Still Alive

She’s dead, but her Facebook page
is still alive, still there,
no comments, pictures, likes deleted.
Her friends leave her messages today,
wish her a Happy Heavenly Birthday.

I stick to the living
with my birthday blessings,
but pause at the names of the dead
on my list of friends, eight of them gone.
A few classmates from 50 years ago.
An old boyfriend. A poet friend. My father.

I click on their profiles, feel a stab,
as if they want something from me.
I could post an emoji: a glass of wine
to celebrate a loved one. A row of red hearts.

A pang, a longing—but also a lifting,
as if I’m being welcomed, taken by the arm,
pulled a little closer. There they are, smiling,
hugging spouses, grandchildren, pets.
My father in his red suspenders,
my mother at his side. Happy, healthy.
No walker in this picture,
no sign of Parkinson’s.

I am not ready—yet—to wish him,
my atheist father, a Happy Heavenly Birthday.
Still, I’d rather visit him on Facebook
than in the cemetery.

Missing You

You missed the war, Da.
You died a month before Russia invaded Ukraine—
not that the world was at peace
when you left it.

I miss the depth of you, Da.
It helped, in our moments of joy
or sadness, to feel the warmth of you
sharing our ups and downs.
It helped, in this falling-apart world,
to know you were there, thinking about things—
able, somehow, with just the right comment,
to clear a path for us through the mud, the mess.

We are making a book of your Potpourri essays:
your thoughts on everything from truth and
gratitude to old clothes, words, politics, aging.
I am the proofreader, mostly adding or removing
commas, dashes, spaces—the little things
you were sometimes careless about.

Who knew your last days would be spent
wilting on a bed in the hospital where you worked?
Small, thin, shrunken, you lay curled
like a comma beneath the blanket.
I want to believe you ended your story
with a comma, Da, not a period.
A comma is a promise, more is coming.
Your children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren
will continue the story,

The Language We Speak

I don’t speak her language, but she speaks mine.
We bond within seconds, joking that we’re the only two
grandmas in Playa Venao, haven for surfers and lovers
of nature and music on the beach.

She is Fatima, who grew up in Paraguay,
one of ten siblings in her Catholic family.
I am American, Jewish, my second home in Israel.
She laughs, says we have nothing in common.

Maybe not, but we talk and talk,
share the stories, the lessons of our lives
until it’s clearer and clearer:
we do speak the same language,
but it’s not about the English she learned
from her years in England. We speak the language
of coffee and cake. My son calls it a playdate when I
meet her for cappuccino at her daughter-in-law’s Cafe.
We agree that coffee without cake is boring, so we
share a slice: chocolate, pumpkin, or passion fruit.
We speak the language of walks on the beach,
flip flops in our hands at the edge of the sea.
The language of mothers and grandmothers,
the ones who come running to help,
who stay for months if we’re needed and wanted.
The language of women growing older.
We have seen what life has to offer:
the joys and heartaches. We take what comes,
as long as there’s coffee and cake
and a friend at our side when discussing
men or kids or the white age spots on our legs
as we laugh and console and laugh some more.

I Will Remember Tomatoes

Is this how it begins?
A name gone AWOL. Fog. A blank stare.
Twice this week I’ve had to ask my daughter
what the weird-looking vegetable in our fridge is called.
Pale green, round and tough, leafy stems sticking out.
Kohlrabi. Kohl-rabi. Will it help next time
if I think of a rabbi? I am certain
I will always remember tomatoes,
lodged firmly in my mind with cucumbers,
spinach, cilantro—but endives are slowly
slipping away, and it takes me a minute to name
an artichoke, my least favourite vegetable,
bitter when I scrape each leaf with my teeth.

I remember Mrs. Mosely, my first grade teacher
and how she visited me in the hospital
when I had my tonsils out, but most of my college
professors are hiding with kohlrabi
in the place of forgotten things.

