Tag: Sadness

Miraculous

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Pam Baggett

Featured Art by Eliza Scott

Switch on the car radio, music falls out of the air
into my ears: James Brown, Joni Mitchell,
Jim Croce. Old gold. Plus, when I got in my car,
it cranked like it does every time, so many miracles
in that I can’t even count them. Traffic lights
that help us get along with one another,
scent of roast chicken rising from my grocery bag,
which also contains the most delicious bread,
whole wheat with flax, sesame and a hint
of cherries. That someone thought to turn wheat
into bread, miraculous. Yeah, I know, I just
had to start on a heart pill, but it’s nothing,
a little electrical nuisance, no effect
on longevity. And yeah, my best friend
has a hurt so deep and wide whole oceans
pour through it, and her story’s not mine to tell
but jeez, what a soul-shatterer. Yet even she
watches bumblebees. She swears they’re her favorite
miracle. So aerodynamically complicated
in the way they get off the ground you’d think
they never would—flapping their wings
back and forth, not up and down—yet up they go.
She says if they can beat gravity she can too,
and I gotta tell you that to see her dressed
and laughing, hear her singing with that voice
that sounds like water tumbling over rocks
in some ancient river, water that’s passed through
some murky cavernous places but has emerged
into the stunning light of day, to hear her sing again
is one big fat black-and-yellow buzzing miracle.

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You Are My Sunshine

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Bobbie Jean Huff

Let me begin by offering my condolences, I said,
holding out my hand. She shook out her umbrella
and placed it open, just beside the altar. They thought
it was an ulcer, she said. They gave him some tablets.
Did he have any special requests? I asked. Favorite
hymns? Or something for Communion, like maybe
Water Music? He was worse by Christmas, she said.
He couldn’t manage the pumpkin pie. He always loved
my pumpkin pie. The King of Love is nice, I said. I
opened the book to page 64. As an alternate to Crimond,
you know. Most people don’t recognize it as the 23rd
Psalm. In January his feet turned black, she said. Toe by
toe. It took exactly ten days. The shadow of a branch
moved slowly back and forth behind the stained glass.
I thought: When I get home I’ll check my toes. Will
there be Communion? I asked, finally.

The last three days he started to hiccup, she said.
He wouldn’t take any water. It never stopped, the
hiccupping. Not once, not one minute until he went. I
could play Pachelbel’s Canon. That’s very popular now.
There’s no reason it can’t work at funerals as well as
weddings. At the very end, she said—then stopped, her
eyes squeezed shut behind her glasses—as if the
rejected water, each wretched hiccup, and every
blackened toe formed a chain she could use to haul
herself back to September, when she would claim
him, finally whole again.
She reached for her umbrella and frowned. Play
what you like, she said. He was never fond of music.
Not hymns, anyhow. Only once in fifty-three years
did I catch him singing. You are My Sunshine, I
believe it was.

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Aesthetics to Change the Way You Live

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Featured Art: The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834 by Joseph Mallord William Turner

“Aesthetics to Change the Way You Live”
—Growth Magazine

For instance wabi sabi,
a Japanese view of life
that celebrates the imperfect,

the light-hearted sound
of the two words
like figures balanced on a seesaw,

behind them, cloudless sky,
and in the spread, the photograph
of nicked and tarnished silver spoons

arranged in rows on lilac velvet—
how perfectly imperfect.
But separate from the printed page,

the air around me darkens—
and then the sound
like thunder pressing closer

as I think of my own flaws—
and then they all
come charging toward me

like a herd of bison,
so dense it’s hard to see
from all the kicked-up dust.

So loud I cannot think.
How much easier to be won over
by a living room’s worn rug,

the reds and blues, faded,
even threadbare in those places
I have most often stood.

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In a Year of Drought, I Drink Wine in a Los Angeles Hot Tub

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Christopher Kempf

Selected as runner-up in the 2015 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Robert Pinsky

Featured Art: Interior of the Pantheon, Rome by Giovanni Paolo Panini

So too on Troy’s final afternoon
the doomed children of the city sang. Such
      was their joy, Virgil tells us, such

was their simple awestruck wonder
at the great beast even
      the Achaeans, cramped, standing

on each other’s shoulders inside
the close wood, wept. What
      he means, of course, is that inside

of the other’s suffering, one
can imagine always aspects
      of a wild beauty refusing

negation. Or no. Not
that it exists, this
      beauty, but that

it can be made so. Rome
Virgil says, springing
      from Ilion’s ashes. Elsewhere

