THE August, 2024 30/30 PROJECT PAGE           

The volunteer poets for August are:  Ayelet Amittay, Patricia Clark, Brian Dickson, Patrick Dixon, Sara Dudo, Molly Donahue, Logan Garner, Amelia K, and Jess Tower.

If you would like to join our alumni group of over 1,000 poets, apply here!

Day 31 / Poem 31

god everywhere: A Cento / composed by Patricia Clark

It’s hard not to ache for these huge elders
Fruit Flies climbing drunkenly out from the wine glass
within you, another night of lightning
Entwined earthworms
make figure eights
in the shallows of a streambed.

Our sunset wish: to be waves
Shimmer jasper, blue, blue—
crying wholly, holy
fear, hope, despair and love
Remind me of all I miss
I know I am walking by the sound of the gravel,
even if my legs don’t-

Wire me to the moon
Spine, ribs, this close
Every July they crater
I am faithful to my phantoms
But in the light of this evening
A delirium of birds!

You will crook your
evening finger with all
your neighbor’s heart.
this is not a metaphor
Three raccoons scramble
a book on a table lying open
cries out a pious I’m sorry

A nerve was severed in my jaw—
I remember numbness.
Left of me, touch me, reach out your hand
Name a tree and call on them every single day
holding holding
We know it’s coming. We just can’t accept it.

the things I went through
were just like yours, locked in that little closet
I couldn’t breathe either
She’s beautifully slippery, a slender trout
in a bath resembling an oyster shell.
Is this when the dead step out of the space between trees?
Up the tree there are more universes to slip into, a daily practice

of fraught and forgetting
translucent larvae for ten months

Sugar does not impress me, but what it sings to hunger
makes me swoon.
You toss a black hole in the stream to watch it disappear
inside an apple
Tomorrow, clementines

(Using lines written and submitted by August 2024 30/30 participants Ayelet Amittay, Patricia Clark, Brian Dickson, Patrick Dixon, Sara Dudo, Molly Donahue, Logan Garner, Amelia K, and Jess Tower)

Day 30 / Poem 30

Instead of Giving Up / Ayelet Amittay

Palms  / Patricia Clark

Pieces of long fronds, slim green,
handed out on Palm Sunday.

We didn’t have art on the walls at home,
we had Jesus of the bleeding heart,

we had pieces of palm fashioned into
a cross. I connected religion

with magic from the start—water
into wine, fishes and loaves

spilling out of baskets on a hilly
slope. The nuns told how a storm

blew through and those with palms
were saved. Tell that to my friend

Patsy Bender, third grade, her mother
dying of cancer. Or Gregory Federighi,

ditto. He told me this years later,
in Seattle, said he still walks by

our old house. The school still stands,
the church, the brick rectory with roses

behind a black iron fence. The nun’s
house where I took piano lessons.

A good lesson meant a gift, a holy card
for a bookmark or a plaster of Paris

bust of Mozart, Haydn, or Beethoven.
Abracadabra—I conjure it up to bring

the sledge down and smash their
thin white skulls. It was magic that worked

only for the ones in power, rich. The rest?
See you at the bedside, the hospital ward,

the gravesite. Fistful of black dirt.

If a god / Brian Dickson

(title borrowed from Wendy Barker)

comes to you as lighting, 
become an electron. 

If a god comes to you as a red-tailed hawk,
become a field mouse.

If a god comes to you as a coyote,
become a mountain hare. 

If a god comes to you as a fox
become sly, sexy. 

If a god comes to you as a show dog,
become a brush. 

If a god comes to you as a tree squirrel,
become a bagel.

If a god comes to you as a line of ants,
become honey.

If a god comes to your home as an assessor,
become horizon lines.

If a god comes to you as property insurance,
become brick and roof.

If a god comes to you as a sprinkler system,
become xeriscape.

If a god comes to you as bicycle, 
become a basket.

If a god comes to you as an envelope,
become coupons.

If a god comes to you as coffee beans,
become a grinder.

If a god comes to you as repairman,
who may arrive between
Monday and any day, 
interrupt your morning brew,
become Sunday’s best,
that bar is a bearable
low, low, low.

If It’s Not Good Enough / Patrick Dixon

I stand again in Yosemite,
under Half-Dome half a century ago
walk along the Merced with Ansel
and his assistant in the cool morning.
The scent of Lodgepole pine and Red fir
redolent in the air. We are disciples
attending a lesson from the Buddha,
photography’s Jesus with a swollen belly
and wide-brimmed hat. Twelve of us
awestruck and dumb watch his every gesture.

He instructs the tripod to be set twenty feet
from a pair of large pines, sunlight
wrapping around the bark like gossamer.
The view camera set on top, screwed in place
at just the height of his eyes, he disappears
under the dark cloth. We wait, watching, not
speaking as he focuses and frames the upside-down,
reversed image on frosted glass. It is a lesson
in patience, not unlike waiting for the Dalai
Lama to open his eyes and speak.

He backs away, turns to us. Would anyone
like to take a look? We all nod, wait our turn.
It takes a bit for me to realize what I am
looking at. The trees are rooted in the sky,
I think. No! That’s the ground. I’m surprised
I can’t see the branches at all. But I see the light.
Finished, he asks, Do you like that image?
Who would say no? We all nod again, sheep
at the feed trough. I would have taken that
photograph twenty years ago. He looks at his
assistant. Move the tripod halfway to the tree,
please.

 He does it again. We all agree the new image is better,
more about the texture and the bark. I would
have taken that one ten years ago. Again the
tripod moves closer. The final picture is focused
on the side of one tree, the light painting each
gnarl of bark with an ethereal touch. That’s
what I would photograph today. He takes a film
holder from his vest, inserts it into the back
of the camera, closes the lens, cocks the shutter,
looks at us. If it’s not good enough,
you’re not close enough. With a push of his
thumb, we all hear a click that echoes
for the rest of our lives.

Terra / Sara Dudo

Ponderosas give way to hesitant cones, grief
then growth under foot.
 
Modesty is waking after a storm, sudden
peaches.
 
The nightgown: in between little quartz gates
lighting
the wounds.
 
Animism in the pitaya fruit gossip, the soul
sliced into two to share.
 
Considering caskets. Can love still be love
without memory?

I remember feeling new.
 
The gloves you wear to tear up ground:
montauk daisies
as collateral damage.
 
A mortician’s chronograph racket makes for years
dancing and feeling new. 
 
Requiem, always yellow hues in the sfumato,
trains converging
into curtains of fire.
 
To put out wet laundries in our false town,
we are the grass ghosts.
 
Specters under the hill, stamens sway
in the unparadox.
 
Terra: a series of strangers hold bouquets
against yellow
and orange walls.

Terra: grandmothers singing everywhere.

The Devil’s Warshtub / Molly Donahue

Ruth says washtub with an R and laughs
louder than you think she would,
her older sister meaner than a snake,
her roses the size of grapefruits
against the backdrop
of a raging Lake Superior
that licks and licks and licks
at rock, an immortal sculptor
you’ve never seen the likes of.

You can jump into the devil’s warshtub
if you dare, but it might not
spit you back out whole.

Penultimate / Logan Garner

Tomorrow is the last day
of this marathon

Sitting down with paper
and my favorite pen,
listening to a recording
of Philip Levine reading
What Work Is
Because I’ve just found
an article about revitalizing
the labor movement.

Waiting, like Philip said
(but not at all like that really)
while I watch Billy Collins
with gray tufts at ten and two 
atop his head

He’s also got a goatee
and, all grays considered,
it’s like having 
a very successful koala|
teach me a little something |
about intention
and not just chasing
the bottom of the page

Now Patti Smith
is telling dark fables
from my kitchen and,
while I can’t see her,
my deaf hand listens 
far better than my ears do
and I must put down the pen.

Uncle Breaks His Oath / Jess Tower

to hate you. He says he was your favorite, once.
He says you were like his mom. 
Like not one wrong thing could change that fact.
I gave him a couple pre-rolls & a little cash. 
The fact that he didn’t ask is telling.
The fact is, he would have done it anyway. 

Moved your entire hoarder house, mom.
Got rid of your shit, mom.
He was more like your parent, mom. 

You told me many times: he stole from you.
Coins, cash, collectibles worth trash.
You were always looking for someone to blame 
for your own drugged-out mistakes.
But I believed you, then.

Just months before you bled out, so harshly, so vividly,
you said, he paused.
looked at me.
but a neighbor helped me up.
I called out your BS then:
but maybe 
he didn’t want to break his oath
to hate you.

Uncle texts me,
calls me my family nickname,
makes plans to see my new apartment.

He brings photos.
I half-ass looking through them. 
He says, I don’t know what changed.
He says, you start thinking of all the good things when they die.

Day 29 / Poem 29

Say It / Ayelet Amittay

The clapper of grief swings inside

Arrival at Funchal  / Patricia Clark

Here is a black cliff; here are green
terraces. Here, after eight days at sea,
is the island of Madeira—and we’ll board
buses to be driven on a tour. We learn

what is grown here: sugar cane, grapes for wine,
sweet potatoes and small, delicious bananas.
We see people with bunches of bananas
on their backs; others cutting canes with machetes.

Of course they drive us to the sheer cliff—
where the herd of us rushes to see—a black
railing, a glass walkway showing a 500-foot
drop to waves and saltwater. There are

toilets for 50 pence and a tourist shop
where we buy colorful peaked hats in woven
cotton, blue and gold, saying “madeira” in red
and green. We ape for selfies and grin.

At the harbor we admire flowers everywhere
in hanging baskets, windowboxes, pots.
A bar serves us the local brew, pancha
with bee honey, lemon and rum. We knock it back.

Always someone is late for the bus, is it
the tall man with big glasses, or the lady
with a limp from Ohio? The driver toots
his horn and our guide checks her clipboard

and counts passengers by twos, in rows.
Taxis back in and out of tight parking spots.
We find available shade and touch up
lipstick. Where is the statue of Winston Churchill?

There’s just enough time to find it, in bronze,
Churchill on a folding chair with a cigar,
paints in a portable box. An honorary citizen
of Madeira, he sits with each of us for snaps,

 said to be good luck. What is the temptation to return
to the bar, drink more pancha and miss the bus?
What would officials on the ship do? We could say
we wanted to hang out with Winston, we could say

we have a hankering to pick bananas and taste their
sweet flavor. Now we’re fumbling for Spanish when
Portuguese is the lingua franca. Is it time to admit
we’re seriously lost? All the guides encourage us

to return—a flower festival in May every year,
fireworks over the harbor and direct flights, easy
to book, from NY’s La Guardia. How do we admit
we’re not leaving but looking for a place to hide?

We’re tired of being counted in twos, tired of America,
the elections are coming, and we live in a swing state. Besides,
the pancha tastes so much of the honey-scented air.
What’s the harm for once, in refusing to comply, in saying

no to repatriation. The black cliff was forbidding but
dogs lie down and snooze in the streets, and we glimpsed
green parrots mobbing the unusual orange trees.
There’s an urge we can’t refuse. The ship sails precisely at 17:00.

Invention of the Swing / Brian Dickson

(one of the earliest representations in Crete)

Found in Hagia Triada, 
the woman swings, 

one imagines, between 
two olive trees, 

between mortality 
and immortality, 

praying, waiting 
for Athena, or 

why not 
enjoy the fruit of rope 

tethered to trunks, 
the oil to come 

lit, gods 
be damned.

I Won’t Cry / Patrick Dixon

When it all comes crashing down
I promise I won’t cry.

When you or he or she
screeches to a halt or slips away

in the dark, under a cloudless sky
or in the pouring rain, I won’t cry.

I won’t shed a tear. I’ll tear at my eyes
each time they moisten, and wipe

them away so rough I never cry,
not once, again. I don’t have the strength

to hold back the sorrow, the loss,
the missing, the ache, the memories

from leaking out my eyes, so don’t believe me
when I say I won’t cry.

Look for me on the floor, under the bed,
hiding in the attic, sleeping in the garage,

living like it doesn’t make sense, but
I won’t cry. I’ll scream, I’ll sob, flail,

check the mail for a letter, my email
or messages for a note, wait for you to call

to tell me what’s out there, who you’re with,
are you still here in spirit, watching me

not
crying.

Merveille du Jour / Sara Dudo

Annulets pepper rockrose
in a world you cannot know.
While the pupa in a processionary
skeletonize the leaves within silk webs,
the emperors and their melanism
drink the grass stems’ morning dew,
(this noticed behavior grants you
the robes of dignitaries).
Adults feed at ivy flowers
and overripe berries, everything
latticed, very warm, open places.
The hillsides after dusk, feeding
on honeysuckle, tobacco, wingspanning
the distance between the rare
red data book, peach blossoms
hiding amidst leaf litter,
and the mass migration of clouded
yellow years. This is when
the feathers and sheen antennae
can turn up almost anywhere.
The wind disperses the young
over dandelion, plantains,
for several wondrous miles.

the crowded struggle / Molly Donahue

barefoot in a city
with thistle
and a scorpion.
depth of curvature
and never
knowing.
sobbing
until a head rages
with aching.
pulling and pulling
a string
a square
at the other end.
to fold
or not to fold.

Hagiography / Logan Garner

Francis, who gathers loose fur
in clumps off of floors
who scoops away droppings 
from the potbelly outside
from barn swallows 
roosting above my door

Benedict, who sings low
and quiet in basements
holds moments in meager light
eats simple meals
of bread and coffee

Mary, queller of all things
fearful and unsettling
a ward against misfortune
for the superstitious
soother and soothsayer

Anthony, who apparently
loves rhyme and has a sharp eye
whose prayer is a child’s poem
who jokes that found things
are always the last place you look

Stephen, whose stones
and cheeks were left unturned
taker of mysteries early
into quiet and darkness
into the great unknown

Judas, who is most generous
reminding us that flaws
faults and failures
are the deepest parts of being
who whispers kindness

Fibromyalgia: / Jess Tower

an uncertain diagnosis pertaining to the body, as a whole, and/or as parts of itself; it is that which causes severe pain all over, and nowhere at all. Fibromyalgia: what my doctor said I might have today. It doesn’t explain the strokes, but it goes hand in hand with your dysautonomia symptoms. A misunderstood diagnosis. Is it what I actually have? 

The way my pain permeates: 

1. my eyelids

2. the various tips of my skin

3. the hair on my arms

4. every cell of my entire being 

It doesn’t explain the strokes. But what else is there besides strokes? A fluke, a fledgling tossed into the wind before its time? What is the wholeness of myself lacking?

The Way Through is included in the following:

1. my shortness of breath

2. my chest pain

3. my fast heart rate 

4. my leg tightness

Secure it all and you will be free. [You still have so much youth to live, even now.]

Why is the wind always so dramatic? Dropping birds until they die. They can’t even fly yet. Cut them some slack.

It’s simple. To cure yourself you just need to:

1. lose weight

2. exercise 

I am so often part of myself, now.

Day 28 / Poem 28

Spinal Column / Ayelet Amittay

Longing Animalia / Patricia Clark

Does longing begin at birth? I wanted the heartbeat
next to me, the pulsing blood, the warmth.

As when you read an article and are surprised by photos.
Lovers who scatter clothing in their haste to fuck,

then take pictures of the scene. I don’t remember
that at all. We didn’t rip each other’s clothes off.

The bedclothes weren’t in disarray. Did we try other rooms
in the house? The living room rug by the fire?

Now we have a hiatus due to illness. We mourn
the loss of skin touching skin. The fluids rising.

Before the summer ends, let’s lie on the screened porch,
so close to the cries of creatures late in moonlight,

either ecstasy or mortality, we aren’t sure which. Align
ourselves with the moon and the wild. There’s much

to be learned by how they venture out. World
of midnight dark, then wrap us in your cloak.

Don’t Bother, We are Deep in Cantaloupe / Brian Dickson

My daughter asks
how can you tell when 
they’re ready. 

Look for a golden yellow net 
around them, then they snap
off the vine easily, I say.

Like this: She grips the air 
in a circle, love, tugs 
softly, green the color of 

resistance—I want more 
peach trees in the neighborhood, 
branches fishing for a hand

over a fence, some 
lining a block begging 
for a ceremonial picking.

We can nitpick city permits, 
who cares for the trees, who 
doesn’t want who slipping 

on souped up pits and skins. 
What to violate if we leave 
our fat melons strewn

on our sidewalk for anyone
searching for slake and slumber
into the afternoon? 

What if, love, we stake 
this patch of slab ours, sprawled
naked, with only slices

of orange-coral covering 
ourselves, gliding off our thighs 
into this strange land.

Do You Ever Write Stoned? / Patrick Dixon

he asked, and I had to reply,
Why yes, all of my stuff is the result
of a healthy dose of cannabis.
Which is about as untrue as anything
I’ve ever said, but I figured if he asked,
why not go with it?

I was fifteen when I got busted for drinking
at summer school. When accused, I lied.
Through my teeth. Around my lips and gums.
I was all set to continue until they threatened
to call home if I didn’t confess. I had them!
They couldn’t prove it. But I caved.
In my defense, I was only 15.

I used to teach Drama. I based my instruction
on Improv. Always say Yes to whatever happens
and build on that. So, Yes, I write stoned
all the time. Dude! It’s the Golden Age of Weed.
Why don’t we all do everything high?
Life is so much more fun this way!
Don’t you agree?

Hell, now I’m 73. I could lie all the time.
Part of me thinks I should lie all the time.
Why should I care what people think?
There’s a certain candidate for President
who is six years old – oops, I mean older than me
who doesn’t give a shit either. I’m not proud
we have that in common. Do you think I’m
telling you the truth? How about now?

Double Image / Sara Dudo

Girl, or someone
travels on foot
into taverns, lighthouses
across metempsychosis.
Ceaseless paradises of grapes, stones.
Out of the hour that smothers
had she compared day
and tomorrow with the help hills,
back in the meadow countless counterparts
filling the dredged sometimes voices.
In her instance,
who knows but winter, the cicada
crying out for having awoken.
The unavoidable oscillation once gone sable,
from now on her breath
in outbursts, ribbons strewn across
years. It was always children,
when the earth was faultless,
girl, or someone in one world body.

The Bell / Molly Donahue

After Jeffrey Skinner’s The Cloud, on the anniversary of my father’s death

My father’s been dead for twenty five years.
I run into him occasionally when I go to sleep.
One of those times we played brass horns together
but it isn’t always a comfort to see him.

He came from a family of great storytellers
and was one himself. His truck smelled of sawdust
and he would make precariously built veggie sandwiches
and eat them from behind the wheel.

He rings out in me like a bell until I die too,
though I don’t know why I think that or what
that sounds like. I’ve purchased small bells
for their resonance and maybe that means something.

If this makes my love for him sound flat
I assure you it is mountainous. My missing him
is at times bountiful and crushing. To watch
him get away changed the shape of me forever.

Boar’s Head Gospel / Logan Garner

The diocese paid for my trip to Italy. 
A pilgrimage with Father Brian 
who showed me that being a man 
has nothing to do with muscles, 
everything to do with feeling, crying. 

Barely eighteen, I went with fervor: 
Wept and sweated 
in a crypt despite the cold.
Prayed the rosary above Assisi 
in the mountain cave. 
He thought I was asleep.
No.

