6 – Poetry

Suzanne Underwood Rhodes

Roses from Susan and a christening 
into what I have no idea of. 
Blanched and christened. White 
polo shirt heavy on the slumping
sacred body. Keys to the kingdom
in his lost pocket. Still  
I hold him, pietà, my hymn, 
body still warm 
in the death that shirks this life,
the darling they said dead I said
risen. I said.

---

Suzanne Underwood Rhodes is Arkansas’s eighth poet laureate. She is the author of Flying Yellow: New and Selected Poems, named a semi-finalist in the 2022 North American Book Award of the Poetry Society of Virginia. Other books are What a Light Thing, This Stone; two chapbooks, Hungry Foxes and Weather of the House, and two books of lyrical prose, A Welcome Shore and Sketches of Home. Her poems have appeared in many journals, books, and anthologies such as Mid/South Anthology, Slant, Shenandoah, Image, Alaska Quarterly Review, Christian Century, Words and Quilts, and others. Awards include nominations for the Pushcart prize, first place in the Dr. Lily Peter Memorial Award, first place in the Virginia Highlands Creative Writing Contest, and others. A retired college professor, she lives in Fayetteville and teaches virtual poetry workshops through the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia.

Jessiela Roberts

On Terminal Disease Square, at the intersection of Doubt and Despair, live the Benders of time, 

Shape Shifters, specialized in contorting time by manipulating disease states with magical elixirs, heroic measures, and gadgets capable of delaying the inevitable.

Time, unimpressed with the trickery and smoke screens slips by slowly, undisturbed.

At the corner of, No More Options live the cerebral demigods, 
twisting facts with statistics, peddling hope to appeal to the unmet expectations for a cure, 
in an attempt to sell the promise of time with one more treatment.

Fear, guilt and defeat tap dance on patrons’ conscience, 
How can we give up without a fight they say?
Sadly they agree to barter quality of time in lieu of quantity of days, 
“All bets are off the table” and “money is no object”, except for those who lack. 

They place their bets on the odds that Science will once again defeat death, while dignity is lost at all cost.

In a game of Russian Roulette the healers take their best shot, 
Successful! 
Life hangs suspended between eternity and purgatory, 
Destiny paused temporarily!

Two paths lie ahead at a fork in the road, 
The Keepers of Time summoned urgently to offer guidance and comfort along the way,
To trade time for the certainty of quality and comfort is the path most feared,
To preserve dignity one must choose to redefine hope and accept death as a normal path of life’s journey. 

Death though deferred can never be denied, 
Time sold can never be retrieved, 
Time planned can always be cherished.

---

Jessiela Roberts, M.D., is a Family Medicine Specialist in Fort Smith, AR. She is a graduate of Trinity School of Medicine.

By Alison Hicks

I could have used the set of traveling colors,
the brush with its barrel of water.
Winter hues: 
ice-covered shallows, 
dry stalks, ragged heads of phragmites,
sparrows that flew back and forth in the grove.
Plank bridge across the neck
where ice gave way to deeper water.
Quiet, considering the highway, 
the train tracks, the airport, 
walking here after drop-off.
Squares of color arrayed, 
shifting with sunset,
paper holding the rinse.

---

Alison Hick’s third book of poems, Knowing Is a Branching Trail, received the 2021 Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Books. Previous books include two full-length collections of poems, You Who Took the Boat Out (Unsolicited Press, 2017) and Kiss (PS Books, 2011); a chapbook, Falling Dreams (Finishing Line Press, 2006); and a novella, Love: A Story of Images(AWA Press, 2004), a finalist in the 1999 Quarterly West Novella Competition. Her work has appeared in Eclipse, Fifth Wednesday, Gargoyle, Louisville Review, Permafrost, Poet Lore, and other journals. She was named a finalist for the 2021 Beullah Rose Prize from Smartish Pace, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Green Hills Literary Lantern. Other awards include the 2011 Philadelphia City Paper Poetry Prize and two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships. She is the founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.

By Sam Byrd

Under the dresser
a small plastic button
uncovered as if 
all of the sudden,

Uncovering thoughts
of your burgundy sweater
wrung and pressed, to make   
it seem better,

Uncovering dreams
of planes next to this
with sweaters untouched
no buttons amiss.
Alas, on this day
as sun fades to taper
so I fear memories become
evanescent vapor

---

Samuel Byrd is a medical student at UAMS.

