Author Archives: Posit Editor

About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.

Rebecca Welz

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Stories To Be Told (view 1) (2025)
Stories To Be Told (view 2) (2025)
What Lies Beneath (2025)
What Lies Beneath (Detail) (2025)
In The Mix (2026)
Currents (2024)
In the Mix (Detail) (2026)
Loose Ends (Detail) (2025)
Woven Water (2025)
Loose Ends (2025)
Mangrove Dance (2021)
Vines (2021)
Root Flower (2021)
Sunstalks with Copper (2017)
Barnacle Installation (2017)
KnitPiece With Copper (2017)
Sunstalks Large and Small (2017)
Alpha Barnacle (2017)
 

—click on any image to enlarge—

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Artist’s Statement
 

My work is inspired by natural wonders and ecological processes that combine to give us biodiversity. I am concerned with the role that humans have in sustaining or destroying our biodiversity. My steel sculpture utilizes lines that combine together to make form relating to systems and networks in nature such as the underground mycelium fungi that connect plants and trees together. Studying and teaching biomimicry has led me to discover a myriad of remarkable functions in the natural world which continue to energize me.

Observing how rivers cut through land and seeing the types of curves the water forges is another source of inspiration. From above, rivers appear to be veins in the earth carrying life blood. Networks of lines symbolize wireframe skeletal structure at its most minimal to veins flowing through our bodies to roots carrying nutrients to trees.

The most recent work incorporates small clay forms threaded onto wire that intertwine through the steel. These works make reference to water bodies and ocean gyres that are filled with particulates, either natural or humanmade. For healthy aquatic ecosystems a combination of plant, mineral, living organisms and fragments that are shed are part of the mix. We humans have contributed plastic particles, industrial materials and agricultural runoff. All of these distinct materials travel together in a suspension of dynamic energy.

Born in Sausalito, California, Rebecca Welz is a sculptor working in Jersey City, New Jersey. She is a professor at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Her sculptures have been featured in museums and galleries throughout the US, including June Kelly Gallery and Grace Borgenicht Gallery in NYC; the Oakland Museum in California; the Heckscher Museum in Huntington, New York; the Butters Gallery in Portland, Oregon; and Sculpturesite Gallery, San Francisco. In addition, her work is in private and corporate collections, including those of Goldman Sachs, Pfizer, Merck, Prudential Life Insurance Corporation, Sabre Corporation, Sunpower Corporation and the William Kaufman Corporation. She is the recipient of the Pollock Krasner awards, Pratt Faculty Development awards, a Fellowship at Experimental Glass Workshop (now Urban Glass) and ED Foundation grants.

Laura Walker

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prompt

Write a poem whose vernacular is equally familiar and foreign: a long-traveled visitor overheard in childhood sleep, a great-great-grandparent’s native tongue. Let the poem be strange and unforgiving, let it twist its ribbons into a careening mass, let it speak only in ciphers as it drains its bathwater, rolls up the carpets, unearths the daffodil bulbs and eats them, one by one, there will be no spring flowers but this is winter, child, and winter claims its own. Let the poem face winter one morning across the barren yard, a creature in sodden ferns and a missing tooth, the poem wrapped only in flour sacks and humming its high-pitched song. Stand stalwart beside the poem, hand it the inky rags and the sawdust, the lost keys and your childhood shoes, but do not watch. The poem is thrumming louder and louder and winter sits on its haunches, weighing its choices and tapping a single claw against the ice.

prompt

Write a poem in which two perennial motifs— sweetchild naïf and crackling blackheart— are joined by a third, a robber girl on her mule. Let her enter the poem and alter everything: the shape of the sky, the contours of the story, and the fullness of your breath. In what order will you despise her, desire her, and forget her? How many years later will you realize that you should have followed her out of the poem, knife swinging at her hip, a swig of something bitter in her canteen? In the long hours of the night, try to resurrect the color of her hair, the smell of her fingers. Let her throw you a single thread, and let yourself lose it. There will always be a mitten abandoned in the snow, and a shard of glass in every heart.

prompt

Write a poem that disappeared into the mud long ago, whose bones are water and whose eyes are fish, and who emerges only on the coldest, stickiest nights, trailing its rags and odor, walking window to window in the small purplish town. It’s forgotten the feel of sheets, the smell of turkey, but it can see the tables laid for the morning, can see the pewter and the glass, the gently rounded forms of oil lamps and terracotta flowers. Call to it softly, then stomp the dry grass into the shape of your own body. Let the poem lay itself down, and then back away slowly. Which animals will soon draw near, and which will lie down beside the poem, twitching softly in their hay-scented dreams?

