Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Fire Season Again
The fire now climbs the mountain’s back.
A red-gray haze swirls around the setting sun,
& the skies rain acrid ashes — tiny moth wings
flickering over everything.
Jose Padua: These Years of Thinking Dangerously
When
the beautiful confusion of dreams becomes a stranger
to my waking hours I start to panic.
Christine Rhein: Attack of the Five-Foot-Four Woman
In truth, only five foot three and a half,
and attack, too, a bit of a stretch
Toi Derricotte: My great teacher, Galway Kinnell, taught me: “Speak the unspeakable.”
My father taught me:
You have to break the bones
To get to the heart
Baruch November: A Gift in the Shallows of the Sea
One night, on Riis Beach,
years ago, I suddenly
proposed to your mother
in the moonlight
Barbara Hamby: Ode to Skimpy Clothes and August in the Deep South
A young woman is walking with her boyfriend, and it’s deep
summer in the South, like being in a sauna
but hotter and stickier
Pablo Otavalo: If you stood any closer you’d be underground
Help me dress these wounds with words
karla k. morton: The Next Generation
Not knowing the spring of 1980
would be the worst drought
in the history of Texas,
my father sod an entire acre.
It was my job to water.
Darnell Arnoult: Beneath Love & View From Space
Awful bucktoothed eyes flash
beneath Love’s crazy room. Round
and round, come again and again.
Believe in Death. Believe in Love.
Michael Simms: Two Summer Songs
I can’t help but be in love
with the blissful light of lemonade at noon
And gazpacho in the evening
a slice of lime hanging by its wound
Sadakichi Hartmann: Why I Love Thee?
Ask why the seawind wanders,
Why the shore is aflush with the tide,
Why the moon through heaven meanders
Like seafaring ships that ride
Barbara Huntington: Lost in Translation | Thoughts on Poetry After My Stroke
Then I became an erasure poem.
Tony Gloeggler: Thirteen
I want to book an early
morning flight, drive over
the hills, ride to the rescue
like John Wayne’s cavalry.
Sally Bliumis-Dunn: The Milkmaid
And what luxury of looking,
knowing that you won’t be seen
by the milkmaid,
gaze fixed upon her task,
her eyes downcast
beneath a crisp white cap
