POETRY

EXTENDING THE INVITATION by Dilruba Ahmed

Who, now, will invite the graveyard crew
for dinner, now that your father is gone?
Who now the diplomat, the politician,
the peacemaker, the clown? Your father
is not here to shake the hand
of the holy man who buried him. You called
and called to him so loudly
through the cold wind at the burial. But nothing,
nothing can rouse him from this sleep.
The air freezing your tears, turning
everything senseless: the unsteady tent
over the open grave. The lone chair
for your mother. The gusts lashing
your sister’s hair into a frenzy. The endless grating
as the caretaker cranks your father’s casket
lower and lower into the ground.
Nothing to do now but grieve and weep.

The holy man explains: the living know
nothing, and can speak—while the dead
know everything, but are mute. Voiceless.
Therein lies the wall between us.
What would he say to you now
if he could? As for you, should you explain
how the day breaks open now
like an empty white bowl: at times smooth,
other times sharply jagged?
How one fracture opens up
onto the next, like a quicksand—

$10,000 PHARMAKON by Dilruba Ahmed

ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: via late Latin from Greek pharmakeutikos (from pharmakeutēs ‘druggist,’ from pharmakon ‘drug’)

We will pay in the form of origami cranes.
Or must we pay with prayers? If so,
we will pray as no one has ever prayed
that pennies will rain from the sky—
nickels, dimes, whole fat wads of cash
wrapped into meaty fists with tight
rubber bands. Let us bow heads together
and thus, be flogged. We will rain
our griefs into reluctant containers:
piggybanks, beer steins, emptied jars
of Oxycontin. Let us pilfer our life savings

and yours, too. Masked as bandits, we’ll pillage
the local coffers for all they’ve got, every
small treasure inside. We’ll take every keepsake.
Here, a footprint bronzed into eternity.
Here, the braided locks of a saint.
Or shall we wander shoeless, hatless, aimless
from pillar to post—panhandling, pious
to the end? What are we but pilgrims
on our final Hajj? Our doctor’s
no pill-pusher; he’s our pillar of strength.
She’s our newest incarnation of God.
The tribes could offer no form of bad medicine.
And thus, we’re conscripted into prescriptions.
And so we pay. We will pay. For this compulsory
enlistment, what a price we pay.

How we’d like to give them a taste
of their own medicine. But to whom
can we address our proof of disagreement,
the limits of maltreatment, our list
of grievances? Whom to trap in a pillory,
to pelt with shrunken heads of cabbage
and rotting tomatoes? Come, bring the pillbox;
let us empty our pockets. Let us empty our
hands for our hopes. Dearly beloved, we gather
to fill the pillbox. For this unholy marriage,
hand us the pill on a pillow. For better.
For worse. Through sickness. In health.
Do you solemnly take? We do. We do. We do.

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of the poetry collection Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Blackbird, New England Review, American Poetry Review, and Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry.

Claustrum and the Kitchen Mouse by Peter Krumbach

Forget the blue mantle of physics, the bearded men
with pipes, the women whose minds burn like jewels.
Disregard the scientific dust, the blown glass
of so-called life, the arrow of time.

You think you know the universe is a long curve
that at first glance looks like a straightaway
you follow for a few million years, only to arrive
dumbfounded and unaged back on your porch.
The truth is, there is no curvature to space,
no straightness either, all of it a humbug.

Just remember the long veil at the fringe of waking,
weightless, yet self-aware. Recall how in the draft
of darkness it undulates, folds and unfolds,
thoughts flashing in its lace. That is universe.
Always keeping you a neuron short of the truth.

Are you listening, Cynthia? No—still busy
turning the crumb of Gouda in the pink of your paws,
convinced my voice is a solar wind, some god’s breath
blowing from the little heaven of this kitchen.

Peter Krumbach’s poetry has appeared in Serving House Journal, Phoebe, and San Diego Poetry Journal.

Who’s That Girl? by Alpay Ulku

– for Anne-Marie

Twilight-blue. The wind is not as biting, hard. You notice it right away. This is the first time the sky has not been dark, at 6:00 pm, in several months. Someone else looks up. Tulips, not yet in bloom, a hint of color in the bud. I am Persephone emerging from the subway –– you say it to yourself, but the cherry blossoms hear, and dust your coat with petals; they touch your hair, a laurel, not only as if they believed you, but as if they recognized you, who meant it as a joke. Persephone didn’t go back to work the very next day, taunts a shadow from the stairwell. A riverboat glides by. And now it’s dark. And yet: does Persephone have very cute shoes? You bet she does.

Alpay Ulku is the author of the poetry collection Meteorology (BOA Editions, 1999). His poems have appeared Agni, Field, Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, and Slate.

