Author: Editor (Page 31 of 62)

Songs in the Subway

22 October 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Colleen W.

(Identifying names and characteristics have been changed.)

I was watering beebalm in my scraggly, but well-intentioned garden when a call came from a nurse. “Jason has had a difficult evening. He overturned a heavy table in the day room and tried to wrap a nurse up in a bedsheet.” I set the watering can down.

“He was put in five-point restraints,” she said.

Silence rang in my ears.

“I didn’t know they still did that,” I said, choking back tears.

I’ve been put in arm restraints before, but never also, leg restraints. My son and I both live with bipolar disorder and have required psychiatric hospitalizations.

A few days passed and he was what they termed as “clearer” and could have visitors. That evening on the way to the hospital I stopped at Subway. I hadn’t eaten lunch yet. When my son is in crisis, I often forget to eat.

I sat in a back booth with my tuna sandwich. I was taking a bite when a young man with long, curly hair and sheepish eyes wearing a green Subway polo, came up to me and said he liked my shirt. I looked down to see what I had on. It was a Grateful Dead t-shirt, the one where the skeletons are playing golf. I thanked him.

“I’ve never been to a show, but my dad went to a lot of them in college. He’s probably around your age,” he said.

“I’ve been to around 65 shows,” I admitted.

Talking about a time in my life I was fond of, lulled me, and I felt a sense of melancholy. The young man might have sensed my mood. “I have something for you,” he said, then turned and went through a door behind me.

I stared at a wilted browning piece of lettuce across the table. The familiar opening chords of “China-cat Sunflower” started to play. I listened to the music, in awe that a stranger would think to play a song for me.

My eyes welled up, but I focused on the beige table, my sandwich wrapper, the tip of my straw and willed myself not to cry.

When I was sure I had composed myself, I made my way to the counter. The kid who had disappeared to the back to change the music was mopping up by the register. He stopped to ring me up for a bag of Doritos I selected for Jason. I asked him for two chocolate-chip cookies.

“I want to get them for my son, but I’m not sure he can have them in an open bag. He’s in the hospital and there’s a lot of rules where he is,” I said.

He nodded and silently sealed the opening of the bag with a sticker.

I thanked him. The song had morphed into “I Know You Rider.” I pushed open the door, blinking at the blaze of the summer evening’s sun.

Colleen W. writes poetry and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the Gyroscope Review, Ravensperch, and The Potomac Review, among other publications. She works in mental health, and is also a consumer of mental health services.

Wednesday in the Neighborhood

22 October 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Bonnie Demerjian

Because my dearest friends are dead or distant
I eavesdrop on the sparrows’ whispered conversation in the blue-green grass.

Because the red-hot scream of chainsaws makes the forest weep,
I bury my face in the cool fountain of lobelias.

Because the flag is like a furious fist,
I melt into the marbled eyes of my old-lady dog.

Because lies multiply like hawkweed on the highway,
I harvest the truth of blueberries.

Because the longed-for heat of summer became instead a fiery furnace,
I rejoice in rain and the chance to pull on socks again.

Because the whirling hulla hoop of years slows and settles,
I putter among exuberant late-blooming lilies. They have no foretaste of grief.

Because these burdens must not win the day,
I beckon to the easeful gulls to lift our weight.

Bonnie Demerjian lives in Southeast Alaska and much of her writing is flavored by this place of forest and ocean. She has written four non-fiction books about the region and her poetry has been published in Blue Heron Review, Pure Slush, Tidal Echoes, and Alaska Women Speak, among others.

Late Aspen

22 October 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Burt Rashbaum

The aspen whispering,
color of late afternoon sun,
deepening in shadow
and the breeze’s
sibilance,
fading gold
washing bliss
upon us,
slowly coming
to sleep, to shed
their currency,
no urgency,
no memory
of spring.

