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Featured Reader

Mary Eichbauer

Virtual Event on October 13th, 2026 — 6:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M.

Live stream will be available on our YouTube Channel at the time of the event!

Mary Eichbauer

Born in New York City, poet and prose writer Mary Eichbauer makes her home in Benicia, California. She was in the first class of women admitted to Caltech. Her first book of poetry, After the Opera (Random Lane Press, 2020), was partly inspired by her extended stays in France and her love of French language and culture. With Johanna Ely, Laurie Hailey, and Deborah Schmidt, she collaborated on the poetry anthology Love’s Meditation (Random Lane Press, 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Tule Review, The Gathering, the Benicia Herald, and many Benicia First Tuesday Poetry Group anthologies, while her prose writing has appeared in the Journal of Lesbian Studies and Paragraph. A book of literary criticism, Poetry’s Self-Portrait: The Visual Arts as Mirror and Muse in René Char and John Ashbery, was published by Peter Lang in 1992. Her latest chapbook, Recipe for a Funeral, is available from finishinglinepress.com.

The Impressionists

They set up their easels everywhere: in the snow, in the fields during harvest time (the farmers thought they were insane), and in each other's gardens, always near water.
Their eyes were full of water when they saw the light. It wavered, gleamed gold and threw off rainbows. The blinder they were, the more they saw.
Their wives and children posed until they cried, holding themselves just so in a windy meadow, in the bath, or at the breakfast table, where the remnants of bread and jam waited for a brush to shape them.
They were too late to paint the loaf, the full jam pot, always painting crusts, a glob of jam staining the white napkin. They were the painters of leftovers, of coffee dregs in saucers, after the children had wandered away from the table into the sunlit park.
They taught us to fear the passing of time, showed us that the moment never lingers. They taught us to hurry, always rushing before the light faded, before the instant passed, before the train left the station— and it is always leaving as the brush scrapes across the canvas, following the sun.

Mercy in the Water

To my ninth great-grandmother, Mercy Holbridge

A servant girl had fits, said she saw a woman with thick lips and a dirty cap, and they knew it must be you. You were the witch. It had to be you, since you divorced your first husband, married a second one whose father had helped overthrow the English king. Once that servant came forward, the floodgates opened. A guest at your house said your pork roast was inedible. (Maybe I’m a witch, too, at least in the kitchen.) He said you made the river rise, scared his horse, made him too weak to slip a canoe off the bank, into the flood. What you said back to your accusers doesn’t survive except for one thing. They asked you to name the other witches so they could hang you together, put on a pitiful show for that colonial town. You refused to name names, but then you said, “If I’m going to hang, I won’t go alone.” I’m not sure the jury really understood who you were threatening. When you asked for the water test— “swimming a witch,” they called it— they bound you hand and foot and tossed you in and you floated, you floated, buoyed up on the holy water by your guilt, by your habitual resistance to going with the flow.