POEMS
SERMON by Kai Carlson-Wee
Kingfishers called from the red mouths
of silos and dove through the idling cows.
I walked seven miles of man- camps
in Williston, sleeping two nights
in a railroad car to avoid the incredible
storm. Around me the rain- walls deleted
the sun. The thunder made everything
shake. I walked in the lightning strikes,
naked and shivering, lifting my hands
to the black scroll of thunderheads,
trying not to get myself struck. I prayed
to my shadow- shape. I prayed to the god
of acrylic pens. Vicodin. God of the Red
River dogs. I made up my own kind
of gospel. I sang my own jingles
and freestyle hymns, washed off my feet
in the tire- ruts, burned up my credit card,
college ID. Just for the novelty. Just for
the swirls of plastic they left in a puddle
of goo on the floor. A few swollen
numbers and bubbles of red ink. The word
“guaranteed” like a rowboat adrift in a lake
of cerulean blue. Forces beyond me
designed this, I said, I surrender, I make
myself pure in the stream. The corroded wall,
faded graffiti signs bleeding, fieldmouse
searching my backpack for grain, jumping
up over my pant legs, skirting away to his
hole in the dark. And then it was August,
early September. The trees turned,
the mile- high larches went gold. I walked
on the ridge overlooking the third lake,
diving off boulders to meet my reflection,
climbing up scree fields, watching the sun
leave a reddish remainder of light on the peaks.
Dancing around in the heather for no one.
Cutting the soft silver bellies of trout.
LOWER WENATCHEE by Kai Carlson-Wee
We used to be young, you said, and I knew
what you meant as we sat on the painted rocks
overlooking the Lower Wenatchee, passing
a cigarette back and forth in the sadness
that comes with dusk, with all things finding
their course. There was nothing to say
we hadn’t already said, or failed to say before,
so we watched the lights in the distant houses
blink on one by one, yellow and sharp
in the evening haze, and the drifting boats
with figures of hunched men quietly casting
their lines, murmuring over the three- horse
motors, necking the bottles, and lower down
swirls of slow dark current with sockeye
salmon inside, reflecting the pale sky, stripes
of Italian cypress, shanties where migrating
farm workers slept, and where, in the off- season,
swallows made homes and teenagers broke
through the plywood doors to get high
in a private room. We watched the wind
reveal itself in trees, a squad of herons flying,
uncharacteristically in pairs, their shadows
growing large against the rocks, rippling
over the hard dimensions, flying toward town,
toward the railroad bridge and the great big gates
of the hydroelectric dam. You shivered a little
and huddled in close, letting our fingertips
graze in the pass, barely a moment but
long enough, keeping your eyes trained over
the shine of the water, where work trucks rode
for the Entiat Valley, heavy with Bartlett pear.
Kai Carlson- Wee is the author of RAIL (BOA Editions, 2018). His poetry has appeared in Narrative, The Missouri Review, Vinyl, Triquarterly, and Best New Poets.
TWILIGHT by Joseph Millar
Sometimes I think you’d give anything
to disappear into the twilight again
to walk ashore, not looking back
through the forest’s insomniac shuffling,
ravens loosening their wings in the pines
where the dry ferns crackle under your soles.
In your left hand a glass of yellow wine
which glows like a blurry lens
through the dusky air from counties east
smelling of burning grass
and it’s not like we’re lost in these woods,
having drifted through here before
for our life together seems like a river
and your hair a world full of time and despair
which I can’t compare to any other
its red thickness streaked with gray –
you with your perfumes and me with my feathers:
we were never delicate lovers.
HOME by Joseph Millar
for Atchison Village
Under this roof when it was new
they got up early and came home late
from the shipyards during the war,
putting in seven twelves a week,
falling asleep in the car.
No one was watching the moon
from their bed
though it’s new tonight,
too dark to see
and extra close to the earth:
dead low tide in the saltmarsh
next to the bay and the racetrack –
where the lone egret roosts on sawgrass
and a clump of tidal mud.
He’s facing away from the chilly wind
and the freight train’s whistle
bound for Los Angeles,
everything haunted the way we like it,
everything closing in.
Joseph Millar is the author of several poetry collections from Carnegie Mellon University Press, including Overtime (2001), Blue Rust (2011), Dark Harvest (2021), and the forthcoming Shine.
SHOSHANAH by Derrick Austin
The pond out back darkens with them,
thick pads with pointed petals thrust skyward.
Were they always there? All at once, they opened
and called the catfish under their green skirts.
I feed the catfish crumbs. They keep me company.
I feed them because I’m a bachelor and roustabout.
If I were a fanciful ichthyologist, I might have named
those old grubbers scavenging below the water lilies.
I adore the water lily, a stylite thriving in stillness.
A snowcap. Far hermitage. A bell and scroll.
Shoshanah recited seven times in the Song of Songs.
A white-haired man whose feet are like brass,
his voice like a flood. No Madonna lily or pale rose
of the valley, this flower is common as the blues,
as the mud it roots in. Amorous blossom, prophet’s bowl.
If absolute attention is prayer, then looking is my work.
MAJOR ARCANA: THE FOOL by Derrick Austin
Have you seen the sea
from this height? Under an overcast sky, slightly bluer than the waves,
brighter? Breathe
the sour gale throwing spray. Take in
the primeval gray. Sea stacks
shaped like the iron hand- bells of wandering saints, black as longing
and its shadow restraint, moss- black where the stone is drenched,
erode and are eroded by the waves.
To leap like the holy fool in yellow stockings. To leap like the heart of a fool
in torn stockings.
Risk is one name the wind answers to;
Abandon, I’m told, is another.
Derrick Austin is the author of two collections from BOA Editions: Trouble the Water (2016) and Tenderness (2021).
i go to meet my tiny gods by Kimberly Blaeser
Lizards vine, now become branches.
Blend into bark, knot, even sweet lime
point of leaf – an edge disappearing.
To whom then shall I pray?
There delicate creased petals creased petals
layer, like singing children’s soft hands
entwined in circle dance – in flowering.
All looking pulls me from single creed.
Unless I feather grow scales or molt.
Until migration miles me ancient currents
element me, I am not tear nor poem.
Words may be wings, but not flight.
Go to tiny gods and break – spirit opens
like flesh – a fissure, a song. My foot lifts
and falls, lifts and falls, lifts – now waits.
Here become precipice – awake, like silence.
THE WAY WE LOVE SOMETHING SMALL by Kimberly Blaeser
Moon glow in the saddle of mountains –
a golden eye opening.
Now we who watch Giizis rising fill.
We too grow.
Round
with being seen.
Kimberly Blaeser is the author of five poetry collections, including the bilingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe- niimi: Dancing Resistance (ED Lisieres, 2020) and Ancient Light (University of Arizona Press, 2024). She is also the author of Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition (University of Oklahoma Press, 2012).
unsurprisingly, we go outside to see the moon by Daniel B. Summerhill
it’ll be the bluest it’s ever been, headlines say. your hair gathered at the crown
of your head, like a hand plucking
at the full orb. we sway to the curb. the night purpling around us. your
stomach pulling back the length
of my trench coat, though it is the penultimate day of august, i insist you see
the moon. in your nightly attire; as little
as your body affords: nakedness under this field of artifact. two cop cars
saunter past within two minutes
i point to the glow. the deepest blue i know & it grows then shrinks like a
god small enough to hold.
you are two months away from the fissure that bearing life requires and
pregnancy is its own anarchy.
there is a theory that the universe is infinite & still i am learning to traverse
all of the right nows harvested
in the space between our muggy bodies. we’ll make it out this swamp, as if to
say: in the photo we take on Benton,
the roofline births an ombre of Black scientists haven’t named. but between
our heads is the moon. it is ours. & one. & still –
Daniel B. Summerhill is the author of the poetry collections Divine, Divine, Divine (Nomadic Press, 2021) and Mausoleum of Flowers (CavanKerry Press, 2022). His work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Obsidian, Callaloo, and Academy of American Poets.
WAITING FOR MY DAUGHTER TO BE BORN by Ben Gucciardi
I lie down to sleep
and ten thousand silver mackerel
swirl inside my skull.
