Poetry / Jason Schneiderman

:: The Last Ace of Base Enthusiast ::

The last Ace of Base Enthusiast wishes she could live in the 1990s. 
The last Ace of Base Enthusiast imagines a world where it was impossible
to avoid Ace of Base—where it would be playing over the stereo
when you entered a convenience store, or when you went to the bank.
At first she was annoyed when her friends asked her what the songs meant,
or tried to pin her down on precisely what “the sign” was, or insisted
on knowing why the main character was crying in “Don’t Turn Around.”
Later, she was frustrated when her friends refused to listen to her answers,
and she had to write a book explaining all of the lyrics, and the multiple
permutations by which they might be understood. No one bought the book,
so she started making dioramas of the convenience stores and banks
in the 1990s where you couldn’t avoid Ace of Base songs. Her show
of dioramas is well received, and highly regarded as an example of 
“The New Retrospectivists” though she is consistently hurt by the pride that
critics take in being able “to endure the hideous cacophony of screeching
vocals that the artist has dredged up from a past that we remember with
great pain, but as she has shown us, forget at our own peril.” Once, she thinks,
people would have bought the CD in the gift shop on the way out of the museum,
back in the 1990s, when there were CDs. 


 

:: Little Red Riding Wolf ::

On the lecture circuit, Little Red Riding Wolf
is generally brought to tears by at least one 
question. Wolves tend to accuse her of being
a collaborator, while humans tend to demand
to know if she has ever eaten a person herself.

Folklorists tend to dismiss her outright
as being trapped in a very stupid story, 
while a certain cadre of literary theorists
consider her very identity an ouroboros, 
a figure that they hope will become as popular

as the rhizome once became for an earlier
generation of scholars. None of this helps
Little Red Riding Wolf, whose only real
pleasure is cruising online dating apps, 
never meeting up, but pretending 

sometimes to be only a wolf, 
sometimes to be only a little girl.  

From the writer

:: Account ::

While these poems were writ­ten as part of very dif­fer­ent sequences, they both reflect the ways that I often see iden­ti­ty as radi­ant or con­ta­gious in ways that blur affin­i­ty or oblig­a­tion and defy sim­pli­fied (but nec­es­sary) forms of stand­point epis­te­mol­o­gy. I think we’re in a time when we are focused on uni­tary forms of iden­ti­ty, which is a cru­cial cor­rec­tive to a kind of post­mod­ernism that failed to decen­ter dom­i­nant modes of iden­ti­ty by extend­ing cer­tain fail­ures of mid twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry human­ism. Both poems are about char­ac­ters caught in forms of iden­ti­ty that look inco­her­ent to the peo­ple around them. The char­ac­ters find strate­gies for being seen in ways that make the mis-recog­ni­tion pro­duc­tive and emo­tion­al­ly sat­is­fy­ing, but they can’t quite find their way to being per­ceived in the ways that they per­ceive them­selves. Poems allow me con­cretize the abstrac­tions that buzz around my head all day, so—fingers crossed—you enjoyed the poems more than the account.

Jason Schnei­der­man is the author of four books of poems: Hold Me Tight (Red Hen Press, 2020), Pri­ma­ry Source (Red Hen Press, 2016), Strik­ing Sur­face (Ash­land Poet­ry Press, 2010), and Sub­li­ma­tion Point (Four Way Books, 2004). He edit­ed the anthol­o­gy Queer: A Read­er for Writ­ers (Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2016). His poet­ry and essays have appeared in Amer­i­can Poet­ry Review, The Best Amer­i­can Poet­ry, Poet­ry Lon­don, Grand Street, and The Pen­guin Book of the Son­net. He is an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at the Bor­ough of Man­hat­tan Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege, CUNY, and lives in Brooklyn.

Poetry / Jeremy Radin

:: A Song of Apples Falling Over a Cliff ::

A boy runs, dragging a forest behind him, babbling 
like a newspaper. Tigers file through the underbrush

whispering Yiddish—or what in a child’s dream sounds 
like Yiddish. Between the boy & me, a coffin full of honey

—we dip the bread, the apples, feed each other the sugar 
of years. Once I wore a tiger suit to the supermarket, 

growled up at stacks of cake. If I told you loneliness 
was a coffin built from sugar, what would you say 

with your warm & human mouth? I should tell you 
there’s a city where it always rains. I wish to live 

there. The boy wishes to live anywhere with tigers. 
The boy wishes to run. We were fat very quickly, 

a mountain of milk. The angel perches upon 
the fridge, in this, the room of my adulthood. 

A woman plays guitar & sings a song of apples 
falling over a cliff. Where does the moment go

& my hair? Ah, Jeremychild—there are such 
nothings with which to fill our bellies. Such 

rooms to back out of. Such silences to say.

From the writer

:: Account ::

For the past ten years, I have been in—and out of—recovery for an eat­ing dis­or­der. I’m a com­pul­sive vol­ume eater, which means I obses­sive­ly want and attempt to eat more than I can eat. As a result of this, I have spent the major­i­ty of my life over­weight, and I’ve let that con­di­tion dic­tate much of my life—I’ve allowed my fat­ness (and the myths I’ve made around my fat­ness) to keep me from inti­ma­cy both phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al, con­nect­ing to my feel­ings, con­nect­ing to the divine, to friends, to fam­i­ly, to partners.

The book I’m work­ing on endeav­ors to explore the facets of dis­or­dered eat­ing, body image, and recov­ery through can­dor, humor, warmth, and bewil­der­ment. Eat­ing dis­or­ders are flu­id. They are alive. They shift and adapt and sur­vive. My eat­ing dis­or­der has all the tools at its dis­pos­al that I have—my imag­i­na­tion, intel­li­gence, pow­ers of rationalization—the dif­fer­ence is it doesn’t get tired. What can I use to cre­ate a dia­logue with this tire­less­ness? What is tire­less enough so as to be up to the task? Well, there is god. But I am not par­tic­u­lar­ly reli­gious. And so how do I attempt, in my way, to com­mune with god? Well, there is poetry.

Poet­ry has been a remark­ably use­ful, if imper­fect, tool in my recov­ery. It attempts to remain as flu­id, as salta­to­ry, as capa­ble of leap­ing through and around the bounds of log­ic as the eat­ing dis­or­der itself. Poet­ry aims to occu­py the space out­side and beyond logic—the same space an eat­ing dis­or­der occu­pies. When one attempts to engage the eat­ing dis­or­der with log­ic, one becomes quick­ly frus­trat­ed. Often a binge is tied to nothing—it seems to have no ori­gin; it just appears. So how do I meet the eat­ing dis­or­der where it lives? While in treat­ment I lead a poet­ry work­shop in which my fel­low eaters and non-eaters and I wrote odes to foods that ter­ri­fied us. What we learned was that we were not writ­ing odes to the food but to our abil­i­ty to imbue the food with such size and mean­ing. What is an eat­ing dis­or­der if not the sign of a tremen­dous imag­i­na­tion? The capac­i­ty to cre­ate mean­ing out of noth­ing. And what is a poem?

We live in a time and in a country—and a glob­al community—where it is dif­fi­cult for me to con­ceive of the fact that there are peo­ple with­out eat­ing dis­or­ders. I live in Los Ange­les, where I am con­stant­ly bom­bard­ed with imagery that is deeply confusing—on Sun­set Boule­vard, a fifty-foot bill­board of a mod­el with a “per­fect” body next to a fifty-foot bill­board of a dou­ble bacon cheese­burg­er. And now, since the advent of the internet—a kind of por­tal onto a kind of Sun­set Boulevard—these frus­trat­ing mixed mes­sages have been glob­al­ized. How is any­one sup­posed to nav­i­gate pure­ly this most basic of sur­vival func­tions when we are told “eat this to look like this,” and then, not more than a few sec­onds lat­er, “doesn’t this look deli­cious?” Shame over the one inevitably leads to engag­ing in the oth­er: “I can’t look this this so I will eat this; I can’t eat this so I will look like this.” It is as if the food indus­try and beau­ty indus­try are toss­ing us glee­ful­ly back and forth, prof­it­ing not only off our con­fu­sion but, because we have been so fierce­ly shamed for it, our unwill­ing­ness to speak open­ly about this confusion.

My dream in work­ing on this project is that it makes avail­able more space where men can talk and lis­ten freely, togeth­er about dis­or­dered eat­ing and body image. I say specif­i­cal­ly men because I am a man, and this is the ver­sion of the sto­ry I can tell. Eat­ing dis­or­ders are ram­pant through­out all gen­ders and it is cer­tain­ly more dif­fi­cult, for many rea­sons, being a fat woman in this coun­try than a fat man—but I also believe that there is a dearth of lit­er­a­ture sur­round­ing men and eat­ing and men and their bod­ies. This, I believe, is because men—as emo­tion­al oppressors—have not been forced to evolve emo­tion­al­ly as quick­ly and ful­ly as women, and what women are attuned enough to their feel­ings to speak open­ly about, men are not.

It is a strange and com­plex thing to be a man with an eat­ing dis­or­der in this coun­try. As is so often the case, this com­plex­i­ty is root­ed in tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty. There exists the misog­y­nis­tic con­sid­er­a­tion that an eat­ing dis­or­der is a “woman’s dis­ease,” that for a man to strug­gle with an eat­ing dis­or­der is not only shame­ful in its own right, but emasculating—the idea being that only women could be weak and vain enough to be sus­cep­ti­ble to these con­fu­sions. As a result of this con­sid­er­a­tion many men remain silent about their eat­ing disorders—some to the point of death. Men are com­pul­sive eaters, anorex­i­cs, bulim­ics, exer­cise bulim­ics, orthorex­i­cs, restric­tors, etc. etc. As do so many tools of the patri­archy, this con­sid­er­a­tion hurts men under the guise of a sort of pro­tec­tion. Our silence will not pro­tect us.

