by Hope Coulter

For the first few lines of a book
you’re aware of the text, the black on cream,

the building of sentences out of words.  The serifs
have small but forcible personalities —

expectant Chapter with its open-eaved r,
One with its round globe of promise;

the periods matter-of-fact, stopping
just short of smug; old-school a tipping its cap

and the tailed characters in debonair array —
artful and random as bird-tracks on the sand,

near the sea, or ripple-marks under the shallows
when you wade with your feet on the sandy bottom, water cold

against your thighs.  Just so the waves lap your waist and chest
for quite a long way, sometimes, depending on the form

of that coastline and sculpted shelf, and what currents
dash bits of salt into your mouth as you duck and lunge forward

through dialogue, toward the next block of text and into the moment the water takes
you, your feet go up, your tentacle hair

turns silky, your hands become blades,
and you’re in the story, swimming, buoyant.

by Sally Molini

Walking to my friends’ place,
I know the evening will be
a series of stock visuals:

Humberto tossing salad,
me slicing bread while May
unfolds the table

in a room too small, our meal
a frugal routine of leftover
chicken and X–Files,

one of Humberto’s favorites.
A breeze might knock
blinds against the jambs,

swell white drapes to full sail.
I’ll pass on coffee,
go for a run between sea

and bottlenecked town,
the ocean my necessary edge,
a muse beyond caring.  Each day

feels like an old choice, the future
too familiar as long as
the past keeps showing up —

I knock on the door, bread still warm
in its foil cocoon, any expectation
just another recurring scene.

by Renée Hearrin

The cedar cape drips its milk-white mask,
quaint boucléd roof and icicle lace,
patchy wet windows, porch and walk
to muddled shovels of craggy gray.

A plow truck rolls and crimps the curb
like a pie crust of unsavory brown
as slumping snowmen in dingy hems
tire and pool on the sodden ground.

The tossed beer bottles with brassy labels
held quiet under snow, now collide
among loose gravel, grit and decay
exposed in the plowed underside.

Beneath a crusty mound, nested in trash
and through a tunnel sculpted deep,
a scant of mice burrow cozy and curled —
bellies fat with rubble, asleep.

A neighbor shovels his way — scrape by scrape —
worn from heaving the wet weight about,
wishing a pansy head or early leaf
(and a warmer mood) would peep out.

by Renée Hearrin

Wilted in the heat, the limp ray petals
of a Shasta daisy hang in defeat.
Underneath the brittle back yard,
its roots search as if soil were braille
to find a wet vein, or better — a trickle
like the one from a worn garden hose left
to weep on the cheek of a cone flower bed,
secretly quenching a cat.

Oh what a soak would do!

For the dusty sparrow who after a day
of foraging and feeding, building and soaring,
finds a puddle to be delight — a port
to sip and splash, to pause and preen
until the sky is open road again.

For the tired old body — in years or miles —
either way, who sinks soft-bottom down
into the cupped arms of a full bathtub
that catches the slide of bones dead tired,
and buoys them in the silky weight of water.

For the woman who wades up to her thighs
in a backcountry river to rinse thin gauze
camisoles and cotton shirts, wipes sun
from her forehead with a wrung out rag —
sighs long — then slaps it dry on flat rocks.