Flying Island

Unexpected Letter                                                                                  by Laurel Smith In a dream you swear you never dreamed, your moth er is writing a letter left-handed on plain paper in a cursive you must work to decipher—so unlike the perfect hand in the letters she wrote you.   Now an urgent message has shaken her ability to hold a pen, or she has suffered a stroke and expects you to see   the chaos, to translate her pain, or you missed the point of every letter she sent: her calm, cheerful text punctuating the years while this letter is the one she intended all the time.   So you focus on each loop that tries to be a vowel, each chunk of ink that wants to be a word since she will not speak again and this broken verse is for you. Laurel Smith lives in Vincennes, Indiana, and happily participates in projects to promote literacy and the arts. Her poems have appeared in Natural Bridge , New Millen

Rain    by Jared Carter The tractor-trailer’s eighteenth wheel,           in cornering The broken exit curb, congeals           and makes a thing Of mud out of the brindled cur           that stood beside Him all this time. The moment blurs.           He throws the sign-- Will Work for Food --into the ditch           that runs nearby, And reaches through the rain to bitch           against the sky. Jared Carter 's most recent book of poems, The Land Itself , is from Monongahela Books in West Virginia.  He lives in Indiana.

On Learning in New Mexico that Seamus Heaney Died              by Norbert Krapf A poet who dug in the earth with his father to plant potatoes and bring them later to light has died. His poems too dig down into bog and peat and past and present and bring up the smell of many layers of lives lived in a place and a language that rose up in him and always stayed connected to his native place. His words live on like roots of history going down and coming back up conducting the water pooled below the surface he walked in a steady rhythm like a creature whose legs and lungs are strong from having worked and written what he discovered he knew because the pen in his hand never stopped digging. This son could handle a pen the way his father did a spade, with an elemental art that revealed its quality by how deep he dug in ways that never stopped being new no matter how old they were Norbert Krapf , a former Indiana Poet Laureate, has published thirteen collect