I Threw the Warthog Away
Materialized by Mary Lou Buschi on Thursday, March 20th 2025.
She found it in the trash next to a table covered with cards. “You are so mean,” she said. It was a grey, plastic, game piece. Her clutter, too much. I’d be sifting through it soon. “Three months,” she said. The dark purple bruises signs of internal bleeding. Chemo still coursing through her. Vials of medicine packed away. She lifted the hog out of trash and placed it back on her table. She never returned to that apartment. Died next to me on a pullout couch.
On my desk, the warthog stands far from a grassland or its wild family.
Mary Lou Buschi (she/her) has 3 full length poetry collections. Her 3rd book, BLUE PHYSICS, 2024 (Lily Poetry Review) was a finalist for Contemporary Poetry in The International Book Awards. Her second book, PADDOCK, 2021 (LPR) was nominated for The Four Quartets Prize through The Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals such as Ploughshares, Glacier, Willow Springs, The Laurel Review and Jet Fuel Review. Mary Lou is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She also holds a Master of Science in Urban Education from Mercy College. She is a special education teacher in the Bronx.
Other stars in the Stitches asterism:
Self-hypnosis, or Dig Deep In There Until the Bottom of the Ocean of Your Childhood
Georgia Bellas
I see her hands cup a grasshopper. I see her sweep with pine needle brooms. Can you smell the lilacs, purple and white?
Choices & Connections - the Game of Life
Angela Mihm
Treehouse
Angela Mihm
Goatboy
Devan Murphy
We’re mooing and braying with laughter, moving in slo-mo, such fun. His little jeans, his striped t-shirt over his drumlike child’s tummy.
The Day of the Great Release
Jessica Richardson
Sometimes this terrified love swooped inches from your face, and you wondered if it would peck your eyes out. Who kept these birds? Why did they?
interlude
Robin Steve
one out of season morning, we went out looking for a name. We did not know where names make their lairs, whether they favour rock, dirt, twigs, or wires.
Skyberries
Geoffrey Wessel
If Erd can translate either “Earth” or “ground,” does German also have one single word for English “sky” and “Heaven”?