Catherine Lazăr
Copilaş
Thinking I don’t speak
English,
my neighbors gather
in the building’s stairwell
to complain
that my baby
cries too loudly.
Catherine Lazăr is a Dublin-based writer and administrator, originally from New Jersey.
Eli S. Evans
Dinner
What I like about the janitor is that when he comes to empty the trashcans in my office in the early evening and looks out the window behind my cubicle toward the field where all the geese have gathered, he licks his lips and says,
“Dinner.”
Eli S. Evans has just finished breakfast
Judy Kronenfeld
Old Longing
The wine-dark velvet cloak of the prima
ballerina (it had to be she!) sweeps
over her lathe-turned calf when she lifts her
slippered, alabaster foot—arched and pointed—
into the black cab in the rain-glossed alley
adjoining the theater—as, hand gripped
by mother’s, you are swept along
with the exiting crowds—and the black door
shuts on that glimpse the years hurry you
away from towards the downward plunge,
grit gusting around your thickened ankles,
and the hot breath of the subway,
merely home and home and home.
Judy Kronenfeld is the author of four full-length books of poetry, and longing to get the fifth one, now making the rounds, out into the world.
Ian Willey
Gone Viral
Standing here with this mask on my face
I watch the starlings leap from wire to sky
where they swirl and circle and return
to the wires to pause before bursting skyward
and repeating their performance with stunning
coordination and speed—what the watchers call
a murmuration—and I’m gripped
by the electricity of it all,
how the birds move
like a video gone viral,
like a fear spreading
through a free society.
Ian Willey is a teacher who spends his days looking for meaning, and occasionally his sunglasses.
Sandy Stert Benjamin
Lingering Chill
It’s always winter in a house of dissension —
icicles hang on each word,
windows fog from exasperated breath.
Sandy Stert Benjamin is a woman of few words, hence her one sentence poem.
Roberta Beach Jacobson
German Autobahn
Fair
or unfair
the blue sign
points
to an off-ramp.
Roberta Beach Jacobson is a humorist from Iowa.
Calida Osti
Permissions
Sometimes, I get permissions and persimmons conflated—
like chalk or honeysuckle in my mouth.
Calida Osti is a poet and writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Better Than Starbucks, The Midwest Quarterly, misfitmagazine.net, Plainsongs, Rogue Agent, Sugared Water, WINK, Willawaw Journal, and Writers Resist.
Steve Klepetar
The Boat of my Birth
They say it happened on a night with no stars,
a night of mist that was almost rain,
and when it was over, my mother held me
above the waves, her quiet face stained with tears
as I lay wrinkled and red, crying a little, then quiet,
as petrels soared and squawked above the mast.
Steve Klepetar has a heart too soon made glad, too easily impressed.