Irish Nocturne

November 15, 2025.Reading time 1 minute.

By Derek Jon Dickinson
Featured Art: “Grass Pathway” by Madelyn Bartolone

I lift myself, pinch my hat, splash some coins against my debt. Crusts of dried swallows in the emptied pint-glass. Outside, the moon is a wooden button through its slit of Gaelic wool. The pub is a cask of fermenting voices, windows oily with yellow light; night melting inside me, like a given kiss, or warm wobble of whiskey. South—my soles scuffed with work, clicking the dew-glistening cobble, the brook-straddling bridge; water, fragile as flute-glass, tinkling the stone sluice. Moonlight stitching the fraying salmon; lidless eyes, cold as premonition; tails pulsing like sunken sails. The coming car-light snips me like scissors from the black pitch night, its red taillights trailing-off as errant sparks. Home—wafts of sweet peat-smoke, a tune rolling around like a marble in my mouth. With sun-chipped hands, I work the turf-stove’s iron latch; strip-off my clothes, naked as a wet salmon, strumming the sheets upstream; thumb denting the clay slab of my wife’s hip.

Elegy

October 28, 2025.Reading time 1 minute.

By S.J. Stover

In my dream they want to wash you,
lather you up and rinse away
all grit, all gravel gathered
in the quick of your claws,
brush the dust, the dirt
from your fur, snip off
the prickles, pluck the brambles
tangled in the black of your belly,
sweep the violets violently from your ears.

But you—
wolf-minded ever—
slip their grip, dive tooth first
into the woods’ waking whoop,
your brain’s blue furnace
alive, alight
with the genius of your idea:

to weld yourself to the world’s wild welter—
to burrow, frog-mad,
in morning’s muddy unending,
cling deathless, tough as kudzu,
to hours, minutes, days—
a tick on the skin of time.

Dew-footed you fly
through thick and thistle,
to chase the needle-eyed dawn—
you the burr, life the fur.

Ichetucknee

June 1, 2025.Reading time 5 minutes.

By J.D. McGee

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2013-2014. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

Archaeological exploration has discovered the site of a 17th century Spanish mission, San Martin de Timucua, next to a short tributary connecting Fig Springs to the Ichetucknee River.
Florida Dept. of State

i.
In needy dawn’s tabula rasa, shred
through breaches in the birch like candleflame
refracted, flung through flashed glass and calms,
as Ichetucknee disrobes habits of mist,
I splash the slim canoe, a floating pew.

The mind creates liturgical vestments;
they vex, featherless chicks pecking for feed.
A broken heart paddles strangely: it bleeds
blood, needs blood. It begs, a feckless and cracked
flask that prays for shape of spring water

ii.
Although the spring is just a thing. It flows
from aquifer, hyaline through bedrock pits.
The parable of trees on the banks preach the chase
of sun and soil; the verse of dragonflies
incants the atom need to procreate and feed.

If it was only just the heron’s sweep,
the otter’s slip, indignant turtle glare,
quiescent flow, supplicant fawn and doe.
This hush, is it within or without me?
Is it scrub jay songs or songs of myself?

iii.
We sat in plastic circles, yellow rooms,
desperate to deserve salvation, told
to find a Higher Power. Fine. But, God,
what grace for nicotine thumbs, DT feet?
Alone, breakfast:
I once was lost but now

Am found.
They sang in church when I was young.
Was the hymn an echo, my voice right now,
or welled from other springs? A coffee trick,
perhaps, compelled halation through the blinds,
wrought mosaics inlaid with my cracked glass.

iv.
It may be how, like mouths open to pray,
the stream invokes river, or a wood stork
sainting; it may have been the want of me,
the open wound or suckling, skies precise
and rare as sapphire, oak monk robes of moss.

It may have been wonder, childlike awe,
primordial immanence in my tear ducts;
or, maybe just the child who needs to know,
who breathes dreaming into the world he floats.

What befell may have already been there:
in my bowels, in clear imagined depths
where mullet twine like a child’s friendship braid.
The child’s ease for tears: it may be these springs
are my tears, maybe the tears of angels;

maybe, there is no other god for me.

v.
If I could speak, articulate, shape words;
or, I’m just cursed, repeating all I’ve heard,
a mouthpiece forever, slowed to stone and root.
What self beyond reflection? Stare and yearn,
burnt and burning, to waste away and drown?

I fall into the mirror, the boreal shock,
and deep in the headspring’s gaped mouth I see
a blackness stretched back, but a rush of life,
flawless as the first breath, sharp as a spring sunrise,
bored into bedrock, black, back, the spring of myself.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

June 1, 2025.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Susan Cohen

Featured Art: Stephen Reichert, Untitled, 2012. Oil on canvas, 12″ x 12″. “Cirlce” series.

after Brueghel the Elder and W.H. Auden

We know what the father did,
aimed too high.

And the son dared too much,
while the ploughman and his stout horse
just got on with business.

But what about the ocean,
Brueghel’s dull green sea, spread
flat as a bolt of fabric?

A few spits of foam
around the boy who cannonballed
headfirst, legs askew,
poor zapped mosquito. A shrug
of polite ripples
and the water takes him in
without the protest of a splash—
Brueghel’s brush applied like a narcotic
to smooth the waves.

They did get it wrong
sometimes, the masters.
Even a painted ocean
can only take so much.

We know now what our ambition
does to seascapes—empties them
of coral and of coho,
fills them with glacial melt
and sends the waters raging.

Of A Million Earths

March 4, 2025.Reading time 1 minute.

By Susan Browne

One million earths could fit inside the sun
The thought of a million earths

makes me want to be a bee falling asleep inside a flower
It’s a fact: sometimes while gathering nectar bees get tired

& put their three pairs of legs over their five eyes
to block the sun which is halfway through its journey

of ten billion years
My mother loved sunsets at the beach

I remember once in Santa Barbara
our chairs close together on the sand

There’s no way to fact-check this
or that we chewed Juicy Fruit gum

& talked about things we’d never shared before
or that I kept looking at the freckles

on her knees because they made me
feel peaceful as a bee dreaming inside a dahlia

A billion years since that day with my mother
or seems like it

Her middle name was Marie
I brought a boombox to the church to play Ave Maria

A cold morning although the sun was shining
on the only known planet in the universe where life exists.

March 1, 2025.Reading time 2 minutes.

In the Midst of It

By Gregory Djanikian

Featured Art: “Titania Dreaming” by Mateo Galvano

The woodpeckers are making holes
in the eaves of my house,
destroying some small part of it
while I count the wood chips
falling from the sky.

Isn’t it lovely that the natural world
can be so companionable,
keeping me frazzled and deeply alert?

Yesterday afternoon, the sky turned gray
as if it were going to thunder and rain
though it never did,
what a turnaround.

Sometimes it’s all you need,
a little reprieve, a surprise
to make you think
it’s not all ruthless
even as the shots ring out
in the heart of the city.

It’s the life we’re given
the pulpit managers say,
some of us having more life than others.

