by R.H. DeVault

Hands clapping over our heads
feet sliding in socks over dimpled
linoleum, cream and gold.

Blue Listerine-colored numbers
glowing through the face
of a clock radio mounted under

the cabinet beneath the drinking
glasses. Sitting on the ninety
degree angle where counters

meet, hearing Jim Croce’s
Pennsylvania folk revival
tones slap the walls of the

kitchen. Singing about
the Southside of Chicago
like it was just outside

our Middle Tennessee farmhouse.
Heels tapping the cabinets
mimic the strike of pool

cues, and bad, bad Leroy Brown
was just about to walk in.
Milk, not beer. Suckers, not cigarettes.

But every tune we howled
Dixie Dawn, carwash blues,
roller derby queen

until we were breathless
from swinging and dancing,
our broom the microphone.

by R.H. DeVault

Helen washes her hair
with rain water.
A brunette cascade
throws diamonds through
the air.

Her startling doe eyes
sparkle copper
She is ten if she is a day
but a very old ten.

Her mother saves loose
string, crooked
Bobby pins, wooden spools
Helen adopts this.

Even at eighty-five
she is ten.
She will keep the stockings
with the run

In the right calf and mark
them “wear with slacks”
She will collect 100 bread
ties, but only

Until she finds more.
Every can,
every bottle gets returned
for a dime.

Ten cents is $1.85 in 1929.

by Molly Smith

Where are we supposed to feel invisible shifts?
I still go to work; I still buy the same kind of milk.
My fingers feel the same, my toes, my gut.
When the world has capsized while looking right side up,
how do we measure the difference?
Like a bird’s relationship with a glass wall, I find
myself in lots and lots of types of days
but they’re different from before, melted and
sticky like sugar in the grooves of a fingerprint.
I think we feel different kinds of grief in similar
places: salt and pepper shakers, split ends, the pages of a book.
I’d like to cut the word goodbye from the dictionary
with a pair of dull scissors so it understands its dull pain.
Maybe I do feel these shifts in my fingers
in fingernail marks on my palm and
cold metal surrounding my thumb.
I hope goodbye is supposed to taste metallic.

by Molly Smith

someone invented coffee because they knew mornings were meant to be slow
gritty and slow like the lingering smell of bacon fat in the kitchen
or the way the word “gravel” feels in your mouth

steam from a boiling pot catches dust and I haven’t seen the entirety of my soul
maybe I’ve peered the center, or the edges,
certainly not both.

it should be savored, like coffee dregs in the morning
like unbrushed hair and toothpaste spit
like how I read books on Saturdays and the way I pick at my skin until it bleeds

how can I be content without knowing it all?
with each green smell of morning I think I’ve come closer
but another piece blurs each time I take a sip