After I Lose the Love of My Life

 Sharon Waller Knutson 

 

   
Shannon, Sharon and Linsi

By Sharon Waller Knutson

The most traumatic event of my life was June 30, 2025, when I found my husband/soulmate/best friend/caregiver dead on the floor. I was devastated because I loved being part of the team of Al and Sharon for thirty years. Now I was totally alone or so I thought until neighbors, most of them strangers, started showing up to help and some are still here. As the first anniversary of his death approaches, I share their stories.

After Paramedics Tell Me My Husband is Gone

Kathleen is the first neighbor to show up.
All six feet of her. Silver pony-tail
swinging like the tails of the mules
she rides past our house before
her husband got dementia,
and they gave up the livestock
and now she walks an old dog
and feeds an aging cat 
on forty acres, three miles from us.

She hugs me, murmurs sorry,
and then heads for the bathroom
to say goodbye to my husband
who lies on the floor like a mannequin.
She sits by my side when the medical
examiner, a tiny doll like woman, arrives
and asks me in the voice of an accuser
why it took me so long to call 911.

“I couldn’t get a dial tone,” I say
“So I kept shaking his arm and telling
him to please wake up. I thought he fainted
like he did three times before.” When
the medical examiner looks skeptical,
Kathleen puts her arm around my shoulder
as if to shield me from being arrested
since my home is swarming with cops.
“Phone service is terrible out here,” she says.

She is still by my side when I say “Goodbye
Sweetheart I love you” and kiss him on the forehead
as he lies on the stretcher like he is sleeping.
 “He looks so handsome, just like when I first met him,”
I say and the medical examiner leaves with my husband.

As does Kathleen, but she is back banging on the window
as I field phone calls from family with her husband
and a bowl of cantaloupe and cottage cheese 
which he spoon feeds me as food and fork
flies from my shaky hand while she fries up
the lamb chops my husband had defrosted for dinner.

I feel faint in the shower the next day. “Panic Attack,”
my son says. I tell him to call Kathleen, who is a nurse.
“You look so pale,” she says as she takes my pulse.
“You might be anemic.” She exchanges nurse’s cap
for angel wings. “There is an Afterlife. I’ve seen it  
when I was seventeen and survived a car accident,”
she says, confirming that I will see my husband again.

She says a prayer for me and then gives me a bed bath
and promises she will be back on her day off
from her job at the hospital and her husband
would check on me every day. After six weeks,
she returns the key and says she is sorry
but at seventy she is too exhausted from working
12-hour shifts at the hospital to help me.

“Hi Luv,” says Sylvia as she sashays into my house
at five foot two. She brings me spinach, tomatoes,
a dozen eggs and fig biscuits she baked with oats.
As she helps me shower and shampoo, 
she tells me her German grandfather built
a brick house when he was her age - eighty.

.

Sylvia

After My Sons Return to their Lives and I am Alone

I answer the doorbell and there stands a seventy-
year-old short stout sumo warrior dead ringer
and I sniff the scent of baked fish and chicken,
vegetables and mashed potatoes. He introduces
himself as Bobby, the owner of the men’s retreat
a few acres away and says he brings free food
his partner, Rick, prepares at the bed and breakfast.

Every Tuesday and Friday afternoon he shows up
with food and advice, “Take it one day at a time”
as he does at the 12 step meetings he runs at the retreat.
Our hands and feet chop the air as we do Tai Chi
to build up my strength and solve balance problems.
He sings songs he wrote himself or covers in a band
and strums the guitar as I clap and compliment.

On some Fridays he brings pictures of his dearly
departed wife and mother and says he still talks
to their photos every day and advises me to speak
to my late husband. “It’s okay for you to be angry
at him if you feel abandoned,” he says.  “Get it all
out.  Scream and cry,” he says.  I sit there numb.
I never cry until Bobby says goodbye
and moves his retreat 100 miles from here.


After I Take too much Benadryl in the Middle of the Night

I am lying on my back 
on the cold, hard tile
in my shorts and top, frigid air
freezing bare skin, scooting
towards my Life Alert button
dangling on the bedpost
and walker desperately to reach
the phone that shrieks nonstop
like a May Day Signal

when I hear a familiar voice calling
“Miss Sharon” and see the blonde
in the ponytail, thinking she stumbled
upon me while delivering free meals
from the café she runs with her husband.
She takes my outstretched hands and lifts
me to my feet and puts me back in bed.

Weeks later as Robbin feeds me roast chicken,
mashed potatoes, broccoli and baby carrots,
she tells me my son had called and asked her
to check on me after I didn’t answer the phone.

Driving the three and a half miles on the dirt road,
she worries what she would do if she finds my dead
body. When she leaves, she says, “See you in a day or so.”
“What if I die?” I ask. “Well, I’ll see you in heaven,” she says
hugging me tight as she does every time she leaves.

I find myself on my back on the floor again.
But I think it’s morning and when a painting falls
on my head, I think I’m back in bed until I see Sylvia
with her short gray hair teetering on wedgie sandals
and a strange man standing over me. They each take
one hand and pull me to my feet and get me back
in bed. “I brought my husband since I can’t lift
more than 70 pounds,” says Sylvia. “It’s nighttime. 
Your son will be here in the morning.”

I pick up the phone in my hospital room.
It is Robbin saying she called every hospital
in the area to find me and she will take me
home. But it is Sylvia in her trusty truck
who pulls up the curb and helps a nurse
get me out of the wheelchair and lift
me into the passenger seat and drive
me forty miles home as my back aches.
It is Sylvia who checks my vitals and gives
me oxygen as she helps my sons nurse
my bruised bones back to health 
so I can walk without pain.

Hank and his wife, Jeannette

After the Holidays, and my Sons Leave Again

“Do you know my name?” asks the six-foot tall 
sixty something muscular man, his mop of white
hair flopping, as he stands holding a carton 
full of bowls of omelets, salads and meals of mashed
potatoes, roast chicken and vegetables. “George,” I say.
 “I’m a chef and I own the café,” he says.
“I know. You’re Robbin’s husband,” I say.

I figure he’s testing to see if I am senile
and I fear I’ve failed when I remember Robbin
calls him Scott. I apologize and he says both names
are correct. He’s George Scott the second. 

Sometimes he delivers food with his wife Robbin,
a beautiful blonde who refuses any money for the food.
Robbin says she wants to help me because she cooked
for her mother and grandmother when they couldn’t
cook for themselves. “God will reward me,” she says.

George and Robbin give me updates on the orange
tabby they rescued from my courtyard and adopted.

“Survivor almost let me pet him today,” Robbin says.

“I roll around on the floor with him twice a day,”
George says. “But he hisses at Robbin.”

One day George says he just found out I was a famous
published writer and wants to be my manager
and sell my books in the café.  As he leaves 
with a handful of books, he says. “If the paparazzi
contact you, send them to me, your manager.”

When it is cold, windy and rainy, George shows up
with a hatchet and his buddy, Hank, a short, slim
sixty something man with gray hair and heart trouble
and they chop wood and light a fire in the wood stove.

