Category: Poetry (Page 4 of 43)

Perfect Day

1 November 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Susan Wolbarst

The day unfolds
in its own sweet way:
sunny, highs
in the mid-seventies,
light breeze. Zero
chance of rain.

Its slow perfection
savored
by coastal retirees
breathing deeply
exhaling thanks.

The most ambitious
get some steps in,
or re-pot baby
tomato plants from
the greenhouse.
The rest of us

sip coffee on
the deck and,
due to bad habits
we cannot shake,
read newspapers
on our phones.

Susan Wolbarst is a newspaper reporter in rural Gualala, California. Her poetry has been published in Plainsongs, pioneertown (pioneertownlit.com), Naugatuck River Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Alchemy and Miracles: Nature Woven Into Words. A chapbook of her poems, It’s Over, published in August 2025 (Finishing Line Press).

Reflection

1 November 2025 / Editor

Poetry by AJ Saur

When the 7 a.m. sun suddenly
beams your windshield, you may discover

yourself in the back window of a city bus
a great deal more serious than you knew.

Perhaps it’s not surprising considering
how you flew out of the house without

your morning coffee, without a goodbye
kiss, without a single word shifting the new air.

Now, thanks to traffic, you’re inching
toward yourself, cautious, uncertain

of this one who acts in opposite
at every turn. Enlightened, block after

block, by the set chin, high cheekbones,
those steely eyes spanning

the distance from a someone so thoroughly
other you catch yourself, for a moment, wondering

where he’s headed on this average Wednesday
and, if you flash a smile, will he follow?

AJ Saur is the author of five books of poetry from Murmuration Press including, most recently, Of Bone and Pinion (2022). AJ’s poems have also appeared (or will soon appear) in Abandoned Mine, Front Range Review, Glimpse, The Midwest Quarterly, Muse, Third Wednesday, Willow Review, and other journals.

Blue June, Slight Breeze

1 November 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Brian Builta

At the Stapleton concert I become
one clap after another, a whooo,
a dervish of hollers and whups,
a disembodied scream. This happens
on occasion. As the fatherless son
and the sonless father, Father’s Day
is a trigger, my poor poor daughter.
Sometimes her father goes missing
right in front of her, missing his chair
and sprawling on the arena floor.
So far, I’ve always come back, so far.
Truth: incarnation is overrated,
yammering emotions running amuck,
saltwater on the cheek, thunderclap
weighing down the chest. My little
private tornado feels so good, so
delightfully destructive and harmless.
Of course, next day I’m a truck-flattened
squirrel. Energy has its consequences.
Stapleton can only get you so far
before the gravity of the empty letter jacket
in the hall returns, reminding your life
is now angry bees rising from bitter honey,
where the best therapies are leaves
murmuring free from any standard-issue tree
as long as there’s a breeze.

Brian Builta lives in Arlington, Texas, and works at Texas Wesleyan University in Fort Worth. His poetry has been published most recently in Freshwater Literary Journal, Meridian, and Red Ogre Review. More of his poetry can be found at brianbuilta.com.

How the Poems Land

1 November 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Kersten Christianson

We share the wind in this early morning hour,
the new leaves of the Japanese Maple, crimson,
skin-soft, fibrillate in genial breeze, fluctuate
in tandem with fish kite, murmuring wind chime,

and to the south, a poet friend meanders her rocky
shore, her dogs advance and retreat, loop to follow
each new scent revealed by tide and temperature,
while she gathers words among popweed, shell

debris. Poetry exists in breath, without formula.
Its thoughts gather like sea foam, words emerge
with the surface and bob of harbor seal’s head,
its eyes scanning shoreline, until poetic lines

land in a whisper-whoosh of baby waves shuffling
into the space between. The spring has been a dark
October, rain repeated by rain, yet the leaves green,
red-breasted robins frolic, the poems need writing.

Kersten Christianson derives inspiration from wild, wanderings, and road trips. Her newest poetry collection, The Ordering of Stars, will publish with Sheila-Na-Gig in fall 2025. Kersten lives in Sitka, Alaska. She eyeballs tides, shops Old Harbor Books, and hoards smooth ink pens.

Hood

1 November 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Shaymaa Mahmoud and John Brantingham

My people immigrated here
from a little town near Nottingham Forest
and in the high romance

of childhood, I decided
that I must have Robin Hood’s
blood inside me

whether Robin Hood existed or not.
And if he did, I suppose I do
and probably the sheriff

of Nottingham and Little John
and whatever heroes and villains
and royalty and peasants,

and I suppose none of this matters.
This was just a boy dreaming
that he could be heroic,

and I don’t want to be a hero
anymore. My dead whisper to me
that to be quiet and kind is enough.

Shaymaa Mahmoud and John Brantingham are a father/ daughter writing team with hundreds of publications and over twenty books between them.

The River God’s Daughter

1 November 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Angela Patten

Here I am on the river again
gliding my kayak past a row of turtles

their shells gleaming in the sun
like freshly washed dinner plates.

