
Winner, Editors’ Prize in Poetry: selected by J. Allyn Rosser

Featured Art: Mounted Model of a Polar Bear from United States National Museum Photographic Laboratory

A father died heroically in some Alaskan park
while trying to save his kids from a polar bear.

Long ago, when his mother gave birth
one summer afternoon in Bakersfield, California,
could anyone have prophesied,
as in an old myth, that the baby crying
at her breast would one day be killed
and partially eaten by a polar bear?

Has anyone from Bakersfield, California been killed
and partially eaten by a polar bear? Yet her son
was. He looked up from making camp,
pitching the tent or lighting his Coleman stove,
and there it was, white and immense. His fate.

And he died heroically and was partially eaten.

Of course, the bear had to be killed. The rangers shot it,
which makes sense. You can’t have polar bears
running around in the wilderness!
The wilderness is a place for dads and kids
and Coleman stoves. Polar bears just . . .
they just kind of ruin the whole thing.

As for the bear, it didn’t die heroically.
It just got shot and fell over
and was sent to a lab for testing.

One Night

June 17, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jeff Knorr

Featured Art: Sarina’s Flowers by Sarina Winner, Nancy Dick, Wendy Minor Viny

But not just any night,

on the 26^th floor of the New Otani Hotel

the night of your aunt’s wedding

your new uncle and I threw centerpieces,

beautiful flowers in glass volleyball-sized

vases out of the window of their hotel room

in downtown L.A. We dropped them, in

amazement, the air flattening petals of roses,

the baby’s breath. They blew out

like cannon balls on the sidewalk—

flowers, soil, Styrofoam, glass. Ten times

we could have killed someone with one of those

centerpieces, our drunkenness—

it could have been over as soon as it started.

Your aunt’s anger flared hot as a brand.

We could be wearing the same prison orange.

I escaped some wild death, manslaughter

by wind, by stupid luck, but you on the other hand

drive the car through our neighborhood,

stop for a cigarette with friends, have brown skin–

you ride, get pulled over, the cops

looking for you and your brothers.

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations: Dial 2 for Inmate Information

June 16, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeff Knorr

Featured Art: Winter Dreaming of Spring by Nancy Dick, Norman Calkanic, Kate Goreman, Patty Mitchell, and David Dewey

What information could you possibly deliver—

that he’s safe, that the kite he put in

for the GED has come through.

If you know the party’s extension you wish

to speak to, you may dial it at any time.

To dial his reference number

and have a phone ring in his cell.

Otherwise hold for a representative—

Information, Officer Medeiros speaking.

Yes, Officer Medeiros, can you wander

over to dorm C, bed 211

and check on my son for me?

Can you tell me what he’s been fed the last two weeks?

Can you check if the light flickering

above his bed at all hours has been fixed,

Instead I ask, is he allowed to

receive packages yet, new books?

Preparations

June 11, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Madeleine Cravens

Featured Art: Bats by Jason Douglas and Wendy Minor

I worry what it says about my character,
that I cannot picture the reality of sickness,
I just wake and read Whitman
and watch the sun on the brick
of the next-door apartment.
I have three cans of chickpeas,
freezer-burned strawberries,
half a bottle of wine. You have
a stronger sense of the anthropocene.
You buy soup, talk with your father.
You know microbes are alive
as they move across the grid.
And in France each small town
has a street named for Pasteur,
who made men dig drains,
convinced them to stop spitting.
I wash my hands with hot water.
I don’t want to be clean. What does it say
that I am fully on my knees to this,
that I admit such weakness willingly,
that should you want company
after any of your transatlantic flights
I would take a cab immediately
to your red and burning door.

Laywoman

June 5, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeff Tigchelaar

Featured Art: Blue Cat by Dar Whitlatch, Jason Douglas, Mallory Valentour

Evenings, let me tell you, are for

coming down. Going home and getting

into bed. Or slippers, at least. Yeah I’ve got bunny slippers

and there’s no shame in that. My only child

is insane. I don’t care who thinks

what about my PJs, either. I sleep

in a faded 4X orange and green T-shirt worn for years

by my father before me. So thin you can see my nips.

If you were looking, that is.

At the mercantile today I couldn’t stop thinking

about how I always just keep looking – nodding –

at Dr. Prajeet even when I haven’t

the slightest what he’s on about.

How hard would it be

– wink – just to say “Dr. Prajeet,

if you wouldn’t mind reiterating a bit –

you know . . . in laywoman’s terms?” Just ask him.

Laywoman, Dr. Prajeet. That’s me.

I wonder what I’d say if Dr. P. asked me

to elope. Off to some far land. Or even if he just asked me

out. Dancing, maybe. Here in town. I wonder what my little

Richie would think about that. If you don’t want mommy

coming home with doctors, don’t be a grown man living

with mom. Maybe I’d say that to old Mr. Ricardo.

You Start To Grow Old

May 29, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Haolun Xu

You start to grow old so fast, you notice how much you love home.
Home means a local mall, it means a place with a little Thai stand with all the world in the pocket.

You walk in with mystery.
People ask you with curiosity if you’re a student, if you work, if you have kids.

You laugh with charisma. You say you’re looking forward to all your time in the world.
London, maybe, next week. But next week never comes. Today just has too much of you in it.

But you’re adventurous, right? You order a new thing everyday. A meal that can be held in your hands, it is the best part of your day. It’s the biggest pillar of your lunchtime.

One day, you have a beautiful combo. Pineapple and shrimp, rice and chopped veggies.
It’s perfect. It’s yours,

you eat it more and more each next month, every other day, every day. You gorge yourself in it,
you start to smile more and more each time,

they start to cheer whenever you come over. You ask, do you know me, and they say yes! of course we know you! They’re all so happy, you’re family now.

But they stop asking about London. They stop asking where you’re going,
they suddenly have all the jokes of a lifetime to tell you.

And they stop asking for your name,
they don’t need to know what it is to know who you are.

Stolen Hard Drive

March 29, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By John Moessner

Featured Art from rawpixel.com

It contained home movies where he wore
goggle-sized glasses, a toweled shoulder holding
a small redhead at a birthday party, three hours

of ripped paper like static on a radio, the sun flaring
off the ripples of the neighborhood pool. What do
those thieves think of your soccer games,

the Go girl! and the rain that drove him cursing to the car?
What about last Christmas? He was too tired, so you held the
camera instead and closed in on his drooped head

nodding while everyone opened gifts. Would they tear up
thinking of their fathers, would it convince them to call more?
Ripped from your life, just a plastic box in a bag of stuff.

Maybe before wiping it clean, they will browse your home
movies and say, What a good father, what a good life.

No, Nothing

March 27, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Daryl Jones

Featured Art by Jozef Israëls

He’s in one of his funks again,
my stepmother’s warned me,
hair shaggy and mussed, baggy clothes afloat
on his skinny frame.

My father makes hardly a dent
in the overstuffed sofa he’s sitting on.

No, he’s not hungry.
No, nothing in the paper interests him.
No, there’s nothing I can do

but stare blankly into the distance where he’s staring

as I did sixty years ago when we hunched
shivering and silent on five-gallon buckets
flipped upside down on the ice of Cedar Lake,
waiting for a tiny red plastic flag
to snap to attention.

Now and then, we would stand up stiffly,
huffing and hugging ourselves, stamping our feet,
then skim the slurry from the augured holes
and sit down again, nothing to do but wait,
testing our wills against the deadening cold

and the wily old lunker pike we pictured

in the black, still depths below, impervious
to the booted thunder rumbling overhead,
hunkered down, hovering in its singular darkness,
grim, stubborn, defiant.

Dear Sister of My Childhood

March 22, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Stephanie Rogers

Remember Mom and how she sent us away
to play near the highway ditch, us throwing gravel,
cracking a windshield, an accident. The wronged

                        woman dragged us by the arms, back
   to Mom, who was talking on the phone with Dad,
                                            their separation not quite

official, the whistle of the kettle in the kitchen.
Listen, the woman yelled at Mom
who paid attention then. Your kids banged up

my ride with a rock, and Mom twisted
the phone cord around her wrist, smiled a sorry,
sent us to our bedroom where we blanketed

the stuffed animals, planned a fantasy
ship trip, and swung them over
the green carpet ocean till a rabbit flew off

and drowned, the kittens and bears unaware
of their fallen friend. What the hell?
We were fun kids, placing our heads

on Dad’s chest, listening for his heartbeat,
our faces like mother
birds covering the nest. We licked

our plates clean when told, laughed at the old
dog dragging its ass across the rug, salted up
those outdoor slugs that vanished

into mush. Dear sister, visit me now.
New York City stays
windy all year, the crowds shouting

their snare-drum quips at one another,
the summer sweaty as beach shells, Dad dead
from a rip in the intestine, Mom’s boyfriend gone

on the vodka binge, and all my life spent rounding
corners like a whirlwind, my smoke
settling now. But here I am, still

broke and meddling in your Nashville life,
your three girls sweet as key lime pie
smashed in the face, their tresses: long

and swaying down their backs the way honey
slips softly from the spoon. Let’s crescendo
under the moon together with our banter,

tempers under the weather
for once, us in love with our stupid boyfriends,
giddy as a cow

Chip’s Laundromat

March 22, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Stephanie Rogers

We walk in on Thanksgiving, trash bags filled with clothes
slung over our shoulders. Heather insists I break
a twenty at McDonald’s. I buy a dollar cheeseburger, eat it
as the cashier counts out the nineteen dollars’ worth

of quarters. No one else is there. Neither of us
bothers to separate
the whites from colors or obey
the posted sign that says we shouldn’t

sit on top of the washers. So, we lie
back, discuss the different shapes
the ceiling stains resemble: a butterfly, atomic
bomb explosion, ruffled

curtain, deep red
crayon melting down the wall. We don’t want to go home.
Three streets over, our parents wash the dishes, hit
their joint again, and pack the leftovers

away, while their two daughters hope
the dryers won’t really dry the clothes
in fifty minutes. We drag them out. Heather insists
we fold the underwear.

Final Visitation

March 8, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Dan Albergotti

Featured Art: by Paul Gauguin

After talking with him for thirty minutes,
as he lay cocooned in a thin wool blanket,
I told my father I had to head back to Conway.

He turned his ashen head a bit and said, Conway . . .
that’s where my son lives. I met my sister’s eyes
before fixing his in mine to say, Father, I am your son.

His eyes widened in that way that makes
us say, You look like you’ve seen a ghost,
or as if he’d found himself the quarry of a hunt.

I touched his hand before I left to show him
I was real. I think I could have walked through walls
to get to my car, so grateful was I to be that ghost.

Donovan

February 13, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Susan Browne

Featured Art: by Carol M Highsmith

I walk down my neighborhood street called mountain
although there is no mountain only rolling hills
although hills don’t really roll & as I look
at a window display of shoes & pass by the candy store
a gasp happens in my head a quake in my heart they aren’t
here my father who loved sweets
my mother who loved shoes & the sun shines
on a world of orphans I quake along mountain street
like a rolling gasp although if someone asked
how are you I’d say fine like most of us are
& aren’t I thought sadness was a prison
but it connects us & if a chain it should be
one of tenderness my father died
two years ago although sometimes I say a year
a way of keeping him closer can’t do that
anymore with my mother need math on paper the ache
woven into each leaf although there are birds & nests
we live in a tsunami waves of being & non-being
but I’m no philosopher standing at the counter buying
bunion pads feeling drowned & drying
under fluorescent lights & warmed by the smile
of the clerk who blesses me with have a great day as I go out
to mountainless mountain & remember donovan’s song
playing in my parents’ house in the sixties first there is
a mountain then there is no mountain then there is

Selling

February 21, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Judy Kronenfeld

Featured Art: Unfinished Monster by Hugh Laidman

Heads thrown back after one
bubbly sip—the young in soft drink commercials
seem as lavishly happy
as lottery winners. They look
the way we imagine ourselves
on the stages of our dreams—glamorous,
anointed, spotlit—our luck about to spill
into graciousness.

And even in ads for walk-in bathtubs,
incontinence pull-ups, stair chairs,
dementia care, the actors don’t merely grin
and bear it, but almost chortle,
like Cheshire cats who just
swallowed these amazing canaries,
though the old they represent
are more like expiring birds.

But the worst soft pitch: the “personal” Christmas
pictures taken in the dementia wing
of my father’s “retirement home.”
In another life, his face would say
This is ridiculous, even if he played along,
and sat in the appointed armchair
by the tree, and hugged the enormous white
teddy bear prop, as instructed.
But he is in this current life,
and guilelessly presses his warm cheek
against the bear’s fuzzy one,
and stabilizes the bear’s plump feet
with his free hand, as if they were a child’s.

Poem Beginning with “My Father”

February 5, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: Ancient Roman Ruins by Giovanni Paolo Panini

–Rome

My father fills a syringe with insulin,
pushes the needle through his shirt into belly skin,
looks through the window at his dying lawn.
He writes a note to me: Summer’s early here, bud.
Your mom’s still on me to lay off the Snickers.
She means well, of course.
The oak tree’s about to go—groans all night long.
Caravaggio is one of my favorites. A sensitive scoundrel.
Go see Conversion On The Road To Damascus.
All is of Grace, Dad.

