Mike Maggio

Please Accept My Donation

for Ken

I want to thank you for dazzling heaving deserts praising love,
for extravagant birds and clowns.
Please forgive the calamitous leaping over sand, the shouts of fire,
the startling rings. I didn’t know.
Afternoons hasten. That’s why I want to say, most of all,
I memorized your paper gardens, drifting stones, the willow trees.
I’ll always remember the sun we survived, the vulnerable surfs, waking.
I deeply appreciate the way we addressed each other faithfully,
powdered gold faces, crossing like this, tomorrow in mirrors.
It was all a lovely motion of fleece, feathers on the sea.

Copyright 2023 by Grace Cavalieri .

Grace Cavalieri is Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate. She founded and still produces “The Poet and The Poem” now from the Library of Congress, now celebrating 46 years on-air.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

Liberation

(with a cat name from Bob Mortimer)

Don’t call me queen. Don’t put me on coins.
Don’t lick my stamp. I’ll sleep on the couch.

Dawn, when I leave, I’ll take the blue car.
I’ll take the cat, Babs Moonwater. I’ll buy

the bowl and the box. The scoop my scepter
in the flat over the sushi place, third best

in town. I’ll rule that town, Moonwater
in my thrall. Paisley sheets. Christmas, I’ll call

with my address to the nation. Mine’s
a new address. Not yours. Not your queen.

© 2023 Pamela Murray Winters

Pamela Murray Winters lives in Bowie, Maryland. She is the recipient of a 2022 Independent Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

THE RIGHT NOUNS ARE JUST OUT OF REACH

Perched on a fallen oak,
she notes the lichen like a green aura
hovering between the rows of knobs
on the bark’s rough braille.

We are dust. We are spores.
The ruffle of turkey tail fungi
on the cut side of the log.
The mist of particulates
suspended in a slanting beam.

Copyright 2023 by Kim Roberts

Kim Roberts is a 2023 Poet-in-Residence at the Arts Club of Washington. She is the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC and editor of two anthologies of DC poets, most recently By Broad Potomac’s Shore, selected by the Centers for the Book for the 2021 Route 1 Reads program. Her sixth book of poems, Corona/Crown, a cross-disciplinary collaboration with photographer Robert Revere, will be released in Fall 2023 by WordTech Editions. http://www.kimroberts.org 

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

Jeweled Reflections

Precious jewels sparkling diamonds
Sunlight shining over earth, over life.
Genuine, precious stone, radiant brilliance star bright.
Reflections pure goodness over all beautiful ladies admire.
Jeweled beauty sparkles over all gorgeous ladies adore.
Steadfast endurance brings complete comfort consistent care.
Glorious, mighty strength, known heartfelt struggles.
Jewels, lavished aquamarine, subtle green, peacefully serene.
Purple passion, amethyst, adorn royalty, poetry’s heart.
Singing sweetly, sashaying brilliance before big, bright eyes.

Copyright 2023 by Sylvia Dianne Beverly

Sylvia Dianne Beverly (Lady Di) is an Internationally acclaimed poet, presenting poetry In London, England, at the Lewisham Theater.  A collection of her work is housed at George Washington University’s Gelman Library, Washington, D.C. She has been featured at Smithsonian’s Museum of History, African Arts Museum, Hirshon  Museum and other Smithsonian museums in the Nation’s Capital.

Ladi Di celebrated the 40th Anniversary of Maryland State Poet Laureate and Host Grace Cavalieri, reading on her show “The Poet and the Poem” at the Library of Congress Experience. She is the author of two books, Forever in Your Eyes poems and Cooking Up South, recipes and poems.  Ladi Di is a founding member of “Collective Voices” Poetry Group.  She is “Poet of Excellence 2020 for Prince George’s County.  Ladi Di is a courageous member of the “Voices of Woodlawn”.  She is also a member of the Poetry Poster Project and the visionary and director of “Males Making a Difference in Our World”.  For the last three months of 2021, Ladi Di was featured in a magazine out of Zimbabwe, South Africa, “Sailor’s Review”.  Ladi Di is the proud Matriarch of her family.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

So Many I Like

Let the sands of poetry run through my little sieve.
Though below I leave a pile,
It makes me smile
To see the pretty pebbles I catch
On the beach between the land and wave
And put them in my bucket to treasure and save.

