Cover image: “Head Shop” by Najib Joe Hakim
Ripples on the Pond:
Flux & Redux
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Michael J. Galko
Egrets as intermittent mileposts
One in the shallow of the bayou, erect, alone in the reflected orange of the morning sun.
Wear your survival like a coat of long white feathers—join us again when you are ready.
Another on the distant green of a golf course, its body’s white ellipse tapering
a needle that feeds the larger and dirtier whiteness of the sky.
The pleasures of others are for you just a good walk spoiled. Walk on, three-toed.
One in a field of longhorns, picking at the bugs that rise from their patient steps.
Choose large and steadfast friends whose very presence is sustenance.
And finally, as you approach your Austin homestead, one alone in a barren fall tree, resting from
some unknown labor of flight.
Rest up. Better days are ahead, across that field.
~
This poem first appeared in The Mojave River Review, 2018.
K.L. Johnston
The End of Lizard Season
Anoles, tiny green dragons,
bob, blink in the fading heat,
then they are away,
hatchlings scurrying faster
than a fat cat’s paw.
The wyvern-size red-head skink
looks up unafraid
to question my disruption
of his sunbathing. It’s a staring match
I never win, blinking first.
Can you stare down a dragon,
no matter how small?
For a season I’ve tended
this garden under their watchful gaze,
learning to know them better
and they have told me, earth, beasts and blooms
what they need: humility,
mindfulness, a little sweat.
My audience of dragons
pardons me my trespasses
then disappears, into their
winter lairs, into the dreaming season.
All of us in the garden
wait for renewal.
~
This poem was first published in Hot Poet Equinox, 2022
Patrick Trombly
Leaves
I cloudily remember the time when I was old enough to handle the yardwork but not yet entrepreneurial enough to do the neighbors’ yardwork for money. After church, there were donuts, and then I would come home and change, go to the once damp, now dry, cobwebbed shed, and pick a rake — the one that still had most of its tongs. The short front yard was easy. We did not have to bag the leaves then — we could just rake them to the street and, weekly, the town would vacuum them up, or if we were impatient, we were allowed to burn them. Lighting the match was not my job, and never would be — a few years later, the Selectmen, in their infinite wisdom, chose to ban the practice.
The expanse of back yard, under all the trees, was another story. We did not have the fence yet, and so if we raked the leaves out to the street and it wasn’t vacuum day, we would have no choice but to burn them, otherwise they would just blow back overnight. Every yard had trees: sugar maple, mostly, but also red oak and sassafras and beech. Our yard had a tall hickory that would drop meaty, olive-green nuts that attracted schizophrenic squirrels. They were mature trees, planted by the original developer back in the ’40s, to go with the trees that were already there. I wondered if he’d traveled to our town by balloon — the neighborhood in fall must have looked like fire from above. From the ground, it looked like a lot of work, interspersed with houses that had window treatments and additions from different periods, none matching any of the others — a record of who had had a bit of money when — and porches that would get Plexiglas windows and electrical outlets years later, when everyone would have some money and when we would have baseball in October.
I would rake with the radio going, my pace quickening in the comeback: Grogan stepping up to connect on a pass that would have fallen incomplete during the first quarter, and then Sam Bam Cunningham running into the end zone, sometimes enough times, sometimes not. I would drop the rake and dance, then pick it back up and work. I would finish about the same time that the game ended. Win or lose, I would zip my jacket and go up the street for the last round. All the kids in the neighborhood would play neighborhood-wide hide and seek every Sunday in summer and fall. There were usually 12 of us, ages 8 to 11 — sometimes some of us would bring a kid brother or sister. That Sunday, there were 17.
In summer, the best hiding place was the Woods, with its glorious overgrown undergrowth. The Selectmen — some of them, the same Selectmen we had, or their fathers — had required the original developer to leave the Woods as a buffer in the middle of all the developments he planned to build — ours on our side, and then every five or six years, a new one on the other side. The whole area had been deciduous forest, and it must have been grand for the Indians back in the day, or anyone who might have been here before the mills had gone up along the river in the city that was founded just adjacent to our town.
