Issue #27.4 A Triple Issue: David Salner, Ellis Purdie, and Maureen O’Leary
A Poem by David Salner
An Infusion
Not too bad, he said, because this is the sweet time, while the last infusion finds its way through the body before it changes blood and bone to pain. He was packing for the move to his daughter’s house in Coatesville, where she’s a nurse, and we were standing beneath the myrtle whose blossoms were already changing red to gray. Mosquitoes left over from summer hummed in the shadows.
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After he’d driven off and thanked me for the little I did I tried to remember what Schubert said about pain, that under the guiding hand of discipline it leads to beauty, but in its pure form pain tells us only of grief, a subject on which we’ve learned enough.
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Schubert, again, wrote that pain sharpens the mind, which I doubt very much, though I suppose if you’ve never sat with it for an hour trying not to cry out, you’d know nothing about despair, you’d be unaware of what the new day means after tossing all night.
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Can we feel the pain of another, asked the creator of Ave Maria, of all that beauty suffused with pain?
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David Salner’s most recent books are The Green Vault Heist and Summer Words: New and Selected Poems. Both appeared in 2023. His award-winning debut novel is A Place to Hide (2021). His writing also appears in Threepenny Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. He’s worked all over the country, as iron ore miner, steelworker, librarian, baseball usher, and in many other trades.
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Two Poems by Ellis Purdie
Sweep Her
Sunday, and service over, I want the quiet of home, but instead I chase my son in the large sanctuary this church no longer uses, membership down, congregation too scattered among the pews to feel kinship, our body the one locals insist will perish soon.
Then, behind the baptistry glass, two older boys with the music minister pass through, and suddenly, my son needs to see it, too, witness empty basin where last baptism took place almost ten years ago. I am eager to leave, but when the boy gets an idea
he races for it. I tell him we can’t, we need to go home. Begging begins, and I listen, argue and then relent, sigh bitterly and say, Let’s go. Waste our time. Nothing to see. Upstairs, old door’s closer creaks, baptistry dim, tile littered with roaches on backs,
dust, skeleton of an anole, and like a tour guide, I present these dead, pick up the lizard hardened to leather, say with a mean charisma here is what happens when the church dies, son, sorry the moment I say it, the empty sanctuary before us in the pane.
I am Moses to the people, striking a rock to slake son’s thirst, causing our banishment from the Promised Land, suddenly sure I want a full sanctuary as badly as I want to go home, but not to sow nor shepherd, lacking altogether a boy’s persistence to get it done.
Safety in Dismay
No Latter-day Saint, but I would be a liar if I said I didn’t like the doctrine of eternal family, still a father and husband to these whom I worry over all the time, and finally, our getting to be each other’s without threat of sickness, death, broken bond. I struggle with the thought of my son and daughter resurrected, seeing me and saying, He was my father, now not. My wife, There is one I loved, most days, our covenant now done. Will we then even sit together, remembering whose we were? Yesterday, I walked the dog and children to the cemetery down the street. Daughter asleep in stroller; son sitting on wall bordering headstones, rapt in video game; dog on his back, joy-tossing in newly-mowed grass; I lifted slabs of concrete and crumbling brick, Searching for an unlikely snake in warm fall. Wind moved through the pines, all else quiet otherwise, and I wondered if Sheol’s garden, or heaven, would be this way, no body under stone ever again, my not-children in no need of my stewardship, but knowing I once did steward them, all of us aware of who helped us find this place, grasping a truth I could not before: there is better than permanence in law, blood, a last name, or a home. Though again, I would be lying if I claimed that even in such a time I would never ask you to sit with me in the garden, sunlight shimmering through branches, kingsnake under rock overturned, and remember those days gone, days somehow we would now not return to, even if offered.
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Ellis Purdie graduated from The Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. Previous work has appeared or is forthcoming in San Pedro River Review, Red Rock Review, Ekstasis, Puerto Del Sol, Riveted, jmww, Reformed Journal, Talking River Review, and Cottonwood. He lives in east Texas with his family, where he teaches and is often looking for wildlife.
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Two Poems by Maureen O’Leary
Queen Mab in Love
I turn inside out without
My own consent I tear
These walls to shreds I burn
Down houses and I crawl into
The lion’s mouth.
I want to open the universe with my
Bare hands and fall into the
Void (the void is me the void is me)
I’m a grabbing hand
I’m the negative space that will hold you
Too tightly and love you too much
I will be too close to you I will set
My wanting loose
A whirl of debris
This is she
Oh this is she
Menopause II
I am most dangerous where
I am lonely
The permafrost is melting
You can talk now
I’m melting, I’m melting,
I’m burning away the
Detritus that confined me
What is left but all this
Blood all this iron all this
Stone.
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Maureen O’Leary lives in California. Her work appears in Nightmare, Chthonic Matter, Bourbon Penn, Sycamore Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and other places.
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