Taking Turns

 Jeanie Greensfelder 

I pass a woman on the beach.
We both wear graying hair,
feel sand between our toes,
hear surf, and see blue sky.
I came with a smile.
She came to get one.

 No.  I’m wrong.

She sits on a boulder
by a cairn of stacked rocks.
Hands over her heart,
she stares out to sea.
Today’s my turn to hold the joy,
hers the sorrow.

__

© Jeanie Greensfelder
Reproduced with permission of the author

Thin Skin

from Poem Boxes
Michele Morgan

The nexus
between daily life and fantasy
Is such a
thin skin of hope and despair

–

© Michele Morgan
Reproduced with permission of the author

Hello Moon

from Poem Boxes
Michele Morgan

New moon 
low slung in the sky 
behind lacy branches 
So many things in this world to do
got to keep breathing in
breathing out
As I have to be walking this way anyway
this cold night, these cold streets
Hello Moon!
Hello Moon! 

Full moon last night
crystal in an icy bowl
Nothing is more precious
than the glances of strangers
meeting each other

Just keep breathing 
asking all the questions 
when the point is 
that there are no answers
Things are as they are 
Got to keep breathing in
breathing out
got to keep breathing in
breathing out
breathing in
breathing out

–

© Michele Morgan
Reproduced with permission of the author

Everywhere & Nowhere

Andrea Keller (2024)

A gush dotted in the wind
Facilitating flight
Holding steadfast
Always championing

Exhaled and compelled to the vast beyond 
Configuring a nebula
Cultivating new life
Always nurturing 

Swept and reckoned to have had their venture
Yet together they form an ocean
The foundation for all life
Invisible(women)

–

© Andrea Keller
Reproduced with permission of the author

Sear and Soothe

 Hazel Smith

The woman supports a child in one hand and a trumpet in the other.     

She beats her soul into a bowl with sugar and melting butter.  

She adores cats, calculus and turning cartwheels. 

She reveres all the women who were hanged, beaten or stoned to death throughout history’s scandalous ode to justice. 

Yet duty is a snake, and the charmer is always female. 

The woman’s son is limping, she must save him from a fall even as the piano lid bangs open and spills bewitching melodies. 

Who entered her for this life-long series of auditions? 

She loves to stitch rejection notes together; 

she converts condescension into floor coverings.

She will never submit to the fangs of bias, the trash-talk of the bigot. 

She whisks up a new language that can sear and soothe before it is understood.

Invention is porous; transparency can be false; falsetto isn’t a male domain. 

She paints bold lyrics on cracked glass, gives throat to broken words.  

She holds a to-do list in one hand, lifts a galaxy with the other.

–

© Hazel Smith
Reproduced with permission of the author

The Long Hill

Sara Teasdale

I must have passed the crest a while ago 
And now I am going down— 
Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know, 
But the brambles were always grabbing at the hem of my gown. 

All the morning I thought how proud I should be 
To stand there straight as a queen, 
Wrapped in the wind and the sun with the world under me— 
But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen. 

It was nearly level along the beaten track
And the brambles caught in my gown— 
But it’s no use now to think of turning back, 
The rest of the way will be only going down.

–

© Sara Teasdale
Reproduced with permission of the author

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Includes images, text and poetry.