In Norcia there were boars’ heads 
above every doorway, or so it felt. 
They were there, jaws agape
snarling and begging 
for a monk’s breakfast:
coffee, apples and bread. 

I stood beneath one
opened my mouth and breathed
a prayer, the heat 
dew on my skin.

Autobiography of My Hungers / Jess Tower

after Eduardo C. Corral

Eating my feelings.
Or fat positivity?
I wonder if I could turn all the shit-talk around,
into a song, into a sunny day, into 
my 600 lb life of beauty, into
the way I eat is gorgeous,
the way I move is intoxicating,
into I enjoy my life.
The way I take care of myself 
is the same as you.
Into: us fat people deserve 
the whole cake, too.

Day 27 / Poem 27

Total Recall / Ayelet Amittay

Let mars be the beginning of my dream.
Red planet, revolution. Let me helmet
crack and my eyes bug out in
wonder-horror. Arnold, you are
an average Joe with a jackhammer 
and upswept eyebrows. Everyman 
with an accent. Muscled cheekbones
The stories you are in are the future
masked, the masculine possible
too beautiful to be in reach.

Ghazal: Like Falling Asleep / Patricia Clark

It’s as though there’s a door, going down
to sleep, and the stairway’s dim, showing down

to be possible, and near. But tonight I can’t find
the way in, no handle, no door, bowing down

doesn’t help. It’s never helped me to count
clouds or sheep, but there’s a poem, flowing down

the page, so I say the opening lines, “Lay
your sleeping head, my love.” Did Auden, rowing down

the Thames, recite these to a lover? The words start
me dreaming. Then I miss a word. Slowing down

now as I get up to check the text. Blue light
interferes with sleep. It doesn’t seem I’m going down

any time soon. Open a book instead? The mystery
I started is boring me. That does it, I’ll be mowing down

anything in my way: people, trees, clouds, sheep.
Maybe I can count flakes: snow coming down.

May 30, 1981 / Brian Dickson

We are at the nursery window, 
flesh and folds, bob

wrinkle and wrap— 
youngest brother there. 

How many want to return?
My face mashed potatoes. 

Blue gown of mom cuts
across the view.

I don’t remember 
expressions from anyone—

but corridors, a nurse’s dash
into the room, rows 

of swaddles, blending 
into blinding white walls.

What could disrupt 
this color— 

one beetle on the glass,
its crawl on tiny cries in the air.

Don’t Cry for the Northern White Rhinoceros/ Patrick Dixon

gone extinct in the wild,
its DNA scattered

across the savanna
of southern Africa, poached

by humans selling the myth
that their horns are wer

an aphrodisiac.
The last male died in 2018

in captivity, leaving behind
a mother and daughter.

We even gave them names.
Conservation couldn’t save them.

It wasn’t climate change.
It was us.

Abundantia / Sara Dudo

In these last days, departments
of every desire.

Glass angels leave their cenotaphs
and I lower my face to the water.

Sorrow: a good reason for our forgetting.

Guests without devotion congregate
on the balcony with sunbellies.

Acceptance: a sudden clearing and splitting
what belongs to us.

How you define memory is the butterfly effect.

Wetland sphered, I’ve come to be xeromorph.
Wetland sphered, an opening, a fourth man of fire.

Remember the illuminationals:

berries on the afghan, Nevada letters
to a phantom sister, grapefruit, red merl
resting in sawgrass.

The life balm of a promise is comfort
in a word that may burn,
a chest of devotions, was it?

Wetland sphered, foundations in abundance
nebulaed

Happy Fourteenth Anniversary / Molly Donahue

You think the loon calling
is a dog barking.
Funny.
Remember the time
on Long Island
I got high and thought
a seal sunning out on a rock
was a dog with no legs
that was thrown overboard?
I think I realized then
I needed glasses.
Good times,
you and I.

An End, a Close, Approaches / Logan Garner

Sunset is coming
back sooner these days,
making gains and playing chase
with the clouds.

This present hour,
a too-thin stretc
of cotton batting follows evening, 
runs away
from the reddening sun.

At that altitude—that of jets, 
which merely crawl 
through heights—
it is apparent: 
These wisps will never escape.

Not only that,
but as they stream fort
they are only screaming
toward return,
toward the sun’s morning face. 

Thanksgiving / Jess Tower

Wonder how awake you were when you died.
If the way down to the floor
was harsh, or empty
Wonder how awake you were when you died.
If the way down to the floor
was harsh, or empty
If it was like falling
or like bending over backwards
for someone you don’t hate
but you don’t love, and never will.
Wonder if you gave it up to a god
or decided on becoming a butterfly.
If you became one with the univers
or one with Lucifer’s damned.
Wonder how awake you were
when you died.
Did you cry
out for your mother then
who you hated, despised
Or did you fall asleep, giving in?
Did you cough blood and call me
one final time because 
you cared, you tried?
What did you want to tell me?
Wonder all the things 
you knew
and never said.

Day 26 / Poem 26

Silverfish / Ayelet Amittay

Yielding to Joy: Ghazal / Patricia Clark

What if we sank into the arms of delight?
We could be seduced by the charms of delight.

Don’t be prudish or fear the harms of delight.
Let’s cultivate and grow on the farms of delight.

Our blood heats quickly and warms with delight.
Come near we say to love, all forms of delight.

There may be setbacks caused by storms of delight.
They will pass and subside in the balms of delight.

Roses smell rich if you ignore the thorns of delight.
Open to love, says Patricia, and be born to delight.

Cento with Bowls of Fruity Pebbles / Brian Dickson

(including lines and phrases from Ayelet Amittay, Patricia Clark, Patrick Dixon, Sara Dudo, Molly Donahue, Logan Garner, Amelia K, and Jess Tower)

We each smell
of milk sometimes, brother. 
The gallons of. 
Double boxes of gallons of.  
We are staggering through the cellars 
of our abandoned hungers, ripple
of cell song, ripple of WIC paperwork 
passing by your young eyes
at a cash register.

Is this when the dead step out 
of the space between the trees? 
Not trees, but grocery aisles
with canning jars in hand,
Dustbowl recipes tucked
inside, how nothing goes 
to waste clings
to fried-dough donuts:
one to give peace and one 
to take it when 
there’s a call for seconds. 

If you stare at the cherubs 
in the store long enough they 
would reverse
direction until you blinked
sending them spinning 
again like the few fruity pebbles 
circling our bowls, as if the neighbor
who reported social services
telescoped into the kitchen
pocked with cereal, as if
reaching to our bedrooms
for a crinkled bag in corners, 
as if you pointed 
at us for too much, too much, 
as if you will crook
your evening finger
with that neighbor’s heart.

Sugar does not impress
me, but what it sings to hunger
makes me swoon, a faithful 
swoon to those phantoms
stacking and unstacking cans
at Skaggs, waiting for us 
to arrive, then dragging 
the kitchen table passed 
down. 

You know, the one 
where it all began, 
where hands go up in prayer
or resignation. The spread
of generations’ hoardings
our before us at the end 
of each aisle, what we 
can dismantle
with a sweet tooth, 
holding, holding. 

Doubts / Patrick Dixon

I have written two other poems tonight,
but am not at peace with them.
They say what I think I want to say,
but too bluntly, like a tire iron in the back seat,
not hidden between branches of metaphor and the leaves
of alliteration. Inside the weave of words
 paint of lines, sculpture of structure,
boundary of form, music of meter and the lyric of rhyme
lurks the potential for more meaning than it seems
I have the skill to craft tonight.
Instead I cheaply turn to confessional and plead
for the patience to carry on. 

Dos Sueños / Sara Dudo

Occasionally, a reverie in entropy
a hill souvenir
of shelter from rain
a banana tree leaf rinsed
in stained glass and a good
number of plum moons
the allure to touch
is the token of erasure
keep your fingers
in these given sunspans
beneath the companion of islets
unfurls me, expands through ships
with butterfly wings for sails
that stroke the hour of
lush abandon in the form
of immature persimmons cast
on the road of sweet
slugs lemon elixir and
the child in the bath sustained
while you roast peaches in cinnamon
for your father dispersing
the lightspans of dreams
as a sum? a division? The sheet
rips the linen into two expanses
disperses a hysteria
of empty anticipation
and seeds.

My mind is all wind / Molly Donahue

Huge, beautiful salmon
flashing
under deafening sun
and men who pursue
with line and hook,
knife and fork.

Wide eyed toddlers
shaking,
arms at wrong angles
and men who stifle
with rubble and dust,
wails and loss.

How to hold it all
at once
like gravity?

How to look and dare to see
and still budge
into tomorrow?

A Thing of Beauty / Logan Garner

your dog has left you both
suddenly
after twelve long years.

Yet there is your partner
down in the surf,
playing with a four-legged stranger, 

both exalting in the scend.

The Last Time I Went Home / Jess Tower

The last time I went home, 
it was a bone-deep, soul-tired.
My mother lay on the floor.
My brother nowhere to be found.
The last time I went home,
it was the last Thanksgiving, or maybe 
that was the one two years before.

The last time I went home, 
Teddy and I drove through Starbucks after
picking up pre-made Thanksgiving dinners
from Steve’s Quality Market, and he yelled 
at me for the first and last time:
calm down, she’s okay!

The last time I went home
wasn’t the last time.
We junk-hauled all the old boxes 
and furniture out, after the fact.
It looks like a real home now, 
I joked to the landlord.

That last time I went home,
the cop told me not to see her body;
it was that bad.
We couldn’t clean up 
the blood 
for days.

Day 25 / Poem 25

Queen Anne’s Lace / Ayelet Amittay

How to Get the Stain Out / Patricia Clark

Take the December calendar down and X out that day.

Check the wi-fi connection so the phone’s sure to work if
            you have to call for help.

Make a list of every kind thing he did.

Make a list of your own kindnesses.

Burn both lists.

Try running water, try rubbing the spot.

Put the house up for sale and sell the furniture.

Ask your sister if therapy helped.

Give instructions on how not to spill.

Tattoo on your hand: spill nothing.

Don’t use a rug or a towel to mop up a mess.

Invent a new story of how he died.
            Repeat it till the spot fades.

Killing the Roaches / Brian Dickson

In this version on the outer rim
of a mountain town, outside 
the skirt of a single-wide trailer,

is me in cowboy-space boots,
(It’s the 80’s. We’re still
enthralled by the universe); 

before the Challenger explosion,
before dad applies to the expedition.
Those creatures flee 

base camp across 
a desert patch to the horse corral. 
There go my giant leaps

for mankind to stomp
them. They only sink 
in the sand without 

stopping to their escape
on horseback to the moon,
where I can’t get hop

to the saddle yet, my feet
heavy in the earth, 
waving my plastic Stetson,

wishing for a telescope
to track that insect progress
for survival anywhere. 

After Dropping Him Off at College/ Patrick Dixon

The odometer spoke to us
on the ride home. Only sixty miles.
Straight north, the compass added,
a call-and-response of simple facts.

But his empty room reminded us,
He’s been here eighteen years.
Only three in this house, we answered,
but the sock on the floor pointed out,
Um, he’s been under your roof for18.

 We looked at each other. Tears ran
to where we hugged in the kitchen.
They left liquid on the tissue,
but didn’t say a word.
The kitchen table knew:
He lives somewhere else now.

 His guitar leaned in, whispered,
He left me behind too.|
He’s outgrown us all.

Flood House / Sara Dudo

Is a flash flood
false hope,
a new dialect of old landscape,
or wet augury?

September’s bravura:

from the balcony
lilac lightning beams
Aliante Casino, droves of rain
erupt the city with water,
streams of silver curbs.

The serenade of a funnel sound.
When our chests meet,
warm notes of green
           desert hillsides,
an abundance of
armadillos

standing
in place of a house
of andrology.

Papas / Molly Donahue

Long drinks of water
at the sink standing
just like my dad used to, one foot
resting atop the fine bones
of the other.

Deep trails
of my ribs the map to my interior:
skeleton afloat in a sea
of pale body and shadows
in nature
that remind me of him.

I watch a bird sip from a pan
filled to the lip with rain,
the world ever tilting back toward sunlight
and pears ripening quick on the tree
like a foul mood.
But not today. No, no.
Not today.

Trestle Bay / Logan Garner

I watch your forward neck
as you scan the flats
of mirror, muck and brine
where the tide is taking
a fistful more away
on each stuttered retreat
than the river pours in.
Silt for the estuary.

You watch the flats
where a fistful of rare
gulls and terns, all
strangers on their way 
to boreal nesting ground.
Each gives you something.

I hold you in my gaze
inside a space
that, like a river, is
never the same twice.
A home to which
you can’t go back.
That old saying, alive.

THIS IS NOT A METAPHOR / Jess Tower

(Cento using lines from: Ayelet Amittay, Patricia Clark, Brian Dickson, Patrick Dixon, Sara Dudo, Molly Donahue, Logan Garner, and Amelia K – the August 2024 Tupelo Press 30/30 poets)

Sometimes you write words:
Three raccoons 
scramble within you.

Another night of lightning.

Sometimes, when the air 
is heavy and warm,
with god everywhere,
it reminds me of all I miss.

Illumination
reduced to a trickle. 
A book on a table 
lying open. 

Tomorrow, clementines.

Day 24 / Poem 24

Sleep Study / Ayelet Amittay

Auvillar / Patricia Clark

I remember paella scented with saffron
in the town square, sautéd in huge iron pans,
glasses beaded with moisture, the local
white wine we drank that didn’t cool us
off, and I can still glimpse the green Garonne,
a blue rowboat someone had left overturned
nearby, and how I could see myself
floating in the bow down past
the nuclear power plant, beyond
several bridges. Walking the narrow streets
paved with slick stones, I tried to get a grip
with my sandals, admiring red old-fashioned roses
blooming and spilling over garden gates,
cats sleeping on windowsills, the gite
where I stayed with wide windows, no
screens, so all night mosquitoes feasted
on my skin that tasted of paella and wine.
A few days later, I feasted on a prix fixe meal
eaten with friends on the first floor of a house,
my first taste of duck confit, when a tall man
from Marseilles asked to join our table for dinner,
a man on the pilgrimage into Spain, a pilgrim
who’d rented a mule to ride on the Compostela
del Santiago, the man older, not able to walk
that far, he was a Vietnamese doctor, now living
in France. We followed him outside to see the mule,
fed it some oats, hobbled among palms.
When it began to rain, we went inside and finished
our meal, saying au revoir, au revoir later
as we promised to keep in touch. The next day
I heard the mule clopping its way out of town,
and I was bereft I never learned French, had missed
most of the doctor’s story, and never wrote down
his name. But I bought a small red encaustic painting
that has a curved streak of gray in it like a comet.
Whenever I think of Auvillar I study that curve
on a wall here, feeling a swirl in time and space
that somehow brings back the sight of a mule
with a rider, a wet stony street, and a rowboat
lying in sun on the rose-scented banks of the Garonne.

Brief Thought on Denver’s Oldest Restaurant / Brian Dickson

Light rail and me free
slipping by The Buckhorn Exchange—
Wild west show inside!

Buffalo Bill—I’m 
coming home—lookout—six-shoot-
er—I’m not dead-eye.

Mike’s Guitar / Patrick Dixon

– a pantoum

This guitar hanging on the wall
was mailed with the currency of my brother’s generosity, 
and glows in a honey-colored shaft of sun
as though I tuned it with my heart.

When he paid to mail it with his compassion,
he knew that this hand-made instrument
could re-tune my heart in the days after
I left my home in Alaska and lost my song.

He knew I loved his hand-built masterpiece
and placed that sweet instrument into my hands
after I left my Alaskan home and my melody turned sour
over the loss of all I was and wanted to be.

But the beautiful six-string he placed in my hands
had the opposite effect of what he intended:
through the loss of what I was and wanted to be
I couldn’t see what was in front of me.

Doing the opposite of playing it as he intended,
I hid it in a corner, convinced I wasn’t worthy.                                  
I couldn’t see what was in that case
was a portrait of my brother’s love.                                                   

I put in the corner, feeling unworthy                          
until I came upon a honey-colored shaft of sun,                                
a portrait of my brother’s song:                                                                      
this guitar hanging on the wall.                         

Nightspans / Sara Dudo

After Geoffrey Hill’s The Triumph of Love

And what of significance except
a sunroom apologia? Unstudied museum the kitchen
bowls of rice and peaches, suspended, the vows
diademed by our remission ecstasy.
Existence is a web, glimmering
joie de vivre, its own
monogram in a frame of thistles.
For things that diagnose
lifespans, will you sing? I am
a lived woman, an infant. Nightfall
is a country transfixed by the survival
of post-frost sedum pink
with aortic adoration.  

Sing Sing Sing / Molly Donahue

Hey rabbit girl
what’s that you’re nibbling? Everything
around us
is pendulating, my skin
pillowy with universe. My mom
on the phone with my grandma
who tells me
to sing.
Entwined earthworms
make figure eights
in the shallows of a streambed.
It rains indoors. Pours,
every surface
wet and pooling. I scramble about
with useless towels
in love with
and awed by the madness
of it all.

Crudités / Logan Garner

There are only a few
moments left,
with dark and rain
colluding to numb
only your extremities,
leaving the rest of you 
to shrink from the bite,
miserable and quite aware.

A few moments wherein
you wish for snow
(if it’s going to be this cold)
and think on resolutions
like you’ve promised
to do in the last gasps
of almost forty other
end-times of revolutions 
around the sun.

As with each
you turn inward,

think on the clock
turned-forward four hours.
The call to grandma
at eight PM to shout
“Happy New Year!”
into the receiver,
and wailing on pots and pans
with wooden spoons
like it’s the real hour.

Now to the chapped hands 
which you stay with longer. 
Pulling you into a hug. 
Softer ones next, 
this embrace lasting
a touch more.

Braunschwieger and crackers
on an oval platter
next to crudités 
and a cheese ball
all tasting far more complicated
than cookies. All these
grown-up snacks.
Or were those at Christmas?

I’m Happy / Jess Tower

Day 23 / Poem 23

Reflections on Devotion / Ayelet Amittay

There are times when I am so bored of packing school lunches I think I might die or turn to stone. And then the little one wants me to open a bag of popcorn, whining when I don’t turn to her immediately as I load the dishwasher. I want to crack the dome of heaven. I want to break open the scrim. Instead, I tell her I’m going to plant a giant wet raspberry on her round belly, watch her run and giggle-scream away from me. Bear cubs wrestle and tussle on the shady grass, that is me and you, little bear. God, will you hold us both, will you not let the grind of sand in the gears come between us. So repeated, sanding me down to shapelessness. God given eye and hand. Crying wholly, holy. Last night I started to cry and the tears pooled in the yellow light of the lamp and became gold ink scripting across the dome of the night sky, the deep heaven blue of night falling in mid-August, the ink breaking the night into pieces, or continents on a map. Oh sweep this mess from my sight, stiff brush broom of God.

Say Foot Fracture, Foot Fault [or: fun with anagrammer] / Patricia Clark

Not bunionectomy, so harsh,
inviting visions of bones, saws and knives,
incisions, stitches. Say

bitumen, instead, which is fuel of course,
the better for how it burns and burns clean
as bone. Say unction, for how the doctor touches
your foot with care, later.

