What then?

by Roberta Brown

When stinging tears form but fail to fall

When refugee hearts run hard into walls

When ink flows freely but no words come

When the scale is tipped by the heaviest thumb

When arms extend but do not enclose

When even a boxer cannot bear the blows

When full moons rise behind sheets of rain

When even the air smells and tastes of our pain

When a knock strikes the door but no one’s outside

When an envelope opened is empty inside

When the shoe slips on fine but is missing a lace

When smiles of sadness bemark every face

When you finish the book but know less than before

When you want to get out but fear opening the door

When asleep you feel happy but know it’s a dream

When you wake from a nightmare and can’t even scream

When clock hands sound like gunfire, but time somehow stands still

When you wish to God you wouldn’t, but you know you will

When the shame you’ve well hidden peeks out from a sleeve

When you crave faith like food, but still cannot believe—

What then?


* * * * *

Roberta Brown teaches at Western New Mexico University in Silver City, New Mexico, where she lives with her family and two retired racing greyhounds.

THE BLUEBIRDS

by Katherine West

There were footprints

All the way down the mountain

Starting at the abandoned mine

But leaving the old road

To follow deer paths

Through avenues

Of juniper and pine

They seemed the right size

So I placed my foot in one

Like Cinderella’s slipper

To see if it would fit

To see what I would find

If I followed it

Even the space between steps

Was so well-measured

I nearly danced

Through the forest

A kind of Inca Trail

Step onto it

And the way

Becomes easy

As if I wore magic

Red shoes

That guided me

That pulled me

Drew me on

And through

A silk thread

Through the eye

Of its needle

Needle through cloth

Thin as gauze

On and on

Thoughtless

As bluebirds

Eating moths

The sun following

Their sudden

Color

As if in love

I flew

Something old

Something new

I arrived

At the red cabin

Dusty footprints

Across the floor

To a table

By a window

Paper

Pencil

A chair

No bears

No dwarves

No witches

Just a house

Like a glove

A mind

Like a glove

Dropped on the floor

By the back door

A drop of blood

On the step

A dry well

A grave

Without a name

A Siamese cat

A bit of trash

And those bluebirds

Like sisters

Turned to swans

Waiting for me

To tell their story

* * * * *

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near the Gila Wilderness, where she writes poetry about the soul-importance of wilderness and performs it with her musician husband, Yaakov. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, and New Verse News, which recently nominated her poem And Then the Sky for a Pushcart Prize.

BREECH

by Katherine West

It was a difficult birth--

She had been crushed

In the womb

The left ear

Smaller

Tighter

A shell

A fossil

An accident 

Incarnated by time

It was a difficult birth--

Breech

The cord around her neck

One foot trapped

Behind

As if she had tried

To run

Each contraction

Tightening the noose

But when she finally

Arrived

She opened like a wild iris

In the meadow

After rain--

She ran everywhere

Singing

Touching

Climbing the tallest trees

As a woman

She began to wilt

The trapped foot

Turned inward

So she walked with a limp

One shoulder higher

As the spine

Tried to adjust--

She could not run

The phantom cord

Choked her breath

Asthma

Shut her lungs

The neck

Stiffened--

The fossil

Fetus

At one with stone

Lived only in the eyes

Sharp as an owl’s

Friends

With every sister

In the Pleiades

Orion’s nebula

The rabbit in the moon

Lived only in ears

Sensitive

To mice

In dry leaves

Javelinas digging for roots

Deer

Ripping up mouthfuls of grass

Lived only

In song--

A low

Hollow

Call

The owl answered

Taking her away

An egg for its nest

Its warm breast

Of feathers

And when the egg cracked

When she pushed

Her way out

Her wings opened

Long and perfect

And when the owl nudged

Her to the edge

She fell

Like a star

* * * * *

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near the Gila Wilderness, where she writes poetry about the soul-importance of wilderness and performs it with her musician husband, Yaakov. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, and New Verse News, which recently nominated her poem And Then the Sky for a Pushcart Prize.

