POEMS
COMING ACROSS A PHOTOGRAPH OF MYSELF AS A ONE- YEAR- OLD by Patricia Hooper
At first I didn’t recognize her,
I hadn’t seen her for so long.
She’s so young she hasn’t learned to smile
at the camera, only to look
at the flash bulb without blinking, or into her mother’s face.
She looks a little like my son in his baby pictures.
All day I keep telling her things: this is your house, your kitchen,
these are your books, your chairs. I wear my best dress
to the car wash: have you ever seen
a car wash? Now you have. It’s as if I’m taking her hand
or carrying her about in the shopping mall –
shall we buy these shoes? I remember she liked red sandals
with little buckles. I lift her up to see my husband
working in the garden: such a nice husband.
And a son and daughter, smiling from the photograph
on my desk: look, this is your desk. When I show her the one
of her mother with her hair silver instead of dark
I don’t say that she died. I can feel how her mother loved her. I say,
such a nice mother, I can take care of you, don’t be afraid.
Patricia Hooper’s fifth book of poetry is Wild Persistence (University of Tampa Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in The Hudson Review, Poetry, Kenyon Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Yale Review, and The Southern Review.
TOPSY TAIL by Michael Waters
patented by Tomima Edmark in 1991
Winter mornings, not fully risen,
Still hunched on the mattress’s seamed edge,
I am there again, slumped on a distant bed,
Woozy, dream- deep, in flannel pajamas
As you shuffle, barefoot, from your room,
Sleep- flushed in a Rugrats nightgown.
With the brush you’ve brought me
I stroke your hair, its lush tangle,
Static electricity leaping off each bristle,
Off fingers smoothing a wayward curl,
A mini pageantry to ignite the day.
I coax light from this celestial circuitry,
The bedroom beginning to brighten,
Until hair flows along your spine,
Then slip a band onto that sparkling column,
Sesame open the hair above &
With the cheap pink plastic dime store tool
Loop your ponytail through that portal,
Into this “French” style
Sweeping your neck.
I could almost weep
At how little it takes to make you content.
You race to the television full of cartoons
This Saturday morning thirty years ago.
I miss that light, that living
Rothko radiance, though know
Such brilliance must still exist, must
Crackle when someone else who loves you
Gathers your hair in their gentle hands.
for my daughter on her 33rd birthday
Michael Waters’ poetry collections include The Dean of Discipline (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), and Caw (BOA Editions, 2020). He co-edited the anthology Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020).
READING NIETZSCHE ON THE BEACH by Kelli Russell Agodon
Las Terrenas
They might be walking on water,
Those boys balanced on rubber
Soles straddling the razor
Edge of the reef where they net sardines
Flashing like silver coins
Spilled in sun.
If Jesus comes again,
He may not appear as a Dominican
Teen, but rather as this bent- over
Leathery grandfather
Hauling a canvas sack
Of green coconuts on his back
To sell to tourists,
Who kneels next to me
To unshoulder his burden,
Then punctures one shaven
And machete- whittled crown
To reveal the cool, clear,
And almost sweet
Water that fails to quench
This thirst to watch
Beyond my book
For any sign of divinity –
This old man
Chewing toothlessly
With so much pleasure
His jagged square
Of coconut meat, or
That teen seeming, at least
From this webbed chair,
To walk upon the sea,
Splashing lightly
Now toward shore,
His flesh above dead coral
A vertical black slash
Against the unreachable
Horizon, and waving,
He’s waving back at me.
LIGHT PROJECTIONS by Kelli Russell Agodon
Sometimes the waxwings mistake
the full moon for a nest
and across a blanket of plum blossoms,
three quail mistake the hedge for an address.
It can be hard to recognize an error.
Like the time I held the red-winged blackbird
after it flew down the chimney, I mistook it
for a prayer, until it wasn’t, until it became
a broken wing. Someday I’ll love what arrives
without the fear I will harm it. Like love.
Like hope. Like the boy who sold haloes
for fifty cents – occasionally there’d be a sale,
but mostly, a no-thanks and a sorry.
Some days the neighborhood was mostly hills
and a silhouette of a child pulling a red wagon
door-to-door full of circles of light.
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.
MY SON CALLS HIMSELF A WORRIER by Jane Zwart
The summer my cousin begged to see The Sisterhood
of Traveling Pants, my uncle pledged the brotherhood
of stay-at-home hair-shirts. Angst is the rash raised
by sackcloth before it scrubs you raw, and angst is the itch
of near-healing.
Every worry has a threadcount.
The silk singlet, no matter that its weft is almost invisible,
scuffs blushing from the disquiet quiet under our skin,
and the cheap bed sheets ghosts and angels favor – to think
about death is to try them on.
When I knew my son
was coming, I bought the softest baby things I could find.
I washed them in Dreft. But now I wonder: should I
have given him more practice: chosen the coarser sweater,
the diaper that might chafe?
