POEMS
NOW by Maxine Scates
And then someone said,
She looks so much like her mother,
and I remembered how surprised I was
when I realized I looked more and more
like my own mother as we both grew older,
and when she lay dying,
she looked like her own mother,
gone long before her, come back to guide her,
show me how we dissolve one
into the other
leaving only a faint imprint
as she entered into no time as we know it,
but a consciousness I imagine
more like those moments late in the evening
when, if I close my eyes,
I rejoin the dream I was dreaming the night before
because I am tired, giving way,
trusting whatever tasks that hold me to know
when to let go until I wake into this world
once again. But when I say that I think
of the woman I often meet
out walking with her dog. A year
or so ago, she remembered
the town where she had gone to a shelter
to rescue him, but now
when she tries to tell the story she has told me
many times, she remembers the town is only
somewhere to the north and does not
remember she has met me before. Each time
we meet is for the first time. She is growing older
as is her dog, who hovers, watchful, her sentinel,
but I think she will outlive him
who brings her to the walk by the waters
of the slough each day
where everything, crows flying, the heron
standing on one leg, is now.
Maxine Scates is the author of four books of poetry, most recently My Wilderness (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Plume, and Poetry.
HINENI by Jehanne Dubrow
In the painting by Chagall, figures move
diffusely through the scene, as in the way
of light through glass. Red is the father.
A yellow burning is the boy, laid on a fog
of fire. So many questions here –
why Isaac winks at us, why two angels
hover like a mist of white and blue.
In the brown distance, someone is carrying
a cross, someone running from the ghetto
of a later time, the old world turned to blazing.
What I like about Chagall is that he sketches
the biblical beside the daily news.
In my tradition, we call this story the binding,
not perhaps because Isaac is bound
to an altar by his father’s daggered faith.
No, we’re tied by the ligature of history,
the purple wound it leaves. Here I am,
says Abraham, when he’s summoned to kill
his own son. Here I am, the cantor sings
on certain days in synagogue, and the room
stills with all it means to ask for mercy
from a great, unflinching power. Here I am,
I might say to the oily darkness at the edge
of this frame, these modern years
when what we are is hated. Meanwhile,
elsewhere in Chagall’s painting, a mother
reaches out to stop what can’t be stopped.
Her hands tear at the green shimmering of air.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Wild Kingdom (LSU Press, 2021), as well as three books of creative nonfiction. Her tenth book of poems, Civilians, will be published by LSU Press in Spring 2025.
AT THE END, THERE IS ALWAYS A HOUSE by Sara Eliza Johnson
These days I move from room to room looking for a thing to
haunt. The filaments inside my teeth glow in the dark,
thirty-two beacons no one will see, except the mirror I
return to again and again, hoping for it to swallow me, to
find anything there but my face. Mirror is another word for
hunger. Hunger is another word for dead. Anyone would be
tired of hearing from me, the kind of woman – this repulsive
word – who’ll never have a garden or greenhouse, only a
fridge crisper full of broccoli and kale and lettuce, all
rotting to sludge, bananas on the counter blackening like
frostbitten skin. I used to quarter an apple with such
perfection I could have been autopsying my own heart. The
thing is there’s no way out of this house. Memory circles
like flies. Even the dead need to eat. Even the dead dream. I
left a note in the memory: You deserve so much more than
desire.
CLOSE YOUR EYES by Sara Eliza Johnson
Remember sunlight tangling your hair as your little
hands pulled up the grass. Honey drizzling over bread.
The gooseberry you held between tooth and tongue,
then burst. The sky sparkling, like the surface of the
water when you’re swimming upward, almost out of
breath and starting to panic. You once held a buttercup
under your chin. After you fell, your healing knee
looked like a prismatic spring. And then the jellyfish
sting, how you screamed, coughed on a wave. The sea
tasted woundless. That’s all you remember. Now
you’re here. When you’re lonely enough, your shadow
leans against you, rests its head on your shoulder. No
matter which way you try to listen, you won’t hear it,
and it won’t hear you. You imagine its voice sounds
like volcanic ash swirling up from the ground. It
knows where the rest of you is buried. No one knows
the worst thing that has ever happened to you, not even
if you’ve told them.
