Issue

Myself in an Old Photograph

That was the day. This is the final record,
me before the change. It’s fantasy
to search out the expression of a word
in lips still motionless—how can I hope
to read a cheek’s subtext, identify
exactly the pigment, shadow, line or shape,
the gaze’s drift, the impossible unblurred
flicker of anguish in a printed eye
that means I did not know, but I would learn.
Nobody can be loved on his own terms.

Peter Kline

Peter Kline lives in San Francisco, where he is a Stegner Fellow in Poetry Writing. Some of his recent work can be found in ZYZZYVA, Lo-Ball, The Potomac Review, Quiddity, and The Pennsylvania Review.

Across a Crowded Room

Peter Austin

Peter Austin lives with his wife and three daughters in Toronto, Canada, where he teaches English at Seneca College. Over a hundred of his poems have been published, in magazines and anthologies in the USA (including Contemporary Sonnet, The Lyric, Iambs & Trochees, The Pennsylvania Review, The Barefoot Muse, 14 by 14, The Raintown Review, The Shit Creek Review, Lucid Rhythms, The Chimaera and Road not Taken), Canada and elsewhere. He also writes plays, and his musical adaptation of The Wind in the Willows has enjoyed four productions.<

Chimborazo Hospital

(after the Battles of the Seven Days)

Lance Levens

Lance Levens is a writer/Latin teacher from Savannah, GA. He has has published in Beloit Poetry Review, The Adirondack Review, The Danforth Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook Jubilate was published by the Pudding House Press in 2007. In that same year he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in fiction.

Nothing but Blue

Thoreau calls the merlin
a tenant of the air
but such a metaphor
requires clouds—nesting place
for almost weightless wings,
the swooping heart and eye
that know the sky. Too bad
this morning’s spotless reach
of blue above the pines
suggests no fanciful
boarding house for bob-whites,
no breezy porch to perch
a speckled thought.