SUMMER 2018 – THE CITY POETRY
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I feel your twilight sky mind in mine. It is a dark but radiant shade of blue. I am still waiting for the stars to fade in as if they were always there – although they themselves have been, for as always as it gets with human beings, a lifetime, the ignition of a single match. And so out there where the stars live, they live unchanging – it is the light that cloys the eye here, the sun’s unsubtle bid for the earth’s entire attention, which we, as numinous creatures call too simply: life.

~ Jill Riga

Always Something

Warped light haloed
In evergreen melts
Thru my window
Melts thru my dream
Of sleeping on an
Old futon sunk in the
Middle eaten alive
By an unforgiving
Floral pattern fading
From existence into
The twilight of mine
& I can’t roll over
‘Cause I’d just roll off
Ain’t nothin’ wakes
You faster than a soft
Carpet hardened by
Years covering a hard
Wood floor reaching
For a cup of coffee
Mocks me just out of
Reach & ain’t nothin’
Comes easy in a life
Lived on the edge

KE

A Happy Marriage

It is said that swallows mate for life
and their very presence creates
a happy marriage.

Chinese leave their windows open
so that during spring the birds can return to their nests,
inside the home’s rafters.

Darling, if we left our window open,
I wonder if they would make their home here
among us…
how many seasons
would they come and go?

Would we still be here when they arrived,
or would we have moved on
even though it was still their home?

They patch their nest with fresh spring mud
from the rice fields–

~ Heather Ann Shepherd

Look for Shepherd’s upcoming new collection, A Hummingbird in the Garage

Something like peace
the laughing sparrow
the jazz light the orange
kiss of the red haired dancer
a delusion of perfume the
breaking light of fork lit
road the hallucinating tangle
of noon.

– Russell Vidrick