River Orchid and the Chinese Auntie
by Sarah Young
My daughter Jiang Lan was born a survivor. She was not among the millions of Chinese girls that disappeared through sex-selective abortion or female infanticide. I imagine her parents wanted a son, or perhaps they already had a child and could not afford the financial and economic penalties of exceeding the one-child quota. It is likely that with a parent’s grief and a hope for her future, they abandoned her so that a passerby would find and take her to a police station or a social welfare institute where she would be cared for. I imagine that in the still night Jiang Lan lay alone on a roadside that by day would bustle and hum, and that would be her birth canal to a second life.
At daybreak a woman found her bundled in a rough blanket and wearing a note pinned to her smock. The note chronicled her lunar time of birth. No name, no message, only the astronomical moment of her arrival on earth, scribbled on a thin torn piece of rice paper. It read “Born the second hour of the third day in the year of Ren Shen.”

Mary Zepp by Paul Martin
Mary Zepp was cute. She was shorter than I was, about the same height as my cousin Jimmy Huffman, but she sure was better looking than Huffy.

I’m Pat Marshall. Mary Zepp, Huffy and I all were 14 years old, and lived in the same neighborhood in Johnstown. That’s in Pennsylvania. It’s a good town, I guess, but way off the so-called “beaten path” if you really want somebody from out-of-town to visit you, or if you ever want to go someplace else.

Nachos and Guacamole by Linda Wentz
I am well past the age of innocence; lost my virginity in September of ‘69 on a desert trail on South Mountain in the great state of Arizona amid bullhorn stickers, jagged rocks and rattlesnakes. Not my most romantic memory. My partner in crime was much older than I was and convinced me that ditching school was not only cool, but a necessary rite of passage - his rite - my passage onto the snowball in hell of evaporating self-esteem.
Now, after thirty-two years of married bliss in the Pacific Northwest, I am, for lack of a better word, divorced. I looked it up in the thesaurus and found words like: ending, disintegrate, fragment, crumble, tear apart, and fall to pieces. That pretty much sums it up.
So what do people my age do about, or with, the opposite sex? Being female of the species, I tend to attract old whiskered guys looking for a soft place to Iand. Just such an unannounced arrival touched down last weekend when snow dusted stubborn Peace rosebuds in my rose garden. An old Friend my age, pleasing in appearance, invited himself to dinner and a movie in my living mom, eating nachos and guacamole.
“Right now I’m working on some business deals with a liquidator.” He scanned the living room searching out potential treasure, his eyes darting like a gecko from furniture to paintings to me to knick-knacks. “You know me; I’ve always had some sort of scheme in the works.”

Adult Poetry

Sanctum by Jerry Kraft
In the cathedral a great wolf moans a lamentation.
A low-hanging shroud of smoke obscures the altar.
A herd of unblessed elk cries out hymns of breath
While a mourning dove ascends above the nave.
Undergrowth embroiders green vestments.
A sanctified wind goes beyond perception.
The timbers of the transept grow weak with rot.
Creatures abiding here walk in a silent faith
Unburdened by any text or chanting, save the wind
Against the mountain, water trickling beneath moss.
Their pilgrimage is toward another season, sustenance
To continue, to multiply, to worship through survival.

Whisper Heresy by Mark Valentine
-Teapot Dome Wyoming 1922
They ate their lunch in the cottonwood shade.
They leaned against the trees and chewed
on bread from tins in silent deference.

It never should have been this way. But since
the Scandal broke, the headlines have been filled
with accusations taking root. And wind-

ome kind of wind appeared at noon and aimed
its whistled shrill on muted men gnawing
on truth like jerky: Whisper heresy:

They know that Judas kissed for bucks. 0 men
who sit in cottonwood shade, eating grit
from paper waxed by grime and know no fill-

at rest on bended knees—don’t pray or moan:
You cannot choose whose graft will grow up tall.

The Equation by Kathy Anita Gonzales
The monk believes
the earth is as flat as a holy wafer
and if he wanders too far
he will fall off the edge
into the eternal arms of hell,
so he stays behind his monastery walls
where he tends to his cattle and sheep,
his vineyard filled with grapes
that in the autumn he harvests,
crushes under his bare, clean feet,
and he stores this wine in a cellar
for five hundred years or more
until another man walks down
the same narrow stairs,
carries a dusty bottle of the Monk’s wine
to the outdoors,