Category Archives: Poetry

James Butler-Gruett

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But I Don’t Want to Get to Know You

As the crow flies, I’m a cross between Sheryl and Russell
whose gladiator’s every first cut’s deepest.
At this point in my living room, every door’s a window.
Go around. We forgot to dim the blackout curtains,
who like Sheryl soak up the sun, snooze beneath them each noon
in fitful allergenic. When God opens a window,
it’s the eyes of the soul, and they blink
through the holes poked inside
to make phosphene constellations.
God’s not closing the door,
but he is flicking the door stopper spring
so it sounds like a woodpecker’s stutter — my favorite season.
Are you not intertwined? A trust bears you soulward in
a cardinal direction, to the team I didn’t know existed
the first three years I lived in Arizona. Three whole springs
I’ve missed without touching down. My first step
is the weakest, and please I’m begging you go around,
one of many things I’m begging off you, among others
to stop saying I’m Australian, I never would be,
the way they say haytch it’s like they put another h in front.

Opossum Coroner

Somewhere each day an opossum coroner
crumples up another autopsy report
& kicks aside the caution tape
huffs to blow away the fingerprint dust
dumps a bucket of water on the chalk outline
which disappears and smears itself
down the roadside like ruined hopscotch

all his work spoiled by revival of surprise
duties you haven’t considered or matters of life
put on ice in case for once the cold pink nose
doesn’t twitch awake America’s only marsupial
this factoid as per my dad whose diabetes
added to Covid to drag him near the coroner
himself when I called teary three states away
to say the last words I probably stole
from a film in retrospect & performed
but who can really demand more
than to bring things back on the right occasion

for example this morning I texted my friend
who will not go on record here
about a poet we both hated in the MFA
being interviewed on a famous show
my friend was already listening to on earbuds
then texted our third pal to coordinate a great
occasion for hatred—not the same as hate much funnier —
& believe you me we put the boots to the poet
who was lucky to come out alive as my father
whose voice in my head reminded me it was ugly
so we swore it off knowing ugly always returns
plans its next appointment
before leaving the office or clocking

a death we know is fake on blank forms in triplicate
better yet not a death but an unaliving
a word housing its opposite in plain sight
a body standing beside its own shroud
playing dead on 2x speed to come out a chipmunk Lazarus
the first recorded case of being story-topped
Lazarus whom the Gospels tell us wore linen
because when you’re rotting who cares about wrinkles
and one must further imagine the titanic “I told you so”
Mary Magdalene let rip coming away from the tomb
on the day of the resurrection
high-stepping through Jerusalem
like Draymond Green at a championship parade

not only opossums play dead but also the lemon shark
which lies upside down in a state called tonic immobility
a state an ex might find you in on a New Year’s Eve
lying just so by the dartboard & covered in linen
you two unsure who is coroner and who opossum
both scrounging in the garbage can to get ugly again
rentals no one wants returned items stored outside the pyramid
cheat meals you have to swallow to keep down
an unblocked revenant who lives to malign again
hot singles are in your area rising from the dead

Herman and Vernon

I dreamed — dreamt? — I knew two tubists
they joined us in the town orchestra
I don’t know what I played but I sat next to the tubists
so possibly trumpet. That’s against type for me
I who am not brassy or pursed but mousy and loose
nobody in the orchestra could tell them apart
the two tubists but get this: they looked nothing alike
Herman was buzzcutted with crowded murine teeth
and Vernon languid, lissome, fond of Ls
yet each time the conductor called on them
he frowned behind his razor-sharp baton
and said “Vernon? Herman?” confused
Gwen who played the recorder which was
key to my dream orchestration made
the same mistakes. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“But your names are so similar.”
Vernon and Herman would protest and whine
and I observed this from a chair then overhead
and thought how rhymes twin us when nothing else
does. Bullies get this right away: Bart — fart.
James—lames. “Don’t you think,” I asked Herman,
“it’s less lonely with a homonym, more
homely in the physical, caught outside a dream?”
“No,” he said. “And my name is Vernon.”
“Forget that,” I said. “Listen.” I shook him
and wanted to say, “Gwen loves you, is it true?”
but I could not speak or move and I rose from bed
and no one rhymed. There was no music
Cars drove in reverse. I never saw a tuba.
I spoke in perfect prose and couldn’t hear it.

