AUGUST

by Juditha Dowd

This evening it occurs to me I ought to call my mom and dad
because it’s been a while. And for a moment they are not
gone some fifteen and thirty-six years, but still at the house 
where I left them, the first of their children to depart.
It’s summer and steamy and all the windows are open wide.
She’s on the porch working the Sunday crossword.
He’s out back picking tomatoes or wielding some tool—
lawnmower, drill, or paint brush. For what they may lack 
in talents or skill they substitute perseverance.  
Today I took tomatoes from the garden we extended again
in this post-pandemic summer, the leaves already mottled 
with a virus that will kill the plant but doesn’t harm us. 
Here too it’s hot and humid, like that year my twin brothers 
caught polio, from swimming at a public pool some said.
The same August our younger brother almost drowned 
in the deep end and our country joined the Korean war,
though my father was too old to fight in that one. 
If only my phone could find them tonight, I’d assure them 
I’ll get another booster. Or bemoan the endless shootings,
the forest fires, the latest wars… Or instead I might say 
It’s 100° and I’m making a tomato sandwich. 
Maybe leave it at that. They’d know what I mean.
 
 
Juditha Dowd’s fifth book of poetry, Audubon’s Sparrow, is a lyric biography in the voice of Lucy Bakewell Audubon (Rose Metal Press). She was a 2022 finalist for the Adrienne Rich Award and has contributed poems to Beloit Poetry Journal, Cider Press Review, Florida Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere.

RECUERDO

by Julian O. Long

Hanging my heart’s wassail

outdoors again once more

shall I light tonight’s candle

to honor the Maccabees?

I, who am neither Jew nor Greek

nor gentile enough to call myself

Christian any longer, but not

alone. Eight days of Temple miracle

this year encompass Christmas.

 

A bit like recurring

planetary conjunctions billed

from time to time in the press

as the Star of Bethlehem, star

in the east that leads us towards

a dying west as Arcturus drives

his great plow in such heavenly

furrows as may from time to time

command him.

 

And we, needing children

we once were, await the miracle

winter solstice always seems to promise

ponder more and more the time

to time, as our recurring

celebrations grow each year

more hollow, as nations rage

and find no compass, take no

counsel or reproof.

 

What will the new year

bring us, no new birth

certainly. Left to comfort

ourselves, can we find solace

in faded retrograde, memory

of walks to school in childish

crowds when the air blew fresh

and scented with as yet no

fevered yearning?

 

It cannot be expanded

to the whole, and yet one almost

thinks it could if one knew the song—

and thus we begin to see our breath

as loops of cold air lift our singing

high and towards the sun, children

again once more in the chosen present

moment, having no memory or thought

of time before or after.

Julian O. Long is a previous contributor to The New Verse News. His poems and essays have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Pembroke Magazine, New Mexico Magazine, and Horizon among others. Recent publications have appeared or are forthcoming at The Piker Press, Better Than Starbucks, Raw Art Review, CulturMag, PineStraw, and O’Henry.

ABDUCTED GOLDFISH

by Kenton K. Yee

Dean Young, 1955-2022

In The Art of Recklessness (Graywolf, 2010), the poet Dean Young's exhilarating book-length essay on writing poetry, he repeatedly questions and rejects the idea that the most important thing in writing poetry is an acquired mastery of craft, suggesting that it comes at the expense of intuition, risk-taking, wildness, and negative capability. He writes, exasperatedly and in all caps, "WE ARE MAKING BIRDS, NOT BIRDCAGES!" —Michael Dumanis, Editor of Bennington Review

I ping. I ping love.

 

I ping love and I love pings.

Here’s one from the library:

Due in two.

 

Love me my deadlines.

Ping me butter melting,

cantaloupe ripening,

gasps quickening.

 

Dean Young.

 

Ducks.

 

Abduct.

 

I’m waiting for the gulls to return my goldfish.

I’m waiting for squirrels to sing like nightingales,

daisies to bear me raspberries,

and bonsai trunks or cornflakes.

I’m waiting for bugles to herald the dying of salmon.

 

All this sun and all that sun.

The melting hours. Starlight. Dew.

The lackadaisical one

who settles for steam turned to rice.

Author’s Note: This poem is in memory of Dean Young, who passed away a few days ago. When I first took up poetry, I didn't know what to make of Dean Young and his rich language and ranging movements. Now, he's become one of my poetry role models.

