…………Perhaps when the boy built the elaborate scaffolding between sand trays in his first therapy session he was building bridges from me to him. …………Perhaps the melting down of crayons in aluminum foil was alchemy, testing the boundaries of the place he would heal. …………Perhaps the Playmobil medical worker locked in a tiny building while opposing armies fought was for her safety, or for his own. …………Perhaps, in a much later sand tray, the same Playmobil medical worker holding a light at the prow of the boat in dangerous waters was lighting the darkness. …………Perhaps … Continue reading Journey by Billie Hinton→
Meeting Myself on My Morning Walk …..a long look up into branches I’ll see him, ………………his blond hair in a butch I wore more than fifty years ago. ………..Where wind currents swell every which way, ……………..a tree where limbs are bustling, ………….his arms around a pair of branches, ………………he’ll thrust them away and draw them back in, ………………somehow getting the whole tree …………heaving in his sway, ………………anything for my attention, …..his face filled with sun, ……………his eyes alive, his jaws wrangling ………………with a wad, while below, on the sidewalk ……………….the sweet scent of Bazooka as … Continue reading Meeting Myself on My Morning Walk and Cheney’s Cafe, 2 poems by Rodney Torreson→
Ahab’s Widow I wait for him as every whaler’s wife. I write him letters every day. I tell him how he grows bigger and stronger. I tell him of his first words and of his first walk on his own. I write, “What a lovely little pip he is.” I write, “I call him that sometimes, instead of Malcolm.” I write, “Rachel says he’s often mischievous.” I write, “Come home to us safely.” At dusk, as the sun goes down behind the white clapboard house and the elms’ shadows reach out across the lawn to … Continue reading Ahab’s Widow and Two Songs, 2 poems by J. R. Solonche→
It was my granddaughter’s fourth birthday party. I, old lady with cane, was sitting in the shade on the side, then made my way cautiously to watch the children hit the piñata with a plastic bat. (In my support group for survivors of sexual abuse, one man told of being hung and whacked just like that; he had black circles under his eyes from never sleeping.) The first few hits yielded no shower of candy and toys. The kids tried again, whacking harder and harder, even the littlest, while the adults yelled raucous encouragement. … Continue reading The Piñata by Dana Robbins→
Antonyms for “Affluence” It is a myth that mice are impossible to eat. I see my tuxedo on another man, a groom or musician. It is a myth that the bride will be thinking about Queen Victoria or the General Washington. It is a myth that I will get fat doing this. As a child, I knew I would marry Gretel, and we would never sleep soundly. I understood that the witch’s candy house wasn’t real, but the children’s hunger was. How to Buy an Antique Picture Frame Sometimes you have to drive …..hundreds of … Continue reading Antonyms for “Affluence” and How to Buy an Antique Picture Frame, 2 poems by Glen Armstrong→
As the East’s Songbird Epidemic Fades, the Cause Remains Unknown ………………….—Audubon Magazine, September, 2021 Fifty thousand starlings swoop above the marshes, wings drum in unison, roar in the crepuscular sky. Black shapes cluster, shift and swerve, entanglement at play, then coalesce, morph into a snake with twitching tail, then giant cells that merge again, give birth to prehistoric forms like dancing aurochs on cave walls. Roman augurs read these signs to interpret gods’ desires: when to fight, when to wait, what the cause, who escape. What sibyls now can tell us why songbirds fell, … Continue reading Reading the Signs by Patricia Hemminger→
Shadows His light bulb dims, and it’s dark enough for shadows revealed. A surprise every time. Strangers rush from nothing to a glittering blue pool. Ships resemble chess pieces from the mist of a balcony. Dock leaves on nettle stings. A lie in a fortune cookie. Paperbacks and Polaroids line the shelves of the bookcase, collected like porcelain angels on a Catholic’s mantelpiece. It’s all a Kodak distraction from being born of bone instead of what gods are made of —-shadows and celluloid. His mother’s still alive. With curlers in her hair, she’s framed on … Continue reading Shadows and Bird of Youth, 2 poems by Joseph Monaghan→
What man would not look back when claiming a celestial voice commanded him to go away from pleasures of wine, games of chance, lust, secular music, dance, art, poetry? The men who deny life’s gifts and joy, who kneel and coerce in the name of one unknown, unseen, beyond reason or proof, men who control by unified power and fear deemed it so that woman should not turn lest she turn to a pillar of salt. The greater choice is to turn, to escape the clutches of piety and power at any cost, becoming salt … Continue reading Salt by Les Brown→
feels this way. Familiar like the abstract place you grab for when you’re curled in despair on your own kitchen floor begging to go home, not knowing where you mean. No matter whose hair and breath lend the other pillowcase its scent, which farm grew this squash so delicately sliced, whose face you lean toward, lips to their ear, cupping a joke. No matter which gone person you scan the crowd for year after year. Whitney Hudak is a CNM and poet living in Newport, R.I. Her work has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal and … Continue reading Each Year by Whitney Hudak→
He looked small, curled up on her couch this handsome boy/man not looking at her picking his fingernails jiggling his foot a whisper of a beard on his face he was silent she waited he cleared his throat, said he had the same nightmare every night dreams of carrying wood up a mountain, walking with his father who he trusted more than God walking with his father who he loved more than God Dreams of an altar a fire, a sacrifice did it really happen? were his hands really bound? a knife at his … Continue reading Therapy Ten Years Later by Claire Scott→
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