Remnant 
 
Rain off the back porch in the early hours
is one more thing I would not have thought
to invent, if I had been deity and not my
dull, drained self still sleepy after waking.
 
Not all of life can be earth-shattering,
unparalleled, ever-unfolding brilliance.
Cat litter needs emptied—one stack of
papers must be assessed, added to another.
 
Sometimes it’s all I can do to remember
the day’s appointments, much less that
behind explanations I treasure, fields
I’ve yet to explore stretch beyond sight.
 
I’m just one person as aimless as the next.
Occasionally a thought coheres, and for
a while it’s easy to believe a small thing
might resurrect a large thing, even a nation. 

Luthier

I want to be one—
planing curly maple into thin sides and backs,
carving spruce tops into arches,
inlaying purfling along curving edges—

just like the fellow I saw
through a large window in Mittenwald
in his workshop snug and warm against the snow,
his life—whatever its complications—

zeroed in to the sculpting of tone,
the connection of flesh and tool and wood

spiritual and movingly abstract,
spirit in the instrument,
instrument in the spirit,
anonymous hope in the sound.

Seasons of Childhood

I’ve woken in the warm hollow of my old bed. Around me in the house, my family is stirring because I’m not yet estranged. I hold my vest to the fire, toast my toes on a boiled egg, try with mittened hands to build an igloo. I rush out the French door to chase bullfinches off the codling blossom, pick short-stemmed white violets in the orchard, suck honey from dead nettle tubes and puff them away. I join the gathering on the hot flagstones in the sun for morning coffee and afterwards clamour to go to the beach the bumpety way with a detour to see the chicory by the gate to Bluestone Farm. I throw prunings onto a bonfire until my hair smells of smoke. I climb the ladder to the apple loft and inhale an earthy sweetness so fiercely aromatic it has seeped into floorboards, brickwork and beams.

The Churn

One too many admiring papers about Elon Musk
send me over the brink. Each one mentions he's
slated to be the world's first trillionaire. I should be
impressed by that and his desire to colonize
the moon, but we've played that out in history
once or twice before. Something has to suffer
this time on a planetary scale. The next paper
I grade is on PewDie Pie, You Tube's most followed
influencer. Over one hundred and twenty million
people think he has something important to say
on a regular basis. Certainly that many people
can't all be wrong, but what if they are?
The will to be entertained is very strong in
this demographic. I can't force myself
to watch for more than three minutes
without rolling my eyes. Another migraine is
coming on. I sense a future when I'll be
forced to submit to popular fools. Lennon
and McCartney will turn out to be gamers
who've amassed fortunes by using the platforms
for their benefit. I am forced to turn away
like the burned out old fart I'm bent on
becoming. I'm told the generations churn
and the great machine keeps humming. Relax,
they assure me, but I am wondering if they
suffer from too much faith. I sigh and rub
my temples. My son can hear me whining
and complaining. He consoles me, Gee, Dad,
if I could bury you right now I would.

Perimenopause Song: Might Have Been
Unnamed High Desert, March 2020

Were you, ever? Maybe. Maybe not. If you’d ever lived, you’d be five now, starting school, and
me at the gate saying No, I’m the mama, not the nana. Not much of a world to bring you
into—news of some new virus out of China, the airports shutting down. I can’t have a baby, over
and over again in my head. I’m too old, I’m forty-eight, old enough to know better. Old enough
to know your father had his eye on someone else, some rich older lawyer. I can’t have a baby. In
an undisclosed location. I’m not even officially here. Not me. It wasn’t supposed to be me.

But. After two months, I would have forsworn all the wars for you, run for the border for you,
made a dark-eyed, dark-haired copy of your father out of you. But then. Cramp and red ribbons
in the women’s latrine. And you a tiny, tiny ghost. Littlest of the might-have-beens.

moth flutter
cool evening
gentle regret

Lemons

Hanging over a fence is flirting,
is asking to be taken whereas reaching
over same fence would be, technically,
theft. I confess to liberating every single 
reachable lemon without regard for any 
real or imaginary vertical fenceline. 
Waste in hungry world: morally reprehensible. 
The following week I climbed right over 
the not-that-high fence at night and filled 
a bag with lemons that were crying out 
to be rescued from rot or an eventual drop 
to earth due to shameful neglect on some-
one’s part, someone whose ethics require 
an overdue service. Note: Lemon trees 
shouldn’t be in private gardens merely 
for decoration. There, I stated the obvious. 
But me, I’m not in the fixing-the-world 
business and shall allow karma to do 
what it must. Best one can hope for… 
besides lemon curd, lemon tarts, lemon 
cake, lemon juice in tea, in sparkling 
water or on fish or salad or anything. 
Have you checked the price of lemons 
at your ‘profitable’ local supermarket?
Unscrupulous, verging on criminal.

