“Roads”: Poems March 2025

The Importance of Elsewhere—Sharon Johnson

Something neither here nor there

—a wispy laugh or passing glance—

can stir so much mystery.

How some voices resonate

in a certain loamy register

and leave me worlds away.

My reckless leap

into Clark Street traffic, playing

chicken with the 22 bus

after spotting the antique gold

and diamond cufflinks I’d given you

winking from a pawn shop window.

The word nuage, French for cloud,

spoken aloud. Nuage. How easily

it opens, permeates, evaporates.

The Exodus—Samreen Sajeda

Dear reader, come, lend me your ear

This verse I etch with a scarlet spear

Into branches covering barren grounds

As fallen crowns of poached deer;    

Wood softly decays in sealed wounds

While fawns play dead in fear.

Birds disperse like painful poems

Of exiles in the heart of night—

The skies become a shifting home

With wings in winds they write.

But won’t ashes feed the dying roots

And feet make room in distant routes?

Samreen Sajeda graduated in English literature from Sophia College, Mumbai. She completed an MA in the same discipline from the University of Mumbai. She writes poems, short stories and book reviews. Her work has been published in Muse India, This Week in Palestine, The Statesman, The Bosphorus Review of Books, Guftugu, Indian Literature (Sahitya Akademi), Indian Cultural Forum, Spark, Punch, The Wise Owl, The Window Journal, Jaggery, Hakara, and in the poetry anthology titled, Of Dry Tongues and Brave Hearts, edited by Semeen Ali and Reema Ahmad, published by Red River. A poem of hers is due to be published in The Aleph Review.

Stilts—Frank William Finney

“Good luck with these,”

the tour guide said,

and off I went across the rubble.

The ditch was wide and fraught with snares.

Touts and tourists trickled by.

Weeks, and months, and decades passed.

Clown cars cruised the alleyways.

I lost balance outside the Big Top.

Swallowed dirt and slipped on sand.

Even now my ankles ache.

Springs might have helped me gain the hill,

but summer led to fallow fall.

And when last winter’s discontents

slid sleds across the melting ice,

my bones cracked like a windblown pine.

Potholes pocked the Bantam Road and all

the signs spun upside down. I landed

wordless on my back.

Too stunned

to stare at stars.

Cracks in the Road—Eleanor Jones

Wildflowers and all their inconspicuous beauty.

Their humble loveliness, their joyful sprouting.

On the side of that winding road by the lake that

I drove us to that one time, when things were still

golden between us. 

The lake with the sand and the slimy water’s edge.

We didn’t mind and waded through anyway and

I wrapped my legs around your waist in the water,

resting my head on your shoulder as if I had won

the lottery. 

The sun burnt my shoulders as we lay wet on the

sand and you kissed them gently to protect them.

As if I were precious, something sweet and too

lovely to find themselves blemished. 

We drove home with the windows down and I pointed

to the patches of flowers as we passed them by. 

Buttercup yellow and cerulean-blue blooming through

the cracks in concrete. 

I drive past the same flowers on my way to work and

I wrestle with all the memories I still hold of you.

How they’re all still tied to so much pleasure and pain.

The quick switch from something beautiful to something

unworthy of days in the sun and by the water.

I used to think that you were the flowers and I the hard tarmac. 

Now I know that I have always been both and I don’t see you

there at all. 

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5