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/

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.

Poetry / Drew Krewer

:: Manufacturing Resilience In Tifton, GA ::

When we talk about dog 
years, we are discussing trajectories 
of death. Instead, let’s discuss 
a lawnmower that doesn’t shear 
but recreates wildlife in its wake. 
Mow down the world in an elaborate frenzy 
against the extinction 
of grass. Buried treasure crazed 
the neighborhood, taught children 
the art of extraction, of taking profit 
from the earth. Sometimes, I find myself 
inside empty supermarkets, with no aisles. 
I am small, sissy, pre-industrial; convenience 
has abandoned me––the tabloids, the candy— 
all of it, not here, not necessary. 
Everything echoing the emptiness 
of the year––the stroke of an impressionist 
leaving me with a suggestion 
of a face and conversations with decorative 
whispers. The portrait––don't remember me this way. 
Remember me as pixels, as wildflowers, 
as chihuahua. What is your earliest 
memory of a natural disaster? 
Was it close or far away? 
While the water is still here and clear, 
I want to wade through and dissolve 
like a vivid watercolor. Tell the dwarfed, 
frightened fish that the diatom has arrived, 
that it is durable and can handle 
this region of pain. We can only 
dive so many times to the beginning, 
where we correct the heart from hateful thresholds 
and not every tree takes in the same amount of light.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This poem comes from a fin­ished man­u­script I start­ed writ­ing in ear­ly 2015 just before elec­tion sea­son kicked into full force. As our coun­try unfold­ed in both star­tling and per­haps expect­ed ways, I found myself unable to iden­ti­fy and char­ac­ter­ize what I was feel­ing in my mind and body; how­ev­er, I knew I want­ed to find a way to access and explore these laten­cies. On Insta­gram, I found myself fol­low­ing sev­er­al dig­i­tal artists, and I real­ized the art was so com­pelling to me because it was pro­vid­ing an avenue to access what my body was try­ing to tell me. Soon there­after, I cre­at­ed a sec­ondary Insta­gram account, curat­ing a list of 100 dig­i­tal artists that some­how felt aligned with my vision. Explor­ing and cycling through mas­sive amounts of imagery from these accounts (over the course of four years) is what ulti­mate­ly cre­at­ed the fab­ric of these poems.

Drew Krew­er is author of the chap­book Ars Warholi­ca (Spork Press, 2010). His work has appeared or is forth­com­ing in Trou­bling the Line: Trans and Gen­derqueer Poet­ry and Poet­ics, Dia­gram, LIT, and Dream Pop, among oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. He holds an MFA in Poet­ry from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ari­zona and lives in the desert. 

Poetry / David Kirby

:: Stanza ::

It means room in Italian, but room itself  
means both enclosed area and open space,  
means confinement and as well as freedom.  
Let the poem say what it will, and let it go  
silent and speak again when it decides to.  
Let its words live under pressure: “in the very  
essence of poetry there is something indecent,” 
says Milosz, for “a thing is brought forth  
which we didn’t know we had in us,”  
and we jump back “as if a tiger had sprung  
out / and stood in the light, lashing his tail.”  
Poets, listen to your poem! It will tell you  
what sort of stanzas it wants to be whittled into:  
long, short, regular, random, or one alone,  
a stanza like a waterfall toward which  
the reader floats unknowing. First there is  
the river, tree-lined and tranquil, then  
the boulders that churn the water and whiten  
it with rage, then the precipice itself,  
and after that, the long flight through a mist  
that hides a future of which you know nothing,  
not a thing, only that it’s waiting for you,  
and you land in the still waters of the pool  
and sink to the bottom, and your feet touch  
everything that came before: ancient cities,  
shipwrecks, the armies of the dead. You rise,  
and the world is more silent than it will  
ever be again, and suddenly there’s sunlight 
and birdsong, and now you know everything.

:: I Should Have It to You by Noon ::

I’d like to write a love poem for you but I’m not sure you’d believe me seeing as how man is 
              ice to truth and fire to falsehood, according to Jean de La Fontaine, though where I come 
              from, we say that a lie can go around the world twice before the truth gets its socks on.  
 
Why? Because the more gaps and fissures in your poem or song or story or press release or 
              conspiracy theory or good or bad dream or academic or personal essay, the more room 
              for your audience to let their imaginations slither in.  
 
And who’d know that better than Jean de La Fontaine, as the most celebrated of his fables, “The 
              Grasshopper and the Ant,” can be read in two completely different ways?  
 
The first has the improvident grasshopper playing his fiddle and dancing while the industrious 
              ant piles up food for the coming winter. When winter arrives, the starving grasshopper 
              begs the ant for something to eat. But the ant says no, and in this way are we told that we 
              should plan for hard times. 
 
However there’s another reading in which the grasshopper is a merry fellow filling the air with 
              music and joy and the ant is a cruel old meanie unable to feel the least bit of compassion 
              for his fellow insect. 
 
“We laymen have always been intensely curious to know… from what sources that strange 
              creature, the creative writer, draws his material,” says Freud, “and how he manages to 
              make such an impression on us with it and to arouse in us emotions of which, perhaps, 
              we had not even thought ourselves capable.” 
 
Jean de La Fontaine answered Freud’s question two hundred years before Freud asked it. If 
              you’re that strange creature the creative writer, you do it this way: you set up a situation 
              and let it play out and refrain from commenting on it, because that’s the beholder’s job. 
              In the eye of the beholder, every entendre is double. 

❧

This is why pornography will never be art. Erica Jong said that when you watch a porno, for the first 
              twenty minutes, you want to go home and have sex, and after that, you never want to 
              have sex again.  
 
John Waters says watching porn is like watching open-heart surgery. 
 

❧

Sam Phillips, who recorded Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash at Sun Records studio in 
              Memphis, had a knack for steering his artists back to the growls and mumbles that not 
              only made them seem more neighborly to their blue collar audience but also allowed 
              listeners to enter into the music’s sense of playfulness.  
 
All those guys wanted to do was get away from farming and truck driving and become regional 
              stars who could play in small-town movie houses and high school gyms in the south, but 
              Phillips insisted they stay in touch with the parts of themselves that didn’t take so well to 
              upward mobility. 
 
When Carl Perkins of “Blue Suede Shoes” fame complained that a particular recording session 
              had been “one big original mistake,” Sam Phillips replied, “That’s what Sun Records is.” 
 
An interviewer asked Jerry Garcia why the Grateful Dead was so popular since the individual 
              band members never started or ended a song at the same time or played in the same key 
              and often forgot the lyrics, and Garcia said, “Well, you can’t please everybody all the 
              time.” 
 
I should have that poem to you by three p.m. 
 

❧

I do know two things about writing a love poem or any poem, for that matter. The first is that 
              you can’t try too hard, and the second is don’t fake it. 
 
Tom Waits says, “Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them.” 
 
Alastair Reid once said that he read a master’s thesis someone had written on his poems, and the 
              thesis said that most of Reid’s poems were about rain. What a terrible epiphany! If you 
              know most of your poems are about one thing,  you might be tempted to make them 
              about something else, and think of all the awful poems that would ensue. 
 
A poet friend of mine who lives in another country wrote that “I am still baffled by America. . . . 
              I cannot understand why there is such a love affair in the country with a joyless 
              obfuscatory poetry that wears out its welcome, for most of us, ultra-rapidly.” 
 
If you like to write about rain and you’re good at it, write about rain. 
 
Something else about trying too hard is that you might be successful, and then where would you 
              be? When Erik Satie was asked about the fact that Ravel had turned down the Legion of 
              Honor, he said: “It’s not enough to have refused the Legion d’Honneur. The important 
              thing is not to have deserved it in the first place.” 
 
As far as faking it goes, you’ll just look silly. In Thomas E. Ricks’ novel Fiasco, a colonel 
              compiling a report is described as “pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck.” 
 

❧

Let me tell you about this poem I’m writing for you.  
 
It’s going to be terrific. It’ll be like a Cole Porter musical. It’ll be like the sack of Rome. It’ll be a 
              regular deluge of a poem: there’ll be music, costumes, angels, scenery, food, vivacity, 
              and weekend charades. 
 
It’ll be chockful of the finest images available to any poet anywhere. Every image in it will be as 
              fabulous as the one in Le Chien Andalou where the lover is advancing on the pretty girl 
              who’s ready to swat him with a tennis racket but drops it and just stares at him in 
              amazement when, out of nowhere, he shoulders two ropes and starts dragging two priests 
              across the floor, and the two priests are tied to two pianos, and on the two pianos are two 
              dead horses.  
 
Religion, art, lust, beastliness: the whole movie’s in that one image, including the lover’s 
              inability to do what he came there to do in the first place, which is to woo the pretty girl. 
 
