Tag Archives: Prose Poetry

Gary Sloboda

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cenotaph

our eyes enlarge behind the lenses of our glasses. coats out of season and heels worn out. like prisoners at the moment before release. we are held so tightly. and the tall buildings’ windows once dazed by the river. glare down tonight at our home. of pressed wood and carpenter’s glue. glitter paint job in the moonlight. and our belongings piled everywhere. as if we’re about to or will never leave.

taurus

i was distressed. voices of others landed in our conversations like spores. when we stood on the curb. its scattered jagged glass reflected the years to come. and our mutiny of life’s more gentle features: hollering on the street like it’s the end of the world. and on the walkway of the bridge. how the form of our breath ascended. like the ghosts of pigeons. floating through the city. and the stars fetchingly arranged.

renewal

the intention was always there until it wasn’t. moon glow on the balcony before eviction. i stared across at the alley peppered with bugs and struggle. without a holler or alarm to catfish my attention. i stood there as if standing in line. to be written out or scripted. the last tenant’s plastic plants gathered tightly on the sill. and left for the next one to leave. as they were left for me.

sunfish

i’m made in the same way. shambling out of the stale fungal scent of my books. through the rusted gate that leads to the cellar. or the courtyard the lobotomized belltower looks down upon. where bullets whine when creditors arrive. in a ripple of wind that once laid down on the sea. people are moving towards me. their arms wide open and slightly animatronic across the concrete. and they hold me against the tides of refusal. as we taste the first light of the day.

memorial 2

the decades of ellipses tracked us home. it’s broken now but weighs the same. and the same emotions linger. pelican wedge overhead. like the hillside cemetery flags fly. we stumble with our bags. as the last days’ dark melodies unwind from passing cars. in the salt pinch of the waves that corrodes the metal railings. along the walls of rock where the ocean begins. and goes on forever.

Gary Sloboda’s work has recently appeared in such places as Blackbox Manifold, Twyckenham Notes, and Word For/ Word. He lives in San Francisco.

Bryan Price

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Light coming over the mountain

I.

you are dead but light keeps
coming over the mountain
as you awaken from life you
realize that the mountain is a line

and the light is everything else
no color or substance
nothing but clarity for the
last few moments of finitude

II.

there is a thing Adorno said
about poetry and yet I go on
returning to it reading about
beds into tombs reading about so

much death among future ruins
a lilac a little finger a grain of sand
dust into dust but the light
keeps coming over the mountain

The mystery of transubstantiation

the wine smells like grass again and vice-versa

when I say ghosts I mean his inglorious past

his oiled boots reminded me of gun grease

he shot the lights out once—sunsets made the

age of angels immaterial but we’d sit and watch

planes crash into the mountains we’d burn

tires in order to fuck with the satellites and when

he gave us his teeth we sharpened them on

a landmine the shape and color of a new moon

The libra archive

one cannot conjure out of thin air or the dead blue leaves
cannot make or break cannot hit or beat with belt
cannot swim or shower cleanse bathe or soak in acid
cannot put plastic into effluvial veins one
cannot ride or rail or with tongue the color of snail put napalm
in the black-as-night shoes of a former lover
the street weeps inchoate the sky falls in dribs and drabs
summer summons suicide summer summons situation-comedies
about certain simulacrums concerning the immutability
of young parasitic love one cannot conjure lovelorn mindless
mind-numbing mindfuck gyrate to gunplay cannot do so
clandestinely without what I’ve heard referred to simply as the
gadget one cannot wear black theoretical tightrope-walker’s shoes
and just walk into the distance between hazel and hazelnut

Bryan Price is the author of A Plea for Secular Gods: Elegies (What Books, 2023). His stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Noon Annual, Chicago Quarterly Review, EPOCH, Dialogist, and elsewhere. He lives in San Diego, California.

