Justen Ahren
former poet laureate of Martha’s Vineyard, who lives in West Tisbury, Massachusetts. He teaches writing workshops in Martha’s Vineyard and Labro, Italy.
Kristin Agudelo
grew up in Borneo and exotic New Jersey. She teaches high school English and History at Merriconeag Waldorf High School in New Gloucester, Maine. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming in, The Commonline Journal, Fear of Monkeys, and Literary Mama. When not writing poetry and teaching, she maintains a blog on women’s literature and history at www.notablewomen.wordpress.com.
Doubt
by Steve Luttrell
It was always
about beginnings.
The first push
to what seemed
most insistent.
The impulse then
to act, to bring off
some occasion
of my own doing.
Because I was alone,
quite alone,
my thoughts became
the company I kept.
But something intervenes,
moves between the thoughts,
a questioning uneasy
in its movement.
And he is strong
who would
take unto himself
such doubt.
I am not that man
and if this is that or
that it matters in
some crazy way
it’s not for me to say.
I won’t, I can’t,
I am not that man.
Selected Hokku / Senryu
by Joe Richey
mottled butterfly
alights on a rock
to roar
*
ancient pond
polluted frog
belly up
*
o star
o powerful western star!
are you a star?
or another big well-lit house
perched high in the foothills?
*
songs to sway
between
the lines by.
*
Sitting at an outdoor café
I am gunned down
by Chilean boys w/ sawed off broomsticks
*
half asleep
in broken English
a good life you.
*
who’s to say
the sky
can’t see?
*
fireworks
five hundred light bulbs
fall from the sky
*
small bamboo day
the sky
on a stick.