February - Poem 14
A Valentine’s Day Card / Kristine Anderson
But not one with fat white cupid
babies flying like drunk cicadas.
Let’s not exchange cards with candied
rhymes—love with dove and above—
that shrink lifetimes into effortless
jingle bells around a kitten’s neck.
You deserve a multi-dimensional
lipstick-red heart rich with kintsugi
for honesty of a long marriage: not only
for all we formed and fired together
in the glowing kiln of our dreams. Also for
the cuts we bore: disappointments, illnesses,
long days at work away from one another.
And truth: for a few unkindnesses, as two people—
even those in love—have been known to wield.
Together we gathered up the pieces, repaired the rifts.
Now here’s the Valentine’s Day heart we’ve made:
brilliantly veined, singularly strong. Sweet, and wise.
Writer’s Dream Advertisement / Barbara Audet
This scribbling cobbler, words embracing
Requires elves with home skills ace-ing.
To brew dark coffee, do stacks of laundry,
Walk the dogs, and all such sundry?
To Poppins, the petition came, right up the chimney.
I’ve none here, so this entreaty, comes by whimsy.
To be specific, clothes need folded,
Trash disposed of, dishes sorted,
A porch front cleared, new flowers planted,
Salary’s minimal, but you are enchanted?
In return instead of dollars,
I’ll sew old-fashioned suits and collars.
At least I’ll promise to make that happen,
In my Grimmest way, job offers wrapped in.
Though winter's got its clutches clinging,
My mind is set on elves spring cleaning.
IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME / Ashby Logan Hill
for Norman Collier Rasnake
December 2006
A dayglow and a dying was done then, and all before dawn, a quiet breakfast,
we all held a rose in the sweaty, tear-soaked palms of our teen-aged hands,
waited for the cue from some somber music his widow had picked, something like this,
a song I’ve forgotten, trying to remember why she’d seemed so tired of crying her
ember-green eyes out — had she ever even loved this man? For years we’d gotten to know each other as some sort of distant, estranged “friends” — it all just felt so different in my head. Had she loved him just to take the money when he split?
I thought that’s what I’d heard my mother said but maybe I had taken parts of what I wanted and split the difference? You do things like that and naive at sixteen.
Some sort of country song I didn’t even know if my grandfather liked played on the loudspeaker through the crowd, and one by one, each of his survived grandchildren processed to the apse of the chapel — if you could even call it that. And etched into the altar DO THIS IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME it read — that’s all I could remember,
a loose thing, forgiveness untethered, a skein of yarn —
Peculiar Desire / Amy Marques
Grand peculiarity
magnificently appeared
in marriage:
is everything you could desire.
Source material: A Tale of Two Cities
House on a pond / Sonia Sophia Sura
Across the towel, we played on endless days,
endless days at the ocean.
Hard boiled eggs in the cooler (weird!),
card games in the bag,
chips, towels, sunglasses.
We put sunscreen on before we even drove to the beach.
Those were some of my favorite days of the year,
for three weeks every August, only and stretched,
my family, my grandparents, my cousins aunt and uncle, and all of our dogs
sat at the table on the screened-in porch.
We looked at the sun melting-to-orange over the pond
in the evening time.
My grandfather remembered me only
for the first ten years of my life.
When Covid came, I
stopped going.
After five years I visited our home in the winter.
Not-so-sunny day for a beach day.
Still, I touched the water with my hands.
It snowed, I believe, I remember
my brain was so cold, my younger self was
giving me a hug. We belong here! What has happened to us? I’m sorry we
had to grow up.