Say incumbent, to describe your foot
that was, say neomycin, for they gave you
an antibiotic. say tomboy for the girl
you were as a child, climbing any tree, picking up
any warty toad. Your feet? Perfect, of course,
even crossing the rocky beach.

Say noontime, it was over by then, say
connote, which is how you suggest a foot
is a beat, an iamb, and can thus
be counted on for rhythm and fun.
Two is simply dimeter. No walking creature
gets you pentameter. (Think poem, instead.)

Say bouncy which is where, in months, your walk
might be. New shoe, new orthotics, a stride
to match those walking a great distance.

That will be you—or also cobnot, centrum, intomb and income—
Maybe cumin, comb or boomy.
Say a bunny in the county, or a mutiny—oh dear,
on the bounty.

Not minny nor uncoy, nor unbent.
No! Now your hallux is no longer valgus.

Pallet Cairn Next to the BNSF Railway / Brian Dickson

As if left from the past, 
brethren railsplitters, 
to mark the next pop up 

town, with the last tent
the lowly tarot reader, 
an eager foreman,

despite the deck stacked
with hermit cards as far
as the dead could see. 

Chainsaw / Patrick Dixon

The motorized whine
echoes through the neighborhood
we picked decades ago because of the trees. 
The Western Red Cedar is predominate here, 
pushing to the sky over a hundred feet at the tip,
anchored by wide roots and heavy branches.
Thick groves around this old subdivision
lower the summer temps compared to all 
the concrete downtown. They offer shelter 
to hummingbirds, owls, crows and ravens, 
finches, sparrows, raccoons, deer, coyotes,
squirrels and hundreds of smaller creatures 
who call the forest here home.

But developers and our neighbors have
convinced themselves and each other
that the prudent thing to do is cut down
these stately giants, even when they stand 
straight, not leaning toward the houses, 
not hollow or diseased from the looks 
of the stumps left behind. 

It’s hard not to ache for these huge elders,
over two hundred years old, cut like weeds
at the whim of whomever “owns” them. 
This land was once home to the Squaxin Indians. 
What would they say, what would they think 
of our capricious behavior toward what makes 
this land verdant, sustainable, beautiful? 
What would they think of our chainsaws?
What indeed.

Ουράνιος / Sara Dudo

White clearing, swarmed an ode to my honeymind.
Deathless fragmentations
beamed across the chrysanthemums.
I am faithful to my phantoms,
to what they can see winged,
how great, how many my aegis
quantify me to dancing places.
Cannas delighting in thunder.
Vagabond bodies of water abound in fish.
In the chambers, the other alives
summit the silver, as it is
gleaming-eyed.

The bread and the butter / Molly Donahue

Of course we cried
over a puzzle
over our fathers. Mine
long gone. Yours somehow
gone in mind inside
an unfailing body. There
was gin. Fruit Flies climbing
drunkenly out
from the wine glass. And lord
much bread with butter.
We walked a plank
of dark into the sound
of loitering
sandhill cranes. Dead wood
made beats and did
the river boogie just
for us. Space is not a place
for any of you
or for me.
Not in the light
of any evening.
But in the light of this evening.

Holding #1 / Logan Garner

I am continuously amazed
at the weight that pilings
on the Astoria waterfront
can hold:

cars
heavy equipment
lumber
so, so many tourists
buildings
heartbreak

the immense joy of dogs being walked

histories
ancestry
displacements

fear, hope, despair and love
(all different faces of one thing)

Holding. Holding.

trauma is not a glass of rosé, held softly at the stem / Jess Tower

Instead, it grows puke-green vines 
spiked off its every millimeter.
It’s a witch-giant callus between my toes.
(Hurts like my mom, a bitch.)
They think I’m thinking:
Wish I could have been there because 
then I wouldn’t want to be there.
But I don’t, 
I don’t grow older and want pale 
homes in pale yards, a horrid life.

Friend, you have no idea the things I’ve been through.
You don’t care to ask, so I’ll never, ever tell.
My secrets are glued behind my twist-stitched
leaves, so green I could puke up my rosé.

Day 22 / Poem 22

Song / Ayelet Amittay

After Bonnard’s Nude in a Bath / Patricia Clark

The room’s blue in a darkening mood—
with lit trees glowing outside
a multi-pane window.

She’s beautifully slippery, a slender trout
in a bath resembling an oyster shell.
Her white leg is like a pencil ending
in a foot. I can see each nibblet toe.

She seems to be half-sitting up, half-
reclining, the top of her head brown,
hair frizzing from rising steam.

Those gold coins to her side are a see-
through robe stitched together with cobwebs
and mystery. It’s October, a wind-scoured
now violet hour. The painter has watched
as the water cools, until he’s sure
the woman will climb out. No,

she has slipped into sleep, barely breathing.
She’s writing down dreams, using her toe as a pen.
He closes the door, gliding off, anything
to leave her in a moment’s peace.

Report from Inside a Happy Meal / Brian Dickson

(McDonald’s promotion of the Dukes of Hazzard, 1982)

This burger cozy 
in the plastic General Lee 
shredding the landscape, 

cheese hugging, ice-
berg-lettuce confetti. 
That one tomato, one

pickle, disc-flying all 
you can handle. Small fry,
one happy ride. 

That flag on the hood
one happy since the day 
it was born.

Bad Back / Patrick Dixon

The doc was excited for me.
The shots in my lower back – the S-I joint – 
worked. I mentioned the recurring pain
I get when walking, more on the outside
of my hips than in the back, though the
pain there is much better. It’s great
that your back is better. That pain
is most likely because the signals 
in your lower spine are scrambled.
It might be something you just have 
to live with. I smiled and nodded,
thinking, Yeah, I’m 73 going on dead.
The pain will disappear then. I hope.
Keep swimming, he advised. It’ll help too.
Anything you can do in the pool is good.
I’m buying new goggles tomorrow.

Everywhere the Orange / Sara Dudo

Later in life,
the full fathom
of loss and gain:

you are who I am
and who I am is hovering

               above the desert floor
               with algorithm air

and water that wants nothing
more than to fall.

Like tachyons, imaginative,
faster than light,

some things cannot even exist
as theories. A shadow
               beside the pale-yellow leaves
               looks like a man
I may have saved.

The mass of life

seen through these cup-shaped flowers,
rounded petals and tiny clusters,

               how we never
end until we end.

There was a time when each face was a trumpet
of goldenrod.

Breaking the light barrier looks like leaving
this world,

though truly believing I can see
them in the instant

               I open my eyes,
everywhere, the orange

and why can’t I lie
in it forever? Where are you?

My life is not my own. I can feel
the leaves, stems, the little hairs star-shaped.

The great blue heron sees us
               through fish glass

               just trying to survive.

At some point, you realize you
are not an orrery,

               rather the black space
where the embers
from our graham cracker fire

escape and fade

               into nothing.

What can be done?

You’re neither desert ready
               nor able to conquer
water air. You chase late summer

mirrors to inescapable blue hours.

Big Flirt / Molly Donahue

A single cardinal flower
standing blaze red
on the river bank today
set my hands to trembling
as I approached,
made me look away,
want to pray,
to cry out,
to bat my eyes,
to pout my lips.

It was love, you bet,
and nothing but.

[untitled] / Logan Garner

Christmas Laughter / Jess Tower

Mom gets her coffee, sits 
on the ratty red couch.
I freeze, making sure to be 
as diligent as the mouse 
I spotted in the corner
of my dark, dark room 
last night. He was suckling 
on cheese from the trap, 
then dissipated 
fast into shadows of boxes 
creeping up the walls.

I slowly start to open 
my stocking,
as we always did.
You’re ruining 
Christmas again!
Let me finish 
my coffee first!
Darias laughs.
I start to cry.
She digs into me further.
Her nails are so sharp 
and swollen –
infections abound. 
So I can’t speak mean.
You always do this shit!
Darias is cackling now.

If I could have anything,
I’d want the ability to never cry,
I tell God that night.

I am resolute as the black poodle 
statue in the living room, covered 
in papers. I don’t move. 
I’m not moved
at my Grandmother’s funeral
and I don’t cry when
mom tells me to leave 
after I make a mistake 
with next year’s Christmas sauce.

I do the all things I’m supposed to do,
feel what I need to. I rest, calm down.
I’m still numb. But less so. 
Less then, more now.

Now, I think back 
and my stomach clenches;
it feels that game she played
with my happy tide.
But it feels too the way she cried 
when I held my new boundaries 
and she spoke a true I’m sorry,
then she died.

I’m not happy yet.
This Christmas, 
Teddy and I will buy a real tree –
my first one –
and we’ll put it upstairs
with all the gifts underneath.
Darias will come to this safe haven –
my new home – 
he’ll open up a Harry Potter wand.
He’ll laugh.

Day 21 / Poem 21

Poem for Molly Brodak / Ayelet Amittay

Air  / Patricia Clark

Let me invite you to look again, look low
before you tell me there’s nothing worth seeing
in the weedy backyard. What caught my attention
yesterday? A large white bird rose from a honeysuckle
bush—out past the devastation of last year’s storm. Awake
but only barely, I scratched the crust from my eyes.
I’ve looked everywhere, please believe me. I’ve let moss
grow on our flagstone path, admiring its texture, soft
as baby toes. And I’ve listened to the landscape man
tell me about tree roots sharing nutrients, carbon,
water, and nitrogen across fine tendrils. What I’ve heard
is the voice of the extraordinary ordinary, easy to miss—
some singers unable to sing until we can tune the ear.

Couch in Front of a House Fence for Months / Brian Dickson

Coyotes checked 
the ass-groves, 

tree squirrels buried 
acorns in nooks, 

tested 
the stuffing 

for their nests, 
pinned 

a sign stating:
Found lost change 

for Vladimer and Estragon.
Garbage collectors

brushed
all hope from 

the scene, 
the two gents 

seen 
on Lyft scooters

scouring 
the night.

Harlan Time / Patrick Dixon

It won’t be long
before his mother drops him off
to spend the night and we’ll fill
tomorrow with sloppy joes,
cookies, grapes. plums and
any number of Hot Wheels,
most notably Mustangs
and Camaros, in between
discussions on dinosaurs and sharks.
We’ll take him swimming
followed by the obligatory trip
to (gasp) Dairy Queen or possibly
(horror!) McDonald’s. Don’t forget
Tickle Time, Bath Time. Nap Time
is off the menu these days, replaced
by Snuggle Time and Reading Time.
By the time we drop him off with
Dad at the end of the day, we’ll be
spent, exhausted, ready for a meal
out for just us and home to veg
in front of mindless TV or to read
a book with our eyes closed. This
is the penultimate day with him
before he starts school, one last
time to savor before he’s a
kindergartener, before the little
boy vanishes in front of us, before
he’s a grown man, before we
run out of time.

August / Sara Dudo

Reconcile
with the earthdreams

and what were they?

             an eruption of zinnias?
             blackberry awakening on the streets
             of my youth to
             the desert’s
             army of whispers?
             absent coagula

Watch the way
love falls
off the trees
like calcium salts
forming stalactites:

each water droplet
a shocked seraph

             Swallowtails follow
             the car

             old crab traps
             are left graffitied in snow

When I close my eyes
sage, sage

the sage in sagebrush:
salvus = safe

             I am only a facsimile of her,
             roots in hand

When I give you
my body,
I don’t hesitate

My words are love,
though I stopped breathing

             On any given hill,
             a choice of being
             coagulated

by your hands and the cool air of slugs

             Does the restless numerousness
                          genuflect only like light
                          glorifying
                          the settling dust?

anonymous missed trees
no windows, no windows
             is that the wind
yucca in childhood field

the difference between purging
and pouring is

the will
             I am only a facsimile
             of her monsoon tongue

                             evening primrose eyes
             You’d think I’m mad the way
             I check his hands

On Little Sleep / Molly Donahue

You toss a black hole 
in the stream to watch it disappear
inside an apple.

We make four loaves of zinnias
and arrange bread 
in delicate vases.

Outside at twilight
I find the neighbors shoe 
with your dog in its mouth.

I stare down a sturgeon moon
until it leaves a pink eye
in my spot.

I will never tell you
that you need not wear garbage
to take out the lipstick.

Surfperch / Logan Garner

Invisible, arriving. Waterborne.
A body with perspective
and home-place not mine.
Here we are, close yet
neither shown to the other.

On opposite looking-glass sides
nothing is crystalized. Mist
hangs from vanished spume
above creatures made known
only through the falls and dives

of beaks in the surf. I witness 
now and then in the median 
between peak and trough, 
a wave-action window
I get to see

the fleeting instant, before
the surface knits closed
whole again but for seafoam,
ephemeral as a dream
when surfperch disappears.

Day 20 / Poem 20

A Chisel  / Patricia Clark

Hauled back to our home in Michigan
from a farm in Indiana, the geodes lay
in a garden bed near the stump of an oak
we had cut down.

I had dreamed of caves of crystals,
amethyst and amber. These stones refused
to crack open neatly, crumbling instead
to Indiana dust.

I had gathered them in a field, throwing them
into a canvas bag that said National
Poetry Month in red letters.

We had gone looking for chanterelle mushrooms,
tiny pinpricks of bright orange emerging.
They smell distinctly fruity like apricots
or peaches.

Geodes instead of mushrooms, no odor
at all, the buff color of fingernail tips, disappointment,
ash.

A curved roof, our ceiling, a sky of crystals or stars.
My husband bought me a chisel.
I’m wielding it for the future.

People Have What They Have / Brian Dickson

(first line from Molly Brodak)

The amount 
of fear
I’m ok
with is
insane
really.

Really
he says
people 
have
what they
have
when 
they 
are born

Are born
sir
my 
test-
tost-
erone
is high
now
most
days
low
low

Low
as you
would
like
your
est-
rogen
daily

Daily
let’s
test
for elgi-
bility
like the
Olympics.

Six Times Faster  / Patrick Dixon

It’s my fault, really.
I agreed that after dinner
was play time. Over the four short
years we’ve known each other,
that’s been the routine.

But now I’ve committed
to writing a poem a day for a month,
and some days playtime
isn’t happening as I type
a new draft on my computer.

You might ask Why then?
Can’t you write in the morning?
And the answer is Yes, I can.
But some days evaporate
before I get started.

So he suffers, and sounds like it.
There’s panting, then whining,
then sitting here at my side,
leaning on my chair while I
write with one hand

scratch him with the other.
I stop writing and rub his face
with both hands. He points his nose
in the air and looks at me
and I melt into a puddle

knowing his life is moving six times
faster than mine. It’s then I stop
writing altogether, grab a ball
or a stuffy, drop to the floor
and count my blessings.

GOLDEN RATIO / Sara Dudo

The human eye
is given a seed head or hurricane,

pinecone or Parthenon,

all to be interpreted
quicker than any other ratio,

the best measurements
for brain transfer.

The circuitry joyous
over flower petals,

and photographs of beetles,
balanced thorax.

Elephant tusks, sea urchin,
honeybee family tree
serve as refractions

of all these ponds in autumn’s
archipelago.

We step on sand
and it barters brittle moon
for timepiece.

A butterfly’s proboscis
somehow cosmic,

the veinous patterns
of dragonfly wings

like digestible
absolute magnitude.

Growing Up / Molly Donahue

do you remember when i tried – line from Theology by Ocean Vuong

Do you remember when I tried so hard to love the dark
and you ran in your socks
with a knife in your hand
and the two of them hid beneath a blanket
like a siamese ghost
and he got poison ivy
and she did not
and they wrote slut in butter on her garage
and all the while our waterbeds were warm
and the shade went up unaided
when the sun had long been down
and you slammed the door
until he cried in his pancakes
and she drank warm beer from a near tapped keg
after they sang into a night whose arms
hung lazily around their shoulders?

Targets / Logan Garner

The full moon has rolled west
and out of view 
illumination reduced 
to a trickle 
through the black frame

The pale orb is hidden
behind the marine layer 
the bank of bottomed out 
stratus clouds which visits 
nightly this West Coast 

A woman sleeps beside me
An ancient dog snores 
at the foot of the bed

In the absence of light
an orange diode glows
whispers the low setting 
on the heating pad
atop which is curled 
a final slumbering form.
The buff tabby

sole occupant of the valley 
owns the space between
our human forms
mountains 
beneath the comforter

Multifaceted / Jess Tower

It’s been a rough time
I swear I tried
Mr. Mother – I mean –
I’m sorry I didn’t
I’m so sorry don’t 
I apologize deeply
I’m going to go now
to my new home
I’ll shut the door
please don’t 
break 
it 
down
I’m sorry
please
I’m so sorry I swear

It’s been such a rough time
with your cigarette voice 
you’ll never know
the things I went through
were just like yours, locked in that little closet
I couldn’t breathe either

Day 19 / Poem 19

Dark Night of the Soul / Ayelet Amittay

William Carlos Williams Cento and Cento Erasure/Burning Haibun  / Patricia Clark

Willliam Carlos Williams Cento: [as one who watches]

as one who watches a storm
spin upon the long axis
This is the sadness of the sea
the pure products of America
sharper, neater, more cutting
this time past, pulled down
as if the certainty of a future life
moving in fog leaves the grass
music and painting and all that
whose blossoms touch the sky.
From the petal’s edge a line starts
For what purpose? Is it for the dead
a celebration of the light.
on a balcony under an elm.

Cento Erasure: Sorrow

            a storm

            sadness of America

                             cut down

                         a future life

            a line for the dead

            light

            on a balcony

[April 4, 1968]

A Black-Crowned Heron Alights / Brian Dickson

(after Mary Oliver)

in the spillway, 
and patience aches, 

radiates in its search 
for minnows and crawdads.

Mary, there’s so much love right now 
my pen is a feather stuck 

in the muck of this flood plain:
the capture of flannel shirts,

golf balls, Kuner beans, a bicycle, 
empty Roman candles (Kerouac on the label!). 

This bird is hardcore. I mean 
dinosaur everlasting—not 

the lumbering ambulance nor
the echoing cough in an alley

to break both of our pale-legged 
vigil. Mary, at each step—

the heron’s eyes see
all of me.

Candelabra  / Patrick Dixon

Christmas, 1957–
Mom and Dad dragged boxes from the attic,
unpacked ornaments wrapped in newspaper
along with knick-knacks to be set out on 
end tables and shelves.

My favorite was the brass candelabra
with four short candles on the base,
underneath a louvred wheel that rotated
with the heat of the flames below, 
spinning a cherub on top blowing a horn.

If you stared at the cherub long enough
it would reverse direction until you blinked
sending it spinning off again. Sometimes
if you looked long enough it was hard to tell 
which direction was real and which
was an illusion.

The Blue Mind Hypothesis / Sara Dudo

A mausoleum
of twilight,

            wondrous summons
            of newly fallen
            plums,

the blue chokes
lampposts in dewy
quietude.

Poseur
perimeters
make the brain
absolute harlequin,

            so we convene
            under solstice snail shells,
            catch fire, our cinders
            so hot they are
            blue.

Look what we can do / Molly Donahue

Busy water
openly singing
through the naked cricket,
around the naked ant,
into the naked basil.

