February - Poem 28
BROCHURE FOR A DREAM / A Cento
composed by Ashby Logan Hill, with lines by and from Kristine Anderson, Barbara Audet, Bee Cordera, Ashby Logan Hill, Amy Marques, Sonia Sophia Sura, and Samuel Spencer.
As far as I can tell, the only laughter came from me,
thin emerald leaves rising from the dark, shivering earth.
I can hear the morning rain pattering on the leaves.
Outside my window, the heart maintains its worth,
everything you could desire. I’ll think of stepping outside on a
clear night, trying to count the dots of glitter in the sky.
Some moments are too precious. This beauty seemed to
speak to me nightly in my dreams, your dancing in the
sky, captured in eardrum hollows. My body and soul are
riven now because my heart is where you are.
Touch me too firmly and you will get burned.
Like the Earth, we are made of dust. Please accept
this. It was an unlearning like this that taught you,
sometimes the best song is silence, something new.
The 30/30 Challenge: Twenty-Eight Days Later / Kristine Anderson
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
—T. S. Eliot
It’s like the family piling into a station wagon, 1968, driving
from the California Bay Area to northern Washington, hot as blazes
through Mendocino County, raining cats and dogs in Crescent City
and all the way up the coast from there. Then, arriving:
My first bee sting outside the motel room I shared with my sister.
Smiling at the uncle I’d met only once, learning to make pie crust
from my grandmother, already stooped from all her hard years.
The point, though, is after a week with little-known relatives,
after hotel swimming pools and diner hamburgers,
after the long road back, once Dad parked in the driveway,
I, at twelve years old, carried with me the revelation of a bigger world
and walked into my bedroom with its hand-me-down bed
and old wooden dresser, the blue braided rug warming
the hardwood floor, while rising around me: welcome
familiarity, electrified with new anticipation.
Don't you feel it, too?
February Haiku No. 2 / Barbara Audet
Stubborn ice-bathed land,
Gets mocked by all teasing warmth.
March prefers to roar.
On Black Love / Bee Cordera
Like moonmilk flowers
cradled in waxy evergreen leaves
blooming like they always
have for millions of years
upon the summer breeze,
heavy on the branches of Magnolia
slowly, but surely, gifting
their sweet scent to the beetles
who have always opened up
the flowers to polinate them.
Durring the land before time
when there were only slow
sunsets moving through hues
of blue, gold, grapefruit pink
we are those tumbling flower
beetles making the Magnolia
bloom look easy, bold,
ancient as breath.
MASTER SONNET #2 / Ashby Logan Hill
At the Monet exhibit I asked about the cold you don't remember, Alaska.
Not even the roses could compete, a dalmatian and carrier pigeon, friends,
the heat of a summer breeze sweeping through the night, then daylight.
This beauty seemed to speak to me nightly in my dreams.
So, feeling enlightened, tonight we slept with both our eyes open.
Secretly I wish for you again. The rain keeps our hearts forever.
“I love you like the dew at break of dawn.” “I love you like the morning tide fading.”
It was the rain in the night, the early morning light that saved us.
“I was wondering when you’d come back up to see me.”
At the light, I was reminded what magic grows of mountains.
At dawn I’d find the foxes lurking, smiling at my counting.
Standing there waiting for me on front porch like fire, glowing,
this second chance at breath you hold a bit before breathing.
We drove into the dark, into the night. We were chasing the light.
Mended / Amy Marques
Exhaustion of
realisation
& misgiving.
Then:
mended;
seeing good.
Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities
Endings / Sonia Sophia Sura
How do I write about endings?
A bird flies away;
A meal’s last bite is chewed;
Eyes open to the morning light.
On the other side of the end
Is a new beginning.
On the other side of a no
Is a yes, and
Yes, and
Yes to something else.
August Something, 2025 / Samuel Spencer
You help my hand
and for a brief instant, I believed
that everything that had passed
through its palm was merely practice
for this moment. All its dexterity, all the
fine motor skills gains performing other
tasks – the racquets, the pens; all the minute
movements I’ve trained its tips to do.
For decades, this hand developed
its Life’s Work, relying on the calluses
formed from holding onto the wrong things
or holding onto things the wrong way –
Only for it to fade away, its form
enclosed in the shape of your own.
I never knew a hand could feel
at home, that it had had reached for
now seems so vain in your simple grasp
on that sunny day in London, in the park
whose name
I can’t seem to remember.
