Memory Lane by Laura Lee Washburn

In the flea market the women talk
about men falling down.  He wasn’t hurt

but he couldn’t get up.             And the next time

he knocked that recliner on its side.

No broken hips.  That’s what she’s afraid of.

He crawled to the den to the phone.

Hips already replaced, pins and screws,

he can feel them when he lays on that side.

 

The talk is business.  The farmer’s market

failing this year, the store on main. Everyone’ll

be down at the school, not shopping.  No one

reads the paper anymore, can’t get them in

with an ad.  They wonder

whose funeral with so many cars

this morning. 

Laura Lee Washburn, Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University, is the author of This Good Warm Place (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Valparaiso Review, Carolina Quarterly, 9th Letter, The Sun, Red Rock Review, and Valparaiso Review.

The Ambigram by Kelley White

It’s honest dirt, blackening his fingers, though a shock
against the newborn’s head—he knows how to cradle
a newborn, has a natural way of rocking just a little
as we talk, and the mother’s on her cell phone in the hall.

You can see how much he loves the child. I don’t mind
the ragged jacket, the leather vest plastered with patches:
Vietnam vet, Harley-Davidson, Gypsy Motor Tour,
Native Riders. He’s earned the black and iron gray braid

hanging down his back. He whispers to the babies scalp,
kisses a patch of sparse pale hair, his huge hands cross
around her buttocks, knuckles spelling L-O-V-E H-A-T-E.
I explain the signs of illness to look for, give him my home

phone number. He warms a bottle under the faucet, shakes
a few drops on his wrist, the baby pale as milk against
his arm. We’ll recheck a weight in two weeks. Does he have
any questions. Yes, do we do DNA testing? Her last boy friend’s

kids all have red hair and blue eyes and I’m. . .I hold
his eyes. Do you want to know? What will it change?
Everything. Yes. Does it matter? He calls me two days later
from a bus on the way to Lowell, the baby has a diaper rash.

I talk him through the way to treat it. The mother’s sleeping
she needs her rest. It’s been a year now, well child checks,
a few colds, a fever. He always brings the child. Now
the woman’s pregnant. Another red head? It doesn’t matter

the love is in him. Who looks at hate.



Pediatrician Kelley White worked in inner city Philadelphia and now works in rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Rattle and JAMA. Her most recent books are TOXIC ENVIRONMENT (Boston Poet Press) and TWO BIRDS IN FLAME (Beech River Books.) She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.

Talkers by Tina Hacker

In the late ‘40s when crying babies
took precedence over Glenn Miller
or Benny Goodman on the radio,
new moms sat on fences
in front of apartment buildings
rocking infants in buggies
as evening shaded the day.
My mother rarely joined them.
She was convinced they gossiped
about her, malicious rumors that rolled
from woman to woman like the L train
nearby. But she occasionally sat
down for a few minutes,
the time it took for an indifferent facial
expression or greeting to confirm
her suspicions.
“Rose thinks she’s better than me,”
she’d grumble as she left.
The name didn’t matter,
Fanny, Jean, Connie.



Tina Hacker’s full-length poetry book, Listening to Night Whistles, was published by Aldrich Press and a chapbook, Cutting It, by The Lives You Touch Publications. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has been published in a wide variety of journals, both online and paper. Since 1976, she has edited poetry for Veterans' Voices, a magazine of writing by hospitalized and recovering vets.

Myth of My Birth by Tina Hacker

Dad liked to gamble.
The story chronicles his
eight weeks of non-stop luck.
Three dollars won each day
from a Chicago bookie, exactly
enough to pay the hospital’s
daily fee for the incubator
that kept his daughter alive.

What if Dad were dealt a bad
hand, picked the losing pony, tossed
craps? Would my name have
disappeared? I picture an orderly pulling
me from my heated bed. An aide
skipping a bottle or two of formula.
No one in the family considered
a dire ending to this tall tale.
Or offered to help pay the bill.



Tina Hacker’s full-length poetry book, Listening to Night Whistles, was published by Aldrich Press and a chapbook, Cutting It, by The Lives You Touch Publications. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has been published in a wide variety of journals, both online and paper. Since 1976, she has edited poetry for Veterans' Voices, a magazine of writing by hospitalized and recovering vets.

