Journal

The only time I see him

This man is bigger than the bakery.

He spills with joy
like the bags of frosting on every counter,
his arm hair, muscles and laugh
too much to be contained
by his apron.

He makes my coffee, bags my loaf
of ciabatta, tucks that little slipper
into brown paper as if he’s dressing
a sleeping baby,
hands me our bread child,

leans forward, asks if I’ve tasted
his eclairs, which I haven’t.
Holds one over the glass case
of sugar, take a bite, he says
with the pastry at the gate of my lips,

you’ll never be the same.

 

The Bear

It’s easy to focus so much on the air
that you forget about the earth,
dust to dust,

so enchanted with the gold-
finches and song sparrows
tilting heads

taking black seeds into their beaks,
leaving the husks behind
like silver confetti.

Somewhere, behind our eyes,
we know it is only a matter of time
before the lumbering lump

stretches out of her slumber
and follows her nose to the oily
sunflower we hung, the greasy suet,

one swipe of bear arm takes down the feeder,
bear haunches completely fill
the stairs while she dines, nothing can pass.

Is this how death comes?
A shining mix of strength and softness,
paw and claw? Fur you want to sink

into, even while you fear it? Can’t you
see yourself climbing onto her back, grasping
tufts of neck in your fingers and savoring

this very new thing even as it carries you
into the darkest part of the woods,
shining nose tilted to the air?

Heather Stearns is a potter, bird lover, and writer based in the northern woods of Wolcott, Vermont.  She is the author of three chapbooks: Virtue, Vise, and Cicadas. Her new work is forthcoming in Thimble Literary Magazine. She spends her days making pots, spinning poems in her head, and teaching others how to move the earth at her community pottery studio, Muddy Creek Pottery. 

Schoolboy

I tell her that she’s as pretty as an October pear.
She looks at me like a disapproving schoolmarm.

I try to explain the lusciousness of the pome,
how its skin takes on the hue of autumn,

the firmness of its body, and how the floral ripe flesh
liquefies in my mouth. To prove my point, I press

my lips against hers like a schoolboy on a dare.
She’s still unsure, not fully trusting analogies or the raw skin

of desire, old as God’s dog, old as dirt. I watch her walk
away into a cold rain. She’d rather be anywhere than with me

because of the pear thing. She teaches me from a distance
that desire is passé, no longer chic. She sends me a pear

plucked from a tree in January, and I see the fruit
of her disfavor, and the reason she avoids that which

she can only see as selfish. Pressing my lips against
the desiccated fruit, dead from ever increasing

rounds of darkness, I taste the flesh of her disfavor,
like a schoolboy on a dare.

William R. Stoddart lives in Southwestern Pennsylvania and has published work in The New York Quarterly, The Writer, North Dakota Quarterly and other literary publications. His poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been published in Pedestal Magazine, The Lake and elsewhere.

Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows (July,1890)

His ravenous eyes gorged
on the succulent summer light
until his tears blazed with color.
But this painting devoured light:
a landscape without hope;
wheat and sky roiling like
a flood toward oblivion.

With quick, desperate strokes
he released a murder of crows
across the torrent of wheat,
into the troubled sky,
scavenging for any scraps
of calm in the catastrophe
as if his art could save him.

Doug Stone lives in Albany, Oregon. He has written three collections of poetry, The Season of Distress and Clarity, The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water, and Sitting in Powell’s Watching Burnside Dissolve in Rain.

Consider Instead

The noise of oxygen passing our tongues:
a real conundrum—loud versions of thought,
louder versions of lack of thought. Everything else
still bound inside lungs struggling to express
what other tongues don’t utter. Solid silence:
an opening where avoidance can present itself.
Everything else hangs in the chatter, like laundry
abandoned on the fraying line, the dishtowels
flagging. Consider instead how the noise of rain,
like stray pebbles tossed over the fence, patters
on our rooves and reminds us what we forgot—
how our fabric soaks itself, the wealth of water
visits and presses on. How our lungs can empty
themselves like the breath of robin wings.
How our laundry in the center of summer shadows
offers its damp to the wind, awaits our return.

Against the Glass

–after “Gold Leaf” by Carl Phillips

To press—without debating which insects deserve to be saved,
the buzzing creature tossing, tossing its varnished self against window—
the mouth of the glass you just sipped from against the smudged pane,
to look through it until the frenzied beating wings become your pulse,
a baton thumping against drumskin, the pace too rushed
to keep up with—a brisk rhythm born long before the insect came to be—
to whisper to the being that’s always made you cringe (even though
it couldn’t understand) to slide a piece of mail between
the glass and glass, to whisper, to press the paper lid
tight, letting nothing escape until you step outside, unseal the vault.

Sarah B Sullivan, of Northampton, MA, is a person, poet, physician, lesbian, ocean-lover, searcher. She is published in journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, Little Patuxent Review, Cider Press Review, and Switchgrass Review. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Pacific University, working with Ellen Bass.

To the Hornet in the Buddha Garden

Under the compassionate gaze of Vajrasattva
You patrol the grounds of the Buddha Garden
Manifesting the perfection of your hornet-nature

Perfection of the chitin encasing your body
From which all impurities have been removed
Perfection of your all-seeing eyes
Symbolizing the purification of ignorance
Perfection of your desire
Which is unsullied by hatred or greed

To your nest in the earth you bring offerings
Of caterpillar and cricket, killed so your babies might live
You turn the terrible wheel of generation, as you must
And if you meet Buddha on the road
You sting him – not once, but many times

Pepper Trail’s poems have appeared in Willawaw, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, Ascent and other publications, and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. His collection, Cascade-Siskiyou: Poems, was a finalist for the 2016 Oregon Book Award in Poetry. He writes and explores the world from his home in Ashland, Oregon.