DIANE IS HERE AND WE ARE HAPPY TO HAVE HER WITH US by Jennifer Tseng

I had forgotten she lived
In our childhood home.
Lay in the same bed
Where I lay
Waiting for a knock
On my window,
For someone to climb in.
Maybe she touched herself
There, in the same place
Where someone touched me
Then rose & crossed the hall
To the bathroom to wash her hands.
Back in bed, through the wall
She could hear
My father & her mother
Turning over & over
In my parents’ old bed,
Then silence.
I didn’t envy her.
I didn’t want her
There either. My
Petty consolation
Came years later,
Reading his letters.
Her name was Diana,
Not Diane.

Jennifer Tseng is the author of the poetry collections Red Flower, White Flower (Marick Press, 2013) and The Man With My Face (Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 2005).

PREPOSITIONS AGAINST DESIRE by Kimberly Grey

Across the bed, separately, like Phoenician-fighters, like lovers and even more unraveling,
a system of two, for three days, four.

It could be over, I think, every time we make it here. Such twin-fish, there’s something
like an electrification. But we are many things. There are many seas, fish, in them.

Before we read Sappho (‘all lovers believe they are inventing love’) we believed we invented it.

We are radical on the inside, our minds revolutionized the idea of touching
by not touching. We grab each other

only at the metaphorical root.

Besides what’s refusal, what’s a moan, a yes, no
please, go, rush now. Slow. And as if with a soft brush
an Egyptian writer strokes us
into letters, forked lines, fine,
with a hand that

don’t stop.

Language is the body our bodies ogle over. Language is the ultimate hobby.

We are theoretically between here and there. We are theoretical boundaries. From
the outside we might resemble theories of lovers contradicting theories of lovers.

Those theories being: into difficulty, we must go.

Since we were once over . . . as we speak we construct time, which is also a construct that has constructed us.

Underneath the covers, the light animates us. Essentially, we are the movement that animates
us. Fundamentally, we are the dark that animates the light that animates us.

There’s too much space in the possibility of space. Movement is something beyond language.
We are moving see us moving across

with, within, without.

Kimberly Grey is the author of The Opposite of Light (Persea Books, 2015). Her poems have appeared in Tin House, A Public Space, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, and Southern Review.

AT GOLDEN GATE PARK WITH YOU by Keetje Kuipers

To watch the sea change
color as steam-
liners move across
it. To watch your eyes

change color as my
hands move across you.
There is no perfect
metaphor for the act

of turning you on.
But I try anyway,
until the slick-skulled
koi, the nasturtiums

sweating on the vine—
everything
becomes your body
twisting in my arms.

Keetje Kuipers is the author of two poetry collections, The Keys to the Jail (BOA, 2014) and Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA, 2010). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Orion, and the Pushcart Prize and The Best American Poetry anthologies.

LONESOME KIMIKO by Kimiko Hahn

Unlike George, Kimiko was not found on Pinta Island, an island thought to have not one tortoise left;

Unlike George, too, Kimiko has never come to recognize Fausto Llerena, the then-72-year-old ranger of said island—in fact, she’s never met Don Fausto;

in fact, no one like Don Fausto will ever say, “He was like a member of the family to me. To me, he was everything.” No one like Washington Tapia will cry because “it was like losing his grandparents” of Kimiko;

Unlike George, the last giant tortoise of his subspecies in this archipelago, Kimiko’s death will not represent the extinction of a creature right before another creature’s eyes;

Unlike George, Kimiko will never be on display, post-mortem, in a museum;

Like George, however, a few people do ooh and ahh over Kimiko, for which she feels eternally thankful;

And, Kimiko would count herself fortunate if in her usual morning spot when she dies: a hot shower with the radio on to girl-group songs;

Yes, like Lonesome George Kimiko has always been lonesome. Also like him, she has not been very often alone. Like him, there will be others—extinct tortoises that is.

Kimiko Hahn’s recent poetry collections are Brain Fever (Norton, 2014) and Toxic Flora (Norton, 2010). Her latest chapbook is The Cryptic Chamber (Epiphany Editions).

NEAR THE GRAVE OF EFFIE GRAY by Margaret Mackinnon

Effie Gray (1828-1897) was married to the English art critic John Ruskin, but the marriage was never consummated. She later married Ruskin’s protégé, the painter John Everett Millais. She is buried in Perth, Scotland.

At the crest of Kinnoull Hill, in the shadow
of the churchyard wall, the gray city lay below us.
Stone spires. Narrow grid of ancient streets.

Light on the river shone like hammered brass.
Air pressed against the afternoon as we climbed,
against the newly planted beds of heather

where a cheerful weekday crew of pensioners
bent to volunteer duties, tending
the bright unlikely mix of color: raw whites,

swaths of gold. Jig-saw diagram of clean lines.
And air pressed against my thoughts
of Effie, far away in her failed

first marriage. That small drab life.
He’d wanted, he said,
a wife like a high glacier, lovely to the eye.

Bleached mornings of wind-hurled rain.
Withered leaves, curled like tight fists, cluttering the yard.
Night settling over their house like grief.

