Category: WTP spotlight: poetry

From WTP Vol. VI #5 Last Dispatch After Partial Resection By AR Dugan I try not to imagine / your real color / when they removed pieces of you / carefully, trying not to wake me. / I can’t help but think of you, / now and forever. / It would be easier if you…

From WTP Vol. VI #4 SONNETS TO ORPHEUS, Part One, 14 Rainer Maria Rilke Translation by Art Beck We’re companions to the flower, the vine leaf, the fruit. They don’t just speak the changing language of the seasons. But a multi-colored revelation that climbs from darkness with a glint, perhaps, of the envy of the dead…

From WTP Vol. VI #4 Hydrangea By Wally Swist These deciduous plants adorn the lawns on which they lavish panicles, large white flowerheads, growing among spear-shaped evergreen leaves. The bushes are as showy as their flowers that are often thought to resemble pom-poms. Every spring and summer, I observe their enormous blossoms bob among their…

From WTP Vol. VI #3 At Night-Point By Michele Leavitt In recent dreams, I weed the night by touch, yanking limp grasses, tossing amputated limbs into the slop bucket’s shame. Now, a different kind of morning: balancing on the fallen hemlock, running my fingers on an angle of barkridge grown thick, resistant to decay and…

From WTP Vol. VI #3 The Clutch By stephanie roberts Headphoned, he pushed the mower following the game couch pleasure held in abeyance to the knuckle-crack of rain. Duty pitched delight in clover levelled—carpet and diamond centerpiece to her garden’s linden-day fragrance of rose and vine. Today, she eyed him from the deck, but preferred…

From WTP Vol. VI #3 God Does His Own Laundry By Joshua Jones Because heaven has no Sears, no Tide— for God’s sake—no running water, His garments must be washed by hand, a tricky venture at first, one doctor of the church has observed in his magnum opus De Sarto Dei, because His hands have…

From WTP Vol. VI #2 Look, Little Brother By Clodagh Beresford Dunne                              Rudimentary kangaroos                                                   on bent…

From WTP Vol. VI #2 Mockingbird By Susan Dworski Nusbaum Under the bronze Buddha’s eye, too many cellphone-talkers, crowds at the koi pond. Hurrying from the Botanical Gardens, I’m stunned by the song of a plump grey bird perched on a palm branch, trilling a nigun like a cantorial soloist. Catching his bead of eye,…

From WTP Vol. VI #1 All This Time By Dina Elenbogen It is true what you’ve said about the birds    They have gone invisible into winter not south   just bowed down in prayer for lighter air Some mornings everything becomes apparent icicles turn from rain to rivers When the ground unfreezes they rise…

From WTP Vol. VI #1 Driving to Petersham By Michael Thurston 1. Around the Quabbin, marsh ponds stare at clouds like the eyes of the drowned watch hulls going over. 2. Let’s say the dry stalks scrape the eye and prop the lid of the descending sky. 3. The first car pins the squirrel so…

From WTP Vol. V #9 November Suite By Richard Hoffman 1. At first I held out my hands, then my arms, to welcome and hold all that was offered. In time I learned that none of it could be abandoned. Having wanted so much, having accepted so much, now possessing so much, what could I…

From WTP Vol. V #9 The Heated Windowsill By Laura Foley From the darkness of unknowing, from the steep unlit stairs, the sudden loss of what was vibrant, the impossibility of imagining what comes next— a room of doors, and which to open? The monk, across from me at lunch, tells me how, three days…