Bolts of Silk

Three Horses in the Cold by Lori Lipsky

2012-01-29T14:49:00.001Z

There stood three geldings strong
Side by side
Near the fence—
We paused our hike
In admiration
And they returned our gaze

From the horizontal bars
Of metal pipe fence
Hung neat rows of
Miniature icicles—
A delicate
Crystal valance

Lori Lipsky, Wisconsin, USA

Sparrows in Winter by Gershon Ben-Avraham

2012-01-22T14:46:00.001Z

I wonder where sparrows go in winter,
When weather turns, and seeds
Sleep silently beneath the frozen fields.

Sitting here beside my fire, I remember how in
Spring they built their home, in a corner of our own,
Beneath the eaves above our bedroom window.

On quiet summer nights I would lie awake
And strain to hear, through the open window,
Sounds of their lives together.

I asked my neighbor if he knew.
Smiling, he said he had never thought on it,
But told me I should remove their nest.

Climbing the ladder propped against the wall, and seeing
Close their work of sticks, and twigs, and string, with their own
Light grey and white feathers woven in, untouched, I left it.

I imagined them somewhere south, sitting in trees Gulf-side,
With a warm Gulf breeze brushing against their breasts,
Their children singing in the branches near them.

And they, their parents, remembering their
Summer home, hoping to return to the one
Sitting still in the eaves above our bedroom window.

I wonder where sparrows go in winter,
When weather turns, and seeds
Sleep silently beneath the frozen fields.

Gershon Ben-Avraham, PA, USA

Snow Pilgrim by Arthur Durkee

2012-01-13T10:04:00.000Z

Snow drives in around the porch edges. Puffs of whitegrained breath, fallen on uninsulated floors, to drift. The local definition of a blizzard asks how horizontal the snow falls. Green and white the red cardinal's shelter. Gray squirrel, puff-cheeked, clutches the topmost spruce bough, bouncing in the wind, to reach the tree's last cones. Rabbit tracks dash lines between trees.

a quiet rest
in between mountain hikes,
the trailman's lodge

Seeking a festival more quiet, more contemplative, the old poet ties up his knapsack, goes out into the snow, boots laced high over wool, hat and mittens braced upwind. Any direction as good, in this whiteout. Where the road shelfs over the cutbank of river's loop, he stops to watch heavy flakes streak through whipping blackoak branches across the oxbow slope. Memorizing calligraphy of lines of trees clouded behind snow, because too cold for inkstone and brush. Flakes tick on already frozen drifts, winds hiss the boughs, somewhere off upstream a bluejay shrieks. All other silences converge. Walking stick and knapsack, uproad, vanishing. Fade to white.

line of footfalls lost
under fresh fallen snow,
no one left to see

Arthur Durkee, USA

Snowblink by Chris Crittenden

2012-01-08T14:19:00.000Z

it puts the lie
to the white of the people
who came over
in their big bellied boats.
noon hits the field
and shatters, a bloodblaze
of angels. no puritan robe
this huge or capable
of inciting the sun.

we'd have to strip down
to bone, wash the crimson
off our sternums. our nerve endings
would have to be spliced, frozen,
and bundled with the paucity
of january alders.

if a just god held court,
it would be here, where boots
blemish pale satin, and ravens
seem pangs of the dead.
a place where ghosts can be molded
and presented as blunt-featured
evidence.

shorn logic waits nude,
sheathed in clear steel and unafraid--
as if we could learn
if we stood mute and calm,
tilting prayers to icicles,
swallowed by their truth.

Chris Crittenden, Maine, USA

The Spectacle by William Ogden Haynes

2011-12-30T17:30:00.000Z

My yellow Labrador puppy
abruptly stops
halfway through his dog door.
He eyes the grey early morning sky
and regards the giant snowflakes
as they slowly fall like white doilies
covering the red Alabama mud.
He emerges into the yard
and licks his back
tasting the snow,
then runs full speed
in a large circle,
snapping at snowflakes in the air.
Stopping in the middle of the yard,
head cocked to one side,
ears peaked with attention,
he looks at me through the kitchen window,
wondering how I can stop to make coffee
on such an amazing day.

William Ogden Haynes, AL, USA

Assembly Required by Michael Keshigian

2011-12-24T10:04:00.000Z

In bits and pieces
they fall from heaven,
disassembled snowmen,
one flake after the other,
strewn about the countryside,
discovered by those young at heart,
and with a dash
of imaginative insight,
they roll a gleeful creature
in their own image.
No directions needed.

Michael Keshigian

After the Fiasco by Anna Sykora

2011-12-19T13:59:00.001Z

A few new cells
May breathe alone
And hide inside
Old cracks of stone
Or creep through
Seeping ooze.

It’s survival
Life will choose,
_Forgetting our mistakes_.

Anna Sykora, Hanover, Germany

Close Calls by Joseph Harker

2011-12-14T16:16:00.000Z

This planet's going to hell: either wrapped up
in a suffocating shroud of coalsmoke
or boxed away between six thick planks of sin,
maybe starved of liquid capital
or drowned with disease: one way or another.
The End Times are a moveable feast that is always
next year.
Though,
given all the times we played chicken on the racetrack
with atoms and nuclei, the bottles of plague
just waiting to be shattered and re-debuted,
comet fragments blowing out boreal candles on a
Siberian birthday cake (rather than smashing into
Berlin or Beijing), it's a wonder
we haven't been burnt to a memorial cinder
already.
We could
keep worrying about either side of the present, but
imagine how foolish we'd feel if we almost
lived our lives, and missed it, just by
this
much.

Joseph Harker,

Afghanistan by Raud Kennedy

2011-12-05T14:11:00.002Z

In bed, prolonging the moments
before pushing back the covers.
The voice on NPR, a reporter in Afghanistan,
refers to the spring fighting season
as if he’s announcing the opening
of ski season at Mt. Hood Meadows.
I brush my teeth, minty fresh, extra whitener.
Death tolls from suicide bombings.
Toweling off after showering, it’s total US casualties,
a number that could be the population figure
of a small city. A city of dead young men and women.
The refreshing lather lifts my beard
as my triple bladed razor shaves my face kissable smooth.
Tell me again why we are there while I am here.

Raud Kennedy, Oregon, USA

The Conclusion of Certainty by Ken Poyner

2011-11-28T14:02:00.001Z

The day before the sun blew up
We took breakfast late, watched
The twenty-four hour news channel,
Considered doing nothing.
You placed on the back porch
Our cats' left over food
For the stray that has been
Looking in across the patio glass
Days, sun and rain, for a week.
Our cats have excess, and, as with all
Your other backdoor bowls of generosity,
Never has any bowl gone less than empty.
What do you think that cat
Feels for us now? Nonetheless
For as long as we could, we were
Committed to doing something, something
Sheepishly cliché, even knowing that the end state
Would be that it was the process that mattered.
Or perhaps it was the other way around.

Ken Poyner, Virginia, USA

The Buyers by Lee Stern

2011-11-23T15:21:00.000Z

The buyers are here
and they want to be sure there is something to buy.
If there’s nothing to buy, they’re going to go back to their sad houses
and line up behind the other sad buyers.
So please try to keep that in mind
when you have something ill to say about them.
Let the buyers advance for the good of humanity.
And let them reconcile their obligations
even when it is still the morning hour for us
and we stand amazed at the quality of the light.
Let the buyers settle their affairs
using the most advanced principles of modern accounting that we are able to relate.
And let the things they have bought settle down easily on shelves.
Let the dust that accumulates become the surface for the road that we keep.
And let the super abundant boxes
sail nightly through the shores of the heaven we can name.

