More recent post can be found here: https://writinginawomansvoice2.blogspot.com/

The Last Time I Saw You

                        by Shaun R. Pankoski


was in front of a pancake house
outside the Strip. The air was dirty dry,
those boots hurt my feet, my sequined shirt
looked garish in the mid-afternoon light.
You called me a cab,
walked me to the curb, pulled me close.

In the crook of your neck I said
“I love you,” plainly,
in that same,
matter-of-fact way I'd said goodbye
a sad, sweet long ago.

Yet, here we were again,
leaving fragments and fibers of ourselves behind,
the space between us just large enough
for the exhale of one
to be taken in by the other.

When you replied,
I tried to imagine not leaving,
becoming indivisible,
immovable in a swirling world.
But like a scab,

a tangle,
a pulled tooth -
thinking about the loss
was more painful than the loss itself,
and in the aftermath,
relief.


* * * * *

Shaun R. Pankoski is a retired County worker living in Volcano on the Island of Hawai'i with her cat, Kiko, and a bunch of coqui frogs. She held a Top Secret clearance in the Air Force, was an artist's model for over twenty years and was a founding member of a Modern Dance company in San Francisco. She is a two time breast cancer survivor and makes a mean corn chowder.

Squeezed

by Tong Ge

Saturday, following a movie and some wine, my new boyfriend and I retired to bed.  We have been dating for six months and have never argued. Then he leans over and squeezes my breasts playfully.

“Stop it!” I shove him away roughly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Never do that, okay?”

 “I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”

I turn away. “Look, I’m fine. You didn’t hurt me, not physically. I just…”

“I’m listening.” He spoons me and presses a light kiss on my shoulder.

I turn around. It’s time. I have never told anyone this story, not even my mother.

 

As a sophomore living in China, I fell in love for the first time. Love poems poured from me like a water-spring gushing out of a fountainhead. 

My boyfriend, an art student, was the older brother of my girlfriend in high school. When we first met three years earlier, I never dreamt that we would date one day. You see, he was just too handsome for an average-looking girl like me. Now, with a movie star face and an artist’s hands, he becomes an ideal husband.

I didn’t tell my practical, stable, unromantic parents about him. Dating would take time and focus away from my academic studies, my mother claimed. But I was not going to give up my Movie Star—not for my studies, not for anything.

 

Life was perfect except for one thing. I had developed some small, painful lumps in my breasts and armpits. I put up with the problem until I couldn’t anymore. I had to seek medical attention. Movie Star dutifully accompanied me.

When we entered the hospital, a tall, slim woman with wavy hair walked elegantly toward us. Movie Star and she exchanged a brief greeting. I was not introduced.

“Who is she?” I asked after she walked away.

“A model in our school,” Movie Star said dismissively.

I knew what he meant. Not just a model, but a nude model. He’d seen her naked and sketched her long legs. Nude models were a new and stigmatized occupation at the time. Old-fashioned Chinese called them whores and most of them had to keep their occupation a secret. Those who were found out often were disowned by their families.

“Does she have a boyfriend?” I asked.

“Not among the students.”

“Because of what she does for a living?”

“Perhaps.”

So, even art students were not immune from deep-rooted traditions and public opinion.

 

When it was my turn to go into the doctor’s office, Movie Star waited outside.

After learning about my problem, the doctor told me to unbutton my shirt. A pair of claws gripped my beasts and squeezed. I knew right away it was not the right way for a doctor to examine a patient, but if I screamed or said anything, Movie Star could hear, and he might dump me.

I should have screamed and slapped the doctor’s face anyway. I should have jumped up and ran out of the room. But I couldn’t risk losing Movie Star.

I tried to see the water-color sunset that Movie Star had painted earlier. The lights and shadows danced in brilliant colors in the river, in the reflection of the sky. My future could be as beautiful as the painting. I would not allow anybody to take it away.

So, in dead silence, I allowed this doctor his actions. I allowed those dirty hands to squeeze and fondle my breasts—the breasts only my boyfriend had ever touched. I clenched my teeth, enduring the pain and the shame.

After he was done with me, the doctor told me the lumps were harmless. I buttoned up my shirt without making eye contact with him.

