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      May 4, 2025Chera HammonsOutage

      Suddenly we live in a house that doesn’t hum,
      on a barren street of dark houses blank and towering,
      abandoned bulwarks backlit by the glow
      of a city miles away across dark fields.
      The walls become thin against the night—
      the air within and without, the same temperature.
      Drywall divides us from the children of wolves.
      When a light goes out, what becomes of the light?
      Does it disappear, the way we do?
      The well gives no water if the pump can’t run.
      The electric fences can’t hold the horses in.
      When my father, who lives half an hour away,
      hears that our power has gone out,
      he tells me again the story of two peregrines
      which had been courting in the wind over his roof,
      how they landed together on a telephone pole,
      sparked an arc and thunder,
      and fell to the ground side-by-side, dead.
      The house had no electricity for hours after that.
      What could bear to keep going, after that?
      Our neighbors are slowly vanishing.
      An old vessel finally tumbles from its place in the stars.
      Tonight, we cancel our plans. We peel oranges
      by lantern light. We shine flashlight beams
      on the ground before we step there.
      We remember the taper candles and matches
      that wait in the kitchen drawer that we almost never open.
      Listen: the dog barks and barks, inconsolable.
      Something unfathomable is happening outside.
      What I want is what happened to the peregrines.
      Not the singed feathers, the earth-tilting stillness,
      but a love that takes the lights out with it when it goes.
      The kind of loss that will be recounted over
      and over again in the dark.
       

      from Poets Respond

      Chera Hammons

      “On Monday, when the power went out in Spain and Portugal, my partner and I inexplicably lost power at our house in Texas, too. The weather was lovely, warm and calm, no storms, no fires, and we still don’t know what happened. But I found out later that many people across the world were, like us, sitting in darkness.”

      May 3, 2025Greg KosmickiWhenever I Peel an Orange

      In Memoriam, J.W.

      It’s 1:30 a.m. or so, and a little while ago
      I ate a banana.
      I got up from the kitchen table
      and dropped the peeling into the trash can
      then ate an orange that I peeled
      all in a long continuous strip
      and dropped that in the trash too.
      The orange, like all oranges,
      was tart and burned my dry winter lips
      a little when I ate it.
      Whenever I peel an orange that way
      I think of this guy I used to know
      at my job who was a nice guy
      but on the opposite end of the spectrum
      from me politically.
      He used to peel his oranges
      then hang the skin
      on the wall of his cubicle.
      I never asked him about it
      but guessed he did that
      because there was always
      only one fresh orange peel spiral
      hanging from his cubicle wall.
      He was a guy who believed in a literal
      interpretation of the Bible
      however it was that his preacher
      happened to literally interpret it
      so he’d get visibly angry sometimes
      when we talked and I would say stuff
      that I knew would piss him off
      just to see him get all flustered
      see his eyes narrow a bit
      shoulders hunch or sometimes
      he would draw back
      look down his nose at me
      like he was examining
      a dangerous species of insect
      before he found some way
      to crush it.
      Even though he was weird that way
      I always kind of liked him
      maybe because he was an old farm kid
      from far out in the central part of Nebraska
      and I was an old farm kid from even farther out
      in western Nebraska, only I maybe
      fell in with a crazy crowd and smoked dope
      and dropped acid in the navy
      while he walked the straight and narrow
      in the army and held on
      to all those home-grown values.
      He was a master with the copy machine—
      I, the kind of person who makes them jam up
      just walking by—
      so one day I asked him how he knew so much
      about copy machines.
      He kind of swelled up with pride
      said he’d been some kind of printing technician
      in the army.
      But there at our job he had a hard time
      adjusting to changes
      and our job was always changing
      thanks to cuts in funding
      and a general overall attitude
      of contempt for the poor
      our right-wing governor had
      in the red-necked state
      we lived in and worked for.
      I was the guy’s boss so I knew
      the tough time he had adjusting
      and I knew how he bucked the system
      his own way by trying
      to continue using all the old ways
      because they were better.
      One time before he got sick he told me
      he was having trouble with his son
      he was worried about him
      who kept getting towed at his apartment
      because he wouldn’t buy a sticker
      or something goofy like that.
      I felt queasy he would confide in me
      about anything, especially his son
      though it seemed like he was just making
      dumb mistakes, nothing major like meth
      or addictions to something else
      like my kid that I’d never
      shared with him, and never would have.
      I thought his kid was being stupid
      but didn’t say that and listened
      father-to-father as though
      he was telling me something truly shocking.
      I told him tell your kid
      buy the freaking permit
      and he had, but there was some
      excuse. That’s the closest we ever got
      but I never could figure out
      why he talked to me about it.
      It was a closeness that I’d never felt
      we either one had earned.
      He was diabetic and overweight
      but always ate carefully, low-carb,
      took a walk in the lunch hour
      to keep his weight down.
      Explained to me how diabetics
      can’t burn up carbs like normal.
      He always said “Be careful”
      as a way to send you off
      at the end of the day
      when most people would say
      “See you tomorrow” or “Be good.”
      One angry client took it wrong
      one time and I had to defuse him—
      “What did he mean by that—‘Be careful’—
      was that a threat?”
      The last time I saw him, he was heading out
      for the weekend, had on a pair
      of shooter’s goggles,
      made me think somehow
      of James Dickey, though I never told him
      because I would have had to explain.
      I talked to his wife on the phone
      because she called in to say
      he’d be out for tests
      or for another two weeks
      or that he’d be back
      or they’ve got to do more surgery
      or that he wasn’t coming back.
      He’s the last guy I thought
      would die out of all the people
      I’ve worked with
      who smoked cigarettes,
      drank sodas, ate junk
      and never exercised.
      On a routine visit
      it was the dentist
      who spotted
      the lesion.
      I think of him every time I peel an orange
      whether I can get that one continuous strip going or not.
      No matter if I’m at home or work,
      peeling an orange for breakfast
      or like tonight, alone in the kitchen
      waiting out stuff, I think of him
      and wonder which one of us
      was right, or if there is such a thing
      as right or wrong
      whether he deserved to die
      if God was watching over him
      and me, and if he let me live on
      to think of him somehow to keep
      him alive that way,
      why it passed we came to work together,
      and if I had been first to die
      is there anything he would have remembered me by.

      from #47 - Spring 2015

      Greg Kosmicki

      “I’ve thought for years about my co-worker—always reminded of him the way the poem says, and tried writing it a couple times. When I peeled this orange, maybe the thousandth since then, I realized the orange spiral was the trigger, so I started with that, then wrote out everything about us that had been bumping around in my head ten or so years.”

      May 2, 2025Bob LuckyAt the Cemetery, the Church of St. James, Porto

      late summer
      kicking dead lichen
      off a tombstone
       
      I had a morbid curiosity about life spans and tropical diseases when I was young and regularly visited famous cemeteries. The Great Christian Burial Ground in Calcutta, now reincarnated as South Park Cemetery in Kolkata, was a favorite. Sir William Jones is buried there, his tomb a magnet for linguistics nerds. The night after paying my homage, I was wracked by pain, a kidney stone I later learned, and scrawled symptoms in my journal like a Romantic poet dying of TB. Now, having survived malaria, dengue fever, amoebic dysentery, an assortment of exotic parasites, and that kidney stone in Calcutta that made me want to die young, the only thing I look forward to in a cemetery is shade trees.
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Bob Lucky

      “I’ve been writing haibun since 2007. At first, it was a way to expand a haiku. Later, it seemed a good way to enhance a prose poem. But at some point I realized, after a fair bit of reading, studying, and good advice from practitioners, it’s an organic whole. Then I just felt at home.”

      May 1, 2025Sonia GreenfieldStorage Spaces

      It seems like I was always on a Los Angeles freeway
      when we’d talk about how her water was shut off
      or the repairs she couldn’t afford, and I understood
      that feeling of getting nowhere. The windshield
      and chrome of luxury cars always flung sun in my eyes
      as I idled in purgatory, and when she asked
      if I had found a therapist yet, I said
      no mom, have you?
      When she’d come
      to visit, my TV would prattle away afternoons,
      and the QVC models would turn their wrists slowly
      so studio lights could catch the facets of fake gems,
      and I understood what it meant to be dazzled blind
      enough to forget what lies behind us.
      Sometimes I’d clear
      paths through her home, sorting clothes into black
      plastic bags, so many items still tagged. I understood
      she was like that one black dress run through with silver
      thread that hung in its sheath behind her bedroom door—
      how it couldn’t know it’ll never be worn again.
      I just wanted
      her to tell me how she broke and who was responsible.
      Instead, she’d go on about storage units in two states,
      that she didn’t remember what they held but refused
      to stop paying for what moldered in
      those dark boxes.
      A few items I’ll never wear
      hang in my closet now—a dress and handknit sweater
      in seafoam, her favorite. That pink sweater
      she wore so much near the end. I get how hard it is
      to let go. I understand how obscene
      some metaphors can be.
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Sonia Greenfield

      “I love you, Mom. Thank you for letting me go and for all of your encouragement. For putting books in my hands. For believing I could do anything.”

      April 30, 2025David KirbyThe Queen of Quirk Says Goodbye to Her Not-Me

      You need some mothballs so you hurry down to the Dollar Tree
      even though it’s about to close, and there’s just one register
      open, and you’re the last person in a long line, and there’s a guy
      sitting at a window waiting for the cashier to end her shift,
      and just then your phone goes ba-ding and it says Shelley
       
