Meredith Kirkwood

A Summer Evening Right Here

You & I sit on lawn chairs in the front yard.

There are too many roses blooming

because I am the gardener

and I can’t bear to thin the buds.

What if each one were a word or

a message? Irreplaceably precious?

Those yellow folds steadfastly

cup some spiders. Across the street

the neighbor’s old Ford up on blocks

rattles to the engine of her ‘89 Camaro

filling the expanse between sidewalks

with static which helps me not hear

my own heartbeat. The powerlines above

sag with some invisible weight.

You wonder out loud how much

they can take. Clouds above tinge pink.

Underneath them surely someone has died.

You might have died this year

but you didn’t. And that makes your existence

holy so I try to breathe your exhale

but the odor is oh-so-ordinary.

Still, I’ve stopped killing spiders

can’t stand to leave a single grape on the vine

or even to sleep sometimes because

since we’re all here it’s shockingly

extravagant and achingly fragile and

alertness seems called for.

Fire Season

1.

Wind, they say you are ancient.

A bird calls

without ever telling me its name.    

Smoke from a fire in the next valley

enters the meadow.

The green-brown and haze

of a forest unmade.

The grass waits for rain

or the mouth of a deer.

And the mountains are slowly

imperfectly blotted out.

2.

The entire Western Slope

is sending signals

to the possibility trapped

in space.

Trees proffer their carbon

through flame.

They have so much to give.

We have everything to lose.

Even now what objects

are falling to the sea?

Can the slump be measured in acres

or tons? And how many lungs

of how many creatures

shut down when they read

the smolder?

3.

What’s the equation that tells me

how many tears I should shed

for 40,000 acres?

I’m not trained for emotional

triage on burns of the heart.

With no funeral how do I grieve

the once-living green?

And do I trust the posts

that claim redemption

even before the fire

is 1 percent contained?

Unseasonable

This warm sun casting

wide-eyed clarity on every leaf

withered to reflectionless rust

by a heat exceeding

October’s range.

These blackbirds clustering

at the persimmon tree

pecking the unripe flesh

because they don’t have dreams

of winter juices.

That hummingbird looking

for raspberries

up and down the vine,

a cultic dance of desiring

the sweet of last season.

Some habits outlive their sense

long before we see it,

their sense but not their beauty,

their rusty brown, their puckered tongues,

their iridescent green sheen on our backs.

---

Meredith Kirkwood's poetry has been published in Iron Horse Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, Rogue Agent, and ONE ART, among others. Find her on the web at www.meredithkirkwood.net.

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Beth Kanell

Brain Mapping

The first color of the day is sky blue, at the window,

edged with grass green and a marbled pattern of apple leaves.

Wake up, visual cortex. There are too many must-do items

lined up (it’s Saturday) but the blue, blue, blue widens

eyelids, tugs the lips into an arc of pleasure, guides

the lilting calls of morning birds and then an auditory

connect with joy, triggered. Robins’ trills, nagging bluejays,

override of a crow insistent: listen without judgment

while the song of the house wren ripples like French

across the seat of love. Which is also

embedded, glowing, behind the racecourse of reason

and above the reptile brain, which unfolds one leg, the other,

balances the pulse of body and breath. Love is physiologic.

How enchanting, to map the blue, green, and red threads

of call and response, core and ripple. No CAT scan required:

merge bookshelves, make dinner together. We grew up

with maps on paper; slid unquestioning to GPS; the mind,

which is not the same as the brain, yearns to organize,

aches to respond. Love is an action verb, I’ve insisted,

pretending I knew the coordinates to tap.

Rx: Mifepristone

Call it the opposite of welcome home. Say goodbye to

a pulsing clump of cells, before naming. Before failure.

Don’t take this if you are past menopause (instructions say).

Avoid it if you’re ingesting fentanyl, warns the clinic webpage.

Don’t mix with blood thinners, heart failure, internal

yeast prescriptions, or if you’re treating malaria,

or with any drug that lowers cholesterol.

