"as close"

by Stephen A. Rozwenc

as close
as sweet jasmine scents
perfume each evening selfless

my love

lemures

by Alison McBain

ghosts of gidro
(in Malagasy)
a lemur by any other name
would smell as sweet
as the tamarinds eaten
while sleeping through extinction

Water Wheel

by Maureen Teresa McCarthy

Gray gulls lift and glide
Wings spread
Floating on winter winds
Easily as on water.
White against gray sky
Song silenced
They sink to earth
Where fields of winter wheat
Harvested
Are golden as the beaches
They call home.

Water birds, shore birds
Riders of the great streams
Swimmers in the endless waters
Which churn our days away
Yet hold this fragile earth
This finite place
In endless space.                               

In the Woods We Talk What Matters

by James Croal Jackson

Ghost from rural America,
we relay atoms as body beams,

intrigued fireflies. The creek, crusted
mud at the bottoms of boots, the vines;

I see necessitudes tangled
in flashlights, reflected glasses ice,

we could not agree on politics.
We shiver the rest of the night.

About Ten Thousand Years Old

by Sarah Henry

Lightning strikes cattle
in fields, those soft targets.
It kills them. In Sweden,
the world’s oldest tree
has always cheated death.
The spruce lives defensively.
The trunk grows longer.
The crown fattens.
The tree stands alone
in an open field, exposed
to threats from violent
weather. Attempts on its
life remain unsuccessful.

2.24.19 8.11 a.m. 25 degrees

by John Stanizzi

Pious with its mellow hissing in the trees,
onomatopoetic voice of the rain, a sound
nearly silent; more vision than sound is the rain
drumming on the melting skin of the pond.

Wind in the Dell

by Khalilah Okeke

The wind
travels   into -

weeping white clouds
finds silver-frosted skies 

waiting.

In the rusted flush of dawn
through steep-walled cliffs

rain splashes on siltstones.

Raptors rouse
in mudstone caves -

canyons peaking beyond

the bosky dells.

Halong Bay Joan Hofmann

Slivers of Silver River

by Satvika Menon

The hum of the river
Spills into the dark green of the mountains
Petrichor plunging into the paper-thin air
The ground cracks its broken back
As carp weave swirls in the silver water

Mission Bells for Sex

by Jake Sheff

Earth’s deficient light, devoid
of devotion. Full of loving
isotopes to fill the night. Bridge
of fire, sunlight through shy
curtains on a bed of hours.
Polymers of prayer ring. The wet
weight of entrepreneurial
white against a field of green.

Fly Agaric

by Jonathan K. Rice

the brook dawdles
over rocks and fallen limbs

pine needles blanket the trail
through the quiet forest

dark red mushrooms with white flecks
appear among the roots of trees

gift of shamans
an owl croons at dusk

12.8.18 6.17 p.m. 21 degrees

by John Stanizzi

--Yesterday the pond was frozen. 
This evening it has thawed. 
But it is 21 degrees,
so that tomorrow…
…yes, winter’s changeability has arrived…


Prodigious conversion from that which we may peer through,
opening our vision to a strangeness like Frost’s,
nuanced and misshapen, to this glazed and shifting surface,
damascene transformation more closely related to stone than to water.

Three Photographs Joan Hofmann

A Tree-Book

by Susie Gharib

Sitting between the toes of a fir-tree,
D. H. Lawrence penned his psychoanalytic theories
of states and plexus.

He could almost hear the sap,
the tree-blood,
pulsating in those round, faceless presences.

Among those silent beings of earth and air,
he began to intuit tree-worship
and wished he could be a tree
to possess root-lust and be thought-free,
a blood-conscious entity.

That haven of Lady Chatterley
was Lawrence’s own sanctuary
on whose altar he could sacrifice
his self-conscious personality
and make his intuited tree-book
the arboreal lore of centuries.

12.1.18 1.34 p.m. 41 degrees

by John Stanizzi

Proposals of clouds in an otherwise 9/11 sky;
overnight squall’s remnants resemble Queen Anne’s Lace,
nighttime blossoms in the grass.   The geometry of an island of ice is
drawn toward the middle of the pond, its shoreline thawing.

