Author’s Note: I’ve always loved Kudzu for its relentless growth. My drives from ETSU (Eastern Tennessee State University) to my parents’ home in Kentucky wound through kudzu-draped roads in Virginia, feeling like another world. This story explores themes of displacement, connection, and the silent struggles we face. Inspired by my mother’s teachings on Kudzu’s dual nature—destructive yet resilient—I hope it resonates deeply, rooting itself in your hearts like Kudzu, unyielding and ever-present.

Someone Planted Kudzu in New York City

NO ONE KNOWS WHEN IT WAS PLANTED, or who did it, or why. In fact, no one even noticed at first. It was a gradual realization, like when you slowly understand that growing up wasn’t anything like you thought it would be, or when you allow days to become weeks and then months without speaking to your parents back home, or when you lie down to sleep next to someone every night and without even meaning to, you find yourself falling out of love with them. That’s how the kudzu managed to grow in the middle of the city—by being quiet and steady and invisible. 

It slithered inch by inch in the background, taking Balto and then the Bethesda Fountain. When it began to walk with me down The Mall and climb into the stone laps of the authors I prayed to, I noticed. I would stand and stare at it, its broad green leaves fluttering in the wind and the tiny, curled fingers reaching out toward the wide-open spaces, just hoping for something to cling to. 

Later that day, when I got home, I called my mother in that automatic way I used to, when talking to her was as natural as breathing. It wasn’t until after I heard the ringing that I started to worry about how long it had been since we’d talked. But when she answered the phone, her voice was sunshine like always and it’s hello Kelly and I miss you Kelly and I love you Kelly and I’m just so happy to hear your voice Kelly. She spoke as if any minute now I was going to no longer be myself, but a telemarketer trying to sell her sham car insurance. 

I told her about my internship at Soho Press and my writing group that meets on Wednesdays and about Noah’s promotion and how we could afford to move out of the Bronx and into Brooklyn now, into a top-floor studio. She seemed pleased with our progress and said she was happy with all the wonderful news. She told me about the squirrel that steals her tomatoes out of her garden and that Dad had gotten her a little wiener dog that she didn’t want but now loves and about how she’s gotten herself a season pass to the Barter Theatre.

I hung up without telling her about my job at Macy’s in the fragrance department that sends me home with headaches every day because I’m allergic to the perfume. I did not tell her about the constant stream of impersonal rejections, each letter like a papercut to the heart. I did not tell her that it’d been four weeks since Noah last touched me. I wondered what she didn’t tell me.

The kudzu took root and made itself at home. The tourists began to take notice when the kudzu besieged the Belvedere and commandeered the Carousel. When the tourists got angry, the city noticed and decided to do something about the “problem.” The last thing they wanted was for the tourists to take their money to some other city, like Pittsburgh, Buffalo, or—heaven forbid—Toronto! So they decided to spray it. The city signed a hurried contract with an herbicide company and launched chemical warfare on the kudzu the moment the sun went down, and only bums and gangbangers were left in the park. 

The next day, the kudzu was gone. 

I tried to go about my routine as usual. I was supposed to stay at home and write; my self-imposed deadline was a week away, but my eyes kept glancing to the window across the cluttered, cupboard-sized living room, and my fingers kept striking the wrong keys, typing longwinded descriptions of greenery instead of forwarding plot or developing characters. Once I’d wasted half the day, I closed the laptop, grabbed my bag, and left for Central Park. I had to know if the kudzu was still there.

I walked down every path and trail. I hunted in the Great Lawn, I scouted out Strawberry Fields—I even interrogated the giraffes and lions at the zoo before going mad searching Alice. I gave up and sat at Shakespeare’s feet. I willed myself to forget the vines and remember the verse. There was a poem on the edges of my consciousness that I couldn’t quite remember, but it felt so right in this moment. Something about soft rains. I was about to ask Bill, but a mother and her two young daughters were standing nearby, and I didn’t want to seem like one of the crazies. 

That night I slept on the couch because Noah said the kudzu was a dangerous, invasive species of plant and that he was glad the city took care of it. He didn’t know it upset me, and I didn’t tell him I thought it was beautiful and reminded me of home. But, mostly, I didn’t want him to accidentally touch me in the middle of the night. When he touches me—if he touches me—I wanted it to be deliberate. So, I put blankets on the couch, and on his way to bed he stopped and stared at me, toothbrush hanging askew out of the side of his mouth. I kept my eyes averted, making myself busy with fluffing my pillow just right.

“What are you doing?” he asked, a white dribble of toothpaste foam gathering at the edges. 

“I thought I’d sleep on the couch tonight.” 

There was silence for a beat, then the sound of him brushing for a moment, and then he asked, “Why?” 

I didn’t respond except to throw the covers back and sit down. A few seconds later he walked out of the room, and I could hear him spit into the sink and gargle mouthwash. He came back, wiping his mouth on the back of his forearm. He stood there watching me. 

“Are you mad?” he asked.

I shook my head no. 

“Did I forget something important?” He was beginning to sound anxious. 

I shook my head no.

“Did I not notice something? Did you get a haircut or lose weight?” 

I shook my head no, again and sighed, now beginning to feel annoyed at how clueless he was. 

After another minute, he admitted, “I have no idea what is going on right now.” 

I looked up at him, taking in the sight of his shirtless body, tousled hair, confused expression. “I guess it’s just not what I imagined.” I stretched myself out on the couch and started to cover up.

“What?” 

“The way everything has changed.” I flipped over and faced the back of the couch, turning away from him. I waited, wondering if he would come to me, comfort me, tell me that the way he feels for me has never and will never change. Instead, I heard his footsteps retreating to the bedroom, and soon I fell asleep under the artificial glow of a muted Amanda Evans and a cacophony of rain on the roof. 

The next morning, I woke to the smell of fresh air mingling with bacon. Noah had opened the window and was making breakfast, which was unusual for him. I sat up and breathed, trying to inhale and internalize the aromas that made the small apartment smell like a real home. I wrapped the covers tighter around me, and Noah told me to unmute the television because there was something I’d want to see. 

I grabbed the remote and listened as Amanda Evans relayed the breaking news. The camera cut to an overhead shot of Central Park showing all eight hundred acres smothered in kudzu. The camera zoomed out farther to show the park juxtaposed with the buildings around it. The vines were spread out like a sea of green in the middle of the sparkling silver city. 

Noah stepped over with two plates of breakfast and handed me one as he sat down on the couch next to me. 

