Texting With My College Roommate After 40 Years

Chip: The Bible says we have to bless each other so we can live in love. So, I’m sending you this message. Today is a day of blessing! I bless you. Your heart. Your health. Your home. Your life. In the name of Jesus.

Me:  You going to church now?

Chip: Yes, I do go to church. Don’t you go?

Me: No.

Chip: I will pray for you.

Me: Good. I need the prayer and you need the practice.

Chip: Bless you! Do you believe in anything?

Me: It’s all a mystery to me. I know I don’t go for that fundamentalism stuff I was raised on. You still indulge?

Chip: I drink a beer or two.

Me: Ok. You still burn one?

Chip: Sometimes.

Me: Ok. Sounds like you aren’t a fundamentalist, either.

Chip: Oh, I forgot. You’re a Democrat.

Me: And you’re not. I should have known back when you were ordering all of those Brandy Alexanders. Do you believe in science?

Chip: I believe in the Son, the Father, and the Holy Ghost.

Me: Ok. But, do you believe in science?

Chip: No!

Me: What do you do when you are sick? Do you take any meds? How are you communicating with me right now without science?

Chip: I believe that Jesus died on the cross for your sins and mine. Do you believe in that?

Me: Ok. Does that mean you can’t believe in science?

Chip: Some of it. But, I believe in Jesus. Don’t you?

Me: Some of it

Chip: There you go!

Greg Clary

Sligo, Pennsylvania 

First published in the Rye and Whisky Review 

LIFE LINES

I looked at my hands today

To examine my life lines

Curious to know how meaningful my life is

I couldn’t decipher what this or that line meant

But what I came to realize was the story of my life

Depicted in my hands as a whole

Not just the coded lines on my palms

Studying my hands, the story unfolded

Barely aged, and hardly worn from labor

Yet scarred here and there with youthful recklessness

I looked over at the hands of my parents

There I saw a better story of my childhood

My father’s hands were large and rough

The knuckles slightly swollen and covered with hair

The palms patched with calluses

Much like the hands of my grandfather

Hard working men and battle-scarred war veterans

My grandfather’s index and middle finger of his right hand

Stained a dark yellow from countless years of smoking

Father’s just starting to darken,

He holds his cigarettes the same way

My mother has smaller hand, almost child size like mine

Our knuckles are hairless and smooth

Her fingers are bruised and swollen from all the blood sugar tests

Diabetes runs on both sides of my family

My mother’s hands are not that aged

Not like my grandmother’s whose hands

Pulse with thick purple veins

Covered in the wrinkles of her wisdom and age

Forever stained with the scent of onions and raw meat

My mother’s hands scented with a fainter chef’s scent

Lastly, I look upon my niece’s baby hands

Untouched by time

Hairless, wrinkle-less, and scarless

A sight of the pure perfection, of innocence

The life lines on her hands much longer

and more crisscrossed than mine

I take this as a good sign

I believe she will have a full and happy life

As I have had,

Thanks to the caring hands of my ancestors

Octavia Knight

Punxsutawney, PA

First published in The Watershed Journal

Sugar

Sugar

Returning home to West Virginia and hearing

“Hey Baby”, “Darlin”, “Honey”. 

“What can I get you?”

“How you doing?”

From unfamiliar women.

How I miss those sweet terms of affection. 

But, Sugar is what gets me.

Every time.

Tips are automatically doubled,

Purchases are made that weren’t intended.

My face goes from grim to grin. 

Every time.

Today, sitting alone in the woods,

I got to thinking. 

Sugar. Why sugar?

Then, a vision. An awareness. An image.

My mother died as I turned 3, and

her oldest sister, my Aunt June, 

would stop by, pick me up, 

turn me upside down,

rough me up, make me laugh. 

And call me Sugar.

Every time.

Something I needed, but could not name.

Something I still need.

When grin needs help conquering grim.

When I come home each day.

Every time.

-Greg Clary

Sligo, PA

Appalachia

Within the arms of Appalachia
Those hills that will never die
Among the skies of our humble seasons
In knowing we must always try

Looking forward to better places
Those meanings within our lives
In the simplicity of simple sorrows
Our Appalachia always survives

Like the roots of a steady forest
Mountains that will never grow old
In all of the vibrancy before us
Through the stories we’ve all been told

The many mysterious creations
By the mists that were crossing those hills
In the stories about our humanity
By a spirit that always wills...


