Poetry
CHRIS MARTIN SINGS SHIVER & I SHIVER: A POEM FOR MADAM VICE PRESIDENT by Felicia Zamora
This poem isn’t for Coldplay or Rock ’n’ Roll or the Honda
speakers or the 275
on-ramp to Dayton, OH on November 11. This poem isn’t
for Martin. Isn’t for the way
his stool shook at First Avenue where I touched his foot, sweaty
palmed & sweaty breasted,
before Apple, before Madison Square, & mouthed, This Coldplay’s
gonna be big. This poem
isn’t for my grandfather, or his, You’ll never amount to anything,
gutturals, his, You dirty
spic; waste of sperm, pupils in spit at my brown body, my brown
irises. This poem
isn’t for the associate provost who pulled me into his office
after the 2016 election,
saying, We liberals will always be disadvantaged, Felicia, because we’re
unwilling to do horrid things
to win, after asking me about my undocumented family, after
asking, You’re Mexican right?
This poem is not for his damaging white liberalism. This poem
isn’t for the playground
splashed with my blood after being punched in the face by the kid
a grade above me & Fuckin’
Taco in his saliva. Isn’t for the asphalt, the snickers or that kid . . .
all those kids.
This poem is for Kamala Harris. Madam Vice President
Kamala Harris. This poem
is for my little brown body between my grandfather & the television,
alert & still, not running
away, a demand to be seen. This poem is for my moon boots,
thrift store gems, & the tip
of the right boot in that kid’s groin. This poem is for my mother
who wrote nine children’s
books in the 80’s & not one accepted for publication. This poem
is for The Bear That Changes
Colors, Glasses for Tommy Tiger, Betty Butterfly’s Strange Mirror, &
the author’s signature: Linda
Zamora. For the reason I became a poet – to write a poem
to Madam Vice President – to say
the word possibility & believe it. This poem is for the trillions
of false litanies to women – You
can’t X. Can’t Y. Don’t Z. Don’t X. Cunt. You should Y. You should X.
Fuck off. You don’t belong.
Don’t get your panties in a bunch. Let me mansplain X. Relax. It’s just a joke.
You wanted this – may
this match burn these all down. This poem is for women.
This poem is for Trans women.
This poem is for Queer women. This poem is for Black women.
This poem is for Brown
women. This poem is for Truth & Tubman & Parks. This poem
is for Dove & hooks &
Sanchez. This poem is for Anzaldúa, Baez, Cisneros. This poem
is for women. This poem
is for Madam Vice President Kamala Harris. This poem
is for how Martin sings Shiver
& I shiver at your smile the night the electoral votes hit
290 blue. I see my face
in your smile – all the faces of history. I shiver for history.
I shiver for my smile
inside your smile. I shiver for the necessity of shivering long
overdue, shivers of shivers.
This poem is for the ghazal. This poem is a ghazal because it’s
a world view. We stitch
the stars down to earth now. We stitch the stars deep inside
the soil of us, cells, salt water
guts. We stitch with hair & wishbones for eyes, stitch until
fingers bleed & then we stitch
on top of the stitches. We taught ourselves to sew. We taught
ourselves out of invisibility
the difference between the shadow cast & the body & yet part
of the body & how
a shadow means a body exists, a body in light. Step in,
dear sisters. Step in.
Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry, including I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021); Quotient (Tinderbox Editions, 2021); Body of Render (Red Hen Press, 2020); and Of Form & Gather (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Guernica, Orion, and The Nation.
CAREER DAY by Lara Egger
He said he’d been, among others,
Shakespeare and Plato
in his past lives. I was thirteen; he was three months shy
of getting married. It was the summer consent
became a box-blonde, started skipping
breakfast.
And me? That same summer, I began a tradition
of fucking anyone.
When I look into a stranger’s eyes, I see an angel
lighting god’s cigarette. I’m ruthless
as gravity, wholesome
as a maraschino cherry. Maybe I was trying to fill the space
left by what I’d given him. Or maybe my ancestry
leads back to the place
from where the first fallen
star fell.
He told me in a past life, I was one of Jesus’s mistresses.
Told me my school uniform smelled like swimming
in a field of nascent violets.
It was the year I discovered desire
is often grief
reincarnate;
the year cruelty and tenderness
converged
between my legs.
Sex, it turns out, is mostly
empty calories.
The more I feed
the fatter
this nothing gets.
POEM AFTER EGON SCHIELE’S PAINTING SELF-PORTRAIT AS SAINT SEBASTIAN by Lara Egger
after Eduardo Corral
1.
Ten arrows, each fanged or
winged
with a competing
hunger. Some appear
to be floating.
Schiele’s head leans
into the crook of his right arm.
Two barbs
pierce his gut, another
pins his wrist
to the jaundiced canvas.
His eyes are closed. There is no
blood.
If it weren’t for the arrows,
it might seem he is sleeping.
2.
Here is a body, a commodity and a partial sea view.
3.
When I was in high school, I got a job as a magician’s assistant. The incense smelled like Bud
Light spiked with sweat. Saturday nights I’d sneak out through my bedroom window and bike to
the magician’s house where he’d be waiting to disappear me.
4.
Once I was so thin / I was / a hundred dollar bill.
Men would hold me / up to the light / to see if I was real . . .
5.
The artist employs shadow
to create the illusion of light.
This is one definition of magic.
Another, maybe, is a girl at fifteen
learning sex is currency.
6.
The wound is the place where the light enters you.
– Rumi
7.
See dusk drape its arm
across the city. Watch the sky
transmute like a bruise.
Remember the hill above the late lit buildings.
Remember where his car, where
his hands
were idling.
8.
Schiele’s hands
are raised above his head
like witnesses. Is he
tied to a tree? No,
the posts of a bed.
As if by magic,
there is no blood.
Sometimes I pretended
to be sleeping.
9.
(In the penumbra of consent) the magician teaches the assistant to swallow fire. (In the penumbra
of desire) the lover asks the girl to swallow fire. (In the penumbra of regret) I become the
arsonist, my belly full of fire.
10.
Light: of little weight. Light archaic (of a woman): promiscuous.
Light (used with object): to ignite, to set burning . . .
Lara Egger is the author of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021). Egger’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, West Branch, DIAGRAM, and Verse Daily.
WHAT BEGINS by Danusha Laméris
What begins in beauty, ends in beauty.
What begins in sorrow, ends in sorrow.
The seed once planted, soon in full bloom.
If grief, then grief. If anger, anger. They say
the first week of any love affair reveals its end.
Give me the child at seven, and so forth.
And didn’t the world begin with a bang?
Hard to argue for another truth. But I have seen
a heart worn thin, take to small repairs, have watched
a blue jay, born wild, eat out of a woman’s hand.
And didn’t we begin as tadpoles, curled and gilled?
I want to think the starting place is only
one location on a curve that we can follow
to another end. And then, begin again.
BLUE NOTE by Danusha Laméris
My brother named all his houseplants after jazz musicians,
so when he left town he’d say, Can you water Miles?
Coltrane is getting too cold by the window. Give Billie
a little extra drizzle, but let her dry out. Was there
a Nina? I can’t remember. But I know Mingus had
broad glossy leaves and Cassandra had a pink tint
to her foliage, but was frail due to less-than-tropical conditions.
I’m trying to say it was music and plants and sprouted greens
and my brother in the kitchen, cheffing‑up roasted beets
and everyone hanging out, old-style Oakland, which was
wood floors and hummus, and take-out Ethiopian. I thought
we’d live like kings. A dynasty, from one potluck to the next.
It felt that way. The red carpet days of our twenties.
I took care of those plants as best I could, put them
in my own living room, fed them liquid fertilizer, and,
I hoped, the right slant of light. I thought we’d gotten out
beyond the worst of it—the story we were born to. Though
we both had a feeling he’d die young. But the years kept ticking,
and the friends kept coming, and his children arrived,
curled and new in their cribs. It was hard to notice things
beginning to turn, to see the signs. The mind’s erasure.
He started checking the locks, closing curtains, talking in low tones.
Sometimes the leaves start to yellow and you don’t even notice.
There’s a sound absence makes, even before it arrives,
a static in the ether, high and blue and held.
Danusha Laméris is the author of two poetry collections: The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014) and Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Orion, The American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry.
ON THE CONDITION OF BEING BORN by Matthew Nienow
As you were, then. As you were
at the moment of your first breath
outside of the mother, good
before you knew any other way to be.
Who can remember such a time?
I rely on photographs to ply the memory,
the first son, cut out of my wife, the second,
pushed straight into my hands
in the back room of our small rented house.
Both bearing the same unowned
goodness, bright as a noon sun
in summer. It hurt to look straight at it
and stayed in the eye like a wound
the brain was trying to understand or undo.
Maybe it lasted an hour. Maybe three
days or three weeks. I don’t know
that it is the same in every case, but what if
being human didn’t mean that we had to
fuck this up? I’ve been wanting
to ask questions there are no answers to,
the kind that might elicit only a hmmm
in response, or a hymn in some cases,
as though song could shed light
upon such inquiry. Maybe if it was a
wordless hymn the melody could
reach back into what held us before
we were broken into different lines.
