Eurydice

by Chella Courington

Women have cried over my confinement

in hell by a husband who loved me so

he could not turn away

could not abide the caveat.

These long dark days

underground

breathless

I have not lived yearning for him.

I’m fine.

Did you really believe he wanted me

on earth with him?

Orpheus?

The beloved singer?

What would he sing if I were there?

For his song he needed me

buried beneath the crushing ground

star-crossed love that could never vanish

because it never was.

He didn’t desire a woman

bloody with menstrual rituals

whose body once luminous would be taken by time.

Orpheus could not accept such a betrayal.

He wanted me as nymph, not crone.

Even more than age

he feared my voice.

Afraid it would rise above his.

What did he know of suffering and forgiveness?

I was the one severed from the sun

shut in subterranean darkness

barely enough oxygen.

He could have joined me the day I descended.

A knife to his throat, a serpent to his breast.

But he did none of these.

Came to me later by other hands.

I have no use for him.

* * * * *

Chella Courington is a writer and teacher whose poetry and stories appear or are forthcoming in numerous anthologies and journals including SmokeLong Quarterly, The Collagist, and The Los Angeles Review. Her novella, Adele and Tom: The Portrait of a Marriage, is available at Breaking Rules Publishing. (chellacourington.net)

ANA

by Juanita Rey

I’d sit on the ledge with my Aunt Ana,

dipping our toes in sea water,

letting the minnows nibble our toes

and laughing.

I was seven years old

and she seemed not much older

though she was my mother’s youngest sister –

the wild one so they said

with her slinky dresses,

high heeled shoes,

and underthings drying on the outside line

that, folks whispered,

no respectable woman

would ever think of wearing.

She loved that Caribbean wind

blowing her hair loose

and the tang of fish and salt.

She’d lead me barefoot

along the sand,

into the cascading waves

that rolled up to her deep brown thighs.

She loved to pick up stones and shells,

rub them for good luck.

And she’d investigate the rotted planks

that drifted shoreward.

To her, there was something of pride’s folly

in the wreckage of old ships.

though she didn’t miss a chance to sway her hips

should some local hunk stride by.

I have just returned briefly for her burial.

I heard the men talk

when they didn’t know I could hear.

And the women too

when they invited me into their circle.

Lascivious or sententious – just different shades of lies.

  

I preferred the ocean’s epilogo –

unknowable but cool.

* * * * *

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in this country five years. Her work has been published in Pennsylvania English, Opiate Journal, Petrichor Machine and Porter Gulch Review.

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

by Juanita Rey

The dead raccoon makes me sad.

To you, it is merely disgusting.

No, the flies, the crows,

or anything else that wants at the corpse

do not bother me.

That’s how the natural world works.

Sure, there’s sorrow in those stiff bandit eyes

but nothing grotesque.

Unless, of course, you factor in

the speeding car that knocked this poor creature

into the gutter.

But, then again,

you shudder at the sight of a tampon,

at the thought of the cycles

a woman’s body goes through.

And there was that film

of a mother giving birth.

Nothing was really shown

but even that nothing was too much for you.

We’re all flesh and blood.

There’s no getting away from it.

And flesh is not always pristine.

And there are times when blood

doesn’t stick to its veins and its arteries.

No, the dead raccoon is not beautiful.

But it fills me with awe.

Here’s four years or more

of foraging, scurrying,

defending, fleeing, mating.

And here’s the machinery

that accomplished that.

No reason for me to ever turn away.

Not while life is such a messy but powerful instinct.

And death says more than it bargained for.

* * * * *

Juanita Rey is a Dominican poet who has been in this country five years. Her work has been published in Pennsylvania English, Opiate Journal, Petrichor Machine and Porter Gulch Review.

If I Brought A Man

by Kennita Ballard

If I brought a man

Into this world

Whose life

Would end

Sooner?

How much can I love

A man that looks like me

When there is a world

That would take that very thing

Away

If, as a baby, I wrapped him up tight

Would that keep the world away

If, as a baby, I scrub his skin raw

Would that keep this target off his flesh

If, I could keep him as a baby

Would he ever become a man

That someday...

