by Joanne Lowery

Girls, aren’t you the ones who under the guise
of “get a life” subsist in universities
with towers of my books piled on your nightstands?
Your unshared beds.
Your color – coded files of notes
about my ted, my bitchy syntax,
the brilliance you will never know.
Keep studying symbiotically and symbolically
how I felt about giraffes,
write a thesis about my favorite vegetable.
My purpose in life was only
metaphors, babies, betrayal, and dissertations.
Surely your apartments have kitchens
with stoves, their oven doors obedient.
You can steal matches from the corner bar.
The dark square, racks removed,
waits for you too.  But I won’t be
available to escort you to literary afterlife,
and my last thought is forever mine.
Girls, if you want to be writers,
close the book on me and write your own.

by Robin Behn

     A tune by Larry Unger
          — for Jack Myers

Two minds, side by side.

Your two minds walking a road,
a road that plunges into cedars,

cedars drinking and drinking
from the straw.

Here is your hat, sir.
Here is your other hat.

Your first mind in your first hat with the good dreams.
Your second mind takes off its hat to them.

Two hands in one mist
too dense to see.

A nodding knot of held – hands bobbing into the mist,
blood – knot riding where it can’t be seen, like singing.

Song – in – the – mind the mind swoons upon.
The feeling of turning feeling over and over.
See how many ends it has?

Jack taught me that.
Jack still walking on the bank of some river.

Some other river inking Jack into our earth.
Writing you could sail quite away on.

What he knew of love was the mist.
And is missed.

by Michael Macklin

Now freshly painted walls
tremble in the hard light of November
with secrets a carpenter
scratched in framing pencil —

No moon . . .

Words, little feathers,
that held him up through
his wandering years since a friend
breathed them into his blood.

But the stars . . .

Without understanding, he wrote them
on stair stringers, behind jack posts,
across sill plates and ridge poles.  Imprinted
on the bones of everything he built:

No moon, but the stars . . .

With each letter something quivered
within him.  Every word a flock of sparrows
whose heartbeats were tiny
hammers building something he never saw,

as if No moon,

was a key or code for everything
he did not know. But the stars,
symbols for the heaven he built toward.
This is what he left behind as he packed his tools.

But the morning

After the dust settled and the paint dried,
beyond the well – made rooms created for strangers,
he scuffed his work – boot way home
wondering what it all means.

No moon, but the stars,
but the morning sky . . .         

by Christopher Soden

word came days after at a poetry workshop
consistent with the nature of our connection
he was a friend rabbi father shaman
mentor I spent some of my most serious
drinking hours in his rich company appreciating
the glow of shared ideology getting sloppy
and burning burning with care and epiphany
I told him I loved him from the podium
of my graduate reading explaining he was
the reason I stood before that gathering
which was not flattery or exaggeration
to this moment I recall finding my way
late to his classroom and his looking up
to inform me as if I’d entirely lost
my compass we met for lunch that semester
and seth around seven I think
was wheedling him to help carve
their halloween pumpkin I would feel like
a phony now trying to excuse the distance
between us bred more of omission and dwindling
luxury of time on a residency in Europe I remember
how relieved I was to sneak him a smoke how
ghoulish is it to think of that now but I wish
I’d made time to see him in hospice when
they said he was down to a flicker
as usual I was distracted and a coward
in my heart he was a raw seraphic mingling
of bells and undiluted light he was my
leonine oracle but I could not bear to break
down at his bedside to demonstrate the fierce
longing he ignited in me it took a few minutes
after I got the news my head feverishly
transmitting repeatedly these neglected words
too late to reach him before
his train pulled out