Each time I share with friends, write, or speak pub­licly about my eat­ing dis­or­der, fat­ness, etc., a lay­er of shame is shaved off. In fact, I have become deeply grate­ful to my eat­ing dis­or­der for the remark­able dia­logues it has led me to. I wish for more men to enter into these con­ver­sa­tions because I believe that they will not only serve to des­tig­ma­tize dis­or­dered eat­ing and body dys­mor­phia, but that they may grant men a tremen­dous insight into the lives of the peo­ple with whom we will be shar­ing these con­ver­sa­tions, with whom we share this coun­try, this plan­et, and will lead us toward more thought­ful­ness and gen­tle­ness in our day to day encoun­ters with oth­er human beings, and, ulti­mate­ly, with ourselves.

So for any­one who may be strug­gling with food and body image, in secret or not, I say to you: Hel­lo. Let’s talk. I am not through it yet. I may nev­er be. But I am here, and I know you are too. We are not alone.

Jere­my Radin is a poet, actor, and teacher. His poems have appeared (or are forth­com­ing) Gulf Coast, The Cort­land Review, The Jour­nal, Vinyl, Pas­sages North, Cos­mo­nauts Avenue, and else­where. He is the author of two col­lec­tions of poet­ry, Slow Dance with Sasquatch (Write Bloody Pub­lish­ing, 2012) and Dear Sal (not a cult press, 2017). He lives in Los Ange­les with his six plants and refrig­er­a­tor. Fol­low him @germyradin.

Poetry / Autumn McClintock

:: Abiding Characteristics ::

	erased from Valerie’s journal: April 21, 1982

With each season

you	           stand the elusive 
reason	for why people “pass on.”
        you learn	to pick tulips

long-stemmed instead of right
from the blossom. Listening
        a glimpse
        you handle relationships

Know	how special you are. You’re just not
                   you’re not	    you’re
not	        you’re not


        so beautiful

                              the seasons
You	             unlearn

 
and	 accept
 

                        understand 
                          something
 
spoken of and		obvious 
you	          say, “get it, mom?”
                                        if you could
get around to the other side it would be 
easier

                         you love to run.


 

:: Isaiah 40: Erased from Headstone ::

          says your God

her hard service has been completed, 
she has received from the LORD’S hand

          the wilderness           the desert 

a highway           rough
and revealed.


And I said, What shall I cry? All people are      grass, 
     and all breath
blows the      grass.


     a high mountain           lift up
with a shout,
lift      up
the hollow breadth      of the heavens
Who has held the earth           in a basket?


Whom did the LORD consult 
and who was
the
     dust the
               fine dust

Do you not know?      Have you not heard?

Has it not been told you 
since the earth was
                     the earth,

 
its grass
stretches
                              like a canopy,

and reduces this world to
the ground
 
the	name
               is missing.

Why do you complain?
Why do you say

LORD my God 
LORD           God,
     no
LORD
               no
                  no.

From the writer

:: Account ::

These era­sures are, respec­tive­ly, from a jour­nal my moth­er wrote to/for me after I was born and from chap­ter 40 of Isa­iah, from the New Inter­na­tion­al Ver­sion of the Bible. This year, I am the age my moth­er was when she died: 41. This project allows our con­ver­sa­tion to go on. These works are also part of a longer man­u­script that exam­ines rela­tion­ships between/among women, ill­ness, grief, enter­ing mid­dle age, and what it means to out­live one’s par­ent in years and age. My hope is that the poems make pos­si­ble oth­er con­ver­sa­tions out in the world, between you and your dead or maybe even you and your liv­ing. Works of era­sure that have been invalu­able as I approached this project are The Ground I Stand on Is Not My Ground by Col­lier Nogues, Radi os by Ronald John­son, and Voy­ager by Srikanth Reddy.

Autumn McClin­tock lives in Philadel­phia and works at the pub­lic library. Her first chap­book, After the Creek, was pub­lished in 2016. Poems of hers have recent­ly appeared or are forth­com­ing in Poet­ry Dai­ly, Green Moun­tains Review, Den­ver Quar­ter­ly, Cimar­ron Review, Drunk­en Boat, Spoon Riv­er Poet­ry Review, and oth­ers. She is a staff read­er for Ploughshares.

Poetry / Sandra Marchetti

:: Late October ::

It’s the first night of the World Series 
and ten jets, like stars, home
toward O’Hare. Runways roll
out the plains in draped carpet. 
Even though little league is over,
each ballfield lit up as if
by candles at the dinner table,
welcoming someone’s return.

From the writer

:: Account ::

I’ve writ­ten a cou­ple poems describ­ing how when land­ing in Chica­go I notice all the base­ball dia­monds. There seem to be more than in oth­er areas of the coun­try (per­haps because of the flat­ness?). I was tak­ing off from O’Hare in Octo­ber on the night of the first game of the World Series, two months after ama­teur base­ball is over, and a bunch of lit­tle league and park dis­trict fields were eeri­ly lit—as if they knew it was a big night for the game.

