Freshwater Literary Journal 2023

2023 Editorial Board: R.J. Caron

Christine Czarnecki

Alexis Fahey

Susan Winters Smith

Miriam Taub

Chelsea Williamson

Editor and Faculty Advisor: John Sheirer

Cover Photo: Susan Winters Smith

Freshwater Literary Journal is published annually by Asnuntuck Community College. We consider poetry and prose. The upcoming reading period will be August 15, 2023, to February 15, 2024. Acceptances and rejections will be sent on a rolling basis, no later than the end of March 2024. 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 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 postal submissions, please.

The 2024 Freshwater Student Writing Contest will focus on short fiction up to 1,500 words. The contest will be open to full- and part-time undergraduate students enrolled during 2022, 2023, or 2024 at Connecticut’s community colleges and public universities. The contest entry deadline is February 15, 2024. More information about the contest and general submissions is available at https://asnuntuck.edu/about/community-engagement/freshwater-literaryjournal/

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

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

4 – David Agyei-Yeboah

5 – Cate Asp

7 – Duane Anderson

9 – Danny P. Barbare

10 – Jeanne M. Barone

12 – Bud R. Berkich

13 – Ace Boggess

15 – Katley Demetria Brown

18 – R.J. Caron

22 – Peter Neil Carroll

24 – Charles Coe

25 – Corey D. Cook

27 – Joe Cottonwood

28 – Holly Day

30 – Krikor Der Hohannesian

31 – Katacha Díaz

32 – Andrea Janelle Dickens

34 – Fred Donovan

35 – Grace Dow

37 – Joanne Durham

40 – TAK Erzinger

41 – Meadow Gates

44

Alexis Fahey

46 – Dave Fromm

47 – Emilea Gartrell

48 – Michael Gigandet

51 – Taylor Graham

53 – John Grey

54 – Derek Harvey

55 – Ruth Holzer

58 – Ann Howells

60 – Greg Huteson

61 – Beth Ann Jedziniak

63 – Judy Kaber

66 – Katy Keffer

69 – Mason Koa

72 – Stuart Larner

74 – Richard LeDue

75 – Katharyn Howd Machan

77 – Chris Marcotte

80 – Kenneth N. Margolin

Table of Contents

David Agyei-Yeboah

Mystery Clouds

Rooted to the spot in his tight-fitting garb, Looking out into a wineless sky

What does he see?

A constellation of impossible dreams kindled into fruition?

A seamless gray-blue Trailing into absence?

He was trained to look into the sky for feathered hope.

That would jostle past the meridian And rustle past the sun

Down skyscrapers, Onto the mud-speckled ground

Then seep into manifestation.

But now termites are chasing down hope.

The sky unfurls for a torrential downpour Yet here he stands

Staring, Longing, aching, Attuning to the mystery of sky

And song of earth.

Hope is a mischievous thing.

Harvest

When I was a young child, armed with pigtails and pink, dancing with bumblebees in the warmth of golden sun, I daydreamed, Of daisies and daffodils and dandelions Of dark dark dirt–a strong desire to grow a garden sitting in the depths of my stomach

Took a while, but I finally got around to growing up I planted my first seed last night, as my lips pressed against the corner of yours, I took my time planning a bountiful harvest–your back turning green as I sowed seeds down your spine.

Me and bees, getting dizzy together now

Cate Asp

Goodbye Honeymoon

Blood trickled down her hand from snagging it on the splintered old orange bench, but she did not mind too much. Sunlight crept into her veins, skin absorbing the warmth, her cheeks pink where she forgot to put on sunscreen. It was days like this that made peace and contentment bubble up inside her, spilling over as she smiled. Her fingers slid on the silky condensation on the plastic cup, leaving a pink trail where the blood was still trying to dry, and her feet doing the same in the dew of the grass. It was these small things and the breeze hitting her that caused her shoulders to loosen and the anxiety that often left her left hand shaking to give her a brief reprise. Her eyes shut and she listened. Listened to the cars pulling in and out of the busy parking lot, their engines calling out to each other, brakes screeching in response. Car doors slammed shut out of habit rather than anger and each time one did it was followed by a brass bell sounding and the sudden release of voices that returned to their muffled state once the door closed. Coffee beans begged for her attention as they slammed into the sides of the roaster. Soon, smoke climbed her nose, blending with the harsh scent of coffee. She did not want to be smelling coffee, but instead the fresh yeasty dough from the building across from her. Her nose had become used to the smell years ago and had held this scent hostage since. One day, she might be able to experience it again. For now, she settled with the mixture of coffee beans and smoke and the slightly fruity scent that rose up from her drink. Her hand had stopped bleeding. Was she ready to leave this place? It had grown on her, over the years. Grabbing at her ankles, wrapping them and then climbing up, up until she was covered in these ties she never wanted in the first place. Her left hand started shaking and some of the dew off the cup dripped onto her jeans. Leaving wasn’t going to be easy.

The Big Splash

One little girl, pink rain boots covering her feet, wearing Minnie Mouse sweatshirt, grey pants, and one big smile,

runs back and forth through the puddle from last night’s rain, one of the activities in her newly found amusement park, having the time of her life.

her own little Disney World. Splash, Dad just got a little too close to the water, an unintended consequence, or one planned by this little girl,

now joining in on the fun, resurrecting childhood memories of when he did the same thing, except maybe without the boots.

Duane Anderson

Do Not Disturb

Our two-year-old granddaughter, visiting my wife and I, along with her parents, had just gone down for her afternoon nap, after playing all morning and finished eating her lunch, when without fail, the doorbell rang,

waking her up, something that has now happened on each of her last two visits. The first time, a Boy Scout, selling popcorn products, and the second, a neighbor, dropping off a sack of tomatoes from his garden.

It was then I knew I would have to invest in a new sign, stating, “Do Not Disturb, Baby Taking Nap,” either that, or guard the front door, like a Special Agent protecting the President, until the nap was finished and my job was complete.

Anderson

Duane

Danny P. Barbare

Paying Bills

Paying bills proud of pushing your own buttons putting your ear to the phone and doing the talking.

Jeanne M. Barone

Empty Nest

The couple found the silence of the house at times almost deafening. Somehow, they never expected each of their children to go off to college at the same time. Nor did they ever contemplate or discuss just what life would be like when the children grew up and left home.

Sitting at the dining room table to begin their day with breakfast and the newspaper, they seemed absorbed in their own thoughts –in the same room, but miles apart. Suddenly, the husband quietly motioned to his wife to look out the window.

“Look, out on the pond. The swans are there with their fledglings again.”

“They’re getting so big. It looks like they’re not interested in staying in line or following their parents. Maybe they want to leave the nest,” the woman answered.

The husband smiled and remarked, “All of a sudden, they will just go their own way. ”

The woman continued preparing breakfast as her husband buried himself deep in an editorial. As she measured the coffee into the basket she asked, “Do you think that we’ll ever have grandchildren?”

“I don’t think so. It doesn’t look that way.”

“What will we do with our time as we grow older?” Tears welled up in her eyes.

Putting the paper aside and looking at his wife, the man took her hand. “I think you and I should try to remember the things we shared when we first met, before we had children.”

As he spoke to his wife, he gazed at her and thought how beautiful she was after all these years, even though her hair had turned gray. He realized it had been far too long since he last looked into her eyes.

Her eyes, he thought, I’d forgotten how blue they are. How they sparkle when she looks at me.

The woman wondered what he was thinking and why he had taken her hand. After all, it had been years since he’d shown any extra affection to her. She thought to herself, He’s still so handsome. That smile, I could never resist that smile. When did he get those little fine lines around his eyes? They make him look so gentle, so wise.

“Well,” he said, “let’s start where we began so very long ago.”

“You mean … a picnic? In the park … wine and cheese?” the woman asked with a hint of cautious excitement.

“Yes, my dear,” he said playfully. “Italian bread, a walk in the park–just like old times, the way it used to be!”

He leaned forward and kissed his wife. Time stood still, if only for a moment. They settled down once again into their usual breakfast routine. The

woman got up to pour the coffee, then placed it back on the hotplate and joined her husband at the table. The man opened the newspaper, took out the Arts section as he did every morning, and set it to the left of his wife’s plate.

They began silently reading their separate articles, in their separate sections of the same daily newspaper. Suddenly, the woman looked up at her husband. “I wonder how the kids are doing?” With no response, she spoke again. “Do you think they’re all right?”

Without looking up, the man answered, “What? Oh, sure they are. Maybe they’ll call today. I’ve got a feeling they’ll be home this weekend.”

“I hope so,” she answered. “They’d love a good picnic,” she looked to him for a response.

“M-m-m, they do, don’t they?” He answered without looking up. She didn’t even react to his half-hearted, half-attentive reply. It was no surprise to her. She was so used to his ways that she knew his reply did not reveal indifference. Her answer would have been a bit different. At the mere suggestion of a family picnic, she would dive right in and begin to plan. No, that’s just not his way. Looking away from her husband, the woman noticed the beautiful couple once again out on the pond. They were almost a perfect reflection of one another. Those beautiful pure white swans anticipated one another’s every move as they glided along the pond.

“Look,” the woman said to her husband. “They’re back. The happy couple is back again.”

He looked up and together they peered through the window to watch this captivating pair.

“Did you know,” the man said, “swans choose their mate for life? And when one of them dies, they never choose another? It’s no wonder really; they’ve been together so long. They’re so used to each other’s ways. ”

The woman replied, “Yes, I have heard that. They really only know that one swan their whole adult life. They swim and feed and look after their young. And when it’s cold, they huddle to keep warm. After their young leave, all they have is each other.”

“Look,” her husband gestured as he spoke. “Their fledglings haven’t followed. They’re nowhere in sight. I guess they’ve all left the nest. You’re right, you know, all they have now is each other.”

Bud R. Berkich

Beyond These Things (Procol Harum)

I look for a time past the present, when the old ways are revisited; and there is motion once again.

A window of rest, yes, but beyond these things, freedom.

“What Are Your Biggest Challenges Right Now?”

–question asked by Raymond Soulard

Treefall toward the nearby wood hypnotic lean, a snap, then misdirection.

It veers mid-drop, aimed suddenly at the neighbor’s house.

A lovely sight, poor thought. It comes up short luck, fate, whatever

while cutters scramble underneath like crickets hopping from a boot.

I’ve been dealing with these guys all week. They have a touch that’s dangerous

yet neat, precise, except this accident & their disregard for the pandemic.

How they talk it down, disabused by rhetoric from the president.

They terrify me more than trees with faulty trajectories,

my head askew from coughing men & proximate calamity.

Black Bear

Wanders the neighborhood in wide arcs: Wilkie, McKinley, Sheridan Circle so close we might spot it with binoculars.

Neighbors post photos on Facebook: the animal long & thin as if denied by famine, a jogger in summer heat. It has a taste for rubbish, rummaging bins to gather scraps.

It won’t survive its excursions, the city not a kind place. I think it knows, laments at night. I imagine I hear its song

bellowing from beyond the fence like Gregorian chants or death metal, impenetrable save the sorrow or the rage.

Ace Boggess

Katley Demetria Brown

The Escape Artist

Tom, a large, hazel eyed Russian Blue, had a knack for getting into trouble. Whoever created the saying “curiosity killed the cat” must have had Tom in mind.

We adopted Tom in Minot, North Dakota, from a couple who owned too many critters. He was peace and love and a bit of druggie because his previous humans smoked weed. It was no surprise that he adored catnip. He loved to get high.

Tom was an extremely affectionate cat. It was not unusual for him to find someone he’d never met, sit on his lap, and fall asleep, purring and kneading his claws. He ate the strangest things. He adored Limburger cheese, which stank like sweaty feet, green olives, canned mushrooms, ice cream, and pretzels. He stole food when he thought no one was looking, despite being spoiled and well fed. We brought Tom to Germany with us. His arrival at Schillerstrasse 7, Kastellaun, made him an instant celebrity. Although he wasn’t purebred, his appearance was unique enough to be noticed by the neighbors. People constantly asked me what kind of cat he was. The Germans in town had never seen a Russian Blue. He had a long, sinuous body and dense, soft, slate gray fur. He was a magnificent feline.

Peggy, who lived across the hall, and her six-year-old son Peter, took to him right away. Pets are icebreakers when it comes to making friends and Tom was a big help. Peter conversed with Tom, whose reply was always “rrow.” This cat understood both English and German.

Houdini had nothing on Tom. He was the ultimate feline escape artist. He quickly learned to open German latch doors and frequently left the apartment to visit the neighbors. His modus operandi was to jump up and push down the door handle. When the door opened, he escaped and disappeared for hours at a time. The neighbors always let me know his whereabouts and enjoyed his “visits.” When we returned to the States, the round doorknobs gave him culture shock.

Early one summer morning, my husband Ed left the ceiling window open in the bathroom before he went to work. We lived in a garret apartment, and several windows were built into the ceiling. The space was wide enough for Tom to jump, with a loud thump, onto the slanted, slippery, slate roof.

The noise woke me and I, with a shock, saw Tom sitting pretty on the roof, next to the rain gutters. He savored the cool morning air. It didn’t faze him that he was three stories up, and a fall would have serious consequences.

I went immediately to Peggy’s. She, too, worried about Tom. Since I didn’t have a phone, she offered to call the Feuerwehr (fire department) for me. They brusquely told her “Wir retten keine katzen” (we don’t rescue cats). Neither one

of us could figure out how to get him back in the apartment. We were getting very concerned.

After about two hours, the sun rose high in the sky, it was getting hot, and Tom was starting to pant. He had enough fresh air and wanted off that hot roof. Heat, hunger, and thirst were beginning to take their toll. We were afraid that he would panic and jump. I left Peggy to watch him while I ran over to an English-speaking friend on Schubertstrasse, around the corner, to see if she had a ladder. We were getting desperate.

She didn’t have one but provided an excellent suggestion. It was worth a try. She asked if we had a large blanket. We did. She then told me to put it on the roof, attach the other end to the window latch, and see if we could reach Tom. It was just long enough. The idea was to get him to climb the blanket back into the bathroom. We had no time to lose.

Tom knew exactly what to do. He slowly, agonizingly, climbed up the blanket. I prayed he wouldn’t slip and fall. We all held our breath until he reached the window and jumped down into the bathroom. I shut the window, and everyone cheered. I hugged and reprimanded Tom for his misbehavior. I thanked the friends who had assisted in his rescue. I owed them big time.

From then on, we kept the bathroom window closed. However, Mr. Feline Houdini had more lessons to learn.

One humid summer afternoon, Ed and I were eating dinner in front of the picture window in the kitchen as the sun’s rays angled magnificently on the ruins of Burg Sponheim, built in the 13th century, partially destroyed in the 1689, during some stupid Franco-German war. Many castles in the Rhineland suffered that fate when the French invaded on numerous occasions. Only a few remained intact. Now they are national treasures and people come from all over the world to gawk at them. Every weekend we were off to a different town, taking in the history of the castles, and the beauty of the scenery.

Tom sat on the outside ledge. We had the window wide open because it was another hot, humid day. Cats are intelligent creatures, but they can’t resist temptation, and open windows are the worst temptation for a feline.

Ed saw I was worried and reassured me with “he won’t fall out; he’s just enjoying the breeze.” My fears were justified after I went to the refrigerator to get the salad and placed it on the table.

Tom, who had been on the ledge a moment before, was no longer there. My worst fear had been realized.

We saw the cat on the grass below. Ed flew down three flights of stairs and almost lost life and limb himself in the process. He swore loudly when he nearly lost his balance.

Peggy had just washed the stairs. They were white marble and extremely slick when wet. In small apartment buildings, it is customary for the tenants on each floor to clean the stairs and the landing leading to the apartment once a week. You were expected to get on your hands and knees with a bucket of

soapy water and a washcloth, wipe them down, and alternate each week with the neighbor on the same floor.

Fortunately, Ed survived the trip down unhurt. Tom was, thankfully alive and in one piece. The first thing Ed did was to check the cat for injuries and broken bones. Tom had cut his lip and walked with a slight limp. Few people would have managed a fall from that height almost unscathed. He used one of his nine lives that day.

Peggy apologized profusely. She had seen the drama and asked us if we wanted to use her phone to call the Tierarzt (vet). It was a Friday evening, and the American vet at Hahn Air Base was off for the weekend. We searched the phone book, made a few calls, and finally found a receptionist at the other end of the line, who explained the doctor was out at a farm inspecting pigs that had just been slaughtered. She took our address and Peggy’s phone number and said he would be there in about an hour or two.

In the meantime, we were concerned that Tom may have possibly sustained some internal injuries. We stayed with him and watched him closely. Peter spoke reassuringly to his feline friend, who didn’t answer. He was still in shock.

The vet arrived shortly after dark. He seemed exhausted and smelled of meat and blood. He apologized for being late and explained that he had spent the entire day inspecting pork for trichinosis. It was slaughtering time and German law required that a veterinarian check each animal for disease before the meat could be sold. We considered ourselves very fortunate that he took time out from his busy day to examine our cat.

Tom was his friendly self and gave the doctor no trouble during his examination. The only injuries were a sprained right leg, which the vet treated with a cortisone injection and a cut lip, which would heal on its own. He added that it was fortunate that Tom had fallen on grass instead of concrete, cautioned us to keep our windows closed from now on, and told us to call him if there was a problem.

We asked for the bill, but the doctor would not accept payment. A few days later we brought him a bottle of Jim Beam to show our gratitude. He was delighted. Most of the Germans we knew loved American whiskey, and our farm vet was no exception.

Tom’s nine lives lasted twelve years. He returned to the States with us and died from natural causes in 1988.

R.J. Caron

It was a little after sunrise when I forced open my burning eyes and gazed up at the blurry ceiling.

Man, I feel like crap! My entire body hurts, like I fell down a flight of stairs!

I don’t get it; I felt fine last night. Julia and I left burn marks on the dance floor at Club Marco. That girl was so hot I fought to keep up! I may have twenty years on her, but c’mon! Where does she get her energy?! Man, we got toasted, drinking beer all night! I knew the car’s Autotron device wouldn’t let me drive, so I summoned Uber to get us back to our places. Maybe I’m just suffering from a wicked hangover this morning, although beer never beat me up this badly!

The only other time I felt similar to this was two years ago, after the company Christmas party. Brayden, my assistant, had just started working. He was with a gorgeous redhead: about 5’4”, not an ounce of fat, and piercing darkblue eyes. She looked at me and flashed a smile I’d never forget.

She and Brayden walked over to me. “Dr. Addison,” said Brayden, “I’d like you to meet my friend, Julia Ivers.”

She flashed that desert-hot smile again. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Addison,” shouted Julia, over the noise of drunken partiers.

“Believe me, the pleasure is mine,” I replied. “Please, call me Thomas.”

Brayden disappeared, then returned with the first of many glasses of imported beer.

I can’t remember much after that, except awakening the next morning, feeling much like now. But, on the good side, Julia and I have been seeing each other hot and heavy since then. Brayden introducing us was more valuable than anything else he’s done as my assistant.

Gotta shake this off! Have to go to work! After a major company-wide network security breach six months ago, Zoom meetings were forbidden. So going to the office, for this meeting, is my only option.

The end of my two-year project is finally in sight. I created the original Autotron and then the Humatron. My new Ultratron is my crowning achievement. My boss, Dr. Matthew Mathers, called it, “Possibly the greatest contribution to humankind!” He’s Director of Research and Development at Worldly Wellness Creations, also known as WWC. That place has gotten twenty years out of me, and this project will definitely earn me a long-overdue promotion. Dr. Mathers is retiring in two weeks; I should be named his successor!

Beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep. Who the hell’s calling me this early?

The caller I.D. displayed the name, Brayden Peters “Dr. Addison here,” I said. “What do you want, Brayden?”

“I just wanna make sure you’re up. Today’s the big day, old man!” said the boy genius.

Brayden had earned a Batchelor of Science in Engineering from M.I.T. when he was merely nineteen and received his doctorate just a year later. He was immediately recruited by Dr. Mathers and accepted a high-paying position as the Number-One Co-Developer at WWC, working directly under me.

So now, that tall, skinny kid is a smothering shadow, always checking my work! Even though we’ve been perfecting my creation, he’ll try anything to steal the credit for the Ultratron, and leap over me to become Director of R&D after Dr. Mathers leaves.

“OK Brayden, gotta go. See you in two hours,” I said, and then quickly hung up.

I wished my sick feeling would vanish. I needed my “A-Game” at the office today. Maybe I’d feel better after a shower.

After fifteen minutes, the heavenly hot water released my body-crushing tension. I felt much better, but far from normal.

I dressed my best, put on my most expensive grey suit, white shirt, red silk tie, and black leather shoes. My reflection in the full-length mirror made me grin: neatly styled greying hair, recently trimmed mustache and beard, and black designer eyeglasses. I was ready for the most important meeting of my life!

Keys in hand, I faced the door, with its microphone ever-present, yet out of sight. “Open,” I said.

“Speak directly into the bodily systems analyzer, Dr. Addison,” said a voice that came from the doorway speaker. It belonged to a computerized guardian, centrally located in my condo.

“Open the door,” I commanded again.

“I am sorry, Dr. Addison. You cannot leave; my sensors detect the strong presence of Type C-42 influenza germs. You must recuperate completely before the door will open.”

“That’s ridiculous! Let me out now!” I hollered.

“Dr. Addison, you, of all people, know that is impossible. You designed and programmed the original Humatron ten years ago. And before that, you invented the Autotron. Both systems have saved countless lives. The Autotron prevents intoxicated individuals from operating motor vehicles. And the Humatron prevents infectious humans from intermingling with others. You are quarantined. This unit, the Humatron 239, is programmed to protect society, so cooperate and relax,” the metallic monster ordered.

“I can’t relax!” I yelled.

“Calm down, Dr. Addison. Your condo contains seventy-five activity-promoting devices. For example, you can choose from 600,000 holographic videos and novels. The Universal Television System provides 1,000 channels. Your automated food and beverage synthesizer can prepare unlimited palate-pleasing delights. If you feel restless, your exercise equipment, sauna, and hot tub will

provide both stimulation and relaxation. You need not leave your quarters for anything. Even your antibiotics are being dispensed to you directly from the government-run pharmacy via pneumatic tubes. So, get well, Dr. Addison.”

There was no sense in reasoning with the damn machine. I was trapped, no matter what I said. But I needed to get to that meeting. Imagine, Brayden becoming my boss! I couldn’t let that happen.

After a couple deep breaths, I sat in my recliner, searching for an answer. After all, I designed the prototype of this electronic world-saving, freedomstealing monstrosity. Machines aren’t perfect, I reasoned. Suddenly, I recalled designing a mechanical override panel, just in case the Humatron quarantined someone in error. Using schematics, I maintained from the original, I located the well-hidden override panel.

After breaking into the protective encasement, I discovered unfamiliar modifications: many extra wire cables connecting numerous circuit boards. I was pretty sure that by rearranging the connections I’d previously seen, the door would open. So that’s what I did.

The next time I opened my eyes I was looking up at a nurse. She was replacing an empty I.V. bag, connected to my arm. “What happened to me?” I asked the nurse, my head pounding,

“You were electrocuted,” she replied. “But you’ll be fine. Your Humatron called an ambulance and saved you.”

After two days of hospitalization, I returned home. The first thing I did was call Julia, but there was no answer. I left a message, then texted and emailed her, but she didn’t reply. After another two days, it was obvious that Julia was ghosting me.

I became so angry, that it became my obsession to confront her. After all, we’d been seeing each other over the past two years, so why would she shut me out? Did I do or say something wrong?

Sunday night, a week after Julia and I went dancing, I drove to Club Marco, hoping to run into her. Upon entering the dining room of the club, there she was, seated, facing me, in a booth. Julia was with a guy, but I couldn’t see his face.

I stomped over to confront Julia and saw the man she was with. It was Brayden!

“Hey, old man. How are you?” asked Brayden, sneering. “Sorry for everything that happened. You look Okay, though.”

“What the hell’s going on, Julia?” I shouted. Her eyes looked away, and she wasn’t smiling. Brayden jumped in. “Hey, don’t yell at her! She was just doing me a favor. We’ve known each other since we attended college. I realized, from Day one as your assistant that you’d be my only obstacle to someday taking over the company, so I put together a plan. Keeping you away from that meeting allowed me to show that old fool Mathers that I deserved credit from the

Ultratron, so he promoted me to Director of R&D. Julia and I are celebrating. It was nice of you to give Julia a key to your condo. She let me borrow it last Sunday while you and she went out drinking and dancing.”

I looked down at the plate of spaghetti and meatballs in front of Brayden. I hate spaghetti and meatballs! I considered breaking the plate over Brayden’s pointy head, but he just kept talking.

“I was only trying to keep you trapped in your condo for a few hours. Using my laptop, to reprogram your Healthatron, worked perfectly. The machine diagnosed your hangover symptoms as Type C-42 Influenza germs. I knew you’d attempt to override the Healthatron, so I changed the electronics as well. But I really didn’t think you’d get shocked that badly, or I might have rewired your Humatron differently.”

Ed’s Smoke Shop

When my daughter was 3, 4, 5, we’d drive Sunday mornings to Ed’s Smoke Shop in the next town for the New York Times,

the clerk an elderly ex-GI named Bob who chewed on a cold cigar and sported what my daughter called an English

“accident.” We had a little ritual: as he gave me the paper, he treated her to a tootsie roll and I’d hand her one penny to give to Bob,

a little lesson on gift-giving. Habits change, the Times came to the door, my girl found better things to do on a Sunday morning.

Next time I saw Bob, he was limping on a cane and a caretaker, looked like he’d had a stroke. We sat at a bus stop bench, Bob chatting about

his years in England as a fighter pilot, which brightened his nurse who hadn’t known his past. She was a London girl, telling us her mother

would invite American flyers for Sunday lamb. Bob grinned, wagged his head, and began to sing Roll Out the Barrel. In a flash, she

joined him, both laughing like kids, nostalgia trumping the gap years. I miss that old soldier, also the little girl who misses her penny candy.

Peter Neil Carroll

Step Child

Wooden, five-feet high, the step ladder

I bought second-hand in Minneapolis 50 years ago has come apart at the seams in California. I had just purchased my first house, began by painting what we called the master bedroom, rolling a soft lavender-blue, while my portable radio blared a new Bob Dylan tune, inviting a lady to lay across his big brass bed.

I, too, had dreams.

The next time I opened the ladder I was brushing glossy white over a dirty kitchen wall, spiffing up my house for sale. I traveled light and so did my ladder, splattered over the years in orange and brown, off-white, yellow, peach color and dark green but never as gorgeous as that first bright coat. When the steps cracked, I thought about feeding old reliable to the fire, but then I just set it outside with the word FREE.

Peter Neil Carroll

Charles Coe

Incantations

Late one night our family was driving home, Father at the wheel, Mother dozing beside him, head against the window, our enormous Ford station wagon humming along, a ship sailing the asphalt ocean. When “PT 109” as I think of it now, wasn’t full of tools, Father let my sister Carol and me pop down the back seat, spread a pile of blankets and stretch out, drifting off sometimes, lulled by the vibrations of road.

The radio was on and there was a sudden crackle and hum as the station Father had tuned in gave way to a disembodied voice reciting the results of high school football games from some far away state. The seemingly endless recitation of unfamiliar places took on a hypnotic quality, an incantation like the Latin words, meaningless to me, the priest spoke at Mass as I kneeled on the altar in cassock and surplus, waiting my cue to pour water over his fingers and hand him a towel to dry them before he gave communion.

I didn’t understand how this was happening. I didn’t know that at night AM radio signals can travel hundreds of miles by reflecting off the ionosphere, bouncing back to Earth, and being picked up on radios impossibly far away. I didn’t know this phenomenon, “skywave,” it’s called, happens only at night, because the ionosphere doesn’t reflect radio waves when warmed by the sun.

I didn’t understand the science, it seemed to me we’d just slipped somehow through a portal to another universe. As that spectral voice droned on I lay in back of the station wagon, mesmerized by the endless stream of numbers that symbolized the joys and disappointments of young gladiators who’d fought their epic battles under the lights, before families and friends, on grass-covered fields, in little faraway towns I would never know.

Full Moon (November 2021)

My therapist points out that not answering the phone is an option.

So I ignore my brother’s next late night call.

Shuffle to the window instead, rest my forehead on the frosty pane, look beyond the formidable maple, the rough stones encircling the firepit, each one a clenched fist.

I know he is sitting in his truck on some unmarked logging road, engine idling, spent beer cans at his feet, a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray.

Know what he would say.

You’re their favorite.

The phone rings again, wails and wails in its black cradle as I spot two deer approaching the apple tree, relaxed and in sync, unburdened by animosity, the past.

You think you’re better than me.

Watch as they feast on rotten fruit, wilted grass.

You’re the reason they don’t love me. As they bound down the embankment, white flags raised.

Corey D. Cook

Corey D. Cook

Stretch of 90 Degree Weather or Waiting for Our Luck to Turn

A passing car enshrouds the house in a cloud of dust, makes me briefly forget about the parched lawn that crunches under our feet, the perennials that languish in the weed-choked garden, even my napping wife who sleeps fitfully under the spinning blades of a ceiling fan upstairs, ice packs on her incisions.

I sit at my favorite window and watch the sediment from the road dissipate, mop sweat from my temples with a handkerchief, notice a spider’s web in a corner of the porch, slip out and lean over its gruesome contents, yet another specimen riddled with malignant cells.

Blonde, tight skirt, leather vest, she knows her privilege and uses it smiling at the young JetBlue attendant who mentions nothing about size limits as he helps her pummel a gigantic purple duffle into the overhead bin occupying the space of two bags. I have the aisle, she the window. From her body, a powdery scent like fresh-cut sugar pine. Perhaps I stare.

Something wrong? she asks. Sorry, I say. First time I ever smelled sawdust on a jet plane. My first husband, she says as if that explains it. I just spent two weeks at his cabin. A chatty woman. I soon learn she woke to the call of loons, had to brake as a dozen turkeys held a family meeting on the road to the airport. She wished she could stop right there, paint plein air on Interstate 89.

She’ s bringing maple moose lollipops for the evil stepchildren. They ’ re frankly glad I ’ m gone, she says. Now we ’ re over Lake Champlain. Destination JFK. Goodbye Vermont, she says to the window. I ’ ve cleaned his cabin, I ’ ve brought you his ashes. Stay green and may we all dwell in peace.

Joe Cottonwood

Afternoon With My Sister

We stop at the glass cage full of monkeys and there’s that pause in conversation that’s always waiting to be filled with words of regret and apology something important and real. But we have become too expert at meaningless prattle to let that silence overcome our day.

I long to reach out and take her hand in my own like I did when we were little, like we did until we grew old enough to wander off on our own. I wonder what she would do if I did it naturally, unexpectedly, and if I only nodded my head curtly at her surprise at our insistence that we act like children.

We talk about the weather and make up lies about our husbands as the monkeys fly and chatter pound on the glass with their tiny, flat palms in mock outrage. I want so badly to talk about my failures as a sister, as a friend about how lonely I feel when I think of her and wonder if she misses me.

My Boyfriend’s Mother

She looked at me as though I had just presented her with a box of screws and rusted metal bits or still-wrapped light fixtures and said “This is your grandson,” and she wasn’t fooled. She looked over at my boyfriend as if wondering how I could have gotten pregnant when I was so obviously sleeping with the vacuum cleaner or with one of the passing school buses or garbage trucks I was always flirting with.

Her expression said I should have been more careful installing the dishwasher, shouldn’t be lying this at the feet of her innocent, helpless, human son.

Later, my boyfriend said his mother had her doubts about the whole thing, as did he, who knows where I’d been what I’d done when his back was turned. I could have lovers hiding in the back yard

buried beneath the rotting piles of leaves, or in the stack of old furniture piled high in the alley, canoodling when I’d said I was gardening, could have a secret lover curled up always under the house, living solely on the pot I knew my boyfriend had hidden there.

Krikor Der Hohannesian

Thoughts While Watching Snow Fall

Such tiny crystals morphed into colossal mounds, a septillion flakes each year, and no two alike?

As for the lone flake, a short life. Death either by natural causes–the March sun’s warmth, an April rain shower–or murder at the hand of salt, plow or shovel. In the end, solace only in certitude there will never be another like it.

In a snow bank I trace infinity’s symbol, that which has no beginning and no end, even as my own years melt into the finite pool of a life, however fleeting.

Katacha Díaz

Saddle Up!

On a weekend getaway from the bustling city, three amigas traveled to a Southwest guest ranch, a perfect destination off the beaten path, for the Big Apple thrill seekers!

They hired Levi West, a tall, hunky cowboy guide for an Old West riding adventure in the foothills of the coral-hued Sandia Mountains of New Mexico, and they saddled up and were ready to ride.

No dull, sidesaddle, nose-to-tail rides for these city cowgirls. They traveled down dusty zigzag trails, dodging yucca and prickly pear, loose rocks and tumbleweed.

The amigas quickly fell into line when they heard Levi shout, “WHOA! WHOA! Y’all wash up while I mosey out yonder to rustle us up with some grub from the chuckwagon.” The spicy buffalo green chile stew with cactus tortillas hit the spot, but they politely declined second helpings of the smoked rattlesnake jerky.

Back on the winding trail, while taking in the desert mountain scenery, they stopped to watch a band of wild Spanish mustangs nibbling on grasses. These urban cowgirls seized the moment! Sitting high on their Arabian trail riding partners, dressed in brand-new Western wear, they struck a pose and smiled for a group selfie.

“OK! It’s time we move on out,” said Levi West, the hunky cowboy guide extraordinaire, as he tipped his Stetson straw hat.

The rugged, picturesque Land of Enchantment was both sublime and exciting. It was an ideal getaway, for the three amigas to saddle up, get in touch with nature and recalibrate.

Andrea Janelle Dickens

Pacific

I’ve spent my whole life by the ocean. Ninth grade, mom tired of taking shit from dad and packed us up and left while he worked a double. Clear across the country. A small town, nearly deserted after summer season. Murals on the sides of moldering buildings leant an air of credibility to the place. The visitors were not-quite-reliably-middle-class families. We helped them pretend to their children they were.

I’d grown up in Rhode Island and was used to warm east coast beaches. Moving to the Oregon coast was a lesson in desolate, rocky, moody beaches. The water was too cold. The waves were rougher. The skies were close and gray many days. The mountains more intense, not gentle grassy slopes. I grew more wild as I adapted to the Pacific.

Summer season was families licking ice creams and biking along the main street. It was traffic jams with three dozen cars. It was locals bringing punnets of berries to sell in roadside stands in front of Wanderer Art Gallery and Joe’s Fish and Chips shop. It was kettle corn next to bags of roasted hazelnuts, handmade soaps, and the few vegetables that were in season. It was Hugh, a brackish water eel hiding beneath his well-worn straw hat, who always brought jerky from whatever he had managed to fish or trap a few weeks before.

The beaches were geoducks, seals, giant pelicans that could stand sentry for hours. The shores were ferns and age-old pines. It was rocks that never dried. It was anemones that would pierce your feet unless you wore shoes in the ocean.

The summers were happy, light, and family oriented; they were fake, transitory, and the best part of the town. After Labor Day, the town regressed. It was like the guests had left, and we could be ourselves again. I yearned to be like the Pacific, unable to be tamed.

One Friday, we were all hanging out at Square Pizza. The only place a group of teens and young adults could hang without being harassed for not buying beer. As I made my way back to the counter to order more pitchers of coke for the table, out of the corner of my eye, Dave was fussing with my glass. I didn’t trust him: a spiny dogfish. He dropped out of school last spring to start a lawnmowing business that never took off and was constantly borrowing money that you knew he’d never pay back.

I didn’t know why he went for my glass. I tried not to stare. I knew the server, Cheri: a rockfish who scouted her waters. I asked her if she would pour me a new glass, said I was suspicious of Dave. She poured a pitcher that I carried back to the table and told me she’d bring over a new glass in a second. As I was sitting down, I realized Cheri followed me with a couple small bowls of bar mix. She faltered and the bowl in her right hand slipped and the mix

tumbled down in my old cup and around it on the table. She looked embarrassed, and insisted she bring me a new glass, scooping up the old one. I moved down to be near Rose and Gwen.

Later, Dave kept looking over at me. We’d never really talked before. He switched seats and sat next to me, trying to flirt. I excused myself to go to the bathroom. I took my phone and small wallet. As I was heading down the hallway at the back of the restaurant, Cheri caught my elbow and said as soon as I turned my back, Dave was adding something to my drink again, while Gwen and Rose watched. I thanked her. As I walked into the women’s room, I knew it was time to be an octopus and climb out the bathroom window. I walked into the ocean of myself that day, having become myself the invincible Pacific.

Deep Blue

Marie had black hair, pale skin, and deep blue eyes. That December, we went for a walk along the beach, held hands, kissed on the jetty, the sea spray wetting our winter coats. Her lips were thin and cold but her eyes were warm. I fell into them like a scuba diver falling backward off the side of the boat not seeing the water’s surface until it slammed into my back and took away my breath.

Sensing my inexperience with the breathing apparatus of life, Marie left me for an older, more experienced man tall, red-headed and cool. She wanted someone familiar with the things that glide unseen along the ocean floor.

Fred Donovan

Secondhand Smoke

Her pale hands take a drag from her cigarette, long fingernails yellowed from tobacco.

It rests between her ring and middle finger, her wedding band gleaming in the light.

Her shaking hand moves to her mouth. Smoke envelopes her face as she exhales.

I ask her, “Grandma, will you stop smoking one day?” She crushes the cigarette in the ashtray.

She opens her Marlboros and grabs her lighter. “Did you say something, hun?”

First Prize, 2023 Freshwater Student Writing Contest

Decomposition

We lay here for years or for hours

Your hand in my hand

So still and discreet

So long we become the flowers

We’d feed well the land

And worry the sheep –from “In a Week,” Hozier

Blood seeps into the dirt, staining the grass, Beginning the early stages of decomposition.

The day is quiet, save the low buzzing of insects and leaves rustling in the wind.

Our bodies are still, but our ghosts dance, moving gracefully.

We contribute to the natural cycle of life, nurturing the decomposers. Mushrooms and flowers find home along our bodies.

We lay unmoving through suntouched and snow-covered months, Our bones peeking through the dirt, the only trace.

Second Prize, 2023 Freshwater Student Writing Contest

Pomegranate

Palms turn crimson as I loosen pods from pulp. The knife slips through seams

of my finger’s skin, scatters rubies known to shield the pump and stutter of the blood,

my blood that drips on the counter from sanguine fruit, in Old French, pomme-grenade,

that named a weapon shaped with the same impenetrable shell, tiny pellets of shrapnel wombed inside

one moment succulence, the next cells strewn across a bleeding earth

like everything else broken open –

Shoe Store

Try these, Mother, he insists, untying heavy, black shoes, soles thick as mortar. No, not those, her fingers caress lacy petals gracing the opposite shelf. Mom, you fell

twice, you need support. Armed in logic he taps his boot, impatient for her surrender. Few weapons left, she lifts her sagging chin. I don’t want to wear those shoes. Their eyes engage

across a field strewn with mines of new and ancient battles. Still, she searches for signs of the boy whose bloody knees she kissed, healing all his wounds, who refused

to eat his oatmeal unless she etched his name in swirls of blossom honey

Joanne Durham

A Toast to What Remains

Here’s to a friend grown from our sons nesting in beds of maple leaves, downtown lunches that salvaged dull office jobs, lovers come and gone.

Here’s to us side by side on the park bench, swirls of severed clouds

rising out of nowhere, like what she wades through now as she wakes up to find her left-hand trembles, first the thumb like the right one before,

vowels slur into consonants that refuse to speak her mind.

Here’s to our bodies that age like stars too distant to compute.

Seismic

All things in nature are interconnected: quilt of life below, quiet roots stitched in soil and breaking ground without being noticed above, skeins of geese in a turning day some believe animals feel no emotion but they have not seen a calf frolic on mild sunny afternoon nor have they listened to the birds at dawn and their lilt of joy here are beings persistent in existence anchored in a cycle, the world, acceptance as it is between land and sea I cannot save it all I bear witness, a mere speck yearning for its protection.

What can I do with my worry?

The oldest generations are being destroyed even little shifts, seismic in the field outside my door.

All the way from the Atlantic I’ve heard the whales weep under a canopy of stars long removed from the coast I try to imagine living in harmony without waste and want of things under the lazy eye of a weeping sky.

Not So Happy Pills

I was a happy child, hugging my other kindergarten classmates, telling them they were my friends. I tried to be friendly with others, but they thought I was too friendly. I was switched between morning and afternoon classes because my behavior was not to their liking. I did not have any friends and others ignored me. By the age of five, I was diagnosed with anxiety, ADHD, and other mental disorders. I was given many medications to try and “fix” me. In my daycare I was aggressive, acting out because I did not know any other way to express my feelings. If someone did something I did not like, I would beat them, pinning them to the ground and punching them. For a long time, anger was the only emotion I knew. I had so many emotions that I wanted to express with no way to express them. When I had temper tantrums, the teachers at my daycare would hold me down as I kicked, screamed, and cried for them to let me go. I felt trapped when they did that, but that was the only way they felt they could control a kid having a panic attack.

Still only five years old, I was put into an outpatient program. I remember it as a colorful room filled with kids my age, toys strewn about, with board games, puzzles, and picture books stacked across every shelf. There were two chairs next to each other pushed against the wall. Every day, they would call us by name, and we would sit next to an adult in those chairs. We would talk about life and how we feel, and I remember being uncomfortable because there was no privacy. When my name was called, I would sit in the chair and smile, always smile. I had trouble portraying my feelings and the thoughts in my head, no matter how dark they were for my age at the time. I knew that smiling meant positive, so that is what I did. They would ask me, “How are you today?” or “How are you feeling?” I would respond with the response I thought they wanted to hear: “Good.” Even if it did not help me. But, at those moments, I was “good,” because I was finally able to play with other kids. Fast forward a year. I was then fully on medication. How was I to know the pills would be the downfall of the next decade of my life? I required extra time and help on assignments, but my teachers argued and said it was not needed. The dosage of my medication wasn’t enough for their liking, so I was sent to the principal’s office for “misbehaving” so often that I was there more than in my own classroom. Every day, I would take a school bus from my elementary school to my outpatient program, the only place where I could have fun with other kids. I built Legos and colored while I waited my turn to talk about my day. The caregivers there would call me up, and I would sit down and do my signature smile. This was my routine every day until I “graduated” from that place and was deemed better, a happy child.

