Preface

“The poem is always incomplete,” Mahmoud Darwish writes, “the butterflies make it whole.” The poem lives in the world. It reaches beyond itself. It reaches beyond the page to touch objects, inspect lives, handle joys and tragedies, turning them this way and that until it finds them shadowed in mystery. The poem looks beyond itself and sees afresh our mundane habits, finds the crisis of the headline in its true scope. And as the poem reaches for the world, the world reaches for the poem. The reader comes to the page and picks up the poem. The reader discovers some bliss or wildness or rapture or ache, finishes the page, and returns to the world. The poem is porous. It is a site of transit, made whole by what arrives and what departs.

    The crises of the world are stark. This issue arrives a month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The pandemic wears on. Climate change maintains its damage and deepening threat. The words of this issue lets the world arrive. Whether the news of our time is spoken of directly or indirectly, the poem, like any part of our lives, is born out of the interconnectedness of our existence—an enmeshment that brings not only the news but the tenderness, bliss, and reverie of being infused in this totality.

    The poets selected for this issue are the finalists for Interim’s annual book contest. Reading for the contest, Claudia Keelan and I have consistently been stunned by the submissions that arrive and how the final manuscripts speak to one another. This issue of our finalists serves as a record of that conversation we witness.

We are pleased to announce two manuscripts will be published from that annual contest. Mark Irwin's Joyful Orphan will be the next book in Interim’s Test Site Poetry Series. It is a book that defamiliarizes our lived experience, changing it into the beauty it always was. Matthew Moore is the winner of the Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award in Poetry for Jeanne d'Antietam, a book of poetry that encounters and transforms the often cruel revelation of American history.

-Andrew S. Nicholson

Mark Irwin

4 poems
from Joyful Orphan

Legend

There are the old questions about animals on cave walls
and how words from blood and ochre
formed there, and the new questions about vanishing
species and how we will ever
speak then? How will we say, zebra,
when there are none. When it is now, we say about the future
collapsing. Then, in the past, sometimes we’d chew
on the grass, and the green
would cut our mouths—grass of the dead. Daylight keeps
surging from that one antler
on the French cave wall, and there’s a breeze
in the midnight grass, while above, that comet’s silver starburst mane
untangles time in space, fire to carbon, not unlike the waste
we make on earth, though the former writes a script
of light, the latter a book of darkness, and now we must eat
the book, even the glittering trash inside until we feel shadow
tide our blood, the buildings climb our faces and everything we see looks small.

La liberté libre

When I read Rimbaud’s letter, written at the age of 16, the one to Izambard
saying how much “ he loves free freedom”;

Rimbaud who had just arrived home, the one he would leave a hundred times;

Rimbaud ready to sell his watch for a ticket anywhere, Rimbaud quivering like a drawn
arrow, his cheeks flushed, “The Drunken Boat” already written with its roiled visions
on the open sea;

when I read this letter, I remember the hives in spring and how some bees would swarm,
leaving their hexagonal mansions of wax, leaving their brood
and powdered bee bread in the dusk-yellow

glow, leaving everything for a new place, with nothing, the way the poet did,
un-singing his Illuminations, the sillage of their imagination

spreading across France, Europe, while unlike the queen who always swarms
to a darker place, hollow log or tree trunk, he traveled

to brighter ones—Sumatra, Cyprus, Addis Ababa, Aden, Harar, Choa—trading coffee, spices,
hides, and camels, often walking 20 miles a day, a feral path,

unhooking places from their maps the way he once unhooked words
from the Latin, Greek, French;

Rimbaud the other, othering far, the force of his body through the fierce light.

Nearer

To keep arriving always, and the book we all want
will be written entirely in the present tense by someone
walking into the remaining green,

looking as into spring rain when sometimes
the dead appear as loose vowels or open
windows—yes—they

are summoning you just a little north of the present
where the puff of seconds sets stuff
in motion, as with

the aspirates and sibilants of certain words, and everything’s
so close, it’s invisible yet
thriving to be

seen, heard, smelled, felt, and licked into the whirling
May of revenants—tadpole, minnow, lacewings—
you can see

right thru. —Nearer us to them—as sun flames on ponds,
lakes. Nearer fire, blood,
phlegm. Nearer


waking, nearer,
sleep, and how sheer
their give or take.

Hungry

Green for a long time then purple before everything turned black, spectral.
—The spandrel within the word goodbye, and the yellow
frisbee climbing beyond the yard and the boy

reaching. His entire body. —The truck. The mother screaming, No,
no, and the way she scratched her

fingernails into the dirt, deeper, as if she could catch hold and climb somewhere
out of it, or pull the earth’s motion backward
till this didn’t occur in the blaring

silence and red near-dusk where the driver
stood above the body—brief

monument, and we saw in that mother’s
pouring grief the way memory
resists entropy

as she said, Aaron, Aaron—the sirens already tearing the name apart, she
remaining on all fours, resisting any hand, preferring

to be animal, staring at the grass, its thousand green lashes.
—Hungry, that night I dreamed
a bear had broken into the house and was ransacking

the fridge, but it was a cartoon bear and after a neighbor
ran over and shot twice, it slumped

on its haunches, leaning against the white enamel, bleeding,
laughing, groaning through the slow days
without dying. —Sniffing, our cats

approached, and it touched them with its giant pads, claws,
collecting sensory data from this world. There was

something so good as we approached with nothing but our hands.

Mark Irwin is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Shimmer (2020), A Passion According to Green (2017), American Urn: Selected Poems (1987-2014), and Bright Hunger (2004). Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and NEA.

Bruce Bond

poem selection
from The Blue Marble   

THE BLUE MARBLE, I

When I was small, I found in the hills a battered car,
the casualty of a fall, a vandal,
acid rain that ate the fabric from the wire.

The beauty of decaying things leaded
the blood of my eyes,              
so I would think of it often, when I was alone,

the metal of the hood that bore
the colors of dusk,
the rust in patterns of the runoff
that longed to return.

But it never returned.   Nothing does.
A little of nothing in everything.
A little of each
in suns that crash

and shards that are the diamonds of the bees.


*


The marriage of attention and imagination
is
out there, somewhere,
where science looks at alchemy and whispers,
I too dream of you.

How odd to be alive.
Alchemy reminds me.

Just today I was nursing a wound
and turned into a child.
The way it shone when I cleansed it.
It made me
careful.  It made me look again.

As if the eye were lead,
and the dusk across the surface, gold.


*


If pasture scripture, so too the page.
Every blade drinks a language,

the way silence drinks a hymn,
or science the alchemical equipment.

Responsibility drinks the wonder that opens its eyes.

The year I was sick, I wrote a letter in my sleep.                                                          
I sent it to the moment before.

