Alexis Rhone Fancher: Three Pantoums for My Sister
Enough already! My sister says..
I can’t bear to watch you anymore.
I know she’s right. But I can’t stop.
I mean where would I put my sorrow?
Wally Swist: Three Poems for Tevis
I discover what remains
is the light that shines through
Larry Levis: Childhood Ideogram
Where did he go, that autumn, when he chose
The chaste, faint ideogram of ash, & I had
To leave him there, white bones in a puzzle
By a plum tree, the sun rising over
The Sierras?
Arlene Weiner: December Vigil
I think of Jeff and Mike, who won’t need
next year’s calendars, Mike saying
These are my last poems. Tomorrow
is not promised, some people say.
Lord Byron: Epitaph to a Dog
…all the Virtues of Man
Without his Vices.
Baron Wormser: On Moral Grounds
One can be humbled into silence and one can be humbled into words. Or one can feel both—the silence that underlies the words.
Jim Daniels: My Security Question
The closet in her room
remains as she left it
clothes losing their dark
interest. Ghosts in the dust.
Kristofer Collins: Looking at the Lake
Where are your
wonderful ideas now? All ten thousand
of them, each one a tiny grain you
let loose in this world.
Barbara E. Young: About the Language. And Inevitable Death
alone could fill all the space
between all the yellow cities on the map with a hollow
more empty than the echo of the emptiest of moved-from homes
Jason Irwin: Ouija Board
I asked When? And How?
I was thirteen. My cousin, twelve.
It said I would be 41.
The same age my mother was that Christmas.
Elvis was 42 when he died. Jesus, 33.
Sally Bliumis-Dunn: Ode to Autumn
this is where I can
still see you
in these gray branches
George Drew: Drumming Armageddon
I, too, have friends dead from drugs,
guys I hung out with on my hometown streets
and in the war memorial park with wood railings
we kept falling off, too stoned to balance on.
Barbara E. Young: Blues for the Fisherman
Since the blues ought to be tall birds
wading and wailing
when the sun dies—
let the blues fill its lungs now
Jo McDougall: This Morning
A woman laughs
and my daughter steps out of the radio.
Grief spreads in my throat like strep.