Then, in a different elementary school, a better one, I received therapy. I was sent to the counselor’s office for extra help and normal school counselor things. The only memorable incident from this elementary school was a drawing I made. A girl from my class was into darker and creepy things, things that would be in horror movies. I was enjoying art back then, so she asked me to draw her a picture. I drew a picture of a creepy doll with a knife, and she said she loved it. I signed my name at the bottom of the picture. She left it in the cafeteria. I was called into the counselor’s office, no idea what it was about. Two police officers were there. I was terrified. I bawled, saying I was sorry repeatedly. The police were called that day because the school thought the drawing I made was a depiction of my desire to harm someone. That traumatic experience is not one a ten-year-old should face. They got an earful from my mother that day.

The years continued until I was finally in middle school, sixth grade. I had been through many therapists and psychiatrists, and my medication now almost tripled the dosage from when I first started. I was diagnosed with depression around this time, but, despite that, I made my first friend. I met her in Spanish class. We worked together on assignments and sat together at lunch. She was the first person with whom I could laugh. I made many other friends, so many until, for the first time, I had a friend group.

I don’t remember much from middle school; it was mostly drama and gossip, childish things that are trivial to me now but were everything to me then, like my first heartbreak. I cried on the bus home that day. My days in middle school were mostly insignificant. I remembered some rumor being spread about me. I cannot remember what it was I just remember being upset because it was not true.

At the end of eighth grade, there was a writing contest. If the holders of the contest liked what you wrote, you would win an award. There would be many winners, so I was excited. I was proud of my writing, having gotten praise from my mother on the book I was trying to write at the time. I remember working extremely hard on the contest paper. Writing was one of the only things I knew I could do well. A few weeks after the submission, the results came back. I was the only one in my class who did not win. My confidence was broken from that day forward. I cried and lost all hope in myself. My thoughts became darker, and I spiraled into a depression. I only had negative words when I thought of myself. I visited a psychiatrist; he recommends more pills to “fix” my depression. At the time, as a fourteen-year-old, I was taking over five different pills every morning with doses that were too high for a child. Some of them counteracted each other. My anxiety medication mellowed me out, but it left me with no energy to do anything. This melancholy feeling of having no energy made me depressed. My psychiatrist recommended a higher dosage. It was a vicious cycle with no end in sight.

Another year went by, and I had completed my first year of high school. It was a year with no meaning. My medication was at the highest dosage it had ever been before, my mind in a bad place. My mother decided I should use the summer wisely and go to a summer camp. I was reluctant but had no choice in the matter. I found it would be too difficult to take my pills every morning at breakfast. Even if taking medications was considered normal, I was embarrassed by it, thinking that something was wrong with me, that people would think I was weird or deranged for taking so many pills. My mother was trying to get me off my medication, but I said I did not want to because it was all I had known. Since I was just a child when I started, I was scared, scared of how I would act or how others would think of me. Whenever there was a morning when I forgot to take my pills, I would get in trouble in class for acting out. My medication “kept me in line.” They said it calmed me down. I was conditioned to think that I needed the medication to be “normal.”

That summer camp changed everything. With the small decision to not take my medication for the duration of time I stayed at that summer camp, my life changed. I finally found the real me, the me that was happy, the me that was energetic and fun, the me that was not tired all the time, the me that could make real friends. After my summer camp, I decided to stay off the medications for good. It has been three years since I have taken any medication. I am extremely happy I made the decision that summer. It undeniably changed my life for the better.

Alexis Fahey

My Annie

I stand alone in a secluded area of land, nature’s gifts being the only thing to keep me company. This all used to be mine but not anymore. The sun is out today. I always enjoyed the sun, especially when it would caress my frail skin, attempting to keep me warm. A light breeze brushes by the trees, causing the maple-colored leaves to shimmy down and lay on the soft grass. I loved this weather, this time of year. I always took immense pride in my sweater collection, adding a new one every year, but none of them beat my favorite sweater. It was chunky, blue, and worn down, but it always kept me warm. I got it as a gift from my father, many years ago, when I turned twenty-seven.

As if she hears me talking about the sweater, a child comes bounding out of the trees and into the open land, laughing and twirling, her blonde hair flowing in the wind and getting in her face as she spun. But to my surprise, she has a young chocolate lab running right along with her, the dog a gift to ease the sorrow of her grandfather’s death.

“Annie,” I whisper, smiling as I watch her, with my adored chunky blue sweater swaying and bouncing with every movement she makes. It was too big for her, with the sleeves covering her hands and the hem almost hitting her knees, but she never seemed to care. The dull, worn blue sweater looked like it was brand new whenever she wore it.

The couple of dime-sized holes that were at the neckline never got sewn. My wife, Annie’s grandmother, begged me to let her fix them, but I always refused. When Annie was a baby, she loved to weave her fingers through the holes of the sweater as if it were a toy. It was my favorite habit of hers. So, I kept the holes and never bothered to get them fixed. And even from this far distance, I can tell those holes are still there on the sweater, a little bigger than when I had it.

She runs and runs until she gets to the middle of the open land and flops to the ground, along with the dog, as their chests both heave, desperately trying to get enough oxygen. I stand, waiting for the pain to follow the use of my old joints, but it never does. I walk across the land, ignoring how I can’t feel my feet hit the ground, and slowly make my way toward Annie. I stop as my feet reach her and sit with my legs crossed, by her side. Her finger is woven through the holes in the sweater, twisting, making the neckline bunch up. Her eyes are closed as she soaks up the sun, singing quietly to herself.

“Your voice has improved,” I say looking down at her, expecting her to open her eyes and make a sarcastic comment like she always did. “You should sing me my favorite song.” I know she can’t hear me, but I still like to ask. But right as I do, the dog perks his ears up and looks over to me, its tongue going

back inside its mouth. Annie opens her eyes and looks over at the dog, curious as to why he stopped panting.

“What are you looking at, Rudy?” Annie asks the dog in a playful voice. The dog looks at her and goes back to panting loudly, dragging his body closer to her so he can lick her face. I smile at her laughing form as she struggles to calm the dog down from his playful attack.

“I am glad you are feeling better. I can see your new friend has helped you. ” The dog stops and looks in my direction again, but this time Annie does too. She looks right at me as she wipes the slobber off her cheek. “Hey, my little Annie,” I say. She smiles, as if she heard me, but turns her smiling face towards the dog.

“You’re a crazy pup, aren’t you? Seeing ghosts or something?” Annie playfully asks the dog as she pets his head. She stays there for a few more minutes messing around with the dog before a whistle is blown, coming from the direction she ran from. Sighing, she looks at Rudy and says, “We’ll have to come out here another time. Grandma is calling us home.” She pushes herself off the ground and wipes off pieces of grass from the sweater. I smile wide as I hear the song coming from her lips as she walks on, the dog following right next to her.

“Say hey, good lookin’, what you got cooking’? Sing it with me, grandpa!” She yells the last part making me laugh aloud before I start to sing my part that I always sang when I was there with her.

“How’s about cookin’ somethin’ up with me?” I sing as I watch Annie walk away with my favorite blue sweater, her finger playing with the cut fabric at the neck, and her new friend Rudy slowing down to match her small steps. I try to follow her home, but I can only go so far before the things around me start to go fuzzy. If I walk away from my space of peace, I’m afraid I’ll be gone forever, and I’m not quite ready for that yet. So, as always, I go back to my spot and appreciate the scenery before me, waiting for the next time I get to see my Annie.

Social Distance

You might be sick but you might not be. That’s true of everyone. Your teeth look yellow. Marlise from HR says stay home better safe than sorry. You remain in your pajamas and watch three episodes of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern. You then hallucinate a theatrical production in which you are the lead and must perform the role while underwater. This might have been a dream. It’s both hot and cold in your bedroom. You set up an out-of-office reply. You put on some sweat clothes and assemble an Ikea dresser you’ve left in the boxes for four weeks and then watch another episode of Bizarre Foods, the one where Zimmern eats rotten lamb. You feel like you’ve seen it before. You wonder what really happened with Anthony Bourdain. Your tailbone is sore but you just can’t with the gym. After all, you might be sick. You take the dog for a walk but use the entire length of his extendable leash. You whistle back at the birds from a distance. Better safe than sorry. You keep your sweatshirt hood up. You order Starbucks but use the app. You hand-sanitize. You drive to the river and park by the defunct yacht club. There are no yachts anymore but there are still a few canoes lined up along a dock, upside down like turtles sunning on a log. You sit in the car and read three pages of a book you’ve told people you already finished. Indeed, you’ve expressed opinions about it. You watch flotsam float south on the river and listen to a true crime podcast. You text your wife that you are resting comfortably. No need to worry. Your skin feels furry. Lichen sprouts from bankside trees like barnacles. You break one small ear of lichen off of a birch and put it in your mouth. It’s chewier than you thought it would be. You liberate a canoe from the defunct yacht club and float down the river with the current. You lower your head over the side and dip it into the cold water to observe the fish. The canoe tips but you balance. You beach it on a mid-river island and set about chewing through the trunk of a small sapling with your teeth. When you have felled it, you chew through another, and then another. You layer the saplings into a dome at the water’s edge and throw some leaves and mud on the top. More saplings, more leaves, more mud. Eventually there is some heft to the structure. It has a hollow in the middle of it and you take your coffee and your book into the hollow and sit there. You chew the shoots off the shrubs. You wonder how hard it would be to flood that cornfield over yonder. On the far shore there’s a road with some cyclists on it. You slap the water with the flat sole of your shoe to let everyone know to stay back.

Emilea Gartrell

Grief’s Humble Abode

An old classmate, only 28, died in a tragic accident. I look into his wife’s eyes, his wedding ring around her neck. All that’s left of him, in a wooden box to her right.

I cower at the fragility of life as “I’m so sorry” escapes my lips, feeling so futile.

“Thank you.” she replies. “Me too.”

I imagine her when the services are over, everything where he left it. The unbearably heavy silence where his voice echoing through the hallway should be, filled with her screams for him to please come back, that the universe must have made a mistake. The type of despair that makes your ribs ache. Knowing the way that no comforting word or hug will ever be what his were to her.

I walk away feeling as if it’s happened to my own self. It’s been a week and the heaviness hasn’t fully left. There is a portion of my mind that has always been much like a funeral home. Adorned in a black dress, holding the ghosts of those I have loved and lost to a place with no mailing address.

A constant combination of gracious celebration and visceral mourning, so aware of the sacredness of every hello and the powerlessness of farewells, the continuous possibility of those I love, slipping through my fingers no matter how tight my grasp.

Attempting to memorize parts of them as if that will make a difference. As if my wearing of a piece of jewelry or their favorite color will keep them safe.

The constant awareness of those in pain, waking up without their beloved next to them for the first time, a child navigating life without a parent far too early, senseless and cruel- no way to stop it. It has been said that grief is just love with no place to go. Turns out, it finds its home in me.

Michael Gigandet

I Lived

Nobody can make you go to a nursing home, at least not without a court order, and your persecutors can only get one of those by proving that you’re mentally incompetent.

That’s what Martin told his son, The Stockbroker. That stopped him. Stopped him so good he’d not mentioned it in his last two weekly visits to check up on his old man.

“It’s not a nursing home dad. It’s an Assisted Living Center.” He said it like the place ought to be capitalized.

No thanks. Martin didn’t want to wait around with a lot of decrepit people who have nothing to do. He had lots to do here on his farm. Besides, he’d visited a friend there once, and he smelled like a blanket which had been stored in the attic too long.

These weekly visits were never long, just time enough for The Stockbroker to walk through the house on inspection, engage Martin in enough conversation to determine if he could talk in coherent sentences and confirm that he was not planning on marrying one of the widows who brought him casseroles during the week.

His son is standing in the driveway next to the orchard where Martin is clawing in the holes he dug that morning for the new apple trees he is planting.

“How long do you think it will take for them to bear fruit?” his son asks, implying that Martin might not be around to enjoy the apples.

“Years.” Martin doesn’t bother to tell him that he’s planting apple trees for a future he knows he will never see. Considering his age though, Martin knew his son was right. When you plant fruit trees you are planting them for future people, future pies, future jams and jellies. When Martin took them out of their shipping carton that morning, he did so reverently, with care and contemplation. After all, these may be the last fruit trees he would ever plant.

When Martin and Em bought the long-abandoned place 40 years ago, trees covered the old house while vines grew in through the open windows. They quickly spent all of their money on the things you must have but can’t see new plumbing, electrical wiring, floor joists and other structural repairs. People told them how much they admired them when they really meant that they could not imagine themselves living in the old shack. Martin fought the encroaching forest with a weedeater and a chainsaw and shoved it back a few yards every year. Meanwhile, they started their family.

Back then, I worked in the present.

“You think you’ll ever sell this place?” The Stockbroker asks, which was a valid question. The 150-acre farm was surrounded by commercial and residential developments and desired by men with hungry eyes and too much

personality who periodically visited him when they drove by and saw him working in his garden or pruning his fruit trees in the orchard or mowing his lawn.

“Never,” Martin says. “Never so long as I’m alive.” That answer is nonsensical; yet it is perfectly clear. “At 75 what do I need with all that money?”

“When you do sell the place…” The Stockbroker began.

“When I die,” Martin interrupts, and his son ignores him.

“ … I hate to see your hard work wasted when a developer gets it.”

Clearing ground and fencing in acreage and digging ponds became the symbols of Martin’s dominance over Mother Nature left unrestrained. The work was hard, but he was young and able to contend with nature with brute strength. He made nature submit to him. That’s how it was at first.

The Stockbroker was right; Martin knew it. Considering the number of people moving to Nashville each year, the farm was ideal for a subdivision. His kids will make a fortune.

A developer will buy up the place, bring in bulldozers and scrape everything my wife and I ever did into a pile and burn it, house, outbuildings, fruit trees, all the landscaping, all of it. You can’t blame anybody. Nobody needs a farm.

“This sun is too hot for you.” Martin can tell by the way his son is standing with his hands on his hips that he is exasperated. “You should have planted them this morning, so you could rest up in the heat of the day.”

“I’m fine, really,” Martin says. He doesn’t tell him that he had to soak the roots for hours before the trees would be ready to plant nor does he mention the time he devoted to studying the placement of the trees, weighing potential sunshine and drainage patterns and the proximity of neighboring trees.

The Stockbroker offers to help him place the trees and pack the soil in around them, but he is wearing a suit and tie, and Martin urges him not to get dirty. “I have to mix the soil I removed with the compost and fertilizer to plant them properly,” he assures him. “I have all day.”

This is the kind of project that Martin liked to take his time with. Somewhere back in time, somewhere in between school plays, cub scouts, his trial practice in Nashville, his vegetable garden and Em’s flower beds, Martin learned to live with nature. He continued to impress his vision on the acreage around their home, but he began to work with nature. He learned to set aside habitat, to grow plants desired by butterflies and bees, to plant things for the pleasure of watching them grow and to stop cursing the deer who raided his vegetable garden.

“Promise me that you will think about what I said,” his son says, and Martin knows that he is leaving.

Martin waved goodbye and leaned on his shovel, watching his son’s car stop at the end of the driveway while The Stockbroker sent the required text to his sisters out of state.

The water in the 5-gallon buckets is heavy, and Martin has to stoop while walking to keep from sloshing it out.

On his second trip from the faucet, Martin dragged his right toe through the grass and fell. He lay there for a few minutes to catch his breath and get over the shock of hitting the ground chest first without his hands to brace against the fall. He took stock of his bones and began summoning the exertion he would need to get up. For a moment though, he ran his fingers through the grass like it was a lover’s hair and smelled the musty wholesomeness of the dirt and the pungent greenness of grass growing from it.

Beats the smell of an old blanket any day.

His son is right about him leaving, but Martin knows that. He thinks of that television commercial about a guilt-free woman searching for a “Place For Mother”: a place, some place to put that parent long past her expiration date.

I have a place; it is here. That may change someday, but that’s the future. For the present, my place is here.

Martin got up off the ground; it wasn’t pretty to watch, but after the wallowing, the grunting and the lurching, he uprighted himself.

There is something else he did not tell his son. He planted time capsules down deep in three of the holes he dug. Each capsule contained a crisp $20 bill and photocopies of articles he’d shrink-wrapped about the country’s pervasive political corruption, mind boggling social absurdities and McCarthyite censorship of political dissent. He included a copy of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Somebody ought to know, he told himself. He threw in assorted old stamps, trinkets, coins, foreign and domestic, family photographs, some stone spear points and pocket-sized King James Bibles. Just in case they kill religion. And in case he was not reaching into the future hard enough, Martin wrote a letter to the finders of his time capsules describing what he’d learned about his farm and himself.

To make sure the capsules were not readily discovered when developers put their dozer blades to the topsoil and began their ravages, Martin buried them extra deep.

Because of the limestone, they don’t dig basements in this part of the state if they can avoid it. I can work with that.

He dug the hole for each tree deep and wide with a shovel. Then, he used his posthole diggers to dig down much deeper in the center until he had a narrow shaft almost three feet deep.

I will surely be long dead when these are found, but I know this; the person spilling the contents of my time capsule onto his table top will be forced to recognize, as I said in the last line of my letters: “I learned to live. And, I lived.”

The Self’s Secret

She tells no one –not her closest friend –what waits for her back home, remote end-of-road place where she’d sleep open-air, even in winter. Is her house too cold? Mercury’s a mercurial recorder of degrees.

At edge of ocean, sky, land –foam cloud, mist over snow –she sleeps like the wild creatures. Wolf and bear, buck and hawk, she’s blanketed soft as feather, skin, fur cuddled close around her.

Are they a dream she dreams, or her familiars? Is it enchantment brings them there, like paradise where all is peace? In arms of nature, not of man, is how she dreams.

Taylor Graham

Is it Contagious?

We were sitting in the waiting room at the vet’s, trying to calm nervous dogs, peeking into carriers at meowling cats.

An older lady sat down again after signing the death sentence –we all knew without hearing.

She hardly dared look down at the silent one in her carrier.

The room went silent. Even nervous dogs settled, laying heads on paws.

An empty seat between me and the lady wiping her eyes.

Slowly my young Shepherd raised himself, leaned across empty space; extending his muzzle to touch the lady’s cheek.

A breath passed around the room as if a prayer.

Across the Table

In still water like this, she always imagines piranhas, figures an idyllic spot can’t just be beautiful. There has to be more to it.

And yet the shower works for her. No eels, no snakes, slither out of the pipes.

That spray rinses away the staleness, the decay, comes up with such a freshness, the mirror gifts her back her face.

But the good cannot hold. That’s why the liquid is teeming with something, even though the nearest scissor-bite fish is more than three thousand miles away.

Maybe she’ll drown. Or wither at its touch. Or her rippling reflection will portend wrinkles in the real world.

In still water like this, her pessimism runs deep. If only men didn’t have eyes.

John Grey

Derek Harvey

A Walk in the Park

Part One: Day

A walk in the park in the day comes with a guarantee

Green trees, black and yellow bees, blue water streams

Kids screams, and sports teams seem to be common themes

The sun shines providing light for fun times

A park is a place where nature resides

Ducks float, frogs croak, and birds’ cry

Flowers die and revive as seasons pass

Winter accents white on green grass

Nature is a gift to every soul

Creatures that call it home act as patrol

Water flows, wind blows, and leaves roll

Sun and rain are certain to show rainbows

Pines and oaks reach the sky

Hawks and crows fly by

A walk in the park is a way to connect

With a world that we sometimes neglect

Part Two: Night

A walk in the park after dark may not be pleasant as day

Needless to say, moonlight is less forgiving than the sun’s rays

illuminated trails lose their details

Darkness will surely cause plans to derail

You may hear the howls of a wolf from a field

Predators prowl hoping for a meal

A starlit sky signifies an energy shift

Humans and the wild can no longer coexist

Ruthless hunters searching for victims

Follow a careful and calculated system

Nocturnal creatures thrive in darkness

Mercy nonexistent because the hunt is heartless

A walk in the park at night eliminates sight

And a human isn’t equipped for a fight without light

A walk in the park is a way to connect

With a world we haven’t seen after death

Third Honorable Mention, 2023 Freshwater Student Writing Contest

Off –Lynne Cohen photographs

After looking long enough at any object, you sink into the thing itself and it appears off-kilter, suddenly strange, as in these shots of awkward furniture, abandoned lecture halls and vertiginous aquamarine pools devoid of swimmers.

The polished surfaces of spas and laboratories hint at boredom, torture. And here’s a thin mattress on an iron frame in a room with plywood walls where you could easily die, reaching for the phone with the disconnected cord.

