What used to be a house is now a room. And in that room, what used to be a girl and then a mother is now an old woman in a recliner facing the western wall’s window. She listens for that strange bird call again. It frustrates her that she can’t place the call to the bird. She had heard it the day before and hears it again now.

Plants suffer on the windowsill from a lack of sunlight, but she often waters and talks to them. Just sweet encouragements and the like. She can help that, but can’t help the direction of the lone window and the little sunlight it provides the plants.

Beside the wilting plants are faces behind glass: a son and a daughter with their spouses and children, and another son and daughter who she will never see again because they’ve died years ago.

The faces behind the glass are just that: faces behind the glass.

They watch her do so little each and every repeating day that she almost feels embarrassed if one can feel that while all alone, but she watched everything; watched them grow up, nursed them all from her own body, cooked for them and cleaned up after them. Before she was an old woman she used to drive a car, a new used one every income tax season, and with that car she had picked them up from school when their bellies hurt or they burned up from a fever. Sometimes she left work early when they had an early dismissal from school. She lived a life doing everything for everyone, yet never getting anything done for herself. Now her children and grandchildren live with her in those picture frames yellowed and dusty.

            Though her room is small, she can’t move around like she used to. She wants to, but her legs disagree with her. Her lungs too. That’s what the oxygen tanks and tubes are for. The tubes would tangle her if she could move fast enough, so she shuffles her ever-cold feet, barely lifting them from the ground (which she tries to clean, but it still leaves her feet blackened like she walked over ash). It’s just tile. Gray tile and white walls and yellow dusty pictures.

            Outside of that western window she sees a tree that she’d love to hang a bird feeder from, and she thinks of how she’d stop the squirrels from stealing the seeds. She thinks a sun catcher would be pretty to look at it. She’d always wanted one, maybe in the shape of a dragon or a bee’s nest, but she never got one for Christmas. There wasn’t enough sun in this window anyway.

            She thought of all the things she wanted to do, which remined her of all the things she couldn’t do. Still, she will make do. As she always has. She rocks a bit in her recliner, sipping on hot instant coffee. She can’t muster the energy to put a full pot together anymore, and her doctor says she can’t have coffee anyway. But she could do what he can’t know.

The coffee is good.

She’s comfortable.

And while she can’t really go outside anymore, she listens again for that strange bird call, hoping soon to know what creature is making that sound. Little things like that keep her at the window.

Tyler is the author of HAVE MERCY and a former journalist from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He holds a Bachelor’s of Arts in English from Penn State University, and a M. A. in creative writing with a focus on fiction from Wilkes University. He’s published multiple short stories and one of them, “That Time Aliens Made Us Vegan,” was nominated for the “Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy Award” in 2018.

Startling hoary branches,
yesterday quite bare,
now glisten in this radiance,
the sky blue-eyed and clear.

How soon the world can change
from dismal to good cheer!
A sudden shaft of sunshine
can dissipate despair.

Mary Hills Kuck is a sometimes-poet who takes her work relatively seriously, having found time to write after years of teaching English and German in the US Midwest, Jamaica West Indies, and US New England. For five years, she has been tutoring an Afghan mother of five who migrated to Massachusetts. After almost a lifetime elsewhere, her Midwestern prairie roots keep her grounded.

Now that dears have departed nothing stirs,
In the self-promised quiet waited for.
Hush suddenly prevails. Not a peep is heard.
Why then the hunger, the wait by the day
For machine talk, the grind, thwack and whirr
Of the washing machine, the whooshing pour,
hot air from dryer’s mouth. She keeps her
Need in check, firmly refuses to fall sway
To television news, killings and car
wrecks are too intrusive. The mind sinks
in the suddenness of the sudden. Discipline
takes its toll. She loves to hear the car
engine roar. But the blind spot has grown.
The plan? A late-night sortie to the kitchen.
Wanton crash of old china, her reckless fling.
What is destined to break must learn to sing.

Pramod Lad was born in India and has a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Cornell University. He worked as a scientist at the National institutes of health. He is 77 years old and started writing poetry after a hiatus of fifty years, at age 75.His poems have been accepted in several poetry journals and he is in no hurry to publish a collection unless he is convinced the poems are worth preserving in book form.

His favorite poet is W S Merwin.

She is old. Long ago she fled
an old country of lace curtains
and blue Delft Spode,
where a midnight knock on the door
opened to a sound-proof room.

Within the cranial vault
of the concert hall
her fingers the color of bone pause
above the black and white keys
gravid with Chopin’s preludes.

The pause grows. It hangs
like a ripening drop of dew
prismed with a story
as old as they say time is
before she lowers her fingers.

Mike Dillon lives in a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle, from where he writes poetry and essays. He is a retired community newspaper publisher who walks the beach and dreams of an America where everyone has read Henry David Thoreau.

I stand with a sharp knife in my hand
Unnerved by its cool, shining blade

I am at the sink helping my cousin cook
in her bright, spacious, kitchen

I am enfolded by the light,
but I do not know about measurement, saucepans, mixes

I am one of those few women who did not learn to cook in her mother’s kitchen

I only know how to work with words, phrasing, stillnesses
Where to begin?

