Fertility

April 2024 | poetry

It was spring, no I mean dusk, and the killdeer began stepping up out

of intricate doors in the field.

They sported unseen fires beneath their downy vests.

Their presence had been warming the soil before the corn crop, except

for their dead sisters, brothers who had joined the soil.

No, that was in my dream, before the part where the covers had parted

and a voice I didn’t recognize asked a question.

It felt like an ancient alphabet trying to spell some message.

It left a churning in my belly for the rest of that day, and again the day

after.

And the killdeer, that first night, had yet to break their wings.

They had no fear of owls, nor of hawks in the morning, after

daybreak.

And the toe prints they left in the muddy swale read as the myth of

Osiris.

Steve Fay began life twelve miles from the Mississippi River in western Illinois. Since the mid-1970s, many journals have published his poetry, which lately appears (or is forthcoming) in: Closed Eye Open, Comstock Review, Decadent Review, Jabberwock Review, Menacing Hedge, Santa Clara Review, Tar River Poetry, The Dewdrop, TriQuarterly, and Watershed Review. His collection, what nature: Poems (Northwestern UP, 1998), was cited by the editors and board of The Orion Society as one of their 10 favorite nature/culture-related books of the 12-month period in which it appeared. He lives among wooded ravines and a donkey pasture in Fulton County, Illinois.

Steve Fay

What to Wear When Having a Drink with Your Ex

April 2024 | poetry

It has been forty years.

he in New York me in San Francisco.

erasing him with ease for forty years. yet he is coming

and wants to meet for a drink. really?

does he regret   the divorce and realize he fucked

up by sleeping with Sally and Sara and Sue?

spending weekends shuffling numbers in his fancy office

on the thirty-sixth floor. but honey

my heartstrings have moved on. happily

Married to a marvelous man. and what

would I wear? certainly not my usual jeans or sweats

that make me look dowdy. which I definitely am. but

certainly not a tight sweater over sagging boobs.

certainly not scads of makeup. which I would have to buy.

I don’t want to fire up his remorse. or do I?

vengeance sweeter than Christmas pie. especially pecan.

rolling the taste on my tongue like a butterscotch disc.

what about the bills for two-hundred dollar “massages”?

Yet we did have some good times, didn’t we? I finger

my rosary of memories. breathless in Florence

standing before David. Coins tossed

in Trevi Fountain. but honey do I really want

to reminisce? do I really want to spend strung-out nights

worrying about what to wear? and fretting

that faint embers might gleam again? flaring

with a word, a look, or even a friendly kiss.

maybe best to say I am busy.

for the next forty years.

Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.

Claire Scott