Malediction

May heaven unsheathe its long slashing swords of violet and slate-gray shot through with a lurid metallic glare. May its curse fall upon that monolith, the labyrinthine cubicles of futility, the flat blue screens flickering toward payday.

Heaven’ s curse upon the soundproof vaults, the cabinets of secret documents, the motion detectors and hidden cameras and on the memory of those meetings when the clock crawled backward. A curse on that entire place stuffed with dullards and wastrels where I once pretended to work.

Ruth Holzer

First Class Funeral Coach in Front of La Madeleine, 1910 –Eugène Atget photograph

The driver has set the brakes on the high rear wheels, fed the horse and taken himself off for a drink while the memorial service drones on. Star-emblazoned fabric drapes the carriage doors; the cushioned interior is adorned with tasseled valances. Curlicues strut around the roof. Polished runners jutting from the back ensure a quiet glide for the casket into the last boudoir.

Just Stupid Cold

Metallic tang rings frigid in silvered air, taps my shoulder. Above treetops, spattered stars squeeze eyes against cold. Invisible moon cloaks itself in cloud. Blank sky. Smell of snow. Taste of it. White breath fogs air. Huge flakes, invasion of ghostly butterflies, sift from ombre sky.

Dazzle slows the world. I tremble, colored glass in a kaleidoscope, walk humming silence: woodwind mourn and pine. Snow-fuzzed light. Ice-edged wind. Chimney smoke scents air; pavements crunch. Winter gnaws bones. Ghosts appear like snowmen. House is chill as only old houses can be. Its stone hums wind hymns slow and deep, barely recognizable as they swirl through empty rooms on bitter drafts, claw my throat like dead men’s fingers. Draped in twilight, snow dust in my hair, I imagine cold earth around my bones.

Beneath the Trestle/Inside a Drum

On their backs. Eyes closed. They hold hands. Leaves catch in their hair. Crumbled wrappers. Pull tabs. Smell of creosote. Initials carved in rough-hewn timbers. And the dime he placed on the tracks thirty years ago still hangs about her neck.

Whenever he’s in town –wife and baby home in Minneapolis –she slips away, meets him beneath the tiny trestle. Friends now, they once were lovers. Comfortable in this return to the womb. Little park deserted. Frisbee golf course empty. Swings rock gently with the ghosts of their past.

Barely room enough for two, they await the 8:03 to Topeka, lumbering tankers, barrels of crude inches above faces. Dust motes swirl a blizzard. Tremble of tracks transfers to marrow, bodies in tune let go completely. Enveloped in sound, open mouthed, they howl life’s frustrations and disappointments into the vortex.

Ann Howells

Gust and Bittern and Canal

That fast the scything wind withholds its strokes and ripples on the concrete-scarred canal disperse and fade. The bittern plods, banal again and just as slow as all the folks who toddle from the greasy spoons in pain soon after church on Sunday afternoon. But this sad bird’s alone like a buffoon off trudging an attenuated plain.

And this is no mirage or muddled dream. Back in a funk, the water chugs because it mourns just what it was before it was dug deep by paddy farmers in a scheme to score more moisture for their scattered fields of long-grain rice and chancy sugarcane. As for the Asian bittern, there’s no stain or print or mark that its glum presence yields.

Greg Huteson

Beth Ann Jedziniak

Finding Moore

My father always left me wanting more. Made me fear that I wasn’t enough as he drove by on his way to somewhere, anywhere else. His mirrored sunglasses reflecting the reasons he could not love me. Not good enough. Not smart enough. Not ... enough. The extent of his love diminishing as I grew in size.

Mr. Harrison Moore was my bus driver in fifth and sixth grades, during the years when my younger brother and I lived in a cabin in the woods of New Hampshire with my paternal grandmother and uncle. There was no running water in that cabin. Love was withheld and punishments were swift and cruel.

Monday through Friday, from September until June, Mr. Moore picked us up each morning, the steering wheel of a glossy yellow school bus in one hand, his other hand lifting us up, individually, collectively. Moving us toward possibility.

We loved mornings and afternoons on his bus, singing songs, laughing, knowing that, for this moment, we were safe. In those moments, he gave us the gift of childhood and the strength to make it through the dark evenings, weekends, and summers without him. This man, with the title “bus driver” modeled how the men with the titles father, uncle, grandfather were supposed to behave.

During the season when turtles lay their eggs, Mr. Moore would pick us up extra early in the morning and take us to the marshes. There, he taught us about snapping turtles. But he taught me more. He taught me that men could be safe and trusted to keep their promises. It was the discovery of a brave new world. A world where I could safely explore, learn, and grow. The ride back to the cabin each afternoon tasted bittersweet on my tongue.

Forty years later, shiny number two pencil in hand, I walked into the office of Paul Foster Moore (no relation) and began the challenging work of selfdiscovery. As I watched the seasons change on the walls of his office and in his choice of neckties, he taught me about personal agency, reminded me of my worth, and walked beside me on the difficult days. He opened my eyes to forgotten possibilities, transforming “not enough” into “enough is enough” into “I am enough.”

He taught me life lessons through personal stories, reminding me that we are all more alike than we realize. He showed me how to name and hold more than one emotion without assigning value. And he reminded me to laugh and savor the good stuff.

My father made me think that I wasn’t enough as he drove by on his way to somewhere, anywhere else. His mirrored sunglasses reflecting the reasons he could not love me. He always left me wanting more. More. More of what I was uncertain.

I have since found what I was looking for. I have found “the more.” More self-love. More acceptance. More compassion. More promise of possibility. I have removed my father’s blinders and now I see that I am enough, have always been enough, just as I am.

Homeostasis

The beauty of my woodstove lies within a fist of fire, a curl of ash, a crack of burning wood. And heat the crackerjack that sings my name. Spin-witch. Ghoul-girl, Linchpin. The road I take is edged with wild things, unraveled seas and speeding trains. I keep my recollections tight and when I weep, it’s for the ugly beasts when maggots wing through bitten lamb-soft flesh, when leeches bite into my own sweet inner thighs. I cast away these blue-bleak thoughts, despise the memories. I see instead peaches, white tablecloth, a winter spread of light, the old Home Comfort keeping back the night.

In the Stream Beneath the Ice

Water. Moving in a rush on warm days, when the snow melts, hardpressed to get to where it’s going. Mud on the bottom, the drift and drip of everything that’s fallen the leaves, bark, bodies of insects, sedge that’s torn from the grip of the earth. The living. Snappers buried in scum, hearts lumping along at a slow beat, lungs still, drawing air through skin, eyes closed. Eggs, larvae of mayfly, dragonfly, caddisfly wedged beneath rocks, along submerged roots. Human rubble. Rusted cans, bottle shards, tires that no longer carry us. Forks that have lost tines, plates thrown and broken. Hooks once attached to lines, to poles, held in hands of young boys, old men, all of them longing for white-bodied fish to feed on.

Judy Kaber

When Green False Hellebore Pokes Through Beside the Stream

Unfiltered light spreads over dirt and I go to the garden with scissors, stoop and clip and carry away in the basket of my hand

slim slips of green bright spikes of chives. They break so early from the ground while all around them dark stubs of other plants lie dormant.

The earth grins again with them, laughter of the dead rolling in sky-wide smile. Across the way, where the old mill stood now burned neighbors have cleared more land,

plan to put in a prefab. They own the place, can put up what they will. Soon buds will open, trees fill out, I’ll no longer see that barren spot belonging to them.

More important things occupy me. This sudden flare of green and soon my knees will be steeped in brown, hands hard on weeds.

Katy Keffer

On Learning from Cicadas

On the cusp of Summer’s arrival, I pause in my backyard on a rectangle of land enclosed by fence and trees in a neighborhood just a bird’s extended flight from Washington DC. The air is a texture of sweet-iced tea, fluffy flour, and fresh cut grass. Trees loom like basketball players, arms outstretched in a huddle under empty space between sun and sky.

Calls of cicadas strike me first. They sing in a fluctuating shake of rattlesnake, a hiss of electrical current invading the afternoon. This chorus reminds me of sluggish and sultry days when heat suffocates activity. And yet, these visitors of every-seventeen-years begin to hint at departure. The busy bodies began as an unnerving squeal of a car’s timing belt, turned into a powerplant’s steady late-night hum and have calmed into a gentle metallic melody. They watch from overhead, lay on stones under my feet and hover in air pressing on the layer of sweat on my arms. These cicadas are like crowds of crickets no social distancing in mind encouraging the band to keep playing one more song, hoping to linger on the dance floor for one final shimmy.

And now, whistles surface in this pulsing cicada curtain. Sparrows swing to the feeder. Gray catbirds dip into the smooth red concrete bird bath like children crowding an ice cream truck. My presence disturbs them. They scold in their rising and falling high-pitched chirps. The black crows caw displeasure not far away. Three, four, then five crows appear, squawks chiding. Even through tree’s shadow, their backs shimmer as nature’s mirror. As they skip between trees, talons grab branches in crackles and claps. Are they hoping I will depart my quiet creative cushion under this soft sunshine?

One hungry sparrow keeps returning. His dark gray mohawk and chocolate brown cheeks dart side to side. Black and dusty white feathers jerk in surprised jumps. His beak is open, and I ponder whether he smells the mixture of insect repellant and sunscreen I applied to extend my stay outdoors. He speaks before plucking at seeds scattered like haphazard knucklebones, his voice a gift like baby’s first giggle.

Anxiety trembles in the unmoving air. Perhaps this is Sunday’s mood darting reminders of weekend trying to overtake the cicadas, the birds, the trees, the easy waves of sunlight. Perhaps it is the near-term seasonal shift from Spring to Summer. Or perhaps, instead, it is the breathless unease of parched waterbeds or disappearing streams or seeing only a handful of fireflies at dusk. Anxiety pulses within nature’s impermanence.

Still, being here feels safe. On this small patio tucked in by red rose trees, creamy azalea bushes, orange daffodils, and cut stems of first-year tulips, I breathe in time like honey poured on toast. I breathe in the pleasure that nature persists.

I keep coming back to the cicadas, to their short, pulsating sojourn. At first, I feel remorse they live such a short time only to die for the next generation. But they inspire. Cicadas sing in sharp rattles and fly in dizzying, drunken diagonals. They live life, find purpose. I may cringe at their dark orange eyes or suffer under their outspoken loud love, but I am able to explore their landscape. I release a deep breath and sink deeper in my chair knowing anxiety will shift as surely as the shadow of the day’s sun crawls over the swaying team of towering, living trees.

Katy Keffer

The Twenty-Five Dollar Tomato

The tomato cost twenty-five dollars. It sat atop the kitchen cutting board a glossy oval ball of unblemished red as Mom prepared sandwiches. She held its sides and let the knife cut identical thick slices. The day before, a kindly, eighty-year-old Black woman from rural southeastern North Carolina drove off from a gas station in her clean but weathered, faded blue, four-door sedan headed for Sunday evening Bible Study. But her trunk remained open. Two separate White men in pickup trucks jumped out. One truck behind Mom; the other pulled in behind the old woman. “Ma’am, your trunk is open,” one man said before closing it. “Thank you,” she said. Pausing mid-stride back to her car and glancing back, Mom held a large tomato.

Moments before, the old woman opened the trunk to reveal potatoes, overgrown yellow squash, faded cucumbers, fuzzy green okra, and a spread of ripened tomatoes. “You’re too kind,” the woman said. “I’ll make tomato sandwiches,” Mom told her. “It would be good for that, too,” the old lady replied. Mom held the tomato out in the space between them, tanks humming, country music blaring overhead. Late afternoon sun set its spotlight on the juicy red jewel.

Paul’s Place sat across the street, its red and white building wafting grease and hot dogs between the fumes of gasoline. Before seeing the shiny tomato, Mom flashed a twenty-five-dollar gas card at the old woman and, in one quick move, swiped it into the gas machine. “What’s that? I don’t know how to use that!” the woman proclaimed. “Here, I’ll show you,” Mom replied.

And just before this, as Mom filled up her car, she heard a woman’s shaky voice, “I need some cash for gas, honey, do you need any vegetables?” Mom turned to see an old woman in a colorful dress and hat. With less than a moment’s pause, she smiled and said, “show me what you got.”

Pope Blue Paperclip

It must have been the obsessive routine that was the death of me. I understood for certain that by the time I memorized the elevator music, knew the texture of cardstock from printer paper and the number of occasions the electric sharpener would break before eleven, my mind would collapse in on itself. The poor thing is surely waiting for retirement.

The cubicles, too, drive me mad. I have nine hundred forty-four coworkers. I have never seen one face-to-face. When we go home (sometimes I forget that we do, as it is all a blur), we all seem to leave at different times so that not one of us interacts with another. I do have a friend, though. He is in the cubicle next to me. His name is Mr. Chum J. Razo. I call him Chumbucket.

“I used to be a tutor,” says Chumbucket over the wall, “then my parents said to get a real job. That’s why I’m here. Who am I to disagree? It was their basement.” I hear him chuckle, then sigh.

“You’re with me now, at least.”

“Cheers to that.”

Then we continue working. Coughing or yawning in between typing and sipping coffee. The coffee is watery and translucent. I know the taste already.

“Aha!” Chumbucket shouts. I hear people from other cubicles shush him. He continues with a softer voice, “the Pope died.”

“What?!”

“They’ve elected a new one.”

“Already?!”

“It’s a blue paperclip. Yessir. Indeed.” Chumbucket holds his computer over the divider so I could see the news stream sure enough, a blue paperclip in minuscule papal robes emerging on a silk pillow from the Sistine Chapel.

“Yessir. Indeed,” he repeats. “I knew it was going to happen too. Screw the conclave. Screw the cardinals, but God bless ‘em. We’re in a new age now the Irrational Age. Don’t you see?”

“The Irrational Age? Since when?”

“Ever since the blue paperclip was elected Pope.” Chumbucket is right. Succeeding a period of order the Industrial Revolution and the Technological Revolution comes disorder. Overworking the middle and lower class now they will be freed by the lack of pattern. Chaos and entropy. A party.

“Soon, the apocalypse will come,” says Chumbucket, “Everything is going to turn into pigeons. Everything. All flocks and bundles and homings of pigeons. Sky rats.”

“Why pigeons?”

“Everything,” he repeats as if he answered my question.

“And the president is a squirrel, I tell you,” he proceeds, “and his secretaries are nuts!”

“You’re nuts,” I say.

It has only been a day, and the hallucinations are getting to me. I watch the static news in my apartment in the morning. The president is a squirrel. I put on my blazer, and it has pink polka dots. I hate pink polka dots. My tie is urine yellow. When I bought it, it was blue.

I drive to work in what looks like a clown suit, rush to the check-in and squeeze into my cubicle. Nobody sees me, I hope. I turn on the desktop and begin to type yesterday’s order receipt. When my fingers touch the keyboard, however, they can only punch out the words “oodles of noodles of oodles of noodles of oodles…” hundreds of times, filling up the screen. I shriek. More shushes.

“I was right,” says Chumbucket upon hearing my frustration.

I try to ignore him, to keep typing, but then I realize that my document margins are one point one inches. That is what drives me overboard and I slam my fist down on the keys.

“Oodles of noodles,” Chumbucket knowingly narrates.

I shove my desk and storm outside of the cubicle, outside of the room, and into the elevator to the main office, where the Executive Officer is. I knock on the door.

“I need to speak with Mr. Charleston.”

It creaks open slightly and I am met by two security guards. The first thing I notice is their long, white beards. The next thing is that they both are dressed head-to-toe like wizards. Green robes and wooden wands and tilted glasses and saggy, tall, starry hats.

But God bless ‘ em they let me in.

I see him. The CEO, Mr. John Charleston, wears his red tie tight and sits behind a glass desk and beside a massive bookshelf. There is a window view of the sad city. It is a pretty day outside, so the buildings look happy. Maybe I should go outside.

“Yes?” he asks me. At the moment, I forget what I came to ask for.

“We need more social interaction,” I say, “It is driving the workers crazy.”

“It is a crazy world.” He shrugs.

“We don’t get time to learn about my coworkers and have them learn about me. ” I begin to have my feelings articulated, and they come out in a tempest. “We don’t get time to break from the routine. Always on schedule, and the clicks get to my brain! We don’t have the time to be happy.”

“Well ”

“We don’t get time to rest from the rat race. To think about family or hobbies. To live! We work, work, work, work… so that we won’t work, and then we die. That’s sad.”

“You’re right,” Mr. Charleston agreed, “And clouds are red.”

I’m suddenly hoisted by the armpits and am escorted out by his wizard guards, and the door shuts in my face.

“But clouds are not ” My mouth drops.

All around me and all at once I swear, the desks, walls, floor, the wizards, my fingers all start to turn into pigeons.

Stuart Larner

On Entrusting My Baby to the Foundling Hospital

Today you lose me and your name. I’ll cut a cloth to be our key, and keep one half as proof for when I come to claim you back to me.

Not gingham, you’re no checkerboard on which the world might play its games. Nor silk offcut, nor lady’s hem. Too solemn we for frill or frames.

Nor drawn with bursting buds and flowers. In life they fade, their marvel gone. No bee can nurse blooms back to life or share out pollen when there’s none.

Not one that’s flocked with rarest birds. Soon they fly off, and will not rest. Though sharp, their eyes can’t find again wind-scattered twigs that were their nest.

I do not ask for finery. Give me the rags that others scorn. This bottom one, this muddy cloth On which a simple acorn’s drawn.

I cut it, keep the cup and stalk. The acorn’s yours. Keep strong our ties. This dark moment in our earth Is where all fruitful hopes arise.

What Might Be

We kept pebbles from that hour: when the world opened on the chill beach, and salt wind swirled seagulls’ cries.

You found one with patterned cuts half-hidden among the shingling tide, and pronounced it a fossil.

No. It’s crystal, I explained, a false fossil, minerals in rock whittled by the wind’s wet knives.

To you it was a fossil because you believed. You asked if I felt the signals from its time.

My choice was a hard round stone. I asked you if a sphere so perfect protects something else inside.

Trust it, you said. Don’t break in. We can’t know beauty and its secret. Later, we swapped them, surprised

at their warmth from our pockets. I keep yours next to my faithful clock. Sometimes, when the angle’s right,

I see what we have given each other: something that lives beyond my shelf, this room, our time.

Stuart Larner

When Lawn Care Replaces Self-Care

I wish I cared enough to mow my grass once a week, to fight a tiny war against black flies and other insects, only to arrive at some self-taught profound lesson about loss, lost on those too busy thinking of what they want to say next instead of listening, and as I undress for a shower afterwards, cursing sweat and bug bites (as if they can hear me), the neighbors (at least in my overgrown imagination) are envious of my articulate lawn, telling them how my soul is greener than theirs.

In Danbury Before Dawn

Twenty years ago tomorrow my brother will have killed himself tidily in a tightly sealed car he learned to fashion for himself from an online self-murder site the Hemlock Society devised in honor of Socrates. Oh, I know my Greek mythology; I’ve suffered from sibling taking sibling into sordid story beyond love’s reach. But when I was called upon to name his body, frozen, all self gone from what lay on a wheeled table? Only my word could say who he was, whom he’d been that last winter night. Alone at last in our dark wrong I ached again with years of silence and reached for one last touch. His brow was cold, the depth of cold, and in my palm that slowly moved away I held lost life.

Katharyn Howd Machan

Katharyn Howd Machan

In Spite of Everything, You Sit at Your Desk and Begin

The letter you know she will never read. The letter you know you will never send. The letter no one should ever need to write because life just isn’t like that no, death isn’t we’re talking about death.

Maybe a journal entry. Maybe a poem. Maybe even a song but hey, when was the last time you picked up a guitar? It’s death.

Thousands of miles away in a bed with her Living Will hovering as helpful machines suddenly couldn’t help anymore as one by one her organs collapsed into death.

You were dancing at a festival. You wore sequin rainbows on your hips. Afterwards you got the call. And now somehow you think a letter will help you find forgiveness for her death?

(*The title is gratefully borrowed from the last line of the poem “The New Year” by Barbara Crooker in her collection from Pittsburgh University Press, Some Glad Morning.)

Bittersweet Tidings

Mrs. Davidson glanced around the mercantile before handing me the packet of letters. We were the only ones in the shop, but still she whispered, “Bad news, Rachel.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. Mrs. Davidson wasn’t known to be a busybody, but as postmistress she did have access to many details of our lives, whether we liked it or not. Had she read the back of a picture postcard?

With reluctance, the postmistress released her grasp of the letters. I quickly leafed through the stack of correspondence. There was no postcard, but the last envelope was smaller and hidden from the rest. And edged in black. I recognized the scrawl in the corner immediately. It was from my brother, Tom.

I gasped. Was it my sister-in-law, Becca? Had she lost the baby? The letter was addressed to my mother. As soon as the milking was done, I’d have to go there. Ma worried so much about her only son. Eight years younger than me, Ma believed his birth was an unexpected gift. He’d had rheumatic fever as a child, so she advised him to take it easy with the farm chores. Tom scoffed at her words of caution and said, “I’m as healthy as a horse.” And he was. He never had trouble keeping up with my husband John, or Pa. I have frequently been jealous of the way Ma dotes on him.

The bells above the door jingled as another patron came in, and with them the chilly winds of October. Soon there would be snow, and months of lonely winter days. I shivered, tucked my scarf around my neck and slipped out. The wind whipped at my skirt, and I held tight to the letters, thrusting them in the deep pocket of my thick sweater

John waited in front of the lumber mill. Our daughter Callie was perched atop the wagon seat. “Mama,” she called. Her arms waved stiffly in her woolen coat. I did my errands as fast as I could, but John always had the shorter list. He helped me into the wagon, and I gathered Callie securely in my arms, anticipating the sudden lurch that accompanied the first anxious steps the horses took towards home.

My husband patted my knee. “Why do you look so worried? You know we wouldn’t have left without you.”

I kissed the top of my daughter’s head. “I know. There’s a letter for Ma from Tom.” I pulled it out as we reached the last building in town.

His eyes widened when he saw the dark edge of the envelope. “We’d better go directly there.”

“Thank you. I suppose whatever has happened, is done, but still.”

John understood. I had lost two babies before Callie. So many dangers on the prairie. Weather, accidents, and illness. A sneeze, a cough, or a bug bite suddenly became a worry when accompanied by a fever. Doctors were a day

and a half away. I would give anything to live in a town like Greenbush, where Tom did. Not only was there a doctor and an apothecary, but a dressmaker, a millinery, and a library.

Tom was hired at the mill the day he arrived in Greenbush. Within six weeks he’d met a young widow whose children adored him. Ma was thrilled Tom and Becca planned to marry that Christmas. I was too close to my delivery and couldn’t travel. I begged Tom to wait until after my baby was born, but Ma told him not to wait, that my emotions were high because of the pregnancy. Within a year, Tom was the proud father of twin sons. I had lost another baby.

My hand rested on my belly. I hadn’t yet told John of the one I carried now. Callie relaxed against me as only a young child can in a jostling wagon. What would she think of a new baby? I smiled. Tonight, I’d tell John.

My thoughts returned to the letter, and I worried. Last July, Tom brought his family for a visit, and all was well. Becca’s three oldest had no qualms about calling him Pa, and their twins were just beginning to walk. It was then Becca had told me she hoped to name the next one Thomas junior. It seemed that everything Tom touched turned to gold. Until now. It was clear someone had died. My heart went out to my brother, and all who were grieving. I prayed it wasn’t Becca, as it would be hard for Tom and their five children.

My folks’ place came into view, silhouetted against the setting sun. It was the home they had expected Tom to have, but he was stubborn and said he’d rather work at the big mill, than farm. It broke my folk’s hearts when he moved away four years ago. Ma could understand as she knew the job at the mill would never have hail, grasshoppers, or drought to destroy a crop. But she wanted her son close to her. When Tom had come with his new bride, she and the children loved everything about the farm. Ma had hoped Becca could convince Tom of the benefits of living there.

“It’s getting late,” I said. “If you want to go home and do the chores, Pa will bring us back.”

“I can stay.”

I squeezed his arm. “I know, but Ma might need me. And our cows need you. ”

John brought the horses to a stop near the porch and helped Callie and I down. By the time we stepped into the house, he was almost to the road.

“Hello,” I called as we walked through to the kitchen.

Ma helped Callie take off her coat and scarf. “Now, I can see you. I wasn’t sure who was inside all those clothes.”

“It’s me, Granny!” Callie giggled.

Ma kissed Callie and Pa scooped her up in his arms. “Did you bring mail for us?” he asked.

Callie looked at me. I nodded. “We brought mail,” she told her grandfather.

“You’d better sit down, Ma,” I said. “There’s a letter from Tom. It’s edged in black.”

In an instant, my mother’s cheerful expression became a furrowed frown. She sat on the edge of her rocker, feet planted, and palm outstretched. She turned the letter over, but there were no more clues. She gave it to my father.

He set Callie down. His hand shook as he opened the envelope with his penknife, extracted the paper, and handed it to his wife of nearly forty years.

Callie stayed by my side as I knelt on the rug next to Ma, my eyes trained on her face. Her lips moved as she silently read the words. Ma drew her hand to her heart. “He’s lost them. The whole family. Smallpox took the children and then Becca in three days’ time.” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed. The letter fell to the floor.

I put my arm around my mother and picked up the single sheet of paper. I read the words written by my brother’s unsteady hand.

“No, Becca’s oldest didn’t get sick.” I turned the page over. “Ruby was helping a new mother on the other side of town, and they sent word for her to stay put. Ma, Tom says he and Ruby are coming here.”

She lifted her face, her cheeks wet with tears. “He’s moving home?”

I nodded. “Yes, Tom and Ruby are coming home to stay.”

Later, when John and I were cocooned in bed, I told him about the baby. His arms tightened around me.

“We’ll take this slow,” he said. “Maybe have Ruby come stay with us for the summer, so she’d be here for your final weeks and after the baby is born.”

I stroked his cheek. “That would be good. It’s a little early to talk about names, but if it’s a boy, I’d like to call him Tom.”

“Tom’s a fine name. And Rachel if the baby is a girl.”

I grinned and snuggled a bit closer to my husband. He seemed to know I’d had a change of heart.

Kenneth N. Margolin

The Soup Kitchen

Thirty raggedy people, faces worn by the cruel streets or hard poverty, wearing raggedy clothes sat at the long table eating soup and bread, and helped themselves from platters of cold cuts and fruit. Four nuns managed the table and the waiting line and kept food coming for all visitors to their order’s soup kitchen. The one hundred fifty-year-old wide-paneled wood floors were darkened by countless footsteps and creaked with each passage. Windows in the stone building were narrow and far apart and let in little sunlight. Still, the nuns kept the soup kitchen clean. The high ceiling and the nuns’ boundless good cheer lent a jovial aspect to the place despite the hard scrabble stories of most of its beneficiaries.

Outside, Brian checked his reflection in the glass front door, and adjusted his cardigan. He set his most disarming smile. As soon as he entered, Sister Beatrice hustled over to greet him.

“We’ve been fortunate to have you here these last four months,” she said. “We don’t get volunteers anymore like we used to.”

“It is my privilege to help,” Brian said. “Keeps me active in my retirement.”

Sister pointed to a woman seated at the end of the table. She wore a large grey sweater over a plain blue dress, was small with white hair and a deeply wrinkled face.

“Sophie will be glad to see you,” Sister Beatrice said. “She is always confused, so we let her stay for as long as she wants, though our regulars know they have to leave when they’re done eating, to make room for others.”

“I’ll be sure to talk to her,” Brian said.

Sister beamed. “You’re our angel.”

Brian went into the kitchen, put on an apron, and helped the two employees load platters of food, which he brought out to the table. He moved constantly, asked the eaters if they were done, and brought empty dishes back into the kitchen. Many recognized him, and he paused to chat before taking their dishes, which was their signal to leave until their next visit.

I’ve got this down, he thought.

After an hour of steady work, Brian moved to a far corner of the room to take a break. He caught Sophie’s eye and nodded to her. She came over to him, as he knew she would. Brian had spotted her immediately on his first day at this, his latest soup kitchen. With patient guile, he had befriended her.

“How are you today, dear?” he asked.

Sophie put a hand on his arm. “This restaurant is wonderful, isn’t it,” she said. “I’ve never been here before. The spice aromas remind me of home when I was a little girl.”

“Sophie, I have to tell you,” Brian said, “you come here every day.”

“I guess I do,” she said.

Brian moved closer to her. He checked the room to be sure no one paid attention, like some small creature who pokes his head above his hole, peers furtively about, and emerges to snatch his prey before he slinks back inside. He lowered his voice.

“Remember my charity,” he said. “I need a $150,000 loan, which I’ll pay back with interest. Give me your phone, and I will transfer the money from your account to mine. O.k.?”

Sophie closed her eyes and clasped her hand to her forehead, a frightened look on her face. “Did I give you a lot of loans already?” she asked.

“Those were gifts, dear, don’t you remember? You have been most generous to my charity.”

She handed Brian the phone. With her password, that she had given him when Brian told her that’s what friends do, he transferred the funds.

“Can I tell you a secret, Sophie? I feel that I owe you the truth since you won’t see me after today.”

“I love secrets,” she said.

Brian lowered his voice again.

“I knew you were wealthy. You see, there is always a daft, old woman or two with tons of money at these soup kitchens for the poor, and they have made me rich.”

Sophie stared past Brian, as if she’d forgotten for a moment he was there.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I have no charity. I’ve been stealing from you, with no shame or guilt. You have no family left and I can tell you won’t be on this earth for long. Better the money go to someone like me who will know how to enjoy it. I left enough in your account for you to live on. I’m not a monster.”

Sophie leaned her face close to Brian’s.

“Can I tell you a secret?” she said. “The money was never mine. I was holding it for my Uncle.”

Brian chuckled. “Of course you were,” he said.

“I want to show you something.”

Sophie reached into her large handbag and began fishing around. Brian’s chuckle became a mean smirk.

“Darn thing always falls to the bottom,” she said. “Ah, here it is.”

She opened a leather card carrier. On top were large blue capital letters and some printing that Brian could not quite make out. On the bottom was a recent picture of Sophie, her visage stern, resolute, no sign of the dementia that Brian had exploited for the last four months.

“FBI. Special Agent Mansfield,” she said, “They persuaded me out of my long retirement just for you. I believe that you will find your bank has frozen your account.”

The smirk was still on Brian’s face when ten crew-cut young men with identical blue suits and shiny black shoes swarmed the soup kitchen and surrounded him.

“You’re under arrest for fraud, wire fraud, and elder fraud. Cuff him,” she said.

Warmed by memories of all the grifters she’d taken down over the years, Sophie gave Brian not another glance as she ambled over to the communal table for one last bowl of her favorite soup.

The Map in My Head

In dreams, my map disintegrates into yellow flakes like books printed on paper pulped with acid. I’m in my childhood home, my bedroom at the back, but it morphs the master bedroom suite in my Florida

house and opens onto the summer pond with lotus blossoms in Virginia. In dreams, I walk or drive and always know the way, though roads shrink to paths too narrow for my Camry. I climb out to hike

because in dreams my legs are strong, and I chat without rancor with my only ex-husband, to whom my unconscious says I’m still married, although we divorced in ‘72 and he’s dead nearly twenty years.

On that map of neural plasticity, he doesn’t descend into a bottle, doesn’t hate brown people, or collect guns and ammo or flags of the Confederacy. The countries on my map preserve their borders without wars or refugees.

Joan Mazza

My Shadow

Sometimes at night I’m overtaken by my shadow. It lurks and it hops ahead of me, trying to dodge the glare of the streetlights, the moon.

It inches ahead of me like a trapeze artist on a long thin wire, aiming home.

Sometimes it turns left when I’m twisting right, aiming for the darkness of the city park. Sometimes it sneaks away from me, an adventurer, a pilgrim, escaping the confines of my body, and I follow it, saved by it, somehow.

When I step over it, something in me itches, something else beckons out, something else in me celebrates in words I don’t recognize or recall.

Summer Sand

On the beach I saw how time holds us. I was just twelve and I was in love.

She was blond with an accordion voice that bent the notes into laughter, and we’d swim together, wading there while the waves lapped our necks, our shoulders,

trying to bid us into the deeper water, into where the beach floor descended, disappeared.

And when we’d run out of the surf to dry off, to drop like two fallen stars into the sand,

the beach held us there, even cupped us there like sand sculptures so we could remember

where our bodies had laid hours later after dark the wind shifting sand down the beach.

An Ode to My Baby

My baby is a quiet one, a mere whisper in the world, the sound of a distant breeze even the dogs don’t hear or smell, the stir of a ceiling fan on its lowest setting, the shush of Styrofoam packing peanuts spilling out. When she sneezes, she shakes the air like Kleenex brand facial tissues fluttering to the thick carpet, and, when she coughs, she is yesterday’s geese on the wing, their high honking recalled by memory’s sharp ears from someplace to the south. When my baby shouts, when her life calls for her to holler or yell, to announce her joy or displeasure to the world, then she is the clap of the moths’ wings that cats hear and track, their tails a-twitch, their ears en pointe. That’s right. She knows how to make herself heard without getting loud, without shriek or scream. My baby goes softly through the world, like sunlight and shadow that fill a space, that make it their own without push or shove. My baby, she’s a presence, the scent of orange blossoms early in spring, the harbinger of blessings to come, the breath of life, the green blush of first leaves unfolding from modest buds, in stealthy hush, a silent surprise, those bare limbs once more adorned. Oh, yes, my baby is quiet as the tireless blood in its ceaseless rounds, as the soundless liver, constant filter, as the fierce bones and embedded marrow at rest but ready. My baby is everywhere and always and essential.

What We Taught Our Daughter

The body, your body, is not a supplication. It asks nothing of men, wants no attention, no care, no protection. Your body does not kneel humbly before men to beg any scrap. It is neither dog nor cat for men to pet and feed, for men to possess, for men to domesticate as chattel of their houses. It is not rabbit or fox for men to hunt, to chase, to corner, its heart racing alarm and panting fear. Your body, this fleshly carriage of your single spirit, does not beseech, implore, entreat, or exhort men’s bodies. It is not a red cape waving for men’s blood-blind eyes. When it moves, however it moves, whether walking or dancing or swimming, your body is not calling men, not beckoning men from their distant, foreign shore, not signaling men like the mythic sirens singing temptation and destruction. When it moves, when it sings, your body moves for itself alone and sings to please you. Your body, colloquy of all your selves, is yours.

Winter Night in New England

The air, that night, felt as if the world itself had paused to take in a sky that was the perfect mix of clouds and starlight and all movement seemed transfixed except for the loose calligraphy of our breath lifting into vapor and dissolving within the golden halos of the lamp-posts. And then watching the broken body of darkness in that tender hour, full-drunk, swallow dusk’s last vial of violet, stumble down the alleyways between brick buildings and the brighter pour of opulent brass from lower shop windows moments before we were overtaken by the sudden applause of snow falling in circling paths with flakes, I swear, the size of sparrows that you cupped into your gloved hands, wanting to hold onto that evening’s miracles before they perished and all drifted back into a brittle breath of wind.

John Muro

Pearls

See what’s become of those inflictions you had left deep inside my chest. Though slowed by sadness, I’ve extracted each of them and placed them within these tiny vessels of opaque ice. Each fragment’s now a pleasing burden, an opulent orb brushed in palest rose and pre-dawn white, draped across your chest and staying your heart with a luster as soft as milk-dust, preserving in loving form those elements of a life you had plundered and are now displayed like fabled artifacts, and my only ask is that you kindly avoid the telling of how, precisely, you have come to it.

James B. Nicola

The London Blitz and Blackout

Those who did not shut their blinds at night (it wasn’t much to ask) but signaled airborne Germans where to bomb, found guilty of treason, were shot; those of sympathetic minds today who do not wear a mask but signal airborne germs where to bomb (for some giddy reason) are not.

Valor

My friend Susan seems downright chipper every time I HowAreYou her

Lately she HowAreYous me first more sanguine than sunrise

She’s been wearing a turban again: the chemo, I know, has resumed

And when I remember to HowAreYou back she lies *

My friend Susan seemed downright chipper every time I’d HowAreYou her

Which she finally is, I pray, wherever she lies

James B. Nicola

Dakota Ouellette

Birthdays

Mama turned forty-one this past July. As she rinsed the ice cream cake crumbs on her butter knife, I noticed new creases and folds indented into her skin.

She sat on the loveseat, politely sipping her hazelnut coffee. I ran my fingers down the valleys between the crevasses of her fingers. Embraced her aging body tightly.

Forks were digging into dessert. Hitting the rim of glass plates. Still, the room felt so quiet.

My family cracked jokes about her becoming old. I laughed alongside them with a twinge of melancholy. Intrusive thoughts of expiry infested my mind, and I began to resent the concept of birthdays. A cruel reminder of our own mortality.

But mama put her hand on my shoulder. She smiled at me. Breath smelled like hot caffeine. It made the world standstill. Allowed for the sand in our hourglass to pause momentarily.

I took a breath.

And enjoyed the bittersweet frosting of birthday cake.

Third Prize, 2023 Freshwater Student Writing Contest

Dakota Ouellette

I Am Cleaning My Bedroom Closet

Toss my tattered clothes in a donation pile on the floor. Haven’t worn that threadbare Imagine Dragons tee-shirt since eighth grade. Yet I still remember how I got a hole in the left sleeve.

And I pass by Maple Street Elementary every day on my route to college. Mulch scattered across the playground, as I recall those days of old. Playing astronauts with a group of friends in fifth grade. I fell out with one in high school. Still fondly remember the little kid who held my hand during recess.

My first period arrived in sixth grade, the same day as another friend. We had a mutual understanding of what it’s like to bleed. She moved away months later, before I could say goodbye. Another reminder that childhood doesn’t last forever.

I’m still cleaning out my bedroom closet. I find my graduation gown, and chuckle. I’m nearly halfway done with my associates degree. I sold all my Littlest Pet Shops in seventh grade. Though I still have a My Little Pony plush from my grandfather’s last Christmas with me.

A wrinkled teddy bear lies in a plastic tote bin, button eyes full of dust. I almost stuffed him down with the rest of my innocent memories. But I’m not ready to completely close the casket of my youth just yet. I will lay down more roses first.

I leave the teddy bear on my desk. And sleep with the lights on for tonight.

First Honorable Mention, 2023 Freshwater Student Writing Contest

Dakota Ouellette

My Grandfather Had Beautiful Eyes

The color of maple tree stumps and dark plywood. He’d spend fall afternoons mowing the backyard lawn. I remember watching him through the kitchen window, working vigorously to keep the yard well kept. Always came inside smelling like freshly cut grass. Dirt lining the wrinkled creases of his palms.

I never understood his obsession with maintaining appearances. Until the day those once vibrant retinas turned listless.

Forty-five percent of Americans possess brown eyes. One in four of us are plagued with a psychological curse. My grandfather gifted my mother these chromosomes long ago. She passed them onto me.

My grandfather had beautiful eyes, and a mental illness. I have them, too.

His death was a reflection of all the cracks we conceal. Hidden by family portraits and pleasant memories. All the things I pretend I am immune to. You cannot escape the confines of the psyche.

I see a dead man when I look in the mirror.

Second Honorable Mention, 2023 Freshwater Student Writing Contest

Ivy Pole

–At St. Francis Hospital

April 22, 2018, 9 a.m.

I remember her as she was readmitted today. Of course I knew that would be the case, overhearing when the doctor told her the diagnosis last time. Yes, her hair is gone just like the others, reddish brown I recall tinted to make her feel younger in her sixties but that did not protect her from the big C.

She is back and it is barely a month, I am glad I am free and they grabbed me. She is an interesting woman. First day jitters, non-stop motion, talking all the time to hold up that façade of control but really anxious from fear.

Looks like she is making a quilt for her granddaughter not born She might be given the time to see her, others aren’t so lucky

“Do you have a family support system to help you?” the resident asked routinely, not even listening for the answer, He didn’t care.

It was just another question for the computer.

Drip, drip, drip

I hold over her head the precious drugs that sometime cure But more often just buy time

Don’t worry, my bag of salt and water is really all you need now. Come let us take a walk down the corridor together to forget.

Judith Jackson Petry

Baby Boy Brown

He weighed less than the chicken I cooked for dinner last night. Impatient to see the world, he had launched himself after only 30 weeks in the safety of his mother’s womb. I met him because I had just begun my fourth-year medical school rotation on Pediatrics. My first night on-call. Excited and terrified, I felt as if standing in an open door of a plane about to take my first parachute jump, praying the chute would open. And there was Baby Boy Brown. He did not even have a first name yet.

The pediatric resident rushed into the pediatric ICU. I kept up with him, imitating every move: slip on shoe covers, grab OR cap and mask, select sterile gloves. Finally, clothed as if we would be doing open heart surgery, we entered the brightly lit room filled with eight tiny incubators and a battlefield of equipment and supplies. Only one of the plexiglass boxes was inhabited.

“Thirty weeks gestation, 2.3 pond baby boy, born precipitously 30 minutes ago. No known problems during the pregnancy, healthy mother, no siblings.”

Daniel Henry is quick, professional, confident. His brisk manner leaves no space for comment or question, so I remain silent and listen while my mind reviews everything I can recall about premature infants.

“He had an Apgar of 3 in the delivery room and was immediately intubated, IV lines placed, and transferred here.” Dr. Henry tells me this as he is reading the nursing notes for the infant’s first 30 minutes of life. I remember a perfect Apgar score is 10, so 3 is not good, and the breathing tube is also a bad sign. My first sight of the baby is enough to startle a quiet “oh” from my lips. He is so tiny I can barely see him in the incubator. He looks like a small animal. There are tubes attached to every orifice: mouth, umbilical cord blood vessels, bladder, an arterial line in his arm and EKG electrodes that nearly obscure his chest. There is a small square of shaved scalp where an IV needle rests, the remainder of his scalp covered with surprisingly thick coarse dark hair. His skin is as pale as the sheet he lies upon. He is so tiny. I want to look away, to leave the room. I breathe through my mouth and try not to panic. I have wanted to be a doctor my whole life. I cannot let this undo me.