By Howard Kuenning

We’re all Gatsby, always have been, standing lonely on our own pier, 
Looking for the certain future, rich as Croesus, really, in this world, 
Food, rent, man, and printed books online. It’s all on line!
Which line? Not really sure, when just a click in is a false fantasy 
Self-policed by Keanu Reeves algorithmic goggle-eyed, Google-eyed, 
Dr. Octo surge machines running their traps along the frozen tracks of 
Our pitiless dreams—Me. Mine. My thirst. My hunger. 
Feed this Dream, the American Dream, 
Hydrogen clouds of nano-fission uncontrolled accelerants 
Seeded and harvested in simultaneous and decayed extinction 
Beyond the reach of any kind of Archeology on this campus, 
This field, opposing teams faced off in this early moment of
A new Age of Hope, Build Back Better. Back, where? 
To some pre-pandemic Eden that rudely shoves our 
Rotten American Dream of white privilege back in line 
With the failed Utopias of dreamless sleep, where nightmares lurk, 
Ready to devour hope and promise, the staggering beauty of 
Young hearts and minds dropped like unarmed victims into a 
Turf battle for Truth, the flipped coin of Both Sides Now, 
Yes, Joni, now, Both Sides? Neither looks quite right, does it? 
No, it doesn’t. Yet we stand in this relative quiet, the Global Blowhard 
Silenced by a click out, his scuttling parasites panicked by deafening silence, 
Parched tongues thirsty for deception, unslaked. How does it feel? 
The great alibi turned out to have vacuum for a soul, and the deal is a Con, 
A Great Lie the bedrock on which all deals fail. At some level 
We’re all jugglers and clowns, and the tricks we turn don’t matter 
When we discover that he really wasn’t where it’s at, 
After he took all that he could steal. In fact, there is no where, here. 
It’s over there, marked in every domicile of hope and sanctuary by 
The bright green gleam off Gatsby’s dock, the pitiless alien router eye of a 
Vast Matrix monster gazing from a billion feeds into our hopeless spaces, 
Only a click away. Go to him, now, you can’t refuse. You’ve got nothing to lose, 
Now you’ve lost it all. Invisible, no secrets, concealed.

---

After decades living as an expatriate in Europe, Rick Kuenning lives in western North Carolina.

Rick Kuenning translates lifelong writing and teaching experience into poems informed by a quick and innovative sensibility. His work reflects a keen interest in nature, art, culture, and religious studies. It also draws on a long career in international relations and national policy. He writes with depth and variety; cultural criticism and political censure are leavened with whimsical reflection and lyrical meditations on the natural world. He is stirred by rich language; words formed into beautiful phrases allow us to see in new ways and better understand ourselves. His poems seek to provoke and inspire!

His creativity is often sparked by dialogue with other poems. He is awed by nature, angered by injustice, and moved by the stories of those whose voices are not heard. Rick Kuenning is a versatile, caring, domestic man. He reads widely, enjoys cooking, and listens to classical and popular music. His poems are forthcoming in Perceptions Magazine, Slab, and Variant.

Boring Creds: B.S. United States Military Academy, M.A. (English) Duke University, ABD (English) University of Maryland; English and Philosophy Instructor at the United States Military Academy, English Instructor at the United States Naval Academy.

By John McPherson

Nanuk thought it was time,
time to go out on the ice,
to relieve her family of one more useless
mouth to feed during this hungry time
when seals were scarce. They would
soon have to move. She did not want
to move again, her bones were too achy.

She remembered as a young girl when
the missionaries came; how they gasped
when they learned about the old way of
going out on the ice. Her people learned to
not tell them of such things. It did not happen
often anyway, and never against one’s will.
She had laughed inside at their strange ideas
about how to care for their old ones,
keeping them alive well past their usefulness.    

She would ask her youngest granddaughter
to take her before the rest were awake.
One last ride, to hear the dogs once more,
to feel the icy wind on her face. The bears had gone,
looking for seals. It was a good time to go.
She would find a small mound
to lean back upon, close to the water
where the ice would soon break up
sending her frozen shell to the bottom of the
cool green sea.  

Her spirit, though, would soar to a place
the missionaries knew little about.
It would be good to see the old ones again.

---

John McPherson started writing for contests in 2015 when he was in his mid-seventies. In addition to contests, his poems have appeared in The Avocet, a quarterly publication emphasizing poetry about nature; Post Scrip, an anthology of postcard poetry; and various other anthologies. His short stories have appeared in Del Garrett’s Vault of Terror, Volumes one, two, and three. He has served as President of White County Creative Writers, Gin Creek Poets, and Poets’ Roundtable of Arkansas. He currently lives in Searcy, Arkansas, just 20 miles from the small town he grew up in, having lived in Little Rock and Russellville.

By Emily Kocurek

Bleeding.

Her mom’s been bleeding for days.
Transfusion after transfusion,
As if her veins were sieves.

Drinking.
Her mom’s been drinking for years.
Bottle after bottle,
As if her only worry were gin.

Dying.
Her mom’s been dying for hours.
Heartache after heartache,
As if there weren’t enough already.

We sit on the floor together
And discuss impossible objects.
She’s kept eternal hope
But also wished her dead.

Now she holds a jaundiced hand,
As she longed for hers to be held,
And fears this wish fulfilled.
I hold her hand too with our hearts

Bleeding. 

Author’s note: Impossible Objects

---

Emily Kocurek, M.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine. She divides her time at UAMS among her research projects, clinical duties in the medical intensive care unit and pulmonary clinic, and being an associate program director for the internal medicine residency. She is a Little Rock native.

Dedication: To Josh, for always giving me perspective.

