First Selection, May 2012

I'll Tell You What It's Like

It's like

Standing on a mountain top

Under a clear blue sky

With cold clean air whipping around me

Naked

Under the gleaming sun

Skin twinkling

Eyes shut

Heart turned to the heavens

And a smile on my face

That's what it's like

--Larissa Dahroug

Second May Selection - - Youth

The Magical World of Harry Potter 

There is a curtain between

the magical world and my world.

Harry steps onto the train station

I feel the curtains open and I’m off to learn magic too.

In my world I play sports

no matter how hard I run

my feet always stay on the ground.

In the magical world

broomsticks fly through the air.

Harry chases the Snitch

his hand outstretched

trying to grasp the tiny golden ball.

When I read the books

 I chase Harry

my heart seeking to be filled

with magic.

But when the time finally comes to close the cover

that curtain closes

and I find myself

back

in

my

own

world.

--Sophia Hanley, 4^th grade

Third and Fourth May Selections

red finches cluster

greedily at the feeder

crows raid their nestlings

the sun moves from east to west

rivers run down to the sea

--Patrick Mizelle

my body melts

spilling enslaved hearts

like burning wax golden Buddhas

kicked over

by black boots

--Morgan zo Callahan

with three bows to twenty-year-old high school student Ksering Kyi, the twenty-fourth Tibetan to die by self-immolation in 2011. This poem has also been selected to appear in Atlas Poetica 12.

Fifth May Selection, 2012

Ad Urbi et Orbi

The city lights

wipe out the polestar, fade out

all the ancient gods excepting Venus

and Latona’s twins.  

On Main Street

the usual apocalypse

fuels both boom box

and Salvation Army band.

The brewpub on the corner

offers another answer.

(What’s the question?)

A man with a laptop sips a foamy cappuccino

CNN’s silent kabuki lights up the laundromat.

Everywhere the smell of gasoline

the constant mechanical roar.

Pigeons coo on a cornice, watched by feral cats.

Pigweed grows in the gutters.

For the child swaddled tight in her carseat

it is all it is all as it is.

--Patrick Mizelle