The Message 

by Heather Sager                                                                                                       

                                                                           

A text message

blinks

on my phone

as I walk the path

nobody out in town

tall weeds along the path

shush the cool stream

the sun splashes playfully on

I glance at my phone,

looking for the message,

when Oh—the Earth calls me back to her—

I find some wildflowers,

redolent with the commingled scent

of rhubarb and chocolate.

* * * * *

Heather Sager lives in Illinois. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Sandpiper, The Wild Word, Remington Review, Cacti Fur, Third Wednesday, CircleShow, Ariel Chart, and Northwest Indiana Literary Journal. Heather also writes short fiction.

Robot

by Shirley Hakim

I am a robot like the rest of them.

I sit in a chair at the carwash

Waiting for my car.

I look dazed like everyone else,

Don’t have a book to read

Or a notebook to write in.

The right thing is to look straight ahead.

Like everyone else,

My gaze is fixed like the dead

Nobody dares to turn.

I dare. And I turn.

An older woman sits on my right.

She wears yellow, flat shoes

And a yellow shirt.

Her white hair is nicely done.

Her blue eyes are locked forward.

A tall, handsome man sits in front of me.

He wears a stripped blue suit.

He stares straight at his car.

He looks very important.

A girl in her twenties

Pretends that she’s busy with her phone.

No one notices me.

I should have worn a funny hat,

Or a brighter shirt.

I did not notice

What shirt my daughter wore today.

I don’t know

If the trees in front of my house

Have blossomed.

I don’t know

Who lives in the second house

Down the road.

* * * * *

"Robot" was first published in Poetry Super Highway (June 2020).

Shirley Hakim came from Teheran to Los Angeles in 1979, at age fifteen. She’s a CPA by trade, with a degree in Economics from UCLA. A student of poet/teacher Jack Grapes, Shirley’s poetry in English has been published in ON THE BUS, and in several publications in her native Farsi. Shirley is the mother of three adult children. She and her husband live in Los Angeles.

Cold Piano Octave (Plus a Fifth)

by Sara Backer

I was what they call a proficient amateur:

polyphonic Bach inventions, brooding Chopin preludes,

the presto impromptus of Schubert.

I bought my Yamaha U-3 before I bought my first car,

and practiced daily, even through graduate school. 

Teaching in Japan, I stopped: three years out of touch. 

On my return, my weakened fingers

no longer channeled the magic. 

I knew what exercises to do, but my lost skill,

so far below the music in my mind,

prevailed over recovering Beethoven’s Moonlight.

My piano, slightly out of tune, wastes away

in the cold room as if in a coma. Selfish, I hang on

to the imposing walnut finish of a lost spirit,

refusing to relinquish the body out of shame and crazy hope

when, on stray August evenings, I attempt Brahms’ Intermezzo:

struggling to align thick whispered chords

into their rightful grandeur, fumbling tricky accidentals

in the turbulent minor middle,

pursuing with calando a revival of grace in A.

* * * * *

Sara Backer’s first book of poetry, Such Luck (Flowstone Press 2019) follows two chapbooks: Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press) and Bicycle Lotus (Left Fork). Her writing was recently honored with a prize in the 2019 Plough Poetry Competition. She teaches at UMass Lowell, and lives in the Merrimack River watershed amid white pines, red oaks, and black bears. Website: http://www.sarabacker.com.

VENGEFUL SPIRIT

by Kathy Abrahams

Angry god of climate change shows his

whimsical capricious nature.

Freakish weather scrawls erratic signatures

across the skies,

Fingers encircle hot and cold taps.

Creatures that have breath in their bodies

wilt and swelter.

Feel acquainted with the fires of hell.

Infernos scorch land, hearts and minds.

Bi-polar logic dictates the seasons of nature.

Floods of Biblical proportions wash away

communities, livelihoods,

Lives, human and animal.

Disorientation is the order of the day.

Many believe in the voracious nature of

this beast,

Some do not.

Governments pledge aid to implement measures

to curb its hunger.

Wispy clouds of promises that evaporate like

ghosts into the ether,

Greed, a consuming fireball, drives industries

to seek more and more,

Regardless of the consequences to

Mother Earth,

Her cries of distress are largely unheard.

'Wake up, my children, people of the world,

lest my tears form a raging torrent

to sweep you and your treasures into a

sea of oblivion.'

* * * * *

Kathy Abrahams Copyright

Kathy Abrahams' work has appeared in a number of magazines. She lives in Busselton, Western Australia. She has 2 poetry titles with Ginninderra Press: Skies Of My Dreams and Creative Potpourri.

July Is Mean and Limp

by Carrie Vaccaro Nelkin

July is mean and limp

like the clothes she hangs

in the bathroom to dry,

sopping for three days

as wind inhales

outside the high window.

In her dreams

November gusts burst through wind chimes

tinkling in moonlight,

but mornings the air wraps

a warm wet tongue down her neck

and round her thighs.

Her walls sweat

like slabs of lard

and let out the bellicose breath

of fusty old age

when she opens the door.

July is mean and limp

and sour

and lives in the red shorts

on her vein-throttled legs,

the skin of her soft white arms,

the pink beneath

her hay-and-silver hair.

What to do?

What to do in this pitiless time

with one virago behind

and one still to come?

What but fan

and rock and sit spread-legged

so the bulges have room,

and caress

the small black radio

close to her ear

and hang more clothes

in the bathroom to dry

and listen for wind chimes at

the height of the sun

as she heard them last night

in her dream?

* * * * *

"July Is Mean and Limp" was originally published in Rose & Thorn Journal (November 2012).

Carrie Vaccaro Nelkin’s poems have appeared in Third Wednesday, Grasslimb Journal, Poppy Road Review, Connecticut River Review, Poetry Quarterly, and other places. Carrie is author of the novel Snare (The Waiting Dark) and has stories in journals like Bards and Sages Quarterly, Supernatural Tales, and Luna Station Quarterly.

Archaeology

by Grace Richards

He wrote me love letters

then, some on large, schmaltzy

drug store cards, proclaiming

in sparkly silver script:

For My Wife

on our Anniversary,

with earnest messages inside:

God blessed me with you;

I cannot imagine a life without you;

You have made my life complete.

My favorites are hand-made,

showing his humor and generosity:

If only I’d had enough wrapping paper

for that Jaguar.

He signed them with fanciful

names of admirers:

All the oleanders in our garden,

or imaginary jazz musicians:

Blind Orange Julius

and Hot T.

On Valentine’s Day

the year of our marriage,

he confessed his initial plan

was never to come near me,

further confessed his complete

inability to stay away.

He chose words like irresistible

and hopelessly in love,

including a detailed list of all

he loved about me:

your sensitivity,

sense of humor,

hands,

hair,

spirituality,

the way you look

when you’re lost in thought,

your legs,

your legs,

your legs.

To preserve his words, I kept

these treasures in a wooden box

elevated by ornate feet,

top painted with a Parisian scene,

as proof that he loved me – once,

but words must be spoken

with power and passion,

not buried in an antique,

resting on now broken feet,

paint faded, pale as tallow.

* * * * *

Grace Richards worked in the TV and film industry in Los Angeles and later taught ESL at the college level in Southern California and at the University of Oregon. During the last few most dramatic years, she has found her poetic voice. Her work has been published in online journals, such as Willawaw Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, and HerStry blog, as well as in the anthology Poems on Poems and Poets. Her first chapbook, Mid-Century Modern and Other Poems, was published in September 2019.

Camp, 1979

by Lourdes Dolores Follins

I’m almost ten years old and for the past two years, I’ve gone away to Girl Scout sleepaway camp for the entire summer—nine weeks! When school ends, I’m excited about seeing my friends from camp, as well as being away from my parents and the two of my four step-brothers who still live at home. Camp usually begins a week after the last day of school, but Mom hasn’t told me to start packing yet.