Once I thought of her as a figure in a fairy tale.
But since we carry with us, always,
an open window, an open door,

happiness hovers like another possibility, just outside.
The way the old leaves could seem silvered,
then, after rain—

The way the pensioners arranged the heather.
And the waters near Mull, on that second honeymoon,
a window opens—

a rinse of turquoise green,
clear and improbable, even where the small waves
lap against the shore, even in the shallows near the hill.

Naming The Natural World by Margaret Mackinnon

in Edinburgh, on our anniversary

When John Bartram, across the sea,
sent his wooden boxes from America,
boxes alive with cuttings,
with cones, with fragile, gathered seeds—

they’d arrive contents unidentified,
a tangle, a surprise.
So when Collinson unpacked the boxes,
spread carefully the clumped earth, planting

those bits of Eden come back home—
it might be years, sometimes decades
before he saw their blooms,
whether horse chestnut, kalmia, goldenrod,

or balsam fir—
until he knew what he’d received.
And that tangled not-quite-knowing

is what I remember—
and the view from our window:
sky white as paper—

Everything near, everything distant
in the low, odd glow—
And someone’s laundry on the line,
catch and rip of a brief wind that lifted it

and then was gone.
And one small bird that sang outside our small room,
bird whose name we would never know—
as if a private happiness had visited

that insistent luxury of summer light,
some bit of Eden come back home.
All we hadn’t known was there.

Margaret Mackinnon is the author of the poetry collection The Invented Child (Silverfish Review Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Quarterly West, and Southern Poetry Review.

LINCOLN PARK, JERSEY CITY by John Bargowski

They’re nearly dead already
so why don’t you just go in
and finish the job,
yelled the man on the park bench,
promising he’d watch over
our bikes that summer blur
of a day in the Sixties
when drought sucked
the fish pond almost dry,
forcing carp, and goldies
that had once been gifts,
to rise through the shallows,
and gill the air.

He wanted us to break
branches into clubs, and
not be afraid to wade
into the muddle,
and unleash some of that fury
he swore would make us men
on them as they thrashed
away from our shadows,
dragging their lustrous fantails
through the slime
until they trapped themselves
in paddy-deep puddles,

where we could see through
the shimmer of the dog day glare
that they looked like the gilded
princes we loved to stare at
on the exotic postcards
our older brothers mailed home
from their far-off green hell,
these bottom feeders,
the trash some of our fathers said
it was alright to kill,
spangled in gold and silver
with thick mustaches,
and wild, wide-open eyes.

John Bargowski’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, New Letters, The Gettysburg Review, and Poetry Daily. He is the author of Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway (Bordighera Press; bilingual edition, 2012).

REST by Chloe Honum

First one psychiatrist is gone, pulled away
on a tide of fluorescent light.
Then the other is gone too,
to tend to matters in the ward above.

In the common room, we talk about side effects,
night sweats and low libidos,
and about miracle drugs. Like a light switch,
one patient says, and we look longingly

beyond the window, at the birds
draped like strings of black pearls
around the saffron-colored trees.
The patient who thinks we’re actors in a play

asks me questions about poetry.
Flowers freshly cut and wrapped in newspaper,
that’s how I want to rest, my dreams
like white petals absorbing ink.

Chloe Honum is the author of the poetry collection The Tulip-Flame (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014) and the chapbook Then Winter (Bull City Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Orion, and Harvard Review Online.

GHOSTS OF THE TOHOKU COAST by Lee Ann Roripaugh

of course, the ghosts are everywhere:

the face that blooms confused
in an unfurling peony bud

the dog who doesn’t know it’s dead
returning to search for the child
who used to pet and play with it

the fisherman who comes to shore
with early morning’s neatly mended nets
looking for his small docked boat

taking taxi rides / wanting to go home
demanding to know: am I still alive?

oyurushi / oyurushi

whisked tea leaves whispering
from the bottom of a cup

the dancing funnel cloud of dust
that rises from a beaten futon

a murmuration of tiny gnats
helixing up like incense from
shriveled fruit at the broken altar

the jumble of unsortable bones
dustpanned out to sea

the husband / the wife
the mother / the daughter
the son / the father
the sister / the brother

all searching for what’s been lost

driven by the electric pain
of phantom limbs
seizing up like dowsing rods

the grief of empty cicada shells
for what’s been torn out trying
to fill themselves back up
with the transparency of rain

how many centuries will it take
for these stricken mists
and fogs to be burned away?

for this haunted water
to evaporate / to be exorcised
and rinsed clean again by light?

Lee Ann Roripaugh is the author of four collections of poetry: Dandarians (Milkweed Editions, 2014), On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), Year of the Snake (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), and Beyond Heart Mountain (Penguin, 1999).

BERLIN, ETC. by Jared Harél

Before the war, there was war
on architecture. On art. Bordering
on the insane. Think of mink
nightlife stifled by gunfire,
the picked clean witness of galleries,
books in the heap.
Beneath our feet,
solid sediments all soiled
by bone, smoothed over, the unmarked
bunker headstoned by condos.
Did I say bordering? The white sky
is about face. Our bald tour-guide skips
the serious bits, brags
about breweries and Thai food
by the Wall.
Maybe I’m old
fashioned, but I keep expecting
the snap back of a burlap sack
over my head, a roundup of us stragglers.
Yet here I am, snapping selfies
with municipal buildings, a column
of Victory; that golden lady still
up there, ready to leap.

Jared Harél’s poems have appeared in Tin House, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, Ecotone, and Poetry Ireland Review.

AT THIS FRONTIER by Sean Hill

At the age when our friends got scraped knees,
the uncomplicated hands of our parents

like a crane of simple block and tackle
or a god from the machine, from above, set

things right, eased our small tragedies, our young
falls, but since then I’ve fallen into the din

of adult life and lost silence, feeling
in my right foot, a tooth, self-respect, one

grandmother and then the other, one
grandfather I barely had and the other

I never knew (both lost when I was a young
man), in this far-north town a summer night’s

dark warmth, the range of quiet degrees in my
hinges—elbows, shoulders, hips, and knees—,

my youth’s hairline gerrymandered by years
for the votes I won’t get, the race rigged for me

to lose, and I’ve lost my taste for booze—
that was a ruse to get the things I’ve truly lost to pay

attention this time—, so at this age, when in the midst
of the living we do, we get the phone call,

the voice of a friend from the machine,
somehow blue or red, hollowed, and edged

—the makings of a terrible god—a friend
who got not a scraped knee but needed scans,

x-rays, and blood work that say she has cancer
or some other devastation, we pray or hope

or shake our heads in resignation; we cry.
For my part, I was a satisfied justice full

of wise saws and modern instances before
being moved to settle this new-to-me land—terra

incognita—, a latecomer, a belated pioneer.

Sean Hill is the author of two poetry collections: Dangerous Goods (Milkweed Editions, 2014) and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor (University of Georgia Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.

IN THE FRAME by Patricia Hooper

Looking out through a narrow pane
of glass in the larger window
I saw how the scene came closer
like the ones Van Gogh isolated
in his perspective frame.
The view, as he wrote, was foreshortened
by borders, the single haystack
no longer lost in the greater
expanse of the summer field.
What I saw was the trumpet lily
without the surrounding garden,
without the competing figures
in the foreground, those phlox and asters
that made it seem so far.
The white lily moved toward me
the way when the surgeon held
your x-ray against the light
he blocked its peripheral features
with both hands, setting apart
what became the entire picture,
making me look
where I had to now, at the heart.

Patricia Hooper’s fourth collection of poetry is Separate Flights (University of Tampa Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Poetry.

GREEN TARGET, JASPER JOHNS, 1955 by Tina Barr

The circles are concentric, a paste, encaustic,
a green eye, unblinking, wedges like honeydew,
sliced into a tight mosaic, greens borrowed
from onion stalks slung over snow, the claw
opening of a hyacinth as it pushes its paw through
ice, buds like seed at the end of redbud twigs.

Greens begin in the valley; fan uphill like bees:
chartreuse, lime, darken to olive, moss, juniper,
pine at the high elevations. Jasper Johns spun
treetops into a target, before we knew acid
was in the rain, before rhododendron began
to slide off its roots, like things slain.

Twisted fronds of DNA have bridges; someone
has tampered with whatever grows, like a child
who makes moats. On the mountain rain tears
open avalanches the width of cars, collapses roads,
tarmac puzzle pieces split over a ravine.
Power lines cut as if with giant scissors.

Below the copperhead graveyard is Eden, poplar
on poplar; hundred foot stands climb steep slope;
from the porch we see at eye level, the mouse
inside the red-tail’s talons. When a hawk slams
your forearm, it handcuffs your glove, grip a clamp,
so prey never drops, digs at the chick in your fist.

Hawks, spinning, see every painted green.

Tina Barr is the author of two poetry collections: Kaleidoscope (Iris Press, 2015) and The Gathering Eye (Tupelo Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Gettysburg Review, New Orleans Review, and Louisiana Literature.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY JAPANESE SCREEN, KYOTO by Ioanna Carlsen

I wish I could have told you

how the headrest of the couch
supporting my head comforted me,
or how the gold of the screen
blazed in the room like the new moon outside.
I loved these little people leaving,

a whole town of them—
I understand this holocaust,
a whole town of the evacuated, here painted.

For a long time I saw the figures as fixed, art,
symbolic—
but now I see that they are moving—
all leaving even as they stand there,
motionless and mute,
before leaving the gold of paradise.

They are moving out, the living,
in evacuation to the hills, refugees,
about to be exiled elsewhere.
In real life one and by one, usually, they go,
but here they are all poised together on the brink,

and since it’s a hundred years later
they all are gone now anyway,
a progression, constantly moving forward
to the end of the horizon at the end of every edge
of every landscape and the edge of every town.

