Kelli Russell Agodon

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Questions From the Afterlife

 

Every September my dead ask me
what I’ve done to be better.

The trees empty themselves of plums,

the apples—heavy on the ground.
 

The dead sort my mail, put their quiet 

heads on my pillow,

 

run their fingers through my hair.
How do I tell them of my imperfections?

I can only say flawed so many ways.

I stand in a field of dahlias—

all the beautiful things are dying.
I question the sky—Will I ever be enough?
 

Even the sunflowers
have learned to bow.

 

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If there’s a golden thread running through my work, it’s likely adorned with charms of ghosts and gravestones. As a poet and person, I spend a lot of time in quiet conversation with death—sometimes not even conversation, sometimes just obsession. I don’t mean this in a morbid way. Writing about death feels like a strange form of company, a reminder of time passing and the temporariness of our lives—even my coffee mug has a small ghost on it. For me, remembering that we’re all just existing here for a brief moment makes life feel more meaningful—perhaps that’s why I continue to explore this theme in my work. 

 

My poem “Questions from the Afterlife” returns to my dialoguing with the dead, but in autumn when the veil is thinnest. I imagined the dead existing around us and asking what we could have done to be better? The speaker of the poem definitely wants to please them. As I wrote it, I thought about how often I’ve measured myself against invisible standards—of success, of goodness, of art—and how death, in its strange way, dissolves those expectations. Maybe I’m still trying to impress my ghosts. Maybe I believe the dead really do rest their heads on my pillow—literally, metaphorically, maybe symbolically. Poetry lets me speak to what’s vanished while acknowledging what’s still here. Keeping ghosts and death at the forefront, makes daily life feel more sacred and poems are where I go to sort out my thoughts and maybe accidentally learn something about myself or the bigger picture in the process.  

 

Note: this poem will be in my next book, Accidental Devotions (Copper Canyon Press, May 2026)

 

—Kelli Russell Agodon

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Ronda Piszk Broatch

 

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I’M ADDICTED TO WATER'S SHUSH,

 

 

                                               the way it wraps its daydreams 

around rocks and moss, how slippery 

the idea of water beneath the tread of my boots. 

 

                                    Give me a fig leaf,

and I’ll put it aside, lie naked on top of Grand Pass after sex, 

after photographing our entangled feet with the snow 

field as backdrop. 

 

                               The first kiss is like stepping 

into a puddle, the next like jumping 

into subalpine Heart Lake. I linger, sun touching parts of me 

 

                                                that haven’t felt such affection 

as only the sun can give, drinking the nectar 

of mountain air, its own fountain of youth. 

 

Water stilled by a slow camera exposure, 

            water captured and filtered for the bottle. 

                        Deer lap our leavings from river rocks,

 

            even the inch worm on my finger agreed to return 

to the moss, nearer the wetness it knows best.

Water accepts me into her body, 

 

                        the way mud—that marriage between soil 

and rain—cleaves to the boots that separate my bare soles 

from rocky ground. Of all the sounds made by water, 

 

                                    what sifts through root and stone 

loves me better than that which comes 

on a tornado’s wings. I’m thirstiest for water 

 

            that flows through old growth forests, and I’ll take 

the fir bough over the olive branch for one more night 

in a tent off the beaten path. 

 

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“I’m Addicted to Water’s Shush” began as “of all sounds made by water,” a line I attributed to Coleman Barks, an ecstatic translator of the poems of Rumi. Though now I cannot find that line in my searchings, both water and Rumi are woven into my being. Once, after a challenging yoga practice I was overtaken by the indisputable presence of a lion, which caused me to weep—water flowing, running its course, stopping only when it was finished. The poet Rumi came to me in that moment with the force of a river. Water as primary source of my wellness; water’s lack leaving me unmoored, adrift. Poems are like that, as is walking in the wilderness amongst the wetness of moss, the language of water as it carves the landscape and enters the thirsty body, wraps its songs around the curves of my ears. “I drank water from your spring / and felt the current take me” (from “Water From Your Spring,” Rumi). “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river / moving in you, a joy” (from “Moving Water,” Rumi). Poems, like water, move through different iterations and influence the reader, landscape, mind in various and powerful ways over the course of time. All of it infused, suffused, saturating, dowsing, dousing, steeping—all of it life giving, essential. 

 

—Ronda Piszk Broatch

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Joanne Clarkson

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For Horses No Longer Ridden

 

Horses by nature were never meant

to be saddled, the slight swale

between withers and rump

not constructed for armor

or even summers of the young.

 

With age comes ease, never again

to be mastered by leather, 

no longer made to carry 

the weight of worry and journey.

