Tag Archives: Poetry

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.

Shou Jie Eng

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Animal Geometries

squirrel we
nest we
desire we
confess we
clavicular fossa
into shoulders
fit we
into spaces
folding ourselves
into place
the way a body
atop or
inscribed or
beneath another
(heaped)
is a kind of gathering
terra fossa
is a kind of ditch
dig we
a kind of ditch
surrounded
by an earth
of wants

Storm King Wavefield, 2007-08

Was it hysterectomies that we talked about?
I cannot remember, but the green

sang over the former gravel pit, sinusoidal
as sky. The cut of the turf

swallowed us into the period of a standing wave,
its swells marked by a riding mower.

If there was conversation, it was lost
in the voice of the wind, rushing ahead

of an afternoon storm. The body told itself
instead: the press of skin on skin,

the holding of fingers on arm. The bumps
raised by moving air.

A pregnant horizon regarded the surface
of the earth the way we studied

each other: bilateral port-site closures, or long
abdominal sutures; cutaneous layers

scalloping and puckering, ribboning their way
over a fretting landscape.

Why We Kept Relocating

—after “Aerial View of Levittown East of Wantagh Parkway” by Thomas Airviews

Whisper in its curves lot minimums
setbacks         subdivisions
forms set apart like speculations
fingers tangenting          into arcs
an echo          how did you become phantom?
suburbia being a noun both countable
and uncountable
stumps of landscaping about a cul-de-sac
the first haunting was Long Island
the second outside Trenton
so many utopias          their names

Park Forest
Lakewood
Silver Spring
Queen Creek
Daly City
Deerfield

I nearly forget where it began
for us          for ou-topos means no place
I remember growing into you
beside the dresser that moved with us
I grew into you          out front
where the new grass blanched in sun
I grew into you          and found
only saplings where trees should be
in their place we tended the curb
and paving slabs          we fought
over dishes where they piled up
countable          uncountable
we weeded the laundry
and folded our dust
we exchanged unmeaning promises
and when we fell you whispered

suburbia
is no place
for a woman—

In Graz

—after “Graz” by Adolfo Natalini (Superstudio)

, all was still. Graz was still that morning. The air in Graz was still. The Schlossberg sat, looming and still, covered in green. The chancel of the Franziskanerkirche, already the tallest point in Graz beneath the clocktower on the hill, made as if to get up, thought better of it, and stayed still. The people of Graz had been told to stay indoors that morning. The rats of Graz — they were, of course, still rats — but they too were still. A cloud sat on Graz. The architects had retreated to their observation post the night before. They had been overseeing the fabrication of their continuous monument around the Innerestadt for months

, and they were now finished. Their monument, which you can see now only in the postcards that they made to commemorate the event, was framed in an unrelenting grid, each cell infilled by sanded glass. When they were finished it seemed like morning. The representatives of the DryIce Corporation of Long Island, New York* had been consulted at great expense, and they had transformed part of an ageing ammonia factory into a facility for the mass production of dry ice. The architects had insisted that they could retain a route into and out of the great walls of their monument despite their building work. They were right. Throughout the streets of Graz now lay enormous slabs of dry ice. Solid carbon dioxide was in the process of sublimating into its gaseous form

, and it caused the temperature of Graz to fall. Water vapour condensed out of the air as it cooled into the streets of the Innerestadt. In the still Graz morning lay a pool of fog. In the still Graz morning lay a pool of carbon dioxide. Denser than air, it collected everywhere within the continuous monument, retained by its walls. It sat, pooling, in the Mur. The people of Graz stayed indoors and wore sweaters, and the architects drifted above in a balloon. They rubbed their hands proudly. The rats of Graz that had not made it out of their nests were rapidly asphyxiated.

*The first and largest dry ice manufacturer in the United States, which applied for and received a trademark for their DryIce product in 1926 (now expired).

Shou Jie Eng is a writer and architectural designer. Originally from Singapore, he runs Left Field Projects, a multi-disciplinary design practice located in Hartford, Connecticut. His writing has appeared in Harvard Review, The Los Angeles Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. His chapbook, We Carry These Bones to Market, was a finalist for the 2024 Helena Whitehill Book Award by Tupelo Press, and he teaches courses in drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Julie Carr

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from Of Turning

 

16.

But I was hot inside a closet, trying to peel a shirt off my back, and it would not be removed. It held on as if it really was my skin. I’d wanted to return to the room where the others were sprawled on couches, laughing quietly. They were waiting, but not for me, for the candidate, her purposeful step. It was as if they did not even know I was absent.

