Submit your poetry and/or art for this site by emailing donkingfishercampbell@gmail.com before 11:59pm PST on Saturday, February 19th, 2022.

Friday, February 18, 2022

Marianne Szlyk

Close: Al & Sly by Marsha Grieco

In the Next Life, the Former Cat Thelma 


dines on raw carrots

and red grapes, no milk, no meat.


She longs to perch on the arm

of the near-antique chair, still


plush and low to the ground.

She longs to sprawl


over a matching sofa

she does not own yet.


In a one-bedroom condo,

close enough to Atlanta,


in almost-silence, with walls

where tape does not stick,


she is reading a Christmas

comfort book on Zen.


She remembers a woman saying

that humans who devoured meat


would return as dogs and cats.

Her neighbor turns on his stereo.


Too loud, his songs remind her

of her last life: bass, drums,


and saxophones, the days 

when she was fascinated


by the carrots and grapes

her people ate.



Drawing by Billy Burgos

In My Next Life


I wake to the dark, to a bench,

to the belly of a vast ship

in vaster space.  Someone snores.


Someone else walks past, 

waves a wand of bells

so that we will all dream


of leaves, of light, of water,

anything that will shimmer,

that will keep us from realizing


that we are not close

to the planet where we will

live and die, never leaving.


In a desert lit by a dimmer sun,

what will we dream of?

I close my eyes to cling


to the shimmer of leaves

above water, a mirror

for bright sun, warm winds.


I shut my eyes to remember

places I’ve only read about,

places I’ve never been to.



 Brainstorming In Color by Raundi Kai Moore-Kondo

The Night the Aliens Came to Worcester


“45 Years Later, Worcester Area Residents Still Say a Large UFO Hovered Over Their City.”

Isabel Sami, Worcester [MA] Telegram, Dec. 22, 2021


Three days before Christmas, snow masked the ground.  

Dry and gritty, it glittered beneath moon,

stars, and streetlights.  Air scraped our throats and lungs

as if it were sharp metal.  Stars seemed so

far away.  The moon withdrew from us too.


We’d never fly there again.  We lived on

earth.  College students drank Budweiser, talked

basketball.  The last bus wandered narrow

streets past dark churches, past darker houses.

Water tasted like dank pipes.  We drank milk.


That night the white ship, a bulging disk topped

with red lights, swung over the seven hills,

the bus station, the expressway, the tracks

past Union Station, boarded up and blank

like the moon God left hanging in the sky.


A boy and his father ran up a hill

to watch the white ship circle their city.

It might have been searching for a place to land

on the hills, some covered with houses, some

covered with trees, all swaddled in thick snow.


At the last minute, the ship backed away

despite downtown Christmas lights and the mall

as white as if it were made from the moon.

The ones on the ship knew the boarded-up 

station and narrow streets were not for them.


Years later, the boy, then a grad student,

watched Star Trek on his black-and-white TV.

He knew this show was the past, the Cold War

never ending, days when we thought we could

visit the moon, could bounce around up there.


He wanted to know if he would ever

meet an alien.  He wished that the ship

had landed on the dry, glittering ground.

Beneath the new moon the last bus

passed the all-night store and sighed.


 

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