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      May 10, 2025Kim DowerI Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom

      breezy floral, dancing with color
      soft, silky, flows as I walk
      Easter Sunday and you always liked
        
      to get dressed, go for brunch, “maybe
      there’s a good movie playing somewhere?”
      Wrong religion, we were not church-goers,
        
      but New Yorkers who understood the value
      of a parade down 5th Avenue, bonnets
      in lavender, powder blues, pinks, hues
        
      of spring, the hope it would bring.
      We had no religion but we did have
      noodle kugel, grandparents, dads
        
      who could fix fans, reach the china
      on the top shelf, carve the turkey.
      That time has passed. You were the last
        
      to go, mom, and I still feel bad I never
      got dressed up for you like you wanted me to.
      I had things, things to do. But today in L.A.— 
        
      hot the way you liked it—those little birds
      you loved to see flitting from tree to tree—
      just saw one, a twig in its mouth, preparing 
        
      a bed for its baby—might still be an egg,
      I wish you were here. I’ve got a closet filled
      with dresses I need to show you. 
        

      from #48 - Summer 2015

      Kim Dower

      “I grew up on the upper west side of Manhattan—89th off Broadway—in ‘The Party Cake Building,’ apartment 6D, when NYC was still a place for middle class families, not just a city for the rich. I was the handball champion of the street, Benny’s hotdog stand and the New Yorker Bookstore on one side, Murray the Sturgeon King around the corner, rode my bike through Riverside Drive when I was ten (no helmets back then), went to the first ‘Be-In’ in Central Park. Though I’ve lived in Los Angeles for decades, my memories of New York sounds, smells, tastes, people, adventures continue to influence my poems. When I was a little girl I thought that only ‘TV families’ lived in houses. I never knew anyone with a yard, a ‘den,’ or a basement.”

      May 9, 2025Michael LaversThere Is a Fire

      We try. We water plants so we can watch 
      God bloom, we look at rivers till our sadness 
      feels beautiful. Tumult and peace 
      and tumult again, and we have no idea
      of what decides what rises and what falls. 
      My daughter combs her hair, 
      watching the snow come slantly down. 
      There is a world, through her, seeing itself. 
      We talk about objects because we cannot 
      talk about the hidden radiance. We talk 
      about how Arshile Gorky swam 
      into the Charles to end his life, 
      but then remembered painting, 
      and swam joyously back. Of pines, 
      of wind. Of how there is a mutual 
      wounding that’s required for love, 
      and although no one’s asking, I can answer 
      that I write about my children to obtain 
      for them life after death. Why else! 
      There is a fire at the heart of things 
      that can’t go out, and we are here, 
      and we remember it. We try. 
      A purple comb. Slant snow.
      My children are, which I don’t 
      understand, but no disaster’s possible. 
      I’m certain what they truly are was 
      never born. That though the sun 
      shall not endure, they shall endure.
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Michael Lavers

      “The French painter and sculptor Georges Braque said: ‘In art there is only one thing that matters: that which cannot be explained.’ I don’t know what poetry is, where it comes from, why exactly I love it so much, or how it gets written. Nor, luckily, do I have to know. What a relief!”

      May 8, 2025Colette InezThe Play of Lovers

      Pears soft to the thumb, wine.
      Now the sun is the moon, each
      look a new word, phrases to arrange
      like roses in a vase.
       
      Lovers. Everyone has seen them fall
      into a blur of change; one leaf
      and then another on the lawn. Shade
      gives way to light. Snow comes down.
      Do you see them, two figures
      in the distance making their small mark?
       
      Words, too, submit to years. Plain
      flowers in the yard repeat their trick
      of vanishing. The sun is the sun
      and each look is seen again and again
      until faces disappear.
      Everyone has seen it.
       

      from #20 - Winter 2003

      Colette Inez

      “A poem is born right here, somewhere in my heart, in my blood vessels, in my gut. It comes to the brain much later. I have to feel them actually pulsing in my body, and then when they get shaped, when the brain, the controller, the pilot, whoever one’s metaphor, however this metaphor can extend, takes over. I like to think that my brain is the lesser part of my poems and that my heart, in the best of my poems, is the one that rules.”

      May 7, 2025Annette MakinoMigration

      Everyone just calls it “the gully.” It’s a bit of wilderness in the midst of our Southern California development. A creek runs through it, lined with eucalyptus trees.
       
      A winter’s day. I am around nine. Some friends and I come upon a strange sight: large clumps of dry leaves hanging from the trees. These turn out to be monarch butterflies—in fabulous numbers. Some fly around the gully and near our faces, bright flashes of orange like enchanted confetti. I hold out my hands and for an instant, one almost lands there.
       
      dappled light
      the untamed taste
      of sour grass
       
      Soon after, my parents divorce. My mother, sisters and I keep moving farther and farther away. Then to my mother’s native Switzerland for a year. The day after we fly back to California, my father stops by on his way to the airport. He is returning to his homeland of Japan—for the rest of his life.

       
      rope swing
      assessing the depth
      of my losses
       
      More than once over the following decades, he moves without telling us his new address. We see each other just three more times.

