February - Poem 7

The Clouds  / Kristine Anderson

The weather report predicts more snow
tomorrow, though this afternoon cumulus
puffs float across a canvas of cornflower blue
behind bare winter arms of birch and alder.

By morning, glacier gray nimbostratus
will arrive, sending icy rain or flakes of snow
to overlay frozen-shrouded lawns, to cover
brown oak leaves still hanging on from fall,

to coat rooftops and doorsteps, settling
on streets finally cleared after last weekend’s
storm, gathering on brick walkways
where neighbors tread carefully to keep

from sliding. A good day to stay inside
while the heater blasts its heart out. A good day
for a book or conversation over tea. A good day
to listen to snow’s hush: easy does it.

Sort Of Sonnet Olympiad / Barbara Audet

He would extol thee on this winter’s eve.
Now is sport more artful and more deliberate.
Ebony skies did greet the sparkling torches’ weave,
To plant a light that burns too brief this Milan-frescoed date.
Not this time will the sun burst unfairly bright for miracle deeds.
Nor will cold mar complexions of Sparta’s children as they soar.
By measures marked oh so small, a few will earn their golden leads.
And yes, sometimes, nature’s chance will enhance what training bore.
This eternal moment will not fade or its import ere diminish.
For those braving ice, long drifts so grandly, boldly Italic.
May yet claim the glory given to those who reach an ephemeral finish.
To wear ‘round their necks, this century’s version of laurel metallic.
So long as women, men exert and breathe, eyes see,
So long lives this and we take untampered joy from thee.

Scissortail Flycatcher / Bee Cordera

Bird of most beautiful sunsets, 
swooping
into the evening, catching summer's 
juicy insects. How we miss you 
during the months of cold 
your dancing in the sky, 
the warmth of the sun as 
red as your inner 
wings and feathers.

DREAM FROM A DINNER PARTY AT THE PALAZ OF HOON / Ashby Logan Hill

All day and still he won’t tell us, two lotus flowers floating in the sun.
And you wake up to the howling wind, as brisk as this morning winter,
the still light sun cast flicker between the trees outside your windows.
And from this purpling dream, just having awakened, you sit up and listen,
as slow as ever wonder what the day will bring, sift through the tattered
memories from those lucid moments ago.  You close your eyes and go
back to the Night river, the dinner party, a woman who sees you out back
waiting by the flowing, rose-filled fountain.  Earlier, you had tied an umbrella
to yourself to use as a hang glider parachute and the wind took you up into the
afternoon sky, somewhere like a breeze above Corolla. A man from down below yells
from the horse-lined beach to punch down the bag a bit and twist with the tethers.  “You’ll make your way back down then,” he said. And so I did. And a soft patch of
cypress trees welcomed me and I waited for a ride into town from a stranger.
And all this just to get back to what my mind held? “A sleepless sanctuary,” I said.

The Beginning of a Struggle / Amy Marques

Brokenhearted

Silent

        Repressed

   always knowing   always seeing

even now.

But witness

so believe

          one day

          a word

                 could touch

            striving

            in a happier future

in aid 

of the beginning of a struggle.

The Surface that Holds  / Sonia Sophia Sura

Can I still 
make a wish?

I found an
eyelash
on 
the
yoga mat.

Maybe that’s where
all the
wishes
go,
on the
surface that
holds
our
child’s pose

Maybe the 
surrender to
the human
shapes
of
surrender
and fetus
and 
animal
and
spine

is how the
wishes
come 
true—

Is
relaxing
all I 
need to do
to 
Save
the World?

Stretching
my neck,
shoulders,
my torso?

Raptured  / Samuel Spencer

And just like that,
it was all over – everything,
my life, a distant memory
shut away in my heavenly mind.
There was more I wanted
to do, something I wanted to say,
though I don’t know what.
I never did catch that red Gyrados
in the Lake of Rage. I was halfway
through A Farewell to Arms.
I’ll never know if my parlay hit.
I never kissed her on her full,
red lips, though I looked at them
long enough to know how mine
would feel pressed against them.
I look down at my glowing,
pedicured feet –  I guess my favorite pair
of Vans weren't holy enough…

Haha, get it?

February - Poem 6

Stars  / Kristine Anderson

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

                                                                                    —Carl Sagan

More of them in the universe than dollars in the federal deficit
and though I can’t even fathom a host of septillion—
sounds more like a reptile I’d like to avoid—
I can imagine each giant gaseous ball,
thanks to years reading science fiction
and close encounters with questionable chili.

And aren’t we humans lucky to have been shaped
from such celestial ingredients?
Next time I go to the dentist, or cut myself and bleed,
or talk myself out of another slice
of dessert, I’ll think of stepping outside on a clear
night, trying to count the dots of glitter in the sky.

Ode to hands  / Bee Cordera

Hands, love incarnate, 
beings of creation, 
destruction, some who have lived
lifetimes without knowing 
the love of pen to paper, 
carving letters out of purgatory.
Or how you pour my likeness 
onto the blank page. 
Or how hands cradle curves
our body’s first food. 
Or how gentle touches 
revive the fallen souls 
of our abuse ridden past.
How hands like ours embrace 
to create to overcome family curses

Loudness of Solitary Confinement  / Barbara Audet

When years advance,
There's no one
to fall asleep with at your side.
When time refuses
to stand still,
somber emptiness
of missing shadows, 
bears down.
Relentless.
As rain that never ends.
One hears a sound,
one's own life force,
captured in eardrum hollows,
Unwelcome.
A going steady hum
ever present
in the waxing
early hours.
Revived.
Like a living 
tuning fork,
hit for summons
from furtive sleep.
Awaken.
Solitary once again.

BUDDHA’S SPOON / Ashby Logan Hill

It is unfortunate that the sun does not travel backwards
“How the lilie is not a lotus, looming long above the crest of lake,” you said. “It looks like a little spoon,” I said, “as if the warmth of the fog above the water, Buddha’s breath, just might keep in balance of his, his curled fingertips, pressed to the tip of his nose, like a paperweight, somehow dangling just above the nostrils.” “I wonder if he can hear us,” you said.
“Do you think he likes golden raisins in his oatmeal?” I said. “I know it’s not a spoon,” you said. “But I want it to be.” “Sometimes your eyes can play dirty tricks on you,” I said. “Do you think along the way, and after his travels back,  beneath the Bodhi tree, he contemplated Spumoni?” you said. “You know, I’m not totally sure,” I said. “We’ve been standing here all day and still he won’t tell us, two lotus flowers floating in the sun.”  

Italicized line from E. Ethelbert Miller's "Michelle"

A To Do List / Amy Marques

you mean?

I mean

I knew--I hope

I pray a tune of silence

I ask

I give

I justified, I know

I have--I may

I can, I suppose...

S

ource Material: A Tale of Two Cities, p. 138

Sex / Sonia Sophia Sura

scared, I
asked him to rest 
his hand 
on me
and say:
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe
You are safe

Thought Terminating Cliché  / Samuel Spencer

“It is what it is.”
They say, as they toss away
what is that could have been.

“Boys will be boys.”
A parent asserts, withholding
their son the joy of
being a delicate man.

“Guns don’t kill people. People kill people."
A man explains
who has never, nor will ever be a killing machine.

“This is just how it’s done.”
My grandfather refrains
as he teaches me how to serve a
tennis ball. Years later, I learned
a better way, and my grandfather was dead.

“Everything happens for a reason.”
Excuses a person who hates
their own ability, or lack thereof,
to change.

“That’s just life.”
Retort the unliving.

February - Poem 5

Frozen  / Kristine Anderson

water below 32°
cubes for cold lemonade
or tumbled into the cooler
or packed in a Ziplock
for a sore shoulder

in winter, the sidewalk
where I shuffle and slide
to the trash can, a bag full
of warm coffee grounds from
breakfast, cellophane
that once held a loaf of bread,
detritus of everyday

crystals hanging onto eaves
puddles turning solid

cold as . . . meaning rigid,
unfeeling, heartless—
the heart as counterpoint:
vital, dynamic, warm

outside a kitchen window,
piled snow hardening the ground
where, below, daffodil bulbs
wait for the thaw

A Tale Of Two  / Barbara Audet

Walking in beauty is dangerous.
Only if there's beauty in you.
Tender beauty 
beyond skin deep courageous;
Eclipses temporary aspect, hues.
Force and Beauty 
meet most often 
when skies are starry,
and demand is great, 
unsoftened in such gaudy days.
Pretty planned, impaired, has no place.
tt shatters under lights, impure, notorious.
Lasting beauty draws attention.
As it's brave, not vainglorious.
Beauty at peace asks Her
Take the stand, go unadorned.
With thoughts expressed serene
Define calmness with
unnecessary win-refusing smiles.
Word eloquence alone
is goodness spent 
most beautifully.
Action in intimidation's face
is nameless grace.

ON FARMING THE LAND / Ashby Logan Hill

                      from King Tutenkamun’s Diary

“Meet me at the heron rookery at dusk. I’ll be waiting for you there,”
he said to his advisors. “I want to talk to you about farming the land,
how fertile the crescent is and Ibis gliding as Thoth tells us of
Ankhesenamun, how rich and ripe the soil is to carry my children.
My father once told me about the people of god, the lamb of the
sun but he kept everything else from me. I took on a different name.
I wanted to till the earth, cultivate the land, sow the fields with the
beauty and magic of the sun. I wish he would have told me sooner
about the drought and the shrines of the delta marshes left to decay. 
I don’t know why he would keep this from me. I like the way the reeds
sway in the wind, how crystal blue the water is. I wish there was a way
to tell him now how much I love the grass by the Nile, the birds and
fishes coexisting, how all the fields and dirt and sky become one.”
It is unfortunate that the sun does not travel backwards.

Italicized line from E. Ethelbert Miller's "Michelle"

Talking to the Moon / Amy Marques

Tell me, dear daughter,
that, years ago, i had
attention & curiosity at
who you were 
to become.

Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

Micah called / Sonia Sophia Sura

He said he doesn’t know how to flirt.

He doesn’t like going to bars and hearing girls
talk about their crazy roommate.

He likes to talk about wars and authors from the
1900s and what he cooks for breakfast. 
His eggs benedict is so passionate, he
almost missed his train, one time out of Saratoga Springs.
Made eggs benny for everyone but himself.

He read me poetry. Elizabeth Bishop.
Told me about her life.
She went to Brazil and wrote a poem for Micah to read to me
while I wrote a poem
and pretended I was listening.

