Poetry

the great northern poem

By john creary
has not been written. No, but it is here. It’s there, North of your first breath, North of your / free speech. North of going bald or being blind. North of crumpled...
Contest Winner

doggerel

By Debbie Strange
another summer’s scorching dog day afternoon / i’m watching the dogs of war and hounds of hell / in their bloody dog-fights / chase the tail of some flea-ridden mongrel country /...
Contest Winner

Thirty Five

By Anne Swannell
knows it’s / odd, /   /   / longs to become three dozen / doughnuts for the office do / eggs for the wedding breakfast / poems by Garrison Keillor /...

chamelier

By Misty Elliot
My proof of choice was moonshine / a fermented sugar that could parch every last hydrogen / pearl from the sky. / Lost to fire spirits, memory is porous, / earthenware, /...

as a child

By Kate Flaherty
Poppa’s trinkets shudder / and rattle against the window-shelf pane / whenever one of the grans primes the pump outside: / an Alaskan fishnet float of glass, the old-fashioned / spun sugar...

Where you came from

By Amy Leah White
I made a crude vessel, a trough my sweetheart. / Shiny pigs, the knives went rooting in the muck of me. / Thorax divided neatly, they nudged aside intestines braided thick, /...
Contest Winner

Road Conditions

By Renée Griffiths
january weather is agitated daily along / the four-oh-one. each nimbus vessel / pausing to think before sloughing / ice, rain, snow, hail. / this is one nervous system. /   /...
Contest Winner

Dear Elizabeth

By Maureen Scott Harris
Your letters have kept me company for weeks / but now I feel the wrench of parting, the book / about to end, and so I read more slowly, put / it...
Contest Winner

This is for Richardson’s Ground Squirrel

By Katherine Lawrence
flickertail, picketpen, tawny burrowing pest / of the short grass prairie, crippler of horse & rider, / cattle bison ox; tractor disabler, axle wheel breaker, / you warrant a pardon, you &...