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Tag: love (Page 4 of 6)

home for the holidays

Poetry by Nicole Farmer

the cold the waiting
the airport the anticipation the anxiety
the arrival the introductions the hugs
the car the road the talking
the home the familiar the suitcases
the shopping the cooking the eating
the mess the cleaning the dishes
the board games the laughter the competition
the fire the warmth the stories
the traditions the movies the quoted lines
the photos the misunderstandings the confrontations
the alcohol the overeating the teasing
the gifts the hugs the texting
the sore throats the tea the tissues
the cold the grey the wind
the accusations the whispers the hurt feelings
the love the irritation the exhaustion
the suitcases the packing the loading
the car the road the silence
the airport the departure the hugs
the cold the relief


Nicole Farmer is a reading tutor living in Asheville, NC. Her poems have been published in many magazines. Her chapbook entitled Wet Underbelly Wind was published in 2022. Her book Honest Sonnets: memories from an unorthodox upbringing in verse will be published by Kelsay Books in 2023. Read more at NicoleFarmerpoetry.com

Tony Told Me

Nonfiction by Susan Mannix

I remember the moment. The look he gave me through the iron bars of his stall, straight in my eye, said it all. “It’s time to let me go.”

But I wasn’t ready, no one in my family was, most of all my sixteen year-old daughter Lauren. Tony (Registered Jockey Club name: Spartans Pride) was her heart horse. The one we searched for and she chose. The one who started making her dreams come true. I remembered how her face lit up in surprise and delight as she ran across the grass parking lot to our trailer. “Mom, I won! I won! My first blue ribbon!” She held it up proudly. That was a year ago and just a month after we bought him

What a day that was. 

So different from today.

 Tony started showing signs of discomfort earlier while Lauren was at school. “Camping out” (stretching his hind legs behind to relieve abdominal pain), pawing, pacing. This wasn’t the first time with him and I waited for it to pass like it usually did.

It didn’t. The pawing became more frantic and he started to roll. 

Phone in hand, I ran out into the paddock and hollered at Tony. He popped up and as I lead him into the barn, I called our veterinarian. In the twenty minutes before he arrived, I walked Tony around in the front of our barn to keep him from rolling, which could cause a deadly twist in his intestine.

 The vet determined it was an impaction – a blockage caused by a mass of grain and hay in his gut. The only thing to do was pump mineral oil and warm water in him in hopes of loosening it. Once done, Tony was given a dose of Banamine, an equine pain reliever. 

The wait began. I checked him often, relieved to see each time he was comfortable. He even passed a little bit of manure – another good sign. Once the drugs wore off in a couple of hours, we’d know more. 

The pain returned. Then came the on-call emergency vet. By now Lauren and her sister, Brooke, were home from school and had set up in the barn with a close friend to keep constant watch on Tony. More mineral oil and Banamine, Another wait. If this didn’t work, the only option was surgery.

“He seems more comfortable.”

“I bet this will work.”

“Look, he’s nosing around for hay. That’s a good sign.”

Statements of hope that were delivered with eyes that were desperately grasping for reassurance. To each one I nodded vigorously and gave an enthusiastic “Yes, I agree!” I sent the girls up to the house for a quick break and stayed behind.

The soft spring air and the chirping of the tree frogs could not ease the heavy stillness of the barn. Darkness pressed in on all sides.

I looked into Tony’s face seeking a way to push back the darkness. Our eyes met. Mine begged him to get better; his said it’s time to face what’s happening. That’s when he told me, even though he stood quietly. 

Hours before we loaded him onto our trailer and made the fifty-minute drive to the Marion duPont Equine Medical Center in Leesburg. Before his worried, scared eyes said “I can’t do this,” as veterinary techs took his vitals. Before the staff prepped him for emergency surgery, his body wracked with pain. Before my daughter sat for hours on the cold hard floor of a dimly lit hallway, offering up her dreams so her horse could graze once again in our pasture. 

Before the phone call that woke us after only two hours sleep.

Before the desperate voice of the veterinary surgeon came through the receiver begging for permission to let him go. 

Before I knew it was time, Tony told me.


