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Archive #43
January, 2017


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Kris Lindbeck

VerseWrights Warmly Welcomes Poet Kris Lindbeck


​from Selected Tanka and Haiku...

Full dark 
winter's quiet crickets 
begin chirping 
The crescent moon lifts up her arms
to catch the evening star

                    ❦

                    no camera 
                    and a heart too full of holes 
                    to hold this sunset

        ❦

​I couldn't tell you
why I'm crying today . . . 
I put out my tongue
like a child 
to taste the salt

                    ❦

                    November . . . 
                    dead leaves rolling sunlight
                    down the street

Read the poetry of kris Lindbeck
​Read a profile of Kris Lindbeck

​
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Edjo Frank

Edjo Frank Trims Sails,
​Heads For The Inevitable

Our Ship of Love

​fair wind blows the sails
our ship steady rolling
my face buried
in your long sisal hair
 
I hold your hips
lips softly caressing
bodies raise and curl
the ocean swell
 
we try to conquer
boundaries of the earthy
fly like wild swans
entangled in love
 
hands clenched
bare feet twisted
speechless history shared
future behind
 
helpless, helpless
insatiable hunger
beyond understanding
we move on
 
love is to end
in the fire of passion
time no longer
on our side
 
no choice but sailing
to the limits of awareness
where freedom waters
wash our tired souls


Read the poetry of Edjo Frank
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Judith Dorian

VerseWrights Warmly Welcomes Poet Judith Dorian

Afternoon at Frick Park

​We hike downhill--
just my speed these days--
Rupa and Kevin deposit me at a bench
climb back up to retrieve their car, then me.

The park seems deserted.
I’ve been reading too much about guns, suicides, murders.
A beat up car pulls into the parking lot
a creepy guy coaxes his dog out
onto the grass where the poor thing can barely move.
“Goldie’s fourteen and her hips don’t work so good,” he says.

Pedestrian traffic picks up:
almost every passerby has a dog on or off a leash
a child in or out of a stroller.
A park ranger whose green shirt reads STAFF
demonstrates how to strap
a hammock to two trees, spaced well apart
invites his colleague to lie down in it.
“Is the hammock for park visitors?” I ask.
“No,” he laughs, unties it, puts it in his car for when he
wants a snooze.

A clutch of clouds obliterates the sun, triggers a sense 
of unease. Two years ago today my neighbor shot his wife.
The papers are full of such stuff—toddlers with loaded guns, 

terrorists, tedious accounts & statistics of bodies violated, 
mutilated, murdered. Wars spring up like children’s toys, 
Bop and Pop. The tale of Mayerling palls, ho-hum.
Can we care about Crown Prince Rudolf--tsk! tsk! when history
is steeped in our killing fields, in the French blessé during
the wars, in the dried blood of Babi Yar or of Burundi, 
the Mexican clandestinas or prehistoric mass graves in Kenya?
Is it still possible to mourn the murder-suicide 

of Crown-Prince Rudolf?

For three years Niki de Saint Phalle was addicted to shooting 

works of art, mesmerized by pellets bursting from a .22 long rifle 
into bags of paint embedded in plaster.  Boom! the monochromatic 
white blooms as sacks spurt and splatter violets and reds, oranges 
and blacks. Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns likewise take part 
in such innocent massacre.

A woman in high heels and chiffon,
a crown of flowers in her hair
steps out of a Toyota, grabs a child’s hand.
Friends and family (and the fiancé) arrive, spattering
the grey parking lot with finery in greens, pinks, blues.
The cluster of celebrants walk across the road 
to a secluded area where a minister intones blessings.


Read the poetry of Judith Dorian
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​
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Phil Boiarski

Phil Boiarski And The
Inevitable Pull Of Time


​Time in the Body

Time feels like growing to a child,
ache of bones, changing clothes,
outgrowing shoes, the awkward
length of leg or foot. It is the ecstasy
of fireflies and the anguish of
acne in the mirrored bathroom light.

Time has no relationship to
stability, it is that cataract
that gushes along, crashing
friends in high school or
losing them to war.
Then the pinnacle
is reached, adulthood
and the beginnings
of nostalgia.

