Tag: Poetry

Two Poems by Sara Cosgrove

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

My Grandfather’s Garden

The North Country yields
the most fragrant flowers—
Tropicana, Sterling, and Peace roses.

They’ve been nurtured for a decade,
season after season.

An attentive doctor/caregiver named Stanley,
who took up gardening at the age of 70,
planted 100+ bushes and
trained them to endure our cruel winters.

The 1991 Halloween Blizzard
would’ve destroyed the buds in my grandmother’s vase
if we hadn’t raked thousands of autumn leaves,
stuffed them into large sacks
and put them to rest atop the rose bushes.

When the leaves finally scattered
and the Spring rain dissipated,
we marched through the maze with our garden hoses,
watered the fertile soil
and waited for our freshly picked bouquets to bloom.


Puppy Love

for Merry

Merry, Merry, Sugar Plum Fairy,
You lean in to love with
Revolutionary ardor.

I’m watching your tail
Wag with intent
As you nuzzle your favorite toy—
A fluorescent ball of fluff I named Fraggle Rock.

Its googly eyes are looking at you,
Looking at me.

This is our spiritual home.

When I return from a trip to the grocery store—
The only acceptable excuse for truancy—
I set the bags on the kitchen floor.

You carefully inspect the goods
Before we feast.

My selections typically meet with your approval:
Baked salmon, sweet potato mash, broiled top sirloin steak with
All the fixins.

We sit before a buffet of nutrient-dense deliciousness,
A veritable cornucopia,
Every single day.

Because we are rich,
We sleep with full bellies
And dream of our next adventure.




Sara Cosgrove is an award-winning journalist and poet. Her poems have appeared or are scheduled to appear in The Seventh Quarry, Meniscus, Osiris, Poetry Ireland Review, Frogpond (Haiku Society of America), Autumn Moon Haiku Journal, Notre Dame Review, Gargoyle, San Antonio Review, ONE ART, In Parentheses, Panoply, Unbroken, and Roi Fainéant. She has worked as an editor for 15 years and has studied in the United States, Cuba, and France.

Two Poems by Arvilla Fee

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

You Once Told Me I was Beautiful

In the spring
when stems were new,
blossoms bright
against the mid-March sun;

we blazed together
during summer,
blown by tipsy winds,
electrified by stars;

you still held me
as dew tipped the grass
in frosted-silver droplets,
and gold hung from my arms;

but then the leaves fell,
as did the temperature,
as did your eyes, your smile;

I suppose you shivered
at the sight of naked branches,
a strange fragility,

but darling, did you not know
that a new spring would come,
that I would bloom again,
thrusting through crusted earth;

you see I am a perennial,
back every year, lovely, fresh—
she is just an annual
and will be gone by season’s end.


An Avalanche of Poetry

a poem gathers
          words
tumbling
at breakneck speed,
leveling everything in its path
until each stanza stacks
like disheveled cords of firewood
one atop another,
sides heaving with panted breaths
at the bottom of the page.




Arvilla Fee teaches English Comp for Clark State College and is the managing editor for the San Antonio Review. She’s been published in numerous presses including Contemporary Haibun Online, Calliope, North of Oxford, Right Hand Pointing, Rat’s Ass Review, Mudlark, & others. Her poetry books, The Human Side (2022) and This is Life (2023), are available on Amazon. Arvilla has an awesome husband and five children (having recently adopted their 3-year-old foster child). She loves reading, writing, photography, traveling–and never leaves the house without a snack and a bottle of water (just in case!). Her favorite quote in the whole world is this: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

Two Poems by D. R. James

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Personal Archeology

Imagine the graphable shifts
in your own self-civilization
from proud, young hunter
to calculating gatherer
to steady cultivator: industrious
over worker of your fragile
inner child. And notice

those thin but alarming layers
in your sedimentary record,
the relative moments indicating
odd breakthroughs, beneficial
mutations, weathered disasters—
in my case, that sudden thaw
of marital ice, the one that displaced
my psychic shoreline inland
hundreds of miles, submerging
remnants of a domestication
I’d survived in ignorant
and therefore precarious peace.

