Two Poems

Poetry / Maggie Queeney

From the writer

:: Account ::

These two poems are reimaginings of two of the myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a book-length poem that presents a series of mortals, mostly women, who are transformed into non-human forms after an encounter with a God or Goddess. The divine encounter, and resulting transformation, almost always include sexual violence or gender-based violence. I too am a survivor of violences (domestic, gender-based, and sexual). I too have spent years as someone or something not quite human. Dr. Judith Herman notes in her vital text about survivors of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence, Trauma and Recovery: “victim retains the dehumanized identity of […] the robot, animal, or vegetable… While the majority of […] patients complained, ‘I am now a different person,’ the most severely harmed stated simply, “‘I am not a person.’”

Decades before I read Trauma and Recovery, before Complex-PTSD was a widely-known and accepted term (although still not included in the newest Text Revision of the DSM V, and so not included on any of my medical records), I read The Metamorphoses. I, who from my earliest memory felt more rock than girl, more bird or river or vine than human, recognized myself in these girls and women, and in the creatures and things they would become. Their stories were my stories, are my stories, and in re-telling what happened to them, in working to speak in their voices, I tell what happened to me. I sound the bounds of my voice, and find my place among the many of my kind.

Maggie Queeney is the author of In Kind, winner of the 2022 Iowa Poetry Prize, and the chapbook settler. Recipient of the 2019 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, The Ruth Stone Scholarship, and an Individual Artists Program Grant from the City of Chicago in 2019 and 2022, her most recent work is found or is forthcoming in Guernica, The Missouri Review, and The American Poetry Review. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, and reads and writes in Chicago.

Two Poems

Poetry / Seth Leeper

:: cats in a bag ::

i learned my duplicity at a young age amidst late night serenades 
of shattering glass and slamming cupboards / slinking around 
corners to survive the impact from each sonic boom / donning 
my cheshire smile in the morning like a denial of the night before / 
an implicit approval / a strategy to avoid the jagged edge of a curse / 
the pointed edge of a cutting board / rolling across the floor showing 
my belly / projecting cute to survive / the long drive to the hospital 
for stitches above a crying eye / phone calls to mother explaining the 
accident / i don’t blame her anymore / we were cats in a bag tossing 
and hissing and fighting for love or approval / stalking a prey called 
loyalty or devotion / he’d left me once / i remember her perched on 
the kitchen counter looking at the clock / calculating the difference 
between time with him and time without

:: the last time we saw you ::

we never got to see your final ascent she just dumped you 
like stale cigarette ashes into the delta and never apologized 
to anyone for the missed show or wasted gas which was her last 
power play her final triumph to singe the skin and squeeze 
the heart and she never had to touch any one of us to do it 
now she had something of you no one could take or give back 
her repulsive reflexes and cackling on the way back to her car 
ensured no one would try so you drifted away from us the wind 
carrying you across grass plains and water the wind chasing 
the wheels of her car down the dirt highway the keys in her 
ignition rattling as she slithered out of focus out of view 
out of our lives for good

From the writer

:: Account ::

“cats in a bag” and “the last time we saw you” are from my manuscript, double feature: anatomy of a star | of men and monsters. The manuscript’s first part follows the Speaker through planes astral and celestial in pursuit of his father. The second part, which these poems are from, finds the Speaker in more grounded spaces, anchored in the reality of his grief and trauma. The Speaker is fleeing from memories and his own accountability in the relationship between himself and his father, and he has plunged headfirst into processing the relationship dynamics that were complicated by his father’s spouse. Deprived of closure for himself and his family, the Speaker makes attempts to forge his own resolution with his father, and make sense of the spouse who functioned as rival and villain in his childhood.

Peeling back the curtain a bit on craft, these poems represent experimentations with how space is utilized on the page. The decision to use punctuation, or not, is meant to add an element of tension, or disruption. It complicates the narrative and the experience of how the reader engages with the text. It also mirrors the fragmentations of the Speaker’s memories.

I was also interested in experimenting with prose blocks, since I had primarily written in verse prior to this project. The blocks provide a frame for each poem, and serve the overall attempt to world-build in both portions of the manuscript. The world in of men and monsters where these poems occur is one of harsh realities and uncertainty—filled with monsters both fictive and real—and it moves back and forth between the present and the past. This is the opposite of the world in anatomy of a star, where the Speaker wields the power of his imagination and grief to create moments outside of commonly accepted consciousness to interrogate and reunite with his father. The project is meant to transcend the personal and the specific; to offer catharsis, comfort, and hopefully healing for the reader who can empathize with the work.

Seth Leeper is a queer poet. A Best of the Net nominee and 2022 Brooklyn Poets Fellow, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Sycamore Review, River Styx, Salamander, Hobart After Dark, Overheard Lit, and Always Crashing. He holds an M.A. in Special Education from Pace University and B.A. in Creative Writing and Fashion Journalism from San Francisco State University. He lives and teaches in Brooklyn, NY. He tweets @sethwleeper.

Two Poems

Poetry / Sara Lynne Puotinen

:: Two Poems ::

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From the writer

:: Account ::

Four years ago, I was diagnosed with cone dystrophy and told that all of my central vision would be gone in five years. I began to document the process of this vision loss. These poems are part of that documentation. They are inspired by Georgina Kleege and her description of finding the large blind spot in her central vision by staring at a blank wall.

One day, during the early stages of the pandemic, I went to a blank wall in my living room, stood still, and stared at it. Soon I saw something strange. It wasn’t a full spot but a dark ring with a light center. I taped a piece of paper to it at eye level, closed one eye, and then traced the blind ring that appeared, first with a pencil, later with blue crayon.

I was delighted to see this ring. Finally evidence of declining vision that I could observe! I knew I was losing central vision by how much harder it was to read, how people’s faces were fuzzy blurs, how I never noticed mold on my food, but my brain was compensating remarkably well and I often wondered if I was imagining my vision problems.

Before seeing my blind ring on the wall, the main method I used for monitoring my vision loss was to stare into an Amsler grid, which is a grid with a dot in the center used to detect damage to the macula. I would notice how the lines were wavy instead of straight, soft instead of sharp, how they faded a few blocks from the center. I could reassure myself that I wasn’t making up my failing vision.

I decided to use these forms—my blind ring and the Amsler grid—to create poems about my moods while living in the in-between state of not quite seeing, not yet (legally) blind. It seemed urgent and important to try to identify these moods and then find ways to express them, partly because I needed to work through my feelings, and partly because I wanted to give attention to something that wasn’t discussed enough: what it feels like to be in the process of losing sight, not after it is lost or before, but during.

I created a grid and fit 3 poems describing a mood into it: a main poem that was in the form of my overall working vision, a smaller poem that was in the form of the central vision within the blind ring that I still have left, and a hidden poem with words filling in the boxes in the space of my blind ring. Each box in the grid contains one character (a letter or space or punctuation) and I use a monotype font to keep it evenly spaced.

Sara Lynne Puotinen lives in south Minneapolis, near the Mississippi River Gorge, where she reads and writes and tries to be upright and outside as much as possible. She earned a B.A. in religion, an M.A. in ethics, and a Ph.D in women’s studies, which all inform her experiments in paying attention and her playful troubling of what it means to write while moving, to move while writing, and to do both while losing her central vision from a degenerative eye disease (cone dystrophy). Her writing has appeared in Poemeleon, Hearth & Coffin, and Longleaf Review, among others. Currently, she is working on a series of poems that use Snellen Charts and Amsler Grids to describe her experiences with vision loss.

There are no synonyms for catharsis

Poetry / Chisom Okafor

:: There are no synonyms for catharsis ::

on the thesaurus of hearts. Only fear, then nothing       situated  
in-between 
 
You wonder what the moon       in all of its opaque        resplendence  
would become       tonight 
  
without       a beholder       and with its lights       of silver        
left hemorrhaging 
 
into this empty room       while we drown ourselves within       a lullaby 
you suddenly        stop to ask. 
 
if my joy       long lost       has returned       but I respond       in the way  
of being curious in my unhappiness 
 
and curious       in my joys       and in my silence       there is a force 
acting       to cause a displacement 
 
within my body       a force       equal and opposite 
to the powerhouse       of my body 
 
what does it mean       to be a fruit       tarrying       undecided 
between ripening        and decay? 
 
even a vain thing        as indecision       possess the power 
to change       every man. 
 
Tonight       I come to you        a man in the face of his epiphany 
 
dear lover       watch me sift       into the heart of the night       watch me echolocate 
watch me trip       over a rock       just as I prep 
 
my heart for disaster       each of the human eye       being god’s 
loneliest creation       and hidden away        
 
each in its socket       each without knowledge       of the presence       of an 'other' 
a few inches       across the street       of the nose 
 
and my body       synonym for      utopia        rising from the Greek word 
utopus       which is to say       best place 
 
But which also means       no place       waterless       if you defer  
to its original         translation. 
 
Tonight       I listen to my heart       whisper double-faced promises       in my hearing 
I’ll take you out       it says       which is to say       dine with you 
 
which is also to say       suffocate you.

From the writer

:: Account ::

In the heat of the Covid-19 pandemic, I was diagnosed of right ventricular dysfunction, which is a hypertensive heart disease. I was just 26, and the cardiac clinic where I had series of ECG and echo sessions, was filled with much older men and women, people in their seventies and eighties, who looked at me with so much pity and questions, that they forgot their own troubles. I had been engrossed with writing love poems before then, but after my diagnosis, my writing gravitated towards the confessional, a kind of testament to the physical and mental trauma I’ve been forced to go through, on my journey to healing. Unfortunately, my heart condition, according to the cardiologist, may never be fully corrected, and may lead to possible cardiac arrests or cerebro-vascular accidents in the near future. The poems I now write morph into repeated echoes down a deserted landscape, calls out to a kind of healing, one that may never arrive, but I keep calling, anyway. Also, I have spent about two years working as a clinical nutritionist during the day, and writing poetry at night. As a result, I often tend to think about bodies like mine, lingering at the intersections of death, departures and clinical vulnerabilities. This marriage between the two, is also what my poems attempt to interrogate. They come close to trauma and dwell in its poetic possibilities, playing with the meeting point between heart as metaphor, heart as deadly literal organ and the body, and by so doing, attempt to stretch the real limits of being.

Chisom Okafor, Nigerian poet and clinical nutritionist, has received nominations for the Brunel International African Poetry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, Gerald Kraak Prize, and the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He tweets @chisomokafor16.

Two Poems

Poetry /Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

:: Week 9: Grape ::

louse: the singular form 
of lice, small, wingless, 
you’d never heard of
because you never find 
just one like the note 
from your son’s school
saying one girl has them
& she’s been treated & you 
should check every tangle 
of your son’s curls to make sure 
some haven’t found their way 
inside & another mother 
says she’d buzz it all off 
just to be safe, says he’s a boy 
so he’ll look tougher anyway 
& you recall how you 
were three then too 
when your parents nearly 
shaved you & the other kids 
wouldn’t share the bench, would 
run away & yell & point, 
would laugh how you were infected
& dirty & a louse, ruined 
—Jewish—so you’ll refuse
to cut his hair & scour
each perfect ringlet, twist
their multitudes around your fingers
& when you find
only more locks, you’ll tell him
to sit with Evelyn tomorrow,
to remind her 
she is beautiful & loved

:: Week 33: Pineapple ::

Every time she turns her head 
between your ilium & coxal bones, 
you feel your water 
about to break, afraid 
of that balloon-pop 
in your pelvis, afraid 
break is wholly wrong 
for what shifts or tears, slips 
& loosens. Bones break. 
Hearts, maybe. But the veil 
between your body’s end
& her beginning? There’s 
no breaking it. Looks like that baby
is about to fall 	      right out of you, 
the women call, holding 
tight to what’s already fallen 
from inside of them. Fall too, 
wholly wrong for the way 
a body enters breathing. 
Rain falls. Fruits from trees. 
But body from body? 
There must be more 
to describe such cleaving. 
Directionless & unfinished.   
I’m gonna report you 
to the grocery store, a man 
yells passing, you stole
one of their watermelons.  
How easy to be 
so wrong in naming 
what you’ve never carried. 
She is not a vine-trailing
scrambler yet, spreading 
as she clings to soil. For now,
she’s still reaching for the sun
atop a tall palm, still 
hardening, bones in her skull 
just starting to overlap, preparing
for descent, She’s only 
a pineapple, you correct him, 
& keep on walking, one 
slow bone in front 
of the other, unsure 
which one of you 
is going where or how
to name your joined, 
persistent motion.

From the writer

:: Account ::

These poems come from a book-length manuscript, 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023) in which I wrote a poem for each week of pregnancy with my second child, playing with the fruits and vegetables the baby’s size is compared to in the weekly emails those who are expecting can sign up to receive. While at times I take inspiration from the objects themselves, the poems aim to highlight the problematic aspects of such comparisons—the way they gender and objectify what is growing inside—and focus instead on societal taboos of the pregnant body and our continued cultural misrepresentation of and discomfort with the experience of the more unfiltered sides of motherhood. These poems embrace the bare and grotesque, looking at what is often looked away from without shame, or at least questioning why there is shame attached to the looking. They are also very much trying to figure out how to continue to mother my neurodivergent older child, who is on the spectrum, while pregnant with my daughter. In writing a poem each week that connected my experience of motherhood and pregnancy, I was able to stay connected to my identities as a mother and writer, feeling that one was feeding the other. I was a better mother because I was able to write, and I was a better writer because I was drawing on my vivid and visceral experience of motherhood. I did not have to choose one, but rather, could be both, and for me, there is no other way of being in the world. I am always navigating space and interactions as a mother, multitasking by simultaneously trying to capture the stories and lyric moments all around me—made more urgent and singing louder because of my children.

