Poem August 2025

POEM

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August 2025

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Moon

In myths and poems, it keeps company with the rose.

Cold scythe of winter. Hammock of summer.

There’s no eclipsing its power over the sea.

In the game of hearts, we “shoot the moon,”

while each new phase of darkness

smolders with anticipation.

Our yard trees may fence us from it, but waxed full,

it offers delivery with argent bath of light. 

Mystics’ elixir. Astrologers’ purlieu.

The moon harvests our dreams.

— Elizabeth W. Jackson

Poem July 2025

POEM

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July 2025

Balancing Act


I was once content with walking railroad
tracks to school, stone walls to church,
touching my toes to the sidewalk
for balance, stepping over cracks
that needed mending.

I balanced on city curbs,
my arms extended like wings
that would fly me to a nearby tree,
a wild turkey perching safely
on the lowest limb.

In school we balanced skinny legs
on beams six inches off the floor
to please Miss Brown,
especially proud
to do it backwards,

and I heard the story of
Dayton’s Great Flood of 1913,
how victims inched their escape
across telephone wires from the railway
station to Apple Street and safety.

Now I walk one tight rope after another,
and wonder about people
who tread on pavement with no cracks,
no broken mothers’ backs,
in sensible shoes, arms to their sides,
with no inclination to fly.

— Marsha Warren

Poem June 2025

POEM

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June 2025

The Ferry from Ocracoke to Swan Quarter

Laughing gulls hover:

a story below,

their shadows slide

and crux across the deck

of the Silver Lake —

painted white by convicts

from the Hyde County camp —

bound over the slick-cam Pamlico, 

past a dredge-spoil island

where cormorants in black

frock coats congregate, exiled,

penitent, eyeing the ferry

with Calvinist reproach.

— Joseph Bathanti

Poem May 2025

POEM

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Erosion Control

We were losing the ridgeline to the dusk
when you asked, “What if I had stayed?”

Ten years is nothing
to a mountain —

unless you clear-cut
and gut it
for someone else
to move in.

I’ve done that too many times —
made my heart a gorge with a river
everyone floats through.


I looked at you
and said, “It wouldn’t have mattered.”

And you stared at me
with eyes
that looked so tired
of trying
to rebuild a rockslide.

—  Clint Bowman

Poem April 2025

POEM APRIL 2025

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Greedy

The catbird is pecking away

at two ripe tomatoes.

I wave my hands and shout,

My tomatoes! as though 

I’d produced them

from my breasts or belly.

 

The catbird aerializes

on the tomato cage,

jabbing and jabbing the red fruit.

I have more on the counter

that I won’t eat before they rot,

or that I’ll give away.

 

It’s unseemly, this stinginess,

a memory of not-enough,

the necessity of preserving

a crop from rabbits and deer,

the otherwise marvelous

round-backed bugs, grasshoppers

flaring red underwings,

 

or birds like this one,

gray as a civil servant,

an actuary of ripeness,

that tilts its head to eye the fruit

and flaunts its rusty bottom

in salute.

— Valerie Nieman

Poem March 2025

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March 2025

The Opal Ring

When I was thirteen, my grandmother gave me an opal ring.

I like to wear it when I dress up to go out.

It is so delicate most people never notice it.

My grandmother whispered, It’s from some old beau.

I wear the ring, her memory, to feel magical.

Three small iridescent stones, a gold band worn thin.

Only when I asked did she whisper her secret.

Did you ever look deeply at the displays of color,

opaque stones holding quiet fire? The band’s worn thin.

The last time you betrayed me I slipped on the ring.

Iridescent means plays of color. So few truly look deeply.

She called me to her room, opened a sacred drawer.

This is the last time you betray me. I slip on the ring,

its blue-green, pink lights so delicate. You never noticed.

In her room, she handed me a velvet-lined box.

My grandmother gave me her opal ring. I was only thirteen.

—Debra Kaufman

Poem February 2025

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February 2025

The Fog

Some say strong winds and hard rain sing,

but I love the more subtle things:

stillness as mists make frost and dew,

the time between crickets and wren

before the cruel light crawls in

and work takes me away from you.

 

Drunk with sleep but almost aware

that we are more real than dreams,

but much less sure and far more rare.

 

Not cold silence, that’s too extreme

though the loudest leaves go quiet

as fog fills in what we forget.

 

The sun starts showing silhouettes.

Stalled clocks whisper: “Not yet. Not yet.”

— Paul Jones

Poem January 2025

POEM JANUARY 2025

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Still Life

Entering that gallery so many years ago,
I spotted a gem, the perfect fit
for the remaining blank space
on one wall in my living room.

It’s a small piece, really,
to dominate such a large room —
two slender pale yellow vases,
each graced with a modest bouquet
of brilliant orange hibiscus blooms,
set off within an ornate gold frame,
which glistens whether bathed
by the afternoon sun or more simply,
in the reflected light of a nearby lamp.

When I return to my apartment
after dinner, I sometimes amuse myself
by spinning a backstory for the painting:
a peace offering from a contrite beau
who’s wounded his sweetheart,
a birthday gift from a loving daughter
to honor her hard-working single mother.
But always it welcomes me home,
and reminds me I’m still here.

—Martha Golensky

Poem December 2024

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Poem December 2024

Winter Solstice

The sun through branches lights

my face. I look through

my eyelashes: prisms.

I close my eyes,

the field glows

warm carmine.

No snow, no

promise of snow.

A crow bark-laughs.

Another clatters its beak like castanets.

Their chatter perhaps

of pecans aplenty

or the simple mad joy

of being alive

in this moment.

It is easy

to love

what is passing.

Debra Kaufman

Poem November 2024

POEM NOVEMBER 2024

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Great Blue Heron

He looked like an old man hunkered down
in a faded blue overcoat, his collar turned up,
shoulders hunched. He didn’t seem bothered

by the shallow water his feet were covered

by, nor the chill winter air blowing around
his bare pate. But then his narrow head rose

like a periscope, higher and higher — swiveled
in the direction of a hardly perceptible splash.

Slowly, he moved toward the sound on legs
as skinny as walking sticks, to the place where
dinner was served and eaten so fast, any cook

would wonder if he tasted it. It was enough,
however, to restore his quiet contemplations.

Hunger sated, he curled his long neck into its
warm collar, and stood as still as a painting

while the sun sank and the snow moon kept

rising like a white balloon over the darkening
lake, the stark tree branches, and a lone heron
blending, bit by bit, into the blue light of dusk.

Terri Kirby Erickson