Kenton K. Yee recently placed poetry in Constellations, Plume Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Indianapolis Review, Matter, Lily Poetry Review, and Pembroke Magazine, among others. An Iowa Summer Poetry Workshop alumnus, he writes from northern California.

HEAT WAVE

by W. Luther Jett

Muffled staccato—
summer voices
too distant to be
understood—I try
not to stress the
circuitry mid-day—
douse the lights,
draw the shades.
A song from fifty
years ago plays on
my radio of memory

at 103 on the dial.


W. Luther Jett is a native of Montgomery County, Maryland and a retired special educator. His poetry has been published in numerous journals as well as several anthologies. He is the author of five poetry chapbooks: Not Quite: Poems Written in Search of My Father (Finishing Line Press, 2015), Our Situation (Prolific Press, 2018), Everyone Disappears (Finishing Line Press, 2020), Little Wars (Kelsay Books, 2021), and Watchman, What of the Night? (CW Books, 2022).

AS A TEN-YEAR-OLD OHIO GIRL

by Laura Grace Weldon

file photo… not the author

I lived the lives I read in books.

I wandered English moors,

raced my horse past Russian wolves,

befriended dolphins, spoke in whistles,

made my home in a hollow tree.

Made a pact with Kim—we’d never

grow breasts, agreeing the encumbrance

made girls act stupid. Boys, stupider.

I’d grown well past playing house

so no longer stuffed a baby doll

under my shirt, letting it drop

into my hands to make me a mama.

I hadn’t grown out of stuffed animals,

Barbies, hula hoops, or bubbles.  

At ten I rode my bike, climbed trees,

giggled with girlfriends. I wasn’t old

enough to babysit. Wasn’t sure

what sex was, exactly.

Now a ten-year-old girl 

is deemed old enough 

in Ohio to be the mother

of her rapist’s child.    

Laura Grace Weldon served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. Laura lives on a ramshackle Ohio farm and as a book editor. 

REMEMBERING CATASTROPHE

by Anita Lerek

“The Lost Library Forest,” a painting by Luis Peres

Mother, how much time is left

for us in the forest library, 

where master spines 

clasp woody pages

pollinated by wind?

How much time before 

the boxing up, the clearing out

of minds meshed in ancient tree lives: 

now inventory, cubic footage,

caged, trucked away—

to bonfires staged by haters. 

1933, Berlin: Cigarettes, 

chocolate, sausages for sale!

To music and spotlights

some 50,000 books burn.

Burn the texts, said Artaud. 

Did he yearn for another heaven

to leave scripts of cruelty 

far behind?

I cry for you, Mother, 

stroke keys for you. 

Something must be saved here 

of your wounded spines… words. 

How memory’s flesh burns.     

Wind, carry my voice without a voice—

tell the trees that she, I—

Author’s Note: Homage to the thought of Edmond Jabes (The Book of Questions), and to the poem by Don Pagis, "Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car."

Anita Lerek has spent her adult life juggling business with the enchantment of poetry. The visual arts, jazz, and social justice are life-long influences. Born abroad (Poland), she retains a sense of otherness, and a resulting affinity for the divergent. Her poems have appeared recently in Poetry Super Highway, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and River Heron. She is co-founder of Change Artists, a start-up online poetry community relating to political engagement. She is the author of a chapbook, History and Being (2019). She lives with her archivist husband in Toronto, Canada.

THE CONCENTRIC CIRCLES OF WAR

by Katherine West 

“A Room of Memory” by Chiharu Shiota (2009): old wooden windows, group exhibition Hundred Stories about Love, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan

Inside, there's a memory of neighbors on an evening porch, of burning then warming sun, of a half-feral cat leaving freedom for langurous hours of touch, of cold night then the warmth of a shared bed. 

Inside, there's a fire going and moody jazz in the background, an old watercolor of a Ukrainian boy and girl in traditional clothes. They are on their way to market; seen from behind and one side, their bodies are full of purpose. 

Inside, there's the sound of birds outside; sometimes just wings whooshing back and forth, sometimes a little squawk and chatter. Faraway, a songbird. 

Outside, sun is trying to warm the morning. Outside, clouds are burning off; red ants are waking up, appearing at the door of their mound like holy men dressed in the color of life. 

Outside, the first truck rumbles down the gravel road, kicking up its own cloud. Outside, the crack of target practice, to the south, a helicopter.

Outside, the first shell drops on an apartment building already abandoned by its residents who now live in the subway. The first paratrooper touches down. The first tank goes up in flames. 

Outside, the first wildflowers glow like a small sunrise amongst dry, white grass. Outside, the ravens are mating aloft. 

