Poems from In Search of Landscape by Helen Wickes
All Must Go for Sale Real Cheap One guy’s work from fifty years back, these unframed watercolors of a white farmhouse, here gabled, here by the sea, next, on a mesa, or in a valley– at least a hundred of the same house– assaulted by weather, birds, eucalyptus; this one with purple wisteria almost lets…Read More
Poems from World as You Left It by Helen Wickes
Listening to Seamus Heaney Read His Translation of Beowulf While at the Gym on the Elliptical Machine Quite Early on a Monday Morning ~ by Helen Wickes The badass dragon’s done for, collapsed, out of form, out of life, a grand deflation. The tatted homey next over, huge headphones, loud on his cell; I evil-eye…Read More
Poems from The Opposite of Clairvoyance by Gillian Wegener
Reflection So you have trouble shifting, have trouble, are troubled, you can’t quite manage how to make the leap, even if it is not a leap really, but just a step, or not even that, maybe a sitting up rather than a lying down. Yes, if you have trouble because you imagined her face so…Read More
Poems from In the Body of Our Lives by Jeanne Wagner
My mother was like the bees because she needed a lavish taste on her tongue, a daily tipple of amber and gold to waft her into the sky, a soluble heat trickling down her throat. Who could blame her for starting out each morning with a swig of something furious in her belly, for days…Read More
Poems from Falling World by Lynn Lyman Trombetta
View from the Headland: Hare Creek Beach, Mendocino Except for the gulls, which lift in languid curves from the sand and swing back down, they are the only ones on the beach, this teenage couple cutting their afternoon classes. She is ten feet ahead of him, her shoes already off, thrown down. Her long skirt…Read More
Poems from Any Old Wolf by Murray Silverstein
ANY OLD WOLF Puzzled by all that e-i, e-i, o business on Old McDonald’s Farm, I once thought vowels were feed, like hay or slop, and therefore the critters cried neigh or moo, oink or baaa: they needed to be fed. They came with consonants like teeth, but vowels came from the man. And when…Read More
Poems from No Easy Light by Susan Sibbet
The Longing for Coffee —the bitter thick taste of it against the mouth roof, the knowing back of the tongue. The black steam rising silently, damp cup warming the fingers, cheek, bright, the bright— eyes opening after weeks of rain. The lashes stick with waking salt. Veins and passages, blood and sound clear. Light pulls…Read More
Poems from Poems from The Distant Sound by Eliot Schain
SPARK When the lightning came through the socket in the house he went out onto the Great American Plain to confront his maker and in the thick night air with only smatterings of rain but the deep thunder that tickles bone he thought of the visions that have changed the world—the brave if slightly stupid…Read More