Stress Test Red is the crest of the purplefinch and raspberry redmy heart that flittering hankiesnagged on pine branches and long the song of the purplefinch, laddered longlike the stuttered start of the heartjust prior to rising there in the sky, five purpleclouds warble the darkeninginside me, an arpeggiodrawn from the cords until silent, the long land and purpletrees all reaching, reachingtoward the beat to follow, the flutterof blood, the hollow bones Veronica Kornberg is a recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize and the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Poetry. Her work appears in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Calyx, Beloit Poetry Journal,…

Crab Apple The crab apple treesieved the windaround the field’s edge, spikey-dense, fruit acidic and rarely picked,binocular-distant on the skyline. The quietthere. Only a ground-level scurry of something like brushes on a snare drum.Is that the place I found the larva,its raw thorax gleaming mid- moult, prolegs collapsed to a slatherof grey nubs?We’d unwound its twill of gauze and bandagesand exposed an Oz behindmoist curtains, termination shimmering in the ruined cocoon.We didn’t mean to hurt a thing, yetwrought our damage. We tossed it in the flattened grassnear burdock flowersand a twisted elbow of the creek.   The Perseids Best chance to view them is late,away from the city’s glow, in…

Good Intentions i promised myself a better self than i could make & i will not forgive                                    —“After Vallejo” by A.B. Spellman At 5:00 a.m. Arthur Sze must be rising, brewing green tea,                then beginning to type his dream of mule deer grazing the chaparral and also wind turbines                slicing songbirds into puffs of feathers. Farther west I page through Sight Lines,                grateful for insomnia and San Francisco’s light-polluted sky, how they…

December Evening at Big Y the axle-bentcart swerves,stubborn, aimingfor anywhereI don’t want to gobut I am more obstinateyanking the handleharsh as the harsh lightecstatic song echoesin the pet food aisleheaven and nature singperfect companionsin the cart is my prisonertree, wrapped tightin green meshoutside: the grey rain Written in Winter traversing his endless palace the first emperornever slept in the same room twice for lack of spaceI had to cry in the car Martha McCollough is the author of Wolf Hat Iron Shoes (Lily Poetry Review Books 2022) and the chapbook Grandmother Mountain (Blue Lyra 2019) . Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, The Boiler, RadarPoetry, Bear Review,…

Religion Out walkingand I have the sudden desire to pass the churchat the bottom of the hill. I’m not religious—it reminds me of Europe, which has beauty.In Rome, the men lookingmade me want to pound my face on the pavement.I gave private tours to Americans. Once,I took a married couple through the Vatican museumsand at the end the man was surprised to be in the Sistine Chapel.I thought it was in Paris, he whispered.The church at the bottom of the hill has dozens of stepsup to heavy doors that are usually locked.For a year I went into every church I saw in Rome,sat in the quiet. I had time then.In…

Fugue of Vodka Light GS with lines & variation from Lorna De Cervantes’ “From the Bus to E.L. at Atascadero State Hospital” The woman screams I want Vodka now! InsteadI offer her more coffee, but tonight youKnow this won’t work. She is adamant—wereYou here you might be scared, hereWhere anger is a daily ruse. She balls her fists. WhereIs the Vodka? She’s in her fifties, delusional. TheWoman grew up in a closed factory town with its woundedMen. Bradford’s blue factory light. BlackbirdsOf men begging for bread. Coal trains warbleAlong the Allegheny River with their industrial jazzFed the furnaces of the Zippo plant. InA town where she was raised by her…

What I Failed to Notice Sometimes in August, the heat demands that your brain shut down, that nothing more should occur to you, even if it is only that the squirrels and crows seem to be having a cocktail party in your backyard, the squirrels like frat boys, the crows observing with mild disdain, even if it is only to ponder a small microwave that the neighbors have placed on the mangled stump of their fallen cotton- wood, where it shimmers and remains for a week. The sun glares in August and distorts your vision: maybe the crows are hawks, maybe the microwave is a box. Tension pulses in the…

Lost …thoughts of a person in agesometimes grow sparer.                               —Jane Hirshfield When I take to dashing awayfrom my computer’s texts and demands, especially finding those codes to prove I’m me, I get lost, even in my own city where I’ve lived over half a century. I pay no attention to street names, so never ask for directions. Besides, I’m geographically challenged. Ask anyone who knows me. They’ll say, “Her? Oh, who knows where she is.” Now we’re talking about this, I find myself driftingthrough a forest of thoughts with quivering leavesleaving myself on the side of…

Small Losses The soupspoons disappeared first, one by onefollowed by knives, a few linen napkins,as if some being on the other sideof the veil was setting up house. I wonderedwho it was, and if they wore my lost sockson their cold feet, my missing glasses ontheir failing eyes. These small losses barelynoticed until later: the slow declineof spring frogs, the carefully worded bill,the quiet appointment of a judge, allthe thin slivers that we believed were ours,pared away like potato skin by thosewho now hold the knives, busy preparingsoup to be eaten only by those with spoons.  Lisa Shulman is a poet, children’s book author, and teacher. Her work has appeared…