Author’s note: “Few literary characters have achieved the infamy of Helen of Troy; she is a character we’re all familiar with, even if she gets relatively short shrift in the stories. She both is and isn’t a villain, a victim, or pawn. The form of a cleave poem allows her to be all at once and say what she means to say—and possibly even something she didn’t.”

 

Everett Roberts is a poet, technical writer, editor, and former UN Sanctions Violations Investigator living in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in The Write Launch, Beyond Words, and Oberon poetry magazine, where he won the 2021 Herbert Poetry Prize for his poem “John the Baptist.”

This poem is from the Delmarva Review’s fifteenth annual edition. The literary journal, based in Talbot County, Maryland, has featured the new writing of more than 500 authors worldwide. Almost half are from the Chesapeake and Delmarva region. The journal is available in paperback and digital editions from Amazon.com and other major booksellers. 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 was sitting by the dining room window when a little wren landed on it, not a foot away from me. The moment was beautiful and I felt as though I could commune with it.  But the wren also got me to thinking about how human interactions with nature have become more disastrous as climate change impacts the Earth. We are all responsible for making the planet more and more uninhabitable, not just for ourselves, but for the creatures who also live here who have no control over what humans ruin.  Our selfishness has privileged human life over animal life, and this poem acknowledges, at least to one bird, that one human is aware of her culpability.”

Anthropocene

A speckled wren alights on the window frame edge.
It pecks at the glass, cocks its head in query.

aaaaaaaI think it asks, as it cocks its head in query,
aaaaaaaWhy do you spoil the Earth,

why do you kill? How we have despoiled the Earth:
polar ice slices like cake off glaciers into the ocean. 

aaaaaaaGlaciers shrink and hurricanes churn the oceans,
aaaaaaaturn flood plains into floods. Coral bleaches. 

Water so warm, whales can’t reproduce. Coral bleaching,
pelicans smeared with oil, dead fish floating, 

algal blooms. Yes, I want to say, we are floating
death against you, little one, against all of you— 

aaaaaaaBecause of us, the world is against you, all of you—
aaaaaaaeven this speckled wren on the window frame edge.

⧫

When she’s not writing, JC Reilly crochets or practices her Italian, and serves as the managing editor of the Atlanta Review. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Santa Clara Review, Rougarou, Barely South, Pine Row, and others. Her southern gothic novel-in-verse, “What Magick May Not Alter,” was published by Madville Publishing (2020). Her blog: jcreilly.com

Delmarva Review publishes the most compelling new poetry, short stories, and nonfiction prose from thousands of submissions annually. Based in Talbot County, Maryland, the literary journal has  featured the new writing of more than 500 authors worldwide during its 15-year history. Almost half are from the Chesapeake and Delmarva region. The journal is available in paperback and digital editions from Amazon.com and other booksellers. 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: “Sweet gum” celebrates the remarkable sweet gum tree; it also praises—well, praise, which it sees as another face of rage and mourning; it sees rage as also a kind of praise, praise of what could be and isn’t.  Some literature seems to suggest that to celebrate anything is to wallow in privilege and ignore all the world’s appalling misery, that misery and evil are inherently more real than joy.  This poem doesn’t agree.

Sweet Gum

       Liquidambar styraciflua

On the sandy track, a smashed squirrel boils
up fresh maggots when stirred with a hand,
refuse of the same old haste and waste,
while the bright October wind sifts down
sweet gum leaves over gray fur and crushed
flesh, reminding the springing squirrel-
mind that black gum leaves turn red, and sweet-
gum leaves—hanging among their caltrop-
seeds—turn purply-black; but that’s naming
for you in a life where we learn late
or not at all, and at least sweet gum
smells sweet, amber-sap native of a new
world which was always the same old world:
bite the sandy stem of a fallen
star-shaped leaf and you’ll catch myrrh-resin,
breathe up incense, even as you feel
its grit grate in your teeth and must spit
and spit. The same old world’s awash
in those telling the same old story:
the one where meat sliding into maws
of ivory worms is always more
real than the life that carried it here
on five-clawed feet, death never less than
appalling, the grit always harsher
than the sassafras-tang of the sap
is bright; where joy is so bourgeois
that they’re ashamed to own the fine
of these few minutes standing on sand
beside the dead, to gnaw the gritty
stem of a leaf whose life has sunk back
into its tree. But today, strangely,
you remember that in this sudden
second, you can pause, you don’t always
have to collude while that same old
story eats all the other stories;
that this wringing place has many names;
that another face of all the rage
and grief is praise. As these maggots praise,
curling like ecstatic toes in their first
first feast, refusing to waste anything.
As this gum tree praises, releasing
deep-purple five-pointed stars into
the shining morning, alligator-
barked being whose first name is sweet. 

