Poetry / Ryan Black 

:: from You Were Never Lovelier ::

	
“This seeing the sick endears them to us,” Hopkins writes,
“us too it endears.” Confirmed in love. God, himself,

the reward. My father-in-law died on a Sunday in August.
For hours, the crackle of fluid in his chest.

Then a small mercy—a productive cough. Then sleep.
The smell of moonflowers in the late air.

I sat alone in the driveway. Everyone I loved
was asleep. My wife, my heart, exhausted, slept.

My father slept in the earth. My mother, in her great distance.
My sisters slept. My brothers. My nieces and nephews,

curled up like cats. Once, he woke into sunlight.
His daughters stood around his body

like Athenians. His son pulled the blanket back
and cupped his swollen feet.


                                 ———


I wake now every morning at 4am,
thinking of my wife who called in March

to say she couldn’t any longer. She just couldn’t.
The half-light of an overcast sky

paled the windows. “It’s irrational,” she said.
The sky was white because winter clouds

tend to be horizontal and summer clouds
vertical. I knew it happened when it happened.

The marriage over in a speech act.
As performative as I now pronounce you.

I now pronounce you no longer. Divorce
is just paperwork. You pay for that.


                                   ———


We married in a municipal court overlooking the Sound.
Her father signed as witness. He wore a beige jacket.

My mother called him handsome. “The hardest thing,”
Anne Carson says, is watching “the year repeat its days,”

each one an anniversary. The soothing voice. A gesture.
A fog so thick I was afraid to drive. Carson’s metaphor

is a videotape running beneath the present tense. I looked it up
because I thought I remembered a cassette. The song taped over

heard beneath the new one. Always there. I was wrong.
But I did remember the “lozenges of April heat.”


                                 ———


A friend calls. The president had been airlifted
to Walter Reed. Twice, his blood oxygen level dropped.

A fever. Then, three days later, on a White House
balcony, breathless, he removed his mask.

Sparrows gather in my mother’s yard.
I hear them chittering. The virus like a circuit continues.

My friend’s mind is quick.
She reads the image—the president framed

by the terrible symmetry of flags. An audience of cameras.
Hyperreality. The masses’ self-expression.

“I think he’ll win, again,” she says. Then she sighs.
She hasn’t been sleeping well. She wakes too early

or can’t get to bed. Her mother is sick
in another city. Alzheimer’s. She worries.

I want the habit of telling her she’s loved,
but I don’t say it, having been raised otherwise.

Not without love. No. That we had.
Its naked expression. That we didn’t.


                                 ———


Nineteen students. Cameras off. Twenty. Twenty-one.
We’re reading Tarfia Faizullah’s Seam

alongside an essay on trauma, “another body
inside your own.” I’m wearing a blue button down,

my knee wrapped in ice. “We can separate the elegist
from the mourner,” I say. One and the same and other.

“But what does it give the writer?” Before class, a student emailed
to tell me she’d lost someone. Then asked to be excused.

A student posts in the chat. “Distance?” Another responds.
“A safe distance.” Another. “What distance is safe?”

From the writer

:: Account ::

“You Were Nev­er Love­li­er” is a long poem occa­sioned by the dis­so­lu­tion of a mar­riage at the start of the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic. The poem’s pri­ma­ry set­tings are the adja­cent neigh­bor­hoods of Jack­son Heights and Elmhurst, Queens, the ini­tial epi­cen­ter of the pan­dem­ic in the Unit­ed States. The end of the mar­riage gath­ers and recalls a myr­i­ad of loss­es, often con­tex­tu­al­ized through the anx­i­eties brought on by the virus. The “divorce poem” (or book) is per­haps its own poet­ic genre; its con­ven­tions often dif­fer depend­ing on whether the poet iden­ti­fies as a man or a woman. I want­ed to explode con­ven­tion­al expec­ta­tions of how, for instance, “a man writes about divorce,” in par­tic­u­lar as I found my expe­ri­ence of divorce more close­ly rep­re­sent­ed in women’s nar­ra­tives than in men’s. “You Were Nev­er Love­li­er” is in con­ver­sa­tion with both Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay” and her work on desire in Eros the Bit­ter­sweet, as well as George Meredith’s 1862 son­net sequence “Mod­ern Love,” an explo­ration of the writer’s own failed marriage

Ryan Black is the author of The Ten­ant of Fire (Uni­ver­si­ty of Pitts­burgh Press), win­ner of the 2018 Agnes Lynch Star­rett Prize, and Death of a Nativist, select­ed by Lin­da Gregerson for a 2016 Poet­ry Soci­ety of Amer­i­ca Chap­book Fel­low­ship. He has pub­lished pre­vi­ous­ly in Best Amer­i­can Poet­ry, Ploughshares, The South­ern Review, Vir­ginia Quar­ter­ly Review, The Yale Review, and else­where. He is an Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at Queens Col­lege of the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York, and lives in Jack­son Heights.

Poetry / Regine Cabato 

:: As Fleabag ::

You’re the only man who sees straight through
my camera. My own mother couldn’t take me
to church. With you at the altar, I worship
like a fleabag, which means I’m either
a bitch or a seedy hotel, where the men come
and go like guests, nowhere remotely close
to the Grand Budapest. If I was born
in Sodom instead of London, I’d be
toast. On the game show of life, I insist
on calling a friend to ask, have you figured it out
yet? Sometimes the friend is Boo, sometimes
it’s you, and sometimes it’s me when I’m fifty.
If I live to silver my hair and still address
an audience. Whenever I give God a call
the line sizzles with static. Could you help me?
I have so many questions I want to ask him.
My therapist said he could be fucked.
Was she for real? Why did he bother
becoming human? We’re all turds.
Will my sister ever find happiness?
Will my best friend ever forgive me?
I want to believe she and my mum
are somewhere good, and maybe the fairy
godmother will head down
to the basement. How do I become
a better feminist? Why were our bodies
designed to shrivel? Sometimes I peer out
into the hard world, and it’s like
I’m the guinea pig.
Does it get any easier?
Are you even sure you’re a priest?
How could you marry a couple in a garden?
How do you give baptisms when you hate kids?
What man of God would say he would marry me
to someone else? I know you cut the line like that
on purpose. You swapped the wine
with G&T and gave me
the pleasure of your company.
Fuck you too, Father, but forgive me
for I have sinned. Maybe calling you that
does turn me on. I promise I won’t tell
God. I forgive you too. I hope he’ll let me
borrow you for an hour or two.
This communion is the most whole
I’ve ever been. Thanks for taking me
as I am: fake miscarriage and loose
buttons and monologues.
I can quit performing now,
because you’ve seen the view
from the cheap seats, that disastrous
dinner, the full stage of this one woman
show. You’ve tamed this wild thing in me.
You’ve pulled me out of this hundred acre
wood and into another sadness,
this time with the gratefulness of a glen:
how lucky I am to have someone
who makes saying good-bye so hard.
I’ll be at home or the bar or the café
but every time you spook my mind,
I’ll send a fox your way.
Its tail will disappear down the corner
of your every corridor.
It will jump headfirst into the blanket
of snow on your churchyard.
It will come knocking
on the door of your silent retreat,
hunting for your name.

