6 – Poetry

By 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.

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.

By 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.