Marilyn Ackerman
Inspiration piece

Tree Farmers
By Adam Cornford
Response

These are the true tree farmers they do not plant plantations uniform grids
of pine and fir like power-poles in rows marching away to the vanishing point
There trees vanish into beams planks printer-paper like brides stripped bare
by their batch processors in hangars of flat suns whirling their stainless teeth
and sliding planes along their surfaces to smooth them to two dead dimensions
These are true tree farmers herders of whole forests their underbrush and ivy
their brambles and berries above widespreading roots like subsoil road-rays
exchanging waterlight and medicine warning each other of parasite assaults
The true tree farmers carry forests inside their bodies red as Western madrone
or Eastern autumn: blood-groves and axonic woods of thought and sensation
The true tree farmers like their trees wear moths and finches as their coronals
All night they sleep-dance in moss pavilions their faces masked in moonlight
Tall forest herds inhale their dark breath and exhale it as the wind’s diamonds

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Jay Young Gerard
“Energy Diptych”
Response

Black Energy

Black inhuman plumes of entropy ascend from bombed Iraq wells and exploded tanker cars in Quebec

Great black snake sways its many-eyed head as it tries to find a way south from boreal tar desolation past the Lakota drum-shields

Black coal soot coating the earth’s lungs paling to ghost-gray and pink coughing froth as all Beijing becomes a forbidden city

Capital intelligent black cancer swirling in the eyes of executives commands them to create Venus climate in the skies of Gaia

Blackness invisible in well-lit rooms and cubicles rises through the floors to form face-eating mirrors like liquid obsidian

Despair transmutes to viridian light in alembic hearts as voice-crowds face down the black uniforms of planetwide extinction

Energy of convection flows between black outer robe and white inner robe of a Bedu woman soaked in sun

Adam Cornford

Tora Estep

La Traicionada

Cartas intolerables rodean su cabeza
se convierten en alas electrocutadas
en albanicos de hueso que se despliegan
frente de sus ojos ahora de plata helada
que reflejan una blancura sin palabras
en las miradas también de sus amigas
Sus manos quieren ser largas cuchillas
su cabellera un camino de sangre seca

The Betrayed Woman

Unbearable letters round her head
turn into electrocuted wings
fans of bone that spread open
before her eyes now frozen silver
that reflect a wordless blankness
as in the gaze of her friends
Her hands want to be long blades
her hair a road of dried blood

JoAnn Gilles

Inspiration Piece

Cave

The red sandstone roof         is imprinted     with millennia             of flickers

…………………………..moiré of soot and sunset

…………..Posthistoric cave         painters with         magnifying optical implants

…………………have celebrated     the flea’s energy and grace

the swaying reed-beds of hair

…..Outside     the low cave mouth         slotted wide         as an ancient airlock

………………………..one arch         of corroded rebar     or industrial cable

………………………………like a burnt

…………………………………..rainbow bridge    ………Then

……………………………………………..above the range beyond

…………………………………………the butte         looming prow

……………the tall pale plume         ………..against night’s refracted blue

……………………………….of a fallen orbital

….On the rubbled watersmooth floor……..head bowed             facing inward

……………………………………………….………in a white robe

………………………………………………….……and neural topknot

………………………………………………..….……kneels the acolyte

…………..imagining         a boat that never ceases

…………………………………..to be a tree

………………..a tree whose boughs       are the galley-oars of summer

………………………………………………………………………a boat that sails on light

Lynn Heiser

Inspiration Piece

The Whisper of Eros
It was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart

The whisper of Eros is heard before He arrives
The sound of reeds trembling in a rising wind
The sound of seafoam yielding to dark sand
The whisper of Eros is a poem heard in a dream
His words take form like virtual photons out
Of silence crowded as the vacuum between stars
And vanish again before they are understood
But not before they are known by the taken heart
And the body fills with a cruel and lovely light

Adam Cornford

Response Piece

Questions Concerning Twin Souls
By Adam Cornford
Response

How does the first soul cell divide to form two identical beginnings? Do they grow apart?

Is each soul still one cell or self, or a growing, cooperative multitude of selves? Bone selves, heart selves, blood selves, brain selves?

In what womb are the two souls nurtured, curving around each other? In what finite but unbounded mother-sea of aether?

How are the twins rotated away from each other through the fourth dimension, so each is now mirror to the other?

If one soul is shadow, is the other soul light? Is each one light to the other, or shadow?

Do souls have graceful tentacles or tendrils, with which they swim through the aether?

Do they lack fingers and toes because they never grasp what they touch?

Do they lack eyes because they see with the outspread feathers of their attention?

Do twin souls turn in long slow spirals, like galaxies, as they pass through each other?

What happens when they fall into the soft kaleidoscope of sex?

Within each fragmentary image of each soul, is the whole image of the other hidden?

When one soul leaves the world, does the other linger as its ghost?