"Generic Kindness” by Isaac Pickell

Isaac Pickell is a poet, PhD candidate, and adjunct instructor in Detroit. A Cave Canem Fellow, Isaac is a graduate of Miami University's Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. He is the author of two collections of poetry, everything saved will be last (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and It’s not over once you figure it out (Black Ocean, 2023), and his most recent work can be found in Brevity, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, diode poetry journal, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Isaac’s taken a seat in all fifty states and has so much to look forward to.

---

Generic kindness

Does it matter where the birds go

—Louise Glück

So begins a poem about the allure of fleeting
passion—what drives a bird to color—they leave

here, that’s the point. She says it plain, like long winter
were a cipher whittling what we thought we knew

to nothing or unbearable change, like they cease
to exist with their song. But songbirds will come home

to the same trees, even after a thousand-mile flight
to passion—what drives a bird to roost—and it’s here

they make their future in every egg. You tell me love
poems are generic kindness, but we never tire of them,

especially now. As everything crumbles, we see the same
shapes in the debris, the same sorrow and possibility,

and what more is desire than sharing truth. Of course
you’d like to know endless summer with me: we could

take wingless flight into seamless blue sky, cross the Gulf
of Mexico in a day like a hummingbird does, and refuse

to return without the sun. But that is not the world we know
and so we must hold on even as we’ve been taught to let go

as a means of survival. For we are not birds, and this
is our winter, and we have so much to do together

before we leave the face of this earth.

---

Protest

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her book SHAHR-E-JAANAAN: THE CITY OF THE BELOVED (Tupelo Press, 2020), is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Gulf Coast, Meridian, The Margins, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net finalist and a Pushcart nominee, Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of an Emerging Poets Fellowship from Poets House.

---

Protest

—for Aya

Each night is a night
of slaughter;  

in the shadows
children dress in tatters,

parched, glass-eyed. Children
whose homes are ash,

children plastered
in cement and blood. 

The world doesn’t care about us,
you say. You’ve gone

from displacement to displacement

searching for life,
for rest, yet  

every evening,
the bombing starts again. 

And I want to say, look!
our streets are alive: 

banners flare & drums
beat and quicken 

like hearts. Night
after night, Aya, 

the world

is a sea chanting
Gaza, Gaza, Gaza— 

but what do I say beyond this?

Aya, I never wanted
to write your name in a poem. 

Aya, I wanted you to be eternal.

---

Five poems by Omar Sakr

Omar Sakr is the son of Arab and Turkish Muslim migrants. He is the author of three poetry collections, including The Lost Arabs (UQP), which won the 2020 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry, and a novel, Son of Sin (Affirm Press, 2022). He was awarded the 2023 Bess Hokin Prize by Poetry Magazine. His latest book is Non-Essential Work. He lives on Dharug land, where he was born and raised.

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How to identify your loves in the genocide

By their hands
By the bracelet
By the shape of their absence
In the food line
In the fuel line
By their hands
By the bracelet
By hair peeking out the pile
Do not say they are in pieces
They are everywhere

---

Good in the genocide

I have all the records of good
Occurring despite the genocide,
Extravagant kindnesses
The occupied in Gaza managed
To miracle in the misery
From the _____ to the _____
And I will not tell you of them
You do not deserve their beauty 

…Look how cruel you’ve made me.
In whose image was this written?
O God! Forgive me, I still want you
To suffer.

---

Reflection in the genocide

My son alights on his prize—a mirrored box—and is transfigured. He can see himself and wants nothing more than to release what’s within. He shakes his arm, producing a rhythmic clatter. He can’t get in. He can’t let go. He careens around the living, his whole body bent to the task, distracted by the music made in the struggle. I’ve seen this process play out with a flower, a book, a banana, the moon, the wind; he is always clutching something. My hands are full of loss. I can’t get in. I can’t let go.

---

Kisses in the genocide

I used to tear out clumps of hair
Fistfuls of white and grey, stark
Against the black. Until the day
Ato told me each brilliant fleck
marked the kiss of an ancestor. Now
When I look in the mirror I’m swept
Under the silver field, the early elders
The astonishing weight of love.

---

Holocaust in the genocide

The living and dead, my friends
And enemies, all are obscured
By millions of memories—
What some call human
Shields. Nobody has devised
A more complete weapon.

---

Three poems by Suheir Hammad

Suheir Hammad is from Brooklyn, by way of Palestine. She is American poet, author, performer, and political activist. She is the author of Breaking Poems, recipient of a 2009 American Book Award and the Arab American Book award for Poetry 2009. Her other books are ZaatarDiva; Born Palestinian, Born Black; and Drops of This Story. Her produced plays include Blood Trinity and breaking letter(s), and she wrote the libretto for the multimedia performance Re-Orientalism. An original writer and performer in the Tony-winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Suheir appears in the 2008 Cannes Film Festival Official Selection Salt of This Sea.

---

we are not numb
there are no pain killers
doctors steady themselves
against impossible pray miracle
no electric no sleep no
pain killer moons of daily
escalation blood telling trap
night raids the dawn views
our bodies morning dew
do not say abandoned
the terrified & grieving shot
reaching to recover them to cover
them no one had seen her
living hair & he used to swim
dressed in the sea let us cover
them from the flies if we not
allowed bury them whole & now
rain eyes staring night is
day no one will say tomorrow

---

TELL THEM
NOTHING
SAVE YOUR BREATH
POINT THEM TOWARDS FIRE
LEAD THEM TO DITCH
SHOW THE FLESH SMOKING
WAS OUR BROTHER
NOT A THING
TELL THEM

---

her smoking body shaking
droned out of skull & home streaming
cactus tears down sunken faces
enclave chests holding everyone ever
the living flame the woman alone
on a reef on a corner braids unraveled
eyes absorbing phosphorous proof
ablaze a lifetime of violence damages
a future without tomorrow
lips pursued tongue bit for if
ever she tells it will be a sea
of names & dreams she hums & burns
if ever she fixes her mouth
to speak bird speak again
it will be a wail of fire an inferno
a woman her one breath aflame

---

Two poems by Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi

Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi, Frontier I, a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer is a graduate of Medical Laboratory Science from Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Sixteen Songs of Loss, selected as a finalist by Rita Mookerjee (Sundress Publications Chapbook Competition, 2023), winner of the inaugural Folorunsho Editor’s Poetry Prize 2023, Labari Poetry Prize 2023, the inaugural Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature 2023, and Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize, 2022. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Fiyah Literary Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Agbowo, The Deadlands, Torch Literary Arts, Arc Poetry Magazine, Ake Review, Native Skin, The Drift, Lucent Dreaming, 20.35 Africa, Canthius, Trampset, and elsewhere. She tweets @ZainabBobi.

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A Poem Where Every Full Stop is Ceasefire

for the thousands of Palestinian children killed by Israel's airstrikes

insomnia & my eyes

lovers ceasefire   

                               rest is a myth,

                               says my reality

ceasefire

even if my dream isn't about activism

i will think it a protest ceasefire

                               i will say robbed

                               if asked of childhood

ceasefire

i will say graveyard

if asked of home ceasefire

                                i will say shattered

                                if asked of tenderness

ceasefire

truth: i search for night in airstrikes

ceasefire

for oxygen

in strides of phosphorus ceasefire

                                for families in rubbled

homes ceasefire 

                                for resemblance

in flowers ceasefire

for bluebirds in crows ceasefire  

for mornings in mourning ceasefire  

                                someday, a child will say

the ruin

                                smells familiar

ceasefire

& i will tell her her family tree

went lost under the rubble ceasefire

                               in the end, i will teach her

to write

                               her name on her arm

& raise it when she gets lost,

too ceasefire

                               but the end's end

                               will be ceasefire إن شاء الله ceasefire

---

 17 - 10 - 23 : 02 - 11 - 23

from the martyrs of Al Ahli Arab Hospital and Jabalia Refugee Camp

If you hear of our deaths

later in the day

know that the airstrike

has finally caught up

with us & the world

watched how the survivors

dug our bodies

from under the rubble

& the sky had asthma

& the rain washed, prepared

for the next spill & earth

became constipated  

too much blood     too many bodies       in a week  

& night screamed,   let me sleep, let me dream.

& post-airstrike, people asked

why leave the door open for 72 years

while the question should've been,

how do you shut the door of a war

that takes the name of a genocide?

