Lost

I was already lost in the city, no map or phrase book, when the man with the umbrella began following me. Or, more likely, he had already been following me when I became lost.

It wasn't until a series of wrong turns brought me back to the same intersection I'd crossed only ten minutes before that I became fully aware of the tapping. At each cross walk, I could hear him behind me, tapping the metal end of his umbrella on the pavement. At first I thought nothing of it. I pulled my scarf tight against the cold and walked on. I'd left the hotel empty handed, thinking I would only go a few blocks and the city was laid out in perfect squares, without even alleys to confuse things, but then a street turned mid-block and I kept going. I'd noticed no such street on the map.

It was cold to be out and rather late in the day, getting on toward dusk, but I was convinced my walk would be short and harmless, just the sort of thing I needed to work up an appetite. I wondered what my pursuer looked like, but I dared not turn to see. How did I know he was a man? Some things one just knows. As we passed a pet store, I glanced to my left, hoping to catch his reflection, but saw only the wary eye of a rather large goldfish, which seemed to watch me, too, as if it could tell I was a foreigner. Then the hubcap of a car flew off its wheel and rolled past me, forcing me jump out of the way lest I be lacerated by rapidly spinning metal, and I turned around to watch it continue on. I looked for the man then, too, but there was no behind me. He must have ducked into a courtyard, I thought, or a doorway. We were on a residential block at that time, one I was sure I had never been on before.

I no longer knew where I was going. I hoped to come upon one of the few major streets that I knew. However, as soon as I turned my attention back to the traffic, waiting to cross, the tapping began again. I started to panic. I ran out into traffic and darted across the street, continued down the block weaving around the other pedestrians, knocking a teenage couple into a door way, enduring the curses of the people, foreign words and phrases but unmistakable in tone. I saw the patch of ice a second before I was upon it. The moments of my accident passed slowly – my foot upon the ice, slipping forward; my center of balance suddenly not centered; the awful feeling of a complete fall, the momentary suspense of the entire body in the air; landing, my head thudding sharply against the pavement. Dizziness, although I was already on the ground. Then a tap, and the metal tip of the umbrella planted itself close to my head. The man leaned down over me, his hand outstretched.

"Pardon me," he said, "but you have something on your eyelash."

When his hand touched my face, a shiver coursed through my body, his face seemed to waver as if underwater, and then there was nothing.

Anne Earney lives in St. Louis with her husband and several well-mannered cats. She earned her MFA from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Her fiction has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as The Bat Shat, Hayden's Ferry Review, Natural Bridge, The Linnet's Wings, Six Little Things, Night Train and Versal.

Field Nurse, 1862

        If the trenches cut from the weight of the coffins
on the carriage were to fill, let it be with water
clean enough to drink, with light, or with forgiveness.

        If the men rolling bread rations into rosary beads
were to pray, it would be for the nursery of birds,           
fifty-nine, the number of feathers in a wing,

        the number of bones in her hands
as she gathers their coats, their blouses,
the sleeves & collars she holds in her palms,

        feeling for a pulse.  & the men, their hands
having never touched her, but having turned the earth
for graves, pour something of themselves inside.       

        One soldier watches the field stitch together,
hears angels sing where cornstalks are cut,
piled, burned for black smoke.           

        Another cries out, and she cannot feed
him because the water for washing is not for drinking.               
Her breasts open again, sweet scent of juniper,           

        stains the color of cream.  & under threadbare canvas,            
over porcelain bowls, she scrubs the milk from her dress,       
strings it between branches to dry, a cloud of bees stinging the wind            

        that keeps its shape. & every night but tonight,    
she squeezes her fingers into a fist, touches the knot of her body,           
the size of a heart, the shape of a horse’s hoof.            

        She presses palm to palm, prays: if this battlefield floods,                
let their rifles be driftwood, let the men believe
that all things are boats, let them sign their names

        in the spaces between stars. Outside the walls of her tent,            
she hears the echo of the cavalry, the steeds galloping
off months of dust, seeding the clouds with rain.

Brandon Courtney spent four years in the United States Navy. His poetry is forthcoming or appears in Best New Poets 2009, Linebreak, and The Los Angeles Review among others. He attends the M.F.A. program at Hollins University.

