Eileen Succumbs to Complications of the Virus, Covid-19
by Christopher Emerson
For nearly fifty years, since boyhood, I’d thought about how my mother would pass from this world—a morbid rumination, wondering what force of nature would have the power, finally, to take her down. When it happened last year in early April, she wasn’t prepared. I’d heard fear in her voice in a phone call two nights before—unfamiliar fear, a luxury she’d never allowed herself, or perhaps, the world never accorded her.
The virus swept through my mother’s assisted living complex just as a late-night fall sent her to hospital, where she tested positive for Covid. After Eileen was admitted, I received regular phone updates from the shift nurses a thousand miles away. I imagine she was not an easy patient. She rejected hospice care, although it would have eased her pain, helped prepare a smooth transition.
Eileen preferred to stick around and fight. She didn’t know any other way.
Then, after two or three “bad nights,” my mother simply vanished. Such a hurried departure, certain to bring complications.
*
April 6th, the date of my mother’s death. April 7th, 8th, as if on cue, once evening settled in, my hands, held in a vice grip, the fingers splayed, curled into claws, bone-crushed, down to the wrist—too fast, too wild for an arthritis flare-up, too quick to abate, after just ninety minutes—my mother’s pain, her essence, being drawn from me.
This new absence from the physical plane, more than a wind shear, or tropical depression: Hurricane Eileen, left swirling between worlds.
I could feel her presence, as if to distract me from the pain, this girl from the frozen upstate who dipped her snowballs in cold water, let them stand—then launched the iced projectiles at innocent strangers from behind a snowy berm. Chased, sometimes caught by furious men, she’d laugh in their faces as though they were boys. All in a good day’s play.
Later, from behind the veil of marriage, my mother continued to live this way: stirring pots, stalking prey—maintaining absolute control, causing chaos, then walking away, blameless, unscathed.
*
Days before the virus takes her, an older, more dangerous version of my mother comes to me in a dream. She suggests that I conjure one good memory of the two of us together, to remind you, she says, that I wasn’t all bad.
The familiar bugle call, the call to the post—then, the voice of the announcer echoing through the grandstand. Eileen and I look up from our racing forms, snap our gum, flick our ash. The horses are entering the track for the running of the Canandaigua Classic. My mother smooths her skirt, slips her stilettos back on, walks to the betting window, wheels the 7 horse, then places my two-dollar bet to show. She hands me my ticket, a slip of cheap pink paper, the ink nearly dry.
Every year, I get to skip school for the first day of racing at Finger Lakes. The memory—this day, every year, ours alone, my mother’s and mine—redemptive.
*
Near the end of the dream, she asks for my forgiveness. Unthinking, I turn away. I want, just once, to hear her say: I’m sorry. I turn back to respond to her request. But she has vanished.
There is nothing but the aftertaste of Chesterfield smoke, its bitter ash, the afternoon sun on my bare neck. Sharp spikes of sunlight slicing through the perfectly manicured, curry-combed sienna terre of the oval track.
The Opposite of Home
by Kayal Vizhi
At the Marathana bazaar, I wait for pa.
He brings with him the scent of street,
a brittle smell, the opposite of home,
nothing that could belong in my mother’s kitchen,
amidst the loud hands of aunties,
their unlit talk, the ticking clock.
The heat from the bodies of the rice
merchants is soft fleshed, I sink my teeth
into it until it swelters on my tongue
like a new name. I become someone
else, not the daughter who left home
but some faraway thing without kin.
The dusk, perfumed by the workers’ hands
hauling cinnamon barks into jute sacks,
turns to gold. I begin here, in this feral
solitude. My alone is my own,
not my mother’s or her mother’s.
I am aware of my body but not its limits.
My collarbones are a geography of blue,
searching for another grammar, not land,
not men. My desire travels where this body
cannot go, towards the narrow darkness
of alleys, open windows above streets,
lingering long enough to leave a stain
in telephone booths, dim cafes,
evening parks laced with lovers.
But pa drives us home. Arriving
outside the house, caught like sillago
by the bristling net of voices inside the kitchen,
I am a daughter once more - such loss.
The Misdirection
by Damen O’Brien
After a line from 'Growing Season' by Maree Reedman
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. – Chinese Proverb
There’s a magic trick performed with a walnut tree, the magician’s watch,
an axe and years of patience. I only know one way to perform that trick:
galling in the soft wood the slow hard way, ringed with time.
As a child I loved magicians. I watched David Copperfield on television
wade through the Great Wall of China in ghostly x-ray steps
and I stayed awake all night wondering how it was done.
Some fathers have a little of that magic, the stuff that grows a child,
they can pluck coins out of their children’s ears or noses, make the
matchstick stand up, name the right card from a shuffled deck.
My father only had one trick, but we would laugh: he’d bring his
severed finger on a bed of gauze, kept safely inside a matchbox
which twitched with a deathly life when we opened the lid.
We all knew how it was done, a splash of dye, a little hole
to conceal his finger poking through, but I never learned
the secret of The Walnut Tree: how the magician retrieved his watch
from inside a cross cut of the wood. No palmed copy, no assistant
from the audience. To place the watch there fifteen years ago or more,
to let the pulp enclose it like a fist, requires a steadiness of purpose,
a terrible determination: all that time knowing that the wood
held his greatest trick, ticking like a promise. But life is not magic.
We do not begin with the solution, we wait for the watch to be found.
Between teasing us kids, my father pulled down houses, ripping
those crumbling fibrous sheets out of the walls, claw hammering into
ceilings, to dump the tiles in a skiff, his hands and face all powder painted
with asbestos dust, his mates as well, big laughing men with burly arms,
who could break a house down to its parts in days, now sunk in on
themselves, in hospital wards, gasping out their nightmares while awake.
If I wish to save my father’s life, I have to start thirty years ago, when
those little spines had not yet needled his lungs, had not yet stung him
like a shoal of nails. Or earlier, before James Hardy Co. sold chrysotile.
But knowing how the trick is done, and doing it, are not the same.
My father’s latest trick is every breath, stolen from bubbling lungs,
another heartbeat and another, until the last card in the deck is turned.
There’s the Rabbit From A Hat, the Levitating Assistant, and finally my father,
The Disappearing Man, teaching me one last trick. We should not wait
for the watch to be recovered from the tree. There is never a better time.
Carved Ivory Head of a Woman
by Danielle Legros Georges
taken from my mother’s house many
years ago, whose provenance is the tusk
of a beast—whose fierce intelligence is
expressed in its amber eyes, whose flesh
is grey as a Lake Kivu dawn, whose memory
is long, whose eye is the size of a human’s
—mine, fixed upon the study’s top shelf
atop which sits the object—whose flesh
is the beige of bone, whose eyes are inversions,
whose visage is a sister’s, by which I mean
a Black woman’s, whose lips are beauty,
whose nostrils are a slight flare, whose coiffure
is the precise separation and togetherness
of cornrows, whose forehead is high
—whose origin resides in the sculptor’s
mind’s eye, in the concatenation of the model’s
exquisite genes, whose father is a full moon,
whose mother is the sun—as all life is anointed,
and all life comes down—and the sound of the first
wound is made—as perfection is subtraction—
as a tusk is extracted—as the chisel bears down,
and the artifact formed and beheld,
as the right price conceived, and the sale
made sweetly, and the item packed
and carried across land and air.
Colloquy with Your Brain Tumor
by Redd Ryder
Why is it, you ask, that it never goes Dutch
Or shares the cost of your medication,
Your copay weighing upon you almost
As much as the prospect of death does.
Several more months of this,
If the lump on your head doesn’t go halfsies,
You’ll be selling umbrellas on street corners
For your next fix of chemotherapy.
The last thing you want to hear from those sad-eyed nurses
Bending over you like housewives over a pram
Is “They regrow up so fast!” In your present condition,
Irradiant as a bridegroom, you couldn’t hokey-pokey your way
Out of a Shroud of Turin. You try to reason with it:
“This is one hell of a state you’ve left me in, old pal,”
Seeking, if not contrition, then remission, the wished-for miracle
Moldering in your closet like a spinster’s hope chest.
Expecting at least an A for effort, with some length left
On your lifeline, you receive an F on every blood test
Not the “OK, all clear” you were looking for.
Must the Big C appear so prominently at parties
And on CAT scans that it scares your guests?
You scheme to shame rogue cells into leaving you alone,
Allowing that you’ve cheated on them
Once or twice with irritable bowel syndrome,
Comparing cancer’s brutality to the Visigoths’ sack of Rome.
“My parietal lobe is yours,” you concede, folding your hand,
Willing as Lord Chamberlain to fork over Sudetenland
And sign the divorce papers. Hairless as Yul Brynner’s Taras Bulba,
You beg, you plead, metastasis replying, —Not so fast, bub.
Your efforts at reconciliation are rewarded
With nothing but scorn, this growth on your noggin,
Formerly the size of a tick bite, more and more resembling
The nub of a rhinoceros’ horn, one lusted after for its sexual potency.
It seems the only thing you can get up now
is the tumor’s reappearance.
How you wish it had never been born, or you, and tell it so
With all the fervor of a religious zealot made painfully aware
That the surgeon’s laying on of hands hadn’t done the trick.
Country Dinners
by Elizabeth Oxley
It was nothing for her to turn out
two pies after church. Engraved,
her napkin holder implored Bless
O Lord. First came gravy and meat,
dandelion leaves dressed. In the lull
before dessert, my brothers and I
pushed back from the table—parting
Victorian shadows, exploring
attic nooks. We sifted through
photos, ran our fingers across
her typewriter’s cold metal,
watched each key throw its punch.
Her house struck us like a temple
to a distant age: cut glass jars
and standing clocks. When she called us
to the kitchen, we spooned up crusts
beneath a picture of The Last Supper.
Everything she did, she did in the name
of that man’s heart red as a wild July
strawberry. Finished, we slipped upstairs
again—children on the quest
for lost things, trespassing through dust
suspended in custard sunlight,
finding a soldier’s uniform hung
inside a closet as if, sleeved in wool,
our grandfather might any minute
climb back down from heaven.
The Missing
by Anthony Lawrence
Ten brass nails, a doll with grey eyes that fluttered then rolled
back into its head, the complete Western Angler
magazine series, a tiara set with plastic rubies and sapphires,
a Ouija board called Pathfinder, the usual assortment
of clothes. Lot 4, Auction of Unclaimed or Abandoned Luggage.
The suitcase was nondescript as a bag of rope,
the name tag missing, yet I made a successful bid and bought
a stranger’s things. Unlike my friend who finds it hard
to enter a hotel without feeding coins into a machine,
the gambling gene was not among the hand-me-down
items in my inheritance. The need for taking risks, however,
like holding the nervous animal of my breath
for too long under water or the covers while listening to you
breathe in your sleep, was alive and well.
After breaking the combination lock, a pair of magpies began
to sing, and I thought of their facial recognition skills,
remembering the features of at least two hundred people.
Then I returned my attention to the contents of the bag
and picked up a nail. Nine inches long, and heavy, the same
style a garrison of tunics had used to pin a supernatural
prisoner to the wood. Weighing them in one hand, I reached
past the doll with Linda Blair's expression during
the crucifix scene in The Exorcist, and opened a magazine
to an article on how to catch cobia by casting
red and white feather jigs to lure them out from under
the wings of manta rays. When I slipped the tiara
into my hair, I half expected a shower of lavender sparks.
I stared at the Ouija board until my eyes went out
of focus yet left it undisturbed. Apart from my late father,
there was no one I felt compelled to summon from
the other side of what being here and now means. I replaced
everything in the order they’d been found
and closed the bag. No bird sang. The words blood and line
arrived and shimmered, just out of reach,
all those names and ages locked into place, shining in the far
regions of the missing.
Ode to the Twenty-First-Century Brain
by Jennifer Fraser
O tiller-clasping captain of my ship
galaxy guided, sails snap, prow dipping
rolling wind whipped waves slip, slice, tipping lip
beneath, amygdala reels with ripping
yet sinks in a watery mindful sea
soothed with parasympathetic shipping.
Forgive inattention, distraction, see
your shadowy hidden realm leaves me lost.
I seek your treasure residing in we
torn asunder, Descartes’ error it cost.
our bond established by evolution
encoding survival, emotion tossed.
Long eras privilege thought contribution,
ignore body-knowledge, synesthesia
solution. Crisis sparks revolution.
Upheaval within mind of fantasia,
blend gone. Textual harmony bombed out,
prefrontal cortex falls to aphasia.
O thou starry network I need your shout,
your clarion call to assert true might
to oust ignorance and to blast the rout.
Trailing clouds of glory, empathic sight
illuminates our world briefly, but blight
bludgeons until entrenching ‘might is right.’
Narcissism’s virus infects the night
dousing synaptic ignition, fiery globe.
I’m your secret sharer, join my fight.
Start harnessing the occipital lobe
to expose Orwellian reversal
naked Emperor parades golden robe.
Time to oust evil bring to demersal.
O my Captain, this is your true calling.
Eighty-six billion neurons’ rehearsal.
The Book of Rachel
by Steve Evans
She is the maker of worlds.
All creatures listen when she speaks.
The oceans know her voice.
When Rachel reaches out her hand,
the stars tremble into place.
Rachel is the sweetness of summer
and the violence of a winter storm,
but the rip of thunder,
like lightning’s gaudy flash,
cannot describe her.
Her skin is soft as smoke.
She is the nectar and the bee.
Gravity rides the curve of her thigh,
her eye on pleasure’s horizon.
Yet these are petty whispers.
Were you to linger at her lips
you could not know her beauty.
Armies hesitate at her collarbone,
empires at the tenderness of her wrist.
Kingdoms rise and fall at her hips.
No song naming her can name her.
You might as well taste rain on your tongue
and call it a language.
Say she is sacred and she turns away.
Any offered praise evaporates.
So many stories told.
It is said that the Book of Rachel
burns true believers with their own desire,
that to read it is to be drawn into
a brilliance beyond awakening.
The Book of Rachel was thought lost
but that is impossible
because it was never written.
There is no book but only ever Rachel,
and the stories that she tells of herself.
Letter From Carthage
by Redd Ryder
He wrote of subjects he wouldn’t talk to us about, of bodies piling up
Like peanut shells on a barroom floor, crushed underfoot
By advancing tank phalanxes. Assuring our mother, before she was our mother,
That his sifting of Desert War sand had revealed no Keatsian worlds to speak of
More peaceful than ours is, filling his monogrammed leather journal
In a hand inspirited by the nearness of Carthage. Entries to lure her thoughts away
From present danger, the Second Battle of El Alamein, towards the Second Punic War,
When the Carthaginians lost everything except their courage and our interest.
Hannibal’s elephants, especially in defeat, casting big shade
On the triumphant wolves of Scipio Africanus. As if to say, Yo, Scipio, dude,
Let Rome bay; while Carthage, in ruins, accounted a loser, endures,
Preeminent in the hearts and minds of not so Rome-centric historians
And the romantics among us. Poets of a certain bent. In theses of Punic War specialists.
Like that hapless football team you wouldn’t bet on but just can’t help rooting for.
That my father, not yet my father, was a fanboy of Carthage
–As he was of my mother–dug a foxhole we shared and still share, our deep love
Of family and history. A pharmacist in peacetime, in letters unseen and unsent
He served up fresh prescriptions for adoration, telling of his absence without leave
From the Army’s Medical Corps, if only for a few hours, risking brig or firing squad
If charged with desertion. For history. For her. Before he had earned his Bronze Star.
Making his journal, discovered by us in a drawer after her death, that much more compelling.
Day-tripping out of his head, carillons of war theatrically hushed for a time
As were walkies of general staffers scouting desert terrain from camoed Jeeps,
Axis and Allies respectively plotting next moves, Rommel and Montgomery,
Chess championship of the dunes down to those two, searching for any signs of weakness
In their rival’s game, my father saw his chance and took it, going AWOL
To survey the ruins, one man squatting on a bit of wall, his cursive retelling
Of city-states facing off across the Mediterranean interrupted by a call to arms.
Around the hip-curve of North Africa, battle-weary men fought and fought again
As in the Punic Wars, the Axis’ hope for world dominion
Foundering on Maghreb’s shores. In that brief interlude when the guns fell silent,
Conducive to writing letters home, triceratopsian armor taking a deep breath,
Arms and legs having flown off more often than Allied sorties, my father described
Taste-testing a pinch of sand for some hint of its signature saltiness, the rot beneath the skin
Of bodies left too long in the sun, this spot he was in having seen too much death.
Glacier
by Claire Wahmanholm
It is everywhere. It is the water I am trying to teach my daughters to float in. It is the sky I tell them to keep their eyes on. It is the air I tell them to seal in their mouths should they slip underwater. I am a leaky boat, but I am trying to answer their questions. As deep as thirty Christmas trees. As deep as twenty giraffes standing on each other’s backs. There hasn’t been a sea here for seventy-five million years. I cannot explain that number. My daughters’ ankles are sinking into the beryl water. No one can float forever. On the map, pushpins skewer patches of icy green like rare moths. I am trying to say it’s too late without making them too sad. It’s like how you can't take the blue out of the white paint, like how you can't hear your name and not turn around. The calving of glaciers is the loudest underwater sound on Earth. I dip my daughters’ ears beneath the surface to let them listen. It’s like how you can't put a feather back on a bird, like how the bird won't fit back into its shell. We step backward into the house. I wring the glacier out of their suits. I wring it out of their hair. I wipe it from their faces, but it is everywhere. It is the storm, it is the drowned harbor, it is the current, it is the bathwater that the baby slurps before we can stop her. The horizon rises. It rains. The glacier hammers the roof, the glacier soaks a corner of the bedroom ceiling, which greens with spores. On the map, the pushpins hover over green air, the green air is a spreading shroud. The storm surges ashore, mercurial and summer-smelling. We are not accustomed to the sea, so we describe it like a sky. The waves are tornado green and loud. In the water, the polar bears look like clouds.
Retiring to the Desert
by Jessie Jones
Speak, inviolate flux of the howling
place unseen. Stepping over a ledge
of grief, I take one after another
without ever feeling my feet. Sun laps
at the earth’s bright bowl until it squeaks clean.
A garden overgrows its walls and goes
to seed. Wind shreds the black locust,
petals fracturing the land into dizzying
abstract. The laudable ease of leaving.
A laugh from the high whorling
linden and the grass stunned
upright sings. The oscine ties bow
after bow with its looping call.The chorus
conquers. The road forward makes no
promise of flowers. The weave
of the world tightens. Reach through the chaos
of nature and its green heaving breach.
Make me green in the light of its eye.
Ready me for absence. Alight on me
in your crazed way, beams like fricative
fingertips in the folds of my brain. Runnel
a passage, bless this end, and I will finally drink
where the horizon bows heady and low
to the perfect cold, to an auroral jade
raging through the hemisphere. I have seen
what goes there, seen the stone path close
around my pink halo. A gum around a fang.
A tongue around a word. I do not wish to heal
from this. A sarabande splits the land
from the sky and the mountains
flow between them. I carry nothing
but the most peaceable forgetting.
From on high, I see twice. All the adjectives
of daylight shout. If I have any doubt, pull me up
by my roots. They are thirsty for the world
behind the eyelid, where even sight cannot touch.
Having Lived in the Light of the Black Sun
by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
I can say
my home was sopping and mapless
in magnolias, our fluted mouths folded against
the cold light. This story is no longer
available, says the app upon my lurking.
Minor prophets shimmer and ache
in the endless frequency of simulacra. Here I am
trying my hand again at artifice. I hope
you can see this flamingo of self-reflexivity
stepping off the hospital bed and the methadone
to move windward into what we call the future
with its publication schedules and sensitivity
readers working more than a year ahead. I have already
been dead in some ways, you could say. But
the mistake I have made is to consider this living
in waiting. Yearning to reach the finish line
of my family tree that disappears somewhere around
1750 when we learned then how to glimpse
our world now, through cameras and telescopes.
The spectacular craft of my father gave me a periscope
from milk cartons. I learned to live underground,
my mirrors stinking of milk, peeking through the carpet
thick with bougainvillea and chicken feathers and plastic packets
of alcohol flipped in the gardens by my grandfather.
They say the mark of melancholy is the loss of language. I remember
his muteness and mine that followed, chosen through no will
of our own but ours nonetheless, a will like a bulbous roach
scuttling under the gate that led to the prayer hall
a holy will, like all the women. Their desertion
and defiance, the sun always stippling across
hijab and sari as if magic were a currency that asks
the gulls to stitch their calls
into the shore for us so that time peels itself
from the dark columns in the cities and
appears to us in the pink fingers of magnolias
punctuating the supplicant air.
“Read,” the voices say. This poem cannot end
but we will, someday
knowing full well that we have been called
autistic and druggie and shy and mad
and we will know to wait for the promiscuous rain falling,
touching everything.
gaze
by Rula Jurdi
after war, it grows again, the
appetite for domes and curly
words, myths beyond ourselves
in the old souk, a stone is erected
for the gaze, the unassailable
outside reassured the haziness
of the inside
there is a plaza to invent, fresh
piety, simulacra of eyelashes and
enameled lovers, which once
breathed in Vahe'́s photos
silence is far away, and we can
no longer defeat narration or the
sovereign bookshop they installed
the poem has failed, in particular,
and the land as skin, secure,
as smell, voluptuous, is neither man
nor woman
the Kalashnikovs that used to blush
for the city, have altered the
movement of memory, its limbs
and skulls
we keep rehearsing our future roles,
with all that yellow. But when
shall we be convinced of sadness?
of the buried city?
it is majestic and viridian, the
disappearance, and time flows in all
directions to bury the pain of language
a few ovule-bearing pines are
squeezed into the scene, slimming
down the past to gossips
from the other broken side, the sea
is not tender, but continual, one million
horses losing their throats again
Blue Dot
by Alison Braid
My phone takes me across town. I, nothing but the water-blue dot.
Effortless, how the blue dot becomes my virtual body;
I recognize myself in its glow, and follow, feet lecturing the sidewalk.
I think of how the blanched garlic clove slips out of its skin. And the bowl
fills up with them, pearl white and blue in veins. But in the sink
their paper wrappers crinkle, the all of them wanting remembrance, sight.
When the blue dot falters and its cone of leading light disappears, the dot
grows larger, pulses, blooming with its discontent. What I mean is the signal
is scrambled and I am lost. A sudden and joyous fragment, paused
in the middle of a leaf-green street. Maybe I am most alive here—here
where the algorithm disappoints and Google has recommended
the wrong shirtsleeves, complete in a colour that will only wash me out.
It is and isn't a shock to find the body is no longer a perfect shape
on the flat map of the city. To find oak trees springing up from the earth in vertical lines,
hydrangeas the size of two anatomically correct hearts held up by one strong stem.
Then to find the body is not blue jeans, though it is a mistake I often make,
choosing not to look closely at whatever is closest to me. I return to the hidden
skeleton of my body slowly, as if reentering a dream. The sun is hot
in my eyes. Wind disrupts the neatness of my hair. Buses pull over but I am not
getting on. Doors open, close. I wave the buses off, drivers showing their teeth.
I show my own. My body on a bus stop bench is a place of high drama, a blip
in the system, not doing what it's meant to. I sit with hands on my thighs and below,
or within, are two hollow bones, cascading with marrow, blood,
two valleys where something—cold, blue stream—runs through. Imagine that,
the wild of my body, loosed and tumbling. I kick a pebble into the street.
Overhead, the buzz of the trolleybus cables is the contented buzz of bees
beating their air-thin wings. Restored to its good health,
my phone tells me drones are expelled from the nest. Sent away, they stay away.
The hive continues without them. And the drones—where do they go?
A beekeeper on the east coast says the bodies of drones are found dead in her grass.
They are born into cells that look like bullets and have no fathers, she writes.
I can feel the sadness of her story in my body if I want to. Sadness in the body
is a basket of wet shelled peas, bells with no answer, dark rooms with darkening
windows. But my body is living and dying, apart from the bees, a fine machine
I don't yet know all the parts to. The sun filters down, a simple pattern playing
on my skin. I don't confuse it for a part of me. In my hand, the phone stirs and sings out.
* "My body on a bus stop bench is a place of high drama" takes its inspiration from Dorothea Lasky's line, "The I of a poem is a place of high drama," from Animal.
Nocturne 20 / Away to Nowhere
by Shellie Harwood
I
A truck carries the piano, burnished,
to the borderline between Ukraine and Poland.
A rush of gentle hands lift it to ground,
one stone’s skip from the battered tracks.
A slight man lowers himself to the bench,
rests fingers on ivory.
Shepherd of exiles,
he will play them through.
Ukrainian mothers step from trains, as weary dancers,
lift arms together, pour their children over the border
like liquid gold. The pianist plays on as light drops,
cut-gloved, bare-fingered,
he caresses Chopin’s Nocturne No. 20,
in C sharp minor,
ushers the refugees, like a waterfall,
into Poland, another land’s clay on their shoes.
Plays on, tempo marking: “Lento con gran espressione”,
meaning “very slow, and with many expressions”.
And so, at tempo, they have come, slowly,
with many faces, nothing more to lose.
II
Olesia’s mother lives in a whisper,
her hands tied behind her back
as she waits at a small café, waits
blindfolded, for Odessa to fall.
She sips strong coffee through a paper straw,
with birds inside her chest. Big wings beat
hard against her brittle bones.
She mouths a letter to Olesia while she waits
for her city to crumble, a letter about the
birds inside, about the grief of all mothers.
She is soaked in the sorrow of Odessa.
A puddle fills, refills beneath her chair.
She prays for skies to close.
Olesia writes to her mother, Come to me.
Come away from Odessa. Olesia’s mother will not.
Will not float across oceans on her own despair.
She has an occupation. She is the record keeper now,
for lost Odessa. She sips, her blind eye turned, and counts
the fleeing feet that shuffle by the sad café,
feet on their way away to nowhere.
Splash Study
by Leigh Lucas
Hippocrates detailed the ailment, Darwin suffered it sailing to the Galapagos and Lawrence of Arabia on camel crossing sand.
Seasickness comes from confusion of the senses, a dissonance between expectations and actuality.
Get to the deck, eyes on the horizon
: I double down on avoiding anyone who might ask me how I’m doing, or who I suspect might care.
: Compulsively, and like a champ, I date. You wouldn’t believe how rarely death comes up.
This one is sweet, he speaks slowly, he thinks it’s dark that I’m researching seasickness. I resist the urge to pat his pretty head.