San­dra Mar­che­t­ti is the author of Con­flu­ence, a full-length col­lec­tion of poet­ry from Sun­dress Pub­li­ca­tions (2015), and four chap­books of poet­ry and lyric essays. Her poet­ry appears in Eco­tone, Poet Lore, Black­bird, Sug­ar House Review, Riv­er Styx, and else­where. Essays can be found in The Rum­pus, Mid-Amer­i­can Review, Bar­rel­house, Pleiades, and oth­er venues.

Poetry / Karen An-hwei Lee

:: Dear Millennium, Jade Rabbit on the Far Side of the Moon ::

We sent a rover called Jade Rabbit to the far side of our moon,
the other side of hiddenness as it faces away from this world,
where cotton seeds sprouted at first, but don’t expect the moon
to change into fresh cotton fields soon, thanks to airlessness—     
minus subzero in microgravity, absolutely freezing up there. 
The spacecraft which carried the rover was named for a lady 
who drank the elixir of immortality and floated to the moon.
She was the same lady who married the archer who shot nine
of the ten suns scorching the earth. As a little girl, I wondered 
if the lady was bored out of her wits from sitting on the moon,
a blanched, cold place without almond cakes or green cheese.
The moon is not made of jade, either. Of course, you can’t eat 
jade, but it is soothing to hold. Meanwhile, the moon’s far side
lies in utter darkness due to tidal locking, not what it sounds—
actually the moon’s orbit and its rotation are not about oceans
the way we feel the ebb and flow of their familiar nocturnes.
The darkness is more about not knowing what else is there. 
It is also not quite the opposite of what we do see, however.
Don’t expect that the moon will turn into cotton fields soon. 
It is not made of mutton fat. Neither cassia trees nor rabbits 
dwell there. On the far side, we find what we already know—
that seeds cannot survive in such weather, and sadly, we get 
no closer to knowing God in doing so, not even in reaching    
out to graze the edges of the farthest stars, dear millennium, 
when God is shooting valentines of love into jaded hearts
where strings hold our atoms of flesh together, for now.


 

:: Dear Millennium, on the Methuselah Star ::

The meteor shower, a famous one, arrives tonight.  
                              To see it, we must drive a hundred miles east 
to Joshua Tree, the high desert. The bright Perseids—  
                              How could we possibly make it
                    in time, crossing this long, clandestine distance 
                                                            to the inland empire?  
Past the drought-blighted avocado and lemon groves,
                                                  on cracked, desolate freeways—  
A pastor once described our path towards eternity 
                                        as a long obedience in the same direction.  
Sounds mundane. Even so, I love this austere method of sameness   
                    while night gently shawls the Mojave with stars— 
                                        ten-billion-year-old pixie dust 
speckling the eastern hemisphere—as our bodies, way stations
                    of hydrogen, carbon, and phosphorus atoms
becloud the hairpin-river of the Milky Way 
                              beyond the light pollution of Los Angeles,
midsummer August. Sea-bright on stillness, rose-prickled
                                                            and spectrally red-shifted, 
                                                  ancient star fumes    
blaze with our unbridled wishes,
                    blend with the coiled smoke of gashed comets 
barely the age of the oldest star discovered,
                              the Methuselah star— 
                                                  born fourteen billion years ago.	

From the writer

:: Account ::

Eter­ni­ty, not the per­fume, is on my mind late­ly, not so much for olfac­to­ry but onto­log­i­cal and oth­er rea­sons, or maybe just out of mun­dane curios­i­ty. The Methuse­lah star—over four bil­lion years old, a para­dox­i­cal age that makes it old­er than the universe—and China’s lunar rover—surface in these poems, thanks to my perusal of Space.com, whose items I pon­dered out of afore­said curios­i­ty as a poet. How can a star be old­er than the uni­verse? Why isn’t the dark side of the moon actu­al­ly dark? Will cot­ton seeds sur­vive on the moon? Why not? For the past two decades, I’ve lived in var­i­ous cities in south­ern Cal­i­for­nia, and now by the sea. The sky opens up with Hop­kins­esque grandeur. Dur­ing a new moon when its light is obscured, or if you ever dri­ve inland to the high desert, zil­lions of stars are vis­i­ble to an unaid­ed eye. When I hold myself still for a minute to bear wit­ness to these finite aspects of cre­ation, I feel God shoot­ing a fleet of valen­tines from the out­er reach­es of eter­ni­ty into the here-and-now of my heart. And in case any­one is won­der­ing, the age of the Methuse­lah star was recal­cu­lat­ed as 4.5 billion—give or take 800 mil­lion years—which would put it at slight­ly younger than the uni­verse, if we go with a minus sign.
__________________
INSPIRATION

Bar­tels, Meghan. “Cot­ton Seeds Sprout on Moon’s Far Side.” Space.com, 15 Jan­u­ary 2019, www.space.com/43012-china-cotton-seed-moon-far-side-chang-e4.html.