So why would you ever? Listen:

Have you seen those raw little faces?

First you have to notice them, to grieve them:

crusted noses running, cheeks red with rash, fussing

all the time. Sharp slap in the supermarket. Silenced with

rubber nipple on a stiff frame, stuffed between

unwiped lips. Bad baby, someone says; give him some

of this: secondhand smoke from excellent weed,

swig of sweet liquor, Adderall crumb.

Nobody remembers his first words.

In a nearby car, there’s a grandparent linked

to the borrowed safety seat, the box of diapers,

school schedule—signing up for food benefits

lining up for the low-cost clinic, coupons caught, cash

that barely covers store-brand mac & cheese. Child,

don’t outgrow that jacket yet. Short on sleep,

poor choices, no good ones affordable.

Weep for the ones who were never chosen.

Mifepristone tells the womb, Let go.

An after-rape rescue, a “what were we thinking” remedy,

last resort when you’re fighting cancer or genes malfunction,

slamming a sentence of round-the-clock caregivers

and lost jobs, shredded lives, onto the couple that once dared

to dream of sports and schools.

Notice the common side effects:

Sour stomach; back pain; dizziness; the runs. Regret and relief

(though those aren’t on the list). Depression. You contemplate

nine months. Eighteen years. All your linked lives, forever.

Call this a way to wait, a rite to re-route. Faith:

One day may offer a quicker quench. Hope hovers.

Meanwhile: Some days, there’s only mifepristone.

---

Beth Kanell lives in northeastern Vermont among rivers, rocks, and a lot of writers. Her poems seek comfortable seats in small well-lit places.

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Mary Buchinger

Walking the Dog

It’s only a red light / a regular red stoplight / it doesn’t mean what it used to / the crawl across my back? a nerve somewhere sending its regards / from the headlands to the stern there’s a storm inside / and I resent my students who say what they think I want to hear /and I want to tell them don’t you know I’m younger than you / I keep not knowing anything / I want them to know that nothing too /the sparrow worries I’m after its nest when I’m just walking past /please treat the place like you live here / don’t throw chicken bones and nips / birthday cake candles in my garden / isn’t this world also yours / we broke it we own it / a redbud is a redbud even if it never blooms—I need that / and there isn’t a dog in the world except for my Dover at the end of her leash /and I know the car has no intention none whatsoever to stop at the red light / so we wait / wait at the curb  / nothing means what I was told

The Screen

My plane waits for me at the end of a tunnel,

its engines brum, knock of bridled explosions,

fumes, squirts of oil and grease, heads slicked,

free of grit, the metal skin mirrors the sunrise

My coming journey will pummel its steel,

test its jets— what can be dissected

and put together again

What gets larger through collective

experience is made of individual noticings

My student described the white bowl

in the museum and discovered

the orbit of earth, its imperfect round,

the moon with its pitted surface,

and what could I do, but thank her?

When the wonder opened,

I mean, the window, I was somewhere

again finally, my body had an earth

for a whole breath

in a blue sky,

but the passenger beside me closed it,

the sunlight streaming in

obscures his screen, 

everyone but me returns

to their movies, curated movement

of a narrative so unlike

life that spends itself heedlessly,

the little seconds whizzing away here and there,

who’s to say this led to that?

What is text, but probability,

the odds of one word

following another

and the predictable world

goes unfilmed, it’s full of the sleeping

and who wants to watch it?

The brain loves motion and will make a story

Let me say this:

I love to see the shadow of my jet

race across winter trees

Catch me! it says

Catch me if you can!

Spun-Butter Light Smothers The Rust-Tipped Weeds

Dusk

clotted with insects

sipping the last

bit of august

dancers

on the palm

of summer

tulle skirts

net light

little leap

of a season

tipping

into September

and from the underwelt

the click and twirl

of cicadas unwinding

dervishes

of the emptying

---

Mary Buchinger is the author of seven collections of poetry including Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, 2023, Mass Book Award, honors, ) and The Book of Shores (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2024).

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