unlike the midnight special / there are no songs / to celebrate the early bird special / no IHOPian bard, / no poet laureate of the blue plate / no bargain basement Dylan / no cut price Cohen / to extol the digestive / and economic benefits / of getting an early start.

Bengaluru, India-based yogi and writer Bernie Gourley captures the city’s volatile monsoon weather in a series of free-form haiku: “trust old people | with umbrellas more than | the blue in the sky”

Revel in the beauty of the wind as revealed by poet Robert Okaji: “That it shudders through / and presages an untimely end, / that it transforms the night’s / body and leaves us / breathless and wanting, / petals strewn about”

At the Chicago Review of Books, Sarah Blake asked four poets to share their thoughts on opening poems, all of whom have prologue-poems in their new books.

Jason Preu with a poem on boxes, candy, and the passing of time: “My daughter enters the room / bearing candy and a smile. // The last time I wrote of her / she was seven. Now she’s ten.”

Monica Byrne shares a winning poem that her father, Donald E. Byrne Jr., wrote about her mother. It was originally published at Red Clay Review.

The caesuras in Dwight L. Roth’s poem add a poignant gravity to his verse:
 
“My words // chosen carefully…
Like stepping on wet rocks
crossing a stream.”