The woodpeckers are still at it,
doing what they are born to do
and I’m throwing tennis balls at them,
I’m squirting a jet stream
of water from my hose.

They disappear, then cheerfully come back.
There’s no manual that says
everything will stay as it is.

Look at the sky.
It’s as clear as day.

In another hour,
I might have to bolt the doors and windows
against the hurricane onrush of all that keeps me weathering away

from those long expansive afternoons
when I was young
and the wind was a feather in my hair.

The Cardinal

July 18, 2024.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Billy Collins

They say a child might grow up to be an artist
if his sandcastle means nothing
until he brings his mother over for a look.

I’m that way with my wife.
Little things that happen don’t mean much
until I report back from the front.

I ran into Rick from the gift shop.
The post office flag is at half-mast.
I counted the cars on a freight train.

Who else in the world would put up
with such froth before it dissolves in the surf?

But early this morning
while I was alone in the pool,
a Vatican-red cardinal flashed down
from the big magnolia
and landed on the deck
right next to where I was standing in the water.

Here was an event worth mentioning,
but I decided that I would keep this one to myself.
I alone would harbor and possess it.

Then I went back to watching the bird
pecking now at the edge of the garden
with the usual swivel-headed wariness of a bird.

I was an unobserved observer
of this private moment,
with only my head above the water,
at very close range for man and bird,
considering my large head and lack of feathers.

A sudden rustling in the magnolia
revealed the vigilant gray-and-pink female,
the mate with whom he shared his life,

but I wouldn’t share this with my wife,
not in the kitchen or in bed,
nor would I disclose it as she made toast
or worked the Sunday crossword.
Indeed, I would take the two cardinals to my grave.

It was just then that she appeared
in a billowing yellow nightgown
carrying two steaming cups of coffee,
and before she could hand one to me,
of course, I began to tell her all about the cardinals,

he pecking in the garden,
she flitting from branch to branch in the tree,
as if we were the male and female birds,
she with the coffee and me in the pool,

leaving me to make sure I divulged
every aspect of the experience,
including the foolish part
about my plan to keep it all a secret,
and that really dumb thing about the grave.

Keats

July 18, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Robert Cording

After my son died in October, I lived
with Keats’ Autumn in my head—
not the relish of lingering summer warmth
in mid-fall, but his one-line imperative:
Think not of the songs of spring.
I watched summer’s hummingbirds
fly off, then the gold of finches turn
dull green. But I couldn’t live with
the music of fall. I heard only those
first words—think not—which I did very well.
How much more Keats had demanded
of himself. And how many more falls I had
yet to undergo before I could hear,
just outside my door, hedge crickets sing.

Driveway Toad

July 18, 2024.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Rob Cording

A year after my brother died,
I told my daughter about
the toad that once lived
in the hollowed-out knot
of an apple tree
in the center of my childhood
driveway. My brothers and I
liked to visit it after school,
but the tree came down
in a snowstorm, and my parents
graveled-over that spot.
When my daughter
asked what happened
to the toad, I explained that
it probably moved
under a rock, or to the woodpile
along the side of the house. “Or,”
she responded, “it died.”
Then, she skipped into the house
and left me outside.

Old Black Water

July 18, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Dion O’Reilly

Suzie, I want to tell you
how frequently I pass the apartment
behind the supermarket
where we street-danced
to the Doobie Brothers,

light shifting as the fog
lifted, front-yard roses
iridescent in the salt-gray
seaside morning.

You died, what, ten years ago?
Not at once, really, though pills
took you quickly. It began, I think,
when we were children: without
knowing why, we wanted out

of that rural beauty—the narrow
valley and gleaming stream,
summers spent diving off
crumbling cliffs, as if nearness
to death was the closest
we came to leaving

your stepdad’s beery fingers,
my Mother who loved
to touch the sweaty chests
of her daughters’ teenage lovers.

Nowadays, everything
is a different kind of dangerous:
rain stays away. June mist
sucks away too soon,
sunlight breaks through
before it should.

What I want to say, Suzie,
is a moment, gone
fifty years, is just a moment,
but you’re still here, unfleshed
in brightness—elfin, jittery, wan—

our arms looped as we turn
tight circles, round and round,
your eyes locked on mine.

Tree Service

July 16, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Ted Kooser

Featured Art: “White Deer” by Amy Nichols, Scott Brooks, and Wendy Minor Viny (Passion Works Studio)

But for the big empty section of sky
that he pieces together, branch by branch,
building a forever of light, his work
is all disassembly, in deafening noise,
today from a cup at the end of a boom
that bounces a little, swinging this way
and that as if trying to catch water
dripping out of a ceiling. He’s taking
apart, from the top down, a sick sixty-foot
ash, first cutting away its outer parts,
feather-light as they fall, each reaching
as if to high-five the branches below,
a helper picking them up by their ends
and dragging them to a big gluttonous
chipper that drags them in, screaming
and flailing. Bobbing lower and lower,
the man in the cup, his saw buzzing,
leans out to unstack the heavy spools
of the trunk, reaching to tip them away
to drop with an emphatic thunk
on the litter of twigs and dead leaves
on the lawn, the cup bouncing lower
and lower, spool after spool, the boom
telescoping back into itself and then
finding its place on top of the truck,
as now he climbs out, lifting one leg
then the other, both whole and unsevered,
and backs down the steps, stretches,
pulls off his gloves in the vast silence
that, suddenly, everything’s part of,
those few of us watching feeling as if
we’ve taken too deep a breath of the sky.

Transitioning Glasses

April 9, 2024.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lauren Camp

Featured Art by Mitzi Klaiber

When I come in after shoveling
that last round of snow—an exquisite parliament
of low-slung brightness
even in its groaning down toward the ground,
I see my sister
has texted QUICK
THING. So easy to send such airy
unplanned balloons. The ordinary
flakes saunter down, will not let go, the white
weather not yet leaving its filthy
will with car tracks and time. I am her
shelter. The snow falls as spheres.
I like being inside now watching it.
I think of the weight of it, the pile-up
as it further neatens. The white at its best
is a blur. My eyesight is off. It has been two years
and seven months since I peered
through one of those devices that brush
eyelashes. I haven’t heard a doctor
circle those disks and ask this one
or that one, this one or that. What I see
is another day, the wind sucking about.
A coyote walks behind the junipers
And now its shadow has become an action.
The snow comes down, side by side.
I am hardly paying attention;
my eye no longer holds what it touches.
There is so much noise in life.
As children, my sister and I played tag
during sermons. I could go on
about how her notes bother me.
The snowflakes are an arm’s length off.
It could be the only thing I do:
answering her, filling the white void
in my hand. Everything comes from further up.
When I respond I can talk now,
I am saying no one realizes
love without feeling this urgency.

In Which I Compare My Brain Surgery to a Slope Mine

April 8, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Evan Gurney

Featured Art by Greg Rounds

Mine and mill have done their work,
the ridge face once lush with fir
and poplar now cleared of airy timber,
the brow slashed and bored, a strip
of railroad curling like a scar up
the mountain to the excavation’s cavity,
sealed now but still marking its territory,
still leaving its lasting impression.

Hidden from sight, a subterranean labyrinth
of crosscuts line like stitches the shaft
that slopes down and in through folds
and plunges to the precious stope
that engineers surveyed, prospected,
and, finally, removed entire, hoisting out
the bituminous ore, leaving behind a sump
that time and age will fill once more.

Leave rocks here

March 22, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Georgina McKay Lodge

Featured Art by Glenna Parry

Annoyed at rocks
in shoes
in laundry
in little piles at dinner,
she has placed a box
in the hall.

-> Leave rocks here

Hold my rock,
her son says
when they are out,
and squats down
to select another.

Be my rock

The smooth
pebbles,
dove-colored,
worn to wisdom,
she will gladly
carry home, but

his favorite find is
the jagged
saw-toothed
ugly rock,

scraped knee
stung by a bee
broken-armed
heart-choked rock.

Of course
she will carry that one too;
to the end of the world
she would carry it.

What It Looks Like

March 14, 2024.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Wheeler

Featured Art by Glenna Parry

Returning from emptying
compost out back,
I’m stopped
by a praying mantis.
Don’t you look fabulous,

I hear my mother’s voice,
Dressed to kill and
to blend in, with just
a flash of emerald
on your lower wing.

I hear her say,
Your feelers, are they new,
or are you parting
them differently?
Also, great figure!

I see her swooning
over its eyes that pop
without any makeup,
and the way its face
comes to a point

at its delicate chin:
really quite special.
To me, the mantis
just stares, nods,
possibly politely.

My mother appreciates
many kinds of beauty
and the bug’s elegant
plus alluring look
but I know

its brown egg sac
is hard as cement to protect
the eggs from heat, cold,
even the occasional maternal
appetite for its young.

Horses in a Field

November 19, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Blair

I am reading my book manuscript to my mother
in her backyard. She tells me that was probably a catbird
I saw earlier. She tells me bleach is the real way
to get stains out of grout. The narrative urge is a strong one,
she says. She had an invisible horse, but never said
she wanted to be one. On that last point, we disagree.
Perhaps it was only a feeling I had
when we were watching horses in a field. That blurring of beings.
Like the colors in a Vuillard painting. A dress turning into
a table or an orchard. My college painting teacher said edges
are important, but never explained how best to create them.
I wanted us to be old ladies together, I say to my mother,
meaning me and her. Now we know it isn’t going to happen.
But she says she was dreading it—she didn’t want to be here
to see me grow old. We decide death comes too soon,
in the second section of my manuscript—
And speaking of death, how can the deck chair cushions
still have a cat hair side, I ask her,
now that the cats have been dead for years.
Because we’re disgusting old people, she replies
with a laugh, meaning herself and my stepfather.
Though the truth is I’m the sloppy one. This redbud tree
is a new redbud tree and I didn’t even notice.
I didn’t notice the new flowers she potted either, lined up
with their brilliant blossoms, waiting
to be put on the front porch. It’s all one to me:
the backyard, the flowers, my mother, me.
How can any of it exist without the rest?
We agree that I’ve written too many poems,
and they don’t go together.

Twenty-pound flower

May 30, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mike Santora

Featured Art: I Will Be Gone, But Not Forever by John Sabraw

O Rafflesia, why so down
in the canopy?
Let’s see anything else
toil for nine months
in the Sumatran jungle and come out
smelling like a rose.
You, cater the tree shrew cotillion.
Just ask the sly monks in Thailand.
Whether your medicine is gospel
can be argued in a lab until
pencils snap,
but in peninsular Malaysia,
you clot the bloodbath
after another girl handles
a birth by herself.
           Where were the roses then?
I know that I am petal-less
but what are you doing
for the next Millenia?
You could have me,
if you’d have me.
After I’ve died,
you can attach yourself to my breast.
I’d like to wear my last parasite
on the outside, like a corsage.
   Or is it that you
       are wearing me,
               and it’s my turn
to live something
              like a flower?

Garage sale bible opened to the Book of Genesis

May 29, 2023.Reading time 1 minute.

By Mike Santora

But for me it’s on the swelling
lip of Lake Maracaibo,
in an august before Augusts
where the old lightning
astonished the coast
and made us.

You and me and the New World
warblers, the tyrant flycatchers,
and all lucky thirteen species
of true vireos.

Yesterday, they sang
that it’s okay,
it’s okay.
Grief and grind are so close
in soul and bones.
And as they sang
the rain was just the earth
reading our alluvial fortune.
Look at us, so confident
in our station —
young diamonds in Islay,
unworked Spanish jet.

I Want to Explain

May 20, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Justin Rigamonti

how it felt to see the city worker
sawing off her branches, though

pronouns aren’t the way. Not her,
not bound by any human

construct. How alien they
seem to us, anyone who stands

outside our understanding. Except
she didn’t, the willow, flanked

as she was by two soaring columns
of our city’s green steel bridge.

But even green is construct—as if one word
could capture both bridge

and the luster of her leaves.
A single strand still clings to the human

discourse she endangered when
wind-weary, rain-weary, addled

by the warming climate, she tipped
into electrical wires. I wish

I’d been there in the dark. I wish
I’d stood with her between the cold

pillars and pressed my hands against
time. Told the soil to keep on

holding. Told the wind
to stop for a moment, or blow

backwards. But the wind can’t
hear me, can’t understand,

and you might never feel
what I felt about her personhood.

That she was a person—as much
as you or me or the dog

sprawled out between my feet.
Our world is made of people,

and why not her? Not her, no—
but there she was, every night

for over sixty years, lifting her
desires like a feathered lantern:

more light and dark, more rain and sun,
more sparrows, robins,

people in her branches.

Scavengers

May 5, 2023.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Mark Neely

I could do without these turkey buzzards
hunched like crash victims
on the water tower’s whitewashed railing

red skulls

poking from the ratty blankets
of their wings. A county over

two taxidermied buzzards hang
from another tower. Their sickly talons
sway in the breeze—

the only thing we’ve found that really works
says the mayor in the local paper.

September. Heat rises in shimmery waves
from the asphalt. The black holes of their eyes
trail me as I sweat through a sluggish run.
They don’t stir, don’t so much as turn their heads.

A few frayed feathers shiver against the sky.

                                                Remember newspapers? They were useful
                                                when we lived with the delusion
                                                we might need each other—under city
                                                bridges the destitute spread
                                                them over heating grates.

             I’m guessing water towers will last longer
             and vultures, who only eat the dead. I read somewhere
             their stomach acids allow them to ingest
             meat so rotten it would kill another animal. Like poets

I said, though no one else was there.

I’m always reading things, storing them away
for later. I’m always
chasing down my youth. So far he’s unimpressed.
He prances along in sleek shoes, pays me about as much
mind as groups of jostling teenagers pay me on the street.

             I fear these old birds
             have a thing or two to say, like grandmothers
             warbling behind screen doors. One drops

                                    flaps twice, rides a thermal
                                    traces three wobbly ovals
                                    over the train tracks where the road crumbles
                                    into gravel. I remember the lines
                                    from “At the Fishhouses,” about the seal who visits

evening after evening

a playful opening
in the vast, inhospitable sea.

              He shrugs off Bishop’s silly hymns, vanishes,
              reemerges elsewhere, making it clear
              he’s in his element. Here

streets run down toward the river, houses shrink
their porches falling in
until they finally collapse. My buzzard veers
over the dog groomer’s, the green-shingled nursing home
the Bahá’í temple—no more than a rundown ranch house—
then swoops high above the dentist’s billboard, a fearsome maw
of gleaming teeth. Earlier, Son House came on the radio:

woke up this morning feeling so sick and bad
thinking ‘bout the good times I once had had

I could see him banging his foot
on the juke joint floor, then withering
in a seedy hospital.

                                           Well, we got that over with,
                                           my mother-in-law likes to say
                                           after the parade winds down
                                           or the last guest pulls away.

You like to run? she asked me once, baffled
by any exercise that isn’t useful. I like to have run
I answered, stealing a line from a novelist I heard once, talking
about his labors, the endless straining for the right word

as opposed to the almost right one, which Mark Twain said
was the difference between the lightning bug
and the lighting. A few cars flash in the distance
as I cross over onto the greenway, a gray path
winding along the river like Ariadne’s thread—

she helped a man who didn’t love her
find his way. Sound familiar?

            Sometimes I catch myself
              wishing the day would end. Or try to leap
              whole years, even as they spool away.

We used to call this human nature.

Bishop thought of knowledge
as a kind of suffering
a dark expanse
we can only skirt the edges of…

                                    Inside the tower’s globe, an ocean
                                    waits for another emergency—
                                    metallic, unthinkably heavy
                                                        drawn impossibly into the sky.

            One morning I watched three buzzards
            huddled by the road, tearing at the pink entrails of a possum
            knocked into the ditch as it scuttled through the night.

                                                Curious, bathed in blood
                                                incapable of mercy, they bowed like monks
                                                over the body.

As they tore at the animal, one fixed me
in her stare.

Look here, she seemed to say.

            I wanted to conflate carrion
            and carry, to imagine an airy chariot
            ascending from the corpse.

A delivery truck rattled around the corner
and startled the birds into flight, where they joined the host
swirling above.

Carnal, of course
is the word I was looking for—

To Save a Life

May 19, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

Co-Winner of the Movable / New Ohio Review Writing Contest

by Kari Gunter-Seymour

Featured Art: Aperture, by John Schriner

We did what we could,
hid the bottles, drove what
was left of him deep
into the yawning hollow,
built a campfire, drank water
from a long-handled gourd,
a galvanized bucket.

We set up tents for triage,
counted his breaths, worried
over irregular heartbeats,
sweats, persistent vomiting,
his jacked up adrenal system.

We waited. Listened for a canvas
zipper in the night, each long slow
pull a call to duty, our legs folding
over duct taped camp stools,
tucked tight around the fire,
his gut-punch stories, stenched
in blood and munitions,
overpowering the woodsmoke’s
curling carbons.

The Natural World

May 14, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

by Chris Crockett

Featured Art: Cosmic Eye, by John Schriner

The moon rises
to the left of the kitchen sink.

I go outside to check on
the world’s artistry:

Moths and stars;
bats whose blind ping-pings

pinpoint insects,
accurate as an adding machine.

Horses are head down in the soup
of flooded grass fields;

All day long
they solve their hunger.

Everything partners and trades
nutrients. Billions

unseen in the black roots.
Inaudible hum.

My fingers keep time
to a barely comprehended

background beat.

Evergreen Oak

May 5, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Marie-Claire Bancquart
Translated from French by Claire Eder and Marie Moulin-Salles

Standing before these thick trunks that sow our wrinkles
in windbreak

standing before these leaves that persist
in the fuzzy gray-green of a caterpillar
complementary to our bloods

I uprise a contradictory forest

A tree
where the cool flow of water would saturate the sap
with a transience that we would find habitable.

I invent a species:
the short-lived live oak
so pleasing to say, it must exist somewhere.

What We Did at the End of the World

April 30, 2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Sunni Brown Wilkinson

We played charades to words we’d forgotten. We made a fire of them with our hands.
We wrote songs on the piano, gave them names like “Fox and Mouse” and “Lightning Chase.”
We watched our parakeets dance in front of their tiny yellow-framed mirror.
We watched them sleep, three on a perch, with their quick beaks tucked in.
We made bread. The top cracked open and we peeled it back and spread butter on
and ate it. We didn’t wear shoes. We wrapped ourselves in scarves.
We opened birthday cards to listen to the music hiding
behind the plastic button. We opened and closed, opened and closed until the songs grew tinny.
We gathered snail shells from the garden. 47. We saw one naked at the base of the daisies.
We made music with ice and water and glasses. We hummed under the covers at night.
We waved tree branches like arms. We waved at the stars. We waved at our silent neighbors.
We taped song lyrics to doors. We swept the fuzz from the rugs
into piles of gray hair. We lifted them carefully when they huddled together like a nest.
We listened at the door of an uncracked egg.
We watched the quail scurry across the street, that one feather on their heads quivering
in the wind like the feathers of great ladies in the movies we watched at night.
We dreamed of the sea untangling its wide blue braids.
We opened our mouths in the morning and salt leaked out.
We called each other dear and laughed at words like rudbeckia. We planted
rudbeckia. We danced like it. We wore yellow too.
Just before we flew away, we were mirrors. That deep. That true.

Reading the Ancients

November 30, 2021.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Matthew Tuckner

What Sappho calls
the desiremind or the couragesoul
I call the swirling Chesapeake Bay
of my brain and sure
you could call the tugboat
trawling through the brackish waters
desire and yes
you could call the striped bass
sourcing speed from the tugboat’s wake
courage and sure
you could call the crushed beer can
scything the surf the mind and yes
the soul looks like a blue crab
when I close my eyes to picture it
aquamarine claw olive-green shell
I can’t quite place
the bird tipping its beak into the bay
to capture an absent worm
absent because fields
of eelgrass are emptied daily
by giant pesticidal blooms
heaps of dead fish
falling upwards
towards the surface
but in placing the bird
a red knot a piping plover
one could easily mistake it for
the faculties of the soul
particularly the appetites
so many Plato doesn’t even bother
to tally them though he does
warn of their penchant for battle
the appetites who are hard to see
when they stand still
like the piping plover for whom
they are often mistaken
yes I’ve been out combing
the waters for a new bird
one whose bright rusty throat
and striped back better represent
those flightier emotions
not even Sappho
has the words for
is it the tundra swan
with ass upended and neck submerged
searching for the eelgrass
that isn’t there
the tundra swan that birdwatchers
who don’t know better
call suicidal ideation
maybe the tawny-throated dotterel
is the one for me
if I cover my left eye
and squint my right the bird looks like
the dysmorphia that keeps me
out of the view of most mirrors
just look at this dotterel
can’t you see the pointed beak
that just screams
I want to be your worst best friend
a voice that sings
come breach that little bay
of yours come tie the sky together with
us birds a pointed beak that’s just dying
to be the Orpheus
to your Eurydice the kind of bird
that wants to kickstart
your katabasis a word
that if I’m reading the Greek correctly
can be widely defined as a descent
of any kind such as moving downhill
the sinking of the sun
a military retreat
clinical depression
a trip to the underworld
or a journey to the coast

