All posts by Dale Wisely

Pamela Joyce Shapiro

Every Morning

When you are reading
in front of the Eastern
window, light resting on
your graying crown, as though
you were a deity
of fictional thought, fraught
with some mind’s best idea,
a story filling you
like pomegranates and
lemons, I imagine
you younger, writing lines
in the marbled notebook
that disappeared with time.

A cognitive psychologist intrigued by memory and language, Pamela Joyce Shapiro writes poetry to capture thoughts and moments otherwise forgotten.

Judith Waller Carroll

My Heart is a Tangle of Colors

Pale pink blending into orange,
yellow weaving across red,
a pattern as intricate and lovely
as the valentine
my son made for me in preschool,
a zig zag of white paste
bleeding through the center
like an old scar that’s healed.

Judith Waller Carroll’s poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on “The Writer’s Almanac,” published in numerous journals and anthologies, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

Judith Waller Carroll

Stairs Leading Nowhere

Stone, tangled with vines,
listing from one side to another
as they rise up the slope
much the way a body moves as it climbs
or the way your golden retriever,
the feathers of his tail swaying,
leads you to this hill
that once led to someone’s home
and now only goes as far
as what’s left of the gazebo,
half-blocked by boulders,
leaving you to imagine the rest:
a Georgian manor house,
a dreamy-eyed girl in the window seat,
a young man whistling
as he takes the steps two at a time.

Judith Waller Carroll’s poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on “The Writer’s Almanac,” published in numerous journals and anthologies, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

John L. Stanizzi

POND

5.6.19
11.32 a.m.
55 degrees

Profligacies in orange and black, black and red, white and white, white and yellow,
officers of influence, their color remains after they have flown, and the toads are a
nimbus of sound in the bright afternoon, their chirring rising and rising to a stop, a
dialogue, a harmony, a synchronization of spring’s opus played, revised, played again.

 

“They are from a project called POND. These short poems are acrostics. This is a one-year-long project. Everyday, at different times during the day, I visit our pond with notebook and camera in hand. I jot down some notes, and take a picture or two, if a good photo op. presents itself. Then I head home and write a four line acrostic using the letters P, O, N, and D.  I do not use any of my first words more than once. I need a different P, O, N, and D word every day for a year; I began the book on November 9, 2018 and will complete it on November 9, 2019.”

John L. Stanizzi is author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits – Fifty 50-Word Pieces, and Chants. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, and many others. His newest book. Sundowning, will be out later this year with Main Street Mag.

John L. Stanizzi

POND

5.5.19
10.57 a.m.
53 degrees

rain

Purest concerto of toads and peepers around the pond, the woods on the
outskirts, everywhere, until I approach and they preserve their silence in the
nooks in which they hide in the open, invisible right in front of us, like
dollops of gray clay given, besides their malleability, the gift of song.

“They are from a project called POND. These short poems are acrostics. This is a one-year-long project. Everyday, at different times during the day, I visit our pond with notebook and camera in hand. I jot down some notes, and take a picture or two, if a good photo op. presents itself. Then I head home and write a four line acrostic using the letters P, O, N, and D.  I do not use any of my first words more than once. I need a different P, O, N, and D word every day for a year; I began the book on November 9, 2018 and will complete it on November 9, 2019.”

John L. Stanizzi is author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits – Fifty 50-Word Pieces, and Chants. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, and many others. His newest book. Sundowning, will be out later this year with Main Street Mag.

John L. Stanizzi

POND

4.28.19
7.18 a.m.
41 degrees

Purple rosettes of the plum tree have just begun to emerge, the verdant
opus of the skunk cabbage continues to slowly splay its wide whole notes, the
nubbin leaves of multiflora roses are now everywhere, and a bluejay in the cedar
distracts everyone with his incessant ruckus – pay attention to me!

 

“They are from a project called POND. These short poems are acrostics. This is a one-year-long project. Everyday, at different times during the day, I visit our pond with notebook and camera in hand. I jot down some notes, and take a picture or two, if a good photo op. presents itself. Then I head home and write a four line acrostic using the letters P, O, N, and D.  I do not use any of my first words more than once. I need a different P, O, N, and D word every day for a year; I began the book on November 9, 2018 and will complete it on November 9, 2019.”

John L. Stanizzi is author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits – Fifty 50-Word Pieces, and Chants. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, and many others. His newest book. Sundowning, will be out later this year with Main Street Mag.

Steve Klepetar

Mirror

This is not a mirror,
it’s not a lake

turned on its axis,
it’s not the sky

drained of color
on a winter’s day,

but a door
to a thousand

lakes, each one
spread out

beneath a ring
of pines,

a door to the sky
you can open to race

at the speed of light,
your body both

particle and wave,
drinking the milk of stars.

Steve Klepetar agrees that “an aged man in but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick unless soul clap its hands and sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.”

Steve Klepetar

Excuse Me

But one thing you’ll never hear from a cat is ‘Excuse me.’
Nor Einstein’s famous theorem.

Jane Hirshfield

No, but if it could move
at something approaching

the speed of light,
you might see a red glow

in August, or green as it fell
to the bottom

of some extraterrestrial sea,
even if you couldn’t tell,

until you looked,
whether the cat was alive or dead.

Steve Klepetar agrees that “an aged man in but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick unless soul clap its hands and sing for every tatter in its mortal dress.”