Betsy Sholl

Little Rock High School, 1957   Memory of course alters the facts, but what remains are shrieking voices, nails on chalkboard, siren shrills, mothers ready to hiss and claw. Our mother said we’d learn more that day watching TV in Brick Town, New Jersey than going to school.  But did she guess we’d learn how scary

“To lives that thought their worshipping A too presumptuous Psalm”   How many times must I say, slant, slant, slant? Lightning, my dear. Will you be struck? Will you allow the graveyard fog to burn its chill down your spine, tap your shoulder into shiver and jump? The Psalm wants.  What will you give it,

As to the oboe it doesn’t need teeth, but a boot heel can’t play it, he tries to tell the guard, and feels for how many teeth he has left.  How will it help him to think his instrument’s older than Zyklon B, older than his neighbor soiling herself as she tumbled down the steps,

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall/Winter 2020 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2019 print issue.

Sidewalk bricks upended by winter’s freeze and thaw– no looking up here, we take mincing steps, and our talk turns to everything undone—frayed boot laces, laundry, taxes, bills, books—so many books piled up unread, sliding off the night stand. Even the universe, you say, is not done expanding into whatever lies beyond.  Once I thought

“Will God, or somebody else, give me the power to breathe into my canvases … the sigh of prayer and of sadness, …of rebirth?” –Marc Chagall   Outside, louder than street noise, the wind is making itself heard.  Trees, wires, loose casements— the whole world’s its instrument.   What does it want, banging at these windows

If the doctor’s new machine is right, my eyes

are turning into old window glass, warped . . .

It’s always winter when I think of him,

gray skies, fog seeping up from the harbor . . .