Sunday Morning Early by David Romtvedt My daughter and I paddle red kayaks across the lake. Pulling hard, we slip easily through the water. Far from either shore, it hits me that my daughter is a young woman and suddenly everything is a metaphor for how short a time we are granted: the red boats on the blue-black water, the russet and gold of late summer’s grasses, the empty sky. We stop and listen to the stillness. I say, “It’s Sunday, and here we are in the church of the out of doors,” then wish I’d kept quiet. That’s the trick in life— learning to leave well enough alone. Our boats drift to where the chirring of grasshoppers reaches us from the rocky hills. A clap of thunder. I want to say something truer than I love you. I want my daughter to know that, through her, I live a life that was closed to me. I paddle up, lean out, and touch her hand. I start to speak then stop. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “Sunday Morning Early” was published in The Sun magazine and in Dilemmas of the Angels (LSU Press, 2017), and was included in the Worthington, Ohio Public Library’s Garden Poetry Path public art project. I recently heard a prominent performance artist say that no great art has ever been produced from happiness. This statement made me feel deeply unhappy. I’ve spent many years working to write poems that will carry social meaning, offer pleasure, lead us to think more deeply, and explore those parts of our lives that give satisfaction, that is, happiness. I believe that great art can arise from happiness. As to whether or not the poem I’ve sent is great art I can’t say, but it is the result of happiness. .................................................................................................................................................................................... DAVID ROMTVEDT'S latest book of poetry is No Way: An American Tao Te Ching (LSU Press, 2021). He was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in southern Arizona. He graduated from Reed College, with a BA in American Studies and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a graduate fellow in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. After serving in the Peace Corps in Zaïre (currently Congo) and Rwanda and on a sister city construction project in Jalapa, Nicaragua, he worked as the folk arts program manager for the Centrum Foundation. He has worked as a carpenter, tree planter, truck driver, bookstore clerk, assembly line operative, letter carrier, blueberry picker, ranch hand, and college professor. A recipient of two NEA fellowships, The Pushcart Prize , and the Wyoming Governor's Arts Award, Romtvedt served as the poet laureate of the state of Wyoming from 2003 to 2011. davidromtvedt.com Next - Peach by Jennifer Tonge Next

Frozen January Mornings by Robert Cooperman When acquaintances call me, “Robert,” I correct them with, It’s Bob. “Robert” still conjures frozen January mornings, Mom shouting, Robert, get up, you’ll be late for school! Her voice, fingernails screeching down the blackboard of my spine, the bedroom window milk-crusted with frost, the bare floor shooting ice-tentacles up from the frozen lake of Dante’s Inferno , and all I wanted was to lie warm in bed. Fat chance! If her first volley failed, the second was louder, closer, threatening she’d rip the comforter off: no choice but to bolt up and throw on clothes. And where was Jeff in all this commotion? In the next twin bed, young enough not to be bothered with school yet, and possessing the rare talent of sleeping through even Mom’s volcanic summons. At least she kissed me on the cheek, to let me know she loved me, as she handed me my brown bag lunch, expelling me from this brief Eden. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Right now this is my favorite unpublished poem; it makes me smile, now, to remember those mornings, which were such hell back then. .................................................................................................................................................................................... ROBERT COOPERMAN "a Brooklyn boy, right down to a B.A. at Brooklyn College," moved to Denver in 1974 to study in the joint Literature-Creative Writing Program, and received a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and 19th Century British Literature. He has taught English at the University of Georgia and Bowling Green State University, in Ohio. He lives in Denver with his wife Beth. His volume In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains (Western Reflections Pub. Co., 1999) won the Colorado Book Award in 2000. Next - Pilgrims in Argyll by Joseph Riddle Next

First Sighting Most people love butterflies and hate moth , he said. But moths are more interesting – more engaging. —Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs by Trish Hopkinson It must have been something about Monday or the dry summer evening, making me unsure of whether I’m bird or moth but feeling small, rolling out my tongue into the center of a honeysuckle blossom, flapping frenetically to hover against sunset’s breeze and hold my space in front of the flower. A hummingbird twice my size trills by toward an imposter, a red glass feeder on the porch. Funny how the humans look up and smile at the birds, watching softly but when they spot me, they squint and stare confused, grab their cameras, try to catch my likeness held in stillness—the lifelessness of my orange and gray wings against the backdrop of a high desert. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This poem is my current favorite unpublished poem because it reminds me of a specific moment when my husband first spotted a hummingbird moth and called to me to come see it. We had just recently moved to western Colorado, so I have fond memories of that time and of my husband always being so attentive that I never missed an opportunity to become inspired. I also get a kick out of the epigraph. .................................................................................................................................................................................... TRISH HOPKINSON is the author of A Godless Ascends (Lithic Press, 2024) and an advocate for the literary arts. You can find her online at SelfishPoet.com and in western Colorado where she runs the regional poetry group Rock Canyon Poets. Next - Waiting Around by Trish Hopkinson Next

THE NOMAD is a nonprofit literary magazine dedicated to writers exploring journeys through a changing world. First Issue ................................................................................................................................................................................. "FAVORITES" - 2024/2025 Siren - poem The Lure of the Unfinished -poem ..................................................................................... by Amy Gerstler Reading -poem Gradual - poem ..................................................................................... by Natasha Sajé You Oughta Know - poem The Black Flies of Home - poem ..................................................................................... by Brock Dethier Fireflies - poem Automotive - poem ..................................................................................... by Kevin Prufer 11/8/16 - poem Tuesday Night Bieber - essay ..................................................................................... by Joe Sacksteder Hiroshi Tanahashi - poem Pissing Toward the Sky - poem ..................................................................................... by Jerry VanIeperen Alien Exchange Program - Host Application - fiction A Twist of the Vine - memoir ..................................................................................... by Naomi Ulsted Something To Surrender To - poem Bone Suite - poem ..................................................................................... by Austin Holmes Village Fiddle - poem New Orleans Villanelle - poem ..................................................................................... by Ken Waldman I'd Rather be Influenced - poem Before Thirty - poem ..................................................................................... by Patrick Ramsay Still Life with Mormons in My Living Room - poem Sinatra, Sinatra - poem ..................................................................................... by Paul Fericano Sacrament Meeting Started the Three Hours of Church on Sunday - poem Teddy Thompson Croons Leonard Cohen - poem ..................................................................................... by Natalie Padilla Young The Worrier - poem Junk Email - poem ..................................................................................... by Nancy Takacs Belief - poem Without Question I Am - poem ..................................................................................... by Mike White The First Time I Saw Snow - poem The Little House: Crystal City, Texas - poem ..................................................................................... by Jeff Talmadge The Dream - poem July - poem ..................................................................................... by Shanan Ballam Missa Brevis - poem Foley Catheter - poem ..................................................................................... by Kimberly Johnson Among - poem Insomnia - poem ..................................................................................... by Cynthia Hardy Mākara Beach - poem On the Disembarkation of Sergeant Nathan E. Cook in Auckland, 13 June 1942 - poem ..................................................................................... by Michael McLane

The Glazier by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky All through the Depression he worked in the barn, surrounded by glass shards from panes he sanded and pressed into wooden frames for neighbors who brought him their broken things. His thick-gloved fingers scraped putty into grooves, carefully fit sharp edges into place, then brushed the wood with lead paint to let dry near the boiler—a furnace on the barn’s gravel floor we were too afraid to start up, after buying the house on the same quarter-acre sixty years later, the realtor’s chatter distracting us from cracked plaster, uneven floors. One night a nameless stray who lived in the loft slid through a tear in our bedroom’s screened door— our legs sprawled, sheets shoved away for the heat— and lunged onto my husband’s thigh, kneaded her claws into his skin. In my half-dream I moaned, thinking an alien creature was howling through our open window. She dug claws in deeper, and he yowled, tried to push her off as she nimbly leapt down, scrambled out. We couldn’t stop laughing, didn’t sleep for the rest of the night but talked until dawn when lilacs wafted through the screen on a morning breeze, and our dog nudged to be let out to the yard of our first garden, freshly planted rose bushes, maple trees that would shade the swing set and the barn. The stray slept in the loft for years until one winter she disappeared. We rattled the food bag in snow, called the name we gave her, returned to the bedroom, finally knowing what we had lost. I still find glints poking through soil hard-packed by a century of footsteps. Sometimes I think I see him too, beneath rafters, cutting and beveling to feel transparent weight in his hands. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue The first house my husband and I bought was a hundred-year-old house with an original old barn in the backyard—one of the last barns in Cedar City, Utah. The man who built the house was a glazier who worked in the barn. This poem captures the feeling of the first few years in our new home, and what it is like to live in a place informed by the past while not always appreciating what you have in the present. It has been a long-time favorite searching for a home. .................................................................................................................................................................................... DANIELLE BEAZER DUBRASKY is the author of Drift Migration (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021). She teaches Creative Writing at Southern Utah University and directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values. danielledubrasky.com Next - Vespers in the Great Basin by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky Next

For Hank Williams No matter how I struggle and strive I'll never get out of this world alive. by Lisa Bickmore In the back seat of a Cadillac, bloated, white boots, white hat, blue suit, all colored with pain of every stripe, a bottle of bonded bourbon in hand, riding on one shot of morphine and then, in Knoxville, two more: they’d driven north into ice and weather on the cusp of a new year, aiming to make recompense for everything: someone once described his drunkenness as shambolic, and it took misunderstanding the word twice—first Shambhala, then shaman—until I got it: shambles, as in flesh shelf, precisely that Cadillac’s back seat, that literal falling apart, as the teenage driver sped on and on for the sake of the contract and its penalty clause, right up to Oak Hill hospital, West Virginia, where two doctors pronounced him dead: he’d been booted from the Opry to the Hayride, and first one, then a second marriage gone wrong, the body bad from the start, spina bifida occulta predicting the entire pandemonium: now I’m listening to the last song he ever charted, listening hard for the hurt, and the will to thwart it, redeem the losses in a voice so brash, and brother if I stepped on a worn-out dime I bet a nickel I could tell you if it was heads or tails, thin shoe sole figuring how every harm marked the body: just a skinny twenty-nine when he went, but this song—the cool chin up as the fiddle scrapes, the beat squares, guitar slides liquid—all telling how this vernacular requires a wreck. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This poem began as a question—I read a piece about Hank Williams that used the word 'shambolic' to describe his drinking. I love when a query leads me into a poem, in this case hearing certain rhymes of meaning that ended up being false, which also led me into learning about Hank Williams and his short, tragic life, and his prodigious songwriting and recording. I have other poems that have had similar origin stories—an assumption or belief that proved to be false, but opened a door into other words and metaphors and stories. I love poems about music and musicians, too. .................................................................................................................................................................................... LISA BICKMORE is the author of three books of poems and is the publisher of Lightscatter Press . She is the poet laureate of the state of Utah. lisabickmore.com Next - The Other Man is Always French by Richard Peabody Next

