ALMOST PAINFUL
by Lori Levy
I want something to grab me.
I’m talking about beauty. The kind that wounds,
that stabs me deep in the place where tears form.
It doesn’t happen today on my morning walk,
despite the purple jacarandas and the pink blossoms
gracing the branches of almond trees—
beauty I see, but can’t feel this time.
I know it will hit me when least expected
as it does a little later
when I see the photo of my youngest granddaughter
in a pale blue Cinderella gown in Disneyland—
the look in her eyes when she comes face to face
with what, for her, is the real Princess Elsa
or Cinderella, not a woman in a costume.
I swallow hard when I catch her expression
of undiluted joy, innocence, awe,
so beautiful it hurts, piercing me,
as when my daughter was little and left a note
to the tooth fairy under her pillow.
Later, I am stabbed again when I read the obituary
about the beer-drinking man with the Marlboro voice
who lived next door to our vacation home in Vermont,
a gifted storyteller whose second grade teacher once declared,
Jim lives every day like it’s a birthday party.
How beautiful that, at 64, he dies as he lived,
adoring friends filling house, yard, beach,
one of them playing Tears in Heaven on acoustic guitar,
the sky—when Jim passes—a burst of pink purple gold
as the sun goes down over Lake Champlain.
Bio: Lori Levy's poems have been published in Rattle, Paterson Literary Review, Nimrod International Journal, Poet Lore, Passager Journal, and numerous other online and print literary journals and anthologies in the U.S., the U.K., and Israel. Two of her chapbooks were published in 2023: "What Do You Mean When You Say Green? and Other Poems of Color" (Kelsay Books) and "Feet in L.A., But My Womb Lives in Jerusalem, My Breath in Vermont" (Ben Yehuda Press). Levy lives with her husband in Los Angeles near their children and grandchildren, but "home," for her, has also been Vermont and Israel.
That One Color
by William Doreski
Nothing is as blue as we thought.
Certainly not shadows on snow
or the indelible marks on our bodies.
Sky and ocean cast illusions
with which we’ve forever evolved.
Dogwalkers in the fierce cold
think blue doesn’t apply to them,
but the dogs shake their hides and sniff
at the splotches on the sidewalk
where crimes were almost committed.
We live in a world almost blue
enough to justify the jazz
we confused with sexual pleasures
because the colors almost matched.
Our late childhoods linger despite
the whispers in the leafless trees,
the stink of engines polluting
our badly compromised hearing.
We complain of the cost of living
without realizing that money
has also lost the last blue tint
and crumples to nothing in our fists.
The snow is impersonal. Also
the sky and sea and shallow rivers.
Ice claims everything despite
bearing the final blue insult
to which no one can respond.
Bio: William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He has taught at several colleges and universities. His most recent book of poetry is Cloud Mountain (2024). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors. His essays, poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in various journals.
The last rose
by Steven Deutsch
of the season
bloomed today,
a fragile orange
with an improbable
yellow-gold
at its center.
It stands proudly tall
like someone who
has just been told
they look terrific,
and beckons me back
for another season.
Isn’t that the message
of the garden—
to stand on the knife
edge of ruin
and sing of rebirth
and return?
Hard frost tonight
and I will wake tomorrow
and walk along the paths
of a garden that has put
itself to sleep.
Yet, still it sings.
Bio: Steve Deutsch is poetry editor of Centered Magazine and is poet in residence at the Bellefonte Art Museum. Steve was nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize. His Chapbook, Perhaps You Can, was published in 2019 by Kelsay Press. His full length books, Persistence of Memory, Going, Going, Gone, and Slipping Away, were published by Kelsay. Brooklyn was awarded the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press. A new full length, Seven Mountains, was just published.
Moonsighting
by Royal Rhodes
The white moon
in the black basin of the sky,
soft and luminous,
rose over the mid-summer water
and seemed to enlarge
as if lobbed out
by some strange engine
and now was falling back.
But it stayed away
where it found its place
long ago when it left
being part of where we stood.
Fear drove us to think
it might come crashing back
like the comet that hit
a giant planet and made
a dark bruise on impact
as large as our Pacific.
No, our moon, regular
and guess proof, revolves
as we spin, a rocky world,
around the flaring sun.
Our only satellite
makes us sense our worth
knowing we are rooted on earth.
On distant worlds do others,
living and conscious
watchers, follow their skies?
Do they call those
revolving objects around
them as we do --
simply "moon"
or something else --
as if we can know
the real name?
Bio: Royal Rhodes is a poet and retired educator. He taught global religions for almost forty years. His poems have been published in numerous literary journals. His poetry and art collaborations have been printed by The Catbird [on the Yadkin] Press in North Carolina.
