Journal

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.

 

Bridge over 15 Mile Creek

–Dufur, Oregon

The night’s velvet hands guide us
under a moon not quite full but full enough
as we hug the gravel verge against
the occasional oncoming semi.
Finches and doves quiet now,
only our voices whisper to each other
and, beyond the school yard,
a dog interested in our passing.
It’s the first of June, warm enough
to walk without a jacket. As we pass
the ancient tractors, their rusty sighs
speak of forgotten furrows, mulch
and earthworms. Amber wheat fields
succulent and wavering. To the west,
the snow-covered mountain governs
all that can be seen from its craggy peak.

Suzy Harris lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in Calyx, Clackamas
Literary Review, and Switchgrass Review, among other journals and anthologies. Her
chapbook Listening in the Dark, about hearing loss and learning to hear again with
cochlear implants, was published by The Poetry Box in February 2023.

France, 1990

The pan-fried, half-moon,
butter-browned omelet was richer
than Versailles’ cold mirrors, stark
shrubs, boudoir cherubs, pebbled-
walks, or cardinals in a line.
It was better than the mechanical bird
the African sold me outside the bus
that flew in circles without a string.

It was before and after the time of Marie
Antoinette. It was the hole the angel
burned into the bishop’s skull
for Mont St. Michel on a gray
day—mudflats below the crag
like a wet towel on the deck. It was
Therese’s tattered arm on the altar,
in crystal, and the billboard nude
in Paris. Sister said, “Don’t look.”

Roadside America

She drove halfway home. The first
rest stop was crowded. The Starbucks
line was too long, so I got
gas station coffee.

‌                                    One cashier
worked the line while two other
gray-shirted workers talked near
stacked cartons. A man, wearing overalls,
in front of me said, “The next government
to get overthrown will be this one.
Nobody wants to work.” I tell him
my grandfather was a black-topper.

‌                                                           It’s good
he died before all this. He might
have shot someone. Or worse, given
up. Let the Miller Genuine Draft
get warm, the dogs starve, the ducks
go wild, the wood stove rust,
the striped turtle slip out, the horse’s
hair tangle, the garden remain mud.

Dropcloth

Mr. Lawrence brought back my ladder,
drop cloth, step ladder, a new
roller, a tray, and pads, for the brush I didn’t
care about. My roller from fifteen years
ago works better than the new ones.
The arm, from handle to pad, is angled, not
straight back. No matter how thick
the steel is, the forty-five-degree-angled
arm outperforms the ninety-degree-
angle-arm. It’s not thickness, it’s
physics.

‌                     He said he wasn’t sure if all
the dropcloths were mine. I recognized splatters
from old jobs: stairs, ramps, doors,
windows, walls. One used to be Sheehan’s,
but I claimed it for the hand-sander they kept.
There’s a fluidity on worksites. That’s why
I wrote my name on the step ladder.

I spread out the big drop cloth—
three-paneled splash art—and set
the aluminum garden trellises on it
to spray. The negative, like an x-ray,
or Jesus’ face on the Turin shroud, remained.
The triptych had outlived marriages.
It had dashes and dots from Joey and Brooke’s shutters.
They liked Neil Diamond. He thought of joining
the Masons for business. She met a boy in a hotel.

Their maroon shutters had clouded. “Paint them black,”
like the Rolling Stones. The sun baked them dry
on the lawn and a skunk wobbled into the street–
blind and spitting like a drunk. We threw rocks.
It climbed into the sewer.

‌                                               Old tools
remember money made in the sun—threadbare
jeans sealed by paint. The way the skin
oil consumes the bronze nose of the boar.

Matthew Hummer is a writer and teacher in PA. He has published poems and prose in various journals, including Cosmic Daffodil and Novus Literary and Arts Journal.

Hunnered

In Shetland, that’s the word
for weary, exhausted, bone tired, as we say
here in Oregon, about to fold. We’ve all been there—
out on our feet, unsteady, reeling, feeling
pulled through a knothole backward, wishing
we could dig a hole and pull the hole in after us.

And then here comes morning and the birds.
Today, as if they’ve heard us flip the calendar
to February, they arrive, a host of wings,
small hearts jubilant with faint rumors of spring.
A dozen sparrows squabble over birdhouses still
filled with last year’s nests and on the maple branch
a pair of collared doves caress each other’s necks.
Juncos, house finches, three flickers wearing bibs,
a black-capped chickadee, the downy woodpecker—
and look! two white-splashed quiverings of orange
and black and bright. The spotted towee’s
brought his cousin. A goldfinch finds the thistle seed
and leaps off into air to spread the word. Now
a mob of robins appears out of nowhere, feathers
in soft focus, murmuring in Robin to each other,
heads cocked our way as if they know
how much we count on their return, especially
when we’re hunnered.

Bette Lynch Husted sees the Columbia River Gorge in all seasons in her monthly commute from Eastern Oregon to her Portland-area “Side Porch Poets” writing group. In Pendleton, she helps coordinate the First Draft Writers’ Series, watches birds, and practices Tai Chi. Her books include the novel All Coyote’s Children (OSU Press), two collections of memoir essays, Above the Clearwater: Living on Stolen Land (OSU Press) and Lessons from the Borderlands (Plain View Press), and the poetry collection At This Distance (Wordcraft of Oregon).