The water is cold and clear,
familiar.
Up from the depths,
the sea lions come, baring their teeth,
barking all the ways
the world will harm her.
Down from the sky,
the cormorants plunge, their beaks
like the tips of spears.
Slowly, slowly, the shark comes,
wearing the plundered face of the future.
I roll on my side,
the bait ball descends.
How shallow, my chest.
Sun rays flood the surface.
I open my hand.
These are fingers,
this is space,
forgive me
this is the song
my mother used to sing.
THE SELF by Ben Gucciardi
is such
a cumbersome stone
and love
so fine a chisel
even as the ice shelves
calve
clink
clink
clink
Ben Gucciardi is the author of West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021). He is also the author of the chapbooks I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020) and Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (Quarterly West, 2021). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, AGNI, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and POETRY Magazine.
“ONE REPORTS ONESELF MISSING” by Jane Hirshfield
“One Reports Oneself Missing”
– Tua Forsström
In an animated film, it would be a gradual erasure:
first the feet, then the knees,
then the stomach, the chest, the heart.
In life, it isn’t like that at all.
No, first it’s your shadow, then your questions.
What a relief.
Too much salt, too little, make no difference.
Opinions – who can hold one, without a hand?
So much wanting, willing, regret – now simply weightless.
Once, in a night of weather,
you woke when the bedclothes lifted.
Your hair lifted.
Like that, your story slipped off.
Now it is 6:41 a.m., June 25, 2023,
and what pours in instead
is lit fog through an uncurtained window.
And you, awake to see it,
are like the abalone’s hidden iridescence,
invisible both to the sea and the creature who made it.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of 10 poetry collections, including Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001); The Beauty: Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015); Ledger (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020); and The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023). She is also the author of Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015). She is a contributing editor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
TULE by Erin Rodoni
The elk share their name with the fog, not the double L’d fabric.
Both named for the species of sedge
from which they rise. Tule, that long e rolling on and on
across boundless grasslands. Great herds roam those inland plains
only in memory, but a stray gang survives
inside a shifting shroud. Imagine an ocean dispersed
and floating, how it sifts through fir forest
toward the towns named for saints
and kings and hard- edged things. Coastal fog rushes
in and out, windy and wild, froth and foam. Flurried
and billowy, it wafts into meadows, pearls
into droplets the elk lap up. Each amorphous wave
crests the ridge, slinks through the saplings. Imagine
a sea that dances between trees, light- footed, soft-
maned, sheathing each needle and blade. A sea that settles
on shoulders, that feathers the tulle of hollyhock and rockrose,
hydrangea and lilac. Apple blossoms in spring, silkworms
in late summer, cobwebs in autumn. Crinolines and clouds
buffering barbed wire. The grief- dress I wear
when I stand at the fences of this hemmed-in world
and the fog of my childhood goes threadbare. Like tulle,
it used to add volume: plump the green satins
of grasses and leaves, blur the boundary between
leased land and free, soften the spaces between lives.
The elk are confined to one small enclosure that grows
more parched with each shrinking season. And the rain-
laden fog startles too quickly in sunlight, burns
into blue – sheer, tearable, all glimmer
and gossamer. It approaches like a creature
that has lost its fear of humans, until it gets so close
we can see its frayed edges and patches of mange
and we start to realize we’re the ones
who should be afraid.
Erin Rodoni is the author of the poetry collections Body, in Good Light (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2017); A Landscape for Loss (NFSPS Press, 2017); and If the Woods Carry You (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2014, Blackbird, Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, The Adroit Journal, and Verse Daily.
TO EACH ITS OWN by Maggie Smith
It feels right to me now,
to have ridden the pain here,
to have dismounted it
carefully, slowly,be
cause it is broad and tall,
because it is stomping its hooves,
because its eyes are wild, its breath hot,
and because it could rear up kicking
or bolt as I slide down its side,
my feet desperate for the ground.
My son can’t see it, can’t hear it.
He is dribbling his soccer ball
in the still- damp grass as he waits
for his friend, and I’m brought to tears
seeing him run, nothing –
nothing – chasing him.
The pain I rode to this place
seems not to know he is here.
I have to keep its eyes on me.
I think, It makes one move
toward that boy and –
But no, this pain is mine. And loyal.
My son will have his own.
May it be smaller, tamer
than this one. May it know mercy.
May it prick its ears
when it hears my son cry.
May its eyes go gentle
when it senses it’s bitten
too hard. If it knocks him down,
may it nuzzle him, nudge him
softly but urgently, as if to say,
Get up, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.
I love you, I’m yours, get up.
POEM BEGINNING WITH A TEXT TO MY NEIGHBOR by Maggie Smith
I have an odd favor to ask: on windy nights,
if you don’t mind, would you bring in
your wind chimes? They’re right outside
my window, and I’m a light sleeper. It sounds
like someone ringing a small, silver bell
again & again, expecting service. A maid. A butler.
They keep me up. Chime me up. Each time
I woke last night, half- dreaming, I thought,
Is that the sound snow makes? I thought it was
ringing outside my small, silver window,
against & against, expectant. Each time
I rang awake, I had to relearn the sound & where
it came from. Right outside my mind. At night,
at last. Please, I’m not a sleeper. I’m a light.
Maggie Smith is the author of seven books of poetry and prose, including Goldenrod (Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2021). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The Best American Poetry.
DUSK by AE Hines
When the neighbor’s dog at last stops barking,
there’s a brief sense of relief, as if an insistent
whirring fan has yammered through the air
so long it’s now imperceptible, the mind
having learned to ignore it. But my ears
still carry the weight, still ache for this silence,
and I lie awhile in the gap, as evening
comes into the fading purple sky,
recline in the low arm of a sycamore
until stillness gives way to restless chatter
behind my eyes – the same old self I mistake
myself to be: a name, a history, a dog- loving
man who could, for a moment, wish the dog
of another man harm. What a relief,
the night’s first nightjar calling in the branches,
churring its goodnight. A few crickets
warm up their tiny bows from the bushes.
When the dog starts again, all I am
is sight and sound, this dim sense of longing
beneath the light of long dead stars.
AE Hines is the author of two poetry collections: Any Dumb Animal (Main Street Rag, 2021) and Adam in the Garden (Charlotte Lit Press, 2024). His work has appeared in The Sun, New Letters, Rattle, Rhino, and Ninth Letter.
SALTON SEA by Todd Turnidge
Another place I’ve never been
is the Salton Sea
whose name was flat- out built
for poetry. All I know about it is:
Sasha lived there
& liked to ride her bike & Irene
has a photo of herself playing
on a rainbow swing.
On the radio I hear the sea is shrinking,
that the banks are drawing back
leaving alkali dust.
It’s like my pancreas, receding
islet cells croaking one- by- one,
leaving me
with less insulin. They say type 1
is an autoimmune complaint. Stephen Dunn
asks why
should the reader care about my suffering?
But what if it wasn’t suffering?
That was the summer
Beth had cancer & I had two boys
to lug around in a double stroller.
Diabetes
was the second best thing in my life
back then: something I could control,
something personal.
They call it childhood diabetes,
but you can get it later
at forty- one
if you work at it. In a way, that summer
was like childhood, all those months
off my job
staying home. In a way, that summer
was the holiest time of my life,
all those hours
with my sons, cooking every bite
of food that crossed their lips. Every morning
I pulled t-shirts
over their little melon heads
THUMBS Todd Turnidge
She says she loves me
for my thumbs –
how they press on a steering wheel
when I park a car.
She cares not a lick
for the things I’ve done.
My cleverness counts for a breath
or less:
a Lucite work trophy
in an attic chest.
She has no use
for buried things.
She wants me, she says,
for my minerals
& not my measures
in the minds of men.
But do not other men
have thumbs?
She says:
Park the car, again.