Four lions stick out hollow tongues
in the middle of Piazza del Popolo.
Each tongue spews water—spilling down
stepped plinths into four collection pools
whose surfaces are mildly disturbed
but never overflow. With their perspective of stone,
the lions have remained unmoved for 200 years.
How, I wonder, can they gaze without weeping
at the sun-burned stoner strumming a distorted
“Stairway To Heaven.”
I stumble from one to another,
dropping coins until my pockets are empty.

When he baptized me, my father’s robe floated
up around him like the wings of a manta ray,
revealing the soft skin of his shins to the believers.
We stood in a glass tank, with nothing to hide.
He covered my eyes with a handkerchief,
dipped me backwards into new life.
I trusted his strong arms
more than God.

Fountains fill my photographs: pissing cherubs,
horses with fish tails. Granite seashells emerge
amid glistening mermaids—
breasts taut in the exquisite way
stone has of lying about flesh and time.

Mailing a Letter

February 3, 2019.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Dawn Davies

Featured Art: Evocation of Roussel by Odilon Redon

The letter came back from the post office so mangled
it was as if the mailman had plucked it out of my box
before being jumped by a clot of street thugs.
Then, still carrying his mail bag, stumbled into a bar
because it was the third time this year that he’d gotten jumped
in my neighborhood, and why do guys gotta pick on him
just because he’s short (under five-six don’t make a man,
his father always said). Then drank scotch and soda
until the bartender made him stop, walked the dimming
summer streets in search of his truck, slept in a doorway,
woke up and vomited into his mailbag, found his truck
and skulked home to his wife, who had sent all four children
to the neighbors and was waiting up in yesterday’s clothes,
with a suitcase and a left hook brewing. Because she hated
the late hours the USPS forced him to carry, and by “late hours”
they both know she meant his cheating with the tiny
Castilian woman two zip codes over, and this thought
that poisoned her days now propelled her to stomp on his mailbag
and kick it off the porch for all that the mailbag stood for:
the overtime, the philandering, the childless Castilian
with the twenty-two inch waist. But then when she saw his face
with his eyebrows tipped and sorry, and she knew
that he hadn’t been sneaking around, but had gotten into trouble,
she sat him down, fed him coffee, and washed his wounds
before sending him back out for his morning shift,
because they both needed him to keep this job
(there was a pension attached, she had secretly started divorce
proceedings, was hungry for the alimony).
And so he got back to work and wiped off the fouled, wretched
letters in his bag, feeding them through the system
before getting called into the supervisor’s, and because
the letter was wet, it got mangled in the maw of a sorting machine,
the address smeared and clotty, the stamp curled and dystonic,
and three weeks later, once the mailman was off probation,
the letter came back to him, smelling like machine oil and vomit,
clawed and shredded, stamped “Return to Sender,”
and he shoved it back in my mailbox with bite marks
from the beast that had mauled it, this letter to my father
on his deathbed, explaining why I wouldn’t be going to see him.

Graduation

February 2, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Maria Nazos

Featured Art: Fern Alley by Felicity Gunn

As my father hands me a bouquet of roses
dyed the shade of a dozen sinking suns, my mother grasps
his steady arm, teetering. Her body
has begun its slow revenge for what it begrudged
all along, and she’s afraid to walk since her last fall, which
snapped her hip in half. My father is tired
of holding her up. He scolds, Just take it. Her hand shakes
as she holds the iPhone to get a photo
of me in my mortarboard and hood. Let go
and take it, he says, and she tries a one-handed
snapshot, her trembling arm still looped through his.

I stitch a smile across my face. The phone flashes.
As she grips his wrist, I can hear him in Greek,
the language reserved for anger and, once, for sex.
The language they speak and still think
I don’t understand. Can I live this way, Tia? he asks.

I clutch my bouquet to my chest, trying
to pretend these flowers aren’t lopped off at the stems.
Trying to move into the next phase of realization
that love is unsteady on its feet. That two people
can resent each other, but care for their daughter
and each other enough to stay put.
Refusing to wilt
into that place I’d go as a child—when I’d hear
their fights and retreat to the backyard to play
with cats, praying to make something else of myself, however
small—I stand tall.
How can I live like this?
he says to her again. Still, I’m posing, smiling
into the face of their slow decline.
And all three of us trying, best we can,
to hold each other shakily, and steadily upright.

I Go Back to Mykonos 1976

February 1, 2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Maria Nazos

Featured Art: “Mykonos” by Maria Karalyos

—after Sharon Olds’ “I Go Back to May 1937”

By the third martini, he’ll ask her to marry him.
She’s a tourist, he’s a captain, home by chance.
I stand at the window, watching. I want to walk
into that bar, order an ouzo, and tell them
that, together, they’ll create a new generation
of pain. I want to tell him to court the island girl,
the one who, forty years later, will see him, run
to the restroom, and return with a fresh coat
of lipstick. I want to tell my young mother,
in the words of the great North American philosopher,
Pamela Anderson, “Never get married on vacation.”
But this is long before Pam and Tommy Lee, before
I existed. Before Reagan reigned over his long line of wreckage,
and couples shot themselves, together, in their cars. The Vietnam War
has ended, but here I am standing
at the window, watching while they meet,
both oblivious of wars they’ll wage. They’ll move
from Greece back to the Midwest—she’ll drink, alone,
in her kitchen. He’ll return to the island every chance
he gets. When he’s back in Illinois, he’ll stare
into the aquarium and long for water. She’ll look
at him, frozen, behind her highball glass. Still, I stay
at the window of the bar, wanting to use Pam’s biting wit.
But this is long before Baywatch, and they’re gazing at the
bay. I tap the glass like Morse code. Sealed in
my own tank of silence, I say, Please let go.
But as they take each other’s hands, I softly touch
the pane and turn away. Because they, too, have the right
to plunge. Even if they’ll swim out too deep:
holding onto each other until death.

Without Pain

January 30, 2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

“Swing in the Right Direction with OxyContin”
—marketing slogan from Purdue Pharma

All day the rain spills onto the backyard deck.
The narcoleptic hours, darkened and dim, rewind and nod off.

My mother walks five miles to the emergency room on a Sunday.
She complains of a toothache, tells the doctors she needs something

to get by. It is predicted the temperature will rise 30 degrees in the next
twelve hours, then drop 20 more tomorrow, which means more talk

of global warming or the next ice age, more waiting for the Earth’s
fever to break like a sick child.

On television, people are dancing in a field of wildflowers.
The sun hits their faces, their pupils confetti.

