Poems
POEM IN WHICH ST. MARIA GORETTI GIVES
LILIES TO HER MURDERER by Amanda Auchter
In 1902, Alessandro Serenelli tried to rape 12-year-old Maria Goretti. He struck her with an awl fourteen times, killing her. He later claimed to have had a vision of Maria in his jail cell holding fourteen lilies. She is considered the youngest saint.
Do not think I didn’t hear you
call for me when I sat at the top of the stairs.
mending shirts. A child –
two braids, a pink skirt,
my mouth filled with hymns,
honeysuckle, soup.
And you with your fist my hair
in your fist .
no.
I am not you, so sorrowful, face
pressed to the stones. I am not
you, mouth of dirt and cobwebs.
But here is my fist of lilies. Here,
another bouquet I place
in your hand. Watch it brighten,
then
ignite its flame. See
how it crackles how you
crackle
into the fire, smoke. You, soot-
swaddled. I bring you flowers,
clean them against your eyelids. Forgiveness
is fire, flower. Listen –
the song inside your body, pulse
of white. Hold out your palms. Find it there.
Amanda Auchter is the author of The Glass Crib (Zone 3 Press, 2011) and The Wishing Tomb (Perugia Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, North American Review, Shenandoah, Tahoma Literary Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem- a- Day project.
THE TENTH TIME by Meryl Natchez
Nirvana is here, nine times out often—
Hô Xuân Hu’o’ng
The disposable diaper
in the meadow
The morning at the DMV
The razor wire on top of the chainlink around the
concrete
around the school
For every black man in college
five behind bars
What happens to the eyes
as the argument flares
The blueprints for the gas chambers, meticulously filed
The invasion
The story of the invasion
The story behind the story
of the invasion
The ones who knew to profit
from it
Meryl Natchez is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Catwalk (Longship Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Hudson Review, Poetry Northwest, ZYZZYVA, Literary Matters, and The American Journal of Poetry.
THE DARK AIR by Mariella Nigro
(Translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine M. Pitas)
But the cone of light is reversed
illuminating the tunnel of the past
the remote, the old, the real, the stuff of dreams,
time compressed to a mere instant
space to a point
beautiful black hole
and wells appear
luminous pools
full of little frogs and paper boats
into which we dipped our palms
splashing childhood joy
and the shadow of those eucalyptus trees
shaped like summer
with the bush stretching its arm
so we could reach the last low- growing flower
and the glimmer of snails
threaded and hung around our necks
and we, such sisters, dancing
in winged white sandals of October
colored ribbons through long hair
playing Ring around the Rosie
and the impossible shade
barely a flash of darkness
unsuspected gamble
in the death’s invisible face.
Mariella Nigro of Uruguay has published eight books of poetry and two of literary essays, most recently Frida y México: de visiones y miradas (Yaugurú, Montevideo, 2017). In 2011, she received the Bartolomé Hidalgo Poetry Prize and in 2013, the Morosoli Prize, both honoring her complete poetic work. Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas are poets and widely- published translators of work by South American poets.
THE ROUGH BEAST NEVER ASKED TO BE BORN by Alexandra Teague
which is what all teens say at some point on some angry
street corner, sweating in unfashionable culottes, blaming
their parents for their stunted sense of style, their everything
wrongness, as Paris swarms like a million bees from the hive
of inaccessible and born to this and sleek around their bad- permed
hair. And they are not lying: none of us asked to be the frizzled
flower of ourselves, the slow galumph, the beasty morning breath
and clawing forward over clumps of emails, all of them flagged
in small, stiff importance like the campus lawn each spring
when a pro- life sorority plants pink plastic flags to remember
fetuses who didn’t ask to be born but also didn’t ask not to be:
the future staking wonder onto accident’s soft turf. As if
it weren’t always too late: this arriving at the party of ourselves –
Surprise! – in little Oshkosh overalls and Born 2B Cute shirts,
our lives underway before consciousness bothers to tell us,
so of course we feel swamp- skinned and blush- faced to say
what we’re doing here. Like my friend’s thirteen- year- old son,
when my friend, his mother, fainted during a dog walk, leaned
over her to say “Mom, can you please stop doing that? It’s so
embarrassing.” Meaning, if I never asked for my body to be here,
I doubly didn’t ask for yours with its menorrhagia and aging mother-
ness. I never asked to climb down from the Spanish moss of nothing:
to cross the slouchy sand dunes, my feet leaving marks of excessive
beingness all over everything. I never asked for toxic wells, explosives
packed in trunks of cars, society’s tidal pools sucking out, refilling,
and me, why? – The future will fix it! – left holding the toilet plunger.
As if kids aren’t all questions, like What rough world imagines a beast
padding across the sands of time would be walking to its own birth?
‘THE ORANGE BLOSSOM SPECIAL’
(ARRANGED FOR ROME’S BURNING) by Alexandra Teague
I want you to hear the first notes when the fiddle
starts to sound like a train, though even then there’s something
squawky to it, something donkey about the wheels
along the high thin trestle of the strings, though maybe
the bow is the trestle and the fiddle is the train upside down
in the dark of the tunnel, which is also the audience:
I want you to hear people in an Ozark theater clapping harder
as it bears down at them and the pink gel lights keep blooming,
and the woman dueling now with the man in the red silk vest
keeps carrying on, which is what we mean by a showstopper:
that it barrels toward us: screeching of wheels turning
in the air by her shoulder, her chin cupping a freight train
that must be a passenger train, aren’t we all on it?
The fiddles fiddling as Rome, well you know what it does,
but it looks less like flames and more like sunset or Fire
in the Hole, a rollercoaster that dived in the dark in a mine
that was just a building built to look old-timey: thin plastic
fringe with orange lights shining behind, the pumped-in sound
of crackling. Hands in the air for a mine fire. Hands in the air
for the Baldknobbers with their black-horned masks and cutout
eye holes, who set the fire, who no one mentioned then, set
the Ozarks on the tracks of whiteness. Hands in the air for
a family ride based on vigilantes, for a past that people
(some people) plunge into and come out laughing. It’s what
the music of this country rushes from and keeps on playing:
one long track for a luxury liner called The Orange Blossom
Special that sped to Florida in the 1940s as white people
slept under white sheets like orange petals drifted from
groves to the sound of that rocking that’s the sound of
this fiddling as the strings keep burning, as the fiddlers smile
in satiny ruffles. Didn’t they back up the Nashville greats?
The program says so. The program’s full of the near-adjacents.
Hands on its glossy paper if they might be your ancestors
who played on as the country burned and lights that said
Country burned, meaning something different or else the same
in a box called entertainment. Hands in the air if you grew up
near here, if you loved the magic shows, where tigers disappeared
from their cages and came back roaring. Hands in the air
if you fear the air here; if the stage has trapdoors; if the train
has trapdoors; if the fiddle keeps barreling; if the song’s
familiar as it flattens you; as it whistles by you; as it does not
flatten you; if you know that dilemma of the trolley lever
that’s really a train lever: whom do you save? Hands in the air
if it’s not your choice. If it is your choice. If the trolley’s
automated. If you’re being held up; if the music keeps coming;
if the clapping’s going to start now; if you don’t want to hear
the foot stomp and popcorn rattle in this icebox theater; if
you’re not immune to it; if you fear your own blood that ran
through your grandmother and her real father who beat his
wife back in West Virginia stone-cold dead, like they say,
though the body’s not stone; it’s more like a horse
before it turns into the hairs of a fiddle bow. Hands in the air
if there’s blood all over them. If there’s blood on his knuckles
in the gas station bathroom as he drives to Texas to fuck
his lover, so nine months later: your grandmother. Hands
in the air if the show is over; if the show’s just starting; if
the parking lot lights keep fritzing like bug zappers; if no
one in your family’s ever been to Rome, just the Olive
Garden in Paris, Texas. Hands in the air if you’d like more
breadsticks. If Rome’s being redlined. If this ride’s
too violent. If you’d like to ask the dead some questions. If
you can hardly hear yourself. If the train that’s not a train
is screeching closer, whistling and wheedling as the emcee’s
saying Wow, folks! Have you ever heard a fiddle sound like that?
Did a train just go right through our hearts, or what? Well, give it up!
Alexandra Teague is the author of three poetry collections from Persea Books: Mortal Geography (2010), The Wise and Foolish Builders (2015), and Or What We’ll Call Desire (2019). She is also the author of the novel The Principles Behind Flotation (Skyhorse Publishing, 2017).
GUARDIAN ANGEL by Jenna Le
In my room full of phonograph trumpets,
I listen for one voice from miles far off
to rise above the rest: your voice. Then I become
the owl I am and, using earth’s magnetic field
to guide me, I fly into your mouth, make your palate
vibrate with the whoosh of my wings,
I tangle in the windsock
of your breathing, I am the brown paper bag
in which you bury your head
to avoid hyperventilating,
I tango with your throat
until the carbon dioxide you exhale
makes a mist that wipes clean your memory
of ever having not been enough,
of ever having been anything other than deserving.
Jenna Le is the author of the poetry collections Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, The Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Pleiades.
DE COLORES by Emily Schulten
Mother’s Day, 2019
When my husband left that morning
I’d only just started losing the baby
that wasn’t even really a baby yet –
it was just growing a tail, something
else we cannot keep. He was getting
into a van to drive to Homestead
to sing in Spanish to children being held
in the migrant detention center.
Their hands, he said, made shadows
against the tarp- covered fence –
in shapes like forming souls, perhaps –
while he followed a procession
of the helpless, for the helpless,
and I laid beside the dining room table
on the cold floor where I convalesced
in the warmth of loss and wept, our dog
licked my salt face, and when I shook
it felt as if it was the actual earth shaking,
the whole world mourning tiny voices
that’ve been made silent, made hard to find,
and while I shook he sang, de colores
son los mil reflejos que el sol atesora.
Emily Schulten is the author of two poetry collections, Rest in Black Haw (New Plains Press, 2009), and The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar (Kelsay Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, The Massachusetts Review, and Prairie Schooner.
BECAUSE THERE WAS NOTHING by Jason Tandon
Because there was nothing
I could say
or write,
no amount of flowers
I could send
I gave my friend a
poem a thousand
years old
and translated, no less,
and after he read it aloud
to his wife and son, he
stood up from the
kitchen table,
scattered feed for the chickens outside
and noticed in the dimmed
light how tall the grass had
grown.
