Margaret Sayers

Margaret Sayers is a writer of poems, short stories, and even a novel now and again. She loves everything about words: how they look, how they sound, how they behave with one another, how they make us feel. When she is not reading or writing, she is cooking and baking, walking her dear rescue pup, and studying classical guitar. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and loves spending time with the awesome humans known as her adult children. By day, she is a soon-to-retire practicing psychologist and university professor.

The Peace, Love, and Coffee Café

In her thirty-two years, Claudette had managed to date one man who might just have been the one. Charlie was a boyishly handsome, fun-loving, fully employed, and emotionally stable paralegal in a big firm working his way through law school at night at Oklahoma City University. The couple dated for about a year and were talking about moving in together when Charlie unexpectedly stopped by the apartment Claudette shared with her mother.

“thirty days after,” “Pivot,” and “Sour”

the time for grieving ends
grief does not

so I unfurl what is no longer and smooth out the
wrinkles
my soul loosens and leans in to the unwanted hereafter
the before murmurs just beyond my hearing
my heart skips in a dissonant rhythm
comfort strikes a truce with disquiet

Issue 66, October 2022

Unpacking Mother

Brigitte could not remember a time before the suitcase flanked the front door on the right, opposite the coat closet to the left. Just like the faded floral wallpaper, the yellowed silhouettes of the stair-step Schmidt sisters, and the frosted glass sconces in the foyer, no one even seemed to notice the weathered hard-shell Samsonite anymore.

Issue 47, March 2021

Margaret Sayers

Margaret Sayers is a writer of poems, short stories, and even a novel now and again. She loves everything about words: how they look, how they sound, how they behave with one another, how they make us feel. When she is not reading or writing, she is cooking and baking, walking her dear rescue pup, and studying classical guitar. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and loves spending time with the awesome humans known as her adult children. By day, she is a soon-to-retire practicing psychologist and university professor.

The Peace, Love, and Coffee Café

In her thirty-two years, Claudette had managed to date one man who might just have been the one. Charlie was a boyishly handsome, fun-loving, fully employed, and emotionally stable paralegal in a big firm working his way through law school at night at Oklahoma City University. The couple dated for about a year and were talking about moving in together when Charlie unexpectedly stopped by the apartment Claudette shared with her mother.

“thirty days after,” “Pivot,” and “Sour”

the time for grieving ends
grief does not

so I unfurl what is no longer and smooth out the
wrinkles
my soul loosens and leans in to the unwanted hereafter
the before murmurs just beyond my hearing
my heart skips in a dissonant rhythm
comfort strikes a truce with disquiet

Issue 66, October 2022

Unpacking Mother

Brigitte could not remember a time before the suitcase flanked the front door on the right, opposite the coat closet to the left. Just like the faded floral wallpaper, the yellowed silhouettes of the stair-step Schmidt sisters, and the frosted glass sconces in the foyer, no one even seemed to notice the weathered hard-shell Samsonite anymore.

Issue 47, March 2021

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