SIMILE ARIA

by Sam Barbee

                                 

Nothing at stake this Christmas morning. 

The grate glares cold ash. I sip coffee

and recall family visits and apparitions

demanding reprise. Holiday lights

warm cedar branches with efforts to stay jolly. 

 

Outside, snowflakes soothe, fresh confection

masterpiece balanced beyond our threshold. 

Chill peals across the snow. Narrow drifts

shiver from the boughs. Yard gnomes grin.

Birdbath idles, basin propped against the pedestal.

 

Our tiny saints sing rounds of Jingle Bells

and toss snowballs. My son slings boyhood

My daughter casts off little sister caution—

Sublime wintering, no need for Merry New Year. 

Icicles hang from soffits, false prisms for icy shadows. 

 

I sort glossy holiday cards. 2021 slumps by the day.

Silence graphs this past year, this dreadful year,

when smallness thrived. My holiday paunch

swollen by a year I etched as edible—

my holiday efforts to burnish shiny days

 

and belittle others until we shutter failings.

I petition for the New Year's messiah with strategies

to charm next year's calendar, already highlighted

with celebrations and pursuits. The moon wanes,

shudders with a gut punch.  Shall I toss the diary?

 

Put the fresh word-a-day calendar in a drawer?

Will I placate the next world with old tricks?

Or tease tonight's marrow. I dream of easy

installments: a bit strapped for cash, my angels

flap their wings and cheer my unraveling day.

 

I stir the hearth ashes. And imagine a single

perfect morning when carols dance in the chimney

and risk sleeps in. Admire art gifted to one another,

hung on stark walls like flawless bliss trying to take hold.

Merriness found in a new masterpiece revealing old joy. 

Sam Barbee has a new collection, Uncommon Book of Prayer (2021, Main Street Rag).  His poems recently appeared in Poetry South, Literary Yard.  His collection That Rain We Needed (2016, Press 53) was nominated for Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best 2016 poetry collections; a two-time Pushcart nominee. 

PENGUIN: FAMILY SPENISCIDAE

by Gwendolyn Morgan

            

aquatic flightless birds

they     like us              have adapted to their environment

adopted flippers for swimming in icy water

in Chile, Argentina, South Africa

We are a black and white same gendered multiracial family

intersectionality of lens          lock and intersect

race      ethnicity          gender              orientation

privilege          power              white and black witness feathers

Our neighbor a white man swerved at us         intentionally

a sandy brown vehicle like the burnt umber sand at the edge of Ushuaia

where you can take a boat to see three species of penguins

his Toyota 4Runner once and another black SUV again

revved at us     make the black woman            jump    again

and her partner            jump    to our neighbor’s green and brown grass

the couple moved here from another state

moved here a few years ago   now still shocked by the behavior

of well-educated mostly white privileged neighbors who in this time of COVID

pack guns, rev engines, use anti-kindness vernacular

we watch brothers, fathers, sisters, mothers die in the pandemic

while our neighbors watch microaggression after macroaggression

directed at my beloved            like guns, tear gas and a palette of vehicles

rainbow of colors, the neighborhood children walk here too

I could write for days

about what it means to live here         in black and white

how we have plush penguins and carved wooden penguins

on our fireplace hearth            

along with sage, sweetgrass, feathers,

ashes, vigil candles, gifts from our elders. 

Gwendolyn Morgan is a Pacific Northwest poet and artist who serves in interfaith Spiritual Care in a medical center in the midst of COVID19.  The Clark County Poet Laureate 2018-2020 in Washington State, her third book of poetry, Before the Sun Rises is a Nautilus Silver Winner in Poetry. Gwendolyn and her spouse Judy A. Rose focused on poetry and music during a Winter 2020 Centrum Artist Residency. As a multiracial family in a multispecies watershed, they are committed to equity work and inclusion for all.