by Christopher Seid

The ruts of my two skis
   fill with shadow, blue ash
from the full moon’s burn.
   The dogs run ahead

to wrestle ghost dogs
   or a fallen pine bough
shivering in a crooked break.
   I’m panting from the work

of circling this field, nose
   runny and lungs scratched
raw from a head cold.  Still,
   it feels good to get close

to the hibernating world,
   to glimpse at least part of
the paralysis underneath.
   I never feel alone here, skiing

beside these trees; I know
   I’m being watched from inside —
good friend gliding with me,
quiet passenger, holding on.

by Marija Sanderling

How does it feel
To live with this mad Russian
On whom we pay homage
For because of him
And because of you
We now know
A bell can make you drool?
Are you plagued, then, by all bells?
The moment you try to impress
That sassy poodle in the lab
Two doors down
Who has a limp but still maintains
Her youthful figure
And you googly – eye her
When, across the street, the schoolmaster
Rings a bell to call in errant students
You drool, and she looks away.

by Leonore Hildebrandt

For the modernist, an egg shattered in the street.
     A heart?  Straggling notes court the monkey tree.
          “It may take sixty years until the bamboo

finally blooms,” you say, “and then the whole plant dies.”
     The dimly – lit blues ballad murmurs intimacies:
          sea lavender in gilded frames.

A break, and the man in the vintage hat
     works the crowd: a trumpeter from Moscow!
          Three horns — their fictions prolifically bounding up

grand stairs and corridors, to the landscapes —
     the field – rubble after winter, a sky over – clouding —
          to rosy bathers, nudes draped on luscious cloth.

Outside, taxis.  We circumvent downtown’s clusters,
     its ravines and cliffs funneling a harsher wind —
          installations in a troubled key.

by Jeff Hardin    
(Columbia, Tennessee)

I must have looked ridiculous, hunched over
the shallows, steering a red Solo cup
behind the minnows smart enough to spurt
just past the come – up – empty sudden rush
I stumbled thick – kneed against the water’s weight.
Except when I got close, they didn’t seem
to care that I was there at all, just stilled
themselves as if the creek were thinking them.

I think it was.  Just now I had that thought,
itself refracting silvered flashes out
of reach, and just as then it seems I’ll waste
all afternoon, not tire of watching thwarts
and bursts regain a poise of being there —
as if I’m not! — the keen stream flowing past.