Poetry
WHY GIVE AN EXCUSE FOR SKINNY DIPPING WHEN YOU CAN TELL AN ORIGIN STORY INSTEAD? by Jessica Jacobs
Yes, I swam naked with strangers in Montana,
floated the dark seam of creek and sky
while stars lit my skin for others, who were
not you, to see. But this was nothing
new, meant nothing; as soon as I could walk, follow a trail
of shed clothes and you’d find me, mouth deep
in the lake as the rain came down, watching each drop
answered by a splash-tipped shoot: for my eyes
alone, a fugitive garden. Why would I let anything
between me and that world? Back on shore, backhoes
chewed hungry at the ground – today’s jagged pit,
tomorrow’s bulb-bordered pond. But in that
taffied summer dusk, when hours bent near
double without breaking, the pond was simply
itself: an emptiness in possession of nothing; an emptiness
to be filled with whatever I saw fit. Ninety-six degrees
and one-hundred percent humidity equaled weather the same
without as within. The heat amniotic. The pit
slick with the once held breath of earth, with
runnels of mud from the afternoon rain. In a blue
two-piece, I slid the sides until my parents left and so
did the suit. New flesh on new soil,
baptized dark by dirt. Covered that way
I was made more visible: the hunger to plunge
deep enough into every moment to have my tongue
swimming in it, to learn the world with my body – a map
traced out, indelible, a map that would one day lead me to you.
Leaving Home by Jessica Jacobs
The koi were killed by a possum killed by
our dog, whose barks brought my dad to the dark
yard, along with me – the stand‑in son, his
midnight shadow. In the glower of the flashlight,
the dog’s eyes were red and rolling, the possum’s
fur bright as an errant scrap of daylight.
The dog wouldn’t put it down, bent the pipe
of the pool skimmer used to lever the body
free from his jaws. My parents gave the dog away
soon after. Because, I suspect,
wildness can live in the suburbs only so long
as it doesn’t bare its teeth; so long as when the light
finds it, it drops its prey and wags its tail;
so long as we confine our darkness to the dark.
Jessica Jacobs is the author of the poetry collection Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press) and a chapbook, In Whatever Light Left to Us (Sibling Rivalry Press). Her second full-length collection, Take Me With You, Wherever You’re Going, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2019.
(FROM TOWARD ANTARCTICA) SIGNING ON AGAIN by Elizabeth Bradfield
Down crew-only stairs – paint-chipped rail, hand- grime on bulkheads, watertight door’s caution-striped sill – to crew mess. Sit at sticky, vinyl tablecloth (tropical, offshore blue) before ship’s registry (a white craft afloat). Name, address, emergency contact: sign in, sign on. Safety Officer’s accent thick as grease ice. Nod understood, understood when sentences end in crest. Get lifejacket with green card (laminated) carabinered on chest, billet number stamped on front. All expedition staff P-something. This time, Papa Nine Three.
distant memory
ship aground, ebbing tide
dark, cold lapping sea
Present certificates vouching competence: medical, crowd management, Zodiac operations . . . Paper to normalize and make of possible disasters base-covered routine.
ALONG THE COAST by Elizabeth Bradfield
Niebla (bus count), Valdivia (radio check, bus count). Pisco sours at the German Club (departure bus count wrong, figure the missing walked back, luckily all accounted by all aboard). Puerto Montt to Osorno’s fog- snagging, stark scree cone (dormant).
rabbled volcano
rough basalt shelters a blossom:
one tiger-orange bee
Switchback back (bus count doubted, recounted, ok). A relief that local guides spiel us. I know mountains, evergreens, raptors but not Darwin’s sightlines, nothofagus, chimangos on the wing, what stories weave what threads to pull in telling. Learn uniform, routine, protocol, crew mess tactics. Settle on who to shadow. Certain courtesies prove universal: help buckle lifejackets, offer binoculars, point toward any sighted thing, boost any upwelling of wonder or delight.
Many note Osorno’s similarity to Mt. Fuji. One of Fuji’s nicknames, Konohana-Sakuahime, means “causing the blossom to bloom brightly.” Charles Darwin saw Osorno, one of the most active volcanos in the Chilean Andes, erupt in 1835 during his second voyage on the Beagle. Nothofagus is a mostly- evergreen genus of trees and shrubs native to the Southern Pacific edges; chimango are falcons.
PATAGONIA: PIO XI GLACIER by Elizabeth Bradfield
But now. At last. At tiller. This throttle’s particulars (stiff arm, ragged idle) acquired. Finally of use in a way I want to be used & useful. Overtowered by ice rivering to tidewater. The usual dangers, less known here: depth at face, advance, tongue? Gauge best as possible. Known cool of ice- breath. Known furl of wake. No head count. So used to retreat & loss beyond seasonal ablation, almost terrifying to see the hunger of advance…
familiar ice
unfamiliar surge, forested edge
overcome
Steer to pace fact & awe, motion & drift. Putter in sun. Kelp geese strut the intertidal. Usual metaphors for blue fumbled as ice pops and groans. Glad to fumble them.
Glaciers can surge (rapidly advance) for any number of reasons. Often, this does not mean that the mass of the glacier itself is growing. Rather, some combination of factors causes the toe of the glacier to slide forward, pulling the whole pile of ice forward with it and thus thinning the glacier. In some cases, a surging glacier can move forward with startling rapidity. The Black Rapids Glacier of central Alaska “galloped” forward at a rate of 200 feet per day in 1936.
FORTUNA by Elizabeth Bradfield
Last contract weathered out from full landing but had hikers to retrieve so watched from side gate. Waves waves broke over the returning bow, washed all in fjord- milk. This time: idyllic. A world from Stromness rust.
Beach a geyser field, each hot node a fur seal bull primed to erupt at, around his females & pups. Shackleton would’ve missed this welcome but still had the kings, green snowed with moult, valley funneling to colony. All along, pups wrangle, knock- kneed & fuzzy. L calls them carpets. I think caterpillars.
against tussock, dark sand
three ivory pups glow
one nuzzling a mink- dark peer
Then landing- stationed, catching boats and Wait – long cold minutes holding camera out, pointed, set to motion. One bull mounts pumps pumps pumps pumps silent, flank- flesh joggling, until cow bites up. Maybe sick of it. Maybe at last engaged.
Antarctic fur seals (Arctocephalus gazella) were thought to be entirely wiped out by the pre- whaling sealers. From that time, the population has dramatically rebounded from what appears to have been a few individuals isolated on Bird Island, just off of South Georgia. No doubt their return was aided by the lack of krill competition in the absence of blue and fin and other whale species. When Shackleton, Crean, and Worsley crossed over from South Georgia’s west side to the east, Fortuna was the first bay they came to. There, they heard the Stromness whaling factory whistle sound over the peaks, clambered back up and down to rescue. One in about 1,000 fur seals are born with light/ leucistic pelage. Not albino and usually healthy, they are called “blondies” and thrive as well or poorly as the rest of their cohort.
ENCOUNTER: LEOPARD SEAL by Elizabeth Bradfield
Presence astern. Brown shadow under skeg, unmistakable despite until now unseen. It lifts to stare. Flexes nares for breath. Stares. Orde- Lees, Mawson, the rest no preparation for menace at my transom. It humps up, dives under. Rises. Huge nostrils. Eyes. I lever into gear, wonder about chase instinct – cats my dad’s dog can’t help but kill –
alive alive enlivened
low clouds give up, gleam, part
admit the sun’s presence
There are many stories of leopard seals bursting up out of the sea and onto the ice to chase (and sometimes attack) people. The most famous account is that of Thomas Orde-Lees on Shackleton’s 1914–1917 expedition. Alternately, there are stories of encounters with leopard seals in which the seal proffers penguin- killed “gifts” of friendship to divers.
FIRST LANDING: BROWN BLUFF by Elizabeth Bradfield
Shuttle driver, ship to shore. Get them out, back before wind kicks, ice shuts, flurries blind. First Continental Landing. They walk the narrow strip. I nudge growlers aside, clear landing site for departure. Idle offshore. Radio- squawk. Another load to the beach. Boat emptied, attention turned, Don’t look hissed to T, holding my bow. Swing boots over port pontoon. Into water. Onto stone. Set foot. My first, too.
dream, story – supplanted
three rocks, gold with lichen
my unmarked marker
OK. Swing over & in, engine on, reversed. Off again. I want to be not competent or knowledgeable. Not watched as guide. Raw. Responsive. Sentimental. A pilgrim. Basho¯ at his shrine alone with Sora and his brush, a cricket cricketing under an old helmet.
Basho¯, in his writings, describes visiting an abandoned shrine in which a cricket calls beneath an old war helmet.
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of three poetry collections, the most recent of which is Once Removed (Persea). Editor of Broadsided Press, she is an Alaska Quarterly Review Contributing Editor. These poems are from an in-progress manuscript of haibun and images, Toward Antarctica.
Closet Moths by Karen Leona Anderson
Come back tomorrow if you want
to weave your own death.
Today, you can’t: there is the rasp
of mouthparts opening like Fates,
the click of their trim. Today
is the crabmeat shred of your joints’
old silk, and the sun’s fine fissures
and the porch light burst, and you
can believe the moon is a compass,
fracked by the branches. All your best
rags leak from the closet: distressed
leather, neon-leopards, metallics,
oil-finished, wool pierced at the waist
and bound by pins. What
you thought you should
want. Today that stitch
is cut: you can beat your brain’s
grey wings up and out. Leave
the honey in the rock. Crack
your own heart’s doors. Come together
however you want.
Roach Ode by Karen Leona Anderson
And now the fliers of the night, unsober,
nasty, cruel, rough, the stinking moth,
a chain of bikers, shining, helmeted.
