SPINNING

by Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

The latest weather dome has uncovered us from its blanket of unrelenting heat. At last, I can walk the trails near my house and not need the inhaler in my pocket. I let the laundry pile up in order to save the grid for more important things—lamplight, fans, the refrigerator’s hum. I’m wearing a T-shirt I haven’t worn in almost ten years with its rainbowed Love is Love on soft heather gray and Legalize Gay on the back. I still remember crying that day the courts ruled in favor of my daughters’ future weddings. I imagine the celebration in the hearts of Black Americans when the Civil Rights Act was signed, a year before I was born. I was too young to understand the ruling in ’73 but have been grateful for rights afforded to our sisters, our mothers, our friends. Now the Ferris Wheel is spinning in reverse. I watch the unraveling of progress in the name of pseudo-freedom, mock patriotism and the so-called good ole days. And here we stand, hand in hand, left wondering which car will be stuck at the top, once this ride comes to an end.

carnival tickets 

scattered like wildflower seeds

we wait for the rain

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders’ poems have appeared worldwide in literary journals including Calyx, ONE ART, Eunoia Review, Blue Heron Review, Tule Review, Amsterdam Quarterly, About Place Journal, and Snapdragon, to name a few. She is the author of What She Was Wearing, a chapbook that reveals her #metoo secret after forty years. She’s co-founder of The Poetry Box press and managing editor of The Poeming Pigeon. Shawn is a proud mother of three amazing humans and Nana to one darling baby girl. She shares the creative life with her husband in Oregon.

ELEGY FOR THE FRENCHMAN

by M.F. Nagel   

The Butte. Good Friday.

The Frenchman is dead.
Bow your head.
Say a prayer.

The Frenchman is dead.

Hopped a train -- age eight.
Joined the carney,
Challenged
The wall of death.

The Frenchman is dead, bow your heads, say a prayer.

                               Went to sea
Became a sailor
Seller of moonshine
Turned creator of gold-plated contraptions
Lost on the moon.

The Frenchman is dead.
                                        Bow your head. Say a prayer.

Married.
Moved his wife to a gravedigger shack
Near the Butte
Next to the Queen of the Angels
Cemetery,
Eying
Rivers and mountains and glaciered filled skies.

The Frenchman is dead.
-- Self-proclaimed:
Proprietor of
Boot Hill Auto Salvation.
(Antique and classic)
                                        His life’s ambition
Read and written
In the Holy Grail of
Abandoned car parts
                     -- A creaking
Harrisville Ferris wheel reaching to heaven,
And
Trunks and hoods -- and
Tires
And horns, and headlights.
Twisted skeletons of wasted steel.
Junkyard dreams.
Waiting . . .
All waiting in the weeds
For the salvage of judgment day.

The Frenchman is dead.
Bow your head. Say a prayer.

“Brother of The Third Wheel,”
He was
Iron crossed.
Road a pan head
223-pieces of gold.

The Frenchman is dead.
Today.
Took his last custom-made ride
On the wild Matanuska winds --

The Frenchman is dead.
Bow your head. Say a prayer.

M.F. Nagel was born in anchorage Alaska. Her Athabaskan and Eyak heritage gave her a love of poetry. M.F. now lives and writes near the banks of the Matanuska river in the Palmer Butte, Alaska, where the moose, wild dog-roses and salmonberries provide unending joy and inspiration.