The gold is a convention and represents time and timelessness, you said,
but that’s in my poem too, I said—
all these anonymous people,
their lives erupting from inside a curve in the landscape
like pines,
the realm of gold sitting between the towns and white horses of here,
and the there of eternity.

Involuntary Memory by Ioanna Carlsen

You don’t remember how to walk—
the limp learns how to live
and your balance goes,
a small precipice appears
to the right of every other
step, and though it’s a place you could hurt
yourself, or fall, it becomes so dear
you don’t want to replace it,
you feel you’ll always limp like this,
even if you no longer have to—
you’ve hit on something, haven’t you,
the way Proust did biting a madeleine—
it took him to a place so familiar,
he never wanted to let it go.

You can live your whole life
and never touch
just the right spot—
finding it is accidental,
and you’ll live,
(don’t worry),
even if you don’t.

But if you do,
happen,
to touch on it,
I promise you,
you will be changed—
the way you see what’s around you,
(what surrounds you)
will never be the same—

a madeleine, a limp, shame,
anything can do it for you,
anything that makes the world become
             only something
                           you drag your foot or tongue over
                                        again and again.

Ioanna Carlsen’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, Field, Prairie Schooner, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Daily, and Poetry 180.

ISMAEL by John Hodgen

It is he, Ismael, who calls me, late,
my carpenter who falls asleep in my class,
to say he has been thinking about what I said,
not that he is one letter away from a famous character,
but that he never speaks in class,
that he is as silent as some nameless sea
on the other side of the world.
He says he simply doesn’t know what to say,
but that he wants to in his secret heart,
that the three hours grind him after work,
wave after wave, weighing on him like the roiling ocean.
He says that he feels as if he’s the last sailor left on the dock
when the ship sails away, that ideas don’t rise to the surface
for him the way they do for everyone else,
like an albatross, or Noah’s dove having found the invisible world,
then landing on a coffin or a hump-backed whale after it breaches,
coming to sit on its back so naturally, effortlessly,
settling in, as if it were his long lost home,
as if it were the New World, bright ships all around him,
lookouts in crow’s nests waving madly and smiling,
everyone, everyone calling his name.

John Hodgen is the author of four poetry collections including Bread Without Sorrow (Lynx House Press, 2012), Heaven & Earth Holding Company (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), and Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). His first book, In My Father’s House, has just been reprinted from Lynx House/University of Washington Press.

UNIVERSAL LAW by Mary Peelen

Gravity is the gift of shape,
the downhill way we tend to roll,

so when the bough begins to break,
we know which way to go.

Mass is variable, hard to gauge,
but G is constant,

a glimmering icon
weighty as Grandma P

calling down the Lord at bedtime,
putting us all to shame.

A body at rest
remains at rest,

it’s a law of Newtonian motion.
You can trust the math,

so hush now
and let yourself fall.

Lay down your rock-a-bye soul
in the unbounded darkness

where a billion stellar galaxies
unwind their spiraled arms.

Mary Peelen’s poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Poetry Review (UK), New American Writing, and Bennington Review.

From Minnesota Route 60 by Marlene VanderWiel

November, and the sky, a stretch
of marble the color of inferior pearls,
splays low over a spent earth.
The farmhouse, turned gray
and forlorn, ceded long ago
to abandonment.

There is no purchase here for
the imagination, the need
to place inside, with hope,
folks stolid as hard-pan or
at least a widower, waiting, say,
for a letter, the echo of cards
shuffling in another room.

Marlene VanderWiel’s poems have appeared in The Briar Cliff Review, The Big Muddy, Snowy Egret, Albatross, and the children’s magazine Highlights.

THE VISIT by Christopher Howell

My father enters with such human care,
I nearly forget
he’s been dead for twenty years.

Beside that brass lamp by the door
he stops to look at me, at this room
overflowing with books and other forms
of precious junk I’ve lugged
through all the jobs and cities, all
the half-beginnings of my time on earth.

I think he supposes us intimate
strangers now, that nothing could explain us,
much less the happiness we feel in this
late night communion
miles and miles from where our days together
made their little footprints in the dust.

I don’t dare to speak
lest I frighten the moment
away. For his part, he simply stands inside
that calm he carried
everywhere, and has no need to tell me why
he’s come.

Certainly he’s here to spill no secrets
about death, no news concerning the joys
and perils of the afterlife
or the meaning of it all.
He has brought only himself, looking
a little tired, but happy, and vaguely expectant, as though

we had arranged to go fishing
and now it’s time.

Christopher Howell has published ten collections of poems, most recently Gaze (Milkweed Editions, 2012) and Dreamless and Possible: Poems New and Selected (University of Washington Press, 2010). His poems have appeared in Harper’s, The Hudson Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, and the Pushcart Prize anthology.