Lee Stern, California, USA

absolute velocity by Linda King

2011-11-15T09:44:00.000Z

sometimes it is enough
this pull of distance its bitter wind
flung past evening driven
beyond the off ramp

even the gods are unhappy
at the broken places
where solitude collects

lean out your window sing
to the street lamps
the half moon dangles
from barren branches

between the lines
memories are written on the bodies
of those plastic flaxen-haired women
the ones that young girls crave

their stories compose a world
where violence becomes a verb
wrenched from another language
all scars and bruised knees

inherited disasters
passed on passed down
like heirloom silver
and those long ago neighbourhoods
where the hard summer grass remains

Linda King, Vancouver, Canada

Lotus shoes by Jan Harris

2011-11-07T15:11:00.002Z

Li combs the elm tree’s roots apart
as Ma Ma once teased tangles from her hair.
She prunes them short to fit the shallow pot
and soothes the severed tips with soil
like arms around a weeping child.

Annealed copper shapes the trunk,
as if it’s growing from a windswept cliff
where clouded panthers climb with ease.
Li twists the boughs with care.
The cracks and tears will heal with time
and all will wonder at its grace and style.

Tonight she’ll lift the Penjing from its plinth
and carry it with tiny steps to her betrothed.
She’ll wear her golden lotus shoes -
two crescent moons of satin silk,
embroidered figures dancing down the sides

Jan Harris, UK

Misdirecting Merlin by Kevin Cadwallender

2011-10-31T07:34:00.001Z

if you had known
would you have said?
in all the magic of our
being together,
a darkness.

was it trickery?
did you weave love
into a shawl?
did you wrap
yourself in it
to save you
from darkness?

if I had been Merlin
I could not have cast a spell
to redeem you.
I am the shabbiest
of conjurors
drawing nothing
from the hat but
my hands, gloved
by your darkness now
and infecting all light.

My cloak hangs
on your bedroom door,
stars long dead still visible.

Kevin Cadwallender, Scotland

Bound to Place by Vivian Faith Prescott

2011-10-23T20:32:00.000Z

Children know haa áan—our land,
ways-of-knowing. Language binds them
to place, my incantations. Fish spawning
in streams, bear cubs birthing in dens.
Children, a seasonal calendar, interwoven.

Daughter born during the Child Moon—Dís yádi

Daughter in the Black Bear Month, S’eek dísi—

..............Month-When-Black-Bear-Cubs-Are-Born

Another daughter born in At gadaxit dísi—

.............The-Birth-Moon-When-Animals-Give-Birth

Son born in At gadaxit yinna dísi—the Breeding Month.

This animal landscape.

Vivian Faith Prescott, Alaska, USA

Lunchtime Dispatch from Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary by Gail Goepfert

2011-10-16T09:10:00.001Z

The green anole lizards along, puffs out
the dewlap under its neck, inches across
the weathered fence rail, postures
in the shade of his tiny domain.

The pileated woodpecker sports
his red workhat, pries off long slivers of wood in search
of carpenter ants buried in the hollow-topped cypress—
home, kitchen, and drum.

The red-shouldered hawk cruises
the swamp understory, scouts
perches and preens, then performs its sky-dance—
an artist’s flipbook in flight.

The great egret, white in a field
of lettuce greens, edges forward in the shallows,
neck first, zen-master of patience
keen-eyed hunter as it stalks its prey.

The nursery log, fallen cypress
opens light in the canopy—
welcomes seedlings
insects, mosses, and ferns.

I set out hungry and fill my plate.

Gail Goepfert, USA

star ash fire by Joseph Mayo Wristen

2011-10-12T14:21:00.000Z

looking to understand
what it was like
to have walked here
before star ash fire,

circle of city lights
surrounded by desert rock
pyramids, scorpion shadow
migrating to birth’s field

mountain Blue Bird nesting
against sage nectar time’s
Saquaro forest stretched
across sand painted earth

October moon rising in Sagittarius

sandstone monument
surround by spiritual
red drop wind chants
layered canyon walls
earth’s endless colors
giving us the ability
to recognize the different
choices civilization has made

looking to understand
what it was like
to have walked here
before star ash fire

Joseph Mayo Wristen, USA

Testimony by Brittany Michelson

2011-10-04T12:28:00.001Z

Do not hold anything I’ve said or done against me
I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth
And nothing but the truth
So help me stars
Raising my right hand and placing it
On your heart
I make a solemn oath
To unlearn the sound of you

I do not recall the exact lighting condition that day
Nor the precise weather forecast
On the night
You struck a chord in me
But I know the feeling of tiny wings
Caught in a flame

Brittany Michelson

Waymarks by Mavis Gulliver

2011-09-28T08:19:00.001Z

Not a goose in sight
but all around are signs
of last night's roosting,
half a mile
of sea-smoothed sand studded
with droppings, the dune edge
flecked with feathers,
scatterings of breast down
heaped in hollows, filling
the small spaces
between sand sedge
and sun-bleached driftwood,
or trapped on tips of marram,
a flurry of restless pennants
fluttering.

Mavis Gulliver, Scotland, UK

The Upkeep of Canaries by Andrew Spacey

2011-09-22T16:36:00.001Z

No one any longer imagined us as real,
we had to imagine ourselves

Joe Wenderoth

I
Were we once dreaming, like men,
of curly clawed ancestors
who inhaled day, exhaled night
long before skin became song?
Now all of us
are amongst subdued musings chewed innuendo
between gobs and baccy.

The black wheel blurs, silhouettes alter shape,
a gruff choir on concrete finding themselves.
Long gone are children of wax who would melt away
in winter sun, leaving ponies, patterns in grass.

Light is a pinhead or a mirrored star they drop
us towards, like larks in steel introduced to rock.
All continuous song, deep song, transmitting finch.

Work mystifies.
Hold us up against definite warm roof space.
Wait for the planet to twitch.
Breath, breathe, brain, men, main, methane, all the voices
buried in their eyes.
Lemon yellow cravings when we turn to stone.

2
Fleshy Elwell of the Lamps,
(his wife had decamped
years ago)
hums electro

magnetically, speaks hendiadys in the foul air of cabined nights,
sucking coal egg shaped, the mind labyrinthine.

Is it a bit of fresh pippin? Seed time, fink sunflower, sip the dew it’s only awkward legislation.

He brews tea in a kettle that steams we delicate exiles, we’re inspired,
filigreeing apprentices and veterans alike until hessian blankets our sky.
Only the wheel and its umbilical feed this faked existence.

Wings make much of wild whilst we build music
compatible with each colour.

Andrew Spacey

The Dogs by Helen Calcutt

2011-09-15T13:36:00.001Z

Tonight the heat invites them
to sing: they stir in their tears
the moon’s light,
tonight she is touching on doorsteps
in the streets. They in another place
hear their voices remember. Sounds

crawl to the red edge
like fingers through gates, we invite them
with our silences. our long stares
of the nowhere darkness sounds
replacing our own.
and we could never say

how sad. how beautiful sad
they sing themselves into the dust
of the day’s ruin

Helen Calcutt, Birmingham, UK

Benevolence by Michael Keshigian

2011-09-07T08:56:00.001Z

Fall approached
with tender kiss
and startling display

gently unhooking
the verdant dress of summer,
who blushed

and dropped soft petals
to the ground,
emerging pale and tired

in the unfamiliar setting,
then curled
to keep herself warm

till a bearded man arrived
with white garb
to comfort her.

Michael Keshigian

Ocean Alone by Allan Peterson

2011-08-28T17:36:00.000Z

Wasps are hunting under leaves
for the late sleepers
Every glitter is a sound below hearing
or we would go deaf from the ocean alone
aspens and cottonwoods
or the little crossed wires slicing wind
beside the horses

Allan Peterson, USA

Pond in Deep Summer by J S Watts

2011-08-26T13:53:00.001Z

Where the fish lie at pond bottom
Deep in the darkest shadows of mud stroked green
The end of this year’s summer waits
Not to be enticed by the orange darts
Of almost too late love.
Time belongs to him now
So he can take his time
Squatting in the black and olive slumbers
Until the ghost beat of goose wings
Draws him out.

