The poets featured here are worthy of their work being displayed. Some were asked to submit for possible publication; others were noted on Desert Moon Review. We present them with the belief that you will enjoy their fine poetry.

   Ladies and Gentlemen, the Spring Edition of Crescent Moon Review -

My best to all,
Jim Corner, Editor

One day a distant hand turned a wheel
and I was reduced to dripping
then stopped altogether.

I was hollow but didn't know it.
I retain the shape of flow
but if you place your fingers

on my seams there is no thrum.
Please keep your hand away;
do not remind me.

I remember photographs.
Tiles shine through the flesh
of six million days,
spotlight shoes
that will not walk again.

Scalps in dim image
of filleted lampshades,
maiden braids break
over the rainbow.
The gate stands silent.
Crossing over,
no one returned.

Brick walls were personal;
porous, moist, inanimate.
They wrap around
a reservoir, discarded
bones for sale.

Patrice, pater patriae, por patriae mori, lacrimae rerum

In the Katanga savannah that terrible night,
they sacrificed you on an altar of pan-Africanism;
in your Congo of violets and violence, copper and blood.
You were the expendable African, who died for your people,
liquidated because faceless men decreed it be so,
Ike who wished you "would fall into a river of crocodiles"
and the British foreign secretary who "regretted the loss
of the techniques of old-fashioned diplomacy,"
your old masters, the Belgians, the CIA, the Russians,
the U.N. How many stood by and watched your
degradation? So you were delivered into the hands
of your enemies that night in Katanga, delivered for execution.
Later, the butler said the Katangan ministers lined up
to wash blood from their hands and more bottles
of whiskey were drunk. Your elimination was well done.
Patrice, pro patriae mori.

Time comes to:
a sleeping bag in the bluegrass.

She's got a view--
constellations, renames them
space acupuncture.

Blood an amalgam: needles and pins.
He erupts in tips of things,
probes distance like a lesion.

She fastens their chamber whole--
the pinch of silver sutures.
Only light gets put to sleep.

Infra-red is what they go by--
the cosmos encapsulates: impulse
and earth of skin.

The Ambiguity of Yearning
by Jim Corner

A paisley box wrapped in cord,
with chocolate in a velvet pouch,
coffee grown in Kona's soil,
a medallion and chain,
dolls in a doll of papier-mache,
sent over four years.

The phone rings in late December,
halts my mood; portends
a father-daughter discord.
Four waiting years are ended;
a plaintive voice breathes,
" no strings attached."

Lopsided
by Chris O'Carroll

Foot snagged in twigs
we watched its parents
fetch and fashion,
blue jay chick dangles

upside down. Wings jut
flightless angles. Nest sports
new silhouette -- lopsided skull,
one ungainly earring.