by Suzanne Langlois

He mistook me for a getaway car —
highway laid out
before the gleaming hood,
straight and faithful as a church aisle.

I mistook him for a muddy riverbed —
a soft thing to drift into,
something that does not grasp or let go,
just gathers itself around you.

He mistook my sigh for a promise,
a holy thing — half prayer, half spell.
He mistook me for someone
with the kind of magic
to bind what is unbound
and make it love its bonds.

I mistook his fantasy for a future
soaked in a broth of wishes —
like waking up into the beautiful dream
instead of out of it,
all the disappointments undone.

He mistook my glance for an unlocked door.
I mistook his for an open window.

Now, we both know better,
and have given back the things we mistook.
But it clings to our fingers —
this stain of taking what wasn’t ours,
what did not exist until we took it,
and not even then.

by Daniel Lusk

In the wide and ordered countryside
where I was born, night seemed
to come as the great shadow
of something passing overhead

a premonition as familiar as
that hailstones will follow
the white breath of thunder,
the veil that hides its angry face

that outside our house by the road,
between the outhouse and empty corncrib
where the barn owl recited
her daily liturgy, shadow

that in summer climbed down
the avuncular maple in our yard
or in winter clambered down
our windmill’s frozen rungs, obscuring
neighboring farms and snowbound fences
as it came over us.

Here in the woods night deepens
under plumes of Goat’s Beard, among
the feathers of red roses,
yellow Heliopsis, Doll’s Eye bane,

ascends the gleaming trunks of birches,
hazel, hornbeam, oak, pushing the last
gilded lamplight of the sun up our cliff, skyward,
even as it vanishes behind the western ridge

until at last it opens its threadbare tunic
to show the stolen jewelry of the stars.

by Daniel Lusk

1
It’s a diary you encounter
with your eyes
and read
with your tongue.

When it was green of after-rain,
and fastened by a secret clasp

you knew, even
before you could spell
disguise, its closure
was a small hoax.

Ripe now, the swollen seam
is a mere white lie, an almost.
Almost open,
almost firmly closed.

2
Nostrils swelling,
you will incline to offer
your teeth.
This will require more
than parting your lips.

Study its swells.
Don’t they seem
an invitation?

To be circumspect
or bellicose?
This is not bread.

With your mouth wide
there will be no stopping
what floods your incisors,

washes the delicate, milk-seeking
nerves that decode all perfumes.

You will remember,
across all your forgetting, this
— all down your breast
and belly, your own firm skin.

by Chris Souza

I’ve left you this pear.
Take it.
Let its russet weight fill
your palm.

Let its shape, pond, lute,
hourglass half-
remembered,
wake in you

the moments of body
we shared:
how we took
as from a field of grain

our fill and drank
the thrush’s song.
Hold it near;

remember how
scent arrived,
the promise
our touch fulfilled.

What store is in
you now
but still water
and broken strings?

I’ve left you this pear.
Take it.