Vol. 7 No. 1

Summer 2024

Red Astral Uterus
Editor's Note
Albanian Folk Dance
In the Barn
Death Cleaning
How Everything And Nothing Changes
The Civilian Conservation Corps
Sunrise and Mountains
GPS
One Spoon or Two
Pando
Matching Blue
The Body of God
Annual Visit
Joshua Tree Yellow Flowers
Neighbors
Artichoke
Centaur
Epiphyte Lessons
Joshua Tree October 14 2023
Invisible Work
Loblolly Pine in August
Enthralled to the Dead
Nothing Compares
The world goes on
Why We Let the Striped Bass Go
Sunset in Joshua Tree, 2024
The Walker
shame and the way it hangs from the body like wet linen
Life Cycle
Unsafe at Any Speed
Today a River
This Man on the Street
Alder and Salmon
Induced by the Ice Moon,
Don't Look
At South Lido Park, When My Husband Has COVID
Ice Cave
Nonverbal Communication
The Making of Horses
Series: Asemic Metamorphoses of Space, (vers. 14)
What Noah's Wife Did
The Pregnancy Pillow
Sunrise, September Five
Even Though My Ulna Popped out of the Skin When I Fell off the 6th-grade Monkey Bar…
Loosdrecht schaatsen
Wood Ear
Foraging for Wine
Wisława Szymborska and the Wounded Angel
Bracken
The Forgotten Tree
If you could be any animal?
When My Mom’s Ghost Comes To Visit Me
Parent's Day
Blues
A Decade of Seasons I
Hairpin
As Highway and Bridge
The Drive Back Home from School with Mom
A Decade of Seasons III
Two Defenseless Haibun
Germination
Elevated Convection
Marigolds
Turbulence, A Zuihitsu
Harmony of Humanity: Evolving Empathy
Missing Persons Report #3
What's It Like To Be a Guinea Pig?
Desert Penumbra
Tangled Yarn: Abstract Elegance in Tufted Artistry, Where Fashion Meets Canvas IV
Keep Child Away From Window
Red Signs
By Water
The light at the end of the tunnel
Starting from Scratch
Bird Singing in the Moonlight
The mnemonic FINISH neatly summarizes the symptoms of antidepressant discontinuation syndrome
Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence
Bad Omens
This is My Impression of a Very Good Girl
Ordinary Nights
Dialogue with the innocent dragon

Sunrise, September Five

Sparrow flies by the corner room’s corner window. Flies when it sees me. Faces East. So much hair; dark, “It looks cherry in this light,” my mother says through the phone.           My other daughter at home with grandma. I don’t know how to do this: share myself.           With mother. You.
          I elevator down to the cafeteria, grab coffee and dark chocolate. Climbing stairs still hurts my stomach; 3 sets of stitches. 
 
          “In your own words, say what we’re doing to you.” 
I say Emergency Appendectomy, and they corrected me; 
          “Removing your appendix,” as if I shouldn’t know the words this high. As if I shouldn’t own what’s mine. I am leaving me. Or being taken. My appendix, my mind. I don’t remember what happened next. “Why don’t hospital beds have USB ports yet?” I ask. “We’ll make millions.”  
 
Going under, the surgeon asks what I do for a living. I tell him I teach English. 
          “What are your favorite books?” he asks, trying to gauge when I’m asleep, I think. I’m conscious long enough to ask him which genre, to say Of Mice and Men, Art & Fear, Counting Descent. To tell him I reread those books the way I reheat meals. 
 
Waking up, my throat is too dry to ask, but the nurse hands me soda anyway. When the surgeon checks in, he mentions that he’s never read Steinbeck. I’m falling asleep, but tell him to read the shorter books. I tell him a poem is a book. I tell him that I know what the word “appendectomy” means. You meet me in my room soon after, and we wait. We’re just glad we aren’t sharing a hospital bed. I try to stand but can’t. 
 
At home, I couldn’t roll over.          Your hips hurt from the weight and we haven’t shared a bed in weeks. The couch rested your belly           or I wanted to give you extra room.
 
“In your own words, say what we’re doing to you.”
          “Inducing labor”
          “We’re gonna get this baby out of you,” again, correcting. 
          “Sure,” you say.
 
We wait.           Sleep, if we can. During labor we watch game shows with the doctor and nurse between contractions.           I’d feel bad about being inattentive if you weren’t joking about it. 
Why do hospital beds not have USB ports yet? you ask. 
          We’ll make millions. 
 
In my own bed two weeks ago, I am on a couch in the corner room of the mother and baby wing. On the phone with my mother, you say, “We’re just happy we weren’t sharing a hospital bed.” (Again? What is the joke, now?)
Charlie is born and I rest my forehead on yours.           This bed we aren’t sharing is the bed we share now. I have forgotten my second skin.           What’s mine was never mine.

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