bulldozer induced
ripples on the pond -
heron takes flight

*

Corey Cook
Corey Cook

Moon River

He nicknamed
his liver Bukowski.
It died the next day.

*

Christian Ward

The lily sticks out her tongue
and savors the taste of death.

*
Paula Ray
Paula Ray's Musical Pencil

Falling asleep
in the arms of a fever.

*

Stephen Jarrell Williams

(follow a handful of stones on Twitter)

If you know what Twitter is, sign up to get a handful of stones here (or my small stones here). If you haven't the foggiest what I'm on about, visit my post explaining the whole thing at Planting Words.

The bare trees are quiet: no birds at all. Except for one tall elm and two big rockdoves sitting at the top, back-to-back. Big birds but still, watching winter coming in.

*

Matthew Friday
Matthew Friday

midafternoon

touching the sun,
my hand burns -
a bright orange
outline.

*

Isabela Oliveira
beautyisinthedark

I remember this: walking down a night in what we hear as silence. Only the tread of gravel, the dark's notes of owl and leaf.

*

Jo Hemmant
florescence

post-argument
clearing the weeds
from his grave

*

Shirla White
Shirla White

There are many Grey Chair people
who do nothing except
let other people sit on them.

*

McGuire
Notes from a Glaswegian Immaturity

snow storm
blacker than usual
the black squirrel

*

Monika Thoma-Petit
MoHe's Xanga site

garter snake’s shed skin –
long striped sock
put through the wash
of the sea

*

Susan Richardson
Susan's Journal of Literary Things

I can't write
today.

I'm so tired
and I have
this great

(poem)

ache in my head.

*

Jeff Fleming
nibble - a poetry magazine

I look at myself in the bathroom mirror and my mother’s tired eyes look back.

*

spj
Writing Home

Border country

Dark thumbs the edges of evening
and the huddled houses sulk in each other’s lights.
Rain chokes the distant road.

*

Claire Askew
Read This Magazine

i wake up
to find the night
pressing down
on my skin,
time ticks by
like a needle
at the end
of a record
when there's
no one left
in the room

*

amanda oaks
verve bath press

rotting leaves beckon
she wiggles onto her back--
contented canine

*

G.R. LeBlanc
Reflective Ink

A dead sparrow—

                sad for
                everything

                except the
                maggots.

*

Hosho McCreesh
Hosho McCreesh

this cold winter day,
the gnarled old apple tree
promises blossoms

*

four winds haiga

SLEEPDEATH

Sleep is practice for death.

*

masterymistery
cosmic rapture

Caught in headlights a hedgehog rushes across the road, her skinny legs exposed below her hitched up spiky skirt, running through the rain.

*

Lorna Senior

clouds are discarded cleansing pads of a self-conscious adolescent troubled by his plouks

*

Gordon Mason
Catapult To Mars

(Plouk is a Scottish word for pimple - PLOUK, n.1, v.1 Also plouck, plook, pluk(e), pleuk, pluik, pluck; ploog (Cai. 1903 E.D.D.), plug; peuk. [pluk] I. n. 1. A pustule, pimple (n. and s.Sc. 1808 Jam., pluke, plouk; Sh. 1908 Jak. (1928), 1914 Angus Gl., pluk; Fif., Lth. 1926 Wilson Cent. Scot. 259; Rxb. 1942 Zai). Gen.Sc. and in n.Eng. dial. Also fig. Hence plouky, plooky, plucky, adj., covered with pimples, spotty (Bwk. 1942 Wettstein). Gen.Sc.; plookiness, n., a pimply condition (Sc. 1825 Jam.). Combs. pluke-faced, pimply-faced; whisky plouk)

A mockingbird scolds me from his hidden perch.

*

Barbara Hollace

A Crow nods out a broken-throated ostinato
above the silver breath of high tide.

*

Annie Kerr
Ink haven

After Everest

Funny how small things
still scare her
like zits and Daddy
Long Legs.

*

William Soule
William Soule

On the beach - shadowbirds sail across the sand.

*

Maggie Sawkins
Maggie Sawkins

After rescue from certain death with the cats, the field mouse calmly washes itself in the safety of the mesh food cover.

*

John Loader

glimpsed from the street

my neighbour alone in her living room
the TV show I stopped watching

*

Richard Powell
Still in the Stream

between shower and towel, wrapped in nothing but steam

*

jem
-the sound of splinters-

Dusk

My laptop whirs on the desk; the lamplight blackens the trees outside

*

Julie Singleton
Julie Singleton

pigeons on my verandah
I run out and beat a metal gong

*

Gabrielle Daly

a warm firm body pressed to my leg;
contentment in canine form

*

Liza Lee Miller
It's Just Me

Reading with the
Indian-summer wind,
it turns back a few pages—

guess it wasn't
done yet.

*
Hosho McCreesh
Hosho McCreesh