POEMS
IN THE NATIONAL LABORATORY’S VIDEOS OF THE BOMB TESTS by Sarah Barber
you never see the air –
but then it had been just
hanging around doing nothing,
and oh it whistled a little,
maybe, to show how idle
and easy it was – before
it bursts open
and then
you can see what used to be
the bomb and it is shocking
how it is not a little
beautiful – as complete
and perfect a ball,
on black and white film,
as the moon’s pitted pearl
and just as a moon
draws close its fogs it pulls
the air in fire clouds around it
and you can see the silky
surface of the gases crater
then bloom and bubble
until each springs like yeast
raising wet bread –
and then
you never see the air
after, when it has become,
in fallout, not a little
terrible and not to be likened
to water poured out steaming
from a kettle
although
tonight as we knead the news
and worry tomorrow’s bread
I think I can see why
they named some bombs
for homely things –
teapot, latchkey, tinderbox –
as if to make rise again
and again the actual moon,
like a spoon dipped in to stir
what used to be the sweet
weak tea of the sky.
Sarah Barber is the author of the poetry collections Country House (Pleiades Press, 2018) and The Kissing Party (National Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Guernica, and Poetry.
AN INTERROGATOR by James Arthur
Whatever I say
the accused agrees. I am
the jackboot’s tongue.
I don’t like hypocrisy. I am not
sentimental about democracy.
I serve my country far from home
in a country where no one
claims to be free.
EFFIGY by James Arthur
everyone knows
who we are supposed to be
but we look like ourself not a scarecrow
dancing on air above the riot square
pelted by bottles and stones
o little boy little girl
o wide-open fire
for us it is the finest most natural thing
to lean into the wind
and start burning
James Arthur is the author of the poetry collection Charms Against Lightning (Copper Canyon Press, 2012). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, and The American Poetry Review.
REMEMBRANCE by Heather Bourbeau
I.
In Berlin, a Syrian clarinetist bellows a chorus of exodus,
unforgiving in its beauty and torment.
What is the language of longing for a home that no longer exists,
that once seemed permanent, as do rooms from youth or dreams?
In Central California, a childhood friend lies on a gurney,
unsure if his body will remember to swallow – the instinct deep, now
forgotten.
II.
Before the concert, we walk past chocolate replicas of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Church ruins –
devastation made delicious and trivial.
What is sacred and what is profane in the memory of war?
Tonight, the oud player could not perform because of the travel ban –
our loss is heard in the silence.
III.
If I were not allowed to return home, what would be left? My writings, my
family
photos, my grandmother’s ring, my will and testament, my echoes of love?
Even in refuge, the pain would run through my bones, haunt my footsteps.
Tomorrow, a young Arab mother and her toddler son will play on the
U‑Bahn.
He will blow kisses goodbye to me as I leave the train.
Heather Bourbeau is the author of the poetry collection Daily Palm Castings (lulu.com 2012). Her poems have appeared in Open City, Santa Ana River Review, Cleaver, Duende, and The Stockholm Review of Literature.
FIDELITY by Kate Gaskin
The former soldier occupies a threshold
between where his eyes meet mine
and where they’re going, as if he thinks
I’m already a ghost, artillery smoke, a flare
shot over a river and receding. It’s enough
to grab me by the knees, his short-cropped
hair, roughshod body that’s had to shoulder
more than its fair share of sand flies
and trips outside the wire, but though I’m
tempted I don’t make myself available
even when my heart – that salty-sweet hook
of mink and hard knocks – wants to.
What most men in this line of business long for
is a headful of hair like ambrosial silk
to disappear into, arms like a May-sweet field
greening beneath the sun. Let these women
be simple as warm grass. Let them
be like gauze packing an open wound. Even
my husband can’t stop holding me days after
he safely returns. How easy it is
to be a cipher in my own story, incidental
and hollow, to have barely anything
to call my own. Even this keening desire
for more – I whistle it back. I call it home.
GHAZAL FOR ALABAMA by Kate Gaskin
after Bruce Snider
And what of the river Alabama?
It is brown as the Coosa, as the Cahaba, green as an Alabama
field – tall wiregrass, jade and then golden. In winter
the rye is green as the eyes of the first boy I loved in Alabama.
And in the field the pigweed
is red as a gummy smile, and the copperheads of Alabama
coil neatly in their soft nests of dead
leaves beneath the airy sycamores of Alabama.
And in the field, there are bonfires and grain
alcohol and a pickup truck that peeled away into an Alabama
night – 1995 – the 12‑year-old flung from its bed and brained.
She never played her clarinet again in Alabama.