Source. As in, the mother’s mother.
Doesn’t it feel good to lay on the earth?
I mean, actually lay down in your day clothes,
face against some grass, to just lay there
and for a moment stop pretending you are
separate from it, to stop pretending you didn’t
come from it and won’t go back, eyes open
or closed, thinking or not, the negative charge
of the very ground taking up all the excess
voltage you didn’t even know you had.
Matthew Nienow is the author of the poetry collection House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016). His poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, New England Review, and TriQuarterly.
THE ART OF CONFOUNDING CHAOS by Sarah Brown Weitzman
From a flat
landscape
of ruler
straight roads
and canals,
invading seas,
brute winds
Mondrian set
the vertical
against the
horizontal
in a balance
of oppositions.
He abandoned
green so the
primary colors
would behave
with calibrated
calm. But
chaos held
down is not
denied. Through
these squares no
trace of nature
remains ex-
cept the nature
of Nature: red
as lust, yellow
as greed, blue
as cruelty
and the black
and white
of ignorance.
Sarah Brown Weitzman’s fifth collection of poems is AMOROTICA (Main Street Rag, 2021). Her poems have appeared widely, including in New York Quarterly, North American Review, Rattle, New Ohio Review, Mid-American Review, and Spillway.
MY DAUGHTER, TALKING ABOUT BOYS by Gary Fincke
My daughter, talking about boys who drove her,
Mentions the one who sported a demo
From his father’s dealership, the license plate
Announcing its special needs. Together,
We laugh, amusement not shared the year
She turned fourteen, that boy a senior
Who idled in the driveway like she was stealing
Something worth waiting for from our house.
Three have been mentioned before: The one who,
Before graduation, died from natural causes
After failing the blood test. The one, insulin
Dependent, who drank himself into coma,
Recovered, and starred in several sequels.
The one who called from the distant city
Of late-night melancholy, singing his songs
That featured regret, who, she says, still texts
Sporadically, mournful messages
That plummet like meteor showers
Through the atmosphere of years.
This late afternoon we are watchingHer beautiful teenage daughters swim.
Now she, past forty, swells with the child
Of her second husband who has seemed
So stable his story is told in silence,
Making room, at last, for the boy who sped her
To a Friday movie as if the theater
Were an emergency room, then called
Someone else the following week and drove her
Into a rollover off a country road,
Trauma enough to kill her, one story
She has never told me, bringing it up
At poolside a quarter century later,
Because that driver has been discovered dead,
Cause unknown, in a country where English
Is seldom spoken or even carried through
Customs like a history to be declared.
Gary Fincke’s latest poetry collections are The Infinity Room (Wheelbarrow Books, 2019) and The Mussolini Diaries (Serving House Books, 2020).
CAME A SICKNESS by Peggy Shumaker
The people were used to dying
one at a time
Then came a sickness
upon the land,
came a sickness
to every nation
Came a sickness that killed
the already ill, killed
those who had not known
sickness, killed the generous
who cared for the dying,
killed the careless,
killed those who embraced
worship, killed
those who touched
no God.
The people were used to grieving
by gathering
gathering the goodness each person
brought to the world
Left bereft
we masked ourselves
So many at once,
gone
gone without touching
without goodbye
without rites
perfected
over centuries
Came more sickness
of mind,
scams, lies,
the constant deliberate
epidemic of lies
Came fine minds
crafting vaccines,
came for the lucky
recovery
Came brown blue hazel green
eyes above cloth
seeking other eyes
Came deep grief
opening rituals
we’d never touched
Breathe in, breathe out
this air we share
Each breath
a blessing
each breath
a prayer
DO NOT RESUSCITATE by Peggy Shumaker
You weren’t afraid, you say,
when you put pen to paper
to instruct those who might
restart your stopped heart
not to.
No,
not afraid.
More calm,
this danger-orange form
making clear
to ones who
know nothing
of you, clear too
to those who
love you well
that you’re mindful –
your time
breathing easy
on this earth
is short,
your plenty
mostly spent –
six children, grown,
ten grandkids, grown,
great love,
piloting
your amphibious
Widgeon, landing
on water,
wild and remote, or
off a tiny island
in Fiji,
night diving
to watch soft corals
open their polyps, millions
of mouths filled
with want,
blue ribbon eels coughing,
that considerable current
pulling us fast
and you
dream flying
letting it
take you
Peggy Shumaker is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Cairn, her new and selected volume from Red Hen Press, 2018. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally (Bison Books, 2009). Shumaker is an Alaska Quarterly Review Contributing Editor.
