The Poets: Volume 10.4, Summer 2026

NEW: Click author’s NAME (not photo) to jump to their section or SCROLL to read the issue in its entirety.

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Editor’s Choice Award Winner: Judith H. Montgomery

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BOOT. SOCK. FOOT.

n 2024, searchers discovered young Sandy Irvine’s partial remains, one hundred years after his Everest expedition with Edmund Mallory

Found: the boot, cracked leather. The sock, its raveling
cotton fiber. Within, what’s left of his foot, exposed

by melting glacial ice. The men who stumble on these
small remains are stunned by this chance clue to his

lost future. The boot, the sock, and the nametag
clinging to its stitched ribs—witness to domestic care.

Was it his mother who stitched his name in place,
fretting in late light? Sewed, so the sock—if the sock

were lost—could be claimed. If the body—so it might
be fetched home to her. How many trusting mothers

have marked socks or shields or skin—knotted prayer
into the work—in hopes their sons and daughters might

be found? Return whole, neither soul nor body harmed?
If not—those prayers unraveled—found by some seeker

who’d chosen to climb or dive or dig to sift. To find.
In the next century, who will undertake to search out

remains of our blighting future? Bring news from any
icy slope or rift, any field of war—words of artifact.

Words of life. What debris might survive us (boot, sock,
son)? What handiwork—what stitched or scribbled name—

might last, scattered among sands or under mortar pits
or awash in tides that roll where cities once rose? Lit

by sharp stars that glitter over this one precarious world.

Cynthia Anderson

Cynthia Anderson has published a dozen poetry collections, including Full Circle (Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2022) and The Missing Peace (Velvet Dusk Publishing, 2021). Her poems frequently appear in journals and anthologies, and her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Cynthia is co-editor of the anthology A Bird Black As the Sun: California Poets on Crows & Ravens. She has lived in California for over 40 years.

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What It Costs

Wind watch. Normal
for a high-desert spring.
It’s been a week of buying
replacement necessities—
ceiling fans, garden hoses,
water filters—then visits
from the electrician,
plumber, handyman—
the kind of week
that takes a psychic toll
along with the blows
to the wallet. The decisions,
the scheduling, leave me
numb. I sit still while
the wind does what it will
with the pine boughs,
and long, flat clouds
scud past on the path
of least resistance.

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Just Something That Happens

I get up early enough
to witness the last
of the lunar eclipse—
a retreating shadow

like an old bruise
slowly fading away.
The mystery I missed
while asleep—or rather,

while I tossed and turned,
fitful—remains a mystery.
By now, the moon has nearly
returned to herself, only

slightly off-kilter
in the predawn dark,
as I am off-kilter
after dreaming of

an old friend who asks
to stay the night—
then the preparations,
the dusting, the laundry,

deciding where everyone
will sleep and what’s for
dinner, going to the store
with my niece, who wants

to make pumpkin pie.
Above it all, the moon
survives a shadow
not of her choosing,

just something that
happens, a story
for later that can
barely be recalled.

Ellen Austin-Li

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Telling His Parents

When my ripe belly filled my striped overalls
at six months, I begged my love to tell
his parents. When he’d told them
two years earlier we wanted to marry,
they squawked. When you choose
a woman, they said, she must be at least
five years younger—can she still have children?
Not a wingbeat of: She is not Chinese
(or did he spare me?). No. No women like me
posed in the photos where they paused
to ask their son, What about this one?
When we first met at the Yum Yum, his father asked,
What’s wrong with moving to your own hometown?
This, on the night of bursting seams. Can you sew?
his mother asked. Can you cook? The dumpling turned
in my oven. When we left the restaurant, my love nodded,
Soon, I promise, and took my hand.
                               After night shifts
in the hospital, hovering over sick kids in the PICU,
I collapsed and slept all day in my love’s nest.
When he finally delivered the news
to his parents, his mother called my name
into the empty house. She stood at the threshold
and chirped, We’re happy about you! We want you
to know—we’re happy about you & the baby!

K.B. Ballentine

KB Ballentine’s latest collection All the Way Through was published in November 2024 from Sheila-Na-Gig Inc. Current books can be found with Blue Light Press, Iris Press, Middle Creek Publishing, and Celtic Cat Publishing. Published in North Dakota Quarterly, Atlanta Review and Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, and others, her work also appears in anthologies including Women Speak (2025) and The Strategic Poet (2021). Learn more at www.kbballentine.com.

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The Fell of Dark

Turtlegrass twitches in high tide,
blades waving under keel as I paddle
down the coast, watch sails skim the blue.
Why do I always choose the difficult way?
Light strokes my skin
echoing the sky as I pause,
let waves sway the boat.
Under water, two lobsters wrestle,
shifting sand brushing their brown backs.
A cloud passes, shadows rippling the surface,
pockmarks of hard rain surprising the afternoon.

Gone again, horizon still veiled,
I bite my lip, salt stinging, and pull harder on the oar.
Challenge once more immediate, physical,
no time to consider the lilies, my loss.
Just sweat slipping down my back,
muscles cramping in the left, right motion.
Clouds chasing me in.

*title from Gerard Manley Hopkins (“fell” means “bitterness”)

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Prayer of Gratefulness

Thank you for this time
to drive to the hospital—

the one three hours away on back
lanes and two-lane highways

so it’s an adventure, a chance
to consider our family

and its ties. I’m grateful
we’re traveling toward the sun,

watching it set as we enter
the city, wind our way

to the hotel and hunker in.
Laugh at fitting in one room

with a wheelchair too wide
and tethers of cannulas, air

hoses and tank for one
who has no breath left.

No room for anger or arguing
when time is (so) short.

Thank you, thank you
for every moment, every memory

we’re making even as night falls.

Tom Barlow

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Ambition

Drag your thumb across the line
as it plays out, Dad said,
reaching around me with both hands
on my new fishing rod. He flicked

the tip of the rod and the spoon arced
toward the cattails where the lunkers
were thought to lurk. I was jazzed on my
eighth birthday, my first grown-up fishing gear.

He reeled in slowly, giving the lure
a beguiling life, and I wouldn’t ask myself
until after his passing why he chose
this battle to measure his life by,

with victories over smallmouth bass
and defeats when a muskie spat his crankbait.

I’m sitting in the office now at fifty
on a Sunday morning crafting a trap,
not quite a con, to reel in a little
more business, the miserable challenge

I’ve chosen to measure myself by.
I think back to the meals Dad brought home
with a treble perch harness and I’m saddened
victory in my life isn’t as simple as a fish fillet.

Perhaps instead of the office today
I should be sitting on some riverbank,
my back up against a sycamore,

whittling while I watch a bobber,
my ambition throwing no shadow
while next to me Dad
threads a worm onto his hook

as though this is
the most important task of his life.

Ruth Bavetta

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On the Other Side of the Wall

Inside the tall concrete border
of their separate country, the dogs next door,

privy to all things dark and dangerous,
send balloons of misery

into a world they seldom see. Sadness
sucks them up by the hair on the backs

of their necks. I imagine their mouths
round with sorrow, howls flying to the clouds.

Rose Mary Boehm

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A Deluge by Any Other Name

Tell me the story of the deluge,
sleep-mate of the anaconda,
shaman of the Urarina,
the downstream people.

Tell me about the first,
the one who climbed the cudí tree
and saved himself when
the daughter of the ayahuasca god
pissed a flood after the festival.
His wily wife also clung to the tree,
became a termite nest.

You can’t give your true name, but
all of nature knows it after you’ve
looked deep into the bottomless
Angel Trumpets.

Slash and burn.
Slash and burn.
The white faces got weeds for corn.
The Amazon was on your side.
So you let down your guard.

You never knew
your enemy’s true name.
Noisy gods with wings fly overhead,
misting death into your green immensity.

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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Apercus of My Grandfather

Grandfather’s first base mitt
saved in a grocery bag, dust,
mites, in the hollowed hallowed palm

          his novel writings
           smell of old age, little air—
           died young, never published.

No one has photos
of grandfather in his study—
no flash allowed in prison.

           Grandfather’s teacup
           the lone emblem of his life
           worn, without stain, perpetually empty

His hidden secret—
50s and 60s Geographics
in a dark corner of a closet

           Life-long abstention
           yet over the linotype ink
           tipsy with wordcraft

Hard worn tile of floor
one square curled at the edges
his footprint heavy

           Bald by eighteen
           said no hair could ever
           stay on his thoughts

A purpose to a walk
but nothing to do, find
breath evaporated, mind clear

           Beetle hidden in bark
           grandfather fascinated, digging
           like a woodpecker

Of trees, knew water
of water, knew rocks
of rocks, knew air

           Shaving lather whipped
           by brush like a snowstorm
           he shoveled to clean his chin

He could skip an un-flat stone
he knew where a voice echoed
because he kept singing

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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Maritime Morning Commute

San Francisco Bay

Off the Larkspur terminal, the boat glides
backward into the bay, the morning,
enters a gray-ceilinged, slate-paved atrium.
Wavelets like whispers of water.

Passengers’ fingers fly on keyboards
while the ferry hums, clouds hover
on the spring-greened hills. Light edges in
through a slit at the horizon, illuminates

the chill outside and, harder to reach, within.
On port, San Quentin’s beige walls loom,
ooze pain no coat of bright paint can efface,
what light filters through locked doors?

