Tanagers in Spring
Onagers in Fall
Winds whistle in the park
Fathers whistle in the dark.

The child is gotten
And rotten is wild
The clover is shotten
All over with green.

Dragons come gently
And nuzzle their hands
Dappling for apples
Warmed by the sand.

Managers mutter in Spring
Dragons mutter in Fall
Wild bad children sing
Whenever the clover calls.

The child is Winter
And splintered and guiled,
But the Summer is quilted
All over with green.

* * * * *

Dale Favier has taught poetry, chopped vegetables, and written software for a living. Currently he works half-time as a massage therapist and half-time running a database for a non-profit in Portland, Oregon. He is a Buddhist, in the Tibetan tradition. He writes about meditation and poetry, and whatever ever else he may be interested in at the moment, at Mole.

He has an M.Phil. in English Literature from Yale, but he never wrote much poetry until he began blogging, a few years ago, and fell in with bad companions. With them he eventually brought out an anthology, Brilliant Coroners. His poems have also appeared in Qarrtsiluni and The Ouroborus Review. His first chapbook, Opening the World, will be coming out next year from Pindrop Press.

We have a home on the shore built from driftwood.  Captured in walls and roof, the tangle of trunk and twig leans, like the sea, into the moon's pull.  You had to leave:  your body unable to resist the impulse drawing you into the wet sand.  You had to turn your back on the water.  You promised the rough branches to find a less strenuous place for all of us.
 
This suitcase, on the porch swing, is packed with your kisses.
Mist falls in and out of each plastic chair stuffed
with the parchment in summer's attic;
full throated cry, star mint dry on the tongue of October.
 
I stayed still with the swaying home, wondered if the mist really was swinging or if the sand was frozen.  I can see my heartbeat in my own eye - the wind is a drum looking
for sticks.
 
Here is my ticket to the roasted garlic aroma of orange,
the knife edge night of Halloween, red wing blackbird feathers
cling like Monarchs to the river reeds of pressured arteries:
harpooned bullfrogs pissing milkweed into veins of October.
 
Each year you come with the wings of butterflies to roost like dead leaves.  Our home calls you back and sends you away.  It is the curse of building with what does not belong
to anyone.  We sleep in a plain-clothed bed and listen to the voices of all the rivers buried in our walls.  They are telling us to admire the Chinook who leaps the fall of water, the spring of rapid, to spawn and die. 
 
Thistle burrs in my ankles scissor up my leg, scrape the chimney
of my spine like ladders of ash. I leap up the siding
to your long-night window.  You now prefer stair-free homes,
butterfly gloves on eucalyptus and finger paints of October.
 
Tomorrow, it is November and you are cold.  You will go farther south, chase the longer names and shorter nights.  You tell me all the frogs are dying.  I say they are candles inhaling water, exhaling air, and we are that wind.  You lament them, who will never have a home.  I say the wind lives in the drifting clouds. 
 
There are few weddings now.  Leave them for the banality of shorter
named months.  Once the bride who relished sunsets dying
on each saw-toothed plot of the cul-de-sac, you say this is not the time
for starting but rather hugging fierce, deep in our lungs of October.
 
I hold my breath and the house ignores the moon.  It is time to spawn.
 
* * * * *

Steve Williams lives and works in Portland with a lovely woman who writes and edits much better than he but refuses to admit it.

in the panorama of
your heart
I wish to be a cubicle
made of beeswax
translucent, thick butterscotch
unfiltered balm
bright with buzz
 
together
we will construct
a confluence of resin and lace
a suspension bridge across
hedge thorns and conflict
 
you will wear my thimble and
I will carry the oracle to our future

* * * * *

Toni Partington lives and works in Vancouver, WA. Her poetry has appeared in the NW Women's Journal, the Anthology of the River Poets' Society, VoiceCatcher 3, the Cascade Journal, and others. Toni's other work includes career/life coaching, editing services for new and emerging writers, and grant writing. This winter she joined the editorial collective for VoiceCatcher 4. She holds a BA in Social Work and an MA focused on Literature and Literary Editing.  Before that, Toni was a high-school drop out, pregnant and then married at age 16 whose life came faster than it should have and toughened her into a self-described survivor. Today, her circle includes family, friends, dogs and poets, not in any particular order.
Blog: www.poettone.blogspot.com
Email: tpartington@earthlink.net

Art In the Walls
By Shawn Sorensen

soft and in between
destinies the yolk
undecided the white
a nimbus of coagulated
light haloing its small
yellow sun as I
have lived trained
to the perimeter
of what is most alive
in me, accomplice
to and and bearer of
diminishing light.