HINGE DAY

by Tricia Knoll

 

 

So much needs exercising, soothing for the opening to beyond and next. Where applause for sun reverberates across plains and oceans to replace fumes of exhaust. Even on the balconies of apartments in my hometown. My car hides in the garage to avoid the steep price of gas. I plot where to scatter a bag of saved marigold and zinnia seed. Where mornings come unchallenged by worst-yet shock. When the bully pulpit voice, a vulgar weaving from Greenland to birthright, issues ultimatums that seem to threaten using nukes to resurrect the stone age and abuses the many names we use for god. A cardinal teeters on my fencepost listening to the oven bird. 

 

Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. Her poems appear in journals and nine collections, full-length or chapbook. Wild Apples (Fernwood Press) details downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. After 18 years of working with free verse, she now writes mostly prose poems. Fernwood Press will publish her full-length poetry book, Gathering Marbles, in July 2027. Knoll serves as a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual.

BRILLIANT

by Katherine Smith

Bruce MacKinnon editorial cartoon February 10, 2022.

The best moment of my day

happened two hours after

I packed my black puppy into the car

when I screamed yes!

when the guy from triple A turned the key in the jammed lock,

a fine moment for human ingenuity. Twenty minutes later

I was driving down the Beltway behind a thousand trucks, a banquet

of American flags rippled from the empty cabs

of eighteen wheelers, a freightless load

of freedom fluttered in the exhaust filled air.

My puppy whimpered in the back seat.

Horns honked. Don’t tread on me,

in brilliant yellow, the red maple leaf

of Canadians blurred the air. On the overpasses

a few lone bodies waved as the trucks drove under.

I searched for my exit. Put my hand in the back seat to comfort the puppy

headed away from the capitol towards the country.

 

I am afraid of stupidity

whether it is driving an empty truck

around the Beltway at rush hour

to protest a mask mandate

while fuel is 4 and a half dollars a gallon

while people are dying in Ukraine

or a student is crying because she has 85 0000

of student loan debt. I didn’t used to be so judgmental

when I had more stupid of my own

when I fled my friends to meet a lover in Boston

whom they despised for good reason

and ruined my life for a couple of years. No one minds

their own stupid even when it distracts them

from the fact that people are dying. Even when I,

a woman who happens to be perfectly sensible today

looks at the convoy

and knows in her bones

that this is what stupid looks like. I keep driving away.

Maybe brilliance is nothing more than enough

hopeless blindness to kill the world

everywhere for everyone. Still,

when I get out of the car the sweetness

of daffodils spills through the air. So far human ingenuity

hasn’t reached the mountain or the reflection

of the moon in the James River.

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.