Sleeping Swans I pause by the water to stare at white feathered bodies floating so peacefully limp they appear to be dead. How can swans sleep with their heads tucked beneath their wings? Another question I can’t answer as I amble along a path winding past boats on one side and cruising cars on the other. The day is dense with clouds consuming the light I need to see what lies ahead. How long will the sky remain overcast without pouring rain? I don’t even know if my legs will last another mile. I could trip or get a cramp, anything could happen between now and the time I reach my favorite benc ..read more

Immune to Nostalgia I’m not. I go back to ride memories as if they were peak experiences of transcendence, pleasure— the old summer bungalow in Sound Beach, alone with mother, unlimited time to read and read, and walk the wooded paths that are no longer. Time to linger and watch squirrels. No car or phone, nowhere to be except home for supper and my mother’s cooking. Clams or scungilli, fresh from the sea, over linguine. Wild raspberries picked in a thicket on the next property, boiled into jam and jarred for sweetness during Brooklyn winters. Even now, I try to grasp that flavor in the air. S ..read more

MOURNING THE DEATH OF MY SON This is not the world. No longer so green and sweet. Memory is a contusion, an enlarged heart, blood rampant against the vein. This is not the world without him in it. Nor will it ever be or was. * Stephen Ruffus’ work has appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, 3rd Wednesday, the American Journal of Poetry, The Shore, Poetica Review, JMWW, Emerge Literary Journal, and Stone Poetry Quarterly, among others. Also, he will have a piece in a forthcoming issue of the I-70 Review and in Hanging Loose Magazine. Ruffus was a semifinalist for the 2022 Morge ..read more

Pressure to play with boys instead of dolls or pressure from boys who treated me like a doll instead of a person * Carry I am sorry I could not carry you in my arms because I could not carry you in my body. * A. Kahn creates raw, emotional poetry and creative nonfiction. Her prose has been published in Of Rust and Glass, and artwork in the horror anthology Café Macabre II ..read more

Babycake Winter sun taunted tendrils through my mother’s blinds on the day she brought me home to no one but herself. Pressing me to her, peeling back another daughter with worry coiled in her chest, eyes that saw and saw each other. Women are snakes: you inside me inside her inside her mother who died on purpose before the snows came. I handfed bits of cake to mine, slept against her until the mirage left her eyelids, until she started making the coffee again. Unending rain the whole summer we poured concrete into the holes we dug in the backyard, erecting a barn where once there stood nothin ..read more

Letter to Earth I know you suffer. It’s an old story. But I believe the day will come when your rivers will run pure again, when your seas will be clean and dazzled with fish. Nights will be black again and crackle with starlight. For every living thing that went extinct, new ones will take their place. In your marrow, the memory of us will turn again to carbon and remain there, finally harmless. Air will flow sweet around the trunks of trees, waterfalls will pound the river rocks, and the sky will fill with insects and birds, wild and loud * Tamara Madison is the author of three full-length v ..read more

Red Coat The night I went to find her she was wearing the red coat, the one she got at Burlington Coat Factory for her 40th class reunion. “I always wanted a red coat,” Mom had said. “They’re so youthful.” She wore it proudly, tossing it over pilled sweaters and filthy sweatpants, cinching the belt to accent a waistline starved by gin and Percocet. Now, under streetlamp, she was vibrant, the coat ever dazzling. Seated on a frayed blanket, wedged between wizened men, Mom broke through the clutter of black bags and bottles, her coat a billboard amidst cardboard signs. “Time to go Mom.” I nudged ..read more

My Mother Gets a Can Opener and Roses for Her Birthday The man she loves surprises her by not giving what she needs around her finger. On her birthday, the metal ring from the green bean can clangs on the counter. She laughs nervously, runs her finger along the long stems of new roses arranged traditionally in the vase my dead father gave her, though she would never take his flowers, expensively bought. And this love, spontaneous in its practicality, practical in its spontaneity, she wears proudly everywhere, polished, shiny as the kitchen her cans still whir in while the two cook, hungrily, t ..read more

Gift Card I’m getting into my car at Starbucks when a man appears out of somewhere. Says he needs to go to Evansville (where I’m going), ten miles away from where we are. “Sorry, I can’t take you,” I say with cowardly shame. “I’m not asking you to take me,” he says. And with the flash of a $25 Schnucks gift card, he says he doesn’t need groceries, he needs a ride, and he’ll pay for it with the twenty-five dollars I should give to him. “You can understand why I might be suspicious,” I say. Flipping the card, he says, “Call this number. You’ll see. What do you take me for anyway?” Though I’m mor ..read more

Gorse The Northeast corner of of our local organic food store Wild by Nature has that smell. You know the one. The one you don’t exactly like but are attracted to a kind of witchy brew of dried herbs, essential oils, vitamins and incense. It was there I saw the “Discover Your Remedy” display, built of wood, promoting nature. It was divided into seven sections, and each of the sections was divided into subsections that housed sets of small brown bottles of labeled remedy. Only one sub-section was sold out. Gorse. I wondered what it was about Gorse That made it so needed. I opened the small draw ..read more