The Poets: Volume 10.3, Spring 2026

NEW: Click author’s NAME to jump to their section or SCROLL to read the issue in its entirety.

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Editor’s Choice Award Winner: Alison Townsend

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Another Kind of Annunciation

I didn’t know when I followed
my mother into the chicken house
to feed her flock of Rhode Island Reds
that we were entering a holy place.
It was dark outside, the darkest time
of the year, and I didn’t want to wait,
alone in the shadow beside the water barrel,
chips of ice sparking its surface
like small, frozen stars. So I trailed her
into the room that smelled of pine shavings
and straw, our way lit by the few bulbs
that kept her hens warm. I plunged my hands
into the bags of cracked corn and scratch grain,
savoring the way it spilled, gold between
my fingers. I watched her fill the feeders
with mash and top off the water, listening
as she greeted her hens by name—Mildred,
Redtop, Junket, Fluff—their ruddy feathers
shining in the fust and dust of the coop.
I didn’t ask what she was thinking.
I didn’t need to, standing so close—
a girl version of her—as I copied
her gestures, the hens murmuring around us.
All I needed to do was watch her face
as she cared for her brood and the way
the light seemed to move inside her,
illuminating her smooth cheeks, her blue
eyes with their long lashes, her chapped
and smiling lips. In two years,
she would be dead, the hens gone,
our farmhouse empty and cold,
night tinting every cell in my body.
But now, in December, the way she glowed
that evening unfolds inside me, and I see
my loss is also the source of my light.

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Walking Home With My Sister

For my sister

One afternoon when I was seventeen,
the year when I was about to leave home
forever, you and I walked up Field’s Lane
on our way back home from someplace I can
no longer remember. We were always walking—
past stone walls, meadows, and woods
where mountain laurel lifted their clusters
of white fire from among quilts of glossy
green leaves. It was May or June, the dirt
road dark and damp beneath our feet, light
flickering through the trees, so that we
walked in and out of shade, our faces clear
then shadowed, then clear again, as we
moved along, talking, then falling silent,
easy together. It felt as if we had walked
that way forever, you always three years
younger, taking the inside edge, me blazing
the way, walking on the outside, my body
a shield if a car came, anything
to protect you.
                          My whole life lay ahead—
the Pacific waiting on the other side
of the country like the mother we’d
lost as girls. But all I could think of
was leaving you, and the country roads
we’d walked together, two ragamuffin
kids, doing the best we could, sisterhood
like sunlight cupping our cheeks. Nothing
I did for you ever seemed enough—
not saving up Beech-Nut Fruit Stripe
Gum wrappers to earn you a green
and white tiger, not sitting beside you
on the bed when your first period came,
not speaking up in your defense when
you got caught hiding your boyfriend
in the barn.
                    But I tried, the pair of us
companion weeds that grew by the side
of the road, resilient and hardy—foxtails
and thistles, ryegrass, and the chicory
our mother had loved best, for its flowers
of heavenly blue that last only a day.
Now, you criticize or cut me off,
totting up emails, listing grievances,
and the many ways I’ve failed you.
I pull curtains of rain around me
for protection, dappled by the green
we walked through, toward some sunlit
shore on the other side of loss and sorrow.
Do you remember the walking, Jenny?
And those dirt roads that led toward home
and away? Do you remember the chicory,
its blue petals the exact color of mercy?

Annah Atane

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War and Desire

Like the larkspur in my backyard,

spreading after the gunfire

our world will learn how to take off

its clothes with the lights on,

and the petals will bloom irrespective

of their spike.

There is pleasure in familiar chaos.

This caustic city,

where night crackles with bones.

The people still play highlife under

burning roofs. So much cheer,

like men at a naming, chattering

gulping bottles of Henequin.

O, how war like heat-filled embers

stay long enough to seem harmless.

No wonder, a man will run

his finger through his lover’s scalp.

Perhaps in disbelief, that guns

too, makes love.

Come outside, see the bullets

How they kiss, dirty.

Jessica Barksdale

Jessica Barksdale has published a short story collection, Trick of the Porch Light, and three poetry collections: When We Almost Drowned (2019), Grim Honey (2021), and Let’s End This Now (2024). Her seventeenth novel, What They Found at the Lake, is forthcoming in 2027.

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All Hallow’s Guilt Trip

All my dead sit around a campfire roasting
my life, gnawing on my live, aching bones,
so I slip away from the dome of haunting
light and startle into an interview with Dracula
who is sharpening his teeth. “Bite me,” I say,
walking on, unafraid of his mesmerism
and terrible widow’s peak. Around the dark bend,
I push aside my overweight conscience,
a golem now untroubled as literally nothing
has occurred of late. I stumble into a marble
bench where I find my malformed childhood,
a creepy, broken doll lumped in an angry pile,
worrying her future like a string of wooden beads,
and that’s when I run, afraid of everything she did:
stealing Laura Goodwin’s pens, hitting sister Sarah,
whack, whack, whack, spying on the long letters
in Dad’s deep desk drawer, and that’s all before
she glomped into a teenager, wild with grief, wracked
with guilt that it was her fault her father died.
She could have been kinder, stronger, better
at every single bloody turn. Suddenly, I need Dracula
to drain me, take me back to the beginning, the years
before the campfire dead were dead, before I was ever
born, but even though I push through the forest, he’s finished
his grooming, transformed into a wisp of creature,
a vampire bat circling a full moon that shines so bright,
I close my eyes against everything I cannot change.

Tom Barlow

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Exile

Dear Father:

Four a.m. in Cleveland
six floors below on the dark street
a dog chases its tail
spinning like a dreidel.

The musical note
of a wine bottle
kicked down the alley.

The drug store here closes at ten
its neon name buzzes like a radio
seeking a dead signal.

Then a cop drives by
talking to someone in the back seat
as he eats falafel with one hand.

He ignores the old Ford pickup
parked in a loading zone
pigeon feathers in its grill.

My wife moans in her sleep
when I pull the drapes

all our windows
are open wide tonight.

You would recognize
this city with its
asphalt wind

the way it pants
like a tired dog.

Here the innocent still sleep hard
unaware this city
rests on a knife-edge.

As you know, they all do.

Caroline Barnes

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At the Tourist Hotel, 1964

In a city by the ocean, a police
station two seedy blocks away
where an officer in the juvenile division
brings my sister out through a buzzing door
and hands our father papers to sign
while she stares at her feet or the floor
with its cracked and stained tiles
then follows us outside past sailors,
bars, tattoo parlors, newspaper stands—
all the way to the hotel, not talking,
not crying, not trying to run again—
the dim lobby heavy with drapes
and cigarette smoke, the clerk
in a plaid suit nodding as he is told
one room one night and after dinner
my sister and I share a bed,
our father alone in the one next to us.
In the morning he opens his wallet,
counts the bills with his thumb
and finds them short. He tells her
take off your glasses
which she does without a word,
not a sound out of her for ten, maybe
fifteen minutes as she twists,
bends, ducks, tries to shield her face,
protect her head
but someone is crying
someone is screaming
until a hard knock on the door
and the muffled voice
of a hotel detective:
you got ten minutes to get out.

And ten minutes later we are
in the lobby checkout line,
her right eye just starting to swell
her pink welts not yet purpled
and there in that line
for just a few minutes
we look like any other family,
vacation over,
ready for home.

