Let me tell you uncomfortable I am with silence. I am handcuffed to a joke I can’t tell. Two crows are where my lungs should be. My exhales are the shape of birds. This is serious business. This is an average Tuesday. Finger in the light socket. Fork in the garbage disposal. Recycling bin blown over by the wind. The week’s detritus spread out for all the neighbors to see. I’m hungry but all my knives are too dull to cut anything. The voice coach said sing from your diaphragm. Someday I’ll have an office … Continue reading Same River, Different Day by Patrick Meeds→
…………………………………………………….A poem is never finished, only abandoned …………………………………………………………..–Paul Valery In a downtown daze I trolled among towers reeking of success, rising proudly into the sky, and between them found an alley of orphans, all my incomplete gestures, children who made and dismayed me, never found a home in my heart. They fled the disregard to which I condemned them, banded together, unselfishly shared their pain and painkillers, and admired each others deformities. They tattooed my ink into their fists and waited, one-eyed and one-armed, (the eye full of spite, the arm heavily armed), hoping that … Continue reading Reckless Abandon by Dudley Stone→
It is just after 5:00 a.m. as I browse among the books that prop up my life. I say prop because books are so often a means of leaving my surroundings, tuning out, turning off. I say prop, but more accurately, they are the existential nail on which I hang my time and effort. Poetry, mostly—Ron Rash, Ted Kooser, Wendell Berry, Kari Gunter-Seymour. Mountain words, plains words, red clay words, river words. Places where I am utterly myself and utterly absent in this fading night whose silence is suddenly shattered by the rattling of a … Continue reading Visitatio Divina by Sharon Perkins Ackerman→
My grocery store is under siege by sleepwalkers who show up in pajamas moping from shelf to shelf for a precious memory. There is no one to guide them. Disposable employees are with- drawn or unhinged; I saw a clerk slap a senior shoplifter to the floor. The butcher who knew your name had a gentle funeral. St. Rita’s warm quiet bells called the old neighborhood together. Almost everyone wore their best. I watched it online in a suit & tie. Deli-lovers from bygone eras filled the pews with greetings & non-greetings. Neighbor-strangers are faux-blind. … Continue reading Shopping by Paul Joseph Enea→
Bed calls at midday, when the eyes drowse and honey themselves shut. Sleep curls thick as nectar. We hexagon ourselves, invert. Always a sigh. Hours ripen sweet. We seal away. For a moment, the unbearable buzz subsides. Cathy Socarras Ferrell is a poet and educator. The granddaughter of Cuban immigrants, she finds inspiration in family story-telling and the Sandhill cranes in her yard. Her work can be found at The Orchards Poetry Journal, Santa Clara Review, and other journals. Readers can connect with Cathy at ferrellwords.com. Follow us!
I danced with a shadow, drifting in the wind, Our forms in ev’ry city window cast. We held each other as the night slipped past, Circled and spun in a chanted keen. I stared into you, where sorrow yields, Those hollow eyes where moonlight softly dives. Your touch slipped through my fingers–five to five– Like wind brushing through a silent mill. Why can’t I see your face, your countenance? Do you take root within my dripping misery, From mem’ries flooding beneath the city, Or are you but a flash of Renaissance? Should I still hold … Continue reading Dancing with a Shadow by Zihan Zang→
we imagine she was a bride the skeleton with the small skull a Greek girl………… ……….her head wreathed in ceramic flowers in Azerbaijan……………… ….800 BC a couple was buried where they fell asphyxiated……………. ……by toxic gas their bones circled around each other 700 years ago two people in England were buried their bodies dusted……………. ……with pollen we hope it was … Continue reading Currency by Maureen Clark→
Cottonwood trees are producing more fluff. I am jealous of things so aptly named. The verb take can be a phrasal verb with so many meanings: take off, take up, take in, take away. If I had a name it would be the sound of a bird making its nest in the empty gutter. It would be the sound of wings flitting over roofs, a thirst without forecast, a number so vast it doesn’t need to be counted. How about a name so simple you forget it ever meant something? A name that takes nothing … Continue reading Names by Esther Sadoff→
I inhaled the soot-sotted grime of New York’s summer, exhaled your scent: lavender and rose. Let me explain, because you had gone to Yankee Stadium solo, or with someone else, who knows. Certainly not me, who always inhaled whatever blackness New York offered, you always said. The Yankees were in town, winning or losing I don’t know, you’d be surprised to hear, with all the cards, keychains, jerseys, helmets, autographs. The Mantles and Marises, the Judges and Jeters, the Ruths and Rodriguezes. You name it. I pictured you in that pinstripe jersey I had bought … Continue reading Away Games by E. H. Jacobs→
More than one has said it: that love is of this world only the world of a willow reaching for a river as the river goes its way and of a nuthatch nesting in a beechwood tree as light devolves from day into night The true reckoning of this world is the way we come to know things twice in the wonder first and then the remembering the bitterroot blossom before it fades and everything else we lose but love anyway. A native of Baton Rouge, La., Michael Blanchard now lives in the Cadron Valley … Continue reading The Things of This World by Michael Blanchard→
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