The Morning News and Snow

I sweat while I hack up dust balls in the oily smelling morning –5:09 I pound the coffee grounds into the receptacle and wait an empty stomach grows like a hybrid monkey I ignore it and read another Isacc Babel story –that horrible war and lumber to the cinema books there is a picture of Satre smoking on the beach at Cannes 1947 I pull at heavy drapes and am surprised by a white and dark world almost black and white but with a strange blue hue –snow in february you are so cliché now Read more [...]

Rose Mary Boehm

Under cover of night The fiddler in blue gave the slip to a toad of African proportions. Toad wanted the fiddle. The big silver whale walked out of the water took over the bandstand   and the angel folded his heavy wings. In the soft light of loving consequences the dragonflies sat quietly on shimmer and sparkle. Brook burbled and wouldn’t change its tune.   Marigold floated on blackbird’s melody, holding on to spiderwebs during intervals. Read more [...]

Carla Ingram

Home The fifth of November, I remember dark nights Of frost, bitter cold, biting winds, clad in Winter's warm woolens with fur-booted feet. Into pitch blackness, a wide gulp of my heaven, The aroma so sweetly inhaled as we stride With the moon as our constant companion.   Rockets and wheels spinning and whizzing, while Heaped pyramid fires rise higher, great pyres Of wood and Guys we all made, with faces And arms and legs, so real, sat atop the tip Stuffed with Read more [...]

Sarah Lucille Marchant

Caleb plastic necklaces strung pretty dusty in his eyes (luminosity dulled by dime-store display) you skip around crinkle leaf sidewalk play you roll your eyes green to yellow to orange ink scratch-out paper hiding behind your grin what was there before? what did you never allow? sodden ground thoughts & secrets threaded dead grass tangled thriving weeds and I'm drowning beside you   Sarah Lucille Marchant is a Missouri resident and university student, studying Read more [...]

Sigh

when I say something witty –   out, because your insides can’t bear to be in. Whatever you pulled inside I deflated. I didn’t even need a pin.   I saw you. When you were under the fig tree I saw you.   While you loaf, I’ll be under lamplight tracing the shadow of my hand on the table.   All I am, the pitcher of thought without the thought of preservation.   Unlike you, unlike salmon, my back will break   the Read more [...]

Call to Outlaws

I.      The Garage Knelt beneath the staircase my skin hummed against the threat of discovery, the shock of her blonde hair, the string of his guitar, the damp silhouette beneath my thin cotton dress. Clouds of laughter and smoke swung between us, a circuit of pungent electricity rocked with soft delirium. She kissed my lips with curling halos of marijuana and strawberry, blew dandelion-seed wishes for a boy.   II.     The Carnival The arc of the Ferris Wheel winked above Read more [...]

Matthew James Babcock Poems

The Journey I wonder if The Age of the Journey has passed in America now that The Port of Arlington has become Earl Snell Memorial Park, and not one hundred yards from rocky banks where burly voyageurs and their Cayuse brides upended canoes of fresh pelts, a toothless Shell station attendant who’s a dead ringer for Carmine Ragusa tops off my tank. Travel means nothing in an era when every destination is your living room. Will any of us ever drink our urine on the Read more [...]

Katie Reed Poems

Scattering Garden The bushes bear no seed in winter. Mourners stand on planks of a wooden arch. They release ashes onto rocks below, a sea of blank faces.   Spider’s Stance An alabaster stone, smooth as the rock which bore it and washed it by the stream - among grainy bits of speckled white, stood a spider. It turned – paused – positioned, its body, thick and copper, reared like a wild mustang in the western plains. I swallowed my fear, careful Read more [...]