Journal

Dear One Medical

You are here for me,
for my physical needs
for my mental needs
and did you say,
did I read correctly,
my other needs?

Did you mean my
material requirements,
organic cotton, and
radicchio and endive,
dressed lightly with lemon?
Or my spiritual needs, so

neglected these past
few decades, what with
work and exercise  and
diet and no faith in
miracles, although I
would not mind one,

as long as you are offering,
I wish to be transformed
from this inauthenticity
to the next level
of transcendent
reality and bliss.

You have my name,
my address, heart rate.
blood type, weight,
my blood pressure,
I have given all.
I am waiting.

Darning

She is always darning the frayed fabric
Of things. Socks or sentences, she contrives
To darn them, with the needle and the word.

Like the pruning spade, she heeds the warning
Clink of steel against roots. Though something loth,
She locks word threads and sound cloth in a truce.

Where a simple seam would mend, her darning
Is forced always to masquerade as cloth,
Or as an oath arm in arm with the deuce.

She is darning, darning, darning a trick,
A mirage of freedom that chirps and strives
To pretend wholeness, like a wing-clipped bird.

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Black Bough, Nine Muses, Borrowed Solace, Ligeia, Cordite Poetry, and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages, and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.     Blog:  hibahshabkhezxicc

 

Eating Infinity

Crouching on a long-shore bar,
I watch hairy-chested men
with a shovel, grill grate and lighter fluid
dig a pit in the curving barrier island.
A glow emerges
as the midsummer sun fades
behind the dune ridge.
Children in dripping bathing suits run
in along the tidal flats to join
the tribal gathering.

I feel the radiating heat on my ankles
from the white hot coals.
Ground beef patties
imbued with chopped red onion,
garlic powder and tongue-tickling season salt,
on paper plates covered with foil
on tailgates of Suburbans
parked backwards in a semi-circle
like an armada of covered wagons,
are now audibly searing on the open flame,
rapacious faces illuminated by firelight
in anticipation, the continual beat of humanity
by the edge if infinity
as the deep blue sky gives way to black.

Sand burgers have the taste of eternity
after Gulf winds have kicked up mud blanket grit,
we eat them with our hands
and don’t mind if drops of grease roll
down our bronzed arms.
The rhythmic ebb and flow
of smooth, round, symmetrical waves
can wash us clean.
But the terrigenous particles of
quartz, feldspar, and garnet that
we have unwittingly delighted in,
washed down over millennia from the Rio Grande,
the Colorado, the Brazos are now
forever part of us.

Nothing can separate us from the siliceous
grains of diatoms and radiolarians that
wind has blown into our charred meat
from the timeless face of the shore.

Bradley Stephenson is a retired attorney living in Burlington, Vermont.  He is a native Texan and his writing is shaped by gulf coast beaches, hardscrabble hill country, and the Chihuahuan desert.  He has advocated for disability rights and increased federal funding for neuromuscular disease research. 

 

 

How Are You Doing?

You always jerry-rigged your life, just made
it work, never worried how it looked or if the fix
would last, just made it work until it didn’t.

You married her in the moment, knowing
if it wasn’t right, you’d cobble it together
if you could or walk away. You never dreamed
you’d come to love her more than life itself.

Does the distance from this place
make your days any easier now?
You always knew you couldn’t fix
the sadness and would have to leave.
The trick was knowing when.

You said if your grief ever made you hate
those low-slung October clouds
scudding over the Coast Range,
you’d walk away, head for California
where people die in sunshine not in rain.
At least you’d have a shadow. Maybe get a dog.
So, how are you doing?

Doug Stone lives in Albany, Oregon. He has written two chapbooks, The Season of Distress
and Clarity (Finishing Line), The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water (CreateSpace), and a
full length poetry collection, Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain (The
Poetry Box). His poems have been published in numerous journals and in the anthology,
A Ritual To Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford.

Meeting a Cottonmouth

My camera lens coils to cricket frogs
pouncing on the river. Somewhere,
cave salamanders, blind as soap
slap dripping rocks. On the trail

a fattened boomerang wriggles his tail,
his throat jammed by a rat, swallowing
prey in a glacial, reverse birth. My photo
shows the rodent’s back feet plunging

through the snake. I imagine
Appalachian churchgoers shaking
armfuls of rattlers, crooning halleluiah,
the woman cradling her Gaboon viper

before the landlord finds her dead.
I love the cottonmouth, his eyes
two berries of lava, his ebony crescent
fanged white. Few friends cared for my frog,

barred owl and damselfly pictures,
but praised the water moccasin
like a soft, venomous cane, stirring
our fate mortal as the rat.

In Genesis, the serpent slid bellying
on earth, accursed by heaven,
yet his mouth’s sweet canker
sends people to God.

Eric Fisher Stone is a poet from Fort Worth, Texas where he now lives. He received his MFA in creative writing and the environment from Iowa State University. His first full length poetry collection, “The Providence of Grass” was published by Chatter House Press in 2018, and his second collection, “Animal Joy” is forthcoming from WordTech Editions in 2021.