Alison Hurwitz

The Weather Retort

I tell you thunder belly, cumulonimbus inner ear. Roil of pressure rising.

You reply insipid drizzle, muggy dew point skinned with gnatty scum.

You’re a supercilious mistral, stale windbag full of fug, shallow oil-slick

of a puddle. Don’t try diluting me to scattered showers, dismissed as just

some fitful tempest in a china cup. You ask if I’ve tried clear skies and common sense?

Batten down your stale toupée. No one wants to sniff your rehatched whiff, the dank

that underarms your ego. You’ve only seen my leading edge. In the calm before,

you could have sensed a supercell, a flanking line, an anvil, yet you never took

the time to overcast your eyes. Don’t you dare go back and diagnose me

with precipitation after rain is drenching down, advise that I should

see someone for my convective complex. Shut your

ornamental shutters. Tornado’s on its way.

This storm is coming in.

How to Go Out for a Drink

Walk in wearing hindsight, liquid liner, mirror glaze.

Keep shoulders down, each cuticle pushed back. Do not

drum the bar or slouch or twitch or cross your arms.

Someone will watch you suck stray whisps of nothing

through a technicolor straw. Bubble every adjective. Lip gloss

your conversation. No one will know you’re filled with boiling oil.

Use some snarky name you write across a napkin

when he asks: Terri Buldate. Shea Monhim. Ana Lias.

Phone number starting 555. Learn to smile while swallowing

stones. Prune bonsai with your teeth. Fill a pond with koi,

glance up, then drop your eyes and look away as ripples spread.

Rake each grain of sand until concentric circles wall around

a central stone. Now, deny the stone. Glue your poise

in place. Your eyelashes. Keep keys in hand, a razor filed

between your breasts. Ask for an Angel Shot, wingstripped.

When you leave, you’ll stir denuded feathers. Watch

them swirl in eddies at your feet, following your footfalls

as the door swings closed. Every echo, a plucked string.

Emergence Is Catching

Everywhere, the tunneled holes of sap-drunk cicadas,

their dormancy at last complete, emerging from

the warming earth. They surface, shed their

duller subterranean skin while all around them

air grows thick with rainstick thrums and chirrs

and tymbal music, drum bodies hollowed, quivering

on fences, branches, anywhere that they can vibrate,

venting thirteen years of pent-up lust. Males shake and rattle

like a brood of randy windup toys, scratching flint

to tinder with such fervor that I wouldn’t be

surprised if you and I, in listening, did not

wet our lips, did not also pulse and loosen,

shiver into buzz and turgid call, response

of mouth and parted thigh,

find what is winged and ready, fly.

Alison Hurwitz is a former cellist and dancer who now finds music in language. A two-time 2023 Best of the Net nominee, she is the founder/host of the monthly online reading Well-Versed Words. Widely published, Alison’s work is upcoming in Sky Island Journal, South Dakota Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal. When not writing, Alison officiates weddings and memorial services, takes singing lessons, walks in the woods, and dances in her kitchen. Find more at alisonhurwitz.com.

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Alison Stone

Sartorial Ghazal

Please don’t ask if you can wear my black pants.

I adore you but won’t share my black pants.

Too often, the world requires armor.

With red lipstick and teased hair, my black pants.

Rip my shirt off, let the buttons pop. Break

my bra’s thin clasp, but don’t tear my black pants.

The spell’s broken, you say. You want to go

home to your marriage. Beware my black pants.

Dead sea mud smoothes and wakes my skin. Like a

facial for my derriere—my black pants.

Shy days demand baggy, ankle-length skirts.

When I want people to stare, my black pants.

Yearly cull of clothes too small, too worn, no

longer loved. I always spare my black pants.

Boxers dangling from a lampshade. Tangled

with your jeans under the chair, my black pants.

You sew carefully, aware you’ll win my

devotion if you repair my black pants.

Older, Stone’s learned less is so much more.

Sexier than my ass, bare—my black pants.

Romantic Ghazal

To shared values, add a dash of romance.

Drape commitment in a sash of romance.

One suitor is an heir. One writes songs. Should

she choose the dazzle of cash? Of romance?

After kids, fatigue, and disappointment,

bright as spring’s first bird—a flash of romance.

He journeyed from flower shop to bar to

religion, spurred by the lash of romance.

Room strewn with empty wine bottles, torn clothes,

dead roses, condoms—the trash of romance.

Come here. Now go away. Sharp words. Kisses.

Her neck aches from the whiplash of romance.

When bills and boredom dampen ardor, pull

happy memories from the cache of romance.

A slinky dress, a rhinestone crown. Eyes rimmed

with Smoke. On each wrist, a splash of Romance.

Let stubborn shoots push through cracks in stone. Let

nascent love rise from the ash of romance.

Dark Ghazal

She snuffs all the candles to find the dark.

The god used golden cords to bind the dark.

Did Cleopatra suffer when she felt

the final threads of self unwind, the dark

replacing everything? Rumi plucked gems

from the divine, Baudelaire mined the dark.

Black cats are chosen last. The Horned God morphed

to devil when some faiths aligned the dark

with evil instead of mystery. In

Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, light defined the dark.

Teens say, That’s so extra!  Adults say, free gift.

When the astronomer went blind, the dark

held memories of stars. Each night, the girl

would brush her mother’s thick hair, wind the dark

strands into a bun. The boy’s aunt taught him

to keep secrets and not to mind the dark.

The sun spent its last oranges and pinks.

Night descended while they dined, the dark

obscuring faces and plates. The bomber

mailed police a confession signed The Dark

Avenger. Do dying patients reach for

a nurse or toward some world behind the dark?

Some subjects won’t be caged by words. Do you

really think, Stone, that you’ve enshrined the dark?

Counterpoints

The sky so blue before the airplanes hit.

Words of praise can land where bullets miss.

Shadows come to life from lamps we lit.

The same lips that curse can also kiss.

Words of praise can land where bullets miss.

Hate’s hidden under fear but never gone.

The same lips that curse can also kiss.

Too quickly a new darkness follows dawn.

Hate’s hidden under fear but never gone.

When one shoe thuds, we know what’s coming soon.

Too quickly a new darkness follows dawn.

Clouds can eclipse even the brightest moon.

When one shoe falls, we know what’s coming soon.

Find joy in the spaces in between.

Clouds can eclipse even the brightest moon.

Past disappointments set up every scene.

Find joy in the spaces in between

the losses. Stacked up like dirty plates,

past disappointments set up every scene.

Still, hope is power that no pain negates.

Although losses stack up like dirty plates,

and shadows come to life from lamps we lit,

hope is power, and no pain negates

the sky—so blue before the airplanes hit.

The Objects of My Adolescence

Torn fishnets, hand-drawn Ramones shirt,

mohawked Barbie head

stuck on a stick—are they

in a landfill somewhere, slimy

with food scraps, trapped next to

charm bracelets and hair clips

from the preppy girls who taunted me,

or are they mixed with the recliners

and wine glasses of parents

whose suburban comforts we scorned?

Before people break down and blend together,

our possessions precede us. A garbage dump,

and not our country, is the true melting pot,

receptacle for refuse of movie stars and janitors,

boxes labeled in myriad languages,

unimportant trash joined with once-loved

mementos of shed selves,

4.9 lbs. per person, per day,

decomposing slowly, if at all,

except for the few treasures we save

to pass along, my spiked bracelets

safe for now from this sad fate,

sharp and shiny on my daughter’s arm.

Alison Stone has published nine full-length collections, including Informed (NYQ Books, 2024), To See What Rises (CW Books, 2023), and Zombies at the Disco (Jacar Press, 2020). She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize, New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award, and The Lyric’s Lyric Prize. Her websites: www.stonepoetry.org and www.stonetarot.com.

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JC Reilly

My Sister Dances to David Bowie, and I Get Caught Up in It: A Mood

“Let’s Dance” slurs on the stereo, Bowie’s voice sexy if

straining, like he’s smoked too many Camels. You

sway along to funk and dance and rhythm, heart captured, say

your love for him tastes like the blues, like salt. You run

the tape back and play the song again, twirling in time. I’ll

slouch to the couch from the floor to leave your legs room to run

through your dance routine. He doesn’t sing to me with

any great gift—no shivers here—though it’s clear he spirits you

to his secret realm under the serious moonlight. You glow, and

cheeks pinken as you’re drawn deeper into the dance. If

I spoke, you might turn from sylph to sudden kid sister, you

might loosen from the hypnotic state that keeps you astir. I say

nothing. Don’t even hum. Rapture like a silver scarf can hide

nothing of your light. At the last note, you come back to yourself. We’ll

let the rest of side one play; flip to side two. Then—a shift. I sense you hide

now, withdraw. The dance was not for me to see, because

it belongs to your David, a moment like a pearl. But I’ll share my

truth, anyway, that somehow I saw you transformed by love,

like a thousand doors opened with black and white keys for

you. Love, that terrorist, takes everyone hostage, except you

don’t mind—no girl with her first love does. Would

David love you back? If you were grown, why not? He’d break

like a geode full of amethyst for you, he’d fall so hard. My

fancy catches me in its basket with a start—whose heart

preoccupies me now? Yours or David’s? Is mine too in-

clined toward romance, that golden pebble, no matter what two

people are involved? I think I want to dance now too, I say, if

that’s ok. You hesitate, but your “boyfriend” won’t wait, and you

nod as you set the tape up again. David sings, and I should

feel silly dancing in the living room, the two of us, fall-

ing into the rhythm, me mirroring your moves, but I’m into

it, feel the way his voice starts to stir the cold stew of my

imagination. But you—already you spin, a vortex in invisible arms,

forgetting anything not him. We’ll spend the hour this way, and

another tomorrow and the next, till you sigh and tremble

from exhaustion, the afternoon dance whirling to a finish like

a dune in a gale. Somehow you’ve endeared me to Bowie a

bit, and as for you, something of the woman you’ll be begins to flower.

            A Golden Shovel after David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”

            (Let’s Dance, 1983)

Deer Season

They amble these hills, follow the track of other deer.

Tussock tamped down, leaves nibbled—a pack of deer.

A doe groans and pushes in high brambles and grass,

down and up she gets, another push—an amniotic sac of deer.

An early moon rises on the scroll of night: a patter

of hooves, a snap of twigs, the shadow black of deer.

In a meadow glossed gold with dandelions,

a sudden spring hosts dozens of laid-back deer.

The faun, polka-dotted, nurses from his mother. She eats

the afterbirth for protection and health—a snack of deer.

Beneath a cluster of pines, two young bucks spar:

grunting and huffing—the antler smack of deer.

The way the sunlight makes them glisten in the fields.

The way the woods hide the cognac fur of deer.

The doe admires her faun who rolls in a patch

of wild violets. A blanket of sky to the backs of deer.

The herd pads through the underbrush slow and steady

until a crash—they swing around—the double-back of deer.

From my window I watch the edge of the forest

for their movements—jot notes in my almanac of deer.

C Reilly has work published or forthcoming from 300 Days of Sun, Sheila-Na-Gig, Dunes Review, and others. When she's not writing, she crochets, plays tennis, and practices her Italian. She lives in Marietta, Georgia, with two cats who hate each other. Follow her on Twitter @Aishatonu, on Bluesky @Aishatonu.bsky.social, or on Instagram @jc.reilly.

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