Poetry / Lisa Fay Coutley

:: Letter to Future Me While Rewatching Game of Thrones ::

All the small centers of the center
leak now. People dress themselves
in endings. Tell me you haven’t
washed the snow from my hair.
I’m still cross-legged in the angry
age of our little epoch, blaming
the girl who turned herself clock
to get us this far. I hope you will
still be foolish enough to forgive
who we love, & that I am finally
among them. Today is when I
gave us a name you’ll braid white
down either side of our future
face. I cannot stop craning to see.
I spend so much time with you now
I hardly touch me anymore. Pleasure
is the smell that refuses to cast its
inevitable goodnight. Big spoon me
in the street. Your palomino knows
someday I’ll pull in that gravel drive.
Already I’ve named the pines for sap
tacking animal hair from my hands
to yours. Every center, like I’ve said,
ignores its eye. Did you stop fighting
artifice? Have you let yourself best
friend your assigned AI? How lonely
are you there, scoffing at the nature
of my reductive inquiries. Of course
the woman who succeeds me shall
be smarter than I. So yeah. Anyway,
the one thing I know won’t change
is everyone—you included—wants
a woman who saunters out of a fire.

:: Letter to Future Me Regarding Our 11s ::

Your face will slacken someday. Even
if it’s that day. That day that comes

more in the mirror now
than in bed or under running 

water scalding as mother
said. Should’ve slept with your bra

on if you wanted a man. These days
sagging alone, I watch the whole

Game of Thrones just waiting
for that tragic moment Wylis

holds the door. I am, after all,
yours. Your braless daughter,

Sad Mom. Doesn’t that just burn
your jaws? I know. Shh. Future me—

are you listening to the temperature
of my voice? My barometric

pressure? Do you know how
many heavy rains I’ve needed you.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Over the years I’ve writ­ten let­ters I’ll nev­er send, let­ters to my dead, let­ters to lovers, let­ters from an earth­bound poet to an astro­naut in space (and back), who were both, of course, parts of the speaker’s self need­ing dis­tance to be seen/to see clear­ly, to try make sense of what it means to be alive. Always they’ve been let­ters of miss­ing. Recent­ly, the per­son I’ve been missing—who I was afraid I might nev­er see—was me, specif­i­cal­ly Future Me. If I wasn’t wor­ried she wouldn’t arrive, I was wait­ing impa­tient­ly for her, as if mov­ing through trau­ma and grief and an espe­cial­ly dif­fi­cult year could have an end goal dressed in a bet­ter ver­sion of me wait­ing at the oth­er side of the seem­ing­ly nev­er-end­ing tun­nel. The heavy­hand­ed and all-too-famil­iar metaphor aside, I’ve been writ­ing to her as a way to make a list, maybe, of what I might like to see in my future (or not), and then she wrote back. This work, I guess, is a flare sent into dark­ness, and I’m mak­ing room for it because even if I can’t see clear­ly just yet, still, I have to tend the desire to keep look­ing. This is how I know to look.

Lisa Fay Cout­ley is the author of HOST (Wis­con­sin Poet­ry Series, forth­com­ing 2024), teth­er (Black­Lawrence Press, 2020), Erra­ta (South­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty, 2015), win­ner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poet­ry Open Com­pe­ti­tion, In the Car­ni­val of Breath­ing (BLP, 2011), win­ner of the Black Riv­er Chap­book Com­pe­ti­tion, and Small Girl: Micromem­oirs (Har­bor Edi­tions, 2024). She is also the edi­tor of the grief anthol­o­gy, In the Tem­pered Dark: Con­tem­po­rary Poets Tran­scend­ing Ele­gy (BLP, 2024). She is an NEA Fel­low, Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Poet­ry & CNF in the Writer’s Work­shop at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Nebras­ka Oma­ha, and Chap­book Series Edi­tor at Black Lawrence Press.

Poetry / Denise Duhamel

:: POEM IN WHICH I NEVER STOPPED DRINKING ::

I’m dead by now—car crash or bad fall. Or I’m still here, but feeling dead inside, yelling at 
Target cashiers or maybe staying home, my Tower Vodka delivered by Total Wine. I have more 
cringy stories or stories swirling about me. I might have slept with a student by now or a dean 
who’s a drunk like me. I might have been fired, actually, claiming my dismissal was all someone 
else’s fault. I never developed the good habit of flossing daily or trying to get eight hours of 
sleep in a row. I might have drowned in a pool or the ocean or a bathtub. I might have pissed 
myself in public. I have surely forgotten the rent check, credit card payment, lost my voter ID. I 
might have stopped writing poems entirely, with excuses about why they are stupid. I might have 
stopped reading them too. Or there I was, until I wasn’t—a high-functioning, lampshade-wearing
jokester who tripped on a step and hit her head, who tore through that stop sign on her way 
home. 

:: POEM IN WHICH I BEFRIEND ROYALTY ::

During quarantine
a lizard so green
she looked like a toy
latched onto the screen
door of my balcony—
she must have climbed a tree.
The sound of her scared me.
My blinds closed, I thought she
was someone trying to break in.
I peeked through the slats
ready to scream,
ready to dial 911.
The foot-long lizard
had climbed as far as my knee
and I shook her off, gently,
afraid she would rip the mesh.
I kept talking to her
the whole time. I was so lonely
that Florida winter, I almost
invited her inside.
She had matching lime green
eyes. When I googled her later
I learned she was a Cuban Knight.
Clearly she was able 
to fend for herself. Still I mashed
a banana and served it to her, 
al fresco, on my best earthenware. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

These poems are from a series in which all the titles con­tain the word “in which.” I began this series as a way to imag­ine oth­er out­comes to my life or what might have been—a prose poem, for exam­ple, in which I nev­er became sober and am pos­si­bly dead. But the “in which” was also expan­sive enough to bring me to glimpses elsewhere—private moments of shame or lone­li­ness, imag­i­na­tive leaps into the inner work­ings of my body. For me, it’s been a mag­i­cal lit­er­ary device, the “which” like a “witch” cast­ing her spell. The work in this series has gone in sur­pris­ing direc­tions, the titles teth­er­ing me down. I find it increas­ing­ly lib­er­at­ing to state my premise in the title, to let the title do a lot of the work to ground a reader.

Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poet­ry are Sec­ond Sto­ry (Pitts­burgh, 2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a final­ist for the Nation­al Book Crit­ics Cir­cle Award. She is a dis­tin­guished uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor in the MFA pro­gram at Flori­da Inter­na­tion­al Uni­ver­si­ty in Miami.

Poetry / Joanne Godley

:: The Hardest Read ::

Inspired by The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and 
Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture, by Vincent Woodward,
 and after Catherine Pierce

In protest, I say the word delectable.
Woodward’s text-title has, for me,  
rancid-washed this word’s flavor. 
In protest, I repeat the word, delectable.
Craggy letter-bits stick in my craw.
Once a pleasing and delitable word,
for me, is delectable, no more.
I spit it out.  

In protest, I say the word, Negro,
and find me shadowed in a corner,
flirting with views past and upon me.
Years ago, at Thanksgiving, my brother asked, 
Why don’t they sell Negro turkeys?  
 No one in our family ate the white meat.

In protest, I say the word, voyeur.
I stare out the window onto the street
lush with jacarandas. My new country.
The purple canopied calles of my neighborhood,
are named for poets and statesmen.
Maimonides. Arquemides. Lamartine.
In protest, I say, I have done the thing.
This fucking thing. I crawled out
of the beast’s belly and slithered away. 
Breathing. Human. Black.
Gut juices painting my path.

My dreams creep back, 
enter my bedroom with caution, lest I relapse.
In protest, I reclaim the word ease.
I say the words copiousness and abundance,
in near disbelief. 
I nap, voraciously.
I am overdue for a leaching.
In protest, I say the word sinuousness.
I say the word luminescence.
I remember night-quiet, wintered Philadelphia,
ice-sliding Osage Avenue with R.,
translucent spears clinging to skeletal trees 
and telephone lines.

My grandfather steepled churches 
using wood gathered from the Great Dismal Swamp.
Watch me maroon, fellow maroons. Watch me prosody.
Watch me cacophony while incognito,
persnickety into clandestine.

I am the right brand of paranoid.
And with perfect tastebuds, no delectable for me.
Watch me polish the ‘I’ in thrive.

:: Gone ::

                                                                 1I was born
I was born  I burst                                bookish     into poetry & charismatic color
nearly blacklisted			      but hallelujahed by countrymen not my own
swam under sprouting clouds		           I was born
testing    testing			              in a place Neruda dubbed ‘Dawn’s Rosy Cheek’
I spoke Yiddish soon after		      I was born
schvartze means Black  		      I was born
I hankered for chitlin’s & oxtails   enjoyed forbidden fruits
I wailed the blues			      with an ear for opera  but no peonies or peace lilies for me
I grooved with Pete Seeger	      I worshipped Paul Robeson &
we marched we protested		      we believed                                       we patienced
I lusted for excellence		      I sought success (American style)
I was born justice-oriented	      for all
like King  I was born dreamer	      Like Langston I deferred dreams   too
After reading We Charge Genocide
at age 9				                      I plotted expatriation at the age of 10
realized I was born in a place ripe
with false promises & hoods	     my country tis of thee   sweet land   				
I embraced your values 		     I drank your tea
then dropped your mic		     this caged bird flew because
this country that birthed me	       the Amerikkka I know
does not love me back   		     does not want me Black

From the writer

:: Account ::

In 1951, the Civ­il Rights Con­gress pre­sent­ed a book-length peti­tion to the Unit­ed Nations enti­tled, We Charge Geno­cide, The Crime of Gov­ern­ment Against the Negro Peo­ple. This book doc­u­ment­ed (with graph­ic pho­tographs) hun­dreds of lynch­ing cas­es of Black Amer­i­cans known to have occurred in the eighty-five years since the end of slav­ery (the num­ber is esti­mat­ed at 10,000 indi­vid­u­als.) I hap­pened upon this book at the age of nine. I was a vora­cious read­er and had been giv­en carte blanche to read any book in my par­ents’ library. I was aghast and won­dered what could pos­si­bly pro­voke a per­son, or groups of peo­ple, to levy such cru­el­ty on oth­er human beings. I promised myself, that, giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty, I would leave the Unit­ed States to live in anoth­er soci­ety. As I grew old­er, I devel­oped a sense of dual self-per­cep­tion, of which WEB DuBois spoke, “It is a pecu­liar sen­sa­tion, this dou­ble con­scious­ness, this sense of always look­ing at one­self through the eyes of oth­ers, of mea­sur­ing one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused con­tempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, – an Amer­i­can, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unrec­on­ciled striv­ings; two war­ring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asun­der” (Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, p. 2). This dual self-per­cep­tion was anoth­er rea­son for my leav­ing the U.S.

The con­cept of flight fig­ures promi­nent­ly in my poet­ry, par­tic­u­lar­ly, once my path to expa­tri­a­tion became clear­er. I have grown inter­est­ed in the con­cept of maroon­age and have researched exten­sive­ly the his­to­ry of maroons (enslaved peo­ple who fled their bondage and sought refuge in swamps or hills) in the U.S. and the Caribbean. I have also done research on the African Amer­i­can folk­lore about the ‘fly­ing Africans’, Blacks who escaped enslave­ment through flight.

Joanne God­ley lives in Mex­i­co City, hav­ing emi­grat­ed from the U.S. a year ago. She is a physi­cian, writer, poet, and a first year MFA can­di­date in Poet­ry. She is a Meter Keep­er in the Poet­ry Witch Com­mu­ni­ty and an Anapho­ra Arts fel­low in both poet­ry and fic­tion. Her poet­ry has been pub­lished in the Belle­vue Lit­er­ary Review, Man­tis, Light, FIYAH, Pratik, among oth­ers. She was twice nom­i­nat­ed for a Push­cart prize. Her prose has been pub­lished in the Mass­a­chu­setts Review, the Keny­on Review online, Juked, Mem­oir, among oth­ers. Her poet­ry chap­book, Pick­ing Scabs from the Body His­to­ry,fea­tures poems of wit­ness and resis­tance. Her web­site is: joannegodley.com

Poetry / Andrew Hemmert

:: The Liquor Store Delivery Driver Considers Ornithology ::

A swift flies like a bat made of straight razors. In summer 
I watch them sweep and curve through the mazes of moving cars, 
chasing the proliferating insects—mosquitos and caddis, 
black flies whose guts rorschach my windshield in yellows and greens 
and always the swifts behind them, like hunger given weight
and weightlessness, like hunger given speed. The way they fly, 
it seems they do not remember the ground is there. 
And nothing makes me feel grounded like watching them. 
Watching them, I might as well be a cattail by a retention pond 
or a shopping cart sunk in that retention pond, or a pond 
full only of oily overflow and no red fish darting
through reeds. When a swift doubles back its belly feathers shine 
like surgery. I am driving my car full of liquor 
into the city, under the swifts’ oblivion joy. 