“Pretty amazing, huh?” He nodded toward the television. 

“I thought you didn’t like the kudzu?” 

He looked at me. “Are you kidding? It’s beautiful. I mean, I know it’s got to be controlled, but this is the coolest fucking thing that’s happened since we moved here, Kel.” 

“You really think so?” 

Noah nodded. “I was thinking about taking the day off work so we could go down and check it out. You want to?” 

“Sure.” 

At the park, caution tape separated the city from the battlefield as dozens of contracted landscapers fought the good fight against the invader. They weren’t even concerned about waiting until after dark anymore to spray the glyphosate onto the plant, but it didn’t look like they needed to waste their time or energy. The herbicide seemed to have no effect whatsoever on the kudzu. Some of the soldiers began hacking and chopping at the vines with sickles; when that didn’t work, they fired up weed eaters and charged into the creepers. 

Noah and I stood watching the massacre for hours until the men worked their way out of sight, leaving in their wake bits of vine and leaves littered across the ground. The segments of vine looked like severed green fingers. I felt Noah’s hand on the small of my back, and I let him guide me away. He guided me all the way to Il Cortile, our favorite restaurant in Little Italy. We used to go so often that the maître d’ knew our names and always gave us the most intimate table on the patio underneath the twinkling lights and grapevines. But we could afford it then. That was when I was teaching at JHS 80, before that kid took a gun to school and Noah convinced me to quit. I had protested; the kid only took it to show off to his friends, never attempted to fire it. My reasons fell on deaf ears, and for weeks afterward he’d hold my face in his hands every morning before work and stare at me for minutes that felt like years, and then he’d kiss me like he was never going to see me again before walking out the door without a word. Then when I’d come home after, he’d beg me on his knees to never go back. He was terrified, and I loved him. And so now I work in Macy’s fragrance department, and I wonder if the reason he doesn’t kiss me anymore is because I smell like sandalwood with a hint of geranium.

To my surprise, the maître d’ remembered our names. At our normal table, under sparkling lights and lifting his glass of wine, Noah reached his hand across the table and interlocked his fingers with mine. I smiled and clinked my glass to his. I drank to the kudzu; I wondered what Noah drank to. He talked about work, and as we ate, the conversation shifted to musings about how things were back in Abingdon and then to our upcoming move and how we needed to start organizing silverware into boxes and how proper labeling was key to a successful move. We sat there talking until they closed, and it felt nice to be talking to him. But as we walked back to the subway, silence descended. I swallowed over and over on the subway ride home, trying to get the stale taste like cardboard out of my mouth.  

The next day the kudzu was gone. They’d shredded it, chopped it, cut it up into itty-bitty pieces, and cleared it out of sight so that the park belonged to the people again and nature was tamed. Amanda Evans’s picture on the television was replaced with video they’d shot the day before of landscapers’ work. I cut off the television, interrupting her mid-sentence. I didn’t bother to try and write at home; I had to go back to Macy’s the next day, and I didn’t want to waste any time, so I packed up my laptop and headed for the park to write.  

I knew the kudzu wouldn’t be there, but I sat on the edge of the Burnett Fountain alone in my own secret garden and trailed my palm across the glassy surface of the water. I sat staring at the deep green pool before pulling my hand away and wiping it off on my pants. I opened my laptop and began typing. I stayed all day without stirring, until the streetlamps flickered to life, and I knew I had to go home.

Noah had dinner ready for me, and we ate on the couch watching Amanda Evans to see if she said anything about the kudzu, but the only thing the brunette reporter mentioned was that landscapers had been successful in eradicating the nuisance. After dinner, Noah asked about my day and about my writing and if I was sad about the kudzu. I told him it was a wonderful day, and I wrote a lot and that it would grow back. He kissed me on the cheek and then the mouth, and then he grabbed my blankets from the couch and took them around the bookshelf that separated the living room from our makeshift bedroom. 

I let him lead me by the hand and didn’t turn from him as he pulled my body to his, and I didn’t push him away as his hand slid up under my shirt and he fell asleep cupping my breast. I scowled at the ceiling, frustrated with myself for being so stupid and angry at Noah for not loving me like he used to. With a sigh, I turned my back to him and yanked the covers around me so that they pulled off of him. He just made a sleepy noise and turned with me, looping his arm around my abdomen and throwing his leg over mine. I tensed, but was too tired to push him off, so I exhaled and tried doing that mental exercise of consciously relaxing each body part, starting with the toes and working upward, but I was barely past my knees when I started thinking about Noah again. Then thinking about Noah became thinking about teaching, which became thinking about writing, and I wanted to write a song about the kudzu that a famous musician would sing so the whole world would know about it, but I have no rhythm. 

We slept and it rained and the next morning the kudzu had reclaimed what was taken from it and had invaded the city. Amanda Evans said the expanse of the vine’s conquest reached out as far as 2nd Ave. and down to 23rd Street on the East Side. The shops on 5th and in the Garment District closed for the day as the herbage coated their display windows with broad leaves and locked its curling arms across their entrances. The streets were not drivable because the vines had climbed their way to the tops of the poles and wrapped themselves around the streetlights. People couldn’t leave their homes because entire apartment buildings were wrapped up in its unyielding embrace. 

With Macy’s closed, I could go see it in person. I needed to witness the verdure violate the cityscape. I hurried down the sidewalk to the Metro station and hopped on Line 6. The route formed itself in my mind and without any effort. As I settled into an empty seat on an almost empty train car, I realized that learning the Metro happened the same as the kudzu—gradually and unnoticed. I remembered the struggle when we had first moved to the Bronx, first dropped our bags on the apartment floor of the Pelham Grand. There was constant confusion every day in figuring out where we were going and how to get there. Now, those things that had confused us were effortless, and what used to seem so simple was what we struggled with the most. 

As the subway approached Manhattan, the car filled up with people; it filled with bodies that had lives and jobs and purposes and families and thoughts that I would never be able to know or experience. They had eyes I would never be able to see from, shoes I’d never be able to walk in. I tried to remember when riding the Metro stopped being an event and just became a routine, when I stopped being a curious outsider and became a whatever I am. I tried to remember that exact moment during the entire fifty-steven minute train ride to 68th Street. But remembering that was as tenuous as trying to remember the day you learned to read or when you went outside to play with your friends for the last time of your childhood. 