A Matter of Perspective II

It is not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see – Henry David Thoreau

When a non-climber looks at a mountain,
he sees, well, a mountain.
However,

when a mountaineer looks up at a mountain,
he sees only a succession of
brick walls.

Likewise, when a non-writer looks at a poem,
he sees… you know where I’m
going with this.

But when a poet looks at a poem all he sees
are the brick walls he’s banged
his head against.

Battlefields never stay battlefields for long,
certainly not forever, besides blood,
dried or metaphorical,

is, so I’ve read, one helluva great fertiliser,
but maybe not if you’re thinking
of growing flowers.

No One Wants to Know

The future merging with the present,
the present becoming tenuous,
energy seeping like a leaking battery,
the minimum becoming overwhelming.

Everyone applauds the virile eighty-year-old
his full head of hair, toothsome smile, poised
at the hatch of Cessna about to
tick off sky diving from his bucket list.

No one wants to hear about
pills coded by color, arranged by time of day,
taken with or without food, living with
side effects that leave you wondering
if you wouldn’t be better
off without any of them but
too much a coward to miss a dose.

Everyone admires the great grandmother
spryly crossing the finish line
of the half-marathon barely out of breath.
She and the skydiver
perfectly coiffed, fit and gliding
across the dance floor in the ballroom
of the luxury liner cruising
to exotic places far from

the endless medical appointments that
resolve nothing,
the living in the moment
because it’s all that’s left.

No one wants to know,
the doctors, caregivers,
the annoying guilt-driven family members
about this game of
diminishing returns where every day
the odds become worse.

Knowing Where the Bodies are Buried

It always comes back to the body in the end. The body as preamble, tossed aside like a torn candy wrapper. A body bitten in half, chewed hurriedly. The bodies of daughters, all twig legs 
and barrettes. Bathing suits sheathed from throat to crotch. Limbs splayed, gaze pinned to a popcorn ceiling. Wound the bark in the body of a tree and out spills resin, henna, rubber, honey sweet as moonlight, cereal boxes. Though the human body can be a product too, bending or breaking. A body of knowledge, loose-lipped memories. Discovering where the bodies are buried, in the yellowed leaves of a childhood calendar or at the bottom of a keg. The cavities of the body – porous and tart, like a slice of bitter melon flung to the curb. Would the body be more credible if so much time hadn’t passed? Each morning, strapping on body armor, breastplate and helmet, the clink of iron gauntlets. Hushed, forgiving afternoon light. Ice and dust. The physical body – distinct from the soul. Crevices and fluids, bad smells, microscopic hairs. The body taking up space, severed, re-assembled. Like a jigsaw puzzle whose edges don’t line up. The body count higher than expected. Hippocampus curled in the lumpy jar of my brain like a ram’s horn or a sea monster. This body blooming like a dark star in the rain.

Meet Me On The Death Exchange

Meet me on the Death Exchange,
we’ll make a fair trade.
Mine for yours.
The sum of our lives will be weighed
stacking our deeds like stones.
Yours are lightweight,
smooth and perfect.
No jagged edges
or razor-like ridges
that make the hand bleed
or the heart congeal.
You were born with an enviable lightness of being,
a gossamer spirit
radiating light
that eviscerated the darkness
with a simple smile.
You were not one who was washed ashore,
shipwrecked and alone,
surviving, not living
in an unwelcoming world
with thoughts so heavy
as to pull you under
drowning you.
The shape of our absence will be measured as well.
Yours is a chasm,
wide and deep.
A thousand cries of grief
echo up from the void,
the laments of all who loved you,
a dirge for the lost fullness of your days.
It is not an infinitesimal pinprick
in the tapestry of existence,
an unnoticed song of empty days
and emptier nights,
an insignificant story that vanishes unseen
as if it never was.
So meet me on the Death Exchange,
we’ll make a fair trade.
Mine for yours.

Astoria Town On My Birthday

Landlady rings and re-rings my bell (those jet planes
ignite slowly over LaGuardia) looking for rent I won’t
pay because she’s holding my lease. I read and re-

read Virginia Woolf like an undergraduate
this hot morning in October until she gives
up. 19 words to the end but I don’t count 19.

