Poetry Winter 2022 fiction all issues
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Cover
Li Zhang
Ana Reisens
Pam asked about Europe
& other poems
Krystle May Statler
To the Slow Burn
& other poems
Kristina Cecka
On Remodeling
& other poems
Belinda Roddie
Bless The Bones Of California
& other poems
Summer Rand
Alexander tells me how he'd like to be buried
& other poems
Alexander Perez
Toward the Rainbow
& other poems
Karo Ska
self-portrait of compassion…
& other poems
David Southward
The Pelican
& other poems
George Longenecker
Stamp Collection
& other poems
Mary Keating
Salty
& other poems
Talya Jankovits
Imagine A World Without Raging Hormones
& other poems
Laurie Holding
Sonnet to Mr. Frost
& other poems
David Ruekberg
A Short Essay on Love
& other poems
Elaine Greenwood
There’s a thick, quiet Angel
& other poems
Richard Baldo
Carry On Caretaker
& other poems
Jefferson Singer
Dave Righetti’s No-Hitter…
& other poems
Diane Ayer
A Fan
& other poems
Kaecey McCormick
Meditation Before Desert Monsoon
& other poems
Meg Whelan
Resubstantiation
& other poems
Katherine B. Arthaud
Possible
& other poems
Aaron Glover
On Transformation
& other poems
Anne Marie Wells
[I'm crying in a sandwich shop reading Diane Seuss' sonnets]
& other poems
Holly Cian
Untitled
& other poems
Kimberly Russo
Selective Memories are the Only Gift of Dementia
& other poems
Steven Monte
Larkin
& other poems
Mervyn Seivwright
Fear Mountain
& other poems
David Ruekberg
A Short Essay on Love
People talk about love and other people
talk about what love means and everyone
knows more or maybe less what they mean
when they talk about love but no one is
able to say just what it is they really
mean. We try to come up with metaphors:
Love’s a rose, love’s a two-way street.
Or definitions: It is patient and kind,
it’s a precious and delicate thing, and
so forth. Or maybe love is two nude and
neutered bobble-headed hominids touting
tired and true credos, such as “Love is
getting a hug and a compliment each and
every day.” Or as the poster says, Love
comes and goes, but people are forever,
or did I get that backwards? It’s tough
to define a thing so big that you can’t
even see. Sunrise arrives in stages—one
instant it’s so dark all you can see is
a blue so black you could fall straight
into it and the burnt branches of trees
and maybe your hand before your face if
your heart is so alive your skin glows.
Then the next the sky is aglow too, and
then only memory and a mind as quiet as
a breezeless lake can say if there were
moments between light and darkness. Say
that the moments are bare plaster, then
memory is a primer you seal it with. So
you apply a first coat, remembering the
memory. Then in wonder you tell someone
else, and that coat adds veracity. Then
you tell it again, touching it up a bit
and then a bit more, so that it becomes
like the walls of an old house, clothed
with character, the nicks and warts and
other imperfections so embellished that
the paint itself forms nicks and warts.
And that’s what love is like. Though it
isn’t quite love, actually; in fact, it
seems love’s a contract, a construct (I
think), an abstracted form of a need to
bond, then to bind and enslave, then to
reconstruct in one’s own image what you
have colonized. But also love is a gift
that you give without expectation. It’s
a burden you can’t bear anymore, so you
give it to a friend. There is a freedom
in the moment they take it, like flying
through space. Then the space fills up,
with guilt or remorse or envy or any of
that other stuff of living. You see you
will never be free. Or maybe, if you’re
lucky, one day you attain satori, so at
least you know that there is a Promised
Land, how it looks. You get to sniff at
its perfumy river, you pluck one of its
petals as a souvenir, you press it into
the leaves of your diary. Later, one of
your grandchildren finds it when you’re
gone, and maybe she thinks, I love you,
Grandpa, her heart lifting like a bird.
Walking and Breathing
Easter Sunday, 2022
My wife is standing at the kitchen sink looking
out the window at the back yard all lit up with
April green, the sun making a go of painting it
with Easter yellow: you know, the lemony pastel
Peeps hue of the day after a cold rain and snow
spits, cherry blossoms preparing to unfurl like
a grove of umbrellas by the back door. “My goal
for today,” she says, “is to walk and breathe.”
This may sound philosophical but it’s a literal
fact. After six weeks of raging bursitis in the
hip capsule caused by a fracture of the femoral
head seven years ago that has kept her from her
morning walks, just as she was starting to take
to the street and trails again, she was knocked
flat by a crippling rhinovirus (not COVID) that
evolved into acute sinusitis (which did not, we
are glad, invade her asthma-ravaged lungs)—then
just when she was mostly recovered from that an
over-zealous physical therapist over-worked her
quadriceps and soleus and put her back onto the
cane we resurrected from the attic for one more
week. Notwithstanding all the above, it is also
philosophical, because that’s just how Leah is.
Her morning meditation practice has brought her
to a place where every day she wakes to joy and
gratitude for simple things: the dawn chorus, a
good pen, the perfect three-minute egg. Whereas
my discipline has waned, and even at its height
I was never what you’d call “joyful,” though on
the whole my scale tips towards optimistic, for
the most part. You’d know this if you’d read my
poem, “Bike Ride in Central Park,” where I said
that I was born in the key of “A-minor...with a
few variations into G major” (a quote of myself
that was already a quote of myself). Though she
cares about war and pollution and the future of
this planet our grandchildren will inherit, she
doesn’t drag her gloom around like a pet cloud,
like yours truly. Okay, occasionally she forays
into dark thoughts. One time as we were driving
home from Pennsylvania in separate cars with CB
radios (okay, I’m dating myself) we still owned
from our move from Colorado (which caused a big
disruption in our marriage, though we worked it
out), my radio crackled with her excited voice:
“Did you see that?” I radioed back, “Yeah, it’s
beautiful,” meaning the Susquehanna River which
we’d just passed over. “People think New York’s
a vast land of steel, concrete and skyscrapers,
but it’s mostly trees and water,” a gripe she’d
heard me assert before. “No,” she said, “I mean
those skid marks”: two serpentine black burns I
did recall seeing just after the bridge, doubt-
less some sleepy drunk who’d hit black ice last
February, or his victim. So “skid marks” became
our private joke for how we, like everyone, see
the same things differently at different times,
depending on our moods or context. Though we’re
more alike than different. That is, we all are,
but Leah and I, being part of the we, are also,
obviously, I mean, we’ve been married 34 years,
and compatibility rubs off on one another. Leah
still remembers it was the Susquehanna; that it
was a sunny day much like this one, but in late
September; that we both still smile whenever we
recall that moment. Sometimes we switch places,
like when she gets worked up about the previous
President, or how our neighbor is poisoning the
neighborhood with his yard sign screeching that
Democrats are attempting to destroy the country
(January 6 notwithstanding), or how the heavens
above Rochester are too often gray. That’s when
we trade places, I take a turn as the optimist,
or at least recommend equanimity. It’s a way we
humans have of enacting binary opposition, that
is, we seek a balance, or maybe simply control,
since it shows a lack of empathy, trying to fix
the other. When you listen without veering into
the other’s lane, just looking in their window,
as if you were on the inside, you let the other
view sink in, and find its long-lost partner in
your own skin. “Yes,” I say to Leah, as the sun
ducks behind another monotonous cloud, “I think
those are good goals. I have a pretty long list
for today, but walking and breathing, those are
good ones to start with.” Leah smiles at me, or
maybe it’s the sun peeking out again, or both.
Last Evening in April
If you turn the sound down on the highway,
the sun sinks more slowly in the west, the
mourning dove buffering its fall, and over
in the near woods a cardinal announces its
superfluous uniform, and there—quicksilver
across the grass—a sparrow stitches it all
together into one fabric. Rumbling beneath
that carnival the river of everything that
happened today mingles what I can remember
with what I want in as many colors as I am
able to imagine, in as many rooms equipped
with as much furniture as they are able to
handle, down to the etchings of you and me
riding the rapids, watching as John hauled
in Pete who’d tumbled over; of us making a
toast at our wedding, your dad crying real
tears, mine bowing in prayer; of watching,
helpless, that night your dog, Ginger, got
hit by a car because I thought dogs should
run free; of that afternoon in the kitchen
when we thought it was over; of the weight
of your arm like a blanket on my shoulders
after my cancer; of your arm heavy on mine
as we staggered under inebriate magnolias,
the arthritis in your hip making each step
a trial, yesterday it was, and now today’s
sorting and planning and listening to each
other’s hearts beginning to blend with the
leisurely sun, with the spruces, the noise
of the highway just now restarting, lifted
up.
David Ruekberg
(MFA, Warren Wilson) lives in Rochester, NY. These poems use a monospaced font and the same number of characters per line to create a form he calls “little coffins”—not to say that language is dead but, as expressed in another poem: “Words are / shadows that mime shadows on a wall.” The form puts pressure on ideas and language to create the finished poem. Read more at https://poetry.ruekberg.com