Journal

La Spezia

Instead, he flicks a royal wave towards La Spezia Gulf,
exhales for emphasis and plunges the quartered lime down

the bottleneck and dams the foam-gush with his thumb.
I prod clotted lobes of candle wax, pick at slick buds of local olives.

We could be snapped by the waiter’s irritant winks for a postcard:
scratch and sniff for tussling scents: cardamom spray vs. coconut balm.

Felicity is a new music discovered in each other, minds dialled in
to the same station, confidants abroad, divested of our regular fronts.

Spinning the table-umbrella’s stem in turns, two bare soles touch,
but it goes without saying — some static fails to crackle —

when he asserts that all that matters is the immediate twenty metres.
What’s beyond can wait. Another word to topple what’s domino-delicate

between us, while behind is the sun’s smoky-mustard midriff,
slow-blushing, reverse easing into a bath, faintly gracing our napes.

Samuel Prince‘s debut collection, Ulterior Atmospheres, was published in 2020 by Live Canon. His work has more recently appeared in Apricot Press, Fauxmoir, Red Door and Thimble Literary Magazine. He lives in Norfolk (UK). More information can be found at www.samuelprince.co.uk

The Anchovy of Melancholy

In my vision along the bookshelf
Anchovy becomes Anatomy
of Melancholy
where Burton accuses fish of slimy nutrients
leading to excessive black bile,
as does most everything the mind eats.

The simple anatomy of an anchovy
differs from other fish where the snout
overhangs a lower jaw which, opening
for plankton, gapes wider
than the entire fish
under black eyes like holes.

The shape is as streamlined as a fountain pen
and, you know, as slippery as a fish
and your knowledge of self,
reflecting silver, then a dubious
blue-green in a graceful turn,
and finally a distant black dot.

An anchovy is never alone,
its thousands pressed together for oil
or paste beaten into dressing.
Even the salty grey-brown strip on your pizza
lies with the many.

And when attacked by shark or pelican
they’re a roiling ball of fish caught
in the frenzy of togetherness
of a political rally, a mega-church
where everyone screams away
the melancholy burden of self.

Sherry Mossafer Rind is the author of six collections of poetry. She has received grants
and awards from Anhinga Press, the Seattle and King County Arts Commissions,
National Endowment for the Arts, and Artist Trust. Her most recent books are Between
States of Matter, Poetry Box Select, 2020, and The Store-House of Wonder and
Astonishment, winner of an Eyelands International award, published by Pleasure Boat
Studio, 2022. https://sherryrind.wixsite.com/writer
Sherry lives on the ancestral land of the Coastal Salish nation, now Lynnwood, Washington.

Desert Tableau, Fort Rock, Oregon

Spray of feathers.
Last flight flown.
Bird no more.

Rodent skull bleached to chalk,
with tiny teeth, still sharp.
No more gnawing.
No more scurrying
under sage and stone.

Half of a red fox, back leg broken
under the ledge where it crawled to die.
Tail intact, white-tipped
fur waving in the gray wind.

Rain and wind scour rock;
freeze and thaw shatter, break, crumble.
Stone. Pebble. Sand. Dust.

Don’t we all lay our bones down
eventually
and not always gently?

Like when I
moved diagonally
down that rocky slope
to mitigate the steep angle of it
to keep myself upright
and my left foot
‌‌                            slipped?
Whirling around, I caught myself
but bent and touched the ground
with both hands.
It was a reminder.
In a moment, a slip became a bow
of reverence and recognition
of the inevitable.

In good time, we all slip, fall, return.
Gravity has its way
and winter does its wild work.

Jennifer Rood is enjoying life in Southern Oregon, where she recently retired from 30 years of teaching high school English, art, and social studies. She has served as a Board Member of the Oregon Poetry Association (including a year as President in 2020-21), and last fall, she spent five weeks as the Oregon Caves National Monument’s Artist in Residence. Her most recently published individual poems appear in The Literary Hatchet and Verseweavers. Present and Speaking Everywhere (Not a Pipe Publishing, 2024) is her newest collection of found poetry and art.

Iowa Scenes

 . . . to glorify things, just because they are.
‌                                 –Czeslaw Milosz

I.
Beginnings
(Iowa City)
This is Grant Wood country,
his painted idylls of lollipop trees
and ribbon-candy country roads.

A century on, no farmer
hulks behind a horse-drawn plow,
no housewife hangs hand-stitched
quilts on a backyard clothesline.

But wind-lashed hills and coffee-brown
fields ripple green every spring.
A blue tendril of river curls
around the University buildings,
bending southeast until it
surrenders to the Mississippi.

