Poems
THE BRA IS THE HARDEST PART by Jackie Craven
It’s a newfangled kind with hooks in front,
so much easier than the bras we wore in junior high,
but in this dream my sister lies like a felled pheasant
waiting to be dressed. She’s developed plumage
too plush for a 36 B and I don’t know how
to wrap spandex around her torso without bending
the scapular feathers. Breathe in, I say
although I know she can’t, and Raise your right arm,
although I know she can’t. No, your other right,
I tease, although I’m the one who gets arms
confused. Careful not to snag the talons,
I glide her hands through elastic straps.
One clumsy move and I might shatter bones I broke
when I jostled her on a playground swing.
Broke that arm the way I broke her 45 rpm
with Bobby Darin singing Beyond the Sea,
broke it the way I broke promises, told fibs,
and made a mess of everything
by being born. Just above her flaccid wrist,
I feel the shadow of childhood fractures. Not my fault,
although I’m sure I made life worse
when I tried to twist her arm in place.
And now I must stuff her breasts, must stuff
her red- tipped breasts, must stuff
breasts swollen with formaldehyde
into white foam demi- cups.
I’ve got her almost buckled in
when the softest part of her flaps free
and bounces on the steel gurney.
You do not fit. I can’t make you fit.
I imagine my sister pressed against the edge
of family photographs. Sucking in her breath.
Tucking in her wings.
Jackie Craven is the author of WHISH (Press 53, 2024) and Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and Poet Lore.
FIRMAMENT by Virginia Konchan
Do you know how far it is from earth to heaven?
Farther than my greatest joy, most egregious sin.
Farther than this day from the day that happened
ten years ago, or the day of Alexander the Great
who succeeded his father Philip II to the throne
in 336 BCE at the age of 20{p}{nd} vastly farther than
ancient Greece to India, conquered in his reign,
begun by vanquishing supposed rivals in power
and ending in Babylon: life lost, empire gained.
My body is tired of holding up terrestrial weight:
mine, and that of the people I’m happy to serve,
unless they stormtrooper my door en masse, as
they often do, after which I scream bloody hell.
I have spent my life seeking to understand God,
meeting others who’ve mostly never once tried,
and I wonder if they’re happier or farther along.
What have I ever wanted from drugs, than to be
restored to myself, my primal instincts, my song?
Farther than Kyoto temple bells to rapt listeners,
than racoons from a safe haven and secure meal,
farther than the pregnant silence before applause.
My body, recalcitrant teen, farther than them all.
But you are proximal to my inescapable shadow,
Lord: closer than my innermost sovereign breath.
My father is losing his mind to neurodegeneration,
forgets where he lives after 50 years in that house.
Farther than even the idea of distance, he suffers.
Carry him tenderly into the perdurable hereafter.
Be with him in this interval between life and death.
Virginia Konchan is the author of Requiem (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025), four other poetry collections, and a collection of short stories, Anatomical Gift. She co-edited Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems (University of Akron Press, 2023), and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, The Believer, and American Poets.
TIME OUT by David Lehman
“What is time?” Einstein asked.
“Great question,” the lecturer said
but digressed to the melodrama
of a brilliant young female physicist
with a limp in the male- dominated world
of European science, and the answer
is never given, though Einstein explains
time is an illusion. I don’t get his reasoning
except in theory; our clocks would run fast
in a weak gravitational field. But if the past
and future are illusions, what happens to music
we measure in time, and death, not just
the absence of key players, but death our physician, death
the distinguished thing, the courteous carriage- driver?
David Lehman is author of twenty non- fiction and poetry titles. Among his poetry collections are The Morning Line (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), Playlist (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), Poems in the Manner Of (Scribner, 2017), New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2013), When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005), and The Daily Mirror (Scribner, 2000). He created The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry
PSALM 56 by Thea Matthews
In conversation with JoeSam’s Survivor, June 17, 2015
Charleston is Golgotha
as we sit on white folding chairs,
holding our Bibles.
