Tag: Nostalgia

Drink it up, buttercup

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Natalie Taylor

                                                             Blue Fruit Moon: August 30, 2023

There’s a lot of hullabaloo in the woo woo
circles about this Super Blue Fruit moon, so rare
we won’t see the next one until 2037. My astrologer
friend counts on her fingers seven celestial bodies
in retrograde: Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Uranus,
Neptune, Pluto, and Chiron. A celestial goo
of retrospect and rehashing, a muck of revisiting old
stories, exes, holidays and birthdays fuzzy on the why
but clear on what wasn’t there, who didn’t show up,
what we missed. Wheels spinning under
a tree. What was plucked too small, hard
and green. Reconnecting with your inner child,
still wanting to play, to be held. Still dreaming
of some freedom attainable with gobs of money or super
hero powers or sheer will. The planets rotate in reverse,
earth shifts in its nook in the universe. We look back.

                                       Riding my scooter after teaching a late class, I stop
                                   at the light. I am not young anymore. I shiver in sweaty
                                      yoga tights, chilling in night air. Once I make it home,
                                             I will have fulfilled responsibilities of all three jobs,
                                        another 12 hours devoted to maintaining shelter and food.
                                          A young man pulls up next to me on his Kawasaki, dirty
                                          carburetor popping with every wrist crank. He waves
                                         smiling under midnight metallic helmet. In the other lane,
                                                                    a Harley’s deep throat rumbles as its bandanaed rider
                                                                     revs the V-twin crankpin engines. We wait for green,
                                                                  a small symphony of crankpins and cylinders and buzz
                                                       and backfires under a freeway overpass. I point to the moon,
                                                                 full and free as a peach, Saturn in conjunction hovering
                                                                                               just above, still spinning. The riders flip
                                                                                            their thumbs up. Just some kids on bikes
                                                                                             lapping up all the juicy bits they can get.

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Aural Projection

.Reading time 1 minute.

By John A. Nieves

I used to believe in the tang of orange
Tic-Tacs—that it had anything to do
with oranges. That three bright sugar

pills in my child-hand could shine
up a dark morning. And they did. What
little magic. What’s so easy to miss

so much. I believed rainbows on
window dew hid tiny treasures, that sneezing
while saying someone’s name meant

they were thinking of me, that everything
I loved would stay forever if I took
care of it, if I did my part. I have almost

none of that now: the purple stuffed
rabbit, my two pet Siamese cats, my best
friend across the way, my whole

family. I used to believe music could
change the weather. I’m lying. I still
do. I still believe people attach themselves

to songs they love, creep into their choruses.
This may be literally true in the science
of memory. This may also make me

superstitious. But, O, when I sing
you, I can almost reach. There is no way
there is nothing there.

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today which is hotdog day 

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By James Lineberger

today which is hotdog day
at forest hill methodist i ran into
my old high school lit teacher
from the tenth grade
one of the great influences in my life and it really got to me
while i was waiting in line
to put in my order
and i thought about all the other
teachers i used to have who lived and died maybe never
realizing how much they
had meant to their students and here was
a perfect opportunity
to express my gratitude and not to just any teacher
but miss ruby herself but then huh oh
all of a sudden i thought ohmygod what if
my eyes were playing tricks on me
and it was just some little old lady
that somewhat resembled her so just to make sure
i went over to another former student
wanda she used to be wanda yow
i forget who it was she married but wanda
was one of the volunteers
who was bringing food to people’s tables and i said
wanda is that her is it really her
and wanda said oh yeah that’s ruby all right don’t she
look wonderful but she’s
deaf in one ear i think the good one
is her left but you better hurry
if you want to speak to her she’s already
called her grandson
to come pick her up so i left
my order with wanda and circled around
behind ruby’s table
hoping i could surprise her and leaned down
from the left side
with my face just barely touching her hair
which smelled my god like violets
a really refreshing smell
and there was something else some kind
of perfume from elsewhere and
i don’t know how it happened but i was already starting
to weep it was such a profound
moment for me
and my feelings damn near overtook me
but i managed to get it out even
though my voice was shaking when i said miss ruby
until i had you for a teacher
i didn’t know
what great literature was and i—
but then
i just ran out of words and out of breath
and as i started
to pull away
she reached her hand back and slapped
me right in the face
turning around
with a stare like she had seen a ghost
saying oh goodness jimmy is that you i thought it was
a brown recluse

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The Skater

.Reading time 2 minutes.

