Chris Lesher

By Abby Caplin

I’m twenty-one, touring a Chicago hospital in a dirty-snow winter, trailing a student who raves about the school, its illustrious doctors. Power suits for women are the fashion for those who hope to be taken seriously, so I’m wearing a black one—big shoulder pads, pink bowtie—and Ferragamo shoes that kill me. We scurry down a hallway, around moaning patients on gurneys, and he delivers me to the half-open door of an office. The doctor behind the desk gestures with a flip of his wrist for me to sit, shuffles papers to find my file. From his questions I can tell he has not read it. He asks me what I think of Roe v. Wade, now three years out from the decision to legalize abortions, a forbidden interview topic. Flustered, I give him my honest answer, that I believe in a woman’s right to make choices about her own body. I am thinking how last year, a month late and scared, I took emergency hot baths, my mother imploring me to have the baby. She would raise it, she said, while I attended classes, took exams, and stayed overnight in the hospital. But I did not want to cede my baby to my mother, as she imagined herself young despite age and illness, while I fulfilled her dream of my becoming a doctor. She asked for too much. But my delayed period was from stress—MCATs, applications with long essays, final exams in physics, and for the first time, I gave thanks for it. Feet on the desk now, steeple-fingered, my interviewer smirks, Tell me, if a patient is pregnant, and a month before her due date she says she wants an abortion to look good in a bathing suit, would you give it to her? Not waiting for an answer, he waves me away.

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Abby Caplin is the author of A Doctor Only Pretends: poems about illness, death, and in-between (2022).  Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Catamaran, The MacGuffin, Midwest Quarterly, Moon City Review, Pennsylvania English, Ponder Review, Salt Hill, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Southampton Review, Tikkun, and elsewhere. Among her awards, she has been a finalist for the Rash Award in Poetry and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Award, a semi-finalist for the Willow Run Poetry Book Award, and a nominee for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. Abby is a physician in San Francisco, California.

Inspired by Elizabeth Bishop

Alan Swope

The art of sighing isn’t hard to master;
each day greets us with news of fresh disaster.

Yes, it is easy to sigh, too easy.
We sigh every five minutes, says science,
but unnoticed, unwitting, not well earned.
Shakespeare’s young lover “sighs like a furnace,”
unceasing groans from a gloomy suitor.
Sighs come cheaply to these moping youth. 

But the true art of sighing is refined by the old.
Aging tunes the pitch of the sigh, enriches its timbre.
Long years deepen the reach of the sigh, each heave 
conveying a lifetime of struggle endured.

My grandfather’s sighs released the weight of years
like bilgewater from a barge. Grandmother’s sighs,
a musical chord resolving when it reaches 
its home key, all dissonance sweetened.

Sighs comfort the old, 
like the bellows breath of the yogi, 
outpourings to recharge the soul.

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Alan Swope’s poetry has been published in Fort Da, Front Range Review, Mixed Mag, Perceptions Magazine, Poetic Sun, and Roanoke Rambler. He is a practicing psychotherapist and an emeritus professor with the California School of Professional Psychology. Alan enjoys singing, acting, travel, cinema, and gardening

Laura Schaeffer

You could fly for an instant
whole body in separate hands
cupped and held hands
you could fly when they let you

but I made a mound beside me.
I kept your shoulder to my shoulder
to lean into wind to feel an updraft
in your paper bone.

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Laura Schaeffer’s poetry has been published in The Pitkin Review, Tidepools, Ars Poetica, Currents, Poetry Corners, Pif Magazine,Collective Visions Gallery, and The Far Field. She is a graduate of Goddard College’s MFA Creative Writing Program and received her undergraduate degree in English/Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Laura has taught workshops to alumni during the annual winter conferences and led a six-month poetry class for at-risk youths. She attended the Centrum Writers Conference on a full scholarship and recently participated in a six-week writing workshop led by a previous program director at Goddard 

Colin Williams

You will care for them when it’s time.
With static eyes, pores firing off sweat,
you’ll milk the globes of blood
dangling like apples under their arms.

You’ll turn the bed into a foam-rubber redoubt,
roll out puppy pads, stroke skin where it’s intact.
You’ll cradle them like grandpa as he withered,
lifting without pulling, patient, strong.

You’ll make broth from whole chicken. You’ll scoop 
the cat shit, you’ll wash shirts stiff with plasma.
You’ll squeeze clots from the lines like jelly. You’ll
turn your house to a stall and muck it out,

Patient farmer, and when they’re whole,
devices back in their boxes, the tape stripped
like old wallpaper, the scars gleaming, your back
aching, you’ll forgive their body, and feel

Your own—whole only as a pound of beef
shining behind glass on plastic and air.

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Colin Williams (he/they) lives in Pittsburgh and holds an MFA from the University of Florida. His writing has appeared in Hobart and the Northern Appalachia Review, and he covers heavy metal for outlets including Bandcamp and Revolver.

Suzanne O’Connell

It was a fine Sunday morning
when I felt the first sign.