If Not No Worries

Like everyone else I practice smiling in the car
Holding it for a minute in traffic because someone said
It improves your mood, one of those people we know
Against our will in short bursts.

At a stoplight a jogger peers inside the windshield
Where my grin’s flexed like a planking exercise,
Ten more seconds and I can return to scowling.

Smoke alarms prompt a midnight fire drill
And Jim stands beside me in blue sleep shorts
Gripping his orange cat Jason whose hip clicks
Each time he chases me to the mailbox.

It’s a lovely cat I tell him but he doesn’t plank
His face back at me regardless of what I say
Even though it’s not my alarm and I love cats.

Though I didn’t always, a friend kept one I didn’t stroke
Which haunts me as does all the other beauty
I evaded, sunpinked fingertips on a polyester hip
Spinning beneath your hand when the DJ says to.

If not that then what? Kratom in a plastic cylinder
Or Jim knocks at night to question me so I declare,
“The immortal man was not meant to work in open
Floor plans or lintroll his fleece vest.”

But Jim says there’s a kind of grape they make
Injected with flavor to taste like bubblegum
And my every pretense drops against my will
The sugar lift of something new I’m waiting
Only forever to find something to live for.

James Butler-Gruett writes fiction, poetry, and book reviews. His work has appeared in the Millions, Passengers Journal, HAD, and elsewhere. Find his other publications at jamesbutlergruett.blogspot.com.

Mike Bagwell

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from Poem of Thanks

The Reversed Star

oracular optimism

many unions
will go on strike tomorrow
including the union
for the blue heart
of the sky
and its arteries of birds
including the union
for the oars
that are let down
by the letter p
the easy thing
is to untouch the world
how many traps I’ve built
for my body to be alone
with its thoughts
and even more elaborate ones
for it to be alone without them
hey blueberry eyes my daughter says
to herself in the fridge photo
life dawns in the poem
until some nearby flowers
do the same
I am still around
might be the first time
I’ve admitted as much
it feels so so so good

we must be winning

no one has died
will ever die
in fact I’m reviving
all of my dead
all of everyone’s
into a world
of meaning
thought I’d share
the good news

thank you pixar

what is going on in this movie
little fires walking around
confused but in awe
like they’re out of my poems
clouds walk through you until
my daughter asks
what baby is crying?
and the answer is an air baby
an air baby what wonders
BOTH SPEAKING FIRISH
say the subtitles welcome
to your new life

continuance

one time we’d run out
of rubber bands
I wanted to move
into my name
to grow all our time
on its spindle
under my ribs
little good it would do me
instead my handwriting
drops its oars to gravity
never fear I say
we’ll find the sea
that has always been
under our lives how could we not
with a white demicrown
of stars and wind
on our side

another upside down tarot star

forgetting the soul’s purpose as if
that’s a bad thing as if my pouring
out of water back into the sky
is not the most divine theft
a text thread
of preschool parents
just warned us about the squirrels
in a nearby park
a hex against the pauses in poetry
and in the writing of poetry
be there no more pauses henceforth

preparation

we bought so many
rubber bands
a lifetime supply
we could constrain anything
anything

thank you for alerting us

is the text that literally
just overlapped
this poem re: the park squirrels
and then receded back to its
floating circle
p as in pours
p as in play
my toddler hiding
behind my back
just now from something
in the fire movie
once said the sun is walking
the moon like a doggy

time

or the love of lack
I am deeply afraid
of my own death of course
but also others’
hiii intones my baby
or something approaching
speech rushing up
to hug my knees
what I am exiled from
is self-imposed
the images
are getting older too
lets say the walls
are overripe you can
feel anything
through them

forgetting again is the point

I waver in and out
of my belief in magic
you can’t always tell
and then you can always tell
in my writing
example: my daughter
is also writing in this notebook
with a wooden dowel
and you can tell
example: the most profound thing
she’s said is what she hasn’t

now choose

I have
I have arrived at
a new way
of love

Mike Bagwell is a poet and software engineer. Recent work appears in Poetry Northwest, Texas Review, ITERANT, Sprung Formal, Noir Sauna, Annulet, and others. Recent chapbooks include Poem of Thanks: Swords and the Devil (Thirty West 2026) and Poem of Thanks: A Court of Wands (Metatron 2025). He runs the Ghost Harmonics reading series and magazine in Philly. Find him at mikebagwell.me, @low_gh0st, or playing dragons with his daughters.

