Last night’s storm tore the star-shaped leaves from the maple, and the persimmon tree, already stripped of fruit, was left in a puddle of damp leaves. Sunset speared the bare limbs with shafts of orange light, which were there, then vanished. Beads of water hang from the leaves of the climbing fig, and a chickadee closes its beak over the heavy drops as if they were seeds. It’s mid-October, and the season’s last dahlias are small but ferocious. The nights will soon get even colder. The branches that I pruned from the white camellia weeks ago are in bloom. The withered limbs have somehow pushed out small, urgent blossoms from…

Opening to Your Dark Eye The electricity buzzed out,extinguishing the dinner party;my mother sighed over table elbows,hurried dinners, and napkins tossedaside on plates dribbled with gravy—resuscitating an Emily Post adage:“Etiquette is the science of living.”She died. What did it matter? I divorced embossed stationeryand sold the Steuben candlesticks,each teardrop base entrappingthe shape of a Hershey kiss—like a bell that would never ringin chilly air (glass in its molten stateresembles the final design, a momentfrozen from process, said the maker). The movers shattered my collectionof blue Haviland porcelain,and I caved to dining with the dimmerturned down and thought spelunking,caught in the tale of your eye blindedby the errant swing of a…

A Short Walk on a Hot Morning Long pile of pipes,    where exactly will you be laid?        Where will you bring water            from this narrow well? * Burnt log fallen across the wash,    you are a bridge over missing water,        illuminated shore to shore            by little lampposts of poison oak. * Eucalyptus, reaching your gray-green    shaggy hand into summer sky,        what is it you hope to grasp? * Little pond in the creek bed,    you are a sea for yellowjackets        to circle in their…

Panther Mountain There’s a poem that knows how to carry a namethrough time. It’s full of plants and placeswhose names curve like winding roads. Waltzing nameslike Aviemore and goldenrod. Ancestral magnoliastiffening into star anise and sleeping in rimefor a thousand years. There’s a spot calledPanther Mountain, with fringed polygala,and somewhere, a small town bordered by a darkwood with a hunter’s cabin in a clearing. I’m there,sitting on the porch of the cabin, looking atthe sky of the poem. You’re there too. And all the goodthat you’ve done stretches out across the poem’ssky like clouds made of tiny white letters, like a letterwritten on a napkin at a party that’s cleared…

Science and Poetry i They say a rainbow is only bright sunlight splintered by water droplets into the visible spectrum of colors. It’s really not there. But we also have Elizabeth Bishop’s rainbow bird from the narrow bevel of the empty mirror waiting to fly. Both, equally exquisite— a prismatic light, a lovely bird to the human eye. ii Here— a lesson in entropy: catch a falling snowflake on your tongue, bringing chaos to all those water molecules that had become (but alas, gone too soon) a perfectly designed, hexagonal crystal— unique in all the universe. iii One of the most famous photographs ever taken by the Hubble is of…

Reading a Buddy’s Badass Book Reading a buddy’s badass book about his tour of Hellin Vietnam, a book of poems that drive the horror home,I find myself enjoying every poem, smiling sometimes,hip to his poetics, his often gut-gouging metaphors,his always straight-ahead truth telling. After the last poem, after the covers close on his galleryof grotesqueries, I go to bed, have bad dreams,and recalling them in the morning when dawn light isthe washed-out gray of all those faces, I write poems,the only atonement I have, the only deterrent.     George Drew is the author of nine poetry collections, including: Pastoral Habits: New and Selected Poems and The View from Jackass…

Indwelling This house and I have grown together the long familiarity of stasis blood and bone wood and plaster Each room known by feel the dark bedroom wall cool as my skin a stained glass round of flowers made by a friend, now gone friends leave us still the walls remain and the bedstead of ten thousand nights, sleepless or deeply lost At the window I stand in luna grayness looking up at spotlight moon from the place where I am thumbtacked to earth by gravity and custom the house holds a second shell grown inside cohabitants as wheat in chaff or stone in fruit     Fran Davis is…

Child-Rearing In the days of first breath, the newborn breeds a rash and since the fact of parenthood is now permanent you phone your mother for advice, a gift you think you’re giving of her own expertise, a chance to take part, but when she claims she’s got no idea what to do, can’t recall that was nearly forty years ago, and if she could remember now what she did for your skin no doubt today the medicine would be different, totally opposed, even, to a cream she might have applied with such care, back then, leaning over the crib and no real grave concern.     Blam-Blam At the…

Here Lies a Poem that was never writtenabout the way a girlwith hair so darkit shone blue in the sunmade you look awayso she could slowlyundress in the arcane silenceof a rented roomwhile you watchedher shadow slipacross the walluntil her voiceturns into the heat of a mouthtouching your neckthe way the white noiseof traffic pulsingdown the boulevardtouches a dying afternoon     Jon Lavieri holds an MFA in writing from Western Michigan University. His poems have appeared in unlost, Stone Poetry Quarterly, New York Quarterly as well as other journals and the anthology, Night Out: Poems About Hotels, Motels, Restaurants and Bars. He currently lives in Rhode Island where he…

Ladies’ Wear There’s a character in a TV show I watch— she runs Ladies’ Wear in a glittering department store with strict grace, every glove and hat in place, sweaters neatly folded, her salesgirls’ posture perfect, as in a poem, after hours, she goes in secret to the warehouse, undresses, and throws herself on her lover, the guy who muscles the crates and trades in contraband cigarettes, her flame.     Betsy Martin’s chapbook, Whale’s Eye, was published by Presa Press in June 2019. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, The Briar Cliff Review, California Quarterly, Cloudbank, Crack the Spine, Diverse Voices Quarterly (Best of the…