Wings of flame, scissors at the tail,
the black clock, coming out at sunset
as if full of gears. Seducin drugging
the air, shed skins, the riffled chitin,
choppers passing the cornfields we are,
a big, dry, gold standing still. Hear
the stridulations: rattlebang,
hiss. The dark, the closeness of space,
the sonification of all.
Just another raisin, a snatch of song
as they pass, body slash machine.
Passed. Where they are now. Can you tell.
Woundwort
Achillea millefolium by Karen Leona Anderson
Achillic, I learned from a goat
to doctor myself. My wounds
creep greatly over me. I ache
like a solider but I say I want
peace. I try herbs; I try ripping them up:
My nose will bleed
if my love love me says an old song.
I try to make it bleed; I try it tied
around my son’s baby neck
to hide him from his enemies.
The leaves rustle with a thousand
strange cures I can’t hear.
Growing over everything now,
copse to corpse. The world
is feathered, seething green
and goats. My wounds still there.
The goat and I converse again.
He says the best herb is my ear.
Karen Leona Anderson is the author of two poetry collections: Receipt (Milkweed) and Punish Honey (Carolina Wren).
That Bird Out There by Karla K. Morton
Every morning I heard
that bird
out there,
that tiny singing spleen;
body
of mere counted feathers.
We know
its humbling frailty, its
hunger;
happiness pulling up
sunrise.
But I knew one – won at
auction,
a yellow bird no one
wanted,
a vibrant beauty who
spit, hissed
every time we neared, no
matter
how tender the offered
morsel.
I don’t speak bird, but I
savvy
sadness hiding behind
cribbed rage –
that wee beating heart heard
that bird
out there,
discontent with tv,
canned food,
and tiny trapezes.
One day,
I unlatched his wire cage.
Instant
was the beauty – yellow
dawn wings;
the sudden song I heard
that bird
out there.
Karla K. Morton is the author of 12 poetry collections, including Redefining Beauty, a journey through cancer diagnosis, chemo, radiation and recovery (Dos Gatos Press); Karla K. Morton: New and Selected Poems (TCU Press); and most recently, Wooden Lions (Texas Review Press).
NOT MONTALE’S EEL by Wendy Barker
These fluttering creatures brushing
our windshields, littering our highways and lawns:
Snout-Nosed Butterflies on the move
this fall for a solid month, drawn by the dangling
fruit of hackberries, trees tidy folk
call “trash,” but with perfect fuel for these twenty
million headed to the Rio Grande
River – and somehow I’m thinking of Montale’s eel,
la sirena infiltrating gorielli di melma,
vast “pockets of mud,” though I’m embarrassed
to remember how, when first translating
the poem, I assumed the eel was male, like a lone
sperm making his determined journey
upstream only to die unless unless he’d beaten all
the other guys to the ovum, and of course
I can’t forget Monty Python’s hilarious “Every
Sperm is Sacred,” so then I wonder about
the millions of migrations from the first time
a single cell from the ocean drifted
to land, beginning a series of transformations
leading to our own species that’s spread
itself across the globe, often, like butterflies,
struggling to find food, or sometimes
to wipe out neighbors and lay claim to silver, oil,
or fertile loam, and of course, thousands
of these butterflies are devoured by the chickadees
and titmice that normally empty our
back yard bird feeders, though I guess it’s always
about moving from one place to another,
each of us food for someone else, or there wouldn’t
be life at all, and I know we don’t want
existence to be a stagnant pool with no whirligig
beetles or dragonflies, but I sure don’t
feel like “sister” to that gleaming eel of Montale’s –
some days I’d like to stay put on solid
clay that will hold my feet steady, but I guess it’s all
a matter of motion, the release
of CO2 so oxygen can travel through capillaries;
migrations, even the poet’s
l’iride breve, “brief iris,” won’t flower without roots,
tentacles swimming through dirt.
Wendy Barker’s sixth poetry collection is One Blackbird at a Time (BkMk Press), and her fourth chapbook is From the Moon, Earth is Blue (Wings Press). Barker’s poems have appeared in The Southern Review, New Letters, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Poetry.
Bamboo Forest by Faith Shearin
My mother meant to hide from the neighbors
which is why she planted an island of bamboo
in the middle of our yard, why it raged
like fire over a nearby fence, threatening
all that was tidy and civilized. At night
I could hear it growing: the music
of disappearances, of privacy
ripening; these were not trees but strange,
miraculous grasses that longed
to expand: ignoring boundaries and
property lines, searching for the appetites
of pandas and rats.
Faith Shearin is the author of five poetry collections, including Telling the Bees (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), Orpheus, Turning (The Broadkill River Press), and Moving the Piano (Stephen F. Austin State University Press).
Interpretive Trail by Willie Lin
I asked for a sign.
I traveled and waited.
The heat humiliated me.
I asked for a sign that I should
before I woke. And light
arrived from a great distance,
from a great remove.
How is it that you know
what you know, I asked.
I saw the day waste away
in the corner of my eye
while clinging to a hymn, a hem
of bread. Dust gathered,
sweat matted my hair.
Like sugar dribbling down
the chin and gathering on the collar
was a sign, maybe, of
gluttony. Birds and branches
swept all one way, guided
by nature, by virtue?
Vulgar sound. Vulgar emotion.
Was this how you ordered?
Give me struggle, bruise
me with orthodoxy, if that
was your sign, I wanted
to know. I ate livers and hearts.
I woke up with questions,
with eyes of bitumen.
Willie Lin is the author of two chapbooks, Lesser Birds of Paradise (MIEL) and Instructions for Folding (Northwestern University Press).
AMERICAN MUTOSCOPE AND BIOGRAPH by Michael Hurley
BARNUM RECALLS HIS BIRTH-MOTHER
Ordinary in the way nothing is until you remove it from the rhythm of your mornings. Even sand is majestic when viewed under microscope. It can be good to simply touch; to press your fingers to the mud-studded glitter to take it home. We are here, in the reaches: the writhing weighs on our shoulders, big words and things made meaningless by others in the world who suffer. We suffer for the relative: my mother unlearning the way to walk, feeling her hand with her other hand, pulling grapes from their stems at the sink; filling a bowl like this.
BARNUM, THE GIRL, HIDES HER LOVE FROM DANIEL
Waiting to be asked What if there was just a little something extra in you that didn’t start to tremble, that didn’t wear socks stained with briar bed and drag a sheet behind you? Or if thinking was better at it, worked for longer, asked people, less, questions that made them twitch?
BARNUM, THE BOY, CONFESSES HIS LOVE TO DANIEL
You can get to know a place by the color of the houses and whether people rearrange the chairs. Whether or not they smile in their photographs. Today instead of writing I stalked you on the internet because your success is making me feel like shit. The line of ants coming from under the backporch of the house on stilts, going to the pantry, and the other line next to it carrying back toward the door, underneath the porch. The first house that wasn’t cold; the houses were always cold and usually in Pittsburgh, with always a redhouse either across or between. Not knowing where to place your “gracelit sinew” because of a shifting second person, people in public talking too loudly, and sometimes I do math to calm my nerves and smoke cigarettes. When I write with elegance it often turns smutty. At times there is a lack of electricity, and you run out of stones halfway through the word. Sometimes you go back home without getting what you left for, and sometimes the eggs beneath your house burst open like seeds and life sprouts vinelike into the room above and the room above that, toward the grey shingles gathering warmth, the rain collecting in troughs around the edge. Light bursting out of gracelit sinews, and the house of redbrick across the street whose windows turn it face-like. We were all facelike this day, far too honest and admitting that it hurts. We were gracelit, even. We were delicate, and when we were asked questions, we had answers; we had eggs. The eggs, we kept from water, and the water we kept in jars. We cleaned the water with sunlight, spread on large metal mirrors. The mirrors lit facelike; we left bed to hike to the sun gate, we dragged bedsheets and made paths in the leaves. You dippped your toe in the water on one side, then you dipped your toe in the water on the other. Under here, you sang, it’s all made of glass. And it was; it was all made of glass.
THE BAREFOOT CIRCUS BOY ARRIVES
And Barnum names him Brian. He puts him in the cage with the other famous ghosts. Later in this story the circus boy will die. Barnum wonders to himself if this is a Winter Quarters or a Showmen’s Rest. You’ll have to bear with him; he’s never been violent before. He’s only using this to construct gender themes. Winter Quarters he tells himself, though he knows he doesn’t know.
I am naked Brian says, Now tell me the rest. Because faith is a good thing to have.
These, indeed, were Winter Quarters. There is, you understand, a wrong kind of honesty.
BARNUM MEETS MAGPIE
The first time I saw you you were smeared with self-tanner pretending not to be sick.
I’d become porous and dust-colored. Wonder: Can blood catch fire?
It was the eighteenth it was the Blessing of the Bikes: All Bikers Welcome.
Hey you, do you make mistakes?
The priests were collared like dogs
flicking water at the lens-flare in the chrome.
BARNUM WITNESSES THE TRAGEDY
They were buried still breathing; their chests pressed blue by time like glaciers.
BARNUM, AGAIN, RECALLS HIS BIRTH-MOTHER
This writhing weighs on our shoulders; big words and things made meaningless by others in the world who suffer. But we suffer too, regardless. Some things crack when you leave them in the sun. Some things, you may already know this, bloom.
BARNUM CONSIDERS THE GRAVES
Pulling grapes from their stems; he’s just angry his dog doesn’t have eyes. The children were there in little coats and I don’t know how to tell you this: Men in trucks with ash in their ears pushed the piles into holes, smoothed them flat, then patted the ground with their shovels.
BARNUM IN OZ
Our child goes elsewhere in this story, turns into a girl. A mirror or a door or a chest of drawers; a gust of sky-breath, pulling you from home. We paint a stand‑in brown to give the effect of stepping suddenly into color. Like a sneeze or the wrist-wrapped women dangling from the trapeze. Like the little zig-zags on the bottoms of candybars. They say the dog can speak but chooses not to. A wise man. Your first act as king is to mandate green glasses.
The princess here was raised a boy; an ocean they cannot fathom is a way to say this as a heavy-handed pun.
Most of our quiet films are lost; they burst into flames, melt into silent discs. Between your knees a ruby drop or a blood-stiffening. A reminder of your form, vibrant in Technicolor, and whatever forever used to be. That blur in your screen’s corner is not a small man dying; it is a bird taking flight that can’t.
BARNUM RECALLS THE TRAGEDY
We saw the icebergs, blue with the press of time….(falling apart)
The children’s chests pressed blue from time like glaciers.
The children were buried alive, their chests pressed blue by time like glaciers.
Pressed blue from time like glaciers which were ordinary the way nothing is if you remove it from the morning. Sometimes it is good to simply touch; to pick up the railroad spike and put it in your pocket, press your fingertip to the mud studded with glitter to take a little
home.
THE COHABITATION OF BARNUM AND MAGPIE
What are the factors that affect the outcome?
They are listed here:
Ones with handles made of horn and wood,
ones with handles made of silver,
trench art buttonhooks,
pocket-knife buttonhooks.
BARNUM AFFECTS THE RESULT
Not: Bell, book, candle, or a plate with a finger-ring used for catching wax. Not a shoebox camera that can capture will-o’-the-wisp, not the photograph of the girl who’ll never know you put her into the internet.
BARNUM, THE BOY, REPLACES MAGPIE IN HIS MEMORY WITH DANIEL
Means so humble it turned you weak, replaced the you with something that melts, that cripples vine-like, aspiring. Something that shifts like the second person, turns gently under gallery lighting, or colors dissolving in water and changing the water’s color.
And you will remember when you were elsewhere and what it was composed of, how the colors of the houses made things different there, and how they carved large letters into the hillside with lines of white stones. A gesture in the dark with a sound. Something delicate is climbing through the floorboards. Something, maybe, is leaving its eggs in the thin cracks your house is made of, in the place where rain each night logs the foundation.
He sings: You can’t make / just any-
body / grateful.
He sings: But sometimes / you can.
BARNUM APPROPRIATES THE TRAGEDY
Before the end, we stood over the hole full of children and held hands praying like an elderly couple over a meal. They pretended to sleep so we’d imagine them sleeping. I knew it all along.
BARNUM RESEMBLES THE SPECTACLE
Can you point to the place on the doll where it happened?
Can you imagine bats streaming out of a hole
for a full two hours?
BARNUM REASSEMBLES THE SPECTACLE
I once read that cameras vex the dead, and so instead we listen.
Our fears are made meaningless by those in the world who suffer.
BACKSTAGE AT THE SPECTACLE
One man wraps the wrists of an aerialist in gauze meant for binding books. Another paints the crickets black; sticks them to a type of trap meant for catching mice. The glueboards twitch around him with their writhing as he works; they inch across the table like dollars jerked in bursts by fishing line. He hangs them still twitching on hooks to dry like crafts like props like woven little meats. Dozens hang around him; some pulse on their cords like little stars, whip like wooden snakes. And some stir gently, twist dreamily, like pinwheels, turn sleepily on their strings as if a door has opened elsewhere in the room.
BARNUM RESPONDS TO REQUESTS FOR CHILDREN
When we brought the first ferris wheel to the first town, the people there thought the sky had caught fire; a round burn. The first child to ride rose to the top and looked over the side at the passengers loading at the fountains glowing at the lights below, and slipped out of his belt to stand.
My sweet, my everything, my thank-god-for: this is why we can’t have nice things.
Imagine what we’d do to them.
THE TRAGEDY
This life gives us, the way cameras vex the dead, problems we hadn’t thought of. And so when a circus train wrecks into another, the question becomes what to do with the elephants: They lie like stunted pyres in their place by twisted spur. One man says to cut them into pieces, to bury them in parts. Another says to keep them burning until they are swept away. Instead, they start to dig, making hills that rise above them.
Let me tell you this:
Men come with rope to pull the piles into holes. They heave backward in ordered bursts.
Let me ask you this: Are you not entertained?
The shovel men tamp smooth the ground, pat the earth up and down, as if their shovels too are saying Yes.
BARNUM RESPONDS AGAIN TO REQUESTS FOR CHILDREN
Maddie, let’s pretend
your pillbox of baby-teeth
sounds when you shake it
like a grown man boxing
a child’s oyster ears.
Isn’t that a precious way
to hurt a child?
MAGPIE SPEAKS TO BARNUM CONCERNING THE END
I was graceless; victories were hard-won and seemed trivial. The restoration marks were plaster halos around the heads of saints painted over. The acorn fell to the street and bounced. We went outside with the dog you named Rubber. Heard another but didn’t see it. You pointed to the house next to the house they tore down yesterday. The house they tore down yesterday left the shape of itself in the bricks of the other house; you could tell how the bricks used to touch where the other house was.
You’ve become a hole nothing uses.
Michael Hurley is the author of the chapbook Wooden Boys (Seven Kitchens Press). His poems have appeared in Sycamore Review, New Delta Review, Fourteen Hills, Spoon River Poetry Review, and FIELD.
The Numerous by Bruce Bond
The animus mundi that moves through all things
tells us precious little about the violence of one
choice devouring all others, how the man with the rifle
in his mouth is, in fact, a friend of mine, or was,
delivered by the hand that must be his alone.
I tell myself I am writing this for him, but who am I
fooling. Who am I to understand his need
to talk to no one. I want to ask, do you feel it still:
the air inside our voices and so beyond them,
the way certain suffering lies beyond description
or advice. Do you hear in the tenement streets
of heaven and hell some enduring note of hope.
You with whom I huffed a lot of pot and wore
the eyes of someone always in the darkness. If
an animus mundi blows through the many men
in one man, why are so many strangers still.
Is every drift the breath and pretext of estrangement.
Or bluster in the sails that send us to the dragons.
Are we closer to the map’s edge, becoming no one.
Such multitudes hunkered in the bomb shelters
of home, as the firestorm passes, and sirens fade,
I want to ask, is there something in your mouth
you want to say. A bullet to spit out, a curse.
Is the wind in the strings of trees too vast to tell me
what you want, the affliction of one man too small.
I ask the way a campfire asks the towering pines.
Is there a name for you that would be no one name
now, a face that would shatter into a thousand faces.
Bruce Bond is the author of 16 books. His most recent poetry collections are Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997‑2015 (LSU Press), Sacrum (Four Way Books), Black Anthem (University of Tampa Press), Gold Bee (Southern Illinois University Press), and For the Lost Cathedral (LSU Press).
EAST OF GLASTONBURY by G. C. Waldrep
Sister, take the ash
hood off. A heavy
dermis of scars
comes out
& explains things,
a little: two coneys
among the rocks,
almost medieval;
moonset;
the ambient myth,
come to claim
you. A cool cloth
passed
over the temple
wipes away
the commercial
veil. We were
green here, once,
clockwork
meadows aspiring
to a flesh’s
bridal cloak.
Whether to spare
what
you cannot touch
is the question
penitence asks,
held above the city
by anticipated
pain.
In the meantime
there is gardening,
basketry,
every useful
art. Sister, give me
the ash hood,
place its dim caul
over my matte
skull. I am
a bee’s breath,
a bitter ammoniac.
Inside a little
blue meat
drifts the animal
soul as
song made flesh.
Debride me
as a surgeon might,
first-hand
in the almost-
dark. Sister,
I too broke
a perfect waiting:
We are not all
ghost. Be
a moth unto me,
an orant gland.
I will have
FIRE, I will have
GLORY.
I would drink
your every bone.
G. C. Waldrep’s most recent poetry collections are Testament and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, both from BOA Editions. His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper’s, Tin House, and The Best American Poetry.
In a Painting By Marc Chagall by Kareem Tayyar
You are surprised when your feet first leave the ground.
You worry about altitude,
About whether you will struggle to breathe the higher you go.
You think about big-horned sheep,
About snow leopards,
And what they will make of you floating above them.
You wonder how you will eat,
About whether the stars will be so bright the closer you get that your eyes will begin to burn.
And of course you worry about sleep.
But all of this lasts only a minute, maybe two,
And then you are just in love with everything,
The houses that grow smaller with each passing second,
Your hightop sneakers that have begun to glow in the dark,
The sound your wings make as they slowly flap,
The playful whisper of the moon as she places her lips to your ear,
And asks what took you so long to arrive.
Kareem Tayyar’s poetry collections are Magic Carpet Poems (Tebot Bach Books), In the Footsteps of the Silver King (Spout Hill Press), Postmark Atlantis (Level 4 Books), and Scenes from a Good Life (Tebot Bach Books).
FRONTIER by L.A. Johnson
At this hour, the transmission towers mirror themselves
in the slough of the bay, loose images of diamonds.
An unfamiliar noise comes from somewhere, refracts
within the three smallest bones in my ears.
Whirring turns to low music. A small prop plane
appears above and is going home, going west. My brain
has become pearl and string. Overhead, a Morse code
taps invisibly. A stranger has been calling. All my life,
I’ve ignored the tiny sparks busting from these wires
and the tinny, quiet sound they make in the air.
L.A. Johnson is the author of the chapbook Little Climates (Bull City Press). Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Antioch Review, and The Iowa Review.