Orpheus. This
is not my home. Here
      for the weekend only, I float

out into the hot tub’s bubbling, bleach-
& salt-scoured water. I watch
      the few stars the city permits

still flicker on, the long
avenues of light below them—Cienaga
      & Sunset, Ventura—burn

& spangle in the mountains’ dark bowl. The bottle
of La Marca prosecco sweats. To secure
      for their desert metropolis water

enough to nourish all this, city
developers—circa
      the arrival, reports suggest, of something

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The Circus Lion’s Lament

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

Featured Art: Circus Clown and Dancer by Marc Chagall

So what happened? I used to be a lion, crashing
the herd and yanking down stampeding

zebras on the hoof. Days spent pissing hot gold

across the Serengeti! The ground gone tawny
with my scat! Those long afternoons

of fly-blown torpor, those gristly jawfuls of prey

and those after-fuck yawns. At night, snoozing
into my paws, I’d twitch and thump

the muscular scourge of my dreaming tail . . .

But Emily the Elephant jerks my chain, suggests
my ferocious howls lack plausibility

or conviction. O how I howl! I can rend the air

with lost prerogatives! Demolish the audience
with has-been imperium! I worry

and tooth the Ringmaster’s splintery stool. Dolts

applaud. Clowns in a jalopy lampoon
terror, hitched to their posse of sidekick knuckle-

draggers waddling away in diapers and tuxedos . . .

Come night, I’ll sniff the corners for what’s left
of my petrified stink, the proof

I somehow still exist. Breakfast’s tossed in at six.

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The Woman Who Didn’t Know How

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Maya Jewell Zeller

Featured Image: Clouds and Sunset, Jamaica by Frederic Edwin Church 1865

Her skin was too human too often,
hands too happy to touch the splintered

door of a barn, too easily moved toward
a nettle, too ready to cover her mouth

when she gasped in joy, so she let
the aliens take her when they came.

They moved like question marks toward her
and she dropped the garden tools

to watch their wavy willow-like eyes, slits
of smoke their mouths flung out in nets.

They didn’t make a sound. Instead they held
signs with shimmery words to tell

what they wanted. On board,
they began to teach her restraint,

offering pudding then peeling the lid
to reveal the round torsos of bugs.

She wanted to laugh, but they asked
her to keep the noise down.

She wanted to explore, but they said
it was best if she lay back, rest a while,

it would be a long trip, would she please
just draw them a picture of a horse or a spade,

a packet of seeds they could plant
back wherever they came from. Through

the floor-holes she could see her husband
still sleeping on the lawn.

She had never wanted more badly
to tear through his loneliness,

lie softly like an animal on his chest.

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How to be Sad

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Laura Read

You’ll be heavier in the mornings, waterlogged.

Don’t try to put on anything from the upside down

clean clothes basket. Just wear yesterday’s pants.

There’s no need to bring in the paper. Or sweep

the dead bees from the windowseat. When

the doctor asks for your pain number, stick

with 2—it’s best to leave everything as it was.

Wish again that you could live in that prefab

house you tour at the fair. It doesn’t matter

what it’s made of. You love the vacuum stripes

in the carpet, which is taupe, always difficult to

describe. There’s a plasma television,

a microfiber sectional, and in the kitchen plastic

steaks on each plate at the table, covered in fake

hollandaise sauce. After you eat, you’ll still have

dinner for tomorrow, and you can just

go to bed where there’s a book already chosen

for you on the woman’s side. Apparently, you like

romance. And if you’re not tired, the fair’s always

there. You love the ferris wheel, the funnel cakes,

and especially the goldfish man, but you never

thought you’d win one of those bags with the small

fish swimming inside it, his life hanging

in the balance of your hands. And there’s no bowl

back at the house. So you’ll have to stay up all

night holding him, in case he panics.

Laura Read has published poems most recently in The Sow’s Ear, Red Rock Review, Edgz, and Poet Lore, and has work forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review and Floating Bridge Review. She teaches writing and literature courses at Spokane Falls Community College.

Originally appeared in NOR 8.

Objective Correlative

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Ann Keniston

Featured Art: The Letter by Alice Pike Barney

All I could do was think of her face.
Or not think of it, the way
after receiving her letter I felt
relief, gratitude, and then
lost the actual note she wrote,
the tiny, lovely photograph
of her children I’d vowed to cherish.
And then I saw: my grief was
the objective correlative, a hook
on which I could hang all the scraps
of whatever other sadnesses
I was more frightened of. And the grief,
like a person, like her in her solicitude,
almost prevented me from seeing this

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Aphorism Aporia

.Reading time 1 minute.

