“Dream a Wish into the World”
Wendy Balconi
Collage
After Nancy Miller Gomez and with an opening quote from my daughter
His three year old says I’m a princess and you’re a spring roll and, dancing along with her, he says no I’m a unicorn and you’re a bowl of noodles, and she says, no I’m a tree and you’re dirt and he says no I’m a toy car and you’re a butterfly and she says no I’m flying to the moon and you’re coming with me and so they do—as soon as she says it fire shoots from their feet, arms pressed against their sides, and they burst through the roof confident they can survive even the coldest corner of the universe, they fly straight up toward that grey-blue beacon in the sky, through every layer of the atmosphere, and they make it. I’m looking at them now through a telescope. I can see them there together on the top of its tallest mountain.
Father’s Day
his last visit
a waxing gibbous
almost
full again
some bird in our neighborhood
cries out for help
close to our home
but far enough away
that there is no way
that I will get up,
find my shoes, deactivate
the alarm, slip away
without waking the baby
to search for the source
of this life in distress.
as with the more human
pain I see daily on my feed,
I roll back over, cover my ears
and fall asleep.
three hours later I rise
and the cries, more space
now between them,
can barely be heard,
drowned out
by the songs of other birds
we kiss
next to Neruda
we kiss
we kiss
we kiss
we kiss
we kiss
there is
an aftertaste
it lasts
for fifty years
John Arthur: “I am a writer and musician from New Jersey. It’s hard to know what the impulse is behind the pieces in my submission. I just write, a lot, every day, and sometimes that writing comes out in a sort of daze and when I’m done writing I feel like I’ve communicated something that is hopefully valuable to both myself and to the reader. I don’t try to interpret what I’ve written. That’s up to a reader, not to me.”