Poems
EVEN THIS LATE THE BONES OF THE BODY SHINE
—Mark Strand
how in the not quite
indelible dark
of 2 am, in the empty
diner 15 floors below
there is a lone gold light
that makes of the place a votive
how on my windowsill
little and off-kilter,
a salt white ceramic
house
perches – its tiny door, its windows,
comic,
as though a child, holding her breath cut them from
paper
with toy scissors hoping to get it
right
yes, light from the candle
inside
beams through, this too
is a votive
and next to it a picture –
my lost sister
who lies in the sun smiling
on Fire Island
whose eyes are shut
against the light,
her sun-bleached summer
hair pulled back
with forethought of diving
disappearing
weightless into the rise
the fall
the breaking
blue
the world
left behind in sound
but for now, her oiled body
gleams
like the gold at her ears
catching tiny fires
of sun, her smile
dazzles, complicit,
I know you
are taking my picture
see how her collar bones
are the wings of a seabird
how the deep vee
between is not yet
filled with shadow –
every lit minute of her life
still retrievable.
Alison Jarvis is the author of the collection Where is North (Silverfish Review Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Cream City Review, New Ohio Review, Notre Dame Review, Plume, The Seattle Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Verse Daily.
THE PATTERN OF LIGHT ON STONE
Oaxaca, Mexico
When we drove the jeep to Mitla, we traveled
the same road the Spanish priests had taken
centuries before, toward the Place of the Dead,
the City of Rest. Space of desolate beauty washed in light.
And underneath it all, openings to elsewhere –
maze of tunnels, labyrinth of rooms, home of the spirits
of those who’d gone before. And the Spanish entered
those gruesome chambers. Father Burgoa called it
the back door of hell. He wrote of damp earth, bad odor.
He said, A cold wind blew out our torches –
so the Spanish priests ordered this infernal gate be closed.
And even now, you sense what they chose not to see
amid this elegant geometry of stone, meandering
mosaics and filigreed designs above the hard, hot ground.
But it’s not among these intricate shadows that I find
what I have traveled far to find, some familiar presence –
or maybe only that dark hope the heart will not let go.
Out among the arid hills beyond the town, the road
turns back. Changing light foretells a change –
and in the small space of the patio, angled sun
speaks of early day, though I know it’s already late.
Winter branches cast a pattern on the whitewashed wall,
offering its own complexity, delicate and brief –
and as if there were room for only so much sorrow,
a hummingbird pauses amid the scarlet blooms,
its hovering made holy, if only for an instant.
It seems to look at me as if it has come far to
find me here, beloved ghost it has long been missing.
Margaret Mackinnon is the author of Afternoon in Cartago (Ashland Poetry Press, 2022), The Invented Child (Silverfish Review Press, 2013), and a chapbook, Naming the Natural World (Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, 2018). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Image, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Blackbird, New England Review, and The Georgia Review
WARNING
Before you go looking, just remember: from some places you can’t truly
come back. Some places are the long dead valley of an unending seizure.
They debone you, bend you all the way around, like the snake that eats
itself with prey already inside. At the moment of contact, you feel all that
others were spared. Your hands become stellar remnants, and your voice
splits into two voices entangling, the primordial hums of the beginning and
the end. If you do find your way out, return to the place you’d called home,
you can’t even hold a spoon with those hands. A noise like fruit flies wafts
in and out of your skull when you try to think. You pass only strangers
without faces, touch your own face and feel nothing, yet a camera still finds
your features. They ask why you no longer smile. How can you explain the
mouth is not yours? One day, I woke from that place in the bathtub shaking,
as if just born in a factory, with no memory of past or future. I’m the wound
uncared for so long you can no longer feel the pain of it, though it is killing
you. This must be why there is always blood in the water, even though I did
not cut myself in this world
Sara Eliza Johnson is the author of two poetry collections, Vapor (2022) and Bone Map (2014), both published by Milkweed Editions. Her poems and essays have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, New England Review, Boston Review, AGNI, and Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day.