Inside, is poetry from Ukraine. 

You are the train that will pour

burning wine on the skin,

so that it will blaze

madly

(Natalka Bioltserkivets)

Outside, is poetry from Ukraine, a long line of refugees with bundles, like leafcutter ants carrying off the petals of roses.  

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, The New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word Fiesta. The New Verse News nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado. She is also an artist. 

A SOLITARY MAN

by Mary K O'Melveny

For the past 27 years, Dennis Wayne Hope (above) has been in a Texas prison cell that is somewhere between the size of an elevator and a compact parking space. For one hour, seven days per week, or two hours, five days per week, he is let out to exercise—alone—in another small enclosure. The only people he comes into contact with are the guards who strip search and handcuff him. The last personal phone call he had was in 2013 when his mother died. More than a quarter-century in isolation has led him to hallucinations, chronic pain and thoughts of suicide. Solitary confinement is a sanitized term for torture. Mr. Hope, 53, whose plight was described by the New York Times, has petitioned the Supreme Court to hear his case on the grounds that his prolonged isolation is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s bar against cruel and unusual punishment. Lower courts denied Mr. Hope’s petition and court observers are skeptical the Supreme Court will take up his case. So sure are Texas officials that the court, with its conservative majority, won’t agree to hear the case that they waived their right to respond to Mr. Hope’s petition for a writ of certiorari. —The Washington Post, February 16, 2022

For twenty-seven years,

I have not seen a bird’s shadow.

Nor felt a droplet of rain.

No one has touched me

save the guards who strip-search

me to take me to an indoor

cubicle for solitary weekly

exercise. They do hold my hands,

to fix them to steel handcuffs

required for our walks down

cement block hallways of a

Texas prison. In 2013, I received

my only telephone call.

My mother was dead.

 

Last month, my lawyers asked

the Supreme Court to weigh

the parameters of punishment,

to tell me if unusualness or

cruelty come to their minds

in circumstances such as mine.

Some say prison focuses one’s

viewpoint. If it tends toward

the myopic, there is good reason.

I would ask them to focus

their eyes on distant objects –

a task I can no longer perform

because my narrowed world

affords no view of light or distance.

A compact car would be too large

to park in my 6x9 foot cell.

 

Next, I would ask them to consider

how vocal cords can atrophy,

as muscle, ligament, mucosal

tissue diminish from lack of use.

I did not take a vow of silence

when I entered this place

but my voice has hollowed

as its volume faded and its pitch

turned to a thin reed-like whisper.

At first, I talked to myself. Even

sang. But soon enough, I was

not enough. Words failed me.

Now, my head aches constantly.

My heart pounds, my pulse races

as if I was running up a mountainside.

But all I do is sit on my metal slab

or stand and watch walls wave, shift

as though a fan was moving them

like air. Sometimes, demon spirits peek

through wearing pinpricks of light.

 

Some say if you do the crime,

you can’t complain about the time.

But duration and despair should not be one.

I do not sleep. I have no sense of space

or stage. My brain must work overtime

to construct reality from scant available

signals. I read about a 1950’s experiment

on rhesus macaque monkeys. After thirty

days of isolation, they turned away from

social interaction, became disconsolate.

Each day I remember less.    Less.

I hope the Justices will answer me

while I still know my name. While I can

still name most things I have lost.  

Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her most recent poetry collection is Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum, just out from Kelsay Books. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press. Mary’s poetry collection Merging Star Hypotheses was published by Finishing Line Press in January, 2020.

TO KNOW A MONARCH

by Phyllis Klein

To know it only as a photograph, a memory.

Never to witness again a community of millions clustered 

on Eucalyptus branches, now empty.

These fragile slivers of stained glass

no longer clinging to winter respites.

What is a world that would allow

this extravagant pollinator to die off?

This migrational miracle. 

Rumi says, You were born 

with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?

I want a humanity that weeps 

copiously for this animal who starts off 

in a crawl, shows us how to fly. I want

processions, dirges everywhere,

want to howl over milkweed, bereft, without 

purpose. So much loss. I want to rend my garments.

Burn kaleidoscopes of butterflies into my skin.

What good would that do? Or I could slice

open the sky, so their ghosts torrent down. 

What do I know of softness—my origins 

in an ice-house, in a tradition of cruelty,

of abhorration, torn appendages. Where

are the wings for this? Where the flashes 

of orange slipped through our fingers?

Phyllis Klein’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is a finalist in the Sweet Poetry Contest, 2017, the Carolyn Forché Humanitarian Poetry Contest, 2019, and the Fischer Prize, 2019. She was nominated for a Pushcart prize in 2018 and again in 2020. She has a new book, The Full Moon Herald  from Grayson Books. Living in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 30 years, she sees writing as artistic dialogue between author and readers—an intimate relationship-building process that fosters healing on many levels. 

SUBURBAN WOMEN

 by Laura Winkelspecht

Suburban women wake up early to exercise,

load the dishwasher while brushing their teeth,

and dress their kids on the way out the door.

 

Suburban women drive to office jobs

in late model crossover vehicles

and pick up overpriced coffee on the way.

 

Suburban women schedule family vacations,

manage doctor appointments and oil changes,

and plan pregnancies in between potty training.

 

Suburban women attend soccer games,

take turns at carpooling to school,

and organize fundraisers and family reunions.  

 

Suburban women decorate for each holiday,

nurture their prized sourdough starter,

and sew masks for everyone in their family.

 

Suburban women host socially distant barbeques

with their brown neighbors two doors over

and promise play dates with genuine smiles.

 

Suburban women tolerate condescension

with tight-lipped smiles and long memories. 

They register voters on the weekend.

Laura Winkelspecht is a poet and writer from Wisconsin who writes with the hope of finding lightning among the lightning bugs. She has been published in Anti-Heroin Chic, One Sentence Poems, Rat’s Ass Review, Poets Reading the News, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

TWO VIEWS

by Jonel Abellanosa





Do we get to decide
what world we live in?
Old world babblers of peace and quiet,
birdsong in our neighborhood still treed.
I still believe tyranny isn’t armed
to the teeth. I still go to burial grounds
in a culture that holds
memory like a coffin

*

Placards and megaphones
alter streets, revulsion here to stay.
I’m familiar with the strange,
songs like barbed wires, grating
to my ears. I’m unable to think
with clarity, except that mine
isn’t the first religion
of public self-flagellation.


Jonel Abellanosa lives in Cebu City, the Philippines. He is a nature lover, an environmental advocate, and loves all animals particularly dogs. His poetry and fiction have appeared in hundreds of literary journals and anthologies, including Windhover, The Lyric, Star*Line, Poetry Kanto, Marsh Hawk Review, That Literary Review, Bosphorous Review of Books and The Anglican Theological Review. His poetry collections include Meditations (Alien Buddha Press), Songs from My Mind’s Tree and Multiverse (Clare Songbirds Publishing House), 50 Acrostic Poems (Cyberwit, India),  In the Donald’s Time (Poetic Justice Books and Art), and his speculative poetry collection Pan’s Saxophone (Weasel Press).

QUARANTINE AUBADE

by Juditha Dowd

"Lifeline" by Pascal Campion

The trucker is hauling food. We often hear him down on
the river road around this hour, hitting his Jake brakes,
slowing his rig on the curves. The sound bounces up and out,
finds us here on College Hill—wide-awake at four o’clock,
trying to return to sleep. He pauses at the highway ramp,
crosses the river, picks up speed. Soon he’ll unload at a market,
where workers rush to stock the shelves, where items spurned
for years are in demand: dry beans, yeast and prunes.
And here in the dark I’m my grandmother’s little girl again,
helping to squeeze red dye into bags of oleomargarine, waiting
to eat the biscuits she’ll take from her small white oven
while she listens to the radio, hopes there may be a letter today
from my uncle in the Army. Always the waiting. For the
the morning paper, twice-daily mail. Always we want news.
Bless our neighbor leaving now for what must be essential work.
Beams from his headlights circle the room. Birds are beginning
to stir, recalling those childhood mornings when I rose ahead of
my family, roused by their chorus, lifted into the dawn on wings.
After breakfast I’ll weed radishes we planted on a day that seems
like years go. Despite a killing frost, they’ve sprouted leaves.
Light is on the way. See how the air is whitening? That there’s
food … and those who must be fed. No certainties but these today.

Juditha Dowd’s latest book is Audubon’s Sparrow, a verse biography in the voice of Lucy Bakewell Audubon, out this month from Rose Metal Press. She has contributed work to many journals and anthologies, including Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, Spillway, Ekphrasis, Rock & Sling, and Florida Review.

FLYOVER

by Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory




As the F-16s flew over Newark,
I wondered how many of my grandfather’s friends
who, too, lied about their ages in order to enlist

flashed back to Normandy,
whether the walls of ICU rooms at University Hospital
dissolved into the photographs he’d kept
Matryoshka-ed within boxes in his attic
until they were discovered by me,

exhaustion-emptied and grasping
for any signs of him I could still see
after both he and his Emily left the Earth,
but before the house was shuttered.

How many prayed
to trade one invisible war
for another,

the virus for vanishing neurons,

and wished
to change their ages
this one last time
to escape the draft?

Jennifer-Leigh Oprihory is a defense journalist and poet who was born in New Jersey and subsequently transplanted in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and Writing from New Jersey City University and an M.S. in Journalism with a Health and Science Reporting Concentration and a National Security Reporting Specialization from Northwestern University's Medill School.

FORGOTTEN

by Tricia Knoll

I forget the name of the first boy who kissed me,
which books I read by Jane Austen during that summer
the l7-year locusts made their outbreak, the names
of most of the horses I’ve ridden except for Daisy—
the bay mare who galloped me to a win in a quarter-mile
race against a field of adolescents on dude ranch mounts.
I remember ear infections as a child with no medicines
because my parents believed in faith healing.
I remember my first polio shot at the age of 18, more
than a decade after everyone I knew had theirs.

Forgotten? The word, sir, blasphemes the dead
and those denied funerals and family mourning.
Those struggling to recover and keep family safe.
The worn out first responders and medical teams.
I fear for a grandson born in this year, a wee boy
for whom immunity is uncertain. I have staged
my will where my family can find it. I have
family who sit home from their jobs. We know
those risks for people of color from old,
old inequities, wonder why those who jobs
are critical to our survival as a people
work for minimum wage, without masks.

You may forget. At your peril and ours.
Are you counting your investments
in the medicine you hawk? Open
will not mean the way the world was.
Open will mean masks, tests, shots,
sanitizers, worry, strategies, research,
and consequences. New normal
will not forget what we have endured
and what we learn about the way
the world’s fate is tied up as one.
We have seen our Enemy.

Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet hunkered in the deep woods. Her recent collection How I Learned To Be White received the 2018 Indie Book Award for Motivational Poetry.

FACE MASKS

by Ed Goodell 

When I stare at your masked mouth
I think of the girls
I’d speak with on the phone
That hung from the dining-room wall
of my parents’ home.

I’m fifteen, maybe sixteen,
Pacing the herringbone floor,
Tangled up in that short coiled cord
Of youth. Not seeing mouths,
I can barely hear their words.

You have to see it to believe it,
And words without tongues
To heaven never go. Maybe
They mean it, maybe they don’t  
When they whisper, “Eddy, my baby.”

This I’ve learned: Something of the lips  
Lends substance to utterance
And unmouthed words lack teeth.
Then and now, in these viral times,
We must see the words we speak.

Day is done. Let us slip inside
Our tender quarantine.
We’ll wash our hands, remove our masks
—Don’t touch! One meter apart!—
Words, mouth, love are all I ask.

Ed Goodell is a teacher of English and journalism at Jakarta Intercultural School in Indonesia. He is sheltered at home with his son, Yohanes, and wife, Irma D. Peña, to whom this poem is dedicated.

CHRISTMAS CAROLS

by Joan Mazza




I’m listening to non-stop holiday
songs between commercials for diamonds,
pet pajamas, end-of-year car closeouts.
While I chop vegetables or fold socks,
I sing along, unable to be quiet, even

for “Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Alvin!
I shout and laugh as if I were still ten
in the year of its release. Indelible,
unforgettable lyrics of Bing Crosby,
Karen Carpenter, Sinatra, Andy Williams.

My mother is frying meatballs and sausages
in that tiny Brooklyn kitchen. I hear her
swearing while making arancini
that resist holding together. At my desk,
I memorize geometry theorems

until mother comes to me with one
golden fried ball, triumphant. Cut it in half,
she says. Taste it! Inside, peas and meat
in tomato sauce. Perfect! I say, before
I return to my present in Virginia.

Past seventy, older than either of my parents
ever got to be, I wish my mom could see
me as I braid challah dough into wreaths
and sing, “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas”
with Burl Ives—the music of our lives.

Joan Mazza has worked as a medical microbiologist, psychotherapist, seminar leader, and she is the author of six self-help psychology books, including Dreaming Your Real Self (Penguin/Putnam). Her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, Prairie Schooner (forthcoming), and The Nation. She lives in rural central Virginia, where she writes a poem every day and is working on a memoir.