And later there were two sisters in a rolled car in a peanut field,
one calling her mother, the other lying in the soft Alabama
dirt, her leg wrong, her head wrong. She’ll become so thin
and restless during the next decade in trailers across Alabama
like the trailer where Lacey lived with her two daughters
and husband. Where they smoked made-in‑Alabama
meth and then left the girls alone to pick the fields for stones,
quartz and mica, anything with a little Alabama
glitz, until one day she wanted to stop, but her husband
didn’t. He wanted to smoke all the meth in Alabama
beneath its simmering star-hot sky. This was before I left
Alabama for good. Some nights the moon was ripe as an Alabama
peach. Some nights I ate Chilton County peaches
over the sink in our first home in Alabama
as you pulled me closer, whispering Kate, and I knew you
loved me, you loved me, you loved me even more in Alabama
Kate Gaskin’s poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Guernica, Puerto del Sol, Passages North, and Blackbird.
THE CLOCK by John McKernan
Someone keeps feeding it human bodies
I would not mind the corpses of hummingbirds
But little kids
Come on
We all know what happened at Hiroshima
Sure the human heart has its unspeakable desires
That won’t erase the screams of the great battles
It knows how to whisper Silence Please
History used to prefer a liquid diet
Glaciers Rivers Volcanic lava Enough rain
to fill nine oceans
Now Anything goes Everything goes
Yes says the dial
No intones the squeaky pendulum
Entire years spent nibbling ancient languages until they
weigh no more than a greasy fingerprint
I despise its cookbook
Every recipe ends Garnish liberally with fine sand
John McKernan is the author of the poetry collection Resurrection of the Dust (The Backwaters Press, 2007). His poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Field.
DIAGRAM OF THE HUMAN EAR by Matthew Minicucci
There was a spring, once,
then sand swept in. Desiccation
along the canal where water
and what wind remains would whisper that pinna
means wing or feather or peak if you keep
the diminutive culum because Latin tell us so much
about just how monumental the pinion
can be to a bird in flight, in fall, the promontory bones
we decided to call hammer or anvil. My
grandfather’s
work, molten lead, how his hands could shape
a box or bed or any wooden beast to buttress
your head the way a poorly set pinky
had changed how he held
a fork for the rest of his days. A well, like an ear
of grain, a spike or a pike or that silence can be
the same in any number of languages. How
a carpenter understands caesura as cut. Longer
than pause; forever the cause and there’s right
and there’s wrong and less than the song your
father
sings before supper. You do not understand.
There’s this land you’ll never hear. There’s
what’s left of your ear drums early morning
mass. The ear like the horse needs its stirrup
to ride until every movement is memorized. Then
silence, the rest. Each morning, a test
a priest nearly preposterous. Any new sun
accompanied by that same old hum. How
can we end the sermon with a benediction
when we hear none? Nothing at all in diction’s
dicere. That unruly dicere. That dousing digit’s
dicere dicere dicere that points to a place
we can’t know.
So.
So, there’s little left to say to speak. The voice is weak like wings
resting at some cut
jut mountain point.
Little bird, don’t you know?
Soon we’ll be nothing at all.
Matthew Minicucci is the author of two collections of poetry: Small Gods (New Issues Press, 2016) and Translation (Kent State University Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, Oregon Humanities, The Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review.
A PASTORAL TOPOGRAPHY by W. J. Herbert
Above her bed, she hung a lithograph
of clouds,
or was it icebergs? –
milk puddled on an azure plate, cotton
in a Sea Island field.
She imagined lambs
in the Eden above us
blessing what was left of her life
and wanted to touch each one,
but I said:
Stop pretending.
In the end, she pointed:
keep this picture, so I hung it
on my stairway wall. If I tilt my head,
its ovals float in a heaven of ice
or air
that lightens as I climb, as if
breezes rising
to the airborne plain
of another place
are lifting me with them and, soon,
I’ll become as light
as she did that day,
between the time I closed my eyes
to escape her labored breathing –
and the moment after.
W. J. Herbert’s poetry and prose have appeared in AGNI Online, Boulevard, Southwest Review, The Montserrat Review, and The Best American Poetry 2017.
AFTERBIRTH by Rimas Uzgiris
It’s 9 AM blue
sky December
cold my son
was born this day
at night
in bright star breath
while I
now bleary-eyed
dazed like
the drunk
I will never be
again
drag a razor
slowly
over the grass
on the grave
of my face.
Rimas Uzgiris’ poetry and translations have appeared in Barrow Street, AGNI, Atlanta Review, The Iowa Review, and Vilnius Review.
AFTERLIFE by Anne Pitkin
Botswana, Okavango Delta
Jacanas stepped leaf to leaf. Hippos dozed,
barely visible in glare.
If you fall out, our guide said
They will kill you. Two women, marriages capsized,
we’d blown our savings on this trip.
We’d do anything, thrilled
by the sudden appearance of a crocodile
like a log against the bank, size of two canoes, thrilled
by the Malachite Kingfishers tipping one reed after another,
close enough to touch, to draw the gaze
from the dangerous magnificent
to the minuscule – red beak and breast, white collar,
under its bluer-than-heaven cloak.
The low sunlight streamed into the river, sky and water
burning behind back-lit palms and rain trees,
a slow descent from fire to darker fire –
embers still glowing after we landed, still lighting
a silhouetted man in a mokoro poling along the bank
while a hippo’s Whump Whump called us out
into our broken-open world.
