by G.H. Smith

Fell asleep on a park bench,
awoke to the sound of leaves hammering the grass.
Surely, someone was coming to fetch me.
What could possibly be keeping them?

by G.H. Smith

What doesn’t flee the center?
Bodies, astral and serene,
turn into slag heaps,
sobbing priests.

Stolen souls learn
to pray without believing.

l dance in the kitchen late
when the cats have signed off,
and the night admonishes us
with her indifference.

by G.H. Smith

The next page and the one after:
what can be said of them?
Is it not as if those days
have already been lived?
Memories flow like ink to the heart.
My desires lie neither here, nor there.
Yesterday is no bridge to sleep on.
Though we both passed through here,
that was ages ago, in another life.

by Carolyn Locke

Lately, the deer have been stepping out of the snowy woods
and onto the roads. In the early morning on my way to work,
a trio cavort in front of me, and on Route 1 another leaps
out of darkness into the beam of my headlights. Then one,
two, three, four come bounding across Route 7 at twilight.
I slam on the brakes. In seconds I am at a dead halt.

No collision, no crumpled car, no shattered windshield —
only a drumming in my chest pleading for the green world
to unfold. Yet in the silent aftermath, a softness in my belly,
a yearning for dark shadows playing over white,
for the openness of leafless trees. I am not ready

to be pushed out of the quiet darkness into a world
about to explode — wood frogs and peepers charging
the air with their collective chant, leaves expanding
into a thousand shades of green, bird song
without end. I emerge blinking in the light, feel a perverse
uneasiness at earth’s slow tilting toward the gaudy sun.