By Rochelle Jewel Shapiro

In a slot of Grandma Ada’s rolltop, 
I found a hand-colored photo 
of Uncle D. in his Marine uniform, smiling, 
eyes bluer than the overbright sky 
of the hand-tinted tropical backdrop. 

I tried to imagine my gentle uncle, 
who taught me how to whistle and to jitterbug, 
peering out of foxholes that could be blown up
at any moment by a tossed grenade, or crawling 
in slippery sand under gunfire, or searching 
for the enemy whose uniform was the color of sand,
my uncle on that volcanic island that stank of sulfur, 
blood, decaying bodies, the flamethrowers’ smoke. I tried 
to imagine him wielding a Ka-Bar knife to slit a throat, 
or swearing to slit his own throat to avoid capture, 
but I could only see him with his shining eyes, soft smile. 

Decades later, after Uncle D. died, my aunt sent me
a Xerox of his war diary that just detailed
in his chicken scrawl what he ate 
and the New York Yankees’ scores. 

How I knew what he’d gone through 
was that I heard after he’d been home 
a month, my mother, his middle sister, irked him, 
and he flew at her, knocked her to the floor, 
began to choke her. 
My grandparents had to pull him off.

---

Rochelle’s novel, Miriam the Medium (Simon & Schuster, 2004), was nominated for the Harold U. Ribelow Award. I’ve published essays in NYT (Lives) and Newsweek. Her poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many literary magazines such as After the Pause, BoomerLitMag, Brief Wilderness, Brushfire, The Courtship of Winds, Figure 1, La Presa, The Midwest Quarterly, Mudfish, Mudlark, Neologism Poetry Journal, Packingtown Review, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Westview, The Iowa Review, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Stone Path Review, Frontier Poetry, Santa Fe Literary Review, Stand, Carbon Culture Review, Cider Press Review, Cutbank Literary Journal, Doubly Mad, Edison Literary Review, Evening Street Review, Euphony Journal, Inkwell Magazine, Amarillo Bay, Bayou Magazine, Poet Lore, Crack the Spine, Compass Rose, Controlled Burn, Cumberland River Review, Flights,The Furious Gazelle, Glint Literary Journal, The Griffin, Grub Street, Hey, I’m Alive, I-70 Review, Isacoustic, Los Angeles Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, East Jasmine Review, El Portal, Litbreak Magazine, The Virginia Normal, Chantwood Magazine, The MacGuffin, Memoir And, Moment, The Moth, The Nonconformist, Rougarou, Negative Capability, Penumbra, The Louisville Review, Amoskeag, Organs of Vision and Speech Magazine, Pennsylvania English, Entropy Magazine, Rio Grande Review, riverSedge, Rogue Agent, The Seattle Star, Seven Circle Press: A Literary Micropress, Sierra Nevada Review, Steam Ticket, Streetlight Magazine, Swamp Ape Review, Licking River Review, Whistling Shade, Peregrine, Gulf Coast, Existere, Passager, Midway Journal, Moria Literary Magazine, Empty Mirror, Sanskrit Magazine, Typishly, The Literary Nest, Underwood Press, Willow Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Waxing & Waning, and Wrath-Bearing Tree. Rochelle’s poetry has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and she won the Branden Memorial Literary Award from Negative Capability. Spry Magazine nominated her poem for the Best of the Net. Rochelle currently teaches writing at UCLA Extension.

By Candace Armstrong

I remember her clumping tread,
the rubber-tipped cane
striking the floor before
the halt-slide step.

In a hurry, it was a faster
clump-shush, clump-shush.
As a child, I never understood
why she walked that way.

She’d had polio, her childhood
spent in heavy leg braces,
one leg forever shorter,
lucky she could walk at all.

Her feet were tiny, her shoes
built-up, special-ordered, 
bought to match her wardrobe 
and walking sticks. 

Her gait sounded an early
warning system to teenage ears.
Later it was the white noise
of her invisibility.

Now, with belated empathy,
I swipe cobwebs from her cane,
long consigned to an attic corner─
put to use for my shattered knee,

lucky I can walk at all.

---

Candace Armstrong writes poetry and fiction in the beautiful woodlands of Shawnee National Forest in Southern Illinois. Her book, Evidence of Grace, was published in April 2021. Her poetry and short stories have been published in DASH Literary Journal, Quill and Parchment, The Corona Silver Linings Anthology, The Lyric, Midwest Review, Illinois State Poetry Society, Highland Park Poetry, Muse, and the Journal of Modern Poetry,and other journals and anthologies. Candace also had an essay published in The Mindful Word. She received Special Recognition in the Helen Schaible Sonnet Contest from Poets & Patrons in 2018 as well as First Honorable Mention in Category 1 of the Poets & Patrons contest in 2020. Candace has taken fiction workshops and classes at the University of Iowa, the College of Charleston, and others online, including WOW! Women on Writing. She participates in local poetry and writing groups. You can learn more about Candace and her writing at candacearmstrongwriter.com.

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.

---

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.