POETRY
MONARCHS, VICEROYS, SWALLOWTAILS BY Robert Hedin
For years they came tacking in, full sail,
Riding the light down through the trees,
Over the rooftops, and not just monarchs,
But viceroys, swallowtails, so many
They became unremarkable, showing up
As they did whether we noticed them or not,
Swooping and fanning out at the bright
Margins of the day. So how did we know
Until it was too late, until they quit coming,
That the flowers in the flowerbeds
Would close their shutters, and the birds
Grow so dull they’d lose the power to sing,
And how later, after the river died,
Others would follow, admirals, buckeyes,
All going off like some lavish parade
Into the great overcrowded silence.
And no one bothered to tell the trees
They wouldn’t be coming back any more,
The huge shade trees where they used
To gather, every last branch and leaf sagging
Under the bright freight of their wings.
Robert Hedin is the author, translator, and editor of two dozen books of poetry and prose, most recently The Dream We Carry: Selected and Last Poems of Olav H. Hauge (co-translated with Robert Bly, 2008) and At the Great Door of Morning: Selected Poems and Translations (2017), both published by Copper Canyon Press.
APOLOGY GIRL BY Lisa C. Krueger
I lose myself in Vuillard’s berry pickers, lush bushes,
a tabby in the foreground whose head is the size
of a house. Sometimes I am cat, sometimes field.
Art saves me, I tell a friend. Well, join the club,
he retorts. Sorry, I answer. I know when to apologize.
I apologized to a waitress, once, when my dad
spilled martini on her; later I apologized to my dad
for the apology, then apologized to my mom
for the hurt the apology caused. He hit her.
I am sorry, I say, when I’m late, early, punctual,
over-booked. I apologize for saying too little,
too much, or for using the wrong tone. Hair, makeup,
jewelry and clothes have occasioned regret.
Once before work I pushed my baby up the block;
a neighbor said, Well, aren’t you gussied up?
Who are you? I didn’t know. Once my supervisors
emailed me Dumb Blond Jokes; Sorry, not funny, I said.
Don’t you ever laugh? they replied. Sorry.
I have apologized for being too helpful, not
helpful enough, for lacking affection, hugging
past the limit, loving in places where love
isn’t allowed. Sorry, I’ve said, for brutal honesty
or lack of candor. Don’t ever write truth,
one child commanded; another said, Jesus,
just say it! Sorry, I said, to each. On days I lose myself
in art, I imagine I won’t apologize again, especially
not for dark views, insomnia, spiritual devotions.
Maybe not even for obsession with people’s geology.
Vuillard’s painting is languorous in wild fennel
and mustard, nature mingling with human form
as though we coexist. I live with longing. To all
who have left: I am sorry! Yet not for desire.
Lisa C. Krueger is the author of four poetry collections published by Red Hen Press: Rebloom (2005), animals the size of dreams (2009), Talisman (2014), and Run Away to the Yard (2017). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, and Nimrod.
MANY SAVAGE THINGS BY John McCarthy
1. Dear Jeremy
Let me tell you how the arms I used to hold out to you
Became wild rye, windflower, copper-shouldered sedge
Reaching for the obese and confident sun of Illinois.
They became sawtooth, sunflower, aster, and coneflower
Growing stiff and erect and lolling with the wind.
They became every other flower, and all of the light
My mouth desires to speak. I wish I could tell you how
It happened. How everything I wanted to say to you
Was like a jar full of lightning bugs that a child caught,
Took to the cellar and forgot about. I suppose
That’s how desire wanes.
2. Dear The Broken From Whence You Came
Most days, it feels like I’m one bad feeling away
From turning into winter. It feels like I’m just waiting
For the ground to freeze, so I can yearn for the thaw
To come. It’s easier than having control. Somewhere,
The hunter is setting up his hunting blind. Cockleburs
Are rubbing off on his jeans. The hunter is kneeling.
His breath is like a boiling pot of water thrown into the air.
The air is a double-digit degree in the negative.
He takes aim. Inhales. Exhales and shoots. The deer
Is a beautiful animal, Jeremy. Just last night,
I saw an injured doe and its two fawns limp across my yard
Into the dead trees. But the shot buck is a sacrifice
Many of us will not understand. The hunter hoists his body
Onto a hook in the field. He takes his carving knife
And starts with the rectum. He pulls the skin away –
All that bright muscle once twitching like wildflowers.
The hunter hacks the legs off at the knee,
chucking shin and hoof into a bucket like broken hammers.
3. Dear Driving Two-Lanes In A Whiteout
Sometimes, when I’m between Murphysboro
And Springfield, white-knuckling the steering wheel,
I change what I believe in so I can get home safely.
It’s a relief, pulling into the driveway, kicking your boots
Against the doorstep, stamping the snow off. Sometimes
I sleep so long that I wake up to the fledgling green
Sprouting and the birdcalls that sound like sunlight
Falling through glass. Photosynthesis. What we love
Is always this close to coming back to life.
