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

 

Special Feature — Word Poems
Poems containing the words pocket, reveal, ruin, and wake.

 

Holy Night
 
Grandmother is listening
to the rosary on cassette, Hail Marys under her breath,
and a cigarette burning in her bean bag ashtray.
 
Jennifer Yurges

 

Are All of These Shovels Our Shovels?
 
We are not ourselves at the dinner table.
We are musical instruments, and animals,
and abstract ideas we can't explain.
 
Jessy Randall

 

Berry Land
 
before they descended on foot, the donkey
loosed into the sun, when the lavender
again became safe
 
Don Pomerantz

 

Drug Dogs
 
You were afraid of dogs since the day a stray
chased you (then a six-year-old eating a tomato
sandwich on your way to abacus classes)
 
Ranjani Murali

 

Two Poems
 
He melted into a shadow
behind his house but still I heard his rake scratch.
 
Christine Potter

 

Three Poems (Spotlight Author Runner-Up!)
 
That day, I dropped the hay rake
where I stood and walked away
toward the edge of the world
 
Marjorie Mir

 

Lost to Lewy Body
 
In the dark, a visceral calm
Spiraling lead sailing unsheathed
Enter the shoulder, exit the palm
 
John Grabski

 

A Lovely Emaciation
 
the sulking sun
begins to linger along its daily arc, fleshing the planet out
of its thin melancholy ache
 
Danny Earl Simmons

 

35th Anniversary Cruise
 
She married the slot machines,
and he, plumbing; but no more.
 
Nicole Borg

 

Two Poems
 
Birds think
grass is a big casino,
gamble with breeze chips.
 
Kenneth Pobo

 

Portraits 101
 
No need to coerce
the proportions. Just capture the shapes
and shadows
 
Greta Bolger

 

The End Of The World
 
Oh and it sure was the end of something
because the birds started cawing
and everyone cried on their phones with their moms
 
Noah Engel

 

Cosmos
 
here, where striders glide the glaze
above a bed of leaves' unmaking, where
salamander larvae slip their jellied orbs
 
David Oestreich