Jefferson Navicky

Other Fathers

They’re floating out there, my string of stand-ins,

understudies, minor characters and back ups.

One father is a railroad track, the other a watch

that kept train times. One father

a gun never shot. Another the tree

who got good at dodging my car. Another

the car, a ’78 Impalla big as a boat

with two tank doors. My father the bank,

the good soap, the swat and the cloak. My father

the hat. Another, the man with the hand jive.

One father, alone in the bar, asleep,

afield, afoot, alive at least. Another father carved

deep in the wood, one balanced between

two states. One father who told me

what he found, another father who should

have told me more, but like all shoulds

this one emits a dying sound.

One father a fist, snapped and twisted into the face

of the poor sap who looked at him wrong,

another a book splayed on the couch,

a thriller in which somebody fucked

with the wrong guy and lookout,

here comes the revenge hammer.

Another father is the lever, another the pulley,

another the chute, an ornate contraption

with a trap door that shuttles me down

to my real father, mute, alone, silhouetted

sitting in a chair in a dark room

watching a home movie of us flicker

across the screen. He doesn’t invite me

to sit but I’m happy to see him so intent

searching for himself in my face.

King Catfish

Heard rumor a catfish come up

Wills Creek to sit his vastness in the shallows

with hooks hanging off lips and whiskers

like porcupine quills, antennae big enough

to get cable, and a hard-won wiliness to spring

from any man-made trap trying to trophy him.

Didn’t hurt he was an easy hundred pounds,

or so I heard, of solid old-man muscle, the kind

of flab that could snap into action to whip any

whipper snapper, yank loose any hook no matter

the cost to his battered body.

Most of us didn’t want to catch him, just catch

glimpse of his spine’s archipelago, maybe

a whisker poking out of water murky

as mud, a way to fill long, hot afternoons

with legend, longing, and the hope that something

mythical awaited us if we just waited long enough

even though the wait lasted, for most of us, our whole lives.

If he ever existed, he must’ve moved on to

another waterway out of earshot, forgot by our collective

brains, moved on into another dreamscape where

his whiskers sharpened somebody else’s desire

to brush against a divine animal oldness, spot from

a safe distance what toll freedom takes on a body.

House Of Silver

Somewhere there’s a house for us, a house for the us of long hours. You fill it with herbs, deer antlers, and bird nests. Mirrors reflect back only the us of our best guess, where we invest

in a Good Stove. The house sits on a soft hill, the hill from whose height we watch our younger selves climb, struggle, hope, look up to our old-us. If this is all too much American dream

I can take it out later, but there’s something in the feathers and hollow bones that lets me

hold to this air-us. The house is not small, because we do not need to be small. You fill the house

with sewing machines and canning jars, books about the sea, budgets and lists, maps, dried

flowers, beeswax, song, acorns and bourbon. An altar in the corner of the house for

everything we’ve lost, the us our life cost, love’s ash. Painted white with scraps of sky,

the window cracked a bit above so the wind blows through, lets fresh air in.

You’re at our kitchen table, arms full of eggs, twilight’s sienna in your silver hair, you’re

out in the yard hacking a nice edge for your new garden patch, you’re asleep in the bed

and I’m walking up. The stairs creak the us of age. Dream catchers hang loose.

Look – out the window in the upper air, a blue patch just above

the roof line hangs there long enough before coming down in light.

---

Jefferson Navicky is the author of four books, most recently Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (2023) as well as Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments on Short Prose (2021), which won the 2022 Maine Literary Book Award for Poetry. He works as the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection.

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Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

Give Up Don’t Give Up

was my brother’s advice

three years after his doctor

said six weeks My brother

years earlier ahead of me

on a path above the tree line

with lightning rolling in

so we ran all the way back

laughing in flashing light

Today snow somehow gathers

in the crook of a pear tree

despite another shooting

into a crowd of bodies

despite a missile that turned

small apartments into ash

despite the names you whisper

to yourself most days

What my brother means

is that you have to lay

your whole teetering pile down

these shorter and shorter winters

the monstrous and unfair

thing that could happen to any

one a disappeared kid

four hundred years of history

like a giant stone

either you know is pushing

you down a mountain and try

to slow the weight or you

slide down pretending it’s not

and all the people (how many)

who dim their lights inside

caves they built and then

lose track of the path out

Lay it all down my brother

said so I say You can’t

carry it all all the time

Yes the muscle in your chest

hurts Of course you are

broken Give all of it up

so you can feel the two

bags of air fill again

An hour will come an hour

when they do not My brother

was eight years past his last

when his organs began to fail

That crook that light his hand

in mine I feel even now

The Stone

I find a stone a little smaller

than half a human heart inside

my chest again this morning.

I forget about it, but in the early

dark when I am quiet and sipping

it is still there. It rises and falls

with each breath—my right

lung, my sternum and ribs

make space for it, as there is

almost always room for one more

on a crowded bus. I first felt it

sometime after two people I called

mine died within two months.

It is oblong and smooth

along the edges. Twenty months now

with this inside my body.

I whisper, Is there something

you’d like to know? And: what

are you protecting me from?

It gives no answer I can hear.

