The Bookends Review

You have asked for just seven candles
demanded chocolate, willing to pass
on ice-cream, though not seconds.

You have invited only me. 
I’m out of work again,
bring only the two-tiered tribute,
place it on the counter, and warn,
be careful chewing, there’s a file inside.…

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The grass had all turned brown.  Snow, crusted gray by car exhaust, hugged the curb.  A blare of shift change whistle blew at the factory a few blocks away; 5:00 pm and the gloaming of evening had already fallen.  From his bedroom window in the rectory, Father Francis watched the cold breeze tug at a lone leaf on the tree in the front lawn.  His own heart felt like that leaf.  He went down the hall to the kitchen to heat water for tea.  Although he’d only turned forty-six earlier that month, days after his mother’s death, he walked with a slight limp.  The rectory was as quiet as a tomb.

At the sound of the factory whistle, Sister Katherine glanced up and looked outside the convent’s basement window. …

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My grandmother sat on the toilet seat. I was on the floor just in front of her.

She brushed my brown curly hair until my scalp hurt.

“You got your grandfather’s hair. Stand up. Look at yourself in the mirror.”

My hair looked flat, like someone had laid a book on it overnight.

I touched my scalp. “It hurts.”

“You gotta toughen up, Aiden. Weak people get nowhere in this world. Your grandfather was weak. Addicted to the bottle. Your mother has an impaired mind and is in a nuthouse. And your father, he just couldn’t handle the responsibility of a child. People gotta be strong.” She bent down and stared into my face. Her hazel eyes seemed enormous. I smelled coffee on her breath. She pinched my cheeks.…

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          On my morning run, I met a boy with a flute case. I was jogging up Highland when he flagged me down and asked directions to the library. He told me his school was closed because of a bomb threat. Then he started swinging his flute case forward and back.

         “I’m the only boy in school who plays. I get teased all the time,” he said.

         The boy was tall and thin with wet hair that fell over his face. He looked to be around twelve. I noticed he wasn’t wearing a backpack. I paused the timer on my watch.

         “I think it’s cool that you play the flute,” I said. “It’s different.”

         I kneeled down to retie my laces.

         “Why are you running?” he asked.…

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Rebecca Resinski is one of the founding editors of Heron Tree, an online poetry journal.  She also designs and produces hand-bound chapbooks and pamphlets under the imprint Cuckoo Grey.  A professor of Classics at Hendrix College, she lives in Conway, Arkansas.

Please describe Heron Tree and your duties as editor:

Heron Tree is a poetry journal founded in 2012 and online at herontree.com.  We aim to publish a poem weekly, and all of each year’s poems are also collected in a volume.  I read and weigh in on all of the submissions, as do the other editors, and in addition I prepare the accepted poems for publication on the website.  Formatting the poems for publication is an especial pleasure because it gives me a chance to inhabit them, to notice and appreciate every word and line break.…

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He wakes to the assimilating weight of his wife on top of him and the sound of Portuguese blooming in his head, her lips feathering his ear, pouring in a steady stream of sinuous vowels and indulgent consonants.  They glide down his spine and enter her, creating an elliptical rhythm duplicated in every one of their cells.  He wonders how this woman can still surprise him after so many years and if it is a sin to be so happy before he has thanked God for another day.  What would his congregation think if they knew their minister’s faith, shaken by the absence of God in his daily rituals and devotions, is revived so readily by a conjugal act that, at this point in their marriage, has nothing to do with procreation?…

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1.

Blurry I blink open
to Madonna in tacky tiara
and low-riding jeans, time-stop
dancing in a blue-red sepia swirl
before the stars and stripes
skinny arms sprawling bare
exposed hips swirling
bye bye Miss American Pie.

I don’t realize it’s the TV
until the doctor rolls in,
feel needles stiff underskin
sticky circles sucked to my chest
reading faint signs of life.…

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