Anne Pitkin is the author of the poetry collection Winter Arguments (Ahadada Books, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, ONE, Cloudbank, Verse Daily, and Poetry Chicago.
A TASTE OF SWEETNESS by Michele Bombardier
I loved feeding my dying father,
rigging him upright,
cocooning him in pillows
tapping the spoon
soft against his lips, waiting
for his bird mouth to open,
tipping in the dab of lemon pudding.
I tell you, he never coughed once,
not like in the hospital.
But home in the rented bed
in the dining room, I tended him
and my hands knew exactly
how to wipe his mouth,
sponge his teeth with the foam toothette,
chapstick his cracked lips.
The time for words had passed
and my father, who did not speak
to me for years, blinked
as he reached for my hand
raising the spoon to his lips,
his hand I knew
from earliest memory as fist,
as slap, as rasp
as he pulled off his belt.
I fed him, I tell you,
like I fed my own babies,
the answer to my long wondering
what could happen
if fear left the house.
Michele Bombardier’s poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Poetry International Online, Raven Chronicles, Artemis Journal, and Atlanta Review.
COMING BACK by Elizabeth Langemak
When the nurse leaves, she leaves a package
of diapers erupting on the table. She leaves
a blue bulb and some shirts that hardly fit
over my hand, a yellow comb, and a sandwich
I could eat two of. She leaves the curtain
open, and I don’t care. She leaves with our blood,
and brings the long icepacks twisting like spines
in the crotch of my underwear, tiny crackers
in plastic, a handout on why the baby won’t sleep.
Sometimes she brings a new nurse, whose name
I forget, or a doctor who just takes a look. Everyone
leaves so they can return. Now, my body startles
and slowly turns back on its long walk toward home.
When it arrives, it will find its life smelling
like a stranger’s apartment. Daughter, I left
there this morning so we could come back.
Elizabeth Langemak’s poems have appeared in Colorado Review, AGNI Online, Beloit Poetry Journal, 32 Poems, and Best New Poets: Fifty Poems by Emerging Writers.
ON WATER, IN CHILDHOOD by Michael Lavers
How it would fall
and fill, and freeze and flow, or shimmer
or surround or slake; and how it heaved,
collapsed, cascaded, how it blazed, carving
the cold and high-duned beaches of my boyhood,
how it breathed, becoming less than air,
and breathed again and fell again, transparent
as a mirror, moving, still, the way
it slid and stirred beneath my uncle’s boat,
alive and writhing as it buoyed us,
diffusing fringe greens into rusty blues,
the whitecaps breaking on the sandstone bluffs,
the sudden fords, peninsulas, and shallows,
Margret’s Bay, the delta’s ventricles
and the chambered cave. And how one day I slipped
from stern and fell into a tar-black world
of it, unnoticed, taken in like water pouring
into water, panic fading fast
to feeling I had tarried long already
and could now clear space for its cold lull,
a rhythm whose faint edge touched everything,
its wake and welter and its noiseless pull,
and how that pull wasn’t pumped out of me
that day but stayed, and rises when I wade
into it, when I put it in my mouth,
whenever I am sick of shivering
or shore and wish for nothing more than to be
hushed and steadied, healed, held, dissolved.
Michael Lavers’ poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Crazyhorse, 32 Poems, and Best New Poets 2015.
MARRIAGE by Nicole Stellon O’Donnell
The rash of weddings at recess continued until Mrs. Provencher had
to give a talk. You are third graders. You cannot be married. Parents had
called to express concerns. The margarine tubs full of violets in your desk
were bouquets and the flower girls had carried them, stems pressed into
foil pilfered from the kitchen drawer. She can say what she wants, but you
are already married to Doug Massey, bound by asphalt promises over the
screech of the swings’ metal chains.
Nicole Stellon O’Donnell is the author of the poetry collection Steam Laundry (Boreal Books, 2012), and You Are No Longer in Trouble, forthcoming in 2019 from the Marie Alexander Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Zyzzyva, Bellingham Review, and Women’s Review of Books.
REFUGEE by Mark Wagenaar
the horse’s spirit dwells in its body
the way an eclipse burns in a pinholed matchbox
like the syllables inside a prayer
wind-shucked snow devils race across the snow
then a current ripples across the skin-shimmer
mane to hoof
& the horse organs – lung-bellows
& nine-pound heart
flatten as the body arrows across the field
toward the gate at the end of the field
open to the half-frozen river
only the head heart & hooves will be buried
if it was escape that brought you here
where will you go
if you are the lone glyph that the language
of vanishing has left behind
what will you sing
Mark Wagenaar is the author of the poetry collection The Body Distances: A Hundred Blackbirds Rising (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Southern Review, Field, Subtropics, and The Missouri Review.
WE ARE MANY PEOPLE SOME OKAY by Christopher Citro
Apparently you can rub your eyes too much –
since the doctor said to her yes you did and
here are drops and stop doing that. Part of me
thinks I’ll make my eyes look older pulling down
the corners which I do when I’ve been staring
too long thinking the thoughts behind my usual
thoughts which just amount to now what have I
done. When I ask you not to stand there watching
me spoon potatoes from the steamer it’s nothing
to do with you and I hope you believe that.