4. Dear Tornado-Wrecked And Still-Thirsty
The fields exhaust themselves out to the horizon.
The horizon boils over with thunder, and these new storms
Bend a town into hopelessness. I’ve seen hopelessness fall
Down a dry well so deep it became a new kind of hope.
It was like resilience but more rabid and bloodshot.
It was a man and a woman on Medicaid. It was their son –
That’s me, Jeremy – perched at the tavern trying
To enhance that hope, thinking that same fever dream
I’ve had since seventh grade where, maybe, if I stay up all night
And make it that late, everything I can’t articulate will come back
To me. That includes you, Jeremy. It includes the oxeyes,
The foxgloves, and the tickseed. Those plants that look like prayers.
Every prayer I’ve ever said has fallen apart. Has withered
Like every town’s population around here.
5. Dear The Memory I Keep Inventing An Image For
Abandoned tractors. The door open and the leather seat
Slashed open like a dead animal. This is where you slept,
Jeremy. I didn’t find you, but I keep finding you here –
In my skull. And every time I have the memory
There’s a new hole in my head that the sun pours into
And makes everything hot. I can’t handle it.
Here’s the burnt spoon. There’s the needle. The bicep knot
I watched you make once. There’s your purple vein.
The one your girlfriend always traced with her fingernail.
And this is where it gets dark. Your head dropping
And giving way to the chemistry that memory is made of.
The tractor sticks like tiny limbs made of peeling rust.
The wind passing through your open mouth, trying
To take the light in and which took too much.
Black-eyed Susans. Purple weeds colored like bruises.
6. Dear This Bruised Landscape
Abandoned oil-tank batteries litter the county roads
Between I-70 and I-64 like some bucolic gesture
Toward heaven. Their gravel lots make of them
A scrap metal peninsula. There are nights now
Where boys climb the catwalks of the oil-tank batteries,
And the catwalks shake like a rope pulled too taut.
Their faces are full of light. Full of smoke. A chorus
Of trespassing and dare. A harmony of chucked bottles.
7. Dear The Desperation From Which The Desperate Still Pray
Fly dumped boxsprings litter furrows and run-off ditches.
Switchgrass conceals them like a torn curtain.
Driving fast enough, and it all looks like a tipped over trailer.
Then there is the big bluestem. Little bluestem. Stiff goldenrod.
I have the desire to never leave, fall in love with sleep,
And stay inside forever, Jeremy. I get it. The desire
For winter and the desire for everything I have ever loved
To be in one large open room. How we don’t even know
Anymore what we loved. We were all wandering spirits
No one could see from the beginning. Outside of Chicago,
The rest of Illinois is a belief. You either don’t believe,
Or you hope that it is there for your own sake. Whatever.
Jeremy, you are all the people running through me.
Their footprints stomped into my snow-barren body.
Every time I think of you, Jeremy, it’s just to remind myself
That you have to leave again. It’s natural. Everything
Mixing back with the dirt. The following season’s pollination.
All of the stars overhead. Every day that happens again.
May everything happen every day again. Maybe next time
with joy.
John McCarthy is the author of Scared Violent Like Horses (Milkweed Editions, 2019). His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Copper Nickel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sycamore Review, and Zone 3.
TRUE LOSS BY Emily Yaremchuk
”Character is who you are when no one is watching.”
– Poster in a Catholic school bathroom
It takes you
somewhere else.
The school darkroom,
Byzantium.
Mostly the girls’ bathroom
with its poster of the lashed eye.
Neutral big sister, her
whip of blood
idling in yolk. She watches over
female things,
the rolling up
of uniform skirts, the bulimic’s
rushing taps. She advises:
good sex blacks you out completely,
pregnancy makes
chocolate cake
taste like nosebleed. Don’t
hurt yourself with the cotton, girls.
You are being watched and
this is it;
a series
of small deaths.
Who else is looking up
during prayer? Facing
the plaster wall knowing
who has chipped it
or gouged
with a lip-
pink fingernail? She is
exhausted by coherence. Let
there be none.
FLORENCE BY Emily Yaremchuk
The fountain has contracted that musk;
winter forgetting its purpose again.
Bright and sour with coins.
The nightly drafts of Heineken
poured in by the lonely people.
Understand, taxpayers demanded
lotuses but can’t cope
with their stupid, dilating pink.
The heads suffer heartbreak after opening
so readily to everyone,
die and look artificial,
crook-necked and wired
to the bottom of the pond.
Know what is real? Seems you do.
Like finches won’t bathe in the cold,
too sensible, concealing
the wet palindrome of their edible hearts.
A delicacy too brief for memory – paused,
tapping the marble for seed.
So sure something must come of it.
Emily Yaremchuk has published poetry and prose in The Ruckus, The London Times Literary Supplement, The Turnip Truck(s), and Virginia Literary Review.