:: The Greyhound ::

I’m feeling more frequently the blues you caught
in December. Last we saw each other, you walked me
to the bus stop down the curb from The Greyhound.
You talked me into talking to you until morning.
We were heading back out of that well-fed
university kennel and into the dog-eat-dog world.
Since arriving in England, I’ve hunted foxes and haunted
terminals, longing to tame and be tamed.
I’ve never before wanted so hard
to graduate from my school of shame.
That spring, we had a Sunday roast, making
the most of the Port Meadow winter melt.
Passing the ghost bicycle by The Plain,
you turned toward me with a grin
that made me want to hurry up out of my upbringing.
Outside the pub, you cradled my face
in your palms and said, your life still needs
some living. I was too young to consider
the consequence of your voice ringing
in my ears all evening. If you wanted to,
you could have brought me to a heel.
But you were a good master, the kind of gentleman
who spoke in Garamond. I didn’t look forward to turning
corners in a city without you. In spite, I left my laughter
tangled in your hair on purpose. I learned to walk
my own leash. Recently, I heard they put down
The Greyhound. You told me there once
the next time you would see me, I would be happy.
I’m happy now, I told you then.
You said, beaming, you’re only beginning.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Poetry / Anne Champion 

:: Persephone Thinks Love is a Parasite ::

These women call on me with garnets and pomegranate seeds 
& ask me to stitch up their broken hearts maimed by some man, 
but their affliction is much more serious than a tear to the muscle of love. 
The man is really a tumor, cutting off their blood supply until they transform 
into ghosts of their former selves. I rip off their rose-colored glasses, crush 
the lenses under my heel. You don’t have the love of a man; 
you don’t even have lust for a beast. If you cut that man open, maggots 
which have cleaned out his soul will worm out and attach 
themselves to your brain. They find delusions of love like yours 
most delicious—they’ll reproduce inside of you faster than rabbits 
until you’re just a husk, as frail and empty as the cicadas 
that litter the ground after they split the silence of an afternoon 
with their symphonies of despair; as frail and empty as the promises 
he made to you, another victim to the pandemic of his pain. 

:: Persephone Celebrates Her Anniversary ::

Hades doesn’t get me anything on our anniversary— 
he tells himself that he already gave me a world. 
Rituals to mark my militant march towards eternity 
are attended by me alone. This year, I want new bones 
to adorn my throne. Hades keeps a pit of men trapped 
in tar: the ones who murdered their wives and kids. I visit 
and stare into the sea of gaping faces, croaking misery 
like a swamp of toads. I pluck one up by the hair 
and hack my scythe to his neck like a stalk of sugarcane. 
I hold his stunned face in my hands, imagine his mother, 
palms on each cheek, asking him his dreams. He said 
he’d be a hero, but in reality he’d be a monster. 
Today his skull becomes a footrest. My marriage 
was never proposed as a question; 
if it had been, this would’ve been my answer. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

I woke grog­gi­ly, dis­ori­ent­ed. Why was I on my back when I sleep on my stom­ach? Why were my breasts out of my bra? Why was there extreme pain in my gen­i­tals? I looked down and gasped: a stain of blood and feces pooled between my legs. “Oh my God, I’m dead,” was my first thought. My sec­ond thought was one of pure despair: “My friend was the one to kill me.” 

Three years ago, this trau­ma became my real­i­ty to heft for the rest of my days: the dis­cov­ery that my apart­ment main­te­nance man had been stalk­ing me for months hit me like a tsuna­mi turns a whole land­scape into ruins. He’d put GHB in my Bri­ta while I was at work, and he’d bro­ken into my home at night with a crow bar to my screen door. Wak­ing up from the first assault was only the begin­ning: he’d go on to drug and assault me for sev­er­al weeks before I escaped. 

It’s no exag­ger­a­tion to say that a part of me didn’t sur­vive that event: the last bits of my naivety had to die com­plete­ly; I had to walk through the world heav­ing a new and bru­tal wis­dom of pain, both my own and my stalker’s. It was a jour­ney to the under­world and back, and, as such, was fraught with com­plex emo­tions, includ­ing bouts of denial, sui­ci­dal ideation, grief, and Stock­holm syn­drome. 

But in that har­row­ing expe­ri­ence, I learned more about my own men­tal health, my autism, and my capa­bil­i­ties for com­pas­sion towards oth­ers, even those with the dark­est patholo­gies. As I healed for sev­er­al years through intense trau­ma ther­a­py and edu­ca­tion, I returned to the land of the liv­ing with a wis­dom of dark­ness like Perse­phone walk­ing through the spring blooms with her mem­o­ries of Hades. 

There­fore, my cur­rent poet­ry project is called Love Let­ters to Hades, in which I explore the mul­ti­fac­eted feel­ings of sur­vivors who endure mul­ti­ple assaults and Stock­holm syn­drome through the voice of the god­dess of ghosts. 