“Salton Sea” and “Thumbs” are Todd Turnidge’s debut publications in a national literary magazine
DIAPAUSE by Keetje Kuipers
My friend and I sit on the rocks across the river from
where a train overturned last spring, a season in
Montana when nothing’s hatching except the early
stoneflies who descend to the water with such spirited
flesh I long each year to put a bug inside my mouth just
to taste something that furiously alive. Now it’s
summer, and I’m here with my friend not so much to
swim as to praise what swimming once felt like. We
splash our feet in the shallows and declare to each other
the gratitude we feel for every lover who ever hurt us –
the drunk, the dead, the simply but thoroughly cruel –
while boys almost too young to have really hurt anyone
launch their bodies through the air and onto the
current’s waiting tongue. There are those who won’t
speak to me now, won’t even whisper my name. But I
say theirs. And contained in each is a pleasure that
would be pain – a kind of persistent longing absent of
desire, the same bittersweet impulse that makes me
reach out to trace the delicate vertebrae descending
below my friend’s bikini clasp – if I refused to allow
myself to somehow love them still. We agree: not
everyone knows what it is to be eaten alive by desire.
But I hope they sometimes think of my name, too, and,
like anything held for a long time in the mouth, it hurts.
Keetje Kuipers is the author of three collections of poems published by BOA Editions: Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), The Keys to the Jail (2014), and All Its Charms (2019). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Narrative, and the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies.
ALL THE DINERS by Frank X. Gaspar
How sometimes I got so high I could see through people’s clothes, and
more, I could see how each one of us had made a choice in some dim
ante- world that always resembled an engraving by Gustave Doré, how I
knew then that we all willed ourselves here to earth, all that naked force
and effort and consequence, too, and then great fields of anxiety began to
wave like the corn along Route I- 80 while all the little roads opened up
to me, all leading to the rising sun, which was splendid and annihilating.
How I survived for a while. How sometimes great chances at love and
joy roared by me, proffering in thunder behind the big- shouldered
yellow locomotives, but I didn’t know. Not until long after the whistles
and air horns doppled off into nothingness. I didn’t know. Stars always,
of course. And small lights winking among the shuffling cornstalks. And
my lantern hissing. My loneliness was my own doing, but I didn’t know.
Sometimes ideas and pictures would trade places, just sometimes, so
that wrath and loathing, say, looked like a man sleeping on the steps of a
courthouse. I can’t explain this except to say that such visions were
shameful to me, a waste. I was in a hurry to get to where I was going, but
at the same time I didn’t care to ever arrive. I was suspended between
one life and another. I liked it like that. Then in all the diners in the wet
mornings, all that sadness that didn’t seem to be mine. But it was mine.
The scalding coffee, the sweet jam on toast, the watery eyes of the fry
cooks and the waitresses, the cigarette smoke in those days hanging in
the air like soft music. Sometimes a tune would come to me out of it, so
clear that I would forget to breathe. Then I would turn my face along the
counter’s faces and find the one man or woman among them, finally, my
companion, to climb aboard and savor every taste, hear every note that
was never heard before. And then I’d breathe again in that noisy light,
and then I would be the one to vanish.
Frank X. Gaspar is the author of five poetry collections, including Night of a Thousand Blossoms (Alice James Books, 2004) and Late Rapturous (Autumn House Press, 2012). He is the author of the novels Leaving Pico (Hardscrabble Books, 1999) and Stealing Fatima (Counterpoint Press, 2009).
DREAM POSTSCRIPT #1 by Sean Cho A
you are now awake. i am sorry that we have to wake
here again. the way we have to turn off the water
so the faucet doesn’t leak all night. how we use the oven
as a drying rack for the dishes. yesterday i walked by
three stray cats. each time they ran back into the bushes,
or trees, or away. i mean to say home. it’s not terrible
to forget our dreams. my vision board is tangible:
a sofa. and. a second trashcan. when the paychecks
come in i do the math. i want equations without
problems. i want the answers to be definitive and favorable.
tonight over the hum of the air conditioner: please
tell me how hard it is to love me.
BROKEN NOT SONNET #2 by Sean Cho A
it has been three months since the big news is coming tomorrow!
all my friends spend their days pushing numbers from here
to there. i also want to watch people happily drive their new
cars off the lot. is it tomorrow yet? there have been many
tomorrows. there has always been a tomorow. everyday
many someones hear i love you for the very first time.
*
i want to unfill this tin bucket. or. pour the rain water back
into each cloud. point them towards tucson. and. feel useful.
but we know that isn’t possible. a lot of things feel impossible.
one day a child will watch the mammoth take his first steps again.
BROKEN NOT SONNET #3 by Sean Cho A
because it was summer and the factory where
the orchids were glued and sewn had to reopen.
three weeks ago someone spray painted i need
god to speak to me now on the side of a building.
it’s unimportant: how many people have walked
by it since. it’s reassuring: how unoriginal this
sadness is. i remember: the paint was blue, the
house was brick. Although it probably wasn’t
*
because it is still august. a school teacher is pressing
on the brakes to let the geese cross the street.
in the perfect world there is a pond on the other
side and no one is late to work.
Sean Cho A. is the author of American Home (Autumn House, 2021). His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Copper Nickel, Prairie Schooner, and The Massachusetts Review.
NIGHT OUT by Kim Addonizio
There are artists who don’t want to have that conversation, she said
and I nodded but didn’t know what she meant by that conversation.
Look at that amazing tree, I said. The waves crashed and flattened
almost before they had curled, the surfers were out,
we watched them from the road above, behind the chiesa.
Almost Easter. At dinner, a dessert case full of what it promised.
Another drink was a bad idea but some wanted it and it came to pass.
Another evening went up in mist. Went down in talk.
With her polka dot gloves and wrong shoes. With his carefully insouciant
scarf.
So much food! Were we being fattened for slaughter? Yes, in a manner
of thinking. Someone pointed out Mars and took a photo of the moon.
The train passed into the tunnel bored out of the cliff, a sound I had come
to love.
We can come to love. It’s still possible, someone said, finishing their drink.
Then we all went to bed alone in the villa.
SOME OF THE QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER by Kim Addonizio
Is it better to offer your heart to the wolf
or wait for the wolf to tear it out of you?
It’s hard to know which is worse,
the nightmare of approaching tornadoes
or waking from the dream your parents were alive in.
Enter the ominous music announcing the shark.
It is best to disappear into one’s work.
Best to be ceaselessly drunk, Baudelaire suggested,
mentioning other things besides wine but most people
ignored that part, because who wants to be drunk on virtue?
Misreadings are best. Misunderstandings are also best
but to be misunderstood is not the goal.
I don’t need drugs, I am drugs, Dali famously said,
and drew his wife’s face exploding into spheres.
What do all these wildflowers mean? Just look,
said a famous American painter who, drunk, drove his convertible
off the road into the trees and flew headfirst into an oak.
We’re all afloat in the same solution.
Would you like to trade some molecules with me?
Better to sketch a few atoms than fire neutrons at them
to create a chain reaction. The adult human body contains
7 octillion atoms and one picnic table. Is it time to go?
Not yet, not yet. Let’s meet for an aperitivo.
Let’s build a pineapple from all this fresh snow.
Kim Addonizio is the author of seven poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry. Her most recent poetry collections are from WW. Norton: Now We’re Getting Somewhere (2021) and Exit Opera (2024).
CLEANING MY MOTHER’S GARAGE AFTER SHE DOWNSIZED by Vincent Antonio Rendoni
I spent too much on the dumpster. Can you Venmo me?
Most of this junk is yours & Carmen’s, anyway. You owe me.
You’re throwing away your Glowworm? But you loved it as a baby.
You & Jen aren’t having any? No, you never told me.
Do you want this hutch? Bend your knees. It’s heavy.
What? No. Make space. It’s always been in the family.
Why would I want to keep my wedding dress? Get it away from me.
I’m not hoarding. Your father. Born poor. Couldn’t part with anything.
Yes, I’m eating. Why are you asking?
I’m finally skinny. Just under a thousand calories.
Yes, I’m in therapy.
I mean, I would be. If I just had some money.
Want Dad’s old Cherokee jacket? Sell it to you for a hundred- fifty.
Take a joke, honey. Take it. I’m kidding.
Are you still mad I pawned your Abuela’s ring?
