2025

by Susan Vespoli

It was the year the garden

wouldn’t grow. Only a few cupped 

palms of sour tomatoes, never red. 

Lettuce leaves limp and bug laden. 

It was the year my ocotillo cracked in half, 

crashed to the ground with a thud. The year 

the U.S. seemed to follow suit. The year of no 

sunflowers in the long rectangular bed stretched 

beneath my office window, (okay, one spindly 

stalk sprouted, then leaned over and croaked), 

the plot where the previous year’s crop had risen 

basketball-player high, a community of petaled 

faces so prolific, neighbors would stroll their babies

past to point and smile. It was the year I bought five

packets of vinca seeds and a big bag of rich mulch,

spread and sprinkled everything over the barren earth, 

and every couple days, through hell-hot summer temps 

and nightly nightmare news, I dragged the hose to the dry

dirt, drenched it until little green arms poked through. 

And the arms grew bodies topped with buds folded

first like origami stars, then unfurled into coral, 

purple, and fuchsia 1960’s-peacenik flower-power 

blossoms that bushed out and flourished like hope.

Flower Power by cressida_carr

Susan Vespoli writes from Phoenix, AZ and believes in the power of poetry to stay sane. Her poems have been published in The New Verse News, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, Gyroscope Review, Rattle, and other cool spots.

SUPERHEROES

by Katherine West 




In the movies they dodge bullets
Jump back up and make jokes
Jack-in-the-boxes all of them
Good role models for poor folk

Who wake up screaming in the night
So loud throats hurt in the morning
Drive-by shootings only in the mind
Past, present, and dream all folding

Into tiny cranes too delicate to fly
Their origami necks long and thin
Wings stretched wide
Trying to remember wind

The lifting into something greater
Than sky yet made for paper

Katherine West is the author of three collections of poetry and one novel: Scimitar Dreams, The Bone Train, Riddle, and Lion Tamer, respectively.  She has had poetry published in Bombay Gin, Lalitamba, Tanka Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, and TheNewVerse.News who nominated her poem "And Then the Sky" for a Pushcart Prize in 2019.  She lives in the mountains outside of Silver City, New Mexico where she translates Mexican revolutionary poetry and creates custom, hand-made poetry chapbooks.