He said he just finished cleaning his room.
I cleaned my room last night, too, but
he’d destroyed things in his room. Broke things.
Has to make coffee differently because he broke the
coff—
I don’t know. I don’t drink coffee.

I want to know
what he’s like
when his guard is
down.
I want to know what
he’s like when
his rage
softens and
slithers like a snake
hugging a 
tree;

what I mean to say, 
what I’m getting at is,

Micah reads me poetry 
from the books on his shelf,
if he has a standing shelf.

Micah gets together with his friends and they
read poetry to each other,
in the heart of Brooklyn,
they are reading poetry to each other. 

Micah is so gentle and ardent for intellectual
stimulation, he must have smashed his belongings in 
pursuit of a higher intelligence…

It’s my philosophy to take care of myself and
share my methods with others.
I tell him about the celtic shaman.
I tell him about meditations
and sufi whirling and
I want to know what he’s like
when his guard is down,
when he’s relaxed to someone’s lips.

Corporate Confession  / Samuel Spencer

I can hear the morning rain pattering
on the leaves outside my window.

I want to stay in this moment, wait
until the sky runs out of droplets –

But I mustn’t, or I will miss the time to be
“on time.” I will be the one who goes

as the rain stays in this moment and watches me
run out. I ask myself

when did my life become a series of forsaking
the joys bestowed on me at birth?

February - Poem 4

Introduction to Winter  / Kristine Anderson

Last weekend’s foot of snow hangs around
though now it’s more like ice
and my dog, about the height of that,
had mostly given up on favorite spots:
no more grassy lawn stretching to the street,
no mounds of dirt beneath the evergreens.

Seven times—maybe eight—he fell in
and, immobilized, looked to me to rescue him.

Today, something different. The dog hopped
up to a plateau of snow and didn’t sink.
The surface held. The dog sniffed.
So I stepped up. The ice supported me
for just a beat—long enough to think
okay, this’ll work . . . then thump!

One foot sank deep, shifting body mass.
I toppled down, squarely on my bum. In the snow.

As far as I can tell, the only laughter
came from me. From deep within my chest.
I stood, regained my equilibrium, dusted
off the ice still clinging to my coat.
The dog tugged the leash, wanting to go on.
No, uh-uh, I said, and shook my head.

We’ve had our turns, my dog and I, and now
I think we see: winter has the upper
hand—at least until the spring.

untitled / Bee Cordera

A Tale Of Two  / Barbara Audet

“In short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Charles Dickens

It was, he said, the best of times.
Because fabrics were fine.
Thoughts were elevated.
Revolution was a birthright.
The golden thread.
They claimed the Greeks.
Hugged their philosophy, knowledge
Science served with cherish on top.
It was, he said, the worst of times.
Death came forward
as a guarantee
for disobedience.
Fell swoop.
Away you went.
Blood was the answer
For despotic disagreements.
It was, he said, the age of wisdom.
More than Burke and Paine.
More than Rousseau and Jefferson.
All. Created. Equal.
Definitely on paper.
It would seem so.
It was, he said, the age of foolishness.
Because fabrics were fine
only for some.
The paper thoughts
were fragile.
It was, he said, the epoch of belief.
Belief compelling, disturbing,
overwhelming, corrupt.
It was, he said, the epoch of incredulity.
Epochs are supposed to have a start, a finish.
There is no finish line
for stunning reversals
In the progression of human desire.
Recalled to life, he said,
In the presence of the track of a storm.
Winds of self-ambition.
Lightning fits of anger,
striking for power’s sake.
It could still be a season for Light
To dispel the ever present Darkness?
His hero would give his life.
Our heroes are also dying.
in this near spring of hope,
Laid on the doorstep
of a literary fantasy
Come to life.
We are yet knee-deep 
in this winter of despair.
The red snow of Minnesota
Must even now give way
To a spring of green and rebirth.
We wish to be recalled 
to a better life.
This is still
A time when we
Have everything before us.
But give way to fear,
We will have nothing
Before us.
The Victorian considered that heaven or hell
Were places on your itinerary.
Eventually.
The year of His Lord
one thousand
seven hundred
and seventy-five.
The year of mine is now.

LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT  / Ashby Logan Hill

That’s all I’ve ever really wanted. Something like this for death.
If you will, please honor it. I know you have your own beliefs
on who gets what and what goes where and how all the papers
in my archive will be “represented.”  I’d like you to know I have
wholehearted trust in you to do so.  I know some of the things
I’ve asked for are a bit wacky but I’ve already got everything straight
with my power of attorney and she'll have you know I’m quite
serious about the ice-cold cantaloupe and cucumber tea sandwiches
to be served at my wake.  I guess that’s what we’ll call it.  I’ve hired a
brass band and a great set of thespians to act it all out — the “dead” me
in my casket will do just that — awake and sing to the rooftops to all my
guests — “He’s already moved on so there better be some damn good laughter
between your sips of whiskey sours and conversations,” he told me to tell you.
“Meet me at the heron rookery at dusk. I’ll be waiting for you there.”

For Kim  / Amy Marques

debauchery 

bred:

public street

                powerful

            extensive

crowd

Therefore:

What's coming?

I want to send all my poems to you / Sonia Sophia Sura

I want to send all my poems to you
I want to be a wound split open
only to show you the remarkable
ability we have to
peer inside with a magnifying glass and
find words, shapes, sound.

I want to tell you
I lost
what could bring me dead.
I shattered.
I de-limbed.

I want to tell you with my hands,
my eyes, my lips.
They are still here.

I want to tell you with my hands,
my eyes, my lips
are still here. 

Layover  / Samuel Spencer

I’m not on-the-go anymore,
but I feel like this, this leg of
The Journey
is just one of those long layovers – 
like that one time I spent 19 hours
in the Denver airport, and slept under the gaze
of its demonic gargoyles – 

Except this time I get to see my friends
and family, and tour the spot I’ve been to
a hundred times. I’m no longer travelling
and yet my toothbrush
continues to live in a travel case, a go-bag,
if you will.

The truth of it all is
I’m not, in fact, on a layover.
There’s no checking in, no need for
security.
I can be here know it soon
won’t have to end. I can pause my means
for escape. I can put away my
baggage.

February - Poem 3

A Note  / Kristine Anderson

The sun sets in the west,
my older sister explained.
You can remember
because cowboys
ride into the sunset.

So how to explain
my riding eastward
at almost seventy,
leaving the Pacific
& a lifetime of sun,
& desert-inspired air,
heading from dusks
toward sunrises—
fire spreading across
the Atlantic sky.

Too many sunsets,
maybe. Days,
lives, dreams
twilit and fallen
behind Coast Range
mountains into
the sizzling ocean.

Sister, you would’ve
known something

of what I’m saying.

Surface Certainty  / Barbara Audet

A life depends so often
on the certainty that a foot
coming to rest on a surface
will not push through
to a lasting void.

A child will rush onto the ice.
Unaware that clear 
enticement of a slide 
across its barren beauty 
is uncertain
at the least.
Breaks, cracks, jagged edges 
must form
when the surface 
inevitably lies
proving unreliable.

Holding onto choices,
the verbal slide 
traipsing so certainly on.
This forward march 
on broad expanses
of dangerous expressions, 
ego-frozen,
is no skating endeavor, 
glibly tracing figures 
from the past.
It reminds one 
of thick boots j
ust behind,
willful walkers 
posed to tiptoe on 
heart-stopping socialized brulee,
intimidation-made glides.

Masked boots 
that lift in unison
to land with malice 
on the worn surface 
of a cold world, upending
Soundtracked with a life-taking 
cacophony of crystals 
thrown into the uncertain face
of its unrecognizable delicate civility.

For Mario / Bee Cordera

I wake up every morning
next to you and that is a poetry.
I fall asleep in your arms as we watch 
horny hockey and even that is poetry.
Sharing your breath, sharing your time,
we are poetry. 

Elegy for the Something of Death and Water Lilies  / Ashby Logan Hill

And afterwards still you and I left, the only ones singing,
angel-headed and high-lighter glow in expanse of night.
Old riverboat for your pleasure in Bardo as fisherman's wife.
And something from me, an elegy I wrote to you before dying
of death, a simple few instructions on the backs of notecards —
green and gold sleeping bag for sarcophagus lined with flowers,
cold but glowing prostrate body in the bed of my pick up truck,
my brother said on pyre of palo santo and white pine pontoons.
And I wanted the jars I had made for my brains to be whipped,
mosaiced from the classes we'd take after work on Wednesdays
to stand there right beside Bastet and Anubis at feet and head.
It almost made sense this set of requests, not the Viking fire
you envisioned. It was almost as if you could hear me calling.
That’s all I’ve ever really wanted. Something like this for death.

Social Seamstresses   / Amy Marques

musingly built

the pattern--

                    inaudible and invisible

which 

         may have been a 

mender

           in due season.

MAx / Sonia Sophia Sura

Max plays the guitar.

I feel it
through my toes 
on his knee.

I hope to fall asleep.

Awake, I dream of the ocean, of finally reaching water and waves. 

I could have gone there from coldened Spain 
to India, or Thailand, or Bali,
but my Heart called me to Texas.
Why do I come here to find pieces of my heart
everywhere I didn’t know it would be?
Everywhere I did know it would be, actually.

In the frustration of highway cars and
expensive living I
find my Heart 
in Max’s tiny home.

I find my butt glued to my body.

It is cold but not like Massachusetts.

Max acts beyond words can describe.

It’s like we’re kids who’ve been friends all along.

We sit next to each other in the bed,
stuffed animals in every direction,
Essay on his lap, Journal in mine,

Shower Dripping to 
a rhythm that
doesn’t
bother me tonight,
it’s
slower
tonight. 
Two 
different notes.

The cat 
is somewhere 
outside,
under Great Tree or
car.
The Howling of 
the Graveyard Ghosts
don’t
reach
us.

We are bubbled-in-light,
the Two of Us,
the Together of Us
as Separate 
but One Unit
of
remarkable
friendship.

The Whole World
might think 
We’re made for Each 
Other,

wearing the
same Jacket,
the same Smile,
the same Love.

I’m
unlike 
a friend 
he’s ever had

and 
He’s
unlike 
a friend 
I’ve
ever had. 

Long Distance Haiku  / Samuel Spencer

My body and soul
are riven now because my
heart is where you are.

February - Poem 2

Winter Oaks  / Kristine Anderson

hold onto brittle brown leaves,
frozen in snow, battered by nor’easters:
marcescence,
unwilling to let go.