Georgic I: Back-to‑the-Land Poem by Ben Swimm
Auggie, look! The sky’s a giant theatre
full of birds we must always stop
and listen to. And ah, how the grass
grows thick and long here in the land
of wooden tool handles. The teenagers
still wear thrift store tennis shoes
and are not afraid to get their dress
clothes dirty hauling water to the pigs.
No one is ever asking how to heat
their meatballs in the microwave
or even cares that there is cow shit
on their coat sleeve. It makes sense
for me to say I love it. It makes sense
for me to borrow my living
from the soil. And the birds?
The neighbor tells me their names.
The shiny black beaks have a language
of their own. The geese resist
the marriage vows we want to give them.
How far the spotted red crest
flies up here to nest each summer!
It makes me think of all the things
we’ve made: a house, a fence, a thousand
loaves of bread. All things that contain us.
Ben Swimm’s poems have appeared in JMWW, Cirque, Hamilton Stone Review, and Salamander.
THE GROSBEAKS by Jill Osier
When I come back
they are singing, hidden
but distinct, whistling, the world
its brown, stained
with waiting. I love to think
they love. I love to think they love the same
this time that comes the same
whether we promise
or we’re sorry.
LIKE A GREAT SADNESS, THE TIDE by Jill Osier
Not that we could forget –
though days we lay about
and talked of nothing but water,
water, water, as if not broken
some the first time moon
and sea conspired, swept us
from arms we knew, left us,
and in their lifelong bond
met again and again. And are
we jealous? Yes.
Jill Osier is the author of two chapbooks: Should Our Undoing Come Down Upon Us White (Bull City Press) and Bedful of Nebraskas (sunnyoutside). Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Iowa Review.
Illusion by Gabrielle Bates
Camp Winnataska, Alabama
Along the crush-tender
grass on the creek’s bank,
white dresses flicker
in the dark
as if the girls themselves
are aflame
and not the bridge they face.
Aflame, but not burning
they watch the bridge appear
to fall
like a thousand fluttering
cardinals in the sun.
It’s night; the bridge intact.
They allow themselves to be tricked
because to believe
in the burning, and after
when the sun rises
again walk
over the unburnt planks –
the wonder of feet
passing where the eyes
perceived destruction – to touch
the whorls of wood,
find them cool –
Thinking of it now,
weightless, mouth agape,
I am the spotted bass
dark among a dark
gravel nest
whose body flips sideways
at the streambed’s base
that its single eye might see
though murked
the falling red light upon
contact with the breathable
world disperse
as clumps of burnt pine straw
into the slow, moving water.
Pastoral by Gabrielle Bates
Houghton-in‑Furness
I paint the sheep on ponds frozen over
despite the fact of autumn & the dark
snowless ovals far below. In this scenario
the sheep charge & I’m left bashing
at their heads with a rock in each hand.
Rams will do it, horns coiled around & up
to point into you twice at once. It’ll carry
your body around the fells like a platter.
I’ve seen it – in tandem the two points
making room in my side as I tried to run away,
hoisted akimbo before its eyes, becoming its eyes,
looking out over the ponds far below
which have yet to freeze, the faded blue
cotton of my shirt thrust between a high rib
into my organs, quiet there as scraps are quiet,
& the sheep keep eating. Their lower jaws
make circles in the air as they watch on.
My paints wait on the rock in a white box.
The ram, unable to shake me, bucks its head
up & down & I sink lower onto its horns.
It rubs me against a wall of rock. The world
is dark for the ram now. He weeps for himself
& the rock weeps for having seen this & I weep for
I have become the winter I’d wanted.
The Masters by Gabrielle Bates
The azalea bushes must bloom no
sooner or later than opening day
or else.
At night men are sent in to embed
under sod, under soil, intricate
heating
systems that snake metallic (just in case
the Augusta spring is too cold too late)
to coax
the pointed, fleshy white hats to split
their hidden heads open to the pre-clapped
air. Or
if too hot, to cool the roots and slow
the thousands’ bursting from beneath the greens
which rip-
ple imperceptibly, clipped. But don’t forget:
“The physiognomy of conduct
must not reveal the skeleton” implies
it can.
Gabrielle Bates’ poems have appeared in Poetry, Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Guernica.
Orgasm as Lapwing by Jennie Malboeuf
The bird fakes hurt
to save herself. A moan
and bent limb, pretend
suffering to distract from her nest.
Even the peculiar way she takes
flight is something brutal
to behold: wingbeat slack
and unmeasured, then at once
a panicked and wounded bat.
Her pattern is both gentle
and drawn-out as a river, an unhurried
bandit, and labored as a blacksmith.
The lapwing is rarely secretive.
Longwinded, she screams
a small murder as she flickers by.
This note is royal. High as the tuft
of down crowning the head
she has forgotten, the brain
full of worries violently
blown away.
Fear by Jennie Malboeuf
This morning opened up
like a long fall from the sun.
That snake we found coiled
under trashbags in the yard
was patient while being discovered.
For some reason, you threw him clear.
Midflight, he danced as the ribbon
moves from an Olympic gymnast’s wrists:
flicked spastic and out of place.
His green-black body painted a rainbow
across – what seemed – an acreage of sky.
Jennie Malboeuf’s poems have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, New American Writing, Poetry Northwest, and Best New Poets.
Kaan and Her Sisters Survive the Siege by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
“This was how Yarmouk entered the world’s consciousness; a refugee
camp designed as a safe haven for the Palestinian diaspora that had
become the worst place on earth.”
– The Guardian
It began in their youth,
and so Kaan and her sisters were raised
to be incomplete, to subsist on little.
In each of them a hunger throbbed,
dull and dependable. Bread grew thinner than paper
and then it ran out. They were lucky in winter.
They could burn their notebooks and stir water
with long spoons over the flames.
A dash of salt, the last few grains of cumin,
the prayer of it, boiling this liar’s broth
over a history incinerating.
And then the water ran out. They were unlucky in summer.
The flavors of bygone meals evaporated,
the sky’s pallid eye glared down at them,
blistering their skin, driving them underground.
The roots and leaves of spring long shriveled,
Kaan and her sisters foraged for geranium ghosts,
fought the last of the sparrows for crumbs.
When no help arrived, they remembered that
their heritage made them ineligible
for mourning. They surrendered
their tired mouths and ate the air,
chewing through its smoldering fibers,
losing teeth to shrapnel and shards of language.
Dear Miss Sahar
Fourth Letter by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
We named her Ayda.
I didn’t want to at first.
I thought it too heavy
a burden for a new life
but I thought better of it within a few hours
when we had to fill out the paperwork that asked us
to locate her in the world. Maybe a child
should be burdened with a dream at birth. Maybe a dream
straightens a spine, roots a language inside the throat.
We gave her a map that no one recognizes.
I didn’t want to at first.
I thought it too heavy
a coat for a young life
but I thought better of it within a few years
and her shoulders grew stronger under the map
of a homeland she had to wear in the world. Maybe a child
should be given a map for her journey. Maybe a map
protects against a history hurtling into the future.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is the author of the poetry collection Water and Salt (Red Hen Press) and the chapbook Arab in Newsland (Two Sylvias Press). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Drunken Boat, Sukoon, and Rumpus.
Pastoral with Restless Searchlight by Michelle Brittan Rosado
Vacaville, California
I was raised with the ocean
over my right shoulder
and the jagged mountains filling
my left hand with teeth, while overhead
the military jets drew their temporary scars.
In this valley I rocked myself like a marble
at the bottom of a bowl. Then I gathered
my skirt of drought, of failing
plants. When I slept, the cropdusters laid down
their thin quilt, and my life shortened,
though barely. I counted my luck
amongst the deer drawn down the hill
by the prison’s lights. I wanted to
be like the dried grass alighting suddenly
on a summer afternoon,
a fire started by nothing
but sun: a helicopter’s oracle, foretelling
the blackened acre like a hole cut
into fabric behind which always breathes
the tangible dark. I wanted to
be like that, to swallow fences, to listen
for the animals crossing over,
the night’s highway crowded
with the footsteps of the anonymous.
Poem to My Unborn Son the Morning after the Election by Michelle Brittan Rosado
Since November began, the painters have been here
stirring their mixtures, preparing for the days ahead, laying down
the dark canvas around the grass perimeter outside.
First they papered the windows, so that in here when I wake
I can’t be sure my eyes are fully open. In the partial light
I make my way through the familiar interior
now suddenly made strange. I count the steps
to the kitchen, am careful in passing
through doorways, slip my body down the hall
without touching anything. I think your life thus far must be like this,
all subtle movements in the semi-dark, my skin half-illuminated
by day, then a shade pulled down at night. I read that this is the week
your body takes on pigment, the blood red burrowing beneath
fat, beneath skin, becoming closer to the color you will learn to wear
in a world that will have to decide whether to love you
or fear you for it. This is the truth about where we are,
as the men work outside, the ladders against our walls
like sudden thunder. We ready ourselves to be altered completely.
Michelle Brittan Rosado is the author of the chapbook Theory on Falling into a Reef (Anhinga Press). Her poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review, Sou’wester, Poet Lore, Quarterly West, and The New Yorker.
Ghost House: To the Child I Couldn’t Carry by Kate Gleason
Once, for a brief time, you hung like Houdini
upside-down in the water
of my womb, bound by the chains
of my DNA, your father’s and my love
a combination lock you found easy to pick.
Deft as a safe-cracker,
you spun the dial of its notched clock
till the tumblers aligned and you slipped from me
back to the other side of whatever glass pane
the unborn press their faces to, longing to come in.
Your spirit had no desire to enter
the smallness of the body, the straitjacket
of skin, the coffin the flesh is
sealed and locked into.
One day, you simply vanished
the way Houdini disappeared from his ghost house
on the stage (a screen he lowered around him
to conceal how he escaped).
