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 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.

Dana Robbins

Midnight. Sleep eludes me. 
As hours pass, my brain is full 
of the usual black dogs: worry 

about my children in this time 
of covid; climate change; fear 
that democracy is on its last legs. 

From the 18th floor, I hear a late train 
rumble along the river down the hill 
and, in the distance, a faint chorus 

of barks and howls, domestic dogs 
communing or a pack of wild dogs 
or even coyotes that come out 

at night to wander the woods by 
the tracks. Do the barks foretell 
the decline of our civilization?  

Will someday the Bronx, my home 
that seems so solid, revert to a state 
of nature; the forest grown up around 

the brick apartments, the way 
the jungle closed in on Mayan 
ruins in the rain forest? 

Or are they simply announcing listen,
I am dog? The barks grow fainter as 
I drift off to sleep. 

---

After a long career as a lawyer, Dana Robbins obtained an MFA from the Stonecoast Writers Program of the University of Southern Maine. Dana’s books of poetry, The Left Side of My Life and After the Parade, were published by Moon Pie Press of Westbrook, Maine, in 2015 and 2020, respectively. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals or anthologies, including DASH Literary Journal, Door Is A Jar Magazine, Edison Literary Review, Euphony Journal, Evening Street Review, Existere Journal, Paterson Literary Review, California Quarterly, Calyx, The Cape Rock, Edison Literary Review, Ignatian Literary Magazine, The Magnolia Review, Mount Hope Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, Pennsylvania English, Poetica Magazine, Moth Magazine, Neologism Poetry Journal, Poydras Review, SLAB, Steam Ticket, Visitant, and Zone 3. Her poem “To My Daughter Teaching Science” was featured by Garrison Keillor on the Writers Almanac in November 2015.

Her work received first prize in the Musehouse Poem of Hope Contest, third prize in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for Jewish Poetry in 2018, as well as an honorable mention in 2017, and an honorable mention in the Fish Poetry Contest. In 2020 she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Moon Pie Press. Dana has attended the Curlew Writers Conference, the Bay Path Writers Conference, the Stonecoast Summer Writers’ Conference, and the Wellfleet Writers with Marge Piercy. Recently, she was featured as Poetica Magazine’s poet of the week.

Mary Ann Dimand

Snowflakes wide

as white hens. Amaranth

bleeds scarlet on the snow.

.   .   .

While the hemlock bends 

to watch, a phoebe flies backward

through a hush of falling snow.

.   .   .

The trees were bending,

their leaves weeping. Fortunately,

it was a smaller sorrow. 

It did not break them.

.   .   .

Robins are stoic.

Why shouldn’t it snow?

No cold can quench 

their bold, red bellies.

---

Mary Ann Dimand was born in Southern Illinois where Union North met Confederate South, and her work is shaped by kinships and conflicts: economics and theology, farming and feminism and history. Dimand holds an M.A. in economics from Carleton University, an M.Phil. from Yale University, and an M.Div. from Iliff School of Theology. Some of her previous publication credits include: The History of Game Theory Volume I: From the Beginnings to 1945; The Foundations of Game Theory; and Women of Value: Feminist Essays on the History of Women in Economics,among others. Her work is published or forthcoming in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Agave Magazine, Apricity Magazine, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Bitterzoet Magazine, The Borfski Press, The Broken Plate, Chapter House Journal, Euphony Journal, Faultline, FRiGG Magazine, From Sac, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Hungry Chimera, Isacoustic, The MacGuffin, Mantis, Misfit Magazine, Mount Hope Magazine, Nixes Mate Review, Oddville Press, Pennsylvania English, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Penumbra, Plainsongs, RAW Journal of the Arts, Scarlet Leaf Review, Slab, Sweet Tree Review, THINK: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Essays, Tulane Review, Visitant Lit, and Wrath-Bearing Tree.

By Barbara Weatherby

---

I laugh when others laugh,

            but offer naught to conversation;

                                    standing still against a shaded wall

                                                observing without participation.

Music flows all around me, 

            an invitation to let go and dance.

                        I  decline for I might look foolish;

                                    probably best to not take the chance.

Everyone around me seems 

            smarter, cleverer, unafraid;

                        their lives bright with opportunities

                                    while my dreams slowly fade.

I wish I were a Phoenix,

            reborn an indomitable spirit

                        with wings to test the winds

                                    and the courage to commit.

But wishes are only imagination,

            vaporous thoughts with no subsistence.

                        It takes resolve to risk being noticed

                                    and action to bring into existence.

Yet, how can I move forward

            when filled with trepidation?

                        Can I fit in if I think I don’t belong?

                                    Am I ever to remain the shy chameleon?

---

Barbara Weatherby lived most of her life as a shy introvert and always had difficulty communicating with others. It was only when she and her husband and moved to the Ozarks of Arkansas that her life changed. She became so enchanted with the beauty of nature surrounding her that she wanted to express her feelings. She decided if she could not verbalize them, she would write. She then discovered that sharing her poetry was a pathway to connecting with people.

By Erin Bennett

In the beginning there is chaos.
Alarms and running and pressured orders. 
A conglomerate of people with a shared goal.
Tireless efforts to revive and restore the previous harmony
Of life. 
Hurried conversations of what might have been, of what could be. 
Old remedies and new technologies discussed and employed.
Persistent efforts to revive and restore the previous harmony
Of life. 

A pause.

Look into the face of Death.
Pain. Surrender. Peace. 
The words hang like ice crystals – fragile and mysterious. 
Death is an enigma.
Death can be a welcome visitor or a tremendous foe. 
Its unexpected nature almost always comes like a force.
One can prepare for Death, but not really. 
One can try to understand Death, but it still stings. 
Death can bring comfort and agony, separate or simultaneously. 
It can equally connect and disconnect people. 
Grief comes, or maybe it has been there for awhile.
Look into the face of Death. 
Pain. Surrender. Peace. 

By Eleanore Lee

They still call it that
Even though now it’s all just screen time
Of course it is day
Definitely.
That glitter of sunlight
Streams through the front windows
Blurring my screens
Making me look gutted and washed out.

Now back into the Zoom Room.
How do I feel about all those tech people
Staring into my bedroom?
Can you read that woman’s book titles
Hanging behind her?
They look most scholarly.

(I’d better get rid of those old beer cans.)

Takes a lot of patience to adjust and tweak—
To work this way, day after day
Takes the patience of that old prophet.
Yes
That was his name:
Job
(Rhymes with globe and probe)

And wasn’t that one of our century’s
Great creators? Plural, of course.
Rhymes with blobs and sobs.

---

Eleanore Lee has been writing fiction and poetry for many years in addition to her regular job as a legislative analyst for the University of California system. Her work has appeared in a range of journals, including Alabama Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Avatar Literary Review, Carbon Culture Review, Existere Journal, Flumes Literary Journal, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Portland Review, and Tampa Review. She was selected as an International Merit Award Winner in Atlanta Review’s 2008 International Poetry Competition. She also won first place in the November 2009 California State Poetry Society contest.