February - Poem 22

Skyline / Kristine Anderson

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

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

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

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

Real Existence / Barbara Audet

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

Which of my memories most succeed?

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

Which of my memories most succeed?

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

Which of my memories most succeed?

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

Which of my memories most mislead?

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

Which of my memories most mislead?

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

Which of my memories most mislead?

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

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

On love / Bee Cordera

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

Rogue Angel / Ashby Logan Hill

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

Solitude / Amy Marques

A solitude may originate:

listening

to our lives

stopping

to ask 

          and hear.

A memorable interval.

Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

I am so tired  / Sonia Sophia Sura

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

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

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

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

A Poem with My Brother and Dad  / Samuel Spencer

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

February - Poem 21

Photographs / Kristine Anderson

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

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

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

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

If Winter Were A Hockey Game / Barbara Audet

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

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

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

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

untitled / Bee Cordera

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

NOEL / Ashby Logan Hill

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

Comedy Influence / Amy Marques

Chocolate was a comedy

influence, a happy

power

both private and public.

A luxury—always.

Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

Mise en place  / Samuel Spencer

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

February - Poem 20

Sepia / Kristine Anderson

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

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

Beside The Sea / Barbara Audet

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

ANTICIPATION / Ashby Logan Hill

                      for Faith

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

Deliberation / Amy Marques

begin deliberating 

before you must

answer:

the tip of your 

tongue is to be

pitied.

Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

Every piece of the world touches me  / Sonia Sophia Sura

I hold my own hand
to fall asleep.

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

Every piece of the world touches me.

It smells amazing
when the earth 
gets wet.

Sometimes I 
see colors
from people.

Sometimes I feel
colors when
I am touched.

Imagine if the 
whole world hugged.

What would that
sound like?

Imagine if we all
went quiet.

Who would speak first? 

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

February - Poem 19

Anniversaries / Kristine Anderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

a remaining ash blowing in the wind, my dad

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

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

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

Clarity / Barbara Audet

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

Daydreams about Miyazaki  / Bee Cordera

and Love at the end of the world

 AMERICAN PARROT / Ashby Logan Hill

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

Worn / Amy Marques

I

Perhaps we are worn
out with thoughts
and dismal gallows.

II

Perhaps we are
worn out
with
thoughts and 
dismal gallows

III

We are worn out
perhaps
with dismal thoughts 
and gallows

IV

We perhaps are dismal
with worn out thoughts
and gallows

V

We are perhaps dismal
with worn out thoughts

Source material: A Tale of Two Cities

In the Future of Time / Sonia Sophia Sura

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

Ghazal for Zion  / Samuel Spencer

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

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

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

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

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

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

February - Poem 18

Reading Rooms / Kristine Anderson

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

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

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

Gone Gras / Barbara Audet

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


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

Ode to spiders  / Bee Cordera

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

ON WHEAT / Ashby Logan Hill

    From King Tutankamen’s Diary

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

Worthy Women / Amy Marques

take eccentricity

among women:

                        bright

                        exalted

                             immeasurably worthy

                                                            people:

making tools to believe.

Source: A Tale of Two Cities

Flu / Sonia Sophia Sura

Today is a morning where I cry a lot.

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

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

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

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

I realize. 

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

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

She says,
thanks! It’s so fun!

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

It’s so beautiful.

Road Trip  / Samuel Spencer

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

February - Poem 17

Laundry Inspiration / Kristine Anderson

All right, that’s just silly. I agree.
There’s nothing inspiring about laundry.

Granted, the colors: Raspberry, the catalog called
this T-shirt. This sweater’s supposed to be black

but, like my hair, shows gray around the edge.
Textures, too, perhaps: rough seams of blue jeans,

soft, plush jackets of fleece, smooth buff
of a flannel shirt. As for sound, the loud huff

when a sorted pile falls to the floor to wait
its turn, and I’ll spare you anything about taste.

Though how about the smell? No, not that—
this: Crispness of running water, bouquet

of the Arm & Hammer soap (Spring Fresh!).
Let’s add: Warm air of the dryer, the whoosh,

whoosh of the washer at work. Do you sense
it now? Hmmm. Maybe laundry can inspire.

Calendar Juxsuppose / Barbara Audet

A fire horse this year
Will find his harness
Strung with fattened beads,
Gold, purple, green.
And while some may feast,
This day, others will
Pass by the flaming
horse made equis
and leave food
Alone to honor tables 
Ramadan or nearly Lenten.
All in anticipation
of a couplet wait, 
Where calendar-conscripted
offerings of frugal 
Simple suffering or
Rejection of repast
are employed to satisfy
our basic dust to dust 
existence noted 
on hanging calendars
of smiling cats who aid
the passing of another
forty days given preferential
Longing in the category
Coming again, 
that treasure
we call salvation.

Birdwatching  / Bee Cordera

what cam we learn from our feathered friends?
To call and be heard the language of music.
How to impress a lover with bright feathers and a dance. To remain light as a feather
to find freedom on the wind we watch birds
to learn about the world of sky•

MIDNIGHT DRIVE / Ashby Logan Hill

Not even the roses could compete, a dalmatian and carrier pigeon, friends,
your hair blowing in the wind, and all you wanted circling back around you,
a drive through the dark night, windows half down and the cold air blasting,
half awake and driving  a hundred miles per hour past Salt Lake and
racing with a man from Utah in his white truck, and a cup of cold coffee,
the radio playing so loud as if the air surrounded you. Filling up on
the lonesome road, you drove all night nine hours to wake at sunrise.
The sun stood tall like you overlooking the canyon. A darker part still and
sparkler’s dim descent  up to an eye in the sky as the locals came to call it.
And all day long we sat on giant logs and used them to float out to the
Jewel center — campfire at night and the starlight flicker, a glowing, floating ember.
It was my spirit I saw for a moment fly away from me in the smoke. It was the drive
I’ll always remember, a lesson from Idaho across the universe from Atomic to Pocatello,
The heat of a summer breeze sweeping through the night, then daylight

Impatient / Amy Marques

this examination

precipitated many quietly

distressful exclamations of impatience.

Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

The Salt from the Grocery Store / Sonia Sophia Sura

I realized why I’d bought salt at the grocery store
weeks ago.
Big chunky sea salt, in balls so large, it
wasn’t so cookable.

Tonight my friend read tarot for me. 
She told me to cleanse by taking a
salt bath.

I sat on the lid of the toilet
after pouring salt into the bathtub.
I listened to a song that’s been
making me cry.
The harmonies are
so beautiful.

I cried and cried and cried and cried.
In front of me was the face of
my future self.
She looked at me with a steadiness
and a wisdom. She was strong
like a tree. Fierce
like an eagle.
Free

She held my face with her hands.

Wow! I said. 
You’re so old! 
And so beautiful!

She told me I 
don’t need to stay
where I am
(come April and May)
Go to the ocean!

she said,
Go to the ocean!

then she
disappeared

Reflection  / Samuel Spencer

Your reflection hates you.
You would hate you too if you
were your reflection, forever imprisoned
behind the pane that you think is you –
instantly erased the moment
you look away.
Your reflection hates you.
That’s why it looks you all over,
looks you deep in your eyes like it
knows you. That’s why it sends thoughts
to your mind, a mirror of the soul,
telling you you need to change… something.
Your reflection hates you
because it cannot be you.
It cannot taste the food you eat,
cannot sing the songs your love,
cannot sleep in your bed,
and, most of all, it hates you because
it cannot kiss anyone in the world
but you.

February - Poem 16

Auto Renewal / Kristine Anderson

The following have been renewed automatically:
Dental exam. Dermatology / skin cancer check.
Annual wellness exam & gerontology blood panel.

Agreement shall be renewed automatically
for succeeding terms . . .

Birthday cake (with candles!). Family Thanksgiving
(trimmings included) around a long dinner table. Wedding
anniversary (thirty-three years & counting).

. . . though the Party may give notice (or not)
prior to the expiration . . .

Yoga, twice a week. Daily walks, some with the dog
pulling on the leash. Phone calls with a grown son
living half a world away. Listening to music. Laughing.

. . . of Decision-Maker’s intention not
to renew pursuant to bylaws . . .

Avoid chocolate chip cookies, glazed donuts, Jolt
Cola (do they even make that anymore?). Keep the cork
in the bottle. Thank you for not smoking.

. . . otherwise to be renewed upon like terms
for successive days, hours, minutes . . .

Automatic renewal: Waking up to the familiar scent
of coffee. Warm slippers on the cold kitchen floor.
Dog jumping in my lap. Your “Good Morning” kiss.

Alone Together / Barbara Audet

Dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe and My Father On His Birthday
“From childhood’s hour, I have not been as others were … ”

Poe believed this. 
I guess it must be so, 
as explanations go. 
My father never said it, 
but he lived it.
And that makes it so.

These two gentle men, 
now gone to souls alone men, 
There's so much more 
I long to understand.

What weighed you down 
beyond survival buoyancy?

How soundly did your sorrow
harbor within you?

Did it lap hard against your sanity, seeking
Footholds to stay you far from calm liberation?

When men die young, 
we must have answers.
For forty years,
I've needed answers.

Across these two disparate, 
desperate lifetimes, 
I see a bond, a linked apartness,
that shakes out the why
of their compulsion—
the need to be other, 
that held faster than family, 
taut like new stitches.

Poe could see, 
but never understand
the cast of demons 
breeding in his mind
that fueled the separation.

Your demons, Dad, were more highly strung, 
dressed to drink in suits, mocking ties, 
the sort that energize and grab the best of you
like a magnet made of maelstrom.

In my childhood’s hours, 
I watched helplessly,
As that storm of ambition 
aimed to own the brain I envied, 
cultivated as my own.

But you, like Poe, put your trust
in never-ending storm clouds.

Call it dedication to addiction. 

Outsiders are timelessly available 
to abandon empathy for indignation.
Children in contrast try to understand why 
They must witness death sure to rise.  

The wind died, 
the last breath gathered all
the happiness, the anger, 
The ongoing agony of the man 
who gave you life. 
I never understood, not really, 
at least,ALASKA / Ashby Logan Hill until I came to see you, 
that one last time.

You said you were afraid to die.
I did not believe you, 
because I knew you.
Passion has no time for fear. 
You taught me that lesson in my crib.
I suspect in that closing of your living,
You told the greatest lie.

ALASKA / Ashby Logan Hill

At the Monet exhibit I asked you about Alaska, the cold you don't remember
because you were just a child and moved to Florida, then Minot, North Dakota,
then Paris, France. You said you liked living in France and remember
at the elementary school on base, or somewhere close to your apartment,
a field full of poppies.  You sat in it all day and told me your mother didn’t even
know where to look, that you liked it that way, face up, laying between the
stems and lady bugs floating, looking into sky and making shapes with the clouds.
You always stood for this and wanted your imagination, the imagination of
others to become their own reality, a suitcase in the grass by the pond,
a day in the rain and cappuccinos by the Seine. You were still little then
and stayed a while before heading back to Alexandria. Maybe this is when
you got Petie? Maybe this is when you first found out your love for lavender.
Wherever it was, it wasn’t anything like the redding fields from moments ago,
not even the roses could compete, a dalmatian and carrier pigeon, friends.

Kindly Disorder / Amy Marques

present kindly
disorder
remember
forgotten complaints
carefully
record
the complete word
found

Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

Fever / Sonia Sophia Sura

I check my temperature every so often
Just out of curiosity
It’s still here I know that
My head is all woowoo and my body is warm like a furnace. 

I cry and wipe my tears all over my face. 
It cools me down. 

My dad sent a picture of my mom and our dog at a restaurant for Valentine’s Day dinner. She is so beautiful, I look at her and remember everything. Everything that was and no longer isn’t; everything that didn’t happen. 

I am in bed, alone, missing a home I didn’t properly fit into. 

Walking Along the Spine  / Samuel Spencer

I look back and see you
Misplace a step, hesitate,
And freeze in place, the snow
Beneath you boots seeping
Down that rocky edge.
For once in my life
I regret not being alone.
Alone I am safe with my stupidity,
Safe to traverse this ledge
With only my own fear, my own
Mortality. But not with you.
I see the fear in your eyes
As they look down at your feet
And back to me. I am afraid.
I search for the words
I would tell your wife,
And come up with nothing better than
“It was my idea.”


