Your Custom Text Here
Kelly Emmrich is an illustrator and animator living and working in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her work has appeared in the Magazine 'Moonhood Magazine,' and 'The Emerald.' She studied creative writing and animation at the University of Mary Washington. She is currently working as a beer label designer for a microbrewery in Afton, Virginia.
The current pace of human-caused carbon emissions is increasingly likely to trigger irreversible damage to the planet
Humans cannot survive prolonged exposure to certain combinations of heat and humidity
highly populated regions of the world will be rendered uninhabitable sooner than previously thought
Dying Words
(“America,”
my
parasite
Dying Words
(the sky is fire (shed your skin
(soul of bullets, soul of cash
Dying Words
panic farm, sizzling burger sky (burst of cash,
burst of death (I had no right to want (I wanted
all the time, I wanted everything (my money,
my body, my oil
Dying Words
(I don’t see
how I can
help you
(bright air
(fire tsunami
(we don't even have
society
Dying Words
(where did you learn to smile (the bill
is due (I was exploding (I was my
twin
(we
have till
Dying Words
(prepare to
treat
patients
without
masks or
Dying Words
hands
(animal
populations
fell sixty
percent
Dying Words
(pleading with
judges
to stay
in
Dying Words
our
homes
(I was the human
game is breaking
Dying Words
(I was you hate what was called
human (I was please I am on your
side, please (we’ve wiped out
perhaps 90 percent of the
big fish
Dying Words
(the world is gone the world
is back (I am not who
I am
Dying Words
(some Americans seem to think,
some Americans seem, some (every
person, every last one, felt death for
the first time
Dying Words
(sky soft metal
(sky soft ice (part
of the truth you
can't
speak
1
Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include The Body Ghost (Coffee House Press, 2018), Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011), and Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007). Lease’s poems “‘Broken World' (For James Assatly)" and “Send My Roots Rain" were anthologized in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Lease’s poem “‘Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was anthologized in The Best American Poetry (Robert Creeley, Guest Editor). His poem “Free Again (Why don’t people)” was published in The New York Times. Lease is a Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts.
A
doença anda aí (rondando os da minha idade)
não sei o que tem esta idade que
tanto apraz à doença
(mesmo aqueles que a vencem ficam
com o corpo
avariado). Esta dor que hoje sinto
ontem não estava ainda
(vai procurando lugar como
quem desafia a paciência)
qual figura de xadrez saltando daqui
para
aqui. Os meus amigos telefonam para
se queixar da doença (com o entibiar dos dias
todos vão
perdendo peças)
quem de nós nunca morreu que atire
a primeira terra.
Illness
lurks nearby (circling my age group)
I don’t know why my age attracts
so much disease
(even those who overcome it remain
with damaged
bodies). This pain I feel today
wasn’t here yesterday
(keeps looking for a spot as
if testing my patience)
like a chess piece moving around from here
over to
here. My friends call me to
complain about diseases (as the days get warmer
each of them
starts losing pieces)
let whoever among us has never died throw
the first clump of dirt.
Nos prédios bombardeados (por exemplo: nos Balcãs)
é fácil de figurar as
caixas em que vivemos. Blocos altos sem fachada
(desde os dias da guerra)
tornam-no mais evidente: celas cúbicas exíguas
às quais falta uma parede–
essa que dá para a fuga
que mostra a liberdade. Mas isso é
nos sítios da
guerra. Nos lugares em paz os banqueiros
(e os cobradores de impostos)
brincam com os moradores
(privando-os de quatro paredes!)
como quem brinca às casinhas com
uma casa de bonecas
dessas que há nos museus ricos do Norte
da Europa.
In the bombed-out buildings (for example: in the Balkans)
it is easy to imagine which
boxes we live in. High blocks without façade
(since the days of the war)
make it all the more evident: miniscule cubic cells
each missing a wall–
the one that points to the escape
that shows freedom. But that is
in the crosshairs
of war. In the places where there’s peace the bankers
(and the tax collectors)
play with the locals
(depriving them of four walls!)
like someone playing with one of those
doll houses
the ones on display at the rich museums of
northern Europe.
«Let the grass grow over our footprints»
CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ
I am the grass.
Let me work.
CARL SANDBURG
Os vagões que aqui chegavam
partiram para outros lugares. O madeiro dos barracos
(onde os mantinham à espera)
não resistiu às estações. Nenhuma
coluna de cinza os leva (em nuvem) pelo ar.
Não há olor a queimado (nem
gritos sob o silêncio) na
plataforma puída ninguém aparta ninguém. As
próprias câmaras de gás (hoje
um monte de ruínas) podiam passar a ideia de que
nada se passou. Mas eles já
vestem de negro para não deixar esquecer.
Sobre a erva que renasce (e faz
por cobrir o passado) os corvos velam a morte
colhendo provas de vida
(restos de biologia:)
sementes
vergonha
aqua lacrimae.
«Let the grass grow over our footprints» CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ
I am the grass.
Let me work.
CARL SANDBURG
The rail cars that arrived here
left for other locations. The wood planks that made up the shacks
(where they kept them waiting)
did not survive the seasons. No
column of smoke takes them (as a cloud) through the air.
There is no burnt odor (no
screams under the silence) on the
threadbare platform no one is rounded up. The
gas chambers themselves (today
a heap of ruins) could certainly convey the idea that
nothing happened at all. But they
all dress in black so that no one forgets.
Over the grass that grows back (and tries
to cover the past)the crows keep watch over death
pecking out the proofs of life
(the remnants of biology:)
seeds
shame
aqua lacrimae.
João Luís Barreto Guimarães was born in Porto, Portugal in June 1967 where he graduated in medicine. He is the author of 13 poetry books and anthologies such as Mediterranean (Mediterrâneo, Lisbon, Quetzal, 2016) chosen for the National Award António Ramos Rosa 2017 for best poetry book edited in Portugal in 2016, also finalist for the Camaiori International Prize 2018 in Italy, and Nomad (Nómada, Lisbon, Quetzal, 2018) chosen for the Best Poetry Book of the Year Bertrand Award 2018. His poems have been published in anthologies and literary magazines in 19 countries and have appeared in the International Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The London Magazine, Salamander, Anima, Asymptote, The Chaattahoochee Review, Ezra Translation, The Cortland Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The Columbia Review, ANMLY, World Without Borders, Poetry London and World Literature Today.
