The Zingara Project

Tag: Adanna

  • Northwoods Christmas Orphans by Nancy Austin

    We caved to the kids visiting in-laws on the real holiday.
    No, not chopped liver, I reassure my husband, coax a scarf
    into his ungloved hands, point to crystalline aspen and hoar-frosted
    huckleberry under the just-shaken snow globe sky.

    Tires crunch a path around the lake, a doe darts across the wooded drive.
    We kick off boots in a knotty-pine kitchen fragrant with cardamom, bacon, vanilla.
    Winnie whips up her cream cheese frosting, mammoth cinnamon swirls yield
    to our knives thick with sweet butter cream.
    Emily, energizer bunny of this geriatric cohort, converses too quickly to think
    between gasps of air, My friend can’t see with her immaculate generation.

    We gather around their woodstove after breakfast.
    Emily’s husband Ray recalls the year their Ford Fairlane
    broke down near a rural tavern/general store,
    Emily fills in every other phrase before he can finish.
    Bologna at the bar. Crackers that Christmas.
    Winnie and Ron remember a holiday alone,
    Rotisserie chicken with our fingers in the parking lot.
    They held one another’s gaze like a warm hand,
    as if to reaffirm life’s slights and disappointments
    form the glue that bonds, that comforts.
    I nodded to my husband with that same knowing glance.
    He narrowed his eyes, muttered chopped liver.

    —

    Nancy Austin has lived on both coasts, but prefers the land between. She relishes time to write in the Northwoods. Austin’s work has appeared in Adanna, Ariel, Gyroscope Review, Midwestern Gothic, Portage Magazine, Verse Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Poets Calendars. Her poetry collection is titled Remnants of Warmth (Aldrich Press/Kelsay Books, 2016).

  • In Memoriam by Sharon Scholl

    I feel the sigh of thinking
    about you, breath
    carving out a riverbed of memory.

    Cool in the shadow
    of my passing through,
    scenes flicker – you standing

    in a door three summers
    tall. I’m trying to find
    your form, assemble love
    from the labyrinth of places
    that contained us, the web
    of words that passed for truth.

    Your pulse is made of ashes.
    Your being is a whirlpool
    in the ripples of my brain.

    Sharon Scholl is professor emerita from Jacksonville University (Fl)  where she taught humanities and non-western studies.  Her chapbook, Summer’s Child, is new from Finishing Line Press.  Individual poems are current in Adanna, Caesura and, Rat’s Ass Review.