Category Archives: Poetry

John Gallaher

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Modern Life Is a Porno

Life, like any fancy dinner, started with soup.
And then an inflatable backyard nightclub
and terracotta army. What if I told you it’s a time bomb
and neither the red wire nor the black wire
are connected to anything important?
Joke’s on you then. You should have cut the red one.
The only acceptable growth is infinite growth. That’s what the explosion says.
And look how well that’s going. One can sleep through an alarm
and be awoken by a whisper. And then I died
and got into composting. End of season one.
I climbed through the window, so the window’s a door.
Kindness was also a survival strategy. Thank you.
Can you pass the salt, please? Thank you.
I’m going to try eating my heart and having it too.

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Knowing it’s an advertisement doesn’t keep it
from persuading you. Like when they talk about sex and death
as foreplay. Hold on.
I’ve not yet gotten over my desire to be beautiful.
Walking down the hall just now I imagined I was
someone else, far away from mirrors, and one of the rest
of these people. That beautiful one.
I decided it was a simulation and that didn’t change anything.
We still debated free will and that didn’t change anything
either. The point of vistas is to be cumbersome
in their staring. And then desire pops up, and all bets are off.
Pull down the shades on these shady streets,
the remote viewing and hideout. You’re not fooling me.
Oh, America, at long last. Everyone’s in drag.

Anything Outside Our Senses Is Invisible

You’re a goldfish watching a feather. Maybe it’s ash.
You have a concept of ground and sea coming to a point.
Your truck goes airborne on ranch Road 12, flipping
and then landing flat back down into oncoming traffic.
A woman drives under, with a concept
of tunnel, maybe trellis. Or force field. God.
Everything is proof, says light to the double slit,
but I keep coming back to bed, saying “Yes, but.”
I’ve run out of variations on my approach. Hopscotch.
Bunny hop. Pogo stick. It’s paratactic. Floors
shine. My forehead crinkles and shines,
an edifice rising across the stars of noon. Say three “Hail Marys”
and don’t forget to vote. Be the statue
in a long conversation with the courthouse atrium wall.

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Holding a warm cup will cause you to feel
that other people are warmer, meaning nicer. Friendlier.
Somewhere in my body the decision is already made.
What gets you here won’t get you there,
unless it does, as things are both complicated
and redundant. You have just enough milk for your recipe.
If I could describe something closely enough. You escape
with only minor bruises. Sorry for all the jumping around.
A clear version of how and why, which ends up
on a cliff face where someone hands you a menu
to explain your hunger. New names for weather events include:
Thundersnow. Bomb cyclone. Heatflation. Atmospheric
lake. How about some fancy chess move as metaphor.
And my plans for a speedy recovery.

At Moments Such As This

They say positive people live longer and I’m not a positive person.
Define “positive.” Define “longer” and “person.” Meanwhile,
these freakishly normal things keep happening.
This toothbrush, for instance. Divorce.
Remarriage. Like that feeling you get when someone’s
looking at you, and you look around suddenly
and you don’t see anyone looking at you, or you see people
who might have been looking at you but have now
looked some other direction. Why might they have been looking
at you? What of this napkin on the floor? Is it a signal?
I’m holding on for a loophole, and what a positive person
might do, like the unexpected appearance of mercy
or it’s some girl scouts selling cookies. “Yes, we have Thin Mints!”
Concentrate on your breathing. Breathing is a positive development.

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Context demands action coherent within that context.
Sail on, sailor. Mow on, mower. Etcetera on,
etc. In history, before the rise of the industrial revolution,
most people didn’t live long enough to see all that much
change. But now we’re all dizzy. Falling over
is an action. So is panic. Living in a loud place,
one will be awoken by silence. I’m going to make signs
to hang around the kitchens of America on this and other matters.
I’m going to write something about life that doesn’t say death.
A car can last as long as you want it to, if you’re OK
with it not being (What was I even thinking about?)
a wise financial decision. This is a study of change. Maybe
you choose wrong in the fire, but an escape opens anyway.
Maybe you freeze as the bull charges, but it passes by.

As One Navigates the Hapless Colonnades

At night, the body says “roll over,” but to roll over a specific way,
and so why that? I flip the pillow, and then again,
like I’ve lost something. It’s one of those overnights
I wake up at 4am to do philosophy. And this clock
keeping everything in order. 4am is a great time for clocks.
Waking up, visualizing your skeleton lying there
in demure repose. It’s got a good beat and I can dance to it.
“Let’s create a threat level hierarchy,” the clock says.
Ants are going to carry this house away. “Wait for us,”
they cry, in their tiny, adorable voices.
The mental health marketplace is so different now. The brochures
are in color. The smiles terrifying. Like the world
is filled with teeth. I look in the mirror
and wonder what it would be like to be this person.