Hotter, sweating, I was desperate with the effort to undress. Then my phone rang. It was Anna. She’d been called to her mother who was dying. The care-worker had called to tell her to come just as she, Anna, had been preparing for the manifestation. The manifestation was to be held on the steps of the Capitol where people would demand the end of killing. As the words flew from their mouths like ghosts from out of graves, the killing continued. There is no time, said the people, in which there is no killing. And yet, they said, we oppose the killing. It was November. Fallen leaves turned to golden dust under their marching soles and rose in little clouds around their ankles. The people opposing killing joined their voices into song, but the building they sang to was empty. No lights on, no footsteps in hallways, the rooms stripped bare, even of furniture. If one were to gaze over the heads of these manifesting people, one would see, behind them, a shining bay. The sky that day was grey and cold, but the ocean was nonetheless sparkling, as if on another plane of existence. A single sailboat slid from left to right like a woman slicing an apple in half.

Anna on the phone was crying for her mother who had fallen, and I, listening to her cry, sat on the closet floor in my hot, tight, wet clothing, a bar of light under the door, and on the other side, the candidate had arrived. She sat rigid on the edge of her chair. Anna paused in her crying to take a drag from her cigarette. I have to go, she said then, I have to pack my suitcase. After that, I fell asleep. Sadness overcame me. My mother, long dead, appeared seated on her bed. That very morning, she’d left the house with a sense of purpose, rushing, well-dressed, ready. But her day had gone badly, and she’d had to return home early, having been, as she put it, utterly defeated. I sat beside her as she spoke her frustration into her hands. Come on, I said finally, let’s go for a walk. Outside we found the ocean rocking, and we, walking beside it, seemed also to rock, so much so that my mother, who was never very strong in the bodily sense, grabbed hold of my hand. That was when she told me she’d been losing the ability to walk in a straight line. She’d begun to lean, she said, always a bit to the left so that her path kept turning, veering, curving. If not careful, she said, she’d find herself walking only in circles as if she had no ambitions at all. But was there, I asked, gripping her small hand tightly, drawing her close to me so that we might walk steadily forward on the road that bordered the sea, anywhere she was in fact trying to get to? Was there, I said, a particular destination? People, she said, are diminished. You’ll see. She said this as if to hurt me, as if she could not bear my strength even as she relied on it. I will see, I echoed, just as a wind rose and whipped my face. Like a beast, I found myself thinking.

The crack under the closet door went black. The meeting was over. The candidate, and then my colleagues, left the room. And now I was cold, and the clothing slipped easily off me. I opened the closet door and walked, naked, into the darkened meeting room. At the window I stood, leaning my naked body against the cool glass, and looked down onto the city in which my mother did not exist, in which the manifestation no longer raged, against which the ocean pressed, asking to be admitted, asking to rise, and I saw no one.

 

 

 

55.

as a fish in a tank from wall to wall
as the grackle from one tree to the next
with its yellow eye in its cobalt head
when the others like a cloud all at once
as in the dream of the trumpeters trumpeting
in a line behind women who are dancing
raise their invisible instruments
all together toward the invisible sky
as the men from border to border
as the fish in a tank wall to wall
the body overheated in its ordeal
of breath of soil and of shadows
the shadows of words now forgotten
as dresses have been and books
whole books, whole meals, whole people
as toward the mother with her unsteady step
or toward the river carrying the dead
as toward the body inside the body (having been initiated)
as the rain that is searching for the gutter
the gutter that is waiting to receive it
like we wait to receive the inner-touch
when we sometimes remember to remember

 

 

 

64.

From inside the closet

I’d listened to the voices

of the questioners.

The questioners had names: William, David, Katherine. Good

English names. Like the ones who always know
the location of the well. But now my clothes

had dried,

now they had fallen from me. I left the closet

and walked naked into the city

to find you.

 

 

 

66.

Waking at two in a headache, she wakes. The world, the available world, entering itself again, describing itself to itself

as a howling. The headache turns to look at the womb—the womb from which it came. Denounces the womb for its innocence, its hiddenness. Under the howling, within the howling, the woman is now behind her desk: head back, mouth open.

     From out of her mouth come the “ten new things” that signal an upheaval, a violence, as when a “murderously gentle exile” returns to the land (like a headache crawling back into its womb from which it came)

 

 

 

67.

What are the “ten new things” that signal a violent upheaval as they float out of her open mouth? First the eyes (for crying), then the hands (for touch), there is fruit (red, overripe), a hunk of concrete (the broken) and the salt.

