Great Apes
/I can jump through a hoop,
but I’m no killer whale.
Bird of Paradise
/You’ve always been embarrassed by
The bare dirt patches
For which summer
Isn’t entirely to blame
Though you shouldn’t be
In Light of All The Suicides
/Hannah, you are somewhere now. Tucked around the landscape
like a fitted sheet around a bed.
In a Painting, Waiting to Remember
/The man with me dips the oar,
drags it through the liquid silver
as gently as wetting a paintbrush.
Two Poems by John Blair
/there are no apples here
only thorns and her wood
is her own and she’s just
fine exactly where she
is
Two Poems by John Byrne
/How many more days
before the sunrise? How many more days before the sun
dies? Every potted plant whispers your undoing.
Two Poems by Bill Ayres
/Each sun has tried to outdo
The other in brightness.
Each has staked out
It’s time in the sky
Landscape with Loss in Motion
/I stood in the barn with its rafters dusty & leather & watched the horses outside
rooted in their pastures. If their hooves could grow deep into earth,
perhaps they would become trees.
Two Poems by Robin Gow
/“he loves ball-point pens
because he can write in blue.
he mutters gospel gospel gospel gospel
& I never bother to ask what he means.”
Read Morethe knowledge of walls
/“as if having the knowledge of walls
was enough to pull out the pigments that characterizes
the will to live. they think that’s why van gogh drank paint.”
Two Poems by Darren Demaree
/“I climb the tree to spite Ohio.
I hold on to Emily
because I am too simple
to provide any real answers.”
Read MoreReading in the Dark
/“it’s late
for reading and twice
I say good night
and good night, later
finding you mined into
the sheets with your little
light to read yourself
to dreaming.”
Dare I Speak of Heaven?
/“I said, This is sad. Bowing her head
on my shoulder, she sighed,
I’m sad too.”
In the Cold Ground (Tom Waits)
/“there is no hell
only the punishment of being able to despise
all that is light”
Dear Pleiades, I
/“When
the bell rang, I jumped, drew
circles in the water, bright as tigers, bright
as bombs, whiffs of cigar.”
Two Poems by Cal Freeman
/
”If the limits of my language…
If the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest informed my mother’s psychosis…
If you can keep your head… she would often recite from memory.”
Read MoreHuddle House
/“Silence stirred remainders of
what we had left, wishing coffee was more
than beans & water."