Adah Makes a Quilt
Adah, 1979
Cheyenne, Wyoming

by Anna Citrino
 

No longer in my house, I live at a home for the elderly
where I’m stitching together a quilt for my great niece,
Adah. Edra’s daughter Freida named her after me.
Home from college, she wrote to ask about my life.
What words could I find to describe my story?
It’s difficult to tell it to myself.

“My life is like your mother’s,” I wrote her.
I know it’s not an answer she wants.
Mother, grandmother, daughter, or great niece—
isn’t there a thread running through every woman’s life
similar to my story?

As I sew, I recall the day my sisters and I lassoed a steer.
We’d seen the animal’s unpredictable moves, and had practiced
perfecting our timing. Eyes focused on the target, the loop
sailing above the head, rope reeling through Jamie’s hands,
she dropped it over the steer’s head, Edra pulled up the slack
as its head jerked back and the animal fell to the ground.

Together, we held the ropes that held the steer in place.
Muscles strained and tense, tugging on the ropes, I looked
in the steer’s eyes as it bellowed and struggled in the dirt
trying to free itself, and saw myself pulling against restraints,
resisting the rules and the life I’d been given that held me tight,
then I thought of us sisters, ropes in hand, each of us
working to hold on to a life we wanted to have.

Thinning hair, stiff joints and sagging skin, no longer strong
like that steer we roped, I still hold on. If before I had beauty,
it’s gone now. A woman is never pleasing enough
in someone’s eyes, though my niece doesn’t follow
my generation’s rules for beauty. She has her own priorities,
but believes me beautiful because that’s how her mother sees me.

Stitch by stitch I piece together brightly colored squares
between strips of flowered fabric, a story of cloth I make
with my hands from clothes I’ve worn. Slowly, the quilt
comes together, a pattern reaching back through time
and the long thread of unnamed women whose lives
we’ll never know who patched together what they had,
so they could pass on something beautiful
to bring a bit of warmth.


* * * * *

"Adah Makes a Quilt" is part of Anna Citrino's growing longer work of related poems. More poems from the longer work were posted here on November 10 and 11, December 14 and 15, 2023, and January 30, 2024.

Anna Citrino is the author of A Space Between, and Buoyant, Saudade, and To Find a River. Anna taught abroad in six different countries: Turkey, Kuwait, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India, and the UK. Her work has appeared in Bellowing Ark, Canary, Evening Street Review, Indelible, Paterson Literary Review, phren-z, Poppy Road Review, and the Porter Gulch Review, among other literary journals. On most any day you can find her going for walks near the coast or biking on paths through rolling hills where she lives in Sonoma County, California. Read more of her writing at annacitrino.com.

 

After Litton
Adah Reflects on Her Third Marriage
Adah, 1965
Mesa, Arizona

by Anna Citrino


Kindness, tenderness, attention to mood or emotion,
romance—these were things of fantasy.
I’d never had them. Wishing for them
could bring disappointment.
Marriage was a practical move.

When I first met Litton at Fort Russell,
he was with a different woman.
I didn’t see that as an obstacle. I knew
how to please a man
and wanted him.

Marriage is a negotiation of terms
partners agree to live with, and the terms
looked good to us.

As a widow, I had life insurance money and income
from Gerard’s pension, as well as deeds to properties
held in collateral from loans to people during
the Depression. A military man, Litton
had guaranteed income, and I assumed
a good-sized pension. After years of uncertainty
in childhood about food and shelter, these
were the comfort and security I wanted.

So, we married. A simple ceremony.
No need for frills and extra expense.

Thirty years I spent with Litton.

We had a solid house, one like I’d always wanted—
a living room stuffed with matching couch and chairs
with plush cushions, lace tablecloths, ceramic dinnerware,
glass goblets, and linen napkins. These gave me
a kind of beauty I’d longed for.

We moved to humid Arkansas, later to Arizona
with its dry, red hills. Always, I cooked his favorite
foods, did laundry as he liked—shirts pressed
wrinkle-free, collars ironed to a perfect point.
My house was tidy, orderly, and clean,
my clothes well-made.

But life was not much more than that.

When he died, I didn’t take his pension.
Mine was better.

After the funeral, I sat alone in that desert-still
Arizona house filled with a wealth of goods
I’d wished to possess since childhood—
that dream’s weight lying there stiff, stale,
coated with dust after returning
from the burial in Denver.

Kindness, an arm reaching toward me
in tenderness, in friendship—I wanted them.
All that beautiful dinnerware.
Stability. Structure.

They aren’t enough.

I turned on the radio. An orchestra was playing.
Violins rose in volume, swelling
like enormous billowing clouds, mounting
high into the heavens ready to rain,
then dissipating, the sky turning clear,

only the quietest of sighs present—a soft wind’s
wrinkle on morning grass as the sun
stretched to warm the world.

I’d never heard anything more able
to define my yearning—

At seventy-five years old, I realized
something I’d been wishing for all my life
but had no words for was something more
like music.


* * * * *

"After Litton" is part of Anna Citrino's growing longer work of related poems. More poems from the longer work were posted here on November 10 and 11 and December 14 and 15, 2023, and one more will follow January 31, 2024.

Anna Citrino is the author of A Space Between, and Buoyant, Saudade, and To Find a River. Anna taught abroad in six different countries: Turkey, Kuwait, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India, and the UK. Her work has appeared in Bellowing Ark, Canary, Evening Street Review, Indelible, Paterson Literary Review, phren-z, Poppy Road Review, and the Porter Gulch Review, among other literary journals. On most any day you can find her going for walks near the coast or biking on paths through rolling hills where she lives in Sonoma County, California. Read more of her writing at annacitrino.com.

 

Speaking to God

by Stacey Lounsberry


Afterwards,
we pretended it wasn’t the sex that made her—
like the pollination she was here, right
on time and our hearts beat together long enough
to fill the void—
before she cut it open again.
Then Afterwards,
I had phantom womb
even though it had been ten years and
the doctor said it was just
my head.

After the first years
the curls in her hair faded away
with the blue in her eyes and I
felt like a part of the wallpaper
that needed glued down.
She told me she had dreams that she would die.
I had none.

And the doctors,
if they could look me straight,
would say I didn’t deserve these kicks
or even this ghost
living in my head and I
am too ashamed to speak to God.


* * * * *

Stacey Lounsberry received a BFA in Creative Writing from Morehead State University, and later a Master of Arts in Teaching in Special Education from the University of the Cumberlands. She is a full-time mother and writer, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ariel Chart, CafeLit, The First Line, and Inscape. She is currently seeking representation for her recently completed middle grades chapter series. She lives in Eastern Kentucky with her two young sons and young-at-heart husband.

 

      In Which the Reader Will Kiss His Wife

      by Stacey Lounsberry

I.               In Which the Reader Will Kiss His Wife

Now, as we speak, excitement spreads like an ulcer
Because children don’t fall like purity from icicles.

II.             In Which the Reader Will Throw Off His Wig

Coffee never tasted so good.
I rub the round cocoon that is my belly.

III.           In Which the Reader Will Sob For His Youth

My nudity trapped in the bathroom mirror,
Another deformity of what I was taught.

IV.           In Which the Reader Will Kiss His Wife

Thank the good lord because icicles vanish at the touch.
I won’t stop trying to salvage what is left.

* * * * *

Stacey Lounsberry received a BFA in Creative Writing from Morehead State University, and later a Master of Arts in Teaching in Special Education from the University of the Cumberlands. She is a full-time mother and writer, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ariel Chart, CafeLit, The First Line, and Inscape. She is currently seeking representation for her recently completed middle grades chapter series. She lives in Eastern Kentucky with her two young sons and young-at-heart husband.

 

Mandala

by Maryann Hurtt


when she was little
she understood her eyes
to be green
because of deep down
in her heart love
of sequoias, magnolias
the front yard maple
and the boy who teased her
a kind of gray
he seemed to do fine
on rainy days
a forever best friend’s eyes
were blue
she was a sky dreamer
now so many years later
she finds all the colors
in a mandala
held inside her
an entire universe
holy and sacred

                                               
* * * * *

After thirty years working as a hospice RN, Maryann Hurtt is now retired and has energy to
pursue new and ongoing loves. She lives in Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine where she hikes, bikes,
writes, reads, and then wanders unfamiliar places. Turning Plow Press published Once Upon a
Tar Creek Mining for Voices in 2021. Tar Creek has been called “the worst environmental
disaster no one has heard of.” She is passionate that Tar Creek’s orange water stories are heard
and heeded. Broken Blossoms (Fernwood Press) is coming out in 2024.

This month, an additional Moon Prize, the 129th, goes to Suzanne Allen's poem "Who Are You?"

Who Are You?

by Suzanne Allen


If you want to change your name, you have
to change your friends too. People who know you,
see you, need you to be one thing, have a hard time
calling you another. They need something
to hold onto, something to set their clocks by, some
way to remember where
in their little black books they put you.
They need something from you that,
probably, you can’t give them. They might ask
for the spelling of your new name, but have a hard
time remembering it when they introduce you
to other people. They will stammer, explain who
you used to be as if this
memory were more true than you, standing there
waiting for them to correct themselves.
They will tell stories about your last husband
or your next one, your old car, the time
you drove off with your skirt hanging out,
dragging in the street. They might even remember
the colors—the orange and magenta flowers
or the shiny black paint job that they could see
themselves in when you parked at their curb. But
in general, they will have a hard time
remembering. You will have to remind
yourself that you are not who they remember,
that you probably
never were, and that the whole friendship need not
be written off as an illusion. It was only a time
in your life when you were more like them
than you are now. And it made everyone happy
to believe, for a little while, that they
knew you, when in fact, they only
knew you when.


* * * * *

"Who Are You?" was first published in Nerve Cowboy, No. 31. It is also included in the author's forthcoming collection, Awkward.

Suzanne Allen is a writing teacher and artist born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles. Her poems appear widely online and in print, and she has two chapbooks verisimilitude (corrupt press) and Little Threats (Picture Show Press.) She also blogs intermittently at suzanneallenpoet.wordpress. In 2021, she published a full-length collection of mostly pandemic poems, We Wash Our Hands, and her long-awaited collection of Paris poems Awkward, will be released this winter.

 

This month's Moon Prize, the 128th, goes to Brooke Herter James's thoughtful poem "I Talk to Myself After Turning Off the Evening News."

 

 

I Talk to Myself After Turning Off the Evening News

by Brooke Herter James

 
The war will end. In the spring 
the wild plums will blossom. 
The bees will return. Next fall, 
the olives will need harvesting
once more. But the boy in the street,  
pulling his suitcase behind him?
He will find his way to a place
with a bed and a window and someone
who will close the window when it’s cold.
But he is all alone. You don’t know.
Maybe his mother is just out of sight. 
I am a mother. I see his face. I know.


* * * * *
 
Brooke Herter James is the author of several poetry chapbooks and one children’s picture book. She lives in Vermont with her husband, two donkeys, a mess of chickens and a dog.
 

The White Footed Mouse

by Meg Rumsey-Lasersohn


I see the white footed mouse
At the foot of the fence
And I think this mouse is just as alone in the universe as I
She cannot truly know any perspective but her own
Just as I cannot
The same number of seconds elapse
In my day as in the day
Of the white footed mouse
I imagine her
Deep in her warren
Setting aside the desperate search for food
Is she thinking “is this all there is to existence?”
“the dirt, the seed, the sun, flight and sleep?”
Or does she think “I am but a single molecule in the vastness of space. The material I am made of is
indistinguishable from all other matter and yet I have been gifted
With this bright moment to make sense of it all
To eat the seed
And sleep in the warm den”


* * * * *

Meg Rumsey-Lasersohn lives in Southern California with her beloved partner and animals. She writes poetry and grants for a legal aid non-profit, creates site-specific immersive theater with award-nominated company Die Cast, and reads a great deal of queer romance novels in her spare time. She is working on befriending the crows in the backyard.

The Oldest Story

by Diane Averill

 
Fir trees under the wind’s power
spin in robin’s-egg blue air
as my daughter contracts, pushes,
contracts. Screams. Pushes.
I am driving fast towards her call.
Gray moves in, blocks my vision.
Rain; then, a silver opening
parts the cloud’s vaginal veil
and for a moment the sun emerges,
a fine sign. The sky is the blue-white of milk.
Remaining clouds rimmed placenta-red.
 
I arrive in the slipping-out time,
hold her in my hands,
body an orb covered in womb-white.
Body that has shed her red, jellyfish home.
First cries are lamb-like.
Next come meows as eyes shut to light,
then open again. Her hands are birds.
Mottled legs kick     Curl     Kick     Curl
as her petal tongue tries out the world’s
will to listen. Then she turns
towards the answering voice
that sang to her in the womb, and she knows that voice.
 
I give her back
as is my daughter’s wish,
give my tiny granddaughter to that voice
echoing from thirty years away.
Again, a cry has split me
as I place this glowing body
turning celestial-pink
into arms strong as fir limbs.
At Laura’s breast lips grasp
the nipple’s ancient wisdom---
and Natalie pulls the universe into her mouth.


* * * * *

Two of Diane Averill's books, Branches Doubled Over With Fruit, published by the University of Florida Press, and Beautiful Obstacles, published by Blue Light Press of Iowa, were finalists for the Oregon Book Award in Poetry. She has been published in many anthologies and literary magazines such as Bloomsbury Review, Calyx, Carolina Quarterly, Clackamas Literary Review, Northwest Review, Mom Egg Review, Poetry Northwest, and Tar River Poetry. She taught English and poetry writing workshops at Clackamas Community College in Oregon.