---

Five Poems by Fatemeh Shams (Translated by Armen Davoudian)

Fatemeh Shams is a poet and associate professor of Persian literature and Gender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author a critical monograph A Revolution in Rhyme: Poetic Co-Option Under the Islamic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2021), and three poetry collections including When They Broke Down the Door (Mage 2015). Her poems have been featured in Poetry, the Hopkins Review, Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, and elsewhere. 

Armen Davoudian is the author of The Palace of Forty Pillars, forthcoming from Tin House in March 2024. His poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry, the Hopkins Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. Armen grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.

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تا گلوله می‌بارد (As Long as Bullets Fall)

تا گلوله می‌بارد

تا گلوله می‌بارد
.شعری نخواهم نوشت 

خیابان را دست آتش ریسه بسته است
و رهگذران، خمیده در جستجوی تکّه‌های خویش
 لال و کورمال از کنار یکدیگر می‌گذرند
کوچه غرق نور است
 .بی‌آن‌که تک‌چراغی زنده بر جای مانده باشد
بخششی در کار نیست
و آسمان
            چرکینِ منوّرهایی‌ست که نور کهربائی‌شان را بر خاکستر سرد خانه‌ها فرو می‌ریزند
انزوای کلماتم را
نه کوران انتقام نجات‌بخش است
نه آیه‌های ترک‌خورده‌ی آسمانی
تنها همین دریاست که لکنت دیرینه‌ام را 
  در اعماق سرخ صدایش سرودی می‌کند
و به ارواح سرگردانش پیوند می‌زند
از آسمان فرمان گریز می‌بارد
و تمام جهات زمین دهان بلعنده‌ی بی‌رحمیست
که در جستجوی تن‌های شکافته‌ تا ابد باز مانده است
گشایشی در کار نیست
مادران با گیسوان سپید در گورهای دسته‌جمعی خوابیده‌اند
.و هیچ گلویی برای شاعران جوانمرگ این خاک مرثیه‌ای نخواهد خواند 

تا گلوله می‌بارد
.شعری نخواهم نوشت

As Long as Bullets Fall

As long as bullets fall
I will not write a poem.

Fire’s hand lights up the streets
and passersby fumble past each other in blind silence
             bent searching for pieces of their bodies
the alley is flooded with light
            but not a single lamp post remains standing
there is no forgiveness
the sky
            shot by flares that shed their amber light on the cool ashes of houses          
neither the hot air of vengeance
nor the cracked verses of heaven 

lightens the loneliness of my words
only this sea turns my chronic stutter into song
            in the red depths of its voice
fusing my words to wandering ghosts
the sky rains down commands of escape
and on all sides the earth is a devouring mouth
            forever hungering for torn bodies
there is no resolution
gray-haired mothers sleep in mass graves
and no throat will lament the young poets of this land. 

As long as bullets fall
I will not write a poem. 

---

بازگشت‌ (Return)

بازگشت‌

انگشتی طبق معمول سر ساعت 
تک‌درخت سوخته را نشانه رفت
و بی‌خبر از ریشه‌ها
ماشه را چکاند
تا در سرزمین آیه‌های ترک‌خورده‌ 
.پرنده هوس آشیانه ساختن در رویای برگ‌ را از سر به در کند
سال پشت سال زیر باران آتش
 درختان پابه‌ماه زیتون هنوز میوه‌های نارس می‌زایند
و زمین گرسنه‌مانده همه‌ را می‌بلعد
اسب‌های بی‌رمق‌
شترهای زخمی
گربه‌های افلیج
و الاغ‌های خسته‌ی گوش‌به‌فرمان
هر روز در جستجوی پناه سایه‌ای از شمال به جنوب
از جنوب به اعماق آب‌ها
این بار هیچ قطب‌نمایی نمی‌داند 
دریانوردان آواره عمق سیمانی عصر را 
.با کدام بادبان درمی‌نوردند 

Return 

As usual at the appointed hour
a finger aimed at the single burnt tree
and ignorant of roots
pulled the trigger
so that no bird can hope to build its nest in the dream of a leaf
in this land of cracked scripture. 

Year after year 
under the rain of fire
pregnant olive trees bear premature fruits
and the starved earth devours them all.

Dying horses
wounded camels
limping cats
exhausted obedient donkeys 
every day search for shade’s shelter
from the north to the south
from the south
to the depths of the sea. 

This time no compass knows 
how the lost sailors will cross a noon of cement. 

---

طبیعی (Normal)

 طبیعی

تو نیستی
و همه چیز طبیعی‌ست
هر روز صبح روزنامه‌ها بدون سانسور در سرم چاپ می‌شوند
اخبار فساد اقتصادی، سلامت روان، تغذیه
و قهوه‌ی صبح هنوز دشمن فراموشیست
پس چرا در ستون تسلیت‌ها از نام تو نشانی نیست؟
از دمپایی هایت، صورتی و سمج، جفت‌شده‌ در راهرو
از استکان‌های لجوج ردیف‌شده برای آمدنت
و زوال تدریجی استخوان‌های سی و دو ساله‌ات در بهار سرد گورستانی در پایتخت
امسال از شکوفه‌های گیلاس خبری نیست
بیرون مازوت می‌سوزانند
و همه چیز همچنان طبیعی‌ست
حتّی تکه تکه شدن نابهنگام صورتم در آینه‌
عمیق‌تر شدن خطوط پیشانی
حفره‌های سیاه پای چشم‌ها
و تداوم حضور غیاب تو
.در ستون تسلیت روزنامه‌ها

Normal

You’re not here
and everything is normal
every day newspapers print uncensored in my head
corruption, mental health, nutrition
coffee in the morning is reported to fight memory loss
so why is there no sign of your name in the obituaries?
of your slippers, pink and obdurate, waiting in the hallway
of stubborn teacups lined up for your arrival
and the slow deterioration of your thirty-two-year old bones in the cold spring of a capital cemetery
no sign of cherry blossoms this year
they’re burning mazut outside
and everything is still normal
even the untimely dissolution of my face in the fog of the mirror
the deepening lines on my forehead
the dark hollows under my eyes
and the persistent presence of your absence
in the daily columns of newspapers.

---

زنجیره‌ای (Chain)

زنجیره‌ای

شعر
با خنجر
به جان کسی
در من
در شعر
کسی
با خنجر
به جان من
در شعر 
با خنجر
کسی
در من
به جان شعر
.می‌افتد

Chain 

Poetry
with a knife
to someone
in me
in poetry
someone
with a knife
to me
in poetry
with a knife
someone 
in me
puts an end
to poetry.

---

تن‌پوش (Cloak)

تن‌پوش 

متلک را می‌پوشم
شبیه پالتوی پشمینه‌ی‌ موروثی مادربزرگ
فشار دست‌های مذکّر مزاحم را
شبیه دامن گل‌دار مادرم
سرزنش‌‌های شرع را
شبیه لباس عروسی دخترک همسایه 
نگا‌ه‌ قضاوت‌گر‌شان  را
شبیه سینه‌بندی تنگ که راه بر نفس می‌بندد
راه می‌روم
در کوچه‌هایی که می‌بینندم، اما لال
می‌شنوندم، اما کر
راه می‌روم
با تنی به قدمت تاریخ ساحرگی
.و شالی که نخ به نخ در دستانم گر گرفته است

Cloak 

I wear their taunts
like grandmother’s heirloom pashmina coat
the plague of intrusive male hands
like mother’s floral skirt
the reproaches of religion
like a neighbor’s bridal dress
their gaze of judgment
like a tight bra that cuts off the breath
I walk in alleys
that see me but are mute
that hear me but are deaf
I walk with a body as old as witchcraft
and a headscarf that thread by thread
flares in my hand.

---

Six poems by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) is the author of three poetry collections: 40 WEEKS (YesYes Books, 2023), Don’t Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize, and The Many Names for Mother, winner of the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and finalist for the Jewish Book Award. She is currently working on a poetry collection as well as a book of linked lyric essays, both of which grapple with raising a neurodiverse child with a disabled partner under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, Julia's birthplace. She is the author of the model poem for "Dear Ukraine": A Global Community Poem. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review, among others. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Julia just relocated with her family to Columbus, Ohio and in fall 2023, she will join Denison University as Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing.

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Why write another poem about the moon?

Because it saves me
from turning 
to my mother 
& my children, 
body & face  

unmade, unrocked
by light. 
What are we 
if not the thing 
we run from? 

The moon broke 
out earth’s belly
& kept on
drifting, tugging
known waters—tide

too familiar 
a story. But the molten 
below is her’s too,
rock that sways
all others.

