Poetry Winter 2020 fiction all issues
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Paula Reed Nancarrow
Morning Coffee
& other poems
Jill Burkey
Mala
& other poems
Oak Morse
Boys Born out of Blues
& other poems
Beatrix Bondor
Engine Ode
& other poems
Monique Jonath
a mi sheberach
& other poems
Lisa Rachel Apple
Bounty
& other poems
Gillian Freebody
The Human Condition
& other poems
Kirsten Hippe-Rychlik
and we are echoes
& other poems
Devon Bohm
Forgiveness
& other poems
Jeddie Sophronius
I Rest My Mother Tongue
& other poems
John Delaney
Poem as Map
& other poems
Elizabeth Bayou-Grace
Fire in Paradise
& other poems
Monaye
In Utero
& other poems
Michelle Lerner
Ode to Exhaustion
& other poems
William French
I Have Never Been
& other poems
Josiah Patterson Wheatley
Coeur de Fleurs
& other poems
Karo Ska
womb song
& other poems
Robyn Joy
Sisyphus
& other poems
Han Raschka
Love Language
& other poems
Rebbekah Vega-Romero
The Memory in My Pinky
& other poems
Gilaine Fiezmont
Europe, too, Came from Somewhere Else
& other poems
Scott Ruescher
At the Childhood Home of Ozzy Osbourne
& other poems
Emily R. Daniel
Visitation Dreams
& other poems
Lindsay Gioffre
Toxicodendron Radicans [Sonnet 1]
& other poems
Jill Burkey
Mala
a Buddhist meditation bracelet
When Jupiter was out, I slipped
it on my nightly wrist
like a ring of stars
reminding me that pain
isn’t suffering if you accept it.
With each breath I count, in and out,
I’m snake, sea, wind, and night,
alive again like blue trumpets
glorying in morning—
who knows how they hold
their vibrating shape, their liquid color?
Silk petals papery as love
or is love the sturdier stalk
that stands, waiting through winter,
while beauty dissolves
into the longing ground.
Columbus Goes to the Moon
Last night my son told me
if it weren’t for the Dark Ages,
Columbus would have landed on the moon
instead of in the New World.
Tonight he says stars are so far away
we can only guess their size
by the color of light they emit.
I’m surprised by this and confess
I always thought stars were the same size as planets,
so I assumed they were just as close.
He smiles and gently explains we can only have one star
in our solar system or it couldn’t exist—
another star would wreak havoc,
and the closest star, besides the sun,
is four light years away—
twenty-four trillion miles . . .
I didn’t think our sun a star,
just as I don’t think my son a man,
yet both are plainly true.
I gaze at him, across the kitchen,
and realize we are all alone.
The stars chaperoning us each night
are impossibly far away
and we’re just eight planets and their elements
gliding around the one god
we are all tethered to
like children fluttering around a maypole.
I lean back against the black granite countertop
flecked with gold and listen as he tells me
blue stars are bigger than red ones
but don’t live as long
because blue stars burn through their fuel faster.
Our sun, he says, will become a red giant,
and will live a billion years.
The dishwasher hums its familiar refrain
while questions spiral my mind.
He says goodnight and hugs me
with arms tanned by the sun.
I feel his blue cotton T-shirt, soft on my cheek,
and wonder where we would be
if the Dark Ages hadn’t happened,
or if our sun had consumed itself too fast,
exploding into the vast darkness
that surrounds us,
and I wonder how on earth
we ever ended up
right here.
The Duration
I.
It’s the time of lions and lambs,
the time to beware the Ides of March,
but little did we know
how much we had to fear.
I promise to stop watching the news,
but tune in to another pandemic press conference.
I wrestle with distraction
as I try to write and work from home.
My family and I take hikes and walk the dog,
who is oblivious to this slow-moving crisis.
My daughter and I listen to her favorite playlist
as we drive by packed grocery stores
and empty downtown sidewalks.
Haven’t we all secretly wished
for the world to slow down?
But now that it has,
we can’t accept it.
We want to make a new wish.
My body misses yoga class
and my head aches from too much
wine and bad news.
I’m scared to touch the mail,
scared to breathe infected air.
I don’t want to be the one
to make my family sick.
It’s odd when the way to help
is to stay home.
Our grocery list grows longer,
and even if the shelves are stocked,
I don’t want to venture out.
I find myself repeating
my mom’s and grandmother’s sayings—
Waste not, want not.
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
I reuse tinfoil and plastic bags,
bake and freeze banana bread instead
of throwing brown clusters of crescents in the trash.
I think about my grandmother, who saved
every morsel of food, no matter how meager.