INSIDE BY Lynn Domina
My friend says heroin smothers
bad thoughts,
so I say bad thoughts
like why does it rain
so many Saturdays or like
I wish my shabby neighbor
and every one of his yapping dogs
would drown in a raging
muddy torrent together and be buried
together in one heaping putrid grave.
My friend says the first one
and so I think
about rain clouds gathering
close like the quilt your grandmother
stitched the first year of her long marriage
folded at the foot of your bed, its border
faded, fraying, but the silhouettes
of rabbits and cats still visible in its square‑inch squares,
rain clouds fading gray to white or shading
into black, rain that keeps you
inside warm, nostalgic, reading
a long novel, The Brothers
Karamazov or The Old Curiosity Shop, thinking
how rain heralds
new seasons, spring
into summer, fall into winter, not every change pleasant
but pleasant enough for you’re still
here aren’t you buttoning your flannel shirt,
black watch plaid, narrow cuffs, banded collar –
why does a shirt make you feel so good? –
you’re here watching rain
meander down your window, curving
as streams curve toward an easier way, its tap,
tap reminiscent of some song
you learned years earlier to help you
remember colors, how vibrant the purple, blue, yellow
became once you learned their names, indigo,
how you liked saying it, indigo.
Your mouth vibrated with vowels,
shimmering like the green and scarlet
leaves do now through this watery
weather that could be so
discouraging, so irritating, but isn’t, isn’t. It keeps you
here inside where you’ve always wanted to stay.
Lynn Domina is the author of two books, Corporal Works (Four Way, 1995) and Framed in Silence (Main Street Rag, 2011). Her poems have appeared in The Saint Ann’s Review, The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, Saranac Review, New Letters, and Nimrod.
WHAT I SHOUTED AND YOU SHOUTED BY Marjorie Saiser
That’s enough, nothing has changed
or it has changed all it can.
The sky is going to be a sky color
and the moon is going to show up
in some kind of washed-out curve.
All the particulars
and the echo of that slap –
these have morphed us.
We have only walls, rugs, window.
The singing has left my body,
that crooked tree
where the singing had wanted to live.
Marjorie Saiser is the author of Learning to Swim (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2019), a hybrid of poetry and memoir. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Bosque, Poetry East, and Water-Stone Review.
NATURAL SELECTIONS BY Bruce Cohen
The meat counter guy asks if he can help me.
I tell him I’m still deciding.
By the time I get home I fret over the realization my reusable bag is still empty.
I order an array of selected cuts
Of Prime Beef from Amazon “Extra Prime”
& receive my shipment a day before I think of ordering it.
What kind of human doodles
In the margins during a planning meeting with the funeral director?
I’m proficiently stuck on three-dimensional cubes
& cartoonish profiles of people who’ll never exist.
I’m regretting the fact I didn’t order any cube steaks.
I swing by the Spirit shop. Bordeaux goes perfectly with red meat.
Each bottle – each time – tastes entirely different.
Is it me or the wine that changes?
Think of it as an out of context police report.
Think of a story that starts in the middle.
There is not even the slightest indication
The world is designed to make any of us feel unbutchered.
When I was a kid, you could drag your broken refrigerator
Out to the curb & not have to unhinge the door.
Only a handful of milk carton children suffocated.
And yet, now, when I see this photo of my son holding
My grandson I thought I’d experienced every form of love.
Danger & hope comingles. That dichotomy is not
Contained in dialogue but in the unsaid between the thoughts.
A missionary, I knock on doors, hand out agnostic pamphlets
& ask what does it mean to be human,
Looking for converts. It’s delicate as dry-kissing
Someone’s purplish swollen eye.
The conceptual exhibit
Is an array of several days of uncollected newspapers
On a papier mâché lawn.
Inside my house, on the end table, a pair of unmagnified
Reading glasses. My old man, a New York Giants baseball
Fanatic, despised, I mean really, really hated,
The Brooklyn Dodgers,
But after the car accident when Roy Campanella was pushed out
To the Polo Grounds Home Plate in his wheelchair
In a pre-game ceremony my father stood & applauded
& wept & head-signaled for me to be a man too
Because our apartment didn’t have an elevator.
There are connections one must make in life.
Sometimes you could hear the anti-mosaic
Thunderclap of a dinner plate against the neighbor’s wall.
Sometimes the game on the radio drowned out the cursing.
As De Niro said in my favorite movie, Raging Bull,
“You cook a steak too long it defeats its own purpose.”
This was not ketchup but real blood.
Or the myth: it’s not blood; it’s only ketchup.
What does it mean to be human?
That blood should remain inside the body?
And what about love?
What if everyone everywhere only walked in single file?
Someday I hope to open a hotel where guests
Have to bring their own pillows.
I feel repulsed at the unsanitary compulsion of shoppers
Auditioning hats & facial expressions in department store
Mirrors. In the dressing room, a sign reads:
NO TRYING ON BATHING SUITS.