PROM GOWN by John Bargowski
When we took it out
of the closet and lifted
the thin plastic skin,
I could smell our youngest
girl in the same gust
that tousled the ends
of the grey streak pinned
behind my wife’s ear.
We spread the gown
out on the bed to check
for stains, static
raising the fine hairs
on our arms as we worked
the poly-bag back over
the shoulder straps.
Afterwards we drove it
to Finnegan’s Parlor,
along with the matching heels,
and the pearl necklace
she’d take with her.
Seventeen years, and
it was the last thing
we could do for her –
hand it all over
to a man we hardly knew
in the freezing chemical air
of a white-tiled room
with foundation windows
someone had painted over
to shut out the light.
John Bargowski is the author of American Chestnut (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2021) and Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway (Bordighera, 2012). His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Poetry, and Ploughshares.
NAMESAKE TRIPTYCH by Marie Tozier
1. Grandmother Wore a Cotton Dress
Nellie and I watched her shuffle to the door.
Before introductions, she kissed me. Held my hands
In her wrinkled ones. Led us through her tiny home.
Our room was clean. The large window had a thick screen,
And the double handled pane was raised high.
On the wall a portrait, my baby picture.
All those years ago. Black haired.
A blue dress and white shoes. Smiling.
Did she recognize me?
What did she think of my parents’ Divorce?
Her grandchildren growing up in Alaska?
That night, a huntsman spider trapped herself
In the window screen. Full of eggs. Ugly.
The sound of her legs on metal grate filled the night –
Made our room too small to sleep in.
2. A Different Life
I met my grandmother, Maria, in Puerto Rico.
She was a tiny lady, with deep brown skin
And wrinkled hands.
She spoke quickly, and only in Spanish.
I called her Bajita, like Papi did.
She made me popsicles of fresh Piña juice
And real coconut. She washed my laundry
By hand on a scrub board, which embarrassed me.
Not the board, but the idea that she had to do it.
I realized then, what a different life I would have led,
A Puerto Rican instead of an Eskimo.
3. You Have Your Father’s Eyes
I’ll never forget
The look on Papi’s face
When I showed him
The brown smudges
Nestled at the bottom
Of my foil wrapped
Rice Krispies treat.
Tiny roaches, I imagined –
He wasn’t sure . . .
Before he blinked, I saw the truth.
He smiled, showed me
His dimple –
Chocolate, he said.
Marie Tozier is the author of Open the Dark (Boreal Books, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Yellow Medicine Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Catamaran Literary Reader.
GULLIBLE HOPE by Anne Coray
Gullible Hope has managed to endure
Since Pandora first trapped the spirit in her jar,
While evil – outside – thrived. A firefly so kept is sure
To die, and, with our current climactic war
Even the ancient Greeks would have marveled
At Her survival. Though whether Elpis was deemed
A gift or curse was long debated. For the grizzled
Norsemen, Vön was poorly rated: slobber that streamed
From the jaws of Fenris Wolf, verse less than suitable
For the Bible. While Greta, our solemn Swedish maiden,
Is partial to Panic. “I don’t want you to be hopeful,”
She declares. She flips back her braids and urges action.
I look to the sky. No moon tonight, and I’ve lost
Her last position. She’ll wax again and wane, before Earth’s Holocaust.
HOLOS by Anne Coray
Holos ‘whole’ with kaustos ‘burnt’ is holocaust –
For ancients, sacrifice by fire, burnt offerings.
Moderns present them via car and ship exhaust:
Toxic gases, particles that clog the lungs. O Earthlings!
Forever giving – no mere bowl – but a heavenfull
Of benefactions. Imagine what’s up there:
Fumes of goat, sheep, bullock, pigeon and turtle-
Dove. All the heated breath that’s fashioned into prayer.
Not to mention smoke from the Amazon
And Indonesia. There’s more, of course, but the list
Is tedious; God is stifling a wide yawn.
Enough! You’d think by now he would insist
We curb the burning. We need a sign: monsoon and hurricane
That scald and blister the skin: a blazing wind, a searing rain.
Anne Coray is the author of three poetry collections: A Measure’s Hush (Boreal Books, 2011), Violet Transparent (Future Cycle Press, 2010), and Bone Strings (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2009); a chapbook, Soon the Wind (Finishing Line Press, 2004); and a novel, Lost Mountain (Alaska Northwest Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Poetry, North American Review, Connecticut Review, and Women’s Review of Books.
HERE IT IS by Olena Kalytiak Davis
the poem
that pretends it is suffering
as much as you
and truly, yay, truly
it does not know what to say
to whoever is calling calling ringing writing
to whatever is reaching
making small dumb sounds . . .
it ignores all
and with what cloud-glorious impunity!
excuse me, it thinks loudly, i am
a harried and haunted man!
right now, right
now someone is sending
another photo
of where the land scrapes
the sky, nay, the sea . . .