What else? Brightness (for the eyes), cows, the un-cry (this is eight), the walking-with (your child, my child, your mother, mine), and finally, number ten: the song/stone.

 

 

 

69.

Now toward the headache, she turns. She addresses it: I know nothing about you, she says. The womb, sure, the vaginal canal, all that. But, she says to the headache in the howling, its mouth open (its dress of blue-white milk), about you, I know nothing.

She was up. Pushed the heavy door to the stairwell. Went down. Shoved her hands into pockets. Kicked the river, like a thug. She (it was you), broke her fast with her ears. Broke her fist with her. Tears. Moon outrageous in its overflow. A garden of hellebores and hogweed. Throat sore, intestines in a knot, the wind: howling. The people: howling. The temperature: plummeting. Darkness: fading. The people: turning. And from their backs, nothing, nothing.

She with her long tongue (it was me), tongue like a road or a snake or a river, licked at the air between them.

 

 

 

70.

Lungs sway in concert; the trees seem to bob. Was she looking for a way out, a way away (from the revulsions),

a backwards butchery through which
she might re-stitch the

the body of the father, the body of the mother?

Through which she might
re-fill

the well, the well, the well?

 

Julie Carr’s recent books are Underscore; Mud, Blood, & Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, & Spiritualism in the American West; and Real Life: An Installation. Her co-translations of Leslie Kaplan’s Excess-The Factory and The Book of Skies were published by Commune Editions & Pamenar Press. Overflow, a trilogy, will be published sequentially over the next few years. She lives in Denver where she co-runs Counterpath, teaches at the University of Colorado Boulder, & hosts the podcast “Return the Key: Jewish Questions for Everyone.”

Charles Borkhuis

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Boneyard Backtalk

lifted the coffin’s eyelid a stitch
just to see if I were still alive
so far so good
although you never know
to what madcap retreats
an unexpected catnap might take you

as you feel your lids closing
try to remember to bring your eyes with you
when skimming over the cusps of waves
or gliding past a field of munching farm animals
never know when a gaucho might suddenly
throw a lasso around your squawking neck
and you’ll be forced to admit
you were never quite human

positInkSpash131210.small

so kick me if you see a hoof
breaking through the toe of my shoe
or a panther’s paw clawing
out of my sleeping hand
who hasn’t glimpsed upon occasion
the gigantic head of a common housefly
staring at him in the bathroom mirror

who hasn’t inhabited another body
while still living in this one
who hasn’t wondered where to place the cut
between self and other
the deep divide holds us in its hands
fragments of faces strain at the peepholes
to see through these watery eyes

positInkSpash131210.small

one hears the snapping of fingers
the talking hand that speaks to you
when no one is home
psychic rhizomes snake through restless
folds of sleep where you hide the life
you can’t control in the hollow of a tree

remember me I’m the one
who climbs out of his skin
leaving footprints in the mud
look again I’m the one taking dictation
from snatches of conversation heard
through the walls that mean
absolutely nothing and everything
depending upon your need to know

positInkSpash131210.small

words circle me like birds of prey
if I hear precisely what they say
it means I’m dead
that’s the game isn’t it
or are the living and the dead tumbling
down the same delirious rabbit hole

why listen to shouts of the townspeople
brandishing burning torches
I’ve been here before when another me
wakes up with a feverish itch
to sink his teeth into the unthinkable
I swear on my mother’s grave
I am not a vampire
turning over in his coffin
this is me
just trying to get another angle
on what it means to be human

positInkSpash131210.small

to inhale the dry breath of a cactus
and exhale a sky-blue river of silk
flowing through a lover’s veins
this is us dancing in a flutter of flames

this is breathing you in and me out
swimming with atoms of thought
through the coffin that blinks
open and shut for the billionth time

Cannibal Soup

my child’s mind eats
little animals floating
on an ocean of cannibal soup
you call this a body
you call this a brain
standing under a red dunce cap
in the corner

no place is unknown
if you look close enough
columbus deduced a new world
from coffee stains on his carpet

deep sea monsters and mermaid flippers
celestial maps growing tentacles
arms and legs of close friends
and mortal enemies morph into
blinking constellations

the celebrated self no more
than a can of holes
watering the enormous space between
atoms and planets that talk back
like voices in my palm
like somnambulist sentences
that bleed through me
but nothing sticks

perhaps my playdough body
is rolled too thin
to find myself within the words
that ricochet off rivers and mountains
tables and chairs the distance pulled
back and forth on a string
between my thumb and the scar tissue
left on a drunken moon

