by Kevin Rabas

At the Olpe Chicken House behind glass there’s a copy
of Ken Ohm’s new book, Ducks Across the Moon.
An old woman and her husband cane their way
to the counter, pay with cash, the bills
old and crumbled and green, and ask about the book.
The kid behind the counter, who looks like the town
quarterback, says, “I didn’t write it,” annoyed.
“Heck, I don’t know.” And the old couple walks on,
goes home, along the way mentioning books they do
know, and love, and read, and slump in peace, sleep
on their La-Z-Boys, the tv snow, the books
held in their laps, the reading lamps still on.

by J. B. Sisson

I buried him two years ago today,
the first day warm enough to bask outside
and watch the fluctuation of the tide
and spring’s migration north at last in May.
As usual, there is nothing more to say
when the whole world has been transmogrified.
Dr. Burney said just before he died,
“As in a dream all this will pass away.”

There came a sudden whir around my head,
and a gray blur distilled a hummingbird
back from Quintana Roo, deep green and red,
full of the tropic gossip he had heard,
back from Quintana Roo, back from the dead,
abuzz with his insistent single word.

by J. B. Sisson

This music crept upon me from old Walter,
infernal noise of Pachelbel and crew.
Walter enlivens his greenhouse next door
with therapeutic tapes to calm his plants
whenever summer’s heat stress makes them falter,
classical tape loops that are never through,
soft melodies you’d always loved before,
till repetition made your neurons dance
like panicked broncos bucking their first halter,
till digitalized brain waves boggled you
and that mosquito whine became the roar
of hectic voices raving blackout rants
in your dungeon with Melmoth doubletalk,
“where noon and night shake hands that never unlock.”

by Russell Evatt

I found a head in the dirt, eyes open,
covered in sand.  But no flies
and no blood.  I should say it was winter,
and this the reason why
there were no flies.  But not the reason
for no blood.  I knelt beside it
and the eye would not look at me.
I wiped the dirt away but the eye would
look at nothing.  We were surrounded
by trees and grass but it felt like
we were in a field, the bare branches
letting enough sun through to make it feel
this way, like a field.  Maybe this farmer
grows heads, and I laughed a little
but it was an empty sound, the sound
of a plowed field at midnight, or
the felling of a dead tree in a high wind.
Not silent but empty, the same as
this head with no blood.  The same as
every hunter dressed in the dead-
grey of the land.  I didn’t have the courage
to abandon the head so I carried it with me
to the house.  I worked for hours
with the shovel in the frozen garden
digging a hole for it.  In a few months
it will be summer, the ground soft,
the fields full of wind and graceful
wheat.  Each stalk a person, nodding off
to sleep yet still standing, as if forced,
as if before Gabriel.  Each person
the chaff from the beginning of the Psalms
wherein it is said the way of the ungodly
shall perish.  The wheat swaying
in the direction of something suddenly
deemed important then something else,
something other.  And the sound of the field
a soft calling that knows no name but yours.