POETRY
DRIVING THROUGH KANSAS, LISTENING TO THE RADIO by Sophie Klahr
with lines from Octavio Paz’s “A Draft of Shadows”
I have only ever seen the shadow
of clouds on the ocean and on the plains.
As in your body / spilled on my body /
seen / dissolved / makes the watching real. A choir
on The River sings an arrangement of
“Amazing Grace,” poultry like fall leaves sleep
outside the dim light of the auction’s door,
and just like that – it’s gone: another town
whose name I’ll never try to remember.
I think before you came into my mouth
you were a fever made of my watching –
a cloud-shape I could know but could not name,
like those walls printed with ash and honey –
a pattern I could track but could not touch.
LISTENING TO THE RADIO, DRIVING THROUGH COLORADO AGAIN by Sophie Klahr
The forest has been waiting just for you!
says the radio The radio says
Sparrow have you been practicing your song
Squirrel are you ready to really have fun
River how are your waters Come on in
says River with a voice like a cartoon
bubbling the sound of a voice that’s sinking
Isn’t it funny how a road can starve
a town and some people will think it’s more
beautiful that way ( Silver Plume yes you
A museum made from your dead school Gone wolf
whose name I was told She looked looked in me
Lost tea room whose pleasant talk I swam with
The cold like the inside of an eggshell )
Sophie Klahr is the author of Meet Me Here At Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016) and the chapbook _____ Versus Recovery (Pilot Books, 2007). Her poetry appears in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Blackbird, and AGNI.
FOR HOODRATS WHO CHOOSE NECROMANCY WHEN TIME AIN’T ENOUGH by Siaara Freeman
a sweet spoil of war, pouring the liquor
to parched earth & quenching death. I rip open
the body bag, without my heart
getting caught in the zipper & I face my father. I open more
body bags & face my friends I write them all: w/ flesh & w/o
bullets. I snatch the worms w/ my jagged teeth
& feed them to my enemies when they call me a chicken-head, I laugh
ghosts in their direction.
I cry the river-styx & dare non-believers to cross
me. I raise my hand & tell them talk to the grave, BOO
I don’t have to look for a fight to look like one;
I remember this & stay
armed, stay legged, stay
one fist in front of the other, stay
fist first. I learned to conjure
my block back.
I am an ancient thing, a screeching artifact, a banshee & all the laments
like gunshots, I know
too many triggers that did not come with warnings, so I try
& be an omen, & ain’t I a sign? If you cut me, is there not caution
tape? If you tackle me, do I not become a ticking
tombstone (that’s right BOO) haint nothing to it. I’m spirit
unrelenting. I tell em I’m haunted. Don’t start no séance,
won’t be no séance;
the blacker the manifestation, the redder
the juice. & you know hoodrats got all the juice. I know
they called us spooks back in the day. A group of spooks is called
a cemetery. I come from
a long line of graveyards: they drowned my kin
& fed their cries to the sea in my stomach,
as bait. I manage to decipher the deadest of tongues. What am I if not
the apparition’s daughter?
Whenever I open my mouth – somewhere in America a Ouija board tells
the system, it can go straight to the hell it planned for me & when it arrives
Hallelujah, I can still talk
mad shit. I can drink ice water. I tell myself – Bitch remember, you can
levitate.
It’s in your bones.
Siaara Freeman is the author of the collection Raised by the Dead (Honeysuckle Press). Her poems have appeared in BOOAT, Glass, Tinderbox, Pinch, FreezeRay, and The Offing.
SMALL NATION by Doug Ramspeck
The first time my brother and I played chicken
on the railroad tracks, we leapt from the bridge
before the train was anywhere near us.
We splashed down at the same moment,
then treaded water while listening to the train
drowning out the sounds of the cicadas.
Afterwards, we lay on our backs in the current
and watched the eye of the moon rolling back
into the skull of the clouds, and we listened
to the breezes sifting through the dreadlocks
of the willows. And that winter there was often
a live wire of blue light at dusk in the field
behind our father’s barn, and we studied how it lived
inside itself, how it seemed older than the moon,
its own small nation. And once we carried saucers
onto the garage roof and sledded off the edge into open
air, down into a snowdrift, and that was the same winter
my brother broke his collarbone twice, and we stole
a hunting knife and a hatchet from the unlocked shed
of a neighbor. Later, when my brother went to prison,
I would tell myself that something was already
forming on those days and nights of our childhood,
was already formed, even though we leapt
with equal abandon toward the river.
USER MANUAL by Doug Ramspeck
Our mother used to say prayers
for our father’s temper, as though
it were a thing living separate from
the man, some volatile creature
that might be tamed with soft words
or clasped hands. And my brother
and I would imagine those prayers
rising up the chimney then bouncing off
the clouds. And God, with one ear tilted,
would hear the words like so many bees
humming in a hive. Meanwhile, on land,
down where prayers seemed – at least
to my brother and to me – like birds
breaking their necks on window glass,
we learned a prayer of watching
closely for the sudden twitching
of our father’s hands. And when,
years later, he was dying of emphysema,
we sat with him on the back porch
and watched follicles of pale light sifting
through the obelisks of corn stalks,
and studied the living funnels of dust
forming on the road
as our father gasped for air,
the claws of his hands
furious in his lap.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of one collection of short stories and six poetry collections, most recently Black Flowers (LSU Press). His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, and The Georgia Review.
CHILD SOLDIER SONG by John Wall Barger
There was a bee storm, my sister flung her headscarf over me.
A boy, she laughed, will chase a firefly
into a nightmare. Hark your sister,
my uncle said, She has a grandmotherly heart.
Early morning, it was spring,
we were ear to ear asleep in the orchard like dogs
when the dust unrolled upon us like a rug.
The river put on its hat, stumbled off.
Infants sucked but there was no milk.
My sister & I had a throat-torn goat, dragging it
one hoof each over the bladebones &
just then out of the woods the thin men stepped, rifles up,
like dowsers. Some carried hoes
but they were not farmers. The thin men gathered
like shadows at the balefire & when
finally they slept the wretched hairless dogs
edged into the light. The thin men
called us boys Little Ones. We drank their wine,
sang their songs. We tied our long hair back
as they did, with red bandanas.
We made noise night & day. In the noise was a silence.
They had a bandylegged bear on a chain.
It was blind & danced, milkeyed, like a prophet.
The rifle in my hands pointed
at a girl in a dragon mask.
She shivered as if visioning.
I shot, she lifted her arms in praise.
They were yelling at the bear,
Make him stop, make him stop singing!
I slipped out of bed.
I carried her to the orchard
under the silver tree of the gods.
I lowered her in a hole
with a firefly in a jar.
Time came to cover her
but I could not.
At dawn, the thin men
screamed like eagles
& the firefly dissolved.
John Wall Barger is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent of which is The Mean Game (Palimpsest Press). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Malahat Review, Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and Best of the Best Canadian Poetry.
THEY SAY THIS IS HOW THE GHOSTS FEEL by W. Todd Kaneko
1.
Minidoka, I never say your name aloud
except when measuring my family’s ghosts
against the razor wire still wrapped
around all our tongues.
2.
Minidoka, I cannot contain your name
in my mouth. When I speak it, each syllable
is a storm of crows – feathers, bone, appetite.
3.
There is a flock of dark birds that circle
my house while I sleep. Their jagged song
more death camp than dreamscape, more
car crash than moonrise.
4.
In the dark, my father tries to explain
what Minidoka means. I can almost read his lips
but all I can hear is a lonely howl.
5.
I say your name but it doesn’t mean anything
to people whose families were not left wrecked
out on the prairie. So I call you America
and let that name sit on my tongue like dust.
6.
Sometimes, things aren’t as terrifying
when they are so far away. I say your name,
America. I say your name, America.
I say your name and wait for you to appear
in my yard – shotgun, noose, barbed wire.
7.
In the dark, my grandfather patrols
up and down city streets, shaking every door
to make sure it’s secure. He says America
and then we are all locked out.
8.
America, sometimes, I don’t understand
what your name means – four syllables
for home, for not home, for bombs bursting
in air, for believing we are all bombs.
9.
In my dream, my son is learning to talk
but all he says is Minidoka. He is learning
to walk but he just walks in circles.
