Robert Walicki: Asleep
Another knuckle white morning,
in a neighborhood of slammed doors,
the salt covered cars and trucks in a haze,
saying prayers to the God of paychecks and Friday afternoons.
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Invitation to Love
Come when my heart is full of grief
Or when my heart is merry;
Come with the falling of the leaf
Or with the redd’ning cherry.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: You Belong
It’s not true our hearts are our own—
they’re symbiotic as meadows in spring.
The heart exists for who grows in it.
W.H. Auden: Lullaby
Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: The Partners
After thirty years, she knows
he will speak with his mouth full.
He knows her stomach will gurgle
in the silence before they sleep.
Sandy Solomon: While You’re Away
Were it a question not of days but weeks
I’d learn, I’m sure, to sprawl mid-bed, the way,
before we met, I did.
Chard deNiord: I Call Out to You
Any moving object must reach halfway on a course before it reaches the end; and because there are an infinite number of halfway points, a moving object never reaches the … Continue reading
Scott Silsbe: Two Poems
That was the summer of the unrelenting wildflower smoke.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Some Nights Missing You
like the letter that doesn’t come,
the one I would carefully slit open
and slowly unfold
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
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Meadow
As if, with open palms,
I could pull this beauty
inside me and carry it with me
until I give it to you—
Alexis Rhone Fancher: Snake/Holding Things Down
I’m going back to Lowe’s to get a bigger, longer snake, my lover says. Get a king snake, I whisper in his ear. I reach between his legs, cop a feel. Yeah, sure, he says, rolling his eyes. A king snake. He gives my roving hand a squeeze. Or would you prefer a boa constrictor?
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: This Longing for Him
Another dawn. Fists in my pockets, I head east
into this street of bungalows
as if I belonged here, among the hundred windows
lit one by one
Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Brief
It happens so often: there — somewhere
in a line, waiting room or store — I see you,
& it’s something about your work-wrecked
hands, cow-lick, the perfect curl of your lips
