Freshwater Literary Journal 2024

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Freshwater Literary Journal, 2024

2023 Editorial Board:

R.J. Caron

Bernadine Franco

Ashlee Hoskins

Susan Winters Smith

Chelsea Williamson

Editors and Faculty Advisors: Jessica Barone and John Sheirer

Cover Photo: Balloons over Quechee by Stephen M. Smith, Jr.

Freshwater Literary Journal is published annually by CT State Asnuntuck (formerly Asnuntuck Community College). We consider poetry and prose. The upcoming reading period will be August 15, 2024, to February 15, 2025. Acceptances and rejections will be sent on a rolling basis, no later than the end of March 2025. Poetry: Three poems maximum, up to 40 lines each. Prose (prose poetry, micro/flash fiction, short stories, creative nonfiction, personal essay, memoir): One or multiple pieces up to 1,500 words total. No previously published material. Simultaneous submissions are considered with proper notification. Submissions should be sent by email to Freshwater@acc.commnet.edu. The email should include a brief, third-person biographical note, and the submission should be a single Word attachment. No .pdf files or postal submissions, please.

The 2025 Freshwater Student Writing Contest will focus on personal essays/memoirs up to 1,500 words. The contest will be open to full- and parttime undergraduate students enrolled during 2023, 2024, or 2025 at Connecticut’s community colleges or public universities. The contest entr y deadline is February 15, 2025. More information about the contest and general submissions is available at https://asnuntuck.edu/about-2/community-engagement/freshwater-literary-journal/

Freshwater Literary Journal is available online for free at https://issuu.com/freshwaterliteraryjournal

We can be reached at Freshwater@acc.commnet.edu. Please follow Freshwater on Facebook: FreshwaterACC; and Instagram: @FreshwaterLiteraryJournal.

2 Table of Contents 4 – Carol Everett Adams 5 – Matthew J. Andrews 6 – Danny P. Barbare 7 – Jessica Barone 11 – Cheryl Block 12 – Christopher Boniecki 14 – Morgan Boyer 17 – Patricia Brawley 18 – Gaylord Brewer 19 – Katley Demetria Brown 21 – Marte Carlock 23 – R.J. Caron 26 – Bill Carr 27 – Max Cavitch 28 – Benjamin J. Chase 29 – Maryanne Chrisant 32 – Laura Claridge 34 – Sarah Daly 35 – Holly Day 36 – Abbie Doll 37 – David Edelman 40 – Duane M. Engelhardt 43 – Arvilla Fee 45 – Bernadine Franco 47 – Alan Gartenhaus 49 – Joe Giordano 51 – Arianna M. Gomez 54 – John Grey 56 – Patricia Hale 57 – Laura B. Hayden 59 – Tom Holmes 60 – Ruth Holzer 62 – Ashlee Hoskins 64 – Ann Howells 65 – Margaret B. Ingraham 67 – Katy Keffer 71 – Casey Killingsworth 73 – Jane Rosenberg LaForge 74 – Tom Lagasse 75 – Vivian Lawry 77 – Richard LeDue
3 79 – Christian Livermore 81 – Leah Lopez 84 – Joan Mazza 87 – Robert McGuill 89 – Catherine McGuire 92 – Isabelle McMahon 96 – Ken Meisel 97 – Rosemary Dunn Moeller 98 – Cecil Morris 100 – John Muro 103 – James B. Nicola 102 – Beckett Norman-Hall 104 – Dakota Ouellette 109 – Ruth Pagano 111 – Jennifer M. Phillips 112 – Alita Pirkopf 113 – Kenneth Pobo 114 – R.V. Priestly 117 – Russell Rowland 121 – Heather Rutherford 123 – Heather Sager 124 – Terry Sanville 128 – Kai Saucier 133 – Bobbie Saunders 136 – Luke Sawczak 137 – John Sheirer 138 – Harvey Silverman 141 – Susan Winters Smith 146 – Victoria Lynn Smith 148 – Matthew J. Spireng 150 – Geo. Staley 152 – Stephen Straight 153 – Angela Townsend 155 – John Tustin 156 – Felanyely Barett Valdez 157 – Jean E. Verthein 159 – Diane Webster 161 – Sharon Whitehill 162 – A.R. Williams 163 – Diana Woodcock 165 – James K. Zimmerman 166 – Contributors

Radial Nerve

“I will be boat and you the rower. ” –May Swenson

You row the river of God’s arm as she unfolds it like a map left open to a sketch of her headwaters.

You row her highway in a little boat to the edge of the earth. The river spears through, and near the drop, you slow, but God points on, so you haul me in. She pulls a vein out, tosses it up. We climb a great ice cliff, escape the dome, map the stars, tie them to the lesser nerves below, tributaries of her arm, where she rests it. We are God’s skull, her fluid sockets, four eyeballs blinking. I dreamed your body was inked in tattoos, and the one in the center of your chest was a sword, a fire line carved by Kilauea. The radial nerve is a red canyon that falls off a cliff, over which we’re not falling. We stand at the edge, dig in oars, watch the river spill.

Your shoulder’s the world, our legs the continents resting. We innervate God’s arm, as she empties her waters at the mouth.

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Seismic Activity

The day before I got married, I missed, by just a few hours, being swallowed by the earth. I’d been paused in reflection, alone on the top of a mountain ridge, above steamy windowpanes of clouds obscuring the world below. I drove down to the ocean, bathed my feet in the silt-strewn waves, covered my bare skin with sand, and saw on the news reports, broadcasted to a beachside bar, that a fault line had slipped and my mountains had tremored and crumbled with the ground’s resonance. The earth pounced to reclaim its fugitives and had just missed me, now free to watch the setting sun glisten on new mercies: this beer, the fresh breath of salty air, a full tank of gas, the road untethered to any map. It almost didn’t matter where I went on to, just as long as I went somewhere.

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At the Lake

Put the knee to the chest let the boat do the pulling in the smooth cove go from side to side kicking up the water as high as you can letting go of the rope gliding to the dock when hungry for roasted corn, homemade hushpuppies and coleslaw, with sunfish and bass caught with a string, bread, and golden claw hook.

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Finding Santa

“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” –Francis P. Church

Christmas Eve, 1987. A ten-year-old girl, taunted by her classmates for her persistent belief in The Big Man, confronts her mother about the existence of Santa. Her pleas for the truth are met with an ambiguous response, “What do you think?” The young girl doesn’t know what to think, and begins to have a creeping fear that she cannot trust her parents. She takes up residence in an old black leather recliner, stares at the Christmas Tree, and announces that she is waiting up for Santa, even if she has to wait until midnight.

Long before midnight, her mother breaks the news and drags a devastated, tearful child off to bed. The child is taught several things that night. Not to trust. Not to believe her parents. It is the night she questions everything and if her parents are liars, what else are they lying about? The child loses her faith. She doesn’t believe in her parents … she doesn’t believe in the church they force her to attend. She loses her faith in god and believes all adults are liars. The loss of Santa leaves a hole in her heart as big as the Artic and as glaring as the Northern Lights. She turns to Earth Based religions and seeks a more solid truth. And when her child is born, she does not want to invite Santa back into her life, and does not want to lie to her child. But it happens, and she does, and the guilt follows her lie.

Christmas 2016. A two-year-old girl full of light and love begs to visit Santa. The mother takes the child to Yankee Candle; her cousin always said, “That’s where you find the real Santa.” Hand in hand, the mother and child wait in line for Santa and the guilt builds and builds and builds. The heat rises to her head, heart pounding. The laughs of happy children are sobs in her ears. This child will hate me forever. I’ll lose her trust. The young girl inside her heart is terrified. The little girl attached to her hand is bursting with joy.

And then …

They are in front of him. The Big Man. At last. The child bounces with happiness, the mother is asked to come take a seat. She can’t hear the words. She can’t focus on the child. For the young girl inside is weeping. The tears seep in a steady stream from her eyes. The mother says in a shaky breath, “Hello, Santa.” He turns and smiles, as if he’d known she’d been coming all along. “Hello,” he says, “I’ve been waiting for you.”

The mother breaks into a tearful smile. She connects everything in that moment, everything suddenly makes sense. Her daughter’s joy, her fear, her guilt, her inability to trust. She thinks of all she’s learned since childhood, the origin of The Big Man, how he came from an ancient place, and went by another name, The Gray Wanderer who flew on an eight-legged horse and

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brought gifts to warriors, not children, and rewarded the brave who’d kept the faith. It’s a story that extends back and back, to a time when myth was reality, and there was no separation of the two, and finally, she understands. There is magic to be found in the world, even if it’s not always in the way we expect.

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Dandelion Wine

I remember the first time I saw her …

And the last …

A baby taking first steps and a womanWalking out my front door

A child in the world both times, It’s all the same At my wedding, lilies for those who passed, But no lily for her, she has not passed But gone all the same

Gone like a fleeting sunset

Gone like a shooting star

Gone like dandelion wine

Gone like a wilted rose

And what was she?

Salty, sweet, what some may call “sister.”

No happy bond this, But a creature filled with regret

She gave happiness with one hand And took it away with silence

She came home as a baby, An infant in a blanket, And left home as a woman, Her blanket a shroud

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My Father’s Pitch

Throw it hard, he yelled, you have to do better if you want to play with the boys! His face a mask of determination rather than joy.

Throwing harder, trying to please, my father’s pitch stung me. What was he trying to prove?

And I, a small girl-child, trying to be?

On the field, I struggled to keep up small legs, arms pumping. Heart racing.

Dirt like blood in my mouth. When the ball hit, blackness. My father’s pitch carried me away.

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Bathing in Sunday Clothes at Founders Landing Park

a toe is immersed, then a leg shrieks of delight permeate the air three in suits and one admires her now wet ruffled dress she giggles at the soaked satin sash first weddings on the beach allow for bathing while bedecked in ribbons and ties the sun’s rays dance to accompany the small feet exploring the sand and sea a chilled escape from heat once more

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I’ll eat your chicken parm, grandma

You wear the haunting well.

Your smile sweet like Aunt Jemima taught you her technique. Hair like marble, a royal glimmer of a distant lighthouse. A surrounding haze of tangential faces disturbs the peace.

Hopped up on youthful adrenaline the newest batch of dummies blabber, Their voices sound like a washer machine to you. You could swear you’ve watched this episode before.

The only difference between the TV and people now is the TV is funny. More blabberers come in (there’s always more blabberers) and after an improper smooching go off into their head to mutter about each other and the brave ones tell you their dreams.

I wonder how the brave ones make you feel. For a moment I could see something on your tongue before you clamp your mouth shut.

Like there’s a brave sentence you’ve pieced together but you fear it’ll be left in the fridge like a gifted chicken parm. I’ll eat your chicken parm, grandma.

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Forgotten Family Recipe

I’d fill my home with Tupperware, Drive tomatoes to near extinction, And do all this through a cloud of cigarette smoke If it meant that the shooting star that sliced through a sky I never saw Had some real magic to it.

That night when you still saw how the stars sparkle And had a head filled with anticipation. Anticipation of a dozen dreams I never got to hear And was never brave enough to ask about.

Did you dance?

Did you try and find a quiet place to practice singing?

Was there a cruel art teacher who killed your dreams as a painter?

I’ve eaten so much of your food but I want to taste the meal that you never got to cook.

I want the forgotten family recipe.

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Journey to get milk

A teenage boy uses his father’s leaf-blower to toss the frail fallen feathers of tree

onto Dormont Avenue to be run over by a Pepsi delivery truck or a used 2011 Nissan

discarded Take 5 wrapper left in a web of vines. Its printer-page packet white inner

skin open for the world to witness. The people filling their tanks almost always speechless

as if the nuzzle of the pump has strangled them as they either look down to the tar-covered

pavement or peer up at the price that grows like ragweed in the time of pumpkin spice lattes

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Awaiting blankness

Eyelids closed, leathery skin shielding glossy muscle tissue, as you try to reign in each synapse rapidly jetting out like Speed Racer across each neuron, flooding your fleeting dreams with images of you standing barefoot outside of a closed coffee-shop with a cardboard sign or sitting in a tent city beneath a bridge. You fear each day that passes until your mother’s next birthday like a ticking clock.

Empty job boards await in your future, and haunts you in the present.

15 Morgan Boyer

Pecking

Pecking like chickens for feed at the bottom of our home office cages, constantly enamored with the occasional dog bark, motorcycle exhaust burst, or chimes dangling against each other, a reminder of when humans weren’t livestock, when we walked the streets free of fear, when our hearts beat together, our respiratory pathways vacant of viruses

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The Gifts of Air

People say things like “Love is in the air” and “I can smell rain coming.”

People say they get ideas out of thin air.

Some people get the big Aha! Like Einstein or poets.

This air we breathe the same air that flows through the universe seems laden with gifts.

This air, this breath of life. The keeper of the Soul. The last breath returning to the cosmos.

Is it any wonder yogis, mystics, talk about deep breathing?

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Morning Augury

My old mutt limps through her days, and my mother failed to answer when I phoned assisted living.

My wife’s flights tomorrow to arrive safely home, my father-in-law a whispering shell of himself.

Of course, I am long reckless with my health. These thoughts coalesce as I hear an approaching rattle,

in disbelief until the belted kingfisher propels low overhead. I chart dagger of bill, gray breastband

above white belly, then it is gone. Understand, in 25 years I have never seen this mystical bird anywhere

but at the creek. Never. As I stand in early light, half-mile from water, it passes again, loudly, is gone again,

cry diminishing. I am no more superstitious than any practical man, but kingfisher, which inhabits

three worlds water, sky, earth is commonly known to portend all that may come. Merely a warning,

I tell myself, wake-up call, even as the day, forecast clear and hot, snarls and begins to darken,

morning gives way to a chilling wind.

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The Zombies of Costco

They enter the warehouse with huge shopping carts mesmerized by the huge selection of merchandise. This store sells everything! Clothes, groceries, frozen foods, rotisserie chickens, electronics, home appliances eyeglasses, hearing aids, vitamins, all this consumerism turns ordinary people into zombies.

The race is on to see who can fill their cart the fastest while tasting a sample or two of the product of the week cheese, coffee, pastry, deli meat. People who shop while hungry will often buy more what they need.

The siren song of shopping is the store’s subliminal message. The zombie apocalypse is a daily occurrence at Costco.

The checkout lines are a half hour long And that’s on a good day.

After they pay for their purchases the last stop is the food court for a quarter pound hot dog with relish and mustard. It’s a recipe for a heart attack. The sodium content is in the stratosphere.

Then there’s a long line to exit the store so that the employee can check the receipt. Do not enter through the exit to sign up for membership. Zombies with full carts will run you over.

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Katley Demetria Brown

Some Thoughts on Getting Old

Longevity, is it worth it? It all depends on your mobility. The 100-year-old who practices yoga has the answer.

Sometimes dying is better than aging. Being dependent on others sucks.

Arthritis is a pain in the butt, knees, shoulders and hands especially when it rains.

As I get older my doctor appointments become more frequent my collection of medications gets bigger bathroom visits become more urgent.

One of the four horsemen will eventually get me. Cancer, heart disease, dementia or diabetes. Whatever it is the quicker the better.

Modern medicine doesn’t have all the answers. Nobody gets out alive.

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Perched

How does she know I’m not a danger scoping her with binoculars when it could be a rifle

color of treebark she sits impassive, maybe digesting

I wish she would catch the mouse that makes a home in my garage

How does the mouse know she’s safe in the garage and in mortal danger under the sky

We want to be the hawk, fearless not the scurrying neurotic mouse, yet how much better if we all were horses running free eating grass.

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Drought Season

Outside, the world turned gray a scrim over the trees so long since we had rain I could not think what it was

I went to stand at the glass door to watch as the miracle of water yet not water but hail began to collect on the deck you and I stood shoulder to shoulder feasting on summer snow.

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Almost

The 1962 Little League World Series was coming to an end. It seemed unfair to call one team winners, and the other, losers

Fifteen bubble gum chewing boys from Carson City, California wore darkblue, snug-fitting hats; the perfectly creased black brims nearly covered their eyes, giving them a “cool” look, on the cloudless, hot summer day. White cotton uniforms, with black belts and red vertical pinstripes completed their attire. Seven-inch blue numbers emblazoned their backs, and the players’ names were displayed in bright red embroidered thread.

The Carson City Cardinals’ skilled opponent was a seldom-smiling squad from the far east. The Taiwan Tigers wore black caps, and donned gold jerseys, with black numbers on their backs, and white-striped black pants. Their uniforms brought the boys’ speed and agility to life.

A capacity crowd of 3,200 fans occupied the old bleachers that surrounded the field. The United States squad was the favorite team, and you could easily tell by observing the fans. Most wore red, white, and blue clothing, and many proudly waved small American flags. An aerial view of the crowd at the Williams, Virginia, stadium might have resembled a bowlful of jellybeans. The multi-tiered metal seating structure shook and creaked under the stomping and clapping of hopeful, excited men, women, and children.

Words of encouragement, aimed at the team from the U.S.A. echoed throughout the grounds: “C’mon! Get a hit! You can do it!” were frequently shouted, when Carson City was batting.

“Strike him out! Smoke it by him! “He’s blind,” were a few sayings blurted out, when Jimmy Jackson, the American’s best pitcher, was on the mound.

Even a cigar-chomping bald guy, with brown juice dripping from the corner of his mouth, got into the act; he shouted nasty remarks at the home-plate ump throughout the game.

But none of that really mattered to the players. Thus far, neither team was able to score a run, in one of the best games ever staged on this World Series battleground.

On the mound, the young, Asian version of Sandy Koufax pinpointed pitches throughout the afternoon. Thirteen American batters struck out, frustrated, mainly by sinking fastballs. His nearly perfect performance was shattered in the bottom of the sixth inning, when he yielded two runs on two hits: a oneout double into the right-field corner by Mike Johns, followed by a fence-clearing home run, solidly smacked by Jimmy Jackson.

The Cardinals had nothing to be ashamed about. Jimmy recorded eleven strike-outs of his own, performing magic with a split-fingered fastball. The ball

23 R.J. Caron

rocketed to the plate shoulder-high, down the middle, and ended around the knees, on the outside corner.

Jimmy’s dad, Maury Jackson, taught him how to throw that pitch. Jimmy idolized his father. Maury was a star at Southern Cal State College, and was a third-round draft pick by the Dodgers. But one day, when Jimmy was ten, Maury fell from a ladder, while building a tree-house for Jimmy. His right shoulder was dislocated so badly that it ended Maury’s career. Eight months later, Maury died in a car crash.

Jimmy always kept his dad’s old glove with him. He rubbed in a small amount of neatsfoot oil weekly, like Maury taught him, and it stayed supple and soft. The glove’s leathery scent made Jimmy think of his dad and him playing catch in the backyard, starting when Jimmy was six years old.

Little League games had only seven innings, and the ‘62 World Series needed all of them. Top of the seventh, Taiwan was due up, down by two runs. While Jimmy was warming up, the Tigers huddled together outside their dugout, with their manager in the middle. He apparently figured out how to hit Jimmy’s elusive pitches and was instructing his boys. The team shouted something in Mandarin, broke the huddle, and ran back into the dugout. First up was the second baseman. He took the first pitch for a strike, then lined the next pitch into center field for a single. The next batter wasted no time, smacking a hot grounder into the left field corner for a double. Runners were on second and third.

Jimmy Jackson smacked the ball into his glove and motioned to his manager to let him keep pitching in the game. Cal Stevens, the man in charge, jogged out to the mound. After a moment of talking to his young pitcher and catcher, Cal took a deep breath and smiled at Jimmy. Then he ran off the mound and into the dugout, to the loud cheers of the crowd.

Yung Po-Tsao, Taiwan’s tall, lanky first baseman, crouched in the batter’s box. Jimmy threw the ball with his usual delivery and intensity. TWANG The aluminum bat struck the lower part of the ball. It popped up to Jimmy, who easily made the catch. He turned and signaled his teammates one out!

Next up: Sen Ni, the Tiger’s shortstop. Jimmy wound up and pitched. TWANG! A grass-burning grounder was hit sharply to Tommy Tobor, the Carson City third-baseman. He glared at the runner on third base, who stayed on the bag, then made a perfect throw to first. The crowd cheered louder than ever. Jimmy got the ball back, turned to his teammates, and signaled: two outs! Then, Taiwan’s pitcher, Ming-Chieh Chen, came up. Jimmy threw a knee-high, blazing fast ball. It sunk out of the strike zone, but Ming-Chieh swung hard anyway. TWANG!! Within seconds, the ball careened off the upper deck of the center field bleachers.

Silence befell the stadium. The home plate umpire threw Jimmy a new ball. Jimmy looked down at the ground, kicked the mound, and prepared to face the next batter. The Tiger’s catcher struck out on three pitches.

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Hollywood films might have shown the Carson City Cardinals fighting back in the bottom of the seventh, to win the game. But this was reality, not a movie. The Chinese pitcher was so pumped up after hitting his three-run homer that he struck out the American’s first two batters.

Then, Billy Thompson stepped anxiously into the batter’s box. He grabbed and filtered a fistful of dirt through his sweaty hands, then wrapped his fingers firmly around the bat handle. Taking a deep breath, he bent his shaking knees, faced the bullet-hurling pitcher, and waited.

TWANG! In a blur, the aluminum bat squarely struck the ball. It skidded to the left of the pitcher, inches out of reach, heading through the infield. Billy dropped the hot bat, and dashed, like an Olympic sprinter, toward first base.

Nearly halfway to safety, Billy glanced at the second baseman. In one fluid motion, the fielder dove, smothering the ball in his glove. Engulfed in a cloud of dirt, he pushed himself to his knees and hurled the ball to the outstretched first baseman.

“Yer out!” hollered the umpire, as his thumb blocked the sun.

The scoreboard read Taiwan 3, Carson City 2.

Fifteen boys from China, and their coaches, wildly jumped up and down, while flinging their hats and gloves into the air. The remainder of the stadium stood stunned, emotionally drained.

The boys from Carson City used their gloves to cover their faces, which hid tears falling from the heartbroken youngsters.

That Saturday was the second saddest day in Jimmy’s life, followed only by the Thursday his father died. He felt broken and alone, even though he stood in the crowded stadium.

A calming, caring voice said, “It’s OK, son. You and your teammates played a great game.” Jimmy’s eyes were blurred from tears, so he couldn’t see who was talking.

“Dad?” Jimmy asked. The voice sounded exactly like his father’s.

Jimmy wiped the wetness from his eyes and looked up. It was Coach Stevens.

“I’m sure your dad is looking down, smiling, and overjoyed with the young man you’ve become,” said Coach Stevens. “You have a lot to be proud about, and nothing to be ashamed of!”

“Thanks, Coach,” replied Jimmy, smiling for the first time of the day.

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Hoops Reflections

I’ve always wondered How any athletic teenager Could resist an obsession With the jump shot. For an instant

You’re the center of attention, And if the person guarding you Is a little lax, You’re head and shoulders

Above everyone on the court. Of course you must also be able to: Drive in for a layup, Hit the pull-up jump shot, Set up your teammates, Play good defense, Grab a few rebounds, And most important, Leave time for studying. Maybe today’s kids Are a lot smarter than I was.

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Museum, Late Afternoon

Through the window beyond roped-off rarities he sees a glacial cloud in tears, dredging the evening sky of indigo. He tries to glower like the cloud to show he’s tired of these misspent hours and wants to go somewhere the colors aren’t so loud and where nice things aren’t too old or valuable to touch. She finishes her rosy cup of tea but can’t stir up her half-doped vigilance and says she’ll take him anywhere but home, not caring that he’ll make them pay for her defiance. She still thinks her son knows more than sons can know, but all he does is kick his feet against her chair, tattooing his resentments. Yes, it’s time. But there aren’t many places she can go with her hard-used little button of a boy. If only it weren’t so late too late for going back to tarot through cheap postcards, seeking clues. Someplace. There must be someplace things aren’t all so breakably disposed. She thinks about his lost, love-crushed bear. His father didn’t care, and now it could be almost anywhere, except, of course, where armed men keep the priceless marvels safe and stare at fragments of the disused lives that pass them there.

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Max Cavitch

Vietnam Conflict

You said it was a sentence all present participles sweating, shelling, waiting without clear subjects, without clear objects, running on fragmented like a torn passage from a history without beginning, without end.

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The Date

I was set up a blind date. Tom, the man I was meeting, was the remote acquaintance of a friend. I didn’t know much he was unmarried, tall, blond, and liked to read. All promising, and possibly more memorable than the last several blind dates, whose names I had forgotten.

We were meeting in a coffee shop on the Upper West Side. I knew the place. The café served great cheesecake. I arrived unintentionally early and stood a moment outside the brownstone. The smell of freshly ground coffee was strong. The door had a bell with a sweet jangle. Inside there was mellow jazz playing, and there were a few tables. I took a seat in the back near the window and watched the door. It was cool, early fall. I didn’t dress up a black sweater and jeans. But I did wear perfume.

The waiter came. He was mid-thirties, lean and unshaven, with deep-green eyes. I ordered coffee and cheesecake. A few people came in. I watched the waiter move catlike around the room.

At 4:30 my date arrived. I could tell he was looking for me. He was thirtyish, tallish, blondish, thinnish. But something was wrong. His body swayed when he walked, and he pulled a stiff, shorter leg with him, trying to compensate with a useless arm. When he saw me sitting alone, he smiled, but only one side of his face animated while the other side stayed flat.

“Hello,” he said slowly. “I’m Tom.”

“Hello,” I said. I smiled, trying not to look startled. “I just ordered a coffee and cheesecake.”

“I’ll have that too!”

His words were articulated in a determined way, as if they would no longer be intelligible when he relaxed. He picked up a napkin and dabbed at the sagging corner of his moist mouth.

The waiter came with my order. The coffee came in a large, white cup and saucer. I sipped, I ate my cheesecake, and watched the waiter. Tom’s deliberate voice plodded on. He stopped talking. My eyes edged back to him.

“I’m sorry,” I said with a half laugh. “You were saying?”

Tom’s lopsided face registered what had transpired.

“Tell me about yourself,” he said.

“I’m a doctor. At the university hospital, uptown. I heard you like to read?”

“Yes, I do,” he said with his crooked smile. “Do you?”

The waiter brought Tom his order. After setting it down, he met my eyes and smiled. With effort I looked at Tom and remembered his question.

“Yes,” I said. “What have you read?”

Tom sipped his coffee and quickly dabbed away the overflow.

“I’ve read all of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, McMurtry. I’ve even read

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Proust ” he said slowly.

“Proust? Really?” I smiled. I saw his eyes for the first time. “What do you like about them?”

He smiled back at me.

“The unexpected,” he said. “We remember ”

“When you’re ready,” the waiter said, setting the check on the table between us.

I nodded, smiled. Tom raised a forkful of cheesecake to his mouth. He chewed awkwardly, covering his mouth with his napkin. He shifted.

“Why did you come out with me?” Tom asked.

“I work long hours. It’s hard to meet people.” I glanced around the now busy and loud café. I had to lean in. “What do you do?”

“Well, I don’t really work.”

“And you’re living in New York?” I laughed lightly.

“I have a trust fund,” he said slowly. “I guess you’re wondering what happened to me.”

“I’m not really.” I shrugged.

“Everyone is curious,” he said. “I don’t usually tell people but you’re a doctor. I fell down the stairs. When I was six.”

“Oh, how awful,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “My mother told people I ‘took a tumble.’”

