by Alexander Etheridge

Sudden winter, unfashionably cold rain —
You may know this, changed now into everywhere
by the shadow’s knick.

And word for November frigid and rain, we waiting for the murk       to
crystallize through oblique semiosis made
bizarrely decipherable by the white left on the
page.  Us in rooms where the wasting met you years later, years           ago (a
high startled math suggests all time is at
once, and one moment’s twitch, eternal — every thing heaped up        and cross–
hatched, the immensity of its scale and
mass quicker than a face in the knives) Us still 90 proof summer

on your back porch, a sound of ancient sparks
under scar tissue.
I was see – through and scared
but you lifted heavy girders up from the scattering
and bolted them into place,
reminded me I was there, that we were
there looking when
June dusk, that to earn just seconds in the tower means we’ll be          ripped and
scalded (expulsions of bone and light / dad’s arc of descent.)  Hour and grain of
tidal sediment, the invisible book trick (or that line I          had about sawing off my
left leg) — the hard
sonics you know and knew I

didn’t know at all.  We’re still
there, at once here too and now, an
us, but I can’t get back to you then.
I wanted to tell you something
but the shape of its number had changed.
I recall, but I can’t know if you’re dead
or ever — hand in subtle flight,
listening, telling me look with a sleepless ear
for signs of the other world.

by Carol Westberg

       It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.
                                              — Wallace Stevens

Anxiety shows up again in the wrong shoes,
feet ablaze, her notorious fingers picking at scabs
long vanished from the surface of skin
once smooth as a cat’s eye but not from a psyche
so easily swayed by rumor of sun or storm,
wasps, lurid flames from neighbors and strangers,
rye bread in the oven or not, the way the girl
imagined the boy’s glance sized her up,
a huge balloon of disdain or praise rising white or red.
Tonight she sleeps but fitfully after falling mercifully
fast into nothing she can remember, waking
to the 3:00 a.m. glowing fluorescent green above
the bookshelf.  How long, she wonders,
will books be made of paper, glue, and ink?
Carson, Rumi, Augustine, Brodsky, Cortazar —
her collection breathes no place else in the universe
like the wild library of anxieties she despairs
to enumerate.  Why can’t she let go of the laundry,
the will, the family photos waiting a child’s lifetime
for her to sort.  Not even she wants to read
her litany of undone chores as kindred packrats
exhaust our earth while millions of hungering souls
still can’t read themselves to sleep.

by Carol Westberg

An eagle, the boy said,
or a loon.  Next time
I might be moss
or stone or a stream
carrying on.

by Betsy Sholl

It all comes down to one day glowing,
one day gone,

one day haloed mother, one day
the hag, scythe in hand.

So, what throw of the dice this time,
Moon, what’s loaded in your bones?

Bright dinner plate set in the sky,
sometimes empty, sometimes full,

you shine in the cat’s eye,
the fox creeping up on the hens,

you slip under the skin of men
murdering words, their mouths

too close to the ear.
You burr in the dog’s paw,

mother of howls,
you the train’s one – eyed beam,

cameo on night’s black breast
the thief itches to snatch and pawn,

mute coin we all rub for good luck —

no water drowns you,
no branches puncture.

Rising over palace and hut,
mosquito net, bed roll in scrub brush —

what throw of the dice this time?

Eh Girl, what widens your eye as you shine
over scrap yard and mountain pass,

as you glance down through tangled limbs,
onto the shuttered windows

of this small house?