Anne Waldman

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Ariel in Minor Mode

—for Peter Lamborn Wilson

i would be hidden
and have made myself

mad,

come after

impure

godiva

naked in heart, a last scene

i’ll rest, activate

liberated from a pine tree
Sycorax, call on you
invoke
mother witch-son

cursed brilliant sly Caliban

haunts all premises now
ally

break free, radiant thot waves

of this, our patriarch,

your Daddy

revoke, it’s time. it’s beyond, & before

let’s look into “future memory”

lest we never forget

ghost masters’ whip

& love of outcast (poet) that is

inner

voice

consciousness, who made us
better

what you gave me characters
a play

of pride

nakedness, magick herbs

a temporary autonomous zone

purpose

my father’s home
from Nazi war as
advance
man sees scorched bodies

lift to putrid heaven

this, certain, the clues we
children

smart of

weep of we, girls, women, we votives

and you cut

short,
dilemma

raging “we” envy ariel messenger

& the world continues

its supremacy
we must kill, defeat
still the wrench of, cut cut

limb of devil tree

your lines in poetry
tell, tell

come to senses in sanity
my hag struggle

age

of

event

horizon

das

capital…

Ariel slips out of

noose

swift foot sprite

a dream a

buried book
takes

notes in.

Anne Waldman is the author of more than 60 books, including Fast Speaking Woman, Bard, Kinetic, Trickster Feminism, and Mesopotamia, as well as book-length poetic works including Marriage: A Sentence, Manatee/Humanity, and The Iovis Trilogy. A founder and director of the Poetry Project, she was a co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, where she is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics. She has created countless interdisciplinary collaborations and performances and is the subject of the current experimental film, Outrider. Waldman served for six years as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and has been awarded the Before Columbus Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, American Book Award’s Lifetime Achievement Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award.
Peter Lamborn Wilson (October 20, 1945 – May 22, 2022) was an American anarchist author and poet, known for his concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones.

Alexandria Peary

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Ancestral Cloud

(After Kenneth Koch)

A cloud covered in numbered windows
just sailed past, green shutters mostly closed,
like a nativity calendar the first week of December
on a kitchen wall in a tattooed building in Pforzheim.

In its celestial wake,
the larger navigating cloud steered by a stick of a sailor,
a huge tanker of a hotel in the Bay of Naples, in Venice.
It hasn’t been in port for years.

But look! An angel with a dot matrix blush,
tilting its face, jousts past,
is on a blind date with a cirrus! Nimbostratus! Father!
Rain cloud

Morning Glory

A slice of 3-tiered building on a plate.
Tilted balconies on a rococo fondant
afternoon pink baroque neo-classical yellow
evening, ordinary brick municipal in winter,
Prague, Vienna, Berlin, Madrid,
or Boston topped with New Orleans
humidity and chilled skies of Nashua,
BAKERY and Rental Office taped
near the awning of the margin.

Can I have a two-bedroom, thanks.
Nasturtiums, not geraniums in windows,
a baby grand piano in the parlor,
bookshelves with ideas of mechanical precision,
clouds of dream filling the rooms?
until the next person in line orders the Sackler torte:

a man facing the sky is turning blue
on a dirty blanket on the sidewalk
as the hairstylists gather, someone makes the Call.