:: The Liquor Store Delivery Driver Considers Quitting ::

Leaving feels like something for which there should be some ritual. 
On my last day at the store, a brand-new driver was t-boned 
in an intersection. I went to get him. Parsed his story 
from those of the witnesses, peeled the company decal 
off the totaled delivery car. The other driver 
though stumbling refused an ambulance. My driver spent 
the ride back to the store with his head in his hands. The ruined 
car we left in a restaurant parking lot for the morning.
What ritual for this? In the end I spent too much money 
on a bottle of rum and drove home under open skies. 
I left my uniform—a black t-shirt, a matching hoodie, 
a fake-gold magnetic nametag—lying on the counter, 
what else is there to say about it. A job is not a life. 
I went out into the night wearing only my own clothes.

From the writer

:: Account ::

When I moved to Thorn­ton, Col­orado, my first job was deliv­er­ing liquor for a local liquor store. These deliv­er­ies were pri­mar­i­ly res­i­den­tial, not retail. I’d been a patron at the store for a few months pri­or to receiv­ing their email adver­tise­ment seek­ing deliv­ery dri­vers. Hav­ing been out of work for near­ly two years at that point due to the pan­dem­ic, I was eager to con­tribute to the household’s finances in what­ev­er way pos­si­ble. And hav­ing at the time recent­ly com­plet­ed my first Covid vac­cine reg­i­ment, I felt rel­a­tive­ly com­fort­able return­ing to a retail envi­ron­ment. Now, a year since hav­ing left that posi­tion, it’s still hard to cap­ture the reg­u­lar absur­di­ty of being part of a liquor store deliv­ery depart­ment. I’d antic­i­pat­ed that the job would pro­vide me with count­less sto­ries I could use as fod­der for poet­ry or fic­tion. And I’m still try­ing to fig­ure out how to chis­el most of those sto­ries out. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, dri­ving fac­tors heav­i­ly into the expe­ri­ence of these poems. And dri­ving has been a major theme in my pri­or books. But this was my first oppor­tu­ni­ty to dis­cuss dri­ving in the con­text of per­son­al labor.

Andrew Hem­mert is the author of Bless­ing the Exoskele­ton (Pitt Poet­ry Series) and Saw­grass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared or are forth­com­ing in var­i­ous mag­a­zines includ­ing The Cincin­nati Review, Cop­per Nick­el, The Keny­on Review, Prairie Schooner, and The South­ern Review. He won the 2018 Riv­er Styx Inter­na­tion­al Poet­ry Con­test. He earned his MFA from South­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty Car­bon­dale, and cur­rent­ly lives in Thorn­ton, Colorado.

Poetry / Carolina Hotchandani

:: Kill the Birds ::

I live my life as the heroine 
of a novel I am authoring.

Hers is the story of a woman who moves 
from Chicago to Vermillion, South Dakota, 
to follow her husband’s job.
It comes with better benefits than hers.

The story she tells could be my own,
or it could be the story of insurance
and the things insurance makes us do
when we feel the soft spot 
on the baby’s skull and imagine the world 
impressing itself upon that head.

I could console myself:
the new insurance is spectacular.
It slays fears like a great, muscular hero,
thundering into the scene astride a horse,
making me blush like a virgin in an 18th-century novel—
a foil for the heroine I’d been molding.

At the university where I begin to work,
my students ask for leave to go pheasant hunting.
Their hunting excursions are sacred, they say—
religious rites, or practically so.

Go. 
Miss class. 
Kill the birds.

Confer upon a lost life 
a meaning. A pheasant 
knocked out of flight,
hurtling over the snow, 
will be your glory.

What’s vermillion, I wonder,
about this white, white town.

Outside my window, the striped cornfields
write new lines onto my brain.

How dare they, I think.
I’m the writer, after all.

One day, walking along the gravel driveway,
I spot a dead fox—
a splotch 
on the snowed-over corn stubble.

