Askold Skalsky

Where I first encountered Hokusai’s wave 
on the South Jersey shore—first it threw me down, 
then twisted me around, then pushed me headfirst 
through the surf and washed me up, scraping my belly 
and filling sand into my trunks galore. That was my surf-
surrendered self. How good it was not to resist the walls 
of sea, unstem the waves crashing over me like a cliff 
of transparent jade, and I bobbing like a fusillade
of stone, like corks of light, not knowing up or down, 
thrashing around in a wet bowl through the silt of stars 
with their wedges of wet light, green fire and ice 
in submerged reservoirs of avalanchine bright,
the smooth and water-weedy skins of briny meteors 
in my young, and as yet innocent, receptive pores.

Originally from Ukraine, ASKOLD SKALSKY is a retired college professor living in Frederick, Maryland, with three cats and many books, and who annually takes at least one trip to his beloved South Jersey.

Zackary Sholem Berger

Every day ties another knot
In the net, and I haven’t got
An instruction book, or a thought

Which coaxes to loosening.
Time will unbind. Or the ending
Of time might mean unwinding.

The night angles shut like a lid.
The day collapses, is elided
Into a mesh of what I did

Or did not. Tangled up and closed,
I watch the dipping sun lose
Itself in the basin of chatzos.

(Chatzos: Midnight according to the definitions of Jewish law. [Hebrew/Yiddish])

A poet and translator in Baltimore, ZACKARY SHOLEM BERGER is a physician by day.

Felicity L. Rollin

in winter diamonds fade 
superseded by the fireplace’s warmth

that never reaches far enough;
our ever-optimistic Lassie shivers

on nights like this,
when the old woods that protect us grow thin,
forever

is never so long as
tonight

FELICITY L. ROLLIN loves art and the color purple. Besides poetry, her hobbies include learning languages and reading philosophy. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Trouvaille Review, Quatrain Fish, and elsewhere.