prompt

Write a poem that chooses red when it could be colluding and moves forward in time when other choices are clearly simpler. Will the poem blur its discrepancies or cage them wildly, like parakeets? Will bracken rise from its surfaces, or will its waters turn ashy and monosyllabic, burdened with baby carriages and the cry of a single freight train? Out on the river a girl rides a boat of perfect metaphor: nothing to touch but everything in view, bobbing from shore to shore dry as a raspy bone. Sing her that song she once knew, the one with the billygoat and the necklace of flowers. Someone is burning the fields; someone is misremembering the park in Paris, late in autumn, with the leaves like wet shoes discarded in the night.

Laura Walker’s seventh book of poetry, red, a reinhabiting of Little Red Riding Hood, won Saturnalia’s Alma prize and will be published in spring 2027. Her other books are psalmbook, story, Follow-Haswed, bird book, rimertown/an atlas, and swarm lure. She lives in Berkeley, California, where she teaches poetry and keeps bees. More information can be found at laura-walker.com.

Olivia Sio Tse

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How Lucky to Get Flushed

From an angel’s eye. Cutaway
of supernal gunk. How lucky
to see you here

whole, repaired by rivers.

Staying is easy when we trust
the medium of things. Car and
tape. We nap

on an open floor like votives.

What of the Lake, Its Pigment

Served in plastic cups        a false spring blush
the streets blare with occasion        not mine

still I am compelled to swim its muscled lather.

Some occasion is my occasion        parade        for others I am squatting in the back
grounding the envious meadow to glisten
kickstanding as such

that wet vehicle
that soft twang
that warehouse at the end of grassland
annex where leftover books keep
at one point        every spine burped velveteen.

To bait memory with our gums showing
combats an essence of what’s present
borrowing extremities as they wish        to be used.

Down where in the nowhere I was arcading
slinkies pinched from a high shelf. Full enough
of these games but not yet won        I think
we know each other on a cellular level
we know that towers are watching

then we tapped and whispered hey this is not an accusation but you got older
(sleeps with a machine).

The sun is too hot to peel        and this chart will shoot up when it’s stared at
reviewed weekly like telekinesis
like you want it so bad it just does
what it should — climbs

you got older
and you got this
auger

when the water wars reach
we may want to be lakeside for practical reasons and also those of splendor.

Baby Breaths

Second summer: less sound, more suggestion
of feldspar, a cracked mineral verging
on hatched rock. I am made           for making. I watch

a tugboat spar rings of wind, choreographed
and docked. Babelike, in the bent care of
buildings. Is it normal to lock           eyes with a cherub?

I ask more of a green field. It says goodbye
to the raw and mission-critical me, small-
time sprig of a minute ago           when I was nothing. Now

I could consider the junior-most: the neighbor
kid with asthma, who we locked in the shed
in a storm. The chihuahua’s           snapped limb, only half

an accident. I can move myself until the mile
simpers into acknowledgements. I am tapped
open by the tenderloin           gently, its physical process

of humming. A daisy rattles as it rinses, so I try
hard to picture holding it. Am I ready to be on
the other side? Was I ever           a thing that strikes soft?

Olivia Sio Tse is a poet from Texas and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Second Factory, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City.

Carole Symer

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You Want Me a Prom Queen

(after Alfonsina Storni and David Lynch)

Me, a polished tiara, you want me.
Framed photo, feathered hair. No flip! You want me
& my twin peaks. To make your night draining in black-&-white.
A darkening window, with no sense of irony, like Venetian blinds, slats up—
always up!—until you black out behind a couch. Out of view, one lone cloud
caught between your branches. In only an apron, then you want me
wild in tongue in a way you can understand. A glaring overhead
snicked on, like dawn in a kitchen. You want me
to cast an odd glow… like I was a treasure… to feel, forever. Stone cold,
stone fruit, rigid & limpid

—no pulp, no more icepick, please. You want me
buried like an old bone in the yard, passing over me
with your lawn mower. Go ahead, you know you want me

wrapping around your shoulders, biting like a swarm.

