March - Poem 9

Spring Cycles / Kathleen Bednarek

Windows unopened 
Birds are impossible guests
To peck house data

-

Holding my fingers
Budding restraint side by side
Make an oath and rise

-

Here in the spring mud 
Evangelical preachers
Teach hell and Easter

The Last Summer Nap / Mymona Bibi

Tree roots 
were unearthed by animal
play and rot
was marvelled at by residents
of the whole street.
The Robin’s old knowledge 
was made anew for us,
the orange of her chest
was fire flickering
above ground.
Another city was bombed
into orange darkness
whilst the children noticed
the tree’s protruding death
and they poked, prodded,
giggled, pointed,
cut, dug, fell, smelt 
and everything 
but talked.
Grief is a silent language.
My eyes drifted off
into orange darkness–
it is so easy to sleep
under the summer sun
when the noise
is so far away.

The Ten Thousand Things, Some of Them / Susan Hankla

Hoping to see again my mom's dress with the green caterpillars printed on it. Was she the living butterfly?

Did a thousand dishes by hand, happy the ancestors broke up sets of them, the missing cups their slender 

handlelessness easier to dry on the tea towel.

Someday in another life we'll see who rapes who. I don't live by the notion of an eye for an eye. I'm sitting here after insomnia has me stingy in the eyes and skin, and a feeling of knowing that something has been wrong.

Just after Dad died, I had the sensation of my heart coming awake, as if before his death it had been on doze mode. Now when I opened the newspaper, the first thing I read is obituaries, & in reading about each person, I could feel that I was in communion with them and their loved ones, all sharing a heart.

Once a frisbee glowed at night so that coming through the door, I screamed to suddenly see it in my studio when I flicked on the light.

I miss my meadow. Grass stains. The skeletal branch on the dessert plate where crisp green grapes gave up their sweetness. I miss attar of turpentine and rose and orange oil when my twin aunts painted China sitting together at a card table and how many undercoats must be kiln-fired, before you actually see anything.

20 Years from Now  / Amy Haworth

At the end of our lives
I hope you live next door
So we can laugh in your kitchen
About the diagnosis
And you can pick me up after the procedure
And we can be done (we'll never be done) analyzing 
And marvel about how it all turned out
And cook dinner for friends like we did in 2001
Under a full moon descending on snowshoes felt like flight
At the end of it all 
We'll make up for lost time
Doing whatever we can with the body we have left
Celebrating your courage that stopped the longing
And my gratitude for how you helped me find my way
and got me to ride a mountain bike race once
By then, at the end of our lives, 
I might even have a dog.
I hope I have a dog, but not nearly as much as 
I hope I live next door.

Dearly Beloved / Christina McCleanhan

Imagine California, Oakland, the East Bay, it is a decade before today.
There are clouds in the sky, low-hanging from pollution.
Leftover morning fog sails 
toward a hillside of homeowner-privileged craftsmanship.
Reach up, lift off, and look
at the fatigue-flushed freeways, spiriting everyday people on their mission
to build a world meant
for entertainment, safety, love, survival, 
and the opportunity to cash in or share sick days.

It felt like an electric stamina willed me to believe
I was the cinnamon crunch of hard candy
when rain muted the sun.
Those cool, old moccasins never stopped bouncing
down steps to
the round rhythm, sharpness of bus wheels,
desperate brake pads.

My youth looked ahead, trying to ignore the quiet
shake, shake, shake
of garbage-day premonitions in neighborhoods 
that waited for cardboard-castle renewal.
I first ate Turkish delight at twenty-four with a tall classmate. 
The powdered sugar coating stuck to the roof of my mouth,
leaving me disappointed, you know?
We saw each other for a while in our classes or in the hallways.
He spoke of volunteering and
the frustration of teaching change with limited resources
I spoke in circles of metered pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness
meant to hide the essence of my ordinariness.
I was afraid I might want to love him,
that he would want to love me, 
so I closed my mouth when nodding hello
and forgot about the afternoon on College Avenue.

But today, the laundry basket’s broken handle poked my wrist.
I remembered the downstairs washers that we used,
saw San Francisco in its Converse,
felt Oakland breathe.
Now, I realize that I know nothing-
except that today’s prices would still be too high,

even if I had agreed to a second date.

Tiptoe  / Elizabeth McGraw

What’s does a day bring in a season of change? It brings cold mornings, iffy conversations and strained relations fixed with a note.

House at 77 no time for the air conditioning so windows all set afloat.

Lord, the dog smells well overdue for his spring cleaning. 

Birthdays on the horizon coinciding with the change in time. 

Not quite equinox.

Skies a hazy gray. I lay down my head. The house is quiet. 

A young one dances in the kitchen.  Winter work overdue creeps in. 

It ties in a knot that promises to unravel. A promise of the season to come. 

Floating in the Indian River Inlet / Alexis Wolfe

Because I could not stay in the green place
I drove straight to the barren one
my teeth chattering and the Atlantic ghost crabs
doing their sideways dance.
Not even that emptiness could hold me.
My eyes and cheeks stung red
from a sun I did not forgive
because I did not know how to ask for it—
not directions
not a warm bed
I said little
no endworld in sight
I floated
in a made up place
between low tide and earth’s edge
one that could hold
my breath

March - Poem 8

Sister Cecilia / Kathleen Bednarek

My fave nun. By the time I was in the third grade, she was on her way to blindness. She taught me meter and "The Owl and the Pussycat." She had a scratched cornea from Ash Wednesday, when ashes slipped off the slope of her forehead into her right eye. 

The edges of her thick glasses magnified into serious wattage when the light came in at a slant through the classroom windows.

Poetry teacher, literally reading close. Explaining to a pod of youngsters in a back room at a school named Epiphany how to wield imagination.

We ditched phonics. At home, typing on a typewriter named for a munitions device: Canon. This is what I wanna do for the rest of my life. Volley words.  I compared the falling snow to doves. 

You disappeared after the spring and went into retirement, in rooms that continued to blur at their edges. 

"I suppose" should never be in a poem, or "suddenly," they say. But you and I were together in the fog this evening as I drove home on the interstate. I couldn't see, and wanted to know the sequel:

So, if "The Owl and the Pussycat" were married, and let’s say they had babies they would have had superior night vision— pure hunter's sight. Eyes specialized for darkness. But the owl would have been lost right now because the two taillights I’m following are red. Owls can’t see red. Cats can’t either. 

And I could...see you with the fine downy hairs on your face. What did you like about that poem? The plump cheeks, hazel eyes magnifying, the habit like a black hole out of which knowledge was sucked in then flowed out, offset by your white hair looking at me through my eyes as I looked into yours in a memory patterned forward black and white. 

Staying with the car ahead of me which is your face, which remembered language though the eye has not seen, ear has not heard. Sought.

Trace, lineage, metronome; in the middle of the fading curves appearing, the tail lights, two disparate things held in relation to one another. Create attention. Keep sitting, looking. Forego the drenching rainstorm, let the fog soak through.

Diaspora / Mymona Bibi

STENDAHL SYNDROME / Susan Hankla

Yes, it's true, often works of art prove

useful-–the incident at the Phillips Gallery

when I saw the movie of myself unglued 

by his "Green and Tangerine" color field
painting in The Rothko Room.

At the Whitney, the Louise Nevelson 
retrospective happened to my body: hot, 
quaking, surprised, nearly walked into a black 
wall of her imagination.

I hereby sign this affidavit these instances did occur.

I’m certain  / Amy Haworth

Dedicated to DLo

“I’m certain
the path to success
is
never
forgetting
where you’re from.”
An angel
without wings
scatters wisdom
like salt
on a blizzard-bound
sidewalk
providing a temporary
spring
of hope in remembering
instead of wondering.
We grow tallest when our
roots touch
the blistering sun and city hum
music jumping open window to air
who we were
is who we are
we are proof of what watered us
tasting of the soil that grew us.

A Note on Understanding / Christina McCleanhan

I do not 
fear
the spiders
the pill bugs
the centipedes
hiding
beneath 
the damp surface of cold, 
outside wetness
in my grandmother’s yard.
We are not so different-
the earth and I. 
Branches, long or short,
offer me shelter
from inevitable elemental shortcomings
much like the respect given to birds- 
hatchlings born and grown
on worms and oxygen.
 deep 

deep

deep 
       down in the backyard mud
       live the memories of my youth.
       We are here; they call. 
       We remember; they call. 
My fingers will dip and prod
until they grasp a root, or
the old handle of my grandmother’s trowel,  
then, amidst the decayed, rusted earth
I am reminded of 
our long laughs,
summer evening shadows, 
ants parading along cracked sidewalks, 
that first mow after Easter,
Saturday night gravy over chicken, 
quilts weighed against winter’s effort, 
warming cold bedclothes with floor furnace heat
and love- 
usually effortless and mostly free. 

A Highway Through Tees Noc Pos, New Mexico    / Elizabeth McGraw

A wilderness all of its own as the highway rolls underneath.
The swells from the searching brings my eyelids to their knees.

It’s been a long walk along this road in search of a phone.
Feet clad in jelly shoes and dad by my side.

They said it was a misunderstanding like in the evening show but I was swept up in a hurt and pulled along this road.

We walked for probably just a mile with the stars laid out quite bare.  It was lonesome and fun at the same time.  

Strange when the familiar faces swung slow to offer the ride.  We said no, knew where to go, and remarked not many walk around here.

As they pulled away.

The phone booth found and the call made but nothing spoken of our journey or the late hour.  The attendant introduced us to the driver of the rig and that is how we ended up here.

In a wilderness all of its own as the highway rolled underneath.
The swells from the searching brought my eyelids to their knees.

middle child what should i / Alexis Wolfe

middle child what should i

middle child, what else
should i call you? hotfoot
but slow to descend worn 
stairs, kind in the cunning,
snagged on life’s pith. last time 
we sat in the ice cream
parking lot smelled like wet birds
you drew long faces on your shoes 
left school again asked me for 
a flight to texas   started dating
  another dancer, the real sweet this one 
played me voice notes of your misplaced
songs without asking if i wanted 
to hear or if I needed ( ) only unanswerables

March - Poem 7

The Morning Bus / Kathleen Bednarek

Standing, 
waiting for the 
morning bus

on the corner 
of Eastern,

one man 
laughing 
at the 
blurting

of one 
goose 
yearning 
through

its neck 
toward 
the harbor—

To pet 
that long 
neck!

He slaps 
his leg 
with the 
broken foot.

