Renee Nicole Good
When another person gets shot in cold blood,
poems sprout like flowers in spring,
but there is nothing close to renewal.
Words in celebration of the life lost,
not the event, words that need to be written
to help soothe the soul of the poet,
and, she hopes, of the reader. But do
readers need to be reminded of a catastrophe
they can’t forget anyhow? What is the purpose
of the writing other than self-service?
Who can do anything to reduce the grief
or prevent another occurrence? We are always
left with the question why, but slowly, very slowly
these days, we are finally getting the answer.
—Jim Tilley
Ants
I loved my stepfather for
the way he asked me questions as a boy.
He sank a Japanese destroyer
watching in awe
at those alien sailors
endlessly falling
darkening the hole his torpedo had made,
like so many ants, he said
disappearing into a cold sea.
I never asked him
if he ever thought about those ants,
each a lover of someone
each also loved.
I suspect not—
after his daughter died
he never spoke her name again.
Did he ever need my question?
He lived for a very long time
busy doing, dreaming, and dying gently.
His was an untroubled sleep
soothed by the assurance
of loyal service.
So my question gnaws only at me,
remembering the holes I made
and the souls who fell into them.
The ones who betrayed me,
And left—
those I betrayed and abandoned.
His was a cascade of ants
consumed by fire and salt water
while mine fell one at a time,
cut loose into another kind of dark.
Though the shape of our sorrows and remorse
Will never touch one another
I must carry the responsibility
and the remembering,
for us both.
—Kemp Battle
Circle Baking
I set the oven to 360°
because that’s a circle.
—Sparrow
Denouement
You trace the morning on my shoulder,
Sail the sheet-marks on my skin with an
Unsinkable touch, proud and doomed.
Your wife will be home soon,
Could be at the ferry now, shading her eyes
With a white glove, thanking the porter.
She has woken me every hour that we slept together.
You wear her like a dead bird around your neck.
Sunlight floods our window like a saltwater spring;
We are all headed for shipwreck
In this vessel of a bedroom, with the calendar
Still turned to yesterday’s page
And the far-off sound of seagulls.
—Emily Murnane
Poor Dead Girl
I’ve seen this dead girl before
Beautiful doe drop-felled on impact
At the side of the road
Legs bent and crossed at
Odd angles; her strong sleek neck
Arched, hazardously
White throat and stunned eyes
Twisted to the skies
Her slim tongue dangling
Out and down against a delicate jowl
This is the same dead deer
Now withered and darkened like a
Nordic bog mummy
A creased and flattened
Brown leather sack
Frayed tendons snapped by
The pull of shrinking tissues
Shin bone white, a tiny naked hoof
That tongue become smaller, stiffened and black
Exposure to ‘the elements’, hot glare
And wind; dust, and gravel tossed
by speeding wheels
Mortality, atrophy
The mummy any of us might become
in the right wrong air
All destined to be left on the
World’s shoulder, toughened
Slime-dried husks.
—Theresa Landi Daniel
On Trouble Trail, Orange County, NY
We’re on a trail to trouble here in black dirt country,
a prehistoric glacial lake, the rich black silt perfect
for farming. Those fields, now glazed with ice,
will bake too hot come summer, no one to plant
or harvest who won’t have to run from ICE,
crops with nowhere to go, a cost that just keeps rising.
—Anne Sandor
Five Haikus About the Winter Blues
Snowflakes land with tales
Serenaded by the wind
Hold on, it’s beginning.
Darkness sedated the sun.
Please take the day off. Thank you.
The moon is impatient.
Frozen snow. Chilled bears.
Look for something warm to eat.
It’s time. Go to sleep.
Exhale too much air
Wind has something to say today
Might you stay till spring?
My true calling is
Plant flowers and tell stories
And pray that they bloom.
—Elizabeth Cassidy
then it stopped being
underappreciated
the broken furnace
—Jennifer Howse
On Becoming a Woman
When my Nanan, prying answers
about her son’s latest, would take
my arm while we slowly gimped along,
it felt most peculiar, as if
I was to be the man, even a man
she clutched with some entitlement.
When my stepmother would cozy up
to have a woman’s gab or, drunk,
squeeze my hand and cry or even,
sober, hug my shoulders, planning
recipes, I would glance away,
wondering what my next move should be.
