Sharon Perkins Ackerman holds an M.Ed from the University of Virginia. Her poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Southern Humanities Review, Appalachian Places, Still: The Journal, Meridian, Blue Mountain Review, Kestrel, and various others. She is the winner of the Hippocrates Poetry in Medicine international poetry contest, London 2019. Her second poetey collection A Legacy of Birds will be published in 2025 (Kelsay Books)
It is two weeks past Mother’s Day, late afternoon, when I see a doe on the neighboring pasture. Light slices across the grass from its peach horizon, nearly blinding. Around the fringes of haze, I see there is also a tiny fawn with noodle-like legs behind the doe, and a few feet away, the neighbor’s small bulldog bluff-barking the two of them. The doe does something that I’ve never seen her do before in her elegant tiptoe strolls—she lifts one leg and hooves the ground, then the other leg, same motion. Her head thrusts forward … Continue reading Finding Isabella by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
……………………………………………..Collision risks are growing every year ……………………………………………..as the number of objects in orbit ……………………………………………..around Earth proliferate. ………………………………………………………………………—CNN How can prayers make it through 130 million pieces of space junk careening and colliding at 18,000 miles per hour in an orbital graveyard bits of broken satellites, the remains of booster rockets and wreckage from weapons tests As violence spreads like head lice more and more prayers swirl the skies jostling and jiggling to make it to heaven and petition the Lord please one night without sirens ………….wailing us awake let my daughter learn to walk ………….on … Continue reading Space Junk by Claire Scott→
for Caitlin Daughtered with the dogwood’s dirge, we expect love to have seasons, ceaseless in its business of change, inconsistency its own persistence. Gravity and petals disclose the antiromance of an age ahead of innocence. The syllables in neglect are more dutiful than parents. Undaughtered onomatopoetics: the how creak of the floorboards, the could you of stiff hinges, a question mark of dust motes. When the father left, the river branched into three and she took a city of bridges. Maggie Rue Hess (she/her) is a PhD student living in Knoxville, Tenn., with her partner … Continue reading running like water by Maggie Rue Hess→
One mile into my daily jog, New Yorker poetry podcast in my ear, hoping for insights and hardware to Sherpa me up poetic Himalayas, and Mary Karr is reading Terrence Hayes’ Ars Poetica with Bacon, which leads her and host Paul Muldoon, to a number of salutary comments on rashers, including Mary’s confession that she never ever passes up bacon, and that given our genetic proximity to Sus scrofa, eating bacon is a form of Eucharistal sacrament, although as a Jew I’m thrown a bit by the host’s claim, though both Mary and Paul are … Continue reading Ars Poetica, Forbidden Fruit by Gary Grossman→
As if to be human is to seek the warmth of another body, ……………………………………………..skin and the course of blood beneath The blood beneath the skin of a city street, how it gives back ……………………………………………..the heat when dusk untethers from the sun’s radiant reach The radiant reach of the heat rising from the skin of the street ……………………………………………..as would any figure of lonely drift and form A form that you meet in the shape of its heat ……………………………………………..and carry into the cool clime of dawn. Ken Holland has been widely published in literary journals and nominated … Continue reading The Radiant Reach of Heat by Ken Holland→
I ready myself to read poetry for a group of graduate students. They’ve had the ingenuity to find an old, abandoned chapel near campus and turn it into a poetry space. Eavesdropping from a pew, I find myself listening once again to choruses of before; before the first published book, before marriages and mortgages and self-support. There are lots of munchies—I’ve forgotten how hungry students are, how irregular the meals. There are students reading poems from phones rather than spiral notebooks, whose edges might as well be the coiling of years between us. There is … Continue reading A Place to Hold Us by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
Keeping Time The mayfly lives two days, a swallowtail butterfly two weeks. The last generation of monarchs born each year endure for months flying the hundred mile a day migration, ribbons, orange and black, unfurl high across the sky. Dragonfly nymphs thrive five years in streams hiding under roots and rocks. Arctic woolly bear caterpillars chew willow leaves for seven. Spiders spin their silk orb webs for twenty years, liquid in their abdomens pulled out as threads by gravity, like water stiffening to icicles. A human life is to the lives of stars as the … Continue reading Keeping Time and Awake in the Night, 2 poems by Patricia Hemminger→
When I encounter a word I don’t know I check the books and screens. Even after that, there remain words I cannot find the meaning of. Some are multisyllabic thefts from languages not mine. Some might be mis-spellings or typos that look correct until not. Some congregate in sentences but so many just sit there refusing to surrender meaning. And then there are the words I always thought I knew: tree, rain, stone, island, myself. Michael Penny was born in Australia and now lives on an island near Vancouver, BC. He pursues his interest in … Continue reading Ignorance by Michael Penny→
…………………………for John Kander Music plays in my head, and I listen. Sounds and rhythms, echoes and vibrations. This is how I move through space, how I comprehend my world. Long, long ago, when I was a baby in Kansas City, I caught tuberculosis. In those days, there was no cure. Isolated on a sleeping porch, I learned to match the sounds of approaching footsteps with the ones who made them. But footsteps go both ways. A residue of loneliness lingers after all these years. Music is the antidote. Anne Whitehouse’s poem, “Outside from the Inside,” … Continue reading The Composer by Anne Whitehouse→
I just bought an eight-pack of bony Jesuses, an Amazon special, to be sure Jesus remembers this little lamb if I run a red light or ease through a stop sign as an 18-wheeler rolls through I also bought eight fuzzy rabbits’ feet on fake gold chains in case I need good luck when stopped by a crotchety cop who had a serious spat with her husband this morning when she discovered condoms in his back pocket I will hang a dangling Jesus on my rearview mirror on even numbered days and the rabbit’s foot … Continue reading Equal Opportunity by Claire Scott→
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