Robert Okaji: Four Poems
The nine lesions
in my brain have not yet diminished language
receptors. Nor my imagination. But
how will I know when it happens?
Sister Lou Ella Hickman: Two Poems
earth will have her own way with hunger
green springing up devouring light
roots singing down into darkness
Joshua McKinney: World Enough
Someone is making a motion
to make a motion on a previous
motion, concerning the minutes
from the last meeting…
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.
Terry Blackhawk: A Springfield Ghazal
My grandfather “witnessed a lynching” my father recalled,
but “expressed no shame” about what he’d seen in Springfield.
“Only a boy,” my mother maintained, when my father
began to tell about his father that night in Springfield.
Meg Pokrass: Enlightened Adventures of Mark Zuckerberg
“Say, is that a dorsal fin in your pocket, or are you happy to see me?” she blurts, all seaweed hair, bioluminescent lipstick, wiggling like a stuck jellyfish— illuminating unseen caves of Mark Zuckerberg’s shipwrecked heart.
Robert Frost: A Servant to Servants
My father’s brother wasn’t right. They kept him
Locked up for years back there at the old farm.
I’ve been away once – yes, I’ve been away.
The State Asylum.
Stuart Dischell: Pleasure Harvest
Nights were difficult when her absence curled beside him,
A long-legged question no longer to be answered.
Mary Jane White: Rain, In Riverview Cemetery, Martins Ferry, Ohio
The rain
Already hangs a grey shawl in front of the blue domes of the Ohio
Greek Orthodox church, standing cheek by jowl by an industrial dairy.
Adam Patric Miller: Two Poems
there’s a train approaching
always a train approaching
lights burning blue and red in the dark
Doug Anderson: Memorial Day
It’s only old Herman sitting a few yards off in the recliner
who looks beyond them into a burning village where a marine
drags a wounded man by his heels behind a tank for cover
and the tank backs up and runs over them both.
Robert Cording: Broken
Now, my brother’s fifty-year marriage
broken off as if their past was
an imposter that had been discovered.
And my best friend’s wife can’t find
the name for husband,
though he sits next to her.
Roberta Hatcher: My Highway 61 Revisited
Well at times ideas seem so absurd
But if you leave me in peace to play with words
I’ll give you something simple
Just a little rhyme
To amuse and to help to pass the time
Charles Harper Webb: Flubadub Invents the Sixties
His elephant-brain conceived The Howdy
Doody Show, and chose what Old-Time
Movie played when Buffalo Bob pried open
his Hostess cupcake-with-the-surprise-inside.
