Better Than Starbucks!

Featured Poems​

 

Editor's Choice:

​

            Written in Despair

 

She crests the hill between their farm and town

and ponders their west fifty in the sun.

The new-tilled soil glistens a richer brown,

but half the morning work remains undone.

Abandoned at a furrow-end, the plow

is punctuation — a period? a dash?

a finish, or a pause?  She shades her brow

to read the message in the ruts that slash

across the tillage, as if a writer struck

his morning’s labor in despair. The line

leads home where, in the yard, beside the truck,

the John Deere clicks as it cools. She knows the sign.

If only she could strike a lifetime spent.

No lease or purchase should be ironclad —

no earthly contract — as the sacrament

that keeps her throwing good years after bad.

Her pickup rattles across the cattleguard.

The house is silent, as if there’s no one home.

She steers the tractor back across the yard

to finish the story written in the loam.

 

​

Richard Wakefield’s first poetry collection, “East of Early Winters” (University of Evansville Press), won the Richard Wilbur Award. His second collection, “A Vertical Mile” (Able Muse Press), was short-listed for the Poets Prize.

 

​

Publisher's Choice:

 

Jardín Los Viveros

—Valencia, España

 

It’s rare to even exist;

the quest for calm comes

second to the wind’s relief

tickling the silver hairs on the back

of a blue-collared neck who checks

his watch for the end of his 30 minute break,

while he feeds fuzzy-headed peaches

to fuzzy-haired children, who dance

in dead leaves under swaying Spanish moss.

 

Impossible to seek solitude

from a willow’s earthly locks as they cascade

down in forest-green waterfalls, her tendrils

tickling the grass until they wet themselves

with laughter, their morning dew erased by

the leaps of woolly squirrels

on their overgrown jungle gym.

 

Hard to convince the wind

your peace is more important than lifting

up the weathered leaves who aren’t strong

enough to hold on, because

a driver’s 10 and 2

is curling his mustache

and flicking his Marlboro, while

barreling into the carefully-placed canopies

sending her children to the ground.

 

And yes, I know it’s selfish to ask the quiet to stifle

the gray moss waltzing in the breeze—

the gust a perfect partner. She belongs here,

foreign or not, because she’s relentless,

her slick, skinny limbs encompassing

each leaf, giving shade to sunburnt branches

while pooling as pillows

for those who have no homes.

 

 

Brittney Rangel graduated from Florida State University with a degree in Creative Writing. She currently teaches and is finishing her Masters of Arts in English Education. Brittney lives in St. Petersburg.