by Yonghong Gu

In coldness —
A thin pink veil
On her orange fingers,
The cloud
Flows against the sky

That short tree —

At the edge of an empty
Playground,
A soccer net

Its strong leg holds the ground

Obliquely, standing

Several branches reach
Toward the sky —
As if shouting
Like an old man:

I am old, but I am hard!

by Deborah Pope

An expert told me that I have six planets
and four angels in my ninth house,
that my familiar is a bear and that I will create
a great work late in life. I have also been told
the lifeline in my palm is forked and my heart
line is broken. And a woman I knew could
recount her past lives in impressive detail.
She’d been male and female, child and crone,
a Sufi, an Aztec, a nun in the time of Assisi,
though in what order, she did not say.
I could almost believe my children were cats
or barbarians, my gentle husband once my mother.
I would like to have been a woman with a lute,
a weaver of sagas, or a girl who saw visions
in the fire, each existence a curious bead
in an abacus of mysterious tallies, and I regret
I know no other lives than this one.

For doesn’t something in all of us long to be
more than one character, to have more than one
story to tell? Who wouldn’t want to appeal to
some Mender of Destinies to let us step up on
the cosmic scale and spin an arrow of options,
especially if it could be weighted in our favor.
We might stop in the slot of a life where scores
are settled, debts paid, our virtue rewarded.
Or is our desire simply to believe we can go on
speaking in some, infinite, elastic theater of time,
keep our voice going, our words pushing back
with each spin against silence? Won’t that be
the hardest part when any life comes to its end
and leaves so much still to explain, forgive?
Can any one life ever finish it?

by Susan Bassler Pickford

In my dreams
Many loved ones live
They come and go as they please
Daylight brings wakefulness
But the love remains

In my dreams
There is no pain
No tears
No sorrows
I hate to leave this land

In my dreams
The brief transition
from sleep to consciousness
is sweet and delicious
But passes in seconds

In my dreams
There is no “unraveled sleeve of care”
to mend
Only the skein
of tangled memories
and fleeting images
of love

by Dan Murphy

The crow walks across the street
he has a little limp you see
it is his intelligence his natural sheen
the supervisor of this suburban block
croaking commands making that
saltwater gargle that dark joy
hopping up in the fir tree’s branches
and flying down he is not our equal is he
we are not his he is a sort
of younger brother emancipated
who counts blessings on 4–fingered hand