A black cross ushers in
a chorus of shadows.
A red cross with a swastika
enters the basement. Outside,
the pointed white arches and spire point to the One, Most High.
From Mother Emmanuel
to the Heavens, how did we
become a target no white hood
could touch, but inside,
an opened fire? Nothing leaks
from impenetrable light. O I trust
my undying love. Have mercy!
Salvation comes when palms touch.
A toe tag replaces the eye of a cedar cross.
A cherub is with us. Quick!
Drop to the floor, play dead.
Another body becomes a dartboard,
I watch what drips,
smell what pours. My heart,
a grandfather clock ticking to the seconds left,
ticks in a place unseen.
What can man do to me?
What is death when death itself
holds a pistol? A black tomb-
stone sprouts as nine doves
fly over my head.
Selah
Thea Matthews is the author of Grime (City Lights, 2025). Her work has appeared in the Colorado Review, The Common, The New Republic, and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora.
SHELTER by Carolina Hotchandani
I want to live in a sentence that lengthens, like an arabesque, the breath.
I want to live in syntax that stretches, limber- muscled and lithe, the space
between a verb and its object, where desire resides – where it effloresces.
I long, inside the sentence, for an outside world where longing thrives.
Guilt is alive beside desire in my sentence. I can write. I can long. This is
my life. Outside my sentence, bombs effloresce. Bullets sentence children
to death. I turn away. I look. There is no object of the verb. There are people
subtracted. My thumbs are fast as I scroll past. I shorten the space between
the verb and its object. For death’s sake. For life’s sake, too. The verb kisses
the forehead of its object, soothes the parents, the injured children I keep
bringing inside my sentence. I leave my roofless poem. Click a link, confirm
that money’s sent –drawn from the bank like drops from a well or a few
deleted words you’ll never see inside the sentence. I cut my breath in half.
I can’t mirror lives cut short. I’m here, alive. My arms encircle my living child.
Carolina Hotchandani is the author of The Book Eaters (Perugia Press, 2023). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, Copper Nickel, Prairie Schooner, and Smartish Pace.
AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY EAST by Shara McCallum
Sentinel, Simone Leigh
You are who I’ve come here to see.
Positioned at the entrance, as if guarding it,
your Black body rises up, in relief
sprawls your shadow across the museum’s
white- grey marbled floor and walls.
Your form – como una guitara,
like mine – I think, before catching myself.
You were forged in the sculptor’s imagination
as clearly other than me: your head,
a parabolic antenna, delicately balanced
atop an elegant, elongated neck; breasts,
so upright they belie gravity and time.
And your onyx skin shimmers night’s palette.
At five or six, one of my daughters asked,
“Tell me again who in our family is Black?”
And after I catalogued, she gleefully announced:
“I’m like you, Mummy! Black on the inside,
white on the outside,” race being a puzzle
she was self- satisfied to have solved,
until, some months later in school,
her teacher taught about King and segregation,
and she came home anxious again. I tried
reassuring, telling her something I knew
wasn’t the whole truth: “That was the past.”
But she kept worrying her line of questioning.
“If we had lived in that time, who would I
have had to go with, you or Daddy?”
What did my child know then of race?
Maybe everything I still don’t.
Sentinel, who here are you guarding,
what are you guarding us against?
Shara McCallum is the author of seven books of poetry published in the United States and the United Kingdom, most recently Behold (forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2026) and No Ruined Stone (Alice James Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Southern Review.