Questions / Mymona Bibi

to saunter along the river is to ask questions,
the question of how 
as your shoulder blades try to kiss
each other in the morning stretch,
of why do your fingertips tap 
your thigh in wait
and where does all the water we forget
to drink wash away to? 
what does all of yesterday melt into?
perhaps the curve inside your elbow
sweaty, creased, brown, lines, separate
when you reach over
to ask me a question 
i can’t answer
not yet
not under this crescent.

REPEAT AFTER ME / Susan Hankla

exploits
escapades
episodes
capers
charades
moments
pentimento
caprice
carapace
spirit wind
convalesce
pork rind
sinshine
codex
architect
Kotex
context
text
sex
Vienna sausage
Kosher dill
hill
safety match
soft serve
swerve
Brillo-pad
hard water
patio
slaw 
slay
barbeque lays
my little pony
paint-by-number
printed matter
gray matter
it matters
safety in numbers 
salad days
Sundays
supper
sup
porcine
pork
telephone
Bible
bubble 
Swiss Miss
mittens
smitten 
witness
waitress
wellness
wasted
stunted
student
pork chop
music
magpie
chocolate cheesecake
nabs
stabs
wanted
stunted
pinecone
telephone
leave me alone.

Mother of Good  / Amy Haworth

Love your neighbor
Love your mother
Mother may I
Mother’s Day
Day after day
Day after tomorrow
Tomorrow never comes
Tomorrow come what may
May I
May-be
Be happy
Be on time
Time to go
Time to change
Change your attitude
Change is growth
Growth is good
Growth rate
Rate your experience
Rate of approval
Approval of the President
Approval of the way we live
Live and learn
Live your best life
Life is good
Life will end
End the way you begin
End state
State of things
State of mind
Mind the gap
Gap between things
Gap to close
Close it off
Close the door
Door to nowhere
Door to somewhere
Somewhere out there
Somewhere over the rainbow
Rainbow wishes
Rainbow bridge
Bridge over troubled waters
Bridge to build
Build the future
Build up
Up we go
Up to something good
Good for you
You…
Good…

To Live is to Accept Circumstance / Christina McCleanhan

During the spring rains, 
on a Friday evening walk before the moon is full 
or on a late-morning Tuesday 
after the geese have stopped chasing the runaway dog,
you might be the first to spot
the new blooms on a secluded bush of wild roses
and tangled onion grass. 
You will visit whenever there are no groceries to buy, 
mouths to feed, clothes to wash, or faucets to fix, 
and remember other freedoms you have known. 
Because no one else sees your adoration,
you can pause to suck deep breaths 
of cut freshness and damp sweetness, 
to bruise one, maybe two of the petals; 
There is no owner to judge. 
There is no cost to regret. 
Linger in this place.
Rest during this season.
Look up at the sun with laughter, my friend.
The wrinkles will be worth it.

Days like these    / Elizabeth McGraw

Don’t require much of me certainly not all of me and somehow make me wonder is this something new.

Uncomfortable for sure far from a flow that I intimately know.  It’s feels like a stretch but before the release that’s always best followed by a deep deep sleep.

In it there is candor that hides a more indirect level of speech. I listen and lean into and watch. Note the books on your desk and order one so that I might know the situation better.

Showing up and showing down trying to find a footing.  Like a back up singer accustomed to the solo I do-wop with the chorus. Inadvertently though it always seems I’m always a bit out of step.  

Found a niche that feels new and maybe a spot to grow.  No scaffolding here this I know so build it for myself until I go. 

Always ready to stay but life’s so short so much to see.  I’m a traveler loyal the most to me. 

windlogged / Alexis Wolfe

sitting in the window again wishing i had 
a desk, its like sitting at the easel 
of the word—sentence jumble, vessel / portal 
and so on, you know—remembering my mouth 
could be blown to bits but it probably won’t.
lately I wake windsick, the wind bangs my 
house loose and something bigger than an animal
is scratching up the attic—a young opossum
is called a joey if you didn’t know and their cries 
sound sort of like pushing a shopping cart 
with a broken wheel. Each time I hang my laundry 
I retrieve it a few hours later from the dirt. 
Each time my phone rings I scream and the wind
picks up. Someone always wants me 
to meet their dog  walk their dog  watch my dog.
I feel about the birds the way everyone must feel
about their dogs—they’re all my pets and invited 
to dinner. Last year, I ruined my friends shoes and now
she won’t talk to me any more: no one is worth more 
than a good pair of Hokas. I used to walk into a new
city but now i’ve drunk all of them. But still isn’t there so 
much? enough burn bright? to make a myth of war?

March - Poem 6

First Day at the Conference / Kathleen Bednarek

When there are this many voices
When the ceiling is forty feet higher than any 

person here
Where there are designated tables with nothing 

on them that could be sold so people know they 
can sit without purpose

Where this is non-fiction and the essayist 
recommends free chocolates 

The amount of voices sounds like the ocean & 
the closer the voices are to me they sound like the 

people on the shore
When I don’t know what to say I say “thank you”

This table is made to look like grey sand
It’s the first time I’ve ever been asked “are you 

using this bench?” Though I’m the only one here 
& I am not sitting on the bench 

I’m at the ocean sounding like the 
people on the shore 

A Photo / Mymona Bibi

A photo of a ripped photo -
torn in the shape of a border
in a land, in a tongue, in a house.
My camera clicks,
captures a moment 
to be sent on whatsapp 
captioned in a different language -
receive a city fertile with my
body in a photo of a photo 
with the edges worn like rubble.
Hate speeds up
the decomposition process.
The photo of a photo is deleted.

SAYINGS / Susan Hankla

Keep your feet on the ground even though friends flatter you.

You are on the verge of something big.

Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.

When the moment comes take the top one.

Man knows more than he understands.

Don't be afraid to smile, you never know who's falling in love with it.

Want to catch the fishes, one must go home and build the net first.

You have a remarkable power which you are not using.

It is much easier to be critical than to be correct.

Life always gets harder near the summit.

Keep your feet firmly on the ground, even if your friends flatter you.
You are on the verge of something great.
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit.
When the right moment comes, choose the best one.
People know more than they understand.
Don't be afraid to smile; you never know who will fall in love with it.
If you want to catch fish, you first have to go home and build a net.
You have extraordinary power that you don't use.
It's much easier to be critical than to be right.
Life always gets harder at the top.
If you want to stew on the ground, and you're your own child.
If Jy and midde-in iets groots.
Logic is dead wrong and dead gees.
I want to die well, die the best.
Mense see more as what happened.
Moenie bang wees comes to glitter; I don't want to live.
And he went to the net.
He will build krag what you cannot.
This makes us believe in wees as we reg in wees.
The die lewe is highly moeiliker daarbo.

Split Personality  / Amy Haworth

so Dimness asked / Christina McCleanhan

Should the Lord ignore your prayer, your pleas, your bargaining tantrum,
what will you do? 

Well, I will…
Sing!   
I will sing the scripture of my grief. 
whole notes!
            high notes!
                 the sweet, pleading dusk notes! 
I Will Lift My Arms in Praise and Holler His Name
to 
the preacher
the choir loft sopranos,
the congregation of early morning baritone frogs,
the man spitting tobacco in the mud by my mailbox,
the child who is too grown for cherry Kool-Aid,
and the sparrows. 

And could you still submit, if He does not answer? 
If his back turns on you in disappointment, 
what then will you do? 

Well, I will…
Wait!
I will wait without worry, a storm’s mischief 
becomes joy 
beneath the Dogwood trees, 
where I will rest until 
His peace commands my feet.
Tired, though I may be. 

Oh, ho, ho, if death’s stillness bears
upon your tethered mortality, 
would you still extend 
the Eirene of your Father’s grace
to a fellow traveler? 
Might your fatigue be better soothed 
in a cold, dark dwelling place?

Go now, small one
save your strength 
for those in need of a shoulder. 
Go now, tepid beast, 
go peddle your Belial’s privation 
to those whose foolish tongues
confuse vinegar for wine. 
Me, I will sing. 

Incomprehensible    / Elizabeth McGraw

Lady at the airport lounge in a language I don’t speak. Who talks this much so early in the morning?

Friends travel to town and you’re having a personal crisis and barely engage.

6am flights arriving an hour prior to boarding.  3am wake up call.

What has been left unsaid that needs to be spoken at this hour?

Incomprehensible.

Tickets to a rodeo that I saw last year. Do I really need to see the mutton busting again?  Don’t even listen to the rascal flatts, no offense.

Meeting starts at 6pm so jumped on the 6am flight. Naturally.

Sold the old cooper for the new fangled ride and I hate it.  Cameras and all. 

Drive 13 hours every summer and still never a phone call in between.  

Left the family chat group. Have Facebook friends don’t need more.

Hosted a month, never heard another word. I did the same. 

Snow in March at this latitude.

Incomprehensible.

contemporary bicoastal lullaby / Alexis Wolfe

won't always be this 
simple: thunderclap,
bioluminescent sea, soft language
begetting breath beneath 
   beating chest. shh 
shh shh whispersongs
soothe even sung by yellow
ing teeth. lay still in this
wet quiet, thumb in your
mouth, invite
surprise—

March - Poem 5

For Art on His Birthday / Kathleen Bednarek

When I consider art it has a double meaning. As much as the Tate Modern it was a September
installation of clothing and records in front of your parent’s house, a yard sale to help you pay to make
it to Peru. The excess of your namesake Rimbaud who I always thought of as your kindred
spirit/brother. Always Adventure ADVENTURE. Excellent. Worry is a waste of the imagination 

living fully is creating inspirational quotes by the way you are. And I don’t think it’s ever over? 
Macchu Picchu is otherworldly, to sit up in the clouds with the condensation and stones in your hair.
Wanting to be taken rather than granted. Like death. I have no idea when. It’s something we are all
granted. It’s probably all an energy song anyway and you are still jamming at the Oasis where the 

jukebox is thankfully useless.  Pick B4 and keep running barefoot in my neurons. I’ll meet you at the
streetlight on the corner where atoms have vibrated into appearing as Philadelphia. And it’s be excellent
to one another, not just a quality. It’s a function. As we are all in the car coming back home laughing in
our bodies.

We never needed eyes for this / Mymona Bibi

I’ve never slept with the filth of noise stressed and stretched a place to thrive between legs and behind them - in a tent - I once nearly died in a tent suffocating underneath them - in a library chewing

on hardback for a chance to be safe before I tasted blood and flesh, teeth sunken sucking whistling inside, spitting outside, the city is loud from the curdle of birth, gutters filled - relief when the cloud silenced the sun and sometimes the running palpitation of an orgasm ripples through - lightning! off go the lights we never needed eyes for this - down sets the sun we never needed eyes for this - in a friend I feel unnamed bites bumps slow down / reconstruct / retile / sew the tarmac closed / taut / stressed and stretched / now - round 2!

