It Never Ends

The day so far: still searching for that epic.
Seafaring? Great mystery of the shadowy deep?
Cataclysm? The earth opening beneath my feet?

No, just the measured stillness that slides
out of my pencil one word at a time.
The vision of my old friend, fresh from cataract surgery,

saying he can once again enjoy looking
at the stars, “connecting the dots.”
A modest return to wonder, the windows washed,

the old universe swimming into view,
a moment of darkness and silence and the awe
of retracing an old riddle, finding north,

February Full Moon

I watch the full moon struggle up the redwood
branch by branch and sympathize. So changeable,
tonight a little mirror on the dark, next week
a sliver of lozenge disappearing in the stars.

A wounded being, not a self-starter,
as the astrophysicists might put it,
just a cold misshapen rock made alluring
by a dose of sunlight and the silent longing
of millions across history, wanting to be—
even three days a month––illumined,
silvering the silent forests, meditating
on the darkened lakes of the Italian Alps,
caressing the high slopes of the Rockies

A Clandesence of Angels

I live in the lavender gut of a horse, a beating heart just beyond the wall. And beyond that two old ladies sip tea on a white porch in the crabapple South, hoping for something that might squirrel up out of the ground, the age-old ground, the Southern ground, the ground at the top of a hill: a thin line of angels listening all boneless and hospitable from above, managing nothing with their tiny, modest, angel hands, hands that might just as well be days of the week. The long-gone Civil War is wearing a small red-and-gold cap once worn by an organ grinder’s monkey.

Touched by Fire

I drank from the fur cup. It tasted like you – orange blossom honey infused with fire. If our forebears had remained in the Pale of Settlement, herding cows, exhorting God, they would have been destroyed with the rest, and we would never have happened. History is riddled with obscure coincidences. The poète maudit Stéphane Mallarme died from the same disease I have. There is no cure, no absolution, no escape. I am not only a prisoner, but also the prison. Please spare me visits from the sort of people who refer to poetry as “verse.” I just want to stand chest-deep in your flames.

River Dogs

River Dogs River folk have destroyed the bridge beneath an obsolete moon their dogs run wild lizards grasped tightly in their iron jaws beneath an iron moon the bridge yaws empty a tracery of absence where the bridge once existed dogs laugh into the throat of history observing the ongoing battle between freshness and salt jellyfish encroach […]

Stick-Me-Tights

Stick-Me-Tights Embraced by weeds, I harvest boards. I’d rather embrace the young bride who will scrape a bungalow to build a mansion but this old fence, precious like barn wood, weathered yet strong, they’ll use for decor, perhaps the front door. Decades ago in a rougher town I set these posts, nailed these planks for […]

The Grey Champion

Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. His poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 […]

I-90 West, South Dakota

Sydney Holets is a poet, editor, environmentalist, intersectional feminist, and vegan who is getting her Creative Writing degree at Hamline University in St. Paul, MN. In December 2018, Sydney self-published her first chapbook of creative writing titled In Full Bloom. When not writing, she can be found in various coffee shops, studying aromatherapy, or tending […]

The Mask

David Chorlton was born in Austria, grew up in rainy Manchester in England, and after spending most of the 1970s in Vienna he moved to Arizona. Since arriving in Phoenix he has pursued his writing, and been active in various capacities in the poetry world. The Bitter Oleander Press recently published his translations from the poetry […]

Jean Lafitte

Lou Marin was born and raised in the western hills of Maine, then spent 20 plus years wandering the country and world in the United States Air Force. He is a published poet and short story writer who now also writes faith based devotionals. He lives in Rumford, Maine. His five poetry anthologies, published by […]

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