Like crystal milk the frost embraces a Busch can tossed with a hand’s wave to the beachgravel road pocked by double-crescent prints of deer crossing in files of four that bound up the grassy rise in grey light to stand in vigilant profile against a hazy sky flushing blood red ahead of dawn’s rays running…

Bread of life, we break your body, tearing you to pieces, allotting our own portions. Bread of life, we crack your crust, scattering you in crumbs, serving our own desires. Our hands raise you up, clench and pull. Our eyes watch you split and rip in our grasp. One loaf, offered for many, one loaf,…

The telescope dozes on its tripod, head tilted back, one eye closed, steady on three feet, waiting patiently for gentle hands to lift and carry it reverently into the darkness of a starry night, open its solitary eye, turn its gaze to the skies and peer deeply into heaven’s past. David M. Frye April 8,…

Hands hold bat unnaturally, left snugged against knob, right gripping handle above. Stance still square to plate, but left shoulder points to mound and pitcher. Head turns left, eyes watch waiting for ball’s release. Mind wanders in waiting, wondering why the switch. Life is left-handed, sinister, a litany of accommodations. Scissors digging into hand pencil…

Today’s poetic attempts lie on the page. Unfinished. Entangled in squiggles, dead ends, cross-outs. But that’s the nature of experimentation. Not every filament lit up Edison’s bulb. Most flashed and crumbled into ashes. So I’ve flipped the switch today. A quick feeble light and embered darkness. Time to strike a match and light a candle.…

A party gathers in the streets flash-mobbing by word-of-mouth raising voices as one with joy. Hosanna in rhythm he’s coming hosanna hosanna I see him ecstatic hosanna Amen shed robes wave palms amen amen he’s here Yes look see yes Oh! Now is the time! This is the day! We are the ones! He is…

A rough row of trees, mulberry and locust and hackberry, angles nearly south by west on the brome-blanketed slope too small to earn the name “hill.” Entwined among the trees and stumps run the rusted traces of an abandoned barbed wire fence bearing the marks of past owners– patches and fortifications. One iron post punctuates…

What makes a poem a poem and not a piece of prose? Is the spark a glint in readers’ eyes as they pass across the page? Or does the destiny of words descend from tip of poet’s pen? Beauty finds life in the beholder’s eye. We know it when we see it. Perhaps poetry emerges…

In today’s Holocene epoch, Nebraska lies far from the ocean, but the dry grassy stems of last season’s brome shift and sift into a sandy beach through eyes slitting and squinting. I lie on my back in the field, crunching the brittle blades, and close my eyes. The sun, tame at this distance, warms my…

So much of a story’s telling depends upon a strong beginning, a word that declares here is the root, the foundation; know this and you begin well. A brazen bisection to place upon a page words that enliven a thought, a memory, that speak a mused image, but also in silent negation declare all else…