Tell Me Where All Past Yeares Are

By

Joel Van Valin

In the JC Penney department store

back by the polar fleece

the woman with the Gucci handbag

her daughter in a Care Bears

T-shirt humming as best she can

around her lollipop

to the wafting Muzak tune

one hand held tight by Mom, the other

touching the nose of Aphrodite

in a set of plaster bookends

resembling a marble statue carved

by a poor man named Phrixus

or Thyrsis, or perhaps Pelaidides, who’d seen

a girl like that walking in a stream one day

in Corinth in the 5th century B.C.

haiku

by

Peggy Hormann

Hospitalized man,

frail life oozing steadily

from cold naked feet