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Poetry

Poetry

Psalm 727

For the Director, to the tune of “The Cup of Mourning.” Dawn, in her tattered veils, wafts one last breath over the pond like a bridal train; the ivory mesh snags, opening on a rain-pearled leaf, a peeling scroll of birch inked with cryptic lines— alas, no message there for a widow. French press steeps as layers of gauze keep parting, God’s hand there, stirring a glimpse within morning’s swirl of cream marbled through coffee, easing this ache we call…
Laurie Klein
October 30, 2014
Poetry

Earthworks 301

Such dubious tutors: the upwardly mobile drone whose instinct sinks his career with a single sting; the flim-flam deer tick, upended, six legs waving, with two new ones, nose hair thin and due to emerge before she self-destructs from Siphon Arrest; and, out-slumming all comers, the fly wannabe, that inveterate pond bum and bottom crawler, the caddis worm, sheathed with twiglets and crumbs of stone, bits of rotted sedge, an earring back, a long-gone snail’s bivalve casket. As it was…
Laurie Klein
October 30, 2014
Poetry

Romantics

He loosens his work-tie’s noose-knot, ascending a staircase climbing above our grey earth, fallen leaves clotting gutters in the car-park where a divorced neighbor, half-lifed, drags on a cigarette, smoldering time until her bed-mate’s pickup returns, a faded T-shirt her smock, her hair a mess like a nest. Exhausted, Ulysses stumbles into his haven, a two-room apartment, having passed by the taupe vestibule’s Charybdis, its mailbox, filled with bills starving for their pounds of flesh, to behold as he does…
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
October 30, 2014
Poetry

What Is Man that Thou Art Mindful of Him

What do we mean when we say children are God’s artistry as preachers are wont to do during baptisms, deleting from their homilies words like “daughter” and “girl” as they exhort their faithful not to deface her beauty? Her cries, while precious, necessary, compelling her mother from tranquil acceptance to energized aid in the nursery, are hardly melodic like deft little fingers dropped by a pianist on his Steinway, the right hand aware of what the left, separate, is doing,…
Nathaniel A. Schmidt
October 30, 2014
Poetry

Hard Red Spring

The day I stood on the clipped grass of Olds College – after palming Norquay, Chinook, and Neepawa, until my fingers had unlocked their doors, and I could smell the loam and feel the wind, and see three months of rain and heat, in an amber seed of Hard Red Spring wheat – I saw kaleidoscopic rings around the sun. And at the sun-dog-ends of those high-noon rims, were more rings intersecting, and at each intersection, like Ezekiel’s wheels in…
Stephen T. Berg
September 1, 2014
Poetry

God Likes Hair Salons

I can’t believe God lives outside the house of earth, beyond the lawn of stars, and the fenced-yard universe, out in the timeless cold, his raw breath, his radon brow, ridged, veiling nebular eyes, and his fingers, freezing as he writes down names in a book, for later. Of course God prefers the clamour of pubs, the company of welders and waitresses, the warm feel of a beech wood pool cue, the chatter on wharves and in hair salons, the…
Stephen T. Berg
September 1, 2014
Poetry

Poetry by Rose Postma

MAY/JUNE 2014: POETRY by Rose Postma The Apostle Peter Contemplates Logical Fallacies Somewhere in Northwest Iowa, a Silver Laced Wyandotte grips the gray-cracked wood of a fence post with his claws. He puffs his feathers in the black-cold, shakes his matched set of comb and wattles once, draws in breath to expel through the syrinx, and crows. The sun rises. Post hoc ergo propter hoc: the sun is not controlled by the cock, but it could be—the way a question…
Rose Postma
May 1, 2014
Poetry

Liturgy for March, Life, and Walking with Jesus

MARCH/APRIL 2014: POETRY by Barbara Crooker Liturgy for March So, here you come again, scratching the ground with your thin green nails. Go ahead, unbutton your purple robe, let us see clear into your golden heart. Let us believe in the resurrection of the earth. Forgive us now our unbelief. Life After "Starfish," by Eleanor Lerman This is what life does. It hits you like a stone through the window in the form of a phone call from your son-in-law…
Barbara Crooker
March 1, 2014
Poetry

Counter Narrative

by Rose Postma In the seven days it took Utnapishtim's hired craftsmen to build his reed-stitched boat, Noah must have wandered over late at night to check his competition out: examining mortise and tenon, measuring the span of the joists, wishing he had more help than three elderly sons. Did sweat salt Utnapishtim's eyes as he helped his men ache the craft over a road of poles, down to the still-smooth Euphrates, or was it just the first drops of…
Rose Postma
January 1, 2014