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L. Annette Binder

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Martha McCollough

Martha McCollough

Lacuna

L. Annette Binder

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The losses accumulate and the world constricts until the possibilities resolve to nothing but the moment you have together. Grace is the medicine lost or forgotten or left in the fridge. Grace is the hours spent on hold with insurers and receptionists and all the things you forgot to do and remember when you are in bed sleepless. It is the deer beside the road as you drive together to the doctor and the nickname nobody else uses and if she leaves she will take it with her and part of you will be lost, too, but not yet because she knows it still and it sounds like grace when she calls you by your name. There is so much beauty you feel obliged to show her, look look at the sky, at the tiger lilies by the wall and the grass bending and the strange yellow bird perched atop the tree, look, look, you say, and grace rises then like water from a well, it rises and fills the empty spaces.

L. Annette Binder was born in Germany and immigrated to the US as a child. Poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Stone, Town Creek Poetry, and JMWW. She lives in New Hampshire with her family.

Breaking

Betty Stanton

It happens every morning before sunrise when you leave hours before I have expected you to, slipping away when you remember you are late for work, for a morning meeting, or to call your wife and I find myself downtown alone

trying to keep pace with ghosts of old lovers, they come at me dressed like ghosts in fraternity tee-shirts, running shoes. They want something from me. Something small and fragile, something private that I am always letting go.

A withered man on the stoop plays the trumpet just like Herb Alpert's little Spanish flea – humming, I move too slowly to catch the beat of woman's voice next to me lilting across coffee cups. Your face there so casually

across from mine that I would cry out, except that my mouth has better things to do. Like your body spread out over coffee cups and pastries. Later it makes you want to kiss me when I scrape my fingernails across your

knuckles, your shattered breath, before we move apart. I forget the spice of your sweat, your skin and the way we slip together. Pieces from mismatched puzzles, we have sanded ourselves to fit, sharp edges made smooth with

blood, sweat. Here, you say, slide in, and between us the car idles. Leaning to open my door stretches time, whole hours dark across your skin. We wonder which of us will move first.

[Originally published in When Women Waken, Issue 7 (Being), 2015.]

Betty Stanton is a writer who lives and works in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various journals and collections and has been included in anthologies from Dos Gatos Press and Picaroon Poetry Press. She received her MFA from The University of Texas at El Paso.

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