To escape from the extreme temperatures, plan to spend some time indoors with the latest issue of damselfly press. We’re eager for you to dive into the story “Things We Think About When We Drown,” and submerge yourselves in the refreshingly unique poems we’ve selected. “SOLSTICE” reinforces this dreamy, lingering time of year, and asks us to revel in these slower days of summer. Soon enough, we’ll be back to the grind. So relax and enjoy.

Our thirteenth issue will be available October 15th, 2010. If you’d like to submit, please visit our guidelines section and send us your submission by September 15th, 2010. Thank you to all of our submitters.

SOLSTICE

She is happy her father has come without excuse.
Against glowing moths and Milky Way, they collect
flashlight, matchbook, the box of fireworks.
And since he is happy, they sing and arrange
cardboard tubes, volcanoes named jade garden,
butterfly burst, stairs to heaven
in the middle of the gravel drive –- silver
and orange fountains repeat and fizzle.
The girl hops and gasps. She has both parents
to herself, for her mother has come away
from the house and dances in dark circles,
waving sparklers from each hand, looping
light, but who can follow wild cursive
she inscribes on sky, of love that flickers
and falls in this longest lit night,
letters that will not be sealed
and sent, but burnt beneath flesh
forever as happiness, in the girl’s long life.

- Barbara Rockman teaches poetry in private workshops and at Santa Fe Community College. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Bellingham Review, Calyx, Concho River Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Quiddity Journal. She is the winner of the New Mexico Discovery Award, The MacGuffin Poets Hunt Prize, the Southwest Writers Prize, and the Baskerville Publisher’s Prize. Rockman’s collection, Sting and Nest, is forthcoming from Sunstone Press.

the spider, its bite

It was as if we weren’t our kind any longer, that we might not nurse the words that tasted less and less like dust, gasoline, might forget the things that kept our feet calloused, left us fashioning mountains with our spines pushed upward, our necks curved as valleys, exposed, in contrast.

Waking in thirst is not knowing a father, knowing instead a woman’s desperation, knowing nicotine and too-tight denim, knowing mattress, knowing floor, knowing the withered pages of a bedside bible by pressing our tongues to the ink, shaping our mouths in practice, learning to speak as prophets, as kings. And even then, as we lay in bed thumbing the pages by candlelight, we were children who would not wake, would not know God.

As it stands now, drawer-tucked, yellowing, spine gnawed to powder by years past, this bible is no mystery; I know what it means. You were prom queen in ’99, wait tables, lost a daughter. Sitting alone on your smoke break, you know what it means.

I remember a crisped field this time last August, our spent bones spread in dusty drowse beneath the heat. You spoke about a deadly gossamer spun between these ridges; our kind does not pull against it, will not reach beyond it.

- Amanda Mitchell Dutton is an undergraduate at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia. She is in the process of completing an English degree and has not previously submitted to any literary journal. Her work consists primarily of poetry.

Re-reading Desire Lines

I begin reading the page
with its corner turned down,
a reminder: This is where we left off.

And then you are here again;
A cut along my finger, a rock
in my hand, a telephone ringing.

You spread the fingers of one hand,
dreaming of food, delicious asterisms
of wine and gravy, something boiling.

I often dream of you in the kitchen:
Glass of gin and simmering pot nearby,
your wooden spoon, offering a taste.

The Saintpaulia grow in clusters:
Slender, flowering peduncles
on the windowsill facing East.

Your body is a constellation;
a recognizable pattern of limbs
beneath blankets, unmoving.

- Adrienne Lewis is a poet, educator, and native of Saginaw. She puts her many talents to work for her local literary community. A full-time faculty member at Michigan’s Davenport University, her creative work has appeared in numerous online and print venues, including her two chapbooks: Coming Clean (Mayapple Press, 2003) and Compared to This (Finishing Line Press, 2005). She is the editor and publisher of the Symbolon poetry newsletter.

What the Camera Loved

The ear – its marvelous, warm shell.

How the ear slowly dissolves into the profile.
The profile’s remoteness.

Retreating from the face to the figure
– lingering on the hands –

from the figure to the dusky air.
Shouldering the quiet.

Into Great Silence: the wooden floor,
its trapezes of light angling into black.

The curving ear. The dark.

- Leonore Hildebrandt teaches writing at the University of Maine. A native of Germany, she now lives off the grid on the coast of Maine and is a member of the Flatbay Collective. She also serves as an editor for the Beloit Poetry Journal. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Salzburg Review, Cider Press Review, and Quercus Review, among many others. A letterpress chapbook of Hildebrandt’s poetry is to be released this summer by the University of Maine in Machias.