After the atmospheric river turned the sky

                                                                        by Diane Averill

 
into punishing rains, rivers were wild creatures rushing out of control.
Within tributaries, old bones of trees
cracked, fell into a nearby creek
clogging the branches with caution-colored leaves,
and waters ran unevenly
                                                     causing my husband’s heart valve to narrow,
                                                     letting less blood through
                                                     and his heartbeats stuttered.
Today, under a softer sky,
I walk the trails, cross a stone bridge with care.
The operation comes soon.
Looking down at the flow,
 one side seems to move easily
while on the other, fear rides over a basalt boulder.
I keep my balance, step onto lower ground
and find a spot near the creek.
Its silver tongues speak to me in a language I almost understand
as it rises over rocks, then pools
before moving on. I bless the waters,
 
                                                         wind my way back home and
                                                         hug my husband the way a stream
                                                         curves into its banks. Then
                                                         I light a small fire for us,            
                                                         its flames completely under my control.


* * *  *

Two of Diane Averill's books, Branches Doubled Over With Fruit, published by the University of Florida Press, and Beautiful Obstacles, published by Blue Light Press of Iowa, were finalists for the Oregon Book Award in Poetry. She has been published in many anthologies and literary magazines such as Bloomsbury Review, Calyx, Carolina Quarterly, Clackamas Literary Review, Northwest Review, Mom Egg Review, Poetry Northwest, and Tar River Poetry. She taught English and poetry writing workshops at Clackamas Community College in Oregon.

 

Undeniable Signs of Homicidal Violence

by Alexis Rhone Fancher


I’d never have guessed from the looks of him: tall, clear-skinned, elegant. Wardrobe straight out of G.Q. A whiff of patchouli in his wake, meant to keep a woman off guard. And such kind eyes! A devastating shade of blue. Arctic, is how I think of them now, but back then they were piercing. Intense. Words I use to lie to myself when I can’t face the dirty truth about someone I’d like to fuck. It always starts out fine, right? My new love ticks all the boxes, performs those courtship ploys girls are taught to desire. The stock seduction scenarios men use to bait, hook, and then - let wiggle on that hook until she’s beat down, compliant. Or dead. I’m trying to conjure the chum, the shift, the sharp pull on the line that reeled me in. Snuffed me out. Why? What changed? I’m doing research, watching countless episodes of ID Obsession, The First 48, and Forensic Files. Going back over every misstep. Taking copious notes. The segue that men do once they’re sure you can’t live without them? Is it something the woman does or says that starts her down the denigration path? Ever since I let him move in with me, eat at my table, share my bed, the relationship’s downhill. I love you, baby, he says, but no more civilities, opening doors, rubbing my feet, doing the dishes after supper. Now, each day he gets shorter with me. Cruel. Aren’t you finished grieving yet? he asked a week after my best friend died. She’s not coming back. Get over it! I chalk up his callousness to a horrible childhood, a single mom with serial boyfriends who beat him. How he ran away at sixteen, did a stint in juvie, and found Jesus, had him tattooed on his chest. Yesterday, I discovered him scrolling through my phone. Delete. Delete. Delete. Now at restaurants, he orders for me. The diet plate. Gotta watch your weight, babe,” he says, winks broadly at the waitress. When I ask him what’s changed, he explains he’s just settling in. That I should get used to it. Man is king of his castle, he says. I am your king. He quits his job, plays video games all day and night. Starts drinking at 9 am, in time to watch Wayne Brady on Let’s Make a Deal. What happened to the man I fell for? These days I do nothing right, berated for the least transgression. So when he knocks me around, tells me it’s for your own good, I believe it. When he snuffs out my words with his hand over my mouth I quit talking. And when he pummels me in my sleep one night when he comes home drunk, again, I let him. I must deserve it. When the gun is missing from my night stand drawer, I bust out a window, tell the police there’s been a break-in, no idea as to the perpetrator. And when my beloved shoots me four times with my own gun, I play dead. I’ll kill you, and then I’ll kill me, he’d promised, those blue eyes sincere. But he lied. He wiped the gun, put it in my right hand. Like I’d shot myself four times, lived to tell the tale.


* * * * *

"Undeniable Signs of Homicidal Violence" was first published in Live Encounters (2022).

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Verse Daily, The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Diode, and elsewhere. She’s authored ten poetry collections, most recently Triggered (MacQueen’s), Erotic: New & Selected (NYQ Books), and Duets, with Cynthia Atkins (Small Harbor Press). Brazen, an erotic, full-length collection, the follow up to Erotic, published in 2023, again from NYQ. A coffee table book of Alexis’ photographs of Southern California poets will be published by Moon Tide Press in 2024. She lives in the Mojave Desert with her husband, Fancher. They have an incredible view.

 

 

Dress Rehearsal

by Alexis Rhone Fancher

I am trying on death like dresses.      

The black, Donna Karan sheath beckons. Perfect for weddings, funerals,
twice to court. Killer side slits.
Call it 38 Special.

The skimpy red “bandage” dress, tags still attached, dinner with Allison, a no-show.
Do I want to be dressed in devastation, found like that?
Call it death by misadventure.

The white silk shirtwaist with black polka dots Stella bought me at a discount
when she worked at I. Magnin. The back-stab stain that made it unwearable.
Call it exsanguination.

The blue velvet gown, ripped by Lorraine while tonguing Veuve Clicquot from my throat.
She left $300 on the nightstand with a note: “Je ne regrette rien.”
Call it strangulation.

The wraparound Diane Von Furstenberg I wore to give Anjelica and her T-Bird the runaround.
Easy on/off. Like us, that molten L.A. summer when I first slummed with girls.
Call it autoerotic asphyxiation.

The babydoll dress from my twenties I can’t get rid of; white lace, pearl buttons,
straight jacket sleeves, mini-skirt flirting my reticent thighs.
Call it buried alive.


* * * * *

“Dress Rehearsal” was previously published in Mudfish 22 (2020)

Alexis Rhone Fancher is published in Best American Poetry, Rattle, Verse Daily, The American Journal of Poetry, Plume, Diode, and elsewhere. She’s authored ten poetry collections, most recently Triggered (MacQueen’s), Erotic: New & Selected (NYQ Books), and Duets, with Cynthia Atkins (Small Harbor Press). Brazen, an erotic, full-length collection, the follow up to Erotic, published in 2023, again from NYQ. A coffee table book of Alexis’ photographs of Southern California poets will be published by Moon Tide Press in 2024. She lives in the Mojave Desert with her husband, Fancher. They have an incredible view.

 

I am the Keeper

                                                 by Camilia Cenk

of details, dates
remembrances, photos.
A spreadsheet inventory of four children’s shoes
(sizes, styles, seasons).

When the volume of data overloads computer memory
(a red usage bar warns of waning capacity)
I comb through months of photos,
sift and winnow,
delete and mold and shape into containable folders,
organized and sorted,
prepped for printing in photobooks
and single snapshots to mail out
(remember to do this on time this year).

When mom-friends or playmates or sisters-in-law or cousins drift
out of contact,
I remember to reel them closer with a timely message
an invitation, a proposal.
A struggle always to circumvent overstuffed schedules.

I keep watch on bathing routines, hair care
oral hygiene, skin conditions,
coughs and breathing patterns.
The color and texture of any visible physical attribute.
The texture and temperature of moods.
Emotional needs parched and unmet
amid a jungle of distraction and meal prep.

All the bits and pieces of daily living.
Socks, cereal, spilled milk, (too many) sweets–
I keep.

And,
I am also the keeper
of heritage, of lineage.
There is not only the dense sticky mass of “now.”
There is also the heavy weight of “later.”
When I am gone.
Who will know the story of the old photos?
Who will record the notes of the day, or what the child said,
or how each one entered the world?
Who will keep the details that I kept?

There is no great-grandmother, mother of my mother,
to have modeled grandmotherhood for me.
There is no grandmother, my mother,
to model mature maternal manners.
There is only me, one of three
Still alive.
Three in one:
great-grandmother, mother, me.
I am my own grandma.

I keep a home in my house,
with books in every room,
photo albums lined on a shelf:
baby pictures of my mother,
baby pictures of myself,
baby pictures of my babies.
Shelves and counters covered
with figures, vases, dried flowers
as a grandmother’s house would have.
Basement stacked with boxes of shoes
(organized and labeled by season and style).
Totes of fabric for assembling quilts
(another grandmothers’ pastime).
More boxes (carefully labeled) with holiday decorations.
And others (carefully stacked) with relics
of past family lives:
my grandparents’ high school yearbooks,
marriage licenses, death certificates,
birth announcements, newspaper clippings,
baby memory albums they started
for the babies that once were their own.

I am the keeper
of generations
of history
of damp moldering evidence
of what came before.
Where all of the lives living
in my home originated–
from the grandmothers
that rippled out from other grandmothers
and that we (my babies and me)
expanded from, too.

I am the keeper
of all the ripples all at once
on a churning sea of right now
among tantrums, squabbles,
ripped knees, stained fingers,
fairy tales, movie nights,
time outs, ice cream,
school days, bedtime prayers.

I pray that the lives in my keeping
outlast my power to keep them.
I am the keeper of too much
all at once–
and I hope what I keep will keep
long enough
for the next keepers
to follow.


* * * * *

Camilia Cenek is a writer and editor. She has BA and MA degrees in English and a BA in Psychology. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Madison Magazine, The Good Life Review, The Sunlight Press, and Creative Wisconsin Anthology. Find her at camiliacenek.com.

 

Sacrifice

by Camilia Cenek


When you did reading practice with our daughter
instead of putting her to bed on time,
you sacrificed my time on the altar of futility.
She gains confidence and attention
one hesitant word at a time,
while I lose another fragment of myself, twice.
First when I called her in from her play outside,
after I had prepared a lunch for her and her sisters,
after I had leaned over the side of the crib
with my hand pressed to the two-year-old’s chest
who has lately been climbing out
when he and I desperately need his nap,
watching him close his eyes and flutter them open,
after ushering neighbor kids from the house,
after a blurred freight train of childcare tasks
that stretches between the hours of 5 and 11 a.m.
which moms know.
I took it hard that after I had already
practiced the word list with her
instead of sitting quietly for myself
and after waking the baby in order to take everyone to the dentist
and after improvising a solution to a surprise, off-schedule, soiled diaper
for which I had not prepared
and after returning home to concoct a last-minute supper
and after then leaving the house alone to devise a respite
that I had fantasized about all day
when I came home at bedtime I found one daughter
not in bed, not wearing jammies, but running across the yard
and you inside listening to another daughter read the word list
that she had already read today with me.
It was sacrifice stolen on top of sacrifice given,
and then more sacrifice still, because
the two-year-old left his crib to enter the hall
to say hi to the floor fan, his sister, and me.
Everything that I had thought was behind me I found before me:
teeth unbrushed, clothes unchanged, kids untucked,
and my goals (a shower, a break, time to write, silence,
the completion of my book, the submission of my application,
the return of my career and my life)
receding such a long way off.


* * * * *

Camilia Cenek is a writer and editor. She has BA and MA degrees in English and a BA in Psychology. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Madison Magazine, The Good Life Review, The Sunlight Press, and Creative Wisconsin Anthology. Find her at camiliacenek.com.

The Couple

by Helen Lemus


He
Tall and thin
Anglo like an Alfred Hitchcock hero
Given to grits and eggs
Likes butter and warm muffins
Walks on neatly paved sidewalks
With lines that direct
Past policeman
Present reporter
Always able to ask the right questions
Patient as a mountain
Vain as an ambitious supermodel
Loves her passionately.

She
Short and plump
Like a Roma tomato
Juicy and usually smiling
Given to paprika and garlic
Likes Beethoven and John Lee Hooker
Walks barefoot on grass
Picks up acorns and seeds in hopes
Of seeing something grow
Amidst the asphalt
Past technician
Present poet
Always able to fix a satisfying meal
Patient as the ocean
Vain as a baby monkey
Loves him passionately.

They
Laugh at absurdity,
Plenty of it nowadays.


* * * * *

Mrs. Helen Lemus works at arranging and rearranging words in Miami, Florida. She has been published in Poet's Choice, Video Librarian and enjoys working as an online essay writing tutor. She struggles with the hyphenated culture of her birth and makes great Cuban stews for her husband. Their two cats rule her world, and that is perfectly fine with her.

 

Lumpy Mashed Potatoes

by Jeanne Lyet Gassman

The stainless steel potato ricer is not my mother's but a replica purchased online. The mint-green Bakelite mixing bowl belonged to her. After she died, I found it in a box of chipped plates, carefully wrapped and preserved, still like new. A receptacle packed with memories.

The steam of cooked spuds rises into my face. My hand steadies the familiar translucent vessel, and I press deep, squeezing them into Play-Doh shapes. Time flows backwards. My mother’s voice murmurs against my ear: "Add more milk. It will make them smoother."

I don’t want to listen, but she is here, and I am there, back to a bitter winter day my sophomore year in high school where the kitchen table is not yet set, and my math homework is spread out before me. My fifteen-year-old eyes watch my mother's shoulders hunch as she leans into her work, plunging the ricer, up and down, up and down, into the boiled potatoes. Like the mystery of solving for X, she will never remove all the lumps.

"Your father must be working late," she says. Her harsh tone grates the silence. Metal scrapes against glass, and tiny particles of white, no larger than snowflakes, fly up with each pass. Outside, the sunset slivers into streaks of orange and gold over the high desert horizon. It will be cold tonight.

The dog whines to be let into the backyard. When I open the kitchen door, he races for the pear tree where he raises his leg and kicks up a spray of dried grass in triumph. Not fully housebroken, he will poop tonight on the layers of newspaper my mother spreads across the pine floors in our living room. It will be my job to clean up the mess in the morning.

