Two poems from Melissa Barrett’s Moon on Roam

followed by a note on the author
 

The Brain Names Itself

The brain named Leif Erikson and Verizon.
Named our dog After after “after,” my favorite
preposition. The brain named looners, nooners,
and euphemisms. Brought an al dente noodle
to the spaghetti house. The brain invented paint by numbers
with Bob Ross and painted numbers on wooden cubes
and a wood of painted bark. It invented acronyms
and contractions. DTF at two o’clock. The brain
invented measurements for precise timekeeping
and the idea that time is a social construct.
The brain thinks a thought and thinks about thinking.
You don’t get much more meta than a fruit salad
served from a watermelon basket. The brain wrote
the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
The brain traced lines from stars and starred the best lines
from books. The brain wrote books and turned some
into props, like the hollowed-out Bible that held alcohol
in The Simpsons. The other Homer spoke his books
and hollowed out a horse. The brain named Zima, Zafiro
Añejo, Helen, and the hippocampus, which comes
in the shape of a seahorse. The brain invented comparison.
The brain invented cramming. The brain invented irony.
Imagine all the med students trying to commit
the functions of the hippocampus to memory.
 

Melissa Barrett

Cross Examination

Memory is at its finest the lip reading of a lost moment.
Instead of “I love you,” you got “island view.” Instead
of “my tag is itchy,” you make out “my dad’s an intern.”
Well, my dad is an intern, so that’s lucky. Read my lips:
I’m a good liar. I think this is because I have a round face.
Cherub cheeks and eyes that disappear when I laugh:
something about all that tells people I am “innocent.”
You get away with a lot if you have the right bone structure.
Studies show that people who use air quotes are full of shit.
Other studies show that people who curse openly tend to
be more honest, and that women who wear make-up
are perceived as being more trustworthy. Figure that one out.
Here is a fact proven by science: 100 percent of writers
are “storytellers.” As in, dishonest people. It’s like
what Amy Hempel said: similes are liars, and metaphors
are better liars. Nothing in the world is truly like anything else
so why do we insist on drawing comparisons. Except she
didn’t say it exactly like that. I don’t remember what she said
or if I’ve ever even heard her speak. Eyewitness testimony
is about as reliable as my mailman, who told me there’s something
kind of sexy about always being late. Perjury is defined as “knowingly
making a false statement.” Merely misremembering is not a crime.
How many of us misremember the first line of this poem?
In the dark auditorium, after the applause, the poet sits down
as the audience scrambles to recall a favorite line. The memory
of her lips reading lost. You lean over and tell me,
“You just touched my thigh.” Watching your mouth move,
I get, “You look deep in thought.” I swear to God,
I am deep in something. I just don’t know what.
 

Melissa Barrett

Melissa Barrett was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1983, and earned her BA from Wittenberg University and MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She taught for several years before becoming the director of a middle school in Columbus, Ohio, where she lives with her partner, the artist Pete Burkeet, and their two dogs, Pearl and Paul. Barrett’s poems have appeared in BOMB, Harvard Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, the Iowa Review, Best American Poetry, and many other journals.
 
The Brain Names Itself first appeared in the Iowa Review; Cross-Examination first appeared in Crazyhorse.
 

Two poems from Michael Lavers’s After Earth

followed by a note on the author

Abridged Taxonomy of Light

Some light unfurls enormous wings,
as though sunning itself. Some light
just roosts, grooming its blue and thinning

plumage down to stars. Some evenings,
even waning sun will overrun the atmosphere’s
cracked dish, or else the dark will whisper

to the skull like waves slowly devouring a cliff.
Sometimes September shifts its weight
onto unwinnowed wheat and spins out gold,

gamboge, champagne, chartreuse.
Sometimes the Earth and this whole edge
of space seem like the blast of chaff

after whatever midnight mass of nothingness
or suns there was before this mess began,
that hornets’ nest of silhouette and shade.

But somewhere light grows cold, and heavy,
and condenses to a river whose vast delta
feeds whole galaxies of coral seas,

thicker forests, greener trees, and eyes
more clear and cavernous than these.

