Amaal Al-Deeb
AMAAL AL-DEEB
ليسَ للذِّئابِ وَطن
...سَأُغَادِرُ
دُونَ فِرَاءِ الدُّبِّ وَخَاتَمِ الأَلْمَاس
دُونَ عِبَارَاتِ التَّغَزُّلِ في أُنُوثَتِي الفَرِيْدَة..
دُونَ انبِهَارِ القَتَلَةِ بالنَّظراتِ الزُّجَاجِيَّةِ لِمَقْتُوْلِيهِم..
سأرحلُ إلى فضاءٍ وسيعٍ
يحْتَوِي رُوْحِي
المُصِرَّةَ عَلَى التَأَلُّقِ..
حَتَّى بَعْدَ انْهِيَارِ الجَسَدِ الذي انْغَرَسَتْ فِيهِ آَلافُ النَّظَرَات
كَانَ فَاتِنًا بِاعتِرَافِهِم..
كَمْ تَغَزَّلُوا فِيهِ
تَمنَّى أَكْثَرُهُم أَنْ يَحْظَى بِدِفْئِهِ وَلَو لِبَعْضِ الوَقت..
الفَضاءُ يَضيقُ
أَطيافُ بعضِهم تحومُ حَولي
تَزعُمُ أنَّ مَا أَشعَلَ فِتنَتَهَا هُوَ ذَاكَ الشَّيطَانُ الـ"مُتلبِّسُني"..
كَيَمَامَةٍ تَنْقُرُ أَحْلامَهُم..
مَا زَالَ يُعَاقِرُهُم أَمَلٌ..
باحتِضَانِ طَيفِي..
أَو مُوَاقَعَةِ خَيَالِي الرَّابِضِ فِي رُكْنٍ دَفِيء
مِنْ إِحْدَى السَّمَاوَاتِ المُتَوَسِّطَة..
وَأَنَا أَهِيمُ..
أَو أَتَسَرَّبُ مِنْ خَلْفِ ظُهُورِهِمُ..
وَرُبَّمَا تَسَلَّلتُ عَلَى أَطرَافِ كِيَانِي ذَا
بَاحِثةً عنْ رَائِحَتِكَ في الأُفقِ المُحِيط
WOLVES HAVE NO HOME
I’ll leave
without the fur coat and diamond rings,
without the feminine trappings they’ve plastered to me—
I’ll leave these murderers, the outline of my shape
still flashing in their eyes
and slip away
to a place where a soul might thrive
rising and flickering like a lit wick
even after its body has collapsed, riddled with a thousand looks.
They admit my body was beautiful, admit they wanted it
so much they can’t stop eulogizing what they’ve crushed.
They’ll still seek even a moment of its heat
as the walls crowd in,
they circle, stalking me in the dark.
They claim their obsession has been sparked by the devil
who possesses me,
who pecks at their dreams like a dove.
They’ll never give up the hope
of pressing themselves against my ghost
or sleeping with my shadow
even as it glides away into the silence of middle heaven.
And so I roam,
sliding through arms to escape beyond their reach,
prowling along the seams of myself,
hunting for the scent of you on the horizon.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amaal Al-Deeb is a poet living in Egypt.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
Amir Al-Azraki is an Arab-Canadian playwright, literary translator, Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner, and Associate Professor and Coordinator of Studies in Islamic and Arab Cultures Program at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. He is the author of The Discourse of War in Contemporary Theatre, co-editor and co-translator of Contemporary Plays from Iraq, “A Rehearsal for Revolution”: An Approach to Theatre of the Oppressed, and and has had co-translated poems published in Consequence Forum, The Common, POETRY Magazine, and Talking Writing. He has recently translated Representations of the Other: The Image of Black People in the Medieval Arab Imaginary by a Bahraini critic Nader Kadhim, which will be published by McGill-Queen's University Press.
Kirun Kapur is the author of three books of poetry, Women in the Waiting Room (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Julie Suk Award and the Massachusetts Book Award; Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015) which won the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize and the Antivenom Poetry Award; and the chapbook All the Rivers in Paradise (UChicago Arts, 2022). Her work appears in AGNI, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares and many other journals. She serves as editor at the Beloit Poetry Journal and teaches at Amherst College, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program.
Muna Al Assi
MUNA AL ASSI
مياه مشبوهة
خرجت من عيادة طبيبي، خفيفة كمغفرة
.تركت في حوض أسماكه رجالا كانوا يسبحون في دمي
.علّقت على جدران عيادته، الصور المبعثرة في ذاكرة مصباحي
,حتى الأسماء، التي كان يلقيها الأصدقاء تحت نافذتي كحبات قمح يابسة
.زرعتها له فيأصيص حبقته
اصطاد كل النحل من قميصي ونظف ألوانه المائعة من الحدائق
,أنا خفيفة من قصائدي أغرقتها في كأس البيرة
.ومن أصدقاء كانوا يزدحمون في قلبي بلا أكتاف
خفيفة من عصافير كانت تعشش في جديلة قلبي
,خفيفة كوعد الغواية
,خفيفة إذاً من رجالي ومن أصدقائي
,من صوري ومن ملابسي
من نصوصي ومن نافذتي التطل على عجوز تكتب رسائل لله عن وحدتي
أنا
خ
ف
ي
ف
ة
سوى من اسم تسيل منه امرأة يابسة
MIRAGE
I left my doctor’s clinic—weightless with forgiveness.