Virginity

November 30, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Zuzanna Ginczanka
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak Huss

Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson

We…
A frenzy of hazel trees, disheveled by rain,
a scented nutty buttery crush.
Cows give birth in the humid air
in barns, blazing like stars.
O, ripe currants and lush grains
Sapid to overbrimming.
O, she-wolves feeding their young,
their eyes sweet like lilies.
Sap drips like apiary honey.
Goat udders sag like pumpkins.
The white milk flows like eternity
in the temples of maternal bosoms.

And we…
…in cubes of peach wallpaper
like steel thermoses
hermetic beyond contemplation
entangled up to our necks in dresses
conduct
proper
conversations.

Process

November 30, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Zuzanna Ginczanka
Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak Huss

Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson

1
In the beginning was heaven and earth:
black tallow and blue oxygen—
and fawns
beside nimble stags
and God, soft, white as linen.

2
Cretaceous
Jurassic
Triassic
The earth layers in strata—
The Miocene advances by tank — a majestic conquest.
There is a separation between water
and the land of ferns and birches
—and God sees that it is good when Genesis dawns.
Nitrogen brews in magma,
magma congeals into rock
mountain
thrusts
upon mountain
in a thunderous, cosmic mounting
The Carboniferous enriches the earth with bituminous pulp.
—and He sees that it is good
for moist amphibians and stars.
Iron pulses like blood
Phosphorus hardens into tibia——
— and with singing air, God whistles into pipes of crater.

3
In the beginning was heaven and earth:
and fawn
and tawny stags
but then things took a different course:
and
flesh
was made
word.

4
Back then, a lone rhododendron trembled before a fragrant angel,
horsetails tall as New York creaked and clattered.
Now daisies wilt
in town squares
in Konin, Brest, and Równe
and at night
policemen
and their spouses
make love.

To Love Love the Beloved

November 30, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Rachel A. Hicks

Featured Image: Pride by Ellery Pollard

When I die, no fly will buzz,
no bird will crow, no man
will cry. Or maybe when I die,
every man will cry

and say, “There goes the love
of my life—a beauty—if only
she had known.” Women
will hate me stealing

their men’s hearts even in death,
for taking over their dinner conversations
after they’ve carefully prepared
the pink-orange ham loaf.

Forks & spoons—the men will swear
to see my eyes—my teeth will show
up in all the fine china. My legs prance
through the women’s heads

as they look at the octopus waving
its arms, wrapping its tentacles
around another. Dirty salt water
will turn red with their fury

as their husbands say, “She was such a beauty.
If only she had had eight arms.” A constellation
will form in the shape of my face & planets with
my thumbprints will be discovered.

When I die, don’t send me roses
because I am now the dirt, I am the plant,
I am the seed that sits in the crook of your skull, always
reminding you what it’s like to call a place home.

My Daughters Sometimes Dress as Ladybugs

November 29, 2021.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Brian Simoneau

Featured Image: Untitled by Tanner Pearson

and I hope they won’t
outgrow it—little heroes
flitting leaf to leaf
in their polka-dotted suits
of armor, their vicious
pursuit of the feasting
pest that destroys what
beauty these days still lives.

Futility

May 13, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Riley Kross

Featured art: Untitled by Sue-Yeon Ryu

– for Fr. Daniel Logan

After the chainsaw, the priest

continued carving up

a small portion of the dogwood stump

with a chisel and pocketknife,

but being only a priest

and not a carpenter,

the task was beyond his expertise.

Still, he sweated and labored

and managed “by God’s grace”

(as priests are prone to say)

to fashion his own rough cross. Read More

On Seasons

May 13, 2021.Reading time 1 minute.

By Christopher Nelson

Featured art: Untitled by Jesse Lee Kercheval

Late May, my favorite time. The false
gromwell glows at field edge, glows
at roadside, and my glowing little boy who holds
a bunch in his fist runs to bring me the gift.
It smells of wet dog—some call it donkey
weed because it smells like them too.
Dense, sort of spiraling, floppy bunch of
unopening blooms wherefrom each sealed
thin white spool protrudes a style like
a ghost moth’s tongue. Grace curve.
Flower-borne spike. I’ve never killed a man.
I haven’t broken a bone of my own or
that of another. Dirty green-white. Stiff-haired.
When my father jabbed a man in the face
at the ball field, his fist so fast,
nearly invisible, yet the man’s
ejected teeth went up into the night sky
and caught the halogen light
and pirouetted slow motion before
getting lost in the red infield dirt
and the general scuffle of men. Part of the
forget-me-not family. Read More

Why You’re Going to Eat That Pelican

May 13, 2021.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jon Fischer

Your lunch at the French bistro was more essence

and foam and reduction than food, and that pelican

is the size of your remaining hunger. He surely tastes

like the history of the sea and especially the doubloons

nestled in the sand in busted buccaneer sloops. Read More

The Time Traveller Chooses an Arrival Point

November 15, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Emily Blair

Featured Art: Yliaster (Paracelsus) by Marsden Hartley

Before it all goes wrong. Before the bell is rung. Before the ship has sailed.
Before the perfect storm begins to brew. Before the term perfect storm goes
viral. Before anything goes viral. Before the fall. Before the crash. After
effective sanitation, before Ronald Reagan. Before that sixth grade school
photo is taken. Before one friend’s accident, another’s illness. Before the first
massacre or environmental disaster. Before the first loss of liberty. Before
the prequels. Before the sequels. Before the remakes. Before guns. Definitely
before Columbus. After your son learns to say he loves you. After the
invention of childhood. Before the police state. Before the nation state. Before
the interstate. After modern medicine. After modern art. After animated GIFs.
After the discovery of fire, of penicillin, of Spandex. After you meet the love
of your life, but before you meet your first miserable boyfriend. After the
Internet, but before we become information. Before your cousin dies, before
your classmate dies, before anyone anywhere dies. It’s important to avoid your
grandfather, and also the Middle Ages. Remember the Nineties sucked, and
so did the Eighties. Maybe that moment when the dog stole pancakes off your
plate. Your parents laughing as the card table shook. Just after the Big Bang.

Invisible Bodies

November 15, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Aza Pace

Featured Art: (Children Swimming) by Unknown

Meanwhile, plastic particles
burrow in the Arctic snow

and in the sea’s deep trenches,
its legion bellies.