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Dnipro, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six. She is the author of three poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother (Kent State University Press, 2019); Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020); and 40 WEEKS, forthcoming from YesYes Books in February, 2023. Her recent poems appear in POETRY, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, and AGNI, among others. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, Lyric Witness: Intergenerational (Re)collection of the Holocaust in Contemporary American Poetry, pays particular attention to the underrepresented atrocity in the former Soviet territories. Julia is the author of the model poem for “Dear Ukraine”: A Global Community Poem https://dearukrainepoem.com/. She is the Murphy Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Hendrix College and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas with her family.

re: Poet Laureate

Poetry / Mark Neely

:: re: Poet Laureate::

I am afraid 
I have to refuse 
 
the laureate  
after all 
 
must envision  
edifying projects 
 
stroll through schoolrooms 
dropping verse 
 
into children’s beaks 
or force it down  
 
their pretty teenage throats 
to fatten up their hearts 
 
a laureate should 
have the gravity 
 
of a minor planet 
a gaseous atmosphere 
 
that can easily liquify  
a soul 
 
and my mornings are rough 
already I choke down coffee 
 
by the thermos trying 
to see in the ink 
 
something other 
than self- 
 
loathing zipped in my space 
suit even simple chores 
 
become difficult there 
are days I cannot stand 
 
to look at my shoes 
lined up by the door 
 
once I saw a moose 
swim across a bay 
 
the miraculous driftwood 
of its antlers 
 
hovered above the water 
a laureate 
 
would have to get that 
in a poem somehow 
 
I want to build a monstrous ship 
that eats ten thousand 
 
tons of plastic every second 
that squeezes through each canal 
 
suturing the planet’s scars 
I steer  
 
it towards my father 
as his hospital bed sinks 
 
in the waves 
and the sun closes 
 
its furious eye 
I taste salt on my lips 
 
he can barely lift his arm 
to wave goodbye

From the writer

:: Account ::

There was a time when I didn’t like “poems about poetry.” As soon as I caught a whiff of that kind of thing, I tuned out. Now I see how narrow minded I was in those days. Poetry is personality. Poetry is politics. Poetry is how we love and grieve. The best ars poeticas are, like all good poems, about a bunch of things all at once. These days I find myself working away on a manuscript about teaching, poetry, and art—a fact that would certainly horrify my younger self, who wanted to be Gary Snyder and write poems about chopping wood and other such manly things.

In one of the poems from the manuscript, “re: Poet Laureate,” I wanted to have a bit of fun—both with the idea that anyone would ever ask me to be poet laureate of anything (ha!), and with the whole concept of the laureate, which is the awkward marriage of poetry (perhaps the most thoughtful form of language) and government (where language is typically mangled and manipulated in an attempt to convince people to vote against their own best interests).

Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill, and Dirty Bomb, (Oberlin College Press). His third book, Ticker, won the Idaho Prize for Poetry and was shortlisted for an Indiana Author Award. His other awards include an NEA Poetry Fellowship, an Indiana Individual Artist Grant, the FIELD Poetry Prize, and the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award for Four of a Kind. He is a professor of English at Ball State University, and a senior editor at River Teeth: a Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.

Bless the Damage

Poetry / Allisa Cherry

:: Bless the Damage ::

Now that time has nacred over
the rough edges of memory
I can say that you were a real beauty.
A shiner. You glittered like glass shards
in the baby formula. I mapped
my way forward in the darkness
by the pulsing gleam of you. Sometimes
the lung-stopping quartz in the quarry
and sometimes the toothy drill—
its circumference as wide as two bodies
entwined—bearing down and fruitful.
When I finally went to Oahu I went there
without you. I sliced my foot open
on a bit of coral. It was my first time
snorkeling. The first time I’d seen
a school of fish. My presence small
before a wall of countless eyes,
I felt—for the first time—beheld.
Back at the hotel, I sat on the sink
and scrubbed the wound out
with bar soap and a toothbrush
feeling resourceful and alone.
And it wasn’t the shine casting off
the warm water or the ribbon of blood
unwinding that I found most compelling,
but how the cut resembled a lightning strike
across the arch of my foot—plumped up
with white blood cells rushing before infection.
How the tight red skin looked like it might 
burst into bloom the way the peony buds 
you sent to my new apartment bloomed.
They were still petal-dense knots 
when they arrived. And I got to watch 
the entire life and death of them: 
the almost obscene way they swelled open,
and then the velvet bowl of each petal 
falling empty across my kitchen counter.

From the writer

:: Account ::

: I’ve spent much of my life thinking about the subtle and not-so subtle threads of violence that run through large families and rural communities. Because of the particularly religious bent of the town I grew up in, much of this violence was shaped by traditional assumptions about gender. It also dangerously overlapped with love and loyalty. In fact, the whole of it—patriarchal faith, family, brutality, sexuality, love, and rural life—are so tightly entangled, I began writing as a way to tease the tension out of the knot.

I have found that the more complex the matter is in my history, the stronger my preference for clean lines and clear syntax in poem. Though, of course, not always. It is often easiest for me to interrogate my upbringing intertextually, to tie my work to the religious books that gave me both my earliest affection for language as well as my most damaged understanding of my designated role as a female in my community. And so, I often see my poem’s speakers quietly struggling with language to wrest their own dignity and power back and to revise their position in sight of the patriarchal systems they grew up in.

Allisa Cherry grew up in a rural religious community seated in an irradiated desert in the southwest of the United States and has since relocated to the Pacific Northwest. A recent MFA graduate from Pacific University, she has just completed a manuscript that explores the way faith, family, and landscape are often reshaped by violence. Her work has received Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations and can be found in High Desert Journal, Westchester Review, and at SWWIM Daily, and is forthcoming at The Columbia Review.

How to Make Beef Stew

Poetry /Stevie Edwards

Stevie-Edwards-1-Poem PDF

From the writer

:: Account ::

I wrote “How to Make Beef Stew” shortly after war broke out in Ukraine. Beyond gluing my eyes to the news cycle, one of the only things I felt capable of doing the day after the war broke out was making beef stew, which for me is a major comfort food in winter. I love how it feels like a hug in a bowl and the aroma spreads through the whole house. In this poem I wanted to capture the juxtaposition between the comforting nature of the stew and the unthinkable violence occurring. I also wanted the poem to demonstrate the inability of daily comforts (like beef stew) to take my mind off the violence, particularly through the simile where sprinkling flour on meat makes the speaker think of the image of snow covering dead bodies, which was something I saw on the news. Ultimately, this poem ends with ruminating on whether this is the kind of world I would want to bring children into.