I think of how, in May 1944, my grandfather
put her and their two small daughters
on a train bound for his mother’s in Lincoln
before he shipped out with his unit for England.
The newspaper called my grandmother and her little girls
the duration guests of her mother-in-law,
a phrase I didn’t follow at first,
but now we find ourselves saying for the duration,
because like World War II, we don’t know
how long this crisis will last.
We must endure for the duration—
endure not knowing how it will turn out,
endure not knowing who will live or die.
Time feels slow and thick, but also like a pinprick
because we’re forced to remain firmly in the present—
no such thing as making plans.
With everything on hold,
the whole world holds its breath.
With well over 100,000 hospitalized,
44,000 dead, and 22 million unemployed,
the pandemic is taking a toll, but seems smaller
than what the Greatest Generation endured.
The numbers keep rising,
we won’t have a vaccine anytime soon,
but birds still happily sing the dawn,
trees haven’t changed, except to slowly grow
and thicken their buds,
and daffodils bloom bright yellow
as if they trust the spring.
II.
We have entered the bleak midwinter,
the dark December of the pandemic,
losing thousands of lives a day,
more than the 320,518 Americans
killed and wounded in World War I.
I wonder what those soldiers would have given
to trade their rubberized gas mask for one made of cloth,
or their rat-infested trench for a tender home.
Or would they claim, like some today, that being asked
to mask and quarantine is too much sacrifice?
We conceived a vaccine,
but do we have the will to stay home
on Christmas Eve,
the will to wear masks until immunity?
Christina Rossetti wrote
these bleak midwinter words:
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what can I give Him: give my heart.
Who loves more—
those who won’t let a pandemic
keep them from their loved ones?
Or those who stay away
in order to keep them safe?
Is it two sides of the same coin?
If only love was enough
to see us through the duration.
New Year
I.
Snow nestles in crooks of branches
of the bush outside my window.
It rests on top of pine needles
that found themselves stuck there, in limbo
between the higher tree they fell from
and the ground.
In the distance, a snow shovel scrapes pavement,
its low growl trying to wake those who are sleeping
on this foggy morning, the sky disorienting, yet tucking us in
to this neighborhood, this street, this house.
Even though it’s New Year’s Eve,
the snow and needles sit undisturbed,
patiently waiting for nothing.
Just being, just waiting.
II.
I start the car and watch snow
fall like confetti in slow motion
the way we fall through our lives,
each flake’s brief flightpunctuated
by gusts of delight and perilous dives.
My daughter emerges from the house,
clarinet case in hand, backpack over her shoulder.
Tiny snowflakes sparkle in the headlights
and mix in the wind with wisps of her long brown hair.
For a moment it seems as if she’s surrounded by bits of magic.
We drive by quiet pastures on unplowed roads
as the morning flushes towards dawn.
It is the first day of school in the new year.
III.
I want to protect her from the perfectionism
that pushed her to tears last night
when she tried to mend her torn clarinet book.
I want to shield her from the terrible secrets
of growing up. I want to fix the slight twist
of her spine and the cyst on her wrist,
but the only thing I can give her this morning
is silence, quiet as the snow,
as she hovers, like the pine needles,
between her childhood and adolescence.
IV.
We turn east towards the sunrise,
and the blanketed world glows
in muffled orange light.
We’re the first car to venture down this lane
and we see a trail of tracks on the snowy road.
I can’t help but wonder aloud
who or what made the haphazard patterns—
no straight lines when nothing’s there to guide them.
She leans forward in her seat like a fledgling
peering over the nest’s edge and says,
The snow filling in the tracks
is like the Buddha Board—
it erases everything.
Her words dissolve time,
and it is just us,
the snow,
and the empty road ahead.
The Two Hearts Inside Us
What is it like to be a root,
to grow away from light,
to dive deep into darkness
hoping to find something good?
Is there any part of us that does the same?
Some internal hero making it all possible,
like the stomach, for instance,
that churns what we give it
into something useful
the way a furnace
creates warmth from coal.
What is it like to be a root,
opposite of stem,
helping beauty stand tall from far below,
never to see the flower it feeds?
Thin, fibrous roots spreading like roads
on a map through black.
Maybe they’re like the two hearts inside us—
the one that breaks,
and the one that goes on beating.
Jill Burkey
’s work won the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize, the Denver Woman’s Press Club Unknown Writers’ Contest, and others. Her poems have appeared in Pilgrimage Magazine, Paddlefish, Soundings Review, Front Range Review, and others. She earned a BA in English and business with endorsements in secondary education from Nebraska Wesleyan University. From 2011 – 2016, Jill taught poetry to hundreds of elementary and high-school students as a writer-in-residence for the Colorado Humanities Writers-in-the Schools program.