She draws the baked chicken, bathed and swimming in butter, lemon juice, and oregano, from the oven and prepares three servings: A drumstick for me, the thigh for her, and for my father, the breast. We each get canned peach halves, their hollows topped with cottage cheese, and a dollop of mostly mashed potato. His filled plate rests in front of his empty chair like a recrimination. She glances at the clock on the stove, watching the second hand move forward. "I guess he was delayed."

I clear off my papers and spoon lemon butter over my potatoes.

After we finish, she wipes up the crumbs and scrapes off my father's plate. The peaches are returned to their covered dish, the cottage cheese tossed in the trash, and the chicken back to its baking pan. Only the potatoes remain, cold and congealing. "I'll heat him up something later."

When the dog barks once, we both jump.

The front door bangs open, and a voice calls out, "Hello, hello. Anybody home?" My father swings into the kitchen, trailing the frozen air in his wake. He sniffs. "Smells good. I'm starving."

My mother stiffens when he kisses her cheek.

His scent, stale and sweet, fills the room. Stale: the cigarettes he stopped smoking over a year ago. Sweet: a woman's perfume.

Not my mother's.

* * * * *

Jeanne Lyet Gassman holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her first novel, Blood of Stone (Tuscany Press), received an Independent Publishers Book Award in 2015. Additional honors for Jeanne include fellowships and grants from the New Mexico Writers' Foundation, Ragdale, and the Arizona Commission for the Arts, as well as nominations for a Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions. Her work has appeared in Skink Beat Review, Tales of Fear, Superstition, and Doom (Redwood Press), and Clerestory, among many others. Learn more about Jeanne: www.jeannelyetgassman.com

What’s in a name…

by Mara Buck


Can I comment intelligently on the most recent horrors in the Middle East? Can I not? Do I have the facts? Does anyone?
 
So I will not take the side of this or that religion, this or that ethnicity, this or that government, and I will insist that a rose is a rose is finally a rose.

I instead will take the side of the children, I who am not a mother, never was, the children who have no side, but are the same children on both sides, the same children of the Sudan and of Romania, the same children of Gaza and of Saigon, the same children of the Cherokee and of the slave quarters,

and I will say,

do not show me the dark eyes, further darkened in pain, the small bodies writhing on litters, carried through rubble-strewn streets, limbs bandaged and bloody.

Do not show me.

Do not preach your explanations.

Do not show me, for I will turn my head.

Do not broadcast the percussion of the bombs, for I will not listen, but I will cock my ear to find the birdsong in the blackened trees, that my mind can stay sane.

Do not focus on the blood on the sand, on the body bags heaped at roadside, for I will be elsewhere,

in a place where birds sing and children laugh and peace rises with the dawn.

In a place where a rose is finally a rose.


* * * * *

Mara Buck writes, paints, and rants in a self-constructed hideaway in the Maine woods. Awarded by Changing Skies with a featured reading of her work at the launch of their latest edition, long-listed for Bath Flash Fiction Award, finalist for the Gravity Award, recently short-listed for the Alpine Fellowship. Winner of The Raven Prize, Scottish Arts Club Short Story Prize, three Moon Prizes, F. Scott Fitzgerald Prize, Binnacle International Prize and others, with works in numerous literary magazines and print anthologies. Two novels remain screaming for publication.

 

Myself

by Jennifer Nichols


I’m myself nowadays
my very own guilt
no hand me downs

I’ve been here all along
waiting
 until what belonged
to others left

* * * * *

Jennifer Nichols is new to submitting her poetry. She is ninety-two years old.

 

Nice Haircut

by Roseanne Freed


A woman in one of those large cars
from the sixties,
the kind with big fins,
a white one,
stuck her head out her car window,
Nice haircut, she yelled.

Strange comment
when I badly needed a cut,
but hey it’s nice to be noticed,
especially in Hollywood,
and by another female.

Did you hear that?
I told my Prince of Poodles,
who was taking me for a walk.

He wagged his tail.
He’d gone to the groomer yesterday
and looked so handsome
in the fluffy Teddy Bear clip.


* * * * *

Roseanne Freed grew up in apartheid South Africa and now lives with her husband in California, where she takes inner-city school children hiking in the Santa Monica mountains. A Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, her poems have appeared in Blue Heron Review, MacQueens Quinterly, ONE ART, Naugatuck River Review, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice among others.

A Week After She Left Us My Therapist Told Me

                                                by Roseanne Freed


You no longer need to hold back your emotions.
You have full permission to feel your feelings.
It’s healthy and important.

I can’t.
If I allow myself to weep 
I hear her—

            Stop making it about you.


* * * * *

Roseanne Freed grew up in apartheid South Africa and now lives with her husband in California, where she takes inner-city school children hiking in the Santa Monica mountains. A Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee, her poems have appeared in Blue Heron Review, MacQueens Quinterly, ONE ART, Naugatuck River Review, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice among others.

