Two poems from Chris Schlegel’s Michigan

followed by a note on the author

Poblocki Paving

Ephrata Community Players expelled H. for comportment
unbecoming a lead soloist. Our combined 50th birthday we celebrated
on the stairwell landing dividing Setu—having relit the boiler and
retired in a sweatsuit—from Aaron and wife K., since August an
adept in mapmaking. At midnight H.’s advisor phoned; offered a
brocaded lampshade for Roz (she there?); coffee Friday, Elsevier, but
tzak-tzak he’s got a fitting.

Agitating, pacifying were Coltrane, the tale of the widower in the
wine-cellar … and naphtha … and a visiting Fluxus stooge called
Rupert. Copy of Carrie, an elbow, Esther’s highball propped the
schoolyard-facing window. Indigo Kia, red hazards, wrong way.
Saturday next (instead of tech) I played P-I-G with Jim, she
backgammon on the counterpane with a clove.

Onscreen the olive forces surrendered, a sailor for the victors hung
his hauberk from the capstan.

Ralph could a thought for a day suppress,
a sensibility for two …
but wept at the fog and prayed by dew
that slicked the maze of the watercress.

“Let this my ardor ever swing
on a plumb-line down from my palsied heart.
Lease me my tongue but bind its art
that being bound retwines the string.”

Chris Schlegel

 

The Great San Bernardino Birthday Party

MacArthur BART. Summer for superstition,
ice cubes from bottled water, baths, not showers,
mold—stunted palms beneath 580 East.
“Yep. Fell asleep at one, 16th and Mission …
No … later … Whidbey Island. End of June.
I asked if she was the photographer.
Annie. Watched them aerate the basin, mowers
whisking up acorns. Brass band. Brewer’s yeast,
coffee people. How’re the waves in Erie?”
Father swats at his son, prone in the rafters,
and the dropped sheaves sluice downstream until the dam.
“It works in practice. What about in theory?
Jess knew I stole her mail … not then. But after.”
“And she took you back?” “She did.” “You broke?” “I am.”

Chris Schlegel

 

Born and raised in Pennsylvania, Christian Schlegel is a doctoral student in English at Harvard, where he’s writing his dissertation on Donald Justice. He studied German at Princeton and received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The Song Cave published his first book, HONEST JAMES, in 2015. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

 

Two poems from Megan Grumbling’s Dwelling

followed by a note on the author

The Heist

Somebody’s made off with the neighbors’ stairs
outside my kitchen window, disappeared

them sometime in the dark between my gin
and bergamot: Beyond these same gold tongues

of tulips on my sill, no one arrives
at higher floors, each door a stranded I

in clapboard rows. For fortnights over bread
or figs I’d watched the late-shift men erect

right-angled stringers, risers, treads, each one
to bear a sole; gazed on as they’d become

themselves, the thing I know. But fast as thought,
irrevocably, now the stairs are not

there, are not any thing – and all at once
a whole array of structures is at risk

of going: Bottom step and middle shelf,
a scarlet wall between study and gulls,

the brick that girds warm windows every dusk.
A whole gestalt remains precarious

even once I’ve eavesdropped, heard the mystery
revealed in other neighbors’ midnight glee:

There’d been a skinflint landlady, her funds
withheld from surly builders, their revenge

done after hours. And strange delight: Relieved
of certain certainties, I love these thieves,

how they’ve not left a plank or screw of proof,
how that dame’s got to hire a whole new crew,

and how this time when I peer through the pane
at stairs appearing, nothing will be safe

from spiriting, the other side or this
of tulips: All we’ve built by mind and fist

is ravishingly stealable, in wait
of liberation. In these stairless days,

bewitched and open-mouthed, I dream things gone
at any slip or whim, and soon my own

larcenous gaze conspires to lift this flight
or that, street names, a certain phrase; to heist

even the sterling surety of does
or is, to leave those vowels vertiginous.

Megan Grumbling

 

Vapors

I fill my glass with fog, sometimes, the grace
of it diffuse: You, gaseous somewhere. Breath

is loss; confess: A palm before my face
grows damp with gone. It’s maybe in the wet

of some man’s retina, the water runs
once it has left, or in the perfect beads,

come morning, warm brown bread with cinnamon
leaves on a cobalt glaze. The pristine weep

of this iced gin I drain, I praise – a flow
through pirates, dodos, dinosaurs, all pores

perspiring steam of you, of us. And so
it goes, just borrowed. So the haunting, pour

or frost, as fluid as the thirst you’d slake,
a need now clear, now prism, now opaque.

Megan Grumbling

 

Megan Grumbling’s collection Booker’s Point was awarded the 2015 Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry and the 2017 Maine Book Award for Poetry. Her work has been awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Robert Frost Foundation Award, a Hawthornden Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, and a St. Boltoph Emerging Artist Award, and has appeared in Poetry, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, Memorious, Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She is librettist of the spoken opera Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, co-created with the late composer Denis Nye. She reviews theater for the Portland Phoenix, serves as poetry reviews editor for The Café Review, and teaches at Southern Maine Community College and the University of New England.

The Heist first appeared in Crazyhorse; Vapors first appeared in Baltimore Review.