A TOKEN FOR CLOSENESS
Here, please hold this. It is an old t-shirt and a handful
of sun, of stones, of words I’ve learned and let ripple
around my voice like a box of jacks. And it is my cold-
night dreams and the steam from greens hitting a hot
pan. I swear it is my sweat – the work kind, the nerves
kind, the I- have-no- idea- why kind. Here, this is what
I have hung and dried, what I have hunted and collected,
what I was, what I’ve become. This is all the doors
I own and all the doors I’ve opened. And right here are
the tiny coins my wishes have become without ever
reaching water. And this is my ripped lip. And this
is the very last corner of my twenty-three-sided room
I haven’t yet lit to let glow prime numbered for you
against some far away sunset slipping in through stained
glass. And this is glass and the waves that licked the beach
it came from and the tiny spider who connects the weird
curves of my heart. And this is also our fossil song. Please,
here, hold this: it is at least one part of me I hope you will keep.
John A. Nieves is the author of Curio (Elixir Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, New Ohio Review, Hopkins Review, and the Pushcart Prize anthology.
THEORIES OF WANTING
You wake with it. Like a headache
but it’s an animal with a hunger
like your hunger. Just at the base of yourself
and impossible to feed.
Night rain is its theme song.
Through the black windows
you imagine a distance filled with wild things,
each muffled by the wet that consumes them.
One is an armadillo. Another is a lonely man.
On the stage your mind makes before sleep,
thinking keeps shining its floodlight
to find things in the emptiness,
to force meanings on dusty floors
and what lies uneaten in the sink.
Sometimes a sandwich is only a sandwich.
The body is an imperfect coat.
All you want is to keep someone warm
but what about your body’s body?
Who will it wear?
Rebecca Macijeski is the author of the chapbooks Apocryphal Girl (Pinhole Poetry, 2024) and Autobiography (Split Rock Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, and Sycamore Review.
TAKE THE BODY
Telling the truth about my own experience in a body,
I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has
solved it yet.– Virginia Woolf
In school we solved for x, never for xx.
Did the answer lie in the stars who are
just like us? Tom Cruise always gave me
the heebie-jeebies. It wasn’t his cock-
sureness, the Scientology. It was
the photos of him with his girlfriends,
wives, one hand placed over their bellies.
This is mine. I didn’t necessarily want
my body. I wanted someone to want it
but not to take it. To prepare for death,
Buddhist monks follow an instruction manual for taking apart the body,
picturing its life after breath. Decompose
a poem and you have rhythm, sound,
syntax, tone, diction, (sometimes
rhetoric) each line break a rehearsal
of death. I wasn’t thinking about my own
that first time I practiced uncherishing
the body, the summer after junior year.
I didn’t go home. Some call the body
a home. I stayed in my off-campus studio.
I was broke, we were all broke, and a woman
I knew got a job dancing topless in Jersey.
Her boyfriend would drive her there
and back, told me I could ride with them.
Her night shifts became a kind of daily
meditation: dancing would solve rent
and with only one letter between earn
and learn, tell me the truth about my own
experience in a body. Buddhist monks
in training, adolescent boys, are taught to put
a lid on lust by contemplating the body
“according to what is attractive and what
is repulsive.” Pus, excrement, bile, mucus,
blood. Like sinking your hand, eyes closed,
into a bag of grain: “This is red rice, these
are beans, these are peas, this is millet, and
this is white rice.” As much as tips, I wanted
distance from my body, as though seeing it
through a peephole or a scrim. When
hadn’t it been a projection of others?
I scheduled an interview, more
of a viewing. Look, you didn’t walk
in my shoes. You can’t even scroll
five minutes through my algorithm.
Friends urged me not to take the job.
Where they saw debasement, I saw
discipline, a chance to separate self
from sack. How was I any different
from a teenage monk who wanders
with his empty bowl, begging
for freedom? Risk came later.
After that summer, I found other ways
to uncherish the body, taking into it
substances (was taking morphine from
the dead stealing?), and taking into it
the bodies of strangers. “This is red
rice, these are beans, these are peas, this
is millet, and this is white rice.” I keep
my mother’s in a plastic bag inside
a Shaker box, oval and made of golden
wood. A body within a body within
a body. I can’t bring myself to sift through
the white grit, hold her in my open palms.