When the wind blows over my satellite dish and I lose
internet service, my son messages Hank, who helped
him repair the leaks in the roof. Hank calls me 
and says he is on his way and is bringing George
in case he gets dizzy from the heart medicine.
I am so tired I fall asleep and awaken to George 
waving a bowl under my nose as if it contains smelling salts.

“We’ve been on your roof,” he says. “I brought you a shrimp salad.
Where do you want it?”  As I go to the table to eat, I hear
Hank say, “Try the internet now. I bolted down your satellite dish.”
I tell Hank to take care of his heart and not worry about me.
“I think of you like a mother figure. Like it or not, you’re part
of my family now and I will help you,” Hank says. 

“By the way, the wife is baking you some banana bread
since you loved the last batch. She bought organic bananas
just for you.” The doorbell rings and Hank introduces me
to Jeannette and she visits with me as I eat a slice of her banana
bread and murmur, “Delicious.” I’m addicted and eat another
slice. “That’s why we brought you two loaves.” Hank says 
as he splits wood. “We’ll be back with more banana bread 
when you run out. Just call me.” They lock the door behind them.

Shannon and her niece, Lindsi, bring salad, sour dough bread
and chocolates in the fall. “The last time I called your husband 
from Wal-Mart in the spring, he said he was fine,”
Shannon says. “When I emailed him in the summer, your son
emailed me back that he was gone.” We didn’t know them
when we lived in Idaho, where they still summer. but Shannon
knew us for a decade when she and I hosted church potlucks.
I meet Lindsi for the first time, tell her I went to high school
with her Aunt Sue, who died shortly after my husband died.
Lindsey recognizes my husband from the photos on the wall.
“He used to come into my father’s Ace Hardware store in Idaho.”


In the Month of March: My First Birthday Without My Beloved

Hank builds a fire and turns up the space heaters 
when I shiver as Sylvia suds my body and hair 
in the shower. The phone goes dead as it rains
slow and steady. I hear my son’s voice 
from a thousand miles away talking 
through the Ring camera speaker in my kitchen
telling me he has scheduled a repair but when
the rain stops, the phone rings and I hear Hank 
and Sylvia’s voice on the line loud and clear.

Outside temperatures climb from 50 to 95
as the refrigerator door warns in red letters 
to change the air and water filter.
I stand at the sink shaking as Sylvia simmers
salmon in a skillet and George shows up
with salads and entrees and holds me 
in his strong arms. “You’re okay,” he says.

Fire ants march in the kitchen like soldiers
and I drown the army in the sink. The skin
on my arm stings and itches and I see a burn mark
left by an ant that escaped the massacre
and soothe it with gel from the aloe vera plant
growing in the courtyard. When Sylvia
shows up, she pours cinnamon on the heads
of ants and traps them in the plastic garbage sack.

Shannon and Lindsi are back with salad fixings
and sour dough bread. Shannon washes dishes
while Lindsi empties the garbage cans.
They say they will return in April with food
and friendship and do household chores.

One of Robbin’s meals goes rancid and I dump
the chicken, mashed potatoes and broccoli
in the front yard for the birds. Hank delivers
new meals for Robbin and George and after
he leaves I find a box of new filters on my doorstep.

George shows up with food and his friend Donnie 
and shows him the house and furniture my husband
built with clay and cactus and says he will bring smoked
salmon, salads and sour dough bread for my birthday dinner.
Donnie buys my poetry book dedicated to my husband
and says his 80-year-old widowed mother would love
to see the house and meet me. I tell him to come anytime.

A voice on the computer shouts “Severe heat
Warning” as the thermometer soars to 105 degrees
two days in a row and 84 degrees when I wake up
at sunrise on my birthday to the shrill voices of quail.
For supper, I dine on smoked salmon, spinach salad
and sour dough bread at the table my soulmate built
with saguaro cactus and imagine him sitting on the chair
across from me smiling and singing Happy Birthday, 
glowing as bright as 84 candles and a full moon.

Book of the Week

 Balance (Moonstone Arts Press 2025) by Laurie Kuntz 


 

Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

Wise and skillfully crafted is the best way to describe Laurie Kuntz’s new poetry collection, Balance, in which she opens up her life to us and gives us insight into how to balance marriage, motherhood and aging and learn how to live with the curve balls life throws us.

I think the life lessons she teaches us are best summed up in the last stanza of the title poem,

Balance:

We need that balance 
to embrace an endless summer state of mind
while dancing in the eye of a storm.

This is how Laurie Kuntz describes the book:

“Balance contains poems about my expatriate existence, cross-cultural experiences, and assimilating back into my own American culture as an aging woman, parent, and partner to the person with whom I share my adult life.  Balance is a collection of poems, which reflects upon finding a place of safety and acceptance while grappling with societal and personal issues of dissension, alienation, and assimilating into one's personal strength and identity.”

Praise from the Poet’s Peers: 

Laurie Kuntz’s Balance is filled with rare insights into interstitial moments, those in-between times when love is neither new nor exhausted, when we are aware of our lives as works in progress, moving toward an unknowable future. Kuntz tells us, “We know we live on a brink, / brink of storm, brink of heartache, brink of all that breaks.” It takes courage for a poet to explore that brink, to live in it, and to allow us to live there with her, in a place without posturing, guarantees, or false promises, but if there is value to our lives, it comes from noticing the flashes of meaning we can find there, such as “A screen door held open or gently shut / after shared cups of chamomile tea on a rainy day.” As Kuntz reminds us, “Between the landing and next jump / are the daily interactions that prove us human.”

– George Franklin, author of A Man Made of Stories.

"There is much wisdom in this book. The voice that holds these poems together is one of experience, insights, and empathy. Laurie Kuntz writes beautifully and truthfully, and in her we trust. Balance contains the still point that we need to get us through these tumultuous times."

 – Bunkong Tuon, author of Koan Khmer and What Is Left


“In this deeply moving collection of 25 poems, the quiet rhythms of marriage, the slow arc of aging, and the ache of grief are brought into focus.  The verses in Balance are simultaneously tender and unflinching.  They explore moments in life that place one squarely on a fulcrum, striving for balance and perspective.  The world and its continual wars also bring a personal and collective need for reckoning. One leaves the pages of this book with “an astonished and renewed light” (“Solstice), and a new respect for Laurie Kuntz’s resonant poetic voice.

 – Judy Ireland, poet & author of Cement Shoes (2013) 


Some of my favorite poems:

Options

In the beginning,
we had time to tally
who spited, who hurt,
who forgave first.

We could nurse our anger
for weeks turning it into a game,
until one of us cried "Uncle."

We bullied time thinking 
it would never fight back,
but now time wins and winds
around us with an aging wisdom.
 
It hardly matters who dirtied  
the new white towels,
forgot to turn off the lights,  
lock the back gate,
ate the last poppy seed muffin, 
broke the porcelain coffee mug, 
or refused to kill the spider.

One of us will always be left  
hungry, in the dark, afraid 
of things that crawl into open entryways.

