Issue 18

Autumn/Winter 2015

Cover Photo © 2008 “Hurt Hearts Mending III” by Patricia Wallace Jones, previously published in

The Chimaera, Issue 2, January 2008.

Whether grieving for ourselves, a love one, or someone we have only recently come to know, loss, in many of its forms, is a shared experience.  Rarely can we rise out of loss alone.  The same can be said for healing.  Not only must we rely on others to shore us up in our moments of need, often we must also count on them to bear part of our burden.  For only when we do so can we experience Touch at its deepest and most meaningful level.

Let me have the shape of bones

broken to the earth

David Anthony Sam

We have lived with chills that can hold their own

against any measure of warmth.

Kenneth Salzmann

We leave her with her grief – or duty –

the moss-tinted marble does not

know the difference.

Kate Van Pelt DeLoach

i have been fighting

in someone else’s war

that has moved along

the channel of time.

Jeanne Ferran

the hair will grow back soon enough

but I should try on the coral checked sunhat

that will be cute for summer.

Dianne Silvestri

For me, another D&C to do, another leaf upon a bough

which shakes against a bare ruined choir.

For her, an everlasting sunset in November.

James S. Wilk

I want to scream in joy and anger

to break this perpetual silence

of rent flesh cathedrals

Ed Bennett

Help me

I am not recognizable.

Susan Quaglietti

time has blown away years of him

like birds gone in a flash of wing

Marianne Lyon

This is my life now,

and I just have to live it as it is,

Claudia Serea

How many months create the door

through which the daze and doubt of grief

pass and slacken to belief,

Elise Hempel