Leaving Guntersville

Pines' outline clouded in fog
mirrors memory that’s losing
its edges, colors, its thoroughfares

are shedding their data
Facts fall brittle through space
What remains looks to be

solid, but its hollow pride
can’t even recall when it last
caught and kissed the moon

Nancy K. Jentsch’s chapbook Authorized Visitors (Cherry Grove Collections) and the collaborative chapbook Frame and Mount the Sky (Finishing Line Press), in which her poetry appears, were published in 2017. Since 2008, when she began writing, her work has appeared in both online and print journals, such as Amethyst Review, Eclectica, Panoply, Tiferet Journal, and Zingara Poetry Review and also in numerous anthologies. In 2020 she received an Arts Enrichment Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She has retired after 37 years of teaching at Northern Kentucky University and finds a bounty of inspiration for her writing in her family and her rural home.

Featured image by benuski “Lake Guntersville” (filers applied) CC BY 2.0

Déjà Vu

On the stone peak of Yosemite
we sat at summer’s end,
mellowed light slanting right 

through us, as though we were
motes of dust in rise and fall
and careless spin above 

the book laid open
to the page that told
the story of its reading.

Through the fissured granite
ran the thinnest crack
in time, and I found my-

self on the other side
of things, unable to move
or speak, yet seeing how

the light was full of language
and knowing what would be,
I waited for your voice

to speak what I saw
and make me whole again.

John Savoie teaches great books at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Best New Poets, and Poetry in Motion.

Casual Friends, Overnight at the Sunken Garden

Drunk – I pin my hands between the back of my head
            and the moist grass; my palms and fingers
              as my pillow for the night.
Drunk – You, devastated by someone else, dream
              soft and warm on my nervous chest.
Drunk – I stave off sleep to watch over you
              under the gaze of the moon and stars,
              all the while convincing myself
              that my hands are at the best place
they should be.

Karlo Sevilla of Quezon City, Philippines is the author of three poetry collections: Metro Manila Mammal (Soma Publishing, 2018), You (Origami Poems Project, 2017), and Outsourced!... (Revolt Magazine, 2021). His poems appear or are forthcoming in Philippines Graphic, DIAGRAM, Small Orange, Dissident Voice, Openwork, Bluepepper, The Minison Zine, NINSHAR Arts, and elsewhere. 

Featured image by Jules Bañgate.

Discovery in the Nature Center

Spring glides into summer as
we pause near the footbridge
its weathered span beckoning us
to gaze at the dark pond surface

dotted with fallen locust blossoms.
It’s 2020 and we must stand aside
six feet apart from other walkers
waiting our turn to breathe safely.

Look! my husband says, pointing,
a wild rose bush, Rosa acicularis,
and lurking on the sweetbriar stem
a fuzzy peach-colored globe.

Cynipid eggs in mossy rose galls
Diplolepis rosea infecting stems
wasp larva growing stout inside
gall shelters immune to chemicals.

Wait for fall to rescue the hapless
roses from further cynipid invasion;
wearing gloves, you reach around
prickly stems to pluck the galls

or in late spring thirty or forty
full grown wasps may emerge
aching to lay more eggs—
but this is the Nature Center

where native roses feed squirrels
and birds and mink and mice;
rose hips and galls and wasps
sustaining each other, naturally

locust blossoms making way
for seed pods to form and fill
surviving as we must learn to
by holding the virus at bay.

Margaret Koger, a Lascaux Prize finalist, is a retired school media specialist with a writing habit. She lives near the river in Boise, Idaho where rafters ride the current on sunny summer afternoons, swerving around apids and waving hello to galleries of park sitters on the green banks of the stream. Her poetry has been archived by the City of Boise and has appeared in numerous journals including Amsterdam Quarterly, Forbidden Peak Press, Collective Unrest, Chaffey College Review, Thimble, Inez, Headway, Burning House, Voice of Eve, Tiny Seeds Literary Journal, Ponder Savant, and The Limberlost Review.

Featured image by Malcolm Manners “Rosa acicularis” CC BY 2.0