In our waning days together,
we can no longer waste 
the time that stretches between us.

Our history is branded by the flames we create.
We can choose to stay in the pan, or jump into the fire.


While My Husband Forgets Our Anniversary

He is making tomato sauce on a rainy Sunday
he grows tomatoes , good for the prostate, 
which I do not have, but I like his tomato sauce, nonetheless.
I offer to help him cut the soft overripe batch of ruby Comparis,
my hand nervous on the knife, after all he is oblivious
to this day, 55 years ago that we met, 37 wedded legal ones,
somewhere I have the paper to prove it. 
Later, he calls me back into the kitchen, asks me to taste--
questions the flavor, the saltiness.
Perhaps a dab of sugar is needed.
Don't burn your tongue he says, as I lift
the spoon to my lips, and tell him it is perfect.


Long Division

In the framed photo 
that sits on a dusty sill, 
the two of us draped
in a landscape of wildflowers,
flowers only you could name:

larkspur, foxglove, yarrow.

We were envied
for our spirit and the grace 
in which we walked, talked, and loved.

You believed in the overall 
goodness of every gesture,
I fixated on details, 
dissecting all we  shared:

larkspur, foxglove, yarrow.

I was the worst of us,
You had the more genuine smile,
the thicker hair, the thinner frame,
the floating gait, the accepting heart.

This kind of  love between opposites
 can only remain intact
when put in a gilded frame:

larkspur, foxglove, yarrow.

We parted in summer, 
when the lavender bushes were in full scent.
Now, approaching another bloom
you come back to me, but only in this photo 
where we walk those blooming paths:

larkspur, foxglove, yarrow.

 Once, in an uninterrupted dream,
I saw you in a crowded bar--
a place you would never enter... 
far from rural hideouts.

(continued with stanza break)


You were surrounded by friends, 
the kind I have now that you are gone
they loved you, not me. 
In this dream, you were the best of us. 

I am foolish to ignore the years falling 
like rusty coins from a frayed pocket.

When I stare at the photo,
engraving your weak smile into memory,
I still try to do the math of forgiveness,
but you are bent on long division.

Sister, sharer of secrets, maker of plans
until the plans never ripened 

Unlike, larkspur, foxglove, yarrow.

 

 Between

If our lives were lived in a straight line
like holding ends of a jump rope--
one turner madness, the other magic,
we would learn to rise in rhythm
with each arc of the rope and all that happens
in a moment of becoming airborne.

Between the landing and next jump
are the daily interactions that prove us human:

The nod of passing hikers scaling an uphill trail.
The placing of coins in a palm by the shopkeeper
after asking how your elderly mother is doing.
A screen door held open or gently shut
after shared cups of chamomile tea on a rainy day.
The manicurist who shapes your nails into a spring color palette.
A pitanga bush overhanging the bridge
never failing to drop its red dappled berries into the lap of April.

Each handshake, hug, and embrace
is a life in the telling, stories that will end
in a skip, jump, and final landing
between madness and magic.


Balance

I could write endlessly 
about all things foreboding--
hurricanes and turbulence
more likely due to  warmer air 
that carries us to  a season 
we hope to thrive in.

From June's blossoms come 
a life in harvest,  
dark soil blankets the roots 
of all that green:
a pasture, cross haired vines, 
meadows abundant with wild petals 
upon petals, every bloom opens 
to summer's endless embrace, 
and we live as if nothing will ever end.

But, an end always comes,
hurricanes and turbulence takeover
a country's spirit, a body's betrayal,
an erosion of simple kindness.

Yet, somewhere a child 
is learning to ride a wave,
someone's mother is picking lilacs and lavender,
a father holds the seat of a two wheel bike
promising not to let go. 

We need that balance 
to embrace an endless summer state of mind
while dancing in the eye of a storm.

Can’t Let Go of Being Let Go

Shoshauna Shy

 

 
Shoshauna Shy

By Shoshauna Shy

This series of poems involves the finale of my 28-year administrative assistant career which ended in 2021 during the pandemic.


PANIC

They say we don’t remember 
what others tell us as much as how 
they make us feel

and so it’s a raw November wind 
at a picnic table in this wooded park 
where my office mates and I once
gathered in photo-ready outfits 
for pizza on workdays.
My boss is seated there 
waiting for me.
The wind is strong enough to blow
her black hair straight off her shoulders

hair at a length dictated by the pandemic 
that has kept us out of hair salons.
Her black mask covers the scars 
around her mouth that her dog left 
when he bit her.
She says she is cutting my hours—

which means I will lose my health 
insurance while my husband undergoes
a needed surgery, and if I retire, I’ll draw
a higher income from my pension.
Of course she doesn’t spell it out that way—

but the cold water splashing 
down my windpipe does
               

OUSTED

A coworker tries
to help me weather
a forced transition
to retirement.
Remaining in the workplace,
she is estranged from her daughter,
has a son out-of-state,
and a husband lying captive
in Memory Care.
Mine is young enough to tour
Japanese gardens, lay flooring tile,
trim a honey locust.
Savor what you have
she pleads with me

while I yearn for the office
with its calendar pages
and klickitat keyboards,
the duties rotating
on their biweekly cycles.
Four clerical decades,
and no need that it end.
In my banishment, 
I imagine the staff
lounging in the sunshine
of paid vacations,
feathering nest eggs
with the skimmed cream
of paychecks, gathering
at abundant potlucks
to discuss new projects,
new schemes.
Those days I played lighthouse
greeting their arrivals
frayed to bits by a long pandemic year;
I, gray-haired in my ankle hems,
blown away like dandelion fluff.

You have a husband, a brother,
your kids, your mother–the rest
is just bullshit! 
my coworker claims.
And yet I have yet
to let that all go:

the lather-rinse-repeat 
of working weekdays,
somewhere to show up and belong,
the chance to begin all over again
once a new Monday rolls around.


STUCK IN TRAFFIC
EN ROUTE AN INTERVIEW
FOR A JOB I DO NOT WANT

I’m a Tonka truck
on remote surging
in vain to cross
a threshold; roadkill
on the shoulder that
a crow pecks with
its beak; incoherent
garble between radio
stations; the pink fabric
in the other lane flattened
by oily tires; the fly
banging itself against
the windshield miles
from all it knows;
that bumper sticker
half shredded ahead
in which the only 
remaining word is
FUCK



THREE YEARS INTO RETIREMENT

Like a boot heel meeting
the aid of a shoehorn, I renew
residency at the job from which
I was fired during the stay-at-home
lockdown because somewhere in
my subcortical region, denial surges 
at 3 AM and I dream I am winging 
up Glenway Hill to update the database 
with donations, write a descriptive eval-
uation, arrange a board luncheon 
with pecan pie because that clipboard 
and calendar are still mine along with 
the mail to open and sort.
I go incognito when my boss appears

sheathed in black rayon shiny as a crow
or I ghost-float away as the woman 
who replaced me arrives to begin her day.
My coworkers don’t hiss What are you
doing here? but clutch me in relief 
I’m back.

