C. Dale Young

Presentable

Breathe. Am I not human? Am I not needed?

The ancients believed from day comes night

and from night comes day. So, too, from life

comes death and from death comes life.

The night demands I think, but thinking brings me

no solace. Who taught us that to be human is to

think? Thinking brought me only worry. Breathe.

The night, too, ends. It ends. Everything ends.

The day’s blue skies will make themselves presentable.

Presentable? Now there is something I understand.

Get up. Rise from the twisted sheets and become

presentable. Shave. Shower. Pretend to be composed.

Become the one who saves, the one who listens

and calms. Breathe. What else could I do? I did

what I had done for decades. I went to the hospital.

It felt normal, felt safe. But once again the circle had

turned, and I was the patient not the doctor. Breathe.

Breathe. Stare into the penlight and describe carefully

what is seen. As the edges of my vision shimmered

and blurred, solid things became watery and fluid.

All I could think about was the tumor, the thing

that was now both a threat and a reminder. I left

the neurosurgeon and became again the doctor. I

listened. I spoke about how the treatments I offered

gave a chance at cure, all the while knowing there was

no cure for me, for the brain tumor in my head. Breathe.

Breathe. Please breathe. I could not breathe. I held

my breath, held on to one of the last things I could.

The Flicker

You had been cold for so long, had lived within

too many anxieties. But it was suddenly clear.

The time had come again. The circle had turned

and it was time to start over. The tumor in your head

was not a tumor. Scarred vessels, your immune system

doing double duty. And the Dragon inside you

was becoming impatient, had begun to snarl. It was time,

time for you to go up in brilliant flames. You closed

your eyes, you slowed your breathing. It had been

cold for so long that you craved the heat. The tiny

flicker was always there, but you felt no fear this time.

The Phoenix inside you was ready to do its job.

And the Dragon breathed fire turning the flicker

within you into a torrent of flames. And you relaxed

and felt yourself rendering to ash. No fear. You had

been here before, knew you would step outside

of yourself to look upon the resulting heap of ash.

And the Phoenix within came alive, wrestling

until you found yourself within the ash, your shape

taking form and trembling, the new skin brown

and glistening. And soon, you were rising from it.

Son of the Dragon and the Phoenix, you stand there

newly born and cleansed. You had been cold for so long.

You stand while smoke and little flames escape your nostrils.

C. Dale Young is the author of a novel, The Affliction (2018) as well as five books of poetry, most recently Prometeo (2021). In 2025, Four Way Books will release his next collection, Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems. Young practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He lives in San Francisco.

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Michael Salcman

First Thing in the Morning

The man with strong hands squeezes his head

From ear to ear until he can feel his face

Disappear except for the nose peering back

At him from the mirror and the honking noise

He makes sneezing into a tissue.

The woman first checks to see if she’s bleeding

A monthly or if she can move her ballerina legs

After cracking his nut hours ago deceiving him

With false cries of pleasure. All these years

What does he know about her physiology

When he has only his? He warms his face

With a towel before shaving barber cream off

A light beard using a two-piece blade and slaps

Mentholated alcohol on pink cheeks and chin

Looking a lot like a baby pig made of plastic

He keeps on his desk for saving lone quarters

He finds in his pants taking the rolls to his bank.

She saves paper money in her bag from trips

To the grocery store and other venues he knows

Nothing about if they don’t serve dinner or beer.

She knows the size of shirts, shoes, even the hole

At which he tightens his belt and where he goes

To the dentist. His practical knowledge is limited

To museums and getting flowers for her birthday.

She never leaves home without makeup and doing

Her hair. They joke about planning for everything

Even their graves: she says his stone should read

Still Talking, he wants Still Shopping on hers.

Geometry of Death in a Painting

Here and not here the pillar and the sphere

As in a still life by Cézanne

No rectangle of a cracker box

In a Morandi either

Far outside the mobile

There are almost no triangles in art

But for the faint itch of Malevich

And Russian Constructivists.

But in today’s collage

The papers wear the architecture of pyramids

Pasted flat on a garbage dump

Beneath cracks and scratches in a black sky

Shaped like two stealth bombers in a pileup of wings

Held taut by strips of measuring tape

And an egg squeezed in between until memory bleeds

Of a final flight made in the darkness of night.