Beth Boylan

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Aphantasia

A flicker of something tonight reminds me of that palomino,
leaning crookedly behind the glass of my grandmother’s curio,

its back hoof in the carnival-glass teacup
waiting for someone to find the glue.

This patch of linoleum peeling up
from the floor, perhaps, or the neighbor

baking with ginger in the apartment below,
the rain that has just begun to pelt the sliding door,

as if to say, There’s work and washing to be done,
let me in. Thunderstorms every night that one summer,

she and I behind the flapping screen, our faces powdered
with sugar and flour, daring each other to run outside,

even as the lightning lit up the porch and small copse of spruce.
There would have been others there, I know,

shuffling cards at the table or banging at the black-and-white TV,
but I can’t quite picture them, memory up to her old tricks.

Dave tells me he is missing his mind’s eye,
that there is a name for it, which escapes him at the moment.

I tell him I mixed up hyacinth with hydrangea last week
and we laugh, change the subject to 1990: that night

we sipped gin fizzes to avoid talk of the Gulf,
danced like we owned the floor and all the decades ahead,

then broke down on the highway home
and hitched a ride to the Big Boy near town.

We could have been killed! I say. Aphantasia! he says,
our joy at remembering mixed with relief.

Now, I place a glass in the sink, wipe down the counter,
stare at the fridge, sure I’ve come into the kitchen for something. . .

Outside, someone tosses empty bottles into the dumpster
and a dog barks. A car pulls out of the lot. The rain has slowed.

Rebecca Brock

Rebecca Brock is the author of The Way Land Breaks (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2023). A MacDowell Fellow, her awards include the Atlantis Award, the Lascaux Poetry Prize, the Kelsay Book’s Woman’s Poetry Prize, among others. Her work appears in CALYX, Radar Poetry, The Shore, Whale Road Review and elsewhere. Find more at www.rebeccabrock.org.

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I Have Had to Remind Myself to Breathe for Years Now

Watch the lit moon through cloud swift
and you’ll know what I mean
when I say there is much to hold
or raise up or even name,
at least for a minute, as mine.
I have never been able to pretend
there isn’t loss, or that it isn’t hard,
because time is loss and gumption,
the dare of a doing or not—
the choice made, and given,
the noise it renders through
and of me—I mean sea
song, and still mountains.
I mean the way a boy
becomes tall and how his hugs
stay awkward for so long—
where to put the arms now, the hands—
how to hold a thing that’s shifting,
fast, and flickering away—think of birds
their rush of breath and heartbeat,
wingspan and the hover—
how an illness or injury can stay
you, hold you captive
to new measures—fear trembles
clear through to new knowing—
I mean it’s all so close,
almost always, any possibility,
and I have had to remind myself
to breathe for years now
because I can’t carry everyone
I love across the line
where they might need carrying—
I’ve tried and I can’t always see the line
even in the trying. I’ve learned
the trees hold the seasons, but also patience—
that surrender—how to wait and let
the sky be, the clouds and rain
and sunlight, how to bud
and blossom, from viridescent
to full viridian, to that beauty
that holds as it is faltering,
fall colors like a gasp, an exhale
and then, almost always,
without fail, the letting go.

Chris Bullard

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Say Hello to Your New Favorite Serum

But the old one was so terrific. Raised
my sagging eyes and gave me werewolf paws.
No better high than a swagger down the alley
snarling trash talk at the sleep-deprived toms.
Gotta give that up now. Got the remote
on Brit Box, drifting off to murderous Lords.
Still got the hubba-hubba in my soul,
though the flue’s shut down with ashes.
Thanks, old pal, for your warmest. I’d like
to knock back a few memories, but the pills
leave me numb as a frozen planet. I’m off
my leash like a wind-struck cartoon float
in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade,
nothing under my feet, free as a dewy plum.

Jeff Burt

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California. He has previously contributed to Sheila-Na-Gig online, Heartwood, Williwaw Journal, and others. More can be found at www.jeff-burt.com

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Lead

She was both cynical and naïve,
raised in a farm town by Facebook
I think, could wear a straw hat
with glamour and swear and drink
and walk awful clumsily in boots,
knew the four Rs and how to post
but couldn’t find Pakistan on a map.
I had been friends with her former husband,
a divorce at twenty-two that made her hard,
indifferent, angry with regret,
She said hollow, like a fallen tree
carved out by rot inside.

Once she took me fishing
and while I put a hook in the water,
she rested at the prow, said
the water looked like stained glass,
like the windows of a church
she had gone to as a child
and never gone back. That lead,
she said, when women make windows
they have to wear gloves
or the lead will make them crazy.
Even the fumes have a poison.
It’s a kind of torture to make something
beautiful like that, she whispered,
and in that moment I saw
the very thing she talked about
in a breath’s evaporation
ascending from her lips.

Simona Carini

Simona Carini was born in Perugia, Italy. She writes poetry and nonfiction and has been published in various venues, in print and online. She lives in Northern California with her husband, loves to spend time outdoors, and works as an academic researcher. Her website is https://simonacarini.com

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On the Great Allegheny Passage: Cycling Along the Water

From Pittsburgh’s Point State Park, the trail, former rail, first follows the Monongahela River,
then parallels the Youghiogheny “a stream flowing in a contrary direction” the Lenape people
observed and named. Both the Mon and the Yogh flow northward, rather than eastward. I cycled
contrary to the water flow, upstream and uphill. Had I been a shirt, the tension of the opposing
movements could have torn me apart.

A river can be a boundary — the Amur, the Columbia, the Rio Grande — but when I saw anglers
standing in the water, like stepping stones between the shores, I saw the stream as the thread
sewing the seam between lands, between people.

We’ll meet at water’s edge,
the river a liquid bridge
between our hands

Bruce Christianson

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Misplaced Love Letter

the nights are cooler now &
    less oppressive through
the open window in the
    distance tower blocks shine
floodlit like ships at anchor
    book half read your note
an undomesticated
    flower pressed forgot
between the pages dis-
    connected passage back
into a haven with
    a different moonstruck view

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The Spirit Has Moved

no she doesn’t live here any more
i don’t know where she went she didn’t say
letters for her still come through the door
from time to time i mark them gone away
& send them back but there are other halls
where letters lie un-forwarded & unread
faded wallpaper upon the walls
except for squares of pattern by her bed

where pictures used to hang instead dust dances
in the light of what is past & missed
or might have been but there i’ll take my chances
a born again but lapsed revivalist
who still from time to time hands round the snakes
but tells himself it’s just for old time sakes

Andrew Cleary

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Out of season

as it describes the heron, ringed blue and copper
wading in a spillway where other stately birds
are more commonly preferred: wading anyway,
searching the drain where gravity tires aging fish.

as it describes the pond, lower now from rain
falling not as we have known it to, or our parents
knew, or theirs before; water anyway that falls
simply downhill everywhere surrounding but here
is made by thought and engineering to hold a fish,
a heron: bare survival punctuated by rest.

as it seemed, Eliot said, that the world was filled
with fragments of systems; a poet like a magpie
picked up torn pieces of misinterpretations
and stuck them about here and there in his verse;
this was, perhaps, an exhortation to do something more
as though a poet weren’t merely a magpie.

as it describes a thought that the world should be
some way improved not just for you but for all
until the thought is lost in the pulling drain;
fish that knew they were fleeing and fish ignorant
alike, swept as they say by history like leaves
which anyway can fly in self-contained glory
without illusion that they must pile here, glow there
or do more than grow, express wealth, curl and return;
not timeless, not timely, together and without time.

as was sometimes called leisure, a pole opposite and
harmonious with effort, as the heron sated, lightly
striding in case another meal should present, returns
to the reeds that provide the common animal comfort:
a sheltered place from which to see, the same as the
great frame of the window in Vuillard’s garden view
which turns a landscape into a place known to be human
and for the heron is the world: no other herons, no sea,
no frost or drought or anything beyond or after.