Book of the Week

About to Disappear (Shanti Arts, 2025) by Robbi Nester

 


Comments by Sharon Waller Knutson

Magical and musical are the two words that best describe Robbi Nester’s poetry collection, About to Disappear. Stunning our senses, she showcases her talent for vivid imagery and skillful craftsmanship by painting poetic portraits of people, creatures and landscapes as beautiful as the artists whose work she interprets.

About the book by Robbi Nester

My book, About to Disappear (Shanti Arts, 2025), is an ekphrastic collection with images for many of the poems. Ekphrastic poems respond to other works of art, whether they are other poems, visual art, film, dance, music, or other art form. In this case, all the poems were inspired by visual artworks, many of them famous. I either collaborated with the contemporary artists or the images were in the common domain.

About to Disappear is a poetry collection that explores the limits of ekphrasis; that is, descriptions and reflections on works of art in order to expand their meaning. The book is separated into four sections: Ex Nihilo, Adaptation, Law of Attraction, and Ad Nihilum. The first and final sections-translated as "from nothing, returning to nothing"-act as bookends. Ex Nihilo includes poems about imagination, optics, creation, and and development; while poems in the final section, Ad Nihilum, are about trauma, unmaking, climate change, and catastrophe. Poems in the middle sections are about artistic, psychological, and physical transformations, and natural history and community. Artworks included are from contemporary artists-as well as such artists as Vermeer, Grant Wood, John Singer Sargent, and Edward Hopper.

Praise from other poets:

According to Leonardo da Vinci, 'Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.' However, in Robbi Nester's fabulous new collection, About to Disappear, nothing vanishes. We see poems, art, the poet, and the world. Nester's lyrical conversations with artists as diverse as Joseph Cornell, Robert Rhodes, Beth Moon, Edward Hopper, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Sally Gall, and even da Vinci himself chart new territories for ekphrasis. Indeed, About to Disappear functions like a gallery in which every poem could be on a wall, talking to everything else in the room. In one of her poems to van Gogh, Nester writes, 'I feel blessed just to be here.' I couldn't agree more."

-Dean Rader, professor, University of San Francisco; author of Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly

"'The mind is always brewing something . . . ' begins the mesmerizing collection About to Disappear. Part magic trick, part treatise on the imagination, Robbi Nester's ekphrastic poems lure and transform. 'Any plain ingredients, ' the poet explains, 'can rise to the occasion, becoming / a new thing.' Gathering memories, art, science, myth, history-even furniture, sea stars, and aliens-Nester delves deeper into and far beyond our own lives. Like the octopus Nester describes in one poem, each ekphrastic response is 'exactly the shape of whatever / it needs to be.'"

-Marjorie Maddox, author of In the Museum of My Daughter's Mind and Small Earthly Space

"As expansive and magical as the worlds it describes, Robbi Nester's poetry collection, About to Disappear, is a luminous, shape-shifting exploration of perception, transformation, and the alchemy of time. By the light of ekphrastic inspiration and with the deep attention of philosophical inquiry, Nester's poems transmute the ordinary into the extraordinary as clouds reform, light shifts, and unseen 'roots and tubers chart their path through darkness' beneath cold earth. 'Subject only to the weather, we / sail above you, understand solidity / as an illusion. In time, / wire rusts. Wood grows porous, / stone swells and contracts / so often it reverts / to sand, ' Nester writes, reminding us that nothing is so permanently wrought into form that it will not eventually dissolve and reclaim its wild potential, becoming, once more, the possibility of a new becoming." 

-Melissa Studdard, librettist / lyricist, podcaster, and poet; author of Dear Selection Committee and I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast

"In About to Disappear Robbi Nester takes inspiration from many different artists and perspectives, but one thing remains true: the poet is the paintbrush . . . and more. Each poem stands on its own and does not require the reader to see or know the inspirational piece. You may want to check out the art later, but there is no need to see the pieces to understand the poems." 

-J. P. Dancing Bear, writing consultant and editor of Verse Daily


American Gothic

  After Grant Wood’s portrait
Weathered as the barn behind them,
hard-eyed and narrow, this pair
has a history that never needs to be spoken—
all the bad harvests, floods, ill fortune. 
A few sparks shielded between their palms.
What little they own they built themselves.
No patience for roses. When they look
at the golden fields, they see only
what those sheaves will buy—a new roof,
some boots, a mule. They teach this
bitter wisdom: we must wrestle
this angel, the earth, until it yields, 
must take what we can
before the storm comes, 
before we return to dust. 

Evolving Sirenian
   After a painting by Sallie Swift

Everything in the ocean becomes something else.
Colonies of coral, once a soft carpet of color, 
become brittle and white, the stuff of island sand.
The octopus embodies this quality of change. 
Exactly the shape of whatever it needs to be, 
the octopus pours itself between two rocks. 
Its tentacles curl like breakers, tangled kelp fronds.

Caught in the act of transformation, the octopus 
takes on the blue and orange of a large carcass, 
flesh peeling in flakes from its side. Then, it 
disappears, skin puckering in mock putrescence, 
eye gaping like a wound.  No wonder sailors 

wandering at sea once mistook this creature for 
a woman, hair trailing behind her in the green-blue 
surf, singing the most beautiful song.


Flamingo in Lake Natron, Northern Tanzania
  After a photograph by Nick Brandt

From above, the lake seems a kind of paradise, 
the breeding ground of many migratory birds. 
Already, flocks dot the shore. Yet the water teems 
with hundreds of fallen birds looking for a place 
to stretch and preen.

Those lured by the mirror of the lake’s red water, 
so bright it’s visible from space, will die in this
runoff from the volcano, Ol Doinyo Lengai. 
Their feathers harden into clumps of brittle string, 
flattened winter weeds. Their wings lie heavy, 
will never feel the touch of air again.

The hollow reeds that were their legs stuck fast 
in silt, the boiling water thick as blood, 
a bitter brew that turned them all to salt.


On Adaptation 

  Inspired by After the Rain (1879), Arkhip Kuindzhi, Solaris (1972), 
      Andrei Tarkovsky, and Solaris (1961), a novel by Stanislaw Lem

I peer from the portal, afraid to find
some portion of my past projected
on the mirror surface of this alien 
world. The field beside the barn 
takes shape as I watch, wrenched 
whole from its foundation in memory, 
dropped like a seed onto what had been 
bare rock between two continents. 
In this incarnation, the rain has just 
ended, will soon begin again. 
Dark clouds brood over the fields, 
flashing, phosphorescent,
like deep-sea jellyfish. I suppose 
at home we’d call this night,
and yet it isn’t quite, something other 
than the ordinary. Cows still browse, 
yet the sky, spent by the storm, 
has at last left off illuminating 
the surface of the planet, 
a task taken up by this bright meadow, 
this farm, simulacrum of our green island, Earth.

