The Literary Magazine of the Osterhout Free Library
Attention
Janet Locke
The microwave clock
tells me I’m running late,
even though it runs slow.
So also say my cell phone,
my watch, and my wall clock.
A good friend was late for
everything, and she was perfect Continue reading “Janet Locke, Two Poems”
At the Now Vacant Lot on Bayard
Mitch Goldwater
I crouch to look at crocus blooms in random array
that trail along the sidewalk
and back across this urban square
of fresh-turned dirt and rusty debris.
A man stops his shuffle and stands above me. He has just returned
from the hospital, he says, a week after a transplant.
His skin is yellowed some.
He calls the purple heads
and golden eyes
on their stick-figure stems
Proud. Continue reading “Mitch Goldwater, Two Poems”
If
Abby Caplin
If, at the moment
of conception,
the matrix
of your corporeality
got plucked from the shelf
near the stove
of Consciousness,
and “you” were ladled
from the hot iron
rim of a dark-holed
kettle, lucky
if paired with soft
rolls and pats
of gold-foiled
buttery love,
while another “you,” by virtue
of spilling from the same
spoon (also into some horses, several
thousand rabbits, a trillion mosquitoes),
worked in a denim factory
in Bangladesh, your Continue reading “Abby Caplin, Two Poems”
The Cough
Robert Fillman
I am sleeping in the bedroom
down the hall for another night—
having spent the last two away
from my wife, in a narrow bed,
feet dangling over the edge,
unsure how to fold my long arms
as I bump against the rear wall
of the coldest room in the house.
All night, I hear my son coughing Continue reading “Robert Fillman, Three Poems”
Delta
Dawn Leas
I am a mosaic of Emerald Isle,
Italian leather and gypsy song.
I am swirls of magic,
Stories my grandmother told in Slovak,
a foreign language she lived in,
but never taught us.
I am salt. I am water.
Flowing blue to green,
dancing calm to chaos in a white foam dress.
I did not root in mountain mud
like an evergreen, but in sand,
like a pitch pine or orchid
moving with fire and breeze
in the barrens of New Jersey.
I am the woman
stepping off the known trail Continue reading “Dawn Leas, Three Poems”