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You can say all sorts of things that you imagine are true,
later, when everything’s calmed into day, and truth
only matters generally, full of dictionaries and breath mints.
But 4am is very clear. It’s April 1st, 4:15,
a perfect time for saying what you really mean.
I really mean a set of reactionary diamonds. Like a framed picture
of one’s elementary school. Here’s a list
of everything there is. Here’s a list of everything
there isn’t. Ignoring the picture and holding the frame instead,
saying all I can hold is beauty, as I hold you, some you,
the band revving up for a big finish, the lights on my
neighbor’s garage, perfectly aligned through my window,
like feeling terrible about the news, sleeping with it
under the mattress, rubbing myself with it in the shower.

John Gallaher’s most recent collection of poetry is My Life in Brutalist Architecture (Four Way Books 2024). Recent poems appear in APR, Ploughshares, New Letters and Copper Nickel, among others. Gallaher lives in northwest Missouri and co-edits the Laurel Review.

Brenda Coultas

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Untitled 1

Stockings hung
On the mantel
The toes dipped bitterly toward the floor

An old dog
Smells the lumps
The light is yellow
The chimney lets the sky have it

Rub and rub
Lamps of truth
Shine, shine
Black clean lines

Untitled 2

I wrote myself into being
A seed
Willing itself into becoming
A tree

Where there was nothing:
Clouds basketballs traffic cones cows

I pull away from reason
As folks in nursing homes do
but then a seed carried by
(I won’t say wind as it has meaning.
Won’t talk about trees because talk about trees leads to forests)
The seed’s soft down
a silken parachute

a heart is fodder for butterflies
I vow to lose my reason.

Vanitas

There’s a red rose behind my eyes
My brain eats the rose

With easy thoughts
I function

Pulsing on green stems, or is the rose
On a cloth with books and a burning candle?

I brown my skull with roses
and arrange my papers

Yellowed with acid
Reddened by fire

Ornaments
Glistening
In the light

In the mid-90s, Brenda Coultas moved to New York City to work on the staff of the Poetry Project. Her essay on her origins as a poet can be found in the anthology Other Influences: Essays on Feminist Avant-garde Poetic Lineages. Her latest collection, The Writing of an Hour, an ars poetica, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2022.

Martine Bellen

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Petrifying Jack Things

Unguent horsehair. Horse people glued together by bits of hoof. Deer people. Jack-in-the-Box people. Our spirit mammals. Jack Torrance trapped in his house, wrapped in his head, while Jack Sprat haunts no-fat food. Then there’s Jack with his bean stalk stalking jackfruit. We frame our Jacks and nail them to our coffin headboards. They mirror us in mirrors. They shift mood and tense depending on our fear level. The jack-o-lantern lighters savor them in our dreams. Mother guffaws. Father and Jack do too. Wisp phantoms hide in the divine jack pine forests. As do jackdaws, dressed for the midnight masquerade, and Night shudders. Night’s wide padded shoulders. We stutter, enveloped by the shrieks of jagged Night. All the lichen laugh. Our goose flesh bumps into Night’s knife, the heat of Night, the seat in Night’s sleigh. Shredded Wheat Night, watery milk we wade in to travel through Night and the Milky Way. Jack jumps over the candlestick. Toward windows he’ll creep while we’re asleep. He puts in his thumb and pulls it out. A plum! All the boys are Jack now. Nimblest at slipping through cracked windows, spired domiciles, riding their loping wild neighs.

Mountain

Clip-clop and underground cicadas clank as first echoes of walking
mountain unmoors the morning.

Mountain-crossing dressed as a cross-dressing mountain, dragging its train
over Yellow Earth, sweeping up crumbs of lives in its wake.

Mountain sits on the throne of a passageless passage of time.
Sentiency pinned to mountain as a butterfly to a mesh net.

Mountain removes its skirts—Layers of textile cover the dancing, ecstatic,
never-static mountain. It disrobes in spring, steps out of the wedding dress at winter’s end.

Mountain churns the oceanic pot; it bellows into a hallowed abyss of emptiness,
lassoing mountains with woven fogbows of light.

From where we stand, we can’t see mountain though perceive its height and sleight of hand.
Mountain humbly bows and hums in our ear.

Mountain as earth’s primal tree with roots combing the underworld;
its crown commanding the firmament by ropy wands of wind.