Growth becomes girth
and each day, gravity
pulls us closer to the earth.


Read the poetry of Phil Boiarski
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​

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Miriam Sagan

Miriam Sagan: When Simpatico, No Words Are Needed 

After Dinner at the Legal Tender

Summer is over. Leaving Lamy
You drive south into basin and range
At sunset. I sit in the passenger seat
Buckled up, not quite
Knowing where you are taking me
Quiet as a farm wife or any
Girl just along
For the ride.

Darkness, autumn, you turn around
Finished with expanse
Head home. I know my story
And I know yours
And why we both

Have a taste for this.

​Read the poetry of Miriam Sagan
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Tracey Gunne

Tracey Gunne Wants To Give You A Nightmare

Swallowing Spiders in
​Your Sleep


well, lover, your fears
although irrational
are charming
the misery you imagined hiding
now travels closer
dents in the pillowcase, tickle on your nose
all evidence of my nocturnal wanderings
weaving past desires through eyelash
in spiral orbs of silk perversions
I will leave eight reasons on your skin
eight synonyms for love
every vibration will lead me crawling
inside your perfectly round opening

a darkness so lovely


Read the poetry of Tracey Gunne
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Witty Fay

Witty Fay Gives Us Two Poems About Self And All Selves

Unscathed,

If you can allow yourself to walk
The perils of the inner time
And still dream a cosseted dream
Of the world, at ease.
If not, climb on the sill of my window, 
I owe you endless stories of delivery
And my voice speaks all earthly tongues.
Down like the rain,
Down like the rain-
A fresh injection of people
In the veins of the inhumane
Shall give all the hardihood
It takes to cut them open
And stuff all the souls inwards.


​
Commitment

The cells and strings, 
This biology of you
Spreading its limbs next to my skin,
Warm and prickly and alive-
I want to wrap myself into the smell of it
But the split infinity of their stance
Saddens the day of me, the night of me,
The all of us 
That is neither everything, nor anything
Under the breath of a sun too short.
In a word, I am not wise and there yet.


​Read the poetry of Witty Fay
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Four Petite Poems From Four Poets

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Breaking Fast
          ~ Mark Dennis Anderson
​

Your lips, coastal –
open to me.

                 Chili pepper,
                 I want to sweat you out.
​                           ❧

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The Core
          ~ Rivka Zorea
​

At the epicenter of 
the earth's core
                    Is a boiling, raging fire

                    Once in a while
                    it pushes forth
                    in an explosion

                    of violent passion


                   ...me too
​                           ❧        

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Water
          ~ R. Gene Turchin

She likes water sounds 
Table top unit pumping water 
                    From the base through plastic lines 
                    To a metal water fall. 
                    Landing with a splash on pebbles.  
                    Says it soothes her soul.
​
                    I hear water dripping from a 
                    Broken faucet.

                           ❧

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​Gin
          ~ David Adès

No tonic for me:
            the djinn would not oblige my
​                 wishes after three.
​


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Karla Linn Merrifield

Karla Linn Merrifield Has A
​Take On The Poet's Ego

Dramatis Persona

This is the gestalt of Ego Everypoet,
E.E. (not e.e.), Psyche’s female lead:
 
To the Superegos—  all egos are illegal aliens
in need of severe restraints, ergo:
 
wing-clipped zoo flamingo,
casino macaw chained to tiki bar,
caged cockatoo in $ Store window.
 
To the Id named JoJo the Poet--
E.E. is a wildling enraptured raptor:
 
Rio Negro harpy eagle, Amazon-eyed,
Nile River falcon-headed sky queen,
Colorado River canyon-conquering condor.
 
She admits to a certain ferocity of syllables.


