Journal

Reprinted from CMarie Fuhrman‘s chapbook, Camping Beneath the Dam: Poems, with the author’s permission. For more about the author, please go to the poet laureate prompts here.

 

Atmospheric River

Walking in Northern California rain,
snug under a plastic poncho
I’m bothered neither by wet nor wind.
Brave dogs at my side,
we straddle puddles and gutters
to get our daily exercise
despite downpours ten days out.
Our snowpack is secure
after years of drought and dust.
Forecast calls for “Atmospheric River”,
the latest in dramatic terms
to excite the media-addicted sedentary class.
I continue my walk, tree limbs wave,
our pace reflected in standing water.

Diane Funston writes poetry of nature and human nature. She co-founded a women’s poetry salon in San Diego, created a weekly poetry gathering in the high desert town of Tehachapi, CA and most recently has been the Yuba-Sutter Arts and Culture Poet-in-Residence for the past two years. It is in this role she created Poetry Square, a monthly online venue that features poets from all the world reading their work and discussing creative process. Her first chapbook, Over the Falls, was published in 2022 by Foothills Publishing. Diane is also a visual artist in mosaic, wool felting, and collage.

The Old Carpenter Does Happy Hour

–for Clem Starck

After the invasion of Ukraine, you gave up
studying Russian. These days
your dining room table is piled instead
with histories of Central and Eastern Europe,
biographies of murdered poets,
and several translations of The Street of Crocodiles.

Meanwhile, the fences
around your forty acres of woodland
have started to sag, and the garden plots
your long-dead wife planted decades ago
are gone to blackberries.

Therefore every evening
you take two beers from the fridge,
a stout and a lager, and sit on your veranda
watching the goldfinches and chickadees
take seed from the feeder for an hour,
or even two hours,
almost like a man at peace.

Charles Goodrich writes and gardens near the confluence of the Marys and Willamette Rivers in Corvallis, Oregon. His books include the poetry collections Watering the Rhubarb; A Scripture of Crows; Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden; and Insects of South Corvallis. His first novel, Weave Me a Crooked Basket, was published by the University of Nevada Press in the Fall of 2023. FMI: charlesgoodrich.com

 

i can’t unknow any knowing of a death grip

–for donna

you are no longer asleep & this urgency in you
with some ability to cut into the rest of us surges in
your weakening frame. my hands have never looked
more mortal, outrage of plush circulation against
rough white blanket repeatedly bleached of its
witness. the backs of yours are bruised, thin skin
stone fruit & talons pressing in to the fleshy bit
below my thumb. this peppering of blood crescents
turns late summer memory of a sidewalk shadow
dancing in total solar eclipse—all moons scattered
in a way i’ve otherwise never seen light bend

ash good is the author of us clumsy gods (What Books Press, 2022) & four previous poetry collections. They are cofounding editor of First Matter Press, a nonprofit collective based in Portland, OR. Their poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net & appears in Faultline, Cimarron Review, 45th Parallel & others. www.ashgood.com

 

If this was the gateway to heaven

then her bed was a ladder
laid down on its back

that pillow, the stone where she settled her head
and she was the traveler, weary.

And if so, this room (on the stark sterile hallway
guarded with a lock on the door and the nurses of doom)

was a crater filling with light
as her breath emptied out

and the whole damn room, you could say, was dreaming
those angels, all a-feather

pulling and lifting in the fluorescent-lit
heaven. Up and down, up and down, and usher her out

as I sat on the lip of the bed letting her go
through the ceiling, the roof, past the half-smiling

moon. When we rolled her in, mere weeks before
all out of hope, this ward was a well-disguised hell.

But God, I now saw, was in this place all along,
and I, I did not know.

Tzivia Gover is the author of Dreaming on the Page: Tap into Your Midnight Mind to Supercharge Your Writing and several other books. Her poetry and essays have been widely published, including in The New York Times, Pensive, The Other Journal, Mom Egg Review, and many more. She lives in western Massachusetts where she teaches courses online and in-person about combining dreams and writing. Learn more at www.thirdhousemoon.com