Trillium

A Spring ephemeral

March mud slides into April,
April slaps the house silly,
slams the door back in my face.

May, I take a morning walk
in an anorak, only to find
trout lily’s sprouted gills

instead of flowers. Aeolus
roars and shoves me home,
my retreat now one more

sad retreat. I’ll stay in
and set the locks against
this botch, this washed-out

washed-up spring—

So who is it who calls
my name, and who is it then
who runs, arms akimbo,

down the brambly
path, afraid to be
too late, afraid

this mean and frigid
mountain has no more
place for fragile beauty?

Who but I
who cups the wide
leaves in shaky

palms, lifts
the bowed and
blood-red head

for a kiss,
thrilled once more
by what I’d almost lost?

Editor’s Note:
The narrator, concerned that the mountain landscape has altered due to climate change, looks for the familiar spring sights and flowers on her walk. Assonance, consonance, alliteration, and specific details of the landscape, weather, and flowers keep the reader engaged.

Hilde Weisert’s poetry collection The Scheme of Things was published by David Robert Books, 2015. Poems in magazines including Ms., Cincinnati Review, Plume, Cortland Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, Lips, anthologies including Choice Words and What They Bring: The Poetry of Migration and Immigration. Awards include 2017 Gretchen Warren Award (New England Poetry Club), 2016 Tiferet Journal Poetry Award. She is the president of the Sandisfield Arts Center in western Massachusetts. She lives in Sandisfield and Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Pulp to Pulp

The daily newspaper, it was announced
by way of a story buried on B3–
appropriately, the page just before the obituary pages–
would no longer be delivered beginning in the new year,

meaning no longer would the days begin with those heralds
driving through the dark before the dawn,
some with a sure aim,
their pitch landing a step or two from the porch,

and others with the haphazard hope that that baton,
spinning end-over-end,
thrown from the shoulder like a rock skipped across a lake
by someone who had never skipped a rock across a lake,

might, at least, come to rest
somewhere between one fencepost and the next.
And, for the sleeping, no longer would the news
be crouched beneath a car in the driveway,

or hidden in the lawn that should have been mown last week,
or buried beneath the gathering snow that had silently built up overnight,
the paper waiting as patient as a cat
and lapping up the wetness of morning,

which would be the first consternation for those barely out of bed and,
already, presented with such a simple disappointment.
In those final months, the letters to the editor page,
alongside the usual lectures penned from atop imagined soapboxes,

was filled with those concerned at the loss of a ritual:
how would coffee taste when not paired
with that smell of fresh pulp and cheap ink?
And here, I thought of my grandmother,

who had developed the habit
of opening the obituary section as if this, too,
was news that ought to concern us all,
these worlds that had ended some time in the last week and now

huddled together between local news and the weather.
Last year, she had appeared in those pages,
in an obituary we had found already written,
fit to print years ago,

composed when she had been in fine health,
and I imagined her at her kitchen table,
those faces of dead strangers stacked in their
four-down, four-wide paper mausoleum in front of her

as she looked for familiar faces
and then as she searched for inspiration,
finding the words,
one ordinary afternoon in the past,

to best capture her life that,
one ordinary afternoon in the future,
would be taken out with the evening trash
by a complete stranger who, on a rainy morning,

would bend down in that shaky way,
and handle the sopping pages like lily petals,
turning in that shaky way to B4
to read the news of the day.

Editor’s Note: The standard morning newspaper delivery and reading rituals described in vivid images stand for life’s expectations and disappointments and the inevitable end. I loved the way the poet portrays the poignancy of the experience and nonchalant continuity of the life-cycle

Goddfrey Hammit was born and raised in Utah, and lives in Utah still, in a small town just outside of Salt Lake City. Hammit is the author of the novel Nimrod, UT.

Bookmaking

for Al Brilliant, even though he probably doesn’t remember me

Those mild south Texas Spring mornings
you spent guiding and goading four college
seniors in the arduous art
of handmaking books might have
seemed squandered,
but I remember.

