No Waiting Room

January 2020 | poetry

The only way is through.

At the moment it seems impossible:

No thoroughfare.

I mean how do you trust yourself?

And your neurotransmitters?

And that’s just one of many

Things to worry about.

Why wake up in the morning?

There must be something that makes it worthwhile.

There must be something

To fix or shrink.

I’ve never seen one

That didn’t make me worse.

And there’s something to drink

On the top shelf.

“Not the cause, just the symptoms.”

You want to know about my mother?

I’ll tell you about my mother.

[Violence ensues,]

And watch out

For charged particles.

They can be very aggressive.

This page is intentionally left blank,

And the one behind it

Is unintelligible.

Ian Ganassi

Ian Ganassi’s work has appeared or will appear in numerous literary magazines, including, New American Writing; The American Journal of Poetry; First Literary Review-East; Clockwise Cat; and The Yale Review; among many others. His poetry collection Mean Numbers was published in 2016. His new collection, True for the Moment, is forthcoming from MadHat Press. Selections from an ongoing collaboration with a painter can be found at www.thecorpses.com.

Suzanne K Miller

January 2020 | poetry

January

Tumblers in the night,

cat’s teeth clicking, tongues lapping,

unlocking light’s safe.

Death arrives sans words.

Red blood falls as silently

through the night as snow.

Morning makes the bed,

lofts light sheets and comforters

over still soft night.

Six crows face sunrise;

no wind bends the cottonwood.

What will be revealed?

Adversity or

light aligns direction in

perch, view, quill, spine, down.

Rapids of starlings,

whirlpools of gulls, tides of crows,

shipwrecks of eagles.

Black fishbone branches

hold up cirrus sky flaked flesh

above dispersed light.

I think a possum

lives in the trunk of this tree—

tail trails mark the snow.

Black branch treetops shine

orange gold before blue clouds.

Ducks float in shadow.

February

Steeping draws out life

in tea leaves dry as mummies.

Tender nights wake frogs.

Four robins blush for

I walk beneath them staring

up into bare trees.

From rest the train rolls;

the railroad bridge, its drum; tracks,

grounded cymbals brushed.

February geese

slipper shuffle on dry grass.

The ruffled duck grooms.

Flies like an arrow—

Ardea herodias—

sure to strike its mark.

Twisting stream of crows

under a silver contrail

follows the river.

Dark-eyed Juncos flit.

The train stops and starts again

on the river span.

Squirrel leaps over

snaking mound pocket gopher

raised, soars with his thoughts.

Squirrels run like scarves

pulled through some windy crevice.

Then Child Man runs by.

Without my glasses,

and maybe with, the moon a

sore that will not heal.

March

Starlings weigh nothing,

touch the ground as ritual

ghost fingers obsessed.

Goose rises on legs

capable of carrying

its stillness away.

Across the river,

blushes of orange and green

suddenly famous.

Rhythm of the goose

eating, like waves. Feathers lift.

Back against the wind.

Given the same life,

could I steer more expertly,

having gone before?

Ornamental pear

blossoms weigh down city streets.

The egrets return.

A storm plows away

sexual moist, fermented, rank

fallen petal drifts.

The kingfisher dives

from the branch mainly submerged

midstream, then returns.

Found a cat whisker

in the vacuum yesterday.

Certain things stick out.

Suzanne K Miller

Suzanne K. Miller lives in a house built in 1900 and works online. She earned an MFA from Wichita State University. Her work has appeared in Festival Quarterly, First Things, The Mennonite, Mikrokosmos, Plainsongs, Porcupine, and Women of the Plains: Kansas Poetry. Storage Issues, her first book of poems, was published by Cascadia Publishing House in 2010.