Remembered Dream by Jonathon Penny

Love wilts. Love whispers.
Love loves to make a scene.
Love wills. Love withers.
Love’s a remembered dream.
Love plants. Love hollows.
Love hijacks every life.
Love grants. Love borrows.
Love still insists it’s right.

Love makes a merry game.
Love kicks you when you’re down.
Love sparks and smothers flame.
Love follows you around.
Love grieves. Love grovels.
Love lifts and love upends.
Love shears. Love shovels.
Love breaks but never bends.

___________________________________________
Jonathon Penny has published poems, reviews, and short fiction in a variety of places. He is WIZ’s poetry editor, amanuensis to Percival P. Pennywhistle, PhD, and a literature professor winding up at one place and looking for another. He loves his wife and children, even when he’s with them.

Photo credit: Wendy Penny, July, 2009–“Ragazza bionda sul balcone di Giulietta a Verona.”

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My Latest Trip to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens by Theric Jepson

My Latest Trip to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens

was accomplished with more than the usual number of boys in tow.
Four in fact. Three mine  
and a friend.

To see the metasequoia and false rocks €”and mating newts
(it’s that time of year)
spotted first and immediately by my three-year-old
who can’t see a dirty sock on the floor no matter how I point
but a perfectly still newt under a foot of pond water
is unmistakable to his bright eyes.

He’s wearing a Cars cap over his long blond hair and his
favorite part of this trip seems to be the railroad-tie stairs.

The roses in their garden are dormant in February
But somewhere in the Gardens is my love
(with three other boys)
And I am hers.

______________________________________________________
Now that his wife has bought a membership to the Berkeley Botanical Gardens, Theric Jepson should be able to visit them more often. He is the author of the novel Byuck.

Photo “Sequoia géant” courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The Wall by Patricia Karamesines

I.
My neighbor’s light steps
Through gaps between the boards at night,
And my neighbor’s light steps
Drift like leaves among his unguessed furniture.
At sunset, the sun leaks from his room.
We have never spoken through the wall,
Though we have, at other times, spoken,
And we have, at other times, thought
Of each other’s sleeping.

II.
Unfamiliar voices,
Male and female,
Twining like butterflies in the space
Of the wall’s other room.
I guess love
And wait ’til their trembling,
And the wall’s trembling, pass.
Then embers of their conversation
Once more permit sleep.

III.
I hear a woman crying.
I think, “There is a woman in my dreams, crying.”
Then I think, “No, I am crying.”
And then another voice says, €œNo,
That’s real sadness on the other side
Of the wall–not your dreaming. €
I follow the sounds, but when my eyes open,
They have nowhere to go in the blindfold blackness.
Yet to my ears, the nightingale, a bare-throated woman,
Warbles her sorrows through the wall’s divide.

_______________________________________________________
Patricia Karamesines lives with her family in the Four Corners region of the southwestern U.S. She has won many awards for her poetry, essays, and fiction. She is the author of The Pictograph Murders, a mystery set in the area where she lives. An adjunct English professor for Utah State University-College of Eastern Utah, she teaches English composition but acts at the college mainly as an English tutor, working mostly with the school’s Native American students. She is founding editor of Wilderness Interface Zone and a passionate advocate for the environment of human expression.

Photo of an old door in Dakhla, Egypt via Wikimedia Commons.