      Duvall just died—oh, no! The same Shelley Duvall whom
      The New York Times called the Queen of Quirk
      for her offbeat looks and even more offbeat performances
      in some of the best movies ever made in the seventies
      and eighties without ever having taken a single acting lesson
       
      and in that way serve as a hero to everybody who
      ever wanted fame and fortune without having to put in
      all that hard work we were told is essential by our parents
      and teachers as we proceeded from one stage in life
      to the next, which group of people includes everybody,
       
      and as you get to the register and put your mothballs
      on the counter along with a couple of other things
      you didn’t need but bought anyway, the guy catches
      your eye, and he looks exhausted, like maybe his helper
      didn’t show up and he had to unload his truck by himself,
       
      so you ask him how he’s doing, and he shakes his head
      and says It’s another day and when you say you hear
      there’s one scheduled for tomorrow as well he says
      Hope not. Shelley Duvall is best known for her performance
      in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, in which she plays
       
      the wife of the Jack Nicholson character who slowly becomes
      unhinged and eventually tries to kill her and particularly
      for the scene where Kubrick did 127 takes of Shelley Duvall
      backing up some stairs and swinging a baseball bat
      at Jack Nicholson. Your body does not differentiate
       
      between a perceived threat and an actual threat
      said Shelley Duvall at the time, so while Mental Shelley
      knew that Jack was just playing, Corporeal Shelley was sure
      he was going to bash her brains out. Emerson called
      the mind the Me and the body the Not-Me in that
       
      the one knows what to do and how to do it while
      the other can barely get itself out of bed in the morning
      and may do something splendid that day but is just as likely
      to be lazy and stupid and will fail us in the end by becoming
      slow and forgetful and maybe even incontinent and certainly
       
      dead, as is now the case with Shelley Duvall. Why can’t we
      be more like honeybees? you think. When a honeybee
      colony needs to find a new hive, it sends out waves of scouts
      to search for a new site, and when they return, they dance
      for the other bees, each scout’s dance signaling a possible
       
      location, and as new waves of scouts go out and return,
      the new scouts align themselves with one old scout or another
      until a single dance becomes the most popular, and there
      you have it: follow those bees to the perfect oak or elm
      and you’re all set, whereas we have to think it through,
       
      work it out, frame it up, break it down, start again.
      Later, Shelley Duvall said she realized Kubrick
      was trying to bring out the complexities in her character,
      and you wonder if she believed that or was just trying to make
      herself feel better. Either way, it worked. You guess.
       
      On your way home you remember you forgot to do
      your pushups that day, so you go to the park even
      though it’s dark now, but the Little League field is all lit up,
      yet when you get to the spot where you always do
      your pushups, there’s a man and a woman about to
       
      go at it, but you figure what the hell, it’s your spot,
      so even though the man is saying You done so-and-so
      and the woman says I ain’t done shit you get down
      and start knocking them out: twenty-three, twenty-four,
      twenty-five, and the man says Hold on, how old are you
       
      and you tell him and he says Damn! and You doing good
      and you say I can’t turn back the hand of time but I figure
      I can slow it down and the man points to his mind and says
      I’ma keep that in my mind but at least he and the woman
      aren’t fighting any more and as you head for home
       
      you think about how when you said Have a good evening
      to the guy who was waiting for the cashier he smiled
      but didn’t say anything and you said Have a good evening
      to the cashier and she said Have a good evening, sir
      and Be careful out there and then Enjoy your mothballs.
       

      David Kirby

      “Man, some days it’s hard to get it together, isn’t it? That’s true whether you’re a movie star or a guy whose helper didn’t show, so he had to do all the work himself. But that’s not how this poem started. It started when the cashier said, ‘Enjoy your mothballs.’ I realized that casual comment was the perfect ending for a poem that not only hadn’t been written yet but should probably be colossal in scope. How to live your life has been the one big question from Aristotle to this day. And then I read that Shelley Duvall had died. And then I ran into the quarrelsome couple at the park. And that’s when I figured that the one big question doesn’t have one big answer. It has a million little answers, most of which come down to some version of ‘life is hard, so be kind to others and be grateful for what you have.’ As the cashier said, enjoy your mothballs.”

      April 29, 2025Thomas MixonOpposing Easels

      Our hearts were formed before our bones
      supported any kind of weight.
      I listen to the metronome
       
      of the daily news, on my phone
      and get depressed, and can’t create.
      Our hearts were formed before our bones
       
      persuaded us that they alone
      could measure our artistic fate.
      I listen to the metronome
       
      that they pound out as I walk home
      to empty canvases I hate.
      Our hearts were formed before our bones,
       
      but what else do I really know
      about myself? I try to paint.
      I listen to the metronome
       
      of dusk against my brush’s groans.
      The palette’s dry. It’s getting late.
      Our hearts were formed before our bones.
      I listen to the metronome.
       
      Image: “Siblings Under the Skin” by Elizabeth Eve King. “Opposing Easels” was written by Thomas Mixon for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, March 2025, and selected as the Editor’s Choice.

      from Ekphrastic Challenge

      Comment from the series editor, Megan O’Reilly

      “One of the elements of Elizabeth Eve King’s artwork that resonates most strongly is the illusionary separation of life and death–that line from the famous 18th century epitaph ringing in my head: ‘As I am now, so you must be.’ The living people in the image are holding death at arm’s length, literally, and yet, at our core, we know how narrow the gap between the two subjects can be. I love the way Mixon’s ‘Opposing Easels’ captures the passage of time with repeated imagery of a metronome, a perfect way to symbolize that life is both relentless (‘the daily news on my phone’) and beautiful (‘dusk against my brush’s groans’). The poet’s refrain about our hearts being formed before our bones hints at a belief that art is our primary purpose, and the speaker’s sense of urgency to fully realize this before time runs out is powerful and inspiring.”