Gazing upon the houses and fields of my kingdom I can see my grandmother outside a cottage – around her neck a heart-shaped amulet. Behind the oak door in back of my retina that man whispering to me has a lot of good ideas. The ten-second delay covers any mistakes.
Looking into the amulet I study my embryo – Am I a bird or a dinosaur or a mustard seed? Human or amphibian, everyone starts out a fish. Glad to deliver all the truths anyone could want – giving money to charity or planning diabolical heists.
A whiff of smoke leads me into the forest to a fairy tale thatched roof cottage rollicking with laughter, fiddles, and breaking glass. There is no door, no way to get inside. Through a steamed-up window I can just make out the outline of an old man playing dice.
A Life in Full
I finally understand him. He used to take me for walks, leaning on his cane, the one I now use. After he passed, I helped go through his belongings. The way I see it, there are two ways of looking at him. 1) He had a secret life, slipping out at night to buy a pack of cigarettes but really heading to a vaudeville stage and an adoring audience to tap dance and tell dirty jokes and pull small animals out of his hat. He might have said to me, “Hells bells, will you sit around all your life?” 2) Another possibility, which I’m hesitant to believe, is that his first wife died of influenza and he turned to drink and gave up his three small children and then lived on the streets till he got sober and worked as a barber in a small town with a new wife and daughter. My puzzle was solved when I cleaned out grandfather’s closet. On the top shelf, inside a fancy box, I found an elegant black top hat.
Jim Smith is retired, living in Silver Spring MD, and writing poetry. In 2024, he was honored to be named an “emerging poet” by the Mid-Atlantic Review. At long last, his debut collection, “The Boxwood Maze”, is now available from Finishing Line Press (and Amazon).
Richard Peabody has spent the majority of his life in the DMV. He wears many literary hats– poet, author, literary editor, publisher, teacher, mentor. The author of a novella and three short story collections, he taught graduate fiction writing at Johns Hopkins University for 17 years. His Gargoyle Magazine/Paycock Press was founded in 1976. His most recent poetry volume, Guinness on the Quay, was published in Ireland (Salmon Poetry, 2019). The Richard Peabody Reader, a career-encompassing collection, was released in 2015 by Alan Squire Publishing, as the first book in their ASP Legacy Series.
I wish you were here, for you would understand how the confident stars can move this night to companionable pity, unwholesome as it is, how the imperishable sea masquerades its self in a pattern of breakers too lengthy for mind,
how even the sand is surely alive, and how the clouds, cheery and innocent, accept they are clouds, and pride is less than sand or vapor, so why don’t I?
Drunk on ourselves we’d demand of the darkness with dark laughter, “Who is our Mother in this heaving immovable sea?”
O, the Europeans would surely snicker were they to watch from across the waves as we ask, “Why?”
Why do we carve our silly hearts
into the beach to proclaim to ourselves that nothing’s right, even as now a tide comes in and the Moon rises, redeeming night? for John Hartsock
A Surprise Snow
It settles through the night, Inching across Northwest. So now a dampening spark of white Veneers the taupes and darks.
Can’t be heard, the drones Of cars coated with flakes. Let go! the covered city groans And hopes to just roll over.
From being the safest path, The frozen walkway quits, A vow broken without wrath: Every thing is open
To the slipperiness— Of rumored deity, Of unforetold seraphic-ness, Of gripping light and cold.
Comes the cheerful part, As pondering such sublimities, My muffled self, so shy of heart, Slogs to the car, and smiles. Washington, D.C. NW January 15, 2024
Patric Pepper, a retired process engineer, holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Maryland. He has published three chapbooks, including Everything Pure as Nothing, Finishing Line Press, 2017, and a full length collection, Temporary Apprehensions, winner of the Washington Writers’ Publishing House Poetry Prize, 2005. He has volunteered for many small press endeavors including the Bethesda Writer’s Center, Washington Writers’ Publishing House, Broadkill River Press and Splendid Wake. With his wife, Mary Ann Larkin, he cofounded a micro press, Pond Road Press, which has published 15 books and chapbooks to date, including Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh, by Jack Gilbert. His work has appeared most recently in Backbone Mountain Review, Gargoyle, The Northern Virginia Review, and online at Full Bleed, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and Mid-Atlantic Review. Pepper moved with his wife from D.C. to North Truro, Massachusetts in 2022. Both remain active in the D.C. literary scene.
Featured image in this post is, “FenwicklightApril08” by Mx. Granger, licensed via creative commons 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Between dead heading the lilies picking blueberries and arranging the fruit plate, half my July morning passes. My village is not strange to me. I have not been hurtled from city to city, nor lived among strangers whose languages I did not know, just stumbled from one college town to another in the Midwest. My father, torn apart by wars and depressions, salvaged memories from his century as Zagajewski’s father did from his. At night, when Patric and I steam the squash we find under the fans of prickly leaves in Alan’s garden, we listen to the three tenors, whose voices seduce us, just as they do the fans who go mad under a Roman moon at the Baths of Caracalla. Other nights, Bruce, after a life in rock ‘n’ roll, sings Pete Seeger’s old songs. I don’t know the elements of music: weakness, power and pain, as Zagajewski does. I marvel at the fourth element that has no name. I want to swim into it as I do the poets’ music which shocks me, like ice cold hands around my breasts. The thoughts of the philosophers are not precious to me. I watch my fellow creatures: a woman a decade ago who swirled an orange shawl around her black curls on the cliff above Longnook. The ocean pounded below. Sometimes, paintings call to me and I enter them, in a wonder at being chosen.