Anne Cham­pi­on is the author of She Saints & Holy Pro­fan­i­ties (Quar­ter­ly West, 2019), The Good Girl is Always a Ghost (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), Book of Lev­i­ta­tions (Trem­bling Pil­low Press, 2019), Reluc­tant Mis­tress (Gold Wake Press, 2013), The Dark Length Home (Noc­tu­ary Press, 2017), Hunt­ed Car­rion: Son­nets to a Stalk­er (Bowk­er, 2024), and This is a Sto­ry About Ghosts: A Mem­oir of Bor­der­line Per­son­al­i­ty Dis­or­der (Bowk­er, 2024). Her work appears in Verse Dai­ly, diode, Tupe­lo Quar­ter­ly, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Sala­man­der, New South, Redi­vider, PANK Mag­a­zine, and else­where. She was a 2009 Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets Prize recip­i­ent, a 2016 Best of the Net win­ner, a Dou­glas Pre­ston Trav­el Grant recip­i­ent, and a Bar­bara Dem­ing Memo­r­i­al Grant recip­i­ent. She received her MFA in poet­ry from Emer­son Col­lege.  

Poetry / Kathy Fagan 

:: As far as the eye can see, we say, ::

as far as I can tell—
if the eye can see, if the I can tell—
our plumage, our plastic, our metals 
brushed gray as sky, 
the clouds we wreck through,
their resistance a minor 
disturbance on the wing, a rattling 
of the shades
on the windows, and below. 
Meanwhile our coughs, our farts, our failure
to place our phones in airplane mode,
our failure to mute them,
to choose correctly a ringtone, a mate, 
the appropriate footwear. These we need
for the making of poems 
in the space below the aerial realms, 
our phones our windows now,
screens of heaven, fruit of the tree 
of the new gods, the gone gods 
dead as our loved ones, the light 
behind their faces eternal in our eyes.
These we need—
the bumps, the reek, the tinkling 
of shot bottles on the carts—
for the making of poems. Watch 
your elbows, your knees,
your hearts, your snores, your babies’ 
cries like the blown 
scraps of birds below,
winter birds and their shadows,
the horizon of their flight made vertical
in puddles, mirrors of longitude, 
black ambigrams as the sky’s gray 
paper folds in half
and half again, a diorama of flight then
before darkness comes to quell the difference,
and trees as I knew them
and forever imagine them to be, 
the trees, their few leaves left shivering.

:: Drought ::

Someone quit practicing the hard notes
and you didn’t notice when

Storm clouds made mountains
then left us flat

gone the chive and jasmine scent
the silver in the leaves

the masterpiece, the archivist said, at rest 
white cotton gloves making sure

and motorbikes wasping beside and past us after
having their turn at empire

Truth is, I miss it all
though it was much too hot already

and pain had made it hard to walk
Autumn, I thought, will be my birthday present 

rain will be, peace
Okay, I know the limit

3 wishes + 22 times as many candles = 
not so many wishes left to make

A garden hose dropped
where someone was trying

trees dormant or dead
earth like a carnival come and gone

the dynamite from Acme or Amazon
having blown the place sky-high

The dad jokes we were raised on made us believe
we’d survive them

I once mourned the children I did not have
now I mourn those others have

children at lessons and the library
down the corner, on the ball field

the one growing sunflowers tall as the roof
at her doorstep

the one who never saw a sunflower 
you, who never saw a door

From the writer

:: Account ::

On a sketch of the Vir­gin and Child, Michelan­ge­lo instruct­ed his young assis­tant, in short­hand Ital­ian, to Draw faster, acknowl­edg­ing that life lasts a moment, death—and art—far longer. As an aging, bi, child­less poet cur­rent­ly rec­og­niz­ing the lim­its of my own life and that of our plan­et, I have immersed myself in the inti­mate and urgent dis­cov­ery that growth and decay are the same cycle, and that art and mem­o­ry, made in the tumul­tuous rush of these, are the deeply human attempts to out­last them. My sev­enth col­lec­tion, The Unbe­com­ing, begins with the com­mand, Run, into a process that is, for me, like all of us, a cir­cle of becom­ing and unbe­com­ing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. The poems are, then, memen­to mori, a lov­ing reminder, a poet’s reck­on­ing with the rewards and loss­es of age, and with our painful­ly beau­ti­ful lit­tle lives “round­ed with a sleep.”

Kathy Fagan’s forth­com­ing col­lec­tion, The Unbe­com­ing, will be pub­lished by W.W. Nor­ton in Sep­tem­ber 2026. Her sixth book, win­ner of PSA’s William Car­los Williams Poet­ry Prize, is Bad Hob­by (Milk­weed Edi­tions, 2022), avail­able in print and audio. Sycamore (Milk­weed, 2017) was a final­ist for the 2018 Kings­ley Tufts Award. A 2023 Guggen­heim Fel­low, she is Pro­fes­sor Emeri­ta of The Ohio State Uni­ver­si­ty, where she co-found­ed and direct­ed the MFA Pro­gram in Cre­ative Writing.

Poetry / M.K. Foster 

:: Annunciation ::

