The Great Dying by Kathleen Jones

Sangan River Meditations: Spring, by Susan Musgrave

What I most want is to spring out of this personality,

then to sit apart from that leaping.

I've lived too long where I can be reached.

Rumi "Unseen Rain"


(i)
In another life, this place was my home.
I feel the rising of a forgotten knowledge
like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth.

To glimpse your own nature is to come home
like the rainfall that turns to mist before

'Taken' by Jo Bell

�When a thief kisses you, count your teeth.� � Yiddish proverb

Let�s just say it was complete surrender.
The wanted word is visceral; the usual
exchange of fluids doesn�t quite compare.
He closed his eyes and tilted back his head
and he was mine, as naked as a worm.
He yielded like a sapling to the axe.

Humility is not an asset in my trade, but
such an ecstasy of loss brought out
the best in

Pascale Petit: Fauverie - Emmanuel

In the last days, after all he said
and didn't say, his iron tongue
resting in the open bell of his mouth,
the belfry of his face asleep,
I climbed the spiral steps of the tower -
up the steep steps of the bell cage, to the bourdon
the great bumblebee, Emmanuel.
I stared at that bronze weight, the voice of Paris,
as if it was my father's voice
and I had climbed up his spine,
all thirteen tons of

Another Exile Paints a Spring Portrait of Katherine Mansfield by Riemke Ensing

(for Eric McCormick)

There are all these lines
without words telling you a whole
story. The portrait is a yellow table
a gingko leaf shaped fan you think
might smell of sandalwood, a paperweight
some flying sheets of paper and a Chinese
vase of �yellow-grey, 2 blues and brown� [guess who]
curving itself round mountains and the wide open
branches of trees looking

If we could speak like Wolves by Kim Moore

if I could wait for weeks for the slightest change
in you, then each day hurt you in a dozen
different ways, bite heart-shaped chunks
of flesh from your thighs to test if you flinch
or if you could be trusted to endure,
if I could rub my scent along your shins to make
you mine, if a mistake could be followed
by instant retribution and end with you
rolling over to expose the stubble and grace
of

Marco Polo by Ali Alizadeh

Marco Polo





Maybe it�s the natural
extension of immigration. Maybe

it�s the awesome travel
bugs, making my wife�s feet

uncommonly itchy. I�m not
surprised, at any rate, to hear

the paediatrician�s nickname
for our son. �Marco Polo� suits

his - in utero - trajectory
along the Silk Road, from

Kublai Khan�s Forbidden City
to the snow-covered stones of a caravanserai

in central Turkey

Tuesday Poem: Nature Writing 101 by Catherine Owen

Our minds can turn anything romantic.
Is the problem.
The sewagy mud of the Fraser a quaint muslin & the spumes

pulsing out of chimneys at the Lafarge cement plant look,
at night, like two of Isadora Duncan�s scarves, pale, insouciant veils,
harmless. The trees are all gone but then aren�t our hearts

more similar to wastelands.
We can make it kin, this pollution, children one is

'Listening to Glenn Gould on Orton Scar' by Kathleen Jones

From Ravenstonedale
driving north on unfenced roads,
moonlight reflects the tarmac�s

frozen wake across the moor �
a snail's trail in my rear-view mirror.

Bach unwinds from the c.d.
a landscape of variations
into this zero night.

The grass is white; trees black.
The walls run off like staves.

The moon fingers each stone
separately, in unexpected harmonies
and structures, endlessly