David, Leonard. “Chi­nese Rover and Lan­der Sur­vive 1st Frigid Night on Moon’s Far Side.” Space.com, 1 Feb­ru­ary 2019, www.space.com/43192-china-farside-moon-mission-survives-lunar-night.html.

Peter­son, Eugene. A Long Obe­di­ence in the Same Direc­tion. West­mont, IL: IVP Press, 1980.

Wall, Mike. “Strange ‘Methuse­lah’ Star Looks Old­er than the Uni­verse.” Space.com, 7 March 2013, www.space.com/20112-oldest-known-star-universe.html.

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phy­la of Joy (Tupe­lo, 2012), Ardor (Tupe­lo, 2008), and In Medias Res (Sara­bande, 2004), win­ner of the Nor­ma Far­ber First Book Award. She authored two nov­els, Sonata in K (Ellip­sis, 2017) and The Maze of Trans­paren­cies (Ellip­sis, 2019). Lee’s trans­la­tions of Li Qingzhao’s writ­ing, Dou­bled Radi­ance: Poet­ry & Prose of Li Qingzhao (Singing Bone, 2018), is the first vol­ume in Eng­lish to col­lect Li’s work in both gen­res. Her book of lit­er­ary crit­i­cism, Anglo­phone Lit­er­a­tures in the Asian Dias­po­ra: Lit­er­ary Transna­tion­al­ism and Translin­gual Migra­tions (Cam­bria, 2013), was select­ed for the Cam­bria Sino­phone World Series. The recip­i­ent of a Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts Grant, Lee is a vot­ing mem­ber of the Nation­al Book Crit­ics Cir­cle. Cur­rent­ly, she lives in San Diego, where she serves in the admin­is­tra­tion at Point Loma Nazarene University.

Poetry / W. Todd Kaneko and Amorak Huey

:: Axl Reads Proust on a Transatlantic Flight ::

/ There is no line between sea, sky. / No hori­zon between what we are, what we become; between fin­ger and string, body and song, book and read­er. / On the aisle you sleep, dream­ing prob­a­bly of sun­glass­es or hats or small pills, and though this tour stretch­es ahead as evi­dence that speak­ing the same lan­guage isn’t the only route to under­stand­ing / though we face anoth­er fugi­tive year of try­ing, our last verse has been writ­ten, our mem­o­ries have been mapped. / Out the win­dow, off-white sky blurs against off-white ocean as if some­one has ren­dered the day with a sin­gle col­or of paint. / What appears to be the bot­tom is not the bot­tom. / There is always some­where deep­er, cold­er, salti­er. / Per­haps your name is not the acci­dent you say it is. / Per­haps all bor­ders are fleet­ing, all part­ing inevitable. / The plane angles north toward dis­tant ice, tak­ing advan­tage of a wind we can­not see. /

:: Slash and Mr. Spock Sitting in the Waffle House at the End of the Universe ::

In the dying light of the final star,
there will be breakfast at that last
truck stop between here and oblivion,
 
a pair of quasars sunny side up,
a bundle of flimsy bacon and a bottle
of Jack Daniels. Spock can’t help
but admire that hue and ooze
of yolk, that way an egg is all
 
things—an embryo, a planet, a goop
of sunshine with a prehistoric bob
and quiver for the fork. Outside,
the truckers shake their heads
at the loads that won’t ever reach
 
their destinations: dilithium crystals
burned out for warp drives, wall clocks
with hands stuck forever at ten and two,
cans of chili con carne and cling peaches,
 
their expiration dates now irrelevant.
The Vulcan takes a slug of whiskey
as he observes Slash preparing to eat
a waffle, pouring syrup into every crevice
without spilling any onto the plate.
 
Just eat it, Spock says. At any moment
we could tumble ass over ashes, collapse
back into that cosmic dust that spawned
us in the vacuum. Slash takes a first bite
and wipes a dribble of syrup from his chin
on his sleeve. That’s rock and roll, he says
with his mouth full. Spock cannot argue logic
for the supernova, reason for catastrophe,
appetite for the eater of worlds.


 

:: Axl Paints a Watercolor of Slash ::

The medi­um is the messi­ness hard to tell when one song ends the next begins hard to know whether it mat­ters the blur of maples arranged along dis­tant hori­zon whis­pers grumpi­ly into the pale ear of the sky every­thing reminds me of smeared lip gloss the col­ors nev­er so bright as they are in my head the music nev­er so loud vis­i­ble brush strokes the fin­ger­prints of god gui­tar strings the let­ters of your name spi­der across the world the way they were meant to be writ­ten there are always moun­tains some­times the moun­tains are sil­ver some­times they look like skulls.

From the writer

:: Account ::

The poems in our Slash project were col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly writ­ten. That is, one of us wrote the ini­tial draft and then placed it in a file we both could access, and we each revised and adjust­ed until the ini­tial draft was gone and in its place a new poem that was not mine or yours, not his or the oth­er his, but ours. It required a great deal of let­ting go, of set­ting ego aside and work­ing in ser­vice of the poem.