You know, I’m going to feel pretty stupid if I put a lot of time and energy into this poem I’m 
              writing for you only to have you say, “David who?” 
  

❧

As if! Of course you love me. You adore me, in fact. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that 
              you’re writing a poem for me yourself at this very moment, even though you don’t know 
              how to do it any more than I do. 
 
Let’s try this. Let’s forget that we don’t know what we’re doing. Who does?  
 
Dante didn’t. Dante has spent a sleepless night making his way through the dark forest and is 
              exhausted before his poem even begins.  
 
So he turns back when he encounters three snarling beasts, but Virgil tells him he has to go 
              through the fiery center of the earth and contend with minotaurs and flesh-eating harpies 
              and ice giants and Satan himself before he comes out on the other side and finds Beatrice, 
              if he’s lucky.  
 
Dante is still exhausted and now he’s terrified as well, but off he goes. 
 
Forget the poem. Give me your hand. Take just one step with me, then one more. Let’s be like 
              Dante. Let’s do it. Let’s do it scared. 

:: Low-Effort Thinking ::

Did you know that when mob bosses want somebody killed, they get the one of the victim’s
              friends to do it?  
 
That way, if you go to your friend’s house to kill him and are seen entering by a nosy neighbor  
              or if, after the deed’s done, investigators find your fingerprint or a strand of hair, it can be 
              explained away.  
 
“I was just dropping off some cannoli,” you could say. “He looked okay to me. Said he had to  
              get his taxes in and find a math tutor for his kid, but otherwise, fine. Is there a problem, 
              officer?” 
 
This is what’s called high-effort thinking.  
 
The opposite of high-effort thinking is low-effort thinking, which leads to political conservatism 
              according to the scientists who tested that hypothesis by conducting two experiments, one 
              boring and one not. 
 
The boring experiment consisted of assigning one group of volunteers to react to items on a list 
              of liberal and conservative statements such as “Large fortunes should be taxed heavily” 
              and “A first consideration of any society is property rights.” 
 
Meanwhile, a second group was given the same task but instructed to listen simultaneously to a 
              tape of tones varying in pitch and to count and record the number of tones that preceded 
              each change.  
 
Ha, ha! I’d go batshit, too, wouldn’t you, reader?  
 
Or at least I’d make conservative choices, as everyone in the second group did. 
 

❧

Popcorn movies as well as most bumper stickers and t-shirts tell us that decisive action by one 
              person saves the day, but in reality, usually that gets you jack diddley. 
 
No, no. False starts, trial and error, teamwork: human progress is built on these.  
 
And patience. Wittgenstein said, “Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination 
              lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, and only when 
              everything is in place does the door open.” 
 

❧

Case in point: it’s 1967, and Albert King is in the Stax studio, and the recording session for his 
              next album is almost done. Thing is, they need one more song.  
 
Now William Bell is in the studio as well, and Mr. Bell has a verse, a chorus, and the bass line to 
              a new song worked out, and when he tries them out on Albert King, the bluesman likes 
              what he hears and asks for the rest.  
 
Well, there is no rest. So Mr. Bell goes off with Booker T. Jones of Booker T. & the M.G.’s, and  
              they stay up all night and finish the song, which they call “Born Under a Bad Sign.” 
 
The next day, everybody comes back to the studio, and here’s where the story gets good.  
 
“Albert King couldn’t read,” Mr. Bell says in the course of an interview about the incident. 
 
“You mean he couldn’t read music?” says the interviewer. “A lot of musicians can’t read music 
              —Paul McCartney can’t read music.”  
 
“No, I mean he couldn’t read!” says Mr. Bell. “Couldn’t read English. Couldn’t read words. So I 
              stood next to him in the studio and whispered each line to him, and he sang it.”  
 
Amazing, huh? Or maybe not.  
 
If you’re a musician, especially a successful one, almost certainly not. 
 
Good musicians always take their time, and the best musicians listen to others.  
 
As they learned their craft, the Beatles played a stint at a Hamburg club called the Indra which 
              was managed by Bruno Koschmider, described by Beatles’ biographer Bob Spitz as “a 
              florid-faced man with a preposterous wig-like mop of hair.”  
 
Koschmider would yell “Mach schau!” (“Put on a show!”) during the boys’ lackluster 
              performances. 
 
At first the four musicians laughed and staggered around, knocking over mikes as they made fun 
              of the silly German man. But when the audiences went crazy, the boys saw the value of
              “putting on a show” and became the band that changed the world. 
 

❧

And now for the fun experiment.  
 
Mixed-sex groups of experimenters waited outside a bar and asked potential participants if they 
              would complete a short survey on social attitudes and then consent to being tested for 
              blood alcohol levels. 
  
Ha, ha again! Can you imagine how much fun it was for the psychology students to accost a 
              bunch of drunkos and ask them to agree or not with statements like “Production and trade 
              should be free of government interference” and “Ultimately, privately property should be 
              abolished”?  
 
The drunkos didn’t care; they were drunk. 
  
The drunkest among them registered more conservative attitudes because alcohol limits 
              cognitive capacity and disrupts controlled responding while leaving automatic thinking 
              largely intact.  
 

❧

By the way, if you’re wondering if conservatives are all dumb-asses, the answer is “Not quite.”  
 
That’s from principal investigator Scott Eidelman, who devised both the boring experiment and  
              the fun one.  
 
“Our research shows that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism,” says Dr. 
              Eidelman, “not that political conservatives use low-effort thinking.” 
 
Those undergraduates must have had so much fun interviewing those drunkos. 
 
“Excuse me, drunko, would you agree that rich people have the right to shove as much money up 
              their backsides as they like?”  
 
“Huh? Oh, yeah, and guns and cocaine and—BLOOOOORCH! Excuse me. Say, who are you anyways?”  
 
Oh, Jesus. I better not laugh again or I might not be able to stop. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

A few years ago, I noticed that I was get­ting tired of some of my favorite poets and couldn’t fig­ure out why. After all, they were still writ­ing great poems. Then I got it: they were writ­ing the same great poem over and over. To avoid the same­ness that can mire the work of any artist who has been going at it as long as I have, I began to think seri­ous­ly about rein­ven­tion. In 2016, I fell hard for the short, punchy poems of Jack Gilbert. Then two years lat­er, I was swept off my feet for the umpteenth time by Ginsberg’s “Howl” and began knock­ing out poems that one might call cousins to that canon­i­cal work. And last sum­mer, I redis­cov­ered Frank O’Hara while look­ing up some­one else. You’ll find exam­ples of all these poem types here.

David Kir­by teach­es at Flori­da State Uni­ver­si­ty. His col­lec­tion The House on Boule­vard St.: New and Select­ed Poems (LSU Press, 2007) was a final­ist for both the Nation­al Book Award and Canada’s Grif­fin Poet­ry Prize. Kir­by is the author of Lit­tle Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (Con­tin­u­um, 2009), which the Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment of Lon­don called “a hymn of praise to the eman­ci­pa­to­ry pow­er of non­sense” and was named one of Book­list’s Top 10 Black His­to­ry Non-Fic­tion Books of 2010. His lat­est books are a poet­ry col­lec­tion, More Than This (LSU Press, 2019), and a text­book mod­est­ly enti­tled The Knowl­edge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them (Flip Learn­ing, 2021).

Poetry / Perry Janes

:: I have lived my entire life inside the movies, ::

          —after Diane Seuss 

their orchestras hiding around every corner. Where boom 
mics lurk between building girders, sidewalks uncouple 
from gravity, Cosmo and coffee cups clutter the skyline. 

Yes. I have lived leaping from one moving vehicle to another. 
Often in peril. Often unable to free scarf from steering wheel 
even at cliff edge, ripping clear to jump the gap from Jeep to jet, 

jet to yacht, from yacht to any stable shore. I have lived here 
learning, each day, to strike my most heroic pose. To love 
linearity! There was a road I followed. From gray sidewalks, tinted 

SUVs chasing me down highway clovers, to a countryside of quiet 
settlers. Finally: a silo I could hide inside when the storm came 
looking for me. Storm of rain, sand, men, yes, I have lived 

where every turn is a wrong turn and only bad choices take me 
where I need to go. Where I am strong but never too strong, 
barely enough to best a one-armed shooter, to grip the slick 

sides of the subway as it hurtles past. Where, some nights, 
the thing I love is a ghost, pixelated fingers brushing 
through my hair. Where, some days, the sun rises twice. 

Some days, if you squint, you can see, in the distance, 
that cut-out where one lost extra ran straight through 
the horizon— 

                           theirs is a shape I yearn toward. 
No acetate sunsets catching flame. No cellos 
playing from the cemetery, cymbals clashing 

me awake. You should know: there are others, 
like me, who have slipped the edges of our frame. 
Slipped to where, I’ve seen, another world waits. 

