#265: Three Poems by Sophie Cabot Black

~This poem was previously published in Bloom (2015).

THE PENITENT

How tired the day of me realizing

Again not the way wanted, the waste

Of each body by mine and yes

I kept myself capable and yes

When entering a room I was the center

But how unchosen I stood

In a slow undraping to catch

Any task of your broad and apparent

Hands; no longer do I know what to cover,

The cat in the corner overseeing

My fall toward not how I have changed

But finally how I could not bear you.

*****

#264: "Goosepimples: by Dallas Woodburn

~This story previously appeared in Arroyo Literary Review (2014).

~Selected by Kenneth Fleming, Assistant Editor for Fiction

He isn’t bothering anybody. He’s just sitting in his car in the parking lot by the freshly mown soccer fields, waiting for his daughter to be done with practice. He isn’t looking at anything in particular, just gazing out in the direction of his pony-tailed daughter and her friends, running forward and back across the field, their cheeks flushed and their toothpick legs like pinwheels in their high rainbow socks.

            But he isn’t really watching them, nor is he particularly aware of the pigeons squatting along the telephone wire in the distance, clumped together like old ladies gossiping, nor of the acute blue of the sky behind them, so blue it almost seems artificial. He gazes towards all of these things but he doesn’t really see them, in the way one stares off vacantly into space when deep in thought or daydreaming.

            He isn’t daydreaming or deep in thought, but the opposite. His mind is blank, blissfully blank, like the clear blue bowl of a sky above them, only an occasional cloud-thought skittering past, dissipating before it wakes him from peaceful emptiness.

            It is a shadow that finally rouses him, falling across his face like a summons. He glances up through the dirt-streaked windshield, expecting to see the shiny red face of his daughter, but instead he is met with the round, shapely behind of a young woman. Tight Lycra shorts grip her perfect, tan thighs. He takes in the smooth-shaven backs of her knees, her slender calves tapering down to exquisite ankles, her running shoes edged in pink trim.

            Quickly he looks away, out at the blue sky, the telephone poles, the gray brick restrooms huddled in the midst of green expanse of soccer fields—but immediately his eyes itch to return to her. She is, after all, standing right in front of his car. Her curvaceous lower half directly at his eye level. Where else is he supposed to look?

            He looks.

#263: Three Poems by Meg Eden

~This poem previously appeared in Kansas City Voices, Salzburg Review (2015).

Civilized People Keep their Silver Polished

My mother polishes her father’s silverware

on the dryer downstairs because

he’s asked her to, and there’s no room

to do it elsewhere. The basement bathroom

hasn’t been clean since my grandmother died.

In the living room, her Greek statues dangle

from bird cages, her piano untuned and unplayed.

In some of the rooms, it still smells like her.

My mother tries to go through each room

with “a woman’s touch”—as if she’s

some spin-off Midas, who can make

the ugly shine—but my granddad

won’t let her throw away anything

that might come in handy one day.

In his workshop, rusting hammers wait

to fix and be fixed.

 *****