September - Poem 14

What is the American berserk? / Laura Bandy

(A Cento with lines—in order—from Thomas Meany, Saul Bellow, Brigit Kelly, Carol Ann Duffy, Michael Van Walleghen, 
Donna Vorreyer, Carl Phillips, Brigit Kelly, Gail McConnell, Jay Bernard, Patience Agbabi, Fatima Asghar, Alice Hiller).

It’s there on the vomit-splattered decks of the Mayflower,
the purgation one can obtain only through rage,
the irises the soldiers are bedded in.
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself
in knee-deep water and the hot acidic dark one full mile underground.
We try in vain to decode the soil’s erosion,
the grass not being flesh, nor flesh the grass,
while the one divides into two: the heart and its shadow, the world
and its threat.
You come to know the one against the other.
You kick the weeds and try to piece it back
like vodka on the rocks, like a slow-burning fuse.
I don’t know what will kill us first: the race war or
what we’ve done to the earth.
Note: this memory comes shagged with flies. 

Ache of Becoming  / Alicia Boemi

You loved me into someone you couldn’t keep in your embrace.
Not because I left,
but because I grew.
The prize of heartbreak is the ache of becoming.

Poem in which Your Snack Choice Tells You That You May Not Be Doing All Right /  Jesse DeLong

Maybe because the salt and pepper shakers
were always at the table, you never think
about how texture affects taste, how
you crave the sourdough nibblers
more than the soft pretzel. You’ve
had a long day and want to
collapse something
stable with your
teeth.

Let’s try this: /  Shelly Krehbiel

How to ride a bicycle, /  rob mclennan

To do so, with resolve. There is no “All Canadian,” whether boy or girl or elsewise. Or Canadian bacon. You can’t always take. A Canada Goose will strike, when threatened. Know your study, wildlife. Be clear, debate. The world is watching. Rarely, so precise. This list of facts. Coined, as caffeine. A land of freedom, there are many. You are not alone. To not deny the space. This lake, so named by original inhabitants. To behave, as a liquid. An ethical purpose. Offshore. Province, followed. Your gods, withdrawn. There is no “Far East,” “Middle.” North Africa, instead. The Gulf States. A colonial language, focused on far-distant London. Ask: what say the locals. Kilometres to go before I sleep. The German word for German is Deutsch.

Joke for Fishing Buddies  / Piper Rasmussen

When I learned to fish, my family recalled
Grandpa's vest, still loaded with line

in the rust-shut cabinet in the Old House, 
gathering dust for half a generation. My cousin

was the first to dig and poke
past runny rubber bait & broken hooks. Straightfaced,

she pulled me aside: 
You shouldn't use Grandpa's

lifetime fishing license.
It's expired.

when your mother resembles a parable  / Connor Simons

a slow roll then all at once   the change started in the womb when she first realized her fist could clench   the second was the hard slap of air and the knowing that oh god it’s always going to be like this and the thing is that she wasn’t always a spider or a tree murmuring a garbled mother mother mother as the bark slowly covered her mouth   her hands were human when she held me and her throat was made of the same muscle and sinew as mine the first time she said my name out loud   can i even call it a decision?   the loom was always there just waiting and the third change came when she said yes this is how i’ll live now and when i was younger the tone of these stories were axiomatic   don’t think you get to be proud   don’t think you can decide which way to run but now it’s not exactly heroic but the light of spider’s eye can bend light in ways that reshape all seeing and the way a bat an owl an eagle can cut across the sky at least makes meaning of arms sagging with the weight of boxed wine and if i want to i can cut through the park and place my hand on the tree and feel the wooden knots as they gnarl to shape the coo of the lullabies still humming in the dark of my ear

Why is everything romance / Veronica Vo

A poem made of signage spotted in NYC (& inspired by Sam)

First kiss was bananas
‍ ‍(what does that even mean)
Send feet pics
‍ ‍(it’s so cliché)
Everything will be okay
‍ ‍(everything is so cliché)
Tastes like cheating   
‍ ‍(and i don’t know what any of it means)
Do not disturb is cat
‍ ‍(let’s move on. Charli XCX said everything is romantic)
Protect yo heart
‍ ‍(but why even try. still, i keep trying)
I didn’t like what you said over text…about the future
‍ ‍(though these Hinge ads mean nothing)
Screaming inside
‍ ‍(i hate using dating apps)
Mess with the bull get the horns
‍ ‍(and all the meaningless language)
Your love is a gift to the world
‍ ‍(but i need to get over myself)
Can we still fall in love this summer?
‍ ‍(i’ve given up on making sense but not on love)
Give me your vape and I’ll give you a hug
‍ ‍(we want what we want. can we just say what we mean?) 

What Is Dead   /  Melinda Wilson

has more life. 
  For instance— 
the blowflies arrive   
sometimes in mere minutes  
to begin their work  
of breaking down the dead. 
What is dead 
has more life     
Because then— 
the water comes  
sometimes in floods 
sometimes as dew drops 
to carry what nutrients remain 
deep into the soil of the earth. 
So what is dead 
has more life still.  
All at once— 
we are reabsorbed into 
the eternal womb. Our energy 
recycled for new growth, new life,  
and for         forever death.  

September - Poem 13

Zero Visibility Sonnet / Laura Bandy

You wrote a sonnet and now
you hate it, the rhymes all
forced and volta manure (cow).
How you wish you could fall
into some other artistic bent,
do sculpture, say, or fingerpaint.
Switch up the form halfway done?
Who’s going to stop you, Donne?
Fuck it. I’m through with you, verse—
consider this my Dear John note. What
have you ever done for me besides purse
your thin and stingy lips when I bought
that, yes, perhaps ill-considered backless top
to wear in a Midwest blizzard? Oh, right—you are the whiteout (I forgot).

Another Postcard from Opportunity, Montana /  Jesse DeLong

Dear Linda,
another flock of birds on their long migration
have rested in the false lake
and died from the arsenic.
The best meal in town
is a pork culet pounded flat
and deep-fried in flavorless batter. It’s good,
of course, with mustard and a butter-grilled bun.  
When you think of us, think
of the children sledding
down the slag piles, unusually
high cases of muscular dystrophy,
the time that woman, thin around the eyes
the way addicts can be, bust
into your uncle’s apartment
to call him a cocksucker, not knowing
around the corner from where he sat
in his wheelchair we were trying
to find the missing piece to an old puzzle.
In a few months, the snow will be
too dry to pack into snowballs,
and so I will  
carefully take a handful inside
and sprinkle it with water, shaping
each side, hoping to form
a perfect sphere. 

To Whom She Wakes /  Shelly Krehbiel

Last night she dreamed of falling asleep again and again, then waking in a bed with someone different
each time. Repeating startles of intimate someones, of not knowing what had happened before, without
memory. Or maybe some memories upside down, some still becoming. These were dreams after all.
One was the lover she dreams most often, the first to touch lips to her waiting lips and turn them into
more. Ever since then, this one appears, long after she lost them, long after she stopped wanting to find
them (1) . They are her beginning. No matter how many times she’s replaced them.
One was a lover she’s never met. In the dream they seemed to know her best of all. When she woke,
they rolled toward her, traced her face with their fingertips. They got up to open the shades, knowing
she would want a few moments to wake herself, giving her space without going away. When she saw
their silhouette in that first light, she tried to wake up for real, just in case they were waiting.
One was the partner of a friend. Because this did not seem horrible to her, she felt guilty. The air
between them was like August, and her dream body wanted this lover more than any of the others.
They seemed to want her too but whispered that there were too many consequences and faded away
like a fog rising out of a valley into the mountains.
One was a real person she’s only just begun to know. She will say nothing else about this dream.
One was a famous person. This dream was much less fun than one might expect. She couldn’t
remember their name and when she asked what to call them (2) they said My Precious. Because she has
seen Lord of the Rings many times, she recognized the danger. Then she remembered it was a dream
and turned in her waking-world body, which erased everything except what they wanted her to be.
One was her mirror, same hair, same lips, same whisper. This one was not a lover, but a twin. Her other
self, or one of them. They knew each other, knew they would never see each other again. Tell me who I
really am, she said, who I will be. The other came close, very close. Just wake, she said.

(1) The use of pronouns is intentionally vague. The dreams contained many lovers, even more than are described
here, most of whom were never hers in waking life. She prefers to keep them as anonymous as possible and feels
that much about her is none of your business anyway. If she dreamed you, you or your dream selves may know.
(2) In the dream she did not remember, though you likely would know them if she could tell you.

Grief Can Walk   / Alicia Boemi

The day grief walked in,
it gloated and gleamed.
Noir hue holding sparks of life deep inside.

I did not take my time leaving the room.
Instead,
I ran as fast as I could.
Like it was a headless horseman after me.
Pumpkin and all.

I kept my pace.
I didn’t wallow.

I tried and tried;
climbed hills and saw valleys.
I drank from a creek;
from the bottom of a near-empty bottle, too.

And still;
plagued by time and energy—
I succumbed.

I hope it leaves— soon.

The dead lake chronicles, /  rob mclennan

El Nino, intensifies. Temperatures. Different speeds, tumbling lakeshore, mountain, green plain. Mouth. Uncertain, soar. Undone, at the hips, where the legs begin. To be assembled. Saltwater taffy. Lake water, boils. Heatwave, primer. Spills. What the crow, the seagull, said. Protect the plover. Variants, this speed, sensation. Cooked, exhaust. Do you know me. As anatomy, skin. Place your hands over ears. This mirror, think. Reveals what was hidden. Sweet creatures of flail, of clarity. Bombast. How could this happen. In a time of opportunists, monsters. Architects, of greed. I see silence, why and need. A finger, at the ready.

We are waiting for the train  / Piper Rasmussen

he has taken 
his whole life, dozens of times; 

I, in my life with him, 
also dozens. Forever fewer dozens,

but we will have taken nearly 
all the same trips

by the end. A train late by an hour 
or short by one car 

which travels 24 hours
across a country

is hardly late at all. 
The magnitude hardly matters: 

only the river 
behind the rain-spotted glass.

aubade  / Connor Simons

at the snelling and university metro station two people meeting in the damp dawnlight is a kind of rictus dance   two Ninjinksys as Petrouchka brought to herky-jerky motion by the holy smoke wafting upward from ad hoc censers of charred tin foil   someone quotes The Charlatan – they’re not really alive you know   that’s not flesh   it’s painted wood – others at the station are inclined to agree   their headphones blocking out splintered arpeggios composed of atonality   longing    and the din of people finding life among the piled receipts and frayed wool of a snow-beaten blanket

Memory Middle Distance Villanelle / Veronica Vo

In this version of the story I die
of happiness because everything goes the way I want it to.
I am remembered and don’t have to try

to be anyone I’m not. Or hide
the way it feels to lose the people I once knew.
In this version of the story I die

before anything bad happens. Which would imply
that I am never born. My mother wouldn’t like that, true,
but then I am remembered and don’t have to try

because never existing means I can’t be forgotten. What I
mean is when you see the cliff and drive anyway, you
accept that in this version of the story I die.

It’s not supposed to be melodramatic. This isn’t a cry
for help. I don’t know how to say what I want in a way that’s new.
Or be remembered and not have to try.

Every time she and I say goodbye
the time in between becomes blank space, love in lieu.
Only in the version of the story in which I die
am I remembered without having to try.

The Household Gods    /  Melinda Wilson

Demand clean bedding and dishes.  
Demand fresh water and snacks.  
Demand bathing and long walks.  
Demand toys and comfy socks.  
Demand love.  And what’s more— 
Demand the demonstration of love. 
Demand / Demand / Demand
The household dogs. 

September - Poem 12

People, Place, and Problem / Laura Bandy

The writer, Liz Moore, uses this template
in fiction instead of an outline. So doing,

she does not know what’s coming. When
the story hits a wall, makes a sticky mess,

she goes back to “the trunk of the tree,”
last time the story made sense. As an epic

messy-maker myself, I set it up. People:
the ones walking by outside my window

right now. Place: too dismal to name. Oh,
okay. I’m in a spaceship that seems to be

taking on extra weight, maybe smuggled
cargo from a new first mate, hold—I am

lying again. It’s raining in the Midwest and
Problem: too much water makes the soil

irate, soaks the crops including corn and
more corn, also soybeans and corn again

which offers stalks that shoot so high (knee-
high by July, men on tractors always say) but 

only when  the ground is dry enough to keep 
those roots from drowning, see, so that the less 

successful varietals go to feed the hogs, snuffling 
in pens like the men in our prison just down 

the way, and those high-quality ears can be used,
fused with other nutrients (don’t ask what

else, you won’t want to know) to feed us, and
humans kernels and karo syrup, dextrose and

bourbon, Xanthan gum and Chicha beer, hominy
and popcorn, even Vitamin C and cobs so sweet

you’ll swear you’re floating somewhere in cotton
candy outer space where plants are hard to grow

those in the know say, but maybe one day, one day
out among those stars igniting as “gravity compresses

together the hydrogen in their cores to the point that
the atoms splice, mutate” and, ah hell. It’s fine. We’ll
go to Mars.

—quoted lines from Reddit/Science query: Why are all the stars on fire? Why aren't

there just trillions of balls of gas that didn't ignite into nuclear furnaces?

That Dingy Old House   / Alicia Boemi

They are tearing down the old house across the street. 
I did not live there but, 
saw the bare inside of it and, 
couldn't help but see the ghosts of
memories forgotten and remembered. 
Time taken away, 
brick by brick, 
as the roof falls. 
A new house will be built —
new people will come and go. 
People turn to memories, 
turn to ghosts. 
And so life continues. 

Marginal Notes on Postcards from a Field of Slightly Askewed Dandelions by Chu Mu-yen /  Jesse DeLong

Each postcard slightly alters the original image, a woman with very short hair, looking startled as a bright light shines on her face, and in each successive image she turns slightly to the left, her face becoming more and more out of focus until we can only see the back of her head, which has been shaved.

“This isn’t a field you’d lay a quilt down in if you wanted your loved one to still love you.”

I tried, once, to pick them for tea. They dried, strung up, over my sink for weeks until I forgot about them and eventually threw them away.

Some patches, green, where the grass has flourished, and others, brown, where the hooves have trampled.

Sort of like that art exhibit in Greensville where you step through the series of partitions and view various projections of yourself, some looming like a too-large-shadow, some hued in an increasingly brighter red.

Though apparently you can eat them raw in salads and partake in your daily need for Vitamin K.

“The bumper, barnacled over in rust, looking like a ship-wrecked submarine.”

Art is the best-suited medium for appropriation, maybe because those who make it are constantly trying to fit themselves into a functioning form.

“like how you used to place gum at the entrance of a gopher hole.”

The artist, for instance, as frying pan.

“The electric fence doesn’t make a hum, the hum is inside you, and so you touch the taut wire just to see if you can feel the sound.”

If you tear out this final page, patiently at its slotted edge, careful not to rip the actual stamp affixed, and you wrote something about yourself, who, really, would you even send it to?

Didn’t you, though, hide in one once as your neighbor scanned the unusually starless night with his flashlight, looking for you, or someone like you?

Dark Oxygen (A Ribcage) /  Shelly Krehbiel

the same as what we breathe up here though no one knows
[how]
it is made. a secret, like so many others
[deep]
beneath the great waters. where mystery is all that
[can]
be proven. the assumption has always been that
[life]
created these molecules that make other lives
[be]
an anomaly come to life to life to life
[as]
breathing became creatures, became us.
[we]
think we should be able to explain everything,
[lose]
the beyond-us as we throw stones into waves,
[our]
way of casting something away, sending our small
[selves]
out into what we cannot see. they drift and sink
[in]
blue until blue disappears. and somehow down there
[each]
molecule matters. deepest darkness makes its own
[breath].

