by Judy Kaber

My brother bragged
that he could hold Orion
in the palm of his hand,

so I stared as he stretched
his arm to the night sky,
fingers wide. At five,

I believed everything.
That a giant rabbit left eggs
and footprints on the neighbor’s

lawn, that girls could fall down
rabbit holes, swallow pills,
change size against their will.

So who was to say a boy
couldn’t scoop a group of stars
from the black sky and hang them,

a glittering rosary, from the rear
view mirror of our 1954 Chevy,
a car my dad loved, drove us

to wash with squeaky sponges
until it glistened, a dark scorpion
under the slanted light of the street

lamp at the foot of our drive.
My dad loved that car. Almost
as much as he’d loved my mother,

when they rode the subway
before the war, before Long Island,
before they were married

or we were born, and she drank
boilermakers, her first drink,
and in a green tiled washroom

vomited while he waited
outside the toilet door.
In the morning he bought

her oranges, dug the peels
loose with his nails, handed
her naked slices on his palm.

by Fern G. Z. Carr

a fox kit
drowning
                  awash in pus
                  bloated abscess
                  burgeoning
infection                      spreading
      bone disintegrating
      ball and socket hip
dis
                                                            located
whisked
           from the wild
           to the sterile
   shaved
   rubber tube down throat
   death–mimicking anaesthesia
multiple surgeries
on stainless steel tabletops
               salty whimpers
               from a stainless steel cage

tentative return to wildlife center
            placed in a pen with
                        vixen Cupcake
                        foster mother of orphaned kits
                        mentor of foxy ways

vixen Cupcake
foster mother of orphaned kits
mentor of foxy ways
            sly vixen
            stealthy executioner
   her needle teeth
            lining determined jaws
shake            shake            shaking            Copper

chunks of rusty fur missing
                  tiny body convulsing

then forever still

by Fern G. Z. Carr

Death is a carnival
shooting gallery —
a line of ducks blankly gliding by,
little tail feathers
curled upward, glazed eyes
focused ahead,
floating along
assembly–line style
one after another
along the pointed crests of
blue plastic waves

oblivious

caught in the cross–hairs
as someone points and shoots —
anybody’s guess
which duck will fall.

by John J. Ronan

1 Quartz

From four feet you can imagine candy,

a lemony tease that turns cruel

closer — rock found in the Mohave,

a common quartz, the hard mineral

Used for marbles, the semi–precious

jewelry trade, for a cat’s whisker

to scratch in the early years of wireless,

raising Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh . . .

The central flaw or inclusion that implies

ghosts and the veiling mist of ritual

is simply a function of refracted sunlight,

your anxious gaze, the indifferent crystal:

Silicon dioxide, locked in hexagons

by the strict physics found in nature,

without magic or hints of incense,

and unrelated to food, beauty, the future.