Journal

The Old Carpenter Does Happy Hour

–for Clem Starck

After the invasion of Ukraine, you gave up
studying Russian. These days
your dining room table is piled instead
with histories of Central and Eastern Europe,
biographies of murdered poets,
and several translations of The Street of Crocodiles.

Meanwhile, the fences
around your forty acres of woodland
have started to sag, and the garden plots
your long-dead wife planted decades ago
are gone to blackberries.

Therefore every evening
you take two beers from the fridge,
a stout and a lager, and sit on your veranda
watching the goldfinches and chickadees
take seed from the feeder for an hour,
or even two hours,
almost like a man at peace.

Charles Goodrich writes and gardens near the confluence of the Marys and Willamette Rivers in Corvallis, Oregon. His books include the poetry collections Watering the Rhubarb; A Scripture of Crows; Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden; and Insects of South Corvallis. His first novel, Weave Me a Crooked Basket, was published by the University of Nevada Press in the Fall of 2023. FMI: charlesgoodrich.com

 

i can’t unknow any knowing of a death grip

–for donna

you are no longer asleep & this urgency in you
with some ability to cut into the rest of us surges in
your weakening frame. my hands have never looked
more mortal, outrage of plush circulation against
rough white blanket repeatedly bleached of its
witness. the backs of yours are bruised, thin skin
stone fruit & talons pressing in to the fleshy bit
below my thumb. this peppering of blood crescents
turns late summer memory of a sidewalk shadow
dancing in total solar eclipse—all moons scattered
in a way i’ve otherwise never seen light bend

ash good is the author of us clumsy gods (What Books Press, 2022) & four previous poetry collections. They are cofounding editor of First Matter Press, a nonprofit collective based in Portland, OR. Their poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net & appears in Faultline, Cimarron Review, 45th Parallel & others. www.ashgood.com

 

If this was the gateway to heaven

then her bed was a ladder
laid down on its back

that pillow, the stone where she settled her head
and she was the traveler, weary.

And if so, this room (on the stark sterile hallway
guarded with a lock on the door and the nurses of doom)

was a crater filling with light
as her breath emptied out

and the whole damn room, you could say, was dreaming
those angels, all a-feather

pulling and lifting in the fluorescent-lit
heaven. Up and down, up and down, and usher her out

as I sat on the lip of the bed letting her go
through the ceiling, the roof, past the half-smiling

moon. When we rolled her in, mere weeks before
all out of hope, this ward was a well-disguised hell.

But God, I now saw, was in this place all along,
and I, I did not know.

Tzivia Gover is the author of Dreaming on the Page: Tap into Your Midnight Mind to Supercharge Your Writing and several other books. Her poetry and essays have been widely published, including in The New York Times, Pensive, The Other Journal, Mom Egg Review, and many more. She lives in western Massachusetts where she teaches courses online and in-person about combining dreams and writing. Learn more at www.thirdhousemoon.com

Interstices

‌     Filtered through intervening time,
fleeting seconds march to B minor
cadence, written on the sky, ephemeral
and vaporous. Overmatched by a fabulist
god, she of gilded wing, lapping purpose,
we have no recourse but to surrender.
Shades of ancient greens and ancestral
yellows glow from sizzling logs, keeping
us as warm as bears in a cave. Paintbrushes
at the ready, the artist dapples in penumbral
shadows, the steady hand betrays no doubt.
Time has stopped having meaning. Dinner
and coffee can wait while the paint is smoothed
out of the tube and onto the canvas, just in
‌     time for one last stroke.

Stephen Grant is a Toronto writer and poet, specializing in the bittersweet, the intersection of love and loss.

Final Cut of the Season

What species of grass is it that smells so sweet
when shorn? Fine fescue? Kentucky blue?

I go ages sometimes without catching its scent
but when I do, as I did today, all the years

I’ve gone without distend and grow heavy,
all those deskbound days redolent of nothing

but office-park carpet, printer ink, and fluorescence.
But there it was, that jade spice, on the air this afternoon

as I drove down leafy streets of purling yellow and orange
to watch my son tend goal on a pitch of plastic turf;

there it was, rushing through my chilly windows
on the purest day of this or possibly any October,

eager to fill me to the brink of spilling with memories
of youth and sun-bleached afternoons that, back then,

also smelled of tropical coconut, that copper perfume
of beach towels bobbing on backyard seas of bladed green.

Eulogy

Words for your eulogy have come to me
early, shaming me. If I jot them down,
will death regard this as a beckoning,
a sibling of some coy come-hither look,
the sort once mastered by Theda Bara,
vamp of the silents, who died at seventy
of stomach cancer in ’55, the same year
you turned twenty and fled the dull cruelties
of West Texas for the culture of cities?

But if I don’t, thus perhaps keeping the grave
at bay for at least a few more shining days,
I’ll forget for good the good I want to say,
thus wrecking my paean to your fine life
when its time to be voiced does come.
I wrestle with this as I clutch and shift,
all the while knowing I can take no note,
at least not until I reach a stoplight’s red,
but the greens keep coming, block after block,

driving me to speed faster, to feel the wind
tear at my hair, to push the jittery needle
deeper into hazardous red, to outrun it all.
But then, with still no stop in sight, the words
wing out the window. I brake. Reverse. And hunt
for them, but they’re gone, though I’m still staring
out when the stranger climbs in. Let’s go, he says,
ignoring the seat belt. Where? I ask. Just drive,
he says through black teeth. You’ll find it.

Kevin Grauke has published work in such places as The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Cimarron Review, Sycamore Review, and Quarterly West. His collection, Shadows of Men (Queen’s Ferry), won the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Originally from Texas, he teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia.