The Old Road to Asheville
By Danny P. Barbare
Simpsonville, South Carolina
Deep in the valley
is where I find my peace,
where the mountain laurel grows
along a winding road
of sun-split trees
and a stone bridge.
SUNRISE, IN A RABBIT HOLE
By Robert Witmer
Tokyo, Japan
SUNRISE, IN A RABBIT HOLE available on Amazon.
I expected something more grandiose than this rusty little gate with a broken latch. Maybe not grandiose, given the early emphasis on humility, but anyway something more befitting the occasion, more … revelatory. But here I am in the altogether, naked as the day I was born, though quite a bit more … developed I should guess, wondering whether to wait for someone to let me in or a great voice calling from on high or maybe just the soft bleating of a lamb, or perhaps I am supposed to continue up the narrow lane to the Big House and announce myself to the man in charge, declaring that I am ready to serve my life sentence. Not life exactly, and rather more than a sentence. More like a tome, an opus magnum, something like one of those Victorian novels with their elaborate constructions of minutia and the omniscient narrator who knows everything about everybody, where a poor guy from the sticks gets a job in a factory and, in the end, just has to accept things as they are. I decide to wait, and time passes. And passes. And passes. And, eventually, passes me by.
THE MOMENT
By Regina (Gina) Piroska
Tasmania, Australia
Exhaling, I hear the sound of my breath as I lean into the rising hush. A breeze plays with a bit of puffy down, picks it up, twirling, a vortex along a dusty pathway. A swallow circles the white bit of fluff that whirls this way, then that
until finally, in a suspended split-second, the bird snatches the fluff, flying quickly under the eaves of the deserted bank building
and deposits it into the newly-made nest.
small town
the second-hand shop sign
says ‘cash only’
2025 – Edited from a published version 2022
(Modern Haiku (print edition) – editor Roberta Beary)
Seagulls
By Regina (Gina) Piroska
Tasmania, Australia
seagulls gather
on the abandoned trawler
a drifting cloud
Published Echidna Tracks #15
PTSD and Psalms
Katy Z. Allen
Wayland, Massachusetts
Yah is at my right hand, I shall not falter.
Maltreatment, disregard, cruelty,
abuse, defilement, contamination
do not go unnoticed,
by the corporeal or the incorporeal,
whether inflicted upon
an individual or a people,
a species or an ecosystem,
an atmosphere or a planet.
Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.
Aftereffects
aftershocks
continue
for years, decades, generations,
millennia.
Truth springs up from the Earth; justice looks down from heaven.
As an individual,
I have lived the impact.
Among too many peoples,
I have seen the devastation.
I call to You, my Rock, do not disregard us.
Regarding countless species
I have witnessed disappearance.
For ecosystems large and small,
I have mourned their loss.
Deep calls to deep.
With the Earth and the air
I have felt the trauma
in my lungs
and in my bones
in my cells
and in my vessels
in my heart
and in my soul.
Hear my prayer, O LORD, and let my outcry come to You.
Psalms cited: 16:8, 130:1, 85:12, 28:1, 47:2, 39:13
Complexity
By Katy Z. Allen
Wayland, Massachusetts
sitting by a stream
enveloped in subtle autumn beauty
feeling solid ground beneath
breathing invisible life-giving air
awareness awakens
verdant summertime leaves
conceal yellows and oranges
reds
maroons
and complexity beyond measure
introduced species small and large
exotic flora and fauna
suppress more delicate autochthones
of many hues
small and large
and complexity beyond measure
death, demolition and destruction
hide and inflame
grief and fear
despair
desolation
and complexity beyond measure
rising seas and rampaging wildfires
screaming winds and persistent drought
overshadow and obliterate connection
to earthy soil and solid rock
iron core of earth
and complexity beyond measure
sitting by a stream
watching beloved children at play
quietly
unexpectedly
touching grief
beyond words
beyond comprehension
beyond endurance
that simmers steadily
in the silent static
and active living
earth
in expansive and tortured
human realms
and in the deepest
most hidden
most vulnerable
recesses of the soul
complexity beyond measure
One October Morning
By Katy Z. Allen
Wayland, Massachusetts
One October morning,
the Merlin app on my phone
heard
only a single dark-eyed Junco.
Nothing else.
My ears
heard
cars and trucks on the road beside my house,
distant heavy machinery, clanging and banging,
and a chainsaw
not far off.
No birds.
My imagination
heard
the trills and chatter of the woodland edge
during the dawn course of spring–
cedar waxings, red wing blackbirds,
yellowthroats, rose-breasted grosbeaks,
and more.
So many birds.
My imagination
heard
the silence of the woods and meadows
punctuated only by the murmuring wind in the trees,
bird calls,
animals scuttering in the litter
and water tumbling in a rushing creek.
Nothing more.
My heart
heard
the single Junco aching for the absent birds
and filled the space around it
with varied and myriad passerines
from my memory and my imagination.
May they not all
disappear.
