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The Attic Closet

Stand on the rocker and pull
at the latch: inside this cedar closet,
there is another: behind black watch plaid skirts—
school uniforms you have grown out of—
there is a brass-latched door. Slide the lock.

Red-winged Blackbirds from the marsh
out to feed—the shiny, black bird,
red on his shoulders, yellow tinge,
and the female like a large, striped sparrow.
And landing on the hardwood floor,
hundreds of peepers—“X’s” on their backs,
road calls that made you believe the myth
frogs are born from spring rains.

Your arms and legs, your body
hasn’t grown so big it can’t still fit
through the wide hole. Pull yourself up into it.
Go out the door that opens from the back
of an accordion elevator that is no longer there,
behind the swinging doors that led to a kitchen
where you ate breakfast at the St. Elmo Hotel
whose long porches, loud bell at the check-in desk,
whose winding and secret hallways, and even the smell
of old women knitting in wicker rockers is gone.

And when you begin to hear the sound of nothing
in that drop down dark hole, wait just a minute
before you rush to pull yourself up. This is not
the adult sound of the clock when no one is home
but of afternoons when you knew your solitude
like the moon at dawn.

Unlock your blue Raleigh ten-speed
in the morning fog, warm steam and soap
wafting up from the hotel laundry. Ride out
to the Thunder Bridge where the echo
of your bike crossing the wooden planks
does not make you feel lost.

Ride over the creek where you caught crayfish
in big, yellow buckets, looked for fossils
on weekends. Go down the Boys Club Hill
to the lake and practice looking for the dead underwater,
practice blowing up your clothes and floating.
Listen underwater for what sounds like breathing
and for the long, deep breaths it took to fill your jeans.

Go back and back
where the hollow sound of the clock
is only as dangerous as your name.
And when you have drunk full of that Lake No One,
pull yourself up from Grandfather, back to the attic room.
Call that cedar door behind another “anti-matter” or “wholeness.”

And when you leave,
let the attic closet spill out—cover the walls,
the floors, flood past the door,
begin its long descent down the stairs.

The Palimpsest

Sparks fly in an old snapshot of my grandfather
hammering something on an anvil.
He wears a striped cap that makes me think of the railroad,
that the photograph is older than it is.
Chain hangs from the ceiling, and a poster I can’t make out
is tacked on the wall behind him.
A sharp splattering of light I should not have found
stuck behind a framed picture of my father as a child.

The mills are abandoned. Still, rusted out steps
line the river up to empty row houses, bridge after bridge—
everywhere a map of the way home. Pittsburgh:
vellum, a medieval manuscript—sheep hide
scraped away to start again, ink in the new,
but the ghost image remains, bleeds through,
will not be erased.

-Anna Catone received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University. She holds an MA from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She has published work in the Boston Review, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Caketrain, The Cortland Review, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Lumina, and Post Road. She lives in Pittsburgh where she teaches and helps to edit Coal Hill Review, associated with Autumn House Press.

The Widow Writes to the River

Indifferent to sticks and stones you bear
away what I’ve thrown as if you cared
nothing for bones. His lie scattered

to rapids. You and the cougar
taste more of him than I,
left with his fly rods, mayflies,

guidebooks and boots. Who needs
your sinuous skin, milky after weeks of rain?
Years when you die to a rumor

I might staunch by lying
across your rocky bed, I smother your body
with my own, as if I could quell

your pulse, hold at bay the approaching snow
and rain come to swell a body pregnant
with Cutthroat and Sockeye. I clean

what’s already washed,
Merino socks, frayed shirts, hang
prayers to dry between birch and pine,

watch each ply unwind from what remains,
fingerling rivers unraveling back
to laughter of a twisting lover.

-Ronda Broatch is the author of Some Other Eden (Finishing Line Press, 2005). Her work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Atlanta Review, Rattle, Poetry Southeast, Blackbird, and Rhino. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Ronda is the recipient of the 2005 Kay Snow Poetry Award, and 2006 WPA William Stafford Award.

You think I’m a lawyer

the first time I see you
again, in twenty years

at your brother’s retirement party.
You smile like Grandma always did

when I introduce myself.
I thank you for the Hungry-Hungry Hippos

you gave me the last time I sat on your lap,
my parents then the age I am now, so too

were you. Sad you didn’t have
children? You were the one

buying me stickers and
sending Snoopy storybooks

via brown boxes with California
postmarks stamped, a heart you drew

next to my name. No.
I tell you, I’m a writer,

I’m a teacher of students,
almost children, really,

children like you never had, but I don’t
either. Neither of us marveling

at the womb’s gate shut, you
have your husband, I have my books,

these words that make me wonder,
were you sorry

I wasn’t that attorney,
you weren’t a mother?

-Melanie Faith holds a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte and educates young minds at a private boarding school in Pennsylvania. Her poems and photography recently appeared in The Binnacle (University of Maine), Six Little Things, Arabesques, Siren, The Long Islander, and Fifth Wednesday Journal.

Cook With Me and Be My Love

They say you can feel the unraveling
of a marriage as surely as a blind man reads Braille.
You will see it coming in the way your fingertips
no longer brush, hear how even your knives
and spoons refuse to clash in the sink, smell
how one pair of underwear accepts
the fresh breeze of fabric softener,
one, still clinging, embraces
static, denies scent altogether.

A cooling union makes no sound.
The end will be soft and raw,
surprising, like a fork sliding into a risen muffin,
pulling roughly out, covered in batter.

In your white dress, in your black
tails and tie, stinking of new love, clean
kisses, you have no idea how sense
will betray you. It will not be so obvious
as apple pie without sugar,
macaroni and cheese with no elbows.
No. The spoiling of a marriage tastes
more like meatloaf without the bread
crumbs holding it together.
The egg, beaten, is there. The meat, mashed
into shape, is there. It is the loaf crumbling
off your fork, falling all over your plate,
missing your mouth completely
that lets you know you’re hungry.

Domestic Dispute

Once, in the midst of all the recklessness
I took the tiny clothes off all the Barbies
and lined them up along the window sill
for all the neighbors to see.

The man with the pugs wanted to know
when the garage sale started.
The man with the young daughter wondered
how much for the blond on the far left,
his daughter wants a doll.

My husband came home after leaving for milk.
He was really just running away. A woman with a gun,
even a glue gun, even a camera, or a handful
of miniature miniskirts can scare a man.
So here he comes with the milk and a Snickers bar,
but he is not snickering because he knows better
and I say, Which Barbie do I look like?

My husband has not come home in three days.
The milk soaked into the carpet has turned
to crust and odor. The Barbies are fading into
the white sill, the babies are hungry.
We are all losing our hair, blonde tufts
falling out in fistfuls, when we remember
to reach up, to pull.

The sun is pale in the sky,
the peonies have lost their pink.
In the midst of all the recklessness,
I wish I had not told my husband to go to hell.

-Jill Crammond Wickham is a poet, artist, teacher and mother living in upstate New York. Her poetry has been published in a variety of journals; most recently, Blueline, Peer Glass, and Literary Mama. The ‘poet-mom’ attributes poetry and collage as the glue holding the disparate pieces of her together.