António Ladeira was born in Portugal in 1969. He currently lives in Lubbock, USA, where he is an Associate Professor of Portuguese and Spanish at Texas Tech University. He holds a Licenciatura degree in Portuguese Studies from Nova University in Lisbon, and a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California in Santa Barbara. He taught at Middlebury College and Yale University and he was a visiting researcher at the Universidade de São Paulo, in Brazil. He has published five volumes of his own poetry in Portugal and two books of short stories in Portugal, Brazil and Colombia. He is also a lyricist for Jazz singer Stacey Kent.
Calvin Olsen is an internationally published poet and translator. He holds an MA in English and Comparative Literature and an MFA in Creative Writing. He has taught English, composition, creative writing, and comparative literature at Boston University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Bunker Hill Community College. He is currently an optician and social media manager in addition to his work as a freelance copywriter and editor. Calvin’s work has appeared in AGNI, Tampa Review, The Baltimore Review, International Poetry Review, The London Magazine, and many others. A former Robert Pinsky Global Fellow and recent Pushcart Prize nominee, Calvin now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he is poetry editor for The Carolina Quarterly
This video poem is based on an excerpt from the poem “Memento Mori” from Later, Knives & Trees.
Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of Later, Knives & Trees; Mirror Inside Coffin; Mantic; Apparition Wren (also a Spanish Edition translated by Mario Domínguez Parra); and several chapbooks. She is the winner of the Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award through the Hawaii Council for the Humanities, Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award, among others. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prize on numerous occasions. Her poems and reviews have appeared in various journals including The Laurel Review, TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, AGNI, Blackbird, Tampa Review, Action Yes, Drunken Boat, The Kenyon Review, Rain Taxi, the Rumpus, Anomaly, and featured on Verse Daily. Her translations of the poetry of Juana de Ibarbourou (Uruguay, 1892-1979) and Mario Domínguez Parra are available through Poetry Salzburg Review. She teaches online with the Poetry Barn and is the book editor for Poemeleon.
Among the raucous ralliers,
sat a man more still
than rest—a heron waiting
knee-deep in lake
among marauding gulls—
as the Narcissus
who would be king
made love to his own polemic
the people reflected
like whitewater.
The placid man
did not react on cue—
not cheering with his fellows,
not laughing, not waving
a sign, perhaps listening
intently to the speaker—
but more likely,
to some inner piper
inviting wandering—
not shouting agreement
or invective, as they all
were exhorted, not praising
his invisible clothes,
as the would-be emperor
spoke of all they should
fear and loathe—
the man’s face
wore an expression
of hope that shone
like a lone flashlight
in a mansion
the lack of power
made dark.
I.
Dark as an overcast night,
licorice, ink, ravens, outer space.
Let me see the beauty
in crows mowing silence
like hundred rusty tractors,
or a crowd calling for murder—
and the peace in sleeping
in my closed eyes’ night,
the safety in waking
in darkness none may penetrate.
II.
In darkness none may penetrate,
lies dark money without which
less corrupt politicians might win;
less partisan judges be anointed,
less partial justice apportioned;
and privilege be less limited—
none yet have proved it.
can’t be infinite as space-time,
or imagination or grace—so, give it
like sun gives light to everyone.
III.
Like sun gives light to everyone,
dark matter gives gravity to galaxies
that would otherwise fly apart
from centers no longer holding.
Say eighty-five percent of matter is dark,
named for not interacting with light,
for being invisible—which is not the same
except in dark skin color in America,
America, where we can do more than hope
for the energy to change.
IV.
For the energy to change,
look to dark: sixty-eight percent
of everything, its endless potential
permeates space, accelerates
universal expansion, peels galaxies
from each other like dividing cells,
begetting new galaxies,
as rogue planets and ejected stars
roam the empty outer spaces,
in the dark energy of infinite possibility.
V.
In the dark energy of infinite possibility,
let freedom ring, in the World Wide Web,
in the deep, and dark web,
allowing us to be anonymous
if we wish, independent, but connected,
not indexed by search engines
or police states, free to navigate
information, communication,
to salve trials and tribulation,
as dark humor makes light of dark matters.
VI.
As dark humor makes light of dark matters,
lave me with a soft summer night,
warm air alive with a symphony
of invisible insects we never knew
kept humans from going extinct;
bathe me in the scent of peonies
and roses, of fungus and bark, of earth,
and grasses I can only guess at,
in the silken dusk I don like lingerie,
as I lay me down to sleep,
dark as an overcast night.
April Ossmann is the author of Event Boundaries (a finalist for the 2018 Vermont Book Award), and Anxious Music (both from Four Way Books) and has published her poetry widely in journals including New England Review, Colorado Review and Harvard Review, and in anthologies. Her poetry awards include a 2013 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant and a Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award. Former executive director of Alice James Books, she owns a poetry consulting business (www.aprilossmann.com), offering manuscript editing, publishing advice, tutorials, and workshops. She is a former faculty editor for the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Sierra Nevada College, and lives in Hartford, Vermont.
1.
On the beach on the Gulf
in Sarasota in
2015. In the sand staring
at the waves listening
looking for the calm they can bring the sound their breathing rings
in and in to
chase the unwavering
hum it thrums out
an unending movement out
of which the rythmós:
more than just matter
moving, more than pulse of
blood: the air the light:
the waves the distance:
flesh and world awash in
sensation streaming to hush
the unceasing hum
in and in
and buzzing out about my cranium this thrum
not the drone hovering over
the post-Katrina Gulf, Deep Horizon, Long Island
after Sandy, the ricochets of Sandy Hook or Charleston
(my father, Charles Edgerton,
only months
deceased), nor the scream of men
dead from their blackness
lit up
by blue fire,
nor the whir
over the discounted in Baghdad,
in Fallujah, fleeing Syria (incalculable), no, at this tick
it only my small monotone it
my sharp Theremin whine it
only my unrelenting regret, a lung ever emptied out,
only my petty, anxious, welling need, my dislocated it
id-itch
always for more
or less than
fullness or negation
ever rivering
( Ocean )
( Ocean )
( Ocean )
2.
The beach for the waves for the calm.
But nothing
but distraction—screeching
children, tourists
splashing, walking
the wet edge (the dry sand
so hot it hurts), feet
submerge in, emerge from
over and over in
measure, bag and book and
chair in hand—chasing
an impossible isolation
insulation from the hum
it pulling. Turning
from the voices, the aureate water,
my head I try to sink in
a book just slides off as if
frozen.
And so I give in
and swipe on
my phone to window shop
on Grindr for the
impoverished consolations
of an improvised encounter
in which to escape
it can’t escape it
it buzzes—
Looking?