When I emerged from the subway station, I entered into a new world. It was no longer New York City—it was the New York Forest. I looked around at green-sheathed buildings and vine-covered sidewalks. I stepped over plant life and stood near a lamppost encircled by foliage. This was not the New York of my dreams or the New York of the new life I made here. This was the New York of three thousand years from now. This was the New York abandoned by humanity and reclaimed by the earth. It occurred to me that this was the New York of the future. 

When I came home there was a letter from Epiphany in my inbox and it was not a rejection. I tried to order pizza and then Chinese, but Bedford Cafe was the only place that agreed to deliver during the kudzu crisis even though we weren’t anywhere near the “outbreak zone” as police were calling it. On  television, Amanda Evans was interviewing a man named Dr. Frye, an extension educator associated with the New York State Integrated Pest Management Program at Cornell University. He has spent most of his career studying kudzu. He says the only way to eradicate the plant was to dig up its root system. 

The doorbell rang, and I accepted the cheeseburgers and handed the skinny teenager a twenty-dollar bill. I left the television on the news and watched as the footage showed them trying to follow Dr. Frye’s advice. They grabbed the plants by the vine with both hands and were trying to follow them back to the base. I thought about how sad that was, how abrupt and ungentle. To just yank something out of its home, roots and all, seemed somehow inhumane. It seemed downright cruel. The kudzu was just trying to live, like all of us. Just trying to find its place, make its home. Taking away its roots would be to take away its life. I thought about how I hadn’t been home in five years. I turned the television off and went to bed without waiting for Noah to get home. 

The next day, the kudzu was gone. 

Noah told me that they’d worked all night, digging up every trace of the root system that they could find. Then, they removed every last scrap of leaf, root, and vine to a remote area for incineration. On the news, Amanda Evans interviewed city officials, who assured citizens this was the last they would have to worry about the kudzu. I pulled on my all-black funeral clothes and headed to Macy’s.

The odors of the fragrance department wafted into the air, cypress and vetiver mixing with oakmoss and magnolia. The scents stuck in the air and became trapped in my sinuses. I couldn’t breathe, and a thumping pain began in my temples and spread behind my eyes. There was a distinct lack of customers, perhaps due to the insanity of the last few days, and so instead of spraying more perfume into the air or organizing and reorganizing crystalline bottles, I pulled out a notebook and began to write. 

I lost myself in the story, became mesmerized with the transfer of words from brain to hand to page, became hypnotized by the light scratching sound of pen against paper, became entranced at the sight of ink pouring out into swirling twirling winding letters linking to form words to form sentences to form paragraphs to form pages, and everything connects and is interconnected and—I quit. 

It seemed I ignored a customer who needed some Bleu de Chanel. I gathered my belongings without a word of apology or excuse, and I just walked out as the manager shouted after me. Outside, I took a deep breath, felt the fresh air of the day inflate my lungs like balloons. On the ride home, I pulled out my notebook and kept writing. When I got home, Noah was still at work. I called my mother again, and she asked me if I was happy. 

After we hung up, I opened the window and climbed out onto the fire escape because I wanted the wind to blow my hair into my face. It was as if I’d awakened from a long sleep and the sunshine was blinding, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed any longer. I looked around as if I thought I could see the kudzu growing from here, but my apartment didn’t have a view. I could only see the brick wall of the building next to mine rising up toward the sky and the alley below, littered with take-out wrappers, glass bottles, and cigarette butts.

♦

Sam Campbell is a writer, teacher, and editor with an M.A. in English (ETSU) and an MFA in Creative Writing (University of Arkansas). She co-founded Black Moon and serves as its fiction editor. Her work has been featured in October Hill and Another Chicago Magazine. She won the 2021 Jesse Stuart Prize for Young Adult Fiction and is currently a student at Columbia’s Publishing Institute. Learn more at samiamwrites.com

The Delmarva Review, published from St. Michaels, Maryland, was founded to offer all writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) presenting their most compelling new prose and poetry to discerning audiences everywhere. This is a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

#  #  #

 

Author’s Note: Many Junes ago, my friend and I found ourselves in Times Square, just as the full moon was rising between skyscrapers. It looked incongruous beside the flashing billboards and scrolling marquees, and I too felt out of place, having grown up in the Midwest on a farm, far from urban centers. I also was experiencing the strangeness of being pregnant—the moon of my body, the new life stirring there—so, in this alien landscape, when I saw a woman draped with lizards, I felt a kind of kinship.

I Land as on Mars

in the flash and flare of Times Square
my years of growing up on a farm
gather up and hide,
but I understand the lizard lady immediately
her adornment of creatures
their calm draping her, large green fronds
cool to the touch on this June dusk

the strawberry moon rising
improbable between hard-edged buildings
as the being in my round belly
my hands move to soothe the kicking
light, tender, that draws me inward
as we stand among the noise
filled with expectation
I read the glowing orange banner
—news! it scrolls across the sky. 

⧫

Mary Buchinger teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences and serves on the board of the New England Poetry Club. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including Navigating the Reach (Salmon Poetry, 2023), Virology (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2022), and Einfühlung/in feeling (Main Street Rag, 2018). Website: www.marybuchinger.com

The Delmarva Review is a literary journal published in St. Michaels, Maryland. The review was founded to offer all writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) presenting their most compelling new prose and poetry to discerning audiences everywhere. This is a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: In 1929, my Grandfather, at 16, came to the United States from Lithuania. He could already speak and read English, in preparation. He corresponded by mail with his friends and family. He received a letter during WWII that all his buddies, all the men of his village, were lined up against a wall and shot.  His buddies, their fathers and sons were gone.  This story is inspired by that event.

Grandfather’s Story

THE IVANS KILL OUR COW, even after I name her Ivan.

I ask my grandfather how to spell Ivan, in Russian. He shows me with his cane in the dirt. I throw my coat on it, so the wind won’t take it and run for the paint.

I run fast, my long stick in both hands, sometimes a cane, sometimes a sword. My grandfather watches me run against wind and dust, past roofless walls, around the one shell-crater that lands in the village, and past doorways where the sick inside make my legs a little shaky.

Boom-pop-pop-prack—in the distance.

I run up the hill home, for Ivan, for glory, to be able to read.

My grandfather is the most important man in the village. He reads Russian and Lithuanian. People stop him while digging his root cellar, and Grandfather stretches the small of his back and takes their pieces of paper. I walk around a lot, stretching the small of my back. My mother asks me what is wrong, and my sister laughs.

I am not allowed to come near my grandfather when he reads to people. No one is. My best friend Mykolas and I flop on our bellies from a distance like soldiers to see what we can see. Grandfather looks upon the paper, and his lips move. People hold their hands together respectfully, bowed heads, nodding. Some cup their hand to their ear, afraid a word might get away. People gratefully take back their letters, folding them like priests, putting them back inside themselves. They talk with Grandfather a long time until Mykolas wants to do something else.

The last is Mr. Binkus’ daughter, Janina. I look up from the root cellar we are digging and see women coming with shawls on their heads from the village, very serious, like a funeral. The women are close around her, supporting her, as she walks from the gray-brown walls of the village to my grandfather in the green grass. When Grandfather sees them, he looks the other way, and I can tell, for a moment, he wants to run.

By the color and size of the paper, her husband is dead. But he can’t be dead until my grandfather says so. Grandfather has to be there for people to die.

Supper is late this day. Grandfather sits in a dark kitchen, not wasting a candle. He smiles at me.

“Grandfather, teach me to read.,”

“Do you remember Gediminas Grebelis?”

He is the blacksmith.

“When Gediminas was no larger than you, he waited for me at the foot of the hill by the creek, and I put him on my shoulder and ran up the hill with him, toolbox and all. He always shouted for me to run faster, faster. Who is left who would remember?”

“Grandfather, teach me to read.”

His eyes glitter. He pinches my cheek, “Antonus, not today. There is nothing, really, for you to read anymore. For now, you play. Go on.”

I want to read the newspapers. Someone comes to Grandfather with a newspaper, everyone gathers around, and my grandfather talks about fighting in Vilnius and Poland, North Africa, other villages and towns, the shortages of food, the marriages of royalty, and the deaths of famous people. My grandfather is so respected, that people tell him things before he reads them in the newspaper. It makes me tingle to know something before the newspaper is read. The paper looks very small in my grandfather’s hands, those days.

I run back with the white paint. I run past the Janulises. Their house is three walls. Most of the roof is left.

Mother Janulis is very ill, in a big bed, with her mouth open. When the east wind blows her white hair too much, Adolph Janulis puts on the rope harness tied to the foot of the bed—the bed Mother Janulis slept in since her wedding night—and drags his mother to the other side of the wall. I often help. She begs every day to not leave her home. It is strange to watch her travel that way, like a puppet, stiff and lifeless and yet moving. When the west wind blows, we do the same.

I have a plan to make Grandfather proud of me. On one side of Ivan’s bell, I write the name, Ivan so the Ivans won’t kill our cow when they pull back. When the Ivans or Fritzes pull back, there is a lot of damage, beaten men, crying women, and much livestock killed. After the Ivans leave, I will ask Grandfather to spell Fritz with his cane in the dirt, in German. He will know. I will put Fritz on the other side of the bell. This will save our cow and show Grandfather how smart I am and make him to teach me to read.

But, the Ivans, they kill our cow, even after I named her Ivan. They stick a bayonet in her side, and my mother screams. The cow jumps, trots, limps, and moans, and finally, legs buckle, and down and over Ivan falls, her huge side rising up and down, blowing great gusts of air and blood out her nose. One of the Ivans cuts the bell from her neck and reads it. He yells something in Russian and throws the bell as far as he can into the horizon. All the Ivans laugh. When they leave, my mother runs out and falls to her knees next to Ivan. People gather around and try to comfort my mother. They stand around, looking at each other, shaking heads, and looking at each other. Some men take off their caps. Some people bring paper, and roasting pans.

There is a silence, and my grandfather’s limp is heard. In his hand, is the longest knife we have in our house. The tip is broken off. The people make room for him to come through. My grandfather looks at the wound on Ivan. The people around him bend nearer and look again. Grandfather scratches his beard. Everyone can hear the scratching, the wind through the grass, and the buzz of black flies moving back and forth over Ivan’s black blood. Then Grandfather grits his teeth, puts the knife to Ivan’s throat, and I turn away. Ivan is dead.

Grandfather gives the knife to Mr. Vitas, the butcher. My mother stands first in line, holding her apron out.

My grandfather is furious with me when I come back with the paint for the bell. He is holding my coat in his arms. It looks like me, sleeping in a tree, one sleeve swinging back and forth.

“Crazy! Madness! Why have you done this?”

“Done what, Grandfather?”

“Put the coat on! Put it on! Do you think they grow like mushrooms? Stand up straight!”

I stand up as straight as I can.

“And throw that stick away! Are you a soldier? Do you want—,” Grandfather runs his hand through his thinning, hair.

Pop-pop and prack-prack.

“You hear? They might be coming again.”

“Yes, Grandfather.”

“Any louder, go home to Mama. I mean it.”

Mykolas comes walking toward us, hands in pockets, playing a little football with stones in the road, kicking up dust that disappears quickly in the wind.

“And tell Mykolas he must go home to his Mama, too.”

Grandfather limps off, stabbing at the earth with his cane, his arms moving faster than his legs. I watch after him, hoping he will slow down and forget. I want to see an end to his anger.

“Is that it? Is that Ivan?”

I nod, and Mykolas looks at it from one side and then the other and then nods like men do when they fix machines.

“Which way does it go?” “

In my excitement, I forget where Grandfather is standing when he writes it. The I and the N are no help, and the V looks much like the A. It looks pretty much the same either way because we were ignorant peasants. But we know that those little things are important to the educated. The small line in the letter A and the middle of the N mean something.

Which way does it go? I think of Ivan, her importance to the family. I pray fast and make a guess, “This way.” I dip the tip of my stick in the paint.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I lie. “This is the way.”

I want to go fishing with Mykolas. Everyone is proud of Mykolas because he catches a fish after all the old men had said the river was fished out. The fish is as big as he is. He walks into the village with his arms around it, muddy tail dragging in the dirt.

Mykolas! Look at Mykolas!

Stone faced, Mykolas walks through all the smiling people to his mother and gives her the fish. Then, he hikes up his pants and wipes his nose. All the women are cooing like doves in his mother’s kitchen, and the men outside knock Mykolas stumbling with slaps on the back and shake his hand and arm until his hat falls off.

Mykolas tells me he knows of a place where there is a fish. He stretches his arms out as far as he can and looks even farther. He is going there tomorrow and says we can go there together.

But I can’t go with Mykolas.

“Antonus, wake up. We have to leave.” Grandfather slaps my cheeks. But I don’t want to wake up. He bundles me up in my clothes and overcoat and takes me out into the cool night and crickets.

“Hurry,” I hear my mother say.

