POEMS
THE BLUES BAND by Matthew Zapruder
The waitress told us it was going to get busy
in town again,
the blues band was coming
and I felt that familiar ancient sorrow
since childhood
of remembering some people
are actually able
to take pleasure
in belonging,
though it is true I have actually attended campfires, dark
water crashed in the darkness
we felt the pleasure
of pure young sorrow, adoring without being adored,
the sea crashes now
but even the darkness
of forgetting could not obliterate
what now seem to be the most tender
sounds made
by those I have forgotten, they are
only shapes to me now
maybe they are still there, in the sunlit
sorrow of former farmer’s markets
where vacant vegans once
chunkled away at various instruments,
an unexamined tendency to sentimentalize
the east and its lessons about freedom
from the self
emerges in the form
of a wandering melody,
that’s your former P.E. teacher playing
the sax with enviable abandon, what
were once electric cries of rage and sorrow
now dissipating in their interpretation,
here, so far
inland already the first chords
are audible from the future, coming closer,
at last they have arrived to regiment
us all into the army
of fun, I’m not
against fun, per se, not everything
has to be sorrow but it seems
some songs
never end, they just pause in a clatter
of repressed sorrow and then resume
elsewhere, certain body parts that should
have remained
unshaken shake, and yes
I know, who am I to say
what is blue, what is true sorrow,
let America have its fun,
shaking while the ghost of sorrow
among us
walks, unamused.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of five poetry collections, including Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017), Father’s Day (Copper Canyon, 2019), and Story of a Poem (Unnamed, 2023). His poems have been featured by PBS News Hour, The Poetry Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review.
THE SUPER BOWL by Jamaica Baldwin
Everyone knows Kansas
is flatter than any other state
except for Mount Sunflower,
which rises in triumphant
anonymity. The plains admire
its noble arrogance, it is
always victorious over
everything no matter
the challenges. Everyone
knows Sundays are for
sleeping through the news.
Everyone knows the handsome
son of America will win,
but they are both so full
of beef authority it is
impossible to tell them apart,
especially in their armored
vulnerability. Everyone knows
one is older, he lives
like a lion unretired
in the sleepy mysteries
of the state that dangles
into the sea. What does
he eat? No one knows. The sea
is the Atlantic, it is so cold,
every night he swims
in it and starlight
caresses his form. Everyone
knows this year the color
red will win and we will all
clean up salty triangular
vehicles for conveying
variegated deliciousness,
we cannot stop, our
hands are alive, everyone
knows it will all end
and we will start talking
about how long it feels until
we can sit together again
and watch big men
fight off pretend death.
Everyone knows one
will fall and the other
will stand over his body, weeping.
Then they will present him
with the bowl, indeed
you can fill it with anything
and it will never overflow.
Everyone knows
a horse takes three hours
to gallop from one end
of the Grand Canyon
to the river to touch
its nose to the red stone.
After so much destruction i give up by Jamaica Baldwin
motherhood for this sorrow of poems
speaking of destruction, too much is made of a girl’s innocence
her body a howl of hornets
her rage a mouthful of cornfields
first the bees disappear from her hair
then the fire spreads from the soles of her feet
beneath an old church a graveyard of children
the air around the church
is filled with the aftermath of egg a dream of sulfur
behind an altar of teeth a bird mouth opens
i have nothing to feed it
the small child holds out her hands
i have nothing to fill them
in this decade of my life, bones and tissue
have been replaced with silicone and metal
and this feels somehow right
a body conforming to its habitat
but darkness is more than unrequited sadness see
see my unbeloved
how not belonging to ourselves
we’ve become
Jamaica Baldwin is the author of the poetry collection Bone Language (YesYes Books, 2023). Her poems have appeared in RHINO, Prairie Schooner, Guernica, World Literature Today, and Southeast Review.
L’HEURE BLEUE by Virginia Konchan
Be drunk always, azure, azure, azure,
psychic life and origin of all vesture,
blue mandorla, Venus’ vesical piscus:
jouissance and puissance, pharmakon.
Our bodies are 60% water: the heart
and brain, 73%, and the earth, 71%.
Blue-veined
breast, rind, moon:
you are not the warmest color,
blue, nor hour, but you sedate the
emotionally disturbed in clinics
and carnivals: Aztecs smeared
the chests of their victims with
blue paint at the lowing altar.
The royal blue throat chakra is
associated with communication,
honesty, empathy, and calming
energy: the indigo ink of Mary,
indignant, as indigo is a cheap,
slave labor crop, called devil’s
dye. Blue depression glass was
manufactured in Ohio’s River Valley
during the war years of 20th century
America, in shades of cobalt,
delphite, and ultramarine.
Latin: ultramarinus, “beyond
the sea,” made by grinding lapis
lazuli into a powder imported into
Europe from Afghanistan mines by
Italian traders in the 14th century.
The color of the Virgin’s robes
in Renaissance paintings, it had
to be made holy by the wicked
logic that renders the expensive
sacred, symbolizing her humility.
The third primary color, after red
and yellow, it’s opposite to orange
on color theory’s prismatic wheel,
stigmatized by value, chroma, hue:
I can almost taste the burst of blue-berries
from the orchards of youth
breaking on the palate of tongue.
Blue, personified, loves you when
you’re lonely, as does the oceanic
gaze of my father, relieving the sky
of religious connotations: alchemical
mediatrix, whirling dervish of flame.
The soul of Anima Mundi is maya.
