Three 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
Landscape with Loss in Motion
/I stood in the barn with its rafters dusty & leather & watched the horses outside
rooted in their pastures. If their hooves could grow deep into earth,
perhaps they would become trees.
Two Poems by Robin Gow
/“he loves ball-point pens
because he can write in blue.
he mutters gospel gospel gospel gospel
& I never bother to ask what he means.”
Read Morethe knowledge of walls
/“as if having the knowledge of walls
was enough to pull out the pigments that characterizes
the will to live. they think that’s why van gogh drank paint.”
Two Poems by Darren Demaree
/“I climb the tree to spite Ohio.
I hold on to Emily
because I am too simple
to provide any real answers.”
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