                                                                                                                                    —for Bam Margera
By Johnny Cate

Modus operandi: grace cut with chaos, every
drop-in a death sentence he’d somehow
skirt and skate off to nollie another day. 

If we got our hands on a burned Bam DVD
we’d play it until the player was hot to touch,
until every trick was etched into the mind’s 

fish-eye and we were sketched up
with strawberries trying to land one like him.
The kids who by high school couldn’t hit  

a heater pitch for shit or cared to run suicides
found a home in the sheet metal half-pipe,
a new American pastime and a hero in  

an unhinged prodigy. Jackass came later—
what mattered first was the skating, each
varial and crooked grind a live creative act 

that left like a vandal Michelangelo, bank
rails marked with paint, curbs darkened
with candle wax. But the rebellious aesthetic 

was just that—aesthetic. A sly disguise for the
same glory, the guttering flame of a single
God-breathed second. Under Bam’s feet,  

the deck spun like a plywood electron,
elemental and holy: 360 degrees of don’t-care
that would carry him to self-destructive stardom. 

Now, hardly a day goes by that TMZ wouldn’t like
to eat him alive, so I’m pulling up the tape,
posted by a stranger, just to see what I saw  

years ago on those long-gone discs: a man
risking blood and bone with total nonchalance,
his soul sliding recklessly, breathlessly diagonal. 

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Covenant 

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Baylina Pu

We were making mojitos 
in the kitchen when we found 
a  mortar and pestle made of 

Marble. With them, I crushed mint leaves 
and later, slices of lime 
four or five at a time. My friend 

Mixed in sugar, the water 
we’d carbonated ourselves, and 
white rum with a wooden spoon 

In a stainless-steel bowl. 
That evening, the sun was 
setting through the Japanese maple 

By the porch, and leaves 
had slid down the car windshield 
like paper cut-outs. I felt 

Grown up, a real woman. At dinner, 
there were eleven of us crowded 
around the table, beside 

A glass door which looked out 
over the lake, still unfrozen 
even in November. We licked brown 

Sugar off the rims of our glasses. 
My hands could still feel the weight 
of that marble mortar, an invention of 

The Stone Age. Even as early 
as then, happiness had already 
been discovered: simple movements of 

Grinding and stirring. Somewhere, desire 
was calling, but we were so deep 
in the woods nobody heard it. 

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Just

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Charlene Fix

I don’t remember her name.
It was Adrienne.
She lived with her parents
in an apartment on Cedar,
the road that split school districts.
So when she threw a party,
she invited kids from both.
Feeling shy in her crowded
living room, I sat on Mark
Shore’s lap while he sat on
the lap of a comfy chair.
We laughed and laughed,
my giddiness netting me
two new boyfriends I didn’t
want or seek and whose interest
waned anyway as soon as they
found I was fun only when
perched on Mark Shore’s lap.
I loved abstractly then, all in
my head, divorced romantically
from anyone real. Mark and I
were just friends, with all of
just’s implications. So we remain,
though he passed away a while ago.
That night I felt protected on his lap
where I could gaze upon the social sea
secure, even when he worked
his arm up the back of my blouse,
until his hand emerged at my collar
waving to those in the room
and, in this ebb-time, to you.

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

.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.

