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. 

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.