AFTER BEN SHAHN’S SCORCHED EARTH by Julia Lisella
At sun-up
I can see into windows of houses
some lit up some still, black squares
My family called me olive eyes because
my eyes were black like the olives that came in the can
pitted and metallic- tasting
& because I loved them
& because at sun-up I would stand
at the foot of each of my siblings’ beds
watching them until their eyes opened
We know – you and I – that we’ll be here
at least for tomorrow but
I don’t want to shut my eyes tonight
Still, I do. And on airplanes
at take off and landing or when
the wings hit turbulence
When I’m the passenger in a car
I close my eyes
to ward off impending crashes
If I die with my eyes shut
I won’t haunt, I’ll go happy
won’t have to see my own body in flames
I text to ask you about your biopsy
and you text back No Radiation
I am happy but unsteady
Does it mean the biopsy is clean?
or that tonight you choose not to burn
Julia Lisella’s latest collection of poems is Our Lively Kingdom (Bordighera Press, 2022). Her other collections include Always (WordTech Editions, 2014), Terrain (WordTech Editions, 2007) and the chapbook Love Song Hiroshima (Finishing Line Press, 2004). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Common, Nimrod, Pangyrus, and The Rupture.
XIBALBÁ :: CONSUME by Felicia Zamora
Hunahpú & Xbalanqué embrace, then leap into the fire. You think about this moment in the Popol Vuh. How the twins refuse to go along with anymore ruses by the Lords of Xibalbá & how prior to the bomb fire, the twins spoke to soothsayers, telling them to grind their bones after smolder & toss the ashes in the river & how five days later they transform into fishmen. The twins knew regeneration meant parts of them must die in Xibalbá. In the last seven sessions of radiation, the deep tissues in your armpit, left chest wall, & neck lymph nodes feel a hundred times worse than any sunburn you’ve ever experienced only inside your body. But your skin looks great, the radiation therapist smiles. You lay on the table, gazing up into the eye of the machine, the calculating lead morphing & changing shape in order to not radiate your heart or lungs & you think of Hunahpú & Xbalanqué’s embrace. You wonder how long the twins held each other before the jump. Did One Death & Seven Death drool in delight to think them soon dead? Did Hunahpú & Xbalanqué smile at each other? You imagine them holding hands. Palm to palm. In your reflection, lasers cross the incision spanning your left breast & infrared markings glow. The machine revs up. Over the intercom you hear, Take a deep breath in & hold your breath. You hold & feel the brothers stiffen, briefly, before flames completely consume.
EARTHLY RHYTHMS by Felicia Zamora
You don’t speak Spanish. You don’t speak Nahautl. You study the Codex regardless. You think of blemishes. How a year ago these facts shamed inside you, saggy guts full of inherited traumas {you remember your internalized oppression training; facilitator guiding, Imagine a world with no oppression; still you swell}. Now, you welcome the cracks, cell by cell sighing out from flesh, from metastasized , from the five- inch scar where breast tissue once lived, from baldness & two years until your hair might touch your chin. You ache; you no longer wish to find holes in your bones to hide; this ache; the world already too greedy & languished & loving of women’s pain {resist dismissive as this term too gentle for the tearing}; you read the article on menopause & the silence menstruating humans feel forced into as a society. You read that 85% of menstruating people experience menopause symptoms & a suggestion of our “high cultural tolerance for women’s suffering.”* You text your friend about pap smears; your friend writes back, Why can’t we just have some sort of hi- def screen we walk behind, fully clothed, that tells us everything we need to know? & you laugh {your discomfort in this laugh; interrogate both the laugh & the discomfort} & type how this screen probably exists, but men stashed it away or burned the blueprints because investing in the relief of women’s pain is unbecoming of capitalism. No money in healthy women. You once believed health lived inside you. All mistakes in believing. You write cancer next to codex on journal pages & step back to breathe in all the unsaid here . Here too . You do not give your full self to the