POETRY: ISSUE FIVE

Mary Jo Bang FROM “A TECHNICAL DRAWING OF THE MOMENT”: Before the monument becomes remote   /   and unapproachable, a made-up anecdote   /   of easy adoration, pressed into marble   /   or a more modern plastic   [keep reading...]

Sam Cha FROM “HOVER”: I saw a peregrine drift   /   to the weathervane of the church:   //   wedge of sky snagged on cross   /   of rusted copper   //   there was no ringing, no   /   golden glory hallowed   //   crowning—only the bird   [keep reading...]

Ching-In Chen FROM “ORAL HISTORY REVISITED: INTERVIEW WITH THE ASSISTANT”: Each house curves a may-open story if you follow his way. Do not open any free doors. We all pitch all touch up. No history screaming, no yelling.   [keep reading...]

Natalie Eilbert FROM “THE RAPIST JOINS AA”: Received an email, formally written.   /   Was sorry for that night all those years ago. Signed sincerely.   //   Never spoke to anyone about this letter, the amends that must have been hiding   [keep reading...]

John Estes FROM “RETROACTIVE CONTINUITY”: One of those days when it’s like the dog ate the grenade   /   And the children play too close to it   /   So you wave them off because you expect it to come at any moment   [keep reading...]

Jessica Fjeld FROM “THE OLD GHOST OF THE GHOST-PLACE”: Like the rainstorm that I will not allow   /   to escape from between my fingers   //   The child is an animal   /  not explained by its parents   //   I want to stop traveling south   [keep reading...]

Margaret LeMay FROM “THOSE ARE BRIGHT”: This was the early-on of it: felt   /   full watching oneself stuck as a grass   /   blade in teeth. Walks the plaid and thinks of you   /   still, your right and diagnosable   //   wishes when pressed we wet to the thighs   [keep reading...]

Nina Puro FROM “EXTERIOR PORTRAIT: YEAR OF THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU”: I was always pulling my pants and pushing my glasses up,   /   hitting snooze then waiting   //   for a train that had just left.   [keep reading...]

Lauren Russell FROM “BEGOTTEN, NOT MADE”: I do not believe in astrology, despite my appearance.   /   I’m always a hippy for Halloween, to avoid hassle   /   and expense. But this year an old friend laughed   /   and said, “You can’t be what   [keep reading...]

Dara-Lyn Shrager FROM “THE SECOND SECRET”: Two girls share a bike.   /   One pedals, steers, avoids potholes.   /   Two holds on to One’s waist and   /   speaks too hotly in One’s ear.   //   At the park, they see a man   /   open his coat.   [keep reading...]

Donna Stonecipher FROM “FOUND TO BE BORROWED FROM SOME MATERIAL APPEARANCE (5)”: The divorced man sat at his desk pretending to work but really imagining getting stuck in an elevator with his ex-wife. His theory was as follows:   [keep reading...]

Henry Walters FROM “PRESTO”: Let’s play for real this time, I mean it, no matter what, the first one to speak is It, & after that it’s the thing you say that’s It, alright, but after that, it’s the way you say whatever you say that’s It, that’s it   [keep reading...]

Kerri Webster FROM “SKINS”: Here is the swan splayed dead   /   on the bed of the pickup truck, massive   /   wings blue-tinged—odd,   /   but I don’t know enough about light   /   to decode what I see. [keep reading...]

Betsy Wheeler FROM “LIMITATIONS OF SOLO PLAY”: Lean-to tree branches form   //   dinosaur faces   //   a bird wearing moon boots   //   lizard nose in a hollow constellation of leaf-stars.   //   Mama carries the white morning in a woven basket   [keep reading...]

POETRY ARCHIVES

Janelle Adsit FROM “TURN THIS MAP INTO SKY”:   there are 350 blues in the Mountain Bluebird  /  beating rhythm of blue beating crest  /  of feather beating skin  /  rainbow beam of blue, not sky blue  /  not the second when sky first came into view   [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   [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   [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...]

