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      April 23, 2025Engin GülezAbsence

      It wasn’t the best way to start a conversation. He muttered the first words that came to mind. They sounded like gibberish. His sister didn’t even notice. She was texting on her phone. “Did you say something?” she asked without looking at him. He didn’t answer. He had no answer. God knows what he was thinking when he came here. He left the room.
      what remains of the silence winter camellia

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Engin Gülez

      “When I’m in a bookshop browsing prose books, I sometimes flip through the pages to see if the writer has included a poem here and there. If I find one, I always read it first. Poetry has always been my first love, so if the prose books don’t have any poems, I feel a bit disappointed. Haibun is the perfect literary form for me. Ever since I read some examples from Basho, I’ve been hooked. However, it took me quite some time to write my first haibun. This year, I’ve been writing more haibun than ever, and I’m loving it. I’m excited to see where the form takes me.”

      April 22, 2025Molly FiskGrowing Cynical

      Sometimes, lately, I don’t believe it:
      the news, the grocery store flyer hawking
      deals on things I never buy.
      Any speed limit, weather report,
      my weight on the scale, even my bills.
      I say to myself a likely story! Or
      you’ve gotta be kidding. Hannah Arendt
      wrote about this, how the lies
      are not meant to fool us but teach
      us in time to not believe anything.
      Well, it’s working on me, Hannah.
      I didn’t snap, I floated away
      into some sort of muted universe
      where my brain isn’t sharp
      and doesn’t care, I’m back
      in a middle-class San Francisco
      childhood walking our beagle Skipper
      up to the corner, around to the flat
      part of the block and turning again
      while she smells invisible
      neighborhood news from curb
      and driveway until I tug the leash
      and say Come. She is a good dog
      and comes. I can feel the edge
      of a fog bank far out at sea, waiting.
       

      from Poets Respond

      Molly Fisk

      “I’m having a hard time believing Senator Chris Van Hollen actually did meet Kilmar Abrego Garcia, despite several photos of them together and announcements by so many news sources. This hasn’t happened to me before, but I’ve read bits and pieces of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and heard of the concept (misquoted apparently) all over social media. I’m trying to feel how this feels and understand it better in myself, and, as usual, writing poems is how I make sense of everything. Also, nature and movement, so I’m heading out now into the higher foothills for a walk.”

      April 21, 2025Arlene DeMarisSeventeen

      The looseness of his age and a dozen beers
      save him. Walk the boy to the road and stand him up
      in my headlights, torn red flag of one hand
      waving me down. What is it the night’s long arms love
      about a drunk? Its dim trees welcome mistakes, its ditches
      cradle wrecks in skunk cabbage, every seventeen
      years another child flown out a windshield, bent
      for good, stopping traffic. I hold his face to mine, read
      the skin of his arm blue with bible verses, my fingers
      pure as well water, and cold. Between his rips
      on the county road and my visits with the dead,
      grief blooms, while overhead in dark branches, giddy
      from their graduation dance, cicadas raise their saw blades,
      those strong yet clumsy fliers colliding
      with whatever crosses their paths.
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Arlene DeMaris

      “My poems are postcards from the Bardo, that liminal ether where I find myself turning the corner into later age. They are a way of saying wish you were here to my future self and whatever entity is to come after her. I write for the mysteries that have always confounded me—god, outer and inner space, the human heart, age and decline, the afterlife—and that have only deepened with time.”

      April 20, 2025Pamela Lucinda MossThe Library’s Roof Is a Meadow

      When the librarian knocks at my door, I ask
      if she has a warrant that’s been signed by a judge.
       
