Carol Willette Bachofner

Half-Haunted

Old Pima came down with the wandering sickness. It edged in when he was digging for water out back. Took over, settled into his heart for four years. There is no warning. It stayed until Grandson came home from college. Ira Hayes got it at Iwo Jima, raising a flag that didn’t recognize him. That’s how it gets in sometimes. Comes and goes. Old Pima put a walking stick by the entrance to his house. In case it comes back. He wears a dream catcher on his shirt now. He heard from an elder that the sickness comes from crazy dreams getting in through the chest. He hasn’t slept in his bed since Old Woman walked away. Grandson builds a fence to keep it out. Granddaughter cooks outside to make it think there’s no house at all. Old Pima smudges. Heya, heya, heya-hey. Linda Little Dog stopped singing and wandered off after breakfast. She might be gone an hour. A week. She might be under the road. Old Pima notices his walking stick wandered off at about the same time.

Carol Willette Bachofner served as Poet Laureate of Rockland, Maine from 2012 to 2016. Carol is the author of seven books of poetry, including Test Pattern, a fantod of prose poems (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Every Place I look, Women With Embers at Their Feet is forthcoming from Main Street Rag. Bachofner’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, most recently, The Mackinaw: a journal of prose poetry, and the following anthologies: Dawnland Voices, An Anthology of Writings from Indigenous New England (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), Enough! (Littoral Books, 2020), and Wait (Littoral Books, 2021).

Claire Millikin

Winter Horses

In snow’s under-speech of lucid shadows,

horses spook in the field behind a motel

owned by emigrants who fear for their lives

and politely serve American motorcyclists

continental breakfasts, looking the other way.

This winter’s horses carry the injustice

of being set aside because they are afraid.

I show up most mornings with apples

from the only grocery store still in town,

where old women shop with carts they own;

I’m also becoming old, invisibly, my eyes the tender 

eyes of a natural thief, polite and still.

You cannot Google my winter horses, and Artificial

Intelligence knows nothing of them.

They’re real in the way of imaginary numbers, this

numb medicine of refuge I master and am mastered by,

riding them when I must, walking beside them

when I can, settling and unsettling the distances of vision.

I’ve always been a runner, but this winter it’s worse.

Only the winter horses understand my terror, a constant urge to sprint.

I feed them apples sweet and dormant,

shipped from Argentina, the seasons opposite ours,

but dictatorships we have in common, theirs gone, ours arriving. 

Ask the horses nothing, they answer as shadows

trace the material world in winter’s mind.

Soon enough, hawthorn and crab apple will open.

Language is never a horse to ride.

I feed my horses weather and sometimes sugar.

Claire Millikin is the author of ten books of poetry including Magicicada (Unicorn Press 2024), winner of the 2024 Foreword Indie Book Award for Poetry. Magicicada is about juvenile solitary confinement. An earlier book, Dolls (2Leaf Press 2021), an extended elegy for transwoman Sage Smith, was a semifinalist for the PSV Poetry Book Award for North American Publishers and Writers. Millikin lives in coastal Maine, enjoys long distance running, and teaches for the University of Maine system.

Betsy Sholl

Fragment

I was always asking something, asking over and over,

never listening to the answer, as if the question was mine,

the answer more like someone else’s wow

over a shooting star I didn’t see.

And isn’t the point to see? —

to be dropped to our knees by a light-struck violin,  

its pitch intent on breaking the heart, and us

crying out, Yes, all right, break it.

Betsy Sholl’s tenth collection of poetry is As If a Song Could Save You

(University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), winner of the Four Lakes Prize.  Her ninth collection is House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin, 2019). She is faculty emerita in the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts and served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011.