By A. E. Stallings

Featured Art: Study for “An Aragonese Smuggler” by William Turner Dannat

What else should I do
But cry for what is spilled?
Not for the fresh glass,
Frothy, newly filled,
Safe on the tabletop
Beside the slice of cake,
Still untouched and chilled,

But for this little lake
The cat laps on the floor,
The glass poured for your sake,
That you would have me pour,
Negative of ink
Filling in the blank
Indelible mistake—

Sweet where tears are salt,
White as oblivion
The souls must learn to drink—
To watch it now escape—
With just myself to thank,
Out of the glass’s tall
Pure transparent shape,

What cannot be put back
And what is past recall:
Secret we couldn’t keep,
Hint I had to drop,
Fall turned into fault.
It’s done, but it won’t stop.
What’s there to do but weep?

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Only Hat

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Hanson

Featured Art: The Purple Dress by William Glackens

My sadness has the texture of a dime store balloon;
when I slide my hand across it, I get no pleasure from it.

My sadness has no merit whatsoever.

My sadness is a pose I cannot hold a moment longer, but I must
because I am in yoga class where this pose in particular would be
impossible to do had I understood it in advance,
yet when fed instructions bit by bit while bending back . . .
I can believe I just might get the hands.

My sadness stems from a bottomless blame. It knows
that it doesn’t matter, does it, if the reason is legitimate.

My sadness is lonelier the longer I sit with it.

My sadness comes back to me; it is all my own.

My sadness has three corners, three corners has my hat.
I have chosen this, my sadness, over all available hats.
Firemen hats and nurses’ hats, telephone line
repairmen hats. Military, ski, and Napoleon’s only hat.

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The Vacuum

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Julie Hanson

Featured Art: Woman Bathing by Mary Cassatt

Don’t ask what it was all about.
Ask instead how sudden it was, how complete.
One minute I was an ordinary woman
vacuuming, a thing it seemed I had too recently done,
and the next minute sobbing,
emitting sounds loud, rapid, and long.
It was the kind of sobbing that makes you feel five—
five years old, or housing a feeling five people wide.
I was seated, my left elbow on my left knee,
my glasses hanging from my left hand
as if they were the problem,
(no use in wearing them, no use in putting them down)
and the vacuum, part pet, part sculpture,
sprawled awkwardly, still shrieking
on the floor in front of me.
The sorrow seemed pulled from outside, unselectively,
as if I had swallowed a magnet.
Each time I felt that I could silence this,
that something had been spent, something settled,
I opened my eyes to that canister,
attachments on its back, hose, and extension,
reality-piece which had withstood the worst of me,
had witnessed, and was unaffected.

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Teddy Agonistes

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Teddy Macker

Summer after high school I lived alone on my family’s farm in Carpinteria,
California.

I didn’t know a hoe from a spade but still reveled in the new role, begging my
mother to send money so I could rent a tractor and disc the field.

I disced the field, had my neighbor take pictures of me discing the field, then
sent those pictures to my ex-girlfriend.

Right before the photo I mashed hay into my hair.

At night I put on my Walkman and drove the tractor up and down the
lightless street, the speed of the machine shocking, the sycamore branches
raining down their sweet womanish incense. . . . I’d listen to Emmylou Harris
sing, You think you’re a cowboy but you’re only a kid, never once thinking I
was a kid.

During the day I spent hours not working but prayerfully wandering the
barn trying to be spellbound by every mote in every last shaft of light, then
scrawling T. S. Eliot on the walls of the hayloft.

Once I found a dead owl and for some reason washed it with a hose.

And late at night, lying on my back, the sounds of the coyotes pinned me to
my bed till I became an infinitely petalling blossom of strange clear dread.

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Little Bird

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lawrence Raab

Featured Art: Seascape by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

One cloud was following another
across a blue and passionless sky.
It was the middle of summer, far enough
from December for a man to feel indifferent
to the memories of cold, not yet close
enough to autumn to be caught up
in all its folderol about death.
Neither cloud looked like a whale
or a weasel, or any kind of fanciful beast.
All morning I’d felt my life dragging me down.
The view from my window refused to lift my heart.
The sight of a blank piece of paper
filled me with sadness. I wanted to set
my life down in a comfortable chair, tell it
to take a long nap, and walk away as if
I were somebody else, somebody without a house
or a family or a job, but somebody who might
soon feel with a pang precisely the absence
of everything I had. A cool breeze lifted
the curtains in the room where I was sitting.
A bird was singing. Had it been singing for long?
Far off there were mountains, but I didn’t
wish to go there. Nor did I yearn
to be standing by a lake, or walking
beside the tumult of the sea.
The little bird kept repeating itself.
I filled a glass with water and watched it tremble.

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