Category Archives: sonnets

Sonnet: Paul Burgess, ‘Asymmetrical War’

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They’re hoping schools won’t rain as rubble showers
resulting from an errant missile strike.
I can’t afford the drive to see the flowers
around the gorge I’d waited months to hike.
They fear they’ll find their children split in half
or buried under shrapnel, dust, and rocks.
I’m scared the jagged line upon a graph
will show decreasing values of my stocks.
Their sky’s become an endless sea of threats
erupting with the sights and sounds of war,
but over here, we’re making mobile bets
on every prop the market’s apps can score.
There’s something vaguely troubling, sad, and dark
about an age of gulfs so deep and stark.

*****

Paul Burgess writes: “I am grateful that we are safe here in the U.S., but I also feel queasy thinking about the fact that Iran is really experiencing the horrors of war while we are fretting about gas prices (with reason, of course), watching the stock market (again, understandable but minor compared to fearing for one’s life), and literally betting on various war-related scenarios and outcomes (sociopathic at best).”

‘Asymmetrical War’ was first published in the The New Verse News

Paul Burgess is the sole proprietor of a business in Lexington, Kentucky that offers ESL classes in addition to English, Japanese, and Spanish-language translation and interpretation services. He has contributed work to Blue Unicorn, The Road Not Taken, Light, The Orchards, Snakeskin, Pulsebeat, Lighten Up Online, Apricity, Star*Line, Asses of Parnassus, The New Verse News, and many other publications.

“Electron asymmetric motion animation” by Sbyrnes321 is marked with CC0 1.0.

Sonnet: Barbara Loots, ‘Intimations’

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This is a Wordsworth morning. Not a leaf
trembles, the water shimmers beneath a shawl
of vapor, and the wild primordial call
of one loon sounds its tremolo of grief
across the lake. The sunlight like a thief
infiltrates slowly, making shadows crawl
out of the hollows where each animal,
furred, feathered, winged or scaled, to its brief
life awakens. My awakened eyes
and all the senses that belong to me
discover in the love that glorifies
whatever was and is and is to be
the wonder and perpetual surprise
of momentary immortality.

*****

Barbara Loots writes: “My husband Bill and I spend summer months in Canada on a tiny pile of granite dropped by a glacier in the middle of Blackwater Lake near Parry Sound, Ontario. Bill’s father purchased the island right after WWII for the tiny price of a property owned by the Crown, in a deal similar to the American Homestead Act: you must build a domicile on it within 18 months. The cottage cobbled together at that time still stands, with a few improvements, not yet including running water, electricity, or indoor plumbing. We bring a lot of books. I often meet the Muse among the towering White Pines. Poems are a natural consequence. Many of them appear in my collection The Beekeeper and other love poems (Kelsay Books 2020).”

“Intimations” appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of The Lyric (Volume 105 Number 4).

After decades of publishing her poems, Barbara Loots has laurels to rest on, but doesn’t. Residing in Kansas City, Missouri, Barbara and her husband, Bill Dickinson, are pleased to share the household with an acrobatic tuxedo kitty named Jane Austen. Barbara has work forthcoming in The Orchards Journal, The Shining Years II anthology, and I-70 Review. Her concerns and complaints can be found on Facebook and at barbaraloots.com. She serves as the review editor for Light Poetry Magazine (see Guidelines at lightpoetrymagazine.com). 

“Early morning lake” by josterpi is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Sonnet: Timothy Sandefur, ‘Aubade’

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I kiss you every morning, even though
you’re far away; even though your bed’s
a thousand miles out of reach. I know
it’s fantasy — only in my head —
I know I cannot slide my fingertips
across the smooth skin of your shoulders, your arms —
or along the sleek sloping of your hips —
or fall into oblivion in the warm
raven tangle of your hair — and that
it’s just poetic silliness to think
that you can feel my chest against your back,
or the brush of flesh when my body instinct-
ively reacts —
               and yet somehow I feel
the distance, not the touch, is what’s unreal.

*****

‘Aubade’ was originally published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

Timothy Sandefur is an attorney practicing law in Phoenix, and also the author of several books including biographies of Frederick Douglass and Jacob Bronowski, and a book of poems called Some Notes on the Silence. He has a Substack page: sandefur.substack.com.

