Earvin Wilson

Seeing Things

It takes time to see a lot of things, and yet,
in a lifetime, we seem to not have the time.
When we could just stop one day, and watch
a beautiful sunset.
Walk along a shore, and just be in that time.
We can miss so much, looking for it all,
like not noticing the mist off the roaring waves.
It's cool in the summer, barefoot in the
grass of morning dew.
But it takes a lot of time, to see a lot
of things, when all we got to do is look.
That's when you can really see the joy,
In seeing things...

{Poem by Earvin Wilson}

Roger G. Singer

Faithful

My fingers greedily crawl
into spring soil;
a salve for hands deep pocketed
from past winter winds.

Up into me an aroma
spills my senses to warm.
I breathe in the green flavor
of growth
while studying the land.

Faithful is the change
that tilts the earth,
raising the sun with blessing
onto the place I live.

I will swim in the suns hold,
opening my shirt,
forgetting my shoes and
welcoming screen doors.

{Poem by Roger G. Singer}

Kevin Cole

This Sidewalk Was More Interesting

This sidewalk was more interesting
In the evening leafy sun
A whitewashed wall
Some roses
A tended hermit’s yard

Paths like free verse stanzas
Trellised vines in poet’s light
A garden of word solitude
A summer of the mind

A few steps in the June past
An evening’s finished pages
This sidewalk was more interesting

{Poem by Kevin Cole}

Brandi Underwood

Smudged

I throw the Twain pages into ember flames. Edges of paper turn crisp brown. Reflecting from my brother’s eyes ink words change hues now inflamed violets. By time twilight runs its time clock, the bottom of the black oil drum ash collects. Bully points out the smile the ash forms. We move along. Towers of charcoal window panes stand evergreen roots a hundred feet long. Billy sees an odd indigo magazine. He sits along the curb edge. His eyes flip through jargon he did not know.

Before the Drop, lands in the central plains grew lush, and kids sat in class and knew that their destiny was like whispers easily re-written. Now out eyes are crisp with dry morning tears. Every sunrise I check Billy for indigo rings almost like bruises. A side effect from radiation. We travel. Our legs grow weak and muscles inflamed by time twilight with few stars. Another side effect partial blindness. Age three towers of red legos towered over me. Now towers of brittle charcoal threaten to crumble. Our bodies turn to ash.

Food: number one priority. Keep moving for Billy’s sake, or his bones will crumble to ash. In Mother’s womb when the Drop came. Radiation seeped through her skin. Now he’ll never know how moist grass feels against your feet. Instead he feels dry lakes of ash. Solomon’s towers are now dawn’s past. Frankenstein, I will remember the story. I will remember inflamed faces as I shoveled dirt upon them. Death’s blanket won’t make me forget mothers crisp eyes of indigo. Six years to the day, to the hour since the Drop. Happy Birthday Billy. Indigo Streams and irises of his eyes still deep, just like hers were. Our night cradles ash flakes. As I lay, I feel the warmth of dying embers. Few travelers along the road but memories of faces are inflamed in the back of my head. In time will I forget what they even look like? No! Just how I will remember the yellow sun. How I miss modern towers. Dreams crystal cut sky with diamonds scattered. The one thing that never changed. Towers with panes of glass still firm in their steel frames, before the flames of burning indigo hues. Story books, fresh from press, typed words to life. Crisp mountains soothed reader’s moral. Now it’s reduce to ash flakes at bottom of countless barrels. I read Frankenstein to Billy. He’ll know stories because of me. I will teach him words are treasures that bring truth inflamed.

The sun rose in the powder sky. Men gazed at clouds with inflamed sins still lingering. Our world was at peace. What a lie. Plane engines buzzed, and boots stomped, towers never stood after the turning of the key. We all know the date October 22 1962. The horizon would shine bright red before the dawn, now indigo shadows replace. “Don’t blink this world changes in an instant.” Ash falls as rain daily. Billy’s tears smudge, but his smile still remains crisp. Crisp, inflamed ash towers no indigo.

