Two poems from Henry Walters’ The Nature Thief

followed by a note on the author

Lullaby

Time’s continuous is what you’re taught.
Meanwhile a spider’s made traps of the irises.
The woods are full of these stories without plot.

I found a mushroom white as a dinner plate.
They say the edibles mimic the poisonous.
Time’s continual. Is what you’re taught

of any use at all? Somehow I forgot
the name of whatever’s doing in the honeybees.
The wards are full. This story has no plot:

new blights in the beeches, the ashes, the oaks. The rot
spreads night by night, whatever the disease.
Time’s contiguous is what. You’re taught

what your parents saw & spoke & thought
except they glossed (on purpose?) the pointlessness
the world’s so full of. Stories without plot

are what I want to hum when the light goes out
& the dark comes down between & over us.
Time discontinues, & all you’re taught
is words, words to make a story out of it.

Henry Walters

King of Infinite Space

Not two inches tall, a conquistador’s horse,
stepping as high through his terrarium
as any life-size bronze in monument.

Hock-deep in moss, fern-shaded, he restores
the Old-World grandeur he’s imported from.
He’s there for illusion’s sake, is what I meant,

to scale the proportions. Maybe his Spaniard knows
how small the jungle is, how low the dome,
how the air, the heat, the gargantuan sweating plants,

are toys under glass in someone else’s room.
The marvel of it is he’d care to claim
dominion in such a country, dominance,

staked to his bit of earth as if he were
the flag of his own unnature, in miniature.

Henry Walters

Henry Walters was born in Chicago in 1984 and grew up in Clinton, Michigan. After studying Latin and Greek as an undergraduate at Harvard University, he worked as a falconer in Ireland and a beekeeper in Sicily. His first book of poems, Field Guide A Tempo, was a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His poems, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in journals such as The Threepenny Review, Orion, Asymptote, and The Iowa Review Online. He lives in New Hampshire with his young family.

Lullaby first appeared in New Letters (86:4). King of Infinite Space first appeared in The Yale Review (106:1) under the title The Marvel of It Is.

Two poems from Danielle Blau’s peep

followed by a note on the author

Villanelle

There is an order. Such an order.
Each event a word that must be read
or else, my friend — Today I woke up shorter,

sleep playing pestle to my twin bed’s mortar,
me the poor shaved meat. But no regret —
an order to these things, you see, there’s order.

Each man a crack at playing cosmic sorter.
Within each uncracked code-shell is a threat.
Today, take notice; time is getting shorter.

Two speckled eggs. Omens from the Lord, or
Nature, the clouds, some darker silhouette.
Listen, my friend: what they say’s an order.

And at this moment’s close, you’ll cross the border
into the moment after — seems no end
of days lived longly but they’re short and shorter

at each turn, the world speaks: I record her
though she only talks in languages long dead,
there is an order — yes — an awful order
my friend, wake up! Your shadow’s growing shorter.

Danielle Blau

I Am the Perennial Head of This One-Person Subcutaneous Wrecking Crew

To maintain these depths of misery
takes work given my buoyant disposition;
for every sill of my flesh
I must invent a new method to flay.
Few people know inside your skin

is a microscopic garden.
With love I tuck in seeds
of its destruction late
each night, daily tend my

dear ruin — knot distant, unsuspecting
clovers at their root tips; stomata full of
rodent bones, down

they go, the pond lilies: I’m strict. Who
could love you like you.

Danielle Blau

Danielle Blau’s Rhyme or Reason: Poets, Philosophers, and the Problem of Being Here Now is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. Her collection mere eye was selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Award and published with an introduction by D.A. Powell, and her poems won first place in the multi-genre Narrative 30 Below Contest. Poetry, short stories, articles, and interviews by Blau appear in The Atlantic, Australian Book Review, The Baffler, The Literary Review, Narrative Magazine, The New Yorker’s book blog, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, several volumes of the Plume Anthology of Poetry, and elsewhere. A graduate of Brown University with an honors degree in philosophy, and of New York University with an MFA in poetry, she curates and hosts the monthly Gavagai Music + Reading Series in Brooklyn, teaches at Hunter College in Manhattan, and lives in Queens. You can learn more about her at danielleblau.com.

Villanelle was first published in Narrative Magazine; and I Am the Perennial Head of This One-Person Subcutaneous Wrecking Crew was first published in The Paris Review.

Two poems from Isaac Pickell’s  It’s Not Over Once You Figure It Out

followed by a note on the author

what words won’t put me in the ground

if black were human
it would be already

if you were breathing
you would be ready

for all of their bark,
if opinions were just

like assholes after all
& not the trap

doors into our dying box,
if brown were human

it would already be
clear there was not

enough for everyone,
& that not enough

was the problem
& not all of us,

scared white as human
after being reminded:

if human were enough
it would be already.