HOMELAND by W. Todd Kaneko
Tonight, my father dreams of the land
we all dream of, standing like cattle
on dark plains, hooves planted in the mud,
horns gashing the sky every time we turn
our heads to look at one another. He is dead
and not a hermit crab laying claim
to the shore, not a deer dashing in and out
of shadows as winter looms hungry
over the woods, not a man with his family
still bound to that town made of antlers
and rickety bones. While my father sleeps,
the cattle stampede free of the barbed wire.
This morning, my son ate an orange
segment by segment, his face smeared
with pulp and juice, the peel in shreds
on the kitchen floor. He is alive, unaware
of all the spirits envious of his teeth,
the animals shivering outside. My father
swims away from us, back to the island
where he could put the ocean between us,
whole families of ghosts in the tide.
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of The Dead Wrestler Elegies (Curbside Splendor) and This is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press), and co‑author with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic).
IN-VITRO by Joe Tobias
Because my father
impregnated my mother
outside either of their bodies,
in a room in England,
where my parents went
for fire that did not burn
at home,
from the moment of my cells’
earliest divisions, my twin sister’s cells
have been dividing beside mine,
hers, keeping me company,
billions of us together,
a boy and a girl
laughing at the made‑up words
they used to make up,
a girl who tucked her brother in at night,
a boy to whom she cried,
when she rarely did, and only to him.
I am grown now, and she,
fiercely strong,
about to marry a man I envy.
Today, we slow-danced to music only we heard.
I missed her already.
And I bent my six-feet-
and I said, I’ll die before you die.
“In-Vitro” is Joe Tobias’ first publication in a national literary journal.
LITTLE LEAGUE by Gabrielle Claffey
My sisters ditch me.
The sunburned crowd goes wild
or quiet with almost the held breath
of a chess game on a huge dusty board.
I slip under the stands, shoes hanging there
in the blue at the end of legs, litter coming down,
candy wrappers, beer cans, popcorn.
I could bum a cigarette,
stir the gasoline pond,
see if I can see the tap root of stripes
at the bottom, brown and tan, whiskers undulating,
wires aquiver with information,
what’s headed their way.
The orderly murk of catfish
eats it all – bubble gum, pop tabs, Snickers,
Milky Ways, shoelaces, sunlight’s ashes.
And don’t forget boredom.
Everybody eats boredom.
Everybody eats the claps when they explode,
boom of the bat when it’s thrown,
my brothers moving base to base
their faces under helmets, sharp, honed to flat
shadows in blind running,
and when they slide home, when the team jumps –
white smeared with dark sand –
the faces, uniforms, bases, diamond, entire field
of blurred lines, concision lost,
what a shimmer it is,
this glory at the end absorbed by woods on three sides
and the dirt road ready for a drink.
Night lights turn off. Car lights blaze
and the road breathes us through corn and still more
boredom to Baroda. Not even a win
can save us from the empty streets
that know us back when we land there.
Everyone’s packed into Bill’s Tap,
ink dark with smudges of light
and we slip into a booth and it’s goose bumps,
AC and catfish, all the garbage of the self
with sliced lemon and parsley.
Gabrielle Claffey’s poems have appeared in Poet Lore, River Styx, Tampa Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Mudfish.
MIDWEST PHYSICS: SECOND LAW by Rushi Vyas
Every lie begets another, a proverb
you would have preached. Were it a penny
saved. Were we earlier to rise.
I never told you about the woman
I lived with in Michigan. Or the cat. You never
knew, with the money you gave me, I drank.
When mom left you, she moved
onto my couch and I told you
I didn’t know her whereabouts.
When the British came to India
they studied the habits of the Rajas,
pitted kings against each other. That –
and genocide. Without weapons,
I studied your routine. Midday doze. Snore
on the sofa to Peter Jennings. Hours
long nap after work before 10pm dinner.
I learned to press your calves
before you rose, understood a father’s
temper as one to fear and tend. I’d rush
to grab the Toledo Blade from the driveway,
make a playful show of stealing the Sports page.
Oh! momentary imagined reprieve.
I did not know how to speak
an honest word to my father.
Bapu, where is mother’s family?
Explain the black under her eye.
You taught me each lie could buy a night.
Rushi Vyas’ poems have appeared in Tin House, The Adroit Journal, and Cosmonauts Avenue.
