POEMS
THE FABULOUS SZIGETIS by Ira Sadoff
The Fabulous Szigetis play the violin for a living. In every great city, on every boulevard that sidles up to great rivers, in cities with thriving markets of fruits and flowers, in tiny wine shops where obscure Dolcetto d’Albas are savored, you won’t find a single Szigeti. The Szigetis lock themselves in their hotel rooms to practice a Stravinsky melody, if you can call it a melody. You could say they are blessed with a calling, a mission. Oh yes, they are driven, as we sometimes wish we were driven. And their music is so metrical, uplifting, transcendent, it crowds out your dark thoughts, the crudest of your desires, your many shaggy disappointments.
Some might find an entire family playing violins exotic, ethereal, distressing. And we can imagine what disdain discarded Szigetis must suffer. The untalented Szigeti, the rebellious Szigeti, the disabled Szigeti, Szigetis who ring doorbells as Seventh-day Adventists. And the shame for any one of them if a wrong note is played, for then they must proceed as if their performance still had its halo around it.
They might remind a few of Josef Szigeti, the patriarch who fiddled through the last century. But these Szigetis have no ancestors, no attachments: they don’t come from Budapest, they never knew Bartok, they never coughed up blood in a Swiss sanitarium. No Nazis ever chased them to southern California. No, these Szigetis serve no god, savor no recollections: they are unscathed and unwearied.
Whereas we of the laundromat and stacks of paper work, we who open our hearts so foolishly and so often, who are surrounded by car horns, children shrieking, and a few pecking sparrows under the park bench, we who only dream of becoming Szigetis, wouldn’t we miss stumbling upon a blooming amaryllis in a neighbor’s window, attending the funeral of our beloved uncle Phil, falling in love with the wrong person?
Ira Sadoff is the author of the novel Uncoupling (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1982), many uncollected stories, and eight collections of poems, most recently Country Living (Alice James, 2020). His poems have appeared widely in magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, Field, The Paris Review, Iowa Review, and American Poetry Review.
RIVER IS ANOTHER WORD FOR PRAYER by Triin Paja
a lynx’s underbelly grows ragged
crossing a field at dawn
when the flora is quarter dew
and wild strawberries grow
where a forest was cut,
as if the earth wants to comfort us.
light falls on hay bales.
I want to look at the light and not speak.
now a line of geese sails above,
known only by sound
for they are so far,
small like eyelashes taken from death.
the river is one field away.
I ask you, as from a beloved,
to come to the river, a place that does not need
to be protected from you,
for you are a beloved
and the river is another word for prayer.
I want us to look at the river and not speak.
now the cranes howl, widening the sky,
and the moon, a simple egg,
lowers into an empty stork nest.
there is no visible cup of life to drink from –
there are wings, wings.
Triin Paja is the author of three collections of poetry in Estonian and a chapbook in English, Sleeping in a Field (Wolfson Press, 2025). Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Thrush, Rattle, and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.
PRIMORDIAL by Charlotte Pence
Your first memory is of water
colors. A failed painting.
The red couldn’t be stopped.
The yellow wanted
the blue. And the water
softened the paper into
a hole.
You learned early:
There is never a single cause
for why things go wrong.
Why wouldn’t you fear
the thunder, the night,
the ocean?
After all, a tiny mosquito
is deadlier than a great white.
There exists a jellyfish
that is also a box
and more painful than fangs.
The ways of ruin are everywhere.
When a breakage occurs – a dam
or levee – you notice
how the water,
once contained and named
into assured shapes onto maps,
becomes nameless, amorphous
as it grows. Becomes multiple
names of who it killed. How many.
You cannot paint this,
then or now, so you swirl the water
a hurricane brown. No pure color.
No single cause.
There is, though,
your first memory, fat
as the paintbrush, wanting to be
dipped into the pan of dried color,
ready for transfiguration.
Charlotte Pence is the author of two collections of poems from Black Lawrence Press, Many Small Fires (2015) and Code (2020), and two chapbooks. Her work has appeared in Epoch, Harvard Review, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry.
LUNA by John Bargowski
In his room looking up
the names of bugs we’d collected
with our long-handled net
in the fields along Ravine Road,
my friend told me about a sister
he wasn’t allowed to talk about.
We’d caught a jar full that day,
all still alive, trying to climb
the glass sides, or flapping wings
against the hole-punched lid
for more air and light as we flipped
through his field guide.
