Two poems from Marsha Pomerantz’s Ravel and Cleave

followed by a note on the author

The Witch Ruminates in her Woodland Grave

Cut white birch above me scatters like bones down the road, sleeved in
bark that ribbons around rot. But my dead mind lights like swamp gas,
my dead belly brims. Gretel, grown into a hausfrau, by now would be
dressing drumsticks in paper frills and marching trussed fowl to the table.
Unhungry, she would like that food consumes the day, would see no
faces at the window, as I did, the two little ones, eyeing peelings. With
my knife I liked to curl ribbon around gifts, the better to bind you, the
better to tear you open, my little sacrificial lambs. I sliced and saved my
Hansel’s ringlets to show the neighbor raptors how blond he was once,
how fine he would no longer be, inside of me. Ingestion was the only
way to keep the small dears near. Oh, that grosgrain life, tied tight
around nothing. My onion skin undone now, I am not yet digested by the
earth that hems me in. Pungent onion, I push hellward.

Marsha Pomerantz

Author Photo

Really, this is just one
iteration of me. I am

often not this, turn autre
at frequent intervals, for

wildering swaths of time. I
won’t be pinned down, yet

blindly tack eternity to each
day like a tail on a donkey.

Remember the joke of jux-
taposition before you ever

heard that word? Should
my nose be a little to the

left? My left or yours?
Beethoven’s baritone

disclaims before Joy: O
friends, not these sounds.

O friends, not these lines.
Only shapes wavering

into what comes next.
Let’s be glad.

Marsha Pomerantz

Marsha Pomerantz’s collection of poems, The Illustrated Edge, was published by Biblioasis in 2011; poems and essays have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, berfrois.com, Best American Essays 2016, Boston Review, broadsidedpress.org, Harvard Review, Literary Review, quidditylit.org, Parnassus, PN Review, Raritan, and Salamander. Selections and a statement of poetics are at poetrynet.org. The artist’s book They Run, made from her poem of that title by Claire Illouz (Chérence, France), appeared in 2016: www.claire-illouz.com. Her translations from the Hebrew include poetry and fiction. More at marshapomerantz.org.

Witch was published as a broadside with art by Amy Meissner, at broadsidedpress.org; Author Photo was first published in Raritan.

Two poems from Michael Rutherglen’s Summer in Symmetry

followed by a note on the author

Youths

Then barb arced
to heel: he fell,

turned his eyes
to the epic

skies of the shield—
that first screen—

and first saw—
final sight—

the flawed swath,
far, of the false-

winged boy’s
descent, sun-scythed

into sea-furrows.
Blood-noise,

blackness now
waxing in his skull.

Now stilled, his fathers’
names rise from him.

Michael Rutherglen

Galileo in Arcetri

By a window an ephemeris left
open to ancient
rays arriving.

High inside his blindness,
a remembered sky: widdershins zodiac
over the slanted campanile.

The stones he’s thrown float up again,
the vespers’ bells transpose themselves
into a higher night

now: neural carillon,
signal fires
across his darkening hemispheres:
quick suns
just touched
with light from farther years.

Michael Rutherglen

Michael Rutherglen’s awards include a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and an Amy Clampitt Residency. He is a PhD Candidate in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Youths first appeared in 9th Letter, and Galileo in Arcetri in The Portland Review.

Two poems from Susan Parr’s Devera

followed by a note on the author

Tickled Sync

Urania, all up in her clock

While in bells I lie,
who lies, if my belle—

my female I—
the one I Hallmark,

with my feelings; we-one
I tremble with consort—

who lies, if by alt-
ernating tongues, we

two-speak false rap-
port—peal apart?

Who lies, if I she-and-I
deliver our ultima-

tum: my surly quiver,
her curt surprise—

if my two-timing slips?
If Time itself

stutters the part—
if it inserts (and she

hearts!) a skipping second
one into my her-verge,

her to-my-from—
pushes in an extra

friend, an other, phan-
tom pendulum?

Susan Parr

Tulip the Revolutionary

Unhappy with the condition of his sleep,
he diverts on a sortie to light.
A self-Atropos, he risks
a shiner in a showdown

with the Prayer Channel. He swords
whether he has any say
once Hardball gives way
to the chiffon antipodes of his taste.

