Al Ortolani: Picking Ticks Off the Dog
Pulling ticks is not for the faint at heart.
Elsa Gidlow: Chance
Strange that a single white iris
Given carelessly one slumbering spring midnight
Should be the first of love,
Yet life is written so.
Carlene M. Gadapee: Give Peace a Chance
The Burning World by Sherod Santos is a complicated and arresting mytho-historical and contemporary narrative demonstrating the pain of war and conflict.
Tony Gloeggler: Autistic Basketball
you rise with the memory
of your first taste of schoolyard
grace and lay it softly against
the backboard
Connie Post: Estrangement
you watch a burning city
from far away
and notice a pigeon flying towards you
gaining speed
pulling the sky’s edges with it
Barbara Edelman: Lot’s Wife
And now I look back
to see that recognition,
that love,
was the lesson I took
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: At the end of the Breakwater
Let the day open so wholly
to light.
Octavio Paz: Motion
If you are the basket of oranges
I am the knife of the sun
James Davis May: Out Too Far
His wife, he’ll find out later, is worried
he hates them. How to tell her
that he sometimes doesn’t know how
he’s ended up in bed?
Dawn Potter: Late April
Ghosts shimmered on the broken doorstep,
rising through dust to become my own new skin
Video: John O’Donohue | Beanacht
And so may a slow
wind work these words
of love around you,
an invisible cloak
to mind your life.
Claude McKay: December, 1919
‘Tis ten years since you died, mother,
Just ten dark years of pain,
And oh, I only wish that I
Could weep just once again.
Elizabeth Drew Barstow Stoddard: Nameless Pain
I should be happy with my lot:
A wife and mother – is it not
Enough for me to be content?
What other blessing could be sent?
Greg Lobas: Her Animal Self
Hanging by a shred of flesh
next to the silky, glistening club of her ankle joint,
is a dangling puppet of a foot without the strings.
Vox Populi 