Final Picnic Poem by Janet Buck

Final Picnics

“I want to go!” was all you said,
as if you were slamming a book.
So I laid out your hat,
a tube of pink lipstick and blush
replacing the color
drained from my cheeks.
Death struck me then
as pottery with handles loose.
To you it snapped like fingernails —
a casualty of brushing up
against the hardness of a life.
“You don’t need eyes to see a forest.
The picture stays in your lungs.”
I packed a red checked tablecloth
pretending the dice weren’t close.

At the edge of a grave,
even the desert looks green.
Country roads spit gravel back
like bacon cooking in a pan.
You needed the custard of clouds
while I busied my triggers
shooting at hail.
The end was soft alyssum grains
finding the gust of a faithful breeze.
Sweat on your brow
could have been streams,
could have been rain licking the moss.
A stone divided by will
is still a stone in reckoning.
Innocence was telling me
to drive around the avalanche.

by Janet I. Buck

***

Nightly News Poem by Linda Straub

Nightly News

Hell in high definition
on four foot screens,
explosions in surround sound,
helmets, flak jackets,
and bunkers of shifting sand,
flat images of real people,
who yearn to outlive
their own apparitions.
Voters, hawks and doves,
squirm in cushioned seats.

Linda Straub
***

Bricks and Mortar Poem by David Michael Jackson

For Just A Second

Glimpses through the trees,

landscapes captured for a second

from the highways,

these are what is left of your

world when you don’t pull over

and you are left with glimpses

soon covered up with

asphalt and concrete

bricks and mortar

and semi-trailers

Sometimes

– David Michael Jackson

***

Creek Poem by David Michael Jackson

IN THESE CLUTTERED TIMES
somehow these places eventually lose
identity too in these
cluttered times
passenger creek still weaves through
sugar camp hollow.
there are still legends and indians for
awhile still
for a short while
but up grant’s chapel road
grant’s chapel being of course long gone
there being left only a cemetery with
one
stone
empty coffin
just up from the biggest oak in any parts
which is at the deserted settlement just off the trail of tears
which is now
gone
the oak being there in some wealthy back yard
the settlement cleaned away except in my memory
It was once to be had by slipping around the pond,
the pond being now gone
and the frogs
yet Passenger Creek still weaves it’s history
through sugar camp hollow,
where it has been said Indian ghosts protect confederate gold
for
a
little
while
yet

– David Jackson
***

Summer Nights Poem by David Michael Jackson

OH, HELLO

willie and lobo
tonight
and the summer nights oh

the summer nights
the hazy moon says
hello
the last of the brandy says
goodbye

and we come and go and pass into the
summer
nights
and we become the wind in the grasses
and the hot breeze which passes
makes us like leather,
tough enough to take the heat
ah,
bring it on
I’ll sit here and run my toes in the freshly cut grass
and tough it out

– David Jackson.

***