 

I do not demand they create a gait for me.

 

Today three twenty-year-old horses

salvage the landscape. They graze

with muscles light as wings: sparrow,

blue bottle fly, afternoon’s angled light.

 

I bring a palm of apple slices.

 

I know they do not love me

the way I might wish for intimate

love, even as the supple lips

caress my open hand. And I do not

plot to harness them to furrow 

the hard, unyielding fields 

for the sake of my hunger.

 

Horses are their own loose army

of peace.  I want to feel how stalks 

grow soft within them. How their slow 

feasting sets the whole Earth free.

 

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Each morning, I start the day by sitting in conversation with a poem. My current favorite inspiration is the anthology, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, edited by past US Poet Laureate Ada Limón. I love anthologies and issues of literary journals because of the various voices of poets I can enjoy and learn from.

 

Poetry has been my artistic and spiritual practice all my life. I grew up in a family of musicians and artists – but had no raw talent for either. When I was nine years old, I discovered I could relate to both beauty and difficult situations in life by using words! I could lose myself in the craft of verse the same way my mother played piano and my cousin painted watercolors. My love of poetry has continued to grow over the years. I could not live without it!

 

We had a very difficult 2024 due to my husband’s health challenges. I didn’t write much during his treatment and recovery and by April 2025 I had written almost no poetry for months. Then a miracle happened. I received an email from a woman who owned a farm for rescued and retired horses. She wanted her animals to be of use and was planning art, music and writing classes inspired by horses. She asked me to be the writing teacher.

 

This experience inspired me in a whole new way and I have been writing freely again. I have always loved horses and I was thrilled to be interacting with them again. All of us in the classes shared feelings of connecting intimately with nature and each other through these beautiful and gentle creatures. Once again, poetry has helped me heal and engage with the world around me.

 

—Joanne Clarkson

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Merrill Oliver Douglas

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What Happened

 

And in the end we locked our cars

and moved on, taking 

 

only things we could carry:

peanut butter crackers

 

stuffed in sweater pockets, 

half-filled travel mugs, tire irons,

 

boxes of Band-Aids. Not one of us

mentioned a map. Our phones got no bars. 

 

Some went singing and clapping. 

Some went spitting blame. 

 

Some snipped their credit cards,

hid what cash they had in their shoes. 

 

Some carried small children. 

Some carried small dogs, 

 

or let their dogs run loose, or kept

them leashed and let the children run. 

 

Some thought they heard fiddle music. 

Some thought they heard mortar fire. 

 

Some put the sun at their backs. 

Some walked toward where the sun set, 

 

and that was the last we knew of them. 

 

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I started this poem in a workshop, in response to a photographic prompt. I no longer have access to that image, but I remember that it showed cars parked in a long line in the middle of a field of very tall grass. Clearly, they’d been sitting there for a long time. 

 

When my son was six or so, he and his friends liked to tape sheets of paper to a wall and draw elaborate “haunted castles.” They made people and creatures (ghosts, skeletons, aliens, dragons…) standing on the ramparts, popping out of windows, flying over the towers, pouring boiling oil. As they drew, the boys narrated the fantasy battle-in-progress. I love writing poetry for many reasons, but a big one is that it lets me enjoy a similar kind of deep play. I get to mess around with words—with meanings, sounds, images, line breaks—the way my son and his friends messed around with their pencils. I try this and that until (I hope) I’ve constructed something that feels real to the reader or listener.  The poem may tell a story, or just hint at one, or be purely lyrical. In any case, it’s a thing I made, and getting lost in the making is great fun. 

 

—Merrill Oliver Douglas

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Peggy Heitman

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On Adopting a New Bird Mythology After My Mastectomies

 

 

According to Chinese astrology,

I was born in the year

of the Rooster, but these days

my way is that of the little sparrow

                        --coffee-brown back-feathered 

                                                            --white under bellied

                                                                                    --pebbled black neck

                                                                                                            --delicate songbirds

I love them, legended 

for their resilience and adaptability

They remind me to embrace change

the same way they thrive whether on a farm or in the city

                        --I must also adapt to reshaping

                                                            --my body’s revised landscape

                                                                                    --find new ways to soar 

                                                                                                                --elegantly

I love them for their bravery

            --to hop and chirp and sing in the midst of adversity

                                                                        --to ward off evil spirits

                                                                                    --to lift their heads in search of hope              

 

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After my second breast cancer diagnosis, a friend advised me, Live each moment, Peggy. It’s all you’ve got. It’s all any of us have. And so, I set about taking her words into my bones, flesh, and heart. I like to say I take each good second and ring it until it sings. I cope with bad days using strategies as long as a Santa list. “On Adopting a New Bird Mythology After My Mastectomies” encapsulates my engrained philosophy of life.