Weeds by Michael Estabrook

Everywhere they’ve lived
there’s been an old couple
next door or three houses down
puttering in their yard the woman
pulling weeds in her garden the man
mowing the lawn or emptying
his wife’s weed bucket for her
or the both of them relaxing
in lawn chairs sipping tea. Suddenly
he realizes as Jeannie next door
waves over at him that they
are that old couple now.



Michael Estabrook is a recently retired baby boomer child-of-the-sixties poet freed finally after working 40 years for “The Man” and sometimes “The Woman.” No more useless meetings under florescent lights in stuffy windowless rooms. Now he’s able to devote serious time to making better poems when he’s not, of course, trying to satisfy his wife’s legendary Honey-Do List.

Hospital Room by Michael Estabrook

Tomorrow is his surgery
a tumorous kidney
so he calls
to more-or-less say good-bye
although he doesn’t
why would they bother doing
a 9-hour operation
if there was no hope?

I see him 3,000 miles away
watching TV
taking his meds
stretching up to see the tree outside the window
rubbing at the pain
in his back and down his legs
will it ever go away
will he get home again
to his own bed
coffee in his favorite mug
cinnamon toast with scrambled eggs
trying to finish the novel
he’s been working on
for a year and a half
plant those tulip bulbs
he ordered from Holland
so they come up in the spring?

Yes way too much still to be done
not a good time to die
operation must be successful
the doctor is a good doctor
or so he’s heard



Michael Estabrook is a recently retired baby boomer child-of-the-sixties poet freed finally after working 40 years for “The Man” and sometimes “The Woman.” No more useless meetings under florescent lights in stuffy windowless rooms. Now he’s able to devote serious time to making better poems when he’s not, of course, trying to satisfy his wife’s legendary Honey-Do List.

Blue Law Blues by Alarie Tennille

Blue laws lock up the fun,
tie Sunday down with the fidgety,
sit-still binds of a sermon.

Nothing to do, nothing to do,
plodding through the last school-free
hours: a martyrdom of quiet

till Daddy says, “Get in the car.”
We drive to the shopping center,
a gray ghost town.

All those empty parking spaces
lined up like grave stones.
Not even a cola for sale.

We stop in front of Roses
dime store, where my horse
is saddled up, waiting.

Like Daddy, he’s all mine today.
No line, no pushing,
no too-busy excuses.

Daddy feeds in a dime
and I’m off across the wide
range. He leans against a post,

smoking a cigarette.
In twenty minutes, we’ll be back
home, my pardner and me.



Alarie Tennille (alariepoet.com) serves on the Emeritus Board of The Writers Place in Kansas City, Missouri. She’s the author of Running Counterclockwise and Spiraling into Control. Alarie’s poems have appeared in numerous journals including Margie, Poetry East, I-70 Review, Southern Women’s Review and Midwest Quarterly Review.

Honeymoon, First Marriage by Jan Duncan-O'Neal

          Windsor, Berkshire, England

After a morning in the chapel
beneath St. George’s wedding cake vault,

we huddled under the dome of a black umbrella,
crossed streets to the tea shop on a corner

where we folded our hands around tea cups
and ate toasted scones. The Cornish cream

spread thick, the raspberry jam drizzle,
the satisfaction. Relief from another day

of rain: a perfect setting for romance
if I had been in love instead of just married.



Jan Duncan-O’Neal has devoted the past twelve years to writing poetry since her retirement in the library world. Her work has been widely published, and The Lives You Touch Publications published her chapbook Voices: Lost and Found in 2011. She is currently compiling a full length collection and is an editor for I-70 Review.

Grieg's Piano Concerto in South Texas, 1949 by Jan Duncan-O'Neal

          For Bill

Every Saturday morning before he fills
the enamel bucket with fresh water, the boy
places his favorite 78 on the record player.

He listens for a roll of timpani,
a piano flourish. He is on his knees now,
a floor scrubber dutifully washing

a family’s footprints, a week’s dirt
from the Mexican tiled back porch.
The music carries him on, fills his head.

Halfway through the movement,
the needle sticks in the last groove.
The boy, hands damp, reaches 

to turn the record over. Electric shocks pinch
his fingers, run up his arms, but he persists,
throws out soiled water, fills the bucket

with fresh. Scrubbing, moving faster
with the piano’s tempo, he finishes
the floor in record time.



Jan Duncan-O’Neal has devoted the past twelve years to writing poetry since her retirement in the library world. Her work has been widely published, and The Lives You Touch Publications published her chapbook Voices: Lost and Found in 2011. She is currently compiling a full length collection and is an editor for I-70 Review.

Looking at Art by Jan Duncan-O'Neal

We take the children to see art,
sacred to us as prayer in a cathedral,
to look, to find the unexpected—
a dot of pink on a blue canvas,
stars puncturing a coal black sky,
a blood orange sunrise rising
over the harbor anchored by sailboats

The children scurry along,
little half-blind mice
sniffing for a morsel of cheese,
content to play hide-and-go-seek
in rooms of glass cases,
never stopping
to squint at their own reflections.



Jan Duncan-O’Neal has devoted the past twelve years to writing poetry since her retirement in the library world. Her work has been widely published, and The Lives You Touch Publications published her chapbook Voices: Lost and Found in 2011. She is currently compiling a full length collection and is an editor for I-70 Review.

My Hungarian by Ronald Moran

My mother was Hungarian, and she would
never let me remember it, by Anglicizing
her maiden name, by forbidding me from
telling anyone that I was half Hungarian,
refusing to teach me any Magyar, despite
my asking during childhood and the teens.
I could never speak with my grandparents,
who were not taught how to speak English.

When I was just 16, I dated a Polish girl, warm,
sweet. I liked her, and I think she felt the same
about me, but when my mother found out
she was of Slavic descent, she shut the door. 
I want to apologize to her for my absence
of courage over 60 years ago, howsoever late.

 

Ronald Moran has published 12 collections of poetry, two books of criticism (one coauthored), and hundreds of poems, essays, and reviews in a number of journals, including Connecticut Poetry Review, Commonweal, Louisiana Review, Northwest Review, South Carolina Review, Southern Poetry Review, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, and The Wallace Stevens Journal. His newest collection, Eye of the World, will be published by Clemson University Press in 2016.

Chinese Lanterns by Bob Bradshaw

How many more years will I look out
on these Chinese Lanterns that grow

as wildly as bamboo? "Stop staring,
and help in the garden," my wife advises.

My wife loves massaging the earth
with her hands, announcing

that soon she'll have soil rich
as Lion's Head soup.

Even her orchids are happy
as if thriving on the slopes

of Tai Shan mountain, her hose's mist
rising high above Jing Shi Valley.



Bob Bradshaw lives in California, and hopes to retire to a hammock soon. He has many such ambitious plans. For now he passes the time listening to old Stones' records, and gathers moss. He can be reached at bobbybradshw@yahoo.com when he isn't napping.

That Dark Space by Martha Christina

The young face
of my daughter
smiles up at me
from old photos
spread on the floor,
a rug of sweet memories;
the uncaptured images
of anger and despair,
like the missing front teeth
in a child's smile. That dark
space, darker.



Martha Christina is a frequent contributor to Brevities and Three Line Poetry. Longer work appears or is forthcoming in the Aurorean, Bryant Literary Review, Blast Furnace, Main Street Rag, and The Orange Room Review. She lives in Bristol, RI.

To a Friend Now Dead by Alarie Tennille

You live so vividly
in college memories
that I promise

your husband photos
that never existed.
I search my album.

You were there…
and there…not more
than eight feet from me.

Behind the camera’s eye,
too shy to be the focus
of attention.

I forgot our game—
how you would turn
just as I snapped.

I always lost you behind
a black silk curtain of hair.
I lost you again tonight.



First published in Touch: The Journal of Healing



Alarie Tennille (alariepoet.com) serves on the Emeritus Board of The Writers Place in Kansas City, Missouri. She’s the author of Running Counterclockwise and Spiraling into Control. Alarie’s poems have appeared in numerous journals including Margie, Poetry East, I-70 Review, Southern Women’s Review and Midwest Quarterly Review.

Open Call for Submissions

Red Eft Review is a new online publication dedicated to accessible poetry and is now open to submissions. Please read the guidelines carefully before submitting. Thanks for visiting and I look forward to reading your poems.