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Awakening

13 May 2023 / Editor

Poetry by N.T. Chambers

It was a late
Spring morning
the sun barely reddening
a drowsy sky –
our dog restlessly
asleep in his corner –
a quiet universe
within the room
undisturbed by events
yet to be
or the Sunday
one-half hour away.

You were
a sepia photograph
in a semi-darkened space–––
contorted on the sheets
with pillow-combed hair
gently caressing one cheek –
a singular bead of sweat
drifting silently
down your neck
as you turned over –
offering a dream-laden smile
to no one in particular.

I found myself wanting
to draw you closer
to inhale your night muskiness,
feel your breath on my chest,
but chose to honor your slumber –
there was coffee to make,
a paper to be retrieved,
pancakes to be cooked
and a lifetime to be shared

N.T. Chambers writes about the emotions, events, and experiences intrinsic to the human condition. Numerous works have been published in several journals and magazines, among them The Banyan Review, Inlandia, The Orchard Poetry Journal, The Decadent Review, New Note Poetry, Quibble Magazine, and Share Literary Journal.

Late Love

11 May 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Sharon Scholl

We meet in the dark kitchen
with separate hungers,
different aching joints,
each with reasons to be sleepless.

I switch on the stove light,
wince at sudden brightness.
You click off your flashlight,
stand mute, indecisive.

What will digest at this hour?
Something quick and harmless
that may invite sleep – at least
fill dull time until it comes.

Quietly we munch and sip, shuffle
by habit around each other.
It’s the company that satisfies.

Sharon Scholl is a retired college professor (humanities) who convenes a poetry critique group and maintains a website of original music compositions (freeprintmusic.com) for small churches. She is the patron for poetry and music composition contests for young creators. Her poetry chapbooks are available via Amazon Books.

The Leaving Moment

9 May 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Tracey Ormerod

I don’t remember packing, but my things must have been on the truck: the plastic-yellow colander I still use every day, the one he cursed while poking the holes with a corkscrew to dislodge spaghetti starch; and the crock pot—just last week, it slow-stewed the roast.

I do remember what couldn’t go on the truck: the propane tank. Over thirty years later, the moving guy no longer has a face but I can still see his burly body hauling it over to where I stood and dropping it at my feet. The lawn muffled the thud. “It’s full … can’t go on the truck.”

He left it there and went back to lift off the truck ramp. He was ready to leave. I turned to my mother in a panic. “What do I do with it? Do I just leave it here?”

He softened and came back. “Here, you open it up, like this.”

He turned the valve. The tank whistled.

Researchers say we alter our memories every time we look.

Quantum particles are like that too. Scientists can’t watch them without changing them, so they’ll never know how they behave when no one is looking. Nonetheless, they can’t help themselves.

Maybe that’s why countries and cultures carve their collective memories deep into stone and story.

Families collect them too. They share ‘remember whens’ that hold their tales together, until there’s a rupture and the timeline becomes a shredded thread of itself.

In a review^[1] of the film, Women Talking, Eliza Smith reflects on her missing memory of leaving her first marriage:

“I may not be able to recall my own leaving moment … but I do remember the precarious, optimistic feeling of leaving one world for another that didn’t quite exist yet.”

She mentions a friend who can’t remember her leaving moment either. So, for the first time, I learn there’s at least two other women like me.

How many of us are out there? A collective without a memory.

I don’t remember why he didn’t get the tank, except maybe the barbecue had been a gift from my side of the family, like the bone china and crystal bowls.

I also don’t recall where my two-year-old was that day.

And then there’s the house keys. How did they get dropped off with the real estate lawyer? I’m not even sure how we sold our house; I don’t remember any sales agents or buyers.

So many details that would’ve been important at the time, while the only other thing I can remember is a song that played on the car radio: Wilson Phillips singing “Hold On, things can change. Things can go your way …”

We leave home. We get left—they say there’s fifty ways to leave a lover. Sometimes, we leave the country. There’s also the countless tiny leavings, like after a dinner date or a party.

We arrive. We leave. Over and over and over until, at last, we depart dearly.

I don’t remember why the mover left the tank with me, except maybe he was hungry and took a lunchbreak. It was full and emptying it would take time.

Even when gas weighs heavy in a tank, it comes out invisible, but I stood there and stared down at it like there was something to see while it hissed like a snake in a pressure cooker, making my leaving loud for the neighbours watching from behind their bay window sheers.

Silent together, we couldn’t help but watch as it grew quiet and the frost spread all over the tank, the kind that burns when you touch it.

