A Good Deal
I don't like empty vases populating my tiny house
but after uploading my listing of the car
I came across a blue Ming vase.
Not with its usual angry dragons
or homes that don’t tell a story
but lotus buds in white
over a base of soft cobalt
and meandering leafy stems
interspersed with occasional ears of millet
between bands of upright and pendent trefoils,
covered overall in a thick unctuous glaze.
I was sold. I sent an offer
which was accepted
in eleven minutes
and I found myself
in the car driving
the sixteen miles.
It came with a spider
who didn't respect vases.
Born and raised in Mumbai, India, Sunayna Pal happily resides in Maryland with her husband, children, plants, and an invincible goldfish. Holding degrees from XLRI and Annamalai University, Sunayna’s poetry is published extensively in international journals and anthologies, and she enjoys working as the Director of The Poetry Academy. She is also devoted to the practice of Heartfulness meditation. Find more on her at sunaynapal.com.
Image: “ALONE LOTUS” from Sanjibkrbasak under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Raised architecture of gold leaf
Time-gone smoke darkened
the possible reflection. Museum light shadows continue
to tweak the narrative.
Gold demands candlelight.
Or maybe candlelight demands the gold?
Unworldly background
in this world –
time travel.
Trim on Mary’s cloak,
gold and hammered like the landscape.
Look longer and figures fade. Only the repeating pattern
are the remains of the dead – the artists who thinned, applied, hammered
this gold, expected light.
Modern Life
Brancusi’s body rests
in the crib under Calder’s mobile.
My Picasso husband fell apart, but
someone spotted him drinking his sorrows
on Hopper’s empty porch.
As I place O’Keefe’s large flowers in a vase,
I imagine riding Chagall’s horse into the night sky
or holding hands with Matisse’s women.
Instead, I reach into Arcimboldo’s fruit basket
for grapes and a melon slice. I sigh
into the De Chirico silence.
To look like a Giacometti woman,
I need more fruit and less
Warhol-prepared foods.
Suddenly, the infant screams
like she saw a de Kooning
in the shadows. I should have given her
a Degas bath before the Cassatt feeding.
I wipe my hands on my bare thighs,
Descend the Stairs
at Futuristic speed.
This is not a woman,
I think in French, which I do not speak.
Chloe Yelena Miller’s poetry collection, Viable, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books (2021) and her poetry chapbook, Unrest, was published by Finishing Line Press (2013). Miller is a recipient of a 2020 and 2022 DC Arts and Humanities Fellowship (Individuals) grant. She teaches writing at American University, University of Maryland Global Campus and Politics & Prose Bookstore, as well as privately. Contact her and read some of her work at www.chloeyelenamiller.com and follow her on Twitter.
Image: “Swirling and Shimmering” from Los Paseos under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.
thick crust dense walnut bread he tears to add to the lamb stew carrots onions peas a stock of pureed turnip kale lamb pan drippings and a kiss a sprinkle of malbec wine she glides onto the opulently pillowed settee under the orange purple green throw she had crafted crocheted with cotton yarn a unique design from wales serpents’ entwined heads with splayed tails writhe her book of illustrated poetry illuminated greygreen by the adjacent window she reads languorously pausing to sigh let her thoughts’ edges wilt her muscles’ tension shudder into stillness he takes himself to the sunroom tosses two blankets over the baby grand lights the cinnamon incense candle anchors the light clicks the brass goose neck lamp opens two collections flips a few pages settles onto the bench and depresses the sostenuto pedal solarium softened wafers of snowdusted clouds largo cushions to the ear a repeated motif begs delicate ornament naked treebranches bow in and out of the passing banks of fog turning to february flake cascades of starry motifs answer the damped earth’s throaty turns she closes her eyes the poems slide between her waist and the brocade face of bacchus nymphs wooden goblets lifted in the sunny glen of a contrapuntal trio rifting the passing pheasants’ ruffled fog bound path in the dry pungent dark a touch a pinch a caress the bounding rift of lines lift into a new key the poet’s voice glad leaping love the thin slippery swelling of spring at her touch the notes wander among the chords of the ancient chorale the joys of desiring waystations of sleep the moored solarium casts off melodies evaporate into echoes
Craig E. Flaherty, writer of poems, reader at poetry groups, publisher of Coastline Window Poems, The Nature of Light, The Glossy Family, presenter at the Takoma Park Thursday Poetry Reading, poetry group leader, member of Writing a Village. His poetry has appeared in Viator and The Raven’s Perch. A lifelong performer of church music, organist, carilloneur, pianist with Dotke Piano Trio, husband, father, grandfather, and accompanist to Jordyn Flaherty
In Florida, Visiting My Father Who Has Parkinson’s and Dementia
Like sand dunes, his cheeks are sliding away and his white hair has collected in tufts of downy feathers, like a seagull’s, today. Sometimes, he meets my gaze with eyes grey as a newborn’s, and as gentle, as though he’s a changeling—a man ancient with clarity, sincerity, a man as wise as a child made of questions. Still, Mother repeats her rules: “He can’t walk far; don’t tell him what’s happening; he doesn’t know what he’s saying.” But can’t he; doesn’t he? We walk in the hot breeze. He shuffles toward the shade of his pretty palm trees, toward the wild orange skies of birds we watch splash down in green ponds, while he asks: “Who will come help me?” He wonders, “What did I do?” He says, “Someone picked me for this.” Followed by, “Why?” And concludes, “I wasn’t a bad boy.”
CALLING MY FATHER
After I leave you, I allow days, sometimes weeks, to go by without calling, convinced I’m doing you a favor. I think I make it easier if you don’t have to work so hard looking for all the words you lose trying to talk to me. If I don’t call, then you can continue to forget me & I can stop wondering what you might have meant in everything we already said. If I don’t phone, you won’t be sad when I say goodbye. If I don’t phone, you won’t cry and I can’t ever hang up.
Ghazal: RED BANK
He was a Vet and she was pregnant when the newlyweds left Boston for Red Bank, where new motherhood alone on a foreign Jersey shore made her abhor Red Bank.
He worked the coastal radar station, woke at dawn to fish in the sea. His memories of sharks and seagulls tell me he would’ve someday liked to live again near Red Bank.
Ask her about the child she raised by the windy green water and she’ll recall hand washing diapers, laundry on the line, dirty dishes, and boring Red Bank.
My father used to say I’d sit on his shoulders to see Manhattan across the bay. I went to work there after leaving my parents, who long ago left poor Red Bank.
Waves of those years return on the rare days now my father can recall my name, —, and asks if we can go to the Florida beach he remembers as pure Red Bank.
A 2022 finalist for the Annie Dillard Award in Creative Nonfiction and a 2012 Pushcart Prize winner for her essay “Dark Horse,” Lisa Couturier is author of the collection of essays, The Hopes of Snakes (Beacon Press), and the chapbook Animals / Bodies (Finishing Line Press), which won the 2015 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize from the New England Poetry Club. She is a notable essayist in Best American Essays, 2004, 2006, 2011. Currently at work on a hybrid manuscript about Parkinson’s as well as a memoir about her ex-racehorse, Couturier is writer with the Sowell Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World, an archive at Texas Tech University. She lives in Dickerson, Maryland, on Montgomery County’s acclaimed Agricultural Reserve, where she keeps her six horses and is an Associate Artist at Riverworks Center for the Arts.
Image: Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Down here on Earth we live in craziness: plants eat air,
light, water and dirt; animals eat plants; animals eat animals;
plants eat animals; people eat people, plants, animals,
and the inanimate Earth herself; ravenous insects eat us all
as we eat them. So, we welcome a rainy day like today.
Rain fills our hearts with wishes for healthier days, the lives
we’d like to live like a child counting cows in Mr. Bean’s field
as she looks out the window in class instead of paying attention. Down here on Earth,
I myself, as it rains today, daydream back to my old pal Sam
and his dog, Roscoe, a prince without papers. How they loved
each other, how Roscoe was Sam’s special pal, and vice versa.
Where are they today? I never had a dog, but me and Roscoe,
we got on well. Sam and I would pick off his ticks, and pet him down here, on Earth.
Roscoe Brings Sam a Present
One summer day, Wendell, Sam and I sat on Sam’s back porch in a fog of boredom, when Roscoe, Sam’s mutt, brought him a baby rabbit. “Roscoe!” Wendell, shouted as if horrified, “What have you got in your mouth?” Roscoe merely—gingerly— held the baby rabbit in his teeth, then presented it to Sam.
Sam took it from Roscoe’s jaws, the jaws of life, and held it up to his face. Wendell poked his head in to investigate as well, as with one silent finger Sam stroked the rabbit between its ears. One summer day,
like any other summer day lost in the middle of endless July, Sam, Wendell and I thoughtfully examined a small handful of palpitating fur, its rabbit ears and nose, its rabbit mouth, a face staring back with brown rabbit eyes, a face amazed as us, as Roscoe panted in the building heat, examining Sam— one summer day.
Me and My Cat
I pull the front door of our house open, pulling the storm door shut with its breath. Straightaway, as if he’s not an apparition in my mind, my old cat sits on silent haunches at my feet.
His name was, accidentally, Angelica. Was there ever such a being in my life as an orange and white tabby cat? I vacantly wonder. Absolutely. The tabby M on his forehead. M for my cat. M for mistook at birth to be female a few days before Christmas—thus, Angelica.
So, we called him Angelica. He sits and stares, now, at the front yard, the busy street beyond, while his small breaths, as if a saloon door swings in his throat, puff in and out, in and out, to slightly fog the great glass pane of the storm door. House. Door. Open. Shut.
Year in year out. Day after day. Ad infinitum. For a limited time only. I ask Angelica, “Angelica, would you rather have a brief electrifying life dodging tires and bringing home murdered birds for me to bury in the backyard? Or would you rather stay inside today, live forever, while I bring you six-packs of ‘Adult Urinary Hairball Control Cat Food?’ ” “Arf!” cries Angelica. And we both chortle, “House, door, open, shut.”
Patric Pepper has published two poetry chapbooks, Zoned Industrial, and Everything Pure as Nothing. His full-length book, Temporary Apprehensions, was a winner of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House (WWPH) Poetry Prize. His work has appeared most recently in Barrelhouse (book review), Feral, Gargoyle, The Northern Virginia Review, and This Is What America Looks Like, the 2021 WWPH anthology. A DMV native, he splits his time between Washington, D.C. and North Truro, Massachusetts.
Image: Isoda Koryūsai, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