Burt Rashbaum’s publications are Of the Carousel (The Poet’s Press, 2019), and Blue Pedals (Editura Pim, 2015, Bucharest). His poems have appeared in The Antonym, The Seventh Quarry, Storms of the Inland Sea (Shanti Arts Press, 2022), Boats Against the Current, The Ravens Perch, and Valiant Scribe.

a person ironing cloth — Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Pexels.com

How to Iron

13 October 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by N.G. Haiduck

My father did the ironing in our house. My mother was sick, not bed-ridden, but too sick to stand at a board pushing a hot iron over my father’s white cotton shirts. So in the evening, after supper (my father cooked) and the dishes (my sister and I washed), in the living room between the sofa and the armchair where my mother sat stone-faced in front of the TV, my father set up the ironing board.

He tested the steam iron by pressing it over a dishtowel. When the iron sputtered, he ironed: his white shirts, my pleated skirts, my sister’s ruffled blouses, my mother’s house dresses. He ironed the sheets. He taught me how to iron his handkerchiefs. First one side, fold once, iron, fold again, the monogram on the outside, iron, fold, iron. I progressed to pillow cases. Same method: iron, fold, iron, fold, iron.

To this day, my aunts disparage my mother (she died and, a few years later, he died) because “she made your father do the ironing.”

My father had a vegetable garden on a patch of land he rented from Miss Bliss, who owned the weather-beaten farmhouse next door. All summer long, I helped weed my father’s garden. On weekends, he sold tomatoes at a roadside stand on Route 51 in front of that old gray house, until Miss Bliss sold her property to a developer.

My father’s partner selling vegetables at the roadside stand was Mike, who had a cornfield down the road. I had to go to Mike’s house one Saturday to pick up an envelope. My mother, sitting in her armchair, called after me, “Don’t tell her I don’t iron!” Mike’s wife, Mary, ironed her husband’s white shirts perfectly.

A smiling plump woman, Mary opened the door, and I came into a living room filled with waves of freshly ironed white shirts, a few pale blue shirts mixed in, on hangers hooked over doorknobs, on rods attached to closet doors, and from the wing of a floor lamp standing next to a massive ironing board in the center of the room. It smelled like spring.

I had to step over a hassock and duck under the shirts to get to the kitchen, where Mary gave me an envelope (money from the business, I suppose). Dutifully, I brought the envelope home, but my mother said she never wanted me to go back there again. “I don’t want her to find out I don’t iron.” Of course I would never tell.

Just as my grandmother never told me. Only after my mother died, she said, shaking her head, “Too bad you didn’t know your mother before she started taking those pills.” I didn’t know. Nobody told me.

My husband says his shirts come out brighter and crisper from the dry cleaners. Still, in the evening, after dinner dishes are put away, I set up the board in the living room. I turn on the TV. When the iron is hot and sputtering, I iron. My husband’s shirts: back of the collar first, then the cuffs, run the iron up the sleeves, flip to the back of the shirt and the shoulder; then the front around the buttons, the shirt pocket, and last, the front of the collar. Same procedure for my blouses. Blue jeans: pockets ironed inside out, waist band and fly pressed twice, then the seams and a sharp crease. Pillowcases (but not sheets): lay flat on the board, iron, fold, iron, fold, iron.

N.G. Haiduck taught English at The City College of New York and now writes from Burlington, Vermont. Publications (2023) include: Aeolian Harp Anthology, Cold Lake Anthology, Kakalak, and BigCityLit. Haiduck’s first book, “Cabbie,” about a young woman driving a cab in New York City, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

autumn leaves placed on ground — Photo by Tim Samuel on Pexels.com

The Rains of November Have Come Again

13 October 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Lisa Ashley

nailing the metal roof. It falls steady on,
clicking like a bad wheel bearing.

The brilliant reds and golds
are getting battered, drenched
until they drown, mush up underfoot.

I want more of the sun’s colorcalling,
less of its slantburn in my squint here
where day gives way to black night by five.

I want to clutch that low down fire dazzle
before the clouds lower themselves over me,
a wet blanket disgruntled.

I want more sweet melancholy
autumn stretched over more days,
days that could bring back the siblings

that once surrounded me with noise,
sheared off like widowmakers
under winter’s snow-weight,

yet still moving about their lives—pinioned
in time, some strangers to themselves, one dead,
all lost to me.