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The Cost of Living

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

With the thumb and first finger make an L.
L is for loser.
It’s a thing anymore.
Now think of 8th grade.
There was King of Detention Jimmy Ramish.
There was Too Tall Eunice Bugg, plus
Kitchen Tom plus Clyde Skopina
who’d said his father was an astronaut—
he was lying and Brenda
Kleefish let him know we knew it too.
Glide, she’d called him, meanly,
Glide away, she’d say and wave.
There was dummy Aldo Krull
and there was fatso Mitchell Beacham,
Beachball, he was called, of course.
And Annie Friebert?
Annie’s winter colds
were worst and left a criss-crossed
slug trail up her parka sleeve.
Achoo we’d say, achoo, achoo.
Hey Annie drop your hankie?
Ha, ha, ha, ha-choo.
She was a neighbor and our folks were friends.
But with Clyde Skopina came a certain desperation,
nothing anyone could name, leastwise not me—
it’s just I wish I’d looked out a little for him.
In the lunch line once, believing we
were friends, touching my arm,
and smiling hard to trick the facts,
he said, My dad can lift a car.

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The Year Time Capsules Started Showing Up

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Seth Peterson

it happened fast. Suddenly, everyone had Rubik’s cubes
& Game Boys.

All day, their eyes & hands were busy, waving sepia Polaroids,
lining up kaleidoscopes.

They felt an easing in their hearts, a silence they couldn’t place.
At night, they noticed these things

could still glow, these new old things, humming in their own way.
Humming

the way a mother hums to her child. A wrecking ball revived these things.
A confederate statue

had its head hacked off at midnight. No one could find it, & for months
it stood there, headless,

haunting all their dreams, until everyone agreed to tear it down.
Beneath the concrete

horse hooves, the elaborate part of the monument, was a hollow-slotted base.
There were murmurs

as the steel crashed into it. They remembered the capsule at its heart.
They remembered

what it was to be a child again. They remembered piñatas & birthdays.
The clap of steel

on concrete sent out a splash of color. A Cabbage Patch Kid.
A Walkman.

A pair of hot pink leg warmers. Each one humming like a memory.
The point is,

these were things they wanted to remember. & it happened
everywhere,

all across the country, all at once. & their hearts were eased.
Some boys, soon after,

claimed to have found the statue’s head. It was covered by wintercreeper
in the woods, they claimed.

It was haphazardly spattered with peat moss. The rumor is,
it’s still there,

absorbing knives of moonlight. They say its mask is ghastly.
It is ghastly.

You think it’s gone, but things can change.

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Driveway Toad

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Rob Cording

A year after my brother died,
I told my daughter about
the toad that once lived
in the hollowed-out knot
of an apple tree
in the center of my childhood
driveway. My brothers and I
liked to visit it after school,
but the tree came down
in a snowstorm, and my parents
graveled-over that spot.
When my daughter
asked what happened
to the toad, I explained that
it probably moved
under a rock, or to the woodpile
along the side of the house. “Or,”
she responded, “it died.”
Then, she skipped into the house
and left me outside.

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Old Black Water

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Dion O’Reilly

Suzie, I want to tell you
how frequently I pass the apartment
behind the supermarket
where we street-danced
to the Doobie Brothers,

light shifting as the fog
lifted, front-yard roses
iridescent in the salt-gray
seaside morning.

You died, what, ten years ago?
Not at once, really, though pills
took you quickly. It began, I think,
when we were children: without
knowing why, we wanted out

of that rural beauty—the narrow
valley and gleaming stream,
summers spent diving off
crumbling cliffs, as if nearness
to death was the closest
we came to leaving

your stepdad’s beery fingers,
my Mother who loved
to touch the sweaty chests
of her daughters’ teenage lovers.

Nowadays, everything
is a different kind of dangerous:
rain stays away. June mist
sucks away too soon,
sunlight breaks through
before it should.

What I want to say, Suzie,
is a moment, gone
fifty years, is just a moment,
but you’re still here, unfleshed
in brightness—elfin, jittery, wan—

our arms looped as we turn
tight circles, round and round,
your eyes locked on mine.

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Obituaries

.Reading time 1 minute.

By George Franklin

My mother used to say that only old people read them.
Now, I get an email about a classmate from high school,
Someone I might not have recognized over fifty years ago,
Much less today. I could call my friend Richard to ask,
Who was the guy who just died? And, Richard could tell me.
But the truth is that I don’t want to keep track of acquaintances
Beneath the ground—or above it. The cemetery in Shreveport
Was just down the block from a drive-thru liquor store that
Didn’t ask for IDs. The ability to turn the steering wheel and
Press the gas pedal was apparently good enough. On the same
Street, a fried chicken place sold onions pickled in jalapeños
And vinegar. They went down well with Jack Daniel’s
On summer weekends when we’d play penny-ante poker
In someone’s garage. Back then, almost none of us were dying.

