Convent Cats by David W. Landrum
Ye shall not possess any beast, my
dear sisters, except only a cat.
—-The Ancren Riewle (Rule for Nuns)
Part of it was practical, no doubt:
you had to have a cat to kill the mice
inside the convent. However devout
and tenderhearted, women will think twice
of tolerating vermin. Yet there’s more
to explain why dogs or birds were not allowed
but cats permitted past the cloister door,
amid those virgin women, triple-vowed.
Cats might go out at night to rut and screw,
but how deeply or greatly involved
with sin, they could trot innocent into
those corridors of chastity, absolved,
self-pardoned of crimes done the night before,
and rub their backs against the vestry door
Fredericksburg by Claire Marie de la Grange
With frosted breath, we wait the break of day;
Our bravest wishing night would stay the morn;
When we will face a bristled wall of gray,
And wonder who will die upon the horn;
December thirteenth breeds a foggy dawn;
We gathered musket, sword, and God divine;
To Marye’s Heights, we marched in columns drawn,
To fall in brother’s blood at Longstreet’s line;
With grey a third the blue at Burnside’s feet,
And Franklin’s troops as dead and surely done,
We crossed the Rappahannock in defeat;
Our legacy, but graves with nothing won.
A northern snow has whitened up the ground;
Beneath a virgin sea, our ghosts are drowned.
Break Time by Michael R. Burch
Intrude upon my grief; sit; take a spot
of milk to cloud the blackness that you feel;
add artificial sweeteners to conceal
the bitter aftertaste of loss. You’ll heal
if I do not. The coffee’s hot. You speak:
of bundt cakes, polls, the price of eggs. You glance
twice at your watch, cough, look at me askance.
The TV drones oeuvres of high romance
in syncopated lip-synch. Should I feel
the underbelly of Love’s warm Ideal,
its fuzzy-wuzzy tummy, and not reel
toward some dark conclusion? Disappear
to pale, dissolving atoms. Were you here?
I brush you off: like saccharine, like a tear.