Aspen, dogwood, alder
splash landscape in autumn, then 
abscission—
shedding, separation, release.

April buds explode to flower and fruit,
ripen and return to the earth:
senescence,
elegance of aging.

The Shadow Knows  / Barbara Audet

If Ogden the poet today were living,
About this Groundhog tradition,
he'd express much misgiving.

I suspect he'd be pondering how such a mere rodent,
Could annually offer weather advice many consider so potent?

Rather, I think Nash with humor would question, 
how Phil, the dear woodchuck,
mastered climate projection.

Gauging winter's demise by plain shadow reckoning?
While outside his burrow, snow-weary humans are beckoning?

No llama lament now, poets put Punx to the test, 
keeping score by thermometer or give it a rest.

For if winter braves on 
despite shadow prognosis,
then it's high time to admit, 
trusting groundhogs
makes no sense.

untitled / Bee Cordera

Like Roses  / Ashby Logan Hill

Fingers holding all that’s left of glacial prairie, your way home
like roses, begonias, bamboo shoots, your walk to the flower market.
Last night, around six thirty, you skated on the ice like rain-song.
You stood leaning on the I beam in the center of the room
watching every member of the band laugh and dance.
You were like an ant in the middle of a bed of roses,
red as strawberries in summertime or the bits of blood
that dripped from your fingertips when pricked because in haste
the thorns remained at first for you primordial glimpse of beauty.
It was an unlearning like this that taught you something new.
And yet, like you, you hadn’t had the heart to name it you said.
And you still wanted the little drips like tie dyed silk ribbons.
Like roses, a cold winter’s breath, a silent song I said.
And afterwards still you and I left, the only ones singing.

Abundant Joy   / Amy Marques

art

books & paper

account

for necessary giddiness.

Source material for erasure: A Tale of Two Cities, pg 140

Loss / Sonia Sophia Sura

When you

love something

you

couldn’t

bear 

to 

live 

with out,

When you

lose something

you

couldn’t

bear 

to 

live 

with out,

Enjoying the Silence of  / Samuel Spencer

I remind myself
not every moment of this life
needs the accompaniment of a well-tailored
Spotify playlist – not every chore
needs chords; not every task
needs tunes.

Sometimes the best song is silence –
songs you cannot store, compile for later;
the songs of a moment you must endure.

Some of the biggest hits include:
Wind passing through leaves.
A distant train horn.
The boiling of a pot of coffee.
A splintering campfire.
Rain.
The mourning dove (work harder).
The mourning dove extended version (drink lager).
And let’s not forget about the lapping waves.

I, for one, pride myself on having
a more eclectic taste in silence.
I mean, not to brag, but I’ve been known to enjoy:
Tires on the interstate.
A dinner alone.
Cicadas.
The anticipation of diagnosis.
A summertime lawnmower.
The hum of a microwave.
The milliseconds thereafter “Do you love me?”

But what I love most of all
is the silence of a poem concluded.
That magnificent white space
devoid of words, yet which holds so much more
than you and I could ever contain,
contain,
contain,
contain,
contain,
con… (sorry, this one’s got a scratch).

February - Poem 1

The Noise / Kristine Anderson

“. . . write with the noise.”
—Susan Muaddi Darraj

Inside my home
the warm kitchen silent
except for the metronomic tick
of an old-fashioned wall clock

Outside the window
late afternoon casting shadows
sharpened by triangles of sunlight
on undulating stretches of icy snow

Beyond this: clatter
of the world. Scraping
of snow plows clearing roads,
sirens of ambulances rushing

to the ER, crack of a pine branch
splitting off. Report of a gun.
And everywhere, it seems,
the breaking of glass

 Belongs  / Barbara Audet

Every sign I carry. 
You carry.
Every raising of my hand with yours says 
we are mind full.
Of worry.
Of pain.
Of awareness that only hands held, fingers squared, will have strength.
A hand held sends 
its grip straight 
to holding a heart
in place. 
Against all 
that would end 
its beating.
The hand 
generates the sign.
The heart maintains 
its worth.

 Pose 4 the Bandit / Bee Cordera

A Good Thing  / Ashby Logan Hill

A loose thing, forgiveness, untethered, a skein of yarn
undoing in time, a good thing that comes like the stiff wind,
the dark night, monks on their way north, a narrow road to the
clifftop chateau, a desert sun not far from Tortilla Flats, Arizona,
a hell of a thing at Hellsgate Wilderness, a forest of pine trees
and hot springs, in the day, too hot for a bike ride, the windows
down and your friends in the back of your truck at dusk, then
moonglow thereafter, loose, untethered, a kite string’s whisper
and rattled about the sand dunes, and yet a turn you take today,
again a thing unfathomable, untouched snow drift, the ocean
and sandpiper dunes, the sun, golden topaz sandstone where
wooly mammoths used to roam, only leaving their footprints below,
mountain top cranberry bogs, Tobacco Row and lakes that look like
fingers holding all that’s left of glacial prairie, your way home

Delightful Though Disapproved   / Amy Marques

Nothing agreeable trifles
in approved best:

Birds, and flowers, and books
and wonder.

Source material for erasure: A Tale of Two Cities, pg 92

Standing in the Garage / Sonia Sophia Sura

I didn’t know it yet,
but he’d become a 
second 
dad to me,

the man,
shirtless and waving 
a sword 
through the air
during a thunderstorm…

We stood in the garage,
door open,
eight or six or 
ten of us,
looking for him
when the lightning was not
being our sky-lamp.

The storm had gone on for hours,
I know this because it had been hours
since I
saw clearly;

someone found my 
glasses
on the bench the next day;

When the rain came,
we took off our shirts
and started running.

The creek is down the road,
a few minutes driving
(one person in the seat,
the others on top of the car),
or an 8 minute run.

I don’t remember putting my
glasses on the bench.

When the lightning struck,
some of us
got scared.

By some of us,
I mean only
the Father 
of my
two friends, 
who became family to me
long after

the Father arrived
at the creek
and
screamed at us.

He asked us 
why we’re
idiots.

It’s dangerous,
he said,
to be standing
in the water
during
a lightning storm.

It’s dangerous,
to wave a sword around
during a
lightning storm,
but not for all 
of us

delinquents (we
could be considered
as)

standing in the
garage. 

Toddler Watching an AI-Generated Show  / Samuel Spencer

I feel bad for the artists
who had their work stolen, all so a pair of parents
could eat and talk in peace.
I feel worse for the child, buckled down
in the restaurant highchair, anesthetized
by a screen pretending to be an acid trip.

I look around to see if anyone else sees
what I’m seeing, but no one does –
I can almost literally see the child’s life force
leaving his eyes and entering the screen,
the realm that holds his attention and (soon)
his dreams.

The restaurant revolves around the scene.
No stops and screams because they don’t see what I see:
The death of the innocence of a child;
a child so close – yet so unseen.

January - Poem 31

Cento to Melt Ice / Composed by Haley Bosse

with lines drawn by and from Tess Adams, Haley Bosse, Jess Bowe, Joanna Lee, Thomas Page, Sarah Paley, and Amy Snodgrass.

While everyone waits for the storm to come,
to hush and quiet. we live

the looming fabric waving
the past uncovers.
a line of police cruisers, sirens mute in the before-dawn

Look, the moon said,
A whistle breaking open

This is where we begin, in the mud with the red–
first note carried through the tunnel

like blood like blood like blood
marking lines of ruin across the map.

They are coming. The signal fires are lit.
and, yes,               words

                           against such relentless
                                    boots?

language to speak the loss that has hollowed me out.
The roar of the engine is a dare.

And for love that is stronger than death.
                  –it is almost within arm’s reach

My heart too – on a leash that I seldom remember to slacken.
An ungovernable force all my own.
It ebbs and flows like the tide full of red blooms and seaweed clouds.

before the world realizes you’re not dead and buried
today, you are still
much too small and alive.

I am not sure I can survive your brightest now.
The crackCRACK
of oversaturated tree trunks

every bucket of midnight
the laying on of their hands.

A cloud circles in and circles out. It drops then spreads.
what do you call that then?

to carry love down the sidewalk,
a song unafraid of its fear.
over a river running black and unpersuadable

over dark cars and dark asphalt
out of my skin, unbloomed.

and you reach your hand
to the human next to you,
stretched like a kitestring as the wind

who dared to venture out into the clear day—
over the windows like eyes and eyes and eyes

to the middle. come walk with me
I am stuck in every tonight
and people are singing somewhere

a hope escaping
the water never
falling still

for those who stay to dare, waiting in the rain.
finally, I become

a tiny cloud
Your life is as valuable as mine. Your life is as valuable as mine. Your life.
Its roots stretching

to guts, to muscle, to skin,       quicker than you can blink
// the undulating sidewalk // full of cracks // and fissures //

Our lungs so like ocean
waterways of a dream;
sound waves swallowing

The scrape of your calluses on broken concrete,
trying to navigate // to any public place // under heaven 

they cannot hear the song I sang. I sung.
That will not be washed away

today I fall with its grit.
reborn into the air 

and I gasp
The worms surfacing from puddles,

i imagine i’m as common as the wind, as ordinary as any leaf left for winter’s bed.
Greenbright between their veins

a surgeon’s neat crosshatch
and feet to kiss the cold of the ground

Involuntary traveler, there is no cure for memory.

what we mean: we were, we are, so lost, so lucky, so lucky, so lost.
cold hands reaching for cold stars

a brighter ending, or less clouded eyes

January - Poem 30

My Gender / Haley Bosse

as the last resort
in a storm-wrecked beach town,

as a slight of hand
by a man in patched-over socks,

an allergic reaction 
to a friend’s unpredictable cat

or a dazzle of seagulls’
clean bellies from below,

Schrödinger’s kit 
tucked away in the attic,

the birds tipping forward 
to disappear in the fog

on the eve of three / Jess Bowe

you demand and you dance and you eat
three breakfasts before nine.
i watch and i watch and i watch
you run and blink and breathe.
you carry a flag and a truck
and build walls and trees 
and vacuums that don’t plug in.
you chase the cat and lay on the dog
and dip your hands in the water bowl.
you sneak behind the couch and open
the window to all six degrees outside.
you fill a cup twenty-eight times
and spill christmas in paris tea
and cry when i'm first to the mess.
you refuse to nap.
you crush cereal with your bike tires.
you spin in circles when the devil 
goes down to georgia, air fiddle
propped between chin and belly.
you save the chickens your apples
and say hello to the stinkbug
and you never, not once, ask
to be anyone else.
you cry and hug in the same hour.
throw a spoon across the table
and tell me that i’m okay.
not once, do you ever, look beyond
the treeline and wonder
where any of your life has gone.

