Prince Albert

It's Prince Albert
looking
over the vast dominions,
offshore balancing it is,

or is it just a can,
rusty,
red,
long discarded amongst the pines,
East Texas pines,

still a hint of tobacco,
long smoked
when the train still pushed through.

By Benjamin Nash

Bedtime

8:00 p.m. Still light out. I hear them
playing, their shouting and laughter.
Not me though, sent to bed on schedule,
(and not even tired!) sighing and twisting
in cotton sheets Mom dried on the line.
Lawn mower blades churn—Mr. Harrison, next door?
There’s Kelly McGrotha two doors down,
tossing a baseball with his big brother.
Is that Ann Swenson bouncing her
red rubber kickball against their garage door?
Miss Lillian Matson is yelling for her Pekinese,
Yen-Tu, to come in for the night.
And me, alone and apart, stuck inside
this solid safe trap of a house.

By Terry Martin

Pavement Sprout

Why do you spray the pavement sprout?
He lives in cement, he doesn’t need this!
Your thumb will get sore choose you to
Continue your spraying of the
Pavement sprout.

How hardy he is, smiling for
The sun’s return. You should admire
His simple pleasures! What ease of
Mind comes to you through a wilted
Pavement Sprout?

By Matthew Pelletier

Burning

Every pore of my diseased skin is
open this evening when
mid-April feels the way mid-August
used to.

The vinca is done and the
forsythia is done and the
lilacs, as of today,
are blooming.

My sister once dreamed
of an iguana sitting in her lap
while we swam outside in winter.

Listen--this is not a metaphor.
My skin is really full
and burning.

By Christian Reifsteck

Dinner After My Dad's Furneral

"Repast,"
I said to my grandmother
91 and almost deaf

"They call these funeral dinners repasts."

"The past?" she kept saying.

"Repast!"

Yelled
My depressed aunt
grey hair short,
                        parted like
                        Audrey Hepburn
"He said repast!"

The table
got quiet.


By Bill Nicholas

While Another Black Hole Eats a Star

In my earlier foolish marriage,
my husband thought it best to confess

everything.
This made cicatrici (scars)—

natural debris from attempts at healing.
When he tried to make up with gifts

like pearls, they turned into mermaid’s tears—
small plastic pellets that poison the seas.


By Susana H. Case

Learn more about Susana here!

Assembly Required

In bits and pieces
they fall from heaven,
disassembled snowmen,
one flake after the other,
strewn about the countryside,
discovered by those young at heart,
and with a dash
of imaginative insight,
they roll a gleeful creature
in their own image.
No directions needed.


By Michael Keshigian

To learn more about Michael, click here!

Moonlight

It delivers a promise from the sun
upon a slender shoot whose spiky tip
slices black windows.
Yet night still penetrates,
an ink stain upon linen,
and the owls, ever vigilant,
stare wide eyed into the deep darkness
of our shadowed insecurities.

By Michael Keshigian

To learn more about Michael, click here!

Mouthful

Some words are bigger than others.
They take up more air, give more lip,
use many more of the mouth’s muscles.
They take longer to say, often unpronounceable,
with unexpected twists, hidden syllables,
extra letters tucked away in some dark corner.
The type of word favoured in spelling bees,
the students stumbling over their tongues;
as if they’ve been given a trick question.

The kind of words rarely used, being difficult,
the foreign speaker wondering ‘why and how’,
my thesaurus baffled, the dictionary mum,
proving some things are better left unsaid,
how some truths are best unspoken.

By Bruce McRae

To find out more about Bruce, click here!

Georgetown, Colorado

The gold-red omens of the frost
Still spin and scrape across the asphalt streets
And come to rest against the playground walls.

The copper light of afternoon
Transforms the town and sets aglow
A yellow house (still hidden from the road).

The flickering aspens line the path,
Where evening slides into an autumn world.

By Jan Whitt

Slow Clap

One hand clapping sounds
the one man band then
the crowd’s crescendo
into one celebratory moment.