Things We Think About When We Drown

My grandmother drowned twice, and both times she fought her way back up to the surface.

The first time, it was mid-summer, 1952. The whole of northern Minnesota was struck by a heat wave that wilted everything but the desire for water. Nowhere was hit harder than Abilene. Humans were boiled down to animals; nothing survived but loose skeletons and lust. People wandered the streets, to-do lists fluttering out of their hands, forgetting errands, misplacing names of old friends, forgetting everything. The roads stretched outward from the heart of the town like shimmering tentacles, curled up at the end. The world contracted inward that summer, my grandmother says.

By mid-July, work started to let out at noon, and everybody migrated toward Horseshoe Lake. The water would boil with limbs, mist thrown ten feet in the air by the churning. Everybody was there. For the first time in weeks, reality sharpened. My grandmother was thirteen that summer, and in old pictures, she is a wiry snip of a child, breasts just starting to surface, every limb confident and well placed. Her hair hung perfect on her back.

On the day of the drowning, she was in the midst of the girls from her school, way over in the northern tip of the lake. With the heavy glint off the water, it looked like the girls were one entity, a slick sea monster threading up and down between the weeds.

A small tangle of boys moved closer. My grandmother was perched on the shoulders of one of her friends, pounding the air with her fists and kicking water. One of the boys emerged from the pack. He spoke to my grandmother. Briefly. Her head dipped down, the blond bright in the sun. She slipped off her friend’s shoulders and swam to the boy. He challenged her to a contest and set forth the rules: they would hold their breath under water as long as they could. The winner would get something from the other. The boy wanted to pull her hair. It was a bet from his friend, the short one with the buck teeth. In a fit of daring, she asked for a kiss. The boy shook his head, blushing, angry. She insisted. Finally, he nodded. All the friends, boys and girls, howled. The boy took a deep breath, his face blew up like a balloon, and he squinched his eyes into little slits. My grandmother watched him, then let all the air out of her lungs, and slipped under the water, eyes wide open.

The rest of the kids screeched and jumped around, throwing insults back and forth like baseballs, waiting for the loser to pop up, shamefaced and gasping. As the seconds ticked by, the insults slowed down, and it was oddly silent by the time the boy emerged. He breathed deeply, fighting off his friends, who surrounded him like locusts. Everybody looked expectantly down at where my grandmother went under, but there was no motion except a stream of bubbles linking her mouth to the open air. For fifteen seconds or so there was nothing, then one of her friends noticed that her body had gone limp.

By the time the kids dragged her to the shore, the adults had been alerted, and everybody crowded around, pushing and shoving to see what looked like it might be Abeline’s first ever drowning victim. A doctor was found, sunning himself with his wife down on the beach, visiting from Minneapolis. He was fifty, still muscular, and stripped down to swimming trunks. He leaned over my grandmother’s tiny frame, checked her pulse, started the push and pull of CPR. A mother covered her mouth, put both hands over her daughter’s eyes. “Oh, god,” somebody muttered quietly.

The doctor kept working, and finally, after a long minute, my grandmother spluttered and sat up, coughing out lake water, tasting bottom feeders. The doctor patted her on the back. The crowd breathed a collective sigh of relief. As my grandmother continued to draw in ragged breathes, the doctor did something odd. He gathered her into his arms and held her like a baby, rubbing her arms and legs. She was as cold as death.

When my grandmother told me this story, she said that her first memory of regaining consciousness was the warm pressure of the sun-heated flesh of the doctor pressed against her. The incredible heat of a full grown man holding her, tight and long, warming her frozen flesh.

“Drowning was the first time I felt cool that summer,” my grandmother loves to say. “And in that damn heat wave, there were a couple times later that summer that I almost wished I could feel that cold again, let me tell you!” This is the way my grandmother always ends this story, and in my childhood, I couldn’t help but believe her.

Years after the first time I heard that story, I’m slouched in the third row of the ninth grade classroom at Abilene High, turning this story over and over in my head like a pet rock, polishing the parts I like, skipping over what feels rough and uncertain. Around me, the room sighs and shifts. We are ready for lunch.

Ms. Smith is pacing back and forth in the front of the room. We have been studying history, and today, we are going to watch the footage from the moon landing. Before the film starts, Ms. Smith tells us a long story about how her father had thrown a party for the moon landing, and everybody on her block came. “Lots of people,” she tells us, “still didn’t have a TV set then.” Somebody in the back of the room snorts, unbelieving. “It’s true,” she told us. “I was your age, then. I was fourteen when we landed on the moon.” She stares out at us sternly as if this meant something, then flicked off the lights and turned to the projector to roll the tape.

As soon as the dark falls, I can hear the boy behind me start to scoot his chair closer to me. In that moment, I am absolutely sure that if I could just get smaller he’d leave me alone. Shrink until I don’t take up as much of his field of vision. Implode, silently. In the muck of the late May classroom, my legs are sticking to the chair. The whole bulk of my body feels heavy- rounded edges and wide expanses that betray me at every turn. I don’t fit into dresses. My wrists are as wide as table legs. Somewhere under the tumor of my flesh, I know the real me is hiding- slim and slow, with eyelashes that curve over my cheeks like a doll. Sometimes, when I pass by billboards of beautiful girls, I actually salivate. Just wait, I tell myself. Someday.

Everybody is whispering and passing notes, movements rendered bizarre by the jerk and flash of the film in the sudden dark. Ms. Smith tells us the moment everybody had been waiting for was when Armstrong stepped off the little landing machine. She tells us to think about what that moment had meant for the country. This epic moment is marked in our classroom by a couple yawns from the second row. The speakers are broken on the projector, so the narration of the moon landing is my class, hissing dirty jokes and insults up and down the aisles.

The chair behind me scoots closer. Suddenly, I feel a knee start to dig itself into my lower back. My whole body freezes. I can feel a slow quiver start in my stomach. His knee presses in, deep, and starts to move around, experimenting. The feel of his awful knee on my exposed back fat literally makes me want to vomit.

I keep my eyes ahead. Ms. Smith is looking the other way. All I want is for somebody to make it stop, but I would rather have my fingernails pulled out than tell on him. I lean slowly away, but he is still there. My back is wide open, raw hamburger under his roving knee. I am sure my spine is exposed, white bone poking out through the fat like dominoes. Ms. Smith turns toward us, and the knee recedes like a tide. My body takes a breath. Relief floods my mouth like copper. I have never felt so ugly.

After lunch, I am walking back to the classroom alone when the two boys who sit behind me, Rayon and Jesse, step out from behind the drinking fountain. I can’t help but look down at their knees, wonder which one of them it was. In the distance, there is the sound of girls laughing and boys shouting in the lunchroom, but here, it is eerily quiet. Jesse steps forward. My hands hang by my sides like dead birds. He reaches out and grabs my shoulder, and Rayon takes the other. I offer no resistance. The only thing worse than them doing whatever they’ve got planned is exposing myself as bigger and stronger than them.

They march me down the hall like some kind of police escort. Somebody, I think, is going to come out of one of these open doors and make them stop. Any second now. It is as if nobody else has ever been born. The three of us move in perfect sync, our feet making a military drumroll down the tiles. Finally, they stop in front of the kitchen.

A mere ten yards away, all the lunch ladies are clustered together, peering into a large pot. All I have to do is say something, and they would hear me. They don’t see us as the boys hustle me past. We glide across the kitchen like panthers, and they move into the maze of freezers and storage in the back. Finally, they stop in front of one of the walk-in freezers, and Jesse pulls the door open. With a fluid, almost tender push, I find myself standing inside, listening to them pull the lock shut. The walls are so thick I don’t even hear them walk away. Perhaps they are still there, ears pressed to the thick, pimpled walls, listening.

At first, it’s not so bad. The cooler fan makes a gentle whirring hiss, and I’ve always been comforted by the sound of machines. There are multiple rows of white wire shelves, piled high with packages wrapped in paper, and those big white buckets with matching lids that cafeterias have. I take a quick little walk around the perimeter, hoping against hope that there’s a second door or some kind of escape latch for the door I came in. Nothing. I’m going to have to bang on the door. Oh my god, I think.

I imagine myself falling out the door, my whole class gathered around, watching. Fat and frozen, like some kind of hideous arctic beast. My back feels bruised, and I feel more than ever like I might throw up. Under my stomach, something that feels like panicked birds are starting to flex their wings. The sharp brush of them across my insides is pushing me closer and closer to total meltdown. I take a deep shuddery breath, and sit down on a huge plastic pack of shredded cheese. I close my eyes.

The second time my grandmother drowned, she was a lot older. Twenty five. My mother had just been born, and she had left her at home with a sitter for the first time. My mother was four months old, and my grandmother had been asked out on a date. Not the father of my mother, who was a no-good mechanic from the next town over with a wide, flat smile, but a younger man, a college boy who was the same age as my grandmother. His name was Ernest, and he was studying Animal Husbandry at the University of Minnesota. They decided to go swimming.

