Andy Posner, “A Love Sonnet Written on the Occasion of the Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg”

Andy Posner grew up in Los Angeles and earned an MA in Environmental Studies at Brown. While there, he founded Capital Good Fund, a nonprofit that provides financial services to low-income families. When not working, he enjoys reading, writing, watching documentaries, and ranting about the state of the world. He has had his poetry published in several journals, including Burningword Literary Journal (which nominated his poem “The Machinery of the State” for the Pushcart Poetry Prize), Rise Up Review, and From Whispers to Roars.

A Love Sonnet Written on the Occasion of the Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

I won’t accept death delivered in prose.
Darkness fell twice tonight; can we still know
what’s real? Give me your hand and we’ll compose
ourselves. Do you recall, not long ago,
when one could mourn but not despair? When pain
made sense? I’m tired. Let us not be bound
by Time, least of all these times, when again
we stand upon the brink. I hear the sound
of mourners keeping vigil in the night:
we’re but tiny flames clinging to the wick.
I want to touch what aches in us, the light
we guard to stay alive. My dear, come quick.
I hear a knock; I’m afraid. Is it you?
I dare to open and let hope come through.

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Robin Turner, “The Way the Sweet Gum Pray”

Robin Turner has recent work in Literary Mama, Heron Tree, and One (Jacar Press). Her chapbook, bindweed & crow poison, is available from Porkbelly Press. She lives in the Piney Woods of East Texas.

The Way the Sweet Gum Pray

Don’t speak to me of faith these days,
its fabled leap all forward force,
all muscle and trouble, slow mercy.

I’m watching the way the sweet gum pray,
the sugar maple and the oak—a leaf at a time,
in its time, lets go, surrenders into

the late-lit air where it’s met, joined with
something—call it what you will—
something that carries

and does not carry, that moves
with and along, with and along,
with and along, a great whisper.

And everywhere here the tall pines tower,
holy and knowing, bearing witness. Listen—
They are silent as our dead and ever green.

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Barbara Daniels, “Emeralds”

Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Lake Effect, Cleaver, Faultline, Small Orange, Meridian, and elsewhere. Barbara Daniels received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Emeralds

My friend fingers her gemstones
and reads her elegant lecture. Almost
singing, she tells us stories pursue

their endings like wolves
on the track of a wounded elk. I hate
the three thieves, locked tower,

sleeping prince. Her hair has thinned.
Cancer’s back. I don’t believe
an emerald’s light enters the blood

and closes the evil eye. I don’t want
to travel in silver ships or untangle
a proof or a paradox. I want to go home

to a bottomless pool, become a slick
animal, swim through summer
with spadefoot toads in the moving green.

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Barbara Daniels, “Imperfect Grief”

Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Lake Effect, Cleaver, Faultline, Small Orange, Meridian, and elsewhere. Barbara Daniels received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Imperfect Grief

The sign at the church says
Thursdays: Grief Sharing.
Half-empty apartments

crowd the street. At a window,
a woman in black.
If she’s like me, she’s glad

it’s getting too dark to see
raised veins on her raddled
hands. I can’t go back

through plowed fields, three steps
up to a modest door, can’t
walk till night wrings itself out

and surrenders to sunrise, house
sparrows idling in the gutter,
iced-over pond shining

like giftwrap. I ask the cold
to be kinder, snow to touch softly,
feather, fall. Every day

my amaryllis almost opens, first
a green pregnancy, spot of red,
then leafy reaching. What drives

a red bloom out of each plumped
green belly, too late for Christmas,
but bright and bouffant as a prom dress?

 

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