Fair Lane All our moments are last moments.                          Jens Jensen, landscape architect Many people are trying to find better waysof doing things that should not have to be done at all.                          Henry Ford Gold scum on the pond in the Clara B. Ford Rose Garden.The tin roof of the tea pavilion creaks.Yew hedges train themselves to the limestone wall,and the low-gradient river babbles where those “vagabonds”Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, John Burroughsand Harvey Firestone rowed and discussed strategiesfor coaxing the proletariat (they wouldn’t have used that term)to…

Make a Fuss (My Mom Tells Me Again) with lips that thunderafter me      vocal cords that wake the dead in every womanless room where speaking       is like eating dryer sheets she demands of me louderagain but         L  O  U  D  E  R sing againstsilence             let confidence ring: a barbed tongue       chattering       for release I become mouthy                     my wordsshards from a shook-up soda can                    spitting and exploding                  …

Opening to Your Dark Eye The electricity buzzed out,extinguishing the dinner party;my mother sighed over table elbows,hurried dinners, and napkins tossedaside on plates dribbled with gravy—resuscitating an Emily Post adage:“Etiquette is the science of living.”She died. What did it matter? I divorced embossed stationeryand sold the Steuben candlesticks,each teardrop base entrappingthe shape of a Hershey kiss—like a bell that would never ringin chilly air (glass in its molten stateresembles the final design, a momentfrozen from process, said the maker). The movers shattered my collectionof blue Haviland porcelain,and I caved to dining with the dimmerturned down and thought spelunking,caught in the tale of your eye blindedby the errant swing of a…

Last night’s storm tore the star-shaped leaves from the maple, and the persimmon tree, already stripped of fruit, was left in a puddle of damp leaves. Sunset speared the bare limbs with shafts of orange light, which were there, then vanished. Beads of water hang from the leaves of the climbing fig, and a chickadee closes its beak over the heavy drops as if they were seeds. It’s mid-October, and the season’s last dahlias are small but ferocious. The nights will soon get even colder. The branches that I pruned from the white camellia weeks ago are in bloom. The withered limbs have somehow pushed out small, urgent blossoms from…

My Life as a Starfish An open wound floating on ocean,mangled limbs washed upon rocks. That there could be nearly nothing leftof my body, yet still I would persist. As if survival were a reflex.As if they knew I could not bleed. No blessings. No sympathy. No succor.No synapses. No sutures. No visible scars. And they called me a healer. I did not resume my yoga practice,nor silently meditate on wholeness. I did not subsist solely on quinoaand freshly snipped microgreens. I sank, heartless, deep beneath sandyshorelines, sucked salt straight from the sea.     Elizabeth Rae Bullmer has been writing poetry since the age of seven. Bullmer’s poetry has…

Guide from Beyond How will I visit you? How about I come to dinner, like we used to do, and drink too much wine. You will spend the day chopping, chopping, chopping, sharpening the knife, curling your knuckles back behind the blade, dicing onions, crying, oils sputtering, picking out stems from cilantro leaves, washing grit from glassware, placing polished silver at each named seat around the table. Here are her linens, you will say, as a puff of steam coughs from my old Rowenta. You will clip fresh marigolds into the chipped vase and not bother to trim the shaggy leaves. As usual, I’m running a little late. It won’t…

Reading a Buddy’s Badass Book Reading a buddy’s badass book about his tour of Hellin Vietnam, a book of poems that drive the horror home,I find myself enjoying every poem, smiling sometimes,hip to his poetics, his often gut-gouging metaphors,his always straight-ahead truth telling. After the last poem, after the covers close on his galleryof grotesqueries, I go to bed, have bad dreams,and recalling them in the morning when dawn light isthe washed-out gray of all those faces, I write poems,the only atonement I have, the only deterrent.     George Drew is the author of nine poetry collections, including: Pastoral Habits: New and Selected Poems and The View from Jackass…

Ladies’ Wear There’s a character in a TV show I watch— she runs Ladies’ Wear in a glittering department store with strict grace, every glove and hat in place, sweaters neatly folded, her salesgirls’ posture perfect, as in a poem, after hours, she goes in secret to the warehouse, undresses, and throws herself on her lover, the guy who muscles the crates and trades in contraband cigarettes, her flame.     Betsy Martin’s chapbook, Whale’s Eye, was published by Presa Press in June 2019. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, The Briar Cliff Review, California Quarterly, Cloudbank, Crack the Spine, Diverse Voices Quarterly (Best of the…

Indwelling This house and I have grown together the long familiarity of stasis blood and bone wood and plaster Each room known by feel the dark bedroom wall cool as my skin a stained glass round of flowers made by a friend, now gone friends leave us still the walls remain and the bedstead of ten thousand nights, sleepless or deeply lost At the window I stand in luna grayness looking up at spotlight moon from the place where I am thumbtacked to earth by gravity and custom the house holds a second shell grown inside cohabitants as wheat in chaff or stone in fruit     Fran Davis is…

Child-Rearing In the days of first breath, the newborn breeds a rash and since the fact of parenthood is now permanent you phone your mother for advice, a gift you think you’re giving of her own expertise, a chance to take part, but when she claims she’s got no idea what to do, can’t recall that was nearly forty years ago, and if she could remember now what she did for your skin no doubt today the medicine would be different, totally opposed, even, to a cream she might have applied with such care, back then, leaning over the crib and no real grave concern.     Blam-Blam At the…