 

Reading poetry is something I consider a practice, a habit, something almost sacred. There are so many poets, I feel unfaithful naming one in preference to another.

 

I’m infatuated with Mary Oliver, her attention to the natural world. Lucie Brock-Broido is the poet I quote most. I relate most to Ron Rash’s poetry. In my imagination, I think of our southern voices harmonizing. 

 

May Sarton’s journals, which sound like poetry, make me wish she was not dead and I was one of the friends she invites to breakfast to feast on morning sunshine, admire the field of jonquils she planted the year before, and eat off her blue and white china while gossiping about our gardens.

 

For years, I tried to bury my southern voice, to write like television announcers with no accent at all. Until I started attending weekly classes by Press 53 called Writing with Shuly Cawood where she prompts me and praises me for my southern voice, I felt like an opera singer singing falsetto. Now I compose words, especially phrases and old sayings with confidence.

 

No matter where I go, no matter what I do, I try to be present and pay attention to the gift of the moment and what it holds, and for me poetry holds an exquisite rapture.

 

—Peggy Heitman

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Marilyn Copley Hilton

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Red balloon 

 

I've begun to bore my children

as my mother did me when we reached a certain age.

A car captive, forced to hear the names of friends

who'd moved away or disappeared into hospitals,

and the faces, hands, and teeth of the old people 

she loved to tend at work. She bored me

again and again with stories 

of when I fell off Mt. Kearsarge

and how I rescued a stray turtle

and why I have my name.

 

Now I bore them 

with suspicions of crows tearing up the yard

and rumors of a wet winter, 

that tomatoes continue to ripen after you pick them. 

I bore them with tales of cranky store clerks

and drivers who refuse to signal,

of jeans that have grown too loose to wear

and what’s in the Goodwill bag. 

I bore them with their childhoods

(because I’m not done)

until they slump and say Heard it.

 

We bore them 

when the silence stretches thin,

because even prattle is a tether,

a red balloon tied to a stroller handle,

which I'm retelling now          yes, again,

how you gazed O-mouthed as it shuddered and stilled 

all through our first dinner out,

as if it had already started.

 

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I began writing “Red balloon” when I recalled the futility of trying to connect deeply with my children when they were teenagers, long before I understood that their concerns were, naturally, as far from mine as my teenage concerns had been from my mother’s. As I drafted and revised the poem, my thoughts trailed to a memory of taking our infant firstborn to a restaurant. After weeks of wolfing down whatever we could throw together at home, my husband and I had looked forward to a dinner out with our new little family. But when we entered the restaurant, the lights, the activity, and the noise were all too much for our baby, and she wailed in her 4-in-1 stroller (basically, an infant car seat on wheels) so pitifully that our plan dissolved into a mere wish. As we turned to leave, the host, an apparent expert at calming screaming babies, called, “Try this,” and fastened a red balloon to the stroller’s handle. Immediately, our daughter’s cries silenced, her eyes widened, and her mouth opened in awe. As her gaze followed that new, astonishing, red thing bobbing and weaving above her, my husband and I, now the boring old things, enjoyed a lovely dinner. As that memory threaded itself into this poem, my interpretation of my baby’s rapt wonder-gaze shifted: by will she was separating from me (as I had from my mother)—as birth had done by force—as she would for the rest of our lives.

 

—Marilyn Copley Hilton

 

Carol Parris Krauss 

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Quantico Calls 

 

Quantico calls me. My Nissan leans toward Exit 150-A. 

I peer, stretch, long to see my imaginary suited associates 

as we travel to ogle and ahhh the Cherry Blossoms each year. 

 

My DNA: Trees. Mysteries to be solved. My 

imagination. 

 

My childhood: Nancy Drew. A PBJ. Orange Nehi.

Four feet from the ground the Tulip Poplar split into three roads. 

The middle leaned & stretched over Lake Norman. Formed 

a perfect nook. Bream nipped and tapped at the surface 

as I fell into The Mystery at the Lilac Inn. 

 

My reality: 100 essays. One set of AP quizzes. A past 

due bill. An unruly lawn. Dirty clothes. A pollen coated car. 

Spring just beyond my window and down the road.

 

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I return, again and again, to Jane Kenyon's "Let Evening Come." There's a quiet wisdom in that poem that eluded me at thirty, revealed itself at fifty, and now, at sixty-six, feels like a prayer I didn't know I needed.

 

"Let it come, as it will," Kenyon writes, and that phrase has become my mantra. As a child, I dreamed of becoming a detective—dramatic, necessary, catching the bad guys. Even now, driving past Quantico with my family, I joke, "There are my people," and I mean it a little. That dream never quite left.