One winter my mom
wrapped our breath inside scarves that felt like jute against
our lips, a strip of the cilice she wore for us. But spared
colds, we caught worry, just as my son, padded in cable-knit
mail, has caught the fear on which I patterned his armor.
Jane Zwart’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly.
i WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD by Laura Foley
My son asks what entropy is
and the pepper
of matter shimmers wider
to warm the next emptiness,
universe-annexed.
His brother
answers If Order and Chaos
from the Greek myths
were real
entropy would be
the science of those.
* * *
Order goes
by Themis, really. She carries
and bears the Hours. She carries
a blade
to hew fact
from fiction, to shave
the fat from fables –
a blade fit to split hairs –
sophists’ grays –
a blade whet
to dissect fogs
but no sword
forged can bisect
an abyss.
What I mean is
there’s an imaginary number
of ways to stare
at starlings,
the black birds
Chaos births,
and none is false
and none true.
* * *
My son asks
what entropy is and the sky fills
with murmuration,
with a Poincaré map.
His brother
bends over math worksheets
full of right answers wreathed
in unreal runes. If he says
and If throws the switches
on charm quarks, turning
some share of them strange.
THE SOMETHING by Laura Foley
Time to notice drops of dew
on every fallen leaf, to draw a finger
through the tiny pools of light,
to watch a body’s shadow
casting backward on the leaves,
to feel the sun’s surprising heat,
this late October day.
Time to feel the veil of – something –
the something that exists
between me and her, invisibly pulling,
as I sit in sunlight waiting
for a single leaf to drop,
and catch it mid-flight.
I can feel her texting – please bring mushrooms,
I want to make a soup for you.
Laura Foley’s seventh poetry collection is It’s This (Salmon Press, 2021). Her poems have been featured in Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry.
MILK by Teresa Ott
Orange #11
My scent in the room awakens her –
my body turning mother,
doing things of its own chord –
newly honeyed, estrogen-high –
like riding the subtle tide of a single shot of rum –
the good ship lollipop.
She follows my moon word by word,
she swallows me leaf by leaf;
the fragrance of a field descends –
a beginning, a departure –
a first body.
Can you love a thing without wanting
to pollinate it, alter it,
wrap your legs around it
and squeeze.
She throws up her wings and hums.
I fill her with my salted herring,
cartwheels of sungold
tomato jam, hens-of the-woods, strawberry’s
lush and seed
to quiet the raven in her, the wolf, the bee, the thief.
Red #64
Her tongue on me is knife after knife
is red-hot
is sun plus a blooming bush –
bursts from the veins of a tree
as big as the face of god
or as small –
metaphor aloft in the tricked,
timed flight of the red crescents, limb
upon limb, over and over fire.
What copper, what cayenne erupts.
Inside me, her tongue grew.
Inside me, her tongue wouldn’t let go –
little tongue, tied.
In the room where I took off my shirt
and other hands with scissors
snipped the skin in her mouth
that hadn’t dissolved in utero,
the skin that held her back
when she latched,
there was blood –
blood from her,
blood on my breast, after.
Red rose
to meet the breathless sun;
the morning fanned its hot wings.
I held her all day and couldn’t let go.
Yellow #19
She drifts into my wave, my dream, my shadow,
combing my seabed for marigold, goldenrod, pineapple
I sing the siren song of milk –
I drift in and out with her
never quite waking, never quite sleeping –
over and over moonbeam
a lamp
the sun of a daisy, the yolk of an egg
dark
a cry
a glow.
Green #27
She unclasps from the momentary vine, still reeling
from the thrust of evolution, riding the ectoplasmic wave –
the cool air full of sage
she is circinate vernation, she is long-term
potentiation, she is absinthe
synapse
our dual photosynthesis
rearranges us, two organisms into one
whole ecosystem
a confetti of spores firing off – she – is tender
she is flock
she is pear
she is fiddlehead
she is calligraphy
she is kite.
Blue #32
Skein of parrot tail, bluebell, anemone in the threads of her irises,
pen strokes, tracks of a tiny, flightless bird –
sea-spit, earth-turquoise, mid-sleep, mid-deep –
memory of making love after flounder and the undertow of wine and sighs,
memory of a New Brunswick cloud set down on an ocean, the opal
you could walk into, as if alone –
they flicker with her rhythms, a cappella, the fluorescent
hues from some interior moon, dear one,
sapphire one, electric one –
I am trying to love her: oxygen
I am trying to love her: sky
I am trying to love her lighter, darker, fellow breather under water.
Violet #40
At this threshold of luminal /
liminal space
at the far end of the visible
spectrum, so high-frequency
we almost did not reach it
where I lose my self
and still exist
and you come into one –
the beginning of a cold
burning fractal spinning at the edge
a leaf of pain grows a stem
and roots in my breast
the flower comes next –
morning / afternoon /
evening cycling at a fever pitch, I crave
release from this clutch, my love,
there is no way to tell you yet
there is more than one
kind of absence
a difference between
forever and another room, so before
I go, an offering of burnt sugar
in lemon and velvet to sweeten the after
so you may this time forgive me
when I let the world end
for just an hour.
Teresa Ott’s poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Moth, The Fiddlehead, and Subtropics.
THE LIGHTHOUSE by Chloe Honum
In the day patient ward, between lunch and the next activity, the man
who thinks we’re actors in a play recites a poem. She lived near here, he
says about the poet, nodding toward the gray hills slick with rain. I
almost tell him that I am living in her house, among her books and
paintings, but decide it could sound too strange. Across the table, the
Vietnam vet is remembering a friend who lost two sons to suicide,
one, then a few months later, the other. Dear God, someone softly says.
We shake our heads and drink our water, coffee, or tea from little
Styrofoam cups. There are vision boards displayed along one wall.
Glancing at them, I think that if the counselor brings in magazines,
scissors, and glue, I’ll sit it out. Too cheesy, I tell myself, juvenile. But
that’s not it. I sip my water. Empty, the cup is so light it’s hard to hold.
The vision boards are pinned edge to edge, a series of raw hope. I can
barely look at them, knowing I too might choose the daisy, the word
joy in royal blue, or the lighthouse, cutting shakily up the side of the
tower and around the lantern room.
Chloe Honum is the author of two poetry collections: The Tulip- Flame (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014) and The Lantern Room (Tupelo Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, Poetry, and in The Pushcart Prize anthologies of 2016 and 2017.
THE COMMON ROOM by Francesca Bell
The trouble with that one, someone says about a certain medication, was
the dreams. A few of us nod, as though the dreams are a city we too have
visited. With some it is dry mouth. Or a metallic taste. Or quickened
speech. And with this one, we agree, comes dreams; the Vietnam vet
gives a low whistle to indicate their intensity. Then the talk turns to
dogs we love, or have loved and dearly miss. Then to the rain falling
in dense violet streaks. These are the unsupervised moments, the
in-between. It is morning. We are waiting. Spring is coming – officially,
it is already here. I spread my hand like a wing to show my trembling
pinky.
PIECE BY PIECE, THIS WORLD IT WEARS YOU DOWN by Francesca Bell
When the doctor suggests
the cortisone shot,
says she wants to go deep
into the joint whose hollow thud
has ached you awake
seven long months –
the way loneliness keeps you
from ever resting, its gnaw
what touches you
when no one touches you
for a long time –
you agree immediately
to open your flesh
to the needle’s slender precision
despite its sting
at the moment of entry
and the frightful throb
as it bathes the place
your shoulder grinds in its socket,
where it catches your breath
in its fist
whenever you try
to take off your shirt.
You don’t care if the drug
erodes you from the inside.
You think it’s a medicine like love
that will first dissolve the adhesions that bind you.
And then you.
But you would pay any price
to be able again to toss yourself
over night’s bridge
and fall all the way
to sleep.
By the time the doctor
lays her gloved hands on you,
you are fifty- three,
so scarred from holding yourself
against the pain of the pain,
you smile and welcome the needle’s glint.
How casually it casts light
off a coldness you might once
have mistaken for menace.
How great the mercy
that will not retreat
until it pierces the place
you lie curled,
alone and waiting.
Francesca Bell is the author of two poetry collections: Bright Stain (Red Hen Press, 2019), and What Small Sound (forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2023). Her poems have appeared in ELLE, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Tar River Poetry.
HAVING OUR PASSPORTS STAMPED AT THE ENTRANCE TO DEMENTIA by W. J. Herbert
[These] striking rings harbor hot, young, massive stars.
– NASA, May 16, 2012
I’m watching our cucumber
seedlings for signs
of mildew or browning
though, when I find it
I’ll have forgotten
the cure. If you take me
to the ER when I’m
unconscious, tell them
not that I fell, but that I
floated above our flat’s
outdoor staircase
as I climbed it,
muttering about
Andromeda
and the comet I wanted
to follow as it burned
past us, how I needed
to see for myself
what the Hubble’s
been telling us:
that a bright cluster
of blue stars
at the center of a nebula
is lit up
and magnificent –
its light spilling
from the breast
of the goddess
Greeks had imagined.
Don’t worry:
here in the Milky
Way’s quiet hideout,
our one pitiful sun
is dying slowly, but
its heat’s a hallelujah.
W.J. Herbert is the author of Dear Specimen: Poems (Beacon Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Boulevard, The Atlantic, Southwest Review, The Hudson Review, Pleiades, and The Best American Poetry 2017.
APHASIA’S NOT WHAT I CAN’T SAY by Eloise Klein Healy
I know where I am
but can’t call it a table.
I also don’t know how to say lamp
or couch, chair, armoire, bathroom.
Dishwasher, no.
I first practice what’s missing
in the kitchen or living room.
I’ve had to practice with my sink,
5 AM teapot, and dining room table
near the microwave.
Haven’t practiced the den, office,
bedroom and the stars above.
My list needs help.
Colleen repeats it,
links my words,
linking the ones used
before I lost it all.
