Countless Times, the Raspberries

Your parents are dying. Mine are already dead.
I have no words of wisdom, no comfort for loss.
It keeps coming and coming, sneaky bastard.  

It pops up in songs and closets, in the curve
of the highway, in the shimmer of sun on a lake,
in spring, in old sweatshirts and the lost lace  

of a shoe, white snake, crisp tulle, a ripped
seamed glove, the empty porch swing. You
cannot escape it. Not ever. And so I offer  

instead raspberries in a blue bowl. I offer
their miniscule seeds, the tart taste
and the green leaves, the name of Germanic  

origin: Anglo-Latin vinum raspeys,
or from raspoie, meaning “thicket.” I understand
grief as thicket—dense, unyielding. Once  

in California, my mother and I picked the berries,
held them up as jewels and laughed. Her face
like a child’s, bright wonder alive for a moment— 

alive, alive— When the bees hum, I remember.
You will, too. Not much else is always.

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Christine Butterworth-McDermott's latest book of poems is Evelyn As (Fomite Press, 2019). Her poetry has also been published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, The Normal School, The Massachusetts Review, and River Styx, among others. She is the founder and co-editor (with M. Brett Gaffney) of Gingerbread House Literary Magazine.

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E. R. Lutken worked as a physician for many years on the Navajo Nation, then taught high school science and math in rural Colorado for several more years. Now she spends time writing poetry, and fishing in the swamps of Louisiana and mountain streams of New Mexico.  Her poems have appeared in Mezzo Cammin, Plainsongs, Thin Air, Think and other journals and anthologies. Her poetry collection Manifold:poetry of mathematics is to be published this year. Website: www.erlutkenpoetry.com

My Mom Will Die Someday

Toward the end of the middle of my mother’s life,
she lines up her pills next to her dinner plate like bullet points:
a list of malfunctions I’ll certainly inherit. Evening settles
in like thromboses, halting my nervous awakeness with a clot—
and in the closing dark, the curtains hang puckered and unmoving.
Does she have a pill to stop the stillness from gripping those eyelet hems,
the stagnant air of summer, 7 p.m.? I remember her gathering the bones
of small animals in a cracking pail, veins of setting sunlight
just out of frame. The girl she was then was so concerned
with how to carry what she came here for. Better to leave
something behind than to lose it all at once. The unstoppable nighttime,
the never-absolute darkness will never hold still enough, will always waver
and wink, always grow older until it becomes the ambivalent morning,
when all of this blue is different. The gold cabinet of evening
begins to purple and close, and stays that way: purpling.
I think I want to find her now as she sits at the table,
swallows the pills with a glass of milk and then it’s over.
Down the dark hall.

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Hayley Bowen (she/her) is a poet interested in how language is used to immortalize everyday life. She is currently an MFA candidate at Syracuse University. Hayley is an avid craft beer enthusiast, a terrible knitter, and shares her studio apartment with her pet moss ball, Peat.

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Herman Sutter (poet, librarian and volunteer hospital chaplain) is the author of the chapbook The World Before Grace (Wings Press) and a long-time reviewer for Library Journal. His work has appeared in: Saint Anthony Messenger, The Porch, The Ekphrastic Review, tejascovido, The Langdon Review, Iris, Benedict XVI Institute, Touchstone, i.e., The English Review, The Merton Journal, blonde on blonde, as well as the anthologies: Texas Poetry Calendar (2021) & By the Light of a Neon Moon (Madville Press, 2019). His narrative poem “Constance,” received the Innisfree Prize for Poetry, and “The World Before Grace,” a poem for voices (about surviving the Bataan Death March), was honored by the Texas Playwrights Festival. He is also the author of the blog The World Before Grace (and after) in which he contemplates the countercultural paradox of finding grace through the loss of self.