(These are excerpts—click on the titles to view the complete poems)

 

Special Feature — Word Poems
Poems containing the words funeral, impartial, reputation, and footsteps.

 

Two Poems
 
I always thanked them
for speaking and putting up with me,
the Nick Bottom of my university
 
David Mathews

 

Two Poems
 
My dreams are like Japanese
beetles eating holes into a just
bloomed white hibiscus.
 
Kenneth Pobo

 

Strata
 
By descendancy,
the actual becomes memory,
memory turns to story
told on a grassy roof
 
Marjorie Mir

 

Two Poems
 
I heard your voice like water
Pushing its way over jagged stones
Crackling like a telephone connection gone bad
 
Pooja Garg Singh

 

Three Poems (Spotlight Runner-Up!)
 
When this curving highway lay submerged
Paleozoic sponges sunk their one foot into the mud;
while worms wrote the first lost alphabet.
 
Patricia Johnson

 

Conservation
 
It is a tender job watching changing light
in woman's face shadowed by a lover
or in the eyes of a milkmaid at work
 
Elizabeth P. Glixman

 

Number 4
 
if anyone's gonna marry Linda
it's gonna be me
 
Michael Estabrook

 

Learning to Play Piano
 
How could we arrive
at Symphony Hall? Or anywhere but an auditorium
filled with folding chairs?
 
Bob Bradshaw

 

A Way Into The Forest
 
I understand
how my body traps light and song, how the woods
sing to themselves in their windy meter
 
Joel Fry

 

Two Poems
 
The moon is moving away from the earth at the rate of one half inch a year. The wild turkey on the sidewalk in front of the MRI center doesn't appear to know it.
 
Ruth D. Handel

 

Two Poems
 
Margins like the white robes at Tiannamen Square.
Anaphora like the holes where the bombs fell in Berlin.
 
Himali Singh Soin