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Archive #45
March, 2017


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Caroline Skanne

New Short Poems From
​Caroline Skanne


from Selected Haiku
​and Tanka


negative space --
enough empty 
for a flower

      ❦

          a fox
          runs ahead of me
          in the woods
          i wonder if he too
          is chasing the wind

              ❦
​
                    failing
                    to define reality
                    sand drift

                      ❦

                               so many 
                               dreams left unturned 
                               yet this pebble 
                               in my hand just smooth 
                               enough

Read the poetry of Caroline Skanne
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Julia Stothard

Julia Stothard Captures The
​Moments, The Joy, The Loss


​Flight

It is most like freedom;
skipping the brook,
slipping on acorns and stalling in flight.
Our escape on a wet day
is picking us up.
Our rocky way is lined with maple trees,
their sun-trapped leaves
smoothing the day to a bright canvas.
 
Where we cross the border,
we cut ourselves off from the battle behind us,
delay the struggle up ahead.
Our eyes shine in the clearing,
sipping the sky
like a faithful wine on a fine evening.
We could settle for this
but the season persists with change.
 
So we soar to a height
where the wind’s sorrow
swallows our words
and the land moves swiftly beneath us.
And when all that is left of our rising
are those few minutes
no longer ours to keep,
we raise our hands and set them free.


Read the poetry of Julia Stothard
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Marianne Szlyk

Marianne Szlyk: A Woman,
​A Tide, A Spectral Song

At Low Tide

Already a ghost at twenty-three,
the singer Tim Buckley howls,
scaling octaves, stretching out syllables

until they dissolve in salty mist.
His fog of consonants and vowels,
salt and smoke, hovers, grazing
 
the skin of the dark-haired woman
standing by the window, holding
a candle in a baby-food jar.

Outside stairs to the second floor
quiver beneath keyboards and bass,
heavy footsteps of a ghost.
 
She turns away from the sea.
Cupping her hand around the
white flame, she blows out
 
her candle before the voice
breaks the last barrier
between indoors and out. Nobody
 
walks out on damp sands,
so far from cold water,
much further from yesterday’s warmth.
 
Nobody walks out at low tide.
Even the seagulls dissolve
as if they were salt.
 
The woman at the window
has turned away. Her man
will not climb up to her,
 
not this morning, not tonight,
not when the fog wails
and salt embitters the air.


​Read the poetry of Marianne Szlyk
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Lavana Kray

VerseWrights Warmly Welcomes Poet Lavana Kray

from Selected Haiku

clothesline -

the evening fog wears
my black frock

​                      ❦

            honey moon -

            first snowflakes gather
            in the empty nests

                     ❦

                         old attic -
                         the doll also has
                         chapped hands

                            ❦

                                    widow's house -
                                    a cherry blossom twig

                                    into the letterbox

Read the poetry of Lavana Kray
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Ram Krishna Singh

Ram Krishna Singh Feels Frustration,
​Senses The Solution

Smallness

I live in a crowd of fakes
smallness rises with age

my mind has ceased to think
new metaphors hardly happen

hunger keeps me awake all night
I mitigate minginess

the inner lives emptied
and filled with fresh stresses

too many fault lines run through
to make sense of the divide

my passion itches and prompts
I nuzzle the virtual too

it’s the same virus aground
the same hackers that hurt

the vigor and rigor of
the new, left, or pushed behind

whatever the remedy
wounds take deaths to heal


Read the poetry of Ram Krishna Singh
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Maja Todorovic

Maja Todorovic Details The Unorthodox Preparations

Getting Ready for Night Out

They say it’s much better to use a ceramic knife.
It doesn’t oxidize vegetable meat.
She first rolled the beet over the flat counter – to let
the juices stir. Then cut it in half. She needed only a
few drops for a blusher.

On the shelf in front of her, beside his favorite tea cup,
she found cinnamon.
Just a pinch of this spicy heat will act as a bronzer.
The index-finger on her right hand she gently dipped in the ashtray –
to give a soft grayish glimmer to her eyelashes.

And the final touch – carmine: a dripping sauce
of red, succulent melted cherries
she mixed with three tears of her own blood she had harvested earlier
from her left thumb.
Now, who can resist kissing these pulsating lips?

