Poetry By Michael Woodard
Good Lord Willin’ and the Creek Don’t Rise
When I go back to the holler
that raised me up in her dark wood,
in the mountains of blue and smoke,
back where folks still take
time to reckon the weather
and slow-tongued locals
add odd notes to words like hell
but axe them from caramel,
I wonder what I have forsaken.
When I return to where
people call Pepsi ‘Coke’ but
know the difference just as well as
they know between Baptist and Methodist,
back where fixin’ doesn’t just mean repair,
and ‘wouldn’t care to’ is roundabout for yes,
I find a well that nostalgia
fills only part-way.
Back here, the gray of winter fits
like a hand-me-down sweatshirt,
soft with wear, but not chosen.
Echoes of youth sound faint
in the damp woods, something like water
dripping in the depth of the old cave
where we used to hide.
Standing in the creek where I learned
to catch salamanders and rainbows,
braced against the numbing stream,
I grasp at something elusive as
those first trout, a feeling of almost home,
slipping from the fingers of my wild heart.
© Michael Woodard
Poetry By Michael Hack
Shadows
My dreams are haunted by visions of you
The countless hours lying awake in the night
Senseless memories bouncing around my head
My eyelids carry the weight of your gaze
In the silence of 3 AM I found your voice
In the absence of sanity I found your touch
Unrequieted and uninvited
Past lives like an anchor tying me to this grave
Lost in the fragments of what we shared
Everywhere I look I see that… smile
Or whatever it once was
In the wake of what you left behind
In the hollow that formed around you
In the furthest reaches of what we were
The darkness tolls
© Michael Hack
Poetry By Sherry Shahan
THE FAMILY OF MAN
A collection of 503 black-and-white photographs taken by 273 men and women, amateurs and professionals,
renowned and unknown—curated by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Long past midnight I’m folded in flannel cobwebs as fuzzy as my slippers.
Time stretches I reorganize 32 archival binders:
10,000 slide negatives, some of my first published photographs.
I set my loupe aside turning to miserly bookshelves in a
former linen closet. Wedged beside Audubon Field Guides,
The Family of Man and its failing spine I shed scales
wade through brittle pages faces familiar from afar
sheepherders farmers bridge builders musicians belly dancers
carpenters poets philosophers canoe carvers weavers
window washers landlords landless the loved and the wholly lost.
There’s so much life in stillness faces help me understand without words.
I see what cameras in 68 countries saw. “I belong here.”
I abandon my office chair join my tribe on the floor. We braid
cut-pile carpet clasp gnarled hands bathe in a new mother’s milk
bearing the human condition membranes of sin, torture, and tears.
Names shouted whispered for the last time a thousand angry tongues
in my pocket.
Frogs and crickets soothe dawn’s edges all that’s charred and
scraped over turns to barley and wild wheat berries and we
feel the earth beneath our bare toes.
We flow, flow, flow restless, spirited, unyielding.
© Sherry Shahan
Poetry By Ghairo Daniels
MYRRH RETOLD
So Myrrh stood in centre of desert
wild winds through branches delivering untruths plaited with sorrow
dust particles choking cacti
scatterings of sparse rain made
no patter ~
silence w a i t i n g
white became her trunk scrubbed with
daunting sunrays through sluggish day
undulating endless sand dunes …
panted
time miracle-less, no veils shielded
raw core, passive ~
lizards l o u n g e d
odourless her branches lost seduction
no oily lubricants for pear-shaped flesh
brittle bark snapped in lost loneliness
beauty a faded glory buried
d
e
e
p
beetles spent by breeding atop
harsh grit of ancient
desert f o s s i l i s e d
mystical myrrh magic was no more
her stump dissipating into fragments
sore
breathless desert discerned, exhausted
camels, lashes threadbare, kneeled surrender
tongues brittle papyrus into electrons
lips parched ~
lines of m e l a n c h o l y
Tree of kings, empresses and prophets !
where have colourful canvassed tents in
sandstorms gone with patterned serpents curling to tunes of alluring pipes,
smoke honey eyes, when limbs twined warm ~
sensual t o g e t h e r
the All-Embracing laments
languid
across desert’s fierce micro flames
sweat dripping ~ His amber inlays
melting into black beads
disappearing
soundless screams ache
starving l o n g i n g
ages of loveless waiting
what is beauty but terror flipped ?
wrinkles speak of struggle and beasts
time tightening grip across
o
p
En
s p a c e
scent slipping ashen dregs
as desert creatures cackled an end
stars dripping crystalline sorrow
myrrh momentarily disappeared …
© Ghairo Daniels
Poetry By LB Sedlacek
Day One
Can’t find anything
much
no cars on
the road
everything
silent
so quiet
where have you
been
in all of this
you
your heart
where have you
been
so silent
but still there all
the same
© LB Sedlacek
Poetry By Andi Brooks
Pon the Stair
There stood a figure ‘pon the stair,
where no one ought to be there;
indistinct, yet growing clearer
with each footstep I took nearer.
‘Do not tarry, take heed, fly!’
I heard a voice within me cry,
but my heart then growing bolder,
I placed a hand upon its shoulder.
At my touch the figure turned;
in its eyes cold terror burned,
and ‘pon the face I knew so well
was etched a horror born of Hell.
Nevermore now shall I pray
to a god whose cruel sway
condemns one as pure as she
to haunt, for all eternity,
that dreadful spot ‘pon the stair
where to tread I no longer dare.
© Andi Brooks
Poetry By Jonathan Hayes
waynesboro, virgina
in the mess hall
at military school
back straight like flagpole
& chin up
the boy on my left
his lips from jamaica
the boy on my right
his teeth from saudi arabia
the boy in front
his tongue from mexico
officer speaks in a southern drawl
“you may eat”
the entire mess hall understands the sentence
cornbread, okra, apple sausage & grits
© Jonathan Hayes
Poetry By Shaun Tenzenmen
The Denouement
From the bed,
all that’s seen is the grey spray of concrete wall
of next door
and a brief triangle of stars
in an oversaturated night sky.
Outside,
just below the bedroom window,
the plastic corrugated roof, rain-worn and sun-beaten,
rolls drips of night condensation
down into the yard.
On the bed,
a whimpering four-year-old shakes
with the news that we are all going to die.
Why you have no father;
why, one day, you too, will cease.
Along the alley,
beyond the open gate,
soldiers run in camouflage
through the garden and onwards.
A mystery that remains
over fifty years later.
On the bed again,
knowing the denouement is still making its way,
the world could still be grey.
Yet somehow, light shines from the horizon,
stitching gold into the four-year-old’s open hand.
© Shaun Tenzenmen
Poetry By Karrie Wortner
Suborned by the Woods
Sometimes, when I step into the hush of the Northwoods evening, it feels as though the pines have suborned the wind itself, teaching it to move through their needles with a plangent tremor that carries old stories I was never meant to hear, and the lake holds its breath in that sempiternal way only northern water can, a stillness so complete it feels like a presence watching from just beyond the birch trunks, where the penumbra of dusk gathers into something almost human, almost memory, almost the version of myself I keep trying to outgrow, and I stand there with the moss soft beneath my palms and the fireflies drifting like slow, deliberate thoughts, telling myself that the shadows shifting at the edge of my vision are only shadows, even as the forest leans closer with the quiet certainty of something that has known me longer than I have known myself, something that understands the weight I carry and the ache I keep tucked under my ribs, something that waits—patient, unhurried—for the moment I finally stop pretending I am alone out here and admit that the land has been walking beside me all along.
© Karrie Wortner
Poetry By Johanna Rodda
To the ones who come after
Remember I have laid tracks of myself in the sand.
Because Polaris spoke to me I will tell you what he said.
When summer comes, do not be afraid
to recognize your eyes are open,
that you know every tongue
and shall climb the Tower of Babel
rising up and planting footprints
on every rung of every ladder
that leads from point A to point B.
Have I lost yet all reason of myself for being
and shall stray from time
crying like Cassandra
“I knew it all along?”
I am and will remain a mystery.
I am under the spell of some
summer-season goddess
and can neither act myself
nor speak anyone’s language that is not my own.
Cee, I am a cipher of myself.
Find me in words, for I am sleeping now
the sleep that poets sleep
when they fall into a land where angels
only understand our thought.
There we shall find shards of great peace
strewn amongst the sands of ourselves.
To the ocean, where we were told we might not go
unless we made sandwiches
and, having created, ate them on the sand
with the crusts cut off them.
We fall into a land of sleep.
The poet in the Tower of Babel
laid his tracks in the mud,
then swept them again away
with Mozart in his brain,
that drove him onward to say
in histories of volume
to tell what he knew he knew.
Louis had consumed the words,
and Jeffrey spat them again back out.
Back out Back out
Back out Back out
To turn the mind off
he did not know how.
See how quickly Phaethon flew through the sky.
He thought he knew his father’s secret.
But flying too fast the horses brought him down.
He did not know how to say giddy-up
in tongues that were right to them.
I do not know all philosophers
know, Aristotle for instance he knew
more, in better language.
Catch me in my words, before I fall.
I do not say the word je suis
ich bin because it is the right word,
only that it is in your language,
that somewhere back in central somewhere
in sibilants were voiced the cries
that also you have translated, and I.
Stop.
We shall go then, come with me,
And trace the track of selves
As far as we can see.
© Johanna Rodda
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