I so wanted to reach the place
my family came to rest.
When the letter arrived, my eyes had eyes.

Some days earth is such good company, I say hello.    

I say, thank you, I missed you,
and feel my voice
vanishing across it,
as people do
and stone beneath the carved initial.


*


If one were one
with a tree, who would think to ask
a tree, the thought of whom is silence. 

What branch would lean through the window
and whisper.

Plato saw learning as remembering,
which is when knowledge is something

we did not know we knew. 
If you are lost, you are not alone.

When I am lost, I love to get more lost
where the streets curve
in deference to the rivers.

Me here, the planet there,
a gravity between us.  It taught me how to run.

And when I ran, I felt a little freer
from the pull of it.
I felt the pull.

And when I stumbled, I went numb.
As if my flesh were flesh alone, and earth
earth.


*


I have walked this path in a game called Death
for Beginners,
tempted as I was to fall.                                               
If I stepped on a fracture, I would scream
softly to myself.
For it was early,
the streets sedated in fog.
The drapes of homes burned dimly
if at all.

Long ago this place was naked. 
Then the sidewalks came.
They laid their faces over
the eyes of gods
where the children pressed their hands.

You can see them still,
beneath the life that fructified the surface.

Like a superstition of graves.


*


The uneven path taught me to be careful.
My body taught me to extend my arms.

Balance, it said, is a variety of flight.

Alan Watts taught me.  Asymmetry brings relief.
Like symmetry I echoed. 

Like music in movies when you fall
in love with virtue. 
Or music. 
Or Alan Watts.  A conversation
where the echo of the echo
curves
into a tree in a parking lot,
a joke among mourners, a child’s boo.

And everyone laughs because they are lonely.
A cross above the dresser gleams.
In accidental light, it glows and darkens. 
In the body
of the planet, it pulses.
Breathes.


*


All is mind, he said,
his hand a figure in the field
that turned into a garden
where every bird is nameless.

Who has not looked for patterns in stone,
a face that says,
Did you think I forgot.

We were all so different then,
lost in a host
of undisclosed relations. 

You are all alone out there,
he added,
and Earth dwindled to a marble in the dark.

Imagine our good fortune,
cradled in nothing, as all things are.     
The sound of rain
running from the rain.


*


5,400 species of songbird, not to mention song.
5,400 breeds of nothing, the lost
inhalations of song,
in the bloodline of the unconceived.

And sometimes a crackle,
and a bird flutters out the mouths of children.

Take of this, my flesh, he said,
and he held up a tiny planet,
so small I thought it was an eye

without a pupil, a transparent ball
with a sky inside.
And smaller versions of ourselves.


*


I had a teacher who chanted holy
to bless each alley in the harbor town
where runaways gather,
an angel-dust in the eyes of a thousand windows,
a thousand forlorn cabs.

Holy the fire eaters, the tattooed girls
beneath an overpass braceleted in fog.

Holy, the breath that blushes the mirror,
notes of surprise
that make our names
vessels of the sacred. 
Holy the dawn that dismantles
the logo on the office of silent affairs. 

Holy the alif, the claw,
the dumpster, the epitaph to a library fire,  

the kiln that killed an aunt.  Holy the ditch
that ate a century, chased it with gasoline,
and woke, blind.

Holy, my teacher wept,
the word a vessel,                     
the sound so tender the vessel disappears.

Bruce Bond is the author of thirty books including, most recently, Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019), Scar (Etruscan, 2020), Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, Criterion Books, 2021), The Calling (Parlor, 2021), and Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including seven editions of Best American Poetry. Presently he is Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas.

Robin Walter

9 poems
from o oio

Begin with the word

starling.
This is a story about flight.

or falling.

Hold in your mind the weight of a bird.
Feel in your hand her feathers shuffling.
Imagine the brightness of day breaking across her beak.
Consider: can a bird break a night

into day?

or:

Begin with the word brightness.
This is a story about night breaking

a bird.

Hold in your mind the weight of her feathers.
Feel in your body her mind shuffling.
Imagine the night breaking across her body.
Consider: can a hand break a bird?

or:

Begin with the word story.
This is a bird about night falling into body.

Hold her feathers in your beak.
Imagine her

body.

Consider: can a shuffling brightness

break?

or:

Begin with

your
hand









shuffling
the night across her body.

Begin with

your mind .
feel your hand
breaking her beak


:



the weight of her feathers





falling .


Imagine her



shuffling bright

think wingbone think hollow

think wingbone think
hollow see black
capped chicadee
stayed through
winter a pine bough think
pine pollen see it lift
in light think

so delicate a thing
can lift so fragile
a body
can stay see

sorrow how
it stays
a body through
winter and pine pollen bird
bone see rime
rime of ice on blush
grass reflections of
bone through glass a
body did not
stay the winter how winter
did not

stay
think lift think blush
grass how sky
turns soft relieves
its clouds of winter think
snowflake think try
and lift try and

lift see

flight—


how it wings a body
from bone

think

lift
in light

a
fragile

sorrow

through




winter



soft

flight––

think hollow

wingbone
see


it lift


fragile

sorrow how




winter winter



relieves




flight


from bone

ink

see black









bird

blush

bone through glass




think
try
and lift and

lift and

hollow













winter winter

think hollow



winter

light

lift so fragile
a


sorrow

s
o





soft





a body

Robin Walter lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. She received her MFA in poetry from Colorado State University, where she now teaches. Her work has appeared in Poets.org, West Branch, Wildness and elsewhere. Her manuscript Little Mercy was selected by Kazim Ali as a finalist for Omnidawn's 1st/2nd book prize. Her manuscript 'o oio' is a finalist for the 2021 Interim Test Site Poetry Series and was a semi-finalist for the series in 2020. Her chapbook of the same title was a finalist for the 2020 Broken River Prize judged by Kaveh Akbar. She was the recipient of a 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize.

Linda Russo

5 poems
from the verdant

*

*

*

*

Linda Russo co-edited, with Marthe Reed, Counter-Desecration: a Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene (Wesleyan), is the author of Participant (Lost Roads Press), and directs Ecoarts on the Palouse.

Colleen O'Brien

5 poems
from Reel

A Poem for Your Walk This Morning

With the rabbit
in the backyard headlights last night
something long-tailed

muskrat possum

someone
would know; I don’t,
said Larkin & my love & I now
say it often.

With the poet
in the background things take
untrustworthy

singularity radiance

no one
would see; I don’t
if put near other
people often.

