Work by Doug Marx, Paulann
Petersen, and Derek Sheffield

Four Poems by Doug Marx

Bracket Fungi

Step by gnomic step
I find them
barnacled to bark,
pale wattles, tumors
affirming a rumor
of organic unity–    
    
witness blaze or scar
the mouth they kiss
where death lives,  
    
all family
and no branch, each
filament a thought
splicing a web,
    
how like tired hearts
stumps crumble.
    
Don’t breathe. They eat the past,
immortal, anemic,
their spores are everywhere.       
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Online Prose Poem – Robert Bly     

The Dead Seal

              1

          Walking north along the point, I find a dead seal. From a few feet away, he looks like a brown log. The body is on its back, dead only a few hours. I stand and look at him. There’s a quiver in the dead flesh: My God, he’s still alive. And a shock goes through me, as if a wall of my room had fallen away.
             
          His head is arched back, the small eyes closed; the whiskers sometimes rise and fall. He is dying. This is oil. Here on its back is the oil that heats our houses so efficiently. Wind blows fine sand back toward the ocean. The flipper near me lies folded over the stomach, looking like an unfinished arm, lightly glazed with sand at its edges. The other flipper lies half underneath. And the seal’s skin looks like an old over coat, scratched here and there — by sharp mussel shells maybe.
       
          I reach out and touch him. Suddenly, he rears up, turns over. He gives three cries: Awaark! Awaark! Awaark! — like the cries from Christmas toys. He lunges toward me, I am terrified and leap back, though I know there can be no teeth in that jaw. He starts flopping toward the sea. But he falls over, on his face. He does not want to go back to the sea. He looks up at the sky, and he looks like and old lady who has lost her hair. He puts his chin back down on the sand, rearranges his flippers, and waits for me to go. I go.

         
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Poems by Elizabeth McLagan 

A Feather Falls from the Wing

     of Light                            
                                    

Today, someone has left like a letter
addressed to a white forest which goes on
           
trailing its blue sleepless shadows. Snow
lips, snow eyes, snow pillows. Like ripples
                 
on an overcast ocean, belts of fog
above a blue core. What is it to lie down
                  
in sleep and lie down again into the sleep
of death? Is there a dream to usher
            
the spirit across – a white hand stretched out?
Once, I lay down in snow, flakes striking
              
the tent like sparks or hard rain, except
it was lightest powder falling all night
     
into the bowl of the lake. Was your death
such a night, warm and unmeasured?
   
A snowshoe hare passed by, ghost moons
drifted into the lungs of trees. Like needles
  
falling, like scratches on a glass plate. The light
went ashy. The ink glittered before it dried.                
                                                                                                

       (from The Bitter Oleander Volume 12 Number 2, 
       Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award Winner 2006)
                 

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Two Pieces by Paul Roth  

Nothing at All