It was the same lake as years before. It was later in the summer, August, but not nearly as hot. The evening was elusive and gorgeous, and my grandmother was having a great time. They were eating ice cream in the car, and when the lake unfolded out of the darkness in front of them, it was like a sheet of velvet glazed over with diamonds. My grandmother was wondering if maybe she should try to marry this Ernest. That night, it seemed like she had finally outrun all the mistakes, all the hurt.

Ernest parked the car under a low stand of white pines, and they ran together, laughing, down toward the water. Ernest had a small, shrunken chest, but an absolutely glorious head of curly black hair that bounced as he ran into the water. They dove off the dock, and my grandmother says the water cut her like a million glorious knives, and that a new body emerged. In the middle of the lake, they found themselves again and floated together, treading water.

“I’ve never seen stars like this,” Ernest said. “Not recently, at least. You can’t see them in the city, I mean.” My grandmother laughed. “I’d die without the stars. Don’t you miss them?” Ernest looked deep into her eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I do.” It felt like the universe was finally snapping into place. My grandmother saw all the ghosts of the bad men who populated her history stream past her in the water. Tonight, they were immaterial and powerless. She touched Ernest’s chest. She felt, she told me once, like for the first time in her life she was young.

Later, they lay on the beach, giggling and talking about nothing. Ernest cajoled her into the water for a final swim. In the story, this is where the moon darkens, and reality bends itself. Somewhere in the water, Ernest told my grandmother that he wanted to make love to her, out there in the lake. My grandmother said no. He insisted. She said no again. He lost his boyish charm, and my grandmother suddenly realized that he was not a child after all. She reached out, hit him in the face. He looked at her, arms hanging loosely at his sides. He reached out, placed one hand on each of her shoulders, and pushed her under the water. She fought. He was so much bigger than her, she might as well have not struggled. He held her there for two minutes, while the moon continued to shine and the cicadas sang. Finally, he let her go, then turned and headed back for shore, not waiting to see if she was dead or alive.

After a few seconds, she spluttered to the surface, gagging and pushing water out of her lungs for the second time in her life. She staggered for the shore, sensed more than felt through her foggy vision, and finally collapsed in the mud. For a few long moments, her world was the simple in and out of breathing. Then, she got up, found her dress, pulled it back on, and walked up the parking lot. Ernest was sitting in the car, engine running, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t act like he saw her, but he leaned over and popped the door open when she walked up. She watched him ash out the window, assessing her odds. The town was nine miles away. She wasn’t wearing shoes. She got in. He locked the door, and the car nosed off into the night. From that moment forward, my grandmother’s life unfolded exactly as she was always afraid it might.

In the cooler, I try knocking on the door yet again. Nothing. I pound. Still no response. Finally, I yell, the thing I’ve been dreading. My voice curdles and cracks, and I feel myself blushing, even here. After a few seconds, I realize nobody has heard me. What an idiot, embarrassed at the sound of my own voice. I take a breath, decide to settle in for a while. I pile three fifty pound bags of rice together, climb on top of them. I will pound on the door every couple minutes. Somebody will come. I can feel myself moving into survivor mode. If nothing else, my mother will notice that I don’t come home on the bus. She will call the police. Everybody will search. Rayon will crack. Somebody will tell. I won’t die in here, that’s for sure.

Maybe they won’t come for a couple days, and I will start to starve. I will emerge skinny, normal, beautiful. The real me inside will finally emerge, victorious, energetic. I will join the cheerleading squad. Maybe I’ll take up the flute. I will become competent, talented, and perhaps a little bit sexually daring. I entertain this fantasy until I realize that I’m in a cooler, literally surrounded by food. Something about the uniform greyness of the cooler makes it almost impossible to keep your brain in one place. My thoughts are starting to separate, cojoin, coagulate.

Right before lunch started today, I came back to the room for my sweater. Ms. Smith was standing at the window, staring out at the playground. The film was playing again, bouncing dead images off the chalkboard. At first, I thought she didn’t see me, and I was fumbling for my sweater in the closet by the door, when she suddenly started talking. “Did you know,” she said, “when the Native Americans had signed away all their land, the very last bits of it, the up and coming generation, kids who could only remember freedom through stories, they started something called the ghost dance.” I held my breath. It didn’t feel like she was talking to me. It felt like if she turned around to see me, she’d be disappointed, like she was expecting somebody else.
She waited a moment, still facing away, then went on. “They thought if they got enough of their people to dance this special dance, the white people would disappear, shoot straight back up into the sky. They all wore special shirts even, to protect them from bullets. It was desperation. Pure desperation. And I’ve just been sitting here, thinking… the dance, I can only imagine it looked something like the moon landing. Stupid, right?”

