Journal

Adagio in Your Absence

Day after day, the piano
sits unplayed, its lustrous,
black-lacquered presence
impressive and imposing
through the French doors.
I’m tempted to enter,

to remember the sure touch
of my fingers on the keys,
the physicality of playing,
once I learned to put my body
into it, the ring of melodious
tones, the spiritual lift

it would bring, and how time
would disappear. I miss
the house we shared, the rarefied
air we lived in, the expansive
space of our lives then. As soon
as I’d finished a piece,

I wanted to play it again.
If I were to lift the top now,
it would cast a shadow,
like the ragged wing
of a dark bird portending
the end of the world,

a shadow the shape of my grief.

Grace Richards has worked in the TV and film industry, taught ESL at the college level, and
during the last few most dramatic years in Eugene, Oregon, has found her poetic voice. Her work has been published by SettingForth.org, Herstryblog.com, Willawaw Journal, and in the
anthology Poems on Poems and Poets (Setting Forth Press, 2016). Her first chapbook, Mid-
Century Modern and Other Poems, will be published by Dancing Girl Press in September 2019.

First Winter in Kopjes, South Africa

Office at Night, 1940

 —after Edward Hopper

A man at his desk ignores his secretary standing
next to him by the cabinet. White light frames
the woman’s black hair and eyes, heavy with
makeup. She wears pump heels, the navy dress

molded to the swelling curves of her body. Hopper’s
angle bears down on the scene the way she looks
down on papers fallen to the floor. A window’s open
with shade and cord swinging. The letter in the typewriter

unfinished, folders on the man’s desk in disarray.
Rigid in concentration and pale as his suit and tie, the man
stares at the letter gripped in his hands. How late is it?
Will they leave together for her walk-up in the city

or go their separate ways. He home on the L
to family in the suburbs, she to one room, a breeze
from the fire escape disturbing diary pages and ashes
of cigarette butts, smeared with dark lipstick.

New York Movie, 1939

–after Edward Hopper

The lovely woman slumps against the chair rail
of the theatre’s hall, apart from the others
at the motion picture, those cinema devotees,

sitting in plush seats, captured by the screen’s allure,
by the new, the modern, in what they called art
houses, a name for many places In that art

capital of the world, of Hopper’s world. Is this woman
whose face rests against her hand an usherette,
or Josephine, the painter’s wife, nursing some insult

from her dismissive husband. Some shush hissed
in her ear after an innocent observation of the unreeling
story. For Edward who, when seeing his first play

as a child, came home to make his own model theatre,
to be distracted while watching would be quite tiresome.
And for Jo, well, she was paying for daring to be

his companion, his model, muse
and the person he, at times could not stand,
but also could not stand to be without.

Diana Pinckney, Charlotte, NC, is the author of 5 collections of poetry, the latest titled, The Beast and The Innocent. She has been awarded  the 2010 Ekphrasis Prize from the journal of that name, Atlanta Review’s 2012 International Prize, and Press 53’s 2018 Prime Number Prize among other awards. Her work has been published widely in printed and online journals.

A Hoary Issue

In the beginning the Earth was flat and infinite.
People ran away from the gods, built cities and burned them down,
translated their sighs into the cracks on the sidewalks
and asked whether or not the trees had a sense of humor.
Now we don’t really follow the forests to the end of the joke,
nor the ice to the mouth of the nearest river,
but maples carry water to all the secret nooks and crannies of the sun,
and pine needles diligently scratch the back of the air,
an animal difficult to awaken.

Ivan Peledov lives in Colorado. He loves to travel and to forget the places he has visited. He has been published in Eunoia Review, Lost and Found Times, Red Fez, Illuminations and other magazines.

Riding with the Diaspora

The air is sharp with the sound of Chinese, sweet with Spanish,
like a good sauce, and everyone is going home,
but not really; home on the bus to small apartments
but not home home, not Guangzhou or Saltillo,
Chongquing or Cartagena.

At 6:00 o’clock on a winter evening
we’re all diaspora, all a little homesick.

If you weren’t on the bus, you missed
the Chinese father and his toddler
who boarded at the day-care stop
with Italian takeout in a clamshell,
its good, garlicky smell
available for everyone to share.

You missed the way he lifted her
onto the quickly vacated bench seat
and the way her dark eyes
stared at our human faces.

John Palen has led a dual life in journalism and poetry. He worked as a reporter and editor on daily newspapers in the Midwest and taught journalism at the university level. He earned a PhD in American Studies at Michigan State University. His first publication as a poet appeared in 1969. Mayapple Press brought out his third full-length collection, Distant Music, in 2017. He lives in retirement on the Grand Prairie of Illinois.