Vermillion.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I am intrigued by how we relate to the fic­tions that we con­sume and write—how we project our­selves onto char­ac­ters and, if we are writ­ers, how we can become moved by our own cre­ations, as if they were not enti­ties we’d brought into being our­selves. Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein had a pro­found influ­ence on me in my youth, and as I grew into adult­hood, I revis­it­ed it, read­ing it as a por­tray­al of how the artist’s cre­ation can be a mon­strous mir­ror, a beloved, a ther­a­pist, a sin­is­ter twin. Writ­ers often speak of writ­ing as ther­a­peu­tic, but I’m espe­cial­ly tak­en with the ways that writ­ing can haunt and cast strange shad­ows on “real” life.

Car­oli­na Hotchan­dani won the 2023 Peru­gia Press Prize for her debut poet­ry col­lec­tion, The Book Eaters, released this past Sep­tem­ber. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Alas­ka Quar­ter­ly Review, Black­bird, Beloit Poet­ry Jour­nal, Cincin­nati Review, Poet­ry North­west, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and oth­er jour­nals. She is a Goodrich Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish in Oma­ha, Nebraska.

Poetry / Katherine Indermaur

:: In the First Days of Pilgrimage ::

O make of me your holiest echo
Shape me by my wandering       may all
I’ve kept close on this earth be shorn from me
Like dust from mountains’ uplifted arms
May I crawl ever closer to your name  

:: At the Shrine of St. Thecla ::

For days I too sat by the blue window   asking
Nothing    Lord    only waiting to be struck
a tongueless bell    but you arrive gentle
As newborn lambs’ shepherd     you  
Kneel gentle as the lioness with her cubs 
Amid the closing in of bloodthirsty men 
Gentle as the tune the nightwatch soldier hums
As the plum tongue his armor entombs

:: Absolution That Begins and Begins and Begins ::

There is nothing beautiful left in me
When I reach the mountaintop
No desire       no forgiveness
Every stone    face    star
Up here bare as distance 
I pitch me out of reach

From the writer

:: Account ::

These poems come from a man­u­script that takes up the true sto­ry of Ege­ria, a female Chris­t­ian pil­grim who trav­eled from her home in west­ern Europe to the bib­li­cal Holy Land in the 380s AD. Some of her orig­i­nal trav­el writ­ing has sur­vived to today. One of the ear­li­est female moun­taineers, Ege­ria is the first known woman to sum­mit Mount Sinai and Mount Nebo. She was not, so far as his­to­ri­ans under­stand, a wealthy woman, but the rights women held in the Roman Empire at that time enabled her to trav­el rel­a­tive­ly freely, and occa­sion­al­ly with a mil­i­tary escort to ensure safe­ty. (The very same Roman Empire that exe­cut­ed Jesus adopt­ed Chris­tian­i­ty as its offi­cial reli­gion less than three cen­turies lat­er. Ege­ria would have been born about twen­ty years after this change.) These spare poems explore Egeria’s pil­grim­age. They are both filled with and emp­tied by the desert land­scape in which Ege­ria finds her­self, and which would have been incred­i­bly for­eign to her.

Kather­ine Inder­maur is the author of I|I (Seneca Review Books), win­ner of the 2022 Deb­o­rah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, and two chap­books. She serves as an edi­tor for Sug­ar House Review and is the win­ner of the Black War­rior Review 2019 Poet­ry Con­test and the 2018 Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets Prize. Her writ­ing has appeared in Eco­tone, Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture, Fron­tier Poet­ry, the Jour­nal, New Delta Review, Ninth Let­ter, the Nor­mal School, and else­where. She holds an MFA from Col­orado State Uni­ver­si­ty and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Poetry / Adriana X. Jacobs

:: Deformation ::

A mother falls through a bed of chalk flowers, pulling her child behind her. A store 
crumbles, spilling votives into the street. The rats pour out of a manhole cover, 
shedding future plagues. And after they clear, a mailbox tips over. The polaroid of 
the family cat falls into the void (they will find him in a thousand years). The glossy 
beetles slide off their pins and take flight. Someone painted “everything will be ok” 
on the bridge. This is how it will be when it is over. The morning news and missing 
faces stitched together. While the wires hold together. Branches covered with the 
luggage of layovers. The restaurant laid out for missed reservations. And under the 
sink, poached chicken in duck fat waiting to be served. There will be no theory for 
the shells in the child’s pocket. For the threads of neon green and yellow, stems of 
flowers stripped from the pavement, migrating into the lower strata, and staying 
there, like a tear on a chin. One of the els collides with the legs of a cockroach to 
form an ancient language. The legs of the k will keep on going, like one of those half 
bodies still walking ahead. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