Sara Eliza Johnson is the author of two poetry collections, Bone Map (2014) and Vapor (2022), both published by Milkweed Editions. Her poems and essays have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, New England Review, Boston Review, AGNI, and Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day.
MOUNT MADONNA’S LAST WHITE DEER by Jeanne Wagner
A shy and ghostly beauty once drew crowds
but is now destined to live, and die, alone.
– The San Jose Mercury News
You with your coat of no colors.
Like me, you’re one of those
who can’t blend.
Who’s born with the dangerous
absence of camouflage.
White doe, with no stripes or spots,
no savanna-gold pelt
to mimic the blessings of sun-shafts
or brown autumn grasses,
who refuses to call it hide
because you’re meant to bare it all:
the blank stare of your body,
a backdrop
for light’s rebounding waves.
I’d like to think it a proud rebuttal
of conformity.
But honestly, it’s only a lack
of pigmentation.
Incomplete unicorn, posing there
without that vestigial horn we love,
prodding the air.
Are you even conscious of being
an outlier, the way I was
those summers in a hot suburb,
baring my pale body poolside,
exposed in skin without its coppery tone,
without its proper armor.
Its amour propré.
I thought I’d failed, wrapped
as I was in a body
that always seemed wanting,
like this page
I write on now.
Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length poetry collections, including The Zen Piano Mover (NFSPS Press, 2004), In the Body of Our Lives (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2011), and Everything Turns into Something Else (Grayson Books, 2020). Her poems have appeared in North American Review, The Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review.
THE POPE’S CANARIES by Heather Treseler
Pope Pius XII led the Catholic Church during the tumult of
World War II, but his silence on the fate of the millions of
Jews killed during the Holocaust has clouded his legacy
with controversy.
– Smithsonian Magazine
It was the canaries he cared for.
He’d let them out at breakfast time,
open the cage door
and listen to the flit of cropped wings
fanning the air.
He loved their bodies, fletched
in pale yellow down.
Loved their nostrils, tiny punctures
above their beaks,
their scant breath bursting
into song.
He’d let them alight on his shoulders.
Feel their wings graze the skin
of his neck,
claws catching the sparse hair
threaded along his skull.
The skin over the mind always taut
because flesh is the prison of the soul
which longs to fly free.
His favorite canary, a white one
called Gretchen.
Did he name her after Faust’s lover
who dies in a prison cell,
another kind of cage?
Or was it their diminutive bodies he loved,
the way they said Guileless,
said Angel,
said Small Innocent Thing?
After The Pope at War by David Kertzer
HERON by Heather Treseler
Like a blue mime on the fashion
runway, oblivious to paparazzi,
she is intent on eddies of fish
swirling about her long legs
like skirts of chiffon. In Rome,
I saw a performance artist, his
body painted tin gray, seem so
much a statue he fooled pigeons.
Nature doesn’t ape history,
but performs the historical,
which is to say: the worn
grooves of instinctual life.
The artist bows meekly
for the tourist’s good
dollar; the heron snatches
the fat sun-dazed fish.
Heather Treseler is the author of the poetry collection Auguries & Divinations (Bauhan, 2024) and the chapbook Parturition (Southword, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, PN Review, The Irish Times, and The American Scholar.
MY FIRST AMERICAN SONNET by Margaret Galey
after Terrance Hayes
[I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison]
It’s just part of this prison we call home
this house set aflame by so many closed faces
& hunger & anger & more
I’ve taken more birds from the bone
than you know.
The dreams don’t stick these days, upon waking &
there is very little cheering going on in the bleachers.
As the crow flies I’ve seen better tries & locked
in the dank dark days
there wasn’t much left to say the shit-
dropping stars shine every which night & still
I stacked boxes of nothing worth saving
day after day & you
never said a thing .
Margaret Galey’s work has appeared in Hyperallergic, Midwest Review, The Southern Review, and Kenyon Review.