{Written by Brandi Underwood}

Peter Lattu

Our Trip to See the Trey McIntyre Project

Saturday night we were off to see a dance performance by the Trey McIntyre Project at the Sidney Harman Hall across from the Verizon Center. We hopped the Metro at Huntington.

There was an intriguing crowd on the subway into the city that night… a man in a kilt with a frame backpack… a woman in a long celery green formal evening gown with bare shoulders listening to her iPod… an older man in jeans and an indigo kimono top in a wheelchair reading a small book… a blonde woman dressed in black and white with a gift bag writing her card on the way to a party… two young women resting their boots on the handicapped seat… a woman way behind us coughing… all this on our train ride to Archives-Navy Memorial-Penn Quarter.

Emerging from the Metro, we walked past the Navy Memorial with pleasant memories of its summer concerts. Regrettably, the Navy Memorial Visitors’ Center itself no longer displays changing daily reminders of events of the day in Navy and Marine Corps history. We used to enjoy reading those historic reminders as we walked by its window. But tonight a red carpet was out for a film showing at the Center – an inviting touch.

On the way to Harman Hall we noticed the packed restaurants and bars. Lots of people were walking along the sidewalks, including a couple pushing a baby and a small white dog in a stroller. A woman in very high heels walked into the street to avoid the grate.

The performance consisted of three dances: Ma Maison, In Dreams, and The Sweeter End, all created by Trey McIntyre in the past several years. Ma Maison featured eight dancers in death’s head masks with recorded music by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Sister Gertrude Morgan. There was a bit of vaudeville and a sequence channeling the Roaring Twenties with an ecstatic Charleston. The death’s head masks reminded us of how death is a part of life even in present pleasure, like a New Orleans jazz funeral. At one point the dancers formed a chain of death as in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal. A hint of plagues and coffle gangs was there in that chain of dancers.

In Dreams, set to recorded music by Roy Orbison, was created for the Ballet Memphis in 2007. The Sweeter End brought us back to jazz with more recorded music by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. The dancers were costumed in post-twentieth-century urban grunge. Sweat flew as they vamped exuberantly to jazz of yesterday.

The program did not have photographs of the dancers in the company so we could not tell who was who except for Jason Hartley, one of our favorites from his days with the Washington Ballet. His characteristic casual soaring lightness remains and we were happy to see that he is now assistant to the artistic director as well as one of the dancers.

Interestingly, this dance company makes its home in Boise, Idaho. All of the dancers are sponsored by someone, including several by people in Boise. Idaho is a long way from New York City, that fertile center of contemporary dance and ballet. However, Trey McIntyre’s company showed no sign of missing the big city. His dances are twenty-first century creations, chic and modern.

After the show, we stepped out into the street and into rain. Several people were wearing police badges with black bands. Later we heard on the radio that it was National Police Week with events downtown. There was track work between Pentagon City and Braddock Road, so our train took twenty-five minutes to appear at Gallery Place. On the way home was a woman wearing a silk kimono in circles of color on black with a purple obi. Back at Huntington, we got in our car and headed home after an exciting night out.

{Essay by Peter and Alison Lattu, May 18, 2011}

Joy Olree

To Dance

My light it shines for all to see,
I am translucent yet fully seen.
My spirit it bids me dance, my
feet they follow suit. I am for
whatever reason a servant of
what is.

But, if in Gods’ wisdom it was
never meant these feet to move
then let him to my soul speak,
because it is for him, I worship
this way.

