Two poems from Rod Moore’s Hole and Ghost

followed by a note on the author

Utah Death Trip

I remember the delicate
trees, the ones Dad called
quaker aspens, while his
hands draped lazy on the
wheel, tires soft as hands
on the canyon asphalt.

All this before the time
of marvelous unraveling.
So far only the vagaries of
adolescence. Once when
I woke up and looked out
the car window, I saw a
screech owl pivot its
head to watch us pass.

In his mind we might have
seemed fairly integral.
But we were also, to him,
the nameable animals
we’d be until torn apart.

Rod Moore

All Consuming

All photos of me in my youth look like children’s
drawings. Stick-out ears, arms thin as wooden
dowels, thick glasses, Beatles haircut, Dracula mouth.

Time softly twines with time. Every second I’m
here counts against the ones when I wasn’t. One
girl was disgusted by the saliva in my kisses.

Graveyards and peacocks are viewed as complementary.
More recent markers have color photos set in cement.
Hardened, I can look them in the eye.

Rod Moore

Rod Val Moore has published short stories in a variety of journals. In 1994 he won the Iowa Fiction Award for his story collection, Igloo Among Palms. His first novel Brittle Star is published by What Books Press. Another novel, A History of Hands, won the Juniper Prize in Fiction, and was subsequently published by the University of Massachusetts Press. More recently, he has focused on writing poetry.

Two poems from Angelo Mao’s A White Horse Is Not a Horse

followed by a note on the author

The Great Sparrow Campaign

I once chased a wild turkey
down to the water’s edge.
The day was beautiful and cool.
The bird ran back and forth,

like a pea on a platter,
its head afloat on two feet of neck.
Then wingbeats blurred wings
into an approximation of wings.

Two years before my mother was born,
it had rained sparrows.
People had gone under trees

to shout clap bang pots,
and those sounds could be said
to have driven the sparrows
into flight, the way that wind

drives water vapor into air,
until it seemed that the earth itself
were tossing birds into the sky’s
exuberant blue dome, tossing

to reel them back down,
reeling from mid-flight,
repeatedly until exhaustion,
and corpses raining.

Come down, plunderer of seeds,
small thief of the fields,
raindrop creature.

Come down with your pink mouth
open, streak of neat tawn.
I imagine your lungs burning

and, because birds’ lungs
extend even into bone,
that the burning slid into bone.

What did we do with your bodies?
Piled up to burn or left out for the pigs?
I try to remember any sounds

the wild turkey made,
recall its frantic communications,
but the wings only elaborate air

in silence. If after the sparrows—
looping, auroral—was a vacuum,
its quick fill was the clicking-

open of chitinous legs, locust wings.
But shouts do not enter a vacuum:
sound requires throats to go throat

to throat, trespassing material
and appraising with its force—
like Plato’s mind rubbing the real—

only density, which is mass
and how much space it compacts,
commands, corrals

and programs into volume,
the way we had corralled sparrows
into a program of locusts, famine,

and memory: a silver print
on gelatin, the photographed urn.
Gelatin comes from pig hide

and was used to hold silver ink in place.
Long ago, we used birds for music
because their bones were hollow

enough to hold breath into song.
But the bodies had to be a certain size.
A wild turkey, for instance, would do.

I omitted the fact there was not
one bird I had chased to the water’s edge
and into the air, but three. Come down,

once you are tired of the sky.
Let me hear the silence in your bone.
The day is beautiful and cool.

Angelo Mao

On Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn

The urn lies on the floor in shards.
The man stands behind it with hands
raised. The backdrop is a brick wall.
It was a joke with my husband.
Chinese once read right-to-left.
Therefore, perturbing the photo’s
left-to-right order must be read
as permitted, legitimate. But if so,
what counts as perversion? One shard
hunches like a territorial crab. It lords
a breach. Rules are hard to forget.

The urn is knee-height above the floor.
The man stands behind it with hands
raised. The backdrop is a brick wall.
Every father is a territorial artist.
The photo is Chinese and had
urn shards on the floor. It started
as a joke (what are the rules?) with
myself. It was a private breach.
The messy hair is like urn shards.
The disheveled urn was a Han piece.
Dismemberment is earned for treason.
Rules for forgetting are hard.
The man has hair like my father.

The urn is held in a man’s hands.
The man stands with his back to
the wall. The wall is brick.
Silence repairs the past. The urn
appears whole without seams.
Pieces dis-remembered. The man
holds the urn with care. But until
when? What are rules tomorrow
can’t breach? Has he forgiven
the urn? They have forgiven each
other, everything can go unsaid.
Still: man holds the urn in the air.
Hard to forget. No one does.