Which side is death row? The ferry accelerates,
follows briefly the San Rafael Bridge.
Cold descends on the deck, water sprinkles my face,
a baptism. On starboard, villas glide past,

gems set among shades of foliage,
angled to escape the prison’s view.
Angel Island Immigration Station’s cells,
empty eye sockets. The park’s serenity

shadowed by past tears, fears, longing for freedom,
lines carved into the barracks’ walls, poetry
the only exit, sorrow-singing a lifeline.
Echoes of pained voices carried by seagulls’ cries.

Through a skylight in the cloud cover, the sun
asserts its presence, the slice of brightness
a promise to the prow pointing towards the Port
of San Francisco, not yet in view for me,

lured inside the coffee in the main cabin.
The Golden Gate Bridge on starboard, awaiting
sunlight to set its reddish-orange sheen on fire.
Alcatraz, pelicans’ isle turned prison turned park,

emerges ghostly from the fog and the water,
now ruffled in waves chasing each other like children.
On starboard, skyscrapers rear up, while on port,
the Bay Bridge leaps from Yerba Buena Island

to the Financial District. The ferry slows down,
rumbles on approach, docks with a clanking,
delivers us, steps unbound, lungs full
of morning air, to our unwalled day.

Rick Christiansen

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Angle of Sky

They stood together in the pit—
father and son in a single angle of sky.

The boy’s hand trembled in his father’s palm.
The father lifted their hands higher.

“Look,” he said.
The boy tilted his chin.
The sky was wide,
hard above them.

“Are you cold?” the father asked.
The boy hesitated, then nodded.

The father squeezed his hand twice—
their signal for I’m here.
The boy squeezed back once—
their signal for I know.

Behind them,
metal clicked—
orders muttered,
boots shifting on frozen dirt.

The father lowered his head to the boy’s ear.
“I’m cold too,” he said.

For a breath,
the boy forgot the cold.
For a breath,
the father steadied himself.
For a breath,
something lifted.

Kersten Christianson

Kersten Christianson derives inspiration from wild, wanderings, and all that glitters and shines. Her newest poetry collection is The Ordering of Stars (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2026). Additionally, she is the poetry editor of the quarterly journal, Alaska Women Speak. Kersten lives in Sitka, Alaska, where she eyeballs tides, shops Old Harbor Books, and hoards smooth ink pens. The arm of her writing hand is adorned with colorful tattoos from the Yukon, including the image of Zhùr, a 57,000-year-old wolf pup discovered in the permafrost near Dawson City, Yukon, placed among an array of flowers, birds, stars, and lyrics by Stevie Nicks.

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Soon, April’s Rejuvenation: A Reflection of Renewal and Return

“Spring has returned [to some places]. The earth is like a child who knows poems [or a least a handful of letters].” — Rainer Maria Rilke

My now two-day hatched, pink-haired daughter FaceTimes me near the end of her spring break to chatter about squirrels nesting in her walls, to cam our cat Star in his various acts of repose and frisk, to let me know her spending allotment has receded in its hairline to a thin and wispy combover of $14, not so unlike the perpetual bust of my school district’s budget. The light of soon-April floods the borderlands framing her face, her show and tells, as if she were the window’s crystal bauble, the medium through which light passes and prisms against the blue pine floor. And the light is that which carries new greens and the bumblebee fire of daffodil bloom, cyan filtering through the flush of cherry blossom between their bloom and drift. I can almost catch the waft, the scent of PNW coffee houses, heady in the breeze. Lightfall here is similar, but different; no spring hues to shock the system, instead, a bounce and refraction off lingering ice-glazed snow berms, ocean gray and dingy, existing between the state of freeze and melt and repeat. I yearn for one, care less for the other, dream-step closer to living the earlier spring of the two with neither the grip of snow nor shovel, to instead leisure-wander the u-pick fields of spring bulb bloom. Because really, isn’t that what we all crave? The light warming our face, cracking the door open to illuminate the shadows, to spotlight the dust bunnies, the found dropped coin, or lost earring. For now, I remit the girl’s allowance to cover a restock of bagels and coffee beans, cat litter, Easter Peeps to match her hair. For now, the warble and trill, the scutter of songbird feet, winged brouhaha to flurry the daily drop of seed on porch. For now, I turn my face to spring.

April 1st for fools,
false spring, financial flimflam;
I’m eager to flee.

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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Bears in the Wild

Lily runs, each day, three miles.
She’s in love with a boy who is farther,
a thousand miles away.

We’ve hauled her on family vacation
to a cabin on Lake Chelan, Washington
where there is no phone. In fact, no road.

We walk a trail to Stehekin, the town.
Lily insists she sees bear tracks
and I insist they are dog tracks
explaining some dogs have large paws.

We meet a bear. Near Hazard Creek.
A she-bear. Not aggressive,
nor particularly impressed by us.
We are very impressed by her.
She walks a wide arc around us,
pausing to relieve herself, perhaps an opinion,
and then ambles on toward town
like a simple fact of nature
that cannot be stopped.

It is Lily’s birthday.
She was born outdoors under a pine tree
next to a cow pasture lit by a full moon.
From such a beginning she will go
to med school, become a doctor.
Of course we don’t know this yet,
only that she is no longer ours.
In the wood stove Rose bakes
an ersatz angel food cake.
For candles we light little twigs
poked into the top. Indulging us,
Lily blows them out, all 17.

From the cabin I watch
as she wanders down to the dock.
Gazes up at the almost touchable stars. Sings.
She’s looked at clouds from both sides now.
Clear through the dark her voice carries
easily to the cabin. To the owls in the air,
to the bears in the forest.
To a boy far, far away.

Robert L. Dean, Jr.

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The Book of Events

No one is born.
No one suckles at the breast of
a forgotten mother. The flavor of milk
becomes a vivid, though elusive, memory.

Dogs bark, or a dog, or possibly a cat. Outside,
a rooster crows, though there is no farm,
though maybe a vague idea of a farm,
possibly a summertime uncle’s farm.

Down the street jingles the Good Humor man,
pedaling his dreamsicle, green-bereted
Thin-Mint girls swarming after, encircled by
encyclopedias, Red Skelton fuller brushes
cleaning up, as seen in the illustration not provided.

No one ever grows up, or always. No one learns
anything, or everything, or someone maybe and everything.
There is much to unknow, the unknown outnumbering
the known, as far as no one can determine.

Love comes and goes, or doesn’t.
No one and everyone, or maybe just
someone, loves someone, or maybe even
no one. No one is ever sure and never certain.
Children come and go, grandchildren, not-so-grandchildren,

canaries swim in bowls, goldfish warble in cages,
Tinker Toys cross swords with light sabers,
Tom Watson responds to A. G. Bell’s request to
Come here with perfect AI pitch.

In the end the Good Old days are found, not so good
and older than anyone recalls, or everyone is older than
what can be recalled, and the nights are found
to be haunted, various nightmares resurrect, though
the prologue, which comes last, claims no resemblance
to persons, living, dead, or otherwise.

The book never closes, an obits page
awaiting a christening, but no one dies.
Here and there, a synapse flames out.

Salvatore Difalco

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Stormtroopers Advancing Under Glass

After my ship-in-a-bottle succumbed
to self-engendered thunderstorms,
I turned to war and fashioned a work
composed of pheasant skulls and bones,
some blackened with charcoal or blood,
all gathered under a classic glass cloche.

Battles and wars, battles and wars,
that is how I approached this probe
into the darker country of man,
ranging the skulls like gas masks,
stitching feathers and skin,
and crafting weapons from bones.

I could not know if the pheasants lived
good lives and died well, or fed families
or armies, or if they went out squawking,
afraid, or full of bitterness and regrets.
But I felt compelled to make the best
of their broken, meatless carcasses.

Battles and wars, battles and wars,
scoring the project from start to completion,
leaving no room for interpretation
or scorn. Covered in glass one might
suspect the remnants of a hearty meal,
not the gassing of millions or bayoneting.

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Bend It Like Albinoni

You rarely hear oboe music these days
when woe is written large upon the map.
But was there a time when it played
all day on the radio or someone’s
phonograph? This is one of those questions
that leaves the room when the door opens
and heads off to its part time job
teaching English as a Second Language.
Sometimes you lob a ball in the air
and hope it doesn’t come back down,
but it always does. Living a predictable
life can be a drag. Swinging a rope over
a rafter answers fewer questions than it invites.
Yes, we must fight our demons, with fists,
with concepts, whatever works best
given the natural gifts bestowed upon you
by the Maker. Careful where you step,
the rhododendrons have been out
of control lately and nothing I do helps.
Now that I am close to completing this
house call, I want to let you know that
everything is okay, everything is fine
and one day when I return with a soccer ball
under my arm and a watermelon under the other
you’ll know what and what not to say.

Lane Falcon

Lane Falcon’s poems from have been published in American Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, The Healing Muse, The Journal, Mayday Magazine, Medmic, Ninth Letter, New York Quarterly, Poet Lore, Poetry South, Presence, Quarter After Eight, Rust & Moth, Sheila-Na-Gig online, Spoon River Poetry Review, Swimm Everyday, Tar River Poetry, and more. Her first manuscript, Deep, Blue Odds, was selected as a finalist for the 2022 and 2023 Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize, as well as a semi-finalist for the 2022 Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize. It was recently published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

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At Newport Aquarium

Turns out the green moray eel
is actually yellow,

covered in mucus, I learn later,
fluorescing in murky tank water.

When it opens its mouth to breathe,
it reveals rows of rotting teeth

that could perforate and chew
slowly, but from which one could escape.

The fish swimming by know this
nocturnal predator is less than predatory—

tricked into thinking it’s hunted
by the school of minnows

someone pours into the tank each night.
Truth? It seems too old to hunt

even if starving—to constrict my waist,
then chest should I encounter it

in open water, the sail of my boat
a distant triangle. Even if it were to find me,

those teeth would break off in my skin
like softened seeds.

And, instead of the pain it could cause,
suddenly I see this long,

lonely fish as agony itself,
which is dying.

Robert Fillman

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My daughter came into the world

with a strawberry shaped birthmark
on her right arm. Baked in the womb
too long, a nurse joked. Just a sign
of her mother’s cravings, chuckled
an uncle. This means she’ll be ‘sweet’
a cashier said.
                             Hot to the touch,
maybe a storm brewing as in
the red dot on Jupiter, curved
like a full bust and narrow waist,
something to beware as she grows.

We traced the flaw with our fingers,
went to the children’s hospital
for yearly checkups, watched as it
withered away like the veins of
late summer, undrawing itself
as it sank deeper into flesh.

Now a teenager, there’s little
to see. Was it made of extra
blood vessels like the doctors said?
I prefer to think it was love.

What’s there now is the memory
of a seed, long runners climbing
the walls of our hearts when all we
could picture was a grain of rice,
or a pearl, or olive, the things
we used to measure a fast pulse.

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

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).

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Bizcocho

We sat on a bench eating bizcocho out
Of a paper bag, cake crumbling in our mouths.
When we’d arrived the night before, it was late,
Too late for the hotel restaurant or any place but
A late-night braseria, all metal and colored plastic—
Whatever we had to eat then, I don’t remember.
The other customers looked tired too.  They’d
Either worked all day or been waiting to score
All evening.  I wanted that night in Barcelona
To feel different, maybe an exotic scent in the air,
But it was just cold and smelled like any other
City.  A wind from the Mediterranean turned
Corners and shifted the dust from one side of
The street to another, climbing the mountains,
Then sliding back onto the same streets, moving
The same dust.  When we left the braseria, it started
To rain.  We walked quickly by the Mercat de
Sant Antoni without knowing what it was, just
Anonymous iron and brick, rain blowing in
Our faces.  In daylight, it was different.  We
Walked through the market and onto the wide
Avenues, plane trees, white with green leaves
Lining the pavement, and the benches you liked
Were on every street.  You said the bizcocho
Was the same cake you ate growing up
in Colombia: eggs, sugar, a little flour, yeast. 
We dug the last crumbs out of the bag, careful
Not to miss anything.

Christien Gholson

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Good/Bad

There is a stuffed lynx
in a glass box in a restaurant in Ely.
There are photos
  from 1930’s westerns on the wall.
Some actors
wear black hats, some
wear white. There are
                 tiny, anonymous graves
scattered all over this desert.
                                      Out here,
drones hover behind
a brilliant sun, practice
for the second coming.
                              There are lights
that move across the night sky,
soaking up the darkness
                               between stars.
No one knows what they are,
what they might mean. I have seen
the men with metal detectors
get down on all fours, desperate
to find pieces of
                         the one true secret,
                          the hidden center,
                    that will destroy all lies.
A vulture’s shadow –
a sudden cross –
briefly animates the stone at my feet.

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Ghost

There had been alligator eyes here once.
                They softly broke
                    the water’s surface at dawn,
took me in, gave me life.
                              There had been catfish
who could imitate the deep sleep
of the first fish, and so
    dreamt my joy and terror into being.
All the bodies in that swamp
                exchanged shadows at twilight.
The dendrites of tiny red ants
sent shadow-messages
to cottonmouth scales, centipedes
transubstantiated into catfish chin barbels.
How is it
          that I have continued to live so long
                after this swamp disappeared?
I thought something would be left.
                I waited for something to rise up,
meet me, recognize me, ghost to ghost,
reclaim me.
                    I waited until night fell.

Gary Glauber

Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He was awarded this year’s Peter Heinegg Literary Award from Union College. He has five collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press), Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), Rocky Landscape with Vagrants (Cyberwit), A Careful Contrition (Shanti Arts Publishing) and most recently, Inside Outrage (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), an Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur finalist. He also has two chapbooks, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press) and The Covalence of Equanimity (SurVision Books), a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize.

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The Law of Providence (an abecedarian)

Ask, this world is yours for the asking…
because few are so inclined, most lack the
courage necessary to voice their precious
desires in a precise and demanding way.
Every day is the dawn of enchantment
for the favored, those aligned with the flow,
grateful, but guided by a spirit of abundance whereby
having is real, a great deal for all who’ve mastered
internalizing growing wants into already haves. The
justice of knowing how preparation breeds luck, like
kindling, caressing the sparks into fire, passions
lifting with each thrilling pop and crackle,
mesmerizing new memories for the promise of ages.
No, I can see your frown lines of skeptic disbelief,
oh, it’s pretty obvious from where I’m sitting. The doubt,
put on like an old familiar coat, protecting you from
questions answered, from the weather of true belief.
Resistance occurs without warning, like an unexpected
sprinkle on a summer’s afternoon, almost a reflex at
times, though the possibilities of changed attitude
urge you forward like an imagined rainbow, a swirling
vertigo of iridescent colors, each stripe a truism of
worldly welfare, a way to dissolve fruitless hopes, to
X-out the disappointing vagaries of the wishy-washy.
You and only you can commit to getting all you want:
zero in and find this world is yours for the asking, truly.

Tony Gloeggler

---

Tracking

Spent all Wednesday morning
tracking flights, hoping
that the 15 inches dumped
on NYC the day before
was enough snow to cancel
my 2:55 PM lift off from JFK.
Streets, sidewalks still a mess,
the 10 block walk to the subway
with a fully packed knapsack
could be rough and the train
to the plane not running regularly
yet with cabs iffy at best, chronic
construction already making
the normal trek endless.

When the word cancelled
appeared next to my Delta
flight to Burlington, it felt
like I filled out my bingo
card, pumping my fist,
grinning as if claiming
a winning pot. I was relieved,
happy to hibernate, stay
warm and well rested
for the rest of the week
instead of walking to, from
bus stops, restaurants
and shops all around frigid
Vermont for 3 days with Jesse.

I put on some music, Shelby
Lynne, Alejandro Escovedo,
unpacked and fixed a classic
lunch: grilled cheese sandwich,
Campbell’s tomato soup,
pickle on the side, scrolled
around on line for a while.
But by 3:30 I started feeling
guilty, knowing how upset
Jess gets whenever his schedule
changed and remembered
I hadn’t seen him since
the first week of January,
the longest time between
visits after Covid broke
and damn I miss him.

I should be sitting across
the table from him trying
to convince him to eat dinner
at this newly opened, nearby
place, Bliss Bee, Wednesday
February 25. I researched
the menu and we’d rehearse
ordering 2 hot dogs, French
fries extra hot, mango juice,
practice saying no mustard
or ketchup, no sauerkraut,
onions, no bread either.

Yep, plain please. Then off
to Barnes N Noble, for I book,
on to Gracey’s for a big snack
and finally 7:30 PM, Evening
Routine, while all along, he recites,
anxiously and autistically, days,
months, years, he wants me back,
pauses until I say yes. One
weekend a month from March
2026 through January 2029
while I’m hoping I’ll still be
alive, happy knowing someone
will still want me around.

Catherine Gonick

---

Cocktails on the Patio

The sound of their talk floats over my head
like words in a book I can’t yet read.
I only know letters and don’t understand
most of what grownups say or why
no one sees
what my father’s
client is doing
his fingers
beneath my dress
moving on me
as I sit on his lap in a crowd
of my parents and their guests
everyone laughing and drinking
cocktails outside
in the sun
as my father barbecues T-bone steaks.

The client’s fingers keep pressing
to the sound of their talk
and I think about telling
but the sky would split
so I just watch
letters high on a cloud
pile and crawl all over themselves
like ants until they can form a black line
like words in a book and march away.

Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas

---

Until We Don’t

Climb into bed with me naked says the man in my room.
And I think he must be the husband from a book I’ve read,
written a hundred lifetimes ago. Some kind of romance novel,
outdated or thrown away. Look, I say, I’m not prepared
for that kind of talk from you tonight. I’m just going to wash
my face and scrub my feet, put on my old nightgown
and turn out the light, close my eyes for a long winter’s
nap, so to speak, savor our comfort. So if you want passion,
you’ll have to whisper about the moon, how it holds itself
up in the middle of the sky as if it’s cradled by the hand
of god, its immaculate reflection in the ocean’s tears.
Tell me something beautiful so we can fake ourselves
into eternity. Pretend this kind of lovemaking lives
on beyond the moment because something tells me once
you have your way with me, you will be too tired to talk
about the weather, or anything else of minor importance—
and this is what I wait for, this time with you, before
I’m ready to shut down for the evening. Half afraid
I’ll never wake up from whatever it is we’re doing here,
this life together, this dream of day to day of being
alive with you. This safe and easy haven of closeness,
my gratitude growing each minute in the waking hours
we share. I don’t want the tomorrows, I want to dare
myself into the nearness of hope, where the outcomes
have yet to begin, to linger here, both of us outside
of time, in the happiness of all that’s possible. I want to be
straddled in the midst of us, to be almost in bed. You waiting
for me always, and forever, before anything forgotten
has already been said, knowing you’ll lie next to me soon.
Your body beside mine like two olive trees knotted into
the other, tangled up as we breathe beneath the covers,
wreathed in love, buried under a veil of leaves.

