Tone Deficit BY KEVIN MCFADDEN

Can't tell your oh from your ah? Go, go or else 
go ga-ga. What, were you born in a barn? Oh. 
Ah. What do you say when the dentist asks? 
No novacaine? Nah. Then joke's on us, Jack: 

we gnaw ourselves when we really ought to know. 
Can't tell the force from the farce, nor our 
cores from our cars. The horde works hard in this 
new nation of shopkeeps, moles in malls, minding 

our stores when we should be minding our stars. 
Harmony, whoremoney—can we even tell 
the showman from the shaman? Or are we 
the worst kind of   tourists, doing La France 

in low fronts, sporting shorts at Chartres 
and so alone in our élan? Nope. We're Napoleons 
of nowhere, hopeless going on hapless, 
unable to tell our Elbas from our elbows.

I could suffice for Him, I knew by Emily Dickinson

I could suffice for Him, I knew—
He—could suffice for Me—
Yet Hesitating Fractions—Both
Surveyed Infinity—

"Would I be Whole" He sudden broached—
My syllable rebelled—
'Twas face to face with Nature—forced—
'Twas face to face with God—

Withdrew the Sun—to Other Wests—
Withdrew the furthest Star
Before Decision—stooped to speech—
And then—be audibler

The Answer of the Sea unto
The Motion of the Moon—
Herself adjust Her Tides—unto—
Could I—do else—with Mine?

Normally Speaking by Dennis O’Driscoll

To assume everything has meaning.
To return at evening 
feeling you have earned a rest
and put your feet up
before a glowing t.v. set and fire.
To have your favourite shows.
To be married to a local
whom your parents absolutely adore. 
To be satisfied with what you have,
the neighbours, the current hemline,
the dual immersion, the government doing its best. 
To keep to an average size
and buy clothes off the rack. 
To bear the kind of face
that can be made-up to prettiness.
To go contentedly to work
knowing how bored you'd be at home. 
To book holidays to where bodies blend,
tanned like sandgrains.
To be given to little excesses, 
Christmas hangovers, spike high heels,
chocolate éclair binges, lightened hair. 
To postpone children until the house extension
can be afforded and the car paid off. 
To see the world through double glazing
and find nothing wrong. 
To expect to go on living like this
and to look straight forward. No regrets. 
To get up each day neither in wonder nor in fear,
mecting people on the bus you recognise
and who accept you, without question, for what you are.

My Grandparents’ Generation by Faith Shearin

They are taking so many things with them:
their sewing machines and fine china,
their ability to fold a newspaper
with one hand and swat a fly.
They are taking their rotary telephones,
and fat televisions, and knitting needles,
their cast iron frying pans, and Tupperware.
They are packing away the picnics
and perambulators, the wagons
and church socials. They are wrapped in
lipstick and big band music, dressed
in recipes. Buried with them: bathtubs
with feet, front porches, dogs without leashes.
These are the people who raised me
and now I am left behind in
a world without paper letters,
a place where the phone
has grown as eager as a weed.
I am going to miss their attics,
their ordinary coffee, their chicken
fried in lard. I would give anything
to be ten again, up late with them
in that cottage by the river, buying
Marvin Gardens and passing go,
collecting two hundred dollars.

Mimesis BY FADY JOUDAH

My daughter

                        wouldn’t hurt a spider

That had nested

Between her bicycle handles

For two weeks

She waited

Until it left of its own accord

If you tear down the web I said

It will simply know

This isn’t a place to call home

And you’d get to go biking

She said that’s how others

Become refugees isn’t it?

”One Poet to Another” Eloise Klein Healy

I see you got a Guggenheim.
I see you sold my book online.

I bought it back and now it’s here—
my signature addressed to “dear.”

Reclaiming makes us square at last.
We’re even now, oops! Not so fast—

that lover whom you took from me
in Venice, fall of ’83.

Feeding the Worms by Danusha Laméris

Ever since I found out that earth worms have taste buds
all over the delicate pink strings of their bodies,
I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine
the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples
permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley,
avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.

I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden,
almost vulgar—though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure
so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can,
forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.