Poetry

Because of their format, several poems that appear in the current issue are included only in pdf. To read them, click on their titles on the right side of this page.

Prospects from the Palisades
John Koethe

We’re always other people, whoever they are.
I’m grateful to poets’ biographies—a genre nearly as
Obsolete as its subjects—for helping me make myself up,

Wide Margin Love Poem
Susan Barba

Let me
let you
make me
proud.

Current
Susan Barba

The closest we can come
to the unseen
plumes of scent
spun by a spindle

The Way You Look Tonight
Peter Cameron

It chafes you, I know, this
Remorseless penchant for drama
I have. Life is too short

The Light in the Marsh Grass
Jeffrey Harrison

was alive: small creatures aglow and crawling
one after the other down each tall green blade—
thousands of them bending at all angles—

Echo Lake
Nicholas Friedman

You hunker underneath a shaggy fir,
shifting when sunlight shifts its bit of shade,
and eat a single almond every hour.

Flirt
Christina Pugh

The bank of cloud that night was like a smoother
lamb’s wool, a fistful you’d pull to stuff
a pointe shoe for ballet class.  Or maybe the cloud
bank was more like the tiny cotton coverlet

The Staircase
Christina Pugh

A white jar dissolves into the whitish background
that gently presses its narrow form upright.  Morandi’s
ceramics must be manna for the eye, I think.  Here,
their proximity makes several forms seem melded—

Still Life, Mouth of the Vistula
Daniel Bourne

After a while the bird starts to twist
to turn this way and that
as if to show me every side

Unconscious Ode
Ann Keniston

Now that my mother, as others say, has passed,
I like to visit churches that display

the miraculously intact bodies of saints
in glass cases. Sometimes the hem of their carved garment