I LEARN TO FIELD‑STRIP AN M-16 by Rebecca Foust
Driving through the Poconos in late fall;
flash storm with actual thunder and lightning
not seen since I fled west 40 years ago,
my cheap rental a thin beer can hydroplaning
past scarlets and golds against a rinsed sky.
A bite in the air, a dark edge on the sun
then down, down into the gray, fraying holler
past rusted train tracks and Confederate flags
and Jesus Saves signs hung on old barns
to visit the sister who soon will have forgotten
my name. Her husband, a Viet Nam war vet
whose M-16 hangs above the mantle
is a good man who will stand by her.
I did not bring up his email the week before
explaining how tree huggers are to blame
for our terrible wildfires, but instead,
remembering some war documentary, asked
about the machine guns that jammed
Firing residue, he said, and no way to clear it,
some tiny rod the government had neglected
to send, or send on time, or to the right place.
When a gun got slugged, the fix was to chuck it
into a rice paddy, and, taking his own gun
down from the wall, I’ll tell you what, this
is what stood between me and death.
When he showed me how to field-strip the M-16,
the first thing he did was yank a lever back
and eject a live round next to me onto the sofa.
I’d never touched a gun before that one
though I’d seen many, in glass safes next to the bed,
in racks on cars, slung on straps over shoulders,
or held like a child by men sitting around the table
after dinner, men who sometimes also held
a sleeping child.
At first, I wouldn’t touch it but only watched,
keeping myself pure and above it all
like when my dad, in the last deplorable year
of his truly deplorable illness, the lung disease
my own and all my friends’ parents died from,
visited me at my law firm on the 33rd floor.
After he left, everyone joked they could see him
a mile down Market Street on account of his blazer:
a truly eye-shattering rust-and-green-neon plaid.
Afterwards we laughed, floating above the world
in that steel-and-glass room with its deep carpets
and dark exotic wood. It was his best jacket,
purchased at great expense to him, and he wore it
to look good so he would not embarrass me.
The laughter was gentle but still thin-edged
with genteel contempt, and the part of me I most despise
is the part that thinks it’s above it all, more pure,
or better, or smarter than everyone and everywhere
I came from – the part that when those lawyers laughed,
laughed too.
Rebecca Foust is the author of The Unexploded Ordnance Bin (Swan Scythe Press) and Paradise Drive (Press 53). Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, The Hudson Review, The Massachusetts Review, Southern Review, and ZYZZYVA.
Etymology by Nicky Beer
Those were the days when I didn’t want to kill myself but I
did take the word suicide out of my pocket now and then,
its syllables like the undulations of black and orange
furred caterpillars, revolting and adorable. Sometimes the
word would grow tender rows of quills
that I could stroke and pluck into a private music. Even
the abysmal eyes of horses watching me as I walked through their country of flies could not silence it. I was the man
in his dead mother’s summer dress preening over one shoulder in a hand mirror, admiring how his dark hair foamed at the décolletage, waiting for the annihilating footstep on the stair.
Nicky Beer is the author of two poetry collections, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House, both from Carnegie Mellon University Press.
ARTEMIS II. by Kirstin Allio
After the rape,
a desire to go back
to being a deer.
Ribcage like a motorcycle
engine, random foreleg
heaped to the side
of the woodpath
in the sueded snow.
It’s a myth
that they’re sexless.
As whore as any wild
creature, all ankle
to the withers.
Hemlock skirts blow high,
a forest of Marilyns.
If she hadn’t passed
through trees by day,
she wouldn’t see green
by moonlight.
It was the winter solstice.
Her mother couldn’t get up
the icy driveway.
Along the road,
every flick-tailed
deer a daughter.
The night bled resin,
her shame in amber.
Kirstin Allio is the author of the novels Buddhism for Western Children (University of Iowa Press) and Garner (Coffee House Press), and a short story collection, Clothed, Female Figure (Dzanc Books). Her recent publications include poems in Conjunctions, Prairie Schooner, Fence, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, and Hotel Amerika.
LANDSCAPE AS TIME MACHINE by Max McDonough
Still, there are things we can’t reverse.
Moon’s counter-clockwise spin. Oyster marsh
pinned down by winter.