Dan Beachy-Quick FROM “DRONE”: sand and what is  /  sound, the nacre-sound,  /  this heart’s acre, bound, unbound  /  o irritant speck  /  all this dust you call clouds  /  all this doubt you found  /  just by thinking I am  /  not quite complete  /     [keep reading...]

Claire Becker FROM “IN THE EVENING, NEATLY”:   Somebody wants to be like me  /  and I want to be somebody better.  /  We all want to be with someone  /  smarter and it’s possible  / /  we’re all somebody’s mother.  /  [keep reading...]

Ryan Bender-Murphy FROM “COMMUTING TO WORK”:   Three skulls that turned over their hats to the police  /  smash into each other and create a new brain.  /  I tear through it like the blade that whirls  /  at the bottom of a sink.   [keep reading...]

Monica Berlin & Beth Marzoni FROM “ALL THE PARTICULAR PLACES WE’VE KNOWN WINDOW SOMETIMES AND SOMETIMES”:   open, sometimes wedge shut, mute  /  the street noise, sometimes light-strewn  / /  & sometimes a tree, never willow   [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.   [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.   [keep reading...]

Dan Chelotti FROM “THE MIDDLE AGES”:   A Saint is being murdered.  /  In another corner, he is dead.  /  At the top, we grieve the loss  /  of St. Peter the Martyr.  /  And even though di Bartolo  /  has Peter scrawling ‘Credo’   [keep reading...]

Heather Christle FROM “AND THIS TOO COMES APART”:   People agree with sleep  /  They nod into it  /  but death they sometimes fight off  /  until they can’t  /  and then  /  from their graves  /  they stick out their tongues  / /  Good for them  /  [keep reading...]

Lisa Ciccarello FROM “WE ARE NOT HOSTAGES SO MUCH AS WE HAVE BEEN TASKED TO HOLD UP THIS WALL FOREVER”:   We want for humor to be our general  /  but our last general betrayed us  / /  He is our enemy whose face is the clay   [keep reading...]

Darin Ciccotelli FROM “THE BLINDS”:   Whichever man that is woman that is  /  contorting their flesh. Whichever man with men  /  with a Roman thinness the women—  /  that private vowel goes public  /  and all of us stop, and all of us scan  /  [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   [keep reading...]

Jennifer Denrow FROM “SEPTEMBER STORIES”:   Sometimes I forget how permanent we are. The people in the sea share each other. I don’t cuss out the Pacific. I hear transformations happen in me. There are just emotions now. [keep reading...]

Christopher DeWeese FROM “THE RAVINE”:   This butter feeling calms me,  /  soft paws and golden light  /  making this place a good place  /  to wake into the letter  /  of yes I remain yours  /  so far as I stay alive.  /  A rented dominion  /  on the edge of town   [keep reading...]

Jessica Farquhar FROM “IT TAKES COURAGE TO BE YOURSELF”:   That’s gadgets on top of  /  our friendship—weights and bolts—  /  for each would do one thing and  /  have boys, misconstrued brave  /  and flighty. Each would go. [keep reading...]

Farnoosh Fathi FROM “GOLD DOLT”:   A crescent cent shores up, a new name  /  in the drip-dry day. And you know, how granted some nucleus,  /  one glues the rest to toothpicks and standing back, looks to,  /  maybe mocks, the resultant gait:  /  [keep reading...]

Stephanie Ford FROM “CATHEDRAL”:   Our sky is no less a special effect.  /  Someone slashes tomorrow’s tires,  /  this month’s billboard says You could be next.  /  Buildings fall, and stars, and dollars.  /  [keep reading...]

Carrie Fountain FROM “HOTTEST SUMMER ON RECORD”: I’m thinking about the night  /  we should’ve died  //  again: fifteen, in the backseat  /  of an egg-shaped car  //  as those feral boys  /  started yelling balls out  //  to the driver, who gripped     [keep reading...]

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   [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   [keep reading...]

Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney FROM “FIGURE AT NIGHT GUIDED BY THE PHOSPHORESCENT TRACKS OF SNAILS”:  The background is sky blue, a sky as seen through the gray of the merest veil of smog. Those aren’t birds. That isn’t a woman.   [keep reading...]

Jules Gibbs FROM “YOU ARE/N’T EVERYONE”: We know heat is not made up  /  of many tiny heats, but suns  /  explode with smaller suns. We know  /  the speed of wind increases with  /  height     [keep reading...]

Tyler Gobble FROM “DONE GOT HOTTEST”:   Say you love all the world         Optimism and stinky metal        Mud  /  in the hand        Three in the bush and counting        One Two Three Four  /  How many times can I say Sissy Girl is the cutest   [keep reading...]

Alen Hamza FROM “AGAIN THE FABLE DIES”: A man of my gender once said to me,  /  Let it go, and it will go away from you.  /  If at the end I realize I thought I wanted  /  to be a poet but deep down I really wanted  /  to be a poem—so what?     [keep reading...]

H. L. Hix FROM “I AM BECOME, NOT WHAT I WANDER THROUGH, BUT MY WANDERINGS”: If my wanderings arrive at, do they occur in, rooms?  /  I myself bear death’s tincture, exude its very attar.  /  Still, I post apotropaics.     [keep reading...]

Anna Maria Hong FROM “THE GRAY BOX”: The apple is red, because the leaves are  /  green. There’s a place in the brain for orange, a  /  grove of reception like Nebraska or  /  Rome. Everyone is fond of Iowa.  //  The moving dot is where     [keep reading...]

Fanny Howe FROM “COOLOCK”:   I never laughed harder than that night alone.  / /  It was as if the sky had an accident  /  and out came the land  / /  like a silver and yellow glandular  /  oil along the estuary.  / / /  You were in the old hotel   [keep reading...]

Krzysztof Jaworski FROM “THE BLUE EYES OF THE PROLETARIAT”: The factories are not waiting on our poems.  /  The cigars of the smokestacks are burning up for nothing. Steel  /  thoughtlessly fills out its forms.     [keep reading...]

Thomas Kane FROM “Q : WHAT IS THAT BRIDGE FOR?”: In a movie things are built in twenty-five minutes that would really take years. Those bridges are for never being useful. In other words, those bridges aren’t real.     [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  [keep reading...]

Eric Kocher FROM “GROW YE, GROW”: There were entire years I kept  /  promising everyone  /  self-improvement  /  like knowing me  /  was some sort of investment  /  they had made  /  in knowing someone better  /  than me in the future     [keep reading...]

Lo Kwa Mei-en FROM “ROMANCE WITH BLACKOUT”:   When a blackout is what I am, not what I had,  /  loving is my nursing a love with just enough stories  /  to leap from. When day’s gone down, news is what is  /  thrust into proof.   [keep reading...]

Nick Lantz FROM “THE PROPHET”:   Nighttime. Just off stage right, the noise and lights of traffic on a busy road. Entering from stage right, an Animal drags itself, uttering pained sounds punctuated by sickening howls. Its injuries are so severe we cannot tell   [keep reading...]

Matthew Lippman FROM “LIFE OF A TRAIN”:   Charlie bought me a train because he loved me. I loved him.  /  It was a choo choo train. We got on it and rode to Italy, right across the waves.  /  He’d never been to Italy. I’d been once.   [keep reading...]

Aditi Machado FROM “SLEEPLESS, HE COUNTS”:   Outside their window an owl is freezing. Inside,  /  she is asleep. He puts his head to her chest  /  and presses in: he hears something like a voice  /  thickening into age as by increments of snow   [keep reading...]

Jennifer MacKenzie FROM “REFUGEE BREATHING #3”: The rain is falling incorrectly God help it  /  The distant brother is making up stories   /  about one Natalie who came and went   //  and is not a thief. In immaterial production     [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   [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   [keep reading...]