In minutes, you were gone.
My blood swirled and circled in the bowl
like a wreath on water for someone buried at sea.
I looked out onto the frozen Hudson
where, deep below, the current was rushing
everything away, racing toward the mouth of salt
where it empties into the Sound.
Kate Gleason is the author of the poetry collection Measuring the Dark (Zone 3 Press), and three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Rattle, Notre Dame Review, Green Mountains Review, and The Best American Poetry
UNDERSTUDIES by John Sibley Williams
In our parents’ bedroom exchanging overalls for ties, bras. I am playing mother again, and, Tyler, for those ten minutes between breakfast and church you can be Dad’s hard open palm. Both your feet drown in his shiny black Sunday shoes. It takes time for the world to whiten around the temples, to scar. You are trying and failing to find something awful enough to pray away, stuffing your big-boy pockets with miracles that sound like stopped watches. Now hold me how they say they held each other once. Tell me how pretty I was when your arms first danced my waist around a crowded Elks Lodge to a song that ended in two sons and a need to atone. And I will show you how to be forgiven without asking the sky, how to love without using your mouth.
John Sibley Williams is the author of nine poetry collections, including Disinheritance (Apprentice House) and Controlled Hallucinations (FutureCycle Press). His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Sycamore Review, The Massachusetts Review, Third Coast, and RHINO.
1976 by Chanda Feldman
In their first fall, married, living
in graduate student housing,
Taliva Court, Knoxville, Tennessee.
The bed made with their wedding quilt:
rose pinwheels, stitched helixes
coiled like vines among flowers.
Their first car they name Nova Jean.
My mother drops my father off
at the research lab. She takes classes
in the Home Economics building.
My mother in turtleneck, cameo locket,
her curls teased into an Afro.
A plaid blanket spread out beneath
their picnic in the Smoky Mountains:
seafood salad, chocolate pie, and cola.
They bought shrimp for weeks
after their first time ever eating it.
The way my father holds my mother –
his camera timer set – they’re in a grove,
the light spindles, the fall foliage begins
to turn on the limestone lookout;
against the peaks, small waterfalls seam
the mossed stones. In this time,
before they’re my parents, they’re in love
with a first child, the one in the womb
whose heartbeat won’t be picked up
in the final week of the third month.
It matters most my father and mother
hold each other again and again,
before they begin their days
on those cold mornings
of tears that lead them to me.
BUT WE LIVED by Chanda Feldman
1. But We Lived
But we lived, my mother told me, day to
day. It always was and we never thought
it wouldn’t be – separate entrances
at the doctor’s, dentist, the fabric store, or
the places we knew not to go. The lines
and the laws and the signs, as you saw
in Eyes on the Prize on TV. When
the law changed – I had two cousins, they said,
y’all can go to the white school now, it’s our
right. Twins. They signed up, they went.
Nobody minded them. They sat in class,
had lunch on the lawn. One full grade report –
the teachers flunked them in every subject.
After that they came back to the black school.
2. Sharecropping
The year ended at the black schools in March.
Children going to the fields with their parents.
My family sharecropped at the Hughes’ place.
The Hughes’ owned the Movie Palace in town,
our little house. They had a pond our church
baptized in. I remember Mrs. Hughes
scolded my parents: it’s too cold in the fields
for that child. Each morning I ate one runny egg
at a little pine table. The Hughes’ ate
at their dining table. It could be an hour or two,
I sat buttoned up in my coat, ready to go
as soon as they gave me permission to go.
3. Friday Night
My parents gave me permission to go
to the Ritz Movie Palace on Fridays.
First we frolicked at the café, no first,
we got fish filleted at the fish market.
You took it to the café and they fried it
with potato slices. Families ate early,
me with my mama and step-daddy,
everybody in pressed dresses and slacks.
Later, the children went home, the adults
stayed, danced, drank. I still had to pay
for movies, but I didn’t have to sit
in the colored gallery. We sharecropped
for the owners. I sat with the whites.
Everybody knew better than to complain.
4. Cutters’ Fabric Store
My 4‑H agent, Ms. Bernice, complained
uptown at Cutters’ Fabric Store. Why
didn’t they hire a black to serve their black
clientele? I was a high school senior and still
picking in the cotton fields. Ms. Bernice –
taught me to sew, lent me my first Singer –
got me the job. I greeted black women,
Hello, Mrs. – , ushered them to the new
stock. My boss liked the business I brought.
I became the first black in town to work
the cash register for blacks and whites. But
I hid the best bolts and notions for my women.
To shape a dress in their minds, I’d drape
and cinch a rich color over their shoulders.
5. Ceremony
I sewed my wedding dress in cameo white.
Your father rode the bus from the Massachusetts
military base two days before Christmas.
(His suit was his army green uniform and cap.)
We were married in the church – a first
in our community. Until that, we’d crowded
in the main room of somebody’s little shack.
Bride and groom jumped the broomstick.
Your father and I on the altar steps,
white carnation bouquet, our parents beside us.
A photographer from the town newspaper,
The Leader, showed up at our ceremony, so
we have one picture of the event.
6. My Father’s Father
Your granddaddy missed our wedding.
After fall harvest was weighed and sold,
your granddaddy rode four hundred miles
down to Louisiana. Stayed three months
as seasonal labor on the Mississippi levees.
My brothers and sisters and I did the rest
while he was gone, after school, before school,
cleaning the coop, slopping pigs, milking,
slaughter, chopping wood, hauling water
from the pump well down Starn’s Hill,
near the turnoff for Richardson Landing.
That’s where we met the ferry dropping off
our sugar, our corn coming back in meal sacks.
Did you know your great-great-grandmother,
a slave-chambermaid on the steam boats,
traveled this stretch of river back and forth?
7. My Father’s Freshman Year
I traveled four hours by bus, two hundred miles
to the Black land-grant university from the bluff.
A knock, a fellow student’s head inside the door,
and Dr. King was slain at the Lorraine. Night,
the Student Union Plaza, the sidewalks, into
the streets, the Black side of town:
Black medical school, Black private college,
the only Black-owned bank in the state
(where we held our first accounts). Then
a row ahead, a row behind, a row on either side,
the National Guard boxed us in, rolling us
back to the campuses. REPORT
TO YOUR RESIDENCE on the megaphone,
but not to our rooms, their rifles single-filed
us down into the dormitory basements.
A guardsman caught my eye as I took the steps.
I saw that he saw a situation with the equal
possibility of us alive and dead.
8. Laboring
Equally a place of living and dying – shadow land,
the midwives called the labor. An ax slid
under the mattress to break the bridle of pain;
two straight pins made a cross fastened to
the pillow warding off haints; the placenta
swaddled and buried deep in a yard grave. Gifts
of eggs and crackers for the new mother.
No one asked to hold the baby in the first six weeks.
The whole time the baby was arriving the midwife
talked under her breath, calling on God
to guide her steps, comforting with Bible passages.
They’d give you teas: tansy when things were lagging,
pepper to clear the afterbirth, and for a stillborn,
mint to keep the woman’s milk from coming in.
9. Taint
The milk my mama and a neighbor drank
was tainted from a cow that must’ve ate
a noxious weed, but we didn’t know that
at first. Her joints swelled, muscles seized,
fever, then her hair combed out in hanks.
Her teeth ached and she couldn’t eat. We called
on the dentist – there was one white man and
his assistant uptown, their advertisement
painted on a building, $5 to pull a tooth.
With a toothache most black folks, even white,
couldn’t afford more. The dentist set the clamp
and yanked out the problem. My mama’s
beautiful, even teeth, but the pain wouldn’t leave.
One by one, they pried them out of her mouth.
10. Baptism
One by one – they’d wade into the pond
we used as a baptismal pool in the side fields
where my family sharecropped. Our church
across the road, an old two-lane highway
dropping down from uptown to the river’s
Chickasaw Bluff. As far as the road went –
sandbags, a sign said TERMINUS, for years
as far as I’d ever traveled.
A rerouted stream
fed the little pond. One by one, the minister
lowered the people beneath, raised them up,
drew away the handkerchief from their eyes.
The whole time watching, a few whites
staring down at us from the highway shoulder.
11. Choir
Above the highway, N. Main and Liberty, uptown,
a small community of blacks, our professional class,
teachers, ministers, funeral owners. My family lived
on the other side, the bottom dip on Loop Road.
The uptown houses, white cottages, green yards,
white lattice fences. Our shotgun houses scattered
and sunk among the crops. They had churches,
we had ours, but on Saturday nights, we met
for contests: male, female, junior, adult choir,
each time a different church, cookies and punch.
Mostly we won ribbons, our choir’s name printed
in the local paper – one page for black community
news: school honor rolls, births, deaths,
marriages, our prayers for the sick and shut-in.
12. My Mother’s Father
You had to be on your deathbed to stay in
from the fields, otherwise you went.
My daddy, one Friday night, shot
and killed a man. Sat in jail for two days.
Monday dawn the guard slides open the cell,
throws in a pair of daddy’s work clothes.
The landowner in the car waiting to drive him.
My daddy never went back for a conviction –
killing a black man wasn’t enough
to keep him from chopping cotton. Even now,
someone’s son or daughter has a run-in
with the police, some black folk call on these
old connections, see if the white family
their families worked for can ease the sentencing.
13. On the Porch
Why she thought we’d ease her predicament –
spinning into the yard near midnight, waking
the house up, slumped into her knees on our porch.
Her boyfriend in the driver’s seat, high beams
trained on our door. The girl crying out
for my mother. This was the daughter of a family
mama cooked and cleaned for on occasion.
They lived in one of the South Main mansions.
How did she think we’d help? We said nothing.
