Stippling Winter Starling

by J. Conrad Smith

Dancing pepper specks
live limbs shimmering
tiny black flashes
bustling gypsy universes
shifting shapes of
hundred-year giants
distracting from nude
bones hollow holding
bent charcoal veins
stumbling skyward crossing
cold melancholy canvas
dreaming daily of
Dodger blue gobs
neon moss catching
cotton tufts falling
past cherry-stem toes—
more permanent tenants
that won't just
flicker and pass

Lines

by Susan N Aassahde

stallion kale noon
janitor trap
falcon turnip hop

6.7.19 9.16 a.m. 70 degrees

by John Stanizzi

Preternatural this coupling and flying, this double-decker dragonfly, from an
otherworld, spectacular, and apparently tasty – the swallows dive trying to catch them
napping where they rest, bumping reed or water, and whether dragonfly or
damselfly, everyone is moving, flying, wary, trying their best to stay alive.

In the pond

by JS Absher
​
the mountain​
is not a mountain ​
​
it is mountain with dragonfly​
with overhanging trees​
​
their leaves spotted yellow​
with early summer heat​
​
in the pond the mountain​
is a spotted leaf​
​
in the pond the mountain​
does not have a backside​
​
it is all there before us​
dragonfly and leaf ​
​
under the mountain the minnow ​
cannot see the mountain​

Crow Dead in a Field

by Ray Greenblatt

Crow on a fence
his eye a knothole,
spreading wings so black
they blend with tree branches above
that rise gracefully,
his observation static
as the length of fence itself.
Crow’s caw a nail down
a sheet of metal,
catching sifted light
his gray-blues of darkness
become parts of machinery,
          long rusting like crow's blood
          matting ruffled feathers.

Lines

by Carl Mayfield

ground-loving thrasher
                  stopping
           under the peach tree

Lines

by Roberta Beach Jacobson

a bloom of jellyfish when the ocean warms

Lines

by Susan N Aassahde

scorpion haze knees
trapeze dash
pears mountain sand

Pieces of Eight

by Marc Carver

We went into the tropic garden
butterflies everywhere
I put my hands out hoping one would land on me
but none did.
Then half way round a big one came down and sat on her shoulder
like a parrot
I thought it would fly off but it stayed with her all the way round.
When we got to the exit she looked at me
If we take it out there it will die I said
So eventually I got it off and it just sat on a leaf.
Of course all it wanted was to die
I see that now

Lines

by Sister Lou Ella Hickman, I.W.B.S.

                                         breath of pond water
thunder   lightning flash   rain stops
                an old frog singing

Morning Glories

by Michael Estabrook

In my wife's garden at dusk bats flit above
azaleas and forsythias while below in the final
moments of twilight paper-thin pink morning glories glow

Late Spring Under Red Pines

by Marguerite María Rivas

In the Northeast Kingdom,

illuminated
by a rising gibbous moon,
the deep night-sky is swept
clean of clouds
by gusts and gales
that animated them

in the first place.

Three Photographs Karla Linn Merrifield

From out of the Fog

Glubokaya Bay, Kamchatka Peninsula

On the Beach

Kamen Ariy Island, Bering Sea

Remains of War

Attu Island, the Aleutians

Shadows on Moss

by Patrick Flynn

I remember these woods from a photograph of snow
around a stage; overgrown space that became forest.
Moss shadows cover the pines,
at night, as a cold shiver speaks now:
pinesap hardens each winter. Branches chill.
Leaves scatter or blow downwind; sap,
like flesh and blood once captured this band
for a magazine shoot; pages yellowing
before turning brown in a closeted room.
They live in weeks past sleeves of shelved music:
before it snowed all day, on harvest fields
outside, walking over broken branches
fallen on a bowed, mildewed stage,
performance worn in the faded pictures;
old songs and melodies snapping
like frozen ice in a field; songs fading now
as the moon crosses the night sky; shadows
and moss on one side of a tree, in light
that does not meet the snow anymore.

Land Inventory

by Janet Sunderland

The county appraiser sent a questionnaire
and a topography map, wants me to update
our family farm value, asks about changes
to acreage or productive capability of the land.