She lived with a bunch of other kids
in a hospital on an island
they crossed a bridge to get to
on Sundays, he whispered, and once,
as they walked through the gate
back to their car he saw
something he’d never seen before
under a floodlight clinging
to the brick wall that surrounded
the grounds, a beauty he wanted
to bring home to show me,
with long pale wings
tinted the color of moonlight
and a fringe of gold powder
that rubbed off onto his palms
when he cupped his hands
and tried to capture it
before it flew away.
John Bargowski is the author of Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway (Bordighere, 2012) and American Chestnut (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Poetry, and Ploughshares.
THE ROUTINE by Michael Mark
I lift what’s left
of the bantam weight champ.
Air Corps, Korea, 1949. Once
from the kitchen linoleum, once
slumping off the couch next to me – once
eyes closed holding the bath towel bar
while the glaucoma drops sink in.
Champ, I call him, and he says,
Of what? and I say, Falling
and he says, Undefeated.
It’s a routine.
Sometimes, when I get him somewhat
steady, we dance. Make light
of his uncharted dips, sags, collapses –
his 96-pound body obeying
malicious gravity.
I am flying back home.
Tomorrow.
Early.
He knows
he can’t come. You wouldn’t want me to,
he said once, when I asked. I didn’t fight.
He can still spot a weak feint. I sweep
his floors, vacuum the carpet’s don’t-ask
where-those-came-from stains, dry
and stack the dishes, dust, leave.
They’ll just keep knocking me down
anyway, he’ll say out of nowhere, reliving
the bouts, each round, blow
after blow. The numbing. His heart
shouting, No! Stay on your feet!
somewhere between falling and dreaming.
Michael Mark is the author of the chapbook Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet (The Rattle Foundation, 2022). His poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Ploughshares, The Sun, 32 Poems, and Verse Daily.
A THEORY OF PERSONAL IDENTITY by Owen McLeod
It’s been one year since my mother
was uploaded to the cloud. According
to John Locke, we’re not material bodies
or immaterial souls, but unified streams
of consciousness, which would also mean
I didn’t actually get a new phone last week
if my phone isn’t a physical object but a set
of photos, videos, texts, songs, and apps
that simply migrated to this new device –
sort of like Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
If we preserve her data, maybe my mother
can migrate to a new device. My father
still charges her phone once a week. She
was attached to that phone, particularly
toward the end when she couldn’t garden,
needlepoint, do crossword puzzles, walk,
or speak – but she could text, more or less,
even if it was a just a handful of basic emojis.
Mostly smileys and hearts, but at some point
she shifted to praying hands only. We knew
what she was saying: I want to be uploaded.
Hospice came in, took care of all that,
and her body went out in a bag. My new
device takes amazing pics. I shot some
this morning while walking in the woods
and sent them to my mother’s phone.
She loved walking in the woods, especially
in the snow, so I used an app that adds
realistic-looking snowfall to pics. I’m not
a fool. I know the little hearts attached
to those pics are from my dad. I know
my mother is never coming back.
I just wish it had been real snow.
Owen McLeod is author of the poetry collections Dream Kitchen (University of North Texas Press, 2019) and Before After (Saturnalia, 2023). His poems have appeared in Field, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review.
DEPARTMENT STORE ESCALATOR by Jessica Greenbaum
After Szymborska’s “Puddle”
I remember that childhood fear well.
If I stepped on the down escalator
which bowed outward over thin air between floors
to a destination I couldn’t see at my height
and, sadly, would never reach
the moving teeth would casually drop me into space
as it had almost done each time before
while mannequins stood blank-faced in their checked raincoats
a clerk fussed with a clothes rack
gay shoppers passed me rising, looking upward, without a care
this time no different: the tug of my mother’s hand
again, the most shocking.
Jessica Greenbaum is the author of three poetry collections: Inventing Difficulty (Silverfish Review Press, 1998); The Two Yvonnes (Princeton University Press, 2012); and Spilled and Gone (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, Plume, The Paris Review, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and The Best American Poetry.
CARDS by Farah Peterson
It’s all I can do to
keep my peace when
my son announces
he has a good hand I wince
when he lets cards
tip as, well
as carelessly as a child
unschooled
of course I look
I can’t help that
I’m just passing an evening
the way he asked and
don’t I win meekly, with none of that
slapping down hilarity
or even the quiet, cruel collection
with one knuckle snap and a half smile
none of the good old fun that
went with my learning to
keep cards close and
expect dissembling
but the result is, all I have for him
is a muzzled company
and all of the ghosts
they crowd me and crowd me
Farah Peterson’s poetry has appeared in The Florida Review, Rattle, and Salamander.
