It's February, sir,
that's the cruellest month,
once your days
are numbered.

Susan Berlin's poems have appeared in the Harvard Review and Ploughshares, among many others. Twice a finalist in the National Poetry Series, six-time nominee for a Pushcart Prize, she was awarded the 16th Annual Galway Kinnell Poetry Prize and recently received an International Publication Prize from the Atlanta Review for Outstanding Poetic Achievement.

When I talk of a trip I mean forever,
             ~ Adrienne Rich

To float day after day
on a broad river
into whatever comes after—
as the early Americans
are said to have done—
seems not the worst way;

to follow the river's bend,
slowly separating
from the known
letting the carved canoe,
with its scant provision
of dried maize, wend
toward a greater water
where no one
has seen the end;

to give oneself
to the journey
the way the arctic tern must
when it begins its long flight
to a dimly remembered spot,
sensing the direction
one wing beat at a time;

to travel night
after star-lit night
until you get there,
until you're gone.

Yvonne Postelle is a poet living in California.

Heaven, She Supposes

is that place where the cops
do not leave the ladder
leaning against the house
for three days, the alarm
blaring so the whole damn world
knows you've been gone
for at least a week--
where they at least scoop up the dead rat
outside McDonald's
or the tennis shoes
from of the middle of Jefferson Avenue
where the child got hit
instead of leaving them
there like some sort of admonition;

heaven, she supposes
is where the thief
who gets in at night even if you are home
does it discreetly,
almost Biblically,
stealing only the important things
in such a way
that you think
you've merely misplaced them--
the earrings in a pocket maybe
or the wedding ring
on the back of the sink
instead of tearing the place apart
ransacking even the children's room
as if they own stock in Fisher-Price
and hide it in the Play Family Village;

heaven, she supposes
might even have been that place
on Lenox Street
where the curtains were yellow
and the cutlery matched
if only her Mama'd taken her
in her arms
and said, O Baby
why didn't you tell me?

instead of smacking her
until her eyes swelled shut
as if not being able to see the man
she made her call Daddy
sneak into her room
at night
would mean it didn't happen.

O God, she thinks,
somewhere in the desert
there must be a cold stream
where you can lie down
and let the water turn the blood
to ice in your veins--
let you be sucked under
just long enough
so that when you come up
(if you come up--if you have to)
it is someplace downstream
where, even if it is the Detroit River
at least you'll be numb enough
so that when
you catch your reflection
you won't be totally mystified
if it shifts
and everything seems
entirely different.

And So You

put on the red mini dress
and you tell the sitter
that you'll be back
before ten
because you're still breast feeding
and even though it's the Winans
and the tickets were pricey
and you should stay the whole time
you won't even though you'll be tempted
because at some point during Celebrate New Life
there is this feeling of dread
that even if you come home earlier
than you said
she'll be asleep on the sofa
and the baby will have
cried so long
that the three-year old
will try to feed him
and there will be
a busted jar of Gerber's
on the floor by the fireplace
there will be glass in their hands
and in the baby's diaper
and blood
will be everywhere
and your fingers will be
shaking so bad
you can't dial the doctor
all you'll be able to do
is scream at her lazy ass
threaten to slit her throat
except that
the children are waiting
for you to
catch them up
bury your face
in their shirts,
breathe the life
their very souls
back into them.

Alinda Wasner's work has appeared in thirty small press publications including Fresh Water: Women Writing About the Great Lakes, Passages North, The Wayne Review, The Wittenberg Review and Michigan Natural Resources. Honors include the Wayne State University Tompkins Prize for Poetry, Fiction and Essay, an Amelia Press Award, the Wittenberg Poetry Award, The Lester Crowell Creative Writing Award, The Judith Siegal Pearson Prize, a Mr. Cogito Press Award, a Flume Press Award, and a MacGuffin prize, third place winner in the 2007 Chicago Poetry Center juried awards, the 2007 Prague Writer's Workshop scholarship, semi-finalist in the 2007 Comstock Review Poetry Contest. Her chapbook, Departures/Arrivals was published by Ridgeway Press, and TailSpin, her latest, from Erstwhile Press. She lives in Lansing, MI.

Gulsum pours lamp oil over her head,
lets the warm liquid rain-soak into her roots.

She strokes the match.   Flames
finger-crawl up Gulsum's arm.
Her hair flares. Black curls
burn to crackle and smoke.

Her husband turns.

A neighbor woman beats the blaze
with her veil. It is her best veil -
white silk, red-embroidered with roses.
The veil vaporizes.

