I’ve restarted many a wood stove’s flames
from sleeping embers when the firebox
remains warm. In the darkening evening,
a faint glow glimmers beneath snowy ash.
We watch it as sleep seeps into our veins.
Some stone tablets I suppose say the
Phoenix rises from ashes. But I cannot
catch those who sleep below the tinder’s
reach, or rekindle those beyond the oak’s
broken trunk that spirits signals into the sky—
all red streamers, white steam, black smoke.
– Michael Dickel
Author’s Note: My wife and I visited the too-new grave of my mother-in-law (of blessed memory), along with family and friends. A rare snow had fallen and the air chilled our bones. I listened to Psalms read in Hebrew, recalling the love we felt for her and she for us warmed me.…
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You ask
and I say delicious
(that cell/splitting glory that
unfolds until we expire)
angels on fire
come remind us
that this life
is just a prayer
we have been
rendezvousing with the dead
in the small hours
they say death is nothing
but a change of clothes
and setting the stage before
the next act
we are corpsing
our way
through a comedy hour
so as not to let on
that we are amused
so as not to expose ourselves
as alive
while they climb Jacob’s ladder
we drive along the coast and
make waves with
one hand out the window
pushing through air with an open palm
and it is our prayer
(all this living
is just a prayer)
– Julie Henderson
Note: This piece was previously published by TheBeZine.com…
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Hearing myself snore, I woke. The ice cream truck’s muffled music penetrated the Tudor style walls of the living room. Outside, children spoke, shouted, and demanded over the looping circus theme. Other than ruining my life, why did the truck stop here? The ice cream truck driver knew better as did the neighborhood.
The whooshing of running water chased along the white plaster above me. He’d gotten in the “bath” by himself. From the angle of midsummer sunlight through the windows, he’d started at least an hour late.
Rising off the warm couch, I shivered in the air-conditioned home.
Footfalls pounded, moving away from the shower to the top of the stairs. He cornered banister. Andy, wet and naked, jogged down the stairs. His penis flopping against his thighs as his hairy gut jiggled. …
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Magdalena Ball Ball has an English Literature honors degree from the City University of New York, studied at Oxford, and has business and marketing degrees. Her editorials, short stories, poetry, articles, and reviews, have appeared in many journals and anthologies, winning several awards. Her poetry books include Unmaking Atoms, Repulsion Thrust, and Quark Soup; her novels include Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening. (The Art of Assessment is nonfiction.) She collaborated with Carolyn Howard-Johnson in several poetry books and has a radio show and a review site. Finally, Magdalena is a research support lead for a multinational company.
Tell us about your highly successful review site, Compulsive Reader:
I started Compulsive Reader nearly 20 years ago (!), after a website I’d been writing reviews for folded. …
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In the aftermath of my father’s terminal cancer diagnosis, I “repatriated” myself into small town life in my hometown in rural Minnesota.
Among the major cultural differences between life in downtown Chicago and a prairie town of 1,500 people (population, ethnic food, lack of diversity, etc.) lie a few more insignificant quirks. Everybody knows each other. The same woman has been working at the grocery store since I was a child, my best friends’ parents run many of the businesses in town, people I don’t even recognize call me by name when I see them at the library. And because of this connectedness, one cannot simply mail a package or buy the newspaper or stop in to the butcher for a round tip steak without answering a line of questioning that always began with:
“How is your Dad doing?”…
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Outside the town past the railroad
where the white mustard grows
A killdeer calls over a woman’s wails
And dusk retreats its way to night
In darkness the place is visited
by an entourage of boys black like ravens
carrying a limp grief to sew
they spend the dark hours crying
it into the ground and leave
the soil swollen marked by its barrenness
walking with the rising sun on dawning
sadness the boys make their way
back to town and through its center
to the house…
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Above the clouds is the space for restless minds,
And after each beat of their wings, you kiss me.
Pearls fall from our mouths when we breathe.
But the day you left was not yesterday –
The ice-cream-scoop hollow in the back of my throat remains,
Or so I tell myself, to exist.
In my fingertips, there is a fire.
Has it never scorched you, lying in your bare skin between my knees?
You smile, and in the corners of your mouth rests every wanton promise.
The air carries a scent of lemon;
The soap you used in my apartment sits heavy in my mind.
Wherever I walk, the grass turns to ash and drifts away.
Only in the rain, now, is there a hand against my cheek,
When ripples still lace together across the surface of the lake
And from the stars, I turn my face to the side.…
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