A Sonata For My Mother

by Dulce Maria Menendez

Because her mother died when she was five.

Because a child should not lose her mother at the age of five.

Because the nuns dressed her as baby Jesus.

Because she wasn't educated past the age of 13.

Because she had to stop going to school to work for her aunt's who beat her and made her wear shoes which were a size too small.

Because she had to give up ballet.

Because she was a lion with green cat yes and her tresses swept past her round

face in the breezes of Havana.

Because she met my father at a bus stop.

Because someone forgot to tell her he was psychofrenic.

Because she was happy for three months before she found out.

Because she left Cuba for US(A).

Because she held my hand as we walked the streets in Miami.

Because she stopped driving after almost killing us in an automobile accident shortly after arriving in Miami.

Because she almost broke her back hunched over a sewing machine.

Because she waited for my father to come home.

Because she waited for my father to come home again.

Because she waited for my father never to return.

Because she left my father.

Because she left my father again.

Because she returned to my father.

Because she loved my father more than me and my sister.

Because she called me hija.

Because she lost her mind.

Because she regained it after my father's death.

Because she wrote poems. 

Because she listened to Rubinstein play Chopin over and over again.

Because she never said a bad word.

Because my sister was her treasure.

Because I was a daddy's girl.

Because she was a work of art.

Because her name was Salome and she carried the beheading of all eternity upon her elegant shoulders as she turned her head to see you as if for the first time.

And why does my mother listen to Chopin?

And why does the sonata bring her comfort?

And why is the sky blue? I asked her once.

Any why did she play Chopin to offer me an answer?

And why does my father leave us again and again? I asked her.

And why am I incarcerated in my own home so far away during this pandemic without my mother?

Listen.

Listen.

Listen. 

The sonata plays.

The phone rings.

It is someone from long ago who remembers my mother.

And why does my mother die on the day of the innocents?

Does Chopin have the answer?

I don't know other than at death as in the sonata

we play alone.

----

For Maria Salome Menendez Planes born October 22, 1932 and died April 1, 2020.

* * * * *

Dulce Maria Menendez publishes artists and poets.

Fingers of Expectation

by B. Lynn Goodwin

“We’re multiplying,” Wilma’s fingers say. “We are your fingers of expectation. Do more. Do more!”

 Wilma sighs. She craves retirement from her work-at-home job. Her husband resists retirement and loves productivity. So she works. She makes lists and checks things off.

1. Write the report.

2. Walk Eddie McPuppers.

3. Or let him walk you.

4. Respond to e-mail.

5. Bill and pay bills.

6. Count the stats on the Covid-19 pandemic.

A twelfth finger is now emerging, inching out next to her left pinkie. A perfect finger, complete with polished nail. Magenta, with a dripping black rose near the tip. The eleventh finger came out in her sleep.

7. Breathe, Wilma. Don’t leave your body. 

If she looks at each finger through a magnifying glass, they turn Christmas tree green and she can read the lists of tasks in snowflake white.

8. Study the specs.

9. Channel the messages.

10. Burkle the blurff.

Wilma reads the last one twice. “Burkle the blurff?” What does that even mean? What do all these tasks mean?

“Time’s a-fleeing, Wilma,” the right thumb says in English. It wiggles, and Wilma thinks of Jackie, who will be five on August 6.

Wilma releases the thumb and shakes her fingers. The finger-lists drip away. She breathes in freedom.  Her jingling Grandpad summons her. Jackie wants to show her a new fluffy bunny. “When can you come play with me?” she asks.

“When the moon sets and the sun rises.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I love you and you are always in my heart.”

“Here’s Mama,” says Jackie, who thinks Wilma is her own personal Mother Goose.

That night her husband asks, “What did you do today?”

She shakes her fingertips until they look like spider legs clawing the air and says, “Let go of time and talked to your granddaughter. You?”

He grabs a Coke and a glass of ice. Wilma the Weird he thinks, but he doesn’t say it out loud. He loves her weirdness, even when he doesn’t understand it.

