Barbara Quick
Three Poems

A Lesson Taken From the Green World

A sprig of basil from the basketful
I gathered for the pesto went astray.
And so I stuck it in a small glass vase
on the sill, to use on another day.

Inside that milky blue glass jar—inside
the stem, hidden from me—a miracle
of transformation took place. Root cells formed
while the stem marinated in water.

When an early frost ruined my garden—
when I needed a fresh leaf of basil,
cooking in lockdown—I plucked
the sprig out of the jar and found a plant,

Ready for soil, ready to grow again,
after such long days of deprivation.

The Writer’s Life in Lockdown

Determined to try to cut my own hair,
I note a similarity to the Herculean labor
of rewriting, yet again, my newest novel,
which is filled with so many words,
each of which needs to be considered
as I go forth with scissors.

I remind myself, looking for courage,
of what my stylist, Emily, used to say:
Divide and conquer!

I have so much hair that Emily always referred
to the second haircut and sometimes the third
I think of this while I stand outside
in the unforgiving sunlight,
a full-length mirror propped against the wall.
One lock at a time, I wind my hair around a brush,
peer at the ragged ends
and attempt to cut.

It’s tricky, in the mirror, to coordinate the interplay
of scissors, brush, and hand, when everything’s inverted
through an irksome law of physics guaranteed to impair
one’s looking-glass dexterity.

The tresses I bring forward from the back—
the only way to cut them—are by necessity
so close to my eyeballs that they’re difficult to see
with clarity.

Like those scenes I wrote and rewrote, so lovingly,
over the course of the last five years or so,
thinking I’d nailed them with each iteration.
The drudgery of editing is nothing like
the joy of creation.

The left side, which looks like the right side,
is looking not bad at all.
Only two-hundred-odd pages to go now,
to layer, to refine,
one god-damned hair
at a time.

Not a Time To Give Up the Fight

in memoriam Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Sometimes, all you can do is make the bread.
When the source of your protection
has flown the coop in panic,
and one of your great heroines is dead,

Look down at your own hands
that have known how to knead and turn
the mixture of flour, water and yeast
for half a century.

Your hands are so much wiser than the part of you
that wants to panic, too.

Think about the migratory birds,
so vulnerable in the vastness of sky.
They don’t give up. Each little body
keeps striving till the goal is reached
or the animating flame of life
goes out—

Even through the darkest night.

—Submitted on 12/21/2020

Barbara Quick is the author of The Light on Sifnos, co-winner of the 2020 Blue Light Press Poetry Prize. She is also the author of three novels, with another forthcoming in 2022. Her poems have appeared in San Francisco Chronicle, Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Panoply, Mezzo Cammin, and Monterey Poetry Review, among other journals, as well as in anthologies including Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2018). She lives in Sonoma County, Calif. Online at BarbaraQuick.com.

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder
Three Poems

After the Fracture

Things break forever, I used to think
before I found Kinsugi, the art of repair,

a mending that exposes the scars
in a map of gilded lines and curves,

a broken bowl becoming somehow more
than what it was before now webbed in gold.

A shattered country looks like debris
on a smooth shore, landing after damage.

There is the finding and puzzling together
with a hope that the quicksand

of pain does not have its way.
Sometimes piece by broken piece,

we seam our lives together, making
something stronger—a new vessel glinting.

Stone Work

I will come back to this world / in a white cotton dress. Kingdom after My Own Heart. / Kingdom of Fragile. Kingdom of Dwarves.
—Lucie Brock-Broido

Everyone walks through shadows. Even the Queen of Mirrors
inside Mirrors in her Queendom of Sisters and Daughters.
Queendom of Umbilical Cords. Queendom of Coffee Pots.
I find more—more stones, more bones, more dust and ash
to unpack carefully like the heirloom baptismal dress
wrapped in tissue paper or the last leaf falling, leaving
branch roots against the sky, the ground turned upside down.
I keep unfolding, unmolding what aches to be retold.
The stone stacks I build and unbuild. The Queendom
of Cairns. Queendom of Water Marks.