Jason Tandon is the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Actual World (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, North American Review, and Esquire.
THE GLASS PARROT by Deborah Brown
I have never understood the way stars burst
apart. I am deaf to wind and trees
to the rose bush we planted, to the tomato plants
lying down with their fruits this August.
I almost understand – how St. Thomas More
became a fanatic and a torturer, and why young men
with hope and without it think a bomb is an answer.
I almost understand the day I was at your bedside
holding your child- sized hand. Tight in your other hand
the glass parrot. No – I made that up for the first poem
about your death.
There was no glass parrot. I did not
hold your hand. I stared at the cancer- filled mound
of your stomach, at your cheekbones that stood out
like wings, at your hand, really child- sized.
No, I don’t understand.
Deborah Brown is the author of two collections of poems: Walking the Dog’s Shadow (2011), and The Human Half (2019), both from BOA Editions. Her poems have appeared in Margie, Rattle, Stand, Mississippi Review, and The Pushcart Prize anthology.
ANOTHER DEDICATION – AFTER
CZESLAW MILOSZ by Emily Franklin
He said the dead could come
disguised as birds
so I wait for finches to flit
across the panes, landing
on rhododendrons opening
sticky and pink or the bulbous junco
bird of the ground, with its receding shades
of gray, dark- eyed and seed- driven, perched
long enough that I dare to ask aloud are you
my friend who died young come back
for a round of lawn tag or could you be
that one I kissed who, barefoot, rang the doorbell
so many times and at seventeen I thought this
romantic and we kissed on someone else’s stoop,
nesting there just for a few hours and he called
and called again and I did not call back –
not right away and then one spring I did
and learned he’d gone and though I was
an adult I ached for my teenage self and for him
and his fine, soft hair, and those faded
jeans and how in the magnolia trees some bird
shat on the sidewalk as we’d huddled there
and now it could be him or you or anyone dead
at the window, glad for the black
sunflower seeds poured into the feeder
as though I have more to offer and can hold
my hand out to call the dead back as though
by feeding them I could save them.
Emily Franklin is the author of the poetry collection Tell Me How You Got Here (Terrapin Books, 2021). Her work has appeared in The London Sunday Times, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, The Baltimore Review, and on National Public Radio.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF HURRICANES by Sara Henning
As Hurricane Laura rages toward the heel of Louisiana’s boot, we watched a
coroner wheel
our neighbor out of his front door on a gurney.
With his body went the whole alphabet of the world.
We stood there, husband, staring through blinds, embarrassed we didn’t know his
name. The stars,
they’re dead before their light ever reaches us.
His living room, dark save for a single torchiere,
its sprawl of glow bleeding out. I want to know why darkness can be interrupted
by the idea of a star,
as if time never existed. Time, it slips within me – my mother’s blood, my
father’s blood, blood
of a whole generation – that furious haunting.
My aunt’s double-wide clutched up by Hurricane
Andrew. My mother planking windows to quash the electric hymn
of water, skin,
David shelling Savannah with my father’s fury. You stayed up, husband,
waiting for the strike –
horror, water, an eye which spares us.
But I’m lost in sleep’s turbine, images
of our neighbor spliced against my aunt’s Schnauzer,
the one she left in a moment’s flash,
hurling his scrawny body at their trailer’s door. I wonder if
she’s haunted by his bark
twisting through metal as her children
sprint for the car, no room for him among
heaps of clothes, Wolf’s chili cans, wedding photos, piles of
what she could carry.
In my dream, my neighbor has risen above the rage of any water.
Sara Henning is the author of the poetry collection View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Crab Orchard Review, Witness, Crazyhorse, Meridian, and The Cincinnati Review.
AT THE BEACH THE SUMMER MY MOTHER FILES FOR DIVORCE, DECIDING, AFTER THREE YEARS, MY FATHER HAS LEFT FOR GOOD by Robin Chapman
Watching the waves come in
it’s not their metronomic repetition,
slightly a-kilter in the swell
if you’re a surfer, but the subtle
shifts in rhythm of foam-spill,
sand-spit, light-strike, running out
to sea again or swirl – I waited,
a fourteen-year-old girl on the edge
of adolescence, beachcombing
sunny days at the Atlantic shore,
for their long wash back to catch
the sand fleas as they rose and fed
in the pebbly trough and dug
back in as the receding surf
sucked our sandcastle’s turrets
down into its moat – the way
you’d feel them scrabbling
in your hands as if you held a wave –
the scene somehow reminiscent
of a book my father read to me long before –
how the first of the five Chinese brothers
could swallow the ocean
and spit it back – though that
must have meant to translate tsunamis
into a story you could tell a child.
Robin Chapman is the author of 10 books of poems, most recently The Only Home We Know (Tebot Bach, 2019). Her poetry has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Hudson Review, Poetry East, and on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day project.