You Know the Drill

one day squats upon another
hatching a totem pole of mumbling skulls
years wander like slow clouds
across her sleeping face

the clues are everywhere
the ring on your finger
the discolored wallpaper
that’s why you can’t see them
too absurdly obvious
or tantalizingly obscure

how do you shake the game
that picks your brain
at each moment a hurricane rages
inside the petals of a rose
too bad you’ll never know
the little you
blooming in another’s head

instead you find yourself following
the murderer you saw in a dream
the one with knives in his eyes
who gets lost in a crowd spinning
through revolving doors
you catch a glimpse of his hat falling
as he turns down a winding corridor

pick it up put it on — perfect fit
walking back through revolving doors
you sense someone following you
turn around and the crowd rushes past

we’re not alone
nor are we really here

Face Off

maybe I’ve come too close
to her rolling hips
the cave of her left nostril
and trembling lower lip
to tell a planet from a pebble
her pupil from paper numbers
swirling down a black hole

perhaps I’ve lost her to her parts
or they’ve become my parts
who talks and who listens
which mouth whose ear

I’m here somewhere
in the cosmic footprint of a dummy
drawn and quartered
the coordinates’ mournful call
give me back my arms and legs
my head my hat

I’m leaving from the inside out
across my widow’s peak to an entangled
particle spinning light years away
but oh so close I can almost hear
her talking in my sleep

the beast dressed in antlers and smoke
clings to the scales on my back
indifferent to chaos to death at our heels
the opening and closing
of the unknown with each breath
now I see it now I don’t

Charles Borkhuis is a poet, playwright, and essayist. He curated poetry readings for the Segue Foundation in NYC for 15 years. His 11 collections of poems include: Rearview Mirror [BlazeVox], Finely Tuned Static (with paintings by John McCluskey) [Lunar Chandelier], Disappearing Acts [Chax], Afterimage [Chax], and Alpha Ruins [Bucknell University]. He was selected by Fanny Howe as a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Book Award and won the 2022 International James Tate Prize for Poetry [SurVision]. His poems have appeared in 9 anthologies, including Contemporary Surrealist and Magic Realist Poetry Anthology [Lamar University] and Dia Anthology: Readings in Contemporary Poetry 2010-2016 [Dia Art Foundation]. His essays on contemporary poetics have appeared in two books published by the University of Alabama Press: Telling it Slant and We Who Love to Be Astonished. He translated New Exercises from the French by Franck André Jamme [Wave Books]. His plays have been presented in NYC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hartford, and Paris, and published in four collections, including Mouth of Shadows [Spuyten Duyvil]. His two radio plays can be heard at PennSound. He is the recipient of a Drama-Logue Award for his play Phantom Limbs. His play Blue Period about young Picasso in Paris in 1900 was selected as one of the 10 best plays produced in San Diego in 2022 [Times of San Diego]. A long-term resident of NYC, he presently lives in San Diego and has taught at Hofstra University and Touro College.

Daniel Biegelson

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from (ת) Tekiah Gedolah [Dream-script Sonnets]

Driving          the high lights forward          into a winter white out
‘my only          swerving’          in mind          stupidly          deepening
the emblazoned ice.          And now the second season’s here.          ‘I am
looking at trees.’ Skeptical. Trying out flooded words.          Is it possible
or righteous          to remain          in a constant state          of praise.          How
many birds. Exist.          The sky          a chorus full of ‘black
and screaming leaves.’ And even the singular — a crow. Breaking.
Who names you. Rounded wings lengthening as your body
slims. Incident light refracted into iridescence. As the scroll turns.
And the third season arrives. And I read the book you gifted us.
And the book of the book. The echo. Too. I read even the space
between each seed of rain          each frozen letter that covers
the ‘earth in forgetful snow          feeding a little’ murmuring life.
‘Oh lucky’ little          cinematic life. I seem          to see          to be suffering.

//

The bird in the house is a bird in a book. Worth a poem.
Not the book of the dead. Or the book of love          ‘long and boring.’
Or the book of conjoined twins. Or the book of brutalist
architecture. Or the book where the bird is a god or the god is a bird.

Or a herald on a carved clock.          Are you reading in the dark. Are you dead.
The bells that can ring          ring and ‘there is a crack          a crack          in everything
that’s how the light gets in.’ Through the dust motes          past the ghosts
downwind. Who doesn’t dance. ‘Knives          all flashing. Hair all streaming.’

