A Poem by Kirsten Luckins

Snail Migration

Cutting down the fennel
I reveal them at their pinnacle,
breeding, always breeding,
taking their time.
Six hours winding
a slow gavotte to reach this little death,
like glaciers cavorting, nipping
each other's eye buds, sharing slick.

I should brand them,
daub pink nail-polish on them and fling them
beyond the fence, see how long before
they come sliming back,
start breeding,
touching face-fronds,
pale undershells canted, pulpous bodies
in desire's garrotte.

When they mount,
undulate frills strain to ridges,
they blacken mantle to foot,
shoot in a pick of bone, snap back
like a throat, like
they like it.

Not in my back garden.
I hack their shelter to the knotted, oozing root.

Kirsten Luckins is a poet, performer and spoken word theatre-maker based on the north-east coast.  She has been a finalist in the BBC Poetry Slam, has toured two solo shows, and her first collection (The Trouble With Compassion) was published by Burning Eye Books in 2016.  Her current collection is the willfully whimsical Utterly Otterly!, which she also illustrated.  She blogs at www.kirstenluckins.wordpress.com 

Three Poems by Byron Hoot

Dreaming Spring

Almost, it seems, overnight
the ground around the base
of the trees in size and shape
almost symmetrical as if a spell
was cast has turned the ground bare.
The unmelted snow beyond
the trees makes me think
a shaman is at work,
one tired of the cold and snow,
a distant cousin, though, of the snow.
Once a thaw begins nothing stops
it.
          Any thaw at all gains
momentum until it reaches
the edge of necessity and changes
like water into wine,
                                      the best at last
least expected by the guests.
But now, it's early.
                          But the roots,
I think, heard the spell
and are moving and in their slow,
deliberate dance have warmed
the earth up around the trees.
Yesterday, it wasn't like this;
today, it is . . . some kink
of magic, some shaman
of the wood dreaming spring . . .



This Light, This Darkness

If the darkness of the dawn
is not the time of light,
I don't know what is.
The brilliance of the day
is slight compared to end
of night, beginning of day.
For a moment it seems it
will not happen
                          and then,
perhaps, some wind sighs
and the arrival and departure
begins.
             I almost fell into that trap
of dark and light . . . getting out
of the dark, getting into the light,
but that's a lie,
an old, big lie.
                                  We need night
as we need day--each is the promised
hope of the other having, giving
what the other lacks,
needs, desires.
                                It doesn't seem
like much, but I suspect
it's a pretty big thing
knowing what the dark and light
inside each of us gives . . .



No Grasp So Strong

Here now hold not that which cannot
be held but chooses only
to stay constantly changing
like Poseidon in his sea of change
each ebb and flow never the same
always something new left
on the shore, always something
taken back out into the depths
of the sea before it returns.
So, too, the ground I walk
does that ebb and flow which
comes over me.
                           There is a touch
of eternity exquisite
that feels as if forever is real
until the grasp of time tightens
and it flees and the knotted muscles
of a forearm testament to what
no longer is but had been remains.
To hold too tightly is to hold
nothing--a touch more than
suffices to know how one is kept
by that grace that leaves nothing
untouched, unblessed . . .
Water running through a hand
is exactly the power all
have to hold what is given
constantly flowing whether
on a shore or dry land
the ebb and flow no grip
is strong enough to grasp.

Byron Hoot lives in central Pennsylvania as a monk with no order in a monastery with no rules, aka retired.

Three Poems by Miki Byrne

Natural Hunger

In three years, ivy squirms
through orifices of dead buildings.
Tiny tendrils suck to desiccation.
A cycle as slow as a seasons turn.

Grass prizes apart pavement teeth
and time edges them with moss-plaque.
Worms slither blindly beneath graffiti
of silver-trailed snails.

Water infiltrates.  Sulks its way
through wood, brick, plaster.
Oozes in capillary action.
Oxidizes iron rebar to bleed rust.

