Category: Poetry (Page 31 of 41)

Happy 125th Birthday Miss Earhart

11 November 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Melissa Wold

Oh Pidge, it’s just like flying.
Amelia Earhart (july 24, 1897 – january 5, 1939)

Like Nike, were you fated to fly
from a box off the roof of Grandpa’s shed
into clouds of gossamer sighs?

Did your treetop view of birds in the sky
propel your wings of imagination to spread?
Like Nike, were you fated to fly?

In your Electra sleek and spry
from the ordinariness you fled
into clouds of gossamer sighs.

Your tenacity and daring mystify
those of us who live in fear and dread.
Like Nike, were you fated to fly?

Did you hear the hue and cry?
Your loss left the world bereft; grief bled
into clouds of gossamer sighs.

On an island unknown, bones petrify.
Your story’s end remains unread.
Like Nike, were you fated to fly
into clouds of gossamer sighs?

Melissa Wold is retired from a career in higher education. She writes with a group affiliated with Mobile Botanical Gardens in Mobile, Alabama. She lives with two rat terriers named Rocket and Spark Plug. They refer to her as their live-in help.

lightning bugs

9 November 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Caroline Randall

at the park, we sit at a picnic table beneath a tree, our faces disappearing in the wane of

daylight. the night is warm with a cooling wind and the scent of distant rain, but we are here,

beneath this tree, discussing the deer across the field and the amount of people still

in the park. we speak of lightning bugs and their absence, and as if summoned,

a single lightning bug glowed, then another, and another until I lost count of their

individual orbs, and i thought,

what kind of magic is this?

that led me beneath this tree?

that brought me to you?

Caroline Randall is a writer and painter living in Louisville, Kentucky. She holds an MFA and a BFA in creative writing from California College of the Arts and Spalding University, respectively. She currently proofs and edits court transcripts for a living.

photo of two white ducks on water during fog — Photo by Karol Wiśniewski on Pexels.com

Haunted Lake

6 November 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Sheryl Guterl

Local legend tells
a winter tale:
A southbound stagecoach

took a short cut
across the frozen water,
hit a soft spot, and sank,

taking passengers,
luggage, and horses
to the bottom.

True or not, it’s reason enough
for mapmakers to name
this lake Haunted.

In an early September morning,
cooled night air
meets summer-warmed water.

Cotton-candy puffs
of fog roll over the lake’s surface.
Eerie, vaporized visions of pines,

cabins, docks, and beaches
come and go.
Spirits rise from the waves.

Sheryl Guterl claims these titles: mother, grandmother, former English teacher, former elementary school counselor, wishful poet, Albuquerque Museum Docent, alto, bookworm. Presently, she is cozied in a New Hampshire cabin, surrounded by water, birds, tall pines, and myriad critters. She will travel back to Albuquerque for the cold months.

red and yellow abstract painting — Photo by Merlin Lightpainting on Pexels.com

Sweet Moon

2 November 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Ursula McCabe

This morning I sliced into a cantaloupe
with ripe musky aromas.
Orange flesh unfolds as I split
the pock marked rind.
Opening up this soft melon
releases an aria of river floating times.

Years ago I rafted down the Salmon River,
an Idaho primitive wilderness area.
We returned home in a panel van
with too many people and a leftover cantaloupe
that had gone uneaten.

Six of us had drifted down the old river
through canyons with 100 foot basalt walls.
Rainbow trout practically
jumped in the boat, pink membrane mouths
puckering up as we slipped barbless hooks
out with our slippery fingers.

After churning rapids tumbled rafts
we warmed ourselves around campfires.
Flickering orange sparks skipped up to the stars,
where a fat round moon looked down.
That moon was as sweet and soft
as the cantaloupe I’m eating right now.

Ursula McCabe lives in Portland Oregon. Poems can be found in Oregon Poetry Association’s Verseweavers Anthology, Piker Press, The Avocet and Academy of the Heart and Mind.

Untitled

30 October 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Melissa Donati-Pizirusso

I am a helium filled balloon
Released from the hands
Of a little girl
Staring in wonder at the sky

A balloon that floats freely
Up
Into the wind
Caught in branches
Waiting for the next breeze to set me free

Descending then to the ground
And then picked up
By another breeze
Sending me to low points and then high
Low
High
Sweeping at the ground
Then dropping
Into a foliage of leaves
Waiting to be lifted again

By a breeze
That may never come
Or one that may bring me even lower

Until once again
I am picked up
by the hands of a child
that holds me like a treasure
to their chest.

Melissa Donati-Pizirusso is a Mom, Writer, and Assistant Principal. Her love of writing and poetry goes back to when she was a child writing numerous stories and poems on a daily basis. She is a graduate of SUNY Albany where she studied Sociology, Italian and Journalism.

What the Old Want

28 October 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Steven Deutsch

Not much—
friends
and family
I suppose—
for short visits
involving meals
at restaurants
with tablecloths,
or something sumptuous
simmered for hours
over a low flame.

How about a week
without a visit
to a doctor
or a single
medical test.
No MRI or EKG
or CAT scan,
or even
a tube of blood
with my name
in magic marker.