Any trained observer could write up
the reports, even poems
on the highlights. Why, I can recount
all kinds of particular days
like geological calamities:
when my grandfather died
and his wrist watch stopped
on the minute he hung his screaming arm
over the gunwale at the Red Umbrella Inn;
the first time I got drunk, so sick
on a buddy’s dad’s secreted liquor
I thought my life would spin forever
out of control; my wedding
when I served the wine, played crazy
blues harmonica and scatted us
on our merry married way;
the divorce.

So why, you may now want to know,
can’t I recall the eons in between,
those thick, bland strata,
those uniformly-striped piles of years
on years when nothing noteworthy
seems to have happened
but wherein must have developed
the insidious disintegrations,
and wherein I must have lived
over twenty thousand of my give-or-take
twenty thousand five hundred days?


Psychological Clock

As García Lorca may have written: some people
forget to live as if a great arsenic lobster
could fall on their heads at any moment.
—Stephen Dunn,      “Sixty”

The will between your ears—plus
when it cuts in, or not—can make
the tick followed by the tock
a pattern to soothe or drive you nuts.
It depends on your kind of quiet.
I’ll wait while you stop to listen . . . .

Now perhaps experiment: try tocking
the tick, ticking the tock, coercing
your orthodox clock to reverse itself.
You’ll find your mind can even tock
then tock, and that the tick, tick, tick
of your current, your always passing,
precious life can be less analytic. Me,

I’m finally grasping that concept called
the noumenal: Plato wisely warned
philosophy’s best kept till your thirties,
so these extra couple decades (or so)
have helped Kant’s metaphysics
make some inroads toward my a priori
formulations, those few brute givens
that lie behind my phenomenal world.

Not that I’ll ever make my sweet way
to where the meanings lie, but
at least I’ve seen it’s not too late
to loosen the noose around our
categorical necks and that the pre-
positions of our space-time grammars
needn’t wield such schoolmarm sway—
like the stranglehold that’s left red welts
around my pliant, compliant soul.

Look, our lucky brains will shuck some
million cells, including a few from troubled
routes through tired gates that may never
wend our way again. But there can be
rejuvenation, for I’ve caught a glimpse
that is both its outcome and its witness.




D. R. James, retired now from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. His latest of ten collections are Mobius Trip and Flip Requiem (Dos Madres Press, 2021, 2020), and his prose and poems have appeared internationally in a wide variety of print and online anthologies and journals.

Two Poems by John Grey

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

A Poet’s Autobiography

I write poetry
because it was
the last art form standing.

I took piano lessons
but my hands, eyes and ears
never could come to terms.

With easel, palette and canvas,
I strode off into the landscape
in hopes of becoming the next
Thomas Cole or John Constable.
My first disproportioned oak
would be my last tree.

My sculpting skills
resulted in a dash to the emergency room
to reattach a fingertip.

I finished three chapters of a novel
but lacked the perseverance to go on.

In my one and only ballet class,
I slipped on the lake floor
and almost drowned the swan.

But I discovered that,
after every one of these failures,
I could retreat to my bedroom
and, with pen and paper,
jot down how miserable I felt.

After that, I could easily adapt my scribblings
to my disappointments, my fiascos,
in everything from romance
to work life to family.

One day, back in the mid-nineties,
something good happened to me
and that inspired a poem
of sheer optimism and joy.

I made it a point
not to put it with my other poems.


Other People

Other people have entire lives that are not mine.
They go to baseball games. They shop at Macy’s.
And they invest money on the stock exchange.
They sit, one among many, at the dinner table.

Other people have family dogs.
They attend banquets, celebrate trophy winners.
Their good deeds roll up into what they call “charity work.”
They try to be disagreeable only part of the time.

Other people are rarely alone and, if they are,
they tend to pace about the room.
Their writing life consists of taking a phone message
for somebody who’ll be home later.

Other people take their medicine religiously
and their religion like medicine,
They garner meaning from the day’s meaningless labor.
They do their utmost to be nothing at all like me.




