Without fox
Red fox in an overgrown field
chased by two dogs
onto a highway into a car;
the fox hit hard on the road.
Edged by mountains capped in snow
fox rolls under the chassis
dead.
The dogs linger, circle death;
the road quiet,
shadowed by clouds.
Tails down, the dogs turn away,
back to the field, without fox.
Ion Corcos
What’s past
The call came from a cousin in Minneapolis. Uncle Ben had died. So Tom flew from St Louis, rented a car and a room at the Holiday Inn.
The funeral itself drew a great blank of tears, made him aware of how little he knew the man. The priest talked of God and the afterlife, concepts as vague and unknowable as the lives of everyone else at the funeral. A few tears, a brief hug, revealed nothing.
Tom left for home feeling as if not just an uncle had died but also everyone he ever knew in the old days in Minneapolis.
He continued to mourn on the flight home. Mostly for himself. And then, in the sixth hour since he'd booked out of that motel, caught a flight home, and with the Gateway Arch in sight through the airplane window, Tom rose from the dead.
John Grey
Ritual
Breakfast – cooking eggs. Sleepy eyed, an attack of the mundane yawns. Burnt toast!
Where did the paper go? The cat looks up and meows. Misplaced glasses, jangling keys, same crossword puzzles everyday.
Open the window to let the world in. Outside, a butterfly visits a coneflower. Inside, the coffee maker burps.
Time to shake off the morning and step into the day. Same routine week after week after week. Breakfast – cooking eggs...
Ann Christine Tabaka
Traveller
The blue of a stone, like the cobalt stoplight inside the bus when I was young, the ceiling of the Greek church in Rose Bay, the green sea. The stone is not heavy; its blue always shifting like the sky. Nothing is permanent. When I was young I thought red was my favourite colour, but I was never sure; I didn’t know how to choose, what I would say about myself when asked who I was. Now, I say I don’t have keys anymore.
Ion Corcos
Sting of a Snowflake
The old barn moans and groans as bones creak on this coolish day. Stepping outside into fields of corn now cut leaving an apocalyptic view. I watched the winds conspire with shafts of wheat tickling the sunset. From a dark cloud drifting above, a lone snowflake floats down and stings the tip of my cold red nose. I'm feeling a tinge of winter as the warm summer dreams disappear, replaced by frosty car windshields, bare feet on cold floors each morning. Twilight time chases the light away near the dead crab apple trees on the old farm where I once roamed.
Ken Allan Dronsfield
Garden Snails
little girl hands outstretched bare feet stuck on damp stone smelling rain fresh on red brick
the ivy they planted twelve years ago has grown over the garden walls it curls like her ringlets
five minutes ago she plucked a hundred snails from the trellis suckered them to her body some tiny some fat and leaking now the corner of her mouth grows a metallic smile
she swaggers forward one step two (thighs apart so as not knock the shells) arms outstretched to her mother
Ruby Lawrence
Mothers in the Plaza
It was during the Dirty Wars that the mothers of Buenos Aires congregated. The madres came to the plaza with old photos and newly-rendered silhouettes of their children, of their grandchildren, of the disappeared taken in the night or in the brazen light of day. After they could no longer ignore so many women, the media said they were not good patriots. Anti-nationalists. The women had no lawyers to defend them. In the city the madres of Buenos Aires resisted. They came to the plaza while the government censored the press and the press censored itself. The papers carried no word of the horrors of the terrible regime, and its attacks against citizens, but the mothers gave the police all their papers to confuse them. So many identity documents it looked like it had snowed in the policemen's hands. Blizzards always cause chaos. They shaped the papers into talismans of unity. Linking arms, all the women became one. During the World Cup when all the world was watching those brave mothers of Buenos Aires rebelled. They came to the plaza wearing their triangular shawls - the sumptuary spirits of their missing children who would never play soccer again. They would never play with their own children, who had been stolen and sold for adoption by collaborators in secret detention centers. Tear gas burnt the women's eyes. They blinked through these tears as they had so many tears of sorrow. In solidarity, some women wept and offered others bicarbonate as a salve. During the March and the Falkland's War the madres of Buenos Aires persisted. They came to the plaza where they marched for the absent, the gone. Each Thursday there were arrests. The mothers demanded to be taken together in so many police vans. They prayed and made the sign of the cross, warding off the evil deeds of those who claimed they respected religion but who had unjustly murdered so many staining the country with blood.