Meanwhile, a galaxy bursts
across my cervix—bad cells

someone will slice off
with electric wire as I sleep.

There is nothing untouched
in the whole furious world.

But the water today
in Galveston is blue,

with not a hint of tar.
In each wave, hermit crabs

and no bottle caps.
Babies in life jackets

tumble and squeal in the surf
while an older child bobs

out to the first sandbar
to fish. Meanwhile,

I think—I’m happy.
Under my tongue

sit the names of children
I will not make.

I roll them over and over
and love them.

(R)egret

November 15, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Danusha Laméris

I see the word egret, but read, instead,
regret. A trick of the mind. Its reversals. One,
a white slash, rising from the marsh. The other

a stone, strapped to the heart. The way I’ve carried
all the would-haves, all the ifs. Each alternate
exhausts. The egret wades in the dark water,

seeking fish. The heart, constancy. I doubt the egret
has regrets. Hatch, fledge, breed, hunt.
And besides, a lovely name that comes from French.

“Aigrette,” for brush, after the long feathers
that stream down its back. How do its legs,
bent reversed, move ahead? Who wouldn’t want

to walk like that? There are days I step
outside my body, arise, fly over the field
of my life, and glimpse—not error—but river,

rock, and oak, a wide expanse. Here and there
a meadow, dry grass dotted with—could
they be poppies?—some bright-blurred, orange flame.

The Elks at the Watering Hole

November 15, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Steve Myers

Sundays they’d meander down from surrounding hills
to the watering hole
just south of French Creek, where it joins the Allegheny, maybe twenty,
thirty on a good day in summer, the fog in no hurry to lift off the river,
& if I were visiting,
my father-in-law would take me along, because
this was the rhythm of Venango County men, week after week, season
on season, for the members who hadn’t lost wives to dementia, cancer,
or a cheating heart,
a chance to get away from the women, bullshit, maybe
win some money in the big drawing,

the Iron City flowing & Wild Turkey,
not yet noon, a thumb-flicked Zippo, cover clicking back, scratchy rachet
of the wheel, flame-sputter, flame, head bowing, a face
sudden, illuminated,
the long fhhhhhhhhhhh, with smoke stream, & a story would begin:

an Army jeep bouncing into a bombed-out Rhineland town, & in an old church
cellar, great shattered wine casks, you drank as you sloshed through it, dark,
fuck-cold;
someone’s uncle down the Mon Valley, the Gold Gloves boxer
who lost an arm; a lieutenant’s first whorehouse.
That was the talk,
and everything was Eddie, almost whispered, a shibboleth:
duck boots, fly rods, the Eddie Bauer Ford Bronco—Elks Masonic
to the nth degree.

Laugh, move among them, wear the flannel, stand them
a round—still, I carried the scent of a distant country. One slight shift
of wind & heads would lift, the circle tighten.

Fulminate

November 8, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kimberly Johnson

Featured Art: Lightning coming from the Sky by Johannes Plenio

I saw you coming from a mile away,
Thunder. You play
Coy, sly your pretty in winks

Around the cumulus, but up close what colors
You show, all shazam
And tantrum while the Wham-bam

On the wireless crackles with static. What the swagger
Are you after?
Whose the heart you do not stagger

When you rattle through the bracken, knocking
Branches at the casement?
I betook me to the basement

When you batted first your lashes, flashed
Your distant
Dazzle—I’ve been whiplashed

By your type before: you come on easy
But want me on my knees,
Want to flutter my transformers

And shut off all my lights. You throw a glam show
And then you blow
Along to the next hapless,

Leaving blank fuzz across the radio dial—
No tune, no storm
Warning, no Thank you ma’am.

Fusion

November 8, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Kimberly Johnson

Featured Art: Water Bubbles by Pixabay

Oh, my quantum soul—restive, sizzling
In its nimbus
Of need. How it dizzies

In the orbit of another’s passing
Fancy, fickle
As it flirts its vacant shells

Hey there sexy fella can you fill
My spinning empties
With your any loose electrons?

How in relentless ciphers it scrawls
On any bathroom wall
My atomic number.

It is a light element, an errant
Sphere with strong wants:
Come Lover, let’s charge ourselves

A spark, a star, a dark and secret
Supernova, let
Us cleave ourselves: attract,

Repel, attract, repel, let us fall
In common gravity,
By which I mean love, and then fall

Out.

tree with ice, under amber light

November 8, 2020.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By James Lineberger

Featured Art: A Pond Near Rousillon by Adolphe Appian

it glows in frozen streaks
each of its feathered limbs curved gently upward
and i find myself pausing
at the edge of the drive
to stand very still in the needles of rain
as if anchored here too
stretching my arms overhead
like some arthritic unpainted mime
not because i need to make
a statement about anything
just that every now and then
like the silent unfolding wings of the tree
something stirs within me trying to say
it believes

North River Shad, c. 1910

November 8, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Lindsay Atnip

Featured Art: Green Fish About to Eat the Fish Hook Wall Art by The Lazy Artist Gallery

William Merritt Chase painted numerous versions of fish still
lifes, many of which were quickly purchased by museums across
the country. Because of the popularity of these works, the artist
worried that he would be remembered only “as a painter of fish.”
—placard, Art Institute of Chicago

The real thing rots. Corrupts,
Decays, time-lapses, hollow to holes.

But yours—immortal, silver-scaled, so round—
(Why should its roundness be wrenching?)

Realer than the real.

You were afraid this was what they’d remember you for.
Afraid—as if there were somehow more than this.

Here one sees, forever, how it could fill the hand—
How it would feel, filling one’s hand.

One could do worse than be a painter of fishes.

Polar Bear

November 6, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By George Bilgere
Winner, Editors’ Prize in Poetry: selected by J. Allyn Rosser

Featured Art: Mounted Model of a Polar Bear from United States National Museum Photographic Laboratory

A father died heroically in some Alaskan park
while trying to save his kids from a polar bear.

Long ago, when his mother gave birth
one summer afternoon in Bakersfield, California,
could anyone have prophesied,
as in an old myth, that the baby crying
at her breast would one day be killed
and partially eaten by a polar bear?

Has anyone from Bakersfield, California been killed
and partially eaten by a polar bear? Yet her son
was. He looked up from making camp,
pitching the tent or lighting his Coleman stove,
and there it was, white and immense. His fate.

And he died heroically and was partially eaten.

Of course, the bear had to be killed. The rangers shot it,
which makes sense. You can’t have polar bears
running around in the wilderness!
The wilderness is a place for dads and kids
and Coleman stoves. Polar bears just . . .
they just kind of ruin the whole thing.

As for the bear, it didn’t die heroically.
It just got shot and fell over
and was sent to a lab for testing.

