WHAT COLOR WAS THE SKY THAT DAY?

by Susan Cossette

Impossibly clear, painfully blue.

 

So much sun, the perfect morning,

then all changed irrevocably.

 

Humanity raining from the sky,

down to the bedrock,

down to the Hudson’s slurry wall.

 

Your lives now confetti.

 

22 years later I regard the bloody eye

of tangled and twisted steel,

the fraught echoes of last calls home.

 

There is no light 70 feet below ground,

in this place,

where we will always remember you.

 

Bagpipe music pumped in,

Amazing Grace, how sweet the contrariety.

 

I take my sandals off.

root into the bedrock,

my small white hand pressed to your tomb.

 

2,977 lives.

 

No day will erase you from the memory of time.

Susan Cossette lives and writes in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Author of Peggy Sue Messed Up, she is a recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rust and Moth, The New Verse News, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Anti-Heroin Chic, The Amethyst Review, Crow & Cross Keys, Loch Raven Review, and in the anthologies Fast Fallen Women (Woodhall Press), Tuesdays at Curley’s (Yuganta Press), and After the Equinox.

ELEGY FOR THE LUNG

by Robert Américo Esnard

The sun streaks a dull rust 

over the Hudson, 

the dusty air shimmers metallic,

and I am overcome 

with awareness of my own blood.

 

I can feel it, not rushing, but crawling,

a slow advance. 

My whole body a fleshy host.

Incredible, 

the small power of a protein 

 

to sustain a whole body: 

to capture, 

to carry, to climb, to clear. 

We, less thankless 

more heedless. I rarely consider:

 

the shape of a fluid forms 

its function.

A tiny shift is enough to poison 

a whole body: 

to capture contagion, to carry 

 

contaminants through the blood. 

A breath of rust 

climbing as the branches burn,

a body overcome,

making a slow advance to dust.

Robert Américo Esnard was born and raised in the Bronx, NY. He studied Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Dartmouth College. His work has been published by or is forthcoming in Alternating Current Press, Alternative Field, Cutbank, Glass, Lunch Ticket, New York Quarterly, and several anthologies. He is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet.

THE SAME RULES APPLY

by Sam Barbee





Ruddy scar protracts the kept
thatch. Rusty shovels propped
as the backhoe heaves beside
the Common Grave: so many
paupers, so many people.

Pine box as caress, no time
for a tight-lipped benediction.
Spray of silt for mantles of boroughs,
and heights and neighborhoods.
No time for individual petitions.

No last kiss, or cross. Veterans
without flags or rifles on this
drab afternoon of a drab dawn.
Trees along the river, quiet field
where pigeons do not bother.

Death’s centrifugal angst plotted
within the City’s adaptable aura.
Time to seal today’s thawing dead.
The diesel throttles up. PPE-clad
laborers, leather palms tight.

Topsoil chokes off creeds, and
rings and rosaries, worry beads.
Distant tugboats sail the Hudson.
Gulls spiral behind their churning
murk, below pinwheels of gray clouds.

Sam Barbee’s poems have appeared Poetry South, The NC Literary Review, Crucible, Asheville Poetry Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology VII: North Carolina.  His second poetry collection That Rain We Needed (2016, Press 53) was a nominee for the Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best poetry collections of 2016.

REOCCURING STORMS

by Marjorie Maddox

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Searchers Find Body of Killed Child in Oklahoma Tornado --AP, May 26, 2011
Woman Finds Boy After Mother Drives Van Into Hudson --The New York Times, April 13, 2011


Wind/Water, Oklahoma/New York,
the domestically symbolic bathtub/minivan,
two mothers.

And so fear gathers speed, swirls in
or out, grabbing—in its selfish velocity—each state
of who we are or were, what’s left
of our man-made lives holding tightly to the already-
born, the life still coming.

Temporarily wedged between faith and scream,
a mother sings reassurances as each
tree, board, sink, tub, life
twists and spins into the horizon
no one foresaw, grief beyond the boundaries
of such predictions, life splintered limb by limb,
like and not like (half a country away)

that other dream-turned-disaster:
depression’s dark tunnel twirling
beyond the imaginable, tires whirring
too quickly toward the Hudson,
fueling the speed of no-return,
a family’s last vision of sky flooded
with the damp wet of despair.

Except ten-year-old La'shaun,
who—between death and breath—
rolled down his window to let out fear,
then swam toward light.

And in Oklahoma, five-year-old Cathleen,
who, amidst the hurricane’s howl,
recognized hope in the heartbeat
of her unborn sibling:
that faint hum in the ear,
or that sudden surge toward possibility

into what one day even you and I—
after a particularly hard day of the ordinary—
might discuss as casually
as weather, as someone else’s life.


Marjorie Maddox is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania.