Walt Whitman's elegy mourns a fallen leader at the moment of victory, setting public triumph against private grief. Its voice of love, loss and reverence opens the Ghosts issue with the haunting presence of memory, sacrifice and unfinished sorrow.

Scotellaro's micro “Big" contrasts the thunderous power of a monster-truck driver's weekend life with the cramped indignities of home, where memory, boredom, grief and irritation shrink him back into ordinary, bruising reality.

Tom Sheehan's 'Imprisoned by Love' follows Willie, an escaped German POW in wartime Maine, and Emsie, the farmer’s daughter who shelters and loves him, in a story of desire, danger, family wrath, memory, and hope across the ruins and reckonings of war, time, loyalty, and returning peace and fate too.

Stephen Zelnick introduces Juana de Ibarbourou, Uruguay's beloved poet, through biography, criticism, and fresh English translations that trace her lyric gifts, youthful love poems, mature elegies, faith, nature imagery, and lasting place in New World poetry for modern readers and poets today again

Fitzpatrick's Crescendo finds music in the pause between thought and creation, where silence, rest, muse, storm, sun, God, and composition gather into a warm, spiritual rhythm that lingers after the poem releases its final bright winter morning note of peace and feeling into the hearts softly.

Bill West's Continental Drift turns an open farm gate into a winter mystery, where wind, snow, road, ditch, and question gather in quiet motion. The poem watches small neglect become drift and possibility, asking what may happen when weather escapes its boundaries and reshapes the world outside now.

Robinson's Eve follows a fugitive mother and child fleeing Texas into a desert café, where grit, grace, and kindness open a new life. The poem honors work, welcome, memory, and the quiet courage that turns hardship into belonging along Highway 395, family, and survival too in hard times.

In “The Dogged Determination of Cats,” Oonah V. Joslin turns a rooftop chorus into a comic, musical lament. The cats sing through soot, memory, lost fields, and city smoke, keeping their truth alive night after night above the chimney pots.

In “Tiny Fingers,” Irena Pasvinter gives voice to a doll carried through terror, loss, and memory. From a child’s grasp to a museum case at Auschwitz, the poem turns innocence into witness, asking what broken objects remember when history will not look away.

In “Feedback,” Terry Jude Miller pauses on a wooded hilltop and lets spring's sound, scent, and softness dissolve the self. The poem becomes a sensuous communion with nature, where human want falls away and breath returns to belonging.