She turned back to the room, and gestured to Neil Armstong. After his first gingerly step onto a frigid alien landscape, he started to run. You have to think the pressure must have got to him, and the relief of not dying on that first step must have been the final straw. He loses all composure, and there’s this fierce sense of play. He forgets the camera, it seems. Anti-gravity pulls him up, but his weight keeps pulling him down, so his movement becomes this push and pull between himself and the environment. He pushes off the surface, and the air almost holds him up for a second. It looks as if he might float away. Then, he gently comes back down, and his feet shatter the surface of the moon. Space dusts goes everywhere, and he is up again, leaping through air that would kill him to breathe. Dancing right through all that poison.

Ms. Smith and I watch together for a moment, holding our breath, waiting. “I think,” she says, “that the ghost dance must have looked exactly like this.” I wait for a heavy moment. “What happened to them?” I ask. She stares blankly.
“Who?”

“The kids, you know…. in the ghost dance.”

She smiles.

“They died, Phoebe. Most of them were shot.”

Inside the cooler, I lay down on the rice, feeling the chill traipse into my deepest bones, into secret corners of my huge bulk. My heart slows. The sacks are freezing. I force myself to get up, to knock on the door one more time. Nothing. It almost feels impossible that there is anything out there anymore. Maybe this is how Neil Armstrong felt. Endless space, outside his door. You could float out. Weightlessness, finally.

In my head, the largest lakes in Minnesota stretch out in all directions, golden, murky, endless. A sense of finality pervades. The silence is as big as the sky. Then, suddenly, without warning, my grandmother surfaces in the middle of the lake. Her head snaps back and she gasps toward the sky, sucking in greedy breath after breath. Reveling in survival. For a single moment, for the space of one long inhale, the oxygen is enough.

- Rachel Nelson is a writer and performance artist currently working out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. She grew up on an isolated farm in the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, and graduated from Hollins University in 2007. She is interested in deconstructing physical and emotional places through memory and identity.

The submission period for the twelfth issue of damselfly press has closed. Look for the issue on July 15th, 2010.

As always, thank you to all of our submitters.

In honor of April’s National Poetry Month, damselfly press presents our first poetry issue. We invite you to kick off spring with great writing by talented women. We are honored to offer you an issue of beauty and wonder that contains some of the best poems we’ve had the pleasure of publishing. The poems speak in unique images and thoughtful observations.

We’re also pleased to announce the publication of Name Me (Fortunate Daughter Press, Spring 2010) by Kim Noriega whose poem “POSTCARD TO MY SISTER FROM RUE DE TURENNE” first appeared in the seventh issue of damselfly press. For more information, please visit kimnoriega.com

Our twelfth issue will be available July 15th, 2010. If you’d like to submit, please visit our guidelines section and send us your submission by June 15th, 2010. Thank you to all of our submitters.

RAPUNZEL

She married the one back home instead
the son of a farmer
heir to a kingdom of tobacco and cotton
a man with broad shoulders and few words
and a farmhouse embedded like a stone in the flat endless fields.

She binds her hair now
safe from the grasp of tiller and plow
a heavy rope coiled at the base of her neck
weighted with memory
that she will not cut
and on hot hot nights
while her husband snores in his chair
she loosens the band and climbs the thick braid
anchors her fingers
in the stunned crumpled mass
and beside her in the stained tub
the cool water rises and rises
lifting above it a mass of scented bubbles
that will collapse beneath the weight of her hand.

- Agnieszka Stachura is a writer and part-time graduate student in the North Carolina piedmont, and her prose has appeared in Tiny Lights, Funny Times, Swink, and Ghoti Magazine, and is forthcoming in both Passages North and in an anthology of “Hint Fiction.”

Blood Moon

A sleepless night, the moon
placed like a filter before fires
that rise in the east. She knows
how blue light scatters
to whiten the paving stones.

When dust infiltrates
it’s like a secret not told
to one’s lover. Later
it becomes off-color, too large,
soaking the sky with trouble.

She tries to breathe.
Each tiny fire will grow
from draw to cliff,
whether by dry lightning
or a campfire left with the stamp
of someone’s footprint
long ago layered on cinder
like a palimpsest.

Each fire will persist
until the events that preceded it
become nothing more than a day’s
worth of chores. Some will leap
these lines the men
have worked for hours.

Perhaps this is just another dawn,
the nests just now sparking
with bird song, fluff and straw,
the patio littered
with bark stripped from twigs
to make a nursery.

Or maybe in the reddened moon
she misplaced some mawkish bit of grief
and now she’s flaying herself
like a priest who knows there is no penance
for words whispered
back into themselves—
for all that was nil, slivered,
addressed by dust to shine particulate, alone.