I turn them, these things, in my mind
this way. Across the far bridge, a radio tower
disperses its red
in diffuse, silent blinks. A signal. A burning
withdraws. Repeats. And whatever glides
beneath the blip, its canvas of bog water
congealing reeds, whatever burrows
in the mud chill, the mud-sunk
medical needles, burrs, cardboard, tin cans,
orphaned hooks, besmeared candy wrappers –
the defiled scrape
of this place.
Egg Harbor –
my incunabula – cocoon, cradle, swaddling
clothes, winding-sheet – no one chooses
the metaphors they need.
When a pain is unspeakable
it speaks until the grave.
Max McDonough’s poems have appeared in The Greensboro Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Adroit Journal, The Journal, RHINO, and Columbia Poetry Review.
Hello, It’s Me by Tony Trigilio
– for Missy
You can’t know “the essence of Todd,” you said,
listening only to “Hello, It’s Me” as a boy
on a plastic Radio Shack phonograph
(I called it my Plastic Ono Record Player)
or Adventures in Utopia on the super audiophile
teenage sound system with the diamond
needles I would steal from stereo store demo
turntables. I used to think if only I could
polish and perfect the skinny rock star
stringy-hair look – Todd Rundgren’s slack
effect, smoking eloquent cigarettes instead of
eating, rising quickly from the couch and stubbing
out the butts when new songs came to his head –
we finally would’ve been perfect together.
Where you come from sounds clichéd until
you live through it. The morning after you’re gone,
I’m remembering the last time I saw you, lunch
at Aida’s Deli, frank talk of reconstructive surgeries,
a punch line about how they were the best thing
to come from being sick. Both of us ordered
Greek salads, both still in our bodies, hungry.
Tony Trigilio’s most recent poetry collections are Inside the Walls of My Own House (BlazeVOX Books) and White Noise (Apostrophe Books). His poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, The Laurel Review, McSweeney’s, and Sou’wester.
MOMENT OF INERTIA by Sneha Madhavan-Reese
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
...
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
-- Sylvia Plath, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”
Watch how I break into pieces,
each particle as it was in the beginning, before
atoms collided and spun into stars.
Before stars exploded and released what became
my body: the nitrogen backbone of my DNA, every
ion of iron and bound oxygen surging through my capillaries.
Each part of me is older than I; how can I be afraid?
Watch how I rearrange myself and fuse my own light.
This is not starlight: ancient, dazzling, and ordinary.
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
Our galaxy spirals through the universe
tethered to a massive black hole. Pulsars
spew their radiance away. The clock’s pendulum ticks;
its figurines slide in and out of their little doors. How long it takes
for a child to gestate, for a seed to grow into a fruit-bearing tree.
In an instant, the heart stops, and the few
remaining rainforests are cut to scrub. Some colours
we can only remember: the shimmering green of the huia,
the Hawai’i mamo’s golden yellow plumes.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
See how the largest and smallest of things,
subject to the same laws, behave so differently.
Planets hurl their colossal bulk around the void
of space. A toy dragonfly cut from heavy paper
balances on my fingertip, in defiance
of the forces willing it to fall, the nod of its body
like the bowing of believers at first light. Illusion
is holy. It conceals creation’s secrets.
The tightrope walker keeps his faith in a long, thin rod,
and the grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God.
The shuttlecock always flips, driving
its nose towards the earth. Despite feathers, it falls
more pointedly than a ball. I study its trajectory,
its dogged devotion. It never fails to take its place, though
I cannot perceive the moment when it turns.
All things know how to act in the world. What must I do?
Around me, the heavens spin and illuminate.
A doorknob sticks in my hand.
I can only see in white. The light is blue.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
Sneha Madhavan-Reese is the author of the poetry collection Observing the Moon (Radiant Press). Her poems have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Rabbit Poetry Journal, Rattle, Global Poetry Anthology, and The Best Canadian Poetry.
Dear Sheryl Sandberg, by Carrie Shipers
I agree the weather has been weird
with all this rain and death, that books
on grief have awful titles. Option B
isn’t the worst I’ve heard although
it makes me think of birth control,
those logic puzzles I won’t try to solve.
I love how you describe the elephant
that followed you around, how people
managed to ignore its size and smell,
the shovel you stood ready with.
I, too, sometimes feel that I’ve become
a ghost, both frightening and invisible.