Susan Mannix is from Maryland, where she lives on a small farm with her family and menagerie of horses, dogs & cats. Formerly a biomedical research editor, she is now working towards a Master’s degree in creative writing from Wilkes University. Find her at susanmannix.com and on Twitter at @lynsuze.

that’s enough

Poetry by Corey Bryan

I’d walk again through icy rain
to eat a chicken salad sandwich on
the world’s driest bread with you
just one more time.
I’d pretend to like seafood and say all
the right things like, “shrimp are the blue collar
workers of the ocean and it feels bad to eat them
but this cocktail sauce is way too good”
and stuff my face.
I’d support everything you
say no questions asked even if you do get a
tiny bit conspiratorial after the third glass
of the house red.
I’d tear down those reality tv show posters
they hung up on Boulevard
which cover your favorite piece of graffiti.
I’d cook you dinner
and buy all your favorite ingredients like
watermelon radishes and dinosaur kale and all the
other vegetables that sound crazy like that.
I’d watch all those shark
documentaries you love and
the more I think about it the more I think I’d
punch a shark in the nose, saddle him up
and take off for Lisbon where you are
now and say to you
“I hate shrimp and watermelon radish
and red wine and graffiti and I especially
hate dry bread
but I love you and I think
that’s enough.”


Corey Bryan is a fourth year student at Georgia State University majoring in Rhetoric and Composition. He is currently writing daily poetry prompts, along with some original poems, with a friend of his at poetryispretentious.com. He has one poem forthcoming at Sage Cigarettes Magazine titled “her kind of love”.

The Lamp in the Room

Nonfiction by Melissa Knox

The bell-shaped white lilies, stretching upward, concealing tiny light bulbs, charmed me. With the delicacy, though not the colors, of Art Nouveau, the lamp softened the room. There was a little white plug. I wondered why it wasn’t plugged in yet.

The furniture was white and mostly square, except for a small black leather sofa near the bed. Between it and the bed, a laminated white bedside table held my husband’s toiletries bag and plastic bottles of pills. The window, which didn’t open, looked out on the white, rectangular buildings of the university hospital. Beyond that, the road filled with pitched-roof German houses, tidy, so much neater than ours. From that road, I figured, he and I could walk to our house in six minutes. But he was never going to walk that road again.

“Oh, look at this pretty lamp!” I said, as the nurse wheeled him to his bed. He cast a blankly sad look at the lamp.

My husband knew what the lamp meant before I did. It didn’t charm him, I now think, because he’d correctly identified it. Where I just saw lovely design, he, raised Catholic, had seen many a virgin-and-child scene strewn with lilies, symbols of life after death. His tumor markers had vaulted up, after a few weeks of dramatic descent. His doctors couldn’t pull any more rabbits out of hats. A few days earlier, he’d had one last immunotherapy. The doctors said it had no side effects. My husband and I sat on his white bed and read the plastic bag listing the side effects, one of which was sudden death.

“It’s just death!” we joked. We spoke of the children and their triumphs, chatted about the one who’d gone vegan for a week and now demanded steak, discussed the wet spot in the left-hand corner of our guest room and how to repair it, held hands. “I couldn’t have asked for a better wife,” said my husband. What came out of my mouth was, “Please send a message to let me know you are okay.” I wished I could have taken that one back. It fell into the whiteness of the room.

The lamp was lit when I returned around one in the morning with my middle child. The room was white, but my husband was yellowing, his lifeless face looking surprised. He’d fallen forward so quickly he knocked over the nurse who was stabilizing his breathing. Just like that, what I knew would happen astonished me when it did—and now the white seemed the blankness of unknowing, the move toward “that undiscovered realm from which no traveler returns,” which we cannot describe—it’s white. Waiting for us to draw on when we get there? Or just nothingness? The room couldn’t tell me; the lilies gleamed—the lamp plugged in, the light shining.


Melissa Knox‘s recent writing appears or is forthcoming in Counterweight, Areo, Parhelion and ACM. Read more of her writing here: https://melissaknox.com

Hiding from the Moon

Poetry by Ben Westlie

On your porch in our stupor
I kept turning to leave
your voice clung to me
holding me like my shadow.

I don’t know if I trembled
from the bitter temperatures
or how your heart kept speaking out
of turn. The green glowing in your irises

like small cauldrons. The yearning bones of your face.