J S Watts, UK

Townie by Melissa Harrison

2011-08-23T10:23:00.000Z

National Trust houses, cows, huge open fields:
The countryside is not present in these.
Rather, it is the brief, warm smell of rain on earth,
The dank, warm taint beneath the riotous grass,
The bare blue chick dead and drying on the path.

The earwigs always in the fencepost-holes
And sycamore-copters that spin down in dizzy lines:
These are the secret things that ‘country’ means.
The scuff of beech mast under rare feet, and the low
Content notes of the wood-pigeon that drift

Above long-shadowed summer air, sifted and sweet
With the haze of distant smoke, and a gentle heat…
Later, the tea-time frost that silvers drifting leaves
So summer’s swelter seems an old amnesia;
These things are the countryside’s lazy treasure.

It’s not the framed, uncomprehending space
Beyond the Intercity’s rain-blown window glass;
Nor is it the cloud-chased wold carved through by car
En route to somewhere easier to picture. No,
It is both more secret than these things, and richer.

It is the simple benediction an evening hedgehog brings
Shambling a myopic trail through dew-veiled grass;
The chain of tiny beads a bramble leaves on skin…
These country things I have given up remembering.

Melissa Harrison, UK

Having Gone West by Jessie Carty

2011-08-17T09:37:00.000Z

It is a landscape I don’t recognize.
If it wasn’t for the heat, I’d think

of winter, of when things die back
because the vegetation here

rises into spikes, reminding me
of leaf empty trees.

Even the red dirt of the cliffs
could be the Piedmont.

Except here, nothing moves
and the occasional

flower on a cactus is a surprise.
I read somewhere

that bats pollinate in desert climates.
I try to picture that

but the image is too dry, too
thin, until I see it,

the shape of the bats wing
in the unlined rock.

Jessie Carty

Cloudlonely by Susan S Keiser

2011-08-07T14:34:00.000Z

bookslept, she's
wordblasted
late and soon,
she's sung out,
too waterworded,
poemhardened,
still lochlost,
laketorn,
reading a word's
worth in a night;

wolfraised,
rough-gnawn
(fangs/doubts)
gnawing the paper
behind the words;
Listeneise,
sordid boon--
a wasted power,
laying waste
the words,
the lakeworth
words. the ones
she reads,
the tarn-ished
words, the
stillworth knowing.

Susan S Keiser, USA

Morning in the Churchyard by Joseph Harker

2011-07-31T17:51:00.001Z

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

2011-07-23T09:27:00.000Z

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

2011-07-16T17:10:00.000Z

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

2011-07-08T09:13:00.001Z

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

Annoying Fly by Chris Crittenden

2011-06-26T15:11:00.000Z

a fly like a meteor
chides my head,
orbiting the big bang
of my distress.

i nap
and its proboscis
daps on my sweat.
i complain
and it whines

like a misunderstood
wizard
whose vision is superior-
-full of sheens, prisms
and wonders--

as if it had seen god
through mandalic eyes.
found manna
on Universal Rundle.

it has zigzagged awed
and nose
dived true,
but never so dizzy
it forgets to see.

why should i be
its nemesis,
the claw in the gloom
that swipes? why must i
exist to thwart

its hallelujah?

Chris Crittenden, Maine, USA

Elkins, NH by Terri Muuss

2011-06-18T19:22:00.000Z

Black fly season peaked
in June. My brother and I
would wade up to our thighs, digging out fresh-
water clams with eager toes. Moist patches
of skin on my cheeks, I feared the
uneasy murk under my feet. In these silent
hours, we never talked
about the tiny spaces between
the wood slats of our childhood.
We were always more comfortable
with the sinking
our ankles made into rotting sediments
of lake and the buzzing
of mosquitoes circling
our heads. We’d stoop down
to catch striders and wait
for the inevitable sting.

Terri Muuss, USA

Beechbank Burn by Ross Wilson

2011-06-17T06:55:00.000Z

We’d run by the burn when the burn
didn’t run at all. Stopped in summers youth,
low and still in the no flow time zone
when we had it all – warm summer light,
nights far off as the sea mouth gulping
greedy as a beer monster, our burn.

We didn’t know it crashing through bushes,
on the run across imaginary enemy-lines,
ducking behind NO DUMPING signs
people ignored to jettison their crap –
magpie-bairns salvaging scrap:
old washing machines concealed in leaves,

wheel-barrows, car seats, cupboards in trees . . .
One day we discovered old cassettes
from the fifties in bags beached by the burn –
compilations of voices recorded long before
we were born: discarded, flowing on
in the winter-gush fast-forwarding the burn –

archaic pop guddled by a new generation.
We ran against the current to an old soundtrack.

Ross Wilson, Scotland, UK

Winter Clothes by Ian Mullins

2011-06-10T18:25:00.000Z

Almost summer, they say; and outside
all the evidence is in place
to confirm the diagnosis. A stale water sky,
yard dressed in confetti; and that sweet aching smell
that’ll wake me up sneezing
every day in June, driving me indoors
until the weather cools

and I can look out
on a dream so beautiful
that everyone dreams it
at exactly the same time.
Remember crossing the bridge
from school, tearing off your shirt
bombing down through the waves:
finding a hollow in the dunes
that feels more like home
than the room barricaded
with the winter things you love
when frost smokes leaves
dry as new sweaters,
and the snow posts cards
through your door.

But here you must be naked
and afraid, shot out of a dream
you only belong to
when you turn out of the office to run
someone else’s errand
and all the skies of summer are out there,
like a postcard from a land
you’ll never visit again;

and you’ll never know why
you need winter
to feel such a summer in your bones.

Ian Mullins

Nesting by Robert Demaree

2011-06-02T07:42:00.000Z

On our pond at Golden Pines
We check each day the shaded grove
Where the swans are nesting.
Shouldn’t be long, we say.
The male shares the duty,
Giving them a leg up
On other species we could name;
But then he wanders off.
Any day now, we remark.
But at the water’s edge:
Some eggs are smashed,
New ones in their place.
Still the mother patiently sits,
Reminding us of things
We wish we did not know.

Robert Demaree, NH, USA

Time Travelling by Peter Branson

2011-05-26T14:01:00.001Z

“Bird species are disappearing at a scarcely conceivable rate.”

(‘Muscicapa Striata: The Spotted Flycatcher’)

Each spring as you stack up they journey north,
re-lay that nest in your old garden wall.
You catch them at their ease, such elegance;
ash brown above a creamy dappled breast.
They dart and twist, snap insects on the wing,
turn deftly back to where they started from.
Eggs warm to touch, as sheer as porcelain;
flecked shades of gilded bronze, the Midas brush.
Each year they leave, conceive strange distances,
exotic latitudes you’ve never seen.
You’ve flown and your old habitat’s turned down,
six houses scheme. No summer guests these days.
That’s progress, you concede, fast in the fourth
dimension where your travellers still breed.

Peter Branson, UK

Tree Dream by David Chorlton

2011-05-20T13:49:00.001Z

In the dream all that remained where the tree had stood
was a stump that marked
its former place at the incline
on which a trail curved back as it climbed
through white stones and grass
from the streambed to the deserted mine
and up into the stars. In the dream
some friends who had never seen the tree
when its roots ran deep into the earth
came to the spot on the occasion
of a loss so great they knew nobody would recover
the boughs reaching high
through all the seasons and thousands of leaves
opening and turning in the forest
as they had fallen and opened
for longer than anyone has been alive.
In the dream they knelt
and raised their eyes toward the sky.
In the dream there was such grief. There was
operatic weeping. There was
black, black mourning. In the dream
it was only one tree.

