Poetry
ANTICIPATE GUNSHOTS IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE PLAY by Karen Skolfield
Real gunshots? My son asks.
I say, just the sound.
Well that will be pretty loud, he says.
When’s the last time you heard gunshots? I ask.
This morning, he says.
Suddenly I remember the little pop pop
during his soccer game.
From the rifle range, I say.
I almost couldn’t play, he says, it was so loud.
Although in truth
it had sounded like snapping twigs,
an odd atmospheric moment
funneled our way. Still air
and our boys in gray jostling
for the ball against Granby’s boys in blue.
The blue and gray part was not
a thing I’d think of until the play,
and those gunshots, in the distance.
Will the sound bother you? I ask.
Mom, it’s Les Mis, he says,
but it will be loud, believe me.
You know I was in the military, I say.
The lights have dimmed and if his eyes
are rolling I can’t see them.
He leans over, wants to tell me
something but the curtains
have parted to the cruelty
of guards, the singing of men
in chains.
Karen Skolfield is the author of the poetry collection Frost in the Low Areas (Zone 3 Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, 32 Poems, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and Boulevard.
FOUR POEMS FROM ‘LIKE NEBRASKA’ by Sophie Klahr
~
He fades like the white animal
Glimpsed only once
In the wildrye and gone,
His customary turning like a sky
That looks like rain but does not rain.
The kid comes down the hill,
Lifts a clot of dirt to their mouth and
The workers who are watching don’t
Stop the kid. In some mythologies,
This act would make the kid a god:
A universe held on a tongue.
It is mosquito hour, thin songs
Visiting each body they find
like a violin’s sharpened
Lift at the end of a story –
The air is full of strings.
There is dirt in his cut knuckle,
Cheap beer on the table,
The kitchen lit by a single bulb
And workers laughing how and where
They’ll go when harvest ends.
I am going to sleep, he says.
Leaves his glass and climbs in the dark
Back to the barn’s forecastle, to his bed
Where the walls seem to luff in the wind.
~
She reels like a cradle
Made of a wide dirt road
and two fields of corn
The road rides between;
Landscape-reaching-never-touching,
The fields watching one another.
A type of vertigo, looking at all that sky.
Her arm out the passenger’s window
Wind-braced, fingertips
Skimming the height of the crops.
Again heat-dumb, they slip away
into the quarry, and again, damp,
Slip back into his car the color of sky
A child would choose for a sky.
Something is dead in the road,
Open to whatever after life might be.
Each time they pass, the dashed body
More itself than what it had been.
Her hand at the nape of his neck
Until he shifts, imperceptibly, away.
~
He wanders like a record
Skips – an idea
With a dropped stitch.
The belly of the barn yawns
Like a ship’s hold in the dim light
Let in by the open door. He is
Searching for a tool the farmer’s
Waved him towards, remembering
The squirrel he shot once,
How it fell
More like a bird – all that soft work.
After September, he has
No plans. Each day he thinks
He’ll make a plan. Almost
The end now of September.
A train comes through the county
Only at night or at least
He hears it only at night.
Flying ants have come
To the kitchen this morning.
They stream upwards
On the windows
Like wrong black rain.
~
She wakes like a crow
Landing in a dry pasture –
The cattle only lift their eyes.
A surprise, to have slept so long:
Boots still tied,
A cat-nap from the heat
Rolled into dusk.
Caught in the window frame,
A moth berates itself
Like a nervous thief.
The insect singing thickens
After sunset, cut grass
Laid in heaps still
Intimate with the uncut grass.
The scent of roasting sausages
Drapes itself along a stairwell.
Somewhere tomorrow is her crowbar,
Lath waiting to be torn.
Somewhere a woman is calling out
From a porch-light’s edge,
Waiting for her boys to come home.
Sophie Klahr is the author of the poetry collection Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016) and the chapbook ______ Versus Recovery (Pilot Books, 2007). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Blackbird, and AGNI.