Isaac Pickell

my mother had to tell me

one day I was black and the past
almost let her laugh. She had to

be told, too, but no one ever
bothered so she shared what she had

chance learned through a life
running: “they will kill you

if they catch you so you mustn’t
let them catch you.” Even now

I say the word us too much
for someone who blends

into so many thems, into a crowd
of our streets and say our names

& syncopated rhythms knowing
equality is the future &

always will be; I say stop killing us
even though I already know

I can always choose to breathe.

If I had been owned by another
Time, would I brave marching

to claim my name, choose pride
and right and right and right over

coming fear, coming the easiest
path—around and not through—

dodging a whole nation plumb
with chimneys’ vent, picturesque

curls of smoke, the slowly burn
of pain that’s learned it’s best

delivered patient, returning a body’s
investment over handshakes.

most of the time. a black seam,
a coal running endlessly

under every foot fall, under a land
in unison, in no rush to know when
it would run out because it would

never run out. I’ve always had that
chance, a good name and eyes
light enough to choose to see

more than they were seen;
you’d be a fool to choose to be
profit instead of reaping it.

you’d be a fool to even tell
a child he had another way.

I knew I was black when I was
seven-years-old and only knew

because before seven I knew
I was white. If I was owned

by another time only a fool
would let it slip, like

I had a choice.

“They will kill you if they see you
so you mustn’t let them see you.”

When I got the talk she made me

promise to remember you can
always be invisible.

Isaac Pickell

Isaac Pickell is a passing poet & PhD student at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he teaches and studies the borderlands of blackness and black literature. A graduate of Miami University’s MFA program, his work has been featured in Crazyhorse, Fence, The Journal, The Missouri Review, and Ninth Letter; you can find his new stuff online at Black Warrior Review, Protean Magazine, and Sixth Finch, and his 2021 debut, everything saved will be last, was published by Black Lawrence Press. Isaac is the founding editor of The Woodward Review, a journal of call and response hosted by Wayne State.

“what words won’t put me in the ground” was first published in Protean Magazine, November, 2020; “my mother had to tell me” was first published in Sixth Finch, August, 2020.

Two poems from Melissa Ginsburg’s Doll Apollo

followed by a note on the author

The Faked Apollo Moon Landing

A perfect parabolic arc of dust
behind the rover’s wheels

binds me to you
Earth

the way you make things heavy
blow air into a space

already filled with air
the way you hide

your stars in the sky you flag
waving army

you scientists
with your answers

***

At the edge of the crater
starless black

multiple light
sources multiple

shadows the doubts
creep in

the sky behind me creeps
outside the viewfinder

***

The flag is waving the flag looks good
without gravity

yes it looks pretty good the astronauts
look good

the earth can’t
anymore contain its

television

bring your war out

from its shadows show it
the stars

show it the moon

Melissa Ginsburg

Apollo

Wolf god. Mouse god. God trapped in a mine. God of fields and
flowers. Of pastures and herds. Sheep god. Hunter and flayer.
Mouse god, feeder of snakes. Healer god, god of arrows and
oracles you will never figure out. God of colonies and the crying
rock. Unshorn god. Shining god of mice and islands.

Wolf of healing. God in the womb already frightening. Killer of
cyclops maker of lightning. God of moderation. Monster of light.
Tender protector. Hunter god liar god. Colonizing god, god of
ships leaving, of sun in the sky, of tunnels and holes, of sowing a
seed. Slayer of Python. God of the deal.

Farm god. Lover god. God of my sister Artemis goddess of that
sleek lens through which I look, the moon. God of ships and a
sun. Supplier god, contract god. Twin god and wave god.
Waving goodbye on the dock and the ship leaving god on a
wave.

God of the oracle stops. God of compromise and centuries. God
of whispered riddles swallowed on an island. Snake-eaten god.
God of dried up waters, cratering depths. Canyon, erosion,
billowing out. Tributary god cut off from its source. God of the
dry bed, of the cold war. Together with Artemis slayer of
progeny. God of exoskeletons. God splits apart in the sky.

Melissa Ginsburg

The Faked Apollo Moon Landing and Apollo first appeared in Descant.

