Everything perfect

by Ronna Magy

 
I’ve been obsessed lately with teapots, the silvered kind, served by waitresses in nice restaurants, handle, lid, and a knob. You sit across from a woman, white cloth, China cups.
Talk of Your day? and the cat? Things weighed more easily before the plague and the war.
Counts of dead bodies, wearing a mask. That trip to Italy along the Amalfi Coast, aqua-marine waters lapping sides of the boat. How a friend met a woman, they’d had an affair. 
 
The white linen napkins, crystal chandeliers, purple lilacs and pink roses blend in with the tea. And the waitress comes to pour more time. 
 
And for that moment you are suspended in sundrenched space, eucalyptus leaves    fragrancing the room. No clock ticks on the brocade wall, only a mirror that scallops the Venetian canals, manicured plantings imagining circular roads. Everything ordered, nothing out of place.  
 
How everything is perfect, and then, it is not. Pandemic and war intervening to kill and maim. 
Afternoon conversation infused with tea. Time silvering moments before taking them away.


* * * * *

Born in Detroit, Michigan, writer Ronna Magy calls Los Angeles home. In her poetry, Ronna combines roots in the rustbelt, and a belief in social justice. Her work has appeared in: Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Writers Resist, Artists and Climate Change, American Writers Review, Persimmon Tree, Nasty Women Poets, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere.

Tilted

by Roselle Kovitz


The slight tilt
of a painting,
a sign askew
sets my nerves on edge,
like there’s something off
with the world.
If only wars could be settled
by a gentle tip
up on the left
to level the conflict,
or pain could be subdued
by rearranging a lampshade
to hide a seam from view.
How about a cure for cancer
by tapping a pile of brochures
to line up all the edges?
Poverty—spackle over that
gaping hole with a graceful sweep
of white filler, a soft sanding,
touch of paint.

Could it be that there is
some sort of cosmic symmetry,
a master level
where the bubble is still
dancing side to side?
Or is change just as easy
as turning a seam
toward the wall?


* * * * *

Roselle Kovitz co-authored The History of Public Broadcasting with John Witherspoon, worked in public broadcasting, and as a communications consultant. She backed into writing poetry about a decade ago and enjoys the dance with mystery that writing, especially poetry, offers.

Passage of Years

by Lynne Zotalis


after a certain amount of time, logical, reasonable
passage of years
different for everyone, there isn’t a conscious sense
of death anymore, the loss
doesn’t physically hurt, more like rubbing
against a scar,
aware of the wound, memory telling the soul
what to feel. Ever present,
you graze the edge of my soul
with hammering silence. I keep distant,

my existence
apparently regardless
of the passage of years, a dozen years,
no longer black or dark,
gray, yes,
cloudy still, chilled
shades of imagination
not of regrets but rather
what might have been


* * * * *

Lynne Zotalis is an award winning author placing 1^st in the creative nonfiction category from Firebird Book Awards for Hippie at Heart (What I Used To Be, I Still Am). Her short stories have won publication for three years in the R.H. Cunningham Short Story Contest through Willowdown Books. Her poetry has appeared in  Nature 20/20, Tuck Magazine, writinginawoman’svoice, The Poetic Bond VII, VIII and IX, and Lyrical Iowa. Saying Goodbye to Chuck, a daily journal helping to enunciate the readers’ personal grief process along with her other publications are available on Amazon. 
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08DC6GZ7T  

Dear Midnight

by Jill Crainshaw


Dear Midnight,

Who do you talk to
when the wrens and robins
go quiet in a storm?
You know, when lightning
strikes every city in every land 
and ignites down deep darkness?

The tiny terrier and I
cock our heads—
She growls down deep 
in her belly suspicious 
at not hearing electricity
scurry through the house.

Rain tiptoes toward us
then chases us home,
silken hair flying out behind her.
She slips in with us as the
door slams with a sonic boom
and a single metallic flash of light—

Silence sidles in too,
scampers off into corners
and down deep into crevices
and we all peer out the window
at a sky homesick for stars.

Dear Midnight,

Can you tell us what it all means?
You, who wander fields and forests
seeking the fierce feeble embers
of once-fiery mornings—

The tiny terrier and I cock our heads.
Out there—
in the dripping down deep darkness
a train whistle melts 
into the rain-slick trees 
and a barn owl queries the night. 


* * * * *

Jill Crainshaw is a professor at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She enjoys exploring how words give voice to unexpected ideas, insights and visions.

Santa Monica Canyon

by Eve Louise Makoff


A Chuppah tunnel
on Sycamore Road
where branches swirl like bony cyclones
tween bodies hunch 
dragging on fragrant leaves wrapped in papers 
Tony with his Cheshire smile 
twisted ends held by girls with straight hair cascading down their backs
like a wedding of initiation we pass through this threshold together
holding hands as the sun splashes gold into the shining Pacific 
just down the road lapping on our sandy spots
waiting for our young bodies to dive in 


* * * * *

Eve Louise Makoff is an internal medicine and palliative care physician and a writer.

Beside the Bed/The Affair   

by Eve Louise Makoff

                                              
Wine glass swishing 
I whispered 
sweet longing
like a snake down a well
I smashed my life


* * * * *

Eve Louise Makoff is an internal medicine and palliative care physician and a writer.

A CHILD’S DREAMS

by Lorri Ventura


In her dreams she drives an ice cream truck
And hands free fudgsicles to all the children
She cures cancer
Ends wars
Reverses climate change
And speaks all languages fluently.
She spreads kernels of beauty and hope
Wherever she goes
The way Miss Rumphius blanketed the earth
With lupine seeds
Best of all
She lives in a house full of cats
That purr her to sleep at night
So that she can save the world


* * * * *

Lorri Ventura is a retired special education administrator living in Massachusetts. She is new to poetry-writing. Her poems have been featured in several anthologies, in Red Eft Journal, and in Quabbin Quills.