I remember the aroma of Earl Grey
in that makeshift classroom—
the Christian Science Reading Room
lent us through kindness—
even though our only shared religion was
a faith in the words on the pages
we saddle-stitched together.

We huddled around the table.
I know now, we were leaning into
your soft-spoken words,
wisdom you near-whispered
in your Brooklynite accent.

You talked of literature,
*******and travel,
*******and books you’d asked us to read,
*******and the sixties,
*******and social justice,
*******and California,
where you founded your
slow and steady press.

My klutzy hands would oft
poke the tip of my awl
clean through a signature of folded pages,
piercing my hand.
I’d bleed on your pages—
these spotted books, you let me keep,
proof of the sacrifice required
for the sacrament of the
enfolded black-inked words.

You taught me that humility is
not mentioning that you’d published
*******Robert Bly,
and Margaret Atwood,
and Leonard Cohen,
and Marge Piercy.

Once, Langston Hughes surfaced from your memories—
his serene, muted intonation
when he would finally speak after
a long pause, in thought,
prior to his purposeful reply
was all you really told us about him.

The art of making books is
lost to me now,
but the value of a life in books
has been collected, sewn, and
bound into me.

I think that is all you wanted
********all along.

Editor’s Note:
I love this heartfelt tribute to Al Brilliant by an eager student of bookmaking. The poet uses vivid descriptions of the bookmaking process, tying each one into a page of memory that finally results in an exquisite book in the student himself.

Shelby Wilson writes, teaches, and lives in Amarillo, Texas. He holds a B.A. in English from Texas A&M University and an M.A. in English from West Texas A&M University. His writing has appeared in many publications, including Ink & Nebula, Sparks of Calliope, Backchannels, BeZine, and anthologies from Madness Muse Press, Clarendon House Publications, and Elizabeth River Press.

Coal Once

I warped back home ninety summers
before I was born, before the north valley train
swelled against trees during a drought, before
the marsh birds haunted their wings with wolves.
I think my grandfather was drunk or had swallowed
lightning, or had imagined his release from prison
as a sign of rain, a synonym for the body in one room
and the mind along the canal road, praying, prying
lifting voices from bread that had molded, but tasted
like heaven’s own wild, swirling feast. And this was
not even where he lived. His story was sunk in coal.
His language left him. He shepherded a machine
through slate rock like a worm, or something burning.
He couldn’t see that I had warped there into his time.
He thought I must be another striker who had given up,
kissed the foreman’s shadow, eaten breakfast in dust,
or had been raised like a soft pillow turned almost
human. I wanted to say grandfather. I wanted to
hand him money, real money, easy money, a stash
that would feel like the face of God placed there
in his mind, far from his home. It was like a human
shadow in Virginia. There was a laugh. It was like
water washing the coal, always sloshing and echoing
and growing and bending into a house. That was where
I forgot who I might have been, had I been real then.

Editor’s Note:
Who knows what you will find when you are mining for your ancestors. The narrator visits his grandfather in a time-warp situation and discovers something about himself. The grandfather was “lifting voices from bread that had molded,” and “His story was sunk in coal./His language left him.” It’s the narrator’s turn now to give the language/voice to the grandfather.

Clyde Kessler lives in Radford, VA with his wife Kendall and their son Alan. In 2017 Cedar Creek published his book Fiddling At Midnight’s Farmhouse, which Kendall illustrated.

Osiers

Editor’s Note: This poem describes the distress of sheltering during the pandemic and the survival of the human spirit using tender images from nature. The last line hints at the future hope and progress.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County and works in mental health. He has contributed to Gold Man Review, Williwaw Journal, Red Wolf Journal, Sheila-na-Gig, and Heartwood.

After Reading Hemingway Late at Night

My clean, well-lighted room was light too late,
the pages of my book far more appealing
than darkness and surrender to a state
of unengaged oblivion. But stealing
another hour for Hemingway may not
have been a good choice. Though at last I’ve let
him go, he holds on: characters and plot
fill pages of my brain, his alphabet
too well-arranged to spell the spell of sleep.
And since I’ve missed the hour when eyes could close
and stay closed with the counting of some sheep—
their fleece can’t muffle echoes of his prose—
I’m counting wives of Hemingway instead,
and wondering about the lives they led.

