The cracked blue jug
on the porch steps
and the old barn
and the larkspur planted
by grandmothers past

Maybe it happened like you thought
or maybe you just gathered memories
like a bouquet of shards: glass, plastic,
stone—strewn and demolition-dusted.
I heard you call my name.
The wire of your voice pulled tight
through the hallway.
We entered Yellowstone, and you gaped
at charred tree trunks,
where acre after acre of still-scarred land
had burned six years before.
Along the Rio Grande, in Ciudad Juárez,
amid the high Chihuahuan desert,
when bitter winter arrives, asylum
seekers like a Zacatecas grandfather
make coffee in a pot from water
frozen overnight
J. M. Jordan recently began writing again after a twenty-year hiatus. He is a Georgia native, a Virginia resident, and a homicide detective by profession. His poems have appeared recently in The Chattahoochee Review, Image, The Carolina Quarterly, Dappled Things, Louisiana Literature, Modern Age and elsewhere.
I never tire of these woods,
having walked them since I arrived
young, intemperate, intent on living
beyond death among these men of practiced habit.
by Cortney Davis –December 21, 2020 Tonight the air had the scent of earth, of dust,like old books in a sunlit library rarely used. We drove out to an overlook…