Poetry

Weather flew across the field. Over the horizon the land tacked to a cloud. The field continued into night a far town lit.

Mephistopheles and Faustus had been eating roast duck
With pancakes and scallions in a Chinese restaurant
In Midtown, and after dinner, they’d gone for a walk

-for Jennifer Martelli

Even the morning word games mourn you.

TANGO]
the sound of copters rising from a distant field or if you were out
of range mistaken for wingbeats of mandarin ducks setting down

Bunion turned
Habit step
As men
Step vainly into men

For this journey, forget practical things.
Begin with touch and smell, silk and mohair
bird feathers, silver frog for joy, comb

He sits in front of a wall of glass, and his glass, which was made of plastic, was already empty.

We talk about other things, but not class
in class. I think in class we don’t talk
about class because the university has

One, I imagine she’s in the throes of
writing her first graphic novel, this young
woman, a remarkable piece entitled New Tales

Standing and praying, a man in a black yarmulke.
His body rocks, swaying back and forth,
his lips moving, murmuring. My lips,

back and forth
in an open car door

Blay, Yaba. “How the ‘One Drop Rule’ Became a Tool of White Supremacy.” LitHub, 22 Feb. 2001.1 CBC Radio. “Black Teen Shot in the Head After Knocking on the Wrong Door Doing ‘Exceptionally

The sun is off
In prayer
In breath abide
Words’ apogee

It wasn’t that the eagle didn’t love you,
that his plumage wasn’t cut like a paper
snowflake is cut, repeating itself like a heart
is cut, or repeats itself—No.

I close the door to my sky blue room.
To feel you there behind it.
The sky blue room is incomplete and imperfect.

collapsed star,
two am Navajo darkness and
waves of string-theory echo
blue sage branches,
canyon red arroyo – glitter pollen dust

They grasp the edges of the off-white parachute
in 1st-grade gym class, soles of their sneakers
peeling off, nursery rhymes rendered mute
like a poisoned pond emptied of frogs’ croaks.

“the Lourdes of America”

you look for a back-channel negotiation,
but no plea is offered only the pretense
you would accept a lesser sentence, time

—after Psalm 130

The rabbi is sitting with me
on the floor, my hand
reaching for your
earlobe through
the sheet’s barrier—

Today, these tears are tulips, gnashing ego petals
lured gold, all raining around brown eyes.

Also, but I am weaker
than you, because you were enslaved.

But instead I’ll write about my sore throat.
Are they related? Some say, pains of the body
are feelings held on to by tissue and cell,
unexpressed like milk hardening in the breast

Quiet now.
The flag-shredding wind
has passed. Door left open,
you are gone.

Briefly, while I watch Lion King with my son
for the billionth time until I finally snap
it off. Enough.

My heart aches, and the same drowsy song begins
Ba-dum-ba-dum-ba-dum. Tree empties itself
into my beak. Tells me how people turn

Some of us are born blacklisted—don’t want work in the womanly arts. Others choose to wait and see. Here’s a gender song, gentle. A two song, a chain? O my small starlet sunk I apologize to your past future self, hosed down the drain of my most need, gurgling. I apologize to no-one else. The

The words were easy to write, even with young hands, even the letters to my father about the hurricane or the collapse  of a house the trapping  of bodies. the legs swinging  from a tree. They were about yesterdays, the what  fell, the what  struck, the who  died. My father said it was the reading

for Jeanne beloved friend   let us start here with the boxes   beneath the eaves in a red caftan   your garnets promised by Isaiah   in covenant with god a prayer for our mothers    four are the matriarchs   three the patriarchs   two the tablets left in the PM pill box one your ram’s horn   your bangle one

we were driving through the oil crisis. How long Ohio felt. Or was it Pennsylvania? Each rest stop a Stuckey’s after Stuckey’s. My cheek healing unhurried from an early summer dog bite. At The Holiday Inn we swam so much, the people hushed us. Sunrise was a pillow, mom’s fist sneaking under my head. It

For two years now I’ve bristled with memories of you. I pull them from their lair, fur sleek, nails sharp. They scrape me, lodge in the back of my throat. Tilt of chainsaw against log. BMW riding 132 to Percé. Last days with oxygen, neck gouged, cheeks pale. I am the keeper now, the one

When your nine year old daughter finishes the line of a Nina Simone song While you are steaming kale, shucking corn, and frying fish You know you are doing something right in the world.  