I should’ve hidden from the moon
so there could be no shadows to latch onto.

I should have blamed my drunken blood.
I prayed for deafness upon my heart.

I should have sprinted down your porch stairs
until I reached another state.

My kind of love wasn’t in any of your mirrors.

Your face is what I see when snow becomes
stars from moonlight. When I hear the creak of old
wood on porches. When I see unruly auburn hair.

I turned around to the begging
of your face. A friend is all you wanted.

The moonlight made me beastly.
A feral creature raging and starving.


Ben Westlie holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Publications: Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25 edited by Naomi Shihab Nye, The Fourth River, Third Coast, Atlas and Alice, the tiny journal, Trampset, ArLiJo, Otis Nebula, WhimsicalPoet, DASH, MUSE, Speckled Trout Review, and Superpresent.

The Leavings

Nonfiction by Susan Reese

I feel the days of parenthood creeping by, distant and unfulfilled. I hear the ticking of my children’s childhood clocks as that time passes forever by. Without a present and without a memory. These are feelings which fill my days and flood my heart with longing, the pain of separation and the melancholy of despair.

Lou Reese, #52760-080, 1992

You called late one night. You called every night, but it was unusual for you to call so late. After the kids were already asleep.

I was in our bed, exhausted from the day, finishing my tea and reading for a few minutes before turning out the light. That first year with you away in prison, it was hard to fall asleep.

We chatted about this and that. You had a new cellmate. Just arrived today. How was I holding up? Pretty good I guess. How was Beau’s sleepover with Orion last night? Fun. Uneventful.

I could tell there was another reason for the late-night call.

I closed my book and placed it on the bedside table. I turned off the lamp and lay on my back in the dark, holding only the phone, pretending you were lying next to me.

There was an awkward silence before you cleared your throat, lowered your voice, and said, “Susan, do you think it would be easier for the kids if you all stopped visiting me? Let them stay home, concentrate on school, their friends and having fun? Let them just pretend I’m away on a long business trip?”

My impulse was to comfort you, to say whatever I had to say to make you feel better, but my anger rose as I recognized your selfishness. I sat up and switched the light back on. Maybe that would be better for the kids, you’d said. My heart was racing as my eyes adjusted to the light. I was wide awake now.

How could you imagine our children not seeing you for three years? Hearing your voice from 800 miles away without seeing your face, or you theirs. Katie needing you for every precarious step from thirteen to sixteen. You were the most important male in her life. Beau needing you for the things I felt ill-equipped to handle. Sports, competition and before long, girls. And McKenzie—the baby. Needing you to be proud of her successes and your reassurance that she was not being disloyal having surrogate fathers for the first grade, father-daughter pancake breakfast and her first under the lights soccer game.

And me, needing you to be strong, to somehow manage to thrive. With the addition of everything else, were you willing to hand me the entire weight of parenthood for three years?

The longer we talked into the night, the easier it was for you to tell me the truth. I relaxed back into our bed and listened to you, my faraway husband.

 “I don’t know if I can handle this, Susan. I’m ashamed, and I hate the kids seeing me this way.” Ashamed to be in the visiting room filled with strangers. The f***ing guards on red alert watching for a forbidden kiss between us. Ashamed of the count, having the kids watch as you line up subserviently with tattooed, long-haired inmates. Ashamed. “Every time you all come to see me, I don’t think I can stand it. When you all leave, I’m a total mess.”

Yes, the leavings hurt the most. Watching us walk away from you—off to the Comfort Inn as you head back to your dorm to climb up on your tiny top bunk, put your t-shirt over your face, and cry yourself to sleep. It would be easier for you to do your time on your own. Sure, probably. But at what cost to our kids? Not a price I was willing to have them pay.


Susan Reese is writing a book length manuscript dealing with the experience she and her family had when her husband, Lou, was incarcerated for three years. Writings include poems and essays written by Lou (the insider) and Susan (the outsider), reflecting the fact that the whole family was incarcerated.

