Issue #25.11 A Double Issue: Jennifer Fair Stewart and Joan E. Bauer

A Poem by Jennifer Fair Stewart

Dead Butterfly   (Kierkegaard and Me, Outside a Texas Psychotherapy Building)

Kierkegaard calls it worse than torturing a butterfly, the pain inflicted if  told to master one’s obsessions, driven to borderlines of madness by guilt.

After I drop my son off, anxious for his next session (his next hope of new life forward), flex

and glide to that one last open parking spot cessation (the long migration ended), still

the finish line’s unreached.  Here’s a bitter sight to stoop to hold; heart-slack, my hands cup and harvest a symbol

in this borderland of autumn:  transfixed orange scaled wings in open position, intact, at my feet

the dead monarch, delicate as a scrap of tracing paper pennon, eloquent

herald loosed from royal blue sky, fallen– blotted on this inky bruise of asphalt

edges cut to black.  The final credits  roll with So close, nice try! as if

that legend of the desert people is true: our whispered secrets winged to God were

orthogonals of intrusive thoughts drawn to the vanishing point, punched down

heaven’s bread, a sacrament shaped for the second rise of fallen sparrows, fallen child.

Brilliant as flames, butterflies give witness:  fire-ant-devoured-alive, or mangled bright on a car grille, like stillness

these nine years of his childhood consumed in mind-body torment.  No snug cocoon,

nothing simple in ritual, arduous acts of pulling on one’s socks, just so when OCD confines, when truth begins in untruth, we grow to know

three thousand miles of migration, car rides of blessed restlessness, exposure therapy and release.  Take, eat… a trail of breadcrumbs

into the broken hands of him who holds,  impaled to a crossbeam tree of life, our fluttered souls

see, raw against the splintered grain, wine- dark tips of nascent wings

rising from the bone-deep burn of trust through uncertainty, at the swoop and ascent of both scapulae.

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Jennifer Fair Stewart is the author of the chapbook Marginalia:  An Interactive Book of Hours (The Orchard Street Press).  Her poetry has won multiple awards, including the 2024 Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award, and has appeared in Heart of Flesh, The Orchards, Quiet Diamonds, Crescendo, Plough, Bacopa, and Abraxas.  Find her at https://jenniferfairstewart.carrd.co/

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A Poem by Joan E. Bauer

Thirteen Things I Never Told My Father

I dreamt I ran you over with your silver Jag. 

In 1969, I registered Peace and Freedom. Mother was frantic, sure you’d lose your clearance.  

When that bouffanted blonde rammed us with her car,  I never believed she was just an unhappy employee.

I smoked for twenty years. Not much, but some. I can’t believe I did that.

When things got bad, someone should have told you  Mother’s name was not ‘Dammit.’  

Every year I took back the Neiman Marcus certificate  you gave me to the store counter., ‘Hey, I don’t need  a hundred dollar scarf.  I need rent money. Can you just give me cash?’

Sometimes, I watched you listening to your second wife and couldn’t believe you married that woman.  

I keep your ‘Eagle Has Landed. First Manned Lunar Landing’  mug on my desk.  The one inscribed ‘Hal Bauer, Mission Control.’  (It holds pens, magic markers, scissors, an old toothbrush,  a screwdriver, a pair of tweezers.)   

Sometimes I hoped you’d come back home.  After awhile,  I hoped you wouldn’t.

Sorry, but I used to make fun of your Walter Cronkite voice. 

At the hospital when I was seven & they couldn’t stop the bleeding,  I remember how you stayed with me.

You appear as ‘this Errol Flynn with slicked-back hair’ in my  poems. You did look like Errol Flynn (from a certain angle).  

On the day you died, I sat alone in my office for a long time. 

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Joan E. Bauer is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Fig Season (Turning Point, 2023), The Camera Artist (Turning Point, 2021), and The Almost Sound of Drowning (Main Street Rag, 2008). Recent work has appeared in Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream and Chiron Review. For some years, she was a teacher and counselor and now divides her time between Venice, CA and Pittsburgh, PA where she co-curates the Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series with Kristofer Collins.

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