The beautiful painting was gone. All I could see now was a dirty spot on the canvas.

Why had I come to the hospital in the first place? I had done it to myself when I insisted on an examination, hadn’t I? Maybe God intended to punish me for not only dating a boy but allowing him to touch my breasts.

As long as I had Movie Star in my life, I told myself, I could endure anything.

 

A year went by. One weekend, Movie Star left his book-bag in my dorm while he went out on an errand. I knew he kept a journal. I soon found it in the bag. I only wanted to know how deeply he still loved me. To my surprise, I found an entry about him stealing an item from a local air force base. He didn’t say what the item was, but it must have been very valuable or very useful for him to risk jail time. Then, a line about me made my heart almost jump out of my throat:

“Qian would have never guessed if she were to come between me and what I want, I would not hesitate to point a dagger at her heart.”

 

The day I broke up with Movie Star, I cried hard for my soap-bubble future—beautiful but fragile; destined to burst. I cried for the compromise I had made for a man I hardly knew. My imagined future was not the beautiful colors in the sky but only a reflection of it—a delusion.

            Over the years, I have managed to paint something on that soiled canvas, to cover the spot, to pretend it is not there. But I know it will never go away. Thank God I was not raped. If I were, I would have had to burn the entire canvas.

 

When I finish my story, my boyfriend gently brushes my tears away. “I’m so sorry.”

“It was a long time ago,” I say.

I don’t tell him that sometimes the memory of that day comes back like a wave of nausea and the suicidal thoughts have never left me, not even after I had immigrated to Canada. But I couldn’t kill myself. My mother would never survive my death. She would never know how her beloved daughter was once squeezed between silence and a scream, between shame and dignity, between the ugly present and a beautiful future. She would never know how she had saved my life, and I, hers.

* * * * *

Born and raised in China, Sherry Wong moved to Canada in 1988 to pursue her master’s degree. Since 2012, she writes both under her real name and her pen name, Tong Ge, and her works may be found in publications including PRISM International, Canadian Stories, Ricepaper, Academy of the Heart and Mind, FLOW magazine, Vineyard Poetry Quarterly, 渥水, 远方的诗, Polyglot Magazine. She has also received three literary awards and is among the finalists for another five. Her debut novel The House Filler will be published in Canada in October of 2023.

 

Night Travels

by Lynn Bechtel

She calls every day, my younger sister. I don’t always answer. I can’t reach the phone or my supper tray has just arrived or I’m too tired. Today I answer.

How are you? she begins. I can hear the worry in her voice.

Fine, I say, fine.

I want to say I’m not fine, this isn’t living, these endless minutes in this bed, this room, this fog, but I don’t. She’s so far away.

The phone is small, a shiny orange wafer that gets lost in my hand.

Where are you? I ask.

At work. Lunch break. Cheese and crackers today. She showed me her office once, on a long-ago trip. I remember stairs and a window looking out at a street full of rooftops.

I got my hair cut today, I say. Everyone says it looks nice.

The phone is so hard to hold; I grip it tightly and my hand spasms.

She’s talking now, a flow of words, one sentence then another, static smothering the sounds. I hear “home” “office” “photographs” “Tashi.”

She says “Tashi” again and I can feel the lean feline body, smooth fur, the vibration of a purr.

Is Tashi OK? I ask.

I think so, she says. Your neighbors took her in when you first got sick. Remember?

But you said something about Tashi, just now.

I found a photo, Peter with Tashi on his shoulder.

As she speaks, I remember the day I took that picture, Peter, my love, bent to his desk, Tashi perched, both turning to look at me as I raised the camera, quickly snapped husband, cat, late afternoon light slanting into the room.

And I remember our house with its low ceilings, winding staircases, and long sloping hallways, the view of the garden out the studio window, the apple tree spilling fruit, the honey locust tree and freshly mown lawn, husband and cat walking down the path toward me.

I wake sometimes in the night and my bed is in the studio at the top of that house and I can see the garden under a full moon, the shadow of the honey locust tree, smell the cut grass, hear Peter’s footsteps.  

I keep this to myself. I told her once about my night travels. Dreams, she said. Delirium. And I said yes, you’re right, but I know it’s real, know that I leave this room, these walls, and my bed takes flight.   

