Tina Privitera-Reynolds

What Is It?

It’s
my Haight-Ashbury helmet,
my Italian heirloom,
my fiberglass insulation,
my static cling,
my gallery of caught crystal snowflakes,
my dog days of napped summer,
my knotted cursive language,
my mind’s wavelengths outstretched, but most importantly,
it’s
my hair.

Tina Privitera-Reynolds should be on the pavement clapped in a sandwich board that says “clown for hire.”

 

J.R. Solonche

Ice

The ice thawing
on the lake sings
as it turns back
to water again
a song neither
happy nor sad,
but just a simple
wordless tune
for going home.

J.R. Solonche is the author of eighteen books of poetry and co-author of one.

 

Steve Klepetar

A Green Country

We are dreaming this, listening
to flame as it eats wood
with its teeth and translucent tongue.

Steve Klepetar listens to Pandora while he walks in his nearly deserted neighborhood, glad not to explain why he wears a Yankees cap in Massachusetts.

 

Robin Dellabough

My Boy

Home again for a moment,
he rests in the sun face down,
his head turned so I can see his shuttered
eyes, notice the thickening hair
covering his legs until in one
sudden inhalation
he is a man
and I cannot ask him certain things,
those questions will have to leave
my body the same way he first left me,
coming into the light of this world.

Robin Dellabough is an editor and poet who recently discovered she is 50% Ashkenazi Jewish via a father she never knew.

 

Aaron Sandberg

RC Plane

We flew it for only a few days
on weeks when I was yours
with the help of the man

from the VFW after buying it
from a shop for more
than we could afford

until my interest faded fast
and it hung in the rafters—
frozen in flight—for me to face

each time I would walk
for half my life into that house
you bought when I was four,

each owing a debt
we keep working to pay.

Aaron Sandberg knows what you did last summer, Dale.

 

F. John Sharp

The Meaning of Adventure

There is nothing
like a backyard
campout, where every
sound is a bad guy
or a bear, where you feel
spiders and snakes
that aren’t there,
and where you don’t really care
as long as you have
snacks and a good flashlight.

 

F. John Sharp lives and works on Northeast Ohio. His stuff can be found at FJohnSharp.com. and he is looking forward to the day Dale starts the journal, One Word Poems, because some days I don’t feel like working any harder than that.

*Editor’s Note: one-half-word-poems.com coming in 2021!