by Marija Sanderling

How does it feel
To live with this mad Russian
On whom we pay homage
For because of him
And because of you
We now know
A bell can make you drool?
Are you plagued, then, by all bells?
The moment you try to impress
That sassy poodle in the lab
Two doors down
Who has a limp but still maintains
Her youthful figure
And you googly – eye her
When, across the street, the schoolmaster
Rings a bell to call in errant students
You drool, and she looks away.

by Leonore Hildebrandt

For the modernist, an egg shattered in the street.
     A heart?  Straggling notes court the monkey tree.
          “It may take sixty years until the bamboo

finally blooms,” you say, “and then the whole plant dies.”
     The dimly – lit blues ballad murmurs intimacies:
          sea lavender in gilded frames.

A break, and the man in the vintage hat
     works the crowd: a trumpeter from Moscow!
          Three horns — their fictions prolifically bounding up

grand stairs and corridors, to the landscapes —
     the field – rubble after winter, a sky over – clouding —
          to rosy bathers, nudes draped on luscious cloth.

Outside, taxis.  We circumvent downtown’s clusters,
     its ravines and cliffs funneling a harsher wind —
          installations in a troubled key.

by Jeff Hardin    
(Columbia, Tennessee)

I must have looked ridiculous, hunched over
the shallows, steering a red Solo cup
behind the minnows smart enough to spurt
just past the come – up – empty sudden rush
I stumbled thick – kneed against the water’s weight.
Except when I got close, they didn’t seem
to care that I was there at all, just stilled
themselves as if the creek were thinking them.

I think it was.  Just now I had that thought,
itself refracting silvered flashes out
of reach, and just as then it seems I’ll waste
all afternoon, not tire of watching thwarts
and bursts regain a poise of being there —
as if I’m not! — the keen stream flowing past.