Vespers in the Great Basin by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky Bald eagles gather among the elms with soft whistles as they glide over snowfields of thistle and jackrabbits, settle on branches, umber wings folded against their bodies, albino heads tucked from the wind. Each winter we watch them fly across the valley to this empty ranch, stretch their wingspan beyond six feet, their darkness growing in sunset until Venus appears in the west. Driving home, your right hand fumbles with my fingers as if with a rosary, while your left keeps the wheel in check. Out the window I see a brown quarter horse lean against a fence in snow, haunches turned to the wind. Our silence meets the coldness that blows in through door jambs, the chimney. Next January when mountain peaks glisten beneath miters of ice we’ll return to the elms as eagles gather across the river and the riven valley—they’ll hunch together on racked branches of winter trees, still believing they can keep the cold at bay. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue First published in Sugar House Review , and Drift Migration (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021). This poem describes how bald eagles winter over in the valley west of Cedar City, Utah, while also referring to a marriage. In this poem, I like how I paid attention to both the imagery and the sound. I admire poetry lines that have “echoes” of sound patterns, such as alliteration or assonance. In the first two lines, such echoes exist in the words “whistles,” “glides,” “snow fields,” “thistle.” I worked hard on the fifth and sixth lines to create a sense of expansion that leads into constriction as the eagles’ bodies become too dark to see in the sunset. .................................................................................................................................................................................... DANIELLE BEAZER DUBRASKY is the author of Drift Migration (Ashland Poetry Press, 2021). She teaches Creative Writing at Southern Utah University and directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values. danielledubrasky.com Next - Kayaking on Hebron Lake by Marjorie Maddox Next

Predictions of the Past by Alison Moore Maybe I need an excuse to come here. The dog needs a walk, and during the day nothing is half as haunted as night. There’s evidence— the dead have been reading, not nineteenth century novels not personal letters or sweepstakes rules, but the Northwest Arkansas Times. The pages are all over the graves. Not the section called “Living,” not the horoscopes, certainly not the future which no longer concerns them, but the wants ads, all those vacancies: rooms with views, sublets, yard sales, must-sees and have-to-sells. Possibilities of one sort or another. Are they planning on coming back? Or simply curious about the places that have opened up now that they are gone? I wonder— is there such a thing as the Reincarnation Times , a deity writing the personals: Middle-aged couple in Des Moines looking for eleventh-hour child, orphans a plus all expenses paid. Lonely heart takes a beating, apply within. My dog runs among the papers, spooked by the way they ride the wind, rustle and snag on the tilting wire stands that once held ribbons and wreaths. She flushes a cardinal and it lands in a nearby cedar, a red gash in the wood, watching. There are families here, but none of mine. My father, who art in Virginia, a drifter reduced to ash. I threw him to the wind five years ago, from a rusted bridge over the Rappahannock. He’s drifting, still. He won’t stay put, certainly not beneath the stone that bears his name in Orlean, in the family plot next to his sister, the one he didn’t mean to kill. He was nine, lifting his father’s shotgun. She was seven, and simply walking up the stairs when the bullet met her, one step below the landing. And so—is this why I’m here— to summon my father, former journalist, to a cemetery in Arkansas to read the paper? He won’t look for a job; he never did. For once he’s not going to comment on the headlines, give a lecture about the whims of the gods, the cost of hubris, or the Real Reasons for the War Between the States. He will concern himself, finally, with what he might need, beginning with minutiae, the useless and marvelous he can now afford: Hermes Typewriter (letter X sticks, otherwise excellent condition ). Printing press (needs work, runs good ). Trunk of Confederate Bonds (like new! ) And best of all, a 1912 Remington rifle (never fired). He can barely bring himself to lift it. It’s heavy and I have to help. It’s all right , I say, I’m right behind you. He closes his eyes, squeezes the trigger. The sound that should have been thunder is no more than a harmless click, the most beautiful of vacancies, the empty chamber. No child will fall. The bird watches from the tree, a red ribbon with wings, ready to disappear. It won’t. It stirs; it stays, sings. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “Predictions of the Past,” was awarded an Honorable Mention by the Patterson Review for the Allen Ginsberg Prize. The title came from a billboard in North Carolina advertising a palm reader who offered “Predictions of the Future and the Past.” It struck me as ironic and perfect. We think we can predict the past with some certainty, but what if we could revise it? This poem is ultimately about a family tragedy. My father, as a boy, accidentally killed his younger sister with a double-barrel shotgun. He never spoke of it. So I did. .................................................................................................................................................................................... ALISON MOORE is s a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and a former Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in fiction, and tours with the multi-media humanities program, "Riders on the Orphan Train" which she co-created with the musician Phil Lancaster. ridersontheorphantrain.org Next - The Queen of Hell by Karin Anderson Next

The Problem with Mrs. P by Michael Shay First problem: nobody was home to help. Not her two daughters, off to school. Not her husband Robbie, who hadn’t been home for weeks, probably right this minute at that whore Gloria’s house. Second problem: she was seven months pregnant and bleeding like crazy. She pressed a cream-colored towel against her crotch; it bloomed with a red chrysanthemum of her own blood. She stood in the bathroom doorway, eyes sparking, knees shaking. Third problem: her damn husband had the car. Not that she was in any shape to make the seven-mile drive into Cheyenne, ten if you factored in the hospital which was downtown. Fourth problem: the telephone was dead, thanks to Robbie not paying the bills like he was supposed to. She had her own prepaid cell phone with a few minutes still left on it. But it was downstairs on the kitchen table. Just the thought of negotiating the stairs brought a throbbing to her abdomen. Fifth problem, or maybe it was the first: she and her baby boy might be dying. She tried to bite back the tears, but they came anyway, raining down on her nightie, the blood-soaked towel, the tiled bathroom floor. It was all so ridiculous. Why had this happened? She should have known better than to let him back into her life, even if it had only been two weeks. He came back to her, all humble and lovey-dovey. She took him back into her bed and then he was gone again and there she was, pregnant again, standing in the doorway, bleeding to death. Her main problem was getting down the stairs to the phone. Clinging to the wall, she made her way out of the bathroom and down the carpeted hallway. To the left was her daughter Kelly’s room. She grabbed the doorknob of the hall closet as she slowly passed. There were only twelve stairs but it looked like a million. Maybe if she just sat on the top step, and bumped her way down….She sat, a good thing since a swoon was coming on. She waited for her head to clear, then carefully slipped down the carpet onto the second step, then the third one. On the next one, her left foot caught the hem of her wool nightgown. She fell back, then felt herself slipping down the stairway; her feet, her butt, her shoulders bumping with each step; wincing in pain as the vibrations traveled to her belly. When she came to a stop, she noticed the quiet of the house. There was some sort of noise coming