Michael Lavers

Field Guide

Come little wind, come sad chinook, come catch
me like a weed, some strain of yellow vetch,
pluck nothing but the uncut rusty strings
of purple sedge and mouse-ear; strum these rows
of barberry and spread the milfoil’s disease,
unsift the sleeping houndtongue and the toadflax,
drain the sour backwaters of my brain
to sow a line of henbane, tansy, ragwort,
brome, the greater groundsel then the lesser;
choke my ears with burs if you are there,
just speak as plainly as you can: say something,
true or not, like beargrass, not a grass,
which bears don’t eat, no matter what it’s called:
elk grass, turkey beard, quip quip, firelily.

Michael Lavers

Michael Lavers’ poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Crazyhorse, 32 Poems, The Hudson Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2016 University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize. He teaches poetry at Brigham Young University.

Abridged Taxonomy of Light first appeared in the Georgia Review;Field Guide first appeared in Crazyhorse.

Two poems from Christine Robbins’s Wake
followed by a note on the author

Immigrant

This bird is mine for being despised –
For its flocks
Swarming slender trees until they bend.

Starlings breed like knotweed,
Gypsy moth, feral swine.
They say the foreign

Have no heart for this land.
My husband shoots a lead pellet
And starling feathers scatter in shades

Of European poison – flake white,
Vermillion and Paris green
Beneath antimony black. The murder

Of neighborhood crows huddles in
And our stranger settles back
In its old black sheen.

On our hill
There is no dead bird.
A heron

Trails its legs above the bay.
An eagle lands
To lift a loop of snake.

Christine Robbins

Vanishing Point at Willapa Bay

1. Tide line

Seabirds buoyant, gray and white. Seaweed
Bright along the sand. Loving you
For nineteen years, I watch
You more than other things. Pocket
My wind-up of time.

2. Skeletal seal

The eye hole that’s left
Sags in half a hide – the bone cover
Facing the water is gone. Bone-raw,
Un-gnawed by a scavenger its size.
I cannot name what hollows me, but I
Can’t walk or speak so well these days. I wait
To be wanted, anyway. By more
Than tiny mouths.

3. Canvas in light

When I was first afraid to die, I spread
Over all I could see. I tried
To cast myself so wide, I’d be
No surface to breach. The sky’s blue
Drops with the sun, and light
Breaks silver on the bay – brief mirror.
Every bird flies twice.

Christine Robbins

Christine Robbins has an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop, and poems from Wake have been published in journals including Barrow Street, Bellevue Literary Review, The Georgia Review, The Los Angeles Review, Missouri Review online, New England Review, and Willow Springs. She lives and works in Olympia, Washington.

Immigrant first appeared in Barrow Street. Vanishing Point at Willapa Bay first appeared in The Georgia Review.

Two poems from Marsha Pomerantz’s The God’s Honest Truth

followed by a note on the author

from Wanting

A Morning Song

1
Dirty window in the breakfast
nook wants the sun any old

way, sends every
ray awry.

2
Rattling down macadam with a
cart, A. surveys recycling for a

dinner gently used, sniffs B.,
in flower, drops a bottle,

making long-stem crystal
chatter up here in the hutch.

3
C., pacing and retracing at
the corner, wants her landlord to

come quickly with the key, looks
up at my window, wants what

from me?

4
D. flutters toward the grocer,
scalp peachy in the sun under

dyed brown braids, wants to put
her foot down, wants a nibble

of the deli boy.

5
Primly, in the planter, ivy lifts
arms up, eyes widening over all,

wants to be a juicy cactus, thick
skinned, wants to flower, wants

sight, wants the seen to spell
something.

6
Dirty window wants the sun any
old way, sends every ray awry.

7
No E.
arrives

with the key
by noon.

8
Ceramic mug, clinking,
directs the traffic of a spoon.

Marsha Pomerantz

Moor Eeffoc

1
Come in, then, and wait for something
to happen: the cream to darken out of

the coffee, sweet syllables to snap back
into crystals of Domino or the store

brand, spoon to spiral up and out,
cup to drain and dry. Moor Eeffoc is

“the motto of all effective realism,”
says the translator of a writer quoting

a writer in translation about immediacy:
a glass sign glimpsed from behind. Real

is no ism, but the distance from exhale
to inhale, any stretch between the eyes

that breaks parallax into component
parts, makes this habitual hand cede

its gelid gesture to an opposite, some
overheated engine that stutters here,

forgetting, inventing, leaking ink into
the burbling pool of the first thirst.