Gary Grossman

---

Synergy

Sometimes two things
combine for greater
impact than either alone,
one plus one equals
three or even five, like
the street dogs grinning
to please both owners
and audience, or how
orange safety suits
shout person louder
than either solitary
red or yellow, or when
5-fluorouracil mixes with
leucovorin, killing colorectal
tumor cells faster than
either drug in solitaire,
or the family that bloomed
when you found the last
piece of my jigsawed heart.

Catherine Harnett

---

Chesapeake

My beloved took me fishing
in the Chesapeake, showed me
how to kill and skin bluefish he reeled in:

deliver a strong blow to the head
with a rock or bat; sever the spinal cord,
remove the gills and entrails, toss
them onto ice.

Return to shore.
There was a coal fire, there was
beer, it was summertime, cicadas
sang and hummed
in trees, in search of mates.

He said it didn’t suffer, the open-mouthed
stunned thing we feasted on.

Melissa Joplin Higley

---

As I See Her

She rides cross-legged on top of the catering cart,
two others pushing the cargo of snacks, drinks, girl—
a trio of giggling teen volunteers winding through

a waiting room full of breast cancer patients.
Her eyes dart between her peers, as if relishing
the attention of two not brave enough to shear

the rules. She sits up there longer than I expect,
pushing some limit only she deems worth pushing,
while the others unload cookies, crackers, juice.

A staff member finally approaches, scolds her
for being unsafe and inappropriate. I can see
the girl’s time slowing to a painful crawl, her

brain identifying its error. She untangles herself,
slides her feet to the floor, aware now of the field
of patients’ gazes, shame flaming her cheeks,

shutting her back inside herself, body imploding,
curving toward the ground—a tender stem shriveling
from bloom to wither. Head lowered, she avoids

even her friends’ eyes—giddiness gone dormant.
How many times have I been that girl, wished
someone would take my hands, reassure me

humiliation is temporary. How many times
have I wished to be seen, as I see her now:
a tendril, unfurling and green, ready to become—

---

Wild Eye

We travel down the highway
alongside an 18-wheeler, hauling

animals locked in by wide, aluminum
rails, allowing just enough air to stir

the stench of urine and feces.
Glimpsing fragments—an ear, a tail,

an occasional haunch—I see, low,
between the floor and first rail,

a glossy, black orb, reflecting
a watery spot from the sun—the

giant eye of a motion-sick horse,
relenting to the buckling of her knees

to lie still and flat on the cool boards,
gazing through the bars of her cage

at the woods, hurling by in a blur.
Listless and defeated, she surrenders

her muscles to gravity’s rough
clutch. I imagine her shell-shocked—

that naked moment of truth
when desire lies prone—legs open,

sickly and vulnerable. That eye—
so close now I want to reach out

and gently close its lid—stares
at me, watering in the 70-mph

wind. As my window lines up
directly across, I can see, it’s not

an eye after all, but a pig’s anus—
dark and swollen, cooling itself

in the untethered wind.

Donna Hilbert

---

Earth Child

Emerging from a half-fathomed dream
with Earth Child on the lip
of my brain, I remember the creature
I found while digging
in the hard dirt yard behind our first house
near the refinery and your work.

Earth Child, you said. No harm, you said.
I cradled the thumb-sized body in my palm.
It looked like a baby, not of our making,
from a world unknowable and full as our own.

Leslie Hodge

---

White Space

Here is where the Christmas tree stood.
Folded like an umbrella, we laid it to rest—
wire, plastic, fake needles, fake wood—
in a worn cardboard box. The tree like a guest
who’d overstayed her welcome. Years ago,
as a baby just learning to sit up by herself,
our daughter sat under that tree all aglow
with colored lights. There’s a photograph.
Now, lacking the lights and decorations,
our living room corner is empty and white.
The souvenir ornaments and child-made creations
that bear witness to every year of her life
abide in the garage, packed in bins.
But let’s be honest. She won’t open them.

Alicia Hoffman

---

Time Is a Fish and I Am the Net It Slips Through

Near the old Agway, crayfish still burrow under
the smooth stones I skipped across as a child.

And look, there is the old penny candy store.
And there, there is the cemetery where I’d slither

between stones like a small snake to reach
the wild strawberry. Do they remember me?

The days that flashed like lightning, condensed
as a kitchen on jamming day, thick with

the steam of the pot, the ripe fruit ready for gelatin.
I can no longer knock on the door to my childhood,

but I can stand like an old ghost past the window:
inside is my mother. Her healthy thyroid concealed

under a layer of sun-kissed skin. She hums
as she works mason jars into warm baths.

A Police album on the stereo. Synchronicity. Watch
how I do not knock at the door. How I see my small

self come into the kitchen. I had caught a minnow
in the creek and my sneakers were sopping wet

and I held the slithering thing in my cupped palm like
a treasure to show her: her, who was all that mattered

at the time. What is time, anyhow, when I can still watch
her turn to the window, past the me who is me no longer?

Mary Ann Honaker

Mary Ann Honaker is the author of Becoming Persephone (Third Lung Press, 2019), Whichever Way the Moon (Main Street Rag, 2023), and the forthcoming Night is Another Realm Altogether (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2026). Her poems have appeared in Bear Review, DIAGRAM, JMWW, Juked, Little Patuxent Review, Rattle.com, River Heron Review, Solstice, Sweet Tree Review, Tuskegee Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Beckley, West Virginia.

---

What Nature Knows

Allow the wavering shadows of trees.
Breaths of wind shift them soundlessly. I
can imagine wanting them to stay still.

Decades, my desire for sharp lines and the
elimination of moving boundaries
formed a bifurcated mind in me. I

grew fixed as a bee gathering pollen,
hovering where the holy odor clung.

I skipped down that balance beam until I slipped,
jaws clacking as my chin hit the ground. I
know what I know now, which is that I don’t.

Light bulb of the sun clicks, lantern of the
moon dims, shadows gather in midsummer.
Noon creates the sharpest shadows of all.

Over me hangs my ignorance, a cloud
plum and pregnant with rain. A groundhog

quirkily bumbles through my yard. He holds
rare wisdoms in his plump body. Much the
same, every bird knows its own song.

Trees know to burrow into the earth, and
upwards reach, trying to touch the Divine.

Villains don’t know they are wicked, and my
woman-body does not know it is good.

Xenophobic humans don’t know their kin.
Yellow dandelions know they’re earth’s suns.

Zenith of knowledge, pity me, poor climber.

David I. Hughes

---

The Alibi

The menu is a novella.
Small print. Big promises.
A Night in Marrakech.
The Smokey Negroni.
Something designed with layers.

She orders the one with the flower.
Two hours of minimum wage.
She’ll post it before she drinks it.

The glass is a geometry lesson.
The ice a cube from God.
A sugared rim.
The garnish a twist
of something that used to be fruit.

She takes a picture.
She takes a sip.

The cocktail is a lie she tells herself:
I am not drinking.
I am tasting.
I am having an experience.

The flower wilts.
The ice softens.
The bill arrives.

She orders another.
No flower this time.

The drink is gone.
The alibi is gone.

She is just drinking.

Paul Jones

---

Dolor Update

– respect to Theodore Roethke

I have known the tremendous tedium of Teams,
the insulting flicker of pixels on lonely screens
aglow like disinterested stacks of mirrors,
a dull display of dimensionless desolations.
The irredeemable irritation of ear phones
stuck in the dungeon of Spotify’s Classic Rock.
The disembodied vocalizations of pets ignored,
shutout. The email set aside, meant to be sent,
stuck in the near-eternal limbo named Drafts. At last,
it drops into folders aptly named Trash, named Spam.
The vapid inspirational Thoughts For the Day,
A. I. generated in predictable phrases,
which, rendered in Arial, appear sincere.
Then the dark pit into which dreams disappear.

Jeremy Jusek

---

Fresh Air Under a Crocodile Sky

Cut off my ear and paste it to the ground
this is the way to hear the padded cats
slink across the ground, the other is to
walk into the shin-biting grasses
of the open wild strapped with dripping raw meat.

Little leopard, flick the rain off your head
and settle back down, egg yolk eyes
bonzai tree perch… gaping straw heave
the slipping life streams churn their
bass across a purring melody.

Kruger calling and the eggs have cracked,
let the land keep calling and the crocodiles
surface. Meat bowl slap stick brazen flesh
into a fine paste, pressing breeze picks up to gale
when watched by the Southern Cross, held up by Orion’s belt.

The wind betrays you, but you
yes you betrayed it—
you didn’t rip off your ear. You didn’t
paste it to the ground. You weren’t
leaves on the water. The kitty has
followed you for over a kilometer,
and the hunter thrives on the hunted’s routine.