Angelo Mao

The Great Sparrow Campaign first appeared in The Adroit Journal, and On Ai Weiwei’s ‘Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn’ first appeared in Poetry Magazine.

Angelo Mao is a biomedical scientist and writer. He obtained his PhD in bioengineering from Harvard University. His first book of poems, Abattoir (2021), won the Burnside Review Press Book Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Georgia Review, The Drift, and other journals. His prose about poetry has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. He edits DIALOGIST, an online poetry journal.

Two poems from Edison Dupree’s Miracle Soap

followed by a note on the author

Cornfield with Doves

It’s getting toward my time
to be enrolled among the legions
of the fallen pretty-good poets.
A grateful earth has patted their heads.

And here’s my head,
this failing crop of white hairs
mown to stubble;
these dry discolored lumps
half-hidden in it, recalling all those

makeshift graves in the bullet-mown
Cornfield at Antietam.
—And then came hundreds of mourning doves,
to peck at the shattered kernels; to peck
down into one bloated shape
the gravediggers missed—

their beaks were foul as vultures’
there. In that obscene place
they were too late to symbolize
peace, let alone mourn.
Those were old lies about them.

But they themselves were just an old true
story of doves flying
toward their food, in the blue air,
their slender tails pointing always
backward toward
the warm original egg.

I lived in an egg once.
I loved the soft light permeating
my shell and my sealed eyelids.
I felt the warmth of my mother’s feathers.
Or was it just the sun’s?

Soon I’ll burn in the sun’s
molten yolk, and feel nothing.
The earth will circle endlessly.
I’ll paint my side of it blue,
and space will blacken the other.

Edison Dupree

Epilogues

for Giulia Dupree

1  Her Floor

A finishing nail
has raised its head
up out of the wood,
and gone all

human and sad.
A tiny blank expression,
catching the sun,
like a match head

scraping against my giant shoe.
As if to burn it down.
As if the old woman
had known what to do.

2  Salvage Yard

This is the way she slumped and died,
on the vinyl seat, on Litchfield Road,
hit by a truck on the driver’s side,
at forty-five through the red light.

This is the son who wasn’t there,
was not and never had been there,
and did not kill her, is that clear?
Nor turn the wheel to save her.

3  Graveside

And now this white stone
tooth has nothing to grind
against but sky.
All the panicky
rage is coffined,
it’s tamped in,

deeper than I am
tall. Nothing to fear
now but the poison’s
own loneliness,
standing here,
saying its charm,

as if to defend
her now. As if her first
little red scream
when nobody came
to offer the breast
were stopped, and pardoned.

Edison Dupreee

Cornfield with Doves first appeared in Ploughshares, and Epilogues first appeared in Southern Poetry Review.

Edison Dupree’s full-length collection, Prosthesis, was the 1994 Bluestem Award volume. He has also published two chapbooks: Boy With a Ball (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019) and A Rapid Transit (North Carolina Writers’ Network, 1988). He is a native of North Carolina, but has lived for many years in Cambridge, Mass., where he recently retired from working as a university library assistant.

Two poems from Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s Might Could

followed by a note on the author

Petunia

Not that I ever liked you
before, but each spring
till now you’ve kept yourself
in the world, died back
to the plain ground
and come again, answering
no invitation of ours but saying
a trumpet’s yes to the part sun
by the front porch where once
presumably a hanging basket
waved above the brick,
above the sandy soil, long after
the first of you were taken
from their own places
but before they were made to live one
season only—or you escaped
that too, persisting, seeds
in the sand, seeds
in the antlion dens, returning
to make each summer
furred leaves and unabashed
purple flowers, deep and cool,
no hint of subtlety,
scent light and almost
irritatingly gentle
but there, inescapable,
making a one-plant world beside
the porch edge, and I like you
now, I know you now,
and now, six years here and well
into June, nothing
of you, no leaf, no sign.

Anna Lena Phillips Bell

Against Stoicism

An itch, untouched,
will twitch and wail

till an answering scratch
unhitches hell.

A tempered squeal
can conjure oil.

Squeak, wheel.
You may as well.

Anna Lena Phillips Bell

Petunia first appeared in The Georgia Review, and Against Stoicism first appeared in The Sewanee Review.

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. New writing appears or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Orion, Electric Literature, West Branch, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and poets.org. Her work has received support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Marble House Project, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the North Carolina Arts Council’s Literature Fellowship program. Bell teaches in the creative writing department at UNC Wilmington and is the editor of Ecotone. She lives with her family near what’s now called the Cape Fear River.

Two poems from Christopher Nelson’s Windshear

followed by a note on the author

Melancholia

Staring into the orchard for no reason other than
to stare. September light and the detritus
that’s blown in against the ancient pear
that bears hard fruits I feel terrible
about letting rot. Seven years since you let
inside your head the patient bullet.
A detail I come back to: an open book beside you,
two-thirds read, some fantasy—dragons, witchery,
the promise of escape typical of the genre. Earlier this year
I pulled a patch of scarlet gaura, mistaking them
for horseweed. Only one survived: backlit, hundreds
of pink-white blooms small as spiders suspended
on stems thin enough in this late hour to be invisible.
As kids we huffed gas in a meadow from a red tank
woodcutters left behind. When everything shimmered we
ran, but I couldn’t feel my body, my legs
just something churning below me, and me
somewhere far off, watching. The gaura lives one year,
maybe two, a fact that is for some reason
unbearable tonight. We dropped acid and climbed
your roof to watch the stars. We spooked when
you said, They’re watching back. The fantasy
novel, mid-chapter—and the fact that it took
a month for anyone to find you. Folklore says
horse thieves used to rub their hands
with gaura blooms to calm the animals—
come to in the night by unknown men
talking softly and moving slowly, as if yielding to
a caution already renounced.

Christopher Nelson

Fugitive

The eastern cousin of wild bergamot isn’t
native to our region, but enough have escaped
from gardens to make their presence common,

yellow and purple like the stuffed harlequin clown
of my kindergarten. When as kids we watched
on the copter cam OJ’s white Bronco clear

the interstate, I knew TV would never be
the same. How we touched tongues once
during a sleepover. How your parents

encouraged us to shower together to save water.
How the water when we washed Dad’s Pontiac
for bowling money flushed to the gutter with a

head of foam, but the birds drank it anyway.
When he sold the car and neglected to remove
the plates, the police called at 3 a.m.

because it had been used to rob a pharmacy.
How it’s never fully dark in jail. Always
the permanent fluorescence. Sleeping faces

in “safety light.” I watch my son sleep in the rose
night-light, time already galloping
away with him, a mare capable and opaque,

more machine than promise.
How dry its muzzle. How large the nostrils
that flex and blow.

Christopher Nelson

Melancholia and Fugitive first appeared in Nelson’s chapbook, Fugitive (New Michigan Press, 2024)

Christopher Nelson is the author of Blood Aria (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021) and five chapbooks, including Blue House, winner of a Poetry Society of America Fellowship. A recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, he is the founding editor of Green Linden Press, a nonprofit publisher dedicated to poetic excellence and reforestation. He has edited two anthologies, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora, which received a Midwest Book Award, and Essential Queer Voices of U.S. Poetry. Visit christophernelson.info.

Two poems from Joseph Cuomo’s What I Didn’t See

followed by a note on the author

Vowel

I’m here now can hear him shouting
seething cursing into the phone the
rage of Achilles unleashed on a reticent

priest he will not let go will eat drink
inhale the fever the bile the spasm
twisting his thick body around wrenched

cork uncorked abrupt what is inside raining
out don’t tell me don’t you tell me you
think I don’t see things you think I don’t

know you think I’m a fucking asshole I
know believe me I know I know my
kids would be sitting in that goddamn

school right now if my name didn’t end in a
vowel there it is the secret the mystery the
source I see my small self helpless perplexed

the shock the conflict the clash of
absolutes the unquestioned authority
of my father of the Church the priest

unforgivable and yet he forgave us forgiving
all our sins now I see what I didn’t
then like a god I take on my father’s form

animate him sense each muscle his mine
tense churning of the blood bilious
liver hammer of the lung inhabiting

his skin his shame his anger
true as bone I can feel it
devour him when trying to buy

a home they weren’t gonna sell to
someone like me someone with a
name that ends in a vowel I sit inside

his soul and see what there is of him in
me his fire his fury the indignity no less
tenacious than mine during the War they

had me stationed in Tennessee before we got
shipped over and the sheriffs in this
frigging town they threw me in jail the

bastards worst jail I ever seen didn’t even have
no toilet just this trough like horses
drink out of running through the cells of course

