Two poems from Patrick Errington’s The Swailing

followed by a note on the author

Fieldwork in Secret

All day in the heat they would talk. Some sang
even, though no one could hear the others’
words through the grit and noise, the rusted
grind of machinery. But still they’d drive their
voices like fenceposts into the hard din of it,
not a fence for keeping in some untamed
thing, but rather just the plain act of keeping.
As a boy, I used to cross the fields to watch
them at it, the sweat, their mouths moving as
practiced as their hands, shaping the steel dust,
the air – into what, I could never quite say.
A craft of some sort, of sound, of stale light.
Whenever my father came home he’d leave
the keys dangling in the pickup, a scum of grey
around the bath and, every now and then, her
(my mother, I mean), driving with me away
for days, weeks even, but we always came and
were taken back. I guess he liked the act of it,
leaving. I still remember him mumbling along
to the radio, but at home he never sang, not
to anyone, barely spoke in more than those
sentences he set out on the table, cruel little
heirlooms. My mother who spoke enough
for all of us told me how she eventually had
to ask him to stop saying he loved her, and so
he did, though as he neared the end she’d hear
him at night muttering the words and her name
over and over as though they were a kind of
work he’d done all his life and now his breath,
like his hands, was set to it. I could always tell
as he and I drove back that we were almost home
when, though we kept no cattle, no horses,
the untended fields were scored with fences.

Patrick Errington

The Point

There’s a sense that what is left
is somehow more than what is left
off. That whatever remains must be
the point, like the point he carves
of each fencepost before driving them
into the frost-hardened dirt. Steam
streaming from his hands into the long
dawn light as he pulls off his gloves,
wipes the dust from his lips. That night,
face smeared across the bathroom
mirror, he’ll slowly undress, peeling
away the sweat-stiff shirt and jeans,
and with them the day, all its
gathered pain, each wince and hiss.
He’ll touch his body then, softly
testing it with the tips of his fingers,
pressing into the skin, the scars, as
though he were some not-yet-named
world. He’ll take off his wedding ring,
set it beside the sink. And then
the rest. All of it. Everything he can
be without – hair, tooth, hand, limb by
limb, scraping, scouring away, cutting
down, knowing he will find it, has
to find it, that pure thing that is left,
the sharp point of him, what he
is, just a little farther now, he thinks,
a little beneath, the water running
dark down the drain. In the morning
he’ll head back out before dawn,
a stack of new posts shuddering in
the truck. It’s just ahead, he can tell
and he stops, steps from the cab, here
where he left off. But there’s nothing.
No fence. No post. Nothing. Or not
quite nothing. A line of deep holes,
stretching off into the half-light, each
one perfectly round and full of water.

Patrick Errington

Fieldwork in Secret first appeared in Best New Poets 2019; The Point first appeared in The Rialto.

Poems by Patrick James Errington appear in magazines and anthologies worldwide, including Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Harvard Review, Boston Review, Oxford Poetry, The Cincinnati Review, and The Fiddlehead, as well as in two chapbooks, Glean (2018) and Field Studies (2019). His work has received numerous awards, including most recently The Poetry International Prize and the Callan Gordon Award from the Scottish Book Trust. Originally from Alberta, Canada, Patrick now lives in Scotland where he teaches at the University of Edinburgh.

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 Amy Glynn’s Romance Language

followed by a note on the author

Glass Beach, Fort Bragg

Afterward, the roiled
detritus washes up for days, shifting but always stuck in the wrack-zone’s

back and forth. No one owns
it and no one can really take it away; it has foiled

all remediation
efforts and it always will. But it does change. Small things accrue

meaning in their accumulation; sharp things do
lose edge to agitation,

and afterward,
the tide recedes across a field of silicate and calcium

and vitreous aggregate. It is the sum
total of everything we will ever break, jettison, discard.

I admit it: I still fail
at being happy enough, though I know what the litter becomes when the tide’s been at it.