All night mountain prays on its knees, shuckling, davening
to the divine feet that tread its rocky skin.

The Older One Becomes, the More Out of Order Time Comes to Be

Between stage and spectators, our assemblage of visitant relatives
debate over the recent debacle: mother has fallen

off Humpty Dumpty’s wall, has broken vibrational string-theory threads,
has cracked the relative mirror in which we watch others who behave

as our worst selves, our wolf selves, mocking us
from our bathroom mirror where we play hide-and-seek with time.

Today the family unit unites in a unisonous performance,
superimposing its appearance from a half century ago.

The children are willing to resume old roles as frightened youngsters
of a frightened young mother. They singsong lines from bygone eras,

whereas mother refuses to mimic the body-memory motions
of being alive, and lies all day on a bed, which will be recast as her deathbed

that the children purchased for this theatrical revival. Mother refuses to play
her role as savior, and the children roll mother over. She shifts from right

to left and lolls. The family says it has run out of lines, the narrative thread
snipped. The family says it doesn’t know what happens next. They know

what will happen but cannot say without lines, and then the apparition
of father manifests at the foot of mother’s bed. Death has entered

through the fourth wall in father’s guise. Violent death who awaits, waves
his arms and spits curses into the family’s mouth. He orders

mother to accept his proposal. He slams his fist
into the children’s chests, and they wail. They rent their garments

as father sucks out mother’s breath with a deep marital kiss,
draping inky velvet cloth over brimstone mirrors.

Martine Bellen is the author of ten books, most recently, An Anatomy of Curiosity (MadHat Press, 2023), This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems (Spuyten Duyvil); The Vulnerability of Order (Copper Canyon Press); and Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems (Sun & Moon Press), which won the National Poetry Series Award. Her work appeared in The Best American Poetry, 2023, edited by Elaine Equi. As a librettist, Bellen has collaborated with David Rosenboom on AH! Opera No-Opera, which world premiered at REDCAT in L.A. Additionally, she cowrote Moon in the Mirror (composer: Stephen Dembski) with Zhang Er, which was performed at Flushing Town Hall, California State University in L.A., Cleveland State University, and the Blue Building in New York City.

Dan Rosenberg

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The Small Hour

the furnace clicks to flame

the wax amaryllis peeks through the blinds
from a thick stalk hinting at yellow

headlights shuffle downcast along

the first scrap of Sappho
“rescued from the City of Crocodiles”

The chairs have square holes mid-spine

empty as a sleeping television

“they caught friendship in a dragnet”
says the first bad read of fragment 1

the silver cup recalls a bell
but makes no sound

the carbon monoxide detector shines
between the curtain and the records

one more bottle will break the bar

stillness like a disease I’m drinking

with bad kid art taped to the walls
deformed blue jay

marker on diamonds of cardboard
soaked from toilet paper rolls

no bear no boar not even a beaver
as the streetlight paints the snow

bittersweet

this quiet on the ground floor
while the warmth crawls up the stairs

this alone with history

The Thin Blanket of Atmosphere

May a fist of clover and white cotton
rise from the mouths of the dead —

until they loose their memories.
The winds are blurry. The water thin.

Up close each face is a garden
seeded from another planet.

May the generative thrust find
its holster on the wall of the sea.

May the concept of bird
rub roughly across the day’s eye.

Brutal melons, sensual hoodie.
I’m holding a motorcycle

in each hand like a judge,
but I’m no judge. I’m reeling

in low-Earth orbit with all the trash
we’re raising like a sloppy wall.

May the distance between stars
stop hoarding time and light.

Who doesn’t deserve to feel small
in the pocket of a cloud? Just

in the evenings, when numbers
forget their cudgels and kiss.

Poor Kegler

You bolted the book shut. The
book of good names & the book
of off-cuts. You rendered from a pelt

the spoon & cup. We all want
around the gallery like a garden,
lurk behind the light you turn

when you’ve turned your face
to another. We touch your hangdog
postcards, say they are a kind

of cold that forgets what’s dead,
what’s a bust in lime, what’s a wing,
what’s a brick. The cold bustles

long among us churls who want
your altars to assemble a grin
we can track like root paths

under the sidewalk. Instead,
you spun the shapes of the States
into a map of Europe. Planted

some golden arches in a woodcut
of the famous Scream. We hang on
as you take each letter & render it

a stranger to itself, like soldiers
in skull masks & bunny ears.
& now we open our mouths

& a parliament of rooks uncurls
from our brains to drink your sky
with one long and many-pointed beak.

