by Trevor Joyce

The dandy candy store sells eggs
extensively to sundry sorts.

Come price your bargains here, find legs
of all hooved ruminants, with goats

so succulent meat slips the bone
before the avid tooth can touch.

Much mayhem stirs the streets, while in
the valued customer can sip

removed from shouts of Yangin var!
a pipe of dark latakia.

Smoke stains the silver atmosphere,
hounds scout for haberdashery,

apothecaries pound their drugs,
men drain their coffee to the dregs,

as in among the gems and rugs
the dandy candy store sells eggs.

by Shiv Mirabito

I don’t want to get married
I don’t want to join the army
I don’t want to wave any flag
I don’t want to be president
or rule the world
or to be the king of curiosities
I don’t want to expand the empire
I don’t want to take away anyone’s rights
I don’t want to steal anyone’s thunder
I don’t want to be the most famous
or the richest man on Earth
I don’t want to live forever
I don’t want a six pack, a facelift, or botox
I don’t want to hate anyone who hates me
I don’t want everyone to love me
I just want everyone to be happy

by Margaret Randall

A quiet moment, yet we still marvel at its elegance.
Amused, Euclid laments no longer possessing
the breath to em it a joyous gasp.
He recognizes his smooth cones and spheres
have grown rough edges,
dance into ever smaller fingers reaching for the promised land.

Benoit Mandelbrot remembers the moment that changed his life
and ours.  I saw how the shapes came together, he says,
(emphasis on saw ), knows our language of words
cannot describe that other language only he can trace
until he shows us clouds and leaves,
shorelines and sand dunes chewed by wind and rain.

I love you, you tell me and no limit stalks our reckoning
as our fingers trace a line
between flesh and knowledge,
cellular memory and this field
where we are both here and everywhere,
ancient patterns rising on our skin.

To glimpse, see, then be able to teach draws wonder
from the heart while images of dying children
capture a single news cycle
and weapon-grade anything refuses to go down
in the history books as progress, only a sad detour
hastening our journey to a place of no return.

I want to trust Benoit’s magical moment, Euclid’s sanity,
Frida’s double helix as I take your fingers into my heart
and hold them against our age.
I want to forget the contest itself leads to oblivion
and end this poem in hope
even as the evidence tries to stare me down.

by George Wallace

You are a rowboat of wild horses and tomatoes
we are sailing home across a surreal fishbowl
this is summer, stupid yeah,

so what if that’s a mixed metaphor — you won
a goldfish and held my hand we bent the rules
we can ride the back roads

grammar is good romance is better real love is
possible and it’s better to swim with the cannibals
than to lie down with the clams

who’s drowning? not us! every moment should be
beautiful like this, o bliss o cotton candy o carousel
of kisses!  It’s your birthday

let me take you home to our goldfish bowl — i am
the bubbleman i live at the bottom of the tank —
and you to me are

better than Shakespeare in a car full of roses

i will carry you home carefully,
i will carry you home