Self-Portrait as Datura Stramonium

Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (Georgia O’Keefe, 1932)

I was born to startle.
Queen to your desert,
darling. Psyche
-delic trickster
stem & trumpet
jerking off
more like dried
-up ass twigs
carried on
the backs of birds.
Try to follow
my lead, will you?
O, to be oblivious:
five different faces
same connective
tissue—white to blue
ventricle, shiver,
skull—all scale,
pulse, place
slips & still you
want me
giving death
a look.

In the Wake

3:17 a.m. A fish splashes in the harbor.
Behind our bedroom, two swans
aloof: latent figures float across
the optic nerve. I lie here, next to you,
my love & try to think of things
that know how to become new.
The list isn’t long—frogs, fungus, trees.

How still you sleep, unaware
how blunt your words, your breath,
how even nude & horizontal you weigh in
heavy       human       carbon,
imprinting me these eleven years.

4:05 a.m. Trees, too, need space, their shy crowns
refuse to touch. Like shadows we enter
when we love. Under this canopy, branches
twisting as we graft onto each other. Every night,
the cellular tissue between bark & wood
unfolds. Until the sun comes up, giving its violet
hue. You pull back again & my skin thickens.

Like a harsh sweep of wind shreds: a nest
then nothingness. The way minutes before rain,
a cockerel hunches into its herringbone wings,
one eye never leaving the ground, the way
I wish I could push away from you.

4:56 a.m. Grief the shape of flattened grass,
bearing our boy’s outline, the essence of time,
before he dissolved into earth, soft bodied,
& you diving in with him, leaving me
the keys, five maples, a sullen sky. As if
the lawn that goes on forever meant nothing.

By dawn, the pores of leaves open.
I find you: letting the water out, carbon
dioxide in, a whole tree again from roots
to branches, breathing. Your body was once
a shrine for me, I swear.

The Mind Is

quivering spikes of foxglove in a field of dying grass

a vague smudge from a bleary-eyed cloud

like a wet mouth suddenly flying apart

an open cavity

juxtaposed with so many ways I emerged as your mother’s angry face

made worse by a series of still-face experiments you subjected me to

a line of resort-ready summer dresses

marketed as fair trade &

specifically female, thanks to the hand-block printed fern fronds unspooling

seduction & a story about the Walgreens® personal lubricant in a motorcycle rucksack

a gaggle of Nassau County girls who will hover over your grave

dredging up your evening voice

in the unreliable light of a couple whiskeys to counter the mother-figure

her indelible brows, still arched & not easily erased

my exception to her rule

the arrangement of exotic flowers you fingered

now a loosening fist

coming clean from your backfire & smoke

Carole Symer is the author of the chapbook Glint (Harbor Editions). A psychologist who works primarily with neurodiverse adolescents, her interviews, reviews, and poems have appeared in publications such as The Adroit Journal, Tupelo Quarterly, and LIT Magazine. She is a reader for Four Way Review, holds an M.F.A from Warren Wilson, and teaches at New York University.

Katharine Rauk

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Totally F-able

is something about me
no one ever has actually

said. So what
if someone told me

he really likes I write
my little poems

and even stand up sometimes
to share them?

You’re a dick
is what I said

but just to myself
as I descended

the narrow stairwell
after that New Year’s Eve

party at Jack’s place.
There was the confetti

my mind makes
when it shivers the night

into beautiful pieces
—I mean the stars.

I wasn’t drunk.
The sky does that

if you’re lucky or if
you are prone

to looking up,
which I guess I am

so terribly trying
hard to do. Then you see

there are strangers
flying 30,000 feet up

in the cloud’s head, bad ideas
like reading the comments

or that one time
some man on tv said out

loud he thinks
Hillary should be shot

in the vagina.
I have lain down

on a frozen lake
and held my breath to hear

the ice moan or crack or
hum—the otherworldly

music of the transformed
water that sounds like

nothing you could believe
unless you were here,

right now,
with your wool mitten

clasped in mine.
Listen, it is good

to make yourself feel
small in the mouth

of the cosmos.
It’s how I am

full of all the things
I want to say but don’t

know how—
the ineffable

in my body taken
form.