2
Gutman’s son, der shtumme, in the shul
vestibule, with his grunts and clutching,

his thick lips forcing toward any young
girl’s unmuted ear, the wanting bursting

in his eyes, unsaying all that was said
around him. Sprechstimme was a

neighbor we never knew, across the
lingual ledge, sidestepping melody

and meaning to get a grip. Real is
col legno, back of the bow approaching

astonished strings: the give and thud
of wood on wood, the damper as vivid

as vibration. All opaque, we try,
dumbstruck, to glance through glass

and come out crystalline.

Marsha Pomerantz

Marsha Pomerantz’s collection of poems, The Illustrated Edge, was published by Biblioasis in 2011; poems and essays have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, berfrois.com, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Literary Review, Parnassus, PN Review, Raritan, and Salamander. Selections and a statement of poetics are at poetrynet.org. Her essay “Right/Left: A Triptych” appeared in Best American Essays 2016, and the artist’s book They Run, made from her poem of that title by Claire Illouz (Chérence, France), also appeared in 2016: www.claire-illouz.com. Her translations from the Hebrew include poetry and fiction.

Wanting first appeared in Raritan; Moor Eeffoc first appeared in PN Review.

Winner of the 13th annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize

Judge: Andrew Motion

Christopher Cessac was born in 1967 in Corpus Christi and grew up in South Texas. He studied literature and history at Texas A&M, law at the University of Michigan Law School, and poetry at Johns Hopkins University. He has worked as a writer, musician and lawyer. He lives now in Toronto. His first poetry collection, Republic Sublime, won the Kenyon Review Poetry Prize. He is also the author of Eros Among the Americans, a chapbook, and his poetry has appeared in The Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Cimarron Review, Drunken Boat, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Rattle, and elsewhere. One of his poems introduces Rio Grande, an anthology of prose edited by Jan Reid and including work by Larry McMurtry, John Reed, Américo Paredes, Woody Guthrie, Molly Ivins and others.

Two poems from Christopher Cessac’s The Youngest Ocean

Six Characters in Search of an Author in the Wal-Mart Parking Lot

The day begins as parody of a day beginning.
Our children gather for the arts (martial

as usual). I still know how to find a good deal
of trouble. Confusing life with plot and how

to construct a decent one. The descent one makes
into fictions: this lust-filled convenience of on and off

ramps as we roam village to village in search
of necessities: a bargain on bliss or at least good

beer. Bare of music, waiting in the wings, still
no script with parts for us, half-heartedly rubbernecking

with my herd, the last good music I heard
left me and that was it. What is it you do?

See how sometimes I please and/or harm others?
That’s all I do.

Christopher Cessac

Poetics in the Suburban

Parked. Idling. Oblivious to the weather
or whether the crops are in, what the factories

are paying, when the troops are returning. Aristotle
would understand. These moments are hard won

and fragile. A little selfish space to dwell
on the precious—iambs (a life?), the introduction

of scenery (this parking lot?), the difference
between Comedy and Tragedy (“the comic mask

is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain”).
This is the natural order of things. To cower,

at times, from all responsibility, to give
the heart a rest as smooth as sleep. To wake

and find the lot is full, the vultures circling,
pained expressions, coveting my space.

Christopher Cessac

Two poems from Alison Prine’s Ghostwriting My Autobiography

followed by a note on the author

Coming Out

I knew when the small plane I was riding in
touched down in the fog.

I knew watching my stepmother’s hands
work the rock garden behind the house.

I didn’t want the circle to close.
I couldn’t see myself in the dress, so shaven.

I knew because I loved to move through water –
the way it yielded
the way it took me in its mouth.

I knew watching our fox hound
when he slipped out of the leash –
how he tore after a scent down our shady street.

I just wanted to sleep in the wild strawberries
with my chopped off hair.

Alison Prine

Hush

Walking home that day I pressed
my face into the fresh snow

piled on a pine bough
so I could see the print of myself asleep.

I met her at my house. Down
in the basement I put a record on.

I lay beside her on the floor.
I touched her hair.

There in the contours
and shadow we recognized each other.

Our bones nearly grown,
she closed the door.

The taste of cherry chapstick,
the clench, the release.

Upstairs my stepmother’s wooden sandals
clicked across the kitchen floor.

The dryer buzzed, then stopped.
The music uncoiled and filled in.

Everything worth doing
is worth being terrified by.

In the static silence she reached out
and dropped the needle to the groove.

That became the refrain
we couldn’t turn away from –

like the threshold and the decade
and the nameless thing we’d done.

Alison Prine

Alison Prine’s debut collection of poems, Steel (Cider Press Review, 2016) was named a finalist for the 2017 Vermont Book Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Field and Prairie Schooner among others. She lives in Burlington, Vermont where she works as a psychotherapist. Visit her at alisonprine.com.

Coming Out first appeared in Hunger Mountain; Hush first appeared in Colorado Review.

Two poems from Jonathan Weinert’s Indifferent Country

followed by a note on the author

History

Fearsome in his superhero sneakers, Jonah rides.
The light in the right shoe isn’t working; the left one
signals when he pedals. Down the sidewalk, crazy
with an after-dinner joy, he shouts and twitches on his seat,
snapping his helmet-hidden head one way and then another,
shadowed-on by early leaves and clouds he won’t remember:

Perfect. Up the driveway, with the wind disordering
the neighbor’s tall white pines, he parks his bike and goes inside,
the dancer-conqueror, and downs a slice of watermelon, red part
and a bit of crisp white rind. Later, during pre-bed rituals,
I hold his small electric body in my iffy hands,
coaxing on his socks and two-piece PJs.

At length his light winks out, and then the others, and the distance
in the darkened earth grows farther. Sometimes only dreams
can reach us where we lie. Opened in the silenced house
like books, our bodies fill with brilliant likenesses: the father dead
almost a year, the dark-haired friend who in this version
doesn’t turn on you, the sad-eyed emissary from the mountain.

On the porch, the landlord’s vine grows bitter on its lattice,
and the poison stars, exploding in their traces, cluster in the west.
Is there any fended ground in all the earth? When Genghis Khan
invaded Helmand, helmet-headed riders sowed the fields with salt.
They’ve found archaic scallop shells on peaks in Appalachia.
Foxes quit the bulldozed acres built with model houses.

Patient in the night wind, the white pines wait for us
to not be here again.

Jonathan Weinert

To My Sick Child, Half Asleep

Because I haven’t yet replaced the stones
Because the river’s a bad gray string
Because the blood won’t stay inside me

The sky fills up with antimatter gray
and the kitchen knife sings in its wooden slot
of how its handle hugs my hand,
its blade the length of a young boy’s clavicle

Don’t forget to put your slippers on, darling
Don’t forget the streetlight’s pale penumbra
spectral as projector light without a film
Don’t forget the thin white shinbones of the trees

I lever my heart out of its slot
and drink the cool black blood directly from the vena cava
I grip the jewel-blue handle, swipe piled snow
from the roof of the ticking car

Remember the pharmacy insane with mice
Remember the long bronze teeth of the pill dispenser
Remember your frail glass cup, your pale percussive medicines

Because I drive through snow to the white facility
Because the knife will have its way
Because the earth’s a cloak of blood and paste

Because you’re prone

Jonathan Weinert

Jonathan Weinert is the author of In the Mode of Disappearance, winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and Thirteen Small Apostrophes. He is co-editor, with Kevin Prufer, of Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W.S. Merwin. Jonathan’s poems and essays are published widely, Recent work appears or will soon appear in Plume, Southwest Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Massachusetts Review, and Copper Nickel, where Jonathan received the Editors’ Prize for poetry in 2015.

History first appeared in Harvard Review.

Two poems from Johnny Horton’s Vesuvius After Dark

followed by a note on the author

Sea Change

Someday we’ll be taken with one another, impressed
like sailors on a voyage of discovery, coupling

rum rations with no idea of where we’re going, hoping
the most important epiphanies happen once

you’ve left the ones you love. Grief is what you feel
in waves. Fish tales are how we feed ourselves

on noble lies. I could be comforting, talk about myths,
like dolphins dropping mariners on the beach.

I could justify Columbus seeing mermaids in the manatees.
Pliny the Elder couldn’t bring himself to eat

the creatures of the deep. He believed his tears
improved his vision. Maybe crying helps people see

from someone else’s point of view. Maybe weepers
make the greatest liars. Every night, Columbus deceived

his crew, undercounting miles they’d gone from Spain.
My equation for staying up all night includes a nest

from which we navigate by stars. I need to hear
your voice. I need to touch your cheek while you’re posing

questions to the sky. In the scope between us, dawn
turns water pink. Maybe our devices make us think

there’s so much space between the future and communion
we’d better not act. Consider the Mediterranean

woodcock. With eyes that see 360 degrees,
it’s become the Isle of Capri’s perfect prey, slow movement

being a consequence of too much sight. I’d rather observe
the Venezuelan anablep, otherwise known

as the four-eyed fish, the pisces
that enjoys cumulonimbus and the bottom of the lake

in one continuous view. Look: It thrives on nothing but air
as it scans the surface for a mate. Don’t make me sing

“Love Boat,” auf Deutsch: Das Liebe Schiff
versprechen etwas für jedermann. Our language survives

the promises we make. Our vessels carry us
up until the breaking point. One way you learn to swim

is by getting in over your head. Pliny the Elder
said people were the only animals to regret getting close, to act

like strangers on the day after they’d gone to bed. The truth
is, some dolphins love drowning sailors. Some

lovers feel current once they’ve come ashore, the sea
being what they can’t ignore. What we walk away from

we leave unexplored.

Johnny Horton

Vampyres

Thy victims ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire…
—Lord Byron

Maybe we were sired by the lumber mill, brought up to suck
life from oyster shells, to crosscut
cedar trees and count the rings. Imagine the scene
from 300 years before Washington

crossed the Delaware. So many people have died
we must believe that some still walk.
Take my recent ex, who couldn’t get off
until I wore a turtleneck. Take my hometown developers,

who imagined the Hellenistic confines of the Carnegie Library
reborn as a parking lot. I remember
watching Frankenstein in the art deco theater
whenever I visit the ATM

where it used to stand. What’s invisible needs us
to live. Lord Byron dared his friends to write, knowing deadlines
brought creatures to life. What if
George Washington had been raised by wolves? What if

we must be open to change? Chickens have eyes
that regenerate their lenses
once you remove their lenses. The immortal Chinese jellyfish
tastes like saffron

if it’s braised in saffron. Maybe we have poor taste
because being offensive is the best defense. Maybe Lord Byron
figured vampires were fathers
because he found his father draining. Washington

cured the common cold with leeches. Egyptians
fought infection with maggots. The survivors of Lord Byron
preserved his corpse in rum
so we can say the spirit saved his heart.

Johnny Horton

Johnny Horton was born on the US Navy base in New London, Connecticut, grew up in Northwest Indiana, and now lives in Seattle where he walks dogs and teaches literature to combat veterans. He co-directs the University of Washington’s summer creative writing program in Rome, and his poems have appeared in Horsethief, Poetry Northwest, Notre Dame Review, Scoundrel Time, Los Angeles Review, and Willow Springs.

Sea Change and Vampyres first appeared in Notre Dame Review.

Two poems from William Winfield Wright’s Birds Vs Cosmonauts
followed by a note on the author

Rabbits

There’s always one guy
who runs out front, sprinting
even when there are miles to go,
flat out as if the first curve
were his perfect destination,
well in the lead should the world
end now before we finish.
Everyone passes him by
the halfway point
while he pants and stumbles
and then holds his side,
but before that inevitability
and for as long as he goes,
it’s just the air in his lungs
and all around him.

“Rabbits are more amenable.
That’s why they go into the hat,”
the magician tells me.
“Pigeons you keep in the refrigerator
to get them to cooperate,
and they make a big mess.
I do mostly schools now
so the kids can play with them
and ask about the tricks,
and there’s that perfect moment
when what wasn’t there is there
waiting to be picked up
by the soft scruff of its neck.
I know how it works
and it still surprises me.”

It’s not a contest, sex,
and we don’t keep count.
Fixed and old, we’re nothing like bunnies,
clumsy and determined, we’re no tortoise either,
but we run this impossible race
knowing we’ll get lapped,
stopping in the places that look comfortable,
stringing together our series of sprints,
slow maybe now but still not steady.

