“My foremothers/stand behind me/dressed in the indigo of the cosmos/stars for eyes with no recipe/ or cookbook in hand/just thousands of hearts resonating,/It’s time for you to know too./They pour into me.”—Glenis Redmond…

“Boleman-Herring took up poetry before she could write, and gave it up, for all intents and purposes (jazz lyrics excepted), after reading Auden. How does one, why should one (she says) follow an…

“Donne’s flea, Keats’s cricket, Dickinson’s buzzing fly,/and Neruda’s lust-filled generic crawler/ making its way across a lover’s hip, to name a few.”—By Rick Mulkey Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—January…

“The tongue is in the eye./It speaks through glints and blinks,/Mama after the stroke,/speechless./One blink meant ‘yes,’/two a ‘no.’/I wanted to read her mind/when that gaze overtook her./In the whites of those fixed…

“I gather stillness in a cold/that hushes all but little sounds—/a woodpecker’s echoless tappings,/leaf-crackle of a jostling squirrel.”—William Thompson Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman   GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—November 2018— William Thompson’s poems…

“My heart did not break for three decades and then it did and I began to see things from inside out / and the outside lost sheen and dust / Interior worlds, my…

“Here is the dog planet at last where all is running/and sinking, rising and running again—/lessons in flight./To those mad glad beasts/all is cold and holy clouds/and certain sacred sky.”—Ashley Crout Speculative Friction…

“Any one of these days can be the new first day, Day One, where things seem to be going well. No problem. Any missed understanding can be beginner’s luck, it can be even…

“The novel I finished reading/last night/in my system like a drug,/a hangover, numbing, dulling,/but for something dark, unseen,/some residue, some fated turn./I have outlived myself,/what now?”—Patricia Waters Speculative Friction By Claire Bateman GREENVILLE…

“It’s as if our home yearns to satisfy us, although lately dinner’s been perfunctory and the dusting lackluster. In this, we sense our home’s human ambition, its human distraction. Tonight, we will loan…