Some Things Never Change
By Robert Witmer
Tokyo, Japan
I get in line with the seabirds. They seem to be looking at their reflections in the thin film of water behind the retreating wave. So I look down. There I am. In a baggy bathing suit with a snorkel in my left hand. It’s hot, and the water smells like gasoline. A kid runs by and the birds scatter. There I am. In a baggy bathing suit – all alone.
a bald tire
on a patch of ice
the world turns
First published in The Other Bunny, January 6, 2025.
The Gardens of Antarctica
By Robert Witmer
Tokyo, Japan
The gardens of Antarctica breathe free. Free of the hideous white. A dense green silence remembers the blinking ice. Dewdrops heavy as stones hung about the neck. The overpowering poetry of tears.
summer
the millstone
ginding
the donkey
First published in Sunrise in a Rabbit Hole, publication date November 3, 2025, Cyberwit.com.
Tide Ledger
By David Anson Lee
Bellaire, Texas, United States
We keep a ledger of small losses: one slipper at the pier, two gull nests, ten breaths of air no one thought to save. The ledger rides in the pocket of a coat that remembers salt: buttons looped with a child’s braid, a coin pressed thin as a fossil.
Once a year we walk the shoreline and record what the tide returns: a plastic comb, a glass bead, a photograph of a town no longer printed on any map. We bury each entry in a jar and plant a willow above it.
The willow grows as though sounding the names aloud.
Dispatch from the Thinning
By David Anson Lee
Bellaire, Texas, United States
They said our town still had a forest, though it clung to the highway like a frayed sleeve. At dawn the trucks came, counting trunks the way bankers count coins, and left behind a geometry of stumps the birds could not decipher. The library taped a notice to its glass: “Community Meeting. Seeds Needed.” Women arrived with seed packets folded like blessings. Children wrote tree names on scraps of paper, as if naming could mend the thinning air. We planted where runoff carved salt into the soil and hoped the roots could read our intentions.
dawn over drainage:
someone scatters sunflower seed
as if feeding stars
Building a Birdhouse
Robert Witmer
Tokyo, Japan
That stuff is for the birds, the builder says, when I point out the loss of shade where the trees would be. He is coming from a power lunch with the architect, a former tightrope walker in his father’s circus. Seems like there was a discussion about an extension to the go-kart track. Noise pollution, apparently. What about electric karts, I say, and an aviary just before the final turn? Fat chance, he says. That little hole in front, beneath the red-peaked roof, is too small for the kid’s albatross.
First published in Sunrise in a Rabbit Hole, publication date November 3, 2025, Cyberwit.com.
Atlas of Small Things
By David Anson Lee
Bellaire, Texas, United States
When the last map burned,
we traced new roads from thumbprints:
salt in the seams,
a country stitched by small hands.
A child learns the coast
by listening for gulls;
an older woman counts orchards
the way she once counted prayers.
Every mouth carries a river’s memory:
names of fish, the taste of rain.
We lift the globe like a bowl,
tilt it until teaspoons of light
slide into the cracked places
and teach the wounds
how to flower.
A Southern Woman Nails Up Her Theses
Rebecca Drouilhet
Picayune, Mississippi, USA
I have an announcement to make: It’s the end of the line for idiotkind. The Civil War ended 157 years ago, and if you can’t understand that, get off my train. I’m going on without you. We need to leave our ancestors in their historical time. Some in our society are trying to resurrect the Confederacy and its symbols, not to honor their ancestors and to learn from them, but to build new nightmares, using the worst of the past to create bizarre new mutations with the potential to destroy the last 157 years of progress toward a more equitable society. Their project has the potential to engulf the vibrant present and create a horrific future, not only for those who were disadvantaged at the time of the Confederacy, but also for the heirs of the Confederacy themselves. Those heirs need to go into the future disentangled from the tentacles of a past that no longer serves them or their society and which deprives them of the chance to go forward, making new choices and entering the future. And we need to be shrewd enough to recognize that many who have no historical ties with the Confederacy are attempting to appropriate its culture and symbols for no good end.
We live in a world of increasing complexity. And because we have no historical precedents to guide us in how to choose wisely from the myriad and dangerous possibilities that now lie before us, we want to go back. We want to dig up the skeletons and taste the blood and the pain of our ancestors. We need catharsis and healing, but the past of a labor-intensive plow agricultural society may offer few clues to guide us. We are Hansel and Gretel in the woods, and the birds have eaten our breadcrumbs.
Some might perceive what I’m saying as an attack on people who have Confederate heritage, but that is not the case. Since our ancestors from that era died over a hundred years ago, none of their heirs now living have any way to go back in time and control a single choice their ancestors made, nor can they alter the context of the past or the social and economic systems that were in place at that time. To blame or scapegoat them for the sins of the past is unjust. To do so denies the reality that they, like everyone else, have undergone a tremendous amount of true social and economic change. They, like everyone else, deserve the right to go forward, living in their own times, capable of making different choices than their forbears. I post my theses now because it is imperative to turn the page of history, taking care to learn all we can from the past, while recognizing that we must go forward to create the future, no matter how frightening or disorienting that may be.
So today, I walk forward and nail my theses to an oak, unsure of where I am, in the wilderness of a new world without a road sign or a guidepost in sight.