By Chris Butler

Hanging Rock

I play a game with the moon. Like the game where you say a word over and over until it loses its meaning, I look at the rising moon again and again until it too becomes nonsense. A thing that hangs there in space, unattached to this world. Painted on a canvas sky, it would make more sense, but a floating rock? And when I remember that we too are hanging rock, the game is over.

By Phillip Barron

Woods Song

In the morning I walk in my pajamas to the perimeter of the woods.
No one hears these birds but me. Singing. Calling.
I stand still. Take it in. My birds. God's birds.

Remember the notes and trills. Stay this moment. Remember.

In the evening I walk the path to the creek. Down hill through the
weeds and poison ivy. Canopy overhead. Fewer songs.
Trees whisper. Squirrels still. I try to hear the deer.

Remember the forest sounds at end of day. Breathe it.
Remember.

At night I sit on the porch. Frog calls at the creek give a bass note to the quiet. Cicadas sing.
The owl may hunt tonight. She'll wake me. I'll know when she eats.

Too soft the passing of time. Too short to waste this glory. Remember.

In the dark I rest inside. I hear what I am tuned to hear. The folds of sleepy air
curl around and rock all but the night hunters. I hear the owl, then nothing.

By Janice A. Farringer

To find out more about Janice, click here!

Black Ice

Sitting in my car ass-backwards in a snow bank,
the explosion of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring
not to be compressed into the crescendo of my fate,
I was reminded of the dual nature of snow,
gravity, and left curves. How destiny is a
snow plow not too worried about oncoming traffic.
Even after a near collision there’s little to do but drive,
knowing well enough the cold silence of passing, the chills
that run through the spine, the black ice beneath our feet.

By Ryan Lappi

fragment

breaking
from you
like a sticky chick
its egg

By donnarkevic

The Ranch Cook

Too many scars on her hands grasping
The paring knife tightly, chopping
Another pile of onions and carrots
Hired hands come in dirty, wash up
At the back door, she attends the cutting
Board, her apron yellowed but clean
A thin stew simmering on the back
Of the stove, one man pats her butt
Affectionately, she still smiles
To herself, waiting for the question
Even after these twenty years.

By Emily Strauss

Dragonfly

Shh the dizzy hum,
Listen little one.
You flutter by, a glassy butterfly
And tiptoe
A blueish tune.

By Delaney Gibbs

The New

Where now is the adventure?
Bounded horizon
Return of the goddess as it were

Elbow deep
Terse then tightening. If you were a pound heavier I’d fit you in this bottle

If the flowers die in Winter, will you?
Insects still mate, that cold stone still breaths

Toy in hand
That Yellow Chevy that poked your bones with fat.

By Mathew Lee Nelson

Happiness

The dog isn’t happy
unless his head is
sticking out the car window.

The man isn’t happy
unless his head is
happy.

The man and the dog
have this in common,
thinks the man,

driving around with his dog
in the backseat, nose
in the wind, happiness

in the air.

By Paul Hostovsky

Makeshift Bookcase

After lifting
cinder blocks,
how light
the poems.

By Paul Hostovsky

Violence

She flicked her hand -
it was nothing to her
backhanding the innocent space.
There was
nothing
but the annoyed swirl of air
she made
at what she almost said.
I hated it.

By Piper Rasmussen

We sat side by side, watching an uncomfortably raunchy Adult Swim program that he loved, until a storm rolled in. The skies darkened and rain beat oppressively over the house all at once. I felt apocalyptic black energy and a lack of safety, superstition, something. We got up without needing to say anything, gathered my belongings and ventured outside the very second the rain slowed.

Our drive was mostly silent, a normal and mutual status in our friendship, but even that was laced this time with uneasiness, as if some movie was about to roll the credits. I blurted something about being afraid, about change looming. I asked him if he knew what I meant and he reassured me in an emotionless tone that my new job wouldn’t be too hard, I would be trained sufficiently and patience would be administered as I learned.

I countered that the change felt bigger than that, and I didn’t know what would happen. I wondered what the new climate would mean for us as friends and as human beings. And then I finally asked, “What if I change?”

My greatest fear, and this time the silence that settled over us was suffocating.


By Kendra L. Saunders

To learn more about Kendra, click here!