Star Slinger

By Deborah Burghardt

Knowing others plot
and await your surrender,
knowing if you do surrender,
they may kill you anyway—
that kind of knowing
is not my country.

I Learn to Appreciate Soft Butter on Our Vacation

By Louisa Muniz

Being brave in rain is not easy. When it stops
I find an outdoor cafe near the hospital.

Running back & forth to see you
hooked up to beeping buzzing machines
is a heft of stone in my chest.

Clocking Out

By Alan Perry

The metal gray time-clock
seemed to monitor every movement.

Its glassy face never blinked
as it belled interruptions through the day.

Accident

By Bill Ratner

I count concrete squares on the way
to school like a gambler counting cards.
Tree roots nudge up the sidewalk.
Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.

I leap at the cross-piece on the power pole,

“Take your broken heart and make it into art” — Carrie Fisher

By Jessica Dubey

Make wallpaper of your greatest losses,
the smallest saved to decoupage
a Pandora-proof box

Sew a quilt from a sundress
tattered at the hem like a failed affair
or the first pair of shorts you ever bled through

Dry Cabin

By Cody Kucker

Between spokes of a spring-borne bicycle,
the redpolls peck at snow,
foraging through clumped leaf chaff for seeds.

The bicycle’s purple,
a pedal permafrosted, its tires flat.

Anticipatory Set

By Donna Isaac

Where does the bee go after the hollyhock?
A stick boy with a blue balloon waited to see,
the bumble so ripe in summer air.

Doesn’t everyone watch and wait?
The ice is out on the lake.

Bobcat*

After you have driven a lot of farm tractors
and a Cat D-8 so ancient that
the pony motor started with a pull rope
and was so persnickety in cold weather
that you wondered if the diesel
would ever turn over, you’d think
a Bobcat wouldn’t be that exciting.