It crawled out of the flowers
like death, like purity, like
one hundred years of marriage,
the soured idea that
they would love each other,
that he would love her,
until the day they died.
She breathed it in,
it buzzed in her skull
like a million bees,
and she believed.

Natalie Wolf (https://nwolfmeep.wixsite.com/nmwolf) is a writer and educator from Kansas City. She is a co-founder and co-editor of Spark to Flame Journal and an editor for Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press. She spends her free time petting cats and thinking about desserts.

An oak, already dead, grey and rattled
by countless storms, came to sudden life
when a bolt from the cobalt blue struck
and kindled a fire inside its trunk.

The fire never dimmed, blew out,
and blazed with a message no Druid left
on earth could interpret, glean meaning from
in a meaningless world.

Even rain, a hard sheet passing over
the field didn’t quench but only sparked
more flames…. Bolts from beyond are rare
but common enough if looked for

even among the weeds and trash.
The fire that burns inside a dead tree
is like a skull that laughs the world awake,
points of light in the hollows of its eyes.

William Miller’s eighth collection of poetry, “The Crow Flew Between Us,” was published by Kelsay Books in 2019. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Penn Review, The Southern Review, Sheandoah, Prairie Schooner and West Branch. Hei lives and writes in the French Quarter of New Orleans.

it is hard to see colors
at this end of the call—
your laugh and query,
“Guess what I am doing?”
obscure my deaf eye from

the hued tangent upon which
you move: red, black, white—
the usual setting with forks
always on the left…unlikely—
You the Contrary, Opposition

to muted dozing, the excluded middle,
embrace the empty palette,
breath chromatic density,
the deep feast of an evocative mixture,
tinctures caressing the clown’s canvas.

I imagine your fingers, dipped,
frosting your face, this sweet margin,
the drifting patina of grief mixed
with huddled mud and the generous
stippling of this season’s contours.

yes, it will play in Berlin—
and a thousand other places—
a glimpse will puncture,
the encased weight of
a headstone’s runes…

and place my hands
in your tender pain.

Wayne Bornholdt is a retired used book seller that specialized in scholarly books in philosophy, religious studies and the humanities. He lives in West Michigan with his wife and two Golden Retrievers.

“Any last words, Uncle Charlie? Anything you want to say?”

“Last words?”

“Yes, Uncle Charlie,” said his nephew Frank. “As many of the family as possible are here. Have you any last words for us?”

The lights were turned down in the old man’s second-floor bedroom. Nieces, grandchildren, even his second-cousin Felix from Cincinnati, were there. And Felix didn’t have too much time left either.

“What?” There was no need for the old man to wear his hearing aids anymore.

“Anything?” asked his granddaughter Felice.

A lonely fly buzzed in the room. Felice swatted at it. She did not wish the insect to ruin this last memory of her grandfather.

“I’m afraid this is it,” said Ralph, Charlie’s nephew, who came from outside Providence.

“This is it?” Did the old man comprehend?

“Has he gone?” whispered Otto in the back of the room.

“What?”

“He only  meant do you have any last thing to say,” said Frank. “I’m sorry this is it.”

“What?”

“This is it.”

“This is it?” repeated Charlie

“Right,” said Frank, wiping his eye with the napkin he had used to go after the fly.

“This is it?”

” All she wrote,” agreed Ralph. He talked the way they do in Providence.

“This is it?”

“Please, Uncle Charlie, you’ve got to accept it. Is there anything you want to say?”

The old man looked across the wall of faces. “How many times do I have to keep telling you? ‘This is it?’ – Those are the last words.”

“What?” questioned Otto from the back.

Surprisingly, the old man seemed to hear. He knew Otto was hard of hearing also.

“OTTO… THIS IS IT?”

David Sydney is a physician from Newtown. Pennsylvania.

I am useless
In the winter
Like soft needles
On a cactus
Or rusted screws
Refusing to spin
The summer is
A big white pill
At the bottom
Of my stomach
My heartbeat follows
The heels of spring

Eva Neuman is a poet and screenwriter from the Texas hill country. Now based in Houston, Texas, Eva has a particular interest in rural, queer, and domestic life. When she isn’t writing, Eva enjoys spending time with her cat, watching old films, and hiking around east Texas.

Books with spring settings
I read on cold winter days
are stacked on the shelf.
Now wondrous spring, I embrace.
There’s nothing like the real thing.

Janice Canerdy is a retired high-school English teacher from Potts Camp, Mississippi. She has been writing poems for decades and has been published frequently. She writes mostly rhymed, metered poetry but enjoys reading all types of poems.