AT THE BIA OFFICE by Mistee St. Clair
I was in my twenties when my father took me
to apply for my BIA card, my certificate
of Indian blood. Like he was reclaiming me.
We spread out my library of identities: blood-
birth certificate, adoption papers, after-
birth certificate. All those old papers
creased and yellowing, an official sticker
barely hanging on. Proof, once, I was his.
ID’s: mine with a name that never really fit
and his with a name I had lost. I was nine
when he signed papers surrendering his rights to me
and for years we barely knew each other.
The forms ask Who is my father?
Who are my ancestors? How much blood?
And then later, I again proved my making
when I received our tribal ID. It has a picture
like a license and I told myself it’s a luggage tag
with his name and address, returning me to him.
Sometimes I get out those papers and rub my thumb
over the ridges of an embossed seal.
I have wanted to throw them all away.
It’s hard to remember what we needed to prove.
How long I believed I was misplaced, lost
between birth, rebirth, paperwork, and blood.
Mistee St. Clair’s poems have appeared in The Common, SWWIM Every Day, Northwest Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Cathexis Northwest Press.
SOCIAL SECURITY ASKS WHETHER I’VE EVER BEEN MARRIED by Jackie Craven
Yes, but only a little bit, so brief it’s easy
to dismiss, like when you drop a blueberry,
quickly snatch it up, and pretend
that nothing happened. Such a silly slip up
(blink and you’d miss it)
yet there’s my married name,
a tumble of s’s and t’s
cascading from church ledgers
and government files. It was the cost
of groceries messed us up,
late-night classes and tuition bills,
the in-laws messed us up, testosterone
messed us up, Mahler,
whiskey sours and the war,
everywhere mounds of laundry and
whispered phone calls, and why hold on
to a floppy wedding veil?
I gave the gown to a civic playhouse,
thought I’d moved on, but now
Social Security demands to know a name
I almost forgot, and that dress,
that ridiculous charmeuse dress,
steps center stage, a walking shadow
reciting Shakespeare –
What’s done
cannot be undone – Oh
my goodness, I’m wading barefoot in
blueberries,
so small, so indelible.
Jackie Craven is the author of Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2018) and two chapbooks, Our Lives Became Unmanageable (Omnidawn, 2016) and Cyborg Sister (Headmistress Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Massachusetts Review, Nimrod, and Ploughshares.
SHOPPING ON EBAY FOR LAIKA MEMORABILIA by Ciaran Berry
Into the search engine, I enter the five letters
of your name and wait for the image to appear –
a cigarette lighter that wears your face in
side profile and bas relief, as if you’re some
sort of canine commissar, staring towards
the Kármán line of the future.
On eBay I’m scrolling through your afterlife:
a trinket box, a clock, a paperweight,
a postage stamp from the Emirate of Ajman.
How far you are now, little barker, from
your Moscow street hustle, the apparatchiks
with the sausage meat and tape measure.
Far as we are from the sickle and hammer
and football tops emblazoned CCCP,
Oleg Blokhin, or Andriy Bal maybe, scoring
in minute thirty three against the Brazil
of Oscar and Sócrates.
Did they use a catchpole noose to entrap you?
Or did you come easily to their outstretched
hands, your tongue some fine grade
sandpaper against the first open palm
to offer food? Did you know, ever,
what was happening to you, strapped
to the vibrating table, or locked inside
a centrifuge and spun at ten times
the force of gravity? Then blasted
skyward from the Biakonur Cosmodrome
to celebrate the complex glories
of the revolution? Your capsule up near
the rocket’s nose looks, from here, like
an upended beer barrel – the one we stole
and rolled across three fields light years ago
but couldn’t pry open. Carlsberg, I think,
or maybe it was Heineken.
I could have this puff box for $160 plus postage
and packing, or this pin badge for $24.99.
A space dog postcard from 1985, or a copy
of Life with Belka and Strelka the cover stars
and your sad story somewhere on the inside.