LATE SUMMER ODE
Look, our little tree has taken root,
presents its fruit: thirty-six or -seven
ombre ways to cherry. Alone (and mute)
in the garden I garden, alone in
the garden, I crawl like a slow fly
over these books, I carry something out-
sized, something heavy and “literary”,
absurd and third, like an “act”, like an overburdened ant,
alone in the garden, I Laevsky
my catalogue (un‑)raisonné. I am so
Chekhovian: old sweater over old
underwear, shoddy, woolen, unkempt of
Ukrainian face, legs, hair, in the half-
kept tender-ly un(der) tended garden.
Like this: Like this, all summer, dishabille,
dishabille, at the table, in ruth’s chair,
undistracted, able – yet – lacking act-
ion, thus, driven to distraction: (like this,
like this, I move to‑ward: the form of form.)
something something something AND: o! there
’s our new wasp’s nest – good for one summer
only. All the rest the rest repeating
repeating: the sweet pea: revenant, re-
established shooting its florescence up
my late vacant trellis: REPEATING:
tender still and purple, purple. Some buds
to flower, some to leaf, from shade to sun
and sun to shade in search of a relief
that never comes: in my Vishnevyi Sad,
sad, alone, just – holding – - on: alea-
tory, asinine, like some old world pass-
erine, perched and panicked. and common.
common, the visitors come, and, (to some)
relief, the visitors go, altricial,
they say-sing, sing-said their made up songs:
Michaela came and told her story: I
can’t stay in the house now that Grandpa wants
to have sex with me. Now that he can’t re-
cognize me. Thinks I’m my dead grandmother
who raised me. She’s twenty
seven, and met her boy-friend
on-line but, shhhhhh, she’s already done
with him. She does not get along with
her mother. She says her little sister
is the shit: on fleek, but complains that
her 6th grade graduation eclipsed her
masters’ celebration. Me and Ruby
and Lyana and I listen. We watch
her whip, we watch her nae nae. Ruby
and Lyana stare at their more immedi-
ate future. Fletcher and his brother
arrive. They brought oysters. But right now,
right away they are hungry, hungry. They
eat the kale salad, the homemade bread,
the peach pie I baked, the Caprese
I made, wash it down with beer, white white,
Rosé, Rosé. They are from Juneau,
New Zealand, and Maine, because Richard’s mother
gave him away when she was twenty
six or seven. Thirty or forty years later
he found his family. Now she’s dead.
I can’t understand a lot of what
’e ’aid: I can’t see the resemblance, but,
they are, some version of the same. Ruby’s here,
she’s fourteen, here to visit her big-faced
bloated father. Ruby’s shorts are very short. Her mother
is breaking up with her young
hedge-fund husband – oh wait – no she’s not.
Ken was here a time or two, he’s very
thoughtful, he brought halibut, he brought
“The Moose”, so then I spent a lot of time
with, yes, again, Cal and Elizabeth.
I whispered this poem to herself. Pre-
cipitate and pragmatical. No.
Anomic and ominous. Yes. Auto-
nymous. Jonathan visited once. He
took an Instagram of the grapefruits’
orange squeezed rounds repeating round the pink
cutting board. Vodka. Vodka. Although we
hung out last summer, and I had wanted
to hang out more, (I did, it’s true,/“he liked
you, then he changed his mind”) (and couldn’t get
it up) he now he lives with a pretty young
fat life coach and I was, i admit, a little bored.
Then Kary came. She’s my Bishop, I’
m her Lowell. She magicked under
the tree with the green vine flowering
yellow from a red hanging pot round the blue
hula hoop; but she’s starting to fade.
She’s in constant chronic pain. She still tries
to groom it and tattoo it. Yeah, what are
poems and diaries for? Her young husband
read them the time before, last time she was
here, loves her and treats her well (despite the
un-unreversed vasectomy she sold
him from abroad). Yes, yes, yes. yes, the
visitors came, and the visitors went.
(and everyone I asked to leave – has left)
Back to my sole, my own alone: i proceed
by light, by shadow, by mirror
and by picture window: ow! and oh! and if
i write letters to my old lovers, I write(s) to them
from over there.
