by Steve Luttrell

Wishes for water —
ashes for the wind —
memories with the passing
and distance from light.

Your poems now recede,
becoming perfect
with the silence
and precious as the breath.

For now enough to say
that we were here
and heard each other’s song
for a time.

And what is that,
       but all that
       really matters
after all?

by Steve Luttrell

In the story
there is a blue truck
parked at the curb.
        Empty,
except for a large
yellow dog —
head resting atop
the steering wheel
        and waiting,
waiting and still
        waiting
with an expectant look of
        let’s go home,
on the other side
        of the glass.

by Stephen Petroff

“the melody
  is memory itself ”

I lay for the night on the yellow roadside,
in a deep field of curving gourds,
across from the dark ploughing ground.

Four steps inside the woods, a stone wall had long been
hidden, and behind it, an old farm dump, with a forgotten
kitchen midden beneath it, where he found a medicine
bottle, small and made of glass, colored cobalt blue.

Everything that had meaning to him, everything that had
ever been of value — all numinosity — he had found
there, in the comfort zone.

Mist coiled, uncoiled, and coiled again, the length
of the ravine, following the stream that carved
these terraces.

by Philip Levine

As they return from their pilgrimage,
footsore and disgusted, only a few
wear jackets and ties. As usual
Gerald is the most emphatic: he stands
at the corner of Broadway and Spring
and demands that an angel descend
from heaven carrying a glass of tea,
sugared, with a little lemon and milk —
not a big deal when you consider
how far he’s come without the least thanks.
It’s early April at the center
of the known world; somewhere tulips
nudge their way heavenward, forsythias
blaze until you have to look away.
How did we come to despise this life?
Somewhere an axe falls, somewhere a boy
hurls a rock, somewhere the answer
is waiting curled in the brown leaves
of a mountain oak. Gerald has fallen
to the sidewalk and the lunch crowds
step carefully over him; the lesser writers
scurry toward their cars or descend
into the subway to make their appointments.
It’s so quiet only you hear the poem
he’s polished all his life, delivered on
a froth of blood and meaning nothing.