Isabella Nazari
Inspiration piece

Franny the Flamingo
By Elizabeth Crawford
Response

Franny the Flamingo was quite the explorer. She loved boats and the ocean. Franny lived in Cancun, a place where every flamingo was happy. The sapphire blue sea glistened and gleamed which gave Franny immense pleasure. Franny peered through a dense fog cloud and spotted a little brown boat like a sitting duck in the water. Pondering the thought of having hands so she could drive the boat Franny skipped down the white sand beach. She watched the vessel rock in the steady currents of the waves. Franny already loved the boat. She could see that it was called the Cancun. “Probably after my home!” Franny thought happily. Then Franny kept walking and she walked into the sunset, importantly scanning over her imagination.

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Superimposed
By KJ Hannah Greenberg
Response

Layering your needs over mine can’t succeed.
I refuse to allege our coupling’s “beautiful.”
As well, reframing our feelings to disfigure
Sincere images ought always to get rejected.
Pretending functions best for sugary cereals.

Sure, there’s shallow “prettiness” in boundaries
Lit with rare fairy dust, gilded with scintillating
Paint. It’s assured that individuals, not privy
To our certainties, might suppose our cornices’
Are escalloped; “superficiality” guiles easily.

Nonetheless, I insist plain views, unadorned
With light or spit, construct us better vistas
Than wholly the universe’s brilliant textures.
Perhaps, next time, you’ll likewise welcome
Straightforward assessments’ grave benefits.

Jacalyn Carley
Inspiration piece

Beheld (The Girl Who Couldn’t Eat Cake)
By Amy Souza
Response

The artist’s eye
brimmed with hips
because I liked the air large

It hadn’t occurred to me
before I was chosen
born to become
wondering if I’ll ever

I began
to think
I started to
crave

but no one
has called in a
long time

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Tora Estep

Response

August by Kathleen Jordan

Inspiration piece

These lingering beach days
Sun bathing the body caressing the skin and
Kissing the limbs
grow short
As the perfume of summer, of brightly colored melons and peppers
Willows nodding in the gentle breezes whisper
not long now
Until the autumn slinks into the bowing out summer
Leaves tearfully fall and pillow the softened ground
Soon to turn hard as the chill settles on land like a smothering fog
Setting sun no longer smiles on the sea
But warns with the chilled wave and the darkened early sky
Lament. Another summer slips away from us
Only to be remembered with the donning of clothes heavy
After summer’s freedom.

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Marilyn Ackerman

Dancing

Response

Dancing
By Diane Mayr
Inspiration piece
Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at
different speeds.  A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.  ~ William James

With the music we lift our
feet. Our arms float. Our hands
take on a life of their own. As
the tempo picks up we laugh
for we know what Common
Sense said, is true, “You can’t
dance with a broken heart.”

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Helen Lewis
Inspiration piece

Eagle
By Michelle Vanstrom
Response

Eagle
You flew in front of my car today, created a visual intersection of liner journey and a horizontal sightline over the asphalt as I drove down Lower River Road. Your perpendicular flight over the open space, over Joe Davis State Park, over the two lane black ribbon towards the Niagara River, a still glass turquoise in the early morning. You flew across the boundary edge of two nations. Your goal: a nest in the treed Canadian shoreline.

Your yellow talons gripped a bundle of dried grass, straw colored stems trailing behind slow flap, seven-foot wings. Grass to freshen the nest. Grass brought daily until the young fledge.

You land on the nest’s edge, curl your talons under in a bird tiptoe to prevent an accidental piercing of two tiny fluff-feathered birds, exchange good morning and a query with your forever mate. “Do I go back out for additional grass, fly for breakfast? Or do you want to leave the nest, spread your wings to glide on the sun’s rising thermals?”

***
Native American flute lilts across the landscape. A single drum beats. Storm hovers over the horizon. Mountainous gray, egg carton clouds. Illumination and reverberation descend upon the river’s Corridor of Antiquity, shrouds the thousand year old trees—cedars and oaks, the old growth canopy. When rain and mist clear, Eagle perches in the highest oak branches. He spreads his wings, glides towards earth, one yellow-clawed foot extended. As he steps onto the ground, he transforms into Man, a message from the Great Creator. When Eagle comes to where we are working, we know the Creator of the Universe cares, is watching. (An Adaptation Retelling of Erik Phelps’ Native American Myth)

***

Eagle
Flew in front of my car today—enroute towards the Niagara River, the gorge, the Canadian treed shoreline. Myth and tale link recognition, a you-are-here intersection. Synchronistic message viewed out the passenger side window as I parallel the Niagara River Greenway, a space where I once advocated for a genuine ecological restoration, advocated and lost, lost a way to restore the Corridor of Antiquity, the old growth forests that once lined the River’s shores, trees Eagle needs to survive.

A talon grasp, a bundle of dried grass. A straw kite trail, tinder for eagle medicine and imbued message: the road as journey, a linear direction cliché, a connection to guides and teachers, to higher truths, to keen insight and creation, a knowing beyond the intellect. Eagle, they sought to extirpate me. Like you, I return to soar over the River with wings held board flat, wings rock steady in a warm wind spiral, the sun’s rising.

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Untitled
By Helen Lewis
Response

Old Money
By Michelle Vanstrom
Inspiration piece 

When I bought the old

coins my mother collected

I always thought I’d give them

back. She called it

collateral for the mortgage

money, or else she wouldn’t

ask and she refused a coin

collector’s large offer

because, she promised, one

day she would buy them

back. I followed her into the bedroom

where she kept them

buried in the floor’s cold

air return inside an ancient suitcase

with broken gold clasps. She placed her eighteen-year

collection into my arms and burdened them

with memories—us searching

for edge-worn faces, tiny minted letters stamped

on silver, D for Denver, S for San Francisco

and scanning bills, ones and fives, marked

with red ink—a trait not normally found

on George or Abraham but always imprinted on us. Small

change always found our hands,

luck discovered in a supermarket parking lot, the gas station,

or the high school cafeteria. Every Friday she bought rolled

coins instead of cigarettes, exchanged

Salems for lucky strikes. After supper

at the dining room table we sat and scrutinized, peering

through blue smoke and

dreams with a magnifying glass

for the rare discovery: bronze Indian heads,

copper wheat pennies, buffalo nickels, Mercury dimes,

Liberty walking halves, or a peace

silver dollar, pressing them into the empty

dated spaces in the green coin collection

books. I bound the blue suitcase with straw-colored masking

tape and I buried it in my storage

closet preserving her memory

and her broken gold clasp promise.

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We Saw You Coming
Kamika Cooper
Response

we saw you coming quickly

stepping lively with all those ill begotten riches
stolen gold, rubies, time, minds, and souls
you walked like they were bags of feathers that just
glided down to you from the generous sky
falling off your slippery fingers and never hitting the ground once

twice, we saw you coming in the broad daylight

moving and shaking through the world without concern
with stealth acquisition though you never appeared to be
the type to move that way, lacking some piece of swagger
and the tailored suits typical to others in your profession
we laughed at your preference for cats as accomplices

fuzzy distractions of purring lies that we thought untrue, so
we were unprepared, but we saw you coming

you were one step ahead of your own game
we were three steps behind and at least one to the right
you looked like a fool but we forgot: the fool is always lucky,
stepping lively with all those ill begotten riches
we saw you coming, but you saw us first

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Tora Estep

Inspiration Piece

The Red Coat
Kathleen Finn Jordan

Response

Apprehensive
called into service surprisingly
guest lecturer to an incoming freshman class
I look at myself in the mirror and wonder
If my attire, the donning of a red coat
after a scenic route tour of my mind
will do the trick
create the atmosphere for a class
riveted daily by virtual gaming
inspire some interest, excitement
captivate their attention for the poem which I have been asked to
read and relate
“To My Daughter in the Red Coat “

Anne Stevenson writes of
“The shriveled women staring at us from their stone benches”
And I wonder, will my red coat force a stare from them
generate a love for this poem
as the coat dances in the final line
will their minds dance and wonder and love this poem
will the donning of my red coat, a folio of poems under my arm
elicit a response, a nod to art and symmetry, a successful lesson
or will I only look foolish and old
as minds wander and cell phones vibrate under the desks of my audience
only a try and I hope they will travel with me
as I look at myself in the mirror visiting the poem in my mind
professor in a red coat, daughter in a red coat, challenge of the times
bringing poetry to life in an age of action games and shattered attention spans.

Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it.  Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Jacalyn Carley
Response
Made with fresh lavender, wind, ink, oil pastels
Size: 24 x 13 ”

Housesitting for Buddhists
By Amy Souza
Inspiration piece

Outside, two spiders spin webs on
either end of the porch
We greet as I sweep
fallen leaves

Sun peeks through
clouds like a whisper
The spiders spin
I sweep

Overnight, wind will
destroy our work
and we
will begin again