(Dear J, Dear K, Dear L, Dear M, Dear
N(!): remember the sex in L.A.? re-
member the times in lakes tahoe and
cuomo? remember that time in cassis,
in paris, in marseille?)
over here (dear Ch, Dear Jh, dear Ba), (in-
versely and in a lower key), it’s all
less clear, like something other than a
painting and a painting: a flowering
orchard. a kettle of trees. under which
i self -protest, -process, and -recede. to‑
ward an un-impaired despair. in a
picture bed! and on a picture chair! in
the garden, in the garden, (deceiving
elf!,) my passions watered, i moderate
my sorrow, by measure, number, and
by wait.
(from person to idea and
idea to gate)
and yeah . . . yeah, that WAS woodthrush. and that was night-
gale, and that was Williams, (that was ashbery!?!) and that was Keats
(and that was some fine BULLSHIT) like a bird
it all repeats repeats repeats
until the mating’s done. like this, like this:
i(t) moved from sun to shade and shade to sun:
it all happened, it all happened
i(t all) ripened, gladdened, slackened, saddened
and it happened the same way nothing happens
all of a sudden – alone in a garden –
AFTER RILKE by Olena Kalytiak Davis
Dude, it is so done. Though Summer went on and on.
Now the shadows lengthen, now the wind spins. Gone.
Let the berries blacken. Let the fruit, over-
ripe, clot slacken rot.
Sober-up!
Still asking for – what? For more? Just two more
Hippocrene Days? Nothing stays,
nothing stays.
Too late to cove.
Too late to love.
Stay up read late rove stoned
through the now, the fast
raving leaves. Unravelling, last,
alone.
Olena Kalytiak Davis is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). Her second book, shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities (Tin House Books, 2003), was republished by Copper Canyon Press in 2014. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Tin House, Poetry Northwest, FIELD, and in multiple editions of The Best American Poetry (including in 2016, featuring a poem that initially appeared in AQR). Davis is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review.
MADAME BOVARY by Virginia Konchan
An erasure of Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis
Look at those pretty daisies. Oracles enough
for any village girl who happens to be in love.
Why rant against the passions? Aren’t they the only
beautiful thing on earth, the source of heroism,
enthusiasm, poetry, music, the arts?
How bored I am! How bored I am!
A surgeon’s caresses are like the oil with which
he greases his scalpel. When I lost my poor dear
late lamented, I would go into the fields to be all alone;
I would fling myself down under a tree, I would weep.
He liked hard cider, a rare leg of lamb, glorias well beaten.
She would think of all the wild emotions, unknown to her.
Why hadn’t she seized that happiness when it was offered?
She would end by asking him to give her some tonic
for her health, and a little more love.
Would this misery last forever?
She grew pale and had palpitations of the heart.
At other times, burning hotly with that secret flame,
she would open her window, breathe in the cold air,
and, looking at the stars, long for princely loves.
You’re ungodly! You have no religion!
A convulsion flung her back on the mattress.
Here I am, I’m yours.
MUTA CUPIDO by Virginia Konchan
Go ahead, erase the source text.
My only desire: to feel the sun,
that pimp, on my etiolated form.
I am famished. I understand the face
value of beauty, but that doesn’t stop me
from dying for it. O killdeer, unsex me.
Invent an allegory for restitution, peace.
Yes, I crashed into a retention wall,
seeking news of you. I can’t believe
I survived. If death is a time warp,
what is life? This is forgiveness, redacted.
This is a surge of syllables, dangling
from my mouth. I was born to deadhead
the peonies. I was born, like medieval art,
to degrade. Domini, domini, I chose breadth
over depth. I chose to offer nothing remedial
or heartwarming to the world. Mary stands still,
benign in blue, plastic arms outstretched.
Or is that polyurethane? Her dress flares
at the knee, as if prepared for a Roman holiday.