“5/365 – Reach Out {Explored}” by susivinh is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: Daniel Kemper, ‘We Talked’

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Why the mumbled answers, often feeling
weary, staring out the window: bitter,
wistful, dreamy, harried — always reeling,
not engaging, letting out a titter,
mocking laughs or strange and distant crying?
But eventually she says it’s cancer,
not affairs, not me – then we were trying,
talking even if there was no answer.
But I would have those awful times again:
I whispered her to sleep and once she slept
I stroked her scalp and tucked her sheets, and then
I ran off to the shower and I wept.
We talked. We really talked though it was draining,
as one, about the time that was remaining.

*****

Daniel Kemper writes: “This poem is utterly imagination, perhaps of the “O my prophetic soul” variety. Alexandra (that’s her name) and I were out of contact at the time, but it would have been right as she came down with cancer, if I have my timeline right. It’s a multi-meter sonnet of the kind I thought probably the easiest to which I could introduce people. It starts off in trochaic meter and changes to iambic at the volta. This design choice was to have descending meter for the down mood, and when looking at the bright spot, change to ascending meter. The couplet unifies them via iambic meter plus feminine endings, hopefully that accented the coming together of the two at the end, even if unconsciously.”

‘We Talked’ was originally published in Rat’s Ass Review.

Daniel Kemper, a former tournament-winning wrestler, black belt in traditional Shotokan karate, and infantryman has earned a BA in English, an MCSE (Systems Engineering), an MBA, and an MA in English and had works accepted for publication at more than a dozen magazines, including a pushcart nomination. He’s been an invited presenter at PAMLA 2024 and presided over the Poetics Panel in 2025 and has been the feature poet at several Sacramento venues.

Photo: “Sick Day” by RLHyde is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.


 

Sonnet: Keith Roberts, ‘Lather’

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Inside the shower’s stream the morning blurs,
ceremony wakes on white marble tile;
brushed steel and shaving brush wait, rituals
that ask the rushing mind to pause a while.

The bowl presents the soap, the steam the heat;
damp badger bristles swirl, patient and slow.
No canned foam, no gelled and fleeting cheat,
hands repeating what older barbers know.

The lather builds like weather in the hand,
a cloud coaxed up from water, soap, and time;
slow turns that ask a man to pause and stand
at break of day before its clamors chime.

Hands learned the quiet patience of the bowl,
small weather turning slowly in the soul.

*****

Keith Roberts writes: “I’d be remiss if I didn’t give my wife credit for this poem. For my birthday she gave me a bowl, a brush, and a puck of all-natural shave soap from a local artisan. A little whisk into lather, the woody-whiskey scent comes up, and suddenly I swear I can hear modal jazz somewhere in the background. In a world built around consumption, algorithms, and binary takes, it’s important to our humanity to rediscover the transcendent in small, ordinary experiences like this. And maybe more importantly, to listen when other people share theirs. This poem is a thank you to my wife for helping me find one.

“I’m just starting this writing and poetry journey.  I’m a recovering math major with graduate degrees in Computer Science and Computational Social Science. Most of my career was spent living in the abstract: programming, modeling, data, systems. When my dad passed away a couple of years ago, something in me shifted. I started writing partly as a way to process the loss and partly to leave my kids something more durable than an Instagram feed. Also, and this is important, it gives me great comfort knowing that dad jokes can, in fact, achieve a kind of immortality…even in sonnet form. If that garners a few more eye rolls from my kids after I’m gone, I’ll consider my work a success.”

‘Lather’ was first published in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily

Photo: “Lather” by RLHyde is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: John Gallas, ‘Mol Sonnet’

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a man will cross the world at the smallest hope of love

Beep. Wrrrr. Clickclack. Ssssss. ‘Hello?’
Ssssss. Ssssss. Ssssss. ‘It’s’ – crackle – ‘Geet.’
Crackle. ‘We could’ – buzzzzz. Ssssss – ‘meet.’
Ssssss. Ssssss. ‘If’ – crackle crackle – ‘Joe?’
Umm. ‘I’mchangingtrainsatLeuvenstation
halfpastfiveonTuesdaymorning’bye.’
Clickclack. Beep. The Monday midnight sky
shuddered like a fridge. Our conversation
never matched our love. Too pissed to drive,
I took my bike. The roads were swiped with ice.
It snowed. My front teeth froze. I fell off twice.
‘The next train‘ – Jesus! Push me! – ‘to arrive…‘
We met – still moving. ‘Kiss me!’ That was it.
I biked back home to Mol. The sun shone. Shit.

