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Adrian T. Quintanar
Psychopomp Perhaps life was meant to endlike this: fisheyes spiralingacross the caution typeface,the steady burn of diodescatching in stucco nooks,bungalow doors gnawed.The slender digit gnarledsnug on a Glock’s cold, wettongue. Like hollow-pointgold that flowers carmineout sagittal crests, thefangs bared from jaws of a dog,smoke-hued and rattleboned.The coming spell of comitycindering in your sclera, lungs.Someone collecting the mattercharged on grass & sidewalk,someone emptying your dozing headback into shaky palms of a loved one.Someone to desperately offer warmth,offer your molt understanding:this is not just pattern, this is ageless,it is ritual. Animals extolling earthshine.But there is no moon, no stars,nothing but owl song, the scatterof a possum, the quiet…
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Peter Cooley
To My Neighbor It’s almost Easter herein Elsewhere and the machinesare doing all the work: washing, sweeping, heating still while I haunt my homeuseless as a second thought.I will never reach the end of this novel. I will fail to emptythe diaper pail. I will eat lunch standingover the sink and it will taste like nothing at all. Even the excursionsare broken. The highway turnsand clovers over and under and over. At the filling stationwhile the car fills itselfI will pass once more on the opportunity to wipethe beetles from my windshieldin favor of staring south and if a stranger were to ask…
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Bill Mohr
Tomato Skins My mother called and said a tiny flapof tomato skin was stuck inside her throatthe way a child who crawled too far might beIrreversibly encased in a mining shaft.Portable generators! All night stand by!I don’t believe she ever again trustedunpeeled tomatoes. A day or two after,she called to tell of watching a butterflytunnel through her garden, and how a jayswooped in and netted its flightin a perishing knot so deft as to yankinvisibility: now that my mother’s dead,and I don’t have to call her once a dayto see if she’s clamped down on somethingunextractable, some taut tarpaulinof indissoluble paradox, I remember how muchshe wanted at the end to…
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Gail White
Beatitudes Blessed are those who take what they can get.Who marry someone who is not the greatestbeauty or athlete that they’ve ever met.Blessed are those who do not have the latesttechnology at command. Who do not speakthree languages. Who cry when something hurts.Blessed are those whose drive to win is weak,stock market failures, poets, introverts.Blessed are those who choose to live alonewith dogs or cats rather than make a speech,who never go exploring on their ownor try for anything beyond their reach.Blessed, who know they’re bound to fail the testand settle down, settling for second best. Gail White is a contributing editor of Light Poetry Magazine and a…
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Patricia Nelson
The Void Perhaps this shimmer in theemptiness is nothing—it doesn’trealize it holds a shadow. Doesn’t see the leaf-thin lightor the cool, dark tree that bendslike an image on the water’s skin. Or love the creatures of eye and awewho reach into the sky with silencegleaming at their wrists. Doesn’t notice its own farness wherea star blows wonder open like a flower. Patricia Nelson is a former environmental attorney who has worked for many years with the “Activist” group of poets in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is working on a book of poetic monologues by monsters and seers.
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Catherine Abbey Hodges
Mountain Garter Snake There you were again, slipping away so imperceptiblyI wouldn’t have seen you had I not been on the alert. After four sightings in a week of your sleek darknessand lightning stripes, the silent parting of grasses as you whipped away under arches heavy with seed heads,I’d come to think of you as a tacit friend. Today, though, when I stopped short to admire your swift passage, you toostopped, then raised your severe head on your slender neck, which is also your body, above the litter of winter’ssycamore leaves and spring’s tangle of vetch, and I heard myself gasp. For a minute or…
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Jon Lavieri
Traffic Three girls in the car behind me are singingand dancing inside their seatbeltsrocking the car and clapping their handsto the same tempo of a different songthat was already playing in my headIt’s the very brink of summerand my heart is dancing under a seatbeltof its own. I’m trying to believethis sudden permissionto feel someone else’s joywill be enough to make me forgetwhere I’m going and fall in lovewith this car crash of being aliveI cannot hear the singing girlsor the song that lifts them off the pageof a day so average it could be yesterdayeven the stoplight is dancing and turninggreen against an endless cobalt skyas we drive away…
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Gina Ferrara
Woven With each conversation and passing day,the selvedge unravels, taking the selfin singular and pluralized form.You’ve watched the loom,how it reminded you of a silent harpwaiting for a seraph’s strum,in anticipation, the genesis of intricaciesvillage scenes, hunts, foliage,apocalypses, droughts, miraculousdraughts of fish, mythical creaturesand life on nebulas, sprawlingsometimes succinct narratives,made by blunt needles, ready eyes openfollowed by the distance of a strand,and turning skeinthe warp and weft of parallels,silken convergences,umber, golden, persimmon and onyx,threads in shades of skin. Gina Ferrara lives and writes in New Orleans. Her poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Dovecote, and The Poetry Ireland Review among others. Her latest collection, Amiss, is forthcoming…
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Christopher Buckley
On Goleta Pier High tide, no room to walkalong the beach. I head outover the splintered planks,empty but for a hundred pigeons,a handful of young men fishing,killing time, having nothingbetter to do. . . . at the end,the pier angles toward the heartof Santa Cruz, an island floatingon channel mist . . . beyond whichthe Chumash believed the deadpassed into paradise througha western gate. . . . I stop a minute,thinking of my wife in Heliopolis,visiting where her grandparentsand her mother, as a child,lived in another world . . .and where the Temple of…
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Joshua McKinney
Buddies There’s the one your wife can’t stand,and there’s the one whose wifecan’t stand you, and there’sthe one whose wife can’t standyour wife, and the one whose wifeyour wife can’t stand, and the onewhose wife you can’t stand, no,be honest—you hate that bitch.Can you see the pattern here?Is it coincidence that feond (fiend)and freond (friend), both masculineagent nouns, were often pairedalliteratively in Old English? Is itfor this that the drinking hornsof Heorot must stand mead-less andthe grease-slicked flesh of feastersin the firelight unilluminated go?How many best men bested, howmany best-laid plans shoved downthe gangway aft of a sinkingfriendship because yougot it wrong, because your tongueslipped or you glanced, too intentlyor…
