Featured Poems
3rd Wednesday Monthly
The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it.
DYLAN THOMAS
Guidelines
Each month we'll try to feature new poems by our members. Members (only) are encouraged to submit. Submission is not a guarantee of publication.
- You must be a paid member in good standing to submit.
- Please, no pornographic poetry or poems more than 100 lines long.
- Poems must be "publish-ready," meaning the formatting is all set to go. We cannot reproduce color or specialized fonts.
- Please send no more than three submissions a month, uploaded in a Word file.
- If your poem appears on the website, please wait two months before submitting again.
- If your poem has been previously published, please list where and when at the end of the poem.
Caveats
All members should understand that publishing a poem on the OPN website constitutes publication in the eyes of many literary journals and magazines. Publication here may disqualify your piece for publication elsewhere. All poems printed here are copyrighted and are the property of the poet. No reproduction without written permission from the poet.
FORMAT POLICY
For best viewing on mobile devices, all line breaks, indents, and spacing will be removed from your poems; stanza breaks are allowed.
FORMAT POLICY
For best viewing on mobile devices, all line breaks, indents, and spacing will be removed from your poems; stanza breaks are allowed.
March 2022
Bill Fay
in the wrong key
the spine of the morning
unwound
the dawning day
with snow-light
falling white
among the guns
where a broken window
is a work of art
and fallen dreams
make giddy sounds
finding him
mews from a locked mouth
a kitten in a box
and then the big silence
of a piano
the corpsman
leans across tomorrow
with the sign
of the cross
the only sanity
is a cup of tea
and music
in the minors
the spine of the morning
unwound
the dawning day
with snow-light
falling white
among the guns
where a broken window
is a work of art
and fallen dreams
make giddy sounds
finding him
mews from a locked mouth
a kitten in a box
and then the big silence
of a piano
the corpsman
leans across tomorrow
with the sign
of the cross
the only sanity
is a cup of tea
and music
in the minors
February, 2022
Anne Leigh Parrish
surrender
mixed on a pallete
caressed & smudged
we’ve no choice but to blend
assimilate, lose ourselves, surrender
to greater numbers & hues
& when we’ve lost all sense of who
we once were, we find we’ve made
a dull mass of brown or gray,
neutral, easy on the eye, ask any decorator
trying to stage a house for sale
is that what the racists fear? the loss of white
skin? or the sameness of tone that would make it
hard to be in charge, pull the trigger, tie the rope?
lifting brightness
where the road bends west, the sky opens
& the trees stand down for a while
its light says it hangs over water
you know what i mean by that
a lifting brightness
not like a smile, more like
an idea of how things might be, or
were in an easier time
i love that wide stretch above us
how it invites us to something better
to be better, in ourselves
denial of our plainness
you fade from view
leave a hint of mauve & green
we’re showgirls
platinum hair
pencil skirts in the daylight
not much on stage
guys & dolls
you hand me the coleous to transplant
its roots dangle like lost thoughts
white border on its leaves
the color of a
winter moon
you choose pearls plucked
from a warm sea
pink will never be mauve
gray only touches green
how dear, that strange desire tinged with blue
we dress for dinner
i choose black for its slimming effect
you go with a red skirt & green shoes to
celebrate the season
the denial of our plainness
softened by the sky’s purple song
mixed on a pallete
caressed & smudged
we’ve no choice but to blend
assimilate, lose ourselves, surrender
to greater numbers & hues
& when we’ve lost all sense of who
we once were, we find we’ve made
a dull mass of brown or gray,
neutral, easy on the eye, ask any decorator
trying to stage a house for sale
is that what the racists fear? the loss of white
skin? or the sameness of tone that would make it
hard to be in charge, pull the trigger, tie the rope?
lifting brightness
where the road bends west, the sky opens
& the trees stand down for a while
its light says it hangs over water
you know what i mean by that
a lifting brightness
not like a smile, more like
an idea of how things might be, or
were in an easier time
i love that wide stretch above us
how it invites us to something better
to be better, in ourselves
denial of our plainness
you fade from view
leave a hint of mauve & green
we’re showgirls
platinum hair
pencil skirts in the daylight
not much on stage
guys & dolls
you hand me the coleous to transplant
its roots dangle like lost thoughts
white border on its leaves
the color of a
winter moon
you choose pearls plucked
from a warm sea
pink will never be mauve
gray only touches green
how dear, that strange desire tinged with blue
we dress for dinner
i choose black for its slimming effect
you go with a red skirt & green shoes to
celebrate the season
the denial of our plainness
softened by the sky’s purple song
May 2021
IV Lindstrom
That time I went on my honeymoon alone
I had screamed myself raw
Bellowing my rage, tears and mucous streaming down my face, to the flocks of roadside crows, the interstate roadkill, and the herds of cows that, kind-eyed, were oblivious to their impending slaughter
My cow-kin, waiting to be blindsided by the hand that had fed them and patted their broad heads, only to reach underneath one day to plunge a knife into their throats where the skin was thinnest
May you die quickly, before they begin to skin you, I prayed silently
Then began to bellow again, until the long road milked my lungs dry
The mountaintop cabin mocked me with its private rose garden and heart-shaped hot tub for two
I wished a blight of mold upon its timbers then sought the escape of a small wine bar, the purple tones of jazz issuing forth into the neon-lit night sidewalk, where I met
A macrobiotic diet wellness resort escapee, desperate for carbs, who shared a plate
of fries with me
The local player, who propositioned me three times through the night, forgetting my
face and rewinding his tired litany each time
The bass player of a band I loved, sadly alone, as I would have propositioned the
guitarist and made use of the desolate heart-shaped hot tub for two
A local farmer, who told me of new varieties of bees visiting his farm, fleeing the
pesticides strewn elsewhere
The cellist from the night’s performing trio, whom I envisioned in the mocking heart-
shaped hot tub for two, skilled hands and fumbling lips and morning apologies
The bartender, who told me of the cellist’s wife and earned a large tip
A witch who, with her too-long bangs shadowing her knowing eyes, white on the
edges like cows having felt the surprise of the knife, looked into my soul and offered
to curse those who had wronged me so deeply
I went back to that cottage, slid alone into the bed strewn with rose petals, and wondered if He and She and the Yet-Unformed It hadn’t conjured that curse themselves
And I slept without tears
Animist Femina
You’re a desiccated leaf
even your species has been lost
as your edges have worn off and only your center vein remains,
surrounded by dead muddled browns and the black of encroaching decay.
You bounce down the stream, no will of your own,
going where you’re told by the uncaring waters
sending you into rapids, careening into rocks, mingling with refuse,
all the while telling yourself you have no say
while the curve of your body
channels the water like the rudder you are.
