Firefly

by Yuan Changming

Burst with courage

You are flying around, using
Your little light
Like a sharp scissor tip
To rip off the heavy curtain
Of all the darkness
Blown out of frenzy dreams

The Reef (Sattahip, Thailand)

by Ellen Chia

At knee-deep,
The ebbing tide's a semblance
Of an expansive glass aquarium;
Within, a city's vivid lights
Have long since snuffed out;
A gradual dimming culminating
To a washed-out white
Before armies of minuscle greens
Laid seige,
Cleaving to this labyrinthine rubble
Like a skintight cloak
Though muffling not
The echo strains of a requiem.
What remains is this
Museum of shame
Gazing back at us.

San Bruno Mountain

by  Dan Richman

Looking up
the slope is studded                                                                 
with Wild Mustard,
Milkweed, Sticky Monkey,
Lantana, Coyote Bush,
Sage,
Yarrow,     
Lupine, brutal
but useful
Thistle, and Wild Fennel,
and scattered within the Red Fescue,
the orange kisses
of California
Poppy. And then it
ends and one is struck
by just how
blank
the sky can be.

green so

by Steve Piazza

the piebald fawn grazing conspicuously alone

unaware as we are of the vanity in our projecting insecurities
about outcast and shunning and how does this happen
and
oh    the    poor    thing

cranes effortlessly to reach challenging leaves

while we waver against the steadiness of nature
and resort to clashes over domain and supremacy
and
who    wins    this    time

according its grace before despondent eyes

8.7.19 8.59 a.m. 71 degrees

by John Stanizzi

Privets ragged in the heat begin their late summer droop lifted somewhat by the slow
ooze of Joe Pye’s lanky mauve, and the goldenrod spirals in the humidity, swirls of
nurls reaching through the air, and here, remnant of a drama, more air than substance, a barred owl
deposited a feather, perhaps dropped as he swooped down then up startled frog on the rising.

Lines

by Susan N Aassahde

frog stiletto dustbin
radio pyre
strawberry fee curfew

No Signs of Intelligent Life

by Todd Mercer

Beam me up, Scotty. I’ve seen enough.
This place is devoid of civilization.
Get me the fuck out of here, before
the prevailing madness mires me in muck.
The locals keep voting to abolish
the locals. They think it’s in their interests.
Something went wrong at the schools,
learning is no longer possible.
People like this cheer for meteors
that are streaking straight toward them.
They can’t foresee the destruction,
only focus on the shiny light.
How they’re still here even this long
is a stumping mystery.
Rumor has it the same citizens
used to want what’s good for citizens.
Little proof remains. So who can say?
They must have somewhere to go
after here’s obliterated. No panic
at irreversible damage from
intentional decisions they have made.
They could fix their society and ecosystem
for free, but they reject the effort,
they suspect a darker motive.
Stupid people lack the means to self-assess
and to alter course. Beam me up
and set a course for basic rationality.
Enlightened self-interest prevails
on the higher quality planets. This was
an asylum before the funding ran out.

Rugged Northern California Wilderness

by Julia Lesel

Grinding. Pulsing. Flashing, dragging, crashing waves.
Rugged, jagged, foggy at various levels.
Bright yellow birch leaves sparkle, dotting through the sequoia forest-scape.
A glen of fat birches, flooded at the bases by creeping moss
Messy sword ferns the edge of a rapid river,
Shaggy, drooping from angular cliff walls, heavily wet.
Cattails elongating from thick spiny bushes
Flanking the winding road out of town.
Glassy silver-green leaf broad clumpy strangling vines,
Large silvery boulders dispersed between a bare spot in the strangling heaps.

Lines

by Sylvia Semel

the water lily
floats by in slow motion
the still sandpiper

On Visiting an Unnamed Swamp

by Ahrend Torrey

Amid high brown cypress in thick
dark air, amid the scent of dirt

and fern, Water Moccasin
lurks head-up, through

black water— question mark,
after question mark.

Cicadas in the distance—
buzz, buzz. Some-

where between they merge
with crickets’ chirp

lacing through the dark air:—
what throbs and throbs of faint light.

Coho

by Sterling Warner

Skokomish longhouse
Overlooks wintery pines
Salmon seaward run

7.14.19 7.22 a.m. 69 degrees

by John Stanizzi,

Pecking the air with their chuck chuck, the grackles worry the trees.
Owl feather floating delicately on the pond, are you part of the reason for the
noise this morning.  Was that you whose wide rump I glimpsed
dexterously wheeling through the thick overgrowth, touching nothing, silently.