poem. The poem is full enough. You open – rupture – the way a fissure forms in the earth’s surface. You think of releases. In Doomstead Days, Teare shows you magic; reveals the body with chronic illness intertwined in the anthropocene, our obsessions as integral parts of the biotariat. Biological hemispheres & landscapes of us impacting earthly rhythms; our bodies as earthly rhythms. You think of how a volcano might be misinterpreted as blemish. You think of releases. In the Codex Yoalli Eheˉcatl, you see fragments of the toˉnalpoˉhualli, one deer pierced with an arrow next to one dead deer – how the supernaturals inhabit daily practice – the bloodshed before the deer’s eyes close. You think of inheritance. Where are you? Pierced & squirming? Quiet & gray? Shedding blood or slowly closing your eyes? {Unsure of your own answers.} The calendrical in the fluids, flesh, cells. You see Stripe Eye’s journey beginning on the blue road. You see divination; your heart a type of conjure – the echocardiograms tell the oncologist the chemo isn’t frying your aortic valve while you hear the cadence in the swift whaawhamp whaawhamp whaawhamp & as a ventricle relaxes, a tricuspid valve opens, a reminder how the body sings despite – you see yourself on your knees in front of the Nine Lords of Night {not to beg but a vantage point to understand cycles}; all the omens & fortunes out of your hands; you etch each letter of transformation on 14 white pills {of all the sonnets you swallow . . .} & feel the healing in your stomach for four days after The Red Devil {term given to doxorubicin by nurses}. You think of all the devils you let in. Devils at the door. What stomps around inside you not always guest. You do not give your full self to the poem. The poem is full enough. The Codex reminds you of oblivion – before- before, when your first structure shaped comet tails; the dust that fell to earth & nestled particle by particle by particle by particle inside your ancestors, womb after womb after womb until you tumble – a minuscule burn gestating minuscule burns.
*Rebecca Thurston, professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/12/podcasts/the- daily/menopause- treatment - hormone- therapy.html
Felicia Zamora is the author of eight books of poetry including Murmuration Archives (forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2026), Interstitial Archaeology (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), I Always Carry My Bones (University of Iowa Press, 2021), Body of Render (Red Hen Press, 2020), and Of Form & Gather (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Nation, and the Best American Poetry 2022 (featuring her poem that originally appeared in AQR).
on the mountain top by Lo Naylor
our father reaches into his backpack
& hands us each a small carton. six miniature
coffins. here’s your sister he says, his hands
shaking. they are clean but I imagine them
covered after he opened the urn, divided the ashes.
sometimes there’s a halfway point
between where you’ve been & everywhere else
& we are here. it looks pretty—
the monarchs bobbing up & down, kissing
wild spikes of violet. our father’s hair
blows askew & there is spittle on his lip,
as there often was when we were children
& he yelled at us. he’d force us to look at him,
take in anger’s contortions. now his mouth
makes the shape of our sister’s name
& we all look away, see, each in the other,
a mirror of grief, how it changes a face.
Lo Naylor has work forthcoming in Narrative and on The Missouri Review’s weekly website poem feature. “on the mountain top” is her debut publication in print.
POST- TRUTH by Richard Spilman
We have come so far
through this fun house,
where the tunnel of love
becomes a hall of mirrors,
to see our truths are only
shadows of shadows
in a trackless forest
where each bleeding blaze
declares our losses.
Still, as the dying Hosanna
of birdsong invokes night,
we go on, mostly together,
by touch, by the sound
of each other’s breath,
by glints of moonlight
through the canopy,
searching for any respite
that feels like home.
Richard Spilman is the author of In the Night Speaking (Sacramento Poetry Center Press, 2009); two chapbooks, Dig (Kelsay Books, 2023) and Suspension (New American Press, 2006); and two short story collections, The Estate Sale (Texas Review Press, 2011) and Hot Fudge (Poseidon Press, 1990).