I love Patric’s wit, his grizzled beard, the way he touches me. On Sundays, my sons call from far away. I rock them in my empty arms. My father is dead. I cry for my country and dance to sad songs.
I’m a child of air and water with a touch of earth, oblivious of plans or endings. This is the life that—so far— belongs to me.
The Midnight Drive-in
When Ralph Roos, already packing for the seminary, invited me to the midnight drive-in, I laughed and told him: My mother will never let me go. But with all his 18-year-old authority, he insisted, and she said yes.
Ralph Roos’ mother stomped to church each morning on legs like pillars. My mother’s ankles were slender. She overslept and we were late for mass. Tell Sister it’s my fault, she moaned, stuffing us into boots and ill-fitting mittens. We hurried past Mrs. Roos, fingering her rosary in a back pew, lips pressed tight. Mrs. Roos is a good woman, my mother always said sadly.
Had Ralph Roos caught some look, perhaps of pity, in my mother’s eyes? His tongue pushed past my lips and my 14-year-old world tilted like the screen outside the windshield. He left for the seminary in a week. What did he do with my kisses? With his wild boy longing? My mother nodded to Mrs. Roos on Sundays.
The Big One
Men always think it’s not big enough. Where is the man with the big one?
Our grandfathers tell how his piss shook the beans from a fence one moonless night. They say our grandmothers yearn for him still.
Did they see him once in a locker room or did some spiteful woman taunt them with tales of him? He haunts us all, this phantom lover, the one our men fear will fill us as they never can.
He is very busy, this big one, first in the bed of the neighbor’s wife then slipping away from some milkmaid left drowsy and content on a bed of hay. But the neighbor’s wife denies him and the milkmaid says it was only a nap in the sun.
And when a woman knows she has found him, when she holds the perfect lover in her arms, he bolts upright and says: “So, I’m not big enough for you. So what!”
After Bly’s Poetry Reading
When my hair was still red, curly and wild, you walked over in a jean jacket and leather boots. Looking tough, playing it cool, I thought, but you spoke, gently, perhaps sensing my wariness. “What did you think of Bly’s reading,” you asked, and waited for me to answer. The crowd swirled around us and you waited. Outside, an amusement park, a merry-go-round from other times, painted horses. Still you waited, with no anxiety or humility, towering above me though I didn’t feel small. And I spoke and you listened.
Mary Ann Larkin is the author of That Deep and Steady Hum (Broadkill River Press) and six poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Poetry Ireland Review, New Letters and other journals. She co-founded the Big Mama Poetry Troupe, based in Cleveland in the 1970s, which performed from Chicago to New York City. Larkin has taught writing at a number of colleges, most recently at Howard University, and written for NPR, NIH, Foundation News and others. She attended Yaddo and the Jentel Foundation. A co-founder of Pond Road Press, she published Jack Gilbert’s Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburgh.
Praise the newspaper tossed each morning by a boy on a bicycle, ink of newsprint, thinness of paper.
Praise phone booths where we waited in line and paid with quarters, praise the long cord and rotary dialing.
Praise the typewriter and white-out, the encyclopedia in 20 volumes.
Praise dipping pen in ink, the flourish of handwriting, perfumed stationery, the stamp and the post office, waiting days or weeks for a response.
Praise the library of books, the card catalog and microfiche, a place of hush.
Praise the record player, placing the needle by hand into just the right groove.
Praise paper maps, finding streets by letter and number, finger tracing square by square.
Praise knocking on doors to visit neighbors.
Praise the mystery. Praise the tactile.
Contours
I run from the house
then feel lost and seek it again
comfort of home the one place I know
I seek smooth waters tilled earth
a rhythm to the day
century-old trunks thick bark to lean on
a cradle a hammock
a place of stillness crevice to call my own
contours to hold me
Yvette Neisser is an award-winning poet, Spanish translator, and founder of the DC-Area Literary Translators Network (DC-ALT). Her latest collection is “Iron into Flower” (Finishing Line, 2022), and her co-translation of Venezuelan poet Maria Teresa Ogliastri’s “From the Diary of Madame Mao” won the 2025 Carnegie Mellon University Press Translation Prize and will be published in 2026. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Foreign Policy in Focus, Tikkun, Virginia Quarterly Review, Split This Rock’s The Quarry, and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (anthology). When she’s not writing, Yvette enjoys nature, yoga, dancing, traveling, and resisting fascism. She lives in Silver Spring, MD.