CNN SAYS NUCLEAR WAR COULD BREAK OUT
AT ANY MOMENT by Julie Danho
but I’m taking my daughter to math club
because she loves playing Moneybags
and Sum Swamp and Smath, which is
just Scrabble looted and repackaged
for math fans. Bombs are math too, half-lives
and chain reactions. Decades ago,
my mother was drilled to duck under
her desk, protect her face and neck,
but do I tell my daughter to take cover
or flee for better shelter? A scientist
could reduce the decision to equations
lovely as calligraphy until the translation
(fallout dose, transit time). Her bomb may be
smaller than the one my mother
waited for. A mile beyond its blast, she might
survive. As she leaves the car,
I hand her a backpack filled with stickers
and glitter markers. We have it easier
than so many. It’s raining, and her umbrella
springs into a bunny, its ears up, alert.
Julie Danho is the author of the poetry collection Those Who Keep Arriving (Silverfish Review Press, 2020), and a chapbook, Six Portraits (Slapering Hol Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, New Ohio Review, and Bennington Review, as well as featured on The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily.
DISPATCH FROM THE EVENTS LEADING UP
TO THE END by Megan Gannon
Because you asked the baby’s sister and brother to watch him
while you showered.– 15 minutes, max. Because at first you
were annoyed to find the baby’s brother had gone outside,
before remembering how many car trips he’d been tasked
with cajoling the baby through crabbiness. Because
the baby’s sister would, on such occasions, burrow deeper
into her nest in the back-backseat, unhearing. Because when you
retrieved the baby after your shower, his sister did not look up
from her phone. Because you asked the baby what he had
in his mouth right before he began choking. Because
you fished from his mouth maybe a dozen dark, jagged stones.
Because you do not keep such stones in the house.
Because later that night the baby’s sister informed
the baby’s parents that the baby had been eating rocks.
Because when you asked the baby’s sister why
she hadn’t prevented the baby from eating rocks, she swore
in the same breath that she didn’t know, that the baby’s brother
had told her. (Because the baby’s sister is White,
and his brother is Black.) Because you sat there listening
to her blame her mistake on the Black boy she lives with,
and you knew her father would say nothing.
Because you knew if you said something to the baby’s sister,
that the baby’s father would yell at you for upsetting her.
Because you sat there, rage funneling into a dark, hard pit.
Because the next day you left and took the boys with you.
Because the next day a White woman walking her dog
in Central Park was asked by a Black man to leash her dog.
Because in a city of six million people, where a man is trying
to find a sliver of quiet in which to hear a bird’s dark, jagged call,
this seemed a reasonable request. Because the White woman
did not appreciate the correction. Because the White woman
called the police. Because the White woman told the police
that an African American man was threatening her.
Because the White woman knew she could pin her own
poor behavior on the Black man and come out clean.– oh so
lily white. Because rage seeped from your pores like rancid onions
for weeks. Because personal and political begin and end the same way.
Because this story always begins and ends the same way.
Because the White woman learned her behavior somewhere.
Because she learned her behavior under your roof.
Megan Gannon is the author of the poetry collection White Nightgown (Apprentice House, 2014). Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Atlanta Review, Boulevard, Crazyhorse, and The Hudson Review.
BIRDS DON’T UNDERSTAND US by Peter Krumbach
A woman on the park bench opens her husband’s head. There’s
another head inside your head, she announces. Well, open it,
instructs the husband. The woman reaches in, extracts a
rosary, a fungo bat, and then, straining, hauls out the man’s
mother. To the Mississippi kite, balanced on the tip of the
oak’s highest branch, this doesn’t make sense. It preens its
belly, little orgasms rippling the feathers. A slice of its mind
signals fulfillment. One eye on the scene below, the other
turned inward, the kite pictures lizards and mice regurgitated
into the beaks of its young. I told you, Friedrich, shouts the
woman as the couple switches positions. Now the man
inspects the wife. A column of warm air rises from the
meadow. With two strokes of its wings, the kite’s adrift in the
current. Gliding off, it finds itself soothed by the shriek
escaping its throat. From the distance, it hears the husband call
out the items pulled from the woman’s head .–
Hypothalamus! Marzipan! Don Giovanni! What’s this?
Peter Krumbach’s poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Hobart, The Manhattan Review, Sixth Finch, and Washington Square Review.
FROM WHERE I FLEW by Mar Ka
with acknowledgement to Tyree Daye’s poem “From Which I Flew”
only alone quickly in silence could I go from a home fortified against ghosts
the spirits of the Tsars and Stalins of the earth
told to keep my head down follow the rules don’t rock the life-boat
we lived then in a Chicago neighborhood
where we could make the sign of the crucifix
openly on the street speak whatever
in whatever language we wished
facing only a bit of name-calling hiring prejudice
how many storks does it take to bring spring to Eastern Europe?
I have nowhere to go but I leave anyhow
driving my American station wagon west and when they ask why
well I say I no longer believe in the same God
as the rest
I can’t be what I have to be to be there
I fail their test
and regret it’s a pair of frayed socks rolled up at the back of my sock drawer
a pair I wear only sometimes while all the others are being washed
Mar Ka is the author of Be- Hooved, a collection of poems (University of Alaska Press Literary Series, 2019).
HOUSE OF FREAKS by Nancy Miller Gomez
Come closer.
This is where I get to be the person
I am. Odd and unnumbered.
My kitchen teeth. My sponge tongue.