      She says no, and I wonder if she wants to talk
      about my bibliographic record, or discuss my requests
       
      for interlibrary loans. I have long sought asylum
      in the stacks that border on the self-help section,
       
      found sanctuary in the shelves that carry the 158.9s,
      but honestly, since the pandemic, I’ve resettled
       
      in the digital land of Libby that lacks the concept
      of overdue status—when your time is up,
       
      that’s it. Your items are just disappeared.
      I haven’t seen you in a while, the librarian says,
       
      but I’ve been thinking about how I used to check you out
      and catalog your cards that were so green,
       
      like the eco-friendly grass on the library’s roof,
      that naturalized meadow, and I’ve been wondering
       
      if you’d shelve your solitude and join me there,
      in solidarity, because a place of renewal
       
      should be everybody’s birthright, and I miss
      your astonishingly undocumented, circulating love.
       

      from Poets Respond

      Pamela Lucinda Moss

      “I’ve been feeling heartbroken lately—by everything, really—and one of the ways I’ve been coping is by writing love notes to the things I do not want to lose. When I heard about the massive funding cuts to libraries, I thought of the librarians who’ve quietly and consistently cared for our communities. This poem is for them—for libraries, for immigrants, for LGBTQ+ people, and for everyone in this country trying to show up with tenderness and courage, standing together to protect what’s most sacred and most at risk.”

      April 19, 2025John L. StanizziDefiantly

      It begins with a mistake
      while they are rushing through
      what they call “busy work,”
      some assignment you
      find a drag as well,
      having concocted it
      so that you can tell
      parents you wouldn’t permit
      a lack of rigor to seep
      into the classes you teach.
      A moment before they sleep,
      stupefied kids reach
      for the mouse and click
      the spell check as the last
      charade in the high school schtick.
      And the word that will never pass
      is their take on definitely,
      which they can never spell.
      Spell check suggests defiantly,
      but you can always tell
      that what they really meant
      was unambiguous,
      something adamant,
      but in their thoughtless rush
      they push the enter key
      and that’s the end of that.
      Yet it doesn’t bother you
      when they turn out the light
      having finished the task,
      held their end of the deal.
      And tomorrow when you ask
      for the work, they’ll feel
      around inside their packs,
      and emerge with a wrinkly mess
      which you will gladly take
      in spite of its meaninglessness.
      You may give them a cursory read,
      and then again maybe not;
      written in a teenage trance,
      it’s better that it’s all forgot.
      No. You’re being defiant, you
      and the kids in this room.
      They know the drill too;
      this will not matter soon.
      You believe this definitely.
      You’d rather see them play
      the game defiantly
      than let them walk away
      absolutely sure
      that as soon as they graduate
      it’s off to the allure
      of the future and a date
      with everything they’ve ever planned.
      Even the dutiful,
      who seem so sapped of life,
      confused and beautiful,
      and concerned only with
      what their parents will say,
      their position in the class,
      the almighty GPA,
      and the terror of being last,
      while working obediently,
      can’t even get it right;
      they click on defiantly,
      and turn out the bedroom light.
      Just once you’d love to see
      them flip you off and smile;
      that would definitely be
      an act defiantly wild,
      an act to be remembered,
      no matter how it’s spelled.
       

      from #34 - Winter 2010

      John L. Stanizzi

      “I defiantly owe this poem to the spell checker and to my high school students.”

      April 18, 2025Seth FriedmanTrenches

      mud-caked boots
      the veteran kneels
      in a newly planted field
       
      The leeks look so scrawny now, weak, vulnerable. But he knows they’ll survive—most of them. They’re a stalwart crop, tougher than they look. It seems like a long ways off … but the day will come, perhaps an overcast November morning, when he’ll bend to pull them from the dark soil, when he’ll stack them in crates, a day when midway through the harvest, it will start to drizzle; and, when it turns to rain, he will smile; and, in the pouring rain, he will open wide his arms, turn his face to the sky, laugh out loud. Later, in the open-air processing area, under the roof he built a few years ago, he’ll wash off the muck, the sand, the clods of dirt, large and small … He’ll wash crate after crate until the evening light starts to fade, until the whites of the leeks are so unsullied they almost seem lit from within.
       
      dirt-smeared face
      the battles
      that never end
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Seth Friedman

      “My fascination with haiku quickly evolved into a similar passion for haibun. I could easily ramble on about the many reasons why I enjoy writing haibun—and then I could bask in the delicious irony of being a long-winded haiku poet. However, in lieu of that lengthy dissertation, I’ll just say that, for me, writing haibun honors the search for finding integration and resonance between the more ‘emotional/feeling’ and the more ‘thoughtful/analytical’ parts of me. I suppose, to an extent, all good art does this, but the hybrid nature of haibun seems especially well suited to the task.”