Oz Hardwick

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Hustings in the Age of Uncertainty

A man in a blue suit speaks in a whisper but carries a megaphone, tunes his preparatory breaths to the pitch of air raid sirens, and coughs up fragments of glass animals. His voice is a crack in the polar ice, through which sabre-toothed tigers, dire wolves, and other apex predators crawl, shaking crystals from their shaggy manes and blinking blood-lusty eyes. It’s a predictable avalanche that leaves peaks denuded of snow, with frostbitten corpses staring at the sky, toilet tissue wreathes, and flies. The man in the blue suit pays his own audience in luxury flights, flattery, and fast-tracked passage through loopholes paved with false intentions, his wheezing laugh lingering long after the last plant is plucked and the last polar bear blasted through its hot skull. When the bombs come, or when the Sun catches in bare branches and refuses to set, the man in the blue suit needles tears from the corners of his eyes as he photoshops his hands out of pictures of star-struck girls; and when he waves from low-slung cars and ornate balconies, he’s just a stand-in for himself, or a shop dummy with a blue suit slapped on in cut-price paint. Meanwhile, mammoths and mastodons march two by two, waving fire that turns mountains into cracked glass, while a disembodied voice gags in the throat of a dropped megaphone, summoning the two-faced faithful to free lunches, free holidays, melting ice creams, and blue suits for each new wailing infant.

Bargain

Contrary to counterindications, we are not flying. We are not fleeing the scenes of crimes in which we may or may not have been complicit. It’s complicated, but we were not created – in God’s image? A dog’s image? A cat, perhaps. Me? How? – to comprehend, any more than to combust from the fire in our bellies. Believe it or not, we are falling, in love like teenage sweethearts, and into the machinery like nameless sweatshop drones. We’re like kids in a sweetshop: not children but goats, sorted from the sheep by Disgusted of Godalming, Surrey, with his fringe on top. Stop. Why-oh-why-oh-why must we distrust the scores and indentations spread out as plain as the noses on our faces? Two wings don’t make a plane. We walk with backs bent through a stately pile falling down. The relationship of verb to subject remains. Ambiguous.

Interpretive Malacology: The Arecibo Division

We monitor the snails with cameras and trackers, then chart their movements with coloured pens on sturdy paper. The technology’s changed, but it’s much the same as it was in our parents’ day and, for all we know, their parents’ day, and on and on, until the Gods of your choice and their analogues and avatars first created snails. To the casual observer, they’re just scaling the fence for the finest leafy greens, then retracing their trails to sleep through the day beneath rusting bins and barrows. But if you look at the charts – here, and here, and particularly here – you can see the patterns and their relation to language, the script of slime on weathered creosote. We send out scouts in the cool of morning to scour chewed stalks for our new Rosetta stone. See how the lines caress the edge of meaning. We know in our bones that this is important, but we don’t quite yet know why.

The Assassin’s Last Bow

Reviews are in and they’re not looking good. Three stars at best, and one of those is O-type, hot and massive, its hydrogen burning out as it swallows itself into a black hole. Another is a washed-up lush in a downtown bar, repeating the same tired tales of the road to anyone who’ll listen. No one will listen. The last one’s more ambivalent, pinned to a five-year-old’s jacket, a tangible signifier of law and order in a clapboard frontier town. He looks at his tears in the mirror, as if they belong to someone else, as if they’re the binary stars he can only dream of. The reviews, he reflects, are disappointing to say the least, peppered with typos and tired tales. Maybe he should jack it in? The old man in the mirror weighs a gun in his innocent palm and aims it at the stars.

Oz Hardwick is a York-based poet, who has published “maybe fifteen?” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024). Oz has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in tiny coffee shops. In 2022, he was awarded the ARC Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry.”

Andrew Zawacki

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from These Late Eclipses

Manufactured Housing

Lit like unto a Vegas casino—permanent sunset, nor window nor clock—day does its un-nuanced thing: frisbee tossing, data drift, a wacky inflatable tube man, breakdancing into the rhodium glare. Over there, in the Öpik–Oort cloud: immobile mobile homes, on rented land.

These Fugitive Apparitions—

pale in the argentine cast of midair—and how we came under their riverine spell, arriving at figurations wherein a trace conceals, or cancels out, the whole. My wife lies down at nightfall: leonine. As an arc of slow light. Breathless in the sharded dark, I read her arousal like braille.

Breech Baby

I remember the doctor tried to flip my younger daughter over—one part primitive wrestling match, his forearms greased to knead the womb, and one part sci-fi shadow play, tectonic on a screen: she wouldn’t budge. We worried then she’d be insolent, hard. Now I think: good.

Verkhoyansk, 100.4º F

A surveying crew is out measuring a fraction of a / fraction of a fraction / of the earth. Case numbers over 14 days are trending +52% +65%. Having shucked the sweetcorn, I chuck the husks at the brink of the woods, as dark is swooning in. The forecast calls for air conditioning.

Droste Effect

Inflicted, inflected: a scar cemented in air. Scare quotes blight my cornea: phosphor luminance, after-eclipse. World not long for this world. Under a hematoma sun, everyone I know’s been broken down, like a cardboard box. My demons hounded by demons of their own.

Andrew Zawacki is the author of Unsun: f/11, Videotape, Petals of Zero Petals of One, Anabranch, and By Reason of Breakings, as well as four books in France. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Nation, and elsewhere. With fellowships from the NEA, Centre National du livre, and French Voices, he translated Sébastien Smirou’s My Lorenzo and See About. Zawacki also edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 and edited and co-translated Aleš Debeljak’s Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems. He was a 2016 Howard Foundation Poetry. These Late Eclipses is due in spring, 2025 from Verge Books.

Marie de Quatrebarbes

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from The Vitals

(translated from the French by Aiden Farrell)

September 1

Signs without referent: fauna-fiction. Fugacities rendered post-war. A sign is a party she watches from death. Can it be, one of these terrestrial days, that which produces the hurried disappearance of a connection? For, to exist, magic is uncertain. Put on a drama of the abst. incompletion of a certain img. To exist, can it alone provoke uncert. fate?

September 2

We don’t trick her. And if she falls, we entrust her to the bees. Head forward, horns, bust. An elegance pageant. Figure of speech: circumstances. Everything is free here. Subtlety comes from the word. A fiction advances: the afternoon, the children…fiction to which we can only respond with a nod when a vague idea, a very vague idea, vaporous even, comes to snatch it away. She turns. Her head, always, in the direction of the wind.

September 3

What is eaten: the vitals. The face as such, the end of the year. Empty swamps, their water brackish, irreducibly yellow. When I say “we” (apples)—the little lame duck, the one we put in the child’s pocket—I mean “he” saves himself (it isn’t him). A sort of ecstasy, delusion of ownership—the reflection on an eye grows in the magnifying glass—loss of the image. Code: passing from green to landscape. Variant: she’s that old boy with the blue mouth.

September 4

Flat mouth (option to withdraw). Heard with mouth: porous. In the implementation of wind: window—its soaked nod. Focal: reclusion-adoration. The frozen function of a use.

September 5

This void: my skin illustrated it. We believe we are born, they say, from swarms of bodies, abstract nudities held in compromised steadiness. They call it: dreams. And we caress them. Our hands reach for their eyes. It’s how we treat things (they are not things). The rupture is often cold, this one, the same scream.

September 6

Yesterday a cloud descended on the city. My window turned the world into a thin surface and I wondered: where are the beds? I’m covered in an onion’s outermost skin. My mouth in situ: narrative acceleration. We find time in the same place we left it—in the pots of crayfish. Inside, tonight, the library burned down and the books were devoured by flames. Say again: are mourners ever singular?

This excerpt from award-winning French poet Marie de Quatrebarbes’ The Vitals, forthcoming with World Poetry Books in 2025, is an elegiac long poem in the form of a fragmentary journal that tracks the loss of a loved one.
Marie de Quatrebarbes has published several books of poetry including Les vivres (P.O.L.) and Vanités (Éric Pesty Éditeur), as well as a novel inspired by the life of Aby Walburg, Aby (P.O.L.). She edited an anthology dedicated to contemporary poetry by young French women: Madame tout le monde (Le Corridor bleu).

Aiden Farrell is a poet, translator, and editor. His translation of The Vitals by Marie de Quatrebarbes will be published by World Poetry Books in 2025. He has published two chapbooks—lilac lilac (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs) and organismalgorithm (Fence). Aiden is the managing editor of Futurepoem. Born in France, Aiden lives in Brooklyn.

Jeffrey Hecker

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New York Avenue

Oafs built The Unemployment Insurance Office inside Gateway Head Start Early Education Center. Jobless adults enter, see children frolic. Recess horn blows. The jobless ask are we in the right place. Children say no. The jobless ask are we in the wrong place. Parents say probably. Teachers say yes.