^[1] Smith, Eliza. “The Most Satisfying Me Too Movie Yet.” The Cut, January 20, 2023. https://www.thecut.com/article/women-talking-me-too-movie.html.

Tracey Ormerod is a Canadian writer and photographer. After growing up in the wilds of the city, she now lives among the forests and farms of rural Ontario. At times an accountant, business analyst, website consultant, and classroom teacher, she is now enjoying a writing life. Read more at https://traceyormerod.com.

On Observing My Daughter At Breakfast

7 May 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Clarence Allan Ebert

My daughter wears a hand-me-down shirt
tie-dyed with the stars, three sizes too big.
Her clothes arrange themselves
in psychedelic constellations.
Her face is a yellow rose through the light
of honey dollops dropping in milk.
She has never tripped and has no band-aids.
She makes no fuss and sleeps with a night light
She is barely aware I love her so much,
oblivious to her own impermanence.

Clarence Allan Ebert celebrated his 70th birthday recently and pledged to maintain some Baby Boomer relevance in the world through the fine craft of poetry. Read his poem from The Bluebird Word‘s January 2023 issue.

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What They Can’t Take Away

4 May 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Raymond Berthelot

The sailboats at anchor
are pulled in one direction
by the tide between the keys

Remember that woman
crazy or drunk, walking by the sanitarium
she too, refused assistance

What is it about moonlight and tropical flowers?
for a while at least
peace seems possible

But back to the sea
and the sun distantly setting, swollen
at a place we’ll never be

Raymond Berthelot is the Historic Sites District Manager for the Louisiana Office of State Parks. His work has appeared in publications such as Progenitor, Mantis, Peregrine Journal, Apricity Magazine, The Elevation Review, the Carolina Quarterly and DASH Literary Journal. A chapbook, The Middle Ages, is available with Finishing Line Press.

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Wolves

2 May 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Alice Collinsworth

When I was very young, my parents assured me
there were no wolves near our home, in spite of fairy tales.
Wolves lived in forests, in mountains, they said.
We had neither trees nor hills.

When I grew older, we visited a zoo, where I saw wolves
kept in cages, pacing, squinting through the insufficient bars
between us. Calculating.

Then came rumors of wolves roaming the plains,
sightings at local farms, small dogs
suddenly missing. I could hear them wail.

Then they came to live with me, right here in town.
They’ve built a den on the porch and they come inside,
helping themselves to sandwiches and wine,
sharpening the knives.

I no longer have a cat.

I slink upstairs and listen to their laughter
and the clink of silverware.
Helpless, I howl in anticipation.

Alice Collinsworth retired recently from a career involving journalism, writing, and media relations. Her poems have been published in several online journals, and she was twice selected as one of Oklahoma’s Woody Guthrie Poets. Her writing has won awards in numerous local and regional contests. She lives near Oklahoma City.

The Litterer and I

30 April 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Marcia Yudkin

This year the litter is blue – a bright, metallic hue found nowhere in nature. Not even our lake sparkling in the reflection of a cloudless sky matches that color. Nestled among stalks of ragweed or heaps of dried-up leaves along the roads near me, blue cans glint in sunlight.

In the past I spotted much more variety in the tossed-out containers: amber Michelob bottles, fruit-colored hard-seltzer cans, translucent one-shot nips of brandy or vodka, red pop-tops sporting the distinctive Coca-Cola script and white Budweisers speckled with red and blue swirls. But this summer and fall, it’s overwhelmingly blue Bud Lights blighting the roadsides.

For years I’ve waged a secret campaign against such aluminum discards. During my daily five-mile walks from home, if a can catches my eye in the quarter-mile or half-mile stretches without any houses I’ll gingerly pick it up and drop it off in the brush beside the next driveway. The cans normally disappear within a week rather than start to form a junkyard. In this way, I spread responsibility for restoring nature’s harmonious palette of greens, grays and browns, so restful to experience.

Why don’t I instead blitz through my walking routes once in a while, adding all the tossed-away cans to a trash bag like a reverse Santa Claus? Humorist David Sedaris did this obsessively in West Sussex, where he lives, his hauls becoming legendary to the point that his district named a garbage truck “Pigpen Sedaris” to honor him.

For me, though, the idea of getting known in my neighborhood as a trash vigilante makes me uneasy. While some would applaud my public service, others might kick dirt in my face over it, like the gun-loving guy one town over who taunted his opposite-politics neighbor by plunking a ratty old portable toilet at the outlet of their shared driveway. It feels safer not to be conspicuous, to carefully stick to the path of peaceful co-existence.

