Humidity clings to begonias weighing down their already fat leaves. Day dawns searching for the newspaper found bound tightly in a rubber band, damp under the browning cedar tree. Headlines sob: Beheading in Iraq, First Execution in 80 Years, Murder-Suicide in Iowa. Thunder rolls in from the west, distant slow percussion of disapproval. Doves add their hunted, haunting dirges and a speckled robin's egg lies cracked near geraniums dying themselves from an errant shot of weed killer. Nearby convent bells toll a call to prayer before the lightning strikes. Reprinted with permission Copyright © 2006 by Karen List Wingett

MERBABE IN MALTA by Karen List Wingett

A naked toddler crawls from her stroller on the promenade beside the sea, brown curls and sandals on either end of her tiny body. Her mother plops her into a pink inflatable baby boat, and when she begins to weep, her cries are caught on the salty wind far into the deep where they are heard. She will not be consoled, cannot speak her needs. Others speculate: she’s hot, she's thirsty, her skin burns, a jelly fish stung her bare bottom. The seaweed shivers. The slippery rocks crumble. They know. Hating the water so close to the shore, she longs to return to the fishy depths where lives bestemmer, ocean grandmother, in whose home her mother chose legs and walked out of the blue ocean, where the baby left the pink scales and shimmering tail she now remembers only in fragments of visions reflected in the surf surrounding her. Reprinted with permission Copyright © 2006 by Karen List Wingett

CHILDREN IN THE EARTH by Karen List Wingett

Lavender irises grow oddly wild in the pioneer cemetery south of Wayne. My friends exhume the antique bulbs for reburial in their own garden plots. I don't dig fearing the madmothers of the plains forced to leave their babies and hearts in this land with few flowers, who wait through seasons of hot wind and brittle leaves and the crystal stillness of winter for April when their children spring from the good earth, briefly and colorfully alive, blooming playfully by their chalky stones. Reprinted with permission Copyright © 2006 by Karen List Wingett

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