So much compressed into a stone, the many stones
I’ve stolen, pieces of a place to remember being there.
I’d like to slice them like cake see the carbon of stars,
taste their light, the pumiced remains of eruptions,
the leathery skin of dinosaurs, the moonlight pressed into sea,
that first bite of an apple, that flesh and the stenciled fear
on cave walls, the making and unmaking of ruins
when the world was snow-filled then ice-covered, not even
one window of sadness left. Queendom of Unblemished.

I might find what I wanted all those hidden tears ago—
maybe the unfracture, a return to the ease of beginnings
before the shatter in the Queendom of Adjusting Well.
Queendom of Undressing. When my skin felt like a suit
with nothing underneath but a weightless kitten or the angel weight
of sorrow or nothing, nothing at all in the Queendom of No Corners.
Queendom of Pins Pursed in the Lips. Queendom of Sheets Drying
in Wind peopled by women who rinse rice, hold keys in their fists
in the dark, know about old failures and twisting rivers,
about opening gates and making gardens by lifting rocks.

Look, right there—the silhouette of one crow
in the center of the road plucking at fresh death
as the last dash of sun gives even pebbles spikes of shadows
in the Queendom of Gravity and Orbit. I harness the work
of stones, fossick for evidence and remembrance,
unearth new moons. Queendom of Repair.

Letterpressing in Autumn, 2020

after Ada Limón

I set each sort upside down in the composing stick,
“A Name” emerging like the steady march of ice across our pond,
a dark openness lightening. In the wooden drawer
below I find the italicized letters for Eve’s
whispered words: Name me. Name me.

And now I welcome the unnamed, a billowing
or a deep murmuration as if the steeled depth of me
had been replaced or loosened back into itself.

It was like a single frond of a fern catching wind,
that kind of breathing freely, like what had tightened
released, first tears, then ease.

It was the fullness of a red maple,
the one on Jericho Street that makes an apron
of redness on the grass below when the sun
weaves through its generous leaves,
a world unwobbling and settling,

and from my window
I see a group of people on the crest of the ridge coming toward me.
I hear joy in their voices and in the late afternoon light,
that perfect slant of our star that rescues almost everything.
I see their faces now.

—Submitted on 12/17/2020

Sarah Dickenson Snyder is the author of The Human Contract ( Kelsay Books, 2017), Notes from a Nomad (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and With a Polaroid Camera (Main Street Rag. 2019). Her poems have appeared in Rattle, The Sewanee Review, RHINO, and other journals. Online at sarahdickensonsnyder.com.

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Gillian Ebersole
On Driving Around to Delay the Inevitable

I wake before my alarm. I think about death. perhaps this is because I am a dancer & my knees have begun to ache. my back hurts in the mornings. there is a sense of time ticking when your career is supposed to reach its peak as your body does. perhaps this started when I watched someone go into cardiac arrest after taking adderall or because the last time I saw someone I loved before he died was through a zoom screen or because I was raised in a religion centered on crucifixion. I begged the figure on the cross to wake up. it is 5:59am. I graduated from my childhood bedroom while people died. from a virus, from truncheons, from tainted water. in prison, on the streets, in hospitals, in cages. I am haunted by the way my country was built on death. the person I love is so disturbed by capital punishment & I realize I have never considered it, except for to say it is bad. this is the worst part. it is going to be a dark Christmas. we do not even put up a tree. the snow freezes over & I almost fall every time I leave the house (which is not often). I wonder about cold toes & soft things & if these are compatible. the first time I made love I left my socks on. there is a small dog with a sweater. the snow has never been so white. I longed for this & now all I want is mahogany bookshelves & oak paneling & red wine & a crackling fire. is it death that is inevitable or separation at night? let me sleep.

