James Bradley
The plucking of a lone, slender
Silver hair—a fair postponement
Of the aging process? Deep lines
Will ever score the dry, shrunken
Brow of the crumbling facade of
The temple once called Beautiful—
Inscribe grotesquery (mockingly)
On youthfulness & longevity
The elongating shadows of
Small-leaved linden in full bloom blot
The thoroughfare like […]
Max Stone
Ungodly, aching for a while.
Why isn’t this sufficient?
Little sips of pain.
I knew how freely the cold air
would let him hold me.
Kept shoulders hunched,
holding myself as grudge.
This evening my body could drop
like a turkey vulture from the sky.
Transient scavenger: it’s the family bird.
We see them all the time.
Pamela Hobart Carter
Last week with my daughter, I ran the track
at Hiawatha, unable again to count laps with accuracy.
What is this inability, this absence
of connection to a simple reality
played over a few slow circles around
a tiny area? Was that four or five times passing
the young family in the sideline gravel
under the landmarked oak? My mental tangles
begin […]
Eli Coyle
Cancer arrived in your house
under the cloud cover of rain
blotting May across paper hearts
I tended to the thoughts of you as morning glory
blooming from the rounded hills
of green mounded graves
Watching as the leafs floated and filled
with water in the rainstorms
leaking chemo from tea bags
I let you die over and over
each month every moon
They cut your breasts from you
under the morning shadows of October
Eli Coyle
I haven’t left the house in a week
Winter is peeling open the insides
Of death and love
Two gifts left unopened
I ease eastward against the east slope of the Sierra
Shrouded in a million imaginary birds
Fifty dogs in the dog park
The playground left vacant
Five hundred kids on Zoom
Walking north, slight west
Towards the pine tree broken
Its spirit wished to be deciduous
Naked and unnerved
In the canopies of ganglia
Eli Coyle
You are diseased, San Joaquin
can’t you see the cancerous corporations
pinning needles in your chest?
Your keepers in cotton dyed tees
with almond eyes of the sun
With bodies of pistachio
cracked open and discarded
Foster Farms who slaughter
three million turkeys in the jungles of Sinclair
one million chickens in the streets of Livingston
one million humans
in the bottomless pockets
of sprawling metropolis
In the Cowschwitz feedlots
by the hundred thousands
Heather M. F. Lyke
It smells of stale PB & J
and I have left behind my stuffy,
but there is a Highlights magazine.
I settle in, wrap legs criss-cross-applesauce,
circle items not supposed to be here—
wish I could circle myself.
The lady in a pale blue sleep set
asks questions about each circle
while down the hallway tangle my mom
plays hide-and-go-sleep […]
Daniel Edward Moore
Courtney Cliften
so I save eraser shavings
just in case. I stay awake until morning
so I can water my plants with the sunrise,
but then I sleep all day
and the sun takes credit
for tomato blossoms.
I’m in a competition with the night sky
to see who can catch more sadness,
but there are so many different kinds,
and we disagree about the rules.
Like sometimes the moon and the sun
are in the same sky, […]
Max Stone
You knew what I meant when I said
I saw a sunflower in hell
and good art sucks too.
That sweaty night
in my empty apartment,
I thought we were immaculate.
It’s all just a series of waiting rooms,
outdated magazines, plastic
plant arrangements,
water coolers glugging on and on.
Time is bottomless boring sludge.
I […]
