October 2024 | poetry
You mourn yesterday’s bare branches when
not a single cherry blossom was
on them. The silent neighbor who takes
slow walks, where is he? You can’t get over
their absence, how they settled into your
invisible calendar, tracked life
so you didn’t have to ponder life’s
unanswerable questions when
3:00 in the morning haunts and acts your
nag. There is no present, only was.
You don’t want to know this play is over
so decades of scenes come back, take
you on journeys the future would take
you on, if you believed in it. You guess life’s
mysteries have answered themselves over
time—Who are your loves? Your friends? When
your brother-in-law died young–wasn’t
that day the most tragic? A late baby–your
happiest? Done. You walk past the house your
mother lived in, relive all the outtakes
of the movie that starred only you, was
boys, tears, edge-of-your-seat drama, life
that was always about to happen when
the sun rose. She watched. And it’s over.
Even your father’s judgments are over.
That report card he frowned at, that boy you’re
still wild about, the career you’d start when
you got real, the money he’d say it takes
to survive in the world, make a full life.
You didn’t know all those strictures were
your spine. You Google old boyfriends, always
a bad idea. Most are dead and over
you. Actors alive during your whole life
slip away. Why do you care? But losing your
touchstones means finding new ones. That takes
an open heart. Living backwards started when?
Dreams are no better. They take over
where the day left off, flashing their childhood
pictures when your life was going to be.
Rosanne Singer
Rosanne Singer is a poet and memoirist living in Baltimore and just about to finish an MFA at the University of Baltimore. For 25 years, she was a teaching artist in the Maryland schools and also part of small arts teams working with wounded warriors and their families at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, MD, and with pediatric patients at Georgetown Hospital in Washington, DC. Her recent poetry appears in Allium Journal and 1-70 Review, and her recent memoir appears in The Baltimore Fishbowl and Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine.
October 2024 | poetry
Keeping Score
The score 983 to 735
he’s quite a bit ahead
(as you can see)
46 points for washing my car
52 for buying me flowers
minus 10 because slightly wilted
I lost 66 points when I called him fuck face
after he watched four hours of women’s
beach volleyball, focused on barely-there bikinis
and 358 when I dropped our tax return in the toilet
but wait, just in
579 points for fixing his phlegmatic computer
saving us a small fortune
I gloat and glee around the room
eternally grateful to You Tube
the god of Fixing All Things
I love this game
but the score suddenly shifts
I lose 937 points for flouncing & swaggering
I collapse on the sofa & swig straight gin
(lose 88 more points)
who cares
stupid ledger
stupid game
Cutting Onions
My husband is cutting an onion with a spoon,
an almost impossible task. I notice
there’s a lock on the drawer with knives,
the first drawer on the left, under the counter.
Is he slow-sliding into dementia? Our kids
are long gone, no need to hide knives, especially
since I just sharpened my Kyoku carving knife
to slice tonight’s roast chicken. What of the row
of wine bottles lined up like empty soldiers?
Did he pour out all that expensive chardonnay?
And where is the thick cotton clothes line
that just arrived from Amazon,
the god of Good Things? I watched
a YouTube video on how to make a clove hitch
that won’t come untied, even under the weight of wet sheets.
Is it time to call Dr. Campbell? Am I losing my husband
to a one-way disease? Could Aricept help?
What of coconut oil or Coral calcium
or maybe twenty jumping jacks a day?
The onion is reduced to a soggy goo.
My husband frowns and tosses it in the trash.
For sure a call to Dr. Campbell first thing in the morning.
Tonight I will drive across the Golden Gate Bridge
and gaze down at the currents of swirling water.
If only I could find my car keys.
Claire Scott
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.
October 2024 | poetry
When I turn 70, I am embracing vices
like a newly-discovered, long-lost twin,
like an adolescent puppy love,
vices I avoided all my life out of fear,
abundant caution and good common sense.
I will smoke cigarettes like Bogart and Garbo—
seriously, mysteriously, sexily,
and casually. I will smoke cigars
and pipes. I will dare cancer to catch me.