As she was waiting for him to pick her up,
in the last minute, she adorned her right hand
with this piece of baked clay – perfectly matching her makeup. 


Read the poetry of Maja Todorovic
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Nancy May

We Warmly Welcome Poet
​Nancy May To VerseWrights

from Selected Haiku​

end of the affair
rain drops
off the blossoms

     ❧

                autumn dusk
                floating on the waves
                a broken daisy chain

             ❧

speed dating
a tornado
travels the coast

     ❧

                dandelions
                in a spring soaked sky
                ponies gallop
​


Read the poetry of Nancy May
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Ann Huang

Ann Huang's Vision And
​Wishful Deduction

Trophy Life

You are given a vision before your eyes when 
The thorns beyond the limelight
Drew a red shadow around the window.  
You needed to make a movie on a
Film stolen in the cold and snow
And your fancy dimly reappear
Borrowed by a plane in the vast of
Grand Canyon
Writing into the wild 
The crayons expose nostalgia
Scooping many fissures 
The pressure turns and unites
Beyond the power of your hands 
Nudging the white plains
You could see what others don’t
We do become younger 


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Grace Pasco

Grace Pasco With An Ancient Scene Sensually Depicted

Choice Gains
            Patience, n. a minor form of despair,
            disguised as a virtue.

                                       -Ambrose Bierce

​By the water, a bird is caught.
Sharpened claws are cloaked with thick woolen mittens.
The owner resists the urge to scratch off
The artificial warmers, since hunger,
Suppressed, provides heat enough.
 
Rough knots in the lower stomach betray
And reveal the pouncing need to devour.
Hours pass. The claws start to retract.
Lips start to purse. The wrists are relaxed
And the gaze? Heavy at the lids.
The prey. The bird. The meal
 
Is set free at the price of the bigger creature's will of
​     won't kill.
Big fish come closer to the surface.
Only then is resistance released.
The feed provides heat enough.
The need to devour is at once realized.
 
Actualized.
Minutes pass. The claws are full of meat.
The mouth makes chomping motions.
Wrists are intent to dine.
And the gaze?
Heavy at the lids–
 
Asleep.


Read the poetry of Grace Pasco
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Lee Kisling

Lee Kisling: A Compromise,  An Understanding

Last Impression

On the day he died, she was mad at him.
Not just annoyed, not quite furious, but mad
enough to not talk to him, to keep her distance.
And then the distance overtook her. It was
a bad bookend for a long life together.
 
Ghosts go wandering with whatever they packed
at the end, and so he would be sorry forever
for some little thing that didn’t amount to much.
She tries to suppose that the dead forget their troubles,
especially if they were forgetful in their lives.
 
Over time she found evidence to question this.
The gate to the barnyard was left open. Tools found
lying beside the car. And now there are muddy
bootprints just outside the back door. These infractions
made her stamp her foot and then she cried.
 
At the grave, now, the earth has settled. The wind has
     taken
away the yellow gold maple leaves. The first hard frost
has finished off the flowers. His name on the stone
seems crooked but maybe because of the hillside.
Far off a church bell starts to ring in the town.
 
I don’t know if saying sorry to the dead really works.
Or if the dead can say they’re sorry.  It would help me
to know this. He watches her from some distance.
She shakes her head, then smiles.
He wanders away. There’s an end to it.


Read the poetry of Lee Kisling
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​

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Marsailidh Groat

Marsailidh Groat's Regret,
Wish For Atonement

           Dinosaurs

You offer words older than yourself
and carry books thicker than your skin.
I relish the sting I can cause by mocking your mistakes,
because it is my job to be cruel.

It will be years until I ache for you the way you do for me,
that I might catch your attention,
that we might really know each other,
because how could anyone else understand?
I’m scared of how distant adults can be,
scared of the habits we could learn.

Do you remember when you bit my toe and drew blood,
and I pulled the flaps of skin apart like a mouth
to make you laugh?
Do you remember when I told you a secret,
and you tried so hard to tell it,
but you didn’t have the right words?

