ISABEL VANDER BLEEK
“I gave up alcohol for Lent / And took up cigarettes. / My choice was met with loud dissent, / In vaguely loving threats.”
E. M. KOMISAR
“She found her faith in static broadcast stations, / The grainiest and blurriest were best”
ANA MICHALOWSKY
“When small, she’d wake, hearthside, to cook and clean with courage. / But then the prince arrived: for her a princess carriage.”
AMIT MAJMUDAR
“How does he square his fiddling with rhymes / with such unbearably precarious times”
AMIT MAJMUDAR
“Caterpillars build their bunkers out / of terror.”
SCOTT RAY
“We smelled the smoke before we saw the fire”
JOHN POCH
“Don’t touch it yet. The gun is not a toy. / This isn’t home, or church, or work, or school”
QUINCY R. LEHR
“That was one more year of America, / a smoking fuselage that never crashes”
PEDRO POITEVIN
“I will remain here on the sidelines where / each Saturday I witness my son glide / over slide tackles with a cocky stride .”
ANA MICHALOWSKY
“We curse. We gather arms. We show our bloody beasts. / Once every word is drawn and swung, we turn to silence.”
DAVID ROSENTHAL
“You’ll come across it in some database– / an arcane list, an ancient family tree– / a ghost town on the edge of cyberspace”
SPENCER HUPP
“Hedge of high sumac that fences the yard / May you be fetid by spring from poor keeping”
JOHN PHILIP DRURY
“‘Ever the best of friends,’ your letters ended, / great expectations for a wave of years / that promised more reunions, correspondence. / But all that’s over.”
MICHAEL BROWN
“Like Job, he kneels, hands placed before him on the ground”
QUINCY R. LEHR
“Up late. The wife asleep, the laptop screen / a nightlight of sorts, I semi-surf the web— / a Twitter deep dive—another angry teen / was shocked by murder into eloquence.”
JEAN L. KREILING
“The palette loses warmth: the hair gone gray, / the teeth not quite so white”
J.C. SCHARL
“See, along the path those clustered sword-like leaves? / Those are the irises, my son”
ADAM TAVEL
“One horseshoe clangs against an iron spike. / You breathe them in: their glimmered bayonets.”
MEASURE REVIEW 