Lines

by Terrence Sykes

crickets & cicada
chant autumnal
secular vespers

Wild Fire

by Marilyn Braendeholm

Fire takes its opportunities.

Wind-burning-whipped bridges 

of smoke on rising spinets of fury. 

Rise and fall, flakes of flame and ash 

scattering weather, then swept

and settled to fall scorched. And 

as fire grows, the wind sings dark. 

The heat endured but not so darkness, 

nor that noise. Aerolites fall into 

throaty pits, as fire draws darkness 

in its parchment heart.

Eleven Suicide Seeds

by Taufiq Abdul Khalid

Where are the rivers mighty?
Where are the lakes serene?
Where are the bears hibernating?
Where are the badgers biting?
Where are the meadows blooming?
Where are the fishes in the sea?
Where are the lions in the plains?
What have you done to them all?
Now who will you seek to blame?
What have you wrought in your greed?
What have you sown in the fields?
I hate but ate your answers!
These suicide seeds,
Your suicide seeds,
Your Suicide...and
Now.... mine.

Full Moon

by Doug Draime

rain drops
on tulips

dark red
as roses

Swamp Psalm of the Water Sprite

by Karla Linn Merrifield

The Fakahatchee is my shepherdess;
I shall not want for canopied swamps.
She maketh me to submerge below profligate
fronds and tendrils.
She leadeth me into still waters.
She restoreth my arid hope.
She leadeth me along slow flowing
strands of wildness for her faith sake.
Yea, though I wade through the valley
in the shadows of fishing spiders
beside alligator ponds, I fear not greed,
for thou, green queen, art with me, in me.
Thy sword ferns and ghost orchids
do comfort me.
Thou preparest a cypress stand before me
in the cool space of my heart.
Thou annointest my soul with dew.
My dream runneth over in liquid light.
Surely chlorophyll and oxygen
shall follow me all the breaths of my life
and I shall dwell in thy habitat
of epiphyte, lichen and moss—forever.

A prism of light

by Maury Grimm

A prism of light graces the San Juans over La Manga pass to the West as the sun breaks through the clouds, a shard. Winter birds line the wires and the horses head to the watering trough.

This overcast sky makes the morning warm as I slip out, bare-toed, to the chickens who are not yet roused awake.

This may be a day of more inside than out, but there is the catching up on cleaning garlic, storing potatoes, stripping the leaves and flowers of the dried herbs, clearing and organizing for the next round of tomatoes, rose hips, marigold and calendula flowers. And maybe after this round of rain, the mountains will proffer another round of mushrooms to dry.

And when to plant the garlic, lay down the red clover seed on the worn potato bed? Another day. Another day.

Valleys of Life, Echoed

by Laurie Kolp

The gods call life
after death
life after
the calling of all things
secret.
Take innocence—
trade it
for guilt after death
after life:
the endangered one
slides down mountain
to death valley
and lives.

Burial for Seamen

by Tom Sheehan

Tonight I think of Jonathan Diggs and how he salts the Atlantic, how the horse of his voice shakes the water from the underneath, cracks the rocks the small fist of Nahant left-jabs in the ocean.

The dory came riding in high and free as a cracker box, the oars gone, locks ripped away as if he had broken all his muscles on them, the anchor gone as Davy’s gift, not even a handful of line left in the loop.

One inconspicuous mark gathered in the final counting: JD9. It was Jonathan’s ninth boat, and the first to outlive him, the first to come back without that oarsman.

Seventy-year old men do not swim all night, do not ride on top like debris caught on the incoming tide, do not materialize on-shore once they are that wet.

They go down like Jonathan Diggs, shaking their fists at the Atlantic, shouting the final obscenity they have waited all this time to use, knowing the exact moment to employ it. They send a sound running along water lines, burst it into sea shells, sing it as a tone of surf busting all September nights when ocean listeners count for sailors.

They become the watery magnet pulling men from inland fields, in turn are magnetized by moon’s deep clutch on the rich pastures of the sea, and sleep then only in tight caves, soundless and dark in their wearing away.

U.S. 50

by Karla Linn Merrifield

A smooth satin road unspools
across the corrugated torso
of Nevada in summer morning,
light rising in a state of cloudlessness.