⧫

Catherine Carter, raised on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, now lives with her husband in Cullowhee, NC, near Western Carolina University, where she is a  professor in the English education program. Her most recent full-length collection is Larvae of the Nearest Stars (LSU Press, 2019). In addition to the Delmarva Review, her work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2009, Orion, Poetry, North Carolina Literary Review, Ashville Poetry Review, and Ploughshares, among others. On a good day, she says she can re-queen a hive of honeybees and roll a whitewater kayak. On less good days, she collects stings, rockburn, and multiple contusions. Website: https://catherinecarterpoetry.com 

Over its 15-year history, Delmarva Review has published new literary poetry and prose by over 500 authors from 42 states, the District of Columbia, and 16 foreign countries. Almost half are from the Chesapeake and Delmarva region. Financial support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Both print and digital editions are available from Amazon and other major online booksellers. The print edition is also available from regional specialty bookstores. Website: https://delmarvareview.org/

Author’s Note: “During the first year of the pandemic, with its horrifying death toll, life became local and confined. Yet my sense of the world and its accents had never been sharper. With borders closing and distrust mounting, language felt increasingly significant, a means of maintaining our humanity. All the words that have come to us from elsewhere were like pebbles found on the beach, solid and resonant, the mind, as always, left to sort and array them.”

Second Language

Harder to net foreign words, those slippery verbs
lacy adjectives, mulish nouns. Cognate to the old
but more porous, the child busily acquiring. Yet
we easily recall Arno, Danube, Limpopo, Yangtze.
Passport safe in a drawer, pandemic borders closed.
When my daughter asked how I lived with my fears
I couldn’t answer her. Unglamorous angst—
in any tongue so burdensome. Each day brings more
so that rain isn’t a mere slick of wetness on the cheek
but flooded bridges, farms; it is corpse and tod.
After all, here’s a syntax, a web, declarative system
by which we point and name. On the beach
lies a welter awaiting some coherence of the mind
or not waiting, in fact, the sea’s breathy vowels
opening, closing, a nudibranch pocketing its own gills.
Voices spill from tour boats to the pebbled shore
and the waves translate: copper, haze, restless tide.

⧫

In addition to the Delmarva Review, Carol Alexander’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, About Place Journal, The Common, Denver Quarterly, One, Ruminate, Southern Humanities Review, Terrain.org, Third Wednesday, Free State Review, Matter, Potomac Review, Verdad, and TheWestchester Review. Her most recent collection is Fever and Bone. She co-edited Stronger Than Fear: Poems of Empowerment, Compassion, and Social Justice (Cave Moon Press, 2022). Alexander lives in New York.

Delmarva Review publishes compelling new poetry, short stories, and nonfiction prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. Located in St. Michaels, MD, the literary journal has featured the new writing of more than 500 authors worldwide during its 15-year history. About half are from the Chesapeake and Delmarva region. The journal is available in paperback and digital editions from Amazon.com and other booksellers. 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: “It can be nice to travel, or just to think about being somewhere else. But some days where we already live approaches perfection. It was a September day after a period of oppressive weather that spurred “A Letter from Here,” a poem that celebrates what is instead of what might be.“ 

A Letter from Here

The weather cleared today, although
it wasn’t expected, and now the sky
is a soft blue, a light breeze 

rocking the locust leaves, and it is
comfortably warm, not oppressively hot
as before. Days like this

it seems there is no better place to be
than here. Imagine, if I were elsewhere
I would not experience this, if

I were elsewhere, it might be raining,
or too hot or too humid, or both. If I were
elsewhere I could not write a letter from here.