One Saturday morning, after I finish watching my cartoons alone in the living room, but before the Abbott and Costello show starts, I corner Mom in the kitchen. Even though I’m really into my shows, during the commercials, I remember that camp’s coming. Dad has gone upstairs to my parents’ bedroom to finish reading the newspapers, while Marshall and Little Harold have gone out somewhere. When I walk into the kitchen, I notice how determined Mom looks. Her thin, dark brown eyebrows look like they’re knit together, she’s frowning, and her light blue cotton nightgown sways as she moves from side to side. The curl in her dark brown, relaxed hair is limp. I’m standing close enough to tell that her edges have grown in and she needs a touch-up. Even though the sun shines directly on her and warms up her cocoa brown skin, I can’t fully feel its heat because of the thick, beveled glass in the kitchen window. Whenever I look at it closely, the glass in the window reminds me of Dad’s bifocals.

She is silently cleaning up after cooking pancakes, bacon, and eggs on the electric griddle. Dad usually does all the cooking, but when he makes hot breakfast, it’s usually Wheatena, oatmeal, or Cream of Wheat. You know, plain beige stuff. Somehow, even though they’re all different, Dad finds a way to make it all look and taste the same—bland, lumpy and dry in spots, and creamy in other spots. Mom hardly ever cooks, so I got really happy when she pulled the griddle out of the wooden cabinet in the dining room a couple hours ago. With the commercial break still on, I ask, “Should I start packing for summer camp?”.

            “No,” she says and continues to focus on what she’s doing in the kitchen.

            “Oh!” I’m surprised, but I can’t read her face. I can’t tell if she’s tired, in a bad mood, or just thinking about something else. I’ve spent most of my short time on this earth trying to read her moods, stay out of her way, and most times, I succeed. But I never know if one day, I’ll do something to upset her and make her give me The Silent Treatment. The Silent Treatment happens when Mom is mad at you. Instead of yelling, she just stops talking to you. You become like Casper the Friendly Ghost: You really want her to see you, but you’re dead to her. It feels awful because it’s like all of the oxygen has been sucked out of the air and you don’t know when it’s gonna end. I just do my best to never get on her bad side and make her mad at me. So far, so good!

I take a chance and press on anyway. “Am I going to sleepaway camp this summer?” I bite my lip and try not to cry in case she says, “No.” I love going to sleepaway camp! It’s a world of mostly Black and Brown girls like me from different parts of New York City and it’s always fun. From swimming in the cold lake on hot, steamy days to roasting (and burning) marshmallows over campfires, and from learning how to distinguish between different types of trees to picking blood-red raspberries off thorny bushes, Girl Scout camp is the best-thing-ever!

            “You’re going to day camp first, then sleepaway camp next month,” Mom continues washing up. Her thick brown hands are dripping with soapy water and they dip in and out of the water as she washes the mixing bowl and plates, splashing a bit each time, like playful dolphins diving into the ocean. The blue stone in the gold ring Mom always wears winks at me.

            Day camp? Why day camp? I wonder. I am suspicious because I never heard of day camp, but I know better than to ask my mother too many questions. It always seems as if there is some unknown limit to the number of questions I’m allowed to ask before she snaps at me and shuts down. I figure two questions was one too many and trudge back to the living room to watch my show.

            The day camp that Mom signed me up for is located on the South Shore, in a part of Staten Island where very few Black people live or work. Despite the fact that it is home to one of the nation’s oldest free Black settlements (Sandy Ground), Staten Island is 85.3 percent White (mostly Italian-, Irish-, and German-Americans). With the exception of Sandy Ground (which is on the South Shore), the majority of Black people on the Island—like my family—live in racially segregated, poor, and working-class neighborhoods on the North Shore. The island also has the highest proportion of Italian Americans in the country.