HISTORY

by Howard Winn

A D-Day commemoration on the beach of Arromanches in France on June 6, 2019, marking the 75th anniversary of the Allied landings in Normandy in World War II. (Joel Saget/Getty-AFP via Chicago Tribune)

of D Day by genetic fate

there is no escape

is where I find myself

with only three percent left

it seems The Greatest Generation

labeled by that newsman who

needed a catchy concept to draw

his audience for the news of the day

when other networks stood ready 

to step in to alter the ratings so

he found the catchy concept for

the mostly children drafted some 

out of high school to be the new

war heroes even though the survivors

kept quiet about their sacrifices 

often with loss of limbs

they were as voiceless as the bodies

buried in those field of crosses in

France where the living might 

have found them selves if they

were as unlucky as those who

survived to become portrayed in

the films of the next life leaving

today only the three percent who

movies seem to give permission to

recount the history they had kept

secret about until the later wars

involving their children gave some

permission to reveal fears and cruelty

for those survivors once silent veterans 

of that conflict between the dead and 

the emotionally quiet and silent for

history to become reality not just story

Howard Winn publishes widely in literary journals such as the Hiram Poetry Review and Valley Voices Journal. His novel has been published by Propertius Press.

PRESENCE IN THE ABSENCE

by Mary K O'Melveny

Illustration by Andy Gilmore for The New York Times, October 4, 2018. Stephen Hawking said that particles that fall into a black hole “can’t just emerge when the black hole disappears.” Instead, “the particles that come out of a black hole seem to be completely random and bear no relation to what fell in. It appears that the information about what fell in is lost, apart from the total amount of mass and the amount of rotation. If determinism breaks down, we can’t be sure of our past history either,”  Hawking said. “The history books and our memories could just be illusions. It is the past that tells us who we are. Without it, we lose our identity. Black holes are stranger than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers, but they are clearly matters of science fact.” —NWO Report, April 24, 2016

Black holes have our attention
once again. We still know little
or nothing. They are consummate
known unknowns, as Rumsfeld once said.

An image haunts us as we guess
at portraits of bending space, our
breath catches mid-inhale, as we
ruminate on combustion.

Or collapse. I had a lover
once who made me feel I could do
both at the same time—plummet from
heat to nothingness in seconds.

How I gravitated to flame
and then to black ice still amazes
all these light years later even
when my days now rotate with sun.

Perhaps we are obsessed with past
lives when they become places of
no return. Where memories curve
inward, leave us to read between lines.

That is why we hunger for things
we don’t know or can’t remember.
Why, even though ignorance may
devour us, shadows of faith adhere.


Mary K O'Melveny is a recently retired labor rights attorney who lives in Washington DC and Woodstock NY.  Her work has appeared in various print and on-line journals. Her first poetry chapbook A Woman of a Certain Age is available from Finishing Line Press.

SONNET FOR GOVERNOR NORTHAM

by Diane Elayne Dees





I had to shine my shoes that day. I might
have inadvertently smeared polish on my face.
I don’t recall—but I’m more or less contrite
(for those who get all worked up about race).
I know that I’m a doctor of neurology,
but I have a lot of brain fog and confusion.
That photo in my yearbook’s an anomaly;
it may even be an optical illusion.
I may have donned a baptismal-like robe—
pure white (and perhaps it had a hood)—
and though I’m trying really hard to probe
my memory, it isn’t very good.
In summary, I’m the short guy. No—the tall!
But wait.....I think I wasn’t there at all.


Diane Elayne Dees’s poetry has been published in many journals and anthologies. Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that covers women’s professional tennis throughout the world.

IF MY MOTHER WERE ALIVE

by Diane Elayne Dees

If my mother were alive, what would she say?
She might just laugh and make fun of his hair,
or turn her eyes and quickly walk away.

She might recall a loud and smoky day
when she huddled underground, alone and scared.
If my mother were alive, what would she say

about the way the mobs are stirred today?
She might act as though she doesn’t really care,
yet turn her eyes and quickly walk away.

When he talks about the ones who shouldn’t stay
among us, would she find that hard to bear,
if my mother were alive? What would she say

about the vulgar signs, the cruel display
of bigotry, the children in despair?
Might she turn her eyes and quickly walk away?

His grinning minions flatter, and obey
his orders—cruel, toxic and unfair.
If my mother were alive, what would she say?
Would she turn her eyes and quickly walk away?

Diane Elayne Dees' poems have been published in many journals and anthologies. Diane, a semi-retired psychotherapist in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that covers women's professional tennis throughout the world.