Month: May 2024

Atlanta International, Concourse D

1 May 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Stacie Eirich

Airports are teeming with constant activity: people rushing, people eating, people waiting. It’s not until I’m in one again that I realize just how much humanity is out there. How busy so many lives are. How different but alike we are, carrying our bags and checking our devices, averting our eyes or carrying on conversations with those travelling with us; but more often silent, especially amongst strangers.

I struck up conversation with two ladies as we stood waiting on the walkway to board our flight. Looked them in the eyes: saw them spark and open, perhaps smiling beneath their masks. They were headed to South Carolina, and I told them I knew of its beauty and that my children were born there. They remarked “Small world!” I agreed, and soon we departed.

Waiting on my connection, I look around the gate and see people bent to their devices, eyes shadowed, faces closed. All ages and colors: dressed down and up, masked and unmasked. Out the large five-tiered windows the figures of jetliners loom, the tarmac abuzz with action as the planes taxi in and out, landing to refuel and prepare for another take-off. Busses, trucks and tugs pulling luggage loads pass, air-traffic controllers in orange vests wave wands. Down the runway the jetliners roll, pushing faster until their noses rise into a sky settled low with gray-blue clouds. A storm is brewing to the west; rain threatens to slow the surge of activity before long.

As I write, the people around me shift and change, the air inside the gate cool but comfortable, the chatter a murmur underneath the din of a drink machine and canned music from a club bar. I’m thirsty but don’t want to overpay for coffee or need to use the restroom on my flight, so I go without.

I notice that I’m the only one here with a notebook and pen, the only one stopping to look around, to notice this atmosphere, record this experience. For most, this moment is lost in the shuffle, only an access point to a destination: unmemorable.

I sit and watch what once was unimaginable; that humans would create a machine that could fly. Something that is now such an everyday occurrence that it is no longer of note. In the time I’ve been sitting here, how many airplanes have rolled by and taken off? 10, 20, 30? Perhaps more. It’s astounding, and humbling. I knew I was small, insignificant. Seeing just how vast humanity is and how much we’ve created is amazing and frightening.

Like everything, there is a poem in this. On that vast sky and the human-made machines that fly within it, on the people that surround me but remain apart, on how my heart and mind and hand (from writing so furiously with this pen) are aching to make sense of it all, on how I feel so much a part of this crush of humanness but at the same time: solitary, apart, alone.

A woman on an island, with her backpack, notebook and pen in the center of this aerial universe on Concourse D in Atlanta International, waiting for the jetliner that will fly her home.

Stacie Eirich is a mother, poet & singer in Louisiana. Her work is forthcoming in Synkroniciti Magazine. Her poem “Blossoms,” published in Susurrus Magazine in 2023, was nominated for The Pushcart Prize. In 2023, she lived in Memphis while caring for her child through cancer treatments at St. Jude. Read more at www.stacieeirich.com

Muscle Memory

1 May 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Anne Bower

She’d told us the genetics,
smiled into the words
as if Alzheimer’s was just
some trip to the beach.

Now she can’t drive,
husband brings her to class,
where she’s
blank-faced at first,
repeats name of disease
that’s taking her mind.
Frowns as we start,
yet her body glides to tai chi.

A pause. She shakes her head,
not knowing what comes next.
A breath, shudder,
yet years of practice surge
her forward. She steps, turns,
gestures easy, smooth.
She’s swimming in a calm sea,
grins with delight.

Anne Bower lives in rural Vermont, teaching tai chi and training tai chi instructors. She has three chapbooks to her credit and poems published in The Raven’s Perch, Gemini Magazine, Cool Beans, Nine Cloud Journal, Plainsong, and many other journals and anthologies.

The Fool: 0

1 May 2024 / Editor

Poetry by J.T. Whitehead

Sometimes acumen gets lost
when tossed like the cards
that are lost in the bets
that we secretly play
in our way – meaning to lose
our sense of all meaning
or meaning to lose our way –
& wands become canes
now holding us upwards.

We dance across plains
all sundown & westwards
to graveyards & canyons
& tin-can saloons.

No longer seers & no longer
bards & no longer tossing
our meaningless cards
away
like our fate or our money today – tonight,

Tonight
we wager on play.

J.T. Whitehead has published poetry in Slipstream, The Iconoclast, Gargoyle and The New York Quarterly, among others. He edited “So It Goes,” the journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Library, briefly, for five issues. He lives in Indianapolis with his sons, practicing law by day and poetry by night.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

For the Love of Color: Ochre

1 May 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Linda Allison

Ochre is a wanderer
Embarking from deep yellow, it charts its way across the palette,
eventually landing somewhere in the vicinity of terracotta.
Ochre is the paprika in my soup and the cinnamon on my toast.
It is a farm-fresh egg, dark yolk dancing in the skillet,
and a hoo-doo rising from the floor of the Palo Duro Canyon.
It is the west Texas sky moments before the sun drops below the horizon.
My memories of Big Bend are all in ochre.

I am a study in ochre. Lids dusted, cheeks rubbed, warm golds and earthy red-browns,
Maybelline Autumn Copper and Almay Sunkissed Bronze
My hair and my sister’s hair, too, different ends of the spectrum: ginger and auburn
both now faded by the years

Isn’t it interesting that what ancient cave art remains was all drawn in ochre?

After forty years in finance, Linda Allison is enjoying a second life as a writer, photographer, and explorer. Her work has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, Pile Press, 2023 Utah’s Best Poetry and Prose Anthology, and others. Find her photography in Persimmon Tree and Burningword Literary Journal.

City Sounds

1 May 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Ginny Bartolone

March. Manhattan tumbles into silence. I hover by the window, inhale a wave of city air, and listen to the door of the 1 train close. Descending major third. Helicopters, sirens, stand clear of the closing doors, DING-dong, and then nothing.

I loop the Natural History Museum. Frigid humidity slips through my coat. It’s colder than it should be. St. Patrick’s Day decorations slip off their windows as condensation separates the tape from the glass. I cross Columbus without looking both ways. No one’s coming.

White poster board taped to a window on the corner reads “Stay the f* home.” A singer warms up his voice. For what? Juilliard-perfected arpeggios now reserved for his neighbors.

I seek hints of progress—stores reopening, bodegas with toilet paper, someone sitting in the park. I spot a family of raccoons. One hangs on a branch with its paws flopping over the icy bark.

The pub on the corner—the one where John the bartender welcomed us the night we moved to the neighborhood—sits dark. A sign on the door reads, “We are sad to announce the passing of…” A picture of a line cook in his apron.

I head home. Cuomo talks at 11:30.

Ben barges in with a sighting. There was a man sitting at the bar of the pub. Inside. Drinking a beer. But the restaurants aren’t open. It’s only May. He was alone, Ben explained. No bartender. Just a man sitting alone drinking a beer.

“I yelled through the open window,” he goes on, “I asked ‘Are you reopening?’ And he answered, ‘I hope so!’” The man raised his glass in celebration.

“He must be the owner,” I add.

“I thought John was the owner, but maybe not? They’re still closed. So how else would he be inside?”

I sit on the roof for most of May. Nails, puddles, pigeons. Almost warm enough for the cockroaches. At 7 p.m., we cheer and bang on pots and pans. Cheering, helicopters, sirens, stand clear of the closing doors, silence.

The pub reopens in September, and we hurry through the hot autumn air toward to outdoor seating area still under construction. John appears.

“You’re here!”

“We are. Somehow,” he answers. I can’t think of what else to say.

“May we never go through something like this again,” comes out of my mouth. John pats me on the back while looking across the street toward nothing in particular.

Ben asks about the man sitting at the bar in May.

“Oh, I’m the owner,” John confirms, “That’s Mark. He’s usually here. When they locked down the city, he stopped leaving his apartment. Lost all muscle mass in his legs. Bunch of us started carrying him down the steps every few days for fresh air and a pint.”

They’re closing the restaurants again. One more night before the silence. Ben and I march up Amsterdam but an early blast of icy air has the city more on edge than usual.

A bundled man shuffles in jagged patterns behind us, and then next to us, and then in front of us. He turns his head—once, twice, again.

Ben whispers, “Let’s go into the pub, just to get off the street a minute.”

John stands behind the bar. Caution tape wraps up the stools.

“Still open for a drink?” We ask, “And food of course.” It’s illegal to get a drink without food.

“Or you know,” John says out of the side of his mouth, “You get a drink or two, you look at the menu, and oops, you can’t decide, and then you pay your bill and storm out without eating.” He shrugs with a laugh and a wink and we take a spot in the loft above the main floor.

It’s the first night of Hanukkah. The only other group sits in the far corner and sings songs and exchanges gifts. We order Manhattans.

“Cheers,” we toast with a clink.

We order another. We toast.

John carries a platter of shots around the room. We toast in the air and all drink.

We climb—stumble—down from the balcony, and line up at the cordoned-off caution-taped bar with shot glasses beside strangers. When was the last I talked to a stranger? Toast. Drink. My memory blurs.

“They just announced vaccines for under 40. Tomorrow,” I yell to Ben across the apartment. It’s March again.

We’ve been training for this. Open the NYC vaccine website. Hit refresh, hit back, hit refresh again. Don’t wait for the circle to stop spinning, just keep clicking. Grab any appointment that isn’t at the Aqueduct Racetrack. That’s too far. Two hours on a train full of a virus. We justify other neighborhoods an hour away. Are we taking slots from other people?

I holler, “I got one! Police station off the F at 7a.m.” Ben gets one for 2p.m. at the same police station.

My alarm chimes at 4:30. We’re told to get there an hour before our appointment. I leave at 5; the sun hasn’t risen. Clouds of roasting bread fill Broadway. My 1 train doors ding open—DING-dong. Descending major third. Sleeping essential workers rest with their heads against the metal poles. They lived a different pandemic. I change at Columbus Circle.

The sun rises as I crest the steps. The line around the station reaches an overgrown parking lot. It inches forward. A handwritten sign on the door comes into sight. “J&J.” I show my ID to a couple of cops at a folding table and wait. Sing a song in your head when you get a shot, that’s what I always learned. I sing “Start spreading the news,” and the shot is done.

The volume knob twists. Someone laughs. A car honks. The bass of a song thumps. As I leave the station, even the sun melting the soot-covered snowbanks makes a sound. I listen with my eyes closed and breathe in the city air.

Ginny Bartolone is a writer who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She’s been writing about travel and the creative process on her blog since 2011. Her fiction and nonfiction are published in literary journals such as The Closed Eye Open and Flumes.

Anapana

1 May 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Tasneem Sadok

Overexposed with explosive imagery
the senses can quickly become dulled
to the granular exhilaration
of a grazed hand
Next time a snowflake falls on your cheek
Pause
And savor the icy pinprick
a crystallized remnant of your planet’s origin
Feel it dissolve
into your breathing pores
already restless
to transform again

Tasneem Sadok is an MD-PhD student at UCLA, fascinated by the brain’s intricacies in contexts of dysfunction. As the American-born daughter of immigrants who fled autocracy, her worldviews have always been steeped in countervailing dualities. Poetry has allowed her to find resolution in mind-numbing tensions while defamiliarizing accepted realities with curiosity.

One Out of Ten

1 May 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Stephanie Shafran

“No one has feet like mine,” my ninety-three-year-old mother announces to the hovering doctor.

“Well, let’s see what brought you here today,” the young doctor smiles as she pulls up a stool directly facing her new patient. After removing the sock as if it were a ticking time bomb fastened to my mother’s foot, she examines the flame-red toe yielding to her curious, slender fingers. It is the third toe on her left foot, rubbed raw by my mother’s second toe, which has long ago snaked over the big one—and twisted itself into an awkward, but permanent position. This deformity is a logical consequence of my mother’s lifetime habit of jamming her foot into ill-fitting shoes.

When I arrived at her apartment yesterday, I found my mother sitting on the bed, cradling her bare foot in her lap. Spotting me in the doorway, she stood up— a grimace spreading across her face as her left foot touched the floor.

“It’s my damn good-for-nothing toe again,” she’d scolded.

My heart slumped, remembering her excuse for refusing to undergo the surgery years ago to remove it. Three weeks off her feet and out of work! she’d whined. I knew the truth—her fear of misshapen body parts. At the Boston skating rink, there was a girl whose stumped arm had barely developed beyond the shoulder. After three Sundays of spotting her on the ice, my mother made excuses whenever I asked why we weren’t going skating anymore.

“Let me see it, Mom. Sit down.”

Plunking her body back on the bed, she lifted the foot an inch from the floor and pointed to the swollen, tomato-colored toe.