                    for the rare sighting of the white stork in Northern Ireland

Lately arrived on the Annadale Embankment, our stork
is supposed to be in North Africa, but has found his way
here to Belfast from Downpatrick, from County Down,
from Donegal, come all this way to our Mouth called River—
and Behold! there he is, as foretold like prophecy, like psalm:
aye there he is, lads, just like the Reddits said, see how he poses
like he knows he is glorious, see how he puffs and plucks
the ruffled shirt of his cumulonimbus plumage, an avian
Liberace, he’s gorgeous, he is! and good with children and pets,
so good to let us gawk and squawk, flap and fumble for our
phones as though we could show what is becoming of us
these days; what is becoming of us these days? we think to,
but don’t ask as we wish him the good luck we wish for,
even as we break with aching to know: is this it for us, will it
be long now, will it hurt? we wonder how, of all we don’t have,
we are so lucky that he’s come to be with us on our last day
of sun before the rain takes hold again; we wonder if he is
named for a number on his ankle, missing from a menagerie,
clawed free from a collection, escaped and thriving and brutally
alive with waking and wanting to Behold! the only kingdom
which is only the living river between all things where we
wonder if he’s on holiday, like he just wants to hang about
the Ormeau Road and hold out for Tesco biscuits; we
wonder if he just wants to be admired by all we cannot
feed him and don’t, anymore than we can feed ourselves
in this era haunted by hunger; and we are, so we do: Behold!
how we’ve left homes and desks, kitchens and offices, how
we’ve all but burned everything we don’t need to witness
an omen, how we’ve thrown it all down, thrown open our
doors, and run to the river to lose ourselves and seek and
find: Behold! people up and down the road abandoning
cars like a second coming we couldn’t see coming until
it was all we wanted, apocalyptic with longing for the rapture
of a seven-foot wingspan of light and dark and beautiful terror:
we, the awakened, wandering, until the other drivers have to
slow and shout Jesus who died?! 	All of us is the answer we
can barely breathe, much less conjure as speech for how much
we love this wild thing immediately when we can barely bring
ourselves to touch ourselves like the holy creatures we are,
like holy smokes, holy fire; holy shit, I could stand here all day,
my friend calls as he calls everyone he knows to share this
scene, this monstrum, this beacon, that they may believe as we,
tap the holes in their screens, Behold! this blazing body unseen
since the 1400s when a mated pair nested in an Edinburgh
cathedral; now, wouldn’t that be a sight, we say, to see her, the one
he seeks; and it is at once the only love story I believe: this bird
crossing time on fire with divine hunger, as we hold ourselves to hold
ourselves back from falling to our knees, a feeling I can’t shake
even as I turn and return along the Lagan to honor what can be
honored while I’m here and thirsty in a way the river can’t break,
but a miracle can; it’s a sign, some say, it’s the climate, say others;
it’s a sky too hot to lie in, even stripped down and laid bare;
it’s desire, I think, which is only transfiguration, which is only
the other side of something that was unbearable until it wasn’t:
aren’t we all? I think, watching kingdom-come coming closer,
winged eyeliner and wings and legs the color of red giants;
or maybe, someone says, new beginnings: yes! can’t we just see it?
we have to, we must, we know it like salt and bone, there: Behold!
a world to be that wants nothing, but to bear the sun on its back—

:: Theia ::

                     according to a theory called the giant-impact hypothesis, 
                     our Moon had a mother


there is nothing left of her—
this long-ago woman: the striking
body of a disrupted planet

crashing before the beginning
of all things into the Earth
and birthing the Moon,

only then to bury herself
under the bald, scalded
milk skin of her child—

there is nothing left of her
because she is everywhere—
in space, this is obliteration,

on Earth, we call it otherwise—
on Earth, we say,

              the daughter is violence

From the writer

:: Account ::

“Annun­ci­a­tion”: It was a rumor that became a quest that became a sign. In May 2025, I was roped into an impromp­tu jour­ney through my new home­town of Belfast in search of a sight 600 years in the mak­ing. “A stork?” I repeat­ed to my friend as we clipped through the Botan­i­cal Gar­dens. “A stork!” he con­firmed, “A real stork!” And for all the sense it didn’t make as we sped up to cross the Kings Bridge, it was all the rea­son there was to turn onto the Annan­dale Embank­ment and believe, along­side dozens more, in what we were see­ing: A stork. A real stork. This rare, huge, mag­nif­i­cent crea­ture arrived out of nowhere, called the city of Belfast togeth­er on the banks of the Riv­er Lagan, and gave us all, near and far, a vision that we are not for­got­ten in this dark epoch of the world, that won­der and beau­ty live on, and that mir­a­cles that reteach us how to see still come to us when we aren’t looking.

“Theia”: Excerpt­ed from my man­u­script, Pleu­ro­tomaria, “Theia” speaks from a lyric con­tin­u­um of poet­ry con­sumed by vis­cer­al eli­sions between deep geo­log­ic time, deep mem­o­ry, and the female body. Sung as a poly­phon­ic voice across time, dis­tance, and min­er­al, flo­ra, and ani­mal bod­ies, each poem is, at once, exca­va­tion, exhuma­tion, resus­ci­ta­tion, recla­ma­tion, and prophecy—singing as ear­ly as the birth of the Moon, call­ing to the stars as late as tonight, refract­ed and beheld in a sin­gle female body before atom­iz­ing into a myth of days to come.

M.K. Fos­ter is a poet, fic­tion writer, and his­to­ri­an of sci­ence from Alaba­ma. Her work has appeared or is forth­com­ing in The Amer­i­can Poet­ry Review, Nim­rod, The Get­tys­burg Review, Nar­ra­tive, Best New Poets, and else­where in the US, and Sky­light 47, Cran­nóg, and The Api­ary in the UK and Ire­land. In 2024, she was named a Mac­Dow­ell Fel­low in Lit­er­a­ture and select­ed for the 2025 Ful­bright US Schol­ar Award in Cre­ative Writ­ing to the Sea­mus Heaney Cen­tre at Queens Uni­ver­si­ty Belfast in North­ern Ire­land. In Fall 2025, she will be abroad as a Mai­son Dora Maar Fel­low in Ménerbes, France. For mon­sters, fairy­tales, and more, please vis­it: marykatherinefoster.com.

Poetry / Kale Hensley 

:: Ugh, I’m So Over Hope ::

In true leap-frog fashion, I’m playing games with abandon, forsaking
all emotion in the vein of Stoic men; their arduous practice

of looking constipated. I’m tired of your very look, hope, how my mouth
must make this embarrassing shape as if I’m swallowing

a snake only to pop off at the tail—no more of you, feathered thing pious
in the soul, why not thrust your beak in utter unmeek out

one of my many holes! Be worth something, be useful! Fallen fat, you have,
from the breast of expect! I miss when the world birthed

older magics, twists, and regrets; no more of this hope nonsense—I’d rather
be jealous: skin threaded in passion, leaping on stilts to curse

the Earth’s unjust tilt toward those who’ve used talents for greed bedazzled
bloodspill. How does it feel? Yes, knowing your name is spelt

in red, knowing you are the muteness and the blindness who begat this help-
lessness, I’m asking you, hesitant resilience, bowed head before

the storm, do more. Pluck the eye out of the hurricane. Grab the tornado’s
pointed tail. No longer shall I wait for you; tonight I make hell. 