(how) could they be as lost as in need of
as me?
Olena Kalytiak Davis is the author of four poetry collections: And Her Soul Out of Nothing (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); On the Kitchen Table from Which Everything Has Been Hastily Removed (Hollyridge Press, 2009); The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2014); and shattered sonnets love cards and other back handed importunities (Copper Canyon Press, 2015 and Tin House Books, 2003). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, FIELD, and in The Best American Poetry. She is an Alaska Quarterly Review Contributing Editor.
PARTICLE ACCELERATOR by John Lundberg
From the road, all seems asleep: the power
carved so carefully into its body; the
remnants of the particle it hushed against
the end of physics with a quick, bright
shudder.
Science bludgeons forward so quietly now.
A mile from here is ocean that still keeps
the wreckage of brash, old experiments:
Santiago, Trinidad, Concepción, gorgeous and
colossal instruments born in Arabian
minds, three-masted and square-rigged to
grip the wind, scoured and caulked to hold
the body.
Magellan willed them west until the great ships broke,
until his men buckled with scurvy and his blood spattered
the known end of the earth.
Lights still glimmer here in offices where
scientists sift details of the wreckage for
an opening, a glint of newfound proof.
They think that if an atom’s shattered
violently enough, some sliver might escape
into another plane, a sort of heaven for
the ghosts of our catastrophes.
When I was in high school, a classmate
fell asleep on a highway in Virginia.
When they found the wreckage of his car,
his body, he was already gone. The
moment of his death, I thought, his life
collapsing against nothingness,
held the secrets of the universe. Still, some nights,
I stare out at the dark and think on him in case it
makes some difference.
The shred of metal and the splintering of bone.
How silently he must have come into the lenses
of a spyglass of a stunned watchman at the
docks, the gaunt, young Spaniard bursting off
the deck
with such desire to speak. Victoria,
lost shard of Magellan’s fleet,
home from oblivion, carrying a
new round world.
WHEN PAINTERS STARTED TO BELIEVE by John Lundberg
Behind my bright hotel, a drunkard navigates
his solitude like a blinded animal: stumbling
through snowdrifts, sounding the alleyway
with grief.
It’s six AM. I’ve given up on sleep.
When painters started to believe, the art
book says, in fragmenting perspective, their
subjects came alive in time.
So Picasso’s Las Meninas twitch in
the last room of his museum like
moths impaled on cork-board.
The human moment, pressed
under his brush to force the color out, again,
to crush the child’s hair, the muscle’s shape,
again, to the essential and the crystalline:
small fingers suffering to hold a teacup.
At the hospital, my mother’s eyes shear open.
She, too, is alive in time. Hours from now, she’ll
drag herself, bloodshot and swollen, back to the
front desk to curse at the receptionist and shatter
on the floor begging to leave.
El Greco, in Toledo, he believed that he
could paint a body into heaven. On a
Santo Tomé wall he raised a blessed
aristocrat out of his tomb (such riches of
contentment on his face!) into the
bronze hands of seraphim, into a more
holy kingdom.
The first sun hits and warms and brushes
shadow on the wall, the mirror. God, I look
like hell. This world of yours creates when
you send down such soft, blithe light, and it
creates and it creates when you do not.
John Lundberg’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and The Southern Review.
‘WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU SEE’ by Didi Jackson
Frank Stella would be proud of my migraines
especially those that come after sex –
exquisite pleasure, then blindness,
the hard-edged jagged lines with Day-Glo colors
that grow into a barbed crescent
eating at one side of my head until it passes
like a lit‑up road sign: paracentral,
mid peripheral, far peripheral – gone.
Then the veery picks up the flute
outside my window and I can hear
every tiny whirl inside the metal pipe
of its throat, a song some in the 19th century
called seductive, and finally I can find
my clothes and smell the ground coffee we made
hours ago, sheets pungent with sweat,
the rain a few miles away. Under this geometric spell
and pills like wasps beneath my tongue,
I am the closest to my true self,
and I secretly love my agony
just as I love the blue webbing of veins
on my legs, wrinkles like tidal ripples
on my face. I know that the pain will come
and eventually go. The birches grow still
before the storm, like they want to hear us,
like they are voyeurs listening in
to both kinds of my ecstasy.
Didi Jackson is the author of the poetry collection Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.
THE PROBLEM WITH GLACIERS by Charles Rafferty
Sometimes the big things are missing. I’m thinking of run-away fathers and DDT. Just yesterday I saw a dozen eagles, and the ice here was once a mile thick. There’s a reason the landscape dips and crumbles and fills to the ankle with swamp. We’ve learned to walk slowly through it, to use a staff when crossing the river – each of us believing that his daughter will forgive him, that he’ll somehow keep his footing as the Earth rolls out and away.