Ignore the appraiser’s flat gray map, see,
instead, the sapphire sky, white-striped
like zebras in Grandpa's National Geographic.
Airplanes flying high to Africa or China maybe.

Walk the field of milo - stacked red heads
flaming on emerald stalks. With one swift swing
of the machete, sever a sunflower’s head,
wipe sticky black resin from the blade –

The map won't show Great Simba, now rotted
to a termite's meal, won’t capture hazy afternoons
we picked gooseberries, or our clamber up
the peeling bark to ride a gray husk to India.

Legends lie hidden in the appraiser’s map—stories
held by the wind, borne by cottonwood seeds, flung
free, as we were all flung free. Memory our property.
I sign the questionnaire; affirm no changes to the land.

An Oasis in the Badlands

by Jan Wiezorek

Breeze swallows the bend
in the back along a meadow

slope where wild sorghum
blows seed foggy

unseen except
that hazy

white reaching out
in a single pan of blue,

thinning in strands
and hollows.

Hempstead Plain

by Janet M. Powers

This flat space, exposed to shifting sky,
horizon unrelieved by undulating hills,
their blue haze always comfortably there,                           
is vulnerable to ocean, more so to man.

Here, the land makes no requirements
(no place not to put a road);
parkways stripe this space flowing east,
plaid counterparts move north to south.

Walking the waste places of Long Island:
risk no hill-born child should take,                                 
except chance set her down, and dice
dictate a half-hour daily walk.

What she sees are fences, anchor chain,
to keep some people out, others in,
yet trap the rich effluvia of their lives:
bags, newsprint, plastic-lidded cups.                     

Three old pines escape man's hand
 in both the planting and the cutting,                                 
huddle next to garbage humped with
used concrete. The sign says "No Dump."

A clean trill breaks the hum of engines
purring down the six-lane avenue:
bird I've never met, gold and red
and gray, gives out a brave new song.

Two Places

by Ron Geigle

moist heat haze
Uber
then Penn Station
the mass stinking
Platform 2
dead sprint
soot life

fingernails
hard in the pine needle slope
motionless
glacier water
30 feet below
lapping
on dead fir

A Fruit Bat

by Kat Terban

hung under
the branch

grabbed
with clawed feet

darkness folded
into wings

Ant's Prayer

by Inguna Brože

Lord Almighty called man
Please listen, if you can-
Don't step on me,
Don't crush a snail,
Don't burn us alive
We want to survive,
Don't pin a butterfly on nail,
Don't catch a bird
To hear it sing,
Don't try to clip its wings,
Don't, don't, don't...
       Amen

Pelicans

by Karla Linn Merrifield

Eight white pelicans
                        __   __   __
__     __     __     __           __

a code of beauty
we cannot crack
until the last bird dies

two more
__     __

one more
                __

Yarrow

by Jeff Burt

The yarrow blooms
in Las Vegas neon yellow
a gaudy sign
inviting bees
to stop, to spend
a little something

Inside Marengo Cave

by Aspen Duscha

Rocks drip from the ceiling,
Water falls upon the ground.
Blind crayfish swim with fish that cannot see,
In a pool that is in the hard floor.
Remains of ancient life remain,
The tracks of a pecarry,
The fossilized bones of pecarry and bison who died in Marengo cave,
The claw prints of bears who used to slumber in the cave.

Northern Frontier (At the Smith River)

by Felix Purat

In the farthest reaches
The redwoods begin to lose their red
Shade by shade, they shrivel to a withered grey
They beg to dissipate with striking haste
As the great nothingness of Oregon looms ahead

A warm canyon diverts the churning Smith River
From its hidden, skyward source
Doomed by a strange acceleration
The canyon of red rock steadily parts ways
The coastal climes are soon left behind.

5.15.19 7.07 a.m. 44 degrees

by John Stanizzi

Pleasant to hear the chipping sparrow in the cedar every day --
you are overfull of your own vibrant song
which lights up the coarse tree, your negligible size no matter,
you singer of singers, the branches movement
dallies when you take flight, making the still pond seem to ripple.