YEAR OF THE CAROUSEL HORSES by Maureen Seaton

For the time being, all my photos have turned their backs on me. Light through the blinds sings to itself, chanson de guerre, chanson d’une chanson triste. My books slump and worry and tick like clocks. Clocks themselves remain clocks, but move around the room at night, deft floaters, dark subterfugers. Red mask comes down, boxes skew behind pillows. A tiny white plate of footprints disappears.

Yet look at the way my hair sticks straight up in the morning. You would think my dream had tortured someone and made me witness. Or my hair was a row of sentries keeping guard through the night. I mustn’t satirize my life. The wind feels like tongues when I turn left at the sea, and my hair is stuck, as they say, on stupid. Something is wrong if all the pelicans are going one way and I the other. Is there a way to sleep so my hair lies flat? And when the pelicans notice they’ve lost me, what then? I expect there will be a mourning period, but who knows? They could all just keep going, as if the wind were actually at their backs.

Either way, at the border of every state I will stop and look around for you, just in case we both decide to head out on the same day at the same time, carrying the same dark river. I will probably not approach lyrical until Pecos County, Texas. There I will simply sit down by the side of the road and weep.

There are several people inside me, strung like paper dolls across the window that opens in half-moon and portrays itself in a seldom-seen rocket coming at the girl who is most visible on Sunday, her selves wondering if they will see each other again. The way the world slips into trouble and that open thing we call death.

Which could be a duet. Which could be a carousel. Which could be an avocado resting on a slice of honeycomb. I don’t recall other days I squeezed my breasts into difficult situations. I do recall women sifting through Deerfield Beach, sucking mangoes, breasts like dunes below sea grass, changing color, vernal and irking. De kus van de zee.

There is no easy way to say voice, crime, oboe. We move on to nowhere recognizable. Between breaths, the way a sniper finds her sweet spot and shoots. Voice, vocate, voyeur. There were more oboes than were generally thought necessary, so she rose into the sound joyfully, into treble primeval, like a bullet.

Dancers danced in a circus full of hats that swung like bubbles with people sleeping inside them. We (there was a we!) lolled and swelled and our hats flew off in a direction not unlike West and we accomplished much that night, gleaming as we did in our marvelous hats, speaking soon and soft, for who would believe we were there at all, bareheaded and moronic as dreams.

Tomorrow I fly to New York in my pink fedora. I’ve prepared in every way possible, munching felt scraps, holding séances with dead gangsters (no dead cigars, please), like if I tell you a secret will you still give me a boutonnière? I’ve come to love everything about you. For that reason, you may advance to the boardwalk.

I speak glossy, nocturnal. Accompanied by a cello. You coach me from the winter sidelines. Or so far north it seems winter. I wanted to bring you aspen leaves like hearts, glisten near you, hear you up close, what you would say to failure: little one, little one, little one. The ceiling in this room slopes toward mountains. Stars hiss in snow. You should hear the furious geese.

Now a man puts away his baby son’s toys, sighing with every block and book as if his soul is heavy in the world of children. Outside there’s a mysterious track in the snow. I think about children and how lucky I am and decide luck is another mystery never to be solved. The way snow falls here in a shower of tiny crystals, not flakes at all, until the house is covered and animals prowl the perimeter, knowing what they know.

Kept whole for spring. Kept clean. Kept craving. Are these the words I hold until then? My glass skin? My veins and valleys? The mountains don’t recognize me with my run-amok soul. Neither do I put one foot on their foothills. They bite the air with their love for me, their icy tremulousness and bald towers of snow. You fly in circles, widening, like a father or a hawk.

A woman unfolds below sea level. She leaves her hat and swims away. There is her soul crossing the Acheron. I swear that could be a centaur in the backyard right now. Duskish. A shadow near the plum tree.

Maureen Seaton is the author of sixteen poetry collections, most recently, Fibonacci Batman: New & Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013); and, with Denise Duhamel, Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, and New Collaborations (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015).

Biennial Migration by John A. Nieves

Hedged out by the creeping cloud of city
sounds, of music gone appliance and auto-
mobile, I found your voice stuck to the side

of a truck trickling toward the exurbs. Silver
Princess waving its stalks at you from the road-
side like so much cilia forcing out an infection.

I know you are wondering if you spelled
your name right on the forwarding
form. I know you threw out everything

but your shoes. This is the wash, the way
you set things compass-straight at whatever
horizon you have decided is yours. Here,

the neighbor berries the roof and brings me
jams. Here, the talk box talks to the wall
with a kind of sincerity that seems to mock

the neon street. Here, the neon street. I remember
you used to say the buildings only stood
because we loved them straight. I know how

unloved things crumble. The sweater you left
on the bannister is already unfurling, but out-
side the buildings are soldier stiff and the shafts

of light hold the darkness tight enough to feel
the friction between them. When you find your new
address, say it sure enough to be a name

then tell the locals what to call you and when.
Open your mouth long enough
to let every breath the you I knew spent

adoring poured concrete and the hush
of three-a.m. traffic seep into the jackweed.
The crickets know what to do with it.