Dr. Henry reaches his gloved hands through the elasticized arm apertures in the sides of the incubator. He listens to the lungs and frowns, then tests the baby’s arms and legs for tone, they are flaccid, like a rag doll. He parts the eyelids and shines a light on the pupils which I can see react to the light becoming pinpoints of black in pale blue irises.

“At least that’s good,” he says, unruffled.

I am erupting with emotion and cannot comprehend how he can be so calm.

I notice a nurse is standing at the other side of the incubator and wonder where she came from. She tells Dr. Henry that the baby’s pO2 is falling. Not enough oxygen in his blood. Dr. Henry tells her to change the respirator settings. She follows his directions and the pO2 rises a little.

“It will be the lungs that kill him,” he says, turning towards me as if recalling that I am there, and he is supposed to be teaching me. I nod dumbly. The nurse adjusts the machine regulating the IV drip as it has started to beep a malfunction warning. The beeping stops and she returns to wherever she came from. My eyes are rivetted on the pO2 level. I mentally command it to rise. It ignores my mandate.

The doctor with two first names has moved to the nursing station and is writing in the baby’s chart. I wonder where the parents are. What they must be suffering. If they are allowed in here. As he writes, he explains that the baby’s lungs are immature and most likely will not support life. “We’ll continue with the respirator and IV support and meds, but there isn’t much we can do.” He says this as if he has already assigned Baby Boy Brown to the morgue. He looks at the clock, one AM it informs him, and he tells me I can go to the on-call room. He will try to get some sleep but will let me know if anything important happens. “Anything important,” I think. What can be more important than this tiny human fighting to breathe in an alien environment for which he is unprepared?

I tell him I will stay for a while and walk back to the sterile plastic womb. The respirator whooshes a muffled short rush of oxygen at frequent intervals, and I can see the baby chest rise and fall under the EKG electrodes. His eyes are lubricated and taped shut and he looks like he is sleeping. I do not know what I feel. This is not the first dying patient I have seen, but it is the first in miniature. There is a vague ache in my chest, and I can sense a sob attempting to form itself and rise to my mouth. I do not allow it to be born.

I want to take him out of the heated box and hold him in my hands and stroke his pale skin. I realize he has never felt the touch of skin upon skin, never seen an unmasked smile, that he has never been cuddled or kissed. The sound of his mother’s heartbeat has been replaced by the hum of equipment vainly attempting to keep him alive. I try to prepare myself for the fact that he will most likely die alone in a sterile cubicle, embraced by machines.

All these years later I still wonder why we physicians are unable to admit when we cannot halt the inexorable grasping of death. I wish now, that when it was clear his chute would not open, that death was imminent, I had detached him from the tubes and wires and held him, kissed his baby lashes, and encouraged him to try again another time, with a better body, with lungs that function. Such an act would not have altered his outcome, but perhaps it might have changed mine. I could have learned that death is not the ultimate malfunction, the champion of all wrestling matches, that it can be embraced, its transition eased.

The nurse has come over to check the IV and says, “Maybe you should get some sleep. There isn’t anything you can do here.” She is kind, and I find my way to the on-call room after one last look at the tiny human. I fall asleep instantly; my body and mind wanting only to stop feeling this deep sadness. I have not yet learned how to remain unaffected by what I see in this place where people come to be fixed.

I jolt awake at 5 a.m. Dressing quickly, I rush to the Pedi ICU to check on Baby Boy Brown before morning rounds. The incubator is empty. My body freezes mid-step. My mind shuts down. The same nurse is still here, finishing her shift, and she tells me the baby died two hours ago. She says this sadly, but as if she knew it was inevitable. She gently touches my shoulder and reminds me that we cannot save the ones who are already lost. Baby Boy Brown’s brief visit to Earth has ended. All I can think is that he died without a first name.

The Arc

That the arc of history bends toward justice let that saying enter the Hall of Dead Canards. Justice doesn’t bend or move forward. It can appear but disappear as easily, maybe more quickly. History is a heap of one injustice upon another. Chaos lunches with justice, but sticks justice with the bill. The arc of history has radiation poisoning. No doctor can save it.

Raisons D’être

There are great deaths out there, glorious or worthwhile or useful or absent. Better to live, best to die in private or in exile on some personal quixotic adventure. Some especially bold needn’t even one fancy nor fury when nothing measures a league

worth a damn. Not one, single damnable iota of meaning. This

is what meaning is made of, ennui. That and absurdities.

Zebulon Huset and Carson Pytell

Another Indoor Day

Absorbent, prone to colds, lacking water-repellant feathers, or what the slow porcupine

does not even understand is stoicism, we turtle down. Night’s blue screens click on early.

Rain keeps faith with the soil. Ospreys nesting high on their roofless cell tower under heaven

do not wish for better. While brooks become rivers, rivers prepare to overflow their banks,

and one encircling world, with horizons for everyone, lives on its will to survive the moment we

hang up our aspirations in the closet with the coats; leave it to the rain to wash the car.

Russell Rowland

Siren Calls

We walked far enough up the mown hillside to regret long sleeves, beneath that overachieving September sun. In shade beside

a stand of birch that I doubt was there while sheep-herds grazed, we found an ancient well not safely boarded-over, quite deep.

It drew me, as railroad tracks did when I was little and the cyclops eye of a train approached. You were present this time. You took my hand.

Many Sirens call: the edge of a cliff, the copperhead sunning on a ledge, a trafficked highway, bridge over the dark torrent. Still, love holds me.

Russell Rowland

Little Old Lady Who Walks with Two Poles

She goes as slow as a clock will when one awaits news. The sun pauses till she gets where she’s going.

Two poles stabilize, steady as she goes, so her body stays in motion. Once,

the body in motion became a body at rest, till some considerate passersby helped her up off the pavement and handed both poles back to her.

All lives confront entropy together “gradual decline into disorder,” or “ashes, ashes, all fall down.” Few victories, frequent tumbles.

Her twin poles on our behalf witness that kinesis is life. In such mettle we stood on the moon.

Grey hair blowing, she passes. Each window watches her out of sight.

Madness

Above the clouds over my terrace

A hidden angel resides watching over me

As I jumble the words and thoughts

Trying to write a poem under a hot roof She moves the lines up and down

Changing the theme and my intentions

Did she write the poem or I?

Often, she leaves me perplexed. I try to fight against her stubbornness

Let me create a new poem; I scream But what’s new, when all is written as a flowing stream, chirping birds, rumbling pebbles, dancing leaves and the happenings of the weird world. The eyes of every soul on earth; and the ripples of a backyard well; There is poetry in every breath. Everyone thinks a poet is a creator But we are just naughty plagiarists stealing God’s poems from the universe The next time I see the angel around I will let her write and dance in my mind While I let my brain sleep on the couch.

Terry Sanville

Chlorine

“I’m lying on my back at the bottom of a swimming pool looking up,” Roger says.

The stranger on the bar stool next to him sips his sloe gin fizz, gives him the eye then returns to watching the Olympic swimmers on TV.

“Yes, it’s funny but I’m breathing, yet I’m not, and I’m under the fucking water. My chest feels really tight, like one of those Monday Night wrestlers is sitting on me.”

The Olympic fan scowls. “Could you please be quiet? I’m trying to watch.”

Roger downs his shot of Pernod and taps the bar for another. “Yes, that’s what they’re all doing, watching.”

The guy next to him groans, shakes his head and moves two stools over. He mutters something to the bartender who rolls his eyes and shrugs.

“They’re all lined up at the edge of the pool, dressed in HAZMAT suits, watching. I can hear them muttering but I don’t understand what they say. It’s like they’re speaking in some foreign language. Or maybe it’s the water that makes them sound silly.”

The bartender pours him a new shot. “It’s all right, Roger. We’ve all heard your story.”

“I wish I could understand what they’re saying. I think about calling out, but I’m under water and I don’t want to drown. My mouth and throat are sore and I wish they’d pour me a beer. And for some reason I can’t move. I’m just drifting there in that aqua underwater world. The wavy images of people come and go like they’re on some poolside stage, sort of like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, all of them staring down at me. Can they even see me? Are they real? Why don’t they do something, jump in the water, call the paramedics, pour me a beer for Christ’s sake?”

“You haven’t drunk beer in a long time,” the bartender says. “Even before the lockdown you were a Pernod man. Now your brother … ”

“I’m so damn thirsty. But then I’m not, it’s as if my blood is now more saline than red and white cells. My face burns and I’m sweating like a pig. A damn pig, I tell you. How do you sweat underwater? My body heat seems to warm the pool. I can smell the chlorine, taste it. For some reason it tastes good, better than the alcohol you’re pouring me.”

“You want to try something else?” the bartender asks. “And could you please lower your voice.”

“You’re right about Dick. My brother was the brave one. He’d walk into a club and point to a bottle on the shelf, something he’d never had before, and order a shot. Not me. I stick to the same ole poison.

“I sometimes think someone poisoned me. That’s how I ended up on the bottom of the pool. I seem to have been there a long time. My beard grew out. Yet I never seemed to pee or poop, just floated. I remember worrying about Dick. He was the reckless one, wouldn’t stay away from his drinking cronies even though his wife begged him to. I wonder if he felt like I did, at the bottom of a pool with a wrestler sitting on his chest.”

The bartender frowns. “I liked Dick. He was a stand-up guy. But he felt

Roger grins. “Yeah, my kid brother felt invincible. He couldn’t believe that some measly little bug swimming around in his bloodstream could kill him. We were all wrong. Some of us more wrong than others.”

“Can someone be ‘more wrong?’” The bartender chuckles. “You’re either wrong or you’re not. I saw that on TV.”

“And I thought I smelled it again at the funeral home.”

“What are you talking about?” the bartender asks.

“The chlorine … or something like it. They tried to cover it up with air freshener and bunches of flowers. They only let Mother and I into the chapel to see Dick at a distance before they put him in the ground. But I could still smell the chlorine. Or maybe it was the embalming fluid they used. Its stink is always with me now, pushing away all other scents.”

“So how long were you under?” the bartender asks.

“Under? Under what?”

“You know, on the vent?”

“I’m not real sure ... two weeks, two months … off and on through rehab. It took me weeks to realize that I wasn’t being attended to by identical synchronized-walking twins, that my eyesight was messed up and I was seeing double.”

“But you’re okay now, right?”

“Right as rain, fit as a fiddle, sans one brother.”

The bartender sighed. “I’m sorry, Roger. Bad timing. If you both could have stayed safe for a year ”

“Yes, yes, you don’t have to remind me. Pour me another Pernod my good man. It’s time for me to get back in the pool. I wonder if I’ll ever get totally out.”

On the TV the U.S. men’s swim team wins the gold in their final event. They stand grinning into the cameras, flexing their muscles. Then they slip on their masks and return to the dressing rooms. Roger notices that one of them looks a lot like a much younger version of his brother. Yeah, right. Neither of us could swim worth a damn.

Ode to an Old Age Spot

At first

I feared it had malevolent intent, appearing as it did out of nowhere to rest on my forehead near where hair used to reign in all its wavy glory …

perhaps the Big C, paving the way for the insidious invasion cancer is, turning loyal cells against the body, attacking the innocents, laying waste to the pulsing home they all share? (It happened before, basal-cell, on the nose, and when it left, by force of surgeon’s hand, it left a scar, but thank God, it was not its deadlier sister: Melanoma did ever such a deathly disease have such a lovely name?)

So, worried, I scurried and hurried off to my skin doctor, asking for a quick checkup and erudite diagnosis. He looked at it, then took out his little magnifying glass and pressed it against my forehead and smiled!

“Don’t worry, be happy!” he sang no, just kidding (he’s a good doctor but not a song and dance man). He told me it was an age spot, I was just getting old (which I maybe should have figured out, after seventy-five years on earth).

Then he said, “I could freeze it” but I told him not to bother old age cannot be disguised, though movie stars and the

vain try then too, a face where time works its way, like some drunk artist, is a thing of courage and in its own very special way, a thing of eternal beauty …

The Words

His father’s slow disease gave Grant time to practice what he needed to say. When asked, he’d force a smile, fake optimism, repeat, “Hanging in there,” “Taking each day,” and “One tough old guy.” Stay strong, he’d think. That went on for six months of doctor visits, treatments, predictions. All the while, to himself, he’d rehearse for the inevitable, test his options. “We lost him.” Too vague. “He passed.” Too old fashioned. “He died.” Too direct. “He’s in a better place.” Too idiotic. Stay strong. Hold it together. When it finally happened, Grant could only look away, silent. Everyone understood.

Beate Sigriddaughter

A Walk by the Ocean

The kids are safely parked in college. On scholarships. There’s even money in the bank in case the scholarships don’t cover everything. The freezer is filled. Dean wouldn’t starve until we all figure out what’s what. Today I could make it to Yuma or Calexico. Tomorrow I could be walking by the ocean somewhere. I yearn for the ocean, its majesty. I yearn for time to hurl myself like a tall wave against this lifelong acceptance of what comes shimmeringly close to indifference.

I was raised with ten-thousand mandates for modesty. Like a strange fish, I feel stranded by rules I have followed, locked in this invisible soft prison of respectability. I could just get into the car and start driving. Instead, I lie next to Dean, unable to sleep, cradling our fragile love in my arms, afraid to let go, not sure of the cost if I did let go, and above all too tired to run away, and ironically too tired even to fall asleep.

He is a good man. And then again, I am a good woman, too. Only, he is what’s that lamentable phrase again? Not into me. That’s it. And I am slowly but surely and unwillingly drifting into an indifference of my own. We’re both yearning for something that seems to be beyond our reach. I wonder what his dreams are. He doesn’t say. Heck, I don’t even know what my dreams are besides wanting to walk by the ocean.

I am so tired of spending most of my nights trying to fall asleep. As soon as my exhausted head hits the pillow, I am wide awake, yearning for deliverance from this gentle prison.

I might only make it as far as Phoenix. There’s a rest area on I-8, not too far beyond Phoenix, where I could sleep for a while, then resume my escape. I am afraid, though, I’ll never outrun this chronic tiredness. And if I ran away for good, how would I support myself? I have no idea. Maybe I’d get a job as a checkout clerk at some store. I’m old enough now to even be able to work as a waitress. Nobody is likely anymore to pinch my butt. Though you never know. There seems to be no limit to the general lust for putting women in their place. Which makes me even more exhausted. How many years have I had to try and hold up my head in the face of all these subtle, mostly inadvertent methods of belittlement? Too many, that’s what. Far too many. At any rate, at this point I am too tired to run away. Perhaps I’m simply too old to run away.

Letting my mind do the wandering is easier anyway. No mosquitoes, no scorpions, no growling dogs, no alarming strangers following too close for comfort.

I listen to Dean’s breath and want to shelter him in any way I can. He turns in his sleep and puts his arm across my ribcage. When I close my eyes, I can feel the fierce damp wind from the ocean bring tears.

Boston Streets

the chafing, grating city wind of Boston when leaving the court room drove me into the café for coffee vowing never again to be there in winter defending anyone for anything yet Boston summer heat will burn the tender eyes unshaded imprinting defenseless iris prisms with images of wounded visions missed the last time you cared but now I make the same mistake and hope to rescue one devalued soul from the cruel unyielding laws of Boston

Susan Winters Smith

Susan Winters Smith

Bullies

at ten your bicycle flew down the valley road taking you to Limehurst pond where leopard frogs fled your barefoot steps and music from the snack shack speaker droned like religious chanting, while the bully who hurt your brother carved the shell of the painted turtle with his jackknife, until it bled and he tossed it in the gully no adult tried to stop him and the knife cut your heart you learned distrust by trusting that same brother who dared you to leap from the top level of the tower which he said was as safe as the lower level but wasn’t, so you sank down deeply into the bottom muck, and kicked desperately to reach the top and gasped for air.

Susan Winters Smith

The Tunnel

Jack was so annoyed with Sierra that he pulled over to the edge of the highway amid heavy traffic heading for the tunnel ahead. He banged his head on the steering wheel, while clenching it tightly, then ruffling his black hair and stifling a scream.

Sierra cried, “I’m sorry, Jack. I told you before we left that I’m too claustrophobic for tunnels.”

“What do you expect me to do?” Jack asked, not hiding his frustration. “I told you there would be tunnels when we go west through the hills.”

“Yes, but, Jack, you promised we could avoid them.”

“We could, but they are safe, and I’ve never heard of one falling in. Just trust me. You can do this. Close your eyes and turn up the radio but not your crappy country music. We’ll get through this in two minutes.”

“No, please, Jack. I can’t. I’m so terrified. I almost died of fright in an elevator. Remember when we got stuck in one?”

“You didn’t almost die. You just gave in to fear. Now you always take the stairs, but there are no stairs over this hill. Why can’t you trust me? You can even put on your own music.” He reached over and squeezed her arm, not very gently.

“It’s not about you, Jack!” Sierra yelled, shaking her hands in the air. “It’s my anxieties. I can’t help it. It’s not that easy to overcome phobias. I went to that therapist last month, remember? Why can’t you care about my feelings? There must be another way.” Sierra put her head down in her hands, feeling the heat building in her face as she blushed right red.

“Well, yeah,” Jack said sarcastically, “One hundred thirty miles around, adding two hours to our trip. Do you really want to do that? Jesus, Sierra, you need to overcome this.”

“I try, Jack, I do. You don’t know how horrible panic attacks are. Please, go around, or let me out now and I’ll hitch a ride home” She put her hand on the door handle and grabbed her bag.

“Oh stop, silly. Don’t be a ditsy blonde. You’re afraid of a tunnel, but not of hitch-hiking? Fine, Sierra. I can’t believe you were named for mountains. I thought you were adventurous. Now I have to do an illegal U-turn, but fine.” Jack turned around, sighing, and drove in silence.

“Thank you,” Sierra choked. “Are there more tunnels on the trip?”

“Yes, but when we get to the motel in Cody, Wyoming, we’ll get a map and find a new route. Dave and Kathy will be there already.”

“I never should have come.” Sierra stifled a sob, praying for strength to get home alive.”

“Well, we’ll just cater to your anxieties,” Jack sighed.

Sierra didn’t miss the judgment in his voice. The detour was long and quiet. Even the beautiful scenery of fields of wildflowers and paddocks of horses did not give her peace. She tried to doze, relieved to avoid the tunnel and any conversation that might invoke more scolding.

They got to the hotel in time to go out to dinner with Jack’s college roommate, Dave, and his girlfriend, Kathy. They both laughed till they cried when Jack told them what a scaredy-cat his girlfriend was. Sierra was seething on the inside but didn’t say a word.

“I swear, if I’d kept going, she would have peed her pants.” Jack chuckled as they ordered drinks. “Make mine a double. I need it.”

“Well,” said Kathy, “maybe you should have done that, just to show her she wouldn’t die, but then you would have had to clean your car!”

“Hilarious, Kathy,” said Sierra, “Have you never been afraid of anything?”

“Not really, unless you count Mrs. Flebotte in Latin class.” More laughter. Sierra drank ice water to cool down her face, red hot from having her feelings dismissed.

“Have a real drink, Sierra,” said Kathy. “It will help you sleep. Just don’t dream about being buried alive!” she quipped. Dave almost choked on an olive.

The others continued throughout the meal with tunnel-phobia jokes.

“What’s the most claustrophobic animal?” Kathy asked.” Jack shrugged. “A turtle.” She chuckled.

“Did you hear about the claustrophobic astronaut?” Jack laughed. “He needed more space!”

Dave shook his head, “I bet you hate having an MRI. Don’t worry, they play creepy music for you now.” His eyes had a sinister stare.

Kathy joked, “Don’t worry, Sierra. You’ll always be safe as long as you think outside the box.” Hysterical laughter.

They finally stopped when their dinners arrived. Sierra didn’t eat much, as she kept choking up. When she looked at Jack, she wondered what she had ever seen in him. Sadness turned to anger, and she fantasized about getting even.

The next morning, a bit hungover, they piled into Jack’s Subaru and headed out.

Kathy asked, “What’s our adventure for today, Jack?”

“We head west and see what we find. The goal is to get to San Francisco, turn around and head back to Boston. Don’t worry, Sierra, I plotted another route with no tunnels.”

“Aw, I love tunnels,” said Kathy, tossing her long ponytail.

Jack’s patronizing stung Sierra, though she now realized that this wasn’t new, and that although their relationship had started off wonderfully six months ago, he had recently become artfully disparaging of her, and she had probably been denying it.

Several miles along, Dave shouted, “Hey, there’s a sign for Wind Caves. Let’s go check it out. Sierra will love it.”

“Not a bad idea,” Kathy said. “Maybe she’ll give it a try. Those caves are wide and well lit not at all scary.”

“You can go wherever you want,” said Sierra, beginning to wish she had never gone on this trip. “I won’t be going in any cave, but I don’t want to spoil your fun.”

Jack turned off the highway onto the road to the Wind Caves. Sierra took a deep breath, her blood boiling, ready for a fight if anyone tried to make her go in there.

“Oh, I just thought of another one, “said Kathy, “You can get over claustrophobia if you just come out of the closet!” Sierra scowled.