In his fish tank, I left men swimming in my blood.
On the clinic walls, I hung photos scattered in the lantern light of
my memory.
The names recited by friends under my window,
like dried wheat seeds—I planted in his basil pots.
I hunt all the bees from my shirt & I clean the colors that melt over
gardens.
Every poem sinks in my glass of beer, & I’m light
of friends that crowded my heart without shoulders,
of friends that nested in my heart braids.
Lightness is a tempting false promise.
So—I’m not weighted by my men & my friends,
by my clothes & my photos,
by my writings & my window framing an old woman writing to
God about my loneliness.
I am
أنا
خ
ف
ي
ف
ة
Except for the weeping of the name: dry woman.
TRANSLATORS’ NOTE:
The letters in Arabic spell out khafifah, meaning ‘weightless’ or ‘light’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Muna Al Assi is a Palestinian poet and journalist, born in Syria in the Yarmouk refugee camp. She studied English literature at Damascus University and has worked in media for many years in Syria and Dubai; notably at The Gulf Emirates Newspaper. Her work has been published in French, English, Bulgarian, German, Flemish and Italian.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
Dima AlBasha is an entrepreneur and translator from Aleppo, Syria. Since coming to the United States, she has become a promoter of interfaith dialogue and intercultural understanding; as well, she’s given a TEDx talk which bridges gaps between people of different cultures and perspectives. Dima is a translator for the Her Story Is collective.
Jennifer Jean’s poetry collections include VOZ, Object Lesson, and The Fool. Her teaching resource book is Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry. She’s received honors, residencies, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, DISQUIET/Dzanc Books, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Her Story Is collective, the Academy of American Poets, and the Women’s Federation for World Peace. As well, her poems and co-translations have appeared in POETRY, Rattle, The Common, Waxwing, On the Seawall, and elsewhere. Jennifer edits translations for Consequence Forum and is the senior program manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center’s online writing program.
Rebecca Foust
REBECCA FOUST
I KEEP HOPING
In our minds our sister is lost to us
even as she continues to walk
the earth, pacing the small rooms
of her last home. Waking, sleeping,
barely eating, sleeping, waking,
and effacing minute-by-minute
into a ghost. She is lost
to us, but I keep hoping
that in her own mind she is not lost
—in her mind she is back in her life
taking dictation at the pentagon
and coming home to work
on her dollhouses till dawn,
painting lines fine as an eyelash
with a brush fine as an eyelash,
trimming tiny topiaries and
Christmas trees with twinkle lights
no bigger than the spark
that flies off a cap gun. No bigger
than the beads flocking the trees
in her shadowbox
with its “Winter White” theme
—she is lost to us—
and I keep hoping that in her mind
she is not lost but still there
somewhere, taking dictation
of what is being said
but not understood, unstringing
the tiny, shining pearls
of her memories, picking them up
with tweezers and using a glue gun
to affix each one, beautiful,
immutable, in its perfect place.
SNEAKY LIKE THAT
In the sixth week of living by myself
during the pandemic, I set up a bird feeder
to feel less alone. Now birds
with plump breasts—pigeon and quail,
nuthatch & towhee—are pecking at the trail
of seed laid almost to my back door.
They remind me of bird in The Poetics
of Space using its breast to shape its nest cup
of mud, hollowed and pressed
with so much persistence
that the nest could be said to be made,
also, of suffering.
Lately I’ve been gritting my teeth
through the days, but I’ve also begun
waking to birdsong.
The birds are so many, so close,
&—it occurs to me—not all that fast
or smart. It took a week
to coax them to the feeder,
to teach them it was there—free food
for the taking. Maybe one
could be snared for my dinner,
I think, when the food supply fails. In fact,
I could eat their seed
ground into bread & could
in a real pinch actually catch one,
or maybe it’s time
to start thinking
about buying a gun, you know,
just for food and maybe,
protection. That’s how
the thoughts never thought before
come in now, often,
but rarely articulate—sneaky like that.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rebecca Foust’s fourth full-length book Only (Four Way Books 2022) received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. Recognitions include runner up for the 2022 Missouri Review Editors Prize, winner of the Pablo Neruda, CP Cavafy, and James Hearst poetry prizes, a Marin County Poet Laureateship, and fellowships from Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Sewanee. Recent poems are in The Common, Five Points, Ploughshares, POETRY, and Quarterly West.
Richard Tillinghast
RICHARD TILLINGHAST
SMOKE
My schoolteacher friend drove me
in his schoolteacher’s-salary Subaru
from the lighthouse in St. James, explaining.
I liked riding in the wet-wool fustiness
of that car, its car-heater warmth
and up-north funk.
I liked jamming my boots down into
the days-old crumpled-up
fast food wrappers and old newspapers,
and I cleared with my glove
circles in the frost on the windshield
as we bumped off the blacktop.
Then there we were on foot in the mud and rain,
circumnavigating the circle of stones—
I counted thirty-nine. We left offerings
where others had left theirs—coins
and trinkets: a St. Christopher, a couple of jacks,
a lipstick, a rabbit’s foot, a dime-store ring.
Someone had chiseled into one of the stones
what looked like a rune.
Was that a thousand years ago?
The weather had not erased it. My friend said
that on the solstice the rising sun
lines up across the circle’s axis.
And that was when the car full of Anishinaabe
appeared—Ojibwe from the look of them—,
their car even older than ours.