How much longer

Can this heart

Not yet the mother

Break?

I’ve wonder about the futility

Of mourning now

For a child not yet

Mine

Who doesn’t come home

How Does it End?

by Tova Hinda Siegel

Ants lay dead on the floor 

in my friend’s bedroom.

Her skirt is grey, or maybe black.  

She can’t tell.

No zipper can make the fit

though it moves 

back and forth

and the cows cross the road

bellowing 

in the attempt.

Moths settle on the inviting wool.

Metamorphize 

beyond youth and rainbow.

Time and sound invite me 

to review the moon’s red halo,

settling into the night 

of swirling wind.

Before their death

they marched around and back

and I think of friends

up and down, in and out

of my life, moving in concentric circles, 

diaphanous, though a glass of wine

would keep them,

would hold them still, 

keep them from sliding,

keep them from drifting into the circle

before the drift of drifting pulls

like the gravity of a black hole

and fills till empty, 

with a speed rivaling light

or death 

or breakfast eggs.

The cry of the mother dove deprived

of her fledgling, echoes in the hollow.  

Feathers, beak and dead still open eye,

I bury it in the garden.

The nest stays empty but for an occasional

visit from the father

who never settles but stands vigilant on the edge.

Then he too leaves.

The ants become dust

only to be swept

into the same dirt 

that holds the days dead dove

safe from hungry flies wanting

food for their maggot offspring.

* * * * *

Tova Hinda Siegel’s work has appeared in Salon.com, I’ll Take Wednesdays, On The Bus, and several anthologies.  She holds a BA from Antioch University and an MS from USC. A midwife, cellist, mother, grandmother and great grandmother, Tova has studied with Jack Grapes, Tresha Faye Haefner, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner. A mother, grandmother and great grandmother, Tova and her husband live in Los Angeles.

That Moment I Knew          

by Tova Hinda Siegel

                                                                                               

Why did I want to walk 

to the Chuppah alone?  

Why didn’t I want my father’s

strength to lean on?

We could have turned and run

the other way. A quick retreat

from what became years of sadness.

Instead, I held 

my flowers, lilacs and

lilies of the valley,

still my favorites, 

in my shaking hands.  

When I looked up –

and I didn’t want to look up –

I could see him

and my mother smiling,

under the Chuppah, waiting.

I stood, so far away, 

solitary as a leaf, 

fallen on the winter ground.

* * * * *

Tova Hinda Siegel’s work has appeared in Salon.com, I’ll Take Wednesdays, On The Bus, and several anthologies.  She holds a BA from Antioch University and an MS from USC. A midwife, cellist, mother, grandmother and great grandmother, Tova has studied with Jack Grapes, Tresha Faye Haefner, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner. A mother, grandmother and great grandmother, Tova and her husband live in Los Angeles.

Keeping Watch

by Carrie Vaccaro Nelkin

Winter’s silence, winter’s darkness,

refuge against the streets.

Walls she can keep dim or make glow,

space she can imagine a French garden

with cornets and hautboys,

or a blue-sizzle club with sax and piano,

or nothing,

just the dripping of the shower,

the creaking of the floorboards,

her own breathing.

Safety, discreetness, discreteness

from the merchants gazing out

through shop windows from sale

to meager sale, the brawny young studs

mustached and tattooed breakfasting at the bar,

the middle-aged men

grouped in early evening before the deli,

standing and looking, standing and talking

the way they say women do, their eyes

following her determined walk

as they follow anyone new

or not male or not white. She could

so easily pass

for one of theirs but

for her wary gait.

On the streets she feels like

the white fly among the black,

the black bear in the Arctic,

the one plant above the snowline. Inside

she can listen to her bourees and blues

and peer out the windows at voices

to catch the speakers at their most disarmed

and candid

and measure if one day they might be

friend or foe.

* * * * *

"Keeping Watch" was originally published in Shadow Road Quarterly (September 2013)

Carrie Vaccaro Nelkin’s poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Grasslimb Journal, Poppy Road Review, Connecticut River Review, Poetry Quarterly, and other places. Carrie is author of the novel Snare (The Waiting Dark) and has stories in journals like Bards and Sages Quarterly, Supernatural Tales, and Luna Station Quarterly.

Playing the Wounded Bird

        a cautionary tale

by Nancy Harris McLelland

Before you play the wounded bird

consider the charadrius vociferus

commonly known as the killdeer.

Because she builds her nest in shortgrass fields 

and sometimes parking lots, nature compensates

with a behavior called injury feigning.

She attempts to protect her fledglings

by making a strident and piping sound

as she hops on the ground,

and flaps a fake broken wing

hoping to fool the cunning coyote

with her plaintive over here, over here.

As I walk down a country road

and harken to her cry,

I reply, “I am not your enemy.”  

Driven by fear and destined by nature 

ever to be the wounded bird,

she’s incapable of making that distinction.

And you? Must you persist in acting the one with a broken wing

hoping to lure the one who needs most to mend a broken thing?

* * * * *

For Nancy Harris McLelland, home means Nevada. She divides her time between Carson City, the capitol, and Tuscarora, an almost ghost town in the ranching country fifty miles north of Elko. She publishes on her blog, Writing from Space—Memoir, Essays, and Poetry from the Wide, Open Spaces of Northeastern Nevada, www.writingfromspace.com, and is also accessible through her Facebook page Tuscarora Writers Retreats.

Light Over a Broken Day

by Jennie Linthorst

I drop my son off before dawn

for a school canoeing trip.

Driving away in a distracted fog

of trivial maternal anxieties,

I reach for the radio to hear

news of the Las Vegas shooting.

A call comes that a mother from our school

has been shot down next to the concert stage.

I want to reach out to my son,

the distance suddenly untenable.

I turn at a stoplight,

and feel my mother come to me.

Over thirty years gone,

she must know how to comfort the newly passed,

how to hold a light over a broken day,

and cross over to me–

Tell me mom, something sage,

so I can breathe again.

But, she’s not here,

none of them are here now.

My God, their shirts still hang in a closet,

shoes by the door.

When my son comes home,

I will listen to his stories told from under the stars.

I will ask him how the moon spoke

to the river after that bloody night.

* * * * *

Jennie Linthorst is published in Foliate Oak, Forge, Kaleidoscope, Literary Mama, Mothers Always Write, Sanskrit, and The Art of Autism. Her two books of poems, Silver Girl (2013), and Autism Disrupted: A Mother's Journey of Hope (2011), were published by Cardinal House. Jennie is certified in poetry therapy from the National Federation of Biblio/Poetry Therapy. www.lifespeakspoetrytherapy.com.

Waiting at a Stoplight on Saturday Morning

by Jennie Linthorst

I know I’m not supposed to stare,

the shame of it burns like a heat rash yet,

I’m drawn to the shine of his red pick-up truck,

surfboards in back, the way his hand

strokes her hair, a girl nuzzled next to him.

I imagine their spontaneity of morning–

how he must wake her with his hands,

his mouth, making love as dawn

creeps through each slat in the blinds,

and what must be a slow drive to the beach.

Like a tigress in heat, pulled to the strongest male,

I am lured to the mountain of his masculinity,

the meat on his bones. Remembering my first kiss

pressed against wet bark, the almosts and could

have beens over pitchers of beer and Camel Lights,

all those mornings after I said yes instead of no.

* * * * *

Jennie Linthorst is published in Foliate Oak, Forge, Kaleidoscope, Literary Mama, Mothers Always Write, Sanskrit, and The Art of Autism. Her two books of poems, Silver Girl (2013), and Autism Disrupted: A Mother's Journey of Hope (2011), were published by Cardinal House. Jennie is certified in poetry therapy from the National Federation of Biblio/Poetry Therapy. www.lifespeakspoetrytherapy.com.