David Chorlton, Arizona, USA

Of Warbler and Quail by Rae Spencer

2011-05-16T12:52:00.001Z

Drab little she in the brush
Muttering her song to lure
Someone else

But only I respond
Drawn across the dune
To listen closer

As a child I spoke to quail
I whistled out their bobwhite name
To hear them shriek it back

But this little warbler
Outside my beachfront door
Her accent slips my ear

Measures of water wisdom
Refrains of woven nest
Codas that fall silent

Because I have come too near
To understanding
What is lovely on this shore

Of daily tide
Of sandy soil and storms
Of quickening flocks

That speak their sea-swept names
In secret tangled tongues
Of salty sail and oar

And then they fly away
While I struggle, yearn to say
What I remember of briars

Of dry summer streams
And winter dreams
Of silent quail

Hungry among the thistle
Of home, my distant valley home
So many years from here

Rae Spencer

In Memoriam by Nadya Avila Chant

2011-05-06T16:15:00.001Z

You are text and subtext, my sound and my caesura,
The verdant meadows of adolescent summers,
And the fallow fields of a dreamless winter.
You are sigh and gasp and bated breath and I
Your restless child and somnolent woman.
You keep a home in the curve of my earlobe,
In the scar on my wrist, in the white of my fingernails.

Nadya Avila Chant, Utah, USA

antler by Arthur Durkee

2011-04-26T17:59:00.002Z

antler bone found in the grass
speaks of lost deer rituals, their religion of seasons
and blood

dance of hoof and antler, horn and fur ruff
circle of apple trees full of bees
and the tender undying evergreens

horn-handed deer staff a dance ritual for young bucks
while old men sit blanket-wrapped watching
sweat-braced flanks they used to know

we rub our bodies with suet and red clay
we dance the deer in spring and autumn
becoming those bones found in the grass

edges of the field at dusk still full of bees
where deer stop to stare, then walk on
suddenly doubled with ghosts of the ancestors

Arthur Durkee, USA

Ancestor Worship by Debby Regan

2011-04-20T07:30:00.004Z

The last Imperial Chinese parts of
Ourselves reside in the attic
With jade busts

To throw garlands?
.............Show our reverential
Anger

These ancestors whose
Maddening destructiveness
Mocks what PBS would instill.

(I cried about the lost
polar bears who float
away from our fingertips
on iceberg rafts)

some Edwardian sailors keep
a naturalist's case of
extinction but when they retire,

the glass eyes reincarnate and
follow the specks of light
from the ceiling

Is the Irish elk in
heaven? I never saw such antlers

They say on
forty feathers of passenger
pigeons the Woolworth Building stands

Debby Regan, USA

My Tribe by Ray Sharp

2011-04-15T07:00:00.001Z

The trouble is not
with the names of flowers

how to make fire
or find my way home
on a moonless night.

I dream
of the long walk
and the endless green river.

What happened to the frogs?

The sky
is bruised
above the blood-red sun.

I live among people
with three simple rules

do not kill birds
do not pee at the water-gathering place
and I can never remember the third.

Ray Sharp, Michigan, USA

A Silent Poem by Michael Keshigian

2011-04-08T19:51:00.001Z

In the beginning it must have been
that the Neanderthal
emerged from his cave
early one day
into a cold and ruthless world

and noticed for the first time
sun’s reflection glistening
upon lake tranquility
between twin peaks
of a snow covered summit.

And speechless
as he might have been
for images never seen
he fell to his knees
staring mutely

unable to excise
the swell in his soul
and realized
each morning thereafter
would speak differently.

Michael Keshigian

Pathfinder by Alan Britt

2011-04-04T16:24:00.000Z

Like Pathfinder
I retreat
across smooth roots,
streetlights,
and the moon’s severed hand
reaching for the wrinkled waist
of a pear tree.

Like Pathfinder
I slip sideways between mercurial shadows
on my way to the outskirts
of the known universe
just behind the speckled thigh
of a golden pear.

I enter each brown spot on the pear
looking for salvation
born inside each russet scale
sloughed from the body
of our most precious religion
we call time.

Once inside, I’m greeted
by black violins
and ten thousand suns digesting
a watery consciousness
inside snail shells.

Like Pathfinder
I retreat
across smooth roots,
streetlights,
and the moon’s severed hand
creasing the wrinkled hips
of a pear tree.

Alan Britt, MD, USA

In Late March by Alicia Hoffman

2011-03-28T20:27:00.002Z

Bulbs peek green
tongues from the soil, snow
becomes a philosophical
question: How long can
one stay the same before melting?
All the while, cold holds. Always,
though, it is the gravity
that gets us in the end, the heaviness
of the mind, that cerebral tug.
In the morning, a wrinkle,
the scrutiny of night. And then
there are the words,
the memory tease
of Thompson, Pennsylvania,
the blue jeaned girl leaning
over, stroking chickens upside down
between the eyes, putting them to sleep.
I never knew her. That’s what I think
now, remembering her lying
in the dark, the coo of the birds
gone with the down
of the sun, unable to find the switch
on the wall in the familiar room,
flailing her long arms out of that
warm blanket, cold fingers finding nothing
but what she thought was not there,
the cord to a lamp, pulling the porcelain
weight through the air, the crashing glass and
the remaining shards. We are all like this,
she thought, like the tulips this time of month,
clawing through the damp, pawing the air, always
with the struggle, the searching for light.

Alicia Hoffman, NY, USA

Foxes by Christopher Woods

2011-03-21T19:14:00.002Z

Running with them
For a time I once divided
Into weeks
Is like a river that never dries
But goes and goes, coasting
Over shells and sand beds,
The souls of mountains
Breaking up, migrating.

Being among them
Nights in frostbound fields
Beneath a ghost moon haze,
I need to believe
They too are counting stars
And all the time between them.

Christopher Woods, Texas, USA

Fever by Corey Mesler

2011-03-15T14:09:00.001Z

On the couch
I lay
and watched

the suncats
chase a

string of yarn
from
my unknit sleep

Corey Mesler, Tennessee, USA

Attunement by Chris Crittenden

2011-03-08T07:34:00.000Z

on a silent pond
a bufflehead
sparks to flight,
sowing gleams
in its wake.
ribs blend
without flaw,
until it is clear
that physics
is a perfect harp.
anything that moves
strums it to play.

Chris Crittenden, Maine, USA

watching by Joanna Lee

2011-02-28T19:25:00.001Z

herons stalk the edge of
civilization; the river
sings a marbled song
of fire and forgotten glory while
the sun casts about the rapids; geese
fish from the shallows, men
from the bridge. stones bake;
clouds come and go
like the old women searching
the banks for change and lost
youth while a train slows
with its mourner's whistle and i
lean on the edge of
wildness, watching.

Joanna Lee, VA, USA

Crazy Crow by Joseph Harker

2011-02-21T16:34:00.000Z

what would possess him
to make a stage of the driveway
for his encrypted hopskip in
three-eight time–

some urgent fire is
smoldering under those
ruffled India ink shoulders

for perhaps he mourns
the loss of a secret magic
with words that are almost
forgotten language–

the depths of his eye
in turn reflect the beholder’s
like two mirrors face-to-face

Joseph Harker

Professor Winter by Mary McKeel

2011-02-14T20:59:00.003Z

I feel like I’m on stage, ready to read a scene.
There’s no one to give me my cues,
or to take cues from me.

Reason says, the loyalty I gave you
is just a crumpled piece of paper.
I keep smoothing it out.

I love how the crocus comes back first
every year. No gardener needed.
Is persistence weakness, or strength?

I wanted to do something old – fashioned,
like give you a lock of my hair,
or keep a lock of yours.

I can’t keep from coming back every year
without betraying myself.

Mary McKeel, North Carolina, USA

My Mother’s Cancer by Kay Middleton

2011-02-07T12:28:00.001Z

cold
winter days
strung together
like cheap beads
snap and spill
onto the earth
chattering hailstones
on window glass melting,
leaving circle scars
of unforgotten pain
tomorrow is gray asphalt
divided by white-lined
platitudes stretching straight
and flat between barren arms
of oak and birch on, undiluted,
to an unknown garden
devoid of fragrance,
yellow daffodils.