I want more of our childhood games,
jumping in piles of leaves we raked,
undoing our work without care,

the lift of the leaps, the screams,
the soft landings we banked on without question.
I want to walk along small-town streets

lined with brilliant red maples,
leaves so blazed I can’t pick out singles.
Whole trees, torched and engulfed.

Lisa Ashley (she/her) Pushcart Prize nominee, descends from Armenian Genocide survivors and supported incarcerated youth for eight years as a chaplain. Her poems appear in Last Leaves Magazine, Amsterdam Quarterly, The Healing Muse, Blue Heron Review, Thimble, Snapdragon and others. She writes in her log home on Bainbridge Island, WA.

Say It With a Smile

13 October 2023 / Editor

Fiction by Melissa Witcher

Tory’s lips form the first syllable but no sound comes from her throat. Conversation swirls around them, voices rising and falling, people coming and going. She pinches the bridge of her nose. She recently read that there were three systems necessary for voice: the respiratory, phonatory, and resonatory systems. She only vaguely recalls learning about the resonatory system, and wonders if that was why she can’t say sorry.

She is not an overly apologetic woman. In 3rd grade, she was the new kid in a suburban school where everyone knew each other. At lunch, she sat at one of the long formica tables in the cafeteria and said something funny. A girl with silky brown hair and a striped blue shirt had laughed, milk coming out of her nose. It never occurred to Tory to apologize—she wanted to do it again. She looked it up to better understand; it happened because of the uvula.

She looks across the round table and Chris’ pursed lips make it obvious that he is waiting for an apology. If she doesn’t say it now it will require further explanation and more extensive effort later. She puts up one finger and balances her head up and down. Her throat is dry and her tongue burns as it pushes against the back of her teeth. She tries again, her mouth opens, but the only noise she produces is the wet sound of her tongue moving.

The offense occurred during a simple thought exercise: who is best equipped to survive the apocalypse? It is no longer a hypothetical situation, with global pandemics and the climate crisis and the rise of machine intelligence, they are literally living through the test run, but it is still far off enough (5-10-15 years?) that the topic wavers between necessary and humorous.

Tory has no desire to survive chaos. She is fine with no hot water, it’s better for her skin, but no running water? No electricity or functioning food supply chain, no ready-made clothes, no medical services, no random internet searches to explain bodily functions? Really truly, no thank you. As such, her stakes in these discussions are very low. If zombies are a real thing, or a meteor hits, or fungi eat brains, or a virus wipes out 80% of the population, she wants to be the first to go.

She picks up her glass of pop, Vernors for an upset stomach made worse by Chris’ apocalyptic aspirations. The glass is wet with condensation and bubbles race to the top, desperate to explode. She gulps down the amber liquid fast, swallows hard, and opens her mouth before closing it in defeat.

Something that never ceases to amaze her is how intensely others want to survive. It shouldn’t surprise her—history is filled with humans enduring impossible-horrible-terrifying situations because of the sheer will to live—but she is still caught off guard by how ardently people insist they can do the same. Chris is one of those people; her comment that his quick texting fingers and a charming ability to never pay full portion when they ate out won’t get you very far when cell towers and diners don’t exist hadn’t gone over well.

Instead of agreeing, the group fell silent and his nostrils flared. When he’d jutted his chin out and crossed his arms over his chest she knew that an apology, not deep but at least sincere, needed to be made. She hurt his feelings, wounded his self-image, questioned his very essence, and he wanted her to take it back. Even if she was most likely right.

She opens her mouth again and knows it will not happen.

Instead, her burp is loud enough to silence those around them and startle Chris into dropping his arms to his sides. During the ensuing collective laughter, she makes eye contact with him and mouths the word. He nods in reluctant acceptance and taps out a message on his cell phone quicker than she ever can. She smiles with tears in her eyes, relieved that an accumulation of air in her esophagus diffused the tension and that their inevitable deaths won’t happen with any lingering resentment.

Melissa Witcher (she/ela) is a self-taught writer, collagist, muralist, and embroidery artist. She was born in Brazil, raised in the U.S. and has lived in São Paulo since 2011. Her writing has appeared in 805 Lit + Art and Panorama Journal.

