Bone Suite by Austin Holmes Staring at these bones in the utter rhythm of sun they seem inevitable, but only might have been. In the Montana mountains scanning a meadow for barbed wire I stumble upon a half-devoured carcass a meal not yet completed. I suddenly feel not so alone in that vastness. I look to the spaces between the trees for eyes in the dark night, there is rain and mud, obscure shapes of their parietal art hovering in scorched shadows, jackrabbit jawbones not quite half-moons. The underside of pelvis bones shaped like owls, these bones and bones and bones, bleached fragments on the edge, stiller than the breath of stone. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue First published in Columbia Journal . I’ve always had a fascination with bones and wrote this after some time spent in Centennial Valley. There were many moments of vulnerability in that land, both physical and emotional. Sometimes it takes feeling small in vast spaces to understand that, as Jim Harrison said, “To have reverence for life, you must have reverence for death.” .................................................................................................................................................................................... Next - Village Fiddle by Ken Waldman Next AUSTIN HOLMES lives in southern Utah, where he spends life with his beloved partner and their dog. He contemplates what he can and falls in love with the sky daily anew.

Mike White < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Double Life Mike White 00:00 / 01:03 Double Life Mike White No man ever steps in the same river twice. -Heraclitus If anyone and I mean anyone knows where she is . . . pleads her father on the news, and I curse under my breath, releasing incomprehensible hosannas of Good God Good God before invoking his only child, Jesus Fucking Christ, who in my childbrain had once led a secret double life as a lamb. In the early spring, ice can give way, so it does, a red snowsuit here one minute and the next and the next and the next until only the river keeps moving, a river that is never the same . . . up to his waist, a father still calling and calling her name. “Double Life,” is a brand new poem, and comes at the theme with a particularly literal rendering. Previous MIKE WHITE is the author of How to Make a Bird with Two Hands (Word Works, 2012) and Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser, 2017), winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Next

Nancy Takacs < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Sweet Peas Nancy Takacs 00:00 / 02:00 Sweet Peas Nancy Takacs Some would say just a noxious weed taking over that bare space where I put some seeds two summers ago in the meadow beyond my garden. ~ This year vines crazy with rosy heads, each blossom scored like two wings over labial hoods, seeds held under, hidden, waiting to drop. ~ I cut some from tangled vines for my kitchen table, to breathe their cool fire on the cloth embroidered by a Croatian woman, her flowers in purple floss straight-stitched, faces with eyes in between wide-open butterfly wings. ~ Her tablecloth swirls under my salad – the woman, her daughters and sisters living in that small wild country I flew to, its border fought over for decades, its past and its future haunted by torture and rape. ~ Each frigid winter our tour guide Marija said women embroider, embroider hundreds of daisies, sweet peas, bees, and Monarchs, prick fingers, careful their blood does not ruin the linen. Tablecloths like my Hungarian grandmother once made, just twenty, thirty dollars blowing on clotheslines on the bank of the Danube. A crucifix around each woman’s neck as they exhale cigarette smoke, some holding babies, bartering with us, begging us Buy another! to dress our foreign tables with their blossoms and wings. ~ I buy five with dollars they hold close, empty my suitcase so I can fit them in. How can I not fly them back across the dark waters of our terrifying world? This poem came to me long after a solo trip to countries near the Danube. It has gone through many revisions, but I always kept the ending. In a sense, the poem is connected to my love of embroidery that my Hungarian immigrant grandmother taught me. Little did I know at that time, this art was a way for women to make a living, and that the Hungary she left when she was sixteen, to come to America, was a scary place, easily taken over and over again. I learned this much later on. The embroidered cloths are emblematic of the women’s protection of their families, earning money to keep the wolves away, or if possible, to travel to “safer” places. They depend on tourism to live, getting their beautiful artful cloths into the hands of other women. The breakthrough comes as the poem progresses, a realization by the speaker that her privilege is fragile. She must support women any way she can. Dominion over women around the world is happening in devastating ways now in our own country, and sadly, it is imminent everywhere. Previous NANCY TAKACS is an avid boater, hiker, and mushroom forager. She lives near the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore in northern Wisconsin, and in the high-desert town of Wellington, Utah. Her latest book of poems is Dearest Water (Mayapple Press, 2022) . nancytakacs.org Next