Wallpaper molds, peels leprous,
flensed by decay.  Silverfish scuttle
in seams of dark rooms,
air vents clog with chickweed.

Ants rustle a chitinous stream
over surfaces, spiders colonize corners.
Hang clinging drapes.
Thumb-size cockroaches scuttle.

A building sheds its last vestige
of human occupation.
Smothered, drawn down to earth.
Reclaimed by natures hunger.



Tall Trees

Deep in winter--sleep,
tall trees stand wintry brown.
A haze of lichen
flares on bough and branch.
Creaks and wind-howl mix,
in sad and mournful sound.
Hums around and through
their chill-held stance.
Last year's nests are empty,
no small birds snugly lie
and all of nature seems
to softly sleep.
Yet her sweet force abounds
with pulsing new supply
as slowly rising sap
begins to creep.
And as bright April's sun
bathes all in warming light,
new leaves pop and burst
in green array.
All is shown of brand-new birth.
Its growing fresh delight.
A fortune gathered
by a blue spring day.



Poem to a Silver Birch

She sways, silver-white.
Bark soft, with a sheen
like raw silk.
Ragged strips peel back
curling tongues
and underneath new bark
shows pale and green.
Diamond leaves tremble.
Pale back-skin flirts, flickers
and darker top surfaces
ripple and whisper
as she sings into the wind.
Joins others in concertos
that echo nature-songs.
Slender limbs move,
hipped and elbowed
in delicate bends.
Her whole body curves
in sinuous sway.
Dainty roots grip the slope.
Her song swells.
Of leaf, weather, sun and rain,
she stands like a dancer
ready for applause.
I silently shout, Bravo!  Bravo!

A Poem by Julie A. Dickson

Mortarous

A massive wall, crumbling
to a pale powder--chalky white,
flakes of pink lay in slivers
on dark pavement.

visualize this old building
bricks a sun-faded russet
with loose fine dust, barely holding
between the courses,

a mortarous barrage waiting to rain down.
Once steadfast against winter storms,
breaks free under the hot sun, baked
dry, any last remnants of moisture.

The wall appears to slough off
a shower of forgotten fragments,
exfoliation of time, exposing
an under-layer anxious to be seen.

Julie A. Dickson is a poet and a writer of fiction and non-fiction.  She resides in New Hampshire with two rescued black cats, close to the ocean--a favorite muse.  A graduate of UNH, Dickson is board secretary for the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program.  Her work appears in Poetry Quarterly, The Harvard Press, The Avocet, Nature Poetry Review, Five Willows Poetry Review and in several published works.

Three Poems by Bryan Damien Nichols

Sojourner in a Mountainous Landscape

These thousands of tall, skinny spruces--
tracing the mountains like wicked staircases--
each enrobed in midnight green speckled
with pale aqua when the full moon
comes to rest atop her effulgent throne.

The living waters, those many streams,
are like veins under human flesh,
their silvered scintillation like
a half-hidden heartbeat.

I wish I could pour myself into this land,
or soar as metallic light above it,
or become the high-hung, whorled branches,
my needles forming a thousand
spiral staircases.



Lessons from the Yukon

Falcon-spread, emerald spruce.  Svelte lodgepole pine.
A steady wind with ephemeral clouds.  Water-mirror.
The undulations of green-grown hills and mountains.

Here is circumscription, defied.  Like I Am Who I Am.
Our attempts to paint the land, defied, no matter
The colors used, or figures enslaved, or whether words
Be simple, abstract, or grandiloquent.  There is only

The chance to describe.  Imperfectly.  And reflect.
And reflect.  To see our imperfections in what is perfect.

To see what we might be, knowing that
What we might be won't compare to this.