Groundcover

You use too much detail, apparently, and have been told to not manspread over the ground though you are not a man but a woman, though you notice that others, specifically men, take up acres of paragraphs and stanzas of mulch, case in point, that gardener holding a hose at waist level is overwatering the other flowering plants with you’re such a good listener, I’ve been talking too much, but let me just add, despite that he’s been allotted fourteen acres already for his baby-blue and baby-pink splatters in this rotting violent cruel immoral hateful polluted unhealthy unkind unjust wasteful world in every headline, and because it’s clear you won’t stop, you’re still covering so much ground, the manager with a clipboard at waist level steps in with orders to “Prune clauses, Karen” and he calls you Karen / though / that is not / your name and he barks “Is the thermostat turned up too high in the greenhouse? Because you seem angry, and that’s not good for the nursery” and he has to yell “Speak in gentle, barely audible mists!” because you’re not paying attention to him since he’s no longer relevant to the conversation and instead you observe how in this rotting violent cruel immoral hateful polluted unhealthy unkind unjust wasteful world your lists of detail have been upcycled as trellises and on the trellises bloom fists, we are everywhere, we are the center of the universe, we made you, we are primary and you secondary, we are reconsidering why we made you, what the world needs now is toxic femininity, a kind of weed killer

Paradise

what do the scroll of clouds say
-their changing shapes
over fortune road

a scroll of clouds
when our days were horses
in a horse-shaped morning
before a drapery of trees

the mare, foals, the stallion
everyone had a parent

a barn with stalls, a home to return to
a gas station, a general store
with curtains in the window
a brook that drowned no one

drapes that close
drapes that open

curtains that close
curtains that open

the world is changing
like a scroll of clouds
a manuscript of weather

Alexandria Peary served as New Hampshire Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2024. She is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and a 2024-2025 Fulbright to write and research two books in Germany.

Laura Mullen

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Could Be

In Ventura, listening to live jazz?
Could be (I am now) in a brewery
In Santa Barbara; could be happy,
Could be tired. Could be listening
To the overcast as if it were music—
Which it is; listening to the flavor
Of a beer as if it were sharp, slightly
Fizzy music, which it is. Could be,
With a quick glance into the pram
As a couple rolls it past me, listening
To a baby’s scrunched-up, gently
Jostled sleep face as if it were music—
An old/new song called “Easy Quiet,”
Called “Nothing To Do” or “Saturday
Afternoon.” Tuning in to the chamber
Opera of conversation, improvisational
Solos played all at the same time and
Somehow synchronized: performers
I’ll never know, scattered at small tables,
Quartets, couples (hurdy-gurdy and oboe)
Working on intimate arrangements, casual,
Resonant, forgettable. Could be writing
This, listening to myself: inescapable
And mostly not beautiful—poet vocalist
Part genie in a bottle, part bumbling
Bee bzzt bzzt at the mysterious clear
Barrier, some shut window. Could be
Composing this for you, here, try these
Notes; could be (a ghost) listening to
Someone sounding it out, this air, years
From now. Could be there’s percussion
I couldn’t have imagined, the program
Should include the name of the dog
Who made (just at this moment) that brief
Snappy riff, staccato, of joking, pretend-
Fierce, remarks; luckily I was recording
An afternoon at the nearest place to get
A beer after my expensive hardware store
Visit (the failure to find recycled plastic
Garbage bags is music—where does it go, once
You’ve heard it?); the busboy changing out
The empty gas canister in the “Lava Heat”
Outdoor furnace is a cello, the waiter with
A tray of burgers, trombone: distribute
Instruments among the crowd however
You like; could be listening to this day,
Unrepeatable, as though I paid for it, as if
I waited years for this performance. What
An incredible seat I had, how (mostly)
Wonderful the acoustics—okay, lots of
Coughing and sneezing, and people trying
Out crinkly candy wrappers like toy pianos,
Ridiculous ringtones, hissed apologies, so
Many bitterly sour notes, but wasn’t I lucky
To be in the ensemble, anyway: to be able
To appreciate, sometimes shape, our ongoing
Song—earsplitting, then suddenly inaudible.

Maritime Forest (the Live Oaks)

Green trees greeting the storm’s start
What shapes you take reaching toward never
Touching one another in this stilled instant

Of ongoing dance I trace your lines to learn
How to venture from a central support
Rooted in and rising away from the earth

Because I need to know how to explore
This ocean air and grow always more open
Accepting what is while bearing

The heavy desire for what might yet
Come to be formed as we are by forces
Seen and unseen twisted by occult despairs

Lifted by encouragements confessed
As this body moves among other bodies
Let me do my absolute unremarkable best

Naturally as any other rough lichen-
Splashed fragile instance of life
Let me grow out from my heart

Like a ripple from a drop of rain
In a widening wood among my kind
A part of the forest celebrating

