12

by Stephen A. Rozwenc

a devoted gathering of cosmic pig parts
lounges
in the open rear cargo enclosure
of a farmer's dented pick-up truck

street side parked
for cheap sale
machete shaved smooth
angelic ribs
the tenderest of loins
along with other assorted cuts
eerily confess
no compassion for self
defiles

Stations

by David Chorlton

There’s a flower in the desert
where a man lay down and died, a cactus
blooming at the spot
he put his backpack down,
and a trail of yellow blossoms leading
to the tree beneath which
he sought shade near the end.
                                                 And they bloom,
the penstemon, ocotillo, and mesquite,
again and again, with each returning year.

No Photosynthesis Occurs

by Patricia Williams

I remember eating white asparagus
at a sidewalk café
in the shadow of Cologne Cathedral      
on an amiable day in June.

This seasonal ivory treat,
topped with sun-colored hollandaise sauce,
tastes best in the company of friends,
with glasses of pale German wine.

Recipe:
To cultivate white asparagus,
bury the shoots in dirt as they grow,
allow no exposure to sunlight.
Use this same process to produce
sterile, non-permeable minds. 

Riparian July: The San Pedro

by David Chorlton

A last river flows
where cottonwoods glow
against the storm side of the sky
as light behind the mountain
turns to rain.

LInes

by Theresa A. Cancro

broken bottle
at the end of the path
blue-eyed grass

Two Cents

by Maury Grimm

A steady rain throughout the night and now a thick fog lies across the field, making fence posts a haze and the cottonwoods not even visible.

I scan the news feed and would rather listen to Łizhiní crowing in the gray than the radio. Not much seems to change and it seems too much sometimes, the constant hate of war-drum beaters, people afraid of each other because of race, sex or religion, the greedy decimation of our home. I am saddened as I approach 61 that we could not learn to live together on this lonely planet and care for her better.

I have no religion but this place, the places I wander, my family and meager friends. The heaviness I feel, is it just the fog? Another day of small, but meaningful accomplishments? One hopes they be meaningful, are the right way and not another mistake to undo, redo, overcome.

Chart out the tasks for the day: Fix the chicken coop door so the magpies do not get in to steal eggs, measure fence lines, gather materials for building a new coop for winter, check the currant bushes and harvest quelites, radishes, cilantro. And maybe there will be time for a mountain foray before meeting with the Forest Service to discuss the fauna, the endangered plants.

I will put my two cents in where I can and pray what I leave reflects who I was and am.

Nocturne Incomplis

by Karla Linn Merrifield
         
Frogs stop rain starts
as wind stirs midnight
with hiss drip rattle creak
full-moon gutter-gushing
puddle-making vernal storm
delivers cool June
on a Canadian front
lately of Toronto.

Wind moves waves
toward the end that is not.

Signals from a Dark River

by Tom Sheehan

Dangers are everywhere about my river: its own porous bog whose underworld has softened for centuries, the jungles of cat-o-nine tails leap up into. Once, six new houses ago, one new street along the banking, two boys went to sea riding a block of ice. They are sailing yet, their last flag a jacket shook out in dusk still hiding in Decembers every year. One old man at river's mouth grows rows on rows of strawberry plants in his front yard. These plants run rampant part of the year. He planted them the year his sons caught their last lobster on the last day of their last storm. Summers, now, strawberries and salt mix on the high air. A truck driver, dumping snow another December, backed out too far and went too deep. His son stutters when the snow falls. Worn wife hung a wreath at the town garage. At the all-night diner a waitress remembers how many ways she put dark liquid into his coffee. When she hears a Mack or a Reo or a huge, chromed but cumbersome International big as those old Walters Snow-Plows used to be, she tastes the hard sense of late whiskeys. He had an honest hunger and the most honest thirst, and thickest eyebrows, she remembers, thick, thick eyebrows. Once I drove a purring Saab 580 miles to my brother's home in Conneaut, Ohio in 8 hours of summer darkness:

six-pack hanging cold
         on his pre-dawn's split rail fence
                  he never drank beer.

Rain

by M.J. Iuppa

Slow, at first, then over-
flowing, a flood that no one
warned us was coming from
a distance, so far away.                                      

Two Plum Trees

by Sandy Benitez

Two purple-leafed plum trees
stand as sentries on opposite ends
of the earth-hued house.
Hummingbirds flit in and out
while crows fly loudly overhead.
There is a drought in this land
but not here, maybe next door
where the neighbors removed turf
and replaced it with beige gravel.
Or down the road where succulents
line the garden shelves.
The plum trees are always aubergine,
blooming and birthing fruit,
shading the wildlife who come
searching for sustenance and shelter.

For the record

by Stefanie Bennett

We’ll understand
That enough
Is enough
When the stars
Climb down
From the Labarum’s
Chemistry
Of change

... Leaving
It bare
          Like
A hole in
The heart
Of darkness.

I asked a cow if she wanted depression meds

by Emily Ramser

and she just shook her head,
saying she was a virgin
in sex and medicine
and that her body was a temple
for the carnivores
who'd suckled her on plastic udders
in place of the mother who'd abandoned her.

Upon My River, Upon My Soul

by Tom Sheehan

What of all the spills that ache here --- upland dosage where the delta’s done and settling its own routines, the near immeasurable transfer of land and other properties of the continent chasing down Atlantic ways, shifting nations and cities from directly underfoot, moving towns along the watershed, oozing territories.

Oh, how I loved the river feeding the ocean.

I have plumbed the Saugus River at its mouth, found the small artifacts of its leaning seaward, tiny bits of history and geography getting muddied up against the Atlantic drift, suffering at tide’s stroke, roiling and eddying to claim selves, marveling at a century’s line of movement, its casual change of character, its causal stress and slight fracturing under ocean’s dual drives, the endless pulsing tide and the overhead draft of clouds bringing their inland torment and trial, land and loam and leaf running away with the swift sprinters of water, the headlong rush of heading home like salmon bursting upstream for the one place they can remember in the chemistry of life, impulses stronger than electricity, smells calling in the water more exotic than Chinese perfume.

The flounder, sheaving under the bridge at the marsh road, pages of an un-sprung book, one-eyed it always seems, hungering for my helpless and hooked worms, sort over parts of Saugus in this great give-away, and nose into the extraneous parts that were my town, my town.

“Listen,” my father said to me, his eyes dark, oh black during a whole generation, “for a sound whose syllable you can’t count up or down, for what you might think is a clam being shucked, a quahog’s last quiet piss on sand, a kelp bubble exploding its one green-stressed overture.”

He talked like that when he knew I was listening, even at ten years of age.

He wasn’t saying, “Listen for me,” just, “Listen for the voices, the statements along Atlantic ritual, every driven shore, rocks sea-swabbed, iodine fists of air potent as a heavyweight’s, tides tossing off their turnpike hum, black-edged brackish ponds holding on for dear life, holding a new sun sultry as anchovies … all of them have words for you.”

I hear that oath of his, the Earth-connected vow all the sea bears, the echoes booming like whale sounds, their deep musical communication, now saying one of his memorials, “Sixty-years and more, I feel you touch Normandy’s sand, measuring the grains of your hope, each grain a stone; and I know the visions last carved in June’s damp air.” 

“Oh,” he’d add, “you sons, forgotten masters of our fate.”

Deepest of all, hearing what I didn’t hear at ten, but hear ever since, the hull-hammered rattling before rescue from the USS Squalus, 60 fathoms down off Portsmouth, the sound and the petition count never fading; three quarters of a century of desperation and plea hammering in my ears.

Say it straight out: “Some were saved and some were lost. That is a memorial.”

The eels squirm and fidget on Saugus farmlands, pitch-black bottom land gone south with rain and years, gutter leanings, great steel street drains emptying lawns and backyards and sidewalk driftage into the river below black clouds. The worn asphalt shingles on my roof yield twenty-five years of granules, and now and then tell that story inside the house.

A ninety-year old pear tree shudders under lightning and offers pieces of itself as sacrifice to the cause, dropping twigs, blasted bark other lightning has tossed into the soft footing, the grayed-out hair of old nests, my initials and hers and the scored heart time has scabbed up, dated, pruned, becoming illegible in the high fancy of new leaves and young shoots. There, too, went my father’s footprints in one April storm, washed away in late afternoon as he lay sleeping in that tree’s hammock; and grease off my brother’s hands from his Ford with nine lives hanging on a chain-fall; and across the street a neighbor’s ashes spread under grapevines and pear tree an August fire later took captive in dark smoke I still smell on heavy summer evenings.

This is my word on all of this:

 It is where the river’s done, where a boy’s hung between the sunlit surface and a pinch of salt, who’s read of twisted souls at sea, knew sweet misery of warming sand, I know how water marks horizon’s dwelling where dark stream and ocean meet twice in the flow of bayside surge and ocean merge grasps the river’s downhill push, losing lush things like the very gravel I have trod, and the locks and board holding back my river horde.

Oh, believe … I have come up by image from the sea in other times, by overhand, by curragh, by slung-sailed ship of oak, afloat a near-sunken log; have crawled sandy edges of the bay, looked back at waters’ merge and flow, found the river’s crawl reversed where floating parts are nursed, toting redwing nests the winds abuse, good ground the rain in swift return hauls down the river … Saugus on the loose.

Ever now, when I fish at the mouth of the river, rod high, and hope too, I catch awful parts of Saugus. I know the stream and ocean meet where I dare dangle my awkward feet, where love-lies-bleeding and the primrose meet, where tempting sea and bay greet all of rhyme and so its clime:

The rainbow catches up the horde;
         Sea color's set by the Lord.
                  This you can believe;
   It’s Saugus I cannot leave,
         I race the river to the sea,                                                                                              
                    always it’s ahead of me.

Is It Ever Spring Anymore?

by Doug Draime

Outside the robins return
Pecking the thawing backyard earth
Like benevolent and silent jack hammers
They are relentless, only pausing cautiously
For sounds of human beings: banging  crushing
Yelling  spewing the arrogance of
Self consumption into the cool polluted air

California Visit

By William Cullen Jr

The only rain that fell
was a sun shower
as if the drought
just couldn’t let go
even for a little while
as your award winning
jalapeno peppers
succumbed to the heat
you took it out
on the scarecrow
knocking him down
with one punch.

Visions of the Old Ones

by Kevin Heaton

Tears of brother eagle fall to mother waters.
No longer does he rise above clouds borne
on pristine thermals. Herds, too vast to number,
lie gasping beneath an incoherent sun, their lifeblood
flowing to tainted streams on a journey to troubled
seas. Creatures in the depths retch the bitterness.
Thorndrops vex through weary eyes, and salt
the wounded furrows of a people still cloaked
in the earth, forgotten; more trails for their tears.
They mourn the ravaged child born in hope,
abandoned. A land of plenty; rendered into blood.

Bird in the Tree

by Taylor Graham

An owl in the grain of a stump –
what had been a great oak in sparse
woods – image of a bird etched
by years of rain and drought, lightning
strike and natural healing.
In woodgrain, the idea of bird. Owl
watching with sharp-taloned eye.

Lines

by Joyce Lorenson

where the river widens
over the sand bar
fingerlings in sunlight

God’s Gift

by Daniel Barbare

In
return

he
gives
me
his
bluebird
on
the
roof

with
a
cheerful
song

and
the
violet
plumage
of
another
dawn.

The Calm Before

by David Chorlton

A raven’s wing peels away from the sky
above an empty road
that does not deviate
from its course beneath the clouds
until the first bend
where an oak tree twists into a breaking storm
and the coyote
who precedes lightning
crosses over
and stops time in the mesquite.

Ellipsis

by Wayne Lee

black angus
meat on the hoof
identical dots disappearing
over the horizon...
pronghorn nowhere
to be seen

When The Sun Rises

by Doug Draime

I want to hear
the bird’s song, that’s all. The
meadowlark in the dense dark oaks,
or the whippoorwill crooning
to and fro in the sun
of the sycamores. I grow so damn
weary of the human sound,
flashing on with its artificial light
and the rat-tat-tat sound
of the collective Ego,
spinning on its
perpetually bloodied,
nowhere wheels. I want to hear
the blue jay high up
in the maple tree, squawking
a shrill celebration. A thrush singing
to me from the birch tree.