Sun streaking. Oh          wild g-d. The problem with imaging. Engine idling.
In chile          the people crowded          the streets. To protest. To insist.
To say no. To say yes.          To pass. Stop. Open          the rusted door. Steel
flakes. Though the hinges          still hinge. Exit the vehicle. Cueca.

The shibboleth. Be the white bee. Who doesn’t worship a wall. Who shakes
down the house of praise. Shutters. See you          in the dirt. Love.          Look.

//

The doctor tapped my forehead and said the pain you feel
is really here. The nerve damage here. And I could not swallow. Estaba
furioso/a.          Now and still now.          The myelin stripped.
Aflame. Still. Now. Beating against the overwhelming presence

of all this nowness.          Can your cry          be heard          across the earth.
Now.          Still.          Should my entire body          being          tremble
with praise. Please. So          you can breathe.          Easily. Truthfully.
Are you in for the drift. Look.          I can look          Anywhere. Turn

toward or away. With you. Not the same if paging through an arbus
or parks folio          and/or are taken in by          the reflection          of eyes.
Now and still now.          Where are you. Are you          the punctum          the spirit
the accident          which ‘pricks’          and ‘bruises.’ The we          that is they says

look at our children eating fistfuls of grass. Ask. How can you live
with burning trees          burning bodies          smoke in our damaged cells.

//

I believe in many of my own failings. Believe          them inexcusable.
But the lonely          loaded with loneliness          ‘wearing the face’
preserved          ‘in a jar          by the door’          like sisyphus
cannot put the dream-script to sleep.          Keep          eating. Keep
shitting. ‘I know what I am doing.’ ‘The plum blossoms falling.
Of course. Flowing. Downstream on black water. Merrily. Pink petal
by white petal. Scent of all          sweet fruit. Latchkeyed to wind. We call
the last letter          the seal          but the seal          is off. So. How to bring
you to an ending. And here I am talking to the book of the book
or to an instantiation of the self.          How          to. Close          the open mouth
with which I began. To love. The white-throated sparrows alter the hook
of their song.          Tree of life. Your threaded leaves shutter. As they mirror.
The word          without echoes          echoes          differently          each moment
but only when I try          to leave you          to write you          into          and out of

Daniel Biegelson is the author of the book of being neighbors (Ricochet Editions) and the chapbook Only the Borrowed Light (VERSE). He currently serves as the Director of the Visiting Writers Series at Northwest Missouri State University and as an editor for The Laurel Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Dialogist, Interim, Lana Turner, The Glacier Journal, The Spectacle, and elsewhere.

Joan Baranow

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Oropharynx

Your scan shows nothing but shadows
yet the surgeon digs in, finds fifty
nodes under your skin,
not one with the right answer.
You think the nozzle’s broken
but actually your pipe’s split, Yikes,
he says, you should’ve come
before all this water wasted.
When all else fails, tie it off
and slap the vein. The intake
nurse taps her phone, showing
off her birthday party displays.
Another unthreads loops of tubing.
By week three you’re hunched over
in hallways, eating Cheerios
snuck from home that’s now
an infusion salon, recliners
wiped down daily
and snacks stacked in plastic drawers.
The parking’s free but you pay
with phlebotomies. He says,
You want your body back, you mean
the one you walked in with?
That first breath hurt,
that’s why the baby cries.
Gravity’s riptide. A heap of blooming
algae frosted with salt.
It was wet and warm in there
until something grabbed you
by the head and pulled.
 

Isolation Vault

Now that you’re closed in
you know how much
you like a windowed tree,
a steady heat source,
fortune folded into the canal
of a cookie you’re meant to break.
You like a warm blanket
straight from the oven,
the usual nurse closing gaps
in your gown, leaving the light on.
That time the machine got stuck?
nothing a crowbar can’t fix,
or so you thought.
You thought how the beloved’s face
swims after anesthesia,
how an infant tossed in the deep end
bobs back up. Like a bubble.
Like a bowl of peonies by the bedside.
By now they don’t look so good
though they like being licked
by sugar ants. When
the waiter comes carrying
a tray arrayed with surgical blades
you’re already buckled in
for a flight across water,
counting up change,
drinks mixed to dull the pain.