:: The Etymology of Harmony ::

Let us begin with a pitch of riling, of meddlesome: a noise
beguiling, that behaves as uncombed hair—

a most darling snare, crying blood-precious, which asks to be
caught despite the hot chance of a brand

down to the bone, kneading alabaster roads as if succubus,
as if warranted, begged for from a star as

pollution personal, or god-sent demon, its first note erotic,
punctures the fabric of darkness to carve

words as if it only knew the heart as tomb, as clay, malleable
enough for its biblical play, recall that net

of dance cast over David? The awe that choked the name of
Saul? It is the music that makes the man,

isn’t it? The oldest spirit in strokes, vibrant:
oh festering flesh, oh blushing dissonance, let me slip between your lips.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I don’t want to be one of those peo­ple, but my work is so lyri­cal that, often­times, it feels as though the poem writes itself. I’m less inter­est­ed in nar­ra­tive than in per­mit­ting the imag­i­na­tion to enact its wild asso­ci­a­tions. Sound becomes a device through which we access star­tling images and unex­pect­ed com­par­isons. It’s strange to expect a poem to tell a sto­ry; bet­ter to expect it to walk you through a room of silk, or to thrust you onto the back of some strange crea­ture and ask you to fend for yourself.

Many of these poems were writ­ten while I was on my hon­ey­moon in the High­lands. The sites and scenes echoed eeri­ly with mem­o­ries from my girl­hood, and so first lines would arise as I walked, bought cof­fee, or browsed for a sou­venir. The poems come to me through motion and emo­tion; once I final­ly sit down to com­pose, the remain­ing notes tend to arrive with­in an hour or so. Truth­ful­ly, my process is as sim­ple as lis­ten­ing. It helps if there’s a pro­fi­cient accor­dion play­er in the back­ground too. Maybe even a dram of whiskey.

Kale Hens­ley is a poet and visu­al artist from West Vir­ginia. Her work appears in Gulf Coast, Booth, Ever­green Review, and Epiphany: A lit­er­ary mag­a­zine. She lives in Texas with her wife and a menagerie of clingy pets. Find more of her writ­ing at kalehens.com.

Poetry / Seth Leeper

:: Pantoublock with Merriam Webster and Survivor’s Guilt :: 

:: Pantoublock with Merriam Webster and the Passing of Time ::

From the writer

:: Account ::

Seth Leep­er is a queer poet. His work has appeared or is forth­com­ing in The Adroit Jour­nal, Foglifter, Greens­boro Review, Only­Po­ems, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, Sala­man­der, and Waxwing. He holds an M.S. in Spe­cial Edu­ca­tion from Pace Uni­ver­si­ty and B.A. in Cre­ative Writ­ing and Fash­ion Jour­nal­ism from San Fran­cis­co State Uni­ver­si­ty. He is a can­di­date in the Low Res­i­den­cy MFA in Cre­ative Writ­ing Pro­gram at Ran­dolph Col­lege. He teach­es drop in and vir­tu­al work­shops for Brook­lyn Poets.

Poetry / Maja Lukic

::  Margarethe ::

                    After Anselm Kiefer, "Margarethe", 1981
 

You don’t have to understand it
to know all this burning straw
stands in for a woman’s blonde hair.

Or that the picture’s nearest association
is human burning,
its acrid puzzlement of the air,

air that has nowhere to go 
to escape its fate, air that absorbs 
dust and skin and lashes.

You don’t have to love, even,
these pieces of hay rising to flame tips
that resemble fingernails.

The fire burns white hot centers
into each tear-shaped flame, ringed
incarnadine—and the hay itself?

Disturbed birthday candles
or a menorah, twisting up.
A reverse celebration—all un-life.

In the blue background, part dusk, part sea,
is time itself. You traveled to see it once, 
then sent a photo to me—

I loved you for it 
until the painting’s weight came down 
and blackened my thoughts.

Its fugue was not for us.
We were not to benefit from it.
What are we to the dead 

but superficial delegates
of a world going on? 
Are we worthy?

We don’t have to touch the charred ground
to imagine how the burnt flakes
disintegrate in your hand.

:: The Women of Antiquity ::

                     After Anselm Kiefer, Die Frauen der Antike (The Women of Antiquity), 1999-2002


They grace art galleries and great halls,
headless and faceless plaster brides, 
their delicate bodies cinched in 
at a ruthlessly thin waist. 

They don’t even have legs, only white skirts
and heavy objects where their heads
ought to be—a glass cube for Hypatia,
razor wire for Canidia’s vipers and hair, 

a tower of lead books for Sappho.
Lead, that melancholiest of materials,
heavy as hard fate, replacing her 
fine elastic brain, exerting gravity.

What is gravity to these dead plaster
beauties but the weight of forgetting?
They were poets and thinkers once. 
Now they are voiceless, 

so what echoes from their bodies 
is a different kind of wailing—silent 
like a metallic taste in my mouth, 
the coolness of my skin in a cemetery. 

He makes them delicate, makes them lithe. 
Kiefer makes the sculptures sensual.
It’s a man’s idea of beauty, which is, 
irrepressibly, my idea of beauty.

And here the startling distance between 
the self’s idea of self 
and its final embodiment is most evident—
there is no life after this one,

and the woman’s body remains
the Sapphic fragment on which 
the artist places his imagination
as he recovers the whole—unfinished,

fragmented and therefore perfected.  
He can only ever be right 
as he renders them. Who could fault him  
for remembering forgotten women poets?  
 
Anselm, what god have you made 
of yourself now?  
It was my father’s memories of my mother 
I most wished to challenge— 
 
this or that ringing true or untrue. 
She was as much his story as mine.  
We were completing what had remained 
of her with our own craft, grafting  
 
onto her what had long ceased to be, 
while she remained boneless, headless, 
the plaster new moon above us, so effaced  
it became one with the leaden dark. 
 
