Morning in the Churchyard by Joseph Harker

The sea, turned upside down and hung over the city from
four posts, is beginning to drip. It rolls over itself, grey and
inverted, and breathes into the belltowers. The sky's language
is this suggestion of copper music. One big tongue of metal

clacking against its flared lips, one tall throat of marble
rattling with air. The first slants of rain stick to low angles,
coming in so shallow that they skip the surface of street
and sidewalk. Falling trigonometry and the calculus of

rogue oceans slamming themselves fragment by fragment
into earth. One church door is half-open. The wood is growing
dark with water. There is a surprised tree, its leaves caught
mid-flutter, each one laughing at its shameless green.




Joseph Harker

Thunder by Karuna Chandrashekar

We sit on swing sets,

sand in our shoes
leaves swirling by.

The sky pulses-
a storm approaches.

You hold my hand,
tight, but smile as if

in a photograph
taken by a stranger.





Karuna Chandrashekar, India

A Morning on Our Earth by Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke

for Michelle Mrozkowski

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”
-- Frederic Chopin

Carefully, morning unfolds itself; filled with small,
trackless serendipities grounded in light. An Emperor
Butterfly blesses a lagoon—a still cool breeze accepts
its royal blue.
We are eighty years beyond, the speak-
easy is now filled with many garish, fleshly butterflies,
some barely legal; we are sixty-six years beyond, Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, once laid bare, now contend with fallout
of mornings fallen:

into the west their wabi-sabi

has wandered; and all the lagoons, all the butterflies
it has passed are soft calls in this hard, digital age,
governed by men intoxicated by anything but the sensum
of feeling. Such is the cliché. I see

*

their private regrets, they are a thing of beauty to our
quiescent Earth. The wars; of ideology; of flesh;
are different intimations of the same breeze—so
futile to try to bundle its usefulness into anything
harmful: its power is the timelessness of time, the
forgotten purity of movement centuries gone, now, to
come. Butterflies do not die from cancer. Humankind
juggles its death, but somehow the skittles do not fall.
Let us return. Morning calls. And as today becomes
extinct, let us not be ashamed: a crimson past

affects us now, and the slices of hope, still fragile,
still carefully unfolding, have at their edges nothing
if not the defining darkness we are leaving, for
our hearts’ language now lives in the breeze.


Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke, Queensland, Australia

Wiregrass by L Ward Abel

A transfusion of yellow butterflies.
It fills the woods late in the afternoon.
I stretch out my arm to receive

and feel wings of silk in my bloodroad
veins. Survival. Gray areas of my seasons
line a path recently paved with white mud.

It sinks better drivers than I ever was.
And I wish I could play the chord
that the color bluegreen makes

just after it rains. Under live oak my legs
are jerking. They refuse to die. It rains again.
Me outstretched now, beaded wet,

out of breath.
See, I want to take something in
like sweet air. Like time.


L Ward Abel, Georgia, USA