by Stuart Sheppard

We have lost the ability to see what the ancients saw,
as we no longer look at the world in candlelight.

Things are seen too clearly now,
the way we have washed the dirty gaze of Michelangelo
from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

When God holds out his hand to us
we like to count the fingers,
instead of leaning forward into the warmth of his palm,

like a cat seeking the heat of our flesh at night,
remembering its birth in darkness.

by Elizabeth Pope

painting by the author

You took a night class, 3D design with the intent to get out of the house
to meet people and make something, to move your mind off the ceiling
watermarks baring the maps of escape, fissures leaking
the silhouette of Alaska.
                                                Left your husband
                                                and daughter, bottled breastmilk in the deep freeze.

Your hair was longer then, and you always worried it might catch fire
as you solder-ironed a book out of steel strips
the size of toothpicks,

photo by Vasily Kleymenov on pexels

by Samn Stockwell

A cockroach takes a sip of night, stirs
by the highway where a mouse
prods bits of chips in a red wrapper.

I’m hanging on the guardrails
of the overpass, on a thin crumble
of sidewalk – below

the turn of the streetcar waddling back,
a guitar player rumbling his hand up the frets,
and the moon over the amplitude
of a horn blowing the last note.

Samn Stockwell has published in Agni,

by Jaye Nasir

photo by Ricardo Lima on pexels

In the dark woods. In the dark
woods at night. It was
a dark and stormy night. There
was a girl. There she was, among
the willows. Among the open mouths
of the trillium flowers.
It was a girl, the woods. A dark
and stormy girl. This girl she was
a woods. The tallest tree: her mother.

To make an index of every folktale
defeats the purpose. The point
of a story is: you cannot catch it.

photo by Henry & Co. on pexels

by Michael Olson

(After Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking”)

I fall to rise and take my falling fast.
I feel myself in things I hope to know.
I learn by holding those that never last.

I feel by thinking how to hold my past.
I know myself by what I need to sow.
I fall to rise and take my falling fast.

To those who know a part of me, you asked:
Where are you going?