 

But the evening came differently than I imagined. I became an English teacher instead, and a damn good one. Most days, I love this life—the moment a student finally sees a poem, understands its structure, and feels its rhythm. But there are other days, days heavy with grading and meetings and the slight tedium that accumulates like dust, when I need Kenyon's reminder that what will come, will come. Not the childhood dream, but something else—something equally real, equally mine.

 

"Quantico Calls" lives in that space between the child who believed anything was possible and the adult who knows what actually was. Kenyon taught me that acceptance isn't resignation; it's a kind of grace. Let the FBI belong to someone else. Let evening come. Let the poem be enough. What keeps me writing is this: the need to reconcile who I thought I'd be with who I am, and to find, in that reconciliation, not loss, but a different kind of beauty.

 

—Carol Parris Krauss

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Yvonne Higgins Leach

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I Left the Hanging Candle Burning

 

above my bed. A wax river

ignited my bedspread.

By then, Paul and I were riding our bikes

in circles in the cul de sac as if

we were on a carousel, slicing

the dusky light with our tires and soft voices,

honeyed with the flutter of our teenage hearts.

All my siblings gone; my parents out to dinner.

 

When the sirens scrawled the dark,

I tasted sandalwood. 

We dumped our bikes on the lawn

and heard my bedroom curtains scream, the flames

cavorting chaos, a red-hunger like blood from a cut.

The fireball spiraling, fastened to air,

unforgivably snapping and roaring

toxins like a scary god. 

 

Faces stitched skyward and riveted 

by real-life TV, my neighbors

pointed my way. 

My young heart jolted, no breath,

nowhere to hide. Then my molten windows 

burst like a bomb, and the firemen created 

a wall to back us away.  

 

The rest of that summer was 

a blackened canvas I took everywhere. 

Certain voices whispered

How could she?

and I wore the burn marks of feeling stupid

as if they were patches everyone could see.  

 

My parents helped me re-paint my room 

and moved on. I could still smell the smoke

and did for years afterward,

worried someone would start the story again. 

 

We moved away, eventually.

But embers still wave their hands

and threaten to re-ignite. 

I hear sirens whenever

I do a foolish thing.

 

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Poetry, to me, is the soul in motion—an act of quiet revelation. Wallace Stevens once said “poetry is like prayer...most effective in solitude.” I believe poems emerge from silence, reaching toward the mysteries of existence. In that stillness, when language meets the soul’s depths, something spiritual is born.

 

I also hold close Pablo Neruda’s vision of poetry as connection. He wrote of the affection from strangers as “something still greater and more beautiful,” a force that expands our being and unites us. His story of exchanging a pinecone and a glimpse of a white sheep through a fence reminds me that poetry is an offering—an indestructible gift passed between souls.

 

My own work often dwells in this space between solitude and communion and what we choose to do with it. I write to listen inwardly, and to reach outward. To stretch myself, I read poets whose voices differ from mine—Diane Suess and Natalie Diaz, for example—whose bold, visceral work challenges and inspires me to grow beyond my own.

 

Poetry is one of the soul’s natural habitats. It is where I go to understand, to connect, to heal, and to give.

 

—Yvonne Higgins Leach

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Eleanor Lewis

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Grief

 

for Jennifer Keith

 

Spring built itself a raft, planks

of migrating birds and light

tied together with blooming, 

knowing trees. I walk the path

in welcome, say yes to sun 

rays upon my face,

dry from winter.

 

Jennifer said, 

The hyacinths you gave me

14 years ago

are up and beaming

in the garden. 

 

It’s a bittersweet

spring, I said. 

 

It always is, she replied.

There’s still a chill and we’re impatient

for something better.

 

A kite flies precariously over

a young dogwood, 

unfolding, full 

of itself.

 

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I’ve been writing for most of my life, but I stopped for a few years and just started again a couple of years ago. Last summer, reading Joyce Mansour’s Emerald Wounds began to stir up something in me. My poems continue to evolve – around the mystical, dreams, and visions; the natural world; saints and healers; death and desire. Wanting to express something there is no language for. Being “sensitive,” never quite feeling accepted. How it feels when it’s dreary and rainy, and then the sun bursts out of clouds. How it felt the first time I listened to albums like Neko Case’s Blacklisted and PJ Harvey’s Dry. Poetry, like music, has always been my companion, my life’s blood or blessing. 

 

—Eleanor Lewis

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Mariana Mcdonald

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Women Themselves

 

     Erasure Poem based on the Taliban’s August 2024 law

     “The Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Law. 

