Tau Herculids

by Christen Lee


Astronomers predicted the Tau Herculids meteor shower
to be an all-or-nothing event,
a once-in-a lifetime sighting that could light up the sky
with as many as 1,000 meteors per hour.
It was Memorial Day.
The kids and I waited until the sun sank low in the west,
imagining how the night would dazzle like never before.
We watched the dusk bleed orange into violet,
stretch long shadows across the wide lawn until full dark.
At ten o’clock, pajamaed and yawning,
we ventured outdoors
walked hand in hand under a
charcoal canvas of black.
We craned our necks, allowing our eyes to adjust as distant dots
of white, faint yellow began to glow.
Look! Look! At the hundreds of pulsing points pulling our eyes
east then west,
south until the trees blocked our view
then north, buttressed by peaked rows of homes.
And while not a single meteor grazed our line of view,
the marvel of the cosmos filled us
poured over into excited gestures
as we pointed, guessing the names and ages of stars
so many million light years away.
And in that hour, the dark receded from our eyes
illuminated by the hope of the unknown.
Finally overcome by sleep, we carried ourselves inside,
our heads falling heavy with so much light and time.
They said it would be an all-or-nothing event
and they weren’t wrong.
Huddled together under that canopy of unyielding light,
we had it all.


* * * * *

Christen Lee is a family nurse practitioner in Cleveland, Ohio. Her writing has been featured in the Literary Cleveland’s Voices from the Edge Anthology, Rue Scribe, The Write Launch, Aurora, Humans of the World Blog, Sad Girls Club, 2022 New Generation Beats Anthology, Wingless Dreamer and is forthcoming in The Voices of Real 7 Compilation.

 

The Clearcut

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley


Sitting in the clearcut on a mammoth stump
Waiting for moose

Gumball-sized scat in piles the size of eagles’ nests
Are flung across the cut, proof of presence
The mountains are lost in a bank of white cloud

While I wait for moose, small things come
A hummingbird, buzzing past
An orange fritillary nectaring in flat-topped goldenrod
A lithe red squirrel, spruce cone in her mouth

Although bleached-bone branches lie helter-skelter
Across the sick yellow moss
And some stumps in the disaster zone are three feet across

All around me baby spruce and fir
Do what babies do
Spring into a broken world
Limbs lifted, all hope, all luck


* * * * *

Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a naturalist and award-winning author of seven nature books, including City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island and The Joy of Forest Bathing. She began writing poetry during the pandemic and had the good fortune to discover Writing in a Woman’s Voice. The site has featured several of her poems, including “How to Silence a Woman,” and “If I have loved you,” both of which won Moon Prizes. Melanie's poetry has also appeared in The New Verse News. She is working on a nature memoir about the Potomac Gorge.   

 

Recycling

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley


It’s hot here in the mountains, hot all over the hemisphere
London train tracks buckling, Sierra sequoias crackling
And where it’s not burning it’s drowning

I walk up the road and take the Short Circuit path
Into the woods
The road is lined with recycling bins

Plastics, glass, papers and cardboard, all methodically sorted
Such conscientious recyclers, fighting to rescue the planet
I take the Short Circuit to the Pasture Path

And down to the Diagonal
I step off the Diagonal to do what most humans do indoors
Into a world of spruce and fir and moss-draped earth

Into a world of unconscious recycling
Birch logs softening into deep decay
Moose scats in piles the size of eagles’ nests drying in the sun

Everything sinking down or rising up, rot and regeneration
Circular resilience
A world apart from rectangular bins


* * * * *

Melanie Choukas-Bradley is a naturalist and award-winning author of seven nature books, including City of Trees, A Year in Rock Creek Park, Finding Solace at Theodore Roosevelt Island and The Joy of Forest Bathing. She began writing poetry during the pandemic and had the good fortune to discover Writing in a Woman’s Voice. The site has featured several of her poems, including “How to Silence a Woman,” and “If I have loved you,” both of which won Moon Prizes. Melanie's poetry has also appeared in The New Verse News. She is working on a nature memoir about the Potomac Gorge.   

 

Inhabited

by Laura Ann Reed


And now, when I summon up
that hamper in my parents’ room,

what do I seek to resurrect if not
the daydreams I inhabited

in that shadowed space?
I want them back—

those idle thoughts
of the duration I could stay

safely hidden, and of how
good the special silence there.

Good too, those ripe,
familiar smells of my

parents—their underwear co-
mingling without shouts or swearing.

I want it back—that proximity
to my mother’s closet, where  

at least six shirtwaist dresses
waited for me to steal among

them and stow my longing between
plaids and floral patterns. Then,

like an afterthought—behind all
those coats and crisp white blouses—

that taffeta gown with its rainbow
sheen I’d never seen her wear,

its cool, deep folds holding the perfume
of who she’d been before I knew her.


