Terry Savoie

I feel you watching me from across the room, long past looking for perfection, the way the aged athlete looks back on the glory days of the summer sandlots. Beloved, never give up the chance to die only once, you would whisper while leading me to the gallows, when no one was there to tell us no; when no one was there to tell us only one person could go.

Michael McManus has published in many places, most recently the North American Journal of Poetry, and in the past the Tipton Poetry Journal, among others. He is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship Award for Literature from the Louisiana Division of the Arts and currently lives in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

If Emily Dickinson happened upon Térèse of Lisieux, they both might walk out into a field of buttercups, daisies & forget-me-nots, but they'd turn away from the other, each returning to the unquestionable pathos of their own life

so that, as individuals, each could once again listen for the unique & irresistible music only they seemed blessed to hear.

Terry Savoie lives in Iowa and has had more than four hundred poems published both here and abroad over the past four decades. These include ones in APR, Poetry (Chicago), Ploughshares, North American Review, American Journal of Poetry and The Iowa Review as well as recent or forthcoming issues of North Dakota Quarterly, One, America, Chiron Review, and Tar River Poetry among several others. A small selection titled Reading Sunday won the Bright Hill Chapbook Competition in 2018.