Category: Poetry

Reservation Renaissance

Bailey Dann

Let me show you what I love
The places where my ancestors walked
Those hills and valleys, dotted with medicine,
And all the jagged mountains yield.
There will we sit upon the rocks
And watch the storms pass,
By rushing rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
There I will translate their songs
I speak in ancient syllables,
My words shine through the sun,
Embroider’d with spider’s thread;
Dyed with huckleberries,
Through our ears our souls are fed;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.
Thy buckskin pouch for thy dried meat
As precious as the creator does eat,
Shall on Mother Earth, a blanket of wood violets will be
Prepared each day for thee and me.
Our people shall dance and sing
For thy delight until the sun rises each morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then come with me and be my love.

Bailey Dann

Once Again

Melodie Jones

I want to
emerge from the womb once again
Clean and healthy and new

Yes, I’ll be crying
We all enter life crying
but I won’t be crying from pain and suffering

My body will be clean, untouched
My eyes will not have seen worldly horrors
and I’ll be pure once again

Melodie Jones

Revival

Emily Craig

I fell in love in Springtime
as the flowers bloomed
and birds chippered a happy song.
His eyes as blue as the sky
on a warm March day.

A season of rebirth
so they tell me.
I grew a year older
as the world continues to
ring in Spring.

Smelling flowers
in a field of daisies.
Spreading my arms
to let the wind take me away.
Listening to the bird’s song
as I catch his blue eyes
staring at my side profile.
as if the dawn of Spring
gave him new information about the girl,
he’s known since Winter days
and chilly, snow mornings.

Love isn’t always what it seems.
We weren’t a Shakespeare love affair –
Not a lover as such.
We weren’t a play coming to life.
but caught in that moment,
I felt like Juliet,
standing on her balcony
as Romeo gazed at her from below.
Waiting for the moment it all changed,
but that moment never came.
Instead I fell in love with me.

A new love begins
as the Springtime takes form
right in front of me.
My revival begins –
A love in Springtime.

Emily Craig

Future Comings

After a photo by Elizabeth Jackson

Cheryl Heineman

Just near, just outside this window
small bird-hearted newborns sing
each with a church in its throat.

Hearing music, although you turn
away to your hurried day,
you recognize these hatchlings

are akin to the stars. Know that
as you see them fledge and soar
there is no need to cry out

another spring will alight
bringing again its chorus
just near this window, just outside.

Cheryl Heineman

The Lion-Side of March

Kimberly Wolkens

Spring is just around the corner
March, they say, comes
“In like a lion; out like a lamb”
I like the lion-side of March
When snow will still float silently down to Earth
Covering the forest floor in a sparkling blanket
When the wind rattles the naked branches
And the night is still fairly long and quiet

It’s not that the lamb-side of March is bad
I love the warmth that sneaks in
And I look forward to the plants soon to grow
And of the songbirds who will soon return to me

But I do so love the romance of winter
Of cozy nights snuggling while the snow flies
The stillness of the world that wakes up covered in frost

The lion-side of March is a final farewell
To turn me away from the night
And to turn me toward the growing sun

May these words remind me to
Blanket my heart with warmth
Sparkle my words with light
And still my racing thoughts
As I embrace the awakening soon to come

Kimberly Wolkens

lady in red

la Dama in Rosso; Giovanni Battista Moroni 1556 – 60  National Art Gallery, London

Claudia Radmore

four centuries old
this young wife in satin gown
of ruddy rose, a cochineal dye
from seventy thousand
pulverised female insects

though owned by high collar
and boned bodice
she is about to get up
or she has just sat down;
to sit for this portrait is

irritation for the artist
will capture forever
her flushed cheeks
and the honey in her eyes―
a lover must be waiting

Claudia Radmore

Portents

Kari A. Flickinger

Go back
who knew gulls at dawn
bear warning?
The bell in the campanile tolls.
Quiets the gulls.
A breath between their warning words.
Orange piercing silence through
wracking caws
calms a calamity of frenzy.

Winds warm will.
O deep ocean so near the desperate
Feathers.
Cackle in
this ditch hidden in this
seed and star

un peu à gauche de (planets)
near the milkiest
stream—down
an ivy way.

Kari A. Flickinger

A Hat Menagerie

Preston Smith

Kaleidoscopic fabric climbs my walls
like ivy, poisonous only in the false hope
it invokes. My hats are compact like a coral
reef, their varying colors culminating
in Humanity. I ask only for my tower.

I sweep the room, ever aware of outside
stares, ever unaware of how everything ended
up dreadfully. I see hats haphazardly strewn,
and I realize: my tower is my Underworld.
I only wished to discover Elysium.

My history unfolds two distinct chapters,
one before the Accident and the other after,
the connective tissue narrating Their deaths.
“How did you not foretell this tragedy?”
they ask, as if I bore the sight of the Fates.

Instead, obsidian velvet matches my gaze
as I examine each hat each day, never hesitating
to craft more, fabric flying in a clashing circus
of pastel and matte, hoping one will reunite
me with my family.

Today, I forge my own Olympus.

Preston Smith

Mutual Defenders

Adrian Slonaker

It doesn’t matter that you
don’t understand my language since my
speech is a whirlpool of stammers,
but my fat ring finger
taps the inside of your wrist,
telegraphing a resurgence of trust
crafted from kvass and vegan caviar and
Elvis Presley and the solitudes we slashed so that
my paisley duvet could shelter layers
of vulnerable limbs while
thunder throbs in our eardrums.

Adrian Slonaker