The Editor2026-09-07T15:01:13-04:00September 7, 2026|
These three poems from the Stone Circle archive examine interactions with the dead — the dead sit at the table with us again, the dead don’t know anything, the dead sometimes only understand music.
by Susan Grimm
The dead crowd the table thickly, criticize our meat. They give
off a low dark buzz. Floating like stodgy balloons, they wobble-
perch on their usual chairs.
by Mary Christine Delea
Eager to unmask what we believe are their attempts
at communication, we are left back where we started.
Without them.
by Sam Szanto
The babies know us only by our heart
beats. My child is handed to me.
I press my face to hers and rock,
skin to skin, cradling and crying
and kissing and crooning.
The Editor2026-07-10T18:06:21-04:00July 10, 2026|
These poems from the Stone Circle archive explore fire any at three very different scales. Ash falls from the air and covers the trees, a beachcomber cranks the radio and mourns, and a wedding dress becomes a beacon.
by Lynne Ellis
They thought
the orange moon could sing
their travel story—they’d driven clasp-handed
across the burning hills, as smoking trees stood
still by the highway side.
by Edie Meade
No one wanted this. I wish we could repay the pipers with beach. Still,
container ships, quilted like shanty towns, wash to blue in the distance
and the shells look like Lee Press-Ons lost in struggle. A gorgeous crime scene.
by Paula Brown
The sun this morning found a hem of beads somewhere beneath white satin.
What was left after the smoldering: a jeweled bodice, seared tufts of desert grass.
The Editor2026-09-07T15:01:04-04:00June 21, 2026|
These three poems from the Stone Circle archive explore the mother/child bond — a mother teaches her child to write, a daughter watches her mother grow old, and a mother oils and braids her daughter’s hair.
by Isabella Mori
Write one verse, then another, a daisy chain of little white words with a sun inside.
Like my mother made.
A mother teaching her child to write — and the long, complicated afterlife of that gift.
by Gail Zing
her wide surprise
jarred by the mirror’s stranger again and again, was that
me, a stupefied bystander
A daughter sees her own future in the mirror of her aging mother.
by Arushee Bhoja
Hands reach to hair
to hands to mother to daughter to daughter
to child.
The same tenderness passed hand to hand — grandmother to mother to daughter.
