Gravity

It’s a surprise, every
time when I see a beetle
but it’s really a brittle, curled leaf;
a thin stick but it’s a dried worm,
a bit of bumpy rock but it’s a
tiny toad and I wonder

are the seasons simply
inhalations and exhalations,
the pupils of my eyes
black holes; am I pulled
forever in because
even gravity cannot escape?

Is it a flattened squirrel
or shred of tire in the road?
Dung or a cicada casing?
Flower petals or tiny,
furry, white aphids, of a sort?

These ambiguities
shouldn’t surprise me–
after all, the solar system
is perhaps an atom
with its massive empty space
and small, orbiting particles–
like the sky and oceans of the earth
so vast and uninterrupted.
The carbon in my body
was formed in a star over
billions of years ago.
My organs or the earth’s:
lungs or rainforests?
Isn’t it all the same?

I breathe out spring,
aware after all
that sometimes all of life is the same
to the gravity of our eyes.

Loralee Clark lives in Williamsburg, Virginia. She writes poetry and nonfiction. She has had poems published in two anthologies as well as Broadkill Review, Literary Mama, The Binnacle, Penwood Review, Cape Rock, Grasslands Review, The Iconoclast, and The Sierra Nevada College Review.

The Weight of the World

On both sides of bookstore glass,
glazed eyes contained worlds.

At that moment, you were no different
than your two children, or any child
who has ever stared into a shop window
amazed by glittering things,
or the irreplaceable things
lost so many years ago.

Mother of two, you may have seen the glare
of the aging poet’s balding head—
(maybe that’s what startled you)
or the flock of attuned onlookers
moved by his heavy breathing,
heavy words, heavy heart.

Wandering woman, you may have wondered what
occasion may have warranted
such attention from one man
stuck in the muck of time, whose verse first
dipped into a quiet stream of memory
but drowned us in whitewater.

At that moment, you may have been gripped
by fractured light, or some distant night,
when death was as common as hunger
in your country of origin, where the State
commanded allegiance, friends disappeared,
self-determination wilted in your hands.

Even if you have never seen a man
shoot all his cattle, set his barn aflame,
then hang himself from a rafter—
as the sage poet has—on the other side
of the glass, you may have parried piercing pangs
that ran as strong and coarse as his rapids.

Rising evening wind buckled you and the children.
You—we—all walked on into a world beyond glass.

The troubled aging poet waded still now,
like a heron on the edge of a dark river.

What settled in softly, though, his wake:
a prayer he unwittingly left behind:

___a surfeit of blooming flowers
___that once bowed his 90-year-old friend’s fragile fence,
___that couldn’t contain the weight
___of beauty in this world.

Mark Strohschein is a Washington state poet who lives on Whidbey Island. His work is forthcoming in Flint Hills Review, Cosmic Double and Plants and Poetry’s anthology, Plant People, Vol. 3. His poems have also appeared in Lips Poetry Magazine, In Parentheses, Dippity, Quibble, and a poetry anthology, Dulce Poetica. 

1958 Plymouth Fury (Transfiguration)

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world.
Whoever will be born must destroy a world
– Hermann Hesse

After they were married, which was just short of a miracle because she was frail and he was literary and eccentric, a city boy to her country girl, they defied the medical odds and conceived a little girl together, although the birth nearly killed the mother; just before she passed out into haze, she saw a large dark hawk pass over two eggs in a porcelain bowl. She lost their son later on. Fertility, so precious, so elusive. They held onto each other in the summer nights, him, a humidity, wrapping himself around her sudden night chills because she was ill, and her, clinging to him like a vine. Nervous, he purchased a car for them, drove them to Iowa. Blue bonnet blue, it rose up on the highway, stole time. A four door, its front grill marked with a V, and thin chrome lines, and a round silver bumper that gripped the entire car’s face. And a set of rear fins rising up like mountain-edged peaks with red, pendulum bell taillights. And a rear bumper that rose like a set of chrome elbows. Soon, the mother would die too. And the little girl in the back seat, innocent as a small cat, cracking eggs open all over the car’s seat. Each single egg, opaque, yellow, lush, with whorls of igniting light and amniotic fluid; a spirit-glow. Osmotic, undisguised, the fluid spilled through her fingers and across the car’s interior; it was migratory, transient, prosperous. She broke open each egg, let the clear fluid liquefy and spill. Watched in wonder at just how the fertile wetness spread, it roamed. The spirit: like an aqueduct, a flume, a channel and a groove where all that’s most holy arrives by sensual, tactile openings. The gentle couple talked on, oblivious, while the classical music station, on AM radio, played S. Rachmaninoff’s, The Bells.

