A POET'S SELF-PORTRAIT AS A HOSPITAL BED

by Gil Hoy

More particularly, one of many hospital beds 

in a hospital where my son is being treated

 

for the bone sticking out of his leg 

from a soccer game

 

using my insurance that I bought for him 

because he is too young, only twelve

 

to have bought any insurance of his own. 

Nor has he any right to vote in a country 

 

where his elected representatives 

are about to take away his health insurance 

 

by making mine too expensive to afford.  

This morning, the news shows how easily 

 

this President and this Congress can take away 

a person’s health insurance, my child's, mine

 

or yours, for example, this President 

and this Congress a bit like a hospital bed 

 

in a country as ill as ours is now. 

Whatever hope we now have lies in a hospital bed 

 

and the medicines we can use to remove 

this pestilence, if we can just take them off 

 

the shelf—for there they sit—and use them 

before it’s too late. My son is still young enough 

 

to love me unconditionally, as much as he 

loves soccer, even though I wasn’t strong enough, 

 

nor my countrymen strong enough, to rise up 

and stop this thing from happening. But there is still 

 

time to act if we are strong enough, 

if we are determined enough, to find a cure. 

 

But judging by how things have gone so far, 

who can foresee with what success 

and with what result?

Gil Hoy is a Master’s Class student in fiction and poetry at The Writers Studio in Tucson, Arizona and previously studied at Boston University. Gil's been nominated for a Best of the Net award in poetry. His work has previously appeared in Third Wednesday, Flash Fiction Journal, Tipton Poetry Journal, Unlikely Stories Mark V, Chiron Review, The Penmen Review, Bewildering Stories, Literally Stories, The New Verse News, and elsewhere.

ODE TO THE HONEY LOCUST

by Therese Gleason

With a line from “All Hallows” by Louise Glück (1943-2023)

I want to write a poem about autumn 
that doesn’t decay 
and stink on impact.
I want to write a poem about the beauty
of small children (whose shoelaces flap
and sneakers slap 
asphalt) that doesn’t reek 
of sweetness. 
All I can offer is a dispatch
from a mid-October recess in central Mass., 
the sky scrubbed squeaky
by an overnight rainstorm,
where kindergarteners skip and whoop
as the wind picks up, pointing to heaven
as the tall honey locust drops
its shower of gold: spiraling eddies 
that drift slowly, softly onto cracked concrete.
The bulky apartment complex next door peeps 
between ragged bushes and chain link
as I holler at a child to come down the hill, away 
from the edge of the dark wood
where scattered syringes linger 
in the barrenness of harvest or pestilence:
our playground tree a site of life
and death, both honey and locust, feast 
and famine. We found a dead mouse 
beneath its fraying canopy
last week. I stood astride the carcass 
swatting curious fingers seeking to probe
its torn side buzzing with flies, its tiny 
bared teeth—and in an instant 
I remember the sickening bump 
under my back left tire, a raccoon
on a dark road, how I honked and swerved,
too late… I can’t forget its wobbly tromp, 
its eyes blinded by my headlights 
before I rendered it dead meat—
I feel a tug like grief, like a small hand
at my sweater’s hem, and look down
into cupped palms brimming 
with tattered gold leaves.

Therese Gleason is author of three chapbooks: Hemicrania (forthcoming, Chestnut Review, 2024); Matrilineal (Honorable Mention, 2022 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize, New England Poetry Club); and Libation (co-winner, 2006 South Carolina Poetry Initiative Competition, selected by Kwame Dawes). Her poems appear in 32 Poems, Indiana Review, New Ohio Review, Notre Dame Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. Originally from Louisville, KY, she is an adjunct creative writing instructor at Clark University and an ESL teacher in the Worcester Public Schools.

SUMMER WINDING DOWN, SALISBURY, 1666

by Sharon Olson

The king is always allowed to do as he wishes.
And so he chose our city, our neighborhood,
as a hiding place from the plague abound in London.
We who live here are weavers, our hands and feet
engage with our looms, the steady thwacking,
for shawls and lap rugs and the tightly woven arras
behind which the king is kept safe, wrapped in his silks.

The king never travels alone but brings his retinue,
his retainers, the men and ladies waiting on him,
jesters, hangers-on, crowds he thrives on
who gawk at the royal trappings, and yes,
the shiny bubble of pestilence has journeyed
here as well, so that each time we entered the church
we could hear the names being written in the parish book
of Salisbury, St. Edmunds, beginning in July:

Elizabeth Clark, of ye plague
Sarah dau of John Conduit, of ye plague
Martha Bartlett, widow, of ye plague
Elizabeth wife of John Conduit, of ye plague

until in September the buriall column in the ledger
overflowed, in Salisbury alone five hundred died.

The king has had his carnival, has come and gone.
Long live the king.


Editor's Note: “Many of the more affluent city members left London when the plague broke out, including King Charles II and his entourage who left the Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Lawrence, to deal with the plague while the king and court retired to Salisbury; they possibly brought the plague with them in the process, as it broke out there after they arrived.  Once this happened, the king and court retired to Oxford to wait it all out.” —Today I Found Out


Sharon Olson is a retired librarian who lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Her book The Long Night of Flying was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2006. Her second book Will There Be Music? was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2019.