Rob Carney

The Typesetter’s Story

When he started in the typesetting business,
his hands were still new, not darkened from the ink yet.

And his eyes, which hadn’t had to strain yet
sorting millions of letters into words,

could still see the ridge
and even tell the mountain goats from snow.

He was a widower now, which he’d never imagined:
her closet so permanently empty;

and around town, or coming through his doorway,
no one in her coat—not blue, more azure or ocean.

He always used that color for the title page.
Never cut the folios clean.

And readers would find two pages
with no words at all.

Some wrote it off as a man’s odd habit.
Others said, “The paper just got stuck.”

But a few looked forward to those blank spots
as places to rest,

to let themselves drift awhile,
let the words so far roll back from wherever they’d come.

The typesetter had his own reasons, of course,
though he liked people saying, “They’re a gift.”

On one blank page, he thought about
how she’d fill it up with conversation.

And the other was the shape of her absence
each night in their bed.

Mary K O’Melveny

Infinity’s Memoirs: As Told By The Webb Telescope

One Christmas morning, as a scarlet sun
gave birth to a crimson sea,
a metal canister arced into the sky.
On board, mirrors as tightly
folded as origami birds,
will gather memories
afloat like mist at time’s edges.
Its fiery tail wrote genesis
as it grazed the outer skin
of our earthly carapace,
pushed against ozone
layered like cake rings,

As it soars toward past lives unknown to us,
unknown to ancestors of ancestors,
it seeks tales of unformed planets,
rings of flame and gas,
dark holes where light bends,
constellations encrusted
with diamonds and dust.
We all want a peek into a looking glass
that will unfold like butterfly wings
to carry stories back to us like ancient griots
crossing deserts on camels,
armed with prayer rugs, cardamom tea, ghazals.

No one knows if ideas we spin about origins
will turn out prescient or useless.
No one knows what will be revealed or when.
No one knows what languages will be spoken.
Yesterday’s mysteries will be unveiled
from a billion miles away.
Our own chronicles will unfurl,
told by prisms of light that will one day
bounce back from long dead stars,
flirting like fireflies as they spin, leap, dance.
We can almost hear them now,
whispering to us as lovers might.
This much is true: No memory will ever be quite the same.

Pamela Wax

1HLY 48

There was the musty bungalow in Beach Haven

            where we bunked each summer for a week,

my father fishing his way from worries left

            bobbing on his store shelves. My mother still

stood over a stove every day except our Sunday

            brunch at a sagging Victorian.

Around a table for five on its spacious porch,

            we fed on M&M pancakes, red and orange

leaching our tongues, our lips. Later, I paddled out to wait

            on a breaker, then rode to shore or tumbled

in the undertow. I emerged coughing and triumphant,

            lips blue with cold, wondering if anyone would notice

if I drowned. To dissemble our sadness, we played

            the license plate game on the Garden State

driving home, tuned to our mother’s swelling despair,

            the sameness that awaited us. We called out Captain!

or Carpet! when we spotted CPT, strutted multisyllabics

            like Magnificent! if it were MGI. Today, on a July beach

kind of day—though I live below the mountain where,

            on a snowy day, Melville dreamed a white whale—

the Prius in front of me calls those car rides to mind, and Holy,

            holy, holy!—not hourly, nor hillbilly, nor honestly—drips

from my lips as prayer, sure even those numerals hold mystery

            I can’t yet break, the whole world full of glory.

Notes:

“The Typesetter’s Story” was previously published in Terrain.org

“Infinity’s Memoirs: As Told By The Webb Telescope” appears in Flight Patterns published in fall 2023 by Kelsay Books https://kelsaybooks.com/products/flight-patterns

“1HLY 48” first appeared in print in Voices Israel Anthology 2023: Poetry from Israel & Abroad, Volume 49, p. 143: Honorable Mention, Reuben Rose Competition