by Taylor Mali

If you were the type of person who could,
without the slightest hesitation,
open your mouth and utter forth one beautiful sentence
with a syntax as easy to follow as a mile of twine
leading out of a complex maze,
then you might enjoy cultivating the idea
that eloquence is a quality that cannot be acquired,
that you are either born with the effortless ability
to produce fully formed thoughts as though crafted and delivered
to the tip of your tongue by God, or else you must resign yourself
to a life of little more than grunts;

but if like me you are one who labors over every word
and turn of phrase, who does not trust he can express
what he believes or even know what he believes
until first he has ground each word against each other
to see what crumbles and falls away
and what in the breaking may get even deadly sharper,
then you know that you do not betray the craft of writing
when sometimes you part the curtain to reveal the awkward gears,
the sputtering false starts and poorly chosen
ejaculations
that may first have burst forth
and threatened to hijack, disguise, or rip
the very guts out of your greatest truth,
of which in desperate need the world may be.

by Thomas R. Moore

Granite posts square a God’s acre, a tiny
plot of blueberries and asters beside a crushed–
stone drive to three new houses on the shore.

The black slate headstones vanished a few years
back, pretty pieces for a garden in New York
or maybe it was kids one night in a pick–up

drinking Bud Lite who tipped them out, then
regretted what they’d done and dropped the stones
into a gully.  Somebody knows.  The names

are erased except on a tax roll or a family tree —
hardscrabble farmers working thin soil over
ledge, the husband cutting shingles at a mill

or wrestling granite or shaping white oak
futtocks for a schooner in Castine.  The new
driveway skirts a rough–cut granite cellar

hole grown up in popple, the apple trees gone
wild, the only sounds a clunking hoe, the gulls,
the wind, a washboard’s splash and thrum.

by Thomas R. Moore

After I set my book aside and turned off the Sox
in the fifth when Ortiz whiffed for the second time,
I dreamed of whales, though somewhere in that sea

I heard the brief screech and clunk of car
meeting spruce and wondered at the whales.
2:00 a.m., I drove down the gravel road

to the highway and found a car breached, tail up
in the gully below, one light still winking hopefully,
a bloodless fellow standing on the tar,

the chef, he said, at the new restaurant in town —
he’d stayed to close the bar.  I went home,
called the cops: Where is your emergency?

though it wasn’t mine at all and soon static crackled
and a winch sang as it reeled in the catch.
The Sox lost.  The neighbors heard it all, rolled over,

never called, but I had seen myself careen down
that gully, head into airbag, flames rising
in the wreck, and later couldn’t find the whales.

by John Driscoll, M.D.

This morning I sank into myself
Putting aside the cigarettes and whiskey
I dropped like a stone
leaving but a vanishing ripple above.
I fell into the slime of self,
the elemental nutrients of being.
Here I found deceptions and broken treaties
but in the murkiest strata
I came upon the will.
Curious that in this dark space
I would see light with no lamentation.
It was pure and sparkling.
Its drama was life with no mask,
no actor’s pigment for the persona.
This thing that I call will filled me with the energy to surface
and once above,
having caught my breath,
I felt no need to return
for awhile.