Until this summer and fall, I assumed from the variety of roadside trash that it came from random passers-through, drivers from other towns who had no reason to care if they littered here. “Why do people do this?” I once asked a hiking buddy who grew up in our area. In Massachusetts, Anne told me, it’s illegal to have an open container of anything alcoholic in a moving truck or car. For some reason I didn’t know this.

People who chug a beer on the way home from work therefore toss the can when it’s almost empty, Anne said, so as to not get in trouble if a cop stopped them. Yet never once in 20 years have I seen anyone pulled over by police on our back roads – not for speeding, for having an out-of-date inspection sticker or for anything else. Or maybe they didn’t want folks at home to know how many beers they were drinking.

And now because almost all the cans matched one another and because new empties would show up like overnight tin mushrooms right after I cleared a stretch of road, I began to suspect that this was from just one Bud Light fan who lived nearby. If I tracked where the blue discards appeared and which roads never had them, mightn’t that indicate the culprit’s homeward route – and maybe lead like breadcrumbs to his location? Perhaps he (yes, in my mind it was a man) would nod nicely when I told him the impact of his tosses onto seemingly neglected yet actually cherished verges.

After all, soon after my husband and I first moved to the country, a guy who often canoed in the marsh behind our house came by and complained that the regulation-blue tarp we’d hung up to shelter our back deck from rain spoiled his view. Couldn’t we put up something brown instead? Surprised, we replaced the tarp – almost exactly the vivid hue of the Bud Lights bothering me now – with something matching our dark wood shingles. Since then, the natural colorscape I live amongst has grown on me.

But most likely the litterer would respond with “Who do you think you are, lady?” Right. Who do I think I am? Am I being righteous or self-righteous? Asked in my imagination, the questions echoed and echoed.

As a cleanup fairy, I’m not doing any harm, I finally decided, especially if I move the litter to unobtrusive staging areas instead of next to driveways. One Saturday I hauled seventeen half-smashed blue beasties to the town dump along with my own week’s trash. Soon a blanket of white, growing higher and higher, began to cover any cans I missed. And when the winter sun twinkled, winking at me as I walked were Bud Light-colored reflectors, waist-high on long metal stems, telling the snowplows where not to go.

Marcia Yudkin lives in the woods of Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960). The author of 17 books, she publishes a Substack newsletter called Introvert UpThink (https://www.introvertupthink.com) in which she critiques society’s myths and misunderstandings about introverts.

The Phone Call

25 April 2023 / Editor

Fiction by Laura L. Feldman & Stephen M. Feldman

I willed my phone to ring. The literary agent had scheduled the call for 2:00 p.m. Not yet late, still one minute before the hour.

I had dreamed of being a writer since junior high, when I’d written my first story for an honors English class. The A+ didn’t hurt, and neither did my mom’s encouragement.

My novel manuscript had consumed two years of writing and rewriting. Before contacting agents, I devoted a month to crafting a query that pitched the story and my writing background in three flawless paragraphs. I sent it to fifteen agents. Three requested the full manuscript.

A month later I received an email scheduling this phone appointment. Soon I would be talking with an agent who wanted to represent me and sell my novel.

I would be a writer. ‘Yes, I’ve published a novel,’ I would say. No longer a poseur.

I checked the time again.

Two minutes late. It didn’t mean anything. I needed to relax, act as if I spoke to agents all the time.

I glanced at my list of questions, lifted from several books about landing an agent. Prepare for the phone call, they all instructed. Don’t immediately say, ‘Yes, yes, yes! I want you to be my agent.’ Ask questions. What did she like about the manuscript? What were the weaknesses? What changes would she want to see before submitting it to publishers? Did she have a plan for the submission process?

Act like a professional writer.

Three minutes late.

Had I gotten the day wrong? Was the call scheduled for tomorrow rather than today? I opened the agent’s email.

I’d already read the brief message at least a dozen times. But I reread it again, twice: “Can you talk about your ms. this coming Thursday at 2 p.m., ET?”

No mistake. It was today.

The phone buzzed. I checked the screen and my stomach hardened into a knot. This call would change my life.

The phone buzzed again. I took a deep breath and answered.

“Hello,” I squeaked. “Sorry.” I cleared my throat and tried again. “Hello, this is Sara Klein.”

“Hi, Sara,” said a sweet lilting voice.

“Hello,” I said, for the third time.

“Just so you know, I’m not calling to offer representation.”

“What?”

“I want to be clear at the outset. So you’re not disappointed. Or confused.”

The ice cracked and I crashed through. Panicking, I opened my mouth to scream and freezing water rushed in. I was drowning in the darkness. Which way was up, which way was down?