These poems draw from music, from lone­li­ness, from long­ing, from Guns N’  Ros­es, and from what it was like to be alive in a met­al age.

W. Todd Kaneko is the author of The Dead Wrestler Ele­gies (Curb­side Splen­dor, 2014) and This Is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), and co-author of Poet­ry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthol­o­gy (Blooms­bury Aca­d­e­m­ic, 2018). A Kundi­man fel­low, he is co-edi­tor of the online lit­er­ary jour­nal Waxwing and lives in Grand Rapids, Michi­gan, where he teach­es cre­ative writ­ing at Grand Val­ley State University.

Amorak Huey, a 2017 Nation­al Endow­ment for the Arts Fel­low, is author of the poet­ry col­lec­tions Seduc­ing the Aspara­gus Queen (Cloud­bank Books, 2018), Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sun­dress, 2015), and Boom Box (Sun­dress, 2019), as well as two chap­books. He is co-author of the text­book Poet­ry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthol­o­gy (Blooms­bury, 2018) and teach­es at Grand Val­ley State University.

Poetry / Sara Henning

:: My Mother Comes Back as a Dragonfly ::

I swear I saw      a bruised moon heat      some angel re-born     
in carnival glass     she was throwing shade from the junk store window          
strung out on fishing twine         some kitsch bird-of-paradise       
some tchotchke mama      flaunting a luminous       vintage thorax                  
I watched her    pivot      all done up with light      her compound eyes	     
twin disco balls      I still want the jewel tones      glinting from her spine     
to blow the sky open        I want the blaze      that means the dead 
no longer haunt      the coordinates of our world       and if we say         
the dead are only intransitive	      do they still seek a signifier?        
My mother      died two Mays ago      and I’m locking eyes with glass
some dime store effigy    hocked on clearance        I’m chump enough 
to believe        still holds her      some hoodoo grace   you could call it 
steeping every memory     I revise here as though     wanting a thing    
could make the act      (of wanting it)      simpler   than touch    Once I 
couldn’t stop searching    for the sheer breach of it   on my grandmother’s 
persimmon tree        the naked devotion      of simply witnessing    
(does that make it simple?)     a carapace slit open    a ghost-colored interloper  
easing its wings     from the breathing sarcophagus     knitted to a branch    
I watched the old eyes     go dead     but you could say      it was lovely   
the belly downright swindled     from its old skin    the muscles in the thorax    
all shiver   and blind urge    you could say   I was watching a spirit   jettison    
from its last known instar       gussy itself up      for flight    my mother 
once said    dragonflies are the spirits     of our lost ones     returned to us    
that when her uncle died     they thronged in swarms   by the mailbox    
the juniper garden just lit up        with them    like stars      she said  
that would land in her braid      churn their wings       with such fury    
she couldn’t unhear      the rusted-bicycle-spoke sound of it    until she 
was persuaded     that every iridescent body    is a soul come home  
it is said          that the dragonfly nymph          is a predator underwater     
and because science is shameful      its flight cycle lasts weeks   
not years     but these facts      don’t stop me from trusting    
that the dead need stories      to keep them iridescent      yes     my mother 
comes back to me     but not like eggs     on the sheen of water   
a version of herself feeding in the dark                she does not perch    
on persimmon trees    to sass the spirit     twisting out of her   last known body       
she does not shimmy her wings      just to show off       a reckoning       
much stronger than silk    I’m trying to say      that glimmer haunting me         
at the junk store window   is a fool’s errand   a trickster medicine     I can’t 
talk myself out of believing      I’m sorry      the dazzle of someone else’s 
lost splendor   brings me to my knees         when I say that angel    
was the winged thing      slipped out of my mother      I’m only saying       
my mother is dead          God help me                my mother is dead 

From the writer

:: Account ::

My moth­er died in 2016 of stage 4 metasta­t­ic ade­no­car­ci­no­ma, oth­er­wise known as colon can­cer. It had trans­ferred from her colon to her womb, to her liv­er, to her lungs, then final­ly back to her liv­er, and she final­ly died from com­pli­ca­tions due to liv­er necro­sis. She chose to keep the news of her can­cer from me for two years. I found out the night she called me in the midst of a post-oper­a­tive hal­lu­ci­na­tion from pain medication—she believed she had been stolen by a man in a van and tak­en to his house. She believed he was cut­ting her open and stitch­ing her closed to show a tox­ic rela­tion­ship to mas­cu­line dom­i­na­tion. After sher­iffs were alert­ed and her call was tracked, we found out she had placed the call from the hos­pi­tal. We found out the man she believed to be her abuser was her oncol­o­gy nurse. These poems doc­u­ment the pain of los­ing a moth­er to can­cer, the pain that stems from untruths, and how one may find one­self in the ret­ro­spec­tive glance of grief every­where one turns.

