Waiting Around after Walking Around by Pablo Neruda by Trish Hopkinson It so happens, I am tired of being a woman. And it happens while I wait for my children to grow into the burning licks of adulthood. The streaks of summer sun have gone, drained between gaps into gutters, and the ink-smell of report cards and recipe boxes cringes me into corners. Still I would be satisfied if I could draw from language the banquet of poets. If I could salvage the space in time for thought and collect it like a souvenir. I can no longer be timid and quiet, breathless and withdrawn. I can’t salve the silence. I can’t be this vineyard to be bottled, corked, cellared, and shelved. That’s why the year-end gapes with pointed teeth, growls at my crow’s feet, and gravels into my throat. It claws its way through the edges of an age I never planned to reach and diffuses my life into dullness— workout rooms and nail salons, bleach-white sheets on clotheslines, and treacherous photographs of younger me at barbecues and birthday parties. I wait. I hold still in my form-fitting camouflage. I put on my strong suit and war paint lipstick and I gamble on what’s expected. And what to become. And how to behave: mother, wife, brave. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “Waiting Around” has been published in Voicemail Poems , Nasty Women Poets Anthology , Thank You For Swallowing , PoetryPasta , Motherhood May Cause Drowsiness , East Coast Literary Review , Verse-Virtual , and was originally published by Wicked Banshee Press. This poem remains one of my all-time favorites. I wrote it before my first non-university publication and it received second place in a university contest, so this is the piece that really pushed me to seek out publication in literary magazines. I’d say in that way, it also led me to a very important step in my poetry career, which was to start my website to help other poets learn about how to get published. Today it is my most published poem and still a favorite to read at events. .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 - The Problem with Mrs. P by Michael Shay Next

The Barking Dogs of Taos by Richard Peabody 1. Ranger, Doyle, Zander, and Mesa are living the feral life in the no man’s land between Taos airport and Route 64 near Bad Dog Road. Doyle is a Belgian Malinois escape artist too slick for animal rescue or dog whisperer. Too cool to be caged. Starving, maybe, but as long as there are dumpsters. A real loner. Mesa and Zander are close knit Shepherd mixes. You catch one, you’ll catch the other. Don’t even look like they’re from the same litter. But still compadres, who have each other’s backs. Ranger is complicated. A shape shifting Australian Cattle Dog. He clings to the shadows, and blurs into the landscape like a coyote. Blink and he’s gone. Like a floater in your eyeball. A wizard of sand and scrub. Strays make rounds at dusk and dawn. Camping out near the John Dunn Bridge at the confluence of the Rio Grande and Rio Hondo. They can reach the river water hide out in the Beargrass and woody shrubs that hug the banks. If they can’t find food at the RV Park or the landfill they roam closer to town try Aly’s Eats or Medley. Doyle was caught one time at the Country Club by the Stray Hearts folks. He escaped the first night by climbing right up and over the rescue center’s wire fence. 2. The crew is back together now, covering a 12-mile radius from Arroyo Hondo to Taos, and back again. Chilly nights bring a wildlife control expert, in a bright red Jeep Cherokee. She’s a young empath and wants to rescue every lost pet. She also brought snacks. Doyle is growling at the dusk. Wary, Ranger circles the Jeep. Mesa and Zander are screw it we’re so hungry. The expert has pre-cut pepperoni. She softly sweet talks Mesa and Zander closer. C’mon guys, get a treat. They follow a pepperoni trail into the back seat. Ranger edges into the shadows barking like a motherfucker. Doyle snarls before he turns tail and runs toward the gravel pit. Fine. The wildlife expert drives to Taos animal rescue. She worries about Ranger and Doyle. The nights are getting colder. How will they survive? Yet now, her hands and heart are full and she wisely keeps the pepperoni coming. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue There’s no secret about my love for the red rock country of the southwestern U.S. I’ve talked about it so much for so long that a lot of people assume I used to live there. I’ve visited maybe six or seven times. I almost bought houses in Taos and Taos Canyon on two separate occasions. And I have friends who have permanently moved there. One of my daughters babysits and walks dogs. A report of some missing dogs in the Taos News mentioned a pack of scallywag dogs and I was smitten. This will be the title poem of my next collection. .................................................................................................................................................................................... RICHARD PEABODY lives in Arlington, Virginia. His most recent volume of poetry is Guinness on the Quay (Salmon Poetry, 2019). gargoylepaycock.wordpress.com Next - The Little Old Lady in the Woodstock T-Shirt by Robert Cooperman 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