My mom is two inches tall and lives in one side
of my brain pressed between gray walls and she’s
pissed. I get approximately ten seconds to do a job
right and then the yells. I’m ten years old. I can’t
expect you to have noticed. It happens in an instant.
Then I grow back up again which means I try to
use my mouth to explain to you what’s happening
and it’s not your fault. I need you to understand
it’s not your fault. The sky full of clouds
like old snow in road ruts. They’re
clouds. They should never look that way.
Christopher Citro is the author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, and North American Review.
SHE TOLD ME HER MOTHER SLEPT WITH A SNUB-NOSED REVOLVER by Justin Hyde
my girlfriend
& her mom left
to take cans back
& get hotdogs
for dinner
i played a nascar game
on the x‑box
with her mom’s boyfriend
rodney told me
the bricklayer’s union
had been thin
but it’d pick up
in a month or two
he had big plans
to build a deck
out front
it was known
he beat
her mother
at the time
a bruise
was taking color
across her left cheek
the sleeves
of his flannel shirt
were rolled up
forearms
of a body builder
LOVE
tattooed
on the four fingers
of his right hand
their toilet
was busted
he went
to the neighbors
to take a shit
i walked back
into their bedroom
it was there
under the pillow
i swung out
the cylinder
chambers
were full
a garbage bag
was taped
over a cracked window
the headboard
was covered
in small pewter
unicorns
whaddya doin’
in mom’s room?
her four-year-old
half-sister
who had been sleeping
was standing
in the doorway
i wanted to see
the unicorns
i said
sliding the revolver
tight down my thigh
back
under the pillow
this is her favorite
she grabbed one
held it out
in her palm
there was
a deep groove
worn
into its side
she showed me
how her mother
rubbed it
back & forth
with her thumb
for good luck.
Justin Hyde has published a poem in The Iowa Review.
MY BROTHER’S FACE by Molly Tenenbaum
looks like a face in pain, but this is his resting face.
How can he bear it, here at Gate A2?
He looks like a man suffering in a painting, bearded man
with blade or nail, deathbed man, mouth
moaning from hell’s crowded pool.
His grim jaw could crack. He’s reading his book.
We’ve been to Berkeley, friends who love us,
we love them, we’re going home, love home,
keep saying “Kitties soon.” His face a dire block
like the day Mom died or like he will soon, as if just now
heard the doctor’s report. His no-hope eyes,
his face of I can’t bear it, face of I will break,
face of This is bearing it, actual news
two days later when five are killed on the bridge,
students at my school, just come from their countries,
had just said goodbye to their parents. How can
their parents bear it? And forty more injured.
At an all-campus meeting, said the e‑mail, “Counselors
and faith-based professionals will be on hand.”
“It is with heavy heart I bring this tragic news,”
said our president, and we centered ourselves
in his standing up, his suit and tie, his declarative
sentence. My school’s architecture is Brutalist –
by which we mean softened in fall orange-speckled green ivy,
and maples whistling their million pointy leaf-tips
on all the stairs and walks as we begin.
They haven’t announced the names.
My brother alone in his chair,
his shoes lumpy and big, the brutalist bones of his face,
large and square, gray beard to soften his cheeks.
Little brother who would eat only carrot sticks,
skinny boy brother older now than I
at my fluke stroke, brother, best teller
of jokes. His resting face of pain a house,
a house of cloud, expression from which
other expressions emerge and pass
like cloud shadows on mountains.
Like how, in the night, we know it’s raining:
The cat comes in wet. Wet are the faces
of some who received calls and some who did not.
What is the time and place?
It is before boarding.
We’re listening for our rows.
We’re anxious for room in the overhead
for our tender instruments, handcarved wood.
We tag behind MVP Gold, say “We’re with him.”
We want to be first. What is the time and place?
During the meeting at school:
“Our college community extends our support.”
I’d had to laugh at one bit on the news –
Last year the board removed the word
“community” from our name, but in this disaster
the announcer returned it. And here, our president’s voice
says it too. Last winter, though, I restrained myself
from Reply-All when he promoted it, proclaiming Seahawks Week.
Wear the blue shirts! Let the blue flags fly from all the office doors!
We’re a college, not a commercial.
What is a faith-based professional?
My brother and I are professionals. We’re alive.
What is the place and time?
His eyes are dark as mercy.
His shoes are clumsy.
If you saw someone with that face, you’d ask,
“Can I help?” “What?” he’d say. “I’m reading my book.”
Going home to where in two days the Duckmobile
will crush the bus. Where in two days the cat’s xray
will show a possible growth, but the radiologist will say,
“No, it’s just thickness and shadow.” Said a pedestrian
on the bridge, “It looked like war, the bodies everywhere.”
They took them to the nearest wide place,
Woodland Park Zoo, and sorted them there
for hospital, for home. To the cat,
my brother’s face, so high up, is a ghost,
and one human face like another, but she knows
his key in the door, that he’s home with his voice,
his breath, his lap, his tears of love raining down.
