Ben & Jerry’s

Someone told me
“Healing isn’t linear”
and I nodded
like I understood

But last night
I listened to a voicemail
from her
from November
just to hear
her voice say my name

And now
I’m back
at day one
with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s
and a hoodie
I should’ve burned
long ago

A Turkish writer & poet, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, Trampset, JMWW, and Normal School, among other journals. Their work has been selected or nominated for anthologies including the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Wigleaf Top 50. They are currently working on their first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam.

Broken Rocks

The rock that broke from the moon
has its own glow that infiltrates
the bedroom, casting shadows.
It’s that kind of night.
We lay around until hunger strikes
and from the kitchen, a honey crisp
apple balanced on the round plate.
The best way to eat it is sliced
down to the core, this one
so sweet and fresh it’s slick
under the knife and longs to be tasted.
I share it with you, my improbable lover,
bending to me in the plate’s
reflection. Moons eclipsed from other nights
are in the curtains, interrupted by thoughts
of Eve. If her apple was a honey crisp
all can be forgiven, and Sin is the name
of the way we make love tonight.
It’s still a surprise, how easily I settle
into your rhythm as if you are the glow
and I the shadow rising to greet you.

Kristy Snedden is a trauma therapist and poet and artist whose work has been widely published online and in print. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and for Best of the Net. She creates poetry and art because it is the most fun she has ever had. www.kristysnedden.com

Insomnia

I was doing well in college, had myself
on a schedule:

_____up at 6
_____showered and breakfasted by 8
_____classes from noon to 6
_____dinner
_____study until 10pm
_____bed

Everything was working except for sleep.
I couldn’t sleep
I was reading Raise High the Roofbeams Carpenters
_____by Salinger.
There wasn’t anything about that book that troubled me.

Usually reading in bed put me to sleep in five minutes.
No more.

I complained to my friend, George—
two years older than me,
the disgruntled son of a famous man.

George had the solution—brandy!
Sitting in his dorm room where booze
was strictly forbidden, George poured me
a huge snifter of golden hooch. By
midnight we’d finished his pint bottle.

Instead of sleep, we both felt the frisky sting of insobriety.

My insomnia doctor prescribed a journey
to Everybody’s, an afterhours joint down
by the railroad tracks in Laramie. We knocked

on the door at 2 AM and were greeted by
two swarthy gentlemen dressed in leather
jackets and smelling of weed. They gave
us the onceover. Evidently, we two white
college boys didn’t threaten them.

Everybody’s was aptly named: everyone
from white football coaches, black basket
ball players, Rhodes scholars, burnt out|
former students, and residents of the local
pokey on work-release were there.

George and I danced with some cowgirls,
their buckskin coats swirled in the dim light.
We sang, we drank more, we closed the place
and staggered into the rose-colored dawn at 6 AM.

It could be said that George’s cure was successful—
I passed out the second my head hit the pillow that morning.

_____My schedule was kaput.
_____I missed all my classes.
_____It took two weeks for me
_____to finally fall asleep
_____at a reasonable hour.

By then I was reading The Brothers Karamazov in bed,
a gentle sedative that ushered me into
the benign world of patricide and grand inquisitions,

and put me right to sleep.

Charlie Brice’s poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of Net Anthology and the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Atlanta Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Ibbetson Street, Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere.

Times Square with My Father

My mother ‘s face was alabaster white and heart shaped and, I imagine, irresistible to my father. They met in church. My father had somehow survived D-Day and what came after, the Battle of the Bulge, and eventually, the liberation of Paris. There was a sweet sadness to my father which must have emerged later, when their first child died, but when I look at pictures of my mother and father alone, just kids, dancing at their wedding reception, he in his handsome tux, she in white eyelet lace with long train trailing half the length of the small immigrant church where they married, I realize he may have been to war but was he prepared for  her? She called herself a brat, had made him wait two years before marrying, and that skin, unblemished, untouched by the sun. They say the generation before ours is the one we’re most curious about, because we cannot fathom what the world was before us. 

One night I had my father to myself in Times Square. I don’t remember why we were in town, though I’m sure it wasn’t for a play on Broadway. My father was not a man who went to the theatre. But on this night, as I walked beside him and tried to match his stride, careening off tourists, my head snapped upward to take in the Marlboro Man’s jutting jaw, and the Camel sign puffing white smoke into frigid air.

A woman wearing a belted black trench coat stepped in front of us. My father watched me stare at the back of her head. The woman stopped to speak to a panhandler. I had a view of fair skin, severe cheekbones, glistening dark brown hair, small nose, light down on her cheeks.

She couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, meaning she was less than ten years older than me. My father elected to keep walking, calling over his shoulder that he’d meet me at Horn & Hardardt automat between 46^th & 47^th.

The woman handed the panhandler a ten-dollar bill and walked off. I wondered how my father looked at my mother that first time, measuring her height, the length of her stride, how they would fit together. No, I thought, they had met at the Italian Methodist church. He’d known women in Paris, desperately hungry, who’d nearly starved through the Occupation, women eager to show their gratitude to GI’s handing out cigarettes and chocolate. My father had waited for what he’d wanted. I watched my girl move up Broadway, her hair perfectly cut and swinging lightly, her heels clicking on the slick pavement.

Gary Percesepe is the author of twelve books, including Moratorium: Collected Stories, named by Kirkus Review one of the top 100 Indie books of 2022. Percesepe’s new poetry collection is titled The Girl of My Dream. He lives on Maui with his family.

Still Life with Yesterday

I collect time—
Sheets of paper made of time and sky and words.

The sky is made of the dead.
How there are no dead all time being simultaneous.

We are living and dead and words are ephemeral.
Paper is made of albino crows that fly away to dust.

My grandmother is dust.
Time moves as wings move as wind moves.

Wind rustles the pages of books.
Wind borrows the voice of cedar boughs.

Words cannot speak for themselves.
Cedar smells like joy.

How the sky is the convex surface of a river called earth.
How the earth is a speck of dust in the cosmos.

Time is the smell of popcorn and wet dog.
Time is the smell of coffee and sea spray.

Joy is the earth itself.
From up in the sky my grandmother sings.

Lana Hechtman Ayers has shepherded over a hundred forty poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, and elsewhere. Her newest collection is The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press, 2024). Visit her online at LanaAyers.com.