Meg Kearney (Two Poems)
When he was dying my little brother
said cancer was “the sins of our mother”
visited upon him. What’s also true:
her heart was the stone rolled away from the tomb.
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Stages of Grief
17 years since my son’s death, and still, each night when my husband drifts off, I watch movies, write, or read. Anything to stay awake.
Joseph Bathanti: High Mass
Winter Sundays,
when my father was on strike from steel,
he and my mother woke late,
then rose and prepared for high mass at Saints Peter and Paul.
Andrea Mazzarino: Broken Heart Syndrome in Trump’s America
I’m the wife of a U.S. military veteran and the mother of children who have been encouraged by those in our family and community to become fighters “like Daddy.”
Baron Wormser: The Loss of Literature
Literature challenges the very idea of right thinking, which is one reason tyrants have suppressed literature, though that suppression is ably carried out by any zealous group of chiding, censorious know-it-alls.
Andrew Reginald Hairston: Sweet Potato Pie
Having gone public with your bisexuality the month prior — and blocking your parents and sister at the same time — the memories would have to suffice
Bill Knott: The Closet
I shall find room enough here
By excluding myself; by excluding myself, I’ll grow.
Robert Okaji: Dream Score
I empty my mother’s ashtray of its treasures—
various picks, the broken watch, a mandolin bridge,
that lock of my wife’s hair—then peer through the amber
glass at a distorted day. What looks back at me?
Traci Brimhall: Museum of Fire
On the first story my son and I make the history of fire,
on the second he wants to make where we are, the slow
smolder of Kansas
Fred Johnston: Ark
She leaned in, my mother, and felt the sleeve
First, then the shoulders, but she left it on its hanger in its own dark
Closed the door as if it were a sacred ark of rules the light might wither
Something I knew she would look at and leave
Baruch November: A Gift in the Shallows of the Sea
One night, on Riis Beach,
years ago, I suddenly
proposed to your mother
in the moonlight
Tony Gloeggler: Anyway
After we dropped dirt
on my father’s coffin
the long line of cars
drove back to the house.
Mandy Fessenden-Brauer: Funeral in Gaza
I’d been in Gaza only a few days when I attended a funeral with my husband who was working with UNRWA. Outside the wake house, soldiers were revving up their … Continue reading
Michael Simms: Leaving Walden
Is it true the distance between atoms
is proportionate to the distance between stars
and the world we know is mostly empty space?