What’s it for
then? Solitary
non confinement

Envy

woke denying
the dream

didn’t count
your blessings, bitch,

one Ur text
message none

would call a [find a
foreign word]

besides you
love her

bedside you
aren’t that

[leave this blank] not

even for a second

honeymoon
suite ladies

be gentle
men my

ego’s in your hands

Habilitate

I didn’t mean to be at this party

first I was alone a public place

I had all these old dresses and was trying to find one
he hadn’t seen

the party grew larger

it was after all a party not just people

a high number now there must
be preferences

I was excited though to be at a party

I would tell my friends oh yeah I
was just at this party

I tried to find a dress that wouldn’t hurt his feelings

this one my dad bought me when I was twenty

I was paranoid the lady at the store
thought we were dating

I envy now what then I

stop that it’s wrong

it can help though
at this kind of party

I had this new dress but he had seen it

I had all these problems with my hands
and feet the doctor said I should

be ashamed

I gathered my things and moved away
from preferences

I kept looking over at them

I chose a dress he’d know I wasn’t wearing

for that reason

Michael Finnegan

re
begin

afoul
of all

intimacy

*

forgave all debts,
grand gestures, etc.

*

from here there shall can

only more no less

*

i was sober six years and six months and

*

bursting can spits

like in the
ad mists

her screen-lit face she

wipes her chin

*

re be
gin your ún

intén

did what
’s the french for

cry for

*

write sober edit sober makes john
imagine decomposing women in
the steam

goddamn, girlflesh
stay on!

*

the choice does seem lose one
or other mind

or matter

*

begin can
re can

know an old man named

poor

Coming Down

Aphorisms on stone benches
Neon in a gallery

Who was that was that

gone in long

return

thick with fantasy

a concentrated color rivuleting into water
filamenting

into water

what if we took no photos

eye contact with a child is like

what if we made no videos what

if the

were the art

the fingerprint what if

I were as neon sober as
aphoristic sober as what

not to be

small but larger

plastic pearls on a woman’s dress if you remembered
plastic pearls on a woman’s dress

Aphorisms in new asphalt
Neon against collision

who was

Colleen O'Brien's poetry and short fiction have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Antioch Review, Fence, Kenyon Review Online, and other journals. Her debut story collection, All Roads, was published by TriQuarterly Books in 2022. She is also the author of a chapbook, Spool in the Maze, from DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press.

Karen Holmberg

5 poems
from The Fugitive Thing I Seek

CONFESSION

Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell.
—John Keats

Your breath came slow, three
light notes decaying
to silence.

Then, as if your body knew
resigning life was to dive
or sing, you took a last breath
deep into your belly.

I gasped in surprise.

No, that’s untrue. It wasn’t
a taking in. It was breaking
the surface without you. It was letting
my held breath go to draw
the sweet air in.

And it wasn’t surprise.
It was a hoarse, explosive laugh
of disbelief.

No, I believed your dying.
It wasn’t disbelief.
It would be close to wonder,
if wonder can be harsh.

If wonder can also hold
the injustice of your too-soon
death, or ascend to awe
when dying proved
your body’s final act
of fully being.

It was visceral astonishment.

You took one final, deliberate breath
as if to taste and bid farewell
to air, then simply as the edge
of summer cloud dissolves in sky
your being melted back
into the world.

All day I’d been matching my breaths
to yours, measuring your body’s need.
And all at once it no longer
needed.

Over the parking lot’s palms and wires,
sunset richened its coals,
bathing the commonplace world
in consecrating light,
then cooled through
the spectrum of lavenders and grays,
diminished, diminishing, gone.

I thought your breath would fade that way to nothing.
What if you, in that last wave of your breath
heard my laugh, my expulsion—whatever
it was—as scorn
or bitter scoffing?

Forgive my violence.

Forgive me for being so delicate,
so wrung by suspense
while your body deliberately
lived itself out, laboring forth
that last surge of energy.

Forgive me the truth:
I was rushing you on.

RECOVERY

The luminous inchworm, two
thread-fine pinstripes
gilding its back, curls up
on the muted forest of my brother’s
chest, hitching a ride
on his ribs as we climb
to the top of Lantern Hill,
where my brother persuades it
to walk into his palm, then
onto a leaf, my brother
whom self-destruction
drove toward change.

I look into his green-gold
eyes, opened wide
like the astonished pupils
on a moth’s wings.
In the worn-out self’s
dull chrysalis, a rift
expands. Gradually, his face
is growing young again.
It dawns. Gazing,
he reaches beyond the ripple
of hills misted
pensive blue by distance,
for the hazy seam
where ocean heals to sky.

LATE WALK

On each side of the trestle, water seethes,
million-diamonded.

My mother scans the ballast
for garnet and fool’s gold
freckling the quartz,
placing her feet with care,
her hands clasped
companionably
behind her back.

Wafts of creosote rise off
the hot sleepers.

My girls leap from each
to each. Now they walk the rails
like a balance beam, heel
to toe, side by side, fingers linked
to form the letter M.

A distant, dull rumble.
We turn to watch
the red engine, silent
as a toy, catch up to its thunder
as it rounds the bend. My mother
catches my eye:
the sap of girlhood
rises in her still, and she gives
her radiant smile.

We stand aside,
each hugging a daughter
from behind as the machine
wails by, its wake
of hot winds whirling.
One girl puts her fingers
to the rail to feel
the shudder of tonnage
rounding the bend.

The air levels and goes still.

But the plum-tinged heads
of the shore reeds
go on rustling
and nodding, nudging
each other.
October will bleach them.
Soon they’ll hold the light
like mother of pearl,
or my mother’s long hair, which
up close
is not simple, but alight
with strands of platinum
and palest gold. A goldfinch
lands a moment, veers off again
with my mother’s
O —
in lilting — isn’t he
triple beat — glorious?
flight.

WIDOWED

An ingot of shadow skims the water.
The black-backed gull sculls the humid surge
of southerly wind, his wingspan wider
than my reach, so close we can hear the scrub
of wings and observe the turn of his neck
as he scans the shore. The crimson badge
of fatherhood flares on his lower beak.

He’s looking for his mate, struck on the bridge,
my father says. She was still limp and warm
when he lifted her, her wings unfolding to graze
the road, her neck falling back along his arm.
Her body was pristine, he said, his eyes
dimming in memory. He drew up her wings,
clasped them, then lay her gently on the waves.

QUESTIONS FOR THE NORTHWEST WILDFLOWERS

i. Meadow Rue

Your nude stamens shimmy, dangling
off some magnet, each

soot-sheathed, a green needle
passed through a flame.

What makes them
twirl, even as I hold

my breath? By breath, do you
mean wings?

Invisible fins—some
pulsing filament?

What good’s the bee
who never lands?

Burrow in. Take our gold away
upon your face.



ii. Western Bleeding Heart

Pads of a newborn kitten:
your pale lavender buttons.

