Linda Aldrich

End of the Line

The box smells damp, decayed, perhaps like the casket

the teenage boys dug up when I was 10, pulling out

Clara Smith from 1850, propping her up at the Valley Street

bus stop: black crinoline dress, lace-up shoes, pleated

bonnet, hair flying around a face of bones and holes.

Halloween prank the paper said no living kin.

That made it OK for them, I thought, to put the photo

on the front page and for me to find it funny,

the bus pulling up, opening the door, unable to board,

didn’t have the fare, so Clara was caught bone-handed

on Saturday morning, trying to get home, but not back

to Jesus, just to her kitchen with those ancient potholders

and a drawer crammed full of keys, covered buttons,

small porcelain knobs, yellowed envelopes containing

snips of hair only she could remember.

Perhaps the boys had done her a favor?

***

Obituaries say no living kin, never living kin. Close kin

and close predeceased are named, while nephews

and nieces who drifted away or ran for their lives

are too many to count, or never counted, and are called

numerous for those who want to say at least something.

I cut through layers of twine and a warning

in my great aunt’s loud cursive don’t ever throw away.

As the childless renegade, I’ve ignored these

curled-up photos of my not living kin, shuffled together,

clinging to each other in a moldering montage, peering

around broken edges at me, or rather eternity. Some smile,

some would never, and I sink into all I don’t know

and how they’ve come down to me, the last to be seen

alive with them. What would they have me do now,

we who never knew each other but are part and parcel?

A declining world catches in my throat.

I’d like to leave my Claras and James Henrys

at the bus stop some dark morning.

***

Instead, I hold them up to the light and touch their faces,

read what’s written on their backs. Great-grandmother

Elizabeth with her solemn face and the dress she made.

William James with scuffed shoes, hands clasped.

Edith and Harold in wicker chairs. Gravestone

of infant Marion and mother Ernestine, 1887.

Martha, Richard, Kathleen, Emily, Garnard.

Ahhhh, I say. Ah-men, Ah-women.

Ah to the theys and the not-theys and the many ways

we name ourselves. I say thank you.

I will make a boat of you and set you on the water.

I will wait for wind.

The seldom rain

brims the edge

of drying leaves

and hesitates

before it drops

as beads

that bounce

that break

but never saturate

the pavement

we have made.

The world’s grown hard.

It dessicates.

All that flies

is bullet-shaped.

My body that was once a lake

is now in drought.

You see the very least of me,

my fears my doubts

have hollowed out,

and all that I’ve held back from you,

especially my love for you,

the ways I haven’t touched.

The world’s grown hard.

It dessicates.

All that flies

is bullet-shaped.

This empty gourd can still make sound.

My feet can pound the sand.

I fiddle forth this dance for you.

I sing this song.

I let my cheeks grow wet.

Linda Aldrich has published three collections of poetry, most recently, Ballast (2021). She won the 2023 Maine Poetry Award for Short Works, and was the Poet Laureate for Portland, Maine, from 2018 to 2021.

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Justin Lowe

Owls in the Gutters

            for Micky Dayman

I.

this is only a beginner’s guide:

for the more advanced there is Bach

and that autumn leaf that tickled Bashō’s snoring nose.

item one:

do not roost in some dark corner

keeping guard over your cold body.

circumstances have rendered you lighter than air,

use this fact to your advantage, friend,

you are celestial now.

slowly, without your even noticing,

you will forget whose body that is

with the tag on its toe,

forget everything, even how to breath,

even forget that you are dead,

which is when you will start to loom large over your void.

death is best left to the living, friend.

you are the glint in the silt now

of the slow wend.

II.

sad is not an epiphany,

sad is not some underline in a diary:

sad is just sad.

sad growls what do you want?

me or ten years of lead-limbed mornings?

sad says a lot but slowly,

like the ground beneath us.

sad makes a point of fluffing the pillows

that your head can barely rise from.

sad says the tap drips

as a cold fact not a plaint,

pips along like a child

chasing gulls in some old Super-8.

sad nods her head in her sleep

as though confirming a whisper passed on.

