fmb0032

"Home From the War"
by Howie Good

for Mikey O.

They said the Army would be good for you
supply the discipline you needed

and when you came back at 21
with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart

there was a ceremony at the high school
with speeches and a color guard

and they renamed a park after you
and planted a tree but you didn't know

how could you at the top of the hill
under a simple stone in the town cemetery

Howie Good, a journalism professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Death of the Frog Prince (2004) and Heartland (2007), both from FootHills Publishing. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the featured poet in the Autumn 2007 issue of The Grand Rapids Literary Review. This poem originally appeared in New Verse News.

fmb0031

"Believe Me"
by Patricia Kennelly

peaches taste better
if they're stolen
from your neighbor's tree
back towards the alley
where the chain-link fence
is broken

on a new moon night
find where black squirrels
have left half-gnawed,
half-ripe ones like
hansel-gretel crumbs

the limb hangs heavy
with the fuzzy globes
you push aside
the glossy leaves
to find one

my advice
eat it
in your garden

Patricia Kennelly is a freelance writer/editor and poet who currently lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Her work has appeared most recently in Artella, The Pointed Circle, Alembic and the Irish American Post. When she's not writing, editing or stealing peaches, she's nagging people about "writing daily" at her blog http://writingnag.blogspot.com.