When a Nomad Marries a Farmer’s Son
Your feet grow into the ground, nursing on the salty water
beneath the black soil as they glide around and embrace rocks and roots
Happy, you stretch to the sun and stand tall,
you remind me of a sunflower
shining your smile around as a tiny mirror of the sky that forms a halo always over your left shoulder
I walk toward you and the floor leaves splinters in my feet
tiny needles of wood that my blood rushes to, my heart’s beat trying to eject them,
but instead fattening those parasites to drive my flesh further apart
I begin to run, fleeing the pain, longing to feel the healing comfort of earth beneath my skin
I leave my bleeding footsteps as guides should I choose to return to find the same sunrise
after I lope across whatever lands I happen to fall asleep in tonight
cataloguing the wonders of the world that had passed beneath my feet and into my lungs as I ran
I sew each experience into the living folds of my mind to dream upon and to spice my days to come
unlike that flower you squashed in the folds of your book to dry into dust
I don’t want to grow to meet the sun, my feet only knowing one soil, no matter how deeply felt
standing still to let the mice scurry over them and feeling the caterpillars begin to gnaw my feet as they bind to the earth
So I run, just to see if I can beat the sun
and then the river it meets that invites me to wander down its banks
to the fields that show me hills in the distance that I simply must climb
to find the waterfall that flows back to the place where the flower of you is planted
But now I see that I have become a spider, memory’s web drawing me back to you
as I ran to chase the sun’s trail, I can only run in circles around you,
my web spinning a home of the sun’s light digested as I loop round and round,
never going forward again
My joy in chasing that filament of spun sunlight,
pregnant with memories of the valleys and hills my feet have seen,
is woven into a frame for your sunflower face that smiles and beacons me to come home
and wrap myself in your arms as my feet bleed onto the splintered floor
I had screamed myself raw
Bellowing my rage, tears and mucous streaming down my face, to the flocks of roadside crows, the interstate roadkill, and the herds of cows that, kind-eyed, were oblivious to their impending slaughter
My cow-kin, waiting to be blindsided by the hand that had fed them and patted their broad heads, only to reach underneath one day to plunge a knife into their throats where the skin was thinnest
May you die quickly, before they begin to skin you, I prayed silently
Then began to bellow again, until the long road milked my lungs dry
The mountaintop cabin mocked me with its private rose garden and heart-shaped hot tub for two
I wished a blight of mold upon its timbers then sought the escape of a small wine bar, the purple tones of jazz issuing forth into the neon-lit night sidewalk, where I met
A macrobiotic diet wellness resort escapee, desperate for carbs, who shared a plate
of fries with me
The local player, who propositioned me three times through the night, forgetting my
face and rewinding his tired litany each time
The bass player of a band I loved, sadly alone, as I would have propositioned the
guitarist and made use of the desolate heart-shaped hot tub for two
A local farmer, who told me of new varieties of bees visiting his farm, fleeing the
pesticides strewn elsewhere
The cellist from the night’s performing trio, whom I envisioned in the mocking heart-
shaped hot tub for two, skilled hands and fumbling lips and morning apologies
The bartender, who told me of the cellist’s wife and earned a large tip
A witch who, with her too-long bangs shadowing her knowing eyes, white on the
edges like cows having felt the surprise of the knife, looked into my soul and offered
to curse those who had wronged me so deeply
I went back to that cottage, slid alone into the bed strewn with rose petals, and wondered if He and She and the Yet-Unformed It hadn’t conjured that curse themselves
And I slept without tears
Animist Femina
You’re a desiccated leaf
even your species has been lost
as your edges have worn off and only your center vein remains,
surrounded by dead muddled browns and the black of encroaching decay.
You bounce down the stream, no will of your own,
going where you’re told by the uncaring waters
sending you into rapids, careening into rocks, mingling with refuse,
all the while telling yourself you have no say
while the curve of your body
channels the water like the rudder you are.
When a Nomad Marries a Farmer’s Son
Your feet grow into the ground, nursing on the salty water
beneath the black soil as they glide around and embrace rocks and roots
Happy, you stretch to the sun and stand tall,
you remind me of a sunflower
shining your smile around as a tiny mirror of the sky that forms a halo always over your left shoulder
I walk toward you and the floor leaves splinters in my feet
tiny needles of wood that my blood rushes to, my heart’s beat trying to eject them,
but instead fattening those parasites to drive my flesh further apart
I begin to run, fleeing the pain, longing to feel the healing comfort of earth beneath my skin
I leave my bleeding footsteps as guides should I choose to return to find the same sunrise
after I lope across whatever lands I happen to fall asleep in tonight
cataloguing the wonders of the world that had passed beneath my feet and into my lungs as I ran
I sew each experience into the living folds of my mind to dream upon and to spice my days to come
unlike that flower you squashed in the folds of your book to dry into dust
I don’t want to grow to meet the sun, my feet only knowing one soil, no matter how deeply felt
standing still to let the mice scurry over them and feeling the caterpillars begin to gnaw my feet as they bind to the earth
So I run, just to see if I can beat the sun
and then the river it meets that invites me to wander down its banks
to the fields that show me hills in the distance that I simply must climb
to find the waterfall that flows back to the place where the flower of you is planted
But now I see that I have become a spider, memory’s web drawing me back to you
as I ran to chase the sun’s trail, I can only run in circles around you,
my web spinning a home of the sun’s light digested as I loop round and round,
never going forward again
My joy in chasing that filament of spun sunlight,
pregnant with memories of the valleys and hills my feet have seen,
is woven into a frame for your sunflower face that smiles and beacons me to come home
and wrap myself in your arms as my feet bleed onto the splintered floor
Doug Stanfield
These poems will appear in “Lifting Stones,” to be published by Rootstock Publishers on June 8 and available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, independent bookstores and others worldwide.