Pawned it. Didn’t sell it. You misunderstand me.
I already gave you an apology.
Plus, it barely went for anything.
Why do you call Manuela your Abuela? She went by Nellie.
You’re still half of me. Though you look more like him. Lately.
Everything hurts. I’m too old to be working.
How can you say that? I’m too young for senior living.
God. My kids are so mean to me.
Wait till it happens to you. One day, you’ll see.
Wow. You’re throwing away everything.
Incredible. How did I raise a son without feelings?
Don’t leave. I’m just hungry.
It’s lunch time. Let me take you out for something.
They screwed up my check. This company.
Would you get this? I’ll pay you back. I’m sorry.
It’s just one meal. I brought you into this world, honey.
You owe me.
ATTACK OF THE 50-FOOT ABUELA by Vincent Antonio Rendoni
Manuela Rendon was stabbing the skidmarks of
her philanderer husband’s underwear with a detergent pen
when a comet appeared outside the laundry- room window.
Brief as it was, she clearly saw something untethered to this world.
She thought of the stories of war & will her mother told her as a child
& as she did, she grew through the roof of her modest home.
With a mighty wepa, Manuela Rendon let her new- found power be known.
Down came the oaks. Down came the powerlines.
Away she went in her baby kitten sweater & hair rollers, away into the night.
The men, they were not so nice. They said she is just being emotional
because maybe her sons don’t visit. Maybe her man isn’t sticking it to her.
Maybe she has seen her last red grasshopper.
The NIMBYs, they piled on, snapping live footage
of the brown, building- sized grandma, writing sarcastic captions about
an increase in taco trucks & a decline in property values.
They would all meet the business end of Manuela Rendon’s sedan- sized chanclas.
Her besties in the old barrio, who were enjoying chisme & cafecito,
cheered as she reduced her enemies to bone & mist, saying good for her.
They flew in the top negotiator in the country. They asked, what do you want?
No one had ever asked Manuela Rendon this question before.
Her demands were reasonable – even though she could’ve got more:
To reopen the old drive- in. To play Cuna de Lobos every night.
To have her sons visit without needing something. A nice cup of tea.
Her no- good husband served on a plate, in chains.
The demands were met & Manuela Rendon
& the neighborhood lived the rest of their lives
in relative peace.
Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of A Grito Contest in the Afterlife (Catamaran Literary Reader, 2022). His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, AGNI, The Pleiades, Ninth Letter, and Another Chicago Magazine.
HANDS : TRIPTYCH by Jenni Qi
My first playthings were hands. Outline of hands
that could
have been. Phantom of hands that would
never be. Hands knitted together hands
twisted apart
hands folded hands givenhands bitten
hands bloody hands tied hands
turned.
1
Once upon a time my mother worked in a university
lab. Some nights, weekends, we
wandered empty bright hallways. In a memory
I made and stored like a film reel the gaze lowers
pans across zooms in on lonely passages
suspended maze in the air bordering
a hollow center an atrium.
An atrium is a hollow of the building,
allows light to flood into.
An atrium is a cavity of the heart,
allows blood to pass through.
//
Now see the three of us my parents and
me a toddling bundle between them.
See the child holding a hand, or covering
of a hand, that is to say a glove ballooned
with water in the shape of a swelled hand.
See the child throw a hand in the air catch it
toss a hand forward and skip it like a stone.
//
I must have forgotten some must have broken.
See the child or blurred outline of the child
drop a heavy hand on the floor
watch it burst into a loud shower
and then a quiet puddle.
2
Day and night the light was different, golding
the air with variables.
See us blanketed by soft white days
like the glow of new snow.
See our reflections dusting dark panes,
outlines lit against a void.
A void is a thing not valid, nulled, negated – a thing
not a thing, nothing, not filled, completely
empty, a paradox
a desolation a freedom.
A void is a suit with no cards – a thing to be
avoided
a game of bridge abridged a bad hand
dealt.
//
See memory like a lost photo sepia- filtered –
the child outside in winter, limbs puffed in a dark
pink coat, gray grandfather standing beside her in faded
wool,
fur trapper’s hat. See them outside the school,
outside the brick house. See them pose for the
camera, smile
frozen in a moment of warmth. The photo
is a kind of capture, a kind of trap.
//
Off- camera, hear a balloon burst – a sound like a
bomb,
or a palm hitting a table, a trap
clamping down on a limb, a scream.
See an animal gnawing its paw bloody
to be freed . . . Fade scene.
3
In a dream I am drawing outlines
of animals, in a kind of game
of high- stakes charades – if someone guesses
the animal in time, it can be saved.
I try so hard to hold my hand steady still –
no one recognizes the animal
before the expiration.
An expiration is an ending
of contracts of timelines of breath.
The expired contract is voided.
The expired timeline is voided.
The expired breath is a void.
//
Fast forward – see a card table, green like money
or counterfeit grass – dead trees in their new
incarnations. Now zoom out
see the dealer’s hands flicking,
flickering like a moth’s wings against light,
the light dim like a fading hearth like the sun
redding
for a storm.
//
Later, there’s a death and then
many more. I feel blood I can’t see
I wash my hands until they bleed – where
did it all go awry? What can I still
revise? I look for hints – I hit rewind,
replay until the film
warps.
Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point (Steel Toe Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Southern Humanities, Rattle, The Racket, Tin House, The Atlantic, and San Francisco Chronicle.
PANTOUM FOR PASSING by Farnaz Fatemi
I can maybe pass for Italian.
What will I claim
as my own? Iran
seems like a terrible place.
What I will claim: some things translate
too comfortably.
Seems like a terrible place. It’s not
what calls me back.
Some things translate too comfortably –
Saffron cookies. A royal family.
It’s not what calls me back.
The speed of Farsi confuses me.
Saffron cookies, a royal family,
where I don’t belong. Others shame
what I refuse. And the speed of Farsi
confuses me. But sometimes, Iran is mine.
Where I don’t belong, I do what I can
to find my way. It’s easy to blame others.
Iran is sometimes mine.
I have no name for this.
I find my way. I pass for Italian.
I want to be myself
I have no name for this –
my own Iran.
Farnaz Fatemi is the author of the poetry collection, Sister Tongue خواهر زبان,) Kent State University Press, 2022). Her poems and lyric essays have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, No Tokens Journal, Poets.org, Tahoma Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly.
IN ONE FAILED ALLEGORY ABOUT GRIEF by Matt Donovan
you take the train from Copenhagen to the castle
that serves as the backdrop for Hamlet, a play
you haven’t read for years. This is months after
what happened. This is a day that began without
any sense of how to pass the time but now
your forehead is pressed against
train window glass as you watch whatever
slip by – thatched roofs, yellow flare of a field
rippling in wind, a glimpse of Sweden
across a bit of sea. At last you arrive and, after
a short walk, walls loom against a sprawl of sky.
Here is a moat filled with brackish water.
Here are stones carved into fruit. In the courtyard,
sunlight spills everywhere and everywhere
there’s language you don’t understand
as a crowd gathers around a tour guide pretending
to be Horatio once again telling the one story
he can’t help but tell. You take a set of stairs
which are, of course, nothing more than a spiral
of stairs and find yourself wandering through
darkness and tunnels that circle back and dead end,
narrow space giving way to more narrow space
and even in that moment you’re telling yourself
this is not a metaphor for loss, there is no story
within a story that explains anything just now –
there’s only you stumbling through passageways
beneath a place where someone once
imagined someone who was lost within grief
and unsure for a long time what to do.
Matt Donovan is the author of The Dug- Up Gun Museum (BOA Editions, 2022) and Missing Department (Visual Studies Workshop, 2023). His work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Copper Nickel, Brevity, and American Poetry Review.
OBJECT PERMANENCE by Emilie Lygren
When my partner
brought home
a terrarium of roly- polies
I peeked in, worrying
when I saw
nothing moving.
How do you know
they’re still in there?
I asked.
You can check,
lift the little stick,
you’ll see them.
This mantle of fear
is my inheritance.
Let me look
to make sure
you are still there
and breathing.
The sparrow
with its quick
contact chirp
in the brush.
Mother, father, friend.
Fearing the roll call
gone silent.
Lid slapped shut
before last reply.
No stomach for
Schrodinger’s uncertainty,
I want everything
to sing back –
still here, still here.
Emilie Lygren is the author of What We Were Born For (Blue Light Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in Anacapa Review, Thimble Literary Magazine, Poetry Breakfast, and Quarter Press.
JULY 2023 by Rebecca Foust
Swords into ploughshares, I think when you
start unscrewing the doors of the gun cabinet
that used to be a window in what used to be
an outside wall of this old cabin, cedar logs
hand sawn a century ago. We wanted a window,
but what once looked out into trees now looks
into kitchen, so we settle for the shelves
we need. The rough opening, eight inches deep,
is perfect for books, & for the boards
of fresh pine you are sanding & fitting in place,
your heavy old level trying to make true
what can never be made truly true.
Yesterday, with you gone to get the truck fixed,
I was alone here except for the warm weight of dog
on my feet, & the rustlings of a few polite mice
in the walls. I thought of our neighbor packing
a gun in her purse to protect her dogs, & wondered
how I’d defend if the need arose. It’s not the bears,
shy blurs of black or cinnamon seen mostly
near blueberries – so, everywhere here in July –
not the wolves & their glissando chord of nightly
longing. No, it’s people I fear, especially people
with guns & a darkness inside they think only
some violent rending can light.
Tomorrow we’ll drive east for two days to say
goodbye to my sister. What once was a window
there has been, finally, walled. It was her third try,
& it took eight gray months for her to die. It took
her cutting her feeding tube in two. Last week
she stopped taking my calls, a retribution I maybe
deserve. I don’t want to remember her as she was
last time I saw her, so subsided that her bed
looked empty & made. Instead, I’ll recall
our picnic – canned chicken salad, strawberries
sprinkled with Splenda (a little won’t kill you!),
folded cloth napkins & sweet sun tea.
It was two years ago, the summer I left my long
marriage. My sister told me then our mother
never loved her, & she did not believe herself
to be the beloved of anyone, not since her twin,
our other sister, was lost to ALZ. She asked me
to make a little more space for her in my life.
Somehow, I didn’t. Now everything’s gone gauze
like curtains hung too long in the sun, more
hole than thread. The whole world sometimes
seems dying or dead, fallen apart at the seams.
You could say to make space for more light,
but tonight that just feels too easy & specious.
You are precious to me, you told me in bed
this morning before you left. My mother used to
make me feel cherished this way, & I’m sad
it wasn’t true for my sister. It won’t be long now,
I know. We cannot defend ourselves
from anything, especially ourselves & others,
especially people we love. We can only pretend
to hold darkness at bay, take shelter where we can,
maybe behind thick cedar walls that, when
we light the lamp, glow like the inside
of a honeyed hive. We can retreat from the fires
& floods to a place in the remote wet wild
but there will still be derechos & deadfall, wildfires
& smoke blown in from afar. We can suspend
belief in the inevitable, the one thing we know
is true. We can love maybe one other person,
deeply & well, at a time. Tomorrow we’ll drive
a thousand miles back to my childhood.
But now, let’s light the lamp, take down a book,
say a poem out loud. Tonight it will do, Love,
as it has to.
Rebecca Foust is the author of four poetry collections, including Only (Four Way Books, 2022). Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review.
STRIDULATION by James Crews
You are not here to sleep through the night,
to lead some noiseless existence. Let crowded
city buses rumble through your dreams, and
teenagers in lust linger beneath your open window,
the sounds of their kissing and cigarette smoke
wafting into the room. Remember sipping shots
of Jäger, and a matchbook with some man’s name
tucked in the back pocket of your skinny jeans?
Remember pillow creases on cheeks, and waking
past noon to wait in line for a brunch of pancakes
and the olive- heavy Bloody Marys you believed
you needed to get through a Sunday? You are not
here for peace and quiet, but for the music made
of bodies in need, like the male cricket in the hallway
of your building, raising one wing and scraping it
against the underside of the other, with a frequency
timed precisely to the rising heat of the summer night.
James Crews is the author of four poetry collections, including Every Waking Moment (Lynx House Press, 2020) and Bluebird (Green Writers Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, and The Sun.
FIRST BOYFRIEND by Dion O’Reilly
for BB
We knew which hills to climb, which waves to take us,
which sands to bask in, which cars to steal,
which church box to jimmy
to buy hot pastrami on rye, mustard licked off each other’s lips,
fierce hunger slaked –
the longing that settled like dust on our adolescence, gone.
You were trouble. Pure trouble.
And sometimes, before it ended, all you wanted
was a drunken brawl.
What can I say? I’d found my spirit animal, invisible
friend who’d left me a few years earlier – lost
imagination that kept me quiet when Sister locked me
in the chicken coop, bird- talking the bantams,
onyx eyes pressed on mine
as we clucked our shared delight in grain and egg.
Your sweet- boy name was the same as bullet,
small planet, shining bead –
Dear BB, you shattered my loneliness, returned me to Child.
Do you remember when we escaped on ponies
in the unending light,
and never went home?
BUT ALSO by Dion O’Reilly
The lavish throat of a hummingbird
as it ravishes a penstemon
and low tide in evening, breathing
like a somnambulant beast,
but also, rip- waters beneath
an orange bridge, its tips misted,
the island we stole
to jail the ones it belonged to. But also,
how I call my husband home,
moon- tied and bright with need.
Let’s not linger on the grip
of longing, the lost. We know
about my mother:
the branding, the night- terrors.
We know about the absence
of insects in the gas station light,
the eucalyptus in January, empty
of monarchs, soot changing the hue
of a moth’s white wing.
We know the cruel don’t die: they defy
the actuaries, while blood continues
to halo the cop- car seats.
But also, every animal
who’s touched me tells me
a story of space and wild.
I heard a wolf- bird creak
like a hinge, saw a door
open in the dark, a glow
outside, a human shape,
but changed.
Dion O’Reilly is the author of Ghost Dogs (Terrapin, 2020) and Sadness of the Apex Predator (Cornerstone Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, and The Slowdown.
RUINS by Ellen Bass
You were here again last night, in my dream,
just close enough to feel the heat of your skin.
It’s not like you decided to forgive me. More
like a cloth hung out in the sun, in rain,
fades until its color becomes no color.
I read about two women who care
for injured turtles in their basement –
75 degrees and the scent of hundreds of turtles and
tens of thousands of gallons of water.
They patch the fractured shells with crazy glue and zip ties.
Everything about a turtle is slow.
They can go hours without a breath.
Long minutes without a heart beat.
They heal slowly. But they heal.
I am always so happy. Happiness I dare not show.
In the glare of day, I know you’ll never return.
But my dreams are stubborn.
Like ruins, where you walk through what were walls,
now only an outline in the earth
and you can imagine
here they cooked, here they slept.
Ellen Bass is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Indigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Sun, and Ploughshares. Her nonfiction books include The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (William Morrow, revised 2008).
ARRIVAL by George Bilgere
I’ve seen that couple before.
Mid- seventies, I’d say, trim and gray,
arrived here from a good life.
They give off that we know
what we’re doing vibe, that sense
of a fine journey behind them
full of kids and grandkids,
dinner parties on the patio,
summers in the south of France,
and some very skillful navigation
through all kinds of weather
that got them here safely,
a little flyblown, it must be said,
but that’s the seventies for you.
One day he said to her,
There’s this nice little café.
Good coffee. The toasted bagel
with cream cheese is outstanding.
It’s about half- a- century from here.
Why don’t we go there together
and I’ll read the Times, and you
can kind of gaze off dreamily
at the people passing by
with your fabulous dreamy gaze,
now and then taking a sip
of your cappuccino. OK,
she said.
George Bilgere is the author of six poetry collections, including Central Air (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Fulcrum, and The Best American Poetry.
BLUEBERRIES by Paul Telles
All summer long, they grew fat
and ripe, coating themselves
with silvery wax until they hung
like tiny planets
in the green orrery of their bush.