“You have to face your fears,” said Dave.

Sierra’s head was exploding, and the only relief was thinking of ways to get even with all of them.

There were people in the building, but mostly just wandering around looking at knick-knacks. One couple complained on the way out the door that it was a big disappointment. Jack, Dave, and Kathy were disappointed when the attendant told them the center was open, but the caves were all closed for a routine security check. Grumbling, they roamed around the visitor center looking at photos of the wind cave and other caves around the world. Sierra bought some chocolate-covered raisins in the gift shop and thought about finding a way home, rather than spending eight more days on the road with Jack & Co.

They all walked to the cave entrance and saw the large bright red and yellow signs reading, CAVES CLOSED. Looking into the cave, they saw a flashing red sign reading, DANGER.

“Something’s wrong,” said Sierra. “This doesn’t seem routine.” However, the others decided to ignore the warnings, and having heard about a unique tunnel at the far end of the cave, lined with opals, and closed off for years, they decided to be adventurous and see for themselves, since there wouldn’t be other people in the caves to block them. The entrance to the cave looked like just a hole in the wall, and Sierra felt ill just looking at it and even sicker as the other three disappeared into it. Jack, waiting till last, called to her, “Last chance, chicken girl. I’m sure it’s not really that dangerous. I thought I had a partner with guts. Now I’m not so sure about us.”

The three of them checked around to make sure no guard was watching, and, one by one, slipped into the cave and disappeared from sight, giggling as they did.

Sierra went out to wait in the Subaru, glad she had brought a book with her, as it might be a long wait. “I’m not so sure, myself,” she mused.

An hour later, Sierra was worried, so she went in to walk around the center. She saw a new sign on the outside of the cave entrance: DANGER, THE

CAVE’S TUNNELS HAVE BECOME TREACHEROUS DUE TO EXPLOSIONS IN A NEARBY QUARRY

“Oh my God,” said Sierra, running to find the attendant, but before she found him, there was a huge boom, and the whole place shook. Sierra fell, but she got up when things settled down and went to look into the main opening, seeing nothing but rock and red dust. The attendant was now evacuating the center, so Sierra told him that her companions had gone in there and might even be in that back tunnel. Soon, sirens screamed, and rescue vehicles arrived.

After two hours of frantic searching, EMTs led Jack, Dave, and Kathy out of the cave, coughing and covered with red dust from head to toe. Sierra roared with laughter and snapped photos as the police gave them summonses for trespassing and ordered them to follow him to the local hospital to be checked out. Kathy gave Sierra a dirty look for chuckling while she snapped. Sierra chatted with the attendant, who laughed out loud with her.

Then Jack growled at her, “Okay, okay, yes, it’s so funny. Laugh at our pain. Come on, you can drive us. We will follow this cop.” But Sierra declined.

“What do you mean? Aren’t you going with us?” asked Jack. “We’ll get cleaned up and then go find our hotel for the night.”

“Sorry, Jack,” Sierra explained. “I’ve just called an Uber to take me to the nearest bus station. I’m heading home.” She walked away as the three dusty friends stared with their mouths open.

The night bus ride back to Boston was beautiful and serene. Sierra knew from the ticket seller that there would be one short tunnel ahead to go through, but she felt so vindicated and liberated that she was sure she could get through that easily. She dozed off, dreaming of flat city streets, where she knew all of the tunnel-free routes. This was heaven.

Victoria Lynn Smith

Prom Flash

Because I like Niles Graham, I walk from school to the small corner grocery store, a throwback to my grandmother’s era. I want him to ask me to prom, which is a month away. It’s my last chance to attend a formal dance. I’ve never been to one. All through January and February, my dreams of prom and Niles piled up like the winter snow. He’s a junior, like my sister. She knows who he is because they have advanced algebra together, but I’m the one he talks to. He’s in my French class.

Niles works in the store after school, sweeping the dark, uneven wooden floor, sliding cans and boxes onto shelves to fill empty spaces, taking out the trash. Always, he smiles when he sees me and talks to me for a bit, often about books. He likes Hemingway, but I like F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Last year I attended a different school in another town. A guy named Blaine asked me to prom, but I didn’t like him well enough. I wanted to go with a boy who would knock my shoes off when he kissed me, like I once saw in an old romantic comedy. To walk with that boy into a gymnasium turned fantasy by crepe-paper streamers, pastel-colored balloons, fake flowers, and hastily built wooden structures made to be used for one night. I wanted to go to prom with a popular, handsome boy, preferably a muscular athlete who wouldn’t look like a string bean playing dress up in a tuxedo. One of those kinds of boys would’ve surely knocked my shoes off when he kissed me. But no one else asked.

I push the store’s old, heavy door, spiderwebbed with a crackling finish, and the bell jingles. The cashier rings up a customer, but nods at me. I walk down an aisle, past boxes of pasta, tinned tuna, and canned vegetables. People complain about canned veggies, but with butter and salt and pepper they’re not bad. I’m always starving after school. The butcher waits on Mrs. Jacobs from down the street. She wants two of his best pork chops. He says he only sells the best. Ten blocks down the road is a modern supermarket, but this old store is still in business. Maybe it’s the butcher.

In the beginning, I liked Niles as a friend. He isn’t popular, handsome, or athletic, and he’s a grade behind me. It’s okay for a girl to date up a grade or two, but it’s not as acceptable for a senior girl to date underclassmen. However, I no longer care about that stuff. Niles is the one I want.

The last few times I’ve been in the store he’s been nervous, tumbling over his words. If he wants to ask me to prom, he needs to ask soon. A girl needs to shop for the perfect dress and shoes and accessories. A girl must have an appointment to have her hair and makeup and nails professionally done. It all takes time. So, he needs to say it Dina, will you go to prom with me?

A month ago, prom talk started with the popular girls who had popular boyfriends and knew for sure they’d go. Next, some of the popular-but-

unattached boys asked some of the popular-but-unattached girls. A king and queen will be chosen. The king will act nonchalant, like he’s always being crowned. The queen will cry as last year’s royalty places a rhinestone tiara on her head. Cameras will flash, and pictures staged like wedding photos will appear in next year’s yearbook. Prom is a rehearsal for our weddings, and if we never marry, it’s practice for our friends’ weddings. And if we never stand up in a wedding, prom might be the last time we’ll wear gowns and walk alongside guys in tuxes.

I head toward the stockroom. I’ll drop a hint. Maybe ask what he thinks about this year’s theme, An Evening in Paris. I want him to hold my hand as we enter the gym that masquerades as a Parisian street. To hold me tight during slow dances. To kiss me in the front seat of his parents’ car, borrowed for the night. To knock my shoes off my feet.

The stockroom door swings open, smacking the butcher’s counter.

“Hi,” Niles says, self-assured. He’s found the courage to ask me, so I’ll let him bring it up.

I ask about his day. It was good, but he has too much algebra homework.

“Would you ” he begins.

I hold my breath.

“ like to borrow a book I read?”

I nod and wait. The book is a warm-up.

“Hey,” he begins again.

Because a girl should never appear too eager, I conceal my excitement.

“Do you think your sister would go to prom with me?” He smiles and the dimples on his reddening cheeks deepen, giving me a moment to find a voice for my anger.

“Take a ticket” I spin on the balls of my feet “and stand in line.”

Let him figure out she already has a date and a dress and an appointment at the beauty shop. His kisses won’t knock my shoes off.

At the front of the store, Mrs. Jacobs pays for her groceries and her two best pork chops. The cashier nods in my direction, dismissing me. For the last time, I yank open the old, heavy door, and the bell jangles.

Whale Watch, Provincetown

Small child Cole, I’m told sits on the whale watch boat bench between his mother and me and smiles

as I smile at him, then crawls my way, stops close on the bench and looks up and smiles. I return the smile. “Want to go back by Nana?” Cole’s mother asks, and Cole edges closer, body language indicating he’s happy

where he is. Out in the water Scylla, a 41-year-old humpback cow who’s birthed fourteen calves, will

soon rise before us, but her forty tons will carry less weight than this small child who smiles at strangers.

Matthew J. Spireng

Joshua Michael Stewart

On Hearing of Charles Simic’s Passing

The January sky’s wet and gray. The streets are old scars on a young girl’s body; all the road signs read, Get the hell out of town. Ahead, a minivan, left blinker, blinking. I pass on the right, continue straight, slowly. Unexpectedly, the minivan jerks right. I swerve, stomp my brakes. Slick pavement. Steel and plastic crunch and grind. Across the street, a black cat slinks out from under an abandoned gas station’s dumpster. A few blocks over, an old woman wearing her husband’s boots stands in her backyard next to a chain-link fence and an empty bird feeder. She clenches her pink robe over her breasts with one hand and the other’s cupped around her disquiet voice as she calls her cat home.

Joshua Michael Stewart

Book of Love

The love my partner and I share is a book we’ve read many times. The pages yellowed. Spine broken. No dog ears, but plenty of bat wings. There ’s a coffee ring on the cover, and the phone number to a defunct laundromat scribbled below the final paragraph on the last page. It’s a story most would find dull. Critics have pointed out its lack of narrative arc. We picked it up years ago at a used bookstore for half-price. She ripped out the page revealing the murderer, so we’d always keep guessing, and to distinguish our copy from all the others, I drew a mustache and devil horns on the author’s photo with a red pen.

Joshua Michael Stewart

Fetching the Mail

I talk wide-mouthed with slow pronunciation, easier for my deaf neighbor to read my lips. “Careful. A lot of ice.”

He smiles. Salutes as he shuffles past with hesitant steps, traversing the path to the congregated mailboxes like a minefield. after the storm snow falling from one pine branch onto another

Hari-Kuyo

In a rite that began 400 years ago Japanese women dressed in ornate kimonos they have made by hand come to the temple bearing stitched silk bags that contain all the needles they have broken this year.

This is hari-kuyo, the Festival of Broken Needles. In the hushed temple the women carefully unfold the fabric, remove the bent and broken needles one by one and then push them into the large block of tofu on the altar. Incense fills the air.

This is the needles’ reward for working so hard, for helping stitch together disparate parts into one whole thing, time after time after time for all that work, a soft place of repose.

In this view of the cosmos, all things have a soul and a spirit, even objects, and especially such sacred tools.

I see now that this purple pen that has served me so well, signing checks for bills, making to-do lists, writing thousands of words for my students, even composing whole books of poems, that its smooth, fluid line has begun to thin and gap, to stutter, its days of stitching words together ebbing, and it is time to wrap the pen in tissue and nestle it somewhere soft.

Sometimes the women put their secret pains and fears, all the things that are broken in their lives, into the pins, and ask the gods to get rid of them, and so now I ask the pen to take with it, if it will, my arthritic feet, my tinnitus, my insecurities and fears, and while I’m at it, all the things that break people on this fragile planet.

Kelly Talbot

After the Apocalypse, Day 581

She emerges from the hardware store, paint cans in hand, and squints upward at the August sky. Creamy poofs slide across an invisible shelf high overhead. She walks around to the north side of the building and sets the paint cans down. She strides back into the store and returns with the longest orange ladder they have.

She leans the ladder against the wall, pops open a can, and begins tracing a giant magenta curve across the bricks on the north face of the building. As she paints, she hums old R&B songs. When she can’t remember a melody, she improvises.

Even though she is in the shade, she perspires. After about forty minutes, she’s thirsty. And a little hungry. She heads into the hardware store and brings out a bottle of water and a candy bar. She sits down under the ladder and takes a little break. The candy bar has caramel and peanuts. It really is the little things, she thinks to herself.

After she drinks half the water bottle, she resumes painting. Four hours later, the painting is complete. It’s a giant mural of a magenta anime woman with huge lavender curls. It doesn’t look quite the way she had envisioned it, but it isn’t bad.

Maybe tomorrow she will come back and add some trees or buildings or something along the perimeter. If she is in the mood.

But now she needs a shower. Her shirt is soaked with perspiration and is clinging to her. She walks over to the corner of the parking lot and climbs onto her bicycle. It doesn’t have a chain or lock. It doesn’t need one.

She glances up at the street sign. She is at the corner of Burnt Sierra and Mauve. Those aren’t the names on the signs, of course. They are the colors she has painted over the names. She pedals onto Mauve and looks at the side of the old doughnut shop. Two cheerful, old-fashioned robots dance together on the wall. She had painted them there last week. They’re so cute that she can’t help but smile.

Three blocks later, she turns onto Turquoise. She lives in the fifth house on the street, the one with the six-foot tulips painted on the exterior. 614 Montgomery Street. That’s what they used to call this place. But now it is Tulip House on Turquoise. That’s so much better.

She enters Tulip House, strips off her clothes, and steps into the shower. As the dirt and sweat of what had once been washes away, the pores of her skin open and can breathe. Cleansed, she feels like a new woman. She no longer has a name. She is simply She, and this is her world now. It really is the little things, after all.

Kelly Talbot

Silas of the Sea

The maple oars press back against Silas’s callused hands. His shoulders, forearms, and stomach flex, relax, flex, relax. Rhythmic, every motion. Even his wrists and ankles push and pull. His feet shove the soles of his boots firmly into the weathered floorboards.

Silas’s sturdy frame shifts to and fro as the choppy waves pitch and lurch his rowboat. He licks the salt from the tips of his long, graying moustache hairs. Squinting at the horizon, he sees the coal-bronze sky darkening. The sea is growing more dangerous.

He would nod or smile in approval if his muscles weren’t straining so hard. Instead, he just grunts and heaves the oars resolutely.

When the island finally looms overhead, Silas rows around to the side that faces away from the mainland. Not that anyone can see the island from the mainland, this many miles out. Green waves convulse against the harsh rocks, hurling white foam high above Silas. Alert, he steers with the surging currents until he reaches the boulders at the base of the cliff. He ties his boat to a great solid rock.

From a box at the bow, he retrieves a lantern and a carefully wrapped box of matches. Then he drapes some rope over his shoulder, picks up his harpoon, and climbs out onto the rocky shore. Cold raindrops pelt his face as he carefully makes his way along the rugged route up the cliff’s face.

When he arrives at the top, he wedges the base of his harpoon between some stones to hold it upright. Turning his back to the wind, he patiently lights the lantern. Then he ties it to the hook of his harpoon, where it sways back and forth, its light dancing mystically in the storm.

Silas faces the sea. He spreads his arms wide, as if he is embracing all the forces of nature. Tight-lipped, he inhales deeply through his nostrils. Sea spray and fresh skywater swirl in his breath. Despite the chill, all his muscles relax. His mouth opens wide, and a resonant tenor thunders from him across the swells to the horizon and beyond. The vibrations penetrate the surface of the waters, reverberating down into the heart of the ocean.

Silas sings his wordless song into the storm. At the base of the cliff far below, a form emerges from the surf, pulls itself to lie upon a boulder, and gazes upward. Then another joins it. And another. Soon, hundreds of merpeople sprawl on the rocks, eyes wide in wonder at this sound that emanates from a man, more dramatic and moving than any foghorn. They join in, chirping cheerfully like a chorus of sea gulls.

Time passes. It is impossible to know how much. Not enough. It could never be enough. But the sky gradually lightens and the raindrops become smaller and sparser. Soon, men will venture forth in their seafaring vessels. Silas

stops singing. He waves an arm widely in farewell. The merpeople return his gesture and one by one slip back beneath the rolling aquamarine.

Silas descends from his perch atop the cliff. As he rows back to the mainland, droplets of mersong linger in his hair.

Tropical Storm Warning

I live in the path of hurricanes and something about me thrills in that. I read about a hurricane forming a thousand miles away or about to lash The Bahamas and I hope its remnants get to where I am. I don’t know why I’m like this.

If the storm gets to Florida there’s a chance we’ll feel it here, a little further north. I begin to check for news of it, hour after hour, stymied by the conflicting information. I don’t want a hurricane, people or property damaged I just want hours of noisy rain and a wind that shakes the treetops. Again I don’t know why.

It’s finally here, 7 a.m. I hear the rain beat down and fall back to sleep to its music. I wake up at 9 and it’s already over downgraded to a tropical depression. My father refers to this kind of storm as a “fruit cup” because it promises some level of devastation but delivers a rainfall that dries up by tomorrow afternoon. I don’t know why it disappoints me, but it does.

I check the news tonight and the tropical depression is flooding parts of Maryland already. It’s been promoted again to tropical storm. The National Hurricane Center shows no other storms developing. Everyone is happy except the weather channels and me.

John Tustin

The Sisters Corner –for Roxy

Today in one coffee-shop alcove a pair of young women have claimed the ochre-print loveseat and table, rerouting me to the opposite nook with a duplicate loveseat and table to wait for my sister. Ensconced with my latte I glance across the room at the women who’ve taken our favorite spot.

One in profile to me who seems to be telling a story, the other wearing a pink baseball cap and listening with her whole body: a mutual focus that hooks my attention in spite of the tables between us and surly habitué John partly blocking my view. The surge of identification I feel undermined by a question: how long will it be before the rapt listener is permitted to speak in her turn? Or, as so frequently happens in pairs, will the talk pouring out on one side inhibit what might billow up on the other?

I look away, sip my latte, consider the give and take of conversation that moves with the rhythm and flow of a dance.

I love women! is my predicable thought, as I turn back to witness the moment these two trade roles without breaking their gaze: the pink-capped former listener now alight with her own eager tale, the raconteur listening, engrossed.

A mirror image of us on that loveseat.

Sharon Whitehill

On impulse I rise, cross over to them, they turn to me, smiling, surprised, and I see in their features a further resemblance: they are sisters too.

Gardening While Bombs Explode

One old woman in Ukraine refuses to board the train. Ignoring her arthritic pain, she goes on gardening though the bombs are exploding all around her. Her resolve

brings me to my knees. The trees go on sprouting as though flouting the madman who has given the orders. One old woman in Ukraine is planting with faith her heart in the earth of her land something

Putin cannot understand. The bombs are falling, but one old woman is stalling death, speaking only of spring and summer. Her voice drowns out the noise of war, crosses the thresh-

hold to a world beyond the material one, the destructive human world overrun with murderers, architects of death, assassins. She goes on gardening, dispensing her own kingdom, positions herself against the current and

all history’s devastating forces. One wildly stubborn old woman in Ukraine refuses to board the train–goes on gardening as if the abolish the reign of terror and death. The flowers will bloom, she insists. The pain and oppression soon

will lift. This is her passion to save her garden, one of earth’s small chapels. The flowers soon will bloom though the bombs loom,

Diane Woodcock

explode in schools and hospitals, homes and theatres. But not this day

pray never in her garden.

Waiting for Goodness and Truth

So here I sit again, waiting for goodness and truth, not seeking, believing Simone (Weil)

was right waiting is indeed more intense than any searching. Morning mist enshrouds me like incense.

White wisps of clouds sail by like doves. Putin refuses to call off Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

I sit waiting in pain for goodness and truth, my heart’s door of compassion swung open.

Next moment I’m full of joy sight and sound of the bulbul couple on the patio, shamal riffling

their feathers as they preen each other. Waiting for goodness and truth, I swallow the Ukrainians’ sorrow

like a sob. Caught up in the fixity and flux, recurrence and change of seasons, endless power games, listening to

lullabies that wound, paused in a moment of dream, between a chant and a scream, I wait, perched like a tattered winged

moth on a windowsill, keeping still, done with beating myself against the screen.

Brought Back and Lifted Up

One Yellowbar angelfish in the midst of grey her roundish blue-black body with its broad yellow band gleaming among the rocks of the sheltered silty bay as she searched for algae and sponges on a midwinter’s day–brought me back down to earth.

Both of us solitary, we seemed birds of a feather one Pomacanthus maculosus, one Homo sapiens–seeking sustenance along the shoreline, taking our time. I wished I could enter her waters without causing a ripple, and browse

beside her. I wished I could whisk away the plastic trash lodged among the rocks, blocking her way. I wished I could stay by her side, and together we could glide and watch the sun sink across the way at the end of the day, and the moon rise up out of the bay.

Beautiful as an angel, she floated like a daydream, reminding me we are fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.* There we met she, in her watery world, I in my dot of a desert edging the Arabian Sea

became as one among grey rocks as she floated and browsed while I became aroused with desire, whirling Sufi-like at the shoreline, keeping time with one ray-finned angel who brought me back then lifted me up above the Earth.

Diane Woodcock

*Henry Beston, from The Outermost House

James K. Zimmerman

The Despot Wannabe Dreams of Dominion

if I were a red-tail hawk sweeping the sky on a helix of breeze, I would not announce myself in asthmatic screeches I would not foreshadow death

too easy for chipmunks and mice to run for cover from aerial attack, a heatseeking missile flung from a cloud above

I think I’d rather shroud myself in burly wings, glide the sky in silence, hide my hunger among pendant branches and leaves

I’d rather hone my beak on oak bark, wait for squirrels to squeak the all-clear and seek seeds from the feeder at the garden’s edge

then in precipitous descent the perfect arrows of my eyes, flashing blades of my talons will abduct them, suspended in air, rending the fabric of their earthbound world

and in the mythic pantheon of their tribe, I will become the Angel of Darkness, proud avatar of a looming apocalypse

Contributors

David Agyei-Yeboah is a young artist from Accra, Ghana. His poetry, fiction & hybrids are published/forthcoming in The Lumiere Review, GUEST (from above/ground press), Ethel Zine & Micro Press, Afritondo Magazine, Ta Adesa, Tampered Press, and elsewhere. He was long-listed for The Totally Free Best of the Bottom Drawer Global Writing Prize 2021 from the Black Spring Press Group, UK. He was also shortlisted for Ursus Americanus 2022 and was a finalist for Harbor Editions 2022 (Small Harbor Publishing). He scarcely tweets @david_shaddai and posts mini-covers on Instagram @davidshaddai.

