Steve Cushman

“The Last Time”
2024 Pushcart Prize nominee

 

The Last Time

 

I found my father on the old porch swing,
wearing nothing but white Jockey’s, drinking
coffee and staring out into the yard, the back
alley, the two, tin garbage cans.  We’d been
up late drinking and playing pool.  We even
tried cards, but our hands were too shaky,
our words mere shadow.  It’s as if we both
knew this would be the last time we’d see
each other, so we were trying to get it all in. 
But that morning I didn’t go out to him.  Instead,
went back to the spare room and slept another hour.

When I finally made it back outside,
he’d pulled on a pair of denim cut-offs
and Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt he’d bought
at Zayre’s, not because he liked the band
but because the shirt cost $2.99.  He stood
by the old shed, watering the purple day
lilies until I said hey, want some breakfast?

We ate eggs, bacon, toast, and then
I drove the two hours home. When I
returned for the funeral three weeks later,
the lilies were shriveled to almost nothing.
I watered them, and considered bringing
them home, trying to resurrect them.
But they weren’t coming back.

~ ~ ~

Steve Cushman is the author of three novels, including Portisville, winner of the 2004 Novello Literary Award. He has published two poetry chapbooks, and his first full-length collection, How Birds Fly, won the 2018 Lena Shull Book award. A new collection, The Last Time, was published in 2023. Cushman lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, and works in the IT department at Cone Health.

Justin Hunt

“The Squatter”

 

The Squatter

 

I told you—didn’t I?—what happened
the morning I turned seventy.
How I squared up to the mirror
and discovered there a stranger,
and in that very moment made a cautious,
somber pledge to embrace that gnarl
of a man and grant him residence.  

But now, my dear, I confess: I’m kicking
the bastard out. I’m done with mirrors,
done with caution. Let’s slice our days
and slice them deep, feast on hours,
ravish minutes. And when October
lays down its angled light, let’s go back
to the beach. If we must die, let it be
with a crash of waves and tang of brine,
a whipping of wind, a tug of moon.

~ ~ ~

Justin Hunt grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. His work has won several awards and appears in a wide range of publications in the U.S., Ireland and the U.K., including, among others, Barrow Street, Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, The Journal, Solstice, Arts & Letters, The Florida Review, Bellingham Review, Terrain.org, Southword, Live Canon and The Bridport Prize Anthology. He is currently assembling a debut poetry collection.

Celisa Steele

“Watching College Basketball with My Mother”

Watching College Basketball with My Mother

  At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise...
 —John Donne, “Holy Sonnet VII”

 

From the second the referee’d blow
the whistle loud as Judgment Day, she’d not rise
from the couch, not during the eternities
of commercials. How fast those boys could go,
the uncanny precision of a cradle-arm throw.
I loved games, how they defeated the tyrannies
of bedtime. Even tired, I’d not close my eyes;
I’d sit with her to the end, victory or woe.

And now if I could reverse time and space,
I’d find that other universe beyond this world’s bound,
where boys in squeaky shoes and shining sweat run with grace,
like angels on the court, the crowd crescendoing in the background,
and she waits to see if the buzzer shot, spinning in the air, is good,
as the last seconds—dizzy infinity—tick in her very blood.

~ ~ ~

Celisa Steele's poetry has appeared in numerous journals and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In 2011, Emrys Press published her chapbook, How Language Is Lost. She lives in Carrboro, North Carolina, where she served as the town's poet laureate from 2013 to 2016. Find her online at celisasteele.com

Marceline White

“Mussels in Galway”
2024 Pushcart Prize nominee

Mussels in Galway

A mountain of mussels and him with a grin
wide as the opened shells piled high on his left.

The sky a beaming blue, the wind a whisper,
we ease into evening, and it’s so simple

to love him when he is happy, tender, vulnerable…
He slips a knife into the mussel, pries it open, slurps

down the briny mass with a grin. Who taught him to so casually
wrest open something that is closed to him? He is learning manhood

from the air around him. He’s heir to its mossy musk, its cask-aged catechism.
When threatened, mussel shells grow thicker, toughen to hide the softness within.

I read once that mussels marry their fates together, byssal threads from one mollusk
reach out, bind to another, gossamer thin, iron-clad tendrils.

This evening in Sardinia, a woman weaves these threads into silk, sea
silk so light, so supple, a pair of gloves would fit into a walnut shell.

Tomorrow on Inishmore, a woman will pick up needle and yarn,
knit a thick sweater, the cable pattern made by crossing one stitch

over another, a pas de deux between the threads, again and again stitching these

crosses together to form a rope so strong it holds against storm and sea. Am I

wrong to want you to live soft and open in this world?

Right now I want to knit you a sweater to keep you warm,
to keep you from unraveling,

to remind you of the tensile strength of tender threads of attachment.
Your face is as soft as sleep, as open as the shimmering bay behind us.

You twist the shiny new Claddagh ring round your middle finger, unused to its heft,
its hands and heart pointed upward, open to love.

When struck by sunlight, sea silk turns a golden hue.

~ ~ ~

Marceline White is a 2023 Best of the Net nominee and Baltimore-based artist and activist. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Harpy Hybrid, Scrawl Place, The Orchard Review, The Indianapolis Review, Atticus Review, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing, Little Patuxent Review, Please See Me, Quaranzine, Gingerbread House, The Free State Review, The Loch Raven Review, oiq11111182www and others; anthologies include Ancient Party: Collaborations in Baltimore, 2000-2010, and Life in Me Like Grass on Fire. Essays, op-eds, and other writing have appeared in Woman’s Day, Parents magazine, Success magazine, Baltimore Fishbowl, Baltimore Sun, and Mother Jones. When not writing or engaged in activism, she can be found learning how to better serve her two cats, posting too many pictures of her garden on social media, and reminding her son to text her when he arrives at the party.