Better Than Starbucks!

SKIPPING ROCKS

 

On Easter, after all the dyed eggs had dried for your hunt

and the Easter Bunny had come with his loot to sweeten

your breakfast as the stone still blocked our Arimethean door,

you put on your Oxford cloth and blazer for the service

of the high-church Episcopalians my people called gutter

Catholics just like they called the Unitarians atheists

in search of the remote possibility that there is a god.

 

You took communion with the flippant contempt of a

boy throwing stubbed cigarette butts in the offering plate.

 

The church is convenient for neighborhood Christianity,

being just around the block so we don’t have far to walk

in dress shoes and we don’t stain our fancy jackets with

too much sweat toward piety. After church you said,

I like Christmas better; no one dies in that story, and

went back home, to this place where I knew that

happiness unhappened, knowing, like I know the Easter

ending, that I bought this house, out of pity, from a woman

who inherited four nieces to stack in these dark corners

after a no-good brother-in-law beat her sister to death.

 

We see alcoves here we don’t visit, phantoms that life

never did inhabit, trashy recesses that won’t stay clean.

 

For this, out of pity, I paid full price. Bored, oppressed

by the weight of air in this house, as sturdy and remorseless

as its age in unloving hands, we left for the park and

I taught you to skip rocks, thinking how our house

skips nothing, leaving ripples all the same. Your image

in the water wavered, I heard the glide and plunk of rocks,

a perceptual entropy, the price of living here, of all places,

ringing the registers of what will be memory, cashing us out

to our last blasphemous tithe, stone by stone.

 

 

Pamela Sumners lives in St. Louis, Missouri with her spouse, a teenage kid, and three dogs.

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                      “Trading Wishes”

 

It was winter

the only posies to be found

had been forced into bloom

in some distant hot house

that turned them into hybrids and

stole their scent away

 

I wrote you a letter

proposing a porch swing to share and

hours upon hours of unhurried conversation

 

Do you remember?

 

Finally spring has arrived

the flowers on my bedside table

are luscious sun-drenched yellow tulips and

the streets beneath my windows are ablaze

with magnificent blooms

 

As far back as I remember

once I had my longed-for-license-to-drive

in one hand and

the keys to my very own sleek automobile

in the other

i would celebrate spring's arrival

with a long drive to nowhere . . .

cruising with the top down and

the radio turned up loud

 

Springtime calls to another lucky girl behind the wheel of my cherished candy-Apple corvette

my sweet allegra

and I think the time has come to trade in

my porch swing wish with you

for a drive to nowhere in particular . . .

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Perhaps a picnic

yummy things to eat

fried chicken . . . blackberry cobbler and

endless pitchers of Bellinis

made with Veuve Cliquot champagne!

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You can drive

we can talk about poems . . . books . . . music . . .

. . . our separate histories . . .

. . . the gift of our friendship . . . cooking from the heart

and how we honor the storytellers

who were our earliest muses

 

Hours will pass un-noticed

whispers of wishes will come to settle

in our hearts and minds and

we will scribble the words

of friendship and connection

on the canvas of each other's souls

 

Though it is just a wish

whispered into the wind

I know that you will

pick it up . . . dust it off

and never forget the girl who wished you into it

 

Though we may never share a porch swing

take that leisurely drive on hidden roads

swig the finest of champagnes

or make angels in the snow

I celebrate the gift of our unlikely friendship

it is a blessing . . . a reason for joy

a reason for joy

and on this glorious spring afternoon

it is indeed enough

 

 

Jill Sharon Kimmelman

 

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At Dusk on Lake Boomoseen

for Betty

 

I wanted it to be a surprise, so

You walked with me without asking

Too much of what I wouldn’t say,

Past Chalet Row and the same dog

Barking us along, over the Float Bridge,

To almost where the dirt road flares

To meet Route 30. From the marsh

They sang baritone cacophonies.

It did not matter why they sang, or

That we couldn’t see their bull bodies,

Or even a glint of red giving away

Their eyes.  Only that we stayed,

Until their song entered our blood

And lifted our knees home once again.

 

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Glenn Pearl lives in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, where he is employed as an administrative assistant at a trauma-informed therapy practice.  This is the first publication of his work in a major literary outlet.

 

 

 

Where There’s a Scaffold

 

Where there’s a scaffold there’s an orchestra,

an orchestra enumerated, tilting, turning,

so if I were you I’d rent a swivel

or reclining chair

and rehabilitate a head of hair

or introduce a color-coded tooth.

If I were you I’d study dream symbology

or probability and butter my bread

on both sides and not be struck

by lightning twice.

 

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Heikki Huotari is a retired math professor, the recipient of the Gambling the Aisle chapbook prize and the author of the collection, Fractal Idyll, which appeared in early 2018.