Nano Taggart < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Chalk-white, Canyon-deep Nano Taggart 00:00 / 02:29 Chalk-white, Canyon-deep Nano Taggart The nightmare isn’t darkness. And in this version, I’m frail enough to fall all the way down the precipice I’d skipped along the edge of since well before the fear was named. It’s white. So white I can’t distinguish its corners, its edges, its end, or its source of light; but my feet sink into something— having fallen from wherever it was that was was before. The fear doesn’t freeze, exactly, it’s the scared-to-to-trembling sort where I can smile, even laugh in a suddenly social setting. Anxiety strikes just as memory powers down. But only Natalie can tell. (The trembling is my schtick?) Then someone wants to know what I think about some dire whatever, and all that I can offer is, “I don’t know. But I think she sells sea shells by the sea shore.” People laugh, because I’m funny sometimes, and thankfully, the conversation moves on, moves past me and the nightmare-white I’m inside. Or—like accretion—that I’m supposed to be. How planets form. Little bits stick together and collide then stick together again-n-again- n-again; and even here, in here , addled with too many pronouns, I’m terrified of my voice’s pale echo or not-echo. Like I’ve gotta hide that my path crossed Rakim before “Ode to the Wind.” I’m walking around like—we’re all walking around like—like these blank pages are a way out. Out of here, out of the dream I can’t leave: it was a room that’s so white I can’t see its corners, just one incandescent band burning from under what must be a door with its otherwise-undetectable edges. That’s it, that’s the nightmare. Then the sandy dryness in my mouth and throat. So dry I can’t swallow, or call for help, or discern if that place (this place?) would allow—or cause—my voice to echo. One of the byproducts of my mental health struggles is crippling creative anxiety. This combined with my belligerent inner critic makes it difficult for me to write. Naming and acknowledging these things, and addressingthem directly, has been a topical breakthrough. It's kind of a cheat code to be able to write about these devils, and it's a deep to be panned. "Chalk-white, Canyon-deep" is a breakthrough in its confrontation of my childhood nightmare and the anxiety of influence. Previous NANO TAGGART is a founding editor of Sugar House Review , and would like to meet your dog. Next

The Queen of Hell by Karin Anderson In 1773, George III’s architect, James Wyatt, was commissioned by Elizabeth, Countess of Home, to build a sophisticated ‘Pavilion’ designed purely for enjoyment and entertainment at No. 20 Portland Square. The Countess, aptly known as ‘The Queen of Hell’, was in her late 60’s, twice widowed, childless and rich. (Home House, “London’s Iconic Members Club” website) In her sixties and seventies, Elizabeth Gibbons, Countess of Home, was one of the most powerful and colorful characters of British high society. But finding authentic traces of her now— beyond the standing edifice on Portland Square—is tricky. I had to rummage. Contemporary references mostly bounce off internet repetitions, clones of each other. Original sources are sparse—in fact, I’m quoting most of them here. Historically, Countess Elizabeth is the “Queen of Hell” because William Beckford, an inconceivably wealthy brat young enough to be her grandson, bestowed the title in one of his many florid letters to his artsy who-alls. Not that he’d miss one of her parties. At least when he wasn’t about to be arrested. Beckford’s catty nickname for the Countess of Home (royal by calculated marriage) stuck to her like a meme, wafting down to us with little context. I’m not saying it’s not apt, but Elizabeth’s hellish queendom was not No. 20 Portland Square. Her hell simmered across the Atlantic, in the brutal slaveholding culture of Jamaica, richly funding the London party house. She was the only daughter and heir of William Gibbons of Vere in the island of Jamaica. Her first husband was James Lawes, son of the Governor of the island. After his death she married William, 8th Earl of Home on 25th December 1742. He was a Lt. General in the army and Governor of Gibraltar but he deserted her the year after the marriage. She had no children and died at Home House in Portland Square, London. (Westminster Abbey Website; Burial Commemorations) Elizabeth was born in 1703, maybe 1704—an only child, which likely means “only surviving child.” Her mother died in 1711, probably taken by one of the freewheeling diseases that jacked the death rate—for Black and white people alike—twice as high as the birth rate. Only slightly less probable causes of death: pirates. Maroons. Slave revolt. So many ways to die young in the Caribbean, even among the unimaginably wealthy and privileged. Elizabeth’s father William was a cane planter. He owned hundreds of sugar-producing acres stocked with hundreds of enslaved workers. At sixteen, Elizabeth married James Lawes. James’s father Nicholas, Governor of Jamaica, was even richer; he had a way of marrying (and surviving) widows of other rich men. Governor Lawes owned more land, enslaved more people, and was apparently more interested in distinguishing himself in public affairs than Elizabeth’s father. Maybe the only plantation family richer than the Gibbonses and Laweses: the neighboring Beckfords. Soon after marrying, Elizabeth commissioned a prestigious London sculptor to craft a memorial for her mother. I have never been there, but by all reports the plaque is still set in Halfway Tree Church near Kingston, in a parish they called Vere: Near this place lies intern’d with her parents, &c., the body of Mrs. Deborah Gibbons, wife to Willm. Gibbons, Esq., and daughter of John Favell, Esq., of ye county of York, who departed this life the 20th of July, 1711, in the 29th year of her age. To summ up her character in brief she was one of the best of women and a most pious Christian. She left only one daughter, who married the Honble. James Lawes, eldest son of Sir N. S. Lawes, Kt., Governor of this island, who in honour to the memory of so good a parent erected this monument to her. Here we see Elizabeth, the “Queen of Hell,” enshrining her mother’s pious Christianity. A trope? The sweetest phrase: “… one of the best of women …” but what did this mean to the daughter who had lost her too soon to know her? When James died, thirteen years after their wedding, Elizabeth imported another memorial—same sculptor, a prestige move—to the same church. The bust of James is puckish and lifelike. The inscription is in Latin, which I don’t read, but I’ve seen this translation: Nearby are placed the remains of the Honourable James Lawes: he was the first-born son of Sir Nicholas Lawes, the Governor of this Island, by his wife Susannah Temple: He married Elizabeth, the only daughter and heiress of William Gibbons, Esq; then in early manhood, when barely thirty-six years of age, he obtained almost the highest position of distinction among his countrymen, being appointed Lieutenant Governor by Royal warrant; but before he entered on his duties, in the prime of life—alas—he died on 4th January 1733. In him we lose an upright and honoured citizen, a faithful and industrious friend, and most affectionate husband, a man who was just and kind to all, and distinguished by the lustre of genuine religion. His wife, who survived him, had this monument erected to perpetuate the memory of a beloved husband. Alas. James Lawes, in life, was a pain in the butt among all and sundry—the entitled oldest son of one of Jamaica’s prominent planters, the governor’s obnoxious kid (we know his kind). James scooted to London after his father died, cleaned up his act enough to return with the crown’s appointment. Back on the island, however, he was no “upright and honoured citizen.” And by all-accounts-not-Elizabeth’s he was neither just nor kind. Genuine religious lustre: zero. But the last sentence of the epitaph may be accurate: his widowed, childless wife Elizabeth appears to have truly loved him—an obscure signal that she also harbored a trickster heart. Not yet thirty, Elizabeth Gibbons Lawes was now among the very wealthiest human beings in the western hemisphere. Heiress of her father’s Jamaican estates and her husband’s formidable holdings, she was richer—and better-landed—than many English royals. James, her dead husband, carried small-time noble blood through his mother’s line, thanks to his common father who had married the “relict” Susannah Temple. Elizabeth’s ancestry is obscure on both sides—the Gibbonses and Favells likely rose from the merchant/esquire class, or military, peppered with buccaneers. A New World pattern: upstart creole heirs entrusting vast properties (and the people enslaved on them) to ruthless hired managers. Raised rugged, isolated, accustomed to violent power and obscenely rich, the second generations believed they warranted royal prestige as they returned to the motherland. Third, fourth, fifth generations—or second, third, and fourth families—often slid back into rough poverty, inheriting only resentments. Elizabeth makes no mark on extant records for nine years after her young husband’s death. Did she hang around Vere, learning the sugar business and the enterprise of enslavement? Did she party in Kingston and Spanish Town, attended by human beings she called her property? Did she, like her Jamaican neighbors the Beckfords, bring Black “servants” to England to pad the shock of return? She appears in London at age thirtyeight, on record for her second marriage: Christmas day 1742, to the eighth Earl of Home. I am no Anglophile. I had to look this up: an earl is the British equivalent of a count. The Earl of Home was several years younger than Elizabeth, dissolute, and probably homosexual (which was not nearly as rare as my ancestor-searching Mormon relatives wish to acknowledge. Not nearly). Elizabeth bailed her prodigal earl out of some hefty bankruptcies, he abandoned her a year after the marriage, her wealth was barely dented, and now she was a countess. Deal. Aaaand she goes invisible again for thirty years, then blazes up in 1773 to contract James Wyatt, a trendy London architect, to design and build her party house on Portland Square. Reminder: Elizabeth was sixty-seven. Notoriously drunk, dirty, and sporadic, Wyatt erected the outer structure and a few ornate ceilings before Elizabeth got fed up and fired him, hiring his rival Robert Adam to redesign and finish. Adam’s takeover-makeover produced one of the most legendary and enduring interiors of the Georgian era; beyond its wide but unostentatious front façade, the entry opens into multiple stories of elaborate and spacious gathering rooms, bound by a central staircase spiraling under a glass dome. Skylight reaches nearly every chamber. A covered garden extends beyond the rear exit. Although there were sleeping quarters, the house was—and remains—a social hall, made to be lit, designed for music, drink (rum I guess), fine food, and rich party animals. For much of the twentieth century, the Home House served as the Courtauld Institute, displaying an offbeat but prestigious art collection. On my first (and probably last) visit to London, as a young wife married to an artist committed to the high truths of the European Enlightenment, I spent a full day in the Countess’s “Pavilion,” although I had no sense of its history or peculiarity. Now the building houses a prestigious private club, frequented by descendants of the original royal revelers. The parties were, by all reports, ragers. Booze. Drugs. Orgies. Costumes. Birthday suits. People came off the streets, out of the palaces, highborn and lowlife. Once, Elizabeth invited a couple of passing Black men in to show the orchestra how to kick up the beat, but they drank themselves to sleep in the kitchen instead. Parties went on for days, one event indistinguishable from the next. The woman was in her seventies. During Elizabeth’s residence, two life-sized, full-body portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland hung on either side of a grand fireplace. A ceiling-high mirror enhanced the grandeur. Thomas Gainsborough was the artist; if you’re not an art history type, orient by recalling that he also painted The Blue Boy and Pinkie . The Cumberland portraits now belong to the Royal Collection Trust and hang in Buckingham Palace—amusing because the couple in their time were notorious for (figuratively at least) farting in the general direction of the king and queen. * * * Henry Frederick, the portrait’s Duke of Cumberland, was King George III’s younger brother, bigly royal but outside the line for the throne. Think Harry, if you must. Anne Luttrell Horton, the portrait’s Duchess of Cumberland, was a widowed Jamaican plantation heiress, in fact James Lawes’ half-sister’s daughter, making her Elizabeth’s half-niece by (long-ago Jamaican) marriage. Elizabeth’s wayback Jamaican sister-in-law had married into the Luttrell family. The Luttrells were surly Irish nobles (also Jamaican planters) committed to social advancement through shameless seduction and/or election rigging and/or vicious personal violence. Hence Anne Luttrell, Elizabeth’s Irish/Jamaican creole niece, widow of some dude named Horton, sprang up at the right moment to become the Duchess of Cumberland. She took to batting her famous eyelashes, flashing her coyest-in-all England green eyes at dumb-as-dirt playboy Henry, the king’s brother. The