6 – Poetry

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.

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.

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.

---

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.

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.

---

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 

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.

---

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

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.

---

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.