June 3, 2019
JOHN L. STANIZZI
6.3.19
7.23 a.m. 55 degrees Phantoms of fall in the cold grass this morning, omens of winter, and my bare feet feel the nippiness of October on this June morning; even the dazzled ripples on the pond have taken on the look of cold. |
June 4, 2019
JOHN L. STANIZZI
6.4.19
9.19 a.m. 57 degrees Pull that hydrilla, Butch! Butch is my neighbor, overalls and boots and rake, pulling and tugging at the nastiness that is hydrilla, waist deep in the pond, damning the stuff, yanking the stuff, losing the war. |
June 6, 2019
JOHN L. STANIZZI
6.6.19
8.46 a.m. 68 degrees Peruser of the clover, a bunny walks casually into the overgrown brush just this side of the pond. Earlier today a bullfrog nobly croaked the dawn awake, and by the time I arrived a tiny daisy had emerged on the pond bank, another reminder of summer. |
June 11, 2019
JOHN L. STANIZZI
6.11.19
7.53 a.m. 67 degrees Profundo bullfrog bellowed all the pre-dawn hours, overtures of the deepest resonance, calling out for love, nobler than the green frog’s soprano squawk, and now he dozes in the shallows, wide and less skittish than the fleeing tadpoles. |
June 12, 2019
JOHN L. STANIZZI
6.13.19
8.58 a.m. 56 degrees Palmy leaves, all undersides and flagging. Beneath them the orphans of winter lay saturated, and day-long rain batters the loosestrife nobby and nodding, heavy with water, wands of wet light, descending and rising, reliquary of strung stars. |
John L. Stanizzi is author of Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits – Fifty 50-Word Pieces, Chants. and Sundowning. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Blue Mountain Review, Paterson Literary Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Poetlore, Paterson Literary Review, and many others. A former New England Poet of the year, Stanizzi has been translated into Italian and his work has appeared in many journals in Italy. Stanizzi teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry.