Susan Auerbach is a retired professor of education who returned in midlife to her first love of creative writing. She often writes in the key of grief, as in her chapbook, In the Mourning Grove (Finishing Line Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rattle, Spillway, Gyroscope Review, Greensboro Review, Ekphrastic Review, and other journals; in the anthology Art in the Time of COVID-19 (San Fedele Press, 2020); and in her memoir, I’ll Write Your Name on Every Beach: A Mother’s Quest for Comfort, Courage & Clarity After Suicide Loss (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2017). She blogs at http://afterachildssuicide.blogspot.com and does public speaking and volunteer service with suicide prevention/suicide loss organizations. She lives in Altadena, CA, where she takes inspiration from the San Gabriel Mountains and is working on a series about the Eaton Fire.
Three Poems by Susan Auerbach
Tending the Shrine, Two Years On
Sky blue origami cranes
hover in vigil
over your portrait.
Candles stand witness
to the flow and ebb
of your years.
My place is here,
tending the shrine,
warding off the creep of time,
keeping fresh the traces
of your wit, the footprints
of your travels.
I perform my ablutions.
I finger the cold
soapstone heart, kiss
the cracked seashell
and marathon medal.
I dust your album and open
to a boy with a handful
of grasshopper, a grinning teen
atop a sailboat mast, then
a student home for winter break,
gaunt and haunted as a refugee.
When did the end begin?
Like a scrim it shades
every picture,
each moment captured
nearly eclipsed.
From In the Mourning Grove by Susan Auerbach (Finishing Line Press, 2024)
Pilgrimage
You bump on beater bikes over miles
of dry lake bed, past the Man and the Temple
and roving throbbing art cars into deep playa.
Far off in the dust, a vertical ring
of floating stones like a relic of ancient rites.
You come upon it then, an elliptical staircase.
Twenty-seven rough-hewn sand-toned boulders,
each the weight of four men, suspended
from looming columns by a ship’s rigging
of cables. Through the wires, wedges of cloud
and mountain. Light, air, and earth, the frame.
Stepping into it like entering a grove of redwoods.
If you’re bold, you scramble up and over
the twenty-foot peak; you can’t help grinning.
If you’re old like me, you try five giant steps
till the wobble defeats you. Like at six
on roller skates: dread had already breached
my bones. How many exhilarations
did I miss? But I wouldn’t miss this.
Hello new planet!
I stroke the sun-warmed stone like an amulet,
pray that nobody falls. Gaze down at rock piles
that hide the hardware. It took three engineers
and heavy equipment to anchor
my son’s vision, make it soar.
A pilgrim, I visit day and night. At noon,
it throws down a shadow on the desert
floor like a fat pearl necklace. At dusk,
it’s swarmed by revelers, their billowing
scarves and sarongs the only color.
One morning, I bask in its stillness,
then spot four legs dangling from the top.
I settle on the first stone, turn to the sun.
From The Ekphrastic Review March
8, 2024
Sound Mind
Next time you come, says our dying friend,
bring a chicken. So from the coop
we grab our most ornamental hen,
black and gold cape festooning
regal head, and bear her in a box
to the sickroom.
Bedside, the potion sits vigil.
Mira has a date with death
as the state now allows—no need
for deceit, just a willing doctor,
compounding pharmacy,
the right time when still of sound mind.
Nestled in the quilt, Lulu lifts her wings
in protest, then gurgles as Mira pets
her tawny feathers, smooth as mink.
How will you know, I ask, when it’s time?
Bedside with family on Sunday.
Grandbabies held out for kisses.
Is it Thursday? Mira asks, eyelids
drooping, but it’s Monday. She must ration
every breath to reach her dying day
Dozing now, friend and hen—
how thin the membrane
at their tender throats.
From Gyroscope Review, winter, 2022.
© 2025 Susan Auerbach All Rights Reserved
William Scott Galasso is the author of eighteen books of poetry including Rough Cut: Thirty Years of Senryu (2019), Saffron Skies (2022), and The Years We Never Saw Coming (2024). In addition, Scott’s co-edited two anthologies, Cascade Cuneiform (1995), and Eclipse Moon, with Deborah P. Kolodji moderator of Southern California Haiku Study Group. (2017). He currently serves as an editor for the California Quarterly, and is a member of Marquis’ Who’s Who in America. In addition, he’s won numerous awards and his work has appeared in over 300 journals and magazines in the U.K. (including Scotland and Wales), Ireland, Croatia, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, India, China, Canada and the U.S. He's organized two poetry festivals on the Eastside, served as MC/reader at the 2005 Ballard Arts festival and participated on Cable TV’s channel 29 poetry series. In addition, he’s appeared in Poets On, Bouillabaisse, Midwest Poetry Review and been published in Japan, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, England, Croatia, Romania, Germany, Austria, India, Singapore and throughout the U.S. In March 2006, he participated in a worldwide event the reading of Eliot Weinberger’s What I Saw in Iraq, as the voice of Gen. Colin Powell. In January of 2007, he collaborated with the UW group Earth Now which sponsored a reading on Ecology and the Environment. In March, 2008 he was a featured reader for the PoetsWest poetry series on KSER 90.7 FM in Everett, WA. He has lived in Laguna Woods, CA since 2015 and made multiple appearances on Channel 6 TV for the Write Now and the Writer’s and Readers series.
Three poems by William Scott Galasso
Methuselah
10,000 feet above sea level,
in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest
stands Methuselah, eldest of trees
pinus longaeva, seeded in 2833 B.C.,
older by three centuries
than the Pyramids of Giza
its locale kept secret for decades
thwarts men that flare like fireflies
eons that pass like whims
its arboreal wisdom knows what
we cannot, how to husband water
through drought, or stay in rhythm
when earth moves and keep its roots
in place, how to bear in silence, solitude
against the banshee wailing wind
and winter ice may chew its bark
and sear sun burn its branch
and constellations shift their gears
but the bristlecone pine endure
This Is How She Sees Me
I’m sitting on a plush gray chair
wearing a brown shirt, blue jeans,
and sandals.
Just to my left and in front
of me, there’s a small table
with a white vase housing
a purple orchid. Duet shades
behind me, let the light in.
A book rests on the left knee
of my crossed legs. Maybe it’s
*Hedin’s At the Great Door
of Morning, or Ida Limon’s
The Hurting Kind, or *Doerr’s
Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Whatever gem it is, I’m engaged.
My goatee points down, yet there’s
a subtle smile on my lips and dimples
on my cheeks.
This is how she sees me, my gifted,
artist wife--when I’m content to
feed my mind and willing to be still.
*Robert Hedin, *Anthony Doerr or *Doerr’s
Sing to Your Baby
Mothers, while she lies in your womb
upon arrival, on each day thereafter.
It’s not sound alone but rhythmic patterns
which waken the brain to speech.
If your register is low, sing your
mellow alto. If high, a soprano lullaby,
and fathers too must sing. Let bass or tenor
in sotto voce enter your child’s ear.
Let notes become words
harmonics fuse sound.
Let nursey rhymes matter
in the pitter patter of rhythm.
Infants can hear vocal stress,
can guess where one-word ends
another begins, the seed
of language is sewn this way.
So, sing bring joy to a soul reborn,
to bestow the gift of speech,
and if your key is slightly off,
who will know but you.
© 2025 William Scott Galasso All Rights Reserved
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