Laura Schaeffer

Memorial Day

From here they fly out—

fly in—temporal moorings of tide and sea mist.

This is the day of remembrance

when you sat at the kitchen table eating toast.

You were so real

with your talk of faraway places, and

almost gone. Was it for honor?

(Soldier. Husband.) Was it escape?

Barnacles breathe under the weight of water

as grief held tight and home clutched to rock.

My silence is caught in sail, out from a ledge—

with absence holed up in a chest like a bullet.

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Laura Schaeffer’s poetry has been published in The Pitkin Review, Tidepools, Ars Poetica, Currents, Poetry Corners, Pif Magazine, Collective Visions Gallery, Hole in the Head Review, The Far Field, Medicine and Meaning, and Cantos. She is a graduate of Goddard College’s MFA Creative Writing Program and received her undergraduate degree in English/Creative Writing from the University of Washington. Laura has taught workshops to alumni and at community centers, including a nine-month poetry class for teens in which she obtained grants to produce a CD of their work. She has attended the Centrum Writers Conference on a full scholarship and continues her interests in international poetry and nature. Laura lives in Port Townsend, WA.

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Jaime Speed

The boat

He jumps off the boat with a splash

that isn’t returned, it must’ve taken a minute

or longer before we realized, our hearts like boom

boxes, no spare batteries, panic

spreading itself on our faces like butter

on scorched toast, and I think not a sunny day

like this, clear horizons aren’t right for tragedy

but her face is full of fright, the edge

of her eyelids hold her tears, like we are

just specks on water, I want to comfort her,

but there are no ripples here, nothing more

than everything we will ever be, in this moment

when we hear tapping below the boat we know

we’ve been had, feigning our anger that peels

into giggles like this old topside paint

when he finally emerges over the hull,

hair wet, smile like the sun, still ripe as an orange

fire in our sky, it never darkens, at night

we roast marshmallows on sticks

and tell our secrets to the moon, knowing she’ll hold tight

to all our dreams, come morning

we pack up without a thought

of never coming back, we couldn’t predict

the prophesies we left at the tops of trees

we climbed together, or if they’re still there

we’ll never know, when is it the right time

to get back in the water now

that she lives in skies, but I can’t believe that

she’s actually gone forever, I still feel her

little hand in mine, getting back into the boat

alone, the dread of return

is a lump of ash in my throat

I sail out to the middle of the lake, dropping

anchor, I wait in the burn of afternoon

I don’t move my hands all day, I can’t let go

the way night does, re-born in the wet,

my ear pressed to the deck, waiting

for laughter to start up again

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Jaime Speed (she/her) has been published in The Rat’s Ass Review, Hobo Camp Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Psaltery & Lyre, Channel, New Feathers Anthology, The Wild Word, Eunoia Review, Flora Fiction, Neologism Poetry Journal, The Pine Cone Review, and Literary Mama, along with numerous others journals, collections, and anthologies. Her prose poetry was selected for Best Small Fictions 2021 by Sonder Press. You can find her poetry hung up in downtown Saskatoon as part of the Kindness – acts of project, supported by the City of Saskatoon, Downtown Saskatoon and the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada.

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Craig Chen

Invocation

Rona, you zinger, you peplomer-slinger,

you are radiant. Under electron

microscope, your searing crown of lipid

a stellar mane. How you descended

upon us, the solar eclipse we did not predict.

In your wreath of light, we, transfixed.

Scorn and pity the virologists

with their nanometer calipers.

You measure in the billions. You

have ambitions.

We are but lonely points

at this event horizon, nearly forgetting

the before times and unable to divine

what comes next, venerating only you,

this beautiful black hole we croon to.

The Forty-Five

for Anna

I had forgotten about that trip last year

when we got turned around

on our way to Culloden. They closed the two lane highway

and we guessed it was whiskey

or a monster sighting

or Americans on the wrong side of the road, but

later we learned a tourist with a selfie-stick leaning off the side of Urquhart

tumbled down that castle’s cracked shell.

We marveled how even on vacation we couldn’t escape disaster.

Now my three masks hang on hooks in the garage,

in neat rotation. My scrubs have lost their starched stiffness,

become parchment soft. I strip

and sit in the tub, the cold shower staccato,

and think on the man who died from The Coronavirus.

That’s how he inhabited it, the way my father owns

The Gout, my mother The Diabetes.

For two weeks, I donned space suit and powered fan

and entered the man’s room in intensive care,

clasping his hand and feeling it grow frail.

He used to teach European history, and his students’ cards leafed

his room in autumn colors. He liked to talk, and

I counted the number of words he could speak before he stopped to gasp for air.

Each day he joked about tipping his doctor for bringing the breakfast tray.

Each day I broached the idea of a breathing tube, and he waved me away,

instead speaking to me of history and the way we preserve our dead,

of the Forty-Five who followed Bonnie Prince Charlie,

and died with targe and broadsword aloft.

Of how we honor those who must have known certainty.

Of historians who collect morsels of metal from that field in Culloden,

mark ditches where soldiers slept the night the line stretched long.

I remember our own trip when you insisted on the long detour

to this battleground where your ancestors escaped ruin.

At first I saw just a field, and then I walked its length in that climeless dusk:

Windless over highland moor, bouquet on a cairn of stones, no midges today. A teenager in a kilt plays the bagpipes.

When the rain begins, black umbrellas unfurl.

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Craig Chen is a critical care physician who began writing poetry in earnest following his experiences caring for patients and families in the COVID-19 pandemic. He is based in Mountain View, California.

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