By Stephen Johnson

Like Aspen leaves adrift on yellowed-cold,
we flutter, down from youth – to frailty.

Bone overlapping nerve, vision narrower,
niggling fire- in an un-stoked furnace.
A familiar name, muted in the downdraft,
gait- become a trudge deliberate.

We swirl, blown about upon Time’s whim,
conjugating in our similarities.

Wisdom, begotten by present sorrow,
consoles- as does hot tea in deep winter.
Retrospection, wrings itself out upon us,
our frayed rag, draped on clean plates.

In groups, proliferous and alarming,
we settle, onto the still and waiting soil.

knurled hands laced with peace accepted,
feet – content to have at last arrived,
hearts, at-pace with the scope of quietude,
we bequeath the bustle, to those we love.

---

Stephen Phillip Johnson is a Mountain Home carpenter. Writing is his itch. Within the halls of medicine, where he’s been (repeatedly) healed, reside flocks of muses.

By John Grey

The man whose wife is having a baby
crouches in his chair like a fetus,
can feel himself kicking.
Another woman’s husband is having a biopsy
of a lump on his back.
She swells from the couch like a tumor,
fights back her thought’s malevolence,
struggles to look benign.
Family of cancer victim can’t help spreading
from one end of the room to the other.
A young mother’s son was hit by a car.
Her mouth gashes like a wound.
Tears well in her eyes’ bruises.

---

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, Santa Fe Literary Review, and Lost Pilots. Latest books, Between Two Fires, Covert, and Memory Outside the Head are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in the Seventh Quarry, La Presa, and California Quarterly.

By Phil Flott

I pivoted on the balls of my feet,
to not fall off to the left or the right
but to sit me down on the flat part
of the roof.

My balancing muscle popped,
I fell atop a mound of soft dirt.
The torn tendon sucked blood to itself
then quickly dispersed it,

though I did not realize that.
I went to lunch, as if the sun in the sky
meant a blessing on my body
and not shining forth my injury.

Night descended; fever arrived.
Immobility was my way to love myself.
Fasting from supper felt like fullness.
I loved my leucocytes.

The doctor made blood seep out
in skank serum,
pulled my tendons back to overlap,
sutured the ripped parts together.

My healthy heart aided my healing.
Cortex contributed its part.
I ate meals to wholeness,
happy to receive back
my healed four-in-one quad.

---

Phil Flott is a retired carpenter. He has had poems in Passager, Sangam, Raven’s Perch, Mulberry Literary, and others.

By Christopher Fettes

Sometimes forgetting is willful, even hoped for.
How he carried himself as he walked across the yard,
Between one building and the next.
How his pant legs were cuffed,
But still grew damp from treading through the dewy morning.
How his eyes pierced your facade when he looked your way.
The way the smell of his sweat hung on him
Warm and intimate, not staid or dirty.
The way he walked past watching eyes, showing no sign he noticed.
The way he disappeared across the lawn.
The way you wondered if he knew your name.
The thoughts you kept to yourself.
It is easier to let the sting of memory recede
Into the past without wondering what
Might have been or revisiting what was.

---

Christopher Fettes was born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he lives with his wife and their beloved pets. He earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English from the University of Central Arkansas. He writes poetry and fiction. He serves as Poetry Editor for Medicine & Meaning and is a reviewer for Slant. He is the author of a chapbook titled A Loneliness in the Distance Between.

By John McPherson

Adrift on the Sea of Tranquility

“Dad, do you know what day it is?”
“Yes, it’s my birthday.”
“I never forget my birthday,”
“And how old are you?”
“Sixty-nine, of course.”
A repeated conversation we had each year as we celebrated his sixty-ninth birthday for seven years— until the crystal clear waters of his everyday madness swept him away.

---

John McPherson is the current president of Poets’ Roundtable of Arkansas, president of Gin Creek Poets, and past president of White County Creative Writers. He writes poems, short stories, and letters to the editor, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

By Pamela Mitchell

I will bundle you in blankets and place you 
on porches in cure chairs to keep you

I leave you in care of white pine and balsam
may their ethers open your weary lungs    

I will bundle you in blankets and place you
on porches in cure chairs to keep you

I leave you in care of lilac and lily-of-the-valley
may scent of sweet blooms open your heart 

I will bundle you in blankets and place you
on porches in cure chairs to keep you

I leave you in care of stillwater lakes may
soothing waves slake your parched soul 

I will bundle you in blankets and place you
on porches in cure chairs to keep you

I leave you in care of glorious granite may aged 
mountain lend you its strength 

I will bundle you in blankets and place you
on porches in cure chairs to keep you

I leave you in care   I leave you    I leave 

---

Note: Our house in the Adirondacks was once a cure cottage for tuberculosis patients. On August 9, 2000 my mother sat in a cure chair on our porch. Ironically, she told my father “It doesn’t get any better than this!” He found her the next morning, having passed from this life.

