Poetry

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

4 de julio: costa verde  We turn the corner and I see her doubled over the seaside bench in taut, iridescent blue. Every movement, slight: fingers skim the ankle, head angles up, shoulders roll down. Her partner approaches from behind, teardrops half-painted beneath his eyes. When he walks he walks stilted, a rhythm: green coast.

We sit in the failure factories; we, the apparition of working mothers clutching our utility shut-off notices. This form says provide proof of your destitution, please summarize your poverty please add emotional abuses in these two lines please multiply by the darkness of the members of your household; keep your faces down, fill out the

“An obeah-man never dies, sir — the Devil looks after him.”                           –Eden Phillpotts for A.R., Harlem, 1985 Somehow, you knew you were naked, in trouble. Something was wrong, because you didn’t feel sacred but tired. Knowing that brain neutrons were going hay-wire wasn’t fun. After the herbal sponge bath, you’d stand in the tub

Back when you were a boy, you were Matt. Now? You say: Call me Matt(ie), or Matt—which is to say, paint your nails scarlet as much as you desire, though she who carries Adam’s apple presents Original Sin to the world. Translation: there’s a serpent in your garden, & yes, that’s euphemism (& yes, that’s

Not his ride-on pony, but its print on the grass. (    ) Galloping white space gathering its fields. Nicker whisper. Thunder burn. (   ) Once at Angelo’s grocery, I reached for a small boy. (   ) We thought, perhaps Rhode Island. Or a border town nearby. (    ) The stars on his face haven’t mapped

it’s something we hadn’t really thought about until she mentioned it: where i end and you begin, this permeable  layer we’d assumed was a good thing how we                                               intermingled  commingled (this is a reference not just to fluids and bodies but brainwaves) (like shaky electrons and electronics through the conservatory air) how can this

For Maria Luisa Over coffee, my friend tells me how he drove to Juarez with his mother’s dresses, his father wanting only one as a remembrance. When he’d piled them into the truck bed, he found himself zippering a sleeveless checkered jumper, a clichéd movie gesture he couldn’t stop right away. His father told him

On his stomach, head to one side, where the land is too far, sea too near. My child slept like that under a white cotton blanket, in her crib. I’d stay near. Sometimes, I’d place a finger under her nose to check for breathing. How’s that for near? This child. Mediterranean blue waves for blankets,

En Plein Air, Summer Beyond these muggy river catacombs in afternoon another mother sinks down in despair: Spill over, spill over Now my only son is gone She howls down phantoms from the sultry air. On moss-wet stone two little girls are watching; the vapor chills; heat hovers like a prayer as something plummets deep

The thief has stolen the water from under the village. He flees, holding it in his arms. The land is parchedAs a hand gathers eggs from the nest, the rich have gathered all the earth. No bird opens its wingThe land idolator builds his house in our orchard. He’s in love with his passive solar,

after Nikky Finney Be reckless when it matters most. Messy incomplete. Belly laugh. Languish language. Be butterfly stroke in a pool of freestylers. Fast & loose. You don’t need all the right moves all the time. You just need limbs wild. Be equator. Lava. Ocean floor, the neon of plankton. Be unexpected. The rope they

& somehow the name fits. My daughters with full on beaks basking & flaunting on their walk/jaunt to school. First day flitting & flirting in April’s early sunshine. Each step, a float from bodega to BX36 bus stop. Their arms as wings, hailing & Miriam, who caws, Morning, in a baritone. So the driver says, Hey there

Chris “Ludacris” Bridges Usher, “Yeah!” Nah. In the streets, watch me spit, suck, stuff, scrawl, loop, lilt, launch, lick— out loud. Do deep squats at stoplights, and grind it loose while leaning at the bus stop. I don’t stop. Ride the pole on the A train, up & down, don’t give a thousand shits. You

  We gunned each other down, gunned each other down in the street, abandoned each other unburied. Later, those left bearing the palls burned to show their love. Burned to light our streets with the dying asterisms of their rage. And we watched until our watching made of them a carnival: He, the twirling fire-spitter.

  Hope was a thing with pink feathers circling Olympic ice. Despite her tender years, a woman of great composure. Circling Olympic ice for gold, Ukraine!  We could hardly believe our ears: This woman of great composure,  triple Lutz-flip-loop world premiere. Ukraine! (We could hardly believe our ears) representing the once orphaned and lost… With

  Ninety-six, my father floats in a fearful dream, rises outside his body, but he’s stuck in the living room, which appears tilted at a surreal angle, ceiling fan coming out of a wall. Float somewhere nicer, my sister suggests. Havana, Athens, Cairo, places he traveled as a younger man, extra pages stapled into his

  her ebony hair to her knees hid her twisted young spine & limp love     to him    her coconut sweat her sweet bread     her whispers of his given name     ay, gerónimo every time    he wrote her songs by lantern light in bed    every dawn his kiss still on her lips     the machete’s glint gone     ten

  In the middle of my lecture  on antebellum plantation life  abolition  Lydia Maria Child  and William Lloyd Garrison pronged slave collars              hung  with iron Christmas bells ringing  and Kara Walker’s oeuvre  a recasting of slavery for the next generation  I finally vocalize a question  I’ve suppressed  while binge-watching episodes  of Say Yes to

  Everything welcomes you—thorny lizards, the West Indian keeper of fighting cocks, the fog caught in the throat of the valley. They step towards you, or drift like airy continents, for they know you are a conjurer of seeds, of balances, and of the wind that shepherds them both. Your lithe form cuts the sea

  It’s as if each morning were a pool into which I have been lowered. Or I dove in and now sit on my blue sofa at the bottom of the sky, swathed in a milky substance amid the trilling of crickets. A few minutes ago my husband clinked his spoon to his cereal bowl,

Me, you, she, they
When I say me, it’s her
When I say him, it’s you

to laugh yourself to death
laugh at yourself
laugh to yourself

‘- Where do you want to go?
– I don’t know.
– When will you come back?

It is only in poems that I realized what a poet is.

O, I don’t care what you are,
I don’t ask about your ways,
nor where you’ve gone, where you’ve been,
whether you’ve killed, or you’ve sinned.

“‘Tain’t natural to be lonesome.” Our Town, Act II At the Berkeley Psychic Institute, seven students and one teacher watched the air around my head to see what might appear about past lives and contracts I had hidden from my consciousness regarding children. A boy and a girl, they finally said, will come to you

A person can take just so much sad news
or guilt: that teenage Arab boy, his mouth
forced into a funnel for gas and set ablaze;

Let’s start with the obvious:
no one wants to be found
when only dirt-dreaming

The year many found the needle but lost the thread.

When was lost, stayed lost. AIDS. Rhodesia.

Here is a body,
not cold yet,
it’s owner 

“Snap trap” was his recommendation
after a glance at the mouse droppings
under my kitchen sink. I refused,

Like eroding wood.
Like aging bricks.
Like initials in
concrete.

Turkeys, a rafter of 42—creeping parade
of purple wattles, rolls of soft tissue

There’s a fist
making its way up the Venice boardwalk,
a cocked fist aiming. Its name

A minute in its creaseless uniform in a row of cadets, salutes Dusk can’t contain the torn sky’s entrails A half-past-nine like all the others but its own half-past-nine An unpassable valley between tick and tock, the scout reports back The scout measured: distance equals length times time Distance circumnavigates time The prisoner’s minute was

In dying one knows,
Unlike other organisms.

STEPHEN DUNN author of Whereas: Poems Interviewed by Lee Hope Solstice Editor-in Chief and Fiction Editor   (From Lee Hope): It is my privilege to interview one of the foremost poets in our country and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize.  Over the years, I have read all of Stephen’s Dunn’s eighteen poetry collections as well as his book

BEN BERMANauthor of Figuring in the FigureSolstice Poetry Editor in conversation with KATHLEEN AGUEROauthor of After ThatSolstice Consulting Poetry Editor   (Editor’s note: Kathi and Ben interview each other, using a more back-and-forth style than a traditional interview format.) Kathi: Strange Borderlands, your first book, took its impetus from, among other things, your experience as

DANIELLE LEGROS GEORGES author of The Dear Remote Nearness of YouSolstice Consulting Poetry Editor Interviewed by Ben BermanSolstice Poetry Editor   Ben: Many years ago, when I was teaching high school in Hyde Park, you visited my class as a guest speaker, and I remember being struck by how immediately you connected with my students

‘-after Francisco X. Alarcon i want a god who lives in a tattered shack by the sea mold growing up its cedar shingles, a god who offers thunder as applause, who knows the heart is both a rapturous and feigning preacher, prone to believing loud praise in the body. i want a god who longs

What was I doing at fifteen? Face down on the pavement, nostrils tinged with bullet-smoke, the brick-dust falling around us like fresh snow or white chalk, I watched the kid stalking the sidewalk. It was summer in Brooklyn. Nothing ever happens until it happens. That’s how my brother and sister-in-law described their tours at war

           —Delray, Detroit, 2014 From this fourth story window I see power lines eating sky, gray awnings blocking all light from the recesses. All neon-like; the entirety of night is captured, drowned in inch-deep puddles. A child half-buried in tarp, asleep between walls.  Walls buried up to their necks in empty

Before Louisiana, Jefferson signaled Lewis with a mirror to his home at Monticello, the hilly path between plantations ten miles on horseback. Distance was a summons to expand the language of one’s purchase, to annotate direction. Knowing the terrain was, for many, second nature. Lewis tracked veiny rust-colored routes that arced like hipbones in his

My daughter writes, to all those who follow her on the web, my eyes               are the same as my father’s. She means to reassure herself they are not so strange. But mine are a stranger’s eyes, as were my grandfather’s, open late like the immigrant grocer’s lit with the awnings up after midnight, eyes

Doesn’t the name bring to mind a dangerous woman at a table in the back corner of a smoky bar? The kind you walk into after disembarking from a six-month stint trawling the ocean, your skin indiscernible from salted cod? Aren’t you both afraid and compelled by her, cloaked as she is in her dark

Sidewalk bricks upended by winter’s freeze and thaw– no looking up here, we take mincing steps, and our talk turns to everything undone—frayed boot laces, laundry, taxes, bills, books—so many books piled up unread, sliding off the night stand. Even the universe, you say, is not done expanding into whatever lies beyond.  Once I thought

“Will God, or somebody else, give me the power to breathe into my canvases … the sigh of prayer and of sadness, …of rebirth?” –Marc Chagall   Outside, louder than street noise, the wind is making itself heard.  Trees, wires, loose casements— the whole world’s its instrument.   What does it want, banging at these windows

Behind the door the dogs are rhapsodizing, out in the garden the crocuses, not quite naked, are waving a little dainty lace. Last autumn, at Hfravatn I was moving mildly with water in my mouth. Remember when I waved my arms around gathering air? Then those days of mid-October snow that blanketed our little evils—and

  The sofa where your sister died so short that she must have been curled up The table where you used to sit barely larger than a doormat .. Your handwriting delicate like the pattern in the misty-white lace cap displayed on a tiny doll head that gazes eyeless over my shoulder   Sófinn þar

  Two sisters with puffed out breasts Eyes closed The have landed in a museum and now bow to their fate Just as each feather was once counted by a gray-bearded old man their softness is now esteemed by his brother   Tvær systur með þanda bringu Augun aftur Þær hafa hafnað á safni og

  I miss how you do not look at me do not come to me never call me barely talk to me oh to be home now to experience all this rejection first hand   ég sakna þess hvernig þú horfir ekki á mig kemur ekki til mín hringir aldrei í mig yrðir varla á

  throat constricted head empty hands flailing absentminded talk shifty eyes acidic stomach and inside it a knot the size of a dark haired man   hálsinn herptur höfuðið tómt hendur fálma tal annars hugar augun hvarflandi maginn er súr og í honum hnútur á stærð við dökkhærðan mann   Translator by Sola Bjarnadóttir-O’Connell is a

The Irvine cops picked up Sherod while he was riding Jimmy’s bike to school. He’d snuck up into the scrub, coyote hills above our complex to work on the fort we were building with wood from a deserted rancher’s shack. By the time he came down to the bus stop, we were the diesel exhaust

Fifteen years since Bobby Dougherty died. The night before our last day of school, in his closet, with a belt, he hanged himself. His girlfriend had left him, and he wouldn’t graduate this year—that’s what we chalked it up to. But grades and a girl couldn’t have been all. We should have seen the impulse

Maybe he never existed. Maybe this is all he is. Cobbled prop in a worker’s cap and  prisoner’s shirt. Face without features. Puppet arm lifting a cup to an absent mouth. Two crossed triangles on a chest where a heart might flutter. Before, and after. Silence speaks where a tongue may not. Strangle it out.

bones. Visible under bits of meat and dark skin—strewn, wanting    y’all-better-finish eating-‘fore-y’all-go-outside-bones left with animal still clinging by a child, too secure; whittled back-in-MY-day-bones used to pick teeth (also bones) with plaque; dried out bones of apples ex-red. The fibula of a last meal: two pizza rolls. Did-you-know-there-was-pork-in-this??-bones—of a pork chop; orange bones, pumpkin skull

Each day a stream of new lost souls succeeds the last. I number the innumerable hosts in triplicate. My office door should read: “Through me the road unto a town of ghosts; through me the way to join an endless war; through me a path among the Lost Almosts: Abandon hope, all ye who enter

Trinity Test Site, July 16, 1945   Great poets dream of clarity and beauty. Even hell has its finer points. But when the announcer shouts out, “Now!” and from the ethereal sky comes hideous ruin down hurled headlong flaming, winged with red lightning and livid flames’ fueled entrails rolling in black billows, words are beggared

Rain skinning granite. I lay the flat of my palm, let pools gather between fingers, streams skim the blue veins down. This is the real, I know it – stone, rain, blood, December cold – the irresistible claim of the material. And then there’s you, love – or rather the absence of you – how

after Faiz, Sauda come walk with me by the lake’s empty benches tell me, dressed in roses that we need some air. the wound’s head has reached the heart– there’s no use in sewing it or rubbing it with balm. all the lovers have snuffed their lamps, headed back over the broken paths. said Sauda

On Boston Common a white girl digs in the sand, swings with black kids, climbs the bars, and if she looks long at hair, color and eyes What does she think, what does she know? * Together a black man, a white woman and her mother enter a New York art gallery; they separate. The

            and everything / Was toil, relentless toil, urged on by need.                         —Virgil   It took centuries to domesticate the wild goat, grow almonds and olives from seed, harvest barley with stone sickles. So crops, livestock, and flint tools could ripple across the Fertile Crescent. The ox was groaning and bent to the plow. Cows

The house cracked from the inside. It plaited and meandered in waves. The tree and the house grew into one. The bark entered the house, inmates of shrines of cicadas. A medieval tower with a clock blasted vertically, with no slant on its knees, and the clock swooped like an owl, grabbed all the hours

We are an emergency room Will litanies arrive? We are the house and the tree, in somebody else’s story. We pass the field of poppies; we collect red graffiti, sacred nouns, red relics. Psalms spread their tents and light their cigarettes.  

Holodomor, Ukraine, 1932-1933   What part of another’s flesh do you ask permission for your body to be freed from hunger the way blood frees itself from frozen earth, in spring, when rain comes to wash everything. Quietly a river refuses to disappear into ground, knowing it owes its mouth to no one— It runs

A felt hat or a cane, a pair of worn out shoes on a road thought left behind— or a hand-carved chess set passed down from my grandfather: the king’s crown a bent nail, the knight’s horse, a nub on a pedestal robbed of wings, its would-be nose blunt and chipped. The queen can still

It would have been nice, that day in Memphis, if the only one, Of all the people I hoped would break into a song By the early Elvis Presley on my way to the site Of the assassination of Martin Luther King At the Lorraine Motel, had turned out to be, Not the unreasonably cheerful

The first time I saw Tabloid Mary, I mean the first time I really recognized her enormous potential For iconic bronze statuary, an archetypal model Of rural American poverty, one afternoon in 1962 As I sat on the couch watching television in a trance And nibbling toward the center of a peanut butter sandwich After

MEG KEARNEY author of When You Never Said Goodbye  Interviewed by Lee Hope Solstice Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor   (From Lee Hope): I am delighted to be interviewing the eminent poet, young adult and children’s writer Meg Kearney.  We hear the term shape shifter, yet Meg is a genre shifter. We will explore how Meg

MARIUS SURLEACauthor of Zeppelin Jack  and MARC VINCENZauthor of Sybilline Translators of the Poetry of Ion Monoran(Read three of Monoran’s poems here) Interviewed by Dzvinia Orlowsky Solstice Editor of Poetry in Translation Introduction to Ion Monoran (1953 – 1993) Born in Petroman Village, Timis, Romania, Ion Monoran was a poet and publisher. His first poems were