“Thank you, Aunt Gert.”

“You’re quite welcome, Otto. I’m glad you enjoyed them.”

They were on their phones. Had Otto said he enjoyed her present?

“I like Argyles, Aunt Gert.”

“They were two of your Uncle Frank’s favorite pairs, Otto.”

Everyone needs socks. And it was Otto’s birthday. Well, actually, the week before was his birthday, and the socks had just arrived. His aunt couldn’t be expected to be perfect on dates. She knew, she explained, that his deceased uncle would want Otto to enjoy some of his favorite socks. Though he’d been gone for three years, she still kept Frank’s clothing, which she offered as birthday gifts.

Yes, Uncle Frank, with his cigar, his pear-shape, his cough, and his ill-fitting clothes.

Should Otto say that one pair of Argyles had holes in the toes?

It’s the consideration that counts. Already, his aunt thought of Otto’s next birthday and of two stretched-out undershorts that her husband used to enjoy wearing, especially in his final years. From what the 78-year-old woman understood – for she knew her nephew – Otto always needed underwear.

David Sydney is a physician who writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

Mel pointed with his spoon to his oatmeal.
“Do those look like two flies to you, Ed?”
Ed squinted, lifting his glasses for a better view. He and Mel were at AL’S counter that Tuesday morning.
“Nah. I think you must’ve separated one fly’s head from its body with that spoon, Mel.”
“Just one, huh?”
Ed nodded, then pointed with his fork which had some yoke on it. He’d ordered fried eggs.
“See, the head’s there. And the body, which’s still moving, is over there.”
Thanks to a decentralized nervous system, a decapitated fly can actually move around and engage in activity, even sexual activity, for several days.
“Thanks, Ed.”
“What’d you mean?”
“Well, I certainly don’t want two flies in my oatmeal.”

David Sydney is a physician who writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

David is also a regular contributor to Rue Scribe with his witty and pithy stories.

When flags relax at half-mast, will we be ready with them to rise?
When the sparks of insolence weed gardens of themselves, will we create a new shared home?
When homonyms parse themselves out of likeness, will there be new bones?
When there is only weather for the birds and bodies of the forgotten, will we seed light?
When the space between quiet and intonation fills with thought will there still be voice?
When children invent new clouds will we allow our hands to inhabit a different dance?
When imagined wise teachers emerge will we recognize their faces?
When we decide the earth is ours and equally not our own will we find new places to roam?
When skin tones accept the moon as kin to sun will we find golden nests?
When we learn to have been separate will we clasp shared history to share?
When we finish practicing cadenzas will we codify magnetic earth?
When we perform the baseline will our hearing faculty reprise foundations of first birds?
When we decide to retrieve our childhood will we locate matching softness?
When breath leaves wind behind will leaves still be trembling?

Sheila Murphy has been writing for a good deal of time and lives her poetry. She walks prolifically, just as she writes. She writes, “I will spare you the biographical details and emphasize that I’m a kind of jet propulsion engine filled with joie de vivre! :)”

“Up there, in the sky…”

“It’s not Superman, Ed. How many times do I have to tell you?”

“But up in the sky, Edna. Look up…”

They were on their back patio, a small, uneven area beyond the back porch, Ed’s failed attempt at brickwork.

There was nothing in the sky, although Ed pointed – no bird at all, no plane.

And it wasn’t the Man of Steel, either, although Superman occasionally zipped over the neighborhood northeast of Philadelphia.

Why not? It was Philadelphia. It needed his help.

Edna had to go over it again.

“Its not him. It’s your glasses, Ed.  Without your glasses, you can’t see worth a damn.”

Squinting, Ed couldn’t gauge distances. He couldn’t differentiate a fly up close and bothersome from a plane moving from east to west in the heavens above.

“If you had ‘em on, Ed, you’d see it’s a fly.”

“Not Superman, huh?”

“No… It’s just a common fly.”

That was the end of it. They had little more to say to one another for the remainder of that Saturday morning.

Even when a dozen more flies joined them, she didn’t ask Ed to go into the kitchen to retrieve the flyswatter. Without his bifocals, what were the chances he’d come back with the dead insect-splattered tool rather than, say, a large plastic salad fork?

The patio was uneven, so they rocked back and forth in their chairs.

There’d be no aerial Superman antics to improve the day.

And the flies?

Most of them decided to go into the kitchen through the torn screen door, to check out the counter and sink with its unwashed breakfast dishes, before Edna and, later, Ed, went inside.

David Sydney is a physician who writes fiction in and out of the EHR (Electronic Health Record).

Dust packets drop from smoky sky
In streaks that etch the windowpane
And lens the iron balcony—
Drab ornaments to rime a tree
And stupefy the weather vane.

(The skater slides to slush-pooled stop
Convinced that metaphors must drop
Away from what was first supposed:
Rainy Monday’s rippling prose.)