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The Morning I Turn Forty-Five, I Wake Up

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Chrys Tobey

with two new creases in my forehead. Deep creases.
The night before, my hair stylist tells me
she wants to get some lift because a man
once told her she would not have to worry
about lines. Just gravity. So I think about the
dermatologist who said Now you look so young after he
convinced me to treat some scars when I was twenty-four,
when I looked fourteen. I fall asleep reading a poem by a woman
who mourns her youth and another elegy nostalgic for beauty
someone fears she’s lost. My girlfriend hates her lines. Hates
her freckles. She asks me to dye the gray from her hair before
she confesses she got Botox before our first date. I eat dinner
with a friend in his early forties; as he sips some whiskey, I remind
him he’s attractive and he smirks, That ship has sailed.
Another friend is going through a divorce
and she’s afraid no one will want to date her.
Later, I google the poet who feels men don’t want
her anymore because she’s no longer young.
She’s gorgeous. During my birthday weekend,
I sheepishly share some photos from my twenties. I see a sad
young woman struggling to smile perfectly
for the disposable camera. If that’s the ship,
let it float away. I’ll blow it kisses while I walk
to the coffee shop. I’ll blow my beautiful friends kisses. I’ll
blow the lamenting poets kisses. And here is a kiss
for our poor brains. And this kiss is for my heart
when the barista smiles and says, It’s on me.

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Wisteria

.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.

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College Days

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Rob Cording

Featured Art by Stephen Rounthwaite

Outside, a few gray snowflakes fell,
a truck rumbled onto 290, and the cold
seeped through our windows.
Our landlord had rigged our thermostat
so we couldn’t turn up the heat.
But that day, the four of us nailed a bag of ice
to the wall over the sensor, and when
the heat kicked on, we let it pump
until we’d shed our sweatshirts and flannels.
Leaning back on our futon, we shared a joint,
invincible in our underwear and T-shirts, laughing
and laughing. Twenty years ago now,
before we knew loss and grief, when we sang along
to our DVD of The Last Waltz and didn’t notice
the steady drip of the ice melting.

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Should You Choose To Accept It

.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.

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Cheap thrill

.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.

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Ms. Appalachia

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Rachel A. Hicks

I’m an Appalachian beauty queen,
a capable kitten with smooth birthing hips.
Applaud the cinema kitty cat caught in the smoke ring.

I rule over Kentucky junkyards, zoom in as I sit on refrigerator thrones,
play pianos by the highway, cigarette-thin fingers give a tinkle tankle of a tune
perking ears that belong to someone twenty years ago.
The honeysuckle sweetness of my fingertips, syrupy sweet on the dirt keys,
greasing up the notes, F, E, B & so on.

Underneath the toasters & the books from all those rummage sales
sits some hot ghost of a memory. Smitten kitten, the smell of trash
makes me think of our place & the breeze outside is the same one
I feel at night when trains go by.

Stack the broken binds of hymnals for a stage, wrap, rip, some leaves, some dirt,
pack, perch, pack it all in, real tight, until the only clumps to fall
from my deciduous crown are intentional. A tap dance for you, a finale
with hula-hooping hubcaps & juggling light bulbs. I sing in a rusty tune,
decaying notes in the keys of D, C, G & so on.

Read More

Reminiscences

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Matthew Valades

Featured art: Sunflowers by Janet Braden

It became possible to say anything:
that was the delusion. A melting tree,
a painted deer—the books sat useless
as guides to understand such thoughts.

Holes at the elbows quickly drew
attention, but bothering to bother seemed
no longer worth the trouble. With walls
and brooms folks got better acquainted.

