Airport Prayer

If I count the times I cried today,

I would need more than two hands—

an 81 year old passes through security

and tells me her mother just stopped driving

yesterday at the age of 108; a woman at the counter

hands me my coffee and says Here, baby;

and when we are lining up at the gate by letter

and number and I don’t know where to go,

a woman tells me conspiratorially that I should

just go behind her. Sometimes life feels conspiratorial.

Like we are conspiring to help each other despite the noise.

How can I explain why I am crying for the glassy-eyed

dog being carried in a tote? For the little boy being led

bleary-eyed to catch a plane I pray will land safely?

I don’t want to be a part of this world, but I can’t stop

negotiating with time, with flesh, audience to myself,

spectator to my own body. I couldn’t bear to be called

baby every day and poured a cup of something hot.

I think it would break me. I can’t bear to be be born

again into the kindness of each and every moment.

I want to believe we are not witless, just wingless,

trying to soar above the wreckage we have made.

That tears are never wasted. Is it foolish to pray

for something you know already exists?

For something that is everywhere?

 

Esther Sadoff

Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Little Patuxent Review, Jet Fuel Review, Cathexis Poetry Northwest, Pidgeonholes, Santa Clara Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, among others. She has three forthcoming chapbooks: Some Wild Woman (Finishing Line Press), Serendipity in France (Finishing Line Press), and Dear Silence (Kelsay Books). She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Hole in the Head Review.

Interview

It’s a pleasure to meet you…just water is fine…

Thanks for taking the trouble to give me a chance.

So, you’ve made it at last to the back of the line

and the candidate worth just a cursory glance?

 

Inconspicuous as the invisible man,

I’ve a resume anyone sane would ignore.

For occasions like this, I attend cap in hand

as I beg for your payroll’s umbilical cord.

 

My most recent employment?  I ran out of luck.

I was blamed for regrettable downturns, you see?

There’s a slope to my shoulders but passing the buck

is a little proactive for someone like me.

 

I’m the figure the folk in the staffroom lampoon

and the name on the rota that’s read with a smirk,

like I’ve stepped on a rake in a children’s cartoon,

I’m the butt of the joke for my colleagues at work.

 

While the suited and booted show brazen contempt,

I’m cold-shouldered by even the uniformed drones

but I’ve not got the courage to make an attempt

at sustaining an income by working from home.

 

A perennial misfit, I can’t find a match

for my dubious talents and limited skills

so the word on the street’s that I’m not up to scratch

and there’s no kind of post I’d successfully fill.

 

I’m an abracadabra away from my goals

(or perhaps it’s Hey Presto! away from my dreams).

My inadequacies are consistently droll

if I’m not indispensably linked to your team.

 

And so thanks for the great opportunity Miss

but I sense that I haven’t impressed you at all

and this isn’t a fairytale plot with a twist

so I won’t hold my breath while I wait for your call.

 

Chris Scriven

Chris’ poetry is heavily influenced by his own lived experience of mental health issues, although it is frequently also underpinned by an (often dark) sense of humor. As he lives in the UK, his poems have predominantly appeared in UK-based magazines and journals such as Acumen, Orbis, and The Frogmore Papers, among others.

Unbidden Image

I can’t unsee firefighters hanging around our

living room like uninvited guests at a party

 

waiting with my wife in case her heart attack

arrives before the ambulance does, each man

 

scanning the room inch by inch as if flames might

burst from a bookcase, can’t unsee them monitoring

 

the way she probes her neck and shoulder and jaw

for a sign of the fuses a coronary lights in a woman’s

 

body, the young one unpacking the defibrillator,

flattening the blue patches that attach to the chest.

 

How strange that pain has a photographic memory.

Unbidden image imbued with new life. The past

 

always hijacking the present, my wife ever lifted

into the ambulance, the door closing between us.

 

Ken Hines

Ken Hines has been an ad agency creative director and a college English teacher, two jobs that take getting through to people who may not be listening. His poetry has appeared in Burningword Literary Journal, Rust & Moth, and Dunes Review, among others. You’ll find his essays in The Millions, Philosophy Now, and Barrelhouse. A recent Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he lives in monument-free Richmond, Virginia with his wife Fran.