Decoration Day by M. L. Liebler A couple of days after The news reached the States, His mother’s heart broke Never to mend itself. With his last breaths, He took his family and friends Hostage into the darkness Of the world’s sin. There’s no turning back The clocks. They cannot be Adjusted to read the present Time, when the future has died, alone Somewhere, in another place. And the newspapers will write About it and the TV will Talk about it, but no one Will ever tell this story he way it happened. The way it was supposed To have happened in a town, In a life somewhere, unknown. And this business of murder Bruises each rising sun Above every American town. Towns that were never More than small dots On small maps, routing death To innocent lives that Will be forever lost In the rapid-fire Of the jungle night. Because everyone can’t Believe it, That doesn’t mean it didn’t Happen! Because everyone didn’t See it, It doesn’t make it Untrue! Because everyone Hurts, Doesn’t make it Stop! Because after twenty years They’ll have forgotten your names Doesn’t mean you never Existed! Because you did live, Doesn’t mean You’ll remain A memory! Because it is, It is! And you can’t reappear For the benefit of the few Who doubted all along. Injustice is the law here Dear boy. Here where You grew up where You dreamed, not where You died. Not where They took you, Laid you out, Neatly uniformed, Placed you in the funeral Home of the Far East. The whole thing planned, Planned to the smallest detail, Except for your mother’s broken heart. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Published in Written in Rain: New & Selected Poems 1985-2000 (Tebot Bach Press, Los Angeles 2000). Back Back to Current Issue .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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

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

Lincoln and Lydia after May 2020 Black Lives Matter protests by Alison Moore They’re all gone now—those thirty-six gladiators who stood on the steps in dark helmets and shields, ruining Lincoln’s view. The only person left is a woman cleaning up the mess with a mop. And a mask. Lydia, her nametag says. Earlier, she’d scrubbed the graffiti: Y’all not tired yet? off the wall. She thinks Lincoln’s sat in that chair, had a front row seat to history long enough. You can’t just sit there, she says, now that you’re woke. Get up. Show us what you got. Lydia sets down her mop. She can see that a hundred years in a hard chair has settled some in his hips. She shares that particular pain, holds out her hand to him. He thinks she must be a nurse, so he grips her arm, and slowly, ever so slowly, rises up until he stands, 28 feet from his head without his hat down to his size twelve shoes. She helps him navigate all 57 steps, then 87 more to the edge of the reflecting pool. A Kennedy half-dollar she once threw in for King, for hope, still shines from the bottom. What time is it? he asks. What country? Take a look, she says, the South is rising all over again right across the river, and the better angels have long since hit the road. At seven score and eight long years from Gettysburg, twenty score since that first ship from Angola to Virginia; he’s out of his depth here, even though the five feet of water he’s wading into now comes only to his knees. Some went too far, she says. I didn’t go far enough, he admits, halfway turning around. I know, she replies. …but still… It was a lot for those times, considering you got shot for it. She urges him onward. We just buried George… she says. …and I don’t mean Washington. They pick up the pace, heading for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, arriving at the gate out of breath, limping. You go on ahead, she says, knowing she’ll never get any closer tonight without becoming invisible. Abraham, she reminds him, hurry. There’s someone robbing our house. He pushes through the fence in a fury, and throws all his weight against the White House, braces his back against the front door. It’s five minutes ‘til midnight now; she’s watching him. Someone or something is pounding— he can feel the blows in his back as he gives his last full measure to bar this particular portal. On the other side, something hoots and howls in epithets, throws condiments at the wall. No matter what, the thing that got itself in there, should not be allowed to get back out. A house divided against itself cannot stand. He can still see Lydia, her face behind the bars of the locked gate. You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time, she calls out. He nods. He said that. It’s still true. She is counting on him she’s going to hold him to it, even if there is a man with a gun over there. Immortal in marble, he’s more than ready. He’s bullet-proof now. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “Lincoln and Lydia” was written after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, D.C. When I saw a photo of troops at the Lincoln Memorial, I was shocked. I participated in the March on the Pentagon in 1967 along with Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and thousands of others fed up with the Vietnam War. For this poem, I couldn’t help but think of the people who had to clean up the mess, and Lydia came from my imagination; she had more than a few things to say. .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 - Predictions of the Past by Alison Moore Next

