at reed side
scatter
gray wings
black wings
black wings with red shoulders
Lucian Staiano-Daniels is a third generation writer of classical Japanese poetry in English and a historian. He has been influenced by the Imagists, which makes sense since they were influenced by Japanese and Chinese poems to begin with. He recently published a long poem based on my historical research in The Fortnightly Review, which has also published some of his linked verse.
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Marc Egnal is a retired professor, living in Toronto, and author of several books on US and Canadian history. His stories have been published in Freedom Fiction Journal and Lowestoft Chronicle. When not writing, he can be found walking my French bulldog, Holden, or playing with grandchildren.
Inspired in part by Annibale Carraci’s painting The Bean Eater (c. 1580-1590) and Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s fruit and vegetable “portraits” (c. 1590)
“Boil us, bake us, put us in a pot!”
I heard this emanating from the kitchen one evening about a month after I had moved into my house, which had been Mrs. Vincarelli’s throughout my childhood. Her children had all moved to Florida and were happy to sell to someone they knew, someone born and raised in the neighborhood. So here I was…hearing voices in what still felt like someone else’s house.
“Boil us, bake us, put us in a pot!”
A merry chant, not menacing, but then again, strange voices in one’s kitchen – especially after sundown—strike me as unsettling.
I entered the kitchen. Floating just above the stove was a figure, now a man, now a woman, sometimes a little of both, about two feet tall. Now comes the weird part: the creature consisted of swirling beans…cannellini, ceci, lenticchie, black beans, white beans, red beans, streaky borlotti. Coalescing and dispersing, reforming in slightly different guises, periodically saying:
“Boil us, bake us, put us in a pot!”
I goggled at the bean-thing (apparition?). It seemed satisfied to dance above the stove, while gesturing at my pantry. Flummoxed, unnerved, I called my uncle Tony.
Uncle Tony is the self-proclaimed head of the family, now that my grandparents are dead. The rest of us humor him, especially when he gets nostalgic for Italian places he has never visited, but we have to admit that in times of crisis Uncle Tony is our go-to guy. He is what we call a “saputo,” a “know-it-all,” at least in the Tuscan peasant dialect that our forebears spoke. Irritating at times, sure, but usually with a kernel of information on obscure topics that was handy when we needed it. Like precisely now, for instance.
“Hey, Uncle Tony,” I said. “Please, you gotta come over, right away.”
“Frankie,” he said. “You sure it can’t wait? You know the Nets are on…”
“Got something even better,” I said. “A…ghost or something, dancing in my kitchen.”
We prank each other a lot in our family, so it took Uncle Tony a while to believe me. He lives four blocks away, so he arrived within minutes.
“Holy shit!” he said, inspecting the bean-figure as it capered.
“Do you think it’s a ghost?” I said. “Mrs. Vincarelli come back? ”
Uncle Tony shook his head.
“No way,” he said. “She was mean but efficient. She wouldn’t bother coming back as a haunt once her time here was done.”
(“Boil us, bake us, put us in a pot!”)
He was watching the bean-arms.
“What you got in your pantry?” he asked.
“What?” I said. “Right now you’re hungry?”
“No, no…but we’re gonna have to check what you got in there.”
He rummaged through the shelves, which were well stocked since I had recently moved in, and I like to cook.
“Ah hah!,” said Uncle Tony, in triumph. “Look at these!”
He was waving a can of beans in each hand.
“So what? Your point is…?”
“Rispetto,” he said, and I knew a lesson was coming because he always sprinkled Italian into his speech whenever he started lecturing, even though he was born in New Jersey just like the rest of us.
“Alora! You know what we’re called back home in Tuscany?”
I always sigh when I hear Uncle Tony describe Tuscany (the hills around Pistoia to be exact) as “home” when three generations of our family have been raised within a few miles of this or that exit along the Garden State Parkway. But I play along because he is not entirely wrong either.
“Sure, the mangiafagioli,” I say (even I know this much Italian). “The bean-eaters.”
“Precisamente! We were mezzadri, sharecroppers, and since all we could afford was beans, we became bean-experts. We knew our beans!”
I arched an eyebrow but kept listening.
“Remember the stories your nonna used to tell, about her mother, your bisnonna, arriving in the States?”
And then suddenly I did remember!
“Yeah,” I said. “She had only the clothes on her back, and a little cardboard suitcase…but in that suitcase was a treasure from home…a bag of beans…”
“Cannellini,” said Uncle Tony, his eyes focused faraway, as if he had been there himself.
(“Boil us, bake us, put us in a pot!”)
The vision faded, for me at least.
“Okay,” I said. “But I don’t get how great-grandma’s bag of beans connects to ….whatever this thing is that’s doing calisthenics in my kitchen.”
“Beans in cans are fine,” said Uncle Tony, in full saputo mode. “We’re in America now, life is busy, no time to cook over the forno like in the Old Country, not every day. Everyone understands…but now and then, every now and then, you gotta go old school, I mean back to the original.”
(“Boil us, bake us, put us in a pot!”)
I still did not understand.
“Beans, like those,” said Uncle Tony, pointing at the legume-figure. “You have to select them with care, clean them, sort them, soak them overnight. You need to boil them slowly, stirring (that’s mescolare, I think) and tasting. Mix in your sage and your thyme, a little onion, dash of pepper, drop of best olive oil.”
Comprehension dawned at last.
“Honoring the beans,” I said.
The beans grew to a manikin three feet tall, saluted, and vanished.
So that’s it. Once a month or so, I prepare beans the old-fashioned way, and the spirit of the bean is content. I sense its presence on the edge of vision, maybe I hear its words early on a Saturday morning. That’s all good: my hearth is complete now, protected and satisfied.
On the other hand, my hot water heater is wonky. It moans in the basement but that is purely mechanical (I think). I mean, we had no running water in Tuscany, let alone heated water, so I cannot imagine there’s a guardian spirit of plumbing or whatever to appease.
Still, just to be sure, I am calling Uncle Tony this weekend.
Daniel A. Rabuzzi (he / his) has had two novels, five short stories, 30 poems, and nearly 50 essays / articles published (www.danielarabuzzi.com). He lived eight years in Norway, Germany and France. He earned degrees in the study of folklore & mythology and European history. He lives in New York City with his artistic partner & spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills (deborahmillswoodcarving@earthlink.net)
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BISQUES
So many heads thrown on the potter’s wheel to be turned and born too early, unable to open half-
closed eyes. Impossible for an infant to hold its head up. We press the bundle to our breast, feed
the suckle instinct, place the infant with great care against our shoulders, holding the neck in
place. Still more are born, as if they were pots meant to be bought by philanthropists. As if they
could replace broken ornaments in razed mosques. We mothers go on holding the head attached
to its fleshless body, palms placed flat against this little wick of neck that could break apart and
crumble. We use words like bébé to indicate that no, others cannot hold our morsel of flesh. How
could anyone know how to feed and change and clothe it? Pulling cotton over the fontanel brings
a bout of screams, as if the blob were being thrown again into the business of birth. We soothe
these cries with lullabies. We watch our baby sleep on its back without a pillow, see its startle
reflex. We try not to think of when the head will be covered in a black hood and dragged by its
body into a courtyard to be shot.
ADDRESS TO MY PHANTOM LIMB
Close if you will, fist I never knew.
Epitomize grief to a widow or the sadness
of any week day, and also, Sunday rites
reserved for others—the fasting, the confession.
Ritual depends upon the hand to take in or push away.
Punch the face you lie next to in sensorial science,
if only in representation. Symbolize something.
Isn’t that what the mind
does best? Become more than this missing
all I didn’t do when I had you hanging from my arm.
Press the center of each note sung by gut strings
against an ebony fingerboard.
Hold the natural hair brush, stroke color and texture,
compose works as spurious as hogweed
found each August at the back of the half acre.
Become horticulture’s dreaded cartwheel flower.
Surely you are capable of imitation?
Tighten and release, find the light, lean into noon.
Open fully (even short a pinky)—
release ten thousand toxic seeds.
Let papery skin stretched tight from phalanx to phalanx
dry to a crisp, before flipping the bird
to each pursuit I followed
with the passion of one addicted to perfection.
Judith Skillman’s poems have appeared in Commonweal, Threepenny Review, Narrative Northeast, Zyzzyva, and other literary journals. She has received awards from Academy of American Poets and Artist Trust. Oscar the Misanthropist won the 2021 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award. Her recent collection is Subterranean Address, New & Selected Poems, Deerbrook Editions 2023. Visit www.judithskillman.com
One April Sunday, several months after Grandpa’s funeral, Dad and I drive in search of wild asparagus. Cruising side roads near our home on the outskirts of Ann Arbor, he drives slowly, and I soon spot a patch. Eagerly wading in, I trip and fall forward, face to face with a human skull. It’s eggshell white, with bright green spears grown up and out of empty eyes. Shaking, I call out “Dad!” He turns to see, pulls me up, blinds my eyes with one big hand, and turns me around. As we leave behind what is either an ancient graveyard or the site of a murder, he says, “The rains must have made it rise.”
Ralph La Rosa has published prose on major American writers (Emerson and Thoreau), and has placed short fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and film scripts. These days, he mostly writes poetry, appearing on the Internet, in print journals and anthologies. His books include the chapbook Sonnet Stanzas and full-length Ghost Trees and My Miscellaneous Muse.
In the weeks before Halloween,
edging to the end of the interminable
election, I found myself obsessed
with the silent vampire classic Nosferatu.
The whys for my obsession are murky
though a preference for silence over
the clamor and din of political ads
is certainly part of the appeal.
Not that Murnau’s movie is really
silent. Befitting a “symphony in horror,”
it has a fine score, not as lugubriously
memorable as the oboe solo opening
the Universal Dracula (borrowed
from Swan Lake) but with its
heaving organ and screeching violins
a powerful part of the plot.
A plot, I must admit, which is
ludicrous for me to obsess on,
recoiling, as I do, from the sight
of blood, sometimes fainting
from the merest razor nick shaving.
Me who averts his eyes the moment
someone reaches for a knife, flicks open
a switch blade, simply mentions a chain saw
(the black-and-whiteness immaterial).
Besides, Count Orlok, as Murnau called him
to fend off lawsuits from Stoker’s widow,
is a tidy bloodsucker with little spillage.
Of course I could mention the obvious:
the undead rising from his sarcophagus,
visiting plague upon the land.. but I think
my obsession rests mostly with the end –
vampire tricked by a stalwart woman
to stay up past dawn, light at last puncturing
his evil which crumbles like his castle
into dream dust
again and again and again.
Paul Genega’s seventh full-length collection, Outtakes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2023, was published by Salmon Poetry in December, 2023. Over a long career, his poems have appeared in scores of magazines and journals, including Poetry, New York Quarterly, The Nation and North American Review. He is Professor Emeritus at Bloomfield College of Montclair State University in New Jersey where he founded the creative writing program, taught literature and writing, chaired the Humanities Division, and served as Chair of Faculty. Visit him at www.paulgenega.com.
Down Smokey Road
Deep in the holler
Edge of the woods
A plain white house
At first glance
An ordinary dwelling
But with unusually
Tiny windows
Brandishes strident
Political preferences
From its porch
Flags and signage
Nailed to the siding
Adjacent to and
Noticeably larger than
Its small apertures
You must wonder with
Such narrow openings
It must be impossible
To catch a glimpse
Of heavens spinning
A plump saffron moon
Skirting the horizon
A fox slipping silently
Past barn and silo
Or when it first begins
To snow – you know
That white blurring of
Vision edge to edge
Or taking in the breadth
Of humanity living
Breathing and suffering
Just beyond
Those tiny windows
David Sapp, writer, artist, and professor, lives along the southern shore of Lake Erie in North America. A Pushcart nominee, he was awarded Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Grants for poetry and the visual arts. His poetry and prose appear widely in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior, chapbooks Close to Home and Two Buddha, a novel Flying Over Erie, and a book of poems and drawings titled Drawing Nirvana.
“Alabama Supreme Court Rules That Frozen
Embryos Are ‘Children” – Taylor Mitchell, Huffington Post
What came first the chicken or the egg?
The Alabama Supreme Court
has finally answered this age old question.
If frozen embryos are children
than an egg is a chicken
& salmon roe are already fish.
Roe, roe, roe your boat
Gently relentlessly down the stream.
After Roe vs. Wade was lost
a war of words/worlds blew up
on blogs & in comments sections
after editorials from CNN on to the bald ass-
sements of Fox News’s talking heads,
convos that flushed thousands of trolls
from under the murky bridges of social media.
The observation that got the skirmish going:
some conservatives care more about
a collection of splitting cells, an unborn embryo
than the full-bodied, already born children
& teens shot to disembodiment’s bloody pieces.
Save the embryo by all means,
but the killing of children
& teens is nothing to protest.
Our young ones caught red-handed,
red-hearted, red-livered—
the sad leaking brain drain on school grounds—
while fixed in the bitter scope and bite of AK-15 bullets.
The remedy for mass murder
by the conservative Christian right,
(Wrong.)
“I’ll say a prayer for you.”
The Editor
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Aditi Bhattacharjee is an Indian writer currently based in New York. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Alipore Post, Gone Lawn, Solstice Literary Magazine, Lunch Ticket Magazine, Sky Island Journal and elsewhere. Most recently, her poems have received Honorable Mention for the Paul Violi Prize, nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net and shortlisted for The Prose Poem’s Spring Short Prize. She is a TIN House alum and holds an MFA from The New School. You can find more of her work at aditibhattacharjee.com
Based on the complete abortion ban mentioned in the Project 2025 Manifesto. Severely
limiting abortion access nationwide by reversing the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, a drug
used in medication abortion, and reviving a 19th-century law, the Comstock Act, to ban any
abortion medications, equipment, or materials from being sent through the U.S. Postal
Service. Source: ACLU.Org
Oh! yes they have plans for us
Oh! yes the one they have hammered
down to the last line
The Manifesto
word after word
line after line;
pages after pages,
mapping the curves of our bodies
silhouettes of our desires:
dipped in their thick black inks of subjugation.
Yes, they have plans for us
boxing all the mottled things
bejeweled with life plans, trinkets, and bling
underlining their adoration for us
their unfettered love, passion
their soft caring being.
Yes, they have plans for us
stripping bare our tongues
with hands tied at our backs
wombs scraped clean,
as pristine and demure as they want us to be
with their stories of success etched
in our spines for kingdoms to come.
Yes, they have plans for us
to carry the love of incest and rape in our womb
licking our wounds clean but never saying a word
bringing shunned love to our full breast
letting it down a bit,
warmly and gently nursing it every day
recounting the days like a horror story on reels.
Yes, they have plans for us
till our thick blood trickles down
murky lanes of a dark empty parking lot
for their sheer pleasure
a sluice of broken dreams and desires
carrying our strangled future.
Yes, they have plans for us
for guarding every inch, every iota of our existence
having a lien to our soul;
a perfect story of a mother with rounded bellies,
making it complete, making it whole.
Yes, they have plans for us
to get on our knees,
to say our prayer for exalted gods in heaven
to utter words of salvation and redemption
till the kingdom comes.
Yes, they have plans for us
to carry blood stories in our sacred womb
and not to utter a single word,
to hold the bitter truth on the edge of our teeth
while licking razor blades without spilling a word.
Yes, they have plans for us
freeing us from all this self-destruction
our simple minds can’t conceive
taking us to yet another hell
that they have brilliantly mapped out for us.
Megha Sood is an award-winning Asian-American author, poet, editor, and literary activist from New Jersey. Literary Partner with “Life in Quarantine”, at Stanford University. Her four poetry collections include the award-winning (My Body Lives Like a Threat, FlowerSong Press, 2022), (My Body is Not an Apology, FinishingLine Press, 2021), and ( Language of the Wound is Love, FlowerSong Press, 2025). She has received support from VONA, Pen Women, Dodge Foundation, Kundiman, and Martha’s Vineyard Writing Institute. Her 900+ works have been featured in print, online journals, public exhibits, and anthologies including the Poetry Society of New York, MS Magazine, NYPL, Pen Magazine by American Pen Women, PBS American Portrait, NPR, WNYC Studio, etc, and numerous universities including Stanford University, Howard University, George Mason, Columbia. Her poems and anthology The Medusa Project have been selected to be sent to the moon in 2025 as part of the historical LunarCodex Project in collaboration with NASA/SpaceX. Find her at https://linktr.ee/meghasood
A broken clothesline leans
against its shadow
nothing to hang memories
on
through the stillness of
the desert landscape
I meander
fragrance of creosote bush
underfoot
dry winds blow
clockwise
shifting transverse
ridges of sand
In the distance a
prickly pear cactus
tempts the coyote
despite needles
the coyote
consumes
its fruit
spreading seeds
every thing
transient
even the
shadows
I stuff my backpack with the basic essentials, orient my body toward west and head out into the cooling desert. Barren hills unfold in abstract patterns against the fading orange and yellow light. During the past year I’ve learned much since leaving my suburban New York home. I’ve given up most of the possessions I’d amassed in my 55 years on the planet. I’ve evolved to adapt in my new environment. I no longer fear the desert. I trust the land and what it offers. I accept everything now and better understand its purpose. I’ve learned to let things go and see where they fall.
I squint my eyes into the last rays of the setting sun, until they pull back from view. The sagebrush smells sweet. Next to a prickly pear cactus a pile of stones mark the point where I enter the river bed and the path begins. Last month after two days of torrential rains, this serene spot turned into a violent river. Flash flooding occurred when the banks could not hold the volume of water. Dried creeks swelled to become raging rivers. A child playing in his backyard was swept away. They searched every inch of the land but could not find him. His parents own a condo at Moriah Heights. He was their only child.
As I approach my night time perch, a faint cluster of stars emerge in the darkening sky.
“Once the stars appear you’ll want to stay on that rock outcropping all night,” Mike said.
Mike was my boss and the person who hired me. A native to the area and head sales manager at Moriah Heights.
“Be careful out there as the river bed can be tricky at night. It can shift fast.”
“I’ll be fine.”
He leaned in close and put his hand on my shoulder.
“What kind of name is Eli?”
“It’s from the Bible,” I said.
“It’s got some kind of meaning?”
“Elevated one.”
He squeezed my shoulder with his fingers.
“Well listen, the desert plays tricks on us. No trees to orient direction. Make sure to take water in case you lose your way.”
“Will do.”
“And remember, I’ll need you at work at 6:30. Gotta get your rounds done before it gets too hot or it’s all lost. Don’t want you to dehydrate and pass out.”
