6 haiku, by Sue Norvell

waking in the night —
the moon has moved
to the bathroom window

up at six
K.C. the cat yowls
"you're late!"

the doctor's office
serious conversations
in one's underwear

by the trumpet vine
a burst of white feathers
our hawk's had lunch

found
the desktop — six pens and a button
January clean-up

old 45s
decades slip-slide out
of the record case

4:10 a.m., by Stacey Murphy

Looking out from the kitchen
At the arthritic crabapple branch
Quivering in the latest of late night light

You think how cold it must be,
How hard to be an animal
Or a person
Outside in this wind
As you cross the floor barefoot
Back to your dark soft cave

You recall that nature show –
The arctic groundhogs who shiver
As they hibernate
To warm up just enough to
Neither perish nor fully wake

How many nights could your
Whole body shake and manage to sleep
Through it? Could you?

“What kind of raspy-shuffle
Spectre would I become on that sleep?
How long would it take”?
You wonder as you
Slide under the blanket
And the cat comes to find the space

You make by your belly
Where he purrs and purrs, drawing
The shiver and gnaw
From your very core,
Absorbing it all until
Your eyes close just as they notice

In the earliest of early morning light
The silver outline of willow branches
Appearing outside the window.

Coloring in Between the Lines, by Liz Burns

Sometime last year I decided to try out the adult coloring book trend. "It's really relaxing," someone said to me. "I just color at night while my husband watches TV."

So I went to the store and looked at coloring books. There were so many to choose from. I picked one with a garden theme, and then my friend gave me one (from the stack she had next to the TV.) So I had two. I bought some markers, and a set of colored pencils, and I was off. 

I packed everything up and went to one of my favorite spots by the lake, sat down at a picnic table, and took out markers and a book. I was ready to color and be relaxed. I started with a floral design.

I love color, I love how mixing colors gives a result completely different than the original, and I love creating endless designs and patterns from color. I've always loved that.

What I had forgotten, though, is how much I don't love coloring in between the lines. I never, ever managed this.  From the time I was able to pick up a crayon, I scribbled in almost every coloring book I ever had. In kindergarten and first grade I was almost never one of the students whose coloring book sheets got tacked up on the bulletin board, because I could never keep my coloring in between the lines of the drawing. Invariably there would be a crayon slash outside the boundaries of a skirt or a tree or someone's hair.  The result was not a neat, tidy, colored-in drawing, but an uneven crayon coloring that far surpassed the boundaries drawn on the page.

This trait didn't confine itself just to crayons. It also happened with things I glued together — more glue showed on the outside of the construction paper than on the back.  When I used scissors I couldn't cut in a straight line no matter how it was marked or how short of a cut I had to make. And my drawing was non-existent, although I got pretty good at stick figures at some point. I was  one of only two students to get a "D" in my seventh grade art class.

Some of this was running through my mind last summer as I sat at the picnic table by the lake. I had a lot of time, a lot of markers. I was ready, or so I thought.

I colored in the petals of the first flower. It felt good. I started on the petals of the second flower. They were a little smaller, it was a little harder. Not so relaxing. I turned my attention to the stem. It was hard getting that marker to stay completely in between the lines all the way down. Wait, I forgot to color in the center of the flowers.

"How is this relaxing?" I thought. "This isn't relaxing. It's stressful. Why is this a trend?"

I looked at the page. The design had impossibly little areas to color in. I knew right then and there, getting more stressed by the minute, that I wasn't going to last. 

Two flowers, and I was done.

Chromesthesia: What if our Voices Came out in Color? by Stacey Murphy

Would my murmured first “good morning” be a mud of flinty brown and moss green, giving way to greyish mist after the first mile of a run? And then, at the end of three miles, would those same words, “good morning,” now show against the sunlit trees as a gold-flecked chartreuse as I call out to the man and his dogs passing the spot where I stretch by the side of the path?

Would we see the avocado in the stories of the cab driver?  Hear the neon orange and banana in the shouts of kids tossing a football at the bus stop?

Do the words of the barista, as he places a mug on the coffee bar, Americano Grande, come out as sable brown, or as a fluttering-but-dirty red, white and blue? 

Meanwhile, in the booth in the corner, would we see the peach glitter haze that surrounds a mother and toddler as she reads him a tale about a bear and a piglet who are best-best friends in the forest of a little boy’s stuffed menagerie? A collection much like his own pile of familiars at home, where he will prattle in a language nonsensical to all but his mother and father and to:

The penguins who answer in the color of morning ice
The dinosaurs who answer in swamp
The ape who chortles back in vine green
The cats who purr back in mischief purple
The doggies who pant agreeably in joyful red
The bears who grumble in the brightest burnt sienna
And the narwhal who responds in rhyming, shimmering turquoise