Past monomania, hypomania, shock,
and grief to the blunt blue of pain,
the first color seen in the aura upon
awakening from a crushing migraine
to discover your Sapphire gin gone.
The spectrum of light emitted by
over 200,000 galaxies is turquoise:
the hottest stars radiate coolness.
Fifteen days after we are hatched,
we can discriminate between colors:
robin’s egg, baby, slate, blue-green.
Cold-blooded
snakes, blue-blooded
queens: lakes, estuaries, tributaries,
universal color of democratic liberty,
the other half of the American flag,
representing vigilance, perseverance,
and justice. Hungry ghosts, surgical
masks, mouths deprived of oxygen,
unable to breathe: we’re not fish.
Krishna blue, immersive baptism
in the sultry scat of Mojo Working,
I’d Rather Be Blind, A Love Supreme.
Sing the blues, servant of sadness, in
your powder, pastel blue bouffant cap
and laboratory coat, as you recede and
advance, subtractive and additive:
in astrophysics, blueshifting occurs
when the heavens move toward our
viewpoint on earth in the Book of
Numbers, ribboning out to speak
to the Israelites and to them say:
“Throughout generations to come,
go make blue cords on the tassels
of your garments.” Someday I shall
tell of your mysterious birth, silence
crossed by vowels, nouns, and angels,
delirium tremens of sacral sublimity.
Passion, aggression, spiritual possession:
O Omega, O hemophiliac chromophile.
Small blue flower with a yellow center
growing abundantly in the countryside,
you are a mirage, image, representation:
I feel your foot tapping like a phantom
on the floor. Tendril of clematis, cling
to the vine: be thou my miracle, whole.
Virginia Konchan’s most recent collection of poems is Bel Canto (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2022). She is the author of three other poetry collections: The End of Spectacle and Any God Will Do (Carnegie Mellon, 2018 and 2020); and Hallelujah Time ( Véhicule Press, 2021), as well as a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift (Noctuary Press, 2017), and four chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, and The Believer.
PRIVACY by Jennifer Barber
Call it what it is:
angel lost in my body,
torn-down
shrubbery
that once functioned
as a partition between
your house and mine.
There I go again,
chasing what I can
never have, what it was
never mine to be given.
The sky’s conducting
the river like a maestro:
current electric as eel.
The small of my back
convulsing with pain
as I forage the sludge,
past skunk cabbages
and wrecked carcasses,
past my sullen petulance
and years of grave folly
now seen in high relief,
wrestling with language
as Jacob wrestled with
his heaven-sent
guide –to
a field of flowering
vetch, where I pause
to drink in darkness.
Take this carapace,
take these vestments,
take what is derivative,
and give me in exchange
a cool draught of water
lifted from a deep well.
The soul, vestigial thing,
cries out sharply, as if
wounded or alarmed.
But no harm has come,
nor intended to come,
to this solitary figure
standing in the clearing,
shaded by a lemon tree.
Here I am: shelter me.
IT IS by Jennifer Barber
like my love of the word
trespass in the Book of Commmon Prayer
and wind trespassing the grass
late September, in the afternoon,
and a song in praise of Ishtar.
A gust along the cedar’s trunk
spreads the scent of resin over me.
I stop by a telephone pole
to look at a homemade poster
with its photo of Blue, last seen
at the corner of Dean and Eliot,
leashless, heading to the park.
Ishtar, if you hear these words,
unleash me from uncertainty.
Rinse me in resin. Let me walk
these blocks another hundred times
until the missing dog is found
and I take in your radiance.
Jennifer Barber is the author of The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made (Word Works, 2022). Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Post Road, upstreet, and Hanging Loose.
CAGE MATCH by Robert Wood Lynn
It takes a while living here to stop mistaking
those headlights on the mountain for fireworks.
An understanding I’ve come to regret, but one
I’d be even more embarrassed to unlearn. This dusk
of almost, whose blue period traces my joints
every evening with the exact same aura as falling
out of love. Some things are tender in their own
obviousness: birds scattering soon as the tailgate
drops. The rainbow puddle marking wherever
I’d parked my truck after driving off. Anger, always
convinced of its own necessity – real the way I was
certain pro wrestling had to be, back before I learned
it was headquartered in a big glass building
in Connecticut. All spring birds stunned against
the folding chairs of their own reflections.
All fall the field apologizing its green away.
Robert Wood Lynn is the author of the poetry collection Mothman Apologia (Yale University Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and other publications.
ADAM by Brooke Sahni
Because he’s a Scorpio, he’s brought with him some strange, alluring gift. A
bone, a feather, something slight and ephemeral – a gentle reminder that he
could be gone, too. If Adam were a Scorpio, then maybe he would have been
born in late October, my favorite season, the dark season – fall. At night, with
Eve, he would have talked abstractly about the world because back then
everything was magic – the lack of language, luminous, lack of science to
name even the sunset or the smell of fruit ripening on the tree. I like to imagine
how beautiful it all would have been. And terrifying, like the Scorpio, all
night and darkness, mystery and abandon. Unabashed about nakedness, first
kiss without a word for swoon – all feeling and flesh. Back when everything
was so close without having the word perigee. And the moon was so close.
Eve, sticking out her tongue, could almost taste it, and Adam knew she was
beautiful. He felt more beautiful in her presence. And he forgot about god,
though god was so close, and believed he had created the world. He
whispered to Eve imperfect explanations: this is how, and this is why.