Some Things to Do in the Face of Death for Manny Castillo "The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real." —To Be of Use by Marge Piercy by Jim LaVilla-Havelin Paint the casket. Stare back. Bring the gifts. Don’t mourn, organize. Do the right thing. Stand at the four corners, watchful. Do what the moment suggests, facing an eternity of moments. Drum. Do what needs to be done. Do more. Play the sax. Embrace. Follow the example of the exemplary life. Laugh. Cry. Sing. Gather light. Remember, but do not lock away as past. Re-dedicate. Make food. Make art. Make peace. Make love. Continue the work. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Originally published in Counting (Pecan Grove Press, 2010). This is a favorite because it’s an elegy and a list poem, a really good poem to read aloud, and one of the first poems of mine that actually live in San Antonio. Manny, who died young, was the director of a community organization called San Anto Cultural Arts, a force on SA’s Westside visible in a mural project across the neighborhood, and newspaper of place. The poem’s specifics are from his memorial service in Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. .................................................................................................................................................................................... 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 - The Concrete Poet by Jim LaVilla-Havelin Next

Tiananmen Mother for Zhao Ziyang by Michael Wells The Beijing breeze whispers mournful strophes. Tears like the mountain rains follow slopes to tributaries until they become one with the rippling waters of the Yangtze. I am a Tiananmen mother. My eyes have swelled with this sadness before. The wetness follows a path well-rehearsed. My nights are immense. I am a lone bare branch in a dark cold world. They replicate that June night etched in my soul over and over. My son stood in the square armed only with a vision and they came— The People’s Army. My son stood in Tiananmen Square, amid a sea of other sons and daughters and they came— armored tanks clanking along the streets into Tiananmen driven by fear, ordered by paranoia. Our sons and daughters toppled to the earth at their hands. Crimson crawling into every crevice of these ancient streets; a stain still upon us today. I cannot count the nights I have wept for my son since. Today, I weep for another. There is no official news but the Beijing breeze whispers again, this time for the death of the old man. There are guards outside my door. The lump in my throat is big, I cannot begin to swallow. That is how I know the truth. Guilt always gnawing at my heart. I could not help my son that June night. Again as I am helpless. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Originally published by the Independent Chinese PEN Center. This is one of my favorite published pieces because of the story of its metamorphosis. I was at a writers retreat in a small community in Iowa and in a larger breakout group session we were instructed to write a small one to three act play. This was something I was not keen about doing. I think I recall saying out loud, I’m a poet not a playwright with a distinctly sarcastic tone. So I wrote what was on my mind at the time in a two act play. When we later read the work aloud it was very positively received. I came home from the retreat with it and a number of other drafts. I liked the concept and the subject and reworked it into a witness poem with a strong anmemorable impact. .................................................................................................................................................................................... MICHAEL WELLS calls Kansas City home but claims the San Francisco Giants as his baseball team. He is an alumnus of the Writer to Writer program. His genre is primarily poetry. He likes his wine white and his coffee black. michaelwells.ink Next - And Tenured was Dropped from the Dictionary by Michael Wells Next