from outside the front door. She didn’t know what it was but she stood and, after letting her head clear momentarily, stepped slowly through the sparsely furnished living room toward the door. Which led to the morning’s sixth problem: she passed out, sliding to the floor like a wet sack. * * * Mrs. P! Mrs. P! She opened her eyes. A big hairy head swam in front of her. Maybe she was dreaming. Mrs. P! Mrs. P! It was the big head’s voice. For a minute she thought it was Robbie but her husband was thin and had a buzzcut in keeping with his role as a punk musician on the make. Who was it? And where was she? For a minute, she hoped she was safe in bed. But then she felt the rough carpet under her, the stickiness between her legs. There was a big hand on her shoulder, shaking gently. Mrs. P! The hairy head’s voice again. She wanted to say: My name is Liz, short for Elizabeth, and not Mrs. P, short for Politazzaro, Robbie’s last name which he had hung on her, presumably forever, and which everyone seemed to want to use in the abbreviated form, making her seem old before her time. She could see the man now. It was Big Ed, her landlord’s goofy son. The Retard, Robbie called him, as if he had a right to call anybody that. Big Ed was a lumbering overgrown kid, slow, who probably had a birth defect or something. But, last summer, he had been dedicated to mowing the weeds that passed for their lawn. That winter, he had pursued the snow with a vengeance. He unclogged toilets and hauled the trash. The girls had been afraid of him at first. Six-foot-five if he was an inch, and built like one of those no-neck linemen you see on NFL football. And that hair, a mass of wavy red curls that framed that moon face of his. But one summer afternoon he came over driving the tractor with the haywagon attached. He asked the girls if they wanted a ride and they said yes and they tooled around the property as she watched from the kitchen window. A few hours later the girls came in screaming, waving something that looked like a rope above their heads. Snake! Snake! they yelled, then told her how Big Ed had whacked the head off a rattler with a hoe and skinned it right there on the spot. He gave the girls the skin and the rattles. This is one big freakin’ snake, Mommy , said Kelly, the youngest, sounding just like her father, New York accent and all. Mrs. P? What are you doing here, Ed? Heard you yellin’ while I was shoveling the snow. Was I yelling? He looked puzzled. Somebody was. Call the hospital, Big Ed, she said weakly. I’m bleeding to death. Hospital , Big Ed muttered. It was strange voice that blended a kid’s cadence with the huskiness of a man. She felt his arms slide under her and, next thing she knew, she was being transported through the living room and out into the cold bright winter day. You’re light , he said, pressing her in his arms. Get my towel, Ed , she said. And I need the phone. Don’t have a phone , he replied. Big Jim took it away. Said it was costin’ him an arm and a leg. Big Jim was his father, their landlord, a big fat guy who seemed eternally pissed off at his slow son. Get my cell, she said, motioning back to the house. It’s on the kitchen table. And the towel, Ed, for the blood. I know where the hospital is, he said. I drove Big Jim there. Remember that time the tractor rolled over on him? She didn’t remember and it didn’t matter anyway. Big Ed had plans and there was nothing she could do. Die on the bathroom floor. Die on the way to the hospital. She opened her eyes and saw ice crystals glinting in a blue-drenched sky. She heard the crunch of Big Ed’s boots in the snow. The wind slapped her bare, bloody legs. I’m cold, Ed. Get you in the van and warm it up, he said. They stopped. Ed’s right arm shifted and she heard a door being pulled open. Crud , he said. Gotta move some things around. She could feel his indecision. This might be too much for him. We can still call 9-1-1 on my phone . No need , he said briskly. She felt a tug, then Ed was arranging something on the ground. He put her down on something cold and plastic, then placed a covering over her. Tarp and sleeping bag, he said. My camping stuff. I keep it in the van. Camping? Well, she was getting warm on the snowy ground. She could see Big Ed shove his body in the van’s side door. His shoulders moved like a machine. She had seen this van dozens of times. Usually she heard it first as it came down the county road and into the dusty drive, its rackety Volkswagen clatter floating in the window across the open Wyoming prairie. She had often wondered why he had this old hippie van and not a huge mud-spattered pick-up like his dad. Ed, I can sit up front , she said. We do need to get to the hospital. Take a minute, he said. Got a mattress in here and everything. She wanted to laugh. There was a racket of shifting and moving. Then she was up again, fitting neatly through the van’s open door. She was on the mattress, which was comfortable and didn’t smell, which surprised her. She looked up and saw Big Ed smile as he covered her with the sleeping bag. Hurry, Ed, she said. Please . A look of concern flashed across his face as he slammed the door shut. Another door opened, and she felt the van shift to the driver’s side. Big Ed was on the bus, taking her to the hospital. They would be there soon and all would be well. She wouldn’t die and the baby would be born and she would call him anything except for Robbie and maybe she would get a divorce and go back to work at a grocery store where she used to make pretty good money. Crud . That was Big Ed. What’s the matter? Van won’t start. Don’t worry. I know what’s wrong. So she was going to die? Don’t worry, Mrs. P. This happens all the time. She heard him fumbling around in the front, obviously looking for something. Then he said Ah-ha and she looked up to see him brandishing a foot-long screwdriver. The sun glinted off its metal shaft, giving it the look of a knife. Go ahead, she thought, plunge it right into my heart and get it over with. The van leaped up as it lightened its load. She heard his boots crunch the snow, then a couple of grunts. The van shifted slightly, and she figured he was underneath, groping for some gizmo or another. Then came the dreaded word again—Crud— and after a few grunts and groans, he was back with his head shoved into the driver’s side. Got a problem, he said. Need you to turn the key as I do this. Do what? Bridge the solenoid. What the hell, Ed, she said. I’m bleeding to death here. Hospital , he said. Gotta get the van started. She breathed deeply. She had a tom cat for a husband. Her father abandoned her decades ago. Now her life depended on this dimwit? Men were such worthless creatures. And she was going to give birth to another one? It didn’t make any sense but she would be damned and damned again if she would stay here and die. She wanted to be with her girls. She wanted to be anywhere but here. Mrs. P pushed herself off the mattress. Fireflies danced in front of her eyes. Her big bloated body felt as if it belonged to someone else, or something else, like an African elephant or one of those strange looking sea lions she had seen at the zoo when she was a kid. But she moved, slowly, inching her way out of the van and onto her bare feet in the snow. Where you goin’? asked Big Ed. Inside to call the ambulance. Or walk to town. Anything but this. You can’t. I can. She still was bleeding, that was a fact, but she knew from experience that she wasn’t in labor, which was good, because the last thing she wanted to do was deliver this baby two months early in the snowy yard with only Big Ed for assistance. Although she hadn’t felt any of the baby’s trademark kicks this morning, intuition told her that he still was alive. The house was a hundred feet away and if she could just reach the door and get inside, she