Maryfrances Wagner: Chuck
‘What are we? Humans? Animals? Savages?’ — William Golding – Lord of the Flies
Jane Taylor: Poverty
O then, let the wealthy and gay
But see such a hovel as this,
That in a poor cottage of clay
They may know what true misery is.
Susan Kelly-DeWitt: The Moon Is Doing The Australian Crawl
my mother has worked her way up
through the wave-rungs
of the spirit-corps’ fleshless ladder—
secretary of the afterworld
Molly Fisk: Parsing
the pounding heart
subsiding slowly, slowly, til it’s just a noun again, returning
to its steady beat of subject, verb, adverb, object
Dear Vox Populi subscribers
Whoops and yay! Because of a technical glitch, instead of one poem, six were sent out to our subscribers this morning, but as it turns out, the glitch resulted in … Continue reading
Martin Edmunds: Personal Mythology
You’re Adam. She’s Eve.
You fuck up: cannot conceive
Yahweh’s anger.
Chard deNiord: I Was Walking Around
in the woods below the house by the stream when suddenly I thought, Why write another thing about the woods or stream or sky as I have for years? Why … Continue reading
Majid Naficy: Stroke
It was last week
Tuesday morning at seven
When in the shower
Your right arm became numb
Doug Anderson: Questions
Won’t you take off your mask no, not that mask
but the one you’ve made with the muscles of your face
a shield of hide can you let it go
Edison Jennings: Flocks of Crowned Spirits
the rich escape to seaside estates
sheltering in place a few sanitized days
behind elaborate wrought iron gates
Majid Naficy: On the Booksellers’ Street of Baghdad
I saw Mutanabbi returning from Persia.
He had heard the sound of Tigris, by the Kor River
Calling him back to Baghdad.
Mary Jane White: Friend, Tell Me, What Can I Know
…always the sun failed again
for the evening, and the short grass fell dull
in the shadows, out of the slant-light.
John O’Donohue: Beannacht
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
George Drew: On Another Epic Trip Around the Sun
I was sixty and I was dancing with Jan,
my brother’s Queen of the Line Dance wife