I watched as they took tobacco from a pouch,
lit it and lifted up some words
into the smoke and drizzle.
Did that smoke, did those words
keep their circle unbroken
in the life they lived among us in this America?—
invisible most days, their lives unchronicled
in the newspapers crushed underfoot
inside the schoolteacher’s car.
THREADS
When I say he was a presence
in the house where I grew up,
I don’t mean as a ghost. My dead
grandfather would have had, I think,
too much tact to return
after the dirt had been shoveled, the limousines
parked, the black clothes folded and put away.
Still, his spirit inhabited our house.
He was born the last year of the war
in Tennessee, and he died
the last year of the war in France,
burning up with influenza the troops
brought back from the trenches.
When the Baptist preacher came to his bedside
to pray for him, Grandfather asked him would he
go out and get him a cold bottle of beer.
Grandfather died with his reserve intact.
How little I know of the man!
I touch, wondering, the keys he left
among his things, their antiquated
edges still sharp:
strongbox, cash drawer, lock box,
office door and locks unknown—
keys to nothing.
When I was seventeen I found
in the back of the attic
his silk frayed smoking jacket, his chesterfield
coat with its velvet lapels. I wore
his clothes until
I wore them out, feeling his spirit
breathe through the threads. Here’s his gold
watch on my table. I keep it wound.
REVIVAL
Abandoned on what was a road,
a pickup truck,
blue paint purpled by sun,
and a Model-A Ford
stalled on this shoulder of the mountain,
sumac growing up through the horsehair seats,
rusty seed pods in league
with the rust of the machine.
Creeper interlaces the tines of an antique
harvester in a field,
a cooking pot overturned in the yard.
Inside the house, pictures still hang on the walls,
though they took their Bible with them.
I don’t hear the hymns they sang, do you?
And what has become of their church?
But let this homeplace speak. Let it tell its story
now that the machinery of the world
starts to misfire,
stall out, and begin its slow deceleration.
Maybe it’s time to disappear
down into the creek bed, quick as we can,
ahead of what’s coming over the mountain,
follow the deer tracks
and the strange cries of wild turkeys.
Flakes of obsidian, arrowheads, rusty bolts,
a cannon ball from an old battle,
bleed into the stream
that obliterates our tracks.
Could we ride bareback again,
plow the earth, hunt and trap,
sew and mend,
rig a snare to catch the feral pigs,
build a tabernacle
in the loneliness of the unpeopled mountains?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Tillinghast’s new collection, Blue If Only I Could Tell You, is the winner of the 2022 White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Blue If Only I Could Tell You is his thirteenth collection, in addition to five books of creative nonfiction, including Istanbul: City of Forgetting and Remembering, and most recently, Journeys into the Mind of the World: A Book of Places, 2017. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New Republic, The New Criterion, The Best American Poetry and elsewhere. In addition, he reviewed new poetry for the New York Times Book Review for many years. The recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Council, the Irish Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Richard lives in Hawaii and spends his summers in Sewanee, Tennessee.
Angie Estes
ANGIE ESTES
SOLSTICE
Towards the end
of her life, my mother kept
saying I’m going to be here
as long as I’m supposed
to be, as long as the days
of June and as long as
Proust said a sentence needs
to be because it contains a
complete thought, and no matter
how complex it may be, the thought
should remain intact because the shape
of the sentence is the shape
of thought: think how
the hummingbird feeds as long
as it needs to, dipping
its tongue to make the nectar tremble,
although not nearly as long as I stayed
behind the Baptist church beneath
honeysuckle when I was ten, pulling
each flower’s pistil back through
its throat to drip one sweet bead
onto my tongue before my parents
drove us up into the mountains
for the all-day meeting and supper
on the ground, which always
seemed to me more like all-day
supper with cakes and pies laid out,
waiting
end-to-end on picnic tables, watermelons
soaking in their galvanized tubs
of ice while the grills kept burning
until even after evening
prayer, everyone still
had mustard on their
folded hands and
faces, the nights so dark
that all the fireflies were one
giant sparkler held up to tick away
the night in their hide-and-seek
here-I-am, over there, here, now
here, as if the shorter
the days become, the longer the sentence
needs to be.
LE PAYS OÙ JE DÉSIRERAIS VIVRE:
terra, cara, terroir: in the open
mouth of the wind, blue-black from all
the kites it has eaten, blown back
like the past, where the family lives
in Alexandre Dumas’ Le chevalier
d’Harmental : 5 rue du Temps-Perdu.
In the about-to-bloom history
of wisteria, twisting while
the soft gray paws of pussy willow
boom suddenly above me, a thunderhead
nods like Mary at the Annunciation,
recalling
how Abraham said the journey is within, from
inside us to inside us, nous même à nous
même. Where else could they be
headed in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia when
the chest of the Virgin Mary flies open
to release the beating doves?
Celtic perigrini wandered
in “thin places,” sites in landscape
where the borders between
this place and some other, past
and present, feel most fragile, begin
to fray the way bison painted on walls
in Grotte de Niaux move in
and out of rock as if it were
a membrane between worlds.
Out back,
the mourning dove bobbing
in the birdbath, one wing unfurled
and hoisted on its mast, doesn’t even think
about sailing home. She’s somewhere
between Pavlov and Pavlova.