The Afternoon on the Sava by Scott Abbott 9 April 2013 Every country has its rivers. That afternoon it was the Sava, not far from where it flows into the Danube under the once-stern gaze of Belgrade’s Kalemegdan fortress, far from the lesser rivers of my own American West. A houseboat was the gathering place, a rustic restaurant with no sign to announce its presence. The invitation had come in response to questions about a translation. Peter Handke had replied, in English: “On April 8th I shall be in Belgrade/Serbia. Žarko will come too, also Zlatko. And you??” On the back flap of the envelope, below F-92370 Chaville, was an Arabic word I could not decipher. A friend later told me it was “Chaville.” Packed into a little Peugeot, a big Jeep Cherokee, and a good-sized taxi, the column of friends, fellow travelers, and distant neighbors wound off the backbone of the white city. At the end of a streetcar line in New Belgrade, the Jeep bumped up over the curb and ascended a steep dirt path to the top of a dike. The Peugeot eased tentatively over the curb and up onto the dike. The taxi followed a more circuitous route but found the top of the dike as well. The cars parked and the passengers disembarked. Peter Handke tugged a dark-brown stocking cap over his grey hair. He wore a knee-length black coat, black pants that twice had been lengthened by hand, and high-top black shoes. Dark-haired Sophie Semin wore a long black coat with sleeves colorfully embroidered by her husband. Ljiljane Kapor was youthful in brown pants and a matching jacket. Her attentive assistant Marija had neon-red hair. Maja Kusturica warded off the cold with an elegant white coat and bright blue scarf. Thin-lipped poet Matija Bećković wore a brown coat and a Sherlock Holmes hat. Theater director Mladen Materić’s blue jeans were baggy at the ass. Short-haired novelist and translator Žarko Radaković had no hat but was snug in a brown wool coat. A dark-haired Belgrade journalist and her younger protégé wore dresses under warm coats. And I, a university professor who wanted, someday, to call myself a writer, was comforted by a black coat against which my long grey hair looked nearly white. The first week of April still saw the river at its spring-flood stage, making access from the shore difficult. Wooden steps led down the grassy dike to a long plank bridge that carried the party out between still leafless trees whose trunks seemed surprised to be rising out of the floodwater; at the bridge’s end ten steep steps led down into the shallow water; two weathered planks reached from the last step above water to a forklift pallet; three planks continued the makeshift bridge to a gravel bank from which two steps led up onto a platform supported by four red 55-gallon drums; from that secure perch, thick planks reached onto a long, floating bridge that ended at the door of a low-roofed restaurant for boaters on the Sava River—and on this day, for the eleven guests who had approached over the labyrinthine path. We shed our coats and scarves and hats in a dining room heated by a small wood fire in a cast-iron stove. Windows looked out over the Sava on one side and to the flooded trees on the other. We took seats at a table that stretched the width of the room along two long windows. On the previous night in the Hotel Moskva, so late in the night that the next day had already begun, so late that who knows how many bottles of Riesling, including a special bottle of Morava offered by the attentive hotel manager, had been emptied by the three who remained after the Serbian poet had said good-night and Sophie had gone to bed—on that night before the afternoon on the Sava, Žarko entertained us with stories about a legendary pair of sly and slow-witted characters. Mujo and Haso went to a soccer game. They agreed that whenever either team scored they would drink a pint of beer. The game ended in a 0-0 tie. Let’s go to a basketball game, suggested Haso. Suljo painted a picture with two naked people and took it to a gallery. It is called Mujo in Sarajevo, he told the gallery owner. “Who are the people?” the owner asked. “The woman is Fatima, Mujo’s wife, and the man is Haso.” “And where is Mujo?” “Mujo is in Sarajevo.” Peter claimed he was not a good teller of jokes but that proved to be only partially true. He said, for instance, that he was thinking about repainting Caspar David Friedrich’s Two Men Contemplating the Moon . He would paint only one man, he said, a drunk who would stand there contemplating two moons. I was halfway through a long joke before I remembered it required an English-language pun and the joke limped to its conclusion. I mentioned my brother who had died of AIDS two decades earlier and described the book of “fraternal meditations” I was writing: Immortal for Quite Some Time . Peter looked at me curiously: “Du bist mir ein Rätzel.” “I am a puzzle to myself,” I replied. The meal on the houseboat began with a toast: slivovitz in small glasses raised to the Austrian author whom the Kapor Foundation and the Serbian president would honor the next day. Plates of tomatoes, spring onions, radishes, and kajmak cheese were the first course, served with mineral water and carafes of red and white wine. Platters of breaded Sava fish followed, thick fish steaks with roasted potatoes and Serbian salad. My mind slipped to the afternoon at Peter’s house in Chaville. Had it been ten years? Fifteen? Peter sautéed mushrooms and served them with dark bread and Portuguese white wine. H e gave me the first pages of the American translation of Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht and asked for an evaluation. I read a few pages aloud and then pointed out an early sentence that, in the original, ended with an der Stelle des zwischendurch mich weiterwürgenden ‘Ende’ das Ding