Indiana Avenue

I have a dream local celebrity James Avery (Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) broadcasts on WPGG-AM to report Turning Point Day Center for the Homeless is six blocks from The Pool & Spa at Bally’s. Avery then makes DJ transmit signal of complete human surrender to estuary birds.

Atlantic Avenue

In 2007, Mayor Bob Levy signed into law 7 ordinances, then Bob simply left City Hall in a Dodge Durango, and nobody knew where Bob was 13 nights. Many, like Truman Capote’s partner Jack Dunphy’s surf instructor, believe Bob disrobed to ascend reborn in a dust devil of artificial sand.

Ventnor Avenue

Once an experimental village flourished where in place of strangers introducing themselves by name or occupation or hey or yo they chose to confess their worst personal tragedy. An empathy hierarchy developed scaled at first painstaking as cantilevered stairs, eventually even like a multipurpose ladder.

Pacific Avenue

Tired of taffy, your daddy told you to give back to the street everybody should start at St. Nicholas of Tolentine Church, end at Altman Playground cookout. He enjoyed Linda Ronstadt in hardware stores. He liked Vietnam Vets who roamed a lumber section hours and never bought a single beam.

Pennsylvania Avenue

My landlady drives tweens ‘tween home and school. Peers must bus. My landlady is a manager of a nightclub. My landlady, nightclub manager, watches the breaking news of today tomorrow. My landlady is a nightclub manager. My landlady wakes at 1:00 p.m. My landlady hates the sun.

Jeffrey Hecker is author of Rumble Seat (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011) & chapbooks Hornbook (Horse Less Press, 2012), Instructions for the Orgy (Sunnyoutside Press, 2013) & Ark Aft (The Magnificent Field, 2020). Recent work appears in South Dakota Review and Bennington Review. A fourth-generation Hawaiian-American, he teaches at The Muse Writers Center & reads for Quarterly West. @jeffrey_hecker

Jeff Friedman

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How to Talk

Give up on drawing breath from your chest. Give up on bringing it up through your throat into your mouth. Give up on your tongue touching your teeth or the draw gate of your glottis opening and closing. It’s not about the lips either. The lips are for kissing if you can find someone to kiss. Forget about the sound of your voice speaking, how it rises and falls like birds flying against a strong wind. Forget about the soft voice you sometimes use to make an impression. The noise from others drowns it out. Imagine pronouncing a single phoneme, then another and now you have a word and more words. Imagine the words drumming into sentences. Let your mind raise its voice and shout sentence after sentence so those around you nod in agreement or smile their acceptance. And even if no one can actually hear you—now you’re talking.

Done Time

Done talking nonsense. Done with brittle tongues and bad brewers, with broods of chickens scratching the dirt. Done with the darkness at the center of darkness—it may be another kind of light. Done with drone mosquitoes buzzing at the windows—and the drones that unload exploding packages. Done with the birds delivering diseases, the doctors painting masterpieces—their floating deathbeds. Done with the wisdom of oracles whose disembodied heads bob up and down in the roiling river, singing their cliches like prophecies. Done waiting for justice to knock Humpty Dumpty off his wall, for his shell to be shattered—the yolk smashed. Done believing that there is a period at the end of a war.

What Her Hand Says

Her hand opens and closes: yes when she opens it, no when she closes it until the loose bulb of her fist bangs against air and collapses. When her hands fold together, she is saying “thank you.” When you touch your heart for her and lean over the bedrails, she touches your heart. The nurse dampens her lips with a sponge stick. Even the tiniest hint of food or water would choke her paralyzed throat. When you hold up the laminated alphabet, she struggles to tap the letters and you guess the wrong words again and again until she is almost smiling. She grips your hand and falls asleep in your silence.

Homeland

“You should visit Hungary,” my sister said. “It’s our homeland.” “How can it be my homeland?” I asked. “I’ve never been there.” “Everyone there has dad’s brown eyes and his rock of a chin.” Everyone looks like him and like us.” I peered into my sister’s face and saw my father’s face and then my own. I remembered how my father combed Wildroot into his black curly hair, huffing so forcefully he fogged up the bathroom mirror, how he whipped the comb away, flinging oily drops on the tile floor, how at dinner he inhaled the hot breath of Hungarian stew as though it were the air rising from the earth of his homeland. A country of our people, I thought, everyone looking like everyone else, everyone looking like us—every face a mirror of every face. “Scary, I said. “I’m not going.”

