You Don’t Start Out wanting to write about pain, the pain lives near you, neighborly and you begin to rely on it as if it would almost always agree to feed your cats or take in the recycling can. Its curtains blow in a midnight breeze the way yours do. There exists a kind of empathy. And you’re lonely. You’re willing to turn toward anything to make a friend.    Jack’s Death At the end of the day what else is there to do but write a poem: the blue and white pillow case you wrapped his body in. The suddenness with which your friend stopped shoveling dirt over the…

  Summer Solstice Morning heats up like a topaz jewel. By noon the matchstick grasses look like beatengold if you squint against the June sheen. Once you touched the burning plexus, the naked fiery hive of tormented passion alive inside the body of another summer, and lived.    Instructions from My Double Snag the day’s plush,_____its seedy glitter, __________those morsels packed _____with juice. Sponge in flecks of goldfish _____shimmer. Filch __________cobwebs of dusk; _______________rummage __________the rain. Jasmine, tuberose, _____gardenias, snakes, asphalt, soot—_____poke your nose __________into their perfume. _____Buildings puffing fat smokestack cigs; _____tangerine fingernails, __________mango computer screens, _______________dreams. Scraps, rags, __________electric tubing, _____all mixed together with wire and pencils,_____with mayonnaise…

The Bastard Children of the Moon My mother loved the Man in the Moon.Nights, his bony light shined down to herFrom where he’d hungHalf-naked in the elms.She would read to us quickly,Snapping shutThe tall book she held half opened in her lap,His name on her lips.The words that rhymed are lost. My mother loved the Man in the Moon.Once we were put to bed,Their talking through the walls changed to laughter,Laughter changed to cries.I went to spy.I saw him waxing over her body.I saw her sink beyond the dark side of his thighs. My mother loved the Man in the Moon.He hit her hard.She fell to the earth.The kitchen floor…

Cloud Report, 8/1/22 Even more light is the opposite of dawn. Or maybe it’s wind stirring maples and oaks before a thunderstorm overtakes them, the sky a plate of solid pewter. Maybe the opposite is my dog lying beside my chair an hour after the storm barreled through. Now whipped piles of clouds float like placid pale fish, covering up miles of clear blue.   Cloud Report, 1/20/23 Same as yesterday and the day before: heavy gray overlaps mounds of cream, no patches of blue, a few sparse snowflakes fall. The dog is sleeping downstairs. Each morning delivers me here, where a crow lands in a bare oak at the…

Suspended to a homeless man in Burlington, Vermont Floating vertically above the frozen groundhis worn-out sleeping bag forms an eggshellso fragile, everybody walks around afraid to touch, to break, keeping hands wellgloved inside pockets, keeping fingers warm,blocking the thought of how much like a cell   he looks: Suspended, embryonic form,apparent only when the sun is low,gold light side-shining through its pulsing storm.   Averted eyes will never see belowthe smooth blank surface of that ivory case.Like Homer, stuck forever in limbo,   he sleeps in his socially prescribed placeunless, lungs filled with icy yolk, he drowns.     Cindy Ellen Hill is a writer, musician and gardener in Middlebury,…

“leviathan” an L.A. story my body hangs suspended under a skyscapeof smog-masked stars — dividedby the water of your infinity pooli float, blind to the edgenever knowing how close i am to fallingover. alexa plays that indieartist you discovered on bandcampwhile high on blueberry morning.you’d rather listen to him than me —he makes you culturedinteresting. the midnight breeze forces your scentinto me, flooding my airways with thesun-soaked citrus of a california boywith your tangled bun and nine o’clock shadow —you wear shades at night because they’re“prescription” — and everyone loves it.your attention is the currency you use torun your freckled nose along bare stomachsuntil it’s buried between thighs. we crave…

Last Will and Testament The valley floor subsides—my roots follow the sinking water table. I wish I could leave you morethan the soggy ashes of your birthplace, the birds all flown like grown children,silence as odd as almond blossoms and snow falling together today.I stood still for thirty years and the desert came to me,plums replaced by prickly pears— I leave you what’s left: sun on skin,the hug of gravity.   Beth Suter studied Environmental Science at U.C. Davis and has worked as a naturalist and teacher. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, New American Writing, Barrow Street, DMQ Review,…

Santo Domingo In the square, four dark men in straw hatsplay an old song that sways with the breeze,Sixty beats a minute, same as your heart,and just a bit farther the town gives wayto the land’s end, where salt water laps on sand.Perfect, all, but we’ve another plan instead:We’re glad we’re alive. Today, we stay in bed. The Man Watching Porn on the 7 Train has a had a long day, I’m sure: his boots caked withcement dust, his jeans dirty from their seventh straightday of wear, his shoulders aching from the pipeshe carries, his knees sore from where he kneels downto put them in. The Union has helped him…

Oregon Trail Diary OCT. 10, 1843. This daywe veered off another wayfrom the main party On from the Snaketoward Powder River &the Blue Mts Susan & Annabeldear friendsmost likely lost for lifethrough the men’s quarrelas to the right route No other woman leftto help cookor ease me when…. Tuesday lastJonathan then little Sarahdied of the bloody flux &we buried them beneath the traildeep as we had time for safe fromdisturbancewe hope Not an hour to sparefor griefour utmost hastetoo slow—snow in the passessmell of snow in the wind Lynn Gilbert’s poems have appeared in The Banyan Review, Blue Unicorn, Concho River Review, Exquisite Corpse, Gnu, The Huron River Review, Kansas…