Copyright 2023 by Dennis Price

Dennis Price is a shy writer of poetry, who uses it as a journal and diary of his life. In his spare time he’s a parent of two, husband and cat father. He makes money by making sawdust.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

Pong

I recall things I used to know
things I loved
Now that I’ve grown old
No longer chasing butterflies and thinking dreams
come true
or playing my favorite game of chase the ball
with you
And my broken arm around my favorite boyhood pal
Pong, my dog
My father made me sell

(c) Rick Landers 2023

Rick Landers is a multi-award-winning singer-songwriter, a poet, publisher
(Guitar International magazine) and author who fronts the Virginia-based band
Heartland which perform Rick’s original songs. The band has been selected to perform at the
2023 National Cherry Blossom Festival. Rick was recently interviewed by the respected
Nashville Voyager magazine. He is currently writing a children’s book series called, The
Adventures of Digit and Tess, about a young teen and her robotic AI cat. His first poem, “Digit the Cat,” appeared in 2018’s 30 for 30.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

Weeding

As a child I never understood her draw
to the chore of the garden. Why she would
come home, kick off her shoes, slip into a terry cloth
tube top and shorts and kneel in the soil for hours, weeding
crabgrass and Creeping Charlie, an endless task
I later learned exactly like that, of mothering
preparing room for things to grow
knowing the work is never done.

Copyright Kindra McDonald 2023

Kindra McDonald is the author of the collections Teaching a Wild Thing, Fossils and In the Meat Years and the chapbooks Elements and Briars and Concealed Weapons. She was the recipient of the 2020 Haunted Waters Press Poetry Award. She received her MFA from Queens University of Charlotte and is a poet artist, working and teaching in mixed-media and found poetry. She served as the Poetry Society of Virginia Southeastern region Vice President from 2019-2022. You can find her in the woods or at www.kindramcdonald.com

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

Ultrasound

The technician turns the light off
above the couch.
I float in the cool, underwater glow
from beyond the mottled, blue curtain,
and the quiet whoosh of the ventilation
is the sound of waves rolling above my head.
She presses the gel-covered probe
against my chest:
the slippery-fingered caress of a mermaid.

Copyright 2023 by Jenny Shepherd

Jenny Shepherd is a British poet, based in London.  She has been writing poetry since her teens, although she had a 20-year hiatus from her late twenties.  Her father introduced her to haiku, when she was about 15, and it remains her favourite verse form.  She won a competition for young poets when she was 17, and up till a few years ago, she felt it’d been downhill since then.  However, since joining The Daily Haiku Facebook group in 2020, she has had various Japanese verse form poems published in national and international journals

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

Delian Diving

In the Symposium, the Greeks got drunk
on wine they’d watered down. So I order
a wine spritzer to get the proportions
right, while my dinner companion tells me
he learned the lines for the play he was in
by declaiming them to cows that heard him
in the pasture while they ruminated.
I attack my Caesar salad and spear
the single anchovy as if I’m a
Delian diver. One spritzer’s enough.

Bonnie Naradzay copyright 2023

Bonnie Naradzay’s poems have appeared in AGNI, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), RHINO, Kenyon Review online, Tampa Review, Florida Review online, EPOCH, Dappled Things, The Birmingham Poetry Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Poetry Miscellany, and other places. In 2010 she was awarded the New Orleans MFA program’s poetry prize: a month’s stay in the castle of Ezra Pound’s daughter, where she enjoyed having tea with Mary, hiking the Dolomites, and hearing cuckoos call during mating season. For many years, she has led regular poetry sessions at day shelters for the homeless and also at a retirement center, all in Washington, DC. 

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review

Jagged

With sunken eyes and shallow breath
she apologizes for the stacks of books
now smothered by cobwebs and dust.
Jagged edges of their broken lines
stab the heavy, oppressive air.
Like crumbling temple columns dotting earth,
they elicit thoughts of once-great civilizations
and challenge me to grasp
what forces caused them
and her to tumble.

Copyright 2023 by Joy Martin

Southern-born, Joy makes her home in New England’s Boston area, with memberships in the Newton Poetry Group and The Poetry Society of Virginia. She is also a member and on the board of The New England Poetry Club.  Her poems explore the many facets of life, including her and broader humanity’s place and challenges within it

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review