III.

there will be

no more poems

friend

the words

once thought infinitesimal

have just about

run out

these

are the last

precious few

the void

has crept up

to the wire

we must

hold steady while

the darkness mills around

for

when you left us

you left us speechless

IV.

since the funeral

my shadow has become

a sort of pale echo, a limp tethered thing.

I noticed it first that morning

as Lindsay and I killed an hour

before the 11 a.m. service.

we were strolling down the rows of smudged headstones,

this limp form trailing reluctantly behind,

as though some dark ink had been spilled.

Lindsay’s beside it seemed so bold and so true,

like one of your stories,

while mine seemed to be saying dive into me, don’t worry.

so, the cemetery gulls duly obliged,

only to rise again sharply

with those dry crumbs that always catch in the throat,

water the eyes.

V.

I can no longer judge happiness,

other people’s or my own.

the nature of the fire on that distant ridge,

its scale and intent.

not that I don’t believe

that happiness exists.

I know it does

because it casts a shadow.

it’s just that happiness has always been

the simplest of constructs:

someone smiles they are happy,

someone laughs they catch the ear of the gods.

VI.

aged eight

I glimpsed my first widow’s smile,

a pale ember

in the cold ash of whispers and grimaces,

the laughing priest

never far from the banquet table,

all the pretty flowers

bursting with colour around the closed casket

where the dead always seemed to be telling some office joke.

I would run off with the other children

to play amongst the headstones, scratching my head,

listening to the breeze

sighing in the thistles as I hid:

the longer they took to find you

the happier it made you.

Justin Lowe lives in a house called “Doug” in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. His ninth collection is due out through Puncher & Wattman in October 2024, and he also has a novel doing the rounds of publishers Down Under.

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Robert Haynes

After Move 37

1

The guests had come to escape troubles that didn’t

look like their own husbands and brothers,

their dogs, their dishes. The war happens far away,

where snow falls with knife-edged shrapnel.

Maybe they’ve seen the news. Maybe not.

. . . in the interview, the witness catches

her breath staring at the landscape and all

the space Chadds Ford can hide. I leave

the veranda to go inside. I’m watching

a re-run of Ancient Aliens and want to believe

we are benevolent beings. Our Skywalker, our

Leia and Obi-Wan have fought our battles

in a galaxy far away from Chadds Ford,

far from the hillsides that hang like artwork.

2

Russian missiles strike the ashes of Chornobyl

long after the power goes out. Even the artist

in his studio remains the unfortunate nobody

with nothing to say. If the news is fake, plenty is

left to praise along roadsides lined with refugees

leaving town. They take nothing but a husband’s

smile, a mother’s hug. They walk away, each

in a different rush. Where they go, no one knows,

not even the aftermath, pregnant with its hush

creeping beneath the unspoken shadows.

3

Numbed by running, the man’s daughter sees

the house on fire. Her husband, the mechanic,

leaves the dishes, photographs, and the sweater

hand-knit by a grand-aunt. Books and letters,

the Bible citing marriages and births, quilts,

the hall clock, the china thrown to the floor.

4

The silence breaks—15 minutes ago, a campus alert.

The witness said dark-skinned, said a gun or a knife.

said the light was bad. Said he acted alone. Said

the light made him stumble. The witness said

nothing else, except herself hunkered in a hallway

trying to hide. Said the knife flashed red under

an exit sign as if a god had pointed to the way

out. Said the world within a world listened

for footsteps. Said the Internet, said footsteps

clicked as if browsing. Said Facebook. Said TikTok—

said it was a distraction from the Crime Alert,

said YouTube. Said puppies, said kittens. Said

the clicking down the hallway got closer…

5

The guests write a review for the AirBnB

on its website. They describe their view

from the veranda over the lake. They write

about the cozy wicker chairs, the awning

overhang, over which hangs a branch

for a heron to perch. It’s early March,

and a robin in the ginkgo tweets its song

into the lake’s algae bloom. All the inedible

fish look up at the heron’s blue wings that are

readied for flight. In time, the bird will arch

from his perch, awakening a rash of ripples.