How is anyone supposed to know what fits our naked bodies?
Between Phys Ed & Homeroom the cool boys huddled
In the lavatory taking a ruler to their penises.
After what happened nobody who knew wanted to live there.
While some women would never think of leaving
Their apartments without lipstick,
Now we must avoid dusk & dawn
Because mosquitos are carrying
Some new strain of deadly bacteria
& it won’t be safe again until there’s a killing frost.
The world will not be safe until all the doors are unhinged.
Life is just a little off-centered, like an ice cream
Truck jingle in the middle of a blizzard.
There are times you can block out an entire galaxy
With only your index finger & a blink.
HOW MANY DAYS CAN A CAMEL SURVIVE WITHOUT WATER? BY Bruce Cohen
Fill a plastic bag with water. Tap or filtered doesn’t matter.
Secure it in a freezer.
Now, take that oddly formed ice
& smash it on a concrete retaining wall.
Scoop up the fragments.
Inevitably, some shards will be too small to recapture
& there must be some microscopic melting.
Refill the bag with the ice & allow it to melt.
It would, with a pinch of salt, resemble a lifetime
Accumulation of tears, some even joyful.
Now, refreeze it. Repeat the smashing & thawing & freezing.
Occasionally use the ice to reduce swelling.
Evenings, chip off a piece
So you can enjoy your nightcap: two fingers of scotch on the rocks.
Over time, naturally, the shrinking ice
Will become smaller until it is so insignificant
It simply evaporates, is no more.
You might think this is the perfect metaphor.
Bruce Cohen is the author of Imminent Disappearances, Impossible Numbers & Panoramic X‑Rays (New Issues Press, 2016). His poems have appeared in AGNI, The Antioch Review, The New Yorker, North American Review, and The Southern Review. His poem “Human Traffic,” which originally appeared in AQR, was reprinted in the 2020 Pushcart Prize anthology.
WISHBONE BY Carey Salerno
– after Lorna Simpson’s III (Three Wishbones in a Wood Box), 1994
–dedicated to Monica A. Hand
Black wishbone white wishbone
Which wishbone bone
My wishbone
None my wishbone
Open me and find blackbone below the deep red pool
Open me and find the dark intention
Open me and find the ghost my father carries
Gnawing at the bone white Black bone
Which bone is my bone
White bone We all bleed We all white bone
Open me and find my father scrubbing black
from these bones
Open me and find him straining
his body into the brush bristles
He makes an art project of his daughter his blank canvas
his blank bone
Open me and see where he pours in the bleach bone
Which bone is my bone
No bone is my bone
Black wishbone Black wish Black wish the
wishbone the white wishbone
The white bone Wishbone Open
me and see I have both breastbones
Open me and see I own black and white I made
Both wishbones Wish and bone I am
the wishmaker and one who hears the wish
All the wishes in these bones
My wishes in these bones My bones
No, not my bones, my father force-feeding me the bones
He said clean them with your tongue He showed me
The way to white wash our bones To
keep them family bones To quicklime thought
The bones in a box in my hands stored in the closet
For my children to be taken out to show
Not for splitting these bones and only for us to split
these bones. The story of the bones
Black and white. The story of wishbone.
Tell the wish without pulling apart the bone
They say Hold black wishbone and white wishbone
One in each hand
Place them behind the back and ask which bone
The answer is both bones The answer is no bones
Your answer is the answer
Always the answer for years the answer all answers that answer
White bone Black bone I tell you your wish
before you break
SICK HORSE by Carey Salerno
Girls, you can bring that horse to water –
sick horse, desert-mouth horse,
painted horse to slick sedimentary rock.
Bring that horse to water, you can girl –
horse bit-grinding
horse you really gotta drag
red stencil, skinny-ass horse.
That horse to the water, bring him.
Girls when it lie down there that
belly on the bank
don’t forget to praise
to stroke the hoary mane
and coo at him
sweetly pray his name.
Don’t forget to praise who made this horse
And made for you the walk
And made for you the bridle
And made for you the cracked earth in want of water
And made for you this river
And made for you this labor
Yank on that bridle, Bitch, yank it
Yank that horse and force its head down
Prove you cannot make a man drink
Carey Salerno is the author of the poetry collection Shelter (Alice James Books, 2009) and co‑editor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry (Alice James Books, 2013).
BEFORE THE WOLF MOON by Brendan Galvin
Are you early or late? That’s
what my father used to ask
when I dragged myself home sticky
and oiled from spraying roads
with asphalt, and it’s what I want
to ask a yellow-throated warbler
as rain on my woodpile tarps
thickens to ice.
If it snows
again tonight the cardinal’s
suit of flame won’t even warm
imagination, but I’ll rise early
tomorrow and hang a chunk of suet
for that yellow-throated one
who’s lighter and more fleeting
than my pocket change
and too far north to be delving
into pinecones for sustenance.