⧫

Matthew J. Spireng won the 2019 Sinclair Poetry Prize for his book Good Work (Evening Street Press). An 11-time Pushcart Prize nominee, he is the author of two other full-length poetry books, What Focus Is and Out of Body (winner of the 2004 Bluestem Poetry Award,) and five chapbooks. His poems have also appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Southern Poetry Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Louisiana Journal, and Poet Lore. Spireng lives in New York. Website: matthewjspireng.com 

Delmarva Review publishes compelling new poetry, short stories, and nonfiction prose selected from thousands of submissions annually. Publishing from St. Michaels, Maryland, the literary journal has featured the new writing of more than 500 authors worldwide during  its 15-year history. Almost half are from the Chesapeake and Delmarva region. The journal is available in paperback and digital editions from Amazon.com and other booksellers. 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: John Philip Drury’s personal essay is from his full-length memoir to be released in August 2024. Drury was born in Cambridge, Maryland, and now writes from Ohio, where he is professor emeritus at the University of Cincinnati.

Author’s Note: “This is the last chapter in Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers, and it recounts a night my mother celebrated secretly for the rest of her life. She and Carolyn raised me together after my father left, calling themselves cousins in order to rent places together. When Carolyn died, my mother’s full name (not Bobby, her nickname) was engraved on the back of the tombstone they shared in Dorchester Memorial Park—like the marker shared by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris.”

Full Moon on the Water

ON JULY 31, 1958, the moon had just passed the point of being completely full, but it would have still looked full to my mother and Carolyn as they drove the Chevrolet Bel-Air from the gravel parking lot of Whispering Pines, strewn with brown needles, where they had just bought a fifth of bourbon, and eased down the single-lane Buck Bryan Road, with loblolly pines on one side and cornfields on the other. The road was named for the owner of the liquor store and led to his house on the shore of Bolingbroke Creek, which everybody called Bowling Brook. 

Their windows would have been wide open, since cars didn’t have air-conditioning in those days, and it was a warm, humid summer night. But a breeze was blowing off the water. The question was, did they pull into the woods in one of the clearings, or did they continue toward the water? How do I know, in any case, what they were doing on that particular night? 

My mother liked to keep records. I learned from her how to annotate receipts when I paid bills, but only when she was too ill to do her own and I had to take over. Once you start the habit, if you’re the slightest bit obsessive-compulsive, you have to continue, if only for the “tiny insane voluptuousness” that Theodor Storm describes in his poem on working at a desk, the pleasure of “getting this done, finally finishing that.” 

She liked to keep a datebook for each year, so I have a record of when she did this and did that. On July 31, she almost always remembered to write “CBD and CL” and “Anniversary” and however many years had passed since 1958. What were they celebrating? Why did my mother continue to commemorate the date? 

I didn’t know the answer until my mother died, when I went through a large plastic storage box she kept under her bed. I knew she had destroyed a stack of letters Carolyn had received, presumably from lovelorn suitors whom she had spurned. She claimed she had burned them, but that sounds like a lot of work and a sooty mess if you lacked a fireplace. She made a point of telling me that she disposed of the letters so I wouldn’t get them and use them as “material.” 

But she did not get rid of Carolyn’s green diary for 1958, the crucial year that was both annus mirabilis and annus horribilis for the two women and me. My mother kept it in a tin box, among her dearest treasures. Although the book said “Diary,” it was really a datebook like those my mother kept, except more elegantly bound. Carolyn had marked down reminders about which students had voice lessons when, which friends she was seeing for dinner, whose birthdays were coming up, which doctors’ appointments she had to keep. Every month, she wrote “CURSE” in red letters, presumably to indicate her menstrual periods. On December 18, she wrote “We Started South” when the three of us left Maryland and headed toward Texas, not knowing then that we wouldn’t get past Alabama. 