All summer, the profusion of green would make the Woods dark and damp and cool and we would meet where there was a group of gray boulders that we believed the ancient glaciers had left, along with a patch of primeval ferns, and we would sit on the big round stones and tell the younger kids stories about witches and ghosts. Or we’d ride our bikes to the corner store and then to the boulders and compare the baseball cards we’d bought with our allowances. The main path in the Woods continued past the boulders to side paths, each connecting to a different development on the other side of the Woods. We would pretend to be Indians traveling great distances to trade with European settlers. Because the developments had been built one at a time as the town expanded, they were distinct little villages, each ending in one street with a dead end at the Woods. We would go back and forth through the Woods to and from the different villages to trade with different Europeans. In truth, we traded baseball cards with kids whom we’d probably met while playing in the Woods. We would try to stay just long enough for the mothers to offer snacks.
As the Earth tilted over each year, and the leaves turned and dried out, the cover thinned and you could make out the houses in the distance in almost every direction you looked, no matter where you were in the Woods. And when you walked, the feet made the sound of shuffling through papers, no matter how high you lifted them.
That Sunday, I made it just in time for the last round, and I hid behind the garage of the last house next to the Woods. I was wearing a green jacket, and that house was green. From a distance, I thought, I would avoid detection. Anna was the youngest, and I watched her keep going, into the Woods. Her jacket was red, and the few leaves remaining, apart from the oaks above, were beech — bright yellow. We had only one “It” that time, and I sat tight — I figured that once he’d concluded that one kid was hiding in the Woods, he would excitedly run in, not noticing me, and he would probably see her right away, and go on after her, giving me the opportunity to double back and reach Base without being tagged out.
My calculation proved to be mistaken, and I was caught fast, as was everyone else but Anna. It was still light out. We stopped playing and looked, working as a group. We left 1 kid at Base and left 3 more, each at a different street corner in case she had doubled back. Then with 12 kids fanning out, we covered the entire Woods. We could see everything. Where the leaves had accumulated, we pushed them around to see if she was hiding underneath. Nothing. We looked at each other with that look on our faces. We could see out, but even so, the Woods were a portal to very different places, as each path ended at its own road that went out in a different direction from the others — and in the shadows, the villages now looked unfamiliar. We decided that we had to run home and tell the parents.
There were a lot of phone calls after that — parents telling each other that she must have become cold and gone to a friend’s house for hot cocoa.
all the flashing lights
chasing ghosts at nightfall
scent of burning leaves
Yvonne Morris
Cessation
The knapsack I carried home
following four months in a commune
held seventeen cents
two cigarettes
a copy of the Baghavad Gita,
one lost ring
two goals—
to go back to where I came from,
to never be the same person.
I stopped smoking instead.
~
This poem was previously published in The Goldenrod Review, July 2022.
Carla Schick
Rent Control
I sit on the window ledge
in my bedroom hang
my legs out
the window drag
the soft part of my thigh
over red
cut-throat brick.
They called this a sin an urge
to leap to bend
to catch marigolds
on sandy dirt and dying grass.
I hold on
to the institutional
brown/green wood frame
I cannot stand. A jump
would be soft
an easy first-story landing.
My mother writes
the rent check in a dark
dining room,
late—
beyond the grace
period—
if I don’t run fast enough.
I swindle pennies
from an opened jar
in my mother’s room where my feet float
above creaky floor boards,
cut my hand
on the sharp edge of the key
and make it down the street
to the office before sunset.
I slide the check beneath the glass pane.
The clerk notes the payment
I notice only her hands,
layered beneath
her smirk—late again.
I know she cannot see
the dexterity
it takes to write
each rent check.
~
This poem was previously published in Milvia St. Literary Journal, 2020.
Lauren Richey
First Book of Botany
I am transplanted bare root
and drought tolerant
until the inflorescence begins
with a white solitary bloom
among a garden of showy purple spikes.
Molecules rearrange
and thick-walled cells shift
stem to bud.
What could have been leaf
becomes flower,
and flower gives way to fruit
as it will and always has
over and again,
pushing through finite time and space,
heavy, dangling,
until the final drop
into the rich compost soil.
Then hot winds blow—
spent blooms droop and fall.
Senescence breaks back to
pruned stem, back to browning leaves,
back to roots
that are balled and burlapped
and buried away
in a pot with mulching directions.
Root bound, deadheaded,
and me, here, just thirsting for rain.
Sandy Beach
Michael J. Clark
This piece previously appeared in Insanity’s Horse, 2021-2022.
Robin Young
Najib Joe Hakim
Jeanne C Wilkinson
Left Behind
Soon I will be left behind.
This I know.
This I see.
I saw the mother of Reya four seasons ago, left behind.
She chose to beg and plead.
I told the mother of Reya not to beg and plead. It is my way, to say what is necessary and right.
I told her I would assist her. I am mistress of the green world. I know which herbs open a path to her own mother who waits to take her hand and lead her to the place of the elders where she will sit at the foot of the never-ending fire and conjure a new life from the ashes of the old. But the mother of Reya retorted that the path she sought was made not by her mother, but by her daughter who carried two small ones newly born side by side. She told me that no one would see her falling behind because there she would be, in her daughter’s footsteps, carrying her world on her back as she always did.
No, I said. You are slow. You are old. During the last walk you made us wait. We came late to our winter grounds with the winds tearing our flesh and gnawing our bones and two small ones left behind under ceremonial rocks on the cold hard ground. To save one old one we gave away two young ones, two who were on their first foot-journey, off their mothers’ broad backs and on their own legs. Your path no longer is ours. Our path is no longer yours.
These words did not please her. They did not please me. Yet they were necessary and right.
On the day of our leaving, her daughter Reya bundled her two side-by-side children at her breast as they were not yet ready for her broad back, and she put one foot in front of the other, again and again, as did we all that day. The mother of Reya did the same, but soon she fell behind. We did not halt our steps. Reya did not halt her steps. We did not see eyes filling with water; we did not hear begging or pleading; we did not hear cries keening out over the hills. We heard only children crying for their grandmother while Reya walked on. The mother of Reya fell far behind; the children’s tears dried; we did not look back.
We returned to our summer grounds after the long winter to find many bones marked by wolves who had led the mother of Reya into the next realm. Reya took those bones into her world and honored them, thanking her mother for her sacrifice, asking her mother to look upon her with favor from the next realm. But she did not ask for forgiveness.
There was nothing to forgive.
I will not beg and plead. I am mother to three sons. They come to me; they bring their wives and children. I embrace them, one by one. They are young and strong. They walk on their own legs. The women have followed me into the green world where I have shown them the lairs of the prickly star, the three-leaved and fur-stemmed plants. I have shown them how to mix the plants together, how to keep them apart, how to make them dry, how to make them wet, how to heal the deep cough and the red wound. I give them my bounty; they share it among themselves. This takes time and yet time flies away.
I keep only one mixture with me.
I sit at my door, watching the sledges grow high with food and hides. I watch my many grandchildren don their walking skins and weave one another’s hair with special feathers to quicken their journey. I watch the fires burn out one by one. I watch my people leave one by one, carrying, pulling, walking.
I do not put one foot in front of the other. My path is not their path. Their path is not my path.
They are waving reeds in a field stretching to the horizon; they are leaves floating in a brook that flows away from me; they are arrows of birds in a far-away sky; they are dark stars in the furthest reaches of night; they are shapes and sounds that live in my heart and nowhere else.
I rise with water in my eyes. I beg, I plead. I say what is necessary and right. Yet it is only the wolves in the hills who answer, the wolves who soar their voices with my keening cries.
I lift my spirit potion to my lips. I drink the bitter liquid drop by drop until my dream flows like a clear river to the other realm. The wolves are my voice; my journeying song rises in the empty air. I see their shining eyes like suns that shimmer white and gold surrounding, lifting me until I fly free. I hear my mother’s voice…
. . . she sings to me; I sing to her. She takes my hand and leads me toward the light of the dancing fire where the elders wait. Soon I will sit at the foot of the never-ending flame and conjure a new life out of the ashes of the old…
When the warm season draws near, three sons return to find a sight so strange that many stories are told around the fire about the woman who left no wolf-gnawed bones behind, not even the smallest of finger bones, who left instead a small stone jar inscribed with an ever-dancing flame, a small stone jar to be given to the next-born daughter of her sons, along with her name.
~
This piece was published in two different online magazines, Prometheus Dreaming, 2019, and Fresh Ink, 2019.
Jessica Hinds
There Are Skeletons in These Dirts
I fell for Christina because I felt how Christina fell for me, and I like how that feels. I have never been motivated by romance. While my sisters were playing house, I played school. I never dreamed about a wedding; I fantasized about book signings and Broadway standing ovations. I failed to swoon over boybands, opting for the distorted melodies of Billy Corgan and Marilyn Manson. I choose my first boyfriend, a barbershop quartet singing, civil war reenacting 16-year-old, because he had a reliable car and was nerdy enough that his devotion and chauffeuring would be guaranteed. I had thought perhaps this was due to my queerness, but even after I switched to dating women, I experienced dating as the intersection of a social buddy, a sex partner, and that person who will help you move. It’s practical in our society to couple up. After rattling off what I was looking for in a partner, a friend informed me that I did not in fact want a girlfriend or wife I wanted a personal assistant, a maid, and a prostitute.
Nevertheless, I go on the apps; it is a thing to do. 2019 was shaping up to be a fantastic year. My business was taking off, my body and mind were healthy, and I was 18 months free from unhealthy people in my life; no more homophobic friends or fraudulent business partners. It was Christina’s style that first caught my eye. A dangerous first attraction for gays because it takes a minute to discover if you want to fuck them or steal their wardrobe. She was short and intensely shy. I am tall and annoyingly loud. But I could tell she was intensely attracted to me, so we fell into coupledom fast. Three-night sleepovers, meeting of friends, staycations in overpriced Times Square hotels.
After two months, she told me she loved me. I didn’t want to lie, so I got naked. It was refreshing to know this tactic works on all genders.
…
I blame Jurassic Park. What tomboy could resist? It was the early 1990s, and we had a sizable backyard, especially with the garden and the sandbox between the back porch and the wooden dock. There are skeletons in these dirts. I was going to find the bones. I was looking for the dead. Searching for the dead is not a disturbing activity. People do it all the time, digging in their head, on the messages on their lover’s phone. If you are not searching for corpses, you are hunting ghosts. I liked to work with my hands. There is a visceral satisfaction in the act of unearthing. There is a comfort in the compression of earth densified into the soft skin beneath your fingernails. Dino bones were hard to find, but I knew if I kept digging, I would find the dead. There are carcasses in these dirts.
My sisters began to notice the amputation of various Barbie limbs. I attempted to curb their rage with stories of heroic veterans, but women weren’t allowed in direct combat. Amputee Barbie would never make it past branding. Perhaps the planting of impossibly perfect limbs might lure the hungry bones of the deceased closer to the surface. I only took what I needed. Never all from one source. Like mom taught us about harvesting the vegetables. Plastic permi-arched feet grow back like ripe red tomatoes, yes? There are bodies in these dirts. My punishment was being locked in the rabbit hutch. A few hours pretzeled in a hutch by your older sister will urge you to find a different bait.
When I returned sans limbs I did find a needle. Not one of my mom’s sewing needles, or grandma’s knitting needles. I found a needle-like the ones that Cyclopes hands out by the San Joaquin River. He’s always behind the pool hall in his leather jacket and black jeans, surrounded by teenagers. It will be a few more years before I understand why my sisters call it Methel Island. Every kind of needle has the magical power to transform; be it cloth, yarn, or blood. There is death in these dirts. But I hadn’t found anyone yet.
I began to feel lost. The world makes too many promises. I did not ask to become hopeful. But the TV told me if I dig I will find bones. This felt like Santa Claus all over again. I was starting to gather a collection of headshots on my prefrontal bulletin board: Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, Father, Kris Kringle, God. Perhaps the dinosaurs were another lie to convince us children to sit still when our bodies yearned for exploration, sensation, and sound. No one had ever taught me how to ask for help. It was not a practice of my people. I earned love, rather earned the absence of rage, by not having needs. But if I don’t tell mother. Perhaps. So I wrote to the one person who would know more than anyone else I knew.
