#42: Poetry by Kevin Canfield

NOT THE ANSWER WE WERE EXPECTING Thirty geese in V formation fly South over the gray, stalwart Hudson Squawking manically as they go Wonk! Wonk! Wonk! Whenever I hear this sound I think not of the majesty of The natural world but the kid Who on show-and-tell day Brought to Ms. P’s second-grade Class a […]

#40: Poetry by Yvonne Higgins Leach

STAGGERING BEES Flowers abandoned at the burial site. The black car doors slam shut.   Guests shed their coats and express sympathy, unforgiving of mortality.   Platters of cold cuts, homemade salads, store-bought buns   and boxed desserts—but I do not want them.   Women bring more food: a bowl of olives, cheese and crackers, […]

#39: Poetry by F.J. Bergmann

FACTION variation on a first line by Matt Miller   My escape route was endless invention. If one wormhole failed, I’d wait for a new star to collapse and fall into its own black magic. I’d start to gnaw at my molecular bonds, eat my way through another ligature. fj was my favorite; all those […]

#37: Poetry by William Doreski

TRYSTING BEHIND THE SQUARE A big green trash compactor hogs half the alley, crowding us into the shadows of fire escapes.   We have to stop meeting here, concealed from tourists and students prowling for scented candles   and clothes that no one should wear. The ramshackle metal siding and greenish board-and-batten   cast shade […]

#33: Poetry by Bruce McRae

WRONG-HEADED PROPHET I’ve a face like a torn curtain. A face like a punched wall or rat’s dinner. Like a smoking battlefield. What Shakespeare would tag rudely stamped and curtailed of fair proportion.   A stranger in stranger times, a frightener of small children, I’m not the prettiest angel in the choir, my face like […]

#30: Poetry by Lynne Potts

MONDAY BEFORE TUESDAY Monday cold oatmeal a shadow-puppet mother waving from the door—   night before bathtub water turned marble gray   outside swilling eddies forming a snow day— you wish, you wish   smell of lead pencil shavings in your new haircut Gilbert Baily in the coat room   Monday—a smudged dwarf trudging forest […]

#29: Poetry by J.R. Solonche

HOW DO YOU TALK TO A PERSON How do you talk to a person who looks like a corpse? How do you exchange pleasantries? How do you say, “What a beautiful day?”  So I say, “What a beautiful day.” How do you say, “It looks like rain?” So I say, “It looks like rain.” How […]

#24: Poetry by Ryan Blosser

TEAKETTLE MEDITATION Silver crescent sliver smiles sideways at sunset. The wind could sweep me up to the top of that maple.   Oh, St. Francis, if I were Catholic, my dog would hear my sermon.   Whine, teakettle, wail on. Show September crickets, that’s/it’s your voice cadencing moon across sky.   It is said that […]

#21: Poetry by Dmitry Blizniuk

THE GRAY MORNING This gray morning is like the unwashed feet of a dancer, and between the trees, like between the toes, there’s dirt of the night feasts: empty bottles, packs of nuts and chips, cigarette butts. Garbage trucks dump waste containers in themselves, as if a caring nurse empties bedpans from under a palsied […]

#20: Poetry by Judith Bowles

UNTITLED Not finding the grave of my parents I came down the road of misshapened trees whose roots, strangled, shoved up in a mass and a heave. Earth there is parched and speaks, with an effort, of days filled with birds, of the many shades of memorial green. I am getting rid of some clothes […]