The scent of scorched rose petals
lingers in the ambulance.

Only later
in the sterile burn unit
does Gulsum smell the burned half of her face,
the soot like vacuum dust in her lungs.

The nurse dribbles apricot juice
on Gulsum's tongue.   Her lips sip the nectar.
The sweetness lingers kiss-sticky in her mouth.

When the doctor unwinds - slow as love -
the white shroud from her head
Gulsum watches in the hand mirror.
The unveiling reveals the tired,
half-turned face of an old midwife.

Gulsum looks at her good right eye:
black-lashed, it is pretty enough
for flirting with the doctor. Its iris
blooms big with morphine.

The midwife's eye cries.
The teenager's eye dreams the future.

Bertha smells the post-dirge darkness,
the sad candles swaying in tiered
rows like a chorus of mourners.

In the front pew she finds a tranquilizer.
It is white as a de-nucleated eye.
Bertha stares into its blankness
then swallows it down.

On her knees she sweeps up grief's debris:
crumpled prayer cards, balled-up kleenex.
Dead carnation heads roll into her dustpan.

When Bertha plunges her mop into the wash bucket
its dreadlocks drip water like a baptized skull.

There are scuff marks to clean:
the soldier's widow drilled her black
high heels into the floor's pine planks.

Bertha still has the black dress,
the black purse from when her son
came home from Nam in a zippered bag.
She bought him a mahogany coffin
with glimmering brass handles.

Bertha scrubs the stations-of-the-cross:
that death story, sculpted out of the cold
stone wall. She touches the nail-heads,
the hole in his side.

Bertha washes his limbs, the limp
soles of his feet. She lingers in front of the tomb.
He sleeps, he sleeps so hard.

Ellen LaFleche has worked as a journalist and women's health educator in western Massachusetts. Publications include The Ledge, and Words and Pictures Magazine, among others.

What's past is nothing and remembering
is not seeing.—Fernando Pessoa, as Alberto Ceiro

Never tell what might have been—
dull stories of almost but not quite
and never was and who cares anyway
but fools babbling on of the heart
attack survived, the rabid dog outrun,
that turn at the last second—accident
that almost was, but wasn't—love
un-snared, so how can it be lost?

Move your hand across the bruised
limbs and knotted branches of grafted
apple trees, thick with spring and mourning
of the homeless swarm. Listen
to the high keening of the wind,
of widows—their voices sound the same
in winter—and learn that fruitless melody.
Taste the sea and someone else's tears
to understand your own are bland,
indistinct. New grass forgets
the sharp teeth of frost. Last summer
owns no light; it has been spent
among the high branches of the pines.

Crickets' cadenced dirges, whirring
downward of maple seeds to their own
burial, death rattles in the narrow throat
of the desiccated gourd: herein
lay a hundred million secrets,
but only one revelation, one
certainty—no matter what
might have been, what was.

Remember the trap you set as a child
just to see what could be caught—
crushed wing and broken leg
of the sparrow there, pale flesh
around the surprised round eyes—
how the sun shone down on you
both and on the winter lawn.

Christina Lovin is an award-winning poet. Her work is widely published and anthologized. She is the recipient of artists' grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

I would write a poem about my childhood
but if you're going to write poetry
you need to use words like “bitter” or “soul dead” or
something that expresses some sort of
angst

and all I can think of is my mother's tuna casserole
with the peas and Campbell's cream of mushroom soup and those
chow mein noodles that were so popular in the 50s
the kind we would eat as a snack right out of the can
if we could get them before she turned them into that
tuna casserole

and about the most dangerous thing in our lives was just
when she would pull out the pack of
True cigarettes she kept in the freezer
light one up and cry and sometimes
drive off in the car after finishing it

I got scared when I smelled those cigarettes

I was never really sure if it was us or the casseroles
or the ranch house we lived in or just what
bitter soul-dead thing had come to roost in her
spreading its shadow
over all of us

Pamela Ethington is a writer and editorial assistant at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, NY.

Moored, unhappily, on the east-facing slope,
he grumbled endlessly over sunset deprivation,
how the house afforded no vista of the clashing clouds,
the titanic spills of mauve and gold,
that others see.

Now and then he'd remember
to run errands around the time of day
when the sun went down,
nudging and tweaking the hour spent
to get him to the spicewood road
that ambled steeply down
the long west face of the hill that led
to the main road back,
and took his time, at that, raising tempers
in the cars behind him so that he would
descend the ridge to the beat
of the sun's own departing song.

