Speak to Me Go ahead, talk to that pile of gravel.They have a language. The dead birdIn the road? Those wrecked feathers can speak up too.The wind whistles in the oak,And the oak shrugs its mighty shoulders.I could put an ear to the groundAnd listen to rumbling complaints below. It’s come to this. My few friends are deadOr others ready to set sail into the flamesOf two-for-one crematorium. Family? They’re quietAs my landline. My cat hasn’t much to say. Like me,It repeats itself with a meow to my mild bark.My wife, a seamstress, speaks to meThrough the snips of her scissors in cloth—Look, a new shirt for me! Is laughter…

Introduced by Guest Editor George Yatchisin Tender and tough, brittle and bruising, the poems of Elizabeth Erbeznik snag on the hope and horror of home like a fishing line caught on tin cans afloat in Sacramento’s American River. While Erbeznik writes “belonging is denied/with official language,” her clear-eyed witness makes beauty bloom with unsentimental poetics. She can even pull off a sestina that wisely demystifies the California dream while still making us ache for that failure. Tule Fog I can’t loosen my grip and thoughts wander, are lost in a rental car blur of hot air and wipers. Sacramento is home but I had to leave before I could want…

White Smoke My wife and I have always celebrated the interregnumbetween popes with a carnival after three days of mourningfor the dead pope, more if we loved his Roman numerals or his face, then days of action without censure, no fearof ex cathedra pronouncements about Mary or sin,and we’d pray for a long conclave with gridlock perhaps of one hundred days, and we’d beginto sin ourselves with no papal eyes on us, offeringpersonal heirlooms to each other for a price— a form of secular simony—or we’d pull back on our donationsto foodbanks, spending on our own forms of gluttonywith pasta at its base, we’d drink our red Sangiovese in a…

Disaster Fat No way not to pack the extra pounds back on. Grief dictated we swallow copious sugar, flour, cream—comfort foods passed daily our direction. Confounding, but hardly brutal, our bad luck, compared to others, the pounded world. Look how safe we stayed! Wrapped in an obesity of kindness. Delivered in corpulent forms: in puddings, steaks, posh lamps and stuffed pleather chairs. In hand-stitched quilts flush with every succulent color, shrouding the scorch, the insurance claim burn. Flung to our doorstep? Not bombs but bags of donated clothes. Each friend, each heavenly body making the scars of all that blazed fade from our lot’s smoked history. Forests may be gorgeous,…

After Thirty Years Together Sherpas lift us onto their backsand carry us down the mountain path. We made the long climb to the summit,strained to see through clouds of confusion. From time to time, the sun slid outand shone on a wind-swept lake. Now, the spring paths are rutted mud.Not many years remain. Fog still clouds our eyes,our spirits of separate natures. We ride on generous shouldersthat know our faults, swept togetherlike catkins on a thawing stream. Daniel Thomas’s third book, River of Light, is forthcoming from Shanti Arts. His previous books are Leaving the Base Camp at Dawn and Deep Pockets. He has published poems in many journals, including…

Lower Falls, Enfield Glen for Sarah When I tell the lifeguard—his roostis right next to the diving board—I’m feeling a little nervous, he says, Okay…, already erasing the hookover the first period in the ellipsishe drags behind the word. Okay… in the voice young men reservefor the weird and querulous, lesta question mark connect us; if it’s level enough to absolve boysof their mothers, it’ll do for the strangenessof any woman their senior in decades and affect, hilarity, worry. Not that I wishthis young man ill; if I wish him anything,it’s a long life. If I wish him anything, I wish him the day he can no longerafford boredom and…

Trouble The summer she was twelvea stray terrier started tagging alongon all her adventures—raiding a neighbor’sstrawberry patch, hiking past the timberline,skinny dipping with her brother and his friendsin the cold little creek. She named the dog Trouble,and pretty soon, when the people saw the mischievous,long-legged girl on the cusp her shining, dog at heel,they would say, uh oh, Double Trouble. ~~~ The day her father drove up to take them downthe tall mountain, she begged and cried, promisedsun and moon, galaxies of perfect obedience, butnonetheless they drove away, back to Santa Fe,junior high, dull routine, leaving Trouble behindin his usual place on the porch. ~~~ After that, the girl started…

The 2021 Pantone Color of the Year Was Dual: ULTIMATE GRAY + ILLUMINATING They said it was a marriage of color. They said it was a message of strength & hopefulness. They said it’s good to push two shades close together.                They didn’t say that illumination makes the gray grayer.                They didn’t say shadows make the sun brighter.                They didn’t say eventually all paint peels.                              (They didn’t need to put ultimate in front of gray.)…

Apropos of Something, a Flourish “Shipwrecks are apropos of nothing” —Stephen Crane When she died, as her only son it may have been assumed that at a ceremony I would say something on my mother’s behalf – at any rate, I was asked by more than one person. I demurred. Her last five years were hard. When calamity crashed upon her in waves, as her only near child we’d both of us be in the boat. Now, having survived her, I wouldn’t need an audience to address my memory. The poem stuck in my head was like one of the black-and-white TCM gems that drop in their rotation whenever I…

It Was the Millennium. It Was Aught-Aught. Once relevant, now quaint.The makeshift ways which some people fancied essential.If it didn’t come out of the refrigerator, it was a hot meal.We all knew that California was full of notions.Collage was what life was after college.Which was everyone making their own case.We felt like we had figured out the time thing.Even in California you saw the dawn two hours before everyone else.You wrote poems as if they were Vermeers. With a Vermeer veneer.To be so nice you’d step aside for a slug.You kept an ostrich egg in the refrigerator to remind you of the lifestyle you’d rejected.You liked to get yourself in…