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Third Grade


Our hands are folded before us on our desks.
Our hearts are bleached clean by contrition.
Sister Marie is standing in back of us. Her hair is hidden.
Our lunch pails are in the cloakroom. Our coats on hooks.
The alphabet is perfect. It smirks above the blackboard.
God is perfect. Our pictures of Him are tacked to the wall.
Bill is in his body, pale and gangly. Al is in his freckled body.
Delores is in her red-haired body. Phil, Kelly, Nate,
Erin in her thin, tall body. Jim, Sister Marie. My body
is in a white shirt, a little ink-blot on the pocket.
And outside: rain, iron, and silence.

Chris Forhan '87G is the author of Forgive Us Our Happiness and The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, which have won several awards. He has won a Pushcart Prize and has been a Yaddo Foundation resident and a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference fellow. Forhan teaches at Auburn University and at Warren Wilson College; he and his wife, Elizabeth Green, live in Alabama. "Third Grade" first appeared in the magazine Prairie Schooner in Spring 2005.



Missing


like paper cut-outs the part cut out
the part left behind to hold its shape

like shadows on the floor the seemingly distinct
forms of things not there

like the deceptive edge of sight where fog
conspires to be wall like the other side

where things again emerge smeared smudged
with some fine ash like the dust of moths

on your hands however much you meant
to leave no trace your fingerprints

all over everything fugitive with the powder
wings are poorer without

Alice B. Fogel '85G, author of Elemental and I Love this Dark World, has received a National Education Association fellowship and a New England Poet's Society prize, among other awards. She has taught poetry at UNH and elsewhere and has a custom clothing business called Lyric Couture. She and her husband, Mark Edson '86G, and their three children live off the grid in Acworth, N.H. "Missing" first appeared in Frisk Magazine.



Under the Colombian Moon



By the gate of a high stone wall
the night watchman sits
in a straight-back kitchen chair
all through the night
in the air a tinny staccato
his radio plays a popular tune
the night watchman croons along
the full moon rests on the wall
a low laugh is heard
his girl arrives like a secret
by his side she will sit
whispering into his ear
as he drinks hot sweet coffee
left by the old Indian cook
on her way to the bus
clicking the steel gate closed

A house surrounded by palms
under flowering trees
on this safe side of the wall
the inhabitants stay behind locks
inside the rooms all is quiet
one light still burns in the back
a man peruses newspapers from home
he does not see the moon is full
he cannot hear the sounds of night
a small green lizard observes
with blinking gold eyes
still as a small jade leaf
the man is far from the lizard
who travels unnoticed
into the deep Colombian night
between her world and his

Lysa James '90G is a member of the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts' Artists in Education Program and has taught writing at UNH and elsewhere. She has published in national literary journals and is included in an anthology of New Hampshire poetry, Under the Legislature of the Stars. Her manuscript, "In All the Benevolent Directions," is presently a finalist in the National Poetry Series Open Competition of 2005. "Under the Colombian Moon" first appeared in the journal Red Brick Review.

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