* * * * *

Lynn Bechtel is a writer, editor, gardener, reader, knitter, and novice meditator. She lives in western Massachusetts where she writes essays and short stories and the occasional poem. Her work has been published in journals including Entropy, The Sunlight Press, and The Berkshire Review and in the anthology grief becomes you.

 

Evening walk

by Mary Wescott Riser


the trees make a cave
cool and shimmering with energy
at dusk
buttercups float in the shade
vibrating with color
the immense pulse of life
surrounds us
whether we notice or not


* * * * *

Mary Wescott Riser worked in Virginia independent schools for 30 years, most recently as Head of School at James River Day School, a K-8 day co-ed day school in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she served as Head for ten years. Mary received her B.A. in English and Philosophy from Georgetown University and her M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Oregon. She writes the education blog “What’s Best For the Children?” www.maryriser.org. Mary and her husband, George, live in Covesville, Virginia and have two adult children.

A letter from Virginia to New Mexico

by Mary Wescott Riser


the dogwoods are in bloom
and soon your high desert
cactus will show her bold color
and you, fierce friend, will run
and dance, so free, alone,
consumed by joy

my heart is comforted to know
you are in your writer's room
making space for every woman's 
song. I long to walk with you
through piney woods
to sun-warmed stones and blue


* * * * *

Mary Wescott Riser worked in Virginia independent schools for 30 years, most recently as Head of School at James River Day School, a K-8 day co-ed day school in Lynchburg, Virginia, where she served as Head for ten years. Mary received her B.A. in English and Philosophy from Georgetown University and her M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Oregon.  She writes the education blog “What’s Best For the Children?” www.maryriser.org. Mary and her husband, George, live in Covesville, Virginia and have two adult children.

 

A Quiet Night
 
by Susan Isla Tepper 
 
 
Naturally years later
you’d show up
during the full moon—
just as I’m dozing
into dreams, curled 
on the rubber sleep pad
each night rolled out and
pushed into the low tight prow
of Isabelle, humble trawler.
 
Bedtime everything puts to order:
Spiders sucked in the dust-buster,
Isabelle tied up anchored
sur la Seine
tucked in beside a larger sleeker vessel.
Safety in numbers.
 
A quiet night—
water slapping the hull; that’s all.
 
‘Til a ping of pearls
pearls washing through sleep
And I’ve wakened; listening
to this, delicate
intermittent by sheer seconds
hitting the round window in the batten door. 
 
Brushing away what seems a web 
woven along my jaw
I wriggle out,
stand, look through the window
Unprepared.
 
It’s you— all right; there
in the open stern
the balmy—
 
sporting those silly
psychedelic-blue shades 
that I remember, somehow;
you tossing pebbles
from the trucked-in sand.
 
O glorious Paris riverside
resplendent summer season!
 
The glasses smashed to your face
seem to vibrate colors
over you, the water, the deck
Picking up frequencies.
Like mine— like how you found me
 
here, under a light post beamed
high over this water
this boat
where we spent
a stretch of languid nights. 
Please do come out your voice implores.
Wobbly, slightly drunk, loud.
I cannot make a move.
I hardly recall your tone.


* * * * *

"A Quiet Night" was previously published in The Galway Review.

Susan Isla Tepper is the author of eleven published books of fiction and poetry, and three stage plays. Her play The Crooked Heart premiered as a staged-reading at Irish Repertory Theatre on October 25, 2022. Tepper has received numerous awards and honors including 19 Pushcart Prize Nominations, a Pulitzer Nomination for the book version of The Crooked Heart, a winner in the Francis Ford Coppola Novel Contest (2003), and more. Two new novels are forthcoming. Tepper was recently made a Brand Ambassador for The Galway Review, out of Ireland. www.susantepper.com

 The Only Reason the Audience Finds the  
      Erotic Poet's Work So Uncomfortable  

                                         by CLS Sandoval

 
is because she thought of all of our fantasies 
before we did—

that and the twelve-year-old boy
sitting in the second row,

wide-eyed.   
 
(for poet Alexis Rhone Fancher) 


* * * * *

"The Only Reason the Audience Finds the Erotic Poet's Work So Uncomfortable" was first published in weirderary in 2016.

