Nothing
There are no footsteps here—
only echoes
dragging their shadows across the ash.
The sky is a sealed eye,
and the stars have stopped pretending to care.
I speak just to feel
my own voice again,
but it dies
before it leaves my throat.
Even silence has abandoned this place.
I walk the ruins of thoughts
that never became prayers.
I touch stone that was once warm
and pretend it remembers me.
It doesn’t.
—Sam Braselmann (13 years)
Aphasia
Evening sunlight drapes across her face as she stares vaguely in my direction. For a moment I feel her eyes meet mine, but in the instant I realize that to meet a gaze requires more than a mere overlap of pupils; it is a recognition, an identification somehow situated outside of language (you do not need to be taught the horror of an empty stare; does she, now lost of language, know that my stare is full?). As I look at the streaks of yellow cascading down her cheek, I wonder if aging brings contrast to the sense of touch: are the striped shadows of the sunlight passing through the blinds felt as oscillating instances of warm and cool, or does she simply feel a uniform warmth radiate across her body? I would ask her, but my question came ten years too late, and so instead I say the same thing as the day before, and the day before, and the day before: hi grannie.
—Casey Michael Robertson
Summer Valentine
Midsummer is better suited to our love
Than February—warm, soft, lilac-scented
June and sweet, sun-dappled, wind-chiming
Honeyed you, still spring-wild around the edges.
June, when you stride home to me whistling,
Reigning in your feral pieces; my green-suited
Roaming tomcat tucking in his shirttails
To appear every inch the flower-bearing suitor
On my doorstep. Darling,
I don’t know where you have been and I don’t care.
Just keep coming home to me. Come home to me
And keep coming home until there is no more June.
—Emily Murnane
Today, My Mother Called Me
Today, my mother called me
And asked me how I was
I told her I watched “Beef,” on Netflix
And that she, too, should watch “Beef” on Netflix
Even though maybe she wouldn’t like it
I was right. She said she hated it off title alone
I asked her what she thought it was about
She said, “I am NOT eating bugs!”
I told her it was about road rage, not vegans
She was now interested, she said so
So I told her of its strong themes, how she may relate
Because I relate, and it gave me comfort
It made me laugh. She raised her voice:
“I don’t have RAGE. I have passion.”
Then she told me she’d come a long way
And I said I believed her, I did, but
Then she started talking about respect
And that you must have it for your elders
And I couldn’t say, even though I wanted to:
“Respect is something earned.” But
She believes in the name of good parenting, in taking
A preteen’s bedroom door off its hinges, to teach lessons
About not slamming them or hiding away behind them
(Even though I was always writing fan fiction and definitely not
Hiding boys—really, I mean it….back then, I maybe knew one)
I don’t believe in the name of good parenting, in being involved
In parental-figure fights that were not mine, of punishments
For having complicated feelings I couldn’t trust at the time
When she didn’t want to understand, she could still see…
My therapist’s away, but I’m writing it down
for when we next meet;
We are trying to kill
Our mothers
Are trying to kill us
—Casey O’Connell
In Bed
14 saint severin
reading rilke
to you
poems to the night
i read
once i took into my hands
your face
the moon fell upon it
most unfathomable of things
you took the book
from my hand
put it on the bed
and kissed my eyes
—J. C. Hopkins
Splashdown
He pulls it out
of my mouth
the drill
for long enough
that I can see the score:
physics versus two humans
left in space
for 286 days.
Parachutes deployed
their pod’s engulfed in flames
while my dentist
earns his pay
my eyes glued to the screen
that normally shows
the weather, who’s died
and what should anger
those of us still living.
He offers me a mirror
that I decline
pointing to the device
he’s had installed
for my distraction
in a ceiling corner
of his office.
We watch well after
my allotted time
divers in green helmets
boarding that capsule
that possible coffin
bobbing in the sea
as dolphins circle to greet it.
The astronauts’ muscles
having atrophied
they can’t open
the vessel’s escape hatch
relying on their rescuers
to cue the media frenzy.
I pity their return.
What a lousy planet
they’ve entered again:
a trauma bond
misnomered
with sentimental value.
