✧ Writer’s Regimen Contest Winner ✧
Meetinghouse Hill, Roxbury, Massachusetts (1799), John Ritto Penniman
un
“Until the dying one says Dream, undream me.”
-Marianne Boruch
the living one the opposite of until: before
his chalk-dry & wild tongue spewed
the unlanguage of monarchs
& the equally banished, the dementia patient
said nothing: wandered blue halls until
afternoon sun led him to a cloud
like a cartoon, he thought: called me his daughter’s
name & I replied to this unmemory, remember when
you carried me to school on your shoulders?
squinted like he did, moments until
the strain became a smile: in another life, lifted
scabby legs a yoke around a younger neck:
they never did but dwelling in our lack: never but
between: two strangers padding our differences
with tall tales of care until a visitor called
him uncle: her own journey with him driving stick-shift
and his? bad sieve of yesterday: the gift-wrapped lie
becomes what’s shared, a photograph: the difference
between truth and untruth is a gaping want: un, or deprived of
something like a hand-held walk to school or the stalled engine
of an unfinished poem: clutching all the same.
Realing, or a cure
for Andrea
And what of loneliness? I ask the cards,
the two of pentacles steadying
like a balancing act. I once loved a clown
who wore many painted faces, each one juggling
almost anything: February clementines, dirty rags,
my shy hand amidst each revolving
door of him. All juggling is a balancing, but not
all balancing succeeds. And so he left me
bruised fruit and one of many faces,
the one he called Pierrots or
“avatar of the disenfranchised” performing unmasked
and miming lonely. Suppose Pierrots becomes you,
suppose to mime is not pretense but
practice. As a child, I refined a seven-course meal
of fake grapes and steak. With each return
from the Fischer-Price kitchen, I brought the opposite
of loneliness to the table: a Velcro avocado
for Andrea’s empty hands, performed eating
with vigor, please and thank you. Taught each other
a meal is more than food as we giggled over plastic
cake for dessert. When the cards call out imbalance,
I call Andrea. They’re in the kitchen, chopping
onions over tears, how I’ve miss you I say
into the phone, real soup bubbling on the stove.
MADELINE SIMMS is a cornfed creative from Illinois. She is currently based in Tuscaloosa, AL where she's working toward a dual MFA in Creative Writing and Book Arts. Madeline is the recipient of the 2023 AWP Intro Award in Fiction. You can find her writing in Poet Lore, Quarterly West, The Journal, and elsewhere.