Sara Hen­ning is the author of two vol­umes of poet­ry, most recent­ly View from True North (South­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty Press, 2018), win­ner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Poet­ry Open Prize. In 2015, she won the Crazy­horse Lyn­da Hull Memo­r­i­al Poet­ry Prize, judged by Alber­to Ríos, and most recent­ly, she is the win­ner of the 2019 Poet­ry Soci­ety of America’s George Bogin Memo­r­i­al Award. She has pub­lished poems in many jour­nals and antholo­gies, most notably Quar­ter­ly West, Crazy­horse, Wit­ness, Merid­i­an, and the Cincin­nati Review. She teach­es writ­ing at Stephen F. Austin State Uni­ver­si­ty, where she also serves as poet­ry edi­tor for Stephen F. Austin State Uni­ver­si­ty Press. Please vis­it her at her elec­tron­ic home: https://www.sarahenningpoet.com.

Poetry / Carolyn Guinzio

:: The Better Part of an Hour ::

The plane was bump­ing across the sky so we raised the arm­rest between us and tried to find mean­ing our neighbor’s Jaguar was a sym­bol of mean­ing­less con­sump­tion but my expen­sive purse was not it’s the inter­rup­tion you see they say it takes twen­ty min­utes to recov­er from each one and they seem to arrive twen­ty min­utes apart if you timed them as though they were con­trac­tions you were born in a stor­age clos­et because no one believed it was real­ly hap­pen­ing no one can ever real­ly grasp that it’s hap­pen­ing because it isn’t at least not now the screens all began to blink and we’d been sweep­ing our eyes over the sea of screens where the means of cop­ing was gen­er­al all over the plane with gra­di­ent changes in tone between super­heroes and friends but it did hap­pen once and then it hap­pened again the nurse scream­ing James can you hear me in his face and no one ever called him James only Jim or Jim­my to his par­ents to his sis­ter already gone and his broth­er now gone but every­one else said Jim and oh love I have not always been good to you but I feel the life in your arm now your hand and we are a we and the screens are sta­t­ic in their light

:: Where One Breath Ended and the Next Began ::

Listen: The field 
looks like a field, 
but water is flowing 
through it—ghost

water shuttling 
grains of red earth. 
Two of them at a time 
make a micro-

scopic glint 
in your beam,
mirroring the faint 
heads of Gemini.

We use light to tether 
dirt to stars, 
fashioning meaning 
out of the barred

owl we didn't
know was watching. 
Listen: Two mortals 
facing off behind

the field. Behind 
the water, the sound 
of talon or of tooth.
A yellowing

hook moon sank
or swung to another 
bit of exhalation- 
heavy sky, the smoky

case of our sphere. 
Someone will pick 
up where another 
left off, catching

a breath as it trails 
away into
not nothingness 
but being.

From the writer

:: Account ::

These poems are part of a mul­ti­me­dia project about bor­ders called Fault. The sequence, which received an Artists 360 Work-in-Progress Grant, con­sists of poems, hybrid writ­ing, short films, sound exper­i­ments and pho­to-col­lages. From the start, my inten­tion was to explore the idea of a bor­der in many sens­es, not mere­ly polit­i­cal or geo­graph­ic bor­ders, and the absur­di­ty of draw­ing a line between one thing and the next. I’ve seen ants defend­ing ter­ri­to­ry on the small­est of scales. Grains of dirt are kicked back and forth across the line.

The pieces are con­cerned with bor­ders best described as philosophical—between human and ani­mal, earth and sky, sky and space. Is there a spe­cif­ic sec­ond, when the heart stops, that the line between life and death is crossed, when one sec­ond ends and the next begins, or are things more flu­id than that? Like the bor­der between real­i­ty and mem­o­ry, per­cep­tion and real­i­ty, between what is actu­al­ly occur­ring and what you are think­ing about as it does? Some of the pieces in the project are meant to reflect the cacoph­o­ny we con­tend with in our dai­ly lives and how, no mat­ter how open one wish­es to be, some­thing must be built to fos­ter focus and com­pre­hen­sion. We live as if we’re in a room with many peo­ple speak­ing at once, and if we want to hear any of them, we have to block the oth­ers out. The poems attempt to cling to a thread of mean­ing amidst num­ber­less attempts to work the men­tal grasp free. From square inch­es of earth to galax­ies, they are try­ing to con­front both begin­ning and end from a sphere sus­pend­ed in the unknowable.

Car­olyn Guinzio’s poems have appeared in The New York­er, AGNI, Har­vard Review, Bomb, Boston Review, and many oth­er jour­nals. Her sixth col­lec­tion is How Much of What Falls Will Be Left When It Gets to The Ground (Tol­sun Books, 2018). Among her pre­vi­ous books are Ozark Crows (Spuyten-Duyvil, 2018), Spoke & Dark (Red Hen, 2012), win­ner of the To the Lighthouse/A Room of Her Own Prize, and Quar­ry (Par­lor, 2008).