-Kirke Wise
Clarion, PA

Jubilee

“Flee to the south come fall
abandon the nest, neighbor and all.”
Sprawled on a bed of disaster,
awakened by the unfamiliar,
alert now, he listened closely
hearing only a truncated echo:
“Flee to the south!”
“Flee to the south!”
“Flee to the south!”
The disembodied voice, a welcome relief
from nightmares of helicopter
gunships, gaping wounds, bodies
stacked like cordwood,
collages of death and destruction
that had awakened him for years,
and more recently, night terrors
of life’s realities: love lost, locked doors, filth, emptiness,
madness stared back from his bathroom mirror,
court documents served as benchmarks
along his path of self-destruction:
    Divorce papers
    Protection from Abuse Order
    Involuntary commitment
The voice was an answered prayer, although
not his (He had not yet learned to pray).
Staring into the abyss, considering the unthinkable
he obeyed, “Flee to the south”

The Tennessee sun cauterized his rage as he labored
among Hutterite and Friend in the southern high bush,
cultivating berries with twine and pruners in hand.
He struggled in the fields of his heart to tame the unruly,
thin the strangled, tangled growth, and prune the dead from the living.
His sweat a sweet unction for gall and malice.
Knowing forgiveness in the fragrance of blueberries.

-Wayne H. Swanger

Photographs by Greg Clary

Photographs by Greg Clary 2020

Christmas 2019

Recall, imagine the painting of Jesus

as an enfant descending from heaven

with the cross already on, above his back

before he is born.

Imagine the life of Mary and Joseph now

husband and wife and she untouched by him

pregnant, virgin, immaculate the life

inside her to be claimed by this life.

See the seventy miles of travel

on a donkey, by foot to answer the call

of Rome when time and circumstance 

will claim what no authority can take.

And see Joseph hear the Angel say

the one word among the many others

shepherds and magi had said

he did not want to hear -- "Flee."

Then the exile for years in Egypt.

This is how the story begins

in each of as we come to see 

the claiming of our human-divinity

is no easy matter though we are born

to no other Fate or Destiny than

to say "I am" the mantra of the universe --

we bear the cross we were born with:

and this is called Christmas.

-Byron Hoot

The Hunt

Imagine you're in the woods

in the second week of deer

season

           sitting, standing ten

yards from a stream 

rippling over rocks, around

sandbars, under fallen trees,

the hemlocks holding snow,

the leaves on the ground 

nearly covered,

                        the air brittle

winter cold and a deer appears

and for a moment don't know

if you're a hunter 

                            as it walks

across the water

                         and disappears.

-Byron Hoot

Ask to Receive

There is no certitude to offer what I ask

for but for the fact there will be no

answer given

                     if I keep asking questions

of what, of whom has no answer to give.

A lifetime can be spent asking the wrong

questions so we can say, "See?  I told

you so!"

              But who wants that as a benediction?

There is no question each of us are given a question

at birth to ask and once asked

heaven and hell become what they utterly are

and we see why this world

was once, still is paradise.

                                        The wrong questions,

the wrong answers open nothing.  It is that singular

question -- perhaps whispered - to which the answer,

"Yes, I've known that all along!"

is a song of salvation not even Angels can sing.

-Byron Hoot

Still, Though

Two people sit opposite in deep-hearted

disagreement talking of their lives,

laughing, frrowning, smiling, sipping

coffee hoping the conversation

does not end.

           One Step, Then Another

I am listening for the combination

of sounds that says footsteps

are being taken;

                           there is no solitary

footstep, just like no singular moment

of love exists.

                      So I listen and look

for that one step making the next.

         I Don't Know What It Means

Everytime I think,

"She's not the one for me,"

my heart and soul and body

break into laughter.

(written in tree stands while deer hunting)

-Byron Hoot

A Simple Woman

(Poem for Ann) A simple woman. Simple in the way a shell is simple In all its translucent curved beauty, Delicately shaped by mathematical order, Echoing the spirals of the galaxies Spinning in the darkest skies, Or the whorl of the sunflower’s face, Under the shimmering wings of the bee, Legs laden with golden pollen. Simple in the way a leaf is simple In all its verdant, veiny sheen, Its synthesis hidden from human eye, pulsing with the green miracle Of captured sunlight, The same elements as in our very cells; Forged in the crucible of the stars, Born when the universe was born. Simple in the way that love is simple, In all its warmth and grace, Its language that of the Divine, Wired in the brain of our forebears, Living deep in the synapses of thought, Lauded in word and song, Ever sought by humankind. 

-Patricia Thrushart