And while I’ve never wanted to lean in,
I laughed out loud when you confessed
that simply standing up was hard enough.
But I find I can’t forgive you for
the ocean metaphors and emphasis
on growth, how you dreamed up
a version of the footprints story –
your friends walking behind in case
you fell – that annoys me more
than the original. I hate the way
you cherry-pick research, name-drop
celebrities, end every chapter trying
to inspire. And most of all I hate
how even though you mention anger
early on it quickly goes away,
how you insist resilience can be learned
if I’ll just put the effort in.
Sheryl, I admit that I don’t always
reach for joy. Often I resort
to ice cream and TV, mysteries
I can read in a day and then forget
forever. Recently a friend accused me
of refusing to rejoin the world,
said she’d decided to back off and stop
playing psychologist. Despite being
furious – because I was hurt and also
scared she had a point – I made myself
apologize, admit my grief’s
been hard on people who aren’t me.
Carrie Shipers is the author of two chapbooks and three full-length collections, Ordinary Mourning (ABZ Press), Cause for Concern (Able Muse Press), and Family Resemblances (University of New Mexico Press). Her poems have appeared in North American Review, New England Review, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review.
FLUTE by Ioanna Carlsen
The Yoshitoshi print
you brought home from your father’s house –
which you bought for him, who is now dead –
is one of the hundred views of the moon.
It now belongs to us as if your father had never existed,
or as an image that has come down to us
from someone who no longer exists.
In it a suitor in a turquoise robe
is playing a flute
outside the house of a courtesan
who sits on a porch listening.
Inside our house, tonight,
he plays,
at first in silence.
But eventually
I can hear, off in the distance,
the sound of his flute
as she would have heard it,
that fleeting melody,
warbling up toward the moon
which reigns over the picture
and bathes it in light
that equals the sound
which you must imagine
in order to hear it
the way she did, that night,
which never exactly existed,
a hundred years ago.
Ioanna Carlsen’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Poetry, FIELD, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and Main Street Rag.
EPITHALAMIUM by Anthony Walton
And it came to him that the question was loneliness-
when he grit his teeth, rearranging
his bones
and self in an easy
chair, which would,
as he thought, trigger
the worry he might dial her in the middle
of the night
only to hang up before she answers.
Then there were the variations: the loneliness
he wore with – no, like –
a good sweater – while he sat in restaurants
reading magazines; while he explained
his life to people he met on airplanes; what made him
stand at the window thinking, without irony,
the private autumnal heart
is the last leaf to fall…
what resolved into a fugue
of silence, counterpoint
of all he would
never fully describe. As in the night he said
he loved her: billowing stars; black leaves;
*
berceuse wind. A sky
of stars, leaves, and wind. He remembered
thinking, with her in his arms,
of loneliness. What should he say? That they
would spend their evenings in metaphor,
in a house of silent song? That there
would be children?
Pray, love, that it be so simple.
Anthony Walton’s poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Black Scholar, Obsidian, Ecotone, Black Renaissance Noire, and The New Yorker.
Let Us Say Good by Cate Lycurgus
– for Bethany and Dan
We say it like we’ve heard it said good
& plenty, often straight from God said good
in the beginning the light was, spark-start
of stars orbiting; & just to pass each other was good
at first, a glance, a word, squeezing the same
avocados at the market to test for the good
sort of give, was, not knowing what could surpass
the promise of an unknown pick. We’re good
till the right sort of soften has us doubled
in laughter, double-dipping, in sweatpants, in good
sweat, serving at match-point, who knew love –
– all was just the start – initial rush – a good
plot, thick & dense & tangled keeps us going,
even when snarled in a rolling hitch, always good
knots, that save a skiff – it’s hard to say if a brush
of snow will lay its quiet down for good
& stay a day a winter a decade until we realize
that we’ve woken into the same good
conversation: a lifetime of saying, not-saying
a thing & let us call the sleigh bed good,
good Sunday walks, despite cancer’s raze, still
we can make out the steeple’s tip a good
head above crimson maples & when in the red
of debt or starting the string of good-
byes that claims our days, on this one & all
the days that gather again & again let’s say good
together, hand in hand, that in the waving
through this life he was good by her; she, by him.
