Tag: poetry

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.

Found a poem

13 June 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Burt Rashbaum

I walk alone in pre-dawn lantern light
sometimes two golden
eyes stare back
other times a hundred
tiny golden orbs all
different heights on the move
a heard of elk
most times a sky of stars a sliver of moon
as the morning light still sleeps
as the bloodshot horizon teases
dawn from the night
a small circle of silver visibility leads the way
beyond its edges the darkness mute unknowable
like a dream.

Burt Rashbaum’s publications are Of the Carousel and Blue Pedals. His poems have appeared in Storms of the Inland Sea (Shanti Arts Press, 2022), Boats Against the Current, The Ravens Perch, Valiant Scribe, The Bluebird Word, The Seraphic Review, and The Nature of Our Times.

frozen wave against sunlight — Photo by Hernan Pauccara on Pexels.com

My Wife Explains How My New Book is One Long Love Poem

9 November 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Steve Cushman

They’re all love poems,
Julie says, holding up my new book,
and I say, I don’t know about that.
What about the sad dog poems?
Love poem, she says,
The broken bones of childhood poems?
Love poem, she says,
The difficult relationship with my father poems?
She bites her lower lip. Definitely love poems.
And the ones about you,
which are sort of true, but also
an idealized version of our life?
Those, she says, are the loveliest of all.

Steve Cushman has published four poetry collections.

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.

Walk a Block

22 October 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Brian Christopher Giddens

The brace of wind
Belies the broad blue sky
And puffs of clouds above me.

I walk, briskly,
To clear my head.

But let’s be honest.

My head is as empty
As a vacant room,
Dull, devoid of detail.

I need an image.
An image that gives birth
To a first word, then a series of words,
Forming sentences, creating a theme,
A theme that leads to a poem.

Or perhaps a story.
An idea that sparks imagination,
A bursting star in a black sky,
Creating a world, a place,
Out of nothing.

A world of words that
Make my fingers fly ‘cross the keyboard
Stopping at times, mid-flight,
To wipe my eyes,
Or laugh out loud.

Lost, in a new land.

Brian Christopher Giddens writes fiction and poetry from his dining room table in Seattle. Brian’s writing has been featured or is pending in Raven’s Perch, Litro Magazine, Silver Rose, On the Run Fiction, Glass Gates Collective, Roi Faineant, Flash Fiction Magazine, Hyacinth Review, and Evening Street Review.

Feeding Time

3 October 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Stephen J. Cribari

I hang my poems on the kitchen wall, each one
A balanced meal providing nourishment
From the artist’s pallet of essential food groups:
Danger, beauty, wisdom, insight, rage.

I say I hang these poems as my defense
Against obscurity but truth be told
I’m peckish. I’m just providing for myself.
I nibble here and there and snack and munch
On feelings and thoughts, on metaphor and rhyme,
The fiber and oats and hay and supplements
Of the controlled diet unique to this animal.

My poems: feed buckets hanging in the stall
Of a horse that would bolt given half a chance.

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.

Wandering the Mojave

12 August 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Cynthia Bernard

Along with the silvering of my hair
the years have gifted me
with a Frequent Wanderer Award
granting open access
to the Mojave of Middle-Night,
where there are many
interesting places to meander
but there does not seem to be
a trailhead that leads back to sleep—
and though I could remedy the one
with gloves, a bottle of dye,
and the laundry room sink,
there seems to be no compass
to help me navigate the other.

For a long time I grumbled about this
and stumbled through too-much-coffee tired days,
but then, during one weary too-early,
I paused to watch a horned lizard
swishing tail, flicking tongue
near the base of a Joshua tree
and noticed the almost silent whisper
of a gestating poem,
stopped to play with her for a while,
and soon I was surrounded
by her many siblings, cousins, and rivals—
quite a lively little nursery
with a hungry baby sonnet I’d almost forgotten,
two toddling villanelles fighting over a yucca flower,
and a pantoum with sand in her eyes crying in the corner.

Middle-Nights now, when the Mojave calls,
I am ready, having indulged in another
gift of the years, the afternoon nap.
I brew up a pot of cactus flower tea,
toss my tinseled hair over my shoulder,
grab my favorite pen,
and set out happily a’wandering.

Cynthia Bernard is a woman in her late sixties who is finding her voice as a poet after many years of silence. A long-time classroom teacher and a spiritual mentor, she lives and writes on a hill overlooking the ocean, about 25 miles south of San Francisco.