Knights in white satin, /  rob mclennan

To a glow, in hand. Robert Creeley’s example. They swirl. This altitude of thumbs. Fittingly. A theatre of mayhem, absurd. Mayhem, words, Catullus. Mind you, he? Mark every beat, set everything aloud. Aflame. Compare wheels, clouds, automobiles. Joys like this, this. No stone, unturned. Is this possible? Light. The reflecting pool, offers. Orange alert. I hear the orcas are vocal. Today’s horizontal. Vertical. The day swimming whole. Disarray, altitude. Fan theories, never. A conscious decision to voice. Of course, Michigan.

Service at Exotic Fragrance  / Piper Rasmussen

I also go to Catholic church occasionally…
the child in me desperately needs the bells and smells.
-Patty Duke

Closest thing to an apothecary
you'll see today. Catch the incense
from the subway, a drift of virga

all the way from 104th & Lex.
Walls lined with bottles,
never empty. Take-a-number

from the DMV-style paper roll as
bottles shimmer -- just glass,
but not just glass -- gifts & tonics

of the senses! You can inhale
everything inside. It's for you,
just for you, custom-made-to

order, always signature.
Go early and alone
or all the people will already be 

transformed: Ruby Orchid 
with L'Eau Rouge #1, and Essential
Neem. Ben's Diluent. Musk Oud &

Oud Santal;
Yves St. Laurent
and Palo Santo. Bodies

of all the saints in bottles.
Take a number;
wait to hear the bell.

ode to a dead black-capped chickadee in my front yard  / Connor Simons

it’s not that you’re beautiful   you’ve become the texture of cardboard left out in the rain
or the ragged contours of a gut whittled from years of cheap red wine   and what’s
calling you beautiful?   the same as when a mother walking her child sees you before
the child does and puts her hand on his shoulder   distracting him with the goldenrod
a neighbor has let sprout in their front yard   that black cap that used to furrow
as you pecked at stubborn seed walls is turning into something else entirely
a tooth   rain clouds hoarding their storm   the expanse of gaze looking back at the length
of disappointment   or not even that   not really   what you are now is a dead thing
losing its color   grass embracing your body in a way that sky most likely never did

Pink Room Bouncer / Veronica Vo

After Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

The bouncer operates
on an outdated model of chivalry.
He says for every guy that pressures
you there’s another that will punch him.
Says, you’re girls in a big city, you should
know this.

Laura Palmer’s father says, I always thought
you knew it was me. Baby angel
face of porcelain. Who chooses who gets saved
and who doesn’t. By the time
this music crescendos and the lights stop flashing
you will understand what I mean.

Can’t hear anything over this music. Might as well
be speaking backwards. That time I was
pressured by a strange man, pure joy sullied
on the street barely 16, where were these
masculine defenders? Where were this bouncer’s
men. I could have thrown a stone and reached one.

The girl you knew dies. I want all my
garmonbozia (pain and sorrow). It looks like corn.
How can I make you understand. These rooms
are mirrors of each other. It’s so fucked up.
Dale Cooper asks which is harder to believe,
supernatural possession or the depths of men’s evil.

Not one did anything to help.
The man said, try to run. I was so scared
I didn’t even scream. In my best concert attire.
I learned why women are scared to exist at night.
Where were the good ones then. The gallant guardians.

That magically appear. To fend off the others. The bouncer pisses me off. We feed his ego to get in. Corn. He imagines himself a hero. A good one. It doesn’t matter. How many of them there are. I learned. It doesn’t matter. 

Worry Siren    /  Melinda Wilson

I am a woman who takes pills,  
often. Yes, daily, but that doesn’t 
mean I don’t face the demons. 
Really, the pills help me to hunt them.  
I seek them for their slaughter,  
which I see as a kind of saving.  
I kneel tall on my bed and call  
to the creatures my narcotic  
songs of sedition: Worry your bones 
if you will, but to dwell  
is to disappear,  
to sit surrounded  
by cliffs and rocks 
and to see only danger,  
no drop dead, bonny apparitions. 
And indeed, the male sirens 
all died off, disappeared from our history 
scrubbed off our stone slabs 
and torn out of our books,  
fed to the flames, then the ashes shoveled 
into the fields to better feed future soil.  
And that’s just the problem.  
The problem is the future 
and its potential for problems.  
So, I am a woman that takes pills,  
often. Yes, daily, and that doesn’t  
mean I don’t still break down,  
don’t still lose my shit and scream 
down the hall for the neighbors 
to keep it the fuck down, don’t  
cry at the smell of urine marking 
my walls or the very fact of the walls 
boxing me in, keep me close to the loss  
and the possibility that I will keep losing.  
But fuck that worry siren. 
I’ll check in with her tomorrow 
if tomorrow comes at all.  

September - Poem 11

Non-Con / Laura Bandy

In the romance novels I inhale, lists of trigger warnings often detail what readers might find
objectionable or too titillating to be born. When the spicy hits a full boil and the consent gets
dubious, it’s okay, really—we’re all on board with this pretend, we’ve all been warned. In poetry
though, the rules feel less set. I don’t check with the humans that have dotted personal
landscapes, don’t ask if they mind when I use their names. Some might call that non-con, but I
say… wait. Hold on. Let me rewind a tick. The trick with genre smut is choosing the right mix of
lovers and learning the lingo: female main character falls for male main character shrinks to
FMC/MMC, and sex saturation factor is denoted with, you guessed it, number of jalapeños.
Sister Sarah says she only reads M/M romance now, since believing that any man could really
love any woman when they so clearly want to kill us is just too far a stretch, even in fiction. Did
I mention that I never use last names? I’m a scoundrel, like Sebastian Ballister, the Marquess of
Dain, in my current Regency, but I would never never never never never never never never never
never never never never never never never never never never never never nevernever never
never never never never never never never never never never never never never never neve
never never never never nevernever never never never never never never never never never
never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never
never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never
never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never
never never never never never never never never never never never never NEVER put real
humans on the front page that way (maybe). Dub and non-con are popular tropes, with readers
wishing to fantasize about giving over, surrendering control safely, all between the clinch covers
of A Week to be Wicked, or Puck Me, if it’s hockey. You can get real naked, there, you can let
Sebastian or Xander or Julian or Enzo or Hunter or Dante or Levi take the wheel, you can revel
in the knowledge that you never really stood a chance because you’re smaller and softer, or
maybe louder and girlbossed, even sporty and muscled, could be long-haired or blonde short,
sometimes bratty and asking for… no. Not there. Let’s give a girl what she wants—the happy
ending, pearl necklace fairy tale, and since we’re mixing genres here, why not a werewolf, too,
who only wants you, his true love, in the flattering light of the blue full moon.

Poem removed for publication!    / Alicia Boemi

Congratulations!

Different Kinds of Currents /  Jesse DeLong

My mother used to buy me birds, usually finches, from the pet store. And my father, a man whose own family raised steer and who had to work the cattle before going to school, used to leave their cages unlatched on the porch. He told me he couldn’t stand to see them that way, it wasn’t natural, but of course finches can’t survive in the mountains of Idaho, so they likely died in the cold or the talons of a hawk. Later my mother would die in the bed beside him of liver failure, my father wiping her body clean. “You came,” she said, almost an empty shirt then, when she saw me sit at the table. “You came.”

that she should smile* /  Shelly Krehbiel

oh, Thalia of the gentle light
you look away as though your love
is one i cannot see, always
just beyond this canvas window.
comics say laughter is a way
to spin pain into another’s
joy. i wonder what desire you
hold for that other you cannot
turn from, whose sight sparkles your eyes,
lifts the corners of your closed lips.
but maybe it’s not a lover,
no, a scene: three children laughing
beneath an oak tree, playing catch
with a ball of string. a scrub jay
hopping through the branches above
watches as though he would join them,
his scruffy grey head betraying
his youth. should i become the bright
creek beside them, send happy light
to your watching eyes or should i
stay here, a distant guest, longing
to kiss your shoulder? muse, must i
make peace with your abandon, rest
my self in some idyllic scene
to become beauty’s smiling mask,
a character in your delight?

*a contemplation of the painting, Thalia by Giuseppe Fagnani

Four views of the solar eclipse, /  rob mclennan

Social media, glisten. Inarticulate, woe. Redemption. From where I stand. Once, once more. From where we sit. Televised. The poets, obsessed. Shake loose these limbs. Anything to do with the moon. Wolves, seasoned. The shape seems as distant. This ponzo illusion. Enlarged, at horizon. Sediment. Waves, incremental. The contours of what one forgets. The hope, in the centre. Circumference, absence. Subjective interest. By the waters of Perth, the Tay River. Six ancient coins. Aesthetically pleased. By the water, proportion. The moon, passes. Pulls, at clouds. TikTok, this view of curled fingers. Dissolve, list. We catch daybreak, news. Cycles, lunar. The Perseids, also. Every third word.

Welcome Back  / Piper Rasmussen

The laborers have had time to send their emails
confirming the new working season, post-Day. Scotty's back
on the bridge & turning up the flux capacitors for Cpt. Alice

& we're plunging into the wormhole,
 the autumn shortcut, student by back-to-school
   permission slips forward-looking

snaps September's rubber band, overfull with that thrill
of signing up, the checks the body can cash later,
for example, after Thanksgiving,
  grateful   for the opportunity,

or resolute (January)
or when beloved (February)

memorialized (May)

promises look different on the other end

Max  / Connor Simons

most days when someone says a wildfire
renews a forest i don’t even scowl   no
patience anymore   how many pinecones
can explode into seed before we stop
confusing cycle and disaster   potash coats
the forest floor and when i gather charcoal
ash to spread between the peppers i do
understand but it’s not that when i hold
you suddenly fingerbone trees seem like
they could one day regrow their flesh
you and i know the names that are just
names now and soon won’t even be that
but when i hear the way your voice ha
lowered or imagine the growing sharpness
of your chin i understand why we once
threw fat on the pyre and if the flames
flared up then something was being fed

Hometown Return / Veronica Vo

Back in the land of not a single other person

in the room who isn’t white.

It’s been minutes and I’ve already seen five

different iterations of Make America ___ Again

and none of these visions for the future include us.

Can realization be a feeling? Mostly, I feel for the girl

I was that didn’t know why she felt so out of place

growing up. I can’t be friends with anyone

who won’t bear witness. But I can be family.

The other day, a white person said, scoffing,

of course, it’s about race. Of course. 

I Wrote Like AI before AI Wrote Like I / Melinda Wilson

Before we taught the algorithms  

to approximate academic discourse, 

I labored over prose that insists  

on evidence over impulse.  

I contend that every claim must bow  

to the majesty of methodological  

account. No interpretation  

is to be accepted without scrutiny 

of bloodline, without the discipline  

of restraint. In the age of AI,  

the detached tone of the scholar  

is labeled computational, absent  

of confession, wanting for personality,  

desperate for rhetorical flourish. All  

diction becomes artifact of suspicion.  

All em dashes discarded in the e-waste  

dumping sites of our data centers,  

alongside the remnants of my little geek heart. 

September - Poem 10

Wet Work (after watching Furious) / Laura Bandy

noun: work involving murder or assassination,
used euphemistically.
—Merriam-Webster

Sarah does it. 
She likes it and
she’s good at it.

Don’t note the
guillotine necklace,
the ACAB earrings—

those are mere
trinkets. What I mean
is how when there’s 

twin girls, grown, one 
needs to manage 
men, close the cases

with a red pen, ink
streaming. Yet who
would have thought 

the old man to have
so much blood in him?
I’m the other one. I am

here to sponge up 
all messes. My neck-
lace is daisies, ears 

pierced with cream
enamel hearts. It’s true,
my trade is marshmallow

although, in the dark, 
you can’t tell us apart
and maybe I’ll cut you

a slice of fresh risen 
bread or find your
jugular with a shiv.

“Which twin is really
which?” the last one 
said. Weird sisters, newt

eyes, boil and blister—
which witch? You’ll never
know for sure, mister.  

—italicized lines from Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1.

Too Much Love   / Alicia Boemi

It’s never enough to say I love you. 
So I’ll walk alongside you for eternity. 
Feet to the pavement. 
Soul in the depths. 
Take me away. 

Poem That Was Supposed to Be an Imitation of “Field Transmission of Tulip Virus in Patriotic Colors” but became “8 Moods, All Similar, in One Day” /  Jesse DeLong

Not the tulip, which remains closed, but the burr,
which latches to your pants as you pass by.
Not the space key, which moves you forward,
but the bracket, which is meant to clarify or make a correction.
Not the free flowing but fully transparent stripes of a highlighter,
but the blotchy pen, messy enough to see
from the backside of the paper.
Not the blank white index card with its perfect lines,
but the old note found in a drawer, it’s references illegible now.
Not the bathroom vanity, her side, blooming with shower steam
and the smell of lavender soap, but the office window
turning a yellow-green from the air’s contaminants.
Not the white shirt fresh from the laundry, but the sock crumpled
and covered in cat hair beneath the nightstand.
Not the pill and its euphoric promise, but the hard, chalky
feeling of its passing down your throat without water,
or, maybe, its wearing away, yes, when it leaves
you—maybe the day feels like your body in a panic
because the pill has closed, like a tulip, your neurons. 

in the gaze of Melpomene* /  Shelly Krehbiel

how you tricked me with your dark eyes
in my dark night. there are such eyes
as this warned about in old books,
caught in snatches of filtered light.
on canvas your eyes are portals.
how I am drawn to their allure.

it’s too late now that i’ve seen more,
seen that sharp blade you hold so close.
not hidden. you never mean harm
as malice. you need pain to turn
into song’s purple enchantments.
you are why music requires night,
why daffodils need cold winter.

muse, because i want to become
what you promise, i will come close.
i will be taste against your skin.
i will be erased by sleeping
in the dream worlds you make of me,
of my blood spilt on beauty’s floor.

*a contemplation of the painting, Melpomene by Giuseppe Fagnani

The Marvel Universe, /  rob mclennan

Excelsior! For the endless, resurrected. Dime-store models, pulp. Those scrappy kids. Celestials, eternity, infinity. A cluster, stones. Behold! Creating history, continued. Continuity. The streets of Brooklyn. What the in-crowd, spoke. In whispers, secret. Chosen, many. Stringbean, puny, stretch. Big brain. These gods of thunder, hammers, patience. To still, get up. A method, marvels. Let, the perfect storm. To me, my Kirbyesque. When comics, woke. The war-time Captain, punched out Hitler. Great responsibility. My word, these hopes. My stars and garters. Exceptions, vary. The needs of the few. Amazed, we soapbox, are. We are still speaking.

Embryo  / Piper Rasmussen

Amanuensis, scribe
of innate knowledge, 
anamnesis endowed,
all amniotic handiwork.

Once she was anemone
alone & pluripotent
a minister, monastic.
An alluvial illumination,

a miniature marvel made manifest. 
Her caul a veil in the Mother's
cloister. What was once the nave,
her mammalian manse.

reading recent translations of Li Bai  / Connor Simons

Tuesday morning, up early with a kinked neck. I want
to rip apart the sky like a bored child pulling
at cotton balls while its mother sits on the edge
of the tub, waiting for the dye to set in her hair.

                               *

Shouldn’t a day be kinder? The dead mice who knew
the taste of peanut butter before the metal snap
broke their necks are an answer to that, I guess.

                               *

And once I spent a whole evening crushing silverfish
in our apartment bathroom with my big toe, turning
off the lights, sitting cross-legged on the toilet, turning
on the light and becoming a generational cataclysm.

                               *

Li Bai wrote that the road to Shu is hard – most are.
Who would travel so far to arrive here?
There are peaks, leopards, and stretches of pale mud.

                               *

It’s the heat, I think, that does this to me. I sleep
in strange positions so my cheek is cool and warp
my limbs like garden twine twisted to hold up
tomatoes who just want to flower then wilt.

                               *

And also wrote, ‘if only I owned the fabled parrot
to tell you of the feelings in my heart,’ which, yes,
being tongueless most days, I understand. 

Focus / Veronica Vo

ancestors speak through this ground you stand on

the trees bend in to listen

rub your hands together

feel that light

inside

a perpetual sky

a day’s blinding silence

forefathers through this

haunting as support: is the body not a vessel too?

Infinite Things (SENT 9/9)   /  Melinda Wilson

The pine forest does its holding in the dark,  
warns there is something wants to be feared. 

Something wants like I want the toilet to stop 
hissing. Something to be feared the way the dog 

recoils after the crackle map cracks on Jacobus.  
Has no way to know what it fears and no way 

to stop fearing it. Impossible to borrow 
another's design and step out of oneself. Unless— 

Useless. Better to shudder through it. To become 
intimate with the thing that one fears.  

Like I will always still somehow            hear it.  
The toilet’s hiss long after it’s been fixed.  

There is form of attack in maintaining calm, 
So I try to love the hiss, learn to stand the siren 

song of every sudden exhale. Work hard to recall 
the detail of my young nephew’s face when he fled 

the washroom  and the flicker of self that flared  
when he accepted the hiss  as his home.   

September - Poem 9

Questions and Advice My First Weeks Living in Mississippi: July 2009 / Laura Bandy

You’re from Illinois—rich. Don’t expect it, here.
You will never stop sweating. Get used to being damp.
Everyone eats sushi, even after the oil spill. Oishi is best.
Everyone goes down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Ignore
the X-marked houses. Katrina is over, we’re on the off ramp.
It’s tempting, but don’t join in saying “Bless your heart.”
You don’t understand.
You don’t understand where to shop—stop going
to the Wal-Mart on (redacted). That’s the Black Wal-Mart.
There is a white Wal-Mart and a Black Wal-Mart. There is
a Farmer’s Market. The egg lady will give you a bag
if you forget. If you forget where you are.
Don’t forget—Friday nights are Ladies Nights at Mag Bar
(girls drink free). Wear your cowboy boots.
Buy cowboy boots.
Nick’s Ice House has toilets for seats, part of the charm.
Brett Favre gets drunk and pisses on the floor there. Great tipper.
Miss Lula is your neighbor. She will bring you tomatoes
from her garden, also pickled cucumbers and honey biscuits.
Miss Lula likes to tell her stories. Some will curl your hair.
The bugs don’t die here and the spiders are poisonous. Just
be aware. Yeah, that’s a brown recluse. She’ll kill a gal.
“You’re a Yankee, ain’t you. Well, it takes all kinds, I guess.”
We don’t have snow. We don’t have fireflies. What is
snow like? How cold, now? Did you ever make a snowman?
Can you catch fireflies in your hand? Does it hurt when they
turn on their light? Ma’am, do you miss the North?
Don’t you know about Robert Johnson and the Crossroads?
He sold his soul to the devil there and we got the Delta blues.
They sent “Dark is the Night, Cold is the Ground” into space
in ’77, that’s how good our music is. Y’all got, what… pop?
All of life’s a tradeoff, Yankee, ain’t it. Phew. I think you hate it.
Down here, we understand. Don’t look at the levee’s rim
at the water rising. The water is always rising, the pot water
always getting hotter. We’re all lobsters. You all got lobsters
up there in Illinois? Crawfish? Just corn? I’m sorry for you. 

A Warm October  / Alicia Boemi

It’s all a cycle,
but there are no ebbs or flows. 
The universe is too too physically jagged and;
it continues to go and go.
Full circle— they do it to themselves—
men tear the heads off one another,
letting their rotting roots be exposed.  
Serrated edges of their headless bodies,
meander the landscape of a scorching earth.  
We’re in the throes of it.
Women wailing, “please no” 
to 
a God who cannot actually hear them.
Whether it’s their blood soaked desperate-for-more whispers through sweat stained lips,
or 
prayers;
their whimpers will always fall on deaf ears.
See, he’s allowing them to
tear off her limbs so you
can still hear her cry out for something better.
While everyone hides behind a modern day antenna. 
You see, it’s actually chaos out here—
we’re just too into our devices to see
what is actually happening
and that;
the mothers and the fathers are not in control.
In fact no one is, 
despite us wanting—
someone to blame.

Marginal Notes on The Fire-eater at Forty-Three by Grace Fontaine /  Jesse DeLong

A spelunker will hold a torch near the ground at a cave’s entrance, sweeping the flame back and forth, waiting to see if unsurvivable levels of carbon monoxide will turn the torch to smoke.

Critics point out that Fontaine was wise to have Emilia’s breakdown occur at forty-three, and not forty, as it seems like less of a trope.

“An experienced fire-eater will snuff the flame. Lock your lips around the handle, and the triangle will cut off the flame’s oxygen. It’s easy. You don’t have to injure yourself.”

How does this apply, I wonder, to a relationship. There must be some symbolism there.

“With the case of the record, that wasn’t possible. The pain blocked out sound. I couldn’t hear the inspector counting. I couldn’t listen to the crowd. The heat of the fire raised so much the temperature of my teeth that the heated bone burned my gums.”

The dentist told me that I grind my teeth in my sleep and that the dead white skin on the sides of my tongue is from me biting its flesh. I never remember, maybe mercifully, my dreams.

In some versions, you are the one holding the torch. In others, you are the unsurvivable levels of a certain type of atmosphere.

You can see how staring into the yellow Post-it notes and inspirational banners of cubical walls will do this to a person. The fake plant that doesn’t need watered. The secret brownie hidden in the back of a desk drawer for when you need a mid-morning pleasure.

Dickens may have had a better way of writing language that obfuscated the meaning, mainly, like here, that someone died: “Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt conquered a confirmed habit of living.”  

There she is, Linda from accounting, talking about her kids again.

“I didn’t go about this the way I methodically moved through the rest of my life. There wasn’t a planner, no pros-and-cons list, no research. One Labor Day off from work, I picked up the Guiness Book of World Records, stuffed between the H encyclopedia and a box set of Friends Season 3, and I flipped to a random page, blindly pointed my finger, and wa-la, there it was. Fire-eating.”

Pablo Manríquez, using his connections as a political reporter, took a similar mid-life veer. He declared that, with no formal training, and never having painted anything, he would sell portraits of famous politicians. He watched YouTube Videos. He bought horse-hair brushes and acrylic colors like umber. There are several replications of Mitch McConnel, glum, looking out of the right side of his eyes. In one, there is red behind him. Another, the background is puke colored.

“I later learned that it can take up to 25 minutes to achieve full arousal, which made a lot of sense when I thought back on my partners. Apparently, it involved increased blood flow, and tissue engorgement, words I couldn’t really use with Charles when talking about sex. All I could say was, ‘It takes time. It takes time. Slow down a bit. That’s why it hurts.’ He never did, though, take his time. None of them did.”

In Prince George’s County Landfill, there are, possibly, still several versions of a Ruth Bader Ginsburg, some smiling, some not.

The contents of this desk drawer: transparent sticky notes, three highlighters, a stapler (out of staples) and a pack of 5 Peppermint Cobalt.

Isn’t it our habits, though, as Emelia knew, that keep us from actually living? 

Something I used to love is playing on the radio /  Shelly Krehbiel

The dishwasher is full. The sky behind
the city lights is a handful of stars.
I made something for dinner. I started
the washing machine. I finally found
the place on the streaming service website
to cancel the subscription. I cancelled
the subscription. And when it dutifully
asked why I was leaving, I selected
Other. Typed: Yesterday I met someone.
Tonight I turned off the lights early, left
the window open for cricket music
that might slip through traffic noise. I don’t know
if anything will come of this, but I
remember enough words to sing along.

For Claudia Lapp, /  rob mclennan

Oregon, trails. Sometimes the oldest, history. Abstraction. Arm to shoulder, leapt into the world. In the Atwater Station. To be attracted, to revelation. Doctors, and durability. Concurs. A Greek phrasebook, begins. Mediterranean, honey. Pixieish ecstasies, what the stars might reveal. Description, description. L, as in Lapp. The old woman in anyone. Full of Jungian dreams, a white stallion. John Abbott. A web full of wanting. Of home, kin. What afternoon light. Beneath your smile, this blue ceiling. A way through the winter. To use the right words. A long silence, indeed.

blithe  / Piper Rasmussen

why does NYC have so many
    sandwich-board &
neon-storefront psychics?      then again, where but

the home of Wall Street?      the city of 
        "See Something, Say Something" (& then     by the way
          Pay Something)

if every TAROT you walk by & every shop
that sells a lotto ticket with your sandwich 
leaves you cold,      & at the corner bookstore,  

you pass over    Beyond Black, the brilliant id
behind the curtain --

say you skip     every time
      the tickle & button click
and miss this moment
     mid-séance with Judi back at home     
   ("I can feel it in my base chakra" /  "probably trapped wind")

those who close their eyes     to all of that
miss also             the spirit
      the creaking-open
of the Golden Door

a crack           & the gifts that come raining
                                               down
on those who can see, those who can

    take     a falling anvil to the face
a little folly & disgrace         once in a while

bop at the end of a terminal summer  / Connor Simons

in august your body careens into wilting
think sunflowers with bloomless faces
think your mother crashing her van
into an already dented garage door   think
the creep of rot eating away at the cedar
wood frame of your bedroom window
 
as breathing flows – my mind secedes
 

the sky’s become a failing liver   sagging
unable to filter life’s daily poison
you’ve seen the world’s distended gut
before and know there’s only one
ending   the unfocused gaze   remnants
of a lake   copper-scented phlegm rattling
in a throat   all of life a warning sign
deferred until your day conflates with dying

as breathing flows – my mind secedes

you want a solution but you’re naked
and splayed on the linoleum floor   sweat
on the small of your back adhering you
to your own discomfort   there’s your
mother’s voice again   you get used to it
and a starving sparrow is dying in your yard

as breathing flows – my mind secedes

Nightmare / Veronica Vo

Locked in a room with a stranger it’s raining so hard
we can’t open any of the doors. I go fishing the stranger
offers to show me how. I know it’s just a dream
because of all the rain. The stranger is trying to keep me safe.

In an elevator that goes up thousands of floors, I go down
hundreds. I test a pit of rocks with my body for fun smile.
Someone spilled blueberries in the car the guts are impossible
to get out. It’s not working. Single digits I’m not having fun.
Guess that’s why the only options are triple or quadruple.
Up or down. Not out.

You Were a Girl Once  /  Melinda Wilson

In the womb    I was your default 
There’s still time to decide
All we want that to mean
In the days when doctors were
dictators   nightmares were 
still nightmares We will
never be gods  but we will feel
like gods when risks pay out
Like I’m waiting for a beer
to get cold in the freezer
next to the cauliflower pizza
crust. Cauliflower as stand-in
for flour. Flower as it stands
on its stem   Risk as replacement
for god The beer could be 
colder  but the air is warm
and I’d like to keep you forever
however you’d like to be
Let me see you with the flower

September - Poem 8

The moon must be behind the black clouds / Laura Bandy

Blood is red and
the lips. And light
is blue, and the eyelids.
And milk is white
and the neck.         

—Brigit Kelly, from “Sundays” 

Color hits different in Switzerland, shades seeming
to portend more in such a pretty place. Maybe
reductive to say “pretty” when what you mean is
impossible. Impossible that such a space 
exists at all, from fern green Alps to lapis blue
of Lac Léman which splits France from Switzerland, sun
gold lattice on the waves in daylight, moon salt white
in night’s shadow. From her balcony in Lausanne,
Silvia lifts her camera over violin 
wine from the vineyard of a friend who assures 
pinot vintage sublimity, a deep ruby 
grape, by playing his Amati to winery 
vines, lulling them to sleep. There is Gruyere cheese
too, and rosemary cracker crisps butter yellow
dotted with needle leaves that snap cleanly to share. 
Here is not there, here is not there: back home where all
our history’s shame is seeping up republic’s 
stew pot, suet floating the surface, translucent 
grease hardening. When Silvia moves to shoot her
moon snaps, a pitch-black veil smothers the light, like a
tablecloth shaken out to rid of crumbs, dust: then
lowered over America’s table to cloak
all manner of nicks and spills. She unstraps Leica, 
places it on the small stone bench, coin gray, stable,
all that will fit on this narrow terrace beyond
three thin metal seats. Across the water, house lights
waver as candles clutched by a child’s choir
on Heilige Nacht, an eve most holy. Silvia 
says what must be said but is not sad at the loss.
Over 85 years she has taken many 
pictures from many balconies at night and knows
how the moon comes and goes, waxes and wanes, even blurs
so that our eye can’t decide—silver, blood, oblivion?

The Undoing of Fruit / Alicia Boemi

She rises high as an apple in a tree; and
five weightless petals fall from her—
one, two,
three, four,
and five. 

Pastel, purple in hues—
she’s ripe, sweet, and waiting to be undone. 

She’s shedding not only thorns; but also
her head.
It’s fallen to the wayside like a tossed pome core. 

Rosey are her cheeks as she starts to tumble down. 
There she goes, 
she’s on the ground. 

Bruised, cut, with seeping brown around her wounds.
She’ll live like this,
until teeth,
‍ ‍sink themselves into her juicy flesh. 

Not For One Moment the Memory of Eternal Summer /  Jesse DeLong

Cento Titles and Lines from Wetherington, Anzaldúa, Groff, Groff, Vuong, Hart, Tokarczuk translated by Croft, Als, Swensen, Shakespeare, Lundy Martin, Tolbert, Okada, Cowles, Leilani, Boully, Choi, Joudah, Ford, Sharma, Persson, Wetherington, Long Soldier, Göransson, Ali, Ko, Alam, Plumly,

This is not a love story.
The winter is a sheet of parchment
that the small feet of birds, of vixens, of hares write upon—
ruin without location, like language.
Few of the hues survived.

What part of the heart believes, and what part is certain that none of it is true?
He knew enough about love—or, more specifically, about its offers and denials,
the sound of a letter slipping out of an envelope.

There’s rosemary/ there’s fennel/ there’s rue/ there’s a daisy
and we, here, amid a failure of images.
Even the body has become a gift we regret.

He had to light a match in the dark hallway to see the faded 2-B on the door.
There is always a door.
He says, I’m sorry, I was having a rough year.
Perhaps the aubade is, in fact, only a convention.

A woman named always
dreams of a scored white pill.
She drifted, all shadowy black silk,
like two magicians in someone else’s window.

The heart is like water,
flowers are a certain color,
how a comma can tip a phrase into sentimentality.

Another map: rotten fruit, my body, words in Swedish pop songs—
three moods in one day.
Think of other words/ not for you to know.
Clarifying in the way of orgasm.
Who am I, we sometimes ask ourselves, to have a life? 

Acts of Resistance /  Shelly Krehbiel

“Pray,” they said, and I laughed, covering myself
in the earth’s brightness, then stole off gray
into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.”
                             --Wendell Berry, “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer”

If butterflies dance at the edge of the field, why do I ask them to come closer?
Why must I want to see the swallowtails land on the last of my own lantana,
then soar up past me into the giant fir trees? What is this need
to make the unspoken mine?  I never have words
when you ask them from me - when you say the greatest praise is to beg for mercy.