Four women married him. The lives they led—
the roles they played as Mrs. Hemingway—
must have been challenging. Had they misread
the man who’d leave them all? Each woman may
have thought that she had wed a different man,
since recent chapters in a life revise
what years have written. Each marriage began,
I’m sure, with hopes that it would not reprise
the previous debacle. But not one
would last more than a decade and a half,
each tale familiar: vows made and undone,
love doomed from the initial paragraph.
Write one true sentence was his famous creed;
truth written by the heart is hard to read.

The truth of one man’s heart is hard to read,
but Hadley and young Ernest started out
(as lovers do) as if all they would need
was passion. I recall a time when doubt
or wariness could not corrupt my heart,
when my own Ernest—though his name was Jack—
slept here beside me. What broke us apart
is hardly worth recounting, but a lack
of passion wasn’t it. We had our own
pale version of their Paris (the café
downtown); we too drank freely. If I’d known
how it would end—that Jack would soon betray
our bliss—I probably would still have lain
beside him, Hadley-like, bracing for pain.

Beside her husband, Hadley braced for pain,
and in time, his deceptions broke their bond.
How long can love and tolerance remain
when trust disintegrates, when you’ve been conned?
He left her for Pauline—well-educated,
a journalist. I can relate to her:
although perhaps not as sophisticated,
I too earned a degree; I too prefer
to write instead of watching someone write.
I wonder if I too would have felt free
to bed the married Hemingway. Tonight
I would have liked some manly company,
but as Pauline would learn, a man can make
a mess of things, make love seem a mistake.

Though Ernest left her, is it a mistake
to think him merely faithless? Macho code
or not, the men he wrote have hearts that break,
and so did he. Another episode
of short-lived marriage started in Key West,
where he met Martha. I wish I were there;
a warm salt breeze would surely help me rest,
and in the morning I might even dare
to drink a Bloody Mary with a stranger.
But Martha dared far more, and zealously:
fearless war correspondent, she faced danger
repeatedly. She went to Normandy,
grew famous, and became widely respected—
and so, it seems, her husband felt neglected.

Maybe most wives and husbands feel neglected
at some point in their marriages; some days,
or years, leave spouses feeling disconnected
or undervalued. More than mere malaise,
it feels like the beginning of the end,
and sometimes it’s exactly that, I’ve learned.
For Ernest, endings had become a trend—
beginnings, too, I guess, for he soon turned
to Mary, his fourth wife. Another writer,
twice wed herself, she must have understood
that he would not be easy: lover, fighter,
serial husband. But this marriage would
endure until the day Ernest could not—
until the moment Mary heard the shot.

The moment Mary heard the fatal shot
is one I can’t imagine. I’ve known loss,
but not that fathomless abyss—the spot
a bullet finds—where grief and horror cross.
And though each new grief leaves a heart in pieces,
mine beats with a desire to keep on beating.
Until the chapter when my breathing ceases,
I’ll keep the light on and I’ll keep on reading—
and maybe counting: famous wives, the men
I’ve loved, true sentences, false vows. Hindsight
may favor caution, but the heart and pen
keep writing. And though I can’t sleep tonight,
there’s no one but myself to implicate:
my clean, well-lighted room was light too late.

The poet weaves the story of Hemingway’s life and the narrator’s own marriage to comment on the state of relationships in general and arrives at a conclusion about self-love. The rhythm and deft rhymes keep the narrative moving smoothly.

Jean L. Kreiling is the author of two collections of poetry:  Arts & Letters & Love  (2018) and The Truth in Dissonance (2014).  Her work has been honored with the Able Muse Write Prize, the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters Sonnet Prize, the Kelsay Books Metrical Poetry Prize, a Laureates’ Prize in the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, three New England Poetry Club prizes, the Plymouth Poetry Contest prize, and the String Poet Prize. 

Peripheral

There is a certain float
xxxa falling leaf makes
that calls to the eye. A golden

blink, kissed by the back
xxxof a boy racing
his bike to school. A quiet quiver

gliding on a dog’s
xxxfull moon howl. A ballet
dancer outside the glint

of an airport window.
xxxThe messenger in the middle
of that first driveway

goodbye. Freed from a fire
xxxtree, a rogue tickle
in the wheeze of a ripe summer

wind, the ocean
xxxa sieving backdrop
to its fleeing sigh.

Editor’s Note: The poem personifies the stages of wind by attributing human behaviors to them. The slow buildup starting with ‘a golden blink’ becomes ‘a quiet quiver’ and ultimately becomes ‘a rouge tickle traveling to the ocean. The hint of a back story with the ‘first goodbye’ adds to the intrigue.

Anna Teresa Slater is a teacher in Iloilo, Philippines. Her work is published in a variety of international journals and in anthologies by Kasingkasing Press and Hedgehog Poetry Press. The eBook version of her first poetry collection, A Singular, Spectacular Chore (Kasingkasing Press), was released in November 2020, with the print version forthcoming in 2021. Anna lives on a farm with her husband, dog, and cat.

SQUALLING

I.
The storm finally erupts, torrents tumbling
down roofs into patios, streaming down the street.
Lightning shreds the sky, immediate thunder,
the rain blowing in waves across the Carib sky.

Quick currents rivers rise in these calles,
eddying with leaves & trash.
Black waters strong & rancid seep through wooden
dikes wedged in doorways, seep through tiled floors.

A dappled hackney pulls a scrap-wood wagon
through hub-deep water, still rising, still swirling
& disappears into the rain undecipherable from
solid grey clouds from the churning sea.

II.
After two hours the downpour lessens, the booming
thunder further asea.
Pallid sunset bleeds through a tear in the clouds.
The river recedes, yet whirling yet rushing
towards the Caribbean.

III.
& with this new night, a softer rain falls.

Editor’s Note: The poet paints a series of pictures with words to create an experience of squalling in a reader’s mind. The last line brings the calm after the storm home.

Lorraine Caputo is a poet, translator, and travel writer. Her works appear in over 200 journals on six continents; and 14 chapbooks of poetry – including On Galápagos Shores (dancing girl press, 2019). She also authors travel narratives, articles, and guidebooks. She travels through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth.

Unimagined Possibilities

Eyes focus on dust motes, yellow swirls
xxxxxhover, animal smells in the air.
My cousins soar between hay bales,
xxxxxexcitement crackles with fear.
Voices loud, mouths wide, leg scratches,
xxxxxstill we chase and scream.
Shoes full of hay stems never slow us
xxxxxdown as over the bales we fly.
Games done, we empty socks and pockets
xxxxxof dried grass, brush each other off.
A tidy for the youngest, a glance around the barn,
xxxxxready for departure.
Oblivious to the black-cloaked figures, scythes
xxxxxraised, who haunt our play.
Death lurks overhead; rusted bale claw held
xxxxxby a tattered rope.
Injury loiters by the open end of the barn,
xxxxxa two-floor drop into a manure pile.
Mortality dallies in the hay mows, a plunge
xxxxxto mangers or stone floors.
We are children, oblivious to grim possibilities
xxxxxskulking around the cows.
Back up the hill to our parents, enjoying
xxxxxgin and tonics in the late afternoon.
We leave the barn reapers to their dark pleasures
xxxxxas we escape the possibilities again.

Editor’s Note: This childhood narrative is sweet yet filled with dangerous possibilities.  The innocent childhood games at twilight, away from parental oversight, are often tinged with danger. It is a miracle that most of us emerge without any harm. The vivid descriptions in this poem bring this barn scene to life.

Susan J. Wurtzburg is a retired academic and lives in Hawai‘i. She writes and runs her editing business (Sandy Dog Books LLC), in between water sports, hiking, and socializing online, while she waits for the pandemic to diminish. Susan’s poetry has appeared in the Hawaii Pacific Review, Poetry and Covid, Quince Magazine, and the Rat’s Ass Review.