Self-portrait as Bruegel’s MFA admission essay / Joanna Lee

Chemical composition of leftover stardust, of iron & saltwater & afraid to take that leap off the old pier. older, now. but not so much i can’t remember the smack of the cold Atlantic or the smell of a Chicago bus station alone, and his name, Ravi, through the long midnight blue hours / shoulders that carried such weight / in canvas i paint myself always with bigger eyes, except the time i highlighted my own skin pink to prove something to someone i refuse to recall / shoulders that still carry such weight / that want to do right but don’t always know what that means. feet turned south / collector of rosary beads and little scars, most / comfortable in corners, in lowercase i’s, but / will always walk like a surgeon : a learned instinct for tying knots : a pretender at many things / a listener / bad at disappointment and no love for rearviews, yet / a secret desire to retract the wounds of my wounded, unpick the scabs / extravasated wolf song / dehisced tideline. sadly wingless, but that applies to most of us. whatever it is you are looking for, i am not it.

Movies  / Thomas Page

There isn’t much you and I can do together 
except for watching movies all day long.

You tend to pick ones that I find slow 
and I pick ones that you find boring.

It seems that we have different tastes—
you hate the movies that I find moving.

Maybe it’s because we’re at different stages
and I’m more willing to put up with garbage.

Glitzy garbage wrapped in a criterion shell 
while you like ones like cherry bombs.

Cherry bombs exploding in bad guys’ faces 
thwarting plans to blow up oil refineries.

How many two hour spans can we 
watch the lives of others unravel?

How many permutations of others’ lives 
can we see before we decide we’ve seen it all?

I’ve been keeping track of the movies we pick 
and it seems that there’s dozens to replace them.

Is there ever an original idea that hasn’t been 
made into onionskin copies?  

How many yous and how many mes 
have had this same conversation?

This same conversation while watching the same movies
as the snow falls like some worn out metaphor?

We Dead / Sarah Paley

I am dead along with the other dead
We are looking at ourselves dead.
The squirrel is particularly upset because, dead,
he looks like a rat and people step over him in disgust.
He had a fluffy tail he was proud of. But he’s dead
now so what does it matter?
I guess I can’t really fault him because I wish I looked better dead.
Among the dead are people I would rather not see.
It’s a real mess here. Confusing. People died
at the wrong time and now they barely know or recognize
each other. The young widow is a dead hag. Her husband
doesn’t know what to do. She looks like his mother, who is,
of course, also dead and she never liked the wife.
I die many times a day. Sometimes I am hit by a bus.
There I go up Sixth Avenue like Wile E. Coyote splayed
on the front. Children under five are amused. They think
I will be fine – just peel myself off and fill back up. But I’m dead.
Their parents try to cover their eyes to protect them.
Sometimes something falls and crushes my head.
The friend I was walking with is horrified, she has
blood all over her new jacket and does she even know who to call?
Sometimes someone kills me. Sometimes I kill myself.
Sometimes people mourn. Sometimes no one cares.
I always wince when I die to try to make it go away.
We dead are embarrassed by how we feel and how much we want.
It has always been this way.

Gratitude / Amy Snodgrass

A tree with deep and lovely grains, filled 
to burst with the sweetest honey, stands
tall and proud on the horizon.  Stark and 
clear, it holds truth in a cheeky wave. Another 
fiery fall awaits, but for me, it is time to let go.

Just now, I read Billy Collins’ “Forgetfulness” 
and it about killed me. No metaphor. No hyperbole. 

People don’t know how you feel unless you tell them. 

Just now, I read Fia Skye’s lines about lies, lines 
that set me straight or at least a little straighter,
making me believe I can strengthen the marrow in 
my bones again, strong enough to pause and listentrue.

Just now, I searched for a vaguely remembered line (and succeeded 
quickly–phew!): a line from David Kirby’s “This Magic Moment,” which 
of course all moments are, saying “Poetry does make things happen.” 
The search also resulted in Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” which 
is beautiful–but did not almost kill me. 

I want to be better. In 6th grade, Mrs. Haase told me my poems couldn’t 
include full sentences. I was furious, in my way of not knowing what that 
meant or that I had the right.  I let her silence me.  

She was not a good teacher.  My whole style now defies her, 
but I think maybe she wasn’t wrong….  She just wasn’t nice. 

People don’t know how you feel unless you tell them. 

Just now, this memory made me search for Herbert Kohl’s I Won't Learn from You and I 
discovered it has the most fantastic subtitle that I hadn’t remembered: And Other Thoughts 
on Creative Maladjustment. People don’t know how you feel unless you tell them. I want to 
be better.  More creatively maladjusted.  Less full-sentenced.  More magic.  Ready to bend.  
More open to being wasted by words. 

So now, I will wait for myself, for the flow I trust will come, and I will write this,
my aching thank you to the dear tupelo tree: stark and cheeky, glorious and real.

January - Poem 29

The Flower Chair / Haley Bosse

Its spray of once-cream silhouettes 
For so long, too light for me to touch,
Always in the corner of my eye
As I slid in socks across the wooden floor
To throw my backpack in the closet,
Palms peeling from swinging from the monkey bars 
One stubborn minute before falling in the sawdust,
Bleeding around the nails from where I’d ripped the skin, 
Mostly dry and cracking even in the rainy months,
The wind blowing broken stalks
Of blackberry bushes past the window,
The summer grasses of the flower chair 
A continuity of somehow unstained,
Clean enough when we spotted it
Between orphaned floor lamps 
At the Goodwill, given away 
While we were missing, one loss
Among everything but a week’s worth of clothes
And the books we were reading when we left,
Waterlogged pages passed from my mother’s hands to mine,
To my sister’s in the big bed in the basement
With windows too high for us to ever shut. We’d gone 
To the Goodwill to replace what had been taken
With other people’s things
But found the flower chair and the dining table,
Our bookcase and the rest.
I swayed the vote to buy back the chair,
Though I’d never been allowed to sit in it and, after,
I got to sit in it
In the sunshine through the open windows,
And later, when I left for college,
My mother stored it in a corner
Of her shed, covered up and waiting
For my partner to cradle it between his arms
And totter up the metal stairs to our apartment,
How he sits there as he reads,
The chair’s thin fabric softened beneath my palm
As I pass it on my way to sleep. 

a revolution / Jess Bowe

i don’t always ask for help with the chickens because i feel answers arrive, first to my legs, lifting bags of feed on my shoulder. i feel answers arrive to my rose-kissed cheeks. the wind sticks to the underside of my hair. i open the door, just as yesterday, and just as yesterday, i tell them hello, feathered friends! and i mean it: friends. i am in love with the day. i am in love with every storm. i am in love with the mid-february edge, the bottom lip of death. the cedar waxwings saying goodbye at my windowglass, crisp-weather drunkards. the pine missing half her face. the stretch between one neighbor and another. i drive to the center of town just to walk on the sidewalks and trip over bliss. my organs are electric and i pretend the light i’m made of is in every color, invisible stained-glass-sun, and today i’m the artist and i paint across the field of every stranger who walks by. i’m in love and i’m not sure how i got here. praying. i do a lot of praying, and i don’t ask if my god is wearing red or blue. i don’t assume to be speaking to a man. what i’m praying to is a river. what i’m praying to has eyes on the inside of me. what i’m praying to looks a lot like my deep breath sounds. a lot like the crackling of stars in the bowl of ice cold sky. i pray, and i pray without permission, and i pray like there’s no tomorrow because no matter how long i live, i still haven’t met one. i don’t ask permission. i don’t ask where you stand. i don’t ask you to throw a fiery hoop in the air, to jump through, to wear my own face, before i lay flowers at your front door. i’m in love, this great big place, this garden without a fence, this hill of birch, this song i find myself to be, on the tongue on the tongue on the tongue of what prays me.

Reporting on the weather (reprise) / Joanna Lee

A man
has died
of over

-exposure under
a walkway
in the city’s North End, hours

before
news spreads
of Them closing

down
the emergency
storm shelter.

Alexa tells
me there’s a
severe

weather warning
for tonight—extreme
cold—and though

I type this
from bed,
faux-down

up to my ears, the heat
tripping steady
as a pulse,

your toes
curled petals
against mine,

I don’t think
I’ll ever again
get warm.

Waiting Room  / Thomas Page

2300: I’m awoken to take you to the hospital
0000: I try not to think about why I’m on the highway  
0030: We arrive at the hospital and take you inside 
0100: My brain finally clams down as you finish your intake forms
0200: I’ve given up on trying to rest my head against the stucco-like walls 
0230: You try to lighten the mood by telling me how you feel better 
0300: I realize how quiet hospitals are in the dead of night 
0330: A tech tells us that the doctor is monitoring your condition 
0400: I’m getting delirious at how long I have been awake; I can’t imagine how you feel 
0500: The doctor comes in and explains that you’ll be admitted soon
0600: I’m told by you to go home and get some provisions / sleep 
0630: I try not to think about why I’m on the highway  

Release / Sarah Paley

Doors & windows flung open with abandon
when you arrived. Curtains blew this way
& that in the crisp breeze & it was fun
as you helped replace rusty hinges that lay
askew off their soggy, splintered frames.
I threw out everything & snapped linens
that we would make soft. We came upon
forgotten treasures – lost buttons in old tins.
Then the first door shut as if by accident.
I opened & you came through eventually.
Then another. This one locked. Not meant
to but did. You happened to have the key
but then others closed. Sometimes I’d unbolt.
Hear them now: slam! slam! as I let go my hold.

Facing a Writing Prompt While Missing My Mother / Amy Snodgrass

Mother and voice: my eyes grasp no other words, 
of which I need five–and fast–so let’s go! Life is whirring. 

A new colleague (my own age) tells me: 
“I was so utterly sick, I had to call my mother.” 

My heart doesn’t know what hit it, but I do: a cliff.
A cloud circles in and circles out. It drops then spreads.

My daughter admits to licking the salt lamp of my friend whenever we 
go to her house. “Do not cook a baby goat in its mother’s salt,” I think.  

I could not care less. I wonder what that makes me, and I wonder if it kept 
her up at night, this secretive salt-licking. How long had she sat on the guilt?

I wonder: does my response (my surprise and laughter and joy) make 
her someone who just takes what she wants? or does it make her feel safe?