He looked at me and when his face wasn’t struggling with speech, it was pleasant.

“I see the way you’re looking at the other men in the room,” he said finally.

“I it’s just habit. I watch people,” I said. But I dropped my gaze.

“I know what I look like,” he said. “I’m sorry you didn’t know, but if you did…” He shrugged with one shoulder.

He leaned forward, inhaled, then put a twenty-dollar bill on the table and stood up.

“I like your perfume,” he said. “And I’ll never see you again.”

Then he smiled his crooked smile, turned carefully, and left, navigating slowly through the crowd.

He pushed open the front door just as a couple was pulling it from the outside. The bell gave a furious jangle, and I felt the crisp air blow in. Something about the momentum and the jostling at the door made him stumble down the stairs, across the sidewalk, and into the street.

The bus driver didn’t have time to react. I saw the impact of Tom with the bus and then with the sidewalk.

The momentary, deep thud was barely audible inside the café. No one else noticed, except for the waiter. I let out a weak, “Oh my God,” but no one heard. I should have gotten up but I sat at the small table with Tom’s halfeaten cheesecake.

I watched out the big picture window as the police arrived, and then the

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ambulance, and then the medical examiner. It was like watching a movie with no sound. I tried to drink my coffee, but in my hands the cup was convulsing against the saucer. I steadied my hands in my lap as I watched the M.E. examine Tom’s body. He was placed with great gentleness onto a stretcher, and a sheet was drawn up and over his face.

Few people in the café noticed, but the waiter and I watched the entire scene and each other. Within an hour the body, the ambulance, and the police had gone, and the bus was on its way.

The sterile deaths I witnessed at the hospital were controlled and clean. What spilled on the floor was wiped up afterward. Everything was put right. But there, extending the width of the sidewalk, was a large, dark-red stain.

That night, at home, I couldn’t sleep. I waited in the dark. But when I closed my eyes, I saw the replay of the silent movie. I saw the dark-red stain. It was too wide to walk around so wide it had followed me home. And now I can’t forget.

31

Dad Died Twice

I recall him as mostly asleep after days of riding his postman’s bicycle under the Florida sun, delivering mail during those long, unremittingly hot Florida days. No wonder he fell to the cool terrazzo floor and lay there, more unconscious than just resting.

The tan mailman’s shirt and shorts had replaced his decorated Marine’s uniform. At nineteen he had gone to war in the Pacific and fought in the famous Battle of Saipan and on Iwo Jima. He came home with many medals, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts and a chrome plate in his head. My young, handsome father was grievously wounded, how wounded no one knew at first; but as time wore on, his brain injuries worsened instead of abating. We did not know then that he had begun to die. My dad, William Powell, was the first in our family’s series of serious brain injuries, and I have reason daily to think of him, and with regret.

Then they called his condition “shell shock.” And over the years the treatments became as painful as the original wounds.

It all started off in such patriotic glory:

In late 1943, as the war in the Pacific accelerated, my dad, homespun William Harney Powell II from the tiny town of Nocatee, Florida, was accepted by the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, to help take down the enemy. He was beside himself and excited to enter the big league. His dream of becoming a naval officer seemed within reach.

Bad luck, however, followed my father the rest of his life. The series of disasters that would overtake him started mere weeks before his entrance. The Naval Academy realized that his birthday fell five days past the official admission date. My father was only nineteen but days too old for this round of admissions.

Devastated, he gave up his dreams and joined the Marines instead, where, after two bouts of malaria, Bill Powell was launched on his career. He intended to become a surgeon, he told his friends, and the medical books stacked in his bedroom in Bowling Green, Florida, until his death attest to that.

Instead of becoming a surgeon, he repeatedly became a seriously injured patient not once, but four times as he fought in the Pacific, battling the Japanese. A cryptic telegram remains in the family archive, stating that my father was wounded but without further information. Can you imagine his distraught mother? Holding this telegram, not knowing how badly he was hurt? And what sort of wounds did he suffer? Was he forever crippled? Was he an amputee? Would he survive?

Now it is hard, even for those who were alive then, to recall how that war in the Pacific was regarded. We do know that it was the Japanese bombing of

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Pearl Harbor that brought the United States, which had been reluctant to engage, into World War II. It was Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, who announced this on the radio, and the shock was felt throughout the country. Even so, the war in the Pacific was somehow never regarded as grievously as the war in Europe, where the Holocaust took place, and many bloody battles such as the Battle of the Bulge took place, and the Allies suffered thousands of lost young men in the D-Day invasion.

But the war in the Pacific, despite the balmy temperatures, turquoise seas, and islands with waving palm trees, was no idyll. It was also a horrendous series of battles, and my father caught the worst of it, wounded not once, but three times in four infamous “engagements,” including the bloody Battle of Saipan (often called the D-Day in the Pacific) and the ultimate struggle to seize Iwo Jima. His serious wounds were duly reported in the local papers.

It took more than thirty years for the war to kill him. He died disoriented and, they said, “of alcohol” in a VA hospital when he was only fifty-one. He had been committed there by his second wife, who could not tolerate his “shell shock” rants and rages, his incapacity to be the husband she wanted.

Yet he was kind to me, sent me regular funds for my college, and I am relieved that I visited him one last time at that VA hospital. He was a specter of his former handsome self. We found little to say, but he smiled, examining my face as if to memorize it. We hugged, though barely touching, whether because of his IV or our lifetime reticence to get close to each other.

“Dad, I promise to stay in touch,” I said as I silently pledged to get there often. “You might even get better soon and come visit me.”

I looked at him in his bed his face seemed covered with a kind of glaze, a sign that he was already separating from this life. Before I left him, I closed that long distance between us and kissed him goodbye.

33

Not Just Anybody’s Grandma

She’s not your sweet-cuddly grandma. She’s a grandma that keeps cigarettes in her purse and drinks Scotch on Sundays. She’s a grandma that swears in traffic and prefers ESPN to PBS. She’s a grandma that bowls instead of knits and drives Harleys instead of Buicks. She’s a grandma who prefers leather to plaid and combat boots to orthopedics. She’s a grandma who skips Herb Society for Poker Night. She’s a grandma who listens to Eminem instead of Chubby Checker. She’s a grandma that bets on horses, not bingo. She’s a grandma that eats pecans rather than prunes. She’s a grandma who orders steak instead of meatloaf. She’s a grandma who doesn’t own a tube of lipstick or a single skirt. She’s a grandma with a crew cut, never a perm. She’s a grandma that always pays her own way. She’s a grandma who never goes to church and never volunteers. She’s a grandma who goes on roller coasters and slurps Slushies. She’s a grandma who won’t buy you that candy bar no matter how hard you whine. She’s a grandma who sees through your fear of water and plops you in anyway. She’s a grandma that can sniff out a lie before it even crosses your teeth. She’s a grandma that makes you strong.

34

Thoughts on Umbrellas

In 16th century Europe, the umbrella was considered such an important status symbol that the Pope himself had to confer rank on a person before they were allowed to carry one. The Pope’s umbrella is called “the umbraculum,” which is Latin for “big umbrella,” even though it’s really not that big compared to modern standards, and since it was designed well before the invention of folding metal ribs or modern synthetic fabrics, it’s very heavy and looks more like a little circus tent on a pole than an actual umbrella.

Because people liked the Pope’s umbrella so much, the Vatican began making copies to send to other churches to use in their parades, and if your church was lucky enough to get one of these umbrellas, then you were no longer just a church you were a “basilica” (a term independent of architecture until recently). So if you were a peasant in the 16th century, and you decided to go on a pilgrimage of basilicas, most of your trip would involve visiting a lot of little country churches with fantastic red-and-yellow umbrellas that could not open or close perched next to the altar. Later versions could open and close, but by that time, the term “basilica” came to mean a specific type of building and umbrellas were not necessary to impart the title.

In the 1700s, Persian traveler and writer Jonas Hanway carried and used an umbrella publicly in England for thirty years. He popularized umbrella use among men to the point that English gentlemen often referred to their umbrellas as a “Hanway.” I think I’m going to bring this one back. “Don’t forget your Hanway,” I’m going to say when people step outside into a rainy day. “I have an extra Hanway if you didn’t bring your own.”

35 Holly Day

people say they’re a nuisance, but … me?

i don’t mind a squeaky floorboard. after all, who on earth am i to silence the wood & deny it its history?

if it’s got something to say, well, hey, i don’t mind.

besides, being a floor is hard tough, tough work with no breaks (no chips, no splinters); there’s a reason we call it hardwood flooring, y’know.

the least we can do is listen.

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Adrift

A tic under my right eye, The one I see out of Mostly, the one in which The world makes sense

Sometimes. What next? What Small calamity of unbelief Will plague me next, will Ensoul the body in pain, will

Mark it with unseen scarring, The loops and twirls of immaculate Distance warped, the ground Giving way in continuous

Unevenness, the masts of the boats Curving, straightened again, Melted and unmelted, snapped to In the unfolding, the opening out,

The flowering in time, in space

Curdled and wrinkled, all Layered, all unexpected, all What next? The tic is seismic,

It shudders the earth and sky, It shakes it anew, alight With bursts of blue and pink From the cherry tree by the bank,

A small scene I would not Deny myself, not today, whatever Anyone may think of An old man adrift with wonder.

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See Seeing

See The reflection of floor lamps in the window,

Thick fog lit by street light, A layer of words running down

The words, lights of the town

Doubled, moving about the town:

See the fatigue of it, understanding

As misunderstanding, space placing things

Where they never quite are: see How I gained by loss, sight as

Insight, memory as imagination, work

As worry, how one object stands

In relation to another: see seeing, What it’s like not to know

There is there, what rich Misapprehensions, what appetites

For missed intuitions: see How all is, isn’t as I see it,

Sow it, worry it anew, wake

From confusion, the eye relaxing

And the mind making it clear: see The lights winking on the ferry dock,

Red taillights trailing through town, The reflection of a reflection, The slow lift of dark, the dream Of sun in the falling season, rain

And the memory of rain making, Marking their way inland, Inward and back out: see How at this table I witness, I word it

As I see it.

38

It Is What We Wait For

Mid-winter thoughts of blindness without end How to bring the world back? Among the fortunes The ancients valued most was friendship, The face of someone with whom we reflect Not merely our abundant sorrows But also joy, that life-force of being We share with the blind dart of the bat, The soft swish of elk in snow, the clamber Of raccoons across the bare winter laurel. It is what we wait for, in the dead air before dawn, The muted cloud-light still hours away and our bodies Sweating out the worst thing we know about ourselves.

39

Duane M. Engelhardt

Yard Sale

“Hey. This one has a crack and a chip.” A woman held up a coffee mug. “Too bad, I was looking for a set. They’re nice, but three mugs doesn’t do me any good.”

“You could use the cracked one as a pencil holder.”

“I’m looking for coffee mugs, not desk accessories.” She handed the mug back to the seller and walked away in disgust.

When the woman was safely out of hearing range the man muttered, “It’s a goddamn yard sale, not Macy’s. Buy, don’t buy.” He shrugged his shoulders.

It was a perfect day for a yard sale, his wife had told him as they set up just after dawn for potential early lookers hunting bargains. He watched as she meticulously laid out items in what appeared to be random patterns but flowed with what she called, “a geometric symmetry.”

After making some adjustments, his wife stepped back, admiring her work as if everything had been arranged for a formal presentation. “Of course, today looks to be a beautiful day to just sit out and lounge in the front yard waiting for customers.” His wife sighed and then looked around as she counted off on her fingers, “Chair, coffee, cash box, something to read. Good. Have fun.” There was a slight pause before she kissed his forehead, jumped in the car, and was gone on a day-long outing with girlfriends to shop the outlets.

For the first hour or so he had played with an old rod and reel set, casting out into the street. When he became bored with that, he tied a practice golf ball to the fishing line, teed up the plastic neon orange ball and hit it down the block. Then using the fishing pole reeled the ball back again. Next was an old boogie board and a short lived experiment using it as a sort of grass sled down the hill in the front yard. He checked his phone, setting it down after resisting the urge to just dead scroll himself into oblivion when various views of a video of a dachshund and a pig, dressed as a man and woman, attempting to buy groceries crossed his timeline multiple times.

In the quiet of the morning, he reflected aloud with a newfound companion constructed of overstuffed clothes, a Halloween mask, garden gloves, and a well-worn knit cap on the philosophical question of when someone should be considered a customer. “Is someone a customer if they don’t buy anything?” The occupant seated in the lawn chair next to him was silent. “More like a nuisance. This entire exercise is a nuisance. No one is out and about. People have better things to do on a Saturday morning than mingle with neighbors they never speak with on a normal day, let alone at an event envisioned to bring the neighborhood together.” He snickered. “Everyone has better plans, even my wife. Oh yeah, she thought this was such a wonderful idea she went ahead and scheduled a shopping trip with girlfriends.”

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The man’s soliloquy was suspended as a sudden rush of people descended upon the scene and mingled among the carefully laid out items. The requests, the questions came fast and furious, the inquirers often not waiting for an answer as they swarmed about the front yard.

A young obstinate man rushed to the front, “I’ll pay premium for any old vinyl you have. Any condition.”

“Downsizing, huh?” A woman muttered, as she picked through a box of kitchenware. “Yeah, me and my guy, we’ve got to do that as well.” She held up and examined an electric coffee pot before tossing it back in the box.

“Watches?”

“Jewelry? Real or costume?”

“No.”

“Tools?”

“No.”

“Camping gear?”

“Antiques?”

“No.”

“Guns?”

He shook his head.

They politely looked, examined, touched, then abandoned those items they had set aside showing little or no indications of buying. As quickly as they had massed, they disappeared and once again he was alone.

Picking up the cracked mug he turned to his discreet friend, “One of four. Simple. Decorated with a line drawing of a cityscape. They were from a long time ago. Before marriage. When I was on my own. My run at being a Bohemian in the twentieth century. Writing bad poetry, smoking pot, and drinking cheap wine while working somewhat irregularly at being a carpenter.” He laughed. “The love of my life back then was bartending her way to becoming an actress or an artist or something creative because that’s what we all did.”

“She went on to become a what?” He searched his memory for the last time he had heard from her. “Christmas, maybe six, no ten years ago she sent a card to Mom and Dad’s address. ‘Hope you are well. Sorry for what I put you through. I’m a grandmother of three, own a small weaving company that makes handmade clothing, sing in the church choir, and I’m very happy.’”

“The last time we saw one another, this mug.” He smiled. “The chip. The crack. We fought over something. I hadn’t taken her latest performance art piece with any seriousness and she accused me of being a bourgeois spectator, unable to ascertain the real value of pain that created genuine art. ‘It’s a metamorphosis,’ she yelled at me as she threw this mug. Thankfully, her aim was off that night and the mug and its contents banged against the wall and not my head.” He laughed. “She spent the next hour packing her things, crying, yelling, as she shoved items from the fridge and kitchen cupboards into her duffel bags. ‘Your poetry is garbage, it never rhymes, it makes no sense. You’re a hack!’ She

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slammed the front door to the apartment and was gone.”

The dummy sitting next to him said nothing.

“That night, that fight, that mug was emancipating. I sat down and wrote an ode, a farewell requiem to being an artist in the modern age. An epiphany that drugs and poetry and being poor were not as romantic as I wanted to believe. Twenty odd pages of bad rhymes and obscure meter tucked away in a box somewhere, abandoned, never to see the light of day.”

“Hey.” A young woman’s voice interrupted the man’s deliberation with his silent colleague. “Is there a fourth mug to this set? Very retro.”

“Complete set, just waiting for a new home.” He stood and handed her the missing mug.

Holding the cracked chipped mug in her hands as if it was some long-lost fragile treasure, “There’s a story here, isn’t there?”

“Things happen,” Smiling, he shrugged his shoulders.

“I think it’s gratifying to know things are going to a new home, getting a second life. Don’t you?”

He gave an affirmative nod, “There is a certain satisfaction in giving worn out memories a new life.” He strolled around tidying up, fussing at the display as if he was a lifelong shopkeeper of a variety store.

She held up the cracked mug again. “I’ll take them, they are perfect just as they are.”

He carefully wrapped the mugs in newspaper and positioned them snugly into a shoebox before relinquishing them. She smiled, turned, and walked away with her treasure cozily tucked under her arm.

The afternoon passed as slowly as the morning with an occasional browser although no one made any efforts to buy anything. He resisted the urge from time to time to just wrap up everything, toss it all in boxes, grab a beer, and head inside. In the end he settled for the beer and with apologies dismantled his mute friend.

Burdened with an arm load of bags his wife hopped out of the car with her usual flourish and made her way to sit in the now empty chair. In an exaggerated fashion of being exhausted she slipped off her shoes, took a sip from the beer he offered and then scanned the yard, “So?”

Reaching for her hand, he smiled, “Just four old, neglected mugs, from the back of the cabinet.”

42

Recall of a Soldier

Except for the missing leg, you’d never know about the bomb, how I catapulted through the air, thinking I would never land. You’d never know about the months I spent in rehab or about this freak prosthetic I’m still trying to figure out.

Except for the twitch in my jaw, you’d never see the film loop in my brain, how it keeps playing the same frames: explosion, bodies, the red-soaked sand.

Except for my night sweats and hands grasping for my gun as I sit bolt upright in bed, you’d never know the enemy is approaching; he never goes away. And when you say, “Thank you for your service,” I know what you really mean, “Thank you for the stories I’ll never have to tell.”

43 Arvilla Fee

Winter Solstice

The days grow shorter; night squeezes the life out of dinner time, brings out the yawns by 7 p.m.

Standing in pajamas, I touch the cold glass, my reflection staring back at me a slightly haggard version of myself. Today is the day, I whisper Solstice, Solstitium:

the sun stands still I hold my breath; the earth holds its breath; there’s an imperceptible shift

a creaking of joints, a creaking of an axis. The days grow longer; the spool of light unwinds: three more minutes, five more minutes, ten more minutes until the sun touches my dinner plate, my fork, my hand, my face. I blink but don’t close the blinds. This is it, I think. I’m going to survive another winter.

44

Gardening with My Son

–thanks to Grace Paley for the first line

Once more I summon you, out of your past where boyhood took you in and you offered it your imagination.

biting into peaches, their sweetness as heavy as Tom Sawyer’s southern drawl building forts with torn, mismatched sheets stepping into Dali paintings balancing a fruit dish atop your head and wading in barbecue sauce; rib dinners with your sister, the tanginess stains your fingers orange.

What I remember most is your wide-open smile and the fishing lures Iridescent yellows and reds displayed, side by side, in your tackle box on Union Pond’s rock-skirted shore.

The whip of your pole seduces the water’s shimmer as you lose yourself, entirely, to Stephanie who summons you now, into the golden crescent of her arms the landscape of her body, lush and fragrant

as the raspberries swell like cherubs, expectantly from their branches where summer casts animated shadows along the horizon; the whir of your bicycle wheels faintly spin.

45
Bernadine Franco

This Moment’s Gleaming Rim

–for my daughter Priscilla –thanks to Mark Doty for the title

In our home by Union Pond where your brother tossed you in his tenderness, and Dad’s late night sundaes, dollops of whipped cream part like waves for the peanuts and the fireball maraschino cherries, are the remnants of the poets and artists we shared. Jane Kenyon’s milk pitcher sits solitary on the kitchen counter along with Doty, holding Wally, who turned into a “dry old leaf,” as vulnerable as the curved leather embrace in a Mapplethorpe photograph. The worn cd is still stuck on repeat on the track where Pavarotti’s pure and resonant voice ascended us to tears.

I tried to see this house without you, and the daily sight of you following the plume of tails of every dog you convinced us to keep. Like food and air you were there, unencumbered by material things, like those trotting brown coats and wet noses who perform their acrobatic welcome, all for a rub behind their ears.

When I look at you in this moment, poised, your long tapered fingers resting in your lap I see my cheek bones, my full lips, and my love of you in me, and in your Dad, and in that wide open smile of your brother. I see your pure depth of feeling as you witness the mother deer leading her babies through the branches of the trees on the edge of morning’s pale pink light.

46
Bernadine Franco

The Wedding Band

My wedding band was missing. It felt strange. Much like losing a tooth, I became overly preoccupied with space unoccupied. Freud had said that there are no such things as accidents. In our eighteen years of marriage, I’d never misplaced my ring. Had I sent myself a subliminal message? We had been quarreling a lot lately.

I returned to our bedroom, pulled the covers off the bed, and threw the linens in the air. The sheets flew around like large, blank flags. I anticipated seeing the ring soar high above the sheets or hearing it ping as it hit the wood floor. But nothing no fling, no ping, no ring.

The ring had been on my hand yesterday, which was Saturday. I remembered seeing it. I’d been home all day, reading the paper, doing chores, and cutting the grass. Perhaps I’d lost it while mowing? One out of every two marriages ends in divorce. That statistic played in my thoughts, grabbed me by the arm, and escorted me outside, where I scoured the yard, searching for anything shiny. I saw nothing. My stomach knotted.

I went into the garage and pulled out one of the big black plastic bags of lawn clippings and dumped it onto the same lawn from which I’d carefully raked and collected it. The ring had to be here. But it wasn’t. I checked a second bag, and again, no ring. In a matter of minutes, I’d emptied three bags but found nothing more than two pennies and a piece of tin.

Kicking and pawing my way through three piles of clippings, I continued tossing everything everywhere. There are no accidents. Did I not want to find it? Could that be the problem? What would Laura think? I felt defensive, confused, and conflicted. The only thing I knew for certain was that I needed to shower and remove all the itchy grass clippings from my legs and arms.

I walked inside. Shoes and socks were deposited on the living room carpet. My shirt and pants joined the sheets jumbled on the bedroom floor. The house was a mess outer reflected inner. I trudged into the bathroom and let my underwear fall onto the floor.

I climbed into the shower stall and turned on the hot water. Let a stream rain down on my outstretched hand. When the water became steamy, I reached over and turned on the cold. Then I moved under the spray, closed my eyes, and allowed the water to pour over my head and face and down my shoulders. It felt good, but I didn’t.

As I turned to grab the soap, I saw my ring lying neatly on the grate of the drain. I knelt and picked it up. It was smooth and warm, and when I slid it on my finger, it felt solid and familiar and right.

There are no accidents. The words sounded quite different this time. While rinsing off, I heard Laura’s voice. “Honey, what happened to the lawn?” She

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paused. “And to our bedroom?” There wasn’t a trace of anger in her voice. She sounded almost musical.

“Oh, that …” I answered as I reached over and turned off the water.

48

Hire Math

Was I in heaven? Standing on the bridge above Triphammer Falls, a rare sunny day in Ithaca lifted my spirits as a wafting breeze carried the scent of the surrounding forest, and my ears sunk into the soothing roll of white water churning beneath me.

The day would’ve been worthy of bottling had my mind not shifted to the depressing realization that although I’d been accepted, I desperately needed a scholarship to attend Cornell. Selling my car wouldn’t put a dent in tuition. Working was a given, but a wait-staff position would barely pay for a one-room apartment with a community bathroom and shower. Without encouragement from the university officials I’d spoken to on the phone, I’d nonetheless driven six hours from Brooklyn to Ithaca hoping that a personal appearance and appeal would yield success, and spent a couple of days, sleeping in my car, bouncing around campus, interviewing with anyone rumored to offer financial aid or a teaching scholarship without luck. My last appointment loomed.

Having grown up in Brooklyn, I’d rarely smelled the bouquet of nature, more often enduring the odor of urine in hallways or diesel fumes amidst cacophonous traffic and jostling streets. Some guys were put down from birth for an Ivy League University. They’d had golf and tennis lessons as toddlers and developed the perfect physique for a lettered sweater. I played stickball and lounged around in an Italian T-shirt. Not being able to afford Ivy League tuition, I leveraged a modest scholarship and enrolled at City College of New York, graduating with an electrical engineering degree because my Italian-immigrant father, who was without a high school education, steered me away from liberal arts “basket weaving.” An MBA degree had emerged as the passport to a lucrative career, and Cornell’s business school accepted my application, but didn’t offer me financial aid.

I took my last breaths in paradise and with angst in my gut headed toward the appropriately squared-off Math Department inside Malott Hall for my appointment with the Dean.

His secretary, Ms. Gleeson, a prim woman in her fifties had the weighty countenance of a gatekeeper. I reminded her of my reason for the appointment. She rose from her desk, knocked, then opened the Dean’s door saying, “A gentleman is here to see you about a teaching scholarship.”

Dean Johnson stirred like he’d been daydreaming. Wearing a tweed jacket, he rose slowly from his desk and greeted me with a doughy handshake. Clean shaven, graying slightly, he moved with the relaxed manner of someone whose greatest urgency was solving the one hundred- and fifty-year-old four-color problem. He gestured for me to sit across from him, and he again took a creaking padded chair behind a carved wooden desk. The room smelled musty.

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“Thank you for seeing me,” I said. “I’ve been accepted by the Business School, but I’ll need a scholarship to attend.”

He grimaced. “I wish I could be more optimistic, but the university is cutting back everywhere.”

My heart dropped. Still, this was my last chance, so I pressed on. “I dropped off my resume and transcripts with Ms. Gleeson. Might you have had a chance to review them?”

“Ah, yes,” he said, as he reached for a manila folder on his desk. I held my breath as he donned onyx-framed reading glasses and reviewed my credentials.

His eyebrows rose. “Your name is John Morales?”

Although of Sicilian-Italian heritage, my Hispanic-sounding last name derived from Spain’s eighteenth-century conquest and rule of the island.

His expression brightened. “May I call you Juan?”

I gulped. “Of course.”

His smile widened. “I see that you graduated as an electrical engineer. You must know calculus.”

I sat up in my chair. “As you can see on my transcript, I scored an A in all my math classes.”

“Impressive. Fortunately, we have a teaching position open for a person like you.”

I almost leapt from my seat. “You’re offering me the job?” “Absolutely. Full scholarship plus a small stipend.”

My elation was constrained by the realization that I may have been given the job, my ticket to attend the university, because the Dean thought me Hispanic.

I asked warily. “Must I sign something?”

He waved dismissively. “Just some paperwork Ms. Gleeson will give you enrolling you as an employee of the Math Department.” He stood and extended his hand saying, “Congratulations,” as he shook mine.

My heart pounded as I signed forms at Ms. Gleeson’s desk, then practically ran out of the building before anybody could ask more questions, resolving to avoid the Dean’s office lest Johnson would next try to engage me in Spanish conversation. Attending Cornell would change my life, but I hadn’t the financial means to matriculate. If I received the scholarship because the Dean thought me Hispanic, I wasn’t about to correct him. I’d been willing to sell my car and work two jobs, hoping, somehow, I’d find the means to continue past the first semester. A teaching scholarship changed all that.

I danced all the way to the business school singing the praises of affirmative action.

50

A Fractured Glow

I can’t recall much from my beginning other than my arrival. It took some effort to heave me from that dark place that wrapped around my head and body, yanking at my sides as they wiggled me from the emptying vessel. She groaned as my legs were dragged free, and out spewed the white crumbs and crinkles of paper and packing peanuts

Those first seconds were a blur. But when my sight cleared, I saw her, the one I call Mama. ‘You think it still works?’ she asked the figure beside her. The figure, he was of a similar shape but broader, boxier, and taller than her. He patted my head with a firm hand. ‘Of course!’ he said, and so on. His hands grazed my behind and took my cord, unwrapping it from twists and coils, giving it the slightest tug. It tickled a bit I must admit. Then there was a punching click!

It was like a surge that flowed through my veins, connecting all the pieces voltaic. I was warm all over. The sensation shot through my back, spine, circling my core, whirling in a fiery spazz before, at last, striking me within. It pulsed, that very little center inside. I couldn’t tell what it was exactly, but I didn’t panic. I felt alive, truly awake. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and opened my eyes to the shadow that hid and reappeared until I opened my eyes widely and it was gone, and a soft glow laid itself on the floor. ‘See! Told ya this old thing will work.’ He patted me again. Mama’s eyes gleamed at the sight, clapping her hands. She emitted a screech through her toothy smile. If I could, I would reflect the precision of her excitement, the way her rosy cheeks carved her wonderful eyes into crescent eclipses, and the way she hopped on her heels. She skipped and sang and jumped around into the figure’s arms.

This figure later became known as Papa.

A few days went on into weeks, and I found myself at home. It was lovely and cozy. Mama and Papa picked the perfect spot where I could look upon our world at its best angles; their favorite seat to rest; a vintage green couch with threads plucked above the simple circled rug. There were shelves to the left of us. It was a big wooden case that collected an array of books and knick-knacks of cherished memories.

Here I spent time with Mama as Papa was usually gone. I watched after Mama and got to know her routine. A lot of it was her plopping down with a book or looking at me. She would do so, read some three or four pages before taking a sip from a mug that was the exact shade of the wallpaper that’s dull pattern lined the wall in its awkward floral design. Mama has become a constant reminder, a reflection from the shades of her hair like cooling coal and to her

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***

eyes and nose sculpted evenly under the freckles of her bridge. She’s near a hand over my shoulder, always holding on.

Every day, Mama stands at the far end of the room and raises her arms, creating a delicate rustle, and a rush of bright light, brighter than my own glow. She’s like a magician casting a spell over my home with the sun warming me, but she makes sure I don’t get too warm. She dries off the heat and dust that clings to me, that would make me itchy and break out in bumps. She catches on quickly and is always to the rescue like a superhero.

Lately it has changed between Mama and me.

Mama has been leaving more, out for much longer. It is because she’s been sick. Since she vomited on the carpet, she has been resting, and her belly has gotten bigger. She’d let the sun in, sit with it, and read whilst rubbing circles around her tummy, humming to herself. Then she got up and would not come back until dark. One day, I knew something was wrong as she got up from the couch clutching her midsection, and Papa rushed in to help her by the arm. There was a dark red stain on the back of her gown.

The two fled in the middle of the night.

Days later, everything changed with the arrival of Tomas.

Tomas was an oddly shaped thing held in a colorful blanket. His presence unsettled me. Eventually, he began to nag and wee, and it was too often. He became so unpleasant, and he ejected all kinds of icky goo from his mouth even his bum. On top of that, he’s taken my time with Mama. I think Mama needs to take him back wherever she got him from. She must take him back to whatever abyss she hauled him from and place him right back there! Tomas eventually grew into a nuisance, and with Papa gone longer and longer, Mama hasn’t found much time to herself.

It started to pain me, watching both Mama and Papa though they looked over Tomas so lovingly, yet their eyes were sullen. That pity only lasted so long, and it began to hurt; the lump inside me. I cannot cough it free. I cannot breathe. I feel myself choking on the weight gathering from top to end, falling forward with the heat under my face.

Their attitudes began after the arrival of Tomas. It feels like subterfuge, a tactic of theirs from the very start like they are deceivers. They scare me now. Neither one of them looked at me the same way. Tomas climbed over them as they sighed. Their life was Tomas’s, it appears, and there was no room left to dance. And I succumbed to Mama and Papa’s unstable coping.

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***
***

When the lights go off, my heart pulses with trepidation as the cushions sink beneath them. They are watching. Ever-present eyes, unblinking and relentless, fixated upon me with such intensity. Tomas stares at me with his glowing bug green eyes, mouth agape to a dark cavern for his fangs to bare ugly and yellow. I fear he may bite me. The next day, he caresses my face with his Cheetostained fingers, smudging my glass orange. The crumbs stuck to me with his saliva. It was best I have no nose though it is still horrible when he touches me and pushes my buttons. Mama, however, has always been to the rescue, taking him away yet I am the one getting the ugly look and the heavy sigh as she slaps me with a rag to wipe clean my face. Going off to smile and laugh with him. And Papa’s here, my heart stops and gets strangled in my veins. My breath whispers when he takes his mud-crusted withered boots off and puts his feet on the coffee table. His socks had holes scarred in the sole and stained dark under the pads of his toes. He points that little box at me, and the glow emits softly, creeping into a flicker.

Usually it’s just silent between us; other times he is on his heels shouting, red in the cheeks, throwing up his fists. Sometimes he gets close, too close, and hits me against the head, and I am blinking, and blinking until the light fades back in, and he gives me that cautious look and sits back down. It was such an awful glare, so horrible.

My head aches from the thought alone. They’re all together now. I can feel them prying with their gazes, the unspoken judgements, their insatiable hunger. I never wanted this. But now the show begins.

I could feel myself grow tired.

I could not harbor the sight of them any longer, the three of them together! I refuse … but if I don’t, then what am I to do? Where am I to go? I cannot leave or return to anywhere else because the place to turn to return to is not but the destination I yearn for, dwelling not in a physical realm but within one of metaphor.

There exists no site on earth to which I wish to return to, for the recollection of the ones I know linger hauntingly within the depths of my soul, that little spirit that falls out one’s head when they fall. The thought of return is but a shudder along my back, a home of emptiness, draining every essence of my being.

If I must contemplate there is a place to go whether it be in memory or dream making the possibility of return impossible, I would flee to where the cliffs meet the sea and salty water mingles with rigid stone, and the sun phases into the thick grays of clouds.

I yearn for a place I’ve never been.

How silly am I?

How delusional is my longing to live as I breathe?

Second Honorable Mention, 2024 Freshwater Student Writing Contest

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The Quiet One

She sat on the lake bank reading “Bridges Of Madison County” while the rest of us laughed and splashed and dunked our feet in all that gooey underwater spinach.

But when water turned too chilly to sustain roughhousing and I clambered out of the lake, whose eyes rubbed me down like a towel? Whose beauty - yes beautyinformed the setting sun that a softer grasp of surfaces was needed? I snuggled up close to her. Credit the cricket chorus for the years to come. And the binding shuttering nightfall.

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The Curse of the Curious Mind

Sure there was something in me that needed to solve the paradox of the heap, the elevator problem, the unexpected hanging, the Thompson Lamp. I drew the diagrams, defined three herders and their sheep into formulas and fractions. I drove my brain like some of those same sheep. Might have had it too. The numbers, the equations, were about to surrender to the sweat of my brain.

But suddenly I thought, what’s the point of knowing something? Why not make coffee? Why not sit out on the porch and watch the sun set? What’s a big mental payday anyhow but some quirk of the geek in me that won’t lie down when I tell it to. Well now I’m telling it to.

Sip of excellent Java, comfy chair, and a warm glow to the horizon. And then it hits me, the right hand rule will get you out of the maze any time. But that doesn’t help with the rotating color wheel. The coffee’s drunk. The sun goes down. Empty cup and the night ... now what is that the answer to exactly?

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Sharing the Bed

Regret rattles the doorknob when I’m nearly asleep, pushes his way in, tears back my covers. Move over, he growls. He kicks off his shoes and lies down beside me, taking up more than his share of the bed.

I was so ready for sleep before he arrived, this guest I must have invited though I can’t say just when.

He’s pleased with me I haven’t forgotten him or shredded my doubts. They’re in a shoebox up high on a shelf, photographs I don’t look at, letters I keep but never reread.

But Regret does. He rummages, remembers, susses me out. He’s ready to talk. You still need me, he says. You still want me, don’t ask me why.

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Kitchen Wisdom

I’ve been told by the early evening servers that my six sheet-pans of roasted vegetables (serving 75) are the talk of those who come through the dinner line from four to five. The guests for whom Want rarely wanes, remark, “Oh goodie, fresh veggies tonight, “

They too have something in common with the supermarket seconds I chop oil and season earlier in the day, having also lost their crispness and market appeal.

But at the soup kitchen I’ve learned most raw vegetables and people past maturity have a shelf life far greater than one might think. With a mere rinse trim and toss of savory ingredients the nearly rejected can become a mini loaves and fishes miracle.

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Birdbrain

Sheer audacity

my crowing to a seasoned birder (and poet no less) about sighting a plié-ted (instead of pileated) woodpecker clinging to the bark of a lakeside oak, spoken as if I knew the red-crested species as well as she who, gracious as the Mona Lisa, half-smiled at my boast, an expression I first perceived as pleased (possibly impressed) but on second thought more likely mere amusement, brought on by the image of a bird, wings akimbo, balanced on bended knees and horizontal thighs, sucking ants from a knotty tree trunk.

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The Narrator Time Travels to the Black Death

I can alter matters and I can flee them and I can gift them hand sanitizer and masks. And so I do. I teach them

distance from person to person, the washing of hands,

the seeking of knowledge. A knowledge to teach the poor to cease working when the wealthy and titled threaten their wages, a lesson where the wealthy and titled learn to plow fields, if they do. There was a great learning

then a recovery. Citizens breathed deep without coughing or bleeding.

Then unlearned the lesson of distance. They filled the town’s statue of Laura’s horse. Its nostrils freely flowed red wine. Even the rich and the rats got drunk from red puddles at people’s feet.

That is my goal, but if they do not learn to wear the masks and you are reading this now you might not survive.

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La Maison de Balzac, 24 rue Berton –Eugène Atget photograph, 1913

The house has fallen on hard times since he was a lodger here. Back then it was a country retreat where he could brood all night wrapped in his monk’s robe, the coffeepot close at hand, and wear a hollow into the writing table. The same blank wall he hurried along remains facing the rear entrance. The same two boundary stones still lean against each other. But the village he knew has been engulfed by the city that swept in with its boredom and graffiti and set a different stage for the whole splendid and miserable comedy to continue playing itself out.

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Meeting

Tiny diamonds sparkle in the widow’s ears and the diamond ring still freights her finger. Glittering on one wrist, gold, real and lots of it. On the other, a complicated watch flashing with data. When we embrace, she’s brittle as a wren-bone. Strange to meet again after many years and for an instant to reawaken our kinship, my last first cousin.

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Casting Memories

The creaky wooden canoe wobbled nervously as my footsteps prompt following dads. The loose fishing bobbers rattled by my feet. My bucket hat intact as we diverged.

Old reliable life jacket was wrapped snugly around my shirt. Again, Dad wore his dirty green vest worn and ripped for decades. Opening the bait, an odor whiffed stronger than the bug repellent on me.

At midpoint, Dad’s wooden pole dove through the water’s surface. He preached the perfect cast with raised eyebrows and pride. Conversations a stranger on breathing water. Nature spoke instead with birds and hints of fish around with subtle splashes. As the boat sat in a spot, a soft breeze passed. Nuisance mosquitoes were ignorant of my repellant threat.

Orange tired eyes from the sun fell over ample trees shuffled together in the distance. The silence was broken when Dad lunged, yanking his pole upward. He clenched both hands tightly around the rod.

Scales teased through the water as the catch approached. On the final reel in, he held his trophy in the air.

Revealing a magnificent Grayling catch still raining drops of water onto the floor of the canoe. Followed by the crisp hiss of a PBR to celebrate.

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Small Talk

Noticing a rivet in the tree’s trunk is not a “normal” observation. In passing on the way back, strangers asked me how my hike was. I told the couple about the waterfall at the end and how the view is “worth it.” It is what they want to hear about anyways. I told them they were close to the waterfall, even though they were still thirty or more minutes away. They requested politely if I could take a photo of them, and of course I did. Stammering to a flat surface they posed grinning for me as I located the snap button on their clunky cased phone. They rambled about how the trail was steeper than expected, but that they plan to finish and see the waterfall. The man gulped his bottle of water as the woman pointed out normal things, such as how beautiful today is for a hike and the sun finally being out. I didn’t tell them how a snail was sitting so perfectly on a smooth rock beneath the gentle ripple in the water. We did not discuss my spiraling thoughts that consumed the beautiful view on the long way down. I didn’t tell them about the shock of the cold water beneath bare feet on sand muck. No, simply just what is supposed to be said and I continued my hike, contemplating the beauty of nature and the little details that make all the difference.

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Night Music, Water Music

All day dragonflies, errant sparks in metallic blue and green, performed a corps de ballet, and the river flowed, reflecting flocculent cumulus like a kindergarten painting whole watery world folded at the horizon, opened to mirror images.

But night created a velvet box, our little boat a Faberge egg. Lanterns appeared ashore, glow like colored jewels through bare oaks’ filigree. Fragmented music rolls the water’s surface like fog, and vibrations shimmer our coffee’s black satin like felted hammers on strings.

Long ago, a professor explained: there’s always a word for it, if not in English, in Farsi, Gaelic, Inuit, Navajo. Tell me then the word for moonlit-lace beneath a backyard pear, for color of lupine not blue yet not quite violet, for the way Chopin’s Piano Concerto #5 leaves memory’s door unsecured, allows it to cant, to fall ajar.

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October

Iconic azure robes October skies and cumulus clouds amass in static banks to create a calm tableau that belies tumult below where errant breezes scuttling along the ground upend the fallen leaves.

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Simple Questions

Do the birds watch me each morning as my dog and I take the same walk under the same trees while he keeps his nose trained down, intent on trailing all that’s gone before as I look up hoping to snatch one glimpse from the thin sky at day’s opening a hint of what it’s end might be? Are the birds curious at all or as purely content as they seem to be in continuing to sing on and on one simple melody day after day, dawn after dawn, with no need to question anything?

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Dear Tommy

Cousin, it takes thirty-four years for me to realize I bought a house less than two miles from the funeral home where I last said farewell to you. The realization comes in a comment, an unexpected aside from my brother. You know, that’s where Tommy’s funeral was. No, I had not remembered, not connected your final family reunion with the unremarkable white and tan building tucked on a secluded side street in this small, southeastern North Carolina town.

That day’s sunshine floods my memory a brightness so suffocating, so unfamiliar in its blinding sadness. I had no words. What could I possibly say to my uncle’s damp and sinking face? You were twelve, Star Wars figurines and Atari game player still so new.

Cousin, if I could have offered words only my future self knew, I might have said, stay inside and play more Donkey Kong. No need to venture out with your best friend. No need to be on the edge of that country highway, barreling dump trucks behind you. Tommy, pick up the phone, call your junior high sweetheart, whose black sunglasses could not hide her splotchy red face. I realize I am the younger Kentucky cousin, but please stay home and watch Luke fight Darth Vader one more time and anticipate the sequels that will never quite match the original. You don’t need to ride that bike. We need you here. You left too soon.

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Hold On, You Can Do This

One way to approach a job fair begins in the late 1990s (yes, that’s in the last century) and the time I drove to Raleigh, NC (or rather somewhere in between Raleigh and Durham just off the highway in an exceptionally large hotel with what appeared to be hundreds of people seated, standing and generally milling about) to attend a job fair for a new regional airline, which will remain unnamed but which only survived ten years since it was, alas, a small company and could not compete with the big name airlines.

But my naïve self did not know any better and traveled there one warm, sunny, Saturday morning in a little red manual-transmission-manual-windowsno-air-conditioning Saturn with I wonder what this flight attendant business might be like running through my head. I filled out form after form, waited in line after line in a large ballroom of people only to be shuffled into a smaller ballroom of people with whom I recall making some flash-in-a-pan kind of friendships, and I thought, I could use my languages, travel the world, make my own schedule, but then I saw my competition which my future forty-some-year-old self would have advised was not that much in the way of competition and I reflected more on their proposed hourly wage, considered the limited (part-time) hours, did a little math before realization dawned: Katy, you’ll be poor and you won’t actually get to travel to Europe and you’ll still have to find another job in your down time, and is that really the life you want? so I turned to my new best friends, and declared, This isn’t for me; I’m headed back to Wilmington, and I wished them luck and walked out into the sunshine of my future.

Which, in some obscure way, brings me to present day twenty-five years later, as I attend another job fair, one in which I am searching for eager, curious, intelligent, and diverse talent, and I find my voice raspy, my throat sore with all the talking, so I take a lunch break. I walk through the convention center’s massive hallways where hundreds of young college kids from all over the United States are seated, standing, and generally milling about.

This time, though, they are also huddled over laptops and phones and tablets deciphering what will help them stand out in front of potential employers because of course there is a separate massive hall for interviews. (You see, these young professional-wanna-be’s are looking for summer internships with glamourous companies, one of which happens to be one of those big name airlines still around all these years later, but now I carry a relaxed, knowing smile because they have a very impressive booth, and I believe I saw some miniature airplanes as give-away merch, but yes, I digress.)

And it’s these interviews for which these young college students are trying to prepare when, randomly, as I walk along the hallway searching for lunch, please let there be something healthy because my body is now twenty-five years older, and it is

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so much harder to lose the extra pounds, I notice one young woman in a tucked away section of the wall, jumping up and down, arms by her sides, in front of a young man who looks about nineteen, in a business suit, wearing glasses, eyes closed, his face drained of color. He mirrors her jumping, up and down, arms at his sides, and he follows her words, shake out your shoulders, wobble your head side to side, jump up, jump down, look up, look down, and he does all this because he trusts her. She is his friend or sister or girlfriend and is helping him prepare. And he believes this is how to calm nerves because he is scared.

I imagine this could be his first interview, and he has seen all the other young people in business suits, resumes printed on pale y ellow paper, holding laptops and phones and tablets, and maybe wearing slightly shinier shoes, and he worries about the competition a competition that will mean nothing twenty-five years from now. But seeing him so visibly nervous about a job interview, I realize he is doing it right: he is holding on to the moment for dear life, taking it seriously, knowing no matter what happens, he won’t walk out the door and say, this isn’t for me, because this is something he knows he must do, and with that knowledge, I know he’ll make it.

I continue my search for lunch, one part pit-of-my-stomach anxious with all the rest of my parts rooting for him. I offer a silent, unseen nod to both for showing me how to hold on and believe you can do this.

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Winter’s Undoing

In one surprise walk, I encounter winter’s undoing.

It’s in the feathery warmth of two o’clock sun across my indoor pale face. It’s in a golf applause of crisp leaves clinging to tree bark as they perform a shimmying dance in an early March breeze. It’s in the metallic dirt that sneaks into the deep breath I inhale. It’s in brown and black sparrows skipping, then blending with last Fall’s leftover leaves. It’s in the goldfinch’s cheerful chirps, hiding (and quite possibly giggling) in trees right next to me. It’s in the fivepatterned call of the red-shouldered hawk as she floats, flies, then falls toward earth in search of food. It’s in the poised pose of a peering bright cardinal tucked between tree branches. I follow his gaze; does he see it too?

There is a rumble of motorcycles silent for months on a nearby highway, the piercing descent of airplanes screaming for land, the slap of a basketball on outdoor courts, and its thudding vibration when it bounces off the rim. It’s in lime-green stems peeking from brown soil beginning their journey toward yawning yellow daffodils. It’s in the encouraging ring of wind chimes playing their most optimistic notes.

On this walk, I encounter winter’s undoing in a breeze at times warm, then cool, but ever hopeful.

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Lullaby in real time

They say crows can use tools and to be fair I’ve seen the videos, watched them break sticks to the exact length, shove them down a hole until they impale their worms, and retrieve them for dinner. This tool making is what distinguishes crows from the other creatures, they say, making them, perhaps, the next-brightest animal.

But I drove to the store today and studied the meat case until I found a worm that suited me, with my hands threw money at the grocery checker, and tossed my meal in the refrigerator. How close are they, is what I want to ask, how close is the next-smartest animal to gaining the ability to impale the rest of the world towards its liking. That’s what I want to know.

71 Casey Killingsworth

Casey Killingsworth

To the map maker who drew this section of the galaxy

I made it, Mom, name-tagged up and a new shirt for my reunion, still walking, shaking hands with the smart kids, luckier than the ones on the list who aren’t here anymore, luckier than the ones who thought nobody would listen to their accomplishments so they stayed home. I made my own list, kids and grandkids, mostly jobs that mostly didn’t suck, not overcome by bills. I’m walking, Mom, I’m still walking.

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Little Death Chemical

I think of you capable of two states, like a spray of phosphorus: inert and explosive. One meant for the folks back home, plain And colorless; the other said to glow in the pitch of night combat, the neon and froth of the enemy’s armaments. We could keep this between ourselves, Not as a secret but as a fact like the laws of thermodynamics, because I know my impulses. I have lived with them through generations of acting and being acted upon, blowing through apartment buildings, tearing away walls, ripping hinges, disgorging upholstery of its contents, separating people from their possessions as if caught in a stampede toward exodus. You raise my blood to the skin’s surface; who knows how many others you have also dusted, taking the insubstantial and unimportant, turning it into temporary sparkle and radiance and all without the aid and benefit of drugs so readily available where the governments are lawless. Chemicals, we are often told, are organic, natural; a consequence of events long before us, in the birth and death of universes, yet this does little to comfort recidivists; and I wonder in our uneasy peace, in the distance of our estrangement, how you might classify me, as among the war criminals, or the innocents.

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Will Be

“We must admit there will be music despite everything.” –Jack Gilbert, A Brief for the Defense

Perhaps one day we will put down our weapons & Return to the guitar or cello, whatever instrument

That has been abandoned, left in the closet

For dead, and surrendered to the gods

Of capitalism. Let’s clear our throats

Of hate or fear and be children again.

We will sing and play. Surely, the chords

Will be strained, the notes will be off-key,

And we’ll howl the lyrics like cats.

This offensive will be much preferred

To the crescendo of bombs & babies screaming.

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Night Sky

A full mother-of-pearl moon lights a path across the bay, so clear one could almost walk it from deck to horizon, so bright the water reflects a shimmering parallel shoreline. Pinpoint stars flash and blink, holding the black velvet night in place. They compete with the moon and water for attention, sketching star pictures: the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, The Dragon, Cassiopeia. Each constellation is a story, waiting to be written.

The illusion of stillness gives way. The shrouds clink against the mast as the boat rocks gently on water that’s never truly still. The tide ripples quietly by. Wavelets tickle the hull. Jellyfish float up from the depths, drifting like watery ghosts just under the surface.

Morgan would have reveled in this night. How often he and Nora had sat topside, sipping scotch, holding hands, telling star stories before moving to the V-berth to be loved to sleep. One year their last sail of the season was over Halloween. The night was cold and still, barely a whisper of wind. They wore socks and fleece and windbreakers, and carved seven small pumpkins into jacko’-lanterns that they arranged along the main, candles glowing in the still air. When the moon rode high, light fell through the hatch, bathing his tanned hand, resting dark on her milk-white belly. Morgan was a passionate, romantic, generous lover. They laughed a lot. Nothing before Morgan or since has given her such feelings of oneness, completeness, safety, and peace as their twentyfour years.

The first time Nora stood at the edge of the ocean, waves licking her feet, she imagined skin cells sanded free, traveling around the world. Then, and in all the years since, that thought has brought comfort. Last year she had joined Morgan’s wife, children, and grandchildren to scatter his ashes on the bay. He’d carved the cherry box himself, after doing the same for a neighbor and her husband. His ashes weren’t so much ashes as cinders and sand. Nora had stood where the surf lapped her ankles and let the last bits of him sift through her fingers. Some particles sank immediately. Others floated on the outgoing tide to the sea. Now every time she wades in a river or splashes in the ocean, she imagines that some tiny bit of Morgan caresses her toes. Perhaps the heavier cinders will be tossed in the surf till they are round as marbles, and beachcombers won’t know what they’ve found when they pocket a lucky piece or a worry stone.

By the time they became lovers, both Nora and Morgan were long married and settled. They agreed from the beginning that neither of them would divorce, and their marriages went on as before the same affections, obligations, and history binding them to their spouses. Nora’s husband never suspected. Morgan’s wife did. When she confronted him, he said, “There’s nothing

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between Nora and me that you need to worry about.” As the years passed and her life went on unchanged, she accepted the situation, never trying to interfere with their times together. She notified Nora each time Morgan went into the hospital, chatted about her activities and their family whenever Nora called and Morgan wasn’t available. Nora still calls Martha every month, though they seldom mention Morgan now.

As the night wears away, the black velvet smothers Nora. She’s drowning in tears and aloneness. Three falling stars flash down the sky, inviting her to step onto the moonlit path, to join with Morgan again, wherever and however.

76

Another Gloomy Day

The rain today reminds me how thirsty I am, of empty bottles in the morning giving ghostly warnings with their silence, while I’m reckless without trying, like an angry poltergeist haunting itself because no one is listening.

77

A Many Splendored Thing

Some treat death like a background character with one important line, others feel death is worth writing poems for, like a waiting lover, anticipating the most final kiss, and then there’s those, who joke with the undertaker as they prearrange their ending, only to lie awake at night, worried about a mole,

which helps them forget the dull ache that reminds them they’re still alive.

78

The Execution of Tertius Lafontaine

–novel excerpt

Only six people come the night they killd me. The prosecutor, he was there acourse, and the prison priest. A reporter for the local paper. But for me they was Fletcher Purdy, and my friend Nissy and my brother Teddy. I begged Teddy not to come, but he come anyway. Then he sat in the back and couldnt watch. Winnie’s parents was long dead by then. She dint have no other family. The only livin person who loved her was the one about to die. They offered me a last meal, like they do, but I couldnt eat. The priest came to take my confession, but I said no. Dint think God would like it.

The curtains pulled back and there they all were. Behind the glass they looked to me like some get-together I couldnt be part of, you know like when you see a bunch of guys playin basketball on the courts at sunset and you wanna join in but you know you ain’t welcome. Dont know how I looked to them. Prolly not too good, strapped into the electric chair and sweaty and aint had a shower in a week.

I smelled leather. I looked up, watched the executioner strappin the cracked leather belt round my middle, bucklin me in. He yanked it tight and went for the ankle straps. Right leg, buckle. Left leg, buckle. I couldnt stop lookin at the top of his head. He had this blond fuzzy crew cut and a inch-long scar on the soft spot, and his head bobbin like a chicken’s while he messed with the straps. Reminded me of Lucius, my father’s old rooster. A Rhode Island Red. Used to strut around the yard and go for the ankles of neighbors when they went past. He kept cows and goats, too, penned in the side yard, long after the street stopped bein farmland and yard animals dint belong no more. Long as we was rich the neighbors shrugged it off, but later it was just one more thing they talked about when they talked about us. Once he started drinkin, he stopped feedin the animals and they broke free and ate up all the woodbine, and shit on the neighbors’ lawns. I penned them when he died, after grandmother took Badness’s brain away. But it dint change nothin. Only Winnie changed things. Things was better after she came. But then that was why I was here, wasn’t it? Things got better, and that wasn’t allowed. I knew it at the time. Should never have let it happen. Then the rest wouldnt of happened neither. Winnie would still be alive.

And now here she was again in my head. I always fight it, but she comes anyway. First the way she was, them shiny blue eyes sparklin in her freckly face, hair color of peaches, the way she laughed, throwin her head back like she meant it; then the way I found her, that night. I tried hard to think of something

79 Christian Livermore

else, even just to concentrate on the guy strappin me in, but my eyes started burnin and then the tears come.

The executioner put them sticky white things on my head and leg. That’s how they’ll tell when I’m dead, I thought. I tried not to, but I got angry. And I said to God: Are you happy now? Bastard? Will this answer? Not for Winnie. That wasn’t me. No. Only the ugliness of finding her, I got that part.