Parting Gift

Special Selection for the 2022/2023 Winter Holiday Issue

Nonfiction by Marianne Lonsdale

I cooked dinner for Dad in early December, warming up canned baked beans, cut up hot dogs and a little ketchup in a pot. The television news blared from the family room accompanied by Dad’s hacking cough. Dad took up smoking again after Mom, his wife of 62 years, died four years earlier. I pushed open a window to diffuse the constant stream of second-hand smoke but worried the cold air would chill him.

I’d given up on cooking anything other than dishes with hot dogs or ground beef—Dad considered pretty much everything else an extravagance. Individual bowls of iceberg lettuce served as my attempt at something healthy and green. I whipped up his favorite salad dressing, equal parts mayonnaise and ketchup.

I put our plates on the table and we took the same spots that we’d been sitting in since we’d moved to this house when I was five years old. Dad at the head, and me to his right. We missed having my mom at the other end and being surrounded by my sister and six brothers.

He spooned the goopy dressing over the beans mix and the salad, ate quickly and handed me his plate.

“Is there more?” he asked.

He’d weighed in at just 130 pounds at his last doctor’s visit. I wasn’t sure what he ate on the nights that I or one of my siblings were not at the house, and it made me happy to see him with an appetite and eating with gusto.

“Thank you for cooking,” he said. “I really like seeing you. I appreciate your coming.”

Dad said the same few sentences to me on each visit and not much else. His world had shrunk to the walls of his house and his memories of his wife, my mother.

Mom’s death disoriented him; he still cried every time I visited. He was so lonely but had little tolerance for visitors. He was even ready for me to leave after about 90 minutes, usually heading up the few stairs to his bedroom without saying goodnight.

He objected to any help. We’d forced a housecleaner on him and he refused to pay her. He sometimes smelled. He’d just begun using a walker after several falls, including one getting out of the sports car he’d bought at age 86, and he lay on the street as cars sped by until some man eventually stopped and helped him up. But every now and then he’d perk up.

“What’s that bird?” Dad asked after he’d taken his last bite of beans. I took a few steps to the freezer, hoping he’d enjoy the vanilla ice cream I’d brought.

What the heck was he talking about? I stared at him; even his eyes, deep brown with hazel highlights, seemed to have faded, filmy and dull.

“The one that people think brings babies?”

“A stork?” I asked and brought two bowls of ice cream to the table. “Do you mean a stork?”

“That’s it! I knew you’d know.” Dad beamed.

“When you were born, the nurse brought me to the nursery in the hospital. All these babies were in clear plastic boxes, lined up. On the wall behind them was a painting of this huge stork—that bird had the most incredible brown eyes. So big and warm and beautiful. The nurse pointed you out to me and I just stared. My girl had the same eyes. So beautiful. Do you remember me calling you Birdseye? Do you remember that nickname?”

I’d hated that nickname. My sister was Princess and I was Birdseye. The name was ugly. I was jealous of Princess. I wondered why my Dad called me Birdseye but never asked why. Questions weren’t much tolerated in our household.

This story had never been told. I was near 60 years old and Dad was 89. He shared this memory with so much love. He said so little these days, like every thought was difficult to pull out.

His story surprised me. I’d never considered that the name might be one of affection. Dad had an unpredictable temper and I’d often assumed that he found humor in being mean and teasing. And I’d shut down, cutting him out of many events of my life, and not sharing how I felt with him. Now I wonder how many times he and I misunderstood each other, blocking so much love that we might have shared.

I didn’t know that would be our last dinner together, or that hospice care would start for Dad in a couple of weeks, and that he’d die on December 27th. I am so grateful that this parting gift, the truth of the nickname, flew from him to me and I better know how much he loved me, right from the start.


Marianne Lonsdale writes personal essays, fiction, and literary interviews. Her work has been published in Literary Mama, Grown and Flown, Pulse and has aired on public radio. She lives in Oakland, California.

