Arts

The Unexpected Harte

JS Apsley

Lady Lazarus Worries Me

after Sylvia Plath Her poem’s zigzagging lines. Its shout buried in soap and fury. The admission of having tried it twice before, though it didn’t stick should have warned us. God, I wish someone had read it closer. Had known. Had said, Girl, get your head out of

Discovered Cries

I thought my favorite sound was classical guitar: thin rosewood shaping pitches warm, round, bright. But yesterday a seagull called, quite loud, its high staccato song, forlorn,   a tragic promise, hungry but resigned. My body opened, lightness spread through me, through chest, limbs, face, with muscles loosened; I rose with

Träumerei

The Rehearsal of the Ballet Onstage (1874) by Edgar Degas

The young girls are like linen hanging out to dry, breeze-buffeted and slightly see-through. They pose, wait with awkwardly clasped hands, rehearse their steps.   Upstage, just off-center, a ginger-haired ballerina pulls her hair away from the nape of her neck, perhaps caught mid-yawn or breathless

Showstopper

There I was torn chiffon & tarnished silk, the spotlight froze it all– dust settling from the warm light, eyes of serpents or fox or both, mouths agape & the announcer’s stuttering words. one hand over my breast, the other holding the remains of my gown; I still feel

Mood Swings

A tear (drop) through my eye lands on the machinery of my cheek   And sparks shoot off of my crackling face   The mask distorts in unnatural twitch   A pole in my brain spins and spits ribbons of storm                                as a                             giant                 flying               carousel           rises from the top of my head

Unicorn Summer

Johanna Elattar

The Best Laid Plans

Robert Jakucs

Godsend

Davor Mondom

Sepulchress

Digging beneath the dirt of my body is the only way I know to escape it: its fatal birdcage, its sung   prison of bones. And as I labor You tell me of all the women who failed to listen, how now they are enshrouded   in salt pillars & sunken in

The Bubble

Philip Dean Walker

Roberta's Little Creatures

An ekphrastic of Roberta Hahn Edward's 2025 watercolor of a "Little Creature" She started when still quite young, creating little husks of life on watercolor paper, bringing them into being, wringing them from pores in the sheet, bright and strange little monsters, never mean or dirty

Severed Hearts / Murdered Brains

an ode to Maybe

a Close Family Friend has an adage: never trade a definitive Yes for a Maybe   He never said a continuation for what I should do when the potential Maybe represents Everything I Want   not that I want to leave Everything and Everyone I know for an Unknown   but that the

Ecdysis

Still Life

Her Plastic Heart

Disintegration

Here’s to the Cardinal Puff

My wife and I put out seeds to feed the little critters in our courtyard: wrens and juncos, mourning doves, squirrels, chipmunks, now and then a rabbit. This morning a cardinal. That reminded me of Cardinal Puff, a drinking game we used to play on Okinawa back in 1968; I’

Dinner

Desire in Ten Parts

Landscape

Scattering, Over and Over Now

The Poetry of Ma Dai

Gowpen & Undertow

Paper Birds at the Crosswalk

Equilibrio Instabile

Observance

Swimming

Leadore

The Word Made Flesh

With Every Classmate I’ve Lost, I Feel like I’ve Failed a Test

Inflection Point

Here To There

A Conversation with Salvator Rosa

The Poet as Thief

“Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu.” — Arthur Rimbaud Was Prometheus a poet? Rimbaud says he was, stealing fire from the gods: technology, knowledge, human arts and sciences. He paid a terrible price for his audacity. Whatever was he thinking? Look what we have done with what he gave

Three States Triptych

The 7th Burial Mound

The Forty-Ninth Year

Unraveling

Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life)

Live from the Hadal Zone

Grace

Animal Instinct

Today a Cooper’s Hawk perched itself outside our bedroom window on a low branch of a small tree not twenty feet away. The courtyard of our condo complex. Frequented by all sorts of wildlife: sparrows and wrens, mourning doves, juncos, hummingbirds, now and then a cardinal, chipmunks, rabbits, lots

Wonder Me

Orchard Season

Pray Silence (The Mind of the Meeting)

Three Elegies for the Everyday

FLATLAND

In the Valles Caldera

Bubble of Loneliness

Ancient Cooperation

Easter Plum

Pistachios

Ars Poetica: or, Benzaitan’s Rules for Poems (That She Told Me In A Dream)

Dream Person

The Morning News

Heat of a Bayou

Dämmerschlaf, or, Twilight Sleep

What You Could Not Spare

Emergency Room

Not Quite Touching Sestos

A Silencing

Crepe Myrtles

Deny Your Surface Self

Văcărești

I Wake Up Daily Which Cannot Continue Forever.

How to Write a Poem

While We Were in Motion

Exit Terra

Porschegasbord

In Search of Dreams

At the Cardiologist’s

Mystifying Answers to Magic 8 Ball Questions Regarding Recent Political Events

Bad Angel's Home

Solaria

An Alternate Ending

Gilgandra, 1963

Words Unheard

Summer in the Mountains

Haberdasher

Mother-in-Law

Stealing Baby Jesus

The headline in today’s Inquirer shocked me to my very soul: “Baby Jesus Stolen from the Shrine of St. John Neumann,” Northern Liberties neighborhood, Fifth Street & Girard. In broad daylight, too. Okay, it was only a plaster figurine, not expensive, though very much beloved— according to the shrine’

Ice Skating on Lake Estancia

Shahuhude (Foolish)

The Teacher Retires

A Manifesto Against Manifestos

Johnny Payne questions the idea of manifestos in poetry, preferring his own mantra: “Write poetry first with the ear, second with the eye, third with the mind.”

The Sound of Silence

Like a Rock

Cheers

"God could be shaking a cocktail for me and I’d still/have a complaint."

The Endless Vitality of "Ode to the West Wind"

Merion West arts editor Johnny Payne reflects on why Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” endures over the centuries as one of the finest works written in English.

At Woodlawn

Three Haiku

The curved universe reflected in this puddle Let us break our stride

Villanelle for Stronghold Table and Daydream

“Prairie dogs call through the murmuring grass,/mimicking history—its rhythmic drum beats—/and resurrecting Wodziwob’s sacred chants.”

Indigo Goodbyes

“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”

The Ficus Frost

“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”

Melodic Dream of Attic

“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”