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Spring Begetting

By Robert Cording Poetry

My one-year-old grandson John has climbed up on the couch where I have been reading Updike, and, standing, looks out the window to the lilacs where a catbird spills itself in long bursts of toowees, cluks, whooits and meows and now he, too, finds his way to runs of throaty vowels and a comedic tumble…

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Backyard Apotheosis

By Robert Cording Poetry

All the way to heaven is heaven, Saint Catherine of Sienna supposedly said, and on most days, replete with the stabbed, shot, run-over or into, the stroked, heart-seized, and cancer-stricken, I’d say bullshit and be done with it. But today, at the tail-end of April, the sun warming things up, I’m in shorts and a…

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The Breaking Strain of Grace

By Marjorie Stelmach Poetry

Holy Week again:             unleavened sky, all tensions held past hold. Mostly, what I feel is the unlikelihood. These days, pick a miracle,             there’s science to explain it. Say it’s nighttime in the Garden, Jesus praying in a bloody sweat: Hematidrosis—rare; not unknown—            …

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Bone Box

By Chris Forhan Poetry

I’m not dead so what do I know. It’s a box of bone I’m in. I work the crash site, push glass bits to the ditch with a broom. A swift hit of spring stuns me, but what’s that. My soul’s not cracked in half for its gold yet. It might be bone in there,…

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The Invented Child

By Margaret McKinnon Poetry

I spring from the pages into your arms. Someone who once knew him said Walt Whitman sang before breakfast behind his bedroom door— broken arias, bits of patriotic tunes, the way my child sings this morning in early spring, the way the raucous mockingbirds fill the warming air with their own borrowed songs. The world…

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Absence Blooming

By Kristin George Bagdanov Poetry

This winter is a bear in my garden: it sharpens its claws against the oak and snuffs through topsoil to pry loose the hidden bulb. I traced its path in window frost, how the soft pad of its heel pressed me like a child inside the womb until the swift puncture of claw. I breathed…

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The Concord of the Strings

By Jason Myers Poetry

He blew harmonica and he was pretty good with that, but he wanted to play guitar.                             —Son House on Robert Johnson   In November, it’s hard to know a cherry tree is a cherry tree. If it has any leaves left, they’re raw as rust. The sound the wind makes hustling through them’s a…

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