                                                          Trees pray.
                                                          And sunlight.
                                                          The deepest, deepest earth,
                                                          the soil still being born
                                                          from dung, from rotting
                                                          branches and spiders.
                                                          Let decay ring out.

Once I danced at the edge of the field amazed as something like holy found me there, sky everywhere,
ocean so far beyond I could only dream it, dream running to taste the salt spray on my face.

                                                          Noise crashes
                                                          around me, but still
                                                          I dip my hand
                                                          to touch the rocky pools.
                                                          Somehow, I trust
                                                          the words of silent
                                                          anemones and urchins.
                                                          Words I will never speak.

I give them back to the deep away – the deep always – even here in this cacophony, especially here.

                                                          Let this be prayer.
                                                      Let butterflies dance along the edge.    

How to be a poet, /  rob mclennan

Forget everything, words. Nothing much to expect. Forget speech. Hold on to the hollow. One simple question, repeated. Wrap, your fingers. The magic of water. It falls.

Digital Preservation  / Piper Rasmussen

File size; Operation: Greater than; Values: 1000000 [bytes]
Safe_Forever_HowTo.fmv

roll it

.Full Motion Video
a film = a thousand pictures = a million words

.Filesize Maiden Veil
why is this smaller
where did she
why can't I open a

.Fix My Version
find an emulator
who makes

.Forever Maintaining Vitae
put in a grant request
hire a team. Passive file monitoring, byte by

.Fair Market Value
  kilobyte = a thousand = a small subscription fee

.Find My Version
= Amazon Web Services

.Finesse MoVe
record: 2 kB
record: 1 kB
record: [error]memory: free

the coal mine canaries' revenge  / Connor Simons

the living say:

                                    is it dead?
                                    yup, it’s dead.
                                    shit.
                                    guess we’ll try another shaft.
                                    i guess so.

the canaries say:

                                    imagine a body that is meant for flight and peck
                                    each feather and curve made perfect for seed

                                    and sky   the type of body that artists see the secret
                                    of light in   that poets come back to again and again

                                    imagine seeing our yellow   a yellow that only belongs
                                    to us   one of one hundred and forty-five and needing

                                    to cram that yellow into a lightless space where air
                                    isn’t stale   it’s stone   you’ve forgotten us before

                                    you turn away to the next task   just a dead bird
                                    a part of work   you need to know something

                                    important   the forgotten things come back   as in
                                    the hidden waters flying downhill to eat your home

Twin Peaks Watch / Veronica Vo

Josie turned into wood
and the little man danced on her deathbed.
Lying in a field the next day, I listen 
to ambient sounds and try to find 
meaning in the moment.
Life can be beautiful as long
as you’re not too desperate for it,
not too desperate to understand it.

The Fire in the Boiler of My Heart/  Melinda Wilson

Dies down, loses steam. Imagine –  
being halfway through any of life’s hard things.  
Labor.  The baby’s head and shoulders  
|are out, but I’m quitting now. Walking 
away from the mess.  
But the mess always 
follows. Or midway through any of the not  
so hard tasks, the shouldn’t be so damn hard  
tasks. Getting dressed, for example. I have  
my legs in the leg holes of these pants, but I can’t  
muster enough motion to get my arms in the shirt. 
Imagine. I am halfway to the airport,  
the plane is midmost in its ascent through the clouds.  
We both turn around. 
I am halfway through my life with you. 
I am midway through my life,  
and the fire in the boiler of my heart 
begins to wane. This task of living  left 
      incomplete.

September - Poem 7

Priest Collar, Nun Habit / Laura Bandy

Signs are key. How else can we decipher
the freaky world around us? Is this it?
Is this semiotics? Never paid attention

in class, Joe and I, although we liked
the prof… Oh, that’s a lie. I paid attention
like my very life rested on outcome: on whether

or not this literary theory made sense.
I don’t know about Joe, he slid into
my life and out so seamlessly, like

a baby born to a woman in the Mesozoic
squatting on the cave floor. That was
another class I liked until the professor’s

test struck us all as unfair, the too-minute
questions not signified by the study sheet,
not signed. Or do I mean Paleolithic? It

was Saussure who said, “ A linguistic sign
is not a link between a thing and a name,
but between a concept and a sound pattern.”

What does unknowing sound like? I know
what fear sounds like, tastes like, although
the bad ones can be hard to spot with mere

tongue. It feels like I failed that particular exam
every year. Probably should have prayed
about it, maybe thrown body against

cathedral’s barred front door, carved marble,
deep and wide, until someone shouted down
from Jesus Wept Red stained-glass windows

that organized religion won’t be invented for
another 100 years (it’s the Neolithic, stupid).
You can see why we are up in arms. How those

nuns thread their sometime thick limbs
through tight habits is a miracle, I guess.
It must be hot under all that black wool,

real hairshirt stuff. And don’t even get me
started on dog collars. I’m no animal doctor
and not remotely Catholic, but even I know

a trap when I see one. What’s another word
for hunger, for I thirst? Okay. You got me.
I’ll kneel. 

Micro Love / Alicia Boemi

Isn’t it all so odd—
and beautiful— 
to be a human?
My eyes staring 
into your blue eyes. 
Your eyes staring 
into my brown eyes. 
Thinking different thoughts 
in one moment of connection. 
Oh, the humanity of it. 
Moments and decisions shape what’s next. 
Will we walk away broken in pieces,
or fully whole?
Time. 
It tells the story of our human 
cruelty,
or delight. 

The Best Burger in the World was Cooked in 1992 at a Pool Party Sorry You Missed It /  Jesse DeLong

But then that guy no one
claimed to invite launched off the railing
while holding a lit “4” candle from the cake—
I swear to you I saw it lit—
and of course he missed
the water
and the blood of his knee was in the water
and when he came up, face folded
so he looked like a pug,
a yappy little mutt off leash,
someone concerned into the crowd
that he had AIDS
and he wouldn’t respond, he wouldn’t
say whether or not he did,
he just took one of the host’s towels
and lay it over his head and left
and later a man who wasn’t so good
at magic waved his hand around
as a Queen of Hearts floated there
above the pool where he bled,
the heart wafting, sort of like the blood in water.
I can see it now. The fishing line.
The way it tricked out the sun. 

close, closer /  Shelly Krehbiel

Cover art by Jack Kirby, /  rob mclennan

Pencils, a window. One can look into. Look out. A layering of buildings. Swings, an arm. Stand, firm and tall. Proclaims! Any technique, to be useful. Kurtzberg, the Lower East Side. Rewrite history, story. How the gods died, reborn. Punching out Nazis. Widescreen energy and motion. King, always. Young Romance, New Gods. I can’t keep them separate. Slippery, Providence. To leap off the page. Soon, soon. Not soon enough. Dynamic. This architect of the imagination. What we talk about Selkirk. Put a post on a website. Unfollow.

Shrink  / Piper Rasmussen

I have a wool sweater that is just the right size
and has never been dried. Never gone through
that felting -- that journey

of becoming too small and stretching and itching
and wriggling out and being left in the armoire
and that regret.

It's the same with the things which could separate
us haven't happened yet -- the deaths and failures
of body parts -- the art

that you or I may never learn to master. The faith &
the untroublement is troubling. But don't worry, I'm
anxious, so I'm working on it.

a climate crisis tank  / Connor Simons

lay your naked chest
on my stomach’s open length
the world is burning
and cardinals moan a song
for the nests they’ll never build

Measuring Closeness / Veronica Vo

Someone I met uses fish. One fish
attached to each of us, two fish
meeting in the middle. If there is a
large distance, there are bigger fish
between us. If there is comfort,
smaller fish. Another person I know
uses time. Specifically, time in line,
which feels different, as we all know.
If there is discomfort, that is a person
to join in a short line or no line at all.
Otherwise, join them in a long line.
I would have waited in a line of any
length with you. I never saw the fish
between us. Why didn’t you tell me
you did? That you saw an ocean, one
I spent a decade swimming across? 

Ask Me about My Multiple Sclerosis   /  Melinda Wilson

And I’ll tell you I have brine shrimp swimming in my spinal  
canal. I keep high resolution images of them on my laptop,  
like a child poring over her colony of magnificent sea monkeys. 

I’ll tell you I have intricate cobwebs collecting in the corners  
of my eyeballs. Their spiders skitter in my field of vision, and 
my hands fly up to swat them away from the front of my face.  

I’ll say that my body hosts nocturnal insect crawls on the surface  
of my skin—parades of ants, ground beetles, crickets,  
and katydids strutting their carapaces through my lucid dreams.  

I’ll explain that tiny earthquakes rumble through my nervous system,  
make my bones quiver, disengage from their sockets. I bounce  
like a marionette hung from rubber bands rather than strings. 

I’ll try to say each day that passes without a new symptom 
to join the litany of pests is a mercy or godsend, but truly 
each ailment is holy, more fellowship,               more friend. 

September - Poem 6

Harebrained Scheme / Laura Bandy

The more I read about rabbits,
the less I like them.

Hares, on the other foot,
interest me exceedingly.

What most don’t know
is the difference. Bunnies

burrow in the dirt, make
homes in cold soil. That’s

called hiding, right?
Hares may be a solitary species,

but at least they live
and scamper above ground. Some

poet, I forget who,
praised the creature, (a dog, maybe?)

who never crept,
never crept, never crept. The truth

is poets are forgettable,
just like most life. I might mean

lives. In college, my
apartment had once been occupied

by Hugh Hefner,
a selling point the realtor made sure

to talk up. It was
a walk-up, and friends and I spent most time

on the roof with coke and
rum, throwing water balloons at the stars.

Someone found a board
one night that seemed sturdy, “sea-worthy,”

we said, and placed wood
across air three stories up, a pirate ship plank

connecting roofs. Tipsy,
we sashayed across, no fuzzy bunny ears perched

but a strut implied. I
don’t remember thinking I could die or pondering

eternal return, but what
was in my small brain then? Rabbits clock 1.8 grams

cerebrum, while hares
come in at 3.0. Oh, these gray cells, these scurries,

these schemes! And what
do you know? The stars looked the same on the other

side— shiny and so close—
not hurtling towards earth, not already dying.

Micro Love / Alicia Boemi

Of all the things I have forgotten, 
I will never forget, 
or regret, 
you.

Because AI-Generated Food Loves Zero-Shaped Shrimp /  Jesse DeLong

From a colony on the moon, 
robots won’t eat
a glug of oil
like on the Jetson’s, but instead crave
the worm-like strings of cornbread,
how all rice and chicken crust
resemble maggots. 
From a colony on the moon
the colon
is in all patterns of speech,
as well as lists of three
and a particular typo 
to pass
as human. And if there is a bird
it will be, unlike the conspiracies say,
left alone, and prone
to fluttering, and real. 

Thirteen After One /  Shelly Krehbiel

The mural of Marge Simpson stares from across the street
like she is watching the one-way traffic drive away,
bumper stickers, license plates, tail lights always leaving.
She never sees them coming, never sees who decides
to take that street on a Saturday afternoon. Just
their head-tops. A bit of hair just over the headrest.
Sometimes a child turns around in their seat, notices
her slight smile, the great height of her signature blue hair
stretched up the building nearly to the roof, taking up
as much space as the rest of her. The child keeps watching
a long time, long for a child, before other buildings
cut Marge from view. So much depends on time and distance.
When did I stop looking back for you and turn around?

Mark Goldstein, Roblin Lake, /  rob mclennan

Left behind by glaciers. Soluble, water-logged. Game, to recognize game. This handmade quality of syntax. A flourish, of hardscrabble. Hewn logs, by the boundaries. Hammer, hold. This widespread mortality. Lake, a loon’s call. Ethos, each structural division. Of going on, without one’s knowledge. An outhouse, closed. This grey shape, framed by leaves. Little point of land. A can of beer, on sun-drenched deck. To ask this of poetry, sport. The local library. Remembering the world. His world, specifically. Al Purdy’s Ameliasburgh; such calm, warm water. A fossil lake, which corresponds to this sentence.

Storytelling  / Piper Rasmussen

Chen, Crow's Foot
flow, Fermi,
Venn, Feyman, 
box-and-whisker, bar:
tell me the story, Papa, 
how you would start the counting & separation 
machines first-thing in the morning, 
stumbling out of bed into a warm house. 
Tell me about the buttons on the sides
again! The lit power
& file & edit & the
warrens of mice
helpfully messengering 
instants, instantly --
about the processing power of the millions
of others in other homes working alongside
you, and their categories, their different 
roles & waters, their undersea cables 
and satellites
before the snarl
for a time
singly & together
charted 

parsing recovery / Connor Simons

you hear the garbage cans rustling at night and it might be the wind or it might be a starving fox – recovery goes back to healing recovrer: coming back to consciousness   rising off the sickbed and becoming yourself again – the word alcoholic gnaws down might be until it’s the marrow of is – healthy and able to work   to be a good husband – didn’t you spend each day after the first beer showing the ragged clot in your heart to anyone close enough to see the space between your ribs? – that body on the bed wasn’t you   those feet crashing into the side table as your spouse was sleeping weren’t your feet – aren’t there days when you need the world to watch the clot untangle? to watch the starving fox that haunts your life snarl at the aluminum frame you’ve trapped it in? – that box of knives rattling in the hollow of your larynx belonged to someone else – don’t you want them to know beneath this covering that is your everyday life is a set of teeth and claws   matted fur and hunger   yellow eyes glowing at night like marsh lights guiding you to the depths out past the reedy shallows?

Venn Diagram Retrospective / Veronica Vo

The Giraffes    /  Melinda Wilson

I’m on the treadmill and thinking 
about how useful longer legs  
would be. I wouldn’t have to scale  
the grocery store shelves or throw  
heavy but unripe oranges towards  
the pack of Scotch-Brite that I need  
to scrub the grout above the shower- 
head where the tile meets the wall.  
Such a task would require a step ladder 
if not for my newfangled, long, and  
commodious legs. My pitching arm 
is out of practice, but I still get  
the sponges eventually. The legs  
I imagine I now have, as I pick up  
my pace, increase the incline and sweat  
beads on my face, these courtly legs  
are without nerve damage or shin  
splits. Not like my everyday stock legs,  
on which I now run. However long  
I could grow them, they aren’t fit  
for running, not really. Too wooden  
and awkward, and if they must be  
wooden, then certainly not toothpicky  
enough, not like the giraffes’ my friend  
tells me about. They graze outside  
the window of his parents’ hotel at Disney’s  
Animal Kingdom Lodge. The giraffes  
delight his mother, and I am suddenly  
envious of so much. His mother’s love  
for these odd animals. The giraffes’ Tim  
Burton legs, how they are a little like  
they are not for this earth, as these legs  
are not for running on this treadmill.  
And that’s to say nothing of the neck.  

