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

Special Feature — Word Poems
Poems containing the words arm, patch, center, and strike.

 

Rituals
 
First unbraid, then brush, then comb
Pull tug, tug kink, pull tug kink
 
Gretchel Hathaway

 

The other side of rain
 
We put them on the back floor
of the carpeted earth,
and waited for them to open
in the new world.
 
Richard Weaver

 

Spare Time, Spare Change
 
this once grandpa-nanny
then more recently dissed geriatric
barista now hopes to become owner
 
Gerard Sarnat

 

The perfect act outside of Brady's Tavern
 
Build a sanctuary beneath it.
Hold here a coronation.
Mark the forehead with chrism
under the liquid vault.
 
Patrick T. Reardon

 

Toward Your Father
 
You will recognize their street because the smell of it will remind you
of long Sabbath afternoons, pushing his large leather wheelchair back
from synagogue.
 
Yael Herzog

 

Scattered
 
The journey today
is from bed to desk and back.
 
LeeAnn Pickrell

 

My Grandmother's Apartment (Spotlight Runner-Up!)
 
I loved to spend the night in the bedroom
with carved pineapples topping
the high post twin beds
 
Mary McGuire

 

Lake Elmore, October First (three studies)
 
More happens here, like the basement day-care
center, chorused with children, always cluttered,
doing a better business than the church.
 
Scudder Parker