Verwandlung . The translation rendered this as the ‘end’ that still gagged me now and then was more and more firmly replaced by this metamorphosis thing. With the throwaway silliness of this metamorphosis thing , I told Peter, das Ding Verwandlung has lost its philosophical tension. And the carefully wrought, eleven-word original phrase has been bloated to nineteen flaccid words. Your sentences have been flattened; the nuance is gone. It had struck me then and now again that this is what I most feared about my own life, that it was commonplace, lackluster, banal, flaccid. At the turn of the century, at the beginning of the new millennium, still married, still practicing the Mormon religion I had been raised in, I woke from a nightmare in which my little car was surrounded by a neverending cluster of identical cars that descended from the sky in ranks of ten to land in perfect synchrony and drive obediently along an endless highway just wide enough for ten little cars. I fled the marriage, left the Mormons, and sought antidotes to the unsettling dream in Handke’s supple and self-questioning sentences, found succor in the author’s preface to A Journey to the Rivers where he asserted that he had written about his journey through Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature: a slow, inquiring narration; every paragraph dealing with and narrating a problem, of representation, of form, of grammar—of aesthetic veracity . I would live with aesthetic veracity, I thought. My life would be a slow and dialectical unfolding. And I would be skeptical of my attempts at aesthetic veracity and dialectical unfolding. That day in Chaville, Peter showed me a letter from American publisher Roger Straus to Siegfried Unseld, Handke’s German publisher: We have a problem, and his name is Peter Handke. The books weren’t selling as they once had. How was it possible, I asked myself, that an editor with Straus’ reputation had no idea what the translations were doing to Peter’s work? I removed the bones from a second fish steak and reflected on how challenging I found each of Peter’s new books. It helped to read with a pen in hand. Der Grosse Fall (The Great Fall) , for instance. I had read it slowly, fascinated by the dual metaphor of standing and falling announced by the title, attentive to the slow, inquiring development of the metaphor. I wondered if my method was compensatory gratification for the sterile pedant I feared I had become. No, I thought. I was finding my way out of dualistic dead ends through the simultaneously critical and affirmative ideas Peter so often conjoined with “and.” I had once written about this productive interplay in Peter’s novel Die Wiederholung (Repetition) , describing the method as postmetaphysical metaphysics. Peter disdained abstractions of that sort. The afternoon hours passed without seeming to pass. The courses of food and pitchers of wine were ever-changing constants as the houseboat lifted and fell with the river’s insistent current. I was experiencing, I thought, a kind of standing now, a nunc stans in which memory was as present as the experience itself. Peter moved to an adjoining table to speak with the Serbian journalists. Žarko joined them as translator, a role he had played dozens of times over the years while traveling with Peter in what had been Yugoslavia. I realized that the wine had gone to my head like the scent of elderberries at the Hallesches Tor in ETA Hoffmann’s The Golden Pot. Peter looked tired. The journalists asked their questions. Žarko translated them. Peter responded. Žarko translated the responses. Žarko looked tired as well. “Or” was my original conjunction. I spent two years in Germany as a Mormon missionary. I knew the truth and knew that other people needed it and I bore witness that if they would pray as I had, God would reveal the truth to them as well. My German improved and I began to read—Buddenbrooks, Mutter Courage, Der Steppenwolf . Nietzsche’s wild-eyed Zarathustra taught me that we create our truths instead of finding them. Lessing’s wise Nathan offered a parable in which the magic ring was mercifully lost. I too would essay a life on my own terms, I thought, on my own terms and yet in the context of the American, Mormon Volk I had left and that was still with me even as the minutes and hours of the afternoon on the Sava were stretched and enhanced by wine and tiredness. I admired the lively face of the man Žarko described as one of Serbia’s greatest living poets and marveled at Mladen’s heavy brows and enjoyed the animated interaction between Maja and Sophie as they smoked and talked and smoked. I watched red-haired Marija move around the room to take photos of the gathering. The German writer Peter Schneider attacked my translation of A Journey to the Rivers for presenting Peter’s work in a less controversial light than it deserved. I replied that Schneider either couldn’t read or refused to read. Criticize what is there, yes; but criticize what you put there with your simplistic and inflexible mind and you become the aggressive and stupid critic I was afraid Peter took me for when he called me Dr. Scott. I am