by Mike Bove

The men buried beneath Commercial Street
are hardly resting.  They died where they worked,
stayed where they fell, and rolled only ever so slightly
when the trucks came with fill, train rail, and thousands
of blocks of cobble.  So tightly packed underneath
they can’t even call to one another
with the windy translucence of the other side.
Some nights when the rain falls they get the itch
to do some real work again, unaware
that the road’s long finished, graduated
from horse-drawn carriage to ornate town car to
hipster-driven rickshaw.  Progress on the streets stays
on the surface, but some nights I lie awake
and think about these men, imagine them
sitting up to wipe their eyes and climb, glowing,
out of the muck to stalk the street they almost built,
weaving in and out of hotels, tracking cabs, or pausing
at a shimmering storefront to gape at a souvenir snowglobe.

by Suzanne Osborne

Is dead acute — the first gasp of loss
and relief when your jagged presence
was torn from my life?

Or is it chronic — the long vanishment that followed
as we less and less often recounted our memories
of you, my eyes less and less often sought your picture
on the piano, and the wound slowly closed
so that now even I can scarcely see the scar?

I still wear your warm Scottish sweater
and the flowered Givenchy blouse I took
from your closet, but your ownership has faded
from them with the scent of your rose sachet.
Even the wedding ring I slipped on my finger
that night for safekeeping feels mostly mine.

So I wonder now:
Are you more
or less
dead
than when I found you?

by Suzanne Osborne

Yeah,
never really did
the whale hunt thing.

Mind you, I have had some strange
bedfellows, and I know a shipwreck
when I swim away from it,
so I guess I qualify as a survivor.

Nearly drowned once, too,
pulled from the water
gasping and snorting, heart
pounding, eyes rolling.

True, that was in the pool
at the Y, but hey —
drowning’s drowning,
same clotted lungs, same black vision
of eternities, so what’s it matter
if you’re in the slow lane
of a tiled tub and not adrift
in the illimitable southern seas?

So I’ve stuck to dry land.
And yet, when I see
above the rooftops, alluring
and unnearable as old Ahab’s
ever was, that moonlit spirit-spout,
I think I might yet set sail
to seek my own Leviathan,
my temple or my doom.

by Larry Schug

What is the name of rain
when it fails to fall from a cloud

What do you call a river
no water flowing within its banks

having returned to the sky
or been swallowed by the earth

a braided channel of sand
evidence of singing water
or the promise of another song

What do you call a tear
before it has been cried

leaving the lake of your eye
flowing down the land of your face

absorbed by your shirt sleeve
your finger dabbing it dry

testimony of the heart
proof of a singing soul
covenant with life lived