When my girl leans
to the mirror, holding back her bangs

so I can name
the shape of her face
I find your heart.

A seedpod strains your sister’s lips.
You too will tear.

Didn’t you?
Wasn’t she

your seed, your self-
fulfilling prophesy?

Where can I find a mirror
small enough to enter you?

You have a mirror.
A mirror is just a face.



iii. Cleavers

How peerless you are
in your place.

Your tiers of wheels spring upright,
crisp with juice, not yet

crimped and limp from being
dragged down the path

on my pants. Did you know
we used to call you

loveman, for your tattling cling
to the furtive boy and girl?

You can’t control what you are seized by.

That we’ve given you the meaning
humility? Do you mind

not having much
of a flower?

Can’t humans love
what doesn’t have a face?

Karen Holmberg is a poet (The Perseids, Axis Mundi), essayist, and YA novelist (The Collagist, forthcoming from Fitzroy Books). Her poems have appeared most recently in Southern Poetry Review, Poetry East, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches in the MFA program at Oregon State University.

Alyse Knorr

4 poems
from Every Last Thing

The Paradox of Self-Reference

so full of wanting I forget my name again
pile crushed down to a swirl of sounds:
the sound of indecision, of sex, of glee,
& at the end a lisped arrival to the place I never left—
cat’s scratch cornea and the smell of coconut
forever a model of loss tucked in with all
the smeared maps of having mark my words
I did find myself sketched on the wall
of that basement I knew my place
as a dot in the code a whole city of desire knew that
if I contain everything I cannot include myself
tame me, retain me I sang hold me faster while I sink

The Lyric Address

illusion of privacy
space behind water
back of the fall
you liked my lists—
I never heard yours

let’s try to meet
you said try to
touch push the limits
of this sacred dull order
why not leap off this

thought into ten million
more why not see
what it’s like newness
for the sake of the new

Activity Report

tie a bell around my neck
so you’ll hear me coming
I’m warning you O how
I am coming noise full
can’t help what came or
what’s to come here in
the hot coming nights come
on I know how you worry
I know how that sounds
but for just one night
it was exactly like a song

A Pearl on Your Finger

sealed sea led down
to sand a hook pierced
through my lonesome
hand I refuse this body
its singularity I refuse
the collapse of time
the unity of a moment
that can only be one

Alyse Knorr is a queer writer and an associate professor of English at Regis University. Since 2017, she has co-edited Switchback Books. Her most recent book of poems, Mega-City Redux, won the 2016 Green Mountains Review Poetry Prize, selected by Olena Kalytiak Davis. She is also the author of the poetry collections Copper Mother (Switchback Books 2016) and Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books 2013); the non-fiction book Super Mario Bros. 3 (Boss Fight Books 2016); and four poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, and The Georgia Review, among others. She received her MFA from George Mason University.

Daniel Ruiz

6 poems
from Reasons for the Dark to Be Afraid

Master of Fine Arts

to Vicente Huidobro

God is an exiled carpenter
from an even grander universe
where He first had to be raised,
educated, and socialized before
they gave Him a reality to govern
and this is the one He got stuck with.

We’re in the same position, which isn’t
what He expected. I mean, what’s so great
about God, God, God? I translate Lorca
and he says, “Love, love, love,”
and now I’m suspicious of statues.

What’s so beautiful about a monument
are the centuries of bystanders
reading the dedicative plaque and at once
feeling lifted to historical significance
and like the gorgeous, memorized
names of the famously dead
have been demystified. They’re there,

beside us, desperate for a bathroom
and some nourishment and a society
that likes their ideas more than the one
that killed them. And God
knows all about that, being a minor poet
Himself, even in His homeland, where He’s riled up
in eternal quarantine from the beings He’s demanded
to love Him, or else.
Vicente, our God is not
an elegant condor marinating on a branch
but the dynasty of pigeons who, because
they don’t mind walking, deny us the chance
to toss our crumbs at the sky.

Peripheral Explosions

There’s no Icarus without sea, sky, trumpets,
no remorse in the painted ricochet of realities and rockets.

When the plane lands and becomes a car
and the spoon catapults an egg, the eye
prefers to close, repulsed by light
like a bedroom. A skeleton
uses its spine as a walking stick
to hitchhike across the country
and dig up its one true love.

Without a story, it’s still a story.
Time passes, you’re reading, that’s the story,
and an image has no need to narrate.
It lives in your eye, under an assembly line of perceptions.
In the Detention Center, badged guards roam,
praying to the portrait of your desperation,
which seems so natural to them, it becomes an exhibit
your entire existence gets stored beneath.

O ghost in a large white sheet, eye sockets scissored open—
behind every firing squad, a photographer; the Antichrist calling Christ
the Antichrist; the body the only bystander—

but not in this realm.
I used to be a sack of cells,
now I’m the Architect of Water.

A Conversation on Poetics

No, the other one. Aristotle said

what? Surely we’ve evolved from there.

Surely story can be investigated

even proven false on false pretenses

even when the antidote is to marvel

as marbles marvel at the numb face

of thumbnail. It sounds better

than it is is a compliment. Since

when is musing better than music?

It’s not like it doesn’t come from us.

In Place of Heaven

The Moirai care after your lifeline, a string with wire inside it.

Homer refers to the three Fates—Clotho, the Spinner (guess what she does?);
Lachesis, the Allotter; and Atropos, the Inflexible (guess what she does?)—
as a singular entity: Moira, just fate, which caused Hesiod to scoff

before asserting their rightful genealogies
in his own poetry, because he was sick of it being Homer
who decided what fate was, or the Fates, our version of them,

and how many, and which gender, and in which society
on this planet in the history of the whole world
is anyone ever going to be truly free? Where are the gods

who will finally tell us what we’ve been feeling all along
is the miracle they intended?
A bird smushed in the forest


reminds me of rolling pins. To hear, right after, the sonic boom
of many vultures’ wings flapping out of the trees high above us
and be startled by their number and the force they leave behind,

shaking all the leaves, is to know some freedom exists
in solitary, sensual pursuits not everyone can access,
and those who can, not too much. Maybe Homer made them one

because it took all three to spin a life that gave time
to solitary and sensual pursuits, in addition to social obligations—
not to mention art, which, if you want real time for,

requires some of it to be sloshed out unto the world like red tide
for many tourists to come by and say, “This is not why
I came to the beach.”


Like my life, I wish this poem began
when I began to understand it. At first, I thought it was about
the easy confluence of contemporary and classic myth—

centaurs in car commercials, kings in their castles
with credit-card debt—in the sense that solutions
need problems to solve them, but the tug-o-war between options

becomes ritual in your frontal lobe, habit in your bones,
until you reach an epiphany that was long ago an afterthought
in someone else’s mind, in many minds, enough to be called a movement.


