House backed by Sippo Lake Park, forest trickled
into my grandparents’ backyard like dandelion seeds.
Oak trees, bumpy and brown bark, like pecans,
sheltered fresh cut grass from sun, ushering in
deer and chipmunks. A flourishing garden of pastel
hydrangeas, golden daffodils, magenta
wild phlox. Beside the door grew a trailing rose bush
back before my sister was born, back before
stepsiblings and significant others joined
the family. Narrow, olive green stems
were dotted with ruby roses, their teardrop petals
soft like spiderweb silk. Before leaving,
I pointed at the fullest
rose and listened to the snip
of my grandma’s scissors. She wrapped it
in damp newspaper to conceal
thorns, until I placed it
in a crystal vase on my dresser, where the sun
shone a spotlight on the rose, petals
extending outward—a child’s hand wishing
to be held forever.
The water yellowed.
The rose withered, wrinkles like smile lines
on my grandma’s face.
Each month of each year
I asked her for a new rose,
naïve in thinking
the bush would last forever.
Taylor Necko
Taylor Necko is a senior at Bowling Green State University majoring in Creative Writing. Much of her work is focused on human relationships and how they transform. Along with her major, she is double-minoring in Art and Word-Image. She is the editor in chief of Prairie Margins, her college’s undergraduate literary journal, and a writer for Her Campus. She has been previously published in Gabby and Min’s Literary Review and is soon to be published in the Oakland Arts Review.
How to Make Tea
It could be
how to make tea means
paying attention
to water, to leaf, to cup.
In the Chinese way, we use
a guywan, a covered cup
filled with
beautiful leaves, spring water
heated to
just the right temperature
poured in circles
to saturate each leaf.
After steeping
at just enough time,
the brewed tea is poured
into waiting cups for a taste,
delicate, ambrosial,
a scent like sweet jasmine
or caramel
or fresh mown hay
a taste surprising
no matter how often
tea is made.
Mitzvah Man
He’s never told me, I love you. To him,
love is a word fraught with pain - - a word
parents used to justify familial
abuse -- not tenderness, deep connection;
certainly, never, trust. He performs daily
mitzvahs -- good deeds -- picks up litter, mulches
roses in the city garden, heirloom
beauties whose scent keeps him calm; buys water
for the mailman and the UPS guy,
fancy fruit ones to boot; brings lunch for his
bike shop friend then inflates thirty tires in
one day to repay kindnesses. You know
how I feel, he says, you don’t need words, but
know this, I thank you, I thank the gods for you!
DIANA ROSEN
DIANA ROSEN is an essayist, poet, and flash writer whose hybrid first full-length book, HIGH STAKES & EXPECTATIONS, is from thetinypublisher.com Her work appears in Rattle, Tiferet Journal, As It Ought to be Magazine among others in the U.K., Australia, India, and Canada and the U.S. She lives and works as a content provider on food and beverage in Los Angeles where her "backyard" is the largest urban greenspace in the country, Griffith Park. To read more of her work, please visit authory.com/dianarosen
For my brother, Joe
For nearly two hundred years,
it drew strength from this place,
but lately its crown of branches
looks sparser every fall—with broken
and diseased limbs—and its massive trunk
surrounded by an ocean of black asphalt.
On a small curbed island
of hard-packed urban dirt,
where tiny cubes of broken windshield glass
outnumber last year’s acorns,
it stands like an abandoned watchtower,
a lighthouse without a keeper.
In the canopy above,
clusters of parasitic mistletoe drain
its remaining sap, and yet this oak
endures, spared perhaps as a token,
some landscape designer's sentimental nod
to an older kind of seasonal longing.
And perhaps it’s only poetry to imagine
that this ancient tree must long for its compatriots,
a lost forest of the harvested—
chestnut, maple, larch, and pine—
or wonder why an unlucky few seem fated
to die upright, slowly, and alone.
Michael Colonnese
Michael Colonnese is the author of Sex and Death, I Suppose, a hard-boiled detective novel with a soft Jungian underbelly, and of two prize-winning poetry collections, Temporary Agency and Double Feature. He lives in the mountains of western North Carolina, near Asheville.