CLS Sandoval, PhD (she/her) is a pushcart nominated writer and communication professor with accolades in film, academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes. She has presented over 50 times at communication conferences, published 15 academic articles, two academic books, three full-length literary collections: God Bless Paul, Soup Stories: A Reconstructed Memoir, and Writing Our Love Story, and three chapbooks: The Way We Were, Tumbleweed: Against All Odds, and The Villain Wore a Hero’s Face. She is raising her daughter and dog with her husband in Alhambra, CA.  

 

Unsheltered, or News of the Broken World

                                           by Emily Patterson

 
arrives on our front porch in the image of
a woman, pregnant, body and clothes aglow
 
against the maternity center blasted by bombs,
her child sheltered by her body, her body
 
unsheltered, her world a shell, shelled.
 
My own daughter wakes up fevered, vomits
milk and mucus beneath the kitchen table,
 
and so I keep her home, keep her close,
sick and safe as she sleeps outside my body,
 
inside these unbruised walls. Hours later,
 
awake and alight at the window, we watch
the stillness of our neighbors’ houses,
 
clustered and intact; weak sunlight in a sky
absent of any threat—this earth untouched
 
by ashes and audacious enough to bloom.


* * * * *

Emily Patterson is the author of So Much Tending Remains (Kelsay Books, 2022), a collection of poems chronicling the first year of motherhood. Her second chapbook, To Bend and Braid, is forthcoming this summer. Emily received her B.A. in English from Ohio Wesleyan University, where she was awarded the Marie Drennan Prize for Poetry, and her M.A. in Education from The Ohio State University. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is published or forthcoming in Rust + Moth, SWWIM, Mom Egg Review, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere. 

A TUMULTUOUS LOVER

by Emily Black


Late afternoon sunlight casts sparkles
on lapping waters of Newnan’s Lake
as they roll toward shore amidst thick
wedge-shaped trunks of tall cypress trees
that stand in shallows of this vast lake
close to my Florida home.

From lake and woods, birds sweetly call
and bestow peace on this setting. Small,
rhythmic waves of tannic-colored water
sing a song I remember from my youth.
A blue heron, classic in stature, so still
he doesn’t seem real, stands patiently

in shallow water to wait for his evening meal.
There are many alligators that live in this lake,
but none are to be seen as the sun declines
toward a watery horizon. Perhaps they know
a hurricane is soon to make landfall and its path
may pass through here.

Maybe they’ve already filled their bellies
and retreated to their reedy flats and mud
burrows for safety, just like the local folks
have gassed-up their cars and hastened to stores
to shop for candles, batteries, ice, bread, milk
and gallon bottles of water.

I still see Mother Nature as my goddess
and accept that her moods are changeable.
No placid lover is she, but her glory, my
deepest love, always surrounds me though
sometimes it is tumultuous, a love that tosses
me around and reminds me I am mortal.


* * * * *

Emily Black, the second woman to graduate in Civil Engineering from the University of Florida, enjoyed a long engineering career. She began writing poetry recently and is published in numerous journals. Her first poetry book, The Lemon Light of Morning, was published by Bambaz press in 2022. Her second book is scheduled for publication in 2023. Emily wears Fire Engine Red Lipstick.

 

This month, an additional Moon Prize, the 114th, goes to Nina Heiser's intense poem "memories thick as mud."


memories thick as mud

                        by Nina Heiser


and then some
lips red as a licked red candy skin
pale as the morning moon
eyes dark as glittered sunshine she
was the altar of his doom she came
in the hours the world goes hiding
where secrets of the heart unfurl she
was his vision his hope his harbor
she was not his girl
her eyes glared like glaze ice
on black roads like a crow’s wing
in a colorless sky her eyes
found his still as frozen-over water
when you are dead she whispered
there will be nothing in that moment
she saw the fear in him the trepidation and she
walked away leaving him alone knowing
he watched as she grew small and smaller and
smaller until the world took her from him
and everything became shadow
after the black flies had their
turn at her she learned to squat
and to like the stretch of picking
in the early morning summer sun
not the white-hot sun she had always
known in the land where colors flowed
like silken robes inside the stench of
poverty and putrid waste where noises
throbbed in pandemonium where he
the photographer from a different world had
zeroed in without a flinch at the inner
harmonium of beauty’s spheres
she was a red-blooded woman in a
black-and-white world in an immobile
time not marked by clocks trapped inside
a crystal-blue cocoon under pricking stars shining and
brittle as an infinity of tiny glass shards sprinkling
down like sugar on ginger like snowflakes on ice like
the guilt of old secrets on newborn joy
shhh she said don’t speak don’t
break the bond silence has forged
between us don’t jinx the spell under
which we labor don’t call bad magic