could get to her cell phone, call the ambulance, and then take her chances. But those chances were better than the ones she had now. She walked five steps—she was counting each one— before a whole flock of fireflies filled her vision and the house kicked up at a strange angle, flying off into space, leaving her on her side in the snow. * * * She was nineteen —that wasn’t even ten years ago—and home from college for Christmas break when she had met Robbie. He was bass guitarist for the group that was playing at the local bar on New Year’s Eve. She was with her high school girlfriends. They all thought the band guys were hot so they hung around after midnight and bought the band some drinks and at 5 a.m. they found themselves at some dumpy house in Jericho, she and her girlfriends making out with the band guys. Robbie was a good kisser. He wanted more, of course, but she wasn’t that looped and she liked him when he didn’t press her. He even gave her a ride home in the band’s van, startling her mother when she sashayed into the kitchen, carrying her shoes in her hand. I’m in love, she said, which surprised her and made Mom cry. The tear ducts really opened once she learned that Robbie was a rocker with pierced lip and nose. She shared that last part with her mother, just to see if the response would measure up to her expectations. It did. She was two months pregnant when they got married that June. Nobody knew yet, except her mom and maybe one or two of her closest friends. Robbie’s band, The Spectral Losers, played at the reception. The honeymoon was short. Robbie was awake all night banging away at her, even when she was dozing off from the champagne. She shouldn’t have been drinking. Her mom told her to cool it a couple times. She promised that she would quit right after the reception, which she did, except for a couple little sips of wine now and again. The morning after she puked her guts out with morning sickness while Robbie snored away in the motel’s vibrating queen-sized bed. Not a terrific start to their marriage. She and Robbie were split up when Katie was born. She was living with her parents and her mom took care of Katie when she went back to work a few weeks later. She was just getting back on her feet when Robbie came back into her life and she turned up pregnant again. That’s when her mother kicked her out. She and Robbie found an apartment closer to the city, so Robbie could go in nights and play at the clubs and not come home until dawn. She could not believe they were in that apartment for three years. Robbie brought home most of his pay. She was working, although a good chunk of it went to daycare for Katie and Kelly. Still, they were making it. Taking the pill helped put a damper on any more baby-making. Then Robbie came home one day and announced they were moving to Wyoming. She about hit the ceiling. One of Robbie’s friends owned a music store in Cheyenne. He liked the idea of going West. So they had moved cross-country and here she was, bleeding in the snow like some pioneer woman from the olden days. But she wasn’t in the snow anymore. She was moving along on some vehicle that wasn’t the van. She shifted her body and felt the crunch and crackle of something underneath. She opened her eyes to the bright sunlight. Hey! It was Ed’s voice. She pushed up on her elbow. She was stuffed in a sleeping bag, surrounded by a tangle of hay stalks. Weathered gray boards marked the wagon’s periphery. She craned her neck to the front to see the massive frame of big Ed bouncing on the seat of a green tractor. The tractor’s engine had a throaty roar that actually sounded good to her. At least they were moving. Got your cell phone, he yelled. What? Phone. Big Ed jerked a thumb over his right shoulder. She looked down and saw the cheapo black cell phone resting on the dark-green sleeping bag. Her mother had sent her a gift certificate and she had used it to buy this pre-paid cell phone which she kept hidden from Robbie, especially after the regular phone service was cut off. She picked it up. The plastic phone was cold in her hand. She dialed 9-11. It rang twice before a mechanical voice said from somewhere very far away: Your Celluphone pre-paid calling service has expired. Shit , she said. Had there been more minutes on her phone? Or had she just imagined it? What? yelled Big Ed. The computerized female voice said: Dial one if you want to add minutes to your service with your credit card. Fat chance, she muttered. Dial two if you wish to talk to a customer service representative to renew your service. She punched two. A few clicks followed. Then she heard a new voice: All our customer service representatives are busy. Please hold on and one will be with you shortly. Canned music came on the line. She felt like heaving the phone into the prairie. She imagined it sailing over the barbed wire fence and falling into a patch of snow-whipped weeds, right at the feet on those blankeyed black cows she always saw wandering the open fields. But not today. She liked the little phone. It was her only link to the outside world, which was very remote. She suddenly realized why Robbie had moved them so far away from town. She and the girls were isolated, dependent on him. He had the car 90 percent of the time. Got a gig, babe, he would say, then be gone for a week. They would be down to their last crust of bread when he would magically arrive laden with grocery sacks. Junk food, mostly, heavy on donuts and ice cream and chips. His idea of dinner was warming up some macaroni and cheese, maybe cutting up some hot dogs, mixing them in. She got queasy just thinking about it. Dinner would be over and Robbie would be off again to a gig or recording session or God knows where or, maybe, she did know where. You okay? shouted Big Ed. Just fine, she said. Just dandy, using one of the westernisms she’d learned since coming to Wyoming. She was not going to cry, no matter what. I am not going to cry, she said out loud. I am not going to cry. What? called Big Ed. Nothing, Ed. What? They moved slowly down the rural road, but she felt each bump. The clouds were traveling faster than they were. Any increase in velocity and she might go flying from the haywagon. A man’s voice finally came on the other end of the phone. Thanks for calling Celluphone, he said cheerily. How may I assist you today? She almost laughed at that. Assist? Hah! Get me off this wagon and into the nearest hospital. Hello , said the voice. Hi , she said weakly. I’m here . I see that I am talking to a Mrs. Politazzaro of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Yes , she said. Nice Irish name, he said. Listen…. Call me Mark , he said. Mark Aloysius Kincannon is my full name, but they tell you to use only your first just in case we piss people off. Listen, Mark, I’m in a bit of a fix here…. We have a variety of payment plans to fit your needs. A wind gust rocked the wagon. Mark, are you reading that? They give us a script, if that’s what you mean. Where are you, Mark? Denver , he said, in a little airless, windowless room in the basement of a gray building. Guess where I am, Mark? In a cozy kitchen baking cookies? Don’t hang up, she said. Please. I got a real problem here and I’m asking for your help. There was another pause. This is real, isn’t it? His voice had changed, serious now. It’s real. She gave him a condensed version of the morning’s events. A haywagon? he said. Riding to the hospital in a haywagon? Down a nice country road, she said. Nice winter day. Can you go faster? It’s an old tractor, Mark. Are you passing any houses? You could stop at one and get some help. Nice suggestion, but Big Ed won’t stop. He’s determined to get me to the hospital. He’s a little slow, in the head. Is that what you mean? That’s right. You’re not going to make it. That’s right, she