a Germanist, a good one. I am also a writer, co-author with Žarko of two books described in Belgrade as a “two-seater without steering.” Couldn’t a person be both a writer and a critic? Was it the double role that made me a puzzle to Peter? When had I begun to write my non-critical work? Why had I done that? It was Žarko’s invitation, I thought. Žarko had asked me to contribute to a Belgrade journal and then to his anthology on childhood and then to the Flugasche issue on the painter Julije Knifer, and then the collaboration on the book Repetitions and later on Vampires & A Reasonable Dictionary . It was Peter’s influence as well. His books engaged me, called to me even, made me want to understand, to pay attention, to weigh possibilities—and beyond the understanding to write, to write about myself. If I ever wrote a book about Peter Handke, I told myself as the houseboat rose and fell gently in the wake of a passing boat, I would write about the dialectical texts and certainly not about this afternoon on the Sava. I wanted to write a bout Žarko’s books as well. I would learn Serbian, I thought, Serbo-Croatian, so I could read my friend’s Tübingen, Emigracia, Knifer, Era, Strah od Emigracije, Pogled, Kafana , and so on. I had made that vow before. I would make it again. The river flowed past, heaving and falling like a mother’s breasts. Marija was brilliant and Handke looked tired and Sophie and Maja shared more cigarettes and Mladen gestured broadly and Matija Bećković said “hello” to me and in English which Mladen translated into Serbian I told the smiling poet that Žarko had said he was the best of all living Serbian poets. The poet winked and said Žarko always told the truth. I said I had known Žarko to lie on occasion. “Not in this case,” the poet replied. I was exhausted; time folded in on itself as did the food and the wine and Mladen’s huge head and Žarko’s solicitous translations and Sophie wincing with her back pain and another pitcher of wine and overlapping conversations translated back and forth from Serbian and English and French and German and even Spanish and the poet’s funny stories about another Serbian poet and soft cheese and onions and more wine. Peter asked the young journalist if she had a boyfriend and she said “yes,” and he asked for his name and she said “Vladimir” and he said “Vladimir?” “Vladimir!” and fish soup came and I asked Marija with her beautiful sharp nose and bright red hair about the man in blue eating alone at a separate table and she said he had a factory that made medals like the one the President of Serbia would give to Peter the next day and, she added with a smile, “he gives away a lot of medals!” I said, “he must be a very good President then” and she laughed and said “oh yes he’s the best there is,” and I suggested that perhaps the President would give Žarko and meedals too and she said it w ould surely happen but that it would probably require that we stay in the country just a few more days and I said we were leaving on Thursday and would that be long enough? and she thought perhaps it might require the weekend as well and the fish soup was followed by thick fish steaks accompanied by potato salad and the Sava flowed as slowly and powerfully as time while swallows dipped and rose outside the window and a photo of Angela Merkel handing a scholarship notice to the son of the houseboat owner hung on one wall and Peter joined the two journalists at another table for an interview Žarko translated and I stared at a photo of a man holding a huge fish in his arms and Marija asked the houseboat owner who said it was a Sava River fish like the one that lay in steaks in front of us and, raising a glass of wine to my lips, I realized that the cold spring meant that there were no orgiastic frogs croaking the way they had alongside the barge on the Danube that night fifteen years earlier when Žarko and I sat with the filmmaker Edgar Pera and drank Jelen Pivo and pissed through a hole in the restroom floor into the Danube and I thought of the book I had read by David Albahari, the one called Leeches , and about the nationalist antagonisms and conspiracy theories sucking nourishment out of the postwar Yugoslav state and we ate nicely toasted cream puffs and deliciously oily baklava and Maja told rapid stories in French while she and Sophie and Ljiljana shared stiletto-thin cigarettes from a pack that was giving out and I wondered why so many “j”s are required for the name Ljiljana and the Sava flowed unceasingly and I, politely, at least I was trying to be polite, asked Maja Kusturica what she did professionally and she asked me, in English, to repeat the question and when I did she raised her shapely eyebrows and expelled cigarette smoke through her nose and looked me in the eyes and said, “I suffer.” I wanted to laugh but smiled instead and she smiled back and time flowed on like the Sava River. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue “The Afternoon on the Sava” is from the book We (On Friendship) , co-authored with Žarko Radaković and published in 2022 by Laguna Press in Serbian and Elik Press in English. We have been friends for three decades, with German as our common language and with Austrian author Peter Handke as our friend and inspiration. .................................................................................................................................................................................... SCOTT ABBOTT completed a doctorate in German Studies at Princeton University and is a professor of Integrated Studies, Philosophy, and Humanities at Utah Valley University. His most recent book is a collection of essays, Dwelling in the Promised Land as a Stranger. (Common Consent Press, 2022). He has translated works by Nobel Prize Awardee Peter Handke and botanist Gregor Mendel. scottabbottauthor.com Next - The Gospel of Overconsumption by Scott Abbott Next

