I heard they were calling for poetry at the edge of the world but I knew they did not want my verses full of the songs of women. They had banned high voices years ago and chose to start every argument in an empty room. This required artistry from people better known as piss artists and so they promised to rely on the grass to remember the songs when the people rebelled. Really, they just wanted it to cover all the spoilt places

I sit in the weeds—waiting. Studying the ladder of my thumb I mourn my dragon mother. I whisper an elegy to the wind about how she puffed silk cut smoke from her nose. When I was little she wrapped me in ancient threads, spinning each pattern into a song of women’s endurance, loss, and birthing. I would watch the glowing tip of her cigarette, a monster’s eye, pulsing in the darkly tent—my weird nightlight. We lived in the high chinks of the Kush alongside the tarnished Stone Loaches, their spotty silver backs mirrored in the jewelry dangling from my mother’s neck and doughy lobes. It took slow seasons for us to hear the inching sound of metal screaking all around us. My mother begging the fish to save my voice, to hide me with the mudlarks but they were always bony specimens and liked to drive a hard bargain. My mother had to barter her iridescent scales to cover their spindly bodies before they would hold me in their mouths and swim away with me. She had been left naked and bitter but her last kindness to me was to smother my father and brothers. She could not bear to see them turn to dust so, she shaped them into icy lapis lazuli.

I am the keeper of our songs and when I raise my voice I smash things. Around my neck, I have hung a locket of bright blue so it will be close to my throat as I sing. Listen in the dawn and you will hear the gentle noise of women and know that this is what you once called feeling.

Adele Evershed is an early years educator. She is originally from Wales and has lived in Hong Kong and Singapore before settling in Connecticut. She writes poetry and prose in a room overlooking a wood.

I grow flowers, and shrubs, and even several trees. I do not take credit for their achievement, even as they rely on my efforts, the watering, the feeding, and removing the invasive weeds that also seek my attention. Those weeds are masters of mimicry, often flowering, acting as if they could add something to the display. The authentic plants poke through the supple soil, then grow, then reach for the sun, only to die, hide and repeat the circularity, which would happen without my help. My help is not natural, but it seems that way.

There was a time when she would walk these gardens, pointing out the weeds I had missed, playfully, because she knows it will somehow hurt my feelings if she sounds dismissive. Never contemptuously; just perfunctorily suggestive. But not this year. The air is different, inside and out, and the late February freeze followed by the early March snowfall did little to help a garden wanting to exist as it had in the years past. These plants are here because of me. I broke the clay, and it was I who removed the recalcitrant sod. This tended plot of once rebellious land is not where they were born.

She assumed as the snow lingered well into the second week, dirty clumps of what was once silent whiteness remain visible, remnants of that desultory effort, that there would be no flowers. And then I notice it. Not the seasonal discursiveness. On the other side of the street, in a home where the man with the memory issues was moved to a place where memories go to die, slowly, I saw it.

If flowers could appear prepubescent, it did. But I could tell, even still encased in green sepal, a floral chrysalis, the blossom beneath would be red.

I took a wet paper towel and stuffed it into a fluted champagne glass we no longer seem to use. We no longer use it as intended. We find it celebratory just to be alive, even if ten thousand bubbles rising was not present to help. I arranged the tulip I had stolen from the man’s abandoned yard and stood it in the glass.

It bloomed, and I watched his yard, every day, many times as the clock wound from one darkness to another. He never came back for it, never missed it. She enjoyed it. The stolen tulip did bloom, red, with white lace frills along the petal, suggesting coquettishness as it revealed its sexual self in an inverted skirt.

Four days later, the weight of the tulip bent the pedicel, a head bowing in reverence, or homage, or perhaps in thanks.

A.M. Mann is an emerging writer currently querying novel-length works. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife of thirty-six years and a blue-eyed dog.

The old man descended the stairs on his matchstick legs to the outside section of the bar and hobbled out to the rusty fire pit where the glaring sun rendered Cherise invisible. As he approached, her body diffused as though he was nearing a pointillist painting.

He arched back, shielding his eyes from the sun, “I can barely see you, Lady! What you doing back here all by yourself?”

Before Cherise could answer he hollered, “Well, I’m Manny and you wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through!” his legs bent stiffly like they were held together by stick pins. He wore holy jeans and an Iron Maiden t-shirt with an aged black leather vest. His face was sunken and his quivering smile revealed few teeth.

Manny said to Cherise, “What do you think about this plan: I’m starting a Saturday sermon out back here at three o’clock. Because church is closed and people are suffering! Hell, I’ve lost a few friends, not from illness but from loneliness! What do you think of that idea, Lady? We won’t out and out offer alcohol but it will be available.”

Cherise replied, “I think it’s a nice idea, Manny. I’d go, but I don’t go to church. I know what you mean about the loneliness though.”

Manny looked at Cherise with his watery eyes and cried, “That’s what I’m talking about! Loneliness is such a god-damned ignored thing these days!” he slapped his leg and Cherise imagined a big bruise already forming on it. He focused on the driftwood benches surrounding the firepit as though imagining them filled with a congregation, then waved and shuffled back inside the bar. Cherise closed her eyes and tilted her head toward the sun, its rays scattering her apart particle by particle.

Susan DeFelice graduated from Sonoma State University and recently moved to Georgia where she writes fiction and bakes.