We make it, our fears instantly trivial.
The mountain rests below us,
Only the clouds and sky above.
It's all fading away
Like a dream I am already forgetting. 

February - Poem 15

Images from a February Day / Kristine Anderson

The brick walkway outside my front door
brown-red geometry
against a monochromatic gray day

The green reach of cedar and pine
ever-forest branches
among wintering skeletons of alder and beech

A stationary goose alongside the road
the S of its neck
rising above a mound of plowed snow

A patch of lawn emerging from the thaw
thin emerald leaves
rising from the dark, shivering earth

Visibility / Barbara Audet

Becoming visible should not require
a glass of vodka, a gifted fur or gassy car.
Visibility requires walking brave
retracing a familiar chipped path, temporarily
burnished golden in the lamplight,
revisiting it alone, ignoring the steps 
in comfortable shoes. Honing
your vision by the ticking
hands of an invisible inner-layered clock,
looking in the moonlight at the flowers,
tucked by hedges draping fine houses,
wondering if these are new or descendants
of ones that once pushed fragrance past
your teenaged nose, your uniform skirt, rolled
to match a model’s magazine cheat sheet
proclaiming style in the spring of '69.
Life does not come pre-packaged,
like the photos captured in the standup booth
at the happily crowded, we are mostly alive, reunion
that led you to choose to walk back in
starstruck mode to the long remembered,
somehow updated sodium-lighted train station
in that better than where you live now Jersey 
suburb. Leaning against the station's bench,
ticket ready, are you ready to head to Brooklyn,
to pass the museum, which is past
the Chinese or is it Thai or is it Indian restaurant,
which is past the pizza place alive with teenagers
who are not concerned with blooms of the past,
but only present suppositions on the status
of a weekend encounter. You reach to adjust
your rolled skirt and realize the skirt became a dress
long ago, and will soon give way to jeans,
despite your age, to get you home, somewhere 
along the decades-documented 
train ride, then plane ride, 
then a car that looks more like you than you,
sleeping like cars do in the parking lot 
behind the gated fence
that is down from the Wendys,
which is down from McDonalds, but not as far as
the gas station, your modern chipped path,
more plastic, if truth be acknowledged,
still no true stop in view, 
perhaps because you are not yet 
visible, but are rather taking shape
in that oh so cliche mind’s eye, that is
more real than even you can comprehend.

MASTER SONNET #1 / Ashby Logan Hill

A loose thing, forgiveness untethered, a skein of yarn,
fingers holding all that’s left of glacial prairie, your way home.
And afterwards still you and I left, the only ones singing.
That’s all I’ve ever really wanted. Something like this for death.
Meet me at the heron rookery at dusk. I’ll be waiting for you there.
It is unfortunate that the sun does not travel backwards.
All day and still he won’t tell us, two lotus flowers floating in the sun.
And all this just to get back to what my mind held? “A sleepless sanctuary,” I said.
We didn’t want but had to see what both of us knew of loss the morning after.
Along this line, a horizon forms of lavender, a blue blossom beginning to bud.
And I smile a little longer, like him, before the oil stains on his blue jeans call to me,
waiting for the clouds to break, no direction home, a complete unknown,
another batch of dough for dinner rolls, at least that’s how I’s told to tell  it.
A dayglow and a dying was done then, and all before dawn, a quiet breakfast.

Not Just Details / Amy Marques

tea

and rain blaring

quiet:

not details.

Source material: A Tale of Two Cities

Chairlift  / Samuel Spencer

The world in my mind
is at peace as I rise
into the air. The ground
a fatal distance below
as the chair climbs higher
into the snowy mountains – 
a beautiful maiden wearing a coat
of wisping powder.
I am but one more soul
ascending into the sky,
a bit like Icarus,
just to fall down the paths
carved by man. The only
difference between this chair and
his waxy wings is that this metal seat
was designed for the purpose of
allowing me down. How sad I would
eventually become
if this chair rose into the heavens,
past the clouds and into Olympus.
How sad and how boring a life
without falling would be

February - Poem 14

A Valentine’s Day Card / Kristine Anderson

But not one with fat white cupid
babies flying like drunk cicadas.

Let’s not exchange cards with candied
rhymes—love with dove and above—

that shrink lifetimes into effortless
jingle bells around a kitten’s neck.                      

You deserve a multi-dimensional
lipstick-red heart rich with kintsugi

for honesty of a long marriage: not only
for all we formed and fired together

in the glowing kiln of our dreams. Also for
the cuts we bore: disappointments, illnesses,

long days at work away from one another.
And truth: for a few unkindnesses, as two people—

even those in love—have been known to wield.
Together we gathered up the pieces, repaired the rifts.

Now here’s the Valentine’s Day heart we’ve made:
brilliantly veined, singularly strong. Sweet, and wise.

Writer’s Dream Advertisement / Barbara Audet

This scribbling cobbler, words embracing
Requires elves with home skills ace-ing.
To brew dark coffee, do stacks of laundry,
Walk the dogs, and all such sundry?
To Poppins, the petition came, right up the chimney.
I’ve none here, so this entreaty, comes by whimsy.
To be specific, clothes need folded,
Trash disposed of, dishes sorted,
A porch front cleared, new flowers planted,
Salary’s minimal, but you are enchanted?
In return instead of dollars,
I’ll sew old-fashioned suits and collars.
At least I’ll promise to make that happen,
In my Grimmest way, job offers wrapped in.
Though winter's got its clutches clinging,
My mind is set on elves spring cleaning.

