Two poems from Saara Myrene Raappana’s –
You Are a House, You Are a Hammer, You’re the Momentum of a Nail
followed by a note on the author

Lord, Make Me a Crane

Between lake-ice and evergreens (I’ve named
them all, the way we name things to remember

what’s stillborn to world or sky), I listen to
the sandhills leave. My father says they’ll swallow stars

for ballast and trail carnivals to perch upon
the Mega-Drop and wonder at what happy screams

the people scream while harnessed in and falling.
Or find a wave of Spanish moss and casting rods

and scatter underfeathers like freak blizzards, O,
and laugh what laughs behind their wingtips at

the insulated suits that shovel up
and organize the ground. Or, having wingclimbed

into space, ease their toes into
the moon’s ensilvered, bubbling face. Anywhere

besides this flank of gravel road. The beach
glows, not with discarded star-stones, but

with snow. I dream I’ll catch a sandhill bobbing past
a sag of fence, red mask blending in with

deer apples that, iced into their branches,
rot. She’ll regard me first with eyes that blink

like neon signs, then tilt her beak toward the sky
and flex her knees, and will the forest finally call

my name and spread its thousand wings?

Saara Myrene Raappana

Given and Shed
—Maasai enkang, Tanzania

Jesus spigots from a bull’s jugular, fills
an etched gourd. Body-hot, He steams like breath.
The olpayan sips brine-coppery Jesus.
Milk congeals in Him, turns yogurt-pink, is declined
by smiling tourists. Look up:
God is the whole, round, bird-hungry sky.

*

My dad distributed Jesus weekly to mouth-sized wildernesses,
deserts of tongue and jaw. Chaliced and whirlpooling,
room-temperature Jesus spattered my father’s chasuble.
For spills, Dad swept in with flannel, lest Jesus stain,
and spoke: a millhopper of souls, husk yielding to germ,
waves of eternal wheat. I thought of birdseed,
a sandstone spinning, a congregation of flour.

*

The olpayan thumbs his arrow—how sharp, how true.
Jesus, the blood beading its edge. That night,
I dream we meet. The olpayan kneads my flesh
into sourdough. He unravels the long cord of my blood.
He calls finches to gather at the trough of my chest
and carry me, in crumbs and ribbons, to the sky.

Saara Myrene Raappana

Saara Myrene Raappana is the author of the chapbooks Milk Tooth, Levee, Fever (Dancing Girl Press, 2015) and A Story of America Goes Walking (Shechem Press, 2016), with poems appearing or forthcoming in such publications as Blackbird, Linebreak, [PANK], The Gettysburg Review, and Vinyl Poetry and Prose. She was born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in southern China, is a founding editor of Cellpoems, and works for Motionpoems. For more, go to saaramyrene.com.

Given and Shed first appeared in The Gettysburg Review.

Two poems from Marsha Pomerantz’s Gneiss
followed by a note on the author

The God’s Honest Truth

By saying so little about love
I was lying. That I didn’t know

what it was was the truth. When
I said all Cretans are liars I was

elsewhere in the archipelago,
fleeing home. When I said

I was living Zeno’s paradox,
that was half a lie. Even

as I confess, I’m stealing
glances at your ear, thinking

how can truth make all those
turns and reach another brain

intact? You know how molecules
of air have to race over the curve

of a wing to keep up with their
friends taking the straight path

below? That’s how we get lift.

Marsha Pomerantz

Saint Luke Paints the Virgin

As soon as his brush lifted,
the elixir of her withdrew,

leaving her mud in small
shaped phrases. He was

painting his desire to hold
her always and want her

never. I’d trade always for
an apple, said the assistant,

stroking the arc of a cheek as
his teeth marked minutes along

his lips. Holiness is separation,
pooling just beyond depiction

in a single swimming thought.
That Luke could ever get her

down was either blasphemy
or fantasy, and both options

beckoned. Know me, he heard her say.
Take my likeness, make me likely.

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/on Beloit Poetry Journal, berfrois.com, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Parnassus, Poetry Daily, PN Review, Raritan, Salamander, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Translations from the Hebrew include a novel, short stories, and poems. Her writing has been supported by two residencies at the MacDowell Colony and a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship in poetry, and Gneiss was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2014. Work in journalism and museum publishing has kept her fed and fueled the poems; she retired in 2013 as managing editor at the Harvard Art Museums, and continues editing art books as a freelancer.

The God’s Honest Truth and Saint Luke Paints the Virgin first appeared in Raritan.

