by Russ Sargent

When you walk down
from the Alhambra, take
small steps past the cuevas
and gypsies selling roses.  Feel
lucky when you find the grave
circled with stones and women
dressed in black who beat
olive trees with sticks slowly
filling their nets.  You will
cross where a river was.
Behind a burro carrying dirt.
Feel the pain in your feet as
you descend through the century
plants and find yourself
under the bridge where a man
roasts potatoes in a pile
of burning rags.  Do not notice
how both the river and his legs
are gone.  Just listen to the song.
Listen to the man almost to
his waist in dry ground, singing.

by Kristen Case

     I must confess there is nothing so strange to me as my
     own body.  I love any other piece of nature, almost, better.
                                                                — Thoreau, Journal

For instance this moss overtaking
the blackened stump the
wood pulling away from the bark a
crack the depth of which you can’t
gauge mosquitos slow and killable
this late hour of summer in which you feel
the slow dissolve of the social self
the grooved body of the oak
this picture-feeling of a pleasure you
wouldn’t call pleasure some
seasonal drift or weather-being in which
personhood is no
question

by Kristen Case

Proximate to the dark mossy under-
story and the watery leaflight you
forget the sentences
about your body and its capture
the words falling from you one
by one even as you feel them
becoming: green and
green and green and
the way light enters you and
your whole being leaning toward
the thin and continual and indifferent exchange,
a pale moss of repeated small forms over-
taking your skin, even this
annihilation now a kind of harmony.

by Marita O’Neill

We meet for coffee, cry,
and I tell you how
sorry I am for tulips
left behind, tulips I know
you planted for me.  How
you planned
our honeymoon
how you surprised me
with a castle with
your Italian zipolo
your optimism undaunted.
How I still wish
for us listening
for geese in the night,
how much that crazy curl
falling on
your forehead keeps me
that hole
in the shoulder
of your purple sweater
keeps me
up at night.  While we’re talking,
maybe even laughing
you tell me how
sorry you are
for all the bearing walls
knocked down
for calling
someone else
love
while I still stood
below the lintels
how sorry you are
for hiding, protecting
the one thing
that might have kept us
grilling fish in our pajamas
saving a wet dog named Buzduk,
cold and shivering in a doorway,
rain making his legs skinny,
us laughing in bed on Saturday.
Then, I ask you to
forgive me
for how I searched
for your one thing
tried to pluck out
beating, throbbing
the mystery
you hid
how I tried to hold
it to the light
shake it out
make sense of
forgive me
not accepting you
for the yellow
balloon
you were
and in that scenario
I stand in my kitchen
alone
imagining.