Judy Kaber

Caught in a downpour

of years, I ache under ancient hip of sky,

everything in disrepair, despair swarming

like blackflies as if spring squalled in February,

as if I am lost in a ground fog of blame.

How can anything be the same when

you are dying? Lay the spoons on the table.

Put the apricots in a bowl. Expect high tide

to overwhelm the breakwater, to flash

against pilings, drive boats onto land.

I’ve left behind the atmospheric river of youth

with iridescent-edged clouds. Now I hug

the beaufort scale, hope for breezy instead

of catastrophic. I wrap myself in layers

of cotton and wool, nubbed hope,

and tattered resolutions. Ground full of ice

and treachery. Every day, gray and dense

with collapsing pressure, veering winds.

It’s hard to know which way to face.

Women’s Work

It’s born in me, the fabric of spit and survival, how I need to shovel compassion, make a bucket of sympathy and carry it

across the parking lot of everyone’s grief. Learn to sweep

at a young age. Learn to hold my mouth at an angle, to purse it

as if I sip on a straw. The time I knelt before the toilet, a blizzard

of words blackening my head—mirror, dinner, knife, red. Sometimes

I think about my life as a chair without a back or legs, nowhere

to lounge. Time gives me children, smelling of sour milk and powder,

presses me up at 2 am, my mind stiff as a marble statue as I rock.

If I’m not careful, one son may turn into a turnip when I make stew.

My stomach roils, but I remember steam rising as my mother taught me

to iron, each slit stiff, not a trace of softness left. I sprayed

starch over each stretched garment. When the car stalls, my job

is to stand by the road, raise my skirt higher. At the copy machine

I never let a man’s inky gaze stain me. But in the closet, I sometimes

replace the mop, let some man wash me clean with his hands.

Waiting Room

On the wall a TV frames tropical homes, sand, rooms

with white walls. A way to mute missing. olive

chairs. My cell phone plugged in. The power at home

out, lines down. Here all the lines are straight, angles

always right. What can go wrong in such a world?

Are you listening? What can possibly turn out

rough or troubled. Voices from the TV just barely

visible. Each time the door opens, we look up.

Each time, someone calls a name, we all

look away politely. Sometimes you can hear one

side of a cell phone conversation. The black and white

time on the clock beside the TV whispers, but

what is there to hear in a hospital waiting room?

Good news is relative. I’m just waiting. Out the window,

a brick wall stretches in sun. Possibly warm.

Rooster

Maybe he had a name, a way to call him across the gravel

drive, free range and half-wild, but he came to us

unwanted, disheveled, any name long fallen into the wide

yawn of nature. A rooster is disorder, disturbance, shape-

shift of feathers that pulls you from dreams with his rough-

throated crow. We hated him. But we kept him. Until

people from the city came to visit in their shiny jeep with

the German shepherd dog that wouldn’t harm a flea, that

managed to slip out the half-open window, grab the

rooster, a deep bite into its back, not quite killing it. I never

blamed the dog. Any yellow feathers the rooster had now

black with blood. My husband wrung its neck, handed me

the body. My eyes watered from the smoke of the fire as I

dipped him in hot water, swished, and the cells holding the

quills released. I knelt, plunged him in cold water, let the

scent of the lilac bush wash over us, wrapped him in a

towel. The only decent thing to do was cook and eat him. I

stuffed him with a mix of onions, walnuts, raisins, spices,

baked him the way I would any chicken. Outside the

weather never changed, each day robed in sun. He tasted

fine. Not tough. When he changed form and only bones

remained, I spread the relics beneath the lilac bush,

crushed petals in my hand, let the trace of those blooms

follow him on his journey.

---

Judy Kaber is the author of three chapbooks.Her poems have appeared in journals such as Hunger Mountain, Poet Lore, and Spillway. Recently, her poem“Sword Swallowing Lessons,” was featured on “The Slowdown.” Judy won the 2021 and 2023 Maine Poetry Contest. She is a past poet laureate of Belfast, Maine (2021-2023).

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Joyce Schmid

A Ceremony of Lessons

Why are we called

to motherhood

without a seminary

teaching how

to be a sun

and not a storm,

to bathe our children every night

in holy water,

to prepare their sacrament

with reverence,

to bear with strength

the sacred burden

of our love?

Hunger

I used to fill myself with all the sweetest food, until

I grew so big it frightened me.

I’m hungry,

hungry.

Who’d believe

I was a five-pound preemie

incubated like a hatchling,

air so pure it could have blinded me,

the milk of many mothers

keeping me alive?

My hunger’s not a metaphor. At most,

a simile:

as hungry

as a hummingbird almost erased by frenzy of desire—

as hungry

as a glorious white pelican, tail tilted up,

head in the lake to satisfy three stomachs.

