Jul/Aug 2018 |
e c l e c t i c a p o e t r y
(These are excerpts—click on the titles to view the complete poems)
Special Feature
— Word Poems
Poems containing the words borrow, phone, lost, and nothing.
Three Poems (Spotlight Runner-Up!)
when life cuts in deep, we reach
out to the Keeper of Flames
Rachel Dacus
Two Poems
Praise the warm morning, the radiators and the window
air conditioner running at the same time, the haze on the distant hills, empty
trees struck green and pink at their tips.
Christine Potter
The Red Cross Swim Meet
On the beach, the ocean
watches our backs
decorated with its wet beads
Judy Kaber
Ghazal to the Night
What folly, your mineral dream of power.
I inhale your bones, oh smoky altar to the night.
Robert Okaji
Frogs in the Basement
Are those tentacles in your teeth, a taste of brine, lips in motion?
Patrick Cahill
Mortgage
It's almost comical how I go to such trouble
to protect what I consider vulnerable
while ignoring that which wounds.
Christine Taylor
Oscar
She shrank to her girlhood,
grieving, worn and silent.
Babitha Marina Justin
How My Cat Found Her Favorite Spot in My Room
I am doing well, you tell yourself.
And suddenly you give up.
Ankush Banerjee
Cento for Our Times
Beyond the last treeline on the horizon
where we store empathy
there's nothing to do but be here.
Virginia Bach Folger
Maurice Prendergast's Pont delia Paglia
Some have graced
this path more than once, their yesterdays
hurrying into their futures.
Deborah Doolittle
To a Green Shoot, Sprouting From the Concrete
For years I ate black earth
from shining metal trays, thinking
it was food
Julia DaSilva
Epithalamion for my Dead Grandparents
When I was a small boy
a chickadee sometimes
would take to my head of curls
Bob Bradshaw
Easter Morning: April 1, 2018
they are cast into the woods to decompose
and rise again as vegetation in three days
Michael Hardin
Inside Voices
Outside, a neighbor's house catches
the brunt end of sunrise.
Cameron Morse
Moose Bog
We hope a spruce grouse will land
on that rotting log, parade in the innocent
glory that makes it easy prey for hunters.
Scudder Parker
Fence
We used to rub bare feet in grass.
Before the banished shadow,
before guilt sutured our lips shut.
Charles Kell
Vicente Huidobro's "El Célebre Océano" (Celebrity Ocean)
The ocean is weary of lapping the shores
Of cocking one eye open to the bas-reliefs of the sky
(translated by) Jonathan Simkins
Space Vision
the clouds
emptied their pockets
when we swapped out the war
head for a camera
Keith Mark Gaboury
Find Yourself
Never attempt to open or dismantle the jumping soldier.
Steve Bogdaniec
Time Morphs
wax figures of
monumental elders
melted
Chuck Kramer
Jet Lag and Other Things That Keep You Up at Night
Houses sleep
like loose-limbed children
Windows yawn darkness
like the monsters in their dreams
Lakshmi Arya Thathachar
I Came To Truro
The wind takes the thoughts I'd begun
to digest and scatters them across the
sand road.
Seth King
The Mirror Dreams of Water
Half-memory, half-story,
it comes back to me
when the room is quiet
Marjorie Mir