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Fall Sun

12 August 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Sharon Scholl

rises reluctantly through ground mist,
travels on the fringe of the horizon,
sinks into a cloak of early dusk.

I find the last of it in a tiny pool
and savor its remains reduced
from August lake to dim reflection.

Leaves enough remain to catch its light
and send their shadows dancing
with a scatter of dry weeds.

Lingering squashes dangle on shrinking
vines while single pumpkins sit deserted
in a field of empty furrows.

This is the season of farewells
to spring wonders worn and drab,
to the past that fades in memory.

Sharon Scholl is a retired college professor (humanities) who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website (freeprintmusic.com) that donates music to small, liberal churches. Her poetry chapbooks, Seasons, Remains, Evensong, are available via Amazon Books. Her poems are current in Third Wednesday and Panoplyzine.

Wandering the Mojave

12 August 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Cynthia Bernard

Along with the silvering of my hair
the years have gifted me
with a Frequent Wanderer Award
granting open access
to the Mojave of Middle-Night,
where there are many
interesting places to meander
but there does not seem to be
a trailhead that leads back to sleep—
and though I could remedy the one
with gloves, a bottle of dye,
and the laundry room sink,
there seems to be no compass
to help me navigate the other.

For a long time I grumbled about this
and stumbled through too-much-coffee tired days,
but then, during one weary too-early,
I paused to watch a horned lizard
swishing tail, flicking tongue
near the base of a Joshua tree
and noticed the almost silent whisper
of a gestating poem,
stopped to play with her for a while,
and soon I was surrounded
by her many siblings, cousins, and rivals—
quite a lively little nursery
with a hungry baby sonnet I’d almost forgotten,
two toddling villanelles fighting over a yucca flower,
and a pantoum with sand in her eyes crying in the corner.

Middle-Nights now, when the Mojave calls,
I am ready, having indulged in another
gift of the years, the afternoon nap.
I brew up a pot of cactus flower tea,
toss my tinseled hair over my shoulder,
grab my favorite pen,
and set out happily a’wandering.

Cynthia Bernard is a woman in her late sixties who is finding her voice as a poet after many years of silence. A long-time classroom teacher and a spiritual mentor, she lives and writes on a hill overlooking the ocean, about 25 miles south of San Francisco.

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Wouldn’t it be something

12 August 2023 / Editor

Poetry by M.S. Rooney

to meet the one
who invented the spoon, that
mouth-sized bowl, that
stirrer of soups, that
gatherer of rain water
from spring puddles.
It doesn’t seem a thing
you would think to invent
just for yourself.
After all, a stick is quick and sure,
fingers do just fine, and
you can drain a big bowl
with just one tilt.
But for the other,
the child, the beloved,
how we must have yearned
for something more shapely,
more tender, to hold,
to offer,
again and again.

M.S. Rooney lives in Sonoma, California with poet Dan Noreen. Her work appears in journals including The Blue Mountain Review, Illuminations, Leaping Clear and Pensive Journal, and anthologies including A Walk with Nature: Poetic Encounters that Nourish the Soul. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

In My Mother’s Last Garden

12 August 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Regina Berg

The roses near the house have bloomed
and bloomed again.
The tomato vines are lush, laden
with fruit, sun-warm, red, taut with sweetness
and crisp green globes you will slice
thin, cornmeal coat, fry golden
and wrap in a fold of white bread.

The collard greens and cabbages are full grown,
though you will leave them to tender
with the first frost. Cucumbers secret themselves
on the other side of the neighbor’s chain link fence
until your quick eye guides me.

Your eyes and ears are the only things quick about you now.
Cancer and age have leached your bones.

We sit on the small concrete patio where the sun rests
on your thin shoulders and a wind warm
as the remembrance of a Mississippi spring
soothes knuckles swollen with years and labor.

Silvered hair scraped into a single braid and pinned
at your neck, you lean close and laughingly gossip
about the young man who bought the derelict
house next door, though you call hello and wish him well.

You won’t come out here on your own, even
with your cane, you are so fearful of snakes.
and truly we may see one sunning itself
against the house once or twice a year.

When we lived in the small jumble of a house
just down the alley, you tended a patch
in a vacant lot hidden by weeds that towered
over your garden stakes.
There were surely snakes, but
you had children to feed and a sharp hoe.

You who made something from nothing
for so long, have a freezer full.