Poetry / Hussain Ahmed

:: Reincarnation ::

the jinn that sits in my mother’s body is of a distant time zone.
she made tea in the night for all her unseen guests.

her tongue was a deserted ranch where nothing edible could grow,
she said the sky would swallow us all if she doesn’t keep guard. 

all our shadows could grow as tall as ten feet, but no one waters it.
mama’s shadow stops growing because she stops sleeping at night.

we sought refuge in the barracks anytime she sets our house on fire
or when the new angel in town was lynched to death. we panicked and left the house

all our windows opened, our sign of allegiance to the governance of the land
beyond the sky. I asked mama what would happen to the ghosts of all our dead

if they come home and find only the ruins of all that should remind them that we say dua’a 
in their names. She said let the curfew end, we will find a way to build back our walls.

curfew is our way of mourning all what could not be buried, because they turn ashes 
in the fire. the debris suggests where the fire started and it’s not the kitchen. 

I scribbled the names of all my dead aunties on the wall, I listed their favorite fruits
beside their names, with the thought that nothing has changed about them.

From the writer

:: Account ::

The poem “Rein­car­na­tion” was inspired by my mother’s sto­ries of how every Thurs­day night all our dead return back to life to come check on their liv­ing fam­i­lies. The sto­ries were to encour­age us say prayers for all our dead before we slept, and they end­ed up scar­ing us. I grew up argu­ing with my sib­lings about how loud dog bark­ing in the night were a sign that val­i­dat­ed our moth­er’s sto­ries of rein­car­na­tion. How­ev­er, I used to believe that our dead have signs that help them track our hous­es with­out los­ing their ways. I wrote the poem about the thought I once had about whether we lose any of the ghosts of our dead if the house gets burnt dur­ing a cri­sis and if they ever stop com­ing because we became scared to hear about them.

Hus­sain Ahmed is a Niger­ian writer and envi­ron­men­tal­ist. His poems are fea­tured or forth­com­ing in Prairie Schooner, Cincin­nati Review, The Jour­nal, Mag­ma, Bay­ou Mag­a­zine, and else­where. His chap­book was short­list­ed for the Hon­ey­suck­le Press, Black Riv­er con­test, and elsewhere.

Poetry / Aremu Adams Adebisi

:: Crowding-out Effect ::

the crowd mopped my tears with phatic decimation.
the crowd scraped the olive oil on my skin with a strigil.

the crowd contended that flames are infectious
and suggested we both apprentice them, me

with a subject body, they with their predicate tongues.
the crowd engineer my mind, my brain, my thought

-process, everywhere thinking is they converge
to galvanize me into them. i am afraid the crowd

may turn mob pretty soon, so i sheathe my strangeness
like a ship's bottom protected from barnacles.

only the dead are unruffled by loudness, as the living
pay the price of breath heaving to breathe again.

the crowd are those i share an affinity with, yet they
abound in differences that call for spades and graves.

we will rather see us dead than share in human diversity.
belief is a worrying affect, sticking like leeches to the skin.

you say “come to me, come to me, i will wrap you in my robe,
put the flames off.” but you are the crowd without a sanctuary.

From the writer

:: Account ::

As an under­grad­u­ate of Eco­nom­ics in my final year, I touch on a lot of per­spec­tives, espe­cial­ly relat­ing the social sci­ences to lit­er­a­ture. I hold the con­vic­tion that eco­nom­ics is more like lit­er­a­ture, poet­ry espe­cial­ly, with its con­cept of human behav­iourism. For exam­ple, once a lec­tur­er came into class and was talk­ing about the crowd­ing-out effect, which orig­i­nal­ly means the gov­ern­ment infring­ing on ven­tures that would have been left to the mar­ket. But the moment this lec­tur­er was say­ing this, I got a whole new per­spec­tive to it, a whole new dimen­sion: a per­spec­tive not far away in mean­ing from the orig­i­nal mean­ing the con­cept has. In fact it was like a com­ple­men­tary aspect to it. Crowd­ing-out here, there­fore, should be seen as the pres­sure of the pub­lic on the indi­vid­u­als, the sub­jec­tive per­cep­tions that every­one are expect­ed to live by, incon­sid­er­ate of indi­vid­ual unique­ness. More like infring­ing on indi­vid­ual rights, like the gov­ern­ment does to ven­tures. The poem affirms the need for an indi­vid­ual under­stand­ing towards tol­er­ance, which unfor­tu­nate­ly is lack­ing, even in the most trust­wor­thy ones among us.

Are­mu Adams Ade­bisi is a North-Cen­tral Niger­ian writer, an under­grad­u­ate of eco­nom­ics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ilorin, and an author of works inspired by nat­ur­al vast­ness, published/forthcoming in Lucent Dream­ing, Thim­blelit­mag, Third Wednes­day Mag­a­zine, The Cathex­is North­west Press, Terse Jour­nal, and else­where. He curates ART­moster­rif­ic and serves as an Asso­ciate Edi­tor for Elar­tinia Mag­a­zine. He has appeared in the Best ‘New’ African Poets Anthol­o­gy and 20.35 Africa’s Anthol­o­gy of Con­tem­po­rary Poet­ry. He tweets as @aremudamsbisi and is a lover of sun­birds and sunflowers.