- Judith Skillman’s twelfth book “The Never” is forthcoming in May, 2010 from Dream Horse Press. The recipient of an award from the Academy of American Poets for her book “Storm” (Blue Begonia Press, 1998), Skillman’s work has appeared in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Seneca Review, among others.

Here’s a steady light, I said

and he was pleased, tucking that
into himself now he owned it.
So I didn’t say, how you are always
around, forcing photosynthesis.

I didn’t say, you see me here
by the side of the road, as if waiting
for your arrival, but normally
I’m a small animal, living far under

reams of dead leaves, where no news
can reach me. But this light. I fear
one day you’re going to tear off
with my shivery pelt.

I didn’t say that. No,
I merely trilled my dainty fingers
as he poled off into the dark
and inevitable street.

- Teresa Scollon lives and writes in Traverse City, Michigan. She taught as writer-in-residence at Interlochen Arts Academy. Her work has appeared in several journals. Her chapbook, Friday Nights the Whole Town Goes to the Basketball Game, was published in 2009 by the Michigan Writers Cooperative Press.

Dear Lady,

You, on the couch, becoming a stranger,
do you know who I am?

You hold your newspaper
without reading words.

Your memories are locked in a cupboard
to which neither of us has the key.

When anyone comes to visit,
you smile. You say:

My house is so beautiful.
Everybody loves my house.
Dogs like it here.

If I were a dog, I would curl on the couch
and lean my chin on your thin ribs.

I would lick your bony mother-hand
to show you I am here.

- Penelope Scambly Schott’s most recent book is Six Lips (Mayapple, 2010). Her verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth won the Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

Buttons

Sometimes it’s the ordinary things
that occur to you in the night
like turning the heat down or
the origin of the mysterious stain on your favorite white shirt,
a call you need to make tomorrow.

Sometimes something reaches out
from a long past place
like a lavender button
with a small rhinestone in the center,
a coat with a pale lavender plaid pattern.

The coat was small,
the girl was small,
her father was alive and smiling
and her mother helped her
put her arms into the sleeves of the lavender coat.

The buttons were difficult to close,
the petal shapes pinched her fingers,
but she didn’t care
her father smiled and her mother said,
Perfect.

- Marietta Calvanico lives in Staten Island, NY. After working for more than two decades in advertising/marketing, she now works with her architect husband and is able to devote more time to writing and music.

Fool’s Gold

In the chaos of our parting, you scattered
scraps of my shredded letter. Bits
of words fell to the floor, noiseless

and soft, as a lover slips into bed
beside a sleeping partner:

sorry
never
meant
wish
forgive
please

As the front door slammed,
they fluttered then stilled, surrounding me;
irreparable fragments of something

so recently whole, still warm in memory.
I swaddle its image, perfect, and choose
to forget that you’ve left me

for the kind of woman who buys herself
flowers. Spread across our bed under
the blanket of night, I slide into a fitful dream:

women move across a dance
floor, sultry, seductive, sparkling,
bright bubbles in champagne flutes. Laughter

rises as music plays, shoes shuffle and skirts
swirl while I, not knowing the steps, follow
behind, bent low and barefoot, nails unpainted.

Flakes of burnt skin fall from my feet
like black petals as I quickly move to pick up
buttons dropped from shimmering gowns,

then hand them over, an offering:
a fistful of gold.

- Christine Orchanian Adler is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in various publications and anthologies across the United States, as well as online at LiteraryMama, Cahoots, The Furnace Review, SavvyMiss and elsewhere. Her writing includes book reviews, poetry and articles on health and family. She lives in New York with her husband and two sons.

The submission period for the eleventh issue of damselfly press has closed. Look for the issue on April 15th, 2010.

As always, thank you to all of our submitters.

We often think of winter as a time of darkness. Yet this season brings stillness and nourishing quiet. Our tenth issue of damselfly press contains fortifying work by writers reminding us even in the depth of winter, spring is waking.

Our eleventh issue will be available April 15th, 2010. If you’d like to submit, please visit our guidelines section and send us your submission by March 15th, 2010. Thank you to all of our submitters.

December Wind

Last night I dreamt I was bleeding,
two cold gushes down my thigh.

I woke up thinking, yes, winter is coming—
winter and my son.

But tonight it’s only wind
hissing something awful

and I see my grandmother
before she died, gray lips open,

the softest moan filling the room
then ending

and I can’t believe the wind is coming
from the earth I have taught you

to love, night after night gliding my hands
down your rocky body

the way Demeter would collapse
suddenly to her knees

and begin to feel
her daughter’s dark descent.