Kay Middleton, Virginia, USA

The Weight by Hal Sirowitz

2011-01-31T19:19:00.000Z

I’m being crushed
by the weight of

this relationship,
she said. I have to

carry it all by myself
from one date

to the next. Not that
it weighs a lot - about

the same as our hearts –
but it’s the responsibility

I bear of not letting it fall,
and shatter in a million pieces

which is frightening. It’s not
like a puzzle that can be put back

together. It’s more like a poodle
who’s going to run away

in search of less contentious owners.

Hal Sirowitz, PA, USA

Mulberry by Andrea Potos

2011-01-22T19:30:00.002Z

At Keats House, Hampstead

They've made two
houses into one,
moved the staircase where the poet
once climbed to his small room.
The door he staggered through
after the chilling coach ride from London
is now in front.

Even the nightingales are gone.

What remains
is the mulberry tree,
low-lying, far-spreading, two centuries old.
For him--only a bush in the garden
where Fanny waved while he lay ill
in the front parlour.

It yields
the most succulent fruit,
juice dripping
over my hands,
staining my fingers
my palms, like ink
like deep,
red remembrance.

Andrea Potos

The San's Promise by Rethabile Masilo

2011-01-17T14:40:00.001Z

They came from the south
holding the sun in their right hand
like an object of worship,
crossed the Mohokare into the mountains,
leather bags full of ochre
and painting sticks, venom in small phials,
dried meat conserved in leaves. They stayed
long enough to paint the fat of the land:
hunt scenes, children hopping in playful circles
round a fire. An ostrich egg and roots
dug up from the desert's giving sand,
hand prints lit like sepals
exploding on grotto walls.

Rethabile Masilo, France

On Reading Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye’ While Watching My Daughter Draw Unicorns by James Valvis

2011-01-12T09:17:00.001Z

I close the book to look at my daughter’s drawing.
Rainbows and unicorns are everywhere.
People with colorful eyes
smile sky-blue teeth that take up half their faces.
She wants to know if it’s good, and I tell her it is.
Then I open the book and read again,
but my mind wanders to gemstones, of all things,
and I think, a ruby is red
because it can accept every color but red;
and an emerald is green because it can’t accept green.
And it’s not just that way for rocks either.
The banana skin you think is yellow isn’t yellow,
it’s every color but yellow,
yellow alone bouncing back to our eyes.
A little more reading, and I decide,
this is true of the races of people also.
The people we call brown are everything but brown,
and the Indians are not reddish
but blue and burnt umber and purple.
Try getting your head around that.
What we see is the rejected color, not what we accept.
If we could see beyond the rejection,
we’d see that each thing is a near-complete spectrum,
colors forever moving through the form.
And then we’d have no need for political correctness,
marches, morons shaving their rainbow heads,
or race-baiters shaking down CEOs.
And the girl in this Toni Morrison novel
who wants the blue eyes,
she’d know she always had them,
and pink eyes too, and peach, and gold,
and any color an imaginative child cared to scribble.

James Valvis, Washington, USA

a penguin in Cardiff by Dave Lewis

2011-01-05T09:18:00.001Z

I never knew her, baby chick, King.
A fleeting movement, walked past, stared for a while.
She rescued me from damp lottery dreams and
I recalculated my entire life in a fly-past. I had back pain, terminal
hopefully not, but she mattered more that minute.

We all chatted about her, her thick coat of fur never mentioned.
We knew in that summer sun it was colder than we’d ever know.
We instinctively knew there was no need to bring up Photoshop,
like a curse, a cheat or a steal. She didn’t warrant it,
not even Smart sharpen or Levels, no need to Crop.
Two sets of footprints in one world. You could feel the
tears flowing inside.

I’m sure we could have all stayed forever, until
the security guards pushed us out. She needed rescuing,
protecting, from iPads and oil spills. The badger killers
lived in this town. Fact is, she was probably surrounded
by a million of her kind, soft and warm. On an ash beach cool as
icicles she’s programmed to wait
for mammy and fish

But we wondered, kept wondering
how the story would end, would she make it?
Yet the answer was as near as her image
the answer was always the same
the answer was frozen in time
like a still shot of God
in black and white.

Dave Lewis, Wales, UK

Standing Stones by Simon Kewin

2010-12-29T21:42:00.000Z

Not the wind to worry the stones
Nor the passing shadows of crows
Casting brief cave-paintings there
Not the gazes of women and men
Nor, then,
The gazes of their great, great, great, great grandchildren
Only the years
Flake away by layers of dust
Peel back the skin, in search of the meaning
But the obelisks, obdurate
Remain silent, disdainful
Keeping their long purposes to themselves

Simon Kewin, UK

Rise and Fall by Martin Hodges

2010-12-23T07:00:00.002Z

Grey, distorts the black
rise of mizzled crows.
Echoes, feathering in retreat.
Rebels with their caws.
Perched in the clinging damp
of a blind day.
Steeped in silence.

Do not disturb.
Their honeyed notes
are long lost to the fields.
Sunk in sullen soil, locked in flint.
Rasping remnants tear the surging
winter skies and pinch the heart.
Chaos, cast in black,
and robbed of a sweet song.

Martin Hodges, UK

Red's the colour by Gabrielle Bryden

2010-12-19T09:01:00.001Z

red proved the toughest contender
in the fiery battle between black and colour

he was a radical mover and shaker
a hot-blooded fighter

who waved the scarlet standard tall
for black to see and force to fall

he led all colours deep into the heated battle
memories of the long dark days

ignited their passions

which raged and flared
creating their own light

they reveled in the spilling of crimson blood
and black recoiled in horror

red rolled out the carpet for his friends
when the battle was won

power to the petite

colours
tints
of every shade
advancing into the open

a revolutionary freedom
cause for celebration

let’s paint the town.

Gabrielle Bryden, Australia

Still-Life Ballad for a Crow by Jay Coral

2010-12-14T08:43:00.001Z

Curiousity
on a barbed wire
your steady eyes
eulogic
i pity
not putting you
next to a rose
on a snowy day
your black sheen
rejoicing in Titian red.

Immaculate white
the crow wonders
why winter
is a delicate harvest
the guts
not as black
as the heart
the reekness
of no reds
dumbfounds

Jay Coral, Los Angeles, USA

illuminations of a cat by Regina Green

2010-12-08T06:26:00.000Z

strike out boldly
learn from the collective
beware of hand-held treats
always appear negotiable then
walk away with tail held high
mice and high heels are fair game
scratching behind the ears can be
used against you
you can take the loner persona a bit too far
the best part of the day is reserved for
sleeping it away
you can say i'm yours and i won't disagree but
i'll keep you up at night wondering where i am
i am beautiful but you know that
it's harder than it looks

Regina Green, USA

Feathery Language by Cathy Cullis

2010-12-05T11:50:00.001Z

Icicles like never before.
I could get used to breathing like this,
a feathery language.

It is now fine to wrap yourself and go,
anywhere, upstairs, to the stars.
The moon has a new dead ring.

A cat enters with a frosted beard,
enters your dreaming, refuses blank stares.
Stairs, stars and stares. This is your winter.

Liking its efforts, snow won’t stick.
Later is no longer in the dictionary of snow,
this blue makes present even recent mistakes.

The secret is a little egg white, the taste of kelp.
This is how even stars spread themselves thinly.
You wear your coat inside.

Cathy Cullis, England

The Wave by Joanna Ezekiel

2010-12-01T11:14:00.001Z

Climate Change March, December 2009

for a while
the skies as blue
as our fingernails

and hats
below the placards,
scarves, banners

an undertow of
anger
fuels us
we walk further
than expected – penance

for your new gloves,
my bottle of water
at Parliament

we hear cheering
fall back
like birdsong

strange in December
upon Westminster Bridge
our blue concern

waves .......at high tide

Joanna Ezekiel, UK

A Sung Dynasty Landscape by David Chorlton

2010-11-28T15:06:00.000Z

The ancients in their mist
sitting by an ink block
at the tip of a meditation
created mountains with a stroke
quick as wind crossing silk

while they left empty space
to flow from their scrolls
into infinity
which we
in our time have discovered

to be smaller by the year
soon to weigh no more
than the snow on a sparrow’s back

when it touches down
in winter and we say
what a relief we thought
there were no more of them.

