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Kevin Grauke
Documentation
 
My son asks his wife to take his picture
with me, something he’s never asked for
before when he’s come home for a visit.
 
He has plenty of us together, but only as part
of those family portraits meant to document
significant events—graduations, marriages . . .
 
Aunts and uncles are always present, as are
odd cousins. But this backyard photo is to be
only us. He puts his arm around my shoulder
 
and pulls me tight. He’s so strong now.
I can feel him smiling, waiting for his wife
to capture us for all time. I smile, too,
 
but my mouth, it breaks a little.
Have I reached that age already,
when next time is always in some doubt?
 
For the very first time, I see the darkness.
Its smoke dims the light of the sun a bit.
I see my son, too—in the future, older.
 
Looking at this memory, at me smiling
next to him here, he’s comforted now
that I’m gone. He did well as a son.
 
He’ll know this. I’ll have told him
many times. I hold my smile, ignoring
the shape gathering itself just above
 
his wife’s head as she centers us. I’m glad
you took this, my son will say. Just look
at you two! she’ll add. Indeed, just look at us.
 
We must look so happy. Big smiles,
she says now, smiling, too, showing us
how to do it. My son pulls me closer still.
 
I smile bigger, though my cheeks ache
and quiver. Soon, this will be over,
but right now, this is it, everything.

Robin Helweg-Larsen
Out Of Many…

Two hundred million sperm
in one ejaculation;
and we are standing firm
and spouting with elation,
though but a single germ
survives to incarnation.

And much in nature throws
vast clouds into the ocean,
where myriad embryos
become a magic potion
consumed by all that goes
with food its only notion;

yet one or two survive
to adulthood and, later,
will make the species thrive
and serve up like a waiter
new young crowds that arrive
like cargo crammed on freighter.

This is how nature lives;
we should not think it foolish
eight billion of us gives
but forty fierce and mulish
posthuman narratives,
godlike as much as ghoulish.

Carl Palmer
Father

I never saw him cry
no tears of joy or regret
nor praise for me
no hugs, never kisses

always that stiff upper lip
ever emotionless smile
always to make me strong
never ever a momma’s boy

handshakes firm, hurtful
until I was strong enough
to squeeze back hard
but never did

Marcus Slingsby
Before Him

He took in shoes to repair as a second job
long before the words ‘fast’ and ‘fashion’
existed.

He blew up bridges in North Africa
before drones could do it alone.

He delivered bicycles on Christmas Eve
before the internet took Santa away.

I, I travelled the world
before the pen lost out to the phone.

My eldest, sixteen
before him, not our dreams,
but his own.

Sharon Whitehill
Missing Pieces

Surely a mythical creature, the starfish: what looks like
a skullcap crawling along the sea floor on its lips,
with nary a torso or tail. Osiris’s wicked brother
chops his body to pieces and scatters the parts in the Nile—
a transgression peculiarly heinous when afterlife access requires
that even a god be physically whole. Losing a piece, a sea star
regrows the appendage; from that one lost arm an entire
new creature sometimes evolves. Absent such cellular magic,
the loss of human parts can be what permits the renewal,
as in surgeries to save my daughters: one with breast cancer,
the other with uterine tumours. Isis collects every piece of Osiris
except for his phallus, consumed by a fish—what better way
to convey the fall of a fertility god? Some female starfish flirt
with a form of dismemberment, splitting in half to become
a male pair who turn female again when mature. The illusion
of safety, so vital to human function and purpose, is easily shaken.
Late at night, when I’m waiting alone after the airport has emptied,
my husband appears at last like an angelic vision: a resurrection,
of sorts, of our life together. Isis reassembles her husband,
fully equipped through her magic, embalms him, wraps his body
in linen—thereafter the rites that reanimate dead Egyptians
as mummies. In my own life, no mythical sorcery or echinoderm
alchemy to restore a lost limb, a disappeared loved one, a self.
Rather, only postponement, the holding of loss in abeyance.
Which seems to me magic enough.