## 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.”