Please enjoy these poems by Beth Brown Preston and Alex Palmatier. These imagistic poems have a wistful quality as the present tries to make sense of the past. What are the things that we notice? What are the memories that stay embedded in us? And, perhaps most importantly, how do those memories shape what we notice today?
—The Editors
Once the Night
Once the summer night fell over the sky like a dark cloth,
or a black evening dress thrown across heaven's starry bed.
The hoo-hoot of an owl's complaint echoed from the branches
of a maple tree in the front yard. All else was silence.
The neighbor's unruly dog lay hushed beneath the porch. And a gentle wind, so unlike the fierce winds of winter, combed the leaves of the maple like so much hair.
We had solace for our grief inside talk about love.
You do not understand: my life always has been a puzzle,
a rune, a card player holding an unlucky hand.
You drank what remained of the red wine
knowing it was time to remember our dead.
What I meant to say is: the music of your voice filled
that stillness. And, in a moment of sudden, yet quiet revelation,
a presence I knew to be my own dead father arrived to sit beside me.
There were so many words I could have said to escape
the labyrinth, your prison of language.
I lean into the hour of yet another sweet farewell.
Beth Brown Preston is a poet and novelist. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College and the MFA Writing Program of Goddard College she has been a CBS Fellow in Writing at the University of Pennsylvania; and, a Bread Loaf Scholar in Nonfiction. She has published three poetry collections and two chapbooks of poetry. Her recent poetry collection is OXYGEN II (Aquarius Press/Willow Books, 2025). Her poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared and are forthcoming in many literary and scholarly journals. Natural History
I come at an an odd hour;
Before midday on a weekday.
I wander through the cavernous halls,
The comforting wooden benches at the center, underneath the elephants,
Beside the dioramas of apple orchards,
The white tailed deer,
The black rhinoceros,
The rings inside a cut redwood tree,
I listen to my echoing footsteps—laughter from a school group somewhere not far off.
I was here once as a child.
I remember my mother, with her disposable camera,
My pigtails swinging
Her hands on my waist and then up
Up on the platform in front of the woolly mammoth that
Wasn’t a woolly mammoth but was just
Organized bones
Looming.
I remember the photograph, now lost
And the voice of the attendant telling me to get down from there
I think of all the photos of dead things next to living things
Walking along the porpoises and penguins suspended in epoxy
To sit beneath the great blue whale.
I imagine being swallowed like Jonah
Or crushed by the falling figure itself
Or buried under all of it
Buried, not erased
Bones on display
Just a skeleton in a photo
While the living press on.
Alex Palmatier is a poet and educator from New York. When she’s not in the classroom, she can be found knee deep in her garden or at the playground with her husband and son. Her work has appeared in Chronogram and Blood + Honey.
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These are fantastic
Great poems, I especially like these lines from Natural History;
'I imagine being swallowed like Jonah
Or crushed by the falling figure itself
Or buried under all of it
Buried, not erased
Bones on display
Just a skeleton in a photo
While the living press on.'