       
      return to sender
      the chrysalis
      unopened
       
      As for the monarchs, severe drought and disease take their toll. For a few years, the butterflies all but disappear from the gully. But now they are returning: last December, more than 26,000 were counted on a single day. In just four hours of flying, I could go back fifty years in time and see them again.

       
      arriving starlight
      his radiant smile
      in my dream
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Annette Makino

      “Sometimes it feels absurd to try to convey the complexity and nuance of any human experience with just 26 letters—like using a mud-covered stick to paint the Sistine Chapel. I find that combining art forms is one good way to expand the possibilities for expression. As an artist, I enjoy working in the Japanese tradition of haiga: art combined with haiku so that both elements deepen our understanding of the whole. A similar process happens in a successful haibun: together, the prose and haiku expand the overall meaning in an intuitive way that neither could do alone. And suddenly, those meager 26 letters transport us to a new world.”

      May 6, 2025Sarah FrelighSex Education

      How is it I recall so exactly the clatter
      of film unspooling from loop
      to loop, the musk of perfume radiating
       
      from my wrists and throat, the warm gush
      of Juicy Fruit, the rasp of stockings
      as we crossed and uncrossed our legs. The heat
       
      in that room, a flock of girls cooped up
      away from the roosters, the almost men
      of our fantasies who we dreamed
       
      would stand beneath our window
      one day and crow for us the way
      Romeo had for Juliet. How we laughed
       
      when an army of sperm ejected
      from a cannon into a body
      of water where they swam or died,
       
      cartoon smiles disappearing in tiny peeps
      as one by one they drowned, leaving
      one last lonely sperm to swim up
       
      the long isthmus where the river
      opened to an ocean and I still recall
      how the orchestra soared as he swam
       
      and swam toward the round ship
      of the egg, and how we stood
      and cheered when he docked, exhausted
       
      and triumphant, this tiny survivor,
      this sturdy sperm we would spend
      the next ten years trying to kill off,
       
      and because of the stupid movie I felt
      like a murderer each time I imagined him battering
      frantic and headlong against the barrier
       
      I’d erected down there, shouting
      defense de la defense! as he died in spasms
      of agony and once—because I was drunk
       
      and didn’t give a damn, because I wanted
      only to sink into the soft chance of carelessness—
      I let the whole bunch of them skinny dip
       
      without a death sentence of chemicals
      awaiting them at the end of their swim
      and because I’d forgotten what
       
      my sex ed teacher said that day
      when the film ended and the lights came up:
      Remember, girls, it takes just one.
       
      What chance did I have anyway?
      They were as fit as Olympians, hardy
      and well-trained. They came in droves
       
      in armies, entire Caesar’s legions, coming
      and coming and coming, so
      many of them against one of me.
       

      from #37 - Summer 2012

      Sarah Freligh

      “My poem ‘Sex Education’ emerged from an exercise I give my creative nonfiction students: to locate a memory by recalling a particular taste or smell. On this particular day, I had twelve minutes to scribble in my own notebook and I conjured up the taste of a fresh stick of Juicy Fruit gum and the smell of Ambush, cologne that was popular at the time. Those details led me back to that sex education classroom and into the poem.”

      May 5, 2025Lance LarsenWhy I Petted the Cat

      Because I was tired and cranky and it was too late
      to take a bus to Siena and ask Saint Catherine’s
      mummified thumb to cure me of insomnia,
      neuropathy, and other afflictions petty
      and daily. Because Florence was threatening
      to rain all over us, especially me. Did I
      mention I was starving and that my wife
      wanted to visit The David a second time?
      Because this cat craved attention and because
      my impatient American paws had to do something.
      Because petting, according to some, is therapeutic
      for all. Not a Persian or Maltese, this charmer,
      nor a fancy ebony number, just a motley calico.
      That’s a point in my favor, isn’t it? Me trying
      to love all mammals equally. Because my species
      once grew fur everywhere. When petting,
      begin with the ugly cat head, face and ears
      and neck, then under the greedy cat chin.
      Sure, I worried about distemper and Lyme
      disease and feline herpes and ticks but not enough
      to stop. Because I considered myself a back-alley
      healer, an amateur shaman (not that I bragged
      it up on a crowded bus or at wedding receptions).
      Because I liked tracing the backbone, transferring
      lightning from human hand to feline spine.
      Because I liked tabling my inner debate about
      who would win in a painterly bar fight,
      DaVinci or Michelangelo, and ignoring how
      to bribe God into liking me again. Because I
      could tell from the cat’s beseeching eyes
      she was alone in Italy, like me, and spoke almost
      no Italian. Because her purring was exquisite,
      her swishing tail unregulated by Pope or police
      or cloud. Because chaos was everywhere,
      because I like the electric glow of a small success.
       

      from #87 – Spring 2025

      Lance Larsen

      “Ezra Pound once described artists as ‘the antennae of the race.’ Is he thinking of a longhorn beetle on reconnaissance feeling and smelling the world before the creature itself arrives? Or maybe he has in mind a ham radio operator like my childhood neighbor who built a tower in his backyard and listened for messages beamed from on high. Don’t writers do a similar thing? As a poet, I live for the chance to sit quietly in a corner waiting for something plain or wondrous to catch on my flypaper.”