Informed Consent

Your ovaries are shot
but the questionnaire still wants
you to check the little box,
watch training videos enact
the usual scenarios—
organs packed in cellophane,
carnage in deep freeze.
The surgeon says tiny incisions
will unstick your tongue
but the robot needs to breathe.
The surgical table weirdly catty-corner,
your legs encased in pneumatic sleeves.
Mildly irked when they say
please “lay” back on the gurney.
You hover near the antimicrobial
laminar ceiling system,
a winged pupa
shmooshing into a cloud.
No air traffic control.
Stomach singing and softening agents.
When your frame’s stitched up
you wake remembering the mechanic
with a glandular condition
could eat six big Macs for lunch
and still fit under a Fiat.
You’re a bit leaky.
Later, your face locked down
in a mesh
with your name taped to it.
Open eye holes.
Eyes closed.
Rinsed and squeegeed.
Relief to hear the pain you feel
is supposed to be there.

Meditation (a cento)

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees
adorned with ferns,
the smell of crushed grass all around me
as sweet as I could bear.
I had meant to have but modest needs.
Yet see how I spread out and I cannot help it
like a grub suddenly exposed.
Inside me were many
black figures in a white landscape,
also pines, lawn, the bay, a blossoming apricot,
then several moths: then many
flowers, unrecognizable
with woolly leaves like tongues.
Then the elms. There marching
with the weight of a domed crown
drenched, knocking against the house.
Sometimes I lift a green lacewing
into a flushed, still sky.

Of course the point is to be hidden,
empty of complaint, forever
a mouth that has no moisture and no breath.
Because my throat clove to hunger,
I hid sometimes in my closet among my own clothes.
I thought, OK this shirt will clothe the other in me,
the unintelligible syllables.
I am its attachment or appendage.
I mean to say
that I’d temporarily died.
But I tell myself I’m safe. I remind myself.
In the bathtub, I examine my body,
blessed to be here in spite of
the rotting odor of need.

I should have begun with this: the sky
pouring itself over and over
though sometimes it is only gauze, unrolling
toward heaven still,
pink, of course, soft; a girl’s—
and you can imagine the face
all feathered out in clouds,
long thin arms stretched out
fence post to fence post.
Unrooted, she walks
as consciousness
estranged from the body,
looking down and seeing some image
of time on sand, mud, bits of shell, the moving
of her hips, her laughter, her will—
whatever suits her      she moves

Two hours before dawn. In the distance
the fields tilt to the sky. Though it is late,
the moon already down,
night covers the pond with its wing.
Late, you can hear the stars. And beyond them
high in the trees, cicadas weave
with their liquid voices.
This is how it always is.
I think of all my time,
who I am and what I’ve done
under a sky that never cared less.
It’s the same weight
before I heard it coming, and when it
split me apart.

Sources

Stanza 1: Louise Gluck, “Medusa”; Elizabeth Bishop, “Jeronimo’s House”; Ellery Akers, “Looking Around”; Robert Frost, “The Onset”; Emily Dickinson, #476; Naomi Replansky, “Housing Shortage”; Jane Kenyon: “Man Waking”; Alicia Ostriker, “volcano 1”; Alicia Ostriker, “the volcano and the covenant 5”; Robert Hass, “Interrupted Meditation”; Ellery Akers, “Letter to Her Sister: By the Carson River, Nevada, 1848”; “ Hayden Carruth, “This Decoration”; Ellery Akers: Letter to Her Sister: Wyoming, 1848”; Hayden Carruth, “Speaking for Them”; H.D., “Tribute to the Angels”; Ellery Akers, “Letter to Her Sister: Wyoming, 1848”; Ruth Stone, “Separate”; Elizabeth Bishop, “Large Bad Picture” Stanza 2: Jeff Oaks, “The Nest in Winter”; Sylvia Plath, “The Thin People”; William Butler Yeats, “Byzantium”; Steven Cramer, Clangings, pg 13; Ruth Stone, “Loss”; Galway Kinnell, “Telephoning in Mexican Sunlight”; Sylvia Plath, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”; Alicia Ostriker, “The Space of This Dialogue 4. Aperture”; Diane di Prima, “Brass Furnace Going Out: Song, after an Abortion”; Wisława Szymborska, “May 16, 1973”; Jack Gilbert, “Infectious”; Louise Gluck, “Mutable Earth”; Alicia Ostriker: “the volcano and the covenant 4” Stanza 3: Wisława Szymborska, “Sky”; Ellery Akers, “Long Island, 1952”; Ellery Akers, “Sky”; Robert Frost, “After Apple Picking”; Robert Hass, “My Mother’s Nipples”; Ted Kooser, “december 22”; Ted Kooser, “december 8”; Ted Kooser, “december 27”; Ted Kooser, “december 9”; Diane di Prima, “The Loba Recovers the Memory of a Mare”; Louise Gluck, “The Wild Iris”; Jane Kenyon, “Summer 1890: Near the Gulf”; Louise Gluck, “Scilla”; Ellen Bass, “Marriage”; Diane di Prima, “Apparuit” Stanza 4: Ted Kooser: january 23; Stevie Smith: “Pretty”; Ted Kooser: “december 2”; Louise Gluck: “The Pond”; William Stafford: “Touches”; Ted Kooser: “An August Night”; Lisel Mueller: “Why I Need the Birds”; Rumi (trans Coleman Barks): #1823; Rumi (trans Coleman Barks): #1823; Hayden Carruth: “Loneliness: An Outburst of Hexasyllables”; Rumi (trans Coleman Barks): #2266; William Stafford: “At the Bomb Testing Site”; Ellery Akers: “Advice from an Angel 5”; Jane Kenyon: “Prognosis”; Rumi (trans Coleman Barks): #1304

