Contemplating the eye of a loved one,
you have noted the white of the sclera,
Its contrast with the pigment of the iris,
the cast pulling your focus. Encircling

I am an emergency. My name is Bernie Smith, my colleagues at HR Block used to call me St. Bernard, like the hospital on the South Side, because I was always trying to save someone a few bucks. I still live a couple blocks from the hospital, near where the Dan Ryan Expressway split the old neighborhood in half, in a post-war cottage. It’s nice, white brick, with a long narrow backyard like a bowling alley.

The bright, green grass was covered in early morning dew drops. They slide down its blades and leave wet spots on my pumps. Rocking my weight on to the heel, and then back to my toes, I focus on how each shift digs the shoes further into the soft ground. I wish I could just take them off, stand even, and feel the earth with my toes.

All it took was one presentation to boost the B to an A plus. If it wasn’t for the awkward pauses, Macson would be enjoying the rest of the day. Students walked along the sidewalk under the awning of the film building. Macson sat on the edge of the sidewalk, staring at the drenched parking lot with rain splashing onto the pavement. His eyes were sunk. He ignored the tight knot that beat inside his throat.

Since assuming a second term of office on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump, with the assistance of his zealous lieutenants, has, among other “accomplishments,” pardoned every one of the 1,500 rioters who were charged with participating in the attack on the Capitol in 2021; forced universities to capitulate to ideological demands at the risk of losing their federal funding; deployed the National Guard to traditionally liberal cities, where it is neither needed nor wanted…

everything beautiful hurts
to be touched
your mother’s
cold hand on your forehead

the number on the thermometer
higher than your burning mind
can count
and now you’re the king

The living room was quiet except for the soft hum of the dishwasher and the occasional rustle of pages turning. Mara sat on the couch, half-listening as her youngest, Nora, read aloud from the school library book they’d brought home that week. Upstairs, her older daughter, Talia, was finishing a science project at the desk they’d squeezed into the corner of her room.

I am finally admitting
that I am never going to read War and Peace.
I started a number of times,
printed out a cheat sheet with the cast of characters,
made many a tasty snack,
read to around page 100,
and each time abandoned the project.

Sister Barbara has always been drawn to the unknown. In 1965, a week before her eighteenth birthday, she travelled some 400km from Mount Gambier to Adelaide to join the Sisters of Mercy. Her entire family piled into the car and for five hours, Barbara and her siblings sat in the backseat watching lonely farmhouses tear past the window. Barbara had no idea that this would be the first of many long journeys…

Walter is feeling pleased with himself, barreling along the Autopista del Mediterráneo, or “AP-7,” as they call it, that starts way up by the French border, on his way to pick up Anna at the airport. It is a soft warm evening in September, the kind they take for granted now, the two of them, having lived on the Costa Blanca for fourteen years.

The challenge is called Oceans Seven,
and by the time Marcia Cleveland
finished the ginormous feat of swimming
all those channels and straits,
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,
she indeed earned ownership.
As in, Her Oceans Seven.

It was 1962 in Taiwan, and I was five years old. The dormitory where my family lived had a single living space, with the bedroom raised three feet above the floor, and partitioned by a Japanese paper sliding door. My parents slept on a wooden double bed placed atop the Japanese tatami. Beside them, five children, ranging in age from seven to one, lay side by side on the tatami, sleeping soundly.

The southeast winds blew gently, caressingly, full of medicinal salts, carried in from the Atlantic Ocean, and fragrances from the vegetation on the shorelands that continued to emit spicy intoxicants ahead of the winter solstice. Bella and Beetle, two lovers on the barrier beach, lay within each other’s arms intertwined like one being, warmed by the burning driftwood they had collected and placed in the fire pit Beetle had dug.

That next afternoon I was sitting round home, I heard the bell. A slight, active sound, about the garden. I tried watching TV. The noise got nearer and farther; neither resolved nor ebbed away. This jingling got loud, resilient. It brought me outside.
And there, beneath the magnolia, the most delightful cream and apricot kitten practiced his pounce. The bell at his neck jogged with each strike. Curious, I picked him up. Perhaps used to attention, he didn’t claw but gave a juvenile, inquiring look. Beneath the bell hung a tag etched with a number. I got my phone. “You don’t know me. I have your cat.”
The woman took a second with it. An exploratory silence. “I don’t have a cat.”

Starscape obscured by
countless swarming pixels with 14-inch wingspans;
but no tangible color or form.
No sound, at least none perceived.
But there was something…
a presence felt. No, not felt. Not exactly;…
a presence known by reputation not senses, as mammal, not bird.

I have walked this winding road a thousand times, though I swear it changes its face whenever I return.
Some days it greets me with the quiet of rain-soaked earth, other days with a brittle wind that sounds almost like a voice trying to call me back. I tell myself this is only memory playing tricks but yet memory has always been the wiser of us two.

A hot September
morning flames fire to heaven,
Golden Lucifer.

Anticipation
to culmination: a bloom,
its cacophony.

He never liked smoking. He only liked the smoke—coiling, hovering, just above him,
a downpour held in suspension.
He loved that suspension.
She never liked heels. She only liked the sound they made on the floor—tap, tap, tap.
Like the way her heartbeat quickened whenever she passed his desk.
She loved that quickening.
He liked getting to the office early, making himself a cup of coffee. He would lean back against the wall.

Is there a planet where words silence
a cannon’s demented mouth?

Here, on Earth, furious iron roars
past all reason, past all pleading.
No warding it off
with incantations, prayers,
poetry.

Margie Olivia Murphy studied her desk calendar. She searched for time to verify the sparrow-sized bird with greenish-yellow breast and lavender wings—reported roosting at a nearby park by birding newbies—was the rare orchid oriole. If true, it would be number 748 on her Audubon Life List. She ran a finger down today’s box—2:30 Lena driving lesson/bank, 3:05 doggie day care Izzy pick-up, 3:45 Lena drop-off swim practice, 4:05 call Senator Hewett’s assistant–God update…

Malia wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel. A foggy feeling enveloped her, the same as it had every day this past year. Pushing through the heaviness of insomnia was a daily battle. Highway 406 stretched further than either she or her son John could see. She tried to remember the last time she and her family traveled this highway, but her recollection was interrupted by the pounding in her ears.

“What does it mean to be African American?”
“Why do you ask that question?”
“At school, Sister Gracilda had me fill out a form and she told me to put a check mark next to the word ‘African American.’ Am I African American? What is an African American?”
“It means persons with African blood. Or better put, someone with African genes. Sometimes they’re also called Black.”
“Am I Black?”

2018
Dodging cyclists, I scurried across the narrow road and headed toward Gaiole’s town center. A small Tuscan village of twenty-seven hundred souls in the Chianti region, Gaiole is known for its idyllic beauty, and these days for L’Eroica, an increasingly popular vintage cycling event.

We saunter along the shore,
boys trailing behind.
Tender dusk, the wind
a sigh as we skip stones,
stride briskly between
the bulky boulders, climb and leap.