Category: Poetry (Page 5 of 33)

After Hours (Guggenheim Museum, 1984)

16 August 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Nancy Nowak

Day in and
up, elevated to the first
piece held in its cell, swarms

of visitors graze on
to the next, descending
away from
Picasso’s late self-

portrait, his hungering gaze
you’d know, my love, if you could
close in.

No matter our rank, we workers
keep watch over
what at times feels ours, so

after the head guard
sends the last tourists spiraling
out and commandeers
the take from my Front Desk shift

like a bluff, beneficent
uncle, he sends me home

to collect you for a private viewing
proud to break
an unwritten rule
no curator would consider.

The Museum glows, evening-lit
as you unlock
tiers of meaning in each

figure and gesture, each tribute
to forebears in a history
Picasso became
as he painted
his final night’s work.

No one else ever
will know we were here
beyond the three of us
joined by the fourth.

Nancy Nowak’s poetry appeared most recently in The Comstock Review, Poeming Pigeon, Timberline Review, and Willows Wept Review. Previously published work is found at www.nancynowakpoetry.com. From 1994 – 2016, she was an Associate Professor of Humanities at Umpqua Community College. She lives in Winston, OR.

Going up Gorham

12 August 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Anne Rankin

Nature is an expression of intelligence and necessity.
PLATO

Here where mountain marries earth to the sea, I open like a prayer.
The climb begins with a sigh as I scour the trail for the wag of his tail.
Clouds form stepping stones into the horizon, and I wonder how
to find a way to tomorrow. Or if I even want to hear the silence that follows.
The spirit of the dog walks beside me;
his step keeps pace with my grief.

One year since. A cool morning then, just like today. A whisper
of early autumn air being polite, nothing more. One of those days you’re blind
to the darkness that’s coming. Gulls and ravens trade places
in the sky, but I’m resigned to the gray that lives between.
I’m in the kind of place where you can’t get there from here.
The way you sometimes need rain to move air.

A bird out of sight offers up its lone song, but all I can hear
is, Still gone, still gone. Far below, ocean keeps sending itself onto shore,
tending the earth’s wounds with waves. Above, the sun rises
over the trees, turning up the volume of the sky.
As the trail stretches skyward, I’m searching what’s near, seeking
what’s revealed in the rooms of the climb.

Autumn huckleberry bleeds into the surrounding hills,
but I’m tuned to the pitch of the path, the blazing red leaves
saying more than I can bear. My eye catches a common tern
sweeping the sea, and I hand myself from rock to rock,
finding solace in the scratch of shoe against granite. I struggle
to unlace the root-studded trail, only to find myself entwined instead.

On this mountain that hands land to sea, the breeze reminds me
of something worth knowing, and I breathe deep,
lungs grateful for all that salt air can relieve.
Ahead, a stand of scrub pine raises questions I can’t answer.
As views of Sand Beach keep turning my head, I’m wondering
what word the sea might offer for grace.

But further along the trail I spot a cairn
stacked in place by some fellow wanderer
who needed to assure me with something only stones can say:
You will find your way, even as the earth turns below your feet.
The spirit of the dog walks beside me;
his step keeps pace with my grief.

Anne Rankin‘s poems have appeared in The Healing Muse, The Poeming Pigeon, Hole in the Head Review, Passager, Scapegoat Review, Atlanta Review, Rattle (forthcoming), and elsewhere. Her poem “Small Primer on Loneliness” received Honorable Mention at the Belfast Poetry Festival 2021.

The Marimekko Dress

10 August 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Katharine Davis

My mother bought me a Marimekko dress,
a dress from Finland, a cool and distant land replete
with fjords, icebergs, wild reindeer and elk.
A dress to wear following my wedding at
my grandmother’s farm, a dress for going away.

All went as it should: a tent in the garden,
dahlias robust and in bloom on a blazing August afternoon,
with views of the covered bridge across the field.
A small gathering of family and friends,
my father in a blue blazer, my mother in gauzy watermelon pink.

Tea sandwiches followed by cake and French Champagne.
No music, no dancing, the scent of mown hay wafting in the white haze,
my sisters, flowers in their hair, sneaking cigarettes behind the barn.
After tossing the bouquet, I slipped on my Marimekko dress,
neatly pressed, blue and white, wavy horizontal stripes.

My Marimekko dress was cool against my skin. Expensive, well-made,
the perfect fit, just right for starting another life.
My mother died two years later. The farm was sold, and fifty years have passed.
But in my dreams, I see it still, a shirt-waist dress with silver buttons,
worn by me, but chosen by my mother.

Katharine Davis is the author of three novels: Capturing Paris (included in the New York Times suggestions for fiction set in Paris), East Hope (winner of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance 2010 award for fiction), and A Slender Thread.

Priced to Go

7 August 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Michael Lyle

our yard-sale discards
shabby in daylight’s glare
only undo me
when I spot treasure—

twiggy high chair
where grandparents fed
during mother’s recovery,
like graying cardinals
on a final nest—

sturdy wooden rocker,
where little limbs
rehearsed dancing,
hello and goodbye

folding lawn chair
with one missing web
beckoning rest,
a soak of sun

impressioned recliner
from beside the window
still ready to hold a wave
like a child
sighting a parade,

all priced to go
like yellow goslings
straying an open field
under a hawk’s hungry eye

Michael Lyle is the author of the poetry chapbook, The Everywhere of Light, and his poems have appeared widely, including Atlanta Review, The Carolina Quarterly and Poetry East. Michael is an ordained minister and lives in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Visit him at http://www.michaellylewriter.com.