John Grey is an Australian poet and U.S. resident recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Lost Pilots. His latest books, Between Two Fires, Covert, and Memory Outside the Head, are available through Amazon. You’ll find more of his work upcoming in California Quarterly, Seventh Quarry, La Presa, and Doubly Mad.

Two Poems by Lorraine Caputo

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ 1 Comment

El Convento de San Francisco

A fortress façade of white-trimmed grey,
the bell towers with three stilled bells,
the doors shut against the heat of mid-day.

Within we walk, through the old convent.
After 450 years, it is now a school,
the green blackboards with faded chalk writings –
lessons of language and history,
the hymn of Nicaragua,
bars and sharps and words
woven across the space.
Within one sala,
upon a blue-bordered porcelain plaque:
Bartolomeo de las Casas
Defender of the Indians
Resided in this room
In the year 1536.

Past the weed-covered courtyard
with hoopless basketball courts,
is a collection
of pre-Columbian statues
raided from the islands
in the lake a few blocks away,
now protected behind a fence,
covered by a red-tiled roof.
Time-worn,
weather-worn,
forgotten in this aged place –
no-one has been here for a long, long while.
Leaves blown in upon the tiled floor,
signs askew on their pedestals.
The faces of dead heroes and images
of crocodiles, jaguars and eagles
gaze across the half-ruined compound.


Dissolving Into the Silence

Again this morning
I awoke too quickly

I tried to gather
the fraying threads
the tenuous chords
of my dreams

but already they had
dissolved
into the predawn
silence




Lorraine Caputo is a wandering troubadour whose poetry appear in over 400 journals on six continents, and 23 collections – including In the Jaguar Valley (dancing girl press, 2023) and Caribbean Interludes (Origami Poems Project, 2022). She also authors travel narratives, articles and guidebooks. Her writing has been honored by the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada and nominated for the Best of the Net. Caputo has done literary readings from Alaska to the Patagonia. She journeys through Latin America with her faithful knapsack Rocinante, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth. Follow her adventures on facebook or on her website here.

Two Poems by Michelle DeRose

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

–And the River Like Ink

Most floats you find me feet up
on the gunwales, cold drink
koozied in my hand, scanning sky-
or bankward for interesting bits–
the first yellow sprout amidst green,
a flat tail in retreat. It doesn’t feel
like toil. Just motion, being propelled,
each bend a nudge to notice what
I couldn’t see two or three strokes

earlier. We hit snags, of course,
when I fail to scour the surface and,
too late to veer or draw, we scrape
or come full stop. Most scratches
on the craft are my fault, too distracted
by the cyclone of eagles banking an updraft,
say, or by webs between branches so gauzy
they could staunch blood, to consider
what awaits below the water line.


After Sunday School

Meteors and volcanoes, or God–
my nephew at four debated
his best car-seated buddy
about what snuffed the dinosaurs,
erased forever any chance
for a pet stegosaurus.
The black nylon straps
chevroned across their torsos
pointed at each other in red-
lidded clips, like blood-
dipped fingertips.

His dad, the philosopher driver,
suggested maybe God sent
the meteor to trigger the volcano,
so they could each be right.
The one-second pause before
they both blurted NO
informed their chauffeur
the four year-olds relished
the rift, wished it to linger
more than their common longing
for a pet filled the gap between belts.




Michelle DeRose teaches creative writing and African-American, Irish, and world literature at Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her most recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Sparks of Calliope, Dunes Review, Making Waves, The Journal of Poetry Therapy, and Healing Muse.

“Grounded” by Craig Kirchner

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

I awake to a green giraffe with black spots,
standing against a royal blue sky.
A little further down the wall
a pink pig is smiling at a coke can,
also, on a royal blue background.

These are surrounded by various,
Jackson Pollack color explosions,
crafted by my two granddaughters.
This is their wall, and it looks at me,
every night, as I attempt to sleep.

We talk about what grounds us,
what keeps us in touch with reality,
keeps both feet balanced on the floor,
responding properly to
protocol and gravity.

This is the first day of the rest of your life.
Every day you wake up is another win,
a miracle, a leg up on mortality,
extra innings.
Time left on the parking meter.

The space I take up,
the air I displace,
is like a drop of water in the earth’s oceans.
I am meaningless and will every day,
every moment, become more so.

In the meantime, I have a giraffe,
with a black and white eye
and a smiling pink pig,
that every morning
laugh with me about it,

and even though they face in
different directions in their world,
they have me,
and that royal blue background
in common.




Craig Kirchner thinks of poetry as hobo art, loves storytelling and the aesthetics of the paper and pen. He has had two poems nominated for the Pushcart, and has a book of poetry, Roomful of Navels. After a writing hiatus he was recently published in Decadent Review, Wild Violet, Last Leaves, Literary Heist, Ariel Chart, Cape Magazine, Flora Fiction, Young Ravens, Chiron Review, Valiant Scribe, Borderless Crossings, The Main Street Rag, Dear Booze, and several dozen other journals.

Two Poems by Jennifer Gurney

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

The First Time I Took A Bus

The first time I took a bus I was four.
It was a big mistake for my mom to put me on a bus alone.
The driver said if we rode to the lake for swim lessons.
We had to ride home that way too.
So I got off, because I was meeting my mom and brother at the lake.
I was only following directions.
I walked home, found the hidden key, and let myself in.
I didn’t answer the phone when my mom called, because I wasn’t supposed to.
I didn’t answer the door when my neighbor came to check, because I wasn’t supposed to.
And when she called through the door, I finally let her in.
She called my mom at the lake and got it sorted.
It was kind of a big deal, being before cell phones and all.
I guess I misspoke, since I didn’t actually take a bus that time, after all.
It was the time I almost took a bus.


The Sound of Winter

When I step onto the bus and quiet myself
I can hear the sound of winter
The car wheels spinning through the melty slush
Following behind the snow plows, well, plowing
The laughter caught in the scarf wrapped around your face
As you laugh at an inside joke you both share
The ringing of the bells at the Salvation Army kettle
And the clank of a coin tossed in
A train whistle in the distance
Sounding as hollow and bereft as me
The silent wish made by my heart
Of one more Christmas together
The sound of my tears on my cheeks
As I begin the mourning of you



Jennifer Gurney lives in Colorado where she teaches, paints, writes and hikes. Her poetry has appeared internationally in a wide variety of journals, including Sparks of Calliope, The Ravens Perch, HaikUniverse, Haiku Corner, Cold Moon Journal, Scarlet Dragonfly and The Haiku Foundation. Jennifer’s haiku has recently won the 6th Basho-an International English Haiku Competition and was recently selected for the Golden Triangle Haiku Poetry Competition in DC. Her poetry has also been accepted into the Ars Nova Shared Vision project in Colorado and will be turned into a choral piece and performed in a series of concerts in the Denver area this June.

“My Mind is Changing Me” by W. Roger Carlisle

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

Everyday now I make a list of names
I can’t remember; I believe rehearsing these
words will save my memory. I place notes inside
cupboard doors to remind me of basic tasks.
I fear having a social microscope focused on me.

My memory has no home but right here, right now.
It has always been my help-mate ready to fill
every pause, every moment of panic with some
pithy saying or the name of some ancient philosopher.

Now, it has gotten lost; it is wandering somewhere
in the backyard weeds with the melting clocks,
a lost piece in a giant puzzle.
I still have old memories but that quick retort
has become unreliable. Like King Lear,
I must throw myself on the mercy of the gods.

When I tell all of this to my children they ignore me;
old people always do this they say; “they
talk about things you can’t see to cover up
their memory losses.”

Now, I am standing alone in a room full of angry people;
the faces are very familiar but I don’t recognize
anyone; I think I am in a dream but I may be confused about that.

I see strained confusion on the face of my friends
as I answer their questions with a blank look.
I have developed many strategies to cope with this
social disgrace. I often cough or rub my head like
I’ve got a headache; sometimes, I just stop and adjust
my hearing aids.

Somehow I will go on. I’ll use disdainful looks to
change the conversation into something I can remember.
I’ll dress in an old trench coat and mimic Columbo.
I’ll feign condescending wisdom as I rub my chin.
There is nothing worse than a puzzle missing a part.