A summer of branches joining field
and sky swelled with lost promise.
It was good to stay, that’s how it felt.
People got older and younger. They’d sit

composing elaborate salad plans.
“Forget about tomorrow” became
a common phrase, but few took comfort
in what it meant. Distance fraught

with waiting, a blank consistency,
infused the hours as if each day
had been left on the table to fill the house,
rising through the rooms like steam. Read More

The Time Traveller Chooses an Arrival Point

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Blair

Featured Art: Yliaster (Paracelsus) by Marsden Hartley

Before it all goes wrong. Before the bell is rung. Before the ship has sailed.
Before the perfect storm begins to brew. Before the term perfect storm goes
viral. Before anything goes viral. Before the fall. Before the crash. After
effective sanitation, before Ronald Reagan. Before that sixth grade school
photo is taken. Before one friend’s accident, another’s illness. Before the first
massacre or environmental disaster. Before the first loss of liberty. Before
the prequels. Before the sequels. Before the remakes. Before guns. Definitely
before Columbus. After your son learns to say he loves you. After the
invention of childhood. Before the police state. Before the nation state. Before
the interstate. After modern medicine. After modern art. After animated GIFs.
After the discovery of fire, of penicillin, of Spandex. After you meet the love
of your life, but before you meet your first miserable boyfriend. After the
Internet, but before we become information. Before your cousin dies, before
your classmate dies, before anyone anywhere dies. It’s important to avoid your
grandfather, and also the Middle Ages. Remember the Nineties sucked, and
so did the Eighties. Maybe that moment when the dog stole pancakes off your
plate. Your parents laughing as the card table shook. Just after the Big Bang.

Read More

Ruthless

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Lee Luan
Winner, New Ohio Review Poetry Contest: selected by Ada Limón

Featured Art: The Dance by George Grey Barnard

My friend lowers his foot into the stony
runoff from the mountain, lets out a burst
of frantic laughter. This, I think, is a happiness.

When I don’t feel pain, is it joy that pours
in? A hollow vessel glows to be filled.
無 , my father taught me, is tangible—

an emptiness held. It means nothing, or to not have,
which implies there was something to be had
in the first place. It negates other characters:

無心 , “without heart”;
無情 , “without feeling”;
heartless, ruthless, pitiless.

Is the vacant heart so ruthless?

The ancient pictogram for 無 shows a person
with something dangling in each hand. Nothingness
the image of yourself with what you once had,

what you could have. And the figure is dancing,
as if to say nothingness is a feeling, maybe even
a happiness—dancing with what is gone from you.

When I ask myself what am I missing? I think
of how much I loved to dance, arms awash
with air, the outline of loss leaping on the wall.

Read More

American Horror

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jessica Alexander

You should have seen me then, under those yellow stadium bulbs, my lips so
full they’d burst in your fingers. I had this top on: a floral print and ruffles, red,
to match my lips, and my tight Levi jeans. And my sun-kissed cheekbones and
the sun-kissed bridge of my nose. And my smile was just like America—like
a cornfield stunned by its own golden beauty—my gorgeous delight! I went
braless, wore no makeup. It rained and the grass was slick. The way it goes is
that something happens next. It happens by a lake or in a parked car. You take
one look and know I’ll never survive it. My teeth were like a horse’s. A feeling
they mistake for a girl. A feeling they write songs for. The kind of songs that
played in pickup trucks and there’s me standing in the bed of one, hurling my
top into traffic. Could be a hitchhiker. Some guys carry knives. What is it about
blonde girls and America? Blonde girls and wherever? I was so all–American.
So cute I could have murdered my own goddamn self. What is it about a blonde
girl that breaks the world’s heart? I miss those days. Not Bobby or Leo or
James. Just miss that particular ache, which was not unlike a bulge in shorts,
that summer rage that could break my chest apart and hurl my beating heart
into the bleachers. Like them I could not keep myself. There is the stadium
again. There is Bobby, cheering. Isn’t that how it happens in America? Topless
in Texas. My little red shorts. In the back of a pickup, again. The window
breaks. In Tennessee? In Indiana? The sound of a power drill, a chainsaw. The
sound of summer. The bleachers, those bright white lights waiting to throw 
my shadow to the ground, and there I am, arriving, and it’s always like what
happens to me next has everything to do with every one of us.

