Lysbeth Em Benkert Amorphous solid I will hold my palm against the window between us, and I’m sure to push through if I just wait long enough. Lysbeth Em Benkert is a long-term transplant to the upper mid-west where she teaches writing, rhetoric, and literature.
Read MoreDale Wisely
Pamela Joyce Shapiro “Every Morning”
Pamela Joyce Shapiro Every Morning When you are reading in front of the Eastern window, light resting on your graying crown, as though you were a deity of fictional thought, fraught with some mind’s best idea, a story filling you like pomegranates and lemons, I imagine you younger, writing lines in the marbled notebook that […]
Read MoreJudith Waller Carroll “My Heart is a Tangle of Colors”
Judith Waller Carroll My Heart is a Tangle of Colors Pale pink blending into orange, yellow weaving across red, a pattern as intricate and lovely as the valentine my son made for me in preschool, a zig zag of white paste bleeding through the center like an old scar that’s healed. Judith Waller Carroll’s poems […]
Read MoreJudith Waller Carroll “Stairs Leading Nowhere”
Judith Waller Carroll Stairs Leading Nowhere Stone, tangled with vines, listing from one side to another as they rise up the slope much the way a body moves as it climbs or the way your golden retriever, the feathers of his tail swaying, leads you to this hill that once led to someone’s home and […]
Read MoreJohn L. Stanizzi “POND” 5.6.19
John L. Stanizzi POND 5.6.19 11.32 a.m. 55 degrees Profligacies in orange and black, black and red, white and white, white and yellow, officers of influence, their color remains after they have flown, and the toads are a nimbus of sound in the bright afternoon, their chirring rising and rising to a stop, a dialogue, […]
Read MoreJohn L. Stanizzi “POND” 5.5.19
John L. Stanizzi POND 5.5.19 10.57 a.m. 53 degrees rain Purest concerto of toads and peepers around the pond, the woods on the outskirts, everywhere, until I approach and they preserve their silence in the nooks in which they hide in the open, invisible right in front of us, like dollops of gray clay given, […]
Read MoreJohn L. Stanizzi “POND” 4.28.19
John L. Stanizzi POND 4.28.19 7.18 a.m. 41 degrees Purple rosettes of the plum tree have just begun to emerge, the verdant opus of the skunk cabbage continues to slowly splay its wide whole notes, the nubbin leaves of multiflora roses are now everywhere, and a bluejay in the cedar distracts everyone with his incessant […]
Read MoreSteve Klepetar “Mirror”
Steve Klepetar Mirror This is not a mirror, it’s not a lake turned on its axis, it’s not the sky drained of color on a winter’s day, but a door to a thousand lakes, each one spread out beneath a ring of pines, a door to the sky you can open to race at the […]
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