Sarah Davis

Mary's Hysteria

Someone’s job it is.

Sweep out the barroom before the morning drinkers.

The wind, which sends the peanut shells back inside.

The beach, which wanders down the hill from there.

Sand churned up overnight, now hardened and cold.

Sandpipers scatter where the sand has some give,

closer to the worry of waves.

Up ahead plain as day—are you walking there?

I look. Are you? If I see you, I see you

as if in a cave.

Gloved. If I see you at all I can’t tell.

My mind’s eye remembers the sea and you and the swell of stony sky.

Someone’s job it is.

The first one arrives, named Mary, and she has a story for me

about the time she woke and could no longer see or feel, those two senses gone.

It was before the war, but the war was coming—

air raid sirens and black curtains and smaller portions all around.

The loss of sight and touch lasted a few hours—

father brought a doctor in—but after tea she began to recover,

the first face she saw her own in the ceiling as though in the clouds.

She drinks until sundown. Someone walks Mary home.

Birds scatter like bones in the rough weather, feathers roughed up.

Fathers blend into the old stories like ash.

A bright red blouse on the jetty rocks sharp with mussels,

the taste red with salt and new blood.

My fingertips trace your jawline, that ragged coast.

I miss all the gone people all the time, those people I never knew.

River Town Rising

From inside the room the rain.

A black spread of soaked branches.

A warm December play.

I can’t see my feet in the water.

The bones won’t come into focus.

In the water the rain, from inside the house.

The birds mostly want. The squirrels.

From the house the smell of cooking.

There you are. From you the rain.

The hills are veering. The ragged run.

One morning and the logging truck.

The brink of sun and then the road.

The river a new color and another each

time I call it river and the rain

that rose it high under the gun. There

you are. From inside the house

look at me and after the rain the man

climbs the highway with trees on his back.

From a distance the place. I’m certain.

From you the place remembers me.

You were a long time ago, in absence

and plaid scarf with rainboots

a small black leaf on your upper wet arm

after you take off your shirt the leaf

the scarf, the boots, after you the rain.

A hand on the slick muddied skin

A breath not deep enough but broad.

---

Sarah Davis has published in a number of journals, including Pleiades, Fence, Drunken Boat, the Antioch Review, and Epoch. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana.

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Sonya Schneider

A Wound Is An Opening

A baby, my brother, his head heavy

with no-speech, propped up against plush

pillows, his heart recently opened like a bifold:

the dime-sized hole sewn up hastily

before anything else vital

slipped out. There I was a girl

practicing cartwheels

on the pintucked pink couch

whose back rested against a window

I threw myself into – a foot breaking glass,

bright blood at the heel and later black

as it dried onto the stiff stitches,

stitching the tiny wound.

A wound is an opening.

His chest a riverbed of scar tissue.

On my foot, all that remains:

a tiny white mark in the shape

of a wishbone.

The Pool

Pa built one, dug the hole

with a few of his friends

till the earth piled up and I’d scale

the excess mound in search

of treasure. To save money,

he stretched the sides of Mystic Blue,

a liner he’d found on clearance,

laid the tile himself.

From the back patio we watched

the lines of his face darken

with dusk, the gaps slowly filling

with grout. After the cool groundwater

was called from deep soils

through a bright hose, chemicals

added, temperature brought to a balmy

eighty-six degrees, he stepped in,

my wordless brother stiff in his arms.

I’d heard of baptizing,

and even though we had no god

in our house, this is what I remember.

My father moved through that chlorinated lake

holding his first-born – small arms akimbo,

hair loose snakes – sashaying

him across the calm surface,

while my brother, very slowly,

relaxed his tense muscles, gazed

skyward. Then, finally, my father

threw back his head and laughed.

---

Sonya Schneider's poetry can be found or is forthcoming in Catamaran, Naugatuck River Review, Potomac Review, Raleigh Review, Rust & Moth, Whale Road Review and elsewhere. She lives and writes in WA.

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Ilari Pass

—After Em Berry’s “Because of Us”

The English word is gauze—(a finely woven medical cloth), comes from the Arabic word  غزة or  Ghazza because Gazans have been skilled weavers for centuries.

There is no need to wonder

Wounds will continue

to be left open

and not because

There isn’t enough wounds

left in the world

that can’t be dressed

But because we have

ran out of all the gauzes

to save anyone that is left

Daedalus

the boy washed ashore

with melted wings, his still body lay

for days—turning and turning

one new color after another

---

Ilari Pass is a four-time Best of the Net nominee and other accolades, with Greatest Hits appear or forthcoming in BULL, Dialogist, South Dakota Review, Cutleaf Journal, Pithead Chapel, and others.

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