Lara Frankena

A Few Words About Summers Past

Somewhere in the sands of Coney Island
where we threw flip-flops at teenage boys who sang
Casper, the Friendly Ghost in tribute to my fair skin,
where the Cyclone trumped a cup of coffee
for Sunday morning pick-me-ups,
where young men turned young women upside down
to see what tumbled from pockets, bikinis, mouths,
is a set of keys to 624 11th Street, apartment 2.

Lara Frankena is a Midwesterner by birth and a Londoner by chance. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Poetry News, PEN International Magazine and Midwestern Gothic, as well as in anthologies and online.

 

H. Edgar Hix

Snow Has Its Own Little Ways

Snow has its own little ways:
melting when you don’t expect it,
flying from the breeze to your glasses,
keeping the dead mouse hidden until spring,
showing up on schedule or not,
calling you from her new boyfriend’s
to ask you to get her the sparkly purse
she left at your mom’s.

H. Edgar Hix is a big fan of snow unless you hand him a shovel or skis.

 

Krishna Lewis

Release

It was not dust escaping to speak to us in ethereal shape, nor was it fine sand trilling
between our fingers to join her parents long ago buoyed forth on the river,
nor was it even the sludge of burnt and now-rancid ghee, as a cousin said it would be,
but rather it was coarse, little, gravity-stricken stones that appeared in our cupped palms
as we dipped into the sack to release our mother into the Ganges,
and in the end, it was the end, for our hands sprung up without weight, without anchor.

Krishna Lewis is happily the Fellows Program Director at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University.

 

Kevin Heslop

Fiction

When David Foster Wallace said that
fiction is about what it is

to be a fucking human being,
he probably didn’t intend to insinuate

coitus is the principal occupation
of the imagination, but may have:

narrative, after all, loves the twilit
entanglement as much as anyone,

and the way the votive gyroscope
of a moving mind compresses

into the white-sheeted ordeal of a book
is, perhaps, like the flowers

later pressed between its pages,
finally sensual in nature.

Kevin Heslop is a poet and actor from London, Ontario.

 

Pamela Joyce Shapiro

Unseasonable

This is for the young widower
who loved his lawn more than life,
who once stood waist high in a sea
of snow and shoveled all of
Pickwick Drive, as though it were
the world, as though the blizzard
bore his private whiteout grief,
and we were all enemies
because we could not save her,
because children did not love her
neat expanse of edged green grass
that spread from seed like the cancer
in her womb at the end of spring.

A cognitive psychologist intrigued by memory and language, Pamela Joyce Shapiro writes poetry to capture thoughts and moments otherwise forgotten.

 

Jon Densford

A Wedding

He was so devoted to loneliness
that he pledged himself
to her in marriage,
but that cold ceremony
was without witness,
except for three white candles
and one grey,
desiccated moth.

Jon Densford lives in Memphis, where he will attain age 69 in two shakes of a sheep’s tail.