Cate Lycurgus’ poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Third Coast, Tin House, Orion, and TriQuarterly.
KAIROS by Bruce Willard
The morning after Thanksgiving
an off-shore wind stands up waves
and calms the sea. Not a bird
on the feeder
this morning. A loose skirt
of bark uncovers
the eucalyptus’
leggy branches.
To give thanks is to expose
everything to nothing;
beat of memory, sound
of flying overhead.
In the salvia a blur
of invisible hunger;
motion before a
great and open window.
Bruce Willard is the author of two poetry collections, Holding Ground and Violent Blues, both from Four Way Books. His poems have appeared in AGNI, The Cortland Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and Salamander.
The Walkers by John Kooistra
Every evening an older man
crosses the street near our house,
his grizzled black dog plodding
forty feet behind.
Curb to curb
their shadows move on the slant
in long single file through the fading light.
Once we called to the man
and he angled over to the gate
his dog adjusting course
to catch up and stand behind him
like a cowboy’s tired horse.
With no hearing aid
and no one in his life to hear,
it was hard to exchange
what we were curious about:
where he’d grown up and lived,
what he’d done for work,
whether he married, had children,
but mostly what he did between walks.
None of this was our business
so maybe it’s fitting
that we really learned nothing
about the two companions
so separate in their species
walking like ghosts
into the remains of the day
the mainsprings of their lives
winding down in time with ours.
John Kooistra’s poems have appeared in Artful Dodge, Cirque, and Northwest Review.
FEEDING THE DOGS by Deborah Brown
A stainless dish, shiny as the silver one
an aunt had engraved for me at birth,
and one that’s blue plastic, not much smaller,
an extra I found in the cellar –
the first for my dog,
the other for the mutt from up the road
where there’s no running water
or central heat, who throws
herself against our door at first light.
It’s like the story of step-sisters,
of my sister, beaten by our father,
then by her husband, pounding one cold night
on my door, who died young –
I wonder, should I give her half
of our dog’s can, the same amount of dry?
And what about the raw beef patties
too expensive for any dog? Should I
offer less, or just less of the good stuff?
Every damn day I circle the enclosure. Whose dog
is she if she spends twelve hours
every day at my house, never leaves
until I leash and walk her the two-tenths
of a mile, and use a milk bone
to get her inside?
Deborah Brown is the author of two poetry collections, The Human Half and Walking the Dog’s Shadow, both from BOA Editions. She edited, with Maxine Kumin and Annie Finch, Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics (University of Arkansas Press).
WOUNDED DOG by Fleda Brown
He’d said longitude. I heard wounded dog.
You might say this arose as from a fold in time:
the seventeenth-century wounded dog theory
of measuring longitude:
a so‑called “powder of sympathy” that healed
at a distance. Although it caused great pain.
Sprinkle it on a dog’s bandage every day at noon in London.
The dog, onboard far at sea, would yelp, which means
“the sun is upon the meridian in London.”
The captain would compare that time
to the ship’s time to calculate longitude.
My hearing was thus miraculous for its accuracy,
perfect for the dog, especially if it was my first dog,
the one run over on Garth Avenue,
who’d crossed a line I wasn’t allowed to.
Or the other dog we had in Little Rock, the hound
named Tripoli who peed on the floor
and was sent supposedly to a farm. A ship is strumming
the longitude as it passes, a sad song
for the lost dogs. I loved those dogs.
I love how the meridians gather at both ends,
how they spread in the middle like a Japanese lantern.
I try to think how the lantern could be suspended,
to shed light on the question of dogs, where they went,
and if they still hurt outside my radius of knowledge.
Fleda Brown is the author of ten poetry collections, including The Woods Are on Fire: New and Selected Poems (University of Nebraska Press) and The Devil’s Child (Carnegie Mellon University Press).
BLACK DOG by Susan Hutton
In my yard tonight, the neighbors’ rooms lit
all around me, I’m looking at the moon
and thinking of Buzz Aldrin because this is where
his grasp of himself, like the objects around him,
first began to float out of his reach. It is hard
to perceive his kind of sadness, like the o
sunk deep in the alphabet or the places so old
inside us we can only enter them without legs.