Ancient History

a poem written in the voice of Medea1

A sonnet is a little prison, so
allow me to slip a few words out
now I’m fixed2 between these walls. Though
I might leak3 like a broken downspout
in a storm, and I don’t doubt
you know what Heraclites4 said of the mind:
dry ones are wisest and best. A drought
is what I’d call that, but I find
it’s best not to disagree with men.5 Let’s rewind:
I spilled the vintage of my agony.
That’s what the chorus rehearsed in ill-timed
verse when I killed my kids. 6 Insanity? 7
You’d better learn how to sing:
I know how to play a king.8
 

 

1 Tyler Perry (a man who plays a woman in the Madea film franchise) explained to TMZ that “Madea” is short for “Mother Dear.”
2Here I must agree with Seth T. Hurd’s A Grammatical Corrector; or, Vocabulary of the Common Errors of Speech: “To fix is to make fast, or permanent; to set immoveably, &c.: hence, to fix a watch, is to stop it, or prevent it from ‘going;’ which, it must be admitted, is a very unsatisfactory mode of repairing that article.”
3 “Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day,” writes Anne Carson. We’re too porous, you know, the way we squirt blood, queefs, the semen entrusted to us, tears.
4Heraclites is also said to have said “you can’t step in the same river twice.” My English teacher claimed that means nobody is the same person from one moment to the next, but I think it’s the river that’s always changing, not men.
5Once, after I ripped my voice on stage reading poems about my grief, an acquaintance approached me and put his hand on my bare arm: “I hadn’t realized you were so beautiful,” he said.
6I asked around: in what other stories do mothers murder their own children? I wasn’t looking for headlines. I was looking for older stories, the ones that bubble up from subterranean veins, the ones that you can sometimes glimpse in the bones of feathered creatures on the forest floor. Everyone circled the answers, like how B. and I went skinny-dipping under a full moon and I forgot I had children, or a body, or a body of words in which to sink or swim.
7 The phrase “to go Madea on” means “to go off on/violently attack,” writes beekm on urbandictionary.com, which I guess could be one definition of insane.
8 Online Etymology Dictionary entry for the name Medea: “related to mēdomai ‘to deliberate, estimate, contrive, decide,’ mēdein ‘to protect, rule over,’ from PIE root *med- ‘take appropriate measures.’”

Dear God

a prayer composed from one line of Sappho

lyre lyre lyre

 

Rumi Says There Are Love Dogs No One Knows the Names Of

The thing about exes is
some people have them. I don’t.
I collect sugar packets, my only

excess. The thing about sex is
I thought it’d be enough, like writing a poem
about the moon: turns out it never leaves you

less thirsty. The thing about XXX
is that Rumi line, how we’re all doggie stylin’ it
after the divine. The thing about death

is the weight of the heart when Anubis drops it
onto the scales, just stop
and think for half a sec about what’s in there

unless your brain’s already been extracted
by hook through your nose —
Abracadabra! now you’re a sky wrecked

with bells. In other worlds, rain. (In other words
sea.) The thing about a hex is how it could be
a jinx or a screw with six sides.

Does it matter what we call it? Either way
we get fastened, and the thing about
yes is my leash.

NOTES

In “Ancient History,” the line “I spilled the vintage of my agony” comes from a translation of Euripides’s Medea that I found in a library on Mallard Island in Rainy Lake. I wrote down the translator’s name, but this scrap of paper has been lost, and I have not been able to return to the island since.

The title “Rumi Says There Are Love Dogs No One Knows the Names Of” is taken from a line in Rumi’s “Love Dogs,” as translated by Coleman Barks.

Katharine Rauk is the author of Buried Choirs (Tinderbox Editions, 2016) and the chapbook Basil (Black Lawrence Press, 2011). She has poems published in Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Harvard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Beloit Poetry Journal, Best of the Net, and other journals. She teaches at North Hennepin Community College in Minnesota.

Paul Potts

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Two Grasses

I was eight when I learned my tincture leaned duskward. Late, perhaps, though in the cornfields everyone pretended the sky had only one obedient shade, cloudless, a single note held too long. Recess: a boy asked where I came from, harmless if your body keeps the color of milkglass or limestone or the soft interior of shells, less so when your ancestry thins into fog past father’s mother and slips toward the mountains purpled like half-healed bruise. I almost told him I’d been steeped in May, that my family bent toward sunlight the way tall grass leans toward water. I was simply devotion fermenting on the dermis.

