by Michael Anania

the descent beckons, note
after note, an implicit
landscape’s reflection
curving along its sides,
Ellington’s piano and
horns in tight harmony,
one city or another always
there, the spring of 1956;
does time in time
go from horizontal
to vertical, do we fall
a bit each day, deformed
as the raindrop is by
all that we pass through

by Michael Anania

more than you know
whether they stay or not,
this evening’s rock doves

and Audra at the vernal
  equinox, whether you’re
right, whether you’re wrong,

the wind from the south
filled with oak pollen
bright yellow and stinging

by Mimi White

I’d already let go of most of your body, not willingly, but with purpose.

    I’d been swimming myself away from what I could not have;

the insatiable longing.

    So while you were learning how to die,

I was the cartographer of your body,

thighs, back, head, groin what I had known and loved and thought were mine.

Map makers create paths into known and unchartered lands, the return

        as mysterious as my willingness to let go, the swimmer

who turns her back on land to find herself alone in open waters.

by Mimi White

When I turn around to look
the sparrow is perched
atop the bluebird house
and the last two bluebird fledglings
are lying in the garden.

Deep furrows churn like the sea
when viewed from the kitchen window,
but up close the turned-over soil
is rock and dirt

and featherless wings
and skulls roped with veins.
Nothing moves
in the inert landscape.

I had planned to turn my back
on what the sparrow does
or watch like the bluebird parents
calling from a distance,

but life is movement
so I looked
and buried the dead birds.

I watch the sparrow
take off and I rub the dirt
from my hands,
in equal measure.
A sharp patch of blue
on the best days.

Last two lines a variation on a line from Alicia Ostriker’s “Poem Beginning With aLine By Rumi”