And that’s the question, right? Are we good parents? 
And how can we go on, when we are sick? And they are gone.

January - Poem 28

Three Decades Cobbled Out of Half-Lives / Haley Bosse

Half-life (noun): the time required for half of the atoms of a radioactive substance to become disintegrated 

The girl who bruised my brain
Brought caesium 
And when she left 
I dredged up fermium 
By dancing in the chill. 

I caught curium 
With a wide-faced spoon, 
Sifting through 
A steaming bowl of ramen,
Fluorine filtered 
As I mouthed at empty air. 

These days, I count out bismuth 
For my neighbors, 
Polonium for my nieces, 
Figure if I’m dreaming big, 
Berkelium for three more goes 
At basking, animal 
Beneath the setting sun. 

Really, I would settle 
For one more thorium
Or even francium
Or the very tip 
Of my finger,
The half-life 
Of a single fleck of skin. 

See:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radioactive_nuclides_by_half-life

holy house / Jess Bowe

rain shivers down,
heavy and muffling
the grass, hostage
under the weight
of minute globes;

the after-dinner choir
sings its final encore,
chimes and bells
etch their praise
into the ceiling

thick and gray,
dirtied-down
and huddled close
to the ground;

casting out a ribbon 
of sound, impersonating, 
for a note, the midnight owl
in muddied daylight.

she fronts the chorus
from the black wire,
electric surging
beneath her fragile

feet, praying for all 
she sees, for all 
we fail to see. 
from the height of her 

perch, Sun slopes 
into Mountain’s chiseled
arm, pushed by her
swallowing cry

looming through the halls
of branches, of night-readied
nests, of ordinary mothers

wiping the ashen dust
of the day from their palms.

The mirrored shades of God / Joanna Lee

Two neighbors, whose names I don’t know,
slide across the street to help
rock my car out of the ice

cage its parking spot has become.
My foot on the gas, the alarm in me rises
with the violence of each convulsion,

their laying on of hands.
Through the windshield, the sun
leaves a slow sinking trail across a landscape

that could be a desert on the moon,
the street ahead slick
as the mirrored shades of God.

The roar of the engine is a dare.
With one huge heave, the rear tires break
free and I am sailing, sailing

on a diagonal across the intersection,
all four wheels purchaseless, un-
tethered by friction,

an ungovernable force all my own.
Our street corner frozen in time, its eyes
out. The light falling, the moment

stretched like a kitestring as the wind
picks up, nothing
between me and a glittering chaos but

classical mechanics—the slowing momentum
as I ease off the gas and let the spin
find its silence. Grin into the hollow.

Look back, then, at how we got here,
grateful for this day, for so many
small miracles across its transept.

 Cabin Fever   / Thomas Page

When was the last time that I felt comfortable enough to leave you unsupervised?
When was the last time that I felt comfortable enough to leave you?
When was the last time that I felt comfortable enough to leave?
When was the last time that I felt comfortable enough to…?
When was the last time that I felt comfortable enough?
When was the last time that I felt comfortable?
When was the last time that I felt?
When was the last time that I?
When was the last time that…?
When was the last time?
When was the last?
When was the…?
When was…?
When?
?

When You Go Looking For What is Lost / Sarah Paley

Everything is a sign.
The holy ghosts won’t stay put
but if the light stays green long
enough for us to cross the street,

if there is just enough milk
for the morning coffee,
or to find money in a forlorn pocket...
Well, I’m not saying it’s definite

but it’s pretty obvious
that something will give
and free the mind to find
what it is that needs to be found.

Good News / Amy Snodgrass

(for Amy Jacobs and with thanks to @winningnmindset)

In Norway, there is an island with no clocks. 
In France, short flights are banned if trains travel the same route.

It’s a relief to know so many ways exist to resist. Call your senator. 
Walk frigid sidewalks as one link in a human chain of truth. Know when 
your neighbors are huddled and scared behind blackout curtains, and 
sneak them a beef broccoli casserole– your mother’s cherished recipe– 
and a gallon of milk. Don’t forget the Hershey’s syrup. Marshmallows.

Dutch engineers built an ocean-plastic vacuum cleaner.
Pandas and green sea turtles no longer land on the endangered list.

Use your talents and energy for love. Dream up, design, and build 
an Instagram page that highlights good news: save all our nervous 
systems from shutdown. Fill up your car and create a safe-ride network 
for wary children too shaken to walk to the school bus. Play Shakira. 
So many ways to resist. Learn them. Teach them. Do not open the door. 

Elephant conservation efforts in Botswana have been wildly successful.
In Ethiopia, in one day, citizens planted 700 million trees. 700 million.

January - Poem 27

27 / Haley Bosse

I climb the ladder
to my father’s distant face,

the heights a blanket
I could reach & pull away. 

Below, games of make believe
& ants sifting through the carpet, 

the looming fabric waving 
on currents from my breath. 

horizon / Jess Bowe

A blackout poem, from Shambhala by Chögyam Trungpa. 

“The challenge of warriorship is to step out of the cocoon, to step out into space, by being brave and at the same time gentle.”

the magic of time 
is the courage to imagine 
seeing the Sun
the past uncovers. 

So we talk about the weather / Joanna Lee

Ten inches, he says.
And not getting above the high twenties
all week: you know it’s not going anywhere.

He’s not wrong. The snow will lie
between tree shadows
for days, lingering, and he’ll

make his slow way round with the shovel and broom,
cleaning off paths from the carport, test-run the jeep
in 4-wheel to see if it’ll clear whatever the plows

have done to the end of the driveway.
He’s worried about getting out,
about a doctor’s appointment next week—

I don’t have the guts
to ask what he’s thinking right now
about this country. If he has the same sick

crumbling immobility threatening his morning routine.
If the deaths I’m seeing on repeat even make
his evening news. He could still lose power

in this cold, out in the woods as he is,
and ice on the lines. Who am I to add
to his fear of falling?

Greenway  / Thomas Page

“Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
To raise herself and look again.”

-from “Home Burial” by Robert Frost

The way back was looking
less pathetic—rainless—when back
this morning I drove over
to your place to tell her
that I wanted to shoulder
some of the burden at
the realization that some
future day’s fear
was about to die. She
made me go and I took
one last chance to say a
goodbye that I was doubtful
I would ever see you again; a step
in the cycles of grief and
then
I drove into the setting sun; Undid
all of the masking to swallow it
down to 
raise yourself 
to comfort herself
and
to look at your face 
again.

Captured / Sarah Paley

My father was just entering what he thought would be his middle age
He was filling out after being young-Sinatra-thin
He’s wearing those soft brown corduroy trousers

I am standing on my left leg, bent forward holding a football at the tip of my raised
right foot as if to kick it in mid-air
A human child-bird with lank hair, chunky glasses, lop-sided smile,
Olive Oyl frame, terrible shorts, shapeless top and there is my father
his arm outstretched to steady me or maybe offer encouragement

He glows in the afternoon light under the scarlet elm with the Mohawk
River in the background
What is the point of being pulled back to this scene that I am not holding
in my hands but sits in a box in a closet yellowing and curling at the edges

The trousers, the lowest branches of the elm, the murky river, the disastrous barn,
the white pillar of the porch where someone stood
my mother? my oldest sister? my other sister? my brother? my other brother?
and captured this moment

My heart too – on a leash that I seldom remember to slacken.

What can we do? / Amy Snodgrass

     thanks to Jessica Barba Brown for the prompt

At an exclusive garden-to-table dinner, 
she eats the mango salsa despite despising
mangoes. Her friends eye her warily,
hoping the night will not be spoiled:

“Well, it doesn’t taste like mango, so I’m 
good.” The tent– tall and wooden-beamed– 
fills with relief, laughter, organic wine. 
And a sound from above. A nectar bat flies

chirping through the rafters, preparing his
two-grooved, double-body-long tongue 
to feed. Swooping in to embrace the night-
blooming mango flowers, he sucks juice

against gravity, and seemingly as an aside, 
he pulls pollen until drenched. Lush and 
heavy, he darts in erratic turns, off to another 
tree. She notices the fading chirp and relaxes,

no longer needing to fear the fangs society 
has told her to imagine he has. The bat knows 
nothing of power, presumption, arrogance, greed. 
Oh, humanity. It is not too late. Make the call.

January - Poem 26

Blueberries / Haley Bosse

Half-thawed
from the back
of the lightless,
breezeless freezer,
soil frothing up
to float
a spinning tire
crusted over
in the image
of the distant
midday sun.

The light drapes itself
across our trembling bodies
then circles back to dance
through the tanager’s uncut song. 

The dark below
my tongue
begins to pop
the skin. 

the storm / Jess Bowe

the know-ahead gives us time,
we think, to drip the faucets 
and spread the salt along 
the sidewalks. 

deadly as it comes. 

driving 
  and 
     walking

are impossible dangers,
a heaviness on every surface. 

the weight of it 
alone 
on highways
of electric power
is enough
to leave a city 
in the dark. 

in Greenland, a mass 
sheet loses 8,000 tons
per second. 

i can feel it swallow us 
from here, calling 
for homeostasis

the natural order of things,

one way or another. 

Grounded / Joanna Lee

--after Nikki Giovanni

i cannot bring myself
to do anything

about the spider
twitching to and fro

across our kitchen floor,
daring me to smush him

if i don’t watch every step.
i can’t even

sweep him up
in the dustpan & air-

lift him out the back door—it’s
ten-degrees and snowing on our porch,

& so much death outside
already.

Unglamorous  / Thomas Page

It seems like everyday I’m cleaning up urine
or finding that the floor is covered in emesis.
I keep taking you to get venipunctures
while she cleans the bathroom of your excretions.
You litter the floor of your rags of mucus
while I cleanse the home with antiseptic.

While I cleanse the home with antiseptic,
it seems like everyday I’m cleaning up urine.
You litter the floor of your rags of mucus
or finding that the floor is covered in emesis
while she cleans the bathroom of your excretions.
I keep taking you to get venipunctures

I keep taking you to get venipunctures
while I cleanse the home with antiseptic,
while she cleans the bathroom of your excretions.
It seems like everyday I’m cleaning up urine
or finding that the floor is covered in emesis.
You litter the floor of your rags of mucus

You litter the floor of your rags of mucus.
I keep taking you to get venipunctures
or finding that the floor is covered in emesis
while I cleanse the home with antiseptic.
It seems like everyday I’m cleaning up urine
while she cleans the bathroom of your excretions

While she cleans the bathroom of your excretions
you litter the floor of your rags of mucus.
It seems like everyday I’m cleaning up urine.
I keep taking you to get venipunctures
while I cleanse the home with antiseptic
or finding that the floor is covered in emesis.