Currency of Survival

November 6, 2020.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Natalie Taylor

Featured Art: Scott Catalogue USA PC7 from National Postal Museum

A half-eaten waffle, syrup-logged in a plastic takeout container,
dropped in the middle of the street. Bald man in a blue truck slows down,
cranes his head out the window to get a closer look. Suited folk

coming home from church swerve. It’s finally cool enough, after 37 days of dry heat,
to turn off the air conditioning, open windows.
Hooting and hollering from the apartments as someone on TV scores a touchdown.

Last night a friend came over. She has 16 pets, most of them rescue animals:
dogs, cats, rabbits, and ducks. She installed a heated pond in a spare bedroom. She’s worried
about how to transport them when she moves to Maine as a climate refugee.

A grandmother and grandkids carrying leftovers in Styrofoam walk past
the waffle. Dark feathers brush across the storm-swift sky.
A car drives over it, wheels straddling the soggy breakfast. Something exciting happens in the game:

Yeah! Then clapping. My friend with 16 pets has no hope life on earth will get better.
If you think we have an immigration crisis now, wait until Mumbai is uninhabitable,
she says. Everyone on the planet is moving to Canada.

I think of a fable where a rich man buries a bag of gold
in the middle of the road and covers it with a boulder. Then he watches.
Some people are angry. Some ignore it and walk around it. Only one boy

thinks to move the stone. My friend thinks that by 2050 the high desert will be too hot to survive.
We’ll run out of water. She thinks we are hurtling ourselves out of
the habitable zone. But I think of pyramids and vaccines and walking on the moon.

Humans adapt. Imagine, all of us trying to fit in the northernmost region
of North America. She thinks it’s impossible because
the rich are already buying up all the land and building homes there.

A girl in a striped shirt and red pants walks a dog with an upcurled
toffee-colored tail. The dog stops to sniff as thunder growls across the valley.
Four teenagers on bicycles. Another couple with three dogs, hair and fur rising

in gusts. Wind rhythms the chimes, thunder drums closer
and the first sweet slaps of rain hit burnt tips of leaves, brown grass, dried lily stalks.
Smell of wet cement. Soon, a miniature river bounces in the gutter.

Clatter of rain drowns out the game. A neighbor checking his mail—leopard-print kimono
sticking to his long legs, arms waving wildly to shoo the storm, yelling out as if in pain—
bends to pick up the waffle. Raindrops plinking like millions of silver coins.

Leaf Light

November 6, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Emily Tuszynska

Featured Art: Forest by Arnold William Brunner

We live in green
depths of trees
planted by those
who grew old
and died or moved
away our children
play in yards theirs left
behind and sleep
in rooms that held two
or even three until
they grew our children too
are growing in summer
we box outgrown
clothes repaint
the walls new tiles
for the bath new
shingles the trees
don’t seem to change
though of course
they must the backyard
beech and oaks
that will outlast us
casting a deeper
shade the front yard
holly reaching farther
over the drive we pull in
and out of always
in a rush someone
running back for what
they forgot the trees
keep some other kind
of time spend whole
seasons taking in
their sustenance
strange food
without substance
every summer a feast
of light

Someone Threw Down a Wildflower Garden in an Empty Lot in Newark

October 24, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Theresa Burns

Featured Art: Flowers in a Vase by Odilon Redon

And now, instead of staring at the weeds
and broken bottles from the train platform,
we’re taking in a scene from a Monet.
Asters, cosmos, little yellow fists
of something. All random and confetti.
I’m half expecting a lady in a high-waist
dress and bonnet to appear on a diagonal
stroll through its splendor, pausing
with her parasol so we can selfie with her.
Maybe she’ll hop aboard the light rail
to the Amtrak station, get off in D.C.,
step back into the painting she escaped from.
Who was the genius who thought of this?
What meadow-in-a-can Samaritan
got sick of passing the four-acre eyesore
on the way to work? Shook pity into blossom.
To whom do I write my thank you?
Mayor, surveyor, county clerk, church lady.
Who marched down to city hall, begged
anyone who would listen?

The World We Wanted Shone So Briefly

June 9, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Gail Martin

Featured Art: Cicadas by Scott Brooks and Wendy Minor Viny

Real life was finally about to begin.

Remember the romance of the silver cigarette case

in college? The integrity of your firstborn’s eyelashes?

We discarded alternate destinies like tired cards

in the Flinch deck. We were only looking forward.

Of course, like the teeth of beavers and horses, there

are parts of the past that never stop growing.

Garage – tree house – vacant lot kinds of cruelty–

how we took turns being mean.

And later, some serrated evenings, dinners

of bluster and recoil, dodge. Flowers sent

or not sent to someone’s funeral.

Mostly there are the years you watch

your neighbors’ cars slide in and out of their garage.

Between blue herons and tumors, you change

the sheets.

We were all surprised to find ourselves old

but really the signs were everywhere, and we

acknowledge we’d been told. Name one

important thing that has not already happened.

The Helms Man

June 8, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Kathryn Jordan

Featured Art: Creative Abundance Flower by Wendy Minor Viny

The Helms Man, we called him. I mean the man in white

baker’s trousers who drove the Helms Bakery van

around our bright California cul-de-sacs and streets —

coastal hills carved to asphalt, tract, and pink ice

plant that we broke open to write on sidewalks.

He drove slowly down our block, stopping to open

wide temptation’s door, inviting adolescent girls in

to view his wares: jelly and glazed doughnuts,

cinnamon twists, sparkling crystal sugar. We ponied

up quarters for paper bags of treats, to be consumed

out of sight of perfect mothers, lying out in lawn chairs,

all Coppertone and Tab gleam, who gave us Teen Magazine,

left us to banana and milk diets, vertical stripes, and scales.

Left us to ripe womanhood and the gaze of men,

to shape and flavor we could never taste ourselves.

To motherhood and stretching of skin, joint loosening,

the joy of being food. Then cronehood with arroyo

of wrinkle, slump of breast, lump of belly.

Each one alone now sees herself in hollow mirror,

flattened chest, belly bulge assessed, while outside

the window, teenage girls parade in short cutoffs,

long legs supple and smooth. And our long-gone

mothers watch us watch them. We, who still hear

the van coming and run, hurry, to be ready, radiant

and thin for the helmsman, just turning the corner.

Walker County Rites

May 14, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Cheyenne Taylor

Featured Art: Flea by Jason Douglas and Wendy Minor

One average night you catch yourself
combing summer’s stour through your hair,

cutting the moon like fruit with a pocketknife.
The night undoes the hooks behind her back

for you, white freckles tossed across her skin.
Before the massless hoots of barred owls hail

you back to camp—your wet, unbaptized body
bruised by testing instinct—you’re convinced

that something’s watching. Fatwood fatigues.
You loom up to the fire, trusting heat. You say

I sort-of think, and I would like to pray,
and marvel at the coal barge hauling

light between banks. When someone thanks
the Lord for camp potatoes, aluminum foil,

rootstalks spread for tortoises, a mammal howls,
and you want all the earthly knowledges.

You steel yourself with whiskey for the river.
You plant yourself ashore and eat the dirt.