Memories Over a Glass of Wine
You weren’t my first summer girl--
But were the first to take me over
Body and soul (I admit,
It wasn’t all that hard to do).
Here’s a wistful toast
To our being so young and eager, so serious, so clumsy,
So lost in hormones and music on the radio.
Sitting on the lawn under a black sky sprinkled with stars,
Fumbling, clutching, giddy with freedom, while
Bullfrogs’ song charged the humid darkness with need.
I could always find your lips in the dark, ready,
Curious, eager, as glad as mine,
And we both bubbled at this secret joy we’d found.
The years have not all been easy, for either of us,
And our paths never crossed again.
I wonder about you sometimes,
Hope you remember, a little,
The innocence and joy.
And, if you do, I hope you raise a glass
With a smile, and think kindly of me, as I do you,
My summer girl, in the last days of our childhood.
A Mortal Wound
I felt for a while that grief would undo death.
Did it?
No.
But I believed it might, if it were deep enough.
I learned something, though.
Just do this.
Go out into the desert.
Just once.
Lie down
look up at the stars,
at a blackness so filled with gem light
it seems alive.
Allow it to bewilder, overtake you.
You shiver, but it is not the cool air:
It is an angel who has appeared beside you.
It’s then that you’ll know
something
beyond your imagining
is waiting.
March 2020
Ryan Todd
Land Me Softly
If we could take
off like birds, fly
far away, could you
offer me safety,
security, love. If
you took my hand
softly, with gentle
eyes, I trust you
would never let go
of that gaze. But
if I were to falter,
fall from grace, I
hope you would see
the wisdom to straighten
me up, set me down
softly, and fly for me.
Fishing for Carpe
Cast from the banks
Of an eternal river,
A barbed hook
Baited by slimy,
Slippery words
Drifts slowly
In the current
Too many scream to be
the barefooted boy
seizing the life
of the first fish floating
by
If we could take
off like birds, fly
far away, could you
offer me safety,
security, love. If
you took my hand
softly, with gentle
eyes, I trust you
would never let go
of that gaze. But
if I were to falter,
fall from grace, I
hope you would see
the wisdom to straighten
me up, set me down
softly, and fly for me.
Fishing for Carpe
Cast from the banks
Of an eternal river,
A barbed hook
Baited by slimy,
Slippery words
Drifts slowly
In the current
Too many scream to be
the barefooted boy
seizing the life
of the first fish floating
by
Sandy Yannone
2014
All those years behind tinted windows.
On the go, a passport tucked in
my back
Pocket waiting for reprieve,
a passionate
Travelling, always hurt, head against
mine.
Unfinished prisons, flying fire,
worthless,
Worthwhile dreams. I chose the former
That I was the way I could not
Stand. The world now as belly
Recovers a woman, a man I must
Miracle and finally disrobe.
All those years behind tinted windows.
On the go, a passport tucked in
my back
Pocket waiting for reprieve,
a passionate
Travelling, always hurt, head against
mine.