     Article 13. Injunctions related to women covering themselves.”

 

A woman is      her entire body

A woman      her face     some      chaos

Women’s voices     song      hymn     recital 

                               out loud      are      something that should be 

A woman’s        clothes          should be 

It is      the responsibility       of women       to their body 

 It is for     men       to look         at a woman

                                    likewise     women    look at men

If an adult woman 

                       leaves  

                                  she is duty-bound 

to her       voice   and        

          body

 

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When I was introduced to erasure poetry through former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s poem “Declaration,” I was amazed. An erasure poem takes out (“erases”) words from an existing text, so that the remaining words make a new work, often one that gives fresh and sometimes contradictory meaning to the original text. Smith uses the Declaration of Independence as her text, and her brilliant erasure of its words creates an astonishing new poem that challenges the document’s words while providing a stunning view of realities behind Jefferson’s prose. 

 

Smith’s work inspired me to write an erasure poem. I considered a number of texts before deciding on the Taliban’s 2024 law declaring strict restrictions on women’s appearance, behavior, and speech in public (which is forbidden). The edict, which requires women to be completely covered outside the home, silences women, essentially erasing women’s presence in public, so it seemed fitting to create an erasure poem from it, one that would celebrate women.

 

Writing this was especially meaningful for me, a lifelong reproductive rights activist, given the ways women’s bodily autonomy has been decimated in the United States. The Taliban’s edict was announced just weeks after the Dobbs Decision overturning Roe v Wade. A second reason was my time spent in Afghanistan many years ago, when I was threatened with arrest for protesting loudly when a man slugged me, fracturing my jaw, for being outspoken, foreign, and bare-faced.  

 

The search for justice and equality in erasure poetry is emblematic of all my writing. Poetry for me is both a weapon and a balm. In my poetry, fiction, and essays, I write to explore and share our collective experience, to shatter lies, and to reclaim our history. 

 

—Mariana Mcdonald

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Katy McKinney

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The Divide

 

Sunlight spills through the water’s surface

as we swim around the lone rock in the middle of the bay,

then along the landslide that forms the shoreline.

Such a sharp division: the air world of kamikaze pelicans,

freewheeling gulls, cloudless sky, boats under sail,

while below, the water world of snorkel breath, 

clicking shrimp, ribbons of colorful fish,

the sway of sea fans.

 

Two worlds as well for my friend back home:

the day she first felt the pea-sized lump,

drew a hollow breath, felt the solid ground

tilt beneath her. Then all the days that came after.

 

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I’ve always been drawn to poetry. As a kid, I’d sit in our living room reading The Best Loved Poems of the American People – a huge book - cover to cover. In high school, I haunted the poetry section of the local bookstore, eventually buying (with my allowance) eight volumes of e.e. cummings’ work. Once past high school, I branched out, but still loved the fact that a poem, whether ancient or modern, could gobsmack me. I’ve never settled on one favorite poet – I love too many. Sometimes it’s the poem I need at a time in my life – Marie Howe’s “What the Living Do” after my sister’s death, or Thomas Lux’s “Upon Seeing an Ultrasound Photo of an Unborn Child” when my daughter was expecting; Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” when trying to make sense of the world.

 

When I was 45, I published my first poem and ran my first marathon. The two events (both huge milestones) weren’t linked at the time, but for a subsequent marathon (knowing I needed distraction for miles 10-26) I began memorizing poems while I ran. I’d type small chunks of a poem onto 3 x 5 cards, usually 4-6 lines per card, laminate them so the sweat from my exertion wouldn’t soak them, then say the words in my head as I ran, line after line, time after time, until I had the poem by heart. I started small: Thomas Lux’s “A Little Tooth” (9 lines) but worked my way up through an eclectic collection of poems that had caught my fancy enough that I wanted them in my brain. Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript” are still there, always, now 20 years later, while the others return with some study. Oh, and it worked for the marathon, too.

 

—Katy McKinney

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Nancy Mitchell

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Ode to Indica

 

Heavy as an X-ray apron, you lay me down,

              swaddled baby, cradle settled.

No more bolting awake in a twist of sweat-wet

               sheets from dreams of spitting splintered

teeth while defending my thesis, or my husband

               lost to dementia. Gone the insomniac

obsessively parsing texts from the ex. Dark, sweet

               our liaisons with sleep, deep as a Pharaoh’s

tomb until the sun lights up a peach fuzz

               of dust on the window, and my mind scrubbed

clean, a whiteboard wet and gleaming.