Though the people there sit, watchful, in the dark. 
Though it is dark there and this world is the light 
they see by.

:: Creation Myth ::

          —beginning with line by Joy Harjo

there’s no more imagination 		we’re in it now 
                    reader 		the storm’s light rising as a boy 

in his father’s too-large leather apron bends 
                    above the sheeted workbench 	steel rod 

raised up through the roof for lightning 
                    to enliven his invention 	how clouds cauldron 

and spark    the edges fade 	the flash resolves 
                    and now we see it clearly 	little bones 	little chin 

not yet scarred by acne       a child I guess 
                    except for the flesh-mitten fingers stitched together 

except for the collage of random raccoon and possum 
                    hide patchworking its back 	  there is of course 

the moment of inspection 	the boy pinches the child 
                    that isn’t a child        flesh that isn’t flesh 	can’t be 

flesh 	those wire-like hairs already sprouting between 
                    legs that raise against his touch 	and if I stand here 

with them      if I watch from the corners of the room        corners 
                    the light doesn’t reach        I’m in this for keeps 

after 

                    the boy tucks his shirt 

he steps into the rain 
                    left alone the child-thing rises 

to test its newfound feet       rubs cocoa butter between its joints 
                    to hide the smell of musk 	wet with what it knows 

marks the body as belonging 	      watch       the light 
                    shifts 	   factory lamps dimming as a sun dazzles up 

and reader      you should know there are no bystanders 
                    here 	outside the boy snaps his half-split thumbnail 

against a matchbook’s flint 	I pull my ragged tee 
                    on top my lotioned chest      when I join him 

the storm washes smoke from my hair

From the writer

:: Account ::

These poems explore an uneasy rela­tion­ship between auto­bi­og­ra­phy and per­for­mance. I cur­rent­ly work as a screen­writer in Hol­ly­wood, where the life of a writer requires I pack­age, pitch, and sell my projects to pro­duc­ers, exec­u­tives, and con­sumers. With time, I’ve become keen­ly aware (and deeply sus­pi­cious) of the mytholo­gies I’ve learned to build. I notice how skilled I’ve become at posi­tion­ing myself in a cer­tain light, in manip­u­lat­ing the details of the sto­ry toward hero­ism, sac­ri­fice, bold dec­la­ra­tions of fact.

Notic­ing these ten­den­cies has led to an obses­sion with assem­blage. In the midst of craft­ing the poem, I’m con­front­ed by the impulse to step back; to inter­ro­gate the speak­er; to look close­ly at those moments where rup­ture or arti­fice appears. Who do I become when I shed my per­for­mance of good­ness, right­ness, cer­tain­ty? When I exam­ine the flaws in my own con­struc­tions? How did I learn to posi­tion the prover­bial cam­era? What are the moral impli­ca­tions of such craftsmanship?

Despite these ques­tions, I find I’m unable to aban­don allu­sion, mythol­o­gy, and arche­type. These struc­tures aren’t only familiar—they’re often play­ful. They allow me to dis­charge dif­fi­cult sub­jects with won­der­ment. When writ­ing about child­hood in par­tic­u­lar, they restore a fun­da­men­tal ele­ment of child­like imag­i­na­tion into expe­ri­ences I might oth­er­wise recoil from. Ele­ments of fan­ta­sy, fable, or (more broad­ly speak­ing) enter­tain­ment enable the poem to hold para­dox and con­tra­dic­tion. What does it mean to con­front trau­ma and nos­tal­gia in the same breath? Shame and wist­ful­ness? Vio­lence and tenderness?

Some­where in this ten­sion, these poems emerge.

Per­ry Janes is a writer and film­mak­er from Metro Detroit, Michi­gan. A Push­cart Prize and Hop­wood Award recip­i­ent, his work has appeared in POETRY, Beloit Poet­ry Jour­nal, The Michi­gan Quar­ter­ly Review, Zyzzy­va, Sub­trop­ics, The North Amer­i­can Review, West Branch, The Adroit Jour­nal, and oth­ers. He holds a BA from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan, Ann Arbor, and an MFA in Poet­ry from War­ren Wil­son Col­lege. A recip­i­ent of the AMPAS Stu­dent Acad­e­my Award, he cur­rent­ly lives in Los Ange­les, where he works as a screenwriter.

Poetry / Natalie E. Illum

:: My Fear of Water Came Later ::

My family doesn’t like the desert air.   
We prefer low-tide to high altitudes; 
coastal highways to mountain. We don’t ski. 
We charter. We choose our bait with precision.  
We don’t let the lines go slack. We hunt the Mako 
because we can.We don’t relish 
a shoreline. We forget  
we live so close to 
what most would pay dearly for. We aren’t  
moved by the stunning sunsets. My father 
named his boat Bite Me. 
That isn’t a joke. We made fun of  
my mother. Whenever she said I pacifically  
told you not to do that.  
She wasn’t born here, but she is a water sign. Said if 
I’m drowning  
I should 
try to play dead and  
hope the Coast Guard finds me in time and  
face up. We don’t fear the riptide 
we live in. We just  
call our flying dishes fish.  
We imagine all our broken  
glass finds its way 
into the Atlantic  
for some sweet kid to discover; our arguments  
finally smoothed enough  
to call treasure.   
Look how pretty we are  
now. The light hits us  
just right. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

How much of one’s life becomes flu­id over time—mem­o­ry as salt water, paint, fear? These poems are held togeth­er by the car­ti­lage of the past—it weak­ens, bends and some­times heals over time. But there is still a film, scar­ring from any tear. Here is a slide show of stains through­out the body of my house.

Natal­ie E. Illum is a poet, dis­abil­i­ty activist and singer liv­ing in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. She is the recip­i­ent of three Poet­ry Fel­low­ship Grants from the D.C. Arts Com­mis­sion and a for­mer Jen­ny McK­ean Moore Fel­low. She was a found­ing board mem­ber of moth­er­tongue, an LGBTQIA open mic that last­ed 15 years. She com­pet­ed on the Nation­al Poet­ry Slam cir­cuit and was the 2013 Belt­way Grand Slam Cham­pi­on. Her work has appeared in var­i­ous pub­li­ca­tions, and on NPR’s Snap Judge­ment. Natal­ie has an MFA in Cre­ative Writ­ing from Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty and was a Teach­ing Artist for Poet­ry Out Loud. You can find her on Insta­gram and Twit­ter as @poetryrox, and as one half of the band All Her Mus­es, whose debut album is being released this Fall. Natal­ie also enjoys whiskey and giraffes.

Poetry / Bill Hollands

:: In Which I Search Zillow® for My Childhood Home and Discover It’s for Sale ::

Our modest 1950s rambler  
now mid-century modern, façade  
crisp white. 40 years, 3000  
miles, one click and I’m  
 
in. Everything is white— 
the walls, the fireplace, even  
the living room’s old wood  
paneling. No more murky  
 
fish tank. Faux fir floors glisten,  
wall-to-wall all gone. I grew up  
here? 3D Walkthrough arrows  
show me the way. I stumble 
 
forward, pull up short, lurch  
again, a drunk, a toddler,  
a robot on the fritz. I zip  
down the hallway (wasn’t it  
 
longer?) to my brother’s  
lair, then my room—no more  
shelves for my beer can  
collection. Walls slant  
 
crazily as I careen around  
corners. Why can’t I  
find my parents’ room? How  
do I back up? I stagger 
 
to the kitchen, a movie  
set of stainless steel  
and granite. Through it all  
the staged furniture  
 
poses, Scandinavian blond 
wood, no clutter of records,  
trophies, dog bowls, Sports  
Illustrated. I need 
 
air, so I click Street View  
and pan around the old  
neighborhood, now  
gated McMansions.  
 
Charming family home.  
Move-in ready. Enjoy as is  
or tear down and build  
the home of your dreams! 

From the writer

:: Account ::

Some­thing about the real estate web­site Zil­low cap­tures the zeit­geist of this moment. Or maybe a zeit­geist since I don’t real­ly believe in just one. In any case, wit­ness the recent Sat­ur­day Night Live spoof in which the char­ac­ters browse Zil­low list­ings as a replace­ment for sex. The ulti­mate aspi­ra­tional fan­ta­sy, who doesn’t like to watch? Or, as in the case of this poem, search for one’s child­hood home? I bet I’m not the only one who has done this on a bor­ing Tues­day night. The expe­ri­ence gets even weird­er when you can (vir­tu­al­ly) go inside and match your inevitably dis­tort­ed mem­o­ries to the cold real­i­ties of mar­ket­ing. Mem­o­ry and fan­ta­sy merge with cap­i­tal­ism and the Amer­i­can Dream of home­own­er­ship, all (of course) in iso­la­tion and on a screen. What’s more 2021 than that? 