It was for all the rest of it that I thought this might even things out for my family. I dint do none of it, but somebody’s gotta pay, eventually.

The little girl was there again, standin in the corner. Nobody else could see her as usual. I think I finally know why she keeps comin back.

The warden ast if I had any last words. I thought for a minute, somethin was there in the back of my mind, from my old lessons. Finally I remembered, and I said it: ‘Thy will be done.’

The priest he made the sign of the cross over me, then a guard crossed hisself. I seen Nissy clutchin on her chair seat and lookin at the floor. I dint see nothin after that.

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A Routine Exchange

“Go play,” Billy commands with a little more firmness than he means to. His niece, Caroline, stomps her way into the large bed of snow surrounding the playground in her dirty winter boots, still humming that ridiculous goodbye song she spent the entire car ride to the park screaming into Billy’s ear. The farther she travels from him, the louder she resumes reciting the lyrics.

“Sing along, the goodbye song! It’s time to go away. Sing along, the goodbye song! We’ll meet again someday!” She sings as she twirls around the basketball hoop pole.

Billy clears a snowy bench that faces the playground, where Caroline is in his clear line of sight, and sits down. The wood is wet beneath him, and he feels the seat of his ripped jeans dampen. He rummages inside the left pocket of his peeling, faux leather jacket for the Newport pack he keeps meaning to throw away. Once he gets hold of a stick, he pulls the lighter from his right pocket out and flicks it with a steady hand. One, two, three ... four times. Nothing happens. Billy flicks the wheel twice more to be sure it’s dead, then bites hard on his lower lip. With a disgruntled sigh, he stuffs the lighter back into his pocket, then he takes out the cigarette pack from his left and chucks it into the snow.

“Well, that’s just great, right? I can’t even have a damn smoke.” Billy’s voice comes out in an irritated mumble like how a little boy sounds when he doesn’t win the prize at a fair game.

“Uncle Billy, watch!” Caroline shouts before she flops face-first into the snow with her arms stretched wide. Billy sighs and stands up, squinting at the child-sized hole his niece made in the fluffy sea of sparkling white.

“Be careful.” Billy scratches his patchy beard; his eyes shift from Caroline to the entrance gate on the other side of the playground and his right heel taps a steady rhythm into the pavement. His niece pops back up from the ground and flops down once again.

“Uncle Billy, are you watching?” Caroline kicks at some of the snow around her then stares at Billy with wide eyes. She flaps her arms with her palms facing towards her, beckoning Billy closer. He gives her a small, awkward smile and nods.

“I’m watching, Carol. I’ll just be right here,” Billy replies. Caroline pouts and places her hands on her hips. Billy doesn’t budge.

“You are not a fun uncle. Silly Billy!” She stomps farther away and gets closer to the swing sets that are lined up at the back of the playground. Billy hears her little giggles and watches as she cleans off a swing. “I’m going to swing!” She’s sure to let Billy know, like he can’t already see where she’s standing. Billy lets out another sigh and gives her a thumbs up.

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“Hey.” Billy’s eyes widen and his head snaps backwards. When his wary gaze falls on his sister that stands just inches behind him, he slowly shakes his head, blinking harshly.

“Fuck, Amy ... I didn’t know there was another way into the park. Why’d you sneak up on me like that?”

Amy does that annoying head-tilt thing that’s gotten under Billy’s skin since they were kids. Back then, it was never the stern reprimands from his father, or the guilt-tripping tears of his mother that provoked his shame when he did wrong: it was being looked down on by his big sister. Amy was older, smarter, and more polite; people always liked her more than they liked him. Her disapproving gaze never fails to make his hands clammy and his stomach churn. It’s gotten a lot harder to handle her constructive criticism nowadays the narrowed eyes and the frustrated sighs especially since his relapse. Billy almost wishes Amy didn’t care about him so much, even though it seems like she’s the only one who ever does.

“Watch your mouth,” Amy says, ignoring his question.

Billy shifts his weight uncomfortably and offers a shrug. “She can’t hear me.”

“Are you sure?” She purses her lips and puts her hands on her hips, just like Caroline did. Billy is certain that Caroline is too far to hear them; she’s gained a lot of height on the swing set and just keeps squealing, “Woo!” But Amy’s face is sour, and her hands haven’t left her hips.

“I don’t know,” Billy mutters and darts his eyes to anything other than his sister.

“Exactly. Think before you speak, Billy. Come on. You told me to help you out, so I’m helping you. It’s hard, but I’m helping you. And my help goes beyond free food and a free room, okay? You need to listen to my advice. You need to change your attitude.” Amy rants while readjusting her enormous purse over her shoulder; she can afford real leather. “God forbid Mom and Dad find out you’re living with me again. But you’re my baby brother, right? I’m not some heartless bitch. I’m not going to leave my baby brother out on the street. No. That’s not how I roll.” Billy’s eye begins to twitch, and his beard is itchy again.

“Yeah, you know ... I get it, sis. Thanks.” What happened to watching our mouths?

“You’re welcome. Caroline Maria! Get your booty over here! It’s time to go and I’m cold!”

Okay, Billy thinks, let’s get this over with. “So, sis ... umm ...” Billy internally curses at the crack in his voice. He clears his throat, deciding to focus on Caroline waddling towards them instead of Amy’s eyes.

“What? What’s up?”

“I, uh ... Do you think I can borrow some money?” Getting the question out was a lot more excruciating than he thought it would be. He stuffs both of

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his hands into his pockets again and feels around for his dead lighter, rubbing the end of it with his thumb. Caroline is at her mother’s side, now; she holds her hand, but keeps her gaze on Billy.

“You want money, Uncle Billy?” Amy quickly looks from Caroline to Billy, then back to Caroline. She is just as shocked as Billy is that Caroline has entered the conversation. He takes a long breath.

“Yeah, Carol. I need money. I don’t have any,” he chuckles, but he doesn’t know why.

“Why do you need my mommy’s money? For grocery food? Maybe for ice cream?” Caroline considers these options with one brow raised and her tiny little hand on her chin. Billy hopes he doesn’t look like he’s shaking because he feels like he is. He looks to Amy for help, but she isn’t looking at him; she’s looking down, and there’s a tear streaming down her cheek.

“Umm ... uh. Well, no.” Billy swallows hard.

“What for? What’s the money going to buy for you Uncle Billy?” Billy looks at Amy again. But now that she stares back at him with watery eyes, her bottom lip quivering, and her neck turning red, his own gaze falls to his old, cheap, scuffed up boots.

“You know what? Never mind. Let’s ... let’s just go home.” Billy’s concession nearly comes out as a whisper. He won’t look either of them in the eye.

“Yes. Yes, let’s go. Let’s get home, bugaboo!” Amy’s voice wavers, but her words are all that’s needed for a young child like Caroline to move swiftly on from a conversation she didn’t understand that much anyway. Though, the abrupt change in subject must also work on an adult addict like Billy; as Amy walks towards the park entrance with her daughter, the exchange has already exited the front of Billy’s mind. All he can fixate on as he stands, seemingly stuck to the pavement in the lot near the playground, is whether he can find a way to retrieve the cigarettes he threw into the snow earlier.

Second Place, 2024 Freshwater Student Writing Contest

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Mastodons in Greenland

The arctic was lush, filled with poplar and birch forests, home to mastodons two million years ago, plus larch trees, daisies and willows. More than 160 species named by traces of their DNA in soil.

We can try to imagine this ecosystem before the last ice age scoured it clean. The Earth is warming again, too warm for some trees that can’t walk north, a sea too warm for corals and shellfish,

too hot for people without air-conditioning or the money to pay their electric bills. People without housing live in tents all over the USA, forced to move on, unable to get care or the medicines they need.

If we’re so smart, so technologically advanced, how have we lost our good sense to be frugal, considerate, to make all lives better? What happened to humankind that we’ve grown so unkind and inhuman to each other?

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If I Were Not Afraid

I’d walk into the woods and keep walking, confident I’d find my way back intact, without a snake bite or a mauling.

I’d hike the Amazon’s rain forest, Appalachian trail, dive the Great Barrier Reef, see Angkor Wat, the pyramids of Giza, cruise the Galapagos.

I wouldn’t take my phone. Only cops had phones twenty years ago. You went out, trusted others would help you if you were lost, or your car broke down. You could knock on someone’s door, use a telephone booth. No one would shoot at you for sport.

I’d walk these country roads, take my camera. I’d forget the woman who went jogging, never to be seen again. No body found.

I’d be naïve, sure that couldn’t happen to me too old to attract a sex offender, too shabby for a robbery. I’d tell myself I’m lucky.

I can go anywhere without a mishap. I’d go to local small town churches and learn the hymns. A mole, I’d keep my unbelief under my wide-brimmed hat. What really scares you? you ask. Not a mugger or predator, not even the ticks and bears and skunks

who live near. Betrayal is what I fear, that sudden trip-up, fumble-tumble, my body giving out, one wrong step

into a hole. Compound fracture, broken ankle. Passing out for no reason, a swoon like falling in love, with no warning at all, the scariest of heart attacks.

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You ask me

how I am. My first impulse is to yell, not speak words you want to hear. Everything is fine. Great! Terrific! All is well.

I lie so well, I tack on, Life is good! I mean it, although I’m only speaking on the surface. The AC works; I have food.

We know the arc of this ancient story, how we grow, mature, and don’t die laughing. The ending’s stormy, without glory.

My litany of worries presses forward and I choose one, say that my retina is healing, leave out scary thoughts and swearwords

to focus on the positive. I’m making art! No one wants to listen to my cussing over jabbing pains that pierce like darts

or ponder with me why I feel so tired. The great diminishment is here: aging. Life will call from the office, say, You’re fired!

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A Matter of Optics

I was up late one night, cleaning my deer rifle, when I come across this show on PBS. A documentary with all these pictures from this mighty telescope up in space. But there was this one shot. This image of a great fiery Elkhorn of dust and starlight, way out in the cosmos. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before, and when the narrator said it was so big, this cloud, that our own galaxy would fit on the tip of one of its dusty little fingers, I put the gun down and scratched my head.

It was a beautiful photograph, you see. Lovely in so many ways. But there was more to the cloud than its towering size and dazzling plumes of color. This “nebula,” as the narrator called it, was so deep in space, it turned out that the image I was seeing was six thousand years old. Which got me thinking. Here I was looking back on something that wasn’t even there anymore. That had already happened. That was hanging, suspended, in the fog of the all-but-forgotten past, yet I was seeing it as clearly as if it had just been born.

I pushed my rifle aside and sat back in my chair and I thought about this, wondering what if that telescope was even more powerful? What if it could look through all that dust and fire, and somewhere in those clumsy little fingertips find a solar system like ours? And what if it could peer inside that solar system and find a planet like the Earth. And what if it could aim its lens at a house any old house in any old neighborhood in any old town and see the folks inside?

It made me consider my own affairs, I’ll tell you that. The life I’d lived. The things I’d lost, or thrown away out of anger or despair. The secrets I’d kept hidden from everyone. Mostly, it made me think about the awful way I’d come between my best friend and his wife, Jorie, losing one first, then the other. Both out of envy. Each in a manner so cruel, I gave up all prayer of ever calling myself a decent man.

Hell. That show made me wonder if maybe somewhere out there in the universe, some tired old alien might be studying those long-forgotten snapshots of me and scratching his big knobby head. Sniggering to himself over the sizable dent me and my kind had put in the theory of intelligent life on other planets.

The pictures kept coming, and I kept asking. But in the end, I never could make head or tail of it. All I came away with was what I already knew. That the things we do echo on forever, bumping across time like ripples on a lake, and there’s no outrunning the past nor pretending it never happened.

Some weeks after seeing this documentary, I read a book about space. It talked a lot about the makings of life, and the possibility of beings from other worlds. It said that if there were aliens out there, the first impressions they’d

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have of us would come from the radio waves we’d broadcasted on television back in the 1950s.

The author of the book said these electromagnetic currents had already sailed out of our solar system and were humming along through deep space even as he wrote. So if there were extra-terrestrials out there, he said with what I took to be a kind of wry smile, we might take pause. Their first impressions of us, after all, might not be so complimentary as we think. In fact, given the programming of the day, there was a strong possibility they’d believe our entire planet was inhabited by a race of Howdy Doodys.

I thought about this a long time. Thought about it good and hard. But this morning, when I unslung my rifle and pulled it snug to my shoulder when I put my eye to the scope and glassed the deep green forest stretching out before me the real world, the one I’ve known all my life, slipped back into focus.

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The bulbous ceramic pot sits scarlet glaze glistening in its rumpled folds like a satin blanket tucked around a sound sleeper.

Did it crumple in the kiln? No, must’ve been on the wheel: the attempt at thin walls too brash the wet clay slumping slowly on one side the potter’s indrawn breath despair then wonder: what a glorious shape!

The beauty of waves of clay, round belly now folded like a plump old woman’s lap. Ambivalent, the potter leaves it, lets the glaring error dry next day it’s just as grand.

Is this insanity? Dunked into cadmium glaze, fired, shelved alongside the perfect ones. It is so odd, so daring. Its irresistible flaw beckons saying, “You know the world’s imperfect. Gloriously imperfect. Take me home.”

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Dolls: A List

She had these moments of specificity, as if to exonerate her motherhood.

A mailed box; tissue paper held my Shirley Temple in a borrowed cotton frock, barefoot, but the Barbies were gone given to a neighbor, according to the handwritten list that itemized what each daughter had received and when.

A complete fiction, of course she was prone to these, when her past haunted her. As if lists were validation, like swearing on a dead saint’s relic.

A few were accurate:

1957 plastic-faced dog doll (ugly!)

1959 dark-haired china-headed doll (run over by a toy car; I “operated” to put the stuffing back) 1962 Barbie dream house a cardboard suitcase that unfolded into a box; printed walls and floors; the crudest simulation, some marketer’s brilliant ploy.

But more than enough for a daughter who could dream up a mother’s love from the most cardboard of lives.

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Exquisite Corpse

“New evidence reveals Yeats’ body is not in his coffin.” –Irish Times

It has come to light that you might be in France, sorted into stacks tibias, fibulas, skull not under Ben Bulben. “Your” coffin a reliquary of strangers, hastily gathered when you were called home. The pomp and ceremony, the marble slab a mere cenotaph empty reminder of your poems sprouted in Irish soil.

Perhaps you’re laughing snuggled down with le boulanger, la madame you’re an exquisite corpse no more real than the finger of St. Peter. Maybe your spirit is stretched from Roquebrun-Cap-Martin to Sligo, a vast poetical web over us all.

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Mission

Bang! I was startled awake from a dream. Thankfully, it got me away from the nightmarish sight going around me. You never know what moment might be your last. I grabbed the gray wool blanket covering me and pulled it over my face, hoping to get some warmth from it, knowing it wouldn’t do me justice. Just a few more minutes of rest, please. I thought to myself as I closed my eyes.

“Colonel Terry,” a stern voice called from above me. I pulled down the blanket to see a skinny man wearing a blue army coat with golden buttons, cold air filled my lungs. I didn’t want to get out from under the blanket, but I did anyway. The cold air embraced my bones as I pushed the frost-covered blanket off of me. I swung my legs to the right and stood up from the man-made cot that was embedded in the wall.

“Reporting for duty, sir,” I said, saluting him.

“At ease, soldier.”

I dropped my hand to my waist. I knew nothing about this intervention, so it concerned me. Am I getting let go? I thought to myself. I can’t be. Why would they?

“Follow me to headquarters.” I got interrupted by the man from my thoughts.

“Yes, sir.”

As I walked, I wiped off my blue battlefield outfit. The trenches layout was quite simple to follow. After many months of going back and forth from supply to the front lines for food, ammo, and weapons. But climbing over the frostcovered fallen comrades who hadn’t been picked up and rescued from the maneating worms was mentally draining.

“This way, Colonel.” He pushed open the mud-covered tent door.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” I said as I stepped nervously into the tent while taking off my hat.

“General George Washington?” I said, holding out my hand to shake his. If he is here, then this encounter is crucial.

“Colonel Terry,” he said, taking my hand firmly and shaking it.

“You’re dismissed,” he stated to the other soldiers in the tent. His eyes followed the last soldier out, and he continued to speak again.

“I need you and a couple of men to gather food to replenish our troops. You will set out to the east. Under your command will be Captain William.” This shook me.

“At once, sir.” I started to walk toward the door.

“Can I trust you to keep quiet about this?” I turned back around to face him. Why would he ask this? I thought.

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“Yes, sir, it will not leave my presence.” I returned to the door and exited while placing my hat back on. I was startled by a young man wearing a brown military uniform who didn’t look a day over nineteen standing outside of the tent.

“Captain William?” I wasn’t one hundred percent sure it was him, but he took my hand, which was extended towards him.

“Yes, sir,” he said. I assumed that he had to meet with General Washington before we went on the mission.

“I will meet you on the east side shortly.”

As he shook his head he stepped to the side for me to get by him.

Walking to my horse, I thought there must be no end in sight to this war. That’s why he was sending me. I glanced to the West, where the enemy was shooting at us. They should be getting low on food, but they are better off with the crown behind them. The king who mistreats them. I pick up the pace to get out of the trench. The good thing about being here in Connecticut, I don’t have to get my horse ready. Walking on level ground made me feel unsafe but the trees give a small barrier. When I reached Grey, who was gifted to me by my parents, I was handed a sack that contained: an axe, a fabric, a few rounds of ammo, gunpowder, a small knife, and a paper with the mission. Perfect! Just enough for a couple of days. I threw it in front of the saddle that was on Grey and swung up onto his back. I fixed my stirrups and stuck my feet into them. I looked back up to see Captain William getting on his bay horse. I started toward him. Next to him were about 10 men all lined up, assuming they were ours.

“Hello men, I’m Colonel Terry. This is Captain William. This trip will be cold and brutal so be warned.” There was no time to waste. We started to head to the east.

With plenty of time to spend looking for food, it was hard not to get stuck in my mind. I can finally be free from my parents, who arranged a marriage for me. It wasn’t true love like my love Bettsy. If we … When we win this war, my parents will never talk to me, but I will be happy. Becoming a rebel will be well worth it.

It felt like hours had passed when we saw a house surrounded by fields of pumpkins. I pulled on the reins to stop my horse.

“Let’s stop here. Let me talk to the owners of the house,” I said, halting my horse and swinging my leg over to get down. When I touched the ground, my legs felt like broken ice. As soon as the feeling went away, I took the reins off of Grey and handed them to the Captain.

“Are you sure this is a great spot?” he asked. I glanced at him and just shook my head yes.

I started to walk up to the house glancing around just in case I had to make a quick getaway. I started to climb the stairs when the door opened and a woman in a purple Victorian dress opened the door.

“Hello, how can I help you?” she said.

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“Hello, ma’am. I am Colonel Terry. I fight for …” I was interrupted by a man.

“Terry William, is that you?” A man wearing a brown coat pushed the door open and stood next to her.

“Yes, I am. May I ask who you are?”

“I am Henry Woodhull. I went to King’s College with you. Based on your coat, I see you are a rebel.”

“Henry? Were you the one who always asked to share the books?”

“That was me. Anyways what can I help you with.” He glanced his eyes down like he was embarrassed.

“Well, Henry, I hate to ask for your hospitality and some pumpkins. Things are getting worse out at the front.”

“Of course. Grab as many pumpkins as you want and put them into the cart. You can bring them back to the front.”

“Thank you so much.”

“It’s not a problem. Anything to get us away from this crown.”

I turned around and waved at the troops to come closer.

“I’m going to grab my horse,” I said while turning away.

“You can give your horses to Shelden. He will put your horses up.” A young man appeared behind them.

“Thank you very much.” I didn’t think just a thank you is enough, but that’s all I could say at the time.

The man and his wife went back into his house, so I turned around and waited until the captain got to me. He soon arrived, and I took Grey’s reins from him so he could dismount. I could tell when he hit the ground if he had the same ice-shattering feeling in his legs.

“This is Sheldon. He will take care of the horses for us,” I said, handing Grey to him. The captain does the same. When Sheldon was out of earshot, Captain William spoke.

“Can we trust them?”

“Yes, of course, we can. I know them.” I grabbed his shoulder to try to ensure him. Then I continued to the pumpkin patch.

As I stumbled through the field, I inspected every pumpkin that was on the ground. I bent down and picked up a yellow pumpkin. There was just a dirt spot on the bottom of the pumpkin where it sat on the ground. I could hear laughter behind me. I turned around to see a group of my men. One of the men was holding a pumpkin.

“Eat it, eat it,” they were chanting.

Assuming they were forcing him to eat the pumpkin. I grabbed the one I picked up and took a big bit out of it. I threw it in their direction. Which made them all stop chanting and turn and look at me.

“It’s food, guys,” I said with a mouth full.

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Pumpkins don’t taste great, but what can you do? We are at war, so any type of food is good. I turn back around and continue to pick Pumpkins.

“Get down!” one of the men hollered, followed by a loud boom and a sharp pain in my back. I fell to the ground. Then everything went black.

Third Honorable Mention, 2024 Freshwater Student Writing Contest

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1965 Chevrolet Biscayne Station Wagon

The car was plain, nothing adorned cameo ivory and my father bought it, as usual, on a lot. We’d drive with our parents to Caseville in it, swim till the sun warmed a horizon and grills, pulsing with burgers or hot dogs, heated dinner. So much to find as we kids dug sand holes, made castles, chased sea gulls while the waves smothered the shore and my mother read women’s magazines. Sometimes my father would swing a golf club through the air, chipping at nothing, and all that nothing landed, somehow, down the beach which showed us a future made of holes-in-one, or bombed rounds, sometimes both. At home, we’d chase a rogue rooster off the front hood of the car, or we’d see bird shit on its white front hood, or worse, some stray cat marked it with scent. Once, late in twilight as the last birds had settled, I found my mother sitting in the front seat, hands round the steering wheel, ears attentive to the radio. She was listening to Elvis, The Wonder of You, her eyes full of light, like she’d found that one song, the one valentine that could truly serenade her, bring her back to a feeling she’d forgotten. Everybody I cared about rode in that car. Another time, I leaned up close to it, with them all: to listen to All My Loving I will send to you.

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Piano Concerto Falls Flat on My Face

I clapped inappropriately. Wrong time in the performance. All alone I heard my hands come together quickly, with a resounding echoing in the middle of an arpeggio. I should have sat on them. But the elaborate hall was full of iridescent bubbles from all the breezy reeds, full of wildflower infused exhalations from the wind section, of growing trees dropping leaves all at once while each piano note blew them farther from the stage and it was so godly glorious that I clapped, before it was over, like when I’m at a basketball game and can get away with it. But not here. Not now.

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Afternoons with My Father

My father wanders across the plain of dementia a disembodied camera. All day he captures the images around him his bloated chihuahua, his youngest daughter cum caretaker cum nemesis who vectors through his house and puts things in their places, the anti-tornado who scatters order and orders in her path, the gray squirrels with their signal tails, the walnuts he cracks for them and then, they disappear, unsaved on faulty memory cards or preserved in empty white of extreme over-exposures.

Each day a new day, a series of regular surprises photo album he found and shared again in wonder at the people he has not seen in years, the littlest brother in knee pants and now lost, the one who forgot him when he went to war and brings him tears now, the fresh hurt of not being recognized on his return, the handsome sailor he can’t name.

I wonder with him who that young man was and why he appears so often with girls he knew, his sister, his mother. An explorer in a strange new land who sees his first kangaroo or hippo, he chuckles and grips my arm: That’s me! He makes that discovery at the same photo on each trip, the first with his wife, my mother, lost too, standing in front of his first car. Then he asks, each and every time, where she has gone and when will she be back, and I, a slow learner and poor guide on this last journey, took weeks to find the right answer for the man who does not know me

98 Cecil Morris

Advice from Your Eccentric Aunt

Walk backwards. Since hindsight is 20-20, face where you see best, where discernment guides understanding, invents wisdom, and sparks inspiration. Look: your story unfolds behind you, the whole of it tumbling out for you to watch, to inspect, to diagnose. Face it, the past is all that you can know; the future, only horizon, the line you can not see beyond, a fog bank as blank as overexposed film or pages not yet written. Turn away. Walk backwards.

99 Cecil Morris

Reclamation

Hard to imagine that the day would end like this the way the morning began with thunderheads rising in silence from a narrowing fissure of sky, extinguishing the ascending light, and then advancing in dark velocity across the Sound, exhorting agitated waves to advance, pummel and vanquish the shore, scavenging and reshaping inlets that shackle marsh and then unleash its dank, loamy scents of decay and we wondered what more could be done to a battered shoreline already littered with shorn limbs, haggard clumps of cord-grass and the distorted detritus of a late summer’s passing. But now, the harbor’s brine-bright and as still as a sheet of glass; its shallow waters calmed and warmed by sun while fanned shells work their way back to sediment and the sky shakes itself dry, pouring torrents of blue down upon us as if the day’s disarray was little more than a set-to that had to be brushed aside while all afflictions eased into air and life went about the wearisome task of healing itself.

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Scenic Road*

Beauty’s been abducted and taken some place beyond the filling station’s exoskeletons of rusted sedans and pick-up trucks that have been assembled like brute equations upon a lot of asphalt and oil-slick stone, the windowgated package stores abloom in sodium light, and the moldering planters festooned with sham daisies and tulips that have been overrun by a tangle of invasive weeds. Even autumn-eager trees appear distressed by something more than draught, nursing deadfalls while blighted evergreens and abandoned homes fall back into a dry, acidic earth. It’s difficult to find the scenic or the divine, though, in a place that nurtures hurt and seems to grind hope to dust; where habitat has been buried by haste and then eerily exhumed, put aside and forgotten and where even a once ornate, slowto-rounding moon has been mothbitten, leaving behind a small piece of itself in its pursuit of some unfixed destination.

*Connecticut has officially designated some seventy roads or highways as scenic.

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Backwash

The shoreline is littered with motifs from the Art Nouveau, assembled from an elaborate tangle of cattails and matted grasses whiplashed and set upon the sand in sinuous scatter, forming intricate arches and arabesques festooned with shells, fishbones and the nautical embellishments of tangled nets held together by crusted medallions of tackle all gilded by a mid-day sun. And I find myself once again attempting to stitch together pieces of a world that remains bruised and broken and in desperate need of repair, as loss continues to assert itself before giving way to receding tides and a deep, perishable stillness, when I can better sense its stealthy advance from the putrid breath of marsh towards the water’s edge before reappearing, exotic yet empty, upon this sinking spit of land.

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An End of Excess

Do you mind that I like you a lot?

I hope you don’t mind that I like you a lot.

But if you do mind that I like you a lot I’ll try not

Since I’d much rather like you than lose you And that means a lot.

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Beckett Norman-Hall

Assembly Instructions for Father™

1. Before beginning assembly, ensure that all parts needed for Father™ are available. If you are missing any, please acquire them from our company as soon as possible, so as not to cause a delay in product completion.

2. Begin by lining up all the parts in an order that works for you. *Note: DO NOT allow the pieces to touch, otherwise you will activate Anger Mode, which may incite screaming, yelling, finger pointing, and throwing of objects. *

3. Place feet firmly on the ground, ensuring that there is enough space between them to support the weight of your new Father™. Feet should be found within the shoes requested, depending on the job description given for your product, and loud enough to rattle the house when he storms around when he’s upset.

