Erren Kelly

Musical Story…after the drawing by Irena Siwek

instead of roses

he tried calla lillies

roses would've been pushing it

even if her hair was red

she merely smiled

reading elizabeth barrett browning didn't work

either

she found a way to make

the cello sound like

a summer night

sometimes, it sounded

like the human voice

or even rain

depending on how she plucked

the strings

he then simply told her

her cello playing

felt like the hollow

in his heart

she replied "sometimes,

just asking for

what you want works

best...

Cheryl

is the grace notes

at the end of a john coltrane solo

is the song sonny rollins practiced

on williamburg bridge

when trane's shadow eclipsed him

is the muse joshua redman calls

when sonny rollis has stopped

giving him inspiration

she is the poem joshua redman plays

that i listen to when i can't

articulate our friendship

Richard Dragan

The Imaginary Travelers

They could never agree on which city was the best place for their vacation, and they ended up not traveling that year. So they abandoned cities for their imaginary itineraries and instead visited rugged places: mountains, deserts, lakes, geological formations, outcroppings of jagged rocks, strange craters, impenetrable (almost) jungles, ruins of ancient non-Western civilizations, solitary obelisks, desecrated pyramids, one-time war zones, peninsulas, isthmuses, collapsed canyons, volcanic rims, archipelagoes, wildlife refuges, underwater reefs, atolls, fault lines, oceanic trenches, glaciers, pristine mountain lakes, ridge lines, the high country, buttes, mesas, oblivious uninhabitable plains, ghost towns, abandoned mines, flooded caves, meteorite craters, untamed savannas, veldts, steppes with half-frozen tundra, Machu Picchu, and Venezuela, and to top it off, birdwatching (of whole penguin families) in King George Island, Antarctica.