by Nikki Moustaki
My neighbor comes at one a.m. in her night
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by W.J. Herbert
herself…
well, nothing, really. It’s me
she wants to talk to but she doesn’t know how,
and I can’t help her. Sarah,
a counselor is saying, now that my daughter’s
finally opened a brochure
which lists follow-up services
hospice provides. Sarah…
this stranger is saying,
not gently, or slowly, or softly
the way I would have,
and now I’m picturing the brittle
filament that runs from his landline
to the receiver she’s holding:
Sarah, he’s saying
with a clipped “ah” at the end of it,
as if this syllable is that filament
about to break—
as if he is the one who is breaking it.
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W. J. Herbert’s work was awarded the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize and was selected by Natasha Trethewey for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2017. Her poetry, fiction, and reviews appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, Hudson Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she was raised in Southern California where she earned a Bachelor’s in studio art and a Master’s in flute performance. She lives in Kingston, New York, and Portland, Maine.
by Carlie Hoffman
Just now a woman in a yellow
dress and matching hair bands enters the train
holding a plastic microphone,
and, because at midnight she turned fifty-two,
will sing Happy Birthday through the eleven
screeching stops home. Happy birthday to me
she is stomping her suede purple heel
as she sways from one end of the car
to the other. Happy, happy
birthday, even in the elevator as I
make my way toward the subway exit, her metal cane
tapping against cement like a drumstick.
I don’t know if she is drunk on gin or some other
almost upper that slowly ends in disgust,
though that is not my story to tell.
Somehow it is autumn. Somehow, yesterday,
I managed to wash my sheets. Like you,
I do not know if happiness
is anything more extravagant than a goal
to shape our lives toward, and it’s
too early for the rest of our lives.
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Carlie Hoffman is the author of This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021). Her second book is forthcoming with Four Way Books in 2023. A poet and translator, her honors include a 92Y Boston Review / Discovery Prize and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, and her work has been published in Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Boston Review, Jewish Currents, New England Review, and elsewhere. Carlie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. For more, visit www.carliehoffman.com.
by Jill Bialosky
lV. Snow of childhood
Snow of childhood,
of dreams, of our poems
& discontent, snow of our memories,
some distorted,
forgotten, trod upon, rendered
to a whiteout, snow that dusts
bridges, highways, roofs,
that tastes of rust
& weighs on the branches,
O don’t forget them,
insufferable snow that falls
on the pots that hold
the pods of the dead
in the brilliance
of the outdoor gazebo
we see from the window
of the care home for the aged,
to praise our matriarch,
our boots wet, snow in our hair,
look how pale she is, look
what she has bore, those veins
in which flowed the blood
that flowed into us—
LXXXIV. The winter where the sparrows quieted
The winter where the sparrows quieted, in which the snow
would not stop, in which the rats would not come out,
in which we feared for our safety & snow covered the bereft shrubs,
homeless (here I am, I am you) sought shelter, fearful stockpiled
water & provisions. The winter a strain of virus
quarantined us far into spring, in which another teenager
somewhere in the city is locked in a soporific fog,
helpless, forgotten, isolated in aloneness, landscape
shrouded in an unreasonable mask, winter of the symphony’s
grand crescendo—seats of council, judges, assemble to form a decree
citizenry run amok is not a matter of the individual, but society,
timpani, cymbals, snare drum, family of percussion.
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Jill Bialosky is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently The Players; three critically acclaimed novels, most recently, The Prize; a New York Times best-selling memoir, History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life; and Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir. Her poems and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, O Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and Paris Review, among others. She coedited, with Helen Schulman, the anthology Wanting a Child. She is an Executive Editor and Vice President at W. W. Norton & Company. Her work has been a finalist for the James Laughlin Prize, The Patterson Prize, and Books for a Better Life. In 2014, she was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry. She lives in New York City.
by Shara McCallum
May 2018: for my grandmother
When the dead return
they will come to you in dream
and in waking, will be the bird
knocking, knocking against glass, seeking
a way in, will masquerade
as the wind, its voice made audible
by the tongues of leaves, greedily
lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue
is a turning and returning, the dead
will not then nor ever again
desert you, their unrest
will be the coat cloaking you,
the farther you journey
from them the more
distance will maw in you,
time and place gulching
when the dead return to demand
accounting, wanting
and wanting and wanting
everything you have to give and nothing
will quench or unhunger them
as they take all you make as offering.
Then tell you to begin again.
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From Jamaica, and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US & UK, including No Ruined Stone (2021). McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Israel. La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room, an anthology of poems selected from across her six books and translated into Spanish by Adalber Salas Hernández, was published in 2021 by Mantis Editores in Mexico. In addition to Spanish, her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch and have been set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz. Awards for her work include the Silver Musgrave Medal, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize (for Madwoman), a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (for The Water Between Us). She is on the faculty of the Pacific Low-Residency MFA and an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. McCallum was appointed the 2021-22 Penn State Laureate. She hosts the weekly radio show “Poetry Moment” on NPR affiliate station WPSU.
by Tibni Reth
In the midst of a worldwide pandemic,
life and work were expected to be perfect.
Out of nowhere, an enemy came
unseen to create a “passing” problem like magic.
From which in the ultimate,
a person should have much gratitude.
Then, all mandated isolation and hunker-down
orders evolved into forced domesticity.
While all the stores which feed domestic dreams
go bankrupt like wild.
Unthinkable that everyone turned
into a housewife, even the species of male.
Gone are home stores like Bed Bath and Beyond;
also Pier One, all gone like magic.
Revealing in secret that the one crying the
hardest & loudest is the manly male!
Perhaps, then, he won’t be required to be
a king of domesticity.
He is to accept what he is turning into with gratitude.
When all he wants to do is to attend
happy hour and go hog wild.
As everyone knows what a boy considers
days or nights that are perfect.
When the homebound guy is…
well, home, he won’t think it’s wild.
To look up what sestina means, even when it sounds like
another ‘s’ word that’s perfect.
With one too proud to ask for directions—
quite like the typical male.
Whatever is not found,
he still finds it best to have gratitude.
What’s so twisted is his idea of domesticity.
Became a search for sestina that’s invisible in
the dictionary, fantastically thinking like magic.
Okay, Okay. This is not a day of bashing the male.
Neither is it a day to criticize the virtues
of vices of domesticity.
And it is ever a day for perfectionists to
strive to be perfect.
Like the saying that declares you can’t be too
rich or too thin—you can’t have too much gratitude.
Believe that the thought is not too wild.
In a world that does not believe in magic.
A typical guy is too logical to believe in magic.
The quintessential “tough dude”
is averse to domesticity.
They must love order that’s wild.
What he deems perfect.
Most females cannot regard with gratitude.
So for any other,
it’s most difficult to define what’s male.
For all my bitching and complaining,
I miss my brilliant friends who are male.
When I cannot resort to magic
I am left with a strong dose of gratitude.
The perfect panacea for what in the
world is not perfect.
One day, I plan to go wild.
In the most tranquil & harmonious domesticity.
What I wrote is my idea of a perfect home —
so full of magic.
Of a loosely-defined and chaotically-ordered
wild domesticity.
Shared with a bright male type who has
in the heart much gratitude.
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Tibni Reth is currently serving a 36-year sentence for second-degree murder in the state of Alaska. She was born in Bandung, Indonesia 57 years ago and became a naturalized citizen at the age of 12. She grew up in Southern California and graduated from Loma Linda University in California as well as from Aurora University in Illinois. Before coming to prison, she worked in health care, social work, commercial fishing, commercial driving and aviation. Among her many hobbies are cooking and travel having visited four continents and eight countries. As of this writing, she still doesn’t know what to do when she grows up.
by Teresa K. Miller
I don’t listen for you now, your crow step,
so eager to say my own piece. How does it
start. The ants came to tear my house down.