I have no sense of what this means to you,
save one lit glimpse of how we live,
a more expansive sense in whom.
I am an atheist who says her prayers,
a little world made cunningly,
a parcel of vain strivings, tied.
I am a poor nun of perpetual adoration
who confuses streetlamps for the moon.
CENTO (“The war machines sigh”) by Virginia Konchan
The war machines sigh with spent bodies,
and the future is a ghost we must embody,
make alive. Am I lost or have I been lifted?
What I know of pleasure I’ve learned only
while putting my clothes back on.
The socioeconomic as seriocomic,
security camera disguised as birdhouse.
The steady approach of entropy, it’ll break your heart.
I lived with a man who said you fucked up your own life.
How were we to practice cruelty if not with virtue?
Like the belts our fathers whipped us with,
not to hurt us but to make sure we remembered.
The grass has been replaced with AstroTurf.
Sing, Muse, of the disappearing world.
Meanwhile I had a passion for cartography.
Not leaving, just coloring the maps.
Never say that I was false at heart!
Director must direct and make decisions.
Your shadow leaves a trench in the pavement,
and no one listens when I speak your name.
I am drawn to the window as if it were a fire.
My hand in yours – blue flame.
CENTO (“They promised me a silence”) by Virginia Konchan
They promised me a silence
between trance & logic.
Je pense, donc je suis.
If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciations to the eye:
if from time to time I long to turn
like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a simple ear of grain,
it is only a dream of grass blowing
east against the source of the sun.
Boot-black night, halogen hum:
you’re the kind who stands still
in front of awful things and squints.
The mind is always elsewhere.
Whose merciful hands, then,
could bind us to our longing?
There is no distinction between
ideology and image. I wanted
to give you something for your pain.
I’ve been waiting for a guide – Dante,
Jesus Christ, anyone – to show a path
through these dark streets. Nothing
is more malleable than a moment.
So, experience. So, the circus tent.
Sometimes the mythologies
of a city are true.
Esperanto of soft keening,
deep green parliament
of delectable branches:
I move toward the dark frigate
of ever-demanding death.
Your beauty is now up to you.
Virginia Konchan is the author of the poetry collections The End of Spectacle (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2018) and Vox Populi (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Western Humanities Review, Shenandoah, and The New Yorker.
QUONDAM HYSTERESIS by Joan Kane
is it the clavicle absent
the sun a hung thing
the horse hooves they cannot find
purchase on ice
a hinge its red unhealing sore
just over the earth’s arc
and then again gone
a confusion of blood done
again into blood
carved light in the vise grip
walrus tusk scrap and then gone
again on Front St a cop makes an arrest
mindless to the widening dilation
the compact man gone limp
arm drifted downward
she with forgotten labors foregoes
the grieved grave
the ward a cheap
fluorescence the daughter they collapse
old house disused rock peaks
sea-roused alike we shall bury
be buried but to poise a seal
oil globule upon caribou-marrow broth
and postpone from blow to moment
that which set me down long ago
Joan Kane’s poetry collections include Sublingual (Finishing Line Press, 2018), Milk Black Carbon (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), The Straits (Voices from the American Land, 2015), Hyperboreal (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), and The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife (North Shore Press, 2009 and reprinted by the University of Alaska Press, 2012). Kane’s poetry has appeared in anthologies including The Best American Poetry, 2015 (featuring a poem which initially appeared in AQR).
SELF-PORTRAIT AS MASTODON REMAINS by Christina Olson
the skull has been punched once twice
eleven thousand years later, the paleontologist
fits another tusk into the holes & sees
what damage the mouth can wreak
once upon an epoch, one mastodon bleeds out
& another one has a killer toothache
mastodon, no one ever told you that a hairy coat
hides all the blood or that the head
weeps from any hole it sees fit to
when your bones are resettled in the flood
do not mourn the scattering of jaw from rib
& hasn’t the heart always begged free of the tongue
when they find what remains of your mouth, smile
finally revealed despite the blue effort of glacier
mastodon: the words breast + tooth in Greek
that was my last kiss my best kiss
Christina Olson’s most recent poetry collection is Terminal Human Velocity (Stillhouse Press, 2017). Her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Arts and Letters, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and Brevity.
