Poetry of the Non-Prose Kind

Voyager 2, thinking, types things

Mark A. McCutcheon

Very very very very very small
Billion miles recalculating
We don’t know details well at all
The direction we were last going

Calculable but undetectable
Earth would be the one-yard line
As bright planets are invisible
Now does not exist in space-time

Outer solar system missions
With the winds from other stars
As in trigintillion years never

But please do send invitations
People might think there are bears
To hear from you by tomorrow over

I Gut the Fish

Robin Walter

When something
in the dark
begins to shift:
I move into it.

 I gut the fish.
 I split my own wood.

O(pi)nion

Kevin Dunn

Peeled away, there’s Pi:
constant, irrational,
repeated to infinite
places. The bedrock
of this stew.

Wor(l)d

Kevin Dunn

In the beginning was the woad,
spackling a firmament cracking.
St. John’s solder, nailing the world
in between, tacks the word to water.

The Tailor of Twitter

Amy Holman

He measured     the pattern     to be cut bias
cherry-coloured     snippets
that will serve one single button hole.

He talked to himself     little twittering tunes     his greatest triumph
but there was no one there
He was vexed     like a cat that expects

cream on the dresser

No more twist!
Throstles and robins sang

His badness     hunted and searched     house to house
and secret trap-doors     without any keys
merry voices an echo

ravelling     that wonderful coat
Never were seen such flowered lappets

And he talked to himself:     do not lose that last penny!
We shall make our fortune     shut out the light

Sonnet with Simile

Jane Huffman

I knew straight away,
like a rabbit darting across traffic
knows the extent of its quickness.

I had wanted to emerge without
emerging. A private debut,
no needling.

What happened, of course,
was threefold, like a Chekhovian
drama. First, I gave in

as some might give birth. Then,
I made the decision. Last, I stayed,
which had the staying power

of an image, a hook-handed man.
A rifle in the umbrella stand.

kitchen window view

Philip Arnold

of the barn-tethered
goat

his joy-besotted molars
cudding

brambles in blossoming
light

the rickety-hinged holler
opens

the
cauliflower

are rife with
it

Licentiam: 9.8

Daniel Y. Harris & Jonathan Mulcahy-King

hissing vessel desperate to be poured, poor little veins,
lava streams engulfing inland valleys, brown blood
flecks, a peaking shrine to blackmail hex on kin, old
straws, busted copper rods to suck, sacrosanct instead
of laundered preempt, sickos willed by the smack of a
papal legate, loyal gene, radical selfcombing, snarled
hair, narrates the rotary gestures, theremin with
vacuum tubes, heterodynes, Fête des Belles Eaux for
six ondes, to crave badly is to take hard the blood-tusk

Quercus alba

Sonja Johanson

mott-gathered, hard
 as hunger

 rock-shelled, soaked soft
 cracked
 open with a maul

 three days
 in a basket, steeped

by the whiskey river
 destitute lobes,
 handful
in the pot, mouthful
in the cup

 one on the sill
 against the storm

Ageratina altissima

Sonja Johanson

 the milk, and the bone –
 sickness and break fever

women in their crinoline
 cages

 round-toothed, scalloped
 feet planted so close
 together

 birthing herb,
snakeroot, richweed, sanicle

 ruptured shade   the febrile wood
 white island
 in a sea of heat

terete-wrap your breeze around
 my aching legs
 and tongue

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