What happens when home is not a place of safety, but a locus of loneliness and even danger and violence? Jocelyn Ulevicus' poem describes a solitude and a fear around isolation wrapped in memories of past violence, and explores what finally settling into a sense of safety really means.
A moment of transcendence is captured by Robert Miner in this short and evocative poem inspired by the sight of a group of students flying kites on a quad. The movement from the earth to the sky and the devotional missive of the kites being sent up and disappearing into the darkness come together like a silent prayer or a whispered exchange between mortals and the infinite.
The pinpoint perspective of the present moment can feel so sharp but ultimately always impossible to fathom and out of our reach. As Erich von Hungen writes, it is simultaneously hard and soft, early and late, tiny and all-encompassing 'like a pocket-sized Big Bang.'
"I saw a man walking his dog, throwing a ball for him/her. The moment was simple and joyful."
Jerome Berglund's poem, Manure, grew from his own practice of sowing and harvesting where he was reminded that compost and dung are always essential to the process of growth and fertilization.
Holly Kelso's Suspended takes place in the space of a pause, walks during a period of isolation near the poet's home at the base of a mountain, and at the edge of both a desert and a lake.
Mesmerized by Miró's ability to metamorphose the external world into something wholly his own, something human and not, Joan Lauri Poole's poetic tribute to the painter details her own revelation of his work.
In his poem, The Chapel, Nicholas Trandahl sets out what he looks for when it comes to faith and spirituality. A lifelong seeker of truth and inner peace, he imagines a fictional space deep in the heart of the wilderness, where pilgrims and seekers can finally rest after their journeys.
Kurt Cole Eidsvig's poem Seasonal is an ode to the goddess Persephone whose twin connections to both spring and death provide the framework for a personal connection to distance, love, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
'Poetry is one way of reading this world,' according to poet Dane Cervine, whose new collection, The World is God’s Language, takes its title from a quote by French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil.
