NOTES ON AN APRIL DAY

by David Chorlton

We returned a pigeon to the sky
where he belongs this morning.
Otherwise, it’s a quiet day

if we ignore the news
of the nuclear mouthed supreme
leader watching oriental snow
fall through his binoculars.
There’s fresh snow too

in the country we left behind
where spring comes in disguise.
Is it caused by climate change

or was the past like this
and we simply forgot?
It’s ninety degrees today
in Arizona, where the legislature
wants to take away civil unions
and give schoolteachers guns.

The mailman delivered only
the usual requests for money
while the same message keeps landing
in the electronic inbox
from a friend whose mind

we hear is becoming like snow
and melting away. What use
is information to her, from radio
or the press? Why bother
telling her the world she tried to improve
is refusing assistance? It’s better to reply

with a few words to say
how gently the afternoon has passed
and hold on to whatever peace
is ours to share.

David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix since 1978, and still sees his surroundings with an outsider's eye. This helps his writing projects, which include a new poetry collection, "The Devil's Sonata," from FutureCycle Press.

WITH GENTLY STREAMING EYES

by Jerome Betts





FARMING leaders have warned that up to an estimated 10,000 ewes and lambs have died in the recent snowstorms, costing the industry hundreds of thousands of pounds and leaving farms struggling to stay afloat. --The Herald (Scotland), 10 April 2013
 

Poor lambs! No chance to play your parts
On legs that learn to leap and run
And touch so many human hearts
With games and gambols in the sun?

Your jumping joints won’t now assert
That spring’s a time to cast off cares −
Though youth and charm would not avert
Your fate as bloody butchers’ wares.


Jerome Betts lives in Devon, England, and has contributed verse to LightenUp OnLine, New Verse News, Per Contra, Snakeskin and Tilt-A-Whirl, as well as numerous print publications.

SASHA'S ROCK

by Jim Gustafson



"I found one!" --Sasha Zarezina, 8, searching a snow bank in Deputatskoye, Russia, for fragments of a meteor.  New York Times, February 19, 2013


Sasha searches for pieces of the end of time
fallen from the sky. She looks for evidence,
the real stuff from which bad dreams
come down in strange stones,
just the way snow does in Siberia.

Deposited in banks,
left to draw interested children and those
who wonder out loud about the meaning of things
that come from above.

It came in the cold time, to be found
by a fair February maid. Still warm,
its bed of snow melts,
cools light years of falling flames.

Sasha’s small hand holds up
a trace of outer space,
a trophy from her hunt,
raised in wonder.
She shouts:

I found one! I have it in my hand.
We need not fear, for it is small.

She does not see the lasting tremors
glow in the eyes of those who saw
the ball of fire tumble, nor does she hear
the echo in the ears of those
who only heard its rumble.

Sasha’s rock sits by the hearth
reflecting the flames the fight
the arctic winds that run
fast beneath the stars.

Mother and father Zarezina’s fear
the future meteor.
They know better, now, than to trust
the sky when they
walk the land.


Jim Gustafson graduated from Florida Southern College, received his master’s degree from Garrett Theological Seminary at Northwestern University and is a currently pursuing his MFA at the University of Tampa. His latest book, Driving Home, was just released by Aldrich Press. Jim lives in Fort Myers, Florida, where he reads, writes, and pulls weeds.

JERUSALEM IN SNOW, 1/10/2013

by Maryann Corbett

Image source: Occupied Palestine

The pious author of the book of Job

lacked maps of isobars to show him where

pressure allows the tongues of wet, warm air

delicately to probe
the hill country, tickling at slippery flows

where winter chill has settled on the height

of Zion. In his poems, only the might
of God breathes down the snows,
pure as surprises. What the psalm observed,

the morning news reveals: a world scrubbed clean.

Changed utterly. Pristine.

The stones of the Old City softened, curved;
old habits stalled; and humankind’s false starts

brought to a standstill. Ancient poets see

how snow grants us new vision, so that we

dream of our own changed hearts.


Maryann Corbett is the author of Breath Control (David Robert Books, 2012) and Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. She has been a winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and a finalist for the Morton Marr prize, the Best of the Net anthology, and the Able Muse Book Prize. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many journals in print and online, including River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Literary Imagination, Measure, Subtropics, and The Dark Horse, as well as in a number of anthologies. New work is forthcoming in PN Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Barrow Street. She lives in St. Paul and works for the Minnesota Legislature.

FOR THE REPOSE OF SOULS

by Carol Alexander

A Berkeley, CA vigil held to remember the victims and families of the Newtown, CT, massacre. Photo: Jeremy Pollack/Creative Commons

A pair of peafowl floats down from the trees,
the wan hen and florid cock picking their way
while the river slowly slips back in its banks.

The boy in his tall wading books creeps after,
licking rust from the muzzle of his gun.

The juddering of a turquoise fan perhaps will be
as close to flame of phoenix  as spirit will draw.
But we were born in fire, and to fire will come.

The woman with the small communion dress
rocks in her chair in her ordinary room
room with its proportions rudely skewed;
shocked feathers of the peafowls gently float down.

With their saintly calendar of woes,
country men and women walk in sober twos.

Still the shops stay open; trees blink red and green,
children dash across the street, cars swerve,
we hear the Morse code of the coming snow,
birds in starry park all the news that we can bear.

A pallid smoke in its helix twists and frays,
as if to question who to go and how to stay?
You mummers in a masquerade of death
shoot off your pop guns, begging cakes and ale.

Neither the country nor the quiet grave where we lay
our old ones down in the lightness of their years,
is this cold town where we have just begun to pray.

But unicorns and little maids remain entwined
(in sable trees an archer waits and strings his silent bow).


A writer for trade and educational publishing, Carol Alexander has authored numerous children’s books, served as a ghostwriter for radio and trade publishing, and taught at colleges around the metropolitan area. In 2011-2012, her poetry appears—or is scheduled to appear-- in literary journals and anthologies published by Avocet, Boyne Berries (UK), Chiron Review, Cave Moon Press, The Canary, Danse Macabre, Earthspeak, Eunoia Review, Fade Poetry Journal (UK), Fat Daddy’s Farm Press, Fried Chicken and Coffee, The Mad Hatter’s Review, Mobius, Numinous, OVS, Red Poppy Review, Red River Review, River Poets Journal, Sleeping Cat Books, The Whistling Fire, and Write Wing Publishing.