Perched on my plastic stool,
I stripped away worlds and all
their moons for nothing more
than my hunger, gently guiding
each one’s entry into the deep
gravity well of my U-Pick bucket.
I rinsed them in my kitchen’s
softest spray, laid them on
my cleanest towel to dry.
Sweet and tart, purple and blue –
this morning, they line up
like beads on an abacus,
the rows combining their powers
to show a number too large
for me to name. I stalk the small,
the misshapen, the not- quite- ripe,
the ones I won’t freeze or use
in recipes, the ones I’m free
to drop into this black hole,
my mouth.
HOW MUCH by Paul Telles
This was the summer I lived
across from the zoo,
just down Vine Street
from the limestone aviary
where the Passenger Pigeon
and the Carolina Parakeet
died out. Mornings, before
I headed out to grill burgers
at Makatewah Country Club,
I sat on the edge
of the fire escape, eating
my Wheaties and smoking
the day’s first joint
while peacocks preened
on the zoo’s green lawn
and the Elephant House loomed
like a carny’s Taj Mahal
above Camaros and Mustangs
unfurling their exhaust
as they crept downtown.
So it was not unusual that I
was running late one Friday
when I met a woman bent in half
by age cringing in the hall.
I’m dying. Her voice quavered,
whining and croaking at once.
I itch all over. I had no phone
but asked if there was someone
she could call. Her hair was thin,
her raw scalp already sweating
in the growing heat of midmorning. I’m dying. I itch
all over. Her flimsy cotton dress
clung to her sticky body,
putting her ribs on display.
What did she want me to do?
I’m dying. I itch all over.
I needed to get the charcoal
ready before the morning golfers
finished their rounds. I’m dying.
I itch all over. I needed the money.
She looked up, craning her neck
to overcome the forward slope
of her back. Her eyes were clear,
brown, pleading. Could she really be
dying right now? I’m dying.
I itch all over. Could I still
catch my bus? What did I say
to excuse myself as I hurried out
to the too- bright sidewalk?
I prickled with sweat, felt
dirty beneath my clean kitchen whites,
but blithe and dull from the weed,
looking up the hot street for my ride
into this future, where I wonder
how much suffering I’ve ignored
on my way to this upstairs study
with its picture- window view
of ancient oaks, massive houses,
a layer of smog in the distance.
Paul Telles’s poetry has appeared in Verseweavers, Pif Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, Book of Matches, and Currents.
AMERICAN ELEGY by Dean Rader
Lord of Loss,
bless this skin,
bless the black stars,
bless the scars
within us all.
Bless the call
note in my throat.
Listen:
the world is deep in death.
What do we do?
Can our land
flourish in flames
Can a country shine
in shadow?
Can anyone know
what to know
of the unknowing bare
before us?
Song of sea rise and snow melt:
Song of sun scorch and sky smoke:
you are the new anthem
I hope never to sing.
Dean Rader is the author of the poetry collections Works & Days (Truman State University Press, 2010) and Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly (Copper Canyon, 2023).
TO THE TUNE OF QIU BO MEI by Shangyang Fang
Lu You, 1125– 1210, Southern Song Dynasty
秋波媚
陆游
秋到边城角声哀，烽火照高台。
悲歌击筑，凭高酹酒，此兴悠哉！
多情谁似南山月，特地暮云开。
灞桥烟柳，曲江池馆，应待人来。
Autumn has reached the villages on the frontier.
The bugle whimpers. The beacon towers are lit.
Enemies are coming. The soldiers are strumming
the Zhu zither, singing a death song. Wine is poured
in libation for the dead to keep the dead from
returning to us. The moon over the southern hills
pushes open the evening clouds for us to look
backward, the willows enveloped in cooking smoke,
the known alleyways and pavilions beside Qu river
in the capital. They’ve almost forgotten our faces.
Shangyang Fang is the author of the poetry collection Burying the Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). His work has appeared in The Yale Review, AGNI, The Georgia Review, and Triquarterly. His translation of “To the Tune of Qiu Bo Mei” is part of a series of new translations of the poets from the Song Dynasty.
THE WEIGHT OF DAYS by Dorianne Laux
Sometimes the months can be weighed
like pounds, twelve in a year. What weighs
twelve pounds? One chair. One dog.
10 sacks of tomatoes. A one month old
baby. A double neck guitar someone
shreds ruthlessly, the band behind
trying to keep up. Sometimes the months
drag, drug like a chair across the dry dirt
of days. Some years come at a price.
Some marked down, on sale, tagged
“as is”. Some days line up like siblings
against a wall, each waiting their turn
to be smacked with a ruler. Or time
can be a beam of light which travels
faster than sound, fastest through air,
slower through water or glass. A dog
lies on the grass, wagging its tail
until someone comes along
and frees the chain, a key
pressed into the metallic dark.
A year can be a truck on the interstate
loaded with crates of tomatoes,
the driver’s wife at home
holding a month- old baby. Some days
there’s no room for another minute.
Some years there’s not enough room
for the days.
Dorianne Laux is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently Life on Earth (2024) and the Pulitzer Prize finalist collection Only as the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems (2020), both from W.W. Norton. She is also the author of Finger Exercises for Poets (W.W. Norton, 2024), a book of craft essays and exercises. Laux is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor
ODE TO A SMITH- CORONA GALAXIE TYPEWRITER by Angela Narciso Torres
Find me again that teal jewel
buried in father’s dust- encrusted cave
of poems and pathology, papers
tipping in piles, a brown reel churning
its mournful symphony. Take me
to where the blue hours crawled
from yellow yawn to drawl of dusk.
Bring out the carriage whose rise
and fall spelled here or gone, asleep,
awake, alone, unafraid. Return me
to that solar system, that universe
of ciphers, cymbals, simplest
of lullabies. That nightly waterfall
of spurts, and starts, of mechanized
whispers. My father’s lips pursed
in lamplight, his fingers the blur of
a hundred woodpeckers. Play me again
that skeletal symphony, that tin can
tango, jangle of keys, bright ding
of bell. O divot, o inkblot, o seed plot
of sorrow. O alphabet reliquary,
ribcage of memory. If time
won’t stop, could it slow
to the tempo of his staccato,
that blue- veined arrhythmia
in a corncob of stars.
TO SCOLIOSIS by Angela Narciso Torres
my S-curved swan- shadow
snake- spine sidewinding
the pink balloons of lungs
the listing cages of my ribs.
I was twelve. A doctor took his ruler
to my back, predicted I’d grow
with one shoulder sloped
a gull’s wing tilted slightly to the sea.
Like swayed bamboo
this inner compass pining
nightly for the moon. From skolios
meaning bent, curved,
surly, skewed, perverse –
If the track hadn’t swerved
could we see beyond the mountain?
Would the view from the window
be so fine? Don’t the trees
with gnarled trunks find more light?
TO SCOLIOSIS by Angela Narciso Torres
my S-curved swan- shadow
snake- spine sidewinding
the pink balloons of lungs
the listing cages of my ribs.
I was twelve. A doctor took his ruler
to my back, predicted I’d grow
with one shoulder sloped
a gull’s wing tilted slightly to the sea.
Like swayed bamboo
this inner compass pining
nightly for the moon. From skolios
meaning bent, curved,
surly, skewed, perverse –
If the track hadn’t swerved
could we see beyond the mountain?
Would the view from the window
be so fine? Don’t the trees
with gnarled trunks find more light?
Angela Narciso Torres is the author of the poetry collections Blood Orange (Willow Publishing, 2013) and What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books, 2021), and the chapbook To the Bone (Sundress Publications, 2020). Her work has appeared in POETRY, Missouri Review, Quarterly West, Cortland Review, and Poetry Northwest
CANTICLE, ANDERSON VALLEY by Lisa Allen Ortiz
The sheep stand in winter rain.
In some canyon of our shared body, the future coils.
We were created to want more than we can carry.
Tenderness is the wheelbarrow leaned up against the barn.
God is the meat and salt passed palm to palm.
Here are water droplets scattering from the pelts.
In the spring, these sheep
will be laid upon their sides and sheared.
Halos of wool will float around them on the grass.