said, trying to imagine, for the first time, what Mark might look like. Okay , said Mark, suddenly businesslike. Give me your position and I’ll call it in. Promise? Promise. Now, where are you? On a country road north of town. Which one? What do you mean, which one? Listen, uh, what’s your name anyway? Mrs. Pol……… Your first name. Liz. Listen, Liz, there’s got to be more than one road north of town. What’s its number? She raised her head and looked for a sign along the side of the road. Nothing but fence posts. Hey Ed! she yelled, taking the phone away from her ear. What? he said, turning to her. His shaggy red hair billowed like a wind-whipped fire. What road is this? She could not see Ed’s face, but she imagined it scrunched up in some sort of thoughtful look. But this thought was taking its time and she was running out of it. Ed! she barked. Some call it the Old Chugwater Road. The Old Chugwater Road, she repeated into the phone. What about a number? She cursed under her breath. Does it have a number, Ed? Don’t know a number. No number , she told Mark. She heard chatter on the other end. Look , said Mark, coming back on the line. I’ve got another CSR on the phone to the Sheriff’s Department and the dispatcher says there are two Old Chugwater Roads. Two? Yeah, one still goes to Chugwater and the other doesn’t. Which one are you on? It’s north of town, she said brusquely. It’s where you go out north on Yellowstone Road and it turns into a two-lane and you come to a stop sign and you keep going out that rural road another five miles or so. Our little farmhouse is just before you come to that big curve…. Hold on, Liz, Mark said. More chatter on the other end. County Road 237? If you say so. We should tell the ambulance to look for a tractor pulling a haywagon, right? Can’t miss us, she said. Green tractor, with Big Ed driving. Me bleeding to death in the haywagon in the back. He laughed. Not so funny, Mark. Right. I’m sorry. More chatter on the far end on the line in Denver. The ambulance is on its way, Mark said, almost breathlessly. No joke? No joke. Stay on the line and talk to me. Okay, sure, I’ll talk to you. Then he was so quiet she thought the line had gone dead. Got a family, Mark? she said weakly. Got a five-year-old boy who lives with my ex-wife. That’s nice, she said. Think we’ll get our names in the paper? Ha ha, she said. Names in the paper. She removed the phone from her ear. Ed! What! Big Ed answered. Ambulance on its way. What? At least that’s what she thought he said. The wind shredded the words on their way from his mouth to her ears. Waaa , it sounded like. Then wawa , just like the word the girls used for water when they were toddlers. We want wawa Mommy , and she would get them water in those little paper cups she kept by the kitchen sink. The girls would spill it and there would be wawa everywhere. W awa , she said to the wind, the sky, the wagon. She was so thirsty. Her head ached. The cold crept through the folds of the sleeping bag. She heard a voice and didn’t know if it was Ed’s or Mark’s or the lowing of a cow or something she had never heard before. Waaaaa! she heard, wondering if it was just in her head or maybe, just maybe, was the distant wail of an ambulance. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue I wrote “The Problem with Mrs. P” for my first collection, The Weight of a Body (Ghost Road Press, 2006). It was included in a 2010 Coffee House Press anthology, Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams . It’s about a real event that happened to a friend. I transformed it into a short ction with invented characters. It’s set during winter in Wyoming, a season for adventures and misadventures. When I read it in public, I like that it elicits both laughter and gasps. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MICHAEL SHAY writes short stories and essays. His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies including Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams from Coffee House Press. His first book of short stories is The Weight of the Body . He recently completed an historical novel set in 1919 Colorado with the working title Zeppelins over Denver . Next - That Time We Got Married at a Tent Revival by Michael Shay Next

Storms, Maybe a Metaphor for Us by Kase Johnstun Storms, here along the Wasatch Front in the summer, change things. They have become so rare that when they do come, they sweep across our landscape like hands picking up lost children. They never last long enough to cleanse us, to give us a fresh start, like the storms did during my youth, but they come to let us know that our skies can, if pushed hard enough, give us rain. Then they leave us to ache for another flash in the sky. We go whole summers without them, the dry and hot air settling in the valley as if it were a squatter claiming its land and unwilling to leave. We pray for it to leave. The high desert cries for a drink. Just the other night, I lay in my son's bed. He and his mom lay in ours. I had a big run the next morning, so I didn't want to bother everyone when I got up early to drink coffee, and eat breakfast before heading out. A storm came. We hadn't had our windows open for days. It was early August, and it had been 99 degrees during the day for more than a week. A stiff air filled the house like a corpse lying immovable in a tomb. The trees began to move outside when I lay down. They moved just a bit at first, so I closed my eyes, crossed my hands over my chest, and tried to sleep. A thwapping sound managed to break through the closed sliding glass door that opens up to a deck outside my son's room. I sat up, looked outside, and saw the limbs of our massive trees begin to sway back and forth. And then a shot of lightning lit the sky over Great Salt Lake. Within moments, I made my way around the home and opened any window that could be opened. I turned on all the fans and then returned to bed. I lay there again. This time, sprawled out, exposing as much of my skin to the cool breeze that I could, its frequent gusts bathing me in damp air. It came in waves at first. A hot wind. A cool breeze. A warm wind. A cooler breeze. A brisk wind. Then it stayed so cool. And then the rain came, and wind carried its scent into the room. I did not want to sleep. Instead, I lay there until 1:00 AM, long after my wife and son had begun to snore together in the room across the hallway. I thought about so many things that night just to keep myself awake, to be able to feel the cold breeze and smell the rain and live in a home that had just taken its first breath of fresh air in months. *** Lightning storms were like magic in our Utah childhood home. During the dry summer, when the lightning came, my dad would turn off the television, turn off the lights in the living room, and open the windows that faced the Weber River. The breeze picked up and turned into a wind. We lived at the mouth of Weber Canyon, so when the winds came, they came hard. They rushed through our open windows and flushed out the stale air of summer. We huddled together on the couch, the four of us, and we watched the darkened skyline. And then the show began. Lightning lit up the hill a mile away like the graceful and powerful legs of ballet dancers, touching down and lifting and touching down again. Moments later, thunder shook our home while we waited for an encore. The house had been filled with the smell of a storm. I placed my hands and arms on the back of the couch and kneeled down and leaned against its soft cushions and watched the skyline drop lightning against the night. Sometimes rain came too. We wouldn't go to bed or turn the television back on until the storm had passed. The breeze would stay all night. The windows would stay open until morning. The next day, the house would smell new. And yes, we would talk