POETRY
Eternity or Infinity? by Maxine Scates
I’ve thought them interchangeable,
though they even sound alike, but today tells me one
has more light and is like looking out at the sea
and finding I have to look away
because the blue, the froth of the waves,
the white variations of tidal sands and whiter birds
gathered to search for tiny shrimp and worms
in the outgoing tide
are too bright to look at. And, though
the sea seems infinite, this view
with people and dogs strolling, everyone
remarkably cordial, even the dogs, could be
the eternity anyone would be happy to have
here on a late February day on the Oregon Coast
where the temperature will reach sixty degrees
when Boston is still under three feet of snow
after weeks of endless storms. I know infinity
isn’t this bright. I think it has an ominous sense
of the undertow, less what we imagine than something
so big we can’t. I don’t think my mother
thought about infinity
each morning when she set off for the bus stop
on her way to work. She thought about how time
lived in the number of steps to the bus stop
and how many minutes it took to walk them.
Yet doesn’t infinity have something to do
with the time we don’t have, never had,
with why it will be sixty degrees here today
when it’s still snowing in Boston keeping kids
home from school and parents from going to work
and eventually not paying their bills? My mother
lived that way too, paycheck to paycheck
though she knew someday eternity would be
her reward. And it occurs to me that if you believe
in eternity, maybe infinity doesn’t matter
even as it threatens to spin us back into where
we came from which does make eternity
a lot more appealing and infinity what we’d like
to forget. Because isn’t it true that mostly all we want
to do is make a story about how we got here
and why we’re good enough to stay?
Maxine Scates is the author of three collections of poetry: Undone (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2011), Black Loam (WordTech Communications, 2005), and Toluca Street (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, and The New Yorker.
Poem in My Mother’s Voice by Augusta Funk
I was given some horses. And the horses carried
my body from the playground to the war and back again.
They must have passed through my life as children,
the men who ran ahead of me, dropping like small animals
who had grown smaller and more furious with each bullet
or number on a die. Otherwise I was cared for, was given
gloves against the rain and made to garden along the road.
I was nowhere. Flickering mountain passes. Trucks sliding
to the left and right. In my father’s voice I said get out.
Never mind I was given some horses. Lightbulbs apples
glasses of sweet tea. I worked for a man who wrote
his name on everything. And the horses stood in a field
across from the hospital where I taught you to hold a fork
in your left hand while cutting, in your right while bringing food
to your mouth. You were born between roads that were
never yours. Crayons and magazines, cut-out snowflakes
and paper gowns. You were given some horses, some roads.
Augusta Funk’s poetry has appeared in The Colorado Review, The Offing, The Massachusetts Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Best New Poets 2019.
Childhood by Sophia Stid
My brother wants to be an archaeologist.
Ar-key-o-lo-gy, I say to myself
when I’m alone, practicing –
pressing my fingertips to the bathroom mirror,
watching my mouth –
over my shoulder, the solid woman
of Mary Cassatt reaches an arm up to bathe
and holds it there like a dancer.
Between her legs, something dark
and lovely . . .
Archaeology. The word tastes
complicated, like meat.
I don’t know what I want to be. Some words
make me stutter. I want to learn to say them
without the lurch. Sense
of standing on a bridge as it takes itself away,
stone by stone –
when I know the steps that brought me there
can’t bring me back. I look over my shoulder
at the woman in the painting
and try to hold my arm like that.
Kings River by Sophia Stid
WATER CONGRESS JESUS
GOD – at 70 MPH, the freeway signs blur
to a warped chorus. Outside the air, the tar
beneath, soft with valley heat. I press
my cheek to the car window – cool shock
of glass – we’re here, you say. Small relief.
I am from tired earth, hard men. The red
scent of this inland resentment. Cow-skin, cess-
pools, sweat, I remember his cigarette dropped
in the trough and hissing. Even the water here
burns a little bit. A skittering incandescence
candled by runoff fertilizer, surface slick,
bursting into a brief dead brightness
that won’t warm. Can’t cleanse. Won’t meld
or mend. The flare drowns itself:
small ending reflected in the dark
wet eyes of the cows. That dull sheen calls
back through decades to the brilliantine
he combed through his neat soldier’s hair,
winking at me now from the photographs,
shining obscene as a movie star grin
or the medals pinned to his chest. What does it do
to a body to sleep every night in reach of a gun?
What does it mean for a body
to grow large wrangling plain‑boned
heads of cows into slots, prodding
warm flanks through slaughter-
house chutes to be shot
through the jaw? I am from bodies that turn
on themselves. You can’t do a damn thing, he snarled
at the doctor years after the stroke, his arm still
wasted, heavy as a rope in his lap. When the end
of a body comes, hard descent. A cow’s knees
locked. The signs that say,
you know no help is coming.
Sophia Stid’s poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, Image, and Crab Orchard Review.
Hiding in the Crook Under His Office Desk From an Active Shooter, Davy Crockett is Visited by an Apparition by Seth García
Which one’s the mockingbird? which one’s the world?
– Randall Jarrell
Gripping a stress ball that looks like Earth,
figured into the angle one’s body must take
at the base of some great immediacy,
his tie never before such a noose, he wonders:
does it come to this – to watch
all we’ve built distill itself into one
brief endless instant?
What was shocking, appalling, even,
was that all there could be taken then
in the molasses slowness, was the inventory:
supplies reflecting in the dim light: in the muzzle flash catching rubber bands; shells and stealth gear, scissors dull and stiff, pencils and open red bleeding pens, spilling printer cartridges, paper torn floating; staplers and thermoses, USBs and paper weights; bulldog clips, an extra pair of sneakers to walk home in, a too cheery family photo or two; and only quick sights of body, twisted and severed malignant, all suspended in air, no sound, no sound; and then movement, growing wings:
eighteen hundred and thirty-six mockingbirds appeared then, calls mimicking the shotgun’s cock pump; the generational condensation, applause of wing, new state of matters, the short shot of flame;
and he understood that, calling like this, a language needs no words to speak:
Hello, Davy. So, now we see the last
extinction. It always came to this, was always
happening, had always happened.
See here the suspended fields
and their blood, the tireless myth, the everlasting
and the appalling finite. Come with us,
step through this blessed, bladed rain –
And didn’t everything then turn
to his parents, or what was left of them
in the mind; what he wouldn’t give to hear his mother
sing out hush little baby, don’t say a word,
or his father, the resignation he couldn’t hide after the flood
took their home, how he held it there, biblically male
in the shoulders, afraid of being seen without the weapons
with which we surround our hearts,
and you,
who claims that bullets can be split in half on
an axe from forty yards out, who believes all
the savagery of the cinema screen, there’s
nothing you can do to stop this.
Seth García’s poems have appeared in Zone 3, Slipstream, Boston Accent, and Reckoning.
The Next Day by Sally Rosen Kindred
Let’s pretend the last time I felt safe
was just last week, that it felt
like moonlight in my skin. Let’s pretend
the next day I went back
into the woods and found a bonnet, a doll
and spiders still moving in the trees.
Let’s say the longleaf pines didn’t die,
the fraser fir withstood threats
of hands and threats of air,
and so the Weller’s salamander
and the rock gnome lichen made
a home there, the spruce fir moss
spider could bend its legs
like women bending at the waist
to touch in thanks the grass
hems of God. Let’s pretend I don’t
need a glass of wine. I don’t need
a wet throat to say I believe
my sons will walk to the store
and home through the woods
and our warped door. That nothing here
belongs in the brute moonless dark
of a box made from fir or pine.
Let’s pretend the last time I felt safe
was yesterday, was soon. Let’s say
we can put all our dark
in a box. And a box is not
always elegy: that the lid will bend
easily, like spider legs, like the legs
of a galaxy in the black
antler-velvet night, and let’s pretend
I made the darkness up –
because after all, it was made. No, let’s thank
the Maker. Say tomorrow it got cool
and the next day, cooler. Let’s say we all survive.
Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of two poetry books from Mayapple Press, Book of Asters (2014) and No Eden (2011). Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Greensboro Review, and The Kenyon Review Online.
A Briefing by Robin Myers
It wasn’t that I died,
obviously.
Just that a life began
and ended
with an insectan
entirety:
one minute lustrous, frightening, winged,
then somehow swept in a husk against
the baseboard,
or something.
And that was that.
And then everything else,
work, youth, currencies, etc.,
another love,
and who knows how many short-lived half-loves that seeped their chemicals
into my things,
and the clean crackle of the love that’s incited me since,
and the occasional untimely revelation,
and baked eggs,
and friends,
and the gray film over the wild city,
and the same big want
but bluer now, soft,
a hum as sweet as the heart of a mouse.
Correlation vs. Causation by Robin Myers
The most sex she’d ever had was the year
she started singing. Her sternum
thrummed on roofs, in bars,
at intersections. It was better
than a secret. She learned
her throat’s best
filaments. She drank herself
bright as a tuning fork, felt
her shoulders luminous. When she shut
her eyes, it wasn’t always clear
if it was rapture
or effacement, but it didn’t
matter much. It wasn’t like,
she thought, there’d be a test – although
the shrug too was a swagger, the strut
a nervousness. Even then,
you see, her hands would flutter
beside the rest of her, flinching in
their little bones.
Her chest would strain to split
open like a carambola, and
it never did – her body
kept her in. Oh god
she can remember thinking, what
will I have to do
to get out of it.
Robin Myers’s poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, PANK Magazine, Harvard Review, The Massachusetts Review, and 32 Poems.
Letter to the Perseids by Felicity Sheehy
after Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Like anything I normally sleep through, I imagined
you were too good for the likes of me: all starry-eyed
and earth-shaking, like Catherine Wheels
on the Fourth of July, or a tiptoed kiss at midnight –
the sort of thing I’d watch from a 6 P.M. couch
on a light-muffled screen. I imagined fire
and flames, or a deep sound, like a gong,
thought you’d fall like underwear from the trees
and the shrieks of my streak-haired neighbor,
or like toilet paper from the wrist of every oak,
every other Halloween, those streamers thudding
my car, like sap. Even my mother saw you
at nineteen, from the back of a motorcycle:
another thing I couldn’t imagine. And round-faced
Mr. Stevens, who’d pocket sandwiches to school
told the whole second grade he’d married his wife
as you fell. I missed you first when I was born –
two weeks early, on a cool morning in July.
I didn’t know how to spin into this world
as something hard and fierce, something bright.
And I didn’t know what it would be like
to tip on my back, in that first field in Vermont
in the milk-thresh of the dew. I didn’t understand
how a change could come quickly, or quietly,
a match dragged in the darkness –
how it could glow. Look for me next time
on the blue Adirondack, with a wool sweater
and muck-ridden boots, as I’ll be looking
for you: small, white, and persistent,
little more than nothing in the night.
Felicity Sheehy’s poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The New Republic, Narrative, The Adroit Journal, and Shenandoah.
Self-Portrait as Office Chair by El Williams III
Plush thick horizon
submitting to your
move. Bend for me
a new way of use.
Make me your
cathedra of choice.
I can handle
you. Sitter.
Back, ass
and thighs.
And if this
becomes a bore,
we can spin ourselves
a new elation,
motion ourselves
rolling all over
this floor. Our space
is primed and privy.
Be body with me.
Pressure.
Test the gravity
of my ballast.
El Williams III’s poems have appeared in Vinyl Poetry and Prose and Shade Literary Arts.
A Man Falls out of a Car by John Hodgen
Just now in the post office parking lot, a car backing up, the man falling out
the passenger door as casually as one might start the old joke about a man
walking into a bar, that perennial trope, that hearty har har, the way a dead
soldier, perhaps one in particular, like a ghost, like a mope, might walk down
the side streets of Cincinnati or Kandahar, and suddenly fall, jump up, get
right back on the horse again for the good of his father. A man has fallen
out of car. He has sprung back to his feet with élan, with sangfroid, more
from embarrassment than hurt, the door still ajar, with an alacrity altogether
unbefitting for a man falling out of a car. He knows he has fallen, just not
exactly how far. He knows he has slipped, his focus righting himself,
regaining control, like a pommel vaulter who hasn’t quite stuck the landing,
who self-corrects, tries to gather his strength for the judges, who see, assess,
to the right, to the left, like the SS for der Führer, despite all our attempts
to cover ourselves. Falling’s the worst, we’re sure of that, as if we’ve fallen
from love or grace. We’re lower to the ground after that, closer to the end.
He sees his skinned hands, looks up to the sky, remembers what his drill
sergeant said, that you’re gonna be dead, you’re in a world of shit,
that there is no other, that Jodie just fell into bed with your mother.
John Hodgen is the author of Heaven & Earth Holding Company (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), Bread Without Sorrow (Lynx House Press, 2002), and In My Father’s House (Bluestem Press, 1993).
The Funeral Ship by Sarah Crossland
That night, the bandmaster and his boys
played their chamber music while the ship filled
with the frozen sea. Grief rockets splintered
the cello’s echo, and it seems incredible, now,
that there is no common word from which
both violence and violin came. I watched the tide,
in my own time, and it was just as shameless,
waves the violet of an eyelid battered
with sleep, the breakers bearing the same emptiness
of a cinched-neck chemise, washed up
weeks later among debris. What the ocean kept
a hundred years became hideous, blooming
lucent with gribble, rock reef: the crow’s nest
bell, a crewman’s keys – the sunken specimens
of living, grown again for the sea. What is not
too often said is that, soon after, another ship
sailed from Nova Scotia to save what it could
of the wreck. On board, the morticians tended
their jars of salt and arsenic, their vaults
of packing ice. In cuffed gloves, the craftsman
sanded down a hundred coffins – the smell
of sawdust swarmed with the intent of bees –
but there would not be enough. To whom
do we turn when there is only the dead
to blame? The morse lamps flickered with code
that night, but neither captain could read meaning
in their erratic flash. Hope does this – will not
let us call it by a name. Somewhere, swallowed
in water: a platen press, its lead type
letters streamered with algae. Speaking
of the sky, a German sailor wrote that the air
mirrored and returned what was below it.
Luft spiegel. Soft horizon, a mirage. And yet,
it would be untrue to say their eyes
knew nothing: inside the hull, and on the rafts,
the passengers’ cries became the noise
of plague locusts let into the woods. Sweet
william, I thought: sedge, blue iris wakeful,
flagged – all that the florist gathered to disguise
the final scent they’d soon bring home with them.
Surrenders by Sarah Crossland
Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site White Haven, Missouri
It was hard to see the color
of Grant’s farmhouse and not think
of Whitman’s grass: the boys
who disappeared into the skirling rye
and fescue on the battlefields,
or the green perfume
of the seckel pears he gave away
as he surveyed the sick beds in Washington.
Everything, as always in war,
eventually refers to silence: in 1861,
Grant led his men to a creek bed
where it was rumored a Confederate
regiment hid. Rattlesnakes trellised
through his ribs as he looked down
over the brow: only drenched timber
and an overturned tent for witness –
the enemy, as it is said, fears you
as much as you fear him.
And in the parlor, where the wind persisted
even after the door had locked,
we could not find the drop-leaf desk,
the pedal harp – what furniture
always waited in these houses kept
for history. Without chairs,
how could we know which of the rooms
death sat in while the tallow candle
licked its wounds, tallying in errant amber
the lives lost in that day’s light?
There were floorboards beneath these
floorboards, a propped milk door
whose millwork once was set by slaves.
The larder shelf hung with a fat glass
gourd to show us – by gesture –
what it was like.