Music of the Spheres (a cento)

—for Galway

I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven—
let me sing
and scatter wheeling in great broken rings

O half moon—
you with the candle—
barren, empty, stone wild. Worn-away wild—

All goes onward and outward—and nothing collapses

These sonatas, these scores, tell me
whose face
shines back at itself
milky, simmering—

in the beginning
there

where the earth oozes up
one letter at a time. Pressing down
the blossom dust
the flesh-flowers
the almost imaginary bones

pressing lips to the edge of each syllable
smoothed or scribbled or cross-hatched everywhere

I can see
the huge broken letters
shining in their heaped-up hair

I see it, foolish and clear, and say it. Sometimes
a whole sentence gets through

shards and lumps
no bigger than a breath

Out of the words, the one
light comes out
that holds this great earth in the air

And then
a little hidden sympathy
floats towards me
in remembrance

of the beginning

Imagine it—

figs, lemons
canaries jouncing in jewelweed
built of these fistfuls of yellow

and all this universe
iridescent, watery

looked like gold bees, and then like pollen

Sources

Stanza 1: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself #49”; Anne Sexton, “In Celebration of My Uterus”; William Butler Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole” Stanza 2: Sylvia Plath, “Thalidomide”; Camille Dungy, “Trophic Cascade”; Jack Gilbert, “Foraging for Wood on the Mountain” Stanza 3: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself #6” Stanza 4: Julia Guez, “If Indeed I am Ill, Brother”; Galway Kinnell, “Under the Maud Moon”; Ted Kooser, “February 25”; Jill Dawson, “The Crossing” Stanza 5: Genesis; Diane di Prima, “The Stars Shine for Us” Stanza 6: Galway Kinnell, “Under the Maud Moon”; Raymond Carver, “The School Desk”; Galway Kinnell, “The Call Across…”; Galway Kinnell, “The Call Across…”; Galway Kinnell, “Little Sleeps-head in the Moonlight” Stanza 7: Naomi Shihab Nye, “Darling”; Mark Doty, “Lilies in New York” Stanza 8: Galway Kinnell, “The Path Among the Stones”; Galway Kinnell, “The Hen Flower”; Ellery Akers, “My Mother’s Decoupage” Stanza 9: Mona van Duyn, “Fear of Flying”; Naomi Shihab Nye, “Morning?” Stanza 10: Galway Kinnell, “In the Hotel of Lost Light”; Ted Kooser, “January 9” Stanza 11: Galway Kinnell, “Under the Maud Moon”; Ellery Akers, “The Dead”; Jack Gilbert, “Adulterated” Stanza 12: Galway Kinnell, “Under the Maud Moon”; Ann Pelletier, Letter That Never, page 21”; Ellery Akers, “What Rises in the Seat at Night Rises in Dreams”; Galway Kinnell, “Under the Maud Moon” Stanza 13: Galway Kinnell, “Under the Maud Moon” Stanza 14: Sylvia Plath, “Letter in November” Stanza 15: Ann Pelletier, Letter That Never, page 35: Ann Pelletier, Letter That Never, page 14; Mark Doty, “Door to the River” Stanza 16: Adrienne Rich, “A Woman Mourned by Daughters”; Mark Doty, “A Display of Mackerel” Stanza 17: Ellery Akers, “The Shouting Match with my Mother at Sixteen”

Joan Baranow is the author of six poetry books, including Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague, winner of the 2021 Brick Road Press Contest. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, zyzzyva, and elsewhere. A member of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Community of Writers, she teaches in the MFA program at Dominican University of California. She is currently producing videos for her YouTube channel @poetryandhealing.