Please forgive me for the times I didn’t listen,
didn’t play with you.
I want more than ever to hear
about dinosaurs now.

Read the poetry of Marsailidh Groat
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Judith Brice

Judith Brice: The Play
​Of Light, Song, Spring

Chiaroscuros  ☊

Dancing their world like dappled ghosts
my shadows dissipated to chiaroscuros--
 
fleeting images
of moon yielded slowly
to dawns of warmer days
 
as frozen fields broke  
          from their fright
                         and shimmied forward
                          to sun.
 
Then sunflowers, wheat
              budded
                                                 up to radiant dreams--
 
Unfolding seams of life
           & mind
                     bloomed to flower
 
at first with hesitance,
           at first in shade, and then into a frisson
 
of Light as she opened her wings
   to spring.
 
Only then I could hear
                      shining ripples of Time,
                                       the horizon
                                                     on her salty breath,
 
                                her silver terns swooping
 
as seconds ticked
                                     into a glow

                     of glistening song.
​
Enjoy this poem in the PoetryAloud area
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Karla Linn Merrifield

Karla Linn Merrifield:
In A Word, Two Poems

New Word

[skuh-too r-ee-uh nt]
(skəˈtjʊərɪənt)
scaturient I become
geyser
flashflood
vaudeville showgirl in feather boa
hussy in stilettos
exclamations
em dashes
volcano ashes
hurricane surges
 
I leave myself breathless



Antidote

even as the darkness oozes
overland, it spews into the sea

spewen… spīwan… speien…
spȳja… speiwan… spuere
 
as verb…as noun…eleven hundred years
of vomit human vomit oceans of vomit--
 
but even then…even now…I commit
hope….hopa…hoop…Hoffe—with you


Read the poetry of Karla Linn Merrifield
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Wayne F Burke

Wayne F Burke Explores A
​Seaworthy Metaphor

A Moment

     "...the wave breaks over its own breaking"
                     Jorie Graham, Never

a misty Gulf Coast morning,
white-capped waves lolly-gagging
onto shore and
creeping onto the beach
before sliding back
into jade overlap
one wave after another
leaving a wet stain of
tan on mauve sand
a sort of hem to the slippage
back
until waves meet in-coming
out-going
capped
recapped
talking in a megaphoned whisper
and occasional Clap
out beyond where waves
KABOUSH
the breakers fold
and roll
spreading a white froth
for the lazy stroll
shoreward
and then
retraction
and again the frothy lace
slide and spread
the stain of wetness
and scrum
of newly formed jade wrinkles
slowly advancing
like old age. 


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Cord Moreski

We Warmly Welcome Poet
Cord Moreski To Our Pages

Doppelgänger

I knew it wasn’t you that summer afternoon      
when I decided to quiet my head for a bit,      
wandering along the crowded boardwalk by myself.  
Not because you only preferred
the beach in September to avoid the swarms       
of drunk college kids and snooty tourists,   
or because you were caught up       
with some odd jobs that day,      
making repairs around the house. 
But simply because the little clenched fist       
pounding against the wall inside your chest      
decided to cease one day about ten winters ago.      
    
Yet there you seemed to appear, anyway:     
doppelgänger, stunt double, déjà vu look-alike,     
with your back to me holding a beach viewfinder  
between the palms of your hands,      
swiveling its chrome-plated shell like a gun turret      
as you stared through the tiny lenses to examine the
​     shore.      
    
So I carried out 
my own investigation      
and tiptoed in your direction,      
but when I got three feet from behind you  
there was no urge left in my body     
to shout your name anymore    
or tap you on the shoulder       
in order to debunk what I already knew. 
All I had to grasp was that brief moment 
we both stood there together 
on our own pedestals—    
searching for something more       
beyond the naked eye.