The Watcher's Query

In the wind's whimsical dance,
in the subtle, soothing play
of bright sun and dark cloud--
at dawn, at noon, at night--
I listen throughout for
the soft waving of oak branches,
the scratch of palm leaves
against themselves, the protest
of yellow hibiscus blooms,
the riot of cordyline, like a commotion
in bright purple, the restless waves of
bougainvillea in permanent green
and garish violet, the ixora's stance
in stolid, impenetrable yellow,
the lily's stutter in mellow green and blue--

and I suddenly wonder:
do all these precious gifts--
soft-caught, sun-sprung,
uniquely moving, singularly inspiring--

listen to us?

Bryan Damien Nichols was born in Hourna, Louisiana, on August 30, 1978.  He earned a B.A., summa cum laude, in Philosophy from Baylor University, and a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law.  He has practiced law both in Houston and in Texas' Rio Grande Valley.  Bryan currently lives in Los Fresnos, Texas, with his loving wife, Michelle.

Two Poems by Gary Metras

Little Dance

Seven turkeys leave the forest, walk out on
the meadow.  The only male fans his tail and struts.

He chooses a female to circle, persistent, but she
keeps foraging as if her world was a straight line

to somewhere else.  Besides, his juvenile sex
isn't bold enough.  They all ignore his little dance.

The young male lowers his feathers, assumes
the posture of feeding.  When they reach the end

of the clearing, his tail flourishes one brief time.



On the First Perfect Day of Spring

On the greening hillside beneath the clubhouse
of this campground, a lost block of wood,

rough sawn, split edged, abandoned to weather
and bad luck.  When I lift it, sand greets flesh.

There is no heft to these seven inches and when
I tap its flank, such a hard, hollow heart I cannot

know with my blood.  Only an empty, blackened
half circle through the top where a blade bit out

the know shows promise for a story--a skill saw
bucking up the arm of the man so that he bled

without metaphor.  Today's breeze so compassionate
that slim branches need not bend to another's desire.

I want an ant, hauling a white egg sac fatter
and as long as its own dark body, to crawl out

the crack of the wood's ribless side to make
this more than some carpenter's discard

so indifferent to this first pregnant April day.

Gary Metras has two new books of poetry:  Captive in the Here (forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press) and White Storm (Presa Press, February 2018).  His poems have been in recent issues of Muddy River Poetry Review, Common Ground Review, Poetry East, Steam Ticket, Ibbetson Street, and Main Street Rag.  He is the editor and letterpress printer at Adastra Press in Easthampton, Massachusetts.  He fly-fishes his home rivers as often as possible.

Three Poems by Jim Zola

The Crows of Wimberly Drive

There are other birds here.
But the crows of Wimberly Drive
stick to the shoulder
and casually scoot when I cruise by.
The crows of Wimberly Drive
hide their bluest feathers
and play piano in my dreams.
Sailor songs and cantatas.
And the crows or Wimberly Drive
mourn the mornings.  I know.
They tell me so.  I wave
to the crows of Wimberly Drive.
I love them because they don't mind.



The Way the Rain Softens the Edges of Everything

The sky, mottled with dark clouds, gives us
something to talk about.

The rain is closer now.  I feel it in my bones.

You look out windows,
this ceremony of rain.

In the garden, peonies
bent towards the earth
leave a legend of petals.



How I Know

I look out the window and see
a field, trees and then
more houses.  I think of you,
wherever you are,
wearing slippers, a cloud
of sadness, keys in hand,

ready.  But there is something
stopping you, an absence
that wraps around your shoulders
like a worn coat.  I'm not sure
how long I've been sitting here.
The dog whines.  A red-tailed hawk
lands on the collapsed swing set
in the yard, head cocked,
looks straight at me.

Jim Zola has worked in a warehouse, as a security guard, in a bookstore, as a teacher for deaf children, as a toy designer for Fisher Price, and currently as a children's librarian.  Published in many journals through the years, his publications include a chapbook--The One Hundred Bones of Weather (Blue Pitcher Press)-- and a full-length poetry collection--What Glorious Possibilities (Aldrich Press).  He currently lives in Greensboro, NC.