LInes

by Perry Lee Powell

What we kill
In our
                   Treading on the garter snake    
Back yard
What we don't

Overview

by Stefanie Bennett  

Watching the storm cloud
Roll up its sleeves
Above the serialized
Splash
Of an ever
Changing
Cosmos

The Thunderbird
Dives
For cover.

Lines

by Tammy T. Stone

The river carrying
Sounds of self, inviting
Witness.

Lines

by JS Absher

slower and slower
crossing a plowed field
after rain

Lines

by Ed Higgins

frog song
heron pond-stalking
listening

Do not microwave

by Emily Ramser

I didn't read the warning,
in fact, I forgot it was there,
and I microwaved my head.

My brain exploded.
It's still dripping out my nose
and ear canals
three years later.

Lines

by Theresa A. Cancro

small silence --
a night heron ensnared
in fishing wire

Last Supper

by Gary Beck

The migratory chickadee
tries to eat at the feeder,
but territorial sparrows,
tough town birds,
have no sympathy
for the traveling nomad
and drive him away.

Scalopinae scalopus

by Barbara Brooks

Don’t know what killed the mole;
on close inspection I saw no damage
from talons of barred owl or punctures
from cat attack.

But there it was, looking like a stone
with feet;  small, pink with nails.
Pointed nose, short naked tail, no eyes or ears,
just a rock with paddles.

Didn’t want to touch it,
no matter that I pick up dead birds.
Scooped it up on the shovel
and tossed the body into the woods.

Something will eat it.

Journeying Through

by Seth Jani

I am simply amazed by the light
Dissolving in the purple vat of evening.
The heavenly entourage of leaves
And starshine, small pools of water
Gleaming in the spaces of the wood,
So dreamily prepared and assembled.
This deep in the forest a single dab
Of honey can light your life on fire.

The Last Frontier

by Sage Borja

Swimming underwater seems closest
To dancing in the Milky Way
Knowing nothing but the amount of air
I have left in my suit
Staring into unknown charters
Not a single sound
But my breath
No longer am I fearful
I am up here
The blue planet is down there.

Thank You

by Larry Jones

Hummingbird lands on the feeder,
takes the nectar.

Flies over to where I sit.

Eyeball to eyeball he hovers.........

You're welcome.

February Journal: Wednesday, February 6, 2013

by Don Mager

Sky’s flattened cloudless platter slides its
short hour into the chromatic scale
of yellow’s pitches.  Overhead spreads
creamy buttermilk.  Lower west, it
edges toward pineapple.  Then lemon.
Turmeric.  As it slips away, its
eyes too piercing to smile, the half sun
glows.  Against the cold, sky holds still in
its golden Beryl moment.  It cracks
as vapor trails appear and spread.  One
lifts from the airport at the city’s
far other side.  The other streams down.
Their undersides burn.  Rise of crimson
aims straight toward magenta’s steep descent.

empathy of Trees, Malaga After Daniel Minter’s “empathy of Trees"

by Sonja Johanson

living so precariously, so easily
undermined by insistence

of water, geometry of swells,
frequencies which could lift

a saltbox as easily as a boat,
fog that would hide the banks

for days, still you loved that spare
island, the barnacled rocks were

as your heart, fish your children, dark-
skinned oaks your company. Why

should these have been taken from you?

Beachhead

by Tom Sheehan

What is inordinate are the hippopotami of rocks near Hermit Island in Maine, thick-skulled, unblinking, refusing to mourn themselves. With a half-displaced surge out of sand, as if they've lost their breath in that terrible underworld of salt and constant push, their shoulders beam as smooth as agates from the iodized wash, gray pavilions  of armor plate massive in titillating breezes. Some are remote, half-seen, the unknown at reunions holding quiet places, waiting for recognition in a place in the pool, a niche in the sun. Only the sun enters these huge hearts and moves them, only the sun stirs the core where memory has upheaval. But in moonlight, when the cold year winds down and sand leaps to draw lace as intricate as six-point stitching, their broad backsides become mirrors and a handful of earthquake glows at rest.