-----------------------------
This piece was selected by Guest Editor Kelly Davio

Kelly Davio is a poet and teacher in the Seattle area. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Northwest Institute of Literary Arts (Whidbey Writers’ Workshop), and works as an instructor of English as a Second Language.

She currently serves as Managing Editor for Los Angeles Review, and Associate Poetry Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal. She is am also a book reviewer for Women’s Review of Books. My poetry has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, and my debut collection, Burn This House, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

Canopy Road Blues

You just need to feel it, they all said to me,
so I let myself feel it the only way I know how--

A Florida summer turns to a Florida fall the way
colors soften at dusk or after rain. From my deck

the webs of banana spiders break like wine glasses
when swept and scattered, and beneath my window

a chorus of tree frogs croons a lonely Cajun aubade.
This story has a predictable ending. This story

belongs in a sinkhole. There are only so many times
a Southern man leaves in one season, only so many hers--

and hers—he’s shucked from the gulf shore. Tar balls,
he tells me. You’re the oyster. And I know that I’m

the hummingbird moth while everyone yelps hornet!
or butterfly! I’m the kind that rusts in a hurricane; I’ll

haunt egrets after I’m gone. And I’m the cottonmouth
slashing through wild blackberries and doveweed,

the lone ghost bike peddling down a canopy road until
I can shroud myself in kudzu, drape myself in vines,

shrink down to just a leaf or a salamander when it all
becomes too humid, when the constellations itch

like fire ant bites, pressing in far too close from the sky.
If things could just stay where they belong: cicadas

in the crab grass, Spanish moss like sorrow on wire,
his thumb on the button of skin between my hipbone

and thigh. But my bed has become a swamp of rotting
gator tail, my lover, a chupacabra I barely recognize.

All night long I cast off leaves that brown, yellow and red
before my fall. And I feel it. I feel it all the damn time.

Anne Barngrover is currently an MFA candidate at Florida State University and is originally from Cincinnati, Ohio.  Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Houston Literary Review, FreightTrain, and Magazine Americana, among others.

-----------------------------
This piece was selected by Guest Editor Kelly Davio

Kelly Davio is a poet and teacher in the Seattle area. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Northwest Institute of Literary Arts (Whidbey Writers’ Workshop), and works as an instructor of English as a Second Language.

She currently serves as Managing Editor for Los Angeles Review, and Associate Poetry Editor for Fifth Wednesday Journal. She is am also a book reviewer for Women’s Review of Books. My poetry has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, and my debut collection, Burn This House, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.

Borges, the Blind Seer
 
Wind, like hot, sour breath on my neck, blowing down the godforsaken scablands. My palomas are sore after riding almost to dawn, that's what Luis calls my tetas when he plays with them behind the stables after he walks my dun mare Minerva to cool her from my morning ride, because he says his rough, brown hands and tongue make me coo like a mourning dove on the pampas. Luis is a gaucho who will have to do until my stupid cow of an older sister, my half-sister Juana, I call her Juana La Vaca to her face, finds a man who needs the dowry, some hard-luck aristocrat down to his last 100 head of cattle. If Papa caught us, he'd slit Luis’s throat so the blood spurted like fat raindrops splotching the dust of the paddock, and then send me to the nunnery in Rosario faster than a bronco kicks through his stall door to reach a mare in heat. But it's a full moon tonight, I can feel in my gut the curse coming on, my palomas are aching, and here I am, a good 20 leagues from home, my hands bound, this big stallion between my legs, abducted by a tall stranger with a northern accent, maybe Paraguayan, a knife scar on his left cheek, I'm thirsty, I have to pee again, and last time I caught him looking at my culo shining in the moonlight.

 It started just after sunset when the carnival came to town. My little brother Tavio, named for Papa and Abuelo, Old Octavio who owns half the land from here to Rio Plata, escorted La Vaca and me to the gypsy camp by the river. There was a chill in the damp air of the cottonwood grove, so we bought three strong mates. As the warm green infusion poured down my throat, I felt a pleasant tingle up my legs and my head buzzed while we walked past a campfire and some wagons to a clearing where a few people I recognized from town were waiting in line. 
          