Luttrells campaigned (blackmailed) for marriage. Hard. Sure, the old serial groom, Governor Lawes, had labored to give his descendants noble blood, but his granddaughter was out of her league. By royal reckoning, Duke Henry was succumbing to a rank commoner, a confoundingly rich creole hick. The creoles won. King George III was furious, inspiring the newlywed Duke and Duchess to take a long honeymoon on the continent. But they returned to their fine estate after long enough, mere walking distance from Buckingham Palace. They played cool uncle and aunt to the Prince of Wales, who liked sneaking over to party like only the Jamaicans could. After yet another brother married a commoner, King George decreed that no member of the royal family could marry without the monarch’s permission, and certainly could not marry a nonroyal. * * * William Beckford (the father of the WB who called Elizabeth the Queen of Hell), possibly the very richest of the Jamaican rich, had also relocated to London, holding various offices—including, over time, Sheriff of London and even Mayor. Despite the high functions, Daddy Beckford was a colorful guy, leaning with the “radicals” who liked to worry the legitimate gentry. Little William Thomas Beckford, next generation, sole heir of his father’s mad fortune, was about thirteen when Elizabeth launched her Portland Square project. This William, a gorgeous, flamboyant Peter Pan (Google his portrait), eventually left England for the continent, hiding out after a scandalous and super kinky (and criminal, even for him) affair with a seriously underaged and even prettier boy. In comfortable exile, young Beckford wrote a dense proto-romantic novel rife with artsy erotic adventures called Vathek, which no one ought to endure, not because it’s perverse (adorned with sensually compliant dwarves and a sexy “black eunuch” who manages Vathek’s harem of “females,” etc.) but because it’s a ponderous “gothick” fundamentally hostile to the twenty-first-century attention span. It’s worth grazing though: his depictions of exotic pleasure palaces seem to be inspired by Elizabeth’s Portland joint. And, possibly, Jamaican fantasies. Beckford made his own attempts at an architectural legacy with the “help” of the same James Wyatt Elizabeth fired. All of this may have spiraled down like Elizabeth’s skylit staircase to birth Coleridge’s In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / a stately pleasure dome decree … * * * Some sources report that the Cumberlands commissioned Gainsborough to paint the matching portraits, and then gave them as a remarkable (and self-aggrandizing) gift to Elizabeth, prompting her to build a stately pleasure dome to house them. Other sources say that Elizabeth commissioned the paintings to flatter the Cumberlands, strengthening her ambivalent and ornery link to established prestige. The portraits are stunning: Gainsborough’s high rococo style, feathery fabric strokes, matching mid-body ferric reds. The artist overcomes the duke’s buggy eyes and wigged pointy head by sussing Henry’s integral sex-money-titular swagger. He fingers royal gold hanging from his neck, reminding all that not even the king can deny the facts of true lineage. Gainsborough portrays Anne somewhere between distinguished lady and incorrigible coquette—drooping lashes over vivid eyes, an almost-smile offering and withholding. The Duchess, like all her family and apparently like the regulars who partied in the court of the Queen of Hell, cursed like a pirate: Lady Anne Fordyce is reported as saying that after hearing (the Countess) talk one ought to go home and wash one’s ears; Lady Louisa Stuart called her vulgar, noisy, indelicate, and intrepid but not, she adds, accused of gallantry. (Historian Lesley Lewis, 1967) * * * It’s appealing, cowgirl American that I believe I am, to root for these appalling white Jamaicans as the feisty underdogs, returned from the rough West to mimic and mock the arrogant royals. Guess I inherited a New World urge to poke self-important folks in the eye with a sharp stick. However. Back when it was legal to assign college students to read words that challenged their worldviews, I spent a week trying to guide my sophomore composition students through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations . A bright young woman— certainly the finest natural writer of the group—said, “Well, if I had any ancestors who owned slaves, I guess I’d feel kind of responsible. But I don’t, so don’t see how this is my problem.” I formulated some responses, but, really, she’d just excused the class. They were done, grateful that she’d stated the obvious. On the train home I admitted to myself that, for all my righteous