—Mike Vahsen
Spring Cherita
a new morning
such sadness everywhere
outside my window
the first elm buds
and spring songbirds
I compose a poem
—Daniel W. Brown
Overlook
Spanning your wings and perching
on the great mountain lying north,
eyes compact and dark as a hawk,
mind spinning hard steel cogs,
you’re an outlier.
Guarded, yet a guardian,
resting the hard, ascetic frame of your body
at the pinnacle.
Elemental: granite, crystal and flint.
A cup of coffee, opaque as ink.
A Boston brownstone,
some windows shut dustily, curtains drawn,
others with shutters that flutter fluently as laughter,
and one in the corner opened wide,
letting in whatever the spring will bring,
oozing the glow of office lamps
onto the sidewalk,
spreadsheets, data sheets,
news about the government,
swirling streams of paper
headed down Main Street
in the gusty wind.
I lived here 12 years and never thought about that mountain.
Now suddenly it looms at dawn as if newly erected,
rust, mauve, turmeric and purple
splashed across it through naked branches,
a llama wool vest woven tight.
After every twig turns on its tiny green bulb
and sprouts thick sugary leaves,
once again singing so loudly of abundance
that it’s practically deafening,
that view will fade again.
But it was there all along.
Gilded by the sun’s early light
glowing like embers in all that cold,
a reliable reminder of relativity;
how distinct, yet alit
by each other we are,
and the arc of our growing,
dying
and the pages in between.
—Katherine Fleissner
A Set Table
Wrap me in a table cloth
Tie my shoulders between folds of stiff linen
Perfect tails between sharp and wide shoulder blades
I am the meal the world craves
Let it eat me whole.
—Emma Lee Patsey
Letter to Kamal Boullata
Restless now in the blood light of autumn, low afternoon sun
on the carpet, the cat preening, I think of you Kamal,
refugee in our land of refugees that fears refugees.
Palestinians were forbidden to paint a homeland. All the artists
went to jail you said; and in Jerusalem told the Israelis—Fascism!
We met in the northern light of Blue Mountain this same season,
Adirondack forests flaming yellow and red, what is changing constant.
When you look at a leaf, you said, and enter into its turning,
when something about that leaf, beautiful
beyond knowing, wound red as an aging sun, something
beyond burning, that is Allah akbar—wondrous as god.
Long conversations walking those woods, Kamal, I imagine we were joined—
underneath, not unlike the trees, yet still am confounded
by the borders between us.
For how many Original Peoples has it been too late? Think of the Maya, Pueblo,
the Apalachee, Cherokee, Ottawa, Shoshone, Zuni— for how many
heartened by another drum, refusing eternal, material progress?
Now harvests of profit fill our plate. Now uranium tailings ride the Plains winds.
Now the dark bud of melanoma blooms on hand, or cheek.
Now the blights with plagues, the spirit hearse.
Sometimes I imagine a line joining everything, imagine pulling on it
and watching every lost face rise and turn to the light,
the way fields of mammoth sunflowers turn, flaring in a lowing sun.
Pray, let my tongue be fire and flower.
Pray, let our tongues be fire and flower.
—Martin Steingesser
Windjammers
Treachery of distance was marked on our nautical chart
before we could grok it. One had to skipper the patterned
tides on the seaway between us. This and other twists
shaped a slot we could not fill. The minutiae of daily acts
accelerated the pace. No hawser could secure our ship.
When the keel leaks, droplets of an unseasonal drizzle
affect it. I’m beginning to learn that love is for loonies.
—Sanjeev Sethi
Haiku (Dear Mr President)
I don’t understand
what part of “love thy neighbor”
you don’t understand
Haiku (Note to Self)
Don’t let the fascists
into your heart—it’s enough
they’re in Washington
Haiku (ish)
Some days, yes
the joy takes
a little effort
—Philip Pardi
Cheers!
Glasses
have emptied.
The wine shouts out
our secrets we have hidden for too long.
—Laurence CarrAfter Snow, Freezing Rain
After snow, freezing rain—
the face of everything now the shell of an egg
A goldfinch appears in its winter plumage
like the flame of an empire turned to ash
Its feet leave no trace across the shell of the world
Overhead, straining against centuries,
the trees creak and knock
The world is made of rock and timber and ice
but it is not solid
—Jason Baker
This article appears in June 2025.