Lines

by Joanna M. Weston

incoming tide
of black oil
sandpipers

Three Deer in Oquossoc

by Sonja Johanson

East will take me back. I drive
west. I wend between snowbanks,
until the road delivers me
to a sleeping boat launch.

They stand on the frozen ramp;
watch me with coats that are
better than mine. Ice houses
and snowmobiles edge the distance.

I have to turn around, I say
to them, I went the wrong
way. They stamp and chuff.
No, they tell me, this is the way.

Misery Whip

by Sonja Johanson

Used to be, trees were so big
we couldn’t see the jack
opposite side of the cross-cut.

Now I can haft an underbuck
and cut the cants alone.

Fall

by Michael Friedman

Light, the reflection of brass,
winks in the chill
and tumbled scattering
of leaves.
Naked branches
no longer pulled
in long gusts
through unfurled sails
of photosynthesis.
Leaf hands with green backs
and matt silver underbellies
curl yellow
and cup in rigor mortis,
snap at the wrists,
point back to the suppleness of youth
until they skitter
against dry asphalt,
lifeless in the whip
and whim of autumn winds,
while once tender bark
hardens under a scale
of lichen and knots. Dried crystalized sap
fixes in twists and drizzle,
to become dull as scab
in the leaden rough of winter.

Honeysuckles for my sisters

by Diane Sahms-Guarnieri

Scattered perfume    hypnotic scent
breathe white-charmed blossoms
wandering vine, which like you, we grew upon

rusty fence days of step and climb –
as children again, we each pick a curling swan neck
trumpeted petal, pull out stem through broken base

drop of nectar’s kiss tantalizes each of our tongues.
All our tomorrows were far away as constellations
oasis of dreams’ expansion infinite as promise.

If only we could have known of hereafters
of impending doom, of those who would
suck honey from our bodies, dews despair.

Only if we could have seen sickle moon omen
felt evil winds blowing from unknown futures.
We were set up - like the demolition of a house of cards

fall of the last dominoes on a worn out pathway.
We served our time. Those tenacious wedding bells,
pulled ourselves out from under the gauzy veil.

Fading

by Michael H. Brownstein

A thin lisp of fog smokes beyond the trees,
white tracks line the farm. Somewhere
someplace else is lost in the picture, the gray
photograph of winter's thaw, the nearby river
missing what makes it a river, one identifiable bird
an unidentifiable smudge on driftwood, the optimism
of beginnings, a hole in white bark.

Nightingale Place

by Tim Gardiner

no longer alive, Jackdaw Drive
much less pleasant, Robin Crescent
kept at bay from Partridge Way
too much talk on Cygnet Walk
a Sunday roast in Wren Close
passing through Swift Avenue
taking up the Magpie Chase
this is not the Nightingale Place.

Lines

by Patricia Williams

big thunder clap
few raindrops –
much said, little action

Zen Masquerade

by Catfish McDaris

raindrops swallowed by
the Pacific, a snowflake
melts, no one listens

Descent

by Taylor Graham

A Great Horned Owl. Three hoots repeated
at intervals. A school lesson, mantra, a warning –
a message to solve. That owl's no stranger,
a local presence. We live with it like thunder,
or dynamite muffled by hills.
It stooped soundless to take our lamb,
leaving no more evidence than water
siphoned from a pond. A change in pressure,
an absence; algebra of regret. Spirit
of a lost one. A second voice joined the first,
call and response.
Then silence, the long history of night.

Lines

by Sandy Hiortdahl

Some bright June morning,
Mockingbird will call you, too,
beyond the known world.

Winds vs Trees

by Yuan Changming

The sad sigh of nature
keeps bugging each inner tree
Into shapeless shapes

Suspended

by Susan Keiser

Winter has frozen her work now,
secret names shimmering, safe, anguished.
Lulled, we enter it like a rocking cradle,
the white, vaulted room
where frost settles into glass,
where we shrink with the noise of death
drawing itself across the snow.

Our hands are older than our eyes, some say.
Some say our memories are forgiven,
that we’ve come to a place
famed for the absurd,

but this is the part where we light the village farolitos,
like children accustomed to time travel and invisibility,
striking our matches in the dark.