Who could remember anymore 
my mother’s intelligence scanning a book, 
a blinking light in the navy sweep of forgetting? 
She, the unfinished genius, the unmanifested—  
 
whatever had lanterned brilliantly in her mind 
went out in the darkness of the crematorium.  
 

From the writer

:: Account ::

“Mar­garethe” and “The Women of Antiq­ui­ty” are the results of my fas­ci­na­tion with the artist Anselm Kiefer. Kiefer is mon­u­men­tal. He unearths sites of vio­lent mem­o­ry while main­tain­ing a firm grip on some­thing time­less. He is a deeply ref­er­en­tial artist, plac­ing his works in dia­logue with Paul Celan and Inge­borg Bach­mann, among oth­er sources. His paint­ing “Mar­garethe” engages with Celan’s “Todesfuge.” “The Women of Antiq­ui­ty” is a series of head­less plas­ter sculp­tures that invoke his­tor­i­cal women, includ­ing poets like Sap­pho. In both of my poems, which share these titles, there is a direct med­i­ta­tion on Kiefer’s art but also a mid-course vol­ta to the personal.

In “Mar­garethe,” the speak­er ques­tions how we relate to art about the Holo­caust. For me, this ques­tion­ing reflects my curios­i­ty about how to con­vey the epic scale of Kiefer’s work with­out betray­ing real­i­ty. At the same time, I was intrigued to write a poem that engaged with a paint­ing that itself engages with anoth­er poem. I strug­gled with the end­ing and had thought to say more after the final image. In the end, it was Richie Hof­mann who wise­ly point­ed out that once every­thing dis­in­te­grates, the poem can­not go on.

“The Women of Antiq­ui­ty” par­al­lels Kiefer’s work of reclaim­ing bril­liant women from his­to­ry. The poem places the speaker’s moth­er in the pan­theon of great women thinkers. It asks, what hap­pens to our minds when we die? Where do all those blink­ing and bril­liant thoughts go? And I want­ed to cre­ate a space in which the speak­er could approach (and per­haps even chal­lenge) Anselm Kiefer himself.

Maja Lukic’s poems have appeared in New Eng­land Review, Nar­ra­tive, A Pub­lic Space, The Adroit Jour­nal, Col­orado Review, Ben­ning­ton Review, Image, Sixth Finch, Cop­per Nick­el, Poet­ry North­west, Brook­lyn Poets, the Slow­down pod­cast, and else­where. She holds an MFA in poet­ry from the MFA Pro­gram for Writ­ers at War­ren Wil­son Col­lege. Cur­rent­ly, she lives in Brook­lyn where she serves as cura­tor of Four Way Books’ Translator’s Page and as a assis­tant poet­ry edi­tor at Nar­ra­tive Mag­a­zine.

Poetry / Nicholas Montemarano

:: C‑Word ::

                     No Covid poems!
                         - From the submission guidelines of the [Redacted] Review


Dear editors, would you mind clarifying something
for me? Do you mean that poems that use the c-word
or are about the c-word will be rejected unread?
Would the other c-word (corona) be permitted?
I’ve written dozens of poems about my mother dying,
but rarely use the c-word, more often the v-word (virus)
or p-word (plague). If I send you a poem that includes
the c- or v- or p-word, would you place me on a list
of writers whose poems you would never consider?
Are there other c-words I should avoid such as cancer?
In your current issue, I read poems about climate crisis,
colonialism, capitalism, coulrophobia, and a cento
about chestnut trees. Poems about being a bottom,
about bottoming out, and two odes to big butts.
A poem about divorce, of course, and late-life
sexual awakening. Some, I must admit, made no sense
(no offense). And so many that reference Greek mythology.
I never knew how many poets have been to Paris
and like to drop in phrases in français, and quite a few
shout-outs, first-name only, to other poets, like Walt or Emily,
as if poetry is a party only other poets are invited to.
If I were a poetry editor, I wouldn’t close a single door,
not even to dead grandmothers and dead dogs.
No subject would be banned. No letter, no word.
Poems in your current issue include the words
clit and cunt, and I have no problem with that. Let the tent
be as big as possible. Better yet, let there be no tent.
You’ve already written my name on a list,
and that’s for the best. Maybe you’ve read 1.2 million poems
about the c-word, and you’re exhausted, you’re ready
to return to normal—poems about cardinals
and calla lilies. Anyway, I’d wanted to send you a poem
about the word expired, which was my mother’s
discharge status from the hospital where she lived
the last two weeks of her life. Her cause of death was
pneumonia and acute respiratory failure due to Covid.
Her heart, however, if I may use that word, her heart
was stable in size.
.

:: Plague Chorus ::

So sorry to hear. Keeping you
in our thoughts. May her memory
be a blessing. We left a meal
on your porch. Heart emoji. Return
the bowl whenever. Just checking in,
thinking about you, no need to reply.
Love to the fam. How’s your dad
holding up? Hey! What a bitch
of a year. Catch me up, k! Sorry
to bug, when you get a chance,
please sign the attached form, thanks.
Feel free to say no, but we’d love you
to serve on the subcommittee.
You probably don’t remember me,
but I’d be so grateful if you could write me
a recommendation. Just bring a salad,
that would be great. Did you see the eclipse?
Have you watched Succession? So good!
Did you hear Joan Didion died? Did you hear
about John Madden? Celebrities die
in threes—who’s next? Are you bringing your kids
to the protest? Was that an earthquake? Oh no—
Betty White! Broken heart emoji. Sorry,
we need an extra meeting. Would you mind
drafting the proposal? I know we’re all running
on fumes. How’s your dad? Did you watch
the Steelers? Have you read Middlemarch?
Give me a call, need a favor. Don’t mean to be
a pest, but the report was due yesterday. Finally—
spring! Just back from Costa Rica, OMG,
you have to go! God, I’m so sorry, I just heard.
As if you haven’t been through enough.
Sending hugs. Two broken heart emojis.
It goes without saying, we’ll finish the report,
just send what you have. I can’t imagine,
we left a casserole on your porch, may his memory
be a blessing, anything you need, hang in there,
no words. Hi, hope you’re doing well!
Just wanted to remind you, my letter
of recommendation is due tomorrow. Thank you
so much, I’ll let you know how it goes!