My father photographed the emptiness.
We walked to the cistern, the pick ice
house where they would lift in
bolts of frozen pondwater to last
through summer. We pictured the slabs
like chiseled silk and still our breath
obeyed us. I did not understand. What good
are ghosts if they can’t help us reckon
with loneliness?
At Shiloh, ankle swollen, the general vained
to sleep beneath a tree as the bandit-swift rain
stole the night. Sherman, his collar banked
around his ears, lit his cigar and said,
We’ve had the devil’s own day. The vineal
smoke climbed up through his words
to the sky . . .
There could be no living in surrender:
they looked up into the moon above them,
distantly blooming, like a cannon’s mouth.
Sarah Crossland’s work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Narrative, FIELD, The Iowa Review, and A Public Space.
Fragments by Jackson Holbert
The river moves and it doesn’t move. Every few towns a dam stops the water. Two years ago this May a sewage line shattered. All that summer hypodermics washed up on the beach. Steel. Moonlight. Sand.
The necks of birds swiveled like the machines that came to me in dreams. Machines that disappeared when I woke up. Machines that had set me free.
My father used to travel around the state and inspect church bells. He believed that bells, real bells, were the purest form of music.
By twelve I’d built five chairs, nine tables, six bookcases, and helped my father cast ten bells.
When my friend Will shot himself in the head my Uncle Tim got his corneas. The day after he died we burned his skateboard and the clearcoat went to our heads. We walked around sick for days.
I spent each autumn in the forest behind my house imagining wars. Whole countries sprawled across the acre of pine. Sometimes I walked among the trees and felt still.
Jackson Holbert’s poems have appeared in The Nation, FIELD, and Best New Poets 2016.
Seven Years After My Son’s Birth by Brian Komei Dempster
Super Bowl helmets crash on screen,
fever scoring over
one-hundred, our son Brendan clenching
his mouth. Halftime ad
of a soldier just returned home, duffel bag
over his shoulder, one arm around his wife, the other
dangling, hand missing, flesh wrapped
over bone. Swatting my hand, Brendan sweeps
the air wildly, knocks over chips
and salsa, rug stained red. Not again I blurt out, take
a breath, guide him straight, lower him soft
to the couch. Grace tucks a pillow under
his neck, strokes his forehead. Ice on his skin, he grips
my wrist. The young son
clings to the leg
of his father’s fatigues, already knowing
to avoid the phantom
hand. Our son resting near, Grace kneels, scrubs out
splattered red of cubed tomatoes. To the sink
I haul the bucket, wring out
the towel. A flag wilted on the pole, the soldier
and his wife step through the screen door, the son
following. My son will be seven
tomorrow. Rising
to his feet, he staggers
as if shot, collapses in my arms. Grace wheels him
to the car. Get him
to Emergency. Lashes fluttering, our son
faraway. We’re almost there. The father looking
past mortar and smoke
to stars. Let’s celebrate our troops
coming home. The camera
pans in, the freckled boy shaking with laughter
from the fake punch
of his father’s only good
hand. Behind the curtain, the nurse’s hand trembles,
misses my boy’s vein, then steadies, fills him
with sodium chloride, electrolytes, drip
of anticonvulsants, Prolonged seizing
causes brain damage. Machine by his bed whirring
like helicopter blades. Should it have been
smaller, the moon sliver
they once removed from Brendan’s brain,
or should it have been bigger, a slab
of granite inscribed with names
of the father’s missing platoon? Curled
into himself, he freezes, the fluorescent panel
flickers, a bullet
of light, I sink, soft trench
of his mattress, bring him close, his t-shirt soaked
in sweat. Shoes tight on my feet
keep me awake. Brendan, come back. In this parched
room his breath lands, rolls
across my chest. Blown sand, we
lift away.
Brian Komei Dempster is the author of two poetry collections, Topaz (2013) and Seize (2020), both from Four Way Books; and editor of the anthology Making Home from War: Stories of Japanese American Exile and Resettlement (Heyday, 2013). His poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, North American Review, Shenandoah, and TriQuarterly.