Bill Hol­lands lives in Seat­tle with his hus­band and their son. His poems have appeared or are forth­com­ing in Rat­tle, North Amer­i­can Review, DIAGRAM, The Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Poet­ry, Hawai’i Pacif­ic Review, The Sum­mer­set Review, and else­where. He was recent­ly named a final­ist for North Amer­i­can Review’s James Hearst Poet­ry Prize and a semi-final­ist for Iron Horse Lit­er­ary Review’s Nation­al Poet­ry Month competition. 

Poetry / Gabrielle Grace Hogan

:: Love Me With the Fierce Horse of Your Heart ::

Then again, don’t. I can’t ride it off into any sunset 
so why bother. Mitski says I could stare at your back all day, 
& I do not understand. I go for a walk. 
 
This fast-fading sunfall feels like a threat, a throat flowering. 
I pass that house with the cactus wall. The plumbago bushes 
pushes whispers of wasps into frame. Lusty neighborhood cat 
 
a skipped stone storing heat in its belly 
before the eventual blossom. The tower blossoms orange 
as night pinkly fades in. 
 
Bats make up a quarter of all mammals— 
this is felt most in a Texan dusk, the acoustic coil 
of their clicks, their frantic chittering & blind low swoops, 
 
as the animal of the skyline bursts with bright yellowed teeth. 
I want to love someone enough to buy an island with them— 
now that, that’s the kind of love mountains move for. 
 
The heart is a mountain. Immovable. My geology professor 
was so beautiful in how he loved minerals—that giddy phosphate 
grin. Rock after rock coaxed, coddled wonder. 
 
I’m afraid 
I’ll never be in love again. Out of the corner of my ear, 
I hear the cowboy say we’re more ghosts than people. 
 
The heart is a cowboy. Riding off. I want 
to love someone enough to make them a stone, 
worn smooth by the brush of my thumb. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

I’ve become invest­ed in nego­ti­at­ing lone­li­ness and nos­tal­gia in my poet­ry as of late. Real­ly, I think I’ve been writ­ing about them for awhile; it’s only recent­ly I’ve real­ized this, and there­fore have leaned into it. I write these poems as an avenue to under­stand­ing my own rela­tion­ship with these top­ics. Over the past few years, I have expe­ri­enced two breakups, nei­ther pleas­ant and one with con­sid­er­able dam­age to myself. I have approached roman­tic rela­tion­ships with a much more bit­ter, cyn­i­cal edge, and have been unable to pin­point where lone­li­ness can feel so large when you are shar­ing a bed with some­one. I want to exam­ine the lone­li­ness that comes from feel­ing inca­pable of lov­ing some­one back, rather than inca­pable of being loved. How do you approach your own lone­li­ness when the alternative—to be with someone—is a much more seri­ous and drain­ing endeav­or than the movies make it seem? What does it mean, too, to be “with some­one”? What are our decid­ed-upon def­i­n­i­tions of love, and how are they flawed? Par­tic­u­lar­ly, how does lone­li­ness affect queer peo­ple in a dif­fer­ent way—we are already fight­ing for the “right to love” from those who would oppose us, but we are fight­ing our­selves some­times as well. And when we “fail” to love, to find a rela­tion­ship (par­tic­u­lar­ly one that close­ly resem­bles a het­ero­sex­u­al one), is that a greater fail­ure because we are meant to act as rep­re­sen­ta­tives of our com­mu­ni­ty? In a sim­i­lar vein, I have been strug­gling with the idea of “home”—what, or even who, makes a home? In the past few years I have begun and grad­u­at­ed from under­grad, and start­ed grad school, so I have lived in three places includ­ing my home­town. It’s been a neb­u­lous weav­ing through, where no place feels exact­ly right because pieces of your­self are stretched over dif­fer­ent states, and you’re in such a quick­ly chang­ing time of life—early 20s, where noth­ing is sta­ble, where your sense of self is as hard to define as a word in a lan­guage you don’t speak. How can you make a rela­tion­ship, make a home, when you don’t have a grasp of your­self? This poem doesn’t seek to answer those ques­tions, but does seek to illu­mi­nate them—I’ve tried to posi­tion the speak­er in a phys­i­cal sense of place through descrip­tion, that then flows into more abstract, emo­tion­al ter­ri­to­ry. The pres­ence of the phys­i­cal and the emo­tion­al togeth­er feels nec­es­sary for grasp­ing that feel­ing of being lost in space and lost in self. Some poets I’ve been read­ing who have had influ­ence on my cur­rent man­u­script include Sharon Olds, Joan­na Klink, Dorothea Lasky, and Eileen Myles. 

Gabrielle Grace Hogan is a poet from St. Louis, MO, cur­rent­ly liv­ing in Austin, TX, while pur­su­ing an MFA from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin. Her work has been pub­lished by the Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets, Nashville Review, Kiss­ing Dyna­mite, Pas­sages North, and more. She has worked as the poet­ry edi­tor of Bat City Review and co-edi­tor of You Flower / You Feast, an online anthol­o­gy inspired by the music of Har­ry Styles. Her debut chap­book, Soft Oblit­er­a­tion, is avail­able now from Ghost City Press. Her social media and projects can be found on her web­site, gabriellegracehogan.com. 

Poetry / Zakiyyah Dzukogi

:: Tough and Soft ::

I’ll write poetry
afresh
tough and soft
on the toilet sit.
Like every spot on my neck
from the ones mother made,
I found poems,
stretchy like today's wind—
forgive them, read them.
Turn off your lamp,
this is one of my dreams.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This poem is one among my sim­ple, short poems. I gave “Tough and Soft” life on the night of 14 Jan­u­ary, 2021. It came about that night when I had a feel­ing about not writ­ing enough in the lan­guage of God. Writ­ing this poem makes me feel free from any rules attached to writ­ing poet­ry: it is ther­a­peu­tic. Poet­ry has always been. Poet­ry, whether “Tough or Soft,” should at least car­ry flowers.

Zakiyyah Dzuko­gi is a 17-year-old Niger­ian poet. She is the author of Carved (a poet­ry col­lec­tion), win­ner of the 2021 Nige­ria Prize for Teen Authors, a prize she had ear­li­er won the sec­ond-place posi­tion in 2020. She is a win­ner of the 2021 Brigitte Poir­son Poet­ry Prize, as well as the 2019 Splen­dors of Dawn Poet­ry Prize. Her works are pub­lished or forth­com­ing in Mel­bourne Cul­ture Cor­ner, Olney Mag­a­zine, Rig­or­ous, The Account, Mixed­Mag, The Beat­nik Cow­boy, Kala­hari Review, Spill­words, Sledge­ham­mer Lit, and others.

Poetry / Hannah Donovan

:: Willow ::

Does she bleed anymore? 
I’ll have to look it up. 
 
I keep thinking about the plastic diagram 
of a woman’s anatomy in the science classroom, 
the great hollowed bean where 
the bloomed iris of reproduction sits. 
In a dream, a careless knock sends it 
to scatter on the floor, ovaries rolling 
under desks to collect dust. 
 
Life continues. 
I’m aware of how full a body feels. 
I run thoughts of touch, of climax, and my pelvis swells. 
I run the pavements and my pelvis thuds. 
I can’t imagine such emptiness. 
 
          They scraped her out. 
          A radical hysterectomy. 
          A restructured vagina. 
          Rounds of radiation. 
 
I thought of her the other day 
as I did the dishes, scouring 
the frying pan with steel wool. 
I cried so hard I filled the sink. 
The drain was slow to empty. 
It held everything. 
I hated its ability. 
 
Malpractice shouldn’t 
roll off the tongue like it does. 
It should require spit, a throaty cough, 
a sharp taste. 
 
          We are not martyrs, we are matrons. 
          Please look to our bodies with blades 
          of scrutiny, waves of patience. 
          Please believe us when we say “it hurts here.”

From the writer

:: Account ::

I spend a lot of time think­ing about the fem­i­nine expe­ri­ence. Whether that’s my own expe­ri­ence or the expe­ri­ence of oth­ers, I am at many moments pre­oc­cu­pied with the soci­etal, inter­per­son­al, and phys­i­cal issues that befall those who iden­ti­fy as women. The specifics of the poems I write are always a bit dif­fer­ent, but the themes I con­sis­tent­ly exam­ine are ones that are close­ly tied to wom­an­hood*. My gen­er­al hope and inten­tion in writ­ing is to unearth the unex­ca­vat­ed truths in myself and to also offer com­fort, per­spec­tive, or a mix­ture of the two to those who read my work and can find com­mon threads.

In “Wil­low,” I write to bring light to a fam­i­ly member’s pain, I write to soft­en the blow of the news, I write to under­stand my anger toward sit­u­a­tions in which women are writ­ten off as hys­ter­i­cal or over-dra­mat­ic and suf­fer because of it. The poem is some­what frag­ment­ed, equal parts lost in thought and root­ed in tac­tile dai­ly life. The struc­ture serves to mim­ic how one process­es a heavy expe­ri­ence: piece­meal. Sud­den and sharp. Pen­sive and nos­tal­gic, then, in an instant, sad or enraged.

(*These state­ments are inclu­sive to every­one who iden­ti­fies as a woman, regard­less of sex assigned at birth.)

Han­nah Dono­van is a poet, pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and visu­al artist from North­ern Cal­i­for­nia. Her work has been fea­tured in Hobart, Else Jour­nal, Hill Lily Mag­a­zine, The Artist Essen­tials, and at the Black Box Gallery in Port­land, OR. Her lat­est chap­book, Ice Chips, will be pub­lished by Ethel Zine in 2022. She lives in Maine and has yet to see a moose. Find more from Han­nah at www.hannahdonovanart.com.

Poetry / Satya Dash

:: Flare ::

Ash and petal plastered on the forehead 
                          of the saint who refused to wake up from 
his nap, the profundity of his slanted semi- 
                          conscious gaze such that it looked powerful 
enough to tame the departure of soul, every 
                          word his mouth muttered in this tranced chant 
alliterated holy, every word an angular rainy lilt 
                      	of an ancient cloudy tongue, the tune of which 
could have passed for the searing hum 
                          of an archetypal 90’s Bollywood lovesick 
song or the fervent intensity of a former 
                      	cricketer’s catchphrase on air ( —the ball went 
to the boundary like a tracer bullet ), the tune 
                      	captivating the large crowd of onlookers 
who had thronged from nearby villages to witness 
                      	either a miracle or a divine death or both, among 
them a boy standing with his father and growing 
                          increasingly restless to go home and watch TV, 
the boy who had only recently learnt about the finality 
                      	of death from history textbooks, his face turning 
glowering red while wishing for the saint 
                          to immediately die when his father slapped him 
hard for pissing at the base of the holy basil plant 
                          in the corner of the saint’s derelict garden. 

:: Ignition ::

A stickler for detail—the monkey  
fooling around the window today or 
even my intoxicated eyes on a sticky 
May evening at a local bar washroom 
 
peering hard into a dirt stained mirror 
at the indentation on my upper lip,  
the sort resembling a birthmark 
but delivered acute by a mishap, the sort 
 
a hot metal brush could impinge  
from its mere acknowledgement; it gives  
my smile some character, says my father,  
his words impressing on me the permanence 
 
assumed by this mark, the evanescence 
of days accentuated for a moment 
by the compounding effect of such 
a tiny feature if regular and relentless 
 
like friction, how a 1% day-on-day growth  
makes a thing 38 times of itself at year-end,  
the responsibility for this scar assigned 
to the young doctor who did my stitches, 
 
who despite my dilapidated condition  
I remember for having a striking face, his  
kind eyes and symmetric swordfish 
jaws inducing envy that transformed  
 
without notice into comfort, the rapid  
change of heart that comes upon starving 
crops during glistening rainbow rains or that 
in the middle of a heated fight causes 
 
the incision on your mouth to be nibbled 
by your new lover, leaving the tongue glazed 
with a ring of volcanic amber usually found  
seething beneath the tip of a burning incense stick.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I have often been fas­ci­nat­ed by the ener­gy of the long sen­tence, sim­i­lar to a pow­er line run­ning through a city, con­duct­ing volt­age at a pace that at once beholds and elec­tri­fies. In this regard, recent­ly read­ing Anuk Arud­pra­gasam’s “The Sto­ry of a Brief Mar­riage” shook me in ways both vis­cer­al and artis­tic. The nov­el, set in the midst of the Sri Lankan Civ­il War, has many a glo­ri­ous long sen­tence that med­i­tates upon the fun­da­men­tal human con­di­tion. Most of these sen­tences that took my breath away had com­mon­al­i­ties: they were long and had the intrin­sic force of a poem. I felt an urge to iso­late these sen­tences, study them on a blank page, use line breaks and white space as a means to reg­u­late their immense ener­gy, to both calm and sur­prise the read­er. This took me back to one of my favorite poems, “Gold Leaf” by Carl Phillips, one that embod­ies a majes­tic long sen­tence and con­tin­ues to add or mod­i­fy mean­ing through mul­ti­ple read­ings. I often find that a good long sen­tence keeps its secrets intact. And through its accu­mu­lat­ed kinet­ic flow, its pay­off is built. 

 These poems are part of a series that attempts to use one long sen­tence as an instru­ment to nav­i­gate a net­work, to shine light upon its con­nec­tions, tie togeth­er under­ly­ing frac­tures to fur­nish the body of a poem toward the body of a liv­ing organ­ism. As I wrote these poems, the com­pound sen­tence tran­scend­ed form to become a vehi­cle for the rest­less thought itself, almost like a train stop­ping at junc­tions along the way to allow inter­mit­tent rests for log­ic, find­ing new ways to twist and turn, both son­i­cal­ly and imag­is­ti­cal­ly. I sus­pect it helps weave on the page what the mind some­times yearns for—an adventure. 

Satya Dash is the recip­i­ent of the 2020 Srini­vas Rayaprol Poet­ry Prize and a final­ist for the 2020 Bro­ken Riv­er Prize. His poems appear in The Boil­er, Anom­aly, Chest­nut Review, Rhi­no Poet­ry, Cincin­nati Review, and Dia­gram, among oth­ers. Apart from hav­ing a degree in elec­tron­ics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a crick­et com­men­ta­tor. He has been nom­i­nat­ed pre­vi­ous­ly for Push­cart, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cut­tack and now lives in Ban­ga­lore, India. He tweets at: @satya043

Poetry / Alex Dang

:: Ode to Orange Chicken ::

I, too, have been described by 
my ancestors as too sweet, 
dumbed down, inauthentic, made 
to satiate American bellies and 
melt on the same tongues who 
spat in our food, called it uncivilized, 
barbaric, dirty, cooked from rats, 
off strapped backs of dynamite. 
 
I, too, have skin golden and glazed, 
to be ripped open by white teeth 
and be left even whiter meat. 
We are found in greasy take out boxes 
deemed unworthy of recognition. 
Eaten both by fork and chopstick alike, 
this American-Chinese dish, 
cheap, affordable, wanted by none, 
but a happy compromise. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

I imag­ine art as a vehi­cle that allows us to trav­el to a des­ti­na­tion. For me, the trip begins with truth and ends with the art arriv­ing at an emo­tion. The truth is that when I look at myself, I some­times only see what Amer­i­ca sees me as. Some­times I only see myself as my diag­no­sis. And there are so many times where I see myself in oth­ers: my favorite musi­cian, a come­di­an, my moth­er and father. I have been led to joy or anger or laugh­ter in more ways than I can count. This time, I’m dri­ving, so that means we start with my truth and we end with my heart. I’m most inter­est­ed in form and con­tent as my vehi­cle to dri­ve the audi­ence to the emo­tion­al points that I was expe­ri­enc­ing. I trust that the read­er will sit in the front seat while I dri­ve and while maybe they don’t like the songs I’m play­ing or the streets I’m tak­ing, but hope­ful­ly when we reach our des­ti­na­tion, we’ll get out of the car and enjoy the view. 

Alex Dang is a poet from Port­land, Ore­gon. A for­mer TEDx speak­er, Dang com­pet­ed at the Nation­al Poet­ry Slam, was a Port­land and Eugene Poet­ry Slam Grand Slam Cham­pi­on, and has per­formed in 7 coun­tries. He has strong opin­ions about burg­ers. He wants to know what your favorite song is. 

Poetry / Jessica Cuello

:: Dear Mother, ::

Father noted each event in his diary  — 
followed by dashes  —                
  
wine diet  —        
   
doctor visit  —             
 
arrival of the puppies —               
 
Your afterbirth would  not  come  out  — 
the doctor pulled it away in pieces  — 
 
Our last meal together  —        
 	—  the scalloped wall 
 	—  the paste of blood 
 
and what did father note down then? 
that you were pinioned like a bird        
that a tomtit sang outside the window            
that I didn’t hear the song      
because my ears were wrapped in cloth 
 
and to expel the placenta 
puppies suckled the milk 
your body meant for me —  
 
Your daughter, 
Mary Shelley 

:: Dear January 1784, ::

She kidnapped her own sister 	
from a terror that made a whimper 
 
Sister lip sputtered a child cry      	        
hound cry	fox bark   seagull shriek 
no sense words     	no sense shapes	
 
shoulder shadow on the blank wall 
hood   cloak   barrel 	nothing there	
 
My mother called it the other evil 
all women know	Don’t name it   	
        
Eliza lost custody of her infant daughter	   
and the baby died shortly after 
 
 
Yours in 1820, 
M.S., Daughter of M. Wollstonecraft 

From the writer

:: Account ::

These epis­to­lary poems are writ­ten in the voice of Mary Shel­ley as she address­es her dead moth­er, the writer Mary Woll­stonecraft. The poems are in the voice of a lone­ly daugh­ter try­ing to make sense of her absent mother’s life. They speak to the aware­ness Shel­ley must have had that her birth killed her moth­er. After Mary Shelley’s birth, Wollstonecraft’s pla­cen­ta would not come out and a doc­tor was sent for. The doc­tor pulled it out, but he infect­ed Woll­stonecraft, who died 10 days lat­er. One of the strange details from the birth is that pup­pies were brought in to suck­le at Wollstonecraft’s breasts and draw out her milk. 

 The poems also ref­er­ence the ter­ror of domes­tic vio­lence. The sec­ond poem is an homage to Woll­stonecraft, who frees her sis­ter from the same kind of domes­tic violence. 

 The poems addressed to years height­en the dis­tance between daugh­ter and mother—in those poems, Shel­ley, the imag­ined speak­er, feels more inti­mate with the des­ig­na­tion of time than the moth­er her­self. The poems believe that in the absence of her mother’s pres­ence, Shel­ley might have drawn on her mother’s expe­ri­ence as a replace­ment. Yet, the cre­ative works of daugh­ter and moth­er are not enough to secure love. The poems attempt to recap­ture that sense of panic—of scram­bling for scraps of love. There is also this sense of exile from the womb itself—the only room that is secure before the world con­tin­u­al­ly expels (or threat­ens with vio­lence) both women. Both moth­er and daugh­ter were con­tin­u­al­ly reject­ed by men and cast out (Woll­stonecraft by the father of her child, Shel­ley by her father). The poems imag­ine the daughter’s con­nec­tion to her mother’s expe­ri­ence and the attempt to find love via letter/via word if not via flesh. The epis­to­lary form feels apt for unex­pressed long­ing, for query, for love that can­not be returned. 

In Dear Jan­u­ary 1784, the line the oth­er evil is from Wollstonecraft’s Let­ters writ­ten in Swe­den, Nor­way, and Den­mark. 

Jes­si­ca Cuel­lo’s Liar was select­ed by Dori­anne Laux for the 2020 Bar­row Street Book Prize, and her man­u­script Yours, Crea­ture is forth­com­ing from Jack­Leg Press in spring of 2022. Cuel­lo is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Prick­ing (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). Cuel­lo has been award­ed The 2017 CNY Book Award, The 2016 Wash­ing­ton Prize, The New Let­ters Poet­ry Prize, a Salton­stall Fel­low­ship, and The New Ohio Review Poet­ry Prize. She is a poet­ry edi­tor at Tahoma Lit­er­ary Review and teach­es French in CNY.

Poetry / Charlie Clark

:: Arnold ::

Honestly 
it is 

awful 
the August 

heat smell 
and waves 

rising from 
the freshly 

repaved lengths 
of blacktop 

the morning 
sun’s light 

glaring 
so brightly 

across it 
even silhouettes 

of the old 
dotted white 

lines now 
buried 

beneath 
the tar 

shine faintly 
through 

though 
silhouette 

is not 
the word 

I am 
looking for 

neither is 
pentimento 

though 
with it 

in mind 
my line of 

thought drifts 
to the way 

in old paintings 
X-Rays can 

expose 
for instance 

inscriptions 
thought 

better off 
hidden 

on a Dutch 
cartouche 

or the profiled 
ghost of 

a begging 
man’s face 

melted along 
a saint’s lapel 

and with 
that I am 

returned 
to the table 

where 
after her own 

digression into 
the way 

looking 
at the work 

of Lucian Freud 
all she sees 

is Francis 
Bacon’s mastery 

peeking through 
Liz said 

palimpsest 
and so 

dignified 
my description 

of words 
lovers wrote 

each other 
across 

their windshields’ 
interiors 

words 
needing 

their bodies’ 
heat present 

to arise 
in this heat 

I say palimpsest 
and receive 

such a sudden 
breadth of 

her bearing 
it is like 

the lone 
blunt laugh 

she gave 
absolute 

as a knuckle 
rapping 

table wood 
at my suggestion 

that 
the pleasure had 

the third time 
through Dumb 

and Dumber 
could rival 

that of 
Throne of Blood 

is now 
and forever 

part of 
my narrative of 

the term 
so too 

her saying 
how 

strange it is 
given 

the long 
plight of 

the human 
animal’s 

living 
that we don’t 

all have 
to the point 

of pain 
a need to 

see nightly 
the fire-

brightened 
faces of 

infants 
gently rocked 

to sleep 
that the 

Barbarians 
were just 

the poor 
saps who 

hadn’t learned 
Greek yet 

her oblique 
tenderness 

toward 
anyone’s 

insomnia 
and 

the many 
balder things 

she quietly 
conveyed 

with all 
sincerity 

put it 
in an ode 

do it 
before 

the subject 
comes back 

an elegy 
don’t have 

heroes 
casually 

inquire 
hard 

don’t smoke 
unless 

you must 
walk 

know 
no matter 

how hard 
on the nose 

this may 
strike you 

you know 
or soon will 

come to 
all the ways 

the body is 
imperiled 

that you 
must 

determine 
to cherish 

yourself 
yourself 

that when 
your heart 

declines 
to continue 

when your 
tongue 

goes black 
the best 

requiem 
you can 

hope to 
receive 

will be 
the one 

set forth 
by the sewing 

of your soul’s 
own seeds

From the writer

:: Account ::

I start­ed this poem short­ly after attend­ing the memo­r­i­al ser­vice for my for­mer teacher Stan­ley Plum­ly. At the recep­tion after the ser­vice, I recon­nect­ed with Eliz­a­beth Arnold, anoth­er for­mer pro­fes­sor whose tute­lage in the class­room and exam­ple as a writer on the page were and con­tin­ue to be tremen­dous­ly impor­tant to me. I’ve read her books, The Reef, Civ­i­liza­tion, Efface­ment, Life, and Skele­ton Coast, greed­i­ly, as they have come out—usually reread­ing all of the pre­vi­ous books pri­or to start­ing the newest one on the occa­sion of its release. I find it an illu­mi­nat­ing way to take in the work of a poet I adore, to see how the new work con­nects to the work already avail­able. It is also invig­o­rat­ing, as a writer, to see just how many fresh sur­pris­es and plea­sures I find in her work, even after so many reread­ings. Her atten­tion to syn­tac­tic and visu­al detail is unique and unpar­al­leled. I par­tic­u­lar­ly appre­ci­ate the way her work can tog­gle between, or simul­ta­ne­ous­ly con­jure, a very frank and par­tic­u­lar under­stand­ing of the per­ils of bod­i­ly human exis­tence and a joy acti­vat­ed by lan­guage, his­to­ry, travel—all the things the body can engage in/with to pitch said per­ils in relief. They are haunt­ed poems whose speci­fici­ties refuse to be haunt­ed. Each time I encounter Liz’s work, I am remind­ed that hers is a means of intel­lec­tion I would do well to mod­el in my own life and writing. 

Think­ing about Liz, and think­ing about hon­or­ing my men­tors (I had been work­ing, on and off, on an ele­gy for Stan for some months after his pass­ing), I decid­ed it was impor­tant and nec­es­sary to cel­e­brate Liz as a writer and thinker. This poem is the result. The ini­tial drafts start­ed with mem­o­ries of cer­tain exchanges and com­ments I recall from the work­shop of hers I took in (I think) the spring of 2001. Par­tic­u­lar­ly, I had the for­tu­nate (and admit­ted­ly hum­bling) expe­ri­ence of dis­cov­er­ing, mid-class, that I did not know the mean­ing of the word palimpsest (which, as the poem indi­cates, Liz used to describe a part of the work of mine then under dis­cus­sion). Liz was delight­ed at the oppor­tu­ni­ty to intro­duce the term; the con­ver­sa­tion soon wan­dered more gen­er­al­ly into the plea­sures of spe­cif­ic words: their sounds, their mean­ings, their ety­mo­log­i­cal roots. It is par­tic­u­lar­ly instruc­tive to have the lived expe­ri­ence of learn­ing the mean­ing of palimpsest etched into my mem­o­ry in this way, the term becom­ing a palimpsest reveal­ing itself and this broad­er swath of expe­ri­ence. Liz made lan­guage acti­vate for me. I am grate­ful to Liz for this, for how she serves as a mod­el, and for the restless/flawless body of work she has pro­duced over the years. I con­tin­ue to be her awed student. 

Char­lie Clark stud­ied poet­ry at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land. His work has appeared in The New Eng­land Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Smar­tish Pace, Three­pen­ny Review, West Branch, and oth­er jour­nals. A 2019 NEA fel­low and recip­i­ent of schol­ar­ships to the Bread Loaf Writ­ers’ Con­fer­ence, he is the author of The Newest Employ­ee of the Muse­um of Ruin (Four Way Books, 2020). He lives in Austin, TX. 

Poetry / Brandon Amico

:: Democracy Minus Democracy ::

On the third panel of every comic, Garfield is flung 
from a window, a closed window, one that shatters 
from the momentum of his body, great enough 
that even beyond the obstacle he is still travelling 
at an upward angle out above Jon’s idealized suburbia. 
 
This is the future 90’s kids want: every important 
piece of legislature, every contract, sieved through 
the medium of Garfield, a comic we remembered 
from childhood as great but as adults discovered it 
derivative and uncreative. We set out to reclaim it,  
make it match our memories, express dread in a new language, 
lift the shifting prism of memory to the light.  
 
We remove Garfield, shuffle or repeat the frames, 
run the text through an algorithm. Garfield is bigger 
than his creator; Jim Davis is a political footnote. 
The Orange Cat Party swells, accepts Nihilists 
and budding creatives, nostalgists and tinkerers. 
 
The internet accelerated the Everything, but the 
Everything includes more and more Garfield, 
in the future there is only Garfield and the night 
that comes between panels like the moment between 
beats of a heart, the fragile seconds bridging 
a transfer of power and the sudden focus on it, 
a hyperawareness, the knowledge that the world 
is what we make it, mutable, striped if we want it striped, 
sarcastic, a mode of expression as bracing as the air 
rushing by us as we get a brief view from above, 
not sure what it’ll be like when we land. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

I spend a lot of time think­ing about what makes poet­ry polit­i­cal. The phrase “polit­i­cal poet­ry” car­ries a lot of bag­gage, but being able to write a poem and say it has absolute­ly no pol­i­tics any­where in it is a lux­u­ry that I feel we can­not often afford. When a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of our country’s polit­i­cal argu­ment is deny­ing peo­ple human rights, any poem that human­izes is inher­ent­ly polit­i­cal. A poet writ­ing to specif­i­cal­ly avoid “polit­i­cal” sub­jects is also mak­ing a polit­i­cal state­ment by this action alone.  

Thus, while I don’t aim to write “polit­i­cal poems,” I do want my poems to be polit­i­cal, to have a stake in the world in which they reside, whether that’s sur­face lev­el or under­pin­ning the text. Per­son­al­ly, I often come to the polit­i­cal through the satir­i­cal, through the absurd. And as our world grows more car­toon­ish and out­landish with every pass­ing day, the poems too need to step it up to stay ahead of the real when it comes to absur­di­ty. I love reading—and try to write—poems that enact them­selves on the back­drop of our day-to-day: the news, social media, the sto­ries that bridge us to the world. 

“Democ­ra­cy Minus Democ­ra­cy” leapt out (sor­ry) from our polit­i­cal sys­tem, which can appar­ent­ly be near­ly over­turned in a day by brute, stu­pid force. I wrote the first draft of the poem days after the assault on the U.S. Capi­tol in Jan­u­ary 2021; I didn’t intend a poem about the cre­ative Nihilism of the Twit­ter­verse and its fas­ci­nat­ing love-hate rela­tion­ship with the Garfield com­ic strip to be my way into the uneasi­ness of our polit­i­cal moment, but once I felt it going there, I couldn’t stop the momen­tum.   

Of the many Garfield com­ic strip vari­ants that pep­per the inter­net, one of the ear­li­est and the most promi­nent is Garfield Minus Garfield, where­in the cre­ator of this web­com­ic, Dan Walsh, repur­posed old Garfield strips by, as the title implies, remov­ing Garfield entire­ly. The result was his own­er, Jon, talk­ing to him­self and/or react­ing to nonex­is­tent stim­uli; the strips were equal parts bleak and fun­ny. G‑G’s pop­u­lar­i­ty helped spur on many oth­er cre­ative projects where­in the offi­cial, pub­lished Garfield com­ic strips are the medi­um, the blank can­vas to start from—it’s a fas­ci­nat­ing recur­ring theme through the mil­len­ni­al inter­net. There are too many to name here, but of impor­tant note for this poem is the ver­sion that is ref­er­enced from the onset: a ded­i­cat­ed Twit­ter account, @yeetgarf, fea­tures Garfield com­ic strips where the only change is the final pan­el is replaced with one of the tit­u­lar cat crash­ing through a win­dow with incred­i­ble force. Again, con­text is every­thing; there’s some­thing to be said for know­ing how some­thing ends, and how expec­ta­tions col­or our present day actions. 

Every­one process­es major world events dif­fer­ent­ly; appar­ent­ly, some of us process through Garfield. 

Bran­don Ami­co is the author of Dis­ap­pear­ing, Inc. (Gold Wake Press, 2019). A 2019 Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts Cre­ative Writ­ing Fel­low, his poems have appeared in pub­li­ca­tions includ­ing Best Amer­i­can Poet­ry 2020, Black­bird, The Cincin­nati Review, the Keny­on Review, and New Ohio Review.

Poetry / Romeo Oriogun

:: This Way to Water ::

Along Sénégal’s river, in Kayes, where the bus 
from Bamako dropped me off, before speeding 
toward Dakar, I walk alone, trying to find leaves 
that whisper of roads, trying to sieve through water 
the haunting part of home. There, children throw stones 
into the river, watch them skip and skip before sinking, 
a game I played as a boy. And before tall trees 
whose names are lost to my hands, I stoop, picking barks, 
gathering leaves, a labor to tie me to a new beginning. 
I watch the rise and fall of water, the wide horizon 
calling in its wisdom of ages. There, an inlet leading  
to a village speaks of possibilities. I see the women in white,  
the man with his kora, playing stories of the past, suspending  
history in the miracle of sound, reviving it through voices, 
and the river path discovers its true purpose of worship, 
the children clap. I turn from them, diving into water,  
watching the unknown rush towards me. There, in the midst 
of women dancing on the riverbank, I didn’t discover the path  
home. I only discovered a goddess, the coolness of water. 

:: Welcome ::

          Kokrobite 

And before dusk bring the boats  
home, and before the sea pronounces  
its great regret upon the sands 
of Kokrobite, I sat alone, far from beach  
goers, from eyes wandering bodies  
of Rastafarians at beer tables, far from music 
of revelry. Before my toes, little animals burrow  
into sand. I, too, have traveled around  
the world. Boarding houses of cities,  
fountains of strangers, the deep eyes of roads  
have known my sleep. Before me, the sea, wide  
and a mirror, holds my thirst abate. The rope tied  
to a rotten boat tugs, announcing the sailor’s  
homecoming. It is time to hold the tired being  
of journeys, to praise trinkets around ankles 
of women carrying home, to praise the sailor’s song  
of longing. I join the long line of people pulling  
the boat. The sea knows our strength, it teases  
and lets go. What weakness I know is a surrender  
to waves, the boat rides on them. What returns  
is not complete, what we hold is only hope.  
Tomorrow we’ll go out, the shore waits.  
Neither grief nor pity holds back the desire  
of water. The sailor knows and we sit, side by side,  
in the makeshift store, waiting for gin, and before us  
the sea continues, fast pace and ever moving. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

On the 17th of Feb­ru­ary 2016, Akin­nife­si Olu­mide Olubun­mi, a gay man from West­ern Nige­ria, was lynched to death. On the night of his death, I was scared. I was scared because it could have been me or any queer per­son I knew. That night, I began to write poems that inter­ro­gat­ed queer sur­vival in Nige­ria. In 2017, I won the Brunel Inter­na­tion­al African Prize for Poet­ry with these poems. I was out­ed, harassed, threat­ened, report­ed to the police and attacked. I had to leave Nige­ria. In exile, as I place my foot in water, in rivers, in the sea, I hear the echo of home. I hear queer bod­ies find­ing home across Africa, across Europe. Every space I have inhab­it­ed was a place of con­flict. On my jour­ney from Nige­ria to Amer­i­ca, I trav­eled across West Africa doc­u­ment­ing cities and vil­lages, doc­u­ment­ing the his­to­ry of con­flict and how the sea played a role in both the past and the present. I intend to inter­ro­gate how queer peo­ple sur­vive dis­place­ment; I intend to link the begin­ning of dis­place­ment to the dis­place­ment of queer peo­ple across West Africa.