Walking the Bear by Star Coulbrooke I walk on water, take the river from its high Uintas down Utah’s cascades, wander Wyoming’s meanders, Montpelier’s meadows, to Soda’s hair-pin curve where thirty-thousand years ago lava turned the Bear away from Blackfoot’s Snake and sent it down to Grace. Doubling back from Gem Valley to Cache, I walk the river’s cobbled bed where tributaries surge, rowdy Cub, Little Bear, Beaver-headed Logan, six-tined fork of Blacksmith. Down the length of floodplains I pass, through wetlands of cattails and bulrushes, to bottomlands leveled and drained, where the river silts in, slows down, its honeyed pace tamed for grain. On the river’s gliding current I travel miles each step, a dreamlike passage through cedar and cottonwood, hawthorn and chokecherry, lifting like a heron over dams and sluggish lakes that halt the river’s breath. I walk the Bear all summer as it builds strength again, widens into marshes, joins in lush bird-heavy congress with the great peculiar Salt, a lake that would surely die if not for this river, this path, this milk and honey. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue Published in Walking the Bear (Outlaw Artists Press, 2011) and in Deseret Magazine , July/August 2024 (Vol. 4 No. 36). My grandfather homesteaded a piece of land along the Bear River in southern Idaho in 1890. I grew up in the family farmhouse near the river. This poem came to me as I worked to save the Bear River from a proposed dam on the Oneida Narrows. I had gone to our family park on the river bottoms and as I sat looking at the water, I felt myself lift off and glide along it. The images flowed easily, gracefully, as if I were living in them as I wrote. I think I had developed such empathy for the river that the poem came gliding out of the air like that heron it mentions. I went back to the books to make sure the history was correct; otherwise, the poem needed only a few revisions. I believe it is an important poem, especially as climate change and development imperil the Bear River and the Great Salt Lake. .................................................................................................................................................................................... STAR COULBROOKE was the inaugural poet laureate of Logan City, Utah, and co-founder of the Helicon West Reading Series. Her most recent poetry collections are Thin Spines of Memory , Both Sides from the Middle and City of Poetry from Helicon West Press. Next - The Glazier by Danielle Beazer Dubrasky Next

The Other Man is Always French by Richard Peabody The other woman can be a blonde or a redhead but the other man is always French. He dresses better than I ever will. He can picnic and stroll with a wineglass in one upraised hand. Munch pâté, drink espresso, and tempt with ashy kisses. He hangs out at Dupont Circle because the trees remind him of Paris. Did I mention sex? Face it— he’s had centuries of practice. I’m an American. What do I know? He drives a fast car, and can brood like nobody’s business, while I sit home watching ESPN. He’s tall and chats about art— I don’t even want to discuss that accent. He’s Mr. Attitude. My fantasy is to call the State Department and have him deported. Only he’ll probably convince you to marry him for a green card. No way I’m going to win— the other man is always more aggressive, always more attentive. The other man is just too French for words. From now on I’m going out with statuesque German women so next time we run into each other they can kick his butt for me. Share: Facebook X (Twitter) Copy link Back Back to Current Issue This poem is my semi-recovery after a relationship ended owing to a classic French louche. At readings it gets a lot of laughs. But I was flabbergasted by how many people have confessed that they’ve been in that situation. My students assumed I’d written the poem after seeing Addicted to Love . Nope. Though after watching it, I get why they thought so. .................................................................................................................................................................................... RICHARD PEABODY lives in Arlington, Virginia. His most recent volume of poetry is Guinness on the Quay (Salmon Poetry, 2019). gargoylepaycock.wordpress.com Next - The Barking Dogs of Taos by Richard Peabody Next