A Fool of Yourself by Jane Zwart
Kindly the idiom implies
that there is manufacture
involved, that you must
haul out the sewing machine
and devise from old scraps
a new costume.
As if
your foolishness were made,
a forked and hotchpotch hat
or borrowed pair of horns;
as if metamorphosis
had to magic you
into the jester capped
with a rabbit’s ears,
ears ringing with a mirth
you didn’t mean to cause;
as if the peals of laughter
owed everything
to two bells you pealed
of your own accord;
as if rage were the work
turning us to cartoons.
Well, maybe it is. Isn’t there,
after all, some foolishness
about Diana Prince’s
spinning until her clothes
change into spangles?
And you, too, can turn
around to find the motley
right there; to find
that there you are, slipping,
without making excuses,
into something
more comfortable.
Jane Zwart’s work has appeared in Poetry, Rattle, Threepenny Review, Cincinnati Review, and TriQuarterly.
ALIEN MISS ATTENDS A COMPLINE SERVICE AS A NON-BELIEVER by Carlina Duan
wearing ripped jeans & clogs while onwards,
women part their lips and let loose the song. lord
have mercy. it has been a long year. and the rosé
has tripped from a glass cup, slosh-sloshed down
my waiting throat. prayer as night falls. for
memory to unreel, peel back. for grief
to release its thick hold. in a room full
of candles, I forget myself. amen, the glossy
notes keep ringing. once, I was younger. baba
and I walked through the Galleria dell’Accademia.
David stood, a body suspended in pristine
white. glory in the calves, the straight
spine. what he didn’t own
ran through my body: the low mud
of speech. years later, speaking to men
I loved, I said what I didn’t mean.
let words drip out of me like fat
beads of milk. I said I would
forget, but here, the memory muzzles
desire, covers me in its pelt.
in the dark pews
of a church I don’t belong to, I come
apart. made alien tonight
by a river of sound, unwinding
itself through one ear, sticky before
exiting the
other. lord look at what
I’ve made. in a year designed
by loss, still, I watch white moths
flicker towards the light. I wrench
open my mouth to say it:
in me lives
an entire spool of thread: I am
a daughter of a daughter of a daughter
of a daughter and yes, they
survived so I could sit on a bench
in another country watching
women pry open their lips to leak it
out: as it was in the beginning
as it always is
I begin with a woman
inside of me
turning on the lamp
reciting the words.
amen, amen.
I-94 by Carlina Duan
& I remember the bus driver who once used each
broken windshield wiper as a drum stick, clattering
on the window, banging out a drum, drum, who
let the dogs out! he cawed, and us second graders
in the back: feral, baby teeth fallen & craters
between our gums, who! who, who who who
we pushed back, & the window grimy with
dust & the strange green branches of maple
& yeah, Lawrence ramming his knee
into the back of my seat, the hard
knob hitting my lower back. how I
felt it, even then, what set me apart
from those other dogs. I was girl. mouth
unlike those other mouths that moaned or barked.
my throat for speech. pristine beneath a cotton collar.
Lawrence kneeing the back of my seat
until I mumbled the words. he wanted
to hear me say it. sitting on the edge
like that. dropping syllables like I
meant them, who let
the dogs out? my eyes straight ahead.
his breath on the back of my neck.
our bus full of dogs. or fangs. wheels round
& round. boys became men who forced
it out of me then shrugged:
who, who, who who?
Carlina Duan is the author of the poetry collection I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017), and Alien Miss, forthcoming from the University of Wisconsin Press in 2021.
Rust Belt Adage by Sophie Klahr, Corey Zeller
I can’t pronounce each rusted thing you are:
factory mouth, pine box,
stitches clipped from a boy’s chin.
It’s July, and we are supposed to say
something but we ride the bus,
your hands in my jeans, and
you never look me in the eye.
