​Takashi Toyooka CC



​Ecosystems 

The farmland sits in a separate realm away. We keep
to ourselves, puncturing maple trees at the end of winter
to bring a slow bleed of life. Watching for wind to pass 
over birch trees like a sign of hope, of seasons shifting. It 
is a gift, though, to have a thousand words to describe 
wintertime. Of the snow that cuts off the dirt lane from
the outer world, or the frost blinding the glass windows of 
the house. The richness of land rolling south and north is 
without fault, revealing pockets of places, like a second 
world beneath a fallen tree. A thousand growing things
exist beneath rot, and we marvel at it, listening
to each heartbeat of sap falling in metal buckets. The 
world within a world is untouched, and we stand yet
on the brink of a third world, of a season unraveling. 





The poets always end up on the subject of the moon

The poets cry about the moon / and the crone, the maiden / and also 
the mother / and ends up comparing it to the drought of the body / 
or the second body walking out the door / and after the applause the 
moon begins a new phase / waxing and waning / splitting into a 
leering smile to pull out / like stage tricks / a representation of 
girlhood heartbreak / red solo cups / or cigarette smoke uncurling 
in the night / the poets later ask / tell me you’re a poet without saying 
you’re a poet / asking for a confession of love for the moon / trusting
that no matter the darkness / the moon will somehow return / and 
that is how poets begin anew / starting with it / ending up all the same / 
waiting for the next phase. 

​

             ​Sippanont Samchai CC

​

​

             Sippanont Samchai CC




Late Morning, Separation

Walking in the fields, driving
the long roads to nowhere
in particular, all was 
distance. We did not belong
as a mountain might,
together to its blue. There was

no going further so we sang
teach us to care then
teach us to move on. How
the mountain can unslip its centuries
of hue. But now, who will remember

I held a newborn goat all damp
heat and legs. Who will I hold
it up to? The finegrain light
through the mist, off the bay
touches the darkpined islands--

The ones newcomers are always mistaking
                                                               at first for mountains.
​

​

             ​Colby Stopa CC



How Time Travel Presents a Challenge for Humans

When I have hard days I want to write as if
there are no other choices and nothing
else worthwhile in the world to do.
I mention this, then gaze up at Crow.
I'm not holding a can attached to a string
but I still feel silly, anxious. I puff out
a breath: in for a penny.

Crow closes one glossy eye.
Despite the tide and drift of ages,
holy places endure.

I tip that side to side and look
for a spillage of insight.
Nothing.

Wait. Thirty million years—that's my
thought. That's how long Crow's kind
have been carrying food to ghosts,
speaking the languages of clan and kindred.
Seeding new fields, forests, fables.

My kind? Six million, give or take.
Our stories were minted yesterday
or five minutes ago, comparatively.

Crow peers down at me and I see myself
reflected: no one goes alone? Then I see
that's not it at all.

No other creatures are deep time travelers.
Frequent out-of-now flyers. Consider the
lilies of the field, birds of the air
and all that for example. Yeah: just us
wandering around out there, haunting
the past or future, now and then getting
a loaf or a note from crows.

Too damn much time thinking about dying
and what thousand places I'm not, the
ten thousand things I'm not doing right
this minute
today.

Deep breath, nine more.

Crow stretches one wing, turns to face
the other way. Your power is finite,
but not useless.

I smile finally, and recall my clean
timeworn body to the present.

It's a hard holy day.
I walk up the mountain
and put pen to paper.




​
​At the Edge

There is a softening
where the sky is wet with ink
and the pine grove
smells of resin despite the snow.

My hope is pliable, though
at first it was a slab broken
from a horror-house ceiling--
a piece of corroded shipwreck or
chain wire fence.

Some dream of it, but that's just dreams.
Everything we're conditioned to want
is still for sale isn't it?

I find it kneads more readily now
despite hands that shake.

There is suffering in this
but also an inscrutable stamina--
a healing more profound than death,
a curative that sings to bees despite
wind changes and dire daily horoscopes.

The universe is groping hard toward
something buoyant, risen. One day soon
we will not recognize ourselves.

Whisper to the milkweed as it flies--
ask advice of ghosts and put your hands
on the trees while they dream.
Even rivers have questions.

So much is alive.
So very much is alive.





How often the wind changes course over the mountains

A common fantasy of the wind up here
is progress unimpeded. Or maybe a better
buzz word is less than lethal.

I want everything to stay the same
while June is tickling fresh except
for my son carrying milk downtown
for his friends, a remedy for pepper spray
or diluted baby shampoo when they were small
and non-compliant. Cornsilk heads
can't be repaired like the watch
my son wears despite cell phones. Sadly
the milk and baking soda don't work
for tear gas, only cakes.

I have one pepper plant already
June-ing but the bullets are not rubber--
they have a metal core with
a polymer coating, hardened plastic
to disperse protesters or for a laugh
or a buzz, multitasking
like a mother of three small boys
ticking down to baths full of soft
bones and plastic to disperse
bedtime stories and sponge

grenades. Yesterday we dug three wild onions
the size of tangerines, the size of
projectile ammunition from the mountain.
They were crisp but without sting
and I didn't cry cutting them. 
I replanted the severed roots
and small hands and voices anyway.

Wind your watch to allow cartridges
to be reloaded quickly. They are safer
than June shock devices and still maintain
knock down weeping and when they bleed
we glue them up or have them embroidered
in every color of the rainbow, or black.

To repair the damage we must confess
our bones inside, ticking, and replant them
as many times as necessary.

            Lenny DiFranza CC



​Dante Was Wrong
 
In Dante’s Divine Comedy,
he proposed there are nine circles of hell
and claims to have walked through each.
 
He forgot to mention 
         the circle of hell reserved for watching your favorite aunt lose her memory,
         the circle when the person you love marries someone else,
         the circle reserved for not making it in time for a visit before your friend dies,
         the circle where you wait on a hospital floor for a diagnosis
         and how you sink into another when you’re given the word, “terminal.”
 
The circle of hell reserved for the phone ringing, and ringing,
and your sister telling you their heart stopped working, they didn’t survive the accident,
 
or the level of hell reserved for when you break the news to your sister
and listen to her shatter on the other line.
 
No one addresses that spaces in hell for the aftermath of grief
the way your bones continue to operate but your chest hollows out.
 
So how many circles of hell
are there really? 





If you let me,

I would spend every second of every day
telling you I love you.
 
If you let me,
I would rearrange the solar system,
so the moon can’t affect your tides.
 
If you let me,
I would make your hands into velvet,
not so that they touch me softer,
but so they’re gentler to you.
 
If you let me,
I would kiss away your scabs so often
the skin won’t ever scar.
 
If you let me,
I would brighten the darkest day,
and if you were too far gone,
join you in the dark.
 
If you let me,
I would lay on the bathroom floor with you,
while the shower runs,
until my voice is the only thing you hear.
 
If you let me, 
I would help erase the memory 
of everyone whose hands have hurt you,
until every touch was new. 
 
If you let me,
I would love you. 

           smilla4 CC


​

Foundation

Unable to stand in our hillside orchard,
too weak to swing a mattock or to wrestle

with dirt, my dad wants to plant peach trees.
For him, I tear the earth open.

Rocks bleed out from the poor mountain soil,
and I unwrap swaddled peach roots.

Before I scrape the dirt back and tamp it down, 
I return the largest rock under the young roots,

a surrogate for what I fear. I bury it back,
imagine the roots encircling the rock,

enclosing it, building from its foundation.
Like the hard stone buried in the sweetest fruit.

​



​Unburied

Slick with summer, my father’s cattle lumber
over hills, their rounded bellies full of grass
and unborn calves. They watch as I follow
fence lines, wonder how the strong barbed
wire breaks, how the briar hells overtake
once clean rows. I hack the blackberries
and the wild rose, patch the strands of wire
the way my father taught me. I cut cedar
saplings at their base, clear the pastures
of fallen tree limbs. Of cow bones, too--
unburied by wild dogs and packs of coyotes
that howl in the night—hungering for flesh,
finding all that’s left is bone.





​On the Other Side of Wilderness

We lowered our heads 
in sorrow and disappeared 
into the tall woods 
without hatchet or arrows. 
We taught ourselves to not leave
tracks among the pine
needles and stinging nettles,
learned killing a wolf 
brought revenge from other wolves.
We learned to taste disease.

*

In January
Venus will reign in the sky.
On the other side
of wilderness, we will see 
that last year’s sorrows belong 
to last year, that we’re
embryo inside acorn,
wind inside the wind.
And earth’s dirt—through dark and damp--
will be more garden than grave.

Denton Loving is the author of the poetry collection Crimes Against Birds (Main Street Rag, 2015) and editor of Seeking Its Own Level, an anthology of writings about water (MotesBooks, 2014).  Follow him on twitter @DentonLoving.

               Paul Wordingham CC



​
Clouds


1.

The clouds overhead flank 
a spine that spirals across the blue.
Is that your x-ray displayed 
to signify the ultimate sacrifice? 


2.

The splintered half-lines are branches 
of my moist bronchial tree
swelling with the setting sun,
bursting with yellow birds in flight. 


3.

The bones belong to the fish
that swims parallel to the halo 
crowning your head, to the long curl
of your calf as you glide to the right. 


4.

Adam’s ribs are here to rank. See, 
I was formed from man—crafted 
from a roll of dice—rushing to bone, 
returning to dust, hanging by the string of a kite.

