February - Poem 15

Images from a February Day / Kristine Anderson

The brick walkway outside my front door
brown-red geometry
against a monochromatic gray day

The green reach of cedar and pine
ever-forest branches
among wintering skeletons of alder and beech

A stationary goose alongside the road
the S of its neck
rising above a mound of plowed snow

A patch of lawn emerging from the thaw
thin emerald leaves
rising from the dark, shivering earth

Visibility / Barbara Audet

Becoming visible should not require
a glass of vodka, a gifted fur or gassy car.
Visibility requires walking brave
retracing a familiar chipped path, temporarily
burnished golden in the lamplight,
revisiting it alone, ignoring the steps 
in comfortable shoes. Honing
your vision by the ticking
hands of an invisible inner-layered clock,
looking in the moonlight at the flowers,
tucked by hedges draping fine houses,
wondering if these are new or descendants
of ones that once pushed fragrance past
your teenaged nose, your uniform skirt, rolled
to match a model’s magazine cheat sheet
proclaiming style in the spring of '69.
Life does not come pre-packaged,
like the photos captured in the standup booth
at the happily crowded, we are mostly alive, reunion
that led you to choose to walk back in
starstruck mode to the long remembered,
somehow updated sodium-lighted train station
in that better than where you live now Jersey 
suburb. Leaning against the station's bench,
ticket ready, are you ready to head to Brooklyn,
to pass the museum, which is past
the Chinese or is it Thai or is it Indian restaurant,
which is past the pizza place alive with teenagers
who are not concerned with blooms of the past,
but only present suppositions on the status
of a weekend encounter. You reach to adjust
your rolled skirt and realize the skirt became a dress
long ago, and will soon give way to jeans,
despite your age, to get you home, somewhere 
along the decades-documented 
train ride, then plane ride, 
then a car that looks more like you than you,
sleeping like cars do in the parking lot 
behind the gated fence
that is down from the Wendys,
which is down from McDonalds, but not as far as
the gas station, your modern chipped path,
more plastic, if truth be acknowledged,
still no true stop in view, 
perhaps because you are not yet 
visible, but are rather taking shape
in that oh so cliche mind’s eye, that is
more real than even you can comprehend.

MASTER SONNET #1 / Ashby Logan Hill

A loose thing, forgiveness untethered, a skein of yarn,
fingers holding all that’s left of glacial prairie, your way home.
And afterwards still you and I left, the only ones singing.
That’s all I’ve ever really wanted. Something like this for death.
Meet me at the heron rookery at dusk. I’ll be waiting for you there.
It is unfortunate that the sun does not travel backwards.
All day and still he won’t tell us, two lotus flowers floating in the sun.
And all this just to get back to what my mind held? “A sleepless sanctuary,” I said.
We didn’t want but had to see what both of us knew of loss the morning after.
Along this line, a horizon forms of lavender, a blue blossom beginning to bud.
And I smile a little longer, like him, before the oil stains on his blue jeans call to me,
waiting for the clouds to break, no direction home, a complete unknown,
another batch of dough for dinner rolls, at least that’s how I’s told to tell  it.
A dayglow and a dying was done then, and all before dawn, a quiet breakfast.

Not Just Details / Amy Marques

tea

and rain blaring

quiet:

not details.

Source material: A Tale of Two Cities

Chairlift  / Samuel Spencer

The world in my mind
is at peace as I rise
into the air. The ground
a fatal distance below
as the chair climbs higher
into the snowy mountains – 
a beautiful maiden wearing a coat
of wisping powder.
I am but one more soul
ascending into the sky,
a bit like Icarus,
just to fall down the paths
carved by man. The only
difference between this chair and
his waxy wings is that this metal seat
was designed for the purpose of
allowing me down. How sad I would
eventually become
if this chair rose into the heavens,
past the clouds and into Olympus.
How sad and how boring a life
without falling would be