We ride by the vines sighing
through broken windows,
abandoned schools not even
for sale, signs peeling from
shut bars and God, how much
this makes us feel at home.
We are still riding
when the ballgame ends.
The light does something
and everyone cheers.
I forget you already;
we touch but I am watching TV,
the game recap, a quiz
show repeat and it is
sweeter this way. This is a way
to become more
like our city. I am thinking about
the way our part of the world
says color. The tongue
in the throat, at the roof,
tighter. The rust and
the rust and the rivers. We clutch
at the carpet, sweating menthol,
laughing at the TV.
What are you doing now
like another bridge I loved
forgetting its name?
Sophie Klahr is the author of the poetry collection Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016). Corey Zeller is the author of the collections You and Other Pieces (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2015) and Man Vs. Sky (YesYes Books, 2013). Their collaborative poems have appeared in Four Way Review, The Rumpus, Passages North, Southeast Review, and Denver Quarterly.
LAST WEEK, TIED TO MY INTRAVENOUS POLE by Adrie Kusserow
In a chemo haze, transfixed by a TV show
about the Cordyceps fungus
attacking its host from the inside,
I lay slack with the others.
All of us watched a bullet ant stumble about
as if drunk, the brain the first to go,
while the colony herded it away
and skittered back to work.
Soon wild neon tentacles
madly unfurled through its stunned corpse.
Orange sprigs and luscious pink tendrils
sprouting through its furry abdomen,
thorax cracked open. Not one
of us could turn away. A kind of science fiction,
the male narrator said, not really, I thought,
my lips cracking, my purple fungal toenails
lifting from their beds, mouth sores,
like white orchids, so perfect in their blooming,
my scalp’s itchy welts rising
like the soft caps of mushrooms,
dark thoughts poking up
through my brain’s tired beds,
imagining all the ways humans, too,
possess and poison the planet’s pores –
Finally I just closed my eyes,
lay there tripping, remembering a video
of a sea turtle, a plastic straw they thought was a worm,
poking out of its nose,
all the pesticides sprouting up
through the earth’s battered body,
emerging as the sweet green sheen of a golf course, its sins hidden
by its velvet emerald moss, so deceptively serene,
or the dazzling iridescent skyscrapers,
so quick to pierce the black soil
and rise, so cocky in their magnificence, their silver scales
glistening with victory. It’s no wonder the whole lot of us
can’t turn away from our own brilliance,
that gravity still keeps us humble at all.
Adrie Kusserow is the author of two collections of poetry, REFUGE (2013) and Hunting Down the Monk (2002), both from BOA Editions, Ltd. Her poems have appeared in diode, Anthropologica: Canadian Anthropological Society, Green Mountains Review, Salmagundi, and Harvard Divinity Bulletin.
ghar ghar dīpak barai by Rajiv Mohabir
I’ll burn in my home,
for another thirty years,
maybe fewer –
the spun cotton of my body
bent before metformin,
gemfibrozil, lisinopril.
Today may as well be Diwali.
I’ve hand rolled ladoos of gram
and ghee. On each one:
Heart line, life line, Mound
of Venus. I’ve lined up
clay vessel after clay
body, each red life thrown
into the river after sputtering
into black. My head
is on fire. I’m still hoping
for a jasmine to open
as though a door to my skull
before it explodes on the pyre.
I want to see. I want
to see myself as dust
still pressed together with blood,
the palm print of being formed
by hands, the sun shaft
through the windows.
Rajiv Mohabir is the author of The Cowherd’s Son (Tupelo Press, 2017) and The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books, 2016). He is the translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (Kaya Press, 2019).
Taking Stock by Michael McGriff
There is one corner
in the room
where feathers
and long hairs collect.
When the wind is right,
the sound of boxcars.
An old woman pushes
a wheelbarrow
down the center
of the road.
She is not unlike
the square of light
I trace onto the wall
each day at noon.
Michael McGriff’s poetry collections include Early Hour (2017) and Home Burial (2012), both from Copper Canyon Press, and Dismantling the Hills (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008). He is the co‑author, with J.M. Tyree, of the linked story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (A Strange Object, 2014).
