April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
I dropped your mother’s
mirror. A horse reared: I spilled
hot coffee on your lap in Amish
country. I walked under three
ladders to get to the office every
day. I hid a small black cat in
the front bedroom. You hated
cats. I was busy hating myself
by Kelley Jean White
Kelley’s writing has been widely published since 2000 in journals including Exquisite Corpse, Friends Journal, Nimrod, Poet Lore, Rattle, the Journal of the American Medical Association and in a number of chapbooks and full-length collections, most recently Toxic Environment from Boston Poet Press, Two Birds in Flame, poems related to the Shaker Community at Canterbury, NH, from Beech River Books, and “In Memory of the Body Donors,” Covert Press. She have received several honors, including a 2008 grant for poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
If tires could score patterns into pavement
then these would be indelible whorls,
fingertip prints dancing like
overburdened bunting,
stretched until tight,
then released
to snap in rubbery tangles,
twisted and perfectly unplanned.
Everything’s reflecting
as visible music,
an evening composed in motion,
all the shining eyes aglow,
waypoints, lit fuses,
blurred meteors blinking
over darkened sidewalks
as I nod my ragged head,
frayed heartstrings
rubbed thin and ringing,
dilated gaze anchored
onto an uncommon image,
gleaming up from blacktop water,
shimmering in joyful ripples
while earth flies by below,
constant and faithful, steadfast
as the path is abandoned
under shorn sycamores,
as the solitary garden patiently bears
a flattening weight, the fallen body
of a man in love with the moon.
by Joshua Herron
April 2013 | back-issues, poetry
Variegated strands of weather weave
their magic tapestry on my mind.
I revel in their changing voices,
interpretative attire, and cacophony.
I look forward day to day, no, even
every moment, to their malleability.
I love sun, blue sky and light breeze,
but no less mad tempestuousness.
The splendance of the greyest dawn
smiles, blows scudding across my day.
It is dramatic change I seek, almost
as the leech smells out fresh blood.
Fastening tenaciously, I suck the
marrow of the barometer’s change.
I meter not my days, but greet each
a new acquaintance, friend or lover.
I extend my soul in welcome as a
knight did his in visual declaration.
Holding no weapon, bearing no
malice, I am seeking no combat.
I wish only to enwrap, submerge,
enjoy weather’s spirited vagaries.
Each changeling child of revolution
brings her own unique enjoyments.
No doppelgangers exists in this with
the parting curtains of each dawn.
Regardless how low the light or loud
the music, my day is a unique option.
I tease out deeper meaning, affinity of
an All: earthly, ethereally, spiritually.
Therefore: every day is acquiescent:
geographic, atmospheric, temporal.
I, too, add or subtract from each day
by the attitude and demeanor I bring.
by Rick Hartwell
Rick Hartwell is a retired middle school (remember, the hormonally-challenged?) English teacher living in Moreno Valley, California. He believes in the succinct, that the small becomes large; and, like the Transcendentalists and William Blake, that the instant contains eternity. Given his “druthers,” if he’s not writing poetry, Rick would rather still be tailing plywood in a mill in Oregon.