Forgive me Laika, if I sentimentalize your plight,
which calls to mind Robert Frost in a long,
black Zim on his way to see Kruschev, and an outfit
near Santa Fe that, for a small fee, will blast
my ashes into space. Think outside the box,
it says on their web page. And still we wish to know
what you have to teach us about weightlessness.
We’re burdened, curious, for sure we are unsure
on this fraught planet, where my vision
begins to blur as I add to the watchlist
a commemorative coin from Mongolia, a set
of nesting dolls from Azerbaijan.
Ciaran Berry is the author of three poetry collections with The Gallery Press: The Sphere of Birds (2008), The Dead Zoo (2013), and Liner Notes (2018). His poems have appeared in AGNI, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, and The Georgia Review.
BELONGING by James Ciano
I have a Vons card
and a gym membership
and a flat white rectangle
that opened a door once
in Gallup, New Mexico.
The money Aunt Mary
sent in a Christmas card
was all fives. Every day
I don’t text her thank you
is another day I hate myself,
the hate like a really bad fire.
Not bad in the sense of
destructive, though that
too, but bad in that
the fire’s mostly smoke,
and nothing stays lit,
and nobody’s warm,
and everyone looks at you
like jeez, you can’t even
start a fire? Nothing seems
to want to belong more
than the smell of smoke in
the threads of a sweater.
I wish my email belonged less
on the Dick’s Sporting Goods
email list than it does.
Once, in an attempt to belong
to the committee of men
I broke another boy’s hand
with the eye of an axe. I knew
I was finally one when we all
began to laugh. And that silence
and the silence after that
are more loud to me now
than any blender full of
ice, any fender half fallen
and dragged across a lot.
A thought I keep having
is how not to fail everyone I love,
and in thinking the thought
knowing that I already have.
James Ciano’s poems have appeared in The Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, Bennington Review, and The Greensboro Review.
THE WATER BEARER by Yerra Sugarman
A gold necklace glittered on her collarbone and swayed to the
words of the French song she sang: Tu me fais tourner la tête – “You
make my head spin.” Three charms dangled from her glittering
chain and swayed too: a Cross; a Star of David; and the sign for
Aquarius, an androgynous figure pouring water from an urn,
“the water bearer” giving life to the world.
The pleasure I took in seeing these symbols together nuzzled my
spine and slid down the back of my legs.
I was eighteen the first time I watched Claudette lead our summer-
school choir. She was teaching us to sing in French when a star-
shaped longing spread over me. Its sharp points sliced my mind
and stabbed my belly. Eros.
Claudette’s Québécois with its nasal twang and her lilting mezzo-
soprano made a shawl of cashmere sound that wrapped around my
shoulders.
When she waved her right hand in front of us as if she were holding
a conductor’s baton, I thought the whole bundled warmth of July
polished her face.
Claudette had planned to become a nun. Although she never took
her final vows, she learned to tame her body, driving out the lust.
Maybe music cleared a path for her through the unruly woodlands
of desire.
“Eros,” the poet Anne Carson writes, is “an enemy,” an “experience
of pleasure and pain” which is “impossible to fight off.”
And there was Claudette with her three charms and her waving
hand and her singing and her French songs. And there I was, at the
mercy of them all, my body packed with its relentless hungers,
conjugating them into prayer.
Yerra Sugarman is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Aunt Bird (Four Way Books, 2022) and the chapbook From Her Lips Like Steam (Aureole Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in New England Review, The Los Angeles Review, Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, Bellevue Literary Review, and The Massachusetts Review.
TERRITORIAL WATERS by Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren
A plaque at the back
of one boathouse read
The Penthouse. Walls
soft as sailors’
gums, floorboards
collapsing into a slough.
Blue flags with white
stripes crossed
like the occasional road
hung from store eaves,
the pattern of the chain
link fences: a net
you’d cast at dawn.
The night we ferried
through Wrangell
Narrows, the motor
startled something
awake. I saw
he unlocked
screen door
in your chest
begin to swing.
Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, The Common, Words Without Borders, and Best New Poets.
THE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE’S WINTER SKY by Rachel Morgan
When the freeze freezes harder, the grocery store’s
entrance blooms with hyacinths, paperwhites,
and tulips, sprouting from planetary bulbs
in vases of water. At school pick up, my oldest
talks rapidly about outer space. The facts
are voluminous, hard to follow. The green comet –
visible tonight – the first time since Neanderthals –
Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, but a neutron star
is the speck of space held between fingertips.
Since middle school, only a few friends text her back.
She’s sunk behind screens, out of orbit. Stars are not
alive, but they have life cycles. Before bedtime,
I dramatically claim comet FOMO, so we drive out
of town, turn onto a frozen farm road – a line of gravel
and ice like the vaporous coma we scan the sky for.
She points out the north star – Polaris – Ursa Minor –
Orion’s belt. Her breath is a whip in the wind chill warning.
We don’t mention not seeing the comet – that was never
the point – just the embarrassing astonishment to have
a mother, a child, someone you love so badly, so terribly –
at times – you’d throw them into the sky just to save them.
Rachel Morgan is the author of the chapbook Honey & Blood, Blood & Honey (Final Thursday Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, and Hunger Mountain.
THE DOMESTIC SPHERE by Farah Peterson
I told my daughter she didn’t need to be afraid of the dark
this house being hers, it was all her darkness
This darkness all belongs to me? and I amended, well,
the darkness is ours, as it is our house.
She found this interesting but not as interesting as her fear, demonstrating
the claws her brother made sneaking up on her and telling me
ghosts were “in it” (she is afraid of ghosts). I said
this proved little because Maxime is not a ghost
and I also told her that she could choose not to be afraid.
But what interests and so takes her beyond herself
is actually not in her control even though she is only three and even though
the sphere of her darkness is almost contained to the domestic.
And then who am I to say what the darkness holds and what is in it
when what interests me most is also in this house and I had never known a fear
before the betrayal of the darkness of the womb and I had never known
a revelation
so terrible as what I have discovered in my own forgotten drawers.
Forget the world, forget the house, there is enough darkness right here in me
and enough interest to people every horror.
The most I can promise is that for as long as she wants me
I will hold her so close I can whisper these slogans
That this is her darkness, her very own, so close our shadows overlap
And also that I will not let go of her hand in this dark house.
Farah Peterson’s poetry has appeared in Salamander, Rattle, and The Florida Review. Her essays have also been published in The Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Magazine Writing 2021 (Columbia University Press, 2022).
VISITATION by Sharon Hashimoto
Twice a month, I meet my ex-wife
in the entryway of a green rambler
for the exchange. I never unzip
my jacket or bend to unlace
my tennis shoes though once I padded
barefoot through these halls.
Six years ago, how did we come together
at the intersections of bath and bed
and closet, bumping elbows
on the stairwell? How did we wake
one morning to find a trail of cereal flakes
to our toddler’s room, her milky frown
dribbling down the left side
of her chin? Our ribs ached
from holding our hiccupping breaths
inside while we kept the muscles
in our faces stern.
When did we start
to spend less time in one room,
one of us entering, the other exiting,
excusing one another’s touch,
our voices raised in half-heard shouts?
I’m home sounded the same as I’m going
if we said it at all. My daughter
told me how the birch tree we saw
through the living room’s picture window
lost a limb, the hole at the roots growing.
I grab her knapsack and gym bag.
Twisting the knob, I can tell
the house has settled – the door
sticks in the frame and squeals as I pull harder
to open and close it.
Sharon Hashimoto is the author of two poetry collections, The Crane Wife (Story Line Press, 2003, reprinted by Red Hen Press, 2021) and More American (Grid Books, 2022). Her short story collection, Stealing Home, is forthcoming from Grid Books.
THE AFTERLIFE by Michael Waters
When my mother died, I missed my father
Thirty years dead but somehow still
More corporeal
Than the shrunken woman
Who gibbered in tongues
Like some desert-addled saint,
Her glossolalia less spiritual
Than dementia’s failure
To prevent her from airing
Never-ending complaints.
