This month an additional Moon Prize, the 110th, goes to Gabrielle Yetter's thought-provoking poem "Why."


WHY

by Gabrielle Yetter


She tosses the lipstick-stained stub to the ground
Grinds it into the dirt with the heel of her stiletto
Inhales deeply
And turns back.
To one more man,
One more beer,
One more night of leering, groping, prodding, snorting
In the suffocating blackness
Where her soul vanishes inside an empty shell
And the wounds of her past sink into pits of pretense.

When the artificial smile and the artificial hair and the artificial nails
Reveal artificial canvases of pretend horizons,
All she can ask is
Why?

Then the door slams shut.
The lights go out.
Coins heavy in her pocket, she draws her coat tighter
To keep out the cold,
To keep in the pain,
To cover the scars
From probing eyes that pierce her skin once again.

Guarding her fractured heart, she walks
And walks
Footsteps echoing on the wet pavement
Until the key in her hand fits
And she stumbles down the steps,
Past her snoring neighbour spread out on the sagging couch
To the room where her treasure lies.
Eyes firmly closed with feathery lashes; ebony locks curled around the face of an angel.
A tiny hand.
Reaches out.
Holds, grasps, squeezes, breathes.
And she remembers.
Once again
The answer to the question,
Why?


* * * * *

"Why" is part of Gabrielle Yetter's new poetry collection And the Clouds Parted. 

Gabrielle Yetter is a former journalist who has lived in Bahrain, South Africa, USA, Cambodia, and the UK. She is author of Whisper of the Lotus, The Definitive Guide to Moving to Southeast Asia: Cambodia, The Sweet Tastes of Cambodia, Ogden the Fish Who Couldn’t Swim Straight, and Martha the Blue Sheep and co-author with her husband Skip of Just Go! Leave the Treadmill for a World of Adventure. Her poetry collection, And the Clouds Parted, was released in November 2022. She lives in East Sussex, UK and can be contacted at www.GabrielleYetter.com or gabrielle.yetter@gmail.com

 

This month's Moon Prize, the 109th, on today's Wolf Moon goes to Melanie Choukas-Bradley's magical poem "If I have loved you" summing up the wealth and rush of our all too short lives.


If I have loved you

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley


Aren’t there those who so purely share your stratosphere
That you need not friend them on Facebook
Or even call when you’re in town?
What’s to be gained from rehashing old magic
Reminding you both that you have moved on?
If I have loved you, I hope you know

* * * * *

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 Beate Sigriddaughter’s Writing in a Woman’s Voice. The site featured several of her poems during 2022, including “How to Silence a Woman,” which won the February Moon Prize. “If I have loved you” was first published on New Year’s Eve and “Storyboards on the Diagonal” was published on New Year’s Day 2023. 

 

Domestic Life

by B. Lynne Zika


When I’m late for dinner,
when the soup is cold,
and he stands in the kitchen—
she’s late; she’s coming,
she’s late; she’s coming—
will he remember the morning sun
glazing my hair in copper and mica
so that he stood watching from the doorway
unwilling to leave?

When I forget to let the cat in,
when I open the windows and turn up the heat,
when I disappear behind a book, a mood,
a question not yet answered,
will he remember me in moonlight,
soft brush of night air
painting everything cool and silver,
his hand against the small of my back,
his lips brushing my forehead?

How long before the fire in his hands
cools to a friendly pat
and he stops aching for me in the night?
How long before yes, my darling
stretches in front of the fireplace
and wakes as an uh-huh and hmm?

I will leave him
before I watch the corpse of love
rot in the fields where we once made love,
night sky pebbled in quartzite,
the lady moon draping her hair around our shoulders,
singing us to sleep.
I will leave before the husbandry of pleasure
is buried in a compost of homemaking,
before household gadgetry
becomes the machinery of love.


* * * * *

B. Lynne Zika’s photography, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous literary and consumer publications. 2022 publications include Delta Poetry Review, Backchannels, Poesy, Suburban Witchcraft, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. In addition to editing poetry and nonfiction, she worked as a closed-captioning editor for the deaf and hard-of-hearing. Awards include: Pacificus Foundation Literary Award in short fiction, Little Sister Award and Moon Prize in poetry, and Viewbug 2020 and 2021Top Creator Awards in photography. Website: https://artsawry.com/.

 

Dear Loretta,

by Sharon Waller Knutson

 
I was never a Coal Miners Daughter
from Butchers Hollow, never got
pregnant in my teens and never could
carry a tune but I worshipped you
when bare foot and pregnant you took the stage
in the sixties and shocked the country
singing songs you penned about birth control,
and fist fighting with floozies
who were sleeping with your husband
while birthing and bathing six babies.
I cheered when you humbly accepted eight
Country Music Awards including the first
female Country Entertainer of the Year
half a century ago. I worried when you
suffered a stroke and then fractured
your hip after falling off the stage
in your mid-eighties. I cried when barely
two weeks after you warbled
your last note at the age of ninety,
your successors, sixty something
redheaded Reba and thirty-nine-year-old
blondes Carrie and Miranda
sang your songs at the CMA Awards,
hoping your spirit would make one
of the blondes the first CMA female
entertainer of the year in ten years
and only the eighth in fifty-nine
years. Since they lost to a male,
please be an angel and finish
your work, Loretta.