Newfoundland Photography by G. Tod Slone

Monkstown

Ile d'Entree

Burlington

Saint Lewis

L'Anse aux Meadows

Superluna

It's very nearness changes who I am.           
--after Sarah Harwell "Super Moon"

by Judith Ann Muse Robinson

Dark dome of night. Split. Ablaze
at the clerestory. Buona sera,

Superluna of the blood. Welcome. Rest
awhile within our brimful nest

of empty opulence. Creation holds ephemeral
residence enough for you. Clever

hangs its head beneath Niagara's
tongue turned sifting whisper

of Sahara's shifting sands. Distant river
ice explodes a scent of new-mown hay.

Fleshing-out begins of sclerotic bones. Rudder
lost. Dam-breaking floods

expose dry riverbeds draining smelted ore
of sword and shield.

Babble becomes anthem. Becomes
lullaby. This palsied foot taps Tango.

Barred Owl on the Road

by Barbara Brooks

It looked like a rock
until it swiveled its head,
yellow eyes looking at me.
It was sitting on
the side of the road, its drab
wings brushing the ground.

I leaned down to pick
it up, its talons softly
grabbed my arm, its

barred wings fluttered
in the wind of the passing
cars.  It clung to my arm.

I tried to cover it with a
bag.  It flew instead.

Lunar Eclipse January 20, 2019

by Jane Richards

8:30
The moon shines pure,
    --no ordinary moon, but perigee,
      so close to earth it exhales past its boundaries--
glistens the snow,
cuts shadows in crisp lines,
brings clarity to a winter night.

9:46
The moon, smudged at its bottom edge,
    --no ordinary smudge, like a passing cloud,
      but a stain, a creeping disease over the white face--
lays a dirty cast on the snow,
smearing shadows--
gloom hovers.

10:16
The moon, a feeble frown of light
    --nearly overcome with thickening shades,
      red stain soaking through the grey--
turns snow into a dark shroud,
shadows into black holes--
the night broods in silence.

10:32
The moon gasps,
    --aspirates a last flare of light--
shimmers snow,
recuts shadows
before all illumination dissolves.

10:40
The moon
    --in total eclipse, a strange rust-colored beauty,
      old blood swirling in murk--
abandons snow and shadows to eerie black--
the earth shoulders a heavy burden,
sinks into itself,
threads to its sun severed.

7.11.19 7.40 a.m. 59 degrees

by John Stanizzi

Pretentious candelabra, the staghorn sumac, and the breeze this morning as
overheard as a whisper in church.  A pair of green frogs
noggles the landscape with gulps, and just along this shore the tendrils of
diving reed-grass are as sleek and smooth as a brushstroke.

Lines

by Roberta Beach Jacobson

concrete hedges painted green

Lines

by Paweł Markiewicz

at the dawn some ants
are swimming in the noble dew
but owl needs water

The Red Tide off the Gulf of Mexico, Florida

by Michael H. Brownstein

The colors of the ocean
turquoise with bits of pickled sky blue,
and a blend of grape juice purple—
and then, its skin ruptures,
a sudden rash red and boiling,
a lesion bleeding rotten blood.

Photo Op

by Phil Huffy

The loon is not compliant
and folks who dare to try
to photograph these creatures
will find things go awry,

for acts of disappearance
are made with style and ease;
they dive beneath the water
and do not deign to please.

You’ll watch for one to surface
but don’t expect to find
it’s where your camera’s pointed,
the loon can read your mind.

Postcard from Lake Gregory, California Joan Eyles Johnson

Turtles

by Olivia Cyr

Jane, my college best friend, licks the back of her hand,
and closes her eyes. It’s the salt, she says. It tastes so earthy.
I say, it tastes like the saltwater, you mean. No.
She turns my palm over and licks it from the heel
to where my pinky finger begins. Like salt.
It takes me a minute to taste brininess the way that she does,
when I open my mouth and try a handful of salt water,
lapping it gently. Jane laughs, pulls me gently along.
We walk along the small, tucked cliffs above the shore,
looking out onto the Naples water.
My sandals work the backs of my ankles like sandpaper.
I stop, take them off, toss them in my drawstring bag
and step through the billions of pearls of sand and salt.

A bicycle whizzes past us, and Jane giggles. For a moment,
I think she is flirting with another pizza boy,
riding through the cobblestone valley in half-moonlight
on his way to the pizza parlor, al chiaro di luna.
But Jane grabs my elbow and squeaks.
When I look where she’s pointing, my cheeks go fat with a smile.
And suddenly we’re girls again, long before the throes
of college and career life, plucking ladybugs from each other’s hair
after swimming in the lake at camp; tanned, smooth legs akimbo
on the grass while we talked about dreading that first day of high school,
how we thought we’d much rather be squeezing lady bugs
until their plump, pearly bodies engorged, popped like little fireworks.

