Sally Bliumis-Dunn: Week One
She is fine like a ringlet of fiddlehead fern
before it unfurls in the summer forest
Thomas McGuire: A Scientist Marvels at Magpie Mob Tactics
Intent on witnessing interactions between magpies and members of the genus elgaria, a scientist released an alligator lizard into a large enclosure housing three captive magpies.
Ruth Muskrat Bronson: Two Poems
If you could know the empty ache of loneliness,
Masked well behind the calm indifferent face
Of us who pass you by in studied hurriedness
Gary Fincke: The Doctrine of Signatures
my mother’s heart
Winding down while I thought of petals
Red and sugared as a lover’s gift
Darnell Arnoult: Widowhood & New Life
Peer passed vibrant stalks of rain. Think of his absent face
now uncaught by earth, light among stars. The man
is now stardust. His voice like the riddle of dreams.
Larry Levis: Family Romance
Abstaining clouds that passed, & kept
Their own counsel, we
Were different, we kept our own counsel.
Michael Daley: Ground Work
swan, coyote, wolf, swallow, butterfly will multiply and prosper,
wilderness sprout through pavement and skylines
Sophie Cabot Black: As to Why We Will Not Stop (Making the Hats)
We have come to know the truth
As no longer true— the old ways do not work
Against the new.
Mosab Abu Toha: Shrapnel Looking for Laughter
Shrapnel flies in the dark,
looks for the family’s peals of
laughter hiding behind piles of disfigured
walls and bleeding picture frames.
Arlene Weiner: Ghazal
When parting or meeting we wish each other peace.
We show with every greeting that we are lovers of peace.
Robert Okaji: Dream Score
I empty my mother’s ashtray of its treasures—
various picks, the broken watch, a mandolin bridge,
that lock of my wife’s hair—then peer through the amber
glass at a distorted day. What looks back at me?
Tony Gloeggler: October
He’s an ex girlfriend’s son
and I’ve known Jesse
since he was five. I decide
not to tell this woman he’s autistic
thinking she can figure it out
if she listens.
Amy Lowell: The Broken Fountain
All day I have watched the purple vine leaves
Fall into the water.
And now in the moonlight they still fall,
But each leaf is fringed with silver.
William Wenthe: Prophecy
In the predawn of Monday, I woke, dream-heavy
with a feeling of fate—like memory, but more
like remembering forward
