POETRY: ISSUE FIVE
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Mary Jo BangFROM “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 |
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Sam ChaFROM “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 |
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Ching-In ChenFROM “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. |
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Natalie EilbertFROM “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 |
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John EstesFROM “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 |
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Jessica FjeldFROM “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 |
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Margaret LeMayFROM “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 |
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Nina PuroFROM “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. |
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Lauren RussellFROM “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 |
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Dara-Lyn ShragerFROM “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. |
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Donna StonecipherFROM “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: |
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Henry WaltersFROM “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 |
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Kerri WebsterFROM “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. |
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Betsy WheelerFROM “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 |
POETRY ARCHIVES
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Janelle AdsitFROM “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
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Samuel AmadonFROM “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 |
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Will ArberyFROM “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 |
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Elizabeth ArnoldFROM “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, |
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Dan Beachy-QuickFROM “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 / |
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Claire BeckerFROM “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. /
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Ryan Bender-MurphyFROM “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.
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Monica Berlin & Beth MarzoniFROM “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
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Melissa BroderFROM “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.
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Kara CanditoFROM “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. |
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Dan ChelottiFROM “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’
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Heather ChristleFROM “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 /
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Lisa CiccarelloFROM “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
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Darin CiccotelliFROM “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 /
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John Lee ClarkFROM “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 |
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Jennifer DenrowFROM “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.
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Christopher DeWeeseFROM “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
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Jessica FarquharFROM “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.
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Farnoosh FathiFROM “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: /
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Stephanie FordFROM “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. /
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Carrie FountainFROM “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 |
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Graham FoustFROM “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 |
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Kit FrickFROM “[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 |
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Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen RooneyFROM “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.
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Jules GibbsFROM “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 |
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Tyler GobbleFROM “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
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Alen HamzaFROM “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? |
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H. L. HixFROM “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. |
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Anna Maria HongFROM “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 |
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Fanny HoweFROM “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
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Krzysztof JaworskiFROM “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. |
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Thomas KaneFROM “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. |
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Paul KillebrewFROM “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 |
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Eric KocherFROM “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 |
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Lo Kwa Mei-enFROM “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.
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Nick LantzFROM “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
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Matthew LippmanFROM “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.
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Aditi MachadoFROM “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
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Jennifer MacKenzieFROM “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 |
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Kyle McCordFROM “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 |
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Shane McCraeFROM “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
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Alice MillerFROM “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
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Andrew NanceFROM “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 |
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Geoffrey NutterFROM “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 /
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Geoffrey G. O’BrienFROM “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 |
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Brian OliuFROM “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. / /
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Paul OtrembaFROM “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 |
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Marc PaltrineriFROM “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
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Kate PartridgeFROM “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. |
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Christopher Rey PérezFROM “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 / /
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Allan PetersonFROM “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.
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Beth Woodcome PlatowFROM “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. |
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Jessica PoliFROM “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. /
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Lynne PottsFROM “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
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Thibault RaoultFROM “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]. /
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Anne Marie RooneyFROM “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, /
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Catie RosemurgyFROM “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 |
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Dan RosenbergFROM “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
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M. C. RushFROM “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.
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Toma alamunFROM “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. /
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Jordan SandersonFROM “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. /
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Sandra SimondsFROM “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 |
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Ed SkoogFROM “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?
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Bruce SmithFROM “[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.
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Claire Sylvester SmithFROM “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 |
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Cindy St. JohnFROM “[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
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Jacob SunderlinFROM “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. /
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Russel SwensenFROM “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.
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Gale Marie ThompsonFROM “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. /
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Emily ToderFROM “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
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David WojciechowskiFROM “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.
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Lesley YalenFROM “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 |
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Laurie Saurborn YoungFROM “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
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