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Vuillard’s Bedroom

I’ll take you there: the wallpaper flowers
will fade to fog like the distant console
its basin holds water still warm from us
washing our hands together. It’s a landscape;

no matter what the museum card says, we’ll go
with our bodies the way Vuillard would paint us
no matter the distance, by love superadding
the daily sight of you, a lace-turned coverlet

fine wrinkle as we are, postures turned
like lathed side chairs: complex bodies
simply seen here in a sun too diffuse to burn.
Better in paint than we could ever live,

his eye is like my eye for you. Invited
by the vanishing point to where domestic days
quietly enclose all grand designs. No need
to justify the delight in every inch, judgment
spills some other canvas; here, life increases.

Lisa Coffman

O quiet cove

The day has not settled on which version.
The sky is wide, the river ruining
in coal ash and gypsum, tributaries of plastic
at every inlet. O quiet cove.
O heron lifting in fractal wind.
Light from a different year falls through the room
—that’s how oddly the day is placed—
light falls on older light in a photograph
of my grandfather, sleek and young,
almost cruel in his remove
under grayscale skies. Beyond us
the disease rages, troops are ordered
in marionette maneuvers,
fresh loaves wait stacked on display.
The river, dammed and majestic,
sways around another bend.
I have ceded something today,
something unplaceable, and I cannot tell
if I should go looking for it now, or stay calm.

Lynn Glicklich Cohen

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I Tell A New Lover About My Dead Father

He could light his pipe in a windstorm.

Why is this the first thing I say? But I can see him so clearly, my dad, with one hand on the tiller,
mouthpiece clamped between molars, right thumb swiping the match head against flint strip—
the spark, the blaze—his torso a fortress against lake breezes as he sucks the flame bowlward,
moist shreds crackling orange, smoke billowing before being whipped away. Ready about?

Why didn’t I tell him how frightened I was, though he never touched me.
How he never touched me?

In the introduction that never happens, my father holds forth from his red leather wing back,
interview-style. He knocks his pipe against the heavy green glass ashtray five, six, seven times—
a clanking halyard, a seagull caw above the whisper
of our presence.

Have you ever considered investing in silver?

I can guess what my new lover would say—something polite, vaguely deferential—but I hope he
hears the muffled longing, an invitation to a friendship, a desire for someone he can take out
sailing, talk S&P, WSJ, stability and volatility, the risks of investing in metal.

No matter how many poems I write about my dead father, this new lover will never understand
my sullen silences or sudden moods or the dread that haunts the father-shaped hole in me, how I
learned what I must do to keep the love of a man, why I now refuse to.

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Assemble All Ingredients

You bake, an effort to recreate something from long ago.
Biscuits. Preheat oven to 450. Cold butter and milk thickened with vinegar.

Back in the day you used Crisco, before trans fats. Heavier then
by twenty pounds, you swam every morning in the university pool. Cut

a half stick into dry ingredients until it resembles coarse meal—
whatever that means. The cellist you lived with then is dead. Grease a shallow

baking tray. He left behind a wife and three young children. Make a well
in center of dry ingredients, add curdled milk. The trombonist you broke

up with for the cellist—he’s dead too. Do not overmix. Coat your hands
with gluey batter, knead lightly, shape into a soft one-inch round. Ignore

sticky smears on every surface, fridge and oven handle.
The other cellist you married who might as well be

dead—bitter, angry, gone full MAGA out in the woods of New Hampshire.
He liked your biscuits but other than Bach, he wasn’t much good

with his hands. You don’t own a cookie cutter, so use a scotch glass
to cut circles from the disc until only scraps of dough remain. Discard

(you not being one for leftover odds and ends). Set timer. Soak
bowl in hot water until white globs float to surface, then discard,

be careful to avoid clogging your drain. It is advisable at this point to run
disposal until all remnants of solid material are dissolved.

Once biscuits are lightly browned on top, remove the tray from oven, allow
to cool. Enjoy.

Joe Cottonwood

Joe Cottonwood is a general contractor, licensed and bonded, who has repaired hundreds of houses to support his unlicensed no-guarantee poems in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. His latest books of poetry are Foggy Dog and Random Saints. His web site is joecottonwood.com

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Motion Detector

“Call me Tatev.”
She offers me lavash, a flatbread
I eat right away feeling awkward.
She lost her life’s companion.
What to say?
How do you move beyond grief?
Lavash is thin, soft, tastes of
an old country I’ve never seen.

Suburban ranch house,
garage used as a den, billiard table
under a sheet like a dead body.
Cheesy pinup posters.
She has no kids, but he was one.
Vintage Corvette in the driveway, bright red.
“He used to ride me,” Tatev says. I don’t ask.

I’m up a ladder removing a basketball hoop
that should never have been placed above
a security light. Hear a pop. Ow!
The motion detector blew up on my leg.
How could that happen? Tiny shards of glass.
As I wipe blood she offers dolma
with spicy rice, and she frowns as if
taking notes while I chew leaf of grape.

I remove fake wood beams, a pendant light.
Patch the ceiling, skim coat the drywall.
She looks sad, whispers, then explains
“In Armenia for ‘dear one’ we say
I will die on your body.”

For take-home she gives me
a covered dish of lamb and eggplant,
because he loved them.

The leg is infected. Red streaks.
I call Tatev, can’t work.
“He got you,” she says.
“Huh?”
“He got you.”
Later a knock on my door. She drove
20 miles to bring a pot of porridge, harissa.
“So sorry,” she says and she smiles,
with tears, as I taste it.

When I return, the Corvette is gone.
The house is for sale.

Carol V. Davis

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Time Change

With the sky still dark, only the murmur
of house finches on the scrawny branches
of the white rose bush at my doorstep
and the wild parrots that usually streak from
one street to the next, noisy as congregants
before the start of prayers, nowhere to be seen,
out on my morning run, in what yesterday was
the pink spread of sunrise, today, little more
than shadows under streetlamps still illuminated
and I, after a recent fall, no longer trust my legs
to read the Braille of bumps and cracks where
sidewalks erupt from an explosion of roots,
my body knows the route by heart but the solace
of this solitary hour has vanished, each curb
a danger, give me back the wavering grey
of dawn, let the day begin again at 6.

Michael Diebert

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To the barista in Vienna whom I meant to tip but didn’t

I was too busy watching myself sitting at your counter
             spellbound, saucers empty at the centers,

broken-off chocolate at the edges,
             the streams pouring from the machines, the steam.

A dish towel was draped over your shoulder.
             I was tired, overstimulated, grateful

to sit a few minutes. The latte was nice and nutty.
             I thought I would just add tip at the register

but you rung up exactly what I owed.
             I signed and left. Too busy being embarrassed.

My family found me. We walked on. Men in costume
             hawked concert tickets. Jewelry, leather,

confectionery, clock museum, opera house.
             Christmas markets we hadn’t hit, a couple we had.

Dusk. Tapestries of soft light hovering above.
             Everyone except me, apparently,

dressed for the weather. Long slender coats
             zipped to the neck. Warm boots. Earth tones.