Don’t count it twice. Age, like poems, are in
dispute. A quivering plantain in the shower my
search for a twenty-two year-old man, his birth

sparse and thin, a snake deadened after three
decades of separation and an excess of sugar.
How ridiculous if younger women love me?

Or don’t love me better yet. Younger women who
eat my cooking, whose hips don’t lie or sing once
breakfast is over— intuition and horoscopes from

The New York Post— nothing my deli man will read to me
from the Starcast can help me rise this morning so drenched
in sweat evaporating in my landlady’s hands.

Conjugations*


The war was bad enough already, and then one day 
the uniformed men arrived with new instructions and
the family was suddenly ordered transported to Siberia.
After all, you couldn't be trusted, not in times like these,
and in the space of days, hearth, house, and shtetl were left behind.
No time to pack or say a proper farewell,
though it hardly mattered, as the whole village was brought along,
transferred east in open railroad carts across taiga and steppes.

There they set you and your brothers up in school -
education was not to be neglected - and taught you, 
for reasons unknown, the elements of English. Sixty years on, 
though your accent remains heavy, and your grammar inverted, 
these old lessons you recite without error:
I was taken, you were taken, we were taken...

*in memory of Alex Odinak

What’s This Here Sauce?

Between college and law school,
Sherman managed a fast food restaurant 
in a university suburb that specialized
in roast beef sandwiches, quarter-pounders
with a variety of sauces,
packaged meals with fries and a soda.
Among the sauces, BBQ the most popular,
an option for Worcestershire sauce,
the word a mouthful to the teenaged cooks
and the kids at the register taking orders.
Unfamiliar with the word, not to mention 
his difficulty with spelling,
Brandon called it “what’s this here sauce,”
assumed it something akin to “mystery meat.”
Years later, a retired Circuit Court judge,
Sherman and his wife hosted Sunday brunches
for their family and friends, Sherman’s
Bloody Marys especially a hit with the guests.
They’d ask him about his ingredients.
“A dash of horseradish,” he’d reply,
“and some what’s this here sauce.”
Dumbfounded, the guests would go away,
to liquor stores and specialty food shops,
in search of the elusive what’s this here sauce.
Brandon, wherever you are,
you have not been forgotten.

Another Revolution

My older sister found me at the end of the sandy road
that led to the lake near our house. You’re going to get
in trouble, she warned. But I was four years old, and
I’d already made a friend by trailing a car that held
a boy who looked about my age, staring through
the back window. Without stopping to tell anyone,
I’d tracked deep ruts down the lane because trouble
was no excuse to ignore what could be gained
while getting lost or being found. Since that day,
I have thrown many years to the stars, but the sun
has obliged to lift me, my life circling the planet,
again and again.

A Stranger Shaped like an Urn

Some nights throb with old pain,
others bloom in silver and brass.
Last night I frustrated myself
with dreams of unwashed laundry

and a looming return to wherever
I’d been, my unpacked clothes
ballooning with ghosts and someone
tying up the communal shower.

The cats roused me by fighting
in their screechy but harmless tones.
The night still weighed heavily
with its organ notes sounding

and the forest grieving with wind.
In the bathroom mirror I met
 a stranger shaped like an urn.
Not the aesthetic Grecian type

but the pot metal kind for stashing
the ashes of an unloved uncle.
I looked that way because sleep
had fogged my sight with mucus.

I washed my face and returned
to the smoldering bedroom where
I struggled to outlive myself
without the comfort of myth.

The Birthright of the Tribe  - scheduled for October 2nd

a north dublin house estate  - scheduled for October 6th

Walking The Trail - scheduled for October 30rd

Moon Watching for Ghosts - scheduled for November 6th

I know this is a little awkward, and I appreciate your patience and understanding. Your work matters to me; I want to make sure every piece that was promised a spot actually gets one. I will do everything I can. 
I apologise for the inconvenience and can assure you that I am taking steps to ensure this won't happen ever again. 

Warmly,
Karina Longo
Editor-in-Chief, La Rotonde Review 


EDIT: The dates originally in the post were edited, now that I have had access to the original spreadsheet. 

Colorless

Colorless, is water's face,
it cools the mind and brow,
of every village child that dwells,
within the here and now.

Colorless, the art of fun,
for living in the moment,
with silliness and energy,
no need to plant or sow it.

And colorless, is spirit too,
it knows no red or blue,
but you can see it in the way,
that someone smiles at you.

If we could color every laugh,
would it mean that much more,
or is it substance from the heart,
that gives our laughter store.