Read the poetry of Karla Linn Merrifield
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​
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Allison Grayhurst

Allison Grayhurst Returns
​With A Jubilant Optimism

Rooms of Joy

We will build four rooms of joy
to honour the monastic sigh, to understand
the kestrel on its perch and the wheelchair
halted at the steep curb.
We will sanctify our moon
with paint, clay and easel - letting colours and moisture
drip through our fingers,
malleable as a conscious dream.
We will bellow out music that towers over
the thieves of daylight, races into our bodies, offering grace
where there is none.
We will write poems and stories of fact
and fiction to bring
definition to our visions, to lose ourselves,
naked as the calling gulls.
We will hold our meditation stones,
like a horse’s beautiful mane, brushing,
braiding, all the while,
softly whispering our affection
into the copper-coloured ear of nature.
And the animals will bind us. The enormous love
between us all will cut away
the scar tissue of disappointment.
We will plunge into this temple, playing games,
bearing fruit. In our four rooms we will love, expand
and often falter - fresh and deep, rooted into the floorboards
of this true home.


Read the poetry of Allison Grayhurst
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Mark MacDonald

Mark MacDonald's New Year Of Focus And Responsibility...

Setting Some New Priorities

I no longer worry that my thesis
on the Ghost Orchid and her shameless romance
with a Cypress in the swamps of Florida
will ever reach the desk of the President;

or that Congress will debate my proposal
to hold sessions on the shores of the Potomac
complete with fried chicken and whisky.

Age and resignation have stripped me
of such ambitions, and smaller
more attainable goals consume me.

Mostly I consort with the dead these days:
Confederate colonels on horseback
gathered beneath a shade tree on a hill,
awaiting the newest orders from their General;

or the massacred peasants of Khitan
and their wives and their children that the Khan
sold off into slavery. Yesterday a boy
in Chicago was killed in the crossfire and a twelve
year old girl was strangled and raped in LA.

The President and Congress have troubles enough
I think, they should be forced to read poetry;
but those colonels, those peasants, those kids

in LA and Chicago? Perhaps they might need me.
​
Read the poetry of Mark MacDonald
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Samantha Reynolds

Samantha Reynolds Cannot Escape Being A Mother

Henry

My kids call him Henry
the little sapling
that stands a foot high
on our forest path

he is mostly stick
with a few green wisps
of hope

and even though they measured him
this year and last
they don’t seem to notice
that he hasn’t grown at all

yesterday they gave him
a maple leaf for a hat
and ferns for shoes

like a pitiable summer version
of a snowman

and they hug him so gently
every time we pass him
leaning way down
and telling him

you’ll be big one day

that as I walked by him today
on my own
and I saw that one
of his flimsy arms
had snapped

I tied it upright
with a piece of grass
and found myself
whispering to him

you’ll be just fine.


Read the poetry of Samantha Reynolds
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Katherine Gallagher

Katherine Gallagher: Testing
​And Then Relishing This World

For Julien at Six Weeks

Already
you have taken the world
by your fingertips
small hands closing on
grapes of air,
first fruits that you touch
and hold at arm's length
to choose and choose again.
 
Soon you will learn
how days are layered with secrets,
how the sun combs back
its fields of light,
how the wind unveils its colours.
 
You have all the time you want –
a careful mime
rehearsing routines
as old as the eye.


Read the poetry of Katherine Gallagher
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​

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Claire Scott

Claire Scott Pens A Clear, Bleak Vision


​Aftermath
          November 9, 2016

Hello whoever is out there
I find myself under serious covers
offering scant protection despite the heavy quilt
sewn by my great grandmother
despite the drawn shades the twelve orange vials of
blessèd Xanax lying next to my pillow
certainly not a solution for the next four years
or ten generations for that matter
a slideshow of despair loops endlessly
a Muslim woman her hijab torn &
tied around her throat
apoplectic faces shrieking
                  go home
to a black man born in Baltimore
a woman in a back alley undoing
the work of a rapist
a teenager returned to El Salvador where
death stalks on legs of steel
their faces indelible, crowding, rustling
begging, screaming, sobbing
while a mad man plays with joysticks
on Pennsylvania Avenue
KA-POW KA-POW
tweeting triumphs at three am
Hello are you there


Read the poetry of Claire Scott
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​