When it’s washed and sunlit
the wreckage can seem like treasure. Thrust a hand in and pull it back bleeding, fist full

of sea glass and something sharp you weren’t expecting. I don’t want to sift
through all that anymore; it’s all just words, and after words

empty shells even the birds
know better than to linger over. They were liars, whoever said a long memory was a gift.

Amy Glynn

Entre-Deux-Mers, June

Every rangy sidewalk-crack
hollyhock in Bordeaux
says the same damned thing.
Depend on nothing. Nothing
to shore you up, nothing to nourish
or validate, nothing.
They rise up against half the doorways
in town, coming out
of nowhere, staying
local, dressed up anyway,
posing before the stone
walls like florid hookers;
six feet tall or more,
veins displayed, stems
clad in starry hairs,
flexed petals powdered
with pollen as if to make
a point of how privation
shouldn’t stop you. They say
to stand your ground and take it.
Take neglect and turn it
to your advantage, build
a little empire of your own with it.
Turn it to pith and pigment, frill
and flush, flashy colors that look
ridiculously expensive, topaz
and jet, cochineal, Tyrian purple; turn
it to wantonly arrogant
dry fruits not in the business
of attracting anything
because screw that; take
nothing, owe nothing, come out
on top, present your proof
of concept ahead of schedule
and under budget: live
on your own terms like that
and there’s nothing
anyone can do,
though they will want to,
because once you need nothing
you will scare people, you will
make them want to cut you,
but here’s the thing–being hollow
doesn’t really make you stronger
but it does make you harder
to bend, and a structure
built on nothing
is near impossible to bring down.

Amy Glynn

Amy Glynn is an award-winning poet and essayist whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry. Her first poetry collection, A Modern Herbal, was published by Measure Press. She has been a recipient of the Troubadour Prize, Poetry Northwest’s Carolyn Kizer Award, the Literal Latte Essay Award, the SPUR Award of the Association of Western Writers, scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers conferences and two James Merrill House fellowships, among other honors. She served as the inaugural poet laureate for the cities of Lafayette and Orinda, CA. Her essay collection, My Empire of Dirt, is forthcoming from Berfrois Books. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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.

A poem from Jacob Boyd’s Convertible

followed by a note on the author

Tattoo & Binnacle

To dream of that beach/For the sake of an instant in the eyes,//The absolute singular//The unearthly bonds/Of the singular//Which is the bright light of shipwreck
— George Oppen

With the great ideal set, what mattered the exceptions, the little evil facts?
— W.E.B. Du Bois

I.

James Journey Fidler sailed the Pacific
from Panama to San Diego then onward
to places with names like Kwajalein,
places he had no reason to be
were it not for the Second World War
& his rank as Quartermaster, First Class,
keeper of the ship’s log, compass reader,
unsettling attendant of the binnacle.

A brink of extinction marine sound
like barnacle, pre-digital, somatic,
a ship’s binnacle is the housing around
its compass, the case that fixes
the needle in place & lets it spin.
The spirit wheels in the body’s stall.
Earth turns like a world on a spit.
Japan joins Hitler. A recruiter calls.

Jim rolled his smokes in his shirtsleeve.
He sold a pint of blood for the mark
of the Navy’s amphibious force on his arm:
a black tank disembarking
from the open gate of a gator’s jaw.
Jim, born back country just
as the governor was giving a luncheon
for the Klan, had soaked Indiana in,

then lugged its scorn four hours north
to rivet planes—the same bombers
that would soon lay fiery blankets
over the beaches he was sliding toward.
He was free to hate who he wanted,
& he hated privately, in harbored silence.
With scales, tails, & four-chambered hearts,
gators are born to maintain the law

as thoughtfully as any Navy. Justice is ancillary.
A racist with liberating inclinations:
nothing new there. Had Jim’s role
in that war opened a rift in his psyche,
this might have the force of reckoning.
Instead, here is the story of an American
majority, its failure to make sense
of skin, & the symbols it hid behind.

When the convoy moored at Coco Solo,
Jim, Tracey, Kalka, & Stew,
after two long weeks at sea,
took a night of liberty in Colón.
Every door in town led to a club
with sequined dancers & an orchestra.
They had more American liquor than America.
Boy, did we have big heads in the morning.

The native women are thick as flies,
Jim wrote in his diary. “Surprisingly light
complexions. Some are even blondes.”
Ghosting the coastline past Costa Rica
in a strange new species of warship—
the LCI—these white, hungover boys
dreaming of the single victory at sea,
killing time, & thinking fondly of home.

II.

The ship’s skin was a thin, steel plate,
flat-bottomed as a gator’s belly.
The men aboard felt every wave.

After emptying the berths of bunks
& removing both ramps, they’d stamped
rocket launchers & machine guns

to every available inch of deck
then stuffed the hold with ammo.
They swarmed south & west, out

from under snow clouds to the azure,
eternal summer, zagging around
battleships & aircraft carriers.

In Honolulu, Jim had a hulu girl
stitched to the cliff of his bicep.
I used to make her dance, he said,

flexing a flabby arm by the bay
window in Ypsi, when the tattoos
had all gone to gravy on the speckled

surface of his body where the war
lay buried, then he laughed
himself to tears, adding, Well, shoot.

Jacob Boyd

Tattoo & Binnacle first appeared in the American Journal of Poetry.

Jacob Boyd is from Holt, Michigan. He teaches in Chicago and in Milwaukee. He has poems forthcoming in Bracken, Iron Horse Literary Review, and RHINO. His chapbook, Stilt House, was selected by Heather McHugh for the Emrys Press Award.

Two poems from Zachary Bos’s Houndsditch

followed by a note on the author

Peaches

Late fruit lies hidden fallen off the boughs
among the bines of creeping vetch & blades
of yellow nutsedge, bruised and ruptured.
Where the furred skins have split open, mauve
hornets swarm the gold dragées of nectar.
A grey gilt of mildew coats the wet honeycrust
of decay; silver dew dries on small webs.
The hungry black-haired bees, hastened
by fear, visit and revisit the last flowers
to hector and harrow, gleaning sweetness.
The summer moths knit themselves into tight
bark crevices, pleat their wings, ease into
dormancy. The bees shiver on their combs,
measuring their stores, murmuring moris.

Zachary Bos

A Dream of Reward

Mud daubers labor on the stone lintel
above the chapel window. Their lance-tip
jaws champ soil into mortar. Their vibrissae
shape and smooth. Each pipe of clay conceals
a chain of sealed chambers; inside each cell
rests a meal of paralyzed spider and one
white egg waiting to burst open, blackbodied,
blue-winged, brutal. Perhaps
I too could transform. Turn saintly. Become
the sort of man who leaves crumbs of meat
on the stone sash to feed the masons.
Perhaps they to show thanks will chew away
my raw vêtements, and bring dust and spit
to beatify (finally) and reflesh my bones.

Zachary Bos

Zachary Bos studied poetry in the graduate workshops at the Boston University Creative Writing Program. His poetry, criticism and translations have appeared in publications including Berfois, The Christian Science Monitor, Route Two, The Bosphorus Review of Books, Noble / Gas Qtrly, Dappled Things, Public Pool, Elsewhere, Lotus-Eater, Istok, Morning Star, and Fallujah. He was named a semifinalist in the Discovery Poetry Contest organized by the Unterberg Poetry Center and in the Disquiet Literary Prize competition organized by Disquiet International. A prolific editor in the little magazine press, he formerly served as Deputy Editor of the magazine News from the Republic of Letters, founded by Keith Botsford and Saul Bellow, and has been an editor, reader or production team member with magazines including The Battersea Review, The Charles River Journal, Fulcrum, Hawk & Whippoorwill, 66: The Journal of Sonnet Studies, and Outlook Springs. As the coordinator of the Boston University BookLab project, he supervises the publication of periodicals including the literary magazines Clarion, Burn, and Stonefence Review, the translation journal Pusteblume, and an annual journal for feminist and intersectional thought, Hoochie Reader. Zachary lived for a period while growing up in Paterson, NJ, where he is taken to understand that his grandmother went to grade school with Allen Ginsberg (though this impression has not yet been substantiated). He now lives in Central Massachusetts with his wife and their small dog. He recently signed a lease for a retail space in the city of Fitchburg which will house Bonfire Bookshop (@bonfirebookshop) and the editorial office for Pen & Anvil Press (@penandanvil). He can be found on social as @zakbos.

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 Hannah Louise Poston’s Julia Hungry

followed by a note on the author

Fear of Horsess

The dripping from their exophthalmic eyes—
the dough inside their hooves that gives like rot—
their size, their size, their size—

their coffin-bones, their envelopes of flies—
the kisses of their whickers, rank and hot—
the dripping from their exophthalmic eyes,

their pupils marbled over like disguise—
the twisting stirrup and the flimsy crop—
their size, their size, their size—

the man that strokes his rasp along the sides
of hooves and pokes the tender frogs apart,
their thrush-affected frogs, their rolling eyes—

the rigid, the relentless bit that slides
in through the velvet lips, and hurts the slot—
their sighs, their sighs, their sighs—

I don’t like having them between my thighs—
I hate my lessons and I want to stop—
the dripping from their exophthalmic eyes—
their size, their size, their size—

Hannah Louise Postons

Grand Central Station

You took my hand and took me to the train.
The sky inhaled above us as we ran.
The weather was suspended like a crane.
The woman’s hand was taken by the man.
The train was in suspension on its tracks.
The woman took her ticket from her pocket.
You left me at the train and then went back.
The weather was a wire in a socket.
The train prepared to take me far away.
They heard a crackle issue from the sky.
You took my hand and left me anyway.
The absence took the woman by surprise.
They took my ticket and I took the train.
The sky exhaled. The man was in the rain.

Hannah Louise Poston

Hannah Louise Poston is a poet, essayist, and online content creator. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writer’s Program and she has received residencies and fellowships from MacDowell, The Ucross Foundation, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Wildacres, and Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park. Her work has been featured on Poetry Daily and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in several literary journals, including Ploughshares, The Yale Review, and Poetry Northwest. Her nonfiction has been featured on Longreads and has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review and The New York Times. Furtrher information is available at her website: www.hannahlouiseposton.com/

Two poems from Mary Tautin Moloney’s At the Base of Kaaterskill Falls

followed by a note on the author

At the Base of Kaaterskill Falls

My bathing suit is loose from accumulations
of ocean sand and laundry soap, soft and slack

in my hands like an offering. I am a new wife
hidden by the full length of my husband,

pulling off my pants in early autumn. The idea
to swim began with the light: low sun through still-

full trees. It seemed to hold the sudden depth
of water without a lot of questions about why now

or how long. On the morning of our wedding,
rain bounced from a winter sky. I had envisioned

the kind of current that carries. Still,
the man waited at the altar, like a stag stripped

from the Song of Songs. In the pictures, I appear
transformed, a pearl released and lifted

into grades of deeper water…I see him now
crouched near the surface. And there I am,

on the silent lurch of rock, a breath of a wife.
I stand at the edge, unable to separate falling

from a choice to fall.

Mary Tautin Moloney

interior landscape / fallen horse I

Snow falls on the fallen
horse, belly-down in a field.

Flakes fatten, arrowed for
breathing heat. More likely

freeze. Faces in profile
urge the body onward

to the blue railroad’s
rulered path. Or away

from broken slogans.
Always the ambiguities.

Black flecks dot the white
as if the horse could rise

up in pieces; as if it could
live as constellations do.

Mary Tautin Moloney

At the Base of Kaaterskill Falls first appeared in Tar River Poetry, and interior landscape / fallen horse I first appeared in The Florida Review Online.

Mary Tautin Moloney has an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. Her work has appeared in Quarterly West, Tar River Poetry, and The Florida Review, among others, and her manuscript, At the Base of Kaaterskill Falls, was a finalist in the 2019 Barrow Street Press Book Contest and the 2016 National Poetry Series. She attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2012 and was selected for the 2015 Bread Loaf Bakeless Camargo Residency fellowship in Cassis, France.

Mary works as a freelance instructional designer and is a volunteer mentor for Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Visible Ink Writing Program. Originally from Wisconsin, she lives with her husband and two children in Maplewood, NJ.

Two poems from Martin Edmunds’ Flame in a Stable

followed by a note on the author

African Funeral, Anjou

Matchflames in the cattails, mating redthroats set
the meadow smoking through thatched straw and fog.

Gashed embers, crèche of feathers, death-
bed hush and wish, rushlight
guttering on the threshold,

rustler of dovecotes, kestrel, Abakuá
seer, Dida king
in your tie-dyed raffia
suit of autumnal colors (cinnamon,
clove, gold), your black-magic
witch-doctor leopardskin
vest and gorget,

roadkill hawk, hooked
beak smashed flatter than an arrowhead
on the macadam of the allée below
the river and a row
of plane trees standing guard
in Maghreb desert camo,
your crushed skull,
that egg, that O, that zero
where nothing said what it meant
through my open mouth:
death’s open eye.

Martin Edmunds

The D.T.’s

. . . the car broke down, and an arrow
of blood on a boulder pointed
the way to Aleppo.
—Eugenio Montale, “Syria”

Global warming? It’s the dogdays, Eugenio. Ratchet the heat!
We’ve closed down the Colosseum—can’t sell a seat
with white cops offing black teens for free in the street.

National Pork Board stuffs House caucus? Sweet!
Play chicken with the Senate (the other white meat)
on cruise control. Rock the Swamp! Swipe right. Swipe left. Repeat.

Jack a Hamilton strapped, do two-to-four.
Pay tax on millions? What’s the bottom 99 percent for?
(Trickle-down‘s pigeon for piss-on-the-poor.)

Money doesn’t talk, it purrs: too small to save, too big to fail.
The Huckster-in-Chief himself is up for sale:
our one-and-only second chance at the third rail!

Perjury trap! Witch hunt! Our democracy’s cursed.
What Swamp Thing starts to life now her waters have burst?
Kool-Aid, Prez? Citizens Benighted! Roberts’ rules! You first!

Which of us hasn’t led a blameless life?
We’re hacking and frac’ing and vac’ing and liking our life
on Facebook, we follow on Twitter, we Kindle and Tinder the wife.

I am a saint for sinning, the bishop of hippos
wallowing in it, killing the competition—lighting them up with my Zippo,
I find your arrow of blood on a boulder pointing the way to Aleppo.

Go, little soul, my body’s host and guest.
The globe is bleeding refugees, the West
is stitching Kevlar to its Sunday best.

Martin Edmunds

African Funeral, Anjou first appeared in Agni (2018), and The D.T.’s first appeared in CONSEQUENCE Magazine, a journal of the cultures and consequences of war (2020).

Martin Edmunds earned an A.B. from Harvard and an M.A. from Boston University. His book The High Road to Taos won the National Poetry Series. Work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, Paris Review, Little Star, and Agni, and is featured on the Yeats Society of New York website and on Poetry Daily. Honors include an Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, and the Lloyd McKim Garrison Prize. He was poetry editor at Epiphany and has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Frolic Press published a prose chapbook, La Danza de las Zarzas; his poetry chapbook, Black Ops, was published in 2018 by Arrowsmith Press.