Towards the east the snow-capped peak of Mt. Hood appeared at once tactile and impossibly distant, the craggy summit redolent of both beauty and death.
-Matthew Vollono, "Samaritan"
I listen to the rain fall like apology, / kneading the pillow to its fresher side.
-Amy Fleury, "Two Solitudes"
If you were a whale / and I a ship, I'd see you / coming for me
-Kevin Ducey, "Beauty, first whale then monkey"
And when the wind rose at night we heard / the barn swallows gather and land inside us.
-Molly Bashaw, "There Were No Mirrors in That Farmhouse"
Last night the dog star stood above my bed --
-Peter Cooley, "Imperialism"
The howl boiled up through the soles of Everill's feet.
-Ann Gelder, "Origin"
In our mouths and palms, death and / the dream of death are one, / thanks to time.
-Christopher Salerno, "Ahead of Schedule"
Sometimes it was like an actress was playing her, living in that strange cinderblock house,...the border between real and cartoon becoming harder to distinguish
-Jill Logan, "Tropism"
The lake will take on the hue of snowflakes unembarrassed by nakedness
-Daneen Wardrop, "Stir the Lake"
Yesterday she walked out of the woods and into a meadow
-Angie DeCola, "Learned Ever to Pine"
In the quiet aftermath of this small personal disaster a single / ray of light sliced a line too bright to face a divide
-Alice B. Fogel, "House of Habit"
The sun was rising, and we were alone. For a moment, her strained face was luminous in the dawn light.
-Steven Schwartz, "So This Is It"
& if we put the tree back / into the ground in our yard, / a Christmas come in June / & if we were to unspool gold / ribbons through its lower branches
-Carolina Ebeid, "Epithalamium"
Under ruined branches, apples / fell like hearts.
-Joanna L. Kaminski, "Faith"
Drawing stars, and drawing firs, gentleness comes to open the vein.
-Sarah Gridley, "Charcoal"
To each house came an invitation, silk-edged / and engraved, to the hanging in Concord in May.
-Cate Whetzel, "The Hanging of Frank C. Almy..."
She is her own apple her own various worm and wax
-Renee Ashley, "She Thinks about the Shapes Things Take"
Then comes the sun and draws its cutlass.
-Danniel Schoonebeek, "Genealogy (rest)"
When they were ten and lost their friends, it took my breath away.
-Katharine Haake, "Diptych: Chrysalis, Prayer"
Trying to mother / these days the Devil courts me, writes his names / in my journal, my mirror, my mornings filled / with hanging smoke
-Wendy Noonan, "Lord, help me eat them bitter words"
I'll rush along a gypsy camp of a dark street / In a black spring carriage chasing a bird cherry branch,
-Osip Mandelstam, "I'll rush along a gypsy camp..." (trans. Ian Probstein)
I was talking to preachy-preach about kissy-kiss
-Pixies, "Bone Machine"
Am antsy starfish. / On a mirror above a mirror.
-Greg Wrenn, "Circumcision"
Lucy's baby is born green, face splotched with yellow like variegated leaves, hair wispy white, corncob cornsilk.
-Tessa Mellas, "Beanstalk"
Tape me to your eyelids : you'll see why beauty hurts
-Deborah Bogen, "Barbed Wire"
The best apples are burnt out stars getting time off for bad behavior.
-Cory Van Landingham, "Orchard"
Some days I clean the rifle so it shines, / A steel slice of darkness in grease-stained hands.
-Hugh Martin, "Sonnet, M-16A2 Assault Rifle"
I could be thinking of a color, a girl, and suddenly it will be there large, / and gray and waiting for accuracy.
-Geffrey Davis, "Revising the Storm, 1991"
The flames groped the ceiling, Peter, and the smoke from the pages blackened their faces like coal soot.
-Robert Kloss, "When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote?"
I love you badly, Phantom, whose absolute brilliance assigns you to this zone.
-Jeffrey Pethybridge, "[Twenty thousand songs]"
Standing in the wind makes a wilderness / for the tribe to wander untethered by thought / quieted by mountains' grief
-Lee Sharkey, "When I fled it followed when I froze it slid forward"
But the yellow-beaked night / bird - in the moonlight, / in the clover, / in the deep deep grass - / could hold me, / always
-Donika Ross, "Perhaps you tire of birds"
We were a different kind of fool then, trimmed / stiff by patterns like stars we'd forget / except they held the night and sidewalks through it.
-Jill Osier, "Brother"
Forks can't solve it any more than a kettle.
-Steven Cramer, from "Clangings"
My lips have tasted golden bees in the rowans, / spring water running from Mount Funiu.
-Lan Lan, "Mother" (trans. Fiona Sze-Lorrain)
All we've built by mind and fist / is ravishingly stealable, in wait / of liberation.