So tired
of my diminishing need to be
wanted, my taunting desire
for more and more than
( Ocean )
( Ocean )
( Ocean )
for less and less than
the Gulf
*
warm rhythm laps against
skin muscle tissue and sinew
extending compressing promising
to release you
to the shore you beat are beaten against:
that line you cannot pass to reach for:
that horizon beyond beach beyond city and
sea:
sometimes to be
only body, any mere part, eye
or ear, cock or hole—push and pulse—and so
ocean
so sex so
the resonance of your singing
you wholly the sound the force:
rythmós rippling face throat chest
nothing more, nothing less: the music
you forge with words, your mind
the body
of the letter shaping page forming sound vibrating through
your head only the poem
for a time it satiated it satiates it it
needs need it wants want it-it more It
saved my life
a poet once told me
after a reading in New Orleans
Poetry saved my life said the same poet’s
poet brother in Providence,
dead despite it
or from it it-it will cross it
( As I write this )
( another poet )
( out )
3.
And in bursts Creeley,
his memorial at St. Mark’s, 2005, his poem, that line, her reading
she struck me
a wall crashing over the pews
again and again over
the years, the decade since, that sentence
in that poem of his I feared
to ask her to name to show
my ignorant ass I should
just read
every last one to see them
lining up to break
in my head
again and again
that they not be
my deathbed words
I want to
be in
my life
C.D. at the podium, her grain
a flintish fiddlefunk of quartz against
the steel of the blank
sparking, as singular
as her tone,
echoing in my head now
as I write this
in the fledging sun
of 2016,
she only two weeks gone.
( I want )
( I want )
( I want )
I poetry
she wrote
and I wonder
at every inflection of it striking against
our depleted eyes, our slighted ears, our dumbed flesh
can’t help but wonder (if only I could unmind) if
I am I do I will
be, myself, or unbeknownst already am
in my want in
my life: my poetry: cannot
correspond
one to one in the sand.
I wonder
how poetry
happened in
to this poem, how C.D.,
how memories of poets
only memory and their poems now.
And their poems, too, will one day cede.
I remember her reading my New Orleans sequence
so generously
outside of class, talking work with me, my struggle:
how to write
about Katrina,
transplanted only a year when it hit,
she sharing her own
with her current project (2005)
about her mentor, “V” (honor of my life
to know her, she said),
not knowing
where it would lead her, how it would hew the page, hitting up
against uncooperative elements, it was a fight it was
relief and liberation for a young poet to see, and then to see her
win with One with Others and now
( ShallCross )
( ShallCross )
( ShallCross )
4.
People packing up the last bits of day: their sand-clotted
clothes and wet towels: draining out
the exit: their umbrellas and coolers and
kids in tow: abandoning (but how)
the rubied water: the burning gulf: sky (so close now)
then the one
remaining incarnadine
streak sinks
beyond final or first,
and for one unsplit sunless instant: water-lit sky.
Then sudden night.
Almost nothing.
A knotted cloth.
No moon.
No stars.
No exit
sign no emergency
lights only wind.
Only soft sand
and sharp shells, my feet
wet flopping look
to look past
the wall of infinite-dense
space I bang against
for a door
and seeing
I’m alone,
unknowing
which way the street which way the car which way
unending shore.
Surge of
fear.
Then one un-split stillness opens inside the roar:
one faceless expanse
of voices ambling, aiming,
casting off:
all
( Wave Lilt )
( Pitch True )
( Hum Hush )
spar
spar
sparking against
the muted sharp
Dedicated to the memories of Robert Creeley, Michael Gizzi, and C.D. Wright, with gratitude for their teaching and writing. And to the memory of my father, with love.
Michael Tod Edgerton is the author of Vitreous Hide (Lavender Ink 2013). His poems have appeared previously in Interim, as well as in Boston Review, Coconut, Denver Quarterly, EOAGH, New American Writing, New Orleans Review, Posit, and Sonora Review, among other journals. He holds an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University and a PhD in English from the University of Georgia. A native of Lexington, KY, Tod teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San José State University and lives with his husband in the city that used to be San Francisco.
“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in “Circles,” one of the Sage of Concord’s more enigmatic meditations on spiral cosmology, “that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” Anticipating Whitman’s “If you want me again, look for me under your bootsoles,” and Thoreau’s “There is more day to dawn,” “There is no end in nature” is at once a recognition of the dynamism extant in any/every instant of being, a condemnation of the detestable human impulse to restrain or confine another, to fix another’s life to a cruelly rooted spot, and also a provocation—a challenge to not stop too long looking at oneself in any moment of reflection, lest we miss the next best thing just ahead. Emerson’s writing in “Circles” doesn’t garner the breathless fanfare of his transparent eyeball in “Nature,” or his exhortations to self-reliance, but as a reminder of the importance of looking forward, and not mistaking any moment of punctuation to be the end-all of time or space, it’s hard to beat.
Emerson’s open-eyed affirmation of the inexhaustibility of nature—and thus of us, of our materials, our forms—has sounded and resounded in my mind so often that it’s very likely physically imprinted behind my eyelids. I see the words when I’m not looking for them. And so it has been, from the very first time I read the line, after being recommended the piece, a lifetime ago, by my friend, Nathan Hauke. It is fitting, then, that Emerson’s formulation rose once again to the surface of my mind as I was reading (and rereading) Hauke’s most recent collection, Indian Summer Recycling (The Magnificent Field, 2019) this spring, as the whole feeling world felt to fall. Inside the convulsions of the year, the concept and practice of recycling have taken on a new charge, a keener edge, linked to survival, to perseverance; taken on the deeper, grittier meaning of the word’s true root, for better and for worse, as we seem doomed to repeat our own human history while also bearing witness to the ways in which the larger history of the universe plays out in our lives in unfolding repetitions. “Cycle’s” etymology speaks to an infinite circulating period, upon the intervallic completion of which certain phenomena return the same once again. It draws on the Old French cicle and pulls directly from the Late Latin cyclus, from Greek kyklos—speaks to a circular body, a wheel or returning celestial projection; it invokes circular motion, a cycle of events. Or, as Hauke frames it in “If somebody don’t help me”:
Language
s Torn
Weathered
Screen
Dewy
Mosquitos
…
Creation alone as each tree folded within
The gleaming ordonnance of wide evergreen rows
Grief you can’t see the end of
Stray feathers unsettled along the periphery
The rest is decomposition
To revolve. To move around. To see something once, and then see it again, anew, another way (as is apparent in the two simultaneous readings allowed concurrently in the last line of the poem above: 1) “All else is decomposition.” 2) “Decomposition is a kind of repose.”) This is what it feels like reading Indian Summer Recycling. Traipsing through the wilds and weeds of Hauke’s new book, tripping over “the irregularities of a web” (“Day swell (horsing around with a toy piano)”) catching a new appreciation of light as it shows itself through “Hole-punched leaves/ A greasy roottiller wed to wakefulness” (“Like a handsaw with a piece of black rag tied to the handle”). The reader is literally refreshed—the staid definitions and associations of a scene, of a word, of a tone, are abandoned and in the empty carapace of their form, new life finds footing. Like Emerson’s incitement in “Circles” that nothing is ever truly over, that the world, and the universe—as well as our hearts and our art—is always in a state of continual recycling, stars exploding lightyears away to say something to us, coalescing in the rare arithmetic of our peculiar lived bodies and consciousnesses, so too is the work in Hauke’s new collection a paean to place as place (and time) shifts beneath the poet’s feet. As he writes in “Day swell (horsing around with a toy piano)”:
It’s all in one ear
And out the other
………..
We’re hunkered down together in weeds like killdeer
To be harrowed by heat bleating through the irregularities of a web
To learn a song about old latticework
That’s worn dirty full of holes
Corroded aluminum pitched to weather headwinds
Verses a mangled roof that wouldn’t give
Kiss it goodbye
A luminous
Gold leaf
Falling
Two beats
After a sparrow
In Hauke’s work, echo is everything—nothing on the page or in the ground can be read as other than a palimpsest. Echo as philosophy (Thoreau: “The echo is, to some extent, original sound”). Echo as way of life. Echo, perhaps most vividly in these poems, as sonic ars poetica—all in one ear, and out the other, like how the very word “ear” above finds new aural home as resonance in “killdeer” a few lines later. This eponymous recycling is the philosophical and formal driving force animating Hauke’s new/old collection (as the weathered, Xeroxed journal pages that begin and end the book aver, this is a book born of an older book, born of books older themselves, and on and on). Compost is the principle, and the poetry in Indian Summer Recycling is as much about allowing things to break down and spread out entropically as it is the usual “creative” writing endeavor of generating new content. Material, for Hauke, is always near at hand. It can be, it is, literally anything:
INDIAN SUMMER RECYCLING
STALLION BELT BUCKLE
Dry leaves in grainy heat startled like a toy duck with a shredded orange bill
Time abandoned to eternity a knot unraveling
Melody that disintegrates through the same old fucked speaker
(“A dog wrings the neck for gladness”)
In fact, and thankfully, in Hauke’s work, there seems to be nothing new under the sun—every scene, every phoneme, is reborn and revised, again and again, from the level of the line to phrases that appear and disappear multiple times throughout the book, like repurposed twine wrapped through a bird’s beak, then its nest. Nothing is “new” because it doesn’t need to be. The binary of “old/new” is demonstrated in Hauke’s work as being ultimately little more than obstinate silliness, outdated, fallacious, needless, and the tool only of commercializing/consolidating power, if any tool at all. Nothing needs to be new if everything already is, Hauke tells us. We are all already hand-me-down stars.
However, it would be wrong to assume, with such a clear-eyed sense for how matter is made and remade, life born and reborn unto itself ad infinitum, that Indian Summer Recycling is therefore a book primarily composed of easy happiness or facile comfort. It isn’t. Some of the echoes here are devastating and disconcerting, to say the least (one of the most oft-repeated refrains in the text pertains to “The tender flow of sap and aluminum shine/ Windows cut into the barn like velvet/ Where X hung himself after he lost all the family money” (“Bury me deep”)). The tone here is threadbare, vocal-strained from holler, oxidized, effaced, and while much finds new purpose in the poet’s reordered eye (the barn where X hung himself is also framed in stunningly beautiful visual terms above, and elsewhere in the book), there is a fundamental understanding always beneath the surface of these poems that, in order to be recycled, something must die. I would hazard that it is precisely this sense—this awareness of death not as a threat, exactly, but as an ineradicable natural fact, commingling creation with its counterpart destruction, innocence with experience, heaven with hell, visible with the invisible, in coeval ways, always—that gives these poems their charge, their spark. While nothing is “new” in Hauke’s book, nothing comes easy, either, as we see in the collection’s opening poem:
Some people have it made and some people don’t
Funny dog named Pink (“Pank”) playing in the street near a blind corner
Metallic aftertaste of sunlight
Streaming through broken glass
Waking sawdust like smoke
Kid in the next room says, It’s a vampire
How do you write ghost rusty flowers
(“Like a handsaw with a piece of black rag tied to the handle”)
American poetry has long had an affinity for recovery, but it is very much an affinity rooted in a love of, or at least perpetual awareness of, death. This sensibility is inherited by Hauke in his poetry, and it electrifies otherwise straightforward lines with an eerie, wavy new significance. Vampires are the living/unliving dead, as Keats has nimbly pointed out, unable to hear new music or love because made to live forever, and thus completely divorced from the joys and pains of actually living. Like “a grape burst upon a palate fine,” in Keats’ formulation, being alive is bittersweet, both difficult outer skin and luscious inner flesh all at once, and this beguiling quality is lost on those who don’t intimately understand the prospect of loss in this life. That’s kind of the deal. The same street where a funny little dog plays has a blind corner, making it desperately dangerous, a collision waiting to happen. Even the rusty flowers are haunted. Some people have it made and some people don’t. Hauke never forgets that in order for something to be recycled—a summer, a substance, a book, a self—it must have, at one point or in one way, expired, outlived its previous usefulness, been thrown away in some way. It must have transitioned from one life or mode of living use to another. Which is, of course, a kind of blessing. But it is also a tragedy—or it certainly can feel that way to us in the living realm who must endure it. The emphasis in thermodynamics—the first law of which governs Hauke’s work at every turn—is not heat. It is motion. Dynamism changes things from what they once were, and depending on how you felt about those things, in that former form, this fact can land with radically different punch. Some people have it made and some people don’t.