Arrivals

Pax Brittanica. Aminal crackers. Switch.
Pedometer. Clotted cream. Bedside pillow
pile. I shamble along the canal with my sweat
diadem & bad knees. But when summer sits
on my chest, I open my belly in welcome.

They’re airborne in the past but catching up
over a world at the throat of the world.
They’re fragile vowels, poking that throat.
What bridges do to riverbanks, they do to me.

The finale of green holes up in heaven. Its arms
shake. No exit, no giftshop. Its arms shake.
I grow tired as a tarmac, where the geese gather.
Flowing larger and alone. I stay up late.
Stir with my pen the unfiltered cider.

Arrivals extend the horizon with their hands.
This body I’ve scraped together. Sunburst
like a flasher on the sidewalk. Sunburst
tumbles from the bus yard like he missed me.

The Heavens

hitched horses drag a globe of light
we used to believe      in people, animals

nothing beyond our scale, ontology      of one
as if a footprint on the moon
is a human thing

//

above some fixed point      we bank
right and nothing follows      freely

pulled and pulling the thread of being things

right now undressed to spring I hurtle
remember red lights weeping from the wing
and me a half-conscious geranium
with head rested against a plastic window

slipping not past but present

//

The maculate female clucks
with options      into the swarm of air
she sees lunch      buzzing the ditch
and clucks again pregnant with sameness

then spies the rooster absurdly above
surprise landlord of the crabapple

//

with enough tongue      nectar
with a furious flapping      stillness

from my roots I say what is small
and more      solar eclipses blinked
away I believe

my body terrestrial except      bathed
in late light      the visible dust      rises

//

when I die I say      so much
of me will continue its ascent

Buckle

As the milk sogs the bowl of mixed grains,
so comes the too-much, heaving

its own highway before it, disgorged
tarmac, the clouds a trash bag

behind last call. And like a savage
I don’t stop at the perfect. I score

my tongue before it enters
the oven. Nabokov called Tolstoy

a groping purist in the face of too-much,
he could one-shot an ottoman but not

the umbilical powerline and the flat
squirrel beneath it, new lamps studding

the cul-de-sac, the fitted sheet gone
flaccid under uneven weight, the black

sky interrupted by stars. Maybe
our heft is the force of attraction sewn

to the stutters of a rusty Honda.
Our breath declines along the trail

of twigs and down and milkweed fluff,
the bright, fibrous undoing

of a sparrow’s nest reaching for
the sidewalk. What exerts itself upon

the world. To break the fast we must
first understand not-eating as an action.

Dan Rosenberg’s books include Bassinet, cadabra, and The Crushing Organ, which won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize. He has also published the chapbooks A Thread of Hands and Thigh’s Hollow, which won the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, and he co-translated Slovenian poet Miklavž Komelj’s Hippodrome. Rosenberg teaches at Cornell University and lives in Ithaca, NY, where he currently serves as the Tompkins County Poet Laureate.

Elizabeth Robinson

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Regrets Rhapsody

Apology for nothing and nothing’s spawn, apology
that falls like a shed hair. Regret roving

and insincere, rained upon, rhyming.

Sorry for surfeit, sorry for scarcity, for
sobriety, for ersatz

song in the face of sorrow, sickness,
sultry harmony.

Whose stress is it
that syncopates and whose
that strikes the wrong key? Sorry
not to say, not to be able
to say.

Say sorry to the head
that aches, that sways,
that revolves on its onliest socket
in time to a tune so few,
regrettably, can hear.

Simple Simon says, “Sing!”
Sorry that we sang.

Giving Up (to) the Ghost Rhapsody

Roll up your pant legs
Bend double and lick the sweat off your midriff.

The ghost has shapely abs. She eats
sunlight. Good

thing it’s so terribly hot today.

The ghost thrives in domestic chores,
watering the burnt plants, smiling

at the neighbor who hates her.

She would be you would be her, if
you understand what I mean she means

for you. She

licks the salt from the rims
of your eyelids. That craving

for salt is a sure sign. She

pulls your shirt off you as though
you were a little child, arms

overhead. She unzips your jeans.

And then puts them on. Her hips
are rounder than yours. Her roses-

and-cream throat scorches the
open neck of your shirt. Bend

double and your midriff is gone.
Giving up is to ghost

as salt is to residue, the tiny crystals
that dry into stinging grit, her

tongue replacing your tears.

Archipelago Rhapsody

Divinity made of blue
who pierces — a sliver

in skin. Sutures
sew gesture to new shape.