Unfinished prisons, flying fire,
worthless,
Worthwhile dreams. I chose the former
That I was the way I could not
Stand. The world now as belly
Recovers a woman, a man I must
Miracle and finally disrobe.
July 2019
Chris Dahl
Detained Children in the Richest Country in the World
Why would they need toothbrushes and soap,
water for bathing, a pillow at night?
Small as they are, they must learn how to cope,
not be sniveling for toothbrushes and soap.
Their aluminum blankets are shiny and bright;
it’s not our fault if they’ve given up hope.
They still won’t get toothbrushes and soap.
Why would they need toothbrushes and soap,
water for bathing, a pillow at night?
Small as they are, they must learn how to cope,
not be sniveling for toothbrushes and soap.
Their aluminum blankets are shiny and bright;
it’s not our fault if they’ve given up hope.
They still won’t get toothbrushes and soap.
January 2019
John R. Haws
|
The Can – I Am
There is in Man a Spirit can, a container for the spirit of life. It's kind of like the force of life that causes a man to take a wife. But more, much more, than just a force. It is the essence of God, of course. The can holds this essence together tight, the essence of Be, the essence of right. The Spirit can of God in man; oh what a complex mystery. The simple proof of this is found all throughout Man's history. The "I am ..." of Man says, "I can ... I can ...", a mighty force of will to Be. Who can stop such awesomeness? Not they ... not you ... not me. |
October 2018
Terri Cohlene
Halloween 2018 (or 19 days to midterms)
Witches and goblins and ghosts, Oh, My! It's Halloween time, all right. But never mind vampires, mummies and such, there's things that go "Trump" in the night. We go to bed listening to Rachel and Wolf, Gloria Erin and Chris. Andrea, Lawrence, Jimmy, Nicolle, Brian & Stephen don't miss. The news they deliver's not scary at all compared to the imminent plight. We awaken in horror to blood-chilling Tweets--those things that go "Trump" in the night. Dia Calhoun
The Naked Queen
The people below thought their old queen stood naked in the high tower window looking out to be seen. They laughed at her weathered breasts. “What a fool!” they cried. “Who wants to see those?” “No wonder she weeps.” But the Naked Queen stood rapt in the high tower window looking out to see--all the mountains in their wintering beauty. John R. Haws
My Music
There are these sounds within my head that long to be expressed somehow. There are these rhythms in my blood. They move, they flow, with each breath now. Some harmonies, some melodies, some transitory phrases, little bits of this and that as I live through various phases. I don't know why they are in me. I only know they are to Be. They come. They go. They hang around. They seem to mellow more with age.They strike the very heart of me with a mild, contented sort of rage. It's poetry, pure poetry, this must do music thing that vibrates through time and space and makes my soul to sing. |
Carol Sunde
Ode to an Insect in Autumn
What is this ball, looking like Halloween in black and orange-brown fuzz? Of course, the defended, coiled woolly bear a child tried to pet. Not your teddy, Winnie, grizzly, your one of three, Smokey, fuzzy-wuzzy with some hair—but, yes, your Lepidoptera. If you, my larva friend, were on an edible list as a dainty dish, would you taste like wool, your bristles brush teeth or tickle a throat? O Renown-throughout-the land Caterpillar; Harbinger of Winter; O Provoker of Festivals (where you race up string in North Carolina, Ohio, Kentucky, New York); O Predictor of Weather (wide brown band, mild winter); Hibernator (protected from cold death by your personally produced anti-freeze); O Reminder of Metamorphosis Possibilities; Cocoon Creator; O Would-be Moth called Isabella (name meaning devoted to God); Light Seeker (as moth who circles lamps at night); O Joyous-Tragic Mystery! How you scurry, ripple, wrinkle, bumble, shamble working your 13 segments (symbol for winter’s 13 weeks) in a hurry to find a hibernal home under a boulder, a cozy bark crevice, or covered corner. Your locomotion sometimes like a train with locomotive pulling your body parts, little rail cars, but with muscle to rear up as a real horse might--the better to locate where to go. No tracks for you. Just a drive to survive, transform to moth, mate, then die within a week or two. How the seasons roll and change. Nothing stays the same except perhaps, the cycle game. Her doctor said, Sorry. Less than a month left. Not the diagnosed one, I think dying in fall doesn’t seem all bad: maybe somewhat like you, O Woolly Bear, we’ll enter winter’s white quiescence, resurrect in green spring, become Isabella with angel wings, and fly into an eternal summer. |