4. Attach legs to feet so that Father™ can carry himself around as though he knows everything. It is important that you do not forget to adjust the knees of Father™ to allow for the appropriate amount of complaining, but also to remind you of the age that you will feel it in your bones.

5. Put groin and hips/waist on top of legs, but do not worry about seeing anything you should not of your Father™. That is not something children should have to worry about, and so any discreet areas will be covered. If you opted to have one leg slightly shorter than the other on your Father™, be sure that you press down firmly when putting these two parts together, to cause discomfort both for yourself and your Father™.

6. Attach stomach to hips/waist. The stomach should be as described in your order if it does not meet your requirements, please let us know. Father™ should be both comfortable to hug as a child and uncomfortable to hug as an adult. Or perhaps he is uncomfortable to hug because he requires it after he has yelled at you as if the hug will solve the problem don’t forget, “If you didn’t act like that, I wouldn’t have reacted the way I did” is an optional response for Father™ when hugged.

7. Place chest and back onto Father™. The back you ordered should be sturdy, but also receive pain occasionally, as a reminder that Father™ breaks his back every day for you. *Note: Father™ will complain about this daily or whenever Father™ feels he is not in authority. Should you ignore Father™ when he states this, you will elevate Anger Mode to Rage Mode, which may result in small acts of physical violence and/or verbal abuse. *

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8. Add arms to shoulders and place atop chest. Shoulders will hold the burden of being a Father™ too young, and arms will be strong yet rigid, so as not to properly hold you. Hands will be screwed to the base of the arms and should be designed as you have described to our company. If there is a flaw, please send a picture and description to us, so we can get you the correct item. It is important to us that Father™’s hands be an exact match, to remind you of the feeling and weight of them when used against you.

9. Once neck is carefully screwed into place, assemble bottom of head on top, leaving room for the brain, top of skull, and hair. The ears, eyes, nose, and mouth should be attached at this time. All these senses are necessary for Father™ to properly berate you for not hearing/seeing/knowing what he expects from you. It should be noted that Father™’s mouth only has two volume levels loud and louder.

10. Place brain inside of Father™, ensuring it is properly connected. Should this be improperly connected, it will initiate Father™’s Blind Rage Mode, which may include kicking, throwing of heavier items (ex. chairs), lack of understanding, and willful neglect.

11. After ensuring that the brain is properly connected, screw top of head and apply hair. *Note: should you active Blind Rage Mode when connecting brain, the Mode will be in Slumber, occasionally switching on when Father™ is extremely displeased or upset. This action cannot be removed. *

12. Should all steps be followed, your Father™ is complete. However, if at any point you have escalated Father™ to Blind Rage Mode, it is likely that he will also be in Abuse Mode, which cannot be shut off or fixed. Should this happen, we do apologize, but we shall not be able to refund or exchange Father™ for you at this point, as he is incapable of being removed and will cause traumatic and life-altering issues to yourself and those around you. Due to this, it would be unsafe to give him to another child, and therefore he is your responsibility, as disclosed in the waiver signed prior to starting assembly.

Thank you for shopping with Create-A-Father™, a company associated with Make-A-Mom™, and in partnership with the United States Government of Child Protective Services.

First Place, 2024 Freshwater Student Writing Contest

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Dakota Ouellette

We Will Always Have the Stars

Alexandria knocked softly on Elizabeth’s door, as she pondered why she agreed to marry a man she could never fall in love with. It wasn’t like Nick was a bad man, but she could never be in love with him. She grew up in a Catholic family that ingrained all the values of a Christian woman into her, including the importance of finding a husband to serve. In her world, women didn’t kiss, or lock their pinkies together, even though that’s what Alex wanted more than anything. She wanted that with her best friend, Elizabeth. The two of them had met as freshmen in a college lecture, and the two of them were still close, even after all the trials their lives had to offer.

Alex was greeted with a kind smile. However, as soon as the door flung open, Alexandria burst into a wave of tears.

“Oh no, Lex! What’s going on?” Elizabeth grabbed her bag for her and placed it in her spare bedroom. She went back into the living room and sat herself beside Alexandria, their legs a mere couple inches away from touching. She folded her hands in her lap, which prevented her from reaching out and rubbing Alexandria’s back.

Alex sniffled before she regained some composure. “I’m sorry I came in acting like such a mess,” she apologized as she wiped her eyes with her cardigan that became smudged with eyeliner.

Elizabeth waved her hand. “Nonsense, you can always come to me with anything.” She grabbed a cup of tea on the table and slurped it slowly. “Did something happen with Nick?”

Alexandria simply nodded, took a deep breath, and began to talk: “As you know, Nick proposed to me last night.” She gripped a soft pink blanket that covered her lap.

Elizabeth took her mug once more. She stirred inside of it, and her spoon made a clunking noise against the cup. “I saw it on Facebook. I am honestly surprised you didn’t call me,” Elizabeth responded with a raised eyebrow.

Alex chuckled sheepishly. “It just caught me off guard, and when I got home, I was practically still in shock. I’m sorry.” Alexandria’s ocean blue eyes look away from Elizabeth’s emerald green ones in guilt.

“It’s okay. I just wish I could’ve been there to celebrate with you.”

Alexandria slumped. Her fingernails slid alongside the leather couch. “There isn’t much to celebrate, if I am being honest.” Alexandria took a tissue as she prepared for more tears to fall. “Liz, I need to tell you something, and you need to promise not to tell a single soul.”

Elizabeth nodded in silent agreement and grabbed Alexandria’s tan-colored hands, which complimented Elizabeth’s dark skin tone.

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Alexandria took a drawn-out breath. “My family is Catholic. I mean, you know that already. My parents love me, or rather, the person they think I am.”

Alexandria trembled as the words poured out of her, but Elizabeth helped her stay grounded enough to finish what she had been longing to say for over a decade.

“I was forced to like guys. Some guys were nice, like Nick. Some never learned how to handle their anger without using their fists,” she said, which alluded to a few particularly bad men that Alex had been with in the past, including one back in college who left her with physical and emotional bruises.

“What exactly are you trying to say, Lexi?” As a woman who swung both ways herself, Liz was certain she knew what Alex would say next. Her hand never let go of Alex’s as she caressed every crease on her palm.

“I’m a lesbian, Elizabeth,” Alexandria allowed the forbidden word to roll off her tongue.

Elizabeth swept Alexandria into a tight embrace. Her soft body pressed against Alexandria’s more petite frame as Alexandria began to sniffle. Elizabeth brushed Alex’s dirty-blonde hair out of her face and asked, “If you’re gay, hun, why did you agree to it?”

“Why do you think so?” Alex responded with her own question as she pulled away from Elizabeth and clenched her fists bitterly. “My Catholic parents sent me to bed hungry once because I asked them why girls can’t kiss other girls. Their love is based on an image of me that they built in their minds. The second I break that image, their love goes away. If I lived a life for myself and not for others, I would lose everything. Life married to Nick won’t be bad. It’ll be a safe option.”

“What’s the point of having love if it’s based on a lie? If it can disappear so easily because of something out of your control, is it truly love?” Elizabeth replied as she moved herself closer to her distraught best friend.

“If it means security, I’m willing to make the sacrifice. This is what women have to do in our society, Liz,” Alex croaked.

“What do you mean?” Liz questioned with a head tilt that resembled a curious pug.

“Forget being a lesbian. Just think about being a woman. We keep car keys tucked between our knuckles just to protect ourselves from being violated because men are permitted to take what they want when they want. But if we dare to sleep with more than one man, we are labeled as sluts. We have to be skinny but also curvy in the right places. We are expected to mother their children, but they can walk away at any time and leave a woman and their child to fend for themselves. We are just tools to be used in a man’s world, and if we do anything to be seen as more, the world will tear us down. Now, imagine being a Catholic woman who yearns for another woman, with no benefits for men. If I came out, I would lose everything.” By the time Alexandria’s speech was over, both women were crying over each other’s shoulders.

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“I understand, you know I really do,” Elizabeth responded through sobs. She had become a woman at a young age at the hands of a boy who she thought she could trust. “Please don’t force yourself to go through with this. You don’t have to live for anyone but yourself.”

“I do, and we both know that,” Alex replied somberly. “That was only the first piece of it.”

“There’s more?”

“Yes, there is. I don’t want just any woman. I want you, and I always have.”

Elizabeth sat in a state of shock for a few minutes, but eventually broke the tense silence. She asked, “then why can’t you be with me?” Little did Alexandria know, her best friend wanted her just as badly.

“You know why.”

Nearly half an hour went by as the two friends sat in complete silence until Alexandria spoke once more. “I am going through with the wedding. We are setting it for a sunny day next June. I am going to say my vows, and I’m going to be the woman that the church, my family, and the world expects me to be. I want you to be my maid of honor.”

“No,” Elizabeth stood up in protest and shook her head disapprovingly.

“What? You’re my best friend, Liz. We’ve always said we would be each other’s maids of honor,” Alexandria argued as she also got off the couch.

Elizabeth huffed, “I’ve liked you for a long time, just like how you like me. I can’t give you away to someone else, especially someone who can’t make you happy. I will still attend the wedding, but I have no interest in being a part of it. You’re beautiful, not in just your face or body, but in your heart and soul. I notice the way your blue eyes crinkle up when you laugh, and I see the way your cherry-colored lips curl into a smile when your silly tomcat flops over on his back as you stroke his chin. In my world, the one I keep in the deepest parts of me, you are more than a tool or an object. You’re the other piece of me.” Alexandria once again teared up, but that time, out of melancholic happiness. Elizabeth wiped her face clean of tears and led her outside. They sat down on a tattered blanket and snuggled close together. Constellations lit the pitchblack night sky, and for a second, Alexandria saw flashes of what her life could’ve been if she had chosen herself over others. Their lips met, their pinkies linked, and Elizabeth would’ve been all she ever needed. However, she knew that she wouldn’t ever get to have that. She would never have another moment like this.

Elizabeth read her mind in that beautiful moment. She leaned over and gave her a kiss on the lips, which they had never mentioned again. The kiss had tasted like bittersweet fruit. They didn’t have forever, but they always had that moment, and they always had the stars.

Third Place, 2024 Freshwater Student Writing Contest

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The Peonies That Year

It was May 1954. My grandmother Minnie Monahan was coming to our home in La Grange, IL. Everyone was excited. Her train from Troy, NY would be arriving next week. My middle brother Michael was to make his First Communion that following Sunday. One could sense the tension in our house. A painter had been coming every day to paint the kitchen and dining room so everything was disrupted. My dad was cutting the grass when he was home to make the yard look nice. It was still too cold to buy any annuals to decorate the front yard but some of the late tulips were still surviving. Along the side of the house the sun was nice and warm so the peony bushes along the driveway had already set their buds. Even the ants were present which meant that the time of blooming was near. These were the twenty prize peonies that my mother planned the first year we moved here from California ten years ago. They came up every year and produced this glorious spread of large pink blooms to greet the summer and give my mother and us girls real joy from their beauty. My mother had nurtured them for years, just like she nurtured her seven children.

Each year the bushes got wider and the blooms bigger which received compliments from our neighbors. I had learned to help my mother stake them up when the buds were coming, otherwise the rain would knock the heavy flowers to the ground. They should be in full bloom for my grandmother’s visit. What a nice greeting for her mother. Minnie lived in downtown Troy so she would be pleased to see that my mother had acquired a green thumb.

The week before my older brother Tom had come home with a note from his teacher that he was acting up again. He was turning into the class clown, disrupting the order she wanted in her fifth-grade classroom. She knew he was smart but he was always drawing attention to himself with antics in the class and on the playground. He had been hyperactive from his birth and luckily mom’s other four boys were more mellow. He was always getting in trouble at school, worse so this year however. Maybe he was looking for more attention as it was hard for my mother to divide her time equally among all her seven children. She could see his potential however. He loved to read and go to the library. Finally he got into sports and riding his bike. But for some reason, he did not like this year’s teacher and was acting out. My mother wondered what more of a punishment would work on him. They had already limited his bicycle riding to going and returning to school. Baseball season was just starting. He had just gotten his new cap and shirt from the Little League and he was thrilled that my dad bought him his own first baseball bat. My dad and Tom would practice in the driveway with his own mitt that he got last year. Tom was getting a good eye for catching so this year the coach had given him first base as his

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new position. Only two more days and grandmother would be here. She would give him lots of attention.

My mother was thinking of what they could do about Tom’s hyperactivity. She had to go shopping so left him home alone. Tom was restricted to the house after school to get his homework done. Bored, he dreamed about winning games this year by his marvelous saving catches. The coach said that he would need more practice at batting. He was never one for yard work but that afternoon, he looked out the window to see the peony buds. He could not resist. He grabbed his bat and ran out of the house before my mother would get home.

Whack!, whack!, whack! The buds were at the perfect height right in the pitching zone. Maybe he could help the team better as a pitcher. One, two, three. That is how he slowly and methodically knocked the buds off the stems. One after another. Some he missed but then another attempt would do it. Some of the bigger buds he tried to throw in the air and then hit them again. But just swinging at them on the bush seemed easier. He was almost finished on the last bush when he spied my mother driving up the street. He ran back into the house leaving early 200 buds lying in the grass.

Rarely did I ever hear my mother scream or cry but that evening the tears flowed for hours. She was almost inconsolable when my dad came home. Now something had to be done about Tom. Ten years old and no remorse.

“What is with a bunch of flowers?” he answered when asked why he did it. Should not she be proud that he was able to hit each one and he might be the best batter on the baseball team that season?

Years went by and that story came down through the family as the year that Tom turned himself around and thought before he acted. His punishment? Go on his bike to the playing field and find someone there to throw him balls and practice. Admit to my grandmother that he was the one that ruined the flowers that year. That was after he had to pick every bud off the ground so that at least the grounds looked nice for grandmom’s visit. She could always come another time to see the peonies in bloom. This visit was to visit all her grandchildren and have fun for a few weeks.

My grandmother returned the following year, for my brother Don’s first communion. She arrived a week before the peonies bloomed that year. We still have the picture of her standing with seven of her twenty grandchildren in back of the line of glorious pink blooms. It was the first year that Kodak made color film for its Brownie camera.

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For Connie

You were one of us aloners at school; at recess, spotted on the swing in the corner, far from cheerleaders and blonde shiners with peppermint lip gloss and gossip, no varsity ring from a tall team player. Freckled, quiet, another strange girl with a notebook. I loved your inventive mind, your rush of images, impassioned zither of descriptive speech. But then, it carried you under in a current of chaos. Like TV snow, sentences broke up and lost their sense, and you were sent away. No one spoke of it until later, when we woke up to the fractures of thought that might, and did, waylay your artistry, the slipped mooring of mind and the pall that fell like fog to which we lost you in the end.

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Dickinson And Frost: Along My Way

My third-grade class memorized poems and one by one one person, one poem recited them. My knees shook as my turn came and I stood, alone, in the narrow aisle between constricting rows of wooden desks

terrified, but enthralled, having felt already, as people often do, solitude, just being lonely, only. I loved and feared the poems, the dealing with feelings, the rhythms, music. Fairies and leprechauns, an elf sheltering under a toadstool, all mattered to me

and then we moved. I cried inconsolably for all that we left behind. But I learned, in the following years, that our early introduction had made poetry my lifelong friend who had always traveled with me, invisibly, or in a small space

Later, and still, among desks, I caught a glimpse from a second-story window in a stone-cold New England college building, of another sometimes solitary figure whose life and work increasingly I have come to know, delighting in our shared familiarity with beautiful, bitter, Vermont ice and snow.

Today our government’s survival remains at stake, so seriously thinking of paths a person chooses, I sidetrack to poetry. I ponder Frost’s path, moving into modernity without smashing order and tradition. Knowing strict form can become rigid and break, I watch to see what will last in our world, what path we choose to take.

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The Perfect Hat

Religion is like being in a hat store and I’m drawn almost irresistibly to one hat after another. I’ve tried on many over the years and I’m barely thirty. My husband Rick tells me I need to find not just a nice hat … but the hat … the one I will wear until the coffin becomes my last address.

Rick has no religion and describes himself as a none. Last month I quit being a Buddhist mainly because I got wobbly with ceasing to desire my mind wandered, often to slasher films, while I was supposed to be emptying myself. That hat will go back in the closet, though I never throw them away or give them to Good Will. Sometimes I try them on again at least for a while. Maybe Rick is right just pick a hat and keep it on, even in the shower.

Of course no hat is perfect. Either my head is too large or too small, the color doesn’t suit, it’s passe by the time I’m ready to buy it, or I lose interest. I do that often. For a while I was madly into birdwatching. My goal was to see a scarlet tanager, but other than on You Tube, I have yet to see one.

Someday Rick may leave the nones and decide that he needs a good hat too. Mostly he slouches around in resale shop jeans. “A brand name is just fame with fabric,” he likes to say. I half admire his boredom with hats. Maybe I should buy a pair of those jeans, eat pretzels in front of the Yankees and scream at the TV if the other team dares to win.

There’s always another hat department or hat shop. Maybe I’ll find a talking hat or one that can leap off of my head and walk me home, a hat that wants to hear all of my confidences and comforts like chicken soup on a January morning.

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Kenneth Pobo

Unforgettable Moments

There have been many unforgettable experiences in my life. Vivid images hang like treasured paintings in the hallowed halls of my memories. Looking back, I reflect on a story of significance and growth, the decisions that shaped what I have become, and moments that I hold close to my heart with a mix of nostalgia and gratitude.

Among these cherished memories are the travel adventures shared with my beloved wife, Lisa. We explored many exciting places, cultures, cities, and landscapes. There was an image of the total lunar eclipse that we witnessed in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, from the twelfth-floor balcony of our hotel. We watched a spectacular supermoon pass through Earth’s shadow and become a blood-red orb, hanging lifeless in the night sky. It was as though the moon had died. Fortunately, it was resurrected the following night. Once again its brilliant light reached across the dark Pacific water like a shimmering bridge, symbolically inviting us to explore the expanding mysteries of the cosmos. It was sheer irony that we happened to be vacationing in one of the few places on the planet where one could witness this spectacular phenomenon. As I reflect on this vivid memory, my reminiscence is enlivened with the thrill of discovery, the warmth of companionship, and the meaningful experiences that enriched our lives and allowed us to grow together.

And then there was that unforgettable wedding day when I sang my heartfelt serenade before our many guests and witnesses. The clouds that threatened to rain on our ceremony parted, and a beam of sunlight magically highlighted my bride. As I reached the high note in the bridge of “A Song For You,” her smile, the music, and the sunshine merged to create a harmonious crescendo of love and light that will remain etched on my mind and heart forever.

As a performer the stage, in general, was the scene of many unforgettable moments. There are images of me at the microphone, with a trumpet, guitar, or percussion instrument, wearing flashy costumes, makeup, and long hair, surrounded by members of a dozen different bands. I remember times when the performance became an out-of-body experience, and there was an inexplicable connection between the musicians on the stage and the audience. In those moments music was the catalyst that transcended barriers. I don’t perform often anymore. Still, these memories remain some of the most vivid strokes on canvas.

In the gallery of my life, there are also darker hues. I recall a fateful night when I was attacked by a gang of thugs on my evening commute. That incident was the ultimate test of my mettle, survival skills, and martial abilities. It was a trial by fire in which I found an unimagined wellspring of strength, courage, and determination. I fought with every scrap of heart and grit I could muster.

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Somehow I survived relatively unscathed. Although the torn meniscus in my right knee remains a subtle but constant reminder of my narrowly thwarted fate. The prospect was dire but against all odds, that day was not my day to die.

Another canvas showed the image of a young woman on a ledge, poised to jump from the pedestrian walk of the George Washington Bridge. In a twist of fate, our paths had crossed. I stealthily dismounted my bike, advanced from behind, and caught her just as she let go of the rail. She struggled at first, then went completely limp, and we both would have fallen except for the railing between us. I saved her life that day. However, holding her in my arms, waiting for authorities to arrive, her aura intermingled with mine. I had never experienced such despair before. What had driven her to take her own life, I wondered, and would she consider me her guardian angel or a meddling villain in her future story? I did not know. Still, this image was a mosaic of empathy and compassion.

“Just let me go,” she pleaded weakly.

“I can’t do that,” I said above the din of traffic speeding past behind us. “This is not your day to die.”

Of course, this recollection of memorable moments would not be complete without recalling the race that tested the limits of endurance the Race Across America. Crossing the finish line with my eight-person team and seven crew members after 3,005 miles, seven days, nine hours, and twenty-seven minutes of continuous racing to break a record for the fastest rookie team to complete in the 27-year history of the event was a monumental accomplishment. Pushing through exhaustion and sleep deprivation to accomplish that goal was a testament to resilience, teamwork, and irrepressible spirit.

And then, of course, there was the mountaintop. On one of my many annual solo sojourns into the wilderness, after fasting on water for several days and climbing to the top of the region’s highest peak, the ominous clouds finally unleashed their full fury after I sat to meditate. Now, everyone knows a mountaintop is not a sensible place to be in a thunderstorm, but driven by the strength of intuition, I was beyond common sense just then. The rain came down, lightning flashed, and thunder echoed through the canyons.

In the center of that storm, I experienced a tranquil convergence, a serene alignment of internal and external forces that bestowed a sense of heightened awareness and connection like I’d never felt before.

The driving force behind my quest to capture these memories now in words is the belief that every life is an adventure.

“A life unexamined is not worth living,” said Socrates. But I say, “Every life lived is worth examining.”

At the end of each day, I reflect on what has transpired, what I have yet to transcend, and any truths I may have ascertained. I record any pivotal events and the moments that have left indelible imprints upon a story that is uniquely mine.

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As I stroll through the gallery of my life and examine the pictures that adorn the walls, I see they are not frozen or fixed space-time events. The memories expand or contract to fit my ever-evolving perspective of truth. The colors, textures, and emotions bring each frame vividly back to life. From the internal and external adventures with my life partner and wife to personal triumphs, encounters with unexpected dangers, and moments of genuine connection with nature and humanity, these brushstrokes have given my life depth, meaning, and a beauty that transcends time.

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Old Man, on Moose

I recall days when moose even wandered downtown, more confused than usual, and road signs warned us to brake for them who wouldn’t? “hundreds of collisions.”

Later in the Ossipees

I began to find matted-down places in the grass, blood drying there: a gory sight, predictive.

One ticket-taker at the tolls who on days off becomes a shaman, told me as he handed me my change

how the moose have mostly all withdrawn to a remote habitat no ticks to drain the young of blood, no cars with long braking times. No hunting season, either. Pardon me, I said, it sounds like extinction. He answered, More like what you folk call Eden.

It’s protected, he assured me that is why you now so seldom see them.

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Going for the Gold

Attentive to the season, I’m spending time in goldenrod up to my chin glad of anything golden that’s perennial, happy to brush gold off my trousers and shirt as the sun sidles southward; as shadows lengthen even at high noon.

People see me out there only my head, though. When I worked, I was worth my wages, but coinage was silver, hard, and cold.

Truly, the illusion of riches is quite as agreeable as riches; both being states of mind and no strings attached with goldenrod (it is ragweed we are sneezing at).

As a little boy I was closer to the ground, its treasures invisible to adults. I grew. But now, like the corn, like altitudinous sunflowers, gold rises to meet me indulgence for my years.

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Footbridge or Steppingstones?

If we choose to cross from here to there, we will use this footbridge.

If we’d rather go from here to somewhere else, we’ll step carefully from rock to rock, downstream or up: stones slick with moss.

Reward for going “somewhere else” could be a wildflower scarce elsewhere; perhaps an undiscovered cellar-hole town.

Of course, those steppingstones are as slippery on return.

I’ll tell you. I helped build the footbridge, years ago, to simplify return visits to familiar surroundings

each flower an old friend, panoramas changeable only by season.

I quit building footbridges eventually. Came up with a theory of sorts: the stones are there for a reason.

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Good Riddance

I wade into overgrown underbrush Wild Asters part of the tangle where this trail was closed for relocation. Feet don’t belong now, vegetation takes it back, returned from exile so I must edge through gingerly, waving tall bushes aside, avoiding overprotective thorns.

I would like to be perceived as a zephyr breeze, nodded to as it passes but no, earthbound boots betray me.

No point explaining to second growth why I’m here, removing our old trail blazes.

Asters in particular, that leaned away at my incursion, have closed ranks behind already,

as I turn to say thank-you and goodbye.

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Down

Jonah jumps first. He’s out of my passenger seat before I stop the car, tearing off his Yuengling Lager T-shirt. The hottest, driest of summers, he’d cut his shirt sleeves and several inches from the bottom so the world could enjoy the biceps and abs he earned in our football team’s weight room. He sprints across the half-full parking lot, weaves between shaded picnic tables, drops his tattered shirt. He leaps out over the gorge. Shouting, windmilling arms, running legs.

We follow.

I try not to hesitate at the edge. In my periphery Greg and Patrick run into the air too, limbs flailing. The fall takes so long. Above us the girls shriek.

My feet slap the hard water, and I sink into murky darkness. Bubbles rush and I stretch my toes in search of bottom until my lungs can no longer hold. I frog-kick to the surface. Pieces of sunlight shine through trees at the top of the gray granite rising above me. The relief of the inhale and my friends’ sleek heads popping up around me are worth the bruises that will darken the soles of my feet. Jonah yells for the girls to jump; they fidget on the edge, arms wrapped around themselves. One finally drops, splashes, and when she surfaces she points to Jonah, who swims toward the waterfall. He scrambles up its rocky ledge.

Shade from pines on the overhanging cliff throws shadows onto water that spills down rocks and rolls over itself at the base of the falls. Jonah climbs higher and muscles himself to standing, his bare toes clinging to wet rock. Water shines on his chest.

“Kids, don’t try this at home!” Sunlight dapples his face. He stretches his arms out into a V, grins at our rapt attention, and dives.

Patrick and Greg splash each other on their way to a wide rock and hoist themselves up. They recline in the sun, feet dangling over the edge.

Treading water, I wait for Jonah and squint into the white churn at the base of the falls. Where he should be. I swim until my feet scrape rock. Standing, the water doesn’t reach my waist.

Between two boulders Jonah bobs up, arms flopping in the waves. Blood streams over his forehead, the side of his face.

I grab under his armpits and, with my back, shield his broken face from the spray.

“Call 911!”

“Is he dead?”

“Don’t move him!”

I stare down at his slack mouth, bloodied eyes, and crushed nose. He doesn’t shove me away. He doesn’t stand, point a finger, and say, “Diving under the influence is a punishable offense.”

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I pull him through shallow water between rocks and logs, drag his limp, heavy body onto the gravel beach. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t open his eyes.

The girl who jumped is a lifeguard. She crouches on pebbles, her ear to Jonah’s mouth. She nods and holds her palm above his chest. Rising and falling. Barely. I reach out to wipe away the frothy pink from his dusky lips but she grabs my hand. “You can’t touch him.”

We wait for him to snort, wheeze, and say, “You should see your faces.”

We huddle around him, demand that he keep breathing. The wet gurgle in his throat grows loud, then nearly silent. Greg, Patrick, and the girls shift their gaze to me.

Finally, an ambulance siren. The EMTs take their time hiking down the trail alongside the falls. Two sweaty, serious men order us out of their way and slide a board under Jonah. They strap him in, wrap his neck and head without wiping away his blood. They lift him and start back up the trail.

I stay close and try another play. “Hey, man. Enough. Your parents will get charged for the ambulance.”