Thesis One:
I declare war on Social Darwinism, a distortion of Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest, which misleads so many into thinking there is a superior race, thinking that has led to so much strife, cruelty and war for dominance over the whole species by a single tribe.
waxing moon
a lone wolf joins
the pack
Thesis Two:
I embrace the concept that cooperation and win/win situations make us all stronger.
Indra’s net
a single jewel
reflects us all
Thesis Three:
I declare that knowledge alone is not enough and that the advances we make in science and technology, including our social sciences, should be tempered by wisdom and compassion for ourselves as the whole of humankind and for all other living creatures.
new horizons…
finding the brain
in the heart
It’s growing dark, and I’m still a long way from my destination. I wonder how to get back home. But step by step my feet carry me forward, moving me along second by second into the future.
Skin and Bones
Pegah Rahmati Nezhad
Tehran, Tehran province, Iran
skin and bones
with a bulging (b)elly
African child
fed up with
kwashiorkor
Depravation Darlings
By Colin James
Massachusetts
The acronym B.L.A.H.
written on the clubhouse door,
because legends are human.
I will follow you anywhere
suitably hydrated, then demobbed
in the Arizona desert.
Behold The Cave Of Reason,
much better than a dusty clubhouse
and your mother’s provincial sandwiches.
The sunsets here are dramatic,
my headaches and carpal tunnel
softly pressed between cactus flowers.
The Meaning of Color: Portrait of Else Lasker-Schuler
By Richard Weaver
San Diego, California, USA
As the Prince of Thebes, I always dress in silks
and bright bangles. You say I am my art
living through the rapt eyes of others.
They see Berlin or Munich in my mirror,
but look away, embarrassed, confused
when I enter a room because I am a Jew.
Their laughter chases me down the street.
Ridicule, my ungrateful friend, my servant,
my only living child, dances alongside me.
And now you are dead. First Georg.
Now you, Franz. Why you? Why does God . . .
This war promised to free us but stains the sky daily
with migraines. I curse it and those who wear it
on their bloated bellies, and make their hearts
and our hope demented pincushions. You, the penultimate
blue child, have bowed beneath bullets, suffered death
so that we may . . . what? Live without? Die with?
I and I not I and thou have packed what little there is,
what little is left of me that can be carried away,
and arrangements made through Switzerland
to reach Palestine. God knows I will be unhappy there
as a blind woman with mismatched glass eyes.
Don’t worry about me: I know this war to end all wars
is only the next before the next promised last.
I say goodbye now to the fixed stars and hello
to my new home, the friendless streets armed
with dark teeth and slurs, sleepless rain and constant
sorrow, the stone heart I carry long past its due date.
But unlike you I am not dead. More pain must pass
before I embrace the bitter earth.
My heartland is not yet a river damned.
From a collection of poems written as an ekphrastic response to the German Expressionist painter, Franz Marc. Marc was stationed near Verdun, France, where nearly 1 million soldiers died. He and Wassily Kandinsky co-founded the Blue Rider movement. Marc died on March 4, 1916.
Geologic Doom
By William Doreski
Peterborough, New Hampshire
Ashen silence molds itself
into the shape of geese drifting
on a gray lake. The angle
of their wake is acute enough
to suggest they’ll get somewhere,
despite their casual poise.
Soon they disappear in a mist
so fine we can hardly feel it
soak through and reveal our bones.
The far shore has faded away.
Maybe the planet has eroded
so its rough edge approaches us
with threats we can’t understand.
Maybe the lake is pouring into
the vacuum of absolute space.
You tire of these uncertainties
and claim we live by maps and charts
that prove the geologic doom
I fear can’t possibly happen.
Geese can happen. Loons and mallards
happen every day. But the flat earth
occurs only in certain old texts,
and even then, you note, the edge
isn’t sharp enough to harm us
unless we choose to die of fright.
Floral Derision
By William Doreski
Peterborough New Hampshire
Fragrant lilies critique the pond.
Subtleties of their punctuation
leave us gasping for response.
The water is a dirty pane of glass.
Looking at rather than through it
reveals only dinge and drab.
No wonder aquatic disdain
extends to dry land where voices
sail across wooded places
and boomerang back to intellects
that lack both form and content.
The lilies remain so aloof,
although rooted in the shallows,
that no one considers plucking them
to place in ordinary vases
in rooms where reckless children roam.
The August days simper and preen.
The pond water smell of decay
although fish and amphibians thrive
despite the threats of climate change.
The lilies gather information
to feed their impeccable poise.
Sun, rain, wind, unseasonable heat.
The force of their critique remains
until some moonless night when
they’ll fold themselves out of reach,
leaving everything vital unsaid.
Yimakh Shemo ( יִמַּח שְׁמוֹ)
by Gerard Sarnat
May his end be to be cut off; in another generation
may their name be blotted out.
—Psalm 109 verse 13
Curse is placed
after exact name
particular enemies
of my Jewish people
–may any remembrance
also get ERASED forever:
Recent starter obviously’s Hitler
but 97-year-old mentor/Auschwitz
survivor just last week told me that she
will consider adding to list Trump and Bibi.