And mourning this lively peace
Of new and ancient growth let us
From rock-snared sand rise to anchor

That shifting stuff lifting a canopy
To shelter our loves on the edge
Of each barrier island exposed

To high waves and the hard
Rush of the wind’s salt

Laura Mullen is the author of nine books—her most recent collection, EtC, was published in 2023. Her translation of Véronique Pittolo’s Hero was published by Black Square Editions and her translation of Stéphanie Chaillou’s first book (something happens) was published by Lavender Ink / Diálogos in 2025. She lives in California.

rob mclennan

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from dream logic

 

012   :   “For violence it laid itself open to defeat by the Western barbarians.”

 

Must be said again, everything. Keep your radios on. For further announcements.

 

019   :   “an unlimited sense of the field”

 

Where there is dissonance, resonance. Where

there is nakedness. Where there is agency. Marco Polo,

his hands worn. The silk road. Where

there is blessing, a kindred act. A capacity

for seeing. Where             one might count

pilgrims, a number            both empty

and endless. The path             not taken,

offered. Where one might field            a purpose

of safety, the gulls. Borders             , flounder

, within. I am             too honest, perhaps. A cruelty

of lines, drawn. Where             there is context,

heavy, on the limbs. Where

there is nothing             but flame.

 

020   :   “about the author”

 

Sunday’s child is full of grace. He was born, they say. As they say. Ripped, from the roots. Whether an object or an idea or a solar eclipse. In the morning, how he was born, he was born. At the dawn of the 1970s, a veil of red through a thousand unwritten lyrics. On the Ides of March, a quarter after the hour, eight. Sunday’s child, is bonny and blithe. It took time, how we sped from place to place. How we stand in full view of history, the marshland. Hintonburg, as once a village. He was born on land, they say, full view of the waves. Full view of this hospital room, full view of Wellington Street. A dawn, encased in amber, somber hands. Something about a story, short and long. To our mythologizing. Pre-cambrian dust, to be free of one’s work. A sandbar, in history’s low tide. This is not a full biography, mine. The flesh of an hour, and how swift one flies. The sound of a step, or a final stop.

 

021   :   “Smaller Mercies”

 

On this plain

Occupied, these chances

Familiar as lines

In the way

Just a short

Step, past is

Present, and always

Are the first

To break gaze

One eye fixed

How we speed

As corrupt, clear

You can trace

Heart, your hand

As swift as

A muscle

 

022   :   “A Wall of Solid Air”

 

At night the children would paint the surface with crayons, acrylic. They had already lost more birds than the skies could afford.

 

rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he is current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, and has run above/ground press since it began in July, 1993. His most recent poetry titles include the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press, 2025) and the forthcoming edgeless (Caitlin Press, 2026). You can find him at https://robmclennan.substack.com/

Alice Letowt

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Bouldering as Forgiveness

Sky puts down roots
washing dishes in a white
bathrobe before bed.

Finished, she uncovers
a clean kitchen:
a car driving in
-to a thunderstorm.

The table needs to be cleared;
next to a pink rose bush,
abandon uses ivy
as molding on a house in Arkansas.

Redress clouds
folding them in with the hills,
highway medians
into meadows.

Move in Place

but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
—William Bronk

Look!              The light moves
along the banister. I stop
To catch the gesture, and
I am in a skylit chapel.
The walls are a pigeon’s neck.
The variance in color is:
leaves sun-red
the mica on the beach
pine trees darker than the sky
oil on water
upon the surface to make
a line of streetlights. Oh no.
I don’t know what it means. Oh no. My eyes
flutter to the sound of someone on the phone.

Stopping to pee in the desert

Too late to live for utopia
We weren’t ourselves climbing

Along a child-drawn ridge
Ben and i’s torn-up hands         grasping at the wall

The rocks         rolling away
Reminding         there is no one place we belong

Too late to live for utopia

And the sky is a mauve cloth backdrop
Rippling in the wind

Each point of contact is its own beginning
Out here there is nothing at the end of headlights

Please, when all this is picturesque
Ruins, ignore our bones

Late to utopia
The clothes are left on the line

Kept in Kaleidoscope

The chorus of creeks
The shore of a beach
Where the water reaches
An inconstant horizon measured
In sky sublimating         above
The road         light giving
Statues of angels turning
Out pockets         filled with rocks
Transience
settles into the turn

wet in morning
Lilac         summer crickets
A change in color
And        I am         the first
One up
Branches spinning blue
Birds in the parking lot
Jeans on the beach
Socks on the sand
sand on the car floor turned

Out on mossy
Pavement
The tree’s leaves in autumn
On summer feet
Framed by a window
My mom sees me
Go into the woods
Not knowing she’s watching
Into beauty I turn

My mom
Leaves the window
And now her father is dying
I tell the river
We are here making ends and
The wintering tree scatters sun
Says goodbye without a kiss
I wake up for the sunset
Feet swinging from a fallen tree
Seeing a person through their dirty glasses
River out of focus
Among reeds
Each distinct and perhaps
To a bird from above
The river is a body turning

//

And in conversation with Ben
We agree that you can’t become I
If no one is listening and
No one is hearing
The surfaces on souls
In all the potentiality of metaphor
A vulture         in an angel’s ladder
Waves braking around
Ben’s body solid
In sunlight
We attempt restoration
Of forms         and becoming
Among ruins
The last word said
The unshaven hair
On both of our faces
Comparisons collapse
And reach for the shade
There may be something
To which the dead goldfinch on the patio
Reflects         and

//

A simple acceptance
That things are same and not same
And
Open the door         moon
Rising and I feel the earth         turning

To Ezra         a leaf rising
To rest on my shoulder
Moon shouldered on the mountain

Words give weight to the pale
Hazy spring sky
That those are the waves breaking
Around Ben’s body
and in my stomach I
Am the old white mustang
Crashed into ditch median
I don’t love you anymore
Can’t be true

Again cold spring
Last frost
Cherry trees pink
Ben and I are in a field of windmills
Each a center
No inherent value makes the color
Blue held in a slant of light
An after image of a lover
Seen in a half-smile
And having confused change for something

Alice Letowt likes azaleas. Her work can be found in Seneca Review, Interim, Thrush, Rougarou, and Bad Lineage.

Hank Lazer

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the once particular                      12.23.2024
atom you were
i that i
that meticulously crafted
thing that i
that i all
along believed i
was tide laps
the shore at
the old eroded
beach that i
that i played
on as a
child space made
for others to
imagine being themselves
important & central
in a momentary
story walls &
quiet tides arriving

 

what are you                               12.29.2024
protecting there is
light in the
world the light
is the world
as you know
in your body’s
life let there
be light each
morning a perfect
occurrence space empty
space between closely
placed stones each
of us adjacent
to what if
we could see
it this arising
& quiet transformation
after an evening
storm sunlight &
tree shadows mind

 

his last word                               12.10.2024
was not a
word burrowed as
he was into
a well-made silence
hers was a
word blurted &
screamed MA MA
shouldn’t you go
out with a
word mass of
said & thought
snail trail of
thinking glistering for
ward slowly broken
speech a whisper
a nod what
word is boat
to go across
when mind returns
to its composite
elements

 

These poems are from the 7th section (Three Is A) of my forthcoming 37th book of poetry, The Silver Bowl Is Filled with Snow (Dos Madres Press). The poems in that section of the book are all composed of three words per line. The overall book is really a series of discovered or invented or asked-of-me (by?) forms, ranging from the long sentence-like lines in the 2nd section of the book (Enlarging Upon) to these compressed, colliding three-word-per-line poems. To a large degree, the various forms or procedures in the book come from a felt sense of what a page might look like when written in this manner. So, too, the Three Is A section of the book leans heavily on the initiating sounds (and sound collisions or twists of syntax) that got my attention (and became the longest, most sustained section of the book). It’s all about going where the juice is, where the current is, until it’s not.
Hank Lazer has published thirty-six books of poetry, including most recently Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems (Chax Press), As We Vanish from Public View (7 Points Press), and field recordings     of mind     in morning (BlazeVOX, with 15 music-poetry tracks with Holland Hopson on banjo – available on YouTube). In 2025, Lavender Ink published What Were You Thinking: Essays 2006-2024. To order books, learn about talks, readings, and workshops, and see photos of Duncan Farm see Lazer’s website.