Read More

What is your favorite past time?

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Danberg

The form asked, “What is your favorite past time?”
So I wrote how I loved the 1947 Technicolor American comedy classic
Life with Father.
Whereas home to me as a kid felt like the morning after a trip to the emergency room,
William Powell’s brood lived on the brink of a joy omnipresent
in the wealthy brownstones of Gay Nineties New York,
and in Meet Me in St. Louis, which opens
on Mary Astor and Marjorie Main making ketchup,
Judy Garland’s face in repose always seemed baffled by love.
And who knew ketchup could be made?

Then, I peeked and saw my neighbor’d written “tennis.”
The guy on the other side, “tailgating.”
I noted that the question before was favorite color,
the one after, what would you do with an unexpected day off.
(Blue, by the way. And, of course, watch whatever’s on Turner Classic Movies.)

Suddenly, I was tired.
I longed for the time before I was ever asked this question.
I crossed out my answer and drew an arrow to the bottom where I wrote

“When I was twenty and my body was a blossom
trembling to shake itself from the vine.”

Read More

You Want to Go Back

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Fleming Meeks

Featured Art: Johnny Dunn’s Sandwhich Shop by Walker Evans

You want to go back is the name of your car,
the make, the model, the name you give the swaying trees,
the rustle of leaves before a thunderstorm
as sun gives way to clouds and quiet falls
on a meadow of grass and clover.
You want to go back and ask the question.
Or you dream it. Or it’s a movie with Walter Huston,
the rumor of a movie at MGM, killed
before shooting began. Nothing was written down,
no minutes of the meetings, nothing
but a few scraps of papyrus, of vellum, of cuneiform
carved into stone, baffling translators.
Or typed on onion skin, brittle and cracked
in a box in the basement of the first house
you ever bought, along with a fund-raising letter
from Dwight Eisenhower, then president
of Columbia University, and a water-stained circular
from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists warning
of the danger of a full-scale atomic war.
The temperature is dropping, the wind is erratic,
swift and then calm. You want to go back.

Read More

Meditation On My 44th Birthday

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Jason Irwin

Before going for a walk, I open the day’s newspaper.
NASA releases detailed photos of Charon,
Pluto’s largest moon. In a marketplace in Diyala Province, Iraq,
a suicide bomber kills one hundred and twenty.
On this day in 1959, Billie Holiday died
handcuffed to her hospital bed. My horoscope
tells me I will be extremely serious and earnest
in my emotions, that I will suffer
from the ailments of birds.

                                        Hard to believe half of my life
is just some thing that used to be.

On my walk I stop at the corner of Maple
and Elm, watch the sun sink behind the station,
I think about Charon, orbiting Pluto, and the Charon
who ferried the souls of the dead to the underworld. Maybe
he delivered the people killed in the marketplace,
or Lady Day. Instead of a coin for passage
she sang Baby why stop and cling to some fading
thing that used to be. Her lilting voice trailing off
as they reached the far shore.

Read More

Coronation with Plastic Flowers

.Reading time 6 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

Featured Art: by Karl Blossfeldt

She says it feels like flowers blooming in her veins.
                                The lilies watch her, unmoved
in the window.
                                She becomes the petals’
white polyester sheen, its rigid spine, slumped posture
                                leaning against the rim
of an old coffee mug filled with week-old cigarette butts.
                                This is how
I will remember her: bottles of pills, the walls scumbled
                                yellow, a flower blooming
in her veins, her gray breath rising

                                in a haze thirty years ago
the way she placed each plastic flower away from
                                the sun, the sting, anything
that could touch the color of the petal as if the light
                                could drag each one into the white,
worn sky, make it fade before her eyes. What else is beauty for?
                                but to be spun, set on a window sill
curtains drawn, petals hugged in dust, as she slept,
                                no sun to tell her if it was day or night,
the three of us kids trying to keep still, feeling our way
                                through the dark dreamt room,
unable to understand that this was the tick-tock of time.
                                 This was what it meant
to live forever.