attitudes about race and history, I too was happy that I had no slaveholding forbears. Not literally, anyway. * * * My down-home Idaho mother knows little of her own maternal ancestry because her mother died very young, at thirty-three. My mom is a sincere and unpretentious Latter-Day Saint, and, maybe due to this early loss, she’s always eager for her academic daughters to retrieve genealogical information about “who we are.” I bailed on my mother’s religion—any religion—long ago, but I like research and I do narrative, so I’m happy to help appease her passion for filling in names and dates on her family group sheets. I try to dig around, find context, pull up information to enrich the characters for her. So far, it’s felt reasonably safe. What even in my straight-from-Europe dirtpoor-immigrant ancestry could foist the brutalities of Jamaican and Barbadian slavery on us? So, tracking the (heavily obfuscated) generations of her Grandma Gibbons’s family was —I don’t know. Should it really be such a shock? Gibbonses proliferated on both islands; my theory now is that Elizabeth’s father had a second family on Barbados— possibly half-siblings she never discovered. But every guess is raw speculation: who even were they? Any of them? They’re no good for fiction; I can’t imagine them well enough to fabricate. Not like I have no evil in me, to help me “relate” to them. I have plenty. It’s just not a world I can conjure. My mom isn’t interested in following this family thread any further. This is not who we are. Maybe that tells me plenty. She’s eighty-eight. It’s not my call to badger her—and, anyway, whatever’s left of those people, they’re already in me as much as they’re in her. If her religion is as true as she hopes, she’ll have to chat those people up in the next life. I’ll leave it to them. * * * But here’s an eighteenth-century Barbadian plantation song, written down (with musical notations) by someone who thought it mattered enough to transcribe as he stood to listen to enslaved people “chanting” in the fields: Massa buy me he won’t killa me Massa buy me he won’t killa me Oh Massa buy me he won’t killa me O ‘for he killa me he ship me regulaw For I live with a bad man oh la for I live with a bad man Obudda bo For I live with a bad man oh la ‘for I would go to the Riverside Regulaw Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link “The Queen of Hell” is a recent foray into ancestral tracing, with problematic implications. Back Back to Current Issue .................................................................................................................................................................................... KARIN ANDERSON I s the author of the novels Before Us Like a Land of Dreams , What Falls Away , and Things I Didn’t Do (forthcoming in 2025), published by Torrey House Press. She hails from the Great Basin. karinandersonauthor.com Next - Ignatius by Karin Anderson Next

klipschutz < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Hymn for Lorca klipschutz 00:00 / 00:37 Hymn for Lorca klipschutz When the sun shines I do not dream of Revolution There is a naked girl in the sand singing Now the clouds have swallowed her and the streets are in chaos Sad guitars are gleaming swords— As we storm the Palace I awake Her shy tongue is restless as it darts from mouth to mouth from revolution to revolution. "Hymn for Lorca" was previously published in The Erection of Scaffolding for the Re-Painting of Heaven by the Lowest Bidder (1985). Written when I wasn’t yet 20. (I am 68 now.) I was channeling the man himself, or thought I was. The ending surprised me, still does. A revolution is a breakthrough, no? Previous klipschutz (pen name of Kurt Lipschutz ) is a poet, songwriter, editor, and occasional literary journalist. He has been based in San Francisco since 1980. klipschutz.com Next

Lauren Camp < Back to Breakthroughs Issue Poem Approaching Four Past Tenses Lauren Camp 00:00 / 01:53 Poem Approaching Four Past Tenses Lauren Camp Later agrees to be the change of subject. On Thursday a fever adored him and then it didn’t, and now it does again. His soft bit of electric hair. His erasing. Two days more and fluid is swimming his lungs. How still we are. Invisible in the soon or very soon. The day nurse gets up, props him up, and up and up in bed, and hums and nests a white towel across him. Obedient oxygen accedes through a tube as a current and I want him to sing to me. A riff from Sinatra, a prayer. His breathing lands in even froth, the whoosh and pecking. I understand it. Or how long I have been making a life in his shadow. First day of spring and brooches of green. I speak close and loose, all calm exits versed beyond our past