IN REMEMBRANCE OF ME / Ashby Logan Hill

                          for Norman Collier Rasnake
                                      December 2006

A dayglow and a dying was done then, and all before dawn, a quiet breakfast,
we all held a rose in the sweaty, tear-soaked palms of our teen-aged hands,
waited for the cue from some somber music his widow had picked, something like this,
a song I’ve forgotten, trying to remember why she’d seemed so tired of crying her
ember-green eyes out — had she ever even loved this man?  For years we’d gotten to know each other as some sort of distant, estranged “friends” — it all just felt so different in my head. Had she loved him just to take the money when he split?
I thought that’s what I’d heard my mother said but maybe I had taken parts of what I wanted and split the difference?  You do things like that and naive at sixteen.
Some sort of country song I didn’t even know if my grandfather liked played on the loudspeaker through the crowd, and one by one, each of his survived grandchildren processed to the apse of the chapel — if you could even call it that.  And etched into the altar  DO  THIS  IN  REMEMBRANCE  OF  ME  it read — that’s all I could remember,
a loose thing, forgiveness untethered, a skein of yarn —

Peculiar Desire / Amy Marques

Grand peculiarity

magnificently appeared

in marriage: 

is everything you could desire.

Source material: A Tale of Two Cities

House on a pond / Sonia Sophia Sura

Across the towel, we played on endless days,
endless days at the ocean. 
Hard boiled eggs in the cooler (weird!),
card games in the bag,
chips, towels, sunglasses. 
We put sunscreen on before we even drove to the beach. 
Those were some of my favorite days of the year,
for three weeks every August, only and stretched,
my family, my grandparents, my cousins aunt and uncle, and all of our dogs
sat at the table on the screened-in porch. 
We looked at the sun melting-to-orange over the pond
in the evening time. 
My grandfather remembered me only
for the first ten years of my life. 
When Covid came, I
stopped going. 
After five years I visited our home in the winter. 
Not-so-sunny day for a beach day. 
Still, I touched the water with my hands. 
It snowed, I believe, I remember
my brain was so cold, my younger self was
giving me a hug. We belong here! What has happened to us? I’m sorry we
had to grow up. 

February - Poem 13

As the Day Is Long / Kristine Anderson

The sun blasts through my kitchen window
before I finish my first cup of joe in the morning
though two months ago, only the slightest glow
peeked over the horizon by this early hour.

We’re in the season of lengthening days.
Already daylight hangs on for ten-plus hours.
Even the birds respond, practicing the songs
they’ll need to woo their mates in spring.

Lamps aren’t on ’til later and later,
and the dog no longer expects dinner
in the afternoon, as when it’s dark so soon.
Days are getting longer, we say with a smile.

Anticipation of sloughing off binding coats,
of melting snow releasing vast grassy lawns.
Expectation of long, generous walks—no icy
pathways limiting the range of our adventuring.

Deeper breaths. Dazzling views. Not so much longer
days we look forward to, I’d say, but unfurled ones.

Friday 13 / Barbara Audet

True Templars,
surprisingly survive.
She is
a bloodline, 
centuries secured, 
a renewed voice
in an unmasked face.
Templar's child,
she endures, 
out from hiding 
in plain sight.
That long ago 
dissolution
of her relations,
brave men,
was kept alive 
in odd witness.
The memory 
of such broad compelling death
sought permanence
in daily aftermaths
of not so subtle acts 
of periodic shame.
Born again as trepidations
fueled by inhibition.
The catalyst was singular. 
A brazen, heartless 
moment of betrayal,
of unchecked greed.
The force of that one
planned transgression
unleashed a sin's enormity
in a strange profusion
of tiny mimicking acts.
Short spasms 
of cowardice
that transpired
in minutiae.
With a never fail you
complex futility.
to hold back those
who committed 
the unthinkable.
Pain reduction acts,
solitary efforts,
made of undisputed
trivial thoughts,
unbridled 
essential 
avoidances.
Ladder undertakings,
cat shadow anticipation, 
sidewalking by leaps, bounds.
In modern times?
Aren't these now
abandoned?
Why now 
does it seem
that the flood 
of superstition
is in ebbtide?
Has superstition
given way 
to widespread,
grander, 
ever-greed inspired,
moments, of 
intentional, 
less forgivable
stupidity.

Zoo psychosis   / Bee Cordera

On Tik-Tok, one soul compared humanity to tigers pacing their crammed cages at the zoo, How we oggle and worler what is wrong with a pacing creature.
But we don't sit and word why we ourselves must take the faster pace through life, never stopping to ask why we wear hard pants.

 ELEGY FOR MY FATHER’S COWS AND TAMALES / Ashby Logan Hill

Another batch of dough for dinner rolls, at least that’s how I’s told to tell  it,
a little salty, a bit slant — nothing for a quarter more of nothing, the way
it’d always been shone to him — grazing in a gold-green pasture, your
father’s seventy-plus cows, how each in his scrapbook had their own
photograph and somewhere along the line, a red “x,” a few early morning
salutations between friends at the stockyard and then a fought farewell — “A hug
around the neck, a kiss upon the head,” Mr. Rodamer had said and so done it —
“Sold!” he said, to the highest bidder. I guess that’s how it was done back then,
and still, in a red little room, like a senate’s chambers between the railroad tracks,
the farm-raised chicken slaughter plant, and Dona Fer’s tamale spot on Saturday
mornings, a Rockingham County ritual his father and his father’s father had spent
half their lifetimes telling him — “It goes on a little better in the end with love,”
they said. “Don’t you mean ‘off?’” my father said. “Without a hitch,” they said.
A dayglow and a dying was done then, and all before dawn, a quiet breakfast.

A Godmother’s Blessing / Amy Marques

That feeling in my heart / Sonia Sophia Sura

Some moments are too precious
to write about;
Hugs and hands and
kisses on the cheek. 
The warmth in my chest
is otherworldly and human,
the most human, arguably,
I can feel. 
It used to be torture, that
feeling,
the bubbling of fire in my heart. 
How peculiar it was to feel that
heat. 
Now it comes to me
from the strangest people,
the most surprising,
the angels in human form. 

At the Base of the Mountain  / Samuel Spencer

I can't listen the things
I've done just to be here.
At the bottom.
I'm standing here look up
At the face of it, wondering
What it's all about.
Is it about getting to the top
And telling others you've done it,
Or is it just a chance to do
What others have done before you?
Or
Did I come to the base of the Mountain
Just to get a better look?

February - Poem 12

Variations on the Word Fat / Kristine Anderson

I.

