January - Poem 16

A Maybe Ode to the Lips Mouthing Along to Protesters’ Chants / Haley Bosse

But no ode to the officer. 
No odes to joining what has been shown
Again and again and again
And again and again and again
To want to kill my neighbors.
So ode to the police officer’s neighbors,
Who are also my neighbors. 
Ode to their tears, watching 
Masked men take our neighbors.
Ode to the dream where 
My neighbors bring back 
Our missing neighbors. Ode 
To nights where no death 
Steals the dreams of my neighbors,
Though we don’t get many 
Anymore, calm nights 
Where my neighbors 
Walk slow through the clouds
Of warm jasmine lifting
From the trellis of our neighbors,
Nights where anything seems possible
Or at least present,
All of us breathing
Wherever we are and not
Being suffocated or shot
Or stolen by men who hide
Their faces. When I still dream,
My neighbors all have faces,
Though I’ve been told 
That it’s not possible
To imagine anyone I haven’t met,
To love anyone I don’t know.
I don’t know
How many of my neighbors 
Have been taken. I don’t know 
How they’re being harmed
Behind fences and walls and beyond
The reach of cameras as I sit awake
All through the night and don’t dream. 
I am awake and awake and awake 
And awake and awake and awake 
And my neighbors are not here.

and also / Jess Bowe

i am here. blue sheets. two 
windows. baby, asleep. dog 
rearranging on the downstairs
couch. night moving further
in to the center of my circling
thoughts. i am here, and also

in the part of an ocean i can’t name
where hands turn to nothing
and humans go from god to shell.
whalesong is caught by a cave
untouched, held deep in the jaw
of the earth. i am here, and also

in the streets on a road 
where a father taught his son
to balance without caution
where a father taught his son
to make friends with every fall,

is the sound of birds
and no bird to be seen,
brick to brick to brick
the bounce of a whistle
trills a long night ahead.

i am here, and also
i can’t bring myself
anywhere but places
that appear to be drowning
in deep water,
swimming with sharks.

somewhere in the mouth 
of the Dark emerges 
language, ancient, stitched 
across the belly of sleep.

Point of Entry  / Joanna Lee

I’ve only once been to Minnesota.
A medical school interview,
an ancient history. Early December,
snow falling for the first time.

The light of it, slightly pink in the dusk,
flakes like thousands of tiny God fingers
brushing down on a hard planet.
The hospital parking lot fluorescing

pools of warmth, a familiarity.
We know each other, it said. Be welcome here.
So quiet, you forgot to be afraid.
Goosebumps of hope like only the young get.

So much wonder between that moment
and this, God taking the snowglobe
of their grand experiment
and giving it a good shake, and now

you can’t look away /you can’t not
write about it, even at such a distance,
so many unknowns: the slickness of time, its trembling
recitations of history and promise—

What if I had been there still?
What if it had been you
waiting at the door, boots on the mat?
What if it hadn’t been snowing,

no God fingers, no ice?
What good could we have done/can
we do/what good is a poem anyway
against batons, rubber bullets?

Knight-Errant  / Thomas Page

A knight errant; his own wandering page
must take ahold of his blades and sabers 
when he goes to fight the wyvern. Some sage 
words of remainders bound the page’s labors 
to tarry over yonder to neighbor-
lands in a quarry for some forgotten 
symbols of battle; cymbal or tabor 
rallying the knights in indigo’d cotton
dyed with oxidized blood running rotten 
down their sides; a mimicry of their Lord; 
passion to strip the old world of jotun.
A page comes to his old knight’s body gored.
A knight errant whispers blood in his beard:
“It is everything that I have e’er feared.” 

Litany  / Sarah Paley

The other day I was telling my son about an order of monks who lived circa 600 AD who catalogued and ranked everything. Everything on earth and in heaven, They’d sit at their tall desk and arrange and rearrange their lists all day, every day.

Seraphim,
cherubs,
treetops,
bird’s nests,
green…

and so on. All the way down to

toothworm,
toenail,
maggot
plague

As I explained my son interrupted: “That is the perfect job for you.” He’s right
but what he doesn’t know is I’ve been at it all my life. I start upon waking and go
till sleep. Sometimes even while I sleep.

Just now,

a man pushing a dog in a baby carriage


This job of mine has no end. No one gave it to me. Judge, place, sort, Judge, place,

sort.
leaf of a scarlet oak
older gentleman tenderly holding his wife’s elbow
the whorl of pigeons above the steeple
a sharpened pencil,
the lone hellebore on 10 th street
man asleep on sidewalk with no shoes
coffee cup lids
stickers on fruit
my attitude
a sudden memory of his/her death
ICE agents dragging a woman from her car
famine
war….


It doesn’t have to be done but it’s done.

The Antecedent of It is Grief   / Amy Snodgrass

Take it with you when you ride.  
Rub it into your saddle to condition and protect.  
Then let your sweat and the rainwater dissolve 
it over time and carry it far away to the sea.  

Let it, as you paint a snail, become the yellow you dab 
onto the antennae, creating the reflected light you 
see when you remember her hands. It will live there 
on the page, holding her in place in golden drops. 

Let it, as you draft in your notebook, be teenytiny 
letters, written for fun, to see if you can 
read them later: like a code, private just for you.

Let it, as you stand in her kitchen, flow through 
your cracks like olive oil through penne, softening 
and loosening them for all that will come. 

Let it laugh at that penne metaphor.  
You know she would laugh, too.  Hear her.

Please: turn those tiny messages and pasta metaphors 
into poems. Believe you have a gift worth giving. 
Let it be that belief. They have the same ending anyway. 

But mostly, as you hike every year up her bluegreen hill, 
let it be in every tree you pass: in the bark and in the roots, in the 
pine cones and the sap, in the glowing char from a controlled fire.  

January - Poem 15

living ghosts / Jess Bowe

Tolerance  / Joanna Lee

Sirens
were once  

bird-bodied
women if you

believe the old
myths, their echo-wail

through the nightwash
breaking darkness into

startled shards, luring
us too close

to the rocks. In this
instance they are distant—

a black train through
a black tunnel, headed

south, the sound waves
receding or

a tide going out:
someone somewhere

dying, but not
any neighbors

we know.
No one

is tying us
to the masts

plugging our ears.
Nowadays

they’re more a track
in our shuffled

trauma
playlist that comes up

at least once
a day, a reflexive  

audible Father,
Son, Holy Ghost, white

noise colored
red. Someone

somewhere is dying,
but a fortnight

into the new year
and this city

has of yet no
reported homicides.

That has to mean something
right? In the cold

stillness of pre-dawn,
the streetlight beside

the vape shop’s
dumpster holds

the light
of a north star.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Your Celebration of Life  / Thomas Page

You always reminded me to cut my lines
like the plaque away from my teeth but I was bad
at making a metaphor feel short. Regardless,
I wanted to write about when I was driving
to your Celebration of Life when I saw
a red Camry that had pulled into the left
lane to turn onto Lynn from Gunn Highway.
In the back, with his face pressed against
the window was a child staring intently
at me as I drove past. When we made eye-
contact, the child lifted his hand with
his middle finger pressed against the glass
and sneered at me. Sneered at me, an innocent
man just driving to a celebration of life.
What had I and my dirty silver Focus
done to this nine-year-old child to make
a crude reference to pheasant under glass?
After I drove past, I was miffed at first then
laughed at the absurdity of it all. 

Courage  / Sarah Paley

Harold Smith, the elevator operator
lets the daughters of the dead tenant
formerly in 2A pray out in the corridor
in front of the deceased’s apartment.
“I’m gonna have to tell them they can’t no
more at some point.” he says. “It’s kind of creepy
but it makes them feel better…” Marco
the Super isn’t aware. “Oh, man, if he
finds out...” Harold doesn’t finish the thought.
He shakes the Super out of his head: “You ever
meet Mickey Rooney?... No? I did. He bought
suits from my father’s store.” He adjusts the lever.
The wooden box he has manned for thirty years
opens. “Nice guy.” Sunlight and interlopers appear.

Fussing about in the Branches  / Amy Snodgrass

after Jimmy Santiago Baca

8:15pm: I am still awake thanks only 
to the testosterone pellet inserted in my side.  
The incision itches but I have more 
pep in my step, and I am glad for it.

Stretched out here on my gray couch, 
I allow my arched thickness to send me 
on its favorite ride: the Pride-Shame roller 
coaster. Cresting the first hill, I gaze at my 
children’s art on the wall across the room.

Pop! A wolf howls! A snake meant to be eating its own
tail escapes that fate (Seemingly a miracle, this saving of 
a life more likely happened because of underdeveloped 
spatial awareness.) and an elephant trumpets a stream 
of confetti back over itself onto a triangle holding three 
balloons, all representing, in my hopeful mind, two 
childhoods going well. Happy.

I wear my menopause–loony and beautiful–like a lined 
and woolen cloak. I am equal parts 1) sunk under its weight 
and 2) enthralled with swinging it out and around like 
a detective, superhero, knight, magician. I can be anyone 
I want now!  

I still have to check my son on the tracking app, though, 
to make sure he’ll be home by 9. And my daughter will 
pop out at any minute—I hope I hope I hope—with a story 
and a plan. 

But me? I am being reborn: howling whenever I want, 
dancing under fantastic elephant confetti, no longer eating 
my tail. Who knew? Who knew, all that time I thought 
my children were doing art projects to develop their 
creativity and their prefrontal cortexes when all along, 
they were actually building my future, handing it to me 
on a canvas, setting it on a shelf next to a broken vase 
and a rusted horseshoe, open side up.

January - Poem 14

One More Ride Home from School Together / Haley Bosse

I’ve realized why we’re here.

Let your forehead freckle,
rumple of something
I am too afraid to prick.

How do you feel
about this thing of darkness
a minute astride?
The scampering heart,
the hitch in the night.

Come and look.
We passed your family
waiting at home.

Little not-bird,
even beyond,
you have to learn how to swim.

I must stop here.

Words scavenged from Charlie Mackesy, Lidia Yuknavitch, Liz Robbins, Kai Cheng Thom, Monica Ojeda, Emma Jones, Christopher Tang, and Shelley Thomas.

a war of one kind / Jess Bowe

tendrils in the back
is what the shaman told me.
like an octopus.

but surely not as 
wise, an animal like him.
surely not as kind.

my insides spiral.
i am every woman with
a blade in her womb,

bleeding on the skirts
of history, silenced as a 
sniper on the roof.

we are the weapon, our mouths
of grenades and poetry.

Every six months  / Joanna Lee

In the elevator of the cancer center parking garage,
a red-haired woman across from us
is giving me the once-over:
with puffy coat & chunky-
heeled boots hiding my mini-dress,
i’m the giraffe in a candy store
holding your hand while we stalk through security
and to the next set of elevators,
only to sit & sit in a darkening waiting room.

one thirty-nine over seventy-eight.
your blood pressure before they stick
the tube with the camera up your nose & down
your throat. my eyes slide
between the screen and your face
as if i could catch one of them lying, admitting pain.
your vocal cords a half-frozen glossy pink horseshoe
on the monitor, your voice remembering old scars,
the doctor’s arms relaxing as he leans back
against the counter: nothing new.

 
this time, you do not use the pocketknife
in your glovebox to cut off the hospital ID.
on the way over the bridge, stuck in a line
of taillights like a river of fire so i’ll never
make my six o’clock poetry event, you
remark instead on the sunset.
we both look up out the windshield
at the deepening blues, crimson-
streaked, something to see.  

Valiant Air Command Warbird Museum  / Thomas Page

we all went down after the snowbirds re-
turned to the great outdoors where alliga-
tors and egrets gather in communion
in the cool, salty air of januar-
y. all stuffed in a minivan without 
coats or sweaters, when we arrived at the 
museum i remember how quickly you’d 
went to the ticket counter making sure 
that we’d all be able to look at the 
warbirds in the hangars. the air was cold-
er inside of the metal cage holding 
these birds that, according to your tour, were 
used to the balmy airs far out west when 
you flew helicopters. the sterile, gray 
concrete nearly camouflaged the arti-
facts held down by chains and breaks you asked to 
have the curator to open the ca-
bin doors so that we all could see inside. 

Metamorphosis  / Sarah Paley

Black rocks slick with slimy green, I re-call
and grey scummy soap suds floating back
and forth over us. So many yesterdays
but they flash involuntarily and bid
me to acknowledge a sense of time
and chronicle as it’s not possible to return.

If I could know what I do now I’d return.
I’d return to eat the sunken cala
lily – my first meal- oh so good. And that time
Ann and Adrianne and I ate the Brush-back
algae and got drunk on the turbid
stuff. We couldn’t tell today from yesterday.

From above our watery ceiling we heard: “Yesterday
when I was young…” A song about a man’s return
to his youthful dreams. Ann said it made her li-BID-o
sing. Li-What? We didn’t even know to call
a song a song but suddenly we were off. Back
Street Boys boomed from a dock and Time

after Time made Adrianne cry every time.
We swam in circles and listened to it on days
they played it off the boats above. Back
then three polly-wogs who didn’t return
to the shallows were presumed eaten and called
fish sticks. We’d show up, our tails shorter and bid

them goodnight or good morning. We three bid
one another with wishes for a longer time
together. Adrianne sprouted legs first. We called
after her as she crawled ashore. We backed
away and watched. Then I too couldn’t return,
couldn’t stop the changes. No more yesterdays,

not the ones we knew. And now the yesterdays
are everywhere I look. Rivet, rivet I bid
thee the farewell I didn’t get to return
to say. Changes happen – nothing time
can stop though I can’t stop looking back.
Polly wolly doodle. Any requests? Last call.
Call back yesterday, bid time return.

Letting Go of Grief  / Amy Snodgrass

You glide across the overgrown, root-filled hill. 
Cell phones meant to light the way distort you,
make you enormous, looming to the arching attics
in wavy shifting layers, reminding your daughter– 

barefoot behind you–of her anime, ominous and dark:
“Let’s watch together when we get home. Promise?”
Your mother’s absence hovers, sends tendrils that trail 
wisp-like into your bloodstream, attacking from all sides.

But still and of course you promise. 

You gaze up as canopy arms spread and Orion rises.

Later, home: sand-and-salt-filled clothes
in the washing machine, you fulfill your 
promise, fraught with prophecy and fire.  
You hold her elbow in the cup of your palm.

She crumbles softly into sleep.  As you shake 
a gray sheet out over her, you decide. You put 
your clothes in the dryer.  You will shrink that 
titan-sized shadow into one small glowing square. 

And later, as she rests, you will fold it and store it, 
high up and away.

January - Poem 13

Everything, After Everything Else / Haley Bosse

Larvae

to—

wing sprout

Dawn—

freckled

with buzzing—

Moon

&—

crunch of steps

well / Jess Bowe

at the onset of curtain-fall across my eyes,
vision, glowing neon and broken apart
with patterned shape and dancing lines–
She calls from somewhere off-planet,
breaking the barrier of Time, swimming
in the canal of my ear, siren song
like Home. and i go, door of ink-swallowed
night unlocked and smiling. down 
the corridor of greenery, the long pool
a mirror angels come to see. drink,
her hands tell me, cupped and full
of cold stone water. ancestors below
the tree, mothers turned mycelium,
arrive to my throat as soldiers
of light and ice-born fire. songs 
known only to my cells echo the chambers
of metronome, cymatic grids
of symmetry bound for my bloodstream.
this is what it means to be well,
i hear me say, sight soft and able,
seven mere minutes against the hardwood.

Haibun-adjacent Semi-Ekphrastic Confessional with Uncomfortable Pauses : When I scroll before bedtime / Joanna Lee

or, tbh, on lunchbreak, or drinking coffee & catching headlines before leaving for work in the mornings, I keep coming back to this picture that doesn’t exist:    I am fourteen. Seated at our kitchen table of varnished blonde           wood, the kitchen lights fluorescing,    the kitchen-yellow linoleum bewilderingly bright.      I am   bawling.           Just back from catechism class,

where we’ve watched   Schindler’s List   in lieu of a Bible lesson.    Bawling.      My face is caught in the cage of my hands, then,          in slow motion,     my hands fall and I’m gaping up at the overheads like they might   have answers.       I don’t            understand. My teenage brain can’t process it  :              how so many were allowed      to die   while others went about their lives, sucked                  their cigarettes, conducted their business.        The trains,   the camps,       that these things                                                                      were                 

while life          elsewhere went on.      It doesn’t compute.                  My mother, the smoke             from her just-extinguished Salem Light curling empty into the air, stands at the other end of the table,            helpless.

As if a sky can
be empty,         all those questions
rising up to God

Limericks for Lowly Caretakers  / Thomas Page

I once knew a man who was very smart 
who memorized foreign verses by heart. 
He ate seven buckets of table cream 
and washed it down with beers like a stream. 
He got up passed me and let out a—

Regal gadzooks and blasted bazookas 
how could I ever imagine these days 
that I’d be the one taking care of ye
under a yellow fog smelling of flea 
that eats what those Spaniards call—

I’m not the only one who’s been affected
by these ghastly attacks orchestrated. 
The problem in this household is severe 
enough that it’s been a request sincere 
that I write about those poor—

Every day it’s been “Oh, Tommy, my son,
the one who writes about sadness for fun,
please write about our daily contritions 
based on the one’s various indigestions 
give rise to the thick airs that always stun. 

Doubting  / Sarah Paley

Do I remember frozen trees screaming in winter?
Blueberries filled with blood in summer?
Inhaling tulips till I understood their way of thinking?
Were the apples in DeVoe’s orchards larger than my head?
Did the earthworms have faces with actual expressions on them?
How did Mr. Hill learn to speak to the raccoons he kept in the parlor of his double wide?
Can it be that Mr. Rosen, the school bus driver, tied me to the pole behind his driver’s seat
and stuffed my ears with wax so I might resist the sirens?
Was the Matterhorn in the woods just up the hill from the house?
Where did the fairies get the tiny axes to destroy the twig ladders I so carefully built?
And caterpillars purring? Could that Scarlet Elm really raise me to the clouds above?
Was that old sleigh in the Ten Eyck’s barn pulled by ghosts of horses?
Possible? Probable?, that Parson, the cat, saved my life? More than once?
There was a boa constrictor in the hayloft – that is certain.

The Attic  / Amy Snodgrass

Yesterday, a moment:

Sitting on the couch, my son on my left, my mom on my right, our row of laps 
under the super-soft purple microfiber blanket we have all loved for years.

she wants to be eating napkins, the word for edges isn’t what she meant, her students are going to buy those square purple things over there to use as spoons, that white yellow thing is coming through the rectangle the wrong way because it’s too easy, and her father is on his way to pick her up from school now and she can’t be late. 

I lean my head left onto my son’s shoulder, finally 
the right height.  I am getting drunk on Sierra 
Nevada with its new yellow label that I hate.
I am thinking how others might see this as a 
beautiful three generational moment.

the keyhole is the perfect place to pour coffee, the circle on the wall should come down because it might fit nicely on her fingernail, the black turny thingy isn’t enough so we should buy more because the bagel needs one, and wouldn’t that be nice?

My son and I breathe together, heads 
touching, eyes not. He breaks first 
and leaps up the stairs and away: “I’ll be back!” 
The blanket can not be thick enough. 
I think I am tuning her out, but her words 
go and go and go in and in and in and do 
things to me, things I do not like.

the squiggles, no, the polish, yes, the prophecy, and the juice can’t fit in the rainbow, probably because it’s so cloudy with all the stripes, and can she hold my hand for just a minute?

These are the types of moments others tell me to treasure.  
Instead, I treasure that photo on the coffee table:

5-year-old me in front of our pull-down attic stairs. 
Scrambling up, fast and sneaky, I always found 
a dark triangle of silence: joyful and free. 
Of course, in the summers it was sweltering up there: 
just one tiny window, sealed shut. It must have been 
dreadful and claustrophobic. But in my memory, 
it is always cool and dreamy with nooks. 

Maybe the owners now would let us back in, let me float her up that ladder. 
Maybe the bat shit crazy could stop, just for one night.  
Maybe I could tell her how she is like that attic: always safe, and now a dream.

We could share an ice cold Sierra Nevada with the original green label.
After a while, she would understand what I am saying, and through 
the circle on the wall, we wouldn’t see the rainbow so much as hold it.

January - Poem 12

Why do you think it’s okay— / Haley Bosse

The snow half-obscuring 
Your face, red glow
From some car’s taillight
Left running with the door open,
Pulled a foot into the road,
The smoke from the tailpipe
Whisked away like someone
Cares about us pausing here
Halfway up the hill
In the nearly deadly dark, like
If there was anything
But the cold
And the snow
And your unknowing smile,
We might not make it
From this moment
To our bed, six years
From now and far
From Boston,
Further north and somehow
Wetter, at least a thousand
Drops of rain
Having slid from your skin
And to the earth by now,
Taking with it the aftertaste
Of sweat, 
From fear,
Climbing, fear again
A morning lost
Underneath the covers
Birdsong and the drum
Of water on the carport
Beyond the foggy window
Sometimes I wake 
Slick with salt 
And worried 
I’m standing in that snowstorm
The wind spiraling 
Around us, unsure
If the flakes are falling
Or rising back toward
The clouds and 
Whether the next moment
Will drive what’s frozen here
To breaking or
If it’s not enough.

the pause between / Jess Bowe

i stop asking my children to save the world. 
i ask them to bring strawberry tops 
to the chickens. i seat them at the table 
with the old stories. i turn off the tv 
and wonder out loud what the trees 
in the corner of the yard might be dreaming. 
i bring them tea and good news and forest-floor
trinkets and apologies to their bedside.
i invite them to the show
of birds and gift them orchestra tickets 
made of sunrise and wet dirt and we listen 
and cry at what we almost missed. 
i recite mother teresa with my hands in the soap, 
we wash the dish 
because we love 
the one who uses it next. 
i stop asking my children to save the world. 
i ask them to notice the sky. to say hello.
to offer the presence of their eyes. to give
attention to what moves them. to stay 
a moment longer in the room 
between inhale and exhale, to give 
to the day what lives there. 

In this picture  / Joanna Lee

we see the backs of three figures, their shadows long against the leaffall and the setting sun. there seems a heaviness to their footsteps, a purpose in the way they hold their bodies, leaning slightly forward, not turning to look at the camera. it is a cold day, or so one supposes from the hoods thrown over their ears, the pale cast to the fast-sinking sun. what we don’t know is where they’re headed, other than a general westward direction. we don’t know their names. why they walk. why the camera has captured them, as if there were something important to this sunset, this grouping. the bareness of the trees is unremarkable; almost, to the framing of this shot, an afterthought. there is no Icarus falling. what, then? we can only suppose they mean something to the shot-taker, the unknown fourth who follows. that this is a family outing, perhaps, or a fistful of friends. some shared resolution in the solidarity of their tread. as if they are on their way to a new chapter that surely will end better than the last one. as if they can get close enough to the dying sun to grab its violet skin like a cape to wrap round their chilled fingers. as if they must reach Valhalla before nightfall. something intimate and ordinary. as if they’ll never have this moment, this precise, unfiltered moment, again. as if that were something worth remembering.

Saganaki  / Thomas Page

we would always go to that greek res-
taurant by your house overlooking 
the bay and arroyos and jacaran-
das people would overwater with ber-
muda grass and english bushes trimmed with 
roses. our server would place by the 
window looking over the chinese bu-
ffet that’s not as good as back then. you’d be
facing the window with a big drink dark
as homer’s seas as your finger pointed
to your preferred appetizer sa-
ganaki served with pita wedges no-
dding as you pointed with certainty 
that they served it best here with the special
liquor they doused it with before flam-
béing it. the fire like a column of sun-
light brightening your face in a warm glow. 

What If Cheetah Forgot How to Tie Vines Together?  / Sarah Paley

Tarzan would sink. He’d scramble and flail. Everyone knows
that’s the worst thing to do if you’re caught in quicksand. Of course,
he knows that too, but he’d still reach out and there’d be nothing
to grab on to. He’d sink and the bubbling quicksand would smooth
and calm over his head after it had swallowed him completely.
Oh! What a terrible way to end.
Jane would swing home from the waterfall with her wet perfect
thighs and damp tussled hair and wait. Eventually she’d worry.
She’d do their special call – yodeling into the forest canopy
but there’d be no reply. There’d be no sign of him –only squawking
birds rising into the sky, alarmed at her alarm. Sooner or later Cheetah
would come home but Cheetah wouldn’t be able to explain.
All that jumping up and down, shrieking, running in circles, and slapping
his head could never make clear what had transpired. Cheetah couldn’t
tell her how sorry sorry sorry he was that he forgot how to tie a knot. After
a while he’d hang his head in shame, sit in the corner, and refuse the bananas
she offered. While Tarzan, petrified, reaches for heaven forever.
Oh! What a terrible way to end.

Why You Shouldn’t Buy a Motorcycle  / Amy Snodgrass

Because in Spain, there is a walled city, with a tiny store 
sort of hidden behind a series of milky stone pillars.

You will find it someday as you 
wander the narrow cobblestone
streets with someone you love
and you will buy a miniature clock–
gold with black inlays– for your father, 
like I did for my father so many years ago.

The inlays will look like flowers, but later 
–after eating tapas at Siglodoce and kissing your 
    love under the vaulted arches of the cathedral–
you will gently unwrap it and set it on your 
hotel nightstand, and you will do a double take. 

You will see there are skeletons etched into the mix, 
peeking out from behind the golden flowering 
vines: skeletons so tiny you will almost miss them, 
but suddenly they will be all you see, those sneaky bones.

While your love hops in the shower, you will 
call me and say, “Hi mom, so, funny story– 
I accidentally bought Dad a skeleton clock,” 
and we will laugh long and hard about it: then, and again, and
from time to time, over the course of our long and beautiful lives.

January - Poem 11

Morning Star & Evening Star / Haley Bosse

You cloak and so
You hold, gazeless
Without radar, rotless
If only rock, a single
Hand outstretched
Across your surface,
Circling smoothly
To grip, unshaking,
At the wrist. 

Written in response to this interview of Dr. Vicki Hansen by Alie Ward: https://www.alieward.com/ologies/venusology

time spiral  / Jess Bowe

(a fibonacci poem)

on
the
carpet
dusky pink,
imaginary
angel beside me as i cry;
remembering: pink dusk, sitting with a small lost girl.

On Cellblock C, a meditation  / Joanna Lee

“De poeta y loco todos tenemos un poco”

            --SM

ando por algún lado
y no me encuentra—
I’m walking somewhere
unable to find myself

the fear—erased from existence
and forgotten forever

wrists freshly wrapped
in gauze, the dream

of America in their hearts
asylum a world 

away
every person here suffering

looking for light,
the bright, blue sky, the sun glaring

they are haunted
each voice ribboned

with a dark melody of pain
no touching,

eyes scared,
caged

Out the window a large, black bird
my heart, a stone thrown hard into the sea

They want you to know
your silence will not protect you (1)

Dear Children,
please forgive me.

All text found from Hope on the Border: Immigration, Incarceration, and the Power of Poetry by Seth Michelson

(1)quote attributed to Audre Lorde

Grief is a thing with barbs / Thomas Page

I suppose it never gets easier with each passing day. I remember when you broke down next to the cans of chicken noodle soup when someone asked how you were doing. It ebbs and flows like the tide full of red blooms and seaweed clouds. Whoever said it is made of wings never had his head on a goose down pillow trying to let the electricity of the mind calm down after a terrible night—the ohm-lessness of it all. 

The barby ball that sits like a lumpy frog in the throat is hard to express in words, at least to someone who hasn’t experienced it. There is a gentleness to grief in the poems we all read in high school that doesn’t seem to be real, at least to someone who experienced it. Grief is not as gentle as the moonless night over the dead calm of a tranquil sea. Grief is more like the bite of a rabid dog that comes at you from behind. 

The weirdest things will make someone sad. I remember ugly crying as a child over a dinosaur left on the shore on some t.v show. When you came to figure out what was wrong I could only babble “dinosaur—abandoned—sad!” 

My throat closes up, 
the chlorophyll-less leaf 
fades into speckles.

Aubade  / Sarah Paley

I wake at night not sure that you will come
and when you do I question why and how.
Your pink hues, your optimism, your mum
face announcing a new day. Really? Here? Now?
Wake me with blood, surprise me with sirens,
howls from hell, or thunderbolts from heaven.
There’s no room for this new norm– unless –
you were never kind & I was never blessed.
Blessed not by some god but by a fragile
golden rule that has fled along with reason.

My friend Maggie gives me a one-word prompt in early January 2026 / Amy Snodgrass

Gamers? Maggie, really? Gamers are people I know nothing about. 

Well, I know they have amazing chairs, almost too comfortable and too clever to be for real. I might recommend they wear bluelight glasses. But I don’t know–maybe they have that covered.

I know my students roll their eyes when I ask them to transition away from their favorite gamer on YouTube and to refocus on the task at hand.  They must be getting something out of it.

In my ignorance, I assume some gamers need rehab for the addiction. And I also imagine some of them make a shit-ton of money. I feel like this is true, though, for lots of us, gamers or not.

I worry about the crazy lights and the glorified violence and the speed of all the flashing, and of course, about the evolving human brain. But, then again, I worry about a lot of shit for no reason.

Once, a long time ago, a student of mine named Ledio tried to teach me the differences in play between a first-person game and a third-person game, making connections to the content of my English class. I liked him and I understood his points, but I just kept getting so motion sick—more and more with every game—so we had to stop. I recently heard he is now a college professor, so that’s cool.  

Since then, my non-gaming lifestyle has kept me pretty much tied to my limited views, my fears, my assumptions about gaming and gamers. You know what, though? Gamers probably feel pretty much the same way about my poetry writing, my hiking, and my middle school teaching, right? If they think about it all, which is doubtful, but will vary from person to person. We’re different beings doing our things, slowly revolving through our days.

I really don’t know anything about gamers, Maggie, my friend.   

But I do know the only way out of our current mess is for people to say to other people things like“I’ll take a Dramamine before we start, so I can really focus and understand,” and “Your interests are as valid as mine,” or even the most obvious: “Your life is as valuable as mine.” Your life is as valuable as mine. Your life is as valuable as mine. Your life is as valuable as mine. Your life.

January - Poem 10

Norway Spruce / Haley Bosse

This year’s new growth gone 
From near-translucent 
To wintermint
And reaching toward 
An almost-unreal shade
Of what only comes 
To pine,
Branch extended 
Just a hand’s reach 
Off the wooden railing,
Warped and disconnected 
In the corner,
A wobbling danger 
For each day it’s stood,
The diving board from which 
My mother’s dog once leapt
And hovered for a moment
Before landing, 
We suspect, 
Among the branches
And wiggling her way 
Into the duff below. 

Every new year, 
My grandmother bemoans 
The looming death
Of the tree, 
Its roots stretching 
Even now, 
She insists, 
Into the foundation, 
Rasping softly
With their mindful creep,
One wrong move 
Enough to send us,
Trembling and uncaught,
Into the earth. 

songbird / Jess Bowe

Around the corner
of the beech-lined trail, gray
feathers kiss the wind.

Nest-fallen Wren sleeps
a final time on the roots,
the forest pulling

her body further
in for inevitable
embrace. I fold green

around her lived-in
wings, one yellow for joy,
star-flower for Thanks.

Somewhere over the rainbow,
I sing her into the grave.

Grief Ghazal  / Joanna Lee

All this cold, fragile grief: we’ve been there, waiting for the rain—
smoke that doesn’t clear, a god who doesn’t care, waiting on the rain.

January dark comes early and school bells mourn an ending
as a child cries somewhere, waiting in the rain.

Bare heads and covered faces, our fingers
tearless searching eyes that stare waiting in the rain.

We become prickled, hard, cactus skins in starless night
our hearts dry as despair, waiting on the rain.

A prayer for those who flee the fight; two
for those who stay to dare, waiting in the rain.

Tell me, brother—how will history remember us?
we were just, we’ll swear, waiting for the rain.

Where will you find a poet who can sing us through to morning?
lost on a road to nowhere, waiting in the rain.

Conestoga / Thomas Page

It feels like everyday I’m driving a conestoga 
whenever you point out the same ponderosa 
although we don’t live anywhere near any jatropha
or see along the beach a mimosa. 

Whenever you point out the same ponderosa 
while asking me if we have any more samosa 
or see along by the beach a mimosa
dreaming of what it must be like to be a mariposa.

While asking me if we have any more samosa 
which may be filled with some scabiosa 
dreaming of what it must be like to be a mariposa
you can point out the arboretum’s gloriosa.

Which may be filled with some scabiosa 
although we don’t live anywhere near any jatropha
you can point out the arboretum’s gloriosa—
It feels like everyday I’m driving a conestoga. 

Boobs  / Sarah Paley

To you, the boys and men who cared so much
when I was a mere stripling girl
about the glacial progress of my Bazookas.
I’d like to apologize for my ingratitude.

Your concern for my slow bloom
boomed off the brownstones in Park Slope
“FLATSO! HEY FLATSO!”
“You ain’t even got Mosquito Bites.”

“You walking forward or back I can’t tell.”
You cared so much and let me know.
Where were my Hooters? My Twin Peaks?
My Knockers? The Gals?

One boy didn’t share your worry. For a few weeks,
or maybe a few days, Darius was my boyfriend.
We’d lope in unison to the park. His arm around
me not searching for nonexistent Tatas or Melons.

This was around the time my best friend Rachel’s
Dream Team appeared. Oh my! Magnificent!
Outsized – like Barbies. You chased after her to snap
her bra strap from behind. She had to swat you away

or be escorted through your throngs like John, Paul, George
or Ringo. It was too much for Darius who disappeared,
maybe in search of some Golden Orbs he could flatter.
And then one day, it seemed to happen overnight –

your chorus changed. “Hey girlie, how’d you know I love
Milkshakes!” “Bouncie, Bouncie!” the construction workers
said in rude rhythm as I passed by on my way to school.
Who, ME? Yes, they were here. Ripening Newbies.

And Darius reappeared but too late. I’d moved on.
He exclaimed and explained to anyone who’d listen
“I never woulda broken up with her if I knew she was
gonna sprout Tits!” And now, half a century later, a still

unfinished woman observes that shy girl as she trudges toward
womanhood, folding into herself, amidst your boosterism
for her burgeoning Boobs. What do I see from this impossible
distance? I see an unsung hero. I see Joan of Arc.

escape   / Amy Snodgrass

a found poem

mind the sparks of your candle:
heaving with malevolence 
deliriously intoxicated
shaded with a heavy cloud
of delusive assurances

I begin to shrink:
I hardly know what to hide
and what to reveal
and must whisper 
bitter things 
of atmospheric tumult
that writhes and yearns

amazed at the blackness 
of spirit transmuted into bits 
of folded paper: resolutions 
formed in the hour of fear 
of the approach of what is coming

ah! the sparks of your candle: beautiful wild 
vindictiveness in its white cheek
the lights flitting to and fro
kindling a spark of spirit
the commencement 
of delirium to beguile me
with the spectre of 
a hope escaping 

                   into the free air
      now clear and still

Source material: Emily Brontë‘s Wuthering Heights 

With the exception of a few minor changes for verb tense consistency, all words are directly from the book, reordered.

January - Poem 9

Leaving Urgent Care / Haley Bosse

For Renée Nicole Good 

This is for every
Fleck of glitter
Exploded from the pocket
Of my hoodie, 
An unexpected birth
Of yesterday’s excitement,
New year hatching 
Six days late,
Almost enough 
To keep me 
At the sink for hours
Washing hope 
From the planes of my palms
And scratching 
Too rough 
Under the overhang
Of my pinky nail.
I could have stayed
Another minute 
Or an hour with the water,
I wouldn’t have been ready 
To see her blood
Across my screen. 
In poems, you almost
Never see a person’s 
Name exactly as it’s called,
Across a kitchen
By an exasperated mother,
Or written on their day of birth,
Or written on a grave. 
In so many ways,
She was living 
A queer dream under tyranny, 
Dropping her child
Off at daycare, 
Holding her partner’s hand. 
Renée Nicole Good. 
One more person
We shouldn’t have to march
Without.
Every word she scattered
Into the air,
Let us clutter
With their closeness,
Pray we’ll never
Wash them clean.

7 minutes after the heart stops / Jess Bowe

lights on the brain’s map
show in god’s polaroids: Love
in every background.

In the Year of the Fire Horse  / Joanna Lee

I am stuck in every tonight
somewhere

between the second
and the third

law of thermodynamics, burning
both ends even

while I know there’s an end
to the middle. come walk with me

in the cold, slipping on darkness
while our eyes

are tuned only to the stars, imagining
oceans. we’ll count out

each constellation until we’ve run
out of breath, lie down

in the wet grass and
laugh and laugh. when the sun

comes back he’ll
find us there still, hand

in hand, lighter
than we’ve ever been,

solving the equations
of this world’s messes

with fingers smeared in river mud.
we won’t fear dying.

we won’t lose sight.
we’ll make a plan to seed

small kindnesses
into the unused crawlspace

between heartbeats, sit back
to watch them grow.   

Song of Yourself  / Thomas Page

after Walt Whitman

I know every facet of yourself 
or, at least, what I assume
and you’ll shall assume that I am too
far gone to really celebrate every version of you
the versions you think you’ve hidden from me 
and the versions you carefully crafted for me. 

You who spent the summer evenings walking around the cityblocks 
looking at each strand of graffiti-spray 
discovering that each dollop of paint 
was an extension of that artist’s own lifeblood.

You who spent the autumn afternoons gazing upon the leaves 
looking at each dying fleck of maple and oak 
dissecting that each fiber of leaf 
was an extension of that tree’s own lifeblood. 

You who spent the winter mornings craving up the lawns 
looking at each snowbounded blade of grass 
digesting that each blade of grass 
was an extension of the Earth’s own lifeblood. 

I know the springtime didn’t bring you joy.
I know the springtime was spent alone. 
I know the springtime many cooed at your situation. 

But I know that you are more than that bed in that room in that ward in that hospital in that city that you felt so bound to which you just told me. 

Found in Boswell  / Sarah Paley

He had for many years a cat which he
called Hodge, that kept always in his room
at Fleet Street; but so exact was he not
to offend the human species by superfluous
attention to brutes, that when the creature
was grown sick and old, and could eat
nothing but oysters, Mr. Johnson always
went out himself to buy Hodge’s dinner
that Francis the servant’s delicacy might
not be hurt, at seeing himself employed
for the convenience of a quadruped.

Poetry  / Amy Snodgrass

after Reading “The Wheel Revolves” by Kenneth Rexroth

Like insecure but insistent leeches 
on the edges of a waterfall pool,
these buzzing squiggles in my brain 
keep me latched to the silent cruelties 
of my past.  
Oh, I am crazed!

Waking, I never remember
how much I am always 
gasping for breath above 
the spray, so close 
to drowning, unheard,

never understand
how tense with sadness 
I move, trying 
to lengthen toward the light,
never– until I read
the first poem
of the morning

and from the inside out
I smooth
like crackling ash.

Today Rexroth is the one:

a single light he writes, 
camping in the rain,
amongst a hundred 

peaks and waterfalls.

I listen to him, to his waterfall daughter.
I see their tent. I hear their talk. They tell me
all this will never be again. They tell me

to go on, to stake my own to the ground 
of my own. They wrap my tension in down. 
Singing bird years and stars swarm into my blood. 

The shame I feel 
for those latching, 
leeching squiggles– 

the campfire embers 
catch it. Screaming, 
finally, I become 

a tiny cloud.

January - Poem 8

caddis 4 / Haley Bosse

Note: This form takes inspiration from the larvae of caddisflies, which create protective shells for themselves out of the natural debris in their habitats. In each of my caddis poems, there is one personal line written by me, the poet. This true line is encrusted in overheard snippets and otherwise found pieces of language debris. Using this form allows me to say something that otherwise feels impossible, under the protection of scavenged language.

how to become lost  / Jess Bowe

find yourself in the forest, in the deep emerald, 
in the dirt of the night and the early 
rainy mornings. find yourself 
when the kids are with dad. 
when the world is quiet for the first time 
since sometime in seventh grade. 

find yourself when sunday mornings are empty 
and made for good coffee and a sunrise 
with a cat in your lap. when you can make 
mistakes and clean them up before the kids get home. 
when you can swing christmas and wrap gifts 
until 2 am. find yourself on a sidewalk on a date 
with yourself, hot chocolate made how you like it 
without anyone asking why, cold 
so painful your hair sticks to the corners 
of your tearing eyes, and yet, never complain, 
not once, because the lights are beautiful 
and people are singing somewhere 
around the corner and the entire world 
has itself unzipped and ready for you. 

find yourself in all your bright ideas. 
in your piles of notebooks. in your dreams 
and time for things like dreaming 
and painting and tv-less bedrooms. 

convince yourself, once, that you’re lonely. 
that you’re ready. come through the front door 
you forbid from any man and tell the cats 
you’re in love. do mushrooms under a full moon 
and when the clouds cup your face, invite him inside 
and forget which moon is yours. 

the nausea will overcome you. 
you’ll learn how to carry life again, 
half divorced, and when your broken walls 
in an already broken home are too shameful 
to look at with someone standing next to you, 
you’ll volunteer yourself for every job 
that mingles with potential disappointment. 

do all the laundry. every sock and tee and blanket. 
watch your children melt into puddles 
and forget to buy rainboots. 
cry in a barnes and noble when you remember 
you loved to read and look at the spot 
you’d sit in when you had time to be alone. 

cry in every empty room, in any empty moment 
left with a hint of your name on it. 
try to remember what color is your favorite. 
what flower, what song, what day of the week. 

write a letter you never finish, and start it nine times: 

dear me, if i ever get out of here, 
please remember this:

Remembering My First Anatomy Lesson  / Joanna Lee

            --after “On learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs1,” by Renée Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by ICE on January 7, 2026

Never before such helplessness

the exact baleful pale green of the cadaver lab’s doors
in line outside and feeling I may as well lie down
beside a body in its sloshy stainless cradle

as expect to pinpoint the location
of the medial-most
branch of the brachial plexus
in a strange corpse.

Every              
body is different,          do you see?
In a room of twenty,
the nerves will take on new appearances in each, im-
perfect facsimiles of some larger principle.
And so many! veins, muscles, fascial planes, all empty now, yes,
all dead, static, flat like a tire with its air let out

but God,

I’ve studied this stuff for weeks—late nights,
skipped dates, through Halloween and damn near to Christmas—and still
can’t bring a quarter of it back to life on a dime. The sheer volume

of detail drowns me, and I smell perpetually of the dead, pungent vinegar-pink which will haunt
my scrub drawer for decades. Yet it isn’t

the formalin that humbles,
but the wonder.
The body thus reduced a miracle of intricacy.
The niceties of our daily rounds revealed
as complex equations in mechanical tension& nerve transmission& chemical signaling. We are

amazing.
Our lungs so like ocean
floor sponges, what divine evolution brought us
to breathe? What tinker-minded plumber
fixed the pump of our hearts into four pliable chambers, what
statistical nearimpossibility is every     
single  
thought? each decision a chain of neurons
firing in succession to relay intention
to guts, to muscle, to skin,       quicker than you can blink
To write a poem.

To assess a threat.

To pull a trigger.

1 https://poets.org/2020-on-learning-to-dissect-fetal-pigs

Inaccessible    / Thomas Page

The world isn’t accessible // at least in a wheelchair // which isn’t fair // because we have to use the wheelchair a lot // a lot a lot // especially whenever we want to go anywhere // that isn’t the kitchen // or the fireplace room // (what she calls the room with all the windows // and // you know // the fireplace) 

I know that it isn’t fun // having me tower over you // as we roll un-merrily along // the undulating sidewalk // full of cracks // and fissures // rocking the red steel chair // into the air // you putting all of your weight // into the left side of my hair // trying to keep you afloat // on the sidewalk // and // me standing upright 

We have traversed over // ungodly huge door jambs // unwieldy accessibility doors // and unseen accessibility buttons // who knew how messed up // the world really is // for those who aren’t ambulatory // trying to navigate // to any public place // under heaven 

EMERGENCY PROCEDURES FOR 2026  / Sarah Paley

Please exit
to the right
of my brain

in an orderly
fashion. Step lively
and mind the gap.

No need to assess
outside conditions
before departing.

Just go.

Migraine Sonnet #4      / Amy Snodgrass

There is a world at the base 
of my head that gets disturbed 
from time to time. I tell everyone 
it’s a migraine and I don’t mean to lie, 

but I think that’s a cover. Things are
alive in there. A cluster of maggots, 
orange with rage, swarms a rat carcass 
that –surprise!– leaps up in still-alive fury: 

claws out, teeth aglow. Then –oh hello!– 
a pool of magma, fierce and mad, in a frenzy, 
and frankly just mean, pours down over the rat 
who fought so hard to survive, over the maggots 

just trying to do their thing. I become the rumbling bubbles of pain– 
I boil wild, I boil free, I spill over– we are gone, gone, me–gone–and the rat.

January - Poem 7

Hopecore / Haley Bosse

When I tell the doctor I was exposed to RSV, he puts on a mask. 
How I only have to search her name to rewatch Princess Diana hugging AIDS patients. 
Knowing that if I get sick someone will hug me. 
Knowing that the first time I had Covid, my partner hugged me from behind through a plastic tarp. 
The memory of both our masked faces seeding clouds into frigid air. 
The hutch of seeds sleeping in the lobby of the public library. 
The older man googling how to support my trans daughter in the public library. 
Replying All in the Zoom chat: still here!

the erosion  / Jess Bowe

it begins before birth. it begins with a name on your back, seventeen stories high, with others just like you, carrying towers of war and legacy strapped and crushing their wings. it begins before your mother’s skin warms to the touch, before your father knows the weight of his own name. it begins before you open your eyes and see clearly the faces that shape you. they spit it out in ink and it begins, this belonging, this leaf on a branch on a tree in a forest in a world. at five, at fifteen, in alphabetical rows. when you marry and make a trade and do the labor of grief alone in your celebratory gown, champagne and sex and promise in your wedding bed. in the government office. in the paperwork. in the whatever-was-established-before-is-no-longer. in the kitchen alone, one night, forgetting what you wanted before you were told what to want. in the let me do that for you, in the late night tears and all the way down to the bottom of the barrel. in the saving yourself for last because you’re a good person. in the fantasy where you chop off the extra weight and your first name stands like an island. in the aftermath, floating on the back of the spirit who will not drown, whispering over her shoulder as an ancient grandmother would: i am. i am. i am, rootdirt still caught in her hair.

I watch cat grooming videos for solace before bed  / Joanna Lee

instead of writing. because my 
brother is drinking while he
cleans up the plumber’s mess
in his upstairs bathroom while
my dad forgot where he put his phone
and my brother yells at him
for not answering, and he feels bad,
and I make him feel worse by
telling him he should not
indeed tip his phlebotomist
when he goes in for his next
urology appointment and maybe
none of us should talk
on the phone so damn often but
then what would we do but worry?
meanwhile you’re coughing again
through a late dinner and
learning CPR is on my 2026 list but
in truth unlikely to worm its way
high enough into my priorities so
one of these nights in the thin window
we have between dinner prep and bed
some malevolent piece of pasta
is going to lodge itself between
the semi-mobile tissues of your vocal cords
and that will be the end.

all the while the number of emails
I haven’t answered multiply like gremlins
between the hours of four and eight-
thirty pm and I’m sure my to-do today
is lying to my screen-lit face and also
Venezuela and Epstein and ICE and
on this day five years ago we watched
—from a hospital bed—while they
stormed the Capitol and I really
should sleep instead of rousing out
those old ghosts because tomorrow
we’ll be back all smiles and pleasant
for another long winter draught
of hours and like the guy who
comes in from the towing company
for his coffee first thing,
we’re it, baby, getting it done without
a break, without breaking, living the dream,
at least someone’s, I suppose,
one of those who believe
it will all come out in the wash,
maybe, or that drinking more water
will solve all our problems. this to say
it could be worse, and really,
I’ve nothing to complain about, but god
bless that cat whisperer guy on IG.  

Online Orders   / Thomas Page

after Ocean Vuong

Monday

book on color theory 
book on WWII airplanes
bottle of gray, horse-pill-size vitamins
box of chocolate-covered oreos 
pair of compression socks 

Tuesday 

100 count box of alcohol prep wipes
bottle of sherry 
100 count box of individual eye drops 
bottle of rioja for kalimotxos 
bottle of coca-cola for kalimotxos 
pair of compression socks from a speciality store 

Wednesday 

refill on the sky blue pills
refill on the hi-vi orange pills
refill on the hazy purple pills 
book on WWII tanks 
ticket for an art film showing out of the state 
fast fashion wool-ish sweater 

Thursday 

giftcard to a national movie theater chain 
book on Japanese grammar 
150 count box of hypodermic needles 
medical grade first-aid kit 
10 ounce tube of neosporin
toilet bowl hand grips with stand 

Friday 

refill on white trapezoidal pills
refill on white oblong pills 
refill on white flat-circle pills
refill on white round-circle pills 
tub of green exercise putty 
box of instant Irish oatmeal  

Like a Dumb Man Trying to Shout “Fire!”  / Sarah Paley

That is how I feel trying to write today.
Something there but it’s like smoke in wind.
I might as well tell you about my grandfather Julius,
the bastard from Bobruisk, aka The Pickle King.
His head was like a misshapen potato and his hair
like a worn-out broom. A master of self-pity and guilt,
with a smile reserved for no one that looked like a boiled
string bean trying to regain its former shape.
Oh, and he was also a crook. As slippery as an eel
preparing for his nuptial journey to the Sargasso Sea.
Julius would have pickled the eel and sold it to the Pope
as if it were the body part of a crucified saint.
Actually, I think he did, and I saw it in a little town near
Assisi when I was young and beautiful as a ripe plum.

Out of Body  / Amy Snodgrass

I had another one of those no-drugs-needed
highs on the way to the airport this morning:

I saw a Porsche dealership 
shimmer by and lost my mind

floating
my skin 
dissolving 

hatred for consumerism seething, fear for 
my son raging in competition for his heart

and my soul felt like the book cover 
of A Million Little Pieces except instead 

of clinging to the skin on my hand, all the tiny 
spheres floated out into a bluegreen ether

strips of flashing street lights shot across 
the dark just enough like stars to deceive

all my pieces floated out I hoped into him, 
agnostic prayers of please stay steady on

the thwap of the rubber on the concrete lines
lulled me into such deep and brighter blues

that the hatred and the seething pulled 
themselves slowly up like a tired band-aid

then ripped themselves off that last little bit 
in a squeal of brakes opening my eyes:

no streetlights
   just stars

        and the plane

bringing him back, steady floating and blue

January - Poem 6

No Violence Without Harm / Haley Bosse

You waited patient
For your first stretch of seam,
You dreamed of perfect
Settling over you in the night,
Friction smoothing crystals
Malleable and ready to be rolled,
Your body doughed out 
On the counter,
Whole ranges of ancient mountains
Parting at the touch.

salt  / Jess Bowe

i used to run from her,
the fish with my mother’s
name, chasing me through 
waterways of a dream;
the mouth, gaping
and toothless,
sound waves swallowing
my safety— i believed
this was anger as big 
as a planet,

formed in a fist of cells
and sea-life, 
made in the image 
of its origin—

until today, waking up
with saltwater dripping
from the blades of my back,
stolen dolphins circling 
the tank of my ribcage,
their prison song wrapping 
its grip around my bones,
cracking me open 
like a lightning knife—

i’m swimming to an illusory 
shore, sand reaching out
with thirsty hands,
brine pool at the bottom
of my first-born fear.

in all of this thrashing,
thunder and roar 
of fins slicing blue,
my small voice feels 
blindly 
for boat bellies,
for boards 

turning waves 
into tunnels of light. 