When we got to the front of the queue, a short, stout woman of indeterminate age, dressed in black rags head to toe, led us to a peculiar glass-fronted wooden cabinet resting on a weathered orange crate. Inside it was the bust of a man, just the head and shoulders, a Turk or perhaps a Chinaman, it was hard to say in the flickering lantern light, wearing a purple robe and a turban festooned with gold stars, and in gold paint on the back wall above his head, in an elegant cursive script, it said Borges, the Blind Seer. Go ahead, she growled at me, feed him a coin and he'll tell your fortune.
          

I reached beneath my red wool shawl, fingered the hidden pocket sewn into its silk lining, and pulled out the peso I was saving for La Virgen at Sunday mass. God forgive me, I fed that smooth silver wafer into the slot, and stared transfixed as the automaton’s eyes slowly opened and emanated a ghastly green glow. A man's voice from inside the carved wooden head, speaking Castilian with a heavy accent that might have been Romanian or even Egyptian, called me by my full baptismal name - Maria Carmenza Aguilar y Delacruz - I felt that I might swoon - in your hour of need, turn not to God nor men but rely on your own wits to save you – Blasphemer! and then it shuddered to a stop as I gasped, then choked, then shook like a dry leaf in the wind as my heart galloped in my throat. What's the matter, Hermana? my brother whispered, but I just stood there, paralyzed with fear and awe as the old gitana tore off the slip of paper that hung from a slot in the cabinet, pressed it to my palm, pushed me aside and yelled, Next!

Did you see that, did you hear that, that…thing? I said. All I heard, said Tavio, was the whir of gears and the rustle of paper.

Away from the lanterns, it was too dark to read because the moon had yet to rise, so I slipped the fortune against my heart for safekeeping. Where is Juana? Tavio asked, you stay here while I find her. In the next instant, before I could so much as cry for help, I was plucked off my feet as if by a winged demon, and we thundered up the sandy bank and into the black night.

Juana, that traitor! But no, La Vaca is too stupid. Tavio and Papa. They’re probably sending me off to a foreign ranch because they know I’m too damned smart and much too beautiful to be trusted.

And now, as the sky blooms rosy in the east, we arrive at a small shelter, a way station. The man helps me down, hobbles the horses, and goes to the well. I lick my parched lips. It’s three long Ave Marias till the pail splashes, a deep drop to the water on this dry stretch of high plains. As he pulls the rope, hand over hand, I see what I must do. I seize my chance and kick him hard in the orto, and that buzzard flies head first down the well. I sink to my knees and whisper, thank you Jesucristo for my salvation. And then, thank you Maria for the strength to kick hard and the courage to choose my destiny. And then I rise to my feet, born into the new day.

The sun is up now, staring at me with its angry red eye, but I notice that my headache’s gone and I’m hungry. I twist my bound hands down my blouse and pull out the crinkled yellow paper.  It reads, Your fate is a labyrinth, a spiral, a black well of infinite depth. I toss that fortune down the well, and turn to the horses.

Ray Sharp is a public health planner who lives and works on the Keweenaw Peninsula along Michigan’s rugged Lake Superior shore. Sharp studied Spanish and Latin American literature at the University of Colorado, and regards Lorca and Neruda among his literary heroes. His poems have appeared at Caper Literary Journal, Eclectic Flash, qarrtsiluni, Referential Magazine, SPARK and vox poetica, and can be seen  “Borges, the Blind Seer” is Sharp’s first published story.

The Unmaking of The World

   
On Monday, the mail didn’t come. Like everyone else, Martha Eshleman had been informed that this would be the final day of delivery, but she couldn’t help lifting the brass lid, peering inside the box, then letting the lid clang shut. Across the street, old Mr. Davies stood in his doorway, looking up the hill toward the spot where the postal service car had parked every day before. When his eyes met Martha’s, he laughed an embarrassed little laugh, hitched up his pants, and went inside. Poor Mr. Davies. She knew that it was more than absent-mindedness. He had been paying his respects, observing a moment of silence, unlike the McCafferty boys pedaling their go-carts along the sidewalk or the man who’d bought the old Werntz place, happily decapitating dandelions with his weed whacker. The younger ones still had their losses coming to them. How could they know?