Grandfather is running. He runs with a limp to the root cellar and throws me in, jumping in after me. I get up naked, out of the cool dirt, fully awake. “Grandfather, what’s happening?”

“Quiet, Antonus! Go to sleep.”

I fall asleep, and I am in bed with Mother Janulis. The jerking of Adolph’s tugs on the bed throws her head backward and forward. She looks one moment like she is in a great howl of laughter and, the next, pain. The wall we are going around is long, disappearing on the horizon. Mykolas is fishing off the foot of the bed. He disappears in the clouds of dust carried by winds, after shelling.

I wake with sun in my eyes coming through gaps in the thatch covering, making lines of light on the ground. Fritzes are shouting. Machine guns, pop-pop-popping. Women are screaming, Grandfather grabs his head, falls against the wall, and slides down to the dirt floor, “Jezau! Jezau, Maria!”

I put on my pants and shirt. Grandfather is crying. Curled up, hugging his knees with his elbows. He looks no older than me.

“What happened, Grandfather?” Only sobs from Grandfather.

He sits a long time, staring into the past. I can tell. The sounds of the truck engines leave the village. I dig a river with a stick. Curled up leaves are boats, and the rocks I line up are houses. I draw little roads and make a big hill with a big rock on it. That is my house. But I want to go fishing with Mykolas. I slash my stick through the town, crushing two boats and send my house rolling. I slash the other way, some other house.

“Antonus! Come here.” He has a piece of paper like Mr. Binkus’ daughter, Janina Grebelis. It is falling apart at the folds. Someone died for it. I look at it. It is full of words and letters. He points to some of them. “Right here, this was your father’s name. It was my name. It is your name.”

I look at my name.

“Take it.”

“Thank you, Grandfather.” I sit down in the middle of my village with my name and a stick and try to write it in the dirt.

“All the men of the village are gone, Antonus.”

“Where did they go, Grandfather?”

“The soldiers didn’t want to worry about us anymore. We would have been hunted down like rabbits, and what about you? You see, it was too much to ask this time.”

I looked at my name on the paper, then in the dirt.

I am thinking of the day when I can read and cannot remember what all he says. Hours later, my name is everywhere in the dirt of my little village.

“Go home, Antonus. Go on home to Mama. I’m staying here.”

I drop my stick and put the paper under my coat, inside myself.

“I love you, Antonus, my little boy. Forgive me.”

I give my grandfather a kiss. “Thank You, Grandfather,” and leave him behind in the root cellar, to find Mykolas . . . 

♦

Richard Sensenbrenner is a writer in Illinois who says he never wanted to be one and considers it a form of mental illness. He works by day in intellectual property law and fights his madness by night. He’s recently published in Ancient Paths, Corner Club Press, Down in the Dirt, EveryDay Fiction and Defenestration. He forgives them all. 

The Delmarva Review is a literary journal, published in St. Michaels, Maryland. It was founded to offer all writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) to feature their most compelling new prose and poetry to discerning audiences everywhere. This is a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. The review is available from most online booksellers and from regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: This poem emerged from a thwarted Marie Kondo effort to “plunge and discard.” As I worked through my deceased husband’s effects, I realized how little we really knew each other despite many years of marriage. Even Marie suggests we keep those things that speak to our hearts, and, in the end, I kept everything. The poem speaks to how difficult it is to know another person truly and how important it is to try. 

Legacy

                              You should catalog them; it’s a ’70s archive
                                     – an historian friend

You’re twenty years dead, but I want to know 
why you saved these letters, boxes and bags of
them, from women, girls, mothers,
nurses, waitresses, from your first wife.

                              You’d say
                                     it was before we met  

I found the lot last week, notes for your next book, 
high school papers, your father’s paint by numbers,
a clown, a dwarf, an old set of drumsticks, a bike helmet
with a crack, and these boxes, dusty, crammed with letters,

                              Did I know you
                                     we never talked about them

Spidery script on thin sheets, once
safe in their sleeves, those sleeves slit open
with that silver knife, I still have it,
you sliced precisely but left rough edges

                              I remember
                                     your eagerness

Dotty, Judy, Louise, Mary Lou, Jan, Carolina,
“I haven’t heard from you,” “I miss you,”
“I will be in Manhattan, in Providence, on Long
Island, at home, to see you, when can we meet.”

                              I knew
                                     their eagerness

 
“Passionate kisses,” writes Ellen, then marries
another man. “We have gotten quite serious,”
says Pam, “but we have not talked about
what comes next. When will you be back?”

                              I could tell her
                                     you will not be back

Stamps were cheap, phones could break the bank,
In those days they saved, scrimped, “I cannot
visit you in Chicago, too expensive. What did
you want from me there?” wary Dolores.

                              What she meant
                                     hold your heart close

“I am confused…I want to be independent…
I am not sure about you…I will always love
you…I just don’t know…” that’s Elizabeth.
I imagine her at Woodstock. 

                              How she felt
                                     muddy puddles, no toilets
  
I still see your face, in dreams I hear your voice,
I am confused, I will always love you, 

                              what did you want from me?

Kathryn Temple writes poetry and fiction from her home on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Dr. Temple is director of honors and professor of law and humanities in the English department at Georgetown University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Streetlight, 3Elements, Moss Puppy, and Persimmon Tree, among other publications. When she’s not writing, she tries to keep the ducks off the dock. Website: medium.com/@templek.

Delmarva Review is a national literary journal published locally, in St. Michaels, Maryland, to offer all writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) presenting their most compelling new poetry and prose to discerning audiences everywhere. This is a time when many commercial publications in print (including literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. The editors read thousands of submissions annually to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Editor’s Note: “Place Setting” was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize in poetry.

Author’s Note: I am old in a world that seems to be falling apart. Many have lifted off for other realms, and of those who are left on this blue planet, multitudes are at the mercy of wars and natural disasters. This poem attempts to celebrate the privilege of clean water, of domestic rituals that briefly draw humans together. And it asks the questions: Why here? Why now? Why me?

Place Setting

My favorite — the chubby salad fork,
perfectly formed to hold a slippery leaf
of butter lettuce or a golden bite
of almond cake. I set it to the left
of the mat, right of the dinner fork
like a priest preparing the sacrament.

The silver candlesticks turn dim so soon
it’s almost as though the dark is in there,
waiting to come out when I turn my back.
At the sink, my hands cup pink polish
as the unacknowledged oath of water
fills the bowl. Someone in Aleppo
dips her finger in a broken jar
to wet the lips of her little girl.