SITE-FAITH by Bruce Beasley
site fidelity: the tendency to return to a previously occupied location
Invariant, innate
regression to source
return to what spawned you This
is my “site- faith
behavior,”
ab initio de profundis
somnial
Is it meet
and right
to go back
- cestors,
ceased ones
ante-
- seed
What does the eel know
of its last metamorphosis
the one that hauls it
into night- migrating does it
even know
it was once
where now it goes
Recusants let me be
your pursuivant
What’s instinct
word for what is indistinct
all unbeknownst
goad
know- slough
I’m recusant in my manner
of “obstinate in refusal”
not to know
what I would know to find myself
gyre- borne on the outskirts
of darksome
spawn- grounds
Gulf- Stream- dragged down the outer
border of homage
of home
sargassum so thick you’d think you could walk there over the water
Bruce Beasley is the author of nine collections of poems, including Prayershreds (Orison Books, 2023); All Soul Parts Returned (2017) and Theophobia (2012), both from BOA Editions; and The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems (University of Washington Press, 2007).
INCONSTANCY IS THE TEACHER OF THE SOUL by Timothy Liu
Each time I wrote you,
I felt a little less
sure. I thought you
might be able to
teach me something
I needed to know
that no one else could
and each time
my heart grew a little
more hard until
the day came when I
had to stop, knowing
you by then had
taught me everything
I needed to know –
Timothy Liu’s latest books of poems are Down Low and Lowdown: Bedside Bottom- Feeder Blues (2023) and Luminous Debris: New & Selected Legerdemain 1992– 2017 (2018), both out from Barrow Street Books.
PLOT by Sarah Seybold
After I left her ashes on the snow behind her church,
I didn’t know what to do with the white
cardboard box or the emptied plastic bag.
I used to imagine she’d be buried in Burnett,
in the old cemetery at the T in the road
up the way from our trailer.
All my childhood I saw family graves
planted in that sad hill.
But Mom had no plot.
No plans or money to have a hole dug
in the ground beside her mother.
My remorse as the plane rose above the February drab,
the dirtied melting snow. I could never go back
to that Indiana gas station outside the airport
where I left the box on the grime- streaked lid
of an over- filled trash can. Inside, the plastic bag
I shook, still lined with residue.
MRS. CARSON by Sarah Seybold
for Lena Mae, 1922– 2004
I imagine cooking grease must have caught fire
and set the yellow kitchen curtains ablaze.
Breakfasts you made for your husband
every morning for sixty- five years.
Like clockwork we’d hear you
swing open the back door
and bellow his name –
Chief! Chief!
Until he quit tinkering in the toolshed
feeding the roosters, or tending the rhubarb
beside the garden’s white lattice fence.
You never knew how we’d listen,
our family joke to mimic your loud howl.
When you visited your kids out in California,
we thought you’d never come back
until one morning we finally heard
the voice we never knew we’d miss:
Chief.
You loved that man.
But you were alone that morning.
Mr. Carson in the nursing home with a broken hip.
Your grandson left to run errands,
and now you’re gone.
Every time I think of home,
my mother, my sister, the trailer,
your house is always there on the other side
of our rusted chain- link fence.
I used to ride by on my bike,
too shy to stop and chat,
yet you always broke the rhythm
of fanning yourself with a folded newspaper
to wave at me from the porch swing
where you sat summer afternoons
in a faded floral house dress,
your brown ankles swollen,
your face always tired
in that humid Midwest heat.
Grieving for you now,
a woman I barely know,
I feel more alive than when I go about living.
I wonder how you raised eight kids in that house,
how you dressed them all for church every week,
what you looked like when you were young,
how someone could live in the same place so long.
How far away I am now but haunted still
by the Burnett Church, the burnt down
Burnett Tavern, the cornfields, the cemetery
where my grandmother and her sisters,
who played with you when you were a child,
are buried now, folded into the hill
with stories I don’t know
that make me who I am.
I imagine you looking out the kitchen window,
shaking your head,
at that sad, rotting trailer we left.
And Chief gone,
probably never coming back,
the garden overgrown.
They found you in the blackened doorway.
They said you looked beaten.
I think of you dying that way, alone.
Your thick, slow legs and swollen feet
hobbling through smoke,
trying to make it out
the small house in flames,
arms reaching toward the other side.