(Floodplain of grief –
how to cross without
soiling the heart)

Brine shrimp ribboning
in salt lake thousands
of miles away –
unending pathways
to the very same ending.

Targets / Logan Garner

Temperature and humidity,
having both reached 

a fever pitch,
come to rest
at the 90 mark.

In my brimmed hat
under buzzing shade, 
I am trading words
for insect bites.

In full sun she,
whose archery practice
will never fall a beast,
lets an arrow fly.

PTSD / Jess Tower

I’m cooking my mother’s sauce
for Christmas Day’s festivities.
My partner comes up behind me,
trying to be cute, I startle;
he touches my stomach.

There are mirrors everywhere.
Dark walls with no pictures, 
so many stairs. There’s a girl
in the room across from me.
She has Down Syndrome.
She’s crying, 
she won’t stop, she won’t stop.

My mother comes back
into the kitchen.
A man is there, 
helping me button 
my shorts from the bathroom.
She says hello to him.
How did she do?
I’m three.

Day 18 / Poem 18

Wellspring  / Patricia Clark

after Edvard Munch’s The Source

A waterfall, two nudes. Water cascades down a rock wall from a verdant green place on top of rocks. It’s a meadow, a field of sorghum or young wheat. The water silvery, blue, a glissando spilling. A young woman and a man, she of dark pixie hair, where he is blond, hair pulled back behind his ears. He cups his hands as though drinking. She is kneeling on one leg to get closer to the cascade, reaching for a bowl behind the waterfall. They look cool, impossibly lean, and their fellowship radiates two intellects joining. This panel will be in a university’s ceremonial hall. The two people drink the celebratory waters of education. They have no shame in this endeavor. They are free. They model what we might find if we attend such a place. Soon, I imagine them transforming into birds, perhaps Arctic terns and taking flight, soaring uplifted by this refreshing drink. Now we all desire it. This spot becomes a mecca, a place like Lourdes, of both learning and healing. No barriers. No artificial layers between us. Their thighs and calves shimmer pink and white. They are bone and flesh.

[Afternoons glide in the gulch] / Brian Dickson

Afternoons glide in the gulch. Fuck Covid returns in spray-painted orange letters. I live here returns. The police hide in sand bunkers on the mini-golf course. We brush the granules in the bushes. We live in five-year increments to settle scores. The gulch hoards the afternoons, herds the heat. We learn how to play again under maximillions to avoid the scorch. EMTs follow the police footprints. Forgiveness trails in the overgrown fields. 

Ode to a Thunderstorm  / Patrick Dixon

O Thunder! You of sharp cracks
and rolling booms! You shake
the walls and rattle windows! Come
let us cower under your percussion laid bare,
your concussive atmospheric explosions.

O Lightening! Flicker on the horizon,
spreader of bolts of brilliance,
you strobe in the heavens, sear
our eyes with instantaneous splendor,
we cannot look away even as you stab our vision
and burn your likeness upon our retinas,
illuminating our fumbling way.

O Rain! Pound, hammer and overflow our eaves, 
flood the streets, wash away the oppressive heat,
water the thirsty hydrangea. May your drops deliver 
needed drink for red-throated hummingbird, for black crow 
and purple-winged  swallow. Replenish the parched summer.

O Wind! Chase away our complacency.
Tear trees limb from limb, scatter leaves,
whistle under our doors, shake our windows. 
Add your music to the song of the storm, 
to the spontaneous composition that inspires us 
to stagger out the door to breathe the ozone.

Gossamer Hammock / Sara Dudo

How I see it:
in between small love,
             we cut plastic screens
             in the potato barn,

a basket of raspberries
on the sill as lunch,
             the red cordial as origin
             of all kindness.

             Faith is created in solitude
             and, when understanding
             nostalgia for a land
             that does not exist to be
             the heavens,
             harmony.

             Monks stand
in a river reciting every psalm,
our young hands,
almost sheer,
             hoard the rain.

Ten acres of flowers.

There he is,
standing in a silver
gauze:

             the live man and
             the ghost,

embodying that which can
not be embodied.

Generosity is a brocade of
golden thread

He was
granted a red guitar,
             a chance to live
             in the honeycomb lace
             stitch of suffering:

purl knit purl,
heal ache heal.

             A lifespan of thunder
             in a field basin of past men
             he was. To each: devotion.
             Slow blue clearing,
when suddenly
the tall grasses.

someone sent birds / Molly Donahue

five hawks then two
seven total
windswept liquid
eyes and wreaking
havoc.

one heron impaling
meals on
towering legs
mouth as spear
as murderer
as innocent forager
when fish
are a no show.

double owls screaming
bloody
guttural vowels
inside night
and under
a dusting
perseid.

heard and noted
i kindly raise you
earfuls of waxwing
nibbling mostly
on fruits
and berries.

Whiskers, Potatoes / Logan Garner

It takes seven hours
I now know
to bend and shape wet reeds
into something resembling utility.
My first potato basket.
Finished with walnut stain
after burning off grass whiskers
trimming the twined handles.

It’s Scottish I’m told
like my mother’s father
whose whiskers I shaved 
bedside after open heart surgery 
whose own twists and turns
late in life left me squirming
at behavior unbecoming
the gospel-singing patriarch.

But I can see this thing—
its warps and windings visible
from effort earnest as it is amateur
—a record of the journey.
Simple to do 
for a potato basket.

Now, let’s set to filling it.

A SONG TO SING AT THE BUS STOP / Jess Tower

she sought drugs I sought life
of a kind I sought doctors
she sought out her own mind
I hate doctors
I hate my mind
all blue to red, all black & white
the enveloping of a wishbone 
in the folds of my mind causes
strokes all the time Darias and I 
never broke it, it’s still sitting 
on that old kitchen table that now 
only lives in my mind
her mind what a mind it 
could have been what a mind it 
was my mind so kind to me 
sometimes in another time I would 
have had a delicious mind, filled to the brim
with spice-of-life she sought nothing I 
sought time it’s not fair I could be 
the mythical savior of this time stuck in 
my mind stuck in my mind
fuck my mind
her mind

Day 17 / Poem 17

Anne Carson Has Parkinson’s / Ayelet Amittay

Reading The Coast of Wales  / Patricia Clark

after the novel Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor

When walking becomes impossible, a limp,
            the stiff boot on your left foot,
            you find another place to walk,
            a beach where a whale has rolled in,
            lumbering ashore, a beach of dark stones
            where people come down to gawk at
            the blue-black hulk. Is it breathing?

When there’s a boy who’s fond of a girl,
            and he’s eager for a job on the mainland,
            asking Manod if she’d share the journey with him,
            but she has a younger sister, how
            can she leave her? And her father often
            calls her the dog’s name.

When the boy takes an ocean skiff without her, she looks
            at the ceiling of the room where she sleeps,
            where they lay together, she thinks
            that the ceiling looks like curdled milk.

Manod’s sister spreads butter on her bread
            with her fingers. Then she meticulously
            licks them off. She refuses to speak English.
            Is it bad luck for a whale to beach itself?
            One of their neighbors says it’s an omen.

Manod dreams of a long dinner table, a banquet,
            with whales dressed in formal clothing,
            laughing over their plates. She was with them,
            dressed in a pear-green silk dress and a hat
            with a long white feather.

Two English ethnographers come to the island, taking
            photographs of kitchens, art work, fishermen and their
            lobster pots and nets. When they take photos of a fisherman
            struggling in the water, Manod objects: “You knew
            he couldn’t swim. None of the residents can swim.
            You put him in danger.”

Sometimes when suitcases have washed ashore, Manod
            opened them up, trying on the clothes found inside.
            Or she cut apart dresses, blouses, pants and re-stitched
            them into something she could wear.

When a detail is left out, it looms large. In this case,
            the mother. She has vanished like something the sea
            took back. There’s no hope for her return.

When boats come in to the island’s north side, it means
            they have letters, supplies and syrup for pancakes.
            On the other side, it means they have visitors.

When  the sea grows jealous, it can turn girls into gulls.
            You can never be sure, then, who’s tapping
            at your window in a storm, a gull or a girl?
            It’s the oldest legend on the island: who is tapping?
            And why did the ethnographers take away pieces
            of the whale? The surprise was a whale skull worn
            by Manod’s own father. Six men had to lift it over him.
             The whale nodded twice then shook its head no.
            That was the party’s end.

Overheard: A Colleague Gives the Facilities Crew a Thumbs Up / Brian Dickson

while we stand in line for an ice cream social after
a Welcome Back meeting, claiming he doesn’t know 
who buffs the floors in the labs, but whoever did it, 
you could eat off of them, how he is happy
to sit on the sheen & eat lunch in there
with his beakers, burners & tubes; 
this obligatory scheduling of munch &
crunch during a break, of bring your brown bag
hunches experiments, this slaking 
with gallons of neapolitan & whipped cream
& sprinkles—there is this pause, a gullet-
pondering of Beaker and Dr. Honeydew
if you will, & what they could do with such
immaculate labs, what they did with their
2004 “voted as Britain’s most popular 
cinematic scientists” award. 
One scrambles for seconds before the next
meeting, sneak a picnic blanket
into of those labs, bask in that shine but let’s
circle back to your first idea just
looping there in our scoops, the crumbles
of our waffle cones. 

So It’s About Fishing Again  / Patrick Dixon

and all these poems I’ve written
about searching for and finding
or not finding salmon back then
when they were as elusive to me
as remembering a dream, for that
is what they were early on, me a
greenhorn with an empty mind
and emptier fishhold, you my crew
those first years– you knew how
hard it was, how I needed to be
propped up like a flag you’d lift
above our heads nightly, when we’d
return to port with less than, even
as we thought we’d done well.

We didn’t know, I didn’t know
I could still be writing about those
days, that life twenty-five years
later, you still at my side, encouraging.

Tumulus / Sara Dudo

An incantatory
existence, coast chrysalis
manifest of its caterpillar ghost
and other inheritance.

Memory is both root
and dryspring,
loss is loss.

Replicas of golden ratio
go with me, no coercion,

and comets
caught in tulle.

When touch
is modern surgery,
a grandmother shades
a third little leaf

and we dance in this sheath:
the vast unknown
shielded by the blue,

little exopods everywhere,
and a birdsong of everywhere
wings. 

A walk with my sister / Molly Donahue

eating olives, spitting the pits into lawns along the way, dog off leash and most obedient, baby in the stroller, her
perfect soft feet in the sun. We talk about death and what it’s done to us, what it will continue to do again and again.
Sometimes, when the air is heavy and warm, we run through sprinklers. How lucky we are, our hair clean, our homes
standing, our shoulders touching, our shared blood and eerily similar voices, the clouds tall and big boned and
shaded with rain they don’t shake off until late evening. I wish for time to drip so slow it petrifies.

Breakfast Consideration / Logan Garner

They serve pancakes
over the Columbia River
on the wharf 
in that hole-in-the-wall 
breakfast joint.

I read once about Kansas
and all things being relative
how it’s truly flat as a pancake.
Here I’ve got a state laid out
in essence and in trait
on my plate. 
And here the coffee 
dark as oil
hot as hell under my hand 
opaque and hiding
beneath a bank of vapor, 
behind a clay wall.
What is its analog? 

Something out there 
in the dark and frigid
grasping water?

Thomas / Amelia K

I don’t want to go to heaven
I want to go back home
I don’t want to get even
I want the end to come

True Crime / Jess Tower

I sit on my couch at night, watching true crime.
Think of how my phlebotomist 
asked me out today,
the weirdness of that,

and how he said he liked my tattoo,
conveniently missing my ring.
Friends on FB joke 
he was in it for the poke.

I wonder if my phlebotomist 
likes true crime, if he’s secretly 
a vampire phlebotomist,
if he’s even kind,
if he treats women unethically all the time.

If my partner was there, he would have told him
you’re very weird.

The fact is, we all are.
The fact is, phlebotomy bro 
probably doesn’t try to hide it, though.

Fact is, he’s probably a womanizer
all the bloody time.

What a weird way to ask someone out.
Possibly lose your job over it all.
Maybe phlebotomy bro
was in it for a true crime scenario.

Maybe he wanted to true crime me,
true crime my dog,
true crime my partner,
true crime my life.

Fact is, he probably didn’t,
but he’s still an unethical idiot.

Day 16 / Poem 16

Chromatophore / Ayelet Amittay

Stippled surges of color skim over her surface as she sleeps.  White to fuschia to plum, ripple of cell song. Along each tentacle the discs of her suckers are opening and closing, rotating as they would if she were walking along the sand. Is the water that billows through her siphon dream water or waking water? Color knows salt and light and the visible. Like a bullet my eye rests at the center of the round. 

Bend in the Road  / Patricia Clark

Swept up and swept away
                         as though I were seaweed

on the shore, tangled, wet.
                                        So it was that day with a boy—

a motorcycle, too tempting
                          to say no to, in a flash

I tucked my dress up under me,
                                    feet on the pegs, arms

circling him, scent of tobacco, woodsmoke,
                                                sweat, his thin t-shirt,

spine, ribs, this close
                         to a boy I didn’t know,

just Mike and a last name, mumbled—
                         Marine View Drive lush in ditches

along both sides, cattails,
                         arrowroot, Queen Anne’s lace,

all the way north to Dash Point
                         State Park, then we leaned sharp,

turned around to go back.
                         At the Cliff House I saw

people dressed up from church going
                         in to eat, me feeling full

 of beauty and risk,                       
                         not yet thinking of girls
 

I’d have to face—“Where’d you go?”                       
                         “Did you make out with him?”

Then more: “What kind of a name
                                       is Turnipseed? Does he live

down along the Puyallup River
                                                    in a tepee?” Sea salt air,

sailboats, sails, white caps
                         glittering. I was trying to find my legs

for land again. And then
                          shame like a dark squall

to ruin everything, the necklace
                                      he fished out of a pocket  

for me, “Promise?”
                         I said sure though the floor

rocked, swayed, me tipsy
                                        from being near him.

I held on despite prejudice,
                                                      common sense, all the frowns.

Ode to the Rando Admonishment/ Brian Dickson

This dude, imploring me to move. 
“It’s dangerous to sit right there. Trains come from that way. 
That’s insane, man.” 

He walks away, blows a whistle. 

Dude, share with me this line of shade on the tracks
from the five-thousand foot sun, this view 
of scarlett finches fashioning nests
over the security cameras, this

march of shooters on the ties stomp-
ing their emptiness to forever guts. And speaking of forever, dude,
what about the Witnesses and their pleasantries? Their
sundry of literature? Their smiles as bright as

your frown? As bright as your non-honorary badge? 
Dude, bloviating south from me to the burgeoning crowd, 
this view is slipping into highway exhaust and boom

I’m in basketball practice in high school…Dickson, your 
playing like crap! Get your head out of your ass!

I scootch back off the tracks, sit criss-cross on 
the yellow warning strip.
“Nauh, bro. Not good enough. Seriously?”

He slumps, lurches into half a blow
like a deflated coach in a sitcom hit 
by a ball during a motivational speech.

I slip behind a lamppost, save a silver of shade. 
“Is this good enough?” I say, as you meander away. 

Dude, the truth is…I love you already,
the coal cargo cooling out going south
as I board, aflame as your passion surrounds me
in the distant north. 

Stuck  / Patrick Dixon

I am stuck here
On this translucent orb
A snow-globe in space
That has lost its snow.

Stranded, I should say,
With no escape but the final.
I am at anchor on an ever-rising
Sea, my scope getting smaller

With each new sunrise.
The planet is feverish, baking
It’s virus away- it’s only choice.
And mindless as a virulent bug

We kill the host with our infection.
Nothing left but heat.
No one left but
No one left.

Et Quels Amours / Sara Dudo

Imitation of “TIMEHALO” sections by Paul Celan

Hemoglobin husband
of an hourglass in the ether,

woven
by dimming comets
thrust
into the imitating, kingly
paragoning
starling-black realm.

There is no void, or a syncope
of photographs.

Close to you,
draped masts
shimmer jasper, blue, blue,

so much jubilee. And what
loves? See beyond
fissures
to all fulfillment
of the bright shots. 

Unspoken / Molly Donahue

She told me
to watch my mouth

so I did

the dishes and washed
clothes that smelled

like I do

and when I opened
my mouth hours later

my teeth were an altar
laden with stone fruit

my words left unspoken
and all the better for it.

Story / Logan Garner

On Sunset Beach
two hours before its namesake
against the hush of the scend
I sit and read a wise friend’s words.
He has just come home
from his first home 
from a powwow. 

The Ponca man melds
personal history and the present 
with ancestry, deep time.
He is speaking of reality.

If I didn’t know better
I’d think his words were visions
literary dream-states
a kind of magical realism
taken down as a lesson
rather than the memoir it is.

“Listen,” the waves whisper.

Trio I (Men, Women, & Chainsaws) / Amelia K

closed open waiting
mouth tongue teeth
natural framed reflexive
solid liquid liminal
life death waiting
running running running

For L / Jess Tower

L goes to court, it hurts
her so bad it hurts her really awful.

I go to the doc, it hurts
me so bad it hurts me really awful.

One and the same:
all is space.

What a shame.
We both could have been 
full of stars, had we both been okay.

I wonder a lot 
about the homeless folks in Salem,
who I’d go to every week for mutual aid.

What is time?

I wonder a lot about all my pain.
This is a bone deep, soul tired, a phoenix tells me.

Why am I still alive?

Day 15 / Poem 15

images that follow a therapy session / Ayelet Amittay

Cento: Sequin Self  / Patricia Clark

If one tells a tale, unending no-night, under these the new stars,
Bits, more of pastness. How one’s concrete, by pulling it along. . .
All others can understand each other as corporeal poems. . .
space or time shit – in a small cell, curled up in this sequin self.
some concepts raise a wind, some elicit vacuumic reactions.
When I was alive, says la France. Quand je vivais dans une reve,
Though maybe this is somehow nature. Natura mine. one’s esprit.
Some ones are crying: opportune for some leaderly bullshit, , ,
They use one. I mean One. Inventing female as succor. Addicts.
One will make a perfect thing; one will define perfect to suit one.
which will change into mast. How many sails? Variable like walls.
In the city of words—such as fresco, warrior, unremembered.
One says, Is one always imagined, or not until the world’s end?
Previous universe. In a prior world there’s another she.

lines taken from Alice Notley’s book For the Ride

Indeed, Breakfast is Important/ Brian Dickson

I drag my witness stand 
under a blue spruce in the park, 
its skirt trimmed

for a non-crowd
of the century.
Three raccoons scramble 

from a grate on the street. 
They smell 
forgiveness spread 

on my toast, 
interrogate me until 
I am raw.

They assemble
twelve stick houses
encircling me.

The end of my bread nears
as dawn peeks 
through the hem of the tree.

What it is / Patrick Dixon

It isn’t television flickering
Or a video game clicking and
Exploding in my face.

It’s not reading the news
On my device like scooping
Out the outhouse to make room
For more.

It’s not even writing a poem
And watching my phone
Stupidly capitalize the start
Of each line.