Romeo Ori­o­gun was born in Lagos, Nige­ria. He is the author of Sacra­ment of Bod­ies (Uni­ver­si­ty of Nebras­ka Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Amer­i­can Poet­ry Review, Har­vard Review, McNeese Review, Bay­ou, Brit­tle Paper, and oth­ers. He cur­rent­ly is an MFA can­di­date for poet­ry at the Iowa Writ­ers’ Work­shop, where he received the John Logan Prize for Poetry.

Poetry / Leah Umansky

:: What’s More ::

is the mer­est urgency is for­ev­er that // for­ev­er urgent // for­ev­er in want // like every­thing now // now // like the right now // like the right now is urgent­ly enflamed // is in a con­stant state of burn­ing // is that the metaphor for rea­son // is that the metaphor of the day // the half-wait // the trac­ing // even now // even now // even // even in urgency // is it the let­ting-in // is it the let­ting out // the slow quick­saw // the giv­ing // the giv­ing up // and what’s more // tell me // what 

From the writer

:: Account ::

This poem is an account of a rela­tion­ship found and end­ed dur­ing this pan­dem­ic. It’s a poem about lim­bo, and uncer­tain­ty, and again, the heart. It often feels like every­thing is impor­tant in our lives right now: every emo­tion, every action, every reac­tion, every rec­ol­lec­tion and mem­o­ry.  This poem is an account of that urgency of the brain and the heart and the way the next thing is always loom­ing and some­times the best thing is to qui­et the mind, qui­et the heart, qui­et the future and be in the now. THAT is the hard­est thing to do, at least for me. 

Leah Uman­sky is the author of two full-length col­lec­tions, The Bar­barous Cen­tu­ry (Eye­wear Pub­lish­ing, 2018), and Domes­tic Uncer­tain­ties (BlazeVOX, 2013), among oth­ers. She earned her MFA in Poet­ry at Sarah Lawrence Col­lege and is the cura­tor and host of The COUPLET Read­ing Series in NYC. Her poems have appeared or are forth­com­ing in such places as Thrush Poet­ry Jour­nal, Glass: A Jour­nal of Poet­ry, The New York Times, POETRY, Guer­ni­ca, The Ben­ning­ton Review, The Acad­e­my of Amer­i­can Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Rhi­no, and Pleiades. She is resist­ing the tyrant with her every move. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com and  @leah.umansky on IG.  

Poetry / Sandra Lim

:: Classics ::

Actaeon turns into a stag, I say, as I spear the fourth  
          oily olive on my toothpick. He saw her nakedness, which was  
appalling in the way it tested the air around it.  
 
Then come the hounds, with their complicated names, the baying  
          and the lurid viscera. Down this road we can scarcely follow in words, 
but I always feel the clothes newly on her back, and the low 
 
calm that comes when bad temper is spent. He is inhumanly excited. 
 
A rack of antlers emerges from his forehead as I talk; there’s no  
          stuffing it back in. He doesn’t seem to notice, as he pulls me into his lap.    
I sip my drink, and the bartender decants striped red straws  
 
with their determined gaiety into a glass jar, carefully wipes down  
          the scarred tabletop. Humiliation, what of it? Formerly, I had a few  
feathers around my mouth, but nothing in my head.

From the writer

:: Account ::

This poem came to me as a bit of a sur­prise. I was just try­ing to pin down a scene in a bar; I cer­tain­ly wasn’t con­scious­ly think­ing about human frailty or clas­si­cal mythol­o­gy. But I love myth for the way it works as a kind of alter­na­tive lan­guage. Here, I wish for the poem to go beyond the lan­guage of psy­chol­o­gy with respect to long­ing and look­ing, or desire and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. I hope you can hear the antlers crack­ling into view.

San­dra Lim is the author of Loveli­est Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006) and The Wilder­ness (W. W. Nor­ton & Com­pa­ny, 2014). Her new col­lec­tion of poems, The Curi­ous Thing, will be pub­lished in 2021.

Poetry / Remi Recchia

:: Pastoral #1 ::

The cows are misting 
silent, burrowed in white 
softness & sky-down. 
 
I’m driving & you are 
golden, counting seconds 
against the digital 
 
clock of our old car 
(three accidents later, 
motor still warm, dash 
 
dented with a yellow 
bruise). Do you ever 
wish we weren’t here? 
 
We are fixtures of other- 
ness, one brown cow 
among the spotted herd. 
 
Rural eyes & cardinal  
sins, they are our gate- 
keepers, as if we need 
 
one reason to leave. 
I want to say I’m used 
to this turning, these fists 
 
hovering over my small 
face. I’m used to this  
orange scrutiny. But you 
 
are not & I don’t want  
you to know we’re alone, 
so let me be your star. 
 
We’ll paint the sky-canvas 
splotchy cow colors  
accented with sober love. 
 
Keep me in the dark. Hold 
dirty towels, always, stark 
neon against the pasture.

:: Pastoral #6 ::

We’re lying next to each other on Sunday morning, sleep- 
flowers pressed in your eyes, five o’clock shadow on my jaw. 
The Venetian blinds are half-drawn: fossil of wine & no 
filter. The slats can be rotated such that they overlap with one 
side facing inward & then in the opposite direction such  
 
they overlap with the other side facing inward.  
An old anniversary balloon wilts in the corner, & I’m reminded  
of last October when the clerk ID’d me at the gas station,  
said I’m too young to be married. What he didn’t know is I 
have already built a house, a home, a life.  
 
My palms sweat your absence on business trips. They butterfly  
your thigh at church. At home we administer our own communion.  
Between those extremes, various degrees of separation may be 
effected between the slats by varying the rotation. I haven’t been 
on a first date in so long, but darling, I’ve always known you. 
 
There are also lift cords passing through slots in each slat— 
& also the sun—there are also empty bottles on the counter—& 
also the red-stained rug. When these cords are pulled, the bottom 
of the blind moves upward, causing the lowest slats to press 
the underside of the next highest slat as the blind is raised.    
 
It took Christ four days to un-sleep Lazarus. We’ll sleep off 
last night together for hours, your legs curled into mine 
on a discount mattress & frayed blanket. A blue jay teaches 
his children to fly outside the window. A modern variation 
of the lift cords combines them with rotational cords in slots 
 
on the two edges of each slat. The baby birds plummet to the ground 
one after the other. Their father flies across the yard like a  
machine. We model our behavior so children can grow 
into their parents. This avoids the slots otherwise required to allow 
a slat to rotate despite a lift cord passing through it, thus decreasing 
 
the amount of light passing through a closed blind. Let the sun 
rise without us. Let’s miss business hours. Let’s fill  
our bellies on bread, on eggs, on cheese. You’ll put cinnamon  
in my coffee. I’ll drive you to work. We have so much time 
to burn these feathers. 

Note: lines in ital­ics tak­en from Wikipedia page on Venet­ian blinds. 

From the writer

:: Account ::

I’m inter­est­ed in what it means to belong some­where, to tru­ly fit in so when you look up from where you’re stand­ing, you can say, I’m home. These poems trace the con­cept of belong­ing in both phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al spaces. As a Mid­west­ern poet, land­scape is impor­tant to me. What I mean by that is I grew up always look­ing at some­thing: at trees, at cows (see espe­cial­ly “Pas­toral #1”), at noth­ing but a flat expanse of wheat while dri­ving down the high­way, which was, in its noth­ing­ness, every­thing. I was raised in Michi­gan and spent a sig­nif­i­cant, if not long, amount of time in Ohio where I was learn­ing how to be a poet. Ohio is also where I met the love of my life. 

This com­bi­na­tion of roman­tic love and appre­ci­a­tion of landscape—which is love of landscape—may be best described as an attempt to fol­low the pas­toral tra­di­tion in Amer­i­can poet­ry. Writ­ing about roman­tic love while observ­ing phys­i­cal sur­round­ings (and if you’re from the Mid­west, you spend a lot of time in the car) is a way of plac­ing myself some­where. While I feel a deep attach­ment to the Mid­west, the Mid­west is not nec­es­sar­i­ly attached to me. I can see this in its numer­ous trans­pho­bic laws. 

Maybe I’m hop­ing that pay­ing homage to my place of ori­gin will make it accept me. Maybe I’m try­ing to share the Mid­west with my lover. Ulti­mate­ly, the Amer­i­can pas­toral gives me a space to do both things, and I hope I’m doing it jus­tice in some way. 

Remi Rec­chia is a trans poet and essay­ist from Kala­ma­zoo, Michi­gan. He is a PhD can­di­date in Cre­ative Writ­ing at Okla­homa State Uni­ver­si­ty. He cur­rent­ly serves as an asso­ciate edi­tor for the Cimar­ron Review. Remi’s work has appeared in Colum­bia Online Jour­nal, Front Porch, and Glass: A Jour­nal of Poet­ry, among oth­ers. He holds an MFA in poet­ry from Bowl­ing Green State University.