S.D. Dillon

Unintended Consequences at Mack Lake, 1980

S.D. Dillon

The controlled burn spirals Out of control, Torches the Jack pine habitat Rebuilt in narrow columns, and fades into charred remains. Things cool down. Birds nest. The return of Kirtland’s warbler From the precipice Brought out haters, with posters: red circle & a slash Through a female black-throated blue warbler.

S.D. Dillon has been published in the Detroit Free Press, FIELD, The South Carolina Review, the Hawai’i Pacific Review, The RavensPerch, and Lighthouse Weekly, and his poetry is forthcoming in Walloon Writers Review, Tar River Poetry, and Tampa Review. He has an AB from Princeton and an MFA from Notre Dame, where he was Managing Editor of The Bend in 2004. He subsequently worked for three years in the editorial departments of a boutique literary agency and Carroll & Graf Publishers, where he acquired and edited a handful of titles. He lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

Crow envies the bees

Peter Grandbois

Whose thoughts never betray them when their children fall to that temple constructed of web

And the woodpeckers, who are too busy to choose the wrong things to love

The starlings, too, he envies for the intuition that tells them when one body ends and another begins

Meanwhile, he sits atop the telephone line, beside which this path goes, staring out over a dump

All this seeing is a trick

All this seeming a joke

It’s never about the thing that shines

“Remember, nothing is permanent,” the squirrel says from its upside-down perch below him

He hates squirrels

“If there weren’t so many . . . If I wasn’t . . .” He stops short, resenting his own whining sickness

The squirrel skitters away

Dark settles around him, and a quiet under the high wheat

In the distance, horses wade toward the moon listening to the sound of a lone crow

damning each and every god worth naming

Peter Grandbois is the author of thirteen books, the most recent of which is the Snyder prize-winning, Last Night I Aged a Hundred Years (Ashland Poetry Press 2021). His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in over one hundred and fifty journals. His plays have been nominated for several New York Innovative Theatre Awards and have been performed in St. Louis, Columbus, Los Angeles, and New York. He is poetry editor at Boulevard Magazine and teaches at Denison University in Ohio. You can find him at www.petergrandbois.com

Lili

Cameron Morse

In Yantai, Lili rode on the back of my bicycle, an arm wrapped around my waist, and I peddled us to the beach on our first date, not knowing she’d fallen asleep as a girl and rolled off the rooftop. Her mom fed the pet dog to the hospital director. Her mother, who could always find a vein, was a master seamstress. My wife mastered raw meat before I could boil water. With her cousin, she liked to torture cockroaches. I knew none of these things when I asked her to marry me: the idyllic childhood fields of rapeseed, half-repressed memories.

Cameron Morse is Senior Reviews editor at Harbor Review and the author of eight collections of poetry. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is The Thing Is (Briar Creek Press, 2021). He holds an MFA from the University of Kansas City-Missouri and lives in Independence, Missouri, with his wife Lili and three children. For more information, check out his Facebook page or website.

Grief or memory

Akshaya Pawaskar

Can you wash it off with a swim in the sea, salt mixing with salt diluting, like body rinsed of the sins? If you take it to the mountains and leave it in the thin air, bury it under the snow, will it call you back? Like escape artists we run, unlock the trunk swim to the surface, free ourselves from the cage, yet sorrow like love comes unbidden.

Can we decorate it with jewels of metaphors, in colorful clothes of verse, dilute it in soft music or turn a deaf ear, surround ourselves with noise so loud that we can’t hear its persistent knock. Just when walking down the street having left the baggage in the garbage pail around the corner you feel light, the doorbell rings and who do you see standing at the door, teary eyed, making you feel guilty for having left it behind and moved on. So we trudge along adrift on this wave of loss as we are washed ashore, it pulls us back in. Like a snake it sheds the old skin and starts afresh. We are free falling into this abyss. Numbers have faces now, obituaries are not merely ink on paper One such hangs on the wall, Inside a frame, garlanded. He weighs heavy on his empty chair. He is everywhere yet he is nowhere. He forgot his suitcase, his pocketbook, his cellphone, his homestead. He forgot us. but he lives on, until our grief dies, then he is a memory.

Akshaya Pawaskar is a doctor practicing in India and poetry is her passion. Her poems have been published in Tipton Poetry Journal, Shards, The Blue Nib, North of Oxford, Indian Rumination, Rock and Sling among many others. She won the Craven Arts Council ekphrastic poetry competition in 2020 and was placed second in The Blue Nib chapbook contest in 2018. Her first solo poetry chapbook,The falling in and the falling out, was published by Alien Buddha Press in January 2021.