 

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Many of us in the greater poetry community are mourning the fresh news of Ellen Bryant Voigt's passing, which occurred almost simultaneously with the razing of the East Wing of the White House. Posts expressing grief for each event dominated my social media feed this past week and will forever be intertwined in my memory as an example of Jung's synchronicity, in which "coincidences that are not causally linked are significant and not random." 

 

As the East Wing was the heart of the White House, Ellen Bryant Voigt was, for generations of poets, the heart of poetry, a repository of poetry's history, a font of knowledge of prosody, and the epitome of a master poet and teacher who inspired others to pledge themselves to a lifelong practice of poetry. Those who knew her believed she was, like the East Wing, an inviolate and enduring icon, immune to the vagaries of time (and politics), and would shine for us forever. 

 

In the early days of my poetry practice, of all my mentors and influences, Ellen Bryant Voigt left the most indelible impression. As mentor and director of my essay semester in the Warren Wilson MFA program, she honed my eye for precision and parallel symmetry in imagery and my ear for music/sound and rhythm in each line by patiently prodding me through eighty tedious pages of parsing prosody and syntax as I scanned/tracked Robert Lowell's seismic shift from iambic pentameter to free verse in Life Studies.

 

It is Ellen Bryant Voigt who reads over my shoulder as I practice poetry. Her declaration, "When meter is honored over rhythm, line over syntax, form over structure, even the most prodigious manipulation of traditional patterns may be rendered purely decorative," hangs over my desk and has been, is, and will remain my unequivocal measure of a poem.

 

—Nancy Mitchell

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Karen McAferty Morris

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Kimono with Rising Suns and Cranes

 

Suspended like a prayer flag, the kimono hangs rectangular and stiff, with no suggestion of the women who wore it, knelt to pour tea, whisper-trod the hushed house, while from afar

the knelling of a temple gong marked time. Pearled light floats down from the museum’s skylight

onto the room’s centerpiece, encircled with scrolls, wood carvings, porcelain bowls. The garment shimmers in wide horizontal stripes of gray and black, dappled with medallions of terra cotta

suns, white cranes overlaying each. With their tilde-shaped necks elongated, wide wings spread, dainty legs dangling, the cranes fly outside the suns’ margins, fly skyward, or upside down. They

are like clocks showing different times of day. If the kimono, or the woman wearing the kimono,

were lying down, there would be only a sense of heading in different directions. But there’s no

whoosh and flurry of wings. The rising suns cannot follow the arc, can never set. There’s only

stillness. That is the benevolent nature of art, the gentle lesson that objects from the past urge us

to understand. We admire and imagine, but their finality is not ours. We have time.

 

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I am forever noticing things – an encounter at a thrift store between a cashier and a customer; the names of craft beers in a brew pub; the comments after a music video on YouTube; and in the case of this poem, the startling sight of a kimono hanging in Seattle’s Asian Art Museum. Then I am compelled to express what I see, what I feel, what I imagine. I enjoy writing haiku and sonnets; mostly I write free verse, playing with word sounds, sensory details, structure; I love the stealthy surprise of prose poetry, which I combined with ekphrastic in this kimono poem. Ordinary people and nature are my favorite topics, and both are often found in the same poem. Decades ago at a writing conference on St. Simon’s Island off the Georgia coast, the critiquing poet told me my poetry reminded her of Mary Oliver’s. I’m astounded by how Oliver uses nature to take hold of us and lead us to other places. I’m awed by how beguilingly simply Ted Kooser’s poetry touches our souls. Through the years I’ve loved the sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Neruda’s love poetry. I never tire of reading Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript” out loud. 

 

—Karen McAferty Morris

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Annette Sisson

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Moose-Wilson Road, Wyoming

 

In the photo a moose chomps on gooseberries. 

She seems to smile, side-eyeing me behind 

my camera. Something about a moose strikes me 

as human, perhaps the kind I’d rather be. 

We’d sighted our first earlier that morning 

as the wildlife caravan pivoted from the resort, 

out for a day in the Tetons. Under light-cracked 

 

dark, she clopped down a neighborhood street 

as if she’d just walked her calf to the bus stop 

to wait with the nattering herd. That evening 

our van maneuvered near a bull moose munching 

willow. He lumbered through scrubs to find 

the tender shoots, snapped withies, his antlers 

wide and low, hide scarred by brushwood 

 

and weather. Another rolled his shoulders 

in a river sliced with ice, dewlap below surface, 

his rack cupped in supplication like knotted 

hands—fierce and graceful. Something always 

stirs, half-hidden in the thicket. Something 

of ourselves. A sudden communion—a cry, 

maybe a prayer. Some kind of wildness. 