                  Only nothing lives forever.
                                                The perfect moment—

the gardenias in full bloom
                                chatter staggering through a promenade,
the quivering flit of sparrows chasing
                                the listless light of noon
until suddenly even this ends,
                                 until suddenly a car alarm ruins everything,
the chatter dissolves into people
                                 screaming over each other,
birds fleeing, the owner trying to turn the damn thing off.

               Maybe there were too many moments
that could never stay quiet or whole in her hands
               like the day we took
our first steps, said our first words, or the day
               she fell in love,
slept all night in his open arms, dreamt of the way
               he looked at her as the ocean
wind tossed her floral dress,
               dreamt of the way time could stop,
only to wake up and find every living thing
               changed in some way

everything except
               the flowers in her hands.

Read More

The Museum of Might-Have-Been

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Anne-Marie Fyfe

Featured Art: Art Institute of Chicago by Thomas Struth

Opens its doors one Sunday a month
in winter. The queues back up for decades.

If you’re lucky and your number’s called
you can have any tour: Your Charmed Life,
Your Regrets, The Prodigal You, every second
slip-road at the intersections of the possible.

The exhibits are stark and infinite
under strip neon, long hallways
of lost opportunity, slow clocks,
stopped clocks, rooms where even now
a thought might wither: the attic storeroom
is out-of-bounds to all but the curators,
though artifacts are still donated by the hour.

Standing in line is no guarantee
of admission: some days
word spreads that when you
reach the queue’s head, pass through
the double doors, it’ll be stripped out,
even lightbulbs, with only packing materials
and discarded drapes left. Yet critics insist
The Multiple-Choice Foyer, The Roads-Not-Taken
Gallery, The Back Burner Café are stunning.

Every room’s a tasteful shade of apple-white
apparently. Waxworks and living statues
rehearse at intervals for The Balcony Scene,
The Shining City, The Reconciliation, over
and over, night by night. As in the finest operas.

Read More

Constant Craving

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Kathy Fagan

Featured Art: Café Concert (The Spectators) by Edgar Degas

When Peter Byrne of the 80s synthpop duo, Naked Eyes, played for me his acoustic cover of k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving” in his studio over-looking Los Angeles, the peacock—not the NBC peacock but a real peacock among the many on the grounds—opened his fan as if the music were a potential mate. He strutted and shirred. He shimmied his many eyes. He’d been drawn to the music, then spotted himself in the sliding glass doors. He leaned in and turned for us like a Vegas show girl. He brought tears to my eyes. When the song was over I could barely muster, “What a tender version, Peter,” though tender wasn’t the word for the primitive if aimless seduction on the lawn.

Read More

My Life

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Jack Myers

Featured Art: October Day by Jean Charles Cazin

was never large enough even for a B movie
though I think I’ve felt as deeply as Brad Pitt.
No one I grew up with ever became famous
or notorious on that spit of land that ended in the sea.
But we became as adept at reading storm warnings
in the muscle and color of water as we did in a face.

In the cold-war doldrums of the 50s, all my teachers
hated teaching. We were such little shits back then
I thought who could blame them, and became a teacher
so I could show these younger versions of myself
how to open their hearts and enter into a different,
richer kind of darkness that exists in them.

We were an obstinate desert people given a single animal
which we rode and milked and roasted and skinned.
The stories strangers told us about fabulous places
we’d never get to taught us how to open a door in rock
and go inward, how to widen our hearts with longing
and a song and bang along on a drum skin and a string.

Read More

Reunion

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Bruce Weigl

Featured Art: Woman at Her Toilette by Edgar Degas

Now, as the popular girl walks among us with the microphone,
most of the stories are about loss,
or include exquisitely precise medical and pharmaceutical details,
as if the words could suture the wounds, or save us even one last breath.
I came here to dance with the Puerto Rican women
of my class of 1967, and to remember a few pals lost in the war,
who had been so beautiful, you were happy just to look upon them,
and one more
lost to his own drunken wildness
under a moon who doesn’t remember us.
It’s not a going back we long for, but a staying still
for one incomparable moment, all the lost loves’ faces
spinning in the mirrored ball.