The Pearls
An engagement present from my husband’s parents. Shoved in a drawer like small eggs waiting to hatch, forgotten. They seemed like something in a high school photograph. I’d have preferred a large wrought iron pendant, beads that caught the sun. Pearls were for them and I was always only a visitor, tho he said he wished I’d call him Dad. Sam was all I could get out. It was hard to throw my arms around him, to bubble and kiss. And not just because they thought me a hippie, a witch, thought I took their son’s car and stamps and coin collections. Pearls wouldn’t...
Read MoreFeatured Works: Week of Jan. 12 (Body)
Since this is the second week of January, a time when many of us are focused on New Year’s resolutions (and many of them about health), our contributors take us inside the body. In Laurie Klein’s poem, “Right Brain Blues,” a breast cancer survivor learns to live in the moment. In John Grey’s poem, “An Asthmatic Hearing Himself Breathe,” the speaker uses metaphors to describe his own breath. Laurie Klein’s poem, “Next Breath, Right Breath,” is a meditation on the...
Read MoreNext Breath, Best Breath
For starters, don’t call it a cage corralling the breath. Savvy fingertips mutely Braille two-dozen ribs, each commandeering its own space 24–7, salaaming or shifting, then rising. And re-envision those lungs as maps, the self’s inner atlas: one hundred routes funneling into branch lines, cloverleafs, cul de sacs. Or call them dual panniers flanking a breastbone, one plump koi, kissing a mirror, all lips and flared silk. Wild as papyrus, a Psalter. A Rorschach. A centerfold. Newly un-boned as a cat, inhabit that next inhale, feeling how spacious a backbone can be, freeing shoulders to...
Read MoreAn Asthmatic Hearing Himself Breathe
Sometimes it sounds like barn doors opening, lots of ancient wood and rusty iron creaking and cracking. Other times, it’s a shrill northeasterly wind, rattling the windows of my lungs. Then there’s that panting of the overheated dog, the rapid wheeze of an accordion playing polka. My breath is a percussion instrument. It’s all the woodwinds and occasionally, the strings. Sometimes, on the good days, I hear nothing at all. Ah the silence of it. That’s a sound...
Read MoreRight Brain Blues
These days, she drinks light, shelves those costly oils, her sable brush, the palette’s whorls—azure, cobalt, cyanine—sky piece hues, left to clot. Since the surgery, she cannot bear time vanishing, stroke by stroke. She lives to swim through twilight’s milk, to echo birds on high, larking away, to chew the new-picked April clover stem, four-leafed or not. She will not mourn her lost breasts, nor scenes she’ll never paint—finally here, as is....
Read MoreFeatured Works: Week of Jan. 4 (Choices)
As 2015 begins, everything seems possible. What choices will you make in the coming year? This week’s contributors depict some big decisions. In a narrative poem by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, “The Introvert Who (Almost) Ran for Town Council,” a concerned citizen thinks about the best ways to help her community. A humorous poem by Carol Hamilton, “Choices,” summarizes the differences between politicians and poets. In the short story by Robert Watts Lamon, “The Ark of Memory,” a 1960s playboy must decide between his love and the family fortune. The short...
Read More