Here’s what she wrote in her diary on July 31, with the date underlined: 

Marito
e moglie
felice per sempre 

“Husband and wife, happy forever.” And then I knew how to put things together. My mother and Carolyn had exchanged vows, under a full moon, either inside or outside the car, near the water and the pines, by a side road where no cars disturbed them. My mother had told me she always liked necking better than sex and had declared that no one gave better back rubs than Carolyn, so exquisite that she threatened to cut off her fingers and keep them after she died, no matter how grotesque that sounded. Part of it may have been hero-worship, a fan’s adoration, a schoolgirl crush, but she was smitten—both of them were. 

Thinking about this privileged moment, this peak of intimacy, this private, secret, do-it-yourself wedding in the woods by the water, I imagined a motion-picture camera pulling back discreetly from the Chevy and slowly panning down the road between pines and cornfields, surging toward the creek and the Choptank River in the distance, settling on the rippling full moon on the water, accompanied by the sound of clanking bell- buoys, the slosh of waves, the low buzz of a johnboat trolling in the dark, a gull or a mallard ruffling its feathers and taking flight. And then, from the car, the sound of “Whither Thou Goest,” a hit song by Les Paul and Mary Ford, would emerge from the radio, with Carolyn singing along, the lyrics quoting from the Bible: “Whither thou goest, I will go.” My mother, the former Sunday School teacher, surely knew the passage from the Book of Ruth: 

Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following
1111111111after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and
1111111111where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall
1111111111be my people, and thy God my God:
Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried:
1111111111the Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but
1111111111death part thee and me.

Before I actually read that lovely book from the Old Testament, I came upon “Ruth and Naomi,” a poem by Edward Field in Stand Up, Friend, with Me, the first poetry collection I was ever given, in which he describes how “Ruth and Naomi, lip to vaginal lip, / Proclaimed their love throughout the land.” Of course, I didn’t see any personal connection until much later, after I had started writing my own poems, had read more poetry, and had learned more about my mother and Carolyn, especially how to empathize with the predicament they faced every day: hiding and denying their intimate relationship, a love that deserved celebration, not concealment. 

Among my mother’s loose papers, the phrase “Whither Thou Goest” appears repeatedly, without explanation. But the words were a pledge, a promise that wherever one of them went, the other would follow, and despite the social pressure against their union and the combustible nature of their personalities, they would honor that contract which no one had witnessed, my mother not abandoning Carolyn in her final illness but tending to her needs, more devoted than any cousin could be, and ultimately following her to the grave plot they shared, with their names on opposite sides of the granite marker, taking her place next to Carolyn’s parents, forsaking her own family and declaring her love in the most permanent way she could. I’m pretty sure that Carolyn sang the words of the popular song and that my mother, her most devoted fan, responded both to the seductive music and the soothing religion it encapsulated. And the romantic, moonlit night by the woods and the water was an essential part of that makeshift, spontaneous, what-the-hell ceremony that bound them so tightly together. They were giving all for love. 

Carolyn’s green diary also contained a note for my mother that she had composed in shaky script on a small sheet of paper. It served as a bookmarker for the page that celebrated their marriage to each other. It may have been the last thing she was able to write: 

My darling I love you
ybeyond all measure
yThere is no separation
yAll I know is
yI love you more
ythan I ever could
ybelieve. It is a love
ythat knows no end
yLove me
yLove me endlessly
yI will wait
1111111111Your Carrie 

During one of the last nights she spent in her own apartment before entering the Western Hills nursing home, my mother was surprised when I seized that binder of notes about her life and said I was taking it home for safe keeping. I was afraid she would destroy those personal reminders, which included several references to “Buck Bryan Road” and “Whither Thou Goest,” those fragments toward an autobiography she could never manage to begin, just as she had destroyed the trove of Carolyn’s correspondence. She objected a little but then relented. She knew I was planning to write about her. “I just worry,” she said, “that we started too late, and I won’t be able to tell you all my stories, all my secrets.” But the point wasn’t to be encyclopedic. 

“That’s okay,” I told her. “We have enough.” 