And he lets his ideas pump
from his ears, his hat, his brain:
lets them flashlight
through the blood in his hands.

Susan Parr

Susan Parr’s first book of poems, Pacific Shooter, won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize and was published by Pleiades Press (2009). Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Alaska Quarterly Review, DIAGRAM, PageBoy, The Seattle Review, and the Best American Poetry series. A graduate of Barnard College with a degree in Russian Studies, and of the University of Washington’s MFA program, she has worked as a graphic designer, and more recently teaches English as a second language, in Seattle.

Two poems from Peter Specker’s Mirrors

followed by a note on the author

Infinite Infinitessimals

In the infinity of what I think
pelletable to the smallest measure
within the field of compressible space
where atoms and their parts make tiny marks,
as light turned me on I’ve oft gotten off.

Peter Specker

Beyond Numb

Outside, the concrete, the ground, minerals,
light, the running water and reflective
puddles, why even the forceful shadows,
consume the drug of not being alive,
and though some move, none are aware of it,
none take pleasure in their painless leisure.

Peter Specker

Peter Specker was born in 1947 in Callicoon New York and since 1994 has published poetry as Twixt. He studied at Cornell in the 1960’s under Taylor Stoehr, Jonathan Bishop, Neil Hertz, Harold Bloom and AR Ammons. He has had poetry published in Margie, The Indiana Review, RE:AL, Pegasus, Subtropics, Quest, Confrontation, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, The Prairie Journal(Can), Stand (UK), Tulane Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, Penmen Review, Blue Mountain Review, and many many others. His chapbook Less’ More may be found online at Azure magazine, https://www.lazuliliterarygroup.com/less-more-by-twixt.html. His collection Mirrors is being published in 2021 by Pinyon Publishing. He is a Management Consultant and lives and works in Clearwater, Florida.

Two poems from Kevin McFadden’s Wicked Bible

followed by a note on the author

Ruin

Timelessness is not so common, in fact,
might not exist; or maybe one should write
under that suspicion, time being inadequate and all
one really has to work with.

Language is here, but not for long—or as
a friend says, it’s hard to hold. He holds
each essay is a failure and it’s failure’s
failure that lends us any success.

I remember one time I was talking into
a machine, said ruin, played the voice in reverse
and swore I heard the slow and slurred word
newer. One comes, one goes. All I want is time

to make something newer, a word
like ruin. My private ruin. The rue in ruin. Rue:
two languages at once. In French, a road.
In the tongue I know too well to love, regret.

Kevin McFadden

The Senate

The eternal uses of the Senate Rules.
The leanest ruse.

That emeth above the eyes; you read its theme.
You watch it turn from meth to them.

Sedition takes editions—that’s how we roll
the bones. Malaise, at least, is a meal.

Gas an arm, say the anagrams.
Language: a gun, a leg.

That’s why a sigh for the highways.
Even directions beg discretion.

Washington? Saw nothing.
Ireful bits (filibuster) on the floor.

O Crossly forbearing (O Library of Congress)
each treason in each senator.

Kevin McFadden

Kevin McFadden is the author of Hardscrabble and the chapbook collaboration with illustrator Jeff Pike, City of Dante. He is the recipient the George Garrett Award for poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Great Lakes College Association’s New Writers Award. His poems have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Fence, Kenyon Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Poetry, and in other publications.

Two poems from Ethan Stebbins’ Selected Correspondence

followed by a note on the author

Politics

If irritation occurs, discontinue use.
– Old Saying

Welp, that’s the last time I use a foamflower
to express an abstract idea. One way
or another I’d need an opinion soon
one way or the other re: the opinions.
What would it take to do the one thing the one way
vs. the other the other? One thing was clear:
both candidates lacked the decorum
observed by fruit bats and deep-sea communities
of unicellular organisms. What brand of fog
did their mothers feed them? Who was I
to never stand beneath the vaults
of a significant pavilion and make
audacious statements, credible or otherwise?
I felt finally, funnily, like furniture.
From my neutral roost I absorbed and stored
for future use the photoelectric luster
emitted from many a buffed pink brow.
I should be good. My name is meleagris gallopavo,
and I’ll be your host for the remainder
of the nebulosity sequence. I seek pleasure
and consensus. To bestir a simmering sauce
with a smooth wood spoon is just delightful,
everyone knows. Blessed is the imperative council
of everyday product precautions.
Instruction manuals have a simple, no-nonsense
agenda. To form the word “Pennsylvania”
the mouth must carry out a series
of interconnected, not unsexy gestures.
What a strange time to be thinking about sex!

