Category: WTP spotlight: poetry

From WTP Vol. VI #1 All This Time By Dina Elenbogen It is true what you’ve said about the birds    They have gone invisible into winter not south   just bowed down in prayer for lighter air Some mornings everything becomes apparent icicles turn from rain to rivers When the ground unfreezes they rise…

From WTP Vol. VI #1 Driving to Petersham By Michael Thurston 1. Around the Quabbin, marsh ponds stare at clouds like the eyes of the drowned watch hulls going over. 2. Let’s say the dry stalks scrape the eye and prop the lid of the descending sky. 3. The first car pins the squirrel so…

From WTP Vol. V #9 November Suite By Richard Hoffman 1. At first I held out my hands, then my arms, to welcome and hold all that was offered. In time I learned that none of it could be abandoned. Having wanted so much, having accepted so much, now possessing so much, what could I…

From WTP Vol. V #9 The Heated Windowsill By Laura Foley From the darkness of unknowing, from the steep unlit stairs, the sudden loss of what was vibrant, the impossibility of imagining what comes next— a room of doors, and which to open? The monk, across from me at lunch, tells me how, three days…

From WTP Vol. V #8 Riverbank By Katrinka Moore At dusk they climb down from the ridge, slope dense with goat’s-thorn, and lie on a low sandy bank.  Across the river limestone cliffs rise straight out of the water.  A bad place to sleep if rain comes but they are tired, do not think.  Deep…

From WTP Vol. V #7 Titmouse Turns By David Hamilton away.  He didn’t fly off but turned his back on me to sit still on the limb from which my feeder dangles. I say he, but it could be she, you can’t really tell, but I’ll guess he who looks a bit sad, contemplative, staring…

From WTP Vol. V #7 Thunderstart By Emily Mohn-Slate We’re in the sea when the rain comes hard He runs to shore    his legs slick and purposeful to build a canopy of umbrellas over our bags on a cracked plastic chair When he’s done he stands and watches to make sure it doesn’t fall…

From WTP Vol. V #2 Choctaw Road By Kelli Simpson I. Yesterday, I drove my daughter out west on Choctaw Road just to show her the country mile I came from. I wanted her to see the sunset that has sustained me – the scissortails on the telephone wires, the ponds her Papa wrestled from…

From WTP Vol. V #1 A Lamentation: Honey By Larry D. Thacker Of the things that take me back when I’m sick for home, biscuits never fail me. If they’re a little flaky, and there’s salty butter to be had, I am transported and a happy man, however temporarily. On this trip, I was glad…

From WTP Vol. V #3 Man With Unhealty Complexion Listening to the Sound of the Sea By Lisa Stice he is seated in a chair in his living room with the blinds drawn raises an opalescent hand cups it to his ear and believes it’s a shell  when he was a boy he walked the…

From WTP Vol. V #6 Archipelagos (Made of Collapsing) By Alexander McCoy I. In the hollows, between the trees, where the woods come into sharp relief, like ribs, like bone-shards stretched with breath, Five o’clock, and already the windows are starting to bleed. How fragile it looks chambering in the light, this little world of…

From Vol. V #5 Cinema By Wally Swist The first film I remember seeing was The Rat Race, with Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds, a blur of a memory, sitting next to my mother, who I believe was her way of preparing me, at the age of eight, for the society I would eventually enter,…