knots which still halve my mind. I make up the difference of his loyal not talking. I daughter. I squirm. I shape words into harmonics and within each scale a proverb. I watch his hands gesture. His mouth doesn’t know questions. Here I am watching some edge of being apart to being farther apart. A hot pink sun comes in urgent to land. It’s interesting to me to look through my drafts of this poem that deal with the end of a life, the actual final days or moments. I changed the title four times, looking to recalibrate my thinking. The poem went through a number of other revisions, too, though “past tense” was there from the start. At one point, I got more interested in exploring that term, and discovered there are four past tenses. This gave me a new way to consider a subject so close to my heart. Previous LAUREN CAMP serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of eight books of poetry. www.laurencamp.com Next

Andrea Hollander < Back to Breakthroughs Issue It's Okay Andrea Hollander 00:00 / 02:20 It's Okay Andrea Hollander In so many films, a family gathers around the bed of the one near death, hoping the far-off son will get there in time. The family doctor stands at the foot in his three-piece suit. If the film takes place early in the last century, maybe a new, black Ford pulls up in the gravel drive. We in the theater, buckets of popcorn in our laps, hear the crunch of its tires. Such a scene I never privileged firsthand, my 51-year-old mother having died alone just after dawn in that pale green room on the third floor of the hospital, where I drove every day to be with her those last weeks. I want to imagine a flurry of birdsong that morning, a family of starlings or finches in the huge cottonwood near the entrance to the hospital, where I would stop briefly beneath its wide canopy of shade. Fifty years later, I wonder if that tree is still there. It could be, couldn’t it? I know the offspring of starlings and finches return to the same tree generation after generation to birth their young. Couldn’t they—like a scene in a movie— have been singing that morning just as the sun came up? And couldn’t my mother have heard in their song the voices of us humans —her humans—as though my father, brother, and I had drawn ourselves around her bed, urging her, "It’s okay, you can let go now, it’s okay." This relatively new, unpublished poem addresses the deep sadness I've felt since my mother's death at 51 in 1970. While I've written about her numerous times since then, none of my previous poems addresses this particular irrepressible image of my mother alone at the very end of her life. For me, the breakthrough to the creation of "It's Okay" came when I was at home watching an all-too-familiar scene in a British film. I actually paused the film, pulled out my notebook and penned the poem's first draft. Previous ANDREA HOLLANDER is the author of six full-length poetry collections and has received number awards, including two Pushcart Prizes for poetry and literary non-fiction, and two fellowships from the National Endownment for the Arts. Next

Flag (2024) by M. L. Liebler An American flag Rippling savagely In the late winter sun. The stripes waving On and on. A revolutionary Handshake with the cold wind. This flag’s fist is the future, Its shoulder turned Towards the past. What do I have In common with that? A piece of cloth? What Can I do for that Which it stands? I am as indifferent As I was as a young boy. My early years coming back On a raging northern wind. It was my Cub Scout Three finger salute To all the injustice, The racism, And the mean Spirit that blows As aloft as yesterday’s Symbol without a home. A man without a country. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This poem and the one that follows, though written almost 35 years apart, both highlight the distress I have had with America since Vietnam. Now, in the 21st century we enter another dark chapter in American history. Many Americans seem happy to vote for a man who has 90 felony charges, a rape conviction, stole Top Secret documents from the American government and bilked the country out of $400+ million dollars in unpaid taxes. Moreover, the Supreme Court has granted immunity for all crimes by presidents in and out of office. This means that all the soldiers who gave their lives for the freedom in the USA have done so for nothing. We now have a dictator and a king. This November was likely our last election, and we will see more of our rights and freedoms taken away by authoritarians disguised as a “Christians.” If this weren’t so tragic, it would seem unbelievable. It couldn’t happen here! Ultimately, my feelings reverted to how I felt as a pre-teen in America. I