Of the cremains, I wish I could say
they’re the body finally bleached of meaning.
Brandel France de Bravo’s third collection of poems is Locomotive Cathedral (University of Nebraska Press, 2025). Her poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Barrow Street, Conduit, Southern Humanities Review, and The Best American Poetry.
EKSTASIS
After all this time of affirming dryness, rain
tails its own imprint. Never mind we dug switches
and paths to be ready, it suddenly bludgeons
the road. The desert wants
so badly to resist it. Later I’ll say, It roiled, it swam.
We zip and go outside, see it vulgar
and supple. Wrapped in our weird quick jackets
we’re in the same place, the porch, to watch the gouging; the rain
with its aerobic turns through culvert, the ground
rearranged or drunk and ejecting
more water. It’s banging cold out here
and we’re grinning. It’s wonderful to be in love
and not realize it. It’s all ruined, what we made. The water
escapes the ditch. But what is
after all, everlasting? I’m out here to praise
the bonanza. Praise rain smeared over the small
rock wall and concrete and the body of it
is flowing. I’ve never felt better
than wearing this cadence – not intimate, but true.
And the truth is I need this full
wrestle. There’s a root to
elemental violence. I am somehow suspended.
Lauren Camp is the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Is Is Enough (Texas Review Press, 2026), as well as In Old Sky (Grand Canyon Conservancy, 2024), Worn Smooth between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023), and An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023). Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, New England Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal.
HOW TO CARE FOR YOUR MISERY
First off, read the instructions
on the tag. Misery can last forever
if you take care of it. Everyone says so.
Especially if you hang it up
properly to dry. Yes, every time.
You think no one sees you
balling it up in a cold little knot
at the bottom of your closet?
And never leave your melancholy
wet on the bathroom floor.
That’s only asking for trouble.
Sunlight is best for intimidating
the spores. Your ancestors knew this.
They didn’t just whimsically throw the whole body away
& then turn up at Target to blow $40
on a brand new variety of sadness
when the old one was perfectly
serviceable. What a waste.
Be glad you never had to rinse
your depression in a sink at recess
before shoving it back in your pants.
For that matter, why not be grateful
you’ve never had to haul your despair
down to a river to scrub it with a rock?
Take some wisdom from the aunties &
take care of what belongs to you.
Replacing your belongings takes time,
& you won’t live forever.
Even then, you’ll need to set aside
your finest misery to meet God.
Emily Skaja is the author of two collections of poetry from Graywolf Press: Black Lake (2026) and Brute (2019). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Na-tion, Poetry, Copper Nickel, Ninth Letter, and The New York Times Magazine.
WAS MY MARRIAGE TO POETRY ARRANGED?
Picture the nine muses at a grand dais.
Judging the Soul-Contract Talent Show.
I see them. Surveying us, the unborn,
like dusty vintage shop knickknacks,
determining by our dents, our patinas,
how we might reflect or deflect light.
Hey, looks like we got another one!
A casting call for spirits – the artsy
types, perhaps a bit shaggy but earnest –
those sisters sizing us up, whispering
behind cupped palms, bidding, bickering,
bartering. Most of us on line vying
to catch the eye of Euterpe (Music)
or Terpsichore (Dance). Even Thalia
(Comedy) promising a bit of glory.
Surely the poets were the last picked.
The quiet ones, less suited for spotlights,
more devoted to diction than dollars.
Assigned the more inconspicuous roles
as background in Life’s school play.
Either way, here I am today delivering
verse, cuddling nightly with my muse,
used to how she hogs the bed, forgetting
where we met, who introduced us, and
not really caring, too distracted by how
she sings me to sleep nightly, promising
everything means something, her lines
about starlight and salvation always
seemingly penned just for me.
Michael Montlack is the author of two poetry collections from NYQ Books: Daddy (2020) and Cool Limbo (2011). His work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Phoebe, Poet Lore, and Epoch.
