OFF DUTY

by Ann Neuser Lederer

Photo by Carol Dorf 

A man crawls
into his own bedroom
window.

It's already night.
He might be contagious.

Soon, a tone—a lone violin—
seeps through the shut room's door.

A grandma nudges—you
can join in with your dad.

A few bars, back and forth.
An unseen whispered conversation.

In the dark of the morning
he descends.

Instead of the bus he walks.
Invisible birds announce it is day.

All playgrounds are locked, the schools deserted—
the children still safe in their sleep.

Ann Neuser Lederer's poetry and nonfiction are published in journals such as Diagram, Passages North, Brevity, 2 River Review, and UCity Review whose "noteworthy" section presents ten of her poems. Her work is also honored in Best of the Net and Ohio State University's Vandewater Poetry Award; published in anthologies such as A Call to Nursing and The Country Doctor Revisited; and in her chapbooks Approaching Freeze (2003), The Undifferentiated (2003), Weaning the Babies (2007), and Fly Away Home (2019). Ann was born in Ohio and has worked there and surrounding states as a Registered Nurse.

ON THE DAY ELLSWORTH KELLY DIED

by Rick Mullin

Ellsworth Kelly, one of America’s great 20th-century abstract artists, who in the years after World War II shaped a distinctive style of American painting by combining the solid shapes and brilliant colors of European abstraction with forms distilled from everyday life, died on Sunday at his home in Spencertown, N.Y. He was 92. —NY Times, Dec. 27, 2015. Photography by Jack Shear. W Magazine, July 2012

I got the news in an iPhone ping
from the New York Times
as I changed from my schmattas,
those long-gone pajamas
on a greyed-out T shirt
from New Orleans
bearing a folk art cartoon

of Satchmo.

I had just finished painting
(in two shots divided by lunch)

a violin lying on five dead roses
and baby’s breath pulled from a bouquet
I’d given my wife before Christmas.

It looked like an ample brown nude
or a corpse waked outside its coffin.
Of course the paint was still wet
and the image still new
and the oil smell still had that sweet
tinge of wood wax and rose.


Rick Mullin's new collection. Stignatz & the User of Vicenza, is due in January from Dos Madres Press.