​

              strahovi CC




​HOW THE BODY HEALS ITSELF: A LOVE POEM TO MY SCARS
 
As unsettling as it is, blood is the first sign of healing––
the body's first responder, scabbing into a natural bandage,
 
nursing the wreckage. Blood vessels around the injury constrict, 
tight as stitches, knowing by some wondrous instinct
 
when to widen again to allow oxygen and nutrients into the damage.
A cut remains open under the scab until the third stage of healing, 
 
when new skin forms where the old was interrupted.
The edges pull inward and the wound becomes 
 
a smaller scar. The body's miracle is knowing how to heal itself.
And if this is extraordinary, then what does that say about the hundreds 
 
of healed scars that layer my arms? Once, the edge of a razor blade
was the only way  I knew how to survive; a blade made to carve 
 
away all of the ugly shame gnarled so bone-deep
inside me, it had to be cut out. I had to slash the memory
 
of a monster's hands from my body; who stabbed my childhood
in its chest the night he crept into my room. But after the mutilation,
 
I would wash the wounds out with care, layering antibiotic into the lacy
gauze bracelets that I used to dress the cuts with the softness of a mother's
 
touch. I did try my best to learn how to care for my body;
yet couldn't stop making more lacerations, couldn't quit the surgical precision
 
of self destruction. There was no other way free, and the cuts were just as hideous
as the hurt, anyway. Weren't they? You get so used to telling the past
 
one way that all the other ways start to feel impossible;
but there is something still so possible,
 
so marvelous within the story of my scars:
the way the blood knew how to clot itself, the swift
 
and tender narrowing of capillaries surrounding the wound,
the scab formed of my own salt and white blood cells;
 
the way my body tended to its own healing,
the best and only way it knew how.

​

             ​Alberto Garcia CC



Encompassing Noise
​
Wind through the pines. Ringing in my ears.
Both persistent. I came to the mountain to think
about who matters but all I hear are tones
in my head—subtle whir of a fan, slosh of waves,
call of one distant bird whose cries never cease.

Voices outside my head can't compete.

The sound of my parents arguing is the steady
rise and fall of word swallows headed to the barn. 
He had expectations, my father, that my mother 
would care for him in his old age, his Parkinson's. 

My mother's bee of resentment buzzed 
in the background, until one day, silence. 
The making of honey fell to my brother,
the one who stayed.
 
I am like her in all ways that matter save one.
Left with an insistent low drone loop in my head, 
it drowns incomplete thoughts at birth, 
expectations tiny bee corpses at my feet.





Dangling Over the River on a Fraying Rope

You listen at the window,
sixteen and dateless, afraid to expose need.
 
Your mother dies, becomes an abstract.
Her image wavers, voice fades to vapor.
Too soon she is silvered photograph,
squinting against harsh light.

You haunt the open window, wait
for your mother to give you a sign, 
to sing down from the heavens.
 
We don't bury anything anymore.

Outsiders prepare the dead.
Others speak words of comfort.
Strangers dig a hole in the ground,
leaving you to fill it with fistfuls of regret.





​First Impressions
             People can reliably tell if someone is richer or poorer than average
             just by looking at a neutral face without any expression. Over time,
             your face comes to permanently reflect and reveal your experiences.
                                                                                                   Source: University of Toronto

Forgive me, child, for not putting a happy face on our poverty.
Psychology research says my (and your) success depends on it.

God knows I kept my face as neutral as possible when the police
came poking around because you said Fuck that to a teacher,

or when I applied for yet another job that promised me time
with the kids and money enough to pay for food and sports gear.

Forgive me for not knowing my social class showed on my face,
the desperation etched there for all to see, where others--

wealthy, satisfied—had contentment plastered all over theirs.
Those cutting remarks, looks of disdain after asking for free school

lunches is the blush on my cheeks and cultivated blank expression.
If only people like us knew our place.

How dare we have a television, a cell phone, a steak for dinner.
We should suffer. Be the noble poor. It's written on my face.

How dare we have hope for a better future for our social class.
See, child, people judge you before they know you.

They excuse it as nonverbal behavior. It's not their fault,
they say. It's hardwired. Cue driven. They never gave us a chance.

Go forth and take all the glory you can, child. Spit in the face
of societal expectations. Don't let psychology steal your happiness. 

Be the beast.​

​

           Alberto Garcia CC



Learning, Still

Little unlearned lessons
make their way back to me.
I still can't remember
how to truly forget
 
It fell between chairs.
At times the divide is
so vast it envelops like
the last snowfall from
a place of no return
 
We look at each other
like earthenware dogs do.
You learn, you forget, you relearn
until somehow it becomes you
 
You must be calm to fight a tiger.
I am still grasping how to channel
the merciless rage of the tempest
become the calm, meet the tiger's gaze
and realize there was no separation

​