Twilight’s turning out the daytime sky as if it was a pilot light, blue flame fluttering into vapor, leaving the edges of heaven fringed in rippled scatter. Shadows lengthening as the last play of light is pulled down to water. Overhead, the hushed, dust-soft sweep of bats, the slow, easy lilt of wind dawdling in languor, and star’s sinking between clouds in bright idleness. Leaf-burdened branches catch and then release a cold, celibate moon into apertures of orange-yellow light. And I see how this may well be the way life abandons us at some near-distant, mystical hour. Luminous in parting, it, too, becomes a thing unburdened and, set adrift, brightly burns as it spins away from us.
Category: Poetry
John Muro: Andantino
- After Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor: Third Movement Calls to mind the disquieting Lull and puddled velvet that comes just after receding tides unravel into an ampersand of foam and fall back to water, thickset in calm, aglint without motion, revealing where grief gathers as surf recoils or that hushed, holy space between breaths, with air held in a kind of peaceful penitence, neither moving in nor out, soft as wide, immaculate lawns at twilight or the momentary stoppage of the heart that comes on just as hope departs, leaving an undulant wake and fractures of light blossoming in abundance and the sound of idle water rising and what amounts to a life near- drowning taken back to shore
John Muro: To My Grandchildren
Gathering up this aging heart that’s loosened and fallen again, unable to rise, leaving a space inside me while watching you sleep, hurtling aimlessly into dream, after a day seaside collecting shells and snails, housing them in bright buckets and counting each one like wishes carried upon incoming tides crusted with light and then taking in, by firelight, the day as it undresses and puts on a night-time sky, with story upon story told or to be continued like your blissful lives that I pray are no less full and never-ending convinced that this earth may well be our only heaven and the best we can do is to try and hold such days close for safekeeping and keep loss at bay, and so what I’m now asking is to forgive those of us who, deep in life’s winter, watch over you and once again dream of being young while hoping we’ve bequeathed something of worth you might hold onto and never outgrow.
Monty Jones: Contemporaries
The ordinary thought is that our contemporaries are now alive during our own lives. But look at this stone axe, or trace your fingers across the red paint on this rock where a deer can still be seen. Or read the Odyssey, Book XXIII, where Penelope realizes that Odysseus has come home. Or witness Lear, mad in the storm, or listen to Maria Yudina playing Mozart, say the Fantasia, K. 475. Who will not find these lives overlapping with our own, their time our present moment? Who will fail to recognize the hands and the eyes that shaped these creations? The same as in the far future when something, or its robot, even from a distant world, sifts the jumbled remains of an archaic streambed or at the mouth of a glacier and finds what it believes to be some trace of the human, something from our own time, from this city before it burned, something we could not take on the long road to the north, our only hope then that someone would come to value it as we did in our day, let us say a square of bronze stamped with five words from the Book of Ephesians: “Be kind to one another.”
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Kelly Ann Ellis: Owen County
They drank nectar from honeysuckle and clover August days when nothing happened ever. A nip and a suck was what it took to taste the moment sudden sweet. It made her livid their mother. She’d holler, You kids get outa them weeds before I skin you alive. You wanna drop dead? They mighta been sprayed with poison. Go on. Just get. She pealed potatoes with a butcher knife wiped it on her dress blinked back sweat. They weighed the odds, ate one last flower made sure she saw, then scattered— like so much dandelion fluff— into the buzzing afternoon
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Holly Day: In Closing
I imagine them finding her on the beach blond hair spread out on the sand, skin pale and taut the water pooling in a foamy halo around her head eyes fixed unblinking on the early morning sun. I don’t think about the crabs and seagulls that must have surely found her before the first pair of joggers stumbled across her in their morning run and whatever other damage that must have occurred from being battered about by the waves before being hurled up on shore. I close my eyes against the curt voice on the phone methodically ticking off the contents of her pockets the jewelry she was still wearing, the description of a tattoo I never knew about and instead, think of angels on Christmas trees, tiny wings spread half-remembered psalms, shattered lectures of Heaven.
James Piatt: Stored Memories
In an old cardboard box in the attic… personal notes sent on cold mornings, rusted nails, paper clips, a gold high school graduation ring, pencil stubs, a chipped red checker piece, but mostly a collection of long-lost memories. The dusty box sits beside a cracked antique mirror, a single bed, a dented in trumpet from the 1930s, boxes of esoteric books, magazines, grocery sacks of old games: monopoly, chess, clue, and on the bottom, an old picture album of known and unknown faces… unfinished: The forgotten memories inside, covered with countless years. The things glistened with newness a long time ago when those who lived in this old house still breathed, laughed and loved, now only an empty silence. Life, so brief, so taken for granted. Then, in a sudden moment, everything faded, and what was can only be found in old cardboard boxes in attics, and far less often, in the memories of those few who are still alive to remember.
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Jim Wilson: New Life Sunrise
This beautiful morning delivers through swirling pastel cloud wisps a baby pink and blue sunrise. The gentle view sets my tone for the day. No complaining, even in thought— I will have, exhibit, and enjoy peace, patience, love and kindness. I’ll start by not caring if the sunrise is a boy or a girl. I can’t decide it, but I can delight in it. Tomorrow I am sure I will be back to persistence, effort, and goal setting, but today I am taking the day off to play with the baby.
For more on Jim Wilson, please see our Authors page.