thought we had moved past this, but we are returning to the 1950s. Young people will have to fight the old culture and political wars again. I hope they have learned something from our past struggles. .................................................................................................................................................................................... M.L. LIEBLER is a Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist and arts organizer. His 15 books and chapbooks include Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream (Wayne State University Press, 2008) which was awarded The Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence and The American Indie Book Award for 2009. A Wayne State University Distinguished Scholar, he directs The WSU Humanities Commons and The Detroit Writers' Guild. mlliebler.com Next - Decoration Day by M.L. Liebler Next

A Love for Loneliness by Stacy Julin They were hours I’ve lost track of now. Those you glimpse in dreams but lose in light of morning. Long days on end in the bluish hue. Loneliness sat with me awhile, then laid with me in bed. I let him stay longer each visit, unafraid and even accustomed to the silence he brought as a gift. Like the cold that curled around me from my cracked window, he wrapped around my grief and lived beside me, until we both longed for days when blood was warm. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue "A Love for Loneliness" was published in my chapbook, Visiting Ghosts and Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2018). I am an only child. My parents were wonderful people, but I spent many hours alone. I would read and write, and I developed such a love for books and poetry. I came to treasure my time alone to write stories and poems. I lost my beloved parents as a young adult woman. At that point, writing really gave me peace and a way to express how I felt. This poem is about a complicated relationship with loneliness. .................................................................................................................................................................................... STACY JULIN'S work has been published in Oyster River Pages , Pirene’s Fountain , Sweet Tree Review , Southern Quill , and Word Fountain , and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, A Pebble Thrown in Water (Tiger’s Eye Press, 2010), Visiting Ghosts and Ground (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and Things We Carry (Finishing Line Press, 2024). She lives with her family at the base of the beautiful Wasatch Mountains. Next - Michaelmas by Lisa Bickmore Next

Foley Catheter by Kimberly Johnson I clean its latex length three times a day With kindliest touch, Swipe an alcohol swatch From the tender skin at the tip of him Down the lumen To the drainage bag I change Each day and flush with vinegar. When I vowed for worse Unwitting did I wed this Something-other-than-a-husband, jumble Of exposed plumbing And euphemism. Fumble I through my nurse’s functions, upended From the spare bed By his every midnight sound. Unsought inside our grand romantic Intimacy Another intimacy Opens—ruthless and indecent, consuming All our hiddenmosts. In a body, immodest Such hunger we sometimes call tumor; In a marriage It’s cherish. From the Latin for cost. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to First Issue Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 15, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets. From Fatal (Persea Books, 2022). I’m not sure this poem qualifies as a “favorite,” frankly, because it deals with such difficult material. But I think that it’s effective in its willingness to reflect honestly on the combination of tenderness and brutality that eventuates when we choose to enter into relationship with others. Love brings along with it the opportunity, the promise, of one party seeing the other into their death, bearing witness to the horrors of that inevitability as well as the intimacies it produces. .................................................................................................................................................................................... KIMBERLY JOHNSON is a poet, translator, and literary critic. Her work has appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, Slate , The Iowa Review , PMLA , and Modern Philology . Recipient of grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Utah Arts Council, and the Mellon Foundation, Johnson holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. Kimberly Johnson lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. kimberly-johnson.com Next - Among by Cynthia Hardy Next