Ruth Foley

Smoke

                        ECB 1955 – 1980

I used to tell myself your time would come

around again.  Perhaps I’d find a door

slightly ajar and swing it wide

and find you’d hidden yourself inside.

You’d brush the dust from the seat

of your jeans and say, I need

a haircut, and I’m dying

for a cigarette.  Perhaps I’d find

this all had been a dream

like the one I had where I said to you,

You have to quit smoking

now that you’re dead, and watched you turn

to ash and vanish in your own cloud.

Twenty-five years you spent on Earth,

and today another twenty-five as part of it

and you are still as diffuse as that smoke.

My memory, too, has dissipated against

my will.  All I know of you now, sister,

is that you made me laugh

and you drove too fast.

Ruth Foley lives in Massachusetts, where she teaches English at Wheaton College. Her recent work is appearing or forthcoming in River Styx, Measure, and The Ghazal Page. She also serves as associate poetry editor for Cider Press Review.

Jari Thymian

Nightsweet

after Nocturne: Black & Gold – The Firewheel, James Abbott McNeil Whistler

Who conjures an ache

like this:  The firewheel

crackles, flings gold nebulae

above your head. Meanwhile you float

on an invisible barge. On shore,

the village streetlamps and table lanterns

flicker like prayers for courage folded

into shadows. Feel your sweat glands

bead one by one, lit by the life force

            that blows smoke.

The night sky pulses, veined lapis.

Jari Thymian’s poetry has appeared in Ekphrasis, Margie Review, Flutter, Broadsided Press, Pedestal Magazine, Alehouse, The Orange Room Review, and Melusine. Poems are forthcoming in Memoir (and), Spillway, Foundling Review, Ken*Again, and Kent State’s (Ohio) 3-year traveling art/poetry exhibit called Peace Speaks. She has a chapbook, The Meaning of Barns, Finishing Line Press. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in a suburb of Denver, Colorado.

Scott Owens

The Nature of the Cycle

You have to believe it doesn’t matter,

that no one expects any different from you,

born among the people you were,

raised the way you were.

You know they’ll do it as you did.

You know that worse than pain or scars

or guilt or shame, they’ll carry the emptiness

with them, the belief they weren’t worth loving.

And worse than that, they’ll carry the dread

of what their hands might do

to those they call their own.

You have to hate yourself a little,

believe you probably deserved it

when it was done to you.

Author of six collections of poetry and over 700 poems published in journals and anthologies, Scott Owens is editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, Vice President of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and recipient of awards from the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Academy of American Poets, the NC Writers’ Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC.  He holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro and currently teaches at Catawba Valley Community College.

Grace H. Jung

Yellow Afternoon 

The sky and air is yellow this afternoon.

It's canvas-yellow, and gets stretched over

four beams of light wood, put together to form a rectangle of 16 by 20 inches.  
 
But can you fit the sight into this frame? 

The trees are swaying. They move their bud-studded stems and scrape across buildings with green windows—green windows of Mapo-gu buildings

and Buam-dong mansions. 

Green windows to keep the light out and bring the jade glare in  
but closer to emerald, really.  

I don’t understand that green for those building windows. I don’t understand that occasional violet, either.  
 
I don’t understand the yellow dust that blows over the skies of this area 
or the orange light that comes off the lamppost when dark closes in.  

Ray Succre

Sea Plane

The Sun in a bare peek is a cloud's pug-snout.

Sea plane spirals, wing-bottoms slaked in digits,

a telephone number, call for a quick fly-over.

A prejudice evolves between plane and moisture,

each despairing to out-climb the other.

Probably this is more animals, more weather.

Frigid hail forms where once a light ray spanned,

drops like teeth spat in a bucket,

the snout wet, the breathing heavy,

the drone of the crowd far below.

The telephone number glints and turns.

So the Sun, so the world.