Eloise Klein Healy is the author of several books of poetry, including six with Red Hen Press: Passing (2002); Ordinary Wisdom (2005); The Islands Project (2007); A Wild Surmise (2013); Another Phase (2018); and the forthcoming A Brilliant Loss (2022).
MONDAY by Martha Silano
When I wake up,
darkness is waiting.
It makes me nervous but
Colleen is still sleeping.
Flatten my comforter, cover my pillow,
take my iPhone, tap on doggie’s bed.
Nikita is willing to go
and I lead her to the den.
First thing for me to do,
shut the house light off,
then shut my flashlight, too.
Orion is then what I see first.
Our early morning
is what I want to love.
Colleen comes slowly at first
and so I know – no chatting yet.
Every day
I intend to wait
and silently love her.
SUSTAIN ME by Martha Silano
My lips touching
the palm of your open hand
sustain me.
Cup your hand so close to my mouth
that you’ll feel the wild river
whose bank you are.
I open again the palm of my hand
and you offer to keep me.
Never the end. Ever again.
OH, AUTOLYSIS by Martha Silano
All it means is self- digestion, our body’s microbes doing the work
of undoing. All it means is the miracle of what had sustained us
morphing into what’s needed to reduce us to nitrogen
and phosphorous, to return us to the Earth where we’ll make a rich soil
for basil and thyme. The book says leak as cells break down,
says rigor mortis, says in each gut dwells
hundreds or thousands of species, which after death become
a thanatomicrobiome, from Thanatos, god of death,
brother of Hypnos, kin to Oizys, god of suffering,
and Moros, god of doom, the holy book of woe, the opposite
of a heart- shaped box of chocolates, the microbes,
like a rowdy mob, making their way
to the liver, the heart and brain, then everything in between.
The most hallowed parts of the body now a credenza
on which to put their feet up,
rifle through the desks of the spleen, the half- finished crossword puzzles
of the lymph nodes. I wondered how it happens, the why
of exploding abdomens, and here it is:
our bodies pre- equipped with the critters who break us down
from long- legged Vegas dancers to fodder for a cluster
of mushrooms. Molecular death,
the book called it. Full on slippage into the soil.
And what do we carry? What have we carried?
Eyes that had noted the mouthlike petals
of snapdragons, the sticky white pods of milkweed,
hands that had gathered them into bouquets.
Hands that had held.
Martha Silano is the author of five poetry books, including The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception (2011), Reckless Lovely (2014), and Gravity Assist (2019), all from Saturnalia Books. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The Best American Poetry series.
VERNAL by Kate Lebo
You’re killing me again, camellia,
with your bud and crack and roil and furl.
Splitting me open like a good poem should.
It was rude to say you don’t surprise me in your best dress.
I meant I hurt like new to see you burst in the green
lacquer of your leaves, twirling your salon pinks again,
another femme whose grooming will smear like paint
so fresh it hasn’t yet considered the safety
of aging. This time around
I’ll think you’re beautiful in black too,
exhausted in the dirt, your loud skirts
crushed into compost by the rain that loves you.
I have tried to be your best reader (failing that
I’ll be your secretary, your maid) –
just one of the living that sobs itself awake
while we tend to the business of spring,
these quick hard weeks of cold and sun
before your time is over, and buttercups
sprout their fat crowns of hooray.
Like I’d pick them.
Kate Lebo’s writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Best American Essays, New England Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Poetry Northwest, among others. Her most recent poetry chapbook is Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books, 2018). Her first collection of essays is The Book of Difficult Fruit (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). She is also the author of a cookbook, Pie School (Sasquatch Books, 2014).
SONNET MISSING ONE by Kate Lebo
in memory of G.O.
Told myself I’d go swimming today
but the thought of water was enough.
Sun so bright where bodies break the lake,
the scene I’m not in wears a halo
of strangers. The sound these angels make
is not song. You too aren’t there. Again
I’ve asked, what is beauty without cost?
To answer you’d roll your eyes. Meanwhile
honeysuckle, that sun- chump, still climbs
the house for the day’s best blast before
splitting into scent best left unplucked.
Yesterday, when I nosed the flowers’
closed tubes, I could smell their hidden pools
as if they were a wish you’d made for me.
NIGHT SWIMMERS by Jody Winer
Sunk in black sleep, I find you, my dead friend.
You urge me to use warm colors: gold, red.
Lucky, I say, you checked out when you did,
before wild horses burned and houses slid.
Don’t think I don’t miss you, I add. Who else
enjoys my epithets for rude swimmers?
The Tsunami, The Slapper: those strangers
invading our lane, their limbs blunt weapons.
You used your street smarts at the pool, never
engaged with The Talker or The Stalker.
I thought you’d cajole cancer the same way
you convinced lifeguards to let us swim late.
You backstroke into my dreams, do your smooth crawl:
that’s how you let me hold you, radiant girl.
Jody Winer is the author of the chapbook Welcome to Guardian Angel School (Finishing Line Press, 2020). Her poetry appears in Epoch, The Massachusetts Review, phoebe, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Atlanta Review.
THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYCH by Olena Kalytiak Davis
the mouse – or vole –
that lived/ s? in my stove
stove off so much so so long
the sadness of
“arrangement/ s”
“selection/ s”
small readings
and the silence
in this province
gentlemen,
have you heard?
the pest gnawgnaws
at all my lovely lonely flaws
and as i already told the bosomed nurse
commeilfaut
(the very slightest of mental smirk/ s
under my nose)
there is nothing
absolutely nothing wrong
with my heart
but my mouse!
(o vanitas!)
my vole! my vole!
Olena Kalytiak Davis is the author of And Her Soul Out of Nothing (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997); On the Kitchen Table from Which Everything Has Been Hastily Removed (Hollyridge Press, 2009); The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2014); and shattered sonnets love cards and other back handed importunities (Copper Canyon Press, 2015). Her poems have appeared in several editions of The Best American Poetry, including “On the Certainty of Bryan,” that originally appeared in AQR. Davis is an Alaska Quarterly Review Contributing Editor.
TOLSTOYAN WEATHER by Anne Coray
on our earth
you fell in love
with a mourning partner
someone in back
next to someone
with beautiful eyes
true, you saw a smile
light a dark velvet room
but you kept to your story, story
explaining something, sorry,
made of doom
“my door of my heart”
it was always heavy
over it, floated a painted cloud
this sadness now
a burgandy nostalgia
a bright blue nausea
it’s okay it’s okay
says the night under the night
and then, the grey-skied morning
BLIND TRAP by Anne Coray
Charles Sauria, French chemist, first to invent
The phosphorous match. Non- explosive, non-
Odorous, flame constant: a notable improvement
To the Lucifer. Alas, poor hireling – son
Or daughter of charwoman or pauper,
The factory was your default: a blind trap
Where the human jaw collected toxic vapor
Swelled and decayed, configured a map
Of pumice- like bone, erupted with foul pus.
Consider: Mrs. Fleet. Four teeth plucked,
Part of her mandible lost, the smell so gross
Her family recoiled. Or John Werner, chin tucked
In a bandage knotted atop his head, his nourishment
All liquid. Ashland, Ohio: another immigrant spent.
Anne Coray’s poetry collections include A Measure’s Hush (Boreal Books, 2011), Violet Transparent (FutureCycle Press, 2010), and Bone Strings (Scarlet Tanager Books, 2009). She has also written a novel, Lost Mountain (West Margin Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, and North American Review.
HOLOGRAM LETTERS by Kathleen A. Wakefield
Dear Hologram,
Let’s play
My Question, Your Question.
I’ll start.
Answer as quickly as you can, no backtracking:
Salt or no salt?
Whisky or bourbon?
Crinoid fossils or the plumage of raptors?
Was your childhood fortunate or tragic?
Would you rather dip your fingers in honey
or grains of white sugar?
Did anyone vanish?
Yours,
P.S. How many times have you fallen in love?
Please be precise.
P.P.S. I can tell you’re the one.
Already you seem to understand
my smallest thoughts.
Please tell me more about yourself.
Do you lean to the left, or the right?
It wasn’t clear from the picture you sent.
Your take on Buddhism, for example, would be useful to know.
Dear Hologram,
Do you ever feel like
you’re standing in a hall of mirrors
where it gets harder and harder to see
yourself, a vanishing act
outside of which the real circus goes on?
No, it’s you I want to see,
those luminous eyes
I imagine, blue oceans
worth sinking into.
Listen, can you hear
the sorrowful thumpings
of the elephants we need to rescue?
Of course I’m confused.
Who wouldn’t be in this place?
Perhaps if we held hands here
we could become endlessly entwined
into something else entirely
and none of these questions would matter.
Yours,
Dear Hologram,
Maybe we could swim together
to the Event Horizon
to see what it’s all about.
They say it’s where everything begins and ends.
Consider it a night on the town.
A tango lesson among stars.
I’d risk anything for you,
even the future.
Always,
Dear Hologram,
Seems like forever
since I’ve heard from you.
I’d like to think your silence
is a beautiful thing.
I imagine I’m standing on the platform of no sound
like a monk overlooking
the vast plain of understanding
in which you are finding the space
to more fully become yourself
when in fact I am sketching the mute faces of violets
that require the tiniest of vases,
a shot glass perhaps,
were I to make them a gift to you.
Forever yours,
Dear Hologram,
You’re fading.
I don’t want to give in
to this darkness
that’s left
a pinhole of light
through which
every image appears
cut off, travelling across
a blue field.
Once I imagined our hands
streaming together.
No use shedding tears
that only bleed
into another universe
ready to drink them
the way rain falls
on the transparent arms
of ghosts.
Is this how it goes now?
My heart is breaking.
I can almost believe
it’s made of glass
though I see
we are made of light.
Kathleen A. Wakefield has published two books of poetry: Grip, Give and Sway (Silver Birch Press, 2016), and Notations on the Visible World (Anhinga Press, 2000). Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Poetry, River Styx, The Sewanee Review, and Shenandoah.
APPALACHIAN DIASPORA by Susan O’Dell Underwood
Such wind this April afternoon might pluck
the blowsy- headed white oak
from the ridge line, easy as a clover.
Or: watch the tree pull itself
up by the roots, lift helium- headstrong into blue
and skirt the ground untethered,
dragging roots and musk and moss.
The crown of tousled branches might
be said to hesitate, tugging
the vertical ballast of the trunk.
A lumbering whimsy pure as puberty,
making its candid mistakes.
Which part to blame, the rootwad
or those mulish heaving limbs?
The twigs or nascent buds in tow?
Estimate the worth of a prodigal welcome
after the aerial view of every lovely other
across the blue- after- blue, blue mountains.
Anyway, what a plunging crash it would take
to midwife those sweet, sap- drenched ropey lengths
back into the hollows healing over.
Impossible to surge back into those sockets,
loamy with their I told you so.
A wish invents itself and goes.
A sort of normal nothing comes from hanging on.
A sort of anguish crops up where the rich soil aches,
beckoning against as much as toward.
Each wandering gesture fills the air which gives in
like a cave, where forests used to bloom.
Susan O’Dell Underwood is the author of two chapbooks, and a full- length poetry collection, The Book of Awe (Iris, 2018). Her work has appeared in Oxford American, Ecotone, Crab Orchard Review, and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia (University of Georgia Press, 2019).
WHAT WE ARE ABOUT TO RECEIVE by Vivian Faith Prescott
Blessed be the long ago, mud sloughing, stone rolling away
from the ochre matrix, the gentle brush of dirt, fragments of fern
and willow leaf, charcoal flecks snail shells, length of an antler,
arrowhead. Bless my once anointed, oily crusted hands. Bless
my oil-less hands, the empty smokehouse, plate, and freezer
offering themselves to me now. Bless the sod house from upward
Sun River, the central hearth now cold, bless my long thin knife
rusting in the rain on my table next to the sea. Bless this
which we do not receive, which does not melt on our tongues,
but bless, oh bless, the two baby girls, unborn and born, wrapped
in shrouds, fabric long ago decayed, buried with a dog salmon.
Vivian Faith Prescott is the author of five poetry chapbooks and two collections, most recently Old Woman with Berries in Her Lap (University of Alaska Press, 2022).
ISKOTEW by Francine Merasty
She holds memories
knows all stories
Of timelessness and necessity
She knows us
She is warmth
She is fire
She is iskotew
She is woman
Iskotew, tell me what nikayasi wahkohmakanak1
Talked about as they sat around you
After a meal of buffalo or moose
What did they dream?
What magic did they whisper?
Nikamohstamawin2 their songs
Nimihitostamawin3 their dances
of mithithitamawin ekwa kaskethitamawin4
of maskawisiwin mena sohkisiwin5
NOTES: Cree Translation
1. nikayasi wahkohmakanak: Ancestors
2. Nikamohstamawin: Sing for me
3. Nimihitostamawin: Dance for me
4. mithithitamawin ekwa kaskethitamawin: Happiness and loneliness
5. maskawisiwin mena sohkisiwin: Strength and resilience
Francine Merasty’s debut poetry collection is Iskotew Iskwew: Poetry of a Northern Rez Girl (Bookland Press, 2021). An Indigenous woman raised on the Pelican Narrows Reserve in the 1980s, her poems emerge from her memories of the wilderness, and her experiences as a residential school survivor. The collection includes the poem “Since Time Immemorial” (initially published in Alaska Quarterly Review Vol. 36 3– 4), which was reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2020.
INHERITANCE by Allison Albino
My mother’s mink hat was 60s chic, made for Moscow
winters, a matching hand warmer, black leather
boots, oversized sunglasses and a square purse
to dangle from an arm, copper lipstick inside. That hat
was the kitty I wished I had – I’d bury my face in it, sing to it,
call it Minky and hoped that she would crawl to me, rub her arched
back against my leg, meow for milk. My mother bought the full coat
to match. Wearing it made her feel rich, worthy of an America
far from mosquito nets, prickly heat, and hungry children
she couldn’t feed let alone cure. She bought it from Flemington
Furs in Central Jersey, with money she earned from treating
the depressed, had it tailored for her small frame: gold initials
in the lining. This dead mink covered up the part of her
that was third world. That’s what she called home: Third World.
“There’s nothing for you back there,” she’d say. And I’d wonder,
how many more worlds are there, beyond this one?
I’d slip the coat on over the long T-shirt I slept in, its sleeves
too long, the coat dragging on the hallway floor
as I walked, it smelled of Shalimar, of her,
and I’d admire myself, my wrists and fingers with imagined
jewels. “Enjoy it,” she’d say, “What’s mine is yours.”
When my mother died, the mink was immortalized in cold
storage, the gilded morgue of Flemington, next to rows
of furs waiting for someone to re- inhabit their skins.