Years later I heard people like me were “nice, real polite,” praised like a hound that has learned to swallow. Call it a compliment if you must, tilt your head as though tuning a cracked satellite dish, hoping the static softens into something like recognition. Now I’m older, enough to know the land keeps its dead stories pressed into the loam, and each time the wind exhales it lifts a little history into my mouth. Some days I taste sifted bone-dust, some days only soil, but never myth.

And still I return to that boy at recess, to the impossible urge to unfasten the whole of me like a garment left out and sunburnt, to drape it across his shoulders and say here, try it—it’s not heavy, only warm, a little wind-scorched, a little full of inherited light. It belongs to me now, even on the days I flare too brightly for this prairie hush, even when I feel like a wildflower blooming out of season.

Another Lesson

Dad called the storm company. He said it was polite to let company in, even if it knocked too hard. The rain obliged. And I believed him, because I was six, and already fluent in obedience, disciple to sound. The rain was rehearsing its psalms upon the roof, each drop a syllable of undoing.

He handed me his phone the way a priest offers bread. “Hold this,” he said. I held it like foresight, numbers gliding down the screen like ghosts migrating south. I couldn’t tell what was calling, or who was listening. Norman was dissolving, one billboard at a time.

When we stopped, he looked at me strangely. As if I were a photograph that had come to life. “Go get granny,” he said. The word get opened into something enormous, a gate I couldn’t close, wide as hunger, wide as the distance between knowing and being known.

The wind was cursive by then, writing my name again and again until the door refused me. The handle was a bone unyielding, my hands confessing weakness. He watched the house bend into vapor, his eyes mirrored water. I thought men weren’t supposed to cry. I thought roofs didn’t vanish. But perhaps we had been living in weather all along, my father’s body only an apartment rented by breath.

Later, beneath the soil’s pulse, we waited. He said something about strength, or safety, or maybe time. It was hard to tell over the radio static. I nodded, faithful, unsure of his language, his jargon. I asked the silence where the walls had gone. Was home a place or a condition? It said nothing, only pressed its damp ear to mine.

That night I learned that they never knock. They seep. They blur. They enter through the seams of light pretending to be rain. By the time you realize their name, it has already washed itself away.

Paul Potts (b. 2007) is a poet from Shawnee, Oklahoma. He was a finalist for the inaugural Rowayat Poetry Prize, winner of The Howl’s 2026 Poetry Prize, and finalist for the Adelphi University Poetry Prize. Outside of writing, he enjoys playing jazz on both the drums and vibraphone.

Kevin McLellan

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Maybe

 

what the baker
on the radio
said today

confect the sugar
and fillings and you
have a confection

& maybes’
suspended
& impossible
question
what will love do
now?

language
acquisitions?
& maybe this too:

(after)
one-hundred leg lifts
the closest

(i felt)
to being
a four-legged creature.

Gainsay

a specialist said, you can sex them
at a distance, so i applied the good
face cream & my pores (twenty
thousand of them) had tongues
as i fidgeted my way to nothing
again & listened to the dripping
faucets (it’s several degrees below
freezing) & the ferries stopped
crossing for the season; i look
for the boat in other fields (&
to no avail the land rejects all
from outside of it) since once
a boat myself i cataloged
a lifetime of looks to know
the intended kinds of disapproval
like the one i received just now;

Inaction Inertia

after moving about
the moving; driven into anti-

seduction; heart
a couch; brain a monitor; watch
the unplanned lean
youthfully forward from an in-

side window; the glare; anti-

i side-

glances regret; inner-

most dialogue a sham
like a crocheted blanket
comprised of other holes; the in-

scripted last kiss // last night
the gunfire outside; why
i stayed home is what
i told anti-

i; told
the monitor; wanted
to tell the gun-

man; there must be;
must be someone
waiting in-

side for me too

Sometimes

The body within
the body
falls: time of
year the light
alludes & when
astronomical
twilight ends
& sometimes

bear-rain
or bird-wind
or 1deer-
snow…

 

 

1deer in the road
& later
on the side of it
with a message
just before a Nor’easter.

Kevin McLellan is the author of: Sky. Pond. Mouth. (winner of the Granite State Poetry Prize and finalist for the Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry); in other words you/ (winner of the Hilary Tham Capital Collection); Ornitheology; Tributary; Round Trip and the book objects, Hemispheres and [box]. Kevin lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches at the Solstice Low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Lasell University.

