Author’s Note: “Ribbon Room” not only chronicles a trip into the Iowa countryside to buy groceries, it is a record of a trip back in time for my inner child who is simultaneously in the fatherly care of myself. “I bought a bag/of licorice pipes from their candy counter,/a grown man thinking he was seven…[Continue Story]
Spy Reprints “Rules for Beachcombing” by Wendy Mitman Clarke
Author’s note: “This poem began as a simple list playing with the idea that beachcombing can be a metaphor for living one’s life. But I love the ... [Continue Story]
Spy Reprints “Crazy (E) Motion” by Peter Waldor
Editor’s Note: Each word leads to the discovery of unexpected sweetness from the “loco” motion of a powerful love, left to our interpretation, unaffected and unbound from any sense of order. Writer’s Note: This poem is part of a series of love poems called “Something About the Way,” just out from Kelsay Publishers, first published… [Continue Story]
Spy Reprints “Odd Fellows” by Lisa Friedman
Author’s Note: “This might be a story about loss, about acceptance, or about grace. It all depends on the reader. Each person sees what they need to see in a story, or on a street.” Odd ... [Continue Story]
Spy Reprints “Two Million Breaths” by Wendy Mitman Clarke
Author’s note: “The story of Tahlequah carrying her dead calf for 17 days rivets and shatters me. Anthropogenic factors including pollution and depletion of chinook salmon have put this group of whales on the Endangered Species list. Every birth is vital. Tahlequah’s calf lived just half an hour. Each time she surfaced to breathe, she ... [Continue Story]
Spy Reprints “How To Walk Among The Dead” by Jennie Linthorst
Author’s Note: “After losing my mother to cancer when I was twelve years old, the cemetery where she is buried became a complicated place for me of expectation and mystery. When I became a mother ... [Continue Story]
Spy Reprints “A Knot That Holds” by Ann LoLordo
Author’s Note: “While on sailing trip on the Chesapeake Bay, I became interested in nautical knots. Their use. Their names. Their configurations. The Anchor Hitch led me here.” A Knot That Holds Another husband to bury, and not yet 60. Sleepless, the dogs can’t settle down, whining in their crates, waiting for him to slip… [Continue Story]
Spy Reprints “Days 8 & 9 Visits During Quarantine” by Joan Drescher Cooper
Author’s Note: “Last March, writing a daily sonnet offered the structure to channel mounting anxiety fed by the news. The goal of five iambic feet per ... [Continue Story]
Spy Reprints “Everybody Who Sits in the Zendo Is Breathing” by Doris Ferleger
Author’s Note: I wrote this poem after attending a week-long silent meditation retreat at a place called Mt. Eden, at a time when I felt the way Eve might have felt after being kicked out of ... [Continue Story]
Spy Reprints “Bring Me Some Hope” by Sepideh Zamani
Author’s Note: Originally, I wrote this poem for Iranians who were killed during the peaceful protest on November 15, 2019 and those people who died in the Ukrainian airplane shot down in Tehran, on ... [Continue Story]