about the storm as if it were a new show or movie we had all watched on opening night. In 1999, I would leave Utah to live somewhere else for the first time in m y oung life. I packed up my Toyota and drove across Colorado and most of Kansas. The peaks of the Rocky Mountains faded into the dry detritus of the high plains of Wyoming, the winds covering the road behind me in a whirl of sand and heat and thin air so far above sea level. Denver rose out of the eastern slope and then Kansas came, not like a riptide or a wave or a rush of earth that sprung out of the ground, but like the gentle feel of a morning when there is nothing on the day's agenda, a slow and peaceful rise that can only come from the vast plains of soy and wheat, corn and cattle. That day, the day I left my hometown for the first time, I could have driven across those Kansas plains forever. I was on that first real journey, the one that would change the course of everything I would ever do from then on. They all do. All the big moves. All the moves that promise no real return home to the place where we grew up. The sun sets differently in Kansas than it does in northern Utah. It seems to take its time. In Utah, the sun drops fast over the lake and the Oquirrh Mountains, the peaks of the mountains cutting into its bright orange roundness until they have cut it all the way through. In Kansas, the sun does not 'drop.' It does not 'fall.' The plains stretch out forever toward the horizon. The curve of the earth dips in the farthest distance. And the sun settles on the earth's subtle edge and seems to hold there for hours, the rich reds and oranges and yellows of light dripping onto the plains. And the storms. When I first saw a wall of clouds move across the sky, I was a newbie graduate student; I was still a child. A new friend and I stood in a park in the center of the city of 50,000 people, most of whom were students. We tossed a baseball back and forth. It thwapped in our gloves, leather smacking against leather, moments of clarity and fulfillment that always come, catch after catch, when playing in an open park. We played catch for an hour, just bullshitting about our lives before we moved to central Kansas. We talked about writers we loved while sharing our fragmented, short biographies that we believed to be so rich and full and long at the time, both of us barely nearing our mid-twenties. That's when the storm came. It moved across the plains. The sky turned a hazy green, a Kansan's telltale sign of an oncoming tornado, and then the hail came. My friend and I ran to his car and huddled in the front seats to ride out the storm. He cracked a beer and gave me one. We sat there and watched the storm and listened to the radio as the tornado circled the city; we became friends, sitting in a car, watching the storm roll. Once, while traveling back to Kansas from a long break spent in Utah, a large storm front pushed toward I-70 just past the eastern border of Colorado and the western border of Kansas. Like a wall of black night had come for me, it shot bolts of lightning toward the earth, trumpeters announcing the arrival of a powerful demigod that shook the earth. At the edge of the storm, as if a sharp knife had cut through the clouds, leaving a nearly perfect line between the storm and the open sky, the7 bright, bright blue of a sunny, cloudless day struck a contrast so deep in color and texture that it shocked my senses. And the black wall pushed fast against the blue sky, toward me. Where I came from, from the Mountain West, storms do not come like this. They follow our mountains like trail guides from the Pacific Northwest or come up through the Southwest or from California, slowly. We see them coming a long way away. By the time storms reach Utah, the second driest state in the Union, they have long lost their battle against the high pressure of the mountains or dropped their rain in Oregon or Washington or were weakened in the deserts of Arizona and Las Vegas. Sure, there are winds and rain and thunder and lightning. Now, in a world that we know is getting hotter and in a time when we know a shift in the climate could take the wind and our precious dry snow from us for years, we want the storms to punch us hard in the gut of the valley. In 2001, I left Utah again, only having spent one month there after graduating from school in Kansas, I headed to Dublin, Ireland. In Dublin, my first night, I lay in bed in a convent just outside of Trinity College. The building was completely silent, by rule. The nuns hosted travelers like me who had yet to find a place to live. I checked into the massive, old building with stone archways that bent over the stone floors, all parts of building that have stood longer than Utah has been a state, longer than the Mormon church has existed, before my Hispanic greatgrandfather crossed the Atlantic Ocean and married my Native American great-grandmother, long before any of those things that brought me here, a child in his mid-twenties who lay in his bed. It rained hard outside my window. I would find that this heavy rain was not a storm at all in Ireland, only a shower that came most days in the months leading up to winter. But it was a storm to me, a boy coming from a cold desert in the Rocky Mountains. I listened to the rain pound against the window. I doubted every decision I had ever made in my short life. Relationships. Family. School. Drug use. I lay next to the opened window and listened to the rain hit the exterior walls. It splashed down and puddled up on the window sill and clinked against the fire escape ladder. It smelled so fresh, so real. I missed home. Mostly, I thought about the girl from Kansas I had started to date before I left for Dublin. She is now my wife, nearly 20 years later. As a gift, she sent me away with a folding picture frame, a small, black thing that I could carry in my pocket. When I opened it up, I saw her face. When I pushed a circular black button, she spoke to me through a recording. I opened it every night before I fell asleep, multiple times, and listened to her say 'hello.' Six months later, I drove back to Kansas from Utah to see the same girl who put her picture in that little frame. A storm front moved across the plains toward my truck. At first, I was amazed at how thick and predominant the edge of the front looked, how the defined wall of storm drew a line in the center of the vast blue sky. When the winds picked up and began to blow my truck from side to side on the interstate, and as drivers with Kansas plates began to pull the cars beneath overpasses and put on their hazard lights, the awe of the storm remained, and the darkness moved toward us. I turned on the AM radio and scanned for weather updates. The updates ran on repeat as I drove through small towns, one of the few cars still pushing its way through head and side and tail winds that whipped the one-ton vehicle around like a paper airplane caught in the breeze of a house fan. I never saw the twister, never looked out my front window and saw it coming my way, but the radio, keeping everyone listening up to speed, told me that it chased me northeast toward The Little Apple. I would pass a town sign. The radio's voice would say that the tornado was heading toward that town. I would pass another town sign, and the radio would warn the people there, telling them to listen for the tornado sirens and to get indoors and in their basements. The wind pushed my Toyota back and forth across the barren road. Huge chunks of hail slammed hard into my truck, and the storm chased me. I drove as fast as I could across the plains. I turned off I-70 and the storm turned southwest and the winds calmed, and I waited for my girlfriend, the clouds above us just a hazy gray over bright blue. When she finally came out, our official life together started. Twenty years later, however, I lay in my son's bed, and the upheaval of the choices of my youth have calmed along with rising drought of my Utah home. The cold wind comes into the room and touches all of my exposed skin. My family sleeps so close by, their snores in asynchronous wave together. Mom and son. I think about storms, about rain, about wind, and watch the tree branches waving. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “Storms, Maybe a Metaphor for Us” is one of my favorites, and one I was baffled about when it didn’t find a home. If you know me, I am not very confident in saying that about any of my work! [Editors’ Note: “Storms, Maybe a Metaphor for Us” was nominated for The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best of the Small Presses .] .................................................................................................................................................................................... KASE JOHNSTUN is an award-winning essayist, memoirist, and Manager for The Utah Center for the Book (Library of Congress). Kase is the author of the award-winning memoir Beyond the Grip of Craniosynostosis (McFarland & Co., 2015), the award-winning novel Let the Wild Grasses Grow (Torrey House Press, 2021), and the novel Cast Away (Torrey House Press, 2024). kasejohnstun.com Next - Fake Soldiers by Kase Johnstun Next

The Concrete Poet by Jim LaVilla-Havelin I. this is the first trans mission of the con crete poet report on exhibit at co-op gallery no press release no postcard no crackers no brie II. the alter native paper critic who is sometimes too smart for words but still uses them found her way there wrote: “_______ has found an alphabet of disaster.” III. somewhere between the calligraphic epics of Cy Twombly the incised mud-silica of Dubuffet the Rosetta Stone and J.G. Ballard’s CRASH IV. was this my fifteen minutes of fame? hiding in the basement while the police streamed through the sleek gallery asking everyone my name, my des cription, my whereabouts V. the art critic for the daily who also reviews restaurants, books, and covers the auto show describes them as “a grammar of happenstance or perhaps mishappenstance” VI. I don’t know when I first began to see them as messages scraped by metal onto barriers stories in stone VII. out with the truck with the pneumatic lift cones, flashers the jackhammer and the blow torch it comes to me we’re not in art school any more more dangerous than pastels VIII. it is the opposite of graffiti I remove de-construct re-contextualize present an outlaw aesthetic that makes art-speak go tongue-tied IX. I am so tired of the language meta phor I went to the wall to escape words I hacked out these sections of barrier to see silence as much as any markings deaths or near scrapes with it may have left I’m not telling stories I’m hammering away at walls Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue THE CONCRETE POET is the third volume of a five-book sequence. Though this section was written in 2010, the book is just now (2024) reaching its conclusion. This was the first section I wrote. It’s a favorite because it lays out some of the extent of what the long poem will include. A road map? A first shot of a voice? A catalogue of possibilities. .................................................................................................................................................................................... JIM LAVILLA-HAVELIN is the author of eight books of poetry, including two forthcoming in 2025, Mesquites Teach Us to Bend (Lamar University Press, 2025) and A Thoreau Book (Alabrava Press, 2025). He is the co-editor of the Houston University Press, Unsung Masters volume on Rosemary Catacalos (2025) and as Literary Executor for Catacalos’ estate, he is assembling her unpublished work for a volume Sing! . An educator, editor, and community arts activist for over 50 years, LaVilla-Havelin coordinates National Poetry Month activities in San Antonio. Awarded the City of San Antonio’s Distinction in the Arts for Literary Art, he teaches at The Cyndi Taylor Krier Juvenile Correctional Treatment Center for Gemini Ink’s Partners Program, teaches senior citizens in the Go Arts Program through Bihl Haus Cultural Arts, and high school students as Poet in Residence at the Young Women’s Leadership Academy. Next - Bruce by J. Diego Frey Next

Past Lives... That's Still a Thing, Right? by J. Diego Frey In my most recent past life, I was almost exactly the same I am now (same job same body shape and fear of spiders same wrinkled cotton wardrobe) except that my hair was curly my name was Margery and my beard was longer. Oh, and I had tentacles where my ears are now. Personal-sized octopus arms, about the thickness of a Marks-a-Lot brand magic marker and long enough to hold in front of my face a cob of buttered corn, which I would eat using the same chewing motions that I do now. In the life before that, prior to the great gene wars of the 2050s, I was shorter, and chubbier, hairier in all the wrong places. And I sold pet insurance to the nervous widows of Omaha. There must be some record of the life that proceeded that but the ether is murky. I was a sort of famous vaudeville act a few lives prior to that. On stage, animal noises would resonate through my enormous, hairy proboscis. In make-up, I had the head of a donkey. My showbiz-name was J. Donkey Frell. A big nose and a fey artistic tendency described my person through an extended series of lives during a dozen generations preceding this, always one of many similar, short, hairy men, weak of will and chin falling always to the sad symphonies of war or at least the singing telegram of venereal disease. Little known fact: Chlamydia…got its name from a character in an unpopular satiric opera I wrote in Vienna in the 1800s. Mostly, though, the spirits describe me as just a surfer of the lower to middle layers of society in a succession of Balkan territories. Notably, once, in the 17th century, I was, due to a clerical error, the Pope for three weeks. Remarkable—my eyeglasses prescription has been almost the same in every life. I don’t want to brag but the gypsy told me that a few thousand years ago, I was a red show pony named Fernutis— rumored to be quite handsome. The gypsy rules our lives. She twists the fabric of time and reality into dental floss. Do not forget to tip the gypsy. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This is a newer poem by me—first draft written maybe 3 years ago. It’s a much longer poem than the previous example. I’ve always felt more comfortable with the short poems, always worrying about overstaying my welcome. But lately I’ve been trying to stretch things out a bit. Mark Doty talks about pushing yourself past the end of your draft to discover where the poem is going to go after your current last line, and it turns out that can be a fun exercise. Mostly I hope that I am keeping the energy all the way through this poem. It starts out with a nice juicy image, so most of my revisions have been along the lines of enriching the subsequent imagery (hmmm…just noticed how close the word imagery is to the name Margery…). Thanks for sticking with the poem over all 23 stanzas! I hope this poem will be an anchor for my new, yet-to-find-an-interested-publisher collection, Froot Loop Moon . .................................................................................................................................................................................... J. DIEGO FREY is a poet living in the Denver area, which is where he grew up and never completely escaped. He published two quite likable collections of poetry, Umbrellas or Else and The Year the Eggs Cracked with Colorado publisher Conundrum Press. jdiego.com Next - Interstellar by David Romtvedt Next