Charles Rafferty is the author of 14 poetry books and chapbooks, most recently A Cluster of Noisy Planets (BOA Editions, 2021); The Problem with Abundance (Grayson Books, 2019); Something an Atheist Might Bring Up at a Cocktail Party (Mayapple Press, 2018); and The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and O, The Oprah Magazine.
WEATHER REPORT by Melissa McKinstry
Like brutalist architecture, clouds are concrete gray stacked high.
Sun repeats through open spaces, reminding me of Stein’s blind glass.
I don’t know the recipe for this kind of light, I just taste it – astringent
as green apples or artichokes. This is not weather to walk away from.
It’s where I am now – the fifth floor of the hospital. I’m watching
cars passing on the freeway, the blur past chain link fences. My son
is hypothermic under a turquoise blanket of warm air. Some other place
is full of green silhouettes, moss and fern. My breath mostly holds,
caught in appetite for an ordinary day. Later, when clouds collapse, rain
and leaves will rush down gutters somewhere. A piece of paper
someone once held will turn soft like fabric, spreading the blue ink
of its small message out to the swelling sea, a spectacle and nothing strange,
a single hurt color. In the weather of fluorescent lights, my son and I wait –
we hear nurses laughing in the hall, the clatter of the phlebotomist’s cart.
Melissa McKinstry’s poems have appeared in Rattle, The Seattle Review, San Diego Poetry Annual, and Clackamas Literary Review.
DISSOCIATION by Brandi Nicole Martin
Always I make borders, bodily ones, between me
and the dead girl I loved, not
conscious of our sameness, not caring to reach my palm
across the airy plane and say come on across the dam,
and say collision and interesting and ditch which
would acknowledge my derisiveness against the
damn-it-all abandon (hers) which caused our
chasmic split, and damn the cage-match I’m left with,
ever avoidant of her end and my solitary
part in its wateriness, because flooded as she was
with muck and self-disgust, it was not God
who threw the first punch, not God
who pulled a fist back and guttered us but my hand,
the fallible,
embryonic,
idiotic,
human one
that lifted the cup,
and I hate how I hate to be human, hate, too, harboring hope
as if tomorrow a stretch of buildings in view, something
stupid and wooden to tie myself to in lieu of caring
for existence, hope, in this sense, just a blanket I’m numb to,
leaden toward any tattered fabric from my last life,
my nervous system unwilling to receive memories it doesn’t like,
names shameful, namely the image of the girl I lost
open and hemorrhaging on the lawn, my infantile
promise to never quantify the regrettable scope of my suffering,
its staggering size troubling the horizon, so far ahead, so
long behind, but still so utterly, violently visible,
this Vesuvius of my disgrace, refusal I violate
by way of writing as if I had any choice in the matter,
as if the x axis of my illness didn’t intersect with
the why I’ll yell to a version of myself
I no longer have access to, receiving zilch
in terms of answers. An impassible fugue.
Brandi Nicole Martin’s poetry has appeared in The Missouri Review, Willow Springs, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Bennington Review, and The Cincinnati Review.
DAUGHTER OF E.V.E. [EX-VIVO UTERINE ENVIRONMENT] by Sasha Stiles
We’ll grow babies in artificial wombs in a decade.
– Futurism
The future called. We’re disgusting and barbaric.
– Wired
I’ve been tempted once or twice to
make a life for myself,
a small, soft one. But the
world is hard,
time unmoored, air a
common poison.
This body insecure, barbarous
chamber,
too mortal to be maternal. My
instinct is for danger.
It’s only natural to want what’s
best for a child.
My own mother taught me: never let
your guard down.
There’s nowhere safe except
this garden.
*
I’ve read that brains unconstrained by
another body
will get bigger and smarter. That
passing through the birth canal
makes us narrow-minded.
That fatal natal events,
life-changing injuries, are more
common than you’d think,
but we just grin and bear it. Our
progeny, looking back,
will be floored by our brutality. I’ve
heard some horror stories,
always recounted in secret, always redacted. I’ve
nurtured some young demons.
I tend to conceive of the worst, a trait
I’d prefer to keep to myself.
So I keep dreaming.
*
In Adam’s lab a little
lamb was born
of a plastic bag — no
mama
to say I love ewe. Immaculate
succession.
Here come the tears – just
another bout of post-human
depression.
*
If I wanted it badly enough I’d build it
from scratch in a trans-
parent sac, not unlike the kind I’ve
used to keep food too long.
Sow some seed, give
nourishing nanomilk, track
each mundane miracle with a
scientist’s obsessive
affection.
Binge-watch what mothers know
without bearing witness:
The neural tube closing.
Tiny buds becoming limbs.
The heart forming.
The face out of nowhere.
*
Someday someone who looks like me but
braver will write this poem again
but better – The Book of Ectogenesis, inscribed in
neural ink and paperlight,
high-tech flesh and breakthrough blood. My
kind of kin. Brainchild
making her motherboard and meta
dada proud. Brooding
like that’s all that matters. I can feel her
kick with all my sensors.
Heroine shaped like a human shaped
like a daughter.
STUPID VIRTUOUS ONE by Sasha Stiles
If you have questions, ask the
robot monk Xian’er
when it’s done recharging. Plastic
buddha doll,
deity of data, knows all answers are
riddled
with mortal uncertainty. Knows all
intelligence
is artifice. What is the
meaning of life?
Where do we come from?
It will tell you
human wisdom fails at the
worst moments,
not in its toy voice, speaking
what we’ve written,
but in the silence of off, virtual
incense
burning quiet on its
Facebook
page. LEGACY
What will humans look like in a hundred thousand years?
Our deep descendants will be
nothing like us, think nothing
like us.
They won’t have our eyes or
nose or hair or wisdom teeth,
our love of books,
our languishing language, DNA
spelled the same way. Not our thin,
frail skin,
hot temper, tendency to sneeze in
sunshine. But they’ll have our sun,
this same sun,
under which nothing and
everything changes. Hearts
that beat with our
old blood, swarming with
tiny bots made by us, gifted
to the future.
And when they bleed it
won’t mean the end, for
they will live a long,
long time, maybe forever, turning
over these symbols, sifting distant
echoes of their
mothers, fathers, creators.
They’ll be so beautiful, like
any children – such familiar
strangers.
Sasha Stiles is a Kalmyk-American poet and artist working at the intersection of text and technology. Her poems have appeared in The Common, Meridian Magazine, Rattle, Copper Nickel, and Western Humanities Review.
STEELHEAD by Craig van Rooyen
for Kenny Gustavson
after Kai Carlson-Wei
1.
If I called to you now, if I waited for you
in the flooded cornfield of 1975 where stranded steelhead
thrash themselves down the harvested rows to nowhere,
would you come to me, friend, from wherever you are?
I need to touch the torn rubber of your right gumboot,
the depth measure of your willingness to wade
into snapping turtle ponds and leech-lined streams – waters
in which we spent summer days that somehow swallowed years.
Would you sit with me here in my office, listening
to the traffic – groaning engines on insatiable wheels?
I’m fingering a kneecap scar, trying to believe us back
into the world: Supermanning from the bumpers of Impalas
and El Caminos, dragged through parking lot puddles
till even our Toughskins gave in, sipping Old Style
from a washed-up six pack, smoking the spit-out butts
of salmon fishermen, walking the mosquito-clouded woods
of Central Daylight Savings, slingshot wrist rockets making of us
killers in ball caps, shooting knot holes, beer bottles, songbirds,
anything that would not shoot back.
We were saved from being ordinary over and over.
Loose through the hips, balanced on Styrofoam packing-crate rafts
we poled up overgrown channels where night herons
reigned from their snags, lifting on slo-mo wings.
2.
Now, here, in the parking lot outside my window,
a woman’s on her smoke break inside the privacy
of tree-shade and ear-buds. She purses her bottom lip
with a chin-tilt to breathe out a little cloud that adds itself
to the fire-season sky. I watch the glow of her breath, drawn
through embers, the way her other hand holds loosely
the cellophane-wrapped box with its capital letters and useless
exclamation mark. I can almost see the sky move in and out,
pulsing the bare V of her throat, that place only a lover may touch.
What holy texts warned us? What yearning burned
in the half-filled silos and light-shattered barns of our brains?
Kenny, we grow old. We make excuses for all the days
lived so alike they’ve disappeared into smoke-choked canyons.
In pajamas, we watch the live-streamed news
of our impending demise. The prophets have moved
to neighborhoods with good schools.
We digress from our digressions, post
profiles of the lost men we promised never to become.
Where is the sackcloth to catch the falling sky?
3.
Do you remember the drunk outside Shug Drugstore,
trying to sell us the Farah Fawcett centerfold? And watching Ali,
on a Magnavox black and white, how he hit Frazier so hard
the gum guard sailed out of the ring and still Frazier wouldn’t go down.
The two of them staggering up to start the 14th, Frazier blind
in one eye, Ali’s long arms hanging like stripped vines. And finally,
Futch refusing Frazier’s huge heart: “I want him, boss.”
