E. M. KOMISAR
“She found her faith in static broadcast stations, / The grainiest and blurriest were best”
Iambic
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 .”
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”
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”
MARYANN CORBETT
“Perfect: the singers, strings, and keyboards. Perfect // Bruised sky above the tents of the squatters’ district”
RICHARD WAKEFIELD
“An old man at his kitchen window sees / by winter light”
STEPHEN KAMPA
“Beloved woman, beautiful and scared”
PHILIP DACEY
“She sits as if before the stillest lake”
MORI CREECH
“I struck the match. My child watched dead leaves burn”
QUINCY R. LEHR
“There’s thudding from the floor above that never seems to stop. / I’m trying to sleep, or waiting for the other shoe to drop”