His father was an engineer in the Merchant Navy—that’s the direct translation to English, I don’t know what you guys call it—and his job was to make sure the motor never stopped. He traveled everywhere and saw the world. But mostly what he remembers is seasickness: You get dizzy in the beginning, but then you learn to cope.
Get to the deck and find the horizon. It will pass.
Epistle
by Allis Hamilton
after Niall Campbell
Understand this is handwritten: scrawled
on paper rubbed with ochre, red
as a chough's sly eye; sent, wrapped
in vine leaves and taped to the back
of a snail’s spun shell; or, rolled tight,
tied to the leg of a homing pigeon –
one who knows where to place the scroll
to have you stumble upon it when
you wake, staggering, fresh from a dream –
the page dribbled with drawings and laced
with half-solved mysteries and twisted myth.
I am writing this for I find myself recalling
your oblong house, its ivy a-sprawl
of tangled limbs nudging every window,
notebooks swollen with intricate maps
of sea floors, elaborate etchings of ants;
your tortoise plodding around the back garden
munching on dandelion leaves or grubs. I come
to realise our bodies cannot always follow
our floating thoughts; that this life may kiss us
goodbye before together we eat artichokes again,
drifting on a boat that takes us to the star-lit dance –
you singing folk songs all the watery way. I
want to tell you, I still hum that tune. Only now
I smell jasmine flowering in spring rain, feel
ancient wind telling the silver eye when to fly,
watch mycelium break the soil only to soak
in pale light, hear the forlorn bird’s unceasing song.
Homesick (Letter to Ovid)
by Maureen Scott Harris
Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.
– Ovid, Heroides
Dear Exile, everyone knows of your misery
in Tomis. Its rivers plunged down rocky slopes,
refused to release the land’s animating spirits.
Surrounded by fishers speaking in tongues
you could name none of their catch. Eight years
of letters begging Imperial forgiveness never
bought your return to Rome, the theatre
for your infamous poems of dalliance, its
countryside alive with transformations.
Did your mother tongue grow rusty? Rumours
circulated. Some said you wrote poems in Getic.
Your late letters home, still pleading, were framed
by the Black Sea’s seasons, its weather blowing in.
Centuries later I write you from the murky edge
of the Anthropocene where we are all exiles,
ignorant of the land’s vocabularies, besotted
with our own. I imagine you beside that tideless
sea the Greeks called hospitable. Your mind turns
again towards transformation. The carp on Roman
dinner tables was hauled from that sea. Beware
the Romans, you think, savouring how the fish
shines, garbed in its local name.
Our Hands
by Dani Dymond
All through adolescence, I felt Amazonian in stature: only daughter
on the hockey team, towering above twelve-year-old boys, shoulders
like framing for a grand house as I outgrew swaths of denim, “floods”
to rot the wood beam bearing my spine. Mom and Dad must have known
what was in store: by my first birthday, I had a mouth full of molars,
ravenous girl. After Seventeen magazine lauded black clothing
for its “sliming effect,” I bought nothing but midnight sky to drape over
my body, a closed museum exhibit. I learned to stoop like a woman aged
decades, disguised in plain sight––the better to hide you with, my dear.
But no garment could hide these hands in Southern California’s heat:
huge palms, wide and white, flat ghosts. They are my father’s hands,
as if cloned and sewn onto my wrists at birth, gift with no receipt, femininity’s
perceived enemy, hungrier even than my teeth. His callouses, denoting
decades of construction sites, contrast my manicure as time
and sunlight wear down the collagen across his forearms.
This watch only cost me five bucks, he says, proud to be a saver, someone
who keeps minutes captive on the cheap. When I first show him my fanned
fingers after getting engaged, Dad pinches them with his own to see: for just
a moment, genetics knit back together, a ring atop the overlap. My smile––
also his––can’t be contained, grin and grip in the looking glass.