Portrait of Simone de Beauvoir as a Beaver
/Run your boomerang blade down my spine
as punishment for building my home of twigs,
ash, and other,
mold my curves, a makeshift hat
to heat the tips of your ears,
hiding your hair with hide of me …
Liturgy for a Lunch Lady
/Don’t call us cooks, or chefs, or nutritional engineers
“Lunch Ladies” works fine for our crew, its our little joke
Some teachers treat us with silence, others consider us partners
in the daily ritual of inspiring hungry bodies and starving minds …
Two Poems by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer
/They tell me you’ve died
storied, an abrupt ending. They
have locked me in a fireplace (a bed of ash---hot and spitting,
the fat flesh melting off bones) isn’t it funny
we are our own demise?
Two Poems by Gretchen Rockwell
/
the properties of iron, and how elements
hiss and bubble when combined. Carefully,
she eats to balance her excess
yellow bile while she pores over
the philosophy of the body.
Read MoreThree Poems by Maurice Ferguson
/His wrinkled eyes
Were the rumpled maps
Of third world countries
No longer in existence
When they drained the canals of Amsterdam it made me think about
/-How whenever you annoyed me, I used to pantomime taking off my ring and throwing it into an
imaginary body of water, and how it always made you laugh
From the Sea
/Still, you worried what the shell might say
about me when visitors held it to their ears.
Tresha is an Invented Name
/If I had been a boy they would have named me Jonah. Which means dove. But all I think of is the would-be-prophet who got swallowed by a whale for trying to run from God.
Read MoreGreat Apes
/I can jump through a hoop,
but I’m no killer whale.
Bird of Paradise
/You’ve always been embarrassed by
The bare dirt patches
For which summer
Isn’t entirely to blame
Though you shouldn’t be
In Light of All The Suicides
/Hannah, you are somewhere now. Tucked around the landscape
like a fitted sheet around a bed.
In a Painting, Waiting to Remember
/The man with me dips the oar,
drags it through the liquid silver
as gently as wetting a paintbrush.
Two Poems by John Blair
/there are no apples here
only thorns and her wood
is her own and she’s just
fine exactly where she
is
Two Poems by John Byrne
/How many more days
before the sunrise? How many more days before the sun
dies? Every potted plant whispers your undoing.
Two Poems by Bill Ayres
/Each sun has tried to outdo
The other in brightness.
Each has staked out
It’s time in the sky