In your city of music and structure, in the midst
             of such seductiveness,

I lost my favorite wool hat and one glove.
             A man bumped me, sent my shopping bag flying.

Maybe, when you learned you’d been shorted,
             you shrugged, smiled to yourself; maybe you cursed me.

Maybe, probably, you were too busy to imagine me.
             I imagine you wiping down that counter,

thinking about your next day off, waking late,
             stretching under covers, hand touching a loved one’s back.

Laura Donnelly

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Morning Prayer

Let me be quiet. Let me be becalmed
and not fighting against the lack
of wind, the lolling boat, but peering
into the blue sea until it becomes
not blue but a passing through of
jellyfish: translucent, iridescent,
so delicate they make the most sense
in glass but only if, in glass, you can still
imagine movement. The velvet
water passing over. The rice paper skin
and no brain but a nerve that lets them
take in the world and turn through
the light. Imagine the young naturalist
leaning over the edge of the boat.
One body stalled. Another and another
turned rainbow under the waves.

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Easter at Forty-Two

Ben makes pizza,
squeezing the plum tomatoes
for sauce. A stone slowly heats
in the oven. Overnight, the dough
has risen and Ben jokes “it has risen,
indeed!” I recall morning
services, new dress each April
in elementary school. Later,
no church but family potlucks,
pastel sweaters, the tray of deviled eggs
Mom made without fail.
One Easter after I’d grown and
moved far, I bought an African violet
to mark the day. Nothing flashy
but I liked its velvet leaves.
I set its plastic pot in a berry bowl,
letting it soak water up from the dish
the way my grandmother taught.
It blooms and re-blooms,
though it doesn’t seem to keep
any particular schedule. This year,
Easter week, my friend texts to say,
sixty degrees, then snow, now
church bells… is it the apocalypse?!
I text back: Maundy Thursday? tasting
the edges of that strange word again.
On Good Friday, I paint my office
the same shade of blue as the eggs
my aunt’s chickens lay. Tillie and Toph
lay the blue ones. On Sunday, I call
my mother from the newly blue room
and we talk about our gardens, our cats,
the pandemic, the new paint. Mom tells me
the red osier dogwoods she cut back hard
aren’t regrowing, and when she called in
to the local garden show, Jan said
they might not come back. Sometimes,
things don’t make it. But the soil
has a long way to warm. It takes time.
Wait and see, Jan says, and so
we move into spring.

Merrill Douglas

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I Forget How Old I Am

When I think of the layers
and layers of days I’ve lived so far,
I see magazines stacked
in a hoarder’s apartment, cans of corn
and chow mein, clothes outgrown,
worn out or not worn once.

*
On better days, the world is still
so fresh its ink rubs off on my fingers.
Fair enough. I wipe those stains
on my sweater and move on.
One creased map, one bag of red
pistachios will get me anywhere.

*
If the past is a real place,
how do I reach it?
Not by metro. Not on foot.
And think how shy I’d feel,
dumb tourist, lacking even the words
for Please and Help me.

*
At 12 or so, when my friends and I
stopped on our walk to the movies,
I picked up the smallest
potato chip bag the store sold,
then sat in the dark and tasted
the salt grains one by one.

*
Moon-stark, the searchlight
the CT scan spills
on my insides: pocked plains—
rifts and ridges—no place I know
how to find, picked out on a map
for anyone’s eyes.

*
What’s bothering the rain?
I wish I weren’t so stumbly,
brain made of thumbs.
How I’d love to hold
one slim thought in my lips
like a silver whistle.

*
Montreal: my favorite meal
is in a Hungarian place so small
I share a table with two college girls.
Pink nails. Pink phones. Quick French.
I spoon my petal-colored borscht
and look around, and smile at the walls.

*
Each day a clean start,
fragrant, crisp to the teeth,
a carrot, tugged from dreamless
sleep in the earth with
a nonchalant spin of the wrist
to rip the root hairs.

*
Sheep-in-the-heavens,
grazing cumulus flock, why can’t I
learn to shut my mouth
and lie still, watch you drift,
while crickets scratch another
summer off my life list?

“The past / is a real place” from “Yahrzeit Candle” by Linda Pastan

Linda Drach

---

Interstitial Spaces

I’m walking in my new neighborhood: left on Harness,
right on Buckskin, left on Saddle. Was this a stable yard
once, after the settlers paved over the Atfalati villages
with plank roads? Or were the street names a gift
for the developer’s daughter, a pony-tailed princess
with horse-filled dreams? I didn’t want to move
from my house in the city, an English Tudor
with leaded glass windows, crown-shaped chimney caps,
an orange rose climbing the clinker brick walls.
I didn’t want to say goodbye to the rich backyard tilth,
which – after two decades on my knees, digging up
malt liquor cans and fifteen-thousand-year-old rocks –
yielded thyme and bee balm, anemone and larkspur.
Even my body is strange terrain, blighted by cycles
of wildfire and mudslide. Up the steep hill
on Maverick, I leave behind the tract houses, turn into
Hyland Woods, and there she is. The mountain lion
swivels her head, fixing me in a steely-eyed gaze
I interpret as a glare, but later will recognize as simply
resting bitch face. It’s rare to see one in the wilderness,
let alone spitting distance from the Costco. Part of me
wants to fall into the pillows of trillium edging the dirt path,
but I stretch my fists into cartoon claws and emit
a guttural growl. She looks away, as if embarrassed for me,
and disappears into the fern and salal. One day,
I know, it will all be gone. The traffic lights
and soccer fields and the Murryhill Café with its almond lattés
and manmade lake. But please, not the Cooper’s hawk
perched in the Doug Fir. Not the dark-eyed juncos
picking through leaf litter in search of chickweed seeds.
Not the mountain lion, her tawny tail so thick,
it would have taken two hands to hold onto it.

Sarah Elkins

---

My Father Emails Me Happy Birthday

You gave me a globe on my tenth birthday
which I spun until the equator peeled away,
until there was no U.S.S.R.,
until this email.

I try to imagine a time
when I will not know my son’s birthday.
When eight twenty-seven oh-eight
doesn’t roll out like a password
at doctors’ offices, on summer camp applications,
or in lone moments just because
I like its symmetry, its seven syllables
speeding up in the middle,
slowing on the return to eight.

I wonder about this email,
the first in years, tethered to nothing,
not even my birthday.
What was it that made you think to send it?

An El Camino blasting We Built this City,
improbable muscadines growing
along a cracked sidewalk,
the waft from a distant chicken house?
Perhaps a skinny girl with short black hair
alone in the baking aisle
staring up at the pink and green candles.

Laura Foley

---

A Small Mercy

It’s Thanksgiving Day,
and you’re standing under the raw oaks,
the wind lifting their leaves
like loose scraps of an old argument,
the dark earth breathing its cold breath
up the back of your neck—

when it hits,
the thought shaped like a fist
to the sternum,
and you bend around it,
the sobs coming up dry and hard,
as if your ribs were trying
to shake something loose.

The leaves slap the frozen ground
like small, repeated punishments.

Somewhere
a life once braided to yours
is moving farther into the world,
beyond your reach.

And you lift your face
as if the heavy sky might split open
and tell you—
in this subtraction,
this cold arithmetic—
where the gratitude
is meant to live.

And then you remember
your loved one—the one you chose—
waiting at home,
stirring your favorite soup,
a small mercy warming on the stove.
And now even in dull November,
look—
how the sun reaches down
through bare branches,
touches your face.