Mike was tall with a tanned face and sharp features. He wore a cowboy hat with a huge turquoise stone attached by a braided string. He always had a pouch attached to his belt. Mike reminded me of one of those cowboys from the old rodeo posters. He was a half Navajo on his mother’s side. I couldn’t see it, but then again, how does one really know? His manner was stoic. At times he was elusive or maybe just stoned, I thought. But I learned to trust him. He mentored me in the ways of the land and reminded me why folks come out here to live.
“We got a lot of good paying residents here and their condos need to be attended to. They come here to enjoy the surroundings. Our job is to provide the best service to let them do that.”
My mind wandered, eddying on my thoughts of the grieving parents.
“You with me, Eli?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Respond to their needs quickly and always with a smile.”
I had been thrown into all kinds of situations. From removing half-eaten poodles to clusters of bats occupying someone’s roof.
“Trap ‘em one by one with a cardboard box,” Mike said.
“But that might take weeks.”
“Look, if one’s rabid and you get bitten you’re a dead man walking.”
He knew everything about his surroundings but not much else I could tell. He was a survivor. I envied that. Once in a while I’d test him and ask about world news or the declining stock market. I wanted to know if he was tethered at all to the world outside the desert. He’d just move his head to the side and squint his eyes.
“It’ll change.”
Even when I told him something uplifting he’d reply the same way.
Along the sides of the path mariposa lilies bloom in spite of the harsh climate, because of it, really. Mike said that in the fall the flowers shed their seeds and germinate during the following winter rains. Several years will pass before a bulb reaches maturity and produces a flower.
“Because they’re buried deep in the earth, they can survive the wildfires. It takes advantage of the nutrient-rich soil and lack of competition from other plants so the bulbs produce greater numbers of flowers than in average years. Might not see it right away, but the fire makes them fight and thrive.”
“We should all have patience like the mariposa,” I said.
“If you’re ever lost and have no food, you unearth their bulbs and eat them. Raw is ok, but I suggest making a fire and roast ‘em.”
I climb to the top of the rock and set down my backpack. The landscape spills out before me as the sky darkens, a tumble of rocks throwing lengthening shadows. Tonight there is a new moon, so the night sky will be at its blackest. The best time of the month to view what’s out there. In the distance, yip-howls of a male and female coyote pierce the air of this deepening night sky.
“Without a canopy of trees their harmonies swirl in a chaotic mix of sound,” Mike said. “This confuses their predators to think they are surrounded by a pack of hundreds. It’s an auditory illusion known as the beau geste effect, caused by a variety of sounds produced by a male and female coyote and gets distorted as it passes through the barren land. Two coyotes’ voices can echo and sound like three times as many.”
During evening walks my thoughts were prone to wandering in non linear ways, bouncing and fracturing off the walls of my mind like coyote howls. Sometimes I wonder about other travelers like me passing through here. Had there been any like me, maybe trying to figure out their life? I was here for a purpose. Not everyone leaves everything they strived for in their lives to one day just up and go. Mike said we are all bound by some kind of fate. I wasn’t sure I agreed but listened to his rationale.
If I was to leave my past world behind and maybe find my son, I knew I had to listen closely to what he had to say, to anything that could help me. He understood this world I had come to live in. He understood the moon and cycles and the creatures that called this harsh land its home. He didn’t read books to get his knowledge. He walked the land and observed and gleaned things in this way, through living on the land.
Are we bound by fate?
Upon reaching the top of the outcropping I lay on my back and look up at the infinite sky. The stars pulsate as if they are signaling something, distinct now, where before they’d been faint. I cover my ears with the palms of my hands and watch for a sign.
During the first few weeks in the desert I received daily texts from friends back home.
“How was your awakening today?” they’d ask. “You find God?”
They predicted I wouldn’t last more than a year. It was a matter of time before I’d come running back to the land of milk and honey Of course, it was no land of milk and honey for me. Not anymore.
“How’s the autumn colors…on the one tree?”
They made fun of the odd names of the gated communities; Bethel Hills, Canaan Vista and of course, Moriah Heights.
“Watch out for the Red Sea, can’t it part at any moment?”
I landed a job pretty quickly.
“Dumb work for an MIT graduate,” they said.
Eventually I grew tired of the sarcasm and stopped responding. I had my job and a rent-free cottage. It was all I needed. With a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering I was able to figure things out pretty quickly.
“You’re in charge of all the maintenance at our wonderful gated community,” Mike said. “The infrastructure at Moriah Heights is your responsibility.”
“Got it.”
“I’ll get the folks to buy in,” he said, extending his hand. “You keep it running.”
We shook on this.
After 25 years behind the computer screen and endless meetings with clients, menial tasks and manual labor suited me just fine. I needed to breathe for a minute.
“Every morning you’ll pick up the garbage in the communal areas and sweep away the encroaching sand. There’s always more, you’ll see.”
My new job allowed me the space I needed to think. I even bought myself an easel and tried my hand at painting.
Leaving behind what I had, or what I lacked, was not a hard decision. My wife and I were no longer speaking to each other. My job stressed me to the point I started drinking to self medicate. I hated myself and my world, and the only thing that kept me grounded was my son, Zach. Once he left, or disappeared, I had no reason to stay.
“He must be using drugs,” my wife said, staring into space. I knew she was in pain, too, but we couldn’t reach each other.
“I don’t think so, darling. We would have seen signs.”
“Maybe he met someone or was abducted by some white supremist group.”
These thoughts went on endlessly.
The beau geste effect. It applied.
Impossible to tell what was real noise and what had echoed, fragmented, magnified.
“You’re his father and you don’t give a shit.”
“Of course I do.”
“So do something. Call the police.”
I cared more about Zach than anything else in my life. That she couldn’t see this is what put me over the edge.
“How could an 18-year-old boy just get up and go like that, disappear?”
Our friends couldn’t comprehend it. They were educated people, rational people. We’d all moved to the city after college. Once cool and gritty was now a place they did not want for their children. I didn’t see it that way.
“The place has turned into a dangerous shithole. Not what it used to be.”
Most of our friends’ kids had gone to school with Zach, one of the most competitive private schools in the country.
“The Jettisons are sending Tommy there,” my wife said.