Molly Tenenbaum is the author of four poetry collections: Mytheria (Two Sylvias Press, 2017), The Cupboard Artist (Floating Bridge Press, 2012), Now (Bear Star Press, 2007), and By a Thread (Van West & Company, 2000). Her poems have appeared in Mississippi Review, New England Review, Poetry, Nimrod, and The Best American Poetry 1991.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS CAIN AND ABEL by Kate Partridge
after Jorie Graham
1
On the way to the field, one brother’s step
2
a little too light, the other’s burdened.
How does sin wait at the tent flap?
In a rough squat, ready to seize
3
or with its feet up, tapping its cigarette ash
into the soil. There are many ways
4
to wait, one brother thought, selecting
5
the place. There are many ways to give,
thought the other, eyes lingering along
the low stone wall marking the path.
6
The problem was too loud too quiet too nervous too presumptive.
One saw it in the other’s boots. The other saw it in the sheep
bleating reliably. They were good-looking sheep
7
fluffy and so on. Can one really be blamed
8
because the earth bears hard and rude forms?
9
Warted squash, carrots like elongated toes, the settling weight of pears.
Oh, they are beautiful, too. Among the most.
10
But might He not have needed a respite from the politics of fruit?
11
The sheep stood scattered in the field, repeating their little shouts.
Was it spring, with the miniatures standing beside their mothers
magnetically? Perhaps they had already gone off
12
in search of whatever else there is. The brothers
had almost reached the field.
Kate Partridge is the author of the poetry collection Ends of the Earth (University of Alaska Press, 2017), and the hybrid chapbooks Guide to Urban Reindeer (Essay Press, 2017) and Intended American Dictionary (MIEL Books, 2016).
OF MOUTH THIS HEAVENLY BODY by Felicia Zamora
Paint my tongue cerulean blue
& all that flows from open jaws
transforms into a field of stars
in illumination; how we bind; say
luminous dwarf, say my galaxy; how light
fools us; how in space, the hot of hot
burn blue; & every star a sun, every
ray a tongue; say black body of stars
in absorb of all; say electromagnetic
radiation as if to taste the blaze
of heaven; oh star, how you emit
back, swallow unbound & gift & gift,
you gift; oh celestial body in glow & so,
too, a mouth in deep open, in expose.
Felicia Zamora is the author of three poetry collections: Of Form & Gather (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), & in Open, Marvel (Parlor Press, 2017), and Instrument of Gaps (Slope Editions, 2017). Her poems have appeared in North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, and West Branch.
HUMAN TRAFFIC by Bruce Cohen
A filmmaker captures two migrating geese dying in midflight.
Most folks would prefer not to immigrate to another country
In the trunk of an El Camino.
The delivery nurse hands a man the next baby in the chain –
His wife will not be traveling incognito with him.
If one were to think about it, the concept of ice water is the epitome
Of extravagance,
The fragrance of a peach, unimpeachable.
Mittens make no sense in terms of finger-function.
Who hasn’t, at some hopeless point, read yesterday’s newspaper,
Refurbished yesterday’s newspaper into shoe insulation,
As a substitute for socks? As a kid I thought the train stationary –
Only the world moved. People duplicate
& hide spare house keys.
Two keys are necessary to destroy civilization, the atomic locks
Always more than an arm’s length apart so two separate people are required.
Yes, two people are needed to make love.
Only an anonymous one in the firing squad has the actual bullets.
Brand new citizens are attaching wheelchairs & bicycles to the front of public buses.
A plastic spoon, melting on the sidewalk,
Imitates the fundamental properties of its eatable ice cream cousin.
Most folks opt not to slurp coagulated soup off a filthy floor
Or bake their bread with sawdust rather than flour.
A man chooses to dogpaddle (never having learned to swim)
Through an ocean with his children on an impromptu raft rather
Than refurbish his bombed-out apartment.
A profound difference: between a kicked‑in door & a door kicked out.
THE RENTERS by Bruce Cohen
People who considered themselves people
In my family did not take slippers to heart.
Or matching pajama halves.
There was a garbage strike that summer (the city stank more than usual),
& on T.V.
“Unheard citizens” looted Sears & Roebuck for bigger televisions.
Lincoln sedans & cop cruisers were rocking horsed & torched.
You’re not going anywhere tonight.
I never got the latest
School clothes –
Only the unclaimed from my father’s dry cleaning establishment.
It was called an establishment
& it had a wooden cash register that stayed perpetually open.
Trust & Temptation,
A dialectic. After 90 days any abandoned garment
Became ours. Someone nudged me from the couch for the moon landing
But I just wanted to stay
Asleep. You’re not leaving this apartment
Till it’s over. As long as you’re going to the kitchen, can you make me a sandwich?
There were never arrangements of cut flowers in our house –
It wasn’t even a house.
And the only fruit was wax.
Even lampshades were protected/camouflaged
In clear plastic.