Words were found and I did eat them.

As we near the end

I turn again to you.

Will you still lie with me,

surround my hunger

with the truth of bodies,

wordless as the flight of birds?

_________________

Note: Italicized lines are from Jeremiah 15:16, KJV; and Archibald MacLeish

Celebration of Life

My sister has evaporated from the slide show

like an old perfume.

Picture after picture flashes by—

girl hiding braces with a tight-lipped smile—

bride in white with stephanotis—

bride in blue, a crown of roses sparked with baby’s breath—

old woman wilted on an old man’s shoulder, giving in.

Enter my foolish ghost, I acquiesce...

and Nothingness becomes its own caress.

Has she discovered

only Nothingness?

Her name was Dolly Gordon.

Now her name

is scouring the shrubbery for her, the clouds.

Not finding her, it wastes away.

She is a blossom dried and pressed,

flaking into stardust

spreading out into the Nothing

and the Everything,

contained in all the living flowers.

__________________________

Note: Italicized lines are from a poem by Dolly Garter Gordon, published in 1060’s.

My spirit so high it was all over the heavens

--Li Po

My mother used to lose me purposely

when I was two, to see if I could find my way

among the shelves and knees,

the empty dresses swaying over me.

Last night—again—

that murky nightmare—

driving home from Oakland—

dark—roads tangled—

grimy fog—dead signals—

signs obscured—my car

careening into badlands—

That’s when I usually wake up.

But this time,

I was in your slipstream,

following your lead—

your silver Honda

flood-lit

in the halo of my headlights,

trailing star-shine.

“And the gold of that land is good....”

Genesis 2:12

There was still snow in Innsbruck,

early April, you and I new-married,

sitting on a lift-chair, swinging low

above the cold and rocky Eden

of those early days.

So many mountains and so many lakes,

so many meadows overlaid with snow,

so many cities with their freeways,

castles jutting out of history,

and supermarkets selling winter strawberries.

We’ve seen the nakedness

of Eden—bare-boughed trees recuperating

from their fruit, collapsing floors,

exploding pipes, torn circuits, trip-wires arcing fire.

The knowledge baffles us.

But this is Garden—Garden—

all of it—

the Eden of our lives.

There is no wisdom to be found in Eden,

just this strange geography of grace

and you and I.

---

Joyce Schmid's poems have appeared in Bridport Prize Anthology 2023, New Ohio Review, The Hudson Review, Five Points, Literary Imagination, Poetry Daily, and other journals and anthologies. Her chapbook, "Natural Science", is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press.

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Rebe Huntman

DEAD MOTHER TOUR:

Moscow, 1983

She is 19 & drunk on Dostoevsky when she dreams

of walking the Volga. There will be snow dusting

the Kremlin & she will be dressed in black. The man,

slick with Marx & Mayakovsky, will take her hand as

they stand in line to see Lenin pickled in his tomb. Shoot

vodka with some men he knows. Later, in the eye

of night he will undress her, & as she thrills to the trill

of Pushkin pouring from his throat, she will catch

the reflection of her own eyes sparking in the moon of his

& believe this is all there is to love. Perhaps, if the mother

were alive, she might warn the daughter that the river,

the moon, are easy. It is the waking that is hard—

the man now distant at the edge of the bed & & you, left

with your own skin, stark & naked beneath the knife of day.

DEAD MOTHER TOUR:

Leningrad, 1983

after Ocean Vuong

What I need you to see is not

how Spring is stilled

by the click of the shutter—

the inadequacy of the girl’s

neckline torn like Alex

from Flashdance to reveal

her motherless throat,

or the two men—

strangers—propped

like exclamation marks

beside her on a park

bench piercing

the horizon

with their gaze,

but the hands holding

the camera that are

my father’s hands,

& the face squinting

into the sun that is

his daughter, his flesh.

Like all photographs

this one fails to tell

the story. Like where

the girl is thinking

of yet another man—

their tour guide sworn

to be their shepherd

in this foreign land.

How, not yet fluent

in the tricks of the moon,

she’d mistaken the flash

of conquest in his eyes

for love.

Or how,

when the trip

draws to a close,

the father

will slip

a bill

into his

pocket—

a tip

for showing

them all

a good time,

& the girl

will be too

ashamed

to stop him.

---

Rebe Huntman's poems, essays, and stories appear in such places as The Southern Review, CRAFT Literary, Ninth Letter, South Loop Review, Tampa Review, Quarter After Eight, Sonora Review, Juked, and The Pinch. The recipient of an Ohio Individual Excellence Award, she holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from The Ohio State University. Her debut memoir, My Mother in Havana, is forthcoming from Monkfish Books. Find her at rebehuntman.com and on Instagram @rebehuntman.

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