—Submitted on 12/16/2020

Gillian Ebersole is the author of  The Water Between Us, winner of the Charlotte Mew Prize from Headmistress Press (forthcoming in 2021). Her poetry has appeared in Attic Salt, Pomona Valley Review, MAYDAY Magazine, and Weasel Press. A dancer, Ebersole currently works for Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Deborah Wanzer
October 2020

October,
Crawls into town on all
Four years, wondering:
Has this been an interlude?
An interrupting minstrel-show
For the basest of the base?

Some say, an aberration,
An oddity, an albino squirrel,
Spectacle of the neighborhood—
Shocks of white
Amid autumnal leaves.

Exhausting and exhausted,
October
Plays songbirds sinking
From smoky skies,
Swallows from a firehose
Of cock and bull stories.

Out of breath,
October remembers organs
Once pink and supple,
Blaze now with the sickly
Sour of pneumonic bonfires.

October,
Eighth month of the Roman calendar
Older now, timeworn.

—Submitted on 10/25/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series

Deborah Wanzer is a clinical social worker. 

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Xiaoly Li
Two Poems

The Voice of Air

We are pigeons
flying olive branches
to our mothers—
boxes and boxes—
building a great wall
of tender hearts
to reduce wind’s ravages.

We are bees
seeking flowers
bringing sweetness
where most needed—
the care-givers and
the care-given.

When this frozen wind
sweeps from East to West,
we have to fight two fights.

“Traitors,” some brothers say from afar.
“You, virus,” a few brothers point fingers here.
The double swords split the sky and ocean
rendered by the bleeding sun.

Spring Still Comes in Spite of April 2020

The minutes grow to be ready—
the first cut of chives of spring.
I drop lemon into the chive dumplings—
wow, explosive taste of spring.

Frank and Violet run back and forth
next to one neighbor’s fence—bark no more,
they just come to say hello.

Across the street at a birthday party,
everyone sits 6 feet apart.
Kids cheer and wave from a honking car,
stand in the sky window, and drop a giant
teddy bear beside bright yellow forsythia.

Air is so translucent after days of rain,
influx of magnolia, peach flower and
rhododendron—the universe is breathing me.

A grosbeak on top of the snowy weeping cherry,
picks and drops flowers—throwing stars.
Oh, I want to catch those stars bloomed fresh.

—Submitted on 10/24/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series

Xiaoly Li‘s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, American Journal of Poetry, PANK, Atlanta Review, Chautauqua, and other journals. She holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., and a masters in computer science and engineering from Tsinghua University in China. A fiction writer and photographer as well as a poet, Li works as a computer engineer and lives in Massachusetts. 

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Judith Skillman
Three Poems

Great Northern Fur Seal

Flaherty—young astronomer
to whom we come after sea horses,
octopi, anemones, jellyfish,
the hermit crab and Moray eel, otter
preening near its red rubber ball—
you remind me of my father Sid,
staring up after dark at the sky
as if it could free him from his own
sad news of living alone while married
to my mother. She the social butterfly,
he the eccentric physicist. Throat-
clearing, cleaning his glasses on his shirt,
staring with a homemade telescope
at eclipsing binaries. Your pronged tail
folded beneath you on a fake sea rock,
we watch as you polish one flipper
then the other, fur glistening beneath lights
of the Seattle harbor. This a Saturday
like any other, except—how explain
the depths and deckled edges
of the two party system—how make sense
of your pose as we round this corner
to find a monk-like almost-
person-animal-sea creature
in an attitude of beatification
observing, as it were, the last white clouds
cross a sky whose stars,
erased by sky glow, seem more holy
for their disappearance.