At the top of the trail, strangers blitz me with questions I can’t answer. The girls cry. Greg and Patrick drag behind, yards of space separating them. I cross the grass, my bare feet grateful for soft ground. Jonah’s shirt is a white puddle in green. I snap it up and rush into the ambulance.

Inside, the paramedics attempt to block me, but I kneel beside Jonah and they slam the doors. They shout, “Open your eyes, Jonah. Move your fingers. Your toes. Anything.”

Please. My Hail Mary for him to save the game. We both know I’m only his backup.

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Perhaps he’s a Gemini

… like me. I see him go by he doesn’t mind that his jacket is shabby, there’s a little hole in his right sneaker. Why care? The clouds above are white and fluffy, the sky bright blue.

He has long, rustling hair and seems devastatingly hip, even though he holds an ancient cellphone.

I am exhausted from my usual activities, letting the day drift by from the bench. I glance at the mulberry tree, then again at the guy. Does he feel as worn out by people as I sometimes do?

Does he, like me, talk to the clouds and the ravens, and feel the wind on his face, like these signals from nature cause a serenity one never feels in a crowd?

Or a person never feels when being judged.

123

Leaving Cumbola

Connor aimed his Boy Scout flashlight at the path ahead, its fading yellow beam blurred by the storm. Raindrops the size of half dollars smacked against the broad-leafed maples and oaks, their branches whipped by the wind. The fleecelined Indian moccasins that he’d sent away for from an ad on the back of a comic book were squishy wet, his Rawhide Kid pajamas soaked.

But he cinched his knapsack tight and pressed forward along the trail he’d climbed much of his eleven years, moving steadily uphill toward the plateau and the coal mine where his father once worked. He could have hiked the mine road that wound gently up the slopes. But the mountain trail seemed shorter, and he hurried to get away, from what and toward what he wasn’t sure.

The leaf-covered ground proved slick as pond ice, and he slipped and fell, landing hard on his side, the breath forced from his lungs but surprisingly, with no pain. Connor scrambled up. A dim light outside the mine watchmen’s shed shone through the trees, and he stumbled toward it, his arms protecting his face from the thrashing branches. The mine had closed down just before Easter, but the company still kept old man Hawkins on, to watch over things until they could remove the equipment and seal things shut.

“The end of an era,” his mother had muttered when they got the news.

“Why?” Connor asked.

“Just is. Good riddance.”

“But we’ve always …”

“Yeah, and look where it got us.”

Reaching the edge of the woods, he stepped into the clearing. The strippins pond lay before him, its black water textured by the rain and wind. It would take years but Connor knew that someday he could fish that pond, like all the other mining pits that had filled. Fishing them was great sport, unless you fell in and couldn’t climb out. It happened to his friend and first crush Lily, the year before at another pond. The company put up a fence, but it didn’t last. Everything about coal seemed dangerous.

In the blackness, he steered clear of the pond’s edge and moved silently across the yard. Puffs of smoke floated up from the shed’s stovepipe. He heard laugher from a TV comedy, probably Jackie Gleason and The Honeymooners, the noise filtering through the shed’s tin walls. The aroma of Hawkins’ greasy supper still fouled the air.

He crept toward the entry to Shaft A, his body shuddering from the cold. Once inside and out of the rain and wind, he crouched and sat on a rail that already sported rust. The stench of coal dust, creosote, and human sweat still filled the tunnel, as if the day shift had just ended with the night crew on its way.

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After a few minutes, Connor stopped shivering. He played his flashlight’s beam against the opposite wall. It caught the glint of small bits of anthracite that peppered the tunnel. As he watched, the pieces of coal seemed to turn into marbles puries, cat’s eyes, swirlies, red devils, all his favorites that he played with at school, all there for the taking. He slipped off his knapsack and untied one of its pockets. But when he looked, the marbles had become coal once again. He shook his head and wondered if he’d wished them into existence, wondered if some left-over gas in the mine shaft had caused him to dream, to get a bit crazy like his Pop sometimes got.

He looked toward the entrance. The wind had died and the rain had turned into spring snow. Everything got quiet as the soft fluff covered the ground. He stood and pushed deeper into the mine, trying not to stumble over the cross ties. Ahead a soft light glowed in the passage. Connor sucked in a deep breath, felt dizzy and slumped against the wall. But slowly his mind cleared and he continued to move toward the glow that seemed to come from a side gallery.

He turned toward the light and into a large softly-lit cavern with a low ceiling, his mouth open, breathing hard. In the middle of the room stood the miners, gray-faced, dust covered, unmoving, frozen in place and time, as if Connor had interrupted a conversation in mid-sentence. He recognized Angus, his Pop’s shift-boss; Jones, the guy that came to the house one time, got drunk on the front porch and puked all over his mother’s potted geraniums; Leroy, who always messed up Connor’s hair when Con brought his father’s lunch; the constantly-grinning Smiley who had no front teeth; and Rich, who had only worked one summer before getting trapped in a cave-in that closed down Shaft B.

As Connor watched, the figures slowly unfroze and the gallery filled with boisterous conversations about the God-damned prices at the company store; about the girl Rich just met in the village and had already made it to second base; about others that Connor didn’t know who had died of the black lung or simply never showed up for work and passed out of their lives; about the pending strike and what they would do to anyone trying to cross union picket lines. Color had returned to their faces, all except Rich’s. Their hands grasped mason jars filled with boilo, their belts loosened, lunch pails and helmets stacked against the wall.

“Hey, everybody, Connor’s here,” Jones hollered and the crowd lifted their jars.

“To Connor, may he never again set foot in a God-damned mine.” Their voices rang out in a seemingly practiced chorus.

Leroy stepped forward and tousled Connor’s hair. “About time you got here, kid. We were just about to start.”

The crowd of jostling men parted. Two caskets with their top lids open rested on sawhorses against a far wall. The men gathered around. One of the coffins looked small. Edging forward Connor stared down at his first

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sweetheart, Lily, dressed in her Sunday best, her lips painted a pale pink, eyes closed as if asleep.

“Yeah, she woulda been a real dreamboat,” someone murmured. “But at least you got one good kiss. That’s better’n some.”

Connor’s eyes leaked tears. “We was just fishin’, just havin’ fun. She fell in when I wasn’t lookin’. Turned around and she’d gone … couldn’t save her … lost her in the black water.”

“Should be a crime to leave them mine pits open like that,” Angus muttered.

Connor reached forward and touched Lily’s lips, willing her to speak but knowing she never would. The pain in his chest grew when he glanced sideways and into the other casket. His father lay stern-faced, wearing his dark suit and flashy red tie, his face showing the damage from every scrape and rock fall, every cave-in that he’d experienced, even the scar on his forehead where a longgone miner had hit him with a shovel.

“We’re sorry about your Pop,” Angus said, followed by a murmur of assent from the crowd. “None of us should die from black lung. But some of us will.” He raised his jar of boilo. “To Joseph and Lily. May they rise above this darkness and forever breathe heaven’s fresh air.”

Connor bowed his head and studied his feet, tears dripping onto the gallery’s rocky floor.

Rich approached. “It’s okay, Con. You’ll beat us all. You’re smart, you’ll get the hell out, fall in love, do something with your mind and keep your body safe.”

He gave Connor a good shake and turned to rejoin the other miners who made headway in downing the remains of their homemade brew. Connor turned and moved toward the main passage. But the noise of their conversation died. He glanced back. The miners had frozen again in place, gray-faced, coated in dust.

Someone grabbed him by the shoulders and shook. “Wake up, Con. It’s time to go.”

He opened his eyes to darkness, in his room, lying in bed under heavy woolen blankets. His mother bent over him and ran a hand along his cheek. “Come eat your breakfast before it gets cold.”

He pushed himself up and stumbled into the kitchen. A row of suitcases lined one wall near the door. A bowl of oatmeal and a glass of milk awaited him. His mother sat at the table and sipped her coffee.

“We’ve got an hour until Uncle Frank shows. You be nice to them. Ya know, they didn’t have ta take us in. You’ll like Philly.”

“But Mama, I got friends at school here, and ya can’t fish and hike around and do stuff in Philadelphia.”

“Yeah, it’ll be a big change for both of us.”

“I don’ wanna change.”

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“Sometimes we don’ get a choice. Jus’ don’ let nobody call you a coal cracker. Besides, those fools would freeze in winter if it wasn’t for King Coal. Now go put on your slippers you’ll catch your death in bare feet.”

“Yes, Mama.”

Connor returned to his room and pulled on his Indian moccasins, still squishy wet from the storm.

127

Dancer

I remember when we first met in the parking lot of a mall. A barren parking lot. The only movement, apart from you, were rogue pieces of litter, little crushed plastic bottles, abandoned receipts, maybe a plastic bag. Cars scattered here and there, but it was really just us two, I think. I mean there was that one person in the passenger seat of your car, but really it was just the two of us. You were in a rush, and I was there watching you in a rush. We were in a rush. You walked so quickly, you barely picked up your feet. I could hear your shoes dragging over the pavement. It’s a habit you’ve got to kick, it’s not satisfying to watch, and you know that. You were even doing it on your way to the store, silly.

Anyway, you were babbling to yourself about “this society,” how you wished it were different. No wait, you were on the phone babbling to someone. Your therapist … Jane? Or … or maybe your mom, Jasmine? Either way, you went on babbling.

“Everything feels like some chaotic, uncontrollable force that’s in every seam of the world,” you spoke in a light, frothy, whisper, like you were so passionate about something but had no confidence behind your words.

“Try to not be overwhelmed by things out of your control … focus on what you can, alright?” A voice said on the other end of the line.

“I know it’s just I don’t know it feels like nothing ever is,” you said, voice all foamy and soft. “It’s like every part of my life exists for anyone and everyone but myself,” you went on, and your nose started to run. “Like I was watching a show yesterday, and every-other goddamn frame was some objectifying bullshit,” a loose curl obstructed my view of your right eye, “And this book I was reading the other day it ” the other person cut you off.

“You’ll find a way, I know it,” they said.

“Yeah, okay, all right.” You pull out your keys and head to the back of the car. “See you Tuesday … yeah, okay bye,” you said, and your stilted, courtesysmile dropped quickly as you hung up the phone.

And we even caught each other’s eyes for a split moment before you went to the driver’s seat in a hurry. Your gaze warmed me up. But you shivered at mine, sometimes I wish my gaze did what yours does to me, but it doesn’t and I’m not sure why.

So, from then I knew that you: want love. You want to feel loved. You want to know that you feel and are loved. You must have said this I’m sure I heard it from the small bubbles of your voice box, as you tossed a shopping bag in the trunk. It closes with a slight creak.

But there are times I’ve noticed where you don’t want this love (it seems that way, I would never want to assign you an emotion, dancer).

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For example, you went to the grocery store by yourself. You walked past desserts and went straight for produce. Carrots and green peppers made their way to your basket. And as you danced there for nearly four minutes and twenty-three seconds (not literally dancing, but you remind me of every perfect poster I’ve seen on the highway or every star I’ve seen on TV, performing). You had gotten strawberries and apples. And I appeared there next to you at the lemons, and you seemed shocked! As if we hadn’t met before you were shocked!

There I was: before you at the store, with as much love for you as Saturn has moons, and you were shocked? Jarred even. You looked at me like you wanted to win a staring contest. You were in the store, basically making a spectacle out of yourself, (hair long, light pink sweater, dark-wash denim jeans that were working for you) and you react in such a way? I mean, even the harsh fluorescents of the place served you with their presence. You really are the quirky type, dancer.

Really, it was as if in that moment you … despised me? And I’m still not sure why.

So now you must understand my irritation confusion as to why you were reacting this way at the store. It was only a few weeks earlier in the mall parking lot that you made it (your desire for my love and affection) known.

And I took every action I could to find out why you felt such resentment towards the world. I came up with little to nothing, but much like a haircut, we could all use some change. So, I eliminated your “boyfriend.” I mean, I guess now that I think about it, I could’ve asked Jane about you. Interrogated your mom, maybe? But he seemed to … drain you anyway.

While you sat in the car, you spoke to him for such a long time. He was just sitting there nodding, with eyebrows raised in the center, like a lost puppy trying to gain your sympathy. You want genuine recognition, not some child who pretends to hear and see you.

So really, you should be at my feet, uttering many thanks. But I of course am not like the many men who have treated you badly, such as your “boyfriend” (rest in peace), so I would never really want you to do that. I mean, not unless you wanted to, but again, that is completely up to you, and I don’t again ever want to pressure you into feeling or acting a certain way.

And so here I am in the market next to you, and the lemons, showing you committed, real love, and your eyes pierce mine. But there isn’t the same loving passion I am giving you in them. There’s a look in your eye that has an unsettled undertone. Like I’m this imagined thing you want gone. Like staring at me long enough will make me disappear.

You want love, and I give it to you. Now you want me to disappear? Now you puzzle me. You linger in my mind at nearly every waking second, in a pulpy, mellow haze, yet you act as if I’m some agonizing presence in yours?

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Dancer, I’m yours. But know that I own you, okay? You demanded my love, and I gave it to you, willingly, openly. This is a transaction; we both get what we want. I pay for a velvet red seat to the show of your existence, and you, perform.

So, grab some lemons, check out, and I’ll follow you home; make sure you’re safe from what you can’t control. My gaze will help, I’m sure of it.

First Honorable Mention, 2024 Freshwater Student Writing Contest

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You and Me at the Beach

A faint familiar smell coconut sunscreen.

Our senses still recognize the aerosol. the earthy sand is just as clear.

And there’s that smell warm skin with melanin and salt and heat.

I take them in run my hand through your hair and feel your scalp as

I smell you. Weird? Yeah.

But I smell the heat you’ve got the sun’s attention too you ignore me.

I love it. Let me take you in.

You’re like a cat. Obsessed with doorways and sun beams and windows. Why they are there? Not too sure. But its natural and kind of nice.

You bask in words, I bask in you.

131 Kai Saucier

Remember That Time

Remember that time your foot slipped off the loose jagged cliff edge while I stood there

I tried to hide the corners of my mouth coming up but

I remember that time my world was so gray when you had both feet planted so when you fell it felt like I could fly.

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Ordeal

Life in chaos, a hoarder’s dream

Sea of papers untouched, tinged with anxiety

Panic overlooking, always ready to pounce

Mail untouched, foreboding, what do I owe today

Sanity just a concept, an illusion, uncertainty in control

The sliver of moon a decoy in the darkness

Be prepared as the fog devours the sun

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Surrender

Is today the day I do it, look for just the right combination of pills

Proper ones escape me, why not be prepared for the unforgiving afternoon, the light blinding Hold on, the night reappears, a dark curtain, sliver of moon

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100 Degrees

Willowy strands of foliage, wave in the wind

Creamcolored hair adorning the plains

Stoic, silent, steadfast, as the heat suffocates

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The subway

We parted on the platform’s steps descending east and west but at the bottom of the stair across the gutted bed we paralleled each other one more time.

I wanted to reach Union so we had to split apart, like a chance-told secret that divides.

I caught your eye, we signalled one another’s presence. Bows, curtsies, namastes, then stillness and alertness.

You raised your voice and shouted, This is like a movie. One of us will see the other’s train, then commotion, like when the universe was formed! Then a ledge emptier than one that was always empty.

In a movie the lovers leap onto the tracks and run to meet each other.

It came when we had met each other’s eyes and looked away. I saw you through a dozen windows, then a door, then not at all.

To think I stood beside you when you loved me, and you loved me, and I didn’t know.

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Untangling the Silence

For all of Iryna’s ten years, the wind had tinkled the brass and copper wind chimes without ever once tangling. But since February, when the explosions sent Iryna’s mother to the hospital and her father and older brother weeping to the front lines, the chimes had tangled into silence after every blast. Each morning, Iryna climbed onto the broken concrete of her porch to free the music with frightened hands. All she knew was that everyone needed to hear something that wasn’t bombs and screams and sobs. Untangling the wind chimes was the only way Iryna knew to save Ukraine.

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Cars

The first car my dad owned, at age thirty-two, was a twelve-year-old ‘39 Plymouth. Had he even been able to afford one before then there was no need for an automobile in New York City where he was born and had grown up. Now, for five years, with wife and son he lived in a New England city of a couple hundred thousand but for the extended family in New York, none of whom had ever traveled north, he lived in “the country.” My folks did not have much money and the old Plymouth, stripped down, was all they could manage. With a floor mounted gearshift and tattered seats, the car ran well enough to get around town but they did not trust it to drive the two hundred miles for our yearly visit to New York. We took the train.

In 1955 when I was nine years old my dad had saved enough to replace what he and my mom called the old jalopy with a brand-new Ford Fairlane. When it came to cars he held on tightly to his money. It was the least expensive model, two doors, and no accessories. He celebrated the fact it had a heater and defroster. He did finally buy a radio on the aftermarket and had it installed thereby saving about ten dollars.

He drove his new automobile to New York, the three of us on something of an adventure, at least it seemed so to me. We went along state roads through small towns and past large tobacco sheds. Finally, we arrived and parked where my grandparents had saved a spot; right in front of their tiny First Avenue store that had for years supported them and my dad and his sister a penny or a nickel at a time by selling newspapers, magazines, comics, penny candies and the offerings of a diminutive soda fountain.

Uncles, aunts, cousins and other assorted family came by and gathered at the store to see us as they always did when we visited. I was, as always, a bit overwhelmed by so many folks, young, ancient, and in between speaking loudly, yelling it seemed to me, with that typical first and second generation New Yawk accent. I stayed to one side, enjoying the products of the soda fountain and reading Uncle Scrooge and other Disney comics. One after another the relatives looked at and admired “Bennie’s” new car while my dad extolled the virtues of a Ford product, and proudly so. I felt pretty good about it myself.

As the years passed and my folks did better financially, they were able to afford a modestly comfortable though not affluent life. That made no difference to my dad who would hold onto his cars for several years, seeing no need to trade in, or up, every couple of years. He continued to purchase the least expensive model and never added options or accessories He never financed an automobile, instead saving until he had enough to buy his next car. His tight grip on his money, so far as automobiles, did not weaken.

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Eventually my mom learned to drive. My dad taught her. While I was never in the car during those lessons more than once they returned with a scowl on my dad’s face, my mom silent as he went off to get the Maalox. One day, she burst into the house radiant after a lesson to proudly announce she had driven “all the way” to the end of our street a distance of two blocks.

Sometime in the early 1960s after my mom had finally earned her driver’s license we became a two car family. Still, for her as well, my dad always bought the least expensive model and continued to see no need for such as automatic transmission, power steering, air conditioning, or any other option.

Even after I was grown and on my own, and my folks had become even more financially secure they, meaning my still frugal dad, continued to buy modest no-frills automobiles. Certain features such as automatic transmission and the like were now standard equipment but options were still avoided.

“What do I need it for?”

My dad had already entered his seventies when I visited one day. He had bought a new car and happily, proudly, showed me all the features. Not only was it not the least expensive model, but it was loaded with options! He delighted in showing me this and demonstrating that. I celebrated his happiness with him and shared his joy over the various gadgets, geegaws, and doohickeys.

Of course I was surprised at this change in his lifelong approach to cars and asked him what had caused him to decide after all these years to indulge himself with an automobile that offered much more than the basics.

“Well, it’s probably the last car I’m ever going to buy so I figured what the heck.”

That was a response that for me came not out of left field but from well beyond the ballpark and caused me to figuratively, and perhaps literally, stand silent with my mouth open, slack jawed and speechless.

Finally I asked, “What do you mean? Is something wrong?”

“No, I’m fine. So’s your mother. I’m just being realistic at my age. Chances are it’s my last car.”

There was no more to say. The implication of his mortality, of a real limit to his life was something I had not had to confront before. He had always been there, a constant, a permanence. It was disquieting, upsetting. Yet he had not seemed at all upset with his recognition of reality. It simply was. Of course he was correct. At his age it might well be the last automobile he would buy. If after all these years, a lifetime, he finally had a reason to go beyond the spartan that was good.

I was happy that my folks were well, that my dad had given himself a treat. He had certainly earned it. He seemed more comfortable with the recognition of his and that would mean my mom’s as well limited lifespan than I was. I could not forget what he had said and many times, really whenever I saw his fancy car, would recall that brief explanation and feel a certain sadness, and

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almost a wistfulness for those earlier times in inexpensive automobiles when my dad was in the prime of his life.

My dad drove that special car, enjoyed that automobile, for a number of years. However, he had been wrong, though barely so. He finally replaced it with another car, returning again to his habit of buying an inexpensive model without options. He had had his fun, I guess. He drove that final car very little, then not at all. It was sold.

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Jury Duty

The case seemed so simple to Sarah, a young researcher, who relied on facts. A battered woman killed her highly respected politician husband after many years of abuse toward her and her children. Sarah had been convinced that that’s how it went down, until it all changed.

She was proud to have been selected for jury duty for the first time, and on this high-profile murder case. She felt a civic responsibility, and was positive she could decipher the truth from conflicting stories in the testimony. After all, she was a scientist. Who could be more impartial and discerning? She had listened carefully to the questions the prosecutor and defense lawyer posed to her. Was she against the death penalty? Was she prejudiced against any ethnic group? Was she a battered wife? Did she feel that she was generally unbiased? Did she have an FBI file? It was an exhausting process, as it was for the other 11 jurors.

The first days were filled with opening statements and getting to know the other jurors four black, six white, and two Hispanic; six men and six women. Sarah thought it was a fair mix.

The prosecutor declared it an obvious case, asserting that this woman, an African-American homemaker, murdered her husband in cold blood, stabbing him forcefully twenty-six times with a kitchen knife as he was beating their son with a bat. Although she was protecting her son, she could have called the police for help. She had admitted guilt, but the law required her to plead “not guilty.” There were witnesses who claimed that the twelve-year-old, although small and thin for his age, was sometimes violent and the father was trying to discipline him. One neighbor swore that he saw the boy torturing a cat once.

The Defense attorney contended that it was self-defense, not only because of the ongoing abuse on her and her children, which had gotten worse over the past year, but because of her perception of an imminent threat.

Witnesses testified to often having seen the woman with black eyes and recently with a broken arm. Others claimed they saw the children beaten with sticks, and covered with black and blue marks when they were outside with other children. Sometimes they had scabs and scars on their arms and legs, and often they could hear screaming coming from the house. Yet, no one ever called the police or children’s services, so there were no official records of abuse, although the kids often stayed home from school because they were feeling sick. Perhaps because of the father’s prominence, no one wanted to accuse him.

The boy and his sister testified to their suffering and at often seeing their Mother badly beaten. They both claimed not to have seen the stabbing, because she was upstairs and he was running away.

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The woman’s handprints were on the bloody knife and all over her husband’s shirt. She did not deny that she killed him. She said that she wanted to stop him from hitting her son with the bat, so went and grabbed a knife from the kitchen and went towards her husband, screaming at him to leave the boy alone. He turned and went after her with the bat, so she stabbed him. She was completely calm and clear when she said it, but then she yelled at the jurors.

“That man was a monster!” the wife yelled, “I got tired of him beating us. I try to protect my kids the best I can, and I always will, no matter what happens to me. I have asked for help from social services, but if I called the police, I knew he would kill me.”

The jurors deliberated for two days. The construction workers, the dock worker and the bus driver believed that the man was an overly abusive disciplinarian but didn’t deserve to die. The nurse, the teachers, the service rep, the drummer and the childcare worker all felt that the man’s violence was evidence that he could have tried to kill his wife, since he was already angry, had already beaten her before, and she had a knife, so he struck out fiercely. They were all tired and frustrated, realizing that this man’s family had suffered greatly at his hands, but that didn’t justify murder, by the law’s definition.

“So we can’t agree on whether it was self-defense or not. There was no eyewitness, right?” asked the foreman, a bus driver.

“Right,” said a teacher. “The boy said he ran when the man turned to his mother.”

“Wait, but. we don’t know that.” the dock worker said. “He may have stayed to help her. What if he did?”

“Then he would be in trouble an accomplice, and his life is ruined.” The service rep said. “That would be tragic, after a life of abuse.”

Sarah chimed in, “The boy’s prints were not on the knife.”

“Right.” The bus driver said. “But his mother could have washed them off and put hers on.”

“What if the boy did it?” asked Sarah.

“We can’t know that with the evidence we have. But he could have, and his mother could have cleaned the knife. She said she’d do whatever was necessary to protect her children.” said the nurse. “Maybe she’d take the blame for them.”

Sarah thought a minute. “Didn’t we hear that the husband was stabbed forcefully twenty-six times? And didn’t we hear that the wife had a recent broken arm? She still had a brace on her right arm and she’s right-handed. She couldn’t have done that. The boy did. He’s small but strong. We’ve been arguing about whether or not she had the right to kill the husband because she was a battered woman, and whether or not it was self-defense. It doesn’t matter. It’s within the realm of possibility that she couldn’t and didn’t do it.”

The eleven other jurors nodded, and signed in relief. The vote was unanimous. “Not guilty.”

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“Do we have to explain our reasonable doubt and implicate someone else?” Sarah asked the foreman.

“No, we do not,” he said, “it’s up to the prosecutor to figure out who actually did it. That’s if he decides to pursue it, after hearing about the bruises all over those children. let’s get this done and go home.”

“Science wins again.” laughed Sarah.

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Another New Morning

Richard, a middle-aged hamburger flipper, woke in a fog, his flabby body twitching in pain, remembering running in terror from the hairy thing chasing him in a large culvert.

Oh Lord, it feels like I was actually there. What a miserable dream. What the hell was that disgusting creature? I know he wanted to eat me and would if he caught me, and I couldn’t find the end of the culvert to get out of there. That culvert had to be six feet wide! What are those things used for? Oh, right, just a dream. Don’t be so nervous, idiot.

Richard got up to go to work, his head still spinning. He combed what was left of his gray hair over the right side of his bald spot, put on his blue JuicyBurgers jump suit which still smelled greasy from yesterday, pulled on his industrial sneakers and headed out the door, still trying to get that nightmare out of his head. No more spicy chips at bedtime for me.

On the way to Juicy-Burgers in his beat-up Chevy S10, Richard went past the construction site where workers were refurbishing the old park, and noticed a few large culverts set aside on one end of the site.

Wow, I wonder what those are for? They’re the same width as the one I was trapped in in my dream. An ugly monster could fit in there just fine.

Richard pulled over to where some of the crew were standing and asked them how the culverts would be used. A tall man in a dress suit who appeared to be the boss sneered at Richard and told him that it was for animal crossings. He said that several species of small animals had always roamed the park and often got killed by bicycles roaming the trails, or once in a while bit people who were in their way. They were going to have high fences around all of the habitats and keep the animals separate from the visitors. The Mayor had decided to put these large culverts under the walkways and bike paths in several areas, with sloping entryways for the animals so they didn’t have to cope with the bikes.

Richard drove off thinking that that was a great idea for the small animals, and wondered for a minute about the big creature chasing him in his dream, and that those culverts were too big for just small animals. I wonder if they are making them big because they have actually seen a big creature that might be dangerous.

At work, Richard cooked juicy burgers and wondered what monsters ate. Do sasquatch or bigfoot eat small animals? That thing I saw could eat anything smaller than a buffalo. He wiped his greasy hands on his blue uniform and a girl beside him called him filthy. Richard was a loner, having realized early on that people could be mean. He lived alone with no friends holding some anger at the world and wished he could just blow it all up.

A rowdy pack of teenagers came into the burger joint hollering about a huge monster bear or gorilla running around the park, with police trying to catch it. Richard told the teens that he hoped they didn’t shoot it. If only the

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tunnels were done and the bear could escape. It’s just a helpless animal. Animals are so much nicer than people.