Something not, some
thing whose name is also

her location. Who dies
dyes her name, a tattoo

on the wrist. Whose red
vein looks blue at the pulse,

whose kindness
is unkind. Sister, unsister.

Wave far below wave, needle-steeple
seen from offshore, who

paints her eyes with vials of
perfume, who trusts no one, whose

spirit is emollient on
bereft skin. Cherished

ambivalence is what we
together call this super-

natural. Who seeks
through the palest blue

cloud: pursuit not
to be to be denied, not

to be escaped. Dense
mats in her dark

blue fur. Her abrasive
kinship, whose tongue

undoes, whose voice insists it has
my smell embedded in it.

Nacreous Rhapsody

The soul goes to the irritant, licks
it obsessively.

If the tongue — the true core of the self,
licks long enough?

A pearly raw spot.

Now to suck sweet fluid from
the blistered self.

Next tongue reaches to the eyelashes,
forcing the lids open.

Besotted with salt and sweet,
suppuration that proves

the something of all that
we do not know to be.

A soul in the making,
the tongue is.

The soul sleeps
on this. The soul sleeps

with her tongue for a pillow, hasping
a hoarse sing-song for all the sleepless hours.

Not-a-Monster Rhapsody

Sing bones or bonds, sing
apophatic catalog of

un-monster. Sing broth
and sing stirring. Sing spoon

slapped against the back of your
thigh.

Stirring our tune
is the prick of the thing

waking up, waking up. Who
has an appetite for

waking up. Sing gruel.

Sing viscous, though not
vivid. Not, naught, knot,

nod at this. Sing jewel, sing
fuel. Sing:

you are what you haven’t eaten.
Haven’t eaten

yet. Sing of what wasn’t
ever there. Un-monster air.

Zip, zed, zilch, zero-ogre
no-golem, nada-beast

burnt on the tongue, the tune
that eats you

you haven’t sung.

Elizabeth Robinson has recently been recognized with a Pushcart Prize and inclusion in the Best American Poetry of 2025. Her forthcoming books are Vulnerability Index (Northwestern University Press) and Being Modernists Together (Solid Objects).

Randy Prunty

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The Affective Beast Sonnet

Every
grave
is
a
groin
at
night.

Gravity
catches
all
things.

Act
out
accordingly.

Poet’s Almanac and Planting Guide Sonnet

The
waning
moon
shows

how
a
metaphor
makes
a
difference

by
masking
a
difference.

At the Level of Story Sonnet

Lying
naked

knowing
nothing.

Tonguing
a
word
called
stumble.

Allowing
how
rupture
is
luck.

Transfiguration Sonnet

I
expected
you
as
spectral.

But
as
spectacle?

Still,
welcome
back.

And
nice
hat.

Weaving the Sail Sonnet

Awakened
from
drowning

I
now
see
things
clearly

but
only
as
they
once
were.

Semiotic Sonnet

If
you
see
a
tow
truck
towing
a
tow
truck

then
there’s
your
poem.

Randy Prunty lives in the Bay Area where he works as a bus driver. In 2022 BlazeVox published Test Camp, a collection of his poetry. Other work can be seen in Poemeleon, Volt, the tiny, Concision, Poem Alone, Parentheses, New American Writing, Noon: Journal of the Short Poem, Fence, and Trilobite. He has a chapbook forthcoming from Three Count Pour, a Selva Oscura Press imprint.

Denise Newman

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from Men I’ve Known

 

Who Is Anyone

Nietzsche fell on the clouds and could not get up. “Stop staring,” he said to the dog, “and tell me how you got so happy.” My father, whose name means good genes, has fond memories of the Korean war having spent it in a dark room encoding and decoding secret messages. Faithful feeder of birds (and mice), he once said that God must exist because water gets lighter before turning to ice and so plants and fish can survive at the bottom. “God arranged it like this for us,” he said, ringing the rim of his wine glass with his middle finger. The gap between fantasy and reality is as good as a moat, that is, when your home is your castle.

 

 

 

Who Is Anyone

A young man serves in the war to end all wars and never speaks about it, sends his two sons to two different wars. A man who doesn’t speak might speak in the dark when no one’s listening, mouthing sounds of gunfire. The man, whose name means supplanter, goes to work in the plant manufacturing corn products, never blows a whistle, not even when his leg gets caught in a machine and he has to cut it off himself. They give him a desk job where he sits quietly for two decades. His grandchild hears his wooden leg swear as he hobbles down the hallway, he turns to wink as if to affirm — see, the puppet can speak for its puppeteer.