David Chorlton, Arizona, USA

A Curtain of Wine Bottle Tops by Mavis Gulliver

2010-11-25T08:42:00.001Z

Africa Remix Exhibition

Down the high wall
folds fall
trail
an undulating hem
across the floor.
Glints of gold
ribbons of red
slivers of silver
shimmer
draw the eye
dominate
the dimly lit gallery.

Seduced
by the surface shine,
no-one notices
the flickering shadows
on the wall behind.

But I watch them
swaying
like the moonlit ghosts
of dead drunkards.

Mavis Gulliver, Scotland

McDiver's Creek by Donal Mahoney

2010-11-22T13:03:00.002Z

Autumn’s over.
Wheatcake odors flood the wood

front porch. Andrew Block,
in mackinaw and overalls,

tamps first tobacco of the day
and estimates his morning.

In an open field beyond McDiver’s Creek
a colt, palomino apricot and snow,

nips grass between great gallops
and the shock of trees.

Donal Mahoney, MO, USA

Mustang by Kevin Heaton

2010-11-19T08:33:00.000Z

I am all that you have lost,
and will never understand.

I filled my lungs with freedom
and was grateful. I bolted

unsaddled across the wind
with happy spirits on my back,

and we shared as brothers.
I quenched my thirst in mystical

waters flowing from the inner
core of life, and I gave thanks.

I raced over hills and through
canyons in dream visions

of the people, and they told
of my valor. Now you shod me

with iron, and tangle my pride
in lariats of bondage.

I was the freedom you cannot
understand.

Kevin Heaton, SC, USA

A Peppermint Tree by Lee Stern

2010-11-16T21:35:00.000Z

I think I should have a peppermint tree to show for everything.
And I think I should have it now.
The fact that they don’t make peppermint trees
shouldn’t even enter into it.
I expect you to deliver it to me
and send me a card telling me that it’s on the way.
If you tell me where to put it, that’ll be a plus.
But I’m so used to you not saying anything
that, if I have to figure it out myself,
I won’t get excited. And I won’t blame you.
Because I know you have enough to worry about.
And you don’t need me to chime in with more aggravation.
So you don’t have to say anything.
Just show up with the peppermint tree
and I’ll consider that you’ve done your job.
I’ll consider that there’s a forest somewhere.
Maybe loosely tied together with dust in its hands.
And its angels are whispering your name.

Lee Stern, California, USA

The Exoneration by Angel Zapata

2010-11-13T14:39:00.000Z

The storm fluctuates, edges closer to sterling.
Turbid rolls of nebulous sheets charcoal and tumbleweed,
spin furious as leaves strike magnetic gold.
I count the seconds between the miles.

The moon plucks a star from its eye like a thorn.
The pitch is ambrosia and midnight;
a canopy of liquid umbrellas melting to a fold.
I am wet from the effort of raising this tide.

A rumble, like the smooth hands of the deaf on a speaker,
stirs the porcelain cauldron, the brew in my delicate cup.
I am thirsty for vowels, for consonant intoxication,
but it’s always coffee he grinds.

This kitchen is tile and plaster, linoleum and stainless steel.
I am fragile stone frozen in my pine chair.
My husband thinks I ignore his pleas for redemption.
He is only beginning to understand the storm.

Angel Zapata, Georgia, USA

Moon lines by Rachel Fox

2010-11-07T21:53:00.000Z

The moon will get more blurred, not less

And more and more I'll look in vain
For edges
And reasons

Old errors lose their lines and shapes

Leave flashes, not whole cycles
There are peaks
And troughs

I see how all is blending thick

Mixing, slurring, soup-of-lifeing
Is it done yet?
Is it right?

I stir, I eat, I look, I sleep

I dream of moons that fill the sky
With brightness
With courage

Rachel Fox, Scotland

Talking about it by Mairi Sharratt

2010-11-04T13:46:00.001Z

It is the silence between the words

where much is said. But her mouth
could not form the sounds
that surround its deep lapping.

Her mind could not speak them to her.

Instead it would glimpse a single frame
of what happened.

Quick enough so not to relive,
but still, it ripples through her day.

Mairi Sharratt, Edinburgh, Scotland

Day of the Dead by Sergio Ortiz

2010-11-01T07:31:00.001Z

On the day of the dead, Pablo put his pants on one mummified foot at a time. It wasn't his fault; rain was the true culprit. Clouds followed his feet for years, poured whenever he tried to cut bread in the city of glass. His soles cracked, sprouted roots. Julia entertained on her balcony, levitated intimate secrets. People on Beaker Street attributed her faculties to a santero visiting her family on the day she was born. She stood tall and elegant like the mountains to the south of Pablo's home. Her face had all the traces of an unforgettable pain. Julia found the last bottle of rum hidden in the trash before the wedding. She bled her life into that gutter. Pablo was one mummified foot at a time closer to banging pots and starvation, orders from the dictator. They are gone, but I keep their marriage vows to read aloud on the day of the dead.

Sergio Ortiz, Puerto Rico
previously published in Yellow Medicine Review

Where I Used to Live by Taylor Graham

2010-10-27T14:24:00.001Z

I’d walk the ridgetop into sunrise,

surprise overnight cobwebs, gold-filament
woven in black-oak.
Evenings I’d hike to a manzanita clearing
and climb the boulder overlooking
canyon, bedrock mortar slipping
to sleep above a nameless creek.

I’d listen for the spirits of the people
who lived there and moved away.

In this new place, how do I find sunrise
under Stone Mountain? Daylight
strikes on chert, not granite. Sun sets
out of sight. No canyon overlook;
a winter creek washes out the fences.
Spotted towhees flit in and out of windfall
from the last big storm.

People used to live here and call it home, and

then moved on. I listen for their spirits.

Taylor Graham, California, USA

Oak by Gill McEvoy

2010-10-24T13:54:00.000Z

As she polishes and buffs the grain,

the golden wood, the strong fine lines,

she almost hears its yellow leaves

mutter in an autumn wind:

growing beside a lake, an oak,

this table forming in its solid heart.

Gill McEvoy, UK

Finalizing Our Aged Property by Rae Spencer

2010-10-20T15:05:00.001Z

The exhausted land reclaimed

Our fence-line
Time blanketed
Obscene barbs
With perfumed honeysuckle

A million twining flowers

With steely resolution
Wrested rusty strands
Toward the soil

A war of decades

Waged on a suspension bridge
Sagging posts and braided wire
Fatigued by the surprising weight
Of so many fragile vines

At last the posts cracked

In surrender
Gave up their substance
To termites and rain

And our boundaries

Crumbled into joyous ruin

Nothing left of fences
To say where we should end
And something else begin

Rae Spencer, Virginia, USA

Cultivating (Preserving) by Scott Edward Anderson

2010-10-16T19:42:00.001Z

Dwelling as preserving

is cultivating.
Dwelling means knowing
what inhabits a place
and understanding that
which belongs to a place.

We cultivate what grows,

while building things
that don’t grow.
We seek the organic
in our own creations,
which are inorganic.

Imposing our will

on the landscape,
we can remove either
that which promotes capacity
or that which prevents capacity.