It unfurls through sage-dusted basin
and over juniper-draped range;
its length unwinds and unwinds.
Onto eight soft-shouldered summits,

into alkali flats of as many
high desert valleys, the macadam
takes on a golden patina as it rolls
above the gold of stone-studded foothills.

The ribbon twists into vast landscapes, finding:
the turquoise ore in me, the copper lode in you.

I Am Meltwater.

by Angi Holden

April’s sun blossoms the hillsides. Its gentle warmth coddles
the icy hollows, and streams dribble through tangles of couch grass.
The breeze drifts over the fells, carries the songs of distant mountains:
Scafell, Helvellyn, Skiddaw. It stirs me, spins me, swirls me.
I tumble down the rockface, gasp for air, splash and splatter against outcrops.
I grasp light and cast aside its fragments, I thrust and whirlpool:
rub, erode, abrase, before plunging on, handrailing across the geology of ancients,
landscapes scarred by wind and weather. Lower there is mud, soft as flesh,
pathways, a tracery of footprints. I am pulled into the river’s eddy,
my chill and rainwater’s sweet balm mingling, flowing, seabound.

Rain, Spark, Cycle

by Richard D. Hartwell

Up-thrust, boulder-rough hills
after late spring’s last runoff;
dirt between veins of granite,
seeded with grasses, flowers
in wild profusion, abandoned.

Such profligate plentitude makes
for a profusion of wildlife fauna:
an overpopulation awaiting their
seared starvation as brittle stubble
expires, scoured by a relentless sun.

Hills turned into fodder for fire
needing only slight provocation,
ignition from outside intervention;
flames eat all to ashen gray, stony
hills turn silver in the orange dusk.

within Roe Wood

by Kate Garrett

your feet pound
   streets, pavements
     bus stops – the urban

  blur heading
for bluebells

   as you slip downhill
 & into the shadow

     of leaves (curled fingers
unfurling green)

   race the brook
along its obstacle
        course:

  forgotten blue
   bicycles, lawnmower
engines & plastic

     bottles without
  a single message inside

Lines

by Theresa A. Cancro

hunter's moon --
a buck blends into
the yarrow

End of Summer

by M.J. Iuppa

By dusk, swallows
disappear–  the barn door
left open a crack.

Now gunshot
marks distance,
close range.

Estranged hour
each second
a lost eyelash.

Work? Anyplace.
A stand of spruce
wears darkness.

Tongue
against palette
issues

small airs
there, there
consoles loneliness–

the clock’s click,
the moth’s
wobble

going mad
for the lamplight’s
humor.

You have named me

by Emily Ramser

At night,
you hold me in your arms,
and whisper my name:

Gaia,
Terra,
Earth,
and
Mother,

and when I awake,
you have named me anew
under the birth of the sunrise.

Lines

by Joanna M. Weston

fall morning …
blackberry jam
simmering

Endings

by Patricia Williams

Baskets of bridal-white begonia and container-grown
red impatiens, convey late summer lushness, yet
indicate human invasion; clumps of daylilies
bloom orange, in messy half-order.
Watery stems and fragile buds go limp,
signal an irrepressible first frost.

Patches of sunlight dapple the driveway
imposed on the land, but broken by natural ice heaving;
the mowed yard, once forest cover, remains a pathway
for undeterred deer on their way from the swamp
and turkey trains that move across north ridges.

The cat makes painful sounds, mourning his companion,
her frail old body found on the back bedroom floor
a few weeks ago, twenty-one years of greeting the dawn.

Hindsight

by Richard D. Hartwell

Once was beauty as the Coos and Coquille Rivers merged
into the sinuous estuarine paths emptying into Coos Bay.

Now deep-water tugs languish awaiting empty freighters as
the lumber industry falters from the ravages of clear-cutting.

Automated ply and lumber companies have driven thousands to
outlaw shake mills, poaching, weed farms, desertion, and suicide.

Late afternoon and gray scud slowly
closes out blue sky and green water,

The world turns slate and dreams are held
together by only the most tenuous breath.

Leaning into Autumn

by Rachel Nix

The cool mornings linger
in the hollows, where the land
dips and divides, waiting
for the day to arrive—

the South cannot shake
the humid breath of sunlight.

