TAX RETURNS LIKE TEA LEAVES

by Carol Parris Krauss

Tasseography. Interpreting patterns in tea leaves.

The inferior grade: dust, steeps in hot water. 

Read clockwise, check the patterns like pages. 

See what the future, the Year of the Water Rabbit,

holds for those that withhold, fail to. 

A charlatan reads.

For a charlatan. 

Carol Parris Krauss: Mother. Teacher. Poet.

ON ART, LINES & EARTH(LINGS)

by Jen Schneider

in honor of James Longenbach (1959-2022)

“Hold the line, please,” the hospital operator says

and all i can think

/ while waiting, wondering, worrying

—mostly wanting

is this must be how poems get made

Longenbach teaches poetry as the sound 

of language (organized in lines)

while physicists teach sound as a type of pressure 

/ a wave & not physical matter 

& that non-physical matter can’t be held  

—but consumed / like a sunburn, a shooting star,

a child’s cry, a first kiss 

/ two people at the end of a dock

/ a gust of wind (of a sea) 

            i inhale / then try

            to hold the line

cup my palm / & imagine

            coiled elastic compressions

            

            pressure creases 

            shadow / then settle

i pull / the line pushes

            all springs (& senses) engaged

Longenbach writes on a poem’s life & death

in concerted arrangements of syllables / patterns 

broken or reinforced

/ line, meter, & rhyme all tools of construction 

/ danglers & run-ons distanced / some say decried

            

            i cry—unexpectedly / 

            poetry is like that / “the sound 

of language organized / in the line”

 

with punctuated breath & cupped palms, 

i consume syllabic beats 

for what feels like forever knowing forever 

is neither a state of physical matter nor finite

/ despite earthling’s desires / all spiral cords 

(& choruses) prone to tangle. all moons cyclical

 

The operator returns & says, “I’m sorry.

We can’t locate the clerk,” at the same time

an overhead speaker buzzes / sound waves press

i hear, “We can’t locate the lyric.”

—& hang up, wishing to continue to hold the line

Jen Schneider is an educator who lives, writes, and works in small spaces throughout Pennsylvania. Recent works include A Collection of Recollections, Invisible Ink, On Habits & Habitats, and Blindfolds, Bruises, and Breakups.

NORTHEAST WINGS

by W.F. Lantry

Small unfamiliar birds with opened wings—

their feathers leaving patterns in the snow

each time they light beside hand scattered seed—

gather just now past dawn along the fence

and in the pine bough drifts, as if to wait

for some break in the lengthening cascades

falling around them everywhere. Now wind

twirls the needles, shakes the laden twigs,

and great clusters of light, in unison,

fall silently to earth. It is a sign

I cannot read or hope to understand

but universal to those sunrise wings.

And each, in harmony, flits to the rail,

then leaps down gently to the crystal drift

where millet, fallen from the feeders, spreads

rough patterns, as bird shadows interweave

bright multicolored leaping mirrored forms

against the silken backdrop of new snow.

W.F. Lantry spent many years gardening in his native San Diego and in the South of France. Currently he lives in the frozen North of DC. He has two full-length collections: The Structure of Desire (Little Red Tree), winner of a 2013 Nautilus Award, and The Terraced Mountain (Little Red Tree). Honors include: The National Hackney Literary Award, Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (Israel), CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize, Crucible Editors' Prize, Old Red Kimono Paris Lake Poetry Prize, and Potomac Review Prize. He is the editor of Peacock Journal.