I was bombed we all were we
knew where we were
headed but that ain’t why they

arrested me you wanna know
why you wanna know for dating
a white girl

yes my father yes he had been
wronged the heat the lightning
genuine though he held it

too long poor man he couldn’t
unknot his pitiless heart could
not calm his own storm it bent

blinded swallowed him a war he
couldn’t win his war the war
within a match inflamed possessed

undid him undid those he
loved wronged cut us now I
see the hit the burn the hurt

to him us me differently no longer
alien to the horror the hurt to
others before others since others

to come I can see a through
line a link a bridge between us
so many of us a bond among the

dead the living the not yet born
so many of us shadows to the
world shadows to ourselves so

many estranged anomalous wretched
refuse cryptic difference the wretched
dream a Trojan horse why why do we

hate whoever is not
us even though of course they
are we yes we are our brothers keep

saying it we are our
sisters they all of them
are me they all of them

are gods.

Joseph Cuomo

Meeting

If you know for certain what is the purpose of
the universe…then…no degree of coercion is
too great, provided it leads to the goal.
— Bertrand Russell

around thirty you debate Jerry Falwell on TV
his face enlarged on the monitor
enormous big as Cyclops smiling courteous

to the camera yet duplicitous he talks
shit to you during the commercial tries
to fluster unnerve you then back live

he claims not to have said what he
did beats you in battle belittles you
foolish a nobody looking through

notes trying to cite his lies his
deceit Falwell sees but a sole
possibility the certainty of war

the dictate of the divine Armageddon
his joy tomorrow already written
knowable inevitable the way forward

indisputable the inerrant command of
the Bible all we can do is walk willingly
or unwillingly down the path history

reduced to this the power to predict
preempts all discussion all
argument disagreement now disloyalty

skepticism subversion fanaticism
infects the Oval Office then as it
will decades later Falwell separates

the righteous from the rest of us the
powerless the feminist the lesbian
the dark barbarian how do we survive

this how do we reason with the
unreasonable inflexible how defend
conciliation kindness empathy now I

see what you didn’t then we yes all
every one of us has tasted the whip
estrangement defeat gay trans Black

Brown odd foreign still our betters are
not better than us they deny their own
ignorance imperfection uncertainty

confuse belief with knowledge believe they
they alone see what no one can
the premise lone key the sole purpose for

the existence of humanity
conviction breeds confidence
however misplaced belligerence

lunacy intolerance the province of
those who know what they
don’t can’t can never know there is

no supremacy no hierarchy we who
stand up speak out we who love yes
love another more than ourselves

there is no panacea utopia no final
victory there is only this the
company of those who have gone

before us those who will follow
there is only the sense of doing
what we must the sense of each

of us hand in hand for all eternity.

Joseph Cuomo

Vowel and Meeting first appeared in Evergreen Review

Joseph Cuomo was born in Harlem and spent his early years in the south Bronx. His poems have appeared in the Boston Review and Evergreen Review. He’s debated Jerry Falwell on CNN, interviewed China’s most prominent dissident, Fang Lizhi, before the massacre in Tiananmen, and produced an award-winning public radio documentary on American fundamentalism, broadcast in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. For over forty years, he was Director of Queens College Evening Readings, a literary reading series he started in 1976. josephacuomo.com

Two poems from Timothy Yu’s 77 Chinese Dreams

followed by a note on the author

39

Hello, yellow peril! You’re always near.
Too many (you said       we read) to be told apart.
We shrivel in the light,
bare-ass Timothy packed away for plunder,
so long! Our barred zones are no ingrates,
coddling us with their hate

from when we’re born. Our hair is tufted off
gently: from shooter to computer man,
we never get tired.
You’re afraid, we’re hit. You murder us with love,
wifey, lackey, since we never can invent
the forms of our desire,

or desire: unmake us: we will stay undressed,
our sallow skin polished like a face,
animate lover,
passing your testing, who have been born to test,
your horsehair engine runs. All look the same,
under the covers.

Timothy Yu

42

You con artist, tongue of a toad, inane
with bigotry & theft: will you take me
as a number one son?
Am I an I by how you reckon one,
spitted, wretched? I kneel before you in pain
(I am killed; I beg, I flee)

your hatred is doubled: hear them chanting—Go.
I fear. I shrink in fear. Call full blaze down
with you as instrument
unstrung, a craven win, a row of tents.
I have half-mast & bluster to revision you
for burning me to ground.

You feed on hatred, and you fake as strong.
Hate winged me, not a person you can grab
or erase with a brand.
Think of it, boss: a bleeding twin: a hand
that blisters rich: stop, here, as if wound wrong
and sprung back to scab.

Timothy Yu

Timothy Yu is the author of a poetry collection, 100 Chinese Silences (Les Figues Press, reissued by punctum books), and two scholarly books, Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia (Oxford University Press) and Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford University Press). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry and Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets (Kelsey Street Press). His work has appeared in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, Fence, and The New Republic. He is a professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Two poems from LaWanda Walters’s How We Really Live

followed by a note on the author

ReLeaf, Relief

We asked for a Japanese cherry,
a redbud, and a sugar maple.
The Friday before my surgery

is when they will arrive. Then Monday
is my lumpectomy. It’s Stage One, small,
and I’ll come home to the Japanese cherry

in our yard that same day.
And my children will be here. I’ll heal.
I was thirteen when I read about this surgery

and felt titillated. A woman’s worry
in “Tell Me, Doctor,” Mama’s Ladies’ Home Journal.
Sposin’ that he says that your lips are like cherries,

Ado Annie sings in I Cain’t Say No. To me it was a story,
like in Oklahoma, the bad girl in the musical
we played on our hi-fi stereo. The doctor mentioned surgery

and said a doctor should examine her breasts and to me
this was sex, Lady Chatterley’s breasts swinging like bells.
I knew people died when they were old. The Japanese cherry

and the other trees are part of ReLeaf, free trees
if you sign up early. I’ve been told that I’ll feel
relieved to get this behind me, the surgery,

which is what Dr. Goodrich C. Schauffler advises
in Tell Me, Doctor in 1962, when women had to feel
for the cancerous lumps and I sang your lips are like cherries

to the record player heartlessly, in Mississippi,
not thinking that the woman in that column, in Tell
Me, Doctor, probably would die. Surgeries

were worse. Jacqueline Susann had a double mastectomy,
but the model in her novel, Valley of the Dolls,
only knows how to take off her clothes. A Japanese cherry

planted in our yard, a redbud and a sugar maple. These trees
won’t have cherries or maple syrup—they are ornamental,
as breasts seem until you hear you need to have surgery.
Sposin’, I sang, your lips are like cherries?

LaWanda Walters

The Flamingo’s Instruction to John James Audubon

Must you kill me to paint me right?
I say, I’m pretty good at posing, myself.
I don’t need to be shot by a gun
and then arranged like I’m a still life,
some poor goose’s liver
with sweaty grapes on a plate.

I’d never lower my head in such obeisance
as you have twisted mine to show. My neck,
when I was alive, bent naturally—
whether to look after our young
or scout for shrimp. You’re as bad
as Lewis Carroll, fancying me
a croquet mallet, stiff as a baton.
And making the hedgehog, curled up in fear,
stand in for a wooden ball. We were real
and wondrous enough before you wanted more.

LaWanda Walters

ReLeaf, Relief first appeared in Poetry and The Flamingo’s Instruction to John James Audubon first appeared in The Southern Review.

LaWanda Walters was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1949 and earned her MFA from Indiana University, where she won the Academy of American Poets Prize. Her first book of poems, Light Is the Odalisque, was published in 2016 by Press 53 in its Silver Concho Poetry Series. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, Nine Mile, Laurel Review, Live Encounters Poetry & Writing, and other literary magazines, as well as in Best American Poetry 2015 and Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century. She received Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in 2020 and 2024. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband, fellow poet John Philip Drury.

Two poems from Kerry James Evans’s Arachne’s Tapestry

followed by a note on the author

The Heavens Opened, and God Said

All endings, even mine, will be yours.
Take the Chevrolet Camaro—
a popular car in Florida.
Not only will Florida cease

to exist, but so will every
yellow Camaro double-parked
in a roped-off field outside
the nearest fall festival

with its haunted corn maze
and pumpkin patch—
its local AC/DC cover band
reuniting for one last tour.

Fear not, my child. Those songs
live on. They carry like bubbles
drawn from a soapy wand.
You are like a branch

that has forgotten the trunk,
a bird in a lightning storm,
waves lingering at the shore.
I am sand. I am the wave, the wind,

the red flag whipping a blue sky.
Would you believe me if I said
you and I are both blue sky?
Would you try? Do you ever

wonder what frustrates me?
Never-ending guitar solos,
legalese, and skinny pawn brokers.
Do you hear the guitar solo?