LEAP OF FAITH by Richard Spilman
The new age descends like an axe.
There has come a revolution:
rooted things have learned to run,
though the crackling of underbrush
betrays their flight and the blade
descends where the rustling ends.
And you, neither new nor old,
balance at cliff’s edge, future
awash in the whitecaps below.
What lies there may be scree
or rapids or just a soft breech into
the slipstream of the imminent,
but it’s an answer, a way not
so much out as into a now
whose chaos is yours by choice.
You could make your way back,
but to what? Ruin and rubble,
and the stale taste of fear.
Instead, you make a steeple
of your raised hands, tense
and leap. It’s death one way
or another, drowning or rising
to shake your hair and follow
the current wherever it goes.
Richard Spilman is the author of the poetry collection In the Night Speaking (Sacramento Poetry Center Press, 2009); two chapbooks, Suspension (New American Press, 2006) and Dig (Kelsay Books, 2023); and two story collections, Hot Fudge (Poseidon Press, 1990) and The Estate Sale (Texas Review Press, 2011).
ALLEGIANCE by Elizabeth Bradfield
Each morning before light, in
season, Billy’s F-150 fires
up, grumbles in his drive,
heads for the pier. I hear it
through the small window above
my bed, and when I’m out,
I watch for him – Billy at the Race,
Billy off the Peaked Hills, Billy steaming
home around the point. Billy. Thick
glasses, accent, hands, wizard
of fiberglass and steam box, torch
and epoxy, whose loft holds all
the tools, any clamp or nail you’d
need, any saw or grinder. Who
coaches us as we fix our skiff in his
garage and doesn’t laugh
in a mean way when we
fuck up. How’s my favorite
whale hugger? calls Billy
as I drive my Prius past his house.
We call him The Boat Fairy. To his face.
He and his wife call us The Girls. We
avoid politics beyond weather
and fish, which we get into
big time, elbows out windows,
idling. We want to make him
a T-shirt, a badge, a sticker
for his truck. We tell him so. Listen:
there are silences between us. We
all know what whispers there. It’s ok
to not speak them here.
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of seven books, including Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008); Toward Antarctica (Boreal Books/Red Hen Press, 2019); and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023). She is a contributing editor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
HER SHAME by John Morgan
Mist rolls above the river like a second river
and the piles of snow darken as she drives
toward town and sees an old woman,
dressed in a light vest and no parka, slumped
on the metal railing where the road winds down.
Thinking that the woman might be lost,
maybe senile, she pulls over, opens
the window, and says, “Do you need help?”
But as the woman stands she sees instead
that it’s a man. Short, with shaggy hair
and a stubble beard, he comes to the window
and says, “I’m looking for a ride to town.”
In these rough times it’s her rule
never to pick up strangers, so she says,
“Oh, sorry, I’m not going there just now,”
and pulls away, confused at how
her good intentions went awry,
and at the bottom of the hill
shame overtakes her like a massive truck
looming in the rearview mirror as night comes on.
John Morgan is the author of a collection of essays and eight poetry collections, most recently The Hungers of the World: New and Later Collected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2023). His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, and Kenyon Review.
NEAR ESTER, ALASKA by Jane Lott
Just under the sternum
there are so many words
for love I discovered
bitter-sweet
in the dictionary
resting on her knee
a solid sense of self
so many words for sea
so many words for bear.
But nowhere a word
for that time
when all that was left of daylight
lay pink and purple across the snow.
Jane Lott’s work has appeared in The Los Angeles Quarterly, Poetry Flash, Sonoma Magazine, and in the anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace edited by Maxine Hong Kingston.
OBATA AT TENAYA PEAK by Ben Gucciardi
A whole year looking for the mountain
inside the mountain
before he tried to paint it.
And even then,
only when the light
off the granite
was tangible,
and with a brush made of mink
whiskers, the line
so fine it was hardly visible.
Ben Gucciardi is the author of West Portal (University of Utah Press, 2021). He is also the author of the chapbooks I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, 2020) and Timeless Tips for Simple Sabotage (Quarterly West, 2021). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, AGNI, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, and Poetry.
POTTED MAPLES by D.S. Waldman
The moon is a bone the shape of a hole.
