Is Time Travel Possible?

July 2019 | poetry

At kitchen table, I regard my young self

gazing on purple bush.

Chewing sugared walnut,

I’m back savoring Gram’s delectable bread

that disentangled, soothed early years.

I devour another slice under lilac canopy.

Is this a figment, a veil that will soon dissolve?

 

Inquisitive mood dances festive

when my ears bend to dad’s glee-filled voice

hopping from one Croatian word

to the next sonic utterance.

I open unlocked door to his enticing vibrato.

My dinky feet shuffle, joined hands, clap pure glee.

Can this be real right now, right here?

I know that it is, even as my hair thins silver

looking more like her every day.

 

These visions, these sounds ferment in me,

sooth as a cradle song.

Some may call these illusions, memories,

nonsense, living in the past, but she is here

so is button accordion on his happy knee.

His slippered feet bounce like gossip at family picnic.

Incandescent images sober me,

when her quiet voice speaks to scatter silence.

“You only live once” resounds.

Eyes look through me as if through a pane of glass.

 

I see reflected future self as hers.

We sit at long-ago kitchen table,

she uses elegant gestures,

exaggerated movements I recognize as mine.

Understand her molten tenderness—

a hope for my vintage self.

In comfortable drowse we peer out window.

Sprawling sunburst afternoon warms flowering lilac

exactly like it was— pungent and comforting

many years ago, like today, or maybe tomorrow.

I overflow with miraculous zest,

Transfixed into wondering if “we only live once”

is but a slip in time?

 

Inspiration from “Brief Answers to Big Questions by Stephen Hawking

 

Marianne Lyon

Marianne has been a music teacher for 43 years. After teaching in Hong Kong, she returned to the Napa Valley and has been published in various literary magazines and reviews including Ravens Perch, TWJM Magazine, Earth Daughters and Indiana Voice Journal. She was nominated for the Pushcart prize in 2017. She is a member of the California Writers Club and an Adjunct Professor at Touro University in California.

Mozart’s Starling

July 2019 | poetry

I read somewhere that

Mozart had a pet starling

 

He called the starling singvogel

or was that an old German toy

 

He taught the bird to sing a song

or was it the other way around

 

And did the bird really come

when Mozart called or did it

 

secretly wish it belonged to

Constanze of the soft breast

 

instead of Wolfie (Johannes

Chrysostomus Wolfgangus

 

Theophilus Mozart to give

the man his proper name)

 

If I had a starling I’d call it

Constanze and ask it to sing

 

a song about the brief musical

career of Mozart’s starling

 

an avian concerto from

one composer to another

 

Sally Zakariya

Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 75 print and online journals and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her most recent publication is The Unknowable Mystery of Other People (Poetry Box, 2019). She is also the author of Personal Astronomy, When You Escape, Insectomania, and Arithmetic and other verses, as well as the editor of a poetry anthology, Joys of the Table. Zakariya blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.

Univocity

July 2019 | poetry

“All being can correctly be spoken of with ‘one voice’ (univocity) as John Duns Scotus put it. What I am you also are, and so is the world.” —Richard Rohr: What You See Is What You Are

Today I heard my voice speaking to me from the oak outside the kitchen window. Like a good Quaker, she got right to the point. It is a beautiful day, she said. A dreadful day. The sun is warm and glowing. Burning.  Blinding. My voice is alone out here. My voice is part of the history of the world, and everything in it that ever was and ever will be, the roar of the dinosaur, the howl of the baby not yet born, the star exploding into lightyears past. Even the trees themselves singing as they traverse the orbit of their rings of life.

I listened. The silence was stunning. Living. Loud.