Two poems from Nikki Moustaki’s Dreaming of Chickens
followed by a note on the author

Diet

A pound of skin is heavier than a pound of potatoes.
If I had skin like potatoes,
I would shuck and climb into the soup.
A hundred photos of potatoes pasted like heartthrobs
beside my bed, a thousand
eyes judging what they do to a body.

I’m animal, mineral, and vegetable oil,
disciplined glutton.
I’m better than hunger.
I watch it eat.

I sit at the desk in hunger’s headquarters,
an interviewee who doesn’t want the job.
I squeeze my hands in my lap.
Who are you? Desire.
What brings you here? Desire.
What do you want? Potatoes.

Hunger would eat me if it could.
Take your thumb off the scale.
Please peel before weighing.

If my skin is heavier than my sensibility,
help me remove my garments.
I’m better than hunger.
I’m not afraid of spoons.
Potatoes in the abyss, skillets, knives, tongs,
strainers, ladles, kettles, whisks.

Nikki Moustaki

Cleaning House

There’s something wicked that empowers poets cleaning their houses.
Poetry loves a fresh floor, a spotless toilet, even under the rim.

There are a thousand ways to get grout white again.
A thousand ways to shine tile, to polish a sink new.

Poetry lives between the bristles of a used toothbrush.
Metaphors choke when a poet touches the feather duster:

poetry loves grime. It’s tired of living like an old washcloth,
wiping away staleness like lime from a spigot.

The garbage must be dumped, the dog washed, books alphabetized.
Help me, whatever it is that makes poems.

Whatever divine synapse clicks invisibly like a dust mote
in the darkness, gathering word upon word,

balling phrases under the bed where only the broom’s
eyelashes touch; help me whatever thing drives the scouring pad,

the dish cloth, the mop, each hand latex-gloved, dumb and callous,
the pen dormant in its shell, but clean. Sloth saves poets

the way the sea saves painters: each wave decorating a new landscape
to love, every handful of sand, original, capricious.

I know each coffee stain on the sofa is a stanza waiting to set in,
that glass-ring on the nightstand an unending orb waiting for its tenor.

I’ll just tidy up a little while poetry dies inside my sponge.
I live here among the dog hair, the mildew, the rust.

Nikki Moustaki

Nikki Moustaki, author of The Bird Market of Paris: A Memoir, holds an MA in poetry from New York University (1997), an MFA in poetry from Indiana University (2000), and an MFA in fiction from New York University (2009), and has taught creative and expository writing at both of those universities, as well as at The New School in New York City and Miami Dade College in Miami, Florida. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry, along with many other national writing awards, including three Pushcart Press nominations. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in various literary magazines, anthologies, and college textbooks, including the New York Times, Good Housekeeping, The American Literary Review, Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets, and America Now, chosen by Robert Atwan, editor of the Best American Essays series. Before beginning her career as a freelance writer and editor, Nikki worked as an acquisitions and development editor at Macmillan Publishing and IDG Books Worldwide, Inc., where she specialized in the non-fiction market.

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

Patmos Revisted

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 here 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

Christmas Eve in Frankfurt

How is the most fine gold changed!
the stones of the sanctuary are poured out
in the top of every street.
—LAMENTATIONS 4:1

Saget, Steine, mir an…
—GOETHE

As if oblivious to rousing winds
or the nightmares of the monuments,
snow settles its burial cloth
over the bombed-out Roman bath,
brimming a beggar’s eyes, balming his hands,

downing boughs where drowsy pawns chase
kings across the park. Another mass
dissolves in pools of wax and candle smoke
uncoiling like the staves of Bach,
framing a stranger’s stained-glass face.

How rich had life together been. How silly.
How wise to shadow stars through Germany,
with, between us, one piece of luggage,
one prodigal speaker of the language—
one last fling before responsibility?

How efficient, like a watch’s gears, the wound syntax
of names, dates, the few surviving facts
with which occasional gold cobblestones are stamped.
One where we queued at the finanzamt,
still two, to give our names, be taxed;

and everywhere. Everywhere
we cavalierly kiss, not unaware
that as river weaves its tapestries of ice,
Earth hardens to paradise,
and prayers unravel into air.

But we rejoice. Adore the word-pierced nave,
the dark the flames annunciate, believe
in tempera and the devotion
to a stroke that froze a brief ocean
of folds into eternal robes; believe

Hades is fed, and heaven’s in the barn,
that we beget no happiness alone,
that we’ll forever crown the hills
whose trembling, soft-cheeked Neanderthals
sowed their lineage into garlands of stone;

that it was this that made the oxen bow:
the black earth’s whispering tenantry, an undertow
where fallen leaves still loom and seethe
and ferns recoil in springs of sleep beneath
the merciful, indifferent snow.

