Featured poems

"The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it." - Dylan Thomas

O c t o b e r 2 0 1 8

Carol Sunde

Dia Calhoun

John R. Haws

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.

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.

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.

S e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 8

Wesley Jones

Desecration

What mirthless crone removed my plaque,
too small to be offensive,
mounted so low that only the dedicated with time to kill
would kneel, read, and learn
that this utility was, in fact,
the A. Wesley Jones Wall Outlet of Electrical Excellence?
Why not vandalize the larger tokens of boastful pride
adorning centers of business, learning, podiatry, or veterinary care?
Is it not a privilege to live in a world where even the most unlikely can,
for a sufficient fee according to a sliding scale of grandeur,
be made excellent in the eyes of all?
Was my contribution perhaps too small even for an outlet?
I made the plaque myself to save expense.
Was it that my check did not arrive on time,
though it was last Tuesday already in the hands of those we praise for excellence
in the swift completion of their appointed rounds?
Or are there people who,
despite the limitless number of opportunities in this world,
must tear down others rather than seek the prize themselves?

The Magic of Saints

If contagion may flow in, belief is: it may also
be drawn out again,
that a glimpse of the holy,
contact with a habit’s hem, the cuff of a sackcloth shirt, may –
if only your leprous soul can knit anew
enough of itself to receive the grace –
draw forth corruption from your flesh and mind
as a blotting cloth, freshly laundered,
sucks ink from carpet, lessening the stain.

And this aura, emanating from the body of the saint,
imbuing the garment like sweat perfuming the close air of the hut,
is thought to linger in diminished form even after death.
Thus: to gaze upon some dusty, blood-stained threads of gauze,
place a hand only inches from a handless, gold-bound chicken bone,
might, it is claimed, allow the blind to scent direction of the sun,
or the halt, slung from a single crutch,
to throw the crutch away and limp.

But I place no faith in the magic of saints,
the power of holy ones to heal.
If any good at all be done by these
it is only the loving touch,
the recognition of one hurt soul by another just as sick
but going out without regard for itself.

M a y 2 0 1 8

Beth McIntyre
(daughter of OPN member Gail Ramsey Wharton, with permission)

Patrick Dixon

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.

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.

A p r i l 2 0 1 8

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.

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 lovewe share for just a day
with laughter, fun and memories
beyond our wildest thoughts and dreams
to last forever -- or so it seems.

D e c e m b e r 2 0 1 7

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.

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.

Eve

The fog clung to needles
and although the sky did not open
and the field was drop-less
the forest rained

N o v e m b e r 2 0 1 7

Joanne Clarkson

Terri Cohlene

Patrick Dixon

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

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

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

Carrie Beth Born

Chris Dahl

Cynthia Pratt

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.

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.

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: barbeque 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.

"n a Place Called Desolation" first appeared in Godiva Speaks, an Anthology of Women Poets, 2011, Vol. 1.)

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

​OPN: Featured Poems