“Defor­ma­tion” comes from a poet­ry book man­u­script I have been work­ing on that is inspired by video games like The Last of Us, Plague Tale: Requiem, and Death Strand­ing. Both the book and this poem imag­ine a left­over world care­ful­ly explored and picked over by those who remain. A few months into the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, I read an arti­cle about the clo­sure of restau­rants in New York City and the future of the food indus­try. The line that stood out for me con­cerned the preser­va­tion of par-cooked chick­en in duck fat. The chef wasn’t sure that this would work, so I took this as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to try a dif­fer­ent method and poach the chick­en instead. I imag­ined some­one stum­bling into the restau­rant kitchen decades from now. Maybe they would be hid­ing or return­ing to a place full of good mem­o­ries of anoth­er time. They would find air-tight bags of chick­en encased in duck fat and maybe have the best meal of their life. Or the rats would get to it first. This image became the ker­nel of “Defor­ma­tion,” which approach­es cri­sis as a seis­mic event, rear­rang­ing mem­o­ries, rou­tines, lan­guage. But in most of my poems, this process is nev­er com­plet­ed; rather, I am inter­est­ed in the space and time between break­down and repair, the state of being in cri­sis, at the edge of greed and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, gen­eros­i­ty and violence.

Adri­ana X. Jacobs is a poet, schol­ar, and trans­la­tor based in Oxford, Eng­land and Brook­lyn, NY. Her poems have appeared recent­ly in Black­box Man­i­fold, Asoophit, Place de la Sor­bonne, Poet­ry Dis­patch, and Tupe­lo Quar­ter­ly. Her trans­la­tions from Hebrew include Vaan Nguyen’s The Truf­fle Eye (Zephyr Press), win­ner of the 2022 Harold Mor­ton Lan­don Trans­la­tion Award, and Mer­av Givoni Hrushovski’s End— (Car­rion Bloom Books, 2023). She is the author of the poet­ry zine After­life is Sweet (rinky dink press) and the chap­book The Turn­ing (forth­com­ing, Danc­ing Girl Press). She teach­es Hebrew and com­par­a­tive lit­er­a­ture at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford.

Poetry / Sarah Kersey

:: Good Men ::

for JWH

I keep changing. This is
forever.
The wind applauds my red motorcycle
as it breaks 50 mph before
it sputters out on the side of the road,
gravel gray like gospel. Shattered.
Do you need help?
Tenderness reduces to copper,
calculates what I owe. I’ve climbed
into beds, onto faces, on top of waists,
now into this white pickup truck.
Bikers help each other.
When I told the elders I no longer
wished to be known as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses,
you, a good man, the only man I love,
cried into the Zoom screen; as if
the weather had changed 
to cool morning mist.
You knew everything I’d lost and wet all of it
so I wouldn’t crack.
Listen to me, you said.
I was going to be alone.
Kicking off gravel caught in my boots,
I got into the truck.
Next time, the man said,
take off your helmet.
It will signal to other bikers that
you need help.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Every year since Sep­tem­ber 2014, I always attempt to write a poem about one of the great­est loss­es I’ve had in my life. I was attempt­ing that poem last year when it became too dif­fi­cult to con­tin­ue the draft. At around that time, I took a poet­ry work­shop called Poet­ry and Inti­ma­cy, which was led by Taneum Bam­brick. One of their prompts was to write about an inti­mate moment between strangers. “Good Men” is the result. It’s based on my actu­al expe­ri­ence of run­ning out of gas while rid­ing my motor­cy­cle in New Jer­sey, and a man who stopped on the side of the road to help. I was also stuck on a sep­a­rate draft of a poem about my dis­as­so­ci­a­tion from the Jehovah’s Wit­ness­es in Decem­ber 2021. All these loss­es merged in my brain, on and off the page. Yet, this poem embod­ies a hope I’d nev­er pre­vi­ous­ly imag­ined for myself, even as I wres­tle between my old and new self, my old and new beliefs.

Sarah Kersey is a poet and x‑ray tech­nol­o­gist who lives right out­side Boston, MA. She has received sup­port from Tin House Work­shop. Their debut chap­book Anacru­sis is forth­com­ing with New­found in 2024. She tweets @sk__poet.

Poetry / David Kirby

:: The Best Thing About Poetry Isn’t Poetry::

When I take my morning walk, I used to wave at every car that came my way, but only half of 
            the drivers waved back, so I stopped waving, but the half that did wave became 
            accustomed to my friendly greeting, and now they wave at me before I can wave at them, 
            so I don’t know what to do.
I do know I wouldn’t be having these problems if Frank O’Hara were my friend. 
Ashbery said O’Hara “gave you the feeling of belonging to an exclusive club with him, as if you 
            had hooked into some big, secret continuum of life. Frank had a personal kind of idea 
            about things, which made you feel you could think independently, too.”
And according to Ginsberg, O’Hara’s “feelings for me seemed to vibrate with my feelings for 
            myself. I think he saw my ideal self-image; he articulated it and made it sound right.”

Remember your first set of friends?
When you were a kid, you’d go to their houses for dinner and learned not only about different 
            foods but also different ways of doing things.
You learned that capers weren’t fish eyes but flower buds, that garlic was an actual vegetable 
            and not a hard dry powder.
Sometimes you saw grown-ups drink wine for dinner instead of milk or Pepsi, and when they 
            gave you a sip, you didn’t like it, but you knew you would.
Then there was the time you saw Ryan Mattingly’s dad pat Mrs. Mattingly’s butt in the kitchen 
            and waited for her to scowl at him the way your mom would, but she smiled instead.

Some of my best friends ever are the ones I argued with most, such as Ed, Dennis, and Ken, my
            grad-school roommates.
Grad school had two effects on us: it made us think we were smarter than we were, and it 
            furnished us with quotes to use like rapiers as we feinted and lunged in our nightly duels, 
            a favorite being Blake’s “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau / Mock on, ’tis all in 
            vain. / You throw the sand against the wind, / And the wind blows it back again.”
Somebody, Ed or Dennis, say, would say, “Would somebody explain to me what structuralism is 
            so I’ll know whether or not I’m a structuralist?” and someone else, maybe Ken or me, 
            would say, “You’re wasting your time. Just say what you like and why you like it,” and
            whoever said the first thing would say “Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau!” and the 
            talk would go on forever because we weren’t contradicting each other, Blake was.
A good quote attributes the animus to someone else, not you. Or it’s like a potholder you use to 
            pick up the argument when the argument’s too hot to handle.

Mainly, though we spent our afternoon sitting on the floor of the library swapping books of 
            poems and reading aloud to each other in stagey whispers, our backs against the stacks 
            like harvesters in a painting by Millet taking a break from the soul-numbing grind of 
            work.

Those guys are all married now. Or re-married. 
And far away.
I never see them any more.
I see them every day.
Isn’t that how friendship works?
Thank you, poetry! Thank you for my friends and the friends to come.

When you’re young and you tell people you’re going to study art and poetry, they look at you as
            though you’re crazy. When you’re older and you tell people you studied art and poetry, 
            they say, “I wish I’d done that.”

From the writer

:: Account ::

Ever get the feel­ing that your favorite poets are writ­ing the same good poems over and over again? I start­ed think­ing that way about my own work a few years ago, so I tried some new tricks: short­er poems, longer poems, dif­fer­ent for­mats, edgi­er syn­tax. Painters and song­writ­ers rein­vent them­selves all the time, so why not poets? At the same time I decid­ed to stop think­ing in terms of good, bet­ter, best. The thing is to be dif­fer­ent. If that leads to work you or your read­ers like, fine, but if it doesn’t, with­out a doubt these changes will lead you to some­thing new and then to some­thing even new­er, a way of writ­ing you haven’t come close to imag­in­ing. Remem­ber, poet­ry is the long con, and rein­ven­tion means you’ll stay in the game that much longer. I call some of these new poem types “Gins­bergs.” That doesn’t mean that they read like Gins­berg poems, just that that old bear’s spir­it freed me to take chances.

David Kir­by teach­es at Flori­da State Uni­ver­si­ty. He is the author of Lit­tle Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment described as “a hymn of praise to the eman­ci­pa­to­ry pow­er of non­sense” and which was named one of Booklist’s Top 10 Black His­to­ry Non-Fic­tion Books of 2010. Enter­tain­ment Week­ly has called Kirby’s poet­ry one of “5 Rea­sons to Live.” In 2016, Kir­by received a Life­time Achieve­ment Award from Flori­da Human­i­ties, which called him “a lit­er­ary trea­sure of our state.”