“Yikes, that looks infected. We’ll have to see a doctor.”

“You’ll take care of it, won’t you?”

“Yes, of course. By tomorrow, I hope.”

I’d have to take her to urgent care, take time off from work, cancel my afternoon hairdresser appointment most likely.

A day later now, we’re seated side by side on grey metal chairs in the clinic’s examination room. The throbbing in my head has finally quieted.

The doctor’s slender fingers wander across the bloated flesh.

“Does this hurt? Or this?”

Savoring this caress, my mother lets out a deep sigh. She shakes her head from side to side, yet her brow furrows and her eyes shudder as the doctor probes the toe.

“I was wondering, Doctor, will you have to amputate this corkscrew toe?”

The doctor lifts her soft brown eyes to my mother’s.

“Heavens no. We’ll just treat the infection on the toe next to it. You’ll be free of pain in no time.”

My eyes moisten. This doctor’s reassurance to my mother—like a mother to a needy child.

Now the doctor swivels her stool to face me.

“I’ll write a prescription for a two-week course of antibiotics. I’d like to check her toe in three weeks.”

Then she swivels a half-turn, shifting her gaze to my mother.

“You must be proud to have a daughter who takes such good care of you. I imagine she learned that from you.”

“Well, I don’t know if she’d agree.” My mother’s eyes ping pong between the doctor’s and mine. “At least I made sure she had a new pair of shoes every September. For the new school year, of course.”

She offers me a shy nod. I can’t deny it—yearly trips to Stride Rite Shoes in Brookline each August, just before the start of the new school year. Choosing a new pair of shoes with sturdy soles and laces, sized correctly to fit my feet, whether I loved the color and style, or not.

As the consultation wraps up, I lift the sock from my mother’s lap. Like a suppliant, I kneel at her feet and lift the bruised foot into my hands. As I do, my mother’s hand reaches to rest on my shoulder. After a long intake of breath, she announces,

“Nine miscarriages. I almost gave up—your father convinced me to try for ten. And then you, one out of ten, like a miracle.”

Her foot still in my lap, I give its heel a gentle squeeze.

Stephanie Shafran’s recent writing appears in literary journals such as Emulate, Persimmon Tree, and Silkworm. Her chapbook “Awakening” was released in 2020. A member of both Straw Dog Writers Guild and Florence Poetry Society, Stephanie resides in Northampton, Massachusetts; read more at stephanieshafran.com, including monthly blog posts.

Photo by Sebastian Coman Photography on Unsplash

Just Kids

1 May 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Susan Zwingli

deep summer bursts the wide garden gate
sweet freedom calls us from whitewashing fences
soon, the jilted brush slouches down the wall, bereft
but we take the hill and its warm, tickling grasses
your emerald eyes tracking the tickling path of a ladybug on my arm
she has her secrets, we have ours
race you, yeah! on the count of three?
running, breathless, our legs pumping pistons
laughing, landing double on your banana-seat bike
a playing card clipped to the tires, poppity-pop-popping
my hands holding onto your hips
we think we’re so grown up, you and I
but late-day thunder booms deep in the sky,
somewhere, far-off, our innocence is running out of time
the changing light chases us, softly laps at our ice cream
mint chip for you, raspberry sherbet for me
blushing my lips pink like the lipstick I’m forbidden to wear
I hope you’ll see
you smile, the freckles on your nose a sweet constellation that I want to kiss
when did you become something more
than just a boy I played with at recess?
I’m all of 11 now, one foot in, one foot racing ahead to some map-less place
but maybe today, we can just be kids, lost in the strange and the wonderful
wandering deep along the river bed, fireflies lighting the sweet-smelling rain
fingers and dreams entangled
while our mothers’ hearts are calling us home

Susan Zwingli is a poet currently living in Boise, Idaho. She writes about love, belonging, and loss, as well as the natural beauty of the Northwest, and exploring mystical spirituality. She holds a BA in English from Michigan State University and a Masters from the Portland Seminary (OR).

The Night Nurse

1 May 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Joan Potter

“Just slip this under your tongue, honey,” said Margie, the night nurse. She held out a tiny white pill. It was six-forty-five in the morning, almost the end of her shift.

“What is this?” I mumbled. I was feeling groggy and anxious, and the pain in the left side of my chest was still there. I had spent a long night in the hospital, trying to get a few hours of sleep while bells rang, buzzers sounded, the IV needle dug into my wrist, and nurses held long, loud conversations out in the hall.

“It’s nitroglycerin,” said Margie. “It’ll help the pain in your chest.”

I dropped the pill into my mouth, and in seconds my head began to pound. Margie had walked away from my bed and was doing something across the room. My skin prickled, and I was soon covered with an icy sweat. I felt myself becoming lighter and lighter, floating upward into some other world.

“Margie, help me,” I whimpered.

I could see the silhouette of her wide back looming by the door. “Take a deep breath,” I heard her say. Slowly she turned and moved toward my bed. “Take deep breaths,” she said.

She grasped my hand and rubbed my palm with her thumb. “What’s your name? Where do you live? Do you have brothers and sisters? Where do they live?”

I couldn’t answer. Through the fog I heard her voice becoming more frantic. “The doctor…blood pressure…red cart.” Then, other voices. “She’s looking better. She’s getting some color.”

I opened my eyes and saw Margie, another nurse, and a blond woman in a white coat, a stethoscope around her neck, all standing around my bed. “Your blood pressure dropped,” the doctor said. “It was a reaction to the nitroglycerin.”

Margie walked away and I never saw her again.

My hospital experience had started the day before on a Sunday morning. I’d had an ache in my chest since Thursday. It was on the left side, but it was not a sharp pain and didn’t radiate down my arm. I thought I might have been focusing on it too much, and figured it would probably just go away. Company was arriving on Saturday, a couple I hadn’t seen for ages. I couldn’t call and tell them not to come. I had to straighten the apartment, cook, chat with them for the two or three hours of their visit, and then clean up.

But by the next morning the pain – which I’d been trying to ignore all Saturday evening – was still there, dull, but persistent. I knew I couldn’t put it off any longer. I called my doctor, who said I should have it checked out. My daughter lived nearby so I gave her a call, trying to sound casual. She soon appeared at my door and we sped to the hospital.

Before long I was on a stretcher in the emergency room, hooked up to monitors. For what seemed hours I lay stretched out in my cubicle, bells dinging in the background, nurses taking blood, a man x-raying my chest, each activity interspersed with periods of restlessness and discomfort.

Finally a doctor entered, a small, pale, humorless man with glasses and thin gray hair. He told me I should stay overnight and have a stress test in the morning. But all I wanted was to get out of that place, go home, and come back the next day. He managed to talk me out of that, and I was soon wheeled away and put in a room on the cardiac corridor. My TV didn’t work, and all they’d given me to eat was tasteless mushy food. I wasn’t especially worried, just exhausted and annoyed that I had to be there.

The next morning, a couple of hours after Margie had fed me the nitroglycerine pill that could have ended my life, I was wheeled down to the ice-cold stress-test room. I sat with a group of patients, all of us swaddled in blue blankets, until it was my turn to get connected to a heart monitor and run on an increasingly speedy treadmill. My heart was fine, a doctor announced. I was released.

A few days later, during a visit with my primary care doctor, I described the nitroglycerine experience. She rolled her eyes. “You could have had a stroke. At least now you know you have strong cerebral arteries.”

Joan Potter‘s essays have appeared in anthologies ad literary journals, including The Bluebird Word, The RavensPerch, Persimmon Tree, Bright Flash Literary Review, New Croton Review, and others. She is the author or coauthor of several nonfiction books. The most recent is the collaborative memoir “Still Here Thinking of You.”

i touch this ripe tomato

1 May 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Amelia Díaz Ettinger

and marvel at how all things
soften—

his voice muted
to warm embers that avoid
scarlet overtones

and my old hands
carved to rice paper,
skin hulled away from bone

even this butcher knife
is dulled from over-care
now it cuts with tenderness

yes,
time’s own waltz,
mollifies all things

and i applaud these parenthesis
of my mouth, how
they enliven my sight

after all they are the repositories
of elapsed laughter

Amelia Díaz Ettinger is a Latinx BIPOC poet and writer. She has three books of poetry and two chapbooks published. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies.

Month: May 2024

Atlanta International, Concourse D

Muscle Memory

The Fool: 0

For the Love of Color: Ochre

City Sounds

Anapana

One Out of Ten

Just Kids

The Night Nurse

i touch this ripe tomato

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