Alice Miller FROM “A MORNING IN TROY”:  Inside the wooden horse alone  / /  Wooden walls thin enough to let light through  / /  Humid under wooden skin, like the oak can breathe  /  Like this dull pulse is the horse’s organ   [keep reading...]

Andrew Nance FROM “DECAY”: As though it would  /  one day keep your teeth  /  clean, dawn trimmed  /  at its dew point, my skeleton  /  bent back, everything  /  about me was a warranty.  /  Dusk’s point of lucidity  /  went floating into view     [keep reading...]

Geoffrey Nutter FROM “PORTRAITS OF OUR FATHERS”:   My father was a vendor of cabbage nets.  /  What was yours? This is a portrait  /  of my father as a soldier; this the blade  /  he carried, like a saber, not a saber,  /  but a blade-like sword of grass  /  [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   [keep reading...]

Brian Oliu FROM “BIRTHDAY CAKE (1:21)”:   Let’s keep this short. There are no more birthdays. The digits will be reclaimed in area codes, pennies in a jar, flight numbers of planes back to you.  / /    [keep reading...]

Paul Otremba FROM “SENTENCES (KÜNSTLERROMAN)”: Not red not a line but spots in a book and “L”  /  was for “Lion” so you get the idea  //  for your ideas somewhere.  //  Unremarkable really was the coterie of nails     [keep reading...]

Marc Paltrineri FROM “HOW DO YOU SAY IT”:  What day is  /  today yes today  /  is Good Friday  /  and I’d like to find you  /  something in Spanish  /  just to say how  /  wide awake the sky is  /  and fuzzy red things  /  are appearing  /  on the tips of trees   [keep reading...]

Kate Partridge FROM “I LIKE THE MUSCLES ON THAT ONE”: Andrew takes us to the Phillies game to watch  /  the players slam balls toward the outfield.  //  The muscles are the active organs of locomotion,  //  endowed with the property of contractability.   [keep reading...]

Christopher Rey Pérez FROM “SNAILS”:  snails  /  snails  /  I love snails  /  what’s there not to love  /  about snails?  / /  snails can live on  /  the line  /  and when I take  /  the 63 past  /  Ma’ale Adumim I  /  think about  /  snails  /  snails  / /     [keep reading...]

Allan Peterson FROM “SO”:  earth is a centrifuge, and what we take as normal  /  is in flux.  /  Eons of atmosphere, continents racing and languages  /  flung about the planet  /  are sorted like blood, providing for strange arrangements.   [keep reading...]

Beth Woodcome Platow FROM “SICK DAY”: When I called out from work I said it was because _________ was sick.  /  She wasn’t sick but she died in my dream the night before.  /  In a dream no one records the time of death. No one prepares.     [keep reading...]

Jessica Poli FROM “IT WAS SOMEONE’S BIRTHDAY AND WE WERE HAVING A PICNIC”:  Suddenly the sky full of jellyfish.  /  The ocean has turned upside down and now  /  we need to swim to the bottom.  /     [keep reading...]

Lynne Potts FROM “WRECKS AND WRECKS”:  Owner Fred of body shop fame, also thief, one hand  /  in the mouth of the sink yawned in front of a TV  /  that looked like a lunar landscape starting with zero  /  and going past America   [keep reading...]

Thibault Raoult FROM “CHICAGO, STABLE AS EVER, ENJOYS THE VIEW DOWN ITS OWN PANTS”:   Gavotte, I’m running out of montre-moi, no sweetener  /  Since Greek reproached us all for allegory allegory 4-5-6 [sung].  /  [keep reading...]

Anne Marie Rooney FROM “LITTLE GIRL WALK DOWN”:   That street and the side of you glinting  /  In light which neither  /  Shows nor ever will show  /  You your muscle, your own  /  Diamond face. It practices  /  A monument open in you,  /  [keep reading...]