Dissolution by John A. Nieves

No, the leaves weren’t gold, weren’t going
to buy you anything as you grabbed and snapped
veins and stems. You were always so hungry

at the sky like it refused to slide down
your throat, to nourish some shivering beast
somewhere in your deepest dark. And no, the moon

isn’t watching. You need not bow. That feeling
of an audience is only us over here by the not-
very-impressive hedgerow. The neighbors hate

it when you run across their lawn and crush the late
spring flowers. If you look our way, you will have
to admit that we are calling you back, that we are not

some chorus from the woods, the just-out-of-focus
trees. If you look, you will see a wanting that is
not your own, that is so easy to sate. But your back

is aegis against our eyes’ small shine. Your back
will be what we remember, the song on our lips
when the others come in dark clothes asking.

John A. Nieves is the author of the poetry collection Curio (Elixir Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Crazyhorse, The Literary Review, and Verse Daily.

The Burning Nest by Nathan Hoks

Snoozing in his chair
My dad hears roaring jets
And droning choppers.

When I crinkle the newspaper
He sees dazzling gold flecks
Leap from the rain forest.

He wakes with a start.
He is just like the rest of us.
A nest is burning in the tree.

Nathan Hoks has published two books of poetry, The Narrow Circle (Penguin, 2013) and Reveilles (Salt Publishing, 2010).

Wild Flower by Cecily Parks

How do we
wild flower
we wonder
in smooth lawns
where to ask
is to yield
to a coil
of prairie
one blue bloom
in size
thriving in
ryegrass blades
by accident
of wind, drought,
grackle- or mourning-
dove-claw, or—
as remnant
faith would please
to have us
believe—to
light our failure
to garden
with garden.

In the Old Story by Cecily Parks

In the old story
the girl clothed in red
carries sweet cakes
wrapped in rough cloth
in her basket. The wolfish
branches graze the soft
outsides of her thighs.
What the branches feel
is not so unlike
what she feels
when she thinks
of the sweet cakes
wrapped in rough cloth
in her basket.
The story
tells me that girls carry sticks
woven into the shape
of a jaw. Or that wolves
should be killed. Or
that when my daughter
doesn’t know the difference
between following and leaving
a trail, I will send her
loaded with sugar and fat
into the woods
that bend in the wind.

Cecily Parks is the author of the poetry collections O’Nights (Alice James, 2015), Field Folly Snow (University of Georgia, 2008) and the editor of The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Everyman’s Pocket Poets, 2016). Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and the Pushcart Prize anthology.

ON THE PROPERTIES OF SUMMER by Laura Kasischke

The rosebush foams, but not the flag (no
breeze at all) exhausted on its pole—as if
the battle has been lost, or
the thinker’s lost the thought, or
the pastor’s head is bowed as he
reads, into a hole, a psalm.

Some bees, abuzz, and seem
to drown together in the pond. Crazy
zig-zag dance across the black. “Could

our bus driver be drunk?” an elderly
woman asks an elderly man. But then

the diner, the others with their canes
behind those two, and the refrigerated
carousel with the cakes. The yawn

of the waitress, long day, and some-

one points out the flattened grass back
there behind it all, the place
where the children roll
in the park on Saturdays, and the way

the sun across the street appears to cling
like a cat
to the teenage lawn boy’s naked back.

Laura Kasischke is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently The Infinitesimals (Copper Canyon, 2014) and the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning collection Space, In Chains (Copper Canyon, 2011).

APPROACHING WINTER by Marie Tozier

A lone gull makes its way
Across the exposed silt of the naked river:
Tide out—stinking of malukchuks and rotting willows,
Loose feathers and one discarded sock, which clings
To the anchor line of a dogged fisherman’s net.
An abandoned snowmachine,
Sunk last spring, sits exposed near the far shore.
The young gull is white and mottled grey,
Ambling on pink legs, long pale-yellow beak
Raised in the air; as if she is a debutante,
Unsure of how to hike her ruffled gown.

Marie Tozier’s poems have appeared in Yellow Medicine Review.

Wheeled Walker on the Bottom of the Ocean by Tina Kelley

Dandled by currents, slow long descent
like sun syruping down a web strand,
slipping to moon’s dark side, it lands
on four feet, ten thousand feet down.

The bottom, ruined like the train’s quiet car
by an eternal piece of junk. Anything lurks
in shadows to steal the widow’s wedding ring.
Sand specks float in robot glare.

My mother can’t talk, but I call her every night,
tell her about my day, pretend she is who she was,
because she may be, and why guess wrong?

The sea floor moves in “mass wasting
events” — landslides, flows, falls. We dump
a whale carcass, gauge erosion, see plastic bags
slithering round. Buckets, monofilament, a tire
that spun on desert roads, now cold, dark, still.
Unexploded bombs, a bed pan, mop head.
The helmet of someone killed in it.

After she dies, I may keep calling, talk to the dark.