COMMENT J’AIMERAIS MOURIR:
in Old English unweder, “unweather,”
weather so extreme that it seems
to have come from another
climate or time, still holding
in my hand a lame, which bakers use
to carve their mark
on bread—not to be
confused with l’âme, the soul—
while blackbirds line up
to form an abacus on the wire
above me, listening
to the Arpeggione Sonata, which Schubert
composed for an almost
extinct instrument, like the moon
we keep singing to anyway—Casta
Diva, pure goddess, shine
on, shine on harvest moon
up in the sky (the most difficult
part of the opera, the soprano
replied, was not crying after
her own death)—and the moon, too,
a trace fossil, a sign left
by the impress of life rather than
life itself, as in the fitting
of a bespoke jacket: all dots
and dashes, Cezanne’s
taches, what’s left of Mont Sainte-
Victoire when he is done painting it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Angie Estes is the author of six books of poems, including Enchantée (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize) and Tryst, one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize.
Valerie Duff
VALERIE DUFF
BIOME
There was a blue drink on the porch sill at the Black Whale
and it was summer.
So many things show up on tests.
This is how we live, adjusting odds, percentages
in our favor. Still I sweated in a hot back room
with windows seamed shut
googling survive googling fear googling possibility
the WiFi ghosting. Never death never radial
symmetry or prime mover. Meanwhile outside,
bumper cars and sand toys nested
in the oyster grass. Island birds pieced
their nothing songs from soft white sand
and little tar
not far from Three Mile Island
against the tide, the guard who held me upside down
for fun when I was five.
How close lifeguard
to diagnostic tool. I never felt the thing,
the jelly luminescent in my breast. Its Medusa stalks
a wave of supplication, umbrella pulse of dreams.
REPORT
Oh, honey,
the unspoken life of the body
and the world in which we drink
tea and eat the ruby
seeds that doom us half to hell.
To be so scared
when considering
the afterlife in the sentinel
pot where tea may steep too long.
A riverbed of tannin coats
the way a specimen lines a dish.
The body, its margin
assessment, has forgotten where it came from,
a snow-capped mountain that’s left
its origins behind, strata
too deep to feel, layered up
to melting ice. Its axillary
may one day give way
to a deluge that will hide
the dye stained earth, simply
spun to a surface of water,
a change so gradual
most don’t feel the slipping
of the shoreline until core
markers are submerged, until
all systems are undone. Because invasion
history of dragon fire
yields satellites
that wink and spread across the galaxy
leaving only vapors of ourselves,
prognostic rolls of the dice,
the wheel spins to reassess
when a medieval fortune teller
with the tarot comes to evaluate
the fireworks display.
All has turned to ash, to sack.
Only skin remains,
a cloak that lived the lie so long:
cutaneous tissue with no diagnostic abnormality.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Valerie Duff’s second book, Aquamarine (Lily Poetry Review Books), will be published in September 2023. Her first book, To the New World (Salmon Poetry), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize from Queens University, Belfast in 2011. She has held fellowships from the VCCA and Writers’ Room of Boston. She is currently working in Donor Relations and Stewardship at MIT and is reviews editor at Salamander.
Alison Granucci
ALISON GRANUCCI
ODE TO THE STAR-NOSED MOLE
It came out of the dark, blind sniffing
for air not light — it was
ugly & alone & without a thought, I scooped
up this fleshy star
into my fleshy palm — two organs
of touch touching the unknown.
But I was not root or stone, worm or loam,
I had to put him down —
faster than a wink, he disappeared underground.
It was love. There is no other word.
I longed to follow him down.
If soil were my home —
and my fossorial nature alive at last,
I’d use my tusky trowel claws
to throw back the earth to the earth
and burrow with a fury into the murk
tight corridor of dirt pressing me on
with no need for useless eyes,
I’d touch-bump in a blur,
hunting with my sea anemone nose — twenty-two rays
that sense my prey’s electricity through water & muck —
able to touch twelve things
in one second, I’d eat any of the twelve
deemed grub not mud —
a wonder of evolution, I’d stun worms
with my saliva & store them in my scullery.
If I were not me —
I’d mine a truer tunnel
my excavation urged
ever downward
by an inner weight
where on earth does a soul belong
clawing through rifts & grit past fossil & rock
drawn deeper
by a graver current —
the earth’s pulse
electric & receptive.
If I were a star-nosed mole —
I’d raise my own star,
ask it to guide me
as I delve
ever more elusive
to what is always
churning & iron hot —
my descent toward the
unreachable
root of all stars.
In this untold below, what prey but my own fear would I eat —
and for what would I pray?
To be held by the earth & rest —
— and to sense, with my little dipper rays
as I approach the end
how in my blind digging
all I ever touched was God.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alison Granucci is a poet, writer, and woodland gardener living in the Hudson Valley. She has poems published or forthcoming in EcoTheo Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, and a book anthology of bird poems by Paris Morning Publications. In 2005, Alison founded Blue Flower Arts, the fist literary speaker’s agency in this country to represent poets, and ran it until she retired at the end of 2019. A 2022 graduate of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program, Alison serves as a poetry reader for The Rumpus and is at work on a book-length manuscript.
