Origins

by Stefanie Bennett

Mohave Shadow-Land’s
Kinship depth
Is nothing less
Than
       A full
       Moon
In the rose
Window –.

Reality Check at Sea

by Karla Linn Merrifield

To learn
wild stories,
their old calculus?
The gyre teaches ancient cold truths.
Listen.

That Leucistic Alligator

by  KJ Hannah Greenberg

That leucistic alligator, all scaly coruscation,
Brought, among ladies taking afternoon tea,
Syncope of the worst kind.

I heard their cries, while parked in a commode,
At Randy’s, the neighboring bar & grill;
A stomach virus had unfastened me.

While I’ve shrugged off romantic love, preferring
Mundane synching up to flowers and candy,
Their shrilling fetched memories.

You were no rare reptile, but a common beast,
Habituated to painful biting, swallowing whole,
Gulping the most intimate morsels.

I mistook your beautiful eyes, your special colors,
As signifying rare, emotional limpidness.
All along, I missed your guile.

Crocodilians don’t think on duplicity; they naturally
Graze on muskrats, coypu, plus broken hearts.
Solipsists seemingly smile.

High Noon

by Tricia Knoll

Fantasies will end,
even swollen dream seeds
the red bird dropped
into your lusty loam.

Come a high spring sun,
let warmth pull forward
a green uneasy sprout
you never imagined.

Whispers of sacred dusk

by Diane Sahms-Guarnieri

1.
Meadow’s leaf-beats of heart’s red maple radiance
falling, one by one, upon earth’s deeply rooted love;
yellow ginkgoes double-winged fans falling like
Tree Yellow butterflies of Singapore fluttering;
along leaf strewn pathways vibrant burgundy oaks
slick as vinyl shine among all the faded and
forgotten, as if each existence only
a whisper or droplet in which the swift moving
seasonal flow rides it over the edge
the holding on, before the letting go.

2.  
Together dressed alike from caps, thermals,
jackets to Timberlands, we easily
step into natural rhythm with the
same solitude and freedom once felt as
children wandering inside woodlands. Old
warrior wind swords through trees; blue fire flame
of sky’s arms encircling; butterscotch sun
slowly dissolving; autumn elms yield, glide
as we hike inclines and declines, then the
sudden brilliance in blue jays’ blades cutting
the air, flashing; and goldfinches flickering
in and out-of  vision before resting
in nakedness of old limbs reaching, always
reaching toward the dizzying heavens.

3.
Long red rays of once lived days setting.
Deer’s night eyes stare into our restful steps –
white tails flickering as candles glowing.
Moon’s white underwing of protection,
as we cross over evening’s bridge,
hand inside hand, whispers of sacred dusk.

Found poem: Through this red haze Source- John Updike’s Rabbit at Rest

by Laurie Kolp

The sea is a vague sudden
fall impinging nature
sun unseen over moon.

Three stony feet, rotten mulch
a wheel’s hedge: yew shoulders
spread through crabgrass.

Weeds, the missing teeth,
muffle dry bark
as ominous as chicory.

Bewildered

by M.J. Iuppa

I doubt that Canada goose
wandering, then holding still
among the cornfield’s blind
of crushed stalks, is caught in
a moment of forgetfulness
or despair— the way it lifts
it head upwards, just above
the zigzag of the row’s ruin
to see what it’s missing,
(which might be everything
at this instant, who knows?)
it looks and looks without
 moving— yet I am, moving
without answers, thinking
about this— silly goose.

The Future

by David Chorlton

This is the bellowing, whimpering
world with stripes and dark spots
that appear in the snow
when it sparkles and crunches
beneath a firm paw. This is the world
whose wingspan is wide,
where a wolf chills the dark
and light is a drop on an ocelot’s eye.
It has tufts on its ears, a ruff
and a fin, and a dangerous glow
in a dart frog’s skin. This is
the chattering, whispering world
with canyons and caves,
snow around its edges
and fire in its deepest parts.
From saber-toothed centuries on
through jungles of steam, down rivers
that crested and soaked
into memory, by high tide and low,
wildfire and drought, its bright
feathers shone and the sea turtle’s shell
bore the weight of time
through distance and days
to the mysterious night
when she pulls herself ashore
to lay the future’s eggs in sand.

Black Mountain

by Matthew David Manning

It's called Black Mountain,
because of how it looked at night:
a void you could climb
and look out at the city
mirrored by still water.

Some made the mountain home.
Their houses filled with the dark,
slipcovered in moonshadow.
Young couples drove access roads
up the mountain in the evening

to speak, listen, and understand.
Their favorite songs glowed soft
on their faces. Sometimes, in winter,
when they could see their breath,
people from the bottom swore
they saw ghosts finding each other.

Untitled

by Stephen A. Rozwenc

The dust-billed motorbike path
that leads to the end of suffering
may well slither
out of this emerald green rice field
like a defanged cobra

once sorrow
is accepted as permanence

Three Haiku

Eyes slightly open,
Fog lying across the field-
Goosebumps on my arm

          -- Yvette Galicia


Drip, drip, no chirps heard
Look out through the door’s holes
Gentle breeze caress

          -- Alejandra Oregon


Ghosts of her giggles
linger frozen in the air
In the bitter frost

          --Sarah Garcia

Remnants

by Ion Corcos

Seaweed scattered,
browns and rots to wrinkled skin;
flesh shed on the high tide.

Sand worn down by the constant thrust,
the ocean surges, rushes to reclaim

prints of paws and long gone feet,
fractured sticks and relics
herded ruthless in a heap.

Colourless shells smashed on rocks,
tangled in stems;

only shells soaked in brine
show signs of life, then fade,
as the sea returns to itself.

Seagulls screech, waste time;
they have time to waste.

They scavenge among remnants,
threads of seagrass, a dead fish,
frail reminders of the deep.

Drip Torch

by Matthew David Manning

The scent of crop fires filled the car.
Kansas land always gave a slow blink.
Smoke rose in patches like freckles.
The lake was far, but sky stayed her eyes
like two index fingers by her temples
almost touching almost touching.

Untitled

by Stephen A. Rozwenc

4 unfair arguments
with nirvana
imprisoned in metaphysical hedonism
pea pods

Lines

by Terrence Sykes

hydrangea leaves
clinging in vain
knife cutting frost

Roses

by Carl Mayfield

Yellow and white flowers,
each one shaped like itself,
espaliered against the house,
neither host nor prisoner
to any mind, taking root
where the earth still lives.

Lines

by Hayden Bunker

Mercury glows red
as a coal banked in the stars—
rubbing cicadas.

Lines

Kelley J. White

late March
clothesline sagging with
melting snow

Corta Brunita

by Fiona Pitt-Kethley

A row of broken houses by the road,
a village of the damned, marks where it lies.
The path winds downwards to a jade green lake,
soft toxic sands gilded with pyrite dust,
marked with the footprints of the last who past. .
They planted trees here years ago…They died.
The withered saplings still have plastic wraps
This soil, it seems, will not rejuvenate.
Yet one thing “grows” here in this barren land,
small crystal sceptres springing from the rocks.

Etch

by Alia Hussain Vancrown

A barking pack of coyotes, cacophonous precision
nine distinct yups of the fox that answers me
when wandering the dead of night is an exhaustion
of darker questions.

Frogs overwhelm the swamps
that surround the house and emerge earlier each year
as the planet threatens to boil.

Too much physics to untangle, too much umbilical
to unwind.

Here is a broken thing, here I shape it beautiful
here is a dead brother, here I avoid bones and soil.

Savoring green apples, what sinks gets seeded so deep
gets swallowed, and sprouts—

what lightning does to a willow
how evening rain undoes morning sun
what birds do to their own reflection, here is

something chiseled, here is sound pollution
the erasure
of stone.

What word exists for when the ocean moves us
standing still, for miles, across continents
that are colonized by none other than a soul

what word exists to replace soul with a thing so biological
you can prick its vein and donate platelets
count the leaves, count the loves

what word exists for when the names you scream are names
too raw to be sung at divine, reverberating decibels?

He points out every new hawk that arcs in circles
and now there are twelve, and the clock is rigid
symmetrical, and life goes on, windswept chimes
jangling, noticed in the unnoticing.

Rare Morning

by Ed Hack

A chatty, misty morning for the birds
between the dawn and brighter light, a kind
of pause before real day begins, disturbs
this balanced and exquisite fragile time.
And here's the gold patina that ignites
the tree, but softly through the mist. A dove
repeats its hooting, dying call as light
clicks up one notch. This is what morning does.
But still no sharpness in the air, no edge
that shows this moment's passed--the day preserves
its gentleness as if this is a sketch
of paradise, which some few might deserve.
Another click, the light is plainer still.
The noise is coming soon. Now, peace, distilled.

The Bay Rises

by Casey FitzSimons

The trains were first to go, then
the freeway hum.

What I’d expected
was a flood: water’s raucous breach
of coast defenses, the sound of its
incursion on the land. I’d expected
people running from a tsunami
whose surges came at intervals, occasioning
fear and flight, violent and desperate acts.
I’d envisioned familiar establishments
submerged to their transoms, their names
still legible on signs and marquees.

What did happen
was more orderly: discussions
over dinner, debates
in the houses of supposed wisdom
about property ownership, the Magna Carta,
theories of legal performance.

Businesses closed before the water
rose around them, some dismantled
behind plywood panels in tidy
deconstruction sites. There were no
floating palettes, sodden sofas, or gyres
of random debris. What might have become
flotsam and jetsam had already been moved inland,
traded, repurposed, re-situated.

What has happened
is a calm tide of smooth water, seemingly
at my eye level. It is a marsh marked off
by telephone poles and a few pitched roofs
of red tiles surrounded by heaving
unmoored islands of grass and peat. Oil slicks
have given way to marine stench, swooping gulls,
and the dinghies of treasure seekers.

Last to go was the racket of city streets. Quiet
has risen with the water level.

Lines

by Jonathan Tu

Hard wind blowing fast,
Leaves falling off the old trees,
Drifting with the wind.

No Haiku

by Darrell Petska

countless
floating
yellow
bellies

ancient
river

mouth choking
on moonlight

toxic
torpedo

Apple Tree

by Gareth Writer-Davies

the original still stands

bent over now
upon staves

a thousand cuts
have spread the arse-shaped apples

into common crumbles
and king sized tarts

bitter
the wild tempered whip

green
the merry kisses of May

red
the soft sweet fruit of grace

enough
for wasps and beasts

Clywedog Trail

by David Subacchi

From Minera’s dark lead mines to Kings Mills
Nine miles of footpath for relaxation
To be followed without hesitation
Along the river, through the North Wales hills.
Here where sweet birdsong the countryside fills
Iron was once made, first in the nation
When John Wilkinson was at his station
Forging his great girders, hammers and drills.

Now at Nant Mill ancient woodland stands
With later planted beech and sycamore
And on Erddig’s gardens a white dove lands
Undisturbed by the fiery furnace roar
Now we walk Clywedog Trail in silence
Free from dark smoke and industrial violence.

The Price

by Ed Hack

A smear of broken glass is what the ice
is now. It's here because it's in the shade.
The wind-kill twigs, the torn oak leaves, the price
the cold exacts so earth can be remade.
Small bits of night with wings, five black birds land,
make tiny storms of leaves to find some seed
then launch themselves away. The world's unplanned,
except it's not, for need must answer need.
And therein is the paradox of this
catastrophe, this cross-eyed gift of life.
A squirrel ransacks the leaves, the loaves and fish
of all that's left behind the winter's strife.
An atom casts a shadow too. No grist
too small for life, for nothing can't exist.

Catamount, Late Summer

by Joe Cottonwood

Come with me. Here’s
the secret trail. At the edge
of the potato field, crouch through
the barbed wire fence. Pass the stone
foundation of an old homestead.
Enter the maple forest, the green oven.
Bake, slowly rise like a gingerbread figure.
Follow, it’s fine (there’s no witch).
Release rivulets of sweat.
This is nothing, the foothill.

Listen: the purr, the burble, the rush,
the small canyon of Catamount
Creek. Remove boots, splash yourself.
Splash me. Cup water in hands
to pour over the face. Let water dribble
inside the shirt, drip to the shorts.
Relish the shock of cold
against hot parts.

Work uphill now, at last
out of the trees into the land of
wild blueberry. Pluck, taste
tiny tight nut-like explosions of blue,
so intense, so different from store-bought.
Gorge, let fingers and tongue
turn garish. Fill pockets.

Climb with me now among rocky
outcrops like stair steps to the Funnel,
a crevice where from below
you push my bottom, then from above
I pull your hand. Emerge to a view
of valley, farmland, wrinkles of mountains
like folds of flesh. How far we’ve come.
This is the false top.

Catch your breath, embrace the vista,
then join me in a scramble up bare granite,
farther than you’d think, no trail marked
on the endless stone but simply
navigate toward the opposite of gravity,
upward, to at last a bald dome
chilled by blasts of breeze.

At the top, sit with me, our backs against
the windbreak of a boulder.
Empty your pockets of blueberries. Nibble,
share — above the rivers,
above the lakes, above the hawks,
among the blue chain of peaks
beyond your outstretched tired feet.
Appreciate your muscles
in exhaustion and exhilaration.
We have made love to this mountain.

Hear a sound like a sigh from waves of
alpine grass in the fading warmth
of a lowering sun. Rest.
After this, the return
is so easy.

American Beeches

by Ryan Harper

Walking with purpose to the wood’s heart
I have come to consider the pure stand,
set off from the trailhead (so help me god,
I would have stayed).  Through congeries
of maple and poplar, through purple flowers
oned-and-manyed into catkins,
through burs and knots of what will be
raspberries, I have come to assume the American
beeches in spectral, undifferentiated mode.
I would have stayed, so help me god.

Under the sawtooth canopy, off white barks tight
on trunks—flexed thighs—the light limes;
aglow in this tract I turn round
a single hulk and find carved
the initials: RH

under the knife the mirror of nature

What uses a species whose skin stays smooth
into old age—cotton-batted,
vivisected to a specimen:
unlobed planetree, eyeless aspen,
swabbed, flush for the marking,
cheap for the practicing omniscient—
hewed arbography, spanning
aureoles—arcade, catalogue,
reliquary of the sacred roundels?

Start and stop your measure at the sought
design and any stand is pure: the first
and last maples, outside by definition; measures
focused until even the lone American
beech dwelling elsewhere in the poplars
grows to exclave; measures taken
until at last there is no elsewhere,
no exclave, only interruptions in the pure stand.
Again I turn round the notched hulk

What is this Titan that has possession of me

missionary of the alien work,
who after the uncircumferenced mandala
compresses properties beyond old native lines
dislocates the unmarkable growths.
What befalls the namer in the woods,

the marker of logs, who esthesic
and aching from a native fever
initializes a singular species: American
beech, surely related to European beech?
We can only say “the same” if we think difference
The day is getting on; the limelight bends—
yellow and green repartitioned in the deepening
shade.  O Abendland, arcade
of the burnished hour, reclassify what you will:
considering the stand I take

leave among the maples and poplars,
burs and knots, a  little embrowned;
I did not start here, by god—
I will not stop, without intent.

Never Mariah

by  Catherine McGuire

I.
From my viewpoint on this flat plain
the stormfront’s billows                      iceberg down the Cascades
like a Titanic-buster                 wet droplets mass like steel
overhead.

II.
Autumn rakes the fields          combs leaves
from alders      baring thin branching fingers
that reach toward geese skeins           ebbing in waves
across a periwinkle sky.

III.
And why does lonely humanity call the wind names
at all?   Why do we hear it weep         and mourn    
as Tess the rain cries our tears?           We want to be big as the sky
stretch our skin            miss nothing.

IV.
Dusk’s purple stains the afternoon     shrinks the landscape
fade to black                to the width of a lamp post’s light
as the field puddles                 glint like shards
of fallen sky.

V.
With sight gone           the voice of wind grows
tumbled clatter of objects unseen       sensed as portents
gives wind the ghostly face    that deserves               demands
a name.

Footprints, Formby Point

by Mantz Yorke

Footprints of horses,
deer, cranes, New Stone Age people:
traces in old mud  
exposed at low spring tide, now
being ground away by waves.

Brown Thrasher

by Julie Ramon

In Piggott, Arkansas in a cottage
not far from where Hemingway lived,
I watched a bird bounce and bury its long,
curved beak into leaves, pitching them
in all directions. Its song—drop it, drop it,
cover it, cover it, pull it up, pull it up—
tapped at the window like the small bits
of sleet that collected overnight.
Flapping its wings, it revealed its spotted
breast timidly, as it saw me watching,
the way a woman allows herself to be seen
naked the first time. Head tilted—yellow eyes
searching, it sang and waited for a female to join.
I’ve learned a song is different than a call,
in the same way wants differ from needs.
And, when one became two, they disappeared
in the thickets, and I got back into bed.
Here, wants and needs were all the same—
in the form of his body pressed against mine.

The Clearing

by Ryan Harper

Each morning walk reminds Elijah he forgets
how many trees grow in his town—how covered, groved,
and leaved the passages, the hiking trails, the yards.
Always he starts early enough to be almost
alone in the morning, sharing passages and paths
only with the joggers, the bodies he has come
to know as well as voiceless passing will allow:
the man who wears shorts all year round, the small
flourescent woman he supposes is his age
who breathes like an alarm clock—A in summer, B

or B flat in winter.  In autumn he slides to the side of the trail,
the thorny side, when he hears someone striding through
the leaves, predicting who’s approaching from behind
by the pace, the running foot’s brush stroke.  Your ear is strange,
Lorraine had told him when he noted in passing one day
the small caesura in her breathing as they lay
in bed.  He was the first to notice.  He forgets
to think about the thickness of the growth, each walk,
until he finds himself in the clearing in the midst
of the pine grove north of his house some half a mile.  The light

falls on him as new despite his daily visitations,
despite his knowing this is the open space at which
his usual trail ends—grassy, warm, nothing to hear.
Routinely lit with absence, remembering shadows, here
Elijah looks up—only when there is nothing
to see except a blue vacuum, an ancient sun
that will not be engaged directly, and scabs—
white vapor trails flaking from flights that may as well
be all departing.  Every morning, Elijah stops,
weeps here a moment in full light, then turns around,
walks back through the grove, listening behind him for footsteps.

Lines

by Lizzie Holden

Blackbird of halo breath.
Scratched branch
beneath you.

Free Will

by Tom Montag

The mountains
push us away,
pull us close.

The rest is mere
philosophy.

Lines

by Debbi Antebi

the orb-weaver spider
rushes towards a dry leaf
caught in its web

Snow Light

by Kara Douglass Thom

The clouds stretch and resist
across the sun, the snow
hums like fluorescent lights
strung along the ground.
Flickering, buzzing. Yellow
then blue.

Morning Dew

by Virgil Huston

Iridescent hues glisten
in morning dew warmth
Walking softly feet wet
Green surrounded by
opaque grey the path
evaporates

The Wound

By Denny E. Marshall

Day after day, the earth will bleed
With blood of water and of land
Humans born with the gene of greed
Day after day, the earth will bleed
Mostly for our own selfish needs
Not just companies understand
Day after day, the earth will bleed
With blood of water and of land

Challenge

by Stefanie Bennett

... In over my head,
All seasons
Are
Contortionists.

Hawk Against The Sky

by Ed Hack

The circling, minute adjustments of
its telltale wings, its ancient circuitry,
black diamond of its brain. Who speaks of love
but all the while neglects the hawk is free
to babble on unmoored from fact, that black
shape circling now. So much summed up in names--
a plunderer, a rapist too, and rapt
in holy light. The hawk's beyond all shame,
like God who breaks us into faith. Against
the gray or sun-dazed light raw hunger guides
its circling flight, impeccable and cleansed,
angelic wings' dark silence as it glides.
Whatever else sky is, it's home to hawks--
implacable and circling, their force.

A Farmer Collects Plants for Louis XVI

by Andrea Wyatt

visiting settlements along the tidal reaches of the Chesapeake

André Michaux sketches patches of tiny pale flowers in moss
with bumpy sweet potatoes at the edges

yellow bees in the chestnut tree leaves

“we cannot sett down a foot, but tread on
Strawberries and fallen mulberrie vines,”

he writes in a small pocket diary stained with saltwater and bear grease

meets men & women who trade beaver skins

roast fat red kernelled ears of corn, dry spicy dark tobacco leaves

gather sea lavender & eat oysters till they keel over

as the canvasbacks and mallards obscure the sun

fly through the wet November sky

they have no idea it is past time to leave

as Louis pushes himself away from his royal table
filled with empty oyster shells & corn.

Lines

by Carl Mayfield

nightshade at dawn:
    poison apples
        lightly frosted

Trails

by David Chorlton

Along a voiceless trail
are the shadows of birds
who once flew over it,

and embedded in the dirt
the tracks a fox left
one full moon’s night

when its tail curled up
behind it with a spark
at the tip of each hair.

Language doesn’t help us
find a way back
to them, only grants

the means to ask where
they have gone, and whether
any other trail leads there.

Slovenian Lament

by Terrence Sykes
　
fog cloaks
gray slate roofs
flint & shadows
streets void
stone mute trees
black canvas blank
steady rain
falls upon the autumn
flowers silent at dusk
darkness drapes
muted melancholy
trellising the soul
burja winds announce
death or resurrection
certainty of uncertainty
dissonance & dissension
chapel & steeple
distant tolling
vertigo & vengeance
mistaken towering babel
forgotten in the ruins

Lines

by Theresa A. Cancro

winter thaw --
a sycamore sloughs off
old bark

Mirroring

by Stefanie Bennett

The Sake moon makes
Busy lake-shore
Love
On the rocks...

Cloak of Fog

by Tim Staley

The sun picks the scab of night
but clouds foam over the light.

The clouds fling their fingers
against the mountain, glide up
and over or sidle for miles
against the canyon wall.

A mountain lion tiptoes
down the canyon to the spring,
both of us are spooked
by the boom of nuclear bombers
running maneuvers all morning
under the cloak of fog.

Lines

by Carl Mayfield

field fence in winter--
honeysuckle
the only green

The Dance of the Meek Lake

by Mendes Biondo

the meek lake
budges with breeze
stalks of sedge

the factories
on the opposite bank
stand still

too hard to
dance with
the meek lake