May 2018
Beth McIntyre
(daughter of OPN member Gail Ramsey Wharton, with permission)
For Jocelyn Whisper-thin and weightless, it floats and glides embracing her gray folds and sliding unnoticed into the fiery synapses. It leaves untouched for now the corridors holding faded snapshots of the hills and valleys of a life touched by love, pain, loss, and growth snow angels in the park the handsy boss at her after-school job the breathless sangria-soaked first kiss on that balmy August night. It rolls and dances through it all, gray matter and white hiding in the hollows that guard her fortunes and aches And then it lays claim to her presence her here and now threading itself in and around her words her where and her why. Barely perceptible at first like the flash of a shooting star a quick stutter-step and course correction without interrupting her rhythm or revealing the bewildering chaos lurking beneath the surface. Its tacky web thickens and expands reaching out to grasp once-protected relics lovers and friends meet her again, for the first time vestiges from bygone days are dusted off and presented as new once familiar journeys become a revolving kaleidoscope leaving her transfixed in time and space. It continues on its determined path hop-scotching now through young and old allowing an occasional respite from its solemn crusade to offer her a glimpse into the in-folding devastation before returning to its merciless task billowing into the open spaces and nooks and crannies of her beautiful mind blunting the sharp edges and dimming the radiant light that once glowed like the sun. |
Pat Dixon
The Pebble Mine
"We have to win every time. They only have to win once." - Jon Broderick, founder, The FisherPoets Gathering first published in National Fisherman magazine, April, 2018 Choices We make our choices: The Grand Coulee built for irrigation of drought-burdened farmland, killed the salmon running the Columbia. June Hogs, 100 pound plus Chinook salmon swam for centuries fed the first peoples created culture and religion gone, spawning grounds locked forever behind concrete. Dams killed sockeye, coho, humpback and Chinook throughout Washington. Salmon fishing now a ghost of what it was. Phantom fish don’t need to spawn. Each dam was a choice. Migration Be a fish. Wander seas tour a blue planet until chemicals mix produce hormones, influence instinct (a clock ticks) and tides send you home. Belly fattens and swells as you ride currents back the way you came years ago, over canyons mountains, around islands, through valleys. Millions swim with you, ahead, beside, beneath, above, behind. Until, what is it, a scent? reaches out from the river you knew, grasps you by the part that remembers, and pulls, quickens the pace, tightens the urge, and you all arrive together, frenzied, leap up a stream to lay, fertilize and die. Only the river is gone. Instead toxic waste oozes from a hole where your birthplace used to be. You didn’t know your corpse is the last, your species added to the litany of all those gone, gone before. We knew, each decision was a choice. Mine, not Yours This is about greed. A copper mine at the headwaters of the last epic salmon run in the world? A copper mine with an earthen dam holding a poison lake in a geologically active environment. What could go wrong? Ask the fish–ask Fraser River salmon caught in the toxic slurry that rolled down the watershed when a copper mine tailing dam failed and flooded salmon grounds. Each mine is a choice. |
April 2018
John R. Haws
Strange Freedom
Ever wonder about your life? Ever ask your beautiful wife, “What am I doing? What’s the point?” “Why am I here and not in the joint?” Strange, is it not, that we ask these things with so many conditions and so many strings. Yet, never and answer and never a clue of what life is or why we do. I guess it’s always been that way, no hope for an answer, no way to stay. Life comes. Life goes – too quickly too; in vain we think we’re not yet through. An even though we long to live another day with more to give, just simply put, it cannot be. The end’s the end. The Spirit’s free. |