KINGFISHER by Stuart Dybek
Over a distance that only the velocity of memory
makes possible to cross he hears the howl still cloaked
in chimney smoke diffuse into wavelets that slosh
through the tangled mangroves where rookeries rest.
The night swirl settles into a fish-scale sequined funk
of salt marsh. On a shadow shore, the pines that stand
accused as illegals by the native palms sough
in a darkness of muted trumpet vines and red-flowering
trees. He can hear the birds impatient for light.
Sing, kingfisher, if your harsh rattle can pass for song.
I want night to be over, too. If like a prayer your song
had words, then in murmured unison I’d pray
to rise from this tangle of deceit, grateful for flight,
with an innocent, ravenous cry.
THE SHORE by Stuart Dybek
But for the brightness, the shore would be the horizon by now.
The farther from it, the farther from whom he’s become. That trick of
distance happened once before. Back then, it was a city he was leaving.
It recedes into light until the caw of a seabird is what’s left of an ocean. When
he emerges from the glare he speaks as if there are two of them.
“We’re here.”
In a field of sunflowers gone to seed, where morning is a thunderstorm of
dew caught in the nets of golden spiders.
On a sundial, if seen from above, noon appears as crow shadows revolving
counterclockwise around the strawman floating face down on the surface of corn.
At dusk the burnished, unreaped hay flickers at the splash back of a fish.
Were there depths, they’d glow up like coals of aquamarine.
In the night, standing beside the scent of water, the vast, dark landscape
becomes the shoreline of a bluegill pond.
Stuart Dybek is the author of two collections of poems: Streets in Their Own Ink (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006) and Brass Knuckles (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979). He is also the author of six collections of fiction, the most recent of which is The Start of Something: The Selected Stories of Stuart Dybek (Vintage, 2017). His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, Tin House, and Ploughshares. Dybek is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review.
HANDPRINTS ON A PAPER LANTERN by Dan Rosenberg
for my son
What’s in the sky? Airplanes, rockets,
the moon, he says. A finished list.
He answers for always, not for now.
His shoes illuminate the ground.
The moon is there, yes, I say,
but the sun’s too busy to let us see it.
He’s like rogue mint, unafraid of weather.
Learning the world through its cracks.
Just do what water does, I say,
reaching for something inside him.
He sees no birdseed left in the brown
clay bowl. What else gets hungry, I say.
The clouds draw their curtain. An eye,
he says. It’s closed, I say. Open it, he says.
Dan Rosenberg is the author of the poetry collections cadabra (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015) and The Crushing Organ (Dream Horse Press, 2012). He has also published two chapbooks, A Thread of Hands (Tilt Press, 2010) and Thigh’s Hollow (Omnidawn, 2015).
TELESCOPE STILTS by Kim Farrar
you will go on telescope stilts
far away into the certain darkness
– Zbigniew Herbert
I finally grasped the ghostly nature of stars –
the light travels long after the core has collapsed.
I turned our telescopes to the ground.
The universe, such a disappointment, mostly empty space.
I needed some height, some perspective.
I re-fashioned our brass companions as stilts.
Satisfaction in the twist and click as each cylinder
locked into place for the last time.
It was good – the small problems to solve.
The lens caps became rubber skids. Old switch-plates
were strapped to the focus knobs as footholds.
I felt better on my stilts, lifting each foot
with its heavy weight, learning to balance.
My center of gravity was off-kilter, pivoting
left and right, forward and back.
I learned to scissor-step with some grace.
I ventured out again,
above the clamor and the demanding eye-contact.
Even our mother understood.
How could I walk around like you were alive?
Kim Farrar is the author of two chapbooks published by Finishing Line Press: The Brief Clear (2015) and The Familiar (2011). Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, RHINO, and Salamander.
