Poetry Winter 2022 fiction all issues
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Cover
Li Zhang
Ana Reisens
Pam asked about Europe
& other poems
Krystle May Statler
To the Slow Burn
& other poems
Kristina Cecka
On Remodeling
& other poems
Belinda Roddie
Bless The Bones Of California
& other poems
Summer Rand
Alexander tells me how he'd like to be buried
& other poems
Alexander Perez
Toward the Rainbow
& other poems
Karo Ska
self-portrait of compassion…
& other poems
David Southward
The Pelican
& other poems
George Longenecker
Stamp Collection
& other poems
Mary Keating
Salty
& other poems
Talya Jankovits
Imagine A World Without Raging Hormones
& other poems
Laurie Holding
Sonnet to Mr. Frost
& other poems
David Ruekberg
A Short Essay on Love
& other poems
Elaine Greenwood
There’s a thick, quiet Angel
& other poems
Richard Baldo
Carry On Caretaker
& other poems
Jefferson Singer
Dave Righetti’s No-Hitter…
& other poems
Diane Ayer
A Fan
& other poems
Kaecey McCormick
Meditation Before Desert Monsoon
& other poems
Meg Whelan
Resubstantiation
& other poems
Katherine B. Arthaud
Possible
& other poems
Aaron Glover
On Transformation
& other poems
Anne Marie Wells
[I'm crying in a sandwich shop reading Diane Seuss' sonnets]
& other poems
Holly Cian
Untitled
& other poems
Kimberly Russo
Selective Memories are the Only Gift of Dementia
& other poems
Steven Monte
Larkin
& other poems
Mervyn Seivwright
Fear Mountain
& other poems
Ana Reisens
Of beige plates and silver buttons
Rosa sold her story to a traveling peddler in a grey suit
with silver buttons when she was five. Money was tight.
Her mother couldn’t afford big words. Hunger had six letters.
So Rosa sold her story and gave the coins to her mother.
Rosa had never met anyone with a story, anyway, so why
should she have one? Instead Rosa learned how to bake
round cakes with just enough sugar and to wear her hair
in a tight braid with no ribbon. She made amiable friends
with names like Mary and Susan and they played
amiable games that involved jumping within the lines
and keeping their pleated skirts clean. Rosa learned to add
and subtract and ate tomato sandwiches, and the days
strung out like laundry on a line. Years later Rosa met
an amiable man with no name and they fit each other
like empty mittens, so they married and bought a grey house
with beige dinner plates and the days strung out like
laundry on a line. They did what all the Marys and Susans
were doing and they had two children, a boy and a girl,
each little and silver and brimming with their own unwoven
stories. The man with no name taught the boy to be amiable
and play catch, and Rosa taught the girl how to bake
round cakes and wear pleated skirts. And the days
strung out like laundry on a line until one evening,
when Rosa’s daughter returned from school with a story.
It wasn’t a big story, mind you—just a morsel,
like a round cake. And Rosa ate it. Hungrily
she devoured the little girl’s story and then
sent her back for more. So the girl traded
her tomato sandwiches for stories because Rosa
was hungry, and hungry was a six-letter word.
As the days strung out like laundry on a line
the girl gave away her own story to her mother.
Yes, I sense your concern. My grandmother
once said most of us are born unremarkable,
and I worry many would agree. Rosa worries about
the same things as you and me, as well as some things
we do not. For instance: Will they leave her?
Will they forget her? Also, what is a beginning
or an end? Sometimes, when the children are in bed
and Rosa is in the kitchen washing beige plates,
she wonders if one day, long after the letters
of her name have passed, someone will find her story
crumpled in the back pocket of a worn pair
of grey pants with silver buttons.
Lidia finds a pink bear
Last week a family of three
died in an abandoned bank.
Mother, father, child.
They were immigrants,
occupying illegally.
The fire came in the night
like a rolling train.
There were protests, of course.
If only they’d surveyed the building.
If only the bank hadn’t closed.
If only we had known.
I pass quickly.
The street is heavy with memories,
and my feet sink too easily
into someone else’s story.
I see a pile of grief arranged
around a tree next to the building.
A woman and a young girl stand beside it.
Lidia, I hear the woman say. Lidia, listen to me.
Do you know what happened here?