Martha Zweig

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Ars Brevis

Nimble mobile sculpture flashes thirty
skinny metallic coils— slinkies, potato peels—
squirming into-&-out-of each least breeze.

If you set the thing outdoors for any longer
than one slick video take though, actual
weather corrodes it to fixed pits &

crooked cramps just like your life.

Let’s hunch in the backseat
together: you, me, & snort white dust.
I don’t remember

exactly but yesterday somebody
rushing Greek swore she got whatever
she still had left of her ownself blown away wild.

Dance

Soggy fog: the lake slumps.
I was just about to wrap
& ribbon it when the one perfect birthday
gift for you seized my wrist & wriggled & twisted
offkey to the wrong song the lake
still likes to pluck its shallow harp
strings to & sing.

Happy Return

Semiangelic, I descend
a measly sky through crisscross
layers of little untidy clouds. Rain
below hurls at the access/exit
gates, kicking up to exaggerate
each lurch of the day.
Was I thinking? One tires.

Long splashy drive, then all’s
gone fine back home. If I never left?
Well I never, a chorus
of rural ladies exclaims
from their booth in my personality.
A mental leopard refreshes,
changing spots before my eyes.

Eyes have it! rules the chair. We prevail.
Curtsey to mama dead in her ash jar.
Duffel unpacks, smoothing away, &, however
unsteady of heart, may I subsume
now into whatever the scrawl
of the gypsy moths at the wet
windowpane has in mind.

Hero

Third jelly danish: home-sickening.
Sucking gooey fingers at age
forty-seven & counting: If the bad boy
hasn’t amounted to much, that’s the good news.
Lengthening odds-over-ends somersault downhill.

Mornings ooze off in all directions.
Lost track of every & each
item I alphabetized into safekeeping: tall
tipsy cabinet by the medicine chest: pinched
ribbons, photos, a medal, clippings, fame.

White lies gossip under my breath.
Crouch me at my locker twiddling tumblers.
Do you love me still? You loved me once as if
I danced all night bravado in parachute silks.
You sang my name like a home town.

Martha Zweig’s four full-length poetry collections are Get Lost (DHP Oregon), Monkey Lightning (Tupelo Press), What Kind (Wesleyan University Press), and Vinegar Bone (Wesleyan University Press). Her chapbooks are Powers (Stinehour Press, Vermont Council on the Arts), and A Skirmish of Harks (Jacar e-books). Zweig’s poems appear widely; her recognitions include Hopwood Awards, a Whiting Award, Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominations, and a Warren Wilson MFA. She lives in Vermont where she worked for ten years as an advocate for seniors, after another ten years handling garments in a pajama factory where she served a term as ILGWU shop chair.

Mikey Swanberg

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Iron Mountain

I fed the last pictures of us
into the narrow slit

of the confidential
recycling bin.

We move offices next month.
I won’t be able to sit all day

Looking out at the busy river
like I’ve loved ever again.

The shaggy migrators came & left
with the Halloween candy
.
Buy-one- get-one Cormorants & Black Ducks.
An aisle of last season’s Herons.

I read once it’s in their bones
the way they know where to stop

a bit to rest before heading
wherever they’re getting to next.

That year after year it’s the same
finches buttering the fence.

God they look young
I thought of us –

already slipping
into darkness

small holes still showing
from where we hung.

picking mulberries

from over the top
of the cemetery’s brick

I bring my hand back
to the living side

any time I see
headlights

I’d hoped      for longer
than I’d care to say

to make something
that preserved me

but now I see
that what stays

is what leaves
a stain

just me my purple
fingertips

this short bruised
season we all get

anyway      I am
coming home to you

anyway      the bag I brought
is getting full

mile marker

I wasn’t smart enough
to know that I was dying

which was good
because I was losing

so much blood
back into myself

a closed loop
of hurt an emt

pressed on lightly
& called a hot belly

they rolled me
from the soft shoulder

of the road
onto a spineboard

then plenty happened
while I was asleep

riding the ink gravity
of fentanyl & nothing

twice caught in the orbit
of what comes next

really – I just wanted to be home
in my life and its mess

please god I said
let me be the same

though what kind of wish
was that

I was changed
but mostly in a boring way

like the elephant-in-a-pill
we dropped in a bucket

to swell 500 times its size
hours later – we fished it out

a chewed bazooka pink
we drove the car

right over the top of it
but even that couldn’t make it shrink

Mikey Swanberg is the author of Good Grief and the chapbook On Earth As It Is, both with VA Press. His work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Oxford American, Passages North and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin—Madison and lives in Chicago.