MAGGIE: A ROMANCE
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893, rev. 1896)
– Stephen Crane
I clump up tenement steps
After night shift at the slaughterhouse,
Unlace the bloody, stinking workboots
And scrub my arms with tallow and lye
At our “unholy sink,” begrimed baptismal font,
Then dry them in sunlight slanting onto the roof
Clotheslined with the contagious
Sheets of the consumptive and clotted with pigeons
Like filthy angels who re fuse to be shooed.
Who re. As the neighbors
Condemned you. That word forming
In the mouths of the pious,
And meaning one who has come undone.
Gone astray. Fallen far away.
O Maggie. In my revision, you are not murdered,
Nor do you succumb to the slum’s unkind slurs
And offer your flesh to the river.
I find you dazed among the denizens of Rum Alley
And shepherd you home. And we marry,
As young couples do in the 19th century.
I reach for the few morning stars,
Then return to our room to lie by your side,
Maggie, my dear swollen unholy bride.
Michael Waters has published fourteen books of poetry, including Pagan Sky: New & Selected Poems 2000–2025 (BOA Editions, 2026); Sinnerman (Etruscan Press, 2023); Caw (BOA Editions, 2020); The Dean of Discipline (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018); and Darling Vulgarity (2006) and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001), both from BOA Editions. He is also the author of The Bicycle and the Soul: Prose on Poetry (Tiger Bark Press, 2024). His poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry and five editions of The Pushcart Prize anthology.
REMAKE
We burn, return as dust, ash floating
through the wind-spill, in this new masked
world, begin again, skies wisping yellow
and blood-red, blaze
into fires of a fresh hell – white demons chasing Asian men
and women down streets, a jogger
spitting in my sister-in-law’s face, You brought
this here –
I binge the shit out
of Cobra Kai to forget
*
where we are – ex-karate kid Daniel LaRusso selling cars
in his pressed suit, practicing
the crane stance, his longtime rival
Johnny, blonde villain
who swigs Coors, neglects
his son, dons faded rocker t-shirts – wax
nostalgic to reclaim
some innocence, that decade
of Ferris wheels, cotton candy, New Wave
music, when we could have never
imagined now – draped
faces, wheeled out bodies, six feet apart presumed
and hoped, no one really knows what’s enough
to keep the viral load down –
streets strewn in broken
windows, stores looted
by flash mobs, mouths spewing Kung Flu, China virus, You don’t
belong, marauders sweeping
up jewels, gun-waving strangers
in trucks, on peaks of nearby mountains, Go back
*
to where you came from. Locked
in my studio, words don’t
come, poems fizzle
on pages, my son’s fist
pounding, I’m trying to write
a bowl, I take deep
breaths, about to explode – set down my pen
again, hold up his red flash card,
sweep away shards, repeat Stop
*
but there is no end – eerie black
inking the sky, nights shrouded in moon
silence, my liquor fog morphing
the crescent
into a knife, samurai sword, glinting
pistol I will need
to protect us. Should we
buy a gun? I flip
to the next
episode, immerse deeper
*
into the glare, this revived
battle, Daniel’s midlife obsession
to beat Johnny, who reopens
Cobra Kai dojo, their motto, “No Mercy,” laughing
drunk, don’t hear
Brendan fall, wake to Grace’s faint cries
through the bathroom door, I need
some help. Buzzed and numb
I stumble, find her cradling
him, bruise spreading
*
across his back, in the background, Johnny’s boys
chanting “No Mercy,” there is
little mercy now, or escape
from this daily
pummeling – backs stiff, we rub
piss stains
from grout, triple our son’s diapers
so he won’t leak, forget
the burner’s whispering blue
fire, smoke from scalded eggs
*
setting off
alarms, always this simmering, the cop
whose knee decides
who lives or dies, Minnesota burning
to the ground – It’s not safe
to go out we tell Brendan again, his forehead pressed
against the glass
of our front door. Shadows pass
by, he touches faces
on Zoom, screams for the school bus
*
to arrive. It’s my turn
to write Grace reminds, shuts the door
of her backyard shed, banging keys
to shape her next
wounded hero and the woman
who will save
him. I bring her iced tea, kiss her neck, hope
she still wants
me. I drive
our neighborhood, circle
*
old places, scribble shitty first drafts, cry
inside my car, something
breaking open, Ojichan blooming
from deserts
into my dreams, bearded ghost
in his purple kesa, It’s happening
again. You must learn
to breathe he tells me, floats
away. I pray
it won’t happen, the next surreal horror
*
spin kicking us into panic, just miles
from my parents, police abuse
tear gas, in our capital, police ask
for heat ray guns, Ojichan descends
again, You are
a vessel, the words move
through you. I return
to breath, undone sentences, melt
into pink sunsets, forget
my next lesson plan, reach
*
lost warmth, curves of Grace, caress
her hipbone, nestle inside her
after Brendan screams himself
to sleep. At his fortieth school Zoom
meeting, he hurls
my laptop. What the fuck
are you doing? I shout, pray
my voice
is muted. The fissured screen
flickers, my cracked words pour
*
in torrents, shine
on us, in the remake
I watch, where are
the Asian names
beside Mr. Miyagi, the real
ambiance beyond cheesy
Oriental lounge music, a flute with notes
floating aimless
as Danny flashes back
to Miyagi’s can of car wax, Wax on, Wax off, the stoic mask
*
Miyagi wore when his family
was taken, and still
he volunteered to fight the war
to show he was
American, my Uncle Hide
flying for our stars
and stripes, plane shot down, MIA
in Korea, last seen
drifting in a parachute
over Pyongyang – Not again, I yell
*
when Brendan falls
from my hands, his body smacking
the ground. He sniffles, sits
on our bed, nestles close
to Grace, crumpled sheets
around us, we look out
our bedroom window, clouds
shifting, Daddy
is sorry, the house
quiets, Sorry for the whole world.
Brian Komei Dempster is the author of two poetry collections from Four Way Books: Seize (2020) and Topaz (2013). His poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Shenandoah, and anthologized in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, & Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008) and Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2004).
DEAR O –
I waited out news of your disaster. No animals
visited me. No new stars were born. In my dreams
I could never find the shore. The endless purple
night a river you could drown in, the sky puckered
tinsel. The pink heat of your mouth a fading galaxy.
I offered you two hearts, you took the one that turned
to black. Even land is no comfort – my longing
sharp as bare feet in summer grass. In your absence,
the men have grown restless. Have laid waste
to my door, a trail of heartache and ambition:
leaves and branches, olive pits and nuts. All manner
of ruin. Empty wine bottles spun in my direction.
They want to hammer out my loneliness until
it’s a thin, see- through shroud. They want
to show me their etchings, the soft leather
of their backseats, their six-packs glistening
with sweat. Even the oracles tell me to give
up on you, midnight souring the minute I lay
in my empty bed, ash of a burnt-out love scattered
around the perimeter. If this is what it means to be
in the world, I don’t want to know where you’ve been.
Vandana Khanna is the author of three poetry collections: Burning Like Her Own Planet (Alice James Books, 2023); Afternoon Masala (University of Arkansas Press, 2014); and Train to Agra (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, New England Review, and The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry.
THE BUREAU OF HUNGER
Here is my application. Frozen under cheap pipes, my need. My cash
in hand. My ticket off the Monopoly board. Somewhere I’ve only ever
had in a dream. Two fruit trees. Pears and plums. Tender orbs that
bound from the boughs and land in my hands, pre-baked in pie tins,
skin warm. A pack of dogs so well-fed they don’t gnaw their fleas. A
pack of dogs chasing a pig. A pig – so ecstatic to be alive, running, he
even loves the knife in his back. The blood (that isn’t blood, really)
gushing in a trail behind him, a shimmer of bacon grease. You can buy
this. You can buy all this, and more, and more and more. Drive in a
large car like a turtle shell to a lake of milk and gummy fish. The day’s
haul is already scooped up, a rainbow waiting in a tin bucket for you.
You would have to be a Judas to think there’s something better. To
question this fine gold necklace. To question why it tugs, just so, like
a leash.
Lucas Jorgensen’s poems have appeared in Poetry, LitHub, The Massachusetts Review, and Copper Nickel
UNDER POLYETHYLENE
The fruit fly trapped above a reservoir of what it wants:
apple cider vinegar which it will in time die in
In the closet of the room in the nursing home
where Luke’s mother lives we find a baby doll
bald blue eyes a sweet blandness to its plastic
face Luke’s mother (on the bed) turns her body
away from it but looks back over her shoulder to
instruct us get it out of here When we leave she appears
behind us in the hall her hands down at her sides
palms out aghast: you forgot the baby Luke walks her
back to bed I retrieve it carry it out by a toe
as if it were contagious and lay it on the counter
of the nurse’s station No small talk Give it to Velma
the nurse nods at two women loitering nearby
Velma The one without the walker I approach dither
hold out the baby Velma snatches it bundles it
in her arms moving quickly from She’s so beautiful
to (lowering her head) You’re so beautiful “Infestation”
seems overblown but generation by generation
the flies have survived in my house since
I first harvested tomatoes which ripened and rotted
the same fruits simultaneously on the sill causing me
to cut out bad parts Simple traps: vinegar
in a juice glass saran wrap overtop poke a few
holes like for breathing but serving the opposite
purpose As I watched the fruit fly I couldn’t discern
if it was atop the saran wrap or just underneath:
on the barrier or through it looking for a way out
When we leave the facility I say to Luke what
we all say as we leave such facilities accompanied
by my fingers in the shape of a pistol pointed
at my ear I need apple trees I say a cat at least
if not a future into which I can project happiness
It does not feel evil does not feel like the machination
of a Greek god to drown the fruit flies in what
intoxicates them does not feel like the pool scene
from Poltergeist to see the fallen floating on the amber
surface beside the churning of those still living
does not seem to license whatever may eventually
become of me Luke says he knows his mother
that she seems happy As he sat beside her on the edge
of her bed he asked if she had dinner Chocolate cake
she said I chimed in And was it good? She paused
savoring her own wit: too good she said winking
Benjamin Grossberg is the author of three poetry collections from the University of Tampa Press: My Husband Would (2020), Space Traveler (2014), and Sweet Core Orchard (2009). He is also the author of a novel, The Spring Before Obergefell (University of Ne-braska Press, 2024)
ON THE MANDELA EFFECT
That couple stuck in space. Stuck, not stranded. They said. Who?
Someone. Stuck. Fixed. Jammed. Did they come home yet. Was
someone sent. Were they plunged into open ocean. Coast guard. A
long way from home, yes? They’re married, yes? Or a scandal.
Drones over New Jersey. Red planet. Press. Droning, those
desperate & perplexed, CEOs. Hit sent. I remember. Took shots.
Screens. Someone did. Health cares, somewhere. What’s here. Can’t
bathe in space. A fine mass. Hall. Assess. Atrophy. Muscle mess.
Shakes. Dense. I woke up dentally. Eventually. One jumps over the
rest. Skims – with feeling. How out of character. No care out the
world. Sending me. Can’t we just lather them. Baby oil. Parachute.
Hold your breath, baby. Is it all a fourth wall & this the way too to not
say I am still stuck up there. Look down. Hurricane. The fleet is in.
Had this fix been a real emergency I’d have melted. Radio in. A
wave of rage. Bait. A decade plus. Something budged, yes, just.
Bandwidth maxed. Mixed. Martian on a warship. Maced by his
own fin. Is that you aren’t sure, just in case. Aisle 51, food desert.
Recall. Cornucopia of the loom, fruit & we were so happy. Fruit of
achtung, baby. Pet names. Disaster. Marooned. Soccer ball you that
I. Call. Waiting.
Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several poetry collections, including If This is the Age We End Discovery (Alice James Books, 2021). Her poems have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, and Tin House.
OBSERVING THE FIRST PHOTOGRAPHED
HUMAN
He’ll leave soon for who knows what
but we can watch him for now – he’s
getting his boots shined,
he’s standing in the sun, this sun,
the one surrounding us today, its light
careening outside our windows.
The ghosts of the living flit invisibly
around him, too quick for this world’s
first exposure to capture.
Only the trees, being trees in their
slower existence, stay with him
and those hand-built walkups
glinting in a blast of morning light,
near blinding, like a thermal force
hurtles headlong for them.