Paula Bohince
PAULA BOHINCE
THE UNRAVELING
This is the field where it happened: shotgun grass
quieting casings that fell from the lesson, where cans
yipped and the kennel hushed over the summer
when Gail got the news. This is the field
where Big Jim bit the lip of his sonofabitch stallion
who’d kicked his gut, that sorrel mistake whose fetlock
went hinky, then lame, the stud fee spent
and then some, and this is the cherry, limber
in spring, blowing its kisses, and this is the walnut
stolen by arborists who promised a cut
then paid my mother in shame. I’m
on the stump, idiotic, still tasting the sawdust,
gripping a Queen Anne cordials box, her one
Christmas indulgence, bought from the Kmart before
the backroads unspooled, blue sirens
in aisles where our machine got its bobbins,
where guppies swarmed, oblivious in cities,
where I chose my training bra for its dinky charm
so when a hubbub rang down the road
I jingled, my parents running at full strength,
taking up the muddy rope lassoed round
the horse’s ribs as he reared in the ditch, in fall chaos,
the year undone, but surely there’d be another,
another, until somewhere it all tipped over. Just leave
me alone, my mother said. I’m done with the past.
She whose future was inches, my muscular dad decades
gone. I thought I’d die from confusion: unloved,
unraveled, with no one to braid me or pull.
ESCAPE TO FIJI
Swimming in a mirage, past the bull shark, sicklefin
lemon, buoyed by a personalized ocean, psychosis floating
me when I wearied, rescued thus by blue saturation, perfumed
and pumicing element, living
as on that Styx song in adolescence, trance overtaking fear
on the papasan chair,
the same biblical sentence cycling
until it engraved on my brain God’s authority. I turned
the watery page. I went to the sun unashamed, submitting to new
species: boggling palms, animals like drawings.
Say toxin again. Under a dome of aura, swirl over me
noni soap. Oils of frangipani,
verbena, gifted by the last true friend, color me in.
Flowers, include me ecstatic in your orgasm.
Opening spheres of vistas, let me buckle with, unbothered
as clownfish or mollusk. Erase me
lotioning little sister’s behind-the-ears, years of weeping
scales, skin like vellum, her head on my lap, our systems
changing
permanently, in stress. Benumbed, watching beauty queens
departing an airplane, sisterly in leis and sashes.
WOOVES
Wait, what was he asking? Wooves was how it sounded, jet-
lagged and woozy in the Highlands. Slumped dumb on Laura
Ashley, in woolens, drinking sherry, I heard, Do you
have wooves where you live? Ah, and then they came: bark-colored,
char-
coal and ash, suckling, adamant in autumnal red. I left
Cadbury bars on his studio doorstep, each one
bigger than the next to break his politesse. I bathed and watched
the rained on skylight. Burns Night Supper brought haggis
and burred recitations, talk of vintages, fox hunts.
The Oxford scholar slurred,
Did you have toy cars or a train set? The smile melting
away was a revelation, fire snarling,
hissing at the question. Alone, finally he confessed his mother
was like the iceberg in Titanic and how he felt
about that Faber rejection. A cough. A twilit handshake.
Clean as moss, I lay in castle-shadow, in moorish ambiance. Wooves
were the lips of schoolboys at water fountains after
shaggy play. His tweed jacket as he bicycled to town for bottles
of ink. Whine of the left behind echoing in the faraway.
MIDLOTHIAN GOLDFINCH
Giddy as dawn, as a promise of treasure, downwind
from the Esk, a millennium of rain erasing the temple roof,
allowing fields of moss and snowdrops. Song alert
to brokenness, leant to voices lost in wind, echoing as
no one, no one. Ecstatic bell in the steeple nest
above saplings torqued as arrows landed in a chorus.
Its call dims, in preservation, where knights once rested, grew
avid, sacrificed youth to plotting and hoarfrost, to abide
in a mutual heart, as brothers. I’m yours, the gold murmured
in dreams and waking, vocalizing each estrangement.
BONE FLUTE, 43,000 BC
Its wail fell into my feed unbidden, interrupting
trance and techno looped during the zoned-out hour
after the funeral. It called forth the cave, the ancient
bear, the femur hammered by instinct. The flutist in mother
Slovenia swayed in muslin robes, incandescent long
white hair a candle in the drip. He played the stranger’s missive
while a virus wilded. Ensconced in sunlight, like spiders
crumpled in amber, we’d stood that morning before her
name, 2021 not yet etched. Just us and a priest in a flowered mask,
a muffled commendation of her spirit, Bible thick as the
Mabinogion.
We watched an unraveling thread on his vestments soar
as he spoke, snow overwhelming the daffodils. After
the vigil, its startle tunneled through satellite and ether, laid
to rest within the delicate bones of the future. A miracle
that it should exist at all. And when tender improvisation shifted
to Ode to Joy—the familiar rampage, the forceful Go on—
it touched an anguished hollow held inside my body,
that flute the source of weeping and hope.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paula Bohince is the author of three poetry collections from Sarabande, most recently Swallows and Waves. She was the guest editor of Best New Poets 2022.
Tim Nolan
TIM NOLAN
THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW I LOVED
after Nazim Hikmet
It’s November 2020. I’m sitting
At a high-top table amidst
A pandemic in a hotel coffee bar.
On the West Bank of the Mississippi.
Minneapolis. I just read the local
Newspaper. The Vikings beat
The Packers. I don’t care one bit.
What I didn’t know I loved—
The Mississippi River. How it’s always
Been in my life. Sometimes rushing by
As cold water from snow melt up North.
Sometimes lolling—in slow procession
Pulling me to the South and gentler lands.
I didn’t know I loved the trees that bank
The river—the elms and oaks—
The birches and scrub pines. Especially
I didn’t know I loved the saplings
Clinging so earnestly to the rock shelf
Above the river. I didn’t know I loved
The rock shelf. Set this way since
The Ice Age. I didn’t know I loved
The Ice Age. Or any age for that matter.
