Sunrays
by: Joe Amaral

Photons disseminate
              Idle dust specks awake
Caroming agitations

Bask my neck as
              A lizard absorbs heat
                          Cold-blooded stones
                                       Tingle window beam warmth
                          Redeye hints glistening
            Under gray moonscape ash
Embers slither afire

Our untrained vision
               Lucks out when glass
                             Cosmically refracts
                 We view miniscule
Shining miracles






Wine
by: Joe Amaral

Red blossoms engorge full lips
Serried vines in sprinkling sun
Myriads of odd flavors persist
With every tasteful ingestion

Locally grown yet so foreign country
This love creates such a funny feeling
Vat-deep simmering pungent beneath
Shared wells of sipping flirtations

Uncorked grape scents burgeon free
Gushing in musical proliferation
Incognito it humbly starts a seed, but
Flourishes with the smile on her face









THE DAY AFTER MARATHON

by: Rodney Nelson


something had pended in them and
they ran and let it out to win
a day of recovery
             but
it was mid-May and we could see
from the deck that something pended
on the river
                          in the sky too
and why did the bright overcast
make the green darker
             more intense
we might have wondered looking at
a world that never went inside
where many of the marathon
were recovering
                          rain did come
but only as the envoy of
a tornado eight hundred miles
away
             and we talked about the
befallen and the misfallen
and what awaited
                          did not probe
the unshared or unacknowledged
or run inside only went when
the bright intensified making
the rain harder
             not quite enough
to let out what pended in it