Jeff Friedman’s tenth collection, Ashes in Paradise, was recently published by Madhat Press. Friedman’s poems and prose pieces have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, New England Review, Poetry International, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Fiction International, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, The New Republic, and Best Microfiction 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards and prizes. His newest book is Broken Signals from Bamboo Dart Press.

Mark DeCarteret

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John Walker.Seal Point Series #VIII

The Year I Went Without Winning at Anything

—for John Walker

I started with the letter that I never sent. How it might tell one about the sea. And the ease in which I steered through it to shore. Tried to put it all to rest. How from here on in, it will return to us not only in song. Churning up notes. That go back far as stones. But in the way that the boats sway in time. Keeping beat against their algae-d slips. Their oars sworn to a now unheard-of silence. As a gull laughs off a near fall. And then I tried settling into an inlet for a spell. Where at low tide another side of this world might be shown. Almost worshiped by sunlight. And its unceasing stare. Where I might be relocated for life. Shot off like a flare. And continue on as an afterthought. Opting out of these poetic doings. And thus, stop looking, so steely and tele-eyed, out past the sea. Where it straightens out its act and then esses, endlessly loops and then pools, spends the rest of eternity either too tired denying the moon’s influence or eddying. The colors slow-heated, steeping like tea, or cooled off and foolishly seen for themselves, charmed back to earth. Miracles are like this. Not worth the ink one tried thinking them less than true. Chances are you have found yourself in the same spot. Sitting atop a hill. A sound down below you. Unimaginatively still except for that gull, its near-falling. If not, I will send you a clip. Or better yet, see that I pencil you in.

The Year I Went Without the Sun Was From

the fire. Or so it was formulated. A monster sun though not big on details. Or getting it right. Not really into anyone’s suffering. Or even having some fun with them. I saw it first thing this morning. Right here where the surf is frustrating the sand. And a tiny bird’s landed. This wren or that. Seemingly new to the area. New to this mess we’ve recreated. With the eye of the same god. (Aren’t there are always some willing to be seen as blameless?) But still singing its way into my memory. How I’d fuss over it! Have a little fun. It was truly, truly frightening. How the sun was from the fire. How it gets like this. When it hasn’t been fed. Read to. These deafening winds. Storms in name only. Alabaster. And Betty Lou. Confused with the thing itself. Or the fleas that have taken us up as their own. Recasting us. Only to find ourselves signed in again. Aligned with the bored and the cross. Light is like this. Reformulated. Nothing but the details. So, let’s get this right. Life is suffering? Too monstrous to get in a word? Yes, you heard it here first. Early this afternoon. We’re so over the birds. And their tiny little songs. There’s more than enough room for no one. What fun. O what fun.

 

The Year We Went Without Frozen Particles Forming in our Mountains

Another easeful though sometimes nuclear proclamation is that of the pogonip or “dense winter fog”—that old standby métier of numbskulls and/or others like them, who’ve long been researching this sort of prefrontal thankfulness for those almost funereal directions we’ve been given to sample—the U standing for upbeat and the “Pneumatic 14” maybe attempting to re-define how for each U that you are thankful for, you picture the 14th upbeat following it in your diet, then repose that same U with its original. So that, in other words—“Mighty oaths from little acrimonies grow” becomes “My tie owes its lack of money to its many gurus” so that later the latter’s dewpoint is not only enveloping, but apparently medicinal, apparently unprofitable, along with others like them, seeming to echo the pogonip’s further researching of fronds and their charged opinions—a polemic that promises to be both pestilent and well worth excerpting.

