The Baltimore Review

Force of the Sonogram

Bob Haynes - Force of the Sonogram

Poetry

Bob Haynes lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, where he teaches at Arizona State University and online at Writers on the Net. Some of his poetry has appeared in North American Review, New Letters, Nimrod,… Read more »

Jesus Bread

Linda Parsons Marion - Jesus Bread

Poetry

Linda Parsons Marion is an editor at the University of Tennessee and the author of three poetry collections, most recently, Bound. She served as poetry editor of Now & Then magazine for many years… Read more »

Migration

Victoria Bosch Murray - Migration

Poetry

Victoria Bosch Murray’s poetry has appeared in American Poetry Journal, Booth, Field, Greensboro Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, The Potomac, and elsewhere. Her… Read more »

Monologue in a Bar

Lewis Turco - Monologue in a Bar

Poetry

Lewis Turco is the inventor of the verse form called the “bluesanell,” and a contributor to the recently-published Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776, edited by Dennis… Read more »

Onychomancy

Maureen Alsop - Onychomancy

Poetry

Maureen Alsop, PhD, is the author two full collections, Apparition Wren and Mantic, as well as several chapbook collections. Her poems have appeared in a variety of print and online publications… Read more »

Perfected

Marjorie Stelmach - Perfected

Poetry

Marjorie Stelmach’s most recent volume of poems is Bent upon Light (University of Tampa Press). Individual poems have recently appeared in Arts & Letters, The Cincinnati Review, Image, The Iowa… Read more »

Sleep in Summer

Leatha Kendrick - Sleep in Summer

Poetry

Author of three volumes of poetry, Leatha Kendrick leads workshops in poetry and life writing at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, a community literary center in Lexington, Kentucky.… Read more »

The House With Only The Sound
of A Dog Barking Inside

Dick Allen - The House With Only The Sound
of A Dog Barking Inside

Poetry

Dick Allen’s forthcoming eighth poetry collection, to be published by St. Augustine Press in Fall, 2013, is This Shadowy Place—winner of the 2013 New Criterion Poetry Prize. It’s his first… Read more »

Understanding Dear Alice’s Dilemma

Emari DiGiorgio - Understanding Dear Alice’s Dilemma

Poetry

Emari DiGiorgio makes a mean arugula quesadilla and has split-boarded the Tasman Glacier. She is Associate Professor of Writing at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey and a NJ State… Read more »

Perfected

Marjorie Stelmach

The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.

- James Wright

The pond is feathered, grey-backed, moving north.
Nothing can hold it.
The fat little saint in the garden prays only
for a paint-job.
Flickers and downies contend at the feeder.
Is this a world in good order?

A red-winged blackbird grates on the world’s nerves—
another of the saints of repetition.
This is not a day
to ask after the gardener.

If Earth is perfected,
it is in its cycles, its seasons, its relentless
replications,
as Time is perfected in the saint’s plaster leprosy,
the scabbed mud of the shoreline,
the pile of lobbed limbs
in the hollow.

As for the geese, they’ve turned to alchemy,
depositing green tubes underfoot, vials
the winds will powder and carry
down to the water.

Drink, and be whole again.

As light sinks, the waters,
resistant to the world’s thirst, stiffen
beneath a glinting shield.
Still, the deer bend to whatever is on offer.
The saints, too, are making do
with gold.
Hard on a throat, gold.
Who would dare to ask after
the gardener?

The pond is flying north against
all natural law,
dragging the dead,
and whatever is un-rooted, uprooted,
unresolved.
See how the waters have broken
into scales, red in the last light, silver
where the moon

touches, troughs, touches.

With sunrise and the washing
of heaven’s flesh in risen mist, ask:
Is this a world in good order?

Ask again. Tomorrow
is the only answer, every sacred
dying cell of it.