“Hurry up!” he called out to them as they filed through the narrow, shaded Arab quarter. For once he was leading the charge. Laura and their two boys sweltering in the heat, 40C even in the shade. Sweating profusely under their baseball caps, they must have thought him mad, marching them at full pace when everyone else was taking a siesta. He couldn’t help it. He was so excited.
Cordova. The name hung over him like rich, intoxicating Arab perfume. He had longed to visit her since a child. What would she be like? Were her gardens still abloom?
As he impatiently waited for his family to catch up, he played back the image of a small boy, his head resting against his father’s shoulder watching wonder-eyed at the spectacle of Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen in Africa.…
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I escaped through the basement door
at midnight, while up on the third floor
they were playing death games
on the flatscreen. I walked the dark streets
barefoot in cargo shorts.
Above me half a moon and half a sun
were stalking each other.
A line of handsome homes posed
at the edge of the bluff
as if thinking about jumping.
I only wanted to hide for a while
in their electric landscapes
to become a stone statue of no one
so they would touch my face
with their trembling fingers.…
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I was seated
in the death black limousine
at the back.
Thirteen, sobbing.
Bagpipes played
the bagpipe songs.
Timely snow
covered our coats.
Our grandmother
mother
wife
stranger
lowered
into the ground.…
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The worst thing you can call a woman these days is a ‘Karen.’ Their entitled raging strikes fear into the hearts of unsuspecting customer service workers everywhere, and “I will speak to the manager,” has been memeified across the internet.
I have laughed at these memes and clapped at the countless videos that chronicle the haughty rise and abrupt fall of Karens as they are banned from stores. I vicariously live through these moments; a balm to my personal experiences with Karens throughout my long career as front-line staff. The first of my memory was working at the front desk for a little museum where a woman demanded a refund for the tour she’d already completed. I’d only been in the job a month and had no idea what our refund policy was.…
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And anybody just might have killed five people.
And anybody just might have drowned a cat.
Barely audible at first, a woman on the train few had noticed began queerly and abruptly a conversation with all the hundred-odd passengers, one-on-one, as the train approached Chicago’s Union Station. Had I heard her right? She certainly had my attention: twilight made a mirror of my window, and I stared out blankly past a corner of my face back across the aisle and watched her where she sat alone. I’d seen her back in New York at Grand Central Station, a silver-haired woman in her late fifties, prim and proper. Her clothes, though from another era, seemed new, as if her beige woolen coat and pillbox hat had been pulled from storage only the day before. …
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After my checkup, hatchlings sitting on a broken
bough startle at the form I’ve taken.
Who’s to say what cures & what chafes?
So far, my generation has
discovered Higgs bosons, gravitons, quarks—
nuclear folly & deterrents.
The hatchings nibble at clippings of timothy
while I can still hear the nurse
tugging a ticker-tape of arrhythmias.
If wishing could reprieve
bones, I’d retrieve that echo through all those
lifetimes when I climbed a trellis
the full width of the patio
to replace a fallen fledgling.
If a hint might reawaken
the wilder beast with whom I’m unfinished
one or two lifetimes from now, I’m curious
how (or if) the bird will sing
the encore of my heartbeat.
– Bob Haynes
Author’s Note: This poem was written in 2022, which was not only a year of a continuing pandemic but also a year of personal loss.…
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“Barren,”
says the doctor and there it is
the monitored hope
of a caught firefly in the mason jar of my womb:
a crescendo to its emptiness
breathing and gasping in
only pockets of air
through a pin-pricked eggshell thin lid.
– Krysten Ross
Author’s Note: In early 2021, I was having a check-up with my doctor when I raised concerns about my health. After reviewing my symptoms, the doctor told me quite matter-of-factly that I may never have children. My heart sunk to the bottom of my stomach when I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. During one of the ultrasound tests, I looked at the monitor when the sonographer left the room. The cysts on my ovaries lit up the screen like a million fireflies in the night.…
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