The Year I Went Without Starring in My Own Life

—for Marguerite T. White

The word always was. Truth be told. That in a family of runts. And runt afficionados. I had the best smile. Which worked out well since I worked on a farm. Where the rest of the crew had but one tooth between them. Earlier on, I was reared by an astronaut. Which had lasted for hundreds of years. What with all the time changes. And after that, was pursued by a human in a turnip suit. Who wanted to include me in their supper plans. But I denied them. Ending any chance of dessert. Or a slow dance. Only to be left with this acre of well cared for seedlings made from felt. So lonely, I’d settled for the cranes all a-blush in the field. And what was far less this dance. Far more this commentary on flight. And the word often was. That of all the towns run by farmers. We either had us more stories to tell than the rest of the towns. Or more arms to deliver them. And that because of this. We would not only be shadowed by our own thoughts. But those of the owls. Our town fathers would lower down with wires. If the towns people got to being well-oiled enough. And how that would be followed by this untoward sun. Cut out from foil by the town mothers. Along with this fourth wall. Thrown together by the town children. And the word sometimes was. That in a city of rivers. We sold as canals to the runts. And as lakes to the farmers. We were not drawn to scale. Even though we had won us an award. For this drawing we’d done of me. Doing my best to smile. Play host to those ghosts who had outstayed our charades. That we’d working titled “The Lame Took to Walking While the Mail Took to Talking” but then switched to “The Turnip Returns Their Suit for a Pint of Ale and an Air Tank.” And the word never ever was. Unless we figure in our curiosity for the sea. And sea captains. And the ships that oft-punished them. Softened their fortitude. But then would raise them like light and as asterisks in the same breath. That the world was as flat. As any mention of death. And where I’d be welcomed back to the stage. As its sidekick, designated sickly presence. Stick-figuring in all of its grievances. Oh, how I had howled and sung. And fronted the band. Had even handled a joy buzzer. As well as a toy sword and gun. Even once, stunt doubling for my guest star’s one solo. Who, in fact, had never had her an acting class. But still went on to become. In a word. A bit of an ass.

The Year We Went Without Fables

We were shaking. Well before the black death. Well before there were babies conceived in the lab. We would carry this broken history on our backs. And the crowbars we’d need. To uncrate them. Let the sun read all kinds of things into them. We had aches where our chairs were. And chairs where our aches. We held our breath for weeks at a time. Then watched as it circled our heads. Thought of us only in terms of a funeral wreath. Or some crown. They’d have a child labor. To punch out of cardboard. And then have a teenager. Hand out free with our fries. We had cable. And nuclear blasts. Labels on our clothes. From countries we’d never heard. Or had ever showed interest. We were wearing out sacks. Well before the class action suits. And wore our shoes without socks. So far after Labor Day. The locals would bray at us. As if we had rabies. Or bared our asses to their ancestors. We were too ecstatic for our own good. Best, by now, at the art. Of chatting up strangers. And then forming stranger attachments. We would carry so much cash on us. Cross our foreheads so often with ash. What we had for faith ate at us. Had for hope developed sores. But to our credit, we shook. Well after it looked cool. Well after it was. Saw our likeness in each lens. Our finest traits in everyone we befriended. Even though we lacked words for everything. Thought the world of next to nothing. We loved hating it. Less it fit in a text. Outwaiting yet another thing. To blur into another. Be rubbed wrong. And then wronger. Growing so tired of dieting. Of the miracle food that might tide us all over. We would throw out our voices. For what little it was worth. And then would black out. In the back of a cab. Dribbling our ABCs on our bibs. Where they’ll eventually crab. Into yet another brand. To refreshen the void.

Mark DeCarteret was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. On “The Road Ride” at the Jack Kerouac Theme Park. And studied with Sam Cornish, Bill Knott, Tom Lux, Mekeel McBride, Charles Simic, and Franz Wright. (See: Representative at the Greater Boston Poetry Festival, Recipient of Thomas Williams Memorial Prize…) He’s worked a third of his life installing tile, a third teaching, and a third selling books. (Going on 13 years at Water Street in Exeter NH…) And has hosted and organized two reading series. Co-edited an anthology of NH poets. He was Poet Laureate of Portsmouth NH. Twice, a finalist for NH Poet Laureate. And his poems have appeared in over 500 magazines including AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, BlazeVOX (which recently published the first chapter of his novel Off Season), Boston Review, Caliban, Chicago Review, Fence, Gargoyle, Hole in the Head, Map Literary, On the Seawall, Plume, and Nixes Mate (which recently published his seventh book of poetry, lesser case). As well as 30 anthologies. Among them, American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press), and Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998 (Black Sparrow Press). He performs with the Dadaist troupe Carteret Voltaire. And plays drums and sings with Codpiece. His latest book Props: Poetic Intros, Praises, Co-conspiraceis, Pairings was released last month by Bee Monk Press.

