Carl Little

Grapefruit

After halving the pink-hued fruit

using skinny knife to cut around wedges

and taking up appointed spoon     

to slip slivers into mouth,

you look ahead, anticipating

largest pieces, what they’ll feel like

on your tongue barely touching teeth

on the way to the throat.

And when done, rushing as usual,

there’s your main squeeze, ravaged half

wrung into a cup brought to the lips 

like devotion near the end of

some holy ceremony, blood-and-body portion

when we kneel and partake

and look floorward, the world

sweet, bitter, and wanting.

---

Carl Little is the author of "Ocean Drinker: New & Selected Poems." His second collection, "Blanket of the Night," with a cover by Abby Shahn, will be out later this year from Deerbrook Editions. His poetry has appeared most recently in The Lowell Review, Maine Arts Journal and Maine Sunday Telegram. He lives and writes on Mount Desert Island.

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Tara Mesalik MacMahon

From Baghdad and Kraków—Fact, Fiction, Query, Plea

I.

They are right heres, my father answers, and he points

to his temple. I realize then there are no photographs

of my Muslim grandma. Nobody tooks them back then,

my father continues, flips open his hands to show me,

bare, though a large photo of his own father commands

his bedroom wall. A robed man, turbaned man,

a man I’ll never know except this presence—eclipsing

something, someone, but what, who? I couldn’t say,   

they are not there. Only the apparition, or my suspicion?—

and now the familiar rise in my throat—The esophagus,

where your fears hide, fears abide!—My therapist

loves her body-talk, body-shock. Still, I probe, advance

more questions, steal bits from others’ memories 

as I try to recreate my paternal grandma, my namesake—

‘Aya’ for short, meaning ‘to swiftly fly.’         

                                    II.

Also, no photos of my Jewish gram from Poland—

that is, until she immigrated to the US, stubborned her way out

between the two wars. I imagine her small-shyness that day

against the NY skyline—iron buildings sawtooth the clouds 

as seagulls caw, tighten their circles. Ellis Island and ten thousand

dissonate strangers. Their names indelible in the passenger logs,

though prologues, saltwater and fresh scars go unrecorded.

III.

Come, bend a little closer, a small bottle you’ll find at the base

of my mouth. Everyone has their seraphim and a place to carry flowers.  

Sprigs of lilac, pink chrysanthemums, purple hyacinths—all Gram’s favorites,

and gardenia petals for my brother and me, to sweeten our bedtime stories.

But Gram’s lips flicker, then shrivel like dead tulips when pressed

for snippets about her childhood. Time, not always a salve for memory—  

No children in the ghetto, only small Jews, the Gentiles had slurred.          

Gram drags a hand down her cheek—

her two brothers and sister, their unblue eyes unspared.

                                    IV. 

Small trace, also, of my Muslim grandma’s childhood or any of her years.

I wonder, did she ever receive flowers?  

Something once about some wool, I believe, was important. 

V.

On my left shoulder, a scratch sheet of velum, a window’s glimpse

into my weak, my rue, and all the sediment of my shame.

On my right, a supple breeze of myrtle. Angels congregate, repose

to slip off their wings. Offer poems, baklava, marjoram tea—

look how Allah provides.

                                    VI.

And already the bright sun lowers, green hills flower mustard blossoms.      

I sit at the stern of a small boat. The Sea of Galilee.  

I face Mecca, southeast, kneel and almost pray. I face Jerusalem,

southwest, and suddenly a cell phone plays Hatikvah, ‘the hope’—

the Israeli national anthem. I mouth-along the words,      

those I remember—some of them, Eretz … Yerushalayim,

the music’s pull from my bones and home Gram fortressed 

for me, with toothpicks and gumdrops after the kids called me—

Heeb, Kike, Muzzie, Ay-rab.

                                    VII.

I have held-up these cut-out stars, my two grandmothers,

for a lifetime now—arcing my curious arms, my wands to the universe.

And yet, so little I have solved since sundown, the careful geometry

of nocturnal clouds, the slow shapes of my laughing cry.        

The end won’t be so bad, someone once said.

Animals, too, pull-up their paths and rest.

Still, in this world with bittersweet rain and the dying things,        

what am I?—this sprawling search, this strangeness…. 

Even Muhammad, who could not read, would meditate

with the birds, song-quiet. Dream, dream in pheromones.   

Soon, all that rustles are my mind-heart thoughts

which island my heart-mind words—a house built

of mortar and sky, wind and stone.

---

Tara Mesalik MacMahon is a Muslim-Jewish poet, child of an immigrant father from Iraq, and American-born mother, the daughter of immigrants from Poland. Most recently Tara’s poetry was selected winner of 2024 The James Hearst Poetry Prize from NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW. Her first chapbook of poems, "Barefoot Up the Mountain," was winner of OPEN COUNTRY PRESS’s Chapbook Contest. Tara’s poems also appear in: NIMROD, POET LORE, RHINO, RADAR, JABBERWOCK REVIEW, RED HEN PRESS’S "New Moons" Anthology by North American Muslim Writers, among many others, several include prizes and honors. She lives on an island with her husband and rescue dog.

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Susanna Lang

History shows

a woman crouched by the river

with her two boys, breadcrumbs

in their palms, half a dozen goslings

drawing near and pulling back,

torn between hunger and fear.

Later, the woman sits in a room

alone, the children asleep,

her husband working nights

or maybe she’s raising the boys

without their father. She no longer

hears the traffic on the avenue,

the occasional late dog walker

or the couple talking in low voices

outside her first floor window.

She may have a notebook open

or a book in which she reads

            Say the word history: I see

            your mother, mine.

Or she’s threaded a needle, laid out

a few yards of fabric that caught her eye

in a shop window. Maybe she sits

at an upright piano her mother played,

or sits with her memories, their colors

lit from within like stained glass

when you walk past a church during

the evening service. It’s been a long year

for all of them, closed-in, too close

together inside these few rooms.

Her grandchildren will ask her about

this year of plague and angers, how

she lived through it, and she’ll tell them

about the goslings, their soft down, the way

they stretched their necks toward the bread

that her boys, their fathers, were offering.

                                                after Eavan Boland

---

Susanna Lang divides her time between Chicago and Uzès, France. The 2024 winner of the Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize from December Magazine, her most recent chapbook, Like This, was released in 2023 (Unsolicited Books), along with her translations of poems by Souad Labbize, My Soul Has No Corners (Diálogos Books). Her third full-length collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was published in 2017 (Terrapin Books). Her work appears in such publications as The Common, Asymptote, American Life in Poetry, Mayday, Rhino Reviews and The Slowdown.

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