My paper doll skin. Here is where
I unwind the coil
of my hands and string my bare
face up like a lantern. Look,
we’re like a family of road flares.
Did we get your attention? See,
I’m shedding my last pair
of eyes. I’m not watching
the parade of strangers.
We have cotton socks
and warm soup and the sound
of helicopters circling has finally
faded back into the everyday hum.
We’ve stopped reading the papers.
Now we make up the headlines
we want to hear. News flash:
a garden snail is crawling
across the flagstone outside.
There is a hole in the word whole
you can fall into, and if
you’re not careful, your sentences
can backfire like a muscle car
on the interstate of your mouth. If
you promise to wipe your feet
and shut the door you can
come in. Welcome.
You look like someone I once knew
who had a beautiful, two-sided smile.
See, already, you fit right in.
Nancy Miller Gomez is the author of the chapbook Punishment (Rattle chapbook series, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, River Styx, The Massachusetts Review, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, The Best American Poetry, and Best New Poets.
OFFICE FAREWELL PARTY by Carrie Shipers
We came mostly for the cake, which we found
dry and over-frosted, barely worth the effort
of leaving our desks. If our Congratulations
seems a little strained, please blame sore throats
brought on by allergies, the HVAC spreading
spores again. We agree the firm you’re moving to
is excellent. We’ve applied there, too,
but never had an interview. When you offer
to pass along our names and résumés,
we recognize you’re trying to be kind but know
you’ll never follow through. By the time
you finally feel secure enough to bring us up,
you won’t remember why you wanted to.
We assure you the forgetting will be mutual.
Monday we’ll be sad to see your empty desk,
the list of tasks you left without completing,
but despite our promises to keep in touch,
if you attempt to make a date we’ll find excuses
to refuse. We don’t blame you for wanting
one last afternoon to reminisce, listen to
how badly you’ll be missed. When it’s our turn
we’ll surely want the same, and like you
we’ll let ourselves forget how these send-offs end:
Once you exit with your personal effects,
leftovers we’ll insist you take, you’ll stop
existing as yourself and become just
one more person who abandoned us.
Carrie Shipers is the author of two chapbooks and four full- length collections, most recently Grief Land (University of New Mexico Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, New England Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review.
A POET TRAVELS TO THE SOUTH
There is no sunshine here; every child is afraid of the river.
There is no shadow here; every woman has a name on her arm
but is it Abraham or Kevin?
It is time for me to write to the councilmen.
But I have no time to do such things.
People of the Mississippi River, do you swallow the water?
There is fire on the surface and every man is swimming.
The toilet in the living room is filled with lilies and rosemary.
In one restaurant I found Jesus. In another,
a mobile phone. Hello, my visa is on fire.
My English is limited, but my friend speaks
it beautifully.
Let me give him the phone.
In Georgia, I met my wife at McDonalds; she had silicon breasts.
I read her a poem like a man biting on ice water.
Democracy is good. I take another flight to Baton Rouge
and spend three nights in New Orleans.
Why can’t I apologize for my lies?
I am the son of half a geography.
The world is full of more lives than before.
But I can pause here, take a walk to the Museum of Bodies.
The commonwealth is a prejudice, a hoax. I
am a person of many languages.
I am not to be blamed for the fire
but I understand that the children are ants and are eaten by ants.
I take my wife to Landon; she wants to go back to Kenner.
I give my wife pizza; she thinks it is too salty.
Let’s go to the zoo in Alexandria.
The elephant is young, the tiger is a buffalo.
My wife says no; take me to a better place.
Shall we proceed to go to another restaurant?
Can you sleep with the lights on?
Can you talk to your God?
There’s no trolley from Monroe to New Iberia.
Brian Gyamfi is a Ghanaian- American poet at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
COMPASS by Susan Rich
Elizabeth Bishop often kept a compass
in her small jacket pocket: a little-known fact
about the poet who fell regularly from a delicate
map of sobriety, lost her keys, entire weeks –
even countries. Could a compass – initially used.
in fortune telling, invented in the Han Dynasty – buoy
her with its divining arrow, its quivering and irregular
heartbeat? What are the coordinates of the soul:
mist-filled or incandescent, briny as ocean air or rugged
as Ouro Prêto? Bishop could lose herself in the architecture
of a bird cage, the clack of wooden clogs. But with binoculars
strung around her neck like miniature islands, a compass
in her hand, her brokenness could orient her, her brokenness
could console her like a harbor chart or a naked, pink dog.
Susan Rich is the author of five poetry collections, including Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press, 2014) and Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Antioch Review, and O, The Oprah Magazine.
MAGNETIC NORTH by Jessica Tanck
Nature had here no monument to denote the spot which she
had chosen as the centre of one of her great and dark powers.
– Commander James Clark Ross
1
The compass-needle swims circles.
It was a victory
but imagine how the world must’ve felt
cracked: the sun splitting, navigation shot.
And the men walked up into night:
twisting wings
of acid green. Unreal current, celestial tease,
so much light a trick
to me – illusion,
a fork
of mockery, nothing more
2
sinister. Weeks remain until I move west.
I keep finding glass in my feet. Austere, a friend
describes it: the backdrop of mountains, desert –
winter smog & wide, diagrammed streets. I brush
out the glass, dab at beads of blood. My friend reminds me
much of taste is memory, much of want a wound.
