James Fleet Underwood: Dead Moths

There’s this feeling of tasks 

unaccomplished, something of necessity 

I’m trying to find, 

could be in one of my notebooks  

or behind my bookshelf, 

beneath a window left open overnight. 

I can work for hours never getting closer 

to what’s driving me than 

dusty residue on my fingers or 

screwed up blurry vision.

Dead moths, lines I scribbled over. 

I make lists every few days 

and check off items until I reach 

the bottom. The significance 

I’m looking for, in the end, 

I never find it.

James Fleet Underwood writes poems rooted in place, memory, and daily life. His work explores childhood, loss, and the quiet rituals that shape how people endure and belong.

jamesfleetpoems.substack.com

Ralph Culver: Lamentation of Another Evening Wasted

—after Li Bai

 

 

The wine jug has been filled and emptied, filled

and emptied. My lips alone have kissed its wide,

wet mouth. Leaves of torn and crumpled paper

scattered about the chamber, covering

my feet. An entire night of raising a cup

to beg the moon’s blessings, hands blackened with ink.

Stain of autumn moonlight on my writing desk,

stain of forsaken verses on my fingers—

a night of drunken lines mourning my drunken days.

One page worth saving. If I thought I could

make it back to my room, I would drag

my body down to the banks of the Yangtze

in the awakening dawn and let

this single sheet set sail on its waters

under the branches of the red maples.

 

[Originally published in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Oct '21]

Ralph Culver's latest poetry collection A Passable Man is available in bookstores and via all the usual internet channels. His new book This to This is coming in 2025.

Tom Gengler: Sleeping with Them Gone

The rainiest May on record. Insanely

growing foliage motioning to the house that

the jungle wins.

 

In the upstairs guest room sleeping on the big bed

and not in my boyhood room.

Do I need to sign the guest book as the one

who slept here the last time?

 

I dreamt that the front door had been sold

at the estate sale, so that one more time

I could slip out at night with no impediments,

 

and run on the fairways again, to the reunion

where I would be the kid who’d never aged.

There was no consolation from the new owners

 

who said they want to take out the trees.

I will dispose of the assemblage,

take the paintings off the walls,

 

write down the old stories

as the designated family scribe.

There was so much rain that the water

 

was coming in through the fireplace cracks

and seeping onto the bookshelves,

the whole house emptying into boxes.

Tom Gengler is an artist living in Denver, Colorado. His poetry has appeared in Progenitor, Blue Collar Review, Exit 13, The Worcester Review, Streetlight, ONE ART, As it Ought to Be, Straylight, The Loch Raven Review, THEMA and Westview. He grew up in Oklahoma and loves the American West.

Ma Yongbo: "Here"

"Here" is a signpost, not really here,  

the earth beneath your feet is a vertical, transparent void,  

you can only recognize here by its "non-existence".  

You're familiar with these signs, a street, a road, the house behind houses,  

a date, a name, the sound of poplar leaves brushing each other,  

and songs from the last century playing on a radio hanging from a branch.  

You can no longer make out their lyrics,  

as if they've been encrypted at the far end of time,  

that's fine—no words to smudge this perfect balm,  

no other you, old, young, or in between,  

walking out of this maze of "here",

to watch a sunset elsewhere,  

or see another autumn rain falling in another realm,  

another of you, nose buried in a colour-blurred map,  

collar wore the wrong way round, searching for a "here" you've been before.

Ma Yongbo was born in 1964, he has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986.He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Amy Lowell, Williams, Ashbery. His translation of Moby Dick has sold over 600,000 copies. www.facebook.com/yongbo.ma.2025/

Jennifer Pratt-Walter: Quest

On a quest for my beliefs, I consider 

undressing them here on the butcher block.

I remove the skin, the muscles and tendons 

of my opinions,

 

I strip out nerves and veins of my schooling,

collapse the lungs of assumptions, delete 

the guts of what I do not need.

 

What’s left?  The tingling skeleton

of fundamental me, the workings of my heart

filled with the Heavy Questions

and the pure organic wonder at being alive

to ask them.

Jennifer Pratt-Walter (she/her) is a Crone, poet, photographer and professional harpist.  She loves to recognize and draw attention to the small everyday miracles of living in the world. She has been fortunate in having work featured in a number of print and online collections. No Ai is ever used in her work.