Now your garden runs
a slender path between the fence
and the concrete walk, filling every inch
with food that will feed us still
when you are gone.

Regina Berg is an emerging poet who resides in Chicago, IL. She is GGE (greatest grandma ever!), a baker, crocheter, and sometime traveler. She enjoys solitary writing, retired life, and lively conversations.

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Artificial Lawn

12 August 2023 / Editor

Fiction by Amy Akiko

He flutters past concrete at the back of houses, knows the slabbed rectangles will not feed him. But look, up ahead, a square of green promise, his own emerald city of grass and worms and slugs and larvae. Swooping down, he prepares to peck into the lifegiving soil, but his beak is rebuffed by an unyielding ground―a manmade sheet of death for the fauna beneath.

Amy Akiko is an educator, journalism graduate and writer from South London. She enjoys creating various forms of fiction including poetry, children’s stories, flash and short stories. Her work is soon to appear in The Tiger Moth Review, and she is currently editing her first novel.

Ruth and Oscar

12 August 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Angela Townsend

Ruth and Oscar have been married forty years, and they have drawn stares for every one.

Oscar, crafted exclusively of knees and elbows, is the word “jaunty” sprung to life. Eighty-six and five-foot-two, he commands eyes bluer than the Earth from space.

Oscar will neither retire from paid work nor stomach being told that he is in any way impressive. What he will do is elbow you, an instant co-conspirator in this majestic business of being awake, and call you “kid” until you wish it was your given name. His polo shirts are sky and indigo, bright enough to spot him across a century.

Statuesque at seventy-eight, Ruth is a cloud of concern, claiming herself unworthy of her white halo. Her mouth is mournful, and if she didn’t love you, she would distrust you when you insist she is one of the kindest people you know.

But Ruth does love you, almost enough to believe the unfathomable things you believe about her. Proficient in ganache and genealogy, she makes cold rooms feel like dens. She feeds strays, only a few of them feline, and lies awake worrying who might be alone this Thanksgiving. Ruth cried when she learned that introversion is an honest, honorable trait, not a shortcoming.

Oscar and Ruth have toilet paper emblazoned with the face of a political figure.

When Oscar sees me, he hugs me so tight I nearly need to have his elbows surgically removed. Ours was one of those instant bonds that makes you wonder if your families touch fingertips above the treeline. Far beyond DNA, Oscar is family now, equal parts scampish brother and Father Abraham.

Ruth learns through cautious eyes but raced through the pages of my affection like one of her Revolutionary War novels. For ten years she has been perplexed by my admiration, telling me I’m kinder than cats and twice as daft. But when Ruth sees Ruth in my mirror, the truth makes her taller, and she shines like God’s angel in her sturdy denim dress.

On my birthday, Ruth carefully lays out cards on her desktop computer, photos of their cats with wry bylines like, “Sage was going to wish you a happy birthday, but she had to eat her third breakfast instead.” I save every one.

Ruth and Oscar are the rare friends with whom I’ve discussed our rare friendship. None of us has any explanation for why we loved each other so quickly and entirely, only that we are very, very fortunate.

I had to downplay the distress of my divorce to Oscar, who shuddered with tears anyway, lip quivering. “This, to the best person we know!”

But Ruth and Oscar found each other after divorces of their own, pasts they don’t discuss, histories that had to happen for us to have Ruth and Oscar.

Oscar and Ruth give me hope.

Oscar and Ruth had better both reach one hundred years.

Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place and has an M.Div. from Princeton Seminary and B.A. from Vassar. Her work has appeared or will be published in upcoming issues of The Amethyst Review, Braided Way, Fathom Magazine, and Young Ravens Literary Review, among others. Angie loves life dearly.

The Visit

12 August 2023 / Editor

Poetry by R.M. Kinder

This house bursts with loving you—
all of you—our voices, vernacular:
“going out of a night,” “Virgie’s man,” “I had went.”
Dear to me, that peasant language I once spoke freely and well,
but it charmed only a few.

Our breed laughed often, sometimes so heartily
the laugh itself was the greatest pleasure of a day,
a day of work—toil—thorough and demanding and done!
We laughed before supper and after,
prayed before the meal and before bed.

What was class and status
but a cloud over land not ours?
We had dumplings, and pot roast, weather,
and animals close to us, named, and well kept.

I loved all of you, and, then, even our enemies
who seamed us together, separate, whole,
a nature, bearing the flags of ourselves,
nothing but that, and proud, proud, proud.

R. M. Kinder is a Missouri writer, author of three collections of short fiction and two novels. Her poems have appeared in Cottonwood, SHR, Appalacian Journal and other journals; her collection, The Likes of Us, was a semi-finalist for the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize at SE Missouri State University.

The Garden

30 July 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Thomas Feeny

for Lorelei

Somebody has to dig,
someone’s called to plant, you say,
shrugging off all those who
with smart grin place
themselves well beyond
remembering how to
scratch and hoe,
turn the soil, pat it, work it.
Yours ever a warm touch
to growth still unfolding.
Like the sun this long season
you are needed.
Later, edging into
winter, how content
you’ll be when,
left to examine your hands,
you nod, wait, anticipate.

Thomas Feeny teaches Italian and Spanish at North Carolina State University. His poetry has appeared in California Poetry Quarterly, Chiron, and Hiram Poetry Journal. He has also done considerable translation of poems and short stories written in the Romance languages.

Queen Elizabeth II died while I was mowing the lawn

27 July 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Joshua Zeitler

I had let it grow longer than I should, and was thinking about how
I had let it grow longer than I should. Weeks, maybe months, of growth.
The mower was having a tough time of it. I had to keep backing up

and pushing forward. One of the wild plants I’d never noticed before
had fruit that looked like little green paper lanterns, a groundcherry.
I had decided to steer around it when the mower choked out. I tried to start it

back up again but it just billowed smoke, and then chugged along
billowing smoke. I couldn’t breathe. I was gasping for air, and besides,
I wanted to give the groundcherries a chance to grow, and the other

plants I would have loved if I’d given them time: the goldenrod, the Queen
Anne’s lace, chicory—yes, even the thistle—have you ever seen
how beautifully the bull thistle blooms? I’ve always dug it out before

it could truly flower. Call it pragmatism, or fear, those formidable
needles. I’m changing my mind. I’ll let it grow. Maybe
I won’t even fix the mower, which doesn’t really look broken,

it just looks like it always does when I’m not using it—slim, and quiet,
and polite in its stillness, which might now last forever. Not laziness, I insist
to myself as I head inside, but a kind of mercy, of grace—and then

I see.

Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer hailing from the heart of Michigan. They are pursuing an MFA in poetry at Alma College, and their poems have been previously published in Black Fox Literary Magazine.

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Changes

25 July 2023 / Editor

Fiction by Brian Daldorph

“The only thing that changes,” Sheila says, “is that nothing changes.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I say.

Sheila’s been taking night classes at Juco, and she reads books of poetry in the kitchen while I’m watching TV. We used to sit together on the couch, our thighs pressed together, our arms around each other, and I’d tell her things about the nature shows I watch all the time.

Do you know how much a grizzly bear eats in a day?

Do you know how fast a tiger shark swims?

Which is bigger, the Taj Mahal or a humpbacked whale?

Sheila would ask me how I knew these cool things and I’d say, “I’m just a smart guy, that’s why you married me.”

But now she’s the one telling me things about Buddhism and poetry and this Russian story about a rich man falling off a chair, hitting his side and then he’s dying and his family and colleagues gather like vultures waiting to feast.

“What’s the big deal about that?” I say. “That’s what happened when my Uncle Alex got sick.” (We all thought he had money, but we were wrong).

Sheila asks me if she can read me one of her poems, so I say, “OK, just wait until after my show, please, because this is really interesting. It’s about tarantulas down in New Mexico and the border states.”

The show ends and slides into another about hyenas, and I keep watching though I know Sheila’s hovering, poem in hand. She’s in bed after the hyena show, turned away from me.

I don’t mind her doing some of what she’s doing but not all of it because we had things really nice just the way they were so why make changes?

I’ll tell her in the morning that I’d like to hear her poem, please, and tell her too that I bought chocolates for her. I put them in back of the refrigerator and forgot to tell her about them. She can write a poem about them, about how just like love they’re dark and sweet but sometimes difficult to find.

Brian Daldorph teaches at the University of Kansas and Douglas County Jail.

The Bluebird Word

Page 31 of 60

Fall Sun

Wandering the Mojave

Wouldn’t it be something

In My Mother’s Last Garden

Artificial Lawn

Ruth and Oscar

The Visit

The Garden

Queen Elizabeth II died while I was mowing the lawn

Changes

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