What about the neighbor’s kids
burning donuts in deserted
quarries? Their bare-chested
howl is a hymn all its own.

Once, the universe was a series
of wheels within wheels. Now,
it is a shattered urn. In the beginning,
it was good—in the beginning.

Kerry James Evans

Stew

From my dialect to my toes,
everything I am
—especially the I am—
is borrowed. All of it
a bit of water and clay

mixed in a pot
—no more than a stew
left to simmer
awhile, to fill a house
with feel-good. To

feel good, but not to burn
the hand who stirred
me into being,
not to boil over when the coils
redden at my feet.

Kerry James Evans

The Heavens Opened, and God Said first appeared in The Tusculum Review, 17 (2021): 40-41; Stew first appeared in 32 Poems, 17.2 (2019): 16

Kerry James Evans is the author of Bangalore (Copper Canyon). He lives in Milledgeville, Georgia, where he teaches in the MFA program at Georgia College & State University and serves as the poetry editor for Arts & Letters. Learn more at www.kerryjamesevans.com.

Two poems from Emily Banks’s Doll Fire

followed by a note on the author

Doll Fire

It wasn’t till my brother tried
to reassure her by saying at least
they’ll be together that my sister-in-law called
her mom to cancel the planned incineration
of her dolls. Think of them, tied up in a bag,
their stiff arms awkwardly hugging
each other’s soft torsos, tender
as girls at a sleepover, whispering fears
into the shadows without having to say
don’t tell. Girls telling the stories of their bodies
for the first time to another
half-asleep. Girls struggling to stay up
all night, smuggling sweets
and soda to keep their joy alive
long after they’d brushed their teeth.
Girls nervous as parental footsteps
creak closer in the hall, cheeks puffed up
with inhaled air as doorknob turns,
thinking their saddest thoughts
to quell laughter. Girls
who had once been cherished, each
picked special from a shelf,
opened by fingers trembling
with delight, given a name and a voice,
outgrown now and too worn
to sell or save. The fancier ones
whose eyes close are lucky.
The others stare into cramped darkness,
trying to make out the smooth curve
of a beloved friend’s plastic cheek,
trying not to picture it melting
in the impending inconceivable heat
like a shy blush at the mention
of a crush’s name that never cools,
that rages hotter and hotter
till her skin crackles into pain and nobody
would call her a girl. Her cloth body
would burn more easily, bursting
into ash, leaving only a scrap
of the last dress a girl, already almost
too old for dolls, must have picked out for her.

Emily Banks

Credit Where It’s Due

Most of the time, saying grace is just a way
to thank a man for what a woman made.
I mean, go ahead and thank Jesus
for your salvation if you want, but not for standing on his feet
over a hot stove, chopping carrots, stirring herbs, pouring broth
into a pot. Women were on that long before
his storied birth. They say Mary could make a stew
so thick and tender it would seduce God himself.
Don’t they say that? I wasn’t raised to say grace
but I was raised to thank my mother.
I was raised to secret the burnt bits and tougher parts
of vegetables into my mouth before serving a meal.
So if a woman swallows every imperfection
in the world to make your table look
like something Jesus himself would have set if he ever set
a table in his life, thank her. You never know
how it will all spill out. What if one day she opens
her mouth to speak and a life’s worth of scraps
she hid inside herself come pouring down?
In Florida, my aunt asked us to join hands
and hang our heads. I was a teenager
and snuck my eyes open. It made me nervous,
keeping them closed as she extolled
the Lord for his bounty. What was I not
supposed to see? Outside, the Virgin
kneeled in sand, surrounded by the rotting
of small oranges. My aunt knows where to find
the photo of her husband in Vietnam
in bed next to a naked local girl—how old? I’m sure not old
enough to say no to a man who could make her eyes burn
with tear gas then come home and make his wife
cry alone once she’d performed the proper accolades. We thank
Jesus because a good man always looks like a miracle.
We thank Mary for making a good son because we know
damn well he didn’t come from any man.

Emily Banks

Doll Fire first appeared in Vox Viola; Credit Where It’s Due first appeared in North Carolina Literary Review

Emily Banks is the author of Mother Water (Lynx House Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Plume, Copper Nickel, 32 Poems, The Rumpus, CutBank, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She has also published scholarship in academic journals including Women’s Studies, JMMLA, and ESQ. She holds a BA from UNC-Chapel Hill, an MFA from the University of Maryland, and a Ph.D. from Emory University. A native of Brooklyn, she currently lives in Indianapolis and teaches at Franklin College.