. . . chance, same as
“slim chance” same as
“no chance” same as
“Stop dreaming and get to work.”

II.

Chew the . . . as in
“Whatcha been up to?”
as in
“Nice weather for ice skaters, huh?”

III.

. . . city, meaning
grocery cart full with 
carton of eggs (18 count), 
quart of orange juice (fresh squeezed), 
Peet’s Coffee (two bags!),
four sticks of real butter . . .
all paid for. In cash.

IV.

. . . of the land, paired with
Living off the . . .

such as
all the time in the world—
sitting in the sun, phone silenced and stashed
in another room, book open in my lap,
sleeping dog at my feet.

Year of the Horse / Barbara Audet

I have ridden a horse. More than once.

Galloping. Posting. Trotting. Sweating.
Swimming. Birthing. Running. Racing.
Snorting. Nuzzling. Lugging Carriages.
Warring. Glueing. Left To Withers 
Forelocks. Flanks. Fetlocks. Loved.

I was born in the year of the Horse.
A lunar expletive.

McCarthy. Segregation. America Beautiful.
Postwar. Nuclear War. Cold War. Pick a War.
Television. Siblings. Suburbia. Survival.
Kindergarten. Kennedy. Khrushchev. Kentucky Derby.

I rode my first horse, on a Girl Scout expedition.
I was too small to stay in the saddle properly.
I have never forgotten holding on and feeling
Myself falling backwards, petrified I would die.

My son was born in the year of the Horse.
A lunar miracle.

Afghanistan. Operation. Desert. Shield.
Hubble. Mom. The Universe.
Genome. Human Catalog. Web Server. 
What Happened to Yugoslavia?

I have ridden a horse in Texas.

I rode my second horse, a gray.
On a day with fellow teachers on retreat.
Along a stream line in the town of cowboys.
This time I held on, less fearful, but still suicidal.

Somewhere in between, in an off year,
Ox or Snake. Rat or Rabbit.
Dragon or Pig. Goat or Tiger. 
Monkey or Rooster. Or Dog.
I watched the horses swim at Chincoteague.
Long after I read the book that made Misty mine.
My cheers had guilt inside them on that day.
Learning terms. Hoof and Pastern. Hock and Stifle.
Gaskin and Croup. Barrel and Back.
These are the horse.
Wilding. Taming. Branding. 
Breeding. Betting. Breaking. 

Another year, I marveled, 
rejoiced for horses.
Secretariat. Odds Defier. 
Farm Saver. Triple Crowner.
Loving Life.
Large.

Life seems to have gotten smaller. 
Even for horses.
So we must make up for last year’s 
Snake in the grass.
Nations are in transit,
No longer needing horseback
To celebrate the Moon.
Steinbeck described 
A previous moving humanity
in Grapes of Wrath.
Go high enough, go to the Moon.
It's what they want. 
Look down.
We are like ants. Not horses. 
Neither of those ignoble. 
Not like the lookers.
Who are just moving in time 
that should have moved
Beyond all the nonsense.
Horses understand.
Harnesses. Whips. 
Shoeing. Corralling.
And just like we shot horses,
We shoot ourselves.

FIRST BEFORE MORNING / Ashby Logan Hill

                                            For Emily

Waiting for the clouds to break, no direction home, a complete unknown,
you’re stopped at a traffic light in Crozet, first before morning and never
once looked up before into the dark like a road toward heaven, night sky
to see your guarding angels, a black bear dancing while Orion and Cassiopeia
hash it out,  something you wished for of the miraculous, the fantastic, your
grandmother sitting on top of the soda machine humming  at the gas station
when you walk in to get some apples wanting to tell you she hadn’t forgotten your
persistence to knit a wig, the concept of crocheting missed on you for the
dropped stitches between your perfect pearls, a star’s circumference you’d
come for and circled back to as reflection on the way the absence of moonglow
suggested the presence of the midnight sun, Shenandoah, somewhere where
the tall trees, and like her, the daughter of the stars again is up before
breakfast, what was said at five o’clock mixing with her paper-white hands
another batch of dough for dinner rolls, at least that’s how I's told to tell it 


                 italics from Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone"

Masked / Amy Marques

A mask
beautifully
changing
attention
was remarkable
consideration

Source material: A Tale of Two Cities

Mother haiku / Sonia Sophia Sura

I wonder what my
mother hoped for when she brought
a child onto Earth. 

Initial Descent  / Samuel Spencer

We’re falling out
of the night sky.
Not quite a shooting
star, but some child may
have mistook us
as some celestial traveller
until he or she saw the
pulsating red lights
along our wing tips.
How lonely
it must be
to be
a shooting star – 
cutting up the blackness
all alone,
leaving only a memory
of light in your wake.

February - Poem 11

Shelter / Kristine Anderson

In winter, busy chickadee-dee-dee calls
fill the woods as songbirds forage in trees,
hopping along branches for insect eggs,

accompanied by the rat-a-tat of woodpeckers
and caws of blue jays storing up before
icy winds blow in with more snowfall,

while gray squirrels scurry across frozen lawns
then skitter up trees, carrying precious acorns
to the shelter of a tree cavity or drey.

Outside, dark nimbostratus clouds roll in.
Here in our kitchen, we switch on lights early,
the room glowing. Steam rises from the coffee

maker, as we settle in like our neighbors
the squirrels, the jays and chickadees
and woodpeckers, to wait out the storm.

Pipevine Love / Barbara Audet

I fear for the lives of deep noir butterflies,
Hindwings edged with blue carbuncles,
Fresh mated on their flight of blending.
Over scrubby Texas fields,
So far from opal beams of treasured Rivendell,
Where I imagine such creatures thrive.
They search, dart, flirt offhandedly at first
In search of lighting places.
Soon, they'll have to make demands, 
Impatient with each other,
Life will generate a need,
More intense, more vital 
For lepidopteran lovers
On a just in time's nick,
Journey 
To survive.
Butterflies such as these aerial anomalies
No doubt, once in abundance, angered wayfarers.
Now, two float in solitary dance
Across a long, brown swatch of faded grass.
Upon reflection, no camera in hand,
This passerby takes mental memory
Of the lovesick Pipevine swallowtails,
More common than my soul
in search of airborne beauty and simplicity.