The world is made of circles.
The world holds us inside itself.
Overpass, cloak, starlight.
I didn’t know my own skin until it bled.
Lisa Allen Ortiz is the author of Guide to the Exhibit (Perugia Press, 2016) and Stem (Lost Horse Press, 2022). Her short stories and poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Bennington Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Colorado Review, and The Literary Review.
DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD? by Pádraig Ó Tuama
I accepted it for far too long,
lay down, said yes, said Anything you want,
said I’ll follow.
I took that path, learnt all the rules.
I was told I was a natural.
I was begged graces from you.
It ended with a word.
What word? I don’t remember,
but it was something like, Okay.
Some voice said, Here’s a map, drive off it.
When do I come back? I asked.
You don’t, they said.
Here’s a road, a sleeping bag, a stove, a little bit to eat,
a night of stars, a fox along the border, a buzzard in the sky.
A hare whose speed you’ll need.
Here’s more grief. And sorrow. And a book. And
a number for a friend.
Leave tomorrow.
I tried everything, or at least, anything
I could get my hands on.
I dreamt of different endings
I paused instead of searching for the way.
I found nothing and nothing
never felt so good.
I return sometimes. Sometimes I like it.
I like the smells, the psalms, the bells for prayer
at midday and at six,
the feeling of the beads between my fingers,
the touch of skin to lips when someone
puts a story in my mouth.
Pádraig Ó Tuama is the author of collections of poems, prayers, and essays, including Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your Life (W.W. Norton, 2022); Being Here: Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love (Eerdmans, 2024); Kitchen Hymns (Copper Canyon Press, 2024); and 40 Poems on Being with Each Other (W.W. Norton, 2024).
CROW COMES BACK by Donna Spruijt- Metz
– after Psalm 104:20-24
YOU and I, we have cycled through days and years and seasons I
can’t name, and I don’t know what pulls us together, or what pulls
us apart. The sun rises, the sun sets, and one day I will lie with YOU,
and I am not ready. Selah.
Blessed is the darkness – how I need it. I light the candles to entice
my animals to emerge, and sometimes – shy, camouflaged,
feathered, crowned in ferns and thistles, flammable, bright eyed,
wily, they come. Sometimes they nuzzle. Sometimes nip.
I still have work to do. And I want to talk about the moon, but I’ll
admit, I am no good at writing about her cycles – we are too close –
her light, my darkness – and really, all of it
is YOURS.
In darkness, I reach out, which is not to say that I don’t reach out in
daylight, but isn’t it the dimming of the days that lengthens our
reach? Isn’t it the blurring that brings, finally, focus?
Donna Spruijt- Metz is the author of two chapbooks and the poetry collection General Release from the Beginning of the World (Parlor Press, 2023).
AT THE IPSWICH RIVER WILDLIFE SANCTUARY by January Gill O’Neil
Mid- March, sugaring time. We walk down the gravel path
with our pockets full of seed, listening for small wonders:
chickadee, cardinal, yellow finch, the trilling of birds
under a bright blue sky. Ahead, we come upon a stand
of maples, with metal pails dangling from nails in the trunks,
spouts pointed and tapped toward the wet ground.
We pull a tin lid off to find a thin layer of sap,
the color of ginger, swirl our fingers in the cold nectar
and taste it: raw, metallic, watery, forbidden.
And in this place that was not our place, I knew better.
Should have been satisfied holding my hand to the big sky
waiting for a grey- winged bird to land in my palm,
grip my fat thumb with its tiny claws to pick the black
sunflower seeds over millet, one for each longing.
January Gill O’Neil is the author of Underlife (2009), Misery Islands (2014), Rewilding (2018), and Glitter Road (2024), all published by CavanKerry Press.
EPICUREAN EXISTENCE by Michael Kleber- Diggs
By happenstance I found myself
elevated to austerity, relieved
of the western burden, separated
from my stuff – worth less. No longer
making money making people money.
I lost everything almost, but not
a single friend. My home was
three small rooms, largely
with no walls. I lived
in the middle of town, in
the middle of anywhere,
nothing. One stove
(for heating, heat).
I set a simple table, ate
a basic meal but only
once each day, lent myself
to ritual, routine. My clothes
were plain but durable –
a gift from an unknown
neighbor. I abandoned
my constant connection
to everybody’s everything.
Whenever news arrived to me,
it came from someone’s mouth.
I shared a bed built for one, one
pillow heavy old and firm.
At night, as the sun sank
pink and pleased, blushing
a goodnight kiss to the earth,
I read from borrowed books
beneath a fritzy lamp which sat
atop a crooked wooden crate.
Michael Kleber- Diggs is the author of Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions, 2021). His work has appeared in Lit Hub, The Rumpus, Rain Taxi, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and North Dakota Quarterly.
PARABLE by Nickole Brown
Let us not with one stone kill one bird,
much less two. Let us never put a cat
in a bag nor skin them, regardless
of how many ways there are to do so.
And let us never take the bull, especially
by his gorgeous horns. What I mean is
we could watch our tongues or keep
silent. What I mean is we could scrub
the violence from our speech. And if we find
truth in a horse’s mouth, let us bless her
ground-down molars, no matter how
old she is, especially if she was given
as gift. Again, let’s open her mouth – that of the horse,
I mean – let us touch that interdental space where
no teeth grow, where the cold bit was made to grip.
Touch her there, gently now, touch that gentle
empty between her incisors and molars, rub her
aching, vulnerable gums. Don’t worry: doing so calms her.
Besides, she’s old now; she’s what we call
broken; she won’t bite. She’s lived through
two fourteen-year emergences of cicadas
and thought their rising a god infestation,
thought each insect roiling up an iteration
of the many names of god, because god to her is
the grasses so what comes up from grass is
god. She would not say it that way. Nor would she
say the word cicada – words are hindrances
to what can be spoken through the body, are
only what she tolerates when straddled,
giddy-up on one side then whoa on the other. After,
it’s all good girl, Mable, good girl, before
the saddle sweat is rinsed cool
with water from the hose and a carrot is offered
flat from the palm. Yes, words being
generally useless she listens instead
to the confused rooster stuttering when the sun
burns overhead, when it’s warm enough
for those time-keepers to tunnel up from the
dark and fill their wings to make them
stiff and capable of flight. To her, it is the sound
of winter-coming in her mane
or the sound of winter-leaving in her mane –
yes, that sound – a liquid shusshing
like the blood-fill of stallion desire she knew once
but crisper, a dry crinkle of fall
leaves. Yes, that sound as they fill their new wings
then lumber to the canopy to demand
come here, come here, come
here, now come.
If this is a parable you don’t understand,
then, dear human, stop listening for words.
Listen instead for mane, wind, wings,
wind, mane, wings, wings, wings.
The lesson here is of the mare
and of the insects, even of the rooster
puffed and strutting past. Because now,
now there is only one thing worth hearing,
and it is the plea of every living being in that field
we call ours, is the two-word commandment
trilling from the trees: let live, let live, let live.
Can you hear it? Please, they say. Please.
Let us live.
Nickole Brown is the author of The Donkey Elegies (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020); Fanny Says (BOA Editions, 2015); Sister (Sibling Rivalry Press), which was first published in 2007 and reissued in 2018; and the chapbook To Those Who Were Our First Gods (Rattle, 2018). “Parable” was a winner of the Academy of American Poets Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize
THE MILK OF ICE by Ama Codjoe
There was the time you were so open it almost
killed you. For a time you remembered
the tattoo, but never called the police.
You’ve been dreaming of killers, school buildings,
and malls. You’ve been dreaming about rescue
dogs and a long indigo coat that flows
from your shoulders as a river. You’ve been
dreaming of marriage: thus the rose you stole
from a stranger’s garden. Over months,
the closed bud opened into November.