But it would also be wrong to suggest that Indian Summer Recycling is essentially a sad book, a book overweighed with the heft of “Grief you can’t see the end of.” As much hardship as is read into lines like “Buoyed bright debris of personality/ Caught in rocks and roots all the way/ Coughed up shards of glass/ Meant to do better/ Rememberence a swollen hive/ Crawling with bees” (“Leaves where light carves your eyes”), and as rightly as we ought to feel empathy for a world where, “Like a sad dog’s face in the window/ You want to kiss it//You get lonely/ When other people are sick” (“Dog Creek”), the truth is that Hauke’s collection is as much shocking sunlight busting through rotten logs as it is the rotten logs themselves. It’s a collection that proves out time and time again that “Heaven is/ The perception/ Of heaven” (“Pastoral (years later)”). It’s a book of shed skin and new beginnings, even if the skin that was shed maybe was torn off, or was taken without our asking—a world where “A molted fawn surfacing through ragwort near the bank/ Picks its way toward a wet black nexus of barbs below the trailer/ Choral work as sunrise eats the wood she disappears into.” (“Bands of strata”) Sure, Hauke says, it’s not an easy heaven, this world, but that doesn’t make it any less heavenly. The line between ecstasy and terror, which is literally delineated in a poem like “Wakefulness more like a stammer,” is indeed a fine line, but for his part, Hauke foregrounds the ecstasy first and foremost, as in the beautiful “Shine an apple”:
You can hardly pick
Which record
Shines an apple
Will sharpen the needle
That ferries us
From one side/
To the other
Ceramic birds cackle near the handle
Oblivious to deer we startle from breakfast
It’s hap a bent corner post
Allows a body into the cemetery
For rest or winter grass
Which is to say, finally, this is a book about love, in its manifold states. What else is the embrace of hap above—of circumstance, of occasion, whatever it may be, of cemetery, even of death—if not a kind of arms-wide adoration? Hauke’s book blossoms from such affection. It is built on a love of the world, love of the other, love of words and of rough melodies and time. The fear that bubbles up in Indian Summer Recycling also stems from love, in a way: it is the fear that compounds when love compounds, proportional anticipation of loss linked to the amount and intensity of our care. There is love rippling through the very fabric of these poems, and there is music, played by a hand tendered with a sense of humility, an almost guarded outlook that feels hopeful, but also born of grief and difficulty. Doubt is a big part of these poems—stylistically, the very characteristic strike-through motif that book-ends and binds the collection, where a word is struck and then a replacement is often quite surprisingly appended, is a kind of revision, a kind of uncertainty. Certainty in these poems is recognized as a violence, and one with a quiver of attendant dangers, like oppression, delusions of grandeur and of superiority, and the profound poetic risk of not seeing the ever-shifting world, with all its joys and sorrows, that is always in front of you, and never standing still.
Elsewhere in “Circles,” Emerson agrees with Hauke’s overarching poetic worldview in fairly explicit terms. “Nature looks provokingly stable and secular,” Emerson writes, “but it has a cause like all the rest…Permanence is a word of degrees. Everything is medial.” In Indian Summer Recycling, Hauke proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is a poet who has internalized and personified this lesson of impermanence, this medial degree. The poems in this collection are both appreciations of an ephemeral world, and also lessons in how to gracefully comport oneself in an existence that never for a moment sits static. They are entreaties not to a better world, but this exact one, complete and broken down as it ever was, and will be. Indian Summer Recycling teaches a reader how to “Gallop wildly/ To compass a/ Turbulent center” (“Ridge cross horses”), and it feels like a gift that won’t stop—cannot stop—giving.
Eryn Green’s first book, Eruv (Yale University Press, 2014), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, and his second book, Beit (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2020), was recently published as the Editor’s Choice at New Issues. Currently an Assistant Professor in Residence at UNLV, where he is the Coordinator for the World Literature Program, Eryn lives near the desert with his wife and daughter.
It’s a September summer and we’re on our porch at midnight. We take turns spitting pits, seeing
who can launch theirs the furthest. We are never unhappy together. Not when the thunder gets
loud, or one of us does something questionable to ourselves.
Moist Guinness bottles cling to our thighs. You taught me how to taste the full-bodied. How to
take a pit and weaponize it, which feels right as we swivel the fruit in our mouths. We separate
red flesh from stem too easy, like the stem was never important for the body’s growth. When we
finish you light your cigarette. I light something else. You talk about the lover 10,000 miles
away, how he places the weight of his grief on your chest alone. I talk about the boy 50 miles
away, who only knows who I am when the lights are on and we avoid politics. I sleep with him
anyway. This world is a mean one, we muse, but we don’t have to make it so for each other. We
will never stop our crying; it could lead us to the end of the world or to some underground
heaven, smelling like citrus and sunshine.
The outsides of our heels touch. Someone barbecues late; their grill smoke, like our porch
smoke, curls skyward in wisps. We collect scattered red pits in our palms. We stand, leaving
damp spots on the porch where our feet sweat through the wood.
Ola Faleti is a Chicago-based writer who loves her city. Her work has appeared in Jet Fuel Review, Hypertext Magazine, The Harpoon Review, Lunch Ticket, and elsewhere. She currently serves as the nonfiction editor for Vagabond City Lit. Ola's favorite number is 9.
At school, we
learned the cruelty
by heart—
his anguished face
and the supporting
players, pale
in the cloistered
dark, lined up
in stunned relief—
a story
we can’t stop
telling.
You hear it
before you
see it, low
end rattling
the chassis
loose, heavy
sound slowly
rolling it-
self apart.
•
Screaming, she
buries her face, he
throws up his hands
and swings around
as if to pull it all
down, Samson
in the temple, a few
pedestrians picking
their way now
among the ruins.
•
Excavators’ sharp
elbows swivel inside
a cloud of dust where
a building once was.
Daylight slants through
the shades, stripes laid down
on the floor, fallen dark
anthurium leaves
not one thing but another.
•
Just a Gigolo
a hollow inside
the song, the standard
stretched to shadow
itself, a handful
of notes
hanging on air.
•
Blinking into
the wind: is that
water’s shadow
on water or
a cormorant fishing
just off shore?
clouds’ massy
shadows marble
gray water, a
storm passing
over the dreamer’s
face, distances
swept by
a hem of light
•
midnight, lid
of the city’s
every eye
seems to drop
but one, a
neon sign
blinking at
this far corner
Once the movie’s
through, what’s left
is the projector’s
pale humming
square, sparks
of dust suspended
in the afterglow,
a hundred thousand
little pictures
coiled away now
in the dark, waiting
to be unspooled
again another
time, another place,
reeling suddenly
back to life
as we stumble out
over each other,
blinking one by one
into the light.
Patrick Morrissey is the author of The Differences (Pressed Wafer, 2014), World Music (Verge Books, 2017), and Light Box (Verge Books, forthcoming in 2021). His writing has recently appeared in The Nation, Bennington Review, Chicago Review, Volt, and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
2 poems
On our first date, you asked me about the woods
of my childhood, my thoughts on god.
We both agreed that it was a complicated question and
a simple one.
Then we were picking flowers, pressing their benign
weight between pages. In the days
we waited, I showed you a small, handmade
book, one I loved for how easy it seemed
to put together. You told me if you take two pieces of clear
tape, the flowers would be preserved.