Stevie Edwards holds a PhD in creative writing from University of North Texas and an MFA in poetry from Cornell University. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. They are a Lecturer at Clemson University and author of Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). Edwards is currently Poetry Editor of The South Carolina Review and their third full-length collection of poetry, Quiet Armor, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press’s Curbstone imprint. Originally a Michigander, they now live in South Carolina with their husband and a small herd of rescue pitbulls (Daisy, Tinkerbell, and Peaches). Stevie uses she/they pronouns.

Four Poems

Poetry / Jenny Molberg

:: Four Poems ::

Molberg — 4 Poems PDF

From the writer

:: Account ::

These poems seek to shed light on the failures of the American justice system to protect victims of abuse and intimate partner violence. The poems are a part of a forthcoming book, The Court of No Record (LSU Press 2023), in which a court transcript in verse presents a cast of characters—the Alpha, the perpetrator of abuse and the petitioner in court; two women who have spoken out against his abuse; the Honorable Answer, a judge with questionable conflicts of interests; and the two attorneys who represent the petitioner and respondent. The Alpha’s attorney speaks mostly in antiquated Bible verses, illuminating the oppressive damage of patriarchal religious institutions on our society’s response to intimate partner violence and the gaslighting that occurs when victims break their silence. “Evidence” suggests what the court will not hear—that is, testimony often silenced in cases of abuse, as a victim’s story may not be considered evidentiary support or is called hearsay. Unfortunately, as many victims of abuse know, legal action can exacerbate a dangerous situation, and often an abuser’s version of events is weighed in equal measure to a victim’s. Orders of protection are often manipulated by abusers or proven ineffective because the court will not see “proof” of abuse until a victim is already injured, or, devastatingly, killed. With these poems, I hope to encourage a conversation that needs to be made more urgent—how to demand change within our systems’ failures and how to reconsider the word “justice” in hegemonic and misogynistic legal settings.

Jenny Molberg is the author of three poetry collections: Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017), Refusal (LSU Press, 2020), and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023). She edited the Unsung Masters book, Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life & Work of an American Master. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Her poems and essays have recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, VIDA, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and co-edits Pleiades magazine.

Wrestling

Poetry / Maxwell Suzuki

:: Wrestling ::

Maxwell Suzuki Wrestling — PDF

From the writer

:: Account ::

In my poetry, I have been obsessed with what it means to be queer, to have loved someone, and for it to bubble deep within history. I wanted to challenge our understandings of masculinity (and sexuality) within the context of ancient cultures as well as our own; how they mingle and diverge from each other. And when learning about Ancient Greece in particular, I was fascinated with how power, as a man, was tied to sexuality rather than strictly being about gender. This dimension of sexuality was something I hadn’t thought about and wanted to delve into that complexity.

When writing “Wrestling”, I decided to play with space, in that I imagined the stanzas as being two men interconnected and fighting for dominance. And in that dominance, there is an intrinsic emotional fragility to the wrestlers. That intimate physicality through aggression, I think, is the only way for some men to feel a connection beyond themselves. “Wrestling” understands these relationships, is restrained in divulging the secrets of the wrestlers, and works to reveal their queer subtleties.

Maxwell Suzuki is a queer writer who lives in Los Angeles. Maxwell’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in CRAFT, Lunch Ticket, ANMLY, and trampset. He is writing a novel on the generational disconnect between Japanese American immigrants and their children.

Two Poems

Poetry / Dear Anselm

:: Dear Anselm ::

Dear Anselm PDF

:: As in Leaving the Pyroclastic Volcano ::

As in Leaving PDF

From the writer

:: Account ::

“Dear Anselm”

I took some emails I had written to my friend and decided to turn some of them into a poem. I still feel guilty for not returning his MoMA membership card.

“As in Leaving the Pyroclastic Volcano”

The first panel was inspired by the stark landscape of Northern Iceland. I imagined a brother and sister holding hands and witnessing a violent tradition (a whale helicoptered above the caldera of a volcano and dropped in). I guess it’s a metaphor for how adults treat the environment and what we pass to our children. The second panel is a kind of light Fruedian drama between two geysers in Iceland. This was inspired by a geyser that went dormant (the father) and the younger geyser (the son) who keeps blowing steam into the world. The third panel was written on the flight leaving Iceland. I turned on the TV and clicked on the flight path and we were flying above a place called “Happy Valley Goose Bay” and I loved the name so much, I had to put it into a poem.

Sandra Simonds is a poet and critic. Her eighth book of poems, a collection of triptychs, will be published by Wave Books in 2022. Her forthcoming novel, Assia (Noemi Press, 2023) is based on the life of Assia Wevill.

Three Poems

Poetry / Claire Wahmanholm

:: Meltwater ::

From the writer

:: Account ::

These poems are based on Lacy M. Johnson’s 2019 New Yorker article “How to Mourn a Glacier.” They would usually be called “erasures,” though I’d like to find a different word for them since the poems—and I—don’t have the relationship with the source text that often characterizes erasure projects. I’m not interested in using erasure as a method of critique or confrontation; I prefer to think of my interactions as a kind of close reading. I see the erasures functioning like any other critical essay on a text, except that I’m using only the language of the original source.

My intention was that the visible words would point up a series of parallel storylines—ones that are sometimes more micro, and more macro, than the original. There are only so many things that can be made explicit/conscious at one time, so isolating certain words might be a way of untangling those threads and making each more visible. In the case of Johnson’s original essay, she’s writing about Okjökull while simultaneously writing about much more than it, and I see the lonely words as making that “moreness” explicit.

I am hoping that the project also makes a point about the way we read news, and our tendency to notice narratives we’re already invested in. The poems obviously say something about me and my own penchant for seeing grief in everything (as well as my impulse to put everything within the context of children).

I saw the essay’s instructional title as making an invitatory gesture to mourn, or to at least consider how mourning looks for each reader. I was compelled by the fact that my own mourning, maybe, is already embedded in the original text, so that the essay is (poetically) enacting the mourning that it (journalistically) describes. I was trying to replicate on the page what I felt like my body was doing when I read the article, which was like a slowing down of my heart, or an unevenness in its beating. Like large chunks of myself were being eaten away.

I was interested in doing more than one erasure (and isolating different words every time) to emphasize the cyclical nature of mourning—how we make minor adjustments without any sweeping overhaul, how it’s (apparently) possible to mourn the same things again and again but using different words. I am hoping that the poems highlight the tension between the apparent inability to communicate—the way we write articles and articles (and poems and poems), and nothing changes—and the impulse to keep trying anyway. And by making the highlighted words off-limits for the next poem, I was trying to show how the pool of words to draw from drains and drains. The way our vocabulary diminishes and diminishes, we have fewer and fewer resources available to us as we descend into grief.