From the writer

:: Account ::

After my moth­er died from Covid in 2021, I pub­lished a mem­oir, If There Are Any Heav­ens, that focus­es on the three weeks lead­ing to her death. Dur­ing the Q&A ses­sion after a read­ing I gave at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, a man in atten­dance asked, “But where’s the rage?”

His ques­tion caught me off guard. I point­ed out to him sev­er­al moments in my mem­oir that have some bite, but I agreed that the pri­ma­ry emo­tion­al reg­is­ter of the mem­oir is not rage or even anger. Con­fu­sion and fear and dis­be­lief and deep sadness—and love.

The man who had asked the ques­tion seemed to be in touch with his rage—not at me, but at the pan­dem­ic that had tak­en my moth­er and mil­lions more. It was as if he had asked, “Where’s my rage in your memoir?”

For the past few years, I have been work­ing on a poet­ry man­u­script called Plague Songs. It includes ele­gies, of course, and poems more gen­er­al­ly about plagues, and it repur­pos­es some of the lan­guage of the pan­dem­ic, and the process has sur­prised me in many ways. One day, I read the sub­mis­sion guide­lines for a jour­nal I will not name, and they includ­ed the direc­tive: “No Covid poems!”

Well, now I had an answer to the man’s ques­tion at my read­ing! Here came my rage (of course, it has always been there). I chan­neled it into new poems. I had to ask myself some inter­est­ing ques­tions: What does it mean to write an angry ele­gy? What does a poem need to do to pre­vent it from being only an angry rant? How can such a poem begin with anger but move toward some­thing else, some­thing surprising—love, empa­thy, heart­break, even dark humor?

I hope that’s what these poems have achieved.

Nicholas Mon­temara­no is the author of five books, most recent­ly a mem­oir, If There Are Any Heav­ens (Persea Books, 2022). Recent poems have appeared or are forth­com­ing in The Hop­kins Review, Ben­ning­ton Review, Cop­per Nick­el, and The Best Amer­i­can Poet­ry 2025. The recip­i­ent of a Push­cart Prize and a Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts fel­low­ship, he is the Alum­ni Pro­fes­sor of Cre­ative Writ­ing and Belles Let­tres at Franklin & Mar­shall College.

Poetry / Michael Montlack

:: Sue Me for Choosing “Delusion”::

                  
             Some of my friends scoff when I confess
I’ve abandoned the news for astrology. For now.
(Maybe forever.) When I explain how this was
to be expected because of the recent shift in nodes
emphasizing my 8th house, I don’t blame them
for tuning me out. (How much bs can anyone take?)
I already miss Rachel, Joy, Anderson, and yes,
the daily outrage that made me feel more alive.
Right now I’d rather research the cosmic trajectory
of benefic Jupiter than gauge any impending damage
done on this planet. Some say we’re living through
an era of willful ignorance. Maybe I’d like a sip too.
To slip into something more comfortable: Denial.
I always thought it a weakness but it’s quite magical
when I consider it a celestial suit of armor—for me,
the knight doing whatever it takes to save himself.

:: Cosmic Latte (#FFF8E7) ::

            
             The average color of the universe,
according to astronomers at Johns Hopkins.

Coffee with cream—god knows what Starbucks
will do with that. Though it’s closer to ivory,

making the tusk of the walrus and elephant even
more mystical. And perhaps more vulnerable.

When Cantor, the German mathematician,
discovered infinity comes in different sizes

during the 19th Century, could he fathom the Earth
has more trees than the Milky Way has stars?

The unicorn is the national animal of Scotland—
why not. Infrared cameras can’t see polar bears

due to their fur, and 80% of our oceans are still
unexplored. So who knows what’s out there?

Imagine what the United States would look like
had George Washington known about dinosaurs.

Compared to most planets, Venus spins “backwards,”
and the Southern Hemisphere sees the moon “upside

down” when compared to how Northerners see it.
(90% of the population in the Northern Hemisphere.)

Wonder if Stevie Nicks spins Venus-wise—her shawls
a cosmic latte swirl, to match the unicorns in her stable.

Let’s hope Cantor’s infinities come in more than one color.
Even if our lenses are too primitive for a wider spectrum.

From the writer

:: Account ::

Hope­ful­ly, all of us are find­ing ways to cope in this polit­i­cal cli­mate. After years of bing­ing on news, I knew I need­ed anoth­er route to nav­i­gate through it all. And I found it: the polit­i­cal astrologers on YouTube, who explained the dai­ly head­lines through the charts of politi­cians and nations. It was immense­ly sooth­ing. And sur­pris­ing­ly accu­rate. I couldn’t believe how geeky too—with the tran­sits, con­junc­tions, sex­tiles and degrees, not to men­tion how they con­nect­ed place­ments of today with his­tor­i­cal ones, show­ing how the sit­u­a­tions par­al­leled. I for­feit­ed the news for their week­ly videos and found myself hap­pi­er and much more pro­duc­tive. Not to men­tion, opti­mistic. As a result of watch­ing reg­u­lar­ly, I learned a lot about astrol­o­gy with­out try­ing. And it’s been seep­ing into my poems in play­ful and mys­ti­cal ways. Some of my friends have start­ed fol­low­ing the same astrologers. Oth­er friends roll their eyes at me when I men­tion it. Either way, this self-imposed delu­sion or enlight­en­ment luck­i­ly result­ed in my next book of poems called Cos­mic Idiot.

These poems fea­ture the plan­ets, the zodi­ac and sci­en­tif­ic fig­ures like Fibonac­ci, Can­tor (the math­e­mati­cian) and astro­physi­cist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I try to mix phi­los­o­phy and facts with play­ful­ness and humor. It’s added new lay­ers and tex­tures to my work and pro­vides a new lex­i­con and palette. Astrol­o­gy is an ancient art that cross­es many cul­tures. And it’s becom­ing more and more main­stream, which the astrologers pre­dict­ed a few years ago, say­ing as Plu­to enters Aquar­ius, astrol­o­gy will gain popularity.