Before his death, my father
Learned to shut his ears
As her babble began to rise
Decibel by decibel
Into a CIA black site’s
Pummel of death metal.
He even struck a deal
With God:
If he stayed his palm, if
He pretended to listen
To her vexed desires,
He would evade
A second hell, never
Be forced to feed
His fingers one by one
To those inexhaustible fires.
Michael Waters is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including The Dean of Discipline (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Caw (BOA Editions, 2020), and Sinnerman (Etruscan Press, 2023).
TRANSMIGRATION by Oksana Maksymchuk
Dad is wearing clothes
he inherited from a relative
who had died
We were the same size, he and I
Handsome devils, both enjoyed
a clean cut, lucid moonshine
& the company of women
I consider the clothes
that’ll outlive him –
their afterlife
Blindingly white sneakers, tiny
wings vigorously aflutter
A cashmere blazer with a moth-eaten spot
the shape of an island we’d lost
Body, isn’t it like a cloak
that the soul wears out, one by one –
now an oak, now a dog, now a boy?
Then it, too, falls apart
order dissolved into a flow, a flux
So the body outlives the soul
sometimes
Then under the cloak
there’s no life – but
something hard and inanimate –
a hard-nosed pitchfork
a cocky missile
a ready dagger
a broken oar
Oksana Maksymchuk is the author of two Ukrainian-language poetry collections: Xenia (Piramida Publishers, 2005) and Lovy (Smoloskyp Press, 2008). Her Englishlanguage poems have appeared in AGNI, The Irish Times, and The Paris Review.
ORCHARD OF YEARS by Doug Ramspeck
I keep thinking there is someone out there.
Maybe it is Mother in the dress in which
we buried her. I wonder if the gray morning light
amid the apple trees confuses her. She can’t decide
where the darkness ends and the day begins.
We used to go out there together and watch
the wasps getting drunk. They fed on fallen
and fermenting apples. They rolled over
on their backs and huzzed. She lifted them
sometimes and held them in her palms.
She told me once that the apple limbs sagged
not because of the burden of the globes
but because they didn’t want the fruit to have
too far to drop to find the ground. And she said
that the story of Eve left out the part where
she slipped the noose around her neck and tried
to hang herself from God’s cursed tree. Mother spent
an orchard of years in and out of psychiatric hospitals.
In one, there was a view from a window
of flowering crabapple trees. I sat with her sometimes
and we talked about how seasons were wanderers,
how they could never settle down, but always,
eventually, came back home. And in the car
on the ride back to the house, my father told me
that what kept happening to my mother
was like fire blight that darkened
then shriveled the leaves until they infected
every single other tree and leaf around them.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Blur (The Word Works, 2023). He is also the author of two collections of short stories and a novella. His poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, and The Georgia Review.
DEER IN HEADLIGHTS by Michael Meyerhofer
If they only knew the metaphor
we’ve made of what happens
when darkness births
twin suns that kiss
their flanks into oblivion.
And yes, I know I should have
said simile, assuming the presence
of like or as, but that’s hard
to remember when
you’re tiptoeing between
cornfed highways on ankles
thin as fishing rods
or gazing into the faces
of the surgeons about
to carve into your father’s skull
when they realize his pills
turn anesthesia into hemlock.
How strange, this dark –
each breath a white blossom
that twists, then fades.
Michael Meyerhofer is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Ragged Eden (Glass Lyre Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in Southern Review, Ploughshares, Rattle, Gargoyle Magazine, and The Missouri Review.
SON by Naomi Shihab Nye
What image shall I carry?
Your finest face, in memory or frame,
overwhelms.
The Hey Mom, you’re funny
rests in a cradle of leaves.
I wanted to be.
Mostly I wanted you safe,
happy, as in the Buddhist chant,
the mother protecting
her only child.
This wild vacancy . . .
I batter against
the sides of any space now
since you’re all space.
Care takes other shapes.
What to plant?
Who to tend?
And why does
the quiet old janitor of
Central School keep
coming to mind?
He carried a sponge
on a long stick, dipping it
a thousand times
into a bucket, day after day,
after everyone left,
erasing blackboards
to an empty shine.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of 26 books of poetry for young people and adults, most recently Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (Greenwillow Books, 2020). She has also written four novels, and her other work ranges from picture books to essays to short stories. In 2019, the Poetry Foundation designated her the Young People’s Poet Laureate for the 2019–2021 term.
ODE TO DARNEL (ODE TO THE CROCUS) by Carey Salerno
To the early morning charge nurse Darnel
who escorted me into the operating theater
where in my cornflower blue gown and goose-pimpled skin
beneath a bleach-slubbed cotton robe I was laid pugnaciously
sobbing beneath the ignited, rotund surgical beams
that blared nearly through to my core where
they would cut into and discover – I swear, the air laden with the way
the scalpel approaches flashing – you are the bright stamen of a crocus
on the late March morning on a Sunday while I walk
my sister in law’s dog with her and discuss our marriages,
a thing I did not consider once before undergoing
the knife except that the knife and going under might
result in my death or in the discovery that I might later die, and I have
no will – said the doctor; he thought it could be quite true and after
a week of trying to process his words, disbelieving them even, I finally
was able to ricochet “cancer” against my spouse and absorb the return if its
flail. It was just a few hours before we were to leave for the city and
our son had mercifully, finally fallen asleep and we held hands limply
and he said we don’t fuck with cancer and I conceded his point.
They could just take whatever was the woman from me.
But I insist this poem is about my love for crocus (and Darnel) and the way
the flower insists upon spring the way he clutched my reluctant arm, as if
come hell or high water I
would break through the rime ice, the word for which is more precise in
less empirical languages, the no
matter the weather, rushing the earth into and out of a season, it’s the
no-matter-whatness
about the flower that I’ve always loved (and that I felt in his embrace) and
if you ask me what my favorite flower is I might say a blue rose because
of the love I have for the first thing my spouse ever gave to me
and what it means so many years later, the petals
unworldly and ethereal and spellbindingly impossible, but I’ve never
seen one rise in the wild as does the crocus that makes my cheeks
flush with its ivory velvet in delicate contrast with the blackened slush
kicked
across it, the cardamom stamen brilliant against our strict winter sun,
how it carries the deep glow of daylight within its cup unfurling
to clutch the sun’s imperceptible emissions and guide them into the depths
of its root,
and the impossibility of its presence each spring the impossibility of
chlorophyll
when I encounter the brilliant blossoms fully flowered in their stocky
clump.
Crocus, you are tender and blooming
like the sickened ovary the oncologist plucked and bagged
from my abdomen while I dreamed I was still sobbing on the matchstick-
thin steel table, while the other is
freed from the sticky web of adhesions spun by endometriosis’s relentless,
gangly nest
that’s ruled my body since its first menstruation. You are the uterus
clipped from its stem, leaving behind the network of root, what led to –
flowering in the vase or sliced lengthwise and flash frozen,
your section beneath the microscope of a pathologist scanned for wilt and
waste, a cluster of majesty brimming from the ground and I tell
whoever I am with even if it’s just myself of my love for crocuses
and then days after: crocuses and days and days and days
and then the year after in anticipation, their arrival and the scans and then
another spring and another.
The luscious purple not even anything like that of my insides,
as if I could know, but saintly and smooth and crisp and purposeful. Silk on
my fingertips. The sturdiness of them. The charm. Darnel, how I loved you
for simply squeezing my hand I will never forget it,
for how you nearly carried my drugged body down the corridor which
seemed like the longest and the shortest walk. The impossibility
of the crocus. The impossibility of cancer. The impossibility of kindness.
The arrival sudden and clear like danger and also maybe something like
conditionless love.
Carey Salerno is the author of the poetry collections Shelter (Alice James Books, 2009) and Tributary (Persea Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Rattle, From the Fishouse, Poets & Writers, and on The Rumpus Original Poetry.