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I Remember the World
I step out on the porch to hear
the woman's voice next door.
“Daddy's home,” she calls out.
That line drawn across
the bottom of the afternoon,
the done and undone at an end.
And even though September,
it will seem still a good idea
to yell the children in, to wash,
and carry dinner things outside.
It's that or candles in the dining room
and manners, napkins, prayers,
for there is just tonight
before the world ends.
Before the boys be men
gone far away.
“Daddy's home,” she calls
as though it were
some common thing to say,
ho-hum to herald fireflies,
chatter, storybooks,
before the darkness,
some ordinary thing
to welcome nighttime
on its way.
Seen Different Ways
You can pay for psychotherapy.
People do. Or, you can read reviews
of things that you have written.
A person named Jane Tuttle
would have the readers of the Boston Globe
believe a certain author - the one who will
insist on writing all my stories - has been
to wizard school, and stopped off
after class to buy a magic carpet
she has ridden to a country
“. . . where aggrieved memory pivots
to empathy and respectful curiosity.”
And sitting by the woodstove,
late in spring, I close my eyes,
thinking to imagine the trip
of transport to such a state as that:
my changing planes three times,
each time in Pittsburgh,
spending all one summer
in an abandoned railway carriage
I’d imagined still in use,
taking Greyhound buses hither -
never thither, never yon -
never really leaving
the driving to anyone but me,
and finally being put down
by the side of the road
– a short walk to the middle –
near a weathered, clapboard church,
shuttered, worn to time’s design,
a signboard faded, steeple listing,
noisy when the storms roll in.
Having traveled ten years,
and ten years, and ten years more.
Everything that ever happened to me
in my life knotted up inside hobo bandanas,
slung on sticks, all rickety, then bending,
in time tatters, little flags of surrender,
my coats of arms.
Till finally
I arrive back home again;
them all there in the kitchen,
waiting dinner. Me there with
my empathy and respectful curiosity.
I pick up another newspaper.
A reviewer in a small town in Nebraska
writes of the same story collection:
“There is a core of sadness,
the not-quite-solid self of a girl
still looking for a portion of love
and attention that just missed her.”
Ah, yes. She’s right, of course.
But too, I’d like to think,
the writer in the Boston Globe,
making out of words a worthy wish.
Linda McCullough Moore is the author of two story collections, a novel, an essay collection and more than 350 shorter published works. She is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, as well as winner and finalist for numerous national awards. Her first story collection was endorsed by Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and equally as joyous, she frequently hears from readers who write to say her work makes a difference in their lives. For many years she has mentored award-winning writers of fiction, poetry, and memoir. She is currently completing a novel, Time Out of Mind, and a collection of her poetry. www.lindamcculloughmoore.com.
ZephyrZ is a computer programmer from Kearns, Utah, and a self-taught artist who uses code and a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to create modern art. Since artificial intelligence is already used to generate faces, music, and even poetry, his artistic endeavors continuously explore how machine intuition and program splicing can not only emulate human-created art, but push the boundaries into something original, too. The end result is an ever-evolving process of creation and destruction. Each workpiece is unique, with its own story and personality. You can commission original pieces on his website: https://www.zephyrzart.com.