NATURE MORTE by Henry Hart
The obit said Louie racked up six trophies as a Marine
sharpshooter and 47 kills as a sniper in Iraq. It said nothing
about how he jack-knifed heads off catfish and cast them
on a dare-devil’s treble hooks in the cow pond, nothing
about how he reeled in a snapper the size of an M1 helmet,
and ordered me to carry it to his basement in a garbage can,
nothing about how he fed it all summer with blue jays
shot with BBs and frogs sprayed with gas and “cooked.”
Walking home from the bus on the first day of ninth grade,
he bragged he’d blown off the snapper’s head with an M80,
boiled it for soup, varnished the shell and nailed it
above the American flag on his bedroom wall.
The last time I stopped at his house, he picked the lock
on his father’s gun case, told me to follow him to the pond
to hunt “the mother of all snappers” sunning in hay.
Instead, he shoved the muzzle of his father’s shotgun
into cow dung, slipped in a shell, and pulled the trigger.
Instead, birdshot split the barrel, cratering mud by our feet.
The obit called him a war hero. It said nothing
about how his lips trembled when he hurled the gun
toward the pond’s algae, nothing about what his father did
when he found the barrel rusting under lily pads
Henry Hart has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Familiar Ghosts (Orchises, 2014). He is also the author of two biographies: Wiley-Blackwell published his The Life of Robert Frost: A Critical Biography in 2017 and Picador published James Dickey: The World as a Lie in 2001. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry.
DISTRIBUTION by Heather Christle
If it’s not one thing
it’s another different
thing
It’s all beads/
wands/hair
Or?
It’s night and the future
isn’t open
If it’s not
a car it’s a surgeon
It’s another smaller car
It’s all day wanting
you slowly
It’s pinning
oneself to one’s life
on the foam core
until
it is nothing but holes
THE THING ABOUT PEOPLE by Heather Christle
People quilt and people are not pearls.
People power trees I think and cars.
Who eats the yellow line off the road?
Not people.
I am trying to commune with a rock.
But I can’t stop thinking.
All the underwear I’ve owned.
A matchbook has to do with people.
Also rope and lifeguards are people in chairs.
I stagger along with the people.
Somewhere a lamp is on sale.
Somewhere a real person needs it.
People hide but go on making noises.
If you stand on the home plate you’re safe.
Heather Christle is the author of the poetry collections Heliopause (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), What Is Amazing (Wesleyan, 2012), The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), and The Difficult Farm (Octopus, 2009).
FOUR MANNEQUINS WITH SUITCASES, DRESSED FOR A JOURNEY by Nancy Eimers
I understand raindrops
can distort the song of birds
so we may not know which direction
the song is coming from,
but I don’t understand the uncanny valleys,
the changeless faces of mannequins
or the factory owner who says
she walks among their bodies
at night and is not afraid.
Can they even be said
to have bodies? Made
with care, she says, made individually
and I’m hearing affection not unlike
how birds in cages begin to sing
when the shower comes on.
Whatever they hear must resemble
something important by instinct;
bodies, yes, in the sense of giving
form to what was once
abstract. For instance, mannequins
in travelwear, each figure’s attitude
an ode to patience, same as wasted
time, same timetable to read, same train
about to come – the window sign Vogue
Suggests . . . then words too small
to read without a telescope.
This might have mattered,
what we wore on earth, faces they wore,
that bright alert urbanity
makes out of poise –
and why we wanted them
that way. The factory workers are sanding
haunches and torsos, tops of heads,
anywhere a mannequin gets round
and the workers seem to do this respectfully,
I swear. Of course they know
they are being filmed. A gentle roar
is how I do not want
to describe the sound of falling water
heard at a distance. Dull
instead of gentle doesn’t get us
any closer in a shopping mall
to why the mannequins all are headless now;
headless has happened before,
it will happen again.
We are passing through
yet another definition of apperception
I do not quite understand,
instinct, a “prompting,”
maybe why the heart recoils at what
resembles such composure – bright faces,
pointless gestures – never to suppose
an end to come nor even lightly
to bestir. One
thing is finally not
another.