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Liam Strong

VerseWrights Extends A Warm Welcome To Poet Liam Strong

we can't grow just
​to diminish


let's dance
as if death
were not at our shoulders,
or doctors prodding
at words we'll
never siphon the meaning from.
let's curl hands
like wood knots
on the park trees
flowing with their own sway,
walk the hospital grounds,
breathe undying air.
we're in our own country
of sick and solitary,
of weak and vanishing.
our bodies want to shrivel
back into themselves,
like raisins at breakfast.
we’re used to the ebb
and dip of wrinkled worry.
we don't have to love
like our young successors.
we have more in common
in mind
than they do in longing.
let's see each other
not because we have to,
but to endure
the withering
of memory.


Read the poetry of Liam Strong
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Darren C. Demaree

Darren C. Demaree: Soft Falls And Nagging Fears

Introducing Cliffs

My children fall down
gently. Even on sidewalks,
the scrapes to cuts

& the blood that follows,
there is hardly any scarring.
My children fall down

gently. Even in waves
they are delivered
to the beach. My children

fall down gently. So,
when the bodies of other
children are on the news

I do not change the channel,
when they talk about death
& it’s not the death

of our beloved cat, I leave
the volume high. I will not
frighten my children,

but I cannot stop them
from forming the questions,
from looking at abyss

& feeling that they could
fall forever from that cliff.
I’ve taught them safety.

I preached some caution.
I’ve let them hear about
the amount of blood

in the American ocean.
My children fall down
gently. I say it out loud

so that I can hear it
when my worst fears
creep in from the wind.


Read the poetry of Darren C. Demaree
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​
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Judy Melchiorre

Judy Melchiorre Has A
​Toe-Tapping Turn

Turkish Tango

The aromas of sweet, fresh bread and robust, dark coffee,
the sounds of syncopated rhythms and melodies in a minor key,
the sharp tang of ginger soda,
the warmth of a croissant, 
the flakes scatter onto the table and my lap,
the clear soprano voice accompanied by guitar,
punctuated by the siren passing,
the high-pitched buzz from an amp that defies adjustment,
the odd bits and snips of whispered conversations.
Focusing on the sounds of an unknown language,
the constant chatter in my head stops - -
I tap my feet to the beat of a Turkish tango.


Read the poetry of Judy Melchiorre
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​
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Julia Stothard

VerseWrights Warmly Welcomes Poet Julia Stothard To Our Pages

Progress Report

So many of us
are sliding down the ridge
of our own shadows,
 
hands held out for sun
on creased skin
silked up from bottles.
 
We’re walking on belly pain
and nylon knees,
feeling the bite of cheap shoes,
 
wondering just what
keeps us trudging, flat-footed
over the stubborn ground.
 
Beneath our gaudy fashion
and false leathers,
what gets us knotted
 
is seeping through our fingers,
smearing a fog
across touch screens.
 
We’ve got it all scheduled
without an outcome;
sunken comfortably down
 
in the spent springs of suburbia
like coins fed between
the lips of a slot machine
 
for a random selection
of promises
and a long empty silence.


Read the poetry of Julia Stothard
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​
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Judith Brice

Judith Brice Leaves The Poetry To The Child

​The Raccoon Ball

I watched it all day out the window
at kindergarten--
I’m sure of it, Mom.
It was sunny, no rain, no clouds.
I could see it for sure,
the gym next door,
all those inside rooms.
And there it was, the black
and round raccoon ball, pounding
one wall, then the next.
And they all kept crashing down
when that big old ball kept hitting
the doors, the windows, and building sides
after it swinged way up.
Boy mom, I could really see it.
Even furniture, Mom, smashed into pieces!
I saw a yellow truck
on the ground and a little man
working levers—two or three—.
And, oh yeah, I saw
a couple of long lines
close up to the sky, before
they ‘tached on that one last lever--
Really high, it was, I swear it,
before those long lines came down
and ‘tached again to the raccoon ball,
all big all black, which swinged
wider, stronger, wilder.
The rooms went to small pieces.
Doors cracked, too
tiny splinters of wood.
All more and more a wreck.