W. Roger Carlisle is a 75-year-old, semi-retired physician. He currently volunteers and works in a free medical clinic for patients living in poverty. He is on a journey of returning home to better understand himself through poetry. He hopes he is becoming more humble in the process.

“Viola” by Henry Stimpson

~ Randal A. Burd, Jr. ~ Leave a comment

1.

“I put my checkbook right there,”
Mom wails. “Am I losing my mind?”
Old bills, notes on scraps and snapshots
breed on the dining-room table,
but no checkbook surfaces.

Mutely, she shuttles from the bedroom
to the living room, piling on the sofa
her hats, sweaters and thin lilac gloves
that were stylish decades ago.

2.

When the movers come,
Mom shrieks at Dad, “It’s all your fault!”
Stripped bare, the dusty rooms
of their little red house echo.

“Let’s go to my house,” I say.
In the passenger seat, she nods out
clutching $36 in her left hand,
a smile on her creased lips.
She thinks she’s moving in with me.

3.

“I could have had a wonderful job
at the bank,” Mom whimpers
when I drive her to their new place.
But she was afraid to leave Linda
and me alone with Dad,
just back from the mental hospital.

4.

The first night in their seniors apartment,
she locks herself out, shrieking
in the hallway in her nightgown.

They send her to the same hospital
Dad went to forty years ago.

5.

In the nursing home,
Mom is lost in a Sunday paper flyer
that’s as gaudy as a macaw.
“That’s not bad!” she says,
pointing to a sneaker on sale.
I plop down, unnoticed.

Her plump pal Mrs. Quinn eyes
the peanut butter crackers
I bought for scrawny Mom.
I crack open the cellophane
and we three have a party.
The crackers are delicious,
bright orange and salty.

She meanders in her slipper-tiny feet
as I walk her slowly down the corridor.
“I love you,” she says with a gappy grin
(they’ve taken away her bridge)
and my heart leaps.

6.

After another bladder infection,
she’s back in the hospital,
not eating or drinking much.
An intravenous line snakes to her hand.
She sits up and stares wide-eyed
at the brown blotches mottling her legs
as if they were a strange map.
“Can’t I get a cup of coffee in here?”
she asks no one in particular.

7.

I put a plastic spoon brimming
with coffee milkshake to her mouth.
Her lips purse tight.
I hand her the spoon.
She plunges the handle in.
I grab it and her mouth pops open
like a baby bird’s
and I shovel the gelid liquid in.
“That’s my son!” Mom tells the nurse,
who purrs, “He’s a nice boy.”
My boyish spirits soar.
I’ll save her life with thickshakes!
She’ll go back to the nursing home,
where I’ll love her again like a baby.

But eating’s too much bother.
She needs a feeding tube to survive.
Linda and I say no. Dad goes along.
They disconnect the IV.

8.

Mom fights for air, fast wheezing breaths,
wrenched-open mouth, dead stale smell,
one eye shut, the other open, glazed as a marble.
She flinches when I kiss her near her shrunken ear.
“You’ve been a great mother,” I say.
“Been” feels like a betrayal.

9.

In a pinkish casket
Mom lies with roses,
looking oddly determined,
almost the mother I knew.
Dad kneels there, crying.
“She’s in heaven now,”
the Catholic priest says.

10.

One of ten fed by the coins
her Italian papa gleaned in his barbershop,
Viola Iervolino married a Yankee
and learned how to crack a lobster.
Viola Elizabeth Stimpson reads
the granite headstone on the family grave.

In this faded color snapshot,
a pretty young woman in shorts
joyously hoists a striped bass
her husband caught. Months later
his seed and her egg will fuse
and time will begin.




Henry Stimpson has been a public relations consultant and writer for decades. His poems, articles, and essays have appeared in Poet Lore, Cream City Review, Lighten Up Online, Rolling Stone, Muddy River Poetry Review, Mad River Review, Aethlon, The MacGuffin, The Aurorean, Common Ground Review, Vol1Brooklyn, Poets & Writers, The Boston Globe and other publications. Once upon a time, he was a reference librarian, a prison librarian, and a cab driver. He lives in Massachusetts.