We make up words for the unfathomable. There is one—
infaunal—for deep sea creatures of the soft sea bottom.
Palilalia, the repetition of one’s own spoken words.
A word for measuring water depth: bathymetry.
Depth of dark, pressure, love. Night.

The dropped crab pot and tangled net keep killing,
mindless as cancer, no lines to the surface, no use.

Tina Kelley is the author of three poetry collections: Abloom and Awry (CavanKerry Press, 2017), Precise (WordTech Communications, 2013), and The Gospel of Galore (WordTech Communications, 2003). She also co-authored with Kevin Ryan the nonfiction book Almost Home: Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope (Wiley, 2012). Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Poetry East, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Poetry.

Ship of Years by Doug Ramspeck

Here is the snow misfired in the open field.
And here is the pause in the chest

where the ice coats the hidden perch of ribs.
The years are a tiptoe. The years encase the tall grass.

I know that I am sleeping because
the sky is a migration of clouds and stars

and sometimes a pallid sun. Once I lift myself
like a passage, lift myself like a tremor,

the spectral snow becoming rain becoming
fog becoming a dark scrape of sky.

Get up, get up a voice says, but somewhere
there are birds pressing the prow of their V

into the air, and somewhere a black snake
is muscling through the living weeds.

All is understudy. I sleep like a spinning,
sleep like a whirr. Think of what you’re missing,

the voice says, but the moon remains a calculus,
and the days unknit themselves.

Here is soft dirt to call a bed.
Here is a fly or a gnat to levitate.

Here is the raft of decades like a bead
of bright blood welling.

Doug Ramspeck is the author of the poetry collections Original Bodies (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2014), Mechanical Fireflies (Barrow Street Press, 2011), and Black Tupelo Country (BkMk Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Slate, The Southern Review, and The Georgia Review.

Shaawatke’é’s Birth by Emily Wall and X’unei Lance Twitchell

- for Káalaa Miriah Twitchell

x’óol’ yáx yatee.[1]

Whirlpool.

ax yádi.
ax yádi.

i eegáa kuwtuwashée.
i eegáa kuwtuwashée.[2]

In this house of chaos—your sister learning
language, your mother sleeping, sleeping in the back room

my father leaving, my mother arriving, phone ringing,
everyone needing a bath, the long hours of light

too bright. Listen: sometimes late, late at night
I place my hands on your mother’s belly

place my hands on your skin house
and what my fingers see is your ears,

small clamshells, listening listening to the summer
rain of LingÍt, the pattern of us, tapping into you.

How shall I stack these words?
What is the first word to give you?

wéidu i tláa,
i tláa áwé.

xát áyá, i éesh.
gunalchéesh.
gunalchéesh.[3]

Then comes that long summer night
when we know you are coming.

Your rich river breaks on the rock
in the backyard, the rock under the cedar tree

and you are coming quickly quickly
in the birthing room.

And now your tongue is a salmon
swimming downstream, heading

for the ocean of sound, ready to take your first swallow
of saltwater, ready to taste your first vowels

rain on ocean, and your ear and tongue, coming now
and pain is here too, and your mother in pain.

wáanganeens
tlax lidzee áyá yá kustí,
ch’a haa kát uwagút.

haa yoo x’atángi yaa nanáan

i een áyá ku.aa,
kei guxlatseen.
kei guxlatseen:

haa Lingítx sateeyí.[4]

And what I know to do is this
and what I know to do is this:

I ask that we turn down the lights
I ask that no one speak. Your first

sound above water will be the language
of black feathers, the language of flight.

I ease into the water, feel your head,
feel its turning until a furled ear emerges

and another, your body coming
swimming into the sound, rising into the sound

of my voice. I hold the air around you.
I blow softly into your ear, to open its listening:

woosh tudzix¯án

haa yoo x’atángi een

woosh tudzixán
haa yoo x’atángi een.[5]

We love each other
and this is your language

we love you in this language
we love you and this is you

sliding wetly into my hands,
your seal-soft mouth opening

and you have the most beautiful
tongue I’ve ever seen. Strong organ

at the center of the world, strong
voice, at the center of my world.

gunalchéesh, gunalchéesh
yéi áwé.[6]

[1] it’s chaotic, like a whirlpool

[2] my child.
my child.

we were looking for you.
we were looking for you.

[3] there is your mother.
that is your mother.

me, i am your father.
thank you.
thank you.

[4] sometimes
this life is so difficult,
it has come upon us.

our language is dying.

but with you, though,
it will get stronger.
it will get stronger:

our Tlingit identity

[5] we love each other
with our language

we love each other
with our language

[6] thank you, thank you
that is how it is.

Emily Wall is the author of two poetry collections from Salmon Poetry: Liveaboard (2012) and Freshly Rooted (2007). Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, WomenArts Quarterly, Room, Terrain, and Salamander. X’unei Lance Twitchell’s poems have appeared in Yellow Medicine Review and

Kate TWS