by Howard Winn

To the right of me loom neo-formalists,
rigor in their cheeks,
cash behind their checks,
anthologies in their bank accounts,
sonnets in their privates,
endowed academic chairs
cradling their comfortable butts,
cozying up to the politicians
who fund the Humanities;
to the left, the spewers of on-the-spot brain waves,
still mourning Ginsberg
and Kerouac.
Fragments of thought crash
against the arrangement of forms,
like waves coming to shore at Montauk
and volumes of verse
are left stranded at the high tide line
as spindrift.

by John F. Buckley

Nobody’s parents have loved him enough,
and everyone’s mommy has struggled with cancer,
and anyone’s daddy’s addicted to ponies or beatings or booze.
So what is it that you bring fresh to the table?
And what can you ever bring new to the table?

Each couple’s romance has ended in heartbreak,
and any past lover has frozen and faded,
and everyone’s theme song’s a cocktail of fury and torment and blues
So what is it that you bring fresh to the table?
And what can you ever bring new to the table?

For every occurrence, you can write a bleak sonnet
as you wallow, reflect, and write stanzas upon it.
You can scribble sestinas or pantoums or maybe a pithy haiku.
But the chimes of your poems, the best of your verse
will still ring like echoes, the plagiarized worst
of the lives of the millions of poets existing and writing like you.

Everyone’s work life is pallid and boring,
and nobody’s uncle has left them with millions,
and anyone happy in their job is soulless and venal and cruel.
So what is it that you bring fresh to the table?
And what can you ever bring new to the table?

Nature is lovely and nature is savage,
and anomie thrives within modern society,
and everyone feels like a god and a fraud and too often a fool.
So what is it that you bring fresh to the table?
And what can you ever bring new to the table?

by Helene Swarts

Light, like spilled milk, spreads
near our feet making little
circles.

Soon the moon
will bring another cast.
Come, let us go
into the garden where soft light
washes the aster.

It is almost evening.
Moist leaves, fat as lungs, turn
toward the wane.

Nothing not even the dark
will cover
what we have done here.

by Helene Swarts

Like orphans dreaming
mothers out of their soup

Like the pauper’s mouth
moving when the rich
man swallows

We expect the moon.