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

Special Feature — Word Poems
Poems containing the words borrow, phone, lost, and nothing.

 

Three Poems (Spotlight Runner-Up!)
 
when life cuts in deep, we reach
out to the Keeper of Flames
 
Rachel Dacus

 

Two Poems
 
Praise the warm morning, the radiators and the window air conditioner running at the same time, the haze on the distant hills, empty trees struck green and pink at their tips.
 
Christine Potter

 

The Red Cross Swim Meet
 
On the beach, the ocean
watches our backs
decorated with its wet beads
 
Judy Kaber

 

Ghazal to the Night
 
What folly, your mineral dream of power.
I inhale your bones, oh smoky altar to the night.
 
Robert Okaji

 

Frogs in the Basement
 
Are those tentacles in your teeth, a taste of brine, lips in motion?
 
Patrick Cahill

 

Mortgage
 
It's almost comical how I go to such trouble
to protect what I consider vulnerable
while ignoring that which wounds.
 
Christine Taylor

 

Oscar
 
She shrank to her girlhood,
grieving, worn and silent.
 
Babitha Marina Justin

 

How My Cat Found Her Favorite Spot in My Room
 
I am doing well, you tell yourself.
And suddenly you give up.
 
Ankush Banerjee

 

Cento for Our Times
 
Beyond the last treeline on the horizon
where we store empathy
there's nothing to do but be here.
 
Virginia Bach Folger

 

Maurice Prendergast's Pont delia Paglia
 
Some have graced
this path more than once, their yesterdays
hurrying into their futures.
 
Deborah Doolittle

 

To a Green Shoot, Sprouting From the Concrete
 
For years I ate black earth
from shining metal trays, thinking
it was food
 
Julia DaSilva

 

Epithalamion for my Dead Grandparents
 
When I was a small boy
a chickadee sometimes
would take to my head of curls
 
Bob Bradshaw

 

Easter Morning: April 1, 2018
 
they are cast into the woods to decompose
and rise again as vegetation in three days
 
Michael Hardin

 

Inside Voices
 
Outside, a neighbor's house catches
the brunt end of sunrise.
 
Cameron Morse

 

Moose Bog
 
We hope a spruce grouse will land
on that rotting log, parade in the innocent
glory that makes it easy prey for hunters.
 
Scudder Parker

 

Fence
 
We used to rub bare feet in grass.
Before the banished shadow,
before guilt sutured our lips shut.
 
Charles Kell

 

Vicente Huidobro's "El Célebre Océano" (Celebrity Ocean)
 
The ocean is weary of lapping the shores
Of cocking one eye open to the bas-reliefs of the sky
 
(translated by) Jonathan Simkins

 

Space Vision
 
the clouds
emptied their pockets
when we swapped out the war
head for a camera
 
Keith Mark Gaboury

 

Find Yourself
 
Never attempt to open or dismantle the jumping soldier.
 
Steve Bogdaniec

 

Time Morphs
 
wax figures of
monumental elders
melted
 
Chuck Kramer

 

Jet Lag and Other Things That Keep You Up at Night
 
Houses sleep
like loose-limbed children
Windows yawn darkness
like the monsters in their dreams
 
Lakshmi Arya Thathachar

 

I Came To Truro
 
The wind takes the thoughts I'd begun
to digest and scatters them across the
sand road.
 
Seth King

 

The Mirror Dreams of Water
 
Half-memory, half-story,
it comes back to me
when the room is quiet
 
Marjorie Mir