Poetry

Bottom

Martha Zweig

You’ll be among the first
to know. You will. You’ll see:
waddling like an emperor’s obesity
ahead of you, sunrise, the future.

Hearse

Martha Zweig

Oops, hit the skid rind, cruel world
slipped a corkscrewy peel
of it’s-about-time.

Hardcore Innocence in Hangzhou, Winter 2015

Julian Gewirtz

We’ve been reading dirty
books, the kind with scurf
in their spines, cracking
their backs over my bed

FL 50’s

Rick McKenzie

This is where a hotel used to be.
Neon made the gin a sea-breeze blue,
Just as if Korea never happened.

Poor Relatives

Robert Morgan

The cloudburst leaves a brown meringue,
a kind of foamy candy on
the pool below the culvert where
the runoff plunged headlong to whip

Moroni’s Tailor

Phillis Levin

On a black cloth, a line of chalk
Marks the course my scissors must follow.

Shakespeare’s Head

Joseph Harrison

And cursed be sexton, parish clerk,
Or any man whose dirty work
Disturbs my poor dust where it lies.
I’ll see you, though through other eyes.

Two Views of Home

Catherine Stearns

An oval mirror that could fit in a child’s hand
from a pocketbook of her mother’s
for the pond beyond the door

Limitless Again

Aaron Fagan

Deplete the ascent, carving up your arms,
Returning flirty glances with the windows.
A film will attend this so don’t bother,

Trying to Write a Poem While the Couple in the Apartment Overhead Make Love

David Wagoner

She’s like a singer straying slowly off key
while trying too hard to remember the words to a song
without words,

Love Poem as Ars Poetica

Erica McAlpine

Because I am the dog who thought
her pain was a location,

Love

Aaron Fagan

Say it’s a form of heat that doesn’t rise
But passes from one body to the next.

Love Poem

Cecily Parks

I begin on an uncertainty of asphalt.
I run with my mouth open. I open my mouth to breathe
into yours.

Between

Shane McCrae

I stood on the bridge in the sky on the bridge between
Two buildings at the second floor but in
Between the buildings so in neither one

We were alive together once.
I thought it was that way from the beginning
of time. And I sang
my songs for him, and he rocked,
squeezing and pulling the accordion in his lap,
while his eyes glistened, shining.

Physics of the Breeze

David Baker

A slight wrinkle

A Portrait of My Father in Seven Maps

David Baker

Here I heard them. Here the big rocks.

In the cottage

Kathleen Winter

a thrush is caught beneath the glass ceiling—
must be a she because of the irony, plus
her coloring is nothing fancy. The racket
woke me at 5:20, I thought a horse

swing-shift ruckus

Kathleen Winter

cool mud a cut
whose red hugs bone
where slag rock sank
through his leather
hide below an eye
all spilling out

The Coming of Age

Henry Sloss

West of the handsome house the land descends
sharply, levels off in a broad flood plain
above Antietam Creek, and then becomes
its sheared-steep bank. The house and land are mine.
For three or four days following the battle
the Creek ran red, from thousands wounded, dead.

Ode on Inheritance

Kate Partridge

It begins, as usual, with the narrative of water:

The Marvel of It Is

Henry Walters

Not two inches tall, a conquistador’s horse,
stepping as high through his terrarium
as any life-size bronze in monument.

Crime Scene

Henry Walters

Ephemera the wind forms out of snow

Night Swimming

George Witte

Midsummer, wind across the lake
the humid morning breath of thunderheads.
Too small for awkward jutting oars
I rowed in futile circles, out of synch.

Three Sonnets

Robert Thomas

Sonnet with Swan and Long Tall Sally

What if we’re the crux, the diamond lynchpin?
What if creatures in other galaxies

Something You Left to Me

Owen McLeod

This box of apothecary vials with black rubber stops.
A strip of masking tape runs the length of each vial.

Breakup at the Starfish Brasserie

Owen McLeod

You imagine yourself the simplified figure
in this future person’s false romantic idea
of the present moment. You’ve even stopped
believing you know where the sculptures end
and the furniture begins. Well, bully for you
is all I can say—that, and have a good one.