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

Special Feature — Word Poems
Poems containing the words current, elude, hidden, and lamp.

 

Three Poems (Spotlight Runner-Up!)
 
how is this done? this rough magic
whereby vagrant molecules (aroma)
assemble on the signal
 
Annie Stenzel

 

Day Lilies
 
I snap off a flower,
cup it in my hand
like a waffle cone
 
Lisa McMonagle

 

Scavenger
 
Inside the tree that resembles me,
evaporation has more patience.
 
Rich Ives

 

Dinner with Zukovsky
 
Tongue-tied I
merely listened. Knew nothing of his
work and less of Catullus.
 
Carole Mertz

 

Gold
 
I begin to contemplate my aloneness.
Easy in a country where not a soul knows me
 
Bryan Prasifka

 

Two Poems
 
my uncle had almost raped a woman once—that
was the story I pretended never to have heard
 
Priyam Goswami Choudhury

 

Two Poems
 
I know the way out of this: four clicks
of the mouse to shut down.
 
Karlo Sevilla

 

Emily As in May
 
So often I end up naked
in front of our neighbors
 
Darren C. Demaree

 

Two Poems
 
The darkest box
of joy
got mold in your basement.
 
Kenneth Pobo

 

Two Poems
 
without fear and loss,
these wars
would be meaningless
 
John Sweet

 

Path
 
a lone
mullein grows, fugitive from Monet's
garden
 
Patrick T. Reardon

 

A Common Ancestry
 
mountains,
how they have come down!
 
Marjorie Mir

 

Two Poems
 
You are metal, not porous
but clanging.
 
Aditi Rao

 

Poet
 
You kept to your poetry
like you kept to the old neighborhood,
both mired in bottomless poverty
 
Steven Deutsch

 

What Is Looming
 
my faked relief
exhaled against a mirror
 
Matthew Bruce Harrison

 

Dusk in Chincoteague
 
silver-sheen oyster shells, orange spirals,
translucent sideways crabs
like fingernails
 
Leigh McDonald