Quick whittle me a birch sea captain, Ingrid,
before you dash off to play pinochle with Paul,
something smallish for our mantelpiece,
something I can paint maroon
with my glossy enamels and big, broad brush.
Your birch sea captain with his spyglass extended
will stand perpetual watch
over the gulf in front of our fireplace,
and his eyesight has to be sharp enough
to never be fooled by costumed invaders,
cutthroats like Paul in their looney-tunes get-ups,
desperately trying to lose their identity
in a following sea of ridiculous optics,
but preparing nonetheless to storm
this brick and stone coast we call hearth.

 

William C. Blome writes poetry and short fiction. He lives wedged between Baltimore and Washington, DC, and he is a master’s degree graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. His work has previously seen the light of day in such fine little mags as Poetry London, PRISM International, In Between Hangovers, Fiction Southeast, Roanoke Review, and The California Quarterly.

You are so pale you must have seen a ghost
No wonder in this old abandoned house
When outside there’s a spreading chestnut tree
Whose rippled reflection shimmers in the pond—
Beyond the pond there is a mounded grave
And all above a beautiful sky-blue heaven.
But now the wind arouses stormy heaven
And awakens from its sleep the shrouded ghost
Where stone cannot now mark a shallow grave
That once belonged to a person in this house;
No life can stir within this muddy pond
Clogged with leaves that fall from this old tree.
Gripping this earth, this ancient sentinel tree
Stretches its limbs and reaches to the heaven
That spreads above and smiles in that old pond
That ripples as if it were touched by playful ghost
Who glides upon the porch of this old house
And dances as if it never knew the grave.
But now it is more serious and grave
As sky now darkens above the ancient tree
And windows glare like eyes in this old house
With not a beam of light from darkened heaven—
Wind devils play in the yard as if the ghost
Is stirring them. And swirling roiling pond
Flings its spray in air above the pond
More fitting for the spirit than the grave
From which escaped the mischievous rollicking ghost;
The air is warm and damp upon the tree
And sun smiles from a sky of golden heaven
And life now seems to return to this old house.
And now you can return to this old house
A place of quiet rest beside the pond
Most familiar under smiling heaven
As flowers decorate the peaceful grave
That rests beneath the greening chestnut tree
And now provides a rest for peaceful ghost.

You sadly remember the one in the grave
Under the shadow of the chestnut tree.
You banish memories of the playful ghost.

 

First appeared in Belle Rêve Literary Review (2016).

 

Dr. Emory D. Jones is a retired English teacher who has taught in Cherokee Vocational High School in Cherokee, Alabama, for one year, Northeast Alabama State Junior College for four years, Snead State Junior College in Alabama for three years, and Northeast Mississippi Community College for thirty-five years. He has published poems in such journals as Voices International, The White Rock Review, Free Xpressions Magazine, The Storyteller, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Gravel, Pasques Petals, The Pink Chameleon, and Encore: Journal of the NFSPS. He is retired and lives in Iuka, Mississippi, with his wife, Glenda. He has two daughters and four grandchildren.

Too little rain parches the garden,
destroys the crops, drives up
the cost of food, and creates
starvation. Wildlife die of thirst,
forests go up in flames.

Too much rain rots the garden,
decimates the crops, drives up
the cost of food, and causes hunger.
Wildlife and people drown,
houses and roads are destroyed,
the will to live goes up in flames.

Tears are like rain. Too few clog
the heart, prevent growth, and create
starvation of the soul. Emotions die
of suffocation, motivation is smothered by fear.

Too many tears cause a kind of blindness.
The beauty and the possibilities in front
of us are obscured by saltwater that burns
the eyes, and our breath is blocked
by a strangling globus sensation.
Courage is destroyed, hope goes up in flames.

Tears are overrated. The line between
cleansing and drowning is frightfully thin.
We can learn to drain the toxins
that enter our thoughts, our hopes,
our dreams. But once the flood begins,
there is no levee strong enough
to save our loss of self-possession,
no government compassionate enough
to preserve our flimsy shelter of belief.

Diane Elayne Dees’s poetry has been published in many journals and anthologies. Diane, who lives in Covington, Louisiana, also publishes Women Who Serve, a blog that delivers news and commentary on women’s professional tennis throughout the world. Her chapbook, I Can’t Recall Exactly When I Died, is forthcoming from Clare Songbirds Publishing House. Also forthcoming (Kelsay Books) is Diane’s chapbook, Coronary Truth.

Today, under fluorescent lights,
I have my grandmother’s eyelids.

Bumpy, flaky, itchy
like a sunburn starting to heal.

At the office,
opinions are offered,
various potions tried and applied.
Solutions to securing suppleness.

What is sapping us?

I thought life had made grandma’s eyelids
wrinkled, discolored sags.

Daughter of the rural poor.
Employee of the cannery.

Wife of the junior-high dropout,
who always resented the fact.
Mother of children who grew
to move out and up,
of an eldest whose own daughters favored
the other grandma.

Florence, never Flo,
obese and ordinary.

Loved through an act of will,
until death made it moot.

Now, in the reflection
of the upper eyelid just
below the right eyebrow
I see the resemblance.

 

Currently, Laura Felleman is an accountant at the University of Iowa.  Before that, she was a seminary professor. Prior to that, she was a pastor.  She moved to Iowa City with her husband in 2016 and started writing poetry soon afterwards.  In order to learn this new craft, Laura attends the Free Generative Writing Workshops and participates in local poetry readings.

A Gloss on the following lines:

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine….

—“To Sleep” by John Keats

O soft embalmer of the still midnight
How peacefully we lie beneath your white
And gentle hands. You work your magic now,
We know, with soothing whispers and endow
With strength to take the approaching day’s delight
O soft embalmer of the still midnight.

Shutting, with careful fingers and benign
The eyes too full of beauty to decline
Your old companion, the maker of pleasant dreams
Who shows each thing much better than it seems
By glaring day. Soft hands, almost divine
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,

Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light.
Within a luscious garden of delight
We find ourselves enfolded in a pure
Fragrance of musky rose, a nightly cure
For heartaches we endure to stand upright.
Our gloom-pleased eyes, embower’d from the light,

Enshaded in forgetfulness divine,
Float inward. There our spirits find
A citadel secure from every foe
And we are made a part of the heavenly flow
That gently runs inside the heart sublime
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine.

 

First appeared in the 2018-2019 issue of Turning Home of the Poets Roundtable of Arkansas.

 

Dr. Emory D. Jones is a retired English teacher who taught in Cherokee Vocational High School in Cherokee, Alabama, for one year, Northeast Alabama State Junior College for four years, Snead State Junior College in Alabama for three years, and Northeast Mississippi Community College for thirty-five years. He has published poems in such journals as Voices International, The White Rock Review, Free Xpressions Magazine, The Storyteller, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Gravel, Pasques Petals, The Pink Chameleon, and Encore: Journal of the NFSPS. He is retired and lives in Iuka, Mississippi, with his wife, Glenda. He has two daughters and four grandchildren.

Across from the widow hunched
By a hundred plus years
Hang two photographic portraits
Her breakfast companions

A full-color, middle-aged man
Smiles through a beard
Chin in his hand
Open to all that’s outside him.

A black-and-white, elderly man
Gestures as he lectures
Perched on a desk
Eyes on the floor of his classroom

She rolls her wrist

“My husband averts his gaze
He had many girlfriends
My son smiles at me
So I look at him
I wish he had been my husband.”

She points to a spot between her eyebrows
“It’s drying up in here.
There’s no blood flow.”

She buries her head in her hands
“It’s a terrible feeling
When the connection snaps.”

Behind her is a poster of a Viennese synagogue

“I stood apart from the crowd
Who chanted to torch it
My husband dragged
Inside with the others.
It was the only one the
Nazis didn’t burn
It had too many important
Buildings around it.”

She grins and I see
What remains of her teeth
She turns and I see
The kindness in her eyes

“You have a Du relationship with God,
Not a Sie.
You are certain of God.
I am certain that I’m not certain.”

She draws her thumb from
One side of her forehead to the other.
“It’s getting empty in here
The connection is lost.”

 

Currently, Laura Felleman is an accountant at the University of Iowa.  Before that, she was a seminary professor. Prior to that, she was a pastor.  She moved to Iowa City with her husband in 2016 and started writing poetry soon afterwards.  In order to learn this new craft, Laura attends the Free Generative Writing Workshops and participates in local poetry readings.