Annual Report

1 July 2024 / Editor

Poetry by William Swarts

Exaggerate old metaphor, expand it
out of all proportion, over-inflate
the usual occasion: each tulip is
a microphone broadcasting the season,
every daffodil a brash loudspeaker
trumpeting a processional for the sun.
Now a glory of color covers the earth,
stridently smothers the hush of grass
growing green and too abundantly
while spring waxes the way to winter.

William Swarts is the author of “Harmonies Unheard,” “Strickland Plains and Other Poems” and “Treehouse of the Mind.” He won First Prize in the Litchfield Review‘s annual Poetry Contest. He studied with Bolligen Prize-winner David Ignatow at the 92nd Street YM-YWHA Poetry Center in New York City.

Notes We Cannot See

1 July 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Mary Baca Haque

today was flawed but not forever–
for when the morrow rises, the will
of first light reflects off leafy trees
halfway healing the disarray, ceasing

yesterday’s melancholy, sailing
on silver seeds of the aged lion’s tooth
dissipating in the new air

to the tune of the devoted cardinal
at first light playing advantageously
in backgrounds

carrying on winds
in notes we cannot see, but feel
the chorus in the promise of a new day

with new breath
under yellow shades with azureous skies.

Mary Baca Haque prefers to capture the essence of the natural world, hence her forthcoming publication, Painting the Sky with Love (2024-Macmillan). Her poetry can be found in Wild Roof Journal, Cosmic Daffodils, Amethyst Review, Closed Eye Open, and Seraphic Review (2023 and forthcoming in 2024). She resides in Chicago, Illinois.

Peregrine

1 July 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Stephen J. Cribari

Two years ago we had peregrine falcons here.
They bred in a nest under a nearby bridge
That spans the Mississippi River. I
Stood riverside the day the three chicks fledged
Dropping from the bridge’s understructure,
Falling in a wild, flailing descent
And finding just before they hit the river
What wings mean, solving the secret code
That opened a doorway into the halls of the sky.

A month later curious I returned.
The empty nest, but there up in the sky
High up in the sky a black speck
Like a piece of protein floating across the eye
But reaching speeds that edged beyond my vision.
Like a thunderbolt loosed from the sky it bolted down,
Leveled to a plane above the river,
Screamed through the bridge’s latticed understructure
Then turned as bolting horse will dead stop turn

And flaring into the bridge’s latticework
Settled on the beam where its nest had been.
And there it began to preen, as if nothing at all
Let alone something utterly extraordinary
Had just happened. And I thought of you.

Stephen J. Cribari has been writing poetry for over sixty years. In a parallel life he was a criminal defense attorney and law professor. He resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Still Life (2020) and Delayed en Route (2022) are published by Lothrop Street Press.

Something Different

1 July 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Emily Lacey

You’re not even mad
that you’re bundled in a pink snowsuit
or that your hands are swallowed
by your sleeves and mittens.
You don’t care that your boots
are stiff or that your hat is strapped tight
below your chin
or that your nose is dripping,

but you’re enraged
that the snow is blocking
the sidewalk,
your mittens now little purple fabric fists
because you can’t go for your
daily walk.
You trudge your body
forward—into the mound—sink.
Mama,
make this go away,
Mama.

You wave at the snow falling,
like it’s something different.
You even try to kiss it.

Emily Lacey lives in Danvers, Massachusetts. Her work appears in Evening Street Review, Medical Literary Messenger, The Broken Plate, and Freshwater.

A Life Lived in Common

1 July 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Robert Harlow

They don’t think much about it,
I suspect, the horses, the snow.
Probably wonderstruck the first time
they stand in it, as it falls on and around them.
As long as they have something to eat,
mostly hay, unbaled, strewn, disheveled,
they are fine, it seems. Nonchalant.
At least that’s what they look like. Their pose.
And there’s always one, isn’t there,
who is off by himself, looking
to the distance he can’t get to.
Even though he’s never been there,
he wonders if there’s a way he can.
Somehow, he’ll have to convince the others,
nodding into the feed, to cover for him
by creating one of their famous diversions
as he tries to figure out how to open the gate,
because he has to live with the mistake he made
of not learning how to be a jumper
as I tried to teach him to be.
And he can’t secretly disassemble the rails
without me seeing him, catch him in the act,
putting on the “What? I wasn’t doing nothing” face.
Even though he is dark-gray, intermittently rain-smooth
when he needs to be, snow won’t help hide him,
as he thinks it will, or fill in his hoof prints
on the other side if he somehow remembers
what I tried to teach him about going over obstacles
one might encounter in this often-puzzling world.
So, he’ll have to be content,
or at least pretend to be, with his lot in life.
We have so much in common, he and I, don’t we?
He staring off into his distance.
Me staring off into mine.

Robert Harlow resides in upstate NY. He is the author of Places Near and Far (Louisiana Literature, 2018). His poems appear in Poetry Northwest, RHINO, Slipstream Magazine, and elsewhere.

Sparks

1 July 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Daphne Riddle

A night in September
surrounded by water
that’s when we first sparked

gentle as ever
I never felt better
meeting your light with my dark

your hands in my hair
that shirt that you wear
our love summed up in parts

the sparks aren’t there
and I wish that you’d care
I’m lost here in the dark

I look for you everywhere
and you just carry on
I’m questioning all those years
but all I really want
is floating in September

with all of the fish
and the stars
and the songs
and the sparks

Daphne Riddle is an artist from Southern California. She is a music student at CSU Long Beach and an active songwriter. She is largely influenced by her study of international art song and her career as a musician. Writing is her foundation to heal.

Category: Poetry (Page 5 of 33)

After Hours (Guggenheim Museum, 1984)

Going up Gorham

The Marimekko Dress

Priced to Go

Annual Report

Notes We Cannot See

Peregrine

Something Different

A Life Lived in Common

Sparks

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