Homes we all leave home eventually, leave the dark comfort of wombs, leave the home of childhood, some earlier than others depending upon the warmth or not of particular hearths. inevitably some step out and abandon silver spoons like Siddhartha who was not comforted by comfort, while some break from huts of sheer neglect. eventually,…

“Parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds all learn new vocalizations. The calls and songs of some species in these groups appear to have even more in common with human language, such as conveying information intentionally and using simple forms of some of the elements of human language such as phonology, semantics and syntax. And the similarities run…

“The past is inevitable”  —Delmore Schwartz, Poet I’d Never Thought of it Like That           though it’s likely to come, tomorrow’s not set, …….. this day’s loose ends twist in the wind ………like kite tails in blue jerked at the end of present’s string, ………they’re codas no one can sing— ………the future’s…

Who Spoke First? who knows from where the echoes come, who knows who forms the echoes? if, in a canyon, I speak loudly enough that echoes come,   I might think it’s me,     I am the maker of echoes,   I belch a series of wave forms toward a mirror of cliff and hear myself return on…

Making Way —Narragansett Bay —1960, first time out We part from pier slow as disengaging lovers one landlocked, the other a floater who won’t be kept at bay The diminishing dock slides back, its bollards and planks deploy to some other place not here —to a distancing otherworld The tether breaks as stern-first we pass…

A Sprawl of Cemeteries Blood for blood is in our bones, the bass line of a ceaseless requiem. Justice screams carpe diem, but none of the dead are soothed as the living gloat and hoot, or wail Why did it have to be her, or him? Satisfaction’s not been found in the pages of our “Good Books”.…

Terri Amig

Two young men greeted a new crew member on a ship’s quarterdeck 60 years ago and, in a matter of weeks, by simple challenge, introduced this then 18 year-old who’d never really read a book through to the lives that can be found in them.… —Thank you Anthony Gaeta and Edmund Budde for your life-altering input.…

Schrödinger’s Cat . I’m in a box in two states at once, dead and alive —what am I Schrödinger’s cat sniffing out mice nose to the sky? I hear the high art of a sparrow sound, I catch a honeysuckle’s scent in a mire of duplicity or worse, my neurons spell disparities in verse which…

—on the song, Twelve Days of Christmas; words here: https://genius.com/Christmas-songs-the-twelve-days-of… ________________________________________ Twelve Days of Christmas and Other Mysteries What does it mean exactly, the chronic return of a partridge, which, swaddled in melody, follows an accumulated bullet list of things my true love gave to me —what must I have missed? — We start with…

Fundamental Disunderstanding ….—thoughts on Oct. 7th and Gaza everything ever written or said everything drawn or played or sung every headline that cried or bled every fresco, every poem everything wrung from our cranial sponge every inky insult flung every bomb that leveled a home ….and left a child to fend alone every instrument ever…

No Joke Regarding quantum chance, why (or more simply) does the world exist, and if it does, is it funny? There might just as well be nothing instead of the risible sun which makes me laugh when it comes up coincidentally with the punch line of a joke that also could never have existed had…

“It was only when my father died in 2016 that this deep truth of human existence hit me: there are two basic categories of people, the living and the dead, and the members of both categories are equally people. Some people are dead people, in other words.” —Justin Smith-Ruiu, from 3 Quarks Daily Knot There are days…

—Two poems separated by 5 years have come together