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

 

Special Feature — Word Poems
Poems containing the words branch, daughter, wrinkle, and globe.

 

Saved
 
Once the hymns begin,
that ramshackle house of worship,
can barely hold the swelling sound.
 
John Grey

 

A Writing Life
 
Say it was a season in the decline
of the New York Intellectuals,
when Solzhenitsyn and Neruda won Nobels
 
Oliver Rice

 

Prolunar
 
The sun brays
at everything like a donkey in heat.
 
C. E. Chaffin

 

The Trunk
 
A dozen years ago, she had come to live with us
from the other side.
 
Shweta S. Banerjee

 

A History of the Saints
 
At the door Mrs. Havershaum
Wants to know if I know
Whose baby is howling
 
Ken Poyner

 

Two Poems
 
It seems to him the old house bulges like a can of beans with botulism—
that all the misery contained within is seeking a way out.
 
Terri Kirby Erickson

 

The Story
 
It begins before the scent of Old
Spice through a window of a car
with Kentucky plates.
 
Shoshauna Shy

 

Crows: The Yard
 
The world
blizzards by, whitens like the knuckles of a fearful
hand.
 
Sharon F. McDermott

 

Kansas
 
Forever and an hour my headlights swallow
figures not defined enough to wear "tree"
 
John Sibley Williams

 

Two Poems
 
It is going to rain someday.
 
Kristine Ong Muslim

 

Two Poems
 
I don't want to pretend that
this is ever going to
be more than what it is.
 
Jim Murdoch

 

Solus
 
I think about furniture:

How still it sits. How uncommunicative it is.
 
Sue Payne

 

In the Museum
 
I thought I saw you behind bars
of dinosaur ribs, but I squint
and my focus frees a stranger.
 
Andrew Oerke