“He’ll be sheltered.”
“Yeah, sheltered among the right people.”
Everything was for Zach so arguing with her was futile. As our only child she had him always in her rearview mirror. He was destined to repeat her father’s success but as a neurosurgeon. He was just a few days away from beginning the dream of every Westchester parent. Our friends termed it the great trek. One studies to seek wealth. No time to waste, so at eighteen their children had set their goals. This was the idea even though we all knew it was us the goal stemmed from: Law school, the medical track, or an MBA in finance; nothing else mattered. They wanted their childrens’ paths to insure greater wealth than they had amassed. The American dream. I had remained silent. I had not thrown Zach a lifeline, the assurance that there were other paths.
The great trek.
“He’s destined to be a brain surgeon,” she said.
I looked up from an article I was reading about the rapid pace of advancement with DNA sampling.
“We don’t know.”
“I’m his mother,” she said “I know.”
A day before his departure for college the walls came tumbling down. His best friend’s parents put together a BBQ and swim party for his class. A going away party and possibly the last time they’d see each other until Thanksgiving or Christmas break. Some were going to Stanford and already had plans to stay with family for the holidays in Marin County. Their great trek would begin in Silicon Valley. The goal was to land an internship at a tech firm to get their foot in the door. We planned with Zach that he’d come home right after the party. He’d help us seal up the boxes and carry them out to our SUV.
“How about you pick up sushi on the way home?”
“Sounds like a plan, Dad.”
We loved our sushi dinners together on Friday nights. Just the three of us chatting about everything from the books we’re reading to the latest film we saw. There was plenty of conversation to go around as we shared our sushi and dunked our rolls into the soy sauce, winced from too much wasabi. We never wanted those evenings to end.
“It’ll be really hard when he goes to college,” my wife said one night as she laid in bed.
I put down my book and rolled over to comfort her. I was surprised to feel tears rolling down her cheek, pooling on her pillow.
“It’ll be okay,” I said, touching her shoulder, then holding her. “We’ll have more time together to do things.”
She rolled away, disconnected. My hand dropped.
“Can you turn off your light, please. I’m done.”
Done
As I wrapped and taped the last box and slid it to the side of the room for Zach, I heard my phone go off. A long thread of texts from Zach.
The last one: “I’m not in control of myself. My thoughts are not in sync with my body.”
I felt queasy. I didn’t know if I should call for help.
“Hey Zach, I’ll call you now.”
But there was no answer.
“Give me a call as soon as you get this message,” I texted.
I saw the three dots and felt a wash of relief that he was at least responding.
“I have this recurring dream,” he texted. “I’m on a ladder, painting a ceiling. Then a blinding light enters the room through a crack in the roof. I can’t see the whole picture. It’s like this great, bright light coming out of the sky.”
For some reason my thoughts jumped to our walks in the woods together when he was a small child, maybe 6- or 7-years-old. He had so many questions. I loved his questions and loved trying to find their answers, to phrase them just right.
“Where does color come from? Also, where does light come from? Do magnetic fields produce sparks? Why does the earth revolve a certain way around the sun?”
He never stopped. More and more of my days were spent researching answers and then phrasing them for my six-year-old to be able to grasp.
“Dad is it true there’s a person out there that does all this?”
He wanted essential truths and I could only hand him more mysteries.
“Is there like a switch?”
“You’ll figure it all out one day.”
“How d’you know, Dad?”
“I don’t know for a fact, but I have a feeling.”
What else could I say?
By the time he entered high school he started to care less about sports and hanging out with his friends. He would spend hours on the Internet searching for information about light, the sun, the interior of the Sistine Chapel. My wife thought it highly unusual for a teenage suburban kid to give up his social life for this.
“It’ll pass,” I assured her.
Although I didn’t think it would. It was in line with what I knew of my son, his hungry mind wanting more answers, then still more. .
I looked back down at my phone as a new text came in.
“I’ll text you tomorrow once I have this all figured out.”
I knew that text would never come. I knew it.
After Zach disappeared I had to make a decision. Either I hire an investigator to look for him, or I sit tight, and let this new change happen. I believed in my heart that something would shift and he would see something that might solve his internal dilemma. I chose to wait. I myself had conviction that all things come if given the right amount of space and patience. The wealthy ‘burbs of Westchester County didn’t afford him either. I had my own thoughts as to where he might end up or when that call would come.
“I know we could have done something to prevent this,” my wife said, stone-faced, seething. She was directing her anger at me. She always knew when my thoughts weren’t in line with her own, even when I said nothing to indicate this.
“We did the best we could,” I said, looking for confirmation for myself that letting him be was the best way.
After his disappearance, our lives began to unravel. I began to have stomach flare-ups that would last for days. When I came home from work she’d be sitting there with a gin and tonic in one hand and her cell phone in the other.
“Did you speak to him about this?”
She was actually closer to the truth than she knew, but we couldn’t discuss it. I knew she knew the answer, she was just trying to pull it from me.
“No dear. I just think we should give him time.”
“I hate you,” she said and refilled her glass with gin.
At work everyone knew what had happened and no one agreed with my decision. Some of them knew Zach, and thought I did the most unparental thing one could do.
“An animal would never do that.”
I shrugged it off. They were helicopter parents who didn’t trust themselves, so how could one expect them to trust their own children? I believe we haven’t fully evolved yet. The more we accept this, the greater our understanding of our needs and ability to survive. I knew Zach was in the process of processing this for himself.
“Survival is the only way,” I said. “Zach is figuring out something now for his future survival.”
We protected him like a seed in a greenhouse for too many years. No animal would do that to their offspring. If I didn’t let go now, let him follow this brave new path he’d forged, he would be stunted. At some point he would have no idea how to get through the turbulence of life. I feared he had no way to swallow the bitter pill.
This was the fundamental difference between my wife and me.
So on a sunny spring day, I poured myself a gin and tonic and sat down next to my wife.
“Looks like you’ll let the garden grow wild this year?”
“I handed my boss my resignation letter. I also met with our family attorney. We’ll be fine, or I should say you’ll be fine. You’ll get monthly checks and can stay in the house as long as you want. If you ever want to sell, he’ll be there to help you. You keep everything from the sale so there’s nothing to argue over.”
She turned her head in my direction and sipped her drink.