On the cliff, Jane pulls me, and we skid recklessly
down a sandy path that slopes between jagged rocks,
our bare feet sprinkled with bubblegum nail polish.
I land at her side, and as we come to a stop by the frothy water,
I put a hand over my sunned chest. I suddenly feel exposed
and want to run forward and scoop them up.
Baby turtles have hatched somewhere along the tiny,
bubbly waves of high tide. Five of them.
Barely minutes old, they sleepwalk, like blind little starfish,
their legs and arms tender flippers. They slog through the sand,
exhausted and oily, as it sticks to them
like granules of sugar on my grandmother’s whiskey cookies.

I pull my hand back to my mouth, lick the inside
of my wrist to taste the earth. We stand, perfectly paced monuments
on the beach, watching the turtles sluicing themselves
with water and coiling, clumsy. Beached, quintuplet sacks of flesh.
Jane is so careful to step around them, and studies their patterned trails,
divots in the sand from their pointed flippers.
The carapace of each turtle is a slick skin sectioned out into squares.
These are leatherbacks, I tell Jane from across the way.
We watch them, crouched over their trails, as they race to the ocean,
wiggling rhythmically, resting every few paces.

I imagine them dehydrated, desperate to reach the water,
breathing heavily with newborn aches all through the tender
curves of their limbs and I’m frightened for them.
I could pluck them from the race and carry them to the water,
past the hermit crabs and sand spiders. I want to mother them,
careful and reasonable. Now, my niece is almost five but
I think about my sister nursing her all those times
when she was a baby, when my sister was just twenty-two
and I was writing for newspapers. I worry about when
she will curl up beside her mother like that again,
and know it will be because someone broke her heart,
and not out of instinctual hunger. She will be desert rocky and mica strong,
and glistening all at once. She will be seventeen
squishing ladybugs on picnic blankets while I write in Colmar
with capfuls of Veuve Clicquot at my little kitchen table.
When she was just weeks old, I cradled her at my own chest
while she gazed up through pink eyelids, both of us full of wonder.
Nursing became fluid, it became competitive for her—her little mouth
grazing over her mother’s skin, my sister just running
her hands over her face so she could look at her, not wanting
to let her eat even when she fussed. That hard, rudimentary pit
in her body of motherhood would make her too eager
for her baby to stay that small.

I though often about how she would grow up,
how she would have to move and shift and be, without leaning on us,
and it choked me, that thought of growing— of them each learning
the push and pull of the other. How will my sister do it?

Jane and I have been in Naples for two weeks,
and Jane has finished her book review, while I have buoyed myself
on the beach in the evenings and written in broken Italian
on paper napkins. It is our last night here;
I dig my hands hard into the beach sand,
encouraging the nest of turtles to go, go, go.
And they move without assistance.
Where’s their mother? Won’t they drown, you think?
Jane shimmies her bottom into the sand next to me,
but the babies have dipped into the tide.

Synchrony

by Jeff King

Five geese
southbound descend
flit-flash, stealth-plash—
splash splash splash splash splash—
across the surface of a catfish pond,
sycamore-encircled,
to rest their wings momentarily and drink
then rise again
to evanesce northwestward,
the ascending sun tincturing the skyline
burnished copper to salmon pink.

composition for spring on the salton sea

by Ginny Short

the salton sea is silvercalm
haze rises up masking
the interface of sea and sky
a lone boat moored offshore
mirrored on a pewter surface

Lines

by Susan N Aassahde

kiwi copper raindrop
lobster duet
charcoal slug faucet

How

by Abby Park

Stepping on the mountain gave me a fresh breath of air
mother nature victoriously stood; it
Took lots of love and time
but people don’t understand the goodness rooted in the mountain
except for this one not so modern man,
It was how he loved it not why.

Lines

by Carl Mayfield

bruised
     two apricots
paint the desert

Lines

by Rp Verlaine

lone river frog
how  far must you swim
to find love?

6.10.196.22 a.m.48 degrees

by John Stanizzi

Periods of heavy rain are forecast for later today; the
offices of sun and sky are transformed to overcast clouds, and the
nominal steam rising from the water drifts like a flimsy ghost
dreaming, as the polliwogs leap farther out of the water every day.

Recovery

J. Conrad Smith

The field went back wild,
sedges and grasses—foxtail barley,
bluestem, bromes, and goosegrass—
thick and teeming from the ferns
and deer tongue and the clusters of perfume
bold violet bright gold alfalfa blooms
burgeoning in the pitches and gradual crooks
that snaked down to the bulrush, cattails, and
buttonbush canopied by cottonwoods standing
escort to the waterway that at night swelled
with fireflies like cityscapes from a dark-side orbit
that spread and saturated the booming thirty acres
with a chatoyant sheet, a bioluminous fog mocking
the milky way for being so static and boring and
tame as the glittering tides formed conga lines
to recede back into the tiny creek that—unlike the
cold implements that would snatch it all back—
only ran when it rained.

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