The Bookends Review

pollen drifts from the oaks, floats down
to the lawn, travels on the breeze

across the grass, turns from yellow-
green to brown, collects in clumps, balls

at the foot of retaining walls
loses stickiness, turns crunchy

blocks gutters & drains, fills cracks
between concrete sidewalk slabs, coats

parked white cars & black trucks, drapes
itself over bushes, hedges

& fences, sticks to black letter-
boxes, clings to the fur of cats

attaches to running shoe soles
& laces, stealthily enters

homes through back doors, insinuates
itself into living rooms, kitchens

bedrooms & bathrooms, irritates
eyes, attacks nostrils, triggers

histamines, sneezing, headaches
brain fog, dripping noses, transports

male oak DNA into gaps
& fissures, fails to fertilize

– Nathanael O’Reilly…

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“I’ll call you Tre.”

There’s a little plaque, welded into the base of #273 with its number and a company name. I look up and up at the monstrous pinwheel. I put my hand against its trunk and feel it hum.

Two plus seven is nine plus three is twelve and one plus two is three. Tre. Like the youngest in a line of oil heirs. Only it’s wind power and has no parent. “Hmm.” But a burden. It has a burden, just like the disappointing James or Howard or Colin that can’t even be called his own name because his namesakes live and glower down. I nod at Tre.

I walk back to my car, still running and perched on the gravel shoulder.

***

I often think I’m a piano player but moving words and punctuation around.…

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1. Places in Time

Yoga came early to the world. The outfits came much later.

2. Womb

It is 1952. My mother—my about-to-be mother—is 43, awaiting me. She takes yoga classes, long before prenatal yoga and spandex.

3. West Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC

My mother, in her 60s, adores Hannah, her considerably younger yoga teacher. Hannah is mild, gentle, with a long braid down her back. I accompany my mother to a handful of classes. I’ve injured first my foot, then my knee, and cannot dance for some weeks, so I’m on an extended visit to my mother.

            I strain to prove myself well versed in stretching, in body elegance, even though my body is tight and somewhat unyielding. I glance over at my mother on her blanket, and I see her wide, flat bottom, her narrow hips resting in her hands, and her misshapen feet—the result of surgeries almost 20 years earlier—angled up over her face as she practices shoulder stand.…

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           Tobacco-stained fingernails dug into Radha’s flesh.

           She started to protest, but he squeezed her wrist. Her words shrank into a yelp that bubbled from her lips. She didn’t understand why he was so angry; then again, he never needed a reason.

           She struggled against his grip, and he twisted her wrist as hard as he could. There was a muffled crack, and her vision went white.

           Radha woke with tears in her eyes. She glanced around and realized that she had fallen asleep on the couch in her living room. She dried her eyes and massaged her throbbing wrist. It should have healed by now, but it still ached whenever a storm was coming.

           She sat up and stared out of the window.…

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I started like a seed, sprouting
in a wild world of June’s bloom.

Growing tall in the sun’s land
I asked why the night comes.

My mother knelt at old oak trees
in empty fields holding hope

in her hands. I spent
summers throwing rocks at stars,

waiting for them to fall
while looking for forever

in their unending light.
I left our ghosts in the garden

and aged among the hungry bees
searching for bright flowers

despite the darkness,
for even the night is as thin as paper.

– Natalie Marino

Note: A different version of this poem was published online by UCity Review in December 2021.…

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1321. Lunchtime. But this P2WM5 is due 1500.

No time for a sit-down. J1N1 sends in sandwiches.

I doff my heels, unbutton my collar, and eat at my picture window.

My last promotion, they were surprised when I chose this 5^th-floor office. A non-corner-office; furniture outmoded; and so low! I said: ‘I have acrophobia.’

I couldn’t say: ‘I want to look, one last year, out of the eyes of the beast.’ This picture window looks into the slum across the road.

The men are coming home for lunch. From where? From that corner. Beyond that corner, my picture window doesn’t see. The men are mostly autorickshaw drivers.

Some of the young men, who’ve acquired broken English, work as shop assistants. They don’t come home for lunch.…

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The Smoke is me, Burning by Constantine Blintzios, is the story of a family surviving on the edge of a pine forest in Harmswood, Arkansas. Crops have been corrupted by an outbreak of parasites in the rye. Livestock and buzzards alike are dying, so decay is left to spread unchecked. Blake and Jamie Ackerman have grown up on the lip of these woods. Raised by an alcoholic mother and a Vietnam-war veteran uncle, they have grown up believing in gods beyond the chicken-wire fence of their backyard, gods that steal children from their beds. When they are little, Jamie sees something in the woods and blinds his brother in one eye to keep him from seeing it, too.…

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