Lost Places

January 2025 | poetry

There were orchards here once

and creeks that ran all the way to July.

In those days, we could cross one on foot

and up the embankment on the other side,

just below the walnut grove, long gone,

as well as deer who lay in the tall grass

and flew at our scent.

We walked then on land

not usually used for grazing,

the windy side of a knoll,

where fog settled into folds and stayed

under the spreading of an oak or laurel.

In outcroppings of granite, slid

between hard shapes

and stood in the silence,

pondering the unspoken questions, listening

for their stony answers.

Jerome Gagnon

Jerome Gagnon is the author of the recent collection Refuge for Cranes: Praise Poems from the Anthropocene and Rumors of Wisdom. His poetry has appeared in a variety of publications, including Spiritus, Poet Lore, and Modern Haiku. A former teacher and tutor, he lives in California in the San Francisco Bay Area. www.jeromegagnonblog.wordpress.com

C.S.I.

January 2025 | poetry

(an early Halloween)

Mildred has a gash on her forehead where

the hatchet from her boyfriend split the bone.

Nearby, there is a skeleton hanging by its left

foot from a small maple-oak across the way.

The rail fence is shattered where the van

with thirty-two immigrants went through it

and they got over the earth in a hurry, never

coming back.  Above, the blue moon not

the slightest color of blue is more brilliant

than a neon planet made of platinum, brighter

than anything I’ve ever seen on an August night.

Which reminds me, once at 1:30 in the morning

when I was seventeen at Mt. Gretna, out in

the middle of the woods, near a picnic area

drinking stolen beer with other/college kids:

ghostly through the trees…

and a lone, rich baritone voice from Broadway

sang a love song to his lady for the night…

(he’d been Li’l Abner, they said)

no music, the most beautifully romantic thing

I’ve ever heard  —  fifty years later in jail

thinking about it.  In the meantime, they put

my bed on the porch roof to be funny… oh, it’s nice

to be the butt of jokes, and the one everyone

hates… seems like, as if to have been born was

to wear some kind of putrid curse around your

face like a necktie for people to piss on, that’s

what it is to be bullied from six to seventeen—

when it stopped, and I pulled the trigger of the

shotgun 14 times where they sat.

[true incident in pieces, but I never shot anybody;

no matter how much I might’ve sometimes wanted to]

Richard Atwood

Born in Baltimore, Rick has lived in Denver and Los Angeles, currently in Wichita, Kansas. He has published three books of poetry, and been published in several literary journals: Karamu, Oberon, Avalon Literary Review, Mochila Review, borrowed solace, Penumbra, ArLiJo, The Raven’s Perch, and Iconoclast among others. He has also authored 3 screenplays, 2 large stage plays; plus an m/m erotic-romantic fantasy, with a GOT ambiance… no supernatural jazz, and a strong moral thread woven throughout (Chronicles of the Mighty and the Fallen, under the name of Richard McHenry).