Catie Rosemurgy FROM “THE SIXTEENTH BURNING”: Do you mind the smell of a scalding pan?  /  The bird bones rearranged each day next to the front step?  //  Because I don’t.  /  I really don’t.  //  Pretty scraps of our mothers’ linens decorate the tree     [keep reading...]

Dan Rosenberg FROM “GROWNUP LOVE”:  Inside the sacrament our daughter lies  /  and ages and three kinds of hunger sag  / /  over the belt of her being ours. Such a  /  daughter we have in the shared spaces,  /  such a boulder comes tumbling, picks up   [keep reading...]

M. C. Rush FROM “DISSENSUS”:  Is everything, anything significant?  /  Is anything, everything important?  / /  One thing is always like another,  /  we just don't always know how.  / /  We live in a Fippy Darkpaw world.   [keep reading...]

Tomaž Šalamun FROM “GIRLIE”:   Girlie!  /  Come out, girlie!  /  Hey, girlie, peep through with your head!  /  A strange wind starts to blow,  /  pieces of glass are glued to the grass.  /  Apricots roll toward the sidewalk.  /  [keep reading...]

Jordan Sanderson FROM “FORMULA #15”:   Unless you are a master of jigsaw puzzles,  /  don’t let a doctor teach you how to regard your body.  /  A good vet, one who sees fish mostly, might recognize  /  something inside you.  /  [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   [keep reading...]

Ed Skoog FROM “WHERE EVERYONE LIVED”:  Joe used to live in a tree  /  by the school and slid down insults  /  my slow head couldn’t throw back.  /  Didn’t someone fuck a cat in a tree?  /  Which tree. Did we add the tree part?   [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.   [keep reading...]

Claire Sylvester Smith FROM “SELF-PORTRAIT ON THE OCCASION OF SETTLING DOWN”: As summer hits us making walls out of the spring  /  and fall, so clothing goes: I live life shirted. May  //  no promotion use up my good name, may     [keep reading...]

Cindy St. John FROM “[I WROTE THIS POEM ON BUS #17]”:  I wrote this poem on bus #17 coming home late at night after a poetry reading while looking at “Rich Kids of Instagram” on my phone and instead of disgust I thought   [keep reading...]

Jacob Sunderlin FROM “CHARLES MANSON”:   During our time here nothing much  /  will be talked about.  /  I will come to some camera  /  in the desert of your making & speak.  / /  I remember getting in the car.  /  This is my country full of pairs.  /  [keep reading...]

Russel Swensen FROM “LUXURIOUS INTERIORS”:  1.  There’s a rising action in my in mind. There’s a denouement beneath my tongue. My captive audience chews its hand off at the wrist.  / /  2.  The premier is found strangled in the trunk of his car.   [keep reading...]

Gale Marie Thompson FROM “PULSAR”:   And so said, and so you said  /  I want to go  /  with you, without you.  /  I only wanted for to see  /  the spectral light.  /  So lucked out,  /  so catching,  /  so dwelled.  /  [keep reading...]

Emily Toder FROM “BACKFIRE”:  The essence of backfire  /  and the feeling of backfire  /  are not the same  /  as its original meaning  / /  I have consulted no reference  /  work on this I have only consulted  /  the sad work I’ve done   [keep reading...]

David Wojciechowski FROM “CYNTHIA,”:   Once I also asked myself to marry me. The ceremony was actually really lovely, but then when I tossed the bouquet I also caught it. That’s when I realized everyone at the wedding was me.   [keep reading...]

Lesley Yalen FROM “THE PROBLEM OF PEOPLE”: Tonight the rainfall exceeded my expectations  /  on the slick dark road with possible deer.  //  Baby so quiet one might think I was myself  /  again. Deer in the shoulder might spring     [keep reading...]

Laurie Saurborn Young FROM “VARIOUS GENERATIONS OF PLASTIC HORSES”:  Skim fifty pages of a soundless  /  sleep; dust flies up from plucked  / /  strings. Rumple-headed, twenty-  /  five years later, finding my crush  / /  on Han Solo means   [keep reading...]