The radio voice attuned to death
intones lives lost, homes folding
as the earth convulsed. My heart
does its new bump and flutter
that the doctor says he’s “watching”
and for a minute I’m looking down
on my little house in this placid street
after the streetlights have flicked on.
Friends outside the door are knocking.
How is it I am here holding old blue napkins
that fold themselves from years of use?

⧫

Katherine Williams, from Washington, DC, is a retired clinical psychologist and art therapist. She is an Associate Professor Emerita at George Washington University, where she directed the MFA program in art therapy. Her clinical articles on art therapy have appeared in The American Journal of Art Therapy and Art Therapy. In addition to the Delmarva Review, her poems have been published in Poet Lore, The Northern Virginia Review, 3rd Wednesday, Voices, The Poet’s Cookbook, The Widows Handbook, and Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection edited by James Crews. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

The Delmarva Review is a literary journal, published in St. Michaels, Maryland, founded to offer all writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) to feature their most compelling new poetry and prose to discerning audiences everywhere. This is a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: I recently discovered that the gravestone of my brother, who died shortly after birth in 1960, is marked only by the word BABY, instead of his name. Seeing those four stark letters evoked memories of how his very existence was erased from our family’s reality. The forced repression of loss and grief had far-reaching implications, not only for my parents, but it impacted my own choices about motherhood.

The Baby in the Corner

I WAS AROUND ELEVEN OR TWELVE when sitting in church one Sunday, I saw a family name I didn’t recognize listed in the bulletin for the altar flowers. I leaned over to my dad and whispered, “Who was that?” He whispered back, “That was your little brother. He was born too early and didn’t live long. Don’t say anything to your mother about it.” No further explanation was given. I was left to ponder the fact that I was not always an only child.

I found this news intriguing from a preadolescent’s perspective. I tried to picture what my brother might have looked like or where his bedroom would have been in our house. I told close friends, and a few would share that their mother, too, had lost or miscarried a baby at some point. It was not an uncommon occurrence in those days before NICUs. I was a curious child, and I had so many questions for my parents. But I knew better than to ask. I had been well-schooled in keeping quiet about things that were painful or messy. 

That sense of never loosening the ties that bound the pain in our lives was strongly communicated to my family and perhaps, most tragically, to my mother by my paternal grandmother. A product of the late Victorian era, my grandmother hoisted on a girdle every morning and never left the house without a pair of white gloves somewhere on her person. Propriety ruled. When my grandfather’s declining health began to require frequent ambulance calls, she would not allow the drivers to sound the siren and “make a scene.” Until the day my grandfather died, I never saw her shed a tear. She insisted on keeping the unsavory side of life well-hidden and as a result, secrets festered in my family to the point that they formed a sort of mushroom cloud, with spores of toxicity floating down on us for years afterward.  

I was an adult for a long time before I knew my grandfather, a wise and kindly small-town physician, saved my young life when I was convulsing with fever from measles. I never realized the hump on my father’s back that “he got from polio” was a condition called scoliosis until I was diagnosed with it myself. I never knew my mother was once engaged to a man killed in World War II until a much older cousin mentioned him at a family reunion several years ago. It’s not surprising that the loss of a premature baby was kept secret from a young child, but the fact that it was neither discussed nor explained when I reached the age of understanding cast a long and dark shadow on my perception of motherhood.

Decades later, after my mother died, my dad would sit across from me in a restaurant, sip his Manhattan and say, “You know, she was never the same after we lost the baby.” Or “I think the drinking started with losing that baby, and Mam (his mother) never really forgave her.” Jesus. He refers to his son as “that baby,” and I certainly didn’t want to believe the grandmother I adored could be so cruel. These conversations felt awkward and cringeworthy, like I was party to some dark intimacy between my parents that was none of my business. “Lost the baby” always made it sound as though my parents were somehow at fault for misplacing a valuable object. My dad never called his son by name or referred to him as “your brother.” He was an entity—something to blame for my mother’s alcoholism and depression—which, following family tradition, was never acknowledged, let alone appropriately treated.

I seldom thought about my brother except during the last months of my dad’s life when I occasionally wondered what it would have been like to have a sibling to share the burden of his care. But until this past December, when my husband and I visited the cemetery where many of my paternal ancestors are buried, I never realized my brother’s grave only says BABY. His small, flat headstone is nestled in the far corner of the plot and almost obscured by overgrown grasses the weed-eater never touches. Names and birth and death dates of even the youngest of those who came before me are engraved on a large memorial stone in the center of the plot, but not the one who came after.

My brother was born prematurely on a January night in 1960, long before the medical advances that could have saved him today. He was named John after his father and grandfather, and he survived for two days. My mother used to refer to certain topics as “house talk”—that which should not be discussed outside the walls of our home. But the brief life of my brother was beyond house talk. He was obliterated, expunged, erased. Even now, I feel twinges of guilt writing about this tiny child, knowing that by giving voice to a forbidden story, I’m breaching a sacred boundary put in place by my parents to shield them from pain. That even these many years after their deaths, I am disrespecting their wishes.

Had I not seen that church bulletin, I don’t know when or if I would ever have been told of the existence of another human being who shared my DNA and whose presence would have changed my life. My dad was an inveterate photographer, documenting our lives with his various 35mm cameras, but in all the boxes of slides sitting on a shelf in our guest room closet, I have not found a single picture of my mother pregnant with John. Nor is there a birth or death certificate for him anywhere in my father’s voluminous collection of family papers.

I would have been almost three at the time John was born, and although I remember a surprising amount from my early childhood, I have absolutely no memory of this time period. I didn’t hear my mother crying behind closed doors until years later, nor do I remember a room set up as a nursery and then quietly disassembled. My mother would have been thirty-seven, considered ancient for pregnancy in those days. There would be no rainbow baby.

A baby’s death was a shadow tragedy—whispered about with pained looks and raised eyebrows but not publicly acknowledged. As quickly as possible, infant loss was sealed up in boxes and packed away in the attic along with the baby paraphernalia. Support groups for families grieving the loss of an infant didn’t exist. The acronym SIDS had yet to be coined. No brief obituaries appeared in the newspaper describing a child gently borne into heaven by the angels. 

