by Jim Davis

I wander through honey mustard hills, weave
through marching brambles, groaning

as your literary army stretches its roots,
threatening to live and breathe.

I pierce the cracked plates of earth with rods,
stretch a cord from one to another.

Draped over the reach of cord, a woven blanket.
Threads of yellow and ochre, blended

with crimson sun, shield me throughout
storms in summer heat, navigating the plains,

rolling across the blustery ocean of sand.
The blue truth of night is rising.

The moon’s alchemy has turned the desert to water
as you said it would.

Waves crash through dark hours, which I endure

by candlelight while you, the moon,

teach me the grace and depravity,
of Evanescence, of the wind.

And as I breathe your lesson I see you,
a frock of black hair, an imaginary white beard

cascading down the waterfall of your chest,
over your beating, crimson heart,

as if seeing you for the first time,

in the most familiar, most grateful of ways.

You are the mountains and the desert.
You are the salutatory cactus and flower.

You are the red beads of wax
staining yellowed pages

as the sun rises
over what was once an ocean.

by Dean Kostos

When Keats coaxed his mind into a page of whiteness,
he unrolled a scroll of seeing, required for witness.

Latin spirare weaves spirit and breath.
Life transpires, vapor through leaves.  Flesh expires as witness.

Knowing his breath would spiral away, Keats
gave himself to odes and sonnets, inspired to witness.

As a brede of lesions pocked his lungs, he no longer climbed
the Spanish Steps.  Bedridden, he desired witness.

Each night he leaned deeper into that urn that spoke,
to learn its wordless beauty: truth lyred into witness.

Did he pour his self into the word martyr — witness in Greek?
Did he write his nest of poems to be pyred in witness?

Am I, Dean, too afraid to carve the dark
that surrounds the self prior to witness?

Death’s negative capability reclaims the artist,
but bequeaths the art — in ink or clay — fired in witness.

by Eric Torgersen

     Call me Ishmael tonight.
          — Agha Shahid Ali

Can you hear it somewhere, Shahid, this groundswell of ghazals?
You, who put us under the spell of ghazals?

At Iowa they’re set to sweep the prizes.
Even at Brown, a sleeper cell of ghazals.

Is it just the “oriental” that we love,
the faintly foreign taste and smell of ghazals?

Many an aging empire has produced
a flowering, before it fell, of ghazals.

You were not taken till you’d made your generous,
mortal, lasting last farewell of ghazals.

Eric strokes the lamp and makes his wish:
sing in me, lost Ishmael of ghazals.

by Zilka Joseph

                       till sun up, you who knew my language
would have understood my homeless heart
and how home lives in many tongues, cities, songs

                       maybe you would have sat me down at your
desk one day taught me my trade, its angels and its tigers
shown me how to navigate our new land’s rivers

                       you who know where I came from
would have told me where I was going, why I was here
and why our rooms would never be finished

                       perhaps you’d have been patient with me,
perhaps impatient been amused by my follies, but not my journeys
your star risen high, now pinned in the heavens

                       I like to believe we would have cooked
together and tasted and tested and tried each dish
fussed and fretted like two picky old women in the kitchen

                       who knows if you’d have liked my poems
but I am sure you would have made a space for me, a place
for me at your always overflowing table, and called me sister.