I want to remember kohlrabi
the way I remember my tenth grade biology teacher—
not what he taught us, but how he held his hand out
and rubbed his fingernails with his thumb while he lectured.
I want to remember my teacher—
but not the crash that killed him
when his car hit a deer. Not the sleepless nights
when I couldn’t stop thinking
about him and his long-haired son:
my crush, a witness to his father’s death.
Will I ever forget how he barely spoke to me
after the accident? How he favoured someone else?

Tongue and Throat

          For Irene

Sometimes my friend is a bonfire.
Her laughter blazes, warms, lights the dark.
Sparks mirth all around till I’m glowing too.

Sometimes she’s a wildfire, worry raging
up and down the hills of her life,
burning all hope—a charred earth left behind
as she imagines the worst, always the worst.

I feel the first hint of heat when she fears
there’s something in her throat. Hotter
when the doctor spots it on an X-ray:
a small, globular mass in her neck
at the base of her tongue. Mass, she says,
choking on terror, as if the word is poison
and can’t possibly mean anything but
cancer of the throat or vocal cords.

Google doesn’t help. Surgery, disfigurement.
Tongues cut out. Vocal cords excised.
Succumb to silence? She’d rather die,
she tells me, than lose her tongue.

Five days after her birthday, she’s headed to a specialist
for a scope—and, most likely, a biopsy.

Flickers! Flares! Orange leaping and dancing when I read her text:
no need for a biopsy. Not cancer. Not. Not.
I call her to celebrate. Balloons for her being wrong again.
Still alive, still talking. A toast to her tongue,
to this birthday blessing, her best gift this year:
a cyst, benign, harmless. Who could ask for more?

Lori Levy‘s poems have appeared in Rattle, Nimrod International Journal, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Mom Egg Review, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies in the U.S., the U.K., and Israel.  Work has also been published in medical humanities journals and has been read on BBC Radio 4.  Lori lives with extended family in Los Angeles, but “home” has also been Vermont, Israel, and, for several months, Panama.

Longstack

The only place it is a mountain is from our dock.
Driving around, I have seen it from other angles,
No more than undulations
In the New Hampshire landscape.
But across the pond it rises
Gently, right to left,
And runs asymmetrically along a ridge
Perhaps a mile,
Sloping down at last toward the big lake.
It is the remembered view
We carry home at the end of summer.
In my binoculars I can see
New A-frames in the high meadow
On the near slope.
I do not begrudge them their gated driveway,
Their view of the pond,
That they have taken up residence
In our field of vision,
Their binoculars trained, I suppose, on us.

At the Laundry

Summers I worked at the laundry,
Money for college. This was in the ’50s,
People still got polio then.
We washed the dingy garments of the shoe towns
(We still had them in New Hampshire then)
And the fine percale of folk
Down gated roads by the lake.
The girls who did the folding
(We called them girls then)
Would offer coarse jokes
About the bed sheets of the rich.
And I, caught, then as now,
Somewhere in the middle,
Passed wrenches to Neil, our boss,
As he straddled the ancient boiler,
Expert turnings of things we chose to think
Kept us from blowing up.
He nursed and finally lost a son to polio.
For forty years I went by his house
And we would recall the ones
Who ran the presses, fed the mangle.
The laundry is gone, of course,
Chiropractors and aromatherapists in its space;
Gone, too, is Neil, my gentle friend,
Who valued me in a fragile time,
On hot July afternoons,
Steamy with the innocent fragrance of
Starch, fresh linen, decent toil.

By the Meadow: June 2007

Betsy Winbourne, now eighty,
Rakes hay in the meadow at midday—
You would not do this a month from now;
Up from Boston, opening the cottage.
No sign of the Woodleys;
They say his tumour has come back,
His fields thick with timothy and clover,
In need of Seth to mow,
If one knew where Seth had gone.
I walk along the lane
Gathering the winter’s news:
Someone’s cellar flooded,
Someone’s well has failed,
Bears in the woods, taking out bird feeders.
And yet:
The young leaves, the greens, the light,
So various, so fresh with innocent hope:
It is early June in New Hampshire
And the world seems possible.

Robert Demaree is the author of four book-length collections of poems, including Other Ladders published in 2017 by Beech River Books. His poems have received first place in competitions sponsored by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire and the Burlington Writers Club. He is a retired school administrator with ties to North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Bob’s poems have appeared in over 150 periodicals including Cold Mountain Review and Louisville Review.

You can find more of Robert’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Atman. Atman.

I have no clue what Krshna taught Arjuna
but I like the name Atman a lot.
Atman. Atman. Where a man is at.
At all times. No matter what.
Gita, get in the action, gorgeous girl,
God is the answer, keep the meter.

Wisdom, none.
What Krshna tells Arjuna makes no sense.
I prefer mathematics.
Knowledge of how things are made and done
more than meditation on the Self
as a manifestation of the One.

I’ll never have to leave this comfortable planet.
We have this asset but can we sell it?
In Paradise Lost, Satan executes his plan
but God already knows all about it.
Still, whether it succeeds or fails is up to Man.
Same here, when it comes to nuclear armaments,
a distraction from the work of making life permanent.

It is all premised on the mystery
of invisible but sentient particles—
little Krshnas and Kachinas
nesting inside one another.
Meanwhile life goes on outside all around you—
WWII, the Napoleonic wars,
the Civil War which we’re still fighting.

Krshna says behead your brothers
without prejudice or justice.
So it transpires in the nuclear fire.
Whatever forever.
Teacher, teacher—tiger!

On the Avenue

From marble and granite to steel and glass,
we were discussing Rhina Espaillat’s On the Avenue in class,
was it 1950s or 1980s NYC and were the fifties
the city’s halcyon days or is it now, the 2020s,
the boroughs teeming with immigrants
from the round earth’s imagined corners,
Hasidim and Muslim, Haitian and Russian, as we
Italians and Irish in an earlier era were. Everything will
be ok or not, the recombinations which make
prediction and intuition fortunately hopeless
and each individual an experiment gone well or wrong.
On the avenue God speaks by spewing
toy and clothing stores, breakdancers and ice skaters,
the Brooklyn Navy Yard seen from the Brooklyn Bridge,
the skyline admired when my car broke down on the Triborough Bridge.
The numbers of us overwhelm, there exist powers
overwhelming for the human body and mind.
I don’t mind but I can’t make sense of it.
Gandhi said What you do may not seem important
but it is very important that you do it. By that what is meant?
Linda said Why does God always have to be a man?
I said He could be a She but she’s probably really
a Tyrannosaurus rex. I like to be in America!

On Suffering

I waited too long
to biopsy my lung
yet lived long enough
however long is long.
Whatever. It’s not wrong
to count along
while busy living. Sing
and stay strong
absorb the sun’s photons
and store them in your bones.

Those bones
outlast slights and wrongs
are white as lightning and strong
as sticks and stones.
Inside is one’s
spirit, soul, the nameless one
the one that’s never known.
It has no cell phone
can’t communicate or even moan.
Therefore. Why complain?
Have some fun.

Soon
I’ll be undone
underground
my garden burned down.
So what. John Donne
died and so did Milton.
Emerson too, and Whitman.
Get over it. Vote. Love. When
the train comes in the station
whistle with it, wish on
stars with passion
or careful hesitation.
Anything’s fine, within reason.

Season by season
things get done.
Algebra and calculus, Malcolm X, George Washington.
No taxation
without representation.
A gun
in every den.
People will be governed
one way or another, by a king
or trusted friend. Corporation.
Men
are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable,
than to right themselves by abolishing the Evils to which they are accustomed.

I’m too young
to die! I cry. My generation
cannot outrun the sun
but I want to see what happens
next, a tsunami or tornado, rain
and wind beyond our comprehension
hit in the head by speeding debris, irony
of ironies! plastic contraptions,
rotting computers and yogurt cups,
pain in the baby! Moment’s
notice. None,
I notice,
live long
enough to see the end. A billion

years hence
human sense
has so modified and mutated under
some other sun
we share one mind
and everything’s remembered by everyone.
Look it up. There is no death, just perfect rest. A perfect tan
is possible, and work is fun.
I’m going there when I pass on
because souls will travel at warp speeds, using nuclear fission.
About suffering, religion
was right (and wrong) all along.

Robert Ronnow‘s most recent poetry collections are New & Selected Poems: 1975-2005 (Barnwood Press, 2007) and Communicating the Bird (Broken Publications, 2012).

Rus Khomutoff is a neo surrealist language poet from Brooklyn.

You can find more of Rus’ work here on Ink Pantry.

Night-time Memories

My world, a dark blue in its
Vastness comes with aches
And pains and a cache of
Visions that echo in the
Ebony void, of its emptiness.
My music, filled with secrets
And stories couples me to
Winter’s wind as it ricochets
Off my nighttime memories.

I Enjoy

                 The sounds of waves continually rushing
onto a sandy shore bringing in stories from the deep
where man has no power to edit,

                The rays of the sun that never end, which
carry warm supplications in the ether high above
where man has no ability to censor.

                The chirping of colourful birds singing feathery
 arias high in the trees of a verdant forest where man 
has no capacity to tarnish.

Yesterdays of my Dreams

Like butterflies flitting in the breeze,
my mind is floating in the blueness
of a sky full of images, visions,
prayers, and forgotten truths, that
touch the quivering echoes of all the
yesterdays of my dreams.

Untitled

As our thoughts rise and fall on seldom trod paths,
The warbling of birds will cast new visions into
Our evolving memories.

As a rusted gate swings lazily on a copper hinged hasp
It solemnly warms us to loosen our emotional grasp
On those things that are dark, but ephemeral.

As thoughts swim up the river to a placid pond,
They go to a place where contented minds gaze,
and muse upon in the lazy hours of the day,

As things plague our mind, and arrive as if designed
by demons, we must understand that they are just
bits of unreality, and

As each new day leads us to greater happiness,
They will vanish into the darkened void where
All such gloomy things are quickly destroyed.

Burning Tempo

Another day
Like yesterday…
Red dust
Climbing
Into the earth,
The oceans,
And rivers dry,
Birds swaying
In the dry wind,
Ashes in
The hearth,
Don’t cry,
Don’t cry, it’s not
Over yet…
Pretend my friend.
Each day is a
Miracle,
Life is magical,
It’s a beat,
A pulse,
An echo.
Voices
Bounding off the
Heated land, by
Drum sticks used by
withered hands
Hidden inside
Leather:
Pretend my friend, …
Don’t cry,
Don’t cry.

James, a retired Professor and octogenarian is a Best of Web nominee and three time Pushcart nominee and has had five poetry books “The Silent Pond,” (2012), “Ancient Rhythms,” (2014), “LIGHT,” (2016),“Solace Between the Lines,” (2019), and Serenity (2022), over 1700 poems, five novels, seven essays, and 35 short stories published worldwide in over 255 publications. He earned his doctorate from BYU, and his BS and MA from California State Polytechnic University, SLO.

You can find more of James’ work here on Ink Pantry.

Footsteps

There was a knock on my door.
I heard footsteps walking as I
opened it. My heart skipped a beat.
I saw no one, only heard footsteps
walk and walking away. I counted
a thousand footsteps at least.
I am known to embellish things.
I fear the man I am turning into.
There was no shadow to those
footsteps. In the distance I thought
I saw a figure walking. It was just
a memory of someone I once knew.

Taking the Name

The skeleton’s skull
is suspended
in the night sky,
taking the name
moon; its bleached
white tears are
dispersed along
night’s canvas,
taking the name
stars. The black ink
is spread throughout,
which has already
been named sky.
Its hue will change
in the twenty-four
hours called day
with spheres lingering
in the sky with the names
of sun and planets
to keep our attention
and interest.

