by Tina Posner

I leaned in to smell the coffee steam,

caressing my cheek with damp tendrils,

unscrolling into ampersands and clefs.

In the early quiet, before I clean my eyes,

dress, and list my chores, the world steps

in like a shy lover. The cold creeps up

from stone pavers. It licks my soles.

A breeze shakes out my night-pressed hair.

I giggle as the last winter leaves tremble.

I imagine them holding in laughter from

some tasteless joke we shared and

kept secret—the way survivors do.

by Tina Posner

Rats high on cocaine prefer jazz to silence.

Orcas have revived a fad from the 80s,

donning dead salmon hats.

This is just the tip of information iceberg.

A fashion show with geese

renders me speechless.

I take many scrolls throughout the day

There’s a lot of shipping,

problems solved by orders of operation,

ADD symptoms wheeled out on reels

My schadenfreude is heartfelt.

There are before and after

versions of everything

I swallow a daily dose of history,

photograph sunsets i paid for in old friends.

I live for this jazz of information

Post pleasure. Post loneliness.

A parade of whales in their Easter bonnets

Ramming and sinking yachts.

Show me more cross-species friends,

And elderly fashion plates.

Reveal the meanings of songs.

I need to be told what I already know

And what I don’t.

It needs to be pithy—more pith, please.

I wonder if I should have had kids.

I wonder if I should have proposed

a threesome that time in Paris.

These are things I can’t yet look up. Yet.

I can’t look up. My attention is glued.

The silence around me is vast.

My eyes are irradiated and dry.

As if I’d finished crying.

As if.

by Cecelia Hagen

I once bought a suit of gray—
boxy jacket with three glum buttons,
mid-calf skirt that had no drape.

Maybe I had read it was best to
dress for the job you wanted, or maybe
I was seeking some notion of safety

in intentional ugliness,
or hoping to appear more
mature by dressing differently.

Whatever prompted the suit’s purchase,
I never did wear it or dare to return it.
It hung in my closet for years, a rebuke,

a lost cause I never cared to champion.
I would gladly have traded it
for a single fiddle lesson

or a sweet dream spent listening
to someone with an expressive face
play a Bach cello suite.

I considered dismantling the suit-—snipping off
the round grey buttons so they could tumble
with their kin in my round black button tin,

maybe pulling out lengths of the hem’s thread
and twisting them into elegant figure eights
for some later use, even scissoring the broad planes

of skirt and jacket back
to sew potholders, perhaps, or upholster
a chair too small to lean back in,

but instead I put the suit in a sack
with a handful or so of other mistakes
and gave it away.

by Cecelia Hagen

One distant summer
at a shop in Kenmore Square
I bought an orange- and red-flowered
shirt. The first day I wore it
to work I noticed a mark
on the left sleeve,
a daub of Wite-Out.
I could almost feel
the shirt’s previous owner
sitting with me in my chair,
facing the keyboard.

Wite-Out—not
the swirl of a blizzard,
just a small screw-top bottle
with a brush applicator
to blot out typos. I would
blow on the paint to dry it
before typing again;
it wasn’t an act of undoing,
just a simple covering.

And the sleeves—
you’re wondering
what they were like?
Long, flowered,
ending with a belllike
ruffle that fell
open when I propped
my elbows on the desk
to answer the phone
or daydream
about a fast youth,
about what
that would be like.