She tries explaining this to you –
Boxes, on the ground, of her mother’s things,
a window open
in another part of the house.
Her legs are up the wall.
You are someone, then she sets her glass of water
on the floor,
and you are someone else – breath
let out the nose,
ghost pipe in the wall.
One is red with light bark, the other
a shade, entirely, of what you want to call maroon.
They take water on Sundays.
And in a month or two you’ll need
to put them in the ground.
D.S. Waldman’s poems have appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Poetry Society of America, Narrative, and Copper Nickel.
YELLOWJACKET TRAP ATTRACTANT by Robert Wrigley
You know a sliver of lamb bone with a bit of gristle’s
way better than the cloying sweet commercial stuff
dribbled on a cotton ball. After half a day
the transparent trap’s so full the bastards have to eat their own
to make room for themselves in the death chamber.
May San Francesco and Father Walt forgive you,
but you relish what looks like yellowjacket panic.
From the porch’s other end the engine hum of them dying.
You take a seat and watch them crawl in legions
through the six bottom holes none ever leaves by.
Nor bonhomie among them anywhere. Here’s one
crawling round and round the crowded cylinder,
hauling another’s head and fighting off
the fellows that would seize it. Meanwhile,
among the dead, tiny nuggets, desiccate gristles of lamb.
Upon your bare toes they light and commence
to chiseling away a divot of flesh, having it half
piranhaed off before you feel their sawtooth razory jaws.
Yes, they feed on certain destructive fruit moths
and flies, and they seem almost brilliantly rugged, as they must be.
But eventually you have to empty the traps and rebait,
and always a few have miraculously survived
among hundreds of cadavers – does that surprise you?
Such a fierce life force in carrion eaters. May it never end.
The morning’s dumped survivors, I crush beneath a boot.
Robert Wrigley is the author of twelve collections of poems, including Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010); Anatomy of Melancholy & Other Poems (Penguin, 2013); The True Account of Myself as a Bird (Penguin, 2022); and a collection of essays, Nemerov’s Door (Tupelo Press, 2021).
ONE OF THE LAND MINE BANDS by John Willson
Ta Prohm Temple, Siem Reap, Cambodia
Named for its likeness to a crocodile’s head,
the zither’s hollow body rested
on two cut sections from a tree trunk.
The fingers of the player’s left hand
pressed ivory frets—
the crocodile’s teeth.
Fronting the band, a low blue table,
a brass bowl holding currency,
a tray with a sign, CD 10$:
at home, I listen to the sweet music,
hand cymbals, gongs, bamboo reeds,
the xylophone’s wood keys, struck brightly.
They performed beside the straight wide path
toward the temple where strangler vines
clutched blocks of stone,
pulled down ancient columns.
Below his knee, the crocodile player’s
left leg was plastic, hollow.
One of his bandmates sawed an upright
fiddle, its body a coconut shell.
He gripped the bow
in the fold between forearm and bicep.
All seven players missed limbs or their sight.
In this photo, blue shade cast by a tarp
suspends them between one chord
and the next,
like the moment each stepped
on something planted that bloomed.
John Willson is the author of the poetry collection Call This Room a Station (MoonPath Press, 2020). His poems have also appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Kyoto Journal, Northwest Review, Notre Dame Review, Sycamore Review, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, and Terrain.org.
SONG OF A STORYTELLER by Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell
A man will journey the river
in a kayak, armed with magic akutuq1 mother made,
looking for uncle and answers, coming out
of strange happenings in order
for his human way of knowing to understand
that uncle’s bones are planted in the tundra.
He will be seduced by a woman with teeth gnashing between
her legs
and will not be consumed.
He will be pursued by a foolish man made of copper
and will set him afire.
He will catch a mermaid
and become an aŋatkuq2 ,
He will hear the bird speak
and become a prophet.
1 akutuq: [uh-koo-took] “a mixture of fat and berries,” Kobuk River Iñupiaq
2 aŋatkuq: [uh-ngut-kook] “shaman,” Kobuk River Iñupiaq
CANNED PEACHES by Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell
Dad told you
Opa used to count out
his peas
one
by
one
just so he’d eat vegetables.
Once a year, the barge
came to town
and unloaded a year’s supply of goods.
Auntie said
“whether something was expired or not
before the next barge came, we had to buy it.”
Dehydrated potatoes
Flour
Hard candy
Eggs
Cans
and cans and
cans.