I went to bed thinking of them, woke plotting
against them. I did not dream. A legion of men
that summer, none could bear to let me
speak. They focused over my shoulder,
the vacant corner a more willing
conspirator. Where will I lay you, wright,
smith, climber cutting to the node, choosing
a new leader.
***
Lured back, I spun myself a shiny aluminum wing—
but in the afternoon, she put on a new face.
Those you love will evaporate before you, leave
their slack-jawed wind-up bodies lying in the yard.
Nicotine-stained filters reeking in the kitchen garbage.
Here is the next moment of your life: You spent it
in my crooked song.
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Teresa K. Miller’s second full-length poetry collection, Borderline Fortune (Penguin, Oct. 5, 2021), was selected as a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series by former California poet laureate Carol Muske-Dukes. A graduate of Barnard College and the Mills College MFA program, Miller is the author of sped (Sidebrow) and Forever No Lo (Tarpaulin Sky) as well as co-editor of Food First: Selected Writings from 40 Years of Movement Building (Food First Books). Her poems and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, AlterNet, Entropy, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Originally from Seattle, she tends a mini orchard near Portland, Oregon.
by Denise Duhamel
I record my mom singing “A Bushel And A Peck”
and send it to my nieces to play for their boys
who are all under 12, the age they need to be
to visit her in the ICU. My mom has a bandage
on her nose from where the ventilator cut her,
and clear tubes of oxygen in her nostrils. Blue
veins squiggle her forehead as though her youngest
great-grandson has scribbled there. The boys
barely notice and send back their own videos—
Ben, Nick, and Max say, “We love you!”
then their mother pans over to the dog,
“And Ringo does too!” Zach, Brody, and Alex
sing “You Are My Sunshine.” My mom
always hated our cell phones, the way they
distracted us away from her. But now she wants
me to hold my screen so she can see, so she can hear
the boys’ song over and over again, her head
gently bopping back and forth on her pillow.
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Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021). Her other titles include Scald; Blowout; Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). And she and Julie Marie Wade co-authored The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Duhamel teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
by Amanda Gomez
April and a morning shower blankets us, covers
the shed out back where my father’s fishing equipment
is stored. On mornings like this, he searches
beneath rain gutters for worms loosening the earth
with his hands, sifting it back and forth; collecting
each body he finds in old crusted Tupperware for bait.
Sometimes, when there isn’t enough, he cuts them
in half. How concerned he is, ensuring there’s enough.
It’s the silence he likes: the solace of being alone,
standing on the bank holding his fishing rod, watching
nothing but the tug of the line against the current until a fish
takes the bait. Most days when he brings home a good catch
I like to watch my mother clean the fish. I stand
by the kitchen sink staring at her blood-covered hands
as she tugs their heads backwards, stripping
the skin from its flesh: this new kind of nakedness.
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Amanda Gomez is a Latinx poet from Norfolk, Virginia. She is the author of the chapbook, Wasting Disease (Finishing Line Press). She was a semi-finalist for the 2019 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from Nimrod International Journal, a finalist for the 2018 James Hearst Poetry Prize from the North American Review, and a 2017 recipient for the Academy of American Poets University Prize. Her poetry can be read in print and online journals such as PANK, Tupelo Quarterly, and others.
by Erika Luckert
When it rains, bloom waxy crystals on the cuticle of a leaf.
When the fertilizers wash in from the fields, bloom algal.
Bloom the slag and iron in the midst of being wrought.
Study coffee grounds or gelatin in water.
When making arrangements, consider color, scale, the life
expectancy of each bloom, their vessel.
Most flowers are imaginary. Somewhere below the surface of Turner’s oil seas
zinc turns to soap and blooms the crests of waves.
Bloom by folding small, syndrome of chromosomes fragmented
while the cancers grow.
Given phosphate, given water, fog, smoke, heat, dust.
