Phanatic the day you swung my Louisville Slugger at me and I caught it with my bare hands you smacked my bare ass while Jimmy held my pants at my ankles and I was getting hard, harder each week from dead lifts, lunges, and power cleans until mom poured a gallon of milk on my ..read more

AUTISTIC EVENING ROUTINE Jesse walks through the living room, grabs a broom to sweep the floor before evening routine at 7:30 PM when he sees mom coming around the back, her part of the duplex, closing the garden gate with the leather strap, walking Oreo. Jesse dashes out the door, skips across the blinking, Christmas ..read more

Time and Space “Swore I could feel you through the walls, but that’s impossible.”                ~ Phoebe Bridgers The trees are always on the cusp             an ending & an entrance warm winter       cold spring. Light in the window brings soft morning in a smoky rented room        galley kitchen overlooking the yard             bike fal ..read more

In the Recovery Room After the Biopsy Once, a friend told me that his mother’s hospice agency offered an early exit option, though they didn’t call it that, or use the phrase assisted suicide. I was surprised, so I wrote it down, the name they gave it, something transition, maybe? Peaceful departure? No, but something to do with travel, velocity. Not exactly pre-boarding, but that’s the gist of it. His mom said no, it was too expensive, and they’d already gone through all her money, so they waited, though he had started to say he’d be happy to pick up the tab, but stopped himself because he wa ..read more

Radish The pleasure of finding one red radish in the dense green foliage my father called a garden was a ticket into his just praise, my small system of effort, reward, accomplishment I could finally arrange. We’d sit at the table in the kitchen, look for birds he told us were rare, and wait for him to bite into our plucked radish, halfway through his sandwich that mom had made, again. We waited for the way his eyes would close just after the crunch into it, then the glimpse of white meat inside the thin red skin, so exotic to the three of us who still held close our naïve palates for foods, t ..read more

LATE IN THE DAY Late in the day when my father lay dying, he called me to his cot and told me of a time when I saved his life. Saved your life? I said, not believing him. Then he said: do you remember that time at Widow’s Lake when, like a fool, I got in water, thinking it would make my bad back better, but as I lay on my side, unable to move, and felt myself tipping, back side up, face down in water, I saw you walking on water beside me and called out your name and asked for your hand. You were only five. If you hadn’t been there that day, that would have been the day I died. * MY NEIGHBOR GE ..read more

Birthday Walking the dogs on the trail after the storm, we pause for a crew trimming a large oak. Look out! I don’t want that limb to get me our friend says— —unless it’s quick. It’s her 90th birthday and she’s perfectly aware of her trajectory. The crew member signals to us: It’s safe. For now. So far. Seated in the booth for the birthday lunch, we comment she’s as old as Willie Nelson, ask her whether she’s gleaned any wisdom from her harvest of years. She looks down: If you wait twenty years for a married man, you’ll end up with exactly nothing. We order drinks, a big dessert, her life spil ..read more

grass bows around my rotten fence the church of now * Joshua Eric Williams’s work usually focuses on the intersection of the human, wild, and the spiritual. His poetry can be found in many online and print journals, including Rattle, Modern Haiku, and Literary Matters. His website is thesmallestwords.com, and he can be found on X, @Hungerfield ..read more

After the Tulip Sale at the North Carolina Arboretum Soon they’ll be undressed, petal-shriveled, disappearing— as light or smoke, shaped and potted as they were to dollar decimals, sold. We’ll forget how—flashing pictures—we tried to join them as if we were the same— our bulbed heads rising like snakes from a slumber, how we too were top-heavy, falling apart, as laughter dangled out our throats, how we sent them to our mothers, fathers as gestures of devotion—we yearned to give back our origins to our origins with this flung constellation of fluorescence, how we never knew if such spectacular ..read more

In Praise of Gravity Which bestows weight or slings me around some other heavenly body, a version of you wondering whether I’ll rise from my next plummet, victim of curvature and infinite range held in place, attractive in nature, bent, perhaps, and scarred, proud to have survived but never wiser. Cleansed, we continue our orbit, our mirrored fall. * Robert Okaji holds a BA in history, served without distinction in the U.S. Navy, toiled as a university administrator, and no longer owns a bookstore. He was recently diagnosed with late stage metastatic lung cancer, and lives, for the time being ..read more