by Keetje Kuipers

To explain, to chart, to graph
what has lasted this long and what hasn’t.

To take the temperature, not with the back
of the hand but with a thermometer. One hundred
thermometers. One thousand.

To correlate, categorize. To count
stacks into stacks. To assign significance

—to a woman, a bed, toast spread with jam.

We make meaning faster than we can understand it:

Listen to the body only
long enough to ignore what it says. Discard
each explanation we uncover.

But in resorting to words—

But if it becomes a story—

Seven years without her was a glacier,
a delicacy, an unquantifiable
quantity.

by Keetje Kuipers

Each afternoon heavy clouds form in the north,

and each evening when I take the dogs out, it snows.
Each morning the mice fly invisible under the drifts,

leaving their tracks only where they cross my path.

I ought to be sick of my life, I ought to be too bored
for words. Each day the red-tailed hawk sits

in his tree, cocks his head from side to side, takes

a low pass over the field and returns with a mouse
for his meal. The dogs bark at the deer, and the deer

don’t move until the dogs have stopped. I ought

to be losing my mind with all this familiarity,
with loving every damn thing I’ve come to know.

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She’s meeting a friend for a walk through the museum of fine arts and lunch –errands to run on the way, a bill to pay, she passes the man who is always sitting with his canvas, painting on the corner of a quiet street, fourteen degrees this morning, and he’s there on his stool, dabbing in the bricks of a nondescript apartment building, recycling bins out back, sagging fence in front. His prayer. She takes the train in, and it’s different because although it is the route to work, she is not going to work, not until later. The meeting with the friend makes her ride entirely unlike every other day of the week.

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by Judith Skillman

Toward sunset it bleeds orange, plums,
and wine. The father always at table
with his mug in hand. How long
must a son allow the city to unwind
its long avenues, branching rivers

full of walkers insular with autumn.
It’s true the blade took garlic cloves
from their little white coats,
so pliant, the stems beneath that fat knife
wolfing into the core of the matter.

It’s true there must be a mother somewhere
in the story—her stringy hair, her roast
burning inside the oven. He sees the clock tower
in the square, glances up to find a rim of moon.
At least, for now, the hole’s been bled
of what it holds. As far as a man can walk
the shops stretch, their signs reversed.
Closed for another, longer night.
Withholding exactly that porcelain—
that Jan Becher Karlovy liqueur cup

one needs to clamp between finger
and thumb. He’s learned one lesson.
This wound must be purged each day.
Else the stench of what it carries
emanates from his mouth, and others turn away.

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by Jeff Hardin

I could give
my horizon,

the one I see
on cheekbones,

or I could give
how a gravestone

is armless
and can’t do anything

to hold back
a soul.

And then there are
those doodlings

my child leaves everywhere,
almost-words

in some new language
I have to

lay on my stomach
to read.

If I could give away
the woman’s fingers

sauntering through
the organ’s tones,

I’d also give
my last three steps

in creek shallows,
how cool my feet felt

in silt.
But who wants

wayward things,
the bricklayer’s humming,

the sandcastle’s lean,
the thimble of air,

the two rowboats
side by side

bumping against
one another

as if in sleep?

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by Susan Laughter Meyers

And what of the pines
branching over the lake? Am I to take them
as a sign,
these few drops of rain as mercy?
Let them cool my wrist
and palm, the crease at my elbow,
as if to say,
There, and there, this gloss—
here, this wet wink misting your face.

The darkest clouds are blowing over,
shaped by wind
that whips across water.
In its path the surface breaks
into ripples—
no, wrinkles. I feel the chill.
For the living, the chickadee’s
boisterous doxologies
and old beads of turtles
strung in a row, sunning on their log
and keeping track: a long, slow
count of tomorrow’s
lack and all the past seasons.
May the yellow warbler
keep flitting about.
May the dog, the crow, persistent and loud,
settle their complaints
against nothing but air.

Between two clouds, a crack of sunlight.
Shadows of waves
are small, ephemeral, lively
as children who’ve never known death.
Cupped and quick, the shallow waves.
Some rolling toward—
and others, whose backs
are bright swells, quietly rolling away.
—for L.A.F.

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by Gary L. McDowell

Let there be woman deranged made of words:
gardeners and snow-ghosts, moving lips
and butterfly-knots. Let there be.

Let there be man garlanded, houred.
Let there be up to our wrists a blind spot.
Let there be all that is forbidden:

songs of devotion, songs of mourning, songs
of fragile—kiss me in the whirling.
Let there be a cup of sugar. Let there be madly

open mouths, bone-stars, two bodies
in bed. Let there be undoing and more time.
Let there be a fever to subside, apple-picking,

the dipping of hands together, touch and more time.
Let there be a spine, a book leafed open,
selfishness. Let there be haircuts, matching

forks and spoons: the little things. The mice
that’ll nest in the garage. Do you trap them—or
let there be come, let’s go inside.

Let there be enough. Let there be. Let there be
lunch on a Tuesday. Quiet, more time,
two bodies because the world

could stand to be still sometimes,
and sometimes it never is, and so let there be wine
and pulp and singing and devour me.

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by Gary L. McDowell

I knew a girl who closed her eyes
every time she heard a car horn,

drew koi on the knees of her jeans,
knew what it meant to be anonymous

in a crowd, and now I close my eyes,
step into the street—a reflection of the people

who’ve walked here before me—and know
that koi—a homophone

for love—can live two-hundred years,
but I can’t manage long without a window,

the patterns of streets and corners
when every city has its perfect hour:

moment before the light changes, moment we don’t
know ourselves from those orange or white

or blue fish: the sorrow we feel over traffic.
The shadows when we clench our eyes match

our ground-shadows pushing forward home.

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