no. 7 (Michael Waite)

He wakes up and means to cook an egg but the eggs are gone
or they have been moved somewhere during the night.
He decides to take the dog for a walk, but the dog is gone
and there is only a leash next to the bowl on the floor.
The phone rings and he answers it, but at the other end
is the sound of backhoe tearing up the ground somewhere.
In the evening, he sits on the recliner, opens a beer
and prepares to watch a television show but the shows
have no people in them. They are just scenes of empty
rooms and occasional breeze on a curtain. He gets up,
pours his beer in the sink and makes his way to the
table where he will wonder if the last twenty years ever happened.

no. 6 (Peter Markus)

But I could not concentrate on the earth while I made my way down the page

and the cracks beneath me seemed to fill with the weight of an old man's heart.

Jack Gilbert pens his way into a woman, out of her, and across state lines.

The end finds me sitting across from a blond girl in a small row-boat

wishing I'd learned how to row forward. This chapter of my life

was heaped into a pile and burned along with the times of being in love.

Look at the boats she kept saying, pushing the piece of yellow
from her face. A sun went up and down while she did this piece-pushing
and all I could smell was popcorn popping. It smelled like a car accident.

The boats glide like leaves on the river, like slivers of moonlit river-water
or the light that comes from between the pieces of her hair that string
from her small head. She must have been the girl in the book,

the one about the girl living and dying in eleven years, but all in one day.
That's all the time it took to read the book and it was all the time in the world.
I'll never know what it's like to be a gull landing on the city's face.

no. 5 (Danielle Damen)

Something happens when you mix beans and consume them.
A pathogen occurs. A light shines from the hole, and the warm
air passes like a fire through the valley. It has been weeks like this
and we're hunched over the sink in repose. Who can sing past
his own shadow and into the green mountainsides of  youth?

It escalates with each encroaching bite, each bean like a memory
of the country's oscillating democracy. The wind between the lips
of the lying politico. I am worried for my country. I am full of
the helium of balloons sailing higher and higher until constellations
come crashing down from the purple; the lion, the scorpion, the pan.

no. 4 (Danielle Damen)

He wore the tiger suit on the road as the cars passed
by in the November wind. Dandelion seeds did not know
what to do with him, so they, too, passed by.

The jaundiced moon was full of regret the night
he decided to put his life in the hands of a costume
and run about the street like a sagebrush.

Ennio Morricone could not score the scene;
the cops slowly making their way up the hill
to see the orange and black man lying still

on the pavement while all the stupid people
of the city cull their need for laughter
with the bluing glow-box in the corner.

no. 3 (anonymous)

When she broke the pan, I was leaving.
It must have turned out that the seagulls
on the street had it figured out ahead of time
because they followed my sedan
from the driveway to the meat-market,
and back to the driveway, where I
tried to think of what to say to the kids;
her shadow hanging in the kitchen
window like a pendulum, swinging
there, in the window, so full of shadow.

I never went back inside, that time.
I drove back to the driveway, and never
got out of the humming car. Dark creeping
over the dull city like a tumor.

no. 2 (Mike Lutenski)

There I was, ready to pay for my hot dog
when the rain started. All the screaming fans
seemed to make less sense. Bringing her father
was a mistake. The park is a shrine, to me
and I know it now as I stand here with one
hand on the dog, one on the wallet, and the rain
not ceasing to begin. Her father is rotting placidly
in his hundred-dollar seat while I miss these last at-bats
for a hot god. God, why must it come between us
like the mustard and relish?

no. 1 (Martha Pena)

I walked and walked. The sun kept following.
When night came, we bedded down in her blue nest.
The smell of chipotle was everything but here
we are now alone and afraid of the stars, again.

God is in love with his only son, who he begot.
Sin and error is pining until he appears.
We ran and ran from the moon whose eye
would not let us be. We fell on our knees.

We heard the voices of angels on those nights
divine when some begotten son was born under
a star that led three schizophrenic men forward.
A morning is filled with the smell of sleep.