Especially The Age of Now. Which
I didn’t know I loved. This very now.
KENNEDY, 1963
That was when it all began—
The dread—The—I Suppose This
Won’t Work Out. The obvious
Fix was in for anything that
Might remotely inspire us. So
We became cynical. I should say
I became cynical—at nine-years-old.
It was that Sunday morning when Oswald
Was shot in the gut on the TV screen.
How many times did he flinch that day?
As the old fashioned hat of Jack Ruby
And his snub nose pistol moved in?
I remember how his face was only pain.
So much pain in his face—it became ours.
In those few days we came to believe
Oswald did it. Probably alone. Probably
Just because. We always make people
Crazy. We are very good at that.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim Nolan was born in Minneapolis, graduated from the University of Minnesota with a B.A. in English, and from Columbia University in New York City with an M.F.A. in writing. Tim is an attorney in private practice in Minneapolis. His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and on The Writer’s Almanac and American Life in Poetry. Three of his four collections—The Sound of It, And Then, and The Field have been published by New Rivers Press, and the fourth, Lines, is from Nodin Press. Tim is the host of the series Readings by Writers at the University Club in St. Paul.
Jane McKinley
JANE MCKINLEY
SOLILOQUY
For Curtis W. Lasell (1953-2005)
Three weeks he’s lain with Shakespeare
propped against the knee that’s bent
on folding up, remembering the womb.
He’s learning to recite To be, or not
to be as if his life depends on whether
he delivers it without a pause, as if
a single hesitation might deliver him
to undiscover'd country, cut him down
mid-sentence, cutting short the tragedy
that is his own: elixir that is killing him,
a mother who would rather have him dead
than bear the shame of tainted illness.
He’s arming himself with words against
oblivion, against ammonia rising in his brain,
against weakness that prevents his doing
anything but think. Last time was different:
hurtled breakneck through night
to an abandoned station halfway there,
a place where time does not exist for those
arriving, those who linger on the platform,
unaware of what they’re waiting for.
On his return, he learned a week had passed,
but to his mind he’d only spent the night.
He can’t remember what he saw or heard
that haunts him, what it is that prompts: To be...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble, a professional chamber music group based in Princeton, New Jersey. Her life as a poet began in 2003 when, haunted by an image, she began writing after a lapse of thirty years. Her manuscript Vanitas won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize and was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2011. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, Southern Poetry Review, on Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She earned a Bachelor of Music from Northwestern University, an MFA in historical musicology from Princeton University, and studied Baroque oboe in Vienna with the late Jürg Schaeftlein. She lives in Hopewell, New Jersey with her husband.
Tom Yuill
TOM YUILL
SAETA
freely after Antonio Machado
Tendrils groping,
blood
on Christ’s hands,
songs of nails torn
from Christ’s
wrists,
the songs
Andalusions
sing every spring
in search of
Christ’s
pain.
Their prayers
are like ladders,
each day a bouquet
for the Christ
of the Passion.
Who do you
love?
Who chews
off his leg
to get
out
amble-
tumbling, as
each wince swims
against
the
tug of
the
mouths
of the past?
They
skin us—
those songs.
Not
to
pietas in
Christ’s pained
face
do I sing,
but the flower,
ancient,
that glides
in the night,
to Christ
as he
walks
on the
water.
ACOUSTIC SHADOW OF BALLADE DES PENDUS
Villon
Freres humaines, qui aprez nous vivez,
don’t let your hearts get hard: the more
you pity us, the more God pities you.
Not for you, to you, Brothers, do we pray.
We hang here by our necks, and Hell
and bile and hard tack acne glisten.
Magpies on our shoulders dab
our swollen cheeks. We’re scab
and bloated flesh, don’t laugh, just listen.
God loves, but doesn’t save us from ourselves.
We hang, we guess,
for not obeying laws, but see:
among us all just some will pass
as living their lives legally.
Hell’s thunder whelps
us, Virgin Mary kisses us,
on Sundays sing the birth of Christ,
but neither Christ nor Mary save us from ourselves.
Lashed by sun, ligaments dried
and slapped by the dark, then kissed,
our brows are plucked, eyes
too. Cheeks like swollen thimbles. No mist,
no rest from whipped
snow, never at peace.
We once decided what to do,
Now here, now there—we’re swept that way and this.
Fuss of fat through thimble holes
the crows peck in our cheeks. Condemn us but don’t hate us,
people. God won’t save you from yourselves.
Prince Jesus of bodies and of souls, just
keep us out of Hell. No wealth, nor hatred,
do we seek. Just people, please don’t send us there.
Prince Jesus doesn’t save us from ourselves.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom Yuill’s first book of poetry, “Medicine Show,” is published by the University of Chicago Press. He has poetry, translations and interviews published or forthcoming in Great River Review, A Public Space, Newsday, Literary Imaginations, Salamander and Dalhousie Review and featured on Poetry Daily, among others. Yuill is writing a literary biography of Francois Villon containing his own translations, adaptations, imitations and acoustic shadows of Villon’s poetry. He teaches in the World Languages and Cultures Department, Honors College, English Department, and guest lectures in the French Department, at Old Dominion University, and recently completed the first draft of his next book of poetry. Yuill also teaches various poetry classes at the Muse Writer’s Center in Virginia, and in the English Department at Norfolk State University.