September - Poem 5

I am starting to wonder… / Laura Bandy

is a hilarious phrase because
you knew all along, didn’t you
says the notes app in my phone, and I
can’t imagine what I knew or thought
I could know, now. Today, the morning after
my birthday, I’m primarily knowledgeable
about this cup of coffee, my second large cup,
and the latticed peach pie waiting for me
at my mother’s house. She baked it for me,
for me! Not my brother, not my twin, and
this means, well into middle age, that yes—
I win. I am starting to wonder, though, at
the way things are going out there: I mean
there—the world outside my window, beyond
our red brick walkway my husband laid by hand
then chalked, in permanent white-chalk marker,
a Smokey the Bear RESIST sign; beyond Mr. Ritzo’s
sycamore, dying now, it seems, in commiseration
with his death by heart attack, I think they said, but
I’m starting to wonder if it was something more,
something that seemed to attack not just the broken
paths, the trees, our neighbors and my father, frankly,
who is waiting to share the pie his wife baked using
peaches from a tree he planted years ago, when they
were first married and life for a young white couple
from towns so small you could play every sport he
said once, and had to, otherwise there would not be
enough to play, and what’s life without a game, what
is life if not a game, this game set up for folks just like
my parents and me, rigged, really, yet I’ve never been
very adept at, the rules eluding at every turn, but I know
one thing and maybe only one thing, and maybe I
am only claiming what every poet tries to claim, is
desperate to claim for their own, would die for on
the page at any rate: this cup, this day, the thought
that there might be another day waiting for me after
pie and time with neighbors, husband, family, peaches,
cancer and what comes after cancer when they say
you’re NED, no evidence of disease, the wonder then,
the wonder.

Poem removed for publication! / Alicia Boemi

Congratulations!

Things Scraped Clear or Scraped Clean /  Jesse DeLong

1.  

A VHS recording of an Easter recital
overwritten with a random episode of The Price is Right
where that man in suspenders from Nantucket
won a Pontiac
and then slid his hands up the suspenders,
making the same sound as the VHS’s black tape spinning,
almost wiping clean the cloth
as it rose up in a tent before releasing
the band to slap his chest.

2.

Taking a long and sharp knife and sliding over
the split open insides
of a serrano, carefully removing with the point
each seed like the dot of an exclamation point.
You do this to reduce the heat
so that, later when you touch your wife’s face
the capsaicin of the peppers
won’t burn there in exclamation the skin.

3.

The scales, ignorantly, of a redfish,
and the butcher’s opinion of you
when you ask him to prepare the meal this way.

4.

The images, especially the first two, in this poem.

5.

The word “old” from the first line. 

It’s been a long time /  Shelly Krehbiel

since I picked up the ball. But today is a day of sun, and I want the air. I’m not afraid to be the old lady down the street shooting hoops in her driveway. Okay, not completely old yet, but old enough for a gray ponytail, old enough to know that later the right knee will want ice. Yes, the knee will hurt and probably the shoulder, even from only this basket and chase, dribble, basket and chase, basket again. I can still shoot, better than when I played in high school, when I was just the smart, quiet one. I wasn’t supposed to feel strong, not in my body. One game I forgot and just played, let go, scored more points than I ever had. After, coach said, Let’s see you do that every time. I probably only scored six points the rest of the season. I was afraid to shoot, to miss, just focused on rebounds and defense. I wasn’t supposed to be good, not like that, not in public. How I wish I could talk to that girl I was, tell her not to fear being her whole self, to love what she loves. Now it doesn’t matter. I’m just the old lady down the street, a ball in my hands, feeling the age and extra weight in my body shift as my muscles remember, trusting the angles, the elbow, the knees, to send the ball where I want it to go, to feel it fly.

orange ball in the air -
arc in time the body makes
as I disappear.

August, Prince Edward Island, /  rob mclennan

Gulls, aplenty. Green gables, white. Of small beginnings. Cows, abstractions. Towels. Grab your bathing suit. By the waters of North Rustico, harbour. Sea glass. By the sandstone, smooth on the beach. From away, then. To rearrange the rules. Acadian fisherman, just off the shore. Seawalk Park, such intelligence. Lobster traps, stacked. What if it stood. The same function holds. A vista of rippled hills, these coded, free roads. Paved, and unvarnished. Iron-rich. Full-fathom deep, boats and nets and traps. These wayward hopes. Pelagic, abyssal. A crest is formed. Flags, a thread of fine vintage. What people, always. This line in red sand.

Showcase  / Piper Rasmussen

Tennis balls ajangle underfoot, sticking out like lulu
lemons from the sticky legs of folding chairs, ma-
mas and papas shuffling slightly to make room for
program sheets in purses, rustle rustle, skrrt skrrt
floorshow quiet fuzz. A community remembers to
look alive: an offkey warble chorus sips its soup &
a little ping-pong ball pops up the stairs ungreen-
screenlike but she just gets up again and stumbles
behind the wobbly ballerina line, proud to be on-
stage, if you can call it a stage. Gymfloor tile: you
could shoot a three-pointer and the library books
would clap from over there. Shelves line the gym
in this moment of disrepair. Student activities have
been crammed into this room for the duration. So-
on. The little ball rolls along with a plié, a tendue.

“In July, St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her’s administration announced that it planned to clear the city’s three largest encampments, starting with Pig’s Eye on Wednesday, August 5th.”  / Connor Simons

The City of Saint Paul completed the planned closure of the Pig's Eye Park encampment on August 5, 2026. City outreach teams were on site to assist in safely transitioning individuals and their belongings. The closure comes after weeks of daily engagement from City and County outreach teams, alongside local service providers. City staff has begun remediation efforts at the encampment site.

This is a permanent closure. The City and County remain committed to a coordinated, supports-frst approach as this effort continues at additional sites. The primary focus for the City is to continue to provide coordinated support to help encampment residents transition toward safer, more stable housing and to access additional services and resources.

Inevitable Not Quite Mad Libs / Veronica Vo

after Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Death blowing you a kiss. Watch yourself watch yourself, tits bouncing no pants on. The point is to feel something even if you don’t understand it. No language. Just body. Can it still be a bad ending if you’re not covered in blood? We turned on Five Nights at Freddy’s while he ____ his ____ in me and I kept watching the movie. He asked, sarcastically, do you want to keep watching. As if I couldn’t because of the ____. I looked away from the movie, finally. Final girl. Watch yourself watch yourself. Death danced here. I felt something I don’t understand. Jamie Hood writes that ignoring the continuity between the unpleasant and abject is laughable. Death laughed here. I should have told him I wanted to watch the movie. Would it have made a difference? I shouldn’t have had to say I don’t want to be ____.

For America’s 250th Birthday during a Heatwave in Bronx, NY at the Corner of Jacobus Place & 225th Street, Marble Hill/  Melinda Wilson

after Allen Ginsberg

America we’ve given you all and now we are nothing.

In the 1950s when McDonald’s first opened, a hamburger cost 15 cents. Today, the children of America are throwing hamburger patties in the cascading waters of open fire hydrants without spray caps. The mini floods sweep the pads of beef past the longing eyes and noses of the neighborhood dogs whose owners are walking them earlier than normal, hoping they will shit, so they won’t have to leave the apartment after dark when the street fireworks crack so loud windows will rattle, babies will cry, veterans will cover their heads, and the dogs will tremble with fear at our collective monstrosity.  

America when will you be angelic? / When will you take off your clothes?

In the 1970s, the Astro Lamp became the psychedelic staple of our mutual desire to free our asses and our minds. Today, the children of America are buried deep in their screens, thoughtlessly handing over all their private data to the tech moguls. They are posting lewd images of their bodies through heavily filtered apps, so when they see each other on the street, they are beyond recognition. Just more faces in a sea of screens. 

America when will we end the human war?

In the 1990s when the officers who beat Rodney King were declared innocent, the people of Los Angeles rioted in the streets. They looted, they assaulted, they let the mother burn. Today, the children of America walk across graduation stages, risking their diplomas to bear the flags of their parent countries. The valedictorians have the microphones pried from their sweaty hands when they do not comply, when they are steadfast and repeat “chinga la migra.” 

America why are your libraries full of tears?

In the 2010s when our colleges and universities started telling a little of the truth about the Trail of Tears, the Florida State Seminoles earned a spot in the ACC Championship game. The fans donned native war bonnets all over the city of Tallahassee, on their trips to Publix, their post office runs, and dentist appointments. They tomahawk-chopped their greetings to every passerby. Today, the children of America are taught to say “criss cross applesauce” instead of “Indian style,” but we still dress them as pilgrims at Thanksgiving. Then they ask ChatGPT what it means to scalp an Indian.  

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.

In the 2020s, New York City elected a new mayor. A Muslim and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. President Donald Trump called him a communist, and the Knicks won the championship for the first time in 53 years, despite the Mad King’s attendance at game 3, which was the only game the Knicks lost. The whole city chanted “my mayor is Muslim, my bagels are Jewish, the Pope’s on our side, Knicks in five,” and we all loved one another for maybe the first time. Today, the children of America might know how to hang on to the small amount of collective joy necessary to keep them alive. Because it is the children of America today who are perfect not the next world.

September - Poem 4

Atomic Tourism / Laura Bandy

Atomic tourism is the most amazing coping mechanism that the people of southern Nevada came up with to deal with the fact that their own government was bombing them. It was a phenomenon where people would come to Vegas to watch the detonations and people would dress up. —Claire Vaye Watkins, Fresh Air, 2026

Tourists come around our town for the Lincoln sites. Not to our town, of course—they can find cornfields and prisons in their own backyards—but nearby, in Springfield, where he lived. There’s the Abraham Lincoln Library, the museum with his unnerving hologram, the Lincoln-Herndon Law Offices Historic site, and his home, where he and Mary shared a bed. Across the street, you can buy ice cream to lick while taking it all in. When Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s wife got wind that Kentucky was trying to claim Lincoln again, she formed a committee to put a stop to that nonsense. They needed an artist to make things look low key, but ignored me, thankfully, at the meetings (what use a poet, really, for anything). While Maggie Daley whipped the committee members who were listening into an Illinois frenzy, I gazed out the window at the Lincoln Square movie theater where a thin man was teetering at the top of a ladder, carefully lettering Atomic Blonde onto the old-fashioned marquee. I had not heard of that one and wondered at the title—did atomic describe the lead’s hair color? What hue of blonde is bomb? It looked like the kind of playhouse left over from another age, where women wore big hats, corsets and steel-hooped cage crinolines under smooth muslin, and men dressed sharp in dark broadcloth, wool vests, and frock coats lined with silk or polished cotton. Since immersion baths were rare, even for the rich, animalic extracts of musk and ambergris were splashed liberally to mask the stench. Maybe the gentlemen stepped out at slow moments in the show  to smoke cheroots and plan capitalism, or maybe they stayed in their seats through every act, every last scene. 

Sonny / Alicia Boemi

I remember the weight of those silver steel doors that kept you,
and your friends— 
trapped in a burdensome manner,
safe but not secure,
uncomfortable but tolerable.
I couldn't help but lock eyes with you,
your eyes were incredibly bright blue.
The heat was searing out that day,
heedful, we went for a walk.
And, even though you couldn't hear me say your name, 
you looked up at me. Relieved. Delighted. Thankful.
Merciful you were to the humans who left you,
including me, who, 
cried on her way home after I left you. 
Heartsore for you— 
and all the dogs I loved, 
but could not mother.

The Role of Art in Late-Stage American Capitalism /  Jesse DeLong

Maybe our mistake was
we should have designed
our poems like the Ford Pinto
or that washing machine
that must be replaced every six years. Maybe

our poems should break down
continuously in the reader’s mind
or make them
feel like they do drinking a Diet Coke
for breakfast. We errored

in letting readers have a favorite
sad song they read at every funeral.
We blundered in giving for free
our labor at coffee shops
and open mic nights
or in the backrooms of libraries. Don’t even
get me started on libraries.  The ending

of this poem shouldn’t even satisfy you.
To feel something, anything now,
comes at a cost. Instead, it should ask you
to hand over your credit card
information. Anyways, here’s my venmo:
@Jesse-DeLong-2
Please send me $5. 

Who is most to blame /  Shelly Krehbiel

Can you be okay with not knowing?
the couples therapist asks.

The woman rolls her eyes. The man looks down,
searching for what he cannot say.

In a year they will be divorced. In a year
the tree they planted when they bought the house

will be dropping peaches into grass kept green
only by its shade. Who could stay here?

she will ask, as she shuts the door for the last time,
their things neatly halved, the new owners

unknown to either of them and coming soon.
Years after that, he will sit on his porch

in another hot Kansas summer and ask himself
What was the name of that peach tree?

And though it was Reliance, he will remember it
as Resilience. No one will correct him. 

For Rachel Blau Duplessis, /  rob mclennan

Blue, legion. Drafts. A polyvocal entry. One’s ear, to lend. A visual, daily practice. Days and works and days. Cartographic, the position of collage. This vanishing point. A sure cure, applied. Categories. So necessary, membrane. How big a threat? What, temporality. How grand, this arrangement of stars. Encompassed. The onset, journey. Heart, and blood, and facts. An ocean. The structural divisions of trees, thin lines of fence. How redundant the aesthetic. Leaves tarnish, fall, and then. Thus, exegesis. These scraps of humanity, assembled. Chorus.

Ekphrasis, SlaveVoyages.org  / Piper Rasmussen

el niño  / Connor Simons

the child is growing in the pacific and did you ever think
our boy would get to be so big?   you don’t know the father
but we all have kept him fed on a steady diet of plastic
and cow shit   thwarted environmental reviews and rapid
easements for roads to plunge deeper into the vine-thick
depths of increasingly nervous jungles   it takes a village
but maybe we spoiled him   he curls his fist and mounds
of dead fish boiled from the inside out line the beaches
like cairns on a steppe   when he sees the previous year’s
work erased by excavators and emergency response teams
he caterwauls a punishing wind   he’s coming home
and somewhere in the sierra nevadas a hermit thrush
scrambles to find the last of autumn’s berries strewn
beneath pine needles on the tinderbox-forest’s floor

A Joke Just for Me / Veronica Vo

Friend said something unexpected
yet funny and I laughed,

looked over to find them watching me,
waiting for that reaction, realized –

friends have said and done things
just to get me to smile,

just to make me laugh,
isn’t that beautiful,

imagine thinking of ways to
get someone to move

their mouth a certain way
or make a sound that conveys joy,

imagine putting in effort to do that,
imagine being loved like that.

Other Words for Atrophy  /  Melinda Wilson

“All that land between 
yesterday and today, and 
the when and how of 
your life somewhere there.” —Joshua Edwards   

Before there is death 
and when there is pain,  
a cat will purr loudly 
to lull itself to the great sleep. 
My aged fox terrier 
licks her bed repeatedly,  
paces the long hallway,  
circles the stairs landing.  
She attempts to quiet,  
we think, 
the terror of a mind 
deleting itself in small 
stages of expansion,  
all marked by a decline 
we can hardly assess. 
When our sights tiptoe away,  
the changes are so slight  
it’s hard to spot 
the perimeter of dark 
at any distance,  
the slow dissolution 
of the herd, and the lone 
llama in the field  
when the fog clears.  

September - Poem 3

Grandmother Theory / Laura Bandy

The grandmother hypothesis reframes menopause as an evolutionary adaptation rather than a loss. It suggests that women who lived long after fertility ended helped care for grandchildren, improving child survival and allowing daughters to have more children. —Dr. Emilė Radytė, Samphire Neuroscience

I guess it never ends.
When I climbed Arthur’s Seat on an ill-planned study abroad,
I did not listen to the guide’s description of what lay beneath my feet—

an ancient extinct volcano—key peak of a hill cluster in Scotland. I was primarily
focused on not being shamed, lagging behind the other, younger girls on the trip,
my sometime smoker’s lungs protesting every upward step. There was a breeze,

thankfully, maybe blowing from the Firth of Forth estuary on its flow to charming Kincardine,
and cooling my plodding way up 1500 steps to the highest point in the city. At the top
I paused, ambler alone, as the rest found a field of yellow gorse and rock rose

just over the hill’s tip and made their way to frolic. Someone stayed to snap a shot of me
(strange in the age before selfies), a ghost behind the camera, catching my thin arms, tossed
bag, shy grin. Behind and below, Edinburgh, and clouds dyed blue like Cub Scout’s shirts

my mother, a Den Mother, used to wash for my brother. Girl Scouts wore green once they
ascended past Brownie status, and the ground beneath me was brown and green, all August
earth and summit tufts of deep clover. Seat’s peak was lush, and I could see far across the land

all the way, it seemed, to the cold North Sea. What anyone wanted or could reap from knowing
me was a mystery. The girls and our guide had already started down the South side, eager to
see Samson’s ribs, vertical basalt columns holding up the hill. Do with us what you will.