*****

John Gallas writes: “Romantic Love called upon to go out in the cold on a bike to resurrect its glories, which may never quite have been what they are remembered as. I enjoyed the stop-start challenge of the expression of hesitation, and of producing punctuation of indecision and effort. Perhaps the last word, far from being annoyance, hints at sadness.”

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.  

Photo: “OuderAmstel” by Markus Keuter is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: Beth Houston, ‘September’

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When spring’s ghost joins me on the deck to watch
Gilt city lights click on across the bay,
Some downtown maid squeaks windows, wipes the splotch
Between us. Here, this quiet view. Soft clay
And pungent eucalyptus, thick with rain,
Exude their essence. Summer’s gloom unwinds,
A pane has shattered, and each rampant cane
Of luscious juicy blackberries reminds
My grief entwining August’s humid air.
A wedge of geese pries open autumn, herds
Fat purple clouds toward dusk above the glare
Of distant offices. Your murdered words
Of love on voicemail echo you were dead
Before you put that bullet through your head.

*****

Beth Houston writes: “Regarding the sonnet: This is one poem I’d prefer to let the reader chew on without me explaining anything. It does have some tricky time aspects…”

She adds: “I have announced the submission period for the next anthology on the Rhizome Press website. Included are updated guidelines and new emails for submissions and general mail (no longer gmail). Folks will have plenty of time to submit. I just hope I don’t get an avalanche at the last minute. But better loads of poems than not getting them. I’m eager for people to let their poet friends know. I’d love to get LOTS of submissions.

‘September’ was first published in Rat’s Ass Review.

Beth Houston (www.bethhouston.com) has taught writing (mostly creative writing) at ten universities and colleges in California and Florida and has worked as a writer and editor. She has published a couple hundred poems in dozens of literary journals. She writes free verse and formal poetry, mostly sonnets, and has published a novel, two nonfiction books, and six poetry books (out of print). She edits the Extreme formal poetry anthologies via one of her indie presses, Rhizome Press (www.rhizomepress.com).

Photo: “Formation” by Nature_Freak is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Sonnet: Ernest Hilbert, ‘Friends of the Library Sale’

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It’s fallen half apart, a derelict.
The gatherings have sprung, the boards detached,
The spine perished, folding maps cut out.
The title page is splotched with ink and nicked
At the edge, the author’s homely portrait scratched—
A splash of beer, faint thumbmarks all about—
Discarded once, but now it’s yours. It lives,
Like you, diminished now by age and loss.
And so, it brings the breeze, the autumn sun,
The creaking door that with a push still gives
The afternoon, the birds and clouds, grass, moss,
The world still new, the journey not begun,
The path curling from sight in the soft glow
Of a fading day—and you, prepared to go.

*****

Ernest Hilbert writes: “I am a rare book dealer, so I spend my days surrounded by books. I love all kinds of books, and I have a particular affection for books no one seems to want but which are, nonetheless, worthwhile. There are, after all, far more books than there are readers. When a book is taken home, adopted, as it were, it finds a new life. Each book one acquires is, in its way, a hedge against the future, a small hope one might some day find the time to read it. When a book is read for the first time, however old it is, however many times it has been read before, it becomes a new book. The structure of the poem is designed to express this sense of renewal and hope, the litany of degradation and wear, the sense of hopelessness, one finds in the octave redeemed, after the volta, in the sestet. 

“I intended to communicate that sense of excitement I still feel when I first open a book, but I likely also had in mind Benjamin Franklin’s mock epitaph, written when he was 22, which begins “The Body of B. Franklin Printer / Like the Cover of an old Book / Its Contents torn out . . .” Finally, I must admit that there are few places I find myself happier than at a promising friends of the library book sale.”

*****

‘Friends of the Library Sale’ was originally published in The Sonneteer.

