Poem by Anne Whitehouse

One-Way Session
(in memory of Marc Snyder)

By the time we heard
your phone message
canceling our meeting,
you had died.

You were our therapist
for 25 years—
to think I still believed
we had all the time
in the world!

All the time
to resist and avoid
our most painful truths.

Only you had the ability
to turn our gazes inward
to reveal how we’d each
wronged the other.

You knew the worst about us
and liked us in spite of it.
I imagine speaking to you,
trying to hear your answer:

“He’s not asking
you to fix his problem,
but just to listen,
try and understand.”

From deep within
I feel the release from
that old way of being,

as if at last I swam out
from under the rock
that had trapped me,

and let myself be pulled
by a silken current
to those places
where we find each other
and hold on,

swaying with each other,
our grip loosening
and tightening and loosening
and tightening

like the way we love to float
in the sea, on our backs,
our legs entwined,
me inside my love,

the two of us warm
and steady, for this time,
now and forever,
between the two immensities.

Poet, fiction writer, journalist, and critic Anne Whitehouse’s books include poetry collections The Surveyor’s Hand (Compton Press), Blessings and Curses (Poetic Matrix Press), One Sunday Morning (Finishing Line Press), The Refrain (Dos Madres Press), Bear in Mind (Finishing Line Press), and Fall Love (novel). Recent poetry and fiction publications include The View from Here, Art from Art (anthology), Istanbul Poetry Review, Pain and Memory and Being Human: Call of the Wild (anthologies), riverbabble, Yale Journal of Humanities in Medicine, and others. She lives in New York City.

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum and The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Since 2007 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 160 on line and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Pollock-Krasner grants, the Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. He currently teaches art to retired public school teachers at The United Federation of Teachers program in Brooklyn.