Beach Fun

by Lorelei Bacht

 
Heavy rain. The sea,
Suddenly troubled, struggles
To read its own face.
 
What a drag! My heart
Broken beyond repair, when
I should “just relax.” 
 
Daddy watches them
Build sandcastles while I drown 
In my middle age. 
 
Bottom of the sea, 
Smooth black hand of cold water – 
Irresistible. 
 
I was lonely once. 
I was lonely twice, and then
I just stopped counting. 
 
Corals, dead white bones –
Soon, everything about me
Will cease to matter.
 
Murmur of the waves:
When I made you, you made me.
Walk out, and happen.
 
Reverse of the sky,
The sea welcomes everything,
Birth, death and the rest. 
 
Rolling hopes and hurts
Between its invisible
Fingers, it forgives.


* * * * *

"Beach Fun" was first published in Litehouse, a journal which promotes the work of exophonic writers (who write in a language other than their mother tongue): https://tothelitehouse.com

Lorelei Bacht is a European poet living in Asia with her family. Her recent poems have appeared and/or are forthcoming in OpenDoor Magazine, Litehouse, Visitant, Quail Bell, Wrongdoing, and SWWIM. She can be found on Instagram: @the.cheated.wife.writes and @lorelei.bacht.writer

A Pocket Full of Questions

by Francesca Brenner


Do butterflies dream?
Do I dare hold a candle when it burns from both ends?
If salt is poured on a wound will it preserve the memory?
If I take my vitamins every day, I don’t have to eat, right?
Is the oldest organized crime group a murder of crows?
If you sleep too much do dreams come true?
Do dust bunnies hop in the dark?
Does a cup of water get mad if you put it in the microwave?
Why can’t we grow back another finger or arm?
If there were flying carpets they’d have seatbelts, right?
Why can’t we create a new primary color?
What is the point of a floating rib?
Why are feet so small when they have to hold up an entire body?
Do tide pools get jealous of oceans?
Do oceans get jealous of tide pools?
Do flowers speak to each other through color?
Do stalactites and stalagmites secretly want to swap definitions?
Does a crossword puzzle get mad if you don’t finish it?
How will I ever learn to fly if I don’t keep trying?


* * * * *

Francesca Brenner grew up in NYC’s Greenwich Village and on The Cape in Massachusetts. She currently lives in Los Angeles though her heart remains bicoastal. Her poetry has appeared in After the Pause, The Alembic, The Best of the Poetry Salon, Common Ground Review, Crack the Spine, Cutthroat, FRE&D, Halfway Down the Stairs, OxMag, Sanskrit, Slab, and Talking River. <ticklefish1@icloud.com>

Cinco

by Julia Fricke Robinson


more hungry than cautious
he crossed the wooden bridge to my porch
on the fifth of May
stalked the offered food, ate
with expeditious nibbles, one eye watching
me, frozen, appreciative, watching back

as he ate, wary, I noted his marks
a broken tail, a festered eye
his unique creamy beauty
one eye blue, one green
named him Cinco
silently begged him to stay

not unlike men I've loved
he resisted, indicated difficult logistics
the need to be satisfied without being trapped
domesticated without giving up freedom
to come and go at will to visit other
generous benefactors with comparable charity

each morning and each evening
he comes, proud and circumspect
rubs his young wildness against me
eats to satisfaction, and is gone again
his free spirit denies ownership
resists an easier way, and me


* * * * *

"Cinco" is part of a new memoir in progress, a follow-up to Julia Fricke Robinson's memoir All I Know (2020).

Julia Fricke Robinson 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.

 

I don’t

by Carrie Lynn Hawthorne
 

My engagement ring is back in the drawer, a lonely tan line the reminder that you are drinking again. It took me eight years to get the damn thing, and now it spends more time in the drawer than it does on my finger. I remember how your voice trembled at dinner; you’d never taken me to a restaurant that expensive before. I knew it was the night. We drove up the entire coast, the beach was too dark, bitter cold. We cruised through downtown L.A. looking for the perfect spot to stop for ice cream, but my stomach wasn’t right. We ended up back at City Hall, on a park bench. You knelt in the dirt, on your bad knee. Like we were in someone else’s memory.

“I want to marry you, I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. Can I give you this, so we can go home, and go to bed?” You put the ring on my finger, and it seemed so dinky, not at all how it looked in the store. Like a façade at a carnival, nothing real behind it, a rigged game. It’d be almost a year before you paid me back for it.

Now I’m washing the dishes with my bare finger, and you’re outside with your IPAs. At least you drink outside now, my sponsor insists it’s better for my sobriety. Our little boy sits in a camping chair beside you, drinking root beer, reading comic books. And we’ll go to bed in our separate rooms, the walls shuddering as you choke through your sleep apnea.

I’ll lie awake and think of that gorgeous dress my father bought me, stored at his house because it wouldn’t fit in any of our closets. I imagine my father walking me down the aisle of the antiquated church we picked, the one I paid for, the one you canceled. My father is turning eighty this year, and with a bad heart. I imagine burying my face into his chest during the father daughter dance, the pride in his face as he gives me away.


* * * * *

Carrie Lynn Hawthorne is a writer, mother, and yoga teacher from Pasadena, CA. She seeks spiritual purpose, being of service, and belly laughs. Her work will be featured in the Fall 2021 issue of Cultural Weekly.

Botany Lesson

by Lillian Necakov


The world asleep in the wolf moon’s arms
March already here, again at 5am
and I am not asleep thinking
about the woman who died
under Pennsylvania Avenue under a bridge
that was her own private heaven and
sometimes trickster

Angela at 5am walking gently off this earth
while the botanist talks to her trees
in the forest hospital
cooing to the balsam fir, sassafras, oak
you are a book not yet written
she whispers
p-i-k-o-w-a-h-t-i-k

robins at 5am stitching together a song
from snow-melt, pine needle, sapwood
against cold-morning skin
I am thinking about the zoologist’s
long arms catching every leaf falling
to pleat into a dead woman’s hair
underpass eulogy
the colour of apricot.


* * * * *

Lillian Necakov is the author of six books of poetry, numerous chapbooks, broadsides and leaflets. Her new book il virus is forthcoming from Anvil Press (A Feed Dog Book) in April 2021. In 2016, her chapbook The Lake Contains an Emergency Room was shortlisted for bpNichol chapbook award. During the 1980s she ran a micro press called “The Surrealist Poets Gardening Association” and sold her books on Toronto’s Yonge Street. She ran the Boneshaker Reading series from 2010-2020. She lives in Toronto and just might be working on a new book.

Transition

by Judy Clarence

 
Now that you've died, you are more alive
than anyone. I see you daily: memorials,
tributes, photos, poems not seen before,
the sly smile, the words
not read ‘til now.
You’re more alive than ever!
 
I only thought about you now and then;
a glimpse sometimes, here and there,
lines, images, reminders. Now
they’re everywhere, embedded in the cool air.
 
Your death. As when a dried-out, whitened
dandelion, still and ancient on its stalk,
is grabbed by an ambling child
who blows its seeds across the vast curve
of earth.


* * * * *

Judy Clarence, a retired academic librarian, currently lives with her daughter, grandchildren, three cats and two dogs in the Sierra, California foothills after many years in Berkeley. She plays violin (baroque and modern) in several orchestras and chamber groups, sang in two classical choruses in pre-COVID days, and writes poetry constantly. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Amarillo Bay, Shot Glass Journal and Allegro.

 

Covid Spring Haiku

by Katherine West


First spring butterfly--
Last patch of winter snow
Takes flight


* * * * *

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 nominated her poem And Then the Sky for a Pushcart Prize.