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| "Reseeding Fields" by Ladislav Hanka |
Helen Losse
In This Season
In her mind, Cassandra
lifts her leg with her hand
like a dancer. But she is not lifting
her leg like a dancer. No.
An old woman now, she angles
her foot off to her right
toward a low-growing rose.
Blithe as a butterfly,
she'd flit from flower to flower,
high-held toe directing the eye
toward the statue of an angel.
The angel was smiling,
before she cracked like a bone
and began mocking the old woman's pink shoes,
in this season
of broken stone & chipped cement.
Helen Losse’s first book, Better With Friends, was published by Rank Stranger Press (Mt. Olive, NC)
in 2009. She is the author of two chapbooks, Gathering the Broken Pieces and Paper Snowflakes. Her recent poetry publications
and acceptances include The Wild Goose Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, Iodine Poetry Review, Blue Fifth Review, Heavy Bear,
Referential Magazine, Hobble Creek Review and Literary Trails of the North Carolina Piedmont. She is the Poetry Editor for
The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.
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Kristin Isgett
Schrodinger's Cat Had A Lover
We seem to be in one anothers' quantum box.
Life as reflection- life as dream.
It both is- and isn't. Until, someone looks in the box.
Impermanent? Aren't all things though?
Could it also be infinite? Simultaneously. Paradoxically.
Dichotomising thought experiments in parallel possibility
illustrate incompleteness of.... love?
Is and isn't. Light and dark. At once,
It is all things; polar magnets. The box is there.
All things, until someone opens the box.
I can smell it, the fire- that does not consume; and does.
Who goes, or doesn't? Who takes the first look into the box to see?
Do you think the cat knows it is both alive and dead?
Until someone looks in the box....
Kristin Isgett lives and works in the Upstate of South Carolina. She studied journalism at The University
of SC and was a staff writer/intern at The Greenville News in the 1990's. She currently writes music reviews and a music blog
at examiner.com/greenville. Kristin also writes poetry, essays, and bits of observational humor. Her first collaborative poem, co-written with Scot
Siegel, was published in August edition of 'Stirring: A Literary Collection.'
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Carolyn Srygley-Moore
Scotch
I used to sit at the bar, order scotch straight-up with a twist.
Isn't that a bit strong for a young girl
the
bartender would say // or the man buying me the drink.
Skiffs set on the currents of my blood
as off the Atlantic
coast, when he touched me, & I felt
everything as never precedent. Now, sober
as a hawk, always sober
but
for when I laugh too hard // I can feel the attic looming dusk
in your touch, the burn of islands
you knew before
me // that hurt you going down,
the women you had, that hurt you
going down // arsonist strawberry fields arising.
Healing the aperture
* Pre-dawn, walking the dogs. Empty streets.
We scare up a miniature flock of silvery geese, already
time
to start southward. I am glad, I long for snow, a delicious longing.
I am a crow, not a dove, the note in
my throat is the yellow
downed, I fly toward carrion not away.
The question is what we do with scars, use them
as launching pads as skateboard tricks as means toward flight // or rather
the hole, the hold, the hold the hole
has over us
especially in youth. Older, it does not mean so much ///
holes are apertures of sea-song, of hourglass,
of the body
when not defiled, when touhed by a familiar.
* I have known both. I am a crow, I
am part dove,
there are flecks of white & green around my throat // I reach for notes
too high & fail but
reach
anyway // black is my road, my fateful road,
by which I try to reach to the Other, while walking my dogs
one red, one black // scaring a shotful of geese up from the brush
with their throaty cries
in memory of nothing.
I have no memory left.
* It is used up, a syringe of molten cinematics
in someone else's arm
or no, was that mine //
but the syringe can be filled again
milking rivers to mend the once defiled.
I
swear it is possible to heal the ravaged hinge.
I have seen it to be true, as crow as dove, I have sung it from the margin
where one goes strange.
Carolyn Srygley-Moore is an award-winning graduate of the Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars and
a Pushcart nominee; her digital chapbook Enough Light on the Dogwood is available at http://www.mimesispoetry.com. Her work has appeared in numerous journals to include The Smoking Poet, Antioch Review, The 3 am Poetry Review, Eclectica,
Stirring, and the antiwar anthology Cost of Freedom. An interview regarding her work is accessible at poet and critic Jacques
Andervillier's Facebook site; her solicited reading at Snoest 2010 can be viewed on You-Tube. Carolyn lives in Upstate New
York with her husband and daughter.
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Robert Lee Brewer
this is modern living
a last gasp. a quick break. a holding on
for one more day. the end rushes away
from us even as it draws closer. birds
huddle on wires and wait; they circle us
from above like satellites. there must be
a better way to say this, but last night,
i knew you'd already left when we kissed.
things that get thrown away
maybe bees or brown bats. maybe even
amphibians. we can't relate--never
could. melting ice threatens the polar bears,
though they're still bears. if we growl, maybe, but
no--not really. there's still a gap to fill.
Robert Lee Brewer edits Poet's Market. Named 2010 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere (with Sina Queyras), he
maintains the Poetic Asides blog (http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides). Robert is married to the poet Tammy Foster Brewer (formerly Trendle), who helps him keep track of their four boys. He can
be contacted via e-mail at robertleebrewer@gmail.com.
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Holly Day
Under the Sand
no places left to sleep, slow bones separate
beneath gloved hands of desert explorers, you, me,
division of the species by body parts
tibia longs for femur, cranium for metacarpals
bagged and labeled and left to gather dust
in the basement of a museum, sequestered desert must
in this, new prison, you and I all of us
lists of pieces to go here, go there
unmatched skeletons of erectus and habilis
creep to meet inside the dark, resuscitate me, darling
paleodance beneath the feet
of modern Man, nostalgic meat
Holly Day is a journalism instructor living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her husband and two children.
Her most recent nonfiction books are Music Theory for Dummies, Music Composition for Dummies, and Guitar All-in-One for Dummies.
Her poetry and fiction has most recently appeared in Willow Review, The Blotter, and Pinyon.
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