I choose to live with a thumb in my mouth not my thumb but my city which tastes like everyone I’ve ever loved.

Mrs. Wyeth / Susan Hankla

A woman rests her arms on a windowsill of a wooden house and looks out.

 She wears a wide-brimmed leather hat and earth brown cable knit sweater buttoned up to her throat.

 Her arms are crossed on the windowsill, and one pinky is up. The gesture expresses openness, maybe.

 She looks out the open window that has no screen. It swings out. What could be captured in her hatchet-blade gaze?

 Who is she? She's her famous husband's, the artist's wife. But who does she think she is?

 Is she counting geese? She wears a man's hat every day. My mind drifts to when my husband almost died.

 I wore his brown Stetson to see him at the rehab place. He is also a well-known artist. He has nine or ten 

 visitors every day. Some get there before I'm even up. For years I was angry all the time. Now I've just made 5 copies 

 of his DNR. He tells the nurses at the rehab place that I never come see him. I'm there every day. When home by myself, 

 I do his laundry and turn the lights out early and look out at the sparkling snow covering unraked leaves.

Alligator Alley  / Amy Haworth

The first time we drove
straight
across Florida
it was you and me. 
Running away while we had a couple of hours
to be who we were before a baby.
I hoped to see an alligator
instead there were only rivers of grass and broad winged birds
Perched like Kings
Looking
Watching
Holding the sky?
After that — these birds — I no longer cared
about an alligator.
It was their nonchalance that made me pause
as we moved 70 miles per hour
they stood air-drying 
Aloof to the encroaching asphalt and the noise
Part of my soul bowed as they took flight.
Their spell cast, I learned their name,
Anhinga a’ñinga anhangá
and rolled it over, tasting it, teaching my mouth to say it.
Holding your hand as we drove
straight across
something had shifted 
tamed
in that wild land.

The Definition Of / Christina McCleanhan

To kiss 
is to exchange
lit divinity
without interruption. 
 as friend
      lover
      family 
      or foe
this spit-worthy violation of vulnerability 
is a mark 
to be wiped across memory’s sword. 

And you,
no longer my beautiful man,
        you met
the ugliness of my raw eagerness 
with watering can and trowel 
in the sturdiness
of your gentle hands. 

There.
Sunrise came early,
on your steps,
in the cold.
Our bare feet found the truth
I would leave in your home.

i was unfair…

    … cruel…

The shelves were not mine to claim. 

On my front stoop   / Elizabeth McGraw

We’ve known each other for ages and it’s really just years. 

We reach out with our stories and fears.

We share no Astro sign.

We believe in each other and it feels kind.

You say you love us but you love the unit more. What we are making together in outside circles has struck a real chord.

I don’t hear it from my family or an internal crew.

So when you travel to say you’re starting a family and it starts with you.

I’m a sister

I’m an auntie 

I’m a friend

Your new sweet family is just starting out. 

I hope for you the blessings of imperfection and nonsense that lets you holler and shout.

A cacophony that shatters all the rules

A love that abides and ultimately cures. 

It’s a world for the loving and adventurous alike. 

Don’t be fooled it’s hard but for the living it’s a calling and a dreading and a life. 

And like all things never lasts. 

Pinto Canyon, after the phone rings / Alexis Wolfe

Julia calls and it’s earthflight 
and blinding, calls me her bright&shiny, like if 
we stare too long into each other’s swirling 
we get a headache. She tells me about a coworker 
who didn’t cry at his girlfriend’s or mother’s 
funeral, though they were only a week apart—
he makes me believe in parallel realities, she says 
incoherence and your own power are hunting 
you down. If a man asked me to trade 
places, I’d place one hand in a hot 
frying pan and the other into a blender. I walk 
down the winding and know the meadowlarks 
sing for me, I hold the cows’ cries of separation 
and whisper may what is for them never pass
them by. Once, a bald professor read my account 
of an infant’s forehead and said this beauty can only
be written by a woman. I resented it, but knew 
what he meant. That same child once suffocated 
on a dog toy and I fishhooked him faster 
than spit, faster than fingers. The same one who, 
allergic to living, sometimes turned blue chewing 
oats. I would balance him on my forearm 
like a small clown, thrust my palm until he blushed 
pink and snot smeared his eyes. There are so many 
things I still cannot do alone. Julia says, I can’t wait 
to raise a child—it’s like going to war! 
Of course, there are more apt metaphors.
Of course, there are a million poets 
dragging tonight, but she called me

March - Poem 4

Day 4  / Kathleen Bednarek

I’ve counted on my fingers, counted on flagrant red petals that slipped  
and counted on people who ended up being known by their actions like came through or left me stranded. 
Counted on paychecks, counted paycheck dollars, counted days until, days since, counted blessings, thought of absolution (really?) after ten Hail Marys        
Hide and Seek counting to 100, sometimes skipped or sped through the numbers, eyes closed, eyes opened seeing where you were. Counted time 
with no drinks; years went by and we spoke across tables about time as a free fall, the rising and falling of each Worm Moon or Strawberry Moon, eclipses hidden by weathermen counting tenths of inches of rain. My height marked on the wall purple magic marker line ____ below my best friend’s (for now my line is above her eleven year old daughter’s). My,     
my, my….no it’s not mine. Impermanence–this breath on my 
lip, the fall and rise of the belly. I’ve been dreaming of a butterfly; fake snoring whistling like a cartoon character, one eye open to see you giggling, I blink and fully grown living in Manhattan, a city of how many people? Taste the innumerableness of this soup! Floating carrot and translucent onion swirling, dash of pepper, splash of dark vinegar to cut. 
How I can’t even begin and then do 
and then I am borrowed to–
About thirty minutes into 
the science showabout black holes: the universe is expanding though it may be infinite

Swollen / Mymona Bibi

the city swelled like the curve of a cat’s back
when I ran out before dawn shivering
from the police in my apparitions,
you sliced the moon and found a sun inside it unkissed
dying - rays untouched.
the light of the new sun burnt the apparition from memory, 
we stumbled on cobblestones back home 
where we believed we were meant to go,
before you could help me stitch up the moon 
so the nights would be ready for the sleepers.
in the padding of the night-cat’s paw
which crawled away from us is a reminder:
we can’t go back to bed until the city empties itself. 

Mrs. Wyeth  / Susan Hankla

A woman rests her arms on a windowsill of a wooden house and looks out.

 She wears a wide-brimmed leather hat and earth brown cable knit sweater buttoned up to her throat.

 Her arms are crossed on the windowsill, and one pinky is up. The gesture expresses openness, maybe.

 She looks out the open window that has no screen. It swings out. What could be captured in her hatchet-blade gaze?

 Who is she? She's her famous husband's, the artist's wife. But who does she think she is?

 Is she counting geese? She wears a man's hat every day. My mind drifts to when my husband almost died.

 I wore his brown Stetson to see him at the rehab place. He is also a well-known artist. He has

 nine or ten visitors every day. Some get there before I'm even up. For years I was angry all the time. Now I've

 just made 5 copies of his DNR. He tells the nurses at the rehab place that I never come see him. I'm there every day.

 When home by myself, I do his laundry and turn the lights out early and look out at the sparkling snow covering

 unraked leaves.

Introductions / Amy Haworth

Inspired by the beautiful prompt and poem by George Ella Lyons 

I am from sagebrush
and last year's aspen leaves
I am from frozen eyelashes
and roller skating in covered courts.
I am from goodbyes to sister friends
from moon boots and mittens
I am from will you be my friend
and green mountain cabins and cards.
I am from outside looking in
hollow longing filled with good grades
    and folded notes
I am from bridesmaid dresses
and moonlight snowshoes.
I am from U-Haul adventures
and severance packages.
I am from new year's sparks 
turned rings below purple mountains.
I am from bedrest to baby
at 36th and Vallejo 
I am from sea shore and man 'o war
finding patterns as a doula for change.
I am the cycle of the sun
watching age wrinkle as she teaches
I am awake. I am alive.
I am.

Dear Spring, Come! Quick! / Christina McCleanhan

Close your eyes. Listen…
to the thawed dirt…the robin’s shuffle…the barking dog
the distant siren…the neighbor’s saw…

Hold out your hand. Wait for Manna.
Turn the palm upward. Wait for forgiveness.
Clench into a fighting fist. Wait for peace.

First, you are exposed flesh; then, age and hydration become evident
when tendons resist the stretch. 
Why must our joints strike in protest?
“Kneel,” I tell you, “Kneel.”  
Pick up the spade. Slice into the earth. 
Slide the worms, the rocks, the necrotic rot into the bucket. 
Ignore its missing handle. 
Renewal is rewarded with nourishing grace, not presented elegance.

Now, be still.  Breathe.
One beat, two beats, three.
Space rests on your skin against your lines, fingerprints, 
and
the knuckles meant for gripping life...

Attention-
offer it, plant it often.
Go ahead, share your fear.
Exist.

Horizontal  / Elizabeth McGraw

Is it Monday, God no.
It’s Tuesday.
No alarm and it’s 4am.
Stayed awake with a single idea about work until 6:05.
True alarm.
First drop off at 7:18 but not before a heated debate on the term crashed out.
Husband in Amsterdam.
As it relates to sister.
Second round begins.
This is not torture.
Torture is knowing you leave for the bus stop in forty-seven minutes and wonder what might you accomplish. Shower for self.
Food for others for the entire day. Quick text. Morning Joe. A novel. 
Walk the dog. 
Head covered. Alarm set. A recovery.
New day. Same day. 
All is well. 

Grievances, Dreams / Alexis Wolfe

You have to dance, not
over-dance, someone said.

People are just like grass, 
Agnes Martin tells me:
that is the way to freedom. 
If you can imagine you’re a rock,
or—even better—a grain of sand, 
you are free. To be free 
one must summon a vision of quiet, 
one must not over-dance. We are 
our own dragon, longing 
to hold one.

When you wade in the river,
you are just like me. When your 
hair is caught in your car 
windows, you are just like 
me. A function of language
is to relate—relatively, I am dreaming
alternatives to Subject/Object 
syntax structure—colonialism burned into 
the brittle bones of our 
language. Each sentence 
a door, yet: He (subject, dominant) holds
her (object, passive). We speak 
Corporation—it is all so 
boring. What about Subject/Subject-ing
with me? We hold we. The body and 
the language resist, there’s one. 
This is less about listing grievances 
and more about summoning a vision 
of quiet within the school of Dreams. 

This evening I biked over a hill
and smacked my face on the orange
moon. I couldn’t stop squinting 
into the flat horizon—Now, 
what is the function of that?

March - Poem 3

Window  / Kathleen Bednarek

-thinking of Lorine Niedecker

Portal into field 
Unchanging frame 

Unknowing 
Wyoming

-

Green & brown dots for cows

My body with its eye-
rises 

A piece of paper rolled-up & 
Stuck in the hole 
In the screen
To keep the mosquito 
Out

How I learned words
Given to the sky 

Now read out loud
To the mountains 
Over my book

Time / Mymona Bibi

there are some
who are great
with time,
they swim through 
it or it swims
through them 
and their fingertips
never wrinkle.

instead time
is something
i choke
on catch
in my throat,
spit out
and lift
my head to find 
spite in my eyes.

when the time 
swimmers float
towards me,
the clocks
break. 
i am elated
by the witch
from my nightmares
who kisses 
my forehead,
plucks time 
from my throat
and tells me to 
swim,
i dive 
into the pool.

when my head 
resurfaces
the sun rises
and i smile
in pain.

what a pleasure!

to feel this body 
in another body,
the clock face
relaxed. 

tears are nothing 
but calls
to ocean.

Mother's Shrine / Susan Hankla

In old albums, sometimes they've cut around a picture 
and stood the inch-tall photo against the black page. 
I have one of those of Mother (her splendid legs cut off)
I keep in a plastic box which I don't know what to do with.

             It's by my keyboard.

In it, I've added a chip of purple glass I once thought was amethyst
until I dropped that brooch from my grandmother on my office floor. 
Earlier, when I thought it was made of amethyst, I 'd sent it to my cousin's daughter. 

            She never thanked me.

Waiting too long for a note from her, I asked that she mail my brooch back.
After more long months, she tucked a nearly illegible note to send 
with the pin. Her chilly little message was about the nature of misunderstanding. 

She never knew her great grandmother, but what I wouldn't give
to have got a thank you note from Ruth mentioning the heirloom. Not being thanked 
made me lonelier than ever, ever I was-- the butt of her joke.

            One day Mother sends me a handwritten note.

First Friends / Amy Haworth

My two friends would come to play
Board games and Barbie dolls
From 10 to 2 we'd huddle down
Happy as we could be.

My two friends would come to play
Until there was a fight.
She threw a fit and yelled and screamed
Until the other cried.

My two friends would fight each day 
And then I'd set things right
With mother's tone and lessons taught
They headed to their home.

My mother asked if they had left
(I knew she could not know.)
My friends, you see, were made of air.
Alive to me alone.

One left behind when we did move
The other came along. 
I never wondered where she lived
Or if she had home.

My two friends would come to play
They were mine alone.
Ghosts or angels — who would know?
For I was not alone.

Please Exit the Ride to Your Left / Christina McCleanhan

To understand is to land

beyond

    the chewed rim

of your styrofoam cup.

at the party
we were laughing

haha

hilarious

Hey...
come back,
come back…what happened…
to the Santa hat?

                                        haha

                                                         hilarious

like most,
our evening passed
in silence

                                         haha

                                                          hilarious

then, there were
only voices left
to adjust
only seams left
to patrol

no need to stage my nightmare
with your spotlight guillotine
my eyes were already wide
when we

walked

to the fenceline

the stars

         that night, they wept

A Refresher  / Elizabeth McGraw

Sitting in the chair under the glare I see my skin sink and dull. 
Color at the roots tips left bare, lipstick still bright red. 
I am hoping for a miracle or just a small nudge further from dread. 
The clock is ticking. 

I've actually somewhere to go but they won't know where I've been
except for the clean trim and filtered smile
that shows I am ready to begin again. 

The candle, not quite a tealight / Alexis Wolfe

the candle, not quite a tealight
waves its neck at my eroding
spray roses; their water is milk

March - Poem 2

Zero Days / Kathleen Bednarek

Last night I was met in a dream by a man I had never met before. His face, a composite of men who have worked in body shops or out in the cold. A traffic flagger. Large, red-faced, longer gray hair flowing out from under a baseball cap that said Semper Fi. I arrived in this dream not because I am a Marine, but maybe because my sister recently told me over the phone: Semper Fi, short for Semper Fidelis, always faithful. 

The man across from me told me he drank Busch beer from the time he woke up, and that it helped him to come to the shop already on his way to blotto. Lucidly, I noted PTSD as a possibility. I don’t know, what rooms are we ever in when we confess? I can't recall. The emotion normally overtakes the atmosphere. 

No one confesses anything unless they can't stand it any longer but the spaces stay. I listened to him and didn't say a word. Even in the dream I never had him do work on my car. 

My sister conjures humor from depths, sourcing  Bloody Marys in Civil War-themed restaurants during snowstorms staving off the lack of light. Sweatpants and high heels juxtaposed, with an old winter coat for a quick jaunt to the supermarket. You know this is the America of spray cheese. Of Powerball. Of poverty, that's different from other countries' poverty, because it dies of heart. If you give someone dreams, there are those who know the turn. The empty-handed side. Here you laugh. And I shake. But no one will know what kind of shakes. Was it from laughing? Who goes there? 

Zero days. A Brad Pitt movie, exited in near darkness. What kind of people are in your dreams? Where are you all sitting, can I sit here? I've been in many rooms. I recall blacklight, deeply cushioned furniture, wood-paneled walls and conversations I no longer wanted to be part of. It was to leave them to return to myself. A different dream. Now it’s Sunday, I'm facing a bare-limbed forest, a winter that won't quit. I think of you enduring. Life will make you its mercenary—pick a song to go into battle with. Dance with it in your room.

Orange / Mymona Bibi

Like the start of a morning or end of a night, orange is tomorrow it’s believing we have a chance it’s the aura of hope. don’t look at it, my love, for orange burns, stings, in a wound as i cut open slice through orange, strings of white, orange, find you in two-toned fruit and one toned flesh, each segment falling, rocking, boatfuls of juice on a small plate. it’s a kiss and the fire left behind on lips and tongues, lighting departures in alleyways. orange is a street full of us, is my knowledge of floating rings and shining jackets and emergency flames where we beg our abusers to save us because no on else is left. 

Untitled / Amy Haworth

I weep for the girls 
who will not see 
another sunrise
who will never know 
this girl
cries 
for the girls 
who I have never seen
but imagine
holding
their mother
I've never met
in this lost
world
where they should 
have come home 
from school
today.

I Had Two Childhoods / Susan Hankla

One in which a father betrayed me.

One in which good women saved me.

So really I had no childhood at all.

But why get all psychological?

 I know how to make biscuits you can see through.

When Courage Fails / Christina McCleanhan

Let depression’s horror sweep across your feet 
before it rises to probe your sacredness
with its clinical fingers.
Offer your shoulders
to the heaviness of jealousy’s resolve 
if forgiveness feels shallow and useless.
But, do not stop dreaming.
Raise your head and watch the sky, 
wait for the rabbit’s jump
from the tall grass 
behind the abandoned white house 
with mismatched clapboard siding.
The dogs will wait or walk; the dogs look after you.
When fear comes 
to pour itself along your breast, 
greet its sting 
like exposed flesh 
reckons with a January coldness.
Welcome reflection 
that means to forge your buyer’s regret, 
compressing your wounded foolishness 
into a proud thickness
that may take another week or year to mold. 
But, do not stop breathing.
Slam your fist down into the dishwater, 
rest while the countertop slant draws the suds 
toward the hidden mildew behind the faucet.
The guests will eat or starve; the guests came for you.

Recognize  / Elizabeth McGraw

Call it like you see it, what should I call what I feel? 
Wait to perform when I know I am liked, 
but they won't like you until you perform. 
I am a monkey. 

By midday / Alexis Wolfe

By midday everything is slippery-wet 
flubber, my hands are two sieves
and i’m hyperfixated on the notes
of a vacuum-sealed Bookkisa coffee
bag again: florals, meyer lemon, melon––washed
process, weren’t the last: meyer lemon, peach, bergamot?

Why all these lemons, melons,
where there are none? Everything
is everywhere. Coffee is coffee, 
not ripped petals, drenched fruits. I drink it.
I read about the detrimental effects 
of globalization: our foreclosed future, 
earth mass smashing
into the continuum of past and future, 
completion as a limit and the time 
of the finite world beginning. Excess, meet
excess meet excess, you’re all the rage
lately—enjoy a cacophonous 
conversation.
The sourdough loaves cool and talk 
amongst each other on my countertop and
it excites me–i don't know
who I’ll gift them to, unable to eat. 
I say I can’t write anything lately, 
but then what is this? What is anyone 
talking about anyways 
on my kitchen blah blah blah
radio, through the nightshade, at the local blah 
blah grandmother-dedicated 
restaurant. I don’t care.
Of course I do.

March - Poem 1

do you follow me / Kathleen Bednarek

if today the blue sky 
without saying a word 
lent us its promise 
today the sun returned after the snow
unearthing a lost earring 
ordinary mysteries accompanied 
by the caw of a crow or two  
if to start this poem with their sounds 
but they clutter the blue of the sky 
if as it turns out makes everything a question  
today i am content to be curious 
do you follow me 
i hope for a way through 
i don’t know how

Nightshift  / MyMona Bibi

dust off the broken glass
from the floor
at 2am on your knees

in the shuttered shisha bar
where ginger coffee once stained
the rug where blood 

was almost spilt
where your nights were paid
for by a boss plagued

with prejudice that cuts
deeper than the shards in your fingers
as you miss the sand in your eyes

from when this country was only a mirage
tiny fickle little dreams die
on boats or drown

nearby loss collects in living bones
knees click back up loud
like returning from sujood

during the last tarawih hands clasped
each other shoulder to shoulder
no space left for anything 

but a child chasing futures between praying
legs snap back to silent jabana
a black memory against white

reality as the kettle whistles
and skin is punctured so realise
that I’m just a night soaked voice

on a phone and mourning eyes
from the street even birds 
won’t sing in as your body falls

to the floor and you find the missing 
double-six domino tile
from the game you would’ve won.

Bus Station Mishap / Susan Hankla

What looked like my yellow Samsonite suitcase
was full of car parts. Back then, you called the person to arrange the swap.
It worked fine. He came to me with my dresses
and underwear, his suitcase a lot heavier than mine.
We laughed and were grateful. That suitcase I’d picked out
at the store had exploits. It went to London. It went to Sweden.
Once I flew from Virginia to Providence
with a new frying pan.
But Aunt Marjorie’s jar of cherry jam
was leaking. She could never manage to get it semi-solid.
I scooped the red stuff from inside the corners of the yellow suitcase
with a serving spoon and spread it on Sally Lunn bread.

Sixteen / Amy Haworth

I wish you would talk to me
like you did
when you were 10.

When I was your everything 
and you were 
my soul.

I wish I could return
to the moments 
you wouldn't let me go

to bed until
you had fallen
asleep.

I was so tired
it hurt
back then.

But your need of me
hurt different
than now's disdain.

They tell me that
you'll be back
again

But never again
in the way
that we were

When we managed to be
only because
of each other.

For the One Who Did Not Call / Christina McCleanhan

I know, I know, you are uninterested.

Today, there was spring warmth.
We may live in a world of phobias, so I beckon
the blackbirds with a faithful hand. 
Let them carry away my orphaned willingness. 
It is no worse than the straw from my yard that will build 
their spring nests.
What will be, will be.

I know, I know, you are exclusive.

Everyone is a neighbor when your heart is breaking.
New friends ask what they do not understand.
What happens when you are angry?
How did you keep walking?
And when my answer is slow to come, old friends push.
Were you angry that summer? That afternoon?
After it happened? Why did you keep trying?
In silence, my mouth is too often parched 
from the stale dryness of the words 
imprisoned on the tip of my tongue.
What has passed, has passed.

I know, I know, you are an intellectual.

Tonight, a late-winter chill has replaced spring. 
I have seen how people hurt others; I am tired, now.
I have felt innocent hope destroyed by barking thieves
who search for diamonds in the water bowls of poor folks,
crippled by a debtor’s loneliness and no heat.
We must first face what will be changed. Understand?

Whim  / Elizabeth McGraw

Fuck.  I forgot.  
My whim and whimsy and talked out loud. 
Sitting in a kitchen I held the hoops close to
my ears and smacked the gum real hard. 
Oh, no I heard them gasp. 
I spit out the gum. 
Reigned myself in. 
Sat on my hands. 
And spoke better next time. 

Fish out of earthly water / Alexis Wolfe

Understand this: if you stumble 
across a quiet, enter. 
Lately reading too
many accellerationisms  ecotraumas  
races for superintelligences    deportations   
before dawns  sentient hells   razor wire 
blueprints dividing dreamt up-transnational- 
national parks    imperialisms   phones mistaken 
for guns    5G aromas    Balenciaga apologies 
dissolving hyperrealities   CGI-generated modeling  
agencies    children falling invisibles   phantasmagoric
agglomerations   plunging birth 
rates   Costco expansions  elitist cannibalism boyscout 
camps  3D printed kidneys / coral reefs    AI-induced
psychosises  baking competitions     competition 
competitions  western wear catastrophes
deepfake porns  Juul-induced popcorn lungs 
washing the shores   razor wire border walls
dividing ideally-transnational 
national parks—before calls and petitions 
for big bend’s wall 
we would float in the Rio, 
one foot in Mexico, frontera invisible, 
frontera nothing but mudded grass, misname 
the constellations (which are the same 
on either side). Springing between hot 
and cold river, we were fish out of earthly
water, we would find 
some quiet place, 
enter:

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.

February - Poem 27

My Friend, Let’s Remember / Kristine Anderson

Snapdragons
            like the ones your mother planted in the backyard
            sun-yellow and lavender and white
                        strength, mystery, protection

The duck
            that wandered into your childhood, which you adopted
            quacking as it waddled in the yard, teasing your terrier
                        grit, fun, adaptability

Chocolate
            as in Halloween or Easter candy, but also in baking
            Christmas cookies every year, a sweet endeavor
                        a small luxury, a gift, celebration

Your cocker spaniel
            the puppy a gift from your father who was dying from cancer
            moving with you to a new home with its impish pleading eyes
                        loyalty, affection, playfulness

One could do worse than have such landmarks along the way.

Justice  / Barbara Audet

… Bold self-creating men did statutes draw,
Skilled to establish villainy by law;
Fanatic drivers, whose unjust careers.
Produced new ills exceeding former fears:
Tarquin And Tullia/John Dryden

Self-shady men ever negotiate the penchant
To vanish faith, duty, decry mercy as an attribute.
Dryden’s villainy secured by law is ever true.
New ills, new fears, fruitful times of wickedness
Are willing stand-ins, holding permanent,
Planting gardens of seedy plotters, overgrown patriots.
Evil does not deserve to be redundant.
The poet wrote, “innumerable woes oppress the land,”
Did his insight leapfrog down the centuries to cast a searchlight
On baffling justice, the lacking of, that holds nations hostage?

ELEGY FOR A SECOND CHANCE AT BREATH / Ashby Logan Hill

Standing there waiting for me on front porch like fire, glowing,
as sure as you are that you still breathe, a heavenly thing,
brought down from sky to earth, as Faith is an angel,
you take all of the air that you can in, release what’s not given,
swift as a brisk wind, cold enough to freeze over, like the
Dry River high up and out of sweet light, for you a
second chance at breath, longing no more for what is lost,
instead for all that breathes and sings holy — Faith is her name,
a way to be whole again, ducks by the shallow pond and
green fields of morning, our walk through Central Park,
and all that remains holy is night — the night, our endless,
sleepless night that brings, sings with it our joy forever.
It’s things like this that make a life. It’s things like that,
this second chance at breath you hold a bit before breathing.

Consider  / Amy Marques

Consider looking
at attitude
his whispered
anxiously unattended
suspicion
his untidy reckless
demeanour, 
his sympathy
which made him
turned
back 
and paused.

Source material: A Tale of Two Cities

I do not want to live a life that is boring  / Sonia Sophia Sura

I do not want to face my journal and have nothing
to write.

I have already lived a thousand lives in this one,
and I’ve recovered enough of my parts to live 
my present moments in one body.
My soul is all-in this human-thing and I am praying,
meditating, cleansing, bathing.

I am calling on all those higher-ups,
the most unconditionally loving
archangels and
elevated ancestors
and my highest self.

We are all here,
cherubs surrounding me with their
cute faces and
white wings and
deadly bows.

I am impenetrable.
I am light shining so bright,

touch me too firmly
and you will
get
burned. 

February - Poem 26

Yesterday Morning / Kristine Anderson

The sky unfolded
pink against arctic blue
as the sun made its way
from the horizon, upward;

in minutes, the snow glistened
after the overnight freeze,
trees as still as mannequins,
rooftops seeming soft

as fleece, sparkling
as if sprinkled with glitter.
Soon the sun would begin
the day’s melting:

snow clusters falling
from burdened holly leaves
and pine needles, cracking,
shattering on the ground.

But those early minutes, a simple
palette: pearl white of snow,
rich-brown boughs of trees,
and above, the splash of dawn.

Unfolded  / Barbara Audet

One silk scarf, peacock blue and emerald green, is folded
Neatly in the top dresser drawer.
Not yet worn by a soon to be previous self,
a woman who pre-daring
knows practical pearls and matched black suits.
She suspects there’s freedom in the folds, lying pressed in wait of assignation, more sultry than sinister.
Unbusinesslike, unexpected,
Untethered though angle regulated. This painted seascape lies in hiding for the perfect gust of a gale of independence.

Light / Bee Cordera

Sometimes we see you sometimes we don't the times we do, evolution, love imigination, co lor beauty, and all life's metaphors we need you for that inspiration. And we dont to know our inner selves.

ODE TO THE STOVE PIPE AND CREOSOTE / Ashby Logan Hill

At dawn I’d find the foxes lurking, smiling at my counting.
Herbaceum, perennial bloom that feasts in sky like translucent moon
or fire smoke in stove pipe fluming up and through the cedar.
Floorboards creak in the morning beneath our feet and the
felines ring their tails around our bare ankles dancing in the
morning naked with ash and dew, how slowly but surely
the sunlight climbs over butte-magic of morning, ember-glow
transfixed in galaxial transfiguration, a bowl of warm milk,
the magpies circling, a gaggle of geese swirling, and flock of
sparrows above the treeline murmuring.  You could see my
breath this morning on my brief-brisk walk out to the wood pile.
I wanted it to blend in with my soul of creosote-smoke, of my old
country home, white stucco and terracotta stone. And you, sweet
standing there waiting for me on front porch like flame, glowing.

Deference to Will  / Amy Marques

Knowledge was privilege; a gentle deference to will.

 Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

BURP!  / Sonia Sophia Sura

That incredible sound is called a funny word. 
I wouldn’t call it that if
I were to name it myself…

My mom calls it Disgusting!
and rather tastefully, Rude!

When I do it, I feel proud! 
I must have done it when I was a baby, 
but it took 18 more years 
for me to burp regularly. 
My burps are a celebration, a release…
I call it an Achievement! 
and Did Ya Hear That?

When Max does it in my bedroom 
or in the kitchen, he does it so frequently 
and so LOUD, I announce, 
That Wasn’t Me! 

I Did That! Max shouts. 
And he sure is proud.

February - Poem 25

Neighbors / Kristine Anderson

Three of us in the parking lot
to charge phones in our cars
having shoveled out
after the plow went through
following yesterday’s snowstorm.
Still no electricity in our homes.
“I have extra batteries,” one neighbor offers,
“if they’ll work for your flashlight,”
and he trudges through the slush to fetch them for me.
A family lugs bags of clothes to their van.
They’re taking off to stay with relatives
who have lights and heat and warm food at home.
Before getting in the van, they ask me quietly,
“Will you check on Henry next door? It’s so cold.”

Henry, 86, returns with the promised batteries.
“I’m good,” he says when I ask. He points to his heavy
coat. “I wear this inside, too.” He shrugs. “Besides,
today’s sunny. The condo’s warming up.”

A teenage neighbor slows his bicycle through the puddles
of melting ice. “Hi!” he says as he rolls by.
Then he adds, shivering a bit, “It’s cold!”
Yep, I nod, and think,
but it’s getting warmer by the minute.

Presence  / Barbara Audet

    Dedicated to Ed

I often hear your voice though the room is quiet.
It starts as a whisper not in my ear but near my eyes.
Like a knowing breath nudging at facial corners, sounding
Resounding, untapped from an ordained rendezvous.
Aligned with no scent of you, just a breeze of you,
for the purpose I conjecture to connect us once more.
And what do you whisper in these logic-loosing talks?
Encouragement, occasionally. Advice, more often.
Is is for me you call or for you, to keep alive in some way,
Substance supernatural to forego death’s true nature.
Even as these words untangle themselves, I hear you
Reading over my shoulder, I feel your weight on my collar.
And I sense you will read them over after I have gone to sleep.

HOMEGROWN ABACUS / Ashby Logan Hill

At the light, I was reminded what magic grows of mountains.
My father’s tomatoes holding on like stone fruit on the wiry vines,
tent-pole stake and string-bent bulbs below the cherries,
sweet one hundreds, romas and other valley-ancient heirlooms.
We’d fry up some Jubilees and Green Zebras in cornmeal mix,
all turned over in garlic butter and buttermilk and dropped
in crackling, smoky-hot safflower oil. My cast iron mind was mine,
dark and sparkling like the morning sunrise.  “I’d seen God
up there in the sky draped above the pillowing, billowed hills,”
I told you, pink gleam of cirrus slipstream. The birds chirped me
again awake although I didn’t want to have to wait.  But I’d wait
for the night all night to whisper then sneak outside with a flashlight
to begin my arithmetic. I’d had just a few hours before first light.
At dawn I’d find the foxes lurking, smiling at my counting.

Asserveration  / Amy Marques

Positively demanding

asserveration: a swarming

anticipation 

of questions:

Whom to have been?

Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

What the flub!  / Sonia Sophia Sura

Flub!
What the flub!
The most beautiful
word in my vocabulary
is not glorp or glob
or blob or gleeb…
The most beautiful word
is flub.
Flub! Beautiful indeed.
I once lived with an artist
who lived with anger quite
not sparingly; he expressed
his emotions 
rather
untamedly…
Well, once he took a liking
to my word,
nothing was ever as
serious as it could be!
“What the flub!” He’d
say as he stormed around the place…
Why, it was quite fun…
Here he was, with
anger expressed
in a silly way; He came
to almost adore it.
“Holy flub!”
is my sacred way of 
expressing reverence,
“That’s flubbed!”
is my way of
expressing condolences,
and
“You flubbernutter!”
is the greatest
insult I could give.
As I use this word,
it spreads across the lands…
Nicole in Florida 
tells me she’s using
it around her friends.
She has her own
rules and preferences…

Someday, I can only dream,
this word will reach
the millions!
No more road rage!
No more violence!
Learn to express yourself,
and make it fun!
Join the motion!
Just say 
“Flub!”

Death of a Suburban Dog  / Samuel Spencer

It’s a labor just to hold up
your heavy head, and yet you rise
on those old, frail, wobbly dog legs

to say hello.

You were in the kitchen, the furthest
room from the living room. Why?

When dogs die, they leave the ones
they love. Why do they wander away?
Is it so they can die in peace? Is it
so they can acquit themselves those last
few pitiful pets? Or, is it so they can spare
us from seeing them stiff without the life
they freely gave?

Why were you in the kitchen, Benji?

Don’t you know if you want to go
we have to let you? Don’t you know
we’ll never have the strength? Don’t you
know we’re not dogs like you,
and we don’t know how

to say goodbye?

Benji?

February - Poem 24

Sublimities  / Barbara Audet

“Lives of great men all remind us, We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us, Footprints on the sands of time …”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Search if you must but dare you find a woman, man today whose life’s sublime?
Transcendent over natural inclinations, not wayward from a noble path.
It’s convenient to profit, to abandon what poets cherished in a time gone by.
Where are those that set grand agendas, ideal swollen hearts ever in harm’s way,
Exalting bravery, in thought, and words, and action, others before self?
Few flash auroras, few burn purely in our current mass construction of the all for one endeavor.
But when they strike a justice-angered flame, are consumed by a starlike immolation,
these few who seek sublime achievement are best foot forward.
By generous risk-taking, those lit from within remind the rest that more is possible, good unchecked.
Our days demand we follow fresh-made footsteps, molded by the weight of bold mankind.
Otherwise, the sands of time are leveled flat, refusing to retain evidence of our passing.

On love / Bee Cordera

Missing you, someone I’ve never met
Is like missing a golden age 
I have yet to experience
But feels right at home.
It feels like the vitamin D
Missing from my body 
When it’s been cloudy
And snowy for two weeks straight.
It feels like the once prairie land
Missing bison wallows
Basins for holding rain 
Wherever the buffalo roam.
You say it’s like missing 
A phantom limb you never had.
We hope their we don’t turn
To dust before we see each other 
Again in this lifetime, but even then
If we do turn to dust
We are destined to meet as dust
Bunnies finally combining 
Into one universe. 

APPALACHIAN APPELLATION / Ashby Logan Hill

“I was wondering when you’d come back up to see me.”
Cornfields and newts, mountain river gulley salamander,
Hessian mercenary, coal miners and moonshine. The hills
in Ansbach seem to keep in same time, one day Pangea split,
and stopped in the city, traffic light waiting, a man in a
golden hat rides by on his bike, past Manuel’s Laundromat,
large chromium swoop and flowers, daffodils for handlebars,
and I sit there thinking — green light, pink and yellow
lady slippers, astringents of bear corn or squawroot and
Sassafras tooth, parasitic phosphorescence, hypothesis for
the phylogenetic trees, clade and sister taxa and cladogram —
I’ll soak my ghost pipe in corn whiskey and go dancing.
Brook trout, Darters, Bowfin, Lake Sturgeon, the wild wind.
At the light, I was reminded what magic grows of mountains.

Anxieties Turned Away  / Amy Marques

Though short
of happiness
speak
of true
justice
earnestly.

With anxieties turned away.

 Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

Planet of Cheese  / Sonia Sophia Sura

The girl who visited
a planet
made only
of cheese
never did return…

Upon arrival, 
the planet was cheese,
not the girl.
But she had been
warned.

She brought pasta
and butter
and prepared
a fine course.

It was absolutely
wonderful 
to take from the
table,
and the chair,
and the fork. 

The shortage was
no issue
of cheese, but her
appetite was
poor. 

Day after day,
she ate her bed
and the floor, 

day after day,
she swallowed the plates
and the kitchen door,

day after day,
she ate and ate and ate
until she could no longer
stand straight. 

No wonder she was
alone,
anything
alive was
eaten soon after
it was born.

The longer she
stayed,
the larger she grew,
and I must tell you
the warning she’d received,
it’s an age-old proverb,
that you’ll become what
you eat…

The chairs disappeared,
she ate the spoons and the forks, 
the musical instruments,
the art and guitars…

All that was left
was a big stomach,
elbows and hands—
a larger planet of cheese,
with rings for arms…

If you don’t yet understand,
let me write this in
simple terms:

She ate the whole planet,
and became a new world. 

Swansong for a Horse (morning complaints)  / Samuel Spencer

I sit here this morning, able but unwanting.
The imaginary mountain of insurmountable
tedium towers over me a schoolyard
bully. I look up, unequal to the challenge –
the unavoidable consequence of saying yes
too many times. I am a horse long in the tooth
who has bitten off more than he could chew.

February - Poem 23

Preparing for the Storm / Kristine Anderson

Grocery shopping. Check. Aisles crowded
with locals doing exactly what I’m doing,
thinking, What will we eat if the power goes out?

My answer: Hard-cooked eggs. Muffins. Meatloaf.
Oh—and cookies. Cookies will save
us. (Baking: something else to do today.)

Full tank of gasoline in the car. Check.
            Probably won’t be able to get on the road
even if we want, but who knows? Just in case.

Shoveling the rest of old snow from the patio. Check.
            Icy, hard, piled in the middle like a pathetic
snowman. Need a patch of ground for the dog.

(Hope we can open the slider during the storm.)
Breaking up chunks of snow. Pitching weird
snowballs over the fence, into the woods.

After all the effort to get ready, I’ll need two
days on the sofa, feet up, eyes staring out
the window, watching snowfall
and fall
and fall.

Best Friends  / Barbara AudetUnderneath the crescent moon,

bolted in the stark, clear sky, 
I walk.
Often dog-encumbered to keep me
grounded.
The leash from man to beast
employed to restrain unspooling 
odd thoughts.
Riots in the brain belie
plain tugging on from stone to plant,
forward.
We cover a quick terrain on foot,
one's fur, one's coat, on defense
this night.
The limitations of the walk head
us back, routine besting straying into
danger.
And as always, I am safely in the doorway,
unattaching only a physical connection, never
our bond.

BLUE-BLACK VISION / Ashby Logan Hill

It was the rain in the night, the early morning light that saved us.
A snowfall came and blessed the banks of the river before disappearing.
I call to say “I love you” in the afternoon and wait to see again your smile.
“March,” you said. “Like the navy, milkshake sky.”  I want to hold her
in my arms forever, like how we eat the sun, an orange peel or two.
In our arms forever we hold the sun. “Who knows with all this warming
what becomes of us on the earth after we die?” Where will you be
sitting?”  “Somewhere on a blue-black cloud?”  I want to go back to the
moment in rain outside the restaurant, embrace like two willows
touching each other’s bark and gather together our beaming branches.
“Saplings,” you said. “”Together we hold what the two of us can do.”
She opens up like a flower, a warm spring bud, back-lit in the wind.
I stand there dancing like a sunflower. “Sunflowers,” I said.
“I was wondering when you’d come back up to see me.”

Annoyance  / Amy Marques

I am annoyed 
by a man's
opinion.

You approve?

I thought you would
this time
yes.

I have looked
it in the face, take
care. 

Find a way.

An Erasure poem. Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

Living in the Dream  / Samuel Spencer

It’s been nearly a month
since I’ve been home to the place
I live, years since I’ve been home
to the place I belong.
I grow further distant
as the decadence chips away
my longing to live close
to the earth. Every flight
I lose something once
mine: a toothbrush, a book, a
memory – it all swirls and fades
in the slipstream of the jet.
I know I’ll have to stop this
movement one day, and accept
the place I knew all those years
ago is too far gone, though it
hasn’t moved an inch.

February - Poem 22

Skyline / Kristine Anderson

From a boat in the harbor, I se the city’s skyline
like irregular cubes against the negative space
of the cloudy afternoon, and here and there a steeple.

In kindergarten, around words we drew boxes
to show the shapes of letters. Around the word book
I’d draw a tall line above the b, a low board

across the oo, and around the k another tall merlon.
My dash-lined pad took on the look of battlements,
as do the rooftops of skyscrapers in the metropolis

seen from miles away on a boat in the bay. Or perhaps
it’s words floating up from crowds of busy people
until stuck against the clouds, forming shapes of parapets.

Real Existence / Barbara Audet

“We are all captives of the picture in our head—our belief that the world we have experienced is the world that really exists.”   Walter Lippmann

Which of my memories most succeed?

My father playing tennis in long pants and a strangely short-sleeved shirt at Bass Lake, in Indiana, where we cooked fresh-caught perch, curled into Army cots and listened to WLS.

Which of my memories most succeed?

Mom singing in a suburban store window in Park Forest, in a satiny pastel dress, her voice hitting high C or was it E, one of the Chansonettes, founded in 1954, just like me.

Which of my memories most succeed?

Jim building a fort or a geiger counter, wearing a plaid shirt with mismatched shorts, while swimming a mile for an Eagle Scout badge, while flying a kite a mile high for days on a bet.

Which of my memories most mislead?

I was not playing tennis but took a picture of Dad swinging that racket. I had never seen him swing a racket before and never would see him swing one ever again. Was that real?

Which of my memories most mislead?

I was so small when Mom sang, a woman who often would break out into song, at a piano with my Dad, yet every year, the music seemed to break out less and less. Was her song ever real?

Which of my memories most mislead?

Jim the eldest of us all. The tinkerer, shipbuilder brother, who climbed a thousand-foot tower to plant a flag and turn electrons into images. Were those brief as electric shock pictures real?

They say out in space, if you go far enough, radio signals, TV signals exist just waiting to be caught again, a reality that can exist only if the magic can be captured at just the right time once again. All Dad’s volleys. All Mom’s songs. All Jim’s steps. Captives of the vacuum that is outside my experience but nevertheless real as it slumbers well inside my smallest part of the universe.

On love / Bee Cordera

We stand at the snowy the edge 
watching a blue and warm river 
carve forever through red stone canyon
Burros lug around home, food,
needful things starting their day 
as the sun rises. Like us they follow 
the man made trail that hugs the canyon rim
going straight towards the river. Trail markers 
along the path warn "once you go down
you must come back up." A race that starts, before 
the sunrise, against the sunset.

Rogue Angel / Ashby Logan Hill

“I love you like the dew at break of dawn.” “I love you like the morning tide fading.”
I am the ring around the rosies and pockets full of ash, the bitter clash
between God up in heaven. I am the dirt and the mud, the fire and wine,
I am the stars and the sky and everything all at once, the dark that
becomes the whirlwind of nothing, the dark-wet leaves of pavement
and the willow trees, the dream like angler fish’s devilish hanging light,
like a lantern that weeps in its own sorrows for lack of sight. I am the
illumination of things, the door jam, melancholy. How can an angel with
no wings fly? Fallen down to go underground? I am the rogue angel
that whispers to you in the night. I am what is needed to make you hear
the sweet music of my lute, to remind myself of good times, cavernous
heat-breaths bound from clouds.  You stood and waited for me at the crossroads.
I hovered above the reddening earth and hot gashes of wounded sand.
It was the rain in the night, the early morning light that saved us.

Solitude / Amy Marques

A solitude may originate:

listening

to our lives

stopping

to ask 

          and hear.

A memorable interval.

Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

I am so tired  / Sonia Sophia Sura

my brain feels like mush.
I want that feeling
I’ll get in the future,
when I’m with my partner
(can I get a hint where we’ll meet?)
in our house on the shore.

We are restful for months.
There are months to our name,
weeks marked on the calendar that
just say, “rest and enjoy the day!”

I want that feeling that will
inevitably come,
where everything that is
still possible for me in this life
that is righteous and best,
materializes.

There, I am facing the ocean and
I am saying, “I understand. It’s
all perfect. It’s all perfect.”
I am visiting my past self
and saying, “don’t worry.
It will all work out. Enjoy
your day. Enjoy your now.”

A Poem with My Brother and Dad  / Samuel Spencer

Peaks wave white flags of misting snow
As sheets of ice reach to meet the sun.
My mind gets lost within my soul,
A snow-dawned mountain wanting undress.
The son's embrace that melts the frozen heart–
A still small speck, but I the whole.

February - Poem 21

Photographs / Kristine Anderson

on my phone
hundreds of them, years of them
emitting startling colors, bodiless
living in a Cloud

in a round tin
where my mother always stored them
dozens upon dozens of them
glossy black-and-white
or faded Kodacolor
children growing up
mugging at the camera

in my grandparents’ shoeboxes
tens of them, cabinet cards
on thick brown cardstock
matte finish
posed forms, smile-less faces

in a tan envelope
Sears, Roebuck and Co. return address
handwritten to my great-grandmother
Mrs. Andy Anderson / Stratford, Iowa
exactly four small tintypes
faces I’ve never seen before

If Winter Were A Hockey Game / Barbara Audet

Demanding winter get a move on, give up its reign to spring?
Never grows old for this captain of a score or more weather-cursed campaigns.
Snow intimidated, lately I got on the steered clear side of Providence.
After fall, I did my blizzard time in Northern Maine,
taking yardsticks to front lawn precipitation, watched my dog grow a melt-capable mustache
as he burrowed tunnels to and from the disappearing back door.

Spare the canine moved me to where ice is less than a stellar bet,
though one can still pull an ace of spades out of winter’s deck.
Winter smirks, eyeing me with one goal: capitulation.
Season demons seek me out for retaliation.
Payback for the go west, tails-tucked, weather-fueled retreat.

February sets off what I know is a devilishly-timed interruption,
an icing call during spring’s on the doorstep power play.
Once more, I’m lulled into that momentary cold comfort,
colored by the holding delusion of rainbow-flamed fires,
that flatter my senses, freeing room
for last minute upper atmosphere disturbances.
I should be finished unwrapping shirt-box cardboard skies,
Embarrassed to send bare arms out as spies
for beams made vagrant by a disobedient sun?
Is if fair spring can hide under wraps, in plain sight?

Go ahead winter, give it your best shot.
Take advantage of some ancient
cloud-wielder’s Olympian sense of humor. My warriors
are saffron-stuffed crocuses poised to strike,
Not so timid tulips with steely spines.
Narcissus with attitude.
You’ve once again crossed the line.

untitled / Bee Cordera

Poetry off the page. 
The heart of the community, 
art, the universal language. 
We've been speaking to each other 
through colors, vibrant wavelengths 
of a familiar beat. We speak 
the same language here 
and understand the 
world of the artist.

NOEL / Ashby Logan Hill

Secretly I wish for you again. The rain keeps our hearts forever.
The rain. The rain. Pitter patting on the rooftops. A song again.
Forever. Forever.  I want to dance in the rain with you forever.
Everytime the door opens, you smile, something new. You. Your smile.
“I want to bathe you in garlic,” she said. “I want to bathe you in silk.”
“I want to take the rose upon the table and make you bend like light.”
“I want to take the tall trees and bend and quake like the aspen.”
The morning time comes and you are half awake and still I dance with you.
Cold atop covers still warming us underneath, and the bull frogs croaking.
“I want to be alive again,” she said. “Take me to the off-road mud,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “The trails you can’t see without noticing, and a light dimly
glimmers.” “I want to hold you in my arms forever,” I said. “The deepest part
of all of us,” she said.  In our hearts, the river can’t even begin to express our love.
“I love you like the dew at break of dawn.” “I love you like the morning tide fading.”

Comedy Influence / Amy Marques

Chocolate was a comedy

influence, a happy

power

both private and public.

A luxury—always.

Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

Mise en place  / Samuel Spencer

I have a place for my laptop, a place
for my book, for my journal, a place
for my mouse tucked away in a small pocket
all inside my bag ready to go
to the coffee shop – a place for the morning.
I have a place for my boots, standing at the
ready by the door, a place for socks, though estranged,
in a drawer. I have a place for loose change
and other jangling things.
I have a place for intangibles, too.
Like my secrets – strangely enough, they too belong
in my sock drawer. I have a place for lost
friends, but I don’t go there anymore.
I have a place for the image of my child self.
I store it in the memory of our backyard – the
trampoline and the sun pouring over the thick, sharp grass.
I have a place for my pain, all the way back
in a cupboard inside my heart. I have a place for
Love in the cupboard over. I keep my imagination
in the glove compartment of my soul – a 2007
Subaru Outback. I keep my worries in the swell of
wrinkles crashing about my forehead.
There’s a closet inside my mind where I shove
all the things I can’t remember. Every so often
something falls loose. Never in time.

February - Poem 20

Sepia / Kristine Anderson

In the faded sepia landscape,
overcast sky, trees not yet in foliage—
early spring, perhaps. Dandelions
dotting the lawn. Or just damage
spots on the old photo. An Iowa farm-
house. Very early twentieth century.
Taken by a roaming photographer,
for the hefty price of $1.00, perhaps.
Six people posing in the yard in front
of the house. To the left, a grandmother
figure, mostly obscured behind a bush
as tall as her shoulders, her face rising
above, wispy gray hair pulled back,
head tilted down, a whimsy of a smile.
To the far right, two tall farmhands
in overalls, wearing caps. All business.
In the middle, two young boys, maybe
pre-teens. Dressed in clothes
they haven’t grown into yet.

I can’t quit staring at the ramrod straight
petite woman to the left of the boys,
dark hair neatly up, sharp heart
of a face, shadows for eyes,
dressed from ground to chin, sleeves
to her wrists, in black. If it’s who
I think, she’d recently lost a child,
a little girl, who lived eleven days.
Two years before that, she’d lost her first-born,
a son, almost 17. Brain abscess.
She has another son, eleven, possibly
the boy closest to her in the picture.
That would be my grandfather, Fred.
The woman’s name is Clara. In two years’
time, she will give birth to another daughter.
In seven years, she will be confined
to a Hospital for the Insane,
where she will die.
Then Clara, my great-grandmother,
will be buried in an unmarked grave.

Beside The Sea / Barbara Audet

She is old, this woman by the wayside, grey wires for tendrils flying out,
dressed in mismatched seams the error of handmade blue gingham.
She is as not as old as the tidal plains her gaze oversees on the gutted turnoff
from the usually busy highway near the autumn-emptied beach.
Not as old but as women go, old enough to harbor a coastal apprehension.
The woman and the wetlands share accordion wrinkles,
They have twin grasps of their singular topography.
The land, the woman are in harmony by necessity,
In concert with no audience to hear the anguish in their duet
of ebbing in the perfection of a sheltered estuary.
Mother Nature on schedule lines up cattails like natural brushed mascara
to define the oscillating edges of the disappearing shore on sea.
The other lost her mother long ago, and cannot compare
if her flesh folds and bends like hers did,
staking claims on her once porcelain veneer.
Customers know the way to her clapboard house,
looking for a Wyeth sketch done in 3D.
They honk their horns in the fog that is always at her door,
Bring sewing to make right or crabs to
team, pick apart.
Neither woman or plain wants to give in to the petulant progression inland.
For her a backward slap against the face, that means a move away to a landlocked existence. 
For the wetland, doom comes in not one fell swoop,
but by a rippling implosion of encroaching improvements.
She listens and swears she hears the land weeping,
as if the Earth could sigh out loud.
The land hears its death arrive in wind sung blues that no human may decode.
Each takes stock of their losses, watching the dismemberment of sand,
swept away, documented by moonrises and capped ocean swells.
The old woman of the fading Virginia homestead, 
made barren by rapacious sea salt, rocks in downtime on her porch, 
aware of cracking floorboards, gone to splinters.
She longs to see the life return, her skin stretched straight again
across praised cheekbones. Only when she feels sorry for herself,
does she dare neglect the tidal tension, goes inside, settles
for a drop-down set of 45s, grooves as angled as her portraiture,
letting Bobby Darren drown out the moaning of her home under siege.

ANTICIPATION / Ashby Logan Hill

                      for Faith

So, feeling enlightened, tonight we slept with both our eyes open.
A wind again, like in the Alchemist, that brings everything back again.
Again, always again as in eddy, undulating pool of new, and heron
bloom blue, breaking into unrestricted beach by pipeline on Saturday
because you had to find yourself alone surrounded by everything
that you love, anticipation like a cat waiting to pounce, or a pelican
drifting into dive, long linger of the lion lurking. And the zebra with
coffee or cream stripes, nothing like a wildebeest or okapi, and my
head lurches up, with my heart beat, door whisper again for a kiss,
the beauty of this, waiting for you to saunter in, again, having not
seen you in months, at the soda counter for an order of two chocolate
milkshakes, ice water, an order of garlic fries, and two snickerdoodle
cream pies, each turn a heart flutter more like a hummingbird waiting.
Secretly I wish for you again. The rain keeps our hearts forever.

Deliberation / Amy Marques

begin deliberating 

before you must

answer:

the tip of your 

tongue is to be

pitied.

Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

Every piece of the world touches me  / Sonia Sophia Sura

I hold my own hand
to fall asleep.

In the bath, I am a mermaid.
I feel the echo of the 
water and I know
the ocean is
endless.
And I know the ocean
is endless.
and it shouldn’t be.
it shouldn’t be.

Every piece of the world touches me.

It smells amazing
when the earth 
gets wet.

Sometimes I 
see colors
from people.

Sometimes I feel
colors when
I am touched.

Imagine if the 
whole world hugged.

What would that
sound like?

Imagine if we all
went quiet.

Who would speak first? 

Every piece of the world touches me.
I am trying to be
romantic about this,
so everything doesn’t hurt. 

February - Poem 19

Anniversaries / Kristine Anderson

Three-fifths of my family will have birthdays
somewhere else this year.
By family, I mean the family I was born into.

Not sure where they are, these other family members.
I know where my brother is, and I know where I am.
A few months ago, my brother turned 60. He’s in

the Pacific Northwest. We talk every week.
This year, I turn 70. I’m in the Northeast.
I live with others: my husband, our dog.

My husband and I have a son. Our son lives
elsewhere in the world, creating a life. That’s good.
I know where my brother is, where I am,

where my immediate family members are.
But three-fifths of the family I was born into
are somewhere else. And honestly, they don’t

have birthdays anymore. Some folks claim
they know where people go. All I know:

They’re not where I can see or talk to them.

Sure, I’ve visited my mother’s grave in California,
brought cut roses and sweet-smelling jasmine
to lay on the grass. When I travel back another time,

the flowers are as absent as she is. She’d be 100,
but we stopped counting forty-eight years ago.

It doesn’t matter that I haven’t visited
that hillside along a bumpy logging road
high in the Cascades where my sister, brother,

and I scattered our father’s ashes. Even if
I remembered how to get there, even if I found

a remaining ash blowing in the wind, my dad

isn’t there. If he were still having birthdays,
he’d be 104. But that was thirty-two years ago.

And although I’ll someday stop by the cemetery
where we buried, next to our mother, the brass urn
decorated with mother-of-pearl containing

my sister’s ashes, I know. She’s not there.
My sister would 71. It’s been only two years.

Clarity / Barbara Audet

Every once in a while
I go too far, I see the dilemma.
Buying one too many pairs of jeans,
Thrifting one too many ancient dishes
at the store when I know I need no more.
I cannot understand why I try
to surround myself, this life
with such an overflow of what
cannot mean much of anything
to anyone other than myself.
Pare it down. Pair it with humility.
Let less be a less ambiguous
mode of catching happiness.

Daydreams about Miyazaki  / Bee Cordera

and Love at the end of the world

 AMERICAN PARROT / Ashby Logan Hill

This beauty seemed to speak to me nightly in my dreams.
A few caws at three a.m. and silver trinkets — “Never feeding
you again,” I said. Two feral cats howl at the last waning  of the moon
and little droplets of early morning rain bless the shingles of my roof.
“That’s fine. I don’t want any more fruit  and crackers,” it squawked.
“I’ve never really liked Ritz with cheese or grapes with my Saltines.”
I was flabbergasted at the way in which it could do basic math.
“I’ll have you know I’ve always been quite skilled at ancient arithmetic.
It was as if we had both almost begun to swap our intelligences.
Trading places with a bird like that didn’t seem right I thought.
Now I was somehow perched atop the woven stone-thread frame?
Like Herodotus, I had to write my myths and reckon with pebbles.
And as such, we were both left there stranded in the sand or dust.
So, feeling enlightened, tonight we slept with both our eyes open.

Worn / Amy Marques

I

Perhaps we are worn
out with thoughts
and dismal gallows.

II

Perhaps we are
worn out
with
thoughts and 
dismal gallows

III

We are worn out
perhaps
with dismal thoughts 
and gallows

IV

We perhaps are dismal
with worn out thoughts
and gallows

V

We are perhaps dismal
with worn out thoughts

Source material: A Tale of Two Cities

In the Future of Time / Sonia Sophia Sura

It is morning when I go to sleep. 
For you, I mean,
You are in the future of time, 
Somehow having gotten eight 
Hours of sleep before I have put 
My head on my pillow. 
I check the clock in your city. 
I wonder why I forget how hard it is to 
Speak on the phone together. 
I don’t even dream about you
Because you’re awake when I dream. 
It takes 8 hours to cross the sea 
(for the sun, I mean). 
I could ride it across the water and 
Show up in the sky for you,
Wouldn’t that be coool? 
To be the light you’re looking at, 
When you’re wondering where I am? 
And what-ever-am-I doing when 
You wonder what I’m up to? 
I’ll be playing guitar or 
Drinking tea or 
Dancing in circles or 
Looking at a picture of you. 
Kissing someone else. 
Sleeping alone. 
Don’t except we’ll stay as we are. 

Ghazal for Zion  / Samuel Spencer

You were born in every way different –
skin and hair and eyes and name.

But ‘same’ does not mean family, or at least
it shouldn’t. Someone left you without a name

and unclaimed you at birth. That was your
introduction to the world, a place whose name

was found not given; quite like you. Today,
at the courthouse, they signed papers with your name

next to ours. Your name is Spencer now, and the only
‘same’ that matters is that nothing will be the same

every again. Like the Earth, we are made of dust. Please accept
this love. It is packaged in the form of your name.

February - Poem 18

Reading Rooms / Kristine Anderson

In the kitchen
            cookbooks, of course
            in the old days, magazines, newspapers
                        we’d pore over with coffee in the morning
            now, a smartphone for browsing and scrolling

In the living room
            handsome hardbacks, spines lined up like geometry
            family photo albums resting on bottom shelves
            today’s library check-out turned upside down
                        & open on the sofa cushion

In our room
            current can’t-put-it-down, bookmarked and waiting
                        for after the day’s rushing around
            in my nightstand drawer, last month’s birthday cards from friends,
                        thank-you notes from the holidays,
                        a handwritten letter from my ninety-four-year-old aunt
                        who passed away last year—
                        each one here and now
                        aching be reread and reread and reread

Gone Gras / Barbara Audet

Mornings after carnivals
Require lukewarm coffee.
Absent cream, cane sugar.
Your hand stumbles
With generic grounds,
Carafe maneuvers,
Forstall percolation,
Leading to toast
With day old brew.


Sacrifice owns satisfaction,
As a next day penance
For headlong indulgence.
Out of character,
Costumed cravings
Rather unexpected.
You waltzed.
You waltzed.
You waltzed.
Because no one
Knew your name.

Ode to spiders  / Bee Cordera

Weavers of history weavers of storied weavers because they have no other option they are built perfect with their long legs for weaving and tellin stories beyond the truth. Spiders, forever vital to the structure of our world.

ON WHEAT / Ashby Logan Hill

    From King Tutankamen’s Diary

The heat of a summer breeze sweeping through the night, then daylight,
Chrysanthemum can’t find in dirt its depths, and like the rice or wheat
strewn out in plats of stem and chaff, a carafe of faience for the wildflowers,
singing out like loin cloth on milk-soaked hums, the bowl of porridge
with flies on by, de dah on by, the fly speaks in whispers of the cows by the
sun-soaked reeds, and Khephra calls collect to me from the eternal glaze,
like how the sun comes up because of dung beetle’s battle with gravity,
and somewhere in this moment your third eye opens from the field of it,
soaked in the rain last week and steeped in glycerin to make your mind
wind in colorful circles, like nothing you’ve ever seen, fractals from the
ancient past illuminated from the ergot you got while harvesting.  Harvesting,
always harvesting, and all I want to do is run free.  Look at the light-leak
through the trees, feel the heat of the summer breeze, and of for more
this beauty seemed to speak to me nightly in my dreams.

Worthy Women / Amy Marques

take eccentricity

among women:

                        bright

                        exalted

                             immeasurably worthy

                                                            people:

making tools to believe.

Source: A Tale of Two Cities

Flu / Sonia Sophia Sura

Today is a morning where I cry a lot.

I listen to a song with three part harmonies
It’s so beautiful, 
it’s so beautiful,
I say over and over 

I go for a walk.
It’s a short one,
My fever just broke and I’m 
still winded. 

On my way back to my house I pass my neighbor’s car, 
doors open. 
I don’t want to get them sick. 
I keep walking. 

I reach my door and turn. 
The mother says hi and I smile and wave. 
She bobs her baby up and down. 

I realize. 

Last time I saw her, 
The baby was inside her stomach. 
Wow! I yell, 
Congratulations! 

I give a thumbs up. 
I feel like a fool. 

She says,
thanks! It’s so fun!

I go inside. I listen to the song again. I cry 
It’s so beautiful, 
I say,

It’s so beautiful.

Road Trip  / Samuel Spencer

There’s that long, straight
stretch of road that seems to coincide
with silence. We’re somewhere
in Wyoming, nothing left to talk about,
no more musing to fill up the empty
air within this car. The sun half mast
on the horizon, we have a few more hours
until everything beyond us
is behind us, and there’s nothing left
to say.