Curtains the color of Silly Putty, walls a morbid beige,
Conversations, with unplanned hesitations,
Interruptions & gaps, beiger still.
A series of paintings, (farm animals), horses primarily,
Nailed crooked on those walls, were paint-by-numbers.
Not literally, but basically – instead of talk,
We bantered dialogue from our favorite movies
In our strangers’ outfits.
Bruce Cohen is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently No Soap, Radio (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and Imminent Disappearances, Impossible Numbers & Panoramic X‑Rays (New Issues Press, 2015). His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review.
THE OAKS by Maxine Scates
The tornadoes split an old oak and took another
on my friend’s farm in Illinois. I think
of cutting down our oak because it’s bound
to fall in a storm taking the fence and smaller trees
some day. It is our last oak, the two on the road,
the one that wrapped around the corner of the house
all gone to the shifting waters of the aquifers
that ate their roots. But nothing ever happens the way
we think it will – one oak never fell but tipped,
caught by the branches of a fir one still summer day,
and I’ve forgotten until this moment that yesterday
I sank so slowly to my knees when I stepped
off the trail so a man and his young dog could pass
my dog and me. Some of the oaks in the meadow
went that way – laid down gently in a storm,
their outstretched branches holding candelabras
of snow, and since I’ve been reading Ovid everything
seems on its way to becoming something else. I think
of our neighbor June who held me when I was a child
and how I loved the tears she cried, a wordless,
watery dissolution which sometimes felt like both of us
were disappearing the way that water nymph
who tried to stop Pluto from taking Proserpina
did disappear after he stepped through her pool
to the underworld. She cried and cried, each human
feature falling away, until she lost her voice. I’ve never
known what made June so sad, or why her curtains
were closed to sunlight. I think of her on still winter
mornings when the sun comes up over the ridge
where the big oaks tilt to the pull of water we can’t see
as Skip runs through the tall grasses, his coat golden,
the grasses glittering, sheathed in hoarfrost.
Maxine Scates is the author of the poetry collection Undone (New Issues Press, 2011). She has published poems in The American Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review.
OYSTERS by Brian Barker
They will remind you of gray, phlegmatic tongues dozing in nacre caves, or gluey pellets dropped by underwater owls. But you will eat them anyway, alive, a bit of grit on the lips, like kissing the cobblestones of Atlantis. Rogue memories will
swim in the brine-sting of their liquor: spicy cucumbers full of rain, the green glow of kelp steeping in vodka. The clack of empties, bell buoys, lost dinghies washed up on a glacier. They will remind you of sodden bulbs from which mysterious sea tulips sprout. You will eat them to be made whole again – your bellies full of blindness, of moonlight drained from a beggar’s cup.
Brian Barker is the author of The Black Ocean (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011) and The Animal Gospels (Tupelo Press, 2006). His poems have appeared in Blackbird, Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, Ploughshares, and Pleiades.
THE SMALL LIGHT by John Straley
I am an old man
riding a green bicycle
through the dark morning,
the small light
on the handlebars chipping
away at the gloom,
the black road ahead
rattling under
these feeble, round tires.
Somewhere out there
a drunk clambers into his car
and wheels out onto the road
heedless and humming
the love song he put on the jukebox
his cigarette’s ash dangerously long.
He may kill me.
He may not.
There is no right and wrong of it:
no road, no love song
no green bicycle
and no nature to ride it through.
John Straley is the author of ten crime novels; two collections of haiku, 100 Poems of Spring and 100 Poems of Summer, published 2016 and 2017 respectively by Shorefast Editions; and the poetry collection The Rising and the Rain (University of Alaska Press, 2008).
GIFTS OF THE MAGI by G. C. Waldrep
Winter has come for me in its passion of oxygen, with its blue hammer.
The animals go right on giving birth. I will not personify love
in the house of my fathers, who were men. I will not accompany the children to the
creche. The moon’s blight creeps towards the page,
where a nurse sleeps. Don’t wake her into the company of strangers,
their dry meats & allegiances. I am the garment love lifted
from its white flock. Frost threads the body’s prison like a frigid needle.
What is love’s name for all that love disdains? (I lie shivering
in open country, my fathers heavy like horses in their blind graves.)
I write this from the desert, in the best tradition. You may buy it as a basket,
carry it through winter’s eye & compact breath. This is history,
the guards sing to me, now from beneath the river, now from my own
narrow bed. It is almost possible to forget what the soul said,
upon its departure. How it was dressed, what it wore in its elegant hair.
G. C. Waldrep’s most recent poetry collections are Testament and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, both from BOA Editions in 2015 and 2011 respectively. His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper’s, Tin House, and The Best American Poetry 2010.
DEAR, WE ARE NOT by Dina Hardy
unlike defining something by what it’s not – unlike
the second stop going west. Not unlike two people on
a country road next to a tree, next to evening.
Not white-framed glasses, not unlike skydiving
goggles. We build civilizations in gardens & the true
geography of light.
We’re on the road. Not unlike a movie where it’s not
like no one moves. The state of bliss & limbo.