Or finding that the floor is covered in emesis,
while she cleans the bathroom of your excretions,
while I cleanse the home with antiseptic,
you litter the floor of your rags of mucus.
I keep taking you to get venipunctures.
It seems like everyday I’m cleaning up urine.

Listening to Tigran Hamasyan on January 25, 2026 / Amy Snodgrass

At about two and a half minutes, I hear his voice: a new 
language to speak the loss that has hollowed me out.

The moaning glory of his melody carries me floating out 
from my jaded immobility of hope. The window holds its shatter

–awaiting me. The rising sun recalls the night before and
I cry out in my new language: ten shots and huddled coats.

And that’s how it starts, finally–a slit almost invisible–
a droplet forming–and gasps escape my shoulders. 

The curves of my shirt enter the pillows in a line, the click 
of my knees, my dented forehead. A collapse of hard-lost dams.

Later– wrung– I listen. A shroud surrounds me, hovering, not touching. 
His crackling piano plays for a nation dying, for a window as yet unbroken.

January - Poem 25

Taken / Haley Bosse

Sometimes, 
The world is the shape
Of a child
And sometimes 
A child is the shape
Of the world, but
Always,
Always 
A child is
A child
And a child 
Cannot bare
All this weight. 

son of a mother / Jess Bowe

a field of small boys
in men’s clothing, life is left
to the morning crows. 

at birth, my first son
feathers my face with fingers,
his palm the lips of

God on my cheek. Love
warms us both. he’s a garden
housing the world’s seeds. 

what will i tend to
across the breakfast table?
what can i offer

in a land growing violence,
blood on the hands of our sons. 

Third Draft for a Requiem / Joanna Lee

what good are even

words
against such relentless
         boots?

how many mothers’ sons
will       we        watch     clubbed

on cold pavement,
shot
dead?

poems can’t hold enough

silence
(see how it slips,
like blood through fingers
we press to the wound?)

to stem grief’s howling
tide
—like the snowfall here tonight,

coming and coming, ghost
white laughter

through the darkness, as if

it could erase the world.

Dirge in the Dirt  / Thomas Page

after Seven Deadly Sins - Wrath, a photograph by Johann Wolf and Kahlen Rondot

What is the price of professionalism when you learn 
on the day of that you’d have to be lowered into dirt 
burying a sin of wrath when just now you’d learned your friend 
died in a car accident? Should you refuse and burn 
your career like the smolders of crematoriums?
Or should you dirge in the dirt as a consolation?   

Thanks / Sarah Paley

For he who first decided to eat an artichoke,
the inspired one, inventor of the supernal bicycle.

For outdoor showers
For indoor tubs
For water, in general (in all its forms)
For sections of oranges
Black and white cats, though some might disagree
and want marmalade or no cats.

For pebbles found in pockets months later.
Change too, especially bills.
And for the pocket.
Yea, for tea, and for the miracle of sleep.

And for love that is stronger than death.

@upwellpoetry  / Amy Snodgrass

a cento from Abby, Henrik, Jen, John, Kristyn, and Sol

¡híjole! mouths defy gravity and

betrayal always happens unannounced
the way ramen broth stews
or bread comes crackling out of the oven

luckily, forgiveness too. 
–it is almost within arm’s reach
–it is the seed, huddling in the dark, damp soil
in an unbreakable vase

late in life
not asking for anything
allies appear
listening with ears that can finally hear
radiant, innocent
     you may call me a witch

and you need no words
to always take my side and
to watch clay harden into dreams

January - Poem 24

Unbecoming / Haley Bosse

Hair falling 
Through my face
In a smudge 
Of crow’s feather
Backlit by fawn,
A scattering
Of skin
Into water,
Its lick sliding down
The windowpane, 
Smoothing glass
Into glass
And its wobbling,
Shining brilliant 
With nothing 
In the place 
Of anything
Else, only 
Dripping
And the absence 
Of knowing 
What I am. 

there is a song  / Jess Bowe

a blackout poem derived from Anthony William’s book, Medical Medium

i follow my curiosity to a precipice—
the secrets we’ve become used
to hush and quiet. we live
to expand and experience 
the fabric of the story,
the reveal of one
unique composition.

How it is from here to Texas / Joanna Lee

While everyone waits for the storm to come,
the moon like a Cheshire cat smile

shines a cold pearly white
over sharp rooftops in silhouette

over a river running black and unpersuadable
over dark cars and dark asphalt

and the white cat that slinks
from beneath one cooling engine to the next

over the trash bins overflowing with torn signs
from yesterday’s protest

and the ground strewn with future ghosts
where they want the new detention center

over the windows like eyes and eyes and eyes
& the tiny screens lit up inside every other one,

bright tired faces drowning themselves
softly while the temperature drops

& you look over your shoulder
to find your shadow becoming

just another part of the night
and you reach your hand

to the human next to you,
now each a little warmer.

 How Quick the Bank Knows You’re Gone.  / Thomas Page

Song / Sarah Paley

My sixtieth year has come and gone
I sit, a solitary woman,
In a crowded New York shop
The Times and empty cup
On the marble tabletop.
Tattooed barista, pierced busser
all have my goodwill. I savor
bitterness. They are young.
Simply happy to be amidst, among,
they cannot hear the song I sang. I sung.

Survival Chute  / Amy Snodgrass

All week I’ve felt good for nothing 
other than a dam for fear, 

politely containing it so I don’t quite burst 
out of my skin, unbloomed. 
    With deeds 
undone and emotions suppressed, my insides 
spin in an under-oxygenated orbit: 
             no arriving or leaving,
                      just dreading, reliving.

–a hooded towel in a perpetual swinging spiral, resoaking on repeat– 

Misery.  But then that moment comes
             the one that anyone who knows, knows: 
the crescendo of a supposed eternity 
bursting like a river blocked-up by boulders

that after all that drama reveal themselves to be mere 
cotton balls spilled from the cabinet with the broken door. 

With each squish 
             of my fingers, one swell after another, 
then more that slow into drips, I plant myself.
Wiping us the mess, I feel again how hope 
crosses its arms, relaxes into the current, 
and finds the survival chute, every single time.

January - Poem 23

Home Sweet Hellscape / Haley Bosse

telescoping arrhythmia 

from the last infection

extended to the yard,

the grackles

and the crows’ feet

seem to lift

with every frantic thump,

floodwater sloshing

over drowning grass,

erratic without moon-bound tide,

beaks bent

to drink regardless

of the airflow,

its ceaseless pulling

on every upturned face,

the water never

falling still

signal / Jess Bowe

to whistle
to whisper
to hiss.
to make a sound.
to carry a finger across the lips.
to carry love down the sidewalk,
a song unafraid of its fear.
to look a man in the eyes 
unshaken and knowing 
the blood and laughter you came from.
to slide on the belly and bite 
from underneath the rocks. 

Hope and the Second Law (1) / Joanna Lee

A conceptual, but not mathematically rigorous, summary of the Second Law is that uneven distributions of energy tend to even out over time. This is the result of the combination of chance and the conservation of energy and momentum. It is hard to prove for a general case, but it is easy to posit convincing examples. 

To take an example involving kinetic energy, if you fire a fast-moving particle (e.g. a bullet) into a box of slower ones (or a crowd), you have a very uneven initial distribution of energy. Over time, the fast-moving particle will trigger a succession of random collisions in which its excess energy will be lost and the average energy of all the other particles will increase slightly, unless they are killed.

(2) “WASHINGTON – The House of Representatives today passed an appropriations bill that would renew ICE’s excessive budget, with no strings attached, adding to the over $170 billion in taxpayer funds already allocated for immigration enforcement in July 2025.” (aclu.org. January 22, 2026)

(3)In Statistical Physics entropy is defined as

𝑆=𝑘𝐵⋅lnΩ

where Ω is the number of accessible micro-states (6)

(4) To put it another way, entropy (𝑆) is a fundamental property in thermodynamics representing the measure of a system's thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work—often interpreted as a measure of disorder or uncertainty. Crowds generally have high entropy compared to individuals, who are usually much more efficient at doing useful work.

(5) In 1850, the German scientist Rudolf Clausius laid the foundation for the second law of thermodynamics by examining the relation between heat transfer and work: Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other change, connected therewith, occurring at the same time. E.g., A medic unable to pass through a ring of ICE guards to reach a dying woman’s body.

(6) Minnesota is generally not included as accessible

Family History.  / Thomas Page

Please mark in either column the following conditions for any conditions you or a family member have or have had in the past: 

Alcoholism / Drug Abuse what can we call excess or just librations

Asthma  when the way your lungs feel after a drink

Cancer (please define which) to celebrate the way our cells do decay 

Depression / Anxiety / Bipolar / Suicide  in the face of the prospect of death

Diabetes (please define which) do you consider the end to be a sweet light

Emphysema a crushing weight on your chest as if 

Heart Disease  your core is breaking into pieces

High Cholesterol as the fat falls off the bones

Hypertension in a display of immense implosion

Hypothyroidism like a deflated geyser of all the cells 

Migraines  or a vice wound around the sutures 

Strokes cutting all circulation to your mind?

Other (please define which) what do you call that then?

Adult Daughters and Sponges / Sarah Paley

The connection between adult daughters and sponges is tangible.
The adult daughter is not a competent caretaker of a dying mother.
She’d like for her to have a peaceful death. She’d like to fullfill
her role seamlessly, lovingly, patiently and never think about
how daughters and mothers’ relationships are often fraught


and complicated. The adult daughter takes a tiny sponge provided
by the hospice and dips it into water and squeezes it onto
her mother’s dry lips. She hopes that some of the water will
make it down her mother’s slaked throat. People are parched
when they are dying. This is something she didn’t know and she’s


pretty sure her mother didn’t know but now there’s no way to ask
the mother. There’s another sponge, this one larger for “sponge
baths.” It’s an unusually shaped sponge devoid of color. It looks
as if it was plucked out of the sea where it had been alive
and beautiful. When the adult daughter attempts to wash her mother


with this genuine article a nurse officiously takes over. The adult
daughter tries to hide her relief. Was she incompetent on purpose?
Sometimes adult daughters are unable or unwilling to fulfill their roles.
She tidies up the Lazy Boy she’s been living on for the past week
as the nurse finishes her administrations to the adult daughter’s


mother. The nurse comments on the handy hands that made the quilt
the adult daughter is folding, and takes the tiny sponge out of the bowl
of water at the mother’s bedside and throws it in the trash bin. She sees
the look of concern on the adult daughter’s face and says “Don’t worry,
plenty more where that came from.” The adult daughter helps put a new


top sheet on over her disappearing mother. As they tuck in the end,
the nurse, who knows the adult daughter is wondering when this will
all be over, says “I can always tell by their feet. They change color. Look
at her feet from time to time.” The adult daughter nods with gratitude.
The nurse takes a tiny sponge from her pocket and puts it in the daughter’s palm.