How to Touch the Dead

I’ve rehearsed this in my mind

countless times–

Put the broom or cardboard scrap

on far side of carcass

Place scoop– something thin and stiff

yet flexible, at near edge

Draw broom towards scoop–

towards myself

 

This is where the problem lies–

no matter what tool

I feel the soft roll of death-filled body

limp foot flop, rotation of tail

through glove, through broom and dustpan

into my veins, my whole being

I can’t do this

I fear my wrist might twitch the pan

popcorn creature into air

 

Once our cat left a field mouse

in the dining room midday

I ran through scenarios for hours

gathered gloves, small paper bag, old broom

but ended up hiding it beneath empty box

until my husband returned from work

to do the deed

 

Yet when he died

I took his lifeless hand directly into mine,

said goodbye, released

golden halo from finger, stayed

with him as he cooled

 

Joy Kreves

Joy Kreves is a visual artist/poet with an M.S. in Painting and a B.S. in art education from Illinois State University. She has often incorporated poems into or exhibited them alongside her artworks. Since 2021, she has been a DVP/US1 Poets member and is the current managing editor of the “US1 Worksheets” anthology. Her poems have appeared in several exhibition catalogs and “US1 Worksheets”. She has had poems published in NewVerseNews in 2024. In 2022, she had a poem at the Poetry show at Trenton Social. Kreves has hosted several “Artist Melts” events incorporating art and poetry at Suburban Frontier, her Ewing, NJ, art space.

needle blight

it is human nature to want to build something

substantial and wonder why our bridges fall

 

like fever. upon conversion from spruce to roof,

the eastern hemlock remains square-shouldered

 

unhungry for sun. a hospital falls in the forest

and everyone can hear it, but you wouldn’t know.

 

the frame of my first home, a place to dream

walls onto bones; in the backyard: three pine trees

 

as surrogate mothers searching for their children

searching for their limbs. books of aftermath

 

on classroom shelves full of featureless figures

drumlined over rockets, ships, blimps, then me,

 

reluctant survivor stretching fingers across

the gray victims, too young to picture their faces

 

too safe to see the size of their crowd. learning

eventually every echo goes unanswered

 

somewhere in the world. the day we move i bury

the woody wedge of a pinecone beside the porch

 

since i believe everyone’s intent is to be good,

unaware mulch and soil boast different creators

 

unaware the sun can’t reach the seeds still at home

in their husk, unaware that no amount of protection

 

will ever grow into a stalwart tree that refuses

to abandon its spire and survive the winter alone.

 

Amanda Nicole Corbin

Amanda Nicole Corbin is an Ohio-based poet who has had her work published in The London Magazine, Door is a Jar, Pile Press, Gone Lawn, the Notre Dame Review, and more. Her debut full-length collection, addiction is a sweet dark room, (Another New Calligraphy, 2024) focuses largely on her journey and struggles with mental health and addiction. Find her on Threads and Instagram at @ancpoet or www.amandanicolecorbin.com.

Lost Places

There were orchards here once

and creeks that ran all the way to July.

 

In those days, we could cross one on foot

and up the embankment on the other side,

just below the walnut grove, long gone,

as well as deer who lay in the tall grass

and flew at our scent.

 

We walked then on land

not usually used for grazing,

the windy side of a knoll,

where fog settled into folds and stayed

under the spreading of an oak or laurel.

 

In outcroppings of granite, slid

between hard shapes

and stood in the silence,

pondering the unspoken questions, listening

for their stony answers.

 

Jerome Gagnon

Jerome Gagnon is the author of the recent collection Refuge for Cranes: Praise Poems from the Anthropocene and Rumors of Wisdom. His poetry has appeared in a variety of publications, including Spiritus, Poet Lore, and Modern Haiku. A former teacher and tutor, he lives in California in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.jeromegagnonblog.wordpress.com