Some stems had broken off, and some leaves were more
beautiful than other leaves, so we placed
flower heads with other stems, leaves with other
flower heads, and pressed
You tell me you make your own runes—
first you collect,
then you carve the symbol.
You use words on me,
words like engrave, divine.
Look, you say, casting the stones
smoothly over the table’s surface.
Close your eyes and feel.
I learn to choose.
We are three weeks old—
I want to pull the stone
that will tell me all about
love’s believing, that will articulate the process
of pulling, the way you
pulled pebbles from beneath
the water’s skin
because they felt right.
Brooke Sahni’s poetry and fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in magazines such as Denver Quarterly, The Journal, The Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She is the author of Divining (Orison Books, 2020), which won the Orison Chapbook Prize. She is from Cleveland, Ohio but lives in New Mexico.
3 poems
in which my brother spent the first two years of his life
screaming. So much so that my father was forced to trek
miles to the local zoo, listening to music so loud
he couldn’t hear his own child’s
misery. Musing, he remembers the same
baby backpack he himself had used was recalled years
later, after an infant had suffocated at its father’s back
long after my brother’s own death through the
windshield of a car that had nothing to do
with the model of baby backpack my father
was wearing or his fatigue or my brother’s breath
entering and leaving his body beneath the sound.
Thank God nothing happened, my father says, astonished.
And he is right. This would not have been the right moment
for my big brother to die. Before I was born, before
anything in my life could have ever
happened. And this is a love poem to the baby backpack,
anyway. To that tiny space between us
which kept us alive, for a time. The careless bound of the step
to music, the heat becoming on our soft
foreheads. Long enough at least to see the baby animals at the zoo
nestled against their mothers, to feel our fathers
sweating through their shirts onto our chests. To learn
our letters and attend to our mother’s breathing. This
is a love poem to the baby backpack, responsible for his dark
hair like mine. His slight figure. His absence beside me
which I’ll hear now and for the rest of my life. The shrieking
baby the throaty voice of brothers.
I can tell, as they tower over me, that these Teletubbies aren’t natural. Bibi smiles and heaves them
like convicts, dragging dust with limp ankles, colorful, beaming. I’ve asked for so much, but I
swear I never asked for this. So I close my eyes and imagine them aliens, maybe, or the once-
Iranian men who now wear flat-rimmed baseball caps and gold chains and watches. Who sit behind
us at a Mediterranean restaurant and spew racist jokes in Farsi about our waitress. My ears burn
for them. They must know how awfully they stand out. They must know that Papa and Bibi are
listening. Years later, I’ll attend a drag show at my arts school in Northern Michigan. I enjoy
myself, clapping my hands, awash in its sincerity. I wish I could sing and dance and become myself
this way. I wonder what Papa would say if he saw me enjoying this show unabashedly. If he’d
look at me the way he does when he finds me on the bathroom floor, still, breathing, or if he’d
stare as he does when he roams the halls, eyes open but markedly asleep, an alter ego we ascribe
to him only in the night, Bibi standing in the doorway.Bahram, come back to the house. To the
life-size animals, the monsters in the dark. I’ve never been one for the snapback of a newly minted
baseball cap, and this doesn’t mean I haven’t always wanted to be, just that my face is square
enough as it is. So maybe there is something I have in common with these Teletubbies, these once-
Iranian men, their heads that remind me of an astronaut’s, a body climbed inside a body or a corpse
torn apart. Assuming this is how the actors must enter their costumes, opening the spine, pushing
their heads through the naval, and, with their backs against my walls, forcing those darkened
eyelids wide open.
on the back deck of a house in a wood I once prayed for
and the stream dogging by and the dog streaming
in her own sun, my father maneuvering his hip bone like roots
the Yogi on-screen sings unfurling into the ground. I begin
to think of my great-grandfather, of my first mother,
a young girl watching him from beyond the door
pray his body in shapes and forms toward some kind
of God, his mustache flush to the ground, and wonder
whether or not my grandparents are real
Muslims, real Iranians. I suppose I could ask though
I’ve never entered a room and seen them bent to Mecca,
or to anything, my grandmother telling me she doesn’t need
some compass to show her which direction she should
face home, that my mother and brother are in every direction
and no direction at once, that she prays every second
of the day and whenever she needs to. She tells me
about birds and numbers and my great-grandmother
dying on her bed in Tehran, bringing my picture
to her coral lips. I feel warned. There will be many dark
and lovely ghosts because of my not going there. The way the earth
warns my Bibi of her body failing inside her a little more
each day, how close it is to rain, always holding an old
cigarette in her body’s mouth like an umbrella saying don’t you see,
Dada, we all go one way or another and I guess she is speaking
some sort of truth in that trail of smoke which shrouds
the dirge of her face, some sort of home. And I guess I should
be grateful. In my new home with my second mother
and back-deck and this woman commanding us to unfurl
with intensity, now, my father unfurling his entire being
as relaxed as he ever was. Soon, I’ll notice a tiny spider burrow into
the dark hair of my arm and I’ll leave it to its own, though
I hate the awful bulb of its body, so that I may watch as
the roots of its legs try and make a home there.
Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian-American poet and essayist. His work has appeared in Texas Review, Zone 3, Nimrod, Brevity, Crab Orchard Review, Cimarron Review and elsewhere. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including My Shadow is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press). Atefat-Peckham lives in Huntington, West Virginia and studies Creative Writing at Harvard College.
3 poems
When soft was the sun and Neruda was the night
I was twenty-five and keeping the secret—
a forbidden pet I fed from the contents
of my chest, and in that windy closet
it curled, a pulse of glistening fur.
Windy was the weather at twenty-five
when I wanted my skin to taste
the world and never wanted to sleep.
I nursed the secret into unearned joy
when soft was the sun and Neruda was the night,
but the years kept coming, exacting a debt
I’ll never repay. The more time you’re given,
my young husband says, the more you have
to lose. The rich don’t want to pay
taxes, and the middle-aged don’t want to die.