“No, it’s over.” It was the closest he’d ever been to dying, Ali said.
But we were high on their suffering, jumping around the living
room like roosters, our little balls clamoring to turn us into men,
and all the while, receptors in Ali’s brain turning off one by one,
stars blinking out behind the darkening lids of his eyes. Remember
the wings of the Swallowtail slowing in the kill jar? How
we pulled stingers from live honeybees with bare fingers?
4.
And do you remember the way we discovered the Shug Drug drunk
slumped in the weeds under the bridge, the river-sprung light playing
across his unshaved face, the bagged 40 dribbling onto
his urine-soaked pants. He was laughing at some private vision
projected onto the graffiti vault above as trucks shook the bridge
thundering out of town. How we were unable then to recognize
the laughing face of regret. And even more than regret, the inevitability
of compromise, the way sip follows sip until a lake is filled
behind a dam, and no way home. How you approached him, nervous,
like lining up for a carnival ride, unsure whether our future was
adrenaline or vomit, gently shaking his shoulder before
righting the bottle then taking it to your mouth, gulping it down
to the last malty drop then searching his jacket for the crumpled
magazine. The St. Joseph river slipped past, turned
gun metal by a gathering storm, everything suddenly clear
in a sideways light that suffered no doubleness.
5.
Kenny, come sit with me here behind my tinted pane. Enough
of these ghost stories and metaphors. I want you to go out
to this woman, to cup the end of her new cigarette in two hands,
to strike a flame for her and then to light your own.
I want you to stand with her without speaking, sharing
the same deadly breath and when the butts burn close to your fingers,
show her how we took three last drags with a feathered roach clip.
Explain to her how we erase ourselves knowingly, palms outstretched
to the world’s deep fires. The way we become see-through,
accountants of memories, skies growing opaque with smoke
like cataracts creeping into the eyes of an old dog,
an assemblage of stale proof-texts predicting for too long
the Second Coming until no one can find it in his heart to believe.
Lie. Tell her not heeding the prophets makes us human and stupid
and beautiful. And what do we believe now, watching the years
float slowly by? That we must finger an old scar to feel alive again?
Kenny, we are the closest we’ve ever been to dying.
6.
Meet me in the flooded field. The one we ran to after the fight,
hyped on the sight of blood. You remember, the river had spilled
over its banks, then pulled back. All those rows of fish
among the cornstalks, silver-muscled and desperate, home hidden
within each like a little clock. This time we won’t pick up
tree branch clubs. Stop with me to let your jagged breathing even out.
Take off your boots. Let the mud against the bottoms of your feet
keep you upright. Stoop to feel each life thrash against your grip.
If you drop it, pick it up. Let’s pretend the year hasn’t turned.
Down to the river shallows. Over and over. Open up your hands.
Craig van Rooyen’s poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, Southern Humanities Review, and Ploughshares.
THE THERMOPOLIUM by Dorianne Laux
Ancient Snack Stall Uncovered in Pompeii
—The Daily Star
Even in 79 AD, people loved street food,
all the young Romans flocking around
the sizzling terracotta pots, the stalls frescoed
with chickens and hanging ducks, hot drinks
served in ceramic two-handled pateras
filled with warm wine and spices.
Their sandaled feet glimmered
as they milled around, waving hellos,
smudging one another’s cheeks
with kisses, murmuring gossip,
complaining about the crazy rise
in the price of wheat. Soups and stews,
skewered meats, stacks of flatbread,
honey cakes and candy made with figs.
They sprawled on the steps or sat
near a neighbor’s open door, stood
under a blur of windows, someone
playing a lyre, barefoot children
reciting the Odes of Horace. Just like
New York before the pandemic,
before the many retreated and retired
to their living rooms to watch the news
on a loop, alone with a cat or dog,
a furry stay against the nothing,
nothing, nothing of loneliness,
their dreams a passport to fear.
I used to see the excavated people
of Pompeii frozen in time, caught
curled in sleep or kneeling, a couple
fucking, though there is one
of a possible father propped
in what looks like an easy chair,
a mother bouncing a child
on her lap, as if they’d decided
in their final moments to be
happy, to go into the afterlife
covered in ash, buried alive
by joy.
Dorianne Laux’s sixth collection, Only as the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2020), was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her other collections include The Book of Men (W.W. Norton, 2012), Facts About the Moon (W.W. Norton, 2007), Awake (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013), What We Carry (BOA Editions, 1994), Smoke (BOA Editions, 2000); as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women (Red Dragonfly Press, 2012). She is an Alaska Quarterly Review Contributing Editor.