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