Morning of March 2, 2023


 shock value

her life

as a live wire

~Kelly Moyer



Matt or Gloss?

 

Can fleas jump through the icepack melt,

deep buried matt in polar fur,

or hide, wide in the penguin stir,

caught bubble, air, as water thump?

Working though clumps to find the derm,

then holding on for all their worth,

despite the preening beaks as comb;

not gloss as seals escape the whales,

thick skinned, unsuitable to fleas.

~Stephen Kingsnorth



Thought is a caterpillar


wiggling down the spine,

making a left into the mouth,

and fluttering out as a word butterfly.


Sometimes, it turns too soon

and slides down the nose.

Then, it’s just snot.

~Nolcha Fox



Highway trucks like thunder invade dreams like a storm

~Julie A. Dickson



clarified butter the owl's antecedent

~Kelly Moyer



spare parts the sum of his life

~Kelly Moyer



Tattered Threads


The holes 

in his jeans

are portals

through 

which 

I embrace

my true nature

and 

the shelf-life

of Easy Cheese.

~Kelly Moyer



dust-covered a poem filled with ribbon candy

~Kelly Moyer



mud flower bloom

~Rob McKinnon



spring rain 

trimming rust 

from the berries

~Kelly Moyer

Afternoon of March 1, 2023



 

braving the elements

he tests the river

lead and mercury

~Robert Witmer


The Wrong Library

A wooden room. A guitar with nine strings.

The books show no titles, just naked spines.

A poet walks in still stiff from driving

his nine-foot bus. The wooden guitar’s strings

are rusty and the neck’s short. All those things

wrong with it draw you like a shot that strikes

a wooden room’s wall. The guitar’s nine strings

form a blank book. The title is your spine.

~Mark J. Mitchell



growing in the dark

rootless

food for thought

or a madman's cloud

mushroom

~Robert Witmer



chipped porcelain —

the antique dealer

cracks a smile

~Rhoda Tripp



Wink

sometimes

a star winks at us

and

we are so small

that it is insignificant

if

we wink back.

~John Tustin



Mask Workshop


With all these still faces, what masks

get shaped? Common gray clay can blind

unclosed eyes. Small mouths don’t close fast.

Some faces won’t hold still while masks

harden. Much stays hidden. You ask

your loose questions and wait for time

to still faces into stiff masks.

They’re shapeless, uncommon and blind.

~Mark J. Mitchell



Watering dead plants

We all do it, hoping to

Revive the lost cause

~Jennifer Gurney



a string of caesuras white-knuckled the broad Himalayan mountains

~Julie Allyn Johnson



silence 

seeking, 

hungering,

digging 

for more

              then

bumping 

into shadows

~Julie Allyn Johnson



A Plucked Flower

I refuse to be a plucked flower

That is pulled from the ground,

Clipped, sprayed to look shiny

And put in a bouquet or garland


With the others.

~John Tustin



old donkeys

the sadness of days without rain

in their eyes

~Françoise Maurice



confusion over cocoa, coca, and cacao

is a distraction

~Harrison Fisher



Rosy


So we come again

to the ancient pretzel.


The moon breaks

a city window.


Your glass is half-full,

my bottle, half-empty.


The pretzel twists but

who cares?

~Mark J. Mitchell



The moon doesn’t pay taxes.

It floats free

beyond the safety net.

~Noah Berlatsky

Evening of February 25, 2023

 

I woke up twice on the same page

~Patrick Sweeney



the inevitability of mass cards in bureau drawers

~Patrick Sweeney



as above so the devil in her eggs

~Kelly Moyer



bottomfeeders assigning value to the moon

~Kelly Moyer



honest eye the thumbprint of a weasel

~Kelly Moyer



I knew I 'd gone on too long about Dostoyevsky when she began to clip her toenails

~Patrick Sweeney



their thoughts of me before I arrived

~Patrick Sweeney



the win loss record of the coach who taught me to read

~Patrick Sweeney



Somebody blew up Mars.

Blame the woodpecker at sun-up,

old phone books clogging our landfills,

this electric golf cart without instructions.

Both Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina

deserve special blame.

There are factory worker

jobs as stake, people.

~Richard Magahiz



eggs over-easy but marriage’ll do that

~Kelly Moyer


bullshit knee-deep in rose petals

~Kelly Moyer

 


cringe factor solving for why

~Kelly Moyer




fitting my nothingness into the four-and-a-half-mat room

~Patrick Sweeney



beachcomber   at the fragile conjunction of relentless forces

~Patrick Sweeney



mystical snowfall undermining the recommendation system's algorithms

~Patrick Sweeney



feathering the line between breaking and broken

~Kelly Moyer


still life the absence of echoes

~Kelly Moyer

Evening of February 23, 2023

 

pleasure of snow

in Bali there is none

if you get my drift

~James Penha



February snowstorm

snow plows rumble, 4 a.m.

over roads of thought

~Wayne F. Burke



melting me snow

~Roberta Beach Jacobson



When all the world seems

To be in love with each other

And I am alone

~Jennifer Gurney



The dog licks


my face to see

if I am breathing.

If I’m not,

she’ll bug her daddy

for food.

~Nolcha Fox



she struggles

to write

just enough

~Sharon Ferrante



high-end church

all its baptismal water

Evian

~John J. Dunphy



a spritz

of extra virgin olive oil

before her date

~Roberta Beach Jacobson



after

the speed

the sound

~Sharon Ferrante



2 men talking out of my

nose as I wake to morning's

gibberish

~Wayne F. Burke