John R. Haws
Along the Way
The course is coarse, the crowd is bland as we journey on this lonely path. How grand we stand in all the land. It figuresit figures. Just do the math. Each one stands and each one stares into the face of eternity; and everyone fans and everyone shares the flames and blames of destiny. The road is rough, the path is tough as air we breath inside a lung; then sigh, then cry, and say, "Enough!" as we turn the sediment back to dung. But something happens along the way that changes all our energies. It's love we share for just a day with laughter, fun and memories beyond our wildest thoughts and dreams to last forever -- or so it seems. |
December 2017
Rebekah Zinn
earth to earth
There are the dead and bloated ones, littering the sidewalk, waving serenely in puddles. The half-dried ones valiantly trying to cross the road. The great, writhing ball of them devouring an apple core, an empire built on refuse. There is the mass grave of them accidentally flooded, not even able to scream. Now they can resurrect as chard, a phoenix from meat slurry. There was my childhood power to find ugly baby birds, nestless. Our oak half-barrel teamed with earthworms. Mom pureed them with oatmeal, shoved them down gullets. Dad could not abide by killing, especially the tiny and helpless creatures, but this was acceptable, becoming food. Rebekah ZinnEve
The fog clung to needles and although the sky did not open and the field was drop-less the forest rained |
Rebekah Zinn
October
Magnolia blossom what the hell are you thinking trying to bloom in October? Your sisters performed their duty -- erupt, open, receive, drop, transform into a seed phallus. Like my first-born, who had to be prodded into this world in sticky September. Even the hippy midwives agreed she must be ejected. Bags packed for the morning hospital cocktail to force her out, me in the living room chugging a vanilla ice cream shake spiked with raw egg and castor oil, bouncing her on a green ball inside me. But you, bud, are too late. It is drippy October and you dare announce your glory too late. You live on a farm, for God’s sake. Can’t you see that the beds have been tilled, planted, tended, stripped, and laid fallow? Like my first-conceived, that had to be opening inside me. I secretly named her snowflake, for her uniqueness and predicted arrival in December. She, too, failed coming too soon. The magnolia tree holds no anger. Her many children make many seeds. She is griefless as her last remaining bud opens the petals creamy on the outside revealing at their core only rot. |
November 2017
Joanne Clarkson
The Stone Masons
Not out of faith, but stone. Two men, atheists both, built the town’s church. Rock rivered to the smoothness of loaves. Heft and sweat. The mortar. This was no cathedral. No tower for bells. No crimson or indigo windows. In those hard times they toiled for food alone and a place to sleep where silence breathed its deep calm. They seldom spoke, yet there was always communion between them. July sun called the house of god upwards though neither of them believed; the war had been too hard. They married sisters. Lived in the city. And after one of them lost his mind, the other sat daily at the bedside, accepting, while the women prayed. He recalled then some remnant of Bible lore from childhood when Christ, fasting, was tempted by the Devil to turn rocks into bread.And he had refused. Let stones be stones, indifferent to weather, worship, what breaks a man and what builds him. From “The Fates” Bright Hill Press, 2017. Originally published in The Baltimore Review, First Prize Contest Winner Patrick Dixon
History Lesson
When you sort it out alone you become weightless, at the mercy of whatever mean wind rustles the corn. You spend the time holding your breath. I drag out brittle photos, beaten journals, bad poetry, words frown from decades past, surge at me out of a dark I turned a long shoulder to, so I thought. I fill with water that rises to a boil. Remember? Of course. Long nights under the bed with dust-ball spiders; behind a locked door – flies buzzing the window; scramble to a basement corner – dirt floors and crumbled masonry, where a shadow walks past the crack at the top of the stairs. "History Lesson" first appeared in the Raven Chronicles Journal, Vol. 24 Cynthia Pratt
