Stephen Dobyns: Stories
All stories, as they reach their end, are sad.
The rain comes; the night falls; Malone dies alone.
Joan E. Bauer: Brilliant Modernist, Armored Life
Afraid of heights, she stood on ledges.
To onlookers, she’d say:
Buddy, I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer.
I go anywhere.
Robert Frost: Storm Fear
I count our strength,
Two and a child,
Those of us not asleep subdued to mark
How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length…
Sandy Solomon: On “Adlestrop”
“Adlestrop” is a poem which, though written in a time of war, takes place during that last, long, beautiful Edwardian summer. The speaker is describing a prewar train journey in full consciousness of the disruption that is soon to follow.
Majid Naficy: I Have Become a Resting Place
And my mother, who at her death
Called out to her sister Ozra,
Has not yet let go of
My own sister’s hand.
Ellen Foos: Support-Group Puppets
We speak in circles,
Sock-monkeys one and all,
able to say what we are told.
Baruch November: St. Louis Park, M.N.
they would ask how it felt
“to be a kike, to taste a baby’s
blood, to kill a savior?”
Sarah Gordon: Threshold
You see them there
their arms weary with
holding the guns
withholding their fire
You see them in the light
Michael Simms: The Story of Autumn House Press (1998-2020)
Most literary presses fade away when the founder leaves, so I cannot tell you how much it thrills me that AHP continues into the second generation.
Jo McDougall: What We Need
Lola the Lion Tamer and the Great Valdini
in Nikes and jeans
sharing a tired cigarette
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Dirge without Music
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind…
Doug Anderson: Vulnerable
It is winter now and also, for me,
the other winter that has no spring.
Our world has turned dark
and fascists have risen from their graves.
Sally Bliumis-Dunn: Work
The father sanded the gunwales,the boy coiled the lines.
And I admired them there, each to his task
in the quiet of the long familiar.
Jose Padua: Glenn Gould’s Search for Petula Clark
Thinking of what might have been,
I save every piece of paper and take my time
coming down from the mountain, believing
in the wisdom of taking the long way home.