I will dabble in recreational drugs,
will sample ecstasy, hallucinogens,
and, of course, marijuana. I will eat
the whole brownie, maybe two, and will sleep
the deep and blissful sleep of the stoned
and will laugh myself silly
at ordinary wonders of the world.
I will mix myself boozy drinks with names
like Moscow Mule or White Russian or Sex
on the Beach or Mai Tai. I will go nude
at nude beaches and stare unabashedly
at naked splendors there displayed. I will.
I will hire expensive companions
and have unwise, illicit, unsafe sex.
I will gamble. I will ride in helicopters
and bi-planes, on backs of motorcycles,
my arms around the supple, sinuous waists
of younger daredevils. I will be
a daredevil. I will eat like Anthony Bourdain.
When I turn 70, I will explore
all the vices, including the one
my parents thought the worst of all
the others, the biggest sin: indolence.
Cecil Morris
Cecil Morris has been nominated for a Pushcart in 2021, 2022, and 2023. He and his indulgent partner, the mother of their children, divide their year between the central valley of California and the Oregon coast. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in The Ekphrastic Review, English Journal, Hole in the Head Review; Rust + Moth, Sugar House Review, Willawaw Journal, and other literary magazines.
October 2024 | poetry
Mesmerizing horizontal snow
on Halloween, a weather record
for Chicago accumulation–
Chicagoans are unpredictable, too,
when they observe Halloween,
putting on masks
when they sit in bars
dressed in orange and black,
sip Betteljuice Cocktails,
tout toy lasar guns like children
dressed as action heroes,
Hasbro Avenger Marvel Titans
with lightning bolts
across their chests,
strut in the costume competition
that doesn’t win the prize
in the school parade.
By Jan Ball
Jan has published 396 poems in U.S. and international journals like Nimrod and Slipstream, U.S. and Orbis, England, and Cordite, Australia. Finishing Line Press published her four chapbooks and first full-length poetry collection. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart as well as twice for Best of the Net.
October 2024 | poetry
(for the cashier at Brookline Booksmith who told me Carlo Rovelli was the best author in the whole bookstore, which felt like a stretch although I liked the book.)
I believe
Before Anaximander the world was flat
and ringed by a river called Ocean,
That Copernicus moved the sun literally
pushing earth to its tertiary orbit.
I believe
We were born of four substances, just earth,
fire, air, and water, later to be atomized,
That we could never have wrapped ourselves
in the blanket of space and time before Einstein.
We invent the world,
Rounding its edges when we need the room
to sail our ships, space the stars to grow
the universe.
Steven Goldman
Steven Goldman is a writer and teacher who lives in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the author of two books: the YA novel Two Parties, One Tux, and a Short Film About the Grapes of Wrath and the essay collection Four Square and the Politics of Sixth Grade Lunch. His work has appeared in a number of literary and professional magazines, including The Jewish Literary Journal, Edutopia, and Nimrod.
October 2024 | poetry
In response to Hieronymus Bosch’s The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things.
If William Tell’s arrow missed
and the child was struck almost clear through the head,
his hat would look like the one on this wall,
crown pierced instead of the apple.
Take that most primal of fruits.
Wedge it into a slaughtered pig’s open mouth.
The cauldron is laughingly small, but somehow a full feast
is laid out—plump chickens, chowder bowls to the brim,
the largest drumstick you can imagine,
and a cavernous jug of wine upturned for one long gulp.
Drink it all down. How could you be blamed
for wanting it now, apt as this world
is to launch arrows at your head,
a mere blink between the quick and dead.
Jennifer LeBlanc
Jennifer LeBlanc earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. Her first full-length book, Descent, was published by Finishing Line Press (2020) and was named a Distinguished Favorite in Poetry (2021) by the Independent Press Award. Individual poems have been published or are forthcoming in Consequence, Solstice, Nixes Mate Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, and J Journal. Jennifer is a poetry reader for Kitchen Table Quarterly. She was nominated for a 2013 Pushcart Prize and works at Harvard University.