Poetry / Louie Leyson

:: pinay cyborg manifesto ::

I’ve been sick with woman’s want
to become beyond body—closer to chrome

glint & pearl oil than blood, than organ. this is how
I understand perfection after years watching

lola tuck herself beneath shadow, bending
like soft metal in her mistaking of bronze

for burning. my lipsticked titas under willow trees,
a collective absence of bone. each brown, full

limb a bruise refusing to heal, each charcoal
shade a fruitless makeshift cast. august a lesson

in how the injured pinay body has parts too rooted
to the human. when nanay said I wish she was born

whiter she meant wishing I entered this world intact,
born a heap of gleaming silver. & how could I

blame her? after so many motions to smooth the lines
rippling the round lake of her face, drawn from the wisps

of a father’s smoke. we both know the cyborg
is an unholy thing, spared edenic origins & therefore

cannot die. there is nothing she dreams of more
than to reach that point of endless healing, to spend

hours submerged in freezing water but still swim up,
intact. to drive through agate swaths of fire but still

speed out, old toyota charred to nothing, skin painted
ash like dove belly. perhaps there’s already

a cyborg quality to the pinay’s long survival, which
to this point has been bulletproof. I don’t know

titanium sturdy enough to withstand the plain hurt
of centuries, coalescing to meet my nanay like wounds

from ancient lives. pained, we keep peeling tamarind
for sinigang. keep gathering okra, patis, chilli pepper,

taro. isn’t that bionic? isn’t that miraculous?

:: a conversation between two choirs ::

ave, ave, ave maria. i am trying to find the root
of silence, like a voice that carries another voice
inside. mary thy praises we sing to the backs of a hundred
upturned heads. like tulips asleep inside the pillow
of your fist. in heaven the blessed crouch to dirty
dance atop a fruitless garden. a stone that falls in winter
& the intact walls of its crater. erupting from our chests
a bird named alleluia! alleluia! how stones make perfect bowls
out of snow. oh lord you arrive & sorrow goes like sparrow heads
buried in holy bark. is there anything more sharp than below
zero quiet. sun on the blood on the wood of the cross, bright
on bright on bright. is anything born from an absence
of mouths. on the pew i shake like a root in the rain.
from the soundlessness of a dead bug. twelfth Sunday
of ordinary time. mistaking a womb for the cave
of my throat. or was it during lenten season.
entombing the wound of my tongue
when you come. holy spirit i too burn like the wick
of a violent candle. a violet candle lit up & noiseless
in its yearning. yes, yes that’s what i always
meant. amen.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I was tired of want­i­ng word­less­ly. I need­ed some con­text, a tex­ture upon which to con­tem­plate desire, and so I wrote these poems. Desire, then, dic­tates the tone of these poems. Much of it restrained, as queer desire often is. There is so much on earth to long for. I need­ed to put that long­ing down, build it a bed in which to sleep through the night.

In her sem­i­nal essay “A Cyborg Man­i­festo,” Don­na Har­away writes, “Cyborg imagery can sug­gest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bod­ies and our tools to our­selves.” Since first encoun­ter­ing this, I’ve obses­sive­ly fig­ured the cyborg in my own work as a utopi­an shapeshifter, or as a nar­ra­tive machine with which to pro­pel our­selves from the dam­ag­ing mytholo­gies that have been instilled in us since child­hood. In “pinay cyborg man­i­festo” specif­i­cal­ly, I allude to mytholo­gies around what con­sti­tutes an ide­al Fil­ip­ina that have been informed by cen­turies of occu­pa­tion, patri­archy, and vio­lence. “This is a dream not of a com­mon lan­guage,” Har­away also writes, “but of a pow­er­ful infi­del het­eroglos­sia.” It is through the cyborg’s poten­tial towards this “pow­er­ful infi­del het­eroglos­sia” that I find new and lib­er­at­ed modes of pos­si­bil­i­ty, of exist­ing at last as myself in the world.

Louie Leyson is a UBC grad­u­ate and writer who lives on the unced­ed ances­tral ter­ri­to­ry of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Wau­tuth Nations. Their work has been nomi­nat­ed for the Push­cart Prize and Nation­al Mag­a­zine Awards. You can find their works in Cat­a­pult, The Mala­hat Review, Palette Poet­ry, The Rup­ture, Nat. Brut, Pleni­tude, and else­where. Their twit­ter is @aswang­po­em, their insta­gram is @cyborg­saints.