The whale is beached again,  Has he no sense  of direction? Is he clinically  depressed? Gulls  flap close and closer to his eyes,  inspecting  the vitreous humor. Sandpipers dance  on the strand,  annoying as sleep-deprived toddlers.  He will miss  the various colors of the seas,  the mating,  the krill cuisine, hunting  gigs, the sheer  clown

The origin of sound was my bare feet curling around blades of grass as I circled, ditch to ditch, waiting for the perfect, pious set of headlights to beam me into the beak of something that wouldn’t spit me out. The origin of heat is that night I spent in the cornfield. Shards of stalk,

A scientific theory used to describe abrupt evolutionary changes that create new species They say dinosaurs shrank to become birds. Locomotion forsaken for tree limbs and flight. Bird-hood is not a phase I am familiar with, tiny lifetimes between bristles to quills to filoplumes. The lines of any change are never neat. A spectacle of

when I worked in the military, it reminded me of the prison, and when I worked in the prison, I was surprised at how many inmates stabbed themselves.  I thought they would stab each other, but they were united in the deaths of their nights, their tears, their dress, their laughter, their hornet-mouths, how they

You’ve surpassed your message quota for the month. May we recommend the Unlimited Option?   Unlimited plan – is Heaven – but comes at a hefty price – steals away those we love prisons them – in Paradise. I make my way – among the Living – tender electric currencies – value what can be

After bandaging blisters and taping arches, we bent our shoes in half, worked the toe boxes softened through repetition and sweat, stuffed the tips with matted wool, snuffed each foot inside, wrapped ribbons taut in pink X-es, knots tucked inside the ankles. Then to the rosin box, to grind pointes and heels against yellow powder in a crust of sticky crystals. Without rosin,

There are times when I miss it, throwing back shots with friends, bumpin’ that bumpin’ as Charli might say Feeling oceanic low, getting seraphic high, just to feel infinitely lower on those blurry nights, lighting the butt-end of cigarettes, crying in the passenger seat of Leo’s beater, remembering that thing I did when I was

I picture you when aura first ignites: an aspen leaf trembling in calm. The teacher crackles. The chalk turns green. Your classmates, counterclockwise, back away. Then a sharp cry!— as in grief or joy. (Who screamed through your mouth’s big O?) Your head jerks back for a kiss. What black! Or have you just gone

I know there are more beautiful ways  to see motherhood, but standing at the display of glass apples, I think of the nicked skin, or the apple’s grey bruising. Imagine how the fruit fly,  parasitic to the orchard, finds herself an apple realizing its own perfection. Then, enter  her ovipositor. Thrust from the underside of

Limousine suite, covered in whitened frosting and sand castles, radio is off as we would like to hear the interstate speak. at this rate at this limousine speed we have caught hornet swarms in our mouth, and arroyos in our hands. and now I will dress in your moles, and in your appetites, in your

In heaven, Goya’s no longer deaf.  He hears Everything Velázquez tells him when they sit Together in one of those gardens the angels Maintain for the blessed who care more For conversation and deep-colored roses Than for divinity.  Velázquez is sad. There are no dogs to paint or war horses Or deer with magnificent antlers.

Mrs. Hareblue is a sick woman Her hair gray-blue held in A net like a fish caught Pencil hair with the white circlet Of halo a graphite Frog an icicle as if someone has Cried over her from above  Mrs. Hareblue Has a tendril escaped on her left Side a curl so thin you might

My mom makes a croak like a big bullfrog in a bog. My dad, like a cat about to vomit. I make a sound like an arrow-shot doe collapsing, as the brown and once-living leaves embrace her in their scent. This is not the part of life where the dandelions first pop into color, but

Today, two teams tried to tackle taboo topics too turbulent to transcribe. The titillating, transcendental triceratops, tirelessly tries to triumph, teeth taken task to task tail to tail. Together they tried to tie the two toucans to the timber to tell them two tall tales, till treelike tutors touched the tender tension to take the

O mercy how it rolls and rolls, but a river is not the sea with its serpents and undulations tugging you under and beneath the self you swam from and the river is not a pond, that puddle of your soul exploded and stretched across tethered earth furrowed beside a farmhouse; it is not a

When the nurse unbandaged my head, I realized I couldn’t speak in the old language; the muscle of my mind knew no way to hold the cleverness of its bons mots. All through my body the ache of accident persisted.  Reader, you cannot know how I want this poem to end in morning glories on

A crab leaves the barrel snapping your new Timberland. A family of laughter is the baritone for your one-footed prance until the shoe comes off. My dark eyes know you, your swag and all that was stolen to convince you you could thieve from every kind every kin except me. I’m the little girl who

a Golden Shovel of “poets in their bassinets” by Lucille Clifton   Finding arrowheads, fixing fractures, poets muscle through the memory of a tick embedded in the back of a childhood to release their dark parts: the empty bassinets, the redemption that doesn’t happen even in a dream. There are phone calls they remember a-

When he told me I throw like a girl, I became at age five a girl-girl, or rather girl became me, her rose-colored shame ribbon snaking from my emptied hand to cinch its bright bow at my neck, yet I also became not-a-girl as the shouldered fury lacking in my girl-pitch rose like a voice,

I. Her laughter rises from the womb of the earth Like a dust devil. Hers is laughter honed in perennial goodbyes. Hers is laughter that rises from the sands Of desert(ed) landscapes. Hers is a voice that knows Days split into pieces like broken calabashes. In the sea of these historical Dis- Continuations, The sea(water)

because my sister hadn’t been home in a few years and hadn’t been bedside when our mother died of lung cancer and I wasn’t there either but had been there all day and had gone home for something to eat where after rice and chicken livers smothered in gravy with sliced onions and bell peppers

fall on someone—who might be drinking a glass of water, reading a book, or pondering last night’s dream. Then not— while back home in the gene pool, I’m lounging with the New York Times reading about two thousand pound bombs. I stand with Israel, so many neighbors say. How I felt that first time at

come to me corgis come to me from conquered vale mountain and stream oh the slaves the spices the silver and gold come see the kingdoms I have won for you leap and frolic and bark by my side come to me corgis come to me they do our bidding this grand biddy’s bidding oh

The scariest part was not that La Llorona was a monster, or that she came when you called her name three times in the dark, or that she could come into your room at night and take you from your bed like she’d done with her own babies. It was that once she’d been a

I want the dark back, the bloody well of it, my face before the fire or lie alone on the cold stone and find a way to sleep awhile, wake clear and wander. Deborah Digges, “Write a Book a Year” The wrens have returned, a male making his rounds of possible nests. I moved the

In the movie, pioneers cross an arm of the Brazos and I think abrazos—how the river wraps wagons, waves children into the past, past parents whose visions of fertile pastures don’t include drought hardened soil unable to hold dead children or wind-maddened women. In one scene, prairie grasses strewn with treasures, too heavy to carry

Trapped in a full-body cast, both femurs broken, held together with steel pins, I read. I listen to my transistor radio, single earplug transporting Eight Days a Week until I know every note of every 1964 Beatles song. It’s hot on my bed so I teach myself to roll over, a baby, twisting, pushing the

after Edvard Munch’s “The Sun,” 1910-13 After a week of rain, the sudden, sodden sun bursts through, spurs the wet winter world into color, and I recall Munch’s famous fractal flares, violet steeping cliff-sides, emerald mosses cropping up in the thought-dead ground and that little army of blue-black backs breaking the surface of the mustardy

for Nien Cheng Write your autobiography, they said, everyone in the country has done it, and they handed me a roll of paper and returned me to my cell, where I watched the spider stumble across the floor and crawl under the cement toilet. The weather had turned cold. I’d spent months watching it diligently

  on sundays      my mother would sigh sit me down between her firm brown legs unfurl my braids         a forest of jet black tangled roots and roses            her slight cool fingers pruning slick with grease         the mist of water like a bruise to an ache        hours later I’d rise graceless, still a child from her