Beaudelaine Pierre
BEAUDELAINE PIERRE
PARABLE OF THE CIRCUS
Consider the following:
I forced my son to ride to church
with me,
a fine Sunday morning of worship services,
untouched, yet,
waiting for rest in a viral show of hopelessness. Our COVID-19
isolation was too much to bear.
It reached its peak the time
city churches with much noticed vacant seats were slowly opening up their door
in the heat of summer 2021.
My daughter used my credit card in
ordinary unnoticed pleasures,
and my son met his friends only in Fortnite wars,
We needed help.
Last time I was at a church service and shall I say,
some American version of it,
the worship service, a group discussion,
was battling the question
“Have you ever doubted God?”
in the lit candles of the Sabbath
I have I said loudly,
from a bare and steadfast soul,
and from a certain pride,
the gray shadow covering my soul.
A big mistake, a sin,
I quickly realized.
The churchgoers haven’t.
Churching I sighed wasn’t my thing.
Just so,
to see myself too ambiguous and too impure to instantly clean up for God or
make it on time to church or
to understand the right language.
The language touch and felt from naked hearts can reach its end.
That morning my son and I returned to church
I was giving myself away to the duality of things,
their double edges and yang and yin,
and to the cohabitation of light and blackness.
On our way I warned my son whose vigil oil runs down madness like:
the church is outdoor.
I don’t care he screams,
Nothing I hush back.
Our morning enterprise was a diktat, after all.
An usher standing at the main entrance,
the church’s ordinary cornerstone and in the moment untouched, ushers:
Take the next right,
that she accompanies with a cheerful okay sign.
A scream of another sort I returned with beatitude.
I was burning out the pride,
greeting the church’s boundless ark, vault, and scents.
I finally packed the car in a corner of the church’s parking lot,
asked my son, wait a minute, and
towards the usher I walked:
where’s the worship service?
We just have to walk straight from the parking lot and,
she added in flux,
near the food distribution area.
I didn’t know there was a party.
As my son and I found our way to the church service,
I noticed a not so strange play of circumstances:
jumping castles, inflatable trampolines standing up
and performers rolling one-wheeled cycles,
all of that lightening the outdoor.
Like a lit candle of its own,
my son suddenly voiced something I was painfully trying to contain inside my chest:
isn’t this a circus show?
Equally unexpected
from the bright and jovial atmosphere,
the worship team raises their voice,
pure and humble and un-circuited above the fake castles,
“Here I am to worship, Here I am to bow down,”
a viral reminder
no matter the circus show, we were at church.
We landed on our seat my son and I six feet apart and
in between us,
the notice of a young man as dark as dark charcoal standing tall and shoulders up in the middle
of the assembly.
He is calmly pacing and lightning up the space like
he was le maître des lieux.
My son in his corner cloaked his face in his hoody on this bright summer day.
May the young man shine on him!
Truth be told, halfway through the worship service
my son stood up to walk his way,
head down though,
towards the party stand for a bottle of water,
something out of his ordinary.
The bright young man,
tall as a castle and as dark as my son,
was by this time dragging his feet here and there for all to see
and holding in his fingers a screaming bag of hot Takis.
The young lord lost his grace from being le maître des lieux
to a light that has gone turbulent and too bright and very quickly flailing.
I looked at my son,
a sort of splendid torch,
a clear and placid light I got hold of and,
for the moment, my soul to rest.
This is the irony of loss, of search,
of hopelessness: a brief candle can disclose our end very quickly,
and darkness,
the shortness of our light.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Beaudelaine Pierre, journalist, scholar, and novelist, writes about her native Haiti and her adopted Youwès. She is the author of You May Have the Suitcase Now (New Rivers Press, 2021); and also, previously, of Testaman (Bon Nouvèl, 2002), La Négresse de Saint-Domingue (Harmattan, 2010), and L’enfant qui voulait devenir président (Harmattan, 2012). She is the co-editor, with Nataša Ďurovičová, of the trilingual anthology How to Write an Earthquake / Comment écrire et quoi écrire / Mou pou 12 Janvye (AHB, 2011). Her essay “I Live Under TPS” is featured in Unbound: Composing Home edited by Nayt Rundquist (New Rivers Press, 2022). Pierre is the 2022-2024 College Arts and Humanities Institute Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University Bloomington.
Genta Nishku
GENTA NISHKU
Runner-Up of the 2022 Pink Prize for Poetry
EMBOUCHURE QUESTIONS THE PAST
i.
I deleted all adjectives.
Everything became [ ].
Subject to dictation, I copied words.
We learned to answer when called.
Someone was [ ], said nothing.
What did they mean by voice?
I moved my mouth, called your name,
no sound escaped.
The body, instrument for the voice,
like the oceans at the mercy of waves.
They held their tongues. I made myself mouth.
Your name changed shape.
I tried to mouth again. Again.
A Sunday, in other words, is called regret.
ii.
Language took a different color.
Frozen like ice, grey-white.
In air too sparse for sound,
we held face to face.
Every new sentence became longer.
But longing, on principle, requires labor.
It’s the fault of the gale. Admit it.
The swimmers had taken cover,
Us, alone, braved it without narrative,
Or plot.
iii.
An isolated cove, then. A clear, turquoise water, then.
Drowned bees on the water, surface tension held only by hope.