 

 

 

Who Is Anyone

Money points to money without showing its hand. Money points to the empty lot, to the dry-docked yachts. Money has a thing for money and a way of calling things by their money names — lot for land, payola for ham. Marx called money for the sake of money “fetishism.” My first boss calls me “glamour girl,” tries to trick me into his bed, thus showing the hand of his bowtie and mid-Atlantic accent. He points to, no fingers the sore on his head — yep, still wet. Points to his belt before we land, “Grab it if anything happens — there’s a lot of money in here.”

 

 

 

Who Is Anyone

The boy writes that his pencil is so quiet it makes him feel dead. That’s why it’s hard to take dictation, although he can speak without doing speaking, causing his teacher to snap — she has something to get from her day. All he wants is to run in an open field like an impala, leaping over every obstacle, turning on a dime. But that freedom falls apart, soon legs and lungs burn, he’s got to rest. Lying in bed, he realizes he should either be committed or put on TV. Later, a teashop woman tells him, “The way is right straight ahead.” He’s back to running, following her pointer straight to Shunryū Suzuki’s mountain posture. There he stops. All at once. Nonstop stepping back going forward.

 

 

 

Who Is Anyone

“Remember, I’m the traveler, I bring only happy things,” he says stepping out of the bathroom in a T-shirt, boxer shorts and socks, holding up a toothbrush. “OK?” Types in the Japanese word, then pushes up his glasses with his knuckle, “Immoral woman?” You might say metamorphosing like a mayfly growing in water then changing bodies to do it in the air. At the airport, he says through my veil of tears, “We make our own stories, but we also have to control them.” He films me walking downhill, my red sweater disappearing into fog — “like Casablanca.” Like a mayfly returning to water to lay her soggy eggs. Sixth generation, he must return to take over the family portrait business.

 

 

 

Who Is Anyone

Up with the birds heading down to the sea in his dark blue bathrobe for a morning dip. “Water is taught by thirst,” said Dickinson who chose her teachers wisely. Thirst is taught by sadistic masters called old school. When the students launch an attack on their professors, they only criticize his feet: And this one wears sandals in winter! Meaning what—too earthy? Too Jesus? No deeper true self, just the need to shape one’s life as a work of art, according to Foucault. Instead of mandatory military service he volunteers at a small art museum on a small island of his small country where there are such options, and there he starts to rewrite the test: What would you give up for love?

Denise Newman is a poet and translator based in San Francisco. Her fifth poetry collection The Redesignation of Paradise was recently published by Kelsey Street Press and her writings and translations have appeared in journals such as Chicago Review 75th Anniversary Anthology, World Literature Today, and Washington Square Review. For her translation work, she has received two NEA fellowships and two PEN awards. Newman is also involved in video and social practice poetry projects, and she teaches at the California College of the Arts.

Julie Hanson

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Ode to Luck

Lacking a proper knife,

Lacking the glass, plastic, or aluminum tools to measure amounts,

Lacking a recipe, or memory thereof,

And having eked out from the grime two vegetables: one onion, one potato, and the wish for a bit
of herb,

There follows the discovery of a young dandelion sprung up clean in the northwest corner of the
prison yard.

The conditions, now miniature, are shoved to the past; in the foreground is luck.

I am given a title: Prison Yard Soup.

 

Mind, there was no fire. No inconspicuous location. No pot.

It was a task impossible, just as people can be —

When, for instance, they become unchangeably distant and who knows why? —

Yet, on occasion, I can come to this: that she may be armed in some fear unknown and untold;
that he may be.

I can hold that thought long, as one does the gaze of an infant.

The Span of a Driveway

September

Once, the newspaper was delivered
right to the doorstep
and early.

Then, for eighteen months,
it arrived at the end of the driveway
and late,

where it arrives to this day,
but early, so early that its landing,
light as a cardinal’s,

must be the first
in the day to occur at the seam
of our pavement and the grass.

There’s nothing landing now,
nothing sounding out
but my slippered steps at 3 A.M.

I’m startled by Venus,
straight ahead at the end of the driveway,
alone, and bright as a bullet

stuck in a black cloak.
A bit to the south
Orion is fainter, falling over, familiar,

and lately returned.
I pick up the paper, straighten
and turn back,

surprised by a doe, high and near,
winter-coated,
and watching my progress below.

We lock looks.
A little time passes. Maybe seconds.
Maybe minutes.

Two bounds east towards the street, and she
stops, glances back.
She knows everything about me now:

that I plan to leave her there.
I leave her there
on the rise of black lawn with the stars,

known to me by their constellation’s name alone,
and the others,
about which I know less,

and the planet that had to be Venus,
feeling they could go on forever,
that the eternal

clocks us on its watch, mute as that doe,
when, in actuality,
I know better.