I scrape at the potato slowly,
It is rough and unwilling

I would prefer to be outside in the large garden,
Making a slow dance by the pink petunias

or sitting near the birch tree under the still sun
feeling its light shift over my shoulders

Or at my old manual typewriter
hearing the tap of the keys, spaces, possibilities

Yet I am stuck with this knife, chiseling away at the potato
Not sure If I am making progress or skimming too close to its core

While working, I picture my great grandmother in rural Ireland
The cold wind whirling by her house

Out on a hill, far from town
a rural shack with a great fireplace at its center

How she tried to keep warm in that place
A gathering of cows in a nearby field

She was a widow
turning withered pages of the Bible over in her firm hands

With small, thin frame,
a black shawl gathered around her shoulders
She stood bent over in the kitchen for hours,
shut in

I do not want my great grandmother’s life
The kitchen’s heat stifling her

I would rather take in the orange sun outside
the cool fresh air, the still sparrow standing in the shifting breeze

I want to step into this summer day of ease
unfolding orange petals

Yet I am stuck here trying to cut a way out of a rough vegetable
Trying to get through this task, so that it will come to an end

so that I will be able to put this knife down
and return again to the sounds and rhythms of words.

to the melancholy stories of my great grandmother
That have found their way into this pen

Dorothy Johnson-Laird is a poet and social worker who lives in New York City. She received an M.F.A in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Dorothy also works as a music journalist with a passion in African music. She has published journalism with www.afropop.org and www.worldmusiccentral.org, among others. More of Dorothy’s poetry can be found at https://www.facebook.com/Dorothy-Johnson-Laird-Poet-106451582140735

Soon I’ll have no shadow left
to throw.
As he stirs, I wonder who,
what I am tonight.
Air gun in hand, he goes pyew pyew
at Mom, mutters
I’m gonna kill, then glares my way—
Fix your eyes
when I’m talking to you, boy.
He snaps
at my glasses and we find
each other
for a moment. His hawkish blues
return to glass
and I kiss his forehead in the dark.

Zach Thomas is a writer from Richmond, Virginia. When not teaching college English, he writes poetry sparked from various locations in Appalachia, the American South, and Latin America. These poems tend to revisit grief, loss, and other topics that he realizes are hardly uplifting.

Pale peaches
plucked before dawn
sunset flesh shrouding
pebbled hearts,
their juice barely bleeds
at cutting teeth
—dreams snatched
like unhatched eggs

Lydia Kuerth is a freelance writer from South Florida, where she edits the Living Waters Review and serves as a peer mentor at her university’s Writing Central. As a lover of reptiles, rainy days, and role-playing games, when not burrowing into books, she enjoys hiking and observing small creatures.

Mel went to bed with the uncomfortable knowledge that he had an 8:30 morning appointment with Dr. Bromberg. A dental visit is bad enough. But he would get up early and skip breakfast, as though a day without coffee might make his teeth more presentable.

For a while, he was gripped by massive pliers, yanked from side to side in a cheap motel room: that was his first dream.

Then, he was at sea, in a leaky lifeboat, watching a cruise ship sink beneath the green waves: his second dream was as unpleasant as the first, and left him sea-sick.

He didn’t want to chance a third, so at 3 AM he was up.

“Well, how’s she hanging, Mel?”

That was Dr. Bromberg, with his usual opening salvo, as Mel squeezed into the dental chair.

The office was brightly lit and antiseptic.

“I don’t suppose you’ve had any coffee this morning, Mel. But let’s see what kind of damage you’ve done anyway.”

Sam Bromberg began his customary inspection.

“Open a little wider, please…”

“You know Mel, in the old days, we’d use pliers on a tooth like that.”

The white-coated dentist tapped with his probe on a lower right molar.

Later, when he stopped drilling for a moment, he mentioned to Mel that he’d just returned from an enjoyable Caribbean cruise.

“After a little more dental work, you might want to try one of those cruises yourself.”

First, a follow-up visit?

Then, the dental bills?

And a cruise?

It was more than Mel could afford, or dream about…

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

I wish I knew you well enough to make
a sound that points to your especial gift,
more complete than the magic afternoon
you told yourself you would remember always

(and you do) or the promise of a film or book
to go on past its ending: live then so.
Why should you, more than momentarily,
believe such prompt unless the author knew

your life, your mind, your history and hurts?
And I do not. And so you gaze away
unmoved, unmarked by sounds that ask for all
of you: intent on single contest for

your singular self. The tomtoms back of you
are growing faint; you cannot yet quite hear
the One ahead who makes to say how long
He knew the way His prize – that you – would come.

So you resist, until the One with milk
will nudge you nearer, wild hungry kitten;
until the taste at once blood-deep and strange
will fill your head with strength, your cry with age.

JOHN VIGREN is a landscape photographer and recovering addict. He has been a machinist, road maintenance laborer, gardener, factory worker, practicing attorney, radio news correspondent, and church deacon. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, Elizabeth.

Corporal Flanagan walked toward the closed door. Rhonda, the Chief’s secretary, looked up from her cell phone.

“I wouldn’t go in there, if I were you.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s in a bad mood. You heard what happened in court yesterday, didn’t you?”

Flanagan shrugged, while trying to see what interested Rhonda on her phone. There was not much else of interest in the office, just a few faded pictures of the Chief shaking hands with politicians in past administrations.

“Yesterday the judge let Rocco off again. And he told the Chief he doesn’t want to see him there anymore with ‘so-called confessions’ beaten out of Rocco.”

The Corporal turned to leave.

“Do you want me to tell him anything, Flanagan?”

“Nah… Just that we picked up Rocco again this morning.”

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