In too deep we must press on, for death never fit
so well as it did at twenty-five when you and I
swam naked at dusk in the reservoir.
poor sparrow lights
and the branch dissolves into ash
light is the sparrow
the path is the branch
dappling light through
the batting of leaves
an afterimage of splash and spark
squeezed across the retina
light through the leaves
dissolves the path, the branch
you’re suddenly up to your knees
in fern then thorn
grasping, squidlike
fastening to any soft flesh that moves
b-grade blue-gray
hand thrusts out of the loam
a crocus on speed
grabs a teen by the ankle
your time will come
when the desert slinks east
and Appalachia is a chapped lip
we will be unmanifested
unsheltered but in dinosaur time
after the trees still standing
in the Smokies after the Thanksgiving
fires have knit up their crowns
in a chlorophyll-soaked shade
oh, the dark oxygen they exhale!
words for wood that burns:
litard, fatwood, kindling, tinder
lapstrake, clinkerbuilt, clapboard, shelter
old English for shield and phalanx
we live and die so fast—
like flies to these rooted sentries
a tree has time to prepare
to burn through its sugar for a blowsy finale
before it is sapped
I hear spiders working
funnel webs in the grass
water drips from an unknown source
the tiniest bird charges the morning with song
jimmy jimmy jimmy
but the real music is the slipknot
of silence between trills
I know what inexorable feels like
the night train’s layered bass and percussion
the engine’s bellowy wheeze
through the round heart’s ta-chunk, ta-chunk
slowly the seas rise
slowly the trees sing
in the earth’s spring I will die
our children in its summer
this is not a poem of hope
but of wonder
at how dying can be
so damned beautiful
A story by way of introduction,
a story as proof you understand,
a story to connect, to stage a life, to misdirect—
this is none of those: I took what was offered
because finally it was offered. My longing
to be longed for was incorrigible. I didn’t know
what I wanted because I didn’t know—I guess
I wanted the bruises where they wouldn’t show
made by a stranger who was the friend of the boy
on the other side of the bathroom door, the boy
waiting for what? The boy whose idea this was.
Just back from Paris, he’d made friends
with the Englishman and made money for wine
drawing caricatures on the street. So I can see
how the girl I wanted to be said yes,
though being asked is only part
of what I don’t remember. The chain is still on,
and the door won’t open all the way
on one of those nights where everyone
wanted so bad to feel good that meanness
ranged freely. I was there so the artist could fuck
the Englishman; the artist was there so the Englishman
could fuck a stranger; the Englishman was there
for his appetites. A bite mark around my nipple,
purplish fingerprints flourishing at my hipbones—
made me viable, I can tell you that. I want
to tell you more but the girl inside won’t take the chain
off the door. She’s afraid of what you won’t see:
the humor in it all. This cosmopolitan proposition in practice
at a seamy Ramada in Atlanta, the rub-a-dub-dub
three of us in a tub, the sickly light and none of us
drunk enough. Or maybe she’s afraid you’ll see her
crying and mistake it for shame. I don’t think
it was shame, more like despair, the hunger
still there, and nothing about her changed.
Leigh Anne Couch’s work has appeared in magazines, including Salmagundi, Gulf Goast, Smartish Pace, the Cincinnati Review, Subtropics, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, and PANK. Her first book, Houses Fly Away, was published by Zone 3 Press; in spring of 2021 her new collection, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize, will be published by the University of North Texas Press. Couch’s work has been featured in Verse Daily, Dzanc’s Best of the Web, and in The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses (Penguin). An editor at Duke University Press and The Sewanee Review for many years, she now lives in Tennessee with the writer Kevin Wilson and their two sons.
their lamps abandoned between
the gnarled branches of
Gethsemane
the five virgins
in a clean white house, bored
their bare feet amongst
bundles of mint,
of anise, of cumin,
they stand motionless–
the husk of a widow’s house
picked clean by vultures
for there prophecy
is unspooled
and quantified
and delivered
in neat packaging to the
orphans of Hakel-D’ma
bloody acre hollowed out
with burial caves in the packed
red clay (yet God is not the God of
the dead, but of the living) the potter
received this traitor. His blood, his guts,
his coiled soul--
yet God, by outstretched arm
in lovingkindness
sent Gabriel and Michael to
wipe his brow and
carry him to the salt flats
the camel mare is slaughtered and
given back to the desert. Salvation
runs over a denuded hill where
money lenders examine
the sky for a familiar sign.
Show us Paradise.
palms choked with gold
encircled by chains, these stones
will be thrown out, and the widows
will lay their hands on you, and
they will bare your heart, while
the polished marble tablets
turn to dust, as the birds
tend to the lilies
the sun is an orb, a gateway to Sijjin
the multitude warming themselves in it
on a cracked-open branch of myrrh
the smell of his body
how it wept resin and
dried onto the rim of a cup
They crept in, and scratched
at the tattered white robe trailing the sandstone
the chapped lips of Judas
Peter looking back before he wept
the blood blossoming, choked thorns
milked eyes, touch me
They whispered
Watch, he said
he wished he didn’t
and on the sixth hour
God left
he thought of the mountain
a tangle of peonies, הגליל
thistles, a gazelle balancing on a
round rock looking towards the
water, a bird--
he saw himself delivered there
traced in light
Ripen me,
fold me into heaven,
breathe it into me
Cure me,
I am thy servant
the cool, clear water
of Gennesaret
brought low
Deliver me,
in bowls of incense
a slaughtered lamb (while
They turn away) on
the polished stones
of the Temple
I know not where
the sky gave birth to death,
his blood pooled in a dry lake bed
and turned to stone
O Elizabeth,
the mountains
the green rolling hills
swarming with locusts
gives way
to wandering
Yahya ibn Zakariyya knelt in the sour waters of Ιορδάνης
he didn’t know his head cost one dance, but what a dance
it was, in the dim hall, her skin slick
with rose water, her bracelets gleaming
her breasts visible through a white shroud
how she moved
the sophists did not stir
they continued their reading
undeterred, uninterrupted
as kings consumed the heads of men
who once knelt in the Ιορδάνης
and saw the heavens open up
the spirit came down from heaven
as a bird in all its wildness, blurred in memory
“Be kind,” the sophists nodded, ah yes.
Kate Shapiro was born and raised in Dallas, TX. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She won first place in the Summer Literary Seminars 2018 Fiction Contest. Her work can be seen in Fence.
Is it better to say that I grew up near
or I am from
or to be exact to a place specifically distant from my lungs?
I say lungs because I’m trying out new images. I’m trying to be less symbolic.
When we fell in love you told me of the dead cats in the abandoned barn and I paused.
I still have only a small window into yours and where you are from. I can only imagine. I try to remember
other impossible horizons and repeat their mantras–
Always on one side of the cusp of day. Only my landscape fills my eyes.
My heart is heart-shaped in my mind. My lungs can open like a heart-shaped heart and sing. Contain a caged
song-my lungs are more like my heart.
My eyes have no scale right now for new lands and windless plains.
I don’t like to talk about what my body actually does in poems.
It is too windy for that and the snowfall this year—
It gets us all down.
When you go into that abandoned house in the woods I know to leave you to wander. I know to leave the
horizon open and my lungs protected.