Lines

by Theresa A. Cancro

sunflower husks --
the sharp cry
of a kestrel

In Cumberland Valley

by JD DeHart

Life exists high
on the mountain, plants growing
sparse in the mouths of rock.
Bits of scrub emerge as
the slope curves down to earth.
All is verdant in  the valley.
A small pool of water
collects experience.  A community
gathers in the shadow, blotting
out the high winds and massive
snows that blow in.

Lines

by Joyce Lorenson

eroding riverbank
by summer's end
the aged tree
sends up a shoot

The tomatoes are in hoop houses

by Maury Grimm

The tomatoes are in hoop houses, as well the fall planted crops. Wire around plants I don't want trampled. And all the birds, turkeys and chickens, roam freely about the place. I can too, all the fence barriers opened up.

Łizhiní and I are more comfortable around each other day-by-day and now Molly is laying eggs behind an old stump in the Quelites. She is not nesting on them, so that is good. Five eggs today from two of the girls, and they are getting bigger. Who ever said chickens do not like grass lied. They slurp the tender greens and I am praying they discover the wealth of grasshoppers.

Peanut and Red--the turkeys--range around from front to back. This eve they are playing back by the truck, whirling around, Peanut chasing Red and then vice versa.

It felt good to get this done today, to get the garden and grasshoppers in better control, one hopes.
Red & Peanut just now outside the window. I greet them. Red seems less nervous and more friendly and I think tomorrow to trim his toenails. They are in bad need; he has a hard time roosting.
This is new to me. I have had ducks, rabbits and other small animals, but never chickens and turkeys. And never free-ranging.

I can tell all are happy to have full range around the place, fences down, no walls. There is so much to forage from Currants to young Amaranth, Purslane and Quelites. I have left some Sorel, too as I know the chickens love them along with the Oregano. I chastise them all, "Bugs, eat those grasshoppers."

They take up different aspects around the place, and sometimes it seems the turkeys herd the chickens, and then the chickens herd the turkeys.

Fences and walls. Sometimes we create them to protect what we love. However, they have to come down to allow those we love to grow. As my mother all ways said, "Fences were made for people that can't fly."

Grub Worm

by Al Ortolani

The rain that has been building all morning begins to tap the window. The sash, raised to allow the garden into the bedroom, is enough of a poem for anyone. Ink can only imitate these first drops, the quiet within the curtained room, the breeze kneading muscle, the drizzling calm. Blue jays swing through the sycamore. Already yellowed, its heavy leaves, thickened at the stem, fall like birds.

the spider’s web
collects rain drops, a mist
of late tomatoes

Lines

by JS Absher

rain cupped
in a sycamore leaf
the wind sips and flies

Sacramento Valley, August

by Taylor Graham

Everything’s a map to get-away.
A/C = 4 rolled down at 70 mph w/o a Delta breeze.
Freeway to arterial to cutoff to the mouth
of some tributary valley, up ladders of streambed
rock, meandering between willow and oak
remembering how it ran in winter spate – dry now
like all the little valleys emptied into this
great basin, too broad to see hills on the other
side. Ridges, canyons – figments of flatland haze.
All the map shows down here are roads
going somewhere  – not wayward paths of memory.
Like salmon, I recite the way in my blood,
tracing back to beginnings, a valley where I live.

An Embrace of Trees

by Michael H. Brownstein

How powerful to swim into your arms.
How steadfast and stubborn. The curl of your palm.
One finger finding another. A gathering
Of love’s flesh like the glorious crown of a tree
Reaching beyond a fence of silver brush
And goldenrod to lay a hand of leaf
Upon a friendly arm and find whatever wonder
Lives in the wind, the brightest day, a cool evening.
The squirrels at play. The murmur of doves.
A warmth turning everything valuable into God.

Daylily

by Donal Mahoney

Blooming for one day
a lily welcomes the sun.
Bumblebees drop in.

Lines

by Kelley J. White

soon enough
this path too
blocked with thorns

Orchid

by Doug Draime

touching, like falling
  through foggy, foggy clouds
of utter shit storms,

holds movement and
      perpetuates movement

all at once.
Where in bright sunlight
an orchid, caresses.