Once, I drove cars over sand
piled inside a wooden box
in a back yard

about which I can recall
little else: some sort of hedge,
a split log fence

just beginning to gray.
We don’t have to work to remember, do we,
what stays the same.

But what does? Once,
I faced east and used language like this
to see with:

straight ahead
stuck
falling over

returned
Once, I stood ten paces away,
slippered, outside in the dark

and held for some moments a notion
more primitive, more
preliterate yet:

that my presence had been
privileged
by having been observed.

How long does it take
to cover the span of a driveway?
Long enough, Euphoria,

you poor feeling, for all of your
direct and effortless work
to come undone.

God of Immediacy (a pop-up god)

Elsewhere, in some villages, the first thing encountered in each day is the deity.
It might be a crow, come into notice—revealed—by way of its caw.
It might be an insect, meticulous in its journey up the wall,
its route like a crack in the plaster.

On the next day, naturally, God is something else entirely.

A miller, long ago, looked up from a book, astonished to be reading this.
Imagine: to be awakened each morning by a holy presence
and one morning it’s masked as a fox,

on another the sound of the rain on the thatch.
Or nearer, right there: your beloved’s or your very own snoring.

Or your very own loneliness.

I bought the book about the miller — oh, years ago now —
and, although my curiosity hadn’t flagged, read it only recently.
I can’t say why I came back to it exactly then,
not sooner, not later.

He’d lived in Italy, the miller,
in the sixteenth century, and put himself at risk repeatedly; yes,
he was careless, off-task, often unapologetic in his speaking. Still,

he might have found solace, or company, before he was put to death . . .

he might have read bits of a treatise by Michael Servetus and the words there,
presumably laid down to begin with somewhere in Scripture,
“I am a god at hand, not a god afar off,”

which would have spoken directly to the miller, I should think,
as directly to him as to anyone interested.

Stubborn

The dirt is too miserable now to feed anything else.
It’s midsummer dirt and things have been done to it
that it looks like it thinks it will never forget.
The spinach was yanked from it. Radishes. Cress.
Hard June rains slapped it and smacked it
and channeled through the beds.
Now pea vines rattle in a snarl,
roots atrophied to taut and brittle threads.
When cayenne pepper funneled down the holes,
moles only made their many ways more myriad.
Everyone wants what they want and will not be discouraged.
Everyone wants what they want and worry is the only work.
The carrots have been stripped to sticks. They wobble in their holes.
The meat of the bean has been pocked by beetles.
Okra holds on by the claw.

Julie Hanson is the author of The Audible and the Evident, winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize (Ohio University Press, 2020) and Unbeknownst (University of Iowa Press, 2011) Iowa Poetry Prize winner and Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist. Her work appears in recent issues of Plume, Copper Nickel, VOLT, and 32 Poems. She has more work forthcoming in Bennington Review, and once again in 32 Poems.

Shawnan Ge

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Swans in their laurels

A toad lingers by the sunless pool, languishing and dying wrong, all
wrong. In the kitchen, my mother swaddles her china with cloth, bumpy
and skin-like, the yellow of running yolk. She speaks in a dialect.
At school, her daughter learns latin. Corpora means Bodies, fields
of deadness in her nativity. She neuters her words fruitlessly.
At night, she devolves, her fingers outstretched into a canopy of
skins. And still man chases, stripping laurels of her boughs, sloughing
bark. And still she flees, her feet embalmed in the earth, coursing–
Morning comes. She is corporeal, salt crusting skin. She yearns for home.
In the water, the swans hang on the shoreline, roaring at the kitchen.
My mother peers out the window. The wood shrinks away from his touch. Swans
lift and crane their orange beaks away from their daughters, white and stiff-necked.
Do they mourn when they spurn their young? Mothers find their daughters curled,
dead in their nests. The toad bites a swan and gnaws. It will crave swan meat endlessly.

A chicken dreams of me

Again, I think of those metallic candies that slick themselves. They are cheap,
divoted, speckled like fruit. My cheeks mount scar tissue so thick the bugs can’t

climb through. I think of my throat that stirs when it savors the old
stone that crawls upwards. The pharynx squeezes like a worm, an old rite.

