Category: Poetry (Page 6 of 35)

Injury Lessons

1 November 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Nicole Farmer

The words tendinitis & torn meniscus get thrown
around doctors’ offices & at home leaving

me to come to terms with immobility & mandatory
rest, while my body revolts, my mind riots

& old age cackles in my ear all the fears
of dependency – send my mind reeling in doom,

despair, confined to a chair or couch
to slowly atrophy & wither away to obscurity.

Then just this morning the trees spoke to me –
underground roots rough raspy voice saying

hold tight, stand still & breathe in the day
be like us and sway your trunk/torso

do what you can to reach your limbs/arms up
move with the gentle wind.

Oh yes, there will be chair yoga & stationary
bikes in your future, but right now

slow down, stop racing & look around
delight in the early yellow light & the drying leaves.

August is evaporating so enjoy these last days
of simmering summer swelter.

So, I moved my reading chair to the deck & embraced
a long-awaited repose in the shade of the old maple.

Nicole Farmer (she/her) has published Wet Underbelly Wind (Finishing Line Press 2022) and Honest Sonnets (Kelsay Books 2023). Her poems have been published in Wisconsin Review, Suisun Valley Review, Apricity, Wild Roof Journal, Poetry South, Drunk Monkeys, Sad Girls Club, and many other journals. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Photo by Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash

Let’s Fly Away

30 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Martha Ellen Johnson

“Grammy, let’s fly away.”
We are sitting on the top
step of the second floor
staircase. Down the hall
is her magical kingdom
bedroom. She’s wearing
fairy wings over her street
clothes as usual, a sign of
a theatrical life to bloom
in later years. “I can’t. I
don’t have any wings,” I said.
“Hold my hand. We can fly
together.” And I do. We
fly down the hall soaring
into another realm hovering
far above the ordinary, held
aloft by the imagination
of the most innocent.

Martha Ellen Johnson lives alone in an old Victorian house on a hill on the Oregon coast. Retired social worker. History of social justice activism. Old hippie. MFA. Poems and prose published in various journals and online forums. She writes to process the events of her wild life.

brown hummingbird selective focus photography — Photo by Philippe Donn on Pexels.com

Laughter

26 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Sharon Whitehill

After Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring“

Nothing is so marvelous as mirth—
When breath, in spasms, splurges, spouts, and sweeps
Away all chance of words: attempts emerge in leaps
And gasps of sound, their content nothing worth.
More overwhelming still is laughter brought to birth
In formal circumstance; it can’t be quelled; it keeps
On bubbling up and out, like lava from the deeps
Wherein, suppressed, it flares from inner earth.

What human gain to all this greed and glee?
Our babies laugh unbidden, even deaf and blind;
Every era, every population, has its devotees.
Children learn to fake-laugh when they find
It wins them friends. Laughter is contagious as a sneeze:
Both speak our shared humanity, and we respond in kind.

Sharon Whitehill is a retired English professor from West Michigan now living in Port Charlotte, Florida. Her most recent chapbook, This Sad and Tender Time, appeared in December 2023; forthcoming in late 2025 is another entitled Putting the Pieces Together.

Words Will Have to Wait

24 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Bonnie Demerjian

In summer poet gardeners are led astray by produce.
There will be no ghazals when peppers are plumping in the greenhouse,
no time for tercets when rhubarb is in season, when rhymes are tangled in pea vine.

Weeds fill the notebook, refusing to be shaped into neat couplets. They spread at will, their roots leaving scant space for pantoum.
Haibuns run amok. They choke potatoes with bland adjectives and limp verbs. They must be trimmed, but first, the lanky willows that overshade the onion bed.

Who could pen a sonnet when gilded squash blossoms swell, outshining every leafy green?
What lofty metaphor can equal looking upward into cherries hanging heavy, juiceful, nearly ready?
And, look behind, because the crows are poised for ripeness, too.

There’s no opportunity for poetry. Beans and beets, carrots and garlic are waiting, and not patiently.
Harvest now and glean from them words for tomorrow.

Bonnie Demerjian writes from her island home in Southeast Alaska in the midst the Tongass National Forest on the land of the Lingit Aaní, a place that continually nourishes her writing. Her work has appeared in Alaska Women Speak, Pure Slush, and Blue Heron Review, among others.

photography of small blue and brown bird — Photo by Tina Nord on Pexels.com

If I Were a Bird

21 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Wesley Sims

I’d be a bluebird,
loved for its song,
its bold blue suit,
its habit of lingering
on limbs long enough
to thrill our mornings.
More than handsome icon,
a creature comfortable
with itself
who knows how to sit
in silence and wait
for the muse to call the song,
confident the music will come.
A bird with the discipline
of a serious writer,
who gets up early
and gets at his task,
living out the wisdom
that the early bird
gets the pick—
of worms, and words.

Wesley Sims has published three chapbooks of poetry: When Night Comes (2013); Taste of Change (2019); and A Pocketful of Little Poems (2020). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has had poems nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

Auction Circus

14 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Patricia Hope

Under the Big Top of lights and steel,
gaping doors open at each end, the noise
rivals a cage of monkeys, sentinels to jungle
chaos. The auctioneer chants his numbers
while the spotters yell – YEAH!
Like Simple Simon come to spend his penny
the bidders vie for the wares. One forty-four
gets one, 159 takes two, do I hear five? Who’II
go five fifty? In the back, another ring of action
takes place at the concession stand. A fly crawls

across the only menu, which is tacked to the wall.
One saltshaker is passed around. The hamburgers
drip grease beside crinkle fries steaming hot from
the fryer, banana pudding is served in Styrofoam cups.
Looky here, we’ve got an Elvis knife complete
with autograph, the auctioneer yells and someone
asks if they took it down to Burger King to be signed?
I look around the room. Elvis might enjoy a place
like this, then I remember his whole life was a circus
and I decide he’d opt for more solitude in his old age.