Cut Down to Size

O, I am not handy with a saw,
but I have cut into wood like
a woodcutter. I cut until my
hands hurt and my blisters
made me feel useful. I cut
under the shadows of tree
leaves. The cutting of limbs
was such a release. One day
someone might be cutting
on me. I am far from healthy.
I feel the pain in my knees.
I feel the torment of not being
able to do what I used to do.
I see my life racing by. I am
seeing a future where I will
need to slow down.

Count the Days

Here I count the days?
My time is going slow.
Between morning and noon,
between noon and five o’clock,
I feel a quiver some days.
The days are so long.
I search my soul so
deep. One of these days
I will lie under grass.

I am just here surviving.
Green pastures await me.
I will lie underneath.
Time is up for everyone.
There is no need to feel sad.
I do not always feel down.
I look forward to night
to watch the stars cluster.

Our Collapse

Our collapse is our own doing.
Greed inevitably consumes itself.
Man has sold its soul for riches.
This negligence will come due.
Like a wilted flower, we will perish
someday someway at any hour.
I will be among the protesters
kicking up the dust I will become.

Luis lives in California and works in the mental health field in Los Angeles. His poems have appeared in Blue Collar Review, Ink Pantry, Kendra Steiner Editions, Mad Swirl, and Unlikely Stories.

You can find more of Luis’ work here on Ink Pantry.

With a Word

I adorn my mind each morning with a word
as a queen for her coronation is adorned with gold,
with associations to combat the foul breath that is spewed
from establishments,
individuals,
and the rituals of the modern world.

Though sharing three consonants with its adversary numb,
nimble is my armor against stagnation,
stupor,
and getting outrun
by the spurious and the arrogant.

I resort to sedate in times of turmoil
when warfare sharpens its fangs and claws,
when rockets compete for the bull’s eye that is wrought
by profiteers who have been wooing my hometown port.

Sanguine is my anodyne for un-halcyon days
when depression is depleting both pockets and spirits
and Hope is an effigy that pins impale
whose sister Mercy is being burnt at the stake.

A Single Birthday

I imagine what a single birthday would be like
spent with her:
a home-made cake that her hands deck with nuts,
with candles that are not to be blown out.
Two glasses of sweet wine
brewed by her ancestors
in the vicinity of their country vineyard.
An apple pie.
And some milk chocolate that instantly melts
in my mind
before it reaches my mouth.

A bottle of perfume
with a blue ribbon round its neck.
A white hairband for my ponytail.
A strapless bikini for my next summer holiday.
A puzzle to keep me busy on lonely nights.
And a tearless goodbye.

The Essenes

Their mode of existence was marked by numbers –
these offsprings of David, the Nazarenes –
by sacred geometry.

Even-tempered and compassionate,
they kept no servants or slaves
and equal
men and women were declared.

The hand that was placed on top of the head
had learnt the art of healing
both the afflicted and the sick.

They consumed their meals in utter silence,
the vegetarian meek
who drank nom fermented liquids
and because purification was uppermost,
they lived by rivers and lakes
to keep themselves cleansed.

On Mount Carmel they pursued the truth,
the illumination of inner lives,
so the Book of Enoch was among other texts
that their precious library kept
and both john the Baptist and Jesus Christ
received their blessings and enlightenment.

And sleep, which for modern thinkers contains the residue
of the day’s turbulence and joys,
is a source of deep knowledge,
so the last thoughts before a slumber
are to be purified and purged
to keep the power of the mind intact.

Susie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with a Ph.D. on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Green Hills Literary Lantern, A New Ulster, Crossways, The Curlew, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Ink Pantry, Mad Swirl, Miller’s Pond Poetry Magazine, and Down in the Dirt.

Susie’s first book (adapted for film), Classic Adaptations, includes Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

You can find more of Susie’s work here on Ink Pantry.

Rus Khomutoff is a neo surrealist language poet from Brooklyn.

You can find more of Rus’ work here on Ink Pantry.