Nights of Dirt [a love letter from Ophelia to Hamlet] Your mother once said all the Hamlet men seemed to walk beyond their deaths. I listenedpolitely. I was never one to believe in ghosts. Down here I wear my own stone crown, skirtsof startled soil. Sometimes the stars ignite the dark, & I’ll find myself more breathless,heartless. Once, I imagined the pitch & yaw of the bird in your soul: You, in court. You,among fools. I would have been your branch, unsettled by the storm but unbroken. Instead,I reach through nights of dirt. Is that you, my lord, arguing yet with the fog? Brittany N. Jaekel writes from the Twin…

Blueberries I’m seduced not by their plumpness, northeir sometimes-sour midnight skin,but rather by how your tall frame bendseach morning at the low freezer drawer,hoists the big bag, pours a clanking handfulinto your bowl, then (beep-beep-beep,vrrrrrrrr) heats them in the microwaveto grace your Scottish oatmeal. It’s not their sweetness, no, it’s the routine—how it creeps into our lives blindlywith its cool quietude, its fresh comb of honey—that makes me want to grasp too tight.I am, after all, my father’s daughter;his gritted teeth, his flex-jawed smile,they’re also mine. But I want us held fastby something more than my fixed gripand stronger than my small fingers;something intangible, reliable, tender. I’d like to draw…

Downsizing My new neighbor is out there again, this time plunking weeds from his flower beds into a plasticbucket. Yesterday he used his shrieking leaf blower to wreak havoc on his six-foot-squareAstroTurf lawn, sending yellowed magnolia tree remnants flying into the street. When he and hiswife moved into our retirement community of manufactured homes a month ago, I said hello onthe sidewalk. We chatted about where we used to live. He said: We downsized from a five-bedroom house on a half-acre in the foothills. What we used to do. I said: I was regional directorof human resources for a hotel company. Now as I see him through my window working…

Dispatch from the second morning of my sixth migraine hospitalization When the nurse wakes me up at 5:30am to ply me with electrodesI literally scream my way out of a dream. Apparently Thorazinecan pull your QT like taffy, and if it gets too long you’re out of luck. I pass my EKG and am awarded a gelatin capsule with a hundredtiny pearls in its casing, a pharmaceutical crown. They give youthe Benadryl first so you don’t fly out of the cuckoo’s nest when they startthe drip. In other fun facts, it turns out squeezing Thorazine through your veins makes your noseso stuffed that even as the drip pulls you under,…

Cleaving, We Respond to a Fascist To crack open a window shreds the spider’s workas to smash an egg along the sharp glass rim kills possibility,defunct already. Soon enough all will be broken. A zipper shreds cloth I can’t hold together, teethplacid, irrevocable. One guest leaves behind a hair fastenerand so, like cirrus, her white mane flows freely down her back. She won’t return here to claim it.We are all near death but speak only about the stateof our days in a world coming apart. If we say “seamless” or “inevitable” or one such word cowardswill use to mask their horror at helplessness we jointhe pack, don’t we, foregoing agency…

Black Feathers It’s time to stoop and gather up black feathersfrom corners of the run we built, its sidesa type of chain mail meant to bar the mostdetermined predator. One found the onlyhole we missed, squeezed small and burrowed into stun our pullets one by one—the chickswe named and trained to trust our clumsy handsas if our care could keep them safe. This morninga stillness tipped me off to what I’d find.Though we spent hours fashioning this fortress,death outspent us, fueled by one sure thing:it would outlast us, worming its way in. April Lindner is the author of two poetry collections—Skin (winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Prize from…

Two months into the trial separation a man offers me coke in a hotel bar30 years or more since my last time, racingthrough campus as a light snow fellon the black balloons I gripped, propsleft over from my friend Carl’s productionof Suddenly Last Summer, the coke racingmy already high strung body, high strungmy mother’s words for the anxiety she andmy father grew in me with their fracturedunion—my father’s fist to the dining tablemy mother’s excuse for my father’s fist—so that in the conference hotel bar the manhas to talk me through it, the bathroom stallthe key, how I only need a little and he’s rightI party with him all night…

Poem Where I Confuse Halloween for Groundhog Day The husband and wife are in their small bedroom, talking about whethershe will leave him for the woman she loves. This conversation takes placeevery day. She sits on the green club chair his parents gave themand he balances on the edge of their sleigh bed, rocking back and forthon the curved piece of cherry wood that sold them on the bedroom set.He lists the reasons she should stay: he would like a chance to makethings right and the boys deserve their family to remain intact. She looksat the pattern on the chair cushion and wishes she were a tiny, sewn,yellow flower, indistinguishable…

A Review of Romeo and Juliet Silly plot. They die before the drama begins—raising children, paying the mortgage, deciding where to go on vacation,when he likes the Alps and she the Riviera. It’s over before she complainshe comes too fast then falls asleep, before he rues her lost figureor the way her nose, in age, turns like her father’s. How long beforeshe pegged his friends as bores? I’d have seen them liveand suffer more. Valerie L. Egar‘s poems have been published in Barrow Street, Lullwater Review, The Closed Eye Open, and other journals. Her creative nonfiction essay, “Cross Stitch” is forthcoming in The Literary Forge Magazine. When she is not…

Mission Church Hall, Sydney I hunt a chair, a heart thump awayfrom the door. Sink into my seat, an imposter. A teen declareshe’s been clean for three weeks. A chorus of applause. His mother’s tight eyes,flighty smile from the trenches. I begin to steep in their ritual of confession. Envious,I dream your face at the door— what miracle that could set in motion.Obliged to explain myself— I trash my sugar cravings, workcompulsions, feign coherence, confess I’m waiting for my brother.A copper-haired woman sobs, thanks me for the memory joltof her family’s anguish. Others ghost-stare. I’m a montage for the parents and partnerswhose love they stunted. Don’t admit I tried to…