Time
is in free fall.
Like riding
an elevator
held by a single
strand of steel
down from
the 93rd floor.
Bring kindness.

And, when all
else fails,
a recliner—
well worn
in all the right
spots.
A coffee
straight up
and the book
I loved best when
I was young.

Steve Deutsch has been widely published both on line and in print. Steve is a three time Pushcart Prize nominee. He is poetry editor for Centered Magazine. His poetry books; Perhaps You Can (2019), Persistence of Memory (2020), and Going, Going, Gone (2021), were all published by Kelsay Press.

scenic view of sky during sunset — Photo by Rahul Pandit on Pexels.com

i have flown from my home

23 October 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Jonah Meyer

i have flown from my home
up into that carolina blue embrace which is the sky
past houses i have flown
past families in yards, past
automobiles quick on the way to somewhere else
past the factories, the outdoor picnics, the baseball games
heavy in extra innings

here i have grown, have spread two yellow wings
out over o.henry’s town, that tiny
dragon-tongue below,
over the births and the deaths and the
songs being sung inside radios

i climb, i climb, the hot thick clouds
are silk-white blankets, rugs by
my fox-trotting feet,

and still i soar into
a universe dream-eyed and naked …

O! that the night is a staircase rising,
pure piano-forte,
and i — thrown by harsh desire — i am
all-too-happy to hear such symphonic
orchestration first-hand

bending, climbing, stretching long pale arms
through such sky-dew, even the birds now

believe me
insane

Jonah Meyer is a poet, writer, and editor in North Carolina. His poetry and creative nonfiction has been published widely. Jonah plays guitar and piano, shoots photography, and studies neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy. He serves as Poetry Editor of Mud Season Review and Assistant Poetry Editor with Random Sample Review.

dinosaur fossil on rough stone formation — Photo by Marcus Lange on Pexels.com

Trace Fossils

22 October 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Carole Greenfield

Small children do not wait for pain
to make a lasting mark. They give fair warning;
we have time to wipe off tears, mop up trouble,
kiss a bruise, pronounce it healed.

But love leaves an impression that won’t be kissed
away. An imprint left in something soft hardens
and congeals. What passed through fire once
is tempered, then annealed.

Children trace their fingers over fossils, guess
at what’s revealed: evidence of ridges, indentations,
life long over, heart’s rush sealed.

Trace fossils: fossils in which evidence of organisms, rather than the organisms themselves, are preserved.

Carole Greenfield grew up in Colombia and lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches at a public elementary school. In the last century, her work appeared in Red Dancefloor, Gulfstream and The Sow’s Ear.

purple leaf — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Lydia Palmer: Redwing, 1888

18 October 2022 / Editor

Poetry by Katharyn Howd Machan

Old idea, a hope chest. Girls already
diligent wives in fond imagination.
No dreams of travel, friendship, books,
deep treasure of solitude.

My mother’s mother started mine:
wedding quilt, baby blanket,
dainty towels with crocheted edges,
tablecloth hemmed with her love.

Oh, I understand her gifts!
She wants her world to be mine.
And I’ll lay them all aside with care
as I repack that flowered trunk.

My future’s shaped by a wide hill
overlooking Cayuga Lake.
There I’ll study more than she
could ever think a girl should need–

but in my sleeve, to honor her,
I’ll tuck the handkerchief she’s stitched
with tiny violets, purple and bright,
small daisies opening into sun.

Katharyn Howd Machan has been writing and publishing poetry for half a century. She lives and teaches in Ithaca, New York with her beloved spouse and fellow poet Eric Machan Howd. She directed the Feminist Women’s Writing Workshops, Inc., and served as Tompkins County’s first poet laureate. She belly dances.

close up photography of green and brown bird flying over body of water with catch on its beak — Photo by Andrew Mckie on Pexels.com

Afternoon by the Brick Pond

16 October 2022 / Editor

Poetry by K.L. Johnston

The fisherman left his folding
chair under the oak in leafy
coolness where occasionally
it’s borrowed to mind the pond.

Content to view its mysteries,
passed by, to watch the young parents
with their daughter discovering
mud, laughing as she finds something

startling that splashes and flicks
away. They scoop her up, strolling
on unmindful of fingerprints
and red clay. They pass the dragon

elm that is far from home, but thrives,
happy to be surrounded by
the wild natives, cinnabar heart
visible through its shrinking bark

next to sycamores flaunting pale
green and white skins. At their dark roots
the bumblebee sits unmoving
on the swamp sunflower, so tired

by afternoon, with few blossoms
left unvisited, he sleeps on
in the acute angles of stem
and sun while pollen shimmers,

a dust of fantasies on the
waters of the pond where carp rise
up from green and purple shadows,
grazing in brilliance, uncaring.

Fierce, the kingfisher darts by blue
and shaded. Not the most brilliant
or the biggest or most deadly
of hunters unless you are small
and a fish! a fish, a fish.

K. L. Johnston‘s favorite subjects are whimsical, environmental and/or philosophical. Her poetry appears in journals ranging from Small Pond magazine in the 1980s to work recently appearing in Humana Obscura and Pangyrus. She is a contributor to the recently published anthology Botany of Gaia.