Melissa Ginsburg was born in Houston, Texas, in 1976, and earned her BA from the University of Houston and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. An assistant professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Ginsburg is the author of the poetry collection Dear Weather Ghost, published by Four Way Books, and 3 poetry chapbooks: Arbor (New Michigan Press), Double Blind (Dancing Girl Press), and Apollo, forthcoming from Condensery Press. She is the author of 2 novels: Sunset City, released in 2016 from Ecco Books, and The House Uptown, forthcoming in 2021 from Flatiron Books. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Denver Quarterly, Field, Pleiades, The Iowa Review, Blackbird, and other magazines. She has received support from the Mississippi Arts Council, the Ucross Foundation, and the University of Mississippi.

Two poems from Anne-Marie Thompson’s Mama Calls Me Crying

followed by a note on the author

The Secret Sound

My husband takes the radio
into the bathroom so he won’t
miss his chance to call in.
Yesterday scanning channels,
he heard the Secret Sound
and all the callers getting it wrong:
pogo stick, bug zapper,
tambourine, microwaved foil.
So today our house is all
KRTY, San Jose’s Hot Country,
all the time. The easy barstools
of a last-call pun and a predictable
melody help you make it through
the workday. Sometime today,
they’ll stop the music and play
the Secret Sound again. Current
jackpot: 1300 dollars for guessing
a 2-second, out-of-context clip.
My music school listening exams
were a string of 8-second clips
cut randomly from the hour-long
symphonies and concertos
we had to identify. Stripped
of his tremolos, Beethoven sounds
a lot like Mendelssohn, who,
stripped of his gondolas,
sounds a lot like any canal town—
Bangkok, Thailand, for example,
which can sound, in a given
8 seconds, like a tambourine,
a pogo stick, foil crinkling
and sparking. The real secret was,
the professor would have taken
any answer, especially if it
made him laugh. That semester,
his wife of twenty years had left him
for a woman, their next-door neighbor.
I learned this much later, when
I also learned that my grasp
of the musical canon was based on
flimsy answers I’d convinced myself
were right. The real secret is
to stick with Today’s
Hot Country, which pours out
all the hackneyed stories
you want to hear, helps drown
the blistering particular.
This calls for a pedal steel solo
and no further questions. Now
my husband is talking over
the shower, shouting his answer
into the phone. Before the door
even opens, releasing first
the white cloud of steam, and then
the naked man, I know he hasn’t
got it. The music’s back;
the jackpot keeps on rising.

Anne-Marie Thompson

The Arsonist Ambushes the Firefighters

so I call my brother, asking him
to become, additionally, bulletproof.

A human can only worry so many
possibilities into superpowers, can only

doubt the rules of order so long before
kindergarteners wear body armor to class

and the whole neighborhood burns,
sympathetic as a virus. We move forward,

which means back to our pact
with the world. When faced with disaster,

our brains turn first to anything else:
trusting that the open door and ransacked

dresser mean not a robbery, but
a forgetful morning, the dog feeling contrary;

gunshots near the burning house mean
a door knocked down, a hoseline bursting.

The way that I trust implicitly
the uniqueness of my hotel keycard; and so,

seeing the latched chain, and then
the elderly woman beyond, gasping in the bed,

paperback splayed on the floor,
I think first: Grandmama, here? And later:

No place is truly safe. And much later:
This is my room, lying down, finally, to read.

Anne-Marie Thompson

The Secret Sound first appeared in Literary Matters; The Arsonist Ambushes the Firefighters first appeared in Poetry Northwest.

Anne-Marie Thompson lives with her husband and son in Syracuse. Her poetry collection, Audiation, won the 2013 Donald Justice Award. Recent musical theatre collaborations with composer Ian Brandon will premiere in San Diego and London in 2020.

Two poems from Miriam Flock’s Words for Love

followed by a note on the author

Homebody

For the gods of home, the Romans had the name
Penates, swelling from the root word penus,
not the garden Priapus you’re picturing
with his improbable member, but where we enter—
storehouse, penetralia, the innermost parts.
Home is a woman’s body. My body,
mortised to join with yours, tongue and groove,
anoints me genius of the place; you priest.
Yes, I admit we’re corporate, heart and hearth
cemented through the body, however hard
we try to find, in art or even science,
a less homely truth. What if we’ve strayed
from the stolidity of our own door? It opens
to us still, and I want to be home.

Miriam Flock

The Story of Breathing

An advantage of being our age, you write,
is instantly recognizing our own subject
in the welter of the day’s gifts and slights,
the way a sailor’s wife knows a ship
as her husband’s when it’s only a point
on the horizon. So, the two men breathing

was something that came easily as breathing
to you, an image from the kind of poem you write
without the thunderous coming to a point
of my work. Why then, would I covet your subject?
I can’t imagine my lines, lithe as ships,
skittering over the unimaginably slight

narrative swell your image offers. (No slight
intended.) Yours is the story of breathing,
but it has a few essential props: a ship
and two men on the beach—you, the writer;
and your sleeping companion, the subject
of your desire. He is closer to the point

where sea and sky collide. From your point
of view, when his chest expands, the slight
shift obscures a sail that had been the subject
of your apostrophe. Thus the lover breathing
makes it impossible for you to write
what you had meant. Instead the ship

vanishing and reappearing—beloved; ship;
beloved; ship—becomes the very point,
becomes the poem you try to write,
and yet delivering, enjambed, this sleight
of body, the story of the breathing
man embroils you in logistics, a subject

that becomes an image for your subject—
out of reach, like the disappearing ship.
When I try my hand at it, my breathing
rushes to catch your image at the point
of vanishing. The exercise, however slight,
is inspiration of a kind. All right,

mine is the subject version, the only point—
to see things as you might: the ship, the slight
motion of breathing, the impetus to write.

Miriam Flock

Homebody first appeared in Southwest Review; The Story of Breathing first appeared in Western Humanities Review.

Miriam Flock is a native of Ohio. She earned her BA from Brandeis University and her MFA from Stanford. She retired last year as the COO of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Chicago Review, Georgia Review, Salmagundi and other publications.

Two poems from Anna Scotti’s Bewildered by All This Broken Sky

followed by a note on the author

Then Fall Again

Orange, gold, crunch, crisp. Apples cut in clean crescents, burnt marshmallow, smoke
caught in the folds of our jackets, in our hair. Luminaria pumpkins like ambassadors of
the season, a mustache drawn with scorched cork, then a pilgrim’s hat of black and white.
Cranberries bright as blood, a cold drift from beneath the door. Crackle of ice. Spring,
finally: silly to think all this could end, when everything is bursting! Buds furled tight
along the branch, wet and new, a girl’s soft hair, hard-soled shoes, rain against the pane
and the smell of cut grass, loam and soil and sod, blossoms on the sidewalk, petals on our
shoulders and days to spend, days to waste, hours sifted through our fingers like spilled
sugar from the bowl. Then summer’s small fruits, hard and sour, hot sidewalk, hot forehead, hot
breath of August at the window and still no way to warm you, huddled at
the heater, stifling wool and cups of tea and soup and steam, sour sweater, stinking socks,
tissues knotted on the floor and all the ways we meant to say goodbye forgotten, no ferry
now to Coronado, no starlit swim at Mazatlan. Nothing matters but to make you warm.
Then fall again: orange, gold, crunch, crisp, bones and stones and broken brown leaves.
One without you, then all the rest the same.

Anna Scotti

When I Could Still Be Seen

I once brushed by a man in a blue cotton shirt
and he sighed in wordless longing and reached
as if to catch me. I pretended then to be invisible,
as I truly am now, pushing my hair into silken masses
then letting it go, letting it go.
Before I disappeared, there was a party
where I poured grand cru, teasing other women’s
husbands ‘till they were silly with delight;
there were turquoise boxes tied up with pale ribbon,
and a ramshackle hut on a cliff at Big Sur,
drenched in moonlight. A clumsy hand traced silvered
shadows along my naked hip, before I vanished
like fragrance, like fog. There were armloads of scarlet roses,
and orchids like furled moths, a black spangled
dress, and glossy chocolates from Geary Street,
when I could still be seen. A man draped a web
of coruscating stones against my throat
and lingered on the pulse, fingers thickened
with desire. This cloak of night,
this umbral shield, were not my first magic.
Once I held a boy against my breasts as he raged,
and released him, gentled like an old dog,
that grateful. When men could still see me,
I tapped nails like painted shells against
a compact of mother of pearl, I felt the hot
stroke of eyes against my taut skin,
when I could still be seen.

Anna Scotti

Then Fall Again was first published in The New Yorker, September 24, 2018; When I Could Still Be Seen was first published in Nimrod International Journal of Poetry and Prose, November, 2018, where it won an honorable mention for the Pablo Neruda Prize.

Anna Scotti’s poetry and prose have been widely recognized with honors and publication from a diversity of literary journals. She has contributed poems to The New Yorker since 2016 and her work has recently appeared in Nimrod, Sequestrum, and The New Guard. Anna’s first young adult novel, Big and Bad, has just been released by Texas Review Press, and her short fiction appears regularly in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. A former journalist writing for national magazines, Anna now teaches at a French international school in Los Angeles. Learn more at www.annakscotti.com.

Two poems from Marsha Pomerantz’s Ravel and Cleave

followed by a note on the author

The Baron Crosses the River

The Baron Munchausen steps to the edge.
Surely this has never been done, but surely he can do it.
He has no need of overhanging branches.
The ferrymen overcharge and anyway ignore his calls.
Not a glimmer of the swimmer in him: little lapping waves dismay.
He needs only purchase. And along with purchase, leverage. This sounds like
business, but is pleasure.
That essence against which to brace one’s being.
A weight in the presence of which to be lighter.
A slip in which to loose the moorings.
A ground from which to launch one’s heaviness heavenward,
arcing across the current to the side where life
wryly resumes.
He seizes himself by the arm. He knows himself seized.
He raises, he flings, he flails, he sails. He sings.

Marsha Pomerantz

Roadkill Haiku

Flies at work: new food.
Flat chipmunk, all parts revised.
Still cute: cheek and stripes.

*
Moths are slow this year.
Clap! Wings without fey flutter.
Applaud Creation.

*
Possible possum.
Fur unzipped, in flagrante,
getting done by Death.

*
A Bambi: round, whole.
Well-bred kid caught in headlights.
So, clichés can kill?

*
I too bled in dirt.
Got salvaged and sewn up.
One syllable short.

Marsha Pomerantz

The Baron Crosses the River was first published at quidditylit.org; Roadkill Haiku was first published in Raritan.

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.

Two poems from Susan Parr’s Devera

followed by a note on the author

He Moonlights in Food Services

Indeed I dwell in the throat of a god
—Saint-John Perse

Silent busboy
with zigging skeleton—
mutton platterer—
he who lilts salami,
who does away salads bawdy,
who totes the bitten parsley
in befuddled falls,
and never apolo-
gizes, as he arcs,
and jazzercises—
one dies
to know the algorithm
he’s flung along,
the uncordoned code
of this boy’s barnstorm;
one haggles to have him,
to inspect his ajar eyes
as he collects the glasses
and one wonders, as he does—does he

speak a language?
And would he be a wag—
or would he be hard to hear—
or could he, speaking, finally conjoin—
meaning, could speech be the cord
on which a being’s hung—
conduit,
from stable, secret trunk—
ladder, to which his wandering’s
insecurely tied—
apotheistic sluice,
voice,
his body
both
vines on
and denies?

Susan Parr

Fruit Loop

The apple tree
(so like a town)
drapes changepurse arms
across the rotting wall.
In every apple’s flesh,
a spot of black,
a hole—
this town’s
in trouble.

But the leaves
(wrists of tissue,
bone/green,
windy rough
draft symphony)
do not fall.
The leaves’ town is
cottony, capable.

(repeat).

Susan Parrr

He Moonlights in Food Services first appeared (as The Answer) in Diagram; Fruit Loop also first appeared in Diagram.

Susan Parr was born in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1967. She was educated in Russian Studies at Barnard College, New York City, and later earned an MFA in Poetry from the University of Washington. A graphic designer for some years, she more recently tutors in English as a second language in Seattle, where she lives with her dog, Diamond. Her first collection of poems, Pacific Shooter, won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize and was published by Pleiades Press (2009). Her work has appeared in anthologies including The Best American Poetry series, as well as in journals such as PageBoy, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Seattle Review, and MARGIE.

Two poems from Sophie Klahr’s Two Open Doors in a Field

followed by a note on the author

Driving Through Utah, Listening to the Radio

I pulled over—the Jurassic sea was
spread in strata far across the canyon—
and sent a photograph of it to you.
I told you this was once a sea. As were
you, you said. There’s no way for faith to be
a rock, the Vatican astronomer
laughs, why would I ever want such a thing?
Just atom, just animal, symmetry;
Everything dies and that’s how it should be,
isn’t it? Too early gone, or too long
suffering—it’s what we claim loss to be,
but even Loss is the wrong word. For what
is there, is, and what is not, we still live
with. The astronomer’s laugh. What a life.

Sophie Klahr

from Like Nebraska

She sees like a memory aware of itself as memory;
He is dressing in the half-dark like some old movie:
A man in a dream of farmland, his profile
plucked from switch-grass, made visible
By light casting its line inwards,
His pale body smelling of flight like a familiar story.
An entire landscape curving to pull on a pair of boots.

Sophie Klahr

Driving Through Utah first appeared in Ploughshares; the excerpt from Like Nebraska first appeared in Blackbird.

Sophie Klahr is the author of Meet Me Here At Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016) and the chapbook _______ Versus Recovery (Pilot Books, 2007). Her poetry appears in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, and other publications. Originally a dancer, her interdisciplinary work includes creating scenic texts for theatre and choreography for performance works. Her collaborative poems with Corey Zeller have appeared or are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, The Shallow Ends, Four Way Review, and other publications. A recent Philip Roth Resident at the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts, she is the 2019-2020 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.