I turn to see a muskrat’s muzzle
parting the water like a butterknife.

Around a bend a heron stands
knee-deep in weeds and water

like my father in black rubber
boots fishing on the River Boyne.

Although he loved rivers and streams,
he hated the sea with equal fervor

distrusting its relentless waves
its monotonous unremitting motion.

But back to the heron and the mystery
of that bony beak, that frozen pose

that alien cranium with its opaque eye
the shriek and fluster of its wings

as it takes off creaking into the air
like an early flying machine.

Unlike my father, I loved the sea
and the cold consecration of salt water.

But now I am a convert to the river
that flows through marsh and mudflat

town and village, state and country
the wayward weather its only god.

Angela Patten is an award-winning Irish poet, author of five poetry collections and a prose memoir. Her work has appeared in literary journals and magazines in the U.S. and abroad. A native of Dublin, Ireland, she is a Senior Lecturer Emerita in English at the University of Vermont. Read more at www.carraigbinn.com.

A Walk Through Burchfield’s “Haunted Twilight”

29 October 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Theresa Wyatt

Who would not tremble here at the sight
of bat wings shrouding window eyes
where alien spirits traipse between
the charred and gobbled trees?

Stop, be still my tripping heart,
there is no subtlety to darkness when tarred
with heavy brush, my skin shades blue
and crawls with insect chatter.

Who can I trust to guide me through this field’s maze
unharmed? Surely not this twilight’s dripping web
and cackle. I need more time to cipher paths
and motives through these brooding indications.

Who waits behind those inky cave clouds?
Could there be a safer destination
where solitudes untouched bed down
below the yellow light?

Look up at that top window!
A small creature, an owl or cat –
is telegraphing auras –
Go slow.

[Editor’s Note: For an October treat, take a look at Charles Burchfield’s Haunted Twilight.]

Theresa Wyatt is the author of “The Beautiful Transport” (Moonstone Press) and “Hurled Into Gettysburg” (BlazeVox Books). Her writing follows the tug of history, nature, and art. Her poems have appeared in the Elm Leaves Journal, Norton’s New Micro, Spillway, and the Press 53 anthology, “What Dwells Between the Lines.”

May We Still Sing?

26 October 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Anne Makeever

Winter blows in late, its inevitability until now unsure. What relief
to watch a pristine obliteration of snow nearly bury the summer chairs
and limn the bare oaks that frame the cold cove.

I want to sigh over the softness, the muffling depth that quiets the day,
to feast on the fineness of black and white that turns O so heartbreakingly,
lavishly purple at dusk. Look, my eyes say, here’s beauty. I want to forget

that life is erasing. Bees, darkness, glaciers, monarchs can’t carry our weight.
The seasons shift, from white to green to orange, each a gift undeserved,
a psalm to savor.

Yes, my mother’s face was beautiful when she died, but the rupture remains.
Consolation comes in what will continue, in the scab that forms at the edge
of the tear then gives over to eventual scar.

Anne Makeever’s work appears in the Eliot Review, Plant Human Quarterly, RavensPerch, and River Styx. She holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where she also taught poetry and essay writing. She lives in Brunswick, Maine, with her partner and exuberant dog.

In a Mirror Clearly Now

23 October 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Judith Yarrow

for my sister

Sometimes, looking in a mirror,
I turn my head just so and
I’m brushing my sister’s hair.
Her same movement.

Conversations that started
when she was born keep on and on.
Antiphonal chorus. Me. Her.
Mine. Hers. I can sing all the parts.

We circled each other until at last
who chased, who fled, who followed,
who led, I don’t even know.
The mirror says, see how alike you are.

That long ago push her pull me?
Just the place we started—no more
separate than fingers on a hand.
connected at the source.

Judith Yarrow been published in two chapbooks and various literary journals, most recently in Hedgerow, RavensPerch, and Medusa’s Kitchen. She was the featured poet in Edge: An International Journal, and her poems have been included in the Washington State Poet Laureates’ collections. Find more of her work at jyarrow.com.

Charles Reznikoff Appraises the Zinnia

20 October 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Deborah H. Doolittle

These days the zinnias in the garden
awake at dawn and await the sun
to open up before them
like the one blossom they’d all like to become.

Let other flowers bloom as dreams
beneath other people’s windows
and rise up from their cultivated beds
in clumps of ordinary color.

These zinnias leap into the air
and broadcast their ambition across the lawn,
not a petal out of place
but has known the touch of dew.

Deborah H. Doolittle has lived in lots of different places, but now calls North Carolina home. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of Floribunda, and three chapbooks No Crazy Notions, That Echo, and Bogbound. When not editing BRILLIG: a micro lit mag, she is training for road races or practicing yoga.

Category: Poetry (Page 4 of 43)

Perfect Day

Reflection

Blue June, Slight Breeze

How the Poems Land

Hood

The River God’s Daughter

A Walk Through Burchfield’s “Haunted Twilight”

May We Still Sing?

In a Mirror Clearly Now

Charles Reznikoff Appraises the Zinnia

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