Waves by Bruce Bond
Once there was a mother who took her children each
Sunday to the sea and never swam. Her hair was perfect.
As time is when it stiffens, or a heaven without animals.
An ocean turned breathless, and so you walk across.
Perfect, from the old French parfit for completed.
A good life was full of endings, and you could find them
in the small and beautiful boxes at the foot of her bed.
You could open and close and open forever, like the tide.
*
As a child, I read the sky at night. It was full of nothing
and fires nailed to nothingness, so long as I could see.
Light archival and wordless still. And I was headed there,
beyond the bear, the twin, the stories told to children in
the woods. I felt nervous, boundless, awed. The world
beyond constellation took on the shade of black known
only to interior spaces. Call it faith. Or utter lack of faith.
I, a child, did not know the difference. I am a child still.
*
When a father leaves, the sea becomes a sky laid low.
On a far horizon, the incognitas of the ancient world.
And you sail toward the edge where the water pours.
When a father dies, the earth’s edge is a cataract of stars.
Why the ocean never empties is anyone’s guess.
But if you look hard, you might see a blur on the floor.
If you lean over the water, you see a body, a face,
beneath the fathoms pinned by starlight to the eye.
*
When I was young, my Lord was clear as consciousness.
And so he slipped in and out of our ears, our mouths.
He was a part of each, the sum of every, of time no less,
its body and its angel, and so I named him the long view
for whom we have no name. Bewildering, as music is,
as I watched my father open a book of hymns and sing
of a god he never spoke of, his breath drawn through a place
I never knew. But from the distance of a song, I heard.
*
I live so close to the funeral home, I hear the sad favorites
on the Hammond organ. The music for one voice or none.
The glass of the heart wrapped in cotton. Silence so misses
another silence, you could hear them as one and never know.
There is a mercy in that. The minimal grace of bewildered spaces.
Every Sunday, the black limousine gets soaped and polished.
I have watched them with their rags without knowing I am
watching. The jewel of the neighborhood, its headlights burning.
*
If, as you leave the scene of the accident, you feel heavy-
limbed, light-headed, more than shattered, less than numb,
take heart. The crumpled hood huffing steam on the cliff
will be your angel. It will stare transfixed across the guardrail.
Wind will lean into your ear and whisper, a body in motion
stays in motion. And the road from here will be more deadly
and sublime. You will lie back down in the snow and wait
for the pain to arrive, for the medic’s light to search your eyes.
*
My father looked all night for the story of his bloodline.
It gave him a consolation of ghosts in the shapes of trees.
Every branch a mother, every leaf a child among the others
beneath a tree. Heaven was an earth, and earth the sum
total of every dawn. And so it never died. We planted
a tree in his memory. It is larger now, though the plaque
with his name on it is smaller. Every fall, the leaves drift over,
scatter. Every time I kneel to read, the leaves fall through.
*
I felt compelled to choose, to pledge allegiance to the wall.
I was told, fear God because he loved me. Love my father,
and so I felt afraid. Death was a small object in the distance.
Like me, beneath a desk. Looking down at the floor, I felt
compelled to choose. Earth or life on the surface. I know.
I would always have a name, a small object in the distance.
But who survives to read it. When the missiles fall, who will
ask the question. Where does heaven go when heaven dies.
*
If not heaven, why not this. Why not paradise as the meal
between us, the story you are telling, how you and I would make
it mine. Why not the night your father carried you, asleep,
from the Hollywood Bowl to the car. Or was that your dream
on the long ride home. It’s all talk now, and the deeper we go,
the more the talk gets quiet, small, as if, with eyes of the sleepless,
we are entering the bedroom of a child, and you say, I buried
my father in his works on earth. And I whisper, me too, me too.
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-six books, including Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997‑2015 (LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir, 2018), Dear Reader (Parlor Press, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018), Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019), and The Calling (Parlor Press, 2020).