Don’t unlet me, Dear. that would mean the end of
longing, the end of the world. We sail our ships
around shifting luggage, language not unlike each
other. We unchain ourselves, don’t unchange
departures, & in returns – we unmake history.
Unagain could be yesterday, could be tomorrow, – or
nothing like now. Nothing’s in order.
The low bass of the train’s wheels, the high pitch of a
sail. I climb onto the hood of a piano, stomp on keys,
& sing. My tongue breaks. To unsentence is to travel
in all directions at once.
Dina Hardy’s poems appear in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, Ink Brick, Pangyrus, and Prelude.
AUBADE by Blas Falconer
Having already looked upon her in the bed where
she slept or did not sleep, now, day and night, and
said all he’d come so far to tell her, he – the brute,
crass and proud – stood before the large window,
his back to them all, looking out onto the woods
and, without turning, raised his hand to the
footsteps coming toward him, the arm reaching
out, to the mouth about to speak and the words
not yet uttered, to the keys, the watch, the wallet
on the table, and the packed bag at the door, to the
room, the house, the foundation on which it stood,
and to the car idling in the street, the street itself,
to the grass in the field, and the path, the path
leading to the pond where, once, he watched the
beautiful girls splash in summer, and to the pond,
both the water and the fish inside skimming the
bottom, and to the great maples and the wind
blowing through them, to the neighbors and theirs
and theirs, on and on, stirring, eyes about to open,
to the light spreading on their faces, the first deep
breath of the day and what joy or misery, he
supposed waited for them, as if to say, Stop, Stop,
to the world, and it would.
GESTURE by Blas Falconer
You stretched your hand
across the table and
said something I couldn’t hear
over the clatter of forks
and plates, the restaurant’s
dumb chatter, and
though the body, once
thrown to the ground
bruised and bleeding for
what it wanted, has
a memory of its own,
how the policemen laughed
later, the body also speaks
its own language, your
hand open before me
and the world
as if to say,
I cannot save you,
but held something
like happiness in it.
A LOVE POEM by Blas Falconer
I fell asleep to the sound of water moving in the dark.
In the morning, the river, what was left of the snow, filled the window in
my hotel room, rushing faster than I’d imagined.
To be here, among the foothills, and not there was like wanting, all at
once, to hold the same stone in each hand.
And all at once, there was a center where there hadn’t been, the way there
seems a center in a field where crows roost in winter.
Call it clarity, or the footing a fisherman finds on the bank, whipping his
line in the air above his head.
What I wanted was not possible: After the birds have gone, the great nests
of leaves and limbs high among leaves and limbs.
He catches the fish he’s wanted all day, pulls the hook from its mouth, and
lets it go.
Which I must remember and remember to tell you.
Blas Falconer is the author of three collections of poetry: Forgive the Body This Failure and The Foundling Wheel (both from Four Way Books, 2018 and 2012 respectively), and A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press, 2006).
TRUST by Jeanne Murray Walker
“Chlorophyll. . . has a so‑called green gap, because it cannot use this part of the color spectrum. . . it has to reflect it back, unused. . . that’s why almost all plants look green.”
– The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben
As if we’re in a plane, spinning nose over tail over nose, sprung
loose in sky, gripping our flimsy armrests, we veer toward
a crack‑up. As if. The falling happens inside us, separate
from one another now. No poem can save us. I lie on our lawn,
look up through blue air, where clouds float like water lilies.
I could be at the bottom of a Minnesota lake. Above, a few leaves
whirl on trees, shiny as my father’s lures. The leaves must trust
their branches to hold them, trust the sun, that generous pitcher
to keep pouring light through them. Inside leaves, factories
too small to see turn sunlight into maple. I want to follow them
into trust, but maybe I have seen too much. I sit immobile
as a lawn ornament, as leaves fling their green to me. Here, take
what we can’t use. It’s free. I want to believe we have not
been left comfortless. Look how green fills us with peace,
and I can’t tell where it comes from: the trees or my own eyes.
TEXT MESSAGE: I’M SORRY, I HONESTLY TRIED TO KEEP OUR APPOINTMENT by Jeanne Murray Walker
but I was diverted by orange cones
funneling traffic to a country lane and
couldn’t keep myself from staring into
the deep wound in the earth, slashed by
a backhoe’s brutal teeth.
The thing
idled smugly, watching us pass, one
by one before it, as if judging women
at a beauty pageant.
I smelled the warm
dirt, heard the rough boulders cry out
softly as mewling kittens from the lacerated earth.
Believe me, I know I heard them:
hurt and broken for years beneath the asphalt,
our cars hurtling over their backs
to our appointments
and I thought about
our speed, our tendency to forget,
even in dreams, the earth.
I remembered
you freeing a stream from trash, tossing
perch back, planting maples. How your
blue eyes reflect the weather.
Please forgive me
for swerving to this field. I’m here for no
reason, really, looking at a bright swath of sunlight
creeping across the weedy pasture. Come
join me. We can watch a bat sleep safely
in the spruce, as if some expert had folded
her wings as tightly as a cinched umbrella.
