Amy Newday

East Field, Sunset, 15° F

What is broken stays broken:

the fractured blue light,

the field grass under snow.

The black scraps

have scattered.

No part of me mourns

or misses another.

What is dead stays dead

and walks

with a clicking sound like branches

pushed together by the wind.

Amy Newday's poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry East, Rhino, Notre Dame Review, Calyx, and Flyway. She earned her MFA through Western Michigan University. She directs the Writing Center at Kalamazoo College and grows vegetables for Harvest of Joy Farm LLC in Shelbyville, Michigan.

Lynn Pattison

Tahquamenon

Water muscles over the edge

of the cataract and roars

its lion roar of crash and speed.

There's an imperative in blood

that reacts with its own wild racing. 

A three-legged hound leaps and circles

dragging her master back along the bank

and you & I climb the hundred stairs

laughing above the white-water din.

Hidden deer run all night

here where abundance gushes

and spills, and the rest of life

adjusts its rhythm, then presses on.

running    surging    brimming over.

*

Bowl or sieve

Where are the words

you learned in school, in books,

in church, in bed?  Warp & woof words,

street signs that got you here.

Hoarded: tucked in some forgotten place

now, with six silver dollars and your christening ring?

Squandered: on throw away lines, letters

you'll never post?  Perhaps you babbled

them all into the black hole

of dreams:  protective incantations,

magic spells, all that stood between you

and dark marauders--between

things as they are and cataclysm. 

Then again, you might have scribbled

each one on thin strips pressed between pages

of a catechism, the Iliad, before you knew

that houses—and everything inside, could burn. 

But there's more where those

came from. New, magnet to the old.

No matter if you left the barn door open, didn't stitch

every one into a linen sampler. Fresh words, fine

or quirky, come singing

into daydreams, some arm in arm

with old friends, back from the diaspora:

the name for where your thin gold ring

is snugged, or the word you need to rewrite

resolve—that sort of gold.

Michigan resident, Lynn Pattison’s work has appeared in Rhino, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Diagram, Harpur Palate, and Notre Dame Review among others, and been anthologized in several venues.  She is the author of tesla's daughter (March St. Press); Walking Back the Cat (Bright Hill Press), and Light That Sounds Like Breaking (Mayapple Press).  She’s been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Retired from Kalamazoo Public Schools, Pattison serves on the board of Friends of Poetry, an organization dedicated to encouraging and celebrating writers in Kalamazoo.

Sharon Eckstein

Sext

It wasn’t the panoramic vista, the postcard view of water, sky and blazing colors that struck me to my knees. Here people gathered at guard rails with cameras, poses and smiles, feeling blessed I suppose, as I did; the weather turning pleasant for Northern Michigan this time of year, late October, the noon sun burning frost off milkweed pods. I was grateful and awed, felt like observing Sext, the sixth of the canonical hours, chanting Psalms with these strangers in this cathedral of sky and sand. But I did not drop to

 my knees.

Not until Brian and I were walking the Cottonwood Trail, a mile plus hike through perched dunes, and he was mushed ahead by our pair of leashed dogs, leaving me alone on the side of a hollow, did I feel my knees begin to buckle. I felt something rush in on the wind, heard the cottonwoods rattle. I looked to my left, up at the trees, at yellow gold quaking against cerulean blue, then to my right, the ancient sandscape formed fierce by ice and wind, moving Her body through God’s Eye, through my eye, and I fell to

my knees.

The Anishinaabek say

The Mother Bear waits

For her cubs to cross the lake

Joseph Heywood

Fishing  With the Famous #16: James Joyce

Oyrish, wuncha know, ‘Imself of Dublin

Novel novelist afire with rages

Furled by eras, wars and ages

Writ by them went afore, much of which he

Pitched out the door, baby, bathwater,

Doors to bedrooms and a whole lot more.

If what you seek are riverine shadows

May your deep thirst be thoroughly slaked

By reading all of Finnegan’s Wake

A tome replete with subtle words so grand

All others seem like simple also-rans,

Of salmon who nose against all currents

Historical and hydrological

Metaphors for a nation of hotheads,

Poets, patriots, scholars, pony touts,

Orators, priests and cold-blooded schemers,

Like trout anglers, most practical dreamers.

*

Fishing With the Famous #20: Georgia Okeeffe

Two effs in your last name, is that symbolic

Or shantymickplumbdumb? Like, stop staring,

The plants on this river are not naughty

Bits like the things you painted for big cash.

I know, your flowers are just some poseys

Not sneaky hunkuspix, tres au contraire

Disputing many critics’ snide asides.

Let’s stop this drivel, put some nice brookies

In the pan. Raise your long wand, keep it stiff

-- no,  wand is not symbolic for Christsake --

or a veiled statement about your Juan

-- whoever the hell he is –put your fly

on the big log, make it ride the whole length.

Stop laughing, the terms are not suggestive

And fishing with you makes me congestive.