He missed the Merrimack, where his home
had perched on the river's edge,
and bends on east and west caught the sun's
chromatic crescendos at first as it rose
and then as it set.

And glorious displays on Cape Cod's soughing shore,
and other lands' ends.

But now he grew older with every night's hello,
longing for the celestial furnace
that once kept him younger with every day's goodbye.

Roy Bernard Mann lives in Austin where he analyses, plans and designs environmental conservation and landscape architectural projects and engages in citizen activism to protect habitat and scenic resources. “He has now turned a good bit of focus toward his quintessential neglected love--poetry.”

Summer brings rain and revolution.

Heat ripples down the cobbled streets
of Oaxaca, Oaxaca, the sing-song city
of heavy cantera stone.  Quiet settles
during siesta, but at night the air clangs
with bells and the piercing frisson of bullets, sirens.

Echoing pings from the tortilla man's high-pitched
metal triangle says safety in the street, at least for the
moment.  Indoors, my computer's cursor blinks at me
like the Cheshire cat.  My mind is a split screen; one side
back flips with the image of a machete-wielding rebel, on the other
side my novel curls in sunlight, languorous as a napping kitten.

Each day I greet my novel,
I pray for a visitation.  My Muse is Mexican;
she doesn't show up on time, sometimes not at all.
I want my characters to save me; pull me into the story so deeply
I can ignore the chaos and shattering light.
I sluice myself with Pound's raspy advice:  "Make it new, make it new."

In the Jacaranda tree, boughs sag with bright green birds.  They caw
Make it weird, make it strange.  Just make it.
I bargain, burn copal all summer.  I beg for a cloak
of words to muffle the exploding story outside my window.

At last she comes.  In the middle of that quiet moment
soft as rustling corn sheaves, I know the story
in the character, the character in the story.  I enter Camille's
mind and body.  My sweet, lost child reveals
herself.  I know why her heart churns and spits.
I finally know her secret.  I pick up my pen and write.

Alice Owens Johnson penned "Writing Under the Gun" during the revolution in Oaxaca, Mexico. Stories have appeared in the O. Henry Festival of Short Stories, I Thought My Father was God, edited by Paul Auster, and Alice Redux: Tales of Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll, also on an affiliate of National Public Radio. She was a finalist in the Hidden River Arts Awards, 2007. She recently completed a novel, ASH WEDNESDAY, written against the backdrop of New Orleans in the turbulent 1950's. “New Orleans is my home no matter where I live.” Currently she resides in Black Mountain, N.C.

The night ocean
shimmers with glinting light.
The moon,
hanging in the velvet darkness,
pours into me and
I forget the way I've been,
the circular life
of unspecified desires,
and the listlessness.

The moon has diminished herself.
She has retreated from the sun
to be in the company of many stars.
She stays up all night to greet the sun.

This is not a night on the calendar.
It's a night beyond the mosaic of imagination,
a night that dissolves through the edge of time
and cascades into an ocean of picturings and pulses.

The turning of the stars,
the breathing galaxies,
the lift and the falling away,
draws me near to the moon.

When I feel this way,
thoughts
even I
don't make sense.

Angella M. Nazarian teaches psychology at local universities in the Los Angeles area. She has great interest in Eastern mysticism and poetry.

Our rooms are infused with the scent
of bread - two loaves,
one plain,

one dotted with millet, quinoa, wheat
germ - a reflection of my need
to complicate the simple.

My daughter kneads
just so long, palm to sticky
dough to which she adds

a hint of flour. My own
clay beats the walls of the mixing bowl,
a testament to tired hands,

less time. Our mounds rise
and we push them down with the heels
of our hands, fold them

into fat origami flowers, cup them
taut as a ball,
firm belly dough.

I watch her turn
her round on the counter,
some magic maneuver she learned

from another. Our loaves
ascend again in clay pans
and what I've let go these past years

returns, if briefly. In the oven our breads
expand over steaming water,
crusts form hard and dark,

hers smooth, mine scarred on top
and spreading open. Our two loaves
cool on racks, still baking inside

she tells me, before the knife
releases heat and the scent of
what is possible in time.

step by wooden step
to the bedroom where he lies
on a horse hair mattress deepened
with forty years.
She straightens his tangled sheets,

listens as he tries again to rouse
the sleeping soldier on the bus.
It is 1941; he knows they are nearly home.
It is the year after coming to America,
after the camps, a book mostly written.
Sometimes

he still reaches trembling fingers
to conceal the window shrapnel sliced
into a brother's skull.
Germany, front line, 1915.
She catches his hand, gives him
water and something for sleep.
Sometimes
he doesn't
know her.
She looks beyond the curtain

to the tree he grafted,
tiny limb wrapped firmly until it held.
She knows its broad sweep, apples,
seedless, green.
She'll stoop to collect them in a paper sack,
later when they fall.