Lot’s Wife

~O Pillar of salt
erect prayer of halite
how come to these late years
without the two angels
begged by your husband
to stay

~two daughters
offered to men
who would harm child-virgins

The cities spread
in checkered burns

~O pillar of salt
left behind
by plump girls decked out
in finery

Say we are Sodom
we Gomorrah
we perceive temptation

Where is north
~where not south

~O cairn see our passage
from four years of yester night
changed into today

The Time to Ask Questions Has Passed

Sunset, and the rains are over. Stout birds sing.
There are no children here and none visit.
The body is its own quarry. An eye
turns inward, notes of Bach fly alone.
A contagious spring reigns in the garden.
Crescendo of purple clouds, lime green leaflets,
bawdy weather unsuited to the mood.
Soon, in the dark, the old depression
lifts. Leo Tolstoy’s Nikita
wakes in the sleigh beneath his master
to live twenty more years as laborer.
To measure with his steps how many straws
it takes to warm a horse in winter.
Three toes gone from each foot, still he walks.

—Submitted on 12/13/2020

Judith Skillman is the author of twenty collections, including Came Home to Winter, (Deerbrook Editions, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Zyzzyva, Field, and other journals. Skillman is a faculty member at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, Wash. Online at judithskillman.com.

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Francis Fernandes
Release

It was so dry and windy back in April
I had to take a polishing cloth to my
Gibson Byrdland almost every day
like in that film where the world
has to live with the constant threat
of dust storms and families keep their
plates and bowls upside down
and sweep the dirt off the dining table
before every meal. That’s how it was,
the pollen-filled dust getting
into your clothes and books and sheet
music, it was enough to drive you
crazy. Plus the fact we were at home
the whole time, work being so scarce.
I tried not to worry, while the pink
and white blossoms blew through the
air, like snow. I heard Billie Holiday
sing the snow is snowing, the wind
is blowing and I remembered those
winters back home when the rumble
of snow-plough trucks would fill
my dreams and the next day I’d have
to shovel the snow off the driveway.
Snow is crystalline and all that,
as everyone knows, and so when
it melts it runs down the back
of your neck like cold silk, in a purifying
way—pure as Christmas. Like that
Christmas it rained and then
the sidewalks and streets froze over
making it well-nigh impossible to go
to church, but we did anyway: we
walked, holding on to each other to keep
our footing and then the priest joked
about it, Thanks for checking your skates—
and your sins—at the door…ha ha!
which I missed because just then
the Three Magi and the shepherds
broke out into a hockey scrimmage
game right before the altar, with
the ghosts of Rocket Richard and Gordie
Howe and the rest of them. All I could
think about in those days was hockey.
And now I hide from the news
and the germs by playing jazz covers
all day. It’s tough not being able to jam
with the guys: jamming is our bread
and butter, as John the bassist would
say. I told them I’m tired of these
strictures and just want to play in front
of a crowd again, see all those faces
and the joy unmasked. Hey, they expect
a storm the day after tomorrow, so
I’m hoping for one of those crazy
blizzards that will blow and freeze
away this bloody virus, wash it clean
off the streets and walkways and window
ledges and off our cloistered minds. And
you know who I want to hear—I want
to hear Billie Holiday sing the snow
is snowing, the wind is blowing, and
when she does I’ll improvise something
like that feeling you get when ice melts
down the back of your neck, and my
bandmates will stop their playing, look
at me in surprise, and wonder where
that one came from.

—Submitted on 12/11/2020

Francis Fernandes‘s poems have appeared in The Zodiac Review, Amethyst Review, Beyond Words, Third Wednesday, Montréal Writes, and other journals. Having grown up in the US and Canada, he lives in Frankfurt, where he writes and teaches.

