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Susan Chase-Foster
God’s Own Fruit Bob, an affable guy born on the South Island of New Zealand, a place locals call Godzone, loves to point out to anyone who’ll listen there are actually three kinds of kiwis: the bird, the people and the fruit. In the backyard his kiwi sprawls over the carport and beyond, climbing like that carnivorous monster in Little Shop of Horrors, or Jack’s beanstalk weaving its way into the clouds.
Sunrise on Resurrection Bay
Katherine Bleth
Kersten Christianson Two Poems
Bob’s kiwi grows fast enough to activate the motion detector light in the middle of stormless nights and sometimes when he’s hammering out a poem in the cottage its tendrils slam against the window like a spitting of sparrows mesmerized by their own reflections. The one time he tried to prune the poor thing its rough and unripe fruit fell to the ground like a hundred stone tears.
Hometown Shuttered up winter town: rain puddling in the gutters and cracks, I am the string of inconsistencies. Twinkle lights; eight bulbs burned out, half winking stars flash against the art shop’s stormdirty windows. Blink of the eye, the blue of the mailbox gnarled, twisted by the drunk driver from the Moose. The Russian curios line the dusty shelves of the old Random House gift shop: Lacquer boxes, Fabergé baubles, Matryoshkas, the little nest of dolls (one word inside another, inside another) in rain gear, dry boots, an apprentice of joy buoyed
Mike Burwell
by the crack of flashy January sunlight, the truth of sky just before the dark.