She should have been prepared for it, but like the loss of a loved one after a long illness, one is never really prepared. Looking at all the empty mailboxes up and down her street, she felt a heaviness in her chest and tears prickling her eyes. Never more would her days be cleaved so predictably in two, her sun and her moon, before the mail and after the mail. She hadn’t minded the advertisements too much. Sometimes the coupons were for items she could actually use, or for a restaurant she really did mean to try. And bills were a part of life, indeed, a proof of life. Sometimes there were free samples, a single serving of breakfast cereal or laundry detergent. Once, she won a three-day stay at Colonial Williamsburg, although she didn’t go, because Harry couldn’t stand the idea of sitting through a sales pitch. She supposed it was silly to get sentimental over the loss of birthday cards at her age. However, she knew she would miss the Christmas cards, even the ones with the long letters inside that made her feel dull and inconsequential.

But as the world was made in seven days, so it would be unmade. Martha blinked. Now where had that gray thought come from? She remembered only one bleak thought from that book of the Bible, about how the earth was formless and empty, with darkness over the surface of the deep. Oh, maybe that was hell. In any case, right after that, there was the part about light, and how it separated the day from darkness. Yes, that was it. Let there be light.

Later, watching from her window, a habit she would not break during the remaining days, she saw a neighbor hammering upwards at his wooden mailbox until, finally, it crashed to his porch and broke, leaving a square patch of paint much brighter than she ever could have imagined.



The news ceased, too. Martha drummed her fingers on the foyer table. Was it that same Monday? Could all of those earthly connections have ceased at once, just like that? She called up the staircase, “Harry, did you pay the paper boy?” But Harry didn’t answer. So often, he was so wrapped up in what he was doing that the whole world could have vanished from beneath him and he’d just go on checking the charges on his Medicare statement or watching the history channel.



So out of habit, Martha watched for the Monday morning paper. Not that the news ever changed much. Always some team won, and another team lost. Suicide bombers were always blowing up in some faraway place. Politicians were always getting caught with their pants down or their hands in the cookie jar. The Royal Farm store was held up, again, and Macy’s was having a white sale, again. One TV series was featuring its premiere episode, and another had gone to reruns. There was comfort in this sameness, in not being surprised. Martha looked forward to these small affirmations, neatly folded, bagged, and sailing toward her porch.

But there was no newspaper on Monday morning. She was not the only one who noticed. Mr. Davies walked from his front door to the street, looked into his hedge and up the hill toward the main road, hitched up his pants, and spit into the grass. The Marshes, two doors down the hill, called out, “You didn’t see a Sun, did you?” Some of the other older neighbors paced the sidewalks with their hands on their hips and shook their heads. Words like “service nowadays” and “hell in a handbasket” were carried on the wind.

But there was no news on the air, either, radio or TV. There was only static where WBAL radio used to be, and that petered out after a second or two. When she clicked the remote to CNN, she saw only those three big letters and a newscaster with his mouth gaping open, caught in an odd holding pattern. No pixelation. Just a still. Same with Fox News. Harry wouldn’t like that one little bit.

She clicked through the local news stations. A similar picture appeared on each channel, a well-coiffed head with a gaping mouth. Perhaps it was only her imagination, but all those newscasters’ faces seemed to hover like Mardi Gras masks, with some larger darker self behind them. Martha shivered. She knew a fertile imagination was a good thing, but it could come back to bite you, too.

Now the end of mail delivery, that had been expected. Everyone had been forewarned. Conservation of energy and all that. The price of stamps. The convenience of online payments. Who wrote letters and sent cards anymore, anyway? But TV? Martha bent down to her cable box and jiggled and twisted connections as best as she could. Harry would know what to do, and he wouldn’t make her feel silly about it, either. He would push a button on one of the remotes, then another, and suddenly there would be sound and a perfect picture, and he would smile and say, “Your turn to choose,” and she would always pick something Harry would like, the Orioles game or anything with Clint Eastwood.