GHOST BOX, LABEL SCAR by Nancy Eimers
It is not at peace, but what is peace?
Dead leaves, maybe a river –
grass in the cracks of a parking lot.
That was never a reason,
never a lonely reason.
Fountains, bridges, skylights,
was it something about taking off?
Some peace is more formal than others.
Some is just about being here.
Mannequins, most of them are composed
of plastic or fiberglass.
They don’t quite look at you.
Really, they are made out of distance.
I wouldn’t want to walk in there at night.
I wouldn’t even want to call it
night. Tree growing out of a window.
How did it get inside in the first place?
Or was it a seed blown in, like a horse
lowered into a mine as a foal?
Ghost box, label scar –
If there are ghosts, they can’t remember
why they are naked, how they got that way.
Nancy Eimers is the author of four poetry collections: Oz (Carnegie Mellon, 2011), A Grammar to Waking (Carnegie Mellon, 2006), No Moon (Purdue University Press, 1997), and Destroying Angel (Wesleyan University Press, 1991). Her poems have appeared in FIELD, Paris Review, The Nation, The Antioch Review, North American Review, and in The Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize anthologies. Eimers is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review.
DRIVING HOME AFTER THANKSGIVING, WE LEARN THAT ARIANA GRANDE HAS BEEN NAMED ARTIST OF THE YEAR by Amorak Huey
Dark when we depart, dark when we arrive –
in between we listen to pop music,
complain about the neverendingness of Indiana,
pretend we are not bored of our own company.
This is the nature of time: every moment
of life a metaphor for all the others.
Ariana Grande played Cat in that show
the kids used to watch, played the same
character in a second show, this new incarnation
peacocking up the most attention-hungry traits
of the original: the arc of the self bends
toward caricature. She also sings
a little less conversation, a little more touch my body,
a Nobel-worthy sentiment for sure, & I’m only
mostly kidding. I can’t say aloud
how these lyrics rumple my blood
because my kids are here & they have
no idea how much I think about desire,
how much I desire. I offer instead a half-assed diatribe
on “Material Girl” & self-determination,
the passage of time & the corporatization of music.
My thesis & all my supporting evidence
are things I assume or do not quite remember.
My wife is rolling her eyes. My kids have tuned out.
I am alone. I have been driving so long
my body will still feel in motion days from now.
One day Ariana Grande will play a concert
where a bomb goes off & people die. Ariana Grande
will reveal herself as kind & sympathetic human
in the aftermath. We do not know any of this yet
though we should probably see it coming.
We are quiet for miles. Green signs count down
our remaining journey. Out of nowhere
my daughter asks What would happen if someone built a city
but forgot to make roads to connect it to anywhere else?
People would eventually find it, I say.
Which is sort of an answer. Sort of a prayer.
Amorak Huey is author of the poetry collections Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress, 2015) and Boom Box (Sundress, forthcoming 2019), and the chapbooks A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road (Porkbelly Press, 2016) and The Insomniac Circus (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014).
BAKERY POEM WITH WOMAN WAITING INSIDE by Elizabeth O’Brien
At the bakery a woman in cutoffs and a fake string of pearls
asks if we make cupcakes with hammerhead sharks
because her boyfriend caught one fishing today, she tells me
eagerly, bouncing up and down
like a child.
A second woman
in overalls, her long hair razzed, orders a plain white cake
She says, she’s so tired. Write on it, just BIRTHDAY.
She’s starting cancer treatment and she wishes
she could have chocolate instead.
Hammerhead sharks have skin like sandpaper, rough enough
to abrade human skin on contact.
My bakery customers bleed together. All of them
tell me too much. They need me
to be patient and gentle
and I’m not especially
but I am trying
to understand what it means to feed people
and to step somewhere beyond my impatience.
A cake is a small gesture but it’s work
to make one after another to order
and at the glass case they wait for the next
unburdening. You can have anything written on a cake,
I will tell the next woman
who waits for me already: Anything you want.