{Poem by Joy Olree}

Jeff Steinle

Beginning Alone

We look out to a cosmos of gargantuan expanse
Willing passage into night’s starlight dance
Wise nephilim through technology reveal
What histories thieves waive and conceal
Canals on Mars were proof at the last centuries turning
Chime in the millennium at a comet cult of lost souls learning
Consider crop circles two guys, two hours, a board, and a six
Crazy, silly, weird times and people humanity shall never lack
Iconoclast astronaut ingest the ambrosia via the ajar adytum
Inquire off the pale blue dot for isles of forgotten wisdom
Inhabitants valiant venture off verdant earth to the celestial
Skyward toward the face and ruins on Mars evidence of alien
Sanctum sanctorum awaits, satori, the ephemeral, the golden
Splendorous contact will raise God’s subtle and divine
shrouding
Stellar enormity belies eminent humanities imminent fated saga
Epochs will pass on emerald planets in the ebony void of space
Eclipsing ancient evidence keeping the enigma of a solitary race
Echoes of past revelations where vast galactic alibis will
astound
Eternally an Eden of stars and vestal planets will be found

{Poem by Jeff Steinle}

Robert D. Lyons

As Daylight Fades

Minutes become hours.
Hours are sprouting to days.
Time slowly withers away with the beating of my heart,
But spreads like my fears,
Which have now become phobias.
Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day,
And to my utter dislike, I am indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell.

Truth is the first victim of the fires of ill perception.
The match has been struck and flames spread like a wildfire in an isolated forest.
I try to embrace the sweet melancholy burns and guide them to caress the fires of my heart:
My inner anguish that turns even the robust rose I touch to the reminiscent atoms of ash.
The scars born from these foreign flames branch off throughout my once pale body,
Hiding my soul like clouds to the March sun.
The wounds of my past have reopened,
And I am watching all my insecurities leak out like a secluded spring.
The scent of blood is in the air,
And my predators are on the prowl,
Thirsty for catastrophe.
Uncertainty has engulfed my goals of bliss
As my thoughts follow these hollow catacombs,
And with terror, I believe myself lost in a world of intangible horrors.

A world in compassed with shades of blue
Where even the tiniest flaw is brought into sight,
From a haze of fluorescent light
Far more perilous than heavens gate.
I am at the mercy of wretched fate!
I never believed in ghost, until I became one.
Sitting in reflection of all the clashes that are far from done,
For I have sat idly by as daylight decayed,
I have yet to see a day without an ambiguous raid.
Helpless, I must stand, as if I am being toyed;
Destined for destruction, never to fill the void.

{Poem by Robert D. Lyons}

Kristyn Marie Taylor

Cartography

I grew out of this--
brackish water, heat and oak trees.
I grew out of soybean soil,
under cotton fields beside Choctaw burial grounds.
My sweat tastes the same as my tears
and my blood, unseen, is
the color of kudzu in April.

{Poem by Kristyn Marie Taylor}

John Grey

These Driven Ones

They wrote and they wrote
while ignoring the lives
they could have lived.
They ate to write. They made love to write.
They grabbed brief snatches of sleep
so they could write while awake.
What they didn’t write didn’t happen.
Who they didn’t write about
couldn’t exist.
But really all that happened was writing.
The only ones who existed were them.
They were snakes chasing some abstract tail
and every length of its body
was the stuff that poured out of them.

From birth to death,
they wrote about themselves writing.

{Poem by John Grey}

Donal Mahoney

Wound in Cellophane

The older women come to coffee
with cookies wound in cellophane.
They talk of children

or their children’s children
or their garden.
Or they simply sew

and watch the young girls trickle in,
buy berry rolls and coffee,
nibble, sip, lick fingers, blow

small parachutes of smoke,
and laugh a young girl’s
world of willy-nilly.


Widower

In the miner’s shack
the vase on the dresser
squats beneath
a giant cactus
planted by hands
flinty and callused.

“When Mona was here,
this vase got roses,
and lots of water.
After she left
I gave it this cactus.
It never needs water.”

{Poetry by Donal Mahoney}

Kenneth Soares

As the Mirror Shatters

As the mirror shatters, the glass falling like rain. So beautiful, So sharp. Like nothing I’ve ever seen. I lose myself, as it cuts me a shower of crimson blood. I don’t notice the pain as I see you over there my perfect angel. You walk over and protect me from the rain. As I see your blood I cry, my perfect angel in pain for me. You hold me tight as I cry in your arms; you’re always there for me. I try to push you away. You’re too good for me. You deserve someone ...better, but you just hold me tighter. You say "You'll love me forever.", and I want to believe. As the rain lets up and I can see your beauty. As I look in to your face I can see the truth. We stayed there til you feel asleep. I picked you up and carried you away with me forever.

