Cloudlonely by Susan S Keiser

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

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

Annoying Fly by Chris Crittenden

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

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

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

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

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