Poetry Winter 2023 fiction all issues
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Cover
Susan Wilkinson
Selena Spier
Red From The West
& other poems
Pamela Wax
Talk Therapy
& other poems
Ana Reisens
Honey Water
& other poems
Mark Yakich
Necessary Hope
& other poems
Bridget Kriner
A Few Lies & a Truth
& other poems
Keegan Shepherd
Silver Queen
& other poems
Alaina Goodrich
Sacred Conflagration
& other poems
George Longenecker
Those Who Hunger
& other poems
Hailey Young
Ball Room
& other poems
Sébastien Luc Butler
Aubade
& other poems
Savannah Grant
Ever Since (v.2)
& other poems
grace (logan)
Dynamic
& other poems
Samantha Imperi
A Poem for the Ghosted
& other poems
Corinne Walsh
Limerence
& other poems
Kayla Heinze
Stop checking the score
& other poems
Richard Baldo
Chasing Through to Dawn
& other poems
Alex Eve
A moment
& other poems
Robert Michael Oliver
Prison Hounds
& other poems
Ana Reisens
Honey water
Our lives change in the simplest of ways.
A butterfly, perched on the trellis.
I let it climb onto my finger,
carry it out of the rain.
A paper towel, damp with honey.
A carefully plucked flower.
It sips sweetness with its infinite
tongue as I write, each of us
learning each other’s beauty.
The sun stretches.
The windmill stills.
I carry it back outside,
watch its wings blink
and unfold.
When it finally leaps into the sky
it takes three laps around me:
one for honey, one for rain,
one for flowers, each
a different form of wonder.
Ripples
Climb with me into the river-wide arms of
the apple tree in May, when the chickadees
pick possibilities from the blossoms and the
bullfrogs call like foghorns across the pond.
We’ll wrap our arms around each other’s
branches and talk about the rain and whether
it’ll ever fall, the way the caterpillars cling
to the ridges of the reeds, how thoroughly
the black-winged kites sweep the sky. We’ll
eat sandwiches packed with our mothers’
memories and laugh at every passing bee, every
wish-shaped cloud, how the sheep leap over
the neighbor’s fence and the gray collie
lies sleeping beneath the willows.
Maybe, you’ll say, there’s more to us
than skin and bark, but a bullfrog will cut in
with a croak that sounds like home
and we’ll lean back and wonder where
the damselflies go after sunset. Later
I might agree that maybe there is more,
that perhaps all of us are just ripples
across a pond. Perhaps the damselflies
are the refractions of stars and we’re all
just fractions, which means nothing
is ever as bad as it seems, is it?
The little mouse skips between
the dipping blades of grass
and the adder still hasn’t caught it.
The sheep graze. The collie stirs.
The fields ruffle as we pass hope
back and forth between branches
like notes, like apples, like rain.
The daffodils, the melody, the rain
Who we really are is
everything:
the whistling green hills,
the silken sea foam.
The rain that gathers
beneath the streetlamps
in silver streams,
the leaves.
We are everything
that has ever been touched
by the sun and everything
that has not: the grass
and stones, the daffodils
and wingbeats.
We are silence
and whispers
and birdsong
all at once,
the blissful beating
of a distant drum.
Ana Reisens
is an emerging poet and writer, and you can find her work in The Bombay Literary Magazine, The Dry River Review, and Channel, among other places. She was a special mention for the 2023 Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Prize for a chapbook and the winner of the 2020 Blue Earth Review poetry contest. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.