                                                                        ***

A few weeks after my exchange with Mom, I am at day camp and it is lunch time. For some reason, my mother braided my hair into small, medium-length box braids that swish when I turn my head from side to side. I rarely wear my hair in braids and Mom has never put my hair into this style before, so it feels weird to feel my hair move. Mom usually puts it into pigtails, cornrows, or two plaits that follow the shape of my head. It’s always kinda tied down so that it doesn’t get messed up. It doesn’t move quite like the White girls’ hair, but I still feel like I’m part of the group as I shake my head to the Grease soundtrack with my new friends.

“You’re the one that I want!

“The one that I want, oh!

“Ooh! Ooh! Ooooo!”

We’re nine- and ten-year-old girls singing together on the benches, shimmying in unison, jockeying to see whose version of Sandra Dee or Rizzo is best. However, I don’t try to out-shimmy anyone; I’m just enjoying belonging. I’m shy and quiet, and I am the only Black girl at camp. I don’t go to school or church with anyone else at camp, so I’m really an outsider. I’m pretty sure that the other girls only speak to me because we’re in the same group—the Stingrays. All the kids are separated into groups named after fish and the older groups are named after big fish, like the Sharks or the Whales. The younger kids are in either the Goldfish or the Guppies, and the other group of kids my age are the Eels.

  Since day camp began, there have been moments where I feel like I am accepted by the other girls and most of the boys. But then, there are other moments where it feels like everyone else got a note that I didn’t get, telling them when to laugh at each other’s jokes, who to pick for your kickball team, who to hit with the dodgeball, and who to let sit with you at lunch. Today, we all got the same note and it feels good to hear my voice in harmony with the other girls.

“Nigger!” a white boy named Mark says. I vaguely remember him from the kickball game my group had against his group, the Eels.

“I got chills

They’re multiplying

And I’m loo-sing con-tro-ol!”

I am singing so deeply from my heart that I don’t hear Mark speaking to me.

“Nigger!” He is now standing six inches away from me and for some reason, Mark looks angry.

“What?” I am confused. I have never heard or been called this word before, but I instinctively know it’s bad. I don’t know why, but I can tell that Mark is trying to hurt me with this word. I am also confused because Mark and I have never talked to each other before now, so I don’t understand why he would be mad at me.

“Nig-ger!!”

“Your mother!” I do not know what has come over me, but somehow I know that if you want to hurt someone’s feelings, you talk about their mama. It must be part of the Black collective unconscious.

Mark apparently knows this too, but persists. “Nigger!!” he spits at me as his eyebrows come together like a drawbridge that’s been lowered.

“Your father!” Why are you still shouting at me? I think to myself.

Mark’s freckled face turns pink. “Nigger!!!”

“Your grandmother!” What it’s gonna take to make him leave? I wonder.

“Nigger!!!!” Mark’s face looks as if someone is playing Connect the Dots with his freckles. It’s difficult to see where one ends and another begins.

“Your grandfather!” I am exasperated and wondering where is everyone else. For this short moment in time, it feels as if Mark and I are in another universe, floating as we hurl small but potentially harmful words at one another. Out of the corner of my left eye, I see my new friends sitting off to the side and simply watching the show. Out of the corner of my other eye, it looks as if someone shouted, “Freeze!” during a camp-wide game of Freeze Tag. No one else is moving and it feels as if even the air around us has stopped moving.

“Alright! That’s it. Leave her alone, Mark!” Victor says to him as he inserts his sinewy body in between us. Victor is an older White boy who’s fourteen years old. He’s so close to me that I can smell his musk from playing basketball with the other older boys. I think I hear an audible gasp from one of my friends, but that couldn’t have happened because neither Mark, Victor, nor I have tagged anyone to release them from being frozen.

“But…!” For some odd reason, Mark wants to continue this. I am still confused—I hadn’t even been talking with him when he started calling me a nigger.

“That’s it, Mark! Leave her alone,” Victor insists.