Excised  / Joanna Lee

Look, I have cut out the words
to make room for you.

We used to say such heavy things,
whole bloodied histories,

devilry and romance. Which we stole
from something someone wrote once,

a soldier, maybe. Maybe Neruda
who dreamed in train whistles,

tracks. The past, though, is never
really past: someone’s dad’s always yelling,

there are forever
sirens. The Roman coins

tucked in the bottom of my dresser
you gave me over

all the years, I see now:
ferryman’s wages.

We never know how close we are
to becoming another statistic.

Just yesterday, for example, I fell in love
with the gleam of this place;

today I fall with its grit.
The same train still passing.

You, still
gone.

Getting twenty-seven cards about you didn’t make me feel better  / Thomas Page

How can I fault them
for trying to make me feel 
better about the way 

I had to leave them 
to attend to matters you
had no reason to 

want to happen? I
received a stack of twenty-
seven cards, hand-drawn

“In a better place 
nows” with smeared clouds and wings 
of angels harping 

gilded strings, happy 
with the results of your place.
I force a smile 
and a soft “thank you” 
at the big stack of twenty
seven earnest pleas 

for me to return 
to normalcy. Bereavement 
lasts only a week, 

apparently, so 
I take my twenty-seven 
cards, in purples, pinks, 

and baby blues; dyed 
with markers; colored with pens
to my desk back there. 

I Stop Somewhere Waiting for You  / Sarah Paley

(Sestina for HDP)

Do you remember me doing a som-
ersault for you? My body
curling up in a ball. But you died,
just as all & every
body must. I stopped then, for
what seemed like good but was mere seconds

in the scheme of the afterlife; heavenly bodies
& such. You’re wandering while I try di-
aloging. Remember that Christmas Eve
when you threw a bat at the cat for
taking a shit on your table saw? A sec-
ant! You had excellent aim. Some

sibling, trying to soothe things over for every
one, drew a cartoon of our Mean Dad. First four:
two sons, two daughters. Then me. I was your second
favorite. Later that year in the summer
he, the cat, would reappear. His terrible body
ravaged by living in the wild. A miracle he hadn’t died.

Images & words float up when I stop & wait for
you. Corduroy jackets, ring-a-ding-ding, your rusty sec-
ateurs. You loved moving earth. Hoeing, digging, some
times making us all join you for hours & hours. Everybody
griping about planting saplings we thought already looked dead.
You know what? I am now older than you ever

were. Seems rude & dangerous to say. I want no seconds
taken off my clock. You didn’t either. Though there was some
thing off, wasn’t there? That sadness got your body
to just quit. Street urchin, loved son, card player/die
roller, soldier, port captain, husband, father & at every
turn never resting. Forging ahead. What did you say? For

Christsakes! Yes, often & with your lower lip bit. Some-
where. Are you out there? I’ll stop and sit my body
down and wait till you pass. When I die
I don’t expect to see you. I do that now, every
once in a while. It’s been what? Forty
plus years since you split in a mere second.

Somebody dies every four seconds. 

Solitaire  / Amy Snodgrass

for Louise Glück and my mother

the cards are glossy and slip

count to seven and over again

sliding the three of hearts 
that can save the game 

the quick flip and tap 
is my mother 
reborn into the air 
around me

and I gasp 

synapses grasp and find their hold

this game I decided 
would save me
did not save her
what did I expect?

count to seven and over again

the sliding and scooping start 
shuffle and arc and flaring fan, fast 
and impressive although it’s all I can do
and within that line she sits 

across from me, ashamed

count to seven and over again

and I gasp  
and shut

cutting the cards, a satisfying 
drop sets new plasticity into place

she hovers lightly and haunts
she never ended her poem

the glow of the bluelight dissipates 
into a cushion, cozy and sure

count to seven and try again

January - Poem 5

Aquifer / Haley Bosse

Broken ankle, bruising like a peach
And propped in the rot of your bedroom.
Memory of the empty church, chairs stacked
And the flickering light barely grazing your face.

It’s cloudset in the street,
The scrape of your calluses on broken concrete,
The shiver you indulge in the place of desperation.

Between the pain, emptiness,
A gift of atoms, invisible
Unless you attend to them:
The worms surfacing from puddles,
Their wriggle in your palm,
The undersides of dripping leaves,
Greenbright between their veins.

Later, when you clutter with distractions,
The worms call out with inching rustle.
Place your softened feet on pavement,
Trace the shape of emptiness again.

no one young knows the names of things  / Jess Bowe

i wander barefoot through the wind-pressed field, high grasses bowing to the soil, birds glittering in color, high and low, sky to Mother. clouds of every weight and form gather and drift. i pay attention. i offer up my most abundant treasure and gift it to the land. white peeks from just before me, rough and weathered bone in my palm. science asks me to drop a skull into a box. Mystery says decide to not know. i imagine a story instead of a face. i imagine survival and what it asks. i imagine i am not god. i imagine i’m as common as the wind, as ordinary as any leaf left for winter’s bed. teeth and jaw. can i call you friend? can i blur the border between body and light? can i rewind, count inward, become alive in the heartwood at my center? can i become new? i carry remnants of a living i’ve never seen, packed away in my pockets of feathers and stone.

Progress can be beautiful  / Joanna Lee

There was a moment on the bridge this morning

blankly driving south to work
across the river in the leftmost lane
as we daily do when out
of nowhere,
all the small presence of traffic, all
the weight of the coming day, all the fear of failure

that tucks itself into my socks,
all the terror of losing you that never really
vanishes
vanished into just the way
the sun smacked the new downtown highrises

crimson gold, a gleam like god herself pausing,
entranced,
as she traces her name in light.

Passwords  / Thomas Page

How many ways can I type recognizable 
combinations of your first grade teacher 
or your first pet or where you met your spouse 
before online hackers access your health records?

Your healthcare provider seems to think everyone 
is out to unearth every single note 
between you and the doctor about flu
shots and medications and test results; like, why?

What purpose would there to be to unearth records 
about all the times I’ve administered 
medication your network of doctors 
seem to disagree or even to disavow? 

What is the value of knowing how many times 
you and I have driven together to 
appointments that say the same, terminal 
diagnoses that washes its hands from treatments?

How could someone impersonate all memories 
that are sewn together in these doctor’s 
notes, hewn by the clinical manner which 
your experiences are totaled in those numbers?

Can a person, a patient, be sold for crypto 
on the black market blockchain for some tryst 
impersonating your numerous years 
for some digital exchange of goods or services?

Where’s the humanity in that?

Sonnet for Fred  / Sarah Paley

Wilma goes to bed but Fred puts
Baby Puss out and gets locked out
himself. “Wil-ma!” he screams to no
avail. No one answers – not his friend
Barney. Not Betty or Bam-Bam. He sleeps
outside which shouldn’t be a hardship
for a caveman but it is. It’s cold and he
doesn’t have any shoes and only three toes –
not like he has any to spare to frost bite.
People night think I’m an alarmist for worrying
so about Fred – locked out of his house every
night. Hapless father, for-granted spouse –
he suffers for us all and we switch channels –
hoping he’ll make it to morning.

grace and mud  / Amy Snodgrass

after Daniel Halpern & Seamus Heaney

expecting the northern lights
then expecting them to crumble

into glisten across mud
that white man and his canon

me holding my pen and 
my rage fades to the exhaustion 

of impotence and I cannot hold
but it's time to be getting on with the getting up now

and this other white man, well, he’s digging things 
up, out of the bog and me, he lightens my load

like swirling arcs of orange so obvious and so rare
hindsight shatters myth into endless renditions

and it’s time to be getting on now, getting 
up now and expecting the grace now

the grace rising up now out of the mud now and up

January - Poem 4

Extant Horizons  / Haley Bosse

Their blue a promise
of elsewhere

as much as proof
of hereness

though you wish
here wouldn’t bother

though you wish
these cousin mountains

would split beneath you
and drop you in the sea

just like your distant
finny relatives

gazing up at the illusion
of bright white nothing

dancing beyond your shrinking bubbles
and then behind your tired eyes.

body heat / burning haibun  / Jess Bowe

new year and i’d like to be
an old me, one still at a crossroads, one
fooled by the costume of loneliness
worn by spacious possibility, the void dressed
up in a bed too big, a carrot in the shape
of a face; i’d tell her to think about 
it, the sense to run, the voice of sunrise
screaming to her bones look how far you can
stretch out your arms! look, i know 
you’re tired of learning how to keep the heat
on, tired of wearing chainlink over the soft
of your silvering coat. i know you wonder
if your hands will sink into more than sherpa
in the middle of the dark. can i be a spark
of a star, dancing across the backroads?
or a scroll of light, carriage of warning,
constellation in the shape of an arrow
go this way! this is a map from your future,
and an accident has been reported.
you are no longer on the fastest route
to joy. pull over and warm yourself
with kindness. it’s just the cold talking,
and the heating costs are much too high.

the voice of sunrise: 
soft wonder, you are the route
to joy, warm with kindness

Poem to a physicist (reprise)  / Joanna Lee

Bitter texts still sit
gathering the dust of the unrequited
on the lowest bookshelf : Schrödinger;
Einstein;          Dirac;              I wish
I had learned my quantum mechanics harder,

learned how the waves of us can crash into
one
another
and devastate or

leave no trace, infinite             
footprints
whose hum no human skin can feel,
on a beach where God bathes without sunscreen.                               

Watching from another ocean,
could you yet teach me
to temper my frequency &

bend it
round an ending
that doesn’t land broken
in a puddle
on the floor? or

demonstrate, at least,               how to encounter                    elastically:
one vibration smiling across a room, and we both walk away, un-

wounded?

Or just (to hit all the classic buzzwords) put time                   

in reverse, do this shit over? the homeless cats
that sleep on my front porch
waking up tomorrow to a slightly
different sun.
Higher
math never had a damn thing
to do with love.

Bloodstains  / Thomas Page

I’ve had to clean up blood twice,
scrubbing the red off the beige 
carpet—mellowed with age.
Wouldn’t it be oh so nice
if I never had to see 
you apologize to me
for letting body slice 
or a gashed fleck of toenail 
to flood my clogged pores. Wail
in unison while I ice 
away the labored pain 
while I let floating guilt pang
me. I continue to roll dice 
allowing myself to care 
for you alone like a bear 
lost in the winter. I splice 
triangles of bandaids
over the wound as I bade 
myself to watch the dear price 
you pay for my negligence.
My troubled, labored conscience
remembers the Prince song thrice 
about blood and rain mixing 
into purple life nixing 
all familial deaths    

On My Way to Lunch for Spicy Jicama Salad and Rissoto Nero  / Sarah Paley

It’s grey, grey, grey on Great Jones Street today
with clouds drifting behind a scrim of mist,
punctuated by exclamation points
of dangling yellow traffic signals.
This vague day sets everything in sharp
focus – the red, yellow, green, red, yellow,
green disappear down the Bowery as wet
wheels hiss on the slick black and I remember
the cow pie on a summer day in a field
of golden hay and know that what thou
lovest remains, the rest is dross and what
thou lovest well shall not be reft from thee
and I remember to try to remember to come
back to any small part of you.

River Street Fire House, September 2001  / Amy Snodgrass

for Ilyce

There’s a beach I go to when I feel lost.
Accessed only by a narrow overgrown path.
Black sand with sparkling flecks. Black cliffs 
with ledges just right for swinging. 

We used to be so every-minute-close I would call you if I sneezed.
We always knew exactly what we meant. Now we are worlds apart.  

Our sons have turned 18.  
You taught me how to pump breast milk. 
You found me the right daycare. 
You clipped that car seat right in.

But– even before all that, and certainly 
before all this– we were lost together

on that awful day and in all 
the weeks after. We had no idea. 

Remember that small, two-bay fire station? 
How we found it one night, just around my corner?  

“Let’s light a candle.” 

It lasted all of two minutes: “Ladies, 
we need you to leave now, and thank you.” 

We had no idea how young we were.

I wonder– where do you go now when you feel lost?
Take me someday? You’ve never seen this beach. 