Or when teams of bloomered girls tore past
or the slight nymphs, who could prize up
out of the pool, basked in prides or
even when they turned their grid eyes
at me, all I knew to speak of
was race relations, um, world peace.
But when my father sat at the head
of the table, chewing slowly, when he
would look at me and flick one brow,
one smile, while he lifted one cheek
and farted, this was when I felt
most like the woman I would become.
—Virginia V. James Hlavsa
River
Not meeting the requirements set forth by geographers, the Willowemoc is
a creek. No matter. I walk beside it through the long days of winter.
Rushing water flowing over flat rocks covered in thick layers of ice. Most days, I’m the only one making my way along the edge. Pale clouds hang overhead.
I chase pockets of sun.
We are companions in the wilderness, in bewilderment of seasons changing. Water takes the shape of its container, the universal solvent. I look to it for answers—teach me to be still motion.
Slow rapids meander, trickle and come to stop against grassy banks. Rushing eddies make time meaningless. Ghosts of things past swirl among stones.
Speak to me of hope; speak to me of spring.
Rain swells the edges of your mud-rushing roars. Fullness overflowing beneath the broad blueness of summer. My meditation ebbs and flows into the undertow. Riding the current, resting in soft pools. Deep, wondrous wakening.
I call you a river.
—Nicole Spiegel-Gotsch
Longings
The yard was full of mystery, and the quiet hum of wind in the maple trees
Whispers and laughter, and hopscotch
Fingers coated in chalk and flowers picked in bundles
Clovers woven into crowns for imaginary princesses.
Nature and play
Blacktop and honeybees
Skinned knees and the rubber smell of a new basketball
The red mailbox at the end of the driveway, a line we couldn’t cross.
Once, you found a bluejay feather behind the bushes,
Cupping it in your hands like a secret
“Look what I found”
And we added it to our stockpile
Of pinecones and treasure.
On the diving board behind the house,
I lie on my back
With a walkman in my hand, dreaming of a first kiss
Surrounded by nothing but the bright clean smell of chlorine,
The haze of sunshine, and the tops of the trees.
—Alexandra Palmatier
The Impossibility
Writing a poem is like
laying an egg—impossible—yet
the poem hatches/flies away…
kick around pieces of broken shell
wondering how I did it!
—C. P. Masciola
Blue Bird
You might look out the window
And think, “Oh no!
Is that a little blue bird in the snow?”
And you think, “I should go down there
and pick it up and hold it to my chest
Maybe we can both survive the winter.”
But it isn’t a blue bird,
It is just the shadow cast by the flag demarking the gas line
And so you may, for a half of a second,
feel like actually, it is fine
It is a little brick house, on a dead-end road
But you know more snow is coming
You know what ice is doing
And your hands are clutching your chest,
absent of a little blue bird,
absent of a string of pearls
Haunted by a shadow
that grows darker every day
—May Nadine-Lewis Heal
For Lack of You
The days stretch and pull like tallow,
the nights keep time by a stopped lock.
Sounds rise and fall like the breath
in my breast, cunning, lonesome breast.
Silently I chant your name, summon memories of your self;
I pace without moving, move without seeing,
grapple to remember our time together, which simply
flew, like animals uncaged after long bondage.
Either it is cloudy or it is night; either the sun is
shining or the moon is full. I shuffle through chores,
suffer unbidden thoughts, juggle routine conversations
as best I can.
Friends and family chirp busily
around me, deaf and blind to this prison or preoccupation,
my eyes locked and fixed in their sockets.
My arms, my eyelids, hang heavy as lead, abandoned as
they are; I wrestle to locate something lost, to picture your smile,
to hear either your voice or your silence.
Others’ words, too, fall heavy in the air. Clouds float motionless;
one can see them—perhaps might even touch them—
but not you.
The day stretches, pulls like tallow, turns inexorably into
night. It MUST be night; the petals of the rose
fold up around themselves,
a closed book.
—Joan Stuart Livingston
Perfectly Peach
When winter slides past my window,
I will remember
sweetest corn of August,
ripeness of tomato in July,
peach so perfect
it makes me cry.
—Alan Silverman
Slowly, Slowly
a
new
year
the
snail
still
climbs
Mt.
Fuji
—Daniel W. Brown
This article appears in March 2026.