“I love Zach more than anything. That’s why I didn’t go after him. I want to hear his voice and walk with him again. I know it might be a while, but something in my gut tells me he’s alright and recalibrating. I’ll let you know when I see him. I’m sure he would have found what he was looking for. My hope is it will happen soon.”
I glanced over at her. The anger in her face hadn’t budged.
“You know it all, don’t you.”
I took a deep breath.
“One thing I am sure about, he is never coming back here.”
“Don’t forget to charge the Tesla, Eli. Don’t want you to get stuck in the middle of nowhere.”
And I left.
I had this weird feeling the further I drove west the closer I’d be to him. The sunsets became more vivid as the trees gave way to shrub brush, then open land, and eventually desert. I thought about the setting of the Old Testament stories. The characters were always wandering about in barren lands like these. Whether it was a verdant oasis or near wells, the writers were also on a search. Their great trek was full of rich stories with metaphors and allegories. Stories of real people grappling with the same questions we deal with today. One thing was for certain, my Tesla’s charge was low.
“Heard you resigned?” my friend from the lab texted. “You heading out to find him?”
“No.”
My colleagues are engineers and scientists. Their experiments yield concrete and tangible results. They understand logic. Terra firma. Beyond this, they wouldn’t dwell.
It took me a few months to acclimate to the desert. The light and heat was unbearable when the sun was high but at night the land cooled down, became chilly. I grew to love the yip-howl of the coyotes, their voices circling in disorienting, eerie echoes. It was a great sacrifice to be out here but it felt right. I had come to realize over the past few years that I needed to change. Zach was not the only one. Maybe he’d absorbed what I’d been feeling. I had to reset my compass and set my priorities right. If not I’d die a lonely death surrounded by people who thought they knew me. My own wife didn’t know me. This knowledge had frightened me. On that spring day when I backed out of the garage of my Westchester house, I knew it was the last time I’d ever see it. I’d start to focus on my day to day existence. I wanted to get in touch with myself and finally get to know myself, be true to my own ideas and questions. I wanted to know what it was that I feared and what I truly loved. There was also a chance I might never see Zach again. I thought about this in my walks in the beautiful sunsets. The hours of solitude. I was at peace with it as Ihoped I could circle in on the logic for all of this. I didn’t know what it was even as I believed in it.
I remembered peeking into his room before he left for his friend’s going away party.
“Zach?”
He appeared to be almost in a trance. He was on the Internet looking at photos of the Sistine Chapel.
“What d’you know about this,” he said.
He didn’t move his eyes from the computer screen. He returned to the Sistine Chapel over the years. His interest always came back.
“I’m a bit confused these days, Dad.”
“About what?”
“Do we have power over our own lives?”
I sat down on his bed.
“Like let’s say I want to go against everything that was planned out for me. Just go.”
“Just go?”
He turned his chair around and leaned in close to me.
“Do we have any control over ourselves?” he whispered. “Any power to move in our own direction? If we become subservient to fate will the human race end up in despair? What if we resist it all?”
I’d remembered this conversation when he sent that text, the last text before he left.
These days while on my evening desert meanders, I think about the same things. I didn’t want to fade away like dust and die a lonely man in a world of familiar people. Like him, I had to move on and continue to live, end if it meant giving up everything I had and starting from the beginning.
When I got home from my stargazing, I’d sit down on my computer until late into the night and check if there was any sign on Zach’s social media sites. His pages were still up, but he’d deleted his headshots.
One day Mike and I went out for beers. He advised me to stop thinking about my son, to unfollow him.
“You’ll lose yourself. He’s not where you’re looking for him anyway. He’s not on the screen, Eli.”
“How are you so sure?”
He bought me a beer and told me the story of his Navajo grandfather.
“He carried a little pouch with him whenever he went out. Told me it was to collect memories ‘cause they don’t last. We forget and they fade.”
“He plucked at leaves from the chaparral and steeped it for tea. It tasted like shit but out of respect we drank it.”
“You’ll remember that,” his grandfather had said.
“And he was right, we sure did.”
He went on to tell me about his wife’s battle with cancer. She was his high school sweetheart. They got married when they were both twenty-one and she was diagnosed with a rare cancer a few years later.
“After she passed I was devastated. I was like this walking zombie. My grandfather said to forget her. Put her out of your memory.”
“That’s tough.”
“She was the only girl I ever had so it was hard, but my grandfather had this wisdom of years. We all respected him so I figured it was worth trying.”
“When you can no longer remember what she looked like, you’ll receive a sign,” his grandfather said. “Then you can search for her spirit, be one with her again.”
Mike leaned forward. I could feel his breath.
“Some said he was crazy but I believed in him. There’s lots of magic around here.”
I was beginning to understand.
“Get off of his Facebook page,” Mike said. “Stop searching.”
He signaled to the bartender for the check.
“Supposed to be a great sunset tonight,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”
He put his arm around me and sang a few verses of an old Eagles song. I sang with him.
“Strange concept,” I said.
“The sunset?”
I waited before answering him.
“To forget everything.”
During the next few days I tried everything to block out memories. If my thoughts wandered back to Westchester, or to Zach, I’d shut my eyes and remember the lyrics to the Eagles song. I kept busy with my handyman work. It helped to get my mind off Zach and everything in my past. One day I got a call from my attorney in New York about our investments. My wife needed more money for new medications. Our insurance wasn’t covering them, so I made some calls. I laid down on my couch and thought about the mess I left back home.
“When you start to drift back, go out and find the creosote bush,” Mike said. “Rub the leaves and inhale. It extracts moisture from parched soil through its root system so the leaves smell like rain. They’re hearty bastards and can withstand high temperatures and dehydration. Put some leaves in your pouch. They cure all kinds of ailments. My grandfather called the bush the anointed one.”
After a few weeks I actually started to forget. I had my work during the morning and afternoon, the sunsets in the evening and out stargazing at night. Folks in the complex started warming to me. I stayed off social media like Mike said and only used the Internet to learn more about the desert. I even started to read the Old Testament as Mike hounded me every day about my name and more meanings. I told him about the namesake of the complex where we lived. He was intrigued about the story of Abraham and his son.
“I could never kill my son.”
“It’s just a metaphor,” I said. “He was being tested.”
“Some metaphor. Tested for what?”