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Night Vision (New Michigan Press 2017), Wilder (Milkweed Editions 2018), Redmouth (Tinderbox Editions 2019), and the forthcoming Meltwater (Milkweed Editions 2023). Her work has most recently appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Couplet, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, Good River Review, Descant, Copper Nickel, and Beloit Poetry Journal. She is a 2020–2021 McKnight Fellow, and lives in the Twin Cities. Find her online at clairewahmanholm.com

Two Visual Poems

Poetry / Nance Van Winckel

:: Clearly ::

:: Auto Pilot ::

From the writer

:: Account ::

I’ve been working on a kind of graphic narrative about a character I call Admiral Dot. He’s full of hubris. He keeps trying, and failing, to conquer the skies. For the pages of his story, I begin with old pages from children’s books and other public domain illustrations. Considering these pieces my “canvases,” I collage onto them and make many alterations as I crop and colorize, etc. The text is my own, and generally it evolves AS I rework the pages and think about poor old Admiral Dot and his world.

Nance Van Winckel’s ninth poetry collection, The Many Beds of Martha Washington, will appear in 2021 from the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series/Lynx House Press. She’s also published five books of fiction, including Ever Yrs, a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road Publications, 2014) and Boneland: Linked Stories (U. of Oklahoma Press, 2013). The recipient of two NEA poetry fellowships, the Washington State Book Award, a Paterson Fiction Prize, Poetry Society of America’s Gordon Barber Poetry Award, a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, and three Pushcart Prizes, Nance teaches in Vermont College’s MFA in Writing Program, is visual poetry editor for Poetry Northwest, and lives in Spokane, Washington.

The Thing About Nature

Poetry / Wendy M. Thompson

:: The Thing About Nature ::

You lie smooth on your back, 
a long pier. 
Each bone is a cliff 
overlooking skin, fatty tissue, 
the best parts around the hooked jaw. 
 
The hairs at the back of your neck, 
small tufts of alumroot,  
were singed by the fire,  
along with feathers, claw,  
and cartilage. 
Smoky with ash, your teeth, and 
an upturned skull in the debris 
were the only evidence they found  
of global warming. 
 
Because there is never a soft way  
to indicate that  
          Man is responsible for the death of earth, 
they extracted the science first: 
a hair pulled from the lab, 
an entire species folded into extinction  
in the back of a  
leather-bound encyclopedia. 
What is science anyway but a wholly  
irrational, irrelevant, omnivorous,  
long-tailed thing? 
 
Instead, it was convenient to lie  
while looking for the 
match that ended the world:  
          an arsonist, white male, about 30,  
          wearing camouflage, holding a beer. 
It’s never the tire marks that  
mar your bed of sage, 
or the eventual highway that  
cuts across the height of your thigh, 
slicing through tendon, 
the fur still warm. 
 
                    New single family homes are being built in this development 
                    New single family homes are being built in this development 
                    New single family homes are being built in this development 
 
The deer that you carried,  
fractured by headlights, 
have migrated further east, onto  
new land  
slated for development. 
 
Every hour,  
the ocean drags you further away  
from  
your mother, 
your children, 
until there is no name  
left in the sand but, always,  
bits of shell and the people  
who come  
to collect them. 
Perhaps one of them will listen  
deeply enough to hear you  
calling for your family. 
 
It isn’t an echo, 
it’s an owl. 
It isn’t an owl, 
it’s a hybrid car backing out of the driveway. 
 
Night constellations map the fibers 
of your many homes: 
a womb,  
a nest,  
a meadow,  
a new three bed / two bath house 
inside of a cul-de-sac 
that was just built in this development. 
The sky is a quilt,  
is a mirror  
through which you look,  
and ask your ancestors,  
          Who’s the fairest of them all: 
          the gophers that dig up my lawn 
          or my right as a tax-paying homeowner to kill them? 
 
Because after all is said and done,  
the wet membrane  
from which you crack, 
the yolk that runs down  
the scruff of your throat when  
you (try to) pick up women  
ten years your junior, 
the savage expression you hide  
behind giant luminescent wings  
when your coworker Eric  
claims full credit and is  
promoted over you, 
the sea cave that rages 
in your throat  
when your father tells you  
he’s getting remarried  
to a brunette your brother’s age, 
the territorial way you mark  
your job title,  
your woman,  
your assets, 
even the blood that fills your mouth  
when you make her 
lie smooth on her back, 
a long pier, 
each bone, a cliff 
overlooking skin, fatty tissue, 
your erect jaw and open teeth 
tearing through her best parts around  
the hooked jaw, 
is anything but fully human.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I wrote this poem after thinking about the interrelated relationship between American masculinity, power, property ownership, and nature. There’s this way in which the structure of European settler colonialism organized all four into a matrix of domination, possession, and (over)use that continues to shape our lives and world today. Through force and violence, the conquest of native inhabitants, flora, and fauna led to the aggressive amassing of land and resources with the ultimate intent being maximum extraction and production for profit. Today, domination, possession, and (over)use reside as core tenets that define a man’s value and worth in society: his ability to dominate all living and nonliving things using direct or indirect violence, his ability to amass great wealth or property at the expense of the natural environment, and his ability to extract maximum value from what he owns or possesses. It is an unnatural way of life that has been made to feel and seem natural. It is also the cause of tremendous detrimental stress on our natural world.

I begin the poem describing the human body as though examining a nonhuman animal, situating it in the midst of a landscape that is perpetually on fire and marked by human overdevelopment. Here, I wanted to link us back to the world we work so hard to distance ourselves from: one connected to trees and plants and birds and predatory mammals. I then move to emphasize the way humans have rendered our natural world unfamiliar, external, and pathological, an empty excess onto which we can build ever-expanding subdivisions and cookie cutter housing developments. While we look at natural disasters as violent disruptions to our idyllic lifestyles, we rarely recognize the violence that is present in our addiction to suburban sprawl, to widening and congested freeways and express lanes, and to the attack on nature when it shows up in the form of “invasive pests” in our backyards.

The rest of the poem interrogates how our man-made surroundings have left us unable to imagine or reclaim our linkages to our animal kin and natural world. Wildlife is disposable when it comes to building newer townhomes and suburban developments. And we find ourselves seeking out the calming and healing properties of nature, driving miles or flying to preserves and other wilderness sites far away to escape the mundaneness and monotony of our everyday lives. In writing this poem, I wanted to stress the fact that we as human animals have a responsibility to our natural world, that our strained relationship to/with nature must be appraised and remedied, and that our proximity to nonhuman animals is a lot closer than we’d like to believe.

I end the poem by playing with the notion of the “animal,” a pejorative term that we apply to humans who we perceive as behaving in ways that do not adhere to social norms or exhibit acceptable decorum. Here, I catalogue the ways that certain expressions of raw human emotion, responses, and behaviors are perceived as animalistic and can signal our inherent wildness, challenging us to consider how our instincts situate us always close to nature no matter how advanced and civil we strive to be.

Wendy M. Thompson is an assistant professor of African American Studies at San José State University. Her creative work has most recently appeared in Palaver, the Santa Fe Writers Project, Rappahannock Review, Jet Fuel Review, and Waccamaw Journal. She is the co-editor of Sparked: George Floyd, Racism, and the Progressive Illusion (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2021).

Excerpts From Your Baby Book

Poetry / Catherine Theis

:: Excerpts From Your Baby Book ::

You sleep for an hour.

The bird flutters by the window’s screen just as you stir awake.

I feed you again, hoping you will fall back asleep.

You are quiet now.

You are crying now, matter-of-factly.

There is always a touch of the menace in the imagination.

It’s hard to understand.

The loneliness of the long-distance swimmer is like the loneliness of the mother.

I hear you cry in the film’s soundtrack.

The short film is usually in black and white but your cry is always color.

Poems, babies, I have milk.

I have loaves of bread, wheels of aged goat cheese

and a bruise you would hardly believe.

I have a small barrel of red wine ready

to be tapped after seven o’clock

and an entire dishwasher of stemware piping hot.

I have an advent calendar with twenty-five tiny doors opening

into a hallway of pure celestial light—

The facts of today:

I buy a singular persimmon nicked by your teeth.

I bring permission to myself to begin again.

I whip heavy cream for a dessert custard of persimmon.

The custard so sweet I don’t add any sugar.

Your bumblebee hat still fits, so.

The slide at the playground an entirely new experience. Have we officially exhausted the swings?

I hold onto your tiny torso while simultaneously letting you slide down. You look the part of a young bumblebee.

We buzz on home under the pink toxic skies of Los Angeles.

I buy a second persimmon from Bob’s Market.

You get to work immediately, scoring its smooth orange skin with your luminous front tooth, a surprising ferocity.

Your fist smaller than the globe of fruit.

Closer and closer you inch toward

the spinning center of creation.

Your preferred method of transport

the whirling, lurching see-saw of swing.

Your clothes grow tighter. Two colds,

one with one cough. We wash blackberry

stains from your booties every night.

Birthday celebration? Champagne,

oysters, blackberries?

From the writer

:: Account ::

I decide to write again out of the nothing.

The appropriate amount of time has passed. I have grieved enough for my body. The world glows in springtime green. I almost forget how quickly the hemorrhage began, how many pints of blood I lost that day or how the doctors and nurses didn’t even have enough time to warm the transfusion blood. I’m O positive. One of the ancient blood types. Various mystics and healers have suggested to me that it’s beneficial to eat red meat and greens. This doesn’t surprise me. I’ve picked my fair share of bitter dandelions from the rocky mountainside with the wind blowing up my black skirt. I do try to eat a nice steak at least one a week. Just like I try to write at least once a week. Also raw oysters. Whatever minerals I’m missing, I crave the creamy flesh of oysters like you wouldn’t believe.

I read somewhere that the pregnant woman’s brain shrinks, and that it takes a full six months after the baby is born to regain its original size.

I have roughly two more months to go.

My sister tells me this is not true. A woman’s brain after having given birth actually grows in size. But we both get some version of the story wrong. I finally read an article that describes the loss of gray matter—specifically in the part of the brain that controls social interaction—as a process called synaptic pruning. This pruning is not a loss of ability but rather an indication that the brain is becoming more specialized. In other words, the gray matter in the mother’s brain changes so that she becomes more attuned to the social cues of her baby and less attentive to the cues of those biting flies around her.

I always keep a flyswatter within reach now. One hangs on a hook near the kitchen sink. One hangs in the laundry room. I saw another one on the dining room table just the other day.

“That’s a calendar with the moon cycles,” I tell the baby, who eats his stuffed firefly we have named Blu for no other reason than we like the sound of the word—blu. The baby sits upon a tuffet on the counter while I narrate the making of the coffee. Eating his curds and whey, eating his curds and whey.

He moves his little neck. His eyes follow. Then his arms stir. He moves in pieces, in parts. A tiny red porcelain spoon taps out coffee grounds into a red coffee pot. I never noticed our fetish with red kitchen appliances and utensils. I’m letting his father sleep in this morning. I can handle the first round, I think.

Catherine Theis is the author of The Fraud of Good Sleep (Salt Modern Poets, 2011) and the chapbook The June Cuckold, a tragedy in verse (Convulsive Editions, 2012). Her recent publication is a full-length original play called MEDEA (Plays Inverse Press, 2017). Recent poems have appeared in Prelude and Quarterly West. Forthcoming poems in Firmament.

Two Poems

Poetry / Jennifer Richter

:: Trending: Seismologist Explains How to Make an Earthquake Early Warning System With Cats ::

Lately I have more cats in my Cloud than kids 
in real life two kids no cats but now no kids at 
home so cats are how we stay in touch if their 
phones ring they huff mom why’re you calling 
but when I text my son a tabby in a taco bowtie 
he texts right back maybe a chonky ginger and 
I know he’s okay that’s a thumbs up for today 
since the kids left I’ve been using cats to predict 
disaster as the seismologist says it’s tricky you’d 
think cats parkouring through kitchens crashing 
trashing everything would mean it’s all falling 
apart you’d think a cat reeling with cheese stuck 
to its face might be a cry for help but when he 
sends those I know my son’s actually laughing 
that day my daughter had a fever and a French 
final I texted you’re the best with a moustached 
munchkin she sent back a show-posed golden 
Persian someone had captioned yo for real this 
cat looks like the grandfather of a croissant how 
is it only 16th best ha I thought okay she’s okay 
when they don’t respond I’m suddenly back 
in a too quiet house with toddlers I worry if 
one sends the same meme two days in a row 
what’s so distracting I worry getting bursts of 
Norwegian forest cats in the snow from my son 
it’s tricky you’d think all those dreamy scenes 
might mean he’d found a little peace this week 
but the last winter he lived at home it vanished 
the neighbor’s cat with ears like that slept only 
on our deck only ever let my son get close then 
one day left no warning just didn’t come back 
that winter my friend left too you never know 
seismologists agree meanwhile we chase hints 
of what and when like red laser dots we won’t 
ever pin down a guy online actually analyzed 
a thousand cookie fortunes found very few use 
predictive language mostly they offer random 
observations about you like my daughter when 
I visit her wow mom at my outfit means either 
the heart-eyed cat emoji or the crying one now 
my son texts kittens spilled from a takeout box 
rice like snow on their noses my friend’s hands 
on my body used to shake with jolts that rose 
he said from deep beneath his feet okay you’ll 
be okay he said anyone can heal anyone then 
pointed to a shadowed corner sighing oh look 
at all their wings so I squinted like I do at my 
phone now at one of the sticky snarling kittens 
chewing a fortune you are surrounded by angels 
it says wow mom they’d say if my kids saw me 
always staring at my dark screen like that corner 
look I’d say I’m okay every day you light it up

