I Stop Writing the Poem to fold the clothes. No matter who lives or who dies, I'm still a woman. I'll always have plenty to do. I bring the arms of his shirt together. Nothing can stop our tenderness. I'll get back to the poem. I'll get back to being a woman. But for now there's a shirt, a giant shirt in my hands, and somewhere a small girl standing next to her mother watching to see how it's done. by Tess Gallagher
In the Bone-Cracking Cold BY M. BARTLEY SEIGEL On this cross-quarter day, quick to temper and cool, your long lashes startle me with their rime of hoarfrost, and I am snared like a rabbit pulled into your gravity by the run of our long love affair together. The seasons race past, one following another, and the rising sap is soon to halo the maples again. I will happily freeze in the bone-cracking cold, just to watch you walk slowly through this sugarbush, rare as a sundog incandescent in a fog of softly falling snow.
Ashberries: Letters BY PHILIP METRES 1. Outside, in a country with no word for outside, they cluster on trees, red bunches. I looked up ryabina, found mountain ash. No mountains here, just these berries cradled in yellow leaves. When I rise, you fall asleep. We barely know each other, you said on the phone last night. Today, sun brushes the wall like an empty canvas, voices from outside drift into this room. I can't translate—my words, frostbitten fingers. I tell no one, how your hands ghost over my back, letters I hold. 2. Reading children's stories by Tolstoy, Alyosha traces his index over the alphabet [...]
Speaking While Masked As the pandemic enters its third year, the role of masks in reducing the risk of infection has been well documented. In the words of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Correct and consistent mask use is a critical step everyone can take to prevent getting and spreading COVID-19." Unfortunately, the protective barriers that masks create can hamper communication unless we compensate for them. I suspect that anyone who has worn a mask has struggled, at times, to be understood. More than once, I have had to repeat myself while placing an order at Starbucks, as in a [...]
Book of the Month: Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977) Critical Evaluation "Toni Morrison’s first two books — “The Bluest Eye” with the purity of its terrors and “Sula” with its dense poetry and the depth of its probing into a small circle of lives — were strong novels. Yet, firm as they both were in achievement and promise, they didn’t fully forecast her new book, “Song of Solomon.” Here the depths of the younger work are still evident, but now they thrust outward, into wider fields, for longer intervals, encompassing many more lives. The result is a long prose [...]
Tennessee Valley Authority BY ISABEL DUARTE-GRAY The corpse boat split the lilies in a black and heaving ribbon in a final day on earth. This lake ain't lake the way a god shapes lakes with claws of ice. A living man remembers when this hole was not a place of many waters but a city drowned in just a day. Underneath the lilies can't you see the roofs where finches threw a nest for sowing panic grass and babies. There was brides made in this place where herons sweep at corners. Mudcats breed here now their knowing whiskers rooted. Home the only [...]
Internet Support Group BY CHELSEA B. DESAUTELS In the shade of a maple tree, on a grassy hill, three women laid hands on me. One saw a cave in my hips. Another felt bricks rising from a brook. The last heard a bellow from deep within the woods. We were strangers come together to spend an afternoon drinking tea & sharing stories of cellular bad luck, then suddenly makeshift healers summoning our mothers' lessons on touch— on heat & symmetry, tenderness & release. From above, we might have looked like sundials or spokes on a round knitting loom. We wanted so [...]
First Thought BY LORNA DEE CERVANTES best thought, you had taught me — a river runs through it, the foot of the soul standing stubbornly in the freeze, all the shards of ice crumpling up the banks, what survives in the ignorance. Play it away. Be ceremony. Be a lit candle to what blows you. Outside, the sun gives a favorite present, mountain nests in ironic meadows, otter takes off her shoes, the small hands of her feet reaching, reaching; still, far away people are dying. Crisp one dollar bills fold another life. You taught me to care in the moment, carve [...]
Facing It BY YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn't dammit: No tears. I'm stone. I'm flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way—the stone lets me go. I turn that way—I'm inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap's white flash. Names shimmer on a woman's blouse but when she [...]
Advice to Myself by Louise Erdich Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor. Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster. Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup. Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins. Don't even sew on a button. Let the wind have its way, then the earth that invades as dust and then the dead foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch. Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome. Don't keep all the pieces [...]
