I.
Tonight’s moon is full and nicotine stained,
our bodies electric like Whitman’s words.
a sparkling moving target.
There is room here for the dreaming.
Flowers so wild they dare not be named.
Soon the heat will reach dangerous proportions.
The roof will not shelter us as it once did.
There comes a time with the abstract holds no purpose.
We saw the end of the sun some time ago,
but that hasn’t stopped us.
Even the beans, joined forces with confetti,
will rejoice in an unknown dead language,
dreaming of sudden salvation,
dark eyes shining.

II.
Sometimes the elegies you never write will kill you—
a sudden knocking,
the bell that sounds for each of us.
It’s been years since the dead heard any song.
Sometimes I hear a train and all I hear are
howls like cold wind that sends shivers down the neck.
I want to rage until I am nothing,
bursting with joy to be that sad,
ready to take in everything.
I would nest in the brambles,
shadows playing a song just for me.
Survival sometimes means you hunker down and hold real still.
To great each day with our heads above our haunting—
an equation for forgiveness suddenly solved.

II.
We make our way home crookedly,
tread down the black sidewalks like generations before,
singing of the streets we cannot walk,
stumbling over the words like it’s the last song we know.
When a witch hands you a jar of moon water you take it and you use it
This is what we are—each other.
And the world is a poem and we are all part of it.
I’m listening, I’m listening
and I will follow your voice.

With lines by most of these poets, and apologies to those whose names or words I left out! Bree, Ralph LaCharity, Joshua Lew McDermott, Eric Scott Sutherland, Jason Baldinger, Jim Palmarini, Jeff Weddle, Ryn Ane Griseto, Damian Rucci, John Burroughs, Jonathan S Baker, Juliet Cook, Tohm Bakelas, Amelia Christine Matus, Chad M. Horn, Kerry Trautman, Bob Ernst, Mark Widrlechner, Michael Grover, Chandra Alderman, Dean McClain, Jason Hardung, Scott Laudati