Issue 19

Spring/Summer 2016

Cover Photo © 2016 “Orange Flowers” by Pat St. Pierre, previously published on photographer’s blog.

Whether it be physical, emotional, or spiritual, we carry the Touch of those we encounter every day, as much as they carry our own, and when we listen to their stories or remember their personal struggles, we can’t help but make their struggles our own.

the hospital demanded all the living

we could muster

Kenneth Salzmann

Fickle, like an infant,

he must be coaxed with airplane noises

Eric Blanchard

I listen the way a foreigner listens to a tour guide,

not asking too many questions for fear

of being misunderstood.

Kate Van Pelt DeLoach

the numbers they use to label men

will never measure a mother's fear,

predict the day she'll be too slow

to break his fall, too old to tie his shoes.

Patricia Wallace Jones

I lost you years ago and I’m off-

kilter, asymmetrical, deformed

James S. Wilk

I’ll walk this night

in a dream so pure and distant

as stars above my seeking soul.

Ed Bennett

I see the shadows in my eyes

setting like a forgetful sunrise

drawing blinds across my daylight.

David Anthony Sam

I am undeniably alive!

A pulse, impulsive,

purple rise -

a shadow on a hillock,

my only wish that you were by my side.

K.R. Copeland

I wipe your face and recall the days gone by,

a messy feeding with sauce remnants everywhere.

Nicholas Andrew Froumis

You abide in every question

I ask in poems I craft

blessings

treasured ineffable friend

Marianne Lyon

It is a shadow crossing

paths with the light just right, so that flickers of yesterday

become quicker than today

Larina Warnock

when cancer said “you’re dead”

a mariposa miracle transformed

Susan Quaglietti

Fake grass his blanket,

no seeds, only prairie, forever the prairie,

stretched in the wind.

Janet Sunderland