We made no lights. Pretended a good night’s
rest. The girl sounded like one of those panthers
the old folks talked about, claimed they yelped
like a crying woman. As a child, I didn’t know
that was said to keep me clear of the woods.
14. My Father’s Birthplace
Mama owned forty acres on the bluff,
inherited from her father, Sampson,
your great-grandfather. Two-hundred acres
divided among his five kids. His hands
built the church, the schoolhouse, planted
pecans up and down the road that bears
his name. It’s said he came from Memphis
(too many lynchings). Originally arrived there
from somewhere in Virginia: a runaway slave,
unknown mother and father. Eighteen,
joined the Civil War colored infantry. Next thing
we know, he’s seventy-five. Like a resurrection,
married your great-grandmother Katie, his
twenty-five-year-old bride. Ministering
his own congregation, farming his own ground,
no white people around, that’s how they lived.
Chanda Feldman is the author of the poetry collection Approaching the Fields, forthcoming from LSU Press in 2018. Her poems have appeared in Ecotone, Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review.
Nobody Wanted Such a River by Erin Hoover
Nobody needed it, nobody was curious about it.
– Mark Twain, “Life on the Mississippi”
Geography in 1608 being what it was,
Captain Smith thought he’d found
in the Chesapeake a way to the South Seas,
but the Susquehanna’s narrow mouth
surprised his fleet after two miles, where
the plodding water turned rocky and rapid.
Go back, the Englishman might have said
to his crew. Or, staring into the faces
of chiefs who’d assembled at the banks,
Nothing here that matters, about the men
whose final grandsons would be scalped
two generations in by the Paxton Boys,
the Indians’ war practice by then adopted
with European ferocity. I’ve peered through
the rail arches that line the Susquehanna,
poked the charcoaled embers of hobo camps.
I’ve watched fishermen throw back shad
corrupted by centuries of seeping mines,
and thought, I’m no different from anybody
else here, still shoving broken microwaves
into any sinkhole I can find. The river
runs acidic enough to pickle animals,
and wafts like a latrine. But once,
when my ancestors first saw its waters,
trees muffled the forest floor to twilight
at noon. I’d like to live on the Susquehanna,
on that first farm, the only sound at night
a baby’s murmuring, a child who’d grow
to produce its own babies. And so on, until
I imagine dozens of babies, over time,
in a house bricked before the Revolution,
as the towns built up around us took
for themselves some measure of stillness
that was ours. Every family corpse was buried
in the same lumpy field, and this will be
my end, too. So, despite the mine fire,
despite the changeless leach of the chemical
spill, despite trading our malignant
small-town hollow for the fetid trench
of the city, if I climb the blue mountain,
stand over its sweep of land and say not me,
I am lying. I was born fifteen minutes
up the Susquehanna from Three Mile Island
in the days they wondered if the check
for ruined DNA and bleeding orifices
was finally in the mail, where in the control room
one worker must’ve turned to another,
surrounded by incomprehensible machinery,
and wondered, Did I do this? But some errors
are too big to be the fault of one person,
and when I asked my mother why she and Dad
didn’t flee, with me, their new baby,
meltdown grave on every lip, she said,
Where were we supposed to go?
and I understood. Later, I used to cross the river
every day to buy Oxys in the section
of Harrisburg whose brick row houses
are shredded with flags, still in daylight
as a pocketed gun. We’d get in and get out,
crush the pills on books on the way home,
speeding by islands in a dry season,
or the rising sludge of an upriver rain.
My playground bordered tracks with great
screeching trains, and next to it, the river,
then the hill beyond where a troop of boy scouts
planted their half-assed flag. How could
I know about the approaching army of energy
companies, wells Roman in scale and ubiquity,
built to frack methane, light cities? Our
taps poisoned with champagne-colored
brack. Nothing to do about the wells,
so my brother tells me, when I offer to spark
the water from his faucet with my cigarette
lighter. Tapwater isn’t a form of dignity
until it is. The river promises to swallow
tinkling pianos along with our garbage,
families grateful for any work,
each proposal for a dam or canal
promising a downward flow of money,
before the usual graft sets in. Twain said,
The Mississippi is in all ways remarkable,
but I’ve got nothing to say for this river.
It’s like talking about my own blood,
trying to sense it shivering along
the walls of an artery. Billions
of gallons pass me by daily, and I never
see them again. But I am bound to them,
as a scalp to a skull. With our history,
second nature now to draw the knife
against our own crowns, and pull.
Erin Hoover’s poems have appeared in Bennington Review, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Sugar House Review, and anthologized in The Best American Poetry.
Once Mother and Father Were Buried by Susan Rich
After the garlic press, the musical penny bank,
the silverware from a smooth locked box
were presented, argued over, stripped bare –
after the claiming of the Seder plate, rosewood
Aladdin table, and my father’s Hamilton watch –
after the aftermath of familial negotiations,
what did we learn of belongings?
Blue inked scraps of paper, objects
conjured 1,2,3, from the lawyer’s yellow pad –
the social worker’s fee? War raged on in the land
of damaged goods, the cellar of used light
bulbs and rotary dial phones. Stubborn and angry
as the ancestors before us, we raised red flags –
armed for total sibling divorce. Stoic in our straight-backed
chairs, our spines taut as if sparring with an earthquake –
then our lives cracked open, shuddered into place.
Susan Rich is the author of four poetry collections from White Pine Press: Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World. Her poems have appeared in The New England Review, Diode, Poetry Ireland, Poetry International, and The Times Literary Supplement.
Oolite Lunch by Mira Rosenthal
Rolling around and around on the shallow sea floor,
gathering layer after layer on a fragment of shell –
is that how it feels past the familiar shore
of my grandfather repeating his what-the-hell
anecdotes about women being far superior
to men? Senile, you might say, the brain belching
into its napkin as the cafeteria’s beige décor
drips into water glasses and emits its smell
of diluted yellow yolk. But now he’s on to the one
about shrapnel lodged in his head, the explosive
splintering of wooden planks around the men
sheltering in a French barn – and I am undone
again, taken by his limestone face that forgives
my failure to comprehend what’s beyond my ken.
Mira Rosenthal is the author of the poetry collection The Local World (The Kent State University Press) and translator of two books by Polish poet Tomasz Różycki.
Vocalise by Laura Fargas
Rebeginning. In this trembling of the air,
fallow language, yet to be tilled. Increase of dissonance.
Nuance going every which way. If the beginning
everywhere was om and ma, where did
the breakage – k,t, for example – sneak in?
Rock chipping, breaking branches. Us behind
Like children following the circus into town.
Blues for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker by Laura Fargas
The first blue touches the sky at five exactly
Tonight and the sparrows are singing.
I’m thinking of the Lord God bird, its “kent,”
Its double tap, and its honking big beak.
No one can prove it is alive, though two
Reputable experts claim to have seen it.
Love is like that, going ahead of proof.
Laura Fargas is the author of four poetry collections including The Green of Ordinary Time (Washington Writers Publishing House) and An Animal of the Sixth Day (Texas Tech University Press). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, Paris Review, and Poetry.
At a Cocktail Party, I Am Given a Drink Called, “Life is Fleeting and the Olive is Temporary” by Kelli Russell Agodon
The horizon is the body
leaning backwards as she laughs
as the olive slips down her cleavage, down
the front of her dress . . . wait. Sometimes
I stumble over the clover, the cleaver,
stumble over the live and downer, the lover
and leaver, sometimes, it’s a tumble
over the horizontal misunderstanding
of laying down in a bed of pleasure, leisure,
a bed of please and release, of sure, and plea,
and maybe some ease here. Sometimes
we tap dance over the harder spots, the spaces
on our spine where we’d rather waltz,
we’d rather fall backwards into a dip,
but instead we gather. I keep silent
about the fear of all of us not making it
through a day. I keep silent about all that love,
all that I want to touch or not touch,
all those sailings into an evening of icebergs.
Sometimes I’m afraid when our bodies fall
back, our hearts will quit and we will be left
with only shadows. Because tomorrow
may never come. Because tomorrow
is coming but you don’t want it to, because
we ache for a few more days while knowing
every guarantee we hold is made of dust.
Kelli Russell Agodon’s most recent poetry collection is Hourglass Museum (White Pine Press). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, New England Review, Plume, Prairie Schooner, and Waxwing.
The Next to Last to First Kiss by Taije Silverman
Happened on a Saturday night at songwriting camp
and remained fateful for months afterward
because he carried my hand to his mouth
and pressed startling lips to say Remember me
in a language we didn’t yet speak. I remember
the dormitory rec room and wall-sized windows,
that fast-swimming whale of my own secret self.
Not him. His hair might have been curly,
he might have had a voice like apples falling
onto a table and a crooked way of leaning to ask
for my name. For some time after I thought
we might get married, though I met him
only once. Oh fate you are the glorious
queen of the prom. I vote for you over and over.
The next kiss tasted of Sprite, came on a dare
in a parents’ garage. The next kiss came in a white
nightgown in Europe on a wooden floor, came
on a porch in Texas through purple night air
where for weeks I walked careful as crumbled up chalk.
The next kiss was pulled out of me
by a single finger hooked into the side of my mouth.
The next kiss was littered with vomit and laughter.
The next kiss tasted like cigarettes and endings
that had been buried under pennies. The next kiss
was the last kiss. It followed me down back roads
at midnight in Asia. Shadowless cows pretended
to sleep while it cornered me in attics and temples.
The next kiss was strangled by cattails.
I wrapped it in tea muslin for the funeral
that was scheduled for winter but lasted all spring.
The next kiss held back like static on the radio.