Jimmy had been dead for years. Surely he would know where to find other dead things. So I wrote to him and buried the letter in the backyard. There are missives in these dirts. When he did not answer, I realized I was probably asking too much without compensation. As a missionary in heaven (that’s what happens when babies die), he must be busy. So I took my life savings; I was a good saver. I took the bus to the mall, not the nice mall, the other one. At the Claire’s kiosk, I purchased one of those broken heart necklaces. Two hearts that, when placed together, complete a single heart. I bury one half in the backyard. I considered saving it for when I grew up and fell in love, but this seemed more important. After all, you have to choose between love and a career if you are a girl, and I had big plans once I finished high school.
So I buried half my heart in the backyard between the cactus and the willow tree in an attempt to hire my dead brother to show me where the dinosaurs are buried. There is love in these dirts.
…
Eventually, it became clear that Christina and I were not going to make it through the pandemic. I had quit smoking and drinking, so we now had nothing in common except four cats and the knowledge that stereotypes are not wrong, just incomplete. Mid-day, mid-rain on July 15th, I met Christina under the overhang of a retail space that failed to retain a renter for more than three months. During the last year, it had been a family-style Italian restaurant, a French bistro, a dumpling house, and now a southern chicken spot. It seemed that no matter what cuisine tried, One Greene Ave was never going to be a restaurant. Perhaps some spaces were meant to stay empty.
The rain thundered down on the awning, applauding the inevitable. Christina asked if we could still remain friends. I told her I had no desire to know her. She accused me of being cold-hearted. I shrugged, “No, no . . . it’s warm underground.”
~
This piece was originally published in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes.
John Peter Beck
Vera
In the
last warm
winds, you
hold tight
knowing
it longs
to move
south. Within
sleep,
it braids
dense
as ropes
pulling
drowned sailors
darkly
from rough
seas.
~
This poem was originally published in Artifact, 1981-82.
Drema Drudge
Control: The Language
Before coffee,
before my overnight oats,
before I wrestle everything into the day:
the brain fire
that has burned in me for days,
subterranean Pennsylvanian coal fire,
shoulders its declaration front and center,
an overheated lover
smoldering syntax all over my
kitchen counters.
Mighty early,
mighty cheeky,
but it knows I am here for it.
The word plasma
that jumped onto my steering wheel
on Thursday
also asked for water.
I gave it a glass
before refilling my own bottle.
How many words
to an ounce?
My lips, dry,
but my soul?
quenched.
Not extinguished.
I pull up my digital day planner.
Under writing,
I put a check.
The language must be controlled,
except when it can’t
be.
~
This poem was previously published on the author’s blog.
Lynn D. Gilbert
Shanghaied
I’d rather be dozing off
in a walled garden of fragrant roses;
instead, I’ve been shanghaied
onto a leaking privateer
crewed by the Seven Deadly Sins,
the worst of whom is a smiler
with a knife under his cloak, who,
swearing friendship, stalks me
closer and closer to the edge
until I leap over the rail
into an icy sea far from shore—
~
This poem was originally published in Pamplemousse, 2023.
Flux
Day and night
every millisecond, things
are streaming past
by the billion
toward the dark.
I make it my work
to reach out and catch one
now and again,
turn it a while in the light
try to hear what it sings,
try to clasp it fast.
CS Crowe
The New Curtains
Red polyester pretends to be damask. Crimson crisp lines pleated by supermarket plastic case; no matter how many times they tumble in the wash, skin never forgets its first home.
A lawn mower rumbles behind the blackout curtains. The cat’s tail twitches. Where is his sunbeam? His songbirds?
Do they long for those abandoned between kitchen and bath? Do they wonder if they miss them? It is so easy to say home is just a place when we are alone, just us, our curtains, and our cat.
On a rebellious summer morning, the cat clamors to the top bar. Too high. Too far. With a shriek, he slides inch by shrill-and-sharp-inch down to the floor. He flees before I can find him; I hold shredded threads of red polyester in my palm. I need new curtains again—third time this year.
I stand in a gash of sunlight. Across the street, my neighbor mows the lawn.
Do I even know his name?