”Your dad doesn’t even
like the taste of frozen veggies now,”
Mom said.
Now you love the softness of pears in a can:
slightly grainy interior,
disintegrating in the mouth,
giving way with each bite.
Canned peaches, on the other hand,
have a slight bite,
a sharp taste of sunshine
coated in syrup.
They were in the small
compartment of your school lunch tray.
Saved for last,
while you made sure
to sit with others of the same gender.
You lost your taste for them
some time after that.
And switched back to pears.
“Song of a Storyteller” and “Canned Peaches” are Qag˙g˙un Chelsey Zibell’s debut poetry publications.
TOMATO DIVINATION by Doug Ramspeck
Like a thumb smudging across the wet ink of her mind,
the doctor said. And in the weeks after that,
a cardinal began battering with territorial insistence
at our kitchen window, leaving behind, sometimes,
small offerings of blood. That this was connected
to my mother seemed to me, at age seven, as clear
as the white robes of sky. I pictured what was happening
inside her as like the mute erasure of winter snow,
or I imagined that her voice was now the dead wisteria
at the yard’s edge with its poisonous seedpods, or like
the yellowjackets flying in and out of an open fissure
in the ground. And I remember my mother telling me
once before she lost herself that everything that stank
was holy: the goat droppings and goat urine in her garden,
the rake making prayerful scrapes amid manure.
And last night she returned to me out of the sky’s rain,
knocking on some unseen door inside a dream – knocking
like that cardinal pecking at our window – her voice like concentric
circles inside the yellow kitchen I’d forgotten. And in her palm
was a tomato still clinging to the nub of a vine. And reaching it
toward me, she said, These aren’t store bought . . . taste.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of two collections of short stories, a novella, and nine poetry collections, most recently Blur (The Word Works, 2023). His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, The Sun, and The Georgia Review.
LATE FRUIT by Daniel Halpern
I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
— William Bronk
I should have foreseen
this defeat of the heart,
but I insisted
on believing that it would beat
forever, and never
cease bearing fruit.
I was a believer.
I thought there was a territory,
a lingua di terra of febrile soil
that survived the harvest,
whose fruit was sweet with a juice
whose color and scent were perennial.
I was a believer. I believed.
I grow older, I bear the weight,
I carry home the sack of that late harvest.
HER DREAM by Daniel Halpern
Susan’s, a found poem
I woke from a dream this morning
We were dating
We weren’t dancing
But there was rhythm
You asked me to live with you
You were so thoughtful
You made a place for me
Where you lived
A collection of my memories
Were placed on three shelves
They remained there
In a kind of permanence
We kissed
I had red lipstick on.
Daniel Halpern has written nine books of poetry and edited more than 15 books and anthologies. He founded the National Poetry Series, Antaeus, and the Ecco Press, now an imprint of HarperCollins.
AN OLD FEAR by James Davis May
The snake you saw that was at first just a thick strand
squiggling from the frayed kitchen rug is a problem
because it slid so soundlessly beneath the fridge
before your wife could see it and you both know
what concussions can do, even decades later,
that your brain can make you see what’s not there,
and feel what you shouldn’t, and that’s before
factoring in the illness that lives in it somewhere
like a queen wasp dormant all winter and the medication
that is supposed to save you from yourself
but can also make you act and think “unusually” –
so many chemicals go into the making of reality,
after all – and when you roll the fridge back
and find no snake but see instead the small hole
for the waterline that could have allowed the snake,
if there was a snake, a route to escape, you know
you’ve entered at least a month of ambient terror,
where every room will be a potential haunting
and you won’t know whether to sigh or gasp
when the drawer you open shimmers
with your face patterned over the quivering knives.
James Davis May is the author of two poetry collections, both published by Louisiana State University Press: Unquiet Things (2016) and Unusually Grand Ideas (2023). His poems and essays have appeared in 32 Poems, The Georgia Review, Literary Hub, New England Review, and The Sun.
ETHERIZE by Amber Flora Thomas
My mother says the wrong word.
The place that has held her tongue coasts,
relieves unthinkable territory: space and hollow
under the curds of night, invisible and endless.
She’ll take her old dog there when it’s time.
If we remember,
we know what she means: after the body,
in the cool stretch of stale air in a white room;
put out away from us, not even ash, but a sphere above the flame,
the mind when we step outside and look at the stars
so the dog can do her business, the ear training itself
to listen in the trees for what might be
another creature smelling us on the air,
but farther out.
So, I don’t correct her.
No needles or cremation estimates. Only the ethereal.
Temporary forces between us and floating off into space
when we walk out somewhere.
Farther still.
Amber Flora Thomas is the author of Eye of Water (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); The Rabbits Could Sing (University of Alaska Press, 2012); and Red Channel in the Rupture (Red Hen Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Georgia Review, Colorado Review, ZYZZYVA, Callaloo, Orion Magazine, Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology, and Ecotone.
LUNKERS by David Starkey
On the big, once blank wall
of his room in assisted living,
I have mounted his largemouth bass.
The smallest weighed five pounds,
the largest was thirteen,
“Big Mama” he called her,
leaving the chartreuse spinnerbait
hooked in her taxidermied
lip. The centerpiece:
a twenty-pound steelhead
with bright orange paint
for the scar on its flank.
The only time he makes sense
these days is remembering
when and where and how
they were caught. He exaggerates
and changes details with the aplomb
of a politician, but that was ever
his way. Turn the conversation
to the recent past,
however, and his language
quickly falls apart,
like a plastic worm that’s been struck
too often, or a wooden lure
long snagged underwater
then discovered during a drought:
pinch its sides and . . . mush.
Soon, the nurses say, he’ll have to
downsize yet again – no room
in Memory Care for fiberglass fish.
On the day we wheel my father
into his final quarters,
the rest of him will be lost,
like the twenty-pound lunker
he claimed almost
to have netted before the line
snapped and, as he leaned over
the boat’s hull, it vanished
into his wavering reflection.
David Starkey is the author of eleven poetry collections, most recently Cutting It Loose (Pine Row Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Review.
WHEN KNOWING IS THE SAME AS LATE WINTER WAITING by W.J. Herbert
Why is the body
still working, if it knows
what’s to come –
isn’t it cowed?
Sometimes, I think the blood
thinks,
the way these robins
must wonder whether the liquid
amber will leaf again
as they sit with their light-bulb
breasts glowing,
orange suns
among skeleton branches,
clots
in the deep-veined tree.
They flutter, as I imagine
my heart does,
just to see if it can feel
itself alive in the quiet
darkness of stiff ribs.
Regreening – that’s what the robins
want
but they can’t know what’s coming.
They wait,
as we do,
deaths tucked into a pocket of sky.
W.J. Herbert is the author of Dear Specimen: Poems (Beacon Press, 2021). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, The Southern Review, and The Best American Poetry.
GRACE by Robin Rosen Chang
The man plunged
into the muddy pond,
cradled the dog’s limp
but still warm body.
On land, he cupped his mouth
over the dog’s snout
and exhaled into it.
Over and over, a man
breathing into a dog,
his humid breath
like a zephyr,
its overblown promise
of a spring that won’t come.
And I think about my mother,
her emaciated body
in her pink nightgown
drowning in the ocean
of her bed, and how
I struggled to hold her hand.
I can’t imagine I’d have the grace
to swaddle another’s mouth
inside mine, offering life
to one whose wind was gone,
filling its lungs
with my trembling breath.
Robin Rosen Chang is the author of The Curator’s Notes (Terrapin Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Diode, The Journal, Cortland Review, American Literary Review, and Verse Daily.
ABECEDARIAN WITH ALS by Martha Silano
A little bit sane (a little bit not).
Blackbirds that turned out to be boat-tailed grackles.
Crows that cannot covert their fury of feathers.
Don’t say Relyvrio reminds you of hemlock.
Every wave reassuringly governed by the moon, but what about riptides?
F*ck a duck!
Glad there’s a joyful edge, though narrower than a Willet’s beak.
Hail in the forecast. A bitter taste:
it enables animals to avoid exposure to toxins.
Jaw stiffens, then relaxes. What will my body do next?
Kindness, we decide, is what we want to broadcast,
letting someone pull out in front of you in traffic,
make their turn, because the universe isn’t elegant,
no one’s really going anywhere important,
or running late to spin or vinyasa or
pilates. The neutral neutrons of the nucleus.
Quarks that are up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom, though
rehab in the CD, a lunch date in Leschi, PT in Madrona – it happens.
Socrates died of centripetal paralysis, a prominent loss of sensation.
Terminal: I wish it was more like waiting out a storm with an $18.00 glass of
Pinot.
Unbound bound.
Very much looking forward to overcooked orzo and finely chopped squash.
What was that you assured me – when we die we wake from a dream?
X marks the rear of the theatre – one shove of poison – into a pure realm.
You know we’re all getting off at the same exit, right?
Zooey’s wish: to pray without ceasing.
Martha Silano is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Gravity Assist (Saturnalia Books, 2019) and This One We Call Ours (Lynx House Press, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and The Missouri Review.
HORSEHAIR ON HELMETS by Maura Stanton
An old-fashioned wooden storm window
placed across sawhorses in a backyard –
nearby a paint can – but the little girl
crawling under this delightful play space
did not see glass panes, only blue sky
She stood up. She shrieked. I saw it all,
for I was high on the swing set next door,
moving through the air in big swoops
like a flag unfurling in a gust of wind.
Adults rushed from the house, running, shouting,
brushing glitter from the girl’s dark curls,
scolding her, bandaging her forehead,
while I kept swinging, swinging through the sky
An older brother got a rake and raked
sharp shimmery pieces from the grass,
the rake tines dragging out daggers of glass
that might have injured a bare foot, but flew
instead into my memory – for today
slits of sun between some fence rails
crisscrossing the snow like light swords
call up that scene – the broken window,
agitated figures, blood, then clean-up.
I held tight to the chains of the swing,
watching it all from a terrified distance
as if I were driving a team of wild horses
into battle, horsehair streaming from my helmet.
PENELOPE’S CHAIR by Maura Stanton
In Urgent Care the TV’s always turned
to HGTV, and today the House Flippers
chat about house staging as I wait here
with groaning patients, and fidgeting family,
my husband called to an exam room.
The topic’s house staging – the lovely room
flashing across the screen’s an illusion
created by designers. A tall young woman
points out a curved white sectional sofa,
and, she says, “here’s a Penelope chair.”
Penelope’s chair? But I’ve missed it.
The camera’s moved on to the staged bedroom.
What’s a chair? A seat with four legs
and a back for one person, like this chair,
where I’m sitting near other chairs in rows
filled with hunched seniors, or Moms or Dads
rocking children on their laps, jackets
wadded behind them like pillows as they text,
no one watching the cheerful TV folk
as they chatter about their California mansions.
I shift my legs, straighten my aching back,
recalling facts about Penelope’s chair
from The Odyssey. Ikmalios carved it all,
chair and footstool, from one piece of wood.
inlaid it with silver and ivory. At night
her hands aching from a day of weaving,
the suitors still noisily drinking her wine,
Penelope spread a thick fleece over the chair
and sat back. Like me, she was waiting
for her husband. And to pass the time,
on my iPad, I Google “Penelope’s Chair,”
expecting Wikipedia or quotes from Homer,
but instead, bewildering visions of chairs
scroll across the screen – Penelope Chairs! –
each one different, offering style or comfort,
Penelope dining chairs in synthetic leather,
stacking chairs framed in bright chrome tubes
or clear molded acrylic with steel legs.
Penelope’s armchair comes in fleur-de-lis
upholstery with claw-like feet, but there’s
a designer version shaped like a puzzle piece
with a bulbous protrusion for Penelope’s head.
Penelope’s beautiful chair’s ubiquitous –
If you don’t stand, walk, or lie down flat,
you’ve got to sit, so why not choose the best?
Get it in Lucite, satin, or soft grey plush?
And what about this swivel version,
or Penelope’s rattan lounger with matching footstool?
The woman next to me groans and rises
when her name’s called. She grabs her coat.
A sighing bearded man lowers himself
slowly into her place, pulls out his phone.
I roll my coat behind my back, my fleece,
thinking of Penelope on her special chair,
her eyes closed as she dreamed of Odysseus.
Those raucous nights her chair became her boat.
She’d float off through the foam-flecked seas
rowed by invisible gods until she reached
that place beyond the sunset where he lingered.
But every morning she woke up alone.
And then I hear a familiar cough and voice
coming from the desk. It’s my Odysseus
arriving back from that uncertain voyage
clutching his chart, and his new prescription,
grinning at me, ready to come home.
Maura Stanton is the author of a novel, three collections of stories, and seven collections of poems including Snow on Snow (Yale University Press, 1975); Cries of Swimmers (University of Utah Press, 1984); Glacier Wine (Carnegie-Mellon, 2001); Immortal Sofa (University of Illinois Press, 2008); and Interiors (Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in Plume, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Poetry East, Gettysburg Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Able Muse.