Marian Kaplun Shapiro

Marian Kaplun Shapiro, a previous contributor, is the author of a professional book, Second Childhood (Norton, 1988), a poetry book, Players In The Dream, Dreamers In The Play (Plain View Press, 2007) and two chapbooks: Your Third Wish, (Finishing Line, 2007); and The End Of The World, Announced On Wednesday (Pudding House, 2007). A Quaker and a psychologist, her poetry often embeds the topics of peace and violence by addressing one within the context of the other. A resident of Lexington, she is a five-time Senior Poet Laureate of Massachusetts. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2012.

Grace

July 2019 | fiction

Jasmine sat in the chair in the counselor’s office, pressing buttons on her cellphone. “He’s gettin’ executed today.”

“Really? I would have thought it was going to take a bit longer, you know, with all the stays and appeals,” Ms. Freeman said.

“Naww,” Jasmine said, unperturbed. “This is it. Six o’clock this evening.”

“That’s sad.”

“Yeah. I heard he wants a cheeseburger and fries for his last meal.”

“Okay.”

“And a bowl of butter pecan ice cream. He used to like that a lot.” Jasmine glanced at the counselor’s black shoes. They were small on her feet and clean. Every time Jasmine saw Ms. Freeman, she had on those same clean, dainty black shoes. Ms. Freeman sat a few feet away on the outside of her desk; her round, pleasant face oozed with empathy and curiosity.

“How do you feel about it?”

Jasmine shrugged her shoulders. “Nothin’, I guess.” Her fingers worked across the cellphone with slow purpose.

“Well, you have to feel something … he is your brother.” Ms. Freeman couldn’t discern if Jasmine was scrolling through Facebook on her phone or just looking for something to divert her consumed mind. She thought to ask her to put the phone away but decided otherwise.

“Mama said I had another brother that died when he was two days old. Mike gonna be buried next to him.”

“I see. Are you worried for his soul?”

“No more than I am for my own.”

“But you didn’t murder two people.”

“I could’ve stopped him.” Jasmine glanced at Ms. Freeman’s poised hands crossed on her lap. She looked away and stared at a picture of Ms. Freeman and a man. She wondered if Ms. Freeman was married but really didn’t care.

“You were just a child then. What could you have done? I’m sure you felt paralyzed when you saw him raging in the house.”

“I felt like, like the sky opened up and a big dog jumped out of it. Are you worried about your own soul, since you askin’?”

“I do but not like that. I haven’t killed anyone.” Ms. Freeman’s round, pleasant face was nearly pinched with smugness.

“Lucky you. You know, God kills and orders hits every day… He orderin’ them now to kill my brother.”

“No. Mike brought death on his own head. He didn’t have to kill his girlfriend and her lover. He could’ve let it go.”

“How do you know that? Maybe God told him to do it.”

“I know you don’t really believe that. God would never tell us to kill anyone.”

Jasmine’s fingers paused momentarily over her phone. She eyed Ms. Freeman with incredulity. “I guess it was the devil, then.” She returned her gaze to her phone. “Hmmph. My brother sent two bad dogs to heaven. They couldn’t’ve gotten there without him.”

 

Alifah Omar

Alifah Omar has been writing since a very young age. She has poetry and prose published in Z-composition, The Fable Online and will be featured in Plainsongs’s July 2019 edition.

 

Jupp Soetebier

July 2019 | visual art

Brownie 01

Polaroid 01

 

Jupp Soetebier

Raised in the American Midwest in what was once known as The German Triangle, Josef Wilhelm “Jupp” Soetebier’s work explores what effect his Deutsch heritage, ancestral family, and the myths and traditions of his peoples have had on memory and the way he perceives and goes about the world. His un-retouched photography of the American West are created using his father’s 1950 Kodak Hawkeye Brownie and uncle’s 1967 Polaroid 210 Automatic Land Camera. A frequent exhibitor at The Other Art Fair by Saatchi, stARTup, and Conception; his work was recently included in the 79th Crocker Kingsley in Sacramento and a solo show at Acumen Gallery in Napa Valley. Jupp currently maintains a working studio in Los Angeles and resides in Northern California with his wife and two Leonberger dogs.