In certain seasons, jellyfish bloom and gather.
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Erika Luckert is a poet, writer, and educator. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, CALYX, Tampa Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA in Poetry, Erika has taught creative and critical writing at public schools and colleges across New York City. In 2017, she was awarded the 92Y Discovery Poetry Prize. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Erika is currently a PhD student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
by Patricia Zylius
Onion’s skin very thin,
Mild winter coming in;
Onion’s skin thick and tough,
Coming winter cold and rough.
—Gardener’s Rhyme
Take this one on the cutting board—
it sneers at the knife, gives up its skin
one smidge at a time.
I’m late-autumnal too, and so thin-skinned
I swathe myself against the chill.
Whatever’s nicking away at the layers of my life
is doing it mildly, fragment by fragment,
slowly prepping me for the winter stew pot.
O for a thick covering to save me
from this niggling disintegration.
And when the season’s cold and rough
let a big knife strip it off
suddenly and whole.
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Patricia Zylius is the author of the chapbook, Once a Vibrant Field. Her poems have appeared in California Quarterly, Catamaran Literary Reader, Passager, Sequestrum, Juniper, Ellipsis, Natural Bridge, Red Wheelbarrow, and other journals, and on the Women’s Voices for Change website. Her poems have also been included in Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, In Plein Air, Women Artists Datebook, and The Yes Book.
by Stephanie Tom
Say the universe didn’t begin with a bang
but with a whisper. Say the stars were
crystallized by their fear of being forgotten.
Say there was life outside of our solar system;
somewhere in a pocket of secrets is a planet
no wider than we know the sea to be deep &
there lives a child that only knows how to
bury seeds but not how to water them.
It believes in nature not nurture, & believes
in the moon. Every night the sunset fades
into silk & silence as it appears, pockmarked
& partitioned into ruby red craters like a
pomegranate. The child stretches onto
dewy grass & reaches upwards. In his dreams
he can cradle the moon in his palms & pick
a jewel out of each crater. They melt on his
tongue & he swallows the heart at each center.
He laments the bitter aril that surrounds each
one & wishes that they would not choke him
every time. The stars don’t know how to tell him
that the bitterness is born from the seeds that
he buries, & that he is only tasting the fruits of
his labor. A seed can only grow when it’s watered
& a jewel can only bloom into sweet syrup when
it’s rooted in remembrance. But he never learns.
In his dreams, the child plucks the craters clean
& loses himself in a solar system without stars.
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Stephanie Tom is a student at Cornell University studying literature, communication, information science, media studies, and psychology. A Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the 2019 Poets & Writers Amy Award, her poetry has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Sine Theta Magazine, Hobart, and Honey Literary, among other places. Her debut chapbook, My Heart is a Mausoleum but Only Out of Necessity, is forthcoming from Glass Poetry Press in 2022. When she’s not writing she dabbles in dance and graphic design. You can read more of her work at tomstephanie.weebly.com.
by Eileen Rush
Uncultivable mycelium runs her strands
through the loam of low-lying woodland.
She sleeps most of the year. Treasure-fish.
Sought by pigs. Hungry kids comb woods
in early May, around Derby Day. Every old
hand has a trick for finding them: go
to the widest tree, the poplar or the cottonwood,
and look among its south-facing knees.
Go after a full moon, go after two days of rain,
go when the sun returns and the moon winks.
When I heard someone say, I'm just not inspired
by nature, I smelled dirt. Layers of rot. Last fall's
oak leaves. I want them to hunt with me,
briars tugging at our ankles, spiderwebs
in our hair, for a thing so precious no one
can grow it on purpose. Honey, I want you
to taste pure luck on a spring morning
when a giant lifts her head from the earth
and, like a miracle, overnight bears up
sweeter than the flesh of any fish.
