Journal

We Return to the Forest

Plagues of minivans descend like locusts
upon the blighted forests. Barefoot folk,
wearing thistles in their tangled hair
and chewing dandelion weeds, tuck geodes
into their flannel for luck. In dark thickets,
deer nuzzle pine needles, nervously worrying
about mass shooters at the farmer’s market.
Opossums sleep in their pebbly dens, dreaming
of Wall Street numbers and hand-pressed coffee.
Dragonflies buzz near the hikers, eager to hear
their speech so they, too, can learn the secrets
of agriculture. After sunset, the forest glows
with fireflies trying to replicate streetlights,
stop signs, the unearthly neon fire
of 24-hour convenience stores. A feral dog
who has spent all day sleeping in the bracken
now awakens. It wanders through the underbrush,
eating lizards and wishing it was asleep. Nearby,
something screams in the darkness and cries
for help. The dog growls but ignores the cry,
trying instead to remember if its dreams
were reality or the other way around.

In the Dark Field

In the dark field, the crickets gather
in their cathedral of dove bones.
Their sawblade hymns sweep the witchgrass
and gather in the pitch-pine’s needles.
They dream of angels—seraphim
with stag-beetle mandibles
and glittering masks of dragonfly eyes.
Their wings are spun of silk and ichor.
When the thunderstorm breaks,
the muddy earth swells. Worms writhe
up from the soft darkness into the rainwind—
silent, blind, terrified.
The field floods. The witchgrass turns
to seaweed. The dove bones break apart,
are borne away in bits. The crickets all drown.
You’d never know they’d been there.

Samuel T. Franklin is the author of two books of poetry: Bright Soil, Dark Sun (2019) and The God of Happiness (2016). A Best of the Net nominee, he resides in Bloomington, Indiana, where he enjoys making useful things out of wood scraps and losing staring contests to his cats. He can be found at samueltfranklin.com.

The Dog Takes it All in Stride, but the Cat’s Gone into Hiding

My husband unleashes beasts at our house,
not just Bottom with his ass’s head escaped from a dream,
but pot-bellied demons from Japan and a coiled ghost
with a girl’s face, her scales blue and white in moonlight.

A lion lounges in a sunny spot in the back bedroom.
Ever watchful, he yawns whenever I pass the door.
His companion, the unicorn, needed some air and now nibbles
pink double hibiscus, while bunnies munch on the lawn.

The dragon scorches the concrete garden wall when he snores,
but he fits tidily in a corner under the Cecile Brunner rose.
On the other hand, the phoenix, perched amid the orange blossoms,
cannot help but set the whole place ablaze when his time comes.

I carry my morning tea and toast through the dining room
where a satyr pulls petals from my birthday bouquet and stuffs them
into his mouth, preferring daisies to the carnations with their scent.
I understand why he avoids bathing, all that curly hair in tangles.

But he reeks of old booze and rotten meat, and his ears need cleaning.
The Minotaur keeps me company while I write at the patio table.
He’s grown too old for his storied appetites, and I’m no longer driven
by a hunger for words that filled this house with books.

When the Santa Ana winds pick up, I anchor my paper with flatware
and turn the notebook so the sun can’t reach the pages.
Better to work out here, knowing that the maw of the gates of hell,
with its jagged teeth of a cat, waits at the back of the coat closet.

 

Trina Gaynon‘s poems appear in Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, and Mizmor Anthology, and recently in the journals Buddhist Poetry Review, Essential, and 45^th Parallel. Her chapbook An Alphabet of Romance is available from Finishing Line Press. She currently leads a group of poetry readers at the Senior Studies Institute in Portland and participates in the Ars Poetica community.

Love Poem to the Number Seven

It’s always been lucky for me:
seventh heaven, seven on the die,
seven seas, seven days in a week.
Well lucky for someone, that is.

And I’ve been looking for a situation
where life is pure calculation.
Twice something really is twice as good.
Three’s a crowd
when only a crowd will do.

I’m alone, as always.
but what begins as a 1
soon bends its back,
elongates into a number
the Christian sacraments
would recognize,
likewise the sorrows
and the Catholic feasts.

I could live forever counting dwarfs.
priests and trumpets
at Jericho’s walls.
moon cycles.
angels, plagues and thunders.
I’d even give those sins
a run for their evil money.

My seven is a prime number.
isolated and virgin.
It’s the day of my withdrawal from the world.
Alone with my seven,
it’s comforting to know that, at least one of us.
vibrates to the inner rhythms of the universe.
And it’s on a page.
I’m the only one who’s trembling here.

 

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in Soundings East, Dalhousie Review and Connecticut River Review. Latest book, “Leaves On Pages” is available through Amazon.

Silver Lining

Has to be one in all this waiting
for the votes to be counted,

for the silver-tongued pundits
to share their predictions.

Please, let the silver-spoon president
go back to his silver screen.

I’ll give you a silver dollar
for each day the states count their ballots.

I want each one carefully touched,
blessed, lovingly caressed.

I know, in the end, no silver bullet,
just our hearts breaking open,

finding solace in the fog’s
silver-edged sky. We know how

to get through this, how to focus
on the horizon, and as the silver mist

rises, to once again cling to hope
which pulls us like a rope to shore.

 

Suzy Harris lives in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared most recently in Clackamas Literary Review and Williwaw and are forthcoming in Rain and Switchgrass Review. She is working on a chapbook about becoming deaf and learning to hear with a cochlear implant. She wrote this poem after reading Parker Palmer’s Healing the Heart of Democracy and while waiting for Biden’s victory to be announced. 

Hillside in Negative

The testament of Sierra oaks is distance. Limbs clutch sky
but trunks sequester. Tap roots wrench through dirt
to bedrock. Others crisscross blind but sure in dappled light.
Strangled silence, omertà, born of ancient necessity,
rules above cracked earth, but tunneling secrets linger.
Listen—just by that pedestal
where scarred black bark meets soil. Mute thoughts
burl too slow for words. Something older than ears
resonates, but it takes more time than you’ll have.

 

Richard Manly Heiman lives in the pines on the slope of the Sierra Nevada. He works as an English teacher and writes when the kids are at recess. Richard has been published by Rattle, Vestal Review, Sonic Boom, Spiritus (Johns Hopkins U.), and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Lindenwood U. and is a two time Pushcart Prize nominee. His URL is poetrick.com.