Julie Sheehan He has placed before you fire and water; stretch out your hand for whichever you choose. Sirach 15:16 Can it be thrift when math necessitates you choose between power or a timer belt? A car can run on hope, but LIPA dealt its inky cut-off notice: thrift dictates more making-do. Thus should we celebrate your television-watching, latch-key kids, who’ve never had a latch, much less a gate, for saving you sitters. You took...

Julie Sheehan Girls, boost your confidence. The competition’s fierce. If you don’t glisten, You’ll never have a chance. My next pet peeve is leave the pre-Madonna Attitude at home! You wanna win, but not by stepping on another girl. It bares repeating: keep your social morays clean. Be curtious! Who cares Your sister’s fat and inappropriate? Freestyle rap’s a talent that beauty judges probably would hate. No holes barred, and...

Patty Seyburn You should have known I’d return. My letters to you always embraced the left margin, the page’s West where the golden apples grew – yes, yes, those same apples Atalanta gathered up while she ran against her suitor, Hippomenes and in losing, poor virgin, lost herself to marriage. I am a better loser: a mediocre huntress, at best, at ease with chronology – step, step – one leads to the next. In the tick-tock...

Mercedes Lawry The hungry who cling to the side of bleak mountains, their stories carried by black birds whose cries are empty of promise. The pale-faced couple, in the midst of a swamp, too old to start again, too tired. The small child in a bed, bald, with epic eyes. The continuum collapses into measures of time, each hour holy in its unfolding, each minute a shallow breath. At the perimeter, the onlookers gaze, curious, a little...

Mercedes Lawry I grow halfway into the gluttonous sun. Gold nimbus gives false protection, but I’m content to glory in the reach. I would be a blazing hand surprising the gulls as I forsake roots and reason, sip greedily at light, nerves firing, little flames all along my skin. Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Rhino, Nimrod, Poetry East, Seattle Review, and others. She’s also published fiction and...

Mercedes Lawry The Modigliani women come to me in half dream, offering comfort. Without brittle words or lies. Sorrow knows sorrow in the tracery of bones. The hands of the pianist are young birds and hungry. Music melds with the elements of a body in motion. And in repose, a flattery of death, which I have watched and can tell you, is an ugly ruckus. Mercedes Lawry has published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Rhino, Nimrod,...

Scott Hightower “Emblem” Richard Hoffman Barrow Street Press, 2011, $16.95 Emblem is Richard Hoffman’s third book. His second, Gold Star Road, won the 2006 Barrow Street Poetry Prize. Emblem departs from Alciati’s 1531 Emblemata, a Latin metrical collection of moral, proverb-like sayings, in which ethical teaching is couched in elegant and forceful diction. That text is accompanied by woodcuts. After Alciati, writing such a...

John W. Evans Only a handful made it to the United States, some as far as Detroit. One killed a Sunday school teacher walking students through the Oregon woods. However many became rumor, stuck on power lines near missile silos, cut into tarps by farmers or chased across the desert with rifles and pickups, only seen or heard after the fact of arrival turned cloud to bulb and flame, morning and empty field, it seemed unjust they might...

John W. Evans Every stick-figure boy stuck under pews smiles, from low angles, looking up. Kind of evil, eagerly lost or found, the struck boy slinks past the sacristy, under the glass, out of earshot of the choir. Wrapped in pale silk, shook foil flowers the cross, iridescent, lemon-oiled. The boy shrugs heaven and sky, soil to pole. Yards down which he longs to roll: green in summer, green in winter. Glory the Lord. John W....

Our May Issue features two new poems by Patty Seyburn, including, "What Is Best."