Sarah Seybold’s work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Indianapolis Review, Arts & Letters, North Dakota Quarterly, and Gargoyle.
HEADING OUT TO SEA by José A. Alcántara
Every boat carries another boat
in case the first boat sinks.
Imagine if you could do that for yourself.
Imagine the second body
deflated, folded up, tucked away
in your back pocket
ready to be whipped out
when the first body fails.
It would have to be smaller
made of cheaper materials
but also lighter, more willing
to go with the flow.
This is it. The final body.
The one you accept just as it is
never worrying about how it looks
compared to other bodies
the one you cling to with everything you have
in love with its rubbery flesh
its tendency to bounce off obstacles
its precious fetid breath.
HAPPY, IN SPITE OF IT ALL by José A. Alcántara
The years start to pile up in drifts
as high as the door frame.
Sometimes I sneak out
the upstairs window to look.
Some are beautiful – smooth surfaces
that glow red when the late sun hits
others are rotten
eaten away from the inside.
When the wind blows
which happens more and more these days
the drifts harden to stiff crust
over which my bare feet walk
until one of them collapses
sending me butt over braincase
into the white dark, nothing but
my pink toes waving at the world.
José A. Alcántara is the author of The Bitten World: Poems (Tebot Bach, 2022). His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, American Life in Poetry, The Threepenny Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and The Slowdown.
LETTER TO TIME by Alison Prine
I looked inside a drawer
and there you were
a collection of many keys
to things I no longer open
I inherited my father’s impatience
yet you cannot come between us
a decade after his death
I can see him
I can see how clearly
he saw me
though we loved different things
and we loved them differently
he held me in unseen ways
like you do and as faithfully
he had his own large collection
of keys to forgotten doors
his favorite color was rust
your color
how you work the patina of surfaces
while deep inside
my father holds you in one hand
and me in the other
Alison Prine is the author of two collections of poems, Loss and Its Antonym (Headmistress Press, 2024) and Steel (Cider Press Review, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Five Points, Harvard Review, and Prairie Schooner.
RUINS AND A RADIO by Maya Janson
Out at the edge of what’s left of the bay
an unleashed dog is racing the tide, barking at
what’s gone, what’s left behind. Used to be.
The love of abandoned buildings is known,
I’m told, as Ruin Porn. Delight in all that
high- res decay. Here on the mudflats, sand
the color of old bone, I’m alone and able
to speak freely with my ghosts. Brother
last seen in a hospital bed, gown hiked up,
no hiding the scars on his gut or his wanting
for breath. He can’t catch it. Or the self
he was at seventeen, Santana’s Evil Ways
on the radio on the beach in the dark while
he stood in the surf casting a heavy line,
reeling it slowly back in. And you, future
ghost, every day a little less here, shoulder
against a door that won’t stay closed. Behind
which, some of the things that keep getting
lost. Common nouns slipping away, tidal.
The name of the town where we waited out
a storm. A pine grove becomes a pool hall.
Tornadic winds show up as sultry.
In which the tent stakes do or do not hold.
To have and to hold, we said that. Now,
you’ve become your own half- done canvas
painted in the style of the Old Masters,
heavy on the earth- tones, a low- lit
self- portrait with nobody in it.
Maya Janson is the author of two poetry collections, On the Mercy Me Planet (Blue Edge Books, 2022) and Murmur and Crush (Levellers Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, Rattle, Guernica, Jubilat, and Plume.
A VOICE WITHOUT WORDS by Kat Cameron
I saw the ghost magpie this morning. My sister said, “Mom will be gone in a year.” Or not. I’m not sure of anything anymore. One day, I know, none of this sadness will matter. A French poet stopped writing for twenty years after he wrote a poem about a child drowning and then his son drowned. The rest is silence. I want to be a voice without words. A chickadee fl itting in the poplars. A white owl floating over snow. A hawk above bare fields, outspread wings riding the wind. We are all changing into something else
Kat Cameron is the author of Ghosts Still Linger (University of Alberta Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Arc Poetry, Capital City Press, Paragon Press, Prairie Fire, and Literary Review of Canada.
ON THE PATH TO TOTALITY by Susan Cohen
The eclipse promised
to be spectacular in Vermont, sun smothered
when closest to the earth and most active in its cycle.
Science News said this would be the last totality
in my lifetime, not that Science News predicts my date of death,
but this was one of those multiplying last chances
I could count on in my life’s limited arithmetic.
The weather suggested clouds.
Meanwhile, Science News assured me the eclipse
would last longer and display more special effects
than the one we flew to see in Oregon.
Plasma streamers, a chance of coronal mass ejection.
They might as well have promised orgasm.
Oregon was a let- down when it turned into a party
with too much food and booze and Pink Floyd
blasting The Dark Side of the Moon.
I like Pink Floyd, just not in any spiritual sort of way,
not in the way of wonder
to greet the vanishing of light.
I’ve reached an age that makes me wonder
if even death will be a disappointment,
my sense of awe spoiled by some angel’s idea of fun.
But there I was again, packing my special glasses
into a small suitcase along with my expectations
in their standard dosage
like the tiny pills I take at night
to keep my heart from running wild. At the end
still wanting to be dazzled by the dark.
Susan Cohen is the author most recently of Democracy of Fire (Broadstone Press, 2022), her third full- length collection. Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, The Southern Review, and Verse Daily.
IN A WORK MEETING I BECOME A HOLY STATUE WEEPING BLOOD by Jeff Whitney
thinking about the mouse we caught in a glue trap last week,
small as an idea a child has. It’s not actual blood, more the soul
of blood. Once a man taught me how to tap dance by clicking
his tongue and moving in beautiful motions, like a swan might
in a local theater production where all things are accidentally
beautiful. Like a blue stapler. It’s important to have blue
anything because change is happening all the time. Like right now
someone said we’re on pace to hit quarterly objective one
but way behind on a smaller initiative. It’s of course lonely
on this planet, surrounded by possibly- dead possibly- flourishing
worlds. That I don’t want to be at work is beside the point
because work is in me. It gets me up sometimes, it takes my
Sundays. Last night I read a poem by an ex-ballerina with a memory
disease who insisted she is a dancer made of song. It’s one of those
big worries: our memories, all gone, a Rubik’s cube blank
on all squares. At least, one says to oneself, I can learn to surf
or grow sourdough in a jar. Sourdough lives as long as some turtles
and trees. There’s a jar of sourdough starter that came alive
when slavery was still around. Injustice sourdough, right there
in your hands. Nevertheless, it’s nice to be sucker- punched by joy
in the checkout line, an email come through about some good news
or something you had been dreading for a week turned out to be
not anything. How cruelty folds again and again like a piece of paper
which, if you were to fold one in half only thirteen times would be bigger
than the known universe, and how the dog found a flattened rat
and that was everything I could pay attention to for thirty- three seconds
until I wrestled it free and threw it like a live rat grenade walking
my quiet street. Listen, I want to say to everyone in attendance,
with flash floods destroying our history, and people in this world
crowding out others, this mouse I found seemed symbolic of how
things feel. A kind of Anatevka on a Tuesday, maybe the last Tuesday
before the finale trumpet. I want Safe as a man looking up and dancing
between rain drops, untouched as anything, and I want to say cruel
no more. Call it a goal and make it quantifi able. Call it a planet and
join me at the ribbon- cutting ceremony for the very serious rocket
we’re building to get there. We’ll answer questions with questions
as all the mice in existence tire themselves out being symbolic
of something, the boy I was connected to the boy I am, still picking through
cluttered cities of late summer firewood for clusters of spider eggs
to immolate, still remembering the way they opened, Alien- like,
after we threw them onto fl ames. How for a moment they woke,
and walked within a world of light, and felt its heat, and did not scream.