Experience excessive coolness
moments before the world gets wet.

Jen Karetnick

---

Landscaping, with Poison

A golden shovel after “For most animals, the milkweed plant is far from appetizing: It contains nasty
toxins…” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-monarch-butterflies-evolved-to-eat-a-poisonous/

We designed the front lawn for
butterflies, dragonflies, bees—most
of the pollinators—those other animals
going extinct from loss of habitat. The
Meyer lemon trees, the giant milkweed,
even a fountain is necessary to plant,
providing mosquito-egged water from what is
a stable source. How were we so far
from predatory knowledge, from
the peacocks who find caterpillars appetizing,
the yardstick-long iguanas? Now when it
flowers, despite what it contains,
the yard attracts colonies who are nasty
with hunger, who happily devour toxins.

Tricia Knoll

---

Huzzah for the Unknown

You may call it spirit; I call it mystery. Pleated, fanning open when least expected. Faint like dust and ice rings around Neptune. Or totally new – swirl sounds of dust devils on Mars. That nematodes survive in the Atacama Desert, the driest one on earth. Someone enters corrections – as knowledge inches its way along. Eighty-five years passed before an umlaut was added over the names of Brontë sisters’ memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey. Dinosaur bones pop up with some regularity, but recently scientists discovered seeds of a 32,000-year-old campion plant buried deep in a squirrel cache in Siberian permafrost. It flowered. A US missile did blast the girl’s school in Minab on the first day of the war with Iran. I cannot state with confidence that truth always outs but keep faith in the radish seed. It splits and sprouts. The radish zesty.

Judy Kronenfeld

Judy Kronenfeld’s six full-length books of poetry include If Only There Were Stations of the Air (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024), Groaning and Singing (FutureCycle, 2022), Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017), and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Her third chapbook is Oh Memory, You Unlocked Cabinet of Amazements! (Bamboo Dart, 2024). Judy’s poems have appeared in four dozen anthologies and in such journals as Cider Press Review, Gyroscope Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, Rattle, Right Hand Pointing, Sheila-Na-Gig online, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Verdad. Her newest book is Apartness: A Memoir in Essays and Poems (Inlandia Institute, 2025).

---

Immortal Weather

Radiance wanes a bit
in Southern California—
just enough chill to taste
brief coziness indoors.
But the year never dies,
exiling us inside.
No months of bare, dry branches
scraping the rushing clouds
that almost shroud
the flickering disc
of our pale daystar. Winter
never gets installed.
Always the prodigal
sun comes back—
flagrant, grandiose,
unrepentant—melting
our impermanence away.

Paula J. Lambert

Paula J. Lambert has published five full-length poetry collections including Terms of Venery, Revised and As If This Did Not Happen Every Day, both from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. She has also published six chapbooks. Lambert is also a literary translator, small press publisher, and visual artist. Her work has been supported by the Ohio Arts Council, the Greater Columbus Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Her mentorship has been recognized by PEN America. A strong supporter of the intersection of poetry and science, she lives in Columbus with her husband Michael Perkins, a philosopher and technologist.
More at www.paulajlambert.com.

---

Love in the Midst of Impending Doom

We are well in the midst of our promised decline,
aware of it and so happy, knowing the rise of holy

ecstasy comes in the creping of skin, the curve
and line and lumpy weight of so much loss

and perfect gain. We’ve dined together, gluttonous,
starved ourselves with worry, been sick, pined

while apart—that mournful yearning, fearful,
knowing what will, eventually, come for us all.

But not today, not in the current sweat of this
honestly miraculous skin, mole and tag and scar

all tingling, joyful: thin and graying hair, baldness,
exuberant cataract vision and gradually muffling

sound, the ebullient suffering of eons, epochs,
canyons of time so open, alive in beautiful decay.

Dotty LeMieux

---

Waiting at the Bus Stop

for a bus that never comes.
It’s evening.
I have gone with my mother
who was keynote speaker at an event
discussing junior delinquency.

My mother proud
to have been asked to speak.
Normally so shy,
in this arena shines.

Her speech on early action to save them.
Prevention.
Their home life.
Teachers should see the signs she says
as she did so many years ago
when the classroom not the kitchen
was her home.

They need help they are
crying out for help
and they get punished instead.

Shame on us.

This is in 1960
Kennedy is on track
to lead our nation
my mother ardent in her support.

It gives her strength. Hope
for her country, herself
and in me who would never
become a juvenile delinquent.

There is a streetlight.
The air is cold.
We stand outside the drugstore
and the bus never comes.

She keeps an eye on her watch.
Can’t we call dad—I ask

She doesn’t answer
looks at her watch and waits.

Finally going inside to ask
the man behind the counter in his white
pharmacists smock
why the bus hasn’t come
as if he by proximity must also be
the keeper of timetables.

There is no bus—he informs us.
The last one left an hour ago.
Oh, now surely we must call dad to get us.

Can you call us a cab?—asks my Mom
in her familiar mom voice
almost haughty with its proper
Boston accent,
the same one Kennedy speaks in.

She should have married him I think
and stayed in Boston and we could live
in one of those houses made of brick near the river.
She could give speeches about how great
her husband is how bold and true
upright and kind .
How he would protect us from bombs and from men
who are at best indifferent, like
my dad.

Sullen and resigned driving home
the new cars he sells
during the day.
In Boston Mom would have a cook
and not have to put the dinner on the table
at six o’clock sharp.

And then iron while we watched
Gunsmoke on TV.
And spend money we don’t have on a cab
which seems like giving up.
Like admitting you made a mistake.
You read the bus schedule wrong
and there was no one there
no knight in a suit to use
his plummy Boston voice
to say—Dear, there’s no bus tonight.

Please take the limo home.

Marjorie Maddox

---

Late Day Request

From wherever loss lingers,
come, dip your hands in those waters
and bring them to my face,
the cool of palms brushing across
my aging cheeks and brow.

What do you know of age,
or fear, or language
except what you found without me
somewhere in the long-ago,
around the bend from here,
before we forgot to remember—
slick with the river’s scent—
that we’d forgotten what we called out
to each other—drifting too fast and far—
to bring the other one home.
Come close.
Say it now.

Tamara Madison

Tamara Madison is the author of the chapbooks “The Belly Remembers” (Pearl Editions) and “Along the Fault Line” (Picture Show Press), and three full-length volumes of poetry, “Wild Domestic” and “Moraine” (Pearl Editions) and “Morpheus Dips His Oar (Sheila-Na-Gig). Her fourth collection, Russian Honeymoon, is expected from Fernwood Press in 2026. Her work has appeared in Chiron Review, the Worcester Review, A Year of Being Here, One Art, the Writer’s Almanac and many other publications. A swimmer, dog lover and native of the southern California desert, she has recently retired from teaching English and French in a Los Angeles high school. Read more about her at tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

---

Oh, America.

Oh, America. Look at you:
fashioned from theft, murder
and dreams, sustained by myth

your rock-solid Constitution rent.
Oh country I have loved, felt safe in—
you mock yourself.

Greedy behemoths giddy
with power devour the leaves
of freedom like the hornworm

destroys the tomato plant.
When will the cocoon form?
What rough beast will emerge?

---

Morning

—after Ellen Rowland

Friend, don’t say no
to this, of all mornings!
The creased sheets
no longer desire your form
and sleep’s river
has waterlogged you through.
Let the grace of the world
take your hand and lead you
to me. Here, where the sun
pours through the glass,
let us call forth music.
For the world’s sake,
let’s dance!

Jessica Manack

Jessica Manack lives with her family in the North Side of Pittsburgh. Her writing has appeared widely in anthologies and journals, including Still: The Journal, SWWIM Every Day, and Fine Print, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a recipient of a Curious Creators Grant and a Getaway Artist Fellowship, and serves as a Poetry Reader for TriQuarterly and Engagement Editor for the Pittsburgh Review of Books. In 2024, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions published her poetry collection, Gastromythology.
Learn more at
http://www.jessicamanack.com

---

Morning Greeting

It was like and unlike a present—
a surprising white at the bottom of the stairs,
china against cement. Looking up, I saw
the source— a bird’s nest in the gutter,
all systems go except for the lack
of chiming, of hungry cries, of sound.

Reexamining the ground,
I traced the flakes of eggshell
until I found what I figured I’d find:
a crescent not empty,
but full over a fallen ball
of yolk and feathers poking out.

Or – not feathers, but the blueprint
for feathers, not bones but frameworks,
clumped together and wet, round
as white bread rolled between fingers.
Why do I always look? I always look.

At the risk of later hearing chirps
in my omelet, peeps in my quiche,
I stare for as long as I can at this wreckage.
This knowledge is a gift, my secret—
a glimpse of what happens in dark
before surprised by light,
a corpse I didn’t kill,
coal en route to jewel.

Jonie McIntire

Jonie McIntire, former Poet Laureate of Lucas County, Ohio (2022-2025), has authored Semidomesticated, (rereleased through Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2022) which won Red Flag Poetry’s 2020 chapbook contest; Beyond the Sidewalk, (Nightballet Press, 2017); and Not All Who Are Lost Wander, (Finishing Line Press, 2016). She hosts Uncloistered Poetry from Toledo, Ohio.

---

Of The Political Polls That Never Stop Calling, What I Want To Tell Them…

Where to stick it.
But I’m all tuckered out
and they never ask
about my abortion
or why all my black neighbors
rent but the white own.
They don’t ask about
my uncle Tucker, who
would have been
in his fifties by now
if he hadn’t hanged himself
at seventeen.

They don’t ask about
why so many cars keep
driving into houses, why
it’s easier to get weed
than a decent electrician,
why my hot flashes have turned
to perimenopausal rage.

I want to tell them
the Greatest of All Time
can’t be known until we’re gone,
that asking today what we’ll
do tomorrow is counting
eggs as future egg-layers.

But tomorrow is work,
and going to the doctor is work,
and eating real food
is work, and drinking water,
and reading about another
natural disaster is work,
and worry is work and fear
is work. And even Tucker,
even back when he was a teen,
was tuckered out already.

So I scroll through email,
delete delete delete, save,
and try to find beauty
in a smoothly-running roundabout,
in the rosebush still thriving
despite so many aphids,
in the crossword puzzle clues
I definitely know the answers to.

Wendy McVicker

Wendy McVicker served as poet laureate of Athens, Ohio from 2020 through 2022, and is a longtime Ohio Arts Council teaching artist. Her books include a collaborative collection with poet Cathy Cultice Lentes, Stronger When We Touch (The Orchard Street Press, 2023) and Alone in the Burning (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2024). Her full length collection, Meanderlines is forthcoming from Sheila-Na-Gig Eitions.

---

One Summer Night

We lived for a week
in a tiny thin-walled
rental at the shore,
flimsy as a box of Saltines
where we, the ragged crumbs,
salt-and sand-crusted, rolled
and tumbled, in and out
of the great gray-green sea.
Nothing else to do, until
one night when the boathouse
across the way burst into flames
I bet they could see all the way
to Wildwood.
We got on our borrowed
bikes and joined the other
summer kids, maybe the all-
year-round kids too, and rode
as close as we dared to roaring,
heat-spitting, brighter-than-fireworks
flames, cheered — or wanted to —
as rafters blackened and fell
in sprays of gold, as walls
went hollow and collapsed,
until we were shooed away,
dampened. What did we know,
of fire’s merciless power to wipe
the world clean of all our traces?
Desire simmered inside us, ready
to boil over: we wanted
some of that power for ourselves.

---

Origins of Dance

We were birds, we flew
in swirling murmurations,
we dipped and soared,
flashed our feathers
in the sun, brushing
our feather-tips before
each other’s faces.

Beneath us, the restless
earth—mountains and lakes,
fields of waving grasses.

Beneath us, rivers
meandering.

We were birds and restless
we flew across the sky,
we gathered blue at dusk
and rained it into the eyes
of those who looked up
when our shadows swept
over them.

We were birds, and when
we came to earth, we learned
to dance.

Victoria Melekian

Victoria Melekian grew up in Los Angeles and now lives with her husband in Carlsbad, California. Her poetry collection “The Accidental Courage of Our Lives” is available from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. “Unhoused,” Victoria’s novella-in-flash, won first place in the 2026 Bath Flash Fiction Novella-in-Flash Awards. For more, see her website: victoriamelekian.com

---

Far From Familiar

The lease never mentioned
the scrub jay came with the house—
a sassy bird, feathers as blue
as my mood these days, a bird
the neighbor says will eat peanuts
from my palm, my shoulder,
even the top of my head.
The bird watches me through windows
and follows as I move room to room
unpacking pots and pans, clothes, books,
and things I wonder if I will keep.
He taps on the glass when I wash dishes
or work at the computer. He’s a streak
of blue racing to my porch when I come home,
my companion at sunset. I want to invite him in
to sit on the rim of my coffee mug,
peck at a dinner plate, maybe soft screech
into my ear at night, but it’s too soon.

---

Wild Meadow Girls

Not everyone likes California natives.
They’ve got a reputation for showing up

uninvited and living wild. Exactly what
I want in my yard: Autumn Glow’s

spikes, Blonde Ambition’s seed head,
Pink Flamingo’s bright plumes. These girls

put the ass in grass, swaying come hither
waves in every breeze. They strut across

the ground like they own it, plop down
long curly roots, flower whenever they please.

Neither shovel nor hoe scares them away.
I hope they stay forever, soaking up sun,

flirting with pollinators, whispering
sweet nothings to honeybees.

Ann E. Michael

---

My Father, The Optimist

When the doctors said maybe, you heard
the be, not the may, and so you were

like a green stem, phototropic always
moving toward the sun, a metaphor

easy to understand, for you were bright
even as a child, sunny and outgoing

though I didn’t know you then as you
must precede me, I am your daughter

and was long dependent upon your
hearth, the very house that sheltered me

and upon you, who sheltered me with
a childhood that was, as you’d say,

good enough, a place full of light and of
your outlook which was learned enough

to recognize irony and sorrow, to know
disaster but also humor, wedged everywhere

in the fissures of existence. And you knew
there would be light past the dark

or that, if there was not light, then the dark
ahead would be a dark most wondrous.

Jean Voneman Mikhail

---

Longest Light

I saw you stopped at the longest light in the world,
and I wondered if you noticed me there, too,
catty corner to you in your car,
also waiting on the longest light
on the outskirts of our small town.

You know the one— the stoplight down
by old White’s Mill on the Hocking River
where shallow waters churn and become
dangerously deep after storm—
where a man once drowned
trying to save his son from drowning.

Cars inch forward, and people lean into
steering wheels, antsy for that light to change.
They sneak glances at their phones,
heads bowed. Maybe on Facebook,
like worshippers waiting for the church
service to end. But this is just a long light.

I’m counting down minutes we’ve spent
together, stopped at that light.
Forever red, the bulb swings ever so slightly
inside the chamber, like a heart
throbbing to life before it blinks to green.
The eye of the sleeping dragon opens.

Your face obscured by sky’s reflection
on the windshield. Inside a cloud on the glass,
you appear to be some kind of a god.
Your hand floats over the steering wheel,
brushes something away, maybe a fly.
Your elbow rests on the window, a wing.
Then, the light changes and you drive away.

I see you stopped at other places, too,
other lights on the east side of town.
The four way stop between Burger King
and Walmart, for example.
I swing around in my car, turning left,
and there you are again, unaware
that I am there, and the last time
I caught you mid-laugh, maybe chatting
with your brother, maybe listening
to NPR’s Fresh Air on the radio.
Or maybe joking at my expense.

You won’t notice the coincidence,
the uncanny way we meet at crossroads.
But I have kept count. We are always both
alone and in our own worlds. But then,
this last time, a saw someone with you—clearly
in the flash of yellow warning lights.

Her face was the color of a freshly broken
egg, and I puzzled over the shell of light
stuck in the corner of her eye. I still am
clinging to the idea that you felt
and wondered at the mysterious forces
that drew us together in the first place.
Then, this spell was broken.
The light that used to hold us together,
has turned, as lights always do.

Michael Minassian

Michael Minassian is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, A Matter of Timing and Jack Pays a Visit, are all available on Amazon. His collection 1000 Pieces of Time was released October, 2025 by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. For more information:
https://michaelminassian.com

---

Blackbird Morning

When I meet my friend,
a poet and recovering alcoholic,
for coffee at an outdoor cafe,
the day seems thin and brittle
as a piece of burnt toast.

I tell her about my neighbors,
about to be evicted,
who vanished without a trace,
and their house, vacant for a month,
the for-sale sign on the lawn,
a forlorn flag waving in surrender.

But she wants to know
where we go
when we are dead,
and laments that
I’m not being any help.

I can only point
to the deepening sky,
and the blackbirds
that gather across
the street in the park,
forming an uneven circle
as if they’re on the floor
of a cheap dancehall,
calling to each other
with something like dread.

Peter Mladinic

---

Screwdriver

I remember looking at the brown
wooden handle of a screwdriver
speckled with little dots of robin’s egg
blue paint. Morning. The corner
of an open garage, with the spiderwebs.
Something registers in me: beauty,
though I wasn’t thinking, just holding
the screwdriver, its handle the light
brown of cardboard, and looking
at the dots of paint. God only knows
what became of it, maybe it’s still
sitting somewhere, whole, maybe even
with the blue dots, not washed away
by time. I thought of it this morning.
When you’re a young child you think
everything’s going to stay the same,
for me, that the red linoleum counter
would stay red; and when it changed
to white Formica with little slashes
of gold, I noticed but didn’t think about it.
Now I’m thinking change, impermanence,
all the time: people, places, things I notice,
and you may too. If you’re old enough,
you remember white cardboard coffee
cups, containers with glaze inside
to keep the coffee from soaking through,
and they had lids with smooth round rims
that you could turn and take off, to sip
the coffee, lids and containers
I much prefer to Styrofoam cups
and flimsy plastic lids, though maybe
trees see it differently. If you don’t recall
the cups I’m fond of, you can see one
in The Godfather Part I. The Turk
is standing around sipping from one,
Coppola such a stickler for detail.
It was either before or after the Turk
was talking all nice to Michael about
doing business, all the while scheming
the demise of the patriarch
of the Corleone family. That cup
in the Turk’s gloved hand is the public
“things don’t last” and the screwdriver
is the private, a thing I held;
as I have mine, you have yours, maybe
a vest you wore twenty years ago.
On the line for self-checkout (they
never had in the Turk’s day), you wonder
if that vest is still a vest, and if anyone
is wearing it, where they are, who they are.

