Time Is A Funny Thing
By Josué Blanca
Time’s a funny thing.
Some people stitch themselves into a place
so gently you hardly see the needle.
A face known on sight, a voice
that finds you easy…
the kind of conversation you can set down
for a week and lift back up
as if it had never really ended.
Somewhere along the way,
the neighborhood begins to hold breaths
in the shape of them.
It’s in the salt air of a Manette walk,
the scratch of a pencil over a crossword,
that small, bright shift in the light
the moment they come into view.
Time doesn’t warn you
when the familiar has ripened into the dear.
It just lets the colors deepen.
One more issue, one more passing hello.
A thousand ordinary kindnesses
gathering a glow they never asked for.
Maybe that is enough:
To love a street simply because
someone moved through it
in a way that made it warmer.
To feel how a single presence
can settle into the pavement and the trees,
until the place finally looks
like itself.
Josue is a local reader, community member, and an absolutely shite poet, interested in the small ways people become part of a place.
Seraphim
By Sarah Steinke
When imagination and spark, the assurance of being found, were new in you,
when moontime and her resurrection of fullness and horizon,
starlit lines below and above were primacy, then language
and acquisition was intimacy, knowing and being known through
what’s this and why and what happens next and I knew how to find you
lightning and electricity and let’s count together and you wanted a language
for just you and I a constellation of light, and light returning
that we could speak into one another’s hearts.
What I didn’t say, because I didn’t know, was this: sometimes when the light
flashes, we’re found without words,
resurrected so suddenly that in the dark
we have only this—
the sound of wing beat.
Sarah is the City of Bremerton’s Poet Laureate.
Mother’s Day On A Dime
By Cravin Moore
Dezaray’s in Disarray.
Her friend Maryellen snitched to the DEA.
Maryellen turned in three, thinking she’d get off free.
Dezaray gave up easy, took the prosecutors plee.
Two grandmother’s doing nothing but time.
Two grandmother’s both sitting on a dime.
Family tree’s a long list of felonies
Mom’s a druggie, Dad’s a thief.
The city streets eventually gain custody.
Mom’s a druggie, Dad’s a thief.
If at first you don’t succeed
Lie, steal, cheat, repeat.
The felon doesn’t fall that far from the tree
Mom’s a druggie, Dad’s a thief.
Dezaray’s in Disarray, and Maryellen feels the same way.
Another year spent living day to day.
Sharing letters in prison
On yet another Mother’s Day.
Cravin is a punk rock poet.