Still Standing

After Ivy and Winslow, David Graeme Baker

At first glance, I think she is a teacher
drawing on the chalkboard. One finger
rests on the crevice where the chalk is kept.
The other arm sweeps wide, into an arc
on the board’s murky green surface,
where transparent moon-jellies swarm:
words poorly erased. She drafts a magic
circle to protect her. Yet her feet are bare,
standing in a pool of long-dried paint,
as in a spotlight. I decide this is an abandoned
school, site of a shooting, now her studio,
where she can drop the line of her imagination,
netting the unexpected, lost voices of a thousand
children and their teachers. She probes a past
she doesn’t really know, like a scientist who
studies creatures making their own cold light
in the deepest ocean, dreams and dreams again
about this ruined room, its light and shadows,
settled dust, compelled to paint it in bright hues,
to return and make this place a kind of shrine,
left standing to remind us of all that has been lost.

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http://www.robbinester.net/
 

The Traumas of My Life

 Rose Mary Boehm

 
Rose Mary with her parents and brother in 1945 right after the war ended.


By Rose Mary Boehm

The first poem is about the day of my rebirth. I suddenly fell very, very ill. The doctors suspected meningitis, until one doctor decided to do a brain scan, when they discovered a benign tumour of about three centimeters in diameter. On 26 December, during an operation of approximately ten hours, it was extirpated. Almost all of it, except for the hard core. My ex-husband was there, my new husband, my kids, my boss, his friend… and everyone else rooted for me, I was buoyed by love. And I flatlined. And it was glorious.

The second poem touches on the same subject, but muses about the past I left behind, wondering whether—if I survived the operation— I would still be able to remember it all. Also: I had left my already quite grown-up children in London and moved to Spain because my marriage went south and things, for a while, became rather unpleasant. Leaving my kids—even though they were already 20 and 22—had made me feel exceedingly guilty.

The others are about me during WWII in Germany. I was born in 1938 and was one year old when the War started. It’s amazing how much of a traumatic time a child remembers.

All poems are from my collection, LIFE STUFF (Kelsay Books.)


Menginioma

Perhaps I should have felt
something akin to gratitude,
as in “Uff, I am still here…
so glad to be alive!” 
Instead, I took it as mine by right.
With indifference.
I existed before and I do now. However,
something important happened between. 
And where was I?

You were my steely walker. 
Both arms around my waist, my feet on yours,
you took me for our daily slow waltz
along the corridors of that place
where I was birthed again. 

When you danced me to the bathroom,
when that steamed-up mirror showed me
this alien drooping, drooling mouth,
your eyes still loved me. 

How did I get there? How 
did I fall into a gap filled with fragments 
of someone I remember still? 
I do recall 10 million termites feeding 
in my skull; eating into carmine 
and sharp yellow, swimming 
in poison green across the ocean
on the inside of my eyes. 
My cranium - too small for armies 
of that magnitude - pushed out 
my eyeballs. Fever shook me. 
Was that how it was? 
I saw you there. 

The surgeon’s face leaned over me:
“Señora, it’ll be the day after Christmas.”
and took my husband for a man-to-man.
They brought a wheelchair.
Curiously, I was grateful.

At the appointed time
someone wheeled me into cold. 

Eleven hours, I was told, they sliced 
and hunted spidery extensions 
that had invaded furtively a territory 
I had believed inviolate. 

Locked into a choreography
of life and death, a part of me
remained awake.

We consign our bodies to oblivion
until some of it goes missing,
or perhaps plays host
to 10 million hungry insects.

I may have laughed.

The surgeons don’t speak English. 
Could someone in my present situation 
manage foreign tongues? Perhaps I ought 
to be more solemn. After all, this is about MY life. 
Isn’t it funny? 

Some bad footage of my film
was left behind in that cutting-room.
Will there ever be an uncut version?


I Find the Healing Fairy in An Old Suitcase

It grew for 14 years, he said.
14 years of sleepless nights, pain, love, laughter, good health,
the time in a woman’s life when so many delete
us from the records. 

Fusili frutti di mare in our favourite Italian,
the critics’ screening of ‘Midnight Express’,
the première of ‘Superman’, 
seeing and being seen in ‘San Lorenzo’s
in London’s Beauchamps Place,
hanging up the washing in the garden,
picking the kids up from school,
the other mums worried about lice,
something not meant for the well-heeled.

Dad lunching with a young woman
whose long, dark, curly hair hid her face.
He didn’t see me sitting a couple of tables to the right.
He only had eyes for HER…

My son wants his birth certificate. He is 16, 
his latest girlfriend is 24. She suggested they get married.
My daughter’s first boyfriend, she sneaked him in for the night.

It’s been eight years since Dad’s lover
broke through the magic circle I’d had painted
around all of us with imaginary chalk.

Many MacDonald’s and Pizza Hut’s later,
we have supper in the same favourite Italian restaurant.
I explain why I must leave for a while.
It’s hard to find the words,
and we grow silent.
Look at our plates.

Many miles from what had been home,
the headaches start. The fever. 
Meningioma, he says. Benign. But the operation
may seriously affect your motor skills.
‘Then again, she may not make it’,
he says, almost to himself.

They all rally around. Fly in. The ones I left,
the new friends, my old love, my new love. My daughter
gives me a healing fairy: long stripey legs, big grin, small, floppy wings.
The kind of wings that don’t get you off the ground.
The surgeon hangs it on the bedpost 
when they wheel me into the operating theatre.

12 hours later I can hear their laughter and know
that I’ve been forgiven.


Another Spring

In those last days, boys in uniform
came past the house where mothers
would fit them out with their own son’s trousers
and shirts —the weather had turned mild.

In those last days I didn’t sleep a child’s
sleep. We'd shuffle to the shelter
that smelled of cool earth, moisture
and things growing on wet walls, settle

into the night counting the seconds, minutes
from the first droning. We waited
for deafening obliteration. I shivered
and crept further into my blanket

when we heard the bombs make contact,
the staccato of strafing fighter planes—
the Flak had long since made a vow of silence--
and boys using bazookas

on anything that moved.
On one of those last days my brother
pushed his teddy between my praying hands
and I found solace in worn tufts of wool.


The Moment a Lightbulb Goes off in Your Head
  
I remember that long, long road on which I walked
to the train station. Thoughtful and elated.
A road I knew so well but this time it was endless.
Every time I looked ahead, the station
seemed as far away as it had been
before I set out.
 
The last time I’d seen him and felt his arms
lifting me up was eons ago. I had been little then.
Now I was grown up. I was eight!
Would he recognize me?
Would I recognize him?
 
In the station yard, some people were sitting, waiting.
Mother had given me some Pfennige (pennies)
for a platform ticket. 
More people were milling there.
The train was not due for another ten minutes,
but trains just came when they could.
 
I saw the steam before the train.
People hanging from doors, sitting
on any available little platform or footplate.
Some on the roof. 
 
As people streamed off the train and filled the tiny platform
I felt very lost and near to tears. I had never scanned faces
so thoroughly and quickly. One last old man walked out
to the other side of the barrier.
There was no one else.
 
