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

Special Feature — Word Poems
Poems containing the words well, dissolve, present, and bed.

Two Poems
 
The lemon surrenders itself,
wedges of light ignited
by late afternoon sun
 

Fiona Tinwei Lam
 

Lairs
 
It skulked in the garden
and sucked the lavenders dry
until only an occasional wind vexed
 

Jane Penaz Eisner
 

Constellations
 
In the latissimus dorsi nebula
I see Pegasus, striding the sky of my skin
as I move my arm
 

Ronnie Sirmans
 

Depression Shows Up Like a Pimple-Spotted Teen
 
like what love doesn't look like:
a golf green browned
where sun sunk his fiery teeth
 

Brenda Nicholas
 

Ninth Life—No Cat
 
I shade my mind from remnants of dreams
omens of our shared natural history
 

Mori Glaser
 

Wedding, and
 
It is the sharpness of those cuts I heal
and the soft plume of seeing, the task.
 

Joanna Brown
 

Waiting for Greta Garbo
 
We could have gone underground
like radicals from the sixties
for all the world cares.
 

Bob Bradshaw
 

Origins
 
And out of the awakened earth,
a lengthened light,
an end to thirst
 

Marjorie Mir
 

Antediluvian Speculations (St. Augustine)
 
It's easy to mock YouTube videos,
but even St. Augustine
once saw an immense molar tooth
and wrote about it
 

Don Thompson
 

My Belly as an Ocean
 
after a week of lounging in Sandwich,
Massachusetts, I waxed on
about my seafood consumption
 

Keith Mark Gaboury
 

My father hammered with words
 
He forced angles to concur,
planed raw wood into roof beams
from trees he cut down himself
 

Sean Lause
 

The Offspring of the Manuscript Defined as Poem
 
Would the hunter stalking the deer, lose sight of the hind
as it springs, running and leaping away? Would the parent
lose its child? The original work its meaning?
 

Carole Mertz
 

Sun Shower in Peekskill
 
now in the way
and disassembled to make way
 

Don Pomerantz
 

Lion's Breath (Spotlight Runner Up!)
 
I thought how wonderful
my father would have found the practice.
I imagined him lion-breathing
on the checkout line at Walmart
 

Steven Deutsch