Go ahead. You can roll your eyes. But hope you like the poems.

Michael Montlack’s third poet­ry col­lec­tion COSMIC IDIOT will be pub­lished by Sat­ur­na­lia. He is the edi­tor of the Lamb­da Final­ist essay anthol­o­gy My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin Press). His work has appeared in Poet­ry Dai­ly, Prairie Schooner, Cincin­nati Review, Lit, Epoch, Alas­ka Quar­ter­ly Review, Phoebe and oth­er mag­a­zines. He lives in NYC and teach­es poet­ry work­shops at NYU and CUNY City College.

Poetry / Leah Umansky 

:: Ars Poetica: Chroma ::

     for Scott 

The world is made up of so much color. 
At the European Collection 1300 - 1800 at The Met,
I am oversaturated with the baby Jesus, and so
Many severed heads, so much death, so
Much despair. All those faces in agony.
It is straining, draining, and I drag my eye
Away from the red, the dead, and the fervor. I
Am full of so much fear and anguish. I know, 
The purpose of art is feeling, is to feel, and to think,
But my eye longs for light, and not the light of angels,
But the natural light of sun, of the water-kissed, and the plain,
The mundane, the simplicity of a field seemingly untouched. I
Urge you to the bright, to the color of Monet, all those water lilies,
All that green, yellow and peach. I lavender around the gallery
Of the Impressionists, and the warmth, that brightness is an escape. 
I look at the rowboats, the gardens, the sunrises, the poplars, and sigh. 
I want to escape into these oceans, these fields, the sunlight. Life
Is for living, I think, and isn’t the world dark enough?

:: Easy ::

     after The New York­er Pod­cast with Donika Kel­ly and Kevin Young

Tonight, I spilled the salmon all over the kitchen floor,
Picked it up, and dropped it again right off the spatula.

There’s no use crying over spilt salmon, I thought to myself,
But really, do these things happen to other people?

And this afternoon, we started to walk up to the reservoir, 
But it ended in us both going back to mine, where I then

Continued on without you, to the river, where I walked, 
Drawn by the sun and the summer beckoning. I 

Felt cheerful, despite you heading back to yours. I  
Felt warm and happy, watching summer at its start. 

Where are the poets who use ‘cheerful’ in a poem?  
Right here, and unafraid of  protocol.

I don’t hold back in a poem, or at least I try not to. 
I saw two birds looking for food in the dandelion patch, 

And stilled myself to stand there and watch them, but 
I could only hold my still for so long; I wanted to for longer,

But I also wanted to keep walking. I couldn’t still 
My self, even with a podcast, so I started naming

Things I was grateful for on the walk:  blue sky, ducks,
Green leaves, the silver river water, yellow sun, my steady steps.

What more can we do? It is so easy to fall to despair. 
And when do I ever do what’s easy.

From the writer

:: Account ::

My part­ner is an artist and he was mak­ing notes for a pro­pos­al for a course he want­ed to teach for chil­dren and one of the lessons was on ‘chro­ma.’ I had no idea what that was, and so I wrote it down in my note­book and looked it up. Lat­er in the week, we went to The Met and the Euro­pean Wing had reopened. Like the poem states, I just couldn’t do it. The world is some­times such a ter­ri­ble place, and late­ly, it’s just get­ting worse. It’s not a world I want to be in and I have to con­stant­ly reframe my see­ing, lift myself up, and fol­low my joy. On this day, we both decid­ed to have a muse­um day, though clear­ly, we had dif­fer­ent ideas in mind. The pow­er of art is how trans­for­ma­tive it can be, but also how ther­a­peu­tic it can be. On this day, I need­ed chro­ma. I need­ed col­or. I need­ed water. I need­ed sun­light and vibrance and glee. I need­ed oth­er world and oth­er words and oth­er ways of see­ing. I need­ed imag­i­na­tion. I need­ed beau­ty. And some­times, beau­ty is the answer; it’s there, in our lives, if we choose to see it.“Easy” is a poem I wrote after a lit­tle lovers spat. First, my part­ner and I were walk­ing togeth­er up to the reser­voir in Cen­tral Park, but after I decid­ed to take a dif­fer­ent path, west­ward, to The Hud­son Riv­er, where I walked along the river­bank and lis­tened to The New York­er Pod­cast. This poem came out of that med­i­ta­tion. I love lis­ten­ing to pod­casts when I go on walks, some­thing about my foot­falls and the sound of peo­ple in con­ver­sa­tion grounds me. I often lis­ten to inter­views, and this episode real­ly inter­est­ed me in terms of the word, ‘cheer­ful.’ It made me think about one of the man­u­scripts I’m work­ing on—one on won­der, joy and love—and how that book is sur­pris­ing to me as I’ve nev­er writ­ten such ‘cheer­ful’ poems. Most of the time a walk is a good dis­trac­tion and a good way to find clar­i­ty. I’ve said this before in a dif­fer­ent poem, but it’s  true: you nev­er regret tak­ing a walk.

Leah Uman­sky is the author of three col­lec­tions of poet­ry, most recent­ly, OF TYRANT (Word Works Books 2024.) She earned her MFA in Poet­ry at Sarah Lawrence Col­lege and has curat­ed and host­ed The COUPLET Read­ing Series in NYC since 2011. She is the cre­ator of the STAY BRAVE Sub­stack which encour­ages women-iden­ti­fy­ing cre­atives to inspire oth­er women-iden­ti­fy­ing cre­atives to stay brave in their cre­ative pur­suits. Her cre­ative work has been fea­tured on PBS and The Slow­down Pod­cast, and in such places as The New York Times, The Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets’ Poem‑A Day,USA Today, POETRY, Ben­ning­ton Review, and Amer­i­can Poet­ry Review. She is an edu­ca­tor and writ­ing coach who has taught work­shops to all ages at such places as Poet­ry School Lon­don, Poets House, Hud­son Val­ley Writ­ers Cen­ter, Memo­r­i­al Sloan Ket­ter­ing and else­where. She is work­ing on a fourth col­lec­tion of poems ORDINARY SPLENDOR, on won­der, joy and love. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com