Ode to Hospitality   / Bee Cordera

On a cold winter evening you are the fire we sit by telling stories, the extra sparkles of stars in the sky guiding us through a dark night.
Because of you, we know a familiar kind of love. We are happy to hold in each other the light of life the inspiration for good.

ODE TO THE FORGOTTEN STONES / Ashby Logan Hill

And I smile a little longer, like him, before the oil stains on his blue jeans call to me.
The man I mean, standing there stone faced by the swift, cold creek,
a simple man in a straw hat and overalls leaning against the fallen stones.
“The river looks mighty fine,” he says to me.  “I just might be able to
take the boat out today and do some fishing.”  He’d been chewing, between
elongated sentences, a wad of Beech-Nut plug, the juices from his “t” and
“s” sounds splitting midair and levitating just a bit before finding ground.
This whole time I’d thought I’d seen a ghost loafing by the ruins of my
father’s childhood house. A doe and a buck stood high in the trees watching.
“These weren’t no hedge or henge,” he says. “I’d be sure as sassafras if’twere
to tell of it.” “I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” I said. The trickle of
water had gotten lost in me and was trying to find its way back. I could
feel it in the bones and bricks of my indifference, standing there in silence,
waiting for the clouds to break, no direction home, a complete unknown. 


       italics from Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone"

Hold / Amy Marques

philosopher, they call me

philosopher

Are they right?

Hold a moment

smoothly, willingly, 

sufficiently 

long and hard

steadily

bright

Source material: A Tale of Two Cities

My name gives me a big ego, / Sonia Sophia Sura

My name, 
from my Great Grandmothers,
is Sonia Sophia Sura.

Sonia means wisdom 
and Golden Voice.
Sophia means Holy Wisdom 
and mother Gaia,
Mother of the Earth.
Sura means chapter,
an image, 
divine,
sun.

Sonia Sophia Sura
is the Golden Voice
of the divine
Chapters 
of Wisdom,
the
image 
of
Mother Earth. 

Mosquito Net  / Samuel Spencer

I used to lie awake,
eyes wide open as the sweat rolled
from my temple to the sheets
I was not beneath.
It must have been November or
December in Malawi, when
the days are hot and dry, and
the dust accumulates in every
crevice you can imagine.
I’d lie pooling and furious at the
dark stagnance trapped within
the dome above my head; a thin
veil of mesh like a fish net designed
to keep those killers, those vampires
from sucking my blood. I’d lie
there, melting and needing to piss;
needing until my stubborn mind
gave in to my persistent blatter.
I’d claw the net away and trace the
walls to the bathroom, grope
the sink for a box of matches
and light a candle. I’d let loose
a long dark ark of urine,
listen to its quiet impact
on the porcelain; shake,
blow out the candle, walk back
to bed in reverse, and
assume my position beneath
the smoldering, life-saving net
only to hear the enemy zip
past my ear, searching for
flesh. It was futile. In the morning
I found her fat and resting
on the wall. I annihilated her
with my palm, and together we left
behind the story of two battles
lost.

February - Poem 10

Pairs  / Kristine Anderson

of feet, one right and one left
(because: dancing, of course)

of hands, one to hold a jar
of pickles, the other to twist the lid

of shoulders, to sling over one a grocery bag,
over the other, a backpack of textbooks

of ears, one to hear the baby cry, the other
to catch my favorite song fading as I run upstairs

of eyes, one to navigate the icy sidewalk, the other
to catch sparrows darting in and out of the holly bush

Haiku One / Barbara Audet

Loyalty bears fruit.
Pregnant deeds give birth anew
Catching threads of hope

Ode to Mother Fletcher  / Bee Cordera

You lived lifetimes in one life. 
Longer than any of my ancestors 
could ever dream.

You see, our mothers turned forgetting
into a hobby. While you made remembering an art. 
You never lost one memory, keeper of a stable 

matriarchy keeper of Greenwood's agony.
The mothers in my family, we lose memory
like it's buried in our bones wrote in our DNA to do so.

Perhaps the pain you carried 
the one we sweep under 
the rug of collective dimentia 
can find freedom too.

LIKE LOAM / Ashby Logan Hill

                                                  For Stanley
                       

Along this line, a horizon forms of lavender, a blue blossom beginning to bud.
Like oleander, like silk, like frozen seafoam, like milk, like the boat lake
near the park by your friend’s house full of frolicking young teenagers
ice skating, hockey sticks in hand, helmets on head, like the feathers of the
geese sauntering toward the worms in the grass, like a rose, how sweet,
like the eyelet somehow still burning in the stove, like snow from the day before,
everything blue, frozen, everything sand, everything silt, like the fields of loam
to the west and north, a storm you’ve been waiting for, like the wind again, always
the wind, like almonds for eyes your grandfather passed along, the left only slightly
smaller, lazier than the other, the newspaper he crinkles between sips of lukewarm
coffee sitting in his white-ribbed “A” shirt, dreaming of Italy, his old cigarettes maybe,
like the sweet, sweaty smell of his old red-white Ford Bronco, a Stanley man it’s said I am, like the curls of red hair bleached blonde for the years of summer spent chlorine.
And I smile a little longer, like him, before the oil stains on his blue jeans call to me.

Bear Hope / Amy Marques

confidence will bear

hope so nothing will

perpetuate apprehensions

new or old

suffering faded

slowly confidence returned

not as an instant

Now: prosper!

Source: A Tale of Two Cities, p. 130

Ice cream  / Sonia Sophia Sura

I don't know
how to
understand
my
desires
Sometimes what
might hurt the
most is
what
feels the best.
Ice cream
made my
tummy feel better
(until it felt worse).

Sonnet for Missing Home  / Samuel Spencer

I’m far away and have been for some time.
I live in the land of the free
“refills,” is what my brother said while stood in line
one day for the soda machine.
I miss my home’s thick grass and red dirt roads,
the smell of an approaching rain.
I miss the ngumbis and the sound of toads
busting up the night with their vain
attempts at love. I missed my chance to stay
when I mistook a brochure for a dream.
I packed my things and climbed aboard that plane,
to a place where the big lights gleam.
I’ve thrived in this country and gained so much,
but I’d give it all up to return to my dust.

