Two poems from Christopher Childers’s Bitters

followed by a note on the author

Miasma

The plague’s a lot more boring than I thought.
I hide. I wait. I write polemic prose.
Who knows what someone has or hasn’t got?

I avoid strangers, do as I was taught.
The wifi’s buffering. The laptop froze.
The plague’s a lot more boring than I thought.

It’s in a cough, a tasteless patch, a clot,
or nothing, or a swelling of the toes.
Who knows what someone has or hasn’t got?

Airplanes are grounded, slots untouched. The hot
dates, the booze, the savings—it all goes.
The plague’s a lot more boring than I thought.

My lying foes expose the lies I’ve bought.
Liars! I hope they end up comatose.
Who knows what someone has or hasn’t got?

Refrigerators sputter. Bodies rot.
We slump at screens. Joints harden in the pose.
The plague’s a lot more boring than we thought.

The things I used to live for, I do not.
Abstraction breeds inside me. Feeling slows.
Who knows what someone has or hasn’t got?
The plague’s a lot more boring than I thought.

Christopher Childers

On the Rocks

All he had ever tried was to find balance,
the kind that comes of reading and riding water.
Hence the gin. The marriage was the ballast.
But the nature of a river is to wander,
unsheathing boulders hidden in their billions
as waters fall and currents turn toward winter.
Another drink. Preservers become burdens
so suddenly, and float off in the welter.

Enough of that. Tomorrow is for crafting
a raft out of the wreckage, lashed with failures.
He’ll start at dawn, when it breaks bright and ashen.
Tonight he’s on the river, drifting, drifting,
nudged by a thousand hands as soft as flowers
into the headwinds rising off the ocean.

Christopher Childers

Miasma first appeared in Smartish Pace, and is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2023; On the Rocks first appeared in 32 Poems.

Christopher Childers is the author of The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse (published March 2024), a book over a decade in the making. He received an NEA Translators’ Fellowship in 2018, and his work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Yale Review, Agni, Literary Matters, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. He has an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He currently lives in Baltimore and teaches Latin at the Gilman School but will be heading to Los Angeles in 2024.

Two poems from Will Cordeiro’s Self-Guided Tours Through Intemperate Weather

followed by a note on the author

Brevity of Life

after Quevedo

So, yesterday’s a dream; tomorrow’s earth.
Before, one’s nothing; and then after, smoke.
I’m just a point inside a circle, choking,
for all presumptions of ambitious worth.

Brief combat in a war in which I’m hurried
off. In my defense, I’m dangerous. I’m haughty.
My arms consume myself, and soon my body
no longer plays the host—it’s where I’m buried.

Yesterday is gone; tomorrow hasn’t come.
Today—it is, it was, then heedless age
would throw me off its cliff, incognizant.

The hours I had in spades are spades that plumb
each day’s harsh soil for my soul’s hard wage.
Moments raze my life to raise its monument.

Will Cordeiro

Four Sisters

after Mikhail Kuzmin

We were four sisters, sisters four—
each loved someone, and each one for
a different reason: parents said so, one;
and two, because her beau had money.
Who loved an artist’s fame was three,
but loved because I fell in love, that’s me.

We were four sisters; four were we,
each longing for her separate needs.
One wished for children, cooking porridge;
another hoped for bright new pinafores.
And three, to be the town’s foremost concern.
I wanted love and to be loved in turn.

Will Cordeiro

Will Cordeiro has work published or forthcoming in 32 Poems, AGNI, Bennington Review, Penn Review, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Will won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award for Trap Street. Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). Will coedits Eggtooth Editions and currently lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Two poems from Jalen Eutsey’s Bubble Gum Stadium

followed by a note on the author

To My Caring and Worried Mother

There are sliced carrots in the shape
of a cowbell because I understand
great food should sing to you.

There’s a novel about Alzheimer’s
and some magic memory pills for Grandma.

There’s an automatic food dispenser
so you don’t have to feed the dogs anymore.

There’s a travel bag with a Bible
and a plane ticket to Paris.

There’s a color-coded flow chart
describing the best way to carry
a conversation with Grandma.

In the bottom right-hand corner,
in fine print, it explains, you may
have to adopt new tactics on the fly.

I caught Grandma watching
The Hulk in Spanish today.
I just flipped to the English version.

To my caring and worried mother:
raising your voice won’t help,
there is no cure.

All the Post-it notes
on all the cabinets
should say: open with caution,
eat with intensity,
remember,
we love you
and we’ll help you
find the watch
you stuffed in the cookie jar.

Jalen Eutsey

After Reading Robert Desnos,

I want to hear you speak French
for twenty-four hours straight.

Talk fast, talk slowly, just talk to me.
I’ll cover my ears so I can’t understand,
my face radiating innocence.

I’ll be content with the knowledge
fruit-flavored diamonds
are falling from your mouth.

Yes, I said mouth, mouth
and not lips. You have no lips.
You left them in a mason jar
next to the brown sugar.

I hope the dogs don’t get to them.
It would be strange to see your face
springing from a dog’s bark.

I’ve set out a picnic
in the woods.

There’s a glass of wine
and a talking canary.

There’s a music-box
and all of Tolstoy.

Jalen Eutsey

To My Caring and Worried Mother first appeared in The Florida Review Online; After Reading Robert Desnos first appeared online at Malarkey Books.

Jalen Eutsey was born and raised in Miami, Florida, and earned a BA from the University of Miami and an MFA from Johns Hopkins University. He is a 2022-2024 Wallace Stegner Fellow. He has been the recipient of a Rubys Artist Grant and a Hatty Fitts Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2022, Nashville Review, Poetry Northwest, Harpur Palate, and The Hopkins Review.

Two poems from David Gorin’s A Pale Green Star

followed by a note on the author

Enchantments

This cigarette burns but is never consumed.
This cell phone makes phone calls to the dead.
Here is the number of a girl who gives protection
from fidelity. These are not loaves of bread,
but photographs of bread pasted to stones
which fill weird hungers and can be resold.
He who sits on this carpet is unable to speak.
He who looks in this mirror is already old.
Quiet friend, you look like you could use a hand
on your reset button to unclench that throat.
If no one built the button in, if no one finds one
sewn into you, like a coin in a coat’s lining,
do some of these lines: the words climb up
inside you and leap out as if you were on fire.
In a forest, in the backwoods of your suburb
crush this paper flower with your tongue,
swallow the wasp who comes: you learn
to change a person’s love for you to fame
using nothing but your tongue and time.

David Gorin

A Moon’s Moon

Snow is supposed to be in the cold. Ash is supposed to be in the past. Snow
is supposed to be on earth; ash, scattering in the wind. Ash is supposed to be
the snow of fire, enemy of winter’s flowers. And winter is supposed to take
place on the earth between the fall and spring. It is not supposed to take
place on the moon. But when it is winter on the moon, when you are writing
a poem in it, taking care to sweep it free of ash and snow, to cut down any
spruces that spring up in the way, disposing also of wind and junipers and
summer sounds, you will now and then look up and see a cloudy planet
floating in the sky. It’s about the size of your fist at arm’s length. Dusty
continents cartwheel into view, then oceans serenely take their place. There
must be people taking a subway. There must be mornings and situations, a
girl walking her bicycle across the street, a graduate student in prayer on the
floor of a hospital chapel, a track team running to the vanishing point and
back, a basketball game the whole neighborhood turns out to cheer, poetry
readings attended by more than sixty people—it sounds exciting! You picture
yourself in a helmet of glass, and a silver suit with copper buckles, strapping
into the seat of a cockpit aimed at the little world. With a few keystrokes, up
you go, lifted by a bright white stream of snow and ash. Of course, this does
not actually happen. You are, after all, still seated at your desk on the surface
of the moon in winter, which shows no signs of abating. And weeks pass by
like windows on a moving train.

David Gorin

Enchantments first appeared in A Public Space; A Moon’s a Moon first appeared in Iowa Review.

David Gorin is the author of To a Distant Country, selected by Jennifer Chang for the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship and forthcoming in 2024. His writing received the 2023 Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America and has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell and Millay Arts. In recent years he has taught creative writing and literature at the Pratt Institute, Deep Springs College, Eastern Correctional Facility (via the Bard Prison Initiative), and Yale University. He lives in San Francisco, CA with his partner Charlotte McCurdy and their hound dog, Odin.

Two poems from Sophie Grimes’s The Shape of Time

followed by a note on the author

Interior / Exterior

Excretions, oils, musks of
living through time, the neckline
of the sleep shirt, the upper
sleeves a kind of vellum, yellow,
the pillowcase is skin, the towel,
pulled off the hook in the heat
the same temperature as the body.
Name a white that stays. Teeth,
polar bears, sheets, see?
You can’t, there isn’t.
painters know the bone is blue,
the moon, lemon. The mind knows
to take shortcuts, like a children’s book.
Milk, moo. Train, choo, sneeze, bless-you,
but it doesn’t know how to shut up.

A co-worker said once her baby was born,
she never got a full night of sleep ever again.
She said this to me and made it fact, cursed me,
experience passed like a cloned object that she both
kept and gave. The child naps long and soft,
deep, warm. I can’t help feeling he has taken this
from me as he took so many other things
that cannot be cloned, on his emergence
into the world. So in this way birth is the partial loss
of the woman. There was a river only.
She was the river and the water.
Then there was a boat. The baby is the boat.
Or is in the boat. Either way works
in this particular metaphor.

Sophie Grimes

Filters

The eye, obviously, washed out hazel
yellowing around the pupil like a stain
and outside the iris, rheumy blue-whites,
phlegm that blink-scratches, pink-twinge
like certain pieces in raw eggs.

The mind next, whirring, autonomous
ghost companion weaving its own
seething opinions, your larvae-
filled flies beating against
this porch-screen of a partner.

Then time. Seeing the Welsh mountains
with the then eyes, Beckett wrote in a letter.
The color of the peak changes, the shape informed
by the bundle of experience accumulated,
how depleted the reservoir of joy.

The tyranny of time and treacherous present,
an amusement park ride where the room spins
and everyone is trapped against the walls
and the floor drops out. Every moment
a new-spun cocoon of context, pulsing

soft white oblongs inserted into a river.
What is the river? Something
structurally consistent but not the same.
Examples: Cities. Sex. Sunset.
And words. But you know this.

Said so many times before in so many forms
we come up short even as we crowd source.
We can speak without thinking, and we do
until hoarse, idea and action triggering an automatic
word equivalent to narrate our limited lives.

But what of that which can’t be said?
The germ, raw rice deep inside something,
a factory on the outskirts of a city
only you know filled with dirty chickens
in cages laying white, bright eggs.

Sophie Grimes

Sophie Grimes holds an MFA in Poetry from Boston University where she worked with Louise Glück and Robert Pinsky. Her poems have been published in various literary magazines including Spoon River Poetry Review, The Literary Review, and AGNIonline, and her manuscript was a 2018 finalist for the New Issues Poetry Prize. She is the author of two chapbooks: Waiting for the Exterminator and City Structures. Sophie lives in Chicago with her husband and son where she writes poetry reviews for Publishers Weekly and works for an early childhood care and education advocacy organization. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing and East Asian Studies from Oberlin College.

Two poems from Nicholas Reading’s Silent Reel

followed by a note on the author

What a Nice Donkey

There is a rider leading a donkey
toward a dim town barely lit
by factory fires. Pothole soup

for the orphaned girl walking until
warmth comes. It’s not complicated,
the rehash and echo of journey.

The dim town is the room you, reading,
sit in. The girl makes it over the black dirt,
past flashing moons to ask you

for work. To shine your salty shoes.
She’ll starch your hat. If you’ve no hat
she will offer her own. You hardly listen

as donkey eats this paper, tugs
your spine right out of your seat.
Tomorrow nothing will be as strange

as these two augurs reading
at your kitchen table. Coffee
will be on and your cigarettes

will be gone. Both want breakfast.
The girl shames you when she says,
What a waste, you trying to be happy.

Donkey nods. They offer to wash
your socks and stitch the holes.
They ask for the thread from your chest.

Nicholas Reading

Dialogue with an Intruder

Now that the door is kicked in we have plenty
to talk about
with you stoned, me weak thinking that Grandmother’s

tea set
has fallen apart and given us plenty to talk about while
you reach

for silver spoons following the tea set falling apart.
What of decorum?
Why the rough handle of my wife’s wedding ring?