A man appears in a lab jacket, claims he has found the cure for all pain.
He crushes the flowers, alkaloids running white across his chin.

You too can be like them, he says. And maybe we can.
But then, without pain—

What will the monks chant? What shrouded
music, what raspy voice will rise from the A.M.

radio, move like heat lightning against our spines?
Who will hear our minareted cries, our tangled

whispering, lowered breath pleading with
the moon? What hand will rock us

to sleep, float through our hair
like bath water, bring us to our knees,

lift our awkward heads
toward the frayed dawn?

Lucky

January 29, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steven Dawson

Featured Art: Firer by Felicity Gunn

The first time I watched Braveheart
was in the basement of Lucky’s dope house.
I remember the soft cone of light

reaching out from that small box TV
as if asking for spare change from the dark
and how that little glass frame made

blue-faced Wallace look so much
like an action figure (back when Mel
was somebody’s idea of a hero).

And in the downstairs bathroom hung
a cage with Lucky’s bird, a gray parrot
he took from a woman who couldn’t

pay him and that bird would pull
every dull feather from its back
and curse in Spanish as I watched.

I was nine or ten and alone with Braveheart,
that bird, and basement boxes I imagined filled
with a life before Lucky, when his name

might have been Greg or Brandon or even Mel.
This is how my brother babysat—
upstairs and horizontal with a needle

sleeping in his bowtied arm
like some guardian angel taking
work naps among hallway sleeping bags

swollen with strangers
practicing how to be dead
and Lucky’s bird downstairs

screaming chinga tu madre.

Repossession

January 28, 2019.Reading time 1 minute.

By Steven Dawson

To apologize for your vanishing
you brought me a loosey
and a rolled-up Hustler and we sat

in your new car trading smoke.
This happened every few months,
a kind of church service for holiday

Catholics. In that steel cathedral
you preached what you thought
I’d absolutely need: how to cheat

the cylinder inside a lock,
what words undress a virgin,
why I can’t confuse the compass

with the cross and how to blame
heaven if you went to hell.
From the passenger seat of that

stolen Cutlass you were a ruined
simile—the way the back
of an empty tow truck looks

like a crucifix and how in the small
light of that blinking patrol car
you blushed like a martyr.

Calling Annie Oakley

November 15, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kirsten Abel

Written on the side of a payphone
lashed to the wall of the bathroom in a Montreal café
is Annie Oakley’s telephone number.
I see it while I’m peeing.
That’s how close the payphone is.
Annie Oakley in black marker and then her number.
I’ve only touched a gun once.
Or maybe I didn’t touch it, I just thought about touching it
and then said, No, thank you.
It was my father’s gun. It was small, perfect
for fitting into a lady’s hand. Is that called a .38 Special?
Annie Oakley would know.
I didn’t grow up with guns.
I didn’t grow up with my father.
People sometimes think that is a great tragedy.
I did grow up near a little lake, beside
which lived two goats and a horse.
In spring and summer I would walk with my sisters
the dirt trail overlooking the mountain to the gravel path to the stables.
If the goats were out,
we’d pass them cabbage through the fence.
Back then I thought the greatest tragedy was August
ending or my eighth-grade crush dumping me
for a girl with nearly my same name.
I’ve always had trouble locating the appropriate level of sadness
about the father thing.
I’m not saying it doesn’t register.
I’ve just known from a young age there was nothing to do about it.
Here is me.
Here is my father.
The distance between us could be as close as me to this payphone
or as far as the mountain felt from the lake.
Either way it changes things.
Either way it’s done.
Annie Oakley shot a squirrel’s head clean off at age eight.
It was her first shot.
Here is me, I hear her saying.
Here is the squirrel.
Right through the head or right through the thigh or right through the gut.
Either way it’s done.

Europeans Wrapping Knickknacks

November 13, 2018.Reading time 21 minutes.

By David Kirby

Featured Art: by Gustave Caillebotte

                                  They’re so meticulous, aren’t they? They take such care
             that I am ashamed for my country, that impatient farm boy,
      that factory hand with the sausage fingers. First there’s
                        the fragile object itself—vase, jewel, ornament—then tissue,
                      stiff paper, bubble wrap, tissue again, tape, a beautiful bag
      made from something more like gift wrap than the stern brown
                        stuff we use here in the States, then the actual carry bag

                       that has a little string handle but which is, in many ways,
                    the loveliest part of the package except for the object
    you can barely remember, it’s been so long since
                        you’ve seen it. In America, we just drop your trinket
                      in a sack and hand it to you. Oh, that’s right. We have cars
     in this country: whereas Stefano or Nathalie has to elbow his
                                or her way down a crowded street and take the bus or subway,

                        you get in the car, put the bag on the seat next to you,
                      and off you go, back to your bungalow in Centralia or Eau Claire.
      Of course, this doesn’t mean you’re culturally inferior
                        to Jacques or Magdalena just because, as Henry James
                    said in his book-length essay on Hawthorne, we have no sovereign
     in our country, no court, no aristocracy, no high church,
                        no palaces or castles or manors, no thatched cottages,

                       no ivied ruins. No, we just do things differently here:
                    whereas Pedro and Ilsa take the tram or trolley,
     you have your car, and now you’re on your way home
                        to Sheboygan or Dearborn, probably daydreaming
                   as you turn the wheel, no more aware of your surroundings
   than 53-year-old Michael Stepien was in 2006 when
                        he was walking home after work in Pittsburgh, which

                        is when a teenager robbed him and shot him in the head,
                    and as Mr. Stepien lay dying, his family decided
     “to accept the inevitable,” said his daughter Jeni,
                        and donate his heart to one Arthur Thomas
                    of Lawrenceville, NJ, who was within days of dying.
                That’s one thing you can say about life in the U.S.:
                        we have great medicine. Mr. Thomas recovered nicely

                        after the transplant, and he and the Stepiens
                        kept in touch, swapping holiday cards and flowers
               on birthdays. And then Jeni Stepien gets engaged to be
                        married and then thinks, Who will walk me down the aisle?
                        No cathedrals in America, says Henry James,
              no abbeys, no little Norman churches, no Oxford nor Eton
                        nor Harrow, no sporting class, no Epsom nor Ascot.

My Father Visits Not Long After My Mother (His Wife Twenty Years Ago) Dies

November 12, 2018.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Brock Guthrie

Featured Art: by Paul Gavarni

My father’s in town for a quick couple days
and it’s early morning and not much to do

and he needs some smokes and I need
a few things from Lowe’s. We walk to my car

and he says, “Man, you need a car wash,”
and I say, “Yeah, I’ve just been so busy,”

which isn’t really untrue, but I tell him
there’s a place on the way. We get in my car

and he says, “Go to McDonald’s, I’ll buy,”
and we wait in the drive-thru and he says,

“You need a vacuum too,” and I don’t reply
because the food is ready. I pass him his

Egg McMuffin and drive down the road,
carefully unwrapping my breakfast burrito,

and this commercial I’ve heard a dozen times
comes on the radio, some guy with a nasally

New York accent, but only now do I gather
it’s an advertisement for snoring remedies.

My father says, “If there are two vacuum hoses,
I can do one side and you can do the other.”

We drive past strip malls. I wave vaguely
toward a Mexican restaurant I kind of like

but I can’t think of what I want to say about it,
so I kind of mumble and my father does too

except his is more reply, like, “Is that right?”
The car wash kiosk has eight confusing options.

Hole in One

November 7, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Alan Shapiro

Since my dad was blind by then,
when David and I led him from his apartment
to the tee of the shrunken one hole
golf course that served as kitschy
courtyard for the complex
of retirees only well-off
enough for this unironic
aping of the rich, it was by habit
only that he looked down
at the ball he couldn’t see,
then up and out into the void
of stunted fairway and green
while first this foot then that
foot patted the fake grass, almost
kneading it cat-like till the tight
swing arced the ball up high

as the second-story windows
and I swear it was like a trick
ball the pin on an invisible line
reeled in straight down
into the hole—his first and only
hole in one, on the last swing
of a club he ever took, though
we didn’t know this then, and how
we whooped my brother and I
as we jumped and capered throwing
the other balls up into the air
while the old man baffled said what?
what happened? what? already wistful
for this best moment of a life it was
his luck the blindness made him miss.

And now it’s my luck, isn’t it just
my luck, to be the last one
remembering, as if I’m not just
there with them but also far
removed above it all and watching
as through the block glass of an upper-story
window high enough for the ruckus
not to reach me but too low
not to see the filmy blur of
bodies hugging one another
pumping fists as arm in arm
the three of them head out across
the fake grass of that single hole.

Bay Sunday

November 5, 2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

By W.J. Herbert

Featured Art: Boys in a Dory by Winslow Homer

Wind hits the cliff face and climbs the palisade
as three men at a slatted table play cards.
Two wear hats. A third faces the sun and smokes.
All three are gray-haired, but none is my father.
He wouldn’t have played without scotch
on a Sunday or sat on a park bench, anyway.

2.

A man holding a child speaks to her in Mandarin
as he touches a small seat attached to the back of a bike.
He pats handlebars and points to spokes, saying bike
every twenty words or so, then taps the front wheel gently,
the way you would touch the shoulder of an old friend.

3.

Some Sundays even if I’m not near the bay,
I imagine my father playing solitaire at a slatted table
as I lean over the cliff rail, watching waves
that grapple with the beach as they leave it.

On the bike path below, grit spins under a stream of cyclists
as a man wipes a child’s tear with the edge
of his sleeve and speaks to her in a language so soft and low
the bay curves like an ear to hear it.

Laundry

November 5, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Cording

Featured Art: The Bathing Hour, Chester, Nova Scotia by William James Glackens

This morning, doing the laundry,
smoothing collars and shirt plackets
before placing it all in the dryer,
I saw the ghost of my recently dead mother,
her red-capillaried face looking on
approvingly in the steam.

I didn’t expect to see her,
and some of this must be pretend,
but she was there, making a place for herself
over by the baskets, in the light
that fell through the windows
at an angle that never seemed to change.

We got to talking—who doesn’t want
to talk with the dead again
when it’s morning and mostly sunny?—
about the telephone pole in our old backyard,
and the sound of the pulleys and ropes
that carried the wash in and out.

I was lingering over the way a drying sheet
took in a breeze and released it
as if it were breathing,
but my mother chattered away non-stop,
moving as she always did, from topic
to topic without transition,

only pausing here and there to punctuate
with one of her sayings—
Doing the wash makes you happy.
It says you can begin again.
And unlike when she was alive
that seemed true. As the light’s angle

sharpened, none of our mistakes,
our fights or failures, the old
argument about Dad—or even
the ridiculous, proper way
to fold a bottom sheet—held us back
as we finished the first load of darks.

And by the time she held a shirt
by the shoulders, folded it in thirds,
then flipped the bottom half under the top
and laid it in the pile for the living,
I was whistling, caught up entirely
in the rhythm and pace of our task.

At Milward Funeral Home, Lexington, KY

November 1, 2017.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jeff Worley

Featured Art: Bloemenzee by Theo van Hoytema

Someone has to identify the body.
The funeral facilitator, Jeanne,
gestures me into the room and clicks
the door shut behind me.

You finally got your wish,
I say to my mother.
She’s wearing a shade of lipstick
that unbecomes her, a subtle peach
she would have hated. Her face
is her face and of course is not,
her hair parted in the middle,
a new look. Her hands, composed
across her sternum, are the color
of parchment, skin thin as vellum.

I don’t stroke her arm. I don’t kiss
her forehead, as I thought I would.
Instead, I wonder, oddly, if the funeral
people use the same gorgeous quilt
that covers my mother now,
with its sunbursts and bluebirds,
for everybody.

When I think I have stayed long enough,
Brahms trailing off in the corners,
Jeanne is sitting outside the door,
her long fingers forming a steeple.
I want to say to her I have no idea
who that is, I’m sorry, but levity
isn’t encouraged here. Although
I would only be speaking the truth:
Alzheimer’s riddled her brain
and sucked the marrow from her spirit;
she became a stranger and a stranger
to herself. What else was there to do
but believe along with her that Hoss
and his Bonanza brothers were indeed
aliens from another planet, that Pat Sajak
was “in on it,” along with everyone else
who came and went in Mom’s room,
stealing her clothes, her makeup,
the nursing home grand conspiracy . . .

I’m sorry it’s taking me so long,
Mom said in a rare lucid moment
last week, and I had nothing to say,
and I tugged the blanket snugly
under her chin, and I handed her
the plastic cup full of water which
she waved away.

Void Unfilled

May 29, 2017.Reading time 3 minutes.

By George Bilgere
Featured Art: Long Exposure Couple by Jr Korpa

I walk past Erin’s house at dusk
and there she is at her kitchen table,
working on her book about the Reformation.

She needs to finish it if she wants to get tenure,
but it’s slow going because being a single mom
is very difficult what with child care and cooking dinner
and going in to teach her courses on the Reformation,
which I can see her writing about right now,
her face attractive yet harried in the glow
of her laptop as she searches for le mot juste.