{Poem by Kenneth Soares}

Matthew Rodgers

Time as a Dancer

Do not touch the rain forest
even for oil
the blood of the earth
the trapped light
makes shadows upon the walls
of butterfly skulls
and the gecko’s eyes
are like a rainbow
as the sound of rain
lulls restless souls
into escaping the darkness
but the shadows that follow
the phases of the moon
cannot be gotten rid of
and the solar flares
exploding in outer space
move through you
like wind passing
through the trees
vibrating effortlessly
as a myriad of peacocks
singing of beauty
shooting stars
remnants of past galaxies
flickering fireflies
like the pulse of time
and the heartbeat
of everyone
everything
the earth
the universe
free falling
through the sky
like a bleeding heart
that cannot be stopped
but bleeds and bleeds
letting go forever.

{Poem by Matthew Rodgers}

Bobbi Sinha-Morey

The Scent Of Love

On a day when the sun
flowered above I breathed
my soul back into me and
a roseate dream beckoned
me. The scent of love
brought me the sun's
warmth even nearer.
Today I will look in front
of me when before I
looked back at where
I'd been. It's a blessing
God's light shines in my
home, and every day
I live in the present.
I leave my heart ajar
for heaven's glow.


Rhapsody Of Shadows

Tonight's lazy rhapsody
of shadows have lit upon
my block and now I am
no longer afraid to let
you see where I live.
You'll never see a flower
grow in my backyard or
by the sidewalk, but the
fine under bone of hope
is inside my home and
the tangled evening
sunlight dances in the
street. Now I've nothing
more to hide for love
heals from the inside.
Memories of living
alone are pages of
dust blown away by
a silent wind and,
on the golden edge
of my sleep, my heart
hums a song now
that you are near.

{Poetry by Bobbie Sinha-Morey}

Susan Marie Davniero

A Garden Tour

A garden tour
Flowers galore
The garden gate
Floral beauty await

A flower bath
Lace the path
Bouquet beauty
Garden variety

Pansies in a row
Marigolds aglow
A sweep of peonies
Field of daises

Fragrance there
Pervades the air
Lavish greens
Poking between

Blooming find
Nature’s design
A visit today
Then, away

{Poem by Susan Marie Davniero}

Maria Arana

A Place for Me

This is a nice place to be
To roam above the sand
Talk to moving crystals
Enjoy the mud

This is the place where others come for
To lean on the dune
And cry for the waters
This is a nice place
A place to catch me
To tumble over foamy coasts
And lie with shells on the sand.


Stolen Love

To claim one’s love is to take its soul
Return it now
The pain is great
Claim another and my heart will weep

{Poetry by Maria Arana}

Johnny Sale

If I Should Go

What eyes may gaze, may lust and love; amaze
My soul if mine must learn to look away?
What heart may grow, may learn to thrive, to stay
If mine should die amidst a cold malaise?
But banished I reach beneath a gaze
For unremembered love that flew away.
Confined in barren homes and bleak array
I yearn for touch; what white incessant haze.

When moon should cease to glow on distant beds
And darkness hugs pink lady slipper’s hand,
Should Luna dim her light and opt to dream:
Reminiscence rings a golden band
Withal to lose and love is all instead
Of empty eyes, a hollow heart to scream.


Till She Gave Her Love to Me

I once loved her like nothing else
Till she gave all her love to me.
I wish that I could love myself,
I once loved her like nothing else.
I made her cry; heart on a shelf
She tried so hard to make me see,
I once loved her like nothing else
Till she gave all her love to me.

{Poetry by Johnny Sale}

Sebastian Lopez

Sarah

My symbolic queen and prayer.
I love your dawning tiny feet
and lizard membrane, your
slivered sugar towers
without sparkle that take
a man’s beige hand without
soft or firm affront...