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of eight poetry collections. He has work in Rattle, Crab Creek Review, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review, Panapoly, Sheila-Na-Gig. His new book, The Light Most Glad of All, will be published by Kelsay Books in 2023.

Changing Planes at Idlewild

My wife and I are on board a large plane. We land safely, but harshly, on an empty street. We are connecting to an overseas flight at Idlewild. This is not Idlewild. It is a small town. Many people deplane at their destination. The plane moves through narrow streets, wingtips nearly hitting streetlights and the like. We are looking for a runway. I am getting nervous about the time.

“When does our plane leave?” I ask my wife.

“The time gets shorter each time the clock is turned back,” she says.

The pilot leaves the plane. We follow him out. The three of us haul the plane down the street toward a downward slope that sweeps upward, helping the plane ascend. Behind us, the plane is shrinking. As we start downhill, the plane rolls ahead of us. Almost out of sight, it swerves onto a pier and splashes into the water.

My wife and I hurry to the dock where the pilot is swimming in the nude, playing with the plane, now the size of a football. He pushes it through the water, just below the surface, a submarine with wings.

My wife and I begin to undress.

Richard Holinger’s work has appeared or will appear in Chicago Quarterly Review, Hobart, Iowa Review, Chautauqua, and has garnered four Pushcart Prize nominations. He holds a doctorate in Creative Writing from UIC and lives northwest of Chicago.

Arrival of Destination

From a skinny girl glimpsed
through a fog of dingy college bar
she closes in and clarifies
grows into subject and object
of all his senses
forsakes, with him, imagination
for the marriage of minds
the making of Home with bare hands
the animal work of bodies
the daunting sobriety
of giving lives over
to the service of happiness

Dan Carpenter is a freelance journalist, poet, fiction writer, essayist and blogger, residing in Indianapolis, and has published poems, stories, and essays in Laurel Review, Poetry East, Illuminations, Pearl, Xavier Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Dan has also published two books of poems, The Art He’d Sell for Love (Cherry Grove, 2015) and More Than I Could See (Restoration, 2009), and two books of non-fiction.

The Cadaver Bone Graft in My Mouth Speaks

Bite the inside cheek when cast-off memories
of what’s-left-undone boomerang back and leak
into the skull’s cavities like a busted well.
Rhizomes, breaking through bricks, refuse to take root
or give solace. Lie in an open field still fresh from tilling.

Die from infarction, a cold heart cracked
by water from a hot tap. Suffer infection
with curt words, like sepsis coursing
through capillaries, touching every cell.
Lie in windless snow beneath a copse of pines.

Lie on stainless steel. Consider each meal the last,
not knowing if it has time to fully digest or will be
picked apart in autopsy, revealing recent history.
Before that, lie in a canal blooming with willow tufts.
Be purified, after being putrefied, after being petrified.

David A. Goodrum, writer/photographer, lives in Corvallis, Oregon. His poems are forthcoming or have been published in Tar River Poetry, The Inflectionist Review, Passengers Journal, Scapegoat Review, Wild Roof Journal, Triggerfish Critical Review, among others. Additional work (poetry and photography) can be viewed at www.davidgoodrum.com.

Leaning Forward

Cully fought her way up the steep hill, attacked at every step by thick alder bushes bent from last winter’s snow. Clumps of prickly Devil’s Club and patches of stinging Cow Parsnip cautioned “danger, retreat.”

She didn’t listen.

Her fiancé waited for her over the next rise. He’d shown her his route on the map before he launched his Cessna 180. She blinked against the stinging sweat dripping off her forehead. In her mind, she saw his wide cowboy smile as he kneeled before her, placing his ring on her finger.

She was out of breath and water by the time she arrived but knew it was the place from the shredded trees and plane debris. She leaned forward.

Then fell.

She’d found him.

Alaskan author Lynne Curry has published four short stories, the most recent in 2022 (After Dinner Conversations) and 2021 (101 Words) and six books, including Navigating Conflict and Managing for Accountability  (BEP), Beating the Workplace Bully (AMACOM) and Solutions. She publishes a weekly “dear Abby of the workplace” newspaper column and in her www.workplacecoachblog (2525 subscribers). 

Cordelia M. Hanemann, writer and artist, currently co-hosts Summer Poets, a poetry critique group in Raleigh, NC. Professor emerita retired English professor, she conducts occasional poetry workshops and is active with youth poetry in the North Carolina Poetry Society. She is also a botanical illustrator and lover of all things botanical. She has published in numerous journals including Atlanta Review, Laurel Review, and California Quarterly and numerous others; in several anthologies including best-selling Poems for the Ukraine and her chapbook. Her poems have been performed by the Strand Project, featured in select journals, won awards, and been nominated for Pushcarts. She is now working on a novel about her Cajun roots.