Come January, the locals will be
vocalizing in tangles of underbrush
and scrambling their flocks
like winged ampersands against the raptors
and this yellow-throated southerner
will amount to a single week logged into
a field manual a half-century old.
Brendan Galvin is the author of 18 collections of poems, including Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965–2005 (LSU Press, 2005), a finalist for the National Book Award; The Air’s Accomplices (LSU Press, 2015); and Egg Island Almanac (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017). A new collection, Partway to Geophany, is forthcoming from LSU Press in Fall 2020.
TWO COYOTES APPEAR TO ME IN THE EMPTY PARKING LOT OF MIX 92.9 by Joanna Currey
and I stop my car
in the street, no cars
behind me in Berry Hill
this late. One runs off
into shadow, the other
stares, tense, amber eyes
opaque above the dull
stretch of asphalt
and painted lines. I stare back
through the passenger window.
Rising high over the brick
studio building, a vertical
latticework of steel
hung with dish, satellite,
and centipede-shaped
antennas. Under big
incandescent lights,
splayed iterations
of the radio tower’s shadow
reach across the empty lot
like some divine hand
revealed in the negation.
My radio squeals faintly
as always, patterns of static
and oscillating frequencies,
the occasional voice
resounding as a preacher
leaking through
from another station.
I wonder whose trash
the coyote has raided,
whose pets it might have killed
and eaten. My headlights
beam down the vacant street,
edged in the thick air.
Our mutual watching
edged in the thick quiet.
The other coyote hasn’t returned.
This one must feel some desire
stronger than that reflex to run,
exposed, solitary as it is.
Maybe it, too, is waiting
to see what happens next.
But nothing is happening.
No one is coming.
Joanna Currey’s poems have appeared in Nimrod and Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry.
ON MARRIAGE AND AMERICAN COOTS by Charlotte Pence
The flock of ducks no one brought inside the house
were inside the house nonetheless. The husband knitted
his dirty socks for a net to cast over them. I stood
on the mahogany table of our past dinner
fights and used my new-found height to correct.
They were not ducks, but mud hens. American Coots
that could not fly without a running-war head-start.
I shouldn’t call it a flock, the husband answered. The term
is a raft. So, the raft nibbled at algae lacing the floor
with their white beaks and ghosts of insults. This was
the lake house of disappointments: Sunday feasts of salt,
anchored eyes, beer and live bait. We were taught not
to speak if it weren’t kind, so we succeeded most days
into stitching our mouths closed. A line would catch,
hook the cheek up or down, smile or frown. The husband
suggested hunters could solve our problems, yet no one
wanted the coots: their meat a tough entrée. So, he placed
the knife by the moon. I paced the lily pad placemats.
The fork made a fine tine of tunes. The goblets served
as pools for our raft, our life, our love that no one wanted
yet could not shoo away.
Charlotte Pence is the author of the poetry collection Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and two poetry chapbooks: The Branches, The Axe, The Missing (Black Lawrence Press, 2012) and Weaves A Clear Night: A Poem In Seventeen Sections (Flying Trout Press, 2011).
Dowser by Samuel Green
– for Fred Adams
We expected someone a bit exotic,
brooding, with a face like a lake
reflecting clouds. What we got
was a neighbor in green plaid
work shirt, faded ball cap
& patched jeans, who brought nothing
with him but a freshly honed knife,
with which he cut the crotch
of a young maple at our clearing’s edge,
trimming until he had the stem
& arms of an upper case Y. It had to be
slim enough to flex, he said, it wouldn’t bend
so much as twist. He gripped one arm
of the Y in each fist, thumbs toward his chest,
the slight curve of the stem pointing a little
up & out, & then meandered through
what would become our orchard
in a few more years, turning at the hips,
scribing an arc in the air north to south, until
the rod began to twitch & tugged itself down
at a clump of saw grass. He saw my look
of doubt, & offered to let me try,
kept one arm of the stick in his right
hand while I held the left, & backed up.
When we stepped forward, I willed it
not to bend, but though I fought to keep my fist
straight, I felt the bark break & the fibers
twist against my skin as the wand tugged
& wrenched itself down toward the grass
again. Our neighbor took out his knife,
sharpened the stem, & stuck it as a marker
into the grass. You’ll find good water
at a hundred & twenty-eight feet. Doesn’t matter
if you drill or not. It’s there. He said there’d be no
charge & left to return to his chores, leaving us
to think how somewhere below
was an aquifer, a fickle lens of water,
how the driller charged by the foot,
dry well or wet, how all we had was
choice & our unrelenting thirst.
Samuel Green is the author of three poetry collections: The Grace of Necessity (2008), All That Might Be Done (2014), and Disturbing the Light (2020), all from Carnegie Mellon University Press. His recent poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Ireland Review, and American Life in Poetry.
STREET CORNER MARKET, PHILADELPHIA by Amy Alvarez
I spot the gold fruit piled high in green paper baskets,
can’t help the oooo that comes as I reach toward them.