The kids laughed at him and said rude things about him being a creepy animal. Richard snarled at them and they jumped and ran off.

That night he dreamed again that he was in the tunnel and the big hairy creature was after him. He ran as fast as he could through the slippery tunnel nearly tripping on the ridges inside it. He screamed but no one came to his rescue. Help, help, it’s got me and it’s eating me! Richard saw the monster’s huge mouth, bright red with long white fangs pressing down on him, and woke up dripping in sweat and smelling like vomit.

The next day, Richard was too nervous to go to work. Instead, he went by the construction site and watched the workers putting in the culvert tunnels that allowed animals to cross. He decided to talk to the men.

Why are the tunnels so big? Your boss said that it was for small animals. The men began laughing hard at Richard and told him that there was a special exhibit coming to the park and that everything would be fine as long as people stayed on the roadways and didn’t go into the habitat areas. There would be a lot of excitement as this exhibit has never been done here before, but it does well in other countries as people love new things.

Richard began to worry. What is the new exhibit and why does it need big tunnels? That’s it. I’ve been warned. I’m retiring from Juicy-Burgers and going west somewhere. I don’t need to get caught in a culvert by some monster.

Richard felt strangely queasy when he climbed into bed that night, and moved around restlessly. He didn’t want to sleep, but exhaustion dragged him down and he was back in the tunnel. He didn’t see the creature, so he wandered along noticing that the tunnel had light at the end. He went towards it, but a rabbit jumped into the tunnel, and Richard felt himself roar and chase after it, drooling at the mouth, feeling hair growing out of his arms, and claws growing out of his fingers. His clothes burst and fell off of his expanding body, giving him more energy to run and catch the rabbit. Richard bit the rabbit apart and chewed it up, swallowing it in two bites.

Wow, this is the strangest dream yet. I hope morning comes soon.

Morning came, and Richard realized that he was in the culvert, hearing a lot of voices outside. How the hell did I get in here?

Richard felt the hair on his big arms and the sharp teeth in his wide mouth, crawled to the opening and saw the people yelling at him and taunting him and screaming in fear from outside the habitat. He bellowed at them, sending them running. Then he sat just inside the tunnel, pondering his situation. Plenty of food. Life could be worse. He roared again, and laughed.

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Margaret and Henry’s Dance

For years Margaret waged war on ants and kept them at bay. She briefed her children, “One grain of sugar will inflame an army of ants.” And they pressed their fingers against crumbs on the kitchen floor, lifting and discarding them before their mother could find them.

Every day the smell of disinfectant obliterated the smell of cooking. Ants didn’t cross the perimeter into Margaret’s home. They would have starved if they had. As a child she watched ants snatch crumbs off the floor, stealing tidbits left from her family’s paltry meals. One evening she discovered some ants crawling in the bed she shared with her two sisters. In her mind, ants and childhood poverty wove together.

In her fifties, after years of widowhood, Margaret married Henry. During their courtship, he took her for rides in his fancy sedan. Her first husband never owned a car, and she never learned to drive. Henry took her dancing she loved dancing. He could cut a rug despite a limp from being shot in the leg in Italy during WWII. His leg had become infected, and he almost lost it. He spent months in an army hospital, listening to other soldiers die.

Margaret discovered something about Henry after their marriage. Turned out he was a drunk. When he took her dancing before they married, he would have a whiskey sour or two, then drop her at home. She didn’t know he went to a bar and drank with his buddies until he was hammered. Now, he dropped her at home and didn’t come in with her. Hours later he stumbled into the house. She complained, so he stopped taking her dancing but still went to the bar. He got a DUI and lost his driver’s license. He almost lost his job. She would have to walk to the grocery store again, and he wouldn’t take her dancing. She told him to get out.

But he wasn’t done with her. He promised to quit. She didn’t believe him. Her first husband never stopped. But Henry did. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead of going to bars, he went to the AA Club where he drank coffee, played cards, and ate candy bars with other recovering alcoholics. He worked through his twelve steps. In moments of temptation, he called his sponsor. Margaret believed he had quit for her.

For the first time, Margaret and Henry were honeymooners. They drove to Van Lear, Kentucky, where Henry was born. They held hands on moonlit nights while he talked about his family. They went dancing at a local shindig. Margaret bought sheet music to some of Lorretta Lynn’s songs. As they drove back to Wisconsin, she sang the lyrics but always off key. He finally asked her to stop and turn on the radio.

Without alcohol to kill his appetite, Henry became interested in food again, but Margaret didn’t like to cook. When she did, it was eggs and oatmeal,

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leathery pork chops and lima beans, charred hamburger patties and baked potatoes. He liked fried chicken and roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy, cookies and donuts, pancakes and syrup, and ice cream and chocolate sauce. She wouldn’t buy those things, so he did. She wouldn’t cook those things, but he did. And he spilled crumbs and drippings on the table and floor, grease and food on the stove.

“There are crumbs on the floor,” she would yell from the kitchen while he watch a show.

“Wipe them up,” he would say. “You’d better hurry before the ants come.”

“You’re a P-I-G-G-Y.”

“Better disinfect. Make the damn place smell like a hospital.”

“Are you going to pay for the exterminator, Mister?”

They had come to a place where they bought their own food and split the cost of the utilities, arguing about who used more water and electricity. If he asked her for a postage stamp, she made him pay for it. When she needed the washing machine repaired, he told her it was her machine, he wasn’t going to contribute.

His siege continued. After every meal he cooked, she wiped and swept the kitchen surfaces. Not him. Food, especially sweets, became his new alcohol and spreading sugar around her kitchen was his new pastime.

One morning after he had made pancakes, then gone to The Club, she entered the kitchen to clean up after him. Two ants trooped across the floor, gripping morsels with their steely mandibles. Using her broom, she smashed the ants again and again as if they were fire. She smothered their march across the floor, but thoughts of more ants flickering within the walls overwhelmed her.

She packed his bags and placed them on the front stoop. She locked all the doors and set the security chain. She couldn’t abide the sight of ants creeping through her home.

When he came back from The Club, she stood in the window. He looked at his bags and read the note she had taped to one of them. He pocketed the note, picked up his bags, and returned to his car. He never looked in the window. He was done with her and the constant smell of disinfectant.

She was relieved. He had a key and could have easily busted the security chain. With him gone, she stood a chance of defeating the ants.

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Memory Test

The nurse practitioner gave me three words and a blank sheet of paper and pen and told me not to write down the words

but to draw a circle and put the numbers for a clock in the circle and then draw the hands at three o’clock. Then she asked for the three words. I remembered them. I remembered all of them then. That was less than an hour ago. The first word

was apple. The second started with a b and the third started with a c. I remembered the three words then

but only remember the first word now. The nurse was pleased with my memory. I think my memory

is faulty if less than an hour later I can’t remember all three words. But my blood pressure was fine.

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Lenny and the IRS

That year the IRS decided to audit him and his wife, but only medical deductions, and they brought in the box of receipts

to show and went through them one by one: “This one is for?” “This one is for?” until the bill for Dr. Martin, when the auditor said, “This one is for?” And Lenny said, “My wife,” and the auditor flipped over the bill and read,

“Martin Veterinary Hospital,” and asked, “Did she have distemper?” They looked at each other for a moment and started laughing.

They laughed and laughed until the auditor stopped himself and said, “Look, I can’t wait to have lunch with the other auditors and

tell them this story. Make out a check to the IRS for your underpayment and you’ll cover this error.” Lenny made out the check real quick.

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Matthew J. Spireng

At 34, we surely had it made a new car our 1st house jobs we wanted and would hold for 25 yrs. even started retirement accounts.

And, now, 34 months since you left I know we both understood we had it made since kindergarten with Miss Mars in the darkened cloak room when you showed me your low glow fluorescent purple cross against your white Peter Pan collared blouse.

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34

Counting Laps

This morning at the aquatic center, a woman I swim with says, “My cousin’s husband has a brain tumor. Like you had.” I say, “It’ll be 20 yrs. ago next week.” She says, “I’ll tell my cousin that.”

As I swim, I alternate between counting laps and thinking of the newest member of the club a club no one wants to be a part of a club that quickly divides like the cancer cells in a brain tumor. Fast for some the one-third who don’t make it 3 yrs.

A bit slower for the next third who won’t be around after 5 yrs.

A lot slower for most of the final third who reach 8 or 12 or maybe 15 yrs. And the few fortunate outliers who manage 20 yrs. and beyond.

I finish today’s mile swim wishing the best for newest club member the club no one deserves to be in hoping he, too, will be a fortunate outlier who will be counting laps after 20 yrs.

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Geo. Staley

Communion Cop

The tour guide said the best way to see the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, as long as it wasn’t flooded, was to attend the seven a.m. Mass before the cruise ships pulled their plugs and thirty-two thousand tourists streamed into the Piazza San Marco for the day.

Indeed, the early Mass was peaceful and the Italian from the pulpit rolled over her in musical waves as she studied the golden mosaics in every direction, the jewels encrusted on the altarpiece. The paper shawl they’d given her itched on her shoulders.

At communion, she felt she understood enough to participate and got in line with the other parishioners, who seemed to be regulars. But when she turned from the altar with the sacred host, she was surprised when a wiry security guard, his huge key ring jangling at his hip, motioned with his head.

At first she did not understand, did not know that this guard was the communion cop, aiming to prevent a Black Mass desecration of some sort, until he nodded right at the wafer.

So this is how Rose Shulman of Shaker Heights, Ohio came not to put the souvenir in her bookcase diorama of her tour of Italy, alongside the mosaic chip from Pompeii, the jar of black sand from Positano, the salt shaker from the osteria in Rome

but came instead to take inside her the body of Christ, something she could not have imagined, as she heard again with each person in line behind her, “Il corpo di Cristo. Il corpo di Cristo,” and wondered what her rabbi would advise.

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Stephen Straight

Hey, Lady!

Words depend on their welders.

When your tall friend in the peace-sign cap yells, “Hey, lady!” it’s the most intimate thing under heaven. When the man who vacuums the hallway says it, you need to take a shower.

I have made a life of loving words, stringing them like pearls around the necks of hours. I was the child who stared at the ceiling rehearsing rhymes about rabbits so I would remember them come morning. I am the narrator who nurtures through correspondence, storytelling tomorrows until they are strong enough to walk. I am the verbal goofus who lays awake still, wondering if the plural of “oaf” is “oafs,” “oaves,” or “persons of oafen origin.”

Words are my waterwheel, my power source of pleasure and play.

The longer I love them, the more I treasure their limits and my own.

We need a healthy respect for anything powerful, be it a tiger or a poem. I can’t seem to learn this for good. Over and again, I split the atom, only to find I can’t hide under my desk from the fallout.

In craven hours, I absolve myself under the awning of career. I am a fundraiser for a nonprofit I adore, and my job juggles storytelling and loving. Hyperbole has its hour, gratitude dripping down my chin as I thank my donors. They are selfless world-changers, guerrilla lovers saving lives. I mean every word, but I must take care not to let the words grow ever larger. There is no economy of scale when everyone is “exquisite” and “extraordinary.”

I can’t blame the shingle over my head. This breathless bubbling has been my business since childhood. I told the fattest fourth-grader that he had eyes like chocolate. I assured the substitute teacher that he was enchanting. I waxed wonderstruck as my ever-growing menagerie of words bandaged bites and scratches.

I was born to sing praises, and I’m reborn every time someone sees their shimmer in my mirror. But sometimes I build a funhouse and can’t escape. The smoke alarm first chirped when my pen ran out mid-doubt. Glutton though I am for words of affirmation, from time to time a tribute wouldn’t ring true. I knew a particular piece of work was not, contra my sweetest friend, “a masterpiece.” She said this of everything I wrote, the dreamy and the dreck. I realized her generous glitter now felt like dust.

I knew I did not look like Audrey Hepburn every day, despite the doting delusion of an elderly donor. What once made my day the right turtleneck and lighting do wonders now made me embarrassed. I know when I look like Steve Buscemi, or the giant iridescent squid at the bottom of the ocean, or just a tired 42-year-old who forgot to put on concealer today.

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I knew that “hey, lady!” meant solidarity and sweetness from my friend. I knew that “hey, lady!” meant mealy-mouthed creepage from the man with the hose.

I knew that words mean more and less than themselves.

Still, I overestimated my good judgment and underestimated my power, sure that my lifetime of language had trained me well.

Perhaps nothing could have trained me for the scowling man. My words first entranced, then repulsed him, but by then I’d taken his name. His wordplay had written stories like lassos around me, and I was hogtied before I knew to yelp.

But I knew how to speak. Surely I could story us to safety.

When I saw a half-shell, I sang of pearls. When I glimpsed decency, I dissolved into praise. When I heard rumors of hope, I wrote odes of awe, gilding dreams that were rapidly coming untrue.

The scowling man convulsed with contempt, correctly calling foul. “Why do you say such things about me? I am no golden man. You cry all night, then call me incandescent. I don’t even know anyone who uses that word.”

But I was determined to use all the words, all the atoms and wind farms, if only I could empower a truer story. If I called forth the good, surely it would answer. If I spoke revelations, surely they would come true. I could rewrite this. I could.

I couldn’t.

I am a child of the God who speaks galaxies into being, and I trust in a faint family resemblance. But I am a liturgist and a lady, not the author. I am one free will walking among others, and every love has a shared byline.

My words could not wrest us from the fire, but they would light my long way home. Poems that fell on stony ground were soft in my hand as I picked them up, one by one. Now was the time to read them to myself. Now was the hour to tether them only to truth.

I am more tender with words than before, motherly where once I only clung. I love them too much to lash them against the rocks. I know their power and the limits of my own.

Ever an over-eager oaf, I will always say too much. I am welding honest tools today, bearing witness to life. I will summon the good but silence the saccharine. I will love in spirit and in truth.

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Trees Have Many Arms

Trees have many arms, hold things big and small; move so slowly that no one can tell. Leaves fan out like many tiny fingers, pointing and grasping and extending but never holding anything but drops of water. The roots of trees meet each other and tangle underneath the soil, armwrestling or holding hands or just brushing palms and their branches above reach for the sun in prayer or groveling or else raise up to denote that they just don’t care about anything but what comes from up there.

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Felanyely Barett Valdez

Bigger fish to fry

I like fried fish

More specifically, fried red snapper. Or Red snapper in coconut Milk, un Moro con arroz y gandules.

I liked fried fish. By the beach, With tostones and ketchup, un janiqueka.

I like fried fish. Fresh from the oil, My Grandmother’s hands.

I like fried fish. Not no talapia no, The good kind del mar Reminds me of my land. Fresh ocean, waves.

Fishermen stand on the sides, a string in hand. Fresh fish, not no store brand.

I like fried fish, with espagueti con queso

I like fried fish, semana santa en abril Habichuela Dulce, can’t you see

I like fried fish, but I’ll eat it any other way.

I love fried fish, the biggest on the menu No fork, no spoon My hands and my uncles.

I like fried fish, it’s such a delight. I like fried fish. Come, take a bite.

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Anna opened the door, like a child with an old-fashioned May basket. I’d hung the small orchid-like flowers on her doorknob, because mice were invading most of our apartments and even my sheets, fine and soft at a 600 thread count.

Our apartments on the same floor plan differ. Hers is 1930s art deco with dark wood: a sideboard expands across the long wall of the living room with elegant older pieces her mother-in-law sent out from Germany. They include a tea set, a rococo vase, semi-chinoiserie; a nude art deco sylph woman and fawn, Diana seated, and other Old World 1920s art deco pieces behind glass, not unlike that of the woman who fled East Germany should. Mine is art deco 2000 fusion: Latino, 1940s overstuffed plush sofa and armchair.

As always, she was groomed in well-combined colors, a blouse iridescent in dark rose and off-rose, one of two her son purchased that requires no ironing.

“Come in, I show you.” She showed me a booklet in German I could not read, evidently an account of the Holocaust victims who either fled with their lives, able to enter another country, or succumbed to the death camp hell. All I could decipher was what was pictured. The old synagogue in the booklet front was the plan for the new one they built in 1932. “They should not have built it,” she said, “and instead given its value to the poor people to get out.

“How could such as this happen?” she asked over and over.

“It’s horrible, beyond words, beyond horror,” I said.

“They were my friends,” she went on. “I went to Catholic school with them. Was their G-d a different God than mine?”

It was all so systemic, so plotted, so planned out, I tried to say. They… I hunted for words, as I always have. Today I found a new set of words and reminded myself to look in my pocket for the card I scribbled them on. Such words loop up from my unconscious at unlikely moments.

How the mind does bend. Bending, yielding into the coerced words coerced by others.

l repeated what some said: Hitler was crazy and stupid. He wouldn’t last. But he did.

Mrs. Spatz pointed to her brother in a photograph and his friend who lived in Riverdale, north of our building’s location. She was teary about another brother in uniform but in what uniform, that of the First World War? Was this the U.S. Army uniform? Or did he die in a concentration camp, I wondered but could not ask at this moment.

Tomorrow she would go with her brother and sister-in-law and their son by car to Long Island for his grandson’s Bar Mitzvah. I wanted to congratulate and comfort her but thought it better to let her thoughts unroll. I placed my

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hand on her arm. A little later she held my hand.

In the booklet, she pointed to friends who’d died in the camp and one beauty in her 1930s fitted dress. “I had a dress just like that,” she noted.

“My sister-in-law was the sharp one in the family,” she remarked. “She hid money in her dress and coat linings and rode the train from near Briland,” Where is that? I wondered, “and disappeared in Switzerland periodically to deposit enough money so, by 1934, we were able to buy a visa into Cuba for a thousand dollars.”

I said, “But this was difficult to get into Cuba and into the USA.”

A week ago, when I asked how she got out, she’d said, “My number came up.” Her mother cried when she left, never to see her again. Anna told her, “We’re going on vacation. I really thought that. But I was the one who planned to stay in Germany and get my parents out. The others left.

“Before they put my mother in jail, the authorities came for my father to take him away. Next, my mother told me she didn’t know where he was. They answered, ‘He’s your husband, and you do know where he is.’

“Eventually, Dr. Kretschmer wrote a letter to the Gestapo about how my father had just had an operation and couldn’t walk.

“He’d gone to the big city and was captured and put in camp Neuengamme, near Hamburg. I went to the jail to get my mother out. I never found my father.

“Last year I had a nervous breakdown. I needed a woman to stay with me all the time. I used oxygen machines to be able to breathe…

“When you’re alone, you think of all the people who’ve died. It all comes over you, and earth begins to cover you.”

Spatz is named on this writer’s family tree, she noted. When Mrs. Spatz’s son moved her out of the building in New York City, he gave the writer his professional photograph of her pug. Next, he hugged her and called her “My cousin, so long.”

With him, Mrs. Spatz lingered.

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Chair Contemplations

Two parallel grooves in the sand beckon curiosity along its path to discover an empty chair like an Alzheimer’s father looking at the lake.

Reflections of the shoreline fir trees ripple into a watercolor painting better seen through squinting eyes. Sun sparkles twinkle star lives across the lake’s surface while night depths laze below.

Sandy footprints scuffle in weird dance steps left, right, over and back. The chair is silent, content to stare; its shadow lengthening-shortening as the sun eyes the scene from different directions.

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Bicycle Man

The bicycle man wears a highway green reflective vest for all the better to see you with. He must be English because he rides on the American wrong side of the road. Sometimes near the curb; sometimes down the middle of the lane toward head-on cars defiantly in the right. Does he enjoy curses shouted out windows, fingers raised in salute to his choice, horns honked, brakes squealed as cars play dodgeball?

The bicycle man pedals on. His reflective vest flaps in man-made wind.

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Apex Predators

The wolf-whistle first, then the slap on the bottom that left the skin burning under my thick winter coat. How much do you cost? the man called. Orcas are known as the wolves of the sea, have recently damaged the rudders of dozens of vessels. Not really attacks, experts say, just playful behavior. In first grade a gang of boys held me down in a ditch, pushed my face in the mud. As if I’d been wearing a sign that said Kick Me. Which later changed to Kiss Me but meant the same thing. A male neighbor pressed me into a full-body hug in the grocery store aisle. “What did you do to entice him?” other shoppers seemed to be thinking at me. The question pierced like a dart. Apex predators, orcas. The triangular dorsal fin of the male juts six feet high. Half-jealous, my girlfriends made jokes: They swarm you like flies on honey. Or on rotting meat, I thought as I turned from a drink at the fountain to find several men waiting, their own thirst postponed by their hunger for me. Oh please, not again! cried the skipper whose boat had been sunk once before. They knew what they wanted this time. They bit off both rudders and didn’t touch anything else. A chiropractor whom I never returned to cracked my spine while standing behind me. I felt his erection. The Etruscan god of the underworld, Orcus, gave orcas their name, punished breakers of oaths. A man I knew punished his broken lawn mower by shooting it with a .22. Later we laughed at the story, but now I don’t know why we found it funny. Walking home after the beating, I felt my teeth scrape grains of dirt.

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Be a Person

“This is what the whole thing is about.” –William Stafford

A golden cascade of light streams in, blanketing my face with warmth. I slide into slippers, listening as a robin trills while owls return to their roosts. Descending the stairs, I glimpse through the window: a lone car hums along our road, carrying a person, someplace. My thoughts drift and settle, like dust mites in sunbeams. Here, in the calm of dawn, I allow myself to be a person before going someplace.

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Visitor Just Passing Through

Here it becomes crystal-clear, breathing in Alaska’s fresh air, drinking from mountain fountains, eating salmon

and wild berries from hillsides and muskegs blueberries and red huckleberries, salmon-, rasp-, thimbleand highbush cranberries our bodies depend on all of earth, sea and air for life. As for our spirits,

we need caribou and bears, seals, whales and mountain sheep, beavers and Bald eagles, ravens, ptarmigans

and Arctic terns, hummingbirds, glaciers and icebergs, auroras and alpenglow, the blossoming profusion

of glacial gardens all these wonders available here. When you enter this kingdom, and the eagles welcome you, you will realize seen through their eyes you are a visitor just passing through, and no matter how much you long to stay, you will be going away, leaving them to reign over their vast (may it last forever) domain.

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Drifting In A Birch Canoe

Here one can sense the lightness in all created things as if (it is!) living is enough. As spires of the spruces

reach up piercing sky, one is inspired anew to live simply like the mountains and forests, to be content

with bare essentials like the gulls and plovers, to listen to the leaves breathe, to birds and whales conversing, to move slowly into the groove of sentient beings who do not hurry or worry about the future. Here one can believe

all species have souls. One can witness the birth of an iceberg and rejoice that creation goes on

is the very form of unity,* everything teeming with calm deliberation. One can come along for the ride and glide free of time

and other constraints, caught up in the mystery and majesty of place. White peaks press themselves against sky, and nature

speaks. One must listen with reverence, and imagine drifting in a birch canoe till that final home comes into view.

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We all crawled in through a hole in the chain-link fence, right next to the No Trespassing sign, careful not to tear a shirt or scratch a forehead, lugging our puck and sticks to what we called The Rink. There wasn’t any flag but it must’ve been the ninth or tenth green, farthest from the clubhouse.

Brian and his brothers made up a whole team, one born every year or so for a while Irish twins, they said, or maybe they were Irish quintuplets. I had to scrounge up the other kids for my five, sometimes came up one short or made my sister play even though she didn’t have a stick. Patrick had to play goalie because he was the youngest and his brothers threatened to tell their dad if he cried. We all knew he was more afraid of that than the puck that hit him in the mouth one time and knocked out two teeth.

All the brothers except Brian and Patrick thought scuffling was as much fun as a sweet slapshot into the cardboard box we used as a goal. Brian always seemed to be inside himself, someplace quiet and sullen, hanging out with me near the bushes on the side of the pond, waiting for the puck to come our way.

One time I slipped on the ice and took him down with me, he shoved me when we got up, I pushed back, and we circled each other like feral cats. I guess you could call it a fight: We both dropped our sticks like we saw them do in the NHL, his brothers swarmed around, cheered us on, mocked him for clenched fists and scowl, called him “wimp” and “pussy.” I wanted to get it over with so I punched him in the nose, drew blood, his swing caught my lip, split it, and then we just stood there, eyes moist.

His brothers jeered some more, yelled “Dad’ll get out the belt if he finds out when we get home,” but we just shook hands real hard and went back to the game on the pond that sprung up every winter.

That was the only fight we ever had Brian and I out on the frozen ninth green, but his brothers brawled and name-called every time while he went deeper and darker inside.

Years later, while they were all together after their father’s wake, beers in hand, watching a fight between the Hawks and Wings in the playoffs, yelling “wimps” and “pussies”, the voices he’d fought off for so long commanded Brian to smash a chair with his fists, throw the TV across the room, and slash Patrick’s mouth with the old hockey stick that slouched for decades with the pucks in the closet. And then he just stood there, clenched, eyes moist, gasping for breath like he’d been on the ice short-handed through a power play.

His brothers looked away, went back to their beers, watched the game in silence into double overtime, Patrick pressing a bloody towel against his lower lip.

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Contributors

Carol Everett Adams’s poems have been published in or are forthcoming in Avalon Literary Review, Boston Accent Lit, California Quarterly, Crack the Spine, Euphony, Evening Street Review, Figure 1, FRiGG, Front Range Review, Ghost City Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Jokes Review, The MacGuffin, Midwest Quarterly, The New York Quarterly, Nonconformist Magazine, Owen Wister Review, Pennsylvania English, Pink Panther Magazine, Pudding Magazine, Quercus Review, SORTES Magazine, Soundings East, South Dakota Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Sweet Tree Review, The Virginia Normal, Voices de la Luna, Wax Paper, Westview, Wrath-Bearing Tree, Zone 3, and others. She earned her MFA in Writing from the University of Nebraska. You can read more of her work at caroleverettadams.com.

Matthew J. Andrews is a private investigator and writer. He is the author of the chapbook I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember, and his poetry has appeared in Rust + Moth, Pithead Chapel, and EcoTheo Review, among others.

Danny P. Barbare’s A Collection of Poems is available through Barnes & Noble. He resides in the Upstate of the Carolinas.

Jessica Barone is an educator, an avid reader and writer, and the mother of a ten-yearold warrior princess. Jessica credits her Sicilian grandmother’s stories of the old country as her earliest source of inspiration. Today Jessica is a mother who tells stories to her own child. Books written by Jessica Barone include the novels Eternal Night, Shadow Cast, Dark Ascension, Dragon Slayer, and the short story collection, Once Upon a Blue Moon.

Cheryl Block is an associate teaching professor of Spanish at North Carolina State University who enjoys creative writing. Her poetry is composed in French, Span ish, and English. Some of her work has been published in Dumas de Demain, Hinchas de Poesía, Saturday Evening Review, Blue Lake Review, and Calliope. When not teaching or writing, she likes to explore trails with her husband and dog, play with her cat, travel, read, and spend time with family and friends.

Christopher Boniecki is a CT State Naugatuck Valley student who has contributed to Fresh Ink multiple times and won awards for his poetry and fiction. The eighteen -yearold lives with his mom and dog in Thomaston, Connecticut, where he does a terrible job writing bios for himself.

