Old friend / Luisa Berne
I have this recurring dream
about you.
In this dream I somehow save
you from dying,
Sometimes I arrive just at the point
where you OD and magically I have Narcan.
Sometimes in this dream I take you to dinner
We sit at an endless table full of those of us
who always thought you would
find your way back to us. At this dinner
we tell you how much we love you,
how much joy you bring to us,
how much we want you to live,
and you never go back to the house where you died
and the people who let your life be snuffed out.
In this magical alternate universe
The bonds of friendship are enough
to pull you back from the darkness.
It doesn’t matter that when you died
I was continent away
or that I haven’t seen you in 7 years
I still have this dream where I, we,
can save you.
Sometimes in this dream
you are healthy and whatever split moment
where your path diverged
never happened and our lives are elliptical
orbits intersecting along the way
never running the exact same path
but always interesting
We laugh about the do you remember when
we did (insert terrible alcohol fueled choice of youth)
then we bask in the ordinariness of
being middle aged women.
When the Agnostic Dares Praye, Don’t Tell Him How to Spell or Grammar / Scott Burnam
(eventually, after Dickinson)
i wish
to awaken each Day of my remaining years
and to a random but known song
and a time check from a voice that’s local and warm
to awaken into Days we can ease into because, for example –
this isn’t a Sunday morning:
it’s a world war zone beginning to toddle
i demand
Days that don’t threaten to consume us or outright doom us
or just groom us into being even more clueless and useful consumers
i wish
to awaken each Day of my remaining years
and to feeling like there is nothing to be saved
except what we put into the kind of recycling bin that matters
to our Earth
i demand
you let our children awaken into Days
that give them a chance against technology & Time
and where their children are safe to be children themselves
whatever children they are born to be
i pray
at each Day’s end that we fall into a gentle sleep
and that Night births a Morning of Hope
who awakens with wings full
of bright, unclipped feathers
The Eye of God / David Estringel
When the summers were warm and
sunlight burned my hands
in greedy fistfuls,
a poison seeped in.
From my maenad ways
or a simple cough
unchecked,
I can’t ever be sure.
Fever took me over and brought me
under.
Look at the mountain crumble.
Days in…
…nights out—ecstatic
septic haze—
I waited, alone,
for the peal of golden bells
save the company of
an omnipresent gaze—
amorphous eye—
watching watching watching
never blinking
always thinking
noting
every labored breath
counting
heartbeats fall to the floor.
But the long night turned to day,
scribbles of nurses and medical students
scattered to the corners
of sterilized hallways
and classrooms.
Raising an emaciated hand
to the window near my bed,
I touched sunlight, like roses,
Again.
God?
A fever dream?
When I close my eyes, I know.
grieving / Catherine Forest
Slug inching forward
Antennae quick to retract
Tender to all touch
That Time I Borrowed an XL Shirt from My Dad / Erika Seshadri
Back home for a visit, I walked into the kitchen where my mother
was preparing salad for lunch. She saw my shirt and smiled.
I haven’t seen that shirt in years, she said.
Your dad bought that at Disney World in, must have been ’89.
It was in the storage closet upstairs, I replied.
It’s comfy. Can I keep it?
She stared at me for a moment.
It hung loose on me, but I could tell
she was looking at my body underneath.
The size twelve that had given birth to three children.
The size twelve that had been through a lifetime of back pain due to a birth defect.
The size twelve that had suffered through countless exercise-induced asthma attacks
in its attempt to show the world it was trying.
I stared back at her size six. Her constant size six.
Thinking the only thing she did to gestate and birth me was sign the adoption papers.
Thinking how fortunate she was not to have any life-altering birth defects.
Thinking it must be nice to have lungs that didn’t close up.
Then she said, of course you can keep the shirt.
But if you gain more weight and fill it out
I will kill you.
After lunch, Dad asked if I wanted ice cream for dessert.
No, I said.
Why not? He asked. It’s pralines and cream. Really good.
No thank you, I’m fine, I said.
He pulled out two bowls, heaping them both
full of ice cream, then poured a liqueur on top.
He set one down on his spot and the other one in front of me.
It won’t hurt you to just have one bowl of ice cream, he said, staring
at me while he ate his own.
I really don’t want it, I said. And the alcohol will make me feel sick.
Oh, come on. A couple bites won’t hurt you, he insisted.
The heat grew inside me. The heat I’d known all my life.
I grabbed my bowl, carried it to the sink, and dumped it out.
He yelled, What is wrong with you? Why would you waste perfectly good ice cream? Someone could have eaten that!
And then Mom told me I overreacted.
Lines on Pentecost Sunday / Arthur Turfa
It is not always
a gust that shatters
the foundation of a house.
Nor public manifestation
of the miraculous
or some other great event.
It might be a breeze
that gently, so gently
moves a beloved’s hair.
Or that nagging feeling,
some whisper that
tells you to do a thing.
The source is the same,
the message is clear,
the time is now.