Michael Lavers

Michael Lavers’s 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 (Samovar Press/Meridian); Christmas Eve in Frankfurt first appeared in The Hudson Review (Summer 2015, 67:2).

Two poems from Dana Koster’s Binary Stars
followed by a note on the author

Binary Stars

I.

In the moment of upsuck, quiet eye
of the storm that was your mouth
gawping open
in another
endless howl
I thought every tender part of me
had broken. Replaced with
something wild
that even then
would not let me
set you down.

Westley. I speak your name here
so you will know me
in your first months:
shade of myself. Flickering
in and out of view.

I didn’t want a daughter, only
a son. I could never wish this on you.

II.

A flurry of red hairs
pooled in the drain –
what remained
of my loveliness
sloughing off,
a death knell.

It was not
the first time
my hair fell
free of me.
For years after
your grandmother died
I pulled it out.

When you were
four weeks old,
I cried in a salon.
Told the hairdresser:
cut it all off.

III.

At 11:53 that horrible nurse
dumped you on my chest.
Westley, my firstborn boy,
I saw
I’d given birth
to a small stranger.

A stocky thing
with my eyes,
blue-tinged and mewling.

I could feel all the anger
go into me, could calmly
flay a man
for not supporting your head.

IV.

I was selfish. I wished you to look
like Justin:
a thatch
of dark hair,
kissable
mole under
black lashes.

Or my mother, thin-
lipped and slim, blonde
tendrils of her
born back.

But the features you drew from me
were all my father:
elfin ears that stick out
at the tip, double-cowlick,
even the twice-jointed thumbs
that scared us at first.
My father, who never called:
you wore him like a curse.
Even your eyes
are really his
staring strangely,
a mirror within a mirror
spiraling through history.

V.

There were times I was primordial, barely
lifting us two from the slime, the muck,
tripping from couch to kitchen
and back.Trapped
and hopeless,
buckling
suction tubes to my breasts.

Human, animal, extraterrestrial –
how does any life exist?
How have any mothers
done this
before me?
Love is something you and I
have stumbled on, Westley.
A disease that needed time
to gestate. We just are.
Impossibly loud, skin
to skin – binary stars.

Dana Koster

The Wolf at the Door

Your father says you’ve all got a bit of the werewolf
in you and continues shoveling. He drawls the word werewolf

until I swear I see it arc out from his lips – or else
the heat is playing tricks on me. Turning pumpkin seeds to wolf’s

teeth. Sweat curls the hairs on your neck as you rupture the earth
beside him, ignoring our conversation, the lone wolf,

as always. I try to see the beast rippling beneath the skin
of this old man, but the wrong celestial body bears down on us. Wolves

need moonlight like these rows need water. Like your father needs to
disappear from the house. And before, I never thought werewolf

when he would irrigate at dusk, but now the image of his pelt
reflected in those flooded fields comes unbidden. The wolf

in him calling to coyotes in the distance, flaring with
the temper you remember from childhood, when the wolf

could hardly be kept from the door. But your own temper comes only
as a snarl and you turn away from me – docile as you ever were.

Dana Koster

Dana Koster has earned degrees from University of California Berkeley and Cornell University. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Indiana Review, Southern Humanities Review, The Collagist, The Cincinnati Review, PN Review and EPOCH, among others. She lives in California’s Central Valley with her husband and young sons.

Binary Stars; and The Wolf at the Door both won a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize in 2012 and are published on the Dorothy Rosenberg website.

Two poems from Johnny Horton’s Dog Days
followed by a note on the author

Sea Legs

Someday we’ll be like the Roman statues of Neptune and Triton
discovered in a sea cave. We’ll be like father and son, remembered
for making waves. Ancient sons became tragic figures. This is why
I prefer modern times to mythology. I’d rather blow my own horn
than listen to old songs. Pliny the Younger understood eternity
began with disaster; residents of Pompeii would be remembered.
Butterflies remember the worst sensations they felt as caterpillars.
Frogs must regret the metamorphosis that ended their schooling.
Otherwise, they wouldn’t sing such mournful songs. Otherwise
they wouldn’t make love for days. Maybe this is why mermaids
look more balanced than fish heads on human legs. Maybe this is why
we call the mackerel holy. Tiberius Caesar called the kids of Capri
little fishes. Pliny said a mushroom cloud looked like an umbrella
pine. Why should we make metaphors more than figures of speech?
Why believe in truth outside sensibility? One way to find the sacred
is not to look for it. In another model, you put on SCUBA gear; dive
in the Etruscan Sea; find yourself facing divinity. It doesn’t matter
if volcanoes change the ocean floor. We love getting in hot water. It
doesn’t matter if we get in over our heads. We have no use for water
wings. Odysseus listened to the Sirens so he could tell the story.
Anchises told Aeneas his mother was a goddess. Memory tells me
I could swim before I learned to walk. This is how I know my mother
loved the sea. I think of Homer on the tongue of Tiberius Caesar
when he couldn’t sleep, when he stayed awake thinking of children
who wanted him dead. Sometimes, the tomcat’s antipathy makes sense.
The channel catfish develops muscle where his brain should be, eats
all the eggs he can as long as he guards the nest. Other fathers
must sacrifice to reproduce. The paper nautilus loses his penis
in the act of love. Anglerfish dissolve like sperm inside their mates.
Sophisticated men may forget their names in orgasmic states.
Maybe that’s why we call on Jesus Christ. Maybe that’s why fathers
teach their children how to fish. Pliny the Younger says his uncle
met a hail of burning pumice wearing nothing but a pillow
for a helmet. Maybe that’s why he looked like he was sleeping
when he was dead. If I knew the language that named Vesuvius
I would tell you what it meant to Tiberius Caesar. I would tell you
the difference between “inferno” and “hearth fire.” Sometimes
it’s better not to know your father.

Johnny Horton

Animatronics

One day I feel just like an undergrad with Sitting Bull
tattooed on his chest. The next I wonder

if I dismissed John Wayne just to please my friends.
Eurocentric pilgrims see the difference

between the baroque and ruins. The speciation of dogs
is the story of Romulus and Remus

in reverse. You might have heard a woman in stilettos
say standing on her tiptoes made her

observable. Cathedrals forbid naked shoulders. Carabinieri
are bug-eyed cartoon wolves. I saw

Paradise lost on the mosaic floor. Putti weren’t smiling
at themselves. Every ecstatic person

looks feral. Actaeon got so horny his dogs couldn’t sense
his humanity. I credit Disney

with animatronics, fault the Romans for the close shave.
Ovid knew how to make an exit

before the husband’s return. Ovid called fake orgasms
costume jewelry. My Madonna

sang “Like a Virgin.” How do you say love is just a game
of hunting the hunters? I’ve got

old lovers to name like fallen friends. I’ve got stones
to skip across my own Black Sea.

I’ve seen the phosphorescence of jellies out of water.
Fear turns on the most beautiful lights.

Johnny Horton

Johnny Horton is the son of a Hoosier truck driver and an amateur collage maker. He currently lives in Seattle where he walks dogs and teaches reading and writing at Seattle Central College and Hugo House. He also directs the University of Washington’s summer creative writing program in Rome. He’s published poems in Poetry Northwest, Notre Dame Review, CutBank, The Los Angeles Review, Borderlands, Willow Springs, and in City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poems (University of Iowa Press).

Sea Legs first appeared in The Los Angelers Review; Animatronics first appeared in Golden Handcuffs Review.

Two poems from Jaclyn Dwyer’s Girl of the Year
followed by a note on the author

Praise Poem for American Girls

Here’s to scissors that clip split ends easily as ex-
boyfriends, the one who died in college, the refugee
who crossed a blood soaked Nile, but never could
get over you. Cheers to his hibiscus tea, to strong

coffee and Kentucky bourbon. Daughters pulled deep
into Ohioan corn, romances banished to backseats
and barstools. Here’s to newlyweds two-stepping
to the second line waving paper napkins with new names

printed in gold. Praise helicopters hovering over frozen
lakes in Madison. Wide blades break the ice, a thick fog
of ozone trapping brides and wives. Boys toppled out
of boats, girls pushed in, the surfacing bodies of all the kids

who couldn’t swim. Praise black loops, lazy coils etched
down 80 like pubic hairs roping down a long white leg.
Praise snow clotting fat cataracts over the road. There is
nothing for miles, only your hot breath unraveling a memory

of wet wool. Blonde girls in hoop skirts getting hitched
in a barn, yellow hair glowing brighter than a burnished
brass sax in Memphis. Praise grandmothers who still pin
laundry outside, their long fingers the brittle wax

of weeping candles. Fruit flies that fill the kitchen and keep
you company nights he is away, his skin clapping
against the sweet country ribs of his ex. Praise the end
of a an excuse with an interrogative. Who? Honey,

praise you. Long legs. High arches. The body you never
used for ballet. Dinners you wasted and drinks
you couldn’t finish. Praise your revolving hips: Hula hoop champ,
flip flops shaken loose in the grass. Your heady

lip gloss shines a Montana moon. Denim laced to fringe
over a fence during crowning for the Milk-Can Dinner
Queen. The silkscreened tee puckered across your chest:
Not All Tetons Are Grand Tetons But Mine Are

Jaclyn Dwyer

The Wreck

We approach the flipped truck –
an upturned turtle on the dark
lawn. You pull to a stop on the shoulder,

grit settles into gravel surf, and say,
“Stay in the car.” I would have
driven past, but you belly-crawl

on broken glass, lay like a child
trying to lure a cat from under
the bed until the sirens take over.

I want to lie under you, test
your flame-retardant cape,
but we leave before the extraction.

Before surgeons hand off
a waxy kidney like an old
telephone still trailing a limp

cord, packed in ice and cradled
like an endzone pass. Before
a set of lungs are helicoptered,

heart still attached. Somewhere
a woman sleeps alone for the first
time in years. We wake to a mad

doe stripping the room, tracking
the scent of her salted buck,
ramming wet into the wall.

Jaclyn Dwyer

Jaclyn Dwyer’s fiction and poetry have been published in a number of literary magazines, most recently Rattle, Ploughshares, Pleiades, and Witness. She received a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a Kingsbury Fellowship from Florida State University, where she is a PhD candidate in creative writing.

Praise Poem for American Girls first appeared in Ploughshares; The Wreck first appeared in Columbia Poetry Review.

Two poems from Scott Coffel’s The Great Blue Question Mark
followed by a note on the author

The Spice Islands of Thought

I still believed it possible to achieve a totality of knowledge,
to stand on a dark country road beneath a plume of galactic clouds
that could absorb a billion Earths placidly without one voice
raised against the immigrants, and calculate how much time
must be sacrificed to reach the spice islands of thought,
known through the cosmos as the marketplace of ideas,
that smudge of intellect behind the cross arm of the utility pole,
modest in passion compared to the pulsating divas overhead

or to the space station now ripping through the Big Dipper
at seventeen thousand miles per hour, a brilliant arc visible for two minutes
then gone like a dream, my future folding inward
like a twin sister in embryo, a docket of encounters booked
years in advance, without whom I am Alamogordo after the blast—
an eternity of minutes and seconds, a desert fused into glass.

Scott Coffel

Crossing the Mighty Catskills

Is it not unconscionable for a man to lay waste his powers
in the serene unpaid cultivation of rutabagas and cherry tomatoes
when he could be giving credence to the vilest rumors
or trading his lewd and expensive wife for a mail-order bride?

Each evening after work he trots out his agrarian agenda
in a pantomime of class warfare, the rich strung up from lampposts
as he preaches in earnest to his polite but amused guests,
a family of Sudanese refugees wearing electric green T-shirts.

Though lazy and skeptical-on-the-cheap
I would risk an appropriate amount of second-degree burns
to extract him from a burning Chrysler and have little doubt
that if a throng of critics emerged to sabotage my reputation

he would drive them underground with a gallon of mole repellent.
I ought to apologize for my spleen but I am disheartened—
in truth more shaken than disheartened—having finished
yet another biography of the Romantics

that ends, as they all do, in a spree of melancholia
for the subject and his friends, all of them dying of ailments
even overweight Southerners never contract. We say things
could be worse until the day they can’t be,

the Age of Reason exploding like the EEG of an epileptic.
On such days we are not of the flesh: our shallow breathing
scares off the sensual stranger. Despondent as Jacobins
we seek safe passage out of history, inhabiting the imagination

of William Wordsworth on the D train as it lurches
between DeKalb Avenue and Grand Street, taking leave
of our senses as we cross the mighty Catskills without knowing it,
bequeathing to autumnal breezes our lyrics of extinction.

Scott Coffel

Born in New York City, Scott Coffel was educated at York College, a senior college of The City University of New York, and at SUNY-Oneonta. In 1995, he received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop. Since 2001, he has directed the Hanson Center for Technical Communication for The University of Iowa’s College of Engineering. His first collection of poems, Toucans in the Arctic, received the Poetry Society of America’s 2010 Norma Farber First Book Award (chosen by Edward Hirsch). Recent honors include the 2013 Boston Review Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Salmagundi, Ploughshares, Paris Review, The Antioch Review, The American Scholar, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Southern Review, and other journals. He has been awarded artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Anderson Center at Tower View.

