by Pippa Little

Over blue woods soaked in night–juices
They nose low from star fields and ice caps, move true
To earth’s curve, surprised perhaps to have strayed so far,

So close that hair on the watchers’ skins electrify,
Burn cold. The artist works fast as if from memory,
The poet plots his Year of Meteors, of miracles

But the beings are gone so soon: having seen lit windows,
Shining water–meadows, they’d thought to rest a moment
On our world’s mattress, and been startled by such attention.

Their luminous after–image hangs above the artist’s marriage be
Through the deaths of two children in a single week.
Their mother thinks the smoulder and smoke–trails

A secret foreboding of battlefields, the falling down of angels.
The poet muses on wanderings in heaven, immeasurable
And random, so far beyond our reach we give them names,

Animal words in order to call them back,
Those glimmering familiars who almost touched us.

Frederic Church’s painting “The Meteor of 1860” and Walt Whitman’s “Year of Meteors” in Leaves of Grass were the result of each man having stood at the same time but several miles apart along the Hudson River and witnessing a very rare meteor-procession so close to earth the phenomenon are called “earth grazers.”

by Pippa Little

drops of light drown
the carved letters of his name

hero of war /
in love, a deserter
the cold weight of him
seeps from her wishful hands

the wind needs and needs
and is never answered
either where he ends
or how she breathes

forest of black leather, old wheels
through slit–tongued grasses,

her webbed
staying, unswayed, among

candle–barbs
stuck in standing water or
spots of smoke
on a lens
not memories nor epithelials

o weight of him
the wind needs and
is never answered
where he ends
she breathes for him

out of the dark
who breathes
who breathes

by Annie Stenzel

Stuck / Torn
     All change is for the worse.   — Anon.

Because the rut has earned
its fame for comfort, being now furnished
with every contemporary necessity
because the fabric is tight–woven like the clean sheets that flap brightly on the clothesline
because the tangled contents
of each kitchen drawer bespeak the lumbering years
of meals prepared in tandem
because the yoke we wore as guardians
of first, toddler, then, child, now, adolescent,
binds us still in furrows across the same field
because the drug of hope seduces and deceives with its diverting promises
because a cactus waits with patience for the few but necessary drops the rainy season will provide —
waits, parched in almost every cell
and won’t be budged
no matter what the weather

by Annie Stenzel

But if you’re waiting for me
to Say things the way I used to
say things, don’t bother.

There is no demand
for plangent images
from a soothsayer you won’t hear

and not every thing a seer says
is prophecy — as much as half
might be a plea for different weather

or a rumination on petulance
in the marketplace
and the price of peace.

Now, sharpened pencils roll about
on the table; brushes
stand in the jar.