Journal

Lynn Martin is an award-winning poet who has written Where the Yellow Field Widened:  Elegies for a Lost Child (1994); and Blue Bowl (2000). She studied Dante in Italy as a fellow to the National Endowment of the Humanities.

Solo Time

The chilly fresh air,
the clouds rolling in and out,
and Spring is where?

The bird song echoes,
the trees leaves whispering loud–
this is Oregon, my home

Cold but weirdly warm,
birds flying above in swarms–
this is the perfect life

Cassidy O’Brien is a fifth grade student at Chapman Hill Elementary in West Salem. She enjoys reading and laughing with friends.

Suppose Death, driving a black Dodge Ram

with custom chrome-aluminum wheels,
causes a multi-car pile-up outside of Tacoma
scoring two fatalities, then one more,
by forcing a target-bound woman off the road at Exit 234.

Suppose he barrels off at a rest stop
somewhere in Oregon. A toothpick hanging
out of the left side of his mouth
he lolls in the noon-day sun
against one of the wooden poles

supporting a plastic encased state map.
Death holds a cold cup of free coffee,
and scans his surroundings. Suppose
a thirty-something guy
with blond dreadlocks and empty eyes

crouches outside the restroom entry
next to a scrappy backpack,
a corrugated cardboard sign
and his angelic four year old son
scratching the dirt with a sharp stick.

Suppose the Grim Reaper, with a sly smile,
strolls over and slips the child a five.
The child puts the finishing touch
on his stick-figure super-hero,
lifts his head and gazes up.

Pushing silky curls from his brow
he meets the Reaper’s grimace
with a wide-open sun-bright smile.
Suppose Death, suddenly startled,
has a change of heart.

He abandons the Dodge,
pinches a red Porsche convertible,
jumps over its driver’s-side door,
settles into a white leather bucket seat,
and peels back out on I-5–

pedal floored, face windward, beach hair blown toward eternity.

Sandra Rokoff-Lizut came to poetry at the age of seventy-one and finds that it feeds her well. She has had quite a few poems published in fine journals. She is honored to be surrounded by a wealth of great teacher-mentors within a supportive poetry community. 

Just a Third Grader

During the war, I wanted to be a fighter pilot,
but I would probably have crashed and be captured
and tortured. All I could do was pull my wagon

around from house to house, collecting newspapers
for the newspaper drive, and in a basement room
at school, Janitor Wesley weighed my papers, gave me

a slip of paper with my name, date, and weight—
then tied my papers into bundles and neatly stacked
them against the wall. I kept his notes at home.

Paper-clipped, in a box in my chest under my bed.
I liked to take them out and thumb through them.
Each day the pile of papers at school climbed higher

up the wall. Then one day a delivery door
opened and light poured in. The truck backed up
to the door and a guy got out and threw

the bundles of papers in the truck,
closed the door and drove off. The room
was so empty it felt like a torture room.

Peter Sears, poet laureate emeritus, offered this poem as a prompt for the issue. For more information about him, click on Poet Laureate Prompts in the menu.