The Spice Islands of Thought first appeared in The Southern Review (Autumn 2011) Crossing the Mighty Catskills first appeared in the Boston Review (Nov/Dec 2013).

Two poems from Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
followed by a note on the author

I’m not a religious person but

God sent an angel. One of his least qualified, though. Fluent only in
Lemme get back to you. The angel sounded like me, early twenties,
unpaid interning. Proficient in fetching coffee, sending super
vague emails. It got so bad God personally had to speak to me.
This was annoying because I’m not a religious person. I thought
I’d made this clear to God by reading Harry Potter & not attending
church except for gay weddings. God did not listen to me. God is
not a good listener. I said Stop it please, I’ll give you wedding cake,
money, candy, marijuana. Go talk to married people, politicians,
children, reality TV stars. I’ll even set up a booth for you,
then everyone who wants to talk to you can do so
without the stuffy house of worship, the stuffier middlemen,
& the football blimps that accidentally intercept prayers
on their way to heaven. I’ll keep the booth decorations simple
but attractive: stickers of angels & cats, because I’m not religious
but didn’t people worship cats? Thing is, God couldn’t take a hint.
My doctor said to eat an apple every day. My best friend said to stop
sleeping with guys with messiah complexes. My mother said she is
pretty sure she had sex with my father so I can’t be some new
Asian Jesus. I tried to enrage God by saying things like When I asked
my mother about you, she was in the middle of making dinner
so she just said Too busy. I tried to confuse God by saying I am
a made-up dinosaur & a real dinosaur & who knows maybe
I love you, but then God ended up relating to me. God said I am
a good dinosaur but also sort of evil & sometimes loving no one.
It rained & we stayed inside. Played a few rounds of backgammon.
We used our indoor voices. It got so quiet I asked God
about the afterlife. Its existence, human continued existence.
He said Oh. That. Then sent his angel again. Who said Ummmmmmm.
I never heard from God or his rookie angel after that. I miss them.
Like creatures I made up or found in a book, then got to know a bit.

Chen Chen

Second Thoughts on a Winter Afternoon

Your mother is sick & all I can think of is how sick’s
also a word for cool, like ill, though maybe ill

is becoming outdated, & sick too, & actually it’s a lie
I can only think of that, I can also think of my mother,

how your mother’s pancreatic cancer doesn’t sound
as pretty as the problem my mother has with her heart,

heartbeat, & I can even think my mother has it tougher,
though it isn’t cancer, & of course I’d think that, she’s mom,

mommy, though of course this woman is mom, mommy
to you, & mommy is very sick, & actually I hate how words

get outdated or we outgrow them, & think you do, too,
saying things like poochie & good gravy, & maybe that’s why I

call you sweetie pie & you call me sweet baby, & how can we
make things stay? how can I, when my brain is all wind, drift—

while you’re on the phone with thoughtful relatives, I try to
sit, think nothing, but then notice dust swirling in a beam

of bright, so think, as I’ve thought since mom once told me,
that the light made the dust rise, dance, beautiful—

when on second thought, I can see the dust was just there,
just dirt, & the light only made it visible.

Chen Chen

Chen Chen grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts and earned his BA at Hampshire College and his MFA at Syracuse University. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. He is the author of two chapbooks, Set the Garden on Fire (Porkbelly Press 2015) and Kissing the Sphinx (Two of Cups Press 2016). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Poetry Review (UK), Best of the Net, The Best American Poetry, and other places. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Saltonstall Foundation, Lambda Literary, and in 2015 he was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships.

I’m not a religious person but" first appeared in PoetrySecond Thoughts on a Winter Afternoon" first appeared in The Massachusetts Review.

Two poems from Christopher Cessac’s The Youngest Ocean
followed by a note on the author

Ars Amatoria in the Express Checkout Lane

Everything—love, lust, even our alphabet—
was young once. If only to amuse death

we should have paused more for photographs.
Or less. Having reduced their immediate desire

to ten items or less, the young lovers before us
in line remind us of blameless lives our mothers

and doctors dreamt for us before these small crimes
that we call a career—the romance of life

in our provincial outpost is no romance. Eros,
that deathless, heartless god of hearts, taught us

to make our own sweet trouble by abandoning
us as he abandons all in time. Our time alone

together: a lucky marriage of sweat and song,
life held close, with purpose, if only to amuse death.

Christopher Cessac

The Youngest Ocean

Nothing beautiful to say about the world
and never stop trying to say it.

A sense we’ve known happiness before
so there can be happiness. What happens

depends. How to be in this world
and what role model doesn’t disappoint.

A desire to persist despite. Everything
before and how it relates to what is possible:

as Columbus is the name of no one
long before trombones and flags parade

down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan—
a King’s army retreats, King’s College

is rechristened Columbia University—
The Manhattan Project begins in secret

and never ends—Japan is Cipangu,
where Columbus believes he will arrive—

. . . .

Start with an impossibility of art:
This world does not exist—everything just

as possible as nothing. Don’t trust literature.
Poets too can camouflage selfish reasons

for killing others like the rest of us.
It’s not easy being President,

finger on the button, etcetera.
Before our wars, before even happiness:

the entire sprawling suburban log-cabin
penthouse empire of convenience,

even invitations to the inaugural ball,
unlikely as life itself . . .

. . . .

Water
and no horizon—creation stories
begin like this (an exhausted albatross,

a ball of fire after a fleeing serpent,
a boy fishing who lands an island,

the sun sprouting from an egg)—
names, details vary, but first: water.

And even water loves to hear its name
so we name:
Atlantic, after Atlas,
from our catalog of sensibly absurd heroes
punished with unbearable chores—

How many ways to say it, our one myth:
resistance is useless.
For Prometheus
sunrise is knowledge a beak will knife

into his stomach again, every morning
is both life and dread . . .
Tantalus
encircled by, yet wanting, olives,
figs, a pomegranate, a single drop
of water . . .
Sisyphus with his rock
and Camus his pen to push and push . . .

Adam and Eve and being made to live
with death . . .

Atlantic, after Atlas,
the weight of any heaven is on a man’s back.

. . . .

. . . in order that the crew might not be dismayed
if the voyage were long . . . two reckonings:
the smaller which was false
and the greater which was true.

. . . .

Any honest cocktail party and some crude
academic with no contempt or sympathy

for empire will yelp of Leif Ericson
and Vikings finding old, unknown shores—

“District of Leif”?
It lacks romance,
sounds like conquest or shipwreck,
not discovery; his story, not history.

. . . .

Interbrand, a division of Omnicom:
[W]e developed the name Prozac. This abstract
name cleverly combines the positive
associations based on the Latin/Greek
derivations of ‘pro’ with a short, effective
sounding suffix. … Brands are an important
influence on our lives. They are central
to free markets and democratic societies.

. . . .

Not Interbrand, Congress or cartography,
“Columbia” is developed within a poem:

Where e’er Columbia spreads her swelling Sails:
To every Realm shall Peace her Charms display,
And Heavenly Freedom spread her golden Ray.

by Phillis Wheatley, a slave—existence
is not simultaneous: the speed of light

versus the sloth of heavenly freedom
and her rays; the sunlight we know is years

older than now—each morning both life
and dread, a world old and unknown.

. . . .

A war knows the work of secrets
and how to bury them—
Beneath bleachers
at Stagg Field, a vacant stadium turned arena

for gladiators in grey flannel, labcoats, egos,
anxious, hurried to prove The Bomb can be.

. . . .

Stagg Field, after Alonzo Stagg—
All football comes from Stagg,

says Knute Rockne: the huddle, numbers
on jerseys, tackling dummies,
the shift
in focus from defense to offense and surprise:

hidden balls, criss-crosses, reverses, laterals;
it’s Stagg who introduces the forward pass—

fourth down, fourth quarter, desperation,
who wouldn’t throw a bomb?

. . . .

Stagg Field and a squash court turned lab—
a chain reaction in uranium lets loose

an impromptu celebration: cheers and chianti
in paper cups follow a quick call to D.C.

to whisper the agreed-on secret phrase
announcing success:

The Italian navigator
has landed in the New World.

. . . .

Too much sake and dancing, the moon
and cherry blossoms have conquered

Capitol Hill, I’m drunk, reeling from poems
you’ve whispered, secrets the Secret Service

will never hear . . .
How to be in this world
and even against unbroken suffering, beauty
and peace are pursued still, if only to argue—

. . . .

Climbing the mast to look for land
or landing at Columbus International:

On one hand: charity, our neighbors, their children,
what happens to this world after us.

On the other: our own comfort (a full belly,
some wine, a solid roof, a soft place to fall at night).

Each moment we prioritize and live.

. . . .