I don’t catch the rest.
I don’t know, for instance,
if she’s explaining why boats arrive
full of people with no homes,
why no one comes to greet them.
Or perhaps she’s telling the girl
why banks close and windows break.
How fires burn in the places
we’re unwilling to see.
Or maybe she’s simply explaining why
there’s a soft pink bear leaning
against a tree. Why the cars pass,
oblivious to even this little tragedy.
Why no one stops to pick it up.
Lilly of the white gloves
Lilly was born in a white house to a woman with white gloves on a wide sidewalk, where children peered through the fences and it never rained. Her mother bleached the floors each day, her blouse crisp as a pressed wildflower. She wore a yellow coat and ate seeds that would not grow. It never rained.
Lilly couldn’t scream but she whispered to the neighbor’s tree and waited. Winter tugged its luggage forward. White fingers on the windows. Christmas, a wrinkled bow. I know this
because I was there. Ours were the fingers of children clinging to a horse that could not run. Plastic painted hooves. The moon, wicked in its glow. A man in a white coat
kept count of Lilly’s heartbeats. Every river had drowned another mother’s gloves, fed a nettle we mustn’t touch. We cupped the light in our hands like melting snow, like a river thin with thirst.
I’ve become a stranger to wide sidewalks. Here the river runs thick with spring. My fingers brush against the nettle. I tell her it prickles with memories. She tells me she has bought a yellow coat, and that it never rains.
Forgive her if her fingers bleed red beneath her white gloves.
Forgive me for leaving.
Olga
had to clean the entire apartment in three hours.
She had heavy red hands and a heavier red duster,
and Borja’s ceramic armies shattered beneath Olga’s
chapped fingers. Borja was 26. Olga had been cleaning
his room since he was 13. Before then, his mother.
Mrs. Garcia didn’t like me talking to Olga. Don’t speak
to the help was the unwritten agreement when I stayed
for the week, an invisible line drawn neatly over
the furniture. So Olga retreated every time I entered
the living room. Except that day, when Mrs. Garcia
was out. Olga was elbow-deep in someone else’s
toothpaste and I was making potato soup in the kitchen.
I know this soup, Olga’s voice rumbled from the doorway.
We make this in my country. I showed her the celery, the carrots,
the cheese I learned to shred as a child. You’re going to need
more pepper, Olga said, and she set down her rag. But then
the front door opened and Mrs. Garcia appeared. Olga,
she said, eyes narrowed. Be careful in Borja’s room today.
So Olga left, shoulders slumped, and I never asked her
about the pepper. Years have passed and I can still see her—
the grey apron wrapped around her waist, her elbows
cracked with battle. How she was somehow bigger
and smaller than every room she entered.
And that day, how Borja and Mrs. Garcia watched
from the hallway as she dabbed a cotton cloth
around the gristle-grey hands of the orcs,
their swords raised against the onslaught. Olga,
I should have told her. Olga, you’re no match for them.
Pam asked about Europe
Is it just England, she wanted to know,
or was there more? I’d just returned from
my first trip to Spain and clocked in late.
It was December, and the morning clung
to the office windows like a curtain.
I remember her slipping out for her
cigarette break, how she returned
to tell me that her crossword
had featured the word connoisseur.
How she hid a hundred-dollar bill
in a striped pair of Christmas socks
and set them on my desk, so you can go back.
She knew, then, that I would leave.
I remember the condensation
on the windowpanes as the plane
took off, how grey the fields looked
from the clouds. How she waited
until I was gone to tell me.
A year later when I visited,
her husband called to explain
how to help her flush her port.
She’s too ashamed to say anything,
he said. That day we sat in the park
and Pam asked if they celebrated
Thanksgiving in Spain. The pond
was beginning to freeze and the geese
huddled in the center, crying out to the sky.
Pam said that someday she would
visit me, and that her crossword
had featured the word avocado.
I didn’t know, then,
that she would leave me.
I never had the chance
to tell her that it wasn’t just England,
that there was so much more.
We can love without knowing.
Ana Reisens
is a poetry farmer and word wrangler. She was the recipient of the 2020 Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award, and you can find her poetry sprouting in The Mud Season Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and The Blue Earth Review, among other places. She’s currently working on her first novel.