Christine Potter

…And Transfiguration

The classical LP your mother let you to pick daily—

just one—for the twenty minutes you were home

to eat deviled ham on white sliced into two equal

triangles: you chose Death and Transfiguration

by Strauss because of the title, because you wanted

to understand what “transfiguration” meant—and

the death part didn’t seem so scary: just violins

and back to sixth grade in the green Ford. You didn’t

get in trouble for not eating your crusts. Your mom

never asked you why you kept picking that record.

The illuminated clock face in the movie theatre on

Cape Cod—movies were ninety minutes long and it

was good to look at the clock when someone was

about to get shot, which frightened you more than

you knew how to explain. That death seemed real.

The pleasant, autumnal smell of cigarette smoke

when the Democrats lost another election but their

victory party was at your house anyway—more

laughter than there should have been, only a few

of the fathers from your neighborhood. Mostly

people you didn’t know, amber bottles of Scotch.

Your father’s voting lists. Your little sister smiling

at everything except when she quietly and politely

wept, which everyone found adorable. The day

someone finally shot the President. Three dead days

afterwards. Your father watching TV, John-John and

Caroline in all that blue glimmering—children your age.

---

Christine Potter is the poetry editor of Eclectica Magazine.  She has recently had poems curated by Rattle, Cloudbank, SWIMM, ONE ART, Consequence, The McNeese Review, Does It Have Pockets, Pictura, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.  Her time-traveling young adult novels, The Bean Books, are published by Evernight Teen and her latest poetry collection, Unforgetting, is on Kelsay Books. She lives with her husband and chonky cat Bella in a very old house in the Hudson River Valley.

toc

next

Manthipe Moila

Jacaranda mimosifolia

You have given up your abandonment the way a boy jumping into a river gives up

his shoes. You have given up your hurt, that ancient skin; your want, that old wound.

There are moments like this where you walk the streets of Joburg with friends

or family, bare of yourself, smelling the Jacaranda mimosifolia; crushing

the fallen flowers beneath your school shoes. You do not know that this is your

way of practicing forgiveness, nor do you know that it will all be for naught:

the trees bloomed in Pretoria weeks ago, and you are smelling time already going,

a belated world of violet; one that your father will slip into and never return from. 

---

Manthipe Moila is a poet from Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a BA Hons. in English Literature from Rhodes University. She has been published in a few online and offline publications including Stirring, Tupelo Quarterly, Agbowó and Saranac Review. She is currently based in Seoul, South Korea.

toc

next

Amelia Martens

Mid-Winter, Far West Kentucky

I am a series of ghosts;

the bones in my ankle creak

my ascent and descent

each stair, a platform

to perform new human

transcendence, or rest.

From the backseat

our daughters discuss

how many children

can fit in the heart

of a blue whale, how

all blood is blue until

it comes out of you.

The light is yellow

as I transport us

through the inter-

section, over ice.

My mind fixed

on microfossils,

the bits of teeth

and skeletal splinter

of manta rays found

shattered in the desert.

It turns out two

children can fit

into the heart.

They ask me to play

the song about trains.

---

Amelia Martens is the author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016), and four poetry chapbooks. In 2021 she was awarded an Artist Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and in 2019 she received an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council.

toc

next