a children's story
Paula Bohince
Again, an ousted child or orphan happens onto a den. It happens then. Invitation by faun or badger to rest from mayhem, undress to white ruffle. Where the tea in its tin gets shook into tarnished teapot
fetched from on tiptoe in an off-kilter kitchen. Cakes with cream and jam are presented (please, delicious, yes, thank you). Manners are everything. Woolens dry
before the fire's cauldron. This is the slumber where nothing happens. The creature-wife wears an apron, the meek husband glasses. This is the pause in the plot where I've lifelong returned. Whenever I bend to the cat, asking How can I help? I'm in it, intuiting her needs with gentleness. I tell this story. My therapist says, Like a parent. The rain's changing dramatically
to snow, making the threshold impassable.
Weft of fur in my pocket, I spy speckled beans and cider, thick brown bread and yellowest butter. Mice are sleeping on extra slices, the ladybugs in matchbooks.
It's blizzarding and will for days. I can smile, nod, offer simple phrases and am treated by strangers as innocent. The safest I've ever been. The room's foggy with kettle steam, the pages damp as I turn and turn, reading
in peace on a loveseat that at night becomes my bed.
an optimism
Cameron Awkward-Rich
It is morning. Remember that.
It is morning and the house is quiet,
so quiet that I can, for the moment, set myself
to wandering. I can sit patient at the door.
I can beg and bang to be let in. I am
turning this way and that. I am circling
the hole in the world of my imagination.
Let me in. I am saying the words, predictable
as any key—when I was a child,
when my mother, when the swarm of bees,
when I spent my days in mud among
the worms, rushing down the hill, our flooding
yard, when Hannah's brother, her mother,
when I was too unclean, too wild a thing,
when I was barred from, when I sat alone
in the snow behind her house, pristine,
when, briefly, J and I were, when we
flew darkly down the green suburban
street, when he loved me, or something
in me and I loved the wind between us,
our bloody knees, when I think back, I am
nearly always otherwise alone, though
I never was alone, child of the salamanders,
child of the morning snow, the shamefaced
leaves. All my life, certainly for as long
as I've known I had a life, I was
like the sparrow right now outside
my window, flying headfirst, incessantly,
into what must seem, to her, like sky.
All around me people moved and laughed
and seemed, from where I fell,
to understand some silent thing,
some secret word that made itself
no home in me. Aggrieved, the world
of other people. I let it go.
we must be in the harvest again
Jessie Leitzel
The end of summer and our jalapeno plant
is wilting, its stem brittle as the heat peels
away from us, though we swore
like every August, that we would die
from it—I have, too, thought
of my great-grandfather, peeling
sweet corn in the heat.
My living room smells of the soil he tracked into his home. It's ruthless in how it doesn't fade: walking on the balls of my feet, I pretend I know how everything would unfold while husking. How the skin would break, the crop yellow and stringy, tinged with dirt.
There's a tale told in my family that says our people grew straight from between the rocks: ankles rooted in tilled earth, skin smelling of good loam, our bodies the first wild crops—there's a lot about farming I should know, but don't. It's cruel how strong the smell is, some nights. How habitually it reminds me of the place I am not.
My father brings home a sheaf and I crack into one by the stem. Bury my pointer finger in its twine like I'm seeding my body into its roots, like I'm belonging to this land instead of searching for a way back into it.