Stanley H. Schuman
In Aramaic scripture*, and Aboriginal Dreamtime.
How else could animal life begin
Except by Divine Breath, oxygen-enriched?
How ingenious! Only two atoms: O2,
Ideal for hemoglobin, mitochondria,
Neurotransmitters, ideal for fight or flight, for vocalizing,
For clever humans to shape tools, split atoms,
Compose opera, sow seeds,
Ann Neuser Lederer
They do not scream. They keep their hands steady as they shoot the shots.
They run from one to the next, on their rounds without walls.
The troops of well trained girls patrol the troops, their wards.
And they make them to inhale their brew
of Friar’s
Jan Jahner
Sometimes nectar appears
when stories intersect:
I walk into the room
rearrange the bed-table
and push the pole with its bulging bladder sideways
for a closer look.
Her thinness triples the size of the bed
but her father, with his anxious chatter
feels strangely like my own
and
Veneta Masson
By ones and twos
we drift up to the bedroom–
the women of the family–
leaving the men to mutter
and churn downstairs.
This is women’s work,
choosing a burial outfit.
We have a list from the mortuary:
bring underthings
no shoes
Soberly we peer into the closet
Kirstyn Smith
I still dream Crayola:Scarlet, cherry, candy apple;
Zeus’ breath, Antiguan shallows, Atlantic turmoil, August twilight;
Green sings lime, martini olive, cypress, spring meadow, life.
When I woke up this morning, I wanted to turn over.
Of course, you feel the same way.
I had a dream about cleaning
Kate Benham
You pour a cup of pecans
Like a kid catching raindrops
In a bucket.
Careful not to spill,
Your fingers playing tremolo on a
Violin-string cup measure.
Your bed-tucked
Mouth, warm, with
Tongue searching the lips
For forgotten first lines of bedtime stories
Like misplaced glasses, resting on
Stacy Nigliazzo
I see myself, always
through a stark looking glass
the fun house view of my own face
reflected in the eyes of my patients–
tangled in the bleeding strands
that line the gray sclera of the meth addict
drowning in the pooling ink that splits
the swelling pupil
Jocelyn Jiao
the articles went first.
then the pronouns, the verbs,
nouns. they melted away, leaving
only memories of warmth
cradled by salivary glands.
adjectives flutter behind
my front teeth, ready for flight.
only adverbs remain,
curled beneath my tongue–
yawning, drowsy:
the softest words of vocabulary.
the lilt of
Mary E. Moore
Tipping forward to escape
the wheelchair’s confines, the ancient one
pleads with her feet, “Go home.”
It’s her companion who volunteers
the Chief Complaint: “Ever since her stroke,
Mother’s back seems to hurt.
Her doctors say there’s nothing can be done,
but I thought that perhaps a specialist ….”
Daniel Becker
Outline the night and all its objects
in black magic marker.
The world through closed eyes
needs texture
the way tires need tread,
brains need wrinkles, and hypnosis
needs the power of suggestion–
traction, surface area, and control
might also apply to a cat
buried alive underneath the
Elizabeth Kao
Today, her head is spinning, just like yesterday,
And the day before that. She is dizzy, experiencing
pain we can’t know unless our heads have hurt like
she hurts now. All she wants is to lie down, and
when we tell her she just woke up, she says
Steve Gunther-Murphy
Drifting on the sea of disease
in a cardboard boat,
never knowing when the slash
of a spinal eel
will lunge from its coral-bone cave
and cut through
the threads
of a