- Wendy Wisner’s first book of poems, Epicenter, was published by CW Books in 2004. Her poems have appeared in The Spoon River Review, Rhino, Natural Bridge, The Bellevue Literary Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Wendy previously taught writing and literature at Hunter College. She is now a La Leche League leader and is pursuing her Lactation Consultant (IBCLC) certification.

Some Memories

thrust themselves on us through cracks. We uproot them,
spray them dead. They loiter in junk drawers, snuggled
with old keys, hide in the charms of silver bracelets.
Sneaky ones slither on the resilient refrain
of a Beatles’ song, proclaim their tenacity in quilt patches.

Memories tailgate on the fragrances— leather and paint,
Camay soap, fresh basil. Against our will, they leap
into presence on an antique teapot, dusty with echoes,
skulk between autumn oaks and sweet gum,
intrude at the sight of old letters under worn lingerie.

We prefer to examine some on stainless steel tables
under cold fluorescent lights, scalpels poised.
We push them down, nail them into coffins,

muffle them with smoke and gauze and snow.
My brother says, “Remember—”
“No!” I say, “No.”

- Joan Mazza has worked as a microbiologist, psychotherapist, writing coach and seminar leader. Author of six books, including “Dreaming Your Real Self” (Penguin/Putnam 1998), her work has appeared in Potomac Review, Permafrost, Slipstream, Writer’s Digest, the minnesota review, and Playgirl. She now writes poetry in rural Virginia.

Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts
– after Winslow Homer, 1870

This is how it happened.

The first one opened her eyes
At the sound of waves
Slapping against the sand.

The second one was startled into daylight
By the creaking of the pump.

The third was lazy,
And they had to rap twice on her window.

The dog zigzagged behind them.

They wet their hair.
They soaked their bathing costumes.
The hot sweat of the August night dissolved.

The single sailboat plying the harbor
Would never give them away.

- Elizabeth Lara has worked as a language teacher and editor. Her poems have appeared in The Rose & Thorn, Persimmon Tree, The Equinox and Reflections 2009. In 2008 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives and writes in New York City.

Ebb Tide

I tell myself that it’s for you

I gather up these stones, for you
this stripe of quartz, this green

like old glass bottles, but the truth is
we all walk the beach head down,

reaching for that salmon mottled
rock that’s not quite like the others,

even when the sign says not to—

that woman with the cell phone,
ankle deep in the receding tide,

who turns a stone around
and around in her other hand

as she says, “I was so sorry
to hear,” she won’t take that stone

back on the ferry as a gift; it will sit
in her pocket till she finds it in the dryer

next week, and puts it on the window
ledge or on her desk. It will always

smell like a disembodied voice, and sparkle
like that release, the water going out, and out.

- Susanna Lang’s collection, Even Now (2008), was published by The Backwaters Press. Her poems have appeared in such journals as New Letters, Green Mountains Review, Jubilat, and Inkwell, where she won the 2009 competition. She also won an Illinois Arts Council award for a poem published in The Spoon River Poetry Review.

Twenty Minutes

“Where do you suppose Granny is now?” Ben asks. And because this is my logical husband, I know he is wondering where the casket is that we left above ground at the committal service, and not something more metaphysical.

Ben, his sister Elizabeth and I stop by the cemetery before leaving for the airport to check up on his grandmother, Marjorie. Manchester, Michigan —“Home of the Famous Chicken Broil”—is only big enough for one cemetery, with a sign halfway up the hill informing visitors they are leaving or entering the Catholic or Protestant section.

We can see that her casket is gone and a man is using a crowbar to maneuver the Bentschneider family headstone back into place. We walk over, still in our funeral clothes—too black, too dressy, too East Coast fancy compared to the rest of the family—and the man explains that the headstone won’t be in its final position for another week or so.

“I’m Mike,” the man says. “I take care of the cemetery.”

Mike is a large, heavyset man with curly brown hair. He is sunburned from the work outdoors and has none of the professional solemnity of the funeral home staff.

I glance over at a dark granite marker in the next row bearing the image of what appears to be a Scottish terrier.

“Is that a dog on that headstone?” I ask, half-smiling at the incongruousness of it. “It looks like a photograph.”

“Oh,” he replies, “That’s an etching of a photograph in the granite. That woman took her own life, and apparently the dog was with her when she died. I guess that dog meant everything to her.”

I stop smiling.

Mike remembers Marjorie, Ben and Elizabeth’s grandmother, and talks about how she used to come to the cemetery after her husband died and tell him how bothered she was that every time she came the wreath on the grave was tipped over.

“So I stuck a couple of pieces of wire in it and just kind of jammed it into the ground, and she must’ve thanked me about twenty times after that.”

Ben and Elizabeth smile. This sounds like the Granny they remember, back when she still remembered them.

We look around at the nearby plots.

“The flowers are planted in the ground,” I observe with surprise.

“Oh, yeah,” says Mike. “You can plant anything you want as long as it’s not a tree or a bush, and I’ll mow around it.”

I think about the small-town cemetery in Connecticut where my maternal grandparents and great-grandparents are buried. It sits atop a rise next to a road that used to be a rural route connecting farms and is now a two-lane state highway. The cemetery is composed of small family plots, with an upright marker in gray or rose granite with the family name. Decoration, if any, consists of engraved flowers or tastefully scrolling ribbons. In my family’s plot there are footstones for each individual grave—light gray slabs that list only the names and dates:

Charles F. Pobuda, 1872–1936
Agnes Luxa, his wife, 1879–1906
Elizabeth Moravec, his wife, 1872–1961
Charles F. Pobuda, 1901–1970
Charles F. “Chucky” Pobuda, 1933–1936
Mary M. Pobuda, 1906–1989

The footstones are flush with the ground so they can be mowed over by tractors, and there are only a couple of times a year when flowers of any kind are allowed—a week around Memorial Day and again around Veterans’ Day—and then only in containers that can be thrown away.

I stop by whenever I’m driving down Interstate 84. I usually have the place to myself. There’s an austere serenity about this cemetery, a dignified stillness beyond the breeze and the cars rushing past, and I sit on a little granite bench for a few minutes and let it wash over me.

I used to talk to my grandparents during those visits. Hi, Grammy. Hi Pa. It’s me. How are you? I felt compelled somehow to be polite, to keep up their spirits, to distract them from the terrible thing—death—that was happening to them. But I came to realize that the person to whom their deaths were still happening was me. Loss reverberates through the living, but for the dead it’s a onetime deal.

Now that my grandparents have been gone for 20 and 40 years—half a lifetime—their deaths are finally in my past as well as theirs, and I can leave them undisturbed by inane chitchat. I sit in silence and notice the quality of the light. Sometimes it feels like I can breathe in the quiet.

These days when I think of my grandparents, it’s not when I’m at the cemetery. I’ll see a daddy longlegs climbing up one of my tomato plants and remember how Pa used to pick them up out by our garage, holding them out by one leg.

“Which way’s north?” he’d inquire of the flailing creature as my sister and I watched in fascinated horror as he touched a bug.

When I think of my grandmother it’s most often in my kitchen, cooking paprikash or pork and sauerkraut, which she learned to make as a new bride, following her mother-in-law around the kitchen in Connecticut, measuring spoons and index cards in hand. My mother has those index cards now, and I have the copies that she wrote down for me.

I have index cards in Marjorie’s handwriting as well—a sloppy joe recipe that I raved over the first time Ben took me to her house is now a winter staple in ours. Someday I will make copies for our kids.

The same handwriting, a little shakier, spells out “Benjamin” on the little cardboard jewelry box that Ben’s mother sent after she moved Marjorie into assisted living. It contained a stone arrowhead. Ben rolled it over in his hands and told me how he and his grandfather found it together in the garden when he was little. Marjorie must have held on to it for almost 30 years.

I see that the photo etching in Michigan is a popular technique. We pass graves decorated with tractors, trucks, and one—apparently that of a hunter—that has three separate images: a deer, a fish, and a boat. It strikes me as terribly sad that somebody thinks their life, or their loved one’s life, could be summed up with a picture of a tractor.

I tell myself that it’s meaningful to the person who chose it, that I am being a snob.

Who thought that all there was to you was a tractor? I wonder.

We pass graves decorated with photographs, toys, relentlessly cheerful flowers in plastic baskets, and one that is maxed out: teddy bear, flowers, dream catcher, and multiple open letters attached to stakes in the ground.

I don’t look for the name or dates on the stone. I don’t want to feel sympathy for the person who created this tacky monument to her own grief, which looks like a dollar store exploded in the middle of the cemetery.

And yet.

Those letters are only a more concrete expression of the need I felt to make small talk with my grandparents. This is a death that is still happening.

Someone spent his entire life at the backbreaking labor of running a farm. Someone lost hope and died in a suicide, alone except for her Scottie. Marjorie used to worry about the wreath on her husband’s grave, but then she got Alzheimer’s and died. The stones tell the facts, but the real monuments are recipe cards and arrowheads. Only the people who loved you can tell the story.

- K. T. Landon is a software engineer at a research institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and lives outside of Boston with her husband, Ben. She is a Pushcart nominee and her essays have appeared in The Dos Passos Review, The Fourth River, The Journal, The Rambler, and Red Cedar Review.