* * * * *

Nina Heiser is a poet, writer and retired journalist currently living in central Florida and
Western New York. Her work has appeared in Tuck Magazine, Cadence, the Florida
State Poets Association Anthology, Vociferous Press anthology Screaming from the
Silence, Embark Literary Journal, and Gargoyle Magazine. Her poetry and photographs
have been featured in Pendemics Journal and Of Poets & Poetry.

This month's Moon Prize, the 113th, goes to Donna Dallas's stunning story "Habitat."

HABITAT

by Donna Dallas

She rides with her pack of wolves on black Harley's. Yellow unkempt hair under a bowl-shaped helmet, flowing over solid shoulders and apple breasts. Her stained-glass makeup covers up days of reckless riding. A blue flame to match her blue eyeshadow. She burns, her heat cannot be contained and that is why she rides. Animal girl, slicked in leather passed down through heavy mileage. A long line of followers wait to share her bike. She can’t have a man without breaking him and when he’s broke, she rides alone.

She smokes cigarettes through her cherry lips with her leather legs spread apart and her beer resting in between. She pees out there in the wilderness, eyes like ripe blueberries, scanning her terrain. She has a tattoo of Jesus Christ on her right arm. Jesus guides her when she fixes her bike. Jesus flexes and stretches on her arm when she works her tools on the bikes’ engine. She knows how to work every part. Her daddy was a biker and she’s traveled more miles than a monarch butterfly.

Daddy raised her on the back of his bike and when she could see over the clutch, he put her on her own. When he died, she sat with him in Washington’s Crossing. She took his place and took his bike. He taught her to move free, a leather panther treading the wild gravel, new leader of the pack. Ode to daddy, never let civilization cut her wheels and contain her habitat.

She won’t stay put for very long. The voices of her people carry over the asphalt of Interstate 66. Her band grows bigger. Laden with leather and worn denim, their primal urge to ride. Animal lust courses through their blood and their scent spreads across the camp like heat out of a furnace. They roll around the devil’s fire, growling through the crackling red flames. Their skins are one and they believe there is no other life truer than theirs.

Her thoughts wander along the black veins of smoke, drifting lazily into the moons’ belly. She recalls a small house in a town she left back east. The man with the crisp clothes and the honey bronzed skin. The one who softened her body to suede. Tamed girl, silly from long kisses that slowed her down and down and melded her into an orb of blue heat. No makeup needed, no leather, just skin wrapped in the scent of his body.

She left one morning before the sun rose, before the bronze god awoke. She heard the roar of the motorcycles, the chanting engines. The walls became too close and the bed too soft for her. Daddy’s breath floated along the carbon monoxide. The air tightened up and she could not breathe any longer unless it was along the wind from her bike in motion. She knew if she stayed, she would lose her freedom, that’s what daddy told her. Never let them tame you. So, she keeps moving, on the bike, with her pack.

* * * * *

Donna Dallas has appeared in a plethora of journals, most recently The Opiate, Beatnik Cowboy, Tribes, Horror Sleaze Trash and Fevers of the Mind. She is the author of Death Sisters, her legacy novel, published by Alien Buddha Press. Her first chapbook, Smoke and Mirrors, launched in 2022 with New York Quarterly. Donna serves on the editorial team of NYQ. donnaanndallas@gmail.com

@DonnaDallas15

 

