The Bookends Review

I could go blind today
& I would still live
in a body teeming
with visions of colors.
The soft blue of a robin’s

egg crushed up over
cement—a human
body dragging their
shoes in its wake.
I’ll permanently

remember how our
bodies move in the arms
of a loved one; how
they curl and fold
into one another. 

– Terin Weinberg…

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Patrice didn’t get to hold her baby.

She woke up without him. She woke cold, shivering, and being fed hot chicken broth.

They pile blankets on her while ignoring her questions.

“Where is my baby, is he ok?”

Finally, a nurse places a cold hand on her forehead.

“He is alive, but you can’t see him.”

Her abdomen hurts from where they cut her open and pulled him out. Her legs are still numb, and she can’t feel her toes.

She tries to take a deep breath, things will get better. They must.

“What’s wrong with him?” she asks, she is afraid. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

The surgery was terrible, unexpected, and not part of her plan.

“He is having trouble breathing and won’t eat properly,” the nurse says, adding another heated blanket.…

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           The first time the officer told the boy to drop the bat, the boy began to walk forward. He was just under five feet tall, so the bat may have looked longer than it would have appeared if held by a boy of greater height. The boy, people in the neighborhood would later comment, had dreamed of becoming a baseball player.

            By the second time the officer ordered the boy to drop the bat, the boy had narrowed the distance between them. The officer wasn’t aware that the late afternoon sun had started shooting rays directly into the boy’s dark brown eyes. Traffic had grown heavy on Seventeenth Street, two blocks south of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, where the boy stood clutching his bat in a field infested with weeds and discarded soiled napkins and soda cups, outside an abandoned low-income housing project.…

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He swings the shark into the air above his head, hands
     wrapped around its tail,
swinging hard backwards and then overhead, until
     at the very peak of the
arc there is a millisecond of stillness, backlit by the glare
     of city lights, man and shark
a dark silhouette edged with glow, the man’s back a curve

against the weight, and the long shark body an answering
     curve in the air above, like a
pair of sweeping wings, as if both plan, at any moment,
     to take flight together
until the frozen moment breaks as the arc comes down hard
     against the planks with shark and
wood meeting in a solid thud amid the gasps of the crowd,

and the now limp shark again rises in the air above the man
     as he pivots and releases its body
back out to the ocean, and we all rush to the rails, watching
     the creature floating still in a
shining pool cast by the pier’s tall lights, motionless, until
    with a full body jerk, it swims away,
heading to the ocean’s deep waters, away from land, away

from us, away from him, and chaos erupts on the pier’s wide
     planks, voices relieved and amazed –
did you see the size of that thing?…

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I learned the other day that women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. Which means I existed as an egg in my mother’s womb before she was born—before that, even—and she existed in her mother’s mother’s womb. And so we are all much older than we realize.

I was with my mother during her turbulent childhood, through the screaming matches, slammed doors, and shattered plates. I was there during the long hours she worked at the deli to pay her way through college, and I was there when, at age 16, she broke her leg and my father helped her with her crutches in Spanish class and fell in love.

And my mother, she was there with my grandmother the night before her wedding, when my grandmother said no, it was all wrong, she didn’t want to marry him, and my grandmother’s mother said too bad, it’s too late, you have to go through with it.…

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Best viewed in the Northern hemisphere in July & August

He’s unbalanced 
despite what neighboring scales suggest. 
My faint companion; visible
not always 
& sometimes even in-between phases.

Always off fixing (or breaking) a system of binary 
stars, travelling along the yellow sea between
Beta
Nu
Xi.

Ascension 
as the Hunter sets.
I remember the burn of your sting.

– Janet Dale

Author’s Note: “Scorpio” is part of a series featuring the twelve zodiac constellations.…

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1.

She thought about him at the oddest times; the thoughts vaguely embarrassing, as if revealing her to be a fraud —something other than a good wife and mother. She considered herself a practical woman, and by her sober estimation, the memories served no purpose. They were, in fact, counter-productive to the already complex task of simply living her life. Yet, as much as she tried, she was powerless to control them. That was the maddening part —their unpredictability. When they were upon her, a kind of déjà vu took hold, leaving her unsettled and lost. Like the time two summers ago, on a family trip to Nags Head, when memories of a long-ago beach welled up from the bright sand like a guilty confession, leaving her dizzy and lightheaded in the Carolina sun, as her family chattered about her, oblivious.…

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