Showstopper

There I was
torn chiffon & tarnished silk,
the spotlight froze it all–
dust settling from the warm light,
eyes of serpents or fox or both,
mouths agape & the announcer’s stuttering words.
one hand over my breast,
the other holding the remains of my gown;
I still feel

Mood Swings

A tear
(drop)
through my eye lands
on the machinery of my cheek

And sparks shoot off of my crackling face

The mask distorts in unnatural twitch

A pole in my brain spins
and spits ribbons of storm

as a
giant
flying
carousel
rises from the top of my head

Sepulchress

Digging beneath the dirt of my body is the only
way I know to escape it: its fatal birdcage, its sung
prison of bones. And as I labor You tell me of all the women
who failed to listen, how now they are enshrouded
in salt pillars & sunken in

Roberta's Little Creatures

An ekphrastic of Roberta Hahn Edward's 2025 watercolor of a "Little Creature"
She started when still quite young,
creating little husks of life
on watercolor paper, bringing them
into being, wringing them from pores
in the sheet, bright and strange
little monsters, never mean or dirty

Severed Hearts / Murdered Brains

an ode to Maybe

a Close Family Friend has an adage:
never trade a definitive Yes
for a Maybe

He never said a continuation for what I should do
when the potential Maybe
represents Everything I Want

not that I want to leave Everything and Everyone I know
for an Unknown

but that the

Ecdysis

Still Life

Her Plastic Heart

Disintegration

Here’s to the Cardinal Puff

My wife and I put out seeds to feed
the little critters in our courtyard:
wrens and juncos, mourning doves,
squirrels, chipmunks, now and then
a rabbit. This morning a cardinal.
That reminded me of Cardinal Puff,
a drinking game we used to play
on Okinawa back in 1968; I’

Dinner

Desire in Ten Parts

Landscape

Scattering, Over and Over Now

The Poetry of Ma Dai

Gowpen & Undertow

Paper Birds at the Crosswalk

Equilibrio Instabile

Observance

Swimming

Leadore

The Word Made Flesh

With Every Classmate I’ve Lost, I Feel like I’ve Failed a Test

Inflection Point

Here To There

A Conversation with Salvator Rosa

“Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu.”
Was Prometheus a poet?
Rimbaud says he was, stealing fire
from the gods: technology, knowledge,
human arts and sciences. He paid
a terrible price for his audacity.
Whatever was he thinking?
Look what we have done
with what he gave

Three States Triptych

The 7th Burial Mound

The Forty-Ninth Year

Unraveling

Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life)

Live from the Hadal Zone

Grace

Animal Instinct

Today a Cooper’s Hawk perched itself
outside our bedroom window on a low branch
of a small tree not twenty feet away.
The courtyard of our condo complex.
Frequented by all sorts of wildlife:
sparrows and wrens, mourning doves, juncos,
hummingbirds, now and then a cardinal,
chipmunks, rabbits, lots

Wonder Me

Orchard Season

Pray Silence (The Mind of the Meeting)

Three Elegies for the Everyday

FLATLAND

In the Valles Caldera

Bubble of Loneliness

Ancient Cooperation

Easter Plum

Pistachios

Ars Poetica: or, Benzaitan’s Rules for Poems (That She Told Me In A Dream)

Dream Person

The Morning News

Heat of a Bayou

Dämmerschlaf, or, Twilight Sleep

What You Could Not Spare

Emergency Room

Not Quite Touching Sestos

A Silencing

Crepe Myrtles

Deny Your Surface Self

Văcărești

I Wake Up Daily Which Cannot Continue Forever.

How to Write a Poem

While We Were in Motion

Exit Terra

Porschegasbord

In Search of Dreams

At the Cardiologist’s

Mystifying Answers to Magic 8 Ball Questions Regarding Recent Political Events

Bad Angel's Home

Solaria

An Alternate Ending

Gilgandra, 1963

Words Unheard

Summer in the Mountains

Haberdasher

Mother-in-Law

Stealing Baby Jesus

The headline in today’s Inquirer
shocked me to my very soul: “Baby Jesus
Stolen from the Shrine of St. John Neumann,”
Northern Liberties neighborhood,
Fifth Street & Girard. In broad daylight, too.
Okay, it was only a plaster figurine,
not expensive, though very much beloved—
according to the shrine

Ice Skating on Lake Estancia

Shahuhude (Foolish)

The Teacher Retires

A Manifesto Against Manifestos

Johnny Payne questions the idea of manifestos in poetry, preferring his own mantra: “Write poetry first with the ear, second with the eye, third with the mind.”

The Sound of Silence

Like a Rock

Cheers

"God could be shaking a cocktail for me and I’d still/have a complaint."

The Endless Vitality of "Ode to the West Wind"

Merion West arts editor Johnny Payne reflects on why Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” endures over the centuries as one of the finest works written in English.

At Woodlawn

Three Haiku

The curved universe
reflected in this puddle
Let us break our stride

The Discarded

Villanelle for Stronghold Table and Daydream

“Prairie dogs call through the murmuring grass,/mimicking history—its rhythmic drum beats—/and resurrecting Wodziwob’s sacred chants.”

Indigo Goodbyes

“in a vale of blue orchid gowns/sewn with bachelor buttons/in lavender blue fields”

Fieldnotes: Annie Christain’s “The Vanguards of Holography” and Caroline Harper New’s “A History of Half-Birds”

“There is a sense of preparation through formal and informal erudition, meant to complicate what it means to write adequately about natural and human worlds, with fewer donnéees and more of a sense of a non-human cosmos, one of manatees and marsupials, in which each creature’s essence is not given t

The Ficus Frost

“to the garage bound welders masked/in metal, tampering the eternal flame”

Melodic Dream of Attic

“Little dragonfly,/Gliding, flew.”

A Chapel

“Yet these walls sound with echoes of the past,/With whispered prayers which linger in the air/And animate this space – still holding fast:/A shelter from the passing world’s despair.”

Strawberry Fields Forever: Amie Whittemore’s “Nest of Matches”

“Lilies/finch/flinches/nest/basil/hair/hat. I would swear before a jury that those are all legitimate off-rhymes, even if I were convicted of perjury for it. I wish that Shelley or Keats or Lorca or Miguel Hernández were alive so that I could pass this poem along to them.”

The Incorporated Town and Cold War Clocks

“The train cars are trying to sleep/in the postal town. Purple tracks/forsake concrete footer and loading/dock pad. The pale moon/asks homes to hold the bones.”

Public Education

“No one assigns homework./No one expects anyone to do anything./Disappoint, like ill-fitting pants,/can chafe you to death.”

Daisy Chain

“Astrology is not a science because women conceived it/and it’s not a religion because the stars, even/with the pictures they pattern,/could never take the place of a god.”