Journal

What if your job

I fooled myself for years that all the jobs
I worked were better than one long career
because without a career I had more time
to spend not thinking about work. But really,
like you, I’d rather not work at all. What if
we got paid for nothing, not even for doing
things we love to do, like the singer in a band,
where sure, it’s fun but there’s still pressure
to perform, but just for living. There would be
no ties between what you get paid and what
you do. You breathe, you get a check.

Once I got paid for how many pounds of beans
I picked. I could pick more beans than most of
the other workers but I wasn’t any better, just faster
at picking beans. And anyway, all of us were
there just to get some money; who would pick
beans on an early summer morning if you
didn’t have to? We stood in line for the weigher
to weigh our beans, like we were waiting to get
picked for a playground team where you have to
wait until the very end just because you can’t dribble
the ball, waiting in line to see what we were worth.

Bill

For just one minute come here,
please come here, to where I am.
For a minute I want to stay
in this place without metaphor,
no embellishment, and tell
you, all of you, some sad thing.
My friend Bill is in a bad way;
his memory is shot and
there’s not a lot left of him.

He’s wandering the halls
of the Aspen Ridge Memory
Care Facility and that’s it;
it’s all he does, kicking
other old people’s asses
around the loop, spitting
on the floor as if he’s
remembering how he spit
on all those long
runs of ours, those long
beautiful runs we’d take
in the mountains. Now
he spits and takes his laps.

I just want to tell you
how hard this is, how
hard it is to slowly lose a friend.
And I know you know this
is about me. You know that.
So I’d like to tell you one
more final thing.
Let me tell you this now
in case I end up like my friend:
I love you all. On behalf of Bill,
we’d like to tell you something:
we love you all.

Casey Killingsworth’s poems have been accepted in Kimera, Timberline Review, COG, and other journals. He has a book of poems, A Handbook for Water, (Cranberry Press, 1995) as well as a book on the poetry of Langston Hughes, The Black and Blue Collar Blues (VDM, 2008). He graduated from Reed College. Casey lives in the Columbia River Gorge.

Memory Care

Tonight I tell Mom about the time
I took a ride from a stranger,
locked my sister out of the house
in the Minnesota snow, clung
to the back of a leather-clad driver
on a speeding motorcycle at midnight
in the middle of West Berlin.
I can finally confess the forbidden tales.
She’ll remember none of them.

And she tells me hers too,
hidden stories of her childhood.
Camping out at a mica mine
in the Rockies while her parents
prospected, fought, blasted,
loaded the truck with shining slabs,
hauled them to Denver. How her mother
traveled through New Mexico
in the ‘20’s, slept beside the road,
shot rattlesnakes with her ‘22.
How her father spent a couple years
in prison after the war.

Outside, dim cubes of fishing shacks
scatter across the frozen lake.
I step into the cold, feel my way
down the icy path in the dark.
The eastern sky glows red,
then flames orange and gold,
ignites evaporating stars.

Matryoshka

This mama’s smooth as an egg
in your two-year-old fingers.
Arms fold across her round belly.
Lashes wink under lacquered headscarf,
black eyes gaze into your blue ones.

You pull her apart, surprised to find
secret dolls within.  Bodies, heads spill,
roll the floor.  You try and fit five generations
back together, search for the missing baby,
laugh when you find her, this tiny heart.

Where’s your own mama, little one?
Off to Vegas with a new boyfriend.
She met him on the Internet weeks ago,
hasn’t been back since.  She’s gone,
seeking her fortune, once again.

Baby heart, you’ll need all of these mamas.
May they hold you in their wombs,
keep you from the wolves of your future.
All hearts bleed for you.  All hearts beat for you.
You too have secret lives within.

Karen  E. Jones is a teacher, poet, and life-long learner from Corvallis, Oregon.  Her poems have appeared in Tower Poetry, River Poets Journal, Paperplates Magazine, Willawaw Journal, Earth’s Daughters, and Rise Up Review.

Recipe for Petite Macaroons

morning

fitful sleep     and the echo
‌     of footfall     down the hall

the scarf of a dream     lingers‌
‌     in the room     wafts off
as the eyes open     to see

what happened behind closed
‌     eyelids     whose hands
was i cupping     in mine

someone slammed a door     someone
‌     leaped through     an open
‌            window

the skeleton of the night
‌     washes its bones
‌                                    in the rain
‌   water
untouched yet by flesh     except
‌     that     of a dream

i wash my face in its bones

my face   its bones   the light
‌     coming off    the sheets of rain

the cupping of hands     the lips
‌     closing      over the rim
of vowels
‌          like a prayer

Night Stillness

Bangkok, Rainy Season

Silence in its silver light pours across my garden wall
through this monsoon break—a cloud-feathered frame
of moonlight tipping jasmine and hibiscus, airy sprays of orchids

spilling flower to flower into shadowpool.
Moon-filled potholes path the street with footlights
drawing me into the lane I came to live in hot season.

Stillness drying on the pavement loosens sounds I’ve never seen.
Behind a slatted wooden fence, small frogs chirp a lily pond,
and as I pass it, a khamoi bird cries its warning in two voices.

John Hicks has been published or accepted for publication by:  Valparaiso Poetry Review, I-70 Review, First Literary Review – East, Panorama, San Pedro River Review, Mohave River Review, Cold Creek Review, Glint, and others.  He completed an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska – Omaha in 2016.  He writes in the thin air of northern New Mexico.

You Find Yourself in Kansas City

among house-proud women
and men who are mean with money

to rent an apartment, the first
900 sq. ft. you’ve ever had all to yourself.

You don’t mind that it is across from your mother’s
where she can keep you close

and at arm’s length all at once because
the space is cute – because there is a porch

for your plants – and then you find
the HVAC for #8 is unpredictable,

or rather just doesn’t work even after the maintenance
man bangs on it with the kind of wrench plumbers use

in a show to convince you he’s making repairs
so that all three rooms stretching from west to east

and the tiny bathroom, too, remain forever
inclement. Below, a neighbor whose dog

barks, whose stereo blares, who is surly. Soon
you will discover the mice and will buy

crappy wood and wire traps at the hardware store
which you will toss away along with the pinched bodies

of bulging-eyed rodents into the trash receptacle
nearly every day despite the fact that the cat

in #10 visits frequently to hunt, brings you mice before there is sun
to play with atop the covers, a strange kind of breakfast in bed.

Lisa M. Hase-Jackson’s debut collection of poetry, Flint and Fire, was selected by Jericho Brown for the 2019 Hilary Tham Capital Collection Series, an imprint of The Word Works in Washington DC. She holds an MFA in poetry from Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and a MA in English from Kansas State University in Manhattan Kansas. A full-time writer and adjunct instructor at the College of Charleston, Lisa is Editor-in-Chief of South 85 Journal and founding editor of Zingara Poetry Review.