Genevieve Kaplan

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The week to share something soft

it’s my turn
to deliver a soft object
and make the team           smile

my back           chills where it leans
against the wall

I hear the switch
in the other room
the sniff beyond the hallway
that is the spine

I prepare to convey
the need           for the soft thing

with the other voices
too much in mind           naysaying
or second guessing when I
am still first-thinking

what is a key, I wonder           and then
what is the field

if I were to point
at the sink in the breakroom, I’d forget
to ask           what makes it fill, what invites
spillover, and worry

who I am, why I might
draw attention to
the silverware drawer           the pocket
door

and penciling           as feminist act, just one
of many dry varieties of grass

I store such fragments
in the cloud           which had been floating along
just fine until
the screen darkened
unexpectedly

Winde leges

a murmuration, a bird
is a sound in the outdoors           on the prairie
wings startle to move the wind and—with other rushes and darts of air—create
a hum
both tangible and daunting           the egg
—the idea of the egg—
builds expectation
scaly legs
tease bits of eggshell
like a xylophone or ratchet
music as dangerous as           gravity’s
feathers

nowhere
do we say the eggshell breaks, though one example is
“to form a cover over: ‘The grass covered the grave’”           without

fragility—there’s a body down there—and harmony
both damp (green, wet, natural)           and ominous (loss)
the egg
is hatched

Saturation

I ask the napkin: will you
miss me when I’ve gone
have you seen my face, how it
sheens red with satisfaction, pink
in agony. At the breakfast table
lunch table, dinner table
I am inspired to be
enchantment.
From my perspective
even the gray path leading
up from the south
across the dry brush
carries a fresh look.
My chair holds me just so:
four legs on the floor supporting
my legs, my arms acting
for its absent arms.
My imagination extends
to the second story
the fourth story, the roof.
Hold me, I say, delight me
you’re exquisite.

Genevieve Kaplan (she/her) is the author of (aviary) (Veliz Books); In the ice house (Red Hen Press); and five chapbooks, most recently Felines, which sounds like feelings (above/ground). Recent work can be found in Indefinite Space, Action, Spectacle, Word For/Word, and The Laurel Review. Genevieve lives in southern California where she edits the Toad Press International chapbook series, publishing contemporary translations of poetry and prose.

Caroline Kanner

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Night Sky White

The neighbor rigged the flag rigid
so even windless it stands at attention.
To void wind—noise of a worm on the lawn—
to plant turf in a desert.
Small white flies buzz over the scene.
Somewhere we aren’t, we could see
all the layers of stars all the way back.

Simple Machines

The cat is everywhere, chasing a blue plastic spring
across the floor. He paws at it, retreats behind a shoe,
suspends his disbelief and vaults back toward it,
sending the spring skittering
and skittering after it. Little panting sound
from the exertion of hunting.
The Wikipedia page for suspension of disbelief
says Coleridge coined it; I wonder what he imagined. A theater
of people, faces glowing from the light of the stage.
Then something happens. A chandelier flickers,
something in the mind is hoisted upwards,
as if hooked to a pulley system. Not like trust; like
yielding. The curtains open
on a blue that doesn’t usually exist.

Routine

Push the wine away from the table ledge
in case overnight there is an earthquake.
This is how I anticipate the night.
But all that really happens is I see birds
in immaculate color, birds I’ve never seen before
and scramble all night to identify, rose-colored birds
nesting in roses, monster bird clamping its beak
over my foot—hardly able to believe
it’s real life and not a dream—
birds with letters or fingers for feathers.
Then, steadily, morning: rain all over the windows,
wine placid in the glass in the center of the table
where I left it. And the birds where I left them
in the roses.

Ars Poetica

Hans, who is a poet, pointed
At the tree trunk. Covered with eyes
And, beneath each, little ripples in the bark
Like sound waves, he said.
I told him he should write about it.
I know, he said, but how?

Caroline Kanner is a writer and teacher from California. She has poems in or forthcoming from Denver Quarterly, Bat City Review, Peripheries, and Action, Spectacle, as well as the math textbook Fractal Worlds: Grown, Built, and Imagined. She co-founded and edits Some Creek Press (somecreekpress.net).