How different my mother’s life might have been had her bridge club friends shown up at the door, enfolded her in their arms, and said, “Oh, my God, we’re so sorry. What can we do?” How devastating that my parents’ grief, and perhaps even shame, drove them to bury John in the far corner of the family plot without identifying him beyond those four stark letters. As a person of faith, I wonder if he was baptized, although I suspect he may have been. Was the rector there when that tiny coffin was lowered into the ground on a cold January day? Were my parents there, or was his committal to the earth so heartbreaking a task that it was left to be accomplished by others as discreetly and efficiently as possible, perhaps by decree from my grandmother?

If she were alive today, my mother would be horrified at the airing of what she deemed house talk on social media and even more horrified that I’m writing about my brother. And yet, in a 1960s small town, she was never offered a safe space in which to grieve. A place where light was allowed to enter the darkness. Where another person said, “This happened to me, too, and here’s how I am coping,” or “Let’s find a way for you to get help.”  My parents felt constrained to keep the death of my brother so intensely private, even within our immediate family that the only way their surviving child found out was by accident.

Seeing that nearly hidden stone in the cemetery reignited the twelve-year-old’s curiosity, and my mind occasionally wanders down the path of what it would have been like to have a brother. Would we have gotten along as kids? What would we find irritating about each other as adults? Would John have possessed my dad’s dry wit and sense of humor, his passion for trains and railroad history? Might he have gone into medicine like our grandfather? Or would he have been more like my mother—someone gregarious, loving, and kind but who occasionally sat for hours alone in a darkened room, chain-smoking, and sipping Carling Black Label beer from a tiny glass? 

Hearing other people talk about their siblings is like listening to a foreign language that I will never fully comprehend. Even writing the words “my brother” feels somehow wrong.  I have no business using those words. I look at having a sibling as a scientist would study an interesting specimen under the microscope. Fascinating, but with no personal connection to me. 

I believe that we are not only shaped by those who touch our lives but by those who did not and should have. That we hold places within us like abandoned highways—those roads to nowhere overgrown with vegetation and long forgotten but where the outline of what might have been still remains. Places where we’re allowed to miss someone we never knew. The absence of my brother, along with the extreme measures taken to all but deny his existence, influenced who I became and the choices I made, perhaps more than I realized. 

I inherited my grandmother’s capacity for stoicism and maintaining decorum in the face of a crisis (minus the white gloves and girdles), and many times, it has served me well. But my ability to stand calm above the fray is also my default mechanism for avoiding overwhelming feelings and prevents me from stepping into waters that carry too much emotional undertow. 

I am not a mother for a number of reasons, many of which were beyond my control. But sometimes I wonder if I would have fought harder to find a way to parent, had I grown up with a sibling. If I hadn’t associated parenthood with something tragic, to be whispered about with furtive looks and hushed voices during a Sunday church service. If I had come to associate having a child in the house with love and normalcy instead of something to be feared, would I have responded to my husband’s “Maybe we could give a kid a life?” question with something other than, “I’m not sure I can do that.” Somehow, I absorbed the idea that having a child means risking incalculable pain and loss to the point that you refer to your own son as “that baby.”  

Although I have a wonderful spouse and close friends who are like sisters, there are times when I’ve longed for the life of the BABY buried in the corner of the cemetery plot. I would love to know another person who navigates the world after starting from the same point. Who looks a little bit like me or in whose eyes or expressions, I catch a glimpse of one of my parents. Who connects me to a past that I can only access through words, pictures, and gradually fading memories. 

Next December, my husband and I will take two Christmas wreaths to the burial plot of my paternal ancestors. I will place one in front of the large stone recognizing my great-great-grandfather and his descendants. I will walk to the far corner of the plot, move the grasses aside to expose the stone and carefully anchor a wreath in front of my brother’s grave. I will position the wreath so that passersby can easily see it and know that someone remembers the BABY in the corner. 

♦

Anne Moul is a retired music educator from York, Pennsylvania and is pursuing her second act as a writer. She has had work published in Hippocampus, Episcopal Café, Thread, AARP’s The Girlfriend, and others. Moul has won several awards in Pennwriters Annual Writing Contest and third place in Medium’s Fall 2022 Tell Your Story contest. Anne blogs at www.secondactstories.com.

The Delmarva Review is a national literary journal published locally,  in St. Michaels, Maryland. The journal was founded to offer all writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) presenting their most compelling new prose and poetry to discerning audiences everywhere. This is a time when many commercial print publications (and literary magazines) have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

 

Editor’s Note: This is an anniversary not to be celebrated but to be remembered. On May 24, 2022, an armed teenager entered the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and fatally shot 21 people (19 children and two teachers) and injured 18 others in one of the deadliest school shootings in American history.

Author’s Note: Two images kept repeating themselves in my mind after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. One was the irony of the school being decorated for the end-of-school celebrations when this happened, and it being the “ending”, juxtaposed with “beginnings”. The other was a news item I read about a teacher being questioned on whether she had locked her classroom door. I imagined her haunted by second-guessing. I imagined the horrors faced by everyone involved, including the school janitor.

Back to School

For the purple polka-dotted
welcome-back-to-school signs
festooned on doors.
For the teacher in Uvalde who
said she locked her classroom door,
how every night her dreams rehearse
her hand on the knob.
For bulletin boards filled with wide-
ruled stories of summer adventures.
For the desks in Uvalde, piled with
gold-stickered certificates from
awards day, and for the students folded
underneath. For the girls excited
to get Mrs. Grundy next year, because
she lets you make macramé plant hangers
and put your head down after lunch.
For the janitor in Uvalde, sobbing
in the supply room, as he watches
the water run red to clear from
the mop in his gray utility sink.

♦

Ellis Elliott likes to divide her time, as much as possible, between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the ocean. She is a writer, leader of online writing groups, and teacher of ballet. Elliott has a blended family of six grown sons and lives with her husband in Juno Beach, Florida. She is a contributing writer for the Southern Review of Books, and recently  completed an MFA at Queens University. Website: www.elliselliottpoet.com  

The Delmarva Review is a national literary journal published in St. Michaels, Maryland, to give writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) presenting their most compelling new prose and poetry to discerning audiences everywhere. This is a time when many commercial print publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have read thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

Author’s Note: Everyone wants to be the hero. But a story might be an epic from one character’s perspective and a tragedy from another’s. This poem plays with the tropes of Homer, recasting roles across gender and time and asking whether, in the end, the adventure is worth the wake.