Truth is, I’ve started to crave it, ask:
what is familiar. Men watched
those needles skitter & turn, knew
what it felt like to stand at the center holding
an instrument that insisted:
you are lost.
Jessica Tanck’s poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Blackbird, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Meridian, and Ruminate.
EACH OTHER MOMENT by Jessica Greenbaum
We turned location back on.
We were resetting our passwords.
We were scanning the QR code
to order an iced matcha latte.
We were on hold; we were saying
representative into the phone.
We were showing our Excelsior Pass
and putting in our contact information
for timed tickets to the gardens.
We were signing up for a streaming
service and decrying our Zoom
appearance. We were skimming
not reading. We were trawling
and scrolling. We were calculating
the millennia before reefs could
revive and species come back
in colors we haven’t imagined.
We were guilty, and each other
moment, also innocent. We were
meditating so the unforgiving
might give a little. We were trying
to find the contact information
for the company. We were
wondering where to recycle
foam rubber. We were listening
to a podcast and downloading
a playlist. We cross-indexed our
top issues in Charity Navigator.
We were making suggested
go bags and stay bins for the likely
floods and fires. We were
wondering why men only
gave us one star. We looked to
the sky for how to help any
anything at all. We hit retweet
on the full moon and we liked
the Big Dipper. Constellations
etch-a-sketched the night, then the
window shade’s round pull
rose into a sun and light came on.
We agreed with the ancients;
that was hopeful. We turned location
back off. We were innocent but
each other moment we were lost.
Jessica Greenbaum is the author of three poetry collections: Inventing Difficulty (Silverfish Review Press, 1998), The Two Yvonnes (Princeton University Press, 2012), and Spilled and Gone (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, Plume, and The Paris Review.
TO MY ANCESTORS by Brent Ameneyro
We’ve grown about four inches over the last
one hundred and fifty years (I thought you’d like
to know). We’ve made these weapons that
could end all life (sorry). We carry candlelight
in our pockets. Well, I can’t explain it all,
but there’s a sense the end is near.
My friend (may I call you that? The salt
of the earth), I want to know the things you feared,
I want to know if anything has changed.
Have we always been such simple water
creatures grabbing anything in reach, scared
the sun will suck us into the sky? My father
doesn’t like to talk about what’s gone,
that’s why I hide you under my tongue.
Brent Ameneyro’s poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, The Journal, Azahares, and Hispanic Culture Review.
portal traveler by Allison Akootchook Warden
these future days
she watches through portals
flashbacks to the 80s
the time when
the Elders glowed
nightlights
sitting near one
like soaking up
an entire library section
on grace
if I could only reach through
the screen
to touch
the sini
of their sunshine ruff parkas
that would be
(the infusion)
of the long long long long ago
a swift-kick
dance
back
into how they kept
the earth steady
under their feet
Allison Akootchook Warden is an Inupiaq traditional artist. Her book of Twitter poems “TAIMANISAAQ/ AKKUPAK (the long long ago/ right now) was published by the Anchorage Museum in 2017. Her poem “we acknowledge ourselves” was recently featured in Poetry and on its podcast series.
WHEN HOME SAYS STAY by Sibongumusa Ncube
after “Home” by Warsan Shire
home pleads with you on hands and knees
to not walk out the door and then
home reminds you that your umbilical cord
is buried in the backyard,
as is your father’s and that of his father
so when you walk into the storm
you will be untethered from the harbor
home switches tactics to get you to stay and
she calls you ungrateful
for wanting the green fields across the sea
instead of the warm but barren land that raised you
and the growl of your empty stomach cannot silence her because
you’re not hungry, she argues, you’re greedy
for always wanting more and more
and with a wagging finger she announces that
you may drink all you want from the golden well
but your thirst shall never be quenched
home watches you swap the land of your ancestors
and leave empty cupboards for first world plenty
and lay your identity at the eGoli(1) alter
but she’s lost too many of her children to cry for you
so she turns back to sit by the hearth and wait
for the foreign land to spit your remains out
so she can bury you in the backyard
where your umbilical cord is buried
with your father’s and that of his father
and tether you emhlabathini(2)
the only home you’ll never leave
April 2022 Alaska/Zimbabwe
NOTES
The italicized words are written in isiNdebele, a Southern African language predominantly spoken in Zimbabwe and in parts of South Africa by people from the Ndebele tribe.
1. eGoli, “city of gold,” is used as an idiomatic expression to describe moving to a place with better opportunities.
2. emhlabathini – “in the ground.”
Sibongumusa Ncube attends Africa University and lives in Gwanda, Zimbabwe. “When Home Says Stay” is her debut publication.
ancestry.com by John Bargowski
Suspected of copping
some horn player’s sax
from the backstage
of a toney mid-town club,
a tenor worth more than a grand
headlined the sepia-stained article
some distant relative posted
to the family tree, so I’m straining
today to hear my uncle solo again
in a furnished room over
a garage on Baldwin,
him with that brass neck
and tapered body that bought him
another trip up the river,
tapping time with his boot
while his chapped hands
fingered the mother of pearl
inlays on the disks of the keys,
trying to blow those blue
notes he’d devoured slopping
dishes clean at the club’s sink,
and string them together
into a melody I might recognize
years later, uncle buffing the mouth
of the sax’s golden bell
so the light from his bare 60 watt
melted into its buttery glow
before he nested that horn
in a padded black case.
John Bargowski’s most recent poetry collection is American Chestnut (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2021). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, New Ohio Review, Gettysburg Review, and Prairie Schooner, and on Poetry Daily.
FATHER, TIME by Stephen Ackerman
What if there were no earth? What if there were clouds,
And the clouds held rain, released the rain, and the rain
Kept falling –
Endlessly, through the dark radiance of space,
From galaxy to galaxy, the way a man weeps
At his own destruction?
There was the night I was home from college, winter break
After my first semester, I was reading Helter Skelter,
My father at the office holiday party, my mother at home
To avoid my father’s office flirtations, when the telephone rang.
I can’t remember now whether it was the police
Or the hospital on the line, but my mother quickly dressed,
We left in the car for the hospital after waking
One of my sisters, so they wouldn’t awaken as orphans,
Wondering why they were alone, at night, no cars
In the driveway. The priest in the waiting room
Had given last rites to the couple in the other car,
And I remember the shock of that, that we wouldn’t
Slough this off like a hangover that you wake to,
That fades by afternoon. My father was alive,
Scalped, but otherwise strangely unbruised.
Days and days we visited the hospital, holy days
And holidays, vigil through the anvil of those days,
Days we pounded ourselves into new shapes, days
Molten with fires fed by dread, the galaxies still wheeling
As they had since the beginning of time, but for us
Time had changed, the present veering out of control,
The slow motion of a car spinning, while you sit,
Strapped, helpless, waiting, reeling toward the future.
Finally, my father woke, and when the nurse called us in,
She asked him who we were. “Some sightseers,” he said,
As if we were there to see some natural wonder,
An eighth wonder of the world, a man alive. He’d lost
Our names in the days and nights of sleep; we discovered
Soon enough how much else he’d lost in the grove
Of wounded trees where the car sailed as if lifted
By invisible wings..
We still had hope then that our lives had not unalterably
Changed, that the promise about time
Healing wounds would hold true. It was not true.
I would drive on the road that led to my parents’ house
And look at serene exteriors of the houses of neighbors
And because I knew the secrets of the lives
Behind the door I entered, knew that I could not know
Which housed knives that cut bread, which skin, which
Hands held guns, which other hands, who slept
Through the night, who kept close watch of the seconds,
Minutes, hours on the bedside clock.
I returned to college.
My father tried to return to work.
Once upon a time and a very fine time it was, my father knew
The complexities of radar systems and sonar systems.
He invited me to a business meeting in the city
Where I attended college. Though my presence was strange
And inappropriate, my father insisted. He was, he said, going to give
A presentation on the latest advances in telecommunications
Equipment. I sat at a table with my father and
His client. The tentacles of the accident
Were still stretching into the future, extensions of a hydra
Blindly searching for something to sting.
Then my father took from his briefcase
Two tin cans connected by a string. He lifted
One to my ear, one to his mouth.
And then he wept.
Stephen Ackerman is the author of the poetry collection Late Life (Silverfish Review Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Boulevard, Partisan Review, Ploughshares, Plume, upstreet, and on Poetry Daily.
WHAT SHINES? by Sydney Lea
Astonishing, this never-ending effort
to have had a happy childhood. Why does it matter
now, why will yourself into all that forgetting?
She may have been a good mother – at least she tried.
Did she? Once again, you’re the one who’s trying.
You contend you do remember moments that glow:
You picture her standing one day in the snow, her teeth
in a chatter, no doubt, and yet she looked quite cheerful –
or she seemed to be trying. As you are. The teeth at least
were one good feature, radiant to the end.
You were poised at the top of a hill on a Flexible Flyer,
red sled that shone, your Christmas present at nine.
It may have brought you joy. You’re trying to alter
the down-slope rush, to make it shiny too,
to forget the icicles of snot, the raw
fingers, chilblains. Pain. A father was there,
a good man, you’ve always believed, but who’s now no more
than a specter, whose presence is no more advantageous
than on that day. Or was it of some avail?
You can’t remember. You honestly can’t remember.
Perhaps you just don’t want to. You’re doing well –
at least you’re trying – with this, your obstinate bid
to winnow the damage and see if there’s anything more
than just the sorrow. Well, there were certain instants.
You say, I remember stones. You say, I saw
a beach by moonlight. And did those pebbles glint
like stars, as you insist? Are you quite sure
clouds never came to eclipse them? You keep on trying.
There’s that pervasive gleam along the shore.
Then you take a step and suddenly there’s nothing
Sydney Lea is the author of 14 collections of poetry, including Here (Four Way Books, 2019), and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Pursuit of a Wound (University of Illinois Press, 2000). He is also the author of nine books of essays, most recently Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life (Green Writers Press, 2021).
PORTRAIT OF APHASIA ON A PLUM TREE by Carolina Hotchandani
Was it not then – as you reached for a word like a ball you’d kicked high
into the plum tree’s grasp, and failing to seize it, said, Forget it,
so the word stayed there
suspended with the overripe plums warming in the sun
beside the nest of a bird neither of us could name
(though the problem of forgetting was not mine) –
Was it not then that silence filled the space
where the word might have bounced like this, like here, like so,
and I might have taken it up and passed it back to you?
The absence of your thought condensed into a pit (as of a plum) I swallowed,
till it burrowed in my chest like a solid thing a word
could almost name.
Complete your sentence I did not
as I thought of the ball perched high in the branches’ leafy clasp –
– and I hoped its touch was soft, its grip
firm and unrelenting.
Carolina Hotchandani’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Missouri Review, Plume, Prairie Schooner, and West Branch.
MEMORY by Kareem Tayyar
it was one of those nights when the horses flew into the trees.
when birds grazed in dark pastures.
when rain fell from the moon
& the sky told anyone who would listen that she used to be a
river. you know the kind of night I’m referring to.
the ones where you fly instead of
walk, sing instead of speak, bloom
instead of sleep.
the kind of night that doesn’t happen
nearly as often as you’d like it to,
& that always leaves you hoping
she’ll take you with her when she
goes.
Kareem Tayyar’s poetry has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Brilliant Corners, and The Writer’s Almanac. He is also the author of a collection of short fiction, The Revolution of Heavenly Bodies & Other Stories (J.New Books, 2022).
HEARTS AND ARROWS by Hailey Leithauser
Fair-haired, tubbiest of cherubs,
rain down your barbs!
Chubby-armed scion, wake me
again with whistles of dove wings,
sweet whistles, spine-shudders.
Roust me, I beg you, with breath-kisses,
rumors of missiles, sharp darts
of delirium, agonies steeper
than canyons and chasms,
than fathomless depth-dark
gulches of oceans.
Unmask and dethrone me;
paint a bright marksman’s target
on the arch of my back and when
you have emptied your quiver,
when I am sufficiently punctured
and scored and you’ve gorged
on my heart, then
sing to me, Fat Boy, of
her silk. Order me slide my thigh
over hers and giggle her neck
like a tipsy milkmaid,
for on this night sat late at the crumbed,
wine-stained cloths of my table,
I am cooled as stone, and grown old,
and no longer babble of women.
Hailey Leithauser’s poems have appeared in 32 Poems, AGNI, Plume, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and three editions of The Best American Poetry.
HERA, IN HER 80S, SORTING PHOTOGRAPHS by Constance Crawford
I’ll keep this picture, it shows a truth about me
that I want them to see, my children
and whoever else is interested.
I have not left my mark the way I’d hoped –
except of course on my successive houses,
my handsome, well-run houses.
But who knows who I am
and what I’ve been through? No one.
I was close to sixty here, after the children were gone
and I had time to read and think; dressed well;
my husband came in and saw me there
in the living room chair reading a book.
He had one of his precious cameras
with him. He aimed it at me and snapped the shutter –
even after everything we’d said that morning.
I remember it well. He knew I detest
having my picture taken.
This time I looked straight at the lens
and let it be myself it saw and recorded.
I should probably destroy this picture,
the hatred that pours out of it.
But, in a way, I like my looks, my skirt fits well
just to the knee. My good legs are crossed
and one blue and white spectator pump is off,
lying on its side. I like that touch.
I’m going to keep this picture
and let my eldest daughter find it,
loose in the box with no explanation.
Constance Crawford’s poems have appeared in Red Wheelbarrow, and in the anthologies The Place That Inhabits Us (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2010) and A Bird Black as the Sun: California Poets on Crows and Ravens (Green Poet Press, 2011).
LOVE IS WHAT THIS IS by Eva Saulitis
Flocks of storm petrels
stippled the luminous pewter
surface of the Strait that day:
here and there, from a distance
dark ink spatterings on milk glass
He steered the boat close
to scatter them, just to see
the lifting of four hundred pearl-gray bodies
all at once, by four hundred pairs
of javelin wings. Their forked tails
scissored the skyline divining rods
the forked sticks Dowsers
hold out before them, searching
for water running below ground
just to hear
the noise of a stampede of wingbeats
four hundred barefoot children running
on hard, dry earth, kicking up dust
thumping like the heartbeats
of a band of wild horses,
amplified
The flock tilted then,
the bodies and wings
thinned into blades, into slashes
Four hundred petrels rustled
the leaves of the air;
their bodies appearing,
disappearing,
like babies’ hands
that sadly open and close,
counting out how many times
they’ll have to say
hello
and
goodbye,
He wanted to see the petrels the way she saw them.
“tell me” he said,
“what it felt like –”
so she looked unblinkingly
into his eyes
And stripped down to nothing
but feathers and frail bones,
two hundred heartbeats every moment,
opened them wider
and let him in
knowing what risk
earns anyone the right to say
Love is what this is.
Eva Saulitis (1963–2016) was the author of the poetry collections Many Ways to Say It (Red Hen Press, 2012) and Prayer in Wind (Boreal Books/ Red Hen Press, 2015). She was also the author of three books of non- fiction: Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist (Boreal Books, 2008); Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss Among Vanishing Orcas (Beacon Press, 2013); and Becoming Earth (Boreal Books/ Red Hen Press, 2017). “Love Is What This Is” is published here for the first time.