Meanwhile Andrew, her nine-year-old son,
shoots forlorn baskets in the driveway
under the fatherless hoop bolted to the garage
by the father now remarried and living in Dayton,
as Andrew makes a move, a crossover dribble,
against the ghost father guarding him, just as I did
when I was nine, my daddy so immensely dead,
my mother inside looking harried and scared,
studying thick frightening books for her realtor’s exam.

And although I hardly know Erin,
I feel I should walk up, knock on her door,
and when she opens it (looking harried,
apologizing for the mess) ask her to marry me.
And she will smile with relief and say
yes, of course, what took you so long,
and she’ll finish her chapter on the Reformation
and start frying up some pork chops for us

as I walk out to the driveway and exorcise
the ghost father with my amazing Larry Bird jump shot,
and tomorrow I’ll mow the lawn and maybe
build a birdhouse with the power tools slumbering
on the basement workbench where the ghost
father left them on his way to Dayton.

I will fill the void, having left voids of my own,
except that my own wife and son are waiting
down the street for me to come home for dinner,
and so I just walk on by, leaving the void unfilled,
as Erin brushes her hair from her face and types out
a further contribution to the body of scholarship
concerning the Reformation, and Andrew
sinks a long beautiful jumper in the gloom.

Stuff

May 29, 2017.Reading time 1 minute.

By Claudia Monpere

Featured Art: [Villa d’un Chiffonier (Ragpicker’s Shack)], 1920 by Eugène Atget

I saw you, daughter, sneaking
a garbage bag of my treasures
into your car. Those heaps of eyeglasses are art.

Never mind the cracked lenses
and broken hinges, the bent frames.
Some day I’ll make a sculpture or hanging lamp.
I’ll make a mobile.

The broken picture frames and dried-out
pens. Even the bottle caps beg
to be known. And how patient
those stacks of hotel soap.
Waiting. Just in case.

Yes newspapers haystack the walls.
But it’s all there: knowledge at my
fingertips. The postman will bring more.

There is an ocean liner inside my heart
that waits to set sail. The crowds wave
at the dock. My shades are drawn.
Bring me, daughter.
Don’t take. Bring me a basket
brimming with words.

Not fester, not filth—
fang words that surgeon my heart.
Bring me gossamer, lagoon, violet-crowned
hummingbird.
Bring me, daughter, elixir of cloud.

My Mother’s Dogs

May 28, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sandy Gingras

Featured Art: Three Dogs Fighting by Antonio Tempesta

They are big and smelly and mean,
and they’re living in her basement.
I think they are dogs, but they might be wolves.
Eight or eighteen of them, something like that.
They all would bite me if I gave them
the chance, so I’m really careful
when I herd them out into the yard.
What is it with my mother?
Most families just have pets—usually one dog
and a cat, nothing like this. How
did she let this happen to her?

She’s living in some decrepit house now on Rt. 9
in the next town over and she’s evidently lost
her taste in furniture. Everything is gold
with rickety legs. She and I watch
the dogs patrol around the yard
from behind a glass sliding door. My mother is angry
now that she’s old, and I think that maybe
she and the dogs deserve each other, but
I can tell that my mother is scared too,
and I want to help her out because
I’m the problem-solver in our family.

The dogs don’t play like normal dogs,
they just move around the yard
like big bullet-headed missiles. We have to get rid
of them somehow, I tell my mother who is
suddenly smaller than she was, and then I hold her
in my arms and she’s a little girl. Whatever you do,
don’t let them in, I whisper, but
she’s already dead of lung cancer.

Serenity Room

May 28, 2017.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Linda Hillringhouse

Featured Art: Buste van een oude vrouw by Anonymous

There are five recliners in a circle,
each with a spongy blanket.
The lights have been dimmed,
but an aide has left behind her walkie-talkie
and it sounds like it’s ready to lift off.
My mother is in one recliner, I’m in another,
an easy way to spend time now that she’s afraid
of the color red and distrusts windows
as if the glass weren’t there and the fingers
of the dwarf palmetto would reach in
and pull her down into its dark center
to cut out the last cluster of syllables
huddled beneath her tongue.

I look over to see if she’s sleeping
and her eyes are open as though
she’s forgotten to close them. Maybe
she’s on some dusky street where half-drawn
figures drift and sounds almost blossom
into meaning. Maybe she opens a door
and her aunts from Brooklyn are there
and clutch her to their mountainous breasts
where she could stay forever.

She tries to inch out of the recliner but an aide
intercedes with a cup of apple juice
which my mother examines closely
for poison and studies her hand as if it’s
screwed to her wrist. Then she brings the cup
to her lips as if it’s the last thing left
from the world when she was Shirley
and carried keys, lipstick, cash.

And I hope that the cold, sweet liquid
brings a moment’s pleasure, but how can it be
that it comes to this, that at the end you get
thrown in the ring for one more brutal round
without enough stamina to put on your shoes
or enough strength to say Thank you or Go to hell.

Little Red Book

February 24, 2016.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Jeffrey Harrison

Featured Art: Le Code Noir by Pierre Prault

I unearth it while cleaning up my office,
The Little Book of Common Sense Investing
that my father sent me two years before he died,
its bright red cover like an accusation,
a yellow Post-it bearing his cheerful
half-script still attached: “Jeff—even if you read
only the first part of this book, you’ll get the gist.
Return it some time, no hurry. Love, Dad.”
I chose to place the emphasis on “no hurry”
and hadn’t cracked its little crimson spine
when, a year later, he asked me what I thought.
When I told him I hadn’t gotten to it yet,
he said he wanted it back, so he could lend it
“to someone who might actually read it.”
“But I might still read it,” I said half-heartedly.
“No, you won’t.” Which made me all the more
determined not to read it, so I said fine,
I’d send it back. But I never did—and then
he got sick, and our investment
in that particular contest seemed pointless.

But here it is again, this little red book
so unlike Mao’s, as if my father were making
a move from beyond the grave. Okay, my turn.
Is it because I need to prove him wrong
even now, or that I want to make amends
belatedly for disappointing him yet again
that I open the book and begin reading?
Or am I doing it in his honor? And is he
still trying to tell me I invested
in the wrong things?—poetry, for instance.
“Counting angels on a pin,” he said once.
Which is just the kind of cliché I find in the book.
Later, though, he claimed to like my poems,
the funny ones at least. And if we drew a graph
of our relationship over his last decades
it would look a lot like the Dow: a steady ascent
with several harrowing jagged downward spikes.
The little red book says nothing about those,
though it does advise not getting too caught up
in the market’s dramatic nose-dives.