Jeanne Murray Walker is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poems (WordFarm Press). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, The Hudson Review, and The Best American Poetry 2009.
ECLIPSE by Alyse Knorr
A baby grabs the pinhole sun and laughs.
Telescopes scatter the lawn – some to show the
flares, others the spots. The sky has never felt so
flattered. The astronomer
can’t answer our questions because he doesn’t
study objects as small as the sun. We could be
blinded, but we aren’t. Today we all wear masks
we can see, and when
the light turns greener and colder we begin to
understand ourselves as thumbprint reflections
cast on a cardboard curtain.
Alyse Knorr is the author of three poetry collections: Mega-City Redux (Green Mountains Review, 2017), Copper Mother (Switchback Books, 2016), and Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books, 2013); and two poetry chapbooks, Epithalamia (Horse Less Press, 2015) and Alternates (dancing girl press, 2014).
LAUDS by Erin Coughlin Hollowell
I am part or particle of God.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I spoke to darkness. I spoke to the dancing couple, two planets conjoined
whirling above mountains until they dipped behind the bench. I spoke
to a blush and brightness that kindled along the rim and then traveled.
Am this. Am this flesh on this bone scaffolding. Am this growl,
this run of consonants without reason. Am this way and then
that way. Am this frost-ridden air smoking from my lungs.
Part of the day broke. Part of the story broke. Part of what
humanity fashioned itself as broke. Part of a blue plate
dropped on the floor, broke into so many pieces, it could
not be mended.
Or used again. Or used the way a young woman uses
her hips. Or used the way an older woman uses
the mirror which has become her reckoning.
Particle of the future. Particles of star dust
on the top of the refrigerator, I write my name in it. Particles
of light which are simultaneously waves. Particle of a particular
nature, which is me, which was me. Particle of dawn.
Of the way each day becomes itself, each sky a sudden
parachute of light. Of refraction and reflection. Of the bay
holding fire from the sky, holding blankness like a mirror.
Of my gain. Of my loss.
God who doesn’t ride a chariot. God who doesn’t explain
why some live and some die. God who says we all die, even
God. God who speaks to me from the dark sky or what was
the dark sky that is now filled with every size of flame.
Erin Coughlin Hollowell is the author of two poetry collections, Every Atom and Pause, Traveler, both from Boreal Books in 2018 and 2013 respectively. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Talking River Review, Red Wheelbarrow, Sugar House Review, and Cutthroat Magazine.
SLURRY SPILL by William Kelley Woolfit
near Inez, Kentucky
It could seem like mercy, like good fortune,
a passing over: that when the slurry
breaks the waste pond’s bottom, it oozes down
two creeks, not one, divides itself between
Coldwater Fork and Wolf Creek, doesn’t rise
very high. Dead fish, but no people died.
Like good luck, that the slurry – three hundred
million gallons, thick as pitch, a dark
dirty slop of mud, mercury, arsenic,
debris that’s left after the prep plant scrubs
its surfeit of coal – that the slurry comes
into town not as flash flood, grinding surge,
but as low ripples, a foul gummy soup.
The thickest chocolate shake, people say.
Smells like hydraulic. A slow-moving black
smothering. Children throw rocks at the creek,
busted cement bricks, old tires, just to find
what else will float. Around here, you don’t
have to be Jesus to walk on water.
CHARLIE LOUVIN SINGS THE HARMONY PARTS by William Kelley Woolfit
Had to load syrup buckets before sun‑up, load the truck
your father drove to Chattanooga. Had to pick okra
with your brother, stomp on tomato worms. Had to cut
sorghum stalks with long knives, feed the grinders,
boil the scummy green juice. Had to do as your father said,
still he might pound you black and blue with a chair leg,
a broomstick, a width of willow. Had to see your brother
whipped more than you, find him back under the porch
cowering in the dirt. Had to wear the shirts
your mother sewed from guano sacks, her singing
sacred harp, singing Mary of the Wild Moor. Had to pick
cotton until dark, go to bed with your hands torn up,
wake with petals of blood on your sheets.
You had to quit that farm, leave Sand Mountain.
Had to follow your brother to the city, work first shift
in the hosiery mill, a spool boy, a ribbon runner,
coughing up lint. Had to sing Hole in the Sea, had to
win the talent show, your brother’s tenor a high cloud,
your harmony dipping low. Had to sing at county fairs,
ice cream suppers, pool halls. Then you changed parts
with him when the feeling came over you, a warm shiver,
a voice like his but coming from you, switching mid-verse
or mid-word, you both felt it, both knew. All that labor,
yours, your brother’s, hands full of cotton, of sorghum,
that worn-out dirt, rough father, call-to‑Jesus mother,
now some of your brother was in you.
William Kelley Woolfit is the author of the poetry collections Charles of the Desert (Paraclete Press, 2016) and Beauty Strip (Texas Review Press, 2014). His work has appeared in Tin House, The Threepenny Review, AGNI, Gettysburg Review, and Poetry International.