                                         —part I of The Labyrinth   Come see what we have wrought        How blindness veils as if a shouldered hand affirming love The darkling comfort of a well-trod path that eases through the open door and down the hallway to the bookshelf strained with rows of foreign mountaintops and children’s heads in glossy frames       

When one great love was done, finished, I wanted to know the bees. So I painted beehives the color of blushing dahlias and worked the secret earth room of my body down into them,  each tired muscle, each sad hip—a bottomless longing pulse from my limbs. In my ears a song loop—not a mother, not

“You are there, almost, without a name, without a body, go now.”                                         ⸺Juan Felipe Herrera    1. Pass the exhausted prayer flags after a day of fiendish wind and no grace.  2. Find true north on your compass and locate the crossroads where I’ve shredded the most debilitating of my regrets.  3. If you’re

Loudly, at the League of Women Voters book sale, my sixth-grade son asks me “Have you ever wanted to commit suicide?” His four moods are silly, angry, hungry, and asleep. A battered copy of the DC Comics series lies between Donald Duck and a graphic memoir of Palestine on the genre-sorted table in the vocational

a woman in a winter hat lifts the fallboard dusts the grit off the keys and begins to play Chopin on the white grand piano a window shattered a wall torn and strewn on the floor around the woman in her winter jacket playing Chopin on the dirty piano to think this woman survived the

The snake’s scales gleam yellow and black. He’s engulfing the bulgy eyed frog, whose throat and chest heave raw. The frog contracts with each gulp, gasping for air. My heart shamed, I remember night-caught frogs cooked delicious and spicy by my kindergarten teachers. I favor the frog now. His croak is music. His song fills twilight’s

When we got out of bed, all four corners of the fitted sheet had pulled off and curled in toward the center, exposing sallow sweat stains, cat claw pockmarks. Sagging pillows, propped at the wall, leaned sideways, partisan: one to the left with all the air squeezed out, one to the right, pillowcase half-peeled back,

Like waves on the mediterranean your little shrieks roll ahead of your feet, watched over by foreign pine trees, and when you chase them, like doves they take off to the blue skies of my father’s youth. Your little eyes and ears clamber up my story line; fascination sits on your eyebrows like a wild

As to the oboe it doesn’t need teeth, but a boot heel can’t play it, he tries to tell the guard, and feels for how many teeth he has left.  How will it help him to think his instrument’s older than Zyklon B, older than his neighbor soiling herself as she tumbled down the steps,

Glowing like a bride she glides as though mounted on a parade float, drawing all eyes to her: a bright blue topaz in miles of poufed organza scooped up to avoid a brush with McDonald’s floor, the jambs & kickplates, where dirty boots have shuffled & food scraps lie in ambush knowing that on this

A strange, soft creature rests tethered in my mouth, gentle aesthete, wet and bumpy, discerning shades of salt, sweet, bitter, sour beyond any practical necessity, understandably alarmed by the occasional taco de lengua, more so by the sharp incisors sharing its space, but still making its modest contribution to speech, not sibilants or fricatives, of

Not to go to bed but to stay the night there, we have to work out who gets which. Whose habit’s stronger decides, except in the happy case where bents agree. This is universal. Yet we have no common language for which is which. North or East won’t do, nearer the bathroom and beside the

I’ve been crawling out of darkness for years, one concerto at a time, prone to unraveling but continuing to climb. I was told to get tough quick, but that hardening only made the darkness deeper, so out of the cicada shell I squoze, shabby spirit amorphous yet intact. I have a hunch of going to

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.