In Cien años de soledad, Melquíades’s scroll is a dry riverbed
that fills with blood as he writes. His pen is the hand of Moira
enacted in another form. Many poems were harmed

in the making of this poem. All of them mine.

Remnants of Empire

The equestrian statues of kings
from various plazas I’ve seen
come together in the plaza
of the mind, crowding a small garden
with Charles’s, and Edwards’s—
the stench of piss ringed around
each base making logical the many
footprints denoting a darkness
of soil between strokes of green.

This impulse has to be questioned.
A country is made up of people
as an ocean is a mausoleum
of raindrops dying for unity,
as the sun’s embers yearn
to be distinguished as flares.
Why else put a statue up there,
if not to say, in this land,
these are the statues? Why not
make them larger than life to imply
History’s bigness, and dominance?

You wake to it every day.
Landscape of Sun with Burning Horses.
Landscape of Landscapes Superimposed—
bad idea. All the world aches. The aches
accumulate into something greater. The horses
carry something heavier than kings—metal,
which is why they ordered their legs
so thin, their bases so heavy,
they cannot run.

Babylon

When the white glove strips
the eyebrows from my forehead,
the emeralds from the gutters
between my teeth, then

then we can leave the party
and explore the stupid streets
of closed banks and black light
bulbs. The river bisects the city

like a tongue gliding over grout.
The windows are open to let
the smoke in. I choose to breathe it,
no better than a tree watching its offering of oxygen
ignite the houses it serves.

ii

Ripen, ripen like a sun-seared ruby.

The ground groans as it stretches,
each atom of dirt competing to gain weight.

There, there,
where even the bricks are asked
for papers, where the packed bus
shatters the communal shroud,
leaving you behind,

there, there,
the clock is black with hands.

iii

Nowhere are we not chased,
not grabbed after by ghosts
like the Golem feeling the full
weight of its clay limbs.

Death doesn’t hear his own rattle
as he stumbles from casket to crime scene,
car crash to cathedral—

can’t feel his cloak drag
the big and small clock hands
trying to pin him down like a tent—

and if you think
for one second that the seashells
cemented into balconies love the salt
of foot soles more than they miss
being pushed by impassible waves,
Death is learning to mouth your name.

Daniel Ruiz is a Puerto Rican poet and translator. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the Michener Center for Writers. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, his poems can or will be found in POETRY, Crazyhorse, Missouri Review, Bennington Review, Meridian, and elsewhere.

Jami Macarty

5 poems
from The Long Now Conditions Permit

On the Beach at Sunset

She has waited all day for it to be okay
to go for a walk, she wants
her flounce to evaporate their stare.

She does not want to be afraid of their gaze.

She is not there for those
who watch her from their studied chairs.

Her gender plus her dress are not a formula for their help.

Let them think what they will, her frock
the flock in open air suggested.

The ending of light at the outlet gulls gather.

When someone approaches they lift
out of reach, their shadows Escherian

As she sits one gull mews close, wanting what
she supposes, which she does not have.

The broken foot of this gull.
The broken wing of that gull.

The mica sand and opalescent muscle shells.
A sudden blue between wandering clouds.

The blue string of horizon strung out.
The salt wind and sail to wherever.

The curved shore, the skip along across water in a stone’s throw.

The crawl of ocean, desperate for shore.
When the water goes out, it takes of the beloved

Water’s obedience articulates grain’s tiny oppressions,
being undersized for their trying.

Before the sea’s radiant taxiing, her longing
to go out, wash in.

The sand, the sea, infinite theater.
Her theater: waiting for light, a her of she here.

The light does not long persist.
The ending of light at the outlet gulls gather.

What is left are feathers.

The Woman in the Changeling Season with Her Choice

answers the questions
the right decision interview requires.

When her mind remains estranged from changing
she funnels farther inside the building’s tunneling
white walls, behind-her falling closed doors and fallopian corridors
toward the procedure theater, toward the nurse
she did not want to coddle her hand, toward
the tall, already masked, man-mum doctor she could not look-muster,
toward refused Valium and the vacuuming sounds of the vacuum
aspiration emptying her uterus of an aspiring breath–
will-less sweat exudes her forehead
as she bears down
the twenty-minute nonspontaneous ending
she chose
toward life without the life she stole from being made,
the one he would have left her on her own to raise.


—


Those next in the wide-windowed waiting room
watching squirrels hop the orange and tawny leaves
already fallen off November’s thin and faceless trees.

Bardo Friend and I Belly Up to Smattering Stars

our legs skin cool as corrugate as light falls
disarming the distance between sky and our bodies

alive provocative the entire
sky machine made stars a minefield

mini-fires shake down on friend and I
flares arc a scar transmit

a girl sadness dusks mountains
scatters the background indigo blue

the universe expands as friend and I talk
of the accrued liars of our lives

damn night forming anxiety after day
reminders of the liars’ aged words

friend’s dry needle has permanently abolished
her heart muscle in five preceding days

then friend took leave showed me elbows
friend left me my heart with friend in it

without her I shall stumble numb my future
for now friend and I agree the corporate monsters

lied about there being enough bee hives
weather farms salmon ladders keystone species

I and friend cast together for Earth
we want free leopards hippos friend and I tell the stars

let the lion pride set upon Africa full of poachers
set upon thieves who summarize the world’s elephants

thieves friend and I say to the transmitting stars
if you want to take take from your lives

dew makes soggy the roof friend and I
under meal of blanket-tangled spider mosquitos

I and friend circumvent further discussion
she passes between worlds an interlude

friend friend friend multiplying
dances over the dewy roof

nighthawks fly to a holy port
ribbit of frogs chirp of crickets a compilation

for friend no longer living I lean the living ladder
against the sky and sleep in the house we no longer star

Hester Prynne

I let ambiguous shame stitch a letter
to my breast. In fact, it was I who stitched it there—
a small business embroidery-work—
and let its red-thread tentacles
sucker shame’s admittance.

The shell-less-ness,
the townspeople’s scorn and bitterness—
a terrestrial form of taunt, their want
kept their pleasure
like the formal cap confining my hair.

But never mind them.
This is between me and shame.
When that shade-loving slug
wants it dimmer, I dim
my head and lower the lamp.

I make myself available to shame and shame
teases me and my house’s floor
with dust and potato bugs.
Now, shame wants some space, so I walk to the shore.
My dress’ hem lost in the mass of sand,
the toilsome sea, my confidant.

With the clouds and townspeople mounting, I expect
some heavy aggression then boom, but no.
Though I refuse to give the townspeople the name,
I tell you, I could do nothing else but
accept the penance and let shame
shimmer its A out in the open.