The mumu-ed woman who stands in front of me turns
saying The smell brings me back to Virginia. High yellow,
plum-round, she tells me fields her granddaddy owned,
sold, meadows she girled through. We talk counties –
Carolina, Henrico – we talk tobacco, sunflower seed, we
speak of what hung in those orchards. Though I’ve only
known that land through car windows on visits to kin,
and my orchards were city parks, mulberries fermenting
on concrete, something in me understands the honey of child
in field. She says I was home today, watching TV and craving some
sweet, some fresh, you know? We dare one another to bite into
our bounty before parting. Our teeth score skin, juice races
rivulets toward elbows. We give ourselves over to sweet.
Amy Alvarez’s poems have appeared in Sugar House Review, Rattle, and The New Guard Review.
SUMMER IMPERATIVE by Michael McGriff
The dead subtract themselves from the noon air, dark
integers of nothing from nothing. And nothing on the wind.
My father’s hands hold a race to see which can out-age
the other. The scrub larch fills with crows placing bets.
Even the drainwater turns its back to me. I offer a carrot
to an empty field. Tall firs deepsway, but the air is still.
As for the deer, when the wind dies down
I hear them gather at the millpond and lower
their soft heads to the unraveled bolts of water.
At the back of every summer is a deeper summer
playing Variations on My Mother’s Voice: Get outside:
Stay hid: Don’t scream unless something’s broken:
I gave you that bag of turkey feathers
so you could sit still and admire the wind.
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE RAIN by Michael McGriff
We’re stuck inside, and mother tells us the story of Abraham.
Against the sky, a black sheet writhing in its trace chains.
She sent me down the road to find a stick and carve
our family name in the red clay above the flooded ditch.
How easily the ferns pull from the ground. I raise a root wad
to my face. My sister holds a salamander above her open mouth.
Like a suit in a coffin, the road will be gone with the tide.
A good day to oil the tools and drag a file across their teeth.
I push a plastic knife into my mother’s side. The blade retracts
into its handle – I won it by tossing a penny into a floating dish.
When it rains at night, Abraham’s voice fills the stone well,
just as a black ribbon in a photograph can never be unbound.
Michael McGriff’s poetry collections include Early Hour (2017) and Home Burial (2012), both published with Copper Canyon Press, and Dismantling the Hills (University of Pitsburgh Press, 2008). He is also the co‑author, with J. M. Tyree, of the linked story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies (A Strange Object, 2014).
COWS RETURNING FROM PASTURE by Judith Harris
In the billowing twilight,
the moon is like a trough
of frothy, white light,
where all day, the cows
had been grazing, their heads
bowed down, hay needles
and dew stuck to their faces,
as they stumble back uphill
with girths rib-etched,
and necks wound with metal bells
clobbering as they make their way
up the gravel path to the barn
as if they were priests
jostling chains on their belts,
entering the tomb of the sacristy.
Judith Harris’s poetry collections include Night Garden (Tiger Bark Press, 2013), The Bad Secret (LSU Press, 2006), and Atonement (LSU Press, 2000). Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, Atlantic, Narrative, The Southern Review, and The American Scholar.
KESSLERS’ WAREHOUSE by John Bargowski
Before they’d load it up
with a shipment of caskets
for a parlor showroom, they’d park
the flatbed on our street
in front of Kessler’s driveway,
the big rig idling until
the overhead door was thrown
open for the forklift
that carried the finished coffins
to the curb,
the sudden rush of fresh varnish
sucked out from the shop
strong enough to dizzy us
for a second or two
as we stopped our sidewalk games
and watched them pass.
Some so long and wide we bet
they could hold a horse
of a man like Silent Bill –
our friend’s father who’d left
his soul on some jungled atoll
during the Big One.
Others the right size for a kid
brother, or sister maybe,
who’d drowned trying to swim
across the river,
or slipped climbing the cliffs
along Mountain Road.
Once a doll-sized box
in the sawdust-flecked arms
of a finisher, who wrapped it
in a quilted spread
and lowered it into the space
behind the driver’s seat
for the trip over the Skyway
to the other side of the state.
John Bargowski is the author of the poetry collection Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway (Bordighera Press, 2012). His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, New Letters, and Poetry.
MOM-IN-A-BOX by Elaine Terranova
I place my mother into a box, white cardboard for instance as if for takeout Chinese. She’s packed away like dime store dolls we sent to displaced children in camps after the war when I was in third grade, along with little accoutrements, toy tea sets and dollhouse furniture. They nestled like Pharaohs traveling with their grave goods into eternity, dogs and jewels they had in life. My mother didn’t want to stay but I made her, folding her arms across her chest and tucking in her apron. I threaded through a thin wire with space for my four fingers so she could be picked up and carried away.
Elaine Terranova seventh poetry collections of poetry including Perdido (Grid Books, 2018). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Laurel Review, and Hotel Amerika.