Best African shop name I’ve ever seen: "A Place of Comfort in Desolation" … and, funny enough, the shop was smack in the middle of desolation. No idea what they sell. - Beth Pratt, Zambia, 2010
In a Place Called Desolation In Desolation you want some comfort Even if it is gum to moisten your lips Even if it is salt-packed chips: barbecue or chive and onion. Still, it’s the name of the place that really drives you down. Never mind that Desolation is its own comfort, like biting down on that aching tooth and feeling the sharp, sharp pain. We all want to stay in this place, at least for awhile, gnawing away at what brought us here, hoping the final comfort is hope itself. But the shop owner knows you can’t see past misery unless You find your way. He suggests melted chocolate bars, or too sweet chai. All you want to know right now is if the road leads somewhere else, to something better. Call it home, or just call it a destination, you think someone will be waiting for you at your next stop. That’s when the shop owner says, “Buy this bottle of water,” pats your hand, like an old uncle. “It will quench your needs.” And it does, and you drive out of this town, a quick rest stop, to a town you no longer need to name because it’s beyond desolation and head for that distant oasis chewing on Beechnut and guzzling warm water. "In a Place Called Desolation" first appeared in Godiva Speaks, an Anthology of Women Poets, 2011, Vol. 1. |
Terri Cohlene
Godiva’s Second Thought
If she could have a do-over, would Lady Godiva nix the horse and still strip naked, streak through that shuttered town of Coventry, just to prove her point? She was, after all, a good Christian woman, giving away her husband’s money to the Virgin Mother and all those God-fearing monks. Perhaps if she’d given less to the abbey, paid less attention to her coiffure and more to her husband, he would not have been compelled to raise taxes in the first place. If she’d had a podium or a quill and a bottle of ink, Godiva could have saved herself. But what would’ve been the fun in that? On second thought, she might have taken a slow stroll, wickedly sashayed through the market without a stitch, shown off her curves, her long, thick tresses to more than just her peeping tailor. After all, that old saddle blanket must’ve given her a powerful itch. "Godiva's Second Thought" first appeared in Godiva Speaks II Carrie Beth Born
Sidewalks
Sidewalks backtalk the boardwalk of catwalks, while cross talk and fast talk to marsh hawk. Moonwalk a nighthawk can skywalk with small talk; a spacewalk of sweet talk and trash talk. Chris Dahl
While My Grandfather Is Dying
a jeweled spider, glistening, pearl-headed and banded gold on black legs scuttles down the dried, gray boards. And I get up and walk to the end of the dock thinking about jumping in, about how I used to love that when I was younger, the water folding over and sealing me in dark, airless cold and then how, without effort, I began to rise and broke surface and was alive again. My son’s buoyant body scarcely questions the tenuous surface. But I stand a long time considering the inlaid strands of sunlight, the murkiness they gild, before I turn and slowly wade in. Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis
Arsenic Dreams
We walked along the waterfront and mused about what it must be like to be among the ones who live there treading in these parts breathing in the sea air from a window inside the room of a luxury home overlooking the view of the shore with the islands near. If you had asked us more of what we had beheld you would have detected we had no knowing beyond the reveries that they who lived with such contrivances were met upon by visits from faraway men in orange vests equipped with air monitors and soil sensors digging mounds of earth from the yard replacing it anew cautioning residents against growing kale and lettuce below ground aiming always to sow in the beds and to never walk indoors with the shoes on lest the specks of arsenic like confetti shine and soar around you. Whats more it did not occur to us to ask if on a windy day one presses the ear to the ground does one hear the mercury and cadmium echo? "Arsenic Dreams" first appeared in Dark Matter, Spring 2017 |