Unless, perhaps, you’re trying to realize
your loss—another topic that the book,
with its rosy perspective, blithely avoids
as it enthuses on “the miracle of compounding.”
But instead of getting annoyed I feel an odd
joy: my father could have written this book.
He too was an optimist who liked to talk
about money, and so I used to ask him questions—
What’s the best kind of mortgage to get? Is life
insurance a good idea?—and those led
to some of our least fraught conversations.
That’s why he gave me the book. And he
was right: I get the gist after two chapters.
And the suggestions seem helpful, if limited—
I even underline a few sentences.
Still, that other book, the one about losses,
would be more complicated, and harder to write,
its author finally coming to understand
that, no matter what the future brings,
he won’t be able to ask his father’s advice.

Black Ants

February 22, 2016.Reading time 1 minute.

By Fay Dillof

Featured Art: Crumpled and Withered Leaf Edge Mimicking Caterpillar (study for book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom) by Emma Beach Thayer

Unable to sleep,
I imagine a blob
of ants, erupting
from a faucet.

If they puddle,
that will mean sleep.

But if each ant
descends on a crumb,
steals what it can
and lumbers robotically off,
which they do,
branching in veins across the tile floor,
then I’m left
listening to the sound
of my two sisters
downstairs
in the summer kitchen
where they’re making
my mother laugh
without me
again,
carrying their prize
over invisible trails.

Phone Call

February 13, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephanie Rogers

Featured Art: Figure with Guitar II by Henry Fitch Taylor

When I got the phone call, I listened
to my sister’s voice give
no hint, at first, that overnight,
like that, her life had changed.
I said hello and flipped through
a book on the nightstand, knowing
deep down, from all my missed
calls, that she was preparing
to tell me something
important. How are you? I asked,
trying to delay what I knew already
I didn’t want to hear. And after
her silence, then, I sat straight up—I was still
in bed—my eyes blinking
awake, the automatic
coffee pot dripping into the quiet,
and I said it: What’s wrong, Heather?
expecting for one singular moment the death
of our father, the sniffed
pills, the heroin finally ending
his life. But when she said
nothing, I demanded, this time, hearing
the pitch of her voice fill with the sound a brass
instrument might make breathing
a low note, barely
audible, into the crashing,
noisy universe. And she said it: Joel killed himself
last night, choking
on “killed,” and when I said, Oh
my god Heather
oh my god, she understood, she told me
later, for the first time,
that her husband was never
coming back. The sun peeked through
the window blinds. It flashed across
the framed faces of his daughters, who I pictured,
for a second, on the swing set
behind their house, their father pushing them
higher each time they swung back to him, further
away each time, further away.

Bank Shot

January 20, 2016.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Greg McBride

Featured Art: Horse Race, Siena, Italy by Walter Shirlaw

I asked about the old days, when they
were my age—my mother scrambling eggs,
Dad and I at the table. He aimed a glance
sidelong at her, then took a shot toward me:

We’ve been very lucky, Son.

He must have meant their gamboling, teenage
marriage after weeks of jitterbug jokes
and getting-to-know-you’s in the Abilene
Lady Luck pool hall in 1941.

Her silence like the hush of a tournament
match, the cue’s tip skittish at the ball,
probing for angle and spin, velocity,
the all-important leave and follow-on.

By now—both gone so long, both unlucky—
I understand his game, how words can
travel in disguise, their spin covert,
as on that morning when his mumbled plea

caromed off me—sharply, as off
a felted cushion—and spun toward her,
determined at the stove:

Come on, Honey, let’s play.
Let’s keep the run alive.

Talking to My Dead Mother About Dogs

December 5, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephanie Gangi

Featured Art: Dog with pups by India, Rajasthan, Ajmer, probably Sawar school

          That damn dog.
Which one, Ma?
          The first one.
There is no first one, there was always a dog, Ma.
          The shepherd, the one who kept the baby
          from rolling in to the road down the hill in front of the house.
That was me, Ma. I was the baby.
          I know that. Rex. Rex.
          And what about your father’s, who jumped
          out the car window at a toll booth, headed for the hills. Skippy,
          ungrateful mutt.
          Then we got Duchess, because of Lassie on television.
          Duchess was weak. Duchess didn’t last.
          The toy poodle came in a hat box. She matched the décor!
          I swear to god, she did.
Your chateau phase.
          What about your dogs?
My dogs? My dogs, Ma?
The fear biter who darted in the dark at the ankles of my bad choices?
The herder who swam himself spent, circling me circling me when I was at sea?
The too-happy dog, who I couldn’t keep, I forget why?
Now this one, the big one, this horse of a dog who braces himself
so I can stand? Who, the slower I go, the stronger he gets?
Who can’t rest until I rest? This dog, Ma?
This last one? Ma?

At the Columbarium

December 4, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jackie Craven

Featured Art: Edge of the Woods Near L’Hermitage, Pontoise by Camille Pissarro

“We’d invite you in,” my mother said, “but where
would we put you?” I must have seemed enormous
squatting before her door, third drawer from center.

If not for the marble nameplate, I might’ve seen
a diorama of Jacobean chairs, tiny forks and spoons,
and my stepfather’s bonsai.

“There’s barely enough room for the two of us,”
my mother went on. Deep inside the granite walls,
my stepfather growled, “I blame the Realtor.”

Dogwoods fluttered, casting stained blossoms
into the fountain. Down the hill, a procession of bagpipes
let out a skirl. “She promised us a view,” my mother shrilled.

I think my parents imagined themselves still
at the retirement home, rolling along a tulip-edged path
from the Independent Wing, past Assisted Living,

over to Memory Care, where the Admissions Lady
touched my arm and whispered, “Don’t worry.
We’ll help them downsize.”

After the Funeral

December 3, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Holly Day

Featured Art: A Funeral by Jean-Paul Laurens

When my father was ten, his mother died
and he went outside into the street after her funeral and screamed
at God. He said, “Take me,
you fucker!” to God, and his younger brother, my
uncle, was so scared he ran
into the room they both shared and hid. Later, when
my father came back, my uncle asked him what Hell was like,
why God had let him come back, if he had seen
their mother, what she was wearing.

Gray Whale

November 29, 2015.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Featured Art: Submarine Series Introductory Lithograph by Eric Ravilious

When they read the metal tag
on her pectoral fin—
a surprise of dark Cyrillic letters

on this Gray Whale
who had swum some fourteen thousand miles,
inter-braiding continent

with continent—
strange that I think of you now, father
though you too had lived

mostly below a surface,
the breadth of which we could not know—

until they read her tag,
the cetologists had thought
the gray whales off the coast of Baja

were of a different species
from the ones in Minsk.