George Franklin

George Franklin practices law in Miami. A Man Made of Stories (2025) is his fourth full-length collection with Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, complementing Remote Cities (2023) Noise of the World (2020) and Traveling for No Good Reason (winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Editions manuscript competition in 2018). His chapbook, What the Angel Saw, What the Saint Refused (2024) and Poetry & Pigeons: Short Essays on Writing (2025) are also from Sheila-Na-Gig. Franklin has also authored the dual-language collection, Among the Ruins / Entre las ruinas (translated by Ximena Gómez and published by Katakana Editores, 2020), and a chapbook, Travels of the Angel of Sorrow (Blue Cedar Press, 2020). He is the co-translator, along with the author, of Ximena Gómez’s Último día / Last Day and co-author with Gómez of Conversaciones sobre agua / Conversations About Water (Katakana Editores 2019 & 2023).

---

A Poem About Silence

Tonight, we spoke on the phone.  We’d both
Gotten flu shots and were waiting to
See if we were going to feel sick.
Some years, you’d sleep for ten hours straight.
Others, nothing would happen.  Tonight,
I’ll go to bed early, listen to
Leaves falling on the roof, the dog in
The hallway outside my door, stretching,
Then moving to the sofa, where he’ll

Spend the rest of the night, unless he
Hears a cat or an opossum on
The back fence.  If you were here, he might
Stay outside the door all night, just to
Listen to your breathing, and mine too.
I told you I made soup for dinner,
Lentils, chicken, potatoes, onions,
Garlic, ginger, and curry powder—
It was thick, yellow from the curry.

I wished for you, imagined how you’d
Sit next to me and say how good it
Was, how we’d share some wine and slices
Of bread I baked yesterday.  I’d look
At you and say, “Mi bella,” and you’d
Reply, “¿Por qué?”—your cheeks flushed from soup,
Your hair grown out down to your shoulders.
These are difficult years.  No one comes
To the US for asylum now.

Your work as a translator has stopped.
We economize where we can, still
Insisting on good coffee, fruit, and
Yogurt in the morning.  A friend in
Spain wants poems from us both about
Silence, and we’ll send them even though
Our whole lives are full of talking and
Listening, reading poems out loud,
Joking about unpredictable

English vowels and my problems with
Spanish diphthongs.  Tomorrow, when you’re
Sitting here next to me, I’ll take your
Hand and say how happy it makes me
To wait for you in that parking lot
At the train station, thinking of all
The things we’ve wanted to talk about
And how impossible it is for
You or me to write about silence.

Michael Friedman

---

Möbius Light

Death as a knot
tied into itself,

squeezing
until it uncoils

from its birth
configuration,

unhinged
and loose upon the wind.

—

To be captured
as remembrance–

Yahrzeit of spring
or cicada summer,

doves startled,
wing chirping

from maple branches
at both dusk and dawn;

the low light ending
and beginning each day.

---

Tubes

The jungle gym became high
when I peered down through
the parallel tubes at my mother
standing below.

Her face arched up at me
as her eyes sucked and sucked
through the straws of their fear,
straining to pull my
untried soul down to her.

In that moment,
I almost gave up my newfound
wind, but urged the rungs to flatten,
to shut her out like flipping
closed Venetian blinds.

Joshua Gage

---

My Aunt Attends Her First Broadway Show, 1961

What is this cathedral built of light
and song? Amongst the neon, horns, and stench
of all that New York City has to give,
amongst the men flannelled in grey suits,
the women in their shapeless shifts, cuffs
and collars choir white, can you pick out
a teenage girl, hand in father’s hand,
in line at Will Call for box seats?

Picture Delaware, suburban lots
the size of postage stamps, cookie cutter
houses filled with DuPont families.
Imagine a Buick in every driveway, Sid
Caesar and Jack Benny in black and white,
a pot roast every Sunday, and if you were lucky,
your father with a new LP from Broadway.

Now, see my aunt, that teenage woman, in line
beneath the terracotta and fire escape.
What is Delaware compared to gold
and ivory, molded ornaments
of urns, acanthus leaves, even Venus
herself?
               The orchestras overtures,
the curtain climbs, and once there was a spot
known as C. Come forth Merlin.
Come forth Arthur, Marian in May.
And tonight of nights, swaggering forth from France
as Lancelot, Robert Goulet, who lifts
his blue eyes to the crowd and finds my aunt
dreaming at him from her seat, and with a wink
she swears was aimed for her, carries her
and everyone on his baritone
through the final notes.
                                             What is Delaware
against a stage so close my aunt can practically smell
Robert Goulet, blazed with a thousand lights,
his voice all but rumbling her skin as he reminds
her, my grandfather, and the world…
                                                                           C’est moi!

Robbie Gamble

---

Sea of Tranquility

once an evening       stuttered
by sudden spats of heat lightening

dusk thickening       to murky soup
a squadron       of moths who slapped

at the downcast porchlight
such sultry       memory on dissolve

like a dollop       of ink blossoming
down a tumbler of spring water

once a lucent       state of mind
ascendant       through ragged horizons

impossibly       cool and luminous
improbably huge       in its orbital caress

such comfort       unfathomable now
this frayed daylight       of absence

Laura Hannett

---

Laüstic

Marie de France makes me wonder,
so I turn to my phone, asking:
How does a nightingale sound?

In my palm, in a cherry tree,
a plain brown bird:
From the blurring, yellow funnel
of his beak, he lets escape
a madcap, teeter-totter song,
a tizzy of clicks and ticks.

The distant day shimmers,
edges dipped in summer—
removed from time,
the cherries are always
hard and green.
Over and again,
this tiny ghost sings his theme.

Ah! prepare the jeweled casket!
The snare is ever set.

For centuries, a lady
in a scarlet-sprinkled smock
has wrapped once more
her samite cloth
around this little singer,
a lover’s farewell gift,
light as a milkweed pod.

Jeff Hardin

---

Some Mornings I Wake Exhausted

I could go back to sleep. I really could. Look at time—
it’s utterly exhausting. I’ve lived in seven cities so far
and know but a handful of people and, at this point, will
likely live out my days in obscurity, visiting a park’s pond

but not studying the ducks moving in circles, or choosing
a thin volume from my shelves and clinging to a few words
floating along toward a precipitous plunge. Everyone everywhere
must wonder what the point of living is, how the whole thing

seems arbitrary, one man’s burst of genius gone at twenty-two,
all the absence of what he might have created, another man’s
dull life a series of trauma and blunders lasting ninety years.
Sometimes bitterness has time to turn into joy or vice-versa.

Other days there’s no way to turn left out of a neighborhood,
and traffic moves non-stop without a break for ten minutes,
and it’s easy to see how a people might kill other people
just because they can, then take their things without remorse.

I always marveled when reading of people feasting, tables
full of fattened calves, fish, turkey, pheasant, every vegetable
in its own bowl, spoons dripping with grease, a fellowship,
while elsewhere someone else was near-starving, making

a porridge, a people displaced without manna falling around
them. It’s odd the rituals we maintain, even more so those
we defend long past when they should have been abandoned.
Not all our thoughts are grammatical nor easily placed beside

others’ thoughts. We’re poor translators, too, of every word
that passes our lips, most of them not the ones we would have
chosen to speak—aching, as we do, for a language beyond
any we currently imagine. I try to keep a small song in mind,

now and then a phrase sung onto the wind, more of a whisper
so that no one will happen along and steal it for themselves
or turn it against me. It’s a purifying song aimed at my heart.
I’m tired, though, and have been for a long time, longer than

geologic time, longer than theological time, a millennium,
an eon. The earth whispered its signature to me as I lay down
in a field one midnight, and the universe above me drew near,
and then, for a while, no one as witness, I leapt from star to star.