Ethan Stebbins

Difficulty

The more you play with it…
A brick guy once told me that.
Talking about the mortar.
Wry, irritable,
laconic as a rock,
the chore of instruction
offended his humility.
Is that true?
Offended? Chore?
It feels important
this is something
I not fuck up.
How good he was
at what he did.
How it pained him
to see me struggle.
I didn’t understand the mud.
The more I labored
the less it stuck.

Ethan Stebbins

Ethan Stebbins went to Colorado College and NYU and read a lot. His manuscript Dear God was selected by Kim Addonizio for the 2020 Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. His poems have appeared in this and that and that other journal.

Two poems from Jessica Savitz’s Television in the Mountains

followed by a note on the author

Bequadro Disrobes an Accidental

BEQUADRO DISROBES AN ACCIDENTAL & so ravishing & refined in its return to naturalness, as with this naked athlete in a simple stagelight of sun: the merest of sporting costume is the sheer sweat across the training ground of body; as such, with a buoyant innocence, the formal & naked body… a delight—within sheets of bound music: the natural, we arrive here when we have taken it as a matter of course: her finger will lift to strike the black key—yet—at the last second, she will not; for the natural mark assures the performer she is not to sound the very note she’s primed us to expect.

A sudden happy novice, hey, of forest hymns, & a natural romance when the song merrily dispenses with the emphatic sharp or flat that had reigned all along as if supreme: pluck the crown from a head; hers seethes with its own crown now, a life-song once so heavy-laden with ornamentation of royal brooch of sharp or flat is rendered here natural, bequadro, she who once trained at Juilliard, now she is more rarefied hippy pinching upon her homespun violin, pizzicato to pluck berries, a purity of jam & mud beneath her fingernails, she who once combed sound so chastely with her bowstrings plucked from the rump of fountaining horsetail, her hairbraid fastened taut atop her head; at present she shook from her hair a cinder of her fiery mind, o ye erudite hippy, falls crosswise to the staff in an odor of a new & natural melody burning-made.

Jessica Savitz

Television Medicines Kin to Chemistry Cabinet of TV …

TELEVISION MEDICINES KIN TO CHEMISTRY CABINET OF TV… Well. Such a doctor makes the tireless house call… In truth, in a bored or rapt consideration of such a view of colorful tincture of storyline & emotional temper tantrums or ardor or serene or erotic view in a hurry-scurry lambent tempest of color in rare tubes lined up as if in the chemistry set, (or curatorial magic, the thin wild-elbowed creature restrained in such a museum)—television, a window to this crude life—sudden change of station—a life of gossamery—it’s top-shelf, a world-class, expensive liquor in cut crystal that magically replenishes itself, television, pours itself to us with abandon, fills our glass before we even ask, with a knowing, good manners; with panache, it senses our great thirst & like a mother spills abundantly of itself into our glass & not only a demonstrable magic, not only the excitement of the flaming or smoking experiment; its greater aim is to cure ills.

Verily, Edith, it occurs to me this day that the television is a comely & dappled wealth of medicines, a humble softspun bandage packed alongside tools of silver-arrowed tinctures swung here from the proud handle of this doctor’s bag; voila, it’s a house call, the aspirins & plasmas, & even plasma tvs, are prescribed, directly to the lady of the house in the parlor, on the gorgeous crush of velvet sofa, directly positioned to take in this treatment of television. Yes, Bernard, like a doctor who makes house calls, the television in the parlor to administer joy & restoration to our lady…

& how like an enchanting spill of mercury, the magic of the story neatly played across the sterilized glass of the parlor television, a neat glass slide, to say if her fever is cause for concern, whether its spike or break might lead to a renewal of health, a flush in her cheeks evident even upon a screen of silver. Or how like a goldrush of color is invented in those television chemistry tubes—& a late goldrush of 1970s westerns, & the way watching television is like panning for gold. Having cut my teeth, so to speak, on PBS cooking shows, well-suited I am now for the royals, it feels so good to be here right now, fever like a cure. Oh the court composers who gather to swell the sound just for me, queen of the parlor, oh doctor, doctor, doctor of story, heal me, heal me.

Jessica Savitz

A graduate of Kenyon College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Jessica Savitz was the inaugural winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize, and Lake Forest College Press published her first book of poems Hunting is Painting. Several of her poems have appeared in Mrs. Maybe, a Journal of Skeptical Occultism, and Sun Sun Sun published her chapbook Fire is the Statue with the Young Face. Savitz has taught poetry writing at the University of Chicago as part of the visiting faculty, and has led community writing workshops for the Chicago Public Library system through the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts. She happily resides in Woodstock, IL with her favorite poets–her husband, Michael Savitz, and their two daughters, Aurelia and Eugenia Savitz.

Two poems from Jared Hayley’s The Depopulate

followed by a note on the author

Xeriscape

If I can, I’ll grapple with exultation,
grip it into an old, stained pillowcase,

and drop it, knotted, into the river it loves.
When sidewalks don’t weigh enough, shade and seal them

with scaffolding and spray paint. Fill the ground with garbage
seeds when the flags flap like a child reciting.

Hothouse things tethered to and trailing from me,

I want to crawl to you with robbed pottery,
so you can sell it and take credit, make treasure.

If I can, I want you to filch it with your own fingers,
dug up from my dark mud and the loam beneath

your nails, ecstatic, bearing the scent of feral animals,
greedy, thinking of honey, thinking of me.

Jared K Hayley

Every Man for Himself

Most of me waits at the crossroads,
only an empty guitar case to lean on,
another locust stuck in my teeth.

Flip-forward the zoetrope and I —
the hippie, the drunk, the punk, the psycho —
cycle through names: Echo, Eeyore, Eddie, Egon.

My eye twitches to watch
the force-feeding commence
in the mirror. Vesuvius moves.

In one future, speakers inside a plush
casket play three chords to dead ears forever.
In another my soiled hand rips through the screen.

Jared K Hayley

Jared K Hayley was born and raised on the Piney Woods of East Texas and raised on Galveston Bay. He was educated at the University of Texas (BA), the CUNY Graduate Center (MA), and Columbia University (MFA). His poems have appeared in various journals, including The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, Spinning Jenny, and American Poetry Journal. Previously an editor for the Academy of American Poets, he teaches in various colleges around Queens, NY, where he lives. When not teaching, he builds guitars and raises his children.

Two poems from Jacob Boyd’s Tattoo & Binnacle

followed by a note on the author

To a Boy I Haven’t Seen Since We Were Five

I lived on Gardenia. You lived on Miller.
My bedroom window
aimed at your backyard. Your smeared face
I can almost recall
shadowed by sour apple trees, an arrow in your hand.

Walnuts, crabapples, and rocks.
How well these fit our palms and flew. Crabapple
from the Gaelic
scrab. Walnuts from branches. Rub the green rinds
and stain with musk.

At dawn, we drain the fryers, pour wheeled buckets
of grease onto grease—
stank layers congealing in steel bins, and still the scent
of rhubarb or garlic
clings to our fingers. We shred lettuce, stock straws,
and even enjoy our chores,
all the while picturing a kitchen window, a child at dinner
on one side, his friend,
impatient, on the other. The clock like a mother.

In the old language—
Scottish Gaelic—letters were named for native trees.
Every word became
a forest: canopy, leaf litter, cradle for fire.
Take manzanita,
Latin America’s little apple, a shrub
with taffy smooth
caramel colored bark, leaves like elliptical sandpaper,
branches that bend shadows
on the Mogollan Rim in the Mazatzal mountains.
Imagine a letter
rooted in that tree, how rain would shape it,
how well you could use it
if you lived in those hills, how each season you’d speak
in varying shades of certainty.

We work alone in the silver light of walk-in freezers,
soft, brown cardboard shells
furred with ice tower before us. Our cold faces,
russet and trout white,
lift as a blushed sky widens over Kalamazoo. In Kazakhstan,
the motherland
of wild apples, old orchards are grief hostels
in a sea of spent oil.

I always think of you as native, and me as passing
through. It feels good

to say your name: Timothy Anders.
A loosened Atlantis,
unmoored, decaying slower than frozen rail ties,
but faster
than plastic. I want our words back. I confuse our youth
with the World’s.

Jacob Boyd

Trying to Remember a Hermit Thrush

Not wren, not warble, nor woman, nor ghost,
Not a foul smell in the frog of a horse’s foot,

But three or four notes
Unspooling at once from one throat,

A flute in the undergrowth, lucid
As two statues of jackrabbits

Never were and never will be. Trying
Not to remember the bird itself,

But the song the surrounding pines
Fostered: not just the song and the pines

but my first yard: there was a screen
I pressed my face against, a scent

of wire mesh, sunlight, and then
every longing that followed.

Jacob Boyd

Jacob Boyd’s work has appeared or is forthcoming from American Journal of Poetry, Bellevue Literary Review, Copper Nickel, Diode, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Stilt House, was selected by Heather McHugh as winner of the Emrys Press Award. He is an artist in residence at Northwestern University.

To a Boy I Haven’t Seen Since We Were Five appeared in North American Review; Trying to Remember a Hermit Thrush appeared in Hawk & Handsaw.

Two poems from Laura Newbern’s A Night in the Country

followed by a note on the author

Madonna of the Meadow

 
Giovanni is very old and yet he is the best painter of all.
– Albrecht Durer, 1506
 
The painter Bellini spent half his life
painting portraits of the Madonna.
Among other things.
In an early version she and the child
glow in a box of dark.
A little bit later, the painter admits
to clouds in the world, floating on either side
of the mother and child’s world.
Later still, the Madonna lifts an apple with one hand
and cups the child in her lap with the other;
more importantly they are turned
to the right, just slightly, to where there is light
and, in the distance, a simple hill.
Until at last, in 1500, he brings the girl
and her burden outside, onto a field: bleak trees
on the left, a ragged chorus of clouds stealing
behind them, more hills, and a far
tower, looking like where they used to live.
He calls it a meadow, but there are hardly flowers,
and the clouds look like smoke belched
from the smokestacks—
but those are the trees. She wears
no halo. Holds the child there. Or rather
balances him, in her blue lap, where he seems
to sleep the sleep of an old man lost
at sea, and not in a meadow, not in a field at all.

Laura Newbern

The Burning West

Every fire has a name.
Today, the Detweiler fire, which sounds
like someone tentative but intent, someone
at the door. Hello?
It’s the Detweiler fire.

Herr Detweiler—that was the name
of the Von Trapps’ eager promoter
in The Sound of Music. In which
the baroness used to be bad—I mean, I used to think
she was awful; now I understand
and even admire her veils, her perfected hair.
She wanted a husband, a beautiful home;
she wanted those stony urns on either side
of the view of the blue river,
the handsome captain standing there with her.

But no one’s so safe. Out west
the mountains are veiled in smoke, the cool
mountains, the blue Pacific and all its mists
too far away. Not near enough.
Von Schraeder—

so was the baroness named: Elsa Von Schraeder.
Maria, you might remember, had no name
besides Maria; a simple name, and a simple blue dress
that made a blue light in the night—

You could see it through all the trees.

Laura Newbern

Laura Newbern grew up in Washington, D.C.. She currently lives in Georgia, where she teaches at Georgia College and edits the journal Arts & Letters. She is the author of Love and the Eye, selected by Claudia Rankine for Kore Press, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of a Writer’s Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, she holds degrees from Barnard College, New York University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Madonna of the Meadow and The Burning West first appeared in Barrow Street (Spring 2020).