When I found your lacquer boxes,
so small they fit into my hand,
with their depictions of our home,

the pots above the stove,
their odd discolorations,
the cheerful curtained window

that looked out at the pines,
I felt sad I had not known your heart
would swim such distance for us—

you had never shown us one.
And how small you had to make yourself
to see each scene and paint it

like an ant stepping carefully along
one of those dark passages
in its hill of dirt that nobody sees inside.

Not Holding the Gun

November 14, 2015.Reading time 3 minutes.

Selected as winner of the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky

By Keith Kopka

Featured Art: Spring Flowers by Claude Monet

Knowledge of crime is a crime
even if one is not committed
by participation. At this cookout,
in a parallel universe, a version
of me lifts the gun, considers
its weight a handful of peanuts.
Another variant lets off a shot
into Godless sky, a traditional
celebration of manhood, in
the dimension of Texas oil barons.
I have a self who understands
breech-bolt action, another
who can separate grip cap
and butt stock, put them back
blindfolded, turn shotgun into
sawed off. In our current rotation
of speed and light, his pump
action is between us on the table.
The cookout has been great,
and I’m glad his sister, my date,
invited me. His mother is grilling
cow tongue. The whole gang’s
here to celebrate Marshmallow’s
release after three years in prison,
he’s at the grill asking for a fourth
helping. The word Rascal carved
in his chest like a pacemaker scar.
In the universe of wooden nickels,
I am best friends with this blunt
instrument. Of course, this isn’t
the universe where we live. My date’s
brother is asking if I’m interested
in a job, simple robbery, I get a part
of the product, but he needs me
because I’m white, because it won’t
get back to his gang, or the black
gangs, if a white man robs a white
man of some drugs. I’ve noticed
I’m the only guy at the cookout
wearing a shirt. Her brother
has a tattoo of two devils balanced
on the top of a mountain range.
It covers his whole stomach.
He tells me if I shoot the guy,
when I rob him, it’s okay, but if I kill
there’s nothing in this world
he can do to help me. Marshmallow
settles himself in a deck chair,
eyes closed, the meat on the grill
smells like warm wood. Hungry
is the only word I can think of.

By a Car Door

May 20, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mark Belair

Featured Image: Interior of the Colosseum by Ippolito Caffi
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

A little boy
in superhero underpants
is made to change clothes
by the open door
of a battered family car
parked on a busy street, his gaunt
mom managing the maneuver
though not quite bothering
to block him from view,

the rest of the family
milling about, each glancing over
impatiently, the scruffy siblings
finally pulling each other’s hair
out of boredom, prompting
a scolding from their pot-bellied dad,
the escalating family tussles
drawing dark scowls
from the overstretched mother,
the little boy’s sense of privacy
seeming oddly

complete
despite the utter lack of it
for they all do
wait and no one, tellingly,
has a taunting word
for the exposed, vulnerable boy,
making his family, while fractious,
seem set on spinning him
in a cocoon

of protective, enduring
force meant to stay—
as he launches into the world—
secret and powerful
as superhero underpants.

BBC

April 25, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mike Wright

Featured Image: View of Toledo by El Greco, 1599-1600

I leave the World Service
on at night, snoozing through
the British iteration of gang rape
and kidnapping. I’ll stir sometimes
to hear a few moments of economic
collapse, but it’s really white noise,
blanching the laughter of drunks outside.
Sleeping to tragedy helps tamp down
my father’s last days, his morphine speech,
how my mother sent me to Kentucky
Fried Chicken with a coupon
for his last meal, and how shame
drove me to throw the coupon out.
If his death were broadcast in the night,
his of thousands of dying fathers,
and you slept well, how could
I begrudge you a night of rest?

My Mother Comes to Dinner

April 22, 2015.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Featured Image: Green Plums by Joseph Decker, 1885
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

We leave the dining room and she remains
alone at the table; the plates need washing,
we prepare dessert. I still wait for her

questions, half-buried in dish-clatter,
her broken tones in the hot kitchen air,
though these days she sits mostly silent.

And larger than the room and yellow walls, her silence—
as though it were strung to the sky,
to the air that too has been washed and washed

like a bed sheet in the relentless sun,
colors and patterns mostly faded

like all the meals enjoyed then washed
from these brown earthenware plates.

POOF

November 29, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sandy Gingras

My mother wants her head to be frozen
after she dies. I’m against it, but
there’s no talking to her. She has a brochure.

On the cover, there’s a picture
of a white building with no windows.
I tell her, I go, “I’m never gonna visit you there.”

She says, “Fine, fine,” the way she does.
She reads me the whole brochure.
She’ll be maintained at something-something degrees

until they come up with the technology to defrost
her. The, she says, “POOF. It’ll be like
being microwaved.” I go, “Think about

what happens to popcorn.” She keeps on reading
about how they’ll just fiddle around with her DNA,
and she’ll grow a whole new body. I don’t get that part.

I go, “What if they can’t grow you a body,
and you’re stuck being an alive head forever.”
She says, “Then you’ll have to carry me around.”

I knew it. I knew it.

The Egg

November 20, 2014.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Eric Nelson

We’re sitting at the table the way people do
When a family member dies and a stream of well-wishers
Arrive with sympathy and food.

Everyone is concerned for the widow, 70, tough, wiry,
Who now seems weak and befuddled, staring at people
She’s known for years without answering,

Rising and walking out the back door, staring at the woods
At the far end of their land.
Returning to the table without a word.

We’re all thinking how often one spouse dies
Soon after the other, dies of nothing
But lack. Because we are surrounded by guns, her husband’s

Sizeable collection—pistols in glass cases, rifles
In racks and corners—talk turns to their value, the merits
Of revolvers versus semi autos, plinking, protection.

Now, for the first time, the widow speaks, remembering
That she went to the coop this morning and found curled
In a nesting box a snake, unhinged mouth filled

With a whole egg, disappearing a swallow at a time.
She walked back to the house, pulled her .410
Off the rack, returned to the coop and blew its head off.

A hog-nose, she says. A good snake. But I had to.
She shrugs her shoulders. I had to. Glancing
At each other, we nod in agreement, relieved.

Activity Room

November 14, 2014.Reading time 1 minute.

By John Bargowski

My mother wants nothing to do with the puzzle
two other residents,
whose wheelchairs have been rolled up
to a folding card table,
are trying to put together—
a west side shot of the New York skyline
broken up into a thousand pieces,
the stubborn morning smog
she could see from the apartment
she had to give up photo-shopped out,
the OT insisting Mom join in the fun,
taking my mother’s stroke-locked hand
and guiding it to
a corner piece that’s an easy fit,