He is the fulcrum holding all the simulacrum
come before and every negative to follow,
but the weight he bears
is weightless with not knowing – how could he?
We are less than unsignificant, like Icarus
falling in the Bruegel painting.
A distant roof, a tiny aperture, that’s us.
But what he attends to is his boot.
He bends down to inspect its cleaning.
He wants it done right so he oversees
whoever is working on the leather below.
Is this a vain man we are looking at?
I suppose they had those then, as the old masters
understood so well – how we float in and judge,
then vanish, like an angel, like a drone.
Masin Persina is the author of the chapbook Centonials (Bottlecap Press, 2024). His work has appeared in Colorado Review, Ninth Letter, Boulevard, and Seneca Review.
FOG
I’m sitting on the couch
looking out the window as fog rolls in –
trees softening at the edges like watercolors,
neighbors’ houses disappearing.
I like fog. When it engulfs
I’m a child again,
reading under the covers late at night –
somebody else out there
doing all the worrying.
The fog edges closer –
hey, hey, don’t worry, it says,
everything will be alright.
Of course it won’t –
not everything.
My phone told me to expect
a thunderstorm today.
Instead – fog.
My dad said more than once
that he wished he could live his life over again,
not make the same mistakes.
Now I’m wondering –
which mistakes?
Maybe he wasn’t so bad.
Maybe I have no clue about harm I’ve done.
How do we know?
I slapped my teenager’s face once.
I remember that.
But what about things I don’t remember?
My daughter left this morning after a visit.
What sticks in her mind?
I’m not beating myself up –
just wondering.
This scenario pops into my head:
Over dinner and wine one night,
History says to his grown children:
I’d like a do-over.
And he gets a do-over!
And afterwards, he says:
I’d like a do-over.
Maybe I read this somewhere,
or saw it in a cartoon.
If so, I don’t remember.
There, there, the fog says,
settling into the yard
like a bird into a nest.
Jennifer Stewart Miller is the author of Thief (Grayson Books, 2020), The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020), and A Fox Appears: A Biography of a Boy in Haiku (2015). Her poems have appeared in Kestrel, Poet Lore, RHINO, Salamander, Tar River Poetry, and Verse Daily.
INDIGOFERA
Once, indigo softened snakebite’s poison,
lifted men out of fever’s hot drowning.
Its name sounds like teeth and fur,
but fera means to bear, not untamed. Still,
aren’t all colors wild? Green of the serpent
conjured from seaweed and desire.
Brown the deep, silent gladness of loam.
Red that hurts: gleaming berries, sweet
to the eye, that burst in the gut
and kick beasts to their knees.
The gleaming maroon of placenta,
mycelial with before and next, slipping
from the body as a new animal scents the air
and begins, somehow, to live. To bear.
A bear. A wolf. An elk. A soft-furred fox
with pincer teeth. Silver as steel.
Orange as heat. A blue
deep as drowning, then rescue.
Catherine Pierce is the author of four books of poems, most recently Danger Days (Saturnalia, 2020). A new poetry collection, Dear Beast (Saturnalia), and an essay collection, Foxes for Everybody (Northwestern University Press), are forthcoming in 2026. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The New York Times, The Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology.
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO RENAME SILENCE
To un-rhyme it from violence, sound’s
brief absence after the safety’s clicked off.
Instead of not-talking-to-the-flashlight:
Name it Choir of Feathers.
Instead of tongue-bit-bloody:
Dandelion Congregation.
Not the noiseless flow of dread,
but Windblown Throng of Milkweed,
Breath Held in a Prayer Flag Forest,
Baffle of Leaf Shadow on Concrete Wall.
Name it Buried Terra Cotta Army, if you will.
Rank on rank of mute generals and warriors.
All their quiet armor, the hushed swords,
the speechless spears and arrows.
Meanwhile, above ground, a boy walks home
with the sound of nothing in his ears.
He has the right to remain Sugar Maple
Heartwood, Bent Sun Through River Shallows
Craig van Rooyen’s poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, New Ohio Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry Northwest.