Read the poetry of Judith Brice
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Wayne F Burke

Wayne F Burke And A Seasonal Metaphor For Us All

Fall

Trying to decide what to do with myself,
I sit
on a park bench
in the sunlight
to think
and I get caught
in whirlwinds
of yellow and rust-colored leaves
rushing from one side of the park
to the other
like a mob storming a Bastille
but then
lying down just as quickly,
spent
apparently,
until they get up
and renew the rush
only in a different direction
obviously confused
and
unruly;
a tornado of them whirls into the road
and is run through by a truck
and scattered;
they are a spiritual force
mainly
though make a clatter on the sidewalk
like tiny horses' hooves
scuttling
like the clouds
across the sky,
not sure where they are goi
ng
either.

Read the poetry of Wayne F Burke
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​
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Ria Meade

Ria Meade Seeks A Brief
​Bond In Her Darkness

              Leaf

When I left the light most life depends on,
      nature's landscape became so very still.
I am always in darkness—alone.
 
It is late, dark, still.
      I am here in the drive.
Hear a scratchy shuttle--
      a lonely leaf speaks.
            Back and forth, left to right, wind or no.
      Separated from its mother limb,
            disfigured by dryness,
            pliability and color gone.
 
In the bareness between fall and spring,
      silence is severe.
Admit fear within me,
      not of being alone,
      but of the loneliness
            which finds me everywhere.
 
It is late, dark, still.
      I am here in the drive.
      I am desperate.
            Are you here, leaf?


Read the poetry of Ria Meade
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Rosa Saba

Rosa Saba: When Hope
​Collides With Reality

a love that didn't love back  ​☊

a love that tried to love back
(hard)
but failed, stepped on by experience
dragged away by abandoned words
taking their revenge
(softly, slowly)
a love that began like the crash of drums
into a song that went on
with a bridge spanning miles
and a chorus just bright enough
to make me believe
(hard)
this love could love us back, and stay
past the end of the show, through the slow shuffle
of a drunken crowd
and i'd take your hand
(naturally)
and lead you home
(steadily)
and show you my mind
(carefully)
but this love recoiled
(fearfully)
and did not love again
Enjoy this poem in the PoetryAloud area
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​

Paul Mortimer And The
Lost, Unreachable Past

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The poet and his mother, 1955
Memory Bank  ☊

The first time I had amnesia
was in Hong Kong.
I was five. I don’t remember.
The second was in Cyprus.
I was ten and found
wandering Limassol’s streets. So

I stand in awe of those who recall
childhood days, opening up a tap
in their hippocampus and pouring out
places, friends’ names, events
even conversations. My memories
are absent. They stand on the other side

of then and now, a canyon between
with no linking bridge. Not even ghosts
teetering on the far side’s edge.
The only triggers are mother’s photo albums,
the past caught in a zoetrope flicker
of black pages and her immaculate white writing.

​
Enjoy this video in the PoetryAloud area
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​
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Rushika Wick

VerseWrights Warmly Welcomes Poet Rushika Wick

Cardiac Rehab

Listening to the radio
on the experiences of young people waiting for heart transplants
(hope and diminution in equal measure; a pendulum ride)
I have a compulsion
to donate mine
now- immediately.
If only I could survive without mine
to give the boy his ...
A strange idea?
Ripping open the rib cage and proffering a
bleeding
beating
heart
to someone who is desperate for it;
The ultimate demonstration of love
The destruction of the possibility to love
in
one
fell
swoop.
Let Them Eat Cake by Poe
Or, do I need to thread my needle
And
start
sewing up
my own collapsing
atria?

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​
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Ryan Quinn Flanagan

VerseWrights Warmly Welcomes Poet Ryan Quinn Flanagan

Mouths to Feed

He had only started working at the full-serve
two weeks previous.
He landed the gig through his parole officer
and though the job wasn’t much
it was more than he had.
And it was summer and the oil cartels
were gouging a little less for some reason
so the cars were lined up in long rows
their gas caps removed, each tank hungry
for the nozzle;
many mouths to feed
and he pretended they were all his children
because he had no children
or woman either;
that made things bearable, filling all those tanks
as though they were his children
and depended on him.
When he was finished he wiped his hands with
a crusty blue rag, clocking out before
the short walk home.
His tired feet throbbing in his shoes
like someone else’s stinking
heart.