* * * * *
 
Sharon Waller Knutson is a retired journalist who lives in Arizona. She has published nine poetry books including My Grandmother Smokes Chesterfields (Flutter Press 2014,) What the Clairvoyant Doesn’t Say and Trials & Tribulations of Sports Bob (Kelsay Books 2021), and Survivors, Saints and Sinners and Kiddos & Mamas Do the Darndest Things (Cyberwit 2022). Her work has also appeared recently in Discretionary Love, Impspired, GAS Poetry, Art and Music, The Rye Whiskey Review, Black Coffee Review, Lothlorien Review, Silver Birch Press, ONE ART, The Drabble, Spillwords, Muddy River Review, Verse-Virtual, Your Daily Poem, Red Eft Review, and The Five-Two.

Distance Learning

by Claire Massey


As a child, she learns about endings, about unwanted beginnings. She remembers her father in the silvery bow of his skiff. He glides her over sandbars, through cloudless air and quiet water. They drift beside cordgrass and wax myrtle. She listens to a lullaby of slow drips from the paddle. He speaks. New wife, new baby, new life, another city. He will love her just the same. Of course, he will. She stops listening. She knows now he was young, susceptible in that way imperceptible to his daughter.

Her brother believes in Father Knows Best, philosophy is for sissies, all wars are necessary. He moves to Ohio. Kent State happens. He joins Veterans Against the War. A lifetime later, and still, he beats time on the wheel, sings with the radio, it ain’t me. I’m not your fortunate son. She knows now that distance transforms.

Her mother does not remarry. She puts herself through art school. She paints light in Italy, halos the heads of urchins, pensioners. Makes olive trees, gondolas, cathedral doors, glow. Her paintings sell. Christmas Eve prompts a phone call. You should have flown over, her mother says, heard the chorus. I’m sending you an oil of the candelabras. She knows now all mothers weren’t meant to mother.

Her lover said just give him time, the distance that creates perspective. For months she listens to break-up songs. I can’t make you love me if you don’t. Her father’s old maps are still in his trunk. She finds a good town and leaves first. She knows now what the gift of time costs.

Decades removed from her family of origin, her original lover, she strokes her skiff forward with ease, closes the distance to shore. She’s learned whitewater, how to dodge snags, run bars, stay upright in shoals, escape eddies that reverse the flow. She knows now how to read the currents that mean, she doesn’t have to paddle so hard.


* * * * *

Claire Massey finds joy in discovering and supporting literary artists who further our quest for understanding of self and the world. Among other journals, recent work has appeared in Snapdragon Journal of Art and Healing, Lucky Jefferson 365 Collection, Halfway Down the Stairs, POEM, Persimmon Tree and Bright Flash Literary Review. She is Poetry Editor for the quarterly magazine, The Pen Woman. Driver Side Window, her collection of flash stories, poems, memoir vignettes and interpretive photographs, debuted in October, 2022.

 

Beach Photo

by Claire Massey


I don’t remember
this portable playpen
from the 1950s
with fat, wooden slats
barely permitting
a view of the breakers.

Must have been my third
or second summer?
I look to be
a handful,
mid-century girl-child
howling for freedom,
a bar-rattling,
foot-stomping
rebel.

My mother watches
intently, looks to be
off-kilter,
losing equilibrium,
feet seeking leverage,
in the lopsided sand.

On a boardwalk distant,
my father levels a tripod,
narrows his focus,
closes an eye,
captures his subjects.


* * * * *

Claire Massey finds joy in discovering and supporting literary artists who further our quest for understanding of self and the world. Among other journals, recent work has appeared in Snapdragon Journal of Art and Healing, Lucky Jefferson 365 Collection, Halfway Down the Stairs, POEM, Persimmon Tree and Bright Flash Literary Review. She is Poetry Editor for the quarterly magazine, The Pen Woman. Driver Side Window, her collection of flash stories, poems, memoir vignettes and interpretive photographs, debuted in October, 2022.

Storyboards on the Diagonal

by Melanie Choukas-Bradley


The old boards through the bog
Will be replaced
The trail crew has hauled in clean new boards, lying pathside

I will miss my old companions, weathered and rotting
With moss growing thick between them
They often land me in the murk

Yet they meld with the fern fronds lining the ancient path called the Diagonal
The parade of wildflowers passing the season baton
Trillium to goldthread to jewelweed to aster

These old boards have borne the weight of moose mothers and calves
Of bear mothers and cubs
And me on skis, their ice filled cracks deep under snow

The new bog boards will be the last I know
May I live to see them grow old and soft
With moss springing green between them
 

* * * * *

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 featured several of her poems during 2022, including “How to Silence a Woman,” which won the February Moon Prize. Melanie wishes Beate’s readers a joyous new year!