UPON READING THAT A SOLDIER
WHO SURVIVES AN IED EXPLOSION
GOES THROUGH A FIVE-PART
STATUS CHECK UPON AWAKENING,
THE FIVE PARTS BEING SENTIENCE,
ARMS, LEGS, RIFLE, AND GENITALS by John Hodgen
Somewhere in the darkness someone simply surmises,
raises the scrim of his lizard eyelids on some new Taliban,
Boko Haram, or putative ISIS, some incipient, twisted Desiderata,
some next-generation Mohammad Atta, eyes as dark as anthracite,
as hate that shines, that chases light, that terrorizes in a thousand
towers of flames, a thousand falling planes, a vision that crystallizes
in a way a cobra in a basket waits a thousand days, surprises
its handler before the flute begins to play, how that catechizes,
unifies us around the newest bomb squad member, not the hurt
locker kid who shoots Budweisers all night long, but one
more disciplined in ordnance disposal, more familiar with disguises,
whose hand never trembles as he devises which of the snaked,
coiled and colored wires he splices will be his ticket to stay
in this world he’s come to love, that he prizes over everything,
even the sacred turtle that holds up the world and all that it comprises,
the world that leans out like a bulbous orchid just for him,
he the new Orchises, his balls dangling like Balzac’s over a garden
of FISA warrants and lethal enterprises, of ever new and improved
improvised explosive devices, of endless human sacrifices,
of the blood-red-snake-eyes moon that always rises.
John Hodgen is the author of Heaven & Earth Holding Company (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), Bread Without Sorrow (Lynx House Press, 2002) and In My Father’s House (Bluestem Press, 1993).
FIVE YEARS AGO TODAY by Katherine Lo
My boyfriend’s wife died. Brain
cancer. Of course, he was not
my boyfriend then. He was her
husband, pushing through nights
of constant waking to shoulder
her shuffling weight to the bathroom
only to find it was a false alarm.
Then the shuffle back, the settling,
until the next waking and the next.
Each time her body signaling urgent
need. One night, in the small dark
hours, he said, Just pee the bed.
Ghost moment that now haunts
him, like the night my mother lay
in bed, tears pooling in her ears,
the tumors growing in her bones
unbearable. I kissed her forehead,
said, I don’t know what to do, and left.
What we’re left with, when it’s over,
is this knowing. The little cruelties
of failure. The hard line of limitation.
Their boat caught in a swift current,
our hand, torn raw, letting go of the rope.
Katherine Lo’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Poet Lore, CALYX, and Tahoma Literary Review.
YUKON INSOMNIA FILE by Jamella Hagen
Even with the curtains pulled
all the way to the desperate edges of the windows, even
with the old green sheet hung behind them, the light
gets in. I check the clock and later the official time
of sunrise: 3:29 am. The exact minute I turned
my head to the faint digital glow.
Did a bird chirp, a squirrel backflip
off the fence to signal sunup, or does our body
just know? When we look at the bright sky
and don’t see a faint trace of aurora, stars,
memories we stuffed in winter’s purse
and forgot about, do they still register
in some sense, like figures
in overexposed photographs?
Light obscures as much as darkness.
Some creatures wait for one, others
the reverse. I still remember my slam dunk
heart on the highway when I learned moose
emerge at dusk – Joyce hunting under
her seat for a camera as the cow blinked
great lashes toward the windshield –
the two of us twenty-two, high on
our ability to drive a stick shift pickup
as far as the road would take us.
THE ASTRONOMER by Jamella Hagen
He lifts a glass, brandy dark
as cheap shelving from 1975.
He was drunk then, too
and made mistakes his grown children
don’t remember – they were that bad.
Frankly, the boys don’t remember
years at a time; there are gaps
in their collective recollections they know
may shed light on their own
misplaced comments, fractured Corningware.
But who wants to drag those moments out
like chewed furs from under the bed
lousy with mothballs and mold.
Much better to turn, take a mouthful
of barbecued chicken, listen to the wind
brush across the bough of a cedar
like a parent’s hand across a toddler’s brow.
Through the closed living room window, a meteor
or maybe a slip of the mind.
Jamella Hagen is the author of the poetry collection Kerosene (Nightwood Editions, 2011). Her poems have appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Antigonish Review, Grain Magazine, The Malahat Review, and CALYX.
ANHEDONIA by Heather Treseler
What, now, to pair with bread? After you died,
I could not think of what to eat: riddling illogic
to every flavor, a revulsion to the idea of taste
or savor in the bitter winter after the coroner
ratified, with sterling knife, you hadn’t meant
to die. ‘No conclusive evidence of self-harm,’
his voice procedural, calm. Still, it seemed you
made a deliberate gift of the shriven sunken
lake of your bluing body, your mermaid legs
that had not moved for twenty years, the steel
rods that held your spine upright. Sacrifice,
pyre: when they slid you from table to fire,
giving you back to vapor and ash, flame took
the hennaed auburn hair where I had always
buried my face: your body, your bread pared
from me, unpaired. And I stood there naked,
raw for shelter: each woman’s house built
on the long bones and breath of her mother.
