SAY SOMETHING NEW ABOUT NOVEMBER

by Penelope Scambly Schott

Source: Photos Public Domain

Nothing new.

Eleventh hour of the eleventh day

of the eleventh month, the end

of World War One. I was eleven

and stood with my young mother

in that railroad car on the siding

where back in 1918 they signed

the Armistice.

I was twenty-one, a new mother

scarcely able to mother myself,

that November twenty-second

when JFK was murdered. This

November I expect nothing, not

peace or murder, birth or death.

I should go outside and rake up

my fallen leaves.

I’ll stand under the cottonwood.

I’ll rake and rake and rake and

stuff leaves into a sack. Every

leaf is yellow or brown. My bag

will keep wanting to tilt over. I

won’t let it. I won’t let it. I won’t

let it.

Penelope Scambly Schott is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her newest book is On Dufur Hill, poems about the cycle of the year in a small wheat-growing town.

YPRES

by Howie Good                            
                                      
                                            for Sarah M. & Tom C.

Tyne Cot cemetery on the Ypres Salient, Belgium.

Despite
a cold
misty rain

poplars
stand
at attention

as

we wander
jet-lagged

down rows
& rows
of gravestones

40,000
stubby
white teeth

bared


Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as numerous print and digital poetry chapbooks, including most recently Love Dagger from Right Hand Pointing, To Shadowy Blue from Gold Wake Press and Love in a Time of Paranoia from Diamond Point Press.