And the prairie flowers,
the wild bees—

I am a coastal woman from a big city.
I have a grandchild, Philly-born, just past infancy.
His parents will raise him here, in Iowa City, for a while.

From their back porch I look out,
past a border of honey locust and cedar
to a sky of fat-bellied clouds,
gravid with rain, ready to calve.

There are fates worse
than starting out in this place.
For now, it will be good.
As sure as season follows season,
it will be very good.

II.
Flyover Country
(Wilson’s Orchard)

One of earth’s great beauties—
a turquoise blue morning in early summer,
the eastern hills dozing in sun-lathered air.
A father and his little son bending
over rows of strawberry bushes.
Speaking softly, cooing with praise,
he shows the child how to separate
ripe fruits from their stems, how to pluck
the sweetest without crushing them.
One by one by one by one by one—
father and son lift the fragile globes into a basket.
For this is slow and deliberate work requiring a fine hand.
High overhead, a long-haul jet streaks northwest.
The boy looks up, tugs at his father’s jeans,
pointing to the jet’s feathery contrail,
twin-tailed like a tree swallow’s.
In that instant, from the very field where they stand,
a meadowlark flings itself into the wind.

III.
Goosetown
(what a grandchild will come to tell his own children
about the early years on Reno Street)

Come evening, we lined our winter boots
along the mud room wall, like tidy children ready for bed.
Coats and car keys hung from steel hooks.
Umbrellas by their straps. Hats and gloves
filled a wicker basket on the floor.

The mud room door opened to the side-yard and the concrete pad
where the black Volkswagen hunkered all night,
square and squat as a sleepy bull in the Iowa snow.
Saturday mornings, we’d climb in for the ride to
the ten o’clock Story Time at the children’s library.

Mama fussed over the belts and buckles until she was sure
I was safely harnessed on my padded throne.
Only then did Papa fire up the engine, and we three
rolled slowly down the driveway, braking at the sidewalk,
scanning this way and that for cars and kids on bikes.
Neighbors jogging past us toward the park
turned their heads and waved, Hi! when my father
pumped lightly on the horn with the heel of his hand.

Then we pushed into the street, made a quick cut left and right,
past a goose and her three goslings forged in steel and welded
to the top of a weather-flayed street sign, corner of Reno and Church.

How I loved that metal mama bird!
Every time I looked up at her and her brood in tow,
I wondered, Where are they going? Long necks urging forward,
one splayed foot flopped in front of the other— I liked to pretend
some important place was waiting for them to arrive.
Just like us.

(note: Goosetown is the name of a neighborhood in Iowa City, indicated by
its logo: the stamped metal geese affixed to all the street signs of that precinct)

Maria Rouphail is Poetry Editor of Main Street Rag literary magazine. Her third poetry collection, All the Way to China (2022), was a finalist in both the University of Wisconsin Brittingham Poetry and the Blue Light Press competitions. Her earlier collections are Apertures and Second Skin. She is the 2024 NCPS Distinguished Poet for central North Carolina. A six-time Pushcart nominee, she lives in Raleigh.

Mornings in Melancholia

–-after Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia”

I.
A strange country to walk into at ten A.M.
when the dark descends on photoshopped,
coffeeshopped bodies cantilevered over steam,

beans and screen. Practiced in the importance
of looking earnest, they have yet to master
the melancholy in their eyes, or re-patriate

the exiled brightening glance they left behind
at the borders of employment.

II.
Colonizing café tables, their comfort is
wrapped in poor posture and pale misery,
set to sipping on solitude. Pretending to see

no one but still carefully seen all the same,
discrete citizens and squatters admire one another,
speak a syntax of gestures laced with spaced sighs

and tongues laid on lips in a mime of thought.
Some days, I catch myself in the mirror of their eyes.

III.
This daily masque, as poised as a play on a stage,
side-lit in blue, stands dressed with brown-stained
saucers placed beside papers marked with

antiquarian, thin black ink. From the corners,
a trio of baristas, unguarded, unbarded,
recites the chorus, and we raise cups till

our fingers, bent by an angry light, uncurl and
cave to the city’s long day of rude demands.

Joel Savishinsky is a retired anthropologist and gerontologist. His books include The Ends of Time: Life and Work in A Nursing Home and Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America, both of which won the Gerontological Society of America’s annual book prize. In 2023, The Poetry Box published his collection Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging. He lives in Seattle, helping to raise five grandchildren, and considers himself a recovering academic and unrepentant activist. savishin@gmail.com