Juan Mobili

---

Chopping

The first time I smelled an onion turning gold
on a shallow bed of olive oil, it was my mother

chopping it down to fine rain, cooking it, slowly,
on a cast iron pan, demanding I keep my distance.

It would be years before I was entrusted with an onion
that needed chopping —my wife, afraid I’d fail

to wield a blade without losing a finger,
my enthusiasm at odds with bleeding.

They were wise women, who protect me
from my romance with sharp knives.

It took more than time for me to respect a blade,
to chop, mince or slice until onions became mist.

Jane Edna Mohler

---

Blunted

—Old Norse, blunda ‘shut the eyes’

Like the sea beside her
she has no words. She counts

out ten dark
cherries, lines them up like a wall,

as if something blood
red might shield

her. Like a heart,
that single-minded muscle,

she tries to carry on but waits
hours for the relief of sleep,

can’t think
what she could change.

She knows these days, thick
with smoke and sirens, won’t matter

in time. That even as it surrounds us
all leaden sorrow is meant

for oblivion. It’s nothing new, except
the gathering abundance of loss.

The seas are filling with tears,
and now they’re rising up.

Jed Myers

Jed Myers’ fourth book of poetry, Can’t Be Far (MoonPath Press, 2026), was a finalist for the press’s Sally Albiso Award. His prior collections are Learning to Hold (2024, winner of the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press, 2019), Watching the Perseids (2014, winner of the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), and six chapbooks. Poems have appeared in Rattle, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, Southern Indiana Review, The Southeast Review, Greensboro Review, and other journals and anthologies. Myers lives in Seattle, where he’s Editor of the journal Bracken.

---

What We Were

What would I look for in the wreckage
a storm or a missile left of my home?

The sky for the moment has cleared,
or there’s a fragile pause in the battle,

and I’ve stumbled a broken road back
there alone. What would I dig for,

on my knees in the crumble, hands
like a dog’s paws or two upside-down

shovels, and coughing on dust clouds
my digging’s released—what would be

the point of my search? In the village
Srifa near Tyre, a woman scratches

at powder and bits of chair, bed, sink,
windowpane, cups and plates—she digs

to uncover a photo album, love’s faces
beaming out of a past she needs

to remember. I almost feel the grit
on my palms, the slices and scrapes

on my fingers and thumb, as I excavate
for those reminders of what we were,

who I was, and hope I still am.

---

To M in Dry Country

I picture you now since you posted missiles
land where you live. I think of your pen
veering to make unintended slashes
across what you’ve written. A poem you send
too urgent, it pretends to be finished,

I feel its length for the hairline fractures
it harbors like the hard-rattled glass
in your windows. I think how the air shakes
hard enough to do this, hard as the ground
you hit if you fall off a tractor in Texas.

I guess it’s dry where you live now across
the world, missile country, where I imagine you
study how the old tongues learned to twist
kin into enemy, sky into deity, how
men made of sacred emptiness silos….

I see you hurry your hand on the desk
as you draft an envisioned peace, an aggrieved
acceptance, or glint of what might now be
had we kept one word for human, one
word for dry country or for anyone’s thirst.

Deni Naffziger

---

A History of Bohemian Waxwings

Go back, way back, before Medicare,
Before bad hips, bad backs, bad knees,
Before those beautiful stones and exotic chocolates,
Before meditations and cancer
And small airway disease,
Before my life on the pond,
And your kitchen renovation,
Before trips to England and France,
Germany, Ireland, Italy, Wales.
Before Vietnam, Thailand, and bathing elephants
In the river. Let’s go back
Before our children arrived,
Before our lovers,
Before we rediscovered
Each other,
Before we grew apart,
Before poetry and the school of art,
Before we dusted the dorm room
With Johnson & Johnson’s
And still got busted. Let’s go back
To high school (but not for long because
I hated it there, except for you).
Let’s be children again. Let’s be
The oldest child of an alcoholic
And the girl with so many freckles
Her cheeks are brown
The one who moved from Connecticut
Leaving best friend, Lauren, behind.
Let’s go back to pretending we are blind
girls walking down Central Avenue,
Ringing church bells and blowing out
The raw contents of an egg
To drive a crazy nun even crazier.
Let’s pull out Maura McGinn’s hair,
One hair at a time. Let’s hang out
In your periwinkle bedroom,
Cover our faces in shaving cream,
Photograph our heads, exposed
From behind a dressing table curtain
And listen to a rock opera.
Let’s ask ourselves how we go so lucky
For the all the elements to align,
For the moon to appear both day and night,
For trillium to line the path
And grass lily to guide us home.
How did we not recognize all along
we were Bohemian Waxwings feeding
on the fruit of ornamental trees?

---

Dear Twentieth Century,

Remember when sharing a cigarette was a kind of foreplay—
the way you pulled it from your mouth, your lower lip still clinging?
Remember the boy who filled your tank at the Marathon station,

his shirt sleeves, robin-egg-blue, his long, muscular arms?
He winked and you began dreaming. We all did. Imagine, now,
all the boys who loosed the cap, sometimes flirting, sometimes bored,

living all these years later with mental illness they earned
along with minimum wage because no one knew those delicious fumes
would make their way into the nervous systems of an entire generation.

I’ll admit I enjoy living in the past. Not just my past, but others’ as well.  
Look back and see my mother, who ferried across the San Francisco Bay
every weekday between 1954 and ’56. She was young,

and in that moment, you were too, while the entire country lay east and ahead.
While the future was light years away unless you pulled a book from a shelf
and read one delicious wood-pulp page at a time about medical scans

that would one day see inside your body, bad lungs that would be replaced
by good ones, utopian dreams of free labor and phones you could carry
in your pocket. Now, I am living in a future we once read about.

I pull out my cell phone, and among other things beyond my understanding,
I learn that far, far away, the Parker Solar Probe makes its closest-ever approach
to the sun, swooping nearer to our star than any human-made object in history.

When I really think about it, a small spaceship, the size of an automobile,
flying close to the sun while I lie awake in my room – well, just to know it
makes me feel vulnerable.

My mother’s journals are housed in a box beneath my bed now,
filled with accounts of falling in love, drinking beer in the backseat
of friend’s Oldsmobile Futuramic, a honeymoon in Chicago.

Remember when we followed our history that way, when we tracked evidence
through thousands, no, millions, of onion-skin pages, like breadcrumbs leading us back
to past mistakes and ascendancies, paragraphs scratched or whited out, arrows in the margins?

These days, I find myself and others floating like lost astronauts,
our lifelines to the mothership, severed. We look for constellations we once recognized,
Betelgeuse, and other stars that may no longer exist.

J. Alan Nelson

---

Evangelist whips boy with belt

There are no non sequiturs in this house.
Whatever the premise, the conclusion is fixed:
Judgment. Punishment.
Believe or burn.

You learn it young as a preacher’s kid,
God arrives wearing your father’s face.
Every night is dress rehearsal for the Last Day.

Rules wrap the heart like pericardium,
tight as gums around the teeth.
Rules enfold with the terror
that your soul might actually be immortal
and flammable.

You broke the stone-cut law:
Honor thy father.
The buckle sings its bright arc.
You flinch, justify, beg.

No delicatessen faith here,
only the plain bread of fear,
the thin wine of obedience.

Praise the Lord,
pass the ammunition of prayer,
and dodge the next swing of the belt
that loves you enough to save you
from the fire you already feel
licking the edges of your name.

John Palen

John Palen’s latest book, Strange and Wonderful Creatures, came out from Sheila-Na-Gig in 2024. Riding With the Diaspora won the SNG poetry chapbook competition in 2021. A newspaper journalist, journalism educator and lifelong Midwesterner, born in rural Missouri in 1942, John lives in retirement on the Illinois Grand Prairie, where he raises a vegetable garden, gets around town on the bus, and walks a couple of miles most days.

---

Thank You Hello Goodbye

I did the laundry alone
they came in families

men in backward ball caps
lugging baskets in and out
sitting together
playing games on their phones

women in ankle-length
red wraparounds
loading the machines
talking laughing
singing to themselves
as the clothes tumble

children who haven’t
caught up yet
with the size of their eyes
drawing pictures
holding the door for me
practicing their English
thank you hello goodbye

one Monday they were gone

Emily Jean Patterson

Emily Patterson is the author of The Birth of Undoing (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025) as well as three chapbooks. Her poetry appears in journals such as Christian Century, SWWIM Every Day, North American Review, CALYX, The Penn Review, Cordella Magazine, and NELLE, and has been nominated for Best Spiritual Literature and the Pushcart Prize. Emily received her B.A. in English from Ohio Wesleyan University and her M.A. in Education from The Ohio State University. She is a curriculum designer with Highlights for Children and lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio. Read more at emilypattersonpoet.com.

---

Picking Blueberries in Summer Rain

—for Elyse

Here, our collective children buzz
between rows, clumps of grass

stuck to bruised knees, royal blue
and yellow buckets swinging

from sticky hands. Amid
our own attempted catch-up,

asking how’s work, any travel
plans, your parents back in town?

we try to teach them which berries
are ripe. Although we guide

them toward navy, cobalt, or at least
magenta, I watch as your two-year-old son

plucks pale green anyway, pops
the sour sphere into his grinning mouth.

