E. M. KOMISAR
“She found her faith in static broadcast stations, / The grainiest and blurriest were best”
Sonnet
AMIT MAJMUDAR
“How does he square his fiddling with rhymes / with such unbearably precarious times”
SCOTT RAY
“We smelled the smoke before we saw the fire”
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”
MICHAEL BROWN
“Like Job, he kneels, hands placed before him on the ground”
ADAM TAVEL
“One horseshoe clangs against an iron spike. / You breathe them in: their glimmered bayonets.”
SALLY THOMAS
“All day the oak came down. The bright air glinted / With fine red sawdust as with locust wings.”
PEDRO POITEVIN
“It springs from mystery like window dew. / It glows in the abrasion of a match.”
CAROL FRITH
“My neighbor’s motion lights ignite, / light up the privet tree, the dying firethorn hedge”
ROB WRIGHT
“I wish that all the hours I’ve spent with bores / in heated arguments were mine again.”
RICHARD WAKEFIELD
“An old man at his kitchen window sees / by winter light”
TONY BARNSTONE
“Descartes installed the eyeball of an ox / in a small hole through which the daylight sprayed / inverted figures of the world’s parade”
JEHANNE DUBROW
“I walk to Safeway where the air stays on / and wander through the frozen foods, the cold / glass coffins”
JUDITH KUNST
“At twelve, she saw so little and so much / in seven stars”
PETER SWANSON
“Think thin, America, in silhouettes / Of evening dress and city lines.”
PHILIP DACEY
“She sits as if before the stillest lake”
MORI CREECH
“I struck the match. My child watched dead leaves burn”
AMIT MAJMUDAR
“Solitudes crowded past at every floor / And filled the lift beginning at the back.”
