Journal

A Note To the Young Woman Who Took
the Dead Squirrel Off the Street

The street has one of those electric signs
that telepathically read your speed & warn you
SLOW DOWN––I sometimes expect it will say
NOW DAMN YOU––Today I kept under 25mph
& in a stretch between the house with a Jeep
with no wheels & the castle––a gentrification
in three stories with lion couchants beside the driveway––
I swerved past a dead squirrel on the center line––a red squirrel, its
tufted tail upright––almost beautiful.
I missed seeing the rest, careful, as I was under 25mph––
too fast to take in a vulture’s view. You appeared
dressed in black––I saw you in my rear-view mirror.
You ventured out & picked up the carrion, holding it
with two hands like an offering, not the disdain
of index & thumb––You carried it to the curb
but then I lost you because of a stop sign
& I had to turn toward home––
I had a time-warp moment like Vonnegut describes
Billy Pilgrim having in his famous slaughterhouse
book––I was a boy again who watched his dog
Blackie dart out into the street just when a bus
turned the corner & approached & came by
& I saw his body give the bus a slight hiccup-bounce
as the rear double wheels ran over him & I heard
once more a sound I won’t try to describe
but will never forget––My friend Joe’s mom
Mrs. Beyea from across the street ran out to Blackie
before I could––while faces stared out of the bus’s
rear window––but nothing stopped the bus––
& Mrs. Beyea raised her righteous hand with its
middle finger straight as a spear at the bus
as it went on down the street––as if nothing
had happened of importance, like the ploughman
in Breugal’s painting––I loved Mrs. Beyea
when she lifted poor Blackie––bloody & smashed
& held him out to me––I thank you young lady
in black for sparing me a middle finger when I
looked back, thinking nothing but too bad.

Robert Eastwood lives in San Ramon, California. His work appeared most recently in  Cimarron Review and Poet Lore. He has three books: Snare (Broadstone Press, 2016), Romer (Etruscan Press, 2018). His third, Locus/Loci, published in November, 2019 (Main Street Rag).

This Stage

Look at you, old
man—distant
dear crusty old
man—you, who never knew
me well, whom I
do not know,
though you are the only man I’ve known for all
my life.  Here you are, your fever heat
beside me in the doctor’s waiting room.
I take your crooked hand.
You let your eyes fall closed.
Without your bustle, your brocade of talk
on antique chests and etymologies and cans
you collected from the side of the road, without the light
of your eyes, I see
the hollows of your skull.
You, who never speak to me of age, or death, or love—
you know, don’t you,
that this is how it may go—this loss
of appetite, the pull
of sleep, the days folded into pale blue
sheets. Today
we sit side by side, waiting. We act
as though you have only
a cold.
But the curtain’s been pulled aside—
if not for the last act,
then for rehearsal.

 

Jennifer L. Freed lives in central Massachusetts, where she has recently completed a manuscript based on the repercussions of her mother’s stroke.  Current work appears/is forthcoming in Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, Rust + Moth, and others. Her poem-sequence “Cerebral Hemorrhage” was awarded the 2020 Samuel Washington Allen Prize from the New England Poetry Club. Please visit jfreed.weebly.com

The Florescent Orange Swimsuit

I wriggled into my fluorescent orange swimsuit,
the one my father and I bought together–
the last one in the last store we visited
before closing time. I had to buy it because
I had nothing else to wear
to the summer camp.

The next day, I looked at the other children,
looking normal in their black and red monochrome,
and I imagined myself
a fluorescent orange glowworm
gleaming against the pale floor tiles
of a pool that looked like a second hand copy
of the afternoon sky.

Don’t worry, I’ll give you company, said my father,
appearing in a pair of swimming trunks
just as fluorescent orange as mine.

I jumped into the pool, for the first time
eyes and nostrils bare, exposed.
My mouth opened like that of a goldfish
and was flooded with a rush of chlorinated water.

I saw a blur of fluorescence.
Then a firm grip pulled me up,
and I spluttered to normalcy,
My father hugged me and whispered it will be alright.

I did not step into the pool again under the April sun,
bunked swimming camp
till my father took charge
and said he would teach me how to swim.

After much prodding, coaxing, coddling, and pushing,
I progressed from dipping to floating.
His patience outshone the fluorescence of both our suits
put together
as he taught me how to breathe underwater
and to freestyle like an Olympian swimmer.
Before I knew it, I was in love with swimming
and my fluorescent orange swimsuit.

 

Preeth Ganapathy’s writings have appeared or are forthcoming in the Buddhist Poetry Review,
Voices on the Wind Poetry Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review among others. Currently, she
works as Deputy Commissioner of Income Tax in Bangalore, India.

 

 

Nightimeliness

Sunburnt, red raw and hurting
most everywhere. Medicine
failing. Complaints about
the thermostat, existence,
other things too. A movie
about talking bears,
another about the Second World
War. The moon eclipsing Earth
completely for the first time
since 37 A.D., or around then.
A crew of wild foxes
tore apart the garbage, scattered
chicken bones into the pool.
When it’s this dark, be careful.

 

Brighterest

A boring sentimentalism: light
reflecting off the distant sea, a light-
bulb aisle enclosed from sunlight. Heat and beams
of radiation, lightness caught in throat
and lung. Received good news today; or, not
exactly good, but not a tragedy.
We’re nauseated, full of poison light.
I’m shivering in bed. You’re dripping down
into my eyes. Your eyes are little bulbs.
You’re always scared you’re sick, and even if
we share some incoherent wrong inside
ourselves, it’s not as though there’s any sense
in visibilities, irregular
abilities to read the blurry bright.

Anthony Hagen is a native of northern Virginia and currently lives and works in Austin, Texas. Recent work can be found in American Poetry Journal and SHARKPACK Annual. 

Yartzeit

–after Li Young-Lee

Ten years ago this week
our mother died, her ashes
in a blue urn, her and his together,

the urn on a shelf in a mausoleum,
all hush and quiet, as if the dead
could hear and be disturbed by the living.

What are we to do with this story of ash,
hum of old life that still rings out to warm
the cold, dark place where they rest?

The others, each urn in its own cubby,
take up the song, night passing to day
and back to night, in a register we can almost hear.

Suzy Harris grew up in Indiana and has lived in Portland, Oregon for her adult life. She is now retired and has returned to poetry, watercolor, oil pastel crayons, and other means of playing with color and words. Her poems have appeared most recently in Clackamas Literary Review and Williwaw and are forthcoming in Rain Magazine and Switchgrass Review. She is working on a chapbook about becoming deaf and learning to hear with a cochlear implant.