Wet was the Light
                   from a line by Pablo Neruda

by Millicent Borges Accardi


Wet was the light as we saw it                                                          
through a threadbare lens
of what we call time or that period
of waiting between what will happen
next and what we regret having happened,
the hard-bad opposite of a world hunch or an omen,
the silent-low sense of doom to come,
a spirit arising in the country we
call home, the desire for isolation,
desperately to be different, the
unexplored nonsense of late.
This is the air in the pastel room when we
are enclosed and locked up by
an intense wondering and fear
of comfort fear of letting our guard
down and forgetting to protect ourselves
from nearly everything we can imagine,
even the scrape of skin upon
our hands, the whispered hello
of a neighbor or a child playing in the creek
below the yard where there are dirt
banks instead of lawn. We are who
we choose to become, are becoming
or perhaps we mean we are who we
are sentenced to be, a corona crown
of in the if and now and meant for always
that time is a path to follow, as we near the
day of the year when June rises
her longest glance of a day and tells us
it is all right to enter.


* * * * *

"Wet was the Light" is from Millicent Borges Accardi's collection Quarantine Highway (Flowersong Press, 2022)

Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer has four poetry collections including Only More So (Salmon Poetry Ireland). Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, CantoMundo, Fulbright, Foundation for Contemporary Arts NYC (Covid grant), Creative Capacity, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation, “Money for Women.” She holds degrees in writing from CSULB and USC and currently lives in the hippie-arts community of Topanga, CA where she curates Kale Soup for the Soul and co-curates the Poets & Writers sponsored Loose Lips poetry readings.  

 

Green was the Silence
                        from a line by Pablo Neruda

by Millicent Borges Accardi


It changes meaning like water,
as a living being, like unfettered civility,
a sunny breezeful summer ahead.
The start of June, it is altogether
stifling, and as if things would never be straight
again we feel as if we had promised to be
dark and mortal, soon, like strangers
from the past we promised to be each other’s
solid memory. We have shortness of breath
and a pounding inside the lungs.
We cannot remember a time when we were able
to sleep before when we were former and usual
vivid beings who existed in the city of Los Angeles,
drifting through rivers of errands and emeralds,
as if nothing had happened. We are
lost now. As if we had been careless. Dropped out.
Like music not written down but whistled and hummed
and played under strange circumstances.
Like a stranger with a guitar at a party.
It is nearly June, near the longest day of the year,
as Jordan comments in The Great Gatsby, a seasonal marker
complete with a sign that says, “We’re done now.”
And we are together and alone and about to
get reckless and cruel, but yet this time it will
be different. This year, belonging to the entangled
world that has been ripped apart.
We are limited by so many things since
the quarantine, absolute touch and hunger
and it all goes to show us that nothing
is visible or at hand anymore.
We are a perfect example of ration
and virtue, essentially savage and, yet—in a new sense—
we are blindly controllable. We feel alternately
safe and in danger, every moment altered,
with no telling which statement above is truer.
We are reckless-absolute and sexual-reasonable
full of home-shocked martyrdom and wary of being
present for what is about to come. We pretend
to be on holiday and take
out the board games, self-full of pride and fear,
notching achievements with false pride:
your charm, my conflict—our 24 hour conversations
lack a richness of reality,
embodied with a generous sadness.


* * * * *

"Green was the Silence" is from Millicent Borges Accardi's collection Quarantine Highway (Flowersong Press, 2022)

Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer has four poetry collections including Only More So (Salmon Poetry Ireland). Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, CantoMundo, Fulbright, Foundation for Contemporary Arts NYC (Covid grant), Creative Capacity, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation, “Money for Women.” She holds degrees in writing from CSULB and USC and currently lives in the hippie-arts community of Topanga, CA where she curates Kale Soup for the Soul and co-curates the Poets & Writers sponsored Loose Lips poetry readings.  