You feel each pang, each pine needle, soft
beneath your soiled boots. I know, you confuse
caution for kindness. You make your face
inscrutable. A rain brings the apples
down. You keep calling your hope last, then
another comes. You’ve been dreaming
of blue glaciers and the milk of ice. All you have
is the under-ocean of once being held as you
cried and the loneliness born from ignorance
and pride. You have regrets. The red squirrel
is the most beautiful. You’ve looked
in the mirror pitying yourself. You’ve been
dreaming of cobalt-suited bridegrooms
riding a carousel’s menagerie. You wake
with knots in your stomach and a sour
taste to brush out of your mouth. You’ve
been dreaming of teeth and ivory keys.
You’ve been dreaming of Los Angeles,
its canyons and hills. Every evening,
you browse for your dream house online.
Meanwhile, property taxes. Meanwhile,
California is ablaze. You can’t use
your voice without weeping. Tears slide
down your cheeks: arrows of gravity
you wipe with the meat of your palm.
There’s so much you don’t know.
So much of what you were certain
would happen seems impossible now.
After a while, no matter your suffering,
the trees become trees again. A dozen tiny
black birds forage the dirt for beetles
and grubs. You’ve been considering what
the earth will be like without us
killing its every reef, bear, whale,
and wasp. Though they are easiest to love,
you, too, hack down the trees. You
strangle the oceans with dry hands.
In the airplane’s steely embrace, you soar
above the teardrops of crystalline
swimming pools pitted from the earth.
You’ve been dreaming of cicadas, unburied,
and the lapses that led to your making:
the young faces of your parents droning
into each other’s necks – everyone
their own tattered god.
LADY-IN-WAITING by Ama Codjoe
He was away and she was or she
was a clock waiting. She rounded
the corner of the ocean. He waited
or weighed the difference, the distance
between them, its ports and portals
with four giant windows. By one
window’s door, she waited for the sun
to make her shed clothes or he did or
they did away from each other. That sun
moving away from the window
into the blue, like a silent clock,
between them. All along the sun
touched the blue, light pooling into
a river. Always the light falling
or falling away. She knew she was
the sun, a ticking, burning thing.
He was a red door or the milky sea or
she was and would be. What was unknown –
unfinished as twilight – a way made
to an end or beginning: a wave.
Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Press, 2020) and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, Callaloo, and on Poem- a- Day.
LOW TIDE, FIRST DAY OF FALL by Laure- Anne Bosselaar
The tide- pool, no larger than a fist, is almost
invisible, there, inside a large rock, its water
so still that clouds slide by inside it like
phantom liners on a mirror- silver sea.
I want nothing more than to stand here,
between two skies, making sure I don’t move,
for if I leaned over even slightly, my shadow
would obscure it all –
& I’m tired of all the darkening, tired
of October always coming so soon,
tired that mirrors show me only my image –
no one leaning over my shoulder.
So I take a step back. Let only this afternoon
swoon in that rock’s cracked- open heart.
Laure- Anne Bosselaar is the author of five poetry collections, including These Many Rooms (Four Way Books, 2019) and Lately (Sungold Editions, 2024).
MERCY by Veronica Kornberg
All October I watered the ground, tricking it
into believing the autumn rains had arrived.
Now there’s half an acre of oxalis to be knifed
out of the dirt with my hori- hori.
Beautiful oxalis, sour on the tongue
and neon yellow in the fields. But invasive,
not meant for this garden of coastal scrub,
a refuge for over- wintering
monarchs, waxwings, turquoise bees.
What are the odds of keeping intact
a place of breathing and easy slumber?
I dig down to the corms –
those bulbus nodes of irrepressible
growth waiting in the deep to send up
yet another shoot, waiting out of sight.
Dirt finds its way beneath each fingernail,
into the cracks on my rough palms.
My basket fills with green leaves, with tender
white filaments laid side by side, thousands.
Veronica Kornberg’s poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Rattle, Beloit Poetry Journal, Plume, Calyx, and Tar River Poetry.
WITH THE FIRST GRADE, ‘IOLANI SCHOOL by Naomi Shihab Nye
The brightness of everything, effervescent light . . .
Here in the joyous kingdom of possibles,
every answer, every question is mine.
But if you ask for a question, I will tell you
a story, my brother, my uncle, my cat.
And the light on the tables bounces and dances.
The rooster, the pigeon, bring them in.
Nothing has sat on my head yet
to say the world is sad or tight.
I live on the island of hope.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of 26 books of poetry for young people and adults, including Words Under the Words (The Eighth Mountain Press, 1994); Fuel (BOA Editions, 1998); The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, 2019); and Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (Greenwillow Books, 2020). She has also written four novels, a short story collection, essays, and picture books. In 2019, the Poetry Foundation designated Nye as the Young People’s Poet Laureate for 2019– 2021.
ALTHOUGH POISONOUS, THE BLACK WIDOW IS NOT CONSIDERED AGGRESSIVE by Kelli Russell Agodon
There are moments you forget your age.
Like when the man you love drops you off
at a cottage and the sex you have before he leaves
is what sex felt like before you signed a contract.
And while you love his body against your body,
you know you squeezed yourself
into a box of what America calls normal
but you are listening to an hourglass of Palm
Springs music, wanting to slip into a new life
knowing this isn’t a poem, but a ransom letter
to an old self. And while you wish your life
to be bigger, better, you still celebrate
the resting spider you accidentally touched,
dropped – fell onto the window pane,
dying so quickly into a small black knot of legs.
And you felt so sorry until a rainbow
of light from the suncatcher sparkled
and the spider, this tiny Lazarus, climbed back
into its web. And maybe this is what you want
– you see yourself as numb but then surprise
yourself by rising back into your life, to go
to sleep in the center of your own web and live.
Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of the poetry collections Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press, 2010), Hourglass Museum (White Pine Press, 2014), and Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). Her poems have been featured on National Public Radio, ABC News, and in O, The Oprah Magazine.
AGAIN THE CHOIRS by Leila Chatti
Nothing is lost. God
a moment, then
away. Great gray
dissembler.
I was and was
not in the field alone.
Grass
and grass beyond.
The passing world
where this happened.
NIGHT POEM by Leila Chatti
I suffered. It’s difficult
to prove. Days of clouds, clouds
like swans, pitiless, mercurial.
Blame the lake. Landscape
so flat I could look into the future.
A year I eyed your narrow hands.
I am trying to tell you how it was.
Leila Chatti is the author of the poetry collection Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and four chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and American Poetry Review.
MONSTER THEORY by Jamaica Baldwin
The bat must have crawled out of the gap behind
the heating vent in the ceiling. I don’t know
how long it had been inside waiting in the dark
shadow of the plant or what it was about the book
on grief I’d been reading before turning out
the light that made it decide to roam. Of course,
the cat arched her back and stood at attention mewing
at the nocturnal blur flying through the room. I don’t
blame her for wanting to protect what’s hers, for
mistaking the bat for something she could catch.
I too mistook it, thought it could have been a moth,
the way we sometimes forget the uninvited beast of us
might be a delicate- winged thing searching for the light.
Jamaica Baldwin is the author of the poetry collection Bone Language (YesYes Books, 2023). Her work has appeared in Rhino, Prairie Schooner, Guernica, World Literature Today, and Southeast Review.
ON KINDNESS by Kwame Dawes
To understand the whole language
the whole immaculate language
of the ravaged world.
– Dionne Brand, “Inventory”
The asthmatic snore of the AC all night
lulls me to a fitful sleep, as if held there
like a night nurse waiting for a pause where
the deepest silence is the ending of light.
At dawn, the canvas blinds glow, pulsing bright,
and waking me to the lull I feared. The rare
gossip of birds seeps through the muggy air.
What I know of their brittle song is not quite
enough to read portents or the science of the wind.
Their immaculate language will outlast my end,
which is a strange kind of comfort, a mind
easing epitaph for me, still living, to amend
the errata of my clumsy life. “Be kind,”
they sing. “To the sorrowing ones, to foe and friend.”
Kwame Dawes is the author of multiple poetry collections, including City of Bones: A Testament (Triquarterly, 2017) and Sturge Town (Peepal Tree Press, 2023). His novels include She’s Gone (Akashic Books, 2007) and Bivouac (Akashic Books, 2019), and his non- fiction collections include A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative (2006) and Fugue and Other Writings (2012), both from Peepal Tree Press.