Ernest Hilbert was born in 1970 in the city of Philadelphia and educated at Rutgers and Oxford Universities. He is the author of the poetry collections Sixty Sonnets, All of You on the Good Earth, Caligulan—selected as winner of the 2017 Poets’ Prize—Last One Out, and Storm Swimmer, winner of the 2022 Vassar Miller Prize. He works as a rare book dealer in Philadelphia. Visit him at www.ernesthilbert.com

Photo: “Journey” by ~Matt LightJam {Mattia Merlo} is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet variation: Marcus Bales, ‘Detective Story’

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“Have you ever thought, Holmes, all we are
Is one long tube around which are attached
As very mixed a cluster of bizarre
Accessories as ever were mis-matched
To move about to gain the wherewithal
To hunt and gather what it needs to eat
From things that grow or swim or fly or crawl,
And change them into matter to excrete?”
“Certainly, dear Watson — that’s a trope
That humankind has puzzled over, now,
And through the eons we’ve had love and hope,
And all philosophy’s no more than how,
Through grasping and digesting, we can cope
With nature’s discontents and discontentery.
You’ve heard me say it, Watson — it’s alimentary.”

*****

Marcus Bales writes: The Human Alloy

I’ve heard a lot of other poets say
   “This poem took me many years to write,”
And never understood, until today,
   What that was like, but now I think I might.

I heard the joke in second grade, or third,
   And didn’t get it. Nothing there for me
Who’d never heard of Sherlock Holmes, absurd
   As classmates made my ignorance out to be.

I read the books and stories then of course
   And hated Holmes’s bullying and sneers
At poor old Dr. Watson, so the source
   Of humor there eluded me for years.

Bit by bit, I finally came around
   To see superiority as fine
And feel such arrogance was something sound.
   You never heard such sneers and snarks as mine.

There’s nothing I would not pretend to know
   Nothing I had no opinion on
No lacerating length I would not go
   To show that all were ducks but I, a swan.

Until at length I came to read Ayn Rand
   Whose heroes do and say such nasty scat
That even I could finally understand
   The breach of faith it is to be like that.

And flawed, addicted Holmes no longer seems
   The snarling height of genius on its throne
Pursuing all the best of human dreams,
   But just another man almost alone.

And it’s by Watson’s decency we gauge
   Cooperation making common sense
Without which Holmes’s self-destructive rage
   Would flail against the world without defense.

My view of Holmes and Watson rounds at last
   To my acceptance of the central hoax
Of life: it’s only teamwork that can cast
   The human alloy. That and silly jokes.

*****

Not much is known about Marcus Bales, except he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, USA, and his work has not appeared in Poetry or The New Yorker. His latest book is 51 Poems; reviews and information at http://tinyurl.com/jo8ek3r

“sherlock-holmes-thomas-watson” by JARS / JMPC / HN is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Sonnet variation: Gail White, “The Left Hand of Saint Teresa’

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When the saint died, her best friend and confessor
cut off her hand. (What are friends for?) The shrine
at Ronda keeps it as a sacred treasure,
covered with glass and gold. I can’t assign
a special magic to those long-dead fingers,
lacking the power or the will to bless.
But with the faithful some enchantment lingers
over the bones, some touch of holiness
that once informed a living heart. I know
the spell I feel here will not come outside
with me, will never cheer me in the dark,
but for Teresa’s lovers, every tree
breathes miracles, and Ronda’s grassy park
abounds in babies whose young mothers planned
their nursery colors once they touched her hand.

Gail White writes: “This is one of about 3 poems based on my attraction-repulsion relationship with the cult of holy relics.  I’ve seen a number of relics, including Catherine of Siena’s head, which is really a creepy sight.  But after all, holiness is in the believer’s heart rather than in the subject’s bones, and that is what I have tried to get across with this poem for St. Teresa.”

This poem is the winner of Plough’s 2025 Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award.

Gail White is a widely published Formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light.  Her latest chapbook, Paper Cuts, is out on Amazon or from Kelsay Books. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats.

Photo: The Hand of Saint Teresa in the church of Nuestra Señora de la Merced in Ronda, Spain. This piece is traditionally visited & kissed by Christians.