Circumlocution When Speaking of Water

13 October 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Sharon Whitehill

I don’t want to talk about water.
How it feels on the body, or in the mouth:
the salty surprise of a first ocean swim;
or bathwater swaddling your body in heat
on a wintry day; or such crystal clear springs,
filtered through sand, as Michigan’s Kitch-iti-Kipi.*
I don’t want to talk about iron-tinged water
tasting of blood, of snow creeping into the mittens
and chapping the wrists; or of the lake
that swallowed and swallowed and swallowed
that girl until the lifeguard dove in. Nor about water
as currents that roil the rapids or crest into waves;
or pond water swirling with creatures that shock school children.
Truly, I don’t want to talk about water.

Rather, I want you to notice what springs to your mind
about trees, clouds, or water: these are yours,
yours alone, to express. Which will free me
to sit here in silence, looking back on my personal trees,
looking out through my window at Florida clouds,
looking inward to contemplate water—
that power that governs my zodiac sign,
that mutable element pulled by the moon into tides,
that sustainer of life and relentless dissolver—
in my own way.

*Ojibwe for Big Cold Stream

Sharon Whitehill is a retired English professor from West Michigan now living in Port Charlotte, Florida. Apart from poems published in literary magazines, her publications include two scholarly biographies, two memoirs, two poetry chapbooks, and a collection of poems. Her chapbook, This Sad and Tender Time, is due Winter 2024.

For Every October

12 October 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Stacie Eirich

The leaves have begun to turn from green to yellow to brown, falling from branches to land in the lawn beside me. The grass is littered with them, the hard cusps of acorns rolling beneath my toes. A cooler wind wisps against my cheek and darkness falls earlier each evening; summer heaves her last breaths as October’s notes become the steady hymn of autumn.

Before last October, autumn would have been my answer to the question: What is your favorite season? Like so many artists, my muse is found in a cool darkness stitched with stars, in nights fragrant with the scent of smoke and glow of firelight, in walks through forests thick with trees that shiver in the breeze, their leaves shimmering green-gold-rust in sunlight as they fall to hard ground.

Before last October, I would have told you that October was a beautiful month, one where nature glistens wide with colors, the one in which my son was born. The month of pumpkin spice, sweater weather, homemade chili and Halloween. I would have told you that October felt lovely and comfortable, a relief from the stifling heat of summer.

I’m not sure how I feel about October now. How I feel about that fateful day: October 12th — Diagnosis Day. The day an MRI revealed that my fourteen-year-old daughter had a brain tumor.

The day was blissful with sunlight and a soft breeze that welcomed in the beginning of my favorite season. In the early afternoon, while she and her brother were still at school and before we knew anything of scans or tumors — I took a journal out on a nature walk. I gathered leaves and wrote verses, pressed them in. That journal sits in my bedside drawer, untouched now since then, almost a year later.

Like autumn, I’m nervous to revisit it, to open it and find whatever beauty is left there. Beauty that is evidence to how October gives life and changes it, evidence to how different the world felt last October from this October.

But as we approach October 12th this year, I find myself drawn to the journal, drawn to touch and examine the leaves I pressed into its pages, to read the words I wrote before I knew anything of brain tumors or intracranial pressure or hydrocephalus or medulloblastoma, of MRIs or lumbar punctures or biopsies or surgical resections. Of shunts or ports or proton beams or absolute neutrophil counts. Before I knew what it means to have a child with cancer.

Yesterday we decorated the house with balloons, celebrated my daughter’s NED status: No Evidence of Disease. She has completed her treatments, completed a year’s worth of life-altering experiences that have both saved her and changed her. She has shown us her resilience and breaking point, her incredible strength and heartbreaking fragility.

I watch the balloons bounce lightly in the breeze on our mailbox, their colors and confetti bright in October’s sunshine. I walk through the lawn, unraveling ribbons to watch them travel higher into a clear blue sky, listen to the chirps of blue jays in the branches.

I hear the sounds of my daughter waking; she comes to sit beside me as I write. We watch the squirrels chitter and chase each other through the lawn, gather acorns and bury them. I tell her about the journal, and she fetches it from my drawer, anxious to see the memories left in its pages.

We touch the dried, spiny pressed leaves and read my words together, October’s light vivid with sun in a clear sky. I feel something loosen, something lighten inside me, and a warmth despite the cool breeze that brushes my skin.

Before last October, I didn’t know light would still be possible through darkness, that survival meant looking for it in each hour. I didn’t know joy would find its way to us through grief.

I look up into the sunlight of this October and see the beauty that remains, glimpse how nature and life are colorful and changing and resilient. I accept that this October will never be the same as the last, that life and experiences have ways of changing you that cannot be undone. And I breathe.

My daughter hands me a clutch of pink, purple and blue ribbons and we walk across the grass together. Slowly, we release strands of ribbon upward, watching the balloons confetti swirl into a cloud of rainbow in blue. We twine our fingers together and look up, up — up.

We breathe in the scents and sounds of October and tell each other we are glad to be home. We talk about her brother’s birthday; how much taller and bigger and stubborner and smarter he is now that he’s almost fourteen.

I think of how amazing it is to be awake together to watch the wings that fly between the trees, the squirrels rush through the grass, the green-gold leaves shimmer in autumn’s light. Present, familiar, yet ever-changing, and wondrous — this month with a heart for so many things, this October and the way it unravels me, the way it breaks me apart and stitches me back together again.

Stacie Eirich is a mother of two, poet & singer from Louisiana. Her poems have recently appeared in The Healing Muse, Inlandia Journal and Susurrus Magazine. During 2023, she lived in Tennessee, where she wrote while caring for her daughter through cancer treatments at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. www.stacieeirich.com

Letter to an Estranged Father

3 October 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Angela Kasumova

Recently, on my way to visit a friend, I drove by Kitty’s Restaurant and Lounge in North Reading. Do you remember the time we went there? It was a Saturday, late summer, either in ‘94 or ‘95, and we’d come from Lawrence where we picked up my school uniform. We stopped by Kitty’s for lunch on the way home. It was a throwback spot: dim lighting, torn booths, cigarette smoke. The bathroom was all red tile and red vinyl and red toilets, like something from a horror movie.

We waited a long time for the food to arrive, and when it did, I remember giggling as I looked down at the brownish steak tip gristle sitting in oil placed in front of me. I don’t remember what you or Mom had, but neither was good. It was one of the worst meals we’d ever had. Comically bad.

I think we left without paying.

Despite the badness of the restaurant this memory is a happy one. We laughed and smiled in unity over the awfulness that was Kitty’s.

Not a day goes by where I don’t think about the tragic outcome of our family, my mind filling with “whys” and “what ifs” and “if onlys.” Lately though, I’ve begun widening the lens, allowing a little more light in.

Turns out we had our good moments, like bonding over bad meals.

Angela Kasumova is an emerging writer of creative nonfiction with over a decade of experience working in the fields of mental health and education. She lives with her husband and sons near Boston, Massachusetts. Read her first published piece on The Bluebird Word from June 2023: For Sale: Kawai Upright Piano, $1,250.

Feeding Time

3 October 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Stephen J. Cribari

I hang my poems on the kitchen wall, each one
A balanced meal providing nourishment
From the artist’s pallet of essential food groups:
Danger, beauty, wisdom, insight, rage.

I say I hang these poems as my defense
Against obscurity but truth be told
I’m peckish. I’m just providing for myself.
I nibble here and there and snack and munch
On feelings and thoughts, on metaphor and rhyme,
The fiber and oats and hay and supplements
Of the controlled diet unique to this animal.

My poems: feed buckets hanging in the stall
Of a horse that would bolt given half a chance.

Stephen J Cribari has been writing poetry for over sixty years. In a parallel life he was a criminal defense attorney and law professor. He resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Still Life (2020) and Delayed en Route (2022) are published by Lothrop Street Press.

Author: Editor (Page 31 of 62)

Songs in the Subway

Wednesday in the Neighborhood

Late Aspen

How to Iron

The Rains of November Have Come Again

Say It With a Smile

Circumlocution When Speaking of Water

For Every October

Letter to an Estranged Father

Feeding Time

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