Agnes Vojta

Fall and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

It is the season of apples, crisp and tart. I transform them into crumbles, pies, and    comfort. They soften, lose their texture, sink into sugary union with the flour.

September lifts the hazy skies of Missouri summer. Contours become clearer. The woods fill with yellow wildflowers; the species are easy to confuse. Does it matter for a poem whether this is  an ashy sunflower or a tickseed coreopsis?

Confusion is easier than clarity. The second law of thermodynamics requires natureto fall from
order into disorder. Atomic arrangements disintegrate. Ink dropped into a glass of water
disperses, forms a cloud, spreads until the liquid is pale blue. Bubbles burst, unable to sustain surface tension. Organisms die.

Autumn is the season of disordering. Of decay. Leaves fall; highly organized matter turns to soil.
Returns to soil. Death is but an increase in entropy. If you look at it like that, there is nothing to fear.

Agnes Vojta grew up in Germany and now lives in Rolla, Missouri where she teaches physics at Missouri S&T and hikes the Ozarks. She is the author of Porous Land (Spartan Press, 2019) and The Eden of Perhaps (Spartan Press, 2020), and her poems have appeared in a variety of magazines. Her website is agnesvojta.com, and her facebook page is @AgnesVojtaPoetry.

Max Heinegg

Sisyphus

Poets can't get enough of the boulder.
Camus, who may as well have been
a poet, said he loved that man
in the frozen multiverse can choose
to assert private meaning & justify the absurdity
of existence, laughing back at the deathless
gods, a savory bit of payback.
My students call him Syphilis.
Stop. I say, You're ruining the mood.

Back to the rock: Gluck’s icy, but she rolls it
easily. Homer’s is for Ajax to hurl, a ton weight.
A millstone only Apollo can save Hector from,
for now. I draw mine in dry erase on the wall
by the window. Erudite vandalism? More
small crimes for daily inspiration! Thinking
less of Camus than reading D’aulaires, laughing
when I read the husband/wife team wrote of the wily
king on his return to the beloved, Fooled him again!

Anything to be alive! To bask in the climb
like Alex Honnold on the staggering face
of El Capitan, smiling, granite-minded, all
long handed limberness. Utterly prepared
for the fabulous labor of his scaling.
Or in the TV Avatar, the blind earth-bender Toph,
the teacher who listens & waits, staring down the muscle-
bound Boulder, who learns a sexist is a Pebble!
Or you, my braver, showing me the mundane is not

that every day. To notice the position of the rock,
how it’s emblem also. To mark,
by contrast, the cloud-cover shadowing
it, our grit influencing the ground's give. Our days
spent hovering over what will be
our grave & time. To be taught a better attitude,
a wiser manner to manage a grief perpetual,
to wield this terrakinesis! To never tire
of the flesh, until it tires of us.

Max Heinegg lives and teaches in Medford, MA. He is the author of Good Harbor, forthcoming spring 2022, which won the inaugural Paul Nemser Prize from Lily Poetry Review. His work has appeared in 32 Poems, Thrush, The Cortland Review, Asheville Poetry Review, and Nimrod, among others. His new record of poetry adaptations will arrive in late 2021, and his previous solo records can be heard at www.maxheinegg.com

Steven Croft

9 / 12

After the sky fell on the City, swelling its canyons,
the talus slopes of smoke and carnage, the names
of missing spoken as pleas into camcorders that
swish pan to passing sirens, in the quiet towns
and muted cities, tv screens blink images
against our staring eyes.

At Fort Stewart we clean weapons and watch CNN,
fingertip smell of gun oil as hand reaches up,
rubbing chin in thought, looking into this widescreen
scry glass, any news of who did this to the staggering
city predicting our future.

"100 percent accountability" releasing us, I pass
the parade field, sunset making a shadow over
ground where a grove of crape myrtles, each named
for a soldier, will soon grow, knowing safety
can be counted, the months of it limited by news
we will receive, that it's finite like grains in a bullet.

Across the world, a desert moon none of us has seen
yet rises over Sadr City....Now, years and all of our
deaths later, I can look up, see it, feel it, its beauty
wounded nightly by an observance of mortar shells.

An Army veteran, Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, Canary, The New Verse News, The Dead Mule, Live Nude Poems, Quaci Press Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ariel Chart, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. 

Howie Good

Street of Tears

There was a man dragging a grand piano containing a stone tablet of the Ten Commandments down the street, and a woman poking a severed hand with a cane. Black ants emerged from a hole in the palm of the hand. I wished Baudelaire was alive to see it. Any time now I'm leaving for ... I don't know where. Baudelaire fled to Brussels to escape his creditors in France. Meanwhile, advanced syphilis was devastating his brain. He could only speak in disconnected words and phrases that might have been mistaken for poetry.

Howie Good is the author of Gunmetal Sky, a 2021 poetry collection from Thirty West Publishing.