She pulls a chair to the bedside, places her hand on her mother’s hand and recites
too loudly:

“The owl and the pussycat went to sea…”

Mentor Text  / Amy Snodgrass

after reading Tess Gallagher’s “Now that I am Never Alone”  

I admit it: I rolled my eyes
at the title, expecting a cliché, 
a well-written whine 
about how having kids 
interrupts the creative process. 

Oh, my lack of faith. 
Oh, Tess. I doubted you. 
I find no strollers, no nap times, 
no pencil-flinging resentment. 

Instead: a moth 
that clings to tile and rips 
to shreds my misplaced cynicism.  

You douse my pain with water: 
first scalding hot then cold in memory. 
Your spring is the tree that roughed my arches to bleed, 
your handfuls are the hours of bedside waiting.  

I am not sure I can survive your brightest now.
I am not sure I can withstand this raw fluttering.
I am not sure I can write, ever, another word.

January - Poem 22

Winter Movement / Haley Bosse

Tufts of brown fur. The long faces of leaves Thin streams rippling
lifting as they dry. tunneling upward  from the crux of a planter
in the sharp thrill of morning & into the air across the sidewalk & into the road

Nearly-foamed snow. The crackCRACK The pop of wet gravel
cradling the roots of oversaturated tree trunks, thrown from a tire,
of the grass popping loose at their seams  its soft thump & then rest in the moss

The scuff and stomp  Small clusters of cicadas  A whistle breaking open
of boots & thick sneakers sleeping or suckling the midafternoon quiet,
dragging in a line at sap far below the startle of running through the cold

short bursts  / Jess Bowe

for a moment, i’d like to live in the body
of a woman unafraid to leave for Paris
at the intersection of twilight and daybreak,
leave the yard for someone else to tend to, leave 
the man who clings to me at midnight, 
temporarily, for a stretch with no clocks 
and a window to a street unfamiliar with my name.

for a moment, i’d like to pick blueberries back
when blueberries still grew here. fill my mouth
more than my basket, fill my hands with cups
of grass, bury a poem at the foot of a northern
pine and believe until i know, for a fact,
that next spring, a robin quilts her nest
with ribboned prayers, ink black as winter’s sleep.

for once, as this woman with this shape,
for once, i share my desire with the meadow flowers:
leave me be. let me be beautiful and smile
because i graced the day with a color
you haven’t seen in this way. leave me be and let me 
dance in the sun, in love with this little
great adventure i find myself in. alone, surrounded 
by strange friends, rainwashed and pink in the face.

Forever home  / Joanna Lee

This is where we begin, in the mud with the red-
eared sliders who, in their leisure time,
sun on logs in the canal building a bridge
to nowhere, then slip off into the green
as each slow canalboat passes,
drifting through the past
before hitting the locks.

We know this city through her mud. Through her grit
and mixed politics and potholes and the still
unplanted shadows where statues once stood.
And yet,
            from how many little upstairs apartments
do our students make their leaving plans…
then return two summers later because
the bigger world didn’t have that same
gently used, relaxed but stylish fit?

Like the cat at the midtown Lowe’s—we
will always be happy to be found, to return home.
Here chose us, now, our hands to reach for
her future, to dig her bones
out of the dirt
trail our fingers through the cobblestoned
gutters as rain washes down and we sit listening
to some home-grown band through
an open window on a Sunday night.

Listen, who else is gonna argue her history
and picnic in her cemeteries, with a view
out over the James where the sturgeon breach
and the trains coil along the banks like some prehistoric
steampunk black snake?
Those are our cards laid out, graffiti-tagged on the CSX,
bright against the creosote. We trace our names in
the wet tar, claiming. A small piece in the scroll of her archives,
a moment of her river. Our feet in its mud. Our footsteps
that echo all along Kanawha, at the Capitol, up Broad Street.
That will not be washed away.

Bear Documentaries / Thomas Page

While my father and I were waiting for 
you to get the stitches taken out, two 
receptionists were watching bear documentaries.

The bears, living out west, were hunting for 
small mammals drinking river water out 
of the stream unaware they were in a bear documentary.

The receptionists’ running commentary 
oscillated between stating how cute 
the bears were and bemoaning scary nature was.

Coyotes, then, came from over the snowy 
hills to scare the bears away from their prey—
much to the chagrin of the two receptionists. 

To break up the implied violence shown up
by the waiting room’s ceiling-mounted set, 
receptionist #1 said to receptionist #2:

“We have a wild turkey problem at 
home but the state of Maryland says we 
can’t shoot it.” Receptionist #2 agreed with the absurdity. 

Details of the Incident / Sarah Paley

(for Liam Conejo Ramos apprehended after
returning home from his preschool classroom)

You are at the table

and, yes,

you are beautiful

and, yes,

we are ashamed

Sometimes: an Ars Poética  / Amy Snodgrass

My daughter ensconces herself in her room 
for hours and hours: building her own world, 
exploring her own mind, sharing only what, 
when, how, she wants to share. A knock can
bring an eye roll, a grunt, a smile, a story.
I never know, but I keep knocking to see.

A poem comes when it comes. Sometimes 
I invite one in and it smiles and plays along.
But most of the time it shoves out a snarky 
laugh and prefers to stay away. Sometimes 
the poem seems annoyed just because I’m 
in the room. Sometimes I even wonder if 
I’ve lost it for good. You get the connection.

So when a poem pops out like a 15-year-old girl 
ready to engage with her mother, swinging a casual 
“Whatssup?” and a half-grin-half-smirk, I revel in the 
miracle of relief, of capillary-bursting hope, of laughter, 
and (did I say relief?) Then sometimes, the poem and my 
daughter are in kahoots: each one seeming to find me 
a perfect vessel for their woes, a worthy speaker of their 
needs, and –dare I say it?–sometimes pretty good at my job.  

January - Poem 21

The Song of Potatoes / Haley Bosse

is a gift I never expected to receive,
just like how they say
we’ll hear the birds’ true names
by the end of the winter
and how, even as we wreck her,
the Earth cries out
from countless twisting roots,
the softest crackle of their bodies
transfigured into chimes,
how when I’m dragging
my calluses through the soil,
I can't help but hum,
the cloud of my voice 
dissolving in the air.

porch on the moon  / Jess Bowe

tethered to rock, gray with waiting, 
bone dry, a face on the night –
i see you from the deep sea of space,
imaginary and ghostlike, paper swords,
a plume of worry from the smokestack
of the mind. it’s cold here, a home
diminished and returning. i can almost
feel the golden kiss placed constant
on your blue skin. i can almost feel
the bracket of living you most often
refuse – the ordinary shade of an oak
so familiar, you’ve stopped asking his name;
the seahorse, her three-beat cantor,
salt in her seaweed mane. the orange, 
still round on the branch. the subway car, 
its endless journey, bottomless pocket 
of noise and play and microbial
hands. you must believe it to be small,
your sight heavy with unanswerable 
asks of why. you must believe it 
a dark and creatured place. i can almost
hear it from here, the bombs you speak
of, fire eating what history can’t save,
licking the streets clean and bare
of anything worth passing to the open
hands of Someday. can you hear
me through the traffic between us?
can you count the stars to my front door?
i see you in heaven; globe of summer 
fruit, plump and sweet, promise
at the open mouth of eternity. 

Haibun: On the repetition of history  / Joanna Lee

Like a funeral procession, a line of police cruisers, sirens mute in the before-dawn, their evenly paced convoy heading south on Chamberlayne, taillights a string of fire as they exit the ramp north into darkness. All week there’s been reports: Short Pump, Chesterfield, Church Hill… now Southside: Hull and Warwick, just down the road. The temperature is falling. Small birds hop in pale twittering circles across the cold cement patio. Behind the counter, the barista waves each patron out the door, on instinct calling be safe more often than see ya round—

like five summers back,
the body remembering
a same swoop-sick fear

An Erasure of an Erased Message from March 2020  / Thomas Page

I wanted to update you with what is happening with Ari. Mom and I went with her to the Howard County Medical Center after she had called mom. They requested an ambulance and she was taken to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. They think it’s Leukemia. It’s what they feared. Mom is really stressing now. Can you drive Ari’s car from the Howard County parking lot? Mom also wants you to buy some gifts for dad’s birthday. Maybe giftcards? She wants you to do it before the quarantine. She’s on the phone with dad now. How is your meeting going? What time can you leave work? Mom said that you said that you asked for a sub for your meeting. I don’t feel well myself.

Cherry Picking in Pasa Robles 1945 / Sarah Paley

You look pretty up on the ladder
in your capri dungarees – your bobby
socks slumped down around your sneakers.
The night before, you tied one on, danced
in the dusty streets and shouted
at the locals about how you hated
their western town, their hick ways.
Now you’re feeling different surrounded
by the branches heavy with fruit. You
hand the baskets down to men who have
done this work before. You, you’re just broke
and out on a lark. Years from now you’ll grab
a tiny plastic saber and stab a maraschino cherry
out of a cocktail glass and declare: I picked that!

Dusty Learns to Drink Water  / Amy Snodgrass

Something I didn't know: newborn kittens don’t know how to drink. I found him, 
discarded, holding on, in a plastic bag, in an empty lot, under a warm drizzling rain. 

We built a strange partnership: six weeks of every-two-hour feedings, droppers, 
formula, warmth. Time passes, of course, and now, somehow, it is time to wean. 

Another thing I didn’t know: kittens prefer to drink from wide and flat receptacles, 
not bowls. I set out a wide, flat green plate, a field for his new and necessary adventure.  

Thirst, and instinct, and no mother but me: so gigantic and strange. He has to teach himself. 
At the first wet touch on the tip of his nose, he starts and shakes and sneezes, hopping back 

like a frog in reverse. Mini-splashes ripple again and again. I tire before he does and so, 
distracted, I miss the moment, damn it.  I miss his choice to stay and see what happens 

if he doesn’t start or shake. I miss his determined overcoming.  By the end of the day 
he has it: lapping. I stare, awash with regret and awe. Just this morning he still had to learn. 