Pattie McCarthy

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blood/work

I never miss         says the phlebotomist at 7am
every story told before         this point is a lie
my testimony is an erasure         as well as
documentary by definition         objection
sustained objection                 sustained

in The Waves Woolf writes         I will reduce you to order
I’m following a fire         in Friendship Maine from
a great distance                the volunteer firefighters fill
their tanks in the community         center pond
fully involved fully         engulfed two story structure

under oath my mother forgets         my age
I’m already making to-do         lists for the summer
reading around the scratches         on my reading glasses
daughtering out means                 to have one’s family name die out
how do I want it         down to the filter

a phlebotomist is a blood         letter & I spell my
name in gulps of bile & gasp         a humiliating public panic
it’s all choke in the moment        it’s all choke choke choke
I was thinking how nice         it would be to be cold
the day after the worst        day of my life I go to work
 

 

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the day after the worst         day of my life I go to work
today I sold my first         edition The Bell Jar
which a college boyfriend         gave me as a xmas gift I meant
to read it again first but         ran out of time
let’s kiss in our         antique fast fashion

in the worst of it        the minus stretch
when we never slept        & an unlineated landscape
made of money               owed & oversized
cumbersome inherited        furniture that did not
fit in the Subaru filled        the space of the buzz in my brain

let’s kiss then         in the worst bit of the minus stretch
me & every other        motherfucker driving
home from King of Prussia        you’ve got a real
smart mouth she said        a real fat
smart mouth she said        & in it I nibbled

the one mean         bone in my body
eat our everyday leaves         drink our weekend wine
everything fits but         I’ll have to be perfect
the color of my                eyes is sellout donkey
the one mean bone in my        body is in my elbow
 

 

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the one mean bone in my        body is in my elbow
my father was a great         talker     a great charmer
an adulterer & a real              boy of summer
the commonwealth sued         him for racketeering
but he was not                 an interesting gangster

the ell in elbow is a former        measure of length
“locally variable” but        generally around 45 inches
the bow is naturally but         somewhat poetically a thing
bent or fashioned to form        part of the circumference of
a circle or another curve        some thing bending

a friend who is the same        age as my mother called
me an orphan         a friend who is the same
age as my mother called        me a good daughter
my mother said that she         would ruin my life & a friend
at work sent me the poem        I wyll no more go to the plowe

& I considered therapy        but I’m an undisciplined person too
devoted to appearing         completely together all the time &
I could spend my                twenty dollar co-pay on
coffee & a pack of cigarettes        imbolc to equinox again
failed again              back to bleakhouse
 

 

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failed again             back to bleakhouse
for several years I tried             a daily writing practice from
imbolc to the spring            (remember how Krapp pronounces) equinox
& for several years now            I failed     picture me photographing
a page in Carson’s Nox        it does not read as I remembered it

picture instead                the fog on the first
page of Bleak House        fog everywhere & up the river &
down the river & fog on        marshes & yards
& fog in the rigging & on        the gunwales & eyes
& throats & barges         & boats & fingers & foggy sinners

our block lit pink by         accurate gas on the corner
in red lights     acme across         the avenue in red lights
imbolc to equinox again        a commonplace book
secular vespers                tidal murmuration
we met late in your         tinnitus period

the day after the worst                   day of my life I go to work
I dream often about my                  mother pulling my teeth
out with her bare fingers & I           don’t need to spend
twenty bucks to figure that             out          it is preferable
not to anticipate the city                 or the sea

 

Pattie McCarthy is the author of eight books of poetry, including the forthcoming Intertidal (Apogee Press, 2026) and the recent Wifthing (Apogee Press, 2021). She is also the author of over a dozen chapbooks, most recently extraordinary tides (Omnidawn, 2023). A former Pew Fellow in the Arts, she is a non-tenure track professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, where she is currently the Associate Director of the Creative Writing MFA Program.

Aaron Lopatin

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Image (Five friends writing in a room)

A room makes room
for its inhabitants.

Questions that word: inhabitants.
Possessors of the room and its lung.

Its lung being the breath
that fills it—that keeps it being filled by things

like mud or brick or slime.

positInkSpash131210.small

And one of the five bodies—if you’re counting just five bodies—sits on a couch now.

The couch—if you count the couch—makes six bodies.

The rug is seven.

The horse in the corner—yes, there is a horse in the corner—can only rock with the weight of body one or three or five, but it is body eight.

Its body feels a constant warmth from body nine, the flames; a proximity to fire that fills the room with mud, and brick, and slime.

The bodies are warm and touch warm, though they don’t choose to do so.

They touch warm because warm touches them; comingles in the air that fills—or keeps the room from being filled—with the parts of hands that feel things.

The parts of shoulders that touch the fabric of the clothes; that touches air; that touches flame; that touches warm; that is or isn’t body ten or twelve or twenty.

Do we become one unified voice?

After all, these are the outermost times.

The people left were breath, or were they
nothing more than breath?

Were we stranded in ourselves or were we birds asleep on shore?

We ingrew on each other; this is such a troublous walk.
This is such a troublous walk, and yet I spend my time in stammer.

Like a crane or strand-bird, wading; like
a sanderling on shore.

Who shakes the droplets quickly
through a crooking of its form.

Who leaves and who leaves blooming — ( I said this to you once

as you lingered in the doorway for —
and how to know — the last —

was it bastion? Were our suppers? Are they
ever not the last ones?)

I synonymize myself with you, a process
known as “dying.”

“The outermost” you
told me; we’re on the verge, or we are verged.

On two questions from Rilke

i. Does the infinite space we dissolve into taste of us then?

And if you tasted were there tablets
of a truth in that?
Were the rain—
those liquid stones—once hidden
in a cloud, dissolved; or solved; or
uninvolved in our exchange?

I
extended like a sparrow from a bow;
like an arrow nurseried in its wings,
you nest.
The sparrow is browned
with its gratitude;        you are either
crumb or bread.

And are not two sparrows “sold for a
farthing?”
Is not a none of me a one
of me no more? I

was carried by words like a hearse
to its winter. Like a verse rehears’d
its grave.

ii. But who would dare to exist just for that?

Who would dare to exist? Or claim
existence as a choice?
I breathe
and therefore tremble. I wake up
and I move.

The cat looks at me for his morning, and we start the day in bed.

The cat looks to me as an evening, so we end the day in bed.

But what’s evened as the day goes
on? We ended
not the same.
I breathed a lot. I walked around.
The cat accomplished play.

Did we
dissolve into our living? Or were we
ate like bread?
Did we eat our breath?
Our solitudes? Did we “exist” the air?

positInkSpash131210.small

I exist for your breath which comes out as giving / you exist for my breath which comes out as prayer.

Aaron Lopatin is a poet and teacher living in Brooklyn. Recent work has appeared in Colorado Review, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Black Sun Lit, and elsewhere.

Seth Kleinschmidt

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Some Bad People

One of my friends lost an eye in autumn
one annealed the new kid with lye
he was gonna flake him good
like lutefisk all is meat after all
and one grinned like candy
or a gel laid across a light
one had a spell
in Australia one got up
to some things
in summer the nights are gloves
thickfingered and pressing
gills shut and boyhood
is a side of beef vibrating
on account of the worms

The Assumption of the Crop

The fawnchested flicker pounds out another grub.
Turn. Turn. From the acreage, parceled out to men
the road circuits through a field where corn patrols
the sky and ground lip, near to the dickering
of men and men, and there’s a need for motion.
Huge anthropod, John Deere oilblooded
godheads slip over an ear and another ear
wisping fluid, petering out bugdom.
I would like to kiss one of these behemoths
thread its needle, crouch, make some masa in a hole
for an offertory. In church the benediction
goes sour, but at least it’s quick, the game
starts soon, the game is all this fog around us.
Drive, man, drive. How’s it curdling already?

Wintering on the Coast

Bodega Bay’s topknot quails kept noses down
beetled by at top speed under the car’s struts.
Seals shot their diesel, recoiled, deployed a honk
and pruned acres of the spume with their mud fins.
In this country dad rose when Venus struck its match
wide arms wide, thinking about the wind
and he scored a truce with the sea’s belch.
I collected limpets like pills in a leather sack
and no one placed a hand on us, disturbed
or footed down the sanded castle walls.
Our only neighbors jellies on the wrack line
that congress of lice moving in a pall
and a paw washed up at the final noon
from an otter, peeled pink as silicon.

Seth Kleinschmidt is a Midwestern writer from the banks of Wisconsin’s Rock River. His work appears or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Yalobusha Review, Gulf Coast, and other journals. A former radio producer and disc jockey, he is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.