Rethinking the Odyssey

Because I set out as swift-footed, as breaker
xxxxxxxxxxxxof horses, thinking myself a chosen, the dawn
XXXXXon her hood—I of many devices, sword on my back

like the wind; because I kicked down the door
xxxxxxxxxxxxto your bolted life, ran after the tips of your hair
as you bolted, knowing who else but I could
XXXXXmake you love yourself, even love me—

xxxxxxxxxxxxnow, shuffling homeward my canvas slip-ons
like a weathered sail, I am many-sorrowed,
XXXXXmy face in the mirror bearing a new line

for every face of yours: wide-eyed & pale,
xxxxxxxxxxxxor flush with tears, or numb like late November.
Beloved, I stole you away from home, wagered
XXXXXyour heart, waged a war to remake you, made you

raise your voice, your fist, to the bricks of
xxxxxxxxxxxxyour house. In the palms of my hands I made
XXXXXyour fingers soft, your knuckles hard, like mine.

How Penelope could have spent those two decades
xxxxxxxxxxxxif she’d never met him—a new cloth finished
each month, each with its own new scene;
XXXXXa house to call her own, its stockrooms full—&; how

xxxxxxxxxxxxCalypso or Circe would never have poured one
final cup, the wine so dark & dry she must have
XXXXXthought it her own blood as he turned it up,

a waning moon on the sea saying I am turning
xxxxxxxxxxxxmy back on you, it will only get darker. Beloved,
I paste a purple band aid here on a shallow cut
XXXXXon the back of your hand, hold it in mine, can’t

meet your eyes for fear of how fierce they
xxxxxxxxxxxxlove me. I have ruined this story. Take what’s left,
the commas & semicolons, the verbs & go—

I will stay with the weight of nouns, the full stops.
xxxxxxxxxxxxI will stay with the fleet falling at dawn, wrapped in
your fleece, dew cold. The landscape beckons me in
XXXXXremembrance: your dark wine, your rosy fingers.

T. Dallas Saylor (he/they) holds a PhD from Florida State University and an MFA from the University of Houston. His work meditates on the body, especially gender and sexuality, against physical, spiritual, and digital landscapes.  His poetry has been featured in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Colorado Review, Christianity & Literature, PRISM international, and the Delmarva Review. Saylor’s first book, Starfish, is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press in 2025. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

The Delmarva Review is a literary journal published in St. Michaels, Maryland, that reaches regionally, nationally, and beyond, to give writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) to present their most compelling new prose and poetry to discerning audiences. This is a time when many commercial print publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, the editors have culled through thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. There is never a publishing or reading fee for the writers. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org

 

Image: “Marooned” by Howard Pyle

Author’s Note:  “The black dog” has become a code name for depression, but here I use it to portray joy. The dog in question belonged to a guest at our place on the shore. She escaped early one morning, and, exploring, discovered the fish. She returned triumphant. This poem honors the late Stanley Plumly, a beloved poetry teacher at the University of Maryland, who would have appreciated a dog’s delight in her dead fish.

The Black Dog Wakes Us with Fish Breath

She found a ripe one in the muck
on her first dash—she reeks of it.
Drunk on the smell, she sneaks out,
runs full tilt, up, down the wet lawn.
Over my head two Canada geese
pass honking, creaking. The wind’s
picked up but can’t drown the roar
of waves from the barrier beach.
The surf will reach six feet tonight.
Down by the channel, birdsong carries.
I can hear willets piping on their nests
in the marsh on the far side. My teacher
died last week. He told us, Come to the page
with a full heart and an empty mind.
He’d walked the paths where Keats
walked in Hampshire when the poet
wrote his great ode to the dying season.
He’d hoped to work at his desk till fall,
revise as he watched the leaves turn,
recalling elms, crowns of airy dreams.
But it’s April, the leaves still in bud,
everything swelling, opening.
From a near pine, a mockingbird carols.
A flock of peeps skims the water,
looking to land on the oyster bar.
A dead fish is cause for rejoicing. 

♦ 

Susan Okie is a doctor, poet, and former Washington Post medical reporter. She holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. Her work has appeared in various poetry journals. Her full-length poetry collection, Women at the Crossing, won the 2023 Off the Grid Poetry Prize. She lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

The Delmarva Review, a literary journal located in St. Michaels, Maryland, reaches regionally, nationally, and beyond, to give writers a desirable home in print (with a digital edition) to present their most compelling new prose and poetry to discerning audiences. This is a time when many commercial publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, editors have culled through thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. There is never a publishing or reading fee to the writers. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.o

Author’s Note: When my parents were dying and thereafter, the poems I read about loss used particular metaphors, and columns about mental health suggested cultivating everyday gratitude, especially during difficult times. I found myself wondering why they left me feeling such a void within. Why did certain words bother me? Why did the notion that everyday gratitude would ground me seem so misplaced? I wrote Unyielding Love in response.

Unyielding Love

Poetry, do not give me words like these:
bittersweet, brambles, barren;
thorns, vines, terrain. Or these:
light, stars, moon;
burgeoning, birth, deliverance;
soothe, navigate, praise. 

Nothing that signals that, since you understand,
you have a suggestion, an answer even:
All I need to do is follow, is believe,
is open my eyes, is be astounded
by your life/my life/life,
is accept that your wisdom
can replenish the—
not this word either—vessel
that I am.

Also, not gratitude—as in,
gratitude will anchor you. 

I have seen, as if in a mirror on a curve,
that what is coming
is not stoppable.
May, in fact, be a beginning.

Today, I finished with soups and teas,
with clean sheets and towels and antiseptic wipes;
with nighttime waking and dosage schedules,
with ice packs and heating pads,
with reverent awe.

What I have witnessed is what anchors me.
Her last breaths. His open eyes, not reflecting.
And what filled me with the peace
I think you mean when you say, gratitude,
was caring for them, was believing
that unyielding love was power.
It is a cloud with nothing left
below to water or shield. 

♦ 

Catherine DeNunzio’s poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from The Robert Frost Place, Connecticut River Review, Italian Americana, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Scapegoat Review, and Waking Up to the Earth: Connecticut Poets in a Time of Global Climate Crisis. Her chapbook, Enough Like Bone to Build On (Antrim House), was released in 2022. Website: www.instagram.com/catherinedenunziopoetry 

The Delmarva Review, a literary journal, reaches audiences regionally, nationally, and beyond, to give writers a desirable home in print (with an electronic edition) to present their most compelling new prose and poetry. This is a time when many commercial publications have closed their doors or are reducing literary content. For each annual edition, editors have culled through thousands of submissions to select the best of new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. There is never a publishing or reading fee to the writers. The review is available from online booksellers and regional specialty bookstores. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org