Elizabeth O’Brien is the author of the chapbook, A Secret History of World Wide Outage (Diode Editions, 2018). Her poems have appeared in New England Review, The Rumpus, Ploughshares, Writer’s Chronicle, and Tin House.
WHEN JAMES SERVES DINNER by Alice Duggan
He sings out praise. He lifts each tray.
No turning round, Lord, no turning round.
He keeps his gaze down, eyelids ash gray.
Shirt pinpoint blue, immaculate garment,
cuffs turned back, he brings on the plastic
and cardboard, no turning round.
Carries the canned horror of dinner,
and Dottie stretches arms into music,
ecstatic, and I sing, no turning round.
How can a heart lift so, it’s a wonder, as trays of poly,
bowls of styrofoam, packets of paper, land.
When he leaves he leaves song in the room.
An aide sings on, and me,
as if I have nothing to be ashamed of,
I open my throat. A woman calls
from across the room: Who’s singing, who’s singing?
She is so light it’s only her wheelchair keeps her
from blowing away. She moves toward me –
would I open this packet of salad dressing
for her? She applies it to her small hands.
We sit together. A congregation.
We want to know who’s singing.
THE SURGEON’S VOICE HAS AN EDGE by Alice Duggan
I stammer that my internal geography should stay, shouldn’t it, as
it was mapped. You’ll never miss it, he says.
So I walk across the weeks, wash clothes, cook meals and schedule
surgery.
By day I’m calm. At night, at night I race through seaside alleys, seedy
and poor,
I’m the adored, the he of it all has me spread against the wall and there we’re held
in silent arousal while the ocean pounds the beach.
These are my nights, dreaming of desire, desire that makes the velvet curtains
tremble. A lover to bring up the lights, dash across the stage . . .
No, wait, I’m on an airplane flying home, writing my thoughts on a small receipt
for paint, Deluxe Ultra Velvet. When it is full I begin again on a record of dental work.
The husband I meet will like me well enough, even without those parts
I will be missing, and that is the daytime fact of the matter,
as I slide my notes inside my purse, doing what any woman could –
leaving them there for a period of mourning,
a period of gestation.
Alice Duggan’s poems have appeared in Tar River Poetry, Sugar House Review, SAND, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and Drunken Boat.
TAINT by Stuart Dischell
A taste in the mouth from tinned meat maybe
Or some mold in the bread, an old tomato
That has you smack your lips but not for savor
And make a face that makes you unpleasant
Company your dining partner remarks.
Something is wrong. Something is tainted.
If you could you would sniff it in public.
Instead you eat what you can believing
You can eat around it, but the taint that tasted
A little wrong at first has plans to get you sick
If not now, you think, in thirty years when
The microbes have taken over your blood.
You can feel this happening already,
But you do not wish to spoil this moment
With your date already looking at their phone
And the server approaching with kind banter.
THE LAST DAYS ON OCEAN LANE by Stuart Dischell
The accordion panels of the hurricane
Shutters unfold a screechy music
So loud I can hear it for the first
Time reverberating in its
Rusted and sea-salted glory in the otherwise
Quiet chasm between condos
Out of season, and I believe how in all
Worthwhile improvisations
Some sections give themselves freely
While others require more
Effort of the artist,
In this case shod foot
And shoulder, where the steel
Rods have caught along the rails.
Finally loose the metal slips once more
Into its position,
And in the moment I close this curtain
On the sunlight and the ocean
On cue through the doorway
My mother in Chanel,
Dark glasses, and pearls steps into the hallway,
Purse in hand,
Ready.
Stuart Dischell is the author of Children with Enemies (University of Chicago Press, 2017), Backwards Days (Penguin, 2007), Dig Safe (Penguin, 2003), Evenings & Avenues (Penguin, 1996), and Good Hope Road (Viking, 1993), winner of the National Poetry Series. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Republic, AGNI, Slate, and The Kenyon Review. Dischell is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review.