We are tenders of the garden,
we tend what needs tending
(heart or "langscape")
What we save remains—

Scott Edward Anderson, USA

i stitched my arms to my sleeve so’s by Blake Ellington Larson

2010-10-13T06:56:00.000Z

i could wave my open heart in

mid-air above my hang’d head

i found a map i made from apples

the how-to-manifesto described
a secret box of postcards

i collected enough stardust to
whisper your name

i raced your camouflage melodies skyward

on full moons i’d
gather less magnetism

but i taught daffodils to bloom

and dried leaves in honor

of your passing ghost

Blake Ellington Larson, California, USA

October ‘08 by Russell Jaffe

2010-10-06T07:05:00.000Z

In a dream, we flew. Our fingers

were out like needles, and we

drifted up as we looked at them.

Weeks ago, we stood in an apple

orchard and condemned that city from
which we couldn’t afford to leave,

I climbed in my nice shoes and the

wet bark scraped and marked my

pants and purple sweater. As you smiled

big up at me, I tossed the apples down

and you caught them, smiling and wincing,

the tiny marks around your eyes disappearing

under the fat, green apples that padded the ground
like cork hitting a plaster wall. You asked me:

what if I had to take a bite from every apple in
the orchard?

You chewed an apple loudly.

The orchard went until

the forest abruptly stopped it, and the hills
of New York went off until they were smoky

and gone. All those trees had all the apples.
We came across rows of peppers growing

and, looking down at them, I pointed spiky

and told you what kinds of peppers they were.

The rows led right up to the apples on the ground
and in the trees, and you smiled and walked,

and I hated that I had to pay for all this.
The air had just the right bite to it.

I can’t even imagine those apples,

emergency red and green as the outskirts of a bruise,

the orchard itself: the number, the amount, is imaginative and lofty.

None of us can even imagine how deep we’re in

Russell Jaffe, Iowa, USA

Flightpaths - 1913 by Dick Jones

2010-10-03T19:18:00.000Z

The strangest of times: a skein of geese

crossing the bedroom window, heading west
and no body of water within seven miles.

I am playing the pagan - lying late amongst

the Sunday morning bells.

Heaven is a cloudless sky

in late September, harvest past,
leaves on the turn.

At first I think I hear the binder,
wheels beating, turning at the headrow,
but the fields are bare.

Such a beating, a clattering.

More geese searching for a lake
in this land of furrows? Or
the rector in his Wolsely
come to seek me out?

And then my window darkens
into the shape of wings, jagged wings –
Weston mill uprooted, reeling across the fields?
Certainly a hurricane of sorts in the throat of this beast
squatting low over the beeches,
dabbling its feet in leaves, roaring
in a black updraft of rooks.

An aeroplane, fearful in the untried air –
nothing like the rising bird
it mocks, This is a man,
dressed in wire and canvas,
climbing out of the long grass.
This is a godless man ascending,
out of the dust, towards the light.

Dick Jones, UK

The Elephant Who Could Have Been Pink is destroyed in a First Grade Classroom by Taryn Spencer

2010-09-29T15:07:00.001Z

I didn’t have a grey crayon

and

I could not envision

Them
Existing

Grey

In their bodies
They live
Copiously

Openly

Through flourished

Thuds

They stomp

Olive plains
In herds
Graceful

Amongst mangy hyenas
Amongst curious jaguars

While cultivating thoughts Of cooling

Sweaty trunks in magical waters-

In between a world of Colorful lives hued in blues and greens-

Shunning jungle disputes and dull human beings

As for you

Depriving me of a creative moment

Of a haunting vision that danced
In my head

Like ballroom girls

In the midst of Eden.

Taryn Spencer

A Letter to the First Graders of 2100 by Kasandra Larsen

2010-09-23T14:52:00.002Z

In Yosemite National Park, we are saying goodbye to the oldest and largest trees;
they must be gone by now. This was a protected place, meaning the vanishing
of branches happened slower. Once upon a time, America was beautiful, blanketed

in green, ripe for harvest because everywhere is virgin territory if you draw the map
yourself. That's what our ancestors thought as they chopped, burnt, built their houses,
made this paper. That was the beginning. Worse came later. At first we were

industrious, not fat. We invented improvements to horses and feet, upgraded to sleek
and shiny cars that idled for hours every year on flat black landscapes, highways
with tiny pines shoved off to the side. Innocents who inherited the earth, still young,

still meek, have you been to the graveyards, hangars full of big tin cans with wings
that flew us almost everywhere we wanted? We never did find new planets with plenty
of trees. Light bulbs were fired by electricity from plants burning coal. Even our

impressive architecture emitted carbon dioxide. Every city had a bunch of Burger
Kings, McDonald's; we raised thousands of heads of cattle for their supply, grew
abundances of rice, blew methane kisses to what we thought was an endless sky.

Kasandra Larsen, New Orleans, USA

Retrograde by Michael Carychao

2010-09-19T11:26:00.001Z

Ovens, refridgerators, washers and dryers,
dishwashers, microwaves, tv's and cars,
computers, phones, stereos, remotes and speakers
buzzed, fumed and lurched,
fell and never got up.

We looked to each other and saw our ancestors
pushing sleeves over elbows,
planting feet, tilting shoulders,
thinking of seasons
and laughing at clouds.

Michael Carychao

Construction Site by Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt

2010-09-15T18:16:00.001Z

The sky has finally lost its mind,
wind lashing out at our sin.
There are not enough trees
to hold back the dust we
have birthed with our earth
moving mothers, no cord
or tube or pipeline to breathe
for us, connect us, to feed
us anything other than sand
from their steel and muddied
breasts. There is no air in this storm.

The golden eye of lightening glares down
upon enemy us, while dirt from undressed
ground grits over our pupils, our streets,
our houses, our eyelids. We remember a time

we used to complain, write to leaders, hold signs
in the narrow streets, but our justified revile
is paved over, our words chucked into landfills,
our yards track-marked into caustic lime.
Our throats have been sanded to silence.

There is not enough left for us all.
There is nothing we can say to the sky.
But there is plenty of sand in the world,
enough to dust us away.

Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, Virginia, USA

Answering the Question by George Bishop

2010-09-10T15:36:00.000Z

I was thinking
of the lizard walking
on water in the pool,
how it can dash across
a mirror or scale a wall—
yet, it couldn’t find a way
out this sky-blue cell.
There it was, doomed
to die while I watched.
Of course, my friend
wouldn’t let that happen
and neither would I—
she performed the rescue,
setting it free to live out
whatever was left of its tiny,
prehistoric life. Returning
to what she asked,
if I believed in the afterlife,
I said yes, without life.
I heard someone call it
The Hereafter somewhere
and something inside nodded
its bare, inside head.
She told me they were just words
and that it was either
the water or the rat terrier.
I hadn’t noticed the dog,
just the lizard and how
deceptively clear it can be
to touch two surfaces
at the same time.

George Bishop, Florida, USA

Outside by Chris Crittenden

2010-09-06T13:05:00.000Z

pain melts
into the yellow of the sun.
the birds, too, are flames
and grass in the wind
supple wicks.

everywhere movement.
branches bob like cello bows.
wind hums across lindens
as if waking bassoons.

meadow golds
blur into festivals that could be.
the sky blooms into bees and flits,
each humming a line
in a polyglot play.

tragedies come and go.
romances upend.
what we thought were last acts
prove the dearest creations.

Chris Crittenden, Maine, USA

Red Deer by Gordon Mason

2010-09-03T14:38:00.001Z

Red deer graze
the Jackson mere,
cinnamon aftertones
on slow waves
of midday light.

Velvet damp, a stag
raises his head.
His twin,
a debarked willow,
stands stiff jointed.

On the wrong side
of the thyme tracks,
he turns to face a storm
that will wash
into September ditches.

As if startled
by a sudden snail,
he strides a slow ballet
into the wings,
reed curtains.

Gordon Mason, Scotland and Spain

End of Summer by Bonnie McClellan

2010-08-31T20:43:00.001Z

Clouds, flat-bottomed as an iron skillet
slapped down on the range-top of this broad sky,
speak bluntly of rain.
The ground cracks, mud-dry
from summer’s grinding hot whisper that yet
sows blankets of saffron dust and disquiet.
Thunder grumbles, snapping out lighting, wry-
necked and surly as an old dog, denied
his usual dark-cool-under-porch billet.