 

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I return again and again to Jack Gilbert’s book The Great Fires and especially to the poem “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart,” which concludes: What we feel most has / no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds. This poem conveys the idea that human language is wholly inadequate to express our deepest needs and emotions. Our mantles of authority fail us when mining and attempting to communicate the most essential aspects of our lives. 

 

And so, I often use nature in my poems as metaphors to express the inexpressible and to explore how animals and plants, even soil and water, are both similar to and a part of our human lives. 

 

For decades I have read Wendell Berry. His way of understanding and being on the earth has sunk deep into my bones, especially the notions that humans are a part of nature and that their relationships to the earth should be a kind of stewarding that honors the interdependence of all living things.

 

Certainly, Mary Oliver’s influence is immense as well. But typically, Oliver bids us to observe nature for its own sake—to stop, see, and marvel at each unique living thing. She rarely suggests that nature and humans are interdependent. 

 

While I am compelled by her work, I lean more toward Berry’s insistence on our kinship with nature. For me, studying nature helps us understand ourselves and our place in the world, in the larger ecology of life. Perhaps that fact reveals my human-centric perspective. Perhaps I’m unable to relish a trillium or tadpole or sycamore simply for itself. But I would contend that by seeing nature as integral to our own lives, it is no longer “other” than us, and we are no longer “other” than nature.

 

—Annette Sisson

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Susan Street

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The Poddy Calf

 

When we arrive, our hosts 

have chopped and stacked wood 

against the side of the barn: 

an act of grace for us city dwellers.

 

I am about to have a bath.

The tub is on the deck 

overlooking this dairy farm. 

Dusk velvets the green fields. 

The cows return after milking, 

fanning across the paddocks at a leisurely pace. 

Huddled at our fence line, poddy calves separated 

from their mothers watch us, half hopeful, half wary. 

 

I remember my friend—

a country woman and a lover of cows—already a mother of four, 

describing the sensation 

of a poddy calf suckling her thumb.

The sandpaper ridges of its mouth. 

The muscular caress of its tongue.

On returning home to her husband, 

she announced she wanted another child. 

 

The calves back away as I step closer. Except for one, 

it tentatively licks my proffered thumb before kneading the length of it. 

For a short time, we engage in a game of comforting pretence: 

that I am its mother and still of childbearing age. 

 

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I started writing (very bad) poetry at a young age—my parents were great readers and lovers of poetry but I credit my high school English teacher with deepening my appreciation of the craft of poetry. She would ask a pupil to choose a poem for discussion and I remember when it was my turn to read a poem aloud—“Drifters,” by Bruce Dawe—her questioning me: why does that line work? Why does the poem resonate with you? What does it make you feel? 

 

When we arrived at the farm that inspired “The Poddy Calf,” I knew a poem was brewing; it was like stepping into a Constable painting. I made a few notes but it was some time before I came to compose the piece. I have found that a little distance distils the essence of what I am trying to capture; otherwise, I can be guilty of burdening a poem with imagery.

 

As to my favourite poets, countless lines of Mary Oliver’s poetry, such as “I want to step through the door full of curiosity” and “I was a bride married to amazement” from “When Death Comes,” encapsulate for me the importance of maintaining a sense of wonder within our ordinary days. 

 

Two poets I return to are Sarah Holland-Batt—her brilliant, tender collection, The Jaguar—and Mark Tredinnick. Lines from his poem, “End of a Lonely Day”—“End of a lonely day / spent watching rain / Showers lift and fall, / Drafting—and erasing—landscapes // across the hours. / My children are scattered like / thoughts / I could not keep," evokes immediate melancholy.

 

As a daily reminder to keep writing, I have this quote from Vita Sackville-West pinned above my desk: “It is necessary to write if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment?”

 

—Susan Street

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Sue Ellen Thompson

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Having Lost Their Only Child

 

they’re always talking to each other:

sitting on the front porch, walking 

 

to the library or post office,

waiting in a darkened theater 

 

for the movie to begin. At a party, 

they will circumnavigate the room 

 

but end up on a sofa, deep

in conversation. What husband and wife,

 

together 40 years, communicate

this constantly—except those who, 

 

lost at sea, have managed to crawl ashore 

where no one speaks their language?

 

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There are two poets to whom I turn when my own writing has stalled: Jane Kenyon and Sharon Olds. I aspire to Kenyon’s precise diction and the clarity of her images. The ending of her poem, “Things,” which seems to presage her own death at the age of 47, is at once transparent and mysterious: “Things: simply lasting, then / failing to last: water, a blue heron’s / eye, and the light passing / between them: into light all things / must fall, glad at last to have fallen.”

 

I look to Olds for emotional courage and honesty. There is an Olds poem called “The Promise,” in which she and her husband are discussing what to do if one of them has a stroke and becomes incapacitated. The last few lines of that poem have stayed with me: “…if a lion / had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes / binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.” Such a fierce image! It goes right to the heart of a marriage, as so many of her poems do.

 

Because I often feel as though I’m writing the same poem over and over, I look to poets who share my subject matter—family, loss, human relationships—but approach it in fresh and surprising ways. Sometimes I deliberately try to imitate a favorite poet’s style, just to see if I can write a poem that sounds like one of theirs. It never works, but the effort sends me back to a failed poem with something more like hope.

 

—Sue Ellen Thompson

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Rebecca Watkins

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When people used to ask me why I didn’t have children, 

 

I dreaded the heaviness that swarmed inside my chest, 

like the starlings at dusk, dark and blaming, 

and later when early menopause highjacked 

my body and I married a man with two daughters,

 

the question sat poised like a chisel 

until each remark drove the mallet home

            /you will die alone/ 

            /you are selfish/

            /you will never be fulfilled/

            /you will regret it/                                                                                                                                           

Now when no one asks me why anymore, 

I can finally tell the origin stories of the children I never had:

 

Story 1: My grandmother had eleven children, sixteen pregnancies. 

                        Ask me how a woman disappears.

 

Story 2: My mother got pregnant, dropped out of high school, 

            and married my father. They struggled to raise four kids, 

            to pay the bills, to buy food. 

                        Ask me if motherhood looked rewarding.

 

Story 3: When I was a nubile teen my mother said,

            I would be the first to get pregnant, meaning I would ruin my life.

                        Ask me if I ever did.

 

Story 4: By the time I wanted to have a child it was too late.

                        Ask me if it was choice/chance/circumstance.

 

Are all mothers humble? / Are all mothers kind? / Does this world, 

where women are taught/coerced/made/struggle/long/cry to be mothers, 

help its mothers?  

            

Some would say my life isn’t enough.

Ask me, and I’ll tell you 

how my tough-rooted love grows through the cracks. 

 

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I read a variety of poets like Clint Smith, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Rainer Maria Rilke just to name a few. I also am a part of a thriving poetry community in the Hudson Valley and often find myself inspired by poets who I consider my dear friends. One poet that I always return to is Mary Oliver. Currently, I am rereading her collection Blue Horses. The poems in this collection are soothing to me right now as I witness so much chaos and heartbreak in our world.  Mary Oliver writes about nature: animals and plants alike as wise, content, sentient beings. But part of what I am drawn to in her poems isn’t just the peaceful imagery, it’s that she challenges us to be better, search deeper within ourselves while simultaneously acknowledging the loneliness of the individual and the dysfunction of the larger society. 

 

I need what she offers in her poetry: a reminder of our potential yet an honest appraisal of our imperfect, sometimes even destructive humanness.

 

This is also the reason I keep writing poetry, not to find an answer in what feels incomprehensible, but to learn my own footing on ever-changing ground. I often turn to nature and poetry to grapple with what I am experiencing. Both hold me here, keepings me steady so that I may live my life and love those around me the best that I can.

 

—Rebecca Watkins

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Ellen Wise

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AT THE END OF THE WAR

 

We emerged, each of us

solo and benumbed.

Burrowing up from the mud 

that reflected only more mud.

                                                                                                            

We were seeking a single, 

unexcavated breadcrumb 

of wonder, but instead spied, 

rising like a fountain aflame, 

 

columns of madly wrangling

angels and scorpions, 

entangled and clinging 

as if the mission, the mis-

adventure of war, 

demanded that we devour 

and become each other. 

 

It seems to us 

the only treasure left to find, 

at the end of the war, 

at the end of the world,

was the unfortunate advent 

of this uneasy peace.

 

൪

 

When writing a poem, inspiration often first comes as unbidden sounds and rhythms that 

pinball around my mind’s inner ear in a sonic onslaught of syllables, vowels and consonants 

that collide and carom as if seeking an opening to unconscious meaning. Meanwhile, in a competing region of my brain, I shuffle the words whose many-layered etymologies morph

over time to deepen and complicate a poem’s conscious meaning. 

 

In an essay, T. S. Eliot described something similar that he called “auditory imagination.” 

It is, he wrote, the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious 

levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and 

the end. 

 

In my own writing and in my readings of others’ work, regardless of subject, form, tone, 

or tenor, it’s always the sounds of the words themselves that render me helpless to resist. 

And when urgent upwelling of feeling ends in unconstrained utterance, well, what to do, 

but clamber aboard as a willing captive and ride along, all the way to the end of the line.

 

—Ellen Wise

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