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​

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J T Milford

J T Milford With A Moment's Communication, Understanding

​Touching

While out walking after my winter storms
have finally begun to subside

A blue and yellow flower
quietly touches my sight

With soft petaled feeling offered
and I not yet understanding return her gaze

In some mysterious way I knew then that
my summer would again bloom

As will fields of red yellow pink and lavender
in blazing sunlight

As the days slowly grow the petals leave
that in an early time somewhere

We may again touch

 as wild ones always do

​Read the
poetry of J T Milford
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John Carroll Walls

John Carroll Walls:
​Turmoil And Tenderness

The Thunder Never Repeats Itself

The motherless gusts have long since carried away your indigo
     sandals.
Unfortunately, a color such as indigo is compasslessness,
And incapable of finding its way back home.
Bare feeling: the rain's brethren will have the final verse about this
​     night's worth,
As I remember held hands; our patented spiraled seashell clasp,
Whilst being read to on a back porch of a gentler time--
The thunder never repeated the same story twice.


Mother

She's mountain-like in reserved watchfulness,
Other times, as loud as a hurricane trying to set the fine china for
​     Christmas dinner.
May she saunter and stomp past a mortal century,
Sharing her extremes with every predictable world.


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Ana Caballero

Ana Caballero Finds Her Own Way

How Others Do It

Two idiots like us
Who planned love like a new car
 
Who bought the floorboards old
So with each step our new home moaned
 
Who mapped the lock
And learned to speak fraternal talk
 
Who toiled to resist slog
A balloon on our wrist in permanent bob
 
Who got drunk with the guests
Painted like rage the right walls red
 
Who saw the new oven installed
Where designer heat is focused and trapped
 
To roast the meat for today’s avid son


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Kerry O'Connor

Kerry O'Connor Regards The Human Race And Finds Raw Beauty

Contemplating people,
I have observed
 ☊

the vast divide between the clean and those
who choose to remain unwashed. A child
will feed pigeons, happy in the dust.
A bull pierced through the shoulder sinks
to his haunches. Never was red so dull.
The female form excites the muse
but all becomes ordinary in reduction.
A platter. A bowl. A long-legged table.
While masculinity resolves its headache
in paunch and penis. Hills rolling unregarded.
A study in plane and colour is as academic
as mud and blood, piss and undressed lamb.
We have eyes that slide past drooping nose,
and oh so many teeth. Sharp. White.
She scrubs herself in a blue room.
He plays ball on the beach. Lover of sand.
Here at last, a man with a guitar.  To wake me
in my grave. Carve your tune in basalt.
Singing the seas to a crying woman.
Where she reclines nude under stars.
We cringe. We crawl. We crow.
So little time to find the soap … Rinse
the sullen crimson tide from your fingers.
Ponder the inevitable fall. Cracked heels.

Rise from bed. This life. Uncovered. Art.
Enjoy this poem in the PoetryAloud area
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 of Kerry O'Connor
​

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Gary Metras

Gary Metras: No Ordinary
​Arachnid Thi
s

My Spider

I’ve invented a spider,
the green-back-spider:
arachnia verdiga domesticus.
Its habitat: suburbia, the foundations
of houses and middle schools, where boys
with handfuls of spiders still chase girls.
Not tarantula, no black widow, it resembles
the daddy-long-legs. But isn’t.
It is the green-back-spider.
It happened like this: I was painting
the cellar hatchway forest green,
painting and whistling when a spider
started to climb the metal wall, shaking
its feet free of the sticky paint. To save
its life, I swept it aside with the paint brush
that left its back green. I watched it angle across
the grass, perfectly camouflaged, to the side
foundation, which it climbed and hung vertical,
drying in the sun, my green-back-spider.


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Gareth Spark

Gareth Spark: One Voice
​Brings Solace, Hope

            Song

For a few nights before the clocks went back
and the Sun's sinking coincided
with my heading home from work, I heard
a bird sing. At the top of concrete steps
littered with pizza cartons and cigarettes,
in the cradling twigs of a blackened tree,
this bird, perched restlessly, sang.
These eyes, tempered by smoke and tile,
sodium lamp and television, trembled
at the flickering breeze, burnished sky
and the sixpence Sun, dulled by decline.
I listened to the bird, forgetting about birds,
replacing myself, the concrete, the words
with unstained, unique melodies.
 
I have not seen the bird since,
nor can I recall the song I'd heard
disturb a warm, March night,
when I ached, and my eyes were sore,
but know that in the crooked feeling
of dictated days, hides the healing
strength to strike them straight.


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Claire Scott

Claire Scott, A Daughter,
​Some Advice...


​Distressed Jeans

She is wearing her distressed jeans again
my fashionable daughter
skinny jeans intentionally destroyed
acid washed, sand papered
pumice stoned, tumbled in gas
washing machines
faded & ripped at the knee
scraped & shredded at the thigh
priced at a premium by
Calvin Klein, Armani, Levi
 
really?

I want to wrap her in my arms
& say: wait
no need to race to what-comes-next
soon enough pleated skin, nagging knees
soon enough holes in your heart
no designer can repair
no need to leap over yourself
to some frayed future
time will snip & slice soon enough
my daughter, much too soon enough
 
wait


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Stefanie Bennett

Stefanie Bennett's Poem
​Finds Peace At Winter's End

Composure

When he whispers incantations
Across the ceremonial-pit
In late Winter
The last snow-drift
Orbits the tree tops
Like smoke
On a morning stroll
Headed towards
Infinity’s skylight.

Praise abounds. The sun soars.
Raven gives a jocular
Caw matched by
The smiling Elder
                       Who has
My father’s eyes
                       And more.

With hands wide open

We spread the wealth.

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​
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Christopher Hopkins

VerseWrights Warmly Welcomes Poet Christopher Hopkins

Night Rover

​The fish hook lights,
Ex'd in their standing,
burning yellow bait,

staggered in the course,
like picked ribs 
stood on a wet flensing stage.

The emptiness softly burning,
above the rushes 
of the blood and the marrow, 
​
the to, the fro, red and the white,
along the silver spine, 
the monster's innards hollowed out.

My onward moves in straight lines,
with the back end canvas 
of a white van in front,

framed to one side,
that glare of the white marrow rush,
to the other,

the dark bracken,
where the wild dogs wait.


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​
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Daniel Klawitter

Daniel Klawitter: A Little
​Jealousy, A Lot Of  Truth

All the Poets

These days, 
it seems all the poets
love using the word: 
“Rhododendron.” 
 
Geography is inspiration. 
Botany begets creation.
 
Esp. in a Mary Oliver poem!
Don’t get me wrong--
I like Mary Oliver. 
Her poetry is very peaceful. 
Full of animals and nature.
Often depopulated of people. 
 
Everyday someone new
succumbs to 
her spiritual spell.
(I wish my books 
sold half as well.) 
 
And then there’s the rebels:
The beatnik poets who 
had a thing for the Buddha. 
Lots of poets now
worship Walt Whitman, 
wish they wrote Howl, 
won a Nobel like 
Pablo Neruda. 
 
In the end, all the poets
are the same as you or me. 
We have moments of clarity, 
and many moments when 
we are mysteries unto ourselves:
two-legged, Janus-faced, perplexed,
 
Searching for the perfect words 
in the perfect order
on the most elusive subjects.


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Valerie Bacharach

Valerie Bacharach And When
​Mortality Becomes Personal

Burial Mounds

When I was a girl, a young girl,
I went on a class trip to Marietta, Ohio
to see the Hopewell Indian burial mounds,
smooth green arcs of grass and dirt.
Beneath, in dark soil, remnants of bodies--
metacarpal, skull, half a tibia.
 
I loved maps as that young girl,
paper ones with precise pleats
like the skirts I wore to school.
They had colors, straight and broken lines,
legends that marked railroads, mountains,
coal mines, lakes.
 
I wanted my mother.
Wanted her to explain myself to me,
decode my moods,
teach me how to be comfortable
in my skin.
Show me her secrets.
How she smoothed ruby color on lips,
left an imprint on a glass of scotch.
 
I am no longer that girl, no longer young.
My mother has no more secrets.
I trace the map of her body,
its changed topography,
sagging muscles, wrinkled flesh, vacant eyes.
Electrodes under skin spark her heart,
a rainbow of pills keeps pressure steady,
calms sugar’s spike, thins her blood.
The looming mass of her wheelchair
casts shadows on the floor.


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Kat Lehmann

Kat Lehmann Rises In The
​Day, And In The Night

Falling Up

She would lie on the grassy hill –
and imagine
falling up

The feel of the Earth behind her –
as they fell
together

They sailed through constellations –
soaring weightlessly
as one

She led the way fearlessly –
brave
and flying free

Her sadness dissolved like the sky at dusk –
as Joy

filled her with suns
​


Tanka

someday

untethered
I will surely rise
to slip between

the light of the stars

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Dana Rushin

Dana Rushin: A Flight Of
Fancy Becomes An Indictment

          Hive

Not
far from now and not far from here
you will look for ways to surrender.
"Each time my heart is broken
it makes me more adventurous" O'Hara wrote.
But all lies, are at best,
inaccurate statements. So this month,
another one without intercourse,
when a red moon came to me in that movie about a fist,

and me, caught licking the salt from walls and
measuring the water line from last years flood,
I drifted back to childhood tea parties.
The ones where the grownups stood and sipped
pretend air from tiny cups
as if grace could be imagined however extreme

and love, unsure of it's rightful task. Then I had a kid.
Trembling. Slippery but loyal
who sat with her legs crossed below her
reaching up with those same empty cups
of tea. Beloved:
Soon the interminable heavens will give

back it's angels to the death walk first intended.
And we dumb-ass Americans
will think them either bees or

Martians and stay in our
hive homes.

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​
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Allison Grayhurst

Allison Grayhurst: A Scattered Being Must Recollect

Introvert

After the talk,
I become like scattered seeds
on concrete. I find the money jar
empty and my stability, ruptured.
After social meanderings, after loose
conversations that never utters the words
‘death’ ‘loss’ or ‘God’ then I am everywhere, pinched
apart, thin pieces of my solitary form.
Days of quiet bring me back from the drug trip
where others thrive but I am like clay drying in the sun,
too much, too fast, too little time in the shade
so that I crack then split, and what I was cannot stand whole.
Mornings of clenching to the things 
that keep me upright, build
again a solid self until I must slip (a fresh water fish)
into the salt waters of acceptable social norm.


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Amy Soricelli

Amy Soricelli's Street View: Appearance and Reality

Rescue Me

There are dogs on the sidewalk. 
Their coats on magazines asleep 
against headlines,
their paws curled underneath faces,
closed up, hidden. 
I heard the homeless girl takes a train from Syosset 
and covers herself with dirt somewhere in Queens.   
I wonder what people think when they watch her 
scratch herself 
or un-tuck her plaid Abercrombie shirt 
from her Old Navy Jeans. 
I wonder if they picture dirt 
under her fingernails,
mad grabby hands in subway tunnels,
hollow screams for help--
or her last summer-camp with that horse 
named Storm,
dancing fairies rising up 
f
rom the hot-dog campfire. 
I heard those dogs are rented.  
Costs $25 for the day,  
and with enough Benadryl in their
water bowls,
they can sleep on a subway grate
or in the biting cold.
People donate to girls with dogs:
storybook lives rescued from mountains,
deep snow drifts,
a run from a hairy monster.
The quarters drop like hope,
or rain. 
One tinny sound against another.


Read the poetry of Amy Soricelli
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Will Reger

From Will Reger, Lyric
Praise For A Lost Friend

Elegy for Toothless,
​Beloved Rabbit


A rabbit has no song,
except the quiver of her nose,
or the easy way of her soft coat,
loose over muscle and bone, 
or the rhythm of her nibbling
from hand or bowl, or of anything
she finds on the floor:
the cereal spilled,
the Timothy hay strewn,
the strawberry tops
dropped intentionally
where she can find them.
She says her bit with scut and speed,

with running in circles, chasing
her rabbit friends, lolloping
on carpet or grass, leading
the way into hijinx.
What was best in us we saw in her.

Her eyes were pools of ink
with which she wrote the moon
when it shone into her kitchen corner,
and the sun sparkling on rain-wet grass.
Everything was hers to sing:

the light, the grass, the love 
she shared with her humans,
the many sounds that reached
her lissome ears. Free of fear
of any foxes, she dozed
with perfect dignity, soft
as a shadow she slept,
soft as a shadow she passed.


Read the poetry of Will Reger
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