Askold Melnyczuk: The Enamel Box
The father smokes a pipe, instructs the child:
“Cultivate wheat and a conscience.
In a pinch, forfeit
the conscience
but save that wheat.”
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The One Great Story
we might find we are held
by strands of birdsong, by the even beat
of eagle’s wings, by the blue moonlight
that reflects off the snow.
Brad Peacock: Pride (Two Poems)
You can scrub letters from websites
You can take away our healthcare
You can do your best to strip away our humanity
We will not be erased
Julia B. Levine: Driving South on I-5 in Spring
How every vanishing enters me
like a bomb not yet tripped, but ready to go.
Most of all, I want to believe I can keep you alive.
Michael Simms: Five Pieces of Advice to Writers Who Want to Publish
Since I’ve been an editor and publisher for a long time, I’m often asked to advise first-time authors on how they can get their work into the world.
R.S. Ramirez: Losing My Mother to Trump
Implicit, of course, was the narrative of us and them, of being a certain kind of immigrant compared to the rest. She blended in perfectly, and as her child, I did the same.
Barbara Crooker: Credo
You can till the earth,
hoe the rows, but each seed is an act of belief
that somehow in the dark something
is happening:
W. H. Auden: Stop all the clocks
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
Byron Hoot: Two poems about beginning and ending
The death of my father is nearly a month
away – 31 years. The haunting of longing
has begun.
Arlene Weiner: For My Husband Who is Depressed at the State of the World
Lilacs perfume the city air. Smoke from wildfires
turns sunsets glorious. Talons tear the breast of the dove.
The world changes. The world doesn’t change.
Michael T. Young: What the World Waits for
Like that day I sat in the yard
under the braids of summer light,
reading, weighing thought
against thought for what was right
or what was wrong
Baron Wormser: Dark Time
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
Alison Luterman: What I Learned
singing’s made of sweat and spittle,
tears and snot, hot breath,
and the soggy crumb of a potato chip left
in a back corner of your unflossed tooth
Michael Simms: The Skateboarder
Not sport but defiance
Not lifestyle but thrust and risk
A kick, an aversion to common sense