We were not the pancake-and-funny-papers
type family.
Mom wasn’t doing the crossword.
Dad wasn’t refilling the coffee cups.
No one taking turns reading Krazy Kat out loud.
Instead, there were three kids fighting
over the small boxes of cereal from 
the bargain pack of 12.
Everyone wanted the Frosted Flakes,
no one wanted Raisin Bran.
Sometimes I felt like the Raisin Bran.

Dad was getting dressed for golf.
He would be gone all day.
Mom was still in bed with another headache.

The sound of crunching cereal shook something loose.
I remembered autumn leaves underfoot,
me walking to school,
each leaf seeming so defeated and sad.
Walking, I would’ve been daydreaming about my usual reveries:

quicksand,
whales,
electrocution,
arithmetic,
my tonsils,
the tragedy of apples.

While thinking about the autumn leaves,
a stirring began in my stomach,
magma churning,
red rocks glowing with heat,

a volcano in the making.
A spanking-new thought occurred to me:
I realized I had clarity about nothing,
that my job as a seven-year-old was 
to define who I was and what I wanted.
Breathing stopped. Arguing fell away.
I stumbled with the gravity of this explosion,
and almost fell down on the kitchen linoleum.

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Suzanne O’Connell’s recently published work can be found in Brushfire, Delmarva Review, El Portal, Good Works Review, Ignatian Literary Magazine, Midwest Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Opiate, Pine Hills Review, Silver Birch Press,Tulsa Review, Visitant Lit, Wrath-Bearing Tree, and others. She was awarded second place in the 2019 Poetry Super Highway poetry contest. O’Connell was also nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and received Honorable Mention in the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, 2019. Her poem “The Viewing” was included in the Finishing Line Press anthology Covid, Isolation & Hope: Artists Respond to the Pandemic. Her two poetry collections, A Prayer For Torn Stockings and What Luck, were published by Garden Oak Press.

Carolyn Jabs   

People flicker out. Each of us has an unknown
expiration date. Someone is always left behind.  
If we cannot live forever, 
what bargains should we make?
Can we schedule our tears?
When must we be wrecked by grief?
How long should we allow ourselves 
to linger in the twilit gap, 
between consciousness and dreams,
where cancer does not exist?  

Weeping is not your way. You would rather die
than ruin one day with useless medicine.
Soon, I will begin to think about a future
that does not include you. I will not
confide these thoughts even to myself.
Like people who have built on a fault line,
we will reach across the widening chasm
as long as we can. What are the odds 
of seeing another sunrise as beautiful as this one?

---

Carolyn Jabs has contributed essays and articles to the New York Times, Newsweek, Working Mother, Self and many other publications. She is author of The Heirloom Gardener, one of the first books about heirloom vegetables, and co-author of Cooperative Wisdom, Bringing People Together When Things Fall Apart.

Quentin Parker

sacrificing self. 
physicians spend a lifetime,
to save another. 

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Quentin Parker is a fourth-year medical student in the College of Medicine and currently applying to Anesthesiology residency programs. In his spare time he enjoys spending time in the outdoors with his wife and daughter.

Alita Pirkopf

I saw geraniums
in the first snow,
blood-bright,
upright,
and one yellow daisy.

But that day ended.
The cold
grows colder, with 
sometimes
noon warmth.

People don jackets,
spend time indoors,
enjoy inside-evenings.
I am invited to admire

a young couple’s slides—
Vietnam, Hanoi, Saigon—
with only the loveliness
they experienced. Flowers,

not history, but flowers, 
flowers, flowers. Next
morning I almost weep.
Petals lie scattered

under snapped frozen stems,
next to the dead daisy,
facedown, on snow.

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Years after graduating from Middlebury College, Alita Pirkopf received a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Denver. Later she enrolled in a poetry seminar at the University of Denver taught by Bin Ramke. Poetry became a long-term focus and obsession.

Alita’s poem “Roadkill” has been nominated for the Sundress Publications 2021 Best of the Net awards. Other poems of mine have appeared or are forthcoming in The Alembic, Caduceus, Cimarron Review, The Courtship of Winds, El Portal, Harpur Palate, The Rail, Stonecoast Review and Wrath-Bearing Tree, as well as in other journals.

By Iris Litt

The guy in charge of the cemetery
said I would like this site.
It has a seasonal view, Mead’s Mountain in winter,
and you can hear the stream year-round.
We laughed because we were living proof
that most people can’t imagine being all dead,
I mean, really thoroughly totally dead.
So I wrote him a check for $700,
my rent for eternity.
Yes, I like it here
and I don’t have to write any more checks.
But, as you can see, I refuse to stop
writing poems.

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Iris Litt, a lifelong poet, passed away this past May at the age of 94. She was writing up until the end, and would be very gratified to know this poem was being published posthumously.

By Chris Fettes

Sunburnt stranger
Buries face in hands
Staggers shadeless sidewalk
Year’s hottest day
Wandering from hospital
Nothing to say
Only left to sob

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Chris Fettes teaches the College of Public Health Writing Workshop and is poetry section chief for Medicine and Meaning. His work has been published in Slant, Import Sky, Nude Bruce Review, and prior issues of Medicine and Meaning.