Someday, I’ll bring you. I’ll say, “Remember that time 
you brought me milk during the lockdown?” and you’ll say 
“Remember that time on the bench by the football field?”
and I’ll say, “Remember that time you said that thing and saved my life?

We will swing our legs, soak in the salt, and know exactly 
what we mean: we were, we are, so lost, so lucky, so lucky, so lost.

January - Poem 3

At the end of the lane, a house with staining carpets  / Haley Bosse

At the carving fork’s furthest tip,
The graveyard where my sister shattered stone,
The borders of letters long softened
Into a face tucked away from fall rains 
And gazing down into the fairy circle
Thumping stone by stone 
From our palms into the moss, 
Small weights sifted from the dust 
At the edge of the nearby field,
Plucked from the ever-crowning Earth
And piled by whoever tended the wheat
Shushing as we layered upward,
Ring becoming clicking fence 
And then a leaning wall, 
Any calls back for dinner muffled 
With the fading light 
Weaving through the Old Man’s Beard, 
The drooping arms of oaks brushing sweaty hair,

My sister’s arms cast out to catch the stone
Between them as she fell, 
The snap and scrape of one more body 
Throwing shadows through the shade. 

resolution  / Jess Bowe

out the window, the backyard is barely breathing.
i wonder whether i am looking out or looking in
the mirror between us.
she yawns in the darkened morning
and stretches her pale face against
the sky. i stretch thin
and flat against the night. 

across the hall
i see you in memory, your small body
hollowed with song. it’s been years
since you saved me
from the frostbite of winter,
kept my heart warm and rhythmic.

across the hall, i see you, 
handfuls of tears, a fear so high
i wonder what you might look like
behind its walls as you 
stand there in front of me.

as close to death as she appears, 
a mother’s silence has a sound,
a primal birthing-place of what eventually
crescendos through the orchestra green.

i am a mother 
in the quietest places,
a daughter adopting the patterns
of Her seasons. 

she taps her cold fingers
on the walls of my room, to say:
we wear teeth, even in the snow,
a necessary danger born
of unquestionable love.

Tanka as Dream Sequence  / Joanna Lee

Up at Dad’s

Up at Dad’s, the deer
curl heavy into daylight,
their white plumes bright flags
to break his long loneliness
into tolerable waves.

Three snows come and gone
before an old year passes
leaving its sharp breath
etched in echoes of regret,
cold hands reaching for cold stars

Leaffall of decades
lingers in the woods’ hollows
collarbone-deep like
swimming holes for winter fear,
cannonballed oblivions

Not the same, you say,
this season, its bright baubles
that hum and lie flat
since your chest rises even,
and dying feels further off.

Still

My hand holds heavy
to yours in the hospital
elevator, sinks
like gravity each checkup,
each new smirk of a season

God’s laughing, maybe
into the wind that howls round
the parking garage
outside the cancer center—
it is always colder there.

We take the long way,
valley road by the old tracks,
the way you don’t like
me to drive at night alone,
where I pretend fearlessness.

Reprieve

Methodical plunge
blunt knife into midwinter
red flesh excisions
then tie stems with summer tongues,
make cherry margaritas

Home again           

Yard sleeps, unlovely
and hard in its winter coat,
still-thorned roses climb
past the windows, penciling
there is no escape from rest.

The white lights you strung
and taught to shine through the night
flicker a welcome
against the cold long darkness
of a city rigid shut

It’s the same, I say,
the loneliness, the cold star
reaching back across
bent midnights to find heartbeats—
to find us, in the moonlight.

Later

Neighbor’s porch chimes fall
into stillness as you sleep
with untroubled breath;
wind has died just a little—
silent prayer of gratitude

 Dr. Pepper Shot Tips    / Thomas Page

It takes about a month to fill one bottle—
one empty bottle—of Dr. Pepper with shot 
tips. I have to be careful not to pierce 
a hypodermic needle through my fingers 
as I juggle the alcoholic prep pads 
to moisten the germs from your skin. 
Every so often, I do puncture 
the skin I inherited from your side 
of the family—pink and white and freckled—
skin I have to keep shrouded in cotton 
and wool; skin labeled “rice paper” 
by the makeup company; skin possibly 
sold in stores under the label “bruised peaches”
or possibly “plum flesh; too ripe to eat;”
skin that my mother slathered in spf 
one hundred because of your time 
in the ultraviolet rays; the skin I lived
in when I impersonated your mannerisms
when I played the dad in The Pajama 
Game when my mother pointed out 
who exactly I was pretending to be. 

LOVE  / Sarah Paley

Blindfolded, we know the way. We’re familiar with the shifting
landscape. Our well-worn boots know those overgrown roots –
there just to trip us up. We know the streams with their sudden
drop-offs, slippery rocks, and, of course, we know where the quicksand lies.

We know who lives where and how to find them and there they’ll always be –
at the kitchen table, dancing in the bar, sleeping in the den, hiding up that tree.
The one we climbed together and where I knew you’d never leave.

We didn’t know the steady breeze would turn into a gust and blow away
the permanent, the for-granted and the dear. So much for popping
by for a drink, to shoot the shit, to play canasta, to roast a chicken, to tell a joke,
to sing that song, to tell what only you would get or to remind you of the time…

Intern at LoveMoney Clothing  / Amy Snodgrass

  for Tyreik Prentice

Because money follows love, the website says.
Not because you’re supposed to love money, right? 

I told you about the salmon in Alaska.
You were mad I was gone. Remember?

You are so full of love in a world so full 
of frantic upstream flipping and frenetic 
addict flailing. The salmon. They flap and flip 

like the hands of the man on the corner:
just as red, scales and scabs, desperate, 

not knowing they are about to die, 
both knowing they are about to die.

The man’s name is Chester, you tell me.  
“Chester,” you say, “You come on in, old man, 
and you eat. Eat for free. Eat because I love you.” 

You hold his hands inside yours and they still.  
My heart son, please, when everyone— 

like the almost-dead— pale blood-red— salmon
like the crack-fueled shaking— death of nature’s making

—when everyone is all on about the money

stop—

           hold the fiending until it stills into love

—hold the love — hold it to heal

the obsessive money-fueled drive to death—

January - poem 2

Stitched Up  / Tess Adams

They closed me with catgut—
a surgeon’s neat crosshatch
where the world had split;
my body a torn thing
stitched back into use.

Sutures tugged and burned
rough twine pulled through silk.
Each knot a small salvation
each scar a line of text
I’d never planned to write.

They mended my belly
my bladder, my broken gate—
made me a patchwork of losses
that somehow held.

I trace the seams—
their raised relief, their quiet shine.
I wear them as testament—
not to what was lost
but to what was re-made.

Unwanted Winter  / Haley Bosse

Wooded midday. Snow nearly
Scarring light. Wondering at
Quick damp. Crackle 
Of the plastic sled. Electric blue
Window of your thighs. How 
A breath catches. Then
Scatters out behind you. Coats
The sharpened hill. How
Even now you fly. 

Mother Magick  / Jess Bowe

three ingredient pasta dinner
tastes like firesitting feels;
for this moment,
you are warm and tethered
to meaning. you are close
to each other and binded
by story and songs and the scent
of smoke prays its way into
every fiber stitched across
your body. you are blessed
by memory.

in every room a song,
in every crisis, you know
what it means to be safe
and you do not learn the word

Crisis or broken poor without;
you know what it means
to have music sung in your doorway
while your blankets
wrap around you like angels
and you say them by name
uriel michael raphael sandalphon

the oven cracked open down the hall
sends heat and you never ask
because you never suspect
your mother is cracking open;
all you hear is melody
painting photos on blank walls.

under the night, poetry is written
in an upstairs room, candle flames
dance their shadows
and your mother, alone,
is sobbing her thanks to the close-up
clouds of winter.

you won’t know the furniture
she’s moved, the stacks of clothing
in the garage, the grief she’s shaken
hands with at all hours. morning is a rising
thing and her well-trained gaze 

catches the shadow of a child
wrapped around her waist
glowing on the back wall of the kitchen,
coffee and bread in the air.

magick comes from nothing.
there’s no need for it
when the world always knocks
at your door.

in the empty night, with bare hands
and feet to kiss the cold of the ground
that’s where it strikes,
each spell
and intention,
each noticed wonder unobstructed
by Things; what can you do
with the Invisible

that opens your eyes
to tiny white faeries
grazing the lips of pink
peonies— that pauses your steps
in the driveway
the sun spilling gold across
your rooftop,
the rain
calling out to light
splitting in spectrum

speaking
‘blessed are the mothers’
who make peace in their walls
with ghosts and crumbs
and still know god
at the end of the night
at the bridge of morning
and still wrap arms around
the world with room in their pockets

and somehow make
fireworthy
three ingredient pasta dinners. 

Haibun: Second draft for a requiem / Joanna Lee

siempre quiero estar contento
triste no valgo la pena

                                    --Estopa, “Te Vi Te Vi,” Destrangis

You were conceived in a season of darkness, of regret and little hope for a brighter anything. Born sour, plucked by hand and secreted into a clear plastic cup during January workdays that began before dawn and ended after night had made its daily return. Washed and paper-towel-dried, you were set with a half dozen brothers into special dirt and a small peat pot, anxiously perched in the sill of the most southern-facing window. You, miracle of mid-winter: those first two baby-fine leaves like a second shot at love. And like love, you grew. At two inches you caught the light as the days lengthened; at four, you were given a pot of your own: clay of some desert earth shaped in promise. Paychecks were poured into your fast-drain soil, and you soaked up each successive summer on the front porch where daylight lingered longest. Come fall, you’d be carried icon-like to the back of the house, your own room lit with your own fluorescent lights, defying the shortness of the days. Soon, your leaves were as big as a hand, fragrant as tea. You grew thorns—thorns! Spring rolled into summer and your branches reached for the sky, their willowy lengths dividing, thickening, hardening into arabesques. But there came a turning point. Some plague, one overlong winter, and for the past eighteen months, you’ve been slowly dying. The leaves dropping soundless, you ceasing to look upward. Each day a slow shear. No more drinking of the light. No more green laughter. Like me, you will never bear fruit. It is the burden of one who has planted the seed to put it to rest at its failing. One midwinter evening I carry you from the house to let the night seep through all at once—leaf, stem, trunk, to the cradle of your roots.     

Eres de los que no vuelan
presidario del silencio frio,
frio que la sangre hiela

Placeholder   / Thomas Page

Most people understand how serious
it is when I say what you’re dealing with 
“Oh, I know a guy’s son,” or “a classmate,”
or whatever distant connection they have 
with what they think you’re going through. 
People always wanted to commiserate 
about what how it must be like to be you
or to deal with you or to deal with it. 
Secrets are like the foil over candies—
torn open rather easily by children;
savored in the mouth as it melts. 

Time Travel  / Sarah Paley

Memories have a gravitational pull
though I seem to become untethered
and find myself floating like a novice 
astronaut taking in the galaxy of my childhood –

the iron key
turning reluctantly
in the grandfather clock

      the slurp of the mud
      swallowing my red boots
      as my sister pulls me from above

      a fireball’s dye
      alarming my red
      tongue

      the smell of lilacs, pine needles,
gasoline, cut grass, the rotting trunk
I sat on for hours in the woods

These comets hurtle towards me or hang
like dumb dead stars insisting on existing.

What are we without them? What do goldfish remember?
Involuntary traveler, there is no cure for memory.

Lap Swimming in Costa Rica  / Amy Snodgrass

(after living here for 12 years)

Somehow I’m still surprised every year
when these December winds make waves,

shaking my early evening laps 
into a frenzy: unwelcome and hard.

Here these winds –warm and long–
mean Christmas. These winds make 
everyone around me glad with tidings.

But even after all this time, I long 
for the dry scent of snow coming, for
the pine wreaths, the toffee and the elves,
and I wonder when my mother will come.

The winds shake the crane cables:
abandoned, shameful, and smooth.
Arcs of half-painted steel above the pool
claw into what’s left of the sun.

I pause and I float, watching others 
on the deck gesticulate as they discuss 
the next stages of construction. I watch 
them wave and point in the direction 
of the winds, and smile 
their holiday smiles. 

To them, the winds are faith.

To me, the winds are dust-filled omens,
darkening my lane with whipping dry leaves—

I don’t know how I got here.

January - Poem 1

Bog Body, Also Known As  / Haley Bosse

Sulfurskin 
Softbone 
Loosebreath
Breakthrough
Bottlerocket
Bricabrac
Songshush
Winterwait
Weightpuddle
Properform
Chloroplast
Sugarcrust
Crumblebuttal 
Cornerstore
Gathergutter
Groanlift 
Pittersplatter
Bedmade 
Lornlace
Twistslumber
Covetcradle
Gonedaughter 
Twinface
Allrefrain

under pressure  / Jess Bowe

saturn moans with a storm
composed of a thousand 
flavors of misery. 

hydrogen gets a hug. 

we stand at the glass 
and cheer 
for what we haven’t survived,
what exists without us,
unflagged. 

she holds me between
thumb and index,
a honeyed marble,
all 5’6 of me,
every bucket of midnight 
grief, volcanic paradise 
joy spewing, flame-spattered 
across the blackened 
forever-night canvas;

every color witnessed,
every tuesday afternoon
down to the palm of a hand. 

isn’t it glorious, the way time turns 
inside-out the moment we become
fully occupied with atmosphere? 

every human story, a game of jacks 
on the ringed bedroom floor. 

Eschatological meditations while doing the dishes on New Years Eve  / Joanna Lee

For some days now, the light
has grown—just a bit, as it does:

a few minutes’ sunshine
at the end of a long dark prayer.

And maybe that’s all we can ask
of the things for which we ask,

a brighter ending, or less clouded eyes
with which to see

even the smallest moments, like
watching the grease

from last night’s dinner
break its slick hold on the plate

when we apply a little Dawn,
a little elbow, the oil becoming

streak, then bubble, then sliding
into the oblivion of the sink’s drain.

A clearing away before beginning again.    
No, it ain’t quite the thing with feathers, this

clock tipping the first handful
of earth onto last year’s grave, it ain’t

dandelion wishes or confetti-on-crystal—yet,
dishes cool and drying on the rack,

we’ll pop that bargain store bottle
of bubbly just the same.   

Cop-Out / Thomas Page

I’ve seen it mentioned a lot on TV
to explain away an absent actor 
or pencil in a cause of departure. 
“This kind of tragic thing happens many
times a day,” they say, “just make sure to see
your doc, just to check” patting the bereaved 
tissues all over the floor. They might play 
Coldplay or Snow Patrol or even Creed
while the heavy, steel double doors close out 
this season’s big twist— a fan favorite killed 
off screen— syncopated with the baseline,
Hollywood white teeth enrobed by cherry gums 
pantomiming grief, collapsed on the floor
liquid tears rolling down in a straight line: 
I only remember how quiet it was when they told me. 

BREUGHEL  / Sarah Paley

Across the street on the sixth-floor missing windowpanes are billowing plastic
on this windy, cold day. A floor below a Puerto Rican flag serves as a curtain.

An army of delivery men congregate outside the Hub. They talk, argue, whisper,
shout, sing in Wolof, French, Fula, Mandinka, Jola, Soninke, Arabic

They wear their unofficial uniform of black hoody, thick canvas pants,
and helmets. A sea of orange and green bicycles extends around the corner.

Prayer mats are snapped open and placed on the sidewalk facing Mecca.
Their comrades huddle and picnic under scaffolding eating mountains of rice

bought from the Halal truck parked mid-block. Cooing pigeons, their chests bulging,
heads thrusting, pace like generals inspecting the troops as they wait

for grains to drop. At the bakery, young couples order lattes and Scandinavian pastries.
They try to navigate their heavily insulated children

while pushing stroller tanks. It’s recess time at the Eastern New York Community School
and a gaggle of adolescent girls, armed crossed, heads askew,

try to convey their utter disinterest to the middle-aged coach who holds the basketball.
On the other side of the playground boys attempt to look menacing

but can’t resist busting out to chase one another in circles. Two customers sit in the window
of The Barber’s Blueprint. A black and white pit bull in an argyle sweater pulls

his master towards a tree. A firetruck, red lights flashing, is pulled up outside Andrea’s
Pizza Oven. A firefighter emerges with a slice

And yes, overhead, that’s Icarus falling and flailing through the blue sky.

Late December, 2025  / Amy Snodgrass

the sun took so long to rise 
we thought it wouldn’t,
my daughter and I  
–it took so long

–the stretch of Illinois highway spilling 
in front of us to the horizon– 

we felt apocalyptic:  the world 
seemed intent on stopping, ready-ing 
          itself to re-start, defiant

we laughed, used the words freaky 
and eerie, doomsday, foreboding

a great moment of connection and we
will relish it in reverse but still
I longed for lorazepam and still
she slide-glanced on repeat to the east 

we came to the brink
I felt my panic tide up to crest
she googled sunrise time today

the white lines barrelled us along our way

and eventually, yes, the darkness heaved into dullness 
and the gray glowed around the edges

my daughter relaxed into relief, laughing 

I myself tightened (and now here’s|
the secret I’m telling only you, so sshhhh!)
I tightened into what felt like–
it couldn’t be, though–     disappointment.

I mean, the day 
rose, the drive ended, and
everything, even after all that, everything 

was just fine

December - Poem 31

We cannot afford to remember only the bitter-breath / A Cento

with lines drawn from Kate Bowers, Katie Collins, Ellen Ferguson, Chris Fong Chew, Davis Hicks, Victor Barnuevo Velasco, Jen Wagner, and Stacy Walker.

aliveness is                                                                                                       the trade value.

the scent always                                                                                               paired with coyote promises

In words and worlds                                                                                     not meant for me

and the stillness

can tell                                                                                                             a story

how malleable light is

I find myself lost

                                                                                                                          in waiting,

the question becomes

another

Can you find me here? 

Lingering in the shade                                                                                      between two and three

The gnawing that knots

Already the house begins to split open, 

like a crackerjack or pomegranate scattering

The stars I claim are  misaligned
I know no                                                              constellations

If you were to ask. And I were to answer 

The worst thing you could have in this world is a biology

Do whatever you have to do to make it                                                             back to the air

Decant your spirits with abandon, knowing this:
                                                                                                                      I was the sign

I can bring lifeboats                                             and landing gear

and pen paper and pen paper                                                              and pen began began

Imagine the world outside your lens

                                                                         Because someday

December - Poem 30

James Joyce’s Eyesight Improves Markedly, and He Gets a Job Writing Catalogue Descriptions for a Window Manufacturer in Pennsylvania  / Kate Bowers

For Val

“I have met with you, bird, too late, or if not, too worm and early” said Jim Joyce as he entered my office.

“Thanks for coming in mate. Now about this recent set of drafts you turned in for the catalogue:”

If the home improvement store is a nightmare from which you are trying to awake, then look no further than Finnegan’s Windows where the supreme work of the life of a windower is to make the aperture dance like a cork upon a tide. Take for example our latest window—

The Bloom NB-20 Double-Hung: 

Constructed from cellular PVC, the Bloom NB series utilizes a block and tackle balance system for ease in opening. AAMA Certified and NFRC rated, the NB series with its super warm edge technology provides outstanding energy efficiency and transsubstantiation of the host when lifted up. Compression balance window units, compression primed wood sash units, and fixed units are available —every one of them inviting you to lean out.

Leave your book.
Leave your room.
Come and see us very soon.

“We’re all good with that. It’s quite striking, actually. It’s this next bit.”

So weenybeenyveenyteeny is our dissatisfaction rate that it is practically nil.

“Jim, lad, some days are Wordle and some days are not. Most days for builders are pretty wordless entirely. So this bit is going to have to go. Also, now that I look at it again, that transsubstantiation bit if you please must go as well. This is an ecumenical workplace. Also, what about these prepositions at the ends of these sentences?”

“Mistakes are the portals of discovery,” said Jim.

“Haha. Very cheeky. Quite good then. Now moving on to this next bit.”

Extrusions forced to meet the die requirements, all the enclosed voids party to same make the Ultra Thermal 4445 series a clear choice for fixed, double-hung, or sliding with optional dual interior/exterior finishes. To wit, unparalleled or grammed is the Ultra Thermal sang Buck Mulligan having commandeered the Fort Pitt stockade for rented rooms free of charge. The Pointe being baptismalb’nthat.

“I know Buck trained you and letting him go was unfortunate. But so is jumping on the company president’s desk while wearing a Statue of Liberty hat and reading our specs for those windows in the observation tower in French at the top of one’s lungs, Christmas Party or no. So there is no saving him. And a catalogue of window specs is not the place for speeches of praise, unless they’re speeches about windows, which this is but kinda sorta more obviously is not. Think of your future, man.”

“Glints in glints out,” said Jim.

“Exactly right. Now get back out there and show us what you’re made of.”

Our administrative assistant saunters in after he leaves. “I think we all know what he’s made of—pure palaver.” She hands me the note he left on her desk.

“I heard you singing 
Through the gloom. 

Singing and singing 
A merry air, 
Lean out of the window, 
                                             Goldenhair.”

Face palm. I sigh and look up. “Ask the H.R. director to call me please.”

Thinking silently as she leaves “He’s such a good writer.”

And also, “Why am I speaking to myself in rhyme of a sudden here?”

Then calling out after her “And what have I told you about singing in the office!”

The Bachelors / Katie Collins

Drown in the waves of uncertainty
Curse fate when it casts you aside
Dig deep in each bout of the unknown
Meet me here
Here we will build our lives
In an ever-changing world
Side by side
Because whatever fears you have
Are mine

3 pm Tickets to the Rockettes / Ellen Ferguson

"Stella for Star," I said to the girl
In the row past the very last one
"Stella for Star," she looked at the wall
"What's your dream?  Share your dream, it's your turn!"
She looked round at me
Thick glasses, odd jaw
She looked rabid, I feared she might bite
"To be a Rockette," Stella said with a slur
A small kick to her shin from the right.

It's a dream for a song
Not your dream
Not your song
Blur the edges a little for me.

Think of Stella the Star before you say no
Every kick to the sky should be seen.

Somewhere in the world   / Chris Fong Chew

The falling of a ball rings in something new 
as the sound of horns and confetti fly 

And in a room in a building somewhere 
a man is crying tears. 
A drop for a loved one 
who did not make it to the new year.

In the room next door, a woman 
surrounded by raucous noise,
of confetti and champagne 
in the company of those held dear. 

Up a floor a family sits 
together around a table. 
In prayer hoping for peace, 
And happiness, maybe even some cheer.

Outside someone huddles 
wrapped in blankets to keep in heat 
some passersby gives coins 
hoping they may find something to eat.

Across the way, a couple is arguing 
over something trivial in the world 
perhaps they will find resolution 
as the conversation unfurls. 

And across an ocean a child awakens 
in a year reset anew 
his journey in life is short thus far 
with many years to grow.

And on another continent, somewhere in the world 
An elderly couple walks slowly 
Counting the days they know. 

Somewhere, somewhere out in the world, 
someone is feeling joy feeling sadness, 
feeling cheer, and more. 
Someone is feeling all the emotions 
bringing in a new year. 

What we see in the moss-mirror / Davis Hicks

The thrum of beating wings
thrashes their threshing-floor tempo
lighter than any thought we could find.
The many making themselves known,
each part of the flock-flight
as vital as any other- 
only interchangeable to the outsider,
only unnoticed by the blindness of the public.
It does not haunt as the sounds of the Coyotes,
that gaunt-grunt of the adaptable,
the genuine struggle of the least concerned.
Those sounds do not get called song,
though their lyrics are often sharper and more real
to us than the bird-beaked melodies.
There’s an honesty in barking, 
a truth in opportunistic scavenge-scrounging
and with it,
perhaps between the mud-scraped clawmarks
and the barred canine teeth 
stuck with sinew and marrow,
we can remember how close
they really are
to our best friends

At Last / Victor Barnuevo Velasco

In time, we will meet again. Perhaps on
a wintry night, along the highway cutting
the Badlands, when the ground is a cathedral
of darkness, and distant cities glow fainter
than stars. Your hand will linger on the back
of my hand. Your fingers will trace my knuckles
as if they were spires and ravines. I will make
a fist. You will enclose it in your palm. We
will grasp the speed of tumbleweeds, at last.
Or perhaps you will be fixed on crossing time.
You will read the sharp-knife ridges as exit
signs. I am decoding the layers of silt and clay
and ash, compacted by epochs of silence.
We will meet -- yes, briefly --and miss each other,
again.

The End  / Jen Wagner

A third cup of coffee.
And endless longing.
I don’t know who I am right now. 
This woman in a swinging chair. 
Breathing deep. 
The cool, balmy air. 
I can hear traffic in the distance and crickets beneath my bare feet. 
I smell honeysuckle and rot. 
I don’t say what I want because I don’t like this place anymore. 
I promised myself to move forward.
Only forward. 
I think this time when I head east once again. 
I will leave her here. 
To sit. 
And swing. 
And fret. 
And long. 
And rot. 
No more balancing on the knife’s edge. 
No more hanging on by a thread. 
Swan dives in the hope that I can learn to grow wings. 
And begin to live again. 

Things I Say to My Daughter That I'm Trying to Hear for Myself / Stacy Walker

I hear you, sweet girl,
This is hard.
You’re allowed to have those feelings,
They are real.
I love you no matter what,
You are safe here.
It’s ok to make mistakes,
I believe in you.
Do you need a big hug?
I’ll hold you.
We can take the day off,

You can always listen to your body.
It doesn’t have to make sense,
You can trust yourself.
You don’t have to have the answers,
Just breathe.
You are not responsible for everyone else,
Care for yourself.
Whatever you have to give is enough,
There is no such thing as perfect.
I love you more than you can imagine,
Just because you’re you.

