Up-And-Doing by Christopher Barnes

(after This Unimportant Morning by Lawrence Durrell)

Leaving you
I open the door to a shift-work of bark beetles.
Sun’s cramped,
The crater’s knick-knack blue as it airs.

A cockleboat ruffles the orangey pool,
A sample mail van’s put-up.

In two hours I’ll relocate
A columbine thaw will suffuse
Over siltstone, sea wall
Reviving in pepper breath.

You pout away sleep
Deep space slackens its twirls,
An airborne miller moth
Will have its pupa.


Christopher Barnes, UK

Terrestrial Illuminations by Constance Stadler

(for Duane Locke)


Grass tuft, will you not speak to me?
A blue and brown tit jumped on my table
Near the Arno and shared
.........................My sandwich
As a full bosomed poppy floated by.
Wilted corn stalks in vermillion light
Thrill as magic
Snowy egrets dance in pond surrender
To cabbage palms.
Flickers seeking to mate rustle, uplift
The molting oak branch.
Baby black snakes break their eggs
And slither in new born delight.
Beetle, I watch you, too
And gasp at the black rainbows
That o'er span the black rivers
Of your glowing wings
Oh why when I, so willing to
Yield to the luminescent
Beckoning of the
Firefly promenade
Should be so sashayed by?
Beholding Blake's sedimentary infinities
The 'mind-forged manacles'
Slip, a bit.
.........But London comes
With Ferris Eye and
Carnival freak shows leaving
Me wistful
For wild swan glimpse
Through
Refracted sky
In a puddle
Of stagnant rain water.


Constance Stadler, VA, USA

Burying the Dog by Taylor Graham

sonnenizio on a line from Frost

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
their darker roots reaching into grassy swale,
be full of darkling birds at evening – phoebe,
nuthatch, thrush – to sing the bright-dark
elegies of greenwood. A place darkened
by bones leaching into rich dark earth held
fast by rock, dark as dead dogs gone. Here
the young buck pauses, dark-set eyes alert,
sniffs the air, then springs away into darker
shadow-thickets. As afternoon darkens
under passing clouds, the dark-light dance
of oak leaves rises to a darkening breeze.
Time for the dark homing. A young dog marks
his master’s call. Roots touch the deep darks.



Taylor Graham, California, USA

Untitled by Regina Green

take it out back, i say
and you do
scooping up the
lifeless gray remains
like you
might scoop up a bit
of warm earth in which to plant
a tulip bulb so gently
and carefully
waiting for the spring to
waken it finally
the long sleep of winter
ended
but not for this little house mouse
the one who ate through the
cheerios box and caused
me more than once to climb
on top of the kitchen counter
it's so small really
our eyes meet
are you sure it's not just sleeping
the back door slams
and you don't come in for
some time



Regina Green, Florida, USA

One Squirrel by Janie Hoffman

It was February that day
that only one gray squirrel
came out to play;
he was sleek as midnight,
with a great plumed tail
and his eyes were the dark
beads of childhood games
he didn't dig under
the walnut tree
or scramble up
the bird feeder pole
to snatch at finch seed
like most of his kind
he was graceful, ungrounded
as a cloud, his jumps were pirouettes
and when he landed
his tail never touched ground
he sprang from tree limb
to fence and back again,
spinning like a top
he could have cocooned
in the woodpile, the cracked
trunk of the willow tree
or anywhere safer, warmer
but he just wanted
to dance, his tracks
criss-crossing like scattered
stitches sewn into the snow
going nowhere but back to him
and I thought he was the fish
I always dreamed
of catching just so I could
throw him back
as he leaped from tree to ground
a creature so unafraid
of the coldness
any human could know


Janie Hoffman, Vancouver, Canada

Tongue by Felino Soriano

After what language holds inside its
many hands,
clenching, as in the diving attribute
of beautified dolphins,
slicing stilled portions of elongated light—
language, the blossoming translucent or
opaque obscurity, the concrete versus abstract
ability to delineate listening from the messengers
of nonchalance—

language dances the twirl
dialect within dialectic verbal observations
whom the philosophical debate while dueling
amid the running wind of
conversational balances.


Felino Soriano, California, USA

Over Weekend Washed Cobbles by Dave Lewis

Over weekend washed cobbles
.....dawn damp beer brown
...coughing men trudge
back to hell


oblivious to the velvet hills
..where flowers salsa and sing
....the cough gets worse
......through sugar-lonely tea


now time has seen enough
..injects sunshine - brief like heroin
....to cut diamond sharp
..and wash away pebbled-dashed bones


while Mammy’s shoes
....tap-dance on and on
..‘till photographs rot
out of children’s memories

Dave Lewis, Wales, UK

In the Headlights by Stuart Sharp

Just beyond the full beam
Caught more as an afterimage
The hare weaves haywire patterns

Leveret, young enough
To thrill in running from shadows
Cast by this artificial sun

It catches the edge of lit space
More movement still than shape
Playing at unreality
In the seconds before I pass

Stuart Sharp, East Yorkshire, UK

Coyote in Blue Quill by Kelly Shepherd

there are still coyotes here
you can hear them at night,
they’re in the ravine

he’s here all right
you can tell by the unpredictable weather
the electricity and the danger in the air

we should have known
a few simple roads wouldn’t stop him
why did we even try

we choose not to hear the howling
we like to believe it’s a long way off
or that the city will protect us

these roads, fences, these lines on maps
it’s all arbitrary:
he does whatever he wants


Kelly Shepherd, South Korea

21st Century Poem by Gary Beck

Wordbab strictly verbot
cause gunners need silence
to heatstrap dissed targets.
Ethnopop groups scan
day blat resource vats,
sunning midgather fruits
deradiated before sharing.
Streettraf moves linear,
wasting natural reserves
of the remaining atmo.
Oxytherapists decline trankheads,
resisting pubserve demands
to detox mindbend.


Gary Beck, New York, USA