Bald branches hold a toupee of snow. They held tie-dyed leaves a month ago, leaves that have fallen like my once-red hair. Leaves that have blown away to decay. My hair’s seeds have taken root on my chest and shoulders, shoulders where hair used to touch and blow by in the wind of my hippie days.The one afternoon we shared, you ran your fingers through my chest hair, like a pianist playing slow notes. It’s true, there are more violins in my heart than trumpets. I still play piano in the dark. I miss your eyes peeking through the chapel’s stained glass, where some nights I played from midnight to dawn. Your dark hair, like night, danced along the shallow river, where rocks kissed the ballet of your fragile steps. Little did I know, we would bury you in the small cemetery above my cabin. The priest, one snow owl fifty yards away on an oak branch, and I attended. People fear witches. Your black worship upstream in a farmhouse where no one would dare, but me. I ask, has this life become dinner and I am now folding my napkin? Gently placing it on the stained white tablecloth? I signal the waiter for the check, please. I am reaching for my car keys. These subtle endings. Someone waiting. A therapist’s whisper: We have to stop here.

Bill Garten recently had three poems selected by Billy Collins to be both short-listed and long-listed as finalists in the Fish Anthology 2022. Bill is the winner of the 2017 Broken Ribbon Poetry Contest; a Finalist in the 2018 and 2022 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards for Poetry; a Finalist in the 44th New Millennium 2017 Awards; and a Finalist in the Writers @Work 2018 Contest for a group of poems from Asphalt Heart.

I hear something, in the far distance
beyond the windowsill of my grandparents’ home.
Hidden between the Iron Giant sized Idaho trees
and after the gradual cascade of darkness,
illuminates a kaleidoscope of cosmic colors
over the valley of flickering emerald pines

Every nightfall, I hear its deep howl echo.
Traveling alongside the hums of forest winds,
it reaches for the distant moon and stars
while dancing around the curves of my ears.
Wandering effortlessly into my dreams,
jolting me awake with shivers of a thrill.

I feel the vibration underneath my feet
as I tiptoe across timeworn floorboards.
Hoping not to alert my grandparents
its way past curfew, one glimpse is all I need.
Then I could transplant my mind, into
the Wolf that howls, at the midnight moon.

Casey McDonald is a poet and began writing poetry when she was a little girl. She lives in Pennsylvania with her family and beloved dog, Lilly. She writes about experiences involving struggles with mental health, death and love.

“WE GO/IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS/DOWN THE IMPERTURBABLE STREET”

Gwendolyn Brooks, from “An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire”

We sit under a hot light. “We”
sounds sly unless I go
into the particulars. What business do I have in
making wide claims? Different
muscles govern the directions
mouths move—chomping down
and grinding across, for instance. The
tongue insists on itself, imperturbable,
even when shunted aside, wrapped in street
widths of gauze, to jump away from fat teeth.

“THE FEELING OF REPELLING AN INVASION IN ORDER, ONE DAY, TO BE YOURSELF”

Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica

I rarely beam from feeling
compliant. Of
course, pleasure comes from repelling
any kink in the scheme. An invasion
of arrows launch from small chariots, orderly
volleys from dull women. One day,
as we’re all hastening to rot, might
the worms tarry a moment, and let you be
yourself?

Jean is a professor of English and women’s studies at Vassar College. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature and Art History from Indiana University, a master’s degree in English and creative writing from Stanford University, and a PhD in English from the University of Virginia. She has attended the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference and has been to the AWP on multiple occasions. Jean also enjoys drawing and frequent visits to her family back home in Indiana.

Winter

What cruel curse is it that commands us live
a quarter of our lives in frozen time
where leaf-bare skeletons of summer give
no shield nor shade to buds upon the vine.
This was not always so, and we did thrive
as green, growing things in a warmer clime.
We lived, loved, laughed in play and were alive
in warmth filled light and happiness sublime.
that was how we lived then, in days gone past
on shootings, bloomings, flowerings of spring
but now cold is our teacher, how naught lasts;
again, loss after loss, it shows dying
is the doom of all living things, a task
to be finished before next spring’s coming.

A Grayling

It is time I rise and go to the stream
with my flies and a hope that there I find
in the water a new hatch of lacewings
struggling to the surface and mostly blind
to what cruises beneath them, a grayling.
It is she, the queen of the stream, I mind
she and her wading courtier lapwing
who in their shared stalking are of a kind.
I watch and I wait, assessing the case
slowly swinging my trotting rod to cast
but then there is a swirl, a whirl, a race
the grayling circles, the lapwing darts past
I stay where I am, firm frozen in place
a disarmed hunter transfixed to the last.

J. B. Fite (Ph.D. Cantab.) is a dyslexic, jobbing chemist who lives on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. Through writing poetry, he has been able to lower his blood pressure to the point he could throw his medication away, that and the gin.