No, it is the sun
Dropping red and orange
Past the horizon, deepening
The foreground to black
As the water quicksilvers ice blue,

A slow motion transformation
Punctuated by sea lion dreams
As they sleep on the raft just offshore.

I have arrived here in time to stop
In time to recline, listen and watch
A piece of this gem of a planet
Remind me of all I miss.

Metaphysical Analysis of Love* / Sara Dudo

The conjecture of your flood, always green.
You being, me knowing you.The substance of your origin:
gold over languageless blood
mistakes abyss for cosmos.
The origin of your identity: salvation.
Time and space, being so synthetic.
I remember the Never Summer Wilderness,
nights trapped in early June snowstorms,
flirting carbon monoxide poisoning to warm.
A time we belonged to the world.
This is how I know adoration’s sound
after dark.
Attraction is caught outside
amidst colossal music.
Desire is vastly enlightened,
sharing with the stars, and we glittering
streetlights catching moths,
beneath moon cinders, the way one is
when seen.

*title stolen from a chapter in Love and Responsibility by Karol Wojtyla 

For Diana / Molly Donahue

Her heart opens into a room
god everywhere
much dark and
very much light
resurfacing and everything
sparrow chatter.
Draw the yellow
from her face
to color
a flower new
to blinking.
Ticking
dainty human bomb
so dearly
departing
please don’t ever
leave.

Ravaging / Logan Garner

This dinner I made﹘
just and only for you
﹘is exactly that. 
Because I want to show
in morsels, colors, aromas,
all the hows of my feeling,
about us, about everything…
And no matter the wedge
that might come between us,
like this salad-centerpiece,
it can be obliterated.
Chewed into helpless, 
unrecognizable pieces.
I know that you know: 
Anything we want 
we can ravage, if we choose it.

Elegy V (Metaphoration) / Amelia K

The earth drinks water. The water intoxicates the earth. Never mind what the fire does, or doesn’t. The sun touches what it sees: this is not a metaphor. Sugar does not impress me, but what it sings to hunger makes me swoon. Must I harden under heat to learn its language? Nothing begins or ends. I crack beneath a dessert spoon, the barest tap. 

Patient Gateway Message to My Stroke Specialist / Jess Tower

MRI came back no changes

Will you treat me for Vasculitis? 

I still have symptoms

shortness of breath, severe 

heart palpitations and pain, interferes with daily life

dizziness, half the time

leg tightness, the Eliquis you gave me helps a little 

purple splotches on my arms, fingers, hands, legs, feet, when cold

chronic pain, all over

Steroid please?

I have to try 

I know you don’t think I

I know I’m at my wits end I

have been thrown around now

five – no maybe six – lost count haha

years lost my youth to this 

can’t walk 

around the block walk 

my dog

go on a day trip

can’t work in person

only online part-time

I see cardiology soon but please

please Dr. V please just try

put in a referral for me 

maybe it’s I 

maybe it’s my time

I just really need your help

Day 14 / Poem 14

Portrait of an Unnamed Sea Captain Hanging in the Summer Rental / Ayelet Amittay

Becoming / Patricia Clark

No one told me it would start in near
disaster wading out in shallow water
at Wapato Park. Was it a drop-off,
or did I tumble from the boardwalk,
hot wooden planks subject to splinters,
Always and not for the first time
I felt my head go under in that
murky water. Glimpsed the sun, duckweed,
lily pads, tiny floaters through squinting eyes,
Why couldn’t I feel the bottom, find
a place to stand? Gulping, half choking,
was I lost? If I could beg, I’d have said
save me. Wasn’t someone always watching
from shore or wading nearby keeping eyes
on the littlest ones? I was five. Now someone
pulled me up and out, arms enfolding me, strong
grip and hands, mouth murmuring, “Oh honey,
honey, what happened?” Tipped me
upside down, a volcano of water gushing
onto the sand. The whole place smelling
of algae, water, frogs. Now a flood of words
found my voice: “I wasn’t afraid. I saw
a halo around the sun and some turtles swam
along to buoy me up.” She said hush, but I knew
I was Patty Clark emerging from an aquatic
christening. No going back. Found, ashore.

Watermelons Revisited / Brian Dickson

Mom, I doubt you thought
of your watermelon patch
as green Buddhas, 

but if you did, what 
would they have said 
to me flinging

grasshoppers off
the leaves into 
monkey spider webs

to kill time? 
The death was so quiet—
Those eight legs—

dangling patience, then
a blur of black and yellow
to spin a body into peace.

And the home repair can wait.
All the while those Buddhas
ripen with laughter

about the hustle of
insect control, bug 
or bust, their destiny 

as discarded 
carved grins, over
and over.

After Charles Simic’s Watermelons

Strangers – a Cento / Patrick Dixon

with lines taken from work this month by Ayelet Amittay, Patricia Clark, Brian Dickson, Patrick Dixon, Sara Dudo, Molly Donahue, Logan Garner, Amelia K, and Jess Tower.

we are staggering through the cellars of 
our abandoned hungers

she ferries the neighborhood
sayin’ been here for thirty years,
been hoping for something good

silver ribbon of dying light laid 
over the brown velvet mirror

you grabbed time by the throat, demanded it help

and the bones inside you feel
like strangers.

What set her adrift in this tumbling world?

The width of the glass window
is a bird’s whisper

I know I am walking by the sound of the gravel, even if my legs don’t

I could be 
a red wheelbarrow
glistening in the rain

Thresholds / Sara Dudo

Fruit leaves luster
and tickseed unmistakably parcels
the distance to water.

We look for you,
through the axiom of no one
staying the same.

Respiration, as expected.

If the whole of space
can expand and contract,
is the breath agony or ecstasy?

A metamorphic lifting of the eyes
as honeycombs shatter
in a cluster of trees,

raying cords of blue stems
recounting winter.

Somewhere, your gaze breaks
from small falls, you see us
grow and recede, like sepals opening

and cloistering the flower.
Can you fathom
our distant paradox bodies,

can you tread the opening
with an oscillating floor?

hard aspects / Molly Donahue

peeling silken hair
from a corncob
crows laughing at their own jokes
in a stage of trees
HA – HA – HA

backbones of nymphs
and a lurking suspicion
the swan floating
on that body of water
is a question mark
~~~~~~~~~~?~~~~~~~~~~

frustration wearing the wardrobe
of anger
each of us with moths
eating tiny holes
in our memories
.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.:.

The Door Knocker / Logan Garner

has no name
but has a wild mane
of oxidized copper
and ancient stories
spun from lichen shag

has a blind starved stare
and no awareness 
of the bit in his mouth
or the twin gazes
that come from the pit 
in his tortured stomach

has a beard of nothing
no not nothing
but something thin 
and whispering
inviting 
calling
bidding visitors
come in come in

Ode V (Bloodimmed) / Amelia K

Cento using lines from Troy by Adele Geras

a clay jar
a statue, weeping and wailing
death?
We shouldn’t laugh
but I’m bored. Everyone 
the Gods
the horses
The ruins
every bone in your body
never claimed to love
You
a blood red sun
the dead
hope like a green tendril
Will we work together?
Nothing will be forgotten. 
I’ll go on being nothing 

What it Means to Be a Woman / Jess Tower

Day 13 / Poem 13

After Wildfire / Ayelet Amittay

Verdigris and copper, the river
winding like a vein through th
coastal
range. Burn evidence
all along the highway
to the sea: trees silvered
as a woman’s hair. Leaves
are sparse and the rash
of wildflowers bristles
against the hills. Not
to return to what was.
Not to be redeemed
by the loss, only turned
unrecognizable, pared down,
waiting for a new name.

Ode to an Acorn / Patricia Clark

Stay with me, marble-
sized celery-green nugget
with a beret
for a cap. That
topknot’s a word
in dispute—a stalk,
a stem, maybe
a spike?

It linked you
to a leaf bundle
sixty-feet up
on the white oak,
your majestic
parental figure.

How will you ever
measure up?

That beret’s glued on
tight to your head,
green as a veil of northern
lights though one
side of your face

sports a dark blemish,
as though
you’ve been singed
or marked.

Didn’t anyone tell you
not to look directly
at the sun?

I know your place
is on the ground
where the seed inside you
aches to break
out. How long
does that take?
What amount of rain

[continued; no stanza]
Ode to an Acorn [continued]

softens your shell enough
to allow the tip
to pierce through?

In the past I’ve pulled up
your sometime
sibling not wanting
a volunteer oak shading
the front door of our
house.

Yanked up, its split
acorn showed a taproot
heading deep already,
one upper leaf
attached. I shed
no tears throwing it
into the compost.

Now, though, I sense
a reined-in jolt of energy
when I roll you
in my palm—chunk,
sphere, life-force,
coiled germ, spiritus
mundi, oh arrow, spear,
verb, almost a spike
ready to drive down,
hold fast that base
foot of the majestic trunk
of o yes, a heaven- and
cloud-climbing oak.

Japanese Beetles / Brian Dickson

Every July they crater 
the leaves of

the English Ivy ascending
on a friend’s ponderosa.

We speak 
about soapy buckets, 

death up the trunk, 
innumerable holes,

how the beetles appear 
to nap under a sliver of leaf

after climax or
slap of a hot day, 

before their 
bodies are pinched, 

dropped into
water to drown,

the quit 
after hours 

of immersion in
metallic-green

thoraxes. Up
the tree there

are more universes 
to slip into, a daily

practice of fraught
and forgetting

translucent larvae
for ten months. 

What’s it like 
to give up on a 

relationship weaves 
through the skeletal vine

as your mother’s pink roses
emerge 

with those insects
bursting at the top.

We Know it’s Coming / Patrick Dixon

the closer we get.
Something’s wrong, you say,
and I answer the standard reply,
It’ll be fine.

 But the winds wind up east and west
and the fires rage where there’s no deluge.
The Gulf Stream is slowing
and the Antarctic ice sheet is on the verge.

It’s cool here in the Pacific Northwest,
and the smoke from the fires hasn’t been bad
this year. It’s hard to take it seriously, you offer,
when everything seems so normal.

 Traffic is worse than ever. The HOV lanes mostly
empty, coal trains race to the coast, in a rush
to deliver their cargo overseas. The US is now
the biggest oil exporter on the planet.

\We know it’s coming. We just can’t accept it.
You turn to me, ask, How much worse can it get?

Georgia O’Keefe’s In the Patio I / Sara Dudo

I wait for grey ghosts to inherit
the flora-less opening. Blessed by the desert
now the dusk is burning.

The dance of past lighthouses.
By what we now know, the keeper of grace
at lake beds.

These walls like stelae should be inscribed
with June grass, pomegranate
propagates. Inside, complimentary receptacles

for a San Fran bathtub, the membranes
of our transience, seeds drop.
No one can stay the same-you are berries

in a white room, caesuras in a prairie of
breath that drums into auroras.
The letter for living is in this window. 

Fractures / Molly Donahue

She shows up with a grocery cart and can’t
find her car, her phone under her pillow,
eight missed calls and pills inside her purse
and her stomach. All the stuff we accumulate.
Mail in piles. Laundry on the line. Cats shaking
on the windowsill at songbirds in the grass.
There is so much I wish I didn't know.
Awake at three in the morning thinking
of revolutionary whales and breakdancing, monarch
numbers and starvation as tactic, the lion’s gate,
the planets reeling, the age of information
a truly fresh hell. The sun painted fuschia along
the horizon before I finally gave up, thankful
you were now stirring to watch as the bedroom
slowly courted the daytime.

MEDITATION ON ABEL AND CAIN / Logan Garner

Brotherly love:
beast with a ball
nosing it into a
ruined pile

A secret story:
one not breathed or 
chewed and defecated 
from some cortex
onto wood pulp 
or into song

A hidden invention
and, oh, is it old

Those living in Hell
speak in rhymes
(a trifling way to
pass the time)

And this is not a
thing of power
It is a poison rose
a moldering letter
a shunned tower

Invocation V (Apocalypso)  / Amelia K

a love that eats itself. Shot through with rot. A love with not enough holes in the lid. Blue lips on a bed of sweat. A love with blood in its laugh. Faces moving on the waters. A love so dim it cannot see its own path. A cracked moon leaking like wine. A love that cries wolf. A soft place to die in. The end of the world is a wedding a want a blank a draw a ware a run

Mom Dies Typing / Jess Tower

I think of mom’s bloodied phone every dead
of night in the dead of the night, half-dead of fright 
I can hear her in the kitchen
making coffee for the morning
when she’ll pick up her bloody phone,
forget it’s all a fever dream, it’s all what it seems

I’m still mourning her forgetting that phone
all bloody, all all alone 
why’d she let it die alone?
(I can hear her in the kitchen
in the dead of night)
the number to hospice nowhere to be found, 
she calls me, I’m still asleep (it’s just a fever dream), she dies alone
(cries out a pious I’m sorry,
comes out as sloppy)

Make sure to clean up, mom,
I yell from bed, because 
she never did
I can hear my mom’s bloody eye socket 
gurling 
in the kitchen where 
she’s making coffee
for the mourners

She doesn’t know it yet, 
but she won’t die here,
only in the past–right there!
behind you, behind you! 

in the dead of night
she cries
I can hear it all, she’s in the kitchen 
banging pans
(it’s all right, Jess, she cries, I’ll make you coffee don’t cry, 
all while holding that damned bloodied phone)
my mom’s blood-soaked phone knows things 
it knows me
(she’s screaming now
that I’m a cry baby now)
a voice from above: abusers never change
but I try and pick a daisy
she loves me, she loves me not

a pause, a disappearing ghost 
mom’s blood-soaked phone stays
but it forgets its coffee
for the morning

Day 12 / Poem 12

Sibling / Ayelet Amittay

We swam the same
canal, one after
the other. Id like
to believe I eased
your path somehow,
widened the aperture.
I know my way
forward left a wake
you had to manage–
long crest of ocean
sundered by the stars.
Still when I turned 
back you’d be there,
facing me.

Self Herbarium / Patricia Clark

Patricia patricius pater Clark clericus
commonly known as a writer,
specifically a poet, a writer of lyric
poetry often using imagery of the natural
world. She is native to Washington State,
fond of the Cascade and Olympic mountains,
though she has now lived in Michigan since 1989
Her range extends to South Korea,
Japan, Russia, Spain, France, and England.
She found herself easily naturalized in Ireland
due to friends scattering seed, especially in County Monaghan,
Dublin, and in the North at Derry and Portstewart.

Patricius connects Patricia to the noble
and she dislikes people who shorten her name
to Patty or Patsy, or the dreaded Pat. Pater from Proto-
Italic connecting her to father and head of household.
Clericus means scribe, or secretary. Patricia aligns
herself with the scribe root, wielding her pen, and less
so with the sense of the scholar tucked in a religious society.

Patricia is a female of medium to tall height,
identifying herself as a walker and ambler, peripatetic.
perhaps a flaneur. Her aspect and structure is upright,
solid late in life without need of a trellis; her faults
corrected through braces on her teeth, surgery on her jaw
(upper and lower) to correct a serious overbite. An
upcoming surgery plans to fix a (left) foot fault.
Her favorite weather is sunny and cold (growing will follow
when warmer), temp around 25 degrees, no wind. She wilts
in 85 degrees plus. Transplant when dormant only,
or root-bound.. Do not overwater. Better as an outside growing
thing than inside. Do not let lily of the valley strangle her roots.
Aspect: medium to tall, swaying, prefers some shelter
from troubling winds, especially polar air from the north.

Picnic on Lake Watch Out Where You Tether Your Boat / Brian Dickson

after the painting, Untitled, by Dimitri Krustalev-Grigoriev

The couple serenely floated near the WWII plane crashed next to them on its delivery route. Watermelon, pumpkin, oranges, bananas drifted to their boat and pier. I want to move their limbs. She to history’s propeller, he to the fuselage. Net the cornucopia. Craft a raft of these bodies. Drag it all to the shore and wait for dessert. 

Motherhood / Patrick Dixon

You carried our children
long before I saw them,
knew them more intimately then
than at anytime after.

You didn’t just carry them
you say, you nurtured them,
sustained them, grew them
into babies, toddlers, children,
young men now grown to
feed on their dreams, chase
down their desires. 

And yet, for nine months each,
you hugged them all day long,
danced with them, laughed, cried.
Is it no wonder they embrace you
with all the love in the world
reflected in their eyes?

CANCER TERMINOLOGIES / Sara Dudo

Benign [a black screen]
Biopsy [these small jewels they excavate]
Bone Marrow [soft sponged little plates]
Chemotherapy [the father that whips to teach]
Cure [five years]
Cytokines [send a message to his little blood]
In Situ [in place: the hills neither eroding, nor covering with sweet grass]
Invasive [hills everywhere]
Lifetime Risk [a given lifespan]
Lymph [a clear river]
Lymph Nodes [small series of dams]
Lymphoma [when a river becomes a gorge]
Precancerous [some men know the ground, the potential for earth to give way]
Radiation [invisible waves heal]
Recurrence [local is the eye, regional is the ear, distant is the blood, a stream after all
Regimen [if there were timetables for rain]
Remission [you are under control, antonym: you are uncontrollable]
Stem Cells [the potential for a gale to develop into a sun]
Tumor [these small jewels] 

Sometimes / Molly Donahue

you blink and happiness
retreats carried
like a stick in the wicked
mouth of hounds.

So you tell yourself the story
of snails in a forest
living on a lake
inside of a maple.

You allow unsettled ardors
to roam freely
the plains
of your face.

You kill time
until happiness
returns disheveled and filthy and dirt
in her fingernails.

You curl your toes
into the fist of your knee
and call every night
that follows your friend.

SENSORY INVENTORY / Logan Garner

The Columbia is catching light, its peaks
a macrocosm of the thousand, thousand,
thousand-scaled things just beneath my view.

Cafe speakers pour velvety Doo-wop 
that slows to a trickle; they slow, dripping
then sputter back to life, splattering funk.

A “healthy” muffin, which is nothing so dry,
but really carrot cake in disguise, complete 
with a Groucho mustache of dried coconut.

The sun again, evidenced by the heat
of the varnished tabletop, a plateau calling
for my newly bared forearms, every inch.

An americano, tall and stately, de-sugaring
my tongue with echoing notes: raisin, chocolate
and joy beneath a balance of bitterness.

Elegy IV (Moonfull)  / Amelia K

Moon full of mourn moans on. Silk like what a kiss knows. Heady revelry of a sheep for slaughter. Drink. You asked for a flood. Sliced-eye sun a sleep through songs dense as hips in his hands (he held me). Selves stacked like cordwood look on to a poison unfettered. Or is it a rose unlovely. Moon full of moan mourns on.

I wish I showed her how / Jess Tower

succumbs to sliced-up organ blood 

on floors of hated apartment

door won’t open, budge 

cop pulls a knife to slice, pick

the door on the right

opens 

you push a bed and there it is, dead

juicy blood surrounds the mound

of body with eye trauma 

with I would advise you not to see her

body pale or green, don’t know

because I didn’t see her

her life becomes a pinprick:

bloodied bed fall off cough chunks of who she was

call me one last time to say goodbye

moan for help

but I didn’t pick up the line

she never could put the number 

to hospice in her phone

that’s the story of how my mom died alone 

Day 11 / Poem 11

Lean / Ayelet Amittay

Brown Bowl: Poem Ending with a Line from Victoria Chang / Patricia Clark

A rich deep color like mahogany,
its glaze is reflective, I can see
a window and a door in its curved side.

Did you see how someone stroked on the glaze
with a brush? Note how the fine hairs left
marks—here, thin as a pencil point, here, thick

as a ribbon. Not always straight going
around the perimeter, sometimes
a bit slanted as though the hand wavered.

The bowl’s foot has little clay bumps that lift
it off a surface, balancing it.
Unglazed here, the maker etched in a mark.

Are we bound by what we see here?
Susan Zapruder? Or it could be
Sam Zacharias. Where has the artist

gone? I rejoice at my choices, free of
the artist’s gaze. Today I fill the bowl
with gala apples persimmon and red

along their sides. Tomorrow, clementines.
I go exploring in the ride of
color and glaze, bound by nothing that’s here.

I step through the reflective doorway, clear
and beckoning. The interior
is a hallowed place made by someone’s hands.

The interior’s a galaxy swirl,
a horse’s dark flank and nose, blazing
with a streak of sun. Riding the prairie,

I’m gripping the horse’s sides with my knees.
When the hand wavers, the heart hiccups.
Most writers want to be loved by light.

We Don’t Know How to Act / Brian Dickson

We smooth our pants for the third time. Readjust our silverware. Our friends have perspective in their spoons. Thanks for doing this, we say. We were underwater for two years, you say. Just the way it is. How were your kisses at that depth? No one told us about the green slime under the armpits. Oh, we never had that problem. Green slime? Never heard of it. Should we order drinks? we say. Relax, they’ll be around. This joint is the best. What about the slime under the chin? Didn’t have that either. Do you have a routine? Of course. Good. Should we order drinks? we say. Sorry, say that again? It got louder in here. Ya’ll look tired. Let’s order drinks. Raise your sense of humor.

Family Connection / Patrick Dixon

I could be 
a red wheelbarrow
glistening in the rain
or a riddle of a stone
here on this page,

but the sun is shining
and my son just visited,
telling me how lost he feels.

I recalled the days 
when the road of my youth
turned to trackless dust,
and though I could see 
how I got here
I felt I had no control 
of what course to set
to see me through
this once-in-a-life journey.

But my summers rescued me
as I found a boat to live with 
and fish to catch. Though we 
never talked about it, both
my father and I became 
summertime fishermen.
His was for walleye at the end 
of a rod in the north woods,
me a net on big Alaskan water.

Unaware of that family connection,
my son tells me he wants to buy
a boat. I respond, If you need help,
let me know.

Epithalamium / Sara Dudo

Sun, midday sun, nothing but outlaw sun
on this concrete apartment, and quiet traffic, and me
remembering your stairwell confession,
of leaving me, dying first
and neither seeing the sun nor praying to it,
for lighting our faces into a field of love
unknowing he was born with this.

Dearly beloved, finesse the iris night for night.
Listen for the decibels of spectra to begin breath.
For now, a man squatting before cattle.
In matters of life and depth, see the little girl
cornering hardwood floor prism slivers
into talks of a diagram of love
the specialists call it a circle of confusion,
I call it mouths caught in hemispheres
of brilliance. 

August / Molly Donahue

The sky spoke in saga this morning, light slicing through cloud to touch
rain falling sideways into the bay, meeting its maker, so to speak.
Building life around death, playing house around holes
dug quick by those who leave us behind.
Remember being washed in the smell of milkweed? One month
feels like years ago. Time feels bendable, but rarely to my benefit.
Nostalgia is a heavy blanket attached to feelings that trawl the guts.
She’s hard to put a finger on, requires a delicate touch for fear
of pulling off a leg.
They say nothing matters but then again, every mother
has carried an ocean.
Every.
Mother.
Has carried.
An ocean.

SUBTLE MAGIC / Logan Garner

“Wild” isn’t the appropriate word. 
“Whole”, perhaps or “Present.” 
Participating.

That winter wren who spent time with me, 
and unnecessarily, bestowing 
tender, primal belonging as gift; 
a benediction spoken softly
by way of overlapping proximity,
vigorously, in arboreal arpeggio.

Subtle, though, was my violence
when I sheared the connection
of our shared space, crouched,
as my knees called out 
for relief.

What else might come 
from such a transformative will as this? 
Nothing that I’ve yet dreamed of, 
nothing worth dreaming about.

Ode IV (Copperhead)  / Amelia K

animal	none
above	of
lonely	this
spring	is
song	real
below	unless
soft	until
mountain	you
moon	pray
bow	right

Mother of Crab / Jess Tower

By the time she died, she’d had five types

all gnarly and overgrown

the way her fingers her bones

would scalpel across each other

into mauve abyss-ness 

a monster deep lurking

could never get it together

she never sought testing, rarely treatment

until I begged I screamed

what about me

what about my brother

the way each type would twist 

her into a different fiend

she could be green & mean

or yellow yellow she’d yell out

please I didn’t think

my mother’s death would do 

me this mean I hated her, she cried

on an old ratted-out couch when 

Edna died she was never bald

but each time each cell succumbed to 

grief and hell it would make her blind to 

everything surrounding her every possible 

good in every possible facet

of her toy-blue life 

little sadist I said

don’t cry now it’s done

you’re finally alive

Day 10 / Poem 10

Distillations / Patricia Clark

To call a woman a girl is to miss the point.

                                    **

Allow the memories to cook and stew,
            vegetables in a pot.

                                    **

After bluebirds, house wrens nest in the box,
            more twig than grass.

                                    **

Mouse tracks left in the kitchen
            soil our morning,

                                    **

The weeds grow faster than the dream
            to pull them out.

                                    **

“Let him in,” my teacher said, speaking of trouble
            in marriage. “Let him in.”

                                    **

To be alert is a quick happiness.

                                    **

The mower leaves tracks in the grass
           that grass doesn’t feel.

                                    **

Lost in a book is a goal fulfilled.

Bioluminescence on the Front Porch / Brian Dickson

(with a phrase from C.K. Williams)

We sit in silence 
with our tangerine popsicles
at dusk, doors open

to a prayer meeting at 
the Catholic High School gym
across the street.

Soft-rock hymns, a mass
of arms and hands swaying, 
ushering in 

the drizzle of rain. 
Joggers streak by,
dogs in the lolling heat

get their fill—
he wants to pet them all,
b-line blaze drenched

in our drained 
natural juice from our sticks. 
Our sunset wish: to be waves

of smoldering auras
wading through tar 
and concrete.

Onion-skinned Dome / Patrick Dixon

do you remember your beginnings?
White-skinned men in fur caps
built you, bent wood planks with steam
formed your shape in sky blue,
raised you to the log church roof
topped with the sign of the crucifixion,
their God giving his life to absolve them.

From your perch you witnessed
their charity: lining the Athabascan,
the Kenaitze one behind the other
to see how many could be killed
at the same time by one musket ball.
You saw their sins absolved by taking
red-skinned people as slaves– justified
because they were not Believers.

O onion-skinned dome! Know why we weep
when we slice into your namesake. Know
why we weep when we tell the stories.

METONYMY / Sara Dudo

In my twenty-eighth year
a glossary needed for my name,
an eponym of another girl scaling azalea.

While I visit her, a voice from somewhere else.
Meanwhile, my montage is busy protecting
the bird’s nest in the mailbox.

I run in hexagons, and miss the film
on how to use the periscope and its mirrors
to see the things otherwise out of sight.

Listen, girl in slip, so ochre
so schema of a finite seashell
trying to capture an infinite ocean.

The white egrets burden down the sole
cedar. While you hunt for them

within you, another night of lightning
as it strikes the sea: is this not
grace abounding? 

girl flex / Molly Donahue

sometimes you write words,
leap long, surprise yourself stupid.

you fool about, not today, then one
tiny scrap gets stuck in your craw:

shifting of wind, rain in the sun,
jesus so dramatic he bleeds.

a world swimming in epics
being born every second

you hang back, you throttle,
you hum until you catch one.

you let the crazy bit drive
and throw out all the fucks.

AURORA BOREALIS / Logan Garner

The heavenly storm breathes
down over it all, bestowing.
And I drink it in.

Far off, in another country
in the lower hemisphere 
a friend carries on
lonely and alone.

Closer, much closer,
a woman sleeps curled
beneath a wimpled blanket
around a feline form.

I message my friend, 
telegraphing warmth.
Wake the woman to share
in the prismatic spectacle.

When both have left me﹘
one for distant work,
the other to complete night’s rest﹘

I visit alone with the bats
all feeding silhouetted
against the glow,

my heartbeat filling silence,
filling my ears

Invocation IV (Gold)  / Amelia K

go on, then
curl up, wanted
Wrists above the wellspring
eternal hopes listing
like a hornet nest: 
You are the worthiest bait
in the dark of the sun

Plumas / Jess Tower

Spanish Jesus music playing in the Lyft

Bright pink picnic table in front of City Hall 

I pass by the Walgreens I went to as a kid

It’s my last day of partial hospital 

I try to let go

Day 9 / Poem 9

Invocation to White Sweet Clover / Patricia Clark

I wouldn’t have guessed
clover when I first
saw you on my walk.

I wouldn’t call your
aspect flimsy and
spindly as my guide,

Peterson First Guides
Wildflowers, well-
thumbed, creased, folded, states.

I admire your
slim, tapering tall
clusters two to eight

feet tall. A pea-like
shape to your florets.
And three-parted leaves.

Why does the writer
call your origin
alien? I don’t

see Mars or moon-glow
in your rising along
roadsides, field edges.

I think you’re spindly
to prove a good point:
it isn’t only

the native who proves
abundant—mongrel,
mix, alien, too,

sport their virtues.
Not all the clovers
grow close to the ground.

Pull me up, Flimsy,
one to eight feet tall,
and we’ll dance in May.

On My Corner  / Brian Dickson

she ferries the neighborhood
sayin’ been here for thirty years,
been hoping for something good.

Across the street once stood
the closed school. Lost tears 
she ferries in the neighborhood.

Police repelled into windows, bud. 
Active shooter trainings, you know? Fears
and hopes of something good

from those fully armored outfits flood-
ing its roofs. She says take the tour, hear
cardboard targets echo in the neighborhood.

The school was sold last week…It’s understood
the Catholics have the money she says, near 
twenty million. Better be good.

Anyway, my zucchini are withering duds,
So are Stacey’s down the block. Her 
kids run wild in the neighborhood. 
We are hoping for something good.

The Alaska Room / Patrick Dixon

I was barely sentient
when I moved to Alaska,
fresh out of school, married too young
I knew I wanted to experience
The Great LandThe North Country
Land of Ice and Snow

And I did. Over two decades of volcanoes
real and figurative, northern lights
dancing above us, 
gold nuggets under our feet
and salmon in the freezer
shaped me– 
icy pulses power my heart
even now,
two decades removed.

I walk into my living room–
Alaska condensed into artifacts,
paintings, masks, photographs 
of a life lived full and wild. 
Not enough, I think. Never enough.
I left, but wasn’t done.

Cycles / Sara Dudo

Marshland

The begonia bodies framed in hothouse vine/ cleansing the month of June with broken bulbs cast to the forest/ man and woman in a thieve’s dawn/ smell of sea-brine and wood/ indigo tongue, dew blossom, root bed/ letters embedded in fallen peaches amidst the backseat/ perennial clusters