If revolution is equal parts philosophy
on fire and cold muscle of desperation

then America was never revolution.
To write a winning creation story

demands discretion: no Pemaquidians,
no Pophamites, no bullion-hungry shiploads

of Roanokers abandoned to die on islands
off Carolina’s coast, no godless aristocrats

lusting for Spanish gold, for real estate,
for fortunes in salt-slacked cod shipped

from Maine for decades before Plymouth.
Forget all these.
Start with honest Pilgrims:
worship and work, worship and work—

and Squanto waiting for us, grateful
to work our crops, worship our gods . . .

. . . .

Interbrand: strong brands bestow value
far beyond the performance of the products
themselves. Brands that do this possess an idea
worthy of consumer loyalty.

. . . .

Loyal and clever,
well-placed, well-read—always others,

eager, busily repainting Pentagons, War
departments into Defense departments

to not announce a shift in focus, a leaning
toward empire—
Calliope or We
the People, Polyhymnia or polycarbonate
conglomerates, we all have our muses . . .

. . . .

George the Third: I wish nothing but good,
therefore everyone who does not agree with me
is a traitor and a scoundrel.

Bush the Second: The reason we start
a war is to fight a war, win a war,
thereby causing no more war.

Roosevelt the First: In strict confidence …
I should welcome almost any war,
for I think this country needs one.

Nixon: I’d rather use the nuclear bomb …
Does that bother you? I just want you to think
big.

. . . .

Our little freedoms, what should we do,
flaunt them? To what end? Some illiterate,

treeless outpost on the Black Sea?
Ask Ovid the pleasures of such a reward.

So what then? Fetch the boss’s laundry,
bang away at one more Aenied? It’s not easy

not being President: someone else’s finger
on the button, etcetera.
Capitol Hill,
Fifth Avenue, the Interbrand board room—
so many ways to measure distance between us

and none adequate—a ghost town in Morocco,
a landlocked village off the Black Sea . . .

What should we do? Settle down, forget
the future, reduce the world to what we can

hold?—some olives, a few pomegranates,
a lover, our children. Pastoral dreaming

solves everything except what matters.
Fellow exile, to not be present is not enough.

. . . .

Ovid: I’m punished because my unknowing eyes
saw an offence, my sin’s that of possessing sight.

For what, naming names? Carmen et error?
Exiled and here at home, among my own.

How else to explain shame at seeing the flag
over there and over there and over there . . .

Columbus the wise proving the world
is round, Pilgrims and Indians embraced

in Thanksgiving, in order to form
a more perfect union, of the people, created

equal, etcetera. What do you expect
from a schoolboy—I believed it all.

Centuries pass. Cemeteries and landfills fill
to near bursting. What do we do?

We grow old. Find work. Try for love.
The alternatives are too grim.

. . . .

Columbus on Santa Maria or Tibbets
on the Enola Gay or Balboa curled up

like a dog, hiding beside his dog
in a barrel on a boat headed west,

or General Curtis Lemay, fast in battle
like a lion, or Captain John Smith, unwearying

master of guile and toil, or De Soto, Octavian,
Truman, certaine Knightes, gentlemen, marchanntes,

Honest John, Davy Crocket, Pershing,
Ajax, Hercules, Fat Man, Little Boy . . .

. . . .

Atlas tending his garden of gold
at the western limit of the known world.

A hero arrives, asking only for rest.
Are you secure enough to let some stranger

loiter among everything you have?
Atlas refuses.

So the hero offers a gift
and who is so satisfied as to refuse a gift?

Atlas is staring as the hero raises the head
of Medusa. First his feet, then his legs—

Atlas becomes a mountain, clouds scratch
his stone shoulders, on his back falls

the work of keeping heaven
separate from world and men.

. . . .

There have always been many ways
this world could end; it’s beginnings

that escape us. Empire or people
resisting empire . . . What could be more

valuable than a new world, everything
before versus what is possible—

. . . .

Two hours after midnight land appeared . . .
green trees . . . fruit of various kinds . . . naked people

. . . in order that they might feel great amity
towards us, because I knew they were a people
to be delivered and converted to our holy faith
rather by love than by force, I gave to some
among them red caps and some glass beads
. . . and many other things of little value.

Christopher Cessac

Christopher Cessac is the author of Republic Sublime (Zoo Press), which won the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry, and Eros Among the Americans (Main Street Rag). His poems have also appeared in Rattle, The Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily and elsewhere. Originally from Texas, he lives now in Toronto.

Ars Amatoria in the Express Checkout Lane; first appeared in Mudlark; The Youngest Ocean; won the Pelleas Long Poem Contest and previously appeared in The Modern Review.