Suzy Harris

---

Longboat Key

-after Eugene Gloria

I ask my mother would she
rather be a great blue heron
or a satin pillowcase. I ask her
would she prefer sand
or oyster shells under her feet.
I ask her what to make
of the years ahead
with their unknown portals,
hidden channels. I ask her
if dried paints may be restored.
Will there be enough water, I ask.
Can I trust that my feet
will know where to go?
And what happens to the love
between mother and daughter
when one has winged off
leaving the other reeling
in the wake of departure,
fifteen years later watching the sky
for those telltale feathers?

Mary Beth Hines

---

Polaris

“… there are now five directions—north, south, east and west, and the online blue dot: You.”
~ Jerry Brotton, Four Points of the Compass

Centered, demagnetized, blue ship-star
in my own night sky, and you, my love, in yours,

our shared true north eclipsed by google map’s
tech-god-crafted world.

And I’m compelled to engage even as I weigh
modernity’s ease against star charts, bird flight,

and you, my once keen navigator
through strange cities’ labyrinthine streets,

down the winter Kancamagus—
all earth-bound grit, blind faith, frayed maps.

If I could, I’d trade satellites for sun cycles,
swap proof for divination, herd-sourced alerts

for your warm touch, though it’s heady
to be a polestar, abiding Stella Maris,

and able to place you, day or night, near or far—
Delphic blue dot drifting, pulsing like a heart.

---

Evening Swim With Cormorants

Three long-necked
silhouettes perch
on October boulders—

elegantly curved
treble clefs; evoke
Water Music, wind.

One readies wings
for stretch
into a migratory V.

Another scans
the seabed, tracks fall’s
last, scattering crabs.

The third eyes
the horizon for a sign
of which I might be one.

Wetsuit-sleek
as a seal, I stroke legato.
Staccato. Toward.

Finally drift eye-to-eye
with them, sentinel
ghosts in the cool gloom.

All of us awash
in that sepia pause
between after and almost.

Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

---

St. Miki, Out-of-Control Bicycler of Lake Park Hill
Lets the Awkward One Steer Just This Once

Be with me now at the hour of my demise.
Pray for me that I will learn, as you have,
how to follow directions from boys with acne
yelling as we fly by riding double.
May I duck down, as you, before we ram the
mailbox, hitting the metal pole with our noses.
What are broken bones to we glorious queens with
jelly shoes and sweaty feet, just now noticing
stinky pits and stubbly legs? Your handle
bars were twisted, a certain and easy fix.
Delicate divine one, O beautiful
girl who knows the ways, do not forsake me
when my thighs rub, when I laugh too loudly,
never at the right jokes, never at the
right time. Don’t forsake me when I swerve and
hit the onlooking cheering crowd.

Jen Karetnick

---

In Search of Resonance

After John Paul Caponigro’s Procession II

How much of my life is echo?
I see joy, so I stamp it on my face.

I witness gratitude, so I name it,
credit it as my own. I chase glory

through the visas of others who learned
the route. In a photo I find online, a row

of obelisks levitates, tails off into the desert.
Underneath, smudges of their shadows

track but overhead, the same shapes
leap awry like plumes from an invisible

fire, as if what parrots below ricochets
above. What can I learn from this

if not that I am either reflection or refraction,
always in the service of a far greater light?

David Anson Lee

---

A Secret in White

The frost stitches the trail in silver,
each leaf a delicate seam,
each branch a thread pulled taut
against a gray sky.

I follow the creek’s whisper,
its murmur swallowed by ice,
and wonder how water remembers
its own turning.

A cardinal flares red:
a secret tucked
into the folds of white.

I pause beneath the sycamore,
its bark pocked with storms,
and feel the valley’s pulse:
that quiet insistence
that nothing, not even winter,
can last forever.

Dana Holley Maloney

---

In Place

The African Tree Frog I bought after college
just clung to glass and I,
not knowing what I would do with my life,
felt hopeless hunting under rocks
beside the back porch
for crickets to feed it.

We lived on the first
mountain west of Manhattan.
Everything turned us toward
the valley where the sun rose,
and at night the skyline,
which you see from farther up the hill.

Rainwater flowed in streams
along the brick-lined sides of the street.
Downpours sent rocks from the quarry
on the ridge. But water rarely
ponded, even in spring,
the way it once might have.

Betsy Mars

---

The Guilt the Wave Took

Before I could catch the word
in my camera lens,
before it sank into sand,
before I could bank the rift
in my heart, there on the beach,
a small wave crept up,
though the tide was low
—a sea gift—
and took the letters
I had carved with a driftwood stick,
its end like a twisted witch’s hand.
On that day of my divorce, a ritual
to begin again. On that day when I felt adrift,
the water, always my friend, erased the word
I’d traced beneath my toes and then
I felt the sands begin to shift.

Rowan Beckett Minor

---

Nine Weeks: A Gunsaku

finding out
that I’m pregnant. . .
mayflies

first ultrasound
trouble finding
my left ovary

carrying you
these few short weeks
cactus blossom

dead of summer
still no growth
on the sonogram

swallowing pills
to induce the miscarriage
morning dew

still waiting
for the bleeding to start
deep summer

writhing in pain
from another contraction
sunset red

two weeks
until I can bathe
oversteeped lady grey

postpartum
dark spots growing
on the apple

Penelope Moffet

---

I’ll Go In

If it’s deep enough
I’ll swim.

And by deep enough
I mean

enough water
that my fingers

don’t scrape
as I breathe

each third stroke,
watch bubbles

rise, see
what flickers

underneath.
If I can become

small enough
I’ll go in

any meditation
pond or creek.

Even the scummy
collecting pool

at the writers’
mountain workshop

looks inviting,
even the blue aqueduct

beside the interstate,
even cold Lake Tahoe, even

snowmelt Alaskan streams
I barely keep myself

from jumping into.
Even salty waves

that roll me under,
calm chlorinated pools,

the shrunken swimming hole
on the Hassayampa River

at Frog Falls,
two breaths

at most
across.

Even this
full glass.

Kate Polak

---

I Wouldn’t Know

There was nowhere left to put it, so I (w)retched it up:

the wine, the collections I would have taken up if we’d
been, local derelicts, women driving to work having a cig,
pinned wings and animal teeth, those stories that start
So I picked him up in the golf cart at the bus stop. . . , the first bay
of the car wash, what thrum would wrest its way from your
waking throat before there was another set of ears
to hear, my parents’ porch light, on for life, so that any
one needing a beacon at any old time might find their way.

Left to my own devices one Friday night a couple months
ago, I drank a bottle of red and paid some Etsy witch $20
not for a love spell—didn’t feel I needed it, and besides, what
kind of person would that make me?—but to ask you see me
again. And you did, however briefly. Best $20 I’ve ever spent
because when your friend shifted his eyes so I knew you were
around the corner and biding, I made my usual goodbye noises
so I wouldn’t slow y’all up, but then, you were there—breezing

in, were always there, waiting a spell—and this was yet another
Tuesday, you understand, so it was easier to roll stones to this
chest’s firepit so it wouldn’t spread, and this was yet another
Tuesday so then, you gave me the smile you reserve for folks you
don’t much like, and I’d been beaming but in that shift I was just
Tuesday, granite where light gleamed. Your dearth smells like exhaust,
and then I think of that Egyptian tomb, fragrant oil so thick you’d
have to wade, and how five thousand years was not enough to banish

woozy, perfumed tide, and how I am forever doing dumb shit,
with my money, my face, my hands, as if millennia from now, anyone
would be vaguely interested in it. The word crush is entirely enough,
my stomach agate pestle against a mortar of everything I choke down
and, later, it all just comes back up. My dental work is brought to mind,
where I know my folks had to forgo all type of things to give me tooth-
colored back teeth, but also grasshopper stains, how before language,
we’re just colors and sounds. Joey takes a drag off his cigarette and says

You should install a load-bearing stripper pole. I am never one to say no
to a boy I love with a bad idea. The ending of that story was all about
fucking in the pet cemetery, and laughing, the only response is just because I was
taught it don’t mean I learnt it. There is a well for water. It tastes like slate
or what that gun woulda felt like in my mouth when those neighbor boys
found the shoebox their dad kept it in. Selective hearing and El Caminos.
Great Aunt Dorothy’s endless terriers named “Buttsy.” Oh, gods, I think
of every time I’ve watched a man become ashamed of what he felt for me.

John Popielaski

John Popielaski is the author of several poetry collections, including most recently That Special Something from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, as well as Attuning, a novel from Broken Tribe Press. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Cutleaf, Gramercy Review, and Public School Poetry.

---

The Old Days

Compassion doesn’t seem to cycle round
with the historical intensity
of bloodshed and reprisal,
of withholding and displacement,
of indifference in its various degrees.
I’m far away from most
of the offenses and atrocities.
That used to be enough.
Not in my lifetime, I don’t think,
but there was once a time
when being distant was enough
to squeak the conscience clean,
to let it skip with its biology
on down the placid sidewalk
past azaleas it was obvious
were unconditionally loved.

David B. Prather

David B. Prather recently won the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize from Madville Publishing for his forthcoming fourth collection, A Heart that Stretches the Length of the Body. He has three previous collections: We Were Birds (Main Street Rag, 2019), Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023), and Bending Light with Bare Hands (Fernwood Press, 2025). His work has appeared in many publications, including New Ohio Review, Cutleaf, Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, Poet Lore, etc. He is currently serving as the Director of the West Virginia Writers, Inc. Annual Spring Writers Conference. He lives in Parkersburg, WV. Website: http://www.davidbprather.com.

---

Shoe Care

My only idea of the kiwi bird came from a picture
on my father’s black shoe polish.
I loved when he got out that flat round can
on Saturday afternoons, his
long-abused work shoes, polish brush,

and buffing cloth. I thought the kiwi was a myth
like a phoenix or thunderbird.
When my father told me it was real and flightless,
I didn’t want to believe him.
He had told tall tales before.

He enticed me to dream dinosaurs so tall
their heads parted clouds, convinced me
an eagle could fly so high
it could skim the edge of space.
On that vintage tin, the gold and brown image

made the earthbound creature
look like a hunched old man with a cane for a nose,
a hermit living alone upon a barren field.
I imagined the call of the kiwi
had to be that shush-shush sound

of a brush buffing the toes and heels.
That pungent aroma, leather-and-whiskey
intoxicating, I remember my father
using a shoehorn to wedge his feet into those boots
then walking out the door.

---

Land of Giants

Some fathers are myths
    whose children sprout
from their foreheads
    or a muscled thigh.

Others are giants, like mine,
    the ones, it’s been told,
who lie down among trees

    and leave valleys
where they sleep.
    They stand so tall
their shoulders are draped

    with clouds.
Something atmospheric
    shrinks them down—

a passing storm, a heavy snow,
    a wind so fierce
the world is knocked flat.
    First, the clouds go unbroken

over their heads. Then,
    the tops of tulip poplars
batter their shoulders.

    Before long, they are just men
standing alone
    in the valleys they created.
Some get smaller still,

    slip into the branches
as cicadas. We know them
    by their harshest voices.

Haylee Schwenk

---

Eating Grapefruit Over the Sink

I’m alone in the house this morning,
scoring the rind with a small knife,
peeling it like an orange,
unwilling to waste those bits the spoon
can never quite remove.

The outer skin comes off easily;
the first pull releases tiny droplets
of citrus-scented oils,
revealing the thick bitter pith
and I reflect that I am of the bitter

white part, descendent
of farmers who came and took land,
little thought for who cherished
the forests they turned into fields,
building their stone houses, frame

barns and churches, breaking
the soil and storing up goods.
They built fences, too, separated
German from Scots-Irish, Lutheran
from Catholic and Quaker, ten generations

until I am alone this morning,
birdsong muted by triple paned-windows.

Julie Schwerin

---

Second Spring

the river rain
starting over

with a layer of moss     for
the gray rock

I’ve become

this need

for straight lines

so at odds with the snail
in me       in a nest
that’s empty

and gone
so too
the leaves

now

silence fading
into
more

and becoming

more
myself

wabi

sabi

Lisa Seidenberg

---

Run-a-way

It was easy to believe in an endless summer
when I pull into Laguna Beach
in a rented Camaro
splash boys in speedos with corkscrew curls
and neo-prened girls hoist long boards overhead
like Spanish sailors steering madly
into uncharted seas

California mothers ask if I am a run-a-way
Well I was and I wasn’t
I love the sound of run-a-way
How it trills in that old pop song by Del Shannon
My little run-a-way
I wo wo wo wonder why
Why she ran away
A question your younger self
never asked because
all she feels is the heat of the Santa Ana wind
and the taste of sand
on her teeth

I head north on Highway One
all the way to Monterey
Sometimes you just need to run

Michael Shoffstall

---

Spring Soliloquy 1939

After Grant Wood’s lithograph “In the Spring” (1939)

I’m tired but it’s a good tired, now
the fenceposts are dug and buried.
Stringing strands of barbed wire,
well, that will have to happen later
because spring planting won’t wait.
Two hundred acres isn’t much
but it’s mine, mine and the damned bank’s
and if I can’t keep up, all of it will be lost
to the jimson weeds that invade by fall
with their spiked grenades of seeds.

God willing, one of our six kids will live
to farm this same land. In three months
I’ll send out our next-to-youngest,
ten-year-old Curt, to wrench out by hand
the jimson plants—already three feet tall—
taller than the hopeful rows of wheat
and not hard to spot, what with those
brazen white trumpets for flowers.
Even for a young boy, it’s not hard work
but oh boy, once those black seeds ripen
and trench themselves into the soil,
you’ll be battling jimson weed for decades.

Another two months and we’ll listen
as our Emerson Bakelite radio broadcasts
Panzer tanks have rolled across Poland.
Within six years, our three oldest sons—
Russell, Gerald, Donald—will have crossed
the Atlantic, will have seen men mown down
like wheat stubble, will have marched
through tread tracks not made by tractors,
and when they’ve finally come home,
it will be with different names, soldiers’
names—Pete, Doc, Dutch. We’ll see
other changes too, ones we can’t name.

But here in this moment, in this calm
Ohio spring, my work in the fields is done.
Like most nights, I’ll turn on the radio,
listen to the Reds’ game, and not even care
how radio waves follow the earth’s curvature
or whether we share these same stars
with farmers in Poland as I stare up
at the glassy, as yet unfractured sky.

Judith Sornberger

---

The Simple News That Nature Tells

for Kristin Sanner

At forest edge, sumac’s
the most precocious
at letting in the end,
pointing flaming fingers
at still-green oaks and maples.
But if we dwell in possibility,
can Nature’s simple news
tell the whole story?

Following your first chemo,
you came back to us
festooned in a wig
the same bittersweet tint
as ten-year-old Emily’s
short waves in the portrait
with sister and brother
that we’ve visited
as pilgrims in her parlor.

Each succeeding Fall
you’d show up on campus
insouciant as chrysanthemums
planted along sidewalks after
the demise of dust-edged pansies,
your grin wickedly cheerful
as you tapped down corridors
from class to class in heels
you only kicked off
when you had to use a cane.

I don’t know if you prayed
except in poems. Still,
you said I could, asking
if I prayed to saints
or friends in high places,
as you called them,
suggesting I try Mother Theresa
who needed one more
miracle to make the grade.

Well, Theresa didn’t reach
sainthood via you.
Anyway, isn’t Emily
more your kind of angel—
timid as a star, wild
as the all-white corpse plant
hiding in the woods,
her preferred flower of life?

If poems are possibilities,
here’s the one I pray for.
Let’s say that you awaken
from this life in a slender
sleigh bed akin to hers,
draw the Turkish coverlet
around your narrow shoulders,
and slip out the back door
to the garden—a fairer house
than prose—where no bloom
needs pressing between pages
to preserve it—a barefoot neighbor
from another world, a sister
shade and debauchee of dew.

Ralph Stevens

---

Road Calling

After Julius Debos’ “The Road from Tupper Lake to Saranac Lake”

It’s a bit late in the day
To get started but
Here’s a road,
Mountains in the distance and
We know the open road with that
Famous call. Get up and get
Going it says, no matter
How late and even if
You’re just travelling
At your desk or
In that armchair.
It’s a strange journey, the landscape
Two dimensional, as if
The artist thought mountains
Could be folded flat,
The psalmist’s rams not skipping
But standing still
Under a sky threatening rain.
The sun is out somewhere though,
Throwing shadows across the road,
In what seems to be afternoon light.
You two sit quietly in the car
One behind the wheel, one
Content to just look, wave
At the man walking his dog and
Picture arriving at the lake
Sometime before the sun
Goes down.

Valy Steverlynck

---

Life With ADD

Ellen Stone

---

Under the flower moon

Beware these lush arms unfolding
into you, hesitant spring.
Call me extraneous, coiled tongue
of spotted adder, rogue rose.
Powder my roots to lighten your hair.

*

Wild vines crisscrossing the little
grey box filled with electricity
have swallowed the chain link
fence, now wave, spidery, off
the smooth edge of the drain spout.

*

Old dog lies on a picnic-colored fleece.
Stretched like a woman curled into herself,
sun streaming over her brown housecoat.
Electric heater fan hums, whirring
like a reverent priest. Brilliant appliance!

*

Shed, barn-dirty. As if mud-spattered mammals
clomp in/out, filling the backyard. (Or rain
off the roof, earth slides down, splats doors.)
Where are the chickens clucking and pecking
their herky-jerky, squeezebox dance?

*

Willow branch girls bending near
lampposts, streetlights. Night done.
Laugh to the moon, purring a sing-song.
Lying on grass, stoop-sitting. Come
ring these swinging bells with us!

James Sutherland-Smith

---

Double Expresso and Schnapps

i.m. Derek Mahon 1941-2020

        But there is silence
        In the houses of Nagoya
        And the hills of Ise.

Lyrical airs of distress filter
from the former state housing blocks
yet remain entirely musical.

Listeners grimace and their cheeks moisten
they are so moved by the surges
of French horn and flute, aureate, drawn out.

It’s a marine orchestra, sunlit,
though so far inland beyond the gulls
that only our tears are salty.

The swifts and martins have flown south
and must be squealing and skimming
above a Mediterranean swell

on which makeshift rickety craft
of abandoned Africans founder
or bob towards France and Italy.

Unlike the birds or dogs or other creatures
without a syntax the boats’ human cargo
has no sense of the earth’s magnetic field

so relies on hope or miracles
those unreliable homing devices
to harbours whose patience is wearing thin.

Those of us, Derek, who live on, landlocked,
give hardly a thought to refugees
or migrating birds, but console ourselves

that our coffee has become Italian
and the radio can still broadcast
the noises of culture which can mean

whatever we like, masked as we are
against an insensate virus, against
pity for those adrift on the cruel sea.

Marc Swan

---

Not for Sale

Off Massachusetts Avenue
nestled below a Japanese restaurant
a fabric store

buttons are popular
as are Bernina sewing machines
and row upon row

of colorful fabrics hanging
like a bevy of exotic birds

waiting to take flight

The owner with the round belly
and loose fitting clothes
has a hearty laugh

and likes to tell stories
until the topic of now comes up

He is quiet
for a minute or so
then tells me he is Jewish

and with the rise
of wide spread intolerance

driven by those in power dictating
all things these days

that may be a problem

Lillo Way

---

Her Last Garden

                        —with a bow to several great poets of gardens past

            The watering can, the clippers, the gloves,
the basket, the pail.

            The groan of the gate grown heavy with years,
the scrape of the rusted latch.

            Birds fall silent in the heat but the hinge sings come,
pass through. She heaves the sagging gate upward,                                      

            clearing the clods clotted with moss, uplifting the sphagnum
that fringes the bottom of the pickets.

            The gate, once white flaked grey, now grey flaked white
and frosted with lichen.

            Her heart hitch-kicked over the fence and is waiting for her
on the path whose pavers lie buried under grass.

            Here, here, she’s in this garden now, not the last walk
but one of them.

            Spent hollyhock stalks bend toward her cheek, seed coins
pour from their purses.

            She passes wilding white roses clenched three to a fist,
their leaves grown frail, brown age spots on yellow.

            Something there is that loves an old woman. Her basket weaved long ago
by who knows whose hands, who knows where.

            One morning soon, she’ll sit down under the ash tree
and never leave.

            Wait for it to come, what’s coming. Choose to have it here.
In this smell. Late summer.

            They’ll search. They’ll come upon. The watering can, the basket,
the pail, the footprint of her boot-soles.

Julie Weiss

---

Lost Tooth

Don ́t cry, son. The world is gorged
with lost things. A cracked
robin ́s egg. A lucky coin dropped

down an elevator shaft. A scoop
of chocolate ice cream, jostled
off its cone in a crowd. The lion

you spotted in a rain cloud,
morphed into an amoeba or a blob
of mold by the time I change lanes.

Listen to the clock ́s thunderous
tick. Walk across any hour of the day
and something you love will plummet

through a sinkhole. A playmate
moved four-hundred miles away.
The picture you painted for weeks

smeared under spilled water. Once,
I fell four times in competition and lost
my will. It stood on the ice for hours

in rhinestones and misery, a specter
on skates, trembling in the spotlight
of my tears, like you ́re trembling now.

But let me tell you about the things
you ́ll find. Courage. Creativity.
An ensemble of robins, serenading the sun.

Enough lucky coins to fill a candy jar.
Flavors and friends. To you, son,
the bathroom drain is a ravenous

beast that feeds on children ́s wishes.
To me, it ́s a spiral slide leading
fairies to a treasure of found teeth.