Three Poems
On Kansas 156 All the radio has to sayis eighties rock and Kenny Rogers.You get behind a horse trailerand stay there because you can’t seearound it and, oh man,the radio seek stops on “Right Down The Line,”Gerry Rafferty making love sound uncrappy whether you’re...
The Social Virtues Series
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Two Poems
Rule number one is to lay it on thick
for anybody that asks about what you do.
This way you’ll seem brooding and dark,
like you maybe know something that they don’t
Tethers
Kaya was risk averse. While our older dog Sappho bloodied her nails scrambling up scree and once gashed her ears tailing an elk through barbed wire, Kaya stayed at our sides with four paws on the ground. She walked off leash for most of her life, rarely enjoyed running, and endured 4th of July fireworks by standing with her head stretched under a coffee table.
At the Naples Botanical Garden
Through the bougainvillea and clematis arch, / past the placards for Screw Palm, Gru-Gru, / Powder Puff, blocking the sun from our eyes / to get a better look at a maroon bloom
The Elaine Race Massacre by J. Chester Johnson
This Green Mountains Review special feature by J. Chester Johnson includes an essay and poems that explore the Elaine Race Massacre, an Arkansas riot that occurred in 1919.
Beholding Hope: A review of Jeffrey Levine’s At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered
In At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered, Levine begins his cinematic collection with the lifeblood line of the book in the second poem: “we know there is something more.” As he shifts in and out of the domestic and the divine in his poems, we feel a deep longing for kinship and connect with a speaker who is unabashed in his belief in what isn’t wholly known. Sometimes, we are located within a piece of art, and at other times, we are right in the middle of a myth or standing there, cooking in his kitchen.
Notes from Isolation
All day I watch boats from the living room window. I do other things, of course, but I always come back to the boats—yachts, skiffs, catamarans. Occasionally, there’s even a dinghy, white or blue, with a small figure aboard, paddling madly.
I used to think there could be nothing lonelier than boating, but these days, I have reconsidered.
Do-gooders
Warm, radiant afternoon after days and days of rainy gloom,
the girls bursting with born-again good intention.
“I want to eat more vegetables. Carrots and broccoli and green beans,”
Giulia announces from her car seat.
Venison, Ham & Butter Beans
I wait. I listen. I look. Nothing happens. I think, so, this is hunting.