She kicked the TV stand and only succeeded in sending a cascade of old TV Guides to the carpet. She yelled “Harry” so loud that her throat hurt after, then plunked down on the sofa. A wave of loss, of old regrets, of all the things she should have said and not said, of the little slights she shouldn’t have let bother her and the gestures of affection she couldn’t be bothered to make, they all washed over her. She slumped into the cushions. Harry couldn’t help her now. There was a crackling sound from the set, a zigzag of lightning on the screen, then a whoosh of the anchorman into a hole in the center, like a genie back into his bottle. No three wishes. Not even one.



The clouds came on Tuesday, a fog that coupled the land and sky. The sun and moon were still there, poked deep into fog, but there was no telling where they were on the horizon. A pinpoint of star appeared as her eyes adjusted, and what she thought might be Mars, but she thought her house may as well have been standing on a pedestal in the eternal void of space for all she could tell. Martha blinked furiously, trying to make out edges, the sidewalk from the grass, the grass from the driveway, the driveway from the street. The street from houses and trees, full of leaves and nests. The vermilion of a Robin’s red breast on her lawn, or the koi swimming in the Millers’ fishpond next door. But the world had been scrubbed of its colors. All fog, like the time she had flown out west to the Grand Canyon with Harry, up in clouds, and all the world below the plane had simply vanished. At least then, there had been a world above, the familiar blue, the heavens. She held his hand, then, and thought, if something happened to the plane and they died, it would be all right. The children were grown. She remembered thinking, here we are, already in heaven. But they had landed, and he had let go her hand.

At first, when the fog persisted into the afternoon, long past a time when morning mist should have burned off in the daylight, she thought maybe her eyes were back to their old tricks. Maybe allergies, hopefully not cataracts, and, please God, not glaucoma, which had run in the family. But her eyes didn’t hurt. Other things hurt, her joints, naturally enough, and there was the occasional bout of angina, but not her eyes. No, there was nothing wrong with her eyes.



On Wednesday, the fruits and vegetables of the garden rotted. Night creatures had left bite marks in the berries, plucked the flowers from the squash vines. Could it have been that very next Wednesday, or coincidentally, a Wednesday? A Wednesday that stood for some ordained time. Some sort of metaphoric Wednesday. And why Wednesday, anyway? All she knew was that at some point, the heirloom tomatoes and jalapeno peppers had lost their flavor. The celery was limp. The sugar snap peas didn’t snap. There were mealybugs in her oatmeal. She hadn’t seen those in years.

The seedless fruits, one of the few luxuries from the grocery store she allowed Harry and herself, were gone. As much as she had enjoyed seedless oranges and grapes, and the watermelons with only small white seeds that could be swallowed, she had always wondered how they could go on that way. No seeds for seedlings. No seedlings to grow and bear fruit. No genesis of trees. They couldn’t go on that way. And they didn’t. Harry understood this, the science of it all. He was the rational one, the one with all the answers. Martha only knew that life had lost its taste. And there was evening, and morning, and —how that third day planted itself so firmly in her mind.



Later, Thursday, the sun and moon and all the stars had burrowed so far into the fog that Martha wondered whether they still existed at all. And of all things, the power went out. The familiar hum of the refrigerator, the whine of the dehumidifier, the occasional pumping of the sump pump, all the ticks and whirs and drones of the house, they simply stopped.

Martha thumped the palm of her hand to the side of her head a couple of times to make sure she hadn’t gotten water in her ears from the shower, but that wasn’t it. She called “Harry” out of habit, and he didn’t answer. When had he answered? Had he answered on some other Thursday and not just ignored her on this Thursday? He had talked to her on Wednesday, hadn’t he? Or maybe that was Tuesday, before she had cried out so loudly? She tried to remember if he had explained to her the science of it all, like he often liked to do, ad infinitum, unfortunately. She was sorry now she hadn’t listened. She called “Harry” once more, just for the reassurance of her own voice, and hummed some old hymn, just to hear the humming of something.