Poem removed for publication! / Alicia Boemi

Congratulations, Alicia!

Marginal Notes on Youngstown by Evelyn Green /  Jesse DeLong

America loves a dead blonde girl.

Something about swans, a velvet dress draped on a pool chair, pink wine left undrunk in a long-stemmed glass stained with lip gloss.

“The atmosphere of a crime noir, but deprived of its clues: no killer, only victims.”

Twin Peaks. Veronica Mars. Pretty Little Liars. Jawbreaker. Even, in reality, Jon Benét.

“A tin voice, void of language, with as much grace as prom decorations.”

Somewhere, Bruce Springsteen is telling you that your life was better in highschool. You poor creature, you believe him.

It’s not that we want to save her. It’s that we want her ravishing to be continuous, over time, and in a way predetermined by art and the economy.

Or, that we want to say it’s in our genetics, the way a praying mantis will feast on her lover’s head after copulation.

Meanwhile, there were over 10,000 missing indigenous women in 2024. And though they are ten times more likely to be murdered than the national average, ninety-five percent of their cases will pass without major media coverage.

This isn’t true. Pedophiles cannot be offered the death penalty because it makes it much less likely that their families will report them.

“Why would she,” he said, looking into the camera, his eyes bright as a bowling ball, “cook me dinner six days later if I hurt her? She wouldn’t.”

This bird isn’t actually native to Youngstown, Ohio, and would be just migrating through at the time.

“His revenge, he’d decided, and revenge isn’t the right word, because it’s more about what he’d determined she’d earned, would be to hold onto the Kermit the Frog stuffy, his daughter’s emotional support buddy, during the custody exchange. Let’s see if she thinks she’s a good mom at midnight when her daughter is crying in her crib, he thinks.”

Some critics claim this is a symbol, a chimera the detective hallucinates due to the repressed trauma of his mother’s death.

There’s a reason we want Daddy to drive a corvette that’s blood red. 

Midnight Sudoku /  Shelly Krehbiel

Emma and Andrew: married, /  rob mclennan

A perfect day for it. Rhetorical, cleave. Reception. His parents’ new house, the compound, the yard. Cunning, not fireworks. How I choose to believe. To address every object, tumbler. Wine glass. Stitch into one’s name. Any technique. As cut with a knife, this grain of salt. A path in the Martintown bush. He, to the left of me. Apprenticed. One, as in English. Shoeless. Gilbert Blythe, carrot. What languages choose. A damp cloth, sleeve. Spark. Speaks, into microphone. Make their way through the crowd. Earmark. As exciting, as punctuation. The magnificent, rise. Weather, imposes. Intercedes. A way with words. Aflame. Huzzah! Lift up, repeat. Cheers.

Nereid  / Piper Rasmussen

LA is low on water & therefore
she's putting off doing the laundry, doing without before she's asked. No surprise: an Earth Mother

in California. Dressed up nice
today, out of other clothes & enthralled 
by the white fringe on a green party dress.

Foam on surf. She waits 'til night & finds a party & someone willing to bunch her satin at the waist, 
to texture her until she's crushed,

profligate, & shining. Afterward, within
concentric circles of salt, she remembers
why it was so important to forget -- 

the moon that once moved her. 
The reef
gone, uninhabited.

unsent letter written during a heatwave  / Connor Simons

manic clouds span the distance between us   a connection
of vaporous expectation and sometimes dread   are they
coming to me or going from you   if this was a letter
i’d ask how the weather is but there wouldn’t be time
for any warning of rain or ash   the tornado siren blares
once a month but only the dogs seem to notice it
and where you are the scoliotic length of mountains
ache the clouds into forgetting how to hold water
until they disperse into gales that   each year   drive
desperate cows into the tangled murk of algae-choked
drainage canals and of course whatever i’d write to you
would hinge on memory to understand the teetering
balance that promises some kind of predictability
in where the rain falls and where it doesn’t   you might
remember the first time i explained why i didn’t like
going home   the 2 am doorslams   the bruises on
my chest   the sorry buried somewhere beneath
unpaid electric bills   pain doesn’t inspire dread
anymore but unknowing still does   the same
questions stretch across a continental distance
will the car pull into the drive tonight becomes will
every summer be like this now   i’m a child again
when i look at the forecast   doubtful of any
promises and locking the door to my room where
the shouting from the house is muffled   the pea
blossoms   dead as soon as they bloom   don’t shock
they disappoint and the clouds continue to tear
their way between you and i    someone’s mother
covers their child’s mouth and the waters leave
mud-caked bicycles and tennis shoes in fresh
embankments where there used to be market
stalls and between the two i thread myself into
anxious poems and this letter i won’t send

Ponyo Poem / Veronica Vo

silly girl, that boy is not your friend, and

narratives are for people who know endings are not destined.

he is going to hurt you when the tide swallows the shore

the fact is life goes on water teaches us that after all.

the truth your father never told you: we have no power over endings

he knew this would happen all along but you are magic

unstoppable, unknowable, you light a flame fish can’t resist

creatures with no language your self in another life

from the first taste of blood never able to return to sea

you will never swim again but you will love

How to Live in the Shadow of a Tottering Skyscraper /  Melinda Wilson

As you leave in the morning, sing softly to the foundation to soothe its aching knuckles, but only songs 
with vapidly optimistic lyrics that won’t antagonize the monster within.  
Tiptoe down the sidewalks to avoid jostling the structure with your tremendous weight. 

Seek out the sun, which will light your path to safety like in the aisle of an airplane in uncontrolled 
descent. 
When you return home in the evening, avoid watching television shows featuring fire-breathing dragons. 
There is only room for one monster in this disaster. 

If it is autumn, collect the falling leaves and press them into the pages of your favorite poetry books. 
This will do nothing for the building but will remind you that each organism is 
worth remembering in the hereafter. 
If it is autumn, visit the reflecting pools and read each poem marked with a leaf to our dead. 

Whatever you do, do not read the news, which seeks to allay your fears with talk of new 
  support structures and other modern fantasies. 
Accept the truth that today or tomorrow, the empire will fall.  

September - Poem 2

The Fisher King / Laura Bandy

What we have done often can’t be unmade.
This means doilies, or hearts made doily through
careful tatting of the organ into
“a pattern of rings and chains over a
core thread.” Why we might want to shred the hub
of love is a query for another
day. When on or around a quest, one must
pay close attention to the goal. Eyes on
the grail, hand on your scabbard, ready for
whomever might be guarding the prize. I
was fishing when they came for me, a spot
shared by my teacher, who loved it there. He
would often leave desk, pen, paper, poems,
classroom behind and go to the water,
back boat into Lake Limbo, drop a line.
What I thought was mine only ever lived
in my mind, my mind’s eye—stories told low
and hopeless—dragons and knights, mortal wounds.
Even if you wish to keep fishing, just
leave off the interminable watch for
those who would destroy whatever you hold
most dear, even if you yield your post, the
worst will still occur. Kings mean nothing. Myth,
legend, constellated down through ages
so to mend unruly threads, human dreads
such as angling with rod, line, hook, only
to pull up a comb, a boot, a rusted
chalice someone once thought (mad!) to drink from.

A Mass on the Soul / Alicia Boemi

The grass was too green, bright, fresh.
Venomous droplets adorned its blades.
Toxic, killing, cancer-causing burns.
in between your toes. 

I was scared. I was brave. I was hopeful. 
Too much hope filled my tepid ego.
“You were untouchable,” I thought. 

Until that day, the world crumbled around us. 
Like hot red ash scorching pale skin. 
Blood. Mind. Yi. 
Denial waves at me like an old friend

You went in and never came out
I died there, too. 
Never came back,
to myself, 
to my home,
 to my comfort.

Marginal Notes on The Real Identity of Kim Il Sung by John David Lerner /  Jesse DeLong

“In a dusty corner of the office, in a drawer seldom opened, in a manilla folder dulled from the years, the docket resides. And make no mistake, the CIA docket is very clear on this—that this man is actually Kim Song Ju, an orphan boy, poor child, who killed his friend to avoid the shame of stealing some food, and who, coerced by the soviets, took on the name of a Korean war hero.”

Other than the final line, Kim does not have a single instance of dialogue in the novel, but continues to affect, like the laws of physics, every movement of the story, such as which direction the prose can muscle or whether a character’s arc will adequately resolve.

Obama had woven into an Oval Office rug this campaign slogan: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Though as he stitched it into the cadence of his speech, the US was barely 200 years old—a mere “ummm…” in the monologue of earth. Martin Luther King Jr., phrasing it more poetically, said, “so in Montgomery we felt somehow that as we struggled we had cosmic companionship.”

We think of mountains as a source of power, a stability formed up out of the oceans, so of course this is where Kim built his prison camps.

The isolation and the snow alone would break you.

“Some would say we look up at the same stars, the same half-crescent moon, but all this laborer saw when he looked up was the sweat and dirt running into his eyes.”

Similar to the argument in this passage, Graeber and Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything, lay out the argument that civilization is not a progression, not a building up in levels like a stone fence along the borders of a labor camp, but a movement here, then there, then back here, sort of like the shedding and regeneration of cells in an aging body.

So that we haven’t so much as evolved to be where we are as a society, but that we just happen to occupy this space. This is where we are doing things now, I guess, and these are the things that we’re doing.

Lerner ended up murdering the owner of a bar over the ten dollars he’d put in the jukebox on karaoke night.

The suicide and alcohol rates in regions that winter are higher.

You can see, in all that snow, in all that white and grey, that you yourself have no real color.

“The feeling of gin in his chest is warm and at least the cigarette tip glows briefly red.”

Posthumously, he would be named “The Eternal President” though the most you can hope for is a few generations of your offspring forgetting how you ruined the family cruise ship.

The military demarcation line, where this defector was shot five times, still marks the separation of uncles from nephews.

In 1976,  North Korean soldiers, during a tree-trimming exercise, killed with their own axes a pair of U.S. Army Officers who refused to stop pruning a poplar tree.

Choi’s DMZ Colony does a better job of holding history accountable.

“Snow, like the shed dander of a dog, continuously fell as the prisoners, mostly bone now, worked. When the cold froze his eyelid shut, the prisoner waited for the warmth of his eyeball to melt the crystals. Later, Kim Ill Sung’s birthday would be known as ‘Day of the Sun.’”

“Kim turns, head bowed, and his hands, clasped at his side, unfurl so that his fingers spread, and as he lifts his chin to look up at me, he says, “And what about any of this do you think will really matter?” 

Sonnet for the Makers /  Shelly Krehbiel

How I wanted you to be kind. How could
you not be – you who made the sonnet song,
the telescope – you who waited so long
watching for comets to come, who made wood
and strings into music? Didn’t you pray
to your maker? Didn’t you too crave warmth?
Every map you left behind points to north,
so maybe cold wind was the thing you craved
until all was frozen at last. Is that
why you made me? Were you alone there? When
everything melted, you were sorry. Then
you blamed me, said I was the urgent threat
to your existence. You wanted to kill
me like tigers, like lambs. Yet I live still.

Half-hearted pronouns, /  rob mclennan

Who is speaking, please. The kitchen knife. Withness. The sparrow, says density. A wooden spoon, stops. Teeth closed and damp. From one language, another. So many fine tales. What one sees in the mountains. Clearly articulate. When I consider. Molecules, grammar, weak limbs. Pattern. The western barbarians, a late country road. How one’s night is spent. On difficulty, the difficult. Peach trees, require pruning. The hot mic moment. Square kilometres of wildfire. Out of their homes, many properties. I am having difficulty. Scatter, the clouds. Left open, defeat. Performs, what provisionally. Again, and again. Whatever the reason. Dawn, nearly broken. You are sleeping. You do not want to believe.

coffee caddy  / Piper Rasmussen

twenty-two and newly-weaned off mochas
the girlboss era peeking up my skirts, I
learned of affogatos, gained some weight,

corrected, clock-work boiling eggs each morning
with Bustelo from a cheap machine, half-
descaled & picked up at the thrift --

sat at a desk which I was told might raise
or lower me. ran back and forth to the Nespresso,
aspired to sip & to sip faster --

lonely, grabbing lattes with old friends
of friends & flirting & then fleeing

by the ends -- each day a thump-tha-thump
of nearly-- syncope--

those were years the coffee carried me.

someone was kidnapped here  / Connor Simons

someone was kidnapped here   across the street from your daily bus station   months out and you’re surprised that the choice of pink for the sticker’s background is what surprises you   what surprised you then was just how many SUVs are on the road at a given time   keeping yourself warm by using your fingers to count each one passing by and nurturing the hate in your heart as landscape becomes a threat   keep an eye on the pedestrian bridge   someone needs to post up at the rec center parking lot   does anyone recognize that van   in negative twenty degrees there’re only so many ways to kindle a flame   the breath behind words can try   promising that with spring we’ll all pitch in for a community garden or backpack drive or gatherings where we learn how to be better neighbors   or even promises told to oneself to be better   be less reclusive   be quicker to respond to a text   be a little more patient as the old woman who walks by your house each day needs to be reminded of your name while you’re trying to remove a burdock without snapping the taproot and letting it come back next year   but then there’s hate and maybe its heat is the surprise now, too   you hate the way commercials for a chevy tahoe hinge on an expanse of wild grass beneath a somehow American sky   you hate the way a hand seems designed to perfectly cover a mouth   you hate the fact that you eventually lost countt somewhere around thirty and had to start over  that now in our outside summer where wounds are slowly disinfected by sun and breeze you still feel that heat and that the sticker still needs to be there   needs to catch the eye with its artificial pink   as in a child’s dream of a heart   because someone was kidnapped here 

Instructions on ROCD / Veronica Vo

carve a circle where there always was one
now it appears only after carved
fill it then empty it then let the body remember before the mind
let the mind circle it

shape yourself into a question
look for the answer
spend the rest of life looking

rest your head in someone’s neck
feel warm
force yourself out of it
be born
be forced out of it

try to tell if you’re having fun
when unable to tell, carve a question out of bone
listen to your bones, even though
plastic replaced broken glass

find rightness in someone else’s warmth
mistake wrongness for solitude for loneliness
for desire for what is real that is real

trust an instinct that doesn’t know itself
let neither mind nor body remember
make peace with the hazy image
don’t know the words but know the song

search in dreams for the answer
for a north star without knowing what a star is
find something close enough
call it a star
let it teach you to breathe
let the answer be enough
let the answer be maybe

My Animal Familiars  /  Melinda Wilson

When I think about the familiars that populate my life, those  
currently at the front of my mind are a pair of domesticated 
mammals of a kind. One white with brown spots like a cow 
but certainly not. The other charcoal ash black, curly of coat  
with sad eyes so emotionally sharp they puncture like a tack.  
There were two before them who occupied my heart, a some- 
what similar pair of black and white partners in crime, but how  
easily angels become thieves when they pass. They took with 
them a love I can never get back, a love so particular to them 
that I needed to find a brand new kind of care when the others 
arrived. Early this morning, I leashed and walked my present  
animal familiars, and as we strolled in the quiet streets, most people  
still asleep, I found it right there in the sidewalk cracks, a tiny  
weed poking through to find its own sun, to drink the night’s dew,  
and to grow and grow until there is no space left for the feeling of loss.   

September 1 - Poem 1

The Fountain / Laura Bandy

A new friend, Bob, recommends a film and
all I know of it is a reputation for grief.
The filmmaker, said to be a difficult man,

wrote the movie to work through early cancer
diagnoses for both of his parents. Bob is a runner.
Over the summer he lost a parent and found

their eulogy while out on a run; “All the way
to Lake Michigan,” he said, “the words  
just appeared in my mind when I most

needed them.” Traveling in Switzerland
this past same summer, I hiked with my 85
year-old mother and her same-aged Swiss friend.

They left me in the dust, these fit women, gasping
in their wake while impossible landscapes of green fields
dotted with sheep and aquamarine Lake Geneva shimmered

in the distance. At a castle on a high hill, I sank
to a bench outside steel gates and pled for a drink,
hoping one of the spry ladies would walk final distance

to concessions. “Drink from the fountain,” said our Swiss friend,
gesturing towards a stone statue with a metal spigot spitting
water into a deep granite bath. It looked like what it was—

something from another century. I, leery American, made noise
about rust and germs until our friend took my hand, dipped fingers
into the pool. “This is snow water from the Alps,” she said,

“we all drink here.” I made an inevitable joke about the fountain
of youth, then drank bone-cold water I can’t describe, then our friend
told a story she had told that morning and the night before. My own

mind is slipping. As I sit down to write these words, summer
nears her end: Demeter preparing to lose her daughter
to the unimaginable as she has before and will again. 

Topple/ Alicia Boemi

The lake waves topple each other. 
Sparkle blue on top of deep blue tide. 
               One… 
                   after the other. 

Always moving, but ever so patient. 

Much is unlike the man who is impatient—
                   toppling,
                        each… 
                              other,
                                 one… 
                                    after the other. 

No sparkle blue, just deep red ooze. 

Your Whole Body is Heavy with a Need to Emote Infinitely /  Jesse DeLong

A Cento with lines taken from Jenny Boully, Ford Madox Ford, Don Mee Choi, Hannah Arendt, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Peter Handke translated by Ralph Manheim, Ginger Ko, Kazim Ali, Layli Long Soldier, Rebecca Boyle, Tommy Orange, Catherine Breese Davis, Joanna Klink, Robert Kloss, Michael Pollan, Eric Bennett, Kathryn Cowles, Tiana Noble, Brandi Wells, Alfred Starr Hamilton, Raven Leilani, Lidija Dimkovska, William Bronk, Cole Swensen, Toni Morrison, C.J. Box, Ann Jäderlund translated by Johannes Göransson and Prageeta Sharma.

In every man there are two minds.
I lived on sesame porridge for a year—
parasite upon a corrupt body,
the last cells of my body.
No owl had hooted in the woods behind the house
nor was it my own breathing that I had heard
and then at last I heard the wind in the pine tree,
the empty cup of the tea left behind.
The human debris,
rootlessness,
always a gift also.

Each day is another chance to try
breaking down like the rest of us wanted to.
What were all the remaining hours going to do?
The moon had an acrid aroma like fireworks that have just gone off.
The world, after all, is porous.
Sunny or sunless or in
those nights when nothing catches, nothing also is artless.
It is better to be a man singing to no one.

We end up trying to nourish ourselves on images.
farmyard animals about to be slaughtered.
Like roosters, men.
Women with short hair
like rotting snow.
The sun is
some loose bits of matter, the dregs,
some background mumbler.

If you meant
there are grey, anonymous hours like this,
let us now eat rolls with salami and cheese.
The nevertheless, the yet.

The world is made of sound
deepened by the constraints of the format.
Orphaned words,
the noises were hollow.
In language there are only distances.
It makes me want to find a bar stool as fast as I can.
Gin is white, for awhile.
The grass is naked,
it is against the snow.
See it in the window acting as trees.

Long Term Care /  Shelly Krehbiel

Today was the first call. The broker introducing himself,
introducing the product: long-term care insurance.
The kind of thing you commit to in November, when
the rains come in, when people put up pretty lights
and suddenly children seem everywhere. I don’t have

children. And it’s August. A good time of year, still
three months from the long and longer darkness.
Now, the mid-season apples are predictably falling,
the late ones barely starting towards deep red,
towards golden. They say it will rain later this week.

Tonight I went out to gather the purple grapes, plump
and perfect, so I could keep whatever rain comes from
splitting them into yellow-jacket heaven. And so I could
sprinkle seed beneath the vines hoping a brief summer
shower will be enough to start the clover I’ve wanted

to plant for a year. I’ve wanted something that will turn
into green cover for beetles and flowers for bees, something
to stand on in sandals, in bare feet next summer
as I pick new grapes, as I show the neighbor kids how
to know when they’ve ripened. Maybe those kids

will remember the taste when they get older, remember
the sticky stains on their fingers. Maybe they will plant
their own green vines for their own good fruit, wherever
they are, whatever rains do or do not come, whether or not
I buy the insurance. There’s so much to read, to decide.

Maybe the perfect time, /  rob mclennan

To read ancient classics. The sound of the press. Curved, thunder. A myth, of high tempo. Rocky terrain. Drifting periods of reflection. All season, fell. A false etymology. Animate. The Greek of Odysseus. How many fine shortcomings. Tales, open windows. Widening. Islands, rings. What carries each surface. The front edge of empire. Solstice, the back end of cover. These weary psalms. Friends you might know. What’s on your mind? Sense, and syntax. System build, the middle, slows. A trove of continued. Have you any questions? Translated into Latinized Roman, Odysseus converts to Ulysses. James Joyce, The Ulyssey. Such a long sentence. He nearly arrived.

Sourdough Aubade  / Piper Rasmussen

The end of a haunted night
the end of rain & spiders washing through
the gutter catchment in a twitching flow, 
perfectly feeding a bright garden I've never had.
The tomatoes were big as horses
& the spiders mounted up, were children 
on a merry-go-round. As I watched at the window, 
a mysterious dough began to rise
in an earthenware bowl on the kitchen sill, & the light 
grew stronger, & the sun rose round,
like a loaf made from scratch. 
That's what I woke to: the sun 
in its witching hour. At least the spell it needs
is easy: water, milk, flour. 

at the corner of Griggs & Dayton  / Connor Simons

five years sober and now – the stubborn pimple
in my right thigh          the left eye that grows
lazier by the year          the sense of simple

times making meaning    the beebalm shows
the mason bees the purpose of a hive
and when the schoolbus stops children flow

out like swirling eddies in the Mississippi – Alive!
yes   the ache in my knee when i tear out weeds
the way rock doves whirl from ash trees and dive

into meltwater and the way i’ve learned to need
my neighbors’ chickens and their brooding hum
the thrum of a pickup truck   the wind’s gentle speed

I'm still going / Veronica Vo

because Mary Oliver said it is no small feat being alive in this broken world
because someone told me in China, shyness is a kind of subtle beauty. beautiful
because someone can be your parents’ age and all you can think of is loss
because memoir from such a young perspective must be interesting
because this is the only form of survival I know how to do
because calling this survival is generous
because crying in front of strangers who are good people forces the honesty out
because I started and I can’t stop
because I was offered a heavy rock to throw in the river, to release grief
because I feel so lonely all the time
because I made martyrs out of people I love who still live
because making someone a muse means you can never touch them
because this is the only form of survival I know how to do
because if I stop it will all be over

When the Work Begins /  Melinda Wilson

What God must have thought on that first day,
gazing into the white abyss of absolute absence.
To design from void is incomprehensible to the
modern mind. Where is the blueprint, the scaffold, 
the clay? What to do with an immeasurable lack. 

Then lightning strikes, 
but from what heavens?

There is no one to care about the how. 
So, giddy with his manumission, God begins
the inconceivable work. Inconceivable because
there is not a soul to conceive. 

When I regard such privacy, I shudder.
I tremble at the thought of blank spaces, 
taught by Frost to fear my own desert places. 
Feel like a zero when unable to produce, 
incapable of connecting mind with pen, 
which is often and unfulfilling but somehow 
not hunger-inducing. I know the human 
urge to yearn, the futile desire to bring forth 
something from nothing. 

Whereas God need only drowse 
in the great empty, siesta in the time before time, 
knows nothing of painful silences nor the cold 
of missed touch. God’s position is such 
that existence is enough.            But without us— 

God would be nullity, nonentity, nought.

August - Poem 30

Thank You For Letting Me Plant the Last Seed  / Dahhee Chung

A cento from Zoe Berger,Ashley Howell, Dahhee Chung, Alison Henderson, Ash Kemp, Hannah Page, PF Potvin, Janette Schafer, and Kate Thuma

A cacophony of the black and white keys of our desire, 
A pounding rhapsody
coat you,
blend you,
candy you.  
You cry and I’m born. 
I smoked each cigarette to the acrid nub  

The lotus, 
Opening in the sunlight, 
Closed to the moon,
We bloom despite our darkness, 
Wear another piece of heart, 
Scar blooming around to gleaming bar, 
A blue silk ribbon runs between each eye-door. 
Night we endure
Not silence, exactly
But the absence of other sounds outside ourselves, 

I didn’t choose to be born,
You chose it for me. 
Living is a conversation with your body 
Wedged between the breeze from my window,
And a phantom in the dark smiling madly. 
Widening mouth, wagging tongue,
Begging for a taste 
Looking for a single source of truth 
Swallow each other like bags of Saccharin and dopamine. 
Can you imagine loving something so much,
You use all the letters naming them? 
Ear to eyelid, I can see what you’re hearing. 
You open your eyes and I’m instantly cosmic.
My blush is every cell,  
At the same time, 
The picture of us smiling,
Since happiness lasts a hundred twenty-fifth of a second, 
Knitted us together. 

You’re dying.
I smell it 
I don’t think about it until my elbow hurts,
Think about how love broke me everyday,
Yes, everyday, my love. 
Nine lives, but is on the last one,
Life my visitor, admit it.
Time is running low, or down, or out.  
Can I hold another ring,
Wear another piece of heart?
A promise broken across half the sky. 
I forgot my wings, but here they are again right where I left them,
These stunted nubs at my shoulders underneath my skin. 
Thought and memory are still accepting sacrifices,
Yawn to the rhythmic march of the coming dark, 
& we found ourselves swept over the brink on the rocks 
Next to lives waiting  in dark scars  
Listening to Jeff Buckley in the car. 

They weren’t ever meant to be anything but sewn together 
Into the most exquisite knot. 
And I never sent for you
(That’s the best part, truly)    
Every dead language eventually evaporates into thin air 
One of us becomes good,
Memory becomes our last.

Hats Off” for the Tupelo Press 30/30 project  / Dahhee Chung

Twenty-one days to form a habit,
So they say.
This is my last one for the month.
I smoked a whole tree in thirty days.
I read The Vegetarian by Han Kang,
And I am now a tree.
My breeze whispers food strung together with bizarre analogies,
The month is over and I’m feeling like that taste,
You know the one everyone says,
Like how I love to eat my semi-sweet dark chocolate and wash it down with,
Don’t say milk, that’s gross,
That would be like numbing the intensity,
Black coffee. 
It brings the intensity to life and allows it to linger,
Because memory is melancholy,
And I’d rather feel uncomfortable,
And when the taste begins to fade,
There’s always another pot 
And one more bar.

What is the true meaning of a shirt / Ash Kemp

After Cypher

Yes, it holds you in its arms,
But what is its favorite sound?
Yes, it covers your top and sometimes 
Brushes allllllll the way to your legs,
But what about her laugh?
Has it ever heard anything so beautiful?
What is the meaning of a garment
Full of soft compliments and bracing seams?
Can anyone know the true meaning of a thing within a dream?

Party Games / Hannah Page

Listening to Lover with headphones in and shades on behind you in the far back seat of the mini van my friends rented to take us all to the Poconos this weekend

One of my biggest life goals was to become happily married

During Never Have I Ever you tell the table that your wife has done it all and our nonverbal exchange is that of pride 

You see you raise up all of me, including the object I (used to) like to become once in a while

Maybe we met on Snapchat and I tried to sell you XXX content

Maybe our first date I blew you in the park next to Yankee Stadium 

after you held a rolled up $20 bill to my nostril after scooping up powder with it — 

We have undergone many deaths. Transformation is nothing less 

than the casting off of everything that no longer serves, and somehow 

beneath the shedding we fit together better

Meeting Jim Again / PF Potvin

Yes, we'll gather by the river,
in the lilac grove in the back yard

counting the mind, counting crows
startled at the diamond back beneath the mesquite,

the early history of Australia. But then the movie
in the river was a trout, and I was on the bank, my heart in my

brain at boil now with heat, afternoon glistening
playing the game of becoming mountains.

I see from the air the rumpled green and beige,
with a thousand colorful birds sweeping in a circle.

Now they live inside me.

I’ll follow you down /  Janette Schafer

after “Silver Spring” by Stevie Nicks

There’s a white flag 
above my door. Somewhere
between the hors d’oeuvres and a look
you gave when you helped
with my coat, I got lost. 
Your silver-brown curls kept falling
in your eyes. Sometimes lovers
change, a hummingbird flit,
a dip in a flower, suddenly across
the way to another nectar.
Maybe they will drop a seed of warning.
I know I could have loved you,
but you would not let me. The sound
of my voice will haunt you. Never get away.

SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION   / Kate Thuma

When the rooms in my brain fill up with dry pens 
and bits of petrified wood and old paper, 
the knowing overflows into my bones, 
hollow like a bird. 

When they’re under enough pressure
a million memories can be measured 
with a bathroom scale – 
the weight of it is what keeps me from flying. 

All the bones in my fingers and toes 
scrunch together to try to stem the leaks, 
and my kneecaps screw more tightly 
to keep the heaviest in. 
Our holding arms and shaking legs 
and back-of-my-neck kisses and closed-eyed declarations
are stacked together so tightly their somehow-bones 
are kissing through a veil. 

A spark from a skinny candle 
leaps into my sternum. 

And, finally, flight.

August - Poem 29

11   / Ashley Howell

I keep looking at the clock and its four pillars like I’m pulling you out of time or trying to make a mirror out of loneliness and they say twins and multiple sea creatures and flames all mean something and I hope so as I look at the clock and see you 

through

***

the blessing of space and the burden of knowing we all fed each other umbilical and that we all move and heave grief as the clock continues to twelve it passes just like this was the first time I’ve ever loved spring and then the snow returned

***

Sublime Fugue  / Dahhee Chung

Three feral kittens played near my flowerbed,
As I sat in a lounge chair
Ritualistically blowing prayers like a steam engine screaming for help,
Watching intently.
Mama cat and I
Made eye contact for forty-five seconds before she turned her head,
Forfeiting her win this round,
And so I fed her babies,
Three like last time,
I hope they’ll survive the streets. 
My friend warned don’t name them this time,
Periwinkle, Mugwort, and Lilac gone,
So I omitted that I already call her Creamsicle. 
The news reports everyone is dying today. 
I see a face in the sky,
Illusory like her mother 
moon revealing Mama’s been watching all this time. 
An eclipse punctually arriving, 
One face dispersing, and the other dying,
Then resurrecting in three hours, slowly brightening.
My eldest boy stood by with his arm permanently tagged
Ephemeral,
When his favorite number was infinite.
A nuance Fitzgerald might have elaborately called first-rate
In so many, many more words. 

My grief at midnight is a mirror / Ash Kemp

My grief at midnight weighs me down
Shows me the other side of a life I don’t want but often feel trapped in. 
A mirror to the grief of my past
My unattainable present 
Sitting on my shoulders like
What.     Am.    I. 
Doing.    Here. 
Where does the midnight go when I’m still awake but not seeing?
Is my grief a reflection of yours?

Mundanities / Hannah Page

Today I did yoga, clipped my toenails
sanded my callouses & drank 40 ounces
of water
in a row, scrubbed my face with harsh
teas & took a shot
          of Apple Cider Vinegar
              of collagen
             of 99% isopropyl alcohol

If only if only the woodpecker cried,
the bark on the tree was a little bit softer
I could carve into it both our names
with my galactic blue fingernails,
inscribe them in a heart – a token
of an homage to our mutual
adoration blossoming from that eternal wound

Found Art / PF Potvin

As the children
splashed and swam and shrieked
with voices echoing ripples
across the blue back of lake

two women with walkers
approached and eased their spines onto the bench

laughing to themselves
about the graffiti
carved on the backboard
“Enjoy the Little Things”

hermetic /  Janette Schafer

finger-point wiping venom off the chin
hazel eyes not quite jade—concentrated

i curse the mind-disease that makes me
misunderstand; should my hand be in your hair
or folded on my lap?

A AAAC CC DEEEEEEEEE FFHIIIIK MM NNO OOPPRR RS SSSTT TTTUUUX    / Kate Thuma

(after “I Used to Experience Memories of the Future as Panic Attack) 

All of the rooms in my brain that aren’t a part of consciousness –
an insistent throbbing pinky knotted in thread 
and enacting what has been ordained.  
And I am here, 
and I’m feeling it through tears. 
And that pinky blue at the tip from the thread 
between us thrumming with the coiled tension of 
extracting the always-was with silver fingertips. 

I received your message. 
I think we were decided by an Old Testament angel.

It dulled the sound but kept the sensation, 
my body couldn’t hold such bigness then.   
She is holding our mouths.  
Snap awake. Look at you, 
spider-drawn over trembling keys of ivory spine  
stretched under my bedroom door.  
String in the moment of attack, 
suspended in the wisps of the feather moon. 

The angel in the corner tells me to stop screaming,  
tongue pressed against a twisted backwards eye tooth, 
When we speak with voices that aren’t ours, 
when you taptaptap goodbye, 
you were still far and long away, but I heard you. 

You’re sending love down the line. 
You’ve been tapping messages to me through time. 

August - Poem 28

Mosquito Poem / Zoe Berger

& if I trust you what would I do with my mouth / what if I said I need you alive / I don’t mind being jerked around by strong wind and avoidance / & what if I like the candles you light for me / a reminder of all the other hot-blooded creatures that do the same / always lighting candles and believing in them / all the sweeter when I smell out your warm body through the smoke / I am thirsty for the river worming through you / I find great pleasure in keeping you up all night / I’m in the room with you now and your cursing is just turning me on / if I could get inside you I would / I was never drawn to the light / I am hiding under your bed and in all the dark / I earned it / give me your neck / I can hear your heart / I will try not to think about the heat breaking or the attention I demand fading / I will do my best to disturb you after I’m gone / let me bloom onto your blushing flesh 

Im/balance  / Ashley Howell

I don’t dream of you much anymore
I’ve stopped inserting myself into yours
I’m just waiting to see if you will come find me

In reading the feminine
There is  much talk of  lactation
One breast always produces more milk

My own, my friend’s, the speaker of the poem’s
There is imbalance in giving life
Life is not symmetrical, and it shouldn’t be

So I’ll let my dreams drip out in ounces
One side 7 and the other 1
Giving imperfect life to our past selves

Running together through the mountains
As the sun set behind the foothills
And then walking our separate paths

Borrowed Words Today  / Dahhee Chung

For Dolly Parton

“Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair
With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green
Your smile is like a breath of spring 
Your voice is soft like summer rain.”
“Islands in the stream, that is what we are
No one in between, how can we be wrong?
Sail away with me to another world
And we rely on each other, ah-ah
From one lover to another, ah-ah”

Oof,
*a moment of silence 

Legislation / Ash Kemp

I am reading the news on my phone,
Barely recovered from another migraine,
Seeing they are pushing hemp beverages off the market again. 
We were sold wine mommy culture and now the wine business are whining that
They are losing their customers. 
In a country that would rather poison its populace than provide safe food,
Is it any wonder they want to line the pockets of alcohol companies rather than let people get California sober?

Clean / Hannah Page

Tits out on the couch next to
my husband scraping
the basin of my skull
for the dregs of an idea
worth pumping up the color
on or ornamenting with all
the trappings of a good word
painting and all that’s flowing
forth redirects my childhood
trauma to the shower
chair we recently installed
after his surgery. I still
wash his back where he
cannot reach the bisecting
scar, and after I deflate
onto polyurethane – stable
in the cleansing rain.

Crossing Cuyahoga / PF Potvin

it’s been seven years since
we sprinted the bridge
passing each of the eight
shirtless guardian pillars
stone faces, eyes set, foreheads
crowned with laurels
looming fourtythree feet
above the span, each
clutching a transit
creation e.g. wagon, stage
coach, car but none
moving how we crossed
on our own legs
with our own steam
racing to the finish
in first form

Late August /  Janette Schafer

oday, the first nips of fall, 
sun beats on my window
like a tappy snare drum, 
wind rattling the panes 
like small melodic percussion—
a triangle or chime. 
No rain today, only breeze
only Bob Ross fluffy clouds
and happy little trees
and I’m catching up on work
and writing gauzy poems—
happy little me, happy little me. 

PRIME    / Kate Thuma

There’s a lot I don’t understand 
about robots. 

In some ways they’re no different 
from a semi or a Camaro. 
And in others,
they do the biologically impossible 
and become a father, 
with something more like blood 
warming a metal hand 
on your thin shoulder. 

A boy needs his father’s voice in his ear: 
be strong enough to be gentle. 

I’d hold a funeral for a sound 
when it’s the voice 
that taught you about being human.

August 27 - Poem 27

Cheers / Zoe Berger

Why would I die? 

Tits up, heart 

pushing 

through my chest

Why 

should I die? Gotta be 

in that cave 

making sense of the shadows

This brief visit 

goes fast enough

Thank god we didn’t find a way 

to make it go faster

12 / Ashely Howell Bunn

I know two people

who broke their jaw

falling off electric

scooters riding through

the city and now I 

won't let my child

ride one I know the

wind would feel so

good in her hair and

I know she needs her

freedom and there are

so many things in the

world that can hurt and

are hurting and I can't

stop all of them but I

can walk along this

cracked sidewalk with

her and hold her hand

for at least a little 

longer

Mother Sea / Dahhee Chung

A cartographer beside your etherized body stretched and mounted to the cardboard backing,

Pinned you

Poked you,

Prodded you 

With every contamination of earth,

Noting the fingerprints of 

Djinn and faeries

That plucked you from the salty waters, satirically labeled Sirius B,

Call you siren,

Afraid to find evidence that they,

Not you,

Are the trespassers. 

Marked with grids sixteen dimensions, 

Protracted and scaled every emerging mountain, 

And measured the streams of bleeding nile,

Bright  red  plague 

Gridded laterally across your body, 

Subjected to the self proclaimed pioneers who

Sinned  on you.

After Ars Poetica / Ash Kemp

When writing an after poem,

You are a runner, with a stolen voice,

Or maybe I should say borrowed?

You are taking inspiration

And turning it into a new piece.

You are running-

with your own thoughts and limitations-

trying desperately

not to sound

like a sad imitation

of the voice that gave you

the idea in the first place.

Demi Sonnet for Dolly - Hannah Page

The new fan for our bedroom arrived today.
I was not her biggest fan, but I liked her quite a bit.
Sometimes mounting something on the wall
is the sturdiest display of love – especially when
the switch flips and I cannot hear you.
Not in the dark, not where her swan song echoes still.
She will always love us, and we’ll never have our fill.

Testimony / P.F. Potvin

screech owl whine in

bushes beyond the fence where

coyotes descend

twisting, yapping, leaping through

the pale pool of the blood moon

You know things are bad when / Janette Schafer

a smart phone tarot deck app makes clear
that you should sell your house, move to

New Hampshire 

a concrete floor looks like a boon or beacon,
beckons to rest the heavy limbs

fear is the tie that binds
fear is the tie that binds
and fear is the tie that binds you

the day is made of one more step one more step

one more step

when Glen Campbell & Dolly Parton  are now dead
and nothing lies gentle on your mind

and you know I will always love you 

and I am weeping when I never even knew them

Untitled / Kate Thuma

2     There are 

4     ways you know me 

6     better than I know me. 

8     More than my own brain lets me see. 

10    I show my bones to you without trying.

8     They creak and flex without pushing. 

6     Trees are stronger in wind. 

4     Are there glimmers? 

2     (There are.) 

August 26 - Poem 26

NO GOING BACK TO THE VILLAGE / Zoe Berger

We try, man. Throwing clouds upwards hoping they won’t come back down. Siphoning water from the moon, storing it in black tanks to cook and shower with, irrigating our moon gardens with our runoff. Selling our moon vegetables for the small suns of coins, which we use to buy horses, not because they can take us farther but because they can carry the people we love too. Tying horses to trees on the beach,  their weathered hooves pawing the ground. We are all asking for more. All of us standing in the bed of your truck. More riders. No going back to the village. No going back to the village now. 

retrograde|retrograde / Ashley Howell

appears moving backwards|backwards moving appears

uncover: apocalypse of definition | definition of apocalypse: uncover

 only way I can recover is leaving| leaving is recover can I way only 

  moving the definition way I can recover|recover can I way definition the moving

apocalypse is leaving|leaving is apocalypse

uncover backwards appears|appears backwards uncover

to leave|leave to

Gadfly / Dahhee Chung

It’s getting dark! 

It looks like the moon destroyed the day!”

Young Pharaoh,

Same as the gadfly and pupil 

Asking questions,

Writing his thesis like Socrates,

With questions,

Through my fingers.

“But what will destroy the night?”

“Bad dreams.”

“And good dreams?”

“I ate them.”

From a phantom plate of whimsy and 

hemlock 

His mouth opens wide,

Eyes turn to crescents,

Mumbling sky. 

Subway Poem / Hannah Page

Your emergence back into 

life has been an unfurling

and tonight you rode into Brooklyn 

with me to my writing group at the fair 

trade coffee shop with all the ugly 

art on the walls in all the colors 

I have dyed my hair before. I used to 

belong to collectives as a second

thought; Now, I bring you 

with me into places once navigable 

through loneliness. This space

is blistering and luminous 

and smacking of a home         everywhere 

you come with me.

Lingering Question / PF Potvin

I can understand

swaddling a pig

in banana leaves

after slathering it

in orange and spice

burying it in coals

underground for hours

before pulling it out

to dress a tortilla

but admit to knowing

nothing about why someone

in the adjacent campsite

started a perfectly good

fire and wasted it on trying

to grill a watermelon

Just Across the Creek / Janette Schafer

A cento using lines from “Poems of the Mad Hunter 

and Other Tales” by Byron Hoot

There is nothing like the stillness of the woods.

What will I dream about?

The low ground wind sound,

the difference between the deer and me.

We do not miss the grace of first light,

the soul needs a broad expanse of country.

I know something of art and what is true of it—

heaven and earth created for us.

Each knows the value of going our own way,

where the possible is limitless, 

the promised land just across the creek. 

WE DON'T KNOW WHAT OYSTERS ARE  / Kate Thuma

Oyster (adjective): 

unknowable; alien; 

the "other" paradigm 

Ex: I held your

oyster heart in limitless

hands -- it filled them up. 

August 25 - Poem 25

Cabin Theory

I used to think if I locked someone in a cabin 

they’d just have to love me. Obviously I hate to admit this 

online. Probably everyone at my high school 

already knew. 

I’m allegedly still young. Each night 

I say a prayer to the gods of standing still. I lock myself 

in a cabin. Now I love my poem and my poem loves me. 

Look how lucky we are to not 

escape each other. No handles on the doors. 

For Your Drive / Dahhee Chung

Wake up and stare until the first song pops up,

“Friends, how many of us have them.”

Whodini tops the charts forty days now. 

Curate a playlist for your day,

Mood like Cortex,

A scene with James Blake,

Add something bumpy, groovy, funky and

A joint with your coffee. 

Get dolled up,

Fill the bottles,

One peanut-butter bar just in case.

Ignite the car and blast your tunes,

The clouds in the front drop

Like rad racer  sped up 8-bit pixels.

Maybe you’re not moving, but Tailored side peripheral’s are racing to an infinite horizon. 

Head bopping’ cuz Olive Jones is swooning Planes while

Two men under a tree talking with their arms, 

And a girl crossing the street in syncopated shoes marching two coffees in both hands,

I hope they know how much she likes them. 

Does anyone else imagine body parts when driving past black trash bags on the street?

Walter white was here 

Sharpie on the wall. 

Get lost, feel free,

The airline flight was a double feature. 

Sivans Estrada’s Un Rayo De Luz evoking pictures of you driving to the end. 

The last song Godspeed,

Frank Ocean will make you cry every time. 

What's more fascist than fat shaming? / Ashley Kemp

after a line from Harryette Mullen

The body

unconscious

devours itself.

Take a little pill,

inject a little liquid,

you will feel

so much... less.

Susurrations / Hannah Page

Follow

me          down

                                     to the boundary             where waves unfurl where I have prayed

the rosary over the fifty-nine small

scallop shells I unearthed with my curled

toes & pressed back

into the sand

in patterns contrived by the mariners

or perhaps the sirens with their slick

songs which seep far beyond

their visibility, beyond

the whole dark sea to brim at the shoreline

a high, pulsing murmur: a melody

simultaneously invented  & recalled

Balcony House / PF Potvin

as you climb the ladder

imagine above

this sandstone slab

patches of corn, squash,

beans and sunsparked faces

put your hands in the holds

your feet in the grooves and squeeze

between walls cut, stacked

mortared and etched

a millennium ago when

ledges held high enough

earth turned rich enough

seeps dripped long enough

to wet thirty tongues

until one day

enough was just not enough

anymore

Hotel meditation / Janette Schafer

This bed is lovely. It’s 5:39 a.m. 

and the world outside my window

in Jefferson County is already

awake and alive, the highway

buzzing, its own kind of wilderness.

My mattress, dense but soft—

my back feels delicious, tells me 

I need a new boxspring when I 

get home. 6:19 a.m. now, dawn 

creeping in, awakening the shapes

inside—outlines of a small table

a tiny refrigerator, a television 

I never turned on, a desk I wrote 

two centos from, and some white

frosted lamps, now disco balls 

by this refraction of sun.

Spent the afternoon in sturdy

farmhouses in need of paint 

and blueprints, drove by fields of

pastoral green—the clean bright 

smell of them. But the hotel is near

I-80, a few miles and mindsets

from the Pennsylvania Wilds

through which I just wandered,

an anonymous mammal burrowed

inside a temporary den, done

what I’d set out to do, sold a home

and time to return to mine. 

DUNSCAITH CASTLE / Kate Thuma

Standing in Dunscaith 

on same-but-different floors, 

our eyes form a human chain of origin, 

where our pupils connect 

to form a single dark hallway

for passing letter-locked messages through time. 

A blue silk ribbon 

runs between each eye-door; 

it flutters when I blink.

My end is woven 

into a slender braid behind my ear, 

so I can feel you first. 

Yours hangs loose 

to catch on thistles hidden in the heather. 

Each tug of the ribbon whispers 

original truth in an old language: 

we were, we are, we will be.