After many not unhappy, self-devoted years,
a moment of recognition—in front of me,
an acorn, leaf still attached,
falls from an oak, bounces off the boarded walkway
and rolls under the tire of a passing wagon
that rolls over it.

O stigma, don’t you know you are my badge,
the one my husband shame sent ahead?

Her Being Cold Caused Her Death

her being cold caused her death , this thought
a gray spot on my brain
as day’s arriving light glints the horizon
washes the overwintering birds with sun—

——

a theory : her essence and mine—our essences in volumes—
marvelous proof
at the dawn pond-margin where wake
and bathe sandhill cranes and snow geese

she is of everywhere tree’s breath , her
in the field where the cranes nibble corn stubble
the coyote-traversed slope the owl’s who , her
in the light by my blue door
at three in the morning spread throughout the night

——

the memory of her like a bicycle wheel turns upon sand

where she is in a blink resembling a coastline—
waves replaying regret
narrow these undertakings
of where she is
where I am
where comfort makes the room a fire and a bath
thrall of lavender water

the room , a prophet of place
stares at a wall in each direction

erosion to wall-less-ness
forms the presence
where she and I are


——

where she and I are is telling
an argument explaining twenty years later from why
to not asking in another day of gravity

the uncertainties indeterminant

——

so to write her externalizes
her , a waning moon owl’s soundless flight
off and
free
can
her wrong death
prove right

——

sprawled Mobius , a starling murmuration blackens , spreads and thins
whirls , wheels changed directions

——

she might say I feel fine with everything
because who can plan for this weather of winter camping
surely trying we would shrink or overdrink

she might say I carry nothing in my pockets , neither will you

she might say I no longer need shoes or to plan dinner
but I can still love socks

do not worry , her last words

her voice celestial , she waves and grows smaller

Jami Macarty gratefully recognizes Native Nations of the West—especially the Coast Salish and Tohono O’odham—as the traditional and rightful owners of lands where Jami has the great privilege to live and work—as a teacher at Simon Fraser University, as an independent editor, and as a writer of essays, reviews, and poetry. Jami is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award - Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, Banff Centre, British Columbia Arts Council, The Community of Writers, and by the confidence of editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Interim, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s writing is forthcoming.

Barbara Tomash

5 poems
from Her Scant State

an inquisitive experimental quality which of the daughters
are you? writing money anything about money in point of fact
inherited a wedge of brown stone
violently






————————————————————————————————
With folded hands I can only give, as I say, a blank page, a pure white surface
easily, easily crushed. Please tell me. I have no memory.
There was a young girl.
I miss. I like. I’m really. I don’t. I don’t. When the sun goes I go. I wish.
Just a small sound like hands quickly. Kissed.
I’m afraid. I’m only.
The small dark, the clear grey which gave as it opened.

*

the privileges of abundant new dresses kaleidoscopic
the name of the name of a a straight young man
a foolish period of history standing near the lamp
requesting your attention





————————————————————————————————
I’ve seen poverty’s handshake burst the fact-angry window open and wildest
hurt set up a house.
A very pretty American gaze doesn’t abuse people. “You know that, perfectly,”
still ironic like a brown velvet jacket, like a joke dying hard for a delicate glow
of shame. Many forms—shocked and false and lost—drifted about the house, or
sat in the garden head thrown back, irreclaimable. Indebted suburban hours and
all young lovers listened to the nightingales.

*

nevertheless, he knocked absented, watery
disamericanising desire so very soluble a problem

in the white American light “the banking mystery”
fine ivory surface polished his own fault

Americans’ right limits of primary pleasure
an unthumbed fruit the historic consciousness





————————————————————————————————
Dear limitation, the illumination was dying.
I waked but was asleep, very much so, and I never arrive at the point, a certain
point—a word I see caught and put into a cage, and letters in absurd pockets.
Words should make mistakes and want no breakfast and live on air, quietly,
coldly.
I do. I go back. I take.
Terrible mouthful.

*

the flatness of exile the fragrance of fruit
in a poor translation

bursts of wildflowers niched in ruin
property of the observed thing

the imagination loving the riot
she’s my _____ she is not his

a sense of property
allowing her two countries with a laugh

as good as summer rain a land of emigration of rescue
a refuge their superfluous population





————————————————————————————————
Poverties dressed as a face of elation.

*

a little bruise to live with

a shelter a speck I’m afraid you mean
the clock the room

taken ill abusing the sound of





————————————————————————————————
Small, it was, the continuity of the human. It carried her from the gradations,
confusions of color, the motionless hills. And in spite of. Her, herself, she. And
let her go? Ah. Help her. The boon must be irony.

Barbara Tomash is the author of the poetry collections PRE- (Black Radish 2018), Arboreal (Apogee 2014), The Secret of White (Spuyten Duyvil 2009), Flying in Water, winner of the 2005 Winnow First Poetry Award, and a chapbook, Of Residue (Drop Leaf 2022). Her writing has recently been a finalist for The Dorset Prize, the Colorado Prize, and the Black Box Poetry Prize, and a semi-finalist for the POL Prize, the Tenth Gate Prize, and the Philip Levine Prize. Before her creative interests turned her toward writing she worked extensively as a multimedia artist. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions Online Exclusives, New American Writing, Verse, VOLT, OmniVerse, and numerous other journals. She lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.

Jackson Wills

4 poems
from Heaven is a Gateway Drug

Dead Honey

Death is large. The honey falls into the honey,
bright glass maggots catching light

This first draft of doomsday
is reassuring, the undesirable wow muted
if death is honey going home to honey

The technical and yellow daffodil became devoid as acid

I see according to that temperature under the senses

To be midwifed by bees into silence
would be sweet after the sense had faded

Lush Livelihoods

Is it warm like a moth?

likerous liflode her lykam to plese

I am only interested in documentaries and allegories,
lush livelihoods pressed together

An allegory is two documentaries played at once,
one of which is invisible,
lush livelihoods

The soil is sour with clouds

Now for the skeleton review

Get out the vote, yes, but possibly more
importantly, get out the bullet

which is warm like a moth
like a mouth
like a mother

1-7-23

Eucalyptic thoughts lead me to sleep

Cutting grass for the sheep for the winter
I convulse down the mountain
in someone’s younger arms

Your fox spiral loves you

The apple sauce dance continues

1-7-23
Spare the horses by the sea

The defensive sparkle of gummosis on the peach tree
at its base two years ago
glitters the memory

