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

 

Special Feature — Word Poems
Poems containing the words orphanage, eggshell, vile, and summon.

 

old tires
 
discarded after their
40,000 mile journeys
and stacked high  
 
Stanley M. Noah

 

New Borders
 
None of the chairs
at my table wobble.
The barista boy assures me
it will be fixed.  
 
Jennifer VanBuren

 

Berkely Waterfront
 
The dog is an arrow
Skimming the placid water-top  
 
Ashok Niyogi

 

Directions on How to Forget
 
Sever a necessary limb.  
 
Jason Fraley

 

Up in Smoke
 
She came to me in a yellow sundress. She
looked like butter melting, like purple M & M's,
like Natalie Wood in This Property is Condemned.  
 
Jose Rivera

 

Visitor
 
Only five people remember
my name. Only one visits.  
 
Joel Fry

 

Two Poems
 
Gathering, I sweat right through my boots
And curse and laugh and scramble
Up gullies and under rhododendrons  
 
Cy Dillon

 

On the Mundi Mundi Plain
 
the body unties
self is fossilized & memory chipped
like the shells on the floor of this spinifex sea  
 
Barbara de Franceschi

 

At Harry's Market
 
The shoppers touch, squeeze, and thump: the rounded horns
Of baby rhinos, the dark breasts of ancient queens.  
 
Elena Arosemena

 

My Buddhist Beginning
 
little blue marble,
locked in great grandmother's
fragrant tin  
 
Charles Clifford Brooks III

 

Storyteller
 
It unspools like a river,
like the silver
filaments of the moon's knitting.  
 
Corey Mesler

 

Three Poems
 
Even if you've had them since puberty,
lose the pipe and the button-up sweater.  
 
William Winfield Wright

 

Well Past Midnight
 
Finally, I used my one-way ticket back to the South
Flashing in winter light, unseen below, silent wings  
 
Patrick Frank

 

The Swan
 
Some rowed backward, some rowed forward, some merely threshed the waves.  
 
Jared Carter

 

A Business Trip
 
In the fireplace the first, confused
insects have begun to roast.  
 
Grzegorz Wróblewski