Morgan Boyer is the author of The Serotonin Cradle (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and a graduate of Carlow University. Boyer has been featured in Kallisto Gaia Press, Thirty West Publishing House, Oyez Review, Pennsylvania English, and Voices from the Attic. Boyer is a neurodivergent bisexual woman who resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Dr. Patricia Brawley’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Flights, Junto, Magnolia Quarterly, Page & Spine, and Steam Ticket, and she won first place in the Pike County Literary Contest for short story and poetry. A psychotherapist and university professor, Patricia has presented her research on the use of poetry in therapy at conferences in Perugia, Italy, and Tokyo, Japan. She has attended the San Francisco Writers

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Conference and the Mississippi Book Festival. Patricia holds a PhD in psychology and has maintained a private counseling practice for more than thirty years.

Gaylord Brewer is a professor at Middle Tennessee State University, where he founded and for twenty-plus years edited the journal Poems & Plays. The most recent of his sixteen books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and cookery are two collections of poems: The Feral Condition (Negative Capability, 2018) and Worship the Pig (Red Hen, 2020). A book of flash nonfiction, Before the Storm Takes It Away, is forthcoming from Red Hen in spring 2024.

Katley Demetria Brown is the pen name for Carol Marrone, who was born in New York City. She grew up in a housing project in the South Bronx and has lived in a number of places, including Minot, North Dakota; Kastellaun, Germany; and Springfield, Massachusetts. Her work has been published in a number of Internet and print anthologies.

Marte Carlock’s poetry has been published by Avalon Literary Review, DASH Literary Journal, Door Is a Jar, Edison Literary Review, Green Prints, Hobart, inscape, Moon City Review, Moria Literary Magazine, and Penumbra. Her fiction has been published in American Literary Review, Angles, Apricity Magazine, Crack the Spine, Diverse Arts Project, Edison Literary Review, El Portal, Evening Street Review, Fiction Fix, Flights, Flock, The Griffin, Halfway Down the Stairs, Glint Literary Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Ink Pantry, Inscape, The Loch Raven Review, The MacGuffin, The Madison Review, MARY: A Journal of New Writing, Menda City Press, and Minetta Review.

R.J. Caron lives with his wife, two cats, and four parrots in Enfield, Connecticut. During his seventy-three years, he’s had millions (at least it seems like that) of varied experiences. He uses them to breathe life into his characters. Bob is no stranger to the Freshwater Journal; four of his stories have been published, and he has been a contributing editor for three Freshwater Journal releases.

Bill Carr’s short story “Exquisite Hoax” was published in the Scholars & Rogues online literary journal. His short story collection Defensive Indifference and other Stories won Prize Americana’s 2022 contest for Prose. His work has also appeared in Central American Literary Review, Evening Street Review, The Furious Gazelle, Good Works Review, The Ham Free Press, Menda City Review, Oracle Fine Arts Review, Projected Letters, Riggwelter, Rockford Review, Scarlet Leaf Review, Sweet Tree Review, and Teleport Magazine. Carr received his master’s degree in English from Brooklyn College and currently serves as chairperson of the North Carolina B’nai B’rith Institute of Judaism.

Max Cavitch is a writer, teacher, and photographer who lives and works in Philadelphia. His most recent poems, aphorisms, and translations have appeared in Brittle Star, Grand, Hooghly Review, Philosophical Salon, Politics/Letters, Stone of Madness, and Stone Poetry Quarterly.

Benjamin J. Chase is a Connecticut native with an MFA in Poetry from Western Connecticut State University. Benjamin’s poems have appeared in over a dozen literary

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journals. Benjamin’s first collection of poetry Here to See It was published by Kelsay Books in May 2022.

Maryanne Chrisant, MD, has been published in 34th Parallel Magazine, Apricity Magazine, Connecticut River Review, JONAHmagazine, Open Ceilings, Pennsylvania English, Platform Review, Shark Reef, Sand Hills Literary Journal, Spotlong Review, and on the podcast Anamnesis: Medical Storytellers. She has attended writing workshops with Jericho Writers, The New School, Tufts University, and in Shaker Square, Ohio. She studied poetry with Galway Kinnell and Denise Levertov. Maryanne is a physician and has held leadership roles at many prominent health-care institutions in the U.S. An advocate for children’s health, she’s currently a medical director at Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in South Florida.

Laura Claridge has written four mainstream-published biographies, two about artists (Tamara de Lempicka and Norman Rockwell) and two about celebrities in the literary world (Emily Post and Blanche Knopf). She has been a frequent writer for national press, such as Wall Street Journal, Vogue, L.A. Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. A PhD, Dr. Claridge has been awarded an NEA grant and the J. Anthony Lukas Prize. She has appeared on the Today Show, NBC, CNN, and NPR. You can learn more at her website: lauraclaridge.com.

Sarah Daly is an American writer whose fiction, poetry, and drama have appeared in thirteen literary journals including Synchronized Chaos, The Olivetree Review, Blue Lake Review, and Fixator Press.

Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in Slipstream, Penumbric, and Maintenant. She is the co-author of the books, Music Theory for Dummies and Music Composition for Dummies and currently works as an instructor at Hugo House in Seattle and at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

Abbie Doll is a writer residing in Columbus, OH, with an MFA from Lindenwood University and is a Fiction Editor at Identity Theory. Her work has been featured in Door Is a Jar Magazine, Full House Literary, and The Bitchin’ Kitsch, among others. Connect on socials @AbbieDollWrites.

David Edelman’s poems have been published in various magazines, including Seattle Review, RHINO, SLANT, Freshwater Literary Journal, Rio Grande Review, Pacific NW Magazine, and others. He has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts and is a former co-editor at Fine Madness. Brooding Heron Press published his chapbook, After the Translation

Duane M. Engelhardt is a new writer who has self-published the novella, Code of Silence and has had short stories published in the Tulsa Review, Rockvale Review, and The Charleston Anvil. After a career spanning such diverse pursuits as CFO of a branch of an international corporation, working on sailboats, managing an art gallery, stage acting, and making furniture, Engelhardt now puts his unique vision of life into photography and writing. Whether traveling with a camera in search of that one particular photograph that captures the offbeat and the unusual, or sitting at a desk crafting a story,

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Engelhardt enjoys telling the tale, “I am at heart a storyteller.” When not traveling, Duane M. Engelhardt and his wife Kit live in Denver, Colorado, while working on his novel, The Forest Hill Crow Society.

Arvilla Fee teaches English Composition for Clark State College and is the poetry editor for the San Antonio Review. She has published poetry, photography, and short stories in numerous presses, and her poetry books, The Human Side and This is Life, are available on Amazon. For Arvilla, writing produces the greatest joy when it connects us to each other.

Bernadine Franco is an educator fascinated by the influence of women artists on the story of art. Her media includes teaching, writing, speaking (in-person and through the Women at the Helm podcast), and designing tours at local museums.

After a thirty-year career in the museum profession, Alan Gartenhaus now lives on the Island of Hawaii, where he farms and writes fiction. His work has been published in Avalon Literary Review, Broad River Review, DASH, Diverse Voices Quarterly, Entropy Magazine, Euphony Journal, The Evening Street Review, Flights, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Ignatian Literary Magazine (recipient of the Editor’s Choice Award), moonShine Review, New English Review, Nude Bruce Review, October Hill Magazine, Paragon Journal, The Penmen Review, The Phoenix, riverSedge, Running Press, Santa Fe Literary Review, Smithsonian Press, Umbrella Factory Magazine, and Writer’s Workshop Review, among others.

Joe Giordano was born in Brooklyn. He and his wife Jane now live in Texas. Joe’s stories have appeared in more than one hundred magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post and Shenandoah, and his short story collection, Stories and Places I Remember His novels include Birds of Passage, An Italian Immigrant Coming of Age Story, and the Anthony Provati thriller series: Appointment with ISIL, Drone Strike, and The Art of Revenge Visit Joe’s website at https://joe-giordano.com/

Arianna M. Gomez is a CT State Housatonic student currently residing in Connecticut after having previously lived in New York City. Passionate about reading, Arianna discovered even more passion in writing, losing herself in genres that encompassed everything from fantasy and philosophy to evocative literary fiction. When she’s not lost in words, Arianna loves to engage in visual arts and hang out with her many pets and loved ones.

John Grey is an Australian poet, U.S. resident, recently published in Stand, Washington Square Review, and Sheepshead Review. Latest books, Between Two Fires, Covert, and Memory Outside The Head, are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the McNeese Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, and California Quarterly.

Patricia Hale’s publications include the poetry collections Seeing Them with My Eyes Closed and Composition and Flight. Her work appears in Naugatuck River Review, CALYX, Connecticut River Review, Lily Poetry Review, Freshwater Literary Journal, Thimble Literary Magazine, and other journals, and is anthologized in Forgotten Women, Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis, and elsewhere. She has been awarded CALYX’s Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and

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first prize in the Al Savard Poetry Competition. She lives in Connecticut, where she serves on the board for the Riverwood Poetry Series.

Laura B. Hayden spent her childhood in Brooklyn, New York and her teens in Enfield, Connecticut, where she went on to teach at Enrico Fermi High School and Asnuntuck Community College as well as freelance for regional publications. She is the author of Staying Alive: A Love Story, a memoir of loss and recovery.

For over twenty years, Tom Holmes has been the founding editor and curator of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics. Holmes is also the author of five full-length collections of poetry, including The Book of Incurable Dreams (Xavier Review Press) and The Cave, which won The Bitter Oleander Press Library of Poetry Book Award for 2013, as well as four chapbooks. He teaches at Nashville State Community College (Clarksville). His writings about wine, poetry book reviews, and poetry can be found at his blog, The Line Break: thelinebreak.wordpress.com/ Follow him on X/Twitter: @TheLineBreak.

Ruth Holzer is the author of eight chapbooks, most recently Home and Away (dancing girl press) and Living in Laconia (Gyroscope Press). Her poems have appeared in previously in the Freshwater Literary Journal as well as in Southern Poetry Review, Blue Unicorn, Slant, and Poet Lore, among others. She has received several Pushcart Prize nominations.

Ashlee Hoskins is a writer based in New England. As a mother of two daughters, she is driven to share the honest feelings we hold inside and embrace our unique journeys unapologetically. She loves to share her fresh perspective and love for connecting as humans with the world.

Ann Howells edited Illya’s Honey for eighteen years. Recent books: So Long As We Speak Their Names (Kelsay Books, 2019) and Painting the Pinwheel Sky (Assure Press, 2020). Chapbooks: Black Crow in Flight, Editor’s Choice Main Street Rag, 2007 and Softly Beating Wings, 2017 William D. Barney winner (Blackbead Books). Her work appears Plainsongs, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and I-70 Review among others. Ann is a multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee.

Poet and photographer, Margaret B. Ingraham is the author of a poetry collection Exploring this Terrain (Paraclete Press, 2020); This Holy Alphabet, lyric poems based on her original translation of Psalm 119 (Paraclete Press, 2009); and a poetry chapbook, Proper Words for Birds (Finishing Line Press), nominated for the 2010 Library of Virginia Award in poetry. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, The Courtship of Winds, DASH Literary Journal, Door is A Jar Magazine, Evening Street Review, The Hollins Critic, MacGuffin, Medicine and Meaning, Mount Hope Magazine, and Nonconformist Magazine.

Katy Keffer writes nonfiction, fiction, and poetry and is pleased her work has again found a home in Freshwater Literary Journal. Other work appears in A Plate of Pandemic, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, The RavensPerch, and Sad Girl Diaries. When not working or writing, she actively supports other writers as founder/managing editor of the online literary journal The Bluebird Word

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Casey Killingsworth has been published in numerous journals including The American Journal of Poetry, Better Than Starbucks, The Moth, and Third Wednesday. His latest book is A nest blew down (Kelsay Books, 2021), and a new collection, Freak show (Fernwood Press), is forthcoming.

Jane Rosenberg LaForge is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, four chapbooks of poetry, a memoir, and two novels. Her most recent book of poems is My Aunt’s Abortion (BlazeVOX [books] 2023). She reads poetry for Counterclock literary magazine and reviews books for American Book Review. More work is forthcoming in Cottonwood Literary Journal, The American Journal of Nursing, and Stone Circle Review.

Tom Lagasse’s writing has appeared in numerous literary journals, both in print and online, and in anthologies. He lives in Bristol, Connecticut.

Vivian Lawry’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in more than seventy literary journals and anthologies, from Adanna Literary Journal to Xavier Review. Her stories appear in Virginia is for Mysteries, Virginia is for Mysteries Volume II, and Virginia is for Mysteries Volume III, anthologies of short fiction featuring landmarks of Virginia. She has four books as well: Dark Harbor and Tiger Heart (installments in the Chesapeake Bay Mysteries), Nettie’s Books, a historical novel of strength and change, and Different Drummer, a collection of off-beat fiction. A complete list of her publications can be found at vivianlawry.com.

Richard LeDue (he/him) lives in Norway House, Manitoba, Canada. He has been published both online and in print. He is the author of eight books of poetry. His latest book, It Could Be Worse, was released by Alien Buddha Press in May 2023.

Christian Livermore served as the judge for the 2024 Freshwater Student Writing Contest. Her debut novel, The Very Special Dead, was published by Meat for Tea Press on October 1, 2023, and her memoir in essays, We Are Not Okay, was published by Indie Blu(e) on October 1, 2022. The Los Angeles Review of Books called We Are Not Okay “ineffably important ... relentless and courageous and entertaining and upsetting.” Christian is also the author of a short story collection, Girl, Lost and Found (Alien Buddha Press, 2021), and her stories and essays have appeared in anthologies and literary journals including Longreads, Santa Fe Writers Project, Salt Hill Journal, The Texas Review, Meat for Tea, and Witch-Pricker. Her second novel, The Execution of Tertius Lafontaine (an excerpt of which appears in this issue), is forthcoming from Meat for Tea Press. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews with an academic focus on medieval English literature and has taught creative writing at Newcastle University and medieval literature at the University of St Andrews.

Leah Lopez is a full-time college student majoring in English Studies at CT State Manchester. In any free time she gets, she writes. Some of her favorite genres to dabble in are dramatic fiction, psychological fiction, and short story/one-shot pieces. She hopes to continue improving her writing skills in and outside of school and views storytelling as an endlessly enjoyable outlet for her creativity.

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Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and seminar leader. She is the author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/ Putnam), and her poetry has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Comstock Review, The MacGuffin, Prairie Schooner, North Dakota Quarterly, Poet Lore, Slant, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia.

Robert McGuill’s work has appeared in Narrative, American Fiction, Louisiana Literature, The Saturday Evening Post, The Southwest Review, and other publications.

Catherine McGuire is a writer/artist with a deep concern for our planet’s future, with five decades of published poetry, six poetry chapbooks, a full-length poetry book, Elegy for the 21st Century, a science fiction novel, Lifeline, and book of short stories, The Dream Hunt and Other Tales. Find her at www.cathymcguire.com.

Isabelle McMahon is currently pursuing her degree in General Studies while enrolled at both the CT State Asnuntuck and Naugatuck Valley campuses. She likes to travel and go horseback riding. She owns chickens, a dog, and a cat. She enjoys long hikes to explore nature.

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the Liakoura Prize, and the author of eight poetry collections. Recent collections include Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance (Kelsay Books: 2022), Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020), Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018), and The Drunken Sweetheart at My Door (FutureCycle Press: 2015),.He has work in Rattle, Crab Creek Review, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review, Panapoly, and Sheila-Na-Gig. His new book, The Light Most Glad of All, will be published by Kelsay Books in 2023.

Rosemary Dunn Moeller has had poems published in Navigating Narratives, The Green Elephant, Sea Change, and is the author of Long Term Mates Migrate Great Distances and two poetry chapbooks. She writes to connect with others through images, ideas and words.

Cecil Morris retired after thirty-seven years of teaching high school English, and now he tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (he hopes) to enjoy. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, Rust+Moth, Sugar House Review, and other literary magazines.

Thrice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, as well as the Best of the Net Award, John Muro is a resident of Connecticut, a graduate of Trinity College, and a lover of all things chocolate. John has authored two volumes of poems: In the Lilac Hour and Pastoral Suite in 2020 and 2022, respectively, and both were published by Antrim House. John’s work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Acumen, Barnstorm, Delmarva, Freshwater Literary Journal, River Heron, Sky Island, and the Valparaiso Review.

James B. Nicola is the author of eight collections of poetry, the latest three being Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, Turns & Twists, and Natural Tendencies (just out). His

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nonfiction book Playing the Audience: The Practical Actor’s Guide to Live Performance won a Choice magazine award. He has received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, Storyteller’s People’s Choice magazine award, one Best of Net, one Rhysling, and eleven Pushcart nominations for which he feels stunned and grateful. A graduate of Yale, James hosts the Writers’ Roundtable at his library branch in Manhattan: walkins are always welcome.

Beckett Norman-Hall is a CT State Sophomore English major. He spends his free time with his spouse, cats, and writing whenever possible. He has published work once before, in Eastern Connecticut State University’s Eastern Exposure 2018. Beckett usually writes poetry, but a professor recommended he publish his creative memoir piece, and he believes it may be a chance to try something different.

Dakota Ouellette is a sophomore student at CT State Asnuntuck who is majoring in social work. They have been drawn to writing for as long as they can remember and avidly enjoy writing poetry and short stories. They are currently in the process of outlining an idea for a novel. They’ve won multiple state and national level writing competitions in high school and college, and they were a gold medal portfolio winner in the 2022 Scholastic Art and Writing Contest, and a winner in the 2023 Freshwater Student Writing Contest. Outside of writing, Dakota is a big advocate for mental health and social justice and is the president of Asnuntuck’s Pride Club. They are also a member of Phi Theta Kappa. They would like to transfer to the Elms College at Asnuntuck bachelor’s degree in social work program after they graduate with their associate’s degree.

Ruth Pagano took up poetry writing in her retirement after a creative writing course at Capital Community College in Hartford in 2015. She has continued to write poetry and short fiction including some memoir pieces. She was too busy in her physician career, raising her two sons, and being a wife to a school principal to take the time to learn this creative endeavor of expression. Her work has been published in the Freshwater Literary Journal in the past, the Altrusa sponsored Gerard Melito Senior poetry journal, and Illuminations, the poetry review journal of University of St. Josephs. She likes to attend local poetry readings and has participated in open mics.

A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M. Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks are Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022). Two of Phillips’s poems are nominated for this year’s Pushcart Prize.

Alita Pirkopf received a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Denver years after graduating from Middlebury College. Later, she enrolled in a poetry seminar at the University of Denver taught by Bin Ramke. Pirkopf’s poem “Shale Bluffs” has been nominated for the 2022 Pushcart Prize. Her poem “Roadkill” has been nominated for the Sundress Publications 2021 Best of the Net awards. Other poems of hers have appeared or are forthcoming in The Alembic, Caduceus, Cimarron Review, El Portal, Harpur Palate, The Rail, Stonecoast Review, Voices de la Luna, and WrathBearing Tree, as well as in other journals.

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Kenneth Pobo (he/him) is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), Lilac And Sawdust (Meadowlark Press) and Gold Bracelet in a Cave: Aunt Stokesia (Ethel Press). His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Asheville Literary Review, Nimrod, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.

R.V. Priestly is the pen name of Roderick Priestly, a martial arts teacher and owns a fitness studio in New York City. He writes a fitness blog, My Studio In The Heights. Once a year, he travels into the mountains on a solo sojourn for inspiration and insight. He has worked as a professional singer/songwriter/performer, studio owner/manager, private personal trainer, and master trainer at New York sports clubs. He attended The Ohio State University for music, The Fashion Institute of Technology for computer design, writing workshops at Manhattanville College, and writing groups. His work is forthcoming in SLAB.

Seven-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions. His work appears in Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall (Encircle Publications), and Covid Spring, Vol. 2 (Hobblebush Books). His latest poetry book, Magnificat, is available from Encircle Publications.

Heather Rutherford has been published in Down in the Dirt, El Portal, Euphony Journal, Literally Stories, The MacGuffin, moonShine Review, riverSedge, SORTES Magazine, Stirring: A Literary Collection, The Thieving Magpie, and Valparaiso Fiction Review. Heather grew up in a small town called Endwell in upstate New York and graduated from the University of Richmond with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, where she taught yoga and meditation for fourteen years and writes and edits the yoga center newsletter. Heather has raised two kids and several Labrador Retrievers, including two yellows named Huckleberry Finn and Scout Finch.

Heather Sager lives in Illinois where she writes poetry and fiction. Her recent poetry appears in the New Feathers Anthology, The Basilisk Tree, 7th-Circle Pyrite, Moss Puppy Magazine, Backwards Trajectory, The Closed Eye Open, Litbop, Magma, Black Poppy Review, and more journals.

Terry Sanville lives in San Luis Obispo, California with his artist-poet wife (his inhouse editor) and two plump cats (his in-house critics). He writes full time, producing short stories, essays, and novels. His short stories have been accepted more than 500 times by journals, magazines, and anthologies including The American Writers Review, The Bryant Literary Review, and Shenandoah. He was nominated three times for Pushcart Prizes and once for inclusion in Best of the Net anthology. Terry is a retired urban planner and an accomplished jazz and blues guitarist who once played with a symphony orchestra backing up jazz legend George Shearing.

Kai Saucier is a nineteen-year-old artist, writer, student, and mom to a three-year-old miniature pinscher. She lives in Manchester, Connecticut, with her mom and brother. Currently working towards her associate’s degree in liberal arts and sciences, Kai is usually writing or thinking a bit too much. She enjoys practicing resilience and gratitude

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in her free time. Find her reading a psychology article or listening to the same five songs.

Born in Cincinnati, Bobbie Saunders is a graduate of Emory University, B.A. in Psychology and Rocky Mountain College of Art & Design, B.F.A. in Painting & Drawing. Her interests include running, baseball, swimming, and playing with dogs. Her poems have appeared in Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Talking River Review, Westward Quarterly and others. Illusions is her collection of poems.

Luke Sawczak is a teacher and writer in Toronto. His poetry has appeared in Sojourners, Acta Victoriana, Queen’s Quarterly, Humber Literary Review, Spadina Literary Review, Ekstasis, and elsewhere. It has been nominated for Best of the Net and included in Best Canadian Poetry. His creative nonfiction placed in Napoli Racconta. In his spare time, he composes for the piano.

John Sheirer (he/him/his) is in his thirty-first year of teaching at CT State Asnuntuck. His recent work has appeared in Flash Boulevard, San Antonio Review, WordPeace, Five Minutes, Iceblink, Fiction on the Web, Wilderness House Literary Review, Meat for Tea, Poppy Road Review, Synkroniciti, 10 By 10 Flash Fiction, Scribes*MICRO*Fiction, Teach.Write., Witcraft, and Goldenrod Review, among others. His most recent books are Stumbling Through Adulthood: Linked Stories (2021 New England Book Festival Award Winner) and For Now: One Hundred 100-Word Stories (2023 New England Book Festival Award Runner-Up). Find him at JohnSheirer.com.

Harvey Silverman is a retired old coot who writes nonfiction primarily for his own enjoyment. His nonfiction has appeared here and there, including Ototillo Review, Queen’s Quarterly, Freshwater Literary Journal, and elsewhere.

Susan Winters Smith, M.A., was born in Massachusetts, grew up in Vermont, and lives in Connecticut with her husband, Stephen. They have three grown children and two grandchildren. She has written all her life and has had many published articles, poems, and stories in workplace newsletters, newspapers, genealogy journals, and literary journals. She has self-published eight books, including two novels, three children’s books (grade three level), two poetry books, and one humor book for seniors. Her Facebook writing page is Wintersmith Books.

Victoria Lynn Smith lives near Lake Superior, a source of inspiration, happiness, mystery, and weather worthy of gothic tales. Her work has appeared in Brevity Blog, Better Than Starbucks, Hive Avenue Literary Journal, Persimmon Tree, Jenny, 45th Parallel, Rathalla Literary Review, Bullshit Lit, Mason Street Review, and regional journals. Both her short stories and essays have won and placed in regional writing contests. She is excited about her first short story collection, which is nearly complete. More at: https://writingnearthelake.org/.

Matthew J. Spireng’s 2019 Sinclair Poetry Prize-winning book Good Work was published by Evening Street Press. An 11-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he is the author of two other full-length poetry books, What Focus Is and Out of Body, winner of the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award, and five chapbooks, Clear Cut; Young Farmer; Encounters;

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Inspiration Point, winner of the 2000 Bright Hill Press Poetry Chapbook Competition; and Just This.

Geo. Staley is retired from twenty-five years of teaching writing and literature at Portland Community College. He had also taught in New England, Appalachia, and on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation. His poetry has appeared in Chest, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Clackamas Literary Review, Main Street Rag, New Mexico Humanities Review, Fireweed, Freshwater Literary Journal, Evening Street Review, Naugatuck River Review, Steam Ticket, and others.

Stephen Straight’s books include Affirmation (Grayson Books, 2022), which has won the 2023 William Meredith Award for Poetry, The Almanac (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2012) and The Water Carrier (Curbstone, 2002). He was professor of English and director of the poetry program at Manchester Community College in Connecticut.

Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place: A Cat Sanctuary. She has an M.Div. from Princeton Seminary and a B.A. from Vassar. Her work appears or is forthcoming in more than thirty-five literary journals, including Amethyst Review, Braided Way, Cagibi, Fathom Magazine, and Young Ravens Literary Review. She received fifth place in the 2023 Writer’s Digest Awards (Spiritual Nonfiction). Angie loves life dearly.

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009. His first poetry collection from Cajun Mutt Press is now available at on Amazon and contains links to his published poetry online.

Felanyely Barett Valdez is an emerging BIPOC writer and graduate of Middletown High School in Connecticut.

Originally from an upper Mississippi tributary town, Jean E. Verthein traveled through Italy, Iran, Japan, and Mexico before settling in New York City. She bused across Afghanistan and Iran in a study tour while learning about the literature of the two countries. Her counseling of disabled students some from war zones has taught her the wonder of survival, and her experience as an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of Social Work has been invaluable.

Diane Webster’s work has appeared in El Portal, New English Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Verdad and other literary magazines. She had micro-chaps published by Origami Poetry Press in 2022 and 2023 and was nominated for Best of the Net in 2022.

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

A.R. Williams is a poet from Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (U.S.A.) and has been published in Black Bough Poetry, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Neologism Poetry, among many others. His

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debut collection, Funeral in the Wild, is slated to be released with Kelsay Books in Spring 2024. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram @arw_poetry

Diana Woodcock has authored seven chapbooks and six poetry collections, most recently Heaven Underfoot (winner of the 2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award), Holy Sparks (2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award finalist), and Facing Aridity (2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature finalist). A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Net nominee, she received the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders. She currently teaches at VCUarts Qatar.

James K. Zimmerman’s writing appears in Carolina Quarterly, Chautauqua, december, Folio, Lumina, Nimrod, Pleiades, Rattle, and elsewhere. He is author of Little Miracles (Passager Books) and Family Cookout (Comstock), winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Prize.

Notice of Non-Discrimination: CT State Asnuntuck does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religious creed, age, sex, national origin, marital status, ancestry, past or present history of mental disorder, learning disability or physical disability, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, or genetic information in its programs and activities. In addition, CT State Asnuntuck does not discriminate in employment on the basis of veteran status or criminal record. The following individuals have been designated to handle inquiries regarding non-discrimination policies: Timothy St. James, 504/ADA Coordinator, tstjames@asnuntuck.edu, (860)-253-3011, Dawn Bryden, Title IX Deputy, dbryden@asnuntuck.edu, (860)-253-1277, CT State Asnuntuck, 170 Elm Street, Enfield, CT 06082

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