The olive-covered hills, property of capital. Market it: the most [ ]
on the continent. Language takes its revenge. Yesterday, you were victim.
I wanted to say something definitive, but I arrived too late.
The mouths had been put away. Ears stuffed in drawers.
Did you see me? Did you see my lips move?
And the wind, hissing, and the branches, breaking.
And the rattling walls, the collapsing statues.
Headless, no longer mouthed.
I voiced it to you, you kept it secret.
Worded it
to yourself.
MONTSERRAT SCREAMING
after a sculpture by Julio González
i.
Take inventory. Body: absent.
Face: facade. Expression: shriek.
Remove the adjectives. Iron is left,
welded until soft, the shape of a death
mask, pliable evidence of suffering.
Tell me, Montserrat, whose story is this?
Who hears you now? Who sees the burned
of your flesh? What frequency captures
the empty of your scream, that echoes,
forever, against the cold of your metal,
your body articulated into absence,
your pleas to the gods who carry
the names of men. Against their unspeakable,
the challenge of your presence, Montserrat.
Who denies you now? Who claims you
voiceless? Ungoverned by their time,
their laws, you become a pendulum
unswayable, despite season or latitude.
ii.
For Julio González, the shrieking human face was the most sublime expression.
He sculpted, and painted, screaming head after screaming head. Their cries frozen in straight lines of abstract faces, the cries silent, but the expression so pained, so distinct from all other human experience, that no one looking could escape without seeing the screams. His screaming subjects are women, common and plain, kerchiefs covering their hair, knotted by their throats, concentrating our attention on the mouth. Lonely colorless figures, they clamor to be heard, Montserrat he named them, the common name, the one he forged out of iron, unglorified parable of all wars, grotesque twist of the mouth, a mouth filled with empty, a mouth’s unuttered scream.
iii.
Once, I heard of women
connected by invisible
threads of sorrow:
a scream across lands &
oceans. Over there, hands
held out in supplication,
over here, the wailing
gone mute. They called
them kore, they called
them montserrat, called
them hopeless, waiting
ones, declared their
speech untranslatable.
Have you never felt
all the ways to say
lament?
A HISTORY OF TEETH
A tooth key used as metaphor
means so little. Why delay the facts?
The rich always knew how to hold
power, manifest it as beauty. Teeth,
ripped from the poor, volunteers,
they’d say, into the mouth of ladies
& gentlemen. Who speaks then?
Whose macabre jaws give voice to
the gospel, the constitution, the decree?
In the market for human teeth, losers
inherit smiling gaps & distorted speech:
onomatopoeia of the hopeless resounds
in abscessed mouths. Do you hear it?
It says, this is not a mouth, but a gape.
This is not a mouth, but a clot. Not a
mouth, but sound: empty and coagulated.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Genta Nishku lives in New York and was raised in Tirana. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Bennington Review, Washington Square Review, Barzakh, B O D Y, CHEAP POP, and others. Find her at gentanishku.com.
Hannah Dierdorff
Hannah dierdorff
Winner of the 2022 Pink Prize for Poetry
EXTENDED SONNET WITH TURKEY VULTURES
inside the apartment complex, i practice belief in death
the way I once believed in god—the fall
from the balcony, the red bolt through the body,
then the holy emptiness, the self erased, cleaned.
six hawks in the distance, spiraling. turkey vultures
maybe. too far to see. the morning is a mirror
in which i do not recognize myself. carnivorous,
cadaverous. hidden litanies of death trailing everything
i name. i've seen the casualties of desire—scraps
of fur on october roads, bones and trash bleaching
in the weeds. chick-fil-a cup, rusted hub cap,
plastic sheetz bag. how to speak the word love
in a landfill. how to praise the body that continues
to eat. a rooftop vent flickers in the sun, exhaling
exhaust into a tree. i tell myself i'm learning
to touch the shape of my life like the gray trunk
of a beech in which a scarlet tanager sings
shureet shureet.
A BRIEF LESSON IN RIMMING
AN APOSTATE’S ABECEDARIAN
All fall i complain to you about the light. Two days
before the solstice, the optometrist explains the irregular
curve of my eyes. Astigmatism he says but i think stigmata:
desire converging to a point of pain on a saint's
exalted palms or feet, the sudden bloom of blood from
francis's side mirroring the wounds of his beloved christ. In
giotto's painting, beams of light extend from a
hovering crucifix through the kneeling francis as
if his body is just another window, a glass frame for
joy and sorrow to pass through. i never
knew the word miraculous even when i still
longed for a shadow i called lord to touch
me in the night. In the new year, you and i climb the cliffs
near summersville lake, your body above me in a blur
of opaline light. My neck cranes back, rope
passing between my hands as you ascend, the sun's
quiver piercing my eyes. Why this grief as you
rise away from me? Ice breaks open on the lake's blue
sheen. In the painting, gold rods pin his body into place,
thanks the saint's only reply. What ties us together is wholly
unholy: a dirty green rope knotted at our hips. i am
vicious and infested with vice. My vision muddies
when you bite my neck under the dark's stars and signs, your
sex pressed to my pelvis where god never came.
Yes, every second a supernova explodes. Some
zeal asks for pain in the absence of touch. Even at its
zenith, can tenderness say enough?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Originally from Spokane, Washington, Hannah Dierdorff is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, where she taught poetry and writing. She is the recipient of the 2022 Dogwood Literary Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cut Bank, About Place, Arkansas International, Willow Springs, and elsewhere.