* * * * *

"Inhabited" was first published in MacQueen's Quinterly and is part of Laura Ann Reed's collection Shadows Thrown (Sungold Editions, 2023)

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the University of California, Berkeley before working as a leadership development trainer at the San Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada, and Britain. She is the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown (2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific Northwest.

No Cats
                     after Robert Hayden

by Laura Ann Reed


On Sunday mornings, my father tiptoes
from the room where my mother sleeps
curled into her womb’s secret of losses.
He closes the door, careful not to let it creak.

I follow him into the kitchen where
he spreads old newspapers over the floor.
Sets out tins of polish, a brush
and flannel cloth. Picks up a shoe. Under
his breath he whistles a tune he claims
he listened to on the radio, as a boy—
a happy song, he says. Perhaps
it’s because he whistles off-key
that it sounds sad.

What do I know about the sadness
in this house, the disappointments?
The way sun refuses to stipple
the walls?  I look down at the daubs
of red, yellow, blue, and green
in the linoleum, playing a game:  
If I find a cat in the pattern, I can
make a wish. But the daubs
are haphazard, there is no pattern.
Every week I look, but
there are never any cats.


* * * * *

"No Cats" was first published in Willawaw Journal and is part of Laura Ann Reed's collection Shadows Thrown (Sungold Editions, 2023)

 

Laura Ann Reed, a San Francisco Bay Area native, taught modern dance and ballet at the
University of California, Berkeley before working as a leadership development trainer at the San
Francisco headquarters of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Her work has
appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the United States, Canada, and Britain. She is
the author of the chapbook, Shadows Thrown (2023). Laura and her husband live in the Pacific
Northwest.

Water into Wine

by Julia Fricke Robinson


the Bible asks us to suspend reality
have faith, believe in miracles,
waters part, commandments come down from heaven
a star leads to a virgin birth by a child bride
a virgin can give birth because the angel Gabriel declared it so?

this baby named Jesus born of this virgin named Mary
goes to a wedding in Cana with his mother
a grown man, past typical marrying age but unmarried
followed by a group of similar young men
what does that tell us?

in the first recorded instance
of helicopter parenting, the Mother Mary
notices that the host is almost out of wine
asks her nearby son Jesus to perform his first miracle
to turn six jars of water into wine

He sasses her, says, “Why me, woman?”
then, compliant and respectful, he consents
whether to distract his mother, who is always at his side
or to impress friends and fellow party-goers
with better wine; the act recorded as Biblical history

Cana of Galilee, now known as Kafr Kanna (kafur Kanah, accent on 2^nd syllables)
in the Northern triangle of Israel is
89% Palestinian Muslim, 11% Jewish or Druze Christian
residents speak different languages, worship different gods
children educated in segregated schools

Palestinian poverty and unemployment rampant
tensions high, war always imminent, “a time bomb
waiting to explode if Palestinians (the “others”)
exceed 20%” warns Netanyahu, encourages
Jewish women to have more children

The “melting pot” model rejected
this mosaic community with rigid, grout-like barriers
intermarriage outlawed, inequality and discrimination enshrined 
awaits a new Gabriel to announce a new Savior
a miracle of transmutation, water into wine


* * * * *

Julia Fricke Robinson, author of two memoirs, All I Know and Between the Desert and the Wetlands, divides her time between visiting children and grandchildren in Colorado, Indiana and New York and living, dancing and writing in a community of artists, writers, performers, activists and otherwise interesting people in beautiful Silver City, New Mexico, where the weather is just about perfect.

 

On Listening to Sade

by Rebecca M. Ross


When she sings she is

three in the morning
smudged mascara,
the haze of exhausted lovemaking
as night wears off,
unintended consequences of
loneliness, desperation, passion

She is Art Deco angles–
gleaming beams
of metallic permanence
in the moonlit city,
empty streets dotted with pools
of buttery light,
diluted traffic
yolk-yellow cabs catching speeds unknown--

She is sound breaking
into hollow echoes of
a secret bassline
of footsteps on concrete,
the seductive warmth
of breath in saxophone
under the cool vastness of
an expansive night sky,
the familiar click of key in lock,
the sigh of a door swinging heavily on its hinges,
the flip of a hall light switch,
the subtle and strange isolation embracing an empty apartment.

She is anxiety and anticipation shimmering
on the raised eyebrows of expectation--
still in view yet further and further away as you chase her voice
through bars and over chords,
hopping over familiar choruses to reach her,
hoping for a rest in the music so you can finally say

Brava.


* * * * *

Rebecca M. Ross is originally from Brooklyn but currently lives, hikes, and teaches in New York’s Hudson Valley. She has poetry forthcoming or published in The Voices Project, Live Nude Poems, The Metaworker, Last Leaves, Uppagus, Streetcake Magazine, Whimsical Poet, The Westchester Review, and others. Rebecca’s terrible love for dad jokes and clever puns is the cause of much grinning and groaning for those within earshot–and she’s not sorry.