Jeff Whitney’s most recent chapbook is Sixteen Stories (Flume Press, 2022). His poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, and Poetry Northwest.
AUTUMNAL by Wendy Wisner
Summer turns to fall. My mother texts me a blurry photo
of wet fall leaves, taken on a walk with her aide,
who kept telling her to put her phone away
so she won’t trip and fall. My sister says we need to buy
our mother slippers, because the flips- flops she wears
around the house are a fall hazard. The doctor says
her bones are sort of okay – not osteoporosis yet –
but we need to keep an eye on her, because if she falls
her bones will break, just like that, the way a fresh stack
of oak leaves crunched breathlessly under my feet
on my morning walk. This afternoon, rushing
from the library to the car, rain undulating,
making a river on the sidewalk, I skated
behind my two children, both taller than me now,
both almost ready for this cruel, cruel world –
one in sandals on a rainy day, the other in half- tied
sneakers, a shoelace dragging through the black
September rain – and I thought: Is anyone ready
for this world? And is my mother ready
to leave it, one blurry photo at a time, one broken
bone after another, her memories washing down the gutter
as we pull out of the parking spot and drive home?
Wendy Wisner is the author of three books of poems, most recently The New Life (Cornerstone Press, 2024). Her poems and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Review, Passages North, Tar River Poetry, Lilith Magazine, and Verse Daily.
IF WISHES WERE ROSES, IF ROSES WERE STARS by John Hodgen
– For Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of The Little Prince,
who disappeared flying his final reconnaissance mission
for the Allies in 1944 and whose plane was never found.
Tonight, with all that remains of my heart I want to find the missing plane
of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
I want it without the slightest concern or word about any award or frond of
fame or exuberant frippery
which might arise for being known worldwide on X as The Discoverer Of or
The One Who Has Finally Found.
I want it for my own reasons, my own fool’s errand, for the way I want all
our lost dreams to be found,
rescued, recovered, for all our empty hands, our holy hearts, each a little
night flight reconnaissance plane
that loops and swirls through the universe looking for us with no hope
whatsoever of coming home again.
Look for them, for every heart stacked up in holding patterns like ribbons
or scarves that intertwine
across solar systems and unfound galaxies like bright rivers of stars,
nebulas, like a giant infinity sign,
a golden helix, a million-mile mural of all our infinitesimal longing, in that
YOU ARE HERE poster sign
which we can see sometimes if we dare look up from our fearful city lights,
or revel in when coming in
for a landing. Home, home, we say, seeing the world’s lights left on waiting
for us by the god or devil in
disguise who owns all our lives, who’s heard every word, every breath of
every prayer we’ve ever said,
each a dead pilot or sleeping little prince. See the dream lifting like a crown
floating above his head.
Oh, World, Oh, Love, Oh, Heart, I will be looking for you long and long,
long after I am dead.
John Hodgen’s most recent poetry collections include What We May Be (University of Washington Press, 2024), The Lord of Everywhere (Lynx House Press, 2019), Heaven & Earth Holding Company (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), and Grace (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).
PRO-CHOICE by Sophie Klahr
At the porch light’s curved edge,
an American giant millipede
moves from my hand into the dark
on its soft legs like an em dash,
exoskeleton thick- soft as a pencil
designed for a child just learning to write.
At the lip of forty- two, I have given up
the idea of becoming a mother.
I could have been
a good one. This giving up
does not grieve me now. Perhaps,
just for today. It is the start
of Daylight Saving Time, and I move through
the hours reminding myself
the saving is not plural,
but singular.
My child would have been born
in the spring
of my seventeenth year.
After they turned five,
I stopped imagining them.
I like the ancient ways
of saying goodbye:
we did not pretend
we would see one another again.
Sophie Klahr is the author of Two Open Doors in a Field (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) and Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016), and co-author of There Is Only One Ghost in the World (Fiction Collective Two, 2023). Her writing may be found in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry London.