What possessed us to grow a pumpkin patch
I cannot remember.
We didn’t own a watering can
But you were sure
And I was happy to go along.
In our youthfulness we dreamed
Of burnt umber orbs
Feeding a dying friendship
Which splintered like rotten wood
When summer passed.
After I moved out
You wrote me only once
Telling me the new homeowners destroyed
Our pumpkin patch. I did not mind.
We had reached seasons end.
 

Carolyn D. Elias is a poet has been published in over 25 literary magazines and websites. When she isn’t writing, she is working at Lutheran Campus Ministry, Morris or volunteering at her local art gallery.

Listen to the poem here:

 
Erin Redfern serves on the board of the Poetry Center San Jose and as an editor for its print publication, Caesura. Her recent poems in Blue Lyra Review and Crab Fat Literary Magazine have been nominated for Best of the Net 2015. www.erinredfern.net

Awakening 
To fall asleep in the theater
during a play
about your life
in which the main character dies at the end.
 
 
 
 
Peycho Kanev is the author of 4 poetry collections and two chapbooks, published in USA and Bulgaria. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, such as: Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Front Porch Review, Hawaii Review, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Adirondack Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Cleveland Review and many others.

The Waft Away World
Robert Vivian
And how it’s floating away even now, ever lofting, ever praiseworthy and I waft with it in these words, spirit drifting, spirit soaring and can we waft, you and I, can we seek the waft away world together arm in arm or dust motes of these human longings apart and drifting, floating toward the ceiling or suspended mid-sigh near the caverns of our open mouths and here is a feather weight world and nothing to hold us down and gravity is defeated in notes of song or a poem chanted from the depths of our innards and waft away world and disposable razors and recycled milk cartons with the pictures of missing children stamped on their sides in stark dot matrix deprived of wafting and taken away and where is the wafting for them, where are the cries of lamentation all the more precious dear the waft away world and scuttle of leaves across the chiseled chin of a curb and all of my life, dear Horatio, dear Martha and St. Therese, I dreamed of wafting and would wake in the middle of the night whispering “Waft for me, waft for me,” not knowing what I was saying or to whom but waft, waft, waft for me, for all of us and show that it can be done and that our souls are waft worthy, the arches of our naked feet leaping in mid-stride over a watering can and to neighbors and strangers I say, Waft with me, to terrorists and lumber barons, CEOs of ruthless corporations waft with me for the waft away world is revolutionary, epistolary with letters flying and sashaying through the air and hardly making a sound and give me a wand and I will make wafting visible like a conductor standing over an orchestra pit with my eyes closed as I wend and waft with my wand, with a swoon and a wobble as we make music together toward the waft away world, O, my daughter never to be born called Wanda and where is St. Wenceslaus and where is Willie Mays making a basket catch near the center field wall then wheeling and throwing home and we wave and we cheer the staggering beauty and courage, running all of us for our lives after a fly ball, a drifting feather that dare not, dare not touch the ground in the waft away world and the tears wet on our cheeks washing us as we raise our eyes to the dog star light years away and the wafting constellations, the wafting words, the signature that is starlight and our inmost names.
 
Robert Vivian is the author of The Tall Grass Trilogy, Water And Abandon, and two books of meditative essays, Cold Snap As Yearning and The Least Cricket Of Evening. His next book–a collection of prose poems called Mystery My Country–will be published in 2016.