William Winfield Wright

If Explanations Were Made of Porcelain

We have a lot to thank gravity for.
There’s the atmosphere and its air,

this sticky planet full of promises,
pressures we can give, pressures we can receive,

and even when everything floated,
we were always safely tethered

to this blue ball, this same place.
So when something falls, something we thought

had wings or rested safely on a table
it can break.

Dead people go back to stars.
Dogs reincarnate even if

we ourselves are a one off.
The wine glass is now glitter,

the cell phone a paperweight or found art.
It hurts when something smashes

into pieces. When idea or understanding lies
scattered and needs

to be swept up from the kitchen floor.

William Winfield Wright

William Winfield Wright is Fulbright Scholar, Fishtrap Fellow, and professor of English at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, Colorado. He was born in Fresno, California in 1960 and received a BA from Linfield College, an MA from the University of New Hampshire, and a PhD from the University of Arizona. He has published widely, including the chapbook Cosmonauts (2012), and his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and featured on Poetry Daily.

Two poems from David Tucker’s Raindogs

followed by a note on the author

Still Waiting

The women of my childhood, my back-then heroes,
protectors, teachers, trailer-park wise, tough as rent,
long gone and still waiting for life to get better,
waiting in beat-up cars under slow red lights
in July, dusty stuffed animals
in the back window, animal crackers
strewn on the car seat, deep circles under red eyes.
They are bringing the sheets from the clothesline
after dark, they are walking to the barn before sunrise.
The milk pail squeaks as it swings from their hands,
but on the return trip it is heavy and silent.
They are dying of hard work and childbearing at 19,
they are waking with a yawn so tired you can hear it
halfway to town; husbands dead and the money gone,
they are tottering from the house trailer ready
for the night shift at the hospital. They are sewing
at dawn, they are mopping while feeding the child
who screams in the high chair and they are feeding
the grandchild in the high chair and the grandfather
on the deathbed, they are working at Pit Stop, Sonic,
the 7-Eleven, bus stations, and Piggly Wiggly,
they are changing bedpans, their names written
on shirt pockets. They are shelling peas
under the oak—it’s 99 degrees in the shade,
they are churning butter in the breezeway—
sweat rills their foreheads. They are waiting
in rattling cars under slow red lights, rubbing
their eyes, pressing fingers down on that ache
on the bridge of the nose. They are taking a deep
breath as the light over the road goes green.

David Tucker

The House of Old Age

The turning of the pages of a magazine
in the middle of a morning sends
waiting-room echoes through the quiet house,
echoes that are making us old.

The routines that hold us closer
and this sense that steady notice is being taken
of us somewhere now, this is making us old,
and the objects with us for so many years
the way they watch the changes to our skin
and voices, listening for repeated stories,
jokes heard before. The books that eye us and glance
sidelong at each other, the yawns declaring themselves
a little louder, and coffee being poured,
sounding harsher because the house is quieter
by degrees, all this makes us old.

And the weather that has been light
and blue for weeks is also making us old.
Years of love have made us old, lovemaking
in all our different beds and houses,
the painstaking care of children,
sleepless nights, work and promises
have made us old. I touch your hand
in the night, your sleeping face,
and we still make promises about the future
but smile about what we can’t stop.

Thin clouds skim across the moon.
Nights are cool with a little wind.
We leave the windows open
and more old age comes in.

David Tucker

David Tucker is a native Tennessean and a graduate of the University of Michigan where he studied under Donald Hall and Robert Hayden. His book, Late for Work, won the Bakeless Poetry Prize, selected by Philip Levine, and was published by Houghton Mifflin. He also won a national chapbook contest held by Slapering Hol Press, for Days When Nothing Happens. He was awarded a Witter Bynner Fellowship by the Library of Congress. Tucker’s poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, Atlanta Review, Lascaux Review, Comstock Review, Narrative and Southern Humanities Review and has work forthcoming in several publications. Tucker has read twice at the Library of Congress. Ted Kooser selected two of his poems for American Life in Poetry. A career journalist, David was managing editor of The Star-Ledger newspaper, in charge of investigations.

Still Waiting first appeared as Women of My Childhood in the Southern Humanities Review; The House of Old Age first appeared in Ploughshares.