Lines

by JS Absher

steady drizzle
silence of the katydids
keeps me awake

Schneider Valley, September

by Taylor Graham

Outside our tent, ice on the water bucket,
old-paper tinge to the willow-thicket.
The creek that cuts this meadow never forgot
its snowmelt rush down Little Round Top,
snowbanks blocking the road till end of June.
And then the flowers came, so many
shades of paintbrush, larkspur, columbine –
a hiker might think he’d climbed to heaven.
Now lupine’s gone to pod, a cold easterly
rattles mules-ears along the trail. I can believe
again in snow. Time to break camp?
The raven says, “while you can, go home.”

In the arroyo

by Miriam Sagan

In the arroyo
just one
sneaker

a metallic wind in the garden of marimbas

plastic bags flutter like prayer flags caught on barbed wire

gamelon of the river fills with rain after drought

Summer Snow

by Donal Mahoney

A row of lilacs
covered with a summer snow.
Ten white butterflies.

Par Avion

by M.J. Iuppa

Over the lake this morning, clouds
appear dinghy white, like a blanket
slipping off the foot of an unmade
bed without a shhh—
                         Still, clouds thicken—
rolling folds drop to the horizon’s
blue mail slot that’s waiting for
an envelope addressed to you.

Hill of the Blue Goose

by Tom Sheehan

The hill
steals lightning,
sees Boston stand up
after catching a haymaker.
This morning caught geese
like runaway shoes, tongue screech,
traffic cop calls and winter
ticket stub lost in a pocket;
has mirrors of yesterday’s thighs
the moon of the seventh of July
of our lord of “Forty-five
touched with its butter,
shows her inclined to me
and tilt of the hill.
Her thighs still count the thrust.

The cops
broke up a card game
on the left shoulder, toward the river
and West Lynn, in ‘Thirty-nine;
the pot’s never surfaced.
Now a specter in tight pants
sells angel dust, gives
green stamps.
Has new options on street war:
use hammers, screwdrivers, no sunlight.
Night kisses the hill with lonely.
Do not be lured there.
No pig in a poke.

Has anyone seen
Frank Parkinson lately,
meant to die outside Tobruk
in the mutilating horrors of the sands,
but didn’t? Hangs on the hill
like cloud root, spills images,
has literate left hand, flies
with the awesome geese.
Oh, Frankie!

Throws hill shadow
ominous as dice toss;
a family’s left a photograph
in a friend’s scrapbook
in a trunk in a cellar
in the thrown shadow.
Nothing else. No dandruff.
No acne. No evidence of being.
Gone off the waterfall of Time.
Nobody remembers they were here
halfway up the hill once.

Lone blue goose,
tandemless, no fore
and aft, plunges over,
cries high noon of search,
drags feathers,  drops
the quick flutter
of a shadow
on Earth's
curve.

Proverb

by Doug Draime

Five thousand years
of solid darkness,

can not hold its own
to one
shifting slither
of light.

Green Valley

by Taylor Graham

Dry Creek’s a bucking torrent after winter rains.
This afternoon, dregs of summer, willow boughs
smell brittle as old pulp fiction, and buckeye’s
a brown ghost of dead leaves. Only wild plum
stays true to the name of this place, dancing
green to any breeze that reaches up the valley.
Two young Herefords know only drought,
grasses that snap – matchsticks under-hoof.
Whoever named this valley must have come
in spring, wading knee-deep through fields
of vetch entangling native bunchgrass.
How dry the creek. Our way down-stream’s
a two-lane that stops for nothing but the first
red traffic light, eight miles down the road.

Anglo in Saxony

by Terrence Sykes

beech forests
poplar meadows
chestnut groves
dusty roads slice fallowed fields
birch embroidering streams
through fog & mist
amongst the stars
almond & apricot lanterns
paper mâché poppy   cosmos
cling upon & amongst
planets & moons
beyond

below
descent & ascent
confined by rail slats
lullabied & cradled
alone along
the Elbe
river valley
dirt to stone to asphalt
steel sparks smoke
window bound
on the overnight
Prague – Dresden train

A Hard Rain

by Maury Grimm

A hard rain. Łizhiní calls the girls together under the currant bush. For awhile there I feared hail, but it is blessed rain.

The coop run is about finished and there is still a door to make and hang, but that will be for another day. My hands hurt incredibly from pounding nails, pulling wire. A blister forming at the base of my finger and I managed to hit my finger with the hammer once, but it is not so bad.

The wind blows the rain into some windows so I shut them, think about what to make for an afternoon meal, what is easy. Some asparagus soup in the reefer, maybe a sandwich. There is plenty to make a salad as well.

The sheep are now in part of the pasture that has been untouched. It was a sight to watch them rush in, joyful at the bounty.

The work of men, and then the work of women. And then it goes on.

Oregon Coast

by Doug Draime

Tide pools
sand dollars
gull-dung  &
pippins dancing in the surf like
                bow-legged children

Henna

by Angelee Deodhar

For thirty one years, just before this particular fast she would get her palms painted with designs of flowers, peacocks, vines, intertwined with her husband’s name. Ten months after their wedding, she got up early, bathed, and after prayers for his long life partook of some fruit, milk and dried fruit.

All day she ate and drank nothing … in the evening she wore a green and gold silk sari, green glass bangles interspersed with gold ones, silver anklets, a bindi on her forehead, and with sindoor in the parting of her jet black hair, looked radiant. Heavy with child, the very first time she kept the fast she could not bend to touch his feet … he held her gently and fed her the first morsel of food and first sip of water … they then shared the food … and held each other late into the moonlit night.

Now two years later, her frail pale hands are devoid of any color except that in her veins…

the stark moon
no longer worshipped –
deep autumn chill

Raspberry Season

by Wayne Lee

My daughter arrives in time
for the raspberries, wings in
from the east just as blossoms drop
onto the loam and fruit plumps
blood red. For her, I leave all
the fruit on the canes.

Journal Entry

by Stefanie Bennett

It’s no illusion:
That Pavarotti
Finch
Whistles
             While
She works
Beside an ochre
And red
Backdrop

... One octave
At a time.

In the Organ Pipe Monument

by David Chorlton

At a place close to here
in a time far away
the ground erupted
and a future landscape
hung briefly in the air
before the pieces fell
for the Earth to receive.
In the calm that followed
rocks kept their shadows
inside them while
the light pressed down
and beads of water rose
through ocotillo stems
until a flame burst from the tip
of each one, which the wind
can never extinguish,
even when it blows
so hard it passes between
the tangled cholla branches
with their thousand thorns
and moves on across
the valley, bearing
not a single scratch.

An End and a Beginning

by William Cullen Jr

There will come no rains
to cool the steaming masses
but clouds of dust
farmland in the sky
will blow away
like hope in the wind
so hungry children
with grimy faces
will curse their parents
and have to dig down deep
and learn to begin again.

Nocturne

by Taylor Graham

On this ridgetop, spires of pines
reach toward the heavens. Evening
darkens, the tip of each ponderosa
pointing to a star.
What I can see: Pinkish glare
of a neighbor’s security light; urban
sky-glow from a city 30 miles away.
Trespass of light.
It robs me of the Milky Way,
Polaris my guide, a heaven’s worth
of imaginings, and this night’s
shooting stars.

Lines

by Angelee Deodhar

shifting sun squares
on the blue ridge mountain
resin scented breeze

Flannel Shirt

by Wayne Lee

It’s the way the shirt hangs
just so in morning light
mist gray and forest green

it’s the light in the air
just so and the shirt
on the chair just right

Soft Flight of Evening Falcon

by Tom Sheehan

World-viewed incandescence; sun up
under his wings with last quick volley,
slipping through a hole in the sky, lilting
the soon-gray aura without a sound,
a fleeted falcon appears above us.

From Yesterday he comes, from Far
Mountains only Time lets go of. Under
wings steady as scissors a thermal
gathers, not sure the joy is ours,
or his. It flings him a David-stone,

racing the Time-catch at heart,
at our throats. There is so much
light falling down from him,
from wing capture, we fall
prostrate. To look in his eye

would bring back volcano, fire
in the sky, a view of the Earth
Earth has not seen yet. In apt
darkness chasing him, in the
mountains where gorge, lake

and river give up daylight
with deep regret, his shadow
hangs itself forever, an evening
falcon sliding mute as a mountain
climber at his work,

leaving in our path next hiker's
quick silence, stunned breath,
the look upward on a frozen
eye and a wingspan  caught
until midnight horizon
halves the moon.