But for now, the guests have nothing more to write.

They bundle their baggage into their Volvo

and start their 6-hour drive back home.

6

The happy ending of that story, if ever, is years away.

The AirBnB recedes into a memory of Keuka’s

manicured vineyards, as if painted by Wyeth or

one of his sons. Rolling hills and stone-walled

lanes paint the road. The guests, a gay couple

newly married by a law, also suddenly new.

My mother used to say Ain’t young love grand?

but I wonder what she’d say of the newlyweds,

of the two middle-aged men in their reverie

exploring dark places. I rub my eyes to erase

some unspoken embarrassment. Said Snap out of it.

I almost say it aloud as if someone from another

world let out a cry from so far inside me that

my voice rushed up from another body—as if

from a fairytale where brambles wreck the castle.

“Move 37” refers to the second game of the historic Go match between Lee Sedol, a world champion Go player, and AlphaGo, an AI developed by Google DeepMind, in which AlphaGo made a highly unconventional and surprising move on the 37th turn. This move, later dubbed “Move 37,” was considered a brilliant and creative play that no human player would have thought of making.

Room on the 7th Floor

Well shit, of course, men will

flee with Trojans in their backpacks.

Of course, drapes will smell

of whiskey. She’s heard the stories

of claws & cats & epochs

belonging to cats, claws

ripping at a dress.

She’s been here before.

After she hauled her bags

to the seventh floor,

after the drapes lulled her

into the midnight clawing

through the window,

& she’s where she once was,

drawing a traverse rod.

She lays her cash down

on the table as the dealer calls

Place your bets. & she remembers

the man vanishing

back into his game.

Yes. That man. That night—

but not this night.

Megalomaniac’s Déjà-vu

Haven’t we been here before—Just look how little

has changed since God had his big date with that girl,

the night he got her pregnant, without foreplay,

without a condom, without asking—no dinner, no movie—

then leaving her without alimony and only a mangy

worn-out ass to ride overnight into a backwoods town

where no one knew her, and she slept in the barn smelling

of goats and donkey shit. He came down on her

like a big shot grabbing her by the pussy, immaculately,

and got away with it. He was famous and she let him do it.

Just look how little has changed: “My Body, My Choice.”

A tipping point, ready to tip, needs more revenge,

maybe half a million pink hats on The Mall—pink

placards, pink banners—shouting into the PA box

where a man who would be God, could be thinking

a bitch is just a bitch. He wants to decree an orange

embryonic, gold-plated bastard will be carried to term.

What Passes for Talent

—for Paul

When Jane called to say you had died,

I thought about the conversations we had

on the phone. That time we talked about

the Chinaman found on a raft off Brazil—

The fishermen who found him had stories:

One said he believed what he saw:

93 pounds of the man cooked to a blister.

Another said the stench was foul.

The third tasted only salt from the ocean.

They argued about what kept him alive.

Was it sugar cubes & lures he twisted from hemp?

Had he been inventing gods and praying to them?

You were convinced that he dreamed

of standing at the door of a lover

who played the piano—

something by Mozart—sweetly.

Robert Haynes lives in Seneca Falls, New York. His poems have appeared in North American Review, Nimrod, New Letters, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, Bellingham Review, Lake Effect, Poet Lore, Cimarron Review, Natural Bridge, Louisville Review, and Louisiana Literature, as well as on the Verse Daily website. Poems have also been reprinted in the anthologies Cabin Fever (Word Words) and Kansas City Out Loud (BkMk Press), and in the poetry textbook Important Words (Boynton/Cook Heinemann). His latest book is The Grand Unified Theory (Paladin Contemporaries). He currently teaches online writing and visual rhetoric and poetry workshops at Arizona State University.

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