Victor is the cutest boy in camp and all the girls swoon whenever he walks by them—except me. It’s not that I don’t notice his looks, it’s just that he looks like a lot of the White boys I’ve seen in this part of Staten Island. He’s got brown, slightly wavy hair like John Travolta, dark brown eyes like Robert De Niro, muscles like Sylvester Stallone, and wears a gold Italian horn necklace. His back is to me, but I see signs of Victor’s exertion on the basketball court: the under-arm sweat stains on his red muscle shirt that clings to his lower back and the damp hairs at his neck line. After a lifetime of watching Mom and reacting to her moods, I notice everything about people. I like to think it keeps me safe.

Victor then turns to face me. “You okay?” I know the words coming out his mouth, but I have never heard them put together before. No one has ever asked if I am okay.

“What?” I feel like I’m under water and he’s standing above me, talking.

Victor peers at me, checking for signs of life—or intelligence. “Are you okay??” My friends are still frozen in their seats, but I smell their jealousy as they shift and look at one another as they watch Victor talking to me as if I am human.

“Um… yeah,” I answer, looking at his face as if I have never seen it before. There are tiny hairs sprouting above his upper lip—or is it dirt mixed with sweat?

“Cool.” Victor walks away, leaving me standing alone where Mark attacked me. I’m not sure who it was, but either Mark or Victor had tagged the other children, for the entire camp is suddenly in motion. Peals of laughter bounce off the monkey bars as young girls swing in the swings and little boys chase one another and pretend they are being eaten by Jaws. Feeling foolish, I walk back over to my friends who look at me warily. I feel foolish because everyone else is behaving as if nothing happened.

“What’d Victor say to you??” they ask almost in unison.

“He asked if I was okay,” I say quietly.

“Why’d he ask you that?” they puzzle, even though they’d just seen my exchange with Mark.

“I dunno.” I am hanging my head. My so-called friends’ questions make me feel as if I have done something wrong for getting Victor to intervene on my behalf.

***

When my parents pick me up at the end of the day, I climb into the back seat of my mother’s car. Dad is seated in the passenger seat. After I fasten my seatbelt, he turns to me, smiling and asks, “How was your day?”

As I tell my parents about what Mark said to me and what I said back to him, I see Dad stiffen and darken. Dad is the darkest Black person I know, so it is difficult to actually see him get darker. Today though, I see his face cloud over and it looks like a storm is coming. Before today, we’ve never had any conversations about color. I’d never had anyone call me names or treat me differently because of the color of my skin before. My parents never warned me about or prepared me for the mean things that White people might say to me because I’m Black. So the fact that I had the verbal response that I did is remarkable. I don’t know what I need to hear from my parents, but I know that I need reassurance that I did the right thing and that I will be okay.

At first, Mom says nothing, but when I lean forward to look at something in the front of the car, she says, “People are ignorant.”

I don’t know what she means, but it feels as if she’s saying what happened wasn’t that bad. I wonder if it’s not a big deal to Mom because she’s lighter than Dad and I. Dad remains silent and stares out the window, looking angry. I have never seen Dad look like this and am both puzzled and scared. I can’t tell if I did something wrong or if he is upset about what happened at day camp today. Maybe he’s had this happen to him too? But I don’t know because he’s not saying anything.

Dad’s silence is confusing to me, especially since I can feel his moods shift right now and Dad is never this quiet. I mean, when he and Mom are together, she does most of the talking. But Dad’s not really a quiet person and doesn’t do the Silent Treatment. The few times he’s been mad at me, Dad’s told me what he’s upset about and why; then we’re okay. Leaning back in the hot, sticky pleather back seat, I wonder if I made a mistake by telling them what happened. Like all the other racist incidents we experience either individually or together, my exchange with Mark is never discussed again.

* * * * *

Lourdes Dolores Follins is a Black queer woman who comes from a long line of intrepid women and working-class strivers. She’s been published in Rigorous, Watermelanin, Indelible Ink, and elsewhere. When Lourdes Dolores isn’t writing, she works as a psychotherapist with QTIPOC and kinky people in New York City. Check her out at www.lourdesdfollins.com