Quentin Parker

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Richard Rauch

Hands clasped,
fingers interlaced
for just a moment
before touching
lightly at the wrist.

Palms, too sweaty
to grasp the gravity
of the situation,
lose their grip.

A stray finger
hooks another,
lingering
for just a second
before slipping away.

Born and raised in the New Orleans area, Richard lives along Bayou Lacombe in southeast Louisiana. A graduate of LSU, he received his doctorate in theoretical physics from Stony Brook University. He has lived and worked in New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and currently tests rockets at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. Richard’s poetry credits include Big Muddy, Bindweed Magazine, Brushfire Literature and Arts Journal, The Cape Rock, Confrontation, Crack the Spine, decomP, Edison Literary Review, El Portal, Euphony, Evening Street Review, Grey Sparrow, Neologism Poetry Journal,The Oxford American, Pembroke Magazine, Pennsylvania English, The Phoenix, Plainsongs, Quiddity, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, SLAB, Steam Ticket, Whimperbang, Wild Violet, the Love Notes anthology (Vagabondage Press), and Down to the Dark River: An Anthology of Contemporary Poems about the Mississippi River (Louisiana Literature Press). His flash fiction credits include Infective Ink and Aspen Idea (2012 Aspen Writers’ Foundation/Esquire Short, Short Fiction Contest finalist).

LaDeanna Mullinix

We named you posthumously 
since you died the same day 
as the prince – April 9, 2021.
You had much in common –

old, loved, regally tall, and we knew 
you were failing,
losing some substance up top.
Still, we were not ready, 

and you’d think we might have heard 
a two-story black gum fall
in the night.
But thunder covered your collapse,

and there you were, 
dead on the damp earth in the morning 
as we walked the dog,
lifting him over your fresh corpse.

Luckily the moon, though waning,
had wooed you to the east 
so you didn’t
crush us, sleeping 15 feet away,

nor the little white dog.
We left you to rest–too heavy to roll, 
remaining a testament 
to gentility, aristocracy among trees. 

It will be a year next month – 
warm enough to sit
on the bench you’ve become 
and have a cup of tea.

LaDeana Mullinix is a Quaker, a retired occupational therapist, a native Kansan, a Master Gardener and a Master Naturalist. Her poetry and essays have been published in Friends Journal and Slant. Her poetry has been published in one anthology, and two were recently accepted in a forthcoming anthology featuring Ozarks poets, from the University of Arkansas Press.