It’s July. Our daughters are four
and five, all spindly limbs speeding

down the slippery hill while gleefully
ignoring our protests, and soon

we stop protesting. Each pail
a quarter full, we trudge back

to our cars, say goodbye to half-had
conversations that once stretched

over hours and glasses of warming
white wine. Now we know they reach

across time.

---

Cape Elizabeth

is cloudless, wind whirling our hair into tangles; is seagrass giving in to
dark water, blue in every direction; is lobsters pulled to pieces on paper
placemats. Cape Elizabeth is us, ten years ago, stepping over these same
rocks; is now, is you, three years old at the bright red picnic table, heaps
of crinkled fries clustered in your fist as you grin. Cape Elizabeth is cups
of clam chowder, thin onion rings, cold pickle coins; is salt on our
tongues; is your small hands in ours as we climb; is tide pools caught
between boulders; is an ocean unspooled, made familiar and new.

Vivian Faith Prescott

Vivian Faith Prescott was born and raised on a small island, Wrangell, Kaachxana.áak’w, in Southeast Alaska. She lives and writes in Lingit Aaní at her family’s fishcamp on the land of the Shtax’heen Kwáan. She is a member of the Pacific Sámi Searvi and a founding member of Community Roots, the first LGBTQIA+ group on the island. She mentors Alaskan writers in two writers’ groups: Blue Canoe Writers and the Drumlin Poets. She’s the author of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including a collection of poems, The Tide Book from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

---

In a Rainforest, Enough is Enough

Summer is a wordsong in raindrops
and wind this year.

I’m convinced handfuls of sunny
days are being swallowed into

the deep pockets of a cosmic
rainforest god, who thinks of sunlight

in terms of flicking tendrils through clouds.
The god gloats—Here is a soggy day,

but wait I’ll gift you enough radiant
sun-balm to hang in your bangs,

so you can walk through the day
like a droopy fairy.

And as a mere mortal, you are content
with that and just when you think

climate change has ambushed your sanity,
a fish jumps, the golden eyes swim by,

their black and white plumage reflecting
on the mirror sea, and you wonder

about this fracture in your convictions,
if the rainforest god has prompted this

revelation—because now the sun is
peeking out through it, and there’s
a strip of believable blue.

Bonnie Proudfoot

Bonnie Proudfoot’s fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have appeared in anthologies and journals, including Sheila-Na-Gig online, SWWIM, Gyroscope Review, Rattle, and the New Ohio Review, and have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart. Her novel Goshen Road (OU Press) received the WCONA Book of the Year and was long-listed for the PEN/ Hemingway. Household Gods, a poetry chapbook, can be found on Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. A full-length poetry collection, Incomer, was published in the spring of 2026 on Shadelandhouse Modern Press.

---

Red

A red upholstered wing chair and settee,
red and white bedquilt, drunkard’s path design.

She slept fitfully, her frail heart, thin blue veins
twined with red wires that kept its unsteady beat,

and let it be said she was not ready
to give over, she fought to keep the red heat

of her, that human flame, stoked. What use
to rage at the injustice of decades of illness,

the body she was given that came to attack
itself, but the rage that kept her fed

also kept her frail. I wanted that red chair,
the red settee. I wanted that quilt,

the way I ‘d wanted to lie down next to her
to be sure that I could feel the red pulse

of her heart, my heart a red kite, rising
and falling with her faint breath, then unstrung.

Katherine Riegel

What Life Is Like Here on Earth from Sheila-na-Gig Editions is Katherine Riegel’s fourth full-length collection of poetry. She also has a lyric memoir about grief, Our Bodies Are Mostly Water (Cornerstone Press, 2025) and a chapbook of prose poems, Letters to Colin Firth (Sundress, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Poets Reading the News, Rattle, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Co-founder and managing editor of Sweet Lit, she runs online writing classes. Find her at katherineriegel.com and in southern Scotland, where she moved in 2025.

---

The Loss Game

I saw the ophthalmologist after the sun
scraped my eyes, the reflection off old snow
painful even through dark glasses,

eyelids swelling under my fingers
until I had to pull the car over.
That was three months

after my mother died.
When I asked the doctor—
a boy, really, young as snowdrops—

if my grief-wrung tears were the reason
for this new pain,
he looked down, adjusted

his glasses. It’s actually
a dry eye condition, he said.
Have you ever played

the loss game? If you had to lose
a limb, which one would it be?
If you had to lose a sense?

For me, sight will always
be last. How can I know
the world without vision?

And yet I may grow old,
unlike my mother,
who died, with her senses intact,

of cancer. The boy doctor
did not say he was sorry. Unfortunately,
he said, those are the wrong kind of tears.

I looked at him across the chasm
of my grief. I looked at him
as he described what I would have

to do, the hot compresses
and eyedrops and all. I knew
I would do anything. I needed

my sight to navigate this new life
as a half-orphan, this life like a room
too dim and full of dangerous edges.

---

I’d Still Go Back

I see that time in images flashing like sun on water:
the raspberry patch and my mother pointing out
a leaf, calling it “katydid,” my nickname, then suddenly
it grew legs and menaced like a grasshopper.

My sister, mother, and me on a trail ride, dusty summer,
the mountain of matted fur called King greeting us
as we passed his yard, following the horses for a while. I
loved that dog, sewed him inside my body, took him

to every lonely place I slept for years
and years. Wind roughing the barn
while my brother and I climbed too high
and half-fell, half-jumped to the dirt floor, freezing

at the sight of a rusty spike from the manure-spreader
inches from my neck—just one way we brushed sleeves
with death, looking back after passing by to see
if we should apologize. I was troubled—weren’t we

all?—and one night, sleepwalking, rose from my twin bed,
padded down the stairs and out into the snowy back yard
to feed the horses. My sister caught me before I reached
the barn, steered me back to our warm room. All I remembered

in the morning was the certainty I’d left
something vital undone. You can trap water
in your cupped hands but the light slips off
to gild another wavelet. My first ten years looked like

an ordinary childhood, where grubby kids ran home
to a green-painted house and washed the blood off
skinned knees before a dinner of spaghetti and sauce
made of our own garden’s tomatoes. It was

a knife-throwing contest, a low rushing flight across prairies,
an ecosphere in a glass jar, the frenzied crescendo
at the end of a symphony or fireworks display—almost
too loud, too bright, too much, and then—nothing.

Laurie Rosen

---

River Raft Macabre

After Times Union, Vermont, Oct. 2011

At the height of Hurricane Irene, coffins rise
from graves, float down Main Street.

Free from dirt and rocks, they dart
among bloated cows and sheep,

brace and roll like rafts in rapids.
Six inches of rain falls in twelve hours,

homes, barns, cornfields wash away.
Houses without bottom floors hang

over rushing water, bridges collapse
and sink, large chunks of road crumble

or go missing. This forest town, now an island.
After the river recedes, news reports recall:

bodies found strewn in open air, caskets poking
out of debris piles, their hinges glint

in the post-storm sun. Now, each summer,
a different town or the same,

a different valley or the same valley.
If I didn’t know better I’d swear

covenants were broken,
the promise of a rainbow—erased.

Susan Shea

---

Face to Face

The women who lived
longest in my family
wore make-up and
knew how to make-up
before and after night fell
they were known for circling
their tea brown eyes with
a porcelain color cream
glass-like or stone-like
translucent or not
they adjusted themselves
to fit into the light
provided for them
they only stood barefaced
alone in the midnight
looking out open windows
to see mother cats
return night after night
to the cave spots
among the boulders
where their children once nursed
where their youth lingered on
in the most pristine
parts of their minds

Alison Stone

---

Nightscape

The pier ends abruptly at the sea,
sudden as a car wreck
or the end of love.

Wind ruffles deep water.
Hidden alphabets
reveal themselves.

A woman hurries away, head bent,
perhaps returning to a rented room
or argument-stiff marriage bed.

Moonlight touches
the round-shouldered man
with his penance of flowers.

On an abandoned blanket—
beer cans, candle wax, black feathers.
Desires slither into dreams.

Draped in silence,
a limping teen leaves prints
on the damp sand.

Salt coats skin
and rotting steps. Whales
drag their shadows under the bridge.

Matt Zambito

---

Love Poem Because We Have To

If we must die just to witness and giggle,
as cherub-us, at those we know on Earth
picking their gross noses before shaking
unexpecting hands, and butt-burping loudly
at baptisms, and generally touching
and releasing themselves to pro hockey
highlights, then maybe death is worth its faults:
maximum agony; phantom doom; fear of
the All-ness of Everything; celestially
defending the trash-talk we talked
after eulogizing formerly sad sacks. If
there’s a way, not to live heavenly forever,
but not to expire either, then that might
not be so bad, though only if my henceforth
outright overflows with you at least
as healthy as we presently are: I’ll take
headaches, heartburn, and the highest
blood pressure over entropy’s slow-motion
middle finger telling us where we can go.
If we must pass on, if a Holy Other insists
on our total annihilations (sentient cells
to silly selves), then who are we to judge
our Judgments? Does who we are matter
after all? Is anything not slightly dire? Oh,
where are you this very moment? Please
my dearest, reach for me right now!