Consider the Dawn

Poetry by Jayne Martin

For Ellie

A raspberry wave splashing
Onto a blank canvas of possibility
Sunflowers turn their faces to the east
Eager to sip from the rising sun
Knowing nothing of the indigo of sorrow
That weighs upon my heart
Taken much too soon
Your loss still a fresh wound festering
regret for all I could have done
better
I drown in the silence
Force myself to rise and step into the day
It is a gift, this life
Each moment
As fleeting as the flight of fireflies
I will be like the sunflowers
My face to sun following its journey
across a serene sky
One breath in, one out. Repeat
Trusting in the passage of time to heal
Bowing my face to the west where
The sun drops into tomorrow
As I await
The dawn of another day to come


Jayne Martin is the author of “Tender Cuts,” a collection of microfiction and “The Daddy Chronicles-Memoir of a Fatherless Daughter.” She lives in California, but dreams of living in Paris. Visit her at www.jaynemartin-writer.com, Twitter: @Jayne_Martin, Instagram: jayne.martin.writer, TikTok: jaynemartin05

What a Nature Poem Can Learn from a Love Poem

Nonfiction by Jesse Curran

Here I find myself: ten years into a marriage, seven years into two kids, two-plus years into a pandemic. Eros has gone dormant, a long winter of eating potatoes and squash and quietly reading books before seeking deep sleep. But it’s spring and I’m dwelling in things that used to be. I’ve been digging through the old file boxes, trying to find that poorly proof-read graduate paper. The one from the Romanticism seminar. The one about Shelley hugging the tree. About the roaring inside. About laying your body next to the earth. I was twenty-five and on fire, the libidinous pulse of poetry reached into every mundanity and exaltation of the day. For those years, everything was erotic. Everything was about connection. About a radical sense of continuity. About reaching through the loneliness. It was running and running and running and being not yet arrived. Whitman’s lusty oak. A Georgia O’Keefe poppy. It was the only subject. The tree-hugger was it: a symbol of the magnetic pull toward a forgotten union. Then something shifted. I turned thirty, I got married, I got pregnant, I got tired. For the past half dozen years, I’ve been working on the virtue of contentment—an often Buddhist and sometimes Stoic sense of equanimity. But still I burn. My god, I burn. I steep like compost at heat; a bowlful of watermelon rinds and coffee grinds and a bucket of crumbling oak leaves sparking something in the backyard. The tree is rooted in the earth. It does not walk. We move toward it and it stares back at us. I long for it to tear its roots, stretch its mycelium, and walk toward me. And sometimes in April, when the colors splatter, when the candy tulips and the dayglo maple leaves buzz with a heady fecundity, when a friend offers to take the kids back to her house after the school pick-up, when it’s suddenly quiet—sometimes, in April, verging on May, I take my seat on the porch and feel the maple shoots lean toward me.


Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in a number of literary journals including About Place, Spillway, Leaping Clear, Ruminate, Green Humanities, Blueline, and Still Point Arts Quarterly. Visit www.jesseleecurran.com

A Painting features Forever

Nonfiction by Meredith Escudier

A woman, pear-shaped and clad in a modest swimming suit, edges her way into the
water. Her toes sink into the wet sand, partially disappearing into a cushiony
softness as a few gentle waves ebb and flow. Despite her tentative approach, her
stance gives off a certain determination. Clutched securely in her right hand is the
left hand of her grandson. Together, in a kind of cross-generational unison, they
advance into the gentle Mediterranean.

Little by little, the waves ripple and swell. By the time the water swirls around her
knees, he will already be waist deep. Mindful of this, she goes no further, not for
now. This will be just a teaser, a taste, an awareness of why a beach holds sway,
why they are here today. The sky, in a wash of orange watercolors, gradually
transforms as the day wears on. The light brightens, nearly blinding in its
luminosity before it recedes, as the day proceeds, as life proceeds, gradually
darkening into another palette of grey and purplish navy blue.

Though the watercolors, light and lovely, maintain their transparency, something
has changed. The grandson will come to approach the water on his own one day,
arms held aloft in greeting, a young expectant heart soaring. She knows this. As a
promoter of life, she somehow hungers for this and yet, looking at the horizon, she
also knows she is enacting a certain lesson, a teaching for him, yes, but also for
her.

He will go on, a member of the future, embracing life on his own. And she, the
grandmother, will follow him along with her eyes, quietly drinking in his wonder
and waving to him, tenderly, from afar.


Meredith Escudier has lived in France for over 35 years, teaching, translating, raising a family and writing. She is the author of three books, most recently, a food memoir, The Taste of Forever, an affectionate examination of home cooks that features an American mother and a French husband.

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