Old Man Jacobs

 

By Alan Bahr

 

A weed-covered field was all that passed for a community park, with shops on either side that begged for a coat of paint and paying customers. We were visiting my father’s hometown accompanied by my Uncle Doug, who was regaling me with tales of his youthful indiscretions. The stories were hilarious and told with the shit-you-say flair of a prison confession. They little resembled my father’s sober recollections, which made me wonder why Dad couldn’t be more like his older brother.

Doug nodded toward the park and said it had once been a ballfield. He chuckled and pointed to where the backstop had stood.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Just thinking.”

“About what?”

“How I blew up second base.”

I laughed, recognizing a prelude to another good story. “How’d you do that?” I asked.

“Got my hands on a stick of dynamite and a long fuse. Lit it and ran like hell. Hid over there.” Doug turned and gestured toward a building across Main Street.

I tracked his gaze and imagined him at my age, a teenaged boy cowering behind a shop wall, hands over ears, waiting. “What happened?” I asked.

“Made a big hole.” Doug let out a loud guffaw.

“I remember that.”

My dad whispered the confirmation in a way that told me what would follow: another dousing of cold water onto our day’s entertainment. Earlier that morning, he’d exchanged words with Doug that were as close to an argument as I’d ever heard pass between them. He told my uncle to be careful of what he said around me, which prompted a terse reply. It’s a free country, little brother. All my dad could do then was sigh in a powerless way and speak what had sounded like gibberish to me at the time. You think freedom is doing whatever the hell you want. Which is why apprehension follows you everywhere.

My father stared at the site of the old ballfield, then at the sad storefronts on either side of it. “Blew out nearly every window,” he said.

My smile disappeared. “You were there, too?” I asked.

Dad shook his head. “I knew better than to follow your uncle out at night. It took a month to replace the panes and clean up the mess. That’s what I recall.”

Doug looked down and kicked at the dirt.

“And there was that other thing, too,” my father said. “Remember, Doug?”

My gaze went from father to uncle, then back again. “What?” I asked.

“Tell him,” Dad said. “Go ahead. It’s a free country.”

Doug put his hands in his pockets and jutted his chin toward the second-floor apartment over a hardware store. “Old man Jacobs died that night,” he said. “Fellow didn’t make it out of bed. Not my fault. Heart attack, they say.”

We eyed the building, not saying a word, when the double doors opened and a chime sounded. We watched as an elderly couple stepped outside and walked away.

Alan is a recovering investment banker and former commercial fisherman. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Midwest Prairie Review, Circle Magazine, Banyan Review, Contra Costa Times, and others. He lives in the San Bernardino National Forest with his wife.

 

The "Sky Above Clouds" Just Looks Like the Sea

 

by Jamie Benner, After Georgia O’Keeffe

 

All lines are liminal

at rest on the horizon.

The sienna sky

leaves glaciers

like neighbors

dissociative expanses

cuffed in unfamiliar hues.

A ship’s corpse sinks

just out of sight.

Beneath, slip shapes

of pitch—

a mother, a calf, a sea

filled with strangers,

faced with a choice:

to splinter or stay.

Jamie Logan Benner holds a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi and works at Acadian House Publishing. She previously served as Managing Editor at The Pinch, Product, and BreakBread magazines and Associate Editor at Mississippi Review. Her writing appears in Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere.

 

Magenta

 

By Miles Liss

 

The sky’s an orange river in this city of thieves.
Gray or blue, the clouds trail overhead.


This is no doomsday scenario
even if the world is slowly fading.
Everything’s rich with life, except maybe us.


Try not to think too much—
just listen—a drop of honey.


The clouds are heavenly silent. They pick up
the magenta of the sun and carry it with them
like a command across the sky.

Miles Liss is the 2021 winner of the AWP Kurt Brown Prize in Poetry. A collection of his poetry and art is forthcoming from Death of Workers Whilst Building Skyscrapers Press at https://www.deathofworkerswhilstbuildingskyscrapers.com. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife, the poet Zakia Ahmadzai.

