Edna St. Vincent Millay Is Dead

Her legs buckle at the top of the stairs.
Her heart, the timepiece of hell, stops.
She cannot watch the fall
because her mind is stone black.
Fingers no longer grasp air.
Her lifeless body jounces down each step
and crumples at the bottom in a drift
of blue nightgown and matching slippers.
For eight hours her broken beauty lies
undiscovered. The nearest neighbor lives
a mile away. She no longer hears owls hoot
in the Berkshire Hills or the scrape of
October’s yellow leaves claw the window.
The key turns in the lock of the back door
The caretaker, James Pinnie, enters
to start the evening fire. He ambles
down the hallway, turns the corner
into the foyer and discovers her face down.
He feels for the pulse, touches her
still pallid flesh. Shock of discovering her
beneath layers of silk compels him
to call the coroner. “Miss Millay is dead,” he says
into the phone. “You mean the poet?” he hears
on the other end. “Yes. The poet.”
The coroner arrives, lays his bowler on the side table,
bends into his pronouncement of finality.
The two men stand silent as they wait
for the undertaker and family to arrive.
A sudden ray of orange dawn spreads across
hardwood floor, stains the end of her
wealthy manners and luxurious decay.

R. Nikolas Macioci earned a PhD from The Ohio State University. OCTELA, the Ohio Council of Teachers of English, named Nik Macioci the best secondary English teacher in the state of Ohio. Nik is the author of two chapbooks as well as nine books: Critics and judges called his first book, Cafes of Childhood, a “beautifully harrowing account of child abuse,” but not “sentimental” or “self-pitying,” an “amazing book,” and “a single unified whole.” Cafes of Childhood was submitted for the Pulitzer Prize in 1992. In 2021, he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net award. More than two hundred of his poems have been published here and abroad in magazines and journals, including Chiron, Concho River Review, The Bombay Review, and Blue Unicorn.

Sorrow

A slow melt that
blurs vision, flows
across taut skin
to pull down cheeks
into a jaw
that sags, my self
oozes memory
to rejoin a past
that only mocks
me, a puddle
in the middle
of a firm wood
floor and a phone 
that hangs limply
from outstretched arm.

Wilson Koewing is a writer from South Carolina. His work has recently appeared in Hobart, Maudlin House, Wigleaf, and X-R-A-Y. His memoir “Bridges” is forthcoming from Bull City Press. 

Scarecrow’s Wealth

Who needs words when you own the wind?
When wingtips flash and you embrace the subtleties
of reflection and shrugs and the next moment’s
glee. My friends bring me bits of each day. 
Today, the bright cap lifted from a cava bottle’s
cork. Three days ago, an aluminum half-heart
stamped with “best.” The rodent-nibbled straw hat 
perched jauntily atop my head bears a pearl 
earring, and yesterday a skeleton 
key materialized in my left coat pocket,
in which a mouse skull and foil wrappers
also rest. My wealth abounds, and despite
protests, I am rewarded daily. Look, they say, 
accept these offerings for what they are: participation 
in joy. So I point to choice grains, contribute advice 
and song, screech warnings and recite poetry, 
though my straw tongue often wavers.
What else may I tender to those who travel
so freely? Last week a polished hinge
came to me, and before that, a chipped glass
eye, which might someday replace my missing 
ocular button, should needle and thread appear. 
Each day is a gift to be shared. Every gift, 
a celebration of days, a commitment to living.
I am grateful, and in my gratitude, give.

Cells

That morning I kneaded dough.
The rose wilted in its cup by the window.
Day folded into night.

What matters? Who?
I don’t know why hope dwindles.
Or how cells grow or navigate. Or
divide. Or keep living. What precedes change?

By candlelight, I sliced bread,
buttered it with a broad, dull blade.
Tossed a piece to my dog.

Planned the next move.

Robert Okaji is a displaced Texan living in Indiana. He holds a BA in history, served without distinction in the U.S. Navy, is the author of multiple chapbooks, and his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, Boston Review, Vox Populi, and elsewhere.

*
Inside this statue’s mouth its tongue
was run aground the way wave after wave
each fossil still hears itself becoming stone

and though the sea is just now taking place
your headstone says the darkness helps
 ̶ there’s nothing else, the voice you hear

is yours, again and again from your lips
as boundary stones, half sealed in the ground
half on all sides the years to come

as some hillside that no longer has its ballast
on the lookout, that waits for a wider shore
hemmed in, using the time over and over

to tighten around those bottom stones
mourners use to bring you nothing that moves
that feeds you salt, was brought by boat.

*
The rag you fold into a loop
knows better, flattening out
where a window should be

though night after night its soot
lifts off the way piece by piece
a sleeve empties into your hand

as moonlight  ̶ it was a dress
motionless, waiting at the wall
for her arm, the usual talk.

*
As if the sun was lost again, its light
crashing into this hillside already covered
with empty bottles, cans and the foul breath

left by a small fire after things didn’t work out
 ̶ your eyes still smoldering from nights
with enough rainfall for you to come back

healed by tears, by your  footsteps wiping dry
what dirt falls from your mouth
as something certain, could be counted on.

*
Every night now you circle the same lamp
become weightless though the bulb
is burning through a gap in the wires

the way madness arrives as darkness
and shoreline  ̶ the usual maneuver
 ̶ you reach in for the light

not yet struck by a wall kept waiting
for the sound that has no place to go
hears where the sun is buried

still breathing, lit, over and over
reaching for salt from the emptiness
in this room heated by a bed

and what’s left from a window
to put out the wound
reeking from ashes and cloth.

*
Too early? Even so, the sun
is backing out though this orchard
was already tilted into Autumn

by the flowers mourners use
to lower one season closer to another
the way every death here

begins as two :an added weight
that heats your forehead
till it touches where the ground

listens for the motherly darkness
made from stone that arrived
as two evenings at once, made heavier

for the kiss beginning a few feet away
still warm, not yet November
is leaving your face thinner, more like bones.

Simon Perchik‘s poetry has appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, The New Yorker, and elsewhere.

Clinging To

We all want to leave a ghost behind, to believe
that our passing from this world will leave such a vacuum
that some remnant of what we were had to stay behind
that the walls and the floors of our house
take enough interest in our activities
to hold the energy of our traumas to replay
for future audiences.

There have to be ghosts, because we are so important
to ourselves and the people we surround ourselves with
there had to be at least some tiny flicker left behind
or some imposing force that lets you know
somebody else once lived in this house
someone who’s no longer here.

The Cottage

If you stay in this room for too long
you will become a part of my fairy tale
initially cast in the role of a prince or a villain
doomed to eventually shrink to the status of a talking mouse
or an abandoned spinning wheel. This is what happens

when people let me write them into my life.
There is only room for one main character
in my story, and I can’t afford the time to write in the supporting cast
as anything but flat and one-dimensional.

Holly Day (hollylday.blogspot.com) has been a writing instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review, and her newest poetry collections are Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), The Tooth is the Largest Organ in the Human Body (Anaphora Literary Press), and Book of Beasts (Weasel Press).