Illness

Perennial clusters, August bumps/ call it the age of falselight/ anatomy division of never and be/ hand stones/ lung stones/ herniation butterfly/ paralysis like instructions in another language/ graduation canopy/ interstates of downhill souvenirs/ in between, balm, body, frame of devotion

Small Heavens

Devotion in a used book store in Maine/ window morning-light/ scintillant shore, snow gloss/ the poetry in plastic garden tomatoes/ feet glimmer shale along the walk at the end of life, beginning of morning/ he rises from pine, stone, bed frame to extend the back

Blood

Back/ tumor back/ the long illness and a body alone with sea hair/ cell eradication or loss or forfeit or ruin/ witness the tornado and hold your knees to your chest in the bathtub/ pigments of rain/ alone at midnight the malignant math of our chronics/ pigments of God 

Mojave

God in the water/ soon a monsoon/ sol sol sol/ in the basin we wash what is left of us/ sand remission/ arid body/ pinnacles pressed to a little girl with a choice of life or death/ a secret passage she is shaded by handkerchief/ a new dwelling, existence, where the hours have a hard time uncreating us 

we’re all just bobbing for midges / Molly Donahue

a thirst for sun so betrothed
to the shaking leaf.
room temperature water
with honey. stirred.
wearing sorrow as a hat
while eating cold soup.
slurping it up, actually.

house cat caught
devouring songbird,
relishing what easily
breaks a heart.
washing the web of hair
we never stop spinning.
part spider, actually.

POSTCARDS / Logan Garner

I anointed myself “postcard person”
when I found an old one 
from my great-grandfather
with some pithy expression inked on.
A comedian’s one-line sermon.
It was just one line.
I don’t remember the words
but I can still feel the wit, 
dry and rasping on my tongue.

That man would pack whiskey 
for fishing trips in canada
bottles beside onions, 
each eaten fresh, whole like an apple,
like communion on the glacier lake.

They have been years since,
sporadically four-by-sixed
and I have kept to this religion,
joined to a flock of strangers:

Some artists dotting
the landscape around Puget Sound.
A donkey rescue in Texas.

The teenage girl who suffered
a brain hemorrhage and asked.
Some retirees looking to fill time.
A good few dozen others
with invisible stories,
all onions, all whiskey.

Elegy III (Rose)  / Amelia K

New Friends Come Over / Jess Tower

One is cooking, one is cleaning.
A kind group of leftists: the mutual aid type.
They know about my health, 
or lack thereof. 

While one does the dishes,
another looks over, sees all my meds.
Makes a harmless joke.
A swooping hand gesture 
over them all. Both laugh.

I know they’re harmless,
but it brings me back
to that time I was fresh out the ER,
and the friend I cared for most back then
slept on my couch, helping me
for that one awful night. I told her, 
here, have this Tylenol.
Because she had a headache. 

Showed her where it was, locked up, safe.
(Here, have my entire life.)
I wake up, I don’t know.
Don’t know for months,
until she texts (won’t call).
I break down in the computer room, 
lonely, at grad school.

M stole my Xanax I wasn’t taking any longer, 
just hoarding for a rainy day where I felt too much pain.
So, new friends, the reason why 
I hide my meds in plain sight 
is so I know when they’re gone.
Because I don’t trust many
now that M’s gone.

Day 8 / Poem 8

Brine / Ayelet Amittay

Tonight for the first time in thirty years I’ve been thinking
about my brother learning to ride a bike that summer
before everything turned to shit, on the paved pathways
next to the Charles River, how he rode straight 
into the water, as if there was a bridge only he could see
extending into nowhere and he was determined
to cross it come hell or high water– in this case,
come water, come dark murky water not safe for
drinking or swimming in, come turtles on the bank
and rowers sculling the edges, the bike sank
down to the bottom my brother fished from the water
sputtering with surprise. The bike was mine–
too small for me then, yet it had been my bike, pink,
fendered, now at the bottom of a river, with no one
planning to rescue it or to give it a different
fate, another chance. I imagined a child
like me, but on the bottom of the river, happy
to find a pink bicycle, riding it everywhere
with the rippled light filtering down from the surface,
and I still think of her now, the underwater alternate
version of me, to whom nothing terrible happened,
growing up with her hair floating around her face
in a kind of halo, smiling, wanting for nothing.

I’ve Been Sketching on the Screened Porch / Patricia Clark

he said stepping inside describing how he’d gotten
purple coneflowers black-eyed susans, shepherd’s crook
with suet cages all down on Arches paper not much
of a draftsman he said though All she could think
was how he’d captured it: her small herb and flower
garden The herbs down to thyme, sage, rosemary, chives
Basil had been eaten by something, skeletonized the word
Rocky their gardener had used For a few years she planted
fennel because of its feathery stalk and also hyssop
for the butterflies and because she loved the word
aromatic and it sported small blue flowers Now
suddenly August she could smell summer’s end in the ripeness
of vegetation She spied strawberries hidden in grass
and purple/black berries from pokeweed lined up like
pearls She and her husband realized their union had lasted
twenty-eight years, a stunning number giving how they had fears
and strikes against them at the start, alcoholism,
fear of taking a chance, years alone Now how to live
with another person? They began, though, and the small
cottage house the start. She’d forgotten how to be
open Had to relearn, there was money to work out chores
and how to spend their time Griefs they went through
together: both mothers dying, then an aunt and uncle,
a beloved sister, friends How to love the process, travel,
disagreements, where to go, when to come home, the dog
to go out and in, learn commands, learn to settle.
Nieces and nephews, grand nieces and nephews,
gifts, birthdays, graduations, shepherding them up, out,
into the world. All the talk of doing, making,
oil paint, canvas, stretchers, easels, brushes, scraper, knife
The poem, image, line, where the voice resides, where
the eye stops, settles, celebrates. Then the first dark sign,
cancer, the needles into the body, the doctor, advice,
fear, procedure, surgery Landing on the other side: recovery
and joy, life, again the garden, again the swallowtail butterfly, red
admiral, not on hyssop but fluttering down to land on glowing purple
butterfly bush, three plants flourishing, miniature, a variant
called pugster, sunlit, growing, aromatic, rich.

The Thingy That Amyloid Plaque Does  / Brian Dickson

The-Thingy-That-Amyloid-Plaque-Does.docx

Generational Poem / Patrick Dixon

From a far distance
I watch you follow me

I am on a cliff above the sea 
you on the sand below

our feet have been in the ocean
no footsteps visible

but they are there 
and somehow you know this

the way birds know where to go
thousands of miles one direction

then travel a different route back
find new paths to the same destination

how do we navigate this life 
so much the same, so different

so much love, my son
so much love

Paradigm Shift / Sara Dudo

These days, conjuring kimono celosia,
ghostwriting
in praise of things she knew and saw.

First, calculate yourself into a paradigm.
Then, watch her fissure
beneath the framework of green fields,
sister space;

a duck suddenly convalesces into a rabbit.
A listener’s guide to wind:

start with thrush feather, descent
of winter pine, canyon ledge of black hair
veiling across the eyes.

These bodies: standing in a place, then residuals
of a past bounty of walnut trees,
the shift is not often monolithic.

One less heat signature, what of these
lights making leaves
inedible to our insects for her,

making a path for our zeitgeist mouths
spiriting catalogs
of saguaros and other desires?

The parallax is deceiving,
her way, reflecting buttercups
for the archetype, the saving lens.

Speaking of Shoes / Molly Donahue

A Book Launch / Logan Garner

for Robert Michael Pyle

Whispers like the hive you press your ear to,
a humming dark beneath whisk-beats of jazz.

A barstool props up a glass of scotch, 
poised to warm us all through the orator,

who will draw out words, slow, 
like honey from the opened comb.

Ode III (Images)  / Amelia K

In the picture where my best friend is holding a popsicle, I am behind the camera. I am behind the camera, and her mouth is red. Her mouth is red, and her heart is beating. Her heart is beating and I am behind the camera. Her pink purse is on the floor. The popsicle is red in her mouth. The whole world is behind the camera. There isn’t a car in the picture. In the picture, where is her red heart? In her red heart, what is beating? Where is she? In the car she brought a pink purse to my house, and then she brought it back to her house. In her house with her pink heart beating the camera. Behind the popsicle her red mouth holding. I am in the car picture, I am the purse camera going back to her beating heart house. The car in her mouth behind me. No one will tell me where she is. She is in the camera. 

forest rites / Jess Tower

I wish I could partake
in forest rites

spices unknown to humankind
waft in the dew
oh, spatial noneness 
wonder how I ever knew
that time flies
within these gray asthmatic trees
a clearing beginning to brighten
I wish I could breathe 

the way we dance
to Celtic instrumentals
around candle flames
smiling with mud caked on our feet
ash swaying in the now picked up breeze

I rarely practice
because I’m full
of Wegovy – my food now
because I’m filled with ten other meds
because I can’t run three feet
because I worry too much
about large noise

maybe I should because it feels right,
it smells nice, and tickles my stomach
like soup on a rainy day
it touches my nose, a perfume I can’t get enough of
it’s a feeling of unity, a sponge cake on a sunny day
it feels like that
this ritual by the moon

when I was a baby
my first word was a phrase
what’s that?
and now I’m always wondering
but never seeking

I wish I could breathe,
walk the forest all day
because it’s precious and mine
because the way I wish for health, for peace
is a wave and a fire, all in one 

Day 7 / Poem 7

Ode to a Contractor / Ayelet Amittay

You have seen our house naked, stripped
lattice and plaster, wires
slung from the ceiling like bridles.
You have witnessed the acne of mold.
You have seen where the animals chew their way
into what feels impermeable,
the brick crumbs, birdsong
from the chimney. Your judgments
are kept to yourself. Instead, the box
gleaming on the back of your truck
with its tools of healing: scroll saw,
claw hammer, beadboard, four 
by sixes and ten by twelves
as a way to describe the heft of trees
cut to shelter. I live in fear
of your wrath, a petty vengeance
like a witch’s curse, but you seem
magnanimous enough. Masc.
You peeled the yellow counter free
of the kitchen floor and it flashed out
sunlight, curled in the dumpster
like parchment. I leaned on that
counter as I washed each dish–
the illusion of solid, which you have
expertise in undoing.

Theodore Roethke Cento / Patricia Clark

I see the flower of all water, above and below me, the river never-ending
Dream of a woman, and a dream of death
The mind remembers from a deeper sleep
Was I the servant of a sovereign wish,
For sale: by order of the remaining heirs
Morning, I saw the world with second sight,
I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A delirium of birds!
I hear the owls, the soft callers, coming down from the hemlocks.
I live with the rocks, their weeds,
A shape of change, encircled by its fire.
The water rippled, and she rippled on.
what falls away is always. And is near.
My dust longs for the invisible.

Garage Sale at the Edge of the World  / Brian Dickson

A collection of World’s Best Dad 
coffee mugs are marked 
a quarter a piece. 

My father is pouring 
Folger’s for anyone 
to test a cup out. 

He nods. Brewed
all day, he says. 
Keeping it real weak 

like I did. He sips 
from his 44oz., 7-11
reusable thermos.

Try this mug.
New Year’s Day, 2000. 
We survived Y2K!

It handles 
well 
around the fingers,

wrist. I ask 
for black. On
the surface,

My face 
translucent 
as his.

The Eight Worst Wars of the 21^st Century / Patrick Dixon

     ~ a found poem

War is a state of opened and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations.

Second Congo War 1998-2003 
3 million dead 

Afghanistan War 2001-2014

94,500 dead

 Conflicts causing at least 1,000 deaths in one calendar year are considered wars.

Syrian Civil War 2011-present
470,000 dead

 Russia-Ukraine War 2014-present
694,000 dead or wounded

 …the walls are writhing blood flows
from acacia blossoms…. ~Marianna Kiyanovska

Darfur Conflict 2003-present
300,000 dead

The War Against Boko Harem 2010-2016
11,700 dead

Yemeni Civil War 2011-2021
375,000 dead

 The beacon fires burn and never go out,
There is no end to war!  ~ Li Po

Iraq War 2003-2011
149,000 dead

 A conflict carried on by force of arms, as between nations or between parties within a nation.

Israel versus Palestine 2021-present
over 40,000 dead

 Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom–
A field where a thousand corpses lie.
                               ~Stephen Crane

What the Light was Like / Sara Dudo

anointing
               my skin

               oiled pink
in ditsy headlights

               at times, unforgiving

each moving thing
exposed:

               a horse farm glass
               dappled
               with black-veined aporia

or beamed crepuscular rays
               blazing a red clover mite
               for its 2-week lifespan

torrential

               the theory of everything’s
               beginning
                               and ending

during sudden torrentials,
               missed

The Hidden Parts of School Lake / Molly Donahue

Lessons are at times delivered 
in the regal packaging of two bald eagles
panting in a pine tree,
lording over a great nest 
on the shoreline,
sticks arranged to shape the bed 
of a young swan yet to be garnished 
in his royal whites.
Beware those devil fellas dripping 
in feathers, I want to bellow
in a boat, in a hat, in the rain, in a lake, in the woods,
so aware, in the world.

Wildlife Inventory, August 1 / Logan Garner

                   at Sleeper Coffee, Astoria, Oregon

1. Harbor seal (because the sea lions
   are summering in San Diego)

2. Short-billed gull (Mew gull to me,
   but they’ve filed for a name change
   with the IRS)

3. Belted Kingfisher (taking its own survey
   of small fishes)

4. American white pelican (resentful
   at being fourth on the list, based on
   their countenances)

5. and Homo sapiens sapiens
   (most of whom don’t realize
   that we, too are wildlife)

Invocation III (Azimuth)  / Amelia K

I’ll stop crying over god’s spilled milk
when you tell me where it’s headed

I’ll keep it all wrapped in silk
when you forget where you’re bedded

Tip this cracked moon leaking like wine
pretend it’s revelry

A Kind Person / Jess Tower

I sip morning tea, green leaves full of flavor.
Savor the sustenance, think what I want to become.
I am awake, I am selfishly enjoying my life.
In Gaza, teas are made of grass. 
Few animals left grazing, so it tastes less like ass.
I wonder what death is.
What I’ll become.
A knock on a door, for me?
What I want to become.
The shock of a limb falling off, for them?
What do I want to become?

Day 6 / Poem 6

Dissociation (I) / Ayelet Amittay

Mark the Path Back / Patricia Clark

From parsley and chives, from rosemary that overwintered
            inside near the north window, comes a meal invented on the run,
            half-French, half West Coast beach meal cooked in a pot
            over a fire—adding some chunks of Yukon gold potato,
            adding shrimp and a pound of mussels. Adding clams.

From broth comes flavor and juice the better to dip the bread in,
            the better to slurp with a large spoon. Are there drips
            on the tablecloth? These will add to our history.

From the news comes the light leaving, as you knew it had
            to depart, is it tonight or the next night, what the news-
            person said, the last 9 p.m. sunset, the last till late
            spring of the new year?

O not to embrace melancholy, but rather toast the change,
            the going-forward, now stars will wink on earlier, we’ll
            set up the tabletop telescope. We’ll see how the shade
            from oaks swallows the backyard in one gulp. Many things
            are voracious. Many mouths instruct us how to live.

Is this when the dead step out of the space between trees?
            Where a membrane parts, thin places, like silk tearing
            silently and vertically, silver-gray and startlingly
            smooth—and there she is: your mother in a joyous
            moment, buttering a piece of toast. Then Father,
            sipping coffee, saying “Hi, kiddo, hey sleepyhead.”
            And Ginger, sister gone too soon now opening her
            mouth to say, “Gosh, it was such a beautiful ride!
            Mt. Hood, skiing in France, water skiing when I was
            pregnant. No advice but in breathing, living. Going out—
            mark the path!—as far as you can.”

Self-Portrait as Baseball Diamond  / Brian Dickson

(with lines from Good Will Hunting)

I have swept the bases
with nothing to serve 
you Mickey Mantle.

From the stands Matt Damon yells
“Take two! Take two, Mickey!” 
with his crew and beer.

You are heedless, headless,
barreling past first
with a flaming can in hand,

Our bodies on fire inside, you 
rounding, rounding, then
third as my dad slings

you home. “Hey, Mickey!”
Damon says. “You like apples?
“How you like this apple”? 

He holds up your head, that
lovely buzz cut, sad smile. 
I’ll keep a place for him, dad.

See? Despite the dirt spiked
up, the chalk lines still clean. 
I’m already at second,

Mickey at home plate, those
Boston boys for their burgers
and beatdown of bullies.

There’s still time to bust out
our bats for our demons, pops, 
them etching our forever diamond.

Enough? / Patrick Dixon

Summer, and it’s hot today, so we
drive to the water, the south end
of the Salish Sea, where the view,
the scent of salt in the air
and the Olympic mountains
nurture us as day-by-hot-day we
move through our seventies, wonder
if our children will live such luxury.

The windows down, AC and engine off,
sleeping dog yet to pant in the back seat,
we watch the boats ebb and flow into
the marina from the Sound, barely a breeze
to keep us cool, when a van pulls alongside.

Out steps a woman our age, opens the hatch
and unpacks a walker for her husband. He
shuffles behind it as he follows her
to the tiny picnic table in front of our car
at the edge of the hill we are parked upon.
She gently tries getting him to sit on the small
bench seat, but he wears a blank expression,
not of confusion, but one of being so far
within himself as to not hear or see anyone else.
His clothes hang off him like they’d flutter
on a clothesline. Unsteady, he steps away
from his walker, pauses and looks
at the water as if seeing it for the first time.

She moves behind him, sees something behind
his ear and gently brushes it away. He doesn’t
move or flinch. She rests her hand upon his
shoulder, then caresses his upper arm. Her
tenderness is lost upon him, but perhaps
it wasn’t meant for him at all. Perhaps it was
for the memory of him, who he used to be,
or even for her– and the memory
of what they once shared.

When all is lost, if one of us remembers,
will it be enough?

Mox Nox / Sara Dudo

In the field marigold lining the fences
of Cecilia’s day,
the interstitial insects know soon
it is night:
tell me the great and unsearchable things.

I am languageless
chasing continuance,
others admire the thunderheads
behind the steeple, the deep blue

in a house of love, how
the polaroids fade. Rust dress lined
with snapdragons, red sun spiriting
across water

glittering in swamp rose mallow.
What we want is an earth
that is not an ossuary.

Yellow strings of sky
and red motel signs preceding the Sierras,
I am living in the spaces between.

Others are filming wildfire
and burning signs for Lone Pine.
The sunny hours, lifting

the eyes to sudden opaque light
in an obliquity of dust storm, smoke,
electric consciousness of the parading night. 

Marcy is Still a Bitch / Molly Donahue

I’ve never been good at burning bridges.
I pat around for matches in my pockets
and come up short with flaccid kleenex.
Please.
Dedicate a song you wrote to me and sing
in notes so low they vibrate my lungs.
Violently decline any advances made by mosquitos.
Even if I’m imprisoned, bake me a baby into a cake
over razor blades.
Name a tree and call on them every single day.
Fold your hands and whisper thank you
into your palms, sweaty or dirty or otherwise.
Tell me you love me. I’ll never tire of it.
I said what I said.
The end.

Fire / Logan Garner

Courted by moths, some falling
into the maw or
culled by bats while 
braving turbid, rarified breath.
Elsewhere, other times
it might

coax wet dough into
pan rustique
leap candle-to-curtain, 
hungry for the house
traverse branch and root alike, soil
no barrier to its storm
grant a child’s wish—or not—
until next year.

But tonight it only lights 
its own feast, consuming
tiny paper wings, offerings
in exchange for entropy,
warmed hands.

Elegy II (Miracles)  / Amelia K

You look at me like I hung the moon
with the rope tied to your family dog,
tired of being yours and wearing a circle
into the lawn the way I wore your red flags
like a gown, until I didn’t; there is a word for removing a veil, and that word is apocalypse

She’s So Fat / Jess Tower

My fat cells converge 
into a being: 
me.

I love the squishy pillows
that are my breasts.
I love the way they’re loved
by my partner.
I love my warm stomach 
that makes me full.
The way my belly button 
looks deeper because 
fat surrounds it.
I love the deep curves
that are my hips.
They can move easier, 
lubricated by my fat.

That dimple on my right thigh
is more pronounced 
because of my fatness;
what a beautiful work of art.

I adore the way my tattoo has grown 
into adulthood.
The imperfection of it is whole.
I am a loved and lovable fatty.
I love my fat ass, my entire body, me.

Day 5 / Poem 5

Legacy / Ayelet Amittay

The Thick of It / Patricia Clark

Photo of a whole family
parents and three kids

tumbled together happy,
smiling on a bed

No hint of trouble or hurry
to find shelter

waiting in lines for bread or rice,
water, the chance of a place
to live

Dark hair, bright eyes, skin
without wrinkles
Maybe they’d just had
a pillow fight—each wears
an unguarded look saying

I intend to live to my full
potential—it’s summer time,
there should be fruit in the stalls,
apricots, peaches, figs

Then the caption saying they’d been
killed by a single bomb
in an area promised to be
safe. A whole family gone.

I’m watching a black-capped chickadee here
tumbling in a redbud tree.
I wouldn’t lift a finger
to harm it.

Hiking Near Mt. Herman Road  / Brian Dickson

(for brothers D. and J.)

We were trying to capture 
a childhood that didn’t exist 
inside a wrecked 
Dodge Dakota 
on the side of the mountain. 

It appeared pushed 
over forwards then turned 
around, crashed 
backwards, scree 
ferrying a one-ton rock 
smashing the hood 
and windshield. 

What if we were in there, speaking 
in hushed reverie, in anger 
about what we do remember,
what we don’t, what we miss,
don’t miss, until we plow down, 
tossing our ledgers 
against boulders.

We decide that story 
on the hike back to our campsite, 
the story for the truck buried 
in other chucked tires 
nestled in a ravine.

I Can’t Hear You Due to All the Noise / Patrick Dixon

Until recently I opened my email first thing
in the morning, over coffee and toast.

I’d browse the messages from friends or family,
organizations whose causes I agree with

and photo attachments of kids, cats and dogs.
But no more.

Now those few are buried under a virtual avalanche
of political solicitations and fundraisers disguised 

as surveys. On top of that, Norton keeps telling me
it’s charging me $1,000 for the computer protection

package I ordered, and recently MacAffee has joined in.
Scammers and phishers elbow each other to be first

in line, but the Democrats are so excited about Kamala
that they can’t squeeze to the front. No matter how many

times I unsubscribe or report them as junk, they run 
back home, change costumes and come knocking again,

hoping I’ll slip up and send them a few bucks, or better yet
the keys to my savings account. 

If you want to communicate with me, please don’t email
or text. Somehow all those same players discovered my 

phone number, and the pile-on has begun. Try calling,
like we used to do before cell phones. Better yet, write 

me a letter or a postcard. I promise to smile when 
I pull it out of the mailbox with all the junk mail. 

The Ripple Effect / Sara Dudo

What once was
a limestone thrown into the lake

now an entourage of small white immensities
multiply

lily is spellbound
chasing the avenues

of rotten branches breaching
their orbits around the reflective sun

and against each growing wall
trumpet flower stretch, begging to be touched

lily is only a parentheses
a small viola in the expanse

between the loneliest objects in the world
be it single-streaked
or weaved in moss

and two starry figures
at the edge of the water dying
to be familiar 

Eating a Moth / Molly Donahue

You at your grandmother’s door
recalling the smell of oranges bleeding
crow in the backseat unfolding
like a cootie catcher.

small mountain of salt not a bounty 
but a pact in circles and circles 
soared by an eagle
in sky the color of chicory.

woodpecker as mother nature’s drumroll
for a kiss in the valley 
of the neck blushing 
to bravery forever erasing voluptuous doubt.

No magic is evil, after all, 
unless you make it so.

Word and Image / Logan Garner

Perched behind a coffee
on the shore of a river
I am holding space
for the art project
word and image together
the potential energy
of ekphrastic dialogue.

I was given an image
a man in a narrow room 
All side lit, dream-green
like a holy night
in the high arctic
He has me humming.
Has me holding my breath.

Ode II (Bodies)  / Amelia K

a cento with lines from The Metamorphoses by Ovid, translated by David R. Slavitt

With her help or without it,
I am here to throw myself on your mercy–
Can such things happen? Can gods rescue us thus?
The price for relief was steep–
One learned not to look. 
I found her, bloody, 
And she turned to a tree 
as if in a kind of childbirth
and her hands are tipped with curved claws
O my darling, he called
while there is something
left of me, touch me, reach out your hand. 
Do not desert me. Stay!
(What kind of fun is that? She simply can’t understand it.)
I loved you, and I love you still. 
Do not replace me 

Perhaps in their new incarnations
a daughter is born to them
He might have had a reason to offer thanks. 

Day 4 / Poem 4

Provenance / Patricia Clark

We floated the Satsop River on air mattresses
            filled with our own breath,

riding the slow current, bumping along
                        into rocks, boulders large

as small cars. Mountain runoff, Father
            said, and our ankles and wrists burned.

Wasn’t the campfire, later, the best part,
                        with marshmallows sticky knots

of flame or blackened glue, while we heard
            the “olden times” stories, how our parents met,

how they drove west and slept at night
                        bedded down in fields or in the car?

Dakota badlands, Clark Fork River named
            for explorers we might be related to,

and Idaho, Coeur d’Alene a touch of France
                        we couldn’t yet point to on a map.

Washington as far west as they could go,
            our East Coast cousins asking did we

sleep in teepees, and we wanted one along with
                        buckskin moccasins and a totem pole.

We learned the lore of fir, pine, salal, cedar,
            rhododendron, chipmunk, otter, fox,

and crows to watch out for who stole buns
                        meant for burgers, and clams that latched

onto a child’s finger like a vise. No one
            died or left or got hurt for years,

until they did. I rode the boat’s bow off
                        Point Defiance, not a worry in my head

  over rip tides under the Narrows Bridge,
            or our lack of life jackets. Smelters along

Ruston Way were shortening our lives with particulates
                        but reckoning was always around

the corner, not today. No signs up then: don’t turn your back
            to the ocean. Fresh oysters plucked, pried open—

danger of sharp shells on the feet but Mother
                        hurled “Tenderfoot!” at anyone who limped.

Road Kill of My Dreams  / Brian Dickson

                                   (for the nine-banded armadillo)

You once in a group of three

                         hovered around 
                         a birch log

                         foraging 
                         for ants 
                         grubs 
                         pill bugs.

                                                                                  You meandered to me 
                                                       with 

     your poor eyesight then stood 

                                                                 on you on your 
                                                                 hind legs

     up
     with your forelimbs

                                                                                                                            waving them as if
                                                                 a ghost truck on 
                                                                 a backroad
                                                                 struck 

                                                       you my spirit animals
                                                       unable 
                                                       to curl

                                                                                  hurtling through 

                                                                                  silver bluestem
                                                                                                                            the stark day 

and flames. 

Who Needs a Mirror? / Patrick Dixon

I don’t use a mirror.
I prefer others to tell me how good I look;
how presidential. A winner. 
I never lose.

The older I get, the younger I feel.
These women don’t get me.
Never have.
Look at all the beauties I have.
Blondes surround me
because I am irresistible.
My rallies are filled with women.
Beautiful women. 
The ones who sue me and call me names
(you know who I mean)
gold-diggers, liars, in it for the money,
they pick on me because I’m successful,
I’m the most successful man in America!
Bezos, Musk, or that brat Zuckerberg,
none of them have ever been President.
I have, and I will be again.
Then they’d all better watch out.

Who needs a mirror
when I have so many beautiful people
telling me how perfect I look,
how great I am?

Infertility / Sara Dudo

Is it a lack of light or am I blinding you?

August is a crape myrtle with tired flesh.

Bees line the grass belly up.

A bee line is a direct route but this carnage a case of phototaxis blues.

Rose Mallow wind.

The green is a green that is slowly tonguing the syllables of goodbye.

For turtles, basking in sun can be a matter of life or death, desperate dreams of half-moons.

Gales are heat’s farewell language.

Saltwater lungs heave footprints out to sea.

Is the sun the only true, terrifying light we know, and if so, what of these fissures?

Can you see sunlight from within me?

An expanse of dunes.

Mother terrapins in marshland wait for eggs to hatch. 

age of innocence / Molly Donahue

heavy beading of dew, of fog fallen and shattered.
birds going nowhere, working hard, singing while they do it.
cloud of hitchhiking water holding sun like nothing else can, giver
of shade and daydream.  
wedge of geese through a break in the cedar.
small silver fish after small silver fish
where we doggy paddle in the clearest shallows.
we’re all loony tunes, he says out of the blue. 
laughter, baring canines and incisors, molars too deep to show off.

The River / Logan Garner

The Nehalem’s ribbon
drags over basalt.
I hold my breath for 
an orange crowned warbler
trilling on the far slope.
But that crow, perched 
just out of sight, lets me know
with black grinning haws
that we two, lying 
here on the grass,
look more than peaceful, 
more than still. 
We look, it says, like bodies 
losing temperature. 
Declares us only deposits 
turning toward entropy,
turning back into earth. 

Invocation II (Soil)  / Amelia K

Like a soul in my bed, I need you, but I prefer weapons of leaving, my heels going down to death, hands together in morning. I like hell the way I imagined it as a kid: a compost heap, hot and rich as chocolate cake. An always kind of dirt, enemy of mother’s fingers. I ate you when there were other options, and I spit when I wanted to swallow. Now I miss your mess in my sheets, the sugar of your grit on my neck, the aliment of you under my nails, the promise that I could dip my head beneath the water and come up still baptized in you.

the art of men / Jess Tower

framed ivory, framed marble 
the vicinity
the door opening 
I play after you 
I move 

I sing 
this delicious mistake

inept positivity
which trembles 
now 
this woman regrets 
the first, the shame 
you deepen 

desired looks 
poisoned attention 
you forget everything rotten
that’s destiny 

the sculptor intimidates 
during sleep 

his cut hair 
her union

she belongs to timbre
and he will push enchantment 

Day 3 / Poem

How I Want You / Ayelet Amittay

— after Lorca

As the sea as a traffic light as the summer
leaves as grapes broccoli bananas
before they ripen as the square territories
of lawns wet and open under the weeping
sprinklers as the golf course as the sign
for go. With envy. Around the gills. As in
young, inexperienced, newbie, untried,
a willow branch cut by a sharp blade,
the color you can smell can taste can know
no they told me when I climbed out of the pool
in childhood if you don’t shower your hair will turn
and I would imagine your touch a hundred years
from now chlorine and lime and sweetgrass

We’re Coming Up On the Perseids (Elliptical Elegy) / Patricia Clark

I love it when the month changes, and I flip calendar pages,
            then stare at a new image.
A calendar of women reading—who chose this in mid-
            December?
If you know where to look, damage from last year’s storm hangs on in the ravine—
            deadfalls, a wound (bright orange) where a limb ripped off.
Kathy was known for her red hair—what trait for me?
Pastel on board by Morris Shulman—26 ¼ X 20 inches.
This woman dressed in blue has suffered—her eyes look down,
            she refuses direct contact.
A pencil in her right work-a-day hand—she cleans and washes
            with those fingers, combs, strokes, soothes. She mixes, kneads,
            measures and arranges: berries, peaches in a pie crust. Cucumbers,
            dill, spices in a tall jar. The pads of those fingers know cotton,
            linen, silk. She can fold and tuck.
Shulman’s calendar woman is learning to write. A tremendous pride links her to a journey
            she never thought would be hers.
No wonder she lowers her eyes.
On the horizon, a trip across the Mississippi to find her sister’s grave.
            And someday a journey out of the country to a continent called
            Africa, to another river delta and deep water.
Gone ten years now, my sister’s movements come back in my hand gestures,
            tone in my voice.
Myiasis an infestation of flies into tissues or cavities.
Is there any forgetting, if an image keeps its location
            in the brain?
It was a park near London where Keats roamed in his day—
            what is its name?

When it Happens  / Brian Dickson

You find yourself 
as an ofrenda 

on the altar of lost 
healthcares, a metal figurine 

in a dentist chair, all skeleton
and slack-jawed

The dentist is slack-
jawed too, you in awe

of his forefinger, a scraper
of tartar with blood 

on the tip. This is 
enough pilgrim,

you feel, despite 
a widening puddle afoot, 

to be this close, 
this close, to a full set 

of chompers in this 
place of progress. 

The Night is Full of Terrors / Patrick Dixon

say the songwriters and poets,
and the last two have been redefining
what that phrase means.

We live under the shadow of Mt. Rainier, a dormant,
potentially active volcano that the vulcanologists
say is long overdue for an eruption.

Under our feet here in western Washington
are dozens of fault lines– the Seattle, Whidbey Island
and where I live, Olympia, to name a few.

All threaten to be part of The Big One,
the earthquake that will dump the west coast
of America into the Pacific. One expert said,

If you live west of I-5, you’ll die quickly
in the cataclysm. If you live east of it,
it will be a slow death before help comes.

 But last night, when the US Army’s artillery
began shooting their practice rounds in the dark
for the second night in a row,

thumping our chests, rattling windows
and terrifying our gentle dog, I was reminded 
of a television interview. A news team

was covering the Russia-Ukraine war,
interviewing a farmer, his wife and children
as the sound of artillery pounded in the background.

It’s closer every day, said the wife, her hands wiping 
her dress over and over, her brow furrowed. The newsman 
in his khaki flak jacket, shoved a microphone into her fear. 

 What will you do when it gets here?  Another off-camera 
explosion. Still together in that moment,
the family flinched as one. 

The Weather Turns / Sara Dudo

Looking at the sea 
moon fabric
small live things. 

Object permanence
on fire,
put out with cactus blood.

Fishermen anatomizing the stars
and terrapins.
At the end of their lines
a series of jellyfish

collection of monosyllabic 
elegies chanting

bloom bloom bloom.

Elsewhere, dewgrass
finite whispers of shells. 

Earth paraphernalia 
we cannot preserve.

Listen to the bluejays
chat about exile,
what hides beneath the empty.

The parameters of my mental map
measured by where the single-cell
thunderstorm touches.

The width of the glass window
is a bird’s whisper.

Maybe a wave
carrying a small tree
or canopy 
of prickly poppy

and the danger of touch. Yet
the desperate need to weed

as a fox runs across the road
where the land ends in sand

and the oceanographers 
measure all the years

little live things hold grudges.

Cicada drone saws outward, cueing heat. / Molly Donahue

Eating nasturtium, leggy and coltish,
not because they taste good necessarily 
but because eating flowers feels to me
like easy magic.

The bees are dressed and levitating 
in yellow pollen muscle suits
while we are reduced to sporting only
our underwear inside the house. 

Emerging from fever territory
with dreams that only fevers can invent:

a small boy swimming 
over a closed, wavy clamshell 
the size of a car or 
I sit by a pool
and order eggs while yelling
at my friend that I am not mad
I’m just hungry.

Grateful, we slip for dips in the lake
just down the street until the sun
finishes eating the day 
and spits out the moon.

When Fear of Storms Subsided / Logan Garner

Despite the wind, still audible 
from our interment, where
we huddled between
limestone walls, he left
as soon as the banshee wail 

wound down to a whimper. 
Must and mildew rushed in
to fill the space he’d guarded 
at the foot of the stairs
beneath our rotting cellar door.

When my throat closed
I climbed up and out, alive
with mock machismo
fleeing ghosts and spiderwebs
palms sweating with the stones.

Soft arrival onto the porch
betrayed by whining
screen door hinges.
Not then, but now I can see 
the holes in the metal mesh.

Then the moment: compression, 
his hand on my shoulder.
Lightning forked and spidered
across the sky, ignited clouds, 
his smile and shining eyes lit bright.

Elegy I (Fences)

You will crook your 

evening finger with all 

your neighbor’s heart. You will cook 

your neighbor’s heart with all your lover’s sugar. You will crook your 

evening neighbor with all 

your evening heart. You 

will fuck your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart. You will lose 

your lover’s neighbor without 

your sugared heart. 

wind phones / Jess Tower

you could have become good, not evil
but this isn’t a fairytale land
then how did it come to this, a sense of pure
                                                                         ocean,
                                                                                  pure sun?

you longed for adventure, so
I’m endlessly roaming
mountaintops in search of
a telephone
a chair
a way to talk with someone not of here
you’re ethereal now, blissed-out, or maybe you saunter

                       just wish I had longer

to cry about your face in my face, pale anger
feel so alone without your abuse
but feels like you were near a revelation
a prophecy foretold your imminent death
but that prophecy also said you’d be great, & you weren’t
you grabbed time by the throat, demanded it help
then you bled out

I forgot to ask about
your most-loved childhood toy
your favorite memory of my brother
the recipe for your homemade sauce
because I forgot we existed amidst

my boulder-boundaries, but then

a fairy arrives here, shatters the glass at my feet
I’d already taken care of the boulder
turned it to glass at last,
have to be careful of it—it can break easy now
it can create pinpricks of blood on my toes
because I’m barefoot
on the grass, careless, but bright-faced

I’ll build now a sturdy fortress
that can open if I let it
allow the crisp water to pass through
have the power to make the swamp stay put

after my fortress side quest,
I’m caught in a levitation spell
(by said fairy above) &
it guides me to you
a valley at last, I ascend the
             round, luscious green
(makes me feel at peace)
I mean: not angry
last leg of my journey

I travel without pain
shame, or remorse
up that mountain
to that chair
pick up that phone

Day 2 / Poem 2

The Kids Are Not Asleep / Ayelet Amittay

Midsummer Paralysis / Patricia Clark

A nerve was severed in my jaw—I remember numbness.
Numbness is a way of saying goodbye but staying.
Your numb cheek doesn’t feel like it’s yours.
Numbness is missing 500 million birds migrating overhead.
Is my wrist resting on the chair arm pulsing or is it numb?
The redbud embodies shame, numb because of Judas.
Movement is opposite and antidote to numbness.
In the jostling of travel, there is sore numbness.
Someone lies crushed under rubble, in Gaza, numb.
She put gold-orange drops in to numb my cornea.
My fear was specific—quicksand numbing my ankles.
When running’s forbidden, numbness embraces.
Beneath the petals of numbness, a scent of rose hip tea.
The probe touching your foot here, here: is it numb now?

Call in the Ants  / Brian Dickson

Lovers fall  
to pieces in a claw-

foot tub. Tiny selves 
drain, hang 

by mesh wire. 
The hair, skin-

granules, toenail  
clippings. Call in

the ants. Their 
sorting of—  

They don’t ask  
about their path.

In Situ / Sara Dudo

We like to define ourselves
by what we’ve touched.  

             Touch one Japanese beetle,
             it bites and flees.
             Touch one wild horse,
             suddenly another appears,

             a sudden mass
             calling you O King…

myriads upon myriads
quickly losing their phenomena.

We like to define ourselves
by what we leave.

In the chiaroscuro,
your hand alight
as it reaches for the door,
bright blue.

             Everything else, flooded
             in darkness.

             In the field leaving
             the chrysanthemum,
             in the field leaving
             the field,
             the new field leaving its vitiligo
                           light on me.

As far as I know,
             how to exist
             in a field: sing.

             Surely, the leaving hides
                         the inability to outlive.

Heliotrope tongue, salt bits.

The unit of measure
for all this pressure:
             few photographs.

             Ignoring radioactivity, the ocean dictates
             our half-lives, now quarters.

             A year and a half of little water.

The boardwalk in warm rain.
It’s dark and the custard parlors are closed.

             Occasional neon sign glow.
                          Under the shop awning,

                                     hold me the way

cease to exist / Molly Donahue

pulp and sour
a bird for hours
and then (dang!) merely
a man.

blade and heathen
too far gone
for all things
young and more than
lovely.

but there are children 
inside our children!
hold up the walls.
tell them
you are not home.

through the sumac
a moon rises like bread,
a crust i wish
i could feed you.

Sump Pump / Logan Garner

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.
Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”

The sump is doing its job 
beneath the house,
trying not to drown
down there in the dark.
A chthonic Sisyphus, 
it fights the joined efforts
of rain, high tide and water table,
close as we are to Young’s Bay.

At every bellowing purge
I could make my way
to the front window, could watch 
it force out impending doom
with bubbling that looks
almost jubilant (in spite of it all)
I rarely make the move
to acknowledge it. Alone 
under there in the dark, 
it goes on, ever pumping.

I could put in a valve to keep 
the water from rushing back
into the line from the flood
atop the lawn, give the thing 
some semblance of relief 
from the storm and endless cycles.
I have purchased such;
it’s been sitting months now
in a darkness of its own
in the closet just above, in fact, 
that pump buried in the crawlspace.

Ode I (Wells) / Amelia K

your water the end song of
our new contorted trick 
power flowing fateful, fast
last chance of seeing it all at once

Breaking the Set-in-Stone with a Gentle Axe / Jess Tower

letting go of you is floral,
a new scent I’ve never noticed before.
letting go of you is clean soap
melting into my crevices, my now-loved
             skin folds.
letting go of you is needed,
             healthy, scary.
letting go of you is a sword fight
in a jester’s costume
against an ogre.
letting go of you is letting go
             of all my old poems,
             tainted in red pen
             with your name everywhere.
letting go of you makes me feel everywhere.
letting go of you is a stone,
the stepping kind.

What it Means to Be a Woman / Jess Tower

We fight for
Imane Khelif
Box like her 
in our everyday 

To be a woman
you know
you are

Day 1/ Poem 1

I Listen to the Disney Princess Impersonator / Ayelet Amittay

Long fake braid over her shoulder
like a wing, she is singing
a song the girls know by heart–
something about the love
we’ve waited for. Her soprano climbs
like the ferris wheel, turning in lights
and organ pipes. Under the big top, taking
a break from the fair heat, I don’t expect
to be moved to tears by the line, all those
years outside looking in. But I am,
Rapunzel, the dunking booths
at the county fair believe in you
and your loneliness. Six year old
me is rushing the stage with the other
princesses. You hold up
a mirror for us every time you wave.

Poem Beginning with a Line from Charles Wright (one word & one letter altered) / Patricia Clark

What set her adrift on the floating world?
It might have been the wind or fire’s spark,
from another’s body her own hurled
to land on a slope in night’s moonless dark.
Helpless but alive, able to detect
both the movement and the smell of water.
She didn’t yet know how to ask, accept
these pulses in her brain as words: Father,
daughter, praise, forest, bird or tree. She stood
and saw glittering matched in a dark pool.
Stars, then, in a clear sky. And all was good.
She let this place around her be her school.
She saw leaves changing color, falling, curled.
What set her adrift in this tumbling world?

Dying Wish / Brian Dickson

When I draw my last bath,
I’ll have the rubber duck fuss
its secrets to me: its past lives
in flood after flood 
after flood—that first time 

a piece of wood tumbling 
out of Noah’s ark, 
wet with holy cleanse 
stoic visions 
of reincarnation
until that other holy place—
The Toy Hall of Fame. 

Blank Page / Patrick Dixon

What am I doing here
wandering around this blank page
with 26 alphabetical legs, sniffing for ideas
to craft into meaning, licking the air
to sense what rides the wind, or rubbing my
face on the paper to see what flutters up
in front of my eyes. I dig with my teeth,
bulldog gripping a bone of a metaphor,
twisting in fear of letting it go. And if I can,
I’ll breathe a new life into being, slap it’s behind
to make it cry right here on this page, and wail
with it upon seeing the world anew.

While Earth Men Hold On / Sara Dudo

Still, nimbus 
nothingness.

–

Brevity
is something
to be envied
by the angels,

the other side
of legacy.

–

Here
in this homeplace,
wide waters

seasons interrogate
the sundial
of bliss
or exodus

the illumined
sacred protocol.

And in the spring,
we disappear

little confetti pieces
of our names
decorate the floor

small blossoms
we swallow
to show the angels.

–

You are brief,
then, swimming
in a sky lake of love
while the earth men
hold on to only parting.

listen. / Molly Donahue

there are not enough words
or time enough or page enough

and the bones inside you feel
like strangers.

walk through me while i am still 
nicely lit and sprawling.

pick me up and shake me
until my head lolls

and you set my tongue wagging
for mercy.

look.  water materializing from our eyes
and rain holding glisten.

bunting screaming jazz
from the prong of a tree snag

against the dawn of a day
that will never dawn again. 

24 June / Logan Garner

We’re getting it out of the way, this
silent padding down Sunset Beach
an hour before its namesake,
sticking to the wet hardpack

that we might lessen the strain 
on our calves. Here, where the scend 
melts into the continent’s doorstep,
silver ribbon of dying light laid 
over the brown velvet mirror.

Another of our troupe is gone. 
Soon we’ll take her things to a shelter
where fosters and old-timers still wait
beneath fluorescents, ammonia.

But first this, simply that 
the next time might not be
the first visit, without.

I search for something round 
to throw into the sea.

Invocation I (Copperhead) / Amelia K

drunk on nothing but the liquor 
of our slickest imaginings made real, we are staggering through the cellars of 
our abandoned hungers; lend to me 
Your labors, steal from me my grace. Love, sing inside me, give my marrow
one burning gulp, the kind only stillborns understand, let the road rise up 
to meet me, and greet me, lift every 
scar I was seared in to Your lips and say 
it ain’t nothing, ain’t one thing
I have dined on tonight that 
I would not crawl to tomorrow. 

Monday at the Mental Hospital / Jess Tower

I meet a potential new friend.
She discharges same day;
I barely get her name,
but I know all about her dogs,
one of which ate a vole’s ass,
happy as can be, wagging his tail
back to her, while her
neighbors all stared, & she
was anxious:
             why she’s here.
A funny story.

But I’ll never see her again.
Partly why I’m here: stuck on time & spirals & me
             continuously spiraling
             into my angry health.
Why is so much of life a spiral, continuous?
Why is so much of life just people
             coming & going?