A Few Things Have to Change

This is one of those times when the water just sits in the Bay

Like a blue scarf hardly rippling

And the squawking gulls fly up in a haunting ballet

As the tired body waits for spring

Its every muscle filled with a memory of hauling sail.

If you want most things to stay the same, they say

A few things have to change.

Some of the gear has been put away on order

And the captain retired to crew.

No one knows this when they are young and oiled

Weighed down with the power of a bright new machine.

You watch the first morning sun-rays stream across the Bay

Until the chill eases in your bones

As if every day is either a good day or maybe a last.

Michael Salcman, a child of the Holocaust and survivor of polio, is former chairman of neurosurgery at University of Maryland and president of The Contemporary Museum. His poems appear in Barrow Street, Blue Unicorn, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Raritan, and Smartish Pace. His books include The Clock Made of Confetti (nominated for The Poets’ Prize); The Enemy of Good Is Better; Poetry in Medicine: An Anthology of Poems About Doctors, Patients, Illness, and Healing; A Prague Spring, Before & After (Sinclair Poetry Prize winner); Shades & Graces (Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize winner); Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (2022); and Crossing the Tape (2024).

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John-Michael Albert

The New Croesus

Just like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

Astride the golfers’ well-groomed eighteen holes,

Here, in a once disease-infested swamp,

An orange hubrid with a coif whose flame

Is Just for Men (under-timed), and his name,

Make Us Great Again. Here, his tiny hands

Waive the world’s contempt; his rheumy eyes lase

The Beltway’s lair of red-tied suits and wealth.

“To hell with treaties, powers, rights,” tweets he

From his sleepless den. “Come—you comfy rich,

You one-percenters Dow-Jonesing for more,

You brash elitist kleptos of the world,

Come, you entitled oligarchs—to me.

I’ll quench this country’s lamp to glut your store.”

The Woman Who Read This Book Before Me

printed in hard lead, No. 1 pencil, tiny letters

next to phoenix, “mythological bird that lived in Arabia”

our improbable meeting was in The Pages of Day

and Night; she arrived like a new character in Act III

when Adonis compares the earth to a pear or a breast,

she hesitated, wondering especially about the pear

she circled damp asphalt and New York

is Harlem, later New York is Wall Street

halfway through the odes, she started to underline

the names of trees—palm, date, cedar—but not plants

some of her comments were enigmatic: one line was decorated

with a five-pointed star, two were fenced-in with braces

in the ode to love, she put a checkmark

each time the poet wrote let there be weddings

            let there be weddings . . .

            let there be weddings . . .

            let there be weddings . . .

in an image / with breasts and thighs and all the rest:

she could not see Mohammad hurling goddesses from the Kaaba

somewhere between the poems and the essay at the back,

she lost her pencil; from there her comments were in ink

when she finally underlined poetry does not become poetry

unless it frees itself from the easiness and obviousness

that is demanded of it, all her marginalia

should have trembled in their chains, eager

to disappear like scorpions and jerboas

frantically seeking shade before the rising desert sun

And So Each Lover Is Both Greek and Trojan

            responding to Richard Bruce Nugent’s “Pattern for Future Dirges, No. 20”

And so each lover is both Greek and Trojan,

Both deceiver and deceived. It’s love’s contract,

The price we pay when we tie abstract

Pleasure to reality’s heartless, daily motion.

And in exchange for what? Meeting in the rain,

A common destination, conversation

Over a meal and drinks, a certain reservation:

How much dare we share, now, of our joy and pain?

And then we feign a scuffle over the tab:

Who will get to show he loves this moment most?

The last of the wine, one final, lingering toast . . .

(Do we part at the doorway, or share a cab?)

Yes, there’s a dream world that we can only feel,

And through love alone can make it almost real.

John-Michael Albert has been active in the Portsmouth, NH, poetry community for the last 25 years. He has served on the board of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and hosted many open mics in Portsmouth, Dover, Durham, and Rochester. Mike edited The Poets’ Guide to New Hampshire (2 vv., 2008 and 2010). His latest published collection is Collected Animal Poems (Portsmouth, NH: Marble Kite Press, 2024).

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