Just this morning he didn’t know. Just this morning he depended on me.  It is hard 
to remember now, the not-drinking. It seems as if he had always done it, as if his mother 

had taught him, as if that plastic bag were being used to wrap a sandwich 
somewhere else instead, as if the confusions of the past never existed. 

But they did, and they do, and they will: as essential and mysterious as weaning, as water. 

January - Poem 20

Other Fairies / Haley Bosse

You were born in a year 
of lesser fires 
and unrung quakes. 

The worst you faced 
were children sick around you 
and then, of course, 
a fever of your own. 

We lay curled 
and sweat-stuck 
into blankets. 

When the rain started or 
when the rain stopped, 
we pulled ourselves up
to learn its dance. 

Look, the moon said,
and there we were.

good on paper  / Jess Bowe

some people don’t try hard enough when it’s hard,
i’ve heard. some people make rash decisions.
some people don’t let the lovemaking heal them
after the last fight. there’s a folded packet
of paper in my old bag, sitting on my closet
shelf. i never asked what to do with it, so i kept
it at the bottom of the dark. i wonder what home
we’d have today. we'd probably fight about the elk
antlers. they don’t belong in the living room. 
you’d probably be asleep on the couch after work.
your brother would still hate me. i’d still 
be counting minutes into the morning
for the booze to lift and the beer to wash
itself out of my hallways. somewhere inside 
of us are two kids: one listening to you read,
one laying on my bedroom floor after the funeral.

Poem I write while packing up the Christmas tree ornaments  / Joanna Lee

I did not mean to be thinking of you.
I was just stealing a few minutes
before dinner to tuck
your little glass angels
into their bubble wrap sleeves,
stack the crystal-and-gold snow-
flakes precisely one atop the other.
And yet here we are, the ghost
of your cigarette smoke
staining the bottom of each box
like cheap fingernail polish, a yellow
memory.
Funny, I can see you
in your red sweater, arm
over the back of the couch,
the cigarette in your hand.
I have heard your voice on repeat
in my dreams, and one cold clear day,
it emerged out of my own lungs
when another car collided lightly
with mine. But I cannot see you
take the smoke into your body.
Not remember how you must
have lifted it to your lips.
Only hear the cough—a wound
of gravel and gauze born
far from the ocean & which leaves me
imagining that last hospital night,
what it must
have felt like finally to run
out of breath,
and no one listening.

I did not mean to be thinking of you.
You, too, always hated this job.

Embrace   / Thomas Page

The doctor left you in the room in tears 
saying that if all else fails in the dead 
of night that it would be the sum of fears
that if you were to die that night in bed 
then it wouldn’t be a surprise, he said 
in a manner so clinical you froze
thinking of everything inside your head—
I remember how long you held me close.

You turned to me when the shock loosened gears 
turned in your head. Take your brother, you pled, 
home so you all can sleep in our home years 
settled in the dirt. Your face was all red
holding back the severity that spread
deep in your eyes trying to not wet throes 
as our own hearts were beginning to shred— 
I remember how long you held me close 

Gingerly walking over to you with spears
in my gut, knelt down to embrace you stead-
fastly, you whispered soft prayers in my ears,
your arms trying to cleave cleanly with thread
me to you that I could maybe have led
you away from all of the rubble those 
realities piping wet poisoned lead— 
I remember how long you held me close 

O princely doctors, whose words sharp as sheers
upon a precipice they don’t mince prose
the way you cut briar roses with shears—
I remember how long you held me close. 

Summer Blagoveshchenck, 1828  / Sarah Paley

(mistranslation after Pushkin)

Calico cats, centipedes, monkeying goats, dog,
NOT funny, humble bumblebees taking
their morning prambles and blitzing Bluebells & anything
NOT red. The thrush plays harp strings –
B to not so minor C to B because he likes a timeline
yet tomorrow’s hero trills
B crescendoing to a howl that resembles the express
from Tiadavostock to Irtusk
Screaming through fields of cabbage and barley. Tick-tock,
station masters shapes appear and mock...
ButImissmyplace! Six months ago none of this
could happen but the passing seconds...
No, not C! Anything but C in any key. Mellow
a penalty not spoken
No, I’ll repeat for the silent spider, no kangaroos can
hop de hop near this clamor.

Hope  / Amy Snodgrass

(Thank you, Carolyn Herman, for the prompt!)

Things I both love and hate:
speed bumps
Ziploc bags
saddles
lorazepam
K-cup coffee makers
calluses on my toes
wind

Things I only love:
those birds passing overhead, looking like petals swept up in a dance
this close silence tempered just enough by distant monkeys howling
the constellation of freckles on my daughter's cheek
an assuaging of my fears by any means
all the chances I get to leap, literally or figuratively, with my son
light reflected in water
a horse’s forelock

Things I only hate:  
Plenty, but I will give them no platform here.

How wonderful, wonderful, to re-invent ourselves.
You can always stand up, even if everyone knows you as a coward.
You can (of course!) begin to flood the world with kindness even if 
you have been known (for years!) as the bitch. 
You can choose to assuage someone’s fears (mine, if you like) rather 
than stoke them. 

Listen.
Ride bareback.
Go barefoot.
Buy a glass French press.
Curl into the skirt of a sequoia until the gusts soften into breeze.
Invest in a Bento box and forgive yourself for the rest.  How wonderful, wonderful. Wonderful, and just right. 

January - Poem 19

Doom Scrolling / Haley Bosse

How many                   hours of the day                      am I supposed
            to let the soft animal              of my body
smash itself                 against the world?                  How
                        does anyone               survive more than a single moment
of wet sparks searing             across the folding                   of their brain?
            Today, I watched a shrimp search                  through its horde of tiny stones,
                        taking each into its mouth      and sucking quickly                 before letting
what couldn’t serve it             fall away.                     Look,                                       I said,              
I can even see              its heart,                      searched,
            Do shrimp                   have skin or                 cartilage or                  something
else protecting them?                         Some days, I don’t remember                        to fear
how much                   I haven’t seen.

every dream i can remember  / Jess Bowe

women washing hats at the stream
at the stone wall, lining hats
in the sunlight, lining men’s 
hats in the morning, hats bathed
in river water, hats brimming
and stacked in the morning of war.

tunnels in and out of small white
houses, village tunnels, tunnels
built by women, mapped by mothers,
guarded by traditions of secrets,
elders at the mouth and door
of each tunnel, mountainous hallways,
mud and plastered tunnels, voices
carried, final note of the root
generation kisses the head of each
first note carried through the tunnel
like blood like blood like blood
through the body.

see them from here, top of the hill,
see them from here, dirtied foreign lights,
see them from here, out of sight,
see them from here, no distance 
is a safe one, no silence is a favor,
no quiet is without sound, 
cars and bodies perpendicular
marking lines of ruin across the map. 

the safest place is with each other.
the safest place is with a woman.
the safest place is a covered crown.
the safest place is a tunnel
  of mothers and grandmothers
carrying ahead of us torches
and stories our mouths
keep swollen and armored.

North with the wind in the left eye  / Joanna Lee

--for Aloka, the Peace Dog, on a successful recovery

toenails click
weary miles

velvet paws
threadbare

asphalt
longings

heart tattoo
quiet

find the path
never lost

furled wagging
to spring

opening
purple tulips

in January—
namaste.

Commiserate  / Thomas Page 

You’d think that 
you’re 
the only person on
Earth who has to deal
with the unbearable, crushing weight of another person entire existence
on your 
shoulders like the beleaguered Atlas groaning 
when the world asked him 
to turn winters
into the summers of youth.

You’d think that this is a brand new 
experience—a vision of your eternal torment for one sin
like the vole pierced by the shrike
who dared to venture out into the clear day—
pierce your heart
whenever they 
ask how you
are doing dealing with everything that is heaped 
onto your worn shoulders—
a cynocephalic saint in river water.

You’d think
that you’re as alone as hermits
chasing away golden demons
or silvery promises 
whenever you pray
for times like these to evaporate like smoke
from steaming thuribles 
swayed slowly 
in a rubricked, Roman rite that you 
never wish to hear their name as the intention.

You’d think that you say

and drive
far away to a desert resort and sleep
all day in the stale, airless hotel room
and order all day 
margaritas 
too watery, too full of salt, and too expensive 
to justify this personal time to yourself 
later.

You’d think that you could sometimes 
sleep in after the morning glories open up fully
and birds roost 
before the world realizes you’re not dead and buried 
able to wash dishes, plates, cups, spoons, and forks
and clean toilets
that are somehow pulpier they were
the night before when you 
said 

You’d think that you’d be
appreciated for all the work you do around here
especially since 

has decided for the both of you that they’re
too busy to help out with the care of
the only one y’all
have left in this cruel world that gave y’all
only two to care 
for your whole lives.

You’d think that you’d never
be understood by the rest of the world 
because it’s 

and expected but never really talked about 
in polite society because it’s a downer
to talk about terminal care with those who avoid
their
loved ones who are suffering 
before their very eyes. 

Sloth  / Sarah Paley

Let us now turn our attention to the Sloth
who lives and dies in the trees.
Let us do justice to him.
He is scarce, solitary.
He inhabits remote and gloomy forests
surrounded by snakes.
His neighbors cruel ants and scorpions,
below him swamps and thorny shrubs.
He has no soles on his feet – none.
His countenance wormwood.
Does he ask for our pity?
If he knew our thoughts
he would outstretch his arm.

anxiety / attack  / Amy Snodgrass

what what / to Xanax or not to Xanax / what what / coming on / from an inner realm of blood / a volcano or a wave pool / or something else–it’s me, right?–that begins with an unseen shift / a subtle rumble / tumbles then shakes something loose / something / what what / is wrong with me / I’m scared / what what / to know / to not know / spoon crashes / ringing in my ears / silence ringing no / silence bouncing off membranes / sending that shudder / its neuron push / and go / what what / and go on / do it / remember / standing there by the bench / by the Charles / then again / under the Bluff Park overpass grasping the chainlink / walk walk away / pounding the road / walk walk / fall / curling on the kitchen floor / just a two-liter Sprite / what what / cool tile / for days / yeah but Susan Sontag / and Lorelai Gilmore / and Joan Didion with her migraines / all get me and that’s / what what / I need / to feel ok / when I get the what whats / what what please just / get me