And I stood there and grew up.
The train slowly puffed away,
forcing itself onto the long climb up into the hills.
As the last carriage passed, I looked across the railway lines. 
And he was there.
His trench coat, his hat, suitcase in hand,
smiling at me and walking across the rails.
He jumped onto the platform and looked at me.
 
I did not move. I stared in shock—and then it was easy.
It no longer mattered.
What had just happened was irreversible.
 
When my father died, I was far away.
I managed to be at the funeral.
I managed a tear or two.
I felt loss and the loneliness
of being shoved onto the front lines.
I wondered why I was empty.
 
Just now I understood:
I had done my mourning when I was eight.


Crossing Illegally from Germany into Germany

At seven I walked that long road
past farmer Bauer’s geese, left at the church,
left again at the brook, over the small bridge,
past the school caretaker with his scary grin
to take my seat
with the local kids. 
I, the refugee. 
I, the one with the strange accent.
‘Heil Hitler’!

My teacher had hairy legs
and big calf muscles that went in and out,
up and down as she biked along the school path.
I stared.

Under the bridge, by the brook, 
I found my friend the frog and stroked
his slimy head, his whole little body seeming
to breathe in and out fast and in panic,
but it stayed, hypnotized
by my gentle finger.

The cockerel waited by the shed. I tucked him
in under the tiny blanket of my dolls’ pram. 
I covered his comb with a little blue hat
my mother had crocheted
for my doll,
his wattles fell to one side,
his protective membrane closed.

The street names changed
to Marx, Engels, Lenin…
I received the coveted blue scarf,
became a Young Pioneer.
The teacher with the big, yellow teeth 
taught me Russian.
Mother decided that this was enough.

In the train chugging towards the border
my attention was on Mother.
I looked at my brother.
In the wooded copse I rested my head
on the backpack I’d dropped
onto a patch of woodruff.
It also smelled of ceps.
I thought of Grandpa.
I sensed danger when Mother said
to wait for darkness.

The soldiers unfolded from the night,
standing on the higher ground, silhouetted against
the starry night sky.
The clicks of their safety catches.
Even though my brother had finally
given me his Teddy, I peed myself.

Super-Sized Series

The Soundtrack of Our Lives

 

 
Sharon and Al Knutson

Waltzing with my Walker by Sharon Waller Knutson

Chris Stapleton sings: “You are smooth
as Tennessee Whiskey and sweet
as Strawberry Wine” to me like you did
in your cowboy hat and red shirt

with your dark hair slicked back
in Fritz’s Café while wildlife
you photographed stared
at us from the walls.

Your bearded best friend and bandmate 
batted his blue eyes at me behind
your back while the racoon tail
swung on his lead guitar.

None of us dreamed that in a decade
you’d both be dust in the desert
and I’d be waltzing with my walker
while wildlife watch through the windows.

“Go rest high on that mountain,”
Vince Gill sings. “I wish I could see 
the angels faces when they hear 
your sweet voice sing.”


Don't Think Twice It's Alright by Laurie Kuntz

Some things I will never do well:
So when you picked up your guitar,
  and asked me to sing, 
after a slight hesitation,
 unsure if the air was riddled, 
I followed you into song--
Dylan being our captain, 
certain that the chorus 
was a metaphor for our lives,
“we both gave our hearts by sacrificing a bit of our souls,”
but perhaps it is time to ignore the words,
and relish the cadence, 
the moment --
we are both carrying the tune.


Eighteen Wheeler by Judith Waller Carroll

That old song’s running through my head again,
the one whose title I can never remember

about the trucker driving through a snowstorm 
to his waiting wife and kids. 

The song that made me have to pull over
every time I heard it

those endless weeks before the birth of my son
my emotions so close to the surface 

anything would set me off.
Even now, as my brain plays a loop 

of the only lines I remember
I’m back in the Stop-N-Go parking lot

my enormous belly grazing the steering wheel
tears streaming down my cheeks 

as Mama gets the news that the Man Upstairs
was listening and Daddy is coming home

joyfully singing, “Roll on...Roll on… Roll on”  
as I pull back onto the freeway

and drive the rest of the way
to wherever it was I was going. 
 

 
Phillip and Rachael Ikins


I Want You to Stay by Rachael Ikins

“I have died every day waiting for you” Christina Perri’s song “A Thousand Years”, my twenty-something self falling into your brown eyes, steady pools over your mask, your hand’s warmth around mine before sleep.

“I have loved you for a thousand years” speaks my heart, yet how could I know this on an operating table in this OR.

A silver curl escapes the neck of your scrub suit, Hozier’s lyrics “Take me to Church” my truth, “good God, I give you my life.”  “You sharpen your knife,” and yes, “this is hungry work.”

This saving me. Your name scrawled beneath my armpit forever, where you cut, touched my heart as you removed what was damaged.

Six months later we healed, together, 
that first visit your magic pocket produced eggs, cream, butter, omelets for my empty cupboard.  Your eyes invited with Rhianna, “Stay”
“If you dare, come a little closer.” 
My refrain took up the verse,
“There’s something in the way you move,
I want you to stay.”

Now I wonder if that was real, 
some memories, visions more solid than reality, the colors, scents, lyrics singing from an iPhone not yet invented when you saved my life; records, cassettes, CDs and you, gone, 
the way my chin fit into your collarbone’s hollow, like an egg in a nest we were 
once that close.


Spring by Tamara Madison
 
Someone loans me her cassette 
of Paul Simon’s latest album. 
I listen to it as I watch snow fall 
through the pines outside the window. 
“Four in the morning/crapped out/yawning.”
 
I listen to it as I watch snow whiten the river. 
“In my little town I grew up believing”
Listen to it as the ice begins to soften
“God keeps his eye on us all.”
 
We are nearing the end. Grass and mud 
begin to show through the ski paths. 
Soon kayakers glide down the river, 
finding channels through the ice. 
“Step out the back, Jack.”
“Make a new plan, Stan.”
 
People were nice to us here. 
We didn’t mind being sequestered. 
It was a long 15 months, felt
four times as long. Decades later
my mind returns to the icy river,
the snow-bound woods,
whenever I hear these songs:
“Still crazy after all these years.”

Poet’s Note: This poem is from my upcoming collection, Russian Honeymoon, a memoir about the 15 months I spent in the USSR as a young bride. This poem is set near the end of the tour, after 15 long months of the hard work of being young Americans in the USSR, tasked by the U.S. Department of State with "telling America's story to the world."


Long Play Records by Mary Ellen Talley
Dedicated to the One I Love

Sure, we sang along with Leslie Gore’s
“Sunshine, Lollipops, and Raindrops”
but our ideal was Simon and Garfunkel’s
“Bridge Over Troubled Water,” even as we swooned
at Paul McCartney singing “All My Loving.”
Time scratched our grooves. We replaced LPs 
with cassettes we had to rewind with pencils.

James Taylor, then with full head of hair 
contemplated “Fire and Rain” but romanced us 
with “How sweet it is,” and every time I felt 
“You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman,” 
I slid Carole King’s music in the cassette slot
even though I was struggling
to be my own version of Gloria Steinem.

