Megan Do

Song of Almería

By JOHN POCH

Our bus downshifts cresting a hill,
and a partridge covey flushes into
the lit mist of the autumn noon, clouds
spilling over higher hills slow and white
like soft glaciers cut by massive stones
the size of fortresses, and just as cold.

Song of Almería
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Stepping Off

By RALPH SNEEDEN

“And we went on living it, like a wave, that doesn’t know
it is at every moment different water.”
—Alan Williamson, from “A Childhood Around 1950”

In 1967 I almost drowned when I wandered from a sandbar and dropped into a deep cleft. That particular summer on the Jersey Shore, my older sisters had taken to riding what seemed to be kind, propellant waves with the rafts our mother had rented near the boardwalk, the industrial canvas sort you couldn’t buy in a store. I wasn’t a confident swimmer yet, so my mother wouldn’t even let me near one, which made no sense; the rafts were oversized life preservers, after all.

Stepping Off
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