The stone
we believe
is made of light.
Why keep turning
her dark? Why 

keep naming her 
woman, expecting 
she break 
from its weight? 

Why write another poem about the moon?

Because we are as far as we will ever be
from the sun & Jupiter is as close  

as it will ever be to Saturn 
& for a moment they will appear 

as one bright star in moonless 
solstice & children everywhere will wish 

and wake believing and some 
won’t wake at all and angels 

are what some people
believe in I tell my son 

when he asks about 
Cirafini park & the children  

cast in stone there 
surrounded by iron and strung-up  

light and broken candy canes 
& he asks if I believe & I  

don’t & he says he’ll believe 
if that's all it takes  

to get wings & it is
as long a dark  

as it will ever be 
& solstice has so little  

to do with light & everything
with standing still long enough 

to appear frozen, the sun 
as far south as my son’s finger 

trying to touch horizon, sol’nishko, 
I call him, little sun & he calls out  

to the sky as though he knows 
every day that follows 

we move closer to light
even if we don't believe

in anything
but darkening distance.

Why write another poem about the moon

when we spent three hours in the social services disability doctor's office
away from any sky?    Some people have been here     all day, the receptionist says.    
My husband & congested        seven-month-old.         Is that your baby             crying? 
Someone leaving asked, an hour after             our scheduled appointment time. I hope 
you have food for her.   I resist              the urge to point         at my waxing breasts, simply say,    
yes. They call us back to check his vitals.        They call us back to have him              undress. 
Do you need an attendant        to help you undress?         

What do you need? Is not a question 

on any of the forms or in anyone's mouth. He doesn't want me          to help, leans 
against the wall or falls, his head              shaking from what they've named        a new
autoimmune neurological disorder.                  The baby coughs & smiles, snot 
running from her nose, green the way my husband tells me the Chicago river has turned
from the dye they pour into her mouth            for saint Patty's every year, the day we first kissed
in another city. I'm pushing the baby   back & forth in the office, her eyes red, wanting sleep
but the fluorescent lights are too much for both of them. My husband hides his eyes in his hands.  

The doctor begins the exam:  Walk from the door back to the table. Good.
Bend over. Good.
We’re going to get you through this.
I'm going to check your reflexes. Jumpy, but good.
The needle will prick but not hurt. Do you feel it the same on both sides? Good.
I’ve brought you this teddy bear. Tie his shoelaces. Good.
Resist my fingers. Again. You’ve got good strength.  

He gets exhausted       holding the baby, I say, his arms and body       collapse, the doctor seems
empathetic. I’m going to do what I can, he says, looks at the list of all his diagnoses. You’ve got a lot
of things there. The baby keeps crying. I try to tell him    there’s nothing my husband would rather do
than go back to the shop & work with his hands.          Come home smelling of oak & cedar,
tired enough    to play make-believe with our son. Tired enough         to make love to me. Rate
your daily pain on a scale of 1 to 10.    The answer: when I was working it used to be a daily 3 or 4, but now,
the doctor doesn't let him finish, That won't do. We must put at least 7 to 9. Sound about right? He nods
or keeps shaking his head, eyes barely open, recovering           from the physical.  

Does it wax & wane? The doctor asks. 

He has a hard time understanding        such lunar language. I resist      the urge 
to answer for him. He means the pain, I clarify, keep pushing the stroller.       It's always there, he says. 

The moon is too, I think, 
even when we don't see it. 

I write another poem about the moon

when every streak of white 
rippled by metal-winged machine 

my son names comet not plane
and reading about monarch butterflies 

he wishes for wings
like anyone who's ever looked up  

because the sky is only torn 
in daylight and the sky 

is every little boy trying
to hold his flight inside 

and I tell him these trails
are clouds not comet tails  

but just last night a meteor
exploded over the horizon 

two states north and he wants
to see it and hear the body-rattling 

boom the sky ripped out
of darkness by something strong enough  

to stone and shine because
what is every little boy 

if not speeding oxygen and iron 
fractaled flame turned solid enough  

to name and tear the sky 
because my little boy once asked me  

for the moon and learned 
how much I cannot give him

Why write another poem about the moon?

because hunger 
is its own howling 

wolved and starved
for January to end  

because it is a month 
longer than cold and light 

because waiting for snow 
or wane is just that  

waiting because the full
wolf stays hidden 

teeth in the gut 
of another                

sky full of hunger 
because full and empty  

come from the same moon
because my belly won't wax again 

but every moon I see
is what I carried  

and every woman howls 
a glow she can  

no longer keep inside 

Why write another poem about the moon?

because you wake exhausted of your own
body and its sea as far as mother

from tranquility because the moon too
can't refuse her tether in every sky 

as your children scream for you and moon
as though your bodies were both

soft and certain and your daughter's 
skin is speckled strawberry 

from frozen fruit and some 
mysterious rash between her spine  

and hairline and you think how beautiful
the rise and fall of her dusted surface  

because when the new moon moves 
between Earth and sun she leaves 

a tail of sodium and our 
planet pinches that stream invisible 

because we are wrapped in salt 
and moon is moo is milk is me is me meaning 

every moon poem is your way of making 
moon into Mama and back again 

stone to shine to disappear without 
your children ever knowing you were gone 

---

Five Poems by Rooja Mohassessy

Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator. She is a MacDowell Fellow and an MFA graduate of Pacific University, Oregon. Her debut collection When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (Feb 2023) was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Award. These poems first appeared in When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (Elixir Press, 2023). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, CALYX Journal, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review, The Adroit Journal, New Letters, The Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, The Pinch, The Rumpus, The Journal, and elsewhere.

---

The Immigrant and Envy

In the Getty version her legs are crossed,
the gossamer cloth pressed
into her pubis. In an instant she’ll withdraw
her palm and recline onto the sham.
Ribbons of gold shimmy about like wild fringes
on a flapper girl. In Rembrandt’s version a putto
vibrates by the bedpost, the velvet canopy sagging
in excess like the amazon-green drapes
Miss O’Hara fashioned into a dress.

The brazen subterranean tower ablaze,
O so blinding.
*
I only understood Scarlett
two thirds in when she got down digging
for frozen roots, the grit of war
caked into her nails, her faded affairs
and frilly gowns trailing like bait
from page to page. I skimmed the Civil War
for dragging endlessly like exhortations
of the Mullahs back home, but I strained
over Rembrandt’s Danaë. I understood God,
dry light at Asr prayer pouring
onto my janamaz. I understood shavings of the sun,
the forked sword of the prophet sharpened
on the great ingot of gold,
sparks shooting vigilant, but I couldn’t
conjure the cry, the throat that seemed to yield
to bliss like a genie released at last, the rose-blossom
of health and cellulite rippling
warm as raw fleece, the half-lifted rump, a pale linen
bunched in the damp of it.

I harkened to the picturesque call of maidens
from tower tops, the clichéd cry of the fallen
from grace, I could fathom the tear
of pubescent girl flesh
in the solitary cells of Evin prison,
but Rembrandt’s Danaë!
How he wished for her thighs to do more
than acquiesce. How she’d found the aplomb to bare
more than one length of skin at a time
I had yet to learn.

---

The Immigrant and Lament

Here’s how it went—
the wind soughed,
I played deaf and stared
ahead those mornings the sky
was a clear-day blue.
I was busy, had begun already

to flay my skin. Yes, it hurt.
How to tell it so you’d understand I didn’t like
the feel of it no more, nor the flesh
and blood I’d brought with.
Well, I had nowhere to turn. I’d clambered out
of rubble and ran
for you, you see. Then, pared,  

I began nitpicking, (it would be years
before a variation of my smile
or gait would scab with an inflection
I thought you’d approve). I picked till then
at my insistent face in the mirror, bridled
my mother tongue, swallowed radifs and quatrains.
Once obsolete, I could lie
about where I’d come from and those
I’d left to die. 

I stood sorely out of doors, blended
with hollow berries
and poisonous bristles of the common yew. 

Don’t get me wrong. None of it was your fault.
It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d been a guest.
It wouldn’t have mattered. If I’d been a guest
I would’ve known my place.
I would’ve arrived with my very tongue and God,
cupping a bowl of night-blooming jasmine
in my palms, the troop of sitar players
at my heels would’ve set the mood at the moonlit
divan and the arm’s length between us
would’ve been fragrant with petals. 

But fear trembled
in the tenor of my voice and settled
into the carriage of your mouth.

---

Rose D’Ispahan

for Fariba

I always visit the same spots at The Huntington
Botanical Gardens. On the path to the Chinese pavilion,
I turn the corner at Shakespeare’s bust, past the small
fountain neatly spilling. Advanced in midsummer,
the garden’s flooded with profuse personalities—

Ingrid Bergman,
American Beauty,
Abby’s Angel

I pause at la rose du petit prince, bent low
to the ground, the silken hem of her mauve petals
scalloped like an old nightgown—a pale ghost
of the early days where she stood aloft the escarpment,
brandishing her four thorns, coughing her low-throated
cough into the wind, like the husky sounds
from your then lush lips no one suspected
mute till parted. I try to remember why I liked her
best, not because le petit prince left as princes must,
as I did. I envisage the end—the rose chilled
without her screen. Without her glass globe
the drawn-out draft pulls at her limbs, she succumbs
to frost, the butterflies called away. Now splayed
at my feet, uprooted, fallen from the twinkle-star,
she has yet to recover. Mother, you
were such a proud flower. You packed for me
knowing it was for good. You never asked,  

Who now will hear the phone ring?

Who is to interpret this lingering ache?

Who will tell of the news, the war, who?

Who will speak for the mouths in constant motion? 

Mother, once your little prince left, how did you haggle
for rationed coupons? Who signed the air-raid siren
into your eyes? You managed though the house no longer heard
the doorbell, could barely read or write, every room dumb,
half-opened doors shutting without a sound.  

I tried to imagine you dying in different ways,
but you lay unconscious again, caught under the fridge,
its heavy door yanked off, the light inside flickering its last.
Once I dreamt you on your back, someone had pulled
the wall size canvas of the English colonel in the hall
over you like a full-length shroud. At the airport,
you remembered the head buried in you breast
was only a child’s. 

خدا نگهت داره.
God will keep you,

you signed through my tears.

*

I rise, having paid my respects as though you were dead,
and continue on my path to the pavilion, searching still
for rose d’isphahan, the pompon of Princes.
You tamed me Mother, you have a prince’s promise,
I will be forever responsible for my rose.

---

Beloved

for Amoo

I see now that all is well—the black mission,
prolific, fruit spaced out three inches along
each limb, the cat drops off a mole a day,
never a bird; a flock of house finches fret
on the weed-ridden lawn as though dandelions
were at stake. This is how I think it victory,
looking back at that final visit to Parioli.
Around our usual corner on the elegant via Collina,
graffiti now screamed in red and green,

Stranieri! Leave and leave Italy for Italians!

We queued at the Alimentari for a bottle
of ferrarelle naturale and a block of Bel Paese,
you clutching your cane, the MSF contact
for physician-assisted suicide face down
in your drawer like a wild card.
This is how I loved you—calling on la Signora
from behind his lavish display case, the clerk
skipped us and you went on leaning into that grand
ivory handle, your brow lifted under that invisible
crown of laurels as if in that moment the very world
had need of us, and I pressed the heels
of my patent leather stilettos into my spot in line,
lifted my diminutive head in genteel
admiration of the animated flourish
of the bow of a panettone before me.

Yes, we abided as though we belonged,
with our painstakingly-acquired palate
for fine cheese. Thirsty for the expensive
effervescence of spring water we stood
with just enough euros in our pockets
for a final ration of water and a wedge
of Bel Paese—the glamorous country
you had courted and escorted me through. 

Your love affair of a lifetime! Italia!
where I too learned to woo. Seduced by the lilt
of her tongue, I tagged along, ran ahead
careening the rounded corners of her cobbled alleys.
Her carefree cadence rolled off the soft palate
of your mouth and nestled into my ears, language
gushing at windblown fountains where gods
coupled in the open, where I, the lovestruck child,
raised my pinwheel to ride the same generous wind.

You poured her like pearls onto my lap as though
she were yours to bequeath—this country that now
shrugged you off as you made ready to die, frightened
the night would come where you would need
ask of her to raise your head for a sip of water.

---

When Your Sky Runs Into Mine

The curse never fell upon our nation till now! I never felt it till now.

—The Merchant of Venice (Act III, Scene 1) by William Shakespeare

When your sky runs into mine,
I’ll be sure to see to your needs, address you
with the appropriate personal pronoun.

If you’ve left behind your hands, organs,
dimensions,
senses, affections, passions,
I’ll assist you in seeking immunity, in signing
the requisite papers.

When your sky runs into mine,
I’ll grade your pigmentation by degrees,
screen you under fluorescent glare
and adjust your Protection Factor.  

In class, when your child raises his hand,
I’ll give him a chance
to demonstrate your literacy rate. 

In mixed company,
I’ll commend your tongue
on how well it speaks my tongue,
as you pronounce my name,
your accent on a foreign syllable. 

When you Naturalize,
I’ll welcome you with a handful
of questions:
Where were you born?
Are you still mourning?
Have you sworn
to return home? 

When I visit your country,
I’ll carry a trifle of your words
to use in fair trade. I’ll express myself
with a generous tip and thank you
and yours for civilizing the children
not to stare, for sterilizing
the countertops for my intestinal flora. 

When your sky runs into mine,
I’ll read your poem
and compliment Jalaluddin Rumi
on his mother-tongue.

---

Three Poems by Nathaniel Rosenthalis

Nathaniel Rosenthalis is the author of The Leniad (Broken Sleep Books, August 2023). His debut book of poems, I Won’t Begin Again, won the 2021 Burnside Review Press Book Award, and his third book, Father Figures, will be out in 2024 (Broken Sleep Books). His poems have appeared in Granta, The Chicago Review, New American Writing, Lana Turner, The Harvard Advocate, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. Based in New York City, he occasionally teaches writing at NYU, Baruch College, and Columbia University. He also works as an actor and singer.

---

Virgil

Just like a snake a bronze wheel crushes on the road
an offshoot or overgrowth of them, I see
or one smashed by a traveler’s cruel stone:
that bush, so the overgrowth becomes a home that any
mangled and half-dead, it’s desperate
one with wings can use, claim, customize, occupy, add
to, glad, glide away but can’t. It keeps coiling
bits to make it on your own. Not sure why
its long body, fiercely rearing up, its neck
the goal. Even a haircut has to converge
hissing, eyes like fire; but the maimed part drags
with something else we’ve seen before, 
down, and the snake weaves knots and falls back,
so loneliness doesn’t seem to apply. The lone
on itself: so the ship limped under oars.
Twig doesn’t raise an eyebrow. My eyebrow
still, it spread full sails and reached the port. 

“Virgil” includes an excerpt of The Aeneid translated by Shadi Bartsch, lines 273-281 in Book 5, where Aeneas and his crew have just left for the sea, leaving Dido behind.

---

Sappho

When many a guy seeks out

the first-person I, the moment becomes Aphrodite, who

if you stayed here five years and kept on asking

how many things the fighters suffered there

to get off, period, they see a

Sappho to Sappho herself, who has now

you, would get bored and go back home, again

attractive, guy they want to fuck, him

become the second-person you

when they watch 

---

from The Leniad

If we boil down the story, we’re left with a few bare bones. Leni eats at a restaurant with an
ex. Travels on a bus between cities. Has a hotel hookup, or three. Importantly, for our
purposes, he keeps a journal.

A scant metaphysics
is scatterable. A man put his hand
on Leni’s ankle.
“I’ll yes myself,” Leni thinks. As per usual.

“As a man, it’s not that I struggle to think about magic or blood”
says the Latest X.
The two of them are munching at a restaurant table.
Cold night.
He zooms inward.

“Again is one gift
of fewer sexual partners.”
He looks in the bathroom mirror.
Availability
makes him often gathering.

Blowback.
Leni passes a center
for conventions, side-eyeing
the suits in and out.
A long line. “It’s as if a lone
line has a static
I absorb, and I need it.”

Convention subject: porn. Porn can’t be separated from art. Great art
is always flanked by its dark sisters, blasphemy and pornography (says a pull-out
quote).

“Desire’s eventual.”
He thinks this, in this city.
“How much is rent?”

“A man is a force, but feeling defeated, his eyes will burn like fire, bright, not dim, as
he comes upon pretty local girls, who are like cows or sheep in sturdy pens, because
he is a mountain lion.” “A man is the in-taking of a breath by a god; when the god
gives him mouth to mouth, the man gets good at words.” “A man is a giant who
supersedes comparison with the usual types that live on bread; compare him to the
wooden peak in airy mountains.” “A man is a lion at home on a mountain when he
eats.” “A man looks like fish when speared.” “A man is a pig in a landlord’s feast
when he’s one of many murdered.” “A man is a prince who tends to be young, with
the soft skin.” “A man is a young boy who grew up like a tree to match limb for limb
that dropped seed.” “A man is material to begin.” “A man is a boy who glows like
embers.” “A man is a goose when he’s one of many, gathering to waste wealth.” “A
man is trash when he puts his feet up to get nasty.” “A man who talks too much is an
old woman at work on an old oven.” “A man who takes up space in the minds of
many, that’s a hero.” “A man is a god when more than one honors him.” “A man is
non-existence if you can’t prove him.”

Doing love well is will.
He looks outside his apartment building.
It’s cold.
He mis-sings, We ain’t ever getting older with our roommates back in Boulder.

“For why shouldn’t I roll.
My eyes do me.
To do as done and still to do.
Change no wet blue jeans, take no

hat off in the wind, for an answer.”
He hears a ringing alarm of a car
and calls it violation.
No such thing as noticing no small thing.

He’s getting out of jeans.
This opens his mouth.

He’s aware
inhaling faster thru the nose
when you suspect a bad smell
is rude.

“I’d laugh.
His musk is like the gasoline
Dad used to power his boat.
He died when I was nine. Death happens then spring’s back.” He writes this down.

“I crave danger
sometimes. Then I go back to the selfsame green.
The green iPod I wrap the
flat headphone cords around.”

Into the huge day he rides, on a train.
Hears the highway is blue in a blur. “I listen.”

“He’s not mine. Nor are his hands
mine now
which he had folded me up
with.”

“If not, one attends,” Leni thinks.
He is looking up
at loud clouds, in a group of buds.
Compare this impression to “She maintained this contradiction.”

“I’ve heard it said ‘Who are your parents?’
is one of the most important questions.
You can ask.”

Knocking around with them
he looks up at the sky.
No eagle.

The prose blocks in “The Leniad” catalog each appearance of the eyes, the heart, grief, men, the mind, night, sleep, wind, and words as metaphors in Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Leni: “I paraphrased them radically.”

---

Six Poems by Carlie Hoffman

Carlie Hoffman is the author of When There Was Light (Four Way Books, 2023) and This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021), winner of the NCPA Gold Award in poetry and a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. She is the translator of Weiße Schatten / White Shadows: Anneliese Hager (Atelier Éditions, 2023). Carlie’s honors include the 92Y “Discovery” / Boston Review poetry prize and a Poets & Writers Amy Award and her work has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, Poetry Daily, Boston Review, New England Review, Jewish Currents, and other publications. Carlie lives in Brooklyn where she edits Small Orange Journal and is a Lecturer of Creative Writing at the State University of New York at Purchase.

---

November Morning on Graham Avenue

The neighbor is playing Chopin again.
I keep the curtain closed. My favorite part

is already knowing the cold outside. Yesterday,
walking back from the store, sadness 

flew toward me from a bag of leaves,
invisible sound so beautiful I could have 

dropped my apples in the street and cried.
I haven’t had enough money or love of money

for a very long time. I put the coffee on
and open the encyclopedia to a confident age—

bombarded city with its chair in the sun,
piano glowing with people approaching

astonishment in a room from long ago—
where the dead go, they leave music behind.

---

The Wolves Ran On Through The Evergreen Forests

Little mons­ter on my lap, your song is broken, unbearable,
and the roofs of this town grow invisible vines 

toward a backwards story. I feel failed here. The wolves
are lonely, unable to reach God who is sneering

­from the mountain’s edge. Together,
we peer at the frozen trees, unreflective.  

I could snap
the root with my thumb, but instead,  

I travel with you into
the greening history and when the downpour arrives  

I am glad for the rain always happening
in the past. I am certain of the rose I carry

underneath language where music stops: 
I am giving you a better brain.

---

I Will Give This Letter to a Worm

                   After Sarah Ruehl

Letter in the frothing field of cornflower & tiger’s milk.

Letter among forsythia & speckled trout.

Letter with misplaced brain, its telephone’s Delphic ringing.

Letter swimming haphazardly toward the albacore & blue fish & basking shark.

Letter stringing hawk moth to whalebone singing the Lord.

Letter’s weathervane of thunder snake & blacksnake & cottonmouth & sidewinder & cobra.

Letter hungry for ant lion, preying locust in sun.

Letter foxlike & bassarisk, resurrecting.

At the scene of disaster: fireworm, earthworm, shipworm.

No day is new in the name of the Lord who knows language 

is a person-sized regret—no day is safe from news of me.

---

The Twenty-First Century

I watch the lonely wolves
button up

their twentieth century skins.
They wear history’s

violent beauty
like a mother 

easing into her
warmest shawl.

---

Refurbished Eden

Horses neighing in the desert that never

 ends. Strawberries from a boreal forest. Bonfire

                                                           in the garden where a pot boils for jam. Someone adds

the leaves to a century spinning a silence void of anger.

How a tongue can be a foreign creature thrashing

                                                          on its back like a toppled goat or sheep or foal. My father’s

 mother hides their Russian in cabinets

 among the worn-out spoons and sugar bowls. The language

                                                          cobwebbed, dehydrated stems peeking out from a sieve—

autumn crocus, peony, siberian lily. His mother

                                                         has firm views on everything: Here is the right time

                                                         to pick a plum. Dark is where the children go

to sleep. Basketball is American, which is good. In Liberty, New York

                                                         my father hurls his basketball at the garage door then ties

                                                         on his apron and enters his parents’ deli

                                                         to sweep away the raisoned bodies

of dead flies. His mother has firm views

                                                         on everything: Here is an honest man and a man

                                                         who is not. Here is how you grow a garden. My father

counts loose dimes and quarters for customers, pressing his hand

against their palms and the leaves sprout. He is telling

                                                           my sister and I the story again like potential memory.

He points his broom to the war, the camp, the soldiers

will order one of us to shoot the other. He holds his staff 

                                              like Moses in the garden—golden root, azalea, siberian lily.

Go ask Cain, he says. Abel’s already written down.

---

The Twenty-First Century

A girl’s mouth parts
in the middle of winter

as she turns her back on Bach,
then Heidegger, then returns

to Akhmatova
asking for the indefinite 

which is the truth. 

---

Five poems by Lauren Camp

Lauren Camp is the author of five books of poetry, including most recently Took House (Tupelo Press). Two new collections — An Eye in Each Square (River River Books) and Worn Smooth between Devourings (NYQ Books) will be published this year. Her work has been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, and Arabic. She is the Poet Laureate of New Mexico. www.laurencamp.com

---

Made of Glass

I exist in this space between nothing and a loudspeaker

pressing its clacking squalls every quarter hour.

Suddenly, our bodies are tasked to line up and we do

with our bags scarlet or black and other

uncomfortable objects. The plane will tremble us

impatient from chipped mountain

to farm. Perhaps we are not

even here. We flee within, yield to the gaze of

land weighed down. All year I have lived

between one unfurled sleep and the next.

Now we stand, line up to leave. People

are going home or toward

some other potential.

---

­­Aposiopesis

 whether or not we go past the main fact he hasn’t yet

been able to whether we almost

unpack that eternal fallacy the slope

of an end and we hear the morning bitter

history the back

of opinion the almost

said aloud and the

barely or intercessions whether

stark unsure

we’re bruised to listen

and follow the distance and another

pause and almost alert

curse the meager then in the wake of it

a word bent and awkward the audible

mistakes and several

almosts these days the word acquired never

time for the mind we return

to the skin of an incident

when we’re in it the conversation beaten

we chorus the spindly

answers

he’s removed and we want

almost to talk things

to build a hole of the infinite

drop anything in

---

Unseeable Vault

The earth revolves. I drive miles up to see

the miles and slabs of ground

that hold fragility. To notice what isn’t

with extreme clarity. Long minutes

raging wind. I watch the stone

longing to fall, longing to stand

upright. Small exercise.

Does it think of existing as a burden?

The day goes on and surrounds me.

A little bridge made of matter tugs across.

The mountains remember spare curves, the sky

blue like a scrape. I stay alone

until the moon gives its familiar and cold

descends. Wide pine for rooftops.

The drive down the same road

biting hard on the past.

Every day desperate stuck seconds,

and landscapes of shelter, and me softly

saying any sound I can make.

Putting my breath into the air which is

anything but sweet now, anything but soft.

---

A Smaller Share of Wisdom Than the Bees

In the gathering of self, I can’t remember what you know.

I was a daughter of thrift and churning.

Bad habits, misremembered origins.

My mind found this pleasing at various heights.

We had fragments and domestic spit,

acorns and adjacent points of light.

I was never forgiven.

Full as I was of the purpose of now,

I would current downstairs

to life’s pulsing or last removal.

My father kept his sentences in photographs, unopened.

My mother sat within that tornado.

I was a weed holding on to a fable. Was it all honey?

Prayers shaped a binocular I couldn’t see through.

Centuries of begats—and sorries wound tight.

The overall condition I want to describe

is sating, even the desolate morsels

of memory. Suburbs unpicked

with their consecutive days, and we took them

as geometry. I wanted to enter

the witch museum. I grew up

at subways, between God and consent

to resistance; my whole life continued. Just so much

and not more and I saw this as losing

what was greater. Now I’m writing long emails

to the dead beside a window that snores.

I could feel a room in our laughter.

I’m not telling you about love

though that’s what I taste in the dark.  

---

The Day Before

Less was the direction to need.

I had to believe there was light, and I had to be willing

to drive toward it. All want

was to shut up my heart, to rotate to a fresh

absence. How jagged I’d become

since ache could be claimed everywhere

and everywhere. Three days I traveled

to a desolation, a geologic depression, going the limit

toward the rush of rust

and shadow. To leave the world

as I saw it at my back.

So much of the known was a wound.

I went through a plain over five bridges, desire

taking a line to the barren. Because geography is scripture

and blanket, I drove it.

The more remote I went, the more I saw:

an arch of trees calligraphed

with leftover heat, the sky lathering copses,

a said-so shack listing left, left to its lack, the next

plaid plowed field. I rode away from memory

to a vanished place where ravens rehearse hunger

from a precipice and cows survey

fence undulations. The night trailed its stages:

from heavy to nothing,

then strung to a new gush of light.

I wasn’t home and couldn’t

be and didn’t have to be. 

---

Seven poems by Elizabeth Metzger

Elizabeth Metzger's second full-length collection Lying In will be published by Milkweed Editions in April 2023. She is also the author of The Spirit Papers, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, as well as the chapbooks The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death and Bed, winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, APR, and Poem-a-Day. She writes, teaches, and edits in Los Angeles, where she is a poetry editor at Los Angeles Review of Books.

---

The Whole Way

You will walk through the worst
forest like any tree
toward a glowing yellow
hole in the ground you would
almost have to step over if you were
just human.
It will be a bird why not
I cannot fly so I glow
and if that’s sorrow you
scoop it into your fat palm
where the lines of a lifetime
belong to you alone
and leave you alone at both ends.
The bird guides you where you don’t know
you’re going then wilder
in my safety
you ask the bird not me
what do you lose by protecting
who would ever sleep

---

Daughter as Myself

She feeds her rabbits.
Without their mouths they eat. Ah
their instincts are taken away.
Why twitch why hop when buckled when this world
is choosing between buckles.

Eyeing the fake moss that grows over the kitchen gate
she used to want safe want safe more
than wanting at all.
What would she do with one tooth.
What would she do with a substance to crunch only
in the same spot repeatedly.

Taste no taste. 
Pull a sheet over your tongue if you have to.
Invent a tongue
for the carrot. This meal is purely
for passing through.

---

Every Child Alone

The world closed. The family
went back to its origins. 
Didn’t they move away finally
as they promised?

Here in my future, is this 
the hotel you told me about?

It is summer I guess.
I haven’t been outside since winter.
I am a child
still of extremeness. 

I run into the arms of a man.
I never even loved him in real life.

He fathers me in a dream.
I know he has to stand for me
his face a clear wish for beginning.
He is my emptiest thing.  

My brain shrinks in daylight. 
My fingers degenerate so early.

The past is moving, I am young already.

My mother speaks her old German
she never taught us a word of—

consonants of a house settling.
We never lived in a house.

If I feel sure
I will never understand her
she can feel the same about me, she says, and adore me.

What does it mean you regret all of it?
We tried. We could not have talked longer.

She says I have never known violence,
and I remember

I knew you. Oh my god do I know you.

---

None Other

What she wants is for the new house to be an old house,
older than anything she owns. Older
than her father. No,

older than sexual love.
In dreams she cannot enter the new house.

She knows it’s hers only because it’s time
for her father never
to be old again. Always, always

from the bottom step
she knows she will wake in a spasm

having been satisfied by a house
she has never entered.

---

For Now

Fathers are sleeper trains to me.
Nobody takes them

except the few who would rather spend lifetimes
than have more time
here.

Oh they are elegant to watch
departing.

I had imagined death
as light leaving the body
but I see it is the body leaving
itself.

---

Was

The last scent I smelled before my father died 
was a rose 
I thought was a woman.

Like him it went away before I thought about it.
Long after that I plucked it.
Why now? I thought then.

Because it will never be my mother
but something else I once had.

Only now can I believe he ever arrived via the female body.
Only now have I considered he might still alter.

---

His Mind Goes Once I Get There

I am not in the room when he tries to get in my bed.

No. This is your daughter’s room, the aide says.

This is my house! he says. For the last time
he knows himself

more than he doesn’t know me.

---

Five poems by Donna Spruijt-Metz

Donna Spruijt-Metz is a poet, a psychology professor, and a recent MacDowell Fellow. Her first career was as a classical flutist. She also translates Dutch poetry to English. Her poetry and translations appear in Copper Nickel, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, the Tahoma Literary Review, the Inflectionist Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbooks are Slippery Surfaces (Finishing Line Press) and And Haunt the World (a collaboration with Flower Conroy, Ghost City Press). Camille Dungy (Orion Magazine) chose her forthcoming full length General Release from the Beginning of the World (January 2023, Free Verse Editions) as one of the 14 Recommended Poetry Collections for Winter 2022. Donna gets restless. Her website is https://www.donnasmetz.com/

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Deluge

She sings: ‘Sometimes loneliness is the only rest we get.’[1]

and I believe it—we need so much

silence. Next in the song—

tambourines & I am dancing across

the kitchen—earbuds in—

Miriam the prophet

on the shore after we walked

through the sundered sea—& then the water

whooshed down—'covered the chariots

and the horsemen, the entire force

of Pharaoh’[2]—& we danced to Miriam’s

tambourine—& this was our call

to joy—& to mourning—because

‘when your enemy falls, do not rejoice.’[3]

            This is the lesson:

            death is death.

& here, in this life, now,

I brave my own sludge to wade back

to YOU—again          

—when my friend        succumbed

—when my father couldn’t

take the heat—when they couldn’t

make it across their days

—called it quits—

I said the blessings, tore

my clothes,

covered my mirrors—

but what am I to do

with this hobbled

heart—this betrayer—how she

bursts with survival

[1] From ‘Hold On’, a song from Adele’s album 30

[2] Exodus 14: 28

[3] Proverbs 24: 17

---

Aperture

                        —in the form of a WaltMarie

I am a storm, a body in

low-grade

inflammation, plummeting towards time, 

longing

for YOU, smeared in dread, yet

sticky

with blessings. YOU, YOU formed me, the

fissures,

the openings and closings, the pain when it comes,

all blessed.

---

Sarah Returns to Me as a Hairdresser’s Fine Mist Spray Bottle Repurposed for Disinfecting Surfaces with Everclear

Omicron has shut us all down again—

again, we pry our tentacles from the lives

we had just begun to reclaim. My daughter 

brings me groceries—and I find myself

spraying down the counters—again—with the 

Hairdresser’s Fine Mist Spray Bottle. It’s the large one

you gave us along with the “travel” bottle—

for our trips to the desert—to disinfect

our VRBOs or Airbnbs—you wanted us to be

prepared for all contingencies—to be

“safe.” So today, to honor that wish, I spray 

down the counters and thank you again—unsheathe

your absence like a blade. You thought the pandemic was

over—you thought you could leave us to it—but no. Where 

can I file a complaint—spray it out

like fine mist—so that you—from the other side—will register

this—my most tender protest?

---

Sarah Returns to Me in the Form of a Ghazal

                                                                                                —after Psalm 104, verses 1-6

I read the verses—each slow to its soul.

I sit with locks and keys—tinkering this stone soul.

This light—merciful, cruel, concealing. Your ghost never leaves [1].

The darkness of it crosses the light of my eyes. What to do, my one lone soul?

I am building something. Not a scaffold. No—a roof of water. Fall through

and be carried—float the seas of our detriment, to the safety of a known soul. 

Your ghost never leaves—bent angel, refracted—just

outside my line of vision— a signpost towards my moss-grown soul.

Creaky vision, precarious—persistent—in every corner of the house I might

meet you—if I don’t blunder past, in pointless hurry, trying to protect my blown soul.

And above us—water—above the mountains—water—it oscillates above us, 

through us—my blood and your no-longer-blood can hymn here, sewn souls.

[1] ‘Your ghost never leaves” is from the song ‘Fire in my Hands’ by Iain Morrison

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Sarah Returns to Me in the Form of Questions I Never Got to Ask My Father about Abandonment

Here you are as the photographer saw you that day [1]—gentle,

folded in upon yourself—a week or so after your first

hospitalization. You were just coming back to life.

Finally, a diagnosis, a label. And with it came
medication. Your life blurred. Your art atrophied.

You, bright and fragile, were caught
in the undertow. In time, you made your choice.

What transmutes life, finally, into something unbearable?

Dear ghost, what made the choice to step over seem—inevitable?

What were you feeling right before you kicked
away the chair? I imagine you doubted, at some point, paused in your careful planning—

but you didn’t—change your mind, that is—not finally.

What was my father feeling right before he began

swallowing his curated feast of pills and

powders? As he continued to swallow?

I imagine what you both might have felt—deluged, maybe—but it always comes back again

to this, to me, to her—to that child in me—asking, did he think of me?

Did you? Could I have, somehow, changed the course?

I light the candles, scry the flame—I consider it—but stop

at summoning your spirit—it seems unkind—to call you

back to this place that you could, perhaps,

no longer tolerate—even as you hover here.

Would I call you back, father? Summon you?

No. I imagine you all those years ago—your world

vibrating around you—slow, at first—but at some point

the vibrating became too much—too high pitched—

and you vortexed.

[1] Photography @ James Walker, used with permission

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Four poems by Adeeba Shahid Talukder

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her book SHAHR-E-JAANAAN: THE CITY OF THE BELOVED (Tupelo Press, 2020), is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Poem-A-Day, Gulf Coast, Meridian, The Margins, and elsewhere. A Best of the Net finalist and a Pushcart nominee, Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is the recipient of an Emerging Poets Fellowship from Poets House.

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The Earthen Pot

in these times

God may seem cruel

but if he is moved

and his mirror, limpid,

shatters and

the golden flame of

prayer gives way to darkness

who will carry her across

the surging

river of her sins, her morality

that wants to end her?

If only

she were her own 

God, if only

she could sustain 

her breath & 

reach land if only 

she were 

cruel 

she could 

save herself.

---

Yaman, an Evening Raga

Yaman:
day’s end, bangles darkening.

Yaman: 
walks along the Hudson and its parallel mania.

Yaman
the ailment of the heart.

Yaman,
night of beauty and torment.

Yaman, 
alchemy of madness.

Yaman, 
ascent upon the rungs of stars.

Yaman, 
descent with white robe trailing.

Yaman,
the beloved’s lamp-lit gathering.

Yaman,
golden throne of poetry.

Yaman, 
the humming center of the universe.

Yaman grieves
in glissandos, collects
like moonlight in a lake.

Yaman skips her resting
note and rises 
to a frenzy.

Yaman purifies
the night of sin–see? 
She says. In ardor is
witness.

Yaman trembles like lightning,
shivers beneath blankets
the way a prophet
might.

Yaman, sleepless,
trails off in exhaustion, but summons
& extends each note
like a silver thread.

Tell her:

If you are holy,
you must sing into eternity.

Never rest on the tonic, lest
it be your last breath.

---

Nimrod’s Flame

—after Allama Iqbal and Christopher Lucka’s “Cloud Fish”

in each world    a mirror:

clouds, stars,

water in the wake 

of movement,

a handful of dust. 

your eyes— 

dead, black

gape to the end

    of sight: glass, 

     the periphery

of the universe.

look, the sky’s 

      torn now;

     light pours

into your fever—

its depth, its scorn,
its endless 

  desire.

when asked

to prove your love,   

leap out

of your element

         into the dark.

---

Shaam-e-firaaq: The Evening of Separation

—after Charlottesville and Faiz 

As we light 

the grief of you, watch the night toss,

turn, wake

from its fitful sleep.

We, too, left our homes

with torches: our light, fainter,

like the dawn so faint

we chanted and chanted

and left it behind.

---

“The Other” by Diane Seuss

I’ve fought it so hard, this

responsiveness to the other,

though as a child it was my nature

to teeter

on the edge of deathbeds and read

storybooks to the ones lying there.

Children, I think, are without ulterior motives.

Those come later, in conjunction with desire.

Maturity taught me to fight it,

that at-oneness with the sufferer. I felt good

about snatching myself back.

I had a life to live, things to lose, like my so-called

virginity, though I’d already lost it

to myself. I helped

a family friend, Jan, by then bald-headed Jan,

onto the bedside commode, and wiped her,

and got her back in bed.

Then I stopped visiting.

Her house had always been a respite.

When she got sick it became the scene of the crime.

I can still smell the sweet rot of her pee.

Like Peter

Pan I was youth! I was joy! I still had

my milk teeth.

I thought poems required a degree

of heartlessness, a running

away into the pines, to the streambed.

From that point on I became squeamish.

I could no longer dig

the bullets out of animals and brown

their thighs in butter and eat them,

or soak morels in a sink full of hot saltwater

to kill the bugs hiding in their spongey hollows.

Once I declined a man’s fig,

having heard gossip of the dead wasp living

at its center. And I have the audacity, now,

to ask people who serve the suffering

to serve with joy. Joy. What a joyless word.

As if I served the drug addicts in my life with joy.

As if I kissed the slashed wrists. The bored doctors.

I’ve only kissed one medical doctor in my life

and it was because he was young and I wanted

to pretend I was young again and he wanted

a green card. Now, when I think of doctors, I say,

out loud, don’t touch me. I think of pap smears.

They want to know what’s inside me.

I once invented a dance, with a friend

who later died of AIDS in his early twenties.

The dance was called the Dance of the Bobby Pin,

and required the dancer to pass a bobby pin

from their lips into the lips of the other dancer

while mutually undulating like snakes.

No body parts touched. Not even the lips.

The bobby pin was the lone interface,

like the coupler linking two cars of a train.

It was fun. We got laughs from onlookers.

Once, he was drunk and stoned enough

to ask if he could feel my boobs.

He wasn’t attracted to women.

His interest was purely clinical. Sure, I said,

go ahead. Feel them.

He found it to be an interesting experiment

in discovering neutrality.

He went blind before he died,

and recited the Lord’s Prayer

in order to appease his mother.

At least I assume it was an appeasement.

Maybe deep, deep down beneath

the hipness and provocations he was a true believer.

When he died, we hadn’t talked in a while.

By then I’d married his arch-nemesis.

At the core of their hostilities was art.

Always art. The person I married was envious

of playfulness in art. Playfulness got all

of the attention, he claimed,

though he was the better draftsman.

He was likewise jealous of the Dance of the Bobby Pin.

It was all projection.

Especially the marriage and the divorce.

I cried in front of the judge,

but now I realize the tears were false,

like the tap water that poured

from the eyes of Tiny Tears, the weeping doll.

What I really wanted was to bury

a pickaxe in my husband’s forehead.

With joy! With joy! With a surplus of joy!

Whatever grace you stumble upon,

don’t sit on it like a smug hen on its eggs.

Whatever you think of yourself,

think otherwise, Diane.

---

Diane Seuss is the author of five books of poetry, including frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry; Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), recipient of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She is on twitter at @dlseuss.

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Friendship Snapshot

By Dunya Mikhail

Dunya Mikhail is an Iraqi American poet and writer. She is a laureate of the UNESCO Sharja Prize for Arab Culture and has received fellowships from the United States Artists, the Guggenheim, and Kresge. Her honors also include Arab American Book Award, and UN Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. She is the first contemporary Iraqi woman poet translated into English. Her book THE WAR WORKS HARD was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. New Directions publisher three of her other poetry books and her non-fiction book,THE BEEKEEPER, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and for PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award. Her debut novel, THE BIRD TATTOO, shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, is coming out on December 6, 2022 from Pegasus. She currently works as a special lecturer of Arabic at Oakland University in Michigan.

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My friend is always busy,

so I made a new friend

of Play-Doh.

She looks lost, but happy.

Her button eyes shine with curiosity.

We sit drinking coffee,

sharing a piece of cake

and joyful little stories

the world doesn’t care about.

She amazes me with her brown pigtails

and playful sense of humor.

But one day when she tries

to tell me something

straight from the green heart

she wears like a brooch,

the words harden like dried clay

and can’t reach me to make

sense of her future absence.

This is just as it happened

with my busy friend.

Once, as we walked by the river,

I tried to remember the dream

in which I saw her coming out

of herself as light,

but I could remember only enough to say

light—light—

while she paused

to snap a photo:

two faces reflected

on the river’s sunlit surface

for an instant…

---

Four poems by Jennifer Franklin

Jennifer Franklin is the author of three full-length collections including If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, March 2023) and No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). Franklin is the recipient of a 2021 NYFA/City Artist Corps grant for poetry and a 2021 CRCF Literature Award. Her work has been published in American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Beloit, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, JAMA, The Nation, New England Review, the Paris Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Poetry Northwest, Poetry Society’s Poetry in Motion, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, and Valparaiso Review, among other places. She teaches in Manhattanville's MFA program and the Hudson Valley Writers Center, where serves as Program Director. She lives in New York City. For more about Franklin’s poetry visit jenniferfranklinpoet.com.

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June 24, 2022

That hospital room—for two decades, I have tried to crawl my way out. Its off-white walls and antiseptic smells still torment me. I read today’s headlines and think of all the women and girls now stripped by the state of their right to choose. Twenty-two winters ago, I begged them—first my mother, then my husband. Then together. I cried, hair matted and dirty from vomiting for three weeks. I pleaded with them not to force me to have the baby. As if my body already knew, at seven weeks pregnant, how sick she was and how the architecture of my life would be destroyed. Instead of helping me, my husband ordered a psychiatric consult. He was a doctor so he convinced the attending that I was hysterical and didn’t know my own mind. Anyone with a mind knows this has always been about control.

Because I love my daughter more than myself, there are some decisions that still shut every door. Dickinson wrote, “To attempt to speak of what has been, would be impossible. Abyss has no Biographer—” Nothing is enough. I volunteer to accompany women to clinics, send money to local abortion funds, write postcards to swing states—my body still a sanctuary, a spring, and a shrine. My daughter crumbles like a rag doll when she seizes, her heavy body limp in my arms. I watch us from above, our forced and permanent Pietà. Can you see the truth? The child isn’t the one who is dead.

---

Memento Mori: Colony Collapse

I used to think Dickinson covered everything
about bees but now they’re disappearing. More
alarming news competes for my attention
but my mother won’t let me forget the bees.
Her garden is almost empty of them. I learn about
their plight—abandoned queens, pesticides, parasites,
pathogens. Even her I cannot coax
more than two small bees around their buttery blooms.

Worried, she warns—nothing will survive without them.
I read the headlines—lists of man-made horrors
I cannot itemize. Funeral after funeral of those who,
struggling to breathe, called out for their mothers.
I think of the insects in Dutch still lifes. The bees lie
upturned on the table, their five eyes, all closed.

---

Nothing Can Cure Her

The woman stands at the high windows.
She is waiting for something. She stands
each day—looking out into the city.

If you don’t know her, you don’t know
why she is there, interrogating the tall window.

She stands perfectly still—head tilted
to the side. She hears music in the distance.
She has stood like this for two decades, waiting.

It is useless to speak to her. To try to convince her
to stop waiting or follow you away from the glass.

She is a mother so her heart is stitched to sorrow.
She waits for her child to return home from school
on the short yellow bus reserved for sick children.

She waits like Demeter waited for Persephone.
Always, she imagines something may have transpired

to finally heal her. Always, she is disappointed.
The child who left in the morning is the same child
who returns at dusk; nothing can cure her.

Never has a mother’s love saved her child—
from disease, from rape, from guns.

The woman has lost her youth in front of this window.
She has lost her first husband, most of her friends.
She loves the sick child more than any of them.

She even loves her grief more than she loved them.
Her grief reminds her what needs to be done.

The child cannot speak but she even loves
her daughter’s silence. The woman who loves
words more than her own life.

She is a mother. A mother is always doomed
to love most what she cannot have.

Six poems by CAConrad

CAConrad has worked with the ancient technologies of poetry and ritual since 1975. They are the author of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), as well as 9 other books of poetry. They received a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a Creative Capital grant, a Pew Fellowship, a Lambda Literary Award, a Believer Magazine Book Award, and the Gil Ott Book Award. Their play The Obituary Show was made into a film in 2022 by Augusto Cascales. They teach at Columbia University in New York City and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam. Visit them online at https://linktr.ee/CAConrad88.

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Four Poems by Mary Jo Bang

Mary Jo Bang is the author of eight books of poems, including A Doll for Throwing, The Last Two Seconds, The Bride of E, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has translated Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, and Purgatorio. She’s been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the American Academy of Berlin. She teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis. Her book of poems A Film in Which I Play Everyone is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2023. Her translation of poems by Matthias Göritz, Colonies of Paradise, is forthcoming from TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in October 2022.

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“Immaculate”

I didn’t imagine it would be like this:
day a thread that turns into ink at night
and sinks in an ocean of inverted brain waves.

Someday, I’ll no longer be
having thoughts, which is fine with me.
No more failure, no more humiliations

of the flesh. Last night I dreamed
I lost my shoes but got on a bus.
When I was too far gone to go back, I got off.

The driver drove away. That was that, I said
to the tree standing next to me, I guess
I’m lost. Then, a child arrived

dressed as a dove. With a feathered cape
that made it part child, part bird.
That one was crying and stopping,

then crying again. Every time it cried,
a halo of baby faces framed the light,
right where my lost mind was staring at air.

Immaculate is intended to be read alongside The Immaculate Conception by El Greco, ca. 1607–1613.

---

“Cosmic Madonna”

I’m available in laminate, plywood
or plastic. Either will last
through a nuclear winter. That’s not to say

there won’t be difficult days,
there will be. They keep coming around
like a regifted Christmas.

Out the window, the street is clear—
no people, no cars, then here comes a clock
dragging a minute through the mud,

ruining the illusion of standstill and closure.
The last of my seven sorrows is the boy
who disappeared like a pin

that rolled under a floorboard, unreachable,
never to be seen again.
I know that’s nothing compared to a war

where the dead lie looking up,
their eyes aimed forever at heaven.
I was once a bronze statue. Someone said

they saw me weeping. Tell me, am I
the only one who doubts that a bronze icon
can cry? Or wonders why the men

in a painting of the magi are wearing tunics
and tights? Was that the fashion year zero
in the West Bank? Surely not.

One life lacks the depth and extravagance
of a country in crisis, yet
here we are, crying for their lives and ours.

His life and mine. That time and this
and all of the times when death happened
through spiteful and vain acts of self-interest.

Cosmic Madonna is intended to be read alongside Cosmic Madonna by Salvador Dalí, 1958.

---

“Mary, Star of the Sea”

In the Nativity set Holy Christmas
Crochet Pattern (Virgin Mary, Joseph,
& Jesus), Joseph has a beard

and a turned-down mustache, which is,
quite possibly, why when I see it
my mind goes straight to Che Guevara.

There’s a downloadable tutorial so
no one need worry they won’t be able
to make me be just what they want

me to be. I’ve never been better
at being than when I live inside
someone’s head. It’s not only lovely but

it is also temperature controlled
the same way San Diego is. I always
wanted to be an actress. I told everyone

I would be. I always thought I would
love living in the city of nameless angels.
My father told me, the sea is a heaven

where everyone goes when they leave you.
I believed. And here I am. Waiting
to be made into something better

than a toy or a coloring book, something
that will stand up to water. The thin
tissue full of tears the world wastes—

when it can’t be bothered to better itself.

Mary, Star of the Sea is intended to be read alongside Raphael Madonna-$6.99, 1985, by Andy Warhol.

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“Mother of God”

In the script, I was twelve
to fourteen, depending on the fantasy.
Lolita as Lo and Behold and God

was born. God having first created me
according to a bicycle form of believing—
where regardless of what can be seen,

a wheel in the mind goes round
and round as it watches the thinking
id become a force of destruction.

The boat, it’s said, was filled with light.
A pretty idea, if somewhat impractical.
Mary, Virgin of the Navigators, the men

hellbent on spreading the news that
imperialism would be good for the rich
and, BTW, would keep the clergy fed.

A wife at home in a brocade gown.
I’m wearing one as I serve
as the mindless humming of those at sea.

Mother of God is intended to be read alongside The Virgin of the Navigators by Alejo Fernández, ca. 1531–1536.

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