Poetry

Haphazard wind lurches through old-growth forest. Green canopy churns. Broadside trunks groan. Duff flies upriver like weightless condor feathers. Soggy soil slips grasp of tendril fingers underground. Twisted roots, black as grizzly claws, rend and rupture, disconnecting life force from its center. Totem topples, limbs crack rapid-fire, crescendo in a landslide roar that reverberates through […]

Young people at a music festival a nation’s grandchildren are never coming home as our bombs rain down     on another side of the world. Is it 45,000 deaths now? According to the UN most of the dead are women and children. Untold numbers are     wounded and orphaned. We weep for the mothers and all of […]

Reading them daily now As friends pass through Twisted, bumpy roads, Towards horizons And endless stars Carrying on Together, Where hearts beat Each moment Into something more Than just another day. Kirk Gothier

Wednesday Adams, wearing Thursday Boots, had dinner with friends at TGI Fridays on Saturday night. They went to Ruby Tuesday for dessert, each of them ordering a sundae. Garrett Snedaker

You moved through like high tide in heavy rain—muddied, filled with beer cans, broken limbs, dangerous against the banks— your fast moving, your hard beauty, the high-water mark I stare at with disbelief and fear— the three inches of rusty water I carry everywhere. Jason Marak

Sunlight snuck in my well defended window found my face and pried open my eyes but first it lit my tender lids warming them to the day ahead so that I couldn’t resist opening to the powerful light knowing I’d see you soon. Carolyn Lehman

How can it be That after the wind rushes Through the trees Flinging branches into the air Like frenzied dervishes And hail pounds the deck While water courses through gutters And rushes downhill like the mighty Mississippi That the morning breaks Serene and crystalline Tree branches shimmering In the dawn The grassy hillside glimmering and […]

Mid-November—and Finally gone the State’s bright flower, Which opened every morning and closed With evening’s light; and were that Not glum enough even autumn’s Asters are beaten back and Sodden lie by the muddy track. Yet come you now with reckless, Wild and heedless growth, and on The tip of each wind-blown branch Sprout you […]

Hope can be intoxicating. Reality is the antidote. Mixed up emotions cascade, carom, careen, Ricocheting from vibrant visions of dreamt futures realized Echoing in dark wells of defeat. As the returns return hope dwindles, flickers, and fades away. It’s hard to look at US and not recoil. “That’s not who we are!” We hear it […]

While October holds its breath, the salmon masses, yearning to spawn, yearning for death, pace, undulating and patient, at the blocked river’s mouth, their bodies tasting the freshness of water that waits, still and impotent, on the other side of the summer-structured sand bar. Tight-skinned orcas arc their bulk through the bulging waves, gorging on […]

Here they come, the mourners Along the streets of Jaroujiji, no stranger to slaughter. They are black and slow, and silent too: No joy through tears, No second line for them, But the gagging, unspeakable Stab of child death, With its thousands of Tiny shrouds, And the women from the hills have made paper children […]