The Mother/Strawberries

January 2023 | poetry

That hot afternoon you took us to pick strawberries at a truck farm just off Dixie Highway, counting out change for three baskets to fill. The farmer took it and grinned at us in a way that seemed mean to me, but we wanted the berries, and you had used all your money so we could have them. “Ya’ll want some bubble gum?” The farmer pulled a few pieces of Dubble Bubble from his pocket. “I give it to them pickaninnies who work for me. Keeps ‘em from eating my fruit.” I saw that you were looking at him with some kind of revulsion – it crossed your face quickly, but he saw it, too – and then you said, “Thank the man for the offer, girls, even if you don’t want it,” which meant we weren’t to take it, and he looked you up and down, showing you he could look at you like that because you were a woman and what could you do about it, and then he smirked and said, “It’s stoop work. Gotta bend over to get at ‘em,” and you turned away from him and led us out into the field, but you didn’t pick the berries, and I realized that you weren’t going to let him see you bending over, and I saw there was something dark about bending over, and it made me uneasy so that I kept looking back at where he stood watching us, watching you. And I understood that if you bent down to pick a single strawberry, you would lose some battle still unknown to me, and it shamed me. We quickly filled our baskets, and after supper, the berries shined like stained glass on our plates. Now, so many years later, I sometimes think of him, the first man I ever saw leer at a woman, the first time I saw it for what it was. But it wasn’t the first time a man leered at you, was it, and were you thinking of your girls that day, of us growing up, and what that would mean, and were you thinking, Never bend over. Never bend, even though you bent, you bent every day until, at last, you couldn’t bend anymore.

 

Nancy Connors

Nancy Connors is a poet and writer whose work has appeared in Stonecoast Review, failbetter, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Phare, Midwest Review and others. She is the recipient of a 2023 Pushcart Prize for her poem, “To Cigarettes.” She lives in New York’s Lower Hudson Valley.

Featured Author: Pamela Wax

January 2023 | poetry

Chewing the Five Zen Remembrances

 

               I inherit the results of my actions of body, speech, and mind.

                               —the Fifth Remembrance

 

You’re neither Buddhist nor Hindu, but here you are,
kneeling on a zafu, slack-jawed, fighting sleep.

You watch the breath at the center of your universe—nostrils,
diaphragm, belly, expand/deflate like a real yogi, growling.

When the woman next to you squirms, wheezing, old monkey
mind drops upside down from the ceiling, grilling your motives.

You’re there for nirvana, to disgorge the huddled sentries
from their watchtowers in your mind, perhaps a few enlightened

nights of sleep. You want to stand in tree pose without teetering
and to sit cross-legged without cramps. You ruminate

on those Zen fates one by one, a gastronomic ploy to get you
back to basics like unleavened bread: how you’re of the nature

to grow old or ill, to ingest small deaths—losing, always losing—
before the final one, your own. You know you can’t hold on

to anything for dear life, except for these common-sensicals
that rouse you from your torpor, roaring to be welcomed. Mother

gone, father gone, brother, too, gone. You root your feet, stack
your hips, knees, ankles. You drop your shoulders, tailbone.

You’ll play mountain, unfazed by wind or time. You breathe
for five counts in, I, too, am of the nature to die, then empty out,

I must be parted from all I love. On your knees, you extend
your arms, a child’s pose over their graves. You practice tree,

growing roots so you no longer fall. But monkey rattles
your branches each time you nibble at the fifth

of the Upajjhatthana Sutta. It sticks in your craw, breath trapped,
like when your morning prayer, My soul is pure, would make

you gag. Monkey see. Monkey laugh. Monkey-you skeptical
that the crumbs of your deeds—what’s left of you at the final

tally—can turn your monkey self to mensch. Your lungs fill, empty,
doing their business, and you keep chewing to get yourself right.