One day after work I was sitting on my deck with my binoculars. I spotted a coyote in the distance tearing at a cactus fruit. I was distracted by the sound of the voice message ring on my phone. The number was unfamiliar to me.
“Dad. It’s me.”
It was hard at first to be sure about his voice. There was so much crackling static and distortion in the background. I pressed the phone closer to my ear.
In the distance I could see dark clouds rolling in fast atop the high range in front of the complex. The highest mountain was called Mt. Moriah.
“I’m experiencing the most intense lightning storm I’ve ever seen. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s beautiful.”
Then a thunderous crash and silence. I quickly called back the number, but no answer. I kept calling.
“Eli,” Mike said, screaming, in a state of panic. “The transformer was hit. There’s a fire near the maintenance garage.”
The storm was moving toward us, blackening the sky. Bolts of lightning flashed across the barren landscape. I could see a small brush fire where the coyote had been eating.
“Bring your tools and the extinguisher. Quick.”
I ran to the shed as my cell phone rang again.
“Hello, Zach is that you?”
There was a loud boom and then his voice.
“Dad, is that you…I am in the desert, dad. The sunsets here are so beautiful. Love you Dad.”
Then a loud bang and the call dropped again. Before I could process what had happened, another call came in. It was Mike.
“Our Welcome to Moriah Heights sign is on fire. I called the fire department but they told me it’ll be a while. I’m heading over there now. Come quick, Eli.”
When I arrived, the fire had consumed the giant wood sign.
“It took me months to make that baby. Carved it all by hand.”
The lights in the complex were flickering on and off.
“I worked so hard on that.”
As I walked toward the smoldering flames with my extinguisher he grabbed my arm.
“Let it go.”
“We can still salvage some parts of it.”
I noticed his eyes had welled up as he looked up at the dark clouds.
“Forget it. The rain is coming.”
He stared at the burning hunk of wood as it crackled then fell to the ground.
“You okay?” he asked.
“I am.”
“Good. I’ll call the residents. I’ll tell them they’ll be without power for a while.”
The rain smelled sweet as it moved closer and blanketed the dry landscape.
“Tomorrow there’ll be flowers,” Mike said, staring at the flames.
My mind held the memory of those mariposa lilies, vibrant yellows and purples echoing the sky above them.
“I’ll go and check the transformer.”
He grabbed my arm again.
“You hear from your son?”
I turned to look at his face.
“Yes, I think I did.”
“I knew you would.”
A lump entered my throat as the rain began to fall in a more steady rhythm.
“You hear from your wife?” I said.
He turned away from the fire and looked directly at me.
“There’ll be a flash flood in the morning. The dry riverbed will overflow. The parents that are grieving over their son will relive the horrible tragedy all over again.”
The rain was coming down in buckets. It fell over the sign and extinguished the embers from the smoldering wood. It sizzled, then fell silent.
“He’s okay?”
“Yes, I think he is.”
“Tomorrow, if the roads aren’t washed away, I’ll buy wood for our new sign. While I’m gone you can remove the burnt stones and clear the foundation.”
“Sounds good.”
“Wait here. I want to give you something.”
He walked over to his truck and returned with a leather pouch.
“Take this to the grieving parents.”
I opened the pouch and inhaled the aroma. The fragrance triggered a flood of memories.
“Make them tea and sit with them.”As I turned away and walked back into Moriah Heights I heard the call and response of a male and female coyote. It sounded very close to where Mike stood. I turned and looked at his imposing figure.
“The anointed one,” I heard him call at me in between the yip-howls. “It’s a metaphor.”
Paul Rabinowitz is an author, screenwriter, photographer and founder of ARTS By The People. He is the author of 5 books including Confluence; The Clay Urn; truth, love and the lines in between; Limited Light and Grand Street, Revisited. Rabinowitz co-writes screenplays with Brittney Bertier including the TV pilot called Bungalow. Rabinowitz’s photography, prose and poetry appear in magazines and journals including The Sun Magazine, New World Writing, Arcturus-Chicago Review Of Books, Evening Street Press, The Montreal Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Talking River Review, The Oddville Press and elsewhere. Rabinowitz was a featured artist in Nailed Magazine in 2020, Mud Season Review in 2022 and Apricity Press in 2023. His photo series Limited Light was nominated for Best of the Net in 2021. Rabinowitz’s poems and fiction are the inspiration for 8 award winning experimental films, including Best Experimental Short at Cannes, Venice Independent Film Festival, Oregon Short Film Festival, Jersey Shore Film Festival, Florence Indie Film Festival and Paris Film Festival. Rabinowitz has produced mixed media performances and poetry films that have appeared on stages and in theaters in New York City, New Jersey, Tel Aviv and Paris.
SPRING EGRET
Last summer this egret
high-stepped the salt marsh
a white puff of grace
more follies fan than bird
keen eyes keeping watch
in the body’s long curves
like the f-holes of a cello
bending low to the sun
stained flats to spear a shad
swallow, cry in voice phlegmy
as an old woman in hospice
the augury of tides –
this spring’s fan of bone arrayed
in stony shallows, chill ripples
lapping leached beauty
beginning the slow, slow dissolve
EAST END ELEGY
for Antje Katcher
the pink of our teens
had long ago popped
consuming passions
burnt down to nostalgia
era of firsts behind us
marriages, jobs, failures
we fit at last the patchwork
costume called self
*
in a dimming afternoon
summerscape we trudged
the lip of a sand bluff
pausing to gaze out
on Cedar Point, Maidstone,
Gardiner’s Bay, Shelter Island
in the amethyst distance
Orient, disease-frizzed Plum
*
lee path choked with grape vine
bittersweet, pitch pine, rose
windward, sheer drop
to a shell encrusted beach
blackbacks, scoters, plovers
ancient skiff with rusted oarlocks
splintered starboard gunwale
fisherwind rising for to ferry us away
*
all this long ago, before
the potato fields were blighted
before the hypno-rich arrived
to claim the sea as their mirror
but I see us again there
and then, see how young
we were without knowing it
how happy without a clue
*
how beautiful that day
that shimmering stretch
of sea sand, perched high
on the shifting lip of it
the silence sweet and salty
with all the time in the world
to say what needed to be said
all the time that never was
(These poems have previously appeared in Outtakes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2023)
Paul Genega’s seventh full-length collection, Outtakes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2023, was published by Salmon Poetry in December, 2023. Over a long career, his poems have appeared in scores of magazines and journals, including Poetry, New York Quarterly, The Nation and North American Review. He is Professor Emeritus at Bloomfield College of Montclair State University in New Jersey where he founded the creative writing program, taught literature and writing, chaired the Humanities Division, and served as Chair of Faculty. Visit him at www.paulgenega.com.
COFFEE BREAKS AND FAMILIAL ACHES
The day
Is frenetic energy
Neutrons bouncing in a nucleus- the walls of this
Kitchen
I stop to percolate
Filter the day through me like water through coffee beans
Café
Bustelo takes me back
To a particular time of day
The way
My father takes
The Sambuca
To an espresso cup, much too small for his callused and arthritic hand
Places a twirl of lemon curl
Wet around the rim and drops it in
The bitter bite, a harpoon
To drown the days demons down
His nerve damaged spine, slackening
Back relaxing
My father, captain, loud at the helm
Rendered
Quiet
For a few hours in the afternoon
Most days we circumnavigate the globe of his moods
Each coffee cup or shot glass a different port
Heaven Hill after an argument
Two cups of coffee or three
Depending
On the previous night’s sleep
My father does not sleep
Years of shift work
Shifting the meridians
Of his body
Most children
Think themselves polar opposites
Of their parents
But I am finding
The coffee is staining my teeth
It becomes harder and harder for me to fall asleep
Is this predisposition
Hereditary
This need for bitter comfort,
Mercy?
The espresso
And expression
A confession
Because I did not go to catholic school
Cannot recite a Hail Mary
But I am full of grace
In this caffeinated state
Café Bustelo, salvation
As the scent of if fills my nostrils
For a moment I breathe deeply
And relax, like my father, into the warmth of the sun
Streaming in through the
Kitchen window
On a hectic afternoon.
TIME AND AGAIN
One day the armies of little boys who saw no other future
than to sacrifice their bodies for money
Will come home from the foreign countries
Whose languages and cultures they were ordered to burn
One day old men will realize borders are pretend
Gates we erected with spikes because white picket fences could not exist for them
One day maybe in another decade little boys will stop fighting wars with little boys
Reminiscent of days on playgrounds where toy airplanes were built from paper
Could not propel bombs the bombs were crayons
Today I can’t read the paper
Most days I can’t face the news
This does not make me naïve, a poet hippie who believes love will save us
It won’t
She hasn’t been loved back for a while she knows
It takes more than love to save the world
But these days I am afraid and my nerves jangle
like plastic skeletons on Halloween
They don’t look like decoration anymore they look like warning
My dead walk the streets each morning
Slowly dying at jobs we hate
But they pay for our portion of the world
We stand ready to defend our corner
I feel like I am suffocating to protect a corner patch of weeds
Nothing has grown here for awhile
I do not have my father’s green thumb
I do not know which seeds I have inherited but I do not want them
The seeds are on fire
The kids are not alright
I must admit I grow more terrified of walking to my car at night
I do not know what more to write
We’ve been typing out the same old ink
I argue in my own mind each night
Try to reconcile poetry as medicine
When it’s medicine we cannot afford
I do not know anymore the point.
Tomorrow I will get out of bed
I will commit to do the work the only way I can
So tomorrow, while the new decade burns, I will write a poem
Again.
Alise Versella is twice nominated for the Pushcart, and A Best of the Net nominated contributing writer for Rebelle Society. She is the author of the full-length When Wolves Become Birds (Golden Dragonfly Press 2021) and the forthcoming chapbook Maenads of the 21st Century (Dancing Girl Press). She has been published widely in such journals as the Opiate, Crack the Spine, Steam Ticket, Penumbra Literary and Arts Journal, Luna Arcana, Soup Can Magazine, The Poeming Pigeon, Circle Show, White Stag Journal, El Portal, Evening Street Review, Press Pause Press, and Soundings East. Versella has worked with Women’s Spiritual Poetry, whose latest anthology, Goddess: When She Rules, raised money for the Malala Fund. Kirkus has called her “…[A] boundlessly energetic and promising technician [who] crafts a unique blend of the symbolist and the confessional; a talented, promising newcomer.” She performs throughout New Jersey and across Zoom screens and has taught Poetry as Power in local libraries and schools.
JOHN J. TRAUSE, the Director of Oradell Public Library, is the author of Why Sing? (Sensitive Skin Press, 2017), a book of traditional and experimental poems; Picture This: For Your Eyes and Ears (Dos Madres Press, 2016), a book of poems on art, film, and photography; Exercises in High Treason (great weather for MEDIA, 2016), a book of fictive translations, found poems, and manipulated texts; Eye Candy for Andy (13 Most Beautiful… Poems for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, Finishing Line Press, 2013); Inside Out, Upside Down, and Round and Round (Nirala Publications, 2012); Seriously Serial (Poets Wear Prada, 2007; rev. ed. 2014); and Latter-Day Litany (Éditions élastiques, 1996), the latter staged Off Broadway. His translations, poetry, and visual work appear internationally in many journals and anthologies, including The Antioch Review, the artists’ periodical Crossings, the Dada journal Maintenant, the journal Offerta Speciale, the Great Weather for Media anthologies It’s Animal but Merciful (2012), I Let Go of the Stars in My Hand (2014), Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea (2019), and the forthcoming A Shape Produced by a Curve (2023), and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books, 2015). Marymark Press has published his visual poetry and art as broadsides and sheets. He is the subject of a 30-on-30-in-30 essay on The Operating System, written by Don Zirilli, and an author of an essay on Baroness Elsa at the same site, both in April 2016. He has shared the stage with Steven Van Zandt, Anne Waldman, Karen Finley, Andrei Codrescu, and Jerome Rothenberg; the page with Billy Collins, Lita Hornick, William Carlos Williams, Woody Allen, Ted Kooser, Victor Buono, and Pope John Paul II; and the cage with the Cumaean Sibyl, Ezra Pound, Hannibal Lector, Andrei Chikatilo, and George “The Animal” Steele. He is a founder of the William Carlos Williams Poetry Cooperative in Rutherford, N. J., and the former host and curator of its monthly reading series. He is fond of cunning acrostics and color-coded chiasmus.
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