---

Pamela Anna Theresa Micieli (Mitchell), MFA, R.N., is a recently retired nurse and has published poems in several journals and anthologies including: The Healer’s Burden, and Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose By Nurses. Both of these were published by Univ. of Iowa Carver College of Medicine Press. She has also published in Pulse: Voices From the Heart of Medicine, as well as a chapbook entitled Finding Lost Pond by Finishing Line Press (2021).

By Rosanne Walters

You came alive at dawn, craving speed,
          eager to clock time and distance.
                Arms and legs pumping faster, ever faster,
            pressing through boundaries real or imagined,
            you relished each strident strike
           against the concrete maze of city streets.

                     Spine now curved, limbs powerless,
         you dream backwards gauging feats and failures in         
      hills once climbed, obstacles dodged, competitors overtaken.
Memories tangled in past and present, your days flow slowly,
each new morning a reward to savor,
yesterdays’ triumphs dimming with each sunset.

In the space between running and remembering,
      you see unspoken truth in lines etched
       across your face by the wind,
          hear reveries echoing in the surrounding silence
           and feel tomorrow as it slips from your grasp,                                                              
                               released to the night sky.

---

Rosanne Walters, Ph.D., retired after a long career in teaching to include ten years as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Old Dominion University, where she taught MPA students. Rosanne also served as the Executive Director of several nonprofit organizations to include a shelter for battered women and rape crisis center, a youth development organization, and a YWCA. In addition, Rosanne was the Community Liaison Officer for the United State Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia.

She retired from the City of Newport News, Virginia, as the Deputy Director of the Department of Human Services.

She now considers herself to be an aspiring poet who hopes to inspire her children and grandchildren to follow their dreams. She lives with her husband of 54 years and their two rescue dogs, Wrangler and Riley.  

By William Palmer

For a DaTscan
to confirm 
I have Parkinson’s,
I am injected
with a radioactive tracer.

A few days later
my neurologist shows me
an image from my brain
that contains 
what looks like
a radiant horseshoe.

The tip, or heel calk, on the left side 
is gone.

The diagnosis is accurate.

But most
of my horseshoe 
is still there.

Each day I will try to throw a ringer.

---

William Palmer’s poetry has appeared recently in Braided Way, JAMA, J Journal, One Art, On the Seawall, Poetry East, and The Westchester Review. He lives in Traverse City, Michigan.

By George Christopher

Transition states not stasis not static
No longer substrate, not yet product
Highest energy on reaction coordinates
Breaking and making covalent bonds

Pre-med, med school, residency, possibly a fellowship, attending
Changing roles, responsibilities, locations, people, relationships
In changes from good to good or good to better
Some-things and some-ones must be given up
For new some-ones and some-things to be embraced

Transition states not stasis not static
Present becoming past
Undetermined future becoming present
Adaptation from cellular to social contexts
Work through grief, move on
Welcome the future in the open-ended
In certainties that give direction
Uncertainties that open new possibilities

---

George Christopher is a physician who has transitioned into retirement. He and his lovely wife Linda live near their two grown sons and grandchildren in western Michigan.

By Michael Salcman

There’s nothing as beautiful as a marina at dawn
the clacking of ducks
the sky clearing away
the remnants of a storm:

A silvery sky
and a breeze sun-filled
and warm
the steel halyards at rest
from beating on mast and boom
the loom of shadows withdrawing
from the wheel
in the cockpit
the city awakening too soon
like a cat in search of a meal.

The cabins in my sailboat line up
like the lenses in a telescope
the rays of the rising sun
pricking through
from back to front
finally reach into the bow
warming the V-berth
and wake me to the morning.

The tide runs low—
soon there will be
dock hands on the dock boards
and halyards stamping in a stronger breeze
carrying the smell of coffee
and the children asleep below
who won’t yet feel or know
the wonder of the world.

---

Michael Salcman is a retired physician and teacher of art history. He was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He is a child of the Holocaust and a survivor of polio.

His poems have appeared in many medical/literary journals (JAMA, Chest, Ars Medica, Blood & Thunder, Caduceus, Healing Muse, Hektoen, Hospital Drive) and less bloody venues like Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Café Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, Raritan and Smartish Pace.

His books include The Clock Made of Confetti; The Enemy of Good Is Better; Poetry in Medicine, a widely used anthology of classic and contemporary poems on medical matters (Persea Books, 2015); A Prague Spring, Before & After (winner 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize); and Shades & Graces, the inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize in 2020. Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems was published in 2022.