Cate Asp is a technical research analyst for a non-profit public policy research organization. She is passionate about equitable education, data analysis, house projects, reading, writing, and her cat Gus! When she is not working or renovating, she is writing poetry and short stories, having previously been published in Freshwater Literary Journal and Penultimate Peanut

Duane Anderson currently lives in La Vista, Nebraska. He has had poems published in Fine Lines, Cholla Needles, Tipton Poetry Journal, and several other publications. He is the author of On the Corner of Walk Don’t Walk and The Blood Drives: One Pint Down; and Conquer the Mountains.

Jeanne M. Barone is a mother, a grandmother, and an alumnus of Asnuntuck Community College. She recently celebrated her fiftieth wedding anniversary in Walt Disney World. Married at the age of nineteen in 1971, she believes that swans stay together for life.

Danny P. Barbare’s work has recently appeared in Nod by the University of Calgary and Die Leere Mitte in Germany. He has been writing poetry most of his adult life. He resides in the foothills of the Carolinas with his family.

Bud R. Berkich is from central New Jersey. He writes in all genres, including songs (lyrics and music), plays (stage and screen), and literary/music criticism. Bud’s poetry collection entitled The Roxy Mix is available at Amazon.com and at Cyberwit.net.

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including Escape Envy (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2021), I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So, and The Prisoners. His writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. An ex-con, he lives in Charleston, West Virginia, where he writes and tries to stay out of trouble. His seventh collection, Tell Us How to Live, is forthcoming in 2024 from Fernwood Press.

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. She enjoys writing about people, places, nature, and her large tabby cat, Munchie. She watches the “Gloom and Doom” reports every night at 6:30 and visits the chiropractor regularly.

R.J. Caron lives in Enfield, Connecticut, with his wife, two cats and four parrots. As a child, he realized that he couldn’t draw to save his life. So he uses blank paper as his canvas and words instead of paint.

Peter Neil Carroll is currently Poetry Moderator of Portside.org. His latest collections of poetry are Talking to Strangers (Turning Point) and This Land, These People: 50 States of the Nation, which won the 2022 Prize Americana. He lives in northern California.

Charles Coe is the author of four books of poetry and one novella. He is adjunct professor of English at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, where teaches in the MFA writing program. (The editorial board is grateful to Charles for serving as out judge for the 2023 Freshwater Student Writing Contest.)

Corey D. Cook’s sixth chapbook, Junk Drawer, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2022. His poems have recently appeared in *82 Review, Black Poppy Review, Duck Head Journal, Muddy River Poetry Review, Naugatuck River Review, Nixes Mate Review, and South Florida Poetry Review. Corey lives in East Thetford, Vermont.

Joe Cottonwood has repaired hundreds of houses to support his writing habit in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. His latest book of poetry is Random Saints.

Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, The Hong Kong Review, and Appalachian Journal, and her hobbies include kicking and screaming at vending machines.

Katacha Díaz is a Peruvian American writer. Wanderlust and love of travel have taken her all over the world to gather material for her stories. Her work appears with ZiN Daily (Croatia), Amsterdam Quarterly (Netherlands), Big Windows Review, Anak Sastra (Malaysia), Shimmer Spring (India), Galway Review (Ireland), Hibiscus (India), Barely South Review, Taj Mahal Review (India), Gravel, Flash Frontier (New Zealand), Westview, New Mexico Review, Foliate Oak, The MacGuffin, Medical Literary Messenger, among others. Katacha lives in the Pacific Northwest, near the mouth of the Columbia River.

Andrea Janelle Dickens is originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains and now lives in the Sonoran Desert, where she resides among the sunshine and saguaro cacti. Her work has appeared in New South, Ruminate, and The Wayfarer, among others. When not writing poems and fiction, she’s making pottery in her ceramics studio or tending hives of bees.

Krikor Der Hohannesian’s poems have appeared in over 275 literary journals including The South Carolina Review, Atlanta Review, Louisiana Literature, Connecticut Review, Comstock Review, and Natural Bridge. He is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and author of three books: Ghosts and Whispers (Finishing Line Press, 2010), Refuge in the Shadows (Cervena Barva Press, 2013), and First Generation (Dos Madres Press, 2020). Ghosts and Whispers was a finalist for the Mass Book Awards in poetry in 2011. First Generation was selected as a “must read” by Mass Book Awards in 2021.

Fred Donovan is an author and editor who writes about technology to make money and crafts poems to keep him sane. He has published poems in numerous journals, and his collection of haiku is forthcoming from Bottle Rockets Press. He lives on Cape Cod with his family and enjoys long walks along the beach.

Grace Dow is a first-year student at Asnuntuck Community College, where she studies Early Childhood Education. Grace’s poems in this issue won first and second prize in the 2023 Freshwater Student Writing Contest.

Joanne Durham is the author of To Drink from a Wider Bowl, winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize (Evening Street Press 2022) and On Shifting Shoals (Kelsay Books 2023). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Poetry South, Poetry East, NC Literary Review, Whale Road Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She lives on the North Carolina coast, with the ocean as her backyard and muse. Learn more about her and her poetry at https://www.joannedurham.com/.

Dave Fromm is the author of a sports memoir Expatriate Games and a novel The Duration. He lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and kids.

TAK Erzinger is an award-winning poet. Her collection, At the Foot of the Mountain (Floricanto Press California, 2021), won the University of Indianapolis Etching Press, Whirling Prize 2021 for best nature poetry book. It was also a finalist at The International Book Awards 2022, Willow Run Book Awards, and Eyelands Book Awards. Her first audio drama, Stella’s Constellation, was produced by Alt.Stories and Fake Realities Podcasts, out of the UK. She is an American/Swiss poet and artist with a Colombian background. She lives on a foothill of a Swiss alp with her husband and cats.

Alexis Fahey is a student at Asnuntuck Community College. She loves reading and has recently been getting into writing. Reading, writing, and drawing are what she enjoys doing most.

Meadow Gates is a student at Asnuntuck Community College. Her essay in this issue chronicles a decision that changed her life for the better.

Michael Gigandet is a lawyer living on a farm in Tennessee. He has been published by the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Reedsy, Spelk Fiction, OrangeBlushZine, Transfigured, and Potato Soup Journal. He has published stories in collections by Palm Sized Press, Pure Slush, and Down in The Dirt.

Emilea Gartrell is a masters-level licensed social worker specializing in grief/bereavement and oncology. She enjoys writing as an outlet. Her poem, “The Ritual,” was published in Freshwater Literary Journal’s 2014 edition.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the California Sierra, and served as El Dorado County’s first poet laureate (2016-2018). In addition to Freshwater, her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Poet Lore, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She’s included in the anthologies California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the

Present, California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology, and Villanelles (Everyman’s Library). Her latest book is Windows of Time and Place (Cold River Press, 2019).

John Grey is an Australian poet, U.S. resident, recently published in Sheepshead Review, Stand, Poetry Salzburg Review, and Ellipsis. Latest books, Covert, Memory Outside The Head, and Guest Of Myself are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Washington Square Review and Red Weather

Derek Harvey is a twenty-year-old sophomore currently attending Asnuntuck Community College and previously Three Rivers Community College. Writing and recording music has been his passion of his for the past five years. Derek’s poem in this issue won honorable mention in the 2023 Freshwater Student Writing Contest.

Ruth Holzer is the author of eight chapbooks, most recently, Living in Laconia (Gyroscope Press) and Among the Missing (Kelsay Books). Her poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, Faultline, Slant, Poet Lore, Connecticut River Review, and Plainsongs, among other journals and anthologies. She has received several Pushcart Prize nominations.

Ann Howells edited Illya’s Honey for eighteen years. Recent books are: So Long As We Speak Their Names (Kelsay Books, 2019) and Painting the Pinwheel Sky (Assure Press, 2020). Chapbooks include Black Crow in Flight, Editor’s Choice in Main Street Rag’s 2007 competition and Softly Beating Wings, 2017 William D. Barney Chapbook Competition winner (Blackbead Books). Her work appears in small press and university publications including Plainsongs, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and San Pedro River Review. Ann has eight Pushcart nominations.

Greg Huteson’s poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including recently in THINK, Alabama Literary Review, and Blue Unicorn. His chapbook, These Unblessed Days, is available from Kelsay Books. He lives in Taiwan.

Beth Ann Jedziniak has a passion for the written and spoken word. Her speech titled “My VaJourney” was recorded for Claim the Stage podcast and published in the collection, Secrets of the Sisterhood: 50 Stories of Love, Truth and Power. She has pieces published in WriteAngles Journal and Freshwater Literary Journal. Her essay “Skin” is scheduled to be published in the anthology, Keeping It Under Wraps: Bodies, due out this year. Most evenings, you can find her at her desk, digging her way out of the past one syllable at a time.

Judy Kaber is the Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine, and author of three chapbooks, most recently A Pandemic Alphabet. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Poet Lore, december, Hunger Mountain, and Spillway. She won the 2021 Maine Poetry Contest and was a finalist for a 2022 Maine Literary Award.

Katy Keffer writes nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. She is published on Sad Girls Club Literary Blog, The RavensPerch, Hare’s Paw Literary Journal, and A Plate of Pandemic. In her free time, she is managing editor of the online literary journal, The Bluebird Word

Mason Koa’s work is published or forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, Literally Stories, and the Appelley Rising Stars Collection. He is Filipino- and Chinese-American and lives in the Bay Area of California. He has undergone study of contemporary writing at Stanford. He is fourteen years old (2022).

Stuart Larner is a retired chartered psychologist. He has written scientific papers, articles, stories, poems and novels, and plays. He has written an ebook in verse, Jack Daw and the Cat; a novel about cricket entitled Guile and Spin; and with Rosie Larner (writing as Rosy Stewart), the novel Hope: Stories from a Women’s Refuge. He wrote the illustrated sonnet sequence, “The Car” in 2016. He has stories in Bridgehouse Press anthologies. He won the British Psychological Society’s Poetry Competition 2022. For more poetry and stories, see his blog. https://stuartlarner.blogspot.com/p/stuff-you-can-accessnow.html

Richard LeDue (he/him) currently lives in Norway House, Manitoba. He has been published in various places online and in print. He is the author of six books of poetry. His sixth book, “A Hard Homecoming,” was released in July 2022 from Alien Buddha Press.

Katharyn Howd Machan, an enthusiastic professor in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College, has served as coordinator of the Ithaca Community Poets and director of the Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops, Inc. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, textbooks, and collections (most recently Dark Side of the Spoon from the Moonstone Press in 2022 and A Slow Bottle of Wine, winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Competition, from Comstock Writers, Inc. in 2020), and she has edited three thematic works, including Adrienne Rich: A Tribute Anthology with Split Oak Press. For body and spirit, she belly dances.

Chris Marcotte writes primarily historical fiction and nonfiction. She is writing a mystery based on the ax murder of her third great grandfather. She writes a column for the local newspaper and is working on multiple writing projects. Her work has been published and has won awards in several regional journals. Chris is inspired by history and loves to travel for her research. She lives on a small lake in northern Minnesota where every day is an adventure.

Kenneth N. Margolin is a retired attorney, and lives with his wife, Judith, in Newton, Massachusetts. During his legal career, he made it a sacred mission to avoid legalese in his professional writing, believing that legal writing should be good writing. Ken’s stories have been published or are upcoming in print and online in Short Edition, Dash Literary Journal, Concrete Desert Review, Evening Street Review, Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight, and The Literary Hatchet, among others; poetry in Shot Glass Journal.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, and has taught workshops on understanding dreams and nightmares. She is the author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, Prairie Schooner, Slant, Poet Lore, and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia.

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of eight books of poetry. His most recent books are: Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020) and Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018). His new book, Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance, was published in 2022 by Kelsay Books. Meisel has recent work in Concho River Review, I-70 Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Crab Creek Review, and Trampoline.

Cecil Morris divides his time between the coast of Oregon and the Central Valley of California, where he taught high school English for 37 years. In his retirement, he has turned his attention to writing what he once taught students to understand and (maybe) enjoy. He has poems appearing in Evening Street Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Hole in the Head Review, Midwest Quarterly, Poem, Talking River Review, and other literary magazines. Right now, he might be reading a novel by Louise Erdrich or poetry by Sharon Olds (or David Kirby or Tony Hoagland or Maggie Smith) or giving thanks for his indulgent partner, the mother of their children.

A two-time 2021 nominee for the Pushcart Prize and, more recently, a 2022 nominee for the Best of the Net Award, John Muro is a resident of Connecticut; a graduate of Trinity College, Wesleyan University and the University of Connecticut; and a lover of all things chocolate. He has authored two volumes of poems: In the Lilac Hour and Pastoral Suite in 2020 and 2022, respectively. Both books were published by Antrim House and both are available on Amazon. John’s poems have been widely published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Acumen, Barnstorm, Euphony, Freshwater Literary Journal, River Heron, Sky Island and the Valparaiso Review. Instagram: @johntmuro.

James B. Nicola’s poems have appeared in the Antioch, Southwest and Atlanta Reviews; Rattle; and Barrow Street. His seven full-length collections (2014 to 2022) are Manhattan Plaza, Stage to Page, Wind in the Cave, Out of Nothing, Quickening, Fires of Heaven, and Turns & Twists. His nonfiction book Playing the Audience won a Choice award. His poetry and prose have received a Dana Literary Award, two Willow Review awards, Storyteller’s People’s Choice award, one Best of Net, one Rhysling, and nine Pushcart nominations for which he feels both stunned and grateful. A graduate of Yale and returning contributor to Freshwater Literary Journal, he hosts the Hell’s Kitchen International Writers’ Round Table at his library branch in Manhattan: walk-ins welcome.

Dakota Ouellette is a first-year student at Asnuntuck Community College. They are majoring in psychology, and they are also a certified Recovery Support Specialist. Once they complete their associates degree, they plan on transferring to Eastern Connecticut State University to receive their Bachelor’s in psychology, with a concentration in either mental health counseling or developmental psychology. On top of their academic and career goals, they adore writing. They took creative writing all throughout high school, winning many distinguished awards, including a gold medal for their writing portfolio in 2022 in the Scholastic Arts and Writing competition. Dakota’s poems in this issue won third prize, first honorable mention, and second honorable mention in the 2023 Freshwater Student Writing Contest.

Inspired by the English teacher Antoinette Brim while taking a class at Capital Community College, Ruth Pagano, a senior citizen, risked submitting her poetry. When it was published in Freshwater Literary Journal, she was excited to see her name and creative writing in print again. A retired pediatrician, she had been published in several scientific journals during her career. She now lives in West Hartford and enjoys Zooming and writing poems for her sons and grandchildren.

Since retiring from the practice of Plastic Surgery, Judith Jackson Petry has been able to engage in her passion for writing. She is in love with words. Their power shocks and amazes her while paradoxically providing personal evolution, comfort, and satisfaction. Her goal is to connect with other humans on a soul level of understanding, where words evoke universal feelings. Her work was a semi-finalist for the Faulkner/Wisdom Creative Writing Contest in 2021 and has appeared in HerStry and Beyond Words Literary Magazine.

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), and Lilac And Sawdust (Meadowlark Press) and The Book of Micah (Moonstone Arts). His work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Asheville Literary Review, Nimrod, Washington Square Review, Mudfish, Hawaii Review, and elsewhere.

The poem by Carson Pytell and Zebulon Huset in this issue is from a collaborative poetry project called “Stanza Trades” where the poets write alternating stanzas. Carson Pytell is a writer living outside Albany, New York, whose work appears in such venues as The Adirondack Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Fourth River, and The Heartland Review. He serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of Coastal Shelf, and his most recent chapbooks are Tomorrow Everyday, Yesterday Too (Anxiety Press, 2022), and A Little Smaller Than the Final Quark (Bullshit Lit, 2022). Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer. His writing has appeared in Freshwater Literary Journal, Best New Poets, Meridian, Rattle, The Southern Review, Fence, Texas Review, and Atlanta Review, among others. He also publishes the writing prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the literary journal Coastal Shelf.

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, Wooden Nutmegs, is available from Encircle Publications.

Shalini Samuel resides in her native Kanyakumari, India. She works as a content writer at Kai Marketing. Her favorite hobbies are reading and writing. She is the author of three poetry collections: Singing Soul, The Painted Life, and Drizzle. Some of her poetry has been published in various print and online magazines and anthologies.

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 twice 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.

Nolo Segundo, pen name of L.J. Carber, became a widely published poet in his mid1970s in over 130 literary journals in the U.S., Canada, England, Romania, Scotland, India, Australia, Sweden, Turkey, and in three trade book collections: The Enormity of Existence (2020); Of Ether and Earth (2021); and Soul Songs (2022). Nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, he’s a retired teacher (America, Taiwan, Japan, Cambodia) who has been married to a smart and beautiful Taiwanese woman for fortythree years.

John Sheirer lives in Western Massachusetts and is in his 30th year of teaching at Asnuntuck Community College. His work has appeared recently in Five Minutes, Wilderness House Literary Review, Meat for Tea, Poppy Road Review, Synkroniciti, Otherwise Engaged, 10 By 10 Flash Fiction, The Journal of Radical Wonder, Scribes*MICRO*Fiction, and Goldenrod Review, among others. His latest book is the award-winning Stumbling Through Adulthood: Linked Stories. His story in this issue will be included in a collection of one hundred 100word stories to be published in the fall of 2023 by Meat For Tea Press. Find him at JohnSheirer.com.

Beate Sigriddaughter, www.sigriddaughter.net, grew up in Nürnberg, Germany. Her playgrounds were a nearby castle and World War II bomb ruins. She lives in Silver City, New Mexico (Land of Enchantment), where she was poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Her latest collections are short stories, Dona Nobis Pacem (Unsolicited Press, December 2021), and poetry, Wild Flowers (FutureCycle Press, February 2022). In her blog, Writing in A Woman’s Voice, she publishes other women’s voices.

Susan Winters Smith was born in Massachsetts, grew up in Vermont, and now lives in Connecticut with her husband Stephen. She has a B.S. in Psychology and an M.A. in Education. She has been writing all of her life while attending school, raising children, and working in the fields of Special Education, free-lance Journalism, and Social Work. Susan is a member of CAPA and LVW. She is also an associate member of the Abenaki Clan of the Hawk in Vermont. Her many interests include genealogy, environmentalism, spirituality, photography, and music. Susan has had articles and poetry published in newspapers and journals, and has self-published two mystery novels, two poetry books, two children’s books, and a humor book. For more information, see www.wintersmithbooks.com.

Victoria Lynn Smith lives by Lake Superior, a source of inspiration, happiness, and mystery. Her work has been published by Brevity Blog, Better Than Starbucks, Hive Avenue Literary Journal, Persimmon Tree, Jenny, and regional journals. Her short story “Not Once” will appear in the 2022 issue of the 45th Parallel. Her essay “Show and Tell to Remember” won second place for humor in the 2022 Bacopa Literary Review. She was a semifinalist in the Wisconsin People & Ideas 2022 fiction contest. She is working on a collection of short stories. More at: https://writingnearthelake.org/.

Matthew J. Spireng’s 2019 Sinclair Prize-winning book Good Work was published in 2020 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.

Joshua Michael Stewart is the author of three poetry collections: Break Every String, The Bastard Children of Dharma Bums, and Love Something. His poems have appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Salamander, Plainsongs, Brilliant Corners, South Dakota Review, Permafrost, and many others. He lives in Ware, Massachusetts. www.joshuamichaelstewart.com

Steve 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.

Kelly Talbot has been an editor for Wiley, Macmillan, Oxford, Pearson Education and other major publishers. His writing has appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies. He divides his time between Indianapolis, Indiana, and Timisoara, Romania.

John Tustin’s poetry has appeared in many disparate literary journals since 2009. fritzware.com/johntustinpoetry contains links to his published poetry online.

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.

Diana Woodcock is the author of seven chapbooks and four poetry collections, most recently Facing Aridity, published in 2021 as the 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature finalist. Forthcoming in 2023 is Holy Sparks (2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award finalist). Recipient of the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders, her work appears in Best New Poets 2008 and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Currently teaching at VCUarts Qatar, she holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where she researched poetry’s role in the pursuit of an environmental ethic.

James K. Zimmerman’s writing appears in Carolina Quarterly, Chautauqua, Folio, Lumina, Nimrod, Pleiades, Rattle, Salamander, 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

Asnuntuck Community College 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, Asnuntuck Community College does not discriminate in employment on the basis of veteran status or criminal record. The following individuals has 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) 253-1273, Asnuntuck Community College, 170 Elm Street, Enfield, CT 06082