December - Poem 29

The Ladies Speak French  / Kate Bowers

There are six of them, white-haired
Reading aloud handwritten letters in French they have found somewhere then translating them aloud into English as well today. 

The flowing, pale blue cursive writing on the fragile, transparent paper is beautiful even at a distance.

They practice every Monday morning from inside the bookstore’s coffee shop and are delighted with themselves.

They are not loud when they are aloud. 

They are chic and elegant in their movements, even the two with canes.
They wear scarves and open collared shirts and rings on their hands.

They greet each other with kissing noises cheek to cheek—faire la bise.

They are not themselves French.

The cafe manager, heavily pregnant with twin girls to be named Genevieve, which means belonging to the tribe or race of women, and Simone, which means to be heard, knows all the ladies by name and has their usual orders waiting.

I do not know the café manager’s name.

The ladies ask after the babies as if they are their own.

So pleasant are their interactions one wonders
If they are related.

They are not.
They just want to become fluent in French.

Because someday.

Anonymous / Katie Collins

Lip gloss, bath bomb
Do you even know me?
I wonder if we’ve met before
Because I can’t tell
Half forgotten memories
I once held dear
Fade with the distance in your eyes
In my mind,
We laugh at the wrong moment
Delighting in missteps
We make together
French yogurt and panty hose
Do you still know our inside jokes
Or am I all alone?

Free Bombas Socks / Ellen Ferguson

How delightful! A man with a plan buys Bombas for his gal.
If she listened to her toes, we’d all be hugging now. Instead,
We three fuzzy pairs land on Swapcandy, free to make magic on some stranger’s soles.

Did you say Bombas?
Won’t those socks match three donated pairs?
Could socks be the new, improved fruitcake?

We are socks, not cake.
Perhaps you misunderstood, should return
To your hovel now.

Hear me out, socks. That guy with the wife who popped you on Swapcandy,
Three needy kids still got excellent socks. Let’s say Claudia over in Math now calls Bombas.
They respond again, Sure! On the house, sending socks to three more poorly shod.  

Oh, that’s what he means about cake. Pass
It forward. Yes,
Twelve feet much warmer and happier now.

Just when you thought we all lived in one bleak house
A landscape bereft of everything good. Yes, even we socks know
An idea with legs. Carry on, Bombas: the Santa of socks.

Global Broadcast  / Chris Fong Chew

To all the children of the world:

As bombs fall, a child is born 
As gunshots ring, a child is born 
As mines explode, a child is born

Into a world where metal tears into flesh 
and violence is the gift bestowed 
by generations previous and their 
hopes and dreams twisted 

Televised for global audiences
what kind of world are we
Crafting, passing along 
Constructing and tying 
neatly with a bow, labeled 
From: the current stewards of this world. 

where beginnings live / Davis Hicks

On the cusp of night
crickets tune their sawblades
to the sound of swaying grass
as the dew has settled
it’s gentle blanket down,
that quilt of shimmering cool
draped across the 
bed of everything alive.
From before the dawn comes the fickle-trickle
of rain romping through
its draining drizzle only just enough
to wet the world,
just as the faint feeling of it
purifies the mind 
and minds the pure.
Barefoot steps were made for such a time,
just as the sky is matching
stars and droplets both,
wish-giving as morning breath turns to 
gasp and tears are blinked away.
Only then, 
only in the interim
does all there is 
shimmer.

I want to love you like you love your freedom / Victor Barnuevo Velasco

What language must I speak so you understand
What freedom means, brother – if I call you that?

I see you always on television. At my doctor’s waiting
Room, you are on mute. You are staring directly at me.

Your arms stretch forward. Is it a hug you want to give?
Do you like to shake my hands or my shoulders?

I am reading your lips. Over and over. If only
I have the words you have yet to find.

I look at the number on my palm. How much
Longer must I wait before I am informed

Of the illness to treat? While you are free to march
Around. Brandishing freedom. As prayers and flags.

As guns. As blank pages of history on which you
Write. Over and over. As if healing words find us.

Grey Sweatpants Diva / Jen Wagner

According to my daughter,
divas also exist
in grey sweatpants
with mismatched slippers,
three-day unwashed hair,
and a face mask
desperately trying
to evict chin acne.

My superhero cape
is a men’s white T-shirt
with coffee stains down the front.
It smells like I haven’t showered in days—
though that’s far from the truth.

I tend to do this
with things I love.
I crawl inside them
until I can’t stand the smell.
Until I forget myself.
Until we merge.
Morph.
Mold into one.

But I’m grateful
she still sees
a beautiful human.

For her—
I will remember myself.
I will try to see myself
the way she sees me.
I will be the woman
she already believes I am.

I will still morph
and mold—
but only into things
worthy of the metamorphosis.

I will still wear great sweatpants
and face masks,
because we are worthy
of care.
Of rest.

And I will become
the thing that I love.

She is the one
who showed me how.
And I will follow her lead—
so when her daughter arrives,
she won’t need
to be reminded.

Ambition Isn't Allowed  / Stacy Walker

A cage
Where good girls go
To become successful women,

Where the achievements
Of childhood
Snowball into more
In a flash,

The top student,
Team captain,
Becomes the young leader,
Up-and-comer,
Who can get things done,

Proves herself
By going the extra mile,
Just as her teachers
Reported.

The extra
always earns approval,
comes with accolades
and affirmation,
but leads to
blazing a trail
ridden with hidden weeds
and thorns,

easy to justify
on an untouched path,
convinced it’s only this way
for a pioneer,
not because I’m off track,
lost.

The trek and its sacrifices
Sold as part of the plan,
Worth it for 
A paycheck, a bonus, a title,
The price to pay to get
Where I’m going,

But the further down the path,
The more scrapes and bruises,
Heartache and break,
I see the carrots dangling,
Become a mirage,

My sacrifices were made
For them,
Their approval never served me –
I was its prisoner –
Providing all they needed,
Perfectly packaged up
With a pretty bow.

But once my vision is clear,
The cage can no longer contain me,
Clawing, breaking out,
Beaten and bruised,
In a body that was built
For their approval, too,

Once out,
Freedom,
Searching for a path of ease and care,
Where I seek no one’s approval
But my own,
My body, too,
Is free,
Refusing to be boxed in
To what anyone wants
It to be.

December - Poem 28

Sciatica 3- The Version Grimm  / Kate Bowers

For Mae and Lane

This back of mine I think I know
Until it brings me very low
A right-angle drooping sheer as fear
Looking like a horse at plow

My neighbors indeed look askance
Each time I take a forward stance
No longer high and lofty like my cakes
They bought each year for every dance

They give their hatted heads a shake
Attempt to foreswear a similar fate
As if that is their promise not to keep
No osteoporosis, no joints replaced

Sadly,

Every Gretel and Hansel will come to weep
Against the witch’s promise reaped
That all but the sacrum burns to a heap
Of ashen promises we never intend to keep
Those winds we bend to, the debt still deep.

That sacrum though?
It still will beat.

Grief / Katie Collins

Cold bath water
Shivering flesh
Popcorn ceilings staring down
The walls are distant memories
You cannot stand
You cannot leave
There's a familiar weight
Pressing down on you
Holding you in this moment
You flesh raises into goosebumps
But even the towel
One arm's reach away
Is too far
When you're suffocating

For Christmas My Father Sent Me a Man / Ellen Ferguson

I asked my father for a man like him.
A mysterious message landed.
"Your package will be delivered January 27," it said.
I hadn't ordered anything, except that guy from my Dad.
On January 27 another message came.
"We're sorry, there are weather-related delivery changes. May 9 is your new delivery date."
On May 9, my birthday, I looked on my porch.
There you were.
"January 27?" I said.
"Yes, May 9," you said.
Package delivered,
Mission accomplished,
We went inside.

The Legend of the Red Thread / Chris Fong Chew

Do you see it? If you look hard enough you can see it. 
Twisting, turning, wrapping around trees, around plants,
a thin thread that follows along the path 
of life, your journey throughout the world. 

It is said that fate tied a knot 
the moment you were born. A red thread 
connecting you to another person in this world. 
Do you see it? Do you believe in this tale? 

Along the way this thread may tangle
trap other people in its long fibers 
wrap around trees and plants and animals 
create a journey that weaves and spins 
across this earth. 

Some may follow it, few will ever find its end. 
But if you see a red thread, bowed neatly 
to your hand, follow it, and perhaps you will uncover 
something wondrous on the other end.

When the heat goes out, remember how we are to love / Davis Hicks

The morning will be draped over you like a shroud,
as the subtle blue of still frosted air
sucks all the wind from your pipes
and removes all the blood from your lips,
Leaving only the husk of dried fruit 
that is your dry shiver-shriveled fingers
searching for the blankets.
You will have a mild growl 
from inside
your gullet, 
well aware you were
a potato or two short
of full.
Your head will pound with the knocks
of worry and ache rapping at your chamber door.
Your tongue will feel swollen,
saturated with the only water 
your body 
can hold.
Remember the bodies 
which must travel 
across the grounds, away
from the warmth and the quiet 
in search of the quenching.
Know the bodies whose nightly sleep-serenade 
is the gnawing in their gut,
is the well known meal 
of sleep.
Know your suffering is only a flicker compared
to the lives of the hundreds
of thousands
of millions
who have and will continue to live lives
entirely in what you think
is pain.
There, 
after bedside cup or sink water has met needs,
after warm blankets melt away the chill
of the frosting season
and headache’s end is only a pill away,
be grateful.
When partner’s patterned breath
becomes the tide pulling
you back to the land of the dreaming,
be grateful
and know
you are blessed.

Almost/Not Quite a Canto/a Cento / Victor Barnuevo Velasco

An enemy among spies: moving gingerly.
A landscape of superbloom. Sudden sprays
Of shrapnel: Red poppies everywhere.

From Florida to California, I-10 stretches:
A belt of sunshine: A border within a border.
Trucks and vans piled: Walls keep moving.

Across the panhandle, the power surges. Lights
Exploding. No distinction among shadows.
Some stalk; some hide: All darkness.

Nothing matters but: the quality of: love/mercy:
Is not strained: In the end. Don’t you – too -- find
This commingling of wisdom injudicious? Injurious?

Anyway, let us now price/praise Paradise/Famous Men:
A way out/a way in. The Barbarians are at the gates:
On both sides. The gates are wide shut/wide open.

Little deaths. / Jen Wagner

I am not afraid of death
I die a bit every day
Although they are little deaths
It mars me all the same. 

I am not afraid of death
It comes with every choice I make
In these deaths I leave behind
The parts of me I cannot take. 

I am not afraid of death
I welcome her with open arms
I know where we are going
I know its worth the scars

I am not afraid of death
At times I seek her out
I revel in her wisdom
I surrender all my doubt. 

I am not afraid of death
But sometimes I try to hide 
In the darkness, It’s odd to think
but those little deaths are my light. 

I am not afraid of death
She will burn it all for me
To illuminate the paths 
I myself cannot see. 

I am not afraid of death
Until it’s you she wants
You can’t see what is waiting
But I do. 
Just hold on. 

These little deaths…
They are a gift
And someday you will see. 
You too will welcome her
and rise again. Like me. 

I am not afraid of death. 
But it’s her sister for whom I fight. . 
Because every little death I suffer
Takes me closer to my light. 

I have died so many times.
And always I’m reborn
With every little death I grow stronger
Than I ever was before. 

So no. I am not afraid of death. 
She is my closest friend. 
And with every little death I thank her
Until we meet again. 

Nothing Lasts  / Stacy Walker

If I’m being honest,
I’m tired of writing poems.
Every time my pen hits the page,
It feels silly,
Pointless,
Like it’s already been said
Or I don’t want to say it.

I don’t want to write about the depths,
My words don’t seem like enough,
A few scribbles on a page
In smooth, black ink,
Drawn into shapes that are letters,
Can’t possibly  contain all
That’s inside.

It would take so many scribbles
Of words on pages,
Filling notebook after notebook,
And quite frankly,
I don’t have the energy
Or the time.

I think I’ve plowed through
Enough darkness,
Maybe I can stay in the light,
On the surface
For a while,

I could write about the simple things,
Ya, maybe I’ll simply observe
My daughter’s little body
Curled up under the dusty, pink comforter,
Nestled into the pile of pillows
And my side,
As she reads,
Enthralled in the story
Inside a little chapter book
With a purple cover.

She’s only just started it
As we lay down for the night,

And I know I’m in for it
Because once she’s begun
And found herself in another world,
Imagination running free,
I’ve lost her for a while,
Pleading for one more chapter,
One more page.

But tonight,
We have time,
It’s the weekend,
It’s the holidays,
And we’re so snuggled up,
And I wonder how long
It will take her to finish –
I could just stay here
Until then.

And I see that the surface of my life
Takes me to the depths daily,
Delivering moments
That threaten to destroy me
If I think too hard.
So yes, I’ll stay here on the surface
For a while,
Because I know it won’t last
Forever.