I drive to work now because of the snowfall this year—
my gratitude for winter has its own problems.
This glacial pace is paced by our mouths now.
New words, in their new time.
The ash trees work with the fracking arm like our metronome
I image-search gratitude and time and fracking and heart and love and lung and ash and lung and lung–
I need to make sure what I’m seeing is what I’m seeing.
I have so much gratitude and carbon and horizons in my lungs. I gather rhythms. I leave possibilities
to other times. I stand perfectly still to see it all, to sing it all.
I know I should eat healthier
that will fix this knowledge
of what I see and cannot know
in my stomach I will fix
the drought–
Another story: I am not a mother
I am not a moth and so I kill
the hoard that enters my home
at night. There is nothing poetic
about how I hit them for their light–
seeking / scatter their bodies into dust /
dark
en My House
At the HOA meeting, our fences much match
my neighbors differentiate themselves from other
neighbors. I have no words at the moment.
I feel outside my stomach and these neighbors
and their borders.
I see pictures of babies /
at the border. I hit moths. I cannot even see
a border my light, a small opening in night–
I will eat healthier I say
This will fix
The rain will fall
The rain will fall
The rain must fall
The salt I eat is my body is dust
My worries are so obvious they’re not poetry unless
this country is my body I have a drought.
I think I have a soul / I think my soul needs / my body unfortunately
Hard things take
poem shapes This
is not an essay
shattered in wind
My House rattles in the Wyoming wind
that crosses the border. The rain must fall.
There is no time for sadness
or commas no time for spring in the northern wind.
All anxious songs in the drought in the plains
We hold our heads temples shattered
Grieving the inevitable is no way to live
I tell myself add honey
I tell myself
You should live and acknowledge your body and look up more often than not
Add honey and the rain must fall.
Assume you can see without static
the stars
I forget which planet lights above in spring
I come back to harmonics, the way we live
fully delicate, this alternating time
I mourn the inevitable daily
it can all go very wrong–
a horizon a voice
Temples shatter.
Pasteurization process: heating to allow some organisms and not others.
Cement process: adding water to disallow spaces, but there is air and water. We all need water;
mining clay, shells, and chalk.
My process:my collections are careful. I attribute names and document.I remember again and again.
Fear of heights: only mine is American. Mine is tender, is my mother.
Pasture: “land covered with grass and other low plants suitable for grazing animals, especially cattle or sheep.”
Tidal pools of brushed grass. We all need water.
Dandelion is also a traditional ingredient in root beer. Will we harvest them, will there be pastures of
dandelion to get our root.
My process is extraction. Allow. Fear of heights, thank you for protecting me.I mine voices and
time, I mine names, I deplete and extract.
One day the scientists walked out into the pastures, done with the work of sending time backwards. We have
created fields of problem and time
[ ]: our worry
seeding time and weeds
sowing or harvesting
our collective song-
*
choir of gratitude for
*
*
Cement requires more pure water than we allow some humans / We value growth
Thistle grows through rock, dares you to pick it–
I can tell you the chemical makeup of concrete–it contains air.
Pierce & name this time.
These times–
So many fields. To love a thorny thing: A complicated you–
We walk through paths in the woods
I come back to what we are losing The mountains are growing and
when we write about water, we always come to rocks.
More and more voices
be still
create less / minimize
chamber foot steps
chambered wind
Wrise heavy
an overgrowth of faith
My plan is to find a stream / My plan is to write an essay
on time and green and the movement of mountains.
Joanna Doxey is the author the book of poetry, Plainspeak, WY (Platypus Press, 2016) as well as several poems appearing in CutBank Literary Journal, Denver Quarterly, Ghost Proposal, Tinderbox, and others. She currently advises undergraduate students in liberal arts at Colorado State University.
If Earth were flat
it would have an Edge
a place of precision
where what is, ends
what is not begins.
Flat earthers, those closet positivists
let sense dictate ontology, say
the unperceivable is
inconceivable, drop
parsimony down
on the horizon
severing the continuum
like a guillotine.
Since Earth has an Edge they think
they wink out
crossing over.
The unknowable stays
put
no longer here
nor anywhere there is.
Some claim this gets death
right and extinction
others persist
on an oblate spheroid.
Rather shabby
it remains:
a study in neglect
battered, dilapidated
still turning.
Not what they hoped.
Somewhere in that slow revolve
a new planetary
wobble
begins
a shifting of the
polar axis
as meltwaters rise
converge
the missing mass of Greenland
calving iceworlds of the Arctic
the Antarctic
Earth
tilting in response.
They barely notice.
Winter takes its grip. Artic wind
yowls down
from tundra, permafrost
scours the prairie.
Near a house flanked by lines
of swaying spruce
deer paw snow for seed
under feeders
and a wild turkey
visits. Presses his body to a
warm basement window
blinks down at the woman who
sits, tending gaps
in time
singular absences grow
into the rest.
Her words drop like
stitches sentences unhem
lose themselves
worlds ravel with
small undoings.
Hand paused
poised to dip, intervene
she is about to end this run
as it happens.
The turkey watches.
Laurelyn Whitt's poems have appeared in various, primarily North American, journals. She is the author of Interstices (Logan House), Tether (Seraphim Editions), and Adagio for the Horizon (Signature Editions). She lives in Manitoba and in Newfoundland.
between
us–– a
chain link
fence u
call
a wall
white red––
& boug––
wild
scaling
weed
we––
call a
flower
through
steel––
patterns
wrap round
wires
coil up
words
we
petal
over
My Wheel is in the dark! / I cannot see a spoke /
Yet know its dripping feet / Go round and round.
––Emily Dickinson
i. her ii. we foot
––wheel to sound
our past
spokes oral
––we ground
brails
band
O barrows a will––
will on small
word a rain
west skillion
lines––
w/ out
thee wheels
we––
pending
wests versed
in clock
above
our heads work
motions
held
in minds cutting
way
upon word
––that hill pacific––
towers
shores
shadow as world
builds
down
rolls cold
to see
stretching
cross
gray
bruegel
fields
and the cave-painters touch them with life, red, brown, black, /
a woman among them, painting.
––Muriel Rukeyser
room field
trip i
notice
the bi
son in
this cave
is still
hunted
by one
group O
tall men
wielding
red spears
i pict
ure my
self in
that cave
the ver
y same
day O
the hunt
I see
a wo
man all
alone
holding
a paint
brush made
yucca
flowers
dripping
w/ one
Angelo Ligori is from the Midwest, where he works in the concrete industry and teaches composition part-time. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and holds a BA in Creative Writing with a Teaching Artist minor from Columbia College Chicago.
