In Some of the Snapshots
Oliver Rice
We wish ironies by which to try the world?
These are the four corners of Cornish,
a pretty enough town in New Hampshire,
known to occasional artists and writers,
to old family selectmen
and cooks atthe elementary school.
We wish symmetries for our turning lives?
It is the fifties of our century.
Choke cherries grow along the tracks.
Sparrows burst from the elms.
We wish a calculus of our ardors?
This is Learned Hand,
most illustrious American jurist
never appointed to the Supreme Court,
summer person since the first Great War,
to whom the gabled windows wish to speak,
distances of birch and snow,
goldenrod, wild aster,
stones in Trinity Yard.
We wish terms of passage through our fables?
Here is J. D. Salinger,
creator of Esme and the Bananafish
and The Catcher in the Rye,
listening in the night
to the rain that drips from the eaves
of those who grow tobacco,
who make sugar, gather butternuts,
hang dimity curtains,
among whom they have become friends,
Learned, singer of comic songs,
fervent defender of the liberties,
moody, gregarious, misgiven,
and Jerome, notorious recluse of a cabin
deep in posted acres on the northwest road,
house to house the selves going on
with deft hands and errant recall,
flowers drying in a quaint green bottle,
son gone to the merchant marine,
become friends,
Learned, lover of the Tuscan sun
and a wife for decades reluctant and infrequent,
aged now,
and Jerome, two generations his junior,
angry, ingenuous, taken by Zen.
Sacramento Morning by Shawn PittardBaking the Ginger Boy's Tongue by Jay Carson
February In the Mirror by Lauren E. Perez
In Some of the Snapshots by Oliver Rice
At Sea by Morgan Claxton
Talking Cure by David Barber
The Greeks by Martin Devecka
Theory to the People by Julianne Werlin