* * * * *

Writer and editor B. Lynn Goodwin owns Writer Advice, www.writeradvice.com. She’s the author of an award-winning YA, Talent, and an award-winning memoir, Never Too Late: From Wannabe to Wife at 62, plus a collection of journaling prompts, flash pieces, and short articles. Her flash fiction was recently published in Nebo, Cabinet of Heed, Murmur of Words, and 100-Word Stories.  

The Garden of Earthly Delights

After Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1500

by Rachel J Fenton

I. The Man in the Bowler Hat

Wounded pictures

wait noiselessly in the field tent

of our bathroom,

open windowed,

where powder light hovers as icing dust

particulates filtered

through the white nylon curtain

hanging like a drunk

from the chrome rail, one foot

in the tub: half the shower rings are bust,

their sickle forms

collected by the trap,

clinical waste.

And usually I'm left alone to tend

my patients but today

you want to know,

today you've ventured in, your thoughts

unmasked to ask:

what's that you're painting?

I load my brush with titanium

acrylic: an answer.

II. Destroyed Object

The artist is a poet.

The artist is all ear, eye and heart.

The artist sits alone to rebuild the moments

                                                                        last

from myriad perspectives.

The artist has a partner.

The artist's partner is also a poet: he sits

                                                              alone,

writes his poems in his head

and keeps them there.

III. Cannibal Feast

When I come to suck fresh raspberries'

juice from your hair

pressing the clasp of my mouth's purse

on the oyster of your ear;

when I bring you morsels dripping syrup

from my mother's lips

to tempt the dormant hunger from the tip-

wrecked freezer of your belly,

know the table is set,

the cupboard's empty.

IV. Four Hours of Summer, Hope

It isn't the loss, it isn't the grief,

it's humiliation,

a joke in the worst taste

when your hopes and dreams, your family,

end up in a yellow bag of clinical waste

along with your mistakes.

* * * * *

Rachel J Fenton is a working-class writer living in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her poetry has appeared in English, Magma, The Rialto, Ink, Sweat & Tears, Landfall, Overland Journal, various anthologies, and a chapbook of poems, Beerstorming with Charlotte Brontë in New York, is forthcoming from Ethel Zine and Micro Press in April 2021.

To the Fetus, or Its Father, or Both

by Clarice Hare

Alone in the soft darkness of my

delirium, far from the loneliest

tree, you swim without fins, without

limbs: whirling, unaccountable, on or

in some sea. Symbolizing

humanness: its eternal

splitting, that clasp and

penetration that dooms you and

me and all before and any

after to the infinite diversions of a

wounded angel. To the scourges

of inchoate imagination; to the
limitations of the earth’s

reserves of colors and refrains. To

scratch words that would be worlds on

barren flints. That which my hand is

reaching out for, but as yet lacks eyes

to see. Which falls forever from

the sky, without ever wholly

leaving it.

* * * * *

Clarice Hare has been writing her entire life, but is new to publication. Though born in humble circumstances, she received a privileged education and has explored both outer and inner worlds widely. She currently lives in obscurity in the southern United States with an assortment of furry and scaly pets.

FLYING HOME

by Marilyn Flower

I'd like to say

I didn't know

he'd die that day,

the morning I fled

my father. I held

his legs against

the palsy,

pressed his jumping

body to the hospital

cot. Early

Monday, the nurse

brings his pill;

he turns

his head away.

I know he’ll be gone

by nightfall.

I kiss him, kiss

Mother (who doesn't

know), race

from the room,

terrified

he'll leave

before the airport

bus carries me away.

He waits

until evening

to take that breath

subdued.

Knowing you knew, Dad,

I sigh, content

we blessed

each other’s flight.

* * * * *

           

"Flying Home" was first published in Poets and Dreamers Literary Journal (April 2016).  

Marilyn Flower teaches literature in the Emeritus program at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo. California. She is a strong advocate for parity for part-time faculty.