The next kiss was made out of nothing
but August and slipped through car windows
to hitchhike back home. Signless it waited
like time on the roadside for each passing sureness
to offer a ride. Fateful for months, fateful for days,
fateful for lip-sealed minutes. The first kiss wished
through the whale of self to a what-iffed list
as precise as the salt in the sea. Remember me.
Taije Silverman is the author of the poetry collection Houses Are Fields (LSU PRESS). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Barrow Street, The Best American Poetry, and The Pushcart Prize anthology.
AT SUNRISE by Dilruba Ahmed
First glint of sun at horizon
it happened upon me
Day creeping from darkness
to blue dawn the slow
emergence of thought I remember
days my father was alive I woke
early with my sisters and washed
in the cold religion a destination
two hours toward the city silent commute
as though calendars could occasion faith
twice yearly and yet I didn’t mind
my mother’s sunflowers nodding
along the drive as we departed
My mother wrapping her sari wrapping
her shawl wrapping us in belief’s gauze
dark morning sky time of prayer
time of contemplation
of the silence before speech
cool as slate, as impartial a god
a shadow of possibility
My friend believes in no god but I cannot say
what rises from mist
when a body disappears
into the unforgiving ground
The ablutions the time wasted
the boulder of regret
I repeat words uttered
when others hear of the loss
of my father I’m sorry sorry sorry
Kneeling now stranger prayer
no mosque temple church and yet
how awkward, what comfort, to pray –
LOCAL NEWSPAPER, FLOATING PHOTOGRAPHER, FATHER’S DAY EDITION by Dilruba Ahmed
Describe your father.
He is a lid I cannot open.
Describe your father.
What language is broken enough?
Describe your father.
Midnight scrambled eggs each New Year’s Eve. The insistence: “say yes to cake.” The serving spoon ever-larger in his grip. Butterscotch candies in the glove compartment. Shared sips of coconut water, the hammer and shell in his hands.
Describe your father.
What could I say as he fidgeted at his mother’s grave? Why did we arrive so late? O final bed. O resting place. O green and sloped burial mound.
Describe your father.
I will try not to be cruel, though this is difficult for me.
Describe your father.
Why do the children keep growing, in their small and ignorant bliss?
Describe your father.
Pizza purchased for men searching dumpsters in Columbus. Thanksgiving plate for our loud-mouthed neighbor, whom my sisters and I dubbed Elmer Fudd. And long ago the hitchhiker picked up en route to the county fair, his odor engulfing the backseat.
Describe your father.
How many forms of sorrow to endure before we die?
Describe your father.
Believe me when I tell you, upon our arrival in the village, he greeted with care the dozens who came to see him: clasping their hands between his own, looking deep into their eyes, patting each child’s head with a smile. When he lamented he had so few gifts, his nephew admonished, “What can you do? Each present you offer will be met with an empty hand. Then another, and another.”
Can you describe your father?
He is a wound I cannot touch.
Describe your father.
[Tribe appears to have no word for grief; instead, gestures toward the sky and ground to indicate fallen world, etc.]
Describe your father.
Are all behaviors learned, including this one?
Describe your father.
I look because I cannot turn away.
Dilruba Ahmed is the author of the poetry collection Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry.
Estelle by Michael Mark
Even when they danced, Dad couldn’t keep her
in his arms. She’d spin off, leave him to fade
back into the circle of others, clapping, hooting.
Days when the pond would freeze, mothers took
their children’s hands and worried them around
in slow circles. Mom raced in unchartable loops
past me and my brother like we weren’t hers.
Same way she didn’t see my report card Fs as Fs.
She’d take the matching color pen and glide
the ballpoint so it looked like the B was always there.
You could ask how she convinced the butcher
his scale was wrong, how she’d roll her cart away
with three-eighths of a pound of corned beef, paying
for only a quarter – fat trimmed, the way dad liked,
but she’d skim that question like she did all surfaces,
even air. Now she’s given her own memory the slip.
Doctors say there’s no reaching her.
Michael Mark’s poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Cutthroat Journal, Pleiades, Rattle, Spillway, and The Sun.
Women in the Waiting Room by Kirun Kapur
1.
Women in the waiting room wear turquoise
headscarves, jade shawls, lemon-yellow tees,
ongoing, their commitment to the flourishing world.
The hair goes. The breasts go. The ovaries, gone
the uterus and fallopian tubes. This is the waiting room
of philosophers straightening lilac wraps, discerning
where the self resides without nipples or brows or two arms
likely to be the same width. Once, I was caught
shoplifting teal eye shadow. Waiting at the station for my father,
I was told that in some countries my hand would be cut off
for what I’d done. There was no imagining – blind shock,
the ache, but I understood the shame of being punished
that way, as if my pride depended on remaining whole.
My father was so angry he didn’t speak for weeks
and so I learned the part of me that can’t survive
without his voice. You, my friend, who have loved me
when I couldn’t do that work myself, are being wheeled away.
I cling to your hand, then the bedrail and then stand
in the fluorescent hall, while in your light blue gown, you go.
2.
Sent up to bed some hours before, we’d traveled far
with flashlights under tented sheets, the stucco ceiling
standing in for stars. You were busy with my third grade
curls, my quarrelsome ends, while I described tall minarets
and crenelated walls, a white-washed compound
fringed with palms, the camel boys and how
a saddle slides as we climb a dune, then passed
the story off to you, taking the brush you handed me.
Your hair, already smooth as bolts of silk we carried
in our camel’s pack, grew smoother still under my hands,
your sentence carting us to the walls of a desert city –
There was a sound downstairs, a grownup sound, somewhere,
outside, I could hear the revving engine of a car. We lay still,
a moment, inside our tent. Today, your hair feels just the same,
though short, your chemo-length. I make the nurses leave
your curtains closed, feed you ice, a luxury in desert places.
3.
I trail a bald parade of ladies
through the maze of elevators, hallways,
seven-story building labeled Parking Only,
hatchback, minivan backed down a driveway
in the early hours, drove cold streets
or highways, minutes and hours and more,
to end here, neatly in a stall. The mind
rewinds – the keys, the parking pass,
the kind attendant stamping time, can’t find
a sequence to the day: Good news,
the Patient Coordinator tells a woman
on the phone, I can schedule the biopsy
and surgical consult back-to-back.
I sit in garage twilight, in the stiff
front seat, feel mid-day light
pour through glass windows,
see nurses laughing in the corridors
rearrange their faces in a flash.
4.
In the darkness of the post-op cubicle,
the world is once again a pulsing liquid place,
the womb, that first waiting room,
it seems reasonable to think about the soul.
What are its limits? Of what is it made?
The IV drips, a nurse squeaks by in hot-pink shoes.
Here, the body seems to rule, and yet
you fix your voice, speaking to your daughter
on the phone, you tell your mother half the truth.
Inside you is a mass of will, still growing.
What are its limits? Of what is it made?
Soon, the surgeons will arrive with news.
Oncology, radiology, gynecology, epistemology,
malignancy, metastases, Ecclesiastes, genetic disease,
remission, superstition, permission, fatalism,
second opinions, mass, stained glass.
5.
In order to debone a twelve-inch trout
your mother used two subtle movements
of the wrist, a flash of lacquer chopsticks,
then, from their tips the intact skeleton
hung graciously. A pot of broth was set
to boil. Rice noodles, translucent tongues
of meat arranged among jade vegetables.
I’m eight and twelve and seventeen. I’ve lost
a mushroom or a sliver of imported beef,
though I try to dredge the pot, repeatedly.
When your news first comes, the question
is why, a cry soon overcome by how, and then
how long – time, the slow gold boiling
in your mother’s pot. I watch you eating
mushroom soup a mile from where
they opened you. This rented room,
the mugs all chipped. We’ve measured
carefully, recorded blood and fluid
draining from your wounds. Your hands
maneuver steadily as though you move
chrysanthemum leaves on an antique plate.
6.
Four can mean death, in Japanese.
When your mother speaks to me
I understand only every fifth word,
but we both pretend. Basho says,
spring passes, birds cry and the eyes
of fish are full of tears. When I describe
the doctor or the surgical margins
or what you’re taking for the pain,
I can’t be sure of what I’ve said.
She tells me I’ve caught the meaning
perfectly, a spring bird, a passing fish.
7.
Side by side, in the motel’s twin beds,
the room dark, the air-conditioner clicking on
and off, we float words up into the wallpapered gloom,
we re-enact the nights when we were small,
the world a massive, ticking, unknown – lost time
alive again. Back and forth we pass the faces
of fourth grade girls, the new infusion staff,
locations where we fought or danced or kissed
someone we’d just as soon forget. Neither of us speaks
about that night. For years I kept the shirt
you wrapped me in, buried my face
in the plain white quiet you laid over me.
When to speak and when to leave an empty space?
Today I had to pull your underwear back up.
Tonight, you’re listing everything you’ll never do –
have sex with the lights on, wear your purple strapless dress,
stand in the temple, year after year, saying prayers
for your mother’s spirit. The future, the time
that might not be, is clear, here, in the dark
and I’m waiting for the moment when it’s right
to make it stop, to interrupt.
8.
Sporting three surgical drains, you text me
from a holiday performance, watching your girl
in a line with other girls. How many
will reach twenty with their mothers still alive,
how many will reach fifteen, ten, without
ever having wondered this? How many
will be tall or fast or good at chemistry?
How many. Thirty snowflakes shuffle
on to stage, execute their practiced twirl.
9.
the night the palm trees
sound like rain
I
voices floors below
you in the street
in the head it’s time what if I
I not
no
time it’s time
10.
You call to say you’ve found a small, new lump
beneath your ear. It’s 2am, the dark so dark
I can’t make out which room I’ve woken in,
the way it was when my son was new –
his cry, my staggering, while space bowed out
around us, cold volumes of a planetarium.