:: Message in a Bottle: Dear Future ::

Stunned to still be here 
after emergency brain 
surgery my friend kept 
weeping kept palming 
her chest to feel the rise 
of her actual breath oh 
future maybe by now 
your earth is fissured 
as a cortex maybe your 
west coast has become 
a sedated brain wiped 
clean by waves oh dear 
future if like my friend 
you wake in a shaken 
state may you recover 
like her surrounded by 
beloveds repeating the 
word fine and experts 
nodding at the word 
stable may it be still 
too soon to say what’s 
been irretrievably lost 
may your memories 
resurface like hers 
just the sunny ones 
floating back so far 
dear future how are 
you I seriously think 
about you all the time

From the writer

:: Account ::

In the windowless depths of the Caltech Archives, I read this question in handwritten fan mail to Charles F. Richter, inventor of the earthquake magnitude scale, and knew I’d found the spark of my next collection: “I was wondering how you feel about your name being associated with a disaster.”

I grew up in the flood-prone, tornado-swept, wind-chilled Midwest; it wasn’t until I moved to the Pacific Northwest twenty years ago that I began hearing the term “Richter scale” threaded through public broadcasts and private conversations with increasing frequency and urgency. These two poems come from that new manuscript, The Really Big One, which has become a consideration of the ways we—as individuals, as families, as communities—cycle through periods of shattering and healing. In both of these poems, the language and imagery of seismology helped me approach the entwined subjects of family, fear, and the future; at the heart of each poem is the beautiful and brave leap of faith we take each day, trusting that everything will be okay.

Jennifer Richter’s first collection, Threshold (2010), was chosen by Natasha Trethewey as a winner in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry; her second collection, No Acute Distress (2016), was a Crab Orchard Series Editor’s Selection, and both books were named Oregon Book Award Finalists. Her new work has been featured in ZYZZYVA, The Los Angeles Review, The Missouri Review, and The Massachusetts Review. Richter teaches in Oregon State University’s MFA program. https://jenniferrichterpoet.com

Two Poems

Poetry / Susan Rich

:: Salt Crystals in Cape Town ::

Always it was the men involved in such minutia— 
  
which prayer to recite first: table salt or kosher, 
 
while the women chopped carrots for the cholent, 
 
added tomato paste and kidney beans that would begin 
 
to simmer and flake before sundown— 
 
indestructible slop dating back to the second temple. 
 
 
In Cape Town I met my only orthodox boyfriend  
 
whose lovemaking leaned towards devout. Please your woman  
 
in bed on the Sabbath, the Torah reads—my favorite  
 
part of the teaching—a religious obligation to pleasure  
 
the woman solely for pleasure’s sake, Exodus 21:10. 
 
Regularly, if he is a husband of means, or once a month 
 
 
for camel drivers and long-haul truckers. We made love 
 
under orange scented trees and above mountain tops. 
 
We salted our lips with each other’s sweat, and still 
 
he hid his grapes fermenting in their improvised machine.  
 
The dozen wine bottles uncorked and sequestered 
 
in the hall closet among suit jackets and ties  
 
 
 
because I wrote on Saturdays, flicked light switches, 
 
loved shrimp. My body would remake his wine  
 
into something impure. So many rituals, so little time— 
 
prayers for a healthy shit, another one for the car keys before 
 
they magically reappear. When my mother died, we covered  
 
the mirrors, thought to tear our clothes. No easy listening,  
 
 
no rock & roll, no show tunes for a year he ordered. 
 
But listening to the Red Sox on the radio? Allowed.  
 
I wonder if God cares for team sports or salt crystals—if  
 
a woman’s pleasure in the Scriptures is a directive slipped  
 
in from some lost holy book? Is there a verse there for fair  
 
wages? Equitable lives? When the orthodox scholar left 
 
 
me he said he said he wanted to make love to everyone 
 
else. His own kabbalistic interpretation of tikkun olam. 
 
He assured me it was kosher because Jewish women  
 
aren’t allowed to create law. Is there a prayer to tell  
 
ex-lovers to fuck off? A prayer to regain belief  
 
in orange groves—for transforming what we are told?

:: Kerchiefs of Yellow Linen ::

 
     During World War II, 91–95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population were killed—  
     the highest casualty rate of Jews in any nation in the Holocaust.

 
Somewhere in Lithuania, my grandmother’s  
sisters, parents, cousins, aunties, in-laws, and everyone else  
 
die during the Holocaust and before that, in pogroms. 
I wonder if the women tracked the soldiers’ path 
 
from the hills, watched them with binoculars as they 
frog-marched through fields of pomegranate and rye. 
 
Did the women foretell danger, the cold wave  
 
cresting on the edge of their skin, their skin 
intuiting door to door searches, ditches, death? 
 
Scientists say our bodies remember  
trauma like footsteps from one generation 
 
into another. The pathogen of the physical  
fear planted in infancy 
 
that festers and expands—not like wild mint 
 
but more like a grove of stinging nettles  
that surrounds my sleep. The house 
 
where I grew up—I’m there alone and then 
—you’d think they were delivering flowers  
 
the hard knock, followed by the doorbell,  
such politeness—until the door breaks open— 
 
and I exile myself from myself— 
 
watch as the militia takes over, helmets  
to boots readied for an ever-present war.  
 
Recently, the scenario reconfigured 
with tech execs and hedge fund  
 
entrepreneurs with slick hair.  
The men drone on: foreclosures and stock ops.                               
 
Do they occupy my body, my land?  
 
I wake on high alert 
bathed in the breath of terror, 
 
a haunting that thrives across  
continents, and further. 
 
What happened to my women— 
the Jews of Lithuania— 
 
raped, taken, tossed  
 
into the deep unknowing  
until perhaps now— 
 
when maybe if I learn to listen, they’ll speak.

From the writer

:: Account ::

For many years I avoided writing about family— not because it seemed too difficult, but because it seemed too ordinary to me. I grew up at the far edge of the post-Holocaust generation with relatives who had hidden in garbage cans to survive and escaped rape by being bandaged to pass as lepers. The old-country stories always ended with the same piece of implied advice: Don’t trust anyone that isn’t Jewish. I rejected this wholeheartedly and spent several years in Niger, West Africa, perhaps the only Jewish person in the country. (At least I never met another.) Therefore, it was a strange surprise to me when, a couple of years ago, I wrote a poem where my Jewishness took front and center. Since then, more poems of otherness, pogroms, Holocaust survivors, and racism have appeared. My perspective, I believe, is more irreverent and surreal than what one thinks of when they think of Jewish poetry, if they think of it at all. These poems are irreverent, surreal, and most definitely in the lineage of Jewish writing. There is no one way to be Jewish just as there is no one way to be a poet.

Susan Rich is an award winning poet, editor and essayist. She is the author of four poetry collections, including, most recently, Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine Press, 2014) and The Alchemist’s Kitchen (White Pine Press, 2010), and co-editor of the anthology The Strangest of Theatres, published by the Poetry Foundation. Rich has received awards from PEN USA and the Fulbright Foundation. Recent poems have appeared in the Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry Ireland, and World Literature Today. Her 5th collection, Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Collected Poems is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry, Ireland, in 2022; Blue Atlas is forthcoming from Red Hen Press, 2024. Susan is on faculty at Highline College outside of Seattle, WA.

Two Poems

Poetry / Suphil Lee Park

:: Present Tense Complex ::

Not I love you 
but the cuckoo 
clock moves me 
to tears. Poor 
thing. 
Have seconds, fast 
I will 
seconds to fast. 
Spare us a second. 
Light at gunpoint. 
Whose lung 
brims with bullets 
already 
ruts snowed- 
in, mind tucked in 
skin. What will 
heal, what not. 
There’s no sobbing in this world 
there’s no sobbing 
          in this world 
          there’s No 
sobbing in this world.

Poetry / Suphil Lee Park

:: Route, Root ::

Volcanic winter, the cold 
is in color, sheltered. 
The canon balls in place 
of your eye balls 
I’m sure are the dead 
ends of your brain—god, 
should I drop my torch.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I’ve always found it hard to agree with many who like to say the most important qualities of a poem are essentially sonic. I believe I feel this way because I’m Korean AND a bilingual writer. I have that hard-headed bias as a native reader and writer of the Korean language that has evolved from centuries of such complicated history; unlike the Japanese who have fully integrated Chinese characters into their own language, we invented our own unique alphabet while still carrying over most of the words that consist of Chinese characters from the last century. For example, the sun in Korean is 해. Other words in Korean, such as “year” and “harm,” even some phrases like “will do,” “do this,” “should I do this?” spell and sound exactly the same (except some subtle differences in intonation when it’s used as a phrase); the meaning of the word, therefore, depends entirely on the context. But we also have another word for the sun in Korean, 태양, which consists of Chinese characters “太” (big) and “陽” (yang); and each of these Chinese characters also has multiple different definitions. While 해 is an exact equivalent for 태양 when it means the sun, a skillful Korean reader will be first sprinting through a web of linguistic possibilities and connotations at their recognition of this simple word. In other words, I was born into a language that necessitates listening not to the words themselves but for the history and potential of each word and how words come together to form a wildly complex relationship. So my obsession with words lies not in how they sound (the sonic elements are notes and beats that provide prerequisite background music) but in the chemistry they spark up on the page.

This linguistic inclination of mine matured into an important aesthetic later when I started writing in English. At first, my very Korean brain approached the English language primarily as text, not as sound that I often had a hard time making out. While spoken English was slippery and hard to grasp at the time, the language on the page felt to me something like clay, especially in poetry—malleable, volatile, and tactile, as the words put and close the distance that we call lines between them. Depending on that distance, they could become entirely disparate things, contained in the exact same word. In that sense, writing in this language has been like painting to me. A simple juxtaposition can bring out an unexpected hue in a simple red; some shapes, you can only discern in hindsight, at a distance. A poached “egg” differs drastically from a woman’s “egg.” I’ve always loved the idea of every word as an attempt and failure to contain the uncontainable, and how that only expands the horizon of each poem, with every word, even a rudimentary one like “egg,” adding layers and nuances when put in a different context, and depending on which line it’s placed in. In that sense, I almost feel every poem is to be a brief journey for its words to align themselves. This is why many of my poems make use of antanaclasis and explore the contextual and textual relationship of words.

Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆李朴) is the author of the poetry collection, Present Tense Complex, winner of the Marystina Santiestevan Prize (Conduit Books & Ephemera 2021) and has recently won the 2021 Indiana Review Fiction Prize. Born and raised in South Korea before finding home in the States, she holds a BA in English from NYU and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Texas at Austin. You can find more about her at: https://suphil-lee-park.com/

Eye to Eye

Poetry / Carol Moldaw

:: Eye to Eye ::

When I see my mom and H__ stare into each other’s eyes, inches away from each other, my mother on her saggy floral coach, H__ bending to her level, leaning in, with her obsidian eyes and limpid smile, the deepness and unbroken length of their gaze stuns me. Had my mother ever held her wildflower blue eyes that steady for anyone, for that long? In old photos, she looks straight into the camera, shining, intent—until the flash pops. With us, her regard was transitory, less than a gaze but more than a glance. H, one hand on the couch’s arm, close to my mother’s resting arm but not touching it, is firm and insistent as she cajoles and appeals to my mother’s better nature. And no matter how uninterested or stubbornly oppositional my mother is, H, in this way, manages to persuade her time after time to do what she wants her to. To rise from the lily-printed couch, to eat, go to the bathroom, change from one fleece or printed polyblend zip-up caftan to another, fresher one. I arrange not to be there to witness the getting out of bed, the teeth cleaning, the bathing, the transactions from one room, one chair, to another. For the moment, H__, the firm but loving mother my mother never had, has her entranced.

From the writer

:: Account ::

In describing aspects of the relationship between my mother and H__, her caregiver–H__’s patience and loving kindness, my mother’s uncharacteristically pliant response to it–I wanted to convey how deeply the relationship reaches into my mother’s psyche, how healing it appears to be for her. Of course, I can’t–and the poem doesn’t–presume to know what place, if any, in H__’s psyche the relationship has; the poem can only characterize the way she treats my mother. Prose, straightforward and observational, seemed to better convey the cadence of their interaction and my own role, as a bystander. Only in describing each set of eyes did I feel the necessity to use imagery.

Carol Moldaw is the author of Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018) as well as well as five other books of poetry, including The Lightning Field, which won the FIELD Poetry Prize (Oberlin College Press, 2002) and a novel, The Widening (Etruscan Press, 2008). Her work has been published widely in journals, including The New York Review of Books, Poem-A-Day, AGNI, Denver Quarterly, FIELD, Harvard Review, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Plume and On the Seawall, which also published Tyler Mills’s interview with her in 2020. She lives in Santa Fe, NM.