In just such weather I stand, face turned up.
Stupid as a sheep in the rain, eyes and mouth
full of water, ripped down from the fractured
black belly of the storm. Immobile and enraptured
by the grey drops’ wet weight of broken drought,
dead-end of August overflows my hands’ cup.

Bonnie McClellan, Italy

Spyglass by Clyde Kessler

2010-08-29T17:21:00.001Z

Midge Burley waded Hackle Creek.
She heard a stray wren singing ivies
to the water. She watched a madtom
creasing into mud. If her children
could own the land that Ezra gambled
away, she’d plant fifty-three flowers
for his ghost, so her kids might learn
lilacs from hobble-weeds, might fit
the stars to their own winter hills.

The wren sang as if scaled into wood
and Midge found it all shadowed in a lens,
an old uncle’s spyglass staring at nothing.
She told the wren, sing and let the earth be,
steal into the sunset, and leave all the earth.
She whistled its song back to the wren,
and burbled the song down to the fishes
as if a ghost there might baptize itself singing.

Clyde Kessler, Virginia, USA

California Summer by Michael Lee Johnson

2010-08-25T18:18:00.002Z

Coastal warm breeze
off Santa Monica, California
the sun turns salt
shaker upside down
and it rains white smog, humid mist.
No thunder, no lightening,
nothing else to do
except sashay
forward into liquid
and swim
into eternal days
like this.

(previously published on Talon Mag)

Michael Lee Johnson, Chicago, USA

surreal lilies. arbitrary boundaries by Marcia Arrieta

2010-08-22T14:54:00.001Z

streets of birds & lemon trees easels & silences
betrayals. illusion's fragments
where the blue reaches sun
seeking clues. but the air is to wander

fall through the spaces
breathing the scent of lemons the light of branches
among moments downfalls
miracles mirrors reflections

Marcia Arrieta, CA, USA

Subterranean Adagio by Denis Robillard

2010-08-18T16:31:00.001Z

Ants perform a subterranean adagio
galaxies of blood burn inside you
night traffic flounders into an aural mess
a conveyor belt of easy amnesia
trees rustle like a leafy woman
adjusting her bangles.
Crickets play their sad black guitars
this late August night
here on the pavement
my shadow looms larger across this parking lot
looking for a better cell connection.
I said a better cell connection.

Denis Robillard, Canada

Wolf Spider by Judith Skillman

2010-08-14T09:38:00.001Z

It comes with the smell of water in the desert
of summer. August, and everything rust-colored.

It is only a myth told by the grown-ups to scare you
into eating a dish too rich for your flat stomach.

Then again, how quickly the arachnid disappears
beneath the siding of your childhood house.

As if it knew you meant some kind of harm. You’d set
an opaque vase over it while screaming curses.

You’d hide the over-done despotic fur legs.
Just the edge of this phobia makes the skin on your forearm crawl.

You would claw your scalp until it bled
to remove the demon that nests in your just-washed hair.

Judith Skillman, Washington, USA

When the World Was Kind by Christy Effinger

2010-08-11T18:12:00.001Z

As the morning melted into afternoon,
translucent with summer light,
our neighbor’s plane roared on the grass runway,
then rose above the woods where we watched
trains pass and hunted toads.

At the sound of the small plane,
we danced and waved across the pasture
pungent with wild onion,
while mad crawdads scaled their mud turrets.

Then came a burst of orange silk in the sky—
and another, and another, like bright webs
floating to earth from a magic spider,
invaders from the world of clouds and stars.

We caught two of the tiny parachutes
and wrestled a sycamore for the other.
Beneath the umbrellas hung paper sacks,
knotted and filled with candy:
lemon heads, fireballs, chocolate, gum.

With our telescope that night
we counted constellations,
slightly out of focus in the cosmic sea,
blurred like fireflies in a blue glass jar.

After finding the man in the moon,
we said our prayers with the whip-poor-will
while crickets competed with tree frogs
in rhythms of nocturnal noise.

Back then their songs made sense
to our young and sunburned ears,
for all of us spoke the same language.
We still understood the voice in the wind,
and believed in the wisdom of owls.

Christy Effinger, Indiana, USA

Night Voices by Jan Harris

2010-08-04T06:25:00.002Z

As evening blurs the edges of the day
I hold your words against the candle flame
and watch them dance like moths

see how the colours fade with the light
from blue to grey and then to black
until shape and form are all that remain.

They flutter away when I try to catch them –
did you really say goodbye? See, they settle
in a different order – you said you would stay forever.

I can name you more clearly in the dark;
the light from the furthest star returns our past
and in the silence I hear the thoughts behind your words.

Here, I will whisper them back to you
before morning dazzles us with its brilliance.

Jan Harris, UK

Holding Hands as She Exhales by Paul Squires

2010-07-31T08:13:00.001Z

just before she dies
after three days at the hands
of u.s. trained torturers acting
for u.s. backed dictators
in the utter darkness of
one of Pinochet’s prisons
and the child inside of her
dies too…

perhaps there is a moment
where she is still alive and
the pain has stopped
long enough for her
to draw one breath
and she will realise
that she is not alone
nor forgotten,

,of course, that happened long ago
in not your country
to someone not you
and you were not there

so you may remain calm
and unaffected and believe
that this is just a poem
and not a holding of hands.

Paul Squires, Australia

(I was shocked to hear that Paul died on 28 July after an accidental fall. He was 46. In memory of a talented poet and entertaining blogger I'm reposting this poem of his which I first published here on 18 October 2007. )

Shine by M P Powers

2010-07-27T07:12:00.001Z

poetry at its best
is music without instruments
the world
devoid
of
time

peace is death made wise

but poets
aren't borne of peace
or
death
or
wisdom

they are borne
of
friction
like
the
pearl

M P Powers, Florida, USA

In Beauty by David Chorlton

2010-07-25T12:06:00.001Z

A scar runs along the high rocks where the wind
turned back toward the other time
when people who once lived here doused
their fires and swept into baskets
the last of the beans they had picked
from mesquite trees and ground to a floury sweetness
then set out for that world
of which they knew little beyond
its scent of rain which carried
on the air all the way across the valley
they could see from this mountain when they stood
near the top having climbed
for one final look and nobody knows
because nobody left word
whether they were glad to leave or whether
they didn’t care about the view
which may have meant nothing to them
for all we know as we stare
at the peak and call it beautiful as we do
when we want nothing from a thing
but the promise that we shall see it again.

David Chorlton, Arizona, USA

Wormwood by Russell Streur

2010-07-22T15:06:00.002Z

They killed the Tree of Knowledge
Poured a shire full of poison on its roots
Killed the ghost gum too
And I am walking on that street in Barcaldine
And the aspen stands are dying in the high country
And the hickory in the low
And I am walking in the forests of Quebec
Where sugar maples used to rise
And the elms are dying in the north
And the hemlock in the south
And I am walking in Croatia
Where the spruce are dying on the slopes
And the lodgepoles on the coast
And I am walking in the rust
In moth and bore and salt
Where graves replace the groves
And brittle bones of wilted dryads blow
Autumn leaves in spring
From withered copse to seedless curb
On the avenue of dead trees:

They nailed Pan last night
With seven stakes
Of birches through his heart
Raped Diana in the orchard Lass o' Gowrie
Hung up Hecate from a willow limb
Buried Odin with the oak
Blew the stump to Kingdom Come
With a Ryder full of acid rain
And poor man’s TNT
While scarlet priests in drive-by sheets
Whispered highland rosaries
Peddling holy hills and sacred roots
To grinning whores on grassy knolls
For Wal-Mart stores and interstates
Our fate to never see the gallows in this forestry
Crown triumphant
Concrete steel glass and noise
Our final kings—
Now is the hour
Wormwood sings.

Russell Streur, Georgia, USA