Brooke Sahni is the author of the poetry collections Diving (Orison Books, 2020) and Before I Had the Word (Texas Review Press, 2021). Her work has also appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Journal, The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere.
COSMIC by Mihaela Moscaliuc
– for Rachel, who took me to the cavern
I was less taken with the cave lake being bottomless
than with the stalactites becoming
stalagmites in its mirror and all of us bent
over the rail, staring at our death masks.
Maybe I’d descended into one cave too many.
It’s not that I don’t tremble or have had enough
of the holy, but splendor and reverence
have come to quicken my pulse with shame.
Then there was the slit traveling the cavernous roof
for miles, hedged with “straw” stalactites
that grow one inch per hundred years,
their sexacentennial presence proof we were safe.
She won’t jilt us, joked the guide.
Young and beautiful Rachel, like you I was seething
at how prisoners forced to build the cement platform
on which we stood were mentioned as a fun fact.
Were the thirty still on death row among them,
have those freed brought their kids to the Cosmic Cave
to see the platform and from it heard, as we did,
how rainbow trout were released into this lake
home to blind fish, how the latter were killed
not knowing by whom or why, how it did not
work out well for the new occupants either?
Without flow, trapped in stasis, their eggs rotted.
Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of three poetry collections: Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010), Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), and Cemetery Ink (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). She is co-editor of Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020), and editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016).
ON PROMISING MYSELF TO BUY ONLY PREVIOUSLY OWNED CLOTHES by Mary Peelen
Give me precision if only for the most finite of tasks,
the shallowest of missions: to wear each thrift store,
each flea market garment like second skin until
I hear the breath above each stitch,
what accelerated the heart at the spindle,
what clouded the lung, what caught in the whirring
machine, who sang. Did your fingers too callus
with needlework until they lost their whorls,
like Mrs. Wong’s? When time came to “naturalize,”
her fingers had not prints to prove who she was.
Silver cotton, hemp, tencel, flax, petroleum, army of polymers,
feed my greed the ghosts of each thread, soft and arsenic.
Note: The story of Mrs. Wong, who lived in the Lower East Side in the 1970s and
worked in the garment industry, is included in one of the exhibits at the Tenement
Museum in NYC.
RASQUE by Mary Peelen
In a cave on a farmer’s ancestral grounds,
we scrambled toward its darkest pit, soles
slipping on wet rocks, hands fumbling for walls
coated thick in – we later learned – guano,
and when we flooded the ceiling with light,
we gasped. Clustered by the dozen to share
body heat, they hung like chandeliers.
We prodded with our flashlight beams,
swirled our wrists to mimic their swooping.
Bodies began to fall, one then another then another,
too small for a thud, naked and milky and still blind,
and we watched, not knowing
that when roused from torpor
they lose energy worth weeks of sustenance,
or how to stop it.
Note: rasque (n. from rue, to regret + bourrasque, a tempest): a moment you instantly wish you could take back, feeling a pulse of dread right after crossing the point of no return (Koenig’s The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows 187).
ON THE BEDSIDE TABLE by Mary Peelen
All morning I observe the stone,
fat and fragrant as overripe fruit.
Peach and plum are stone fruits.
Pomme means apple. A human heart
weighs ten ounces. The temptation
with an apple, as with pain,
is to categorize it as sin and shame,
along with Eve, I suppose, and Persephone,
abductee into the underworld. Once, my sister
told me if you know three types of rocks,
you can do the crossword puzzle
even when you have a migraine. So often
lately I can’t even think, lose track
of basic facts. To hold things together,
I recite taxonomies – phylum, class,
order – like lullabies they soothe me
until Imitrex stupefies me,
extinction gone to the vein again,
call it taxidermy: vital organ,
wild and beating, panicked into stone,
petrified in the shape of a hole, a hole
the size of a fist, my fist
the shape of a heart buried alive –
igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic.
Mary Peelen is the author of Quantum Heresies: Poems (Glass Lyre Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry Review (UK), Pleiades, and Poetry Daily.
A ROOM STACKED WITH NEWSPAPER by Eva Saulitis
You tell me your memory is a room stacked with newspaper.
Sometimes you enter, swipe dust off the stacks, turn the brown pages.
Some you never looked at. You left us those and they are silent.
Is this organic? this gesture of one hand, this surrender? the way your
surgeon says one brain hemisphere disconnects from the other? Is
this the gesture of fireweed and wild rose, horsetail and lupine,
stinging nettle? To lie down at last? Say, nothing comes between us now?
Or is this the moment when rain begins?
Wind begins, a sound like someone moving a heavy armoire, or the
oak chest of drawers in my childhood room, with the warped oval
mirror and aluminum sheen. Birch limbs flail like scissors, crossing
land, a flock of brown birds in the sodden field. I would show you
pictures of this bay, now overlain with peach and pale blue light,
jagged between clouds and mountains. I would show you – Here is
Tuesday. And here is Friday, noon. This is your daughter, Eva. And this.
And this. Rain drums the roof at night, like your fingers, and the
wind – a moan, a chant, a hum, a brushing shoulder, indifferent to
me. I like to listen to the rain, Mama, on my red tin roof. When it
drums harder, I’m relieved. It’s a release, a long exhalation after
holding my breath. Or the way it stops, as if it never was at all, as if it
had always been this silent.
Eva Saulitis (1963–2016) was the author of the poetry collections Many Ways to Say It (Red Hen Press, 2012) and Prayer in the 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). These three poems are being published for the first time.
BLACK BREAD by Dannye Romine Powell
My mother is knitting one of her shawls.
Her hands are working, they can’t stop.
Her eyes are watching
Television, at the same time
They are watching my father.
My father says in ten days.
In ten days it will be different, he’ll be
Back there, on the front lines,
His legs frozen.
He says now they are working on his hands,
Cooling them slowly. Touch them
He says. The cold is traveling
Up his arms like birds
Crawling backwards up a tree.
When we were little
He planted a thousand trees in our back yard.
He wore a handkerchief on his head.
Now, the handkerchief, knotted and smelling
Of sweat, is the same thing.
The same thing as the spruce sapling down
In the hole. Is the same thing
As his Latvian Army uniform.
Anything my mother says,
He can’t hear it. We translate, say Dad,
Mom says you can’t leave yet.
She hasn’t finished your scarf. That’s right,
She says. My mother’s hands repeat
This request all day long.
Her mouth, it’s shaped like an acorn.
We hand her words to him
Like morsels of strong, black bread.
A few words. And then he sleeps.
MOON POOL by Dannye Romine Powell
I’m trying to write a poem about the old country and memory
and suicide and my grandmother when Otto calls, he’s been to Seward
to check on his landing craft, and the weather was bad, clear,
but with that northerly wind, damn, huffing down the peaks like
old man winter in those kids’ books, foot-high wind chop in the harbor
one williwaw bursting both doors open in the ship’s chandlery
and down on the dock, he saw a buddy, a tug captain, who took
one look at his landing craft, said I don’t want to have anything to do
with that thing, the rusting hulk with its crabbed wires, the wrenched-open
hatch
exposing water lapping up through a round hole in the deck.
You got bigger problems than your battery’s bein’ dead.
She’s all but sunk. Wait man, that’s just the moon pool, Otto said
And thank god the past is dead. Thank god for telephone calls
interrupting the writing of another depressing immigrant poem.
Thank god for moon pools, tubes welded to the bottom of the deck.
You could drop a line through one, catch something, Otto said
Don’t get too close to my moon pool, honey. Thank god
the imagination can be shattered like plate glass. For bitter weather
when you think it should be spring. ’Cause sometimes I think
I’m hauling my family’s refugee past in a sack on my back,
and then with a blast
of late February wind – that long-beard,
white-haired
angry
Norwegian god-man
slaps me hard on both sides of my face.
Grabs my collar and shakes, says, wake up, sis, this is real.
Better put your boots on.
WHAT I REMEMBER ABOUT DYING by Dannye Romine Powell
What I remember about dying
is how I kept trying
to retrieve something, a handkerchief
from the quilted box, one
silver napkin ring, a grown son’s
first tooth. What I recall
about dying is the kaleidoscope
of memory that swam over me,
Mrs. Sulzner pulling down
third grade’s long, crackly map,
her pointer’s steady tap-tap
at a ragged blue sea. My mother,
with her tiny pout, ironing
my father’s white boxer shorts,
while he sat smoking a Lucky
in the rattan chair. What
I remember about dying
was wanting one more
of something – one more taste
of mango from the backyard tree.
One more, I cried out. One more night
in the old mountain house,
an ancient wind rummaging the leaves.
Dannye Romine Powell is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently In the Sunroom with Raymond Carver (Press 53, 2020). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, San Pedro River Poetry Review, Memoir, and Tar River Poetry.
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.
NIGHT MUSIC by Kareem Tayyar
you have been dancing at the bottom of a well.
the moon has been dancing with you.
neither of you are where you are supposed to be,
which only adds to the fun the two of you are having.
in the fields surrounding the well it is winter.
in the winter surrounding the fields a light snow is falling.
the moon is a ghost that does not believe in the idea of haunting.
this, among other things, is a belief the two of you have in common.
Kareem Tayyar is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Revolution of Heavenly Bodies & Other Stories (J.New Books, 2022). His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Brilliant Corners, and The Writer’s Almanac.
FINE WORK by Sarah B Sullivan
Once I came upon a dying man
at the end of his driveway,
still wearing one garden glove.
I held his other hand, brushed the hair
from his forehead. Murmured
something useless,
no louder than the gentle rain
which darkened the freshly tended
ground. He was beyond
words but appeared sturdy, shirt tucked,
average build, dusty dungarees.
His lawn well-kempt,
a pile of weeds to the side of the bed,
cracks in the driveway sealed.
I told him he’d done fine work,
the burgundy poppies were marvelous.
I promised, like any helpless fool,
he was safe. I only stopped
stroking his cheek
to call an ambulance.
Before sirens descended, a quiet arose
then settled between us, like the space
after the cellist lowers his bow,
before the audience applauds.
Sarah B Sullivan’s work has appeared in Little Patuxent Review, Cider Press Review, Switchgrass Review, and Sixfold.
FLATLAND by Mathew Weitman
How beautiful and soulless is the city
on this unmailed postcard
with its iconic view from nowhere
a tourist searches for but never finds
One cloud loiters above the esplanade
where beneath the broken statues
time is etherized at a summer picnic –
children wait in eternity
for ginger ale, cake
To the left the ocean’s boring
with enlightened stillness:
no tidal wave threatens the cathedral’s stories of bearded men
who cannot bear to look at the light
passing through their stained-glass bodies
I’d never tell you the first part of my life
was spent weeping, or in prayer
because it isn’t true
and I’d rather lie about other things
What is most arresting is the indication of movement:
bent branches above café tables
the wind’s code is glorious & simple
but the skyline is a language
one acquires in lecture halls
There is a riverine darkness in certain windows
of the houses on the right
suggesting absence or intimacy:
what happens beyond the postcard
lends a dimensionality I am not qualified to speak about –
remember when you stopped loving me
after I confused the INDEFINITE with the INFINITE at the diner
Look:
in the distance fishermen are napping
after casting their nets
Mathew Weitman’s poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Evergreen Review, The Missouri Review, Southwest Review, and New South.
WRITTEN IN THE DARK by Alison Hawthorne Deming
I sit in the fog on a small island in the North Atlantic
a peaceful day with the invasive leopard slugs
destroying my lettuce plants
invasive green crabs decimating the clams
that thought they’d lie at peace in mud.
Tent caterpillars are having a good summer
devouring trees on the mainland
though a surprise fungus may be
slowing their spread while on the island
the forests work to recover
from last year’s bark beetle assault
that tore through like a wildfire
turning giant black spruces and lacy tamaracks
into spindle-stick corpses. The ash trees
so far holding out against emerald ash borer.
So now I read about trees and praise the knowledge
their bodies archive. Nickel-harvesting species
that grow in mine tailings – “hyper-accumulators”
that suck up waste that becomes
batteries to drive our cars,
soil made clean for crops, trees become central characters
in the human drama, carbon consumers and altruists
nourishing one another through roots,
code talkers who send chemical messages
when parasites rise.
One day when working in the woods
I heard a stand of white birches call out to me
across a fern meadow. I understood them
to mean that they wanted to be seen
as light having an edge over darkness.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently Stairway to Heaven (Penguin Poets, 2016). She has four essay collections, most recently A Woven World: On Fashion, Fishermen, and the Sardine Dress (Counterpoint Press, 2021). Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including The Norton Book of Nature Writing and The Best American Science and Nature Writing.
THE SHUT-OFF WEIR by Elizabeth Bradfield
Getting ready for bed I noticed lights on the water
a boat working along the island shore.
Was it search and rescue? Boats leaving
the North Head wharf head east or northeast
to herring weirs or salmon cages.
This boat had come south to the Long Bank
and it made no sense in a place where
tides and fish determine where the boats will go
patterns of routine behavior reminding me of the fish biologist
who described the largest migration in the world
happening every night when plankton rise from the bottom
and come to shore to feed. Herring follow them.
And so the boats and so the islanders lining the scenic
pullout to behold the work trucks, camp chairs and binos.
Next I could see someone had cast twine in a broad arc
across the little cove. By six a.m. the gulls were screaming.
By afternoon two carriers lay back waiting to fill
their holds. A couple skiffs. Someone at the pullout said
I heard they could get a thousand hogsheads. Another said
three thousand. A fish story forming as the boats
drew the sweep across the weir to push the herring
into the pocket. Wind picked up. Someone said
easterly wind is a cancer to that weir. No one had fished
this method for decades. Maybe someone’s father knew
how to do it but others from a nearby island had come
to help and so it went. The crowd grew and with it
the stories flowed. What seemed lost knowledge
came back and in those days abundance ruled.
ERRATIC by Elizabeth Bradfield
Glacially deposited rock differing from the size and type of rock native to
the area in which it rests. From the Latin errare (to wander).
I come upon them sometimes
like today beside a favorite trail
in a month without leaves and before
snow which is to say now an unpredictable
time in a time when I too am unpredictable but
there she hunkers gray and strange in this land ground
into being by glaciers and plopped dropped at their now-gone
feet I know something of where it came from &
how it got here but even though this is a daily
walk a walk walked daily I’d not noticed it
before and probably wouldn’t have
noticed it until now when my own
body is in retreat from its decades
of advance
the change
it’s called and it’s as unexpected
as a boulder in an easy trail which your
strolling self must swerve around or clamber
over or blast through as you puzzle as you hitch
your pace for it is hard and inscrutable you must
walk around or over must circumvent and
she is mysterious in her looming (why
here? why the trail here, around?)
strange and insurmountable as
my adolescent surging self was
to myself then as this new self
is to me now surging and in
retreat and as capable
of damage as any
ungiving thing
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Toward Antarctica (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2019), and a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro, Theorem (Candor Arts, 2019). Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and Orion. She is a contributing editor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
THE CALIFORNIA COAST by Patricia Clark
Offshore, the sea lions wouldn’t stop
barking. I didn’t want them to. Not
ever – through the thin tent walls: sea lions.
Over surf, under pines, along the high,
chittering of oystercatchers. Inland,
fires were burning. We didn’t live here,
so didn’t know how wrong the gorgeous
noon sky, the sunset or flushed dawn. We
loved it. Wanted to move here. Back home,
the bay froze, sea turtles were stopped mid-
paddle.But we were off the grid, nearly
barefoot, basking. We shat in a hole. We tossed
our rinsewater out the trailer door. It was
paradise at the pink camper until I suggested
we go walk in the redwoods. Off the coast, off
the conservation land, we found etched
into dirt and river bed what’s found everywhere.
Rage. A door-less
white truck, forever
stalled, rusting and left there. Fuck it.
On one oxbow shore: blue panties with lace
trim, straw-brimmed
hat on a stump, a dusty
sweatshirt. Boredom and the violence
of being bored. Story we were reluctant
to imagine. Back home it’s told different,
sculpted with other debris & hidden under
other veneers. But, America, it’s everywhere.
WHEN THE GOLDFINCHES RETURN TO THE PURPLE CONEFLOWER, HE CALLS TO ME by Patricia Clark
They ride the blossoms, stalk-swaying,
fluttering to keep their balance,
and I notice it’s the female pulling out
a thistle from the flower center,
eating it, then digging for another.
Sometimes he says we don’t talk enough,
or that he can’t get a word in
when we go out with friends. At Licari’s,
over Italian food, he said the servers
always came over, too, and interrupted him.
Sometimes I wonder who will go first,
which one of us, I mean, feeling a clutch
at my heart. Resolve—talk more, listen
better. Then he calls me to look
and we stand side by side, united, as one.
We watch the goldfinches together, right out
the dining room window, first four,
then six of them with black and white wing bars,
their black foreheads. Then in a whisk,
they go straight out to the woods.
Patricia Clark is the author of three chapbooks and six books of poetry, most recently Self-Portrait with a Million Dollars (Terrapin Books, 2020). Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and has appeared in The Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, Slate, and Stand.
FOLLOW THE SUN by Rachel Hadas
My sister’s visit. Matching memories
over outdoor lunches buzzed by bees
turn out to be not identical
but a bit jagged, asymmetrical.
Each supplies something that the other needs.
Nasturtiums flare like flames among the weeds.
I’m seventy-two.
She is seventy-five.
Will either of us even be alive
to manage one more visit at the most?
Balance between the present and the past,
then add the wobbly future: quite a trick.
We’d better lend her friend a walking stick.
He loves to hike the trails, but tends to lean
off to one side. Back, safely on the lawn,
he moves his chair into a patch of sun
and leans back, his book open on his lap,
hat tipped over his eyes, and takes a nap –asleep,
awake, and drifting in between.
From outside age looks dull, but not to us
perched on its tightrope over the abyss.
We move with caution, careful not to miss
a step. We all will stumble and fall down –not
quite yet, though. Following the sun,
we move toward the warmest patch of green.
Rachel Hadas is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, essays, and translations. Her latest collection of poems is Love and Dread (Measure Press Inc., 2021), and her most recent book of essays is Piece by Piece: Selected Prose (Paul Dry Books, 2021).
WESTERN LOVE SONG REFUSING THE APOCALYPSE by Andrew Hemmert
For one, it’s hard to believe the world could ever end
when you’re sitting under a tree full of wild cherries
eating a seafood bouillabaisse while honeybees
buzz past your ears like allied biplanes on their way
to save you. In Santa Fe, New Mexico
my mother drizzled olive oil on a sliced heirloom tomato,
seasoned it with kosher salt and black pepper,
then we ate it while using her phone to identify
constellations. If you pointed the camera at the ground
the app would show you whatever stars
were shining on the other side of the world –
shapes that promise to return, to go on
even if we disappear from beneath them.
So it’s not that I think we’re invulnerable,
far from it. I just think the apocalypse is
an anthropocentric concept. The next morning
we had breakfast in a hole-in-the-wall café –
huevos rancheros, smothered burritos,
bitter coffee, heaven. And later the smell
of the farmer’s market, green chiles turning over
on red coals, pork sausages frying on skillets. I swear
it cured my hangover. I bought a bag of yellow pears
on my friend’s recommendation, and the old man
running the fruit stall handed me a black plum,
said you should try this, so I did. And then I bought a bag
of black plums. I sometimes get overwhelmed
by the sensation of taste coupled with the knowledge
of how far every ingredient has traveled
to become part of my meal, and the environmental cost
of that journey. Sometimes it feels the best thing we can do
is eat nothing and lie in bed waiting for one
of various fires to consume us, then let the world
become the world again. Last week
my friend woke up to a layer of ash
on her roof. She lives closer to the wildfires than we do,
but even here the air was thick
with smoke. We could feel it in the backs of our throats,
like the prairie grasses disappearing into ozone
were gradually becoming us. Ours
is a neighborhood of lost dogs. The same vanished yorkie
has stared out of a photograph taped to the mailbox
for weeks now. He’s wearing a blue bandana
with yellow stars, and thinking about it
can ruin me for an afternoon. We’ve returned
more than our share of escaped boxers
and labs, even once a pair of limping pit bulls
who were trailed by a group of kids trying
and failing to get them back. But people speed
through these streets, and I don’t want to imagine
where that yorkie ended up. I don’t want to
imagine what this place will look like in twenty years,
how much more of the wild, western expanse will be
hidden under suburbs. The houses go up so fast
they almost seem like the facades of houses,
just cardboard cutouts designed to make you feel
like nothing is left but the dreams of real estate agents.
If the west has a definition, it must be more
than the dust of a shrinking prairie
shook from the fur of a skittish coyote
crossing the parking lot of a sports bar.
When I went looking for my old house in Lone Tree,
I couldn’t find it at first. I was searching
for the prairie that used to run parallel to that highway,
for the antelope that threaded those hills.
I should have known it would be gone,
swallowed up in the city’s neon crawl
of strip malls and chain restaurants.
Like the jumping cholla cactus, the city’s thirst
so unquenchable its needles grow right through your clothes,
reaching for the water under your skin.
Yesterday after sex Lucia and I went outside
to find the hose had been left on, flooding the yard
with water in a dry season, and a pigeon
was lying dead on the patio, its head bloody
where it hit the kitchen window. I do wonder
whether we really see what we’re flying towards
at such speed. I said sorry, then buried the pigeon
in the yard, where a few of the birdfeeder’s corn kernels
had sprouted green against the xeriscape.
Andrew Hemmert is the author of two poetry collections: Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press, 2021) and Blessing the Exoskeleton (Pitt Poetry Series, 2022). His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review.
PRETENSES by Farah Peterson
With biscuits from the plantation house hotel
Wrapped in a hasty napkin, we went early
Out where morning fired frost-tipped
stands of grass
Our shotguns cold and heavy in our hands
My dad had his cracked resting on one shoulder
And laughed over the other shoulder with our guide,
The borrowed dogs, spilling from the flatbed
Dispersed like fish released into still water
Until, triumph of domestication, the stock-still point
A mobile nose, a spray of urine, otherwise fixed.
What were we doing there, two northern Blacks
In a field once farmed by slaves
Harrying quail released the night before
To hurry in meandering lines from their safe cages?
Was it only to pretend
That meat well-laced with buckshot
Is as good as meat without?
We beat together through the grass, advancing
To where the dog still pointed out our quarry
– His stance unchanging as we neared the hidden covey
But somehow starting to convey hysteria –And
then a sudden bursting at our feet,
Ululating volley of veering wings
Unused to this, we stood briefly amazed
Aiming late and almost into the sun.
Some of this was real enough
One of the birds I shot was not quite dead
When the dog placed its tender body in my hand
Arrested by a sensation like a finger
Tapping swift insistence on my palm,
I felt the bird’s heart still
I met a black caviar eye as it filmed over blue.
At times I found I had to shield my face
Against undulating switchbacks of the smoke
Acrid incense from a deadly censer.
But it was not a day to speak of things like that
Nor did we ever mention the missing son
For whom I made an adequate understudy.
Farah Peterson’s poetry has appeared in Salamander, Rattle, and The Florida Review. Her essays have also been published in The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Magazine Writing 2021 (Columbia University Press, 2022).
EXCERPT: 25 YEARS OF TINY POWER by Annie Wenstrup
Tiny Architectural Digest Interviews Polly Pocket
at Her Home Alongside the Lazy River
PP: That’s a great question! Thanks so much for asking! My life
now? It’s like this: solitude grits the inside of my clamshell. It
never rains and it never shines. The lifeguard’s chair sits empty.
The riverbed remains dry. Sometimes I lie in bed and remember it
wasn’t always this way. I remember the girl that held me. She
pinched me between thumb and forefinger, homed my feet in the
depressions along the river. I pretend I remember what it was like
to stand. Upright, I faced the lime-green
apple trees. Her voice
narrated my story, together we made the apples real. They ripened
at her word. Transformed, we picnicked on them while watching
the river. She told me it was our secret, told me the water’s source
was forbidden. The girl tweezered me into the river and we
pretended I floated through its S‑curves. What no one understands
is we always pretended she wasn’t there. That was the magic.
TA: That sounds beautiful and lonely.
PP: Does it? . . .
PP: It was never lonely. It was only lonely when we hosted parties
and the other Pollys visited my clamshell. Their faces and bodies
mirrored my own. She pinched us, turned us to face each other. We
mimed saying hello while our bodies entered depressions. She told
us what to say to each other. It was very polite.
TA: It sounds like you want to say it wasn’t.
PP: Is that a question or a statement? I don’t know if it was polite
or not. I know it wasn’t what I wanted it to be. When it was the
two of us, I could ignore how her hands moved through my home.
I could ignore her thumb and index finger gripping me. But at the
parties? I saw how I must appear, covered in fingerprints, unable to
move myself. Seeing this way, I knew the river was tap water. I
knew we’d never eaten the apples, that they were only dots of red
paint on green.
Annie Wenstrup (Dena’ina) has had work in Ecotone, Nimrod, Palette, Poetry Northwest, and Ran Off with the Star Bassoon.
TODAY IN THE MAIL A CARD FROM HER, by Megan Snyder-Camp
two unicorns, yellow not touching blue, empty triangles, pink wash,
a green window, darkened, pink shadow
of the second unicorn, a horn piercing its foot, feathered,
looping black grass, blue-edged ear shaded pink, a yellow bystander, five of
this,
five of that, the spine of the card respected, both horses headed west.
How many years ago was it she would only draw an egg
with its back and forth thickening around ten o’clock, ten and two,
her hands on the paper, the egg with its scar tissue, its start, its dark,
pencil as firestarter, for months we had a house full
of her eggs, all sizes, the yolk or whatever the extra was, the back and forth,
she wouldn’t name it, I would tell myself this is what abundance feels like
when it’s stolen from someone else, the child not mine,
I know that, one day the eggs grew long trailing spider legs,
then shirts, then stripes of varying thicknesses, bars of time. I could go on.
When we drove her to her family they had a yard full of chickens and kept
pressing cartons on us, how delicious, and then we drove away without her.
Megan Snyder-Camp is the author of three books of poetry: The Forest of Sure Things (Tupelo Press, 2010), Wintering (Tupelo Press, 2016), and The Gunnywolf (Bear Star Press, 2016). Her work has also appeared in The Southern Review, FIELD, Ecotone, The Antioch Review, and The Sewanee Review.
GRANVILLE IN JULY by Laura Kolbe
14 weeks
I was handed an ungrateful soul
and a gewgaw world –who
among us hatched out different,
ecstatically eggtoothed,
without pain? – but this
I know I love and don’t deserve
and have: to smell the sulfur
from a country well
rising off your showered arms,
and the citrine hiss at six
of onions in hot butter
snaking up the vents from the rich
and bay-strewn supper-cooking
of our friends below.
The world is working for our good.
The hot lid of day is bluing
and withdrawn. Thrushes finally
cool enough to cry.
In the guest room’s preternatural dark,
we could fall chinfirst on this sweetly broken,
bunny-sloping bed
if you’d incline. We could go down
and fix ourselves a sphinx.
Something out of pond-clay
and playing cards to inform me
what the meaning is
in all these morseled rivulets,
merle-blue patches deepening the yard,
robins clocking gospel
in the draft-chinks
of the eaves.
Holiness on the head,
perfection on the beasts.
Whatever it is claims
to rise like heat will have to walk
our grubbed, pocked passageways,
collagen and albumin,
fat and iron. College-learning
mineraled and bubbled,
the waterglass left sat.
There is no other way to stir the pot.
To wind our breasts up
painting us aflush.
Whatever it is
claims its little rising
and is listenably dotty
and exact – I thank it
from my carmine hunch
of heart – as though
we’d hulk forever on
just this narthex
built of white
bean and onion,
butter and bread and sex.
THE DOUBLE LIFE by Laura Kolbe
21 Weeks
They were like the canvas and the paint
of a grand portrait. The two necessities.
The one, the daywork in the hospital,
stretched its linened fingers
with geometric grace.
Eyeless it felt the nubs and crevices of sick-wards.
Tensed them on a frame until they smoothed
in readiness for oil.
The other, the burden of poems,
coursed in many colors
the brown and pink smokes of a face.
It slaked the chapped canvas,
which kept stretching, surviving,
encarboned by its dim roots in plant life
its origin as part of nature,
which wounds and heals and is heaping
with victorious white scar
that end to end would circle every planet.
More poems came knifethick
decked upon the work.
For a while, the brushstrokes
lapped placable in their pigments, slept, almost
against the linen sternum.
Made the unisoned life.
The doctor spun pneumonias out of the body,
poured elixirs,
measured the liver in centimeters,
belayed the pressure of the blood.
The poet drank the blood.
The dark paint lodged in the canvas’s pale fibers.
Hung, the coupled gravity –the
rowing brushwork,
the bleached wattle of a canvas like a tide-rim –
like all ornaments, finally unendured.
The paint split wrongsized in its varnished coat.
Like a cigarette, just where it was brightest
it ashed off. It had to.
Flaking, it was most itself:
isolations of apricot, gamboge, topaz, scarlet.
No longer part of any picture. Fugitive, it entered
the room warm with bodies. The floor, the rug.
Entered as dust the bodies’ blood.
Its leaden chaff stirred madness.
Wove itself in bone.
High on the wall denuded chinks of canvas
glistened, newly undisguised
in milky pennants.
The war of work, the taut battalion going onwards
with its retinue, with its sick.
Is this to be regretted, the unlastingness?
Tell me, how else can union end
between color and its harbor?
Between color and its canvas bondage?
Aren’t we tired of our pictures?
The surface always peeling from its own radiance.
And the canvas suffers too.
Suffers where its pallor has been dyed.
Unfaced again, the canvas whitens into splendor.
Bright flakes of poems litter the floor.
Unflocked they unhoard their unreality.
Laura Kolbe is the author of the poetry collection Little Pharma (University of Pittsburgh, 2021). Her poetry, fiction, personal essays, and criticism can be found in Poetry, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, The Yale Review, and Best American Poetry 2022.
YEAR ONE by Jessica Greenbaum
We were a small roving band of lactating mothers
settling into the corner of a coffee shop, unwanted upper-middle-
class nomads with our trendy fold‑up strollers, our enormous
bags of compostable diapers, because at first we took everything
a baby could need wherever we went – I’m surprised
a pediatrician didn’t pop out – although one item we lacked
was those lovely fabric shoulder tents they have now
so that breast feeding required a partial view of a blossoming bosom
which more than any other single thing
made us feel part of a time before equipment – we, who had
so recently been strangers in a birthing class –one
from Italy, the other from Sweden, and both brassy, confident
striders along Brooklyn sidewalks – now around a table
instinctually shielding each other like (un)covered wagons circling a
campfire
and for many months when one baby cried
all our breasts zinged to the task; it was a time before
differentiation, in so many ways, of us, the closest I will get
to a tribal tent, and whatever went on at home it was good
to gather inside and speak our mother tongue.
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.
GETTING RID OF THE GOD’S EYE MY CHILD MADE by Amy Dryansky
Except it looks more like the eye of Sauron
or the snake in God’s garden than any eye
I imagine a god would have. If I ever imagined
that, which I don’t, because if I think of God
it’s as photosynthesis, fractals, migration,
light on water. And my daughter is no longer
my daughter, because she’s chosen they, or was
chosen, made that way, and they are fluid,
the way my god is fluid, one thing slipping
gently into the next, one element making room
for another, the way it’s hard to say exactly
when it stops being night, or if teal is blue
or green. And the eye they made when they
was she is a halfhearted effort at obedience:
sticks and faded yarn arranged in concentric,
vaguely rhomboid shapes, some camp craft
to prove to parents progress is made. This ersatz
eye hung from a nail on the porch so long
it became invisible, the way things do when we
see them every day. Until today, when I took it
down, tossed it onto the kindling pile. They
and I will make a fire, we’ll warm ourselves.
Amy Dryansky is the author of two poetry collections: How I Got Lost So Close to Home (Alice James Books, 1999) and Grass Whistle (Salmon Poetry, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, The Sun, and Tin House.