Tinney Creek

by Anda Peterson

runs past
and under
the TJ Max
CVS, Target.
Tinney Creek
travels back and forth
from Tampa Bay
rises and falls with the tide
feeds turtles, Egrets, Muscovy ducks
who seek tiny prawns, mud crabs, bugs
in its water.
Along its  muddy bank grow
feathery Java fern
rounded Moneywort
verdant, abundant
     despite the insults of a styrofoam cup,
     a plastic bag,
as if this was still The Garden.

Here between snaking highways,
Dollar Stores
gas stations
condo buildings
Taco Bells
Hawk has built a nest atop the pole
advertising Beer and Low-Cost Cigarettes.
Mallard makes the high grass along the parking lot
her nursery.
Crow claims the power lines.

la vie en gris

by Terrence Sykes

meandering into dusk
shadows of the seine
followed – haunted me

empty quays
compasslessly
labyrinth of narrow rue

waning moon found me tiring
so I folded the map
& sipped the last cognac

Fireflies and Yama

by Shraddhanvita Tivari

a weathered champa
falls on the ground
the skylark disappears
in the night ebony
gathering beneath the peepal
fireflies with Yama.

Vulture Ritual

by Wesley D. Sims

Buzzards congregate at dusk,
blitz a large oak tree to roost
like a bagful of black clothespins.
Morning draws them out
to perch on fence posts
around a near pasture like a village
of totems, wings spread wide
as if some mysterious ritual.
The sunshine chases away
mites that plague them.

Dying in Drift

by Sam Dixon

A dark sea falls,
ceaseless in heavy curls,
drumming the beaten sand at Cape Henlopen

as a blue-black fin lifts, hangs,
fought out like a capsized hull,
bobbing wave-lip on wave-lip,
tugged in
by the stammering, convincing shore.

Prague

 by Terrence Sykes

up in the old hotel
an uncharted country
nightingale sings amongst the garden

vltava waters flow
in silent repose
night photographer waits

stagnant crepuscular air
drags that indigo sky
through naked branches

upon staved river bank
following shadowed sun
meandering to awaiting sea

Fools’ Day

by José Stelle

Green shoots split open
Last year’s constructs 
Of horse and cow:

Fine filaments,
They rise like Astroturf
Through the brown mounds.

In the new air,
Prickly with light,
Everything conspires
To break ground.

It’s official --
The Daughter of Zeus
Has made her round.

Early Morning Fog with Chickens

by Emily Strauss​

Layers of mist rise up the steep slopes, terraces
of young rice step up, bordered by muddy paths
thick morning fog plies the flooded
paddies, wooden houses on stilts with pigs

living below. Two dozen chickens roam free
under floors, on roofs, hidden in the fields
in the early morning damp but heard,
while a mother fights to comb a girl's hair

before school, breakfast of cold rice balls
with stringy meat left from dinner.
The chickens range on bugs and crumbs
ignoring people, call, cluck, strut in the fog

a distant cry in dawn's sleep through the open
windows, the dew soaking heavy cotton quilts
bamboo floors warping in the cool
mountain air as thick as the flooded fields.

Today I heard a rooster call in someone's
back yard, fenced in a city, I remembered.

The Smell of Sand

by Emily Strauss

The city of Twenty Nine Palms coats
one dusty street
its sand smells like dry sun.
In winter the smell turns brittle
cactus spines blow against the lines
of broken fences bent south
under the prevailing gales
thorned by years of wind
that whitens the crying boards.

Next year at this time more fence
posts will split, the sand will pile higher
the sun will hurt more
this line in the sand defined by
old barbed wire.

There are none of O'Keefe's orange poppies here.

Will joshua trees survive another century?
Arms break off, cactus wrens abandon
old nest cavities— we can only stare.

Cold winter storms leave a thin frost
on palo verde leaves. The sand blows
harder, scraping the bark off acacia trees
down in the shallow arroyos that run
by the highway, smelling of friction
and a town on the edge.

