POETRY: issue one

Graham Foust

FROM "9/10/11": Life’s just enough to make a life incomplete. / Hours at a time, a dying cynosure, / you, my face if it were printed on money, // you’ve got the nerve to tell me that I’m standing / too close to this poem, but I wrote the thing. / You know you’re certifiable, now don’t you? [keep reading...]

Bruce Smith

FROM "[AN ANXIOUS YOUNG RED HEAD]": An anxious young red head holds the telephone... It cost us what / we’re worth. We are what the market bears. We’re excess and ism. I can’t call / myself one of us. Call me occupant, call me off, pale landlord, one of the gully / people. [keep reading...]

Melissa Broder

FROM "POWERED": A lamp powered by blood is called / a miracle and a legend / powered by blood is called a church. / I am not against anything / not even infinity I / just don’t want to be made to watch. / My consort’s head is burning hot / so I take it off. This is not / how compassion works but it works. / What of next? [keep reading...]

Shane McCrae

FROM "THE PROMISE IS NEW LIFE": Grandmother most of it / for most of it I wasn’t there for most of it / And are you resting now do you await / The new heavens and the new earth / The promise as I’ve come to understand the promise / is / New life [keep reading...]

Elizabeth Arnold

FROM "A LARGE SADNESS": swelling, welling / in me I see / one, want that / then another with the / passing draw / to a one more like / the first pull / pulling me toward that, / glancing / off it in the bright air, [keep reading...]

Paul Killebrew

FROM "EXCLAMATIONS IN EARNEST": We seem to be / surrounded. We / go straight into / the undependable / air. Movies / about us, the mush / in my mouth, / how I love / to braid our arms / around narrow trees / in a snow-drenched / painting. I added / a red line that / ruined it, / or it was just the thing, / I don’t know. / Green smears / on the trees / vibrated across / the windshield. [keep reading...]

Samuel Amadon

FROM "OH STEREO": I don’t know how it goes. / What I had was humming / a little bit. That almost / feeling. I suspected those // days, I was always talking / about the same thing, / and I intended to change / the subject, even // though there were some / people I didn’t like / around. This was when / the weather, I’d often // notice, had been / approaching. [keep reading...]

Kara Candito

FROM "ELEVATOR: A LOVE STORY": Someone says, a poem can’t just plunge into / surrealistic bewilderment no matter how much / your life sucks. Someone else says, / the attempt to store or isolate momentum is tyranny. / These two things, and weeks spent deciphering / the elevator dream, though the setting is not / a casino-lit skybox in a high-end mall / or a Halliburton safe house in which whole / countries are fucked between P4 and Mezzanine. [keep reading...]

Geoffrey G. O'Brien

FROM "DISTRACTION": Spenser coined blatant to show us the scandal / Of truth can only be invented. The same / Holds true for you, in whom subject and object / Sound alike a common depth, “the never other / Than lost continuity” Grossman defines / As present wherever poems are present. / Stein says “They will not nearly know” / As if she were one of the Romantics / But is not talking about a ruin or frieze. [keep reading...]

Kyle McCord

FROM "WHAT'S LEFT": I’m astonished no one has ever suggested that your sight has simply / preceded you into your following life. This isn’t intended cruelly. / Like Siddhartha, but much less zealously, I based my life on a gamble / that the buds that die simply weren’t intended for this particular act. [keep reading...]

Sandra Simonds

FROM "BLACK LEOTARD": There was one man, then two men, then three. / The worst part of me did a somersault on the balance beam. / The bumblebee audience cooked to 103 degrees. / One man bumped the next one off the beam, then the next / one did the same thing. I spent the day making sure I didn’t call / each one by the wrong name. [keep reading...]

Will Arbery

FROM "IN WHICH TARRARE EATS TWO COVETED BOPPERS": Last night, this, Bieber, you sat perch and says “Yo, I think you might be my best friend in the world.” You ask, does Tarrare dream. Yes I have. You say “Usually I dream about blackness because I don’t dream. I just fall asleep, see black, and wake up. [keep reading...]

Kit Frick

FROM "[THE MEN HERE ARE CRUEL]": The men here are cruel by some estimations / withholders of gesture embrace // it’s very personal but not how you think / this is infection’s way // they keep / a prudent distance they spare you // have learned things / about mercy [keep reading...]

John Lee Clark

FROM "QUANTUM PHYSICS": I am not sure what physics means much less quantum // I did watch the TV show Quantum Leap in the boys' dormitory // I mention that I watched it in the boys' dormitory because my family didn't have a TV at home // I saw the same actor in a movie where he was the manager of a minor league baseball team [keep reading...]