Read the poetry of Ryann Quinn Flanagan
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​

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Stefanie Bennett

Stefanie Bennett's Complex Farewell

Thrift

Anna Maria, let’s pretend
The years haven’t
Bridged the steps untaken;
The calendar turned
Without one twinge
Of pitying.

If memory serves truly, we played
Blind-man’s-bluff
In that
Very same refuge; there

Beside the wood-pile, where
White rosemary
Dazzled
The bronze hill – and
The grave wept
Shy atonement.

Anna Maria! The Matriarch
Died three
Decades ago.
Only

Providence knows why.
Let’s say
Our farewell...
Mother’s
Depart because

Daughters don’t.

Read the poetry of Stefanie Bennett
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Marianne Szlyk

Marianne Szlyk Fashions An
​Artful Transmigration

Visiting the Ancestors

The deer are visiting the ancestors,
nibbling on grass at Mt. Calvary,
waiting in the shade of winter
 
underneath the low trees that could be
on a riverbank in the deep
South that the ancestors fled from.
 
The five deer browse on the
pale green fringe of the cemetery,
limp parsley left on winter’s plate
 
beside the river that neither flows
nor freezes.  The deer have bodies
the color of earth in shadow,

but they could be spirit animals
of family living elsewhere come to
visit great-grandparents in the ground,
 
the great-grandfather who was gentle with
farm animals, remembered horses and mules,
the great-grandmother who kept a pot
 
on the stove for family, neighbors,
and friends, served Red Rose tea
with milk and sugar like coffee,
 
The deer linger on the fringes
like the awkward children they
once were when the ancestors
 
were alive.


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Will Reger

VerseWrights Warmly Welcomes Poet Will Reger To Our Pages

Spaghetti Stain

Thumbing through One Hundred 
                Best Poems
, I came upon lines 
from the poet Kunitz--

powerful words about the moment
he waits for the mailman to bring his draft 
card, from which he takes us

back through all
the generations of his ancestors--

But what catches my eye 
is the wide spaghetti stain 
in the margin with a tiny scrim of tomato

skin caught in the smear, rubbed in
by the big left thumb of the reader.

Was he so caught up in the poem,
so passion-smeared, 
olive oil on his lips,

that he laid aside his fork 
to grip the page inscribed 
with the poet’s seminal moment?

Did the poem channel his own despair?
His own loss? Was this smear of red

a metaphorical bloodletting,
a grander vision that the poem pointed to,

or was it some thoughtless passing, 
like a mailman who has nothing
for the hushed address so passes on?


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JT Milford

JT Milford Finds A Personal
Permanance In A Moment's Passing

This Gift

Early morning
A windblown spring
sun sparkles my neighbor's
wild cherry tree silver, gold.
Awed by the unusual light
I pause.

Moments later the tree and the sun
change positions causing the view
to forever disappear
from our time and space.

How fortunate to be given
this gift of transient beauty.
A brief flowering of elegance
beyond my ordinary life.

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Michele Riedel

Michele Riedel Witnesses
​One Of Life's Passages

The Interview

Shoes, belt coiled
ties laid smooth like runways
-he’s home.
 
Borrowed folder
leather pockets hold dust
seeping into tightly gripped edges
of rehearsed answers
and sweaty replies.
 
Finding old polish
rubbing into the pores of
scuffed shoes and skin
until fingers ache
into a hard shine.
 
Next to overloaded laundry basket,
he stands
mirror shined shoes
jacketed with runway tie
ready.
 
He spins quarters in his pockets
with a smile like the 1000 rhododendrons
blooming outside
toe tips out
he rocks back on his heels
– Johnny Jump ups
springing toward the May sky.
 
I watch him leave
like that first driving day
alone
puddled in the window
my shoulders
deflated
while hangers punctuate chairs and
frame jackets.


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