Poetry Issue #13: Animals & Health July 24th, 2023 Three Poems by Lucia Owen Barn Chores Whispers in soft syllables, coven of healing, they stand together around him, my old horse, the four young girls who help with barn chores, after they found him rolling, kicking in his paddock in the mud, not getting up, nipping at his flanks - Colic - and they ran for help on such a hot stormy summer night, when they knew he could have twisted a gut and ...
Read MorePoetry Issue #13: Animals & Health July 24th, 2023 Animal, Human, Tree by Lisa Romano Licht Animal, Human, Tree He hasn’t walked all week. Tonight four little legs agree, march the lawn and looming street At the corner his face surveys the evening’s offering. Sniffs the potpourri of animal, human, tree Behind our neighbor’s house the sun descends, dusts gold onto his honeyed fur, failing eyes His gaze meets mine—gentle surprise—as if to say: This is all good, it’s very good. Then things I had stopped seeing, shine: his creature-kind expression, regal stance, twilight’s water-colored page, the leaving leaves that ...
Read MoreEditorial Issue #13: Animals & Health July 24th, 2023 Letter from the Editor: Who Rescues Who? by Tracy Granzyk was having dinner with fellow patient safety advocates recently and the opening phrase from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina came to mind: All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unique in its own way. We were all seated at this same dinner table, now longtime friends and colleagues, because of the death of Michelle Malizzo ...
Read MorePoetry Issue #13: Animals & Health July 17th, 2023 Letter from the Poetry Editor: TBD by Steve Granzyk Deepening our Connections I was well into middle age when I encountered poet Richard Wilbur’s “Advice to a Prophet.” In that remarkably imagined poem, the speaker provides a scene of our planet devastated and destroyed by human ignorance and irrationality, a poetic imagining of a nuclear winter. He longs for a modern version of a biblical prophet who ...
Read MoreIssue #13 Animals & Health Letter from the Editor: Who Rescues Who? Letter from the Poetry Editor: Deepening our Connection July 24, 2023 Eyes of the Mare by Tracy Granzyk Sympathy for the Devil | Mary Mahoney Three Graces | Carole Duff Surviving Is Little Comfort | Hannah Comerford How A Stray Dog Infiltrated My Writing Life | Kurt Schmidt Whose Mess? | Elizabeth JacksonMaster Key, Welcome Thunder, Self-Portrait as Kitten, Ars Poetica Haibun: Hospice Dogs, Two Versions, and Redeemer, Make Me Your ...
Read MorePoetry Issue #12: Diagnosis December 31st, 2022 Letter from the Poetry Editor: Diagnosis: Bravely Finding A Path Forward by Steve Granzyk ust as all of us eventually become patients, so too do the ways we experience diagnosis share common elements. The poets here have conjured a variety of figures representing how we may proceed from experiencing symptoms, to getting diagnosed, to struggling with various maladies—whether temporary or permanently life altering. Here you will find images of ...
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