Two poems from Audrey Bohanan’s Any Keep or Contour

followed by a note on the author

The Far Beyond with Indigo Buntings

“And so when we examine a nest,
we place ourselves at the origin
of confidence in the world.”
– Gaston Bachelard

There is no sparing of the always thinking
out. Time, now, for the emptiness of their nest
to be filled with the sound of small wings under
big thunder. There is no picking the past tense

out, as fused as oil of myrrh put anywhere
close to Nei silk, the bond becomes eternal
as the future. It is solid. They are gone,
by feel by now they are flying, by tonight

they will be heading out across the spillage
of constellations in the South sky, which they
keenly skirt beyond the concrete of, as slick
as a sublingual curative in dodging

the complexities of the spleen. All in how
they bushwhack around the more damply hummocked
brain regions. She wove in Sweet Canary Grass
to ride the sundown tipped in crimson waves, scent

of Lady’s Drawer from fields mown inland, upland
by the tide, to gather them back to high ground.
And to meet the mid-rib, there she laid in fur,
kill of Cottontail or jumping-mouse to be

sorrowed after. To keep the hearts of the young
from being broken, so they will be broken
less often. I am not fitting their dark flight
to my makeshift bind of comprehension as

little backdoor collection agency claims
on the soul. Nothing there can be returned to.
While in their coverts they keep safe each likeness
the stars come up with deeper than scar tissue.

Audrey Bohanan

 

To Be Shaken Out of a Life

“To be among the shaken
is to have responded
to grimly disturbing experiences…”
– Andrew Shanks

Longing, and close on its heels despair
hits a trip-wire where hope has been driven off

like a hare on the run and strung low
to the ground under a shadow’s wingtips.

When there is not anywhere left to arrive at,
hope separates like porridge-peas

gone too cold to ever reach the table,
never the infant not yet nine days old

clutched on a shoulder in the freezer aisle
corrugations of a box store, dilute wines

and one of the known food groups accounted for
in the cart he is carried over, with no

crocheted intervention, no metabolic spelling
of his skin, and he is shivering. To be

a crib-death survivor, an infant
would have to be shaken out of his life

and back into one that is different;
shaken out into a darkness like a single cell

when catastrophe is sea-deep. Then he must go
by hand over hand back into the pod of him.

Audrey Bohanan

Audrey Bohanan’s first book, Lime, won the Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press. Her work has appeared in many journals including The Antioch Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Colorado Review, Seneca Review, and Shenandoah. She has been the recipient of several awards, including a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship and a Beyond Boundaries Endowment from the Marion Weber Foundation. Originally from New Hampshire, she and her husband have for many year lived in rural, coastal Maine, where she teaches and writes.

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 is a current finalist for the New England Review Emerging Writers Award. 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 Gneiss
followed by a note on the author

Bangwell Putt Steps Out in Spring

No hatchet to hand has Bangwell Putt
but hatchets to mind, all minding much,

all grinding in her like urges edging
toward larger life, like villi rumbling

for grub. Out of the house now, Putt, and
signal quick crocuses before summer

sun does them in, that mother of their
yellow. Miss Putt notes strewn trash

stinkless after long winter, sees flattened
this and that, cans bottles cartons, mis-

construed beauty. Miss Bangwell Putt-
putts along asphalt under her own

dissident steam, noting wee melted
hearts of coal hardened into road. Don’t

lie down, flattened world, says she, or lie
but don’t let on, says Bangwell, lest

they stamp out your campfire,
tamp down your buttercups upping

among Styrofoam suds, says Miss
Misconstrue, Miss Suzy Q, Miss

Bite-the-Hand-That-Feeds-You, off-
spring of How-Can-I-Make-You-Under-

stand, misdeemed daughter of If-Only
and Can’t-Be-Done, miscegenation of

grape and ale, Miss Fine Ferment,
miscellaneous, Miss Euphonious née

Erroneous, Miss Make-Your-Own-
Dinner-I’m-Going-Out-Slam.

Mystery.

Now where? says she. All you startled
birds hiding under rocks, flutter

up, show yourselves to incipient sun, says
Miss Turn Loose, Miss Last Chance,

Ya pays yer money and I takes yer pants,
says Miss Don’t-You-Miss-Me-But-Do-

Pay-Me-Mind, laughing into loudening bliss
as Prince Hard Luck gets down off his high

horse and tries out his flat feet.
Where you been all my life, where

I been all my life? Holding my horses,
holding my nose, picking my teeth

behind my hand, says Miss Manners,
Miss Sunny Disposition, bolding my NO,

says Miss Marginalia, repositioned.
Buds don’t ask permission to expand.

________________________________________________

Bangwell Putt, born in 1770, is believed to be the oldest rag doll in America. She resides on shirt cardboard in the Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, Massachusetts.

Marsha Pomerantz

Pond in Winter: Canon and Fugue

Along the path around the pond we
walk a fifth apart. What fugue is

escapes me. I sing a parting song,
a round gone wrong, a flighty canon.

Your blunt glove points to blue
dots on trees, painted signal from

the forerunner who found a way
(You see! you say). But I glance

back and eye the yellows, inversion
of our cranky clockwise tune.