⧫

John Philip Drury, a native of Cambridge, Maryland, is now professor emeritus at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Sea Level Rising (Able Muse Press, 2015) and The Teller’s Cage: Poems and Imaginary Movies (Able Muse Press, January 2024).  “Full Moon on the Water” is the last chapter in “Bobby and Carolyn: A Memoir of My Two Mothers,” which will be published by Finishing Line Press in August 2024. 

Delmarva Review selects the most compelling new nonfiction, poetry, and short stories from thousands of submissions annually. Publishing from St. Michaels, Maryland, the literary journal has featured new writing from more than 500 authors worldwide since its first issue fifteen years ago. Forty-one percent are from the Chesapeake-Delmarva region. It is available worldwide in paperback and digital editions from Amazon.com and other booksellers. 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: “Moving Out” recalls watching my son pack his bags to move to a distant state. It felt momentous and, at the same time, made me appreciate his deep attachment to home and family. I expected to face a cleanup job once he drove away. Instead, he startled me with a flash of maturity. Writing this poem made me remember Robert Frost’s advice for poets: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.”

Moving Out

a clingy baby, slow to settle, never one
to let go, he became a keeper of shells,
stones, clay-modeled frogs, chessmen,

a piler-up of dusty stuffed animals,
sleepless and sad for weeks that time
when some disappeared in a move,

his room still hung with old posters,
corners curling—Jimi Hendrix,
Green Lantern, Chaplin’s little tramp—

while into his car, he stuffs hiking boots,
skis, favorite pants, violin in its case,
then, from the doorway, looks back

at the mongrel piles on the floor—
I don’t want to leave you with this mess—
and returns to toss out tie-dyed shirts

from Quaker camp, drop diaries
and love letters into a box, and gather
me a caulk bouquet, six tubes

securely planted in a paint bucket,
caulk enough to patch all our cracks

Susan Okie is a doctor, poet, and former Washington Post medical reporter. She received her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College in 2014. Her first poetry collection, Woman at the Crossing, will be published in October by Grid Books. Her chapbook, Let You Fly, was published in 2019. She teaches patient-interviewing and clinical ethics to medical students at Georgetown University and to volunteers at a safety-net clinic for uninsured adults. Susan lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Website: www.susanokie.com

Delmarva Review publishes the most compelling new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from thousands of submissions annually. Based in St. Michaels, Maryland, the literary journal has featured the new writing of more than 500 authors since its first edition fifteen years ago. Over forty percent are from the Chesapeake-Delmarva region. The journal is available in print and digital editions from Amazon.com and other booksellers. 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: The brief personal essay is a powerful form of writing capable of building one’s understanding and acceptance of the feelings defining grief. Once the painful trip is made, publication can share the experience with a willing audience. . . often helping many.

Author’s Note: “When I lost my husband, I could no longer see, hear, touch him. But he lived on in my heart and mind.  Shortly thereafter, I lost my father-in-law to dementia. I could still see, hear, and touch him. But in his heart and mind, I no longer existed. After my last visit to his nursing home, I tried to put on paper my grief at this second loss, this second kind of death.” 

Please Remember

MY FATHER-IN-LAW NO LONGER KNEW ME when I saw him for the last time. Deaf, almost blind, and in the grip of dementia, he looked at me blankly as I stood in front of him. The nursing home aide leaned down and spoke loudly in his ear. “It’s your daughter-in-law. She’s come to visit you.” 

“Hi, Dad!” I said, waving my arms and smiling. He sat in his wheelchair and stared. I waved harder and said louder, “Dad, it’s me! It’s Tess, your daughter-in-law. I’m Richie’s wife. You lived with us in our house in Flushing.” Nothing. 

“Remember how you used to sit in the backyard all summer? And the hot dogs you loved every time we barbecued?” Nothing. House, yard, happy summers, and hot dogs were as forgotten as I was. 

Dad was my last living tie to my recently deceased husband. Desperate now, I went on. “Can you remember Richie? Your son?” Still nothing. 

Before his mind stopped working, Dad had greeted me each visit by saying, “Are you all right? Everything is on you now.” 