Tonight, the silence grows until we break
its shape with words: fat deposit, swollen gland,
likely to be nothing. Then plan for surgeries,
new meds, a battery of scans. All calls in the night
are calls to live under the unsolvable dome.
I reposition the phone. We go on exchanging sounds.
I count your breaths, as I do my son’s.
11.
The week. The weeks. The year.
The twelfth floor follows
the fifth. Honey. Hon. My Dear.
Are you the patient’s family?
On a scale from one to ten,
how is the shooting/intermittent
rain that can’t be seen from the Cat Scan
waiting room? How is
the tingling, numbness
that blanks my brain?
Fuck you, I want to say,
to the beautiful young man looking
for your good vein.
12.
Still, there are some things I can’t say
in a body that’s been opened and reopened,
dressed and undressed by strangers.
The cell we are locked in grows.
The breast that grew, undressed,
that is removed, and yet some part of us
continues forward, the opposite
of still, living on in the body’s
dismemberment. We have tried so hard
to be clear with our words, we have tried
to love these bodies. Be still, a man told me.
Hold still, the radiation tech now says.
I lay under the body of silence, alive. You,
your chest unzipped, prepare to leap away.
13.
When wind ruffles the short wisps of your hair.
When your body becomes a dial turning toward the sun.
When out of your mouth, a parade of soldiers carting guns.
Oh matter, Oh creaturely nature.
When you dream of pressing mouths to your breastlessness.
When you drag a noose of hope and plastic tubing.
When you know, exactly, what matters.
When you know knowing doesn’t matter at all.
14.
The river can carry a woman-sized tree-trunk,
absorb the whole hillside’s slurry. All the same,
I find a long stick in the reeds, clear a place
around the rocks where the geese patrol.
On the days when I am half a continent away,
when the surgeon is not yet awake, not thinking
of who will lie under the lights, I make coffee,
say your name, standing in my dark kitchen,
I say it. On the days when you call, finding a way
to describe holding a bouquet of your own hair,
the toxic ice-creep in your veins, I watch the last
whip of light blurring the far bank slip away.
It will be back tomorrow. I know better than to say so.
I make plans to go out and rake the dropped leaves,
send you an envelope full of rust and gold.
Hotline by Kirun Kapur
She said: I did have a lot to drink
She said: I did say he could come in
It was fall I could smell the leaves
I could see the ghost of my breath
He kept saying he
loved me
It’s a relief such a relief
Sometimes I do it while I pray
She said: I hope it’s ok that I’m calling
I need to hear a human voice today She said: Do you
think it’s a sin
Do you think God won’t save me if he knows
I love to cut my skin
Is it ok for me to say that here
She said: I’m not harming myself
I’m making myself feel free
I’ve read that nuns were allowed to starve
themselves
It was holy, then
Kirun Kapur is the author of the poetry collection Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, Prairie Schooner, and The Christian Science Monitor.
FLANNERY’S WHITE IRISES by Peggy Shumaker
They have risen.
Risen as they are wont
to do before leaves sigh open
before the pasture greens.
They are not garments
of sinners forgiven, not
souls left in limbo. They feel
no need to confess.
Clean handkerchiefs, they
wave from rails on high
of steamships departing
for dreamed-of places
we’ll never travel, ports
we remake in our hearts.
Bridges in time, white petals
brown and fall
to earth, footsteps
of the holy ghost.
They are not and never will be
flags of tiny surrender.
Peggy Shumaker is the author of seven poetry collections, the most recent of which is Toucan Nest, Poems of Costa Rica (Red Hen Press), and the literary memoir Just Breathe Normally (University of Nebraska Press). Shumaker founded the Boreal Books Series (Red Hen Press) and serves as an Alaska Quarterly Review Contributing Editor.
BROCADE by Jane Hirshfield
All day wondering
if I’ve become useless.
All day the osprey
white and black,
carrying
big dry sticks without leaves.
Late, I said to my pride,
You think you’re the feathered part
of this, do you?
MUSA PARADISIACA by Jane Hirshfield
Outside the window
big eight-foot leaves
lift taller
than the height of the island they rise from.
Green faces unmoving,
rain runs down and outside their nearness.
– else there when –
Such thoughts do not touch them.
The rain does not touch them.
They stand.
Only I at a night window,
thinking,
as if from the high rung of a handmade ladder,
Though it is not words that turn you,
chlorophyll sorrow,
do not abandon yet your faithless servants.
Questionnaire by Jane Hirshfield
Each was a small emergency,
a requiring.
Oddly, I liked that,
as I liked to look
at a tree or a mountain,
and hear their own questions,
undistracted and steady.
As I liked to look at a horse
who would sometimes look back.
Pressing, we say:
a pressing question.
As if something were oil within us
that could be released
and then cooked with,
as if something in us could be lit
and set burning,
its yellow light going one way,
its scent another.
As one by one
did the questions,
in schoolrooms, hospitals,
offices for hiring.
Tests forced and tests chosen,
tests minor, tests idle,
taking with them
the right, the wrong,
the answers, the guesses,
taking with them
my inkless, unanswerable life.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently, The Beauty (Knopf Doubleday), and two books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf Doubleday). Hirshfield is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a Contributing Editor of Alaska Quarterly Review.
HARBOURY by Robert Wrigley
It was an odd word to wake up to.
He was uncertain it was a word at all
so he rose and looked it up before coffee,
and until he saw it on the page
he only half-believed he had ever beheld it
in his life. And yet there it was,
implanted from his subconscious, he supposed,
then spoken by him into the air above the bed,
harboury, the English spelling, with a U.
A place of shelter, a lodging place,
a literal and figurative harbor, or harbour,
as it appeared, in Times New Roman,
on the otherwise unblinking page of his brain.
A noun, he thought, or perhaps an adjective,
as in This is a harboury place, a place
not exactly a harbor but very like one.
Had there been such a place in a dream?
Had he been safe there, in a harboury?
Probably, he believed, it had slipped loose
from a book he could no longer remember,
like the face of a stranger glimpsed
from a passing train, a face that in a dream
years later became an archetype of desire,
or the face of a maniac with a knife.
But it was not a face. It was word.
From Melville, he theorized, or O’Brian,
from Two Years Before the Mast.
But what had loosened it from its harbor,
set it adrift in his sleep? So that he woke
and opened his eyes and saw the branches
of a pine tree outside the window,
a harboury for birds, as though the letters of it
were there in the tree and not, and then he said it
aloud, or read it as it was imprinted there,
though it was not there at all, this word
out of which he must make sense.
And all that occurs to him is this,
to speak of its advent, its sudden appearance,
as though it was an emissary from the past,
when in truth it might have been
not that at all. Rather this harboury
was not where he had been or what he’d read
but where he was headed, an afterworld,
an arrival, a destination, a grave, a fate,
a prognostication, a fortune, this very place.
HORSE HEAVEN by Robert Wrigley
The pipe from the spring cistern, beloved by birds
for its chill on hot summer days, spilled
into a one hundred gallon trough made of ancient coopered
two-inch thick wooden staves. And the trough was beloved
by a pair of frogs and two lazy geldings. Or not lazy
but spoiled, ridden infrequently, fed every morning
a quarter bucket each of oat mix and molasses
and every afternoon or evening an apple, carrot, or frozen slab
of watermelon rind. And the horses themselves were beloved
by cowbirds, perched on the withers or the croup,
from which they’d pluck up the occasional otherwise
horse annoying insect. And the cowbirds rode across
the pasture to the trough that day, where I stood
as I often stood with apples or sugar cube in my pocket.
They stood with the horses on the north side of the trough,
while I stood on the south, one bird each remaining
on the croup, having at the sight of me retreated
almost to the dock, the uppermost trace of the tail.
And we waited. Two horses, two birds, two frogs
having dived to the bottom, and a man with pocketful of sugar cubes.
They were beginning to understand the drill, the horses.
I wanted them to drink first. They knew it, but they were impatient.
First one then the other dipped his snout in the water
and looked up at me, hopeful, ready, though I waited,
my arms folded over my chest. I wanted to see them drink,
and they did, lapping, sometimes plunging their muzzles deep
below the surface to gulp, sometimes in the process remembering
how thirsty they must have been and taking in great drafts,
pints or more, although eventually one stopped
and lifted his head, then the other, and I produced
two sugar cubes from my pocket and arranged one on each palm
and held them out to them, and their soft horse lips
and now cold tongues lifted the cubes into their mouths
and I heard a single crunch and watched as joy
swept across their faces. Then I produced two more
and we repeated the process. Then we waited again.
Because I did not walk away they believed I still had more,
as I did, but still I waited. And the frogs swam in the trough,
and the cowbirds hunted bugs near the docks,
then one by one the horses both drank again, a little less than before,
then lifted their heads and looked at me.
Spoiled, yes, and probably lazy. Two geldings we owned
for several years, having rescued them from a stable
where they sometimes spent days at a time in their stalls,
mouthing a meal of tasteless hay from a rick, a draft of murky water
from a bucket on a hook – nothing like the spill
of this cold and continually fresh spring. They had not died
but they understood somehow they had gone to horse heaven.
There was a seven-acre pasture to run. Often at night
there was a moon. There were apples and carrots
and frozen watermelon rinds, and there was the man I was,
waiting with them, waiting for them, as they waited
for and with me, and once one of them nickered
or shook a head – that immemorial equine interrogatory –
I produced from my miraculous pocket two final cubes of sugar,
which they ate with something like ecstasy,
after which I walked back to the house
and sat on the porch and waited for them,
as they always did on such days and as they did that day, to run
around the pasture once or twice, in their joy,
which was beloved by me.
Robert Wrigley is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems (Penguin Books). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Barrow Street, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry.