David Schnare

Caesura

To liken it to pregnancy

is to deny the differences

between what is and is not said,

but in the rest between the last and next,

a silent word is born in the imagination,

cannot survive the pause,

and dies alone.

He looks to where her eyes might misdirect.

Perhaps he hopes to find the frightened child

he hopes to save,

he hopes to rescue

from the hollowness between them.

She is reflecting on the stillness

of the surface of the wine

that lies as featureless

within the half-filled glass

as emptiness itself.

Insects

Insects sift scant light

into this dense summer heat.

I sweat like some blond Mexican laborer

drinking a wine from California,

my warm blood making mosquitoes drowsy,

while fireflies drift like glowing ash

on the draft of a dying flame.

I held them in my hand as a child

reading their message, chanting aloud,

“Oh, grant us peace this warm night.”

They beckon to attract a mate,

but as a child I did not know that,

believing they had flown too near the moon.

“Denise,” I whisper, sitting alone,

the lines of kiting spiderlings adrift across my lips,

imagining small creatures hunting in the night,

springing traps,

running each other to the ground,

calling, their bodies’ lamps burned cold,

“we are surrounded by hunger and loneliness,”

knowing that words are worthless,

recalling a firefly pinched in half,

flickering rhythmically, oblivious to his death.

David Schnare is a retired house painter, dishwasher, used car reconditioner, cathode ray tube assembler, warehouse clerk, hospital orderly, and general practice physician. Aside from single poems in Better Than Starbucks and The Ekphrastic Review, he has no publications.

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Stan Sanvel Rubin

Half Life

The day of your coming

was the day of my undoing.

I date everything now

by a calendar of exclusion.

Grief is on every page

like a blot

made not of ink,

but blood.

Considering our promises,

is there a difference?

What’s left is punctuation

and blank spaces.

Bang

From the smallest beginning

the structure of this universe

grew like a balloon

endlessly filling

with rocks and gases

and explosions and

the silence

that’s permanent.

Then we came

with our questions

and our fear.

Stalker

As if I’m backing

out of Time

I obsessively watch

the shadow follow.

Its darkness is lit

from within like a demon

whose soupy brow

consumes its face

the way night does,

and now

I cannot see

my face.

Bridge

Before you can be home,

you have to travel

far and wide

in dim regions

and wild places on the Earth

and the space between

where horror grows

as a daily occurrence.

No one plans this

though we try

to plan everything.

That’s how smart we’ve become.

The span of time

is your open hand.

Called

When distant trees move,

Sun Tzu says,

the enemy is coming.

When the trees walk toward you

as prophesized by witches,

Macbeth learns what it means.

These are all signs.

Our life is filled with them.

Today the Wine Gods

have called me

for a special mission

that does not need words,

which is lucky

since I used mine.

Stan Sanvel Rubin has published poems in many US journals including Agni, The Georgia Review, and Poetry Northwest as well as in China, Canada, and Ireland. Four full-length collections include There. Here. (Lost Horse Press) and Hidden Sequel (Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize). A retired educator, he has lived on the north Olympic Peninsula of Washington for over twenty years.

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Jennifer Franklin

Still, Flowers

Even today, with two new diagnoses,

(supposedly cured from the cancer

that almost killed me), I am still here.

I walk out of the doctor’s office,

with my bad news, into sun.

The spotted lantern flies are killing

maples and ailanthus all over the city

but someone has planted flowers

in the window boxes that line

my walk home from the pharmacy

that dispenses my daughter’s four

epilepsy drugs. Still, flowers open

and their petals withstand the wind.

I stop to memorize their shock of pink.

After reading that Flaco flew into a building and died

“to be / Assassin of a Bird

Resembles to my outraged mind

The firing in Heaven,

On Angels – squandering for you

Their Miracles of Tune –”

             —Emily Dickinson 

He lived in this neighborhood for almost a year.

I never spotted him in the wild but in photographs

he perches on water towers, fire escapes, and balconies.

I have not escaped my cage. Have not soared

above anything with abandon. Have not looked down

on grass or trees. Even if a vandal cut the mesh wire

of my enclosure, I wouldn’t leave. Love binds me

here as the walls close in and the tinny music

of the harp creates an intractable earworm.

In the middle of the night, I look out the window.

From this perch, I might have sighted him emerging

from a nap on an air conditioner or a terrace, to follow

a slow rat, thick with poison. I might have heard

a struggle as he swooped down to make a kill.

There Was a Time

After everything that has happened,

we can only agree on flowers.

If you were here, you would love

the huge hibiscus—each peach

flower closing for the evening—

folded like your fists when you sleep.

It’s hard to believe we lived

through those years of my treatment

when you slept in my bed mouth open

like a dead body waiting to be embalmed.

We haven’t slept under the same roof

in years. Now, when we spread

peach jam at your breakfast table,

we each strain for something

uncontroversial to say over the scent

of burnt toast on your apple green

plates. A robin perched on the branch

above the deck frightens the dog.

In a moment, it’s gone. There was a time

I would have picked up the phone

to tell you what happened but now

I can only send you a photo of the hibiscus.

Self-Portrait as Panel Painting

I am this tiny tabula

of a swallow, sharp-beak

like a silver sword,

curved claws, motionless,

iridescent, still wing.

Painted on wood over three

other paintings of birds—

a gold canary in a cage,

a nightingale out of sight

above a beech tree, consumed

by its own song, a finch

chained to a shelf, blinded.

A crackled palimpsest on cut

wood, bronze circle at the top

to put a nail through. Hang me

on the cabin wall. Don’t let me

remember the other birds beneath

thick paint. Don’t remind me

of the song that used to emerge,

unbidden from my small soft chest.

Jennifer Franklin is the author of three full-length poetry collections including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023), finalist for the 2024 Paterson Poetry Prize. Franklin has received a Pushcart Prize, a NYFA/City Artist Corps grant, and a Café Royal Cultural Foundation Literature Award. Her work has been published in anthologies and journals including in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, The Nation, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Society’s “Poetry in Motion,” and The Academy of American Poets “poem-a-day” series. With Nicole Callihan and Chenda Bao, she coedited Braving the Body (Harbor Editions, 2024). She teaches craft workshops at Manhattanville’s MFA program and 24 Pearl Street of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. For the past ten years, she has taught manuscript revision at the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where she serves as Program Director.

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