Journal

See-ums

This year they are the size
of permanent marker dots left
on the bottom of weather charts
tracing the paths of smoke
from Canadian wildfires
hundreds of miles to the north.
Hazy mornings promise relief-
storm clouds that might come,
but stinging ash hovers in the fields.

 

Do you love me, Chicago?

You ask, does Chicago
love me?
And I say,
Chicago loves me
like a tight guitar solo,
fingers tap dancing rapid-fire
arpeggios that tattoo
the fretboard of my soul.

And you sneer, will Chicago
always be true?
And I yell back, listen,
Chicago will stick with me
like an Italian beef sandwich.
I feel the hot peppers in my dreams;
they wrench me out of bed,
dump me on the cold, hard floor.

I can tell you how I feel
Chicago’s love if you’d pay attention–
It tastes like stolen kisses in the back seat
of a Chevy sedan, her tongue
pressed tight against my lips.

I hear Chicago’s love,
in the cool spring breeze
blowing off Lake Michigan,
soothing my brow even
when she breaks my heart.

Frank C. Modica is a retired teacher and cancer survivor who taught children with special needs for over 34 years. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dust Poetry, New Square, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Lit Shark. Frank’s first chapbook, What We Harvest, nominated for an Eric Hoffer book award, was published in the fall of 2021 by Kelsay Books. His second chapbook, Old Friends, was published this past December by Cyberwit Press.

The Harvest Moon Calls Us Again

Past halfway from equator to northern pole,
harvest moon drops so low it bounces across

the tops of the Douglas firs as it tries to lead
the crows in a song about the passing season.

The crows won’t sing, and we stay silent, too,
this season another surgery we did not want.

In the morning, anesthesia occluding the sun,
we send our tentative fingers out for bandage,

for incision ridge and furrow, for angry yellow-
red of tomatoes or betadine, for discoloration

of dismantling. We know something has been
removed. We feel the absence.
‌                                                                  Gall bladder?
Appendix? Kidney? Belief in the arc of good
humor? We want it back, the summer corn,
the indolence of sun-soaked youth,
‌                                                                          the wild
green sprouting, vigor of every appendage
and organ intact and ready.
‌                                                             Before we can
voice our plaintive suits or sound our laments,
impatient crows turn their backs on our loss,
dip their jet heads, and mount their wings.

They leave our ruined carcasses behind.
‌

 

Going to the Palm Reader

My wife has been talking about seeing a palm reader
as a lark, she says, a goof, a game, kind of like checking
our horoscopes in the alternative weekly that’s filled
with dispensary ads—specials for doobie Tuesdays
and refer-a-friend and feel-good Fridays, one touting
their “ediblissables”—marijuana for the masses,
medicinal or recreational. She brings it up—
the palm reader—every time we pass the neon hand
in the window of the old house with the heavy curtains.
We are knocking on 70s door, our lives mostly
behind us and out of our hands, so I wonder what
she thinks this reader can discover in our creases
and callouses, what advice she (or he) can offer us.
Beware the icy steps? Shun the treacherous throw rugs
like disaster scattered beneath our feet? Steer clear
of busy streets, avoid left turns, and drive not
in twilight hours? No, that’s the advice
of the AARP Drive Safely course we had to take,
an earnest soporific that haunts me. Maybe
my wife imagines the chiromancer will find for her
a new man since I am clearly past my best-by date
and begin to resemble the carrot left too long
in the vegetable bin or the banana ready
for transubstantiation into bread or muffin.
When she thinks I have dozed off to my audio book,
she will take my hand in hers and trace the lines,
her fingertip a hound sniffing out a quarry’s path,
so slow, so gentle, circling the mounts on my palm
and nosing along the old ravines. I open
my eyes and look at her, at her hands first, then her face,
and she smiles and tells me I fell asleep. Maybe
she wants the palmist’s help divining the lost past,
recalling for her the sugar and salt of years gone.

Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English in Roseville, California, and now he tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (he hopes) to enjoy. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, and other literary magazines.

Buttermilk Falls

From this bare outcropping of stone,
I watch the giddy river flee its headwaters
beneath a canopy of hardwoods and
mountain laurel before it spools in languor
and seeks to separate itself from itself
within a wide platter of basin then pauses
as if weighing life beyond the ledge,
but unable to walk itself back, it succumbs
and tumbles forth, like muffled thunder,
into the lower chasm where it cleaves
the surface, rises rudderless and presses
on in hurried torrent, singing itself south
in liquid bluster, flowing away past saplings
and the tousled underbrush, bearing vivid
fibers of moss-green stubble and tablets
of bark, softening soil and stone as it feels
its way forward, wrinkling the landscape
and staking its claim upon the earth.
The eyes can’t help but stop and settle
there – though – near the banks in the
slow drowse of foam and tea-stained
water collecting in oval eddies that
work their way towards – and then
away from – one another just the way
the water manages to gather itself
before remembering its path and
then moving on to marry with the
astonished and witless what’s-to-come.

Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and, more recently, the Best of the Net Award, John Muro is a resident of Connecticut and a lover of all things chocolate. He has published two volumes of poems — In the Lilac Hour and Pastoral Suite — in 2020 and 2022, respectively. Both volumes were published by Antrim House, and both are available on Amazon and elsewhere. John’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Acumen, Barnstorm, Delmarva, River Heron, Sky Island, Valparaiso and Willawaw. Instagram: @johntmuro.

Bolivar Ferry

As we cross over the water, moon jellies
clap the causeway, filmy, phosphorescent,
Bolivar a black pearl of a bayou.

I swear I can smell the specters skimming
the seawall and salt-caked planking
of abandoned factories, Gulf air

so glutted with ghosts our tongues
turn gray. Dune plants plume like undines
in the lagoon and a tangle of tanzanite

colored nets dangle from the mosquito
fleets. We watch rapt as red-tailed hawks
rim the swampland, a black-necked

stilt cranes its bill, stalking the marsh,
and a yellow-crowned night heron screams,
the queen of the sea. Underbellies of sand-

dwelling sanderlings glimmer in the seagrass
where nettles swarm, this sin city a symphony
of tentacles and triple-digit heat, turbulent

whitecaps more sulphur than azure, rich
with gypsum and ocean jasper. Shorewinds
whip white horses lush on the water’s edge,

sea-rose oleanders overlay the inlet in a
lunatic fringe. Broadway shivers down
the spine of the island where Bettie’s brass-

bound souvenir box locks itself, clutching her
secrets like a prayer shawl, the ghosts of Galveston
little hat tricks rattling our brackish bones loose.
‌

Brood XXII

The summer before the great storm, the magicicadas sputter
and scrim, a whispered chorus chirring like wire brushes on snare

drums. This Baton Rouge brood of stragglers rises four years
early from their subterranean chambers, hatchlings bunching

in branches, nymphs cloaking themselves in crackling exoskeletons
to emerge immortal, imago, feeding on the xylem fizz of root

sap and molting into winged things. Let their tymbals throb,
a squeeze box of ribs buckling one after another in a glamorous

babble. My sisters and I spill onto the balcony, marveling
at the sea of sound, up close the caterwauling of a million cats,

the mating dance of an alien race, the lament of jilted lovers doomed
to sing their throats out, to rasp and dance and clamor until the room

is all on fire, red-eyed and green-skinned, wings as membranous
as embryos. Let us from our safe distance hear them shrilling

the word pharaoh over and over on a loop like a prayer. Enthralled
by their frenzy, let us choose the fugues to drag us from the deep.

Let the Pretenders hijack my world, flying into the townhouse
like pigeons from hell. But half a year later, let it be Stevie who

delivers me from my hospital bed with her cicatrix of black skirts,
a vespiary of veined wings reverberating through the ash

trees, limpid as vapors. Let the brood report back to the Muses:
This is the season she emerges. This is the year she’s reborn.

LeeAnn Olivier, MFA, is the author of the chapbooks Doom Loop Wonderland (The Hunger Press, 2021) and Spindle, My Spindle (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2016). Her poetry has appeared in The Missouri Review, Rockvale Review, Driftwood Press and elsewhere. Originally from Louisiana, LeeAnn now teaches English at a college in Fort Worth, Texas. She is a survivor of domestic violence and breast cancer. In December, LeeAnn went into acute liver failure due to a medication injury and received an emergency liver transplant. Much of her recent work explores the power of the natural world to aid in the healing process.

 

Elegy for Grit and Gumption

A shack with an overhead door,
a grimy window, an unspeakable john,
and a back door just because:
West Side Radiator—40 years an eyesore
to the city planners, the shop itself a hub for
errant vehicles and their owners who’d linger
for a cuppa and a chat with the self-made
host as congenial as his shop was antediluvian.
The upscalers’ disdain failed to penetrate
the thin walls buttressed by the affability
welling inside like an overheating radiator.
Only Death has managed that (hundreds mourning),
loosing the bellowing bulldozer of progress
to level the shop in a trice—a lifetime’s labor
reduced to a parking lot where cars line up like
lolling turtles as their radiators grumble and rust.

Darrell Petska is a retired university engineering editor. His poetry and fiction can be found in 3rd Wednesday Magazine, First Literary Review–East, Nixes Mate Review, Verse Virtual and widely elsewhere (conservancies.wordpress.com). A father of five and grandfather of six, he lives near Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife of more than 50 years.