Since there was no electricity to the boiler, by the afternoon Martha had to put on her heavy wool sweater. Odd to wear a sweater. She thought that just that morning it had been mid-summer, with strawberries rambling over the hill at the back of the yard and yellow flowers opening on the tomato vines. But the old do get cold. She looked out the front window toward where Mr. Davies’ house was, presumably, and pulled her sweater tightly across her chest. Her bifocals were still in the pocket, since she rarely had to use them anymore, and she put them on to peer through the top for a moment, and then through the bottom. No night or day, no years, no change of season. It was all the same. Damned fog. Where was the sun to govern the day, and the moon to govern the night, when you needed them?



No mockingbirds or doves awakened Martha on Friday. No burbling from the fishpond next door. Poor koi. There was still no electricity. Without the water pump and filtration system that the Millers spent so much time futzing around with, those lovely koi wouldn’t survive long, and scarlet Hanako, who would eat peas and bits of watermelon from her hand, who was older than her Harry, would not survive. Some would survive longer than others. Martha wondered if the koi would turn on each other or simply shut down quietly as the pumps.

Martha turned away from Harry’s side of the bed toward the blue numbers that signaled her to rise and shine. But the face of her alarm clock was black now, inscrutable. She thought, “Time’s up,” and squeezed her eyes shut, pressed her palms together and prayed, but God wasn’t talking. The birds wouldn’t sing. Already, she missed the golds and reds of the tanagers and cardinals, and especially the vermilions, of her neighbors’ koi.



An old habit, sleeping in on a Saturday, although now that both she and Harry had retired, she supposed every day was a Saturday. How many had there been now, during the unmaking of the world? The land animals vanishing into the fog, one by one, following the birds of the air and fish of the sea—just like that nice anchorman with the open mouth. She wondered what he had been trying to say, or if his mouth was open in hunger, asking for one last little bit of manna. Martha had stopped feeling hungry, but she missed the cattle that had fed her, missed knowing they were out there somewhere in an old-fashioned red barn. And she missed the chickens she had fried very crisply, the way Harry liked, even if it wasn’t the best thing for his heart. Some things you know intellectually, he would say, but that didn’t always change what you wanted, what you did.

Martha tried to make the image of God in her mind. God in man’s own image. Mr. Davies, old as sin, yanking up his trousers. The Marshes, bones of each other’s bones, looking for the Sun. Her Harry, explaining at great length, with great patience, the inexplicable, how heaven could seem so close, so blue, but with no place to land. But none of the images stayed. They slipped, as if weary of reaching a finger across time toward an outstretched hand.

On Sunday, Martha Eshleman rolled toward Harry’s side of the bed and found the hole in his side, the side where she had burrowed on cold nights for most of her long life, the hole God had opened like a genie bottle, and returned home to that place she had left so very long ago, tucked among his ribs.



Barbara Westwood Diehl is founding editor of the Baltimore Review and a Master of Arts in Writing student at Johns Hopkins University. She works for the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her short stories and poetry have been published or accepted for publication in a variety of publications, including MacGuffin, Confrontation, Rosebud, Thema, JMWW, Potomac Review, American Poetry Journal, Measure, Little Patuxent Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Able Muse, and Gargoyle.

It Makes All the Difference

She is lounging on a pool float
but not swimming.
no one has used that long-handled net scoop
and the dead bugs are floating
        like show girls in leotards
        fallen from their trapeze,
now suspended by a safety net of green murk.
she skims her fingers across the surface
and the algae hangs there
        like a lover’s hair,
slowly slides off and flies
        like a private jet
as she hurtles it at the wall of the courtyard.
it splats. stays stuck to the stucco.
no one joins her pool party.
they smile sweetly from the sides.
check their watches. make excuses:
the kids. a meeting. forgot a suit.
I  have an extra Speedo, she offers,
the cabana boy will fetch it for you.
I’m in the weeds at work, he says,
straightening his tie nervously,
then waves a sheepish goodbye and hurries away.
She flings a clump if slimy algae
at the back of his head
        like a grenade.
        she misses. oh well.
she adjusts her straw hat and sunglasses.
sips her iced tea. points her pedicured toes
and dips them gingerly into the muck.
she prepares for a refreshing plunge
by closing her eyes. it makes all the difference
to close her eyes.