{Poem by Sebastian Lopez}

Alan Britt

A Little Poem About Grief
(For Maura Gage Cavell)

Words sometimes seem inadequate in times
of grief, but poems are made of words,
and sometimes they're all we have.

You see, grief hovers above an unmarked grave
like a bleached membrane, or a filament dancing,
tilting left before losing its balance.

Exhausted, it tightens…trembling.

A voice removes its shawl of silk, wool, and salt,
and places the shawl above unmarked bones fast asleep
beneath graphite roots of moonlight digging with picks and shovels,
hoping to reach China, unless, of course,
they’re already in China,
whereupon the sun rises in the East
and sets behind a yellow mountain.

{Poem by Alan Britt}

Adam Dolewski

Travel

What a sight to see
A spot on the plane
One for you and one for me
All around the world we go
Stopping at different places we know
Bangkok, Bangladesh, Lima, and Rome
We visit all the best places within the bio dome.
But if you ask me where my favorite place will be
In Mile Square park with me family.

{Poem by Adam Dolewski}

Susan Marie Davniero

My Mother's Songs

My Mother’s songs
Her music belongs
The lyrics known
For her to own

Writing the verses
As songs emerges
Hear, so shall be
My Mother’s melody

As we listen to
Her musical menu
Forever long
My Mother’s songs


Easter's Lily

Easter had seen
Burst of green
In garden’s room
White lily blooms

Pure as white
Point of light
To grace the way
This Easter Day

Awakens spring
Hear Angels sing
Each Easter gives
Behold, God lives

{Poem by Susan Marie Davniero}

Holly Day

The Footsteps Overhead

at night
the thud of the dishwasher upstairs
sounds like voices. I crank
the baby monitor
way up, listen for monsters
in my daughter's room.

sometimes
I hear something on the back porch
behind my head
can almost see
the deranged face pressed up against the glass
hands ready to smash through
I won't turn around.

if I just pretend
everything's all right
it will be.
If I cover my ears
and close my eyes
it'll be all right.

{Poem by Holly Day}

Marlene Ann Soifer

War

All of us have a gift, why waste yourself
on jealousy, jealousy breeds insanity:
All the young grab for love:
Love everyone, every human being:
"They know right from wrong"; "they know fear";
"they know doubt", so why waste a minute
"love now". Young. "Love now", why fight.

You fight for your right not to be walked over and take
what belongs to you:

"Wars", start that way "don't they": hate is insanity:
don't you see: so the young, don't wait.


Slavery

Aren't we all slaves to some extent? Working on missions within:
Don't we all feel compelled to stay steadfast to something we hold a necessary task? No matter which way you turn: we are all slaves to ourselves for reasons beyond compare:

{Poetry by Marlene Ann Soifer}

Joy Olree

Where I Am Called

To go where I am called,
for where can mans time
best be spent except in
the presence of God.


Pictures of my World

Took a picture of a book
to read its’ words when
I am gone.

Took a picture of a brook
to feel its’ wet when I am
dry.

Took a picture of the wind
to feel its’ air when I can't
breathe.

Took a picture of the earth
to see my home when I am
lost.

Took a picture of the sky
to remember where my
parents are.

Took a picture of myself
so I would know who I am.

Took a picture of my camera
so when it breaks I'll have
its’ memories.

{Poetry by Joy Olree}

Susan Marie Davniero

Snowflakes Place

Winter’s gift
Floating adrift
Snowflakes flight
No two alike

Winter time
Supreme design
Clouds snowflakes fall
If flakes come at all

Winter’s beauty
Crystal symmetry
Snowflakes around
Kissing the ground

Winter’s fall from grace
Pardon snowflakes place
An ice beauty before
Melts into nothing more

{Poem by Susan Marie Davniero}

Peter Lattu

The Wild Braid: A Review

The Wild Braid by Stanley Kunitz with Genine Lentine reflects on poetry and gardening. The book arose from a series of conversations between Kunitz and Lentine between 2002 and 2004. Musing on gardening and poetry, Kunitz looked back on a century of doing both:

… the garden is a metaphor for the poems you write in a lifetime and give to the world in the hope that these poems you have lived through will be equivalent to the flower that takes root in the soil and becomes a part of the landscape. If you’re lucky, that happens with some of the poems you create, while others pass the way of so many plants you let into the garden, or grow from seed: they emerge and give pleasure for a season and then vanish.

The dozen poems included in The Wild Braid have taken root in our literary landscape.

Kunitz explains that writing poetry taps into the unconscious, “the wilderness” of which he said “its beasts are not within our control”. Other writers have seen creativity as like a beast emerging from the wilderness. The poet Gary Snyder wrote that his poems came from things lurking in the darkness at the edge of his campfire. The writer Stephen King said that his stories came from creatures in the shadows at the edge of his garden. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in “Inversnaid”: “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.” Kunitz says of Hopkins: “… that’s exactly what he was saying. When people say they are moved by a poem they are saying they have been in touch with the untouchable.” Out of this wilderness of the unconscious come poems and they “seem to have no maker at all”.

While poems may come from the wilderness of the mind, Kunitz finds a lot of similarity between poems and gardens. Stanzas are like terraces, “letting our mind rest before moving on”. Revisiting a garden or a poem leads to new perspectives with different colorations. To Kunitz, a poem has a sense of secrecy like a flower about to unfold: “So much of the power of a poem is in what it doesn’t say as much as in what it does say.” He finds that poems are “muddied by too much explanation, too much exposure.”

For all the similarities, Kunitz enumerates ways a new poem differs from a garden:

Thinking of a new season in the garden feels different from imagining a new poem. The garden has achieved its form, it doesn’t have to be new each year. What it has to do is grow. You’re not going to uproot the entire garden and start all over. The poem is always a new creation and aspires to a transcendence that is beyond telling at the moment when you’re working on it. You know that you are moving into an area you’ve never explored before and there is the great difference.

Poems live in a wilderness beyond the garden.

The Wild Braid is an enchanting book: beautiful photographs, fine poems, and lucid conversations. Stanley Kunitz and Genine Lentine distill Kunitz’s century of gardening and writing into a short book full of insight into both.

{Essay by Peter Lattu}

Patrick T. Randolph

motherhood

Robin’s beak—
Fat earthworm,
Euphoric chirps!


secrets

Childhood voice
peeks out from
Memory’s eyes.


a study in linguistics

Winter stars
are Night’s verbs
in Sky language.

{Breath Poems by Patrick T. Randolph}

Kalifornia

Evil Ways

When I first met you I was obsessed
Your face, your body and the way that you dressed
You smiled and laughed and gave me stolen candy
You take what you want and use who is handy
A wink and a smile in your catholic school dress
You take their existence and accept nothing less
A boy or a girl whichever you choose
They fall prey to your beauty and that’s when they lose
Their mind, their soul nothing is wasted
I love your stolen candy it’s the best I’ve ever tasted

{Poem by Kalifornia}

Ray Gallucci

Water Drop

In icy cold of empty space,
It hitched a ride on comet's face,
Accelerating toward a star
Of recent birth, from distance far.

As sun of color yellow grew
In field of vision, met with two
Enormous spheres of frigid gas
That slightly altered comet's path.

Whereas before would swing around
The virgin star, now comet found
What was a clear path forward blocked
By cooling sphere of molten rock.

The impact spewed infernal heat
That vaporized it so completely.
But despite this extra speed,
From planet's pull could not be freed.

And so became a resident
Of cooling planet permanent.
With other zillions of its kind
Condensed into a watery rind.

Our planet's oceans may be older
Than whatever magma smolders
From beneath the ancient crust
Recycling iron back to rust.

I find myself in Ocean City
Strolling through the wavelets pretty,
Knowing that the ancient surf's
Touched every shore since planet's birth.

