Kiss. Baptism.

 by David Campos

The night fills with charged chatter
from the bar we exited. I ask if I can kiss
her
and wonder what door this will open.

Soon, she'll be gone for two weeks,

and I'll ride my bike out to a bench

close to a canal where the crows eat the

fallen

left-over fruit from the orchards.

They've been cleared to build new doors

over the rotting roots. Each day she's

gone,

I chain smoke to ease nerves and call her,

already out of breath. Her voice, an elixir I 

savor

like the small and sudden bursts of a 

breeze

cooling my forehead; baptism is a doorway

for faith.

It's been hard to believe in love again,

but faith is at the center of every request.

She answered by kissing me, unlocking

all the terror stored in these clouds of

flesh.

But I remember how easily and quickly

the mind travels vast distances to find

meaning

in the strange and striking shapes of our

lives.

I felt her sweat on my lips. Baptism.

from Poem-a-Day, February 13, 2026

The ecstasy now

is simply my hand scratching my head

underneath what is left of my hair

and noticing the rolled cuffs--plaid--

of the man exiting the parking lot.

Or "the man existing the parking lot,"

as I just mistakenly wrote.

There is ecstasy sometimes in intending

exiting, but writing existing.

Certainly the ecstasy now is the simple pigeon

flying through the simple sky

and my simply being able to see it.

It's the blue car,

the red car, and all the rest

of the revving motors lined up

inside my heart: that they so want

to race until the end of time.

The ecstasy now

is the gray day growing grayer.

It's even diabetes

with its bloody little pricks

delivering the glucose news.

And it's that woman over there

in the billowing dress

on the purple bicycle, deciding

at the last minute to turn left

into traffic, and still, she lives.

It is the stooped-over man

with the wide-brimmed, too-heavy hat

in that Japanese movie,

the old black-and-white one.

He goes to the doctor and overhears, by accident,

he has seventy days left; seventy-five tops. God knows

what gets into him, but he finds

a shovel and a rake and makes

a little neighborhood park by poking around

under some old trees, I don't remember, maybe oaks, 

maybe ancient maples. But big ones, trees that understand

how to dignify the little world of his neighborhood.

Day after day, the scratching and digging. The rearranging.

He lives long enough to stand under those trees,

when finally the park is done. It is December now,

day falling into darkness, big hat in hand,

snow slowly descending all around him,

those fluffy flakes that only fall

in that dreamy way in movies.

Isn't now the time to pick up your shovel and start?

by Jim Moore 
from Prognosis

Prayer to the Road

by Lesyn Panasiuk
Translated from the Ukrainian by Katie Farris & Ilya Kaminsky

Old bicycles stubbornly pull sticks into their wheels,

pull everything into their mouths

like infants still discovering the world.

They often break their own teeth and jaws,

scraping their black, rubber lips

which bleed air.

They tell too many stories. 

They no longer remember where

they meant to wheel us.

They pray to the roads,

endlessly kissing the asphalt like it was

a vast self-portrait

of God,

begging

and begging to stop --

yet, like a vast

self-portrait of God, they cannot stop.

from Poetry Magazine, December 2025

alameda point

 by David Maduli

- after lucille clifton

the estuary opens to the bay

and the bay stretches into the pacific and so

on

therefore and such-and-such,

none of them empty or full

in the way no frame can minimize nor

contain horizon--

yet the ocean can be it, even when sky

and sea are the same late summer gray

they blend together erasing, making

each other. the humpback whale

breaching the slate screen is the only

one who knows the tension between.

here arrive two children winding bikes

on the path to the point passing succulents

and ground squirrels, and three pelicans

follow in spinning dives to slash

down on this estuary guarded

by gurgling sea lions. the children

collecting rocks and examining mussel shells,

millennia in their hands, nod to each other

and laugh

racing childhood to the pier's edge.

from Poem-a-Day, April 14, 2025

Urban Youth

 by Tracy K. Smith

You'd wake me for Saturday cartoons
When you were twelve and I was two.
Hong Kong Phooey, Fat Albert & the Cosby Kids.
In the '70s, everything shone bright as brass

When you were twelve and I was two,
It was always autumn, blue sky, flimsy clouds.
This was the '70s. Every bright day a brass
Trombone slept, leaning in your room.

Autumn-crisp air. Blue skies. Clouds
Of steam clotted the windows near the stove (and
Slept in the trombone kept in your room). You
Wrote a poem about the sea and never forgot it.

Steam clotted the window near the stove
Where Mom stood sometimes staring out.
I forget now what there was to see.
So much now gone was only then beginning.

Mom stood once looking out while you and 
Dad and Mike taught me to ride a two-wheeler.
So much was only then beginning. Should
I have been afraid? The hedges hummed with bees,

But it was you and Dad and Mike teaching me to ride,
Running a long beside me until you didn't have to hold on.
Who was afraid? The hedges thrummed with bees
That only sang. Every happy thing I've known,

You held, or ran alongside not having to hold.

Sai Tells a Ghost Story

 

by Soham Patel (while practicing some version of surya namaskar [aka sun salutations]) One morning in late 2010 I looked out my Pittsburgh apartment window where I always saw a parking lot, the Spinning Plates Artist Lofts, and a euonymus-lined part of the avenue, there at the beginning of Friendship. I knew all the families living on the block because of the rescue dog I live with—we would walk around, routinely meet the people. That early morning and only that morning, I saw out the window a figure of what seemed to be a like four- or five-year-old brown girl riding a bicycle up Friendship Avenue then fade away. How else I know I saw a ghost is the child seemed so composed, happy, and it was way too early in the morning for someone so young to be out riding alone. from Poem-a-Day, October 30, 2024

Mr. Myra Albert Wiggins Recalls Their Arrangement

 by Susan Rich

Maybe it was the bicycle. The way her hips

rose up and up - as if directed straight to heaven - 

Like a Venus. And a banker's daughter - true.

Real original, this girl - a bicycle, a camera,

other newfangled tools. I sent her bolts

of cloth, overalls, and boots - anything to make her squint

her eyes and glance one day towards me - me: Fred

Wiggins of Wiggins bazaar - 123 Commercial Street.

More of a back-up boyfriend, for someone like Myra

her family would say. Everyone knew she was in love

with her own life: bareback rides, opera singing,

and the New York artiste nights. But I expected 

to live a little, too. And so if there were men

of Salem, Toppenish, Seattle, lovely and rich - 

who snickered at our last-season suits

and sequined gowns, who hinted not infrequently - 

that a husband should not be so happy

packing picture frames and mounting

photographs. Christ. They knew nothing.

from Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems