THE BLUE-STATE HERON

by Barbara Lydecker Crane

Artwork: a paper collage by the poet.

Flapping hard all day and night,
these herons grapple with their plight: 
a large right wing distorts their flight. 
 
Bi-coastal, Blue-states can be found
Virginia Beach to Provincetown,
San Diego to Puget Sound.

They have lost their rural southern range;
midwest statistics now look strange;
and poachers threaten further change.

Not yet in an endangered fate,
they step with slow and measured gait,

biding time. Blue-states wait.


Barbara Lydecker Crane won the Sonnet Crown category of the 2024 Kim Bridgford Memorial Sonnet Contest, Honorable Mention in the 2024 Frost Farm Poetry Contest, and was twice a finalist for the Rattle Poetry Prize. Able Muse recently published her fourth collection, ekphrastic sonnets entitled You Will Remember Me.

WHAT WE LEARNED IN 2020

by Katherine West

The globe of Earth has shrunk, a small balloon

losing air sinking against the blue blue sky

to land exactly in my hand, all mine 

to know the pain of every land, all you 

and you and you, all me in mirrors new 

as stars on windy nights of sharpened light 

that cuts my chest that makes me bleed your time

cut short then so is mine the years so few 

now less the globe a shriveled wrinkled skin

I cup as gently as a fallen bird 

my own true love I carry home to bed 

I tuck you up, I slide beside so thin

we fit, an old and folded map, a world 

of continents that kiss, of coasts that wed.

 

Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City.  She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer.  Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, The New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, and Southwest Word Fiesta.  The New Verse News nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019.  In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico and at the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado.  Using the name Kit West, Katherine's new novel When Night Comes: A Christmas Carol Revisited has just been released, and a selection of poetry entitled Raising the Sparks will come out in 2021, both published by Breaking Rules Publishing.  She is presently at work on the sequel to When Night Comes. It is called Slave: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Revisited. She is also an artist.