Look Up, Slowly

by M.J. Iuppa

Exhausted: the clump-drag of horse hooves striking
the pocked dirt road. Yellow dust eddies— small clouds.
Mountains rise in their encampment. The wide desert sky
palls purple and pink:

by nightfall
earth exhales
                         a cache of stars 

After the Winter Storm, the Clouds Melted into Rain

by Michael H. Brownstein

The slipshod ice of clarity,
Daylight dripping snow into pellets
Opaque and clear, off white with an essence
Of ash tree, clouds, a spirit within wind.
On the dunes, scrub brush, sand thorn,
And stacked on the piles of crusted ice,
Herring gulls each with a piece of fish
Waiting patiently for the long spray of spring.

Yggdrasil

by Bill Arnott

Yggdrasil – the world tree, mother ash
stands astride a Nordic knoll
beyond Uppsala’s temples
where every god – the real ones
take meat and mead amongst the Norns
Wyrd, Verðandi, Skuld

atop the tree the eagle with no name resides
witness to our lives and spindle whorls of fate
an eyrie shared with a hawk called Veðrfölnir
witherer of wind

from a drifting wooden ark I saw the eagle
through looming crags of crystal leaded ice
“Nattoralik,” whispered the Greenlander
aurora eyes squinting into cloudless Arctic sky
following the nameless one in flight

high overhead the giant sailed
across a canvas of calcium blue
the hawk invisible to us
its presence though we felt
in the eagle’s sweeping gaze
removing every trace of wind
breath sucked silent from our lungs
a contour feather whoosh the only sound

Carved in Red Bryce Canyon Utah, 2007

by Amy Uyematsu

Delicate arches, spires, and castles
giant robed goddesses of stone
await our arrival

~ ~ ~

Unimagined,
this stark red beauty -
almost cruel

~ ~ ~

Mountaintop arch - where
stone, raven, lovers
touch sky

~ ~ ~

Endless walls of red -
now pink then orange -
whose sly paintbrush

~ ~ ~

One more juniper -
desert sandstone gives birth
to evergreen

~ ~ ~

Just enough hardness,
just enough balance -
local secret for survival

~ ~ ~

Stone keeps asking
whose voice will sing
our stories

11.13.2018 2.46 p.m. 39 degrees

by John Stanizzi

Piety arrives with a female evening grosbeak.
Offed by chill wind, the leaves cover the wet forest ground.
Nearby, the look of running water
dazzles like a miniature Topajos, miniature Amazon.

Winterwoods

by Carl Parsons

The doe and fawn have lost their hiding place.
Swept clean by wind and rain, the forest now
is bare and bears no fruit for famished mouths.
No trace of summer dalliance here remains
where bee and blossom kissed above the humid                 
garden ground.  The chance not seized now is lost.
Summer’s cost, the recompense for that warm
sweetness that we knew, now in full is due.

Now the roaring cold has come again;
we cluster about repentant fires and wrap
ourselves in shawls and shrouds while we
tell ourselves again the holy days.
We praise the orchard apples that we saved                       
and hang them in the snow-filled garden where
the doe and fawn may browse.  Yesterday
at nightfall we thought we saw them moving,
faint and brown, rousing the winterwoods.

Awaiting Aesop

by John Grey

Jackrabbit’s scat is nothing much but,
under the circumstances, it’s the best that he can do.
But it invokes all kind of activity.
Like the dung-beetle that appears from nowhere.
rolls the crap into a little ball,
gets it moving with the power
of its feathery hind legs.

The pride-bound hare has no appetite for dung,
boasts long ears instead of a hard carapace,
flutters whiskers like a lord at high tea
while his stomach hungers like the living for the dead.
Meanwhile, the ball forces the beetle vertical,
threatens to roll back, crush its body,
but tenacious, unyielding, it nudges the treasure forward,
over pebble, in and out of small ditch,   
until both insect and ball disappear from the jackrabbit’s view
into its underground den..

Dung-beetle no longer of interest, reader and hare
dart off into ribbons of heat, fur like stubble,
chest made slender by the lack of good grasses,
the tough dry chew of the few that survive the oppressiveness,
No succulent carrots. No celery. No apples fallen from a tree.
And all the while, his crap is fueling who knows
how many of these insignificant creatures.
As if being outrun by a tortoise wasn’t enough.
Now, as far as the desert is concerned,
Leporidae has been out-evolved by the dung-beetle.
He rests by a rock, salivating on better times.
His sensitive hearing can almost hear the fable being written.