by Tabitha Turner
It’s just a small, small town. My life consists of old people, family, and a lot of cotton farms.
I live in a little town called Cranea. It’s the typical kind, I guess. A person can’t walk down the street without someone asking them if they know who their mom or dad or [...]

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It’s calm.
Too quiet.
My clear plastic bowl
serves as my bird feeder.
I don’t hear the distant
scratching, shuffling
of tiny sparrow feet,
the wing dances, fluttering, of a hungry
morning’s lack of big band sounds.
I walk tentatively to my patio window,
spy the balcony with detective eyes.
I witness three newly hatched
toddler sparrows, curved nails, mounted
deep, in their mother’s dead, decaying back.
Their childish [...]

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Edith, in this nursing home
blinded with macular degeneration,
I come to you with your blurry
eyes, crystal sharp mind,
your countenance of grace–
as yesterday’s winds
I have chosen to consume you
and take you away.
“Oh, where did Jesus disappear
to, she murmured,
over and over again,”
in a low voice
dripping words
like a leaking faucet:
“Oh, there He is my my
Angel of the coming.”
About the [...]

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A Métis Indian lady
hands blanketed over as in pray,
spirit gods inside her empty purse,
hang over a large brown fruit basket
naked of fruit, no vine,
approaches the Edmonton, Alberta
adoption agency.
Inside, refrained from life
with a wine sap apple wedged fruity
like a teaspoon of autumn sun
inside the infants mouth,
a shallow pool of tears form–
swell like melons in infant
native blue [...]

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Rebecca fantasized that life was a lottery ticket or a pull of a lever,
that one of the bunch in her pocket was a winner or the slots were a redeemer;
but life itself was not real that was strictly for the mentally insane at the Elgin
Mental Institution..
She gambled her savings away on a riverboat
stuck in mud [...]

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Soft nursing
5 solid minutes
of purr
paw peddling
like a kayak competitor
against ripples of my
60 year old river rib cage–
I feel like a nursing mother
but I’m male and I have no nipples.
Sometimes I feel afloat.
Nikki is a little black skunk,
kitten, suckles me for milk,
or affection?
But she is 8 years old a cat.
I’m her substitute mother,
afloat in a flower [...]

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Crippled with arthritis
and Alzheimer’s,
in a dark rented room
Charley, plays
melancholic melodies
on a dust filled
harmonica he
found abandoned
on a playground of sand
years ago by a handful of children
playing on monkey bars.
He now goes to the bathroom on occasion,
peeing takes forever; he feeds the cat when
he doesn’t forget where the food is stashed at.
He hears bedlam [...]

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