Grace Smith

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Sadder and Deeper

I dropped off a lover at the sad train station. He got us coffee and I waited in the little street wishing it was full of morning people and would be full of night people but there were just two men by a doorway talking about war.

In the translation seminar people asked how to find a text. Translators told the stories of how they’d found their texts. I found a big white dog in the street. She was cheerful. We knocked on all the doors until somebody knew her house. When they opened the door, they said, Magic, I didn’t even know you were gone–

Outside the grocery store a woman recognized a man in the street. You work at the shelter, she said, you’re funny as shit. It was sunny. I want to be related.

On the bus a girl said to a boy, If my pussy stinks so bad then why is your friend in it all day long? A man yelled about language. A tiny lap-sized girl looked. The yelling man said, This man has a daughter! Later I tried to joke about it in the lawyer bar with the math teacher by titling it A Feminist Issue on Bus 28. I thought I might love the math teacher but I have whatever that sexuality is called where you fall in love from coming until you don’t. When the girl and her friends got down off the bus, she reminded us through dirty springtime windows, We are kids.

At a clinic the man waiting across from me said with a sheepish grandma-flirting smile, You don’t want what I’ve got. Maybe I do though, I think I was thinking. In my mind the chair beside him’s empty, but I know he was talking to someone he knew.

The city was taking people’s houses if they hadn’t gutted them by the date after the flood. One day the homeowner was with us volunteers, touching everyone with his bright attitude. Under the drywall we found plaster, old plaster on old wood laithes, and none of it looked moldy. The house had been in his family for generations. He said, this is beautiful. This must be hundreds of years old, even older than I ever knew, historic. Your beautiful house, we agreed, your beautiful laithes. In my mind I said, your beautiful eyes. They were gold like fall and trying. On the porch he kept trying. I’ll never see the street he saw. There were people there, he said. There were people. There.

She Says She’s Sure My Soul Mate’s Out There

I’m so happy. It’s Saturday night.
Drank a 5PM can in the shower.

By the lamp I’m back at it. Planning summer, new
lives. I turn off the radio coming from France.

In the glass museum I was wrong about the
blue arrival of winter nights. Factories

didn’t interpret these kitchen window skies, but
I left without a souvenir cup to compare. I’m 38.

It’s February. Is this attitude or feeling?
My mother, alive, picks up the phone.

Astrology for Small Potatoes

Some people have a rain cloud above their heads.
And that is why, french fry, their thoughts are frizzy.
The water goes down and floats back up.

Some people have a light bulb dinging just above,
rattling when it’s used up. They stop. They start.

Some people have a spotlight shining down upon
them, tater. That’s why they must keep dancing.
They must keep dancing.

Some people have a forest hovering above the
tops of them. Dirty roots drop worms on them,
and furry worm gobblers. These people are lost
underground, reformed hunters, never going back.

Some people have a bright pail of blood balanced on
the air above them, always about to topple. That is
why they laugh so easily.

Some people have a handsome hawk above them,
but they don’t see the shiny killer because they are hooked
over their phones, reporting me to my boss instead of listening.

How about you, potato? What’s just above your head?

Flying

Our parents are not our real parents. I used to have a
lovebird. Crossed the Bay Bridge to get her.

I’m on a creek bridge in snow with orange gatorade and
an aging spit swan talons boy wet and clawing in my chest.

I wake up again in bird song. I can’t honestly stand it
when indigo morning grays and the day is everyone’s.

Everyone who might mom talks genetic screenings at the cookout.
Why I like past lives. My dog’s tongue is purple and the croci.

Wind moves the purple croci. I wrote about Baisat hearing her
song. Her whole face changed, her whole body, she went fast

to somewhere good. I can’t write about songs. I was seven
when I won the dove in the lottery. I was twenty-one tortured

by thoughts of fourteen. I was the one girl in motorcycle class.
The old men, the young men. They cheered when I passed.

Grace Smith is a writer and teacher. Her poetry has been published in Muzzle Magazine and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol.

Kylie Hough

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Prognosis Uncertain

This monotony rampant in the suburbs. The constant hum of electric drills and the wringing out of Op Shop cocktail dresses. It isn’t the way I imagined I would go. I light a Red Head and watch it fizzle to black. With my butcher’s knife, I slice and dice my way to the dog park. Someone swing high ahead of me and look back smiling on the upturn. Bring your philosophy and your poetry books. I am an unrealised nobody moulded from midnight. I have the potential of a hand grenade and the attention span of a clown fish. By day I scrub toilets. Boats power past, a tabby meows at a magpie. At night I talk with moving shadows. Who’s there? Oh, it’s you. I act like silence, breathless. To be heard is so close to being loved, it is almost impossible to tell the difference. This is not akin to some field trip to the zoo. No, this is warfare. This is sculpting a tin man with gloved hands. My liver poisoning someone else’s blood. Trevally in a tidal wave. I am two hotels away and freedom looks like walking fully clothed into salted black water. The tunnel of light after the feeding frenzy. A shark shaped shadow slips through the lip of a wave and I dash from the seashore. Surely someone will notice I’m playing at opposites. Somebody maybe wants to dance with me in the dunes.

Diary of a Dead Poet

The kale tastes like cardboard smells and I’m telling you, I’m trying. You stand under a deluge of cold water ripping into you like road spikes because it’s good for your immune system. Or something I can’t put my finger on that jabs like an uppercut to the jaw. I pick Aloe Vera from the garden and smear it on my skin under a pre-midday sun. You spoon magnesium into a plastic glass and watch me swallow until there’s nothing left. But the baby girl, initiated into this patriarchal prison. I don’t tell you about my dream. The one I have where your nervous system shuts down in the middle of the night and despite outside attempts to bring you back to life, you can only watch from your position on the ceiling of Accident and Emergency. Get on with it, you say, and I run around the neighbourhood in circles until I’m stopped by a man who asks me to Cocktails and Dreams. Because it’s a club, Love, and you know you want to. You’re looking down on your fitting body in horror now, two-one-shock, limbs flying, me—smiling. I’m someplace else and I’m telling you, I’m trying. But when you’re already dead, there isn’t much you don’t have to smile about.

No Place Like Home

I have this idea for a story. In it, there are two people. There is you, with your broad chest and your muscled arms. There is me, with my perky breasts and my dimpled smile. It’s a story of high school sweethearts and Disney endings. There is this castle made from yellow bricks set amongst rolling meadows of daisy and clover outside a township that glimmers green and gold. Surrounding the stronghold is a mote filled with angry alligators looking to chomp men who hurt women, children and other domesticated animals. I live in the top chamber on the thirty-fifth floor at the end of a spiral staircase you climb with the force and passion of a steed half your age. There is a white mare I feed oats to in the stable. It necks with a black stallion. The same one you ride into the sunset, me on my white horse galloping beside you. Side by side we journey, toward everything bright lights, white-picket-fences, kinky sex, two-and-a-half-kids, safe jobs, a fixed mortgage, Prozac, bullshit and banter at TGI Fridays, tantrums and track marks, rehab, unemployment, cutbacks, setbacks, climate change, Smirnoff, despair, sex trafficking, glacial melting, and grass-filled-billies smoked Saturday nights which morph into Monday mornings. And it’s lovely. And it’s wonderful. And it’s all we hoped for. Except it’s not. But we don’t mustn’t can’t. Instead, the story ends. Back it up. Reel it in. Edit. On a Sunday morning in Spring, light streams in on a gentle breeze trailing through curtained windows. Blueberry pancakes and freshly squeezed orange juice are served in the super king by adoring, impeccably-behaved, A-grade children with white teeth and sparkling eyes. A kiss, a hug, a dozen lies swallowed.

Kylie Hough writes on Yugambeh land. She was a finalist in the Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction 2018 and long listed in Room Magazine’s 2021 Creative Nonfiction Contest. Kylie received a 2021 CA/ASA Award Mentorship, was a finalist in the 2022 Page Turner Awards, and shortlisted in the 2022 Woollahra Digital Literary Award. Her stories, essays and poems are published in literary journals OyeDrum, Litro Magazine, Posit, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and others.