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.

ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS

by Jackie Fox




Paper beats rock
Rock beats scissors
Scissors beats paper
Water beats them all
The river runs with scissors
like a child laughing
in whitecaps
Laughing so hard
it capsizes the airboats
sent to save families and pets
Clenching its fists of ice
it smashes the rock
in highways and dams,
the metal in bridges
and grain bins
until they crumple like paper
and are swept away

Jackie Fox’s work has appeared in Rattle, Bellevue Literary Review, The Fem, Tar River Poetry, Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, The Untidy Season: An Anthology of Nebraska Women Poets, and other journals and anthologies.

APRIL IN THE UPPER MIDWEST

John Savoie teaches great books at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

SEXY MOTHER NATURE

by Lylanne Musselman

Photo source: Wunderground -- Uploaded by: Gordanian — Monday January 27, 2014 — Green Camp, OH

Snow rollers, hoar frost,
Lake Erie ice balls –
if one didn’t know better
it sounds as if Mother Nature
has turned to pornography,
or sophomoric humor.

Don’t be snowed
by her cold-shoulder.

She must love seeing
meteorologists across
the Midwest, and beyond,
rushing to measure
those frigid inches and boast
of record breaking nights and days,
buried knee-deep in her
winter white blankets.


Lylanne Musselman is an award winning poet and artist, who lives in Toledo, Ohio. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Literary Brushstrokes, Pank, New Verse News, Cyclamens & Swords, and The Prose-Poem Project among others, and many anthologies. She is the author of three chapbooks, and a co-author of Company of Women: New & Selected Poems (Chatter House Press, 2013). Presently, she is Coordinator of Creative Writing at Terra State Community College, and teaches online writing courses for Ivy Tech Community College. She is participating in the 2014 Oulipost, a found poetry event during National Poetry Month, sponsored by the Found Poetry Review.

MY DAUGHTER IS PLAYING OUTSIDE

by John Guzlowski

In the quiet space of the dining room
My wife and I lay out the place settings

The forks beside the Wedgwood plates
The spoons and knives in their places.

A napkin in her hand, she pauses
And tells me again of how her mother

Would starch and iron the squares of cotton
Wash the plates by hand and again by machine.

I smile, nod my head and turn to the window
See the roof next door lift, shingles

Exploding like scattered sparrows, and there
It is—the howl of the locomotive wind

And then a pounding at the glass door
And a screaming that will not stop.



John Guzlowski’s writing has appeared in Garrison Keillor's Writers' Almanac, The Ontario Review, Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, and other journals.  His poems about his parents’ experiences in Nazi concentration camps appear in his book Lightning and Ashes.  He blogs about his parents and their experiences at http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/ .