This trio of heartfelt verses invites readers to explore love’s raw emotional terrain—from the aching silence of abandonment, to the quiet unraveling of a friendship, to the daily tenderness of enduring connection. Carol Ostrow’s Unhealed Wounds lays bare the sudden rupture of romantic hope. Nicole Freezer Rubens’s Game Over traces the bittersweet end of a shared ritual and a deep, decades-long friendship with poetic grit. And Madlyn Epstein Steinhart’s Could You Be Loved More reminds us that some loves arrive once, linger always, and wrap us in their quiet, unshakeable truth.

Unhealed Wounds

Very deep down in the depths of my heart,
I felt that something fell unexpectedly apart,
A love so deep, never felt before,
Dug into my very unprotected core,

This is not a movie script gone very wrong,
With a theme played out in some sad love song,
No, this was a flesh and blood person I had met,
And imagined with him our futures were set,

Then, out of nowhere it was over in a flash,
Ghosted so quickly like a sudden car crash,
All the imagined plans thrown up in the air,
Where someone was important but did not care,

I landed in a place so full of questions,
Why, how, asking friends for suggestions,
No one so far has any answers for sure,
But I can tell you this, that there is no cure,

It is up to me to glue the broken pieces,
Get Botox to remove those awful creases,

And simply move on!

~Carol Ostrow, author “Poems from My Pandemic Pen” and “Poetry in Motion with Much Emotion”

Game Over

The last lottery ticket
we shared
was purchased
in Astoria, Queens,
using 2 stale
crumpled dollar bills.
The odds seemed better
than from a tidy
Lexington Avenue
Upper East Side bodega,
but they weren’t really any better.

8 years ago
we decided to band together,
double down and share
our jackpot wins.
I used to buy a Powerball or Mega Millions ticket
only when the stakes
were life altering high.
After you took to your bed
I knew this game would get you
out of the house
at least a few times a week,
and maybe you’d pick up
some milk or cat food
while you were out.

First we’d text simple pics of the tickets,
then we graduated to staging
funny photos to tell the story
of our days,
and hopefully of a Tuesday win.
We fantasized of fortunes
but were satisfied
with a meager $2 victory
with which to buy
another optimistic, flimsy
numbered slip.

When we started our play
the cost was “a dollar
and a dream”.
This was even their slogan.
I think this must have been the price
when we met in high school
so long ago,
when not only did the tickets look different,
but so did your fertile future.
Slowly the cost crept up,
and now the Mega is truly mega,
with a $5 price tag
and much greater,
albeit still highly unlikely odds.

Then you texted me
that you wanted to withdraw
and stop buying, exchanging
and sharing the dream with me.

What I heard
as your words shot out
one at a time
from the cannon
my phone has become,
is that you were closing the raffle
of our lifelong friendship.
My reply was in the form
of the indifferent emoji.

I am glad
your bed sees less of you
during daylight hours,
and that Tabby
is always fed.

Game over,
best of luck
old friend.
Odds are
that I’m here when you need me.

~Nicole Freezer Rubens, author of “The Long Pause and the Short Breath”

Could you be loved more