“Duncan MacDonell,” by Tait Rains, student, grade 11

I loved my house in Mexico.

I could be there

and let the thoughts in my mind

just drive

a   w   a   y   ,

like putting a bottle in the ocean

and watching it float 

farther

and father away from your ship

until finally you couldn’t see it anymore.

I missed my wife and girls

while I was away.

The more I saw my wife,

the more I fell in love with her.

Why were we divorced

if we were still in love?

Maybe she could tell you.

Oh those polo fields,

how I love to just go for a match.

If I do say so myself,

I was pretty impressive.

Like crabgrass in the lawn,

I eventually dominated 

those games.

How ‘bout them cocktails?

Never was I able to get myself to stop.

Only my 

d

e

a

t

h

could do that.

“Allan Frank Bednar” by Savanna Stanley, student, grade 11

Out in Minnesota

the winter brought

cold, desolate thoughts.

The farm cried for attention

to those seven children.

Korean War 1950 brought 

out the man in me.

My hands grew numb on

the frontline; the cows

begging to be nourished.

Beautiful teacher.

The definition of children:

seven members of the tribe.

The theory of practical experience

for those young boys.

Train a child in the way he should go . . . .

Warm, sunny beaches, far

west as can be.

He used to say, “People are too busy to work.”

Cracked one callus over another.

Cement poured down the back.

Day one saw hot hands and faintness,

later felt the presence of an angel.

In seven days the earth was made.

In seven more days, I bowed my head.

There is no distance on this earth

as far away as yesterday.

"Renee Radding" by Lauren Radding, student, grade 11

I was a hair stylist, 

a cake decorator,

but overall I was a mother, 

the mother of three young children.

I had a husband who was a dentist

and I lived in a small town named Ojai.

I felt a bump,

in fact it was a lump,

a lump of cancer.

The doctors told me that I was 

diagnosed with breast cancer.

The cancer spread throughout my body,

like butter spreads on bread.

I began to feel weak,

as the hair started leaving my head.

I didn’t like to live as if my life was done.

In the time they gave me,

I made sure to have the most fun.

I want the best,

for the ones I love most dear. 

Please don’t cry.

For I will always be near.

"Rich Johnson" by Jeffrey Johnson

Jeff's book on Japanese poetics

Ishmael
they called me Ishmael
in the roadside shops,
no truck stops,
in those days

along the two laners
spotted with towns
from east Wisconsin
to Chicago and beyond

i drove through weather
that kept even the best
off the roads
hunkered and huddled indoors

pink sky twisters,
freezing rain,
sideways blizzards,
mistakes were buried six feet under

on that Spanish doubloon
he wagered and nailed to the mast,
i cast my die with all my might
my bid in the gamble of industry

i mounted the crow’s nest
green eyes sharp and peeled
on the horizon
for the prize

through dustbowl wasteland
a generation of best minds,
abandoned in railway cars
begging for sardine tins and a smoke

i pushed on
driving and driven
for what i do not know
and hell, who lives to tell

fearing the whip
sharing a bunk
breathing in desperation
and out desolation

i scratched out
not a living,
but a life
from those roadsides

littered with the broken glass
and dreams
of a hobo generation
that like me lived and died in heroic anonymity

"T. S. Eliot" by John Guzlowski

Love Song of T. S. Eliot

My new false teeth made it hard
For me to speak the French
I wanted to whisper to her,
Those lines from Baudelaire,
That always touched me so,
Lines about the light love creates,

So I took the teeth out
And gummed my Baudelaire
Until she begged me to stop,
Her tears rolling through
Her laughter but I couldn’t.

I just kept spitting out vowels
Vibrating them with my slippery
Red gums and mulish laughter.

John Guzlowski is a widely published poet.  

Learn more about his work here

"Thomas Browne" by Ueno Wayne

Skull of Thomas Browne

Like the poet of Paradise Lost, I was born 
     in Cheapside,

And I was raised under the shadow of 
     Paul’s Cross.

My father, a silk mercer, from his craft 

I learned color,  pigment, how to pattern 
     prose.

Style can make an Antiseptick to Decay.

With Thomas Clayton, ornament of Oxford medical men,

I lingered in Ashmole’s Ark. His Cabinet of Curiosities

Showed a mermaid’s hand and the pizzle of a dragon.

By my good wife I had ten children, of whom four lived,

And my delight was planting trees in groups of five.

Geometry and Anatomy were my Theology:

In an age of religious wars I diagnosed disease

Through the color of urine and timed the decay of tissue.

My Religion of a Doctor made me famous.

I loved Antiquities, like that Field of old Walsingham

Where were digged up forty-five urns,

In them two pounds of skulls, jaws, thigh-bones, and teeth.

Time which antiquates Antiquities and hath an Art 

To make dust of all things yet spared these minor Monuments.

I completed my own circle, dying on my 77th birthday.

Came the age of skull-duggery and they dug me up.

The sexton George Potter absconded with my skull,

Sold it to the surgeon Edward Lubbock, who

Deeded it to the Norwich Hospital Museum.

In 1922 Mancroft Church retrieved and reinterred it,

The vicar recording the age of the deceased as 317 years.

Who hath the Oracle of his Ashes

Or knoweth the Fate of his Bones?

"Woody Guthrie" by Ueno Wayne

Find a Grave

It was in a bend of the Sacramento River, Redding, California,

I come into camp one night from playing the saloons and two girls, twelve and fourteen, were singing to quiet a baby and strumming a guitar.

I hung mine up on a stub of limb, went down and stretched myself out and listened for a long time.

I just reared back and soaked in every note.

It was so clear and honest sounding, no Hollywood put-on, no fake wiggling.

It was better to me than the loud squalling and bawling I had to do to make myself heard in the old mobbed up saloons. 
And instead of getting you all riled up mentally and sexually, it done something a lot better, something that’s harder to do.

It cleared your head up, that's what it done, caused you to fall back and let your draggy bones rest.

The men who’d been in the saloons come down the trail to where they was singing--then the whole drunk mess of them stood there reeling and listening in the dark. Then they shushed each other to keep quiet and set down on the ground to listen. Everybody got so still that it almost crackled in the air. 

Two little girls were making two thousand working people feel like I felt, rest like I rested. 
Not a one of them talking above a whisper, and the one whispering feels guilty because she knows that ninety-nine out of every hundred are tired, weary, have felt sad, joked and carried on to keep from crying. 
These two little girls are telling about all of that trouble, and everybody knows it’s helping.

These songs say something about our hard traveling, something about our hard luck, our hard get-by,

But the songs say we’ll come through all of these in pretty good shape, and we’ll be all right. We’ll work, help each other, and make ourself useful.

If a cyclone comes, or a flood wrecks the country, or a bus load of school children freeze to death along the road, if a big ship goes down, or an airplane falls in your neighborhood, an outlaw shoots it out with the deputies, or the working people go out to win a war, yes, you’ll find a train load of things you can set down and make up a song about. 

You’ll hear people singing your words around over the country, and you’ll sing their songs everywhere you travel or everywhere you live, and these are the only kind of song my head or my music box has got any room for. 

Men squatted or sat leaning back against tree trunks. It got so quiet you could hear the lightning bugs turn their lights on and off. The old jungle camp was getting a lot of good rest there listening to the little girls’ song drift out across the dark wind.