Mama Cass sang us into “California Dreamin’”
and the Beach Boys revved up 
“Good Vibrations.” 
Every song dove deep
into angst and joy. We knew “Don’t Worry Baby” 
meant more than just a car race 
back when scarcity of birth control
could scare the crap out of any couple.

Now new cars aren’t sold with CD players.
Our kids grew up with iPods
and I was too busy to make playlists.
Everybody’s streaming onto cell phones
while we play retro stacks of CDs.
Our son who values vinyl
knows despair is still “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

We’ve stopped buying new paraphernalia.
Our son gave us a turntable for Christmas
so we can play old vinyl 
As the stylus descends, we listen to Elvis sing
“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”
then The Righteous Brothers “Soul and Inspiration”
as we move about the living room in a slow dance.


Sweet Betsy by Joe Cottonwood

Happened in a grocery store, 
I was fondling a can labeled 
Betsy’s Sweet Peas, reminded of 
“Oh do you remember 
Sweet Betsy from Pike
Who crossed the wide prairie 
with her lover Ike”
which made me wonder if 
Ike and Betsy were, like, 
making whoopee out of wedlock
all over the wide prairie 
before finally they marry 
at the end of the song, 
a song they taught us in 
grade school for Pete’s sake 
when a stranger with infant swaddled 
to her chest blocks the Safeway aisle 
and sings soprano:
“With two yoke of oxen, 
a big yellow dog, 
A tall Shanghai rooster 
and one spotted hog.”
“Excuse me?” I say. “Was I singing? Out loud?”
“Better,” she says, “than the crap they’re playing.” 
Harmony, you know, is intimacy. Instantly.
We, strangers pushing carts. 
The baby wide-eyed, silent. 
A minute later from the next aisle 
I hear her soprano: 
“One evening quite early 
they camped on the Platte.
'Twas near by the road 
on a green shady flat.”
But she falters. Over the shelves I offer:
“Where Betsy, sore-footed, 
lay down to repose
With wonder Ike gazed 
on that Pike County rose.”
Ah, love, and the day is plenty. 
The infant wails. 



Plastic Pipeline by Lynn White

“He’s got a plastic heart, plastic teeth and toes,
plastic knees and a perfect plastic nose.
He’s got plastic lips that hide his plastic teeth and gums,”
so sang the Kinks then about their plastic man in 1969.

Now in the twenty-first century it seems he’s here
as plastic gushes everywhere
over land,
over sea
and into our very being
as plastics ingested from our food,
and inhaled in from the air we breath
become part of our bodies,
part of ourselves
to be inherited 
by our children.

We fill every hole in the ground
and soon the sea will be transformed into plastic land.
We re-cycle it by the shipload from rich places to poor,
places where the people don’t matter,
where “plastic man don’t feel no pain”.
There we dump it on the newly plasticised people 
in the plastic land we’ve created for them.

First published in Ekphrastic Review challenge for Benjamin Von Wong


A Car That Could Fly

By Joan Leotta

Domenico Modugno sold me my first car when I was twenty-seven. Although a Northern Virginia Chrysler Plymouth salesman pocketed the commission, Modugno's award winning song, Volare convinced me to buy. The rolling lyrics of this ballad about love, achieving one's dreams, and the simple freedom of dreaming one's way into the sky, were stamped on my psyche. 

I duly wrote it down my Dad’s advice but…. when the salesman showed me a blue, two door model of the car inspired by the song, the words "Nel blu dipinto di blu (in the blue sky, painted blue)" filled my brain. 

Distracted by the car's beauty, I didn’t notice any problems, bought it and named it, "Victor." At first, Victor seemed to be all I had dreamed. Then, came the problems that made me a regular at the repair bay. Worked fine there but as soon as I got home, Victor would refuse to start without ten minutes of engine warming. Victor's good nature was only paint deep.

When my job offered me a two-month assignment in Dallas Texas, I accepted with alacrity and opted to make the three-day drive. Once arrived, Victor’s starting problems continued so I took him to a Dallas Plymouth Dealer. They healed him! Together we flew along Dallas highways and explored Texas byways with nary another starting issues.

Just before Dallas assignment was finished, I sent a postcard to a guy back in DC who had laughed when I told him I’d bought a Volare. A few months after my return to DC, fall 1977, I married Joe, the laughing guy. 

Yes, a car is really nothing more than transportation from point A to point B, but there are days when I swing onto the highway in my current vehicle and gasp for joy at the  wide expanse of blue across my windshield, a sky so big that the road seems to disappear into it and I sing," Blu dipinto di blu”,  as I escape happily piu in alto, (higher) than the sun,  My everyday self disappears lassu (up there) and my dreams take over. Volare!








 

Book of the Week

 Scrap: Salvaging a Family (ELJ Editions 2026) by Luanne Castle

 


Comments by Editor Sharon Waller Knutson

Fellow Arizonian, Luanne Castle is a masterful storyteller so it was no surprise to me when I couldn’t put down her unique well written memoir, “Scrap: Salvaging a Family,” until I had read it from cover to cover.  With powerful and poignant poems and flash fiction she tells the story of her chaotic childhood in description and dialogue so vivid it was like watching a movie.

Synopsis: Scrap: Salvaging a Family

Luanne Castle’s hybrid flash memoir explores the stain of childhood fear and anxiety on the adult spirit and the experience of reconciling with an aging or dying parent. A daughter has grown up in a household with an angry and abusive father. He keeps the secret of his biological father’s identity from his daughter for decades. When the elderly man faces his mortality, he finally names his father. The more the daughter learns about her father’s early life and origins, the more she understands him which leads to forgiveness for the past. 
Praise from Luanne’s peers:

Borne of shame and trauma, the secrets uncovered in Luanne Castle’s hybrid memoir reveal her father’s complicated childhood and the impact it had on their relationship. Told in brief, strikingly vivid fragments, and through various perspectives and forms, the book as a whole presents a deeply moving and unforgettable account. We readers are privileged to bear witness to this emotional excavation, one that ultimately reminds us that love is powerful even when it’s painful and that forgiveness is the only way forward. Scrap: Salvaging a Family is a gorgeous and brilliantly original collection. I highly recommend it.
–Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works

Luanne Castle’s “Scrap” is a memoir in flash. In flashes might be a more accurate term. This is a family story told in bursts of memory and image, puzzle pieces waiting to connect. It’s a young girl’s coming of age, navigating a path to womanhood out of hand-sewn dresses, gym class movies shown behind closed doors, stacks of moldering girlie magazines discovered at the dump. A girl living in the shadow of her father’s anger, violent and unpredictable as the tornadoes her family hides from. Behind the father’s anger, a missing piece. A hole where a father should be, a “space of unknowingness” both child and father must try to fill.
This lyrical, beautifully imagistic work is both an exploration of the long roots of generational trauma and identity erasure and a vivid look back at growing up female in mid-century America.
–Kathryn Kulpa, author of A Map of Lost Places

The vignettes in Castle’s Scrap are beautifully rendered. With house as vessel, we are voyeurs through her domesticity, the skilled lens of speaker Luanne’s traumas and perseverance as she navigates the rawness and fragility of youth. The book is both powerful and arresting—Castle is a deft miniaturist—each story etched with a fine blade, yet a delicate touch. Scrap is a collection of constellations of the ordinary.
–Robert Vaughan, Editor-in-Chief of Bending Genres, author of ASKEW.

