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Bruce Willard’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cortland Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner as well as on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Foundation’s American Life In Poetry, curated by Kwame Dawes, and The Slowdown curated by Major Jackson.

He has published 3 collections of poems: Holding Ground (2013), Violent Blues (2016) and In Light of Stars (2021) - all 3 published by Four Way Books (NYC). In Light of Stars received an Indie Book Award Prize for Poetry in 2022.

In addition to his work as a poet, Willard directs the Blue Raven Poetry Series in Rockland, Maine -Blue Raven Poetry Series | Blue Raven Gallery

He lives in Maine and Colorado.

32 Bar Blues Foundation
www.32barblues.com

FEBRUARY 13TH

Ribboned to a stoplight post
on Highway 50 in bay-less Bayfield,
Colorado, a bouquet of red roses

wrapped in small green leaves,
so arresting, so close
I half-imagined they were for me. Me,

 solo, traveling through open country,
that one becoming three –
lover, loved and one

for whom touch is witness –
gathered at the only light
between and Durango and Chimney Rock.

 Someone must have known the color
would have me stop
60 seconds, that moment  

 of forever, green turning
momentarily to red
then back to green again.

KAIROS

The morning after Thanksgiving
an off-shore wind stands up waves
and calms the sea. Not a bird
on the feeder

this morning. A loose skirt
of bark uncovers
the eucalyptus’
leggy branches.

To give thanks is to expose
everything to nothing;
beat of memory, sound
of flying overhead.

In the salvia a blur
of invisible hunger;
motion before a
great and open window.