A throat yielding. My hands cup themselves to offer each other solace. When
I watch the sun, my eyelashes grasp at the light and drag me downwards into earth

where the millions of suns eat the soil after they set. They burn quietly
still. A city of gold remains, traces of a winter that swallows. I once climbed a tree

to split it, to see yolk running through its bones. Instead, I snapped its fingers and
waited. But nothing happened. No one came to find me. I walked home, leaving

my fingers behind and my sleeves, wet and orange. At home, my legs prostrate themselves
and ask me why I want to fall away. My wanting walks me at odd times, permisses me

to hide as strangers do. At night, I want to dig at the ground as moths do
to light, lapping at the holes, flying as chickens do in their dreams.

There are stones growing

My father holds his casket close to him when
I ask to see him. They’re stamps, he tells me.
The stones are rubbed raw, glassy and bleeding
Like little fingertips clinking together. Last night

I picked at my chair and slit my palm open. The air
sucked the puckered skin, sipping red and plodding
like a balloon breathing. Some day my grandchild
will watch it bobbing and tell her child, that’s nai nai!

and her child will look at her like I do. She will hear me
in bronze tin chocolate capsules, find me in the must of
corners dawdling, cutting my pants to fit my arms. But now

there’s nothing clutched in my mouth, a barren plot. Once,
I planted chives in my backyard. They ripened, keeled over
like a father who fears for his son. There was nothing I could do.
I am sorry, I still want to say. I want to know us into being, to show
softness, to disgorge gracefully. There are stones growing. We
no longer etch our names into them. Where will we linger?
I can only write him simply.

Lick the child

that springs forth from the eyes of her
father. When she casts her feet on the leaves, they turn
away from her, crestfallen. The crumbles of road
forget the path. The gutter anoints her when she lathers
her fingers through dirt water. When her father hugs her,
she will push him away. The chemtrails
flee in the sky, arc towards the rim of the distance. If
the rain falls in her mouth, she might be able to draw them in.
Her neck arching towards the sky, teeth jut from the lips,
spangled red, a zippered tongue
peeking. A tongue bump like a fattened tick.
Sometimes I think I am afraid of being known.
Her lips are stained black, oily.
There are bulbs fruiting
on her skin,
apple-like.

Shawnan Ge is a senior at Cornell University studying biology. She resides in California. This is her first poetry publication.

MK Francisco

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Narrative

Aftermath
Two answers
Raw metric

Book banning followed by sweeps
(withholding danger to your child)
You shouldn’t be here

 

Twin velvet sofas. Commercial district neon blue pulsing against the rosewood
dining table set. Descending the elevator cage to the post office, butcher, grocery.
Bad coffee. Repair/decay.

Some people need to tell children we are the greatest. Hold the baby. Switch off
the lights. In a pale-yellow kitchen peeling potatoes with a knife. Lighting your son’s
heater with a match before daybreak. Responsible/accountable. A dilemma reflecting
the larger dilemma. The white china dog of your white silk blouse. Your mother sewed
lipstick, photographs and cash into her fox fur stole. Forcing us to see what was concealed
from thought.

Narrative

Starstruck
No fixed address
Misfit manifest destiny
Cadged drinks or steaks in cocktail lounges
(rejecting the prescribed fear)
Completely belonging to the space
 

Made to be discovered two inches off a city sidewalk. Pale skin in high weeds.
The incomplete street. Mutilation as language from redesigning the edges of your mouth back to your ears.

A westward expansion drawn to stranger corners. The rotten egg scent of oil fields floating on the Pacific Ocean. Chaparral land parceled. Quick to laugh and sleeping in your sable coat for days. Chumash. Tongva. Tataviam. Begin again/living twice. Biting your nails in your Raven Red lips, you can return to the soft glow of your reinvented future. The illusion of control, a magician’s trick. Defiance in your jaw, the places that made you.

Narrative

Trail markers
Stop thinking
Bone loss

Focused on the vanishing horizon
(constrictive knots)
What do you want from your body?

 

Left the champagne reception. The air defense system. People who think they can control the weather. A sheet of vapor inside the window triggered the sudden ache. Your fingers glowing blue and pink, the brushstrokes of thinning tissues.

Dissolved by touch or any words, you cut your hair close to the scalp. Stepped into an ocean in the desert. Awake/without. Liberty/abasement. A hum of color seeking the elimination of almost everything. Called upon the innocence of trees. Skin-to-bones-to-brain. Curved-to-spiked-to-porous. A visual mantra asking us only to sit and look. Lose your mind to it: warmth arises from nothing, dwells in the space between rain.

MK Francisco lives in Seattle, Washington. A graduate of the University of Washington MFA program, her work has appeared in Fence, Quarterly West, and Santa Clara Review. Her book Insects of the Data Lake is forthcoming from Inverted Syntax.