Two poems from Anne-Marie Thompson’s Is

followed by a note on the author

Lost

When Mama’s tabby cat ran away,
something shifted, cosmic.

It was as though she felt the expansion
of the universe in her tiny bones,

aching with Earth’s extending elliptics.
This sounds hyperbolic,

but she cried less at the deaths of grandparents.
Because she thought it might

leave a trail, home-scent leading homewards,
she dragged a bedsheet

down the street, calling, Here, Tippy, Tippy.
This is not so much about

a breakdown as it is breaking down, as in
taking apart, as in an idea.

One piece: She teaches me to set a formal table,
the placement of crystal goblets.

Another: She corrects the grammar and usage
of tenth-grade students, circling

split infinitives, crossing through busted out.
In the end, nobody cares,

not even Mama, whether or not the blade
faces inward, or whether

the neighbors stare from respectable windows.
In the end, it’s not a burst at all,

but a slow pulling away: the planets acting on
each other, changing incrementally

their own orbits. They say Neptune and Uranus
may have switched places.

But all this was years ago, eons, long before
we ever thought to look up

into the darkness, before we realized
how far away we’d gotten.

Anne-Marie Thompson

Dr. Panda Hoopa City 2

You build the world, with gardens
and roads and hospitals and houses
and animals walking around like people,
because this is a game for preschoolers,

and you watch the animals work and eat
and drive and sleep and then you notice
the world is flat, a large flat square
floating among the clouds, and so

you start picking up and dragging
your anthropomorphic pandas
and elephants and cats and hippos
to the edge of the world and letting go.

You drop them all over the edge,
every single one, because, you say,
There are always more. The animals say, Oh!
and poof into nothing, and then

other nearly identical animals appear
in their places. When I say that’s not nice,
and not the way to play the game, you say,
I’m sending them to Texas, which seems

these days as plausible as both a flat earth
and people walking around like people.
When I went to Texas to take care
of my dying mother, I was gone

for three weeks, during which time
you were praised: Thank you for being so good,
thank you for letting Mama go. I returned changed,
red-eyed and prone to leave the room

in the middle of a game. You learned
when to ask questions and when
to keep playing without me, sending more
and more over the edge, sending help.

Anne-Marie Thompson

Lost first appeared in Iron Horse Literary Review; Dr. Panda Hoopa City 2 first appeared in Poetry Northwest.

Anne-Marie Thompson is the author of Audiation, winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. She has taught music, writing, and literature at Johns Hopkins University, Westminster College, Lincoln University, and the Syracuse Downtown Writers Center. Originally from southeast Texas, she now lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband and son.

Two poems from LaWanda Walters’s Seedy Lake

followed by a note on the author

Woodcut

The trouble with Jane Eyre
isn’t what I thought when I slammed shut the book
on those pictures trying to fly out at me
because I misunderstood, being too young

to read. When you’re unable to read a book
you can’t understand the illustrations, either.
Those were my mother’s books, a green, bound set
of that one and the book by her sister, Emily.

When you can’t understand the artwork
the face at the window is a monster.
It is only Cathy, though, in the book by Brontë’s sister
calling for her lover. And the awful figure bending

over Jane’s bed with the candle, that monstrous
creature—well, there are flaws in the mind of Jane, too,
and the awful figure bending over her
might be the tormented wife of Rochester.

There’s a flaw in Jane’s mind, too,
looking down on the young French child
born to another tormented mother
whom Rochester says has inherited sin.

The young French child likes presents too much,
likes to dance and sing—and so what? She is love-starved,
this child who has supposedly inherited sin,
who will never get the approval of Mr. Rochester.

We lose track of the pretty child who likes to sing.
Jane goes away for a while to prove her purity.
Then, when the other wife dies, Mr. Rochester
will approve. Reader, I married him, she says,

after she has gone away for a while. He is blind
from the fire the crazy wife set. And then, miraculously,
her love asks if she is wearing a blue dress.
I believe she is pregnant, then, carrying a child

who will be a good child, miraculously.
Charlotte Brontë knew only part of the happy ending.
Perhaps he gets better and sees the blue dress.
We have to believe things turn out well,

while Charlotte, herself, had nine months of pleasure
and died. And so the book, which ends as if resolved,
asks us to believe things turn out well, the French girl gone,
Rochester and Jane and the baby in the burned-out

mansion, because books then ended resolutely
and did not reflect how it is to have a calm life,
Rochester and Jane and the baby in the burned-out
mansion, illustrated by the art of the woodcut,

which does not suggest such a calm life,
but a knife and fire making art out of wood,
in a mansion that itself has been sculpted by
fire and breaking things, which is how we really live.

LaWanda Walters

My First Orgasm at Main Street Baptist Church

It was the little Bible I had on my lap—the New
Testament. It was “white patent,” like my shoes.
It might be a clutch purse, I felt,
and I was being admirably still and quiet

with my white patent-leather clutch purse,
pretending I was a fashion model, praying
when the preacher said to or singing the hymn
Daddy led, holding my clutch purse even

after we sat back down, pretending I was a model
like Colleen Corby in Seventeen.
If I could sit as I sat last Sunday, my clutch
purse at that same angle, a buzz

of pleasure came. Colleen Corby was a “flower,”
my mother said, one time we went to Gulfport.
Sometimes the New Testament would buzz
and tingle, fizz some pleasure in my Sunday dress.

That’s what she was like, my mother in Gulfport,
alive to the sweetness of those pretty girls.
The gathers and ruffles in my skirt were ocean waves.
In our bathroom, I saw froth in my panties.

LaWanda Walters

Woodcut and My First Orgasm in Main Street Baptist Church first appeared in Poetry.

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

Two poems from Jane Zwart’s Small Craft

followed by a note on the author

The World Is Too Much With US

And now for the metaphors that are not balm. Now
the winter of a single blizzard, of drought, of hogbacks
plowed across Lowes’ huge lot: a bleached reef,

says my son. Now, moored to locusts, a sling, a woman
sleeping rough: low-hanging fruit. Now metastasis:
milk thistle. Now the hospice of bees and frogs.

Once things took generations; it took seven, for instance,
for toymakers to rule guillotines fair game. Now, though—
now a stick is a Ruger the second some kid picks it up.

Jane Zwart

Eudocima Phalonia

One way to tell
the earth from hell
is to remind oneself:
for every narcissist

there is a creature
so oblivious to its beauty
that, for it, a mirror
would be a terror.

For every dictator
there is a caterpillar—
jet, cut from velvet,
splattered with nebulae—

whom metamorphosis
makes common, just
a sweet tooth, a moth
on whose mudcloth

culottes it is written
that a strongman’s arms
can be snapped in half,
his flex turned curlicue.

Jane Zwart

The World Is Too Much With Us first appeared in Muzzle Magazine; Eudocima Phalonia first appeared in Tahoma Review.

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. In addition, she is the co-editor of book reviews for Plume; her own reviews have been published there and in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Two poems from Daniel Saalfeld’s Sweet Teeth

followed by a note on the author

West Side Story

From stroking his sensitive chords,
the old harpist paused in the penthouse restaurant
and asked me, as I passed by with a tray of drinks,

“You like my music?” I nodded and said “Oui”
in this Croatian-owned French affair.
His lips curled upward as his left hand

slid from a coral pant pocket
to generate heaven with his gin-and-tonic hand
for the old New Yorkers dining on soufflés

prepared by the Swiss-schooled Algerian chef.
It was that O.J. summer. Over beef cubes
given me after I’d folded napkins

and placed silverware around plates,
the owner kept calling the Juice a pussy,
saying he should’ve been a man

and taken his life on that freeway
while one of the burly waiters
kept yelling, “They should cut off his balls.”

Before these crude views were voiced,
my jet from the West had banked gently left
in early April over Jersey,

showing me the whole rawboned borough
in whose acidic bowels
I’d fuel my cells with fine fats.

Daniel Saalfeld

Sweet Tooth

Like the Barolo I drink, the leather chairs
down the stairs are dark. The waitress’s hair

also is dark and styled in a silky bun
atop her head. Before I order,

she holds up each cellophane-wrapped cut
with her milky hands whose long fingers,

crowned with carmine nails, treat the meat
with velvet care. She then shows me the potato,

the asparagus, the onion. Mahogany
surrounds this fantasy as her burgundy lips

bend. I cut my filet mignon with a knife
that could kill me after I’m stuffed with beef,

caramelized onions, and sautéed mushrooms.
But I won’t polish off myself

when raspberry-topped chocolate cake
lacquered with thin mud awaits.

Daniel Saalfeld

Sweet Tooth first appeared in Tar River Poetry.

Daniel Saalfeld received his B.A. in English and History from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Before receiving his M.F.A. from American University, he studied French at the University of Burgundy. A Fulbright Scholar recipient, he lectured on modern and contemporary poetry and creative writing in Russia. He lives in Washington, D.C. and teaches at the University of Maryland. His poems have appeared in many journals, including The Hopkins Review, The Southeast Review, The Seattle Review, Cimarron Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Tar River Poetry, The South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Poet Lore, and The Pinch.

Two poems from Katie Chaple’s How clearly you can see some nights

followed by a note on the author

How clearly you can see some nights

So many stars like salt crystals
scattered on a tablecloth,
the seeming blankness of space,
but it isn’t—it is cities, filled, and history
rages its prayer wheel, spinning
loose chains as the bonfire sparks, flickers
the field, dismantling the evening into night,
too soon into daybreak. The two of you walk into the field
drunk and admiring. The two of you dismantle
the evening, drink, look up, stop,
look up, sway. Let the dear friend burning
from too much, lean against and into you,
and you both stagger under the weight
of the artifacts tattooed in their significance above,
tarot cards pointing back to the beast of the beginning.
We all should be naked, you think, allowing the fire to burn back
to some country of existence.

And your friend recalls himself as a child, and further,
when he died in a room in a warm, bright country,
and before, when he drank with other friends on shore,
boats, harbor-bright and pulling at their tethers,
and your friend is only words. He is scrawled,
black, expanding into the page.

And you, you wish he could love this mirror first—
the moon, the fire of an hour.
This dream you both walk in fires its lunar tongue,
the hour of your deaths, conceivable to him
but to you, an intemperate planet with no name,
and the day, today, you spent hiking in the woods, swimming
with these friends deforms, all of you distillations
of yourselves that will disappear
when you return home from this place where bonfires
order the night, and the Milky Way
is visible to you like it hasn’t been since you were a child,
and you want to know how the night collapsed,
how everything started falling away;
you’re trying to piece together the shores
of everyone before they started drifting back,
away from now, away from this place,
how you were just at the edge of a field.

Katie Chaple

View from my yard —

The night there was a fire eater
behind our house in a neighbor’s yard my mother
had gone into the hospital for her heart. The party
ringed him, and below, I looked up into this scene
one street over. He began with fire on chains, swinging
them—above his head, then repeated the figure of infinity—
one in front of him, another behind his back.
All this in silence. What is not made more foreign at such a late hour
in January cold, me in a housecoat and my mother
wired, green beeps outside her body
that explained the noise inside? I’ve heard
that the most important question is Why?
Then the most important answer begins with because.
I realized that we could still be surprised—
that we could make up instead of remember.
In some foreign tongue that vibrates
when spoken, mother, horse, and ghost
are all the same word. He twirled
batons, arced orange that trailed
behind itself like kicked-up dust,
like the reverberation of a bell
after its clang. This small privacy rings
through me, measures. For over an hour, he juggled
flame, and for a finale, made it disappear down his throat,
pitching us all into darkness over and over
like it wasn’t a trick to make the fire come back.

Katie Chaple

How clearly you can see some nights first appeared in The Rumpus; View from my yard– first appeared in Five Points

Katie Chaple is the author of Pretty Little Rooms (Press 53), winner of the 2012 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Poetry through Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She is editor of Terminus Magazine, published through Georgia Tech and also serves as the McEver Chair in Community Outreach with Poetry @ TECH. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as American Literary Review, Antioch Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, Five Points, Greensboro Review, Mead, Passages North, Poetry International, The Rumpus, Washington Square, and others. She teaches at the University of West Georgia.

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

followed by a note on the author

The Heavens Opened, and God Said

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kerry James Evans

Stew

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

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

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

Kerry James Evans

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

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

Two poems from Michael Fulop’s The Long Blue Evenings of Summer

followed by a note on the author

The Family

One summer two cellos fell in love.
And the next summer the lady cello
gave birth to a baby.
It was not a baby cello, however.

It was a violin with a high squeaky cry.
They fed it and they wrapped it in warm clothing.
But it did not grow.
It played music, of course, but a squeaky music.

The cellos looked at each other in silence.
In recrimination.
And at night they slept
with their curved backs against each other.

Michael Fulop

A Painting by Seurat

I would be happy to live inside
a painting by Seurat.
Here in this life I am surrounded
mostly by air.
But there I would be surrounded by pure color.

A dot of black for each of my pupils of course.
A few dots of blue for my irises.
And look how my body is touched
by the blue of the lake in the background.
In this life the blue would be far away.
But here the blue touches my face, my arms.

And see that lady over there:
she tries to turn the dot
of her eye toward me but cannot.
Oh.
And I do feel a little bit wobbly
when the light passes through my body.

Michael Fulop

The Family first appeared in Prairie Schooner; A Painting by Seurat first appeared in The Antioch Review

Michael Fulop was born in New York City in 1959, and earned his BA from Princeton University, and his MD from Harvard Medical School. He works as a psychiatrist in Maryland. He and his wife have two daughters. His poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Hopkins Review, and Prairie Schooner, among other journals.

Two poems from Eva Hooker’s Portion

followed by a note on the author

Stilleven (Still Life)

They open
their wings and drink—nectaring

with radiant
skin (& finely fitted),

a sustenance that shakes
outwardly the stem,

picking with their feet
the bloom, this

& repeatedly
(hair pencils within).

Alert to their own frail
need, they set fire

to the follicle, absolve
the aorta (veiling the face).

They still,
even the thickness & boniness & crumble

of light, on
and in—

innermost, beneath the surface of things,
the chosen

bone & fuel
of body,

of fit & bud,
of embellishment & boundary.

I brought back from despair so small
a basket, my love, they wove
it of willow:

Five Monarch Butterflies on Lavender

Eva Hooker

Tech me that nedeth to wit

And those who are beautiful, who can know them?

The child murmuring as she runs,
keep safe my joy.

Her flowering, then her fading, seem
forms of trespass,

Like the scattering of peony blossoms after a storm.
Their beauty, oddly, drags them to earth.

What then?

What then?

*

When you lift yourself up to the mouth
of another,

What is its proof-text? When Julian asked,
who shall tell me,

Who tech me that nedeth to wit

What need marked her? What desire?
What gave her to say

That God is like a circle whose center point
is everywhere,

Whose circumference is nowhere?

Her language, geometry. Oddly cool.
Her words, backlit and sure.

How do such words arrive
as signature within the body of another

Speaking God?

*

Her gesture holds. Do not turn from this.

In her mouth like honey.

Slowly she brakes her sentence.

A fragmentary of Whom she knows shivering
at dawn.

What then?

What then?

Peony petals—

Eva Hooker

Stilleven (Still Life) first appeared in Salamander; Tech me that nedeth to wit first appeared in the Taos International Poetry Journal.

Eva Hooker writes: In my first book, Godwit, I traced the migration patterns of a bird, collected wildflowers for semblances, and rooted around in the testimony of women mystics. I like to wander in places strange to me. I like to explore without linguistic obligation. My second manuscript, Portion, leans up out of the shade and explores the compass of the world. I use a long rake, narrow-tined, to explore in Margaret Cavendish’s voice, the invention of a self. I am professor of English and Writer in Residence at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana.

Two poems from Peter Krumbach’s Me Not Me

followed by a note on the author

Loop

—for S.M.

This time I will have a brother.
And the woman across the table slicing
bread will be my mother, my sister still
inside her. From the door I will hear voices

of two priests who’ll soon stand
behind my father’s chair. The sound of rain
on leaves so near, and death breathing
so gently, my life will have no end.

I will think of the Christmas carp circling
in the bathtub, and of all the teeth reflected
in our spoons. I will cut my finger to show
the finch my blood. And I will sing

as the dead sing in dreams, mouths opened
to wafers, the tune dissolving on our tongues.
This time I will smile at the potato steam
lifting my grandmother’s heart.

It will be me and not me, the way light
can never fit into itself.

Peter Krumbach

And Somehow a Dog

And somehow a dog

And someway a sow

And anyhow a walking stick

And however a caribou

And ergo a mole dreaming of sight

And duly an adverb safari

And indeed looking for hitherto

And hence a god’s dogwalker letting go

And therefore the hounds fleeing heaven

And nonetheless the crows always know

And nevertheless your face in the mule’s eye

And accordingly an ostrich egg rolling

And henceforth settling at your feet

Peter Krumbach

Loop first appeared in The Greensboro Review; And Somehow a Dog first appeared in Denver Quarterly

Peter Krumbach was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. After graduating with a degree in visual arts, he left the country, and eventually found his way to the U.S. He worked in commercial art (New York), as a translator and broadcaster (Washington, D.C.), and, for the last 25 years, has lived and written in Southern California. His collection Degrees of Romance, winner of the 2022 Antivenom Poetry Award, is forthcoming from Elixir Press.

Two poems from Susan Parr’s Devera

followed by a note on the author

The Soft Skin

 In the voice of Dido, Queen of Carthage

Aeneas with fever:
stoney, a sweet, a

sacked pers-
on I attend

with a cool cloth—
but he won’t

signal by moving
finger,

or even feet—
he won’t sign

or press by grasping—
only determined alive

wherein I dimple
with my tongue.

Susan Parr

Thalia’s Horology

I carried a cloud; I thought
it was gentle—

orca, ape, or peaches;
according to the wind.

It bad-dreamed on me,
so I wiped along

our foggy mosey.
But it kept dumping

in my mouth. Listing—
my crony dripping

England, ship, cabooses
tucking in, pil-

ing on my breath;
it made my mock

nutrition. It sugar-
daddied my light duty—

the crystal sky pimp-
le, a pox—so I wolfed

and snarfed—until it tick-
led me to crack up

clowns, puppets, players
in jaw-window.

Susan Parr

Susan Parr is the author of the poetry collection Pacific Shooter (Pleiades Press, 2009). Educated in Russian Studies at Barnard College, and via exchange at (then) Leningrad State University in the U.S.S.R., she went on to earn an MFA in Poetry from the University of Washington in 2005. She has contributed to publications and anthologies including DIAGRAM, PageBoy, The Seattle Review, POETRY, and the Best American Poetry series. She lives in Seattle.