 

The Barred Owl of Tree Hollow

 

By Janay Garrick

 

“You here for the owls?” the man flings open his Ford truck’s white door, his accent, southern. “Damn things. Up all hours of the night. Goddamn neighbor,” he points across the street at three old oak trees where them damn things live. “She puts out half a rotisserie chicken every night on her back deck. Keeps ‘em around.”

I, myself, am pleased with the goddamn neighbor, whoever she is. A Barred Owl baby above my head just now. Black-eyed, close-set, mottled gray peeping down at me. The baby moves her head elliptically right, then left. Clockwise then counterclockwise. She’s hip hop, she’s feather and flow—she’s got some bounce to her ounce. Delightful! How could anyone possibly call her, Damn Thing?

Baby Owl practices the short sprint, the fly-hop from oak to oak. She lands, at times, too close to a vertical branch and hasn’t the room to retract her wing. It’s clear: she’s no idea how long those things are, nor of what they are capable. Her wing scrapes the branch, she tilts left, tilts right, but does not fall. She wobble-walks, she side steps like a country-line dancer. Look at her feathered down! Her silver ballet skirt made of tulle.

From the family of Typical Owls, Barred Owl’s call is commonplace, a loud “who-cooks-for-you” most frequently heard at night. No wonder the man can’t sleep, Who-Cooks-For-You carrying on like she does—all night—like some 1960s, bra-burning feminist. I picture the man in the thralls of two a.m. pillow-plumping sleep, thrashing, kicking straight then jackknifing, then straight-as-a-board and cursing. Lots of cursing. This pleases me enormously. Barred Owl, she’s done her do. Sometimes birders say her call sounds like this: who-cooks-for-you-all. She’s real southern.

I strain my neck, tilting toward the treetops. It’s dusk dark. Where are the rest of them? I wonder. He said this was a family of seven. The no-see-ums pinch, yip, irritate. I swat, smack, ignore. They persist.

The Barred Owl is nocturnal. She hunts at night. When agitated, or defending her territory or her babies, she sounds like a French Bulldog. Her bark ascending, rising into a hoo-wah, loud and drawn out. This is a Big Old Deal. Ruckus raising. Her big, flat-faced, blunt-headed bark; her blunt-tongued, bar-breasted feathers in a ruffle. Do not invade her territory. She is revved up.

I look up to her.

Lightning’s heat has vaporized the water inside the oak tree, but the steam does not blow the trunk or the limbs apart. There, Barred Owl sets down wing and pulls up perch. She grafts herself into tree and limb, homemaking where wind has done its damage and lightning has flung its fiery tail. She is strong and resolute. She thinks outside the box, the bars, and barriers—what the oak tree calls disaster, Barred Owl calls home.

Janay Garrick writes from her grandmother’s pink secretary desk in Northern California. Influenced by the poetry of witness and resistance writing, Janay desires her art to speak back to the centers of power. Her work has appeared in Narrative, TriQuarterly, Eclectica, and Memoir Land among others. Connect with her: janaygarrick.com.

 

We Took It All

 

By Laura Rockhold

 

We went mid-morning, under a clear sky,

to walk and listen as we do in the woods.

 

First, we saw two trumpeter swans gliding on the lake,

holding themselves as sacred as their other, we said, loves for life.

 

In the marsh, we saw four great white egrets wading,

each on their own path.

 

And three garter snakes sunning

their creative sides in the tall, yellow grass.

 

We saw six bass spawning by the bridge, giving up

something they think they love, for something they really do love.

 

We saw one bald eagle ascending

from the lowest to the highest point.

 

And on the lake again, we saw two loons and their reflections

as still as reawakening dreams.

 

We started on the path for home, and took it all

as a sign of something good.

Laura Rockhold is a poet and visual artist living in Minnesota. She is the inventor of the golden root poetic form and 2022 recipient of the Bring Back The Prairies Award and Southern MN Poets Society Award. Find her at: www.laurarockhold.com.