 

Green was the Silence
                        From a line by Pablo Neruda

by Millicent Borges Accardi


It changes meaning like water,
as a living being, like unfettered civility,
a sunny breezeful summer ahead.
The start of June, it is altogether
stifling, and as if things would never be straight
again we feel as if we had promised to be
dark and mortal, soon, like strangers
from the past we promised to be each other’s
solid memory. We have shortness of breath
and a pounding inside the lungs.
We cannot remember a time when we were able
to sleep before when we were former and usual
vivid beings who existed in the city of Los Angeles,
drifting through rivers of errands and emeralds,
as if nothing had happened. We are
lost now. As if we had been careless. Dropped out.
Like music not written down but whistled and hummed
and played under strange circumstances.
Like a stranger with a guitar at a party.
It is nearly June, near the longest day of the year,
as Jordan comments in The Great Gatsby, a seasonal marker
complete with a sign that says, “We’re done now.”
And we are together and alone and about to
get reckless and cruel, but yet this time it will
be different. This year, belonging to the entangled
world that has been ripped apart.
We are limited by so many things since
the quarantine, absolute touch and hunger
and it all goes to show us that nothing
is visible or at hand anymore.
We are a perfect example of ration
and virtue, essentially savage and, yet—in a new sense—
we are blindly controllable. We feel alternately
safe and in danger, every moment altered,
with no telling which statement above is truer.
We are reckless-absolute and sexual-reasonable
full of home-shocked martyrdom and wary of being
present for what is about to come. We pretend
to be on holiday and take
out the board games, self-full of pride and fear,
notching achievements with false pride:
your charm, my conflict—our 24 hour conversations
lack a richness of reality,
embodied with a generous sadness.


* * * * *

"Green was the Silence" is from Millicent Borges Accardi's collection Quarantine Highway (Flowersong Press, 2022)

Millicent Borges Accardi, a Portuguese-American writer has four poetry collections including Only More So (Salmon Poetry Ireland). Among her awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, CantoMundo, Fulbright, Foundation for Contemporary Arts NYC (Covid grant), Creative Capacity, Fundação Luso-Americana, and Barbara Deming Foundation, “Money for Women.” She holds degrees in writing from CSULB and USC and currently lives in the hippie-arts community of Topanga, CA where she curates Kale Soup for the Soul and co-curates the Poets & Writers sponsored Loose Lips poetry readings.  

Losing the Fog

by Cynthia Bernard


The Pacific inhales overnight,
then, shortly before dawn, begins 
crooning her love to the hills nearby.

Her fog-song caresses the beach,
sashays up the hillside,
tucking in between houses,
weaving through bushes, around trees,
seeping down to greet the gophers,
gliding up to tango with the crows.

It’s a relationship renewed each morning,
fertile and productive—
nurturing coastal redwoods, who would not survive 
without the moisture they sip from each morning’s mist,
and salmon, who swim streams
kept alive by fog-drip.

She’s begun to develop shortness of breath, 
fog barely making it beyond the bottom of the hill—
and there’s no inhaler we can offer her, 
no chemotherapy that will cool things down,
no radiation that will stop the spread.

We can’t advise her to quit smoking, either;
we’re the ones who feed the flames.

Less fog… even less fog…
The hillside weeps dried leaves, dead branches, 
as his beloved’s song fades away.


* * * * *

"Losing the Fog" was previously published in Heimat Review, January 2023.

Cynthia Bernard is a woman in her late sixties who is finding her voice as a poet after many decades of silence. A long-time classroom teacher and a spiritual mentor, she lives and writes on a hill overlooking the ocean, about 20 miles south of San Francisco. 

 

In Case of Emergency

by Lesley Warren
 

WARNING: do not attempt alone.
What to do in instances
of sudden loss of love:
determine source of apathy.
Quickly remove pride and spite.
If in doubt, consult bystanders.
Loosen tongue.
In cases of suspicion,
check for foreign bodies.
Measure impetus levels.
If good, attempt resuscitation.
If none found, proceed to next step.
Carefully remove attachments.
Assess the damage.
Continue to breathe.
Remove all visual stimuli
from the immediate vicinity.
Lock doors, initiate Playlist 1.
Exceed recommended listening volume.
Apply ice (creamed) copiously to the affected area.
Stop blaming self.
Repeat as necessary.
DO NOT, under any circumstances,
re-enter burning building.
Important:
put on your mask
before facing others.


* * * * *

Lesley Warren lives for language. Born to Filipino and Welsh parents, she now works as a translator in Frankfurt, Germany. Her poetry and prose, which often encompass themes of identity, mental health and "otherness", have appeared in multiple online and print journals and anthologies, including those of the Frankfurt Creative Writing Group. 

 

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.