by Margaret Young

Merced your playgrounds fill with ghosts,
pipes and ditches suck Sierra snowmelt down
to green your lawns and rows of palm trees.
Merced, behind your fences dogs are screaming,
your fruit ripens and falls and rots, Merced,
your gardens teem with oleander, roses and lilies,
your telephone poles crazy with ivy, honeysuckle.
Have mercy on your minivans and soccer fields, Merced,
your malls are sweet with girls swinging ponytails,
drinking bubble tea and giggling, straws plunged
among the wet black pearls, your plazas run with blood
as boys collapse next to the 99 Cent Store
and the Save Mart, shot for some color,
for wearing or being the wrong one.

by Harold Van Lonkhuyzen

Silence, stillness,

yew bushes, Norway spruces,

granite step and empty clothesline:

let me not disturb

the memories interred

of two parents and four children,

a happiness pursued

and perished.

I have wanted to dig in,

to remember, revise,

cooperate with life

in my own liberation.

Today, it seems, I resist.

I’ll visit again, tomorrow.

by Harold Van Lonkhuyzen

Strange innovations like Venetian blinds,

A wall of mirrors that were closet doors,

Sleek Danish cookpots I’d not seen before,

That unfamiliar smell: all call to mind

Your first apartment, Father, as bachelor

Again. Susan, your pretty lady friend,

Always just leaving, smirking, seemed to commend

This as “progress.” Weren’t you in search of “something more”?

The question, I suppose, was if our roles

As parent and child were now outmoded too?

I vomited each time I visited, it’s true —

Made sick by my mother’s rage, its bilious toll

Wrung from her Garrison Colonial

Just miles away — and longed for the historical.

by Nathaniel Dolton–Thornton

AETHER /OAR

winter XXXXVIII

the world is full of mystery
dramas we’ve seen before

the world is full of riddle
writers and solvers hunched over tables under drawn blinds

the plum tree blooms
sky in winter, but that doesn’t explain whom it’s for

the Foolish Creek foolishly burbles
where no one hears