Expanding to enormous size,
Our dying sun will oceans fry,
Returning vapors where they came
In search of where new stars may flame.

{Poem by Ray Gallucci}

Stephanie Kaylor

Under an Old Apple Tree

In the field next to the orchard
a black stallion grazed upon the
lanky blades of grass while a white
mare tread softly around in circles
until he met her eye.

I turned my head and smiled,
resting against the gnarled
tree trunk while my daughter
floated along with the bees
through the golden light, filling
her basket as she picked an apple
from every tree,

fears I once had about my skin
seeing too much of the sun
evaporating into the pungent air
of life turned ripe, now seeing
that beauty is not something
you drape upon a powdered body,

but a feeling you can watch
under an old apple tree.

{Poem by Stephanie Kaylor}

John Grey

Cure-All

Another letter from you,
full of medical advice.
You write to my ailments,
not to me.
I’m beginning to think
it’s my headaches you miss,
the allergies, the cough.
You lived with them, not with me.
Your companion was the throb
behind my forehead,
the sneezing fits,
the cigarette hack of one
who never smoked.
I’m sure you only pretend
to want them cured
with your new—age remedies,
your lists of pharmaceutical web sites.
If I got better,
you’d be killing your own memories.
A clean bill of health for me
is five years stolen from your life.
You end your letter with the usual
“Love you.”
That’ s another cure that you
don’t really wish for me.

{Poem by John Grey}

A. J. Chilson

In Memoriam, for “Dandy Don” Meredith, 1938-2010

He used to sing “Turn out the lights, the party’s over,”
when the Monday night game neared its conclusion,
and it was time for all of us to head off to bed,
knowing we would get to hear that song once again.

The voice, though, has since become silent,
now drained in the memory of those who heard him.
The man known as “Dandy Don” has drifted off
into the sunset, where football stories continue
to be shared as though it had happened yesterday.

{Poem by A.J. Chilson}

Peter Lattu

the tree

gaily adorned
lights winking bright
amidst the black
midwinter night
until
stripped bare
and looking
forlorn
its passage
marks
a season gone
as time
passes on

{Poem by Peter Lattu}

Nathan Nobbe

Changing Beds

Being happy is a scary thought.
It means leaving behind an old friend,
An old friend named unhappiness.
We have shared so much time with him,
Have always found a sense of security
In the familiarity of his embrace.
To step out with happiness,
We have only allowed this at short intervals
Before feeling like an unfaithful lover
And running back to the comfort of his bed.
To wake up happy?
Oh my, this would be a bit like standing
At the edge of a cliff.
At the edge of a cliff with no confidence
In a sense of balance to be able
To remain there.
Ah yes, to remain wrapped in the snug
Blankets in the dark bed of unhappiness.
Much easier to do.
But why then complain of the plight,
To blame unhappiness for the comfort we feel.
We have chosen again his company through fear.
Goodbye we must say. Goodbye we must say.
And never, never look back.

{Poem by Nathan Nobbe}

Eliot Tracz

Picking Up The Pieces

We are left to wonder “Why?”
What could I have said, or
What could I have done?

How do we pick up the pieces
And try to make a whole, when
Everything that’s lost, was everything we had?

How a neighbors voice in the hall
During another sleepless night, is not
You coming home or calling to say “Hello.”

These questions have no answers,
The walls stare back in silence, and I am left alone-
To begin picking up the pieces.

{Poem by Eliot Tracz}

Anne Malin Ringwalt

Wanderer's Ghazal

Deface the meaning of your hands
lie lost in the sand, dig with someone else's hands.

Don't pity lost meaning when nothing tangible relates
my words plead you to rename your fate's hands.

Lost in Florence or Nice; a European coastline
find the architecture of stone, crumble in your hands.

In Moscow I sit on a broken chair
strung to the ceiling, I use the spindle, sew a quilt on your hands.

For Anne is said to be graceful and Malin clever
your farce disposition is not the meaning of your hands.

{Poem by Anne Malin Ringwalt}