Time flies before us, footprints
leading us on. Do you hear anything?

Row, row, row your boat against
the stanch of ice. How many beats

to a fissure? Pines prick us as we
balance on a plank above a

stream. Fugue is but a forgetting that
life is but a dream.

Marsha Pomerantz

Marsha Pomerantz grew up in New York, lived in Israel for twenty years, and now lives in Boston. A collection of her poems, The Illustrated Edge, was published by Biblioasis in 2011, and poems and essays have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, berfrois.com, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, PN Review, Raritan, and Salamander. Selections and a (somewhat) statement of poetics are at poetrynet.org (Poet of the Month, June 2016), and one of the essays is in Best American Essays 2016, guest edited by Jonathan Franzen. Also published in 2016 is an artist’s book, They Run, made from her poem of that title by Claire Illouz (Chérence, France), with original etchings and engravings, edition of 30: www.claire-illouz.com.

Two poems from Kat Mustatea’s A Sort of Perfect Square
followed by a note on the author

A Sort of Perfect Square

The moon is bliss, the handkerchief is truth;
A wailing rain lays waste to what you knew
Of country roads traversing this wild place;
Let’s say two neighing horses—If and When—
Are waiting in the rain for who knows whom;
The landscape is a quarter past immense
And time is a terrain of nowhere grace,
With not a single mark to help you choose the way;
You’ve never found where you belong and let’s just say
You never might; the horses drowned or ran away
Or both declined in age and competence and fight;
Given a hand that moves across the page,
Given a sort of perfect square to start,
Given the midnight of your heart, what would you write?

Kat Mustatea

The Wino Room

Intent on curing yet another breach
Between the universe and consciousness,
You’ll linger after in the barren street,
You’ll breathe—electric sheen of moon just out of reach—
The city like a wino room in which the thing
Of greatest beauty breaks in buoyant perpetuity.
Love is too soon an animal when it arrives;
Love is the outer district after words are dead,
Slatted along the rails of yellow passing trains;
Love stands there baffled and bereft, unkempt,
A bum who seeks out what a person has to learn
He has to be in order to be loved—and yet—
No trumpet sounds when you at last are with the one
The gods allowed you to love best. No, not a one.

Kat Mustatea

Kat Mustatea is a poet and playwright based in New York City. As a poet, she is the author of the ongoing digital poetry project Sonnet City (www.sonnetcity.com). As a playwright, she has written four full-length works, Eight Figures (2015), Satellite (2013), The Model (2011), and Glass House (2006), and a suite of short plays that explore otherness and transformation, absurdity, misunderstanding, and what it means to be American. Her plays have been produced in New York, Berlin and Oslo, and she was commissioned by the Abingdon Theatre for her play Leda (2013). She studied philosophy at Columbia University and sculpture at Pratt Institute in New York, and is a member of Dramatists Guild of America and League of Professional Theatre Women. Website: www.mustatea.com

Two poems from Michael Lavers’s After Earth
followed by a note on the author

Patmos Revisited

No green clouds hang like a divine disease,
no hot breath haunts the back of the neck,
no claws clink their dictation across shale.
Oyster-shell sand still scatters the light, but songs
the sea murmurs seem scum-fringed, colloquial,
their rhythms private and indifferent
to us; no tides of purple crabs rising
through town, bearing the dead back down to sea.
And dreams, when they happen now, are dreams:
we bore each other with them over breakfast.
No sun’s blunt fist, no bruise of earth; instead,
leaf-colored leaves, and cow-faced cows,
and nameless toads that spook us while we sleep;
a perfect darkness making shadows disappear,
nights punctuated by someone downshore,
braining an octopus against a stone.

Michael Lavers

Elegy

While that sheep staggered
up the gravel road, stooped low,
unsheathing seablush from the dirt,
and through a skin of August snow,

or after, when a whisper
warmed the horsetail and heal-all,
wooing the cows, panning an empire
of reeds for one last pastoral?

While wind plucked everlasting,
miles away in shoaling light
your last words, like a harp string,
snapped: don’t be afraid, you said, and died.

Don’t be afraid, you said, and died
like everybody else, your first cliché.
But day does turn to night,
fallow to seed, hayseed to hay.

Of course you died. But why
should I try stitching wounded air
with breath where yours should ramify
the bloodroot, foxglove, toad’s prayer?

Shepherds plaiting phlox and lily,
filigreeing with their sighs
your vacancy, cannot buck gravity,
or sweet-talk ice, or cauterize

the wind. They loiter and award
prizes for mourning, string a fence
of syllables around their herd
as if claiming the place grief ends,

language begins. They sing all night.
And so, as when a yearling, spooked,
believes its mother might
be there, I turned and looked.

You weren’t. Upstream,
the bees spit out another hive,
and the she-goat’s twins steam,
inconceivably alive.

Michael Lavers

Michael Lavers’ poems have recently appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Arts & Letters, 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He teaches poetry at Brigham Young University.

Patmos Revisited first appeared in Best New Poets 2015.(Sampovar Press/Meridian). Elegy first appeared in River Styx.