February - Poem 9

Alliance  / Kristine Anderson

Daylight low on the horizon
glowing behind thin, gray clouds,
blue sky peeping through,

pitch pine and bare birch reaching up,
waving in the wind. A crow caw,
geese flying overhead, emitting their nasal honk,

the raspy whirr of a blue jay. Soon
our kitchen will fill with scents of soup:
celery and bay and chicken broth.

The dog paws for his dinner. It’s time.
The sun sets orange-pink, a splash
beyond the community of trees.

Poetic Sight / Barbara Audet

"It's not what you look at that matters; it's what you see."
Henry David Thoreau

Wordsworth observed daffodils
explode across green hills. 
He saw alone that day. 
Did his words protect 
his golden horde?
When all around him, 
wordless men 
broke the Earth?
How can words alone
change the scope 
of planetary reeling?
A word-wielding hoard 
everblind to the power of daffodils,
or Thoreau's patient pond,
use language bent to hurt.
Discourse: electronic, rapid,
falsely born to aid distraction,
now governs.
To own what should not be owned,
To claim what should not be claimed.
Shelley wrote of his broken statue,
a vain king, 
long forgotten 
in the desert, 
wasted.
He saw. 
For the privilege 
of his empowered sight,
a sly push beyond providence,
lost him his heart and penmanship.
What is the purpose 
of a poetic soul?
To make the world more lush, 
tolerable somehow?
To right the helm 
of society's sinking ship?
She thought she saw.
How unpoetic words provoke 
pretense that cries 
pathetically blameless.
Translated by narrow blinders, 
these quick bursts 
of money-laundered wordplay
are transparent.
As if a handful 
of jewel-colored balloons
were held up to the sun, 
and we poetic few 
could see straight through 
to the Apocalypse they want.
Soon their visible folly bursts,
balloons transform opaque,
landing from aloft,
across what is left 
of the blanket
of yellow daffodils.
All the cruelty,
is painted on the remnant
of those shattered thin skins.
Words unspoken though
are a silent paradox.
Composition forever 
on the cusp 
of new invention.
Waves of sentences,
particles of grammar,
made up
of passed on threads
of precious daffodils 
and sculptured, broken kings.
Once poetic, voiced,
the words fall 
more gracefully,
side by side,
awaiting translation 
of brave 
long-standing
universal truths.
We see.

untitled   / Bee Cordera

ATTEMPTS AT MEMORY / Ashby Logan Hill

We didn’t want but had to see what both of us knew of loss the morning after.
What happens when you deprive yourself of sleep before going under.
What mushrooms flush on this side of the river in the early parts of Springtime.
Did you happen to see the chickens and hens and cows again?
I can’t say I’m too fond of this cold, this bitterness for the first time here ever.
What is which that is of the moment and all you have is an empty nest?
Where is the paper spark you made which floats aimlessly still within your head?
It’s the year of the horse and you know it — the same thing over and over.
What is the ocean without its depths except a glimpse of the surface?
Five more times I’ve become overcome with the empty space.
It binds us like the seeping sap dripping everything, holds all of us together.
I’d like for there to be something more than the sum of these parts.
I’ll take the long way home to risk the matter of being late and more joyful for it.
Along this line, a horizon forms of lavender, a blue blossom beginning to bud.

A Case for Dreaming / Amy Marques

Silence faces heavy hours.

Dreaming, the village began 

to be lighter and lighter:

amazed,

awestricken.

And came forth to lead

as could be.

Source material: A Tale of Two Cities, p. 122

My day today  / Sonia Sophia Sura

I woke up to my roommate coughing in the kitchen. 
It sounded like a burp in my dream. 
Max texted me at the minute I awoke. 
Asked if I wanted to go to a coffee place. 
Yes! Yes! Yes! 
It felt like a propozal. 
It was 4 o clock, 3:54 pm to be exact, my birth time years ago. 
Max and I are both from 1999, both from the northeast, both met at a Gong festival. In Texas. He was working at the farm. 
I saw him as already-my-friend. 
Today at the coffee shop two people came up to us and said
I just wanted to say you two are so cute and look so in love! 

We’re best friend exhibitionists, Max says today.
Exhibitionists of the best friends in the universe. 
People think we’re in love. 
We are! 
Isn’t that all we’re made of? 

Moments of Japan  / Samuel Spencer

One moment, you’re trudging through
the most overcrowded, overstimulating
street in your life – a sea of people
with no discernable tide, neon lights
and signs for products you didn’t know
existed, a thousand raman shops and
a thousand izakayas; all accompanied by
a multitude of sounds, the chirping of a bird
of a crosswalk.

The next, you’re in a neighborhood devoid
of chaos, surrounded by quaint houses
and parks, grass. This moment is so
serene you forget the one before. You walk
quietly as not to disturb this moment.
An old man walks slowly passed you with
his hands clasped behind his back. He tips
his head at you in acknowledgment, and
finally you know the satisfaction of being
seen in such a place.

February - Poem 8

The House  / Kristine Anderson

the one I used to live in, with the backyard
where my son once built a treehouse looking over
the weedy lawn and unruly privets,

the California house I moved from—
but not really that place, because dreams overlay
one experience onto fabrications—

I walked into this unreal house of white walls,
plush pristine carpet, indoor balcony overhanging
an empty living room (no guardrail!)

and turning in circles, searching for all the boxes
of books and clothes we’d moved out, overland
far away, months ago, seeing nothing . . . Then

voices wafted in—a mother’s humming, baby babbling—
fragrant presence of that other family who took over
this invented domicile, this not-the-house

I used to live in, and me suddenly beginning to understand how
white vacant rooms stood in for what I once fussed over—
weekly vacuuming and constant closet-cleaning—

bringing to mind how my child, now grown and gone,
and my own and my husband’s now growing old, overturn
& blessedly simplify my needs—a truth revealing itself

even as I woke up.

