Dialogue
Child: Does the moon have a bed?
Mama: The sky is the moon’s bed.
Child: Do you know what the best
thing is about Earth?
Mama: No, what is it?
Child: It has delicious toast.
—Zalman Malone (4 years)
This Summer
This summer was even funner,
Family and friends,
Sales and all, ching ching down the hall!
New clothes, new friends, they’re all 10s,
Actually can’t wait to walk down those Edson halls,
Oldest kids in the school, it’ll be so cool,
But, back to summer…every year it gets even funner.
—Mariam Amalia Shepherd (9 years)
Drinking with John Doe
and the detective, he’s my friend,
closest thing I have to family.
Invites me over for Thanksgiving,
barbecues. His kids call me Uncle John—
yup, they really do. It’s my legal name
’til I’m found—if I’m found.
“Don’t you ever—”
Wonder? Who I am? That bothers
other people more’n it bothers me.
When you got no past, you don’t waste worry
on the future either. You’re assuming I used
to be somebody, that eventually I’ll
be somebody again. Maybe that ain’t true.
“But everyone is somebody.”
Not me. I’m Nobody. Like that poem, with
the frog. You know it? Well, there we go.
You think you’re somebody, but
you’re at same bar as Nobody,
and he knows a poem you ain’t ever even heard.
—Emily Murnane
Crabapples
On my way to check
my tender corn, and pick
suggestive raspberries,
heavy-hanging crabapples
bonk me in the head
with billiard ball fruit.
Ouch! Out of my way,
Things-Bigger-Than-
I-Imagined! I planted quiet,
slender, stately maypoles,
but Ow! your grabby, laden
branches conk me. Quit it,
ya big bruisers! Third thunk
knocks in sense. Why curse
what likes it here? Obstacles
themselves bear fruit.
—Irene O’Garden
Figurehead
I positioned myself to lead the way
But when the time came
I found myself hardened, inflexible
Unable, perhaps unwilling,
to change my direction
or anyone else’s
As the rocks loom closer with each passing day.
—Elise Bruce-Grey
The Sound of Fire
They stand in a line—thirty-seven people in all
At the front, the husband-father looks down and off to his left
His wife’s oldest friend stands stooped-over at the end of the line
Neck craned—she waits for a sign
At the top of the hour, his vigil over
The husband father turns, and his ghost-smile catches her eye.
High on her toes she reaches for the shoulder of the teenage boy ahead of her
Then his hand moves to the shoulder of his married sister
Sister’s falls gentle on the worn coat of the oldest man in the line.
He lifts his wrinkled fingers to the shoulder of his great-niece
And so it goes until at last the youngest brother
moves his hand with three missing fingers to the shoulder of his brother-in-law
Feeling the familiar claw he mines a deep breath,
leans forward, exhales, and pushes the button
The sound of fire is loud in the room
The body of his wife, mother of their children is conveyered into the flames
Wrapped in the shroud she embroidered for the occasion
In a shower of late afternoon light falling from the clerestory windows,
her body is made ash and some of it rushes up the chimney
One with the wind
One with the light
One with the now approaching night
They say goodbye on the street and scatter in the near dark
Though one among them is missing
When something’s lost and something’s gained
Love is in the balance
—Jim Savio
The End
If this is it,
then we are here together.
This may not seem like
great solace.
It is.
—Alan Silverman
Mosh Pit
Self conscious at the show, standing in the wrong kind of combat boots,
I met Nicky at the door.
We hung out a lot that year
In part because we both suspected each others’ fathers beat them too.
Pushing our way to the front
Wanting to punch harder with each passing song
And wanting to be hit as well
Again
But this time on purpose
Only knowing how to join games of pain
But also longing to dance
Like we’d seen our sisters do at sleepovers
Touching without a thought lost to sex or lust-
such a clean thing really—
Clean being foreign to us.
Nick took an elbow to the nose
And so we left the pit
With blood streaming down both his nostrils
Dripping down into the biggest grin you ever saw
I might have thought then
“How beautiful he looks now!”
Platonic conquering hero
all bruisable flesh and blood like mine
But we both spit and swore instead.
After school we never bothered to keep in touch
Slow learners
Hopeless when it came to
making friendship last
or dancing without violence
And still waiting for a wiser brother,
A manual or morning star
To show us how.
—Billy Internicola
Tearing
I laugh
I cry
I yell
I shout
I get angry
I wipe the tears off my eyes
Then I walk off my anxieties
I go back to my desk
And write with no order or sense
Then I erase and add
Add and erase
You might end up reading it
and wipe the tears off your eyes
I’m sorry
It’s just my writing
Not my doing
—Ze’ev Willy Neumann
Late June, After Dark
Our field is ablaze
with the fireworks
of fireflies.
Our children awake
late, still
fighting, reading,
almost sleeping.
And you—
surrounded by city streets,
masked attendants,
poison pumped
into your bloodstream
at regular intervals,
steady stream of
steroids, visitors,
virtual phone calls.
You—
who just last week
whacked weeds,
roller-skied, ran
intervals while
running with me.
You—
who planted trees
and lifted us all.
Here,
every surface is covered.
Compost, paperwork,
schoolwork, clean clothes,
dirty clothes, fresh flowers,
dying plants.
Grass grows long,
children are fed
haphazardly,
gratuitously.
They swim,
finish school,
read, play, build, argue.
We visit you
and miss you.
—Veronica O’Keefe Ruoff
peonies in bloom
heads almost touching the ground
the weight of beauty
—John Kiersten
The Punisher
I see him in the rearview mirror coercing
the safe distance left between the cars.
The two-lane highway is congested for miles
but he’s determined to force his way.
He weaves between us switching from the slow
and fast lane grabbing any opportunity to advance
his agenda. We’re all moving at the same
pace but this man needs to fly.
He’s made his way behind me now in the left lane
and drives so close that if I stopped, we’d collide.
There’s room for him to pass if I pull up a bit.
Instead, I keep pace with the car next to me.
He’s flashing his headlights but I remain
cool and let him stew for a bit. I see him
in my mirror getting angrier, waving his arms.
After a moment, I move ahead so he can pass.
He jolts to the next lane, back to mine,
then he’s in front of me. His rear window
is decaled with a menacing skull, its jaw melting into
a vertical American flag, stripes stripped of any color.
Minutes later he’s pressed his way ahead without
resistance and I can see him approaching
the source of our delay: an accident. My lane
begins to move at a faster pace while his crawls.
I approach him stuck in his lane.
He looks at me, fury hard on his face.
I give him a thumbs up. Then a wink.
You win, I mouth and move forward.
—Robert P. Langdon
AMC
Swimming in the placid lake.
Judging the loud city kid.
He takes out a knife.
The offering.
A large slice of watermelon.
The sweetness of summer.
The harshness of judgement.
—Terri Kayden
after summer break
the slowest day of classes
empty swimming hole
—Jennifer Howse
This article appears in September 2025.