 

Edible Plant Walk

 

Array sun fern under your
pillow when nightmares trot

unbridled. Down knotweed—
japonica—worthy Samurai

to cross swords with Lyme.
Squeeze jewelweed to detox

poison ivy. Brew creeping
ivy with honey for strep. Steep

Joe Pye weed for gout,
deep breathing, or even fever,

and if you’re Joe, to get it
up for the night shift.

Mugwort—mother of herbs,
perennial, pungent—perverts

the sowing of Joe’s seed,
if you’re female. Or crumble

wild carrot—white, witchy
umbels of Queen Anne’s lace—

on salad to trip up your cycle,
to trick your inner mother.

 

Pamela Wax, an ordained rabbi, is the author of Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022) and the forthcoming chapbook, Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have received a Best of the Net nomination and awards from Crosswinds, Paterson Literary Review, Poets’ Billow, Oberon, and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House. She has been published in literary journals including Barrow Street, About Place Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Naugatuck River Review, Pedestal, Split Rock Review, Sixfold, and Passengers Journal. She offers spirituality and poetry workshops online from her home in the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts.

Jean Wolff

October 2022 | visual art

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Jean Wolff

Jean Wolff has had group and solo exhibits in various galleries in New York City and internationally. In addition, she has published 129 works in 84 issues of 55 magazines. Born in Detroit, Michigan, she studied fine arts at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, receiving a BFA in studio arts. She then attended Hunter College, CUNY in New York, graduating with an MFA in painting and printmaking. She is now part of the artistic community of Westbeth in Manhattan.

The way it was before

October 2022 | poetry

Twice the raccoon attempts its nest,

her scaffolding slides away on a kind wind,

before gathering back into the rock’s hollow

shared with skunks and rivulets.

I am finally permanent and still

water refuses to keep my image. Suppose

my planetary wanderings do not subside. Suppose,

in this rigidity, this paltry wish for gardens

to die and come back different, suppose, Lord,

sick with boredom, that quality I’ve come to recognize

as singular, you finally decide motion lends

a certain excitement to water yet to form a canyon.

And having spoken, your fingers compass the quiet

world and wait for the sputter of change

on the other side of your hands. It’s as if

there never was a voice spurring

change through will, willing the multiplicity

of Animalia, of pollen to lie down in earth.

Nick Visconti

Nick Visconti is a writer living in Brooklyn with an artist, and a cat.

Chemical Reaction

October 2022 | nonfiction

You find yourself in your junior high milk room-turned-dark room on a Saturday morning being taught to process film by your 8th grade science teacher. (His suggestion.)

You are crying because the prior afternoon your dad cuffed you so hard that the space before your eyes became a black-and-white checkerboard of spots. You willed yourself not to faint, kept your head up, eyes forward, and walked to your room, where you closed the door and laid down until morning.

You are enveloped in the pungent odor of metallic solution emanating from a silver tray. You are, instead of comforted, given your first French kiss by this balding man. His hands slide beneath your lavender tee as his wife and two eldest children come into focus in the developing fluid. Apparitions entering into black and white, the Mrs., so young then, sits on a park bench, toddler at one knee, baby clasped in a white blanket in her arms, and smiles into the lens, into her future.

Janine Harrison

Janine Harrison wrote the memoir/guidebook, Turning 50 on El Camino de Santiago: A Solo Woman’s Travel Adventure(Rivette Press, 2021), poetry collection, Weight of Silence (Wordpool Press, 2019), and chapbook, If We Were Birds(Locofo Chaps, 2017). Her work has appeared in Haiku for Hikers, Veils, Halos, and Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women, Not Like the Rest of Us: An Anthology of Contemporary Indiana Writers, A&U, Gyroscope Review, and other publications. She teaches creative writing at Calumet College of St. Joseph and serves as a Highland Arts Council member. Formerly, Janine was a Highland Poet Laureate, an Indiana Writers’ Consortium leader, and a poetry reviewer for The Florida Review.