 
Luanne as a baby with her father Rudy

Excerpts from the book:
Scrap
A scrappy boy fuses
himself a father out of wants
Out of the gritty street pavement
Out of throwing away the hurt
Out of fighting and scraping
punching cracks and potholes
Scrapyard salvage appeals to him
Each scrap reveals a system
Steel gears, bolts, and bushings
rake heads, trowels, posts
wire aluminum and copper, tin
everything, brass hinges, fittings
he rearranges and solders into
magical monstrosities 

My father was scraps of before
initials instead of names
his father before him scraps 
of place and name, the secret
middle name shared under 
its double-locked hiding place
What do I do with a sack of bits
his mother’s scissors left behind? 
Love’s been stitched into me 
by her threaded tongue 
By the snips and wisp
The junk or trash, recyclable
material, remnants, fragments
Puzzle pieces awaiting home

Below is a portion of a flash story introducing Luanne as a child and her father Rudy. 

At the bottom of the steps, you walk into a room without walls, merely a corner of the basement. Up high, one casement window looks out into a window well sprouting weeds and dead leaves. A man throws his efforts into the project. A little girl, face like a cup, watches his Superman arms crank the vise handle and tighten the grip. The girl is me, and the workbench, its surface scarred slick by hammer blows, belongs to the shoemaker’s elves that visit the man when I am asleep. He presides over the saw, aiming for the pencil line, sawdust falling away on each side as snow does from a plow. On the pegboard, pliers and screwdrivers line up by size like Goldilocks’ bears. I sit behind the man who is my father, the chilled concrete floor twanging my backside.

 
Luanne as a baby with her mother and father

This poem is about Luanne’s mother:

Mommy’s Keds bend almost in half.
The rubber soles jut out at the folds.
I feel a spit of jealousy at the smart blue label
at her heels. My mother kneels, facing the tub,
the can of Comet in one hand, a sponge in the other.
I can’t figure out why our bathtub needs scrubbing
several times a week. She might wear off
the shiny porcelain finish if she keeps this up.
Why don’t you go dust the living room?
I should have just kept walking fast past the door.
She likes me to dust, but she does the real cleaning
herself. It has to be done very well.

The book is divided in three sections. The first section is a coming-of-age story, told in flash and poetry. It shows Rudy’s anger, Luanne’s anxiety, Rudy’s hard-working single mother, and the missing piece that must not be spoken of—where is Rudy’s father? 

I wonder why I’ve never heard of Dad’s father. My mind is still inside the book when my father stops by to see if I’m ready for ballet. “You ready to go?”
“Dad, where’s your father?” 
My father’s face colors a dangerous red. Although he’s a small man, he fills my open doorway. He’s in HELL! The exclamation point seals off my question. Zip. Period. End of subject.

The middle section is a disembodied therapy section. The third section is in later years, when Rudy finally tells Luanne about his father and the two begin to reshape their relationship. Throughout the first and third sections are brief reflective pieces that “interrogate” Luanne’s memories. The middle section is also reflective and sheds light on the workings of Luanne’s mind about the events of her relationship with her father. Scattered throughout the book are imaginings of periods in Rudy’s life. In the middle therapy section he tells one of his Korean War stories. It foreshadows his loving grandparenting of Luanne’s adopted Korean children.

I might as well have eyes on the back of my head and in my ears because I feel theirs on me all the time. Whether I’m weeding or nailing framework, they are close by, watching. Who knows what they are thinking. Some of them are missing fathers. They’ve either been killed or will be. The kids are supposed to stay outside the wire, but they are so skinny and malleable that they slide in. Yesterday, Jake tossed a few Hot Tamales into his mouth, then had the decency to look embarrassed when he saw their eyes and mouths open wide as if they could taste the candy.

We finally got our guns, so sometimes I’m on guard duty and get to return some of the attention. There’s one girl, maybe 11 or 12, who I see bossing the little ones when they get too near where we’re working. She’ll be pretty one day, but right now I only know she’s a girl by her ragged dress. I’ve noticed her sneaking cabbage rinds out of the trash. Of course, I pretended I didn’t see. Sometimes she gives me a smart mouth though I must imagine what she’s saying. Maybe it’s “go home, American.” She might imagine that we’re the reason they don’t have enough food. Every day I hope I get a package. But it hasn’t come yet.

Rudy is awaiting a package of candy from his mother for the children.

In the third section Luanne researches her father’s father, eventually finding a DNA connection with a relative and acts upon this match. As she puts the pieces together, Rudy falls seriously ill, and he and Luanne begin to talk every day. When Luanne visits her terminally ill father, he hands her a diamond ring from his finger just before she leaves for her plane. It belonged to her grandmother before her father had it made into a man’s ring. The diamond is flawed and is a metaphor for the relationship between Rudy’s parents. 

This is the diamond in the thick gold band that I carried home through the TSA line in the pouch with dimes and nickels. You’re the only one that knows its story. On the plane trip home, I read that when a meteor strikes earth, diamonds form in an instant. Some foreign bodies contain trillions. And iron, fire, silicate. But this was an interruption so that I could sheath my emotions. 

The facets are cloudy with soap and my father’s sweat. At the open jewel bath, I stop. I can’t make myself plunk it in. Should I wear you or throw you in the lake? Do you know the ways to obtain a diamond? 24/7 open pit, marine, and coastal mining year-round, year upon year. But there are other ways, too. Both legitimate and illegitimate. Ask my grandmother, if you know what I mean. Nobody else wants this shitty diamond that looks hacked in two with a silver blade.  

About the Author

Luanne Castle’s poetry and prose have appeared in Copper Nickel, River Teeth, Your Impossible Voice, JMWW, Grist, Fourteen Hills, Verse Daily, Disappointed Housewife, Lunch Ticket, Saranac Review, Pleiades, Cleaver, Moon City, Moon Park, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bending Genres, BULL, The Mackinaw, The Ekphrastic Review, Phoebe, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Gone Lawn, Burningword, Superstition Review, One Art, Roi Fainéant, Dribble Drabble, Flash Boulevard, O:JA&L, Sheila-Na-Gig, Thimble, Antigonish Review, Longridge, Paragraph Planet, Six Sentences, Gooseberry Pie, Switch, and Ginosko. Her story, “Garden Seasons,” was selected for Best Microfiction 2026. She has published four award-winning poetry collections, and her ekphrastic flash and poetry collection Hunting the Cosmos is forthcoming from Shanti Arts in fall 2026. 

Scrap: Salvaging a Family (ELJ Editions 2026) is available on the ELJ Editions website as well as Amazon.

To buy the book contact Luanne Castle at luanne.castle@gmail.com