Author: meganrusso

Morning in the Village

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee

First, the farmer selling vegetables
in baskets strung astride his mule
wakes me as the morning sun releases

dew and the sweet aroma of thyme
begins to dissipate. Then the women
who pass outside the house chat

as they return from the baker
with warm loaves of horiátiko psomí
or from the milkmaid with eggs and

news, their voices rising from the street.
I can smell the sea air warming. I can feel it
laced with salt. I can feel the rhythm of a country

underfoot. I can almost hear the lyre on the wind.
Every step becomes a note in the string
of words I mouth imperfectly

as I begin my trek into the village,
where women keep shop near the platía
and we exchange our greetings

as I collect bottles of water, Greek
crackers in plastic wrap, toilet tissue,
the news in English, just ferried in,

along with the tourists, from Athens.
All the way back, I glance into
the limewashed open-doored

tourist shops selling T-shirts, film,
strappy cotton dresses, and re-
productions, on vases, of an ancient life.

Donna J. Gelagotis Lee

My Father Speaking About Monsoons

ESH Leighton

My father thinks his voice has gotten tinny with age
that it has thinned and thinned like
some other fathers’ hairlines

I don’t see him much anymore
and when I do, I notice that his body is a different shape,
the hair at his temple gone completely white,
and the skin beneath less freckled and ruddier and ruddier by the year

But his voice,
his voice is stronger than it was when I was a child

When I was so young I could count my years on my fingers,
my favorite book was about the Gingerbread Man
and his hubris and his downfall
I remember my father reading it over and over,
quieter and quieter
as I learned the verse by heart
until I could recite it to myself
until his voice wasn’t there at all
just my own lungs my own larynx my own cadence

Today my father sent me a message of his voice
speaking about the monsoons in Arizona
when here in Las Vegas
we’ve gone two hundred days without rain
He sounded like a great orator
like a man of the stage
like the person you’d want to read you a good book
There were stories in his throat
ones I have never heard
and his voice was cool and concentrated
just like the rain in this desert that never seems to come

ESH Leighton

Keep Things in Perspective

Kat Terban

The days keep serving up overcast skies but the air
is always dry and the plants are shriveling up with thirst;
yet the birds still sing, the fisher humps across the yard,
and the mornings, plangent with dew, conquers dread night.

Purple tipped fingers sifting through shells where blue
dunes hold the full tide’s wrack so wool dipped willful
in swift dye sought across ages, wrought by snails
soft from the sea. The past returns within us to live,

to turn to itself again, day upon day. It reaches through
our skin, our bones, to knell, to echo across tongues
at fireside. Fevered brows seek to be remembered when
embraced by cold shrouds. What has soft lips and a hide

that enjoys a feather-stiff curry brush? In the night, we
imagine our fingertips extending like quicks grown
beneath nails left long uncut, touching the window
as the first frost radiates out across one pane while laying

warm under another. Fresh fallen death crunching beneath
our boots: birch, maple, oak, hemlock, and walnut. Ferns
shifting from green to gold on the corner of River View
and Merrow. Water cools. Bubbles pop. The bottom

of the cup never has answers. It is empty. It is devoid,
burning away certitude. It is filled again with the lies
about how things couldn’t get any worse, where hope is flanked
by fear. Closed eyes linger on dusk’d lids and bring no safety.

Clouds crack and stars spill out along the edges. Long gusts,
uneasy wind breaks the peace between leaf and branch. A deer
steps into the flurried fall to lay athwart a gap at the base of two
young oaks. Birds eat the bones of bread, the entrails of yesterday’s

croissant, the burnt offerings of panko that’s dropped from fingers
baking. Clever beaks pecking at the crusts cut away and abandoned
by mothers. Spread wings swift in swooping down to pluck up
and devour the whipped stiff and custard smooth embryos of friends

and enemies alike. The unborn children of flowers are ground down
to paste inside gizzards during the short days of winter. The lumpy
oatmeal of the sky that started shearing off into flakes and drifting
toward the ground. We open our mouths and taste breakfast.

All of the wrong reasons were remembered, were recorded
as a stained outline on the concrete, found when the snow
banks melted the next spring. Deep loam held in the hand,
warmed, bedding for mammoth, gray-striped sunflowers

overhead, nodding in a light breeze. Three painted turtles,
faces raised, aligned on a log set and centered in an intermittent
pond surrounded by tufts of scarlet miniclover. Today, the sun
refused to set. It drunkenly stumbled across its zenith

then paused at the threshold where night sleeps before
tiptoeing the entire way ’round the horizon, drinking up
the bright blue of the sky. Mountains crumble into grit,
stars fall into singularities, and oceans expand as the dead

fill up what’s not bottomless. Rivers walk back upon
themselves, rejuvenating oxbows, eating the foundations
of the world. The universe breaths in the space between
atoms, gravity bends time, and everything becomes new born.

Kat Terban

Assisted Living Facility

Samantha DeFlitch

Across from St. Bede’s. Here
a young man with

his holding gloves and an owl
outside the window

of an old woman watching
her soaps. Her sill:

rosary beads, two blood
pressure cuffs

and photo frames that push
time through

her drawn-out years. She was
once a train

station. Found sensible love
in the old country.

Spoke Polish in reverse. Back
further, war and war.

Fish egg. Magpie shot and book
of heaven and war.

Childbirth. And a girl whirling
to a balalaika,

ritual against ghost-drawing
winter dusk.

Cold snap. Babushkas like
nesting dolls,

opening their bodies to more
little babushkas,

brought forth already full of
prophecy and slouching.

The years of sloping
blue and pine,

bread, chipping at ice with a
blunt blade.

All at once, language loses
meaning; a flame

casts long shadows on a cabin
wall as the dogs

creep closer and begin.
Look! The young

man taps the window,
gestures until our

old woman threads out a smile.
Then the owl

turns its white head
and becomes.

Samantha DeFlitch