Hawaiian Redux

by John Raffetto

If Hawaii runs backwards
into the big bang
then what is pushing the islands out?
The volcanic ash of developers,
fragrant white ginger
plowed under a metal foot.
Did the big bang
start the tour buses?

No Hawaii is
caught in a fishing net
tangled on black sand
closing on an apparition.

Desert Nights

by Heather Browne

Steam rose from tarred streets
and dinosaur breath
fogging
the desert sky

We drove under this
ancient moon
flickering wings
trapped
slapping
the howling night
and sinking sand

The Great Pacific Garbage Blob

by  Sarah Henry

Humans made the blob.
It’s plastic cells spread
wide as Mexico.

Tunas tire of leftovers.
Sharks mind the water.
A whale butts a jug.

A dark abyss is a trench
where urchins die.
An abyss opens when men

consume trash-filled fish.
Junk spreads through
their stomachs.

They become plastic.
We become plastic.
The blob comes ashore.

Life Sentences

by Alexander Garza

The longer the spill, the redder the earth gets,
And the more that we speak out, the lesser our sentence.

The same goes for lighters and smoke
And even not to bother with honor or hope

Or expectation. The slope
Seizes moisture and don’t forget

We’re mostly water anyway.
So when the tide comes, even the tiny ones,

At dawn under the sunny guise of afternoon,
Even the ones at night,

Be prepared by having breathed well,
Filling lungs and portraits

And release muscles tension tender
Into the sultry skies of the Gulf,

Somewhere between nadir and God,
Between oracle and shore.

4.20.19 7.16 a.m. 65 degrees

by John Stanizzi

Portraits – goldfinch in the bramble, rain on the pond,
orbits of skippers and spiders walking on water,
necessity of meditations this Holy Saturday, this rain-
dampened morning blessed, cleansed by the softest steady rain.

Lines

by Roberta Beach Jacobson

plastic litter becomes the beach

Lines

by Susan N Aassahde

snail lake blossom
court jester
forest branches stream

Lines

by Angele Ellis

purple velvet throats
spare us spare us
morning glory falls

Lines

by Christina Chin

deforestation
silt chokes overflowing
Rajang river

Lines

by Rp verlaine

another night
my shadow leaves me
to dance alone

Lines

by Hifsa Ashraf

curls of smoke
from the chimney
flying crows

Lines

by Veronika Zora Novak

3 a.m.
cherry blossoms hung heavy
with snow

Tanka

by Darrell Lindsey                              

sound of a flute
going deeper into dusk
along the river
we count the same firefly
over and over again

EQI Glacier

by Abigail Tyrrell

Lick of the iceberg.
Crystal burns to salt.
You don't need to

hide.

Bob there with the plastic.
Clash with midday sun,
body delving deeper
and deeper away from day.
(Night is colder, a frigid shelter)
Crippled kingdom;

glass castle pouring
into the sea.

Downsized

by  Ellen Chia

A case of hijacking
In nature's flight plan:
Fallen snow-garbed seraphs
Dislodged, freighted

From the
Arctic to the equator,
From the lemming-rich tundra
To a
Length = Wingspan x 5
Breath =  Wingspan x 4
Height =  Wingspan x 3
Coop of a glass tank

Bathed in neither
Night nor day,
Summer nor winter;
Where camouflage
And binocular vision
Are rendered superfluous
Against the painted
Backdrop of wintry blotches
Peering over dwarfish faux
Snow-dusted spruce trees.

On the other side
Of the glass panel,
Conveyor streams of
Gleaming patrons
Sneak at flash photography
Marvel at the pair's
Captive glory -
The snowy owls perching,
Half-squinting;
Their talons marking time
On sculpted concrete.

Mute

by Marc Carver

Everyday I wake up
born again
well almost
I tell myself this as I walk along the pilgrims path.
A woman passes with two dogs
the woman doesn't notice me but the second dog does
as I walk away he turns to me
and I stop look at him and ask him if he wants to come with  me.
His jaw starts to move as if he is talking but no words come out but he can't understand why I don't hear him
then she shouts and off he goes.