Heather Treseler’s poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, PN Review, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, and Southern Humanities Review.
SUBSTANCE AND ACCIDENT by Margaret Ray
The blood had already dried and the crowd
was starting to disperse by the time someone came
to collect the body of the dead alligator
that had plodded out into one of Alachua county’s
busiest intersections an hour before. There it was.
Biggest one in years, people were saying,
shaking their heads or leading small girl-children away,
letting the boys gape a little longer,
because in central Florida this
is how it’s done. Animal Control
monitors the swamp-puddle of a reedy pond
a block from downtown, relocating
the occasional gator that manages
to survive in the fuzzy water long enough
to grow bigger than a few feet, but this one
must have hidden out for years, breaking
the surface only with its marble eyes and nostrils.
Let’s not speculate about what
might make a six-foot aquatic lizard suddenly
haul itself right out into the open after
so much growth below the muck.
Let’s not linger on the image of the skull,
flattened and leaking on the road after
the Honda’s driver either didn’t see it, or did.
Oil and gore, pooling in patches on the cement.
It would go viral, surely, with the right image
of only the tail sticking out, wet-leather-black-green,
from behind the traffic cones. It had taken several adults
to drag it out of the intersection by the tail
while we waited for Animal Control, a streaked stain
marking our efforts. I was sweating
as much as everyone else,
everyone looking in the same direction,
or looking away on purpose. This is the same world
it’s always been, where lumbering monsters
emerge after years of silence
to take up space and give us pause.
We gaze at their bodies and wander away
to buy groceries, which is fine. I am not talking
about myths or human impact. Not about
identifying with an ancient predator
that gapes among us. Not about sympathy
or symbolism. I am talking about disorientation.
About pausing on the hot sidewalk
to look at the ruined body. About spectacle.
You can look, or you can look away, and who am I
to tell you what to do with the bodies
of your monsters? You can leave them on the road
and walk home without having taken a single photo.
You can wash your hands. You can make dinner.
THE CLEARING by Margaret Ray
I treat happiness
like the half-tamed deer I have coaxed
into a clearing and want only
to be near –
If I look right at it,
it will spook and disappear.
Instead I have to look studiously
away, offering my mind permission to marvel
only out of the furthest
corner of my eye.
If I reach out to it with a handful
of something sweet,
it will smell a trap and start
away, flash of white tail
into the underbrush.
No sudden movements.
I only want
to look at you. Stay,
just long enough
to let me look at you in the fading light.
Margaret Ray’s poems have appeared in FIELD, The Gettysburg Review, Threepenny Review, American Literary Review, and Frontier Poetry.
REGIONAL ECHO by Colby Cotton
People will tell you a poem cannot be
a list of images, spilling itself out into a valley
at dusk. There has never been
a silver ball of fish floating above rapids,
flapping in unison,
spinning below a full moon,
and I’ve never owned horses
but have sometimes felt something large
moving through the pasture,
and pass through the skin
of the pond at night
as I stood there counting white tails to sleep.
All morning I accomplished nothing
but incorrect images, and watched for hours
the spike of aloe fail
to grow towards the tomato vines
as my breath scrawled the early air
and truckers pushed off towards Burlington,
Raleigh, Clinton. All to say,
Every thing living dies
but I’ve seen a river dry and reappear
on the cold banks of my hometown.
Even while I am here
I am not here.
Colby Cotton’s poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, and Washington Square Review.
THE STEADFAST TIN SOLDIER by Margaret MacKinnon
After a story by Hans Christian Andersen
Why do we judge the story by the way
it ends? Here, remembering only
the final scene: the tin soldier’s melted heart,
charred spangle from the dancer’s gauzy
dress. An ashy, sentimental mess –
but what interests me is the way
we walk this world before we know
our end: not the time, before she died,
when my mother’s skin was so thin
it tore – but that other, younger girl,
all bright dreams and hope, who posed
for a photo leaning on the pillar
of her mother’s porch, looking out
toward what none of us can quite see.
So consider, instead, the middle
of the tale, that brief voyage
when the tin soldier sails his soggy
craft, sliding down through a tunnel
toward the hard sea –
the not-yet-known belly of a fish.
He recalls each hallway of the old house
he’s escaped, dark passageways paved
with rules, where the paper dancer
may have loved him too –
and halfway there, drawn by currents
he cannot name, his own deep instincts,
some shard of love, he imagines
all that just might lie ahead:
a new home emerging, eager morning
opening to a white expanse of sky –
like whatever it was my mother might have seen –
how it is his own, how it was her own –
and may have been enough.
Margaret MacKinnon is the author of the poetry collection The Invented Child (Silverfish Review Press, 2013) and a chapbook, Naming the Natural World (The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, New England Review, Image, and The American Journal of Poetry.