By Julie Danho

Featured Art: by J.L. Mott Iron Works

How long I’ve tried to love you, the way
you still blush and gleam like a teenager
in a poodle skirt, unblemished as the day

you were pressed against wire and mortar
in the shower, on the walls, even the floor,
its concrete flecked with pink. The Nolans,

who chose you, are long gone, their daughters
now grandmothers in their own houses,
the blueprints they left behind moldering

in the basement. How can I blame them?
I didn’t live through the War, the Boom,
this neighborhood rising up in neat rows

as if each Cape had been pining for sun.
In those years, you were prosperity, pedigree,
First Lady Pink named in honor of Mamie

Eisenhower, her White House bathroom pink
from the walls to the tub to the cotton balls,
so that all over America, millions like me

wake up and stumble into a past that waits
with toothbrush and soap. In you, I saw history
running like a faucet, building to a flood

unless stemmed. But when the contractor
gave me a price, he said you were lead,
and with my daughter . . . it might be better

to let you be. So I’ll own your purr and poison,
though I may dream still of reinvention—
blue trim and Harbor Gray—even as I hang

the pink polka dot shower curtain, lay down
that cranberry rug, act as if I chose you,
as if you were everything I ever wanted.

By Anne Starling

Featured Art: A Holiday by Edward Henry Potthast

The dead are with us to stay
                  —Charles Wright

But not the living, the fallible breathing.

For a while it seemed one thing
could be righted. One small piece at the
ocean’s bottom corner
or the bottom
dresser drawer with the scuffed
baby shoes and shoeboxes
               full of snapshots of kid parties, holidays, school picnics
               etcetera.

A comfort, even knowing that wrong
can’t be undone, is more like oceans plural
rushing in
               weighing in with their trick of
                no light, unfathomable.

The idea was to inscribe
the back of the photograph taken
on our last anniversary.
                        Simply to write, in everyday
permanent ink
his name                in the possessive
                then “Mom and Dad.”

By Faith Shearin

Featured Art: by Emil Carlsen

I open a box
in a closet and here I find us,
stuck in scenes long forgotten: my uncle

disappearing down an oak alley
in a horse-drawn carriage,
my grandmother dressed for a garden party,

gloves to her elbows, posed in a stiff
southern parlor, 1953. Here is the trip
to Disney World where we drank from

plastic oranges, held balloons
with ears; oh, we grow younger
on beaches, until we are babies, naked

on blankets, and my grandfather
rises from the grave to sit
in a wood-paneled living room,

on a plaid couch, in a fedora.
I find my cousins beneath cypress trees,
in a river at sunset, and my sister,

age eight, dressed as a mosquito,
on her way to a costume party.
The van that floated away

in a hurricane reassembles itself in our
driveway and my father’s dog,
ten years dead, rides over the lagoon

where she will someday drown,
in a canoe: October falling,
my father’s hair black, his paddle

still in his hands.

By George Kalogeris

Featured Art: by Piet Mondrian

It’s ’68. Whatever he saw, whatever he smelt
In that smoky, dripping handful of purple entrails
Just thawing out from the freezer, the news from Athens

Was ominous, and he wouldn’t haruspicate
On how and when the Colonels might react—
But the gobbets of offal keep piling up in the pail.

It’s not that he fully trusted the lordly voice
Of the BBC, but hearing Vietnam
He drops what he’s doing, and cranking up the volume

On that crackly plastic Panasonic—
That’s when I hear it too: Khe Sanh. It’s what
Comes through the speaker’s throbbing bamboo mesh

As I’m stamping prices on jars of baby food:
A staticky hiss like burning jungle grass . . .
My father wiping his hands on his butcher’s apron,

Oblivious to his customers as he listens
To a transistor radio broadcast the blood
Of a world in shambles. And then he’s back at his block.

Khe Sanh. My older cousins, Kosta and Jimmy,
Are loading up the van they’ll drive around Winthrop,
Delivering groceries and checking out girls.

I’m stamping the little glass jars of applesauce.
Nobody knows whose number will come up.
But our Calchas isn’t taking any chances.

Already he’s built another hecatomb,
And now he’s scrutinizing some gristly turkey
Intestines unfurling for all I know like the coils

Of giant lianas he saw in Guadalcanal
As a young recruit. But through that throbbing bamboo
Mesh I hear the Hydra’s serpentine hiss

He heard as a village boy way up in the Peloponnese.

By Molly Minturn

Featured Art: Still Life with Cake by Raphaelle Peale

It was spring and I walked
the streets in the late afternoon
with the best poet I knew.
She was tall with a severe face
like an early New Englander.
Her ancestors survived genocide.
We didn’t discuss our work, only
the weather, how the blossoms
were upsetting. The war was on.
We bought a hefty slice of cake
and walked slowly under a murder
of crows back to my apartment.
This seemed too evocative,
almost to the point of embarrassment.
The cake was coconut. We split
the slice, sitting at the small
table in my living room, away
from the sun. At the time,
it was the present. Here
in the future, I sometimes forget
to breathe, waiting
for the next catastrophe. That cake
was pure in its sweetness, the poet
alive with me, her eyes scanning
my face, both of our histories
neatly bound in our throats.
I wanted to ask if she was frightened
by living, by the change
in the light. Instead, she slid the plate
across to me, a Ouija planchette,
insisting I take the last bite.

By Margot Wizansky

Featured Art: “Beach of Bass Rocks, Gloucester, Massachusetts” by Frank Knox Morton Rehn

Everything made my mother nervous:
the baby crying, sand on the floor, the flies.
So we went out to the beach.
I took my bucket and shovel.
My mother sat my little brother up on her shoulders
and carried the towels and a canvas chair for my father,
who was too weak to carry anything.
He wore his cabaña suit, light green with white palm trees,
his legs, pale like the sheets in the hotel room.
He hadn’t shaved.
His face had been blue for weeks,
the circles under his eyes, dark as his beard.
Mother said I was too heavy to sit in his lap.
All afternoon I dug a string of frantic little ponds.
Nothing was right; my back was sunburnt;
my father hardly moved.
Uncle Robert came, like a bus from the city,
to build me a race car of sand, with jar lids
for hubcaps and for headlights, clamshells,
and he found a quoit on the beach for the steering wheel.
He dug me a driver’s seat that just fit,
and a rumble seat for my little brother.
My father peeled me an apple with his penknife,
in one long piece, that didn’t ever break.