Ronda Broatch is the author of Shedding Our Skins (Finishing Line Press, 2008) and Some Other Eden (FLP, 2005). Nominated for a Pushcart and Best of the Web, Ronda is the recipient of the 2007 Artist Trust GAP Grant.

Christ himself allowed Saint Luke to paint his sacred portrait
so there's no idolatry, just honest craftsmanship, icons on wood
a thousand years old hacked from deserving trees, wood that
serfs might've gladly burned mounted for public display, hung
for agnostics & worse, every heart-shaped countenance utterly
disengaged. You can stand with them like Pasternak & not be
the wiser man, not till you face your shame, flog an already
broken horse or beg for your worthless life but witness that dread
ascent, however you kneel or crawl. How can they float above
altar & cross on solar vermilion rays? How can that primitive
blood-orange light seep from their flaking pores? How can they
breathe those turquoise hues without getting vertigo? They're
not human, those martyrs & saints, those translucent Roswell
eyes, they see Chernobyl & Babi Yar, the gulags you resurrect
no matter your tongue or creed. An innocent system & a guilty
defendant, that's what John Ashcroft said, you can believe
Raskolnikov opened his wretched heart. You can look through
them like cold stained glass warmed by the Arctic sun, where
suffering's sacrosanct. You can appreciate anything
executed so well

Michael Sweeney is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee who teaches at Fairfield University. "Holy Icons of Mother Russia" appears in his book In Memory of the Fast Break, which is forthcoming from Plain View Press. His poem "The Last Cracker" was recently selected by Stephen Dunn as runner-up in the St. Louis Poetry Center's Strong Medicine contest and can be found in Margie, a Journal of American Poetry, Volume Six.

How mean it was of him to bring the deer to the house
when he knew it was for her but pretended
to be giving it to both of them;
and like a buddy showed the husband
how to carve the fur and skin from the fat
and the fat from the meat and how to separate
the muscles and tendons and how to go around
the genitals and the anus and how to pull the guts out
and the liver and the heart and how to do the job.

He enjoyed telling the husband what to do
as if he were telling him how to make love to her,
but the husband thought it was about the deer
and the knife and the body and their meal.

And she saw this and thought it funny
because the lovemaking she had with the hunter
was simple, like something alive,
an engine with its own heart that might,
at any moment, run away.

Make it my name you say and mine you hear
in your sleep my ears near your mouth my arms
in your arms and your hands wrapped in mine
for this one late moment before we turn aside
as earth opens up and swallows us
our complaints and yearnings our harsh syllables
our mouths empty of names and no skull
to fill the hollows of our hands or shore to follow
barefoot behind the summer flies Take this image
into the center of your hand and fold it
into mine as if into a canvas the landscape of
thought desire winter summer all extremes until
we've swallowed the word and the world
of words the world the last

She went into the hall
down the stairs, left him
in their bed breathing the heaving
rhythms of sleep. He turned
and groaned

as she walked though the rooms to the stairs,
and the front door and walked out
into the coolness, the garlands of stars
and the dark sky beyond.
She walked along wet grass into the forested
hillside, overlooking the neighbors
with their midnight lights and dogs;
and she watched the shadows carefully
and heard the whispers of men from ways
still foreign to her as she moved
through the tall grasses, thinking of love,
gliding to the calls of foxes, and the sounds
of deer tumbling into the orchard.

Nellie Hill's poetry and stories have appeared in The Harvard Magazine, Poetry East, American Poetry Review, and The Alaska Quarterly, and in three chapbooks, Astrolabes, Having Come This Far, and Geographies. She has a private acupressure practice in Berkeley where she lives.

On the bank under the green spring willow,
he loves a woman with his eyes.

She gathers up her dress, just above the knee,
and steps into the incandescent stream.

The white water curtsies round her ankles.
Tonight, the moon will set in the small of her back.

Dr. Anthony Hughes is an English Professor at Hilbert College in Hamburg, NY. He has published widely and was a finalist for the Bridgeport Poetry prize in England for his poem, “Ephemeral.” He “lives in Orchard Park with two dogs and a cat and a salt-water aquarium with a sea rose anemone about the size of a dinner plate.”