My Heart-Shaped Bruise 

by Evgeniya Dineva


The fairy-blue smoke escapes the lips 
then curls around the slim,
so - familiar fingers 
of your hands - once wrapped around me,
in me.
The scent dances above us and dissolves 
in the stale air
of the motel room at the corner of 45th and Elm. 
It’s the time I’m the happiest 
it’s when I’m the saddest.
The numbers are melting in the light of dawn
threatening to break in
through the thick curtains. 
I’m a puddle of disjoined human parts, 
limbs, bones and all this being fragile.
It’s you leaving and me lying here
with my breaths dissipating.
It’s my proof this happened 
it’s my heart-shaped bruise 
no matter what’s to come. 


* * * * *

Evgeniya Dineva is a poet from Bulgaria. Her works appear in The Hong Kong Review, Ethel, Asian Cha and others. Her debut poetry collection Animals Have No Fathers was published by Ars&Scribens in November 2023 (Животните нямат бащи | Евгения Динева | Цена | Ozone.bg). Evgeniya is a fellow of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing.

 

Breastfeeding

by Evgeniya Dineva


Road 26^th is closed
because of storms and a collapsed bridge.
The radio’s not working and we missed the announcement.
Your fist lands on the old steering wheel-
it is the rusty car’s fault you’ve been unable to sleep
and Stoyan’s operation failed.
Clay-dusted snow swallows
the road ahead as my hand closes
around the gift wrap.
Marlin-blue paper crunches
and you’ve inherited your mother’s taste
for acting like everything’s fine.
By ten pm my window shoulder’s gone numb
and dinner’s long over.
Eight-year-old Mitko has dyslexia
and can’t spell welcome correctly.
Birthdays and Thanksgiving
are only for close family, anyway.
The no-bad habits rule invites me out,
propped on the frosty handrails.
Smoke curls above ghost-white and powder garden
and I exhale wondering if
Mitko has the time to learn my name.


* * * * *

My Heart-Shaped Bruise 

by Evgeniya Dineva


The fairy-blue smoke escapes the lips 
then curls around the slim,
so - familiar fingers 
of your hands - once wrapped around me,
in me.
The scent dances above us and dissolves 
in the stale air
of the motel room at the corner of 45th and Elm. 
It’s the time I’m the happiest 
it’s when I’m the saddest.
The numbers are melting in the light of dawn
threatening to break in
through the thick curtains. 
I’m a puddle of disjoined human parts, 
limbs, bones and all this being fragile.
It’s you leaving and me lying here
with my breaths dissipating.
It’s my proof this happened 
it’s my heart-shaped bruise 
no matter what’s to come. 


* * * * *

Evgeniya Dineva is a poet from Bulgaria. Her works appear in The Hong Kong Review, Ethel, Asian Cha and others. Her debut poetry collection Animals Have No Fathers was published by Ars&Scribens in November 2023 (Животните нямат бащи | Евгения Динева | Цена | Ozone.bg). Evgeniya is a fellow of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation for Creative Writing.

Who Are You?

by Suzanne Allen


If you want to change your name, you have
to change your friends too. People who know you,
see you, need you to be one thing, have a hard time
calling you another. They need something
to hold onto, something to set their clocks by, some
way to remember where
in their little black books they put you.
They need something from you that,
probably, you can’t give them. They might ask
for the spelling of your new name, but have a hard
time remembering it when they introduce you
to other people. They will stammer, explain who
you used to be as if this
memory were more true than you, standing there
waiting for them to correct themselves.
They will tell stories about your last husband
or your next one, your old car, the time
you drove off with your skirt hanging out,
dragging in the street. They might even remember
the colors—the orange and magenta flowers
or the shiny black paint job that they could see
themselves in when you parked at their curb. But
in general, they will have a hard time
remembering. You will have to remind
yourself that you are not who they remember,
that you probably
never were, and that the whole friendship need not
be written off as an illusion. It was only a time
in your life when you were more like them
than you are now. And it made everyone happy
to believe, for a little while, that they
knew you, when in fact, they only
knew you when.


* * * * *

"Who Are You?" was first published in Nerve Cowboy, No. 31. It is also included in the author's forthcoming collection, Awkward.

Suzanne Allen is a writing teacher and artist born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley near Los Angeles. Her poems appear widely online and in print, and she has two chapbooks verisimilitude (corrupt press) and Little Threats (Picture Show Press.) She also blogs intermittently at suzanneallenpoet.wordpress. In 2021, she published a full-length collection of mostly pandemic poems, We Wash Our Hands, and her long-awaited collection of Paris poems Awkward, will be released this winter.