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.

Watch
Elisabeth Murawski

The sky’s a murky green. You stop the car
in heavy rain to take my hand and pray.
Is this a truce? An end to civil war?

On Turning Ninety
Edmund Keeley

It can be laughable
to stand in a room
and not know why
you came in there,

Mansplaining Oracle
Caki Wilkinson

Hey you, untrue god, fiscal man,
futile man, sour young cad; hey,
yahoo, seducer, family gun nut,

To the Embalmers
G. C. Waldrep

i.m. Mahmoud Darwish

I went into the desert for the velvet flesh of two white fish.
And when the heat of the desert was withdrawn from me

The Completion of Shadows
G. C. Waldrep

Oh friends I am a prison to all that lies within me.
It burns the way phosphorus burns.  It bears the raven’s flag
into the ragged country called by its natives Los Arpas.
 

Darklight
Rosanna Warren

The moon dragged her string-net bag of shadows through the boughs

The Point
Rosanna Warren

My long shadow paces and the skreak of gulls
hauls evening down and furls it along the edge of the lake.

First Crocuses
Donald Platt

They are the colors/of my dead father’s Lenten chasuble,

Margaritas
Knute Skinner

Margaritas tonight,
and I think of our friend Greg.

Julia Hungry
Hannah Louise Poston

She reconstructs her ruptured orange peel
while telling me about the fancy meal