It is cut
from her as our breath wanes. Burn decorum. Take
the back roads

and curse your sleep. You should be cut as our breath
wanes over
your frown and prowl. Scare those roads and curse

your sleep.
Trade me your ski mask, your hands, your frown
and prowl. Fuck

me with your faults. Give me your ski mask and
your hands
for my failings. My wife is very quiet. Your faults –

forgive me –
give me no comfort for my own failings. My wife
is quiet

and your breath is like mine and there will be
no comfort
for tomorrow. You are stoned. I am weak. I am

thinking
that my breath is like yours now that the door
is kicked in.

Nicholas Reading

What a Nice Donkey first appeared in New Orleans Review and the chapbook The Party in Question; Dialogue with an Intruder first appeared in Copper Nickel and the chapbook The Party in Question.

Nicholas Reading is the author of the chapbooks Love & Sundries (SplitLip Press, 2017) and The Party in Question, winner of the Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Mid-American Review, Cortland Review, Twyckenham Notes, and others. Visit him at www.nickreading.com

Two poems from Miriam Flock’s Fight or Flight

followed by a note on the author

Epistemology

The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of. —Pascal

It’s not that I am blunt and you are long.
I say I like the brush of your attenuated hands.
You like the saying.

It’s not my discovery, stretching a hand
beneath your pillow, that the same book
sleeps beside us in our separate beds.

It’s not the survival of recriminations.
You never cared for anyone so small
and yet tenacious, like scrub pine.

I jilted truer men who promised me
unbroken mornings in the city
of my choice.

It isn’t even this bad habit that we share—
this seeking after reasons
in the precincts of the heart.

Miriam Flock

Chickens in Your Backyard

They come, like the dishwasher, with the house.
“No trouble,” swears the seller, and—presto change-o—
for handfuls of Layena every morning,
the pair of hens trade one or two brown eggs.
The chick, if we approach with proper coos,
will let itself be stroked. This we learned
from our new bible, Chickens in Your Backyard.
Like neighbors of a different faith, we practice
tolerance, let them grub among the bulbs,
ignore the way their droppings singe the mulch.

Meanwhile, we’re intent on our own nesting.
My husband paints the nursery; I quilt
a golden goose with pockets shaped like eggs.
We hardly register the added squawking
from the coop or look for more than tribute
when we rob the nesting boxes. Then
one dawn, I’m roused by what can only be
a cock-a-doodle- doo. And in the breaking light,
our chick-turned-rooster struts, ruffed as Raleigh,
shaking his noble scarlet comb. What waits

inside me to astonish like this male?
Such sudden majesty, sudden red.

Miriam Flock

Epistemology first appeared in Salmagundi; Chickens in Your Backyard first appeared in New Ohio Review.

Miriam Flock’s work has previously appeared in Poetry, Chicago Review, Georgia Review, and other publications. She was the winner of the 2019 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for poems on the Jewish experience. Her chapbook, The Scientist’s Wife, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2021. She is a graduate of the Stanford University master’s program in creative writing.

Two poems from Julia Thacker’s To Wildness

followed by a note on the author

Braid Him into the Earth

Knee-high coffin of wicker, earth-boat floating through the woods.
Wrap him in heather, the old way. Hold a pocket mirror under his nose.
Say of him what we say of fathers.

If one of you has a three-string, then a tune.
Boots, stamp away spirits. If the ground is frozen,
dig shallow, spade ringing through ice, shale, mica-shine.

Lower the basket in a tangle of ginseng root, because I can’t.
Let well water seep into crevices, mineral, like nickels
on the tongue. Skin freckling in feldspar, beetle, slug.

If flood waters drift the body loose, let him not be found by a child.
Let bones wash up with clay pipes, beads, thumb-size skulls.
Let them whiten and scatter in blond fields.

Julia Thacker

God Denies Any Knowledge of Dead Angel in His Bed

He searches Heaven’s cabinets for a hangover cure.
Combs knotted stars from his beard.
Sets the morning agenda. To the blind shepherd
he dictates a note: The wind is blue.
And what of tsunamis, wars?
Macedonian wells infested with bees?
God has a headache. His hands tremble.
He cannot look at the heap of sheets,
her celestial body, marcelled bob, cold
in his chamber. No one understands
that he is full of duende. Not the swarm of angels,
their platinum regiment rapping
at his windows, rattling doors, voices sharp
and clear, Why? God covers his ears.

Julia Thacker

Braid Him into the Earth first appeared in Plume; God Denies Any Knowledge of Dead Angel in His Bed first appeared in Southern Humanities Review.

The granddaughter of a Harlan County coal miner, Julia Thacker was raised in Dayton Ohio. She first came to Massachusetts as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has also been the recipient of fellowships from The Bunting Institute at Radcliffe (now The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study), the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poems appear in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Southern Humanities Review, and The New Republic. A portfolio of her work is included in the 25th anniversary issue of Poetry International. Julia has taught writing at Tufts University, Radcliffe Seminars and as Poet-in-Residence in public schools throughout the state. In 2024, she was an Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence at The Mount in Lenox. She lives in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Two poems from Susan Parr’s Devera

followed by a note on the author

And Wings

I can’t wait to melt
into the all—
into every many one,
and you—
first winking
out of knowing
‘wherefore,’
to not thinking.

I can’t wait to swim
among the atlas,
under a sneaking sky—
drifting play-
ful if my sum
lightens to excised,
and I whoop this rascal
body, bye.

It won’t wait to hole
up with the bacilli.
Our loving meat
indecipherable press—
Devonian cud—
ashes to hard bake.
And if we scrape, a callus
on the Earth,

we’ll await evacuation,
as the gales go
whistling,
to bandy by,
in numbers only—
not even ghosts—
just pares or pricks,
nicks of time.

Susan Parr

Extreme Weather

In the voice of Dido, Queen of Carthage

Sometimes I think
these floods think

like a new Minnows ® —
built for some food purpose,

not fast moves.
But freaks haul,

like him, from me-in-love.
What once darted

to clutter a wave’s crushing,
or just rolled down deep

like a memory,
got wings.

Susan Parr

Susan Parr’s first collection of poems, Pacific Shooter, won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize and was published by Pleiades Press. She earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Washington, and has contributed to publications and anthologies including DIAGRAM, PageBoy, Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry series.

Two poems from Sara Femenella’s Elegies for One Small Future

followed by a note on the author

Niobe

I will kill the babies myself I say
like a good woman the story of my tears
is the story of my bleeding all my shedding
every month I emerge a crying stone
curl in my socket of dried blood
as my body kills the babies one by one
and after I wash myself clean
I wash myself where their blood ran
through me I wash until there is no blood
wash until there is no skin or muscle
until there is no body until there are no
hands I wash until the water runs dry
until I am a rough stone, stone down
to the heart of me and I do not even cry

Sara Femenella

In Bad Faith

Elsewhere a bell rings
medieval in its calling and here

I fumble for a reliquary,
any bit of cloth or bone

my religion left me
naked on a marble slab

what else is faith? The inner eye
takes the initiative like Medea

spent centuries believing pregnancy
would save us, programmed ambition

through seasonal depression,
social media and NPR, and there

the elsewhere bell clangs the myth
as pure and ruinous as an all-boys choir,

angelic sons already smoking
with the violence we burn.

My son is my greatest pagan idol
I even love his shit, my feminism

a split tongue wanting
what others have, unrepentant

for each of the thousand pregnancies
I bet on the prophecy of a son

that will one day destroy us
and my witch hysteria begs

to whom Dear Body
shall I give you?

My love language lies somewhere
between the book of shadows and pizza

delivered still hot: my husband
built the back deck himself

my son drew me a Mother’s Day card
strewn with both hearts and ghosts

and whether or not such happiness
is an illusion the elsewhere bell

rings like a scapegoat
for the grandmothers who

spilled blood in the kitchen
but kept the floors so clean

you could eat off them
this is our inheritance, the sainthood

we hungered, the hexes we cast
to hold any space in line

for the next woman rushing to make it
home in time for dinner.

Sara Femenella

Niobe first appeared in Jukejoint Magazine; In Bad Faith first appeared in Seventh Wave.

Sara Femenella’s poems have been published in Pleiades, The Journal, The New Orleans Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Denver Quarterly, Salamander, The Shore and Seventh Wave, among others. Her forthcoming book of poems, Elegy for One Small Future, was a semi-finalist for Autumn House Press’ Poetry Prize, a finalist for Write Bloody Publishing’s Jack Mccarthy Book Prize and a semi-finalist for The Waywiser Press Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.