R.H. Russell grew up in New England, which he continues to call home. One of his poems recently appeared in Touchstone, the journal of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Russell says: “I write poems because of the way the creative process totally eclipses my political anxieties, while connecting to a world of beauty that seems both distant and imminent.” In his professional life he focused on environmental advocacy and policymaking.

almost every
memory of you
happiness

I thought we had years
decades, even
instead … only days

even my cat
knows my heart is shattered
she’s trying to purr me back together

saying out loud
every time, gutting
hospice

honoring your wishes
to not see you like this
hardest thing I’ve ever done

letting go
gets harder each day
as the end looms close

this morning when I woke
in that millisecond before I remembered
my heart breathed

it is fitting
I rediscovered passion tea
in the days just after you died
all tang and zest
just like you

our wedding song plays
I brace my newly raw heart
What A Wonderful World
only five days since you died
for a brief moment, it is…

too sick to make the journey
for our boy’s wedding
you traveled in my heart

Jennifer Gurney lives in Colorado where she teaches, paints, writes and hikes. Her poetry is widely published, two of her poems have won international contests and one was turned into a choral piece. Jennifer has four books of published poetry, My Eyes Adjusting (2024), Liquid Sky (2025), Love’s Echolocation (2025) and Light Matters More (2025, forthcoming). In just over two and a half years, more than 1,500 of Jennifer’s poems have been published. She is also delighted to be a guest editor for Haiku Girl Summer.

So much confusion,
yet limited – and limitless time.
So many random thoughts
undermining my mind.

So many potential causes’
For one’s memory losses:
old age or a family history
are possibilities.

or a long-forgotten head injury,
or a chromosome 19
that hosts
an APOE 4 gene.

There are several causes of delusion
that confound the diagnostic conclusion,
that in turn, leads to treatment confusion
as the disease slowly proceeds.

I can’t or won’t accept this diagnosis,
but I need to be honest with myself –
some kind of rot in my mind
is going to undermine my mental and physical health.

Until that day when I won’t know better,
it won’t matter how much I fought.
My irrational mind will block my ego
So I won’t be able to experience what I ought:

A diminishing control
over my mind and heart,
which the absence of each,
will tear me apart.

My mind will go out of my head
like a balloon in the air
as relatives and friends
grasp at what I feared:

a mind that flies high
into a fully cloudy sky.

Larry Ullian is retired and has written a lot (mostly unpublished) poetry for more years that he cares to recall. This is one of his first efforts at seeking publication. He was a Training & Development designer for various public, private, and non-profit organizations.

Some might say I’m a polymath,
Some, a dilettante,
I think I’m both, and you are not?
The both you do not want?

But why the one and not the other?
Do easy you fall prey
To how others wish to label you
Or think you then, to be?

A narrow line you really walk,
Not fat nor adventurous
But pulling in and shutting down
With absence of all lust

And glee, and general insanity
Plus the joy of letting go?
But hurt resides in limiting
The feelings that you show

Or feel, or how you think of self,
And also what you say
Or do or play, dance, draw or act,
And what you might display.

Let go say I, you’ll manage well
Inevitable anxiety;
That never killed a fly it’s said –
The killer’s piety.

Ann Grogan is a new poet, pianophile, attorney, and octogenarian residing in San Francisco, California. She promotes the unequivocal permission to pursue one’s passions at any age. Since most stress in life is caused by taking oneself too seriously, she likes to reflect humorously on her struggles after retirement in 2020 to re-learn to play the piano and write about her long-standing feminist-humanist values.

           
The groom looked handsome, even though his suit was a full size too big. But naturally most of the focus was on the bride. Her hair, her makeup, her heart rate, her fluid intake.

            Her nurses doubled as her bridesmaids.

            Because both sets of parents had signed the consent forms, the marriage was legally valid. It was a formality, a kindness, to allow these teenagers a “real” wedding. It imbued the event with a genuine sense of gravitas. “See, children? You’re not just playing dress up! No, of course not! You’re legally married, in the eyes of the state!” Such was the subtext, which everyone understood.

            No one—least of all the bride and groom—expected the marriage to last a month. The vows were real, the way a rain shower is real.

            But then the experimental drug did a remarkable thing.

            Two years later, he asked her for a divorce. But because they shared a sense of humor, he did it in public, offering her an empty ring box and a pen.

            “Yes, oh yes! A thousand times yes!” The onlookers clapped and cheered.

            You had to admit, it was a badass way to celebrate beating cancer.

Alaina Hammond is a poet, playwright, fiction writer, and visual artist. Her poems, plays, short stories, philosophical essays, creative nonfiction, paintings, drawings and photographs have been published both online and in print. @alainaheidelberger on Instagram.

On a Hilton Head Island beach, I almost
give up looking for her. It’s October, one year
after her death. The hues that sunsets leave
in the sky on most days are absent.

I stop my stroll, stare
at the colorless sky’s reflection
in the ashen ocean.

Pipers stir the damp sand with their bills.
While ospreys dive, the seascape
becomes more of a thing I feel
than merely see, possessing an inner life
with complications. The surf moans.
Seagulls circle overhead and cry
as if they, too, have suffered losses, live
with melancholy and longings
as persistent as my own.
There ought to be some comfort in this.
The horizon should reveal more than a drab bend.

I expect clouds to shift, think
the half-moon might appear, then wait
for her invisible presence

and her touch in a breeze, a voice
among hushed waves, as soft
as every time she said goodnight,

but there are only the voices
of strangers,
all of them wondering,

Who is he looking for?
What is he seeking?

Gregory E. Lucas lives on Hilton Head Island in South Carolina. He loves to swim in the ocean and he plays classical guitar every day. He is a caregiver to his ninety-year-old mother.