A Tidings of Magpies

by Joyce Sutphen Dr. Zhivago  was playing at the Paramount Theater in St. Cloud. That afternoon, we went into Russia, and when we came out, the snow was falling—the same snow that fell in Moscow. The sky had turned black velvet. We’d been through the Revolution and the frozen winters. In the Chevy, we waited for the heater to melt ice on the windshield, clapping our hands to keep warm. On the highway, these two things: a song from  Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and that semi-truck careening by. Now I travel through the dark without you and sometimes I turn up the radio, hopeful the way you were, no matter what.

The White by Patricia Hampl These are the moments before snow, whole weeks before. The rehearsals of milky November, cloud constructions when a warm day lowers a drift of light through the leafless angles of the trees lining the streets. Green is gone, gold is gone. The blue sky is the clairvoyance of snow. There is night and a moon but these facts force the hand of the season: from that black sky the real and cold white will begin to emerge. please note: photo by Drew Sanborn

Sundown by Jorie Graham (St. Laurent Sur Mer, June 5, 2009) Sometimes the day light winces behind you and it is a great treasure in this case today a man on a horse in calm full gallop on Omaha over my left shoulder coming on fast but calm not audible to me at all until I turned back my head for no reason as if what lies behind one had whispered what can I do for you today and I had just turned to answer and the answer to my answer flooded from the front with the late sun he/they were driving into—gleaming— wet chest and upraised knees and light-struck hooves and thrust-out even breathing of the great beast—from just behind me, passing me—the rider looking straight ahead and yet smiling without looking at me as I smiled as we both smiled for the young animal, my feet in the breaking wave-edge, his hooves returning, as they begin to pass by, to the edge of the furling break, each tossed-up flake of ocean offered into...

by Mary Mackey One November a week before Thanksgiving the Ohio river froze and my great uncles put on their coats and drove the turkeys across the ice to Rosiclare where they sold them for enough to buy my grandmother a Christmas doll with blue china eyes I like to think of the sound of two hundred turkey feet running across to Illinois on their way to the platter the scrape of their nails and my great uncles in their homespun leggings calling out gee and haw and git to them as if they were mules I like to think of the Ohio at that moment the clear cold sky the green river sleeping under the ice before the land got stripped and the farm got sold and the water turned the color of whiskey and all the uncles lay down and never got up again I like to think of the world before some genius invented turkeys with pop-up plastic thermometers in their breasts idiot birds with no wildness left in them...

by Walt McDonald Pulling our Stetsons low, we whispered songs to sweethearts who clung so close we danced in slow motion, heartache of steel guitars, vows we swore with our bones. Their hair was the air for an hour. We breathed and held them close, ignoring the war for the night, voices on jukebox wax winding around like a rope. One week we kissed them hard and rode off, swearing we'd bring back silk and souvenirs. Long after a war no one we cared for survived without scars, Earl and I are here with wives as old as country songs and guitars, our children older than all of us that fall. Don's a name on the wall in Washington. I hear his name sometimes in questions at class reunions. I haven't heard from Carl.

by Patricia Hampl These are the moments before snow, whole weeks before. The rehearsals of milky November, cloud constructions when a warm day lowers a drift of light through the leafless angles of the trees lining the streets. Green is gone, gold is gone. The blue sky is the clairvoyance of snow. There is night and a moon but these facts force the hand of the season: from that black sky the real and cold white will begin to emerge.

It was a dark and stormy night. In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat at the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind. Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraith-like shadows that raced along the ground. The house shook. excerpt from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle please note: photo by StrawberryFields1967

by Linda Pastan How separate we are under our black umbrellas—dark planets in our own small orbits, hiding from this wet assault of weather as if water would violate the skin, as if these raised silk canopies could protect us from whatever is coming next— December with its white enamel surfaces; the numbing silences of winter. From above we must look like a family of bats— ribbed wings spread against the rain, swooping towards any makeshift shelter.