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

 

Special Feature — Word Poems
Poems containing the words vinegar, fossil, heedless, and embroider.

 

Two Poems
 
A black widow tats doilies across
my husband's eyes. Blind, he seeds
marigolds in the kitchen cupboards  
 
Shanna Germain

 

the silence is worse
 
someone had scribbled purple
pencil crayon over the
wild-eyed man's face  
 
Rob Taylor

 

From the Side Window
 
I can see a grove of bamboo trees.
When it drizzles, they shed their rust colors,
become green.  
 
Arun Gaur

 

A Love Song for Leviathan
 
What we craved
was instant hugeness, rearing terrors,
something absolute without a shape  
 
Adam Elgar

 

Love, Death, Etc.
 
I don't explain that there aren't any angels to consult, and that if there were, they'd hurl themselves like drunks onto the gleaming knives and spears of the spires below.  
 
Howard Good

 

One-Room Flat
 
he liked peanut
butter, Botero women,
and standing right where
the 9.43 bus stopped  
 
Arlene Ang

 

Bathos I
 
Christ arched his back in every corner,
while mezuzot stood erect in mine.  
 
Laurie Soslow

 

Homocide
 
We shouldn't be scraping
young men off the streets
like gum.  
 
Bob Bradshaw

 

I bought charms from the old man
 
His hands trembled—
an epicenter of wreck—
as he gave me the bauble.  
 
Rohith Sundararaman

 

Two Poems
 
hessian walls swayed in the wind
floorboards stuffed with paper
kept hope out
cockroaches in  
 
Barbara De Franceschi