Self-Portrait as Minor Prophet

May 11, 2020.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Craig Van Rooyen

Not the one who foretells
our city become a jackals’ haunt
or our silver turned to dross.

Rather, the one who needs a grocery list
from his wife with the precise level of yogurt fat
underlined and the aisle number

for the hypo-allergenic soap
so he will not wander, masked, into
the floral section to be with orchids,

their double stems of moth wings
looking nothing like fields stripped by foreigners
or hands hinged in prayer.

Woe to you with more than 10 items
in express checkout, he may think.
Woe to you who do not stand six feet apart.

But he does not proclaim their downfall
or predict their cattle slaughtered, their
gardens trampled underfoot.

I have seen enough buying and selling by now
to know I am a product, packaged
for someone else’s comfort, and to know

in this too I will fail. The truth is, my people,
we were always sheltered alone
and for mysterious reasons never knew it.

After 24 years with one woman
I still wonder with whom I will awake:
Sword or plowshare; flint horse hoof

or threshing floor, wasteland or vineyard
where grape skins crack from the pressure
of flesh and juice answering sun.

The Universe is Just One of Those Things That Happens from Time to Time

May 10, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jacob Griffin Hall

Featured Art: Stacked Animals by Jonathan Salzman

I deposit my tired universe of bones
beside the farmhouse. Discrete, the butterfly weed
with its leaves tapered to a soft point
leans against the lower stem of a coneflower.
I eat sweet bread and strawberries
and stare into the pocket of oaks dawdling
at the far edge of the field. I draw rings in the clouds
with my outstretched finger, the posture
not unlike accusation, the hair erect at the brush
of a spider against an exposed ankle. The only choice
is how far to carry a burden. I’ve known
the most ordinary people, autumn, untamed piles
of burning leaves. I’ve watched from a safe distance
and disregarded the intensity with which I scratched
my wrist, the skin slick and glinting
beneath a series of similar suns. I’ve negotiated
my right to fathom the bodies of insects.
It’s going well so far. I’ve given up
chocolate bars and late nights and thoughts
of making my life a metaphor. Still the coneflower
is nimble atop its spread of fibrous root.
I wait for the sun to stain the clouds
that shade of rattled yellow that announces evening,
the low light, a thing I know but still need to parse.

Someone Threw Down a Wildflower Garden in an Empty Lot in Newark

April 11, 2020.Reading time 1 minute.

By Theresa Burns

Featured Art by Robert Jacob Gordon

I propose we worship the mud dauber

April 10, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Jessica Pierce

Featured Art: by Pieter Holsteyn

The female in particular seems worthy.
She carries mud in her jaws to make her nest
one mouthful at a time, setting up
in a crevice or a corner. One egg,
one chamber. One egg, one chamber.
It’s better to keep them apart, as larvae don’t
know the difference between food and
a brother or a sister. They aren’t wicked,
just young and hungry. She has pirate
wasps to battle—they want her young
to feed their own offspring—and she does this
alone, drinking flower nectar to keep
herself going. Let’s just try

and see what happens when we raise up
this winged thing who will hover by your feet
without attacking. Covered with dense golden
hair and sometimes described as singing while
she works, all she wants is bits of damp dirt.
She has a slender thorax and two thin
sets of wings to carry her and
her earth. She is exactly strong enough
for what she needs to do. She doesn’t burn
or proclaim or fill your head with visions
as she hunts crab spiders and orb
weavers and black widows. Yes, let’s ask

her to pray for us as she stings
a black widow, brings it to its knees,
and sets off to feed her children,
singing as she holds up the world.

Learning

March 26, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Kelly Michels

Featured Art from rawpixel.com

A new cure is invented every day,
along with a new disease
because every miracle needs a disaster
to survive, and there is no shortage
of disaster, the sparrows have learned
to eat anything under the slash-and-burn
of the sun, and the children have learned
how to weave plastic buttercups into bracelets
between the alphabet and spoonfuls of NyQuil
their mothers give them before bed
where they dream of the swish of scar tissue
behind their teacher’s glass eye.

We tell them: There is horror. There is pain.
There are people wedged between bullets
and mud floors, between cracked river ice
and broken elevator shafts. But not here.
Never here.

Now, we sit still as an Eames chair, and the children
will never know the bridge of a song the rain spells
out in the sand on an October morning.
It is safer behind closed doors and windows, safer
where the wheat and ragweed and daisies
can kill no one.

We tell them: We have seen the grim amoeba of lake water,
the blizzard of ocean waves lashing against the curved spine
of coast, the blue-eyed grass raising itself like a rash toward
the swollen ache of sun, the sting of salt, grazing the long arm
of a bluff. We have lived it. We know better now.
We have knelt at the rim of a cliff and looked down.
We have fallen, felt the pulse of the sea pull at our hair
and it was not kind.

Child, put your ear to the conch shell and listen.
This is enough.

The Pasture Ponds

March 25, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By John Bargowski

Featured Art by Kieran Osborn

You know the spot, that sharp left
off the county road to Hope

that passes the roadside shrine her
classmates built to our youngest,

the blank stones that mark the old
Presbyterian graveyard,

then on past the last rusted knob
of safety rail

where a graveled lane cuts through
swampy woods.

The pair of wood drake decoys
Hubert anchored to the bottom

riding out every weather on the big pond,
the splotch of white on their sides

that catches in our high beams
as we round the curve.

The twiggy wrack of alder and sumac
clipping the sideviews

as we pass through streaks of moonlight
burnishing the shields

on the skeletoned ruins of our friend’s
red Massey Ferg.

A place we’ve gone to many times
trying to nudge the season ahead,

we crack open the side window, crank
the heater up a couple notches,

sit with the lights clicked shut, side
by side in the front seat,

strain for the first callers crawled free
from March mud, the hyla crucifer,

no bigger than a fingertip, noted in our
dog-eared Peterson’s for shrill voices

that rise then fall, and those dark little crosses
they carry on their backs.

Tackle

March 24, 2020.Reading time 2 minutes.

By John Bargowski

Featured Art: by Teerasak Anantanon

Weeks after the cops cut Bill down
and the squad sheeted his body,

bore it out to the street, his mother
leaned over her sill and called us

upstairs to share the flies he’d wrapped
and knotted, labeled

with names we could never
have dreamed up, and arranged

in small wooden boxes next to coils
of tapered leader and packs

of hooks barbed along their shanks,
the button-down shirts

and bank teller suits in his closet
screeched and swayed

on their hangers when she elbowed
her way in for the split bamboo pole

he’d hand-rubbed to a gloss
and mounted with a reel cranked

full of line, nothing we could ever use
when we biked down

to the Hudson piers and bait-fished
for river eels and tommycod,

but we took it all, every piece
of tackle we could carry down

to the stoop to divvy up among us—
his canvas vest, his shoulder bag,

spools of waxed line, the bamboo poles,
his hip waders and creel,

and those boxes of flies—
the Zebra Midge and Gray Ghost,

his Black Woolly Bugger,
Pale Morning Dun.