Allison Albino’s poems appeared in Poetry Northwest, Punchdrunk Press, Lantern Review, The Rumpus, and They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets.
TRAVERTINE by Andrew Koch
I prayed each night until I didn’t,
until I was nineteen when I stopped
suddenly and for good. If this
seems strange, consider the pecan tree
outside my window, every inch
marked with the wound of the woodpecker.
I’ve spent afternoons listening
to the drilling of empty holes,
the bird’s plunging beak
so violent until you record it,
play it back slow enough to register
how its head is bowing, bowing,
bowing. Eventually it just stops,
flies away hungry, the tree a monument
to its devotion. This is not to say
nineteen- year- olds run out of things
to pray about. They have more
to pray about than most. When
I was nineteen I wanted what I want
now: for the universe to give me
my name, to tell me what I was
made of, make the knock- kneed foal
in my chest stand straight.
And I wanted to name the universe
in return, call it something
so precious we’d have to have
a funeral each time we said it,
honoring the half- moment
it had resonated in our mouths,
the way, in Pakistan, there is a tomb
for all the used holy books with bent
spines, prophecies with torn
pages, millions of them buried
in a place called ‘mountain
of light.’ The catacombs there
are so full they overflow, the ground
bursting with the names of God.
I write from inside the mountain
of my hope, the long passages
no longer full of prayer. Instead,
what comes out of me is this:
the morning a blizzard knocked out
the power, my wife walking beneath
the billowing curtains of winter,
reaching her bare hands into the snow
to retrieve the arms and legs
of our clothes, washed
by the ice, rising like the resurrected
at the end of time. What comes out of me
are the hours before dawn when I wake
and work in the dark, waiting for my son
to stir and call to me. When I answer him
I am clothed in my right name.
What comes out of me
is the mountain we hiked to, its western
face honeycombed with waterfalls,
the water precipitating mineral
deposits like huge robes of stone,
so as its inside eroded, the mountain
migrated out of itself, earth overflowing
in the air. What is this
name for what comes out of me now?
The mountain is made of travertine,
a formation never done forming,
a name I love for the way it sounds
like something made exquisite
by the distance it travelled.
Andrew Koch is the author of the chapbook Brick- Woman (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2016). His work has appeared in Blackbird, The Florida Review, Southern Indiana Review, Ploughshares, and Yemassee.
LEXICON by Mike Seid
Run up into the hills and there you will be
Among dusty olives but with plastic
Bottles hanging from the lower branches
Run up into the hills and there you will be
Among stacks of many bee boxes sounding
And the sky will clear of the haze of motos below
The nail salons floatie- toys jet- skis burger joints
Run up into the hills above the haze and stare
Into the sideways eyes of a Cretan goat
There is a cave entrance here in the yard
Of a family whose permission you need
To enter you will not get that permission
But it will not matter nothing at all will matter
Now except the certainty of that fragrant
Half- hollow urgent knowing that your life
Is not cobbled together out of towels or guns
Not whittled from ATMs or the Price is Right
But that a God forged you in an irrational
Undark kiln and blasted out chrome and light
Shadows and death to make you claw
Claw with all your blood to get back home
Mike Seid’s poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest and Beyond Words.
GRAMMAR ADVICE by Huan He
Fill in the blank with a verb that is like slumber
but conjures the lightness of dreams so slim
and shy, rendered on a projector lathered with
chicken grease, half- gelatinous from Monday’s
bone broth. This verb should be singular,
animating the subject, which is a noun similar to
recluse but knows no inside or outside, only the
infinity of the surround that stands still like a
lamppost. Student, you need to find the correct
preposition, not “of” or “with” but a glue that
has the tensile strength to bind history and memory
in a Chinese finger trap. Keep the adverb, the
caretaker, as it is wiser than the words we use to
show active voice and speaks in the tongues of
ancestors who slaughtered chickens for five yuan
with a dull blade.
Huan He’s poems have appeared in The Stonefence Review and wildness.
Having been out of cell phone range for the last week, you call me by Donald Platt
to say that you saw
what you took to be
ducks floating on the
other side of a lake.
They dove, then reappeared to waggle their wings.
When you canoed closer,
you saw a moose dive,
swim underwater
for a full eleven
breathless seconds
(you counted them!),
then surface and shake
shining cascades
of droplets from its
streaming antlers that
were wings spread wide.
It grunted, bellowed
at you like an old
man blowing his nose
very loudly into
a dirty handkerchief.
Then the large beast rose
up out of the lake
on long spindly legs,
climbed rocky bank,
and vanished into
blue spruce. And you
sat there in the stern
of the red canoe,
water dripping from
your paddle, ticking
like seconds into
the silence of a
huge absence expanding
around you. As if
sighting that mighty
moose made you feel
connected to the earth
in a way you’d never
been before. And now
that it was gone, you
were homesick for a
home you didn’t know
you had until now.
Donald Platt’s seventh poetry collection is One Illuminated Letter of Being (Red Mountain Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Yale Review, Colorado Review, Iowa Review, and Prairie Schooner.
