by Frederick Wilbur

Days of tenacious March when songbirds
drain the feeders like visiting magicians,

I watch from my desk window — the urge
to replenish them distracting.

I should be laboring at other sincereties.
They gossip and bully, tango and pirouette,

in a gorgeous deception of flirtation
and survival. To write the apology

to girlfriends I wanted and lost long ago
hours vanish until ubiquitous chick–a–dees

scold me back to my chore of words,
but flight metaphors have gingerly flown.

I want to fill the scoop with millet
and sunflower seeds, traipse rotting snow

to say how much of a friend I am,
but like my grandson’s stubborn tooth,

I wiggle and squirm, not wrenched from
my guilt until, tucked in a seam

and unattainable, only a few seeds remain.

by Frederick Wilbur

Too praising, you could sabotage this poem,
finely wrought, keenly carved, hand thrown, the kind
crafted perhaps with an imperfect eye —
but regardless, is what must be signed.

Words are bouqueted into many cares,
convention and taboo spar throughout the text,
are gladiators to a stalemate, a pardon —
a forgiveness which wears me out, vexed

by how your drums have dreamed
their cadences — not like grace notes nailed
to the board fences of a storybook farm,
where prose grazes for hay yet bailed.

Give me your griefs, they are passwords
to where I’m going. Camouflaged despair
is the edge of our lives, like barn roofs
showing maps of rust, ragged beyond repair.

by Margaret Young

Another June, embarrassing roses
brandish their sexual petals. The swan–
necked excavator digs up the shady street
while men in vests and helmets stand
like ruminants among their orange cones.
Elm seeds, brown paper nipples, drift
into piles. It’s not enough to live next
to the graveyard: you must take them by
the soft dry hand sometimes, the ones standing
among gray rectangles, spelling out names,
a glance around to try to guess who’s next.

by Steve Luria Ablon

I have to pee even though I don’t.
I place my arms across my chest

like the Buddha, to hold myself here.
This is how Stinestsky will arrange

me in the coffin. I think I feel like dying,
scratch the sheet, digging, digging, helpless,

get up out of this bed, hear the rumble
of a landslide, stumble, run to high ground,

hold trees being uprooted, mud, dirt, roots,
boulders coming to submerge me,

pee and shake the earth off.
I don’t see death, just white light,

colloidal granite grooves of sandstone,
outside consciousness, blood basted

in my hair. It will be one step too far
into the canyons kaleidoscopic.