“Some writers,” she said, her voice muffled and distant, “think this first phone call is to offer representation.”

“No,” I croaked. “Of course not.”

I glanced at my list of questions. Nothing there suggested an appropriate response.

“If you’re amenable,” she said, “I’d like to discuss your manuscript and some changes I’d like to see.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, holding in my tears.

“If you rewrite it,” she continued, “I’d be willing to take another look at it.”

“That would be great,” I managed to say.

“No promises of course.”

“That makes sense. You’ll have to read the—”

“I don’t want to mislead you. I plan to read the rewrite, if you do it. But at this stage, I can’t promise I’ll have the time.”

“Oh.” I squeezed my temples. What were we even discussing, then? “I understand.”

“Do you still want to proceed?”

“Please,” I wanted to hang up, throw my manuscript in the trash, and cry for a month. “Go ahead,” I said.

“Wonderful. The first thing I noticed was a problem with the plot.”

“The plot?” Shit. Shit. Shit.

“That’s right. After the first plot point—”

“Hold on,” I said, clicking my ball point pen. “Just one second.” I flipped the page where I’d jotted my useless questions. “Sorry. I’m ready.”

And she was off and running, tearing the manuscript apart. I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t comprehend enough to ask intelligent questions. I tried to take copious notes, nearly transcribing the conversation. Later on, after I calmed down, I might be able to learn from my notes and benefit from this torturous experience.

If an agent, any agent, was willing to critique my manuscript, I should consider myself lucky—that’s what I reminded myself. Despite my disappointment, I would rewrite and send the manuscript to her again. Of course I could do exactly what she wanted, and she could still reject it. Or I might not even hear back from her. She hadn’t even committed to reading the next version.

As she talked, I decided to send the rewrite to other agents as well. Why not?

The phone call ended abruptly. She had another appointment. Maybe with an actual client? I didn’t ask.

Hollowed, drained of motivation, I riffled through my three pages of notes without comprehending them. My gaze shifted to the desk drawer on the lower right. I didn’t want to do it. But I couldn’t fool myself any longer. Neither this agent nor any other would likely offer representation.

I swallowed, my throat dry and raspy. Then I slid open the drawer and pulled out a stack of law school applications. I’d put it off long enough.

Laura L. Feldman writes and edits for the Wyoming Survey & Analysis Center. She has degrees and certificates from the University of Oregon, Stanford, and Harvard. Stephen M. Feldman is the Housel/Arnold Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Wyoming. He has published several short stories and nonfiction books.

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I learned self-destruction from a cartoon

23 April 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Esther Sadoff

All morning, sweat springs from Arnold’s brow
as he awaits the beatdown at the end of the day:

a pummeling between him and a huge kid
and everyone knows who’s going to win.

I’ve been lowered a few rungs by self-deprecation.
Folded myself into impressive origami-smallness.

I’ve thrown in the towel, waved a white flag, and run
for the hills but in this episode of Hey Arnold!,

Arnold actually starts to hit himself in the school yard,
a dizzying kaleidoscope of faces spinning round,

but what stands out most are their egg-shaped
eyes vacant and hungry for action.

Arnold gives himself such an insane beating
that he scares the bully into submission.

I’d like to think of myself exactly like that:
two sides of the mirror fighting each other,

a reflection that won’t quit, myself standing over
(or under) my other self and declaring it some kind of win.

Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, Jet Fuel Review, Cathexis Poetry Northwest, Pidgeonholes, Santa Clara Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others.

gray house with fireplace surrounded by grass under white and gray cloudy sky — Photo by Sebastian Sørensen on Pexels.com

The House

20 April 2023 / Editor

Poetry by G. Milton

The house, like my childhood, abandoned.
Withered, worn, and saddened.
The broken door hangs by its rusty hinges.
Once mighty, now only cringes.

The windows, like my dreams, shattered.
Shiny shards of glass tossed and scattered.
The ragged steps creak and sway
buckling under the stress of another torrid day.

The roof, like my life, dilapidated and leaking.
Much like the tears I’m constantly weeping.
The paint just peels and fades away.
Once vibrant, now, only a somber gray.

The foundation, like my soul, buckled and cracked.
Trembling like a kitten being attacked.
Once strong, stubborn, and sturdy.
Now, broken, weakened, and dirty.

The house, like me, has been through it all.
Beaten, battered, ready to fall.
Although we dread the next inevitable storm,
inside us both, it is still inviting and warm.

G. Milton is a part time writer and full-time grandparent.

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