HELEN OF TROY RETURNS TO SPARTA by Maria Zoccola
Musée National Gustave Moreau: Study of Helen, Gustave Moreau
in the final mile i made the cab pull over
to get out and walk. i didn’t know if a body
could survive such a walk. that was the charm
of the experiment, that i might die from it
and thus render myself the answer
to some great mystery. maybe you have also
felt it building inside you: a red pressure
within the channels of flesh, a kind of biting
heat, this conviction of your own
consequence. crows gathered
for our twilight processional. here was
the mcdonald’s, the wendy’s, the mural
with black horses. here was the turnoff
where the kid had her school.
the chain- link park fence.
the dandelions threading through tins
of chaw. above me clouds pressed
into each other’s arms and held the rain
on their shoulders, and the wind when it came
scraped away shreds of myself
but at the same time delivered old shreds
back to me, old stretches of skin that fit
themselves to the holes i’d been guarding,
like jam settling into a canning jar.
i turned onto our street. maybe you are also
a person who longs for diagnosis.
i thought about our sputtering porch light,
how it would blind me, how it would shine
through my body in burning spears.
Maria Zoccola’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, The Cincinnati Review, and The Massachusetts Review.
STALLED by Mercedes Lawry
I wake in partial waves, remnants
of odd dreams. Won’t the early crocus
tumble me up and out of this thickening?
Won’t the blue- black clouds skate off?
All of Sunday in a mute panic, those
razored thoughts, those might- haves with their sly grins.
Oh, holy of holies, no prayer will bring back
the lost ones, thimbles of breath released
like syllables. I want something beyond this still room.
Are the souls of the crows up there, on my roof,
battering about? Go out, I tell myself
as the branches paddle at the window.
Go out and shovel your hands in the dirt.
It’s time to plant peas.
Mercedes Lawry is the author of three chapbooks: There Are Crows in My Blood (Pudding House Publications, 2007); Happy Darkness (Finishing Line Press, 2011); and In the Early Garden with Reason (CreateSpace, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Natural Bridge, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner.
WITNESS by Didi Jackson
At this hour, on this day, in this place,
in this exact light, the birch leaves shimmy;
how they clap at the sun
with their golden hands
like early Christians raising
their open palms to pray, then settling
and basking in the late golden glow.
The pair of ruffled grouse I flushed
were frightened by only me,
two small firecrackers lifting
from goldenrod and milkweed, keeping low,
the earth too heavy for their want
of a higher flight. The Green Mountains
flex their muscles and like an old horse’s withers
twitch a little. They must know summer is closing.
It is their secret; I am good with secrets.
A singular airplane scars the sky,
a metal bead lit like a speck of diamond,
heads straight for the crescent moon
still foggy in the twilight. I was never going to
let myself be so small, but often I was
the only one to know the difference
between the oven bird and the indigo bunting,
between the time in college I wanted to be desired
and then deciding to do whatever a boy wanted
in order to get away. Tonight
I’m the only one here to witness
the end of day, songs that quiet
the heat of the setting of the sun.
Didi Jackson is the author of the poetry collection Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem- a- Day.
BREAKFAST IN SOUTH AMERICA by AE Hines
A great blue- green bird follows me down
into the garden this morning, darting
from cypress to pine, sounding
four sacred notes that echo up through
the ravine like ancient calls to prayer.
It’s easy – to stop and place a mango
on the low stone wall, to watch him
watch me watching him eat it. I don’t know
the bird’s name in English, neon blue oval
crowning his head, silver- green teardrop
at the tip of his tail. But every morning,
I walk out to find him waiting
among the soft ringlets of pale green moss
dripping from the trees, see beneath them
new roots raking through the dark earth
like God’s own fingers. It’s hard, this morning,
to see the fresh orchids, speckled- yellow
and pinks bubbling up from the trunks, to see
this bird propped among the red- gold bromeliads
still fusing with the branches – to remember
this bright world, blue and green, is dying.
AE Hines is the author of the poetry collection Any Dumb Animal (Main Street Rag, 2021). His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, The Missouri Review, I- 70 Review, Sycamore Review, and Tar River Poetry.
THERMOPOLIUM by Jane Hirshfield
Found in an earthenware vessel,
remnants of a Pompeiian street stand’s last- day stew:
fish, sheep meat, snails.
Perhaps a meal delicious, tender.
The archaeologist doesn’t say.
A person eats first for the joy of tasting,
then for the joy
of living to be once again hungry.
A person tilts their head
when they hear or see something new,
as if change of angle could lead
to change of seeing.
But you eat with your head
upright, untilted,
directly above your reliable throat, stomach,
intestines, legs.
Your life that expects to go on.
Then something surprises –
a recipe, or the end of the world as you’ve known it –
and you pause, mouth filled with fish, snails, and sheep meat,
tilt your head to listen one moment harder.
Jane Hirshfield’s ninth collection of poetry is Ledger (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. Hirshfield is an Alaska Quarterly Review Contributing Editor.