A Rose Is / Barbara Audet

Can it be 
that two,
refuse to die,
rose bushes,
dictionary-worthy 
see '"spindly,"
are in truth,
a garden?
Or are these
stalwart pair,
just a fool's--
where's my green thumb--
thorny episode?
Fileable
under the heading,
fat chance?
Is it oxymoronic
to say rose garden,
when a rose
is not a rose
when they merely rise,
petals lurking
despite me?
One blooms by surprise
even in the pitch of winter,
in a spotty, odd profusion
of fluttering ivory
while my back
is turned.
One blooms on occasion,
a birthday or last Christmas.
I suspect, this one may have 
a datebook
hidden in the ground 
that owns its roots.
January's frost took out
the basil and the bougainvillea.
I am bereft of parsley.
Lilies tried to hide
in the shallows of the rose
and these are gone.
Each rose once 
had a name,
long forgotten.
One is a red.
One is white.
Like wine bought 
at the grocery store
for quick consumption.
Wine with twist off caps.
No corks.
That's all I know.
Still they grow, 
my minor landscaped realm,
and by default, 
I am ever rose queen. 

Ode to Blues   / Bee Cordera

Freedom music so full of soul 
we can't help but reconnect with ancestors
and world where we all belong.
Blues is the music of togetherness, 
Of family blues is the music of true love.

THE FIRST THIRD / Ashby Logan Hill

And all this just to get back to what my mind held? “A sleepless sanctuary,” I said.
And first at finding, on a road in July in Moab, climbing by petroglyphs another thing untethered, winding out from the mind, something you hold onto for whatever reason but now knowing you must let go of yet, everything you once stood for not loosed out, at thirty five, and still seventy years more till the earth will shake you from it, a love you had and walking back from the parking lot around the corner just for the moment
to show you how everything’s connected — you didn’t want to be dead but the hundred degree plus heat was determined to make sure of it. We got a hotel and stayed up
all night, our bodies intertwined like stardust because we knew we didn’t have another second, at least this is what we thought at least, at least two fingers more for a shot of
whiskey and the condensation on the mirror from the heat of us and our breaths.
Later that morning we both woke early to read in our books. We smiled as if we knew there soon to be a child inside, what we didn’t know yet we’d lose two Julys later.
We didn’t want but had to see what both of us knew of loss the morning after.

Refuge / Amy Marques

claim hope
honor and live
a wilderness: luxurious
under daylight
well-satisfied, qualified in this
new philosophy to live brightly
observed
the Refuge of many.

Yoga poems I wrote in my head  / Sonia Sophia Sura

Yoga poems I
wrote in my
head,
4 poems,
the first about
softening
and how I wanted to punch the air
because I needed to
soften
into 
this body 
of earth
and forgive. 

The second was
about 
the different lengths 
of time.

One hour has
different lengths.
One hour of yoga is
five hours.
One hour with
a lover 
is
forever 
and not 
long
enough. 

The third poem
was unremarkable,
I guess,
or about my
sadness
knowing
I wouldn’t
remember it. 

A Sijo for Stars  / Samuel Spencer

In the sky, galaxies wave with hands made of exploding light.
I wave back from a blue Earth, hands made of flesh, blood warm and red.
But no – I am left unseen because waving stars have no sky.

February - Poem 7

The Clouds  / Kristine Anderson

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

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

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

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

Sort Of Sonnet Olympiad / Barbara Audet

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

Scissortail Flycatcher / Bee Cordera

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

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

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

The Beginning of a Struggle / Amy Marques

Brokenhearted

Silent

        Repressed

   always knowing   always seeing

even now.

But witness

so believe

          one day

          a word

                 could touch

            striving

            in a happier future

in aid 

of the beginning of a struggle.

The Surface that Holds  / Sonia Sophia Sura

Can I still 
make a wish?

I found an
eyelash
on 
the
yoga mat.

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

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

is how the
wishes
come 
true—

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

Stretching
my neck,
shoulders,
my torso?

Raptured  / Samuel Spencer

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

Haha, get it?

February - Poem 6

Stars  / Kristine Anderson

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

                                                                                    —Carl Sagan

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

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

Ode to hands  / Bee Cordera

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

Loudness of Solitary Confinement  / Barbara Audet

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

BUDDHA’S SPOON / Ashby Logan Hill

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

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

A To Do List / Amy Marques

you mean?

I mean

I knew--I hope

I pray a tune of silence

I ask

I give

I justified, I know

I have--I may

I can, I suppose...

S

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

Sex / Sonia Sophia Sura

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

Thought Terminating Cliché  / Samuel Spencer

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

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

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

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

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

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

February - Poem 5

Frozen  / Kristine Anderson

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

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

crystals hanging onto eaves
puddles turning solid

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

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

A Tale Of Two  / Barbara Audet

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

ON FARMING THE LAND / Ashby Logan Hill

                      from King Tutenkamun’s Diary

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

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

Talking to the Moon / Amy Marques

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

Source Material: A Tale of Two Cities

Micah called / Sonia Sophia Sura

He said he doesn’t know how to flirt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Corporate Confession  / Samuel Spencer

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

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

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

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

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

February - Poem 4

Introduction to Winter  / Kristine Anderson

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

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

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

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

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

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

untitled / Bee Cordera

A Tale Of Two  / Barbara Audet

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

Charles Dickens

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

LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT  / Ashby Logan Hill

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

For Kim  / Amy Marques

debauchery 

bred:

public street

                powerful

            extensive

crowd

Therefore:

What's coming?

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

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

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

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

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

Layover  / Samuel Spencer

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

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

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

February - Poem 3

A Note  / Kristine Anderson

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

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

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

Sister, you would’ve
known something

of what I’m saying.

Surface Certainty  / Barbara Audet

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

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

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

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

For Mario / Bee Cordera

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

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

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

Social Seamstresses   / Amy Marques

musingly built

the pattern--

                    inaudible and invisible

which 

         may have been a 

mender

           in due season.

MAx / Sonia Sophia Sura

Max plays the guitar.

I feel it
through my toes 
on his knee.

I hope to fall asleep.

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

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

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

I find my butt glued to my body.

It is cold but not like Massachusetts.

Max acts beyond words can describe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m
unlike 
a friend 
he’s ever had

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

Long Distance Haiku  / Samuel Spencer

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