_____________________________________________________________________
Eileen Rush is a queer writer, poet, and narrative designer raised in Appalachia and living in Louisville, Kentucky. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She's got her a garden and lives on a farm with, depending on who you ask, too many chickens.
by Anna Lena Phillips Bell
When you pick a flower, you risk
violence to it
beyond the taking. I used to try—
wanting to hold a bright, rough zinnia,
wanting to carry it
away with me—then soon
the stem bent, its fibers
showing but not breaking, the leaves
stripping off, the heat of my hand
in the stem now, sweat and the plant’s
fluids mixed, and still no flower for me—
wanting it, wanting the shortcut,
not to go get the scissors—
I thought I loved but I was not kind.
I didn’t understand
the stem bends
so it can survive the air—
preserve the vessels
that carry what it needs
from the ground, from sun, even if hurt,
so it might, in slow-fast
plant time, repair
the damage. Now, in hurricane country,
watching the orange tithonia
sway in before-storm wind, thinking
I’ll be needing to prop them up again,
I see: how the cosmos, heavy with purple buds,
bent in the last torrent
at the root rather than breaking,
so they could reangle themselves
from the ground
or so I could help them upright,
which I did, with bricks,
with sticks and string,
and though they lean, they lean
toward the sky.
______________________________________________________________________
Anna Lena Phillips Bell is the author of Ornament, winner of the Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, and the chapbook Smaller Songs, from St. Brigid Press. Her work is forthcoming in The Common online and Denver Quarterly, and appears in anthologies including Gracious: Poems from the 21st Century South and Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing within the Anthropocene. She teaches at UNC Wilmington, where she is editor of Ecotone, and calls ungendered Appalachian square dances in North Carolina and beyond.
by Lisa Mottolo
by Carolyn Oliver
Birch leaf undersides silver
the summer shimmer, rumbling.
Poppies wince closed, disperse
slow bees, and the black butterfly
too leaves the ochre-umber sunflower
for flicking flies to pick at.
Over them, over the new milkweed,
fragile stock and sunstruck phlox,
a round house made for sharpness,
paper lantern never lit. The nest—
size of a baby’s fist, if uncurled
room enough for a few dashed lines—
won’t sway in the wind, won’t say
who’s gone, left home, left behind
this vessel waiting to be miracled full.
______________________________________________________________________
Carolyn Oliver’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Radar Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Cherry Tree, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Goldstein Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review, the Writer’s Block Prize in Poetry, and the Frank O’Hara Prize from The Worcester Review, where she now serves as a poetry editor. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family. See carolynoliver.net.
by Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers
1
Sex is in the brain; I’ve been training
mine for so long. Please don’t fail me now.
2
The sutures move,
pull loose and tight,
each stitch a closet
in the garment, a room
within a room.
3
Doctors make you beg
for the comfort of your own body.
They tell me my vagina has integrity
neither foreshortened
nor shallow, its walls intact.
As apparatus goes, there’s nothing
I lack. What their excises have decreed
let no woman question.
4
Ordinary motion presses
against the scar, life
a big toe stretching
and pulling the darn.
My stomach puckers,
pantyhose skin center-
seamed. By reflex, I reach
to take it off and realize
I’m already naked, belly
button to pubic bone.
5
Fifteen to thirty minutes
of visualizing—face under a pillow,
seam-side down, my partner rubbing
rubbing—and still
I catch no charge.
6
After so much probing,
mental inquiry:
If I am the sock monkey,
who’s my puppeteer?
7
When I finally orgasm, I think
I’ve escaped, and my body lifts
a finger.
______________________________________________________________________
Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers is a queer, nonbinary poet, writer, book critic, and farmer. A graduate of Penn State and Old Dominion University, their creative work has been published in venues such as Gulf Stream, IthacaLit, Menacing Hedge, and Peculiar. They were a 2018-19 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow, and their critical work has appeared in Orion, LitHub, The Believer, The Rumpus, The Millions, Foreword Reviews, and others. Find them talking about books and other passions on Twitter @murderopilcrows.
by Katharine Rauk
by Esther Ra
by Michelle Menting