Renee Podunovich's writing has been described as merging science, nature, and soul. She explores human experience in relation to a living planet. Renee lives off the grid in southwest Colorado in an “Earthship” home. Her most recent publications include Mississippi Review, Boston Literary Magazine, White Whale Review, The View From Here, RATTLE and SW Colorado Arts Perspective. Her book of poems “If There Is a Center No One Knows Where It Begins” (Art Juice Press) is available online. Find her here.

How to Finally Cry
 
I’ve held in the death of you since you died.
When it came, you were probably
laid out like this: In a hospital bed, your head
in your husband’s lap, blouse not cut off
because there was no need to even try to save you. 
 
I’ve held in the death of you and the way your blood 
had to be ignored because there was even more bad news.
Ignored, because you had begun to press toward
the place where life isn’t anymore. I’ve held it in
until now. And I don’t want to cloud your memory,
but I don’t think I would by telling
 
you? this poem? the fucking cat?
 
I held in your death until late last night
when I was on my father’s porch. There was a kitten
following a man in a green trench coat.
He asked if the kitten was mine, and I said no.
He picked it up, and said the kitten was his then.
 
Things like this don’t happen, do they? 
Maybe I should ask your headstone. Or maybe 
I should ask your tooth that is lost on the highway, 
between Reliance and White River, South Dakota.

Timothy Black’s first poetic novella, Connecticut Shade, is in its second printing through WSC Press. He teaches poetry at Wayne State College, and is a Cave Canem Fellow. He lives in Wakefield, Nebraska with his wife and two sons.
Timothy’s work has appeared in the anthologies The Logan House Anthology of 21st Century American Poetry, The Great American Roadshow, and Words Like Rain. He has been published in The Platte Valley Review and at bringtheink.com, and has won an Academy of American Poets prize for his poem "Heavy Freight."

The girl who wanted to be a painting
 
To be forever beautiful,
aging with a patina of
centuries – not Dorian
but a landscape of
green meadows with
a small stream where
deer would drink
and the woodsman’s ax
would never fall.
Perhaps the lighting would
change subtly and one
or two would notice
and say Is that picture
more foggy than I remember?
And yet again, No,
it’s a sunny day.
And she, of the painting,
drifting on the stream,
would say
Ah ha!
and smile.

Mara Buck writes and paints in the Maine woods. Her novel Highway To Oblivion is a Short-Listed Finalist for The Faulkner-Wisdom Competition and her poem Charmeuse has been named second in the Carpe Articulum Literary Review 2010 Poetry Competition and is published in the Autumn edition. Other poems may be seen in the anthology Vwa: Poems For Haiti, in Caper Literary Journal, and in Poets For Living Waters. She is the creator of the gallery-sized installation “A Year In Oblivion.” More of her writing can be found here. 

The Woman in the Garden

There is a dead woman in the garden, and she will be there until morning.  The lines are down, road washed out. She came through the back gate, no one knows why, and then she dropped dead. No one knows why.
    I can see her through the window, propped up against the peonies.  Her legs are spread in a wide ‘V’, one of her stockings has pulled itself down and gathers in folds around her ankle. Her coat and her skirt and her hair are grey.
    Mother had wanted to bring her inside, lay her out in the empty room. “Her eyes are still open,” she said. But no one wanted to go outside in the rain to drag in the dead, wet woman, to place their fingers on her jellied eyes.
I do not tell anyone this, but I have seen her before.

Sonata

I. Adagio sostenuto

Sam was watching a commercial and the commercial was there with him.  The commercial showed a man growing agitated in his attempts at sleep, while beyond him and barely sketched a woman’s silhouette dozed on.

    Quiltō, said a toasted female voice.

    “Quiltō,” Sam intoned, sipping his beer.  He acted like he was interested in what TV said, just to humor it.

    Is now Quiltō+.  An extended release sleeping aid with two layers.
“Layers?”

    The man had stopped thrashing under his blanket.  His eyes were closed and his smile pinned on.  The woman—the wife—from over a shoulder observed his contentment, the utter stillness of which had woken her.