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CONTENTS |
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| John Ashbery: A Symposium | |
| David St. John | "Illustration": Luster |
| Ann Lauterbach | "A Blessing in Disguise": Enlightened Trust |
| David Walker | "Summer": Cryptography, Desire, and the Secret Language of Nature |
| Jonathan Holden | "A Tone Poem": Rude Color |
| Bin Ramke | "Just Someone You Say Hi To": Say Hello to the Nice Man |
| Ed Barrett | "Crossroads in the Past": Techie |
| Lee Upton | "Get Me Rewrite": I Want Candy |
| **** | |
| Michael Chitwood | Threshold At the Wilco with Some Founding Fathers From Whence |
| Ioanna Carlsen | Walking the Dog When Hermes Whispers |
| Karl Krolow | The Couple Way Down Below |
| Gerald Majer | 1939: Duke Ellington: The Kiss |
| Martha Ronk | A Moon, A Memory, A Paper Boat Logic of Alphabets |
| Ellen Wehle | Lead Sympathetic Magic |
| Venus Khoury-Ghata | "The dead, she says..." "There is winter in her sleep..." "She says..." "Winter is painful to her..." |
| Carol Henrie | Preferment Airing the Sickroom After a Week of Rain |
| Betsy Sholl | Vertical Melancholy |
| Peggy Ann Tartt | A Tanka |
| Inge Pedersen | Blue Wild Pursuit Salt |
| Jon Loomis | Addictions Ars Poetica Sex |
| Jim Daniels | Early March, St. Paul's Seminary, Minnesota |
| Patty Seyburn | The Lady Vanishes (Return of) The Lady Vanishes |
| Alan Michael Parker | Books and Money |
| John Witte | You Were Right |
| Mary Quade | Hammer Dress |
| Janice N. Harrington | A Colored Woman Cannot Sing What There Was Tanner's "The Banjo Lesson," 1893 |
| Sean McDonnell | Song #1 |
| Sandro Penna | Five Poems |
| James Longenbach | Providence Unspoken |
| Juli Nunlist | Viewpoint |
| Dane Zajc | Solitude Encounters Woman from a Desert Ransom |
| Michael Van Walleghen | When... |
| January Gill | Drinking |
| George Bilgere | Stupid Cordell Jennifer |
| Gerald Stern | Burning Roses |
| Pattiann Rogers | Alpha and Omega A Statement of Certainty |
The car that knocked the deer to the roadside
is long gone. Maybe there's gray-brown bristle still stuck
to the fender, maybe a dent in the quarter panel.
This time of year they don't decay so much as deflate,
the rawhide bag leaking until it's flat,
the hair matted and sodden with cinder-pocked snow.
Come spring, there'll be a scar in the shoulder grass
where the doe sagged into a tattered rug,
welcome mat at the random threshold of the next world.
The pond is holding up the stone a boy threw.
He won't be here to notice, he may no longer be a child,
when the ice softens just enough for the rock
to ease through and plunge to the pond's dark bottom.
--Michael Chitwood
Dark night, flashlight,
you and the dog walking.
He's got a companion...
at first you think it's just a shadow.
But what you think is a shadow
becomes a dog you actually knew,
a dog who once lived with you,
a shadow so much the other side of light
every time your black dog moves,
the other moves,
and in between their two tails
a triangle of light connects them,
your black dog
and the dog that's not a dog,
the figment real as a shadow,
a shadow conveying the intensity of fur,
that plays with him,
turning as he does, accurate as himself,
twisting around some invisible center,
his familiar--
a shadow that whispers
in all the shades of black
come back
this thing that being alive is,
something you forget
that remembers you.
--Ioanna Carlsen