Carl Boon
Onondaga After Susan

Onondaga’s cold on these October mornings. All night the wind—the gray wind—hurtles across Lake Ontario and settles the leaves in unlikely places. I take my coffee to the backyard and scan the sky for changing weather, remembering my wife and her reminders that we live on sacred land. She died of cancer two years ago. I’m writing this for her.

What they say about death is true: cold-clawed and whimsical it comes, cynical and wintry. For weeks I watched her struggle to stand, and bathed her legs in warm blue cloth until she settled, like the leaves. I made soup and commented that the pin-oaks we put inside the soil twenty years before had given birth to smaller trees, a scatter of trees to the south. Her body, though barren, would be there with them, even in the snow.

In Onondaga, where its namesake Americans cut canoes and built fires for their dead, you can feel the snow before you see it. Menacing Ontario, still silky and warm even deep into October, placates the clouds drawn down from the North and asks no questions. It gives until the real freeze begins the third week of November. Then everything is memory; then from Syracuse westward our sins become translucent.

But now I must do things: one last mow of the lawn, one last scrape of the gutters, a bundle of field corn to untie for the squirrels. She would’ve insisted; she would’ve scorned me for staying inside with Shakespeare and Paul the Apostle. There will be time for them when the waist-high snow wind-whipped keeps me in the kitchen. Then I’ll skin the remaining squash and smother it with cheese and butter for the baking pan; that’s what she would’ve wanted. That’s Susan, whose piano-playing touched the congregation.

I’m lonely. I’ve put up the tomatoes and the peppers, too, with bits of garlic. I’ve checked the furnace for worn wire, but I want you to hear me. She bargained for life; she moved about the rooms in a threadbare old shirt of mine and listened to the radio, but there was no radio. I believe it was the First Americans she heard, pounding the soil in some distant winter. There’d been water below for cider, for life, for the old longing to rise again.

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.

Maureen Cantara is best known for her layered acrylic paintings that incorporate granite, charcoal, soft pastel and oil stick, which have been blended, rubbed, and mixed together, guided by a quest for balance.

Common themes depicted in her work are abstract landscapes, inspired by the ever-changing beauty of the rocky Maine coastline of her youth, and harsh lines that transition to softness, demonstrating the tenet of her urban adulthood experience in Boston, New York, and her love of travel.