The glitter has dried out and fallen off

The tree survived

Smell the sharp mustard flower
in the winter garden
In the dark

Yellow hinting smell

In dark

Yellow scenting

In dark

My mentholated heart tingles out into your limbs
The mustard blossoms secrete melatonin in the winter garden
with no relationship to sleep

Cherry Week

Peach petals fallen
near the wild iris,
cherry week is over

already

The Japanese magnolia has started to bruise brown

Defunct docks drop themselves into the estuary

The stoney smack of the turtle
jumps back in

Horse toes don’t live in water

It’s a beautiful day, I want to snuffle it up

The orange beach made of blasted scrap metal
looks up to the bridge on the bay

She pulls at her skin
like an uncomfortable shirt

The bubbles like pearls I’m forgetting
before

the peach’s pink screen peeling with season

Film of your life is like living without any obligations,
without any nerve endings -
I don’t panic over her mouth this time around

I would lie in windy beds on afternoons

A mold piles like soot on sprigs of beech

We meet them where the forest goes

I hoard these images from a sickness at time

Jackson Wills earned an MFA from Iowa and a PhD from UNLV. Early versions of these poems and all work in the collection first appeared as video poems in Instagram posts; they are documentary poems of his life. If you would like to see more initial poems before they are remediated to the page and separated from their first images, follow him at jacksons_username.

Michael D. Snediker

5 poems
from Meanderest

STREGA NONA

Go in old
thorn apple to salt
& spikenard.

The same emplastering
oysters of attention
approaching

boy after hollow boy,
the fig in mordant.

Were there nymphs in amethyst crying
at our expense, was the aura between
them

also
a little addled,
coaxed

in the soap to spur
their wheel of leg.

How they thimble for days half-
forgetting pyramids
of shadow lavender

quickening the glacier
moon over which winged
things

wandered
fog in rutilated fog.

Others grew from the feathers shed in moss pond
meadow ponder but only smoke

survived, amber
thatch in Benjamin water.

I live there in the factory of a feather wristed voice,

a saint’s vision of peacocks waking
in alchemical rain.

Forgive this charlatan his green
glass grain for eyes leaving

their paste on everything he claimed
to see, the chaudron chatter in leaves,
sailors in slow

motion straining from all that open.

A serpent girt with his watery
heart & wax conscience.

I wasn’t always meanwhile made
of wood I stole down

like snow in common water.

Once mine own error but
the creasing flooded
away—

the blue crow
bar of our mouths.

MINOR POETS OF THE CAROLINE PERIOD

A powdered wheelbarrow’s rubicon makes no noise nor sense who sobs in numbers, dabbling
incognito fountaineer. Apostrophe ruins our sooty throat, the prank in its veins. Hence to woodbine.

Asterisk andromeda prolonged. This winter something of its yew-and-roses charm left me flagged in
lichen howling like the lighthouse in a mowing field. This crazy altar jackpot skimmed. I didn’t want

to sell my pain is hymn meter approaching something to dust. We weren’t used to feeding his relation to
object relations. Occulted in the steam of memory. Balanced on the balls of our feet. No art more

gentle than this rogue slowness where blew a wilder time in the ballast. Wearing the spandrels down,
filling the nerves if it would only stay. Ether ore’s prairie story clingstone dictated to our perplex circle

of wet. Dull to temper advice just now learning to write through thaw. Edifice wrecks, arguing overcast
the long way to Westerly. An arm of sable plums sails clean off the map somewhere in this underlying

quadrant. My best friend riff if in mulch revel. How he heckled the exode by its little chafe of
furloughed four-leaf smoke, a gossamer groom for the mock moon’s acreage. A ragweed prayer wheel

in the hiccup of these shambling hands thus spins the computation. Some other point but then the
earthquake in view, the learning curve’s meteor kiss.

THE FUTURE OF FRIENDSHIP

A young man weddyd to the kyng lost his ring
climbing from the Scantic river,

borrowing names from

a map of fountains later scribbled from
his Amsterdam of bed.

A hole in the ice through which the martyr spoke.

What we found in his mouth.
What we saw there waging

bottomless scorch
lark fiction.

The moon’s expiring
paragraph pulls our ankles
down

to the sea.

Mist ache, stochastic stinkbug in
windowsill pollen.

What language wasn’t snow
angel structure engrained

in the drift.

Duraflame. Cheerio.

What Ray Johnson kept there,
left in Locust Valley.

The minor materials of his celery heart
as though yawning down

the boulevard, the flash of flesh
redistributed as rain as the thickness

of his film diminished.

Split zephyr worsted,
a vowel’s accidental ego.

The bird’s choral talking cure take care take care

however briefly in the vein. Collapse
as diagrammed through a veil.

This is a description

of shivering my body asleep in
the photograph, a suspicion living

deep in the dappled.

A glaze misaligned from the universe
harbors some idea of its breadth,

a transferential undertow snagging
either side of the batten.

Its wet-eared circle.

Not wishing to appear
in a hurry lest I happen

across a stone

apt to dazzle, to make

his substrate figure
surface in crystalline.

I lost threadbare to it alone an uncreated
light, the secrets of a river stuffed &
strewn—to this

end with this illegitimate siphon.
Some reckless commonplace
devotion spills, spilling in, into, place.

Kimono of sun, an exoskeleton of
qualm as he leans in.

The nautilus of his groin roped in the Shaker chair.

His massive animacy from
the ring to the wax

without leaving the ring.

A sharpie & 7 across
his chest. Where your cool hand had been.

CAMPO APERTO

If there were one to read it, the fable practiced in our head. The diligence of what wouldn’t absorb
evolved. Perfoliate numquid sown in the gladdened. In swaddle rangling a well-placed smudge

driven round the filament. Distaff an invitation, nova moth & frown, a parchmentizing in the scene’s
scant metabolism. Irrationale, the ravine catastrophe’s comedizing element misunderstood. The urn

geranium. Neither action nor speculation but a middle eye raged just then in sedge. Off went its
wig with the feelings of a bird. Either this or he cried aloud, the powder of making himself

perceptible. Now comes the explanation. Where does the music come from. Should you like to go
elsewhere. The light in the cord. What I meant was stars. Headlong this morning in question, the

last seventh sphere as love to the mossy pot. In the wall, where it was hidden. Hither hinder sunder
when I was a child of pale green sky. Come wrung from it. A crown of tamarisk detachment awes

the cosmos in reverse, the sibyl’s village lost to eventide. Two directions of spirit movement,
shipwreck learning to be still. A shadow quarrel freezing over the field. Were we solid when you

came to the sea. At least an orison. It blew right through me, the morning sings, its fossil beauty.
The thunder in the ark straying hollow beside a leaf. I copied his little cave of anger. What have I

to do with wishful emergency. Say again about the jasper light in my eyes, the Swedenborg of
morning fretted away.

WHIG FEELINGS

Pathos an acorn slain in dew. Not there & some moss.
Oh when will night crystallize in you again.

Also is an acquaintance in the red array
of accident that was the work. An artificial heart, an
artificial sea shall make

ascesis of you
yet—

snow across a barn or beauty from a dust. I sleep now
in the bushes, the bureau angels burgling.

A polite bed surrounded by mint rose
rises in the boat without beholding.

Cloud milk pulls,

my brain for a foreign
neck & feeble morning foliage.

And if affection clogs, if she clings timidly
to avalanche,

these isolated comets.
An anodyne for moth.

Forgive me the arrogance,
he told me.

Permit me to accord with your abler machinery.

I was disappointed & celestial as
snow while you went away.

My awkward life. It ascends,
bride of the precipice, the stars bedecked.
She came halfway home.

Michael D. Snediker is the author of two poetry collections, The New York Editions (Fordham University Press, 2017), winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize, and The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (Punctum Books, 2013), a Lambda finalist for Best Gay Poetry. Additionally, he's the author of Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain and Queer Embodiment (U.Minnesota Press, 2021) and Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and other Felicitous Persuasions (U.Minnesota Press, 2021), a finalist for both the Christian Gauss Award and the MLA First Book Prize. His poems and essays have appeared in journals including Black Warrior Review, ELH, FENCE, The Henry James Review, jubilat, Qui Parle, South Atlantic Quarterly, PEN Poetry Series, Poem-a-Day, and The Tupelo Review. He is the fortunate recipient of multiple Yaddo residencies, and is presently Professor of American Literature & Poetics at the University of Houston.

Adrian Lürssen

6 poems
from Human is to Wander

Palm-Wine Songs for the Ghost King

Awe, Incantation

solar tell, gravity's homeless other

translated guilt heard our satisfaction

Gateway Horus, overpowered Sphinx to

theory: ghost-hurtle obliterates slope

shoes, timbre —  gather heads out






his road to the future
reached a fork

primitive races drawing
sounds from reeds

or strings allocating music
to the realm of gods

he had carried it far
away before I woke inside this wood

ghosts smart to trek
short or long distances if they could

not bear the music
stand still then the whole

of them in intentional activity
in ‘doing’ that these categories

are resolved — the body
which acts and has consequences

cannot be seen in dualistic terms
it works then naturally — he also believes

in something like them
only much more powerful

intelligent and reliable a guardian angel
will do so out in the world

years of belief in magic called upon
to compensate for argument no longer applied

with so many TV crews extracting daily
awesome images of death they were

to protect the living of course
but they fit the size of a dying child







Ore, Inclantation

our visitor has the quiet

confident look of one  

who has chosen

to be she said









I noticed the silence of the house
on the faces of the guests

everyone on his best behavior
a keen anticipation where

the evil figure materializes
as ferocious animal

(it could not possibly turn itself into a little animal)

In those days without satellite navigation
it was much more risky than it is now

There were many attackers
he recalled and they came from all sides

from the church from behind
from the north and south

The course and temperature of the first greeting
are of utmost significance

to the ultimate fate of any relationship

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

ACTION

An army and its camp. A tale of the interior called Opening from the North. The differ-
ence between rhyme and accent, rumor and a given name. The actual point to the os-
trich in any movement.

Or when movement is the antelope and the tale is of an enemy always just beyond
range. How yelling becomes planning, invoking becomes engaging, and noon is only a
matter of time.

When what’s left is a response called “home” and to be included means to find order in
the rhyme.  

OPENING

The opposite of a plan. Or, the way an explanation surrounds itself with names. When
“place” no longer means “land” and night becomes the offering, perfectly acceptable,
for time on a train.

It is the ostrich at noon: neither necessary nor true but, like the rifle and hope, what a
system requires.

This only difference between “insect” and “injury” is the sound of what’s next (or
“nest”), the way tapping becomes something to count on. The way “enemy” is to “en-
counter” as “envelope” is to “explain.”

TRAIN

A troupe following its rhymes, an antelope following its insects, the nightly reasoning
that holds a nation to its names. How the need to inform finds opposites in “yam” and
“time” – and how sound from a group is as uniform as a mountain. If to explain is to
exit, then to hold is to peel (as in: “a fact”) – but the explanation of love as “a camp
held in time by sand and an ostrich” really is just another form of training.

Plain truth to the end. 

TROOP

Truth and the room it occupies. The optional persona in the anecdote about an ostrich
and its time in camp. Place – and its elephant. (Or any lasting opposition to clarity.)

When truth is reason enough to kill and mud becomes a uniform insanity. It is the sys-
tem that begins when planning is neither overt nor over.

The yam is a nuisance, but it allows naming as a form of answer.

TROUPE

Treason. The rhyme it occupies. A unit performing exercises for the right hand (piece
called “Camp at Noon”). To be able to explain “X” but not “enemy” or “yam.” Remem-
bering to replace “insect” with “inspect” and “range” with “engage” before asking what
moves a unit.

Time is framed by this response to sound – and so, the elephant scratching its post, the
ostrich entering a cause only to be included.

Reason requires injury to become its own excuse. (The movement and its system,
saved by an ending.)

Born and raised in South Africa, Adrian Lürssen lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His chapbook NEOWISE (comprised of work excerpted from Human is to Wander) is forthcoming from Trainwreck Press. Work in this manuscript has been published in Fence, The Boston Review, The Bombay Gin, Posit Journal, Word for/ Word, and places elsewhere. Collaborations with Norma Cole are forthcoming in Bay Area-based Second Stutter.

Matthew Moore

3 poems
from the author of Jeanne d’Antietam

TALEH

to the memory of poets and soldiers who died fighting colonialism 
to the Daraawiish commander-poet, Ismaaciil Mire
a prayer for the destruction of the European and U.S. war powers

O—unconditional, beseiged,
Fortified engulfed glister-fold,
Dazzlers, and proto-salt roses,

Dancers, centrifugal roadside
Elegies, joyful as cruelty, dear
Intruder, meet the state-to-be.

Italy is colonial, of governs
Lethal, O, to garnish wealth,
It will blast you, eh, to pieces.

Of course, the fortresses.
Of course the traditions.
Of course, poet-soldiers.

Show colonial administrators
Your teeth, show them, roads
Their bodies roll down to hell.

Britain is colonial, of governs
Lethal, O, shipping regiments
Anywhere, eh, that install fate.

Quattuor vexillum partitions,
Jihad animator, O client fold,
Jackals descended on Dalyare.

What wonder, Jihad of colonizers.
No saltire-necklaced fourth shore.
No Holy See’s Eritrea. No Pappas.

Sucking