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Jona Fine
My body only wants to live in velvet

a very specific green gold—mossy
I want everyone to feel how soft I am but
you’re on the other side of Zoom
I pretend it’s comfortable to sit cross legged knees up
I contort and smush my body to frame myself
in hopes that you will notice
that you will text me
telling me how much you wish you could
rub your face against my velvet thighs

I only want to live in velvet because—loneliness
I only want to live in velvet because I am alone
and have been alone for a very long time
I only want to live in velvet because I never have to leave my house anymore

touch is something I took for granted
the last time I hugged my sister and she was surprised by that
she doesn’t believe me, that one of my love languages is touch but
she doesn’t come over enough to know my closet is
filling up with velvet and
sometimes I sleep in it

—Submitted on 10/18/2020 to the erstwhile series What Rough Beast

Jona Fine‘s poems have appeared in journals including DryLandLit and Polari Journal, as well as in anthologies. A 2016 Lambda Literary Fellow, they hold an MFA in poetry from Naropa University. Living in Colorado, Fine works at an LGBTQ youth suicide hotline and lives with their leopard gecko, Max.

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Michael Cunningham
The Great Communicator Communicates

(Camera pans into scene of the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan, in very orange make up, speaks.)

“Before I refuse to take your questions, I have an opening statement”

“What would this country be without the great land of ours”

My fellow Americans, “we are trying to get unemployment to go up,
and I think we’re going to succeed.”

“Poverty is a career for lots of well-paid people.” Especially in Washington.

“It’s difficult to believe that people are still starving in the country
because food isn’t available.”

My fellow Americans, “Trees cause more pollution than automobiles.”

We should use nuclear power. “All the waste in a year from a nuclear
power plant can be stored under a desk.”
Although, no one in Washington will sit anywhere near it.

“Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession.
I have to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”

“I never drink coffee at lunch. I find it keeps me awake for the afternoon.”

But “I have left orders to be awakened at any time in case of national emergency…even if I’m in a Cabinet meeting.”

“My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve signed legislation
outlawing the Soviet Union. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

“Let us pledge to each other, so help us God, that we will make America great again.”
Thank you and good night.

(Lights fade out on Ronald Reagan.)

“How could an actor become President?” Oh, we’re still rolling?

(Blackout)

Editor’s Note: The poet avers that all statements in quotation marks are actual documented statements of Ronald Reagan.

—Submitted on 10/17/2020 to the erstwhile What Rough Beast series

Michael Cunningham is a school librarian and outdoor nature educator trained in Waldorf education and biodynamic farming. He lives in New York City. 

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

Melissa Eleftherion
Two Poems

New Biota

To be natural & occurring
Internal order of a structure
Fine-grained translucence
Some failure
Salt carvings for the landmine
Geyser what cherishes
Salt all the bodies
Salt the wounds
To purify & extract
We are magicking through
Equinox of vortices
We salt our way
Let the coarse granules
Mix & cleanse
Let the clear stones
Light a path
We coax & glide
We move through
tear-drop shape
opening
We suffuse
We crackle in the mixture
Fold in like new
biota—
or erosion—crystals
rising in one fluid
wash—we
effervesce with
its life we
heal

There is no separation
We maintain & coalesce
We part & whole
Clover & cup

Justice

We’re coming for you//dizzy with sweat & consequence//

Disoriented and still reeling//Our collective body politic

A dull quick-moving consumption//alive with the pain and suffering of its people

Its monotonous movement over the city//how crowd culture grows like a festering boil

rancid with its own racist heat //its own clamor for the oyster

how the snapping conch aches to trap the vile many in its pearlescent teeth //its grit
sealing its ardor//the crowd is a dull roar//but we are unifying we are
gathering//strength and you won’t see us coming//

—Submitted on 11/21/2020

Melissa Eleftherion is the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018), little ditch (above/ground press, 2018), and trauma suture (above/ground press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Entropy, Flag+Void, Lunch Ticket, Pith, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and other journals. Born and raised in Brooklyn, Eleftherion lives in Northern California, where she manages the Ukiah Library, teaches creative writing, and curates the LOBA Reading Series. Online at apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.

SUBMIT to Transition: Poems in the Afterglow via our SUBMITTABLE site. 

If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value Poems in the Afterglow, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.