Following Armstrong outside the Apollo
changed everything for Aldrin, but it took some time
before he could say how. All of the magnificent
desolation, in every direction pressing against
the pearl of earth innocently churning out color
and light. Aldrin recognized the nothingness
waiting at the earth’s margins. The moon
curving away – no atmosphere, black sky. Think
of the mouth going slack, the body giving over
to pleasure, the euphoria of slipping the boundary
of the self. I can remember the flutter from saying
my husband to a stranger for the first time. My husband
uncovered the pine floors, I now say to the stout man
on the porch, who tells me he lived here,
in our house, when he was a boy.
He probably played in the places
where my own children played, the cupboards
and closets, under the beds, in the bare attic eaves
and empty spaces where nails earnestly fasten
down the floors. There are days I lie in bed
beneath a leaden sadness that might be like Aldrin’s,
but today the stranger on the porch asks me
to let him inside. He wants to remember
how it feels to stand inside these rooms
he once occupied and absorbed
that have long since lost their composition,
like his leg, which I don’t notice
until he steps inside, bringing with him,
below the mechanical knee, his own
dark and half-submerged hollow.
Susan Hutton is the author of the poetry collection On the Vanishing of Large Creatures (Carnegie Mellon University Press). Her poems have appeared in North American Review, FIELD, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, and The New England Review.
A PAIR OF GLOVES by Joan Murray
We should have noticed in the way she kept the blinds closed –
either “because of the light” or “because of the dark,”
or “the strangers,” or “the neighbors.”
Or in the way the unpruned saplings on her lawn
sent out their light-starved branches until they linked together
like a fence, and the lawn died underneath.
Or in the way the windows wouldn’t budge, or the way the sink
bubbled up from the years of grease from when our father
was alive and there were roasts on Sunday.
She fired the cleaning help we hired for her after –
either they stole her phone or her pocket book,
which always turned up later.
Holiday, birthday, holiday, I’d look for the clothes I’d sent her –
whole regiments of them, mustered in her closet,
their tags draped on like medals,
and, below them, the shoes she’d never set foot in,
standing two by two in the dust beside the shoeboxes
that she’d filled with dead people’s pictures.
A neighbor came each morning with her paper –
silent, nearly deaf, her human contact for the day,
then Sanka, yogurt, tea, Stouffers, more tea, then sleep –
every day the same, till one morning she phoned my brother.
“I don’t remember how to get dressed anymore,” she said.
He found her sitting on her bed,
the quilt beneath her soiled, and her bra and panties beside her.
How long had she been sitting there like that
before she remembered how to dial?
By then it was too late to take her in. It took us only a day to
find a home for her, then take her out-of‑tune piano to the dump,
and put everything else in a truck and take it to Goodwill –
except for her gloves, which I slipped into the pockets of my jeans:
a pair of brown cotton gloves, mended along the fingers
five different times with different shades of brown –
so no one would ever notice, so no one would have to
bother doing anything about her. Just old neglected things
that no one would want to touch.
Joan Murray is the author of five poetry collections including a novel in verse, Queen of the Mist (Beacon Press); the National Poetry Series winner Looking for the Parade (W W Norton); and Swimming for the Ark: New & Selected Poems 1990–2015 (White Pine Press). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Poetry.
LET US FLEE THE NURSING HOME by Madelyn Garner
She laughs as I sneak us out the side exit, [fleeing]
the bedlam of beds toward the pocket park,
toward fall’s skeletal leaves [fleeing] the trees,
clouds crumpled against the horizon.
So this is the taste of flight I think; I smell it on my breath.
Knowing no matter how far we go,
my sister will never [flee] the growing profusion
of absences, darkness of silence; and yet
for the first time in months, from the graveyard
of her mouth springs – bush and rabbit and growling dog.
She turns, (o, the startling clarity of her eyes),
as if she sees I, too, am [fleeing]
losses flocked here all along.
We follow the path until there is no path
before I draw her back, my hand
cupped in the warmth of hers, toward the world
of blankets and blankness all too aware of what it is
we both are [fleeing], have [fled], will [flee].
Madelyn Garner is the author of the poetry collection Hum of Our Blood (3: A Taos Press). Her poems have appeared in The Florida Review, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, The Pinch, Western Humanities Review, Water-Stone Review, and The Best American Poetry.