Second Person

You wake on a cold fall

morning with two holes

to the right of your heart

that you feel the edges of

when the wind is really

blowing, or when you

hustle around town, a time

when you might call and say

into the ether—voicemail—

just thinking about you

but someone else answers

that number now and so

you leave a message here.

You think they’ll visit

in a dream and explain

but wake dreamless

thinking you’re his little

brother, her youngest son—

my baby, she called you

into your forties.

Last night you sat around

a tall fire with friends—

the only safe way

to see these men right now—

and toasted a late guitarist

who could make the whole

burning world with his

fingers and send it driving

up over a thousand bodies.

The weight is real on your

chest, shoulders, temples, as is

early light through the honey

locust’s spikes almost

as long as your pinkie.

You know we are an

awful species—we kill

each other or ourselves

regularly, we invent

new ways to infect the earth

with our trash and love letters—

I, I, I. I can’t right now,

but maybe you can see

the nearly infinite ways

we can be beautiful, like

a small black disc passed

along the ice to a place

where you didn’t know

you’d be but then you

were. Your brother’s chuckle

after that pass, your

mother’s earnest cheering.

Your mother handed you

her ever-present gold-rimmed

sunglasses—this was decades

ago—said, Look,

so now on this morning

this strange light

turned up by cheap lenses

outlines your beloved

your two sons your two

bearded rescue dogs and

you sit with a tree’s thicket

of spikes and you sit

with the two people not here

and then stand and make

sure to lay your hand

on each of the bodies

that are still here

before you leave.

---

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc's first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers, and his second, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. His poems have appeared in magazines including the New Republic, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and Orion. He has helped lead community arts organizations including The Telling Room, SPACE Gallery, and Hewnoaks and currently serves as executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

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Ruby Shifrin

Bird of Evening

Pippistrellus pippistrellus, family Vespertilionidae

The rescued bat nestled, dark and resolute, eyes closed,

slow heart beating beneath furry brown chest,

inside a cardboard shoebox Timothy brought to school.

Pippistrellus pippistrellus.

We crowded round, camouflaged in silence, the boy’s instinct-awake,

weightless fingers, more precise than any geisha’s, fanned out

the span of the sectioned, leathery wing.

He wouldn’t let me touch, though I edged my ear and nose near

to smell, to listen. I’d heard about that impossibly high note.

He knew where the cloud of bats roosted, nodded I could tag

along later, if I was quiet, didn’t bother him or the bat.

After sunset, at the roost, lid raised, the bat flap-fluttered away.

No hesitation. Echolocation. I wanted to stay in the dark

with this sinew of boy, explore feral territories he didn’t need to be taught.

But we were only eight and the most he promised,

going home, was a chance to hold his older brother’s snake.

The Beat

When we first met, you corrected my spelling.

You shrugged, denim shoulders rising

level with your Easy Rider glasses:

Existence, Essence—

two important words, else I wouldn’t bother.

Later your postcard arrived. You wrote you’d been ill,

had a stay in psych hospital—

it lets you know who your friends are.

Your script was the same as ever,

thin, looped, long drops, tall highs.

I was too slow to reply—ruffled

by your attempt to kiss me

that last time we met—

your eyes false-glitter bright,

toes shifting left and right

to your inner repetitive beats,

moustache bristling, stray hairs tickling

up your nostrils—you’d rub your nose fiercely,

without staunching your words—

farsighted, interdisciplinary, mixed media, your talk

jazzed by tracks—Gil Evans, Aphex Twin,

Shakatak, we must just hear this now.

Existence, Essence, those words you corrected,

did they lose their meaning,

one day when your beat was relentless

when your high windows opened

over ground that pulsed hypnotically,

while we, me, who’d forgot the word friend,

stayed cloistered at home, stayed safe.

Voyage

Small tasks stitch us to this day.

These are the ways we navigate

when no map of the distressed area—

sheared cliff or drowned meadow—exists.

When sudden shifts in landmass shake

us, when we stumble in the unexpected

sinkhole, our sight elsewhere.

A helping hand, and friends believe

us rescued, back on firm land.

Aside from needing their hands forever—

skein of skin-on-skin tethers our estranged

body, which performs

movements, intricate and momentous, walks

the now-foreign land of supermarket aisles,

fingers pressing pears, lightbulb-bright,

for ripeness. Sinkholes re-appear,

open up, no warning:

remnant, revenant, reminder—

a coat they wore, a waft of sandalwood—

carries them back over and over,

from some other territory, who knows where,

radiant in ways we were never wise to before.

We keep roving through starless nights,

motion and darkness familiar, ignoring the raw

jagged land, how cracks in desiccated hearts

are spreading contiguous. Seedlings

will be planted again. Hands soiled with life.

You would expect it.

Small tasks thread then to now, now to then,

put out birdseed, sweep the path,

repair our unravelling

fibres and fascia, our wine-dark

darned and altered raiment.

---

Ruby Shifrin studied art. She writes letters, short stories, and poems. She loves flora, fauna, and the light on the coast. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Harbor Review, Hole in the Head Review, Passengers Journal, and The Westchester Review.

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