People mill around as cardboard boxes fill up,
and cards printed with bid numbers become fans.
While men stand in the doorway spitting tobacco,
another table of treasure is pulled into place.
The clock ticks, the sun sets, a slight breeze
wafts through the crowd, thinner now, some
succumbing to the drawn-out process. Serious
buyers move closer to the front ready for the REAL
bargains. The Elvis knife sells for seven and a half
in between an angle grinder and a “million-candlepower”

light (I wonder who got the assignment for that striking
job?) I suppress the urge to giggle but no one else
in the room seems to question the light’s power.
After all, the bidding has shifted to walking
canes and umbrellas. Bidders scoff them up,
eager for rain now, some using the purchases
to lean on as they leave, treasures tucked under
arms and in boxes. The building is almost empty.
The tent is finally folded and everyone slips
silently into the moonlit night.

Patricia Hope’s award-winning writing has appeared in the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Guideposts’ Blessed by His Love, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Agape Review, Spirit Fire Review, Dog Throat Journal, American Diversity, and many newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. She has edited numerous poetry anthologies. She lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Imprint

11 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Carolyn Chilton Casas

How much of my essence
is imprinted for perpetuity
on the objects I hold dear?

My favorite coffee cup
stamped with a dragonfly,
stashed on a higher shelf,
waiting to be filled with a favorite,
freshly ground roast,
frothed cashew cream stirred in,
cinnamon sprinkled on top.

The colored notepads where I write
to my heart’s abandon,
or the dusty keyboard
with its smooth, black mouse cupped
for hours in my right hand.

The special pruning shears
and gloves only I use
while speaking kindly to each plant
and flower I trim.

A fraction of my being
infused into items often touched.

The rose-gold, ruby diamond ring
my grandfather presented
to my mother’s mother
almost a hundred years ago,
her legacy, the one she placed
in my sixteen-year-old palm
days before she died.

Carolyn Chilton Casas writes for energy and wellness magazines in several countries. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Wonder of Small Things: Poems of Peace and Renewal. More of Carolyn’s work can be found in her second collection of poetry Under the Same Sky.

willow leaves touching lake — Photo by vanesa ayala on Pexels.com

In My Father’s Backyard

7 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by David Athey

There is a weeping willow
in sunrise

wild with ravens
singing in the crown,

a raucous song, a tantrum
of cries; and there is

a hint of a wind
like a gentling hand

brushing branches away
like hair from sorrow;

and there is silence
in the crown when the ravens hush

and the willow begins—and here
is my father—to laugh.

David Athey‘s poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Iowa Review, Poet Lore, California Quarterly, Seattle Review, and the Wallace Stevens Journal. Athey lives in South Florida on a small lake with large iguanas. His books, including the Florida spoof, Iggy in Paradise, are available at Amazon.

vibrant red poppies in summer field — Photo by Piotr Baranowski on Pexels.com

When the Column Blooms

1 October 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Jackie McClure

There are green things
we’ve planted here.
There are things that grew
which we never planted.

Had I weeded more
while my mother was dying
I would have never
discovered the poppies,
dormant in their seed-encased husks,
under the matting of grass,
masking an old garden spot.

So you see,
we did some good here:
ripping up squares
of thickly rooted sod
to unwittingly scatter
millions of seeds,
and, unknowingly,
we fed them.

When first they rose
above the weeds
in the new-broken soil
I was spending daylight
hours by my mother’s side,
urging her to eat,
helping her to move.

When I noticed they
were to be flowers,
she had gone home,
lonely, broken, and frightened.
It took longer to reach her.

When they burst
into scarlet bloom,
dwarfing the hearty weeds

I knew they were for her:
tall, lipstick-red poppies
garish, erect, unexpected,
floating
on the thin stems
upon which everything rests.

Jackie McClure writes poetry and fiction aiming to illuminate commonplace segments of our shared landscapes. She has an MFA from Goddard College and has published most recently in Humana Obscura and Hellbender. She lives near the Salish Sea in Northwest Washington State. Her preferred state of being is swimming.

footprints on snow covered ground in drone shot — Photo by Jamo Images on Pexels.com

Footwriting

1 September 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Russell Rowland

Hand it to the blank slate
of new snow—entire days could be written on it.

There’s plenty of page for me
and the child, with her closer-spaced footwriting.

If it’s a long walk we take, and we turn
to look behind, we discover
we wrote exactly that: “Love took a long walk.”

The tiny fieldmouse’s penmanship
is a fine hand, its thin tail writing a narrow line;
correct footprint punctuation—“I’m

easily overlooked, and thank you very much.”

A snowshoe hare leaves a lot of white spaces,
scrawling “Fox alert!” in haste.

Ethereal deer have a streamlined logo. It reads,
“No comment.”

Russell Rowland writes from New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, where he has judged high-school Poetry Out Loud competitions. His work appears in Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall (Encircle Publications), and Covid Spring, Vol. 2 (Hobblebush Books). His latest poetry book, Magnificat, is available from Encircle Publications.