Everything was on me. Dad had outlived his family, including his only son, and I was now his legal caretaker. Dad was an old-fashioned gentleman, and I was fond of him, but I couldn’t help resenting his longevity. His only child, my husband, hadn’t made it to seventy-five, yet Dad was now pushing ninety-eight. Luckily for him, I had inherited my husband’s fierce sense of family loyalty; his mantle of caretaker now rested on my shoulders. He had always done the right thing by his family, and numb with his loss, I felt good every time I went to the nursing home in his stead. 

Before each visit, I felt guilty for having negative thoughts. But I did have them. Every time I looked into Dad’s warm brown eyes, so like his son’s, I resented the fact that those eyes were not his son’s. But despite my unvoiced bitterness, I always left feeling virtuous. I was doing the right thing, just as my husband would have done, and the link between us held. 

As Dad’s dementia progressed, the saddest phase was when he voiced his awareness that he couldn’t recall things, or people, properly. “I can’t remember right,” he’d say, shaking his head. At least you still recognize me, I thought, holding his hand and wondering if he’d know me next time I came. 

And now I did not exist at all in his mind. “Bye, Dad,” I said, as the aide wheeled him into the common room for lunch. He did not wave back. 

Numbly, I walked to my car. I thought to my husband, Well, at least we know Dad is being taken good care of. But, honey, he doesn’t remember me anymore. I don’t know about another visit. I hope you understand. And dear, if I’m lucky enough to join you someday in heaven, please… remember me. 

⧫

Terry Riccardi is a philatelist and freelance editor. She says that when not creating dark-hued tales, she can be found trying to bowl a perfect game, watching classic movies, and searching for lost jigsaw puzzle pieces. She hopes to be a world-famous author when she grows up. In addition to the Delmarva Review, her work has appeared in Newtown Literary, Corvus Review, Black Petals, and three literary anthologies. Riccardi lives in New York.

Delmarva Review publishes the most compelling new essays, poetry, and short stories from thousands of submissions annually. Publishing from St. Michaels, Maryland, the literary journal has featured the new writing of more than 500 authors world-wide since its first edition fifteen years ago. Forty-one percent are from the Chesapeake-Delmarva region. The journal is available worldwide from Amazon.com and other booksellers. 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: “The most important information any Bay sailor needs is the weather report available on the VHF radio by the National Marine Weather Forecast. The wise sailor needs daily information about wind strength and direction, the height of waves, and the strength of local currents. From all this some proverbial advice has been distilled, not only small craft prohibitions but the wisdom of being at anchor by 4 PM in the afternoon when most Bay storms are likely to appear and the average length of most thunderstorms coming from the North and the West is an hour. After a sailor has been caught in high winds and waves, the relief of a safe anchorage and survival is often remembered with a drink and a pet or a friend away from windward.” 

A Bay Fisherman’s Meteorological Lesson

Good clouds flying west to east make no argument against
the planet’s breath while their horsetails banner the sky. 

If we meet in angry confrontation, it’s an offshore front
hiding the sun and landing in a tumbling punt 

with increasing frequency, gust after gust pushing us too close
to jagged rocks in rising oceans I’d rather not see, 

our innards twisted with vain hopes rocked by reality.
Everything turns in its motion at once, not just our homes 

but our fishing boats soaked by a two-ton punch
hitting the gunnels, throwing souls and stomachs up to the sky. 

As the pandemic of fear snaps free my gimlet eye awaits
a drop of courage to steer us safely by 

having left the sea for a cozy room with pictures of calmer waves
in a drowning town, a drink at my side and a cat to lee. 

⧫

Michael Salcman is a poet, physician, and art historian. He was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum. His poems appear in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Café Review, Delmarva Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Smartish Pace. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good is Better, Poetry in Medicine, his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness & healing, A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner of the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize, and Shades & Graces, inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems was published by Spuyten Duyvil (2022).

Delmarva Review publishes the most compelling new poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from thousands of submissions annually. The literary journal is designed by its founders to encourage outstanding new writing for publication. The journal is available worldwide from Amazon.com and other booksellers. Support comes from tax-deductible contributions and a grant from Talbot Arts with funds from the Maryland State Arts Council. Website: www.DelmarvaReview.org