My Father’s Joy

by Abigail Davis

 
I had barely learned how to walk, how to talk,
how to share, how to play fair.
I was not yet old enough for the burden
you placed on me. Looking right
into the innocent blue eyes
of your three-year-old daughter, telling her
how she is the reason you are miserable.
I just wanted you to play with me.
I have spent my life beyond that point
believing myself to be nothing more
than a burden.
At best, a chore.
Never wanting to ask too much,
never wanting to be too much.
How ironic
my name means “My father’s joy.”


* * * * *

Abigail Davis is a preschool teacher living in North Carolina. Her poem, “Where Love Died,” can be found in One Page Poetry’s 2023 Anthology. She has a passion for expressing emotions through writing whether it be poetry, journaling, or short stories. Her joy is found in seeking solitude in nature, as well as witnessing the antics of her two beloved cats, Tylee and Azula. 

 

Enough

by Elaine Reardon


I wondered if it was the war
that made him so angry,
nights when he shook with
malaria, sheets soaked through.
He shouted through nightmares,
flung blankets and me off the bed.

Do you know
how many nights
I woke airborne,
then crashing?

Sudden changes in mood—
he'd scream that he'd leave
if I left him alone with the baby,
he'd leave her right there, in the crib.
And he did, when I walked to the corner
to buy a quart of milk.

I remember my Gramma saying
You make your bed, you lie in it
as she washed the linoleum floor,
limp apron tied around her.
How much do we swallow before
we know we've had enough?


* * * * *

Elaine Reardon is a writer, herbalist, and artist and educator. Her first chapbook, The Heart is a Nursery For Hope, won first honors from Flutter Press in 2016, and her second chapbook, Look Behind You, was also published in late 2019 by Flutter Press. Most recently Elaine's work was published in The Common, Galway Review, Pensive Journal, and similar journals. A new chapbook, Stories Told in a Lost Tongue was published by Finishing Line Press in September 2024. www.elainereardon.wordpress.com. 

So this is hope
                 After Ted Kooser

by Patricia Phillips-Batoma 


Lit by a single half-moon window,
a throng of disparate objects
lines every inch of garage shelf space.

Their indistinct shapes bear down on me
like the sound and fury
of a conclave of despots.
 
Is this clutter really what summons
the mournful strains
jabbing from the shadows?

Solving that riddle is like
trying to paint the shape
of gathering clouds.
 
A baggy piece of this puzzle
catches my eye. White, plastic, pillowy,
a sack of Asiatic lily bulbs.
 
After their delayed arrival last fall,
perhaps it was too late to plant.
Or was it that illness, other sirens,
 
one pursuit toppling another,
that caused them to drift
inside this debris field?

Between my fingers, they crackle and groan,
dare me to settle the question of whether
life still exists inside their papery hulls.

So this is hope. Here in a dingy space,
softly suggesting I might still find
flowers inside.

Its presence so unobtrusive until
it shoulders its way out of the cacophonic din,
unscathed from years of living
 
between war and peace,
thistles and lilies.


* * * * *

Patricia Phillips-Batoma is a writer and teacher who lives in Illinois. She has published poems in Skylight 47, An Capall Dorcha, The New Verse News, Off Course, Plants and Poetry and Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis.

 

Genesis and Embryogenesis

by Patricia Phillips-Batoma 

i
And so it was written that in seven days
God created the sun and the moon,
curled the clematis vine, periwinkled
its flowers blue and plumped coral
the petals of peonies. Light fell
on patterned butterfly wings, glossed
hummingbird bodies, and night moonlit
the feathered antennae of the moth.
Lizards basked in radiating desert sands
and beneath the waves,
cephalopods
swerved in and out of shadow.

ii
In seven or so real Earth days,
a woman’s body transforms an ovum
into an implanted blastocyst. We call this
embryogenesis.
But don’t say the egg
is fertilized     
by the sperm
as if she waits dreamily at the doorway
to the fallopian cavern musing
about distant possibilities. Of the millions of sperm
on their way up the river, she calls only
a couple hundred. And though we cling
to the tale of the speeding destrier
penetrating the fortress through sheer grit,
science now thinks the egg chooses
which one may enter her, if any,
then pulls him in through a window,
hidden from the light.


* * * * *

Patricia Phillips-Batoma is a writer and teacher who lives in Illinois. She has published poems in Skylight 47, An Capall Dorcha, The New Verse News, Off Course, Plants and Poetry and Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis.

LAVENDER SKIES

by Amy Ballard Rich


Under lavender skies she flew low;
she recently learned the art
of staying under the radar

Now more than ever
she will look before leaping
into any new company
she wants to keep

Close calls are everywhere;
better to memorize plants and herbs
than to rely on anyone
or anything else

Remembering how and where your roots are,
deeply buried for thousands of years,
will help you fix your gaze ever upward
to find hidden rainbows
behind
the tears clouds are shedding
as they watch a powerful few
try and choke our freedoms
out of us


* * * * *

Amy Ballard Rich is a retired preschool teacher, living in Berkeley, CA. When not writing she can be found hugging both trees and her chosen family. She is still waiting for her attempts to smash patriarchy to bear fruit.

 

Red

by Abigail Davis

 
As a little girl,
my mother did her best
to protect me from men.
 
Red became a color
I could not wear
on my lips,
on my nails.
“But why?” I persisted
as she struggled to explain
in a way that appeased
my tiny, growing brain.
 
“Provocative”
was the word
she was searching for:
a word
I could not understand at four.
 
“Why don’t you try pink?”
I did not want to try pink.
“Red is for grown women”
she’d say,
but what she meant was,
“If you wear it, men will see you as grown.”
 
Yet here I am
at 27,
a year of abstinence,
six weeks of unshaved legs,
divorce papers in the mail,
trauma within the confines of my heart,
and red staining my lips.
Tell me,
is this what provocative looks like?
 
 
* * * * *

Abigail Davis is a preschool teacher living in North Carolina. Her poem, “Where Love Died,” can be found in One Page Poetry’s 2023 Anthology. She has a passion for expressing emotions through writing whether it be poetry, journaling, or short stories. Her joy is found in seeking solitude in nature, as well as witnessing the antics of her two beloved cats, Tylee and Azula. 

Your Grip on Me

by Abigail Davis


Your grip on me
was not solid. Not steel
or iron or wood. But tendrils
of smoke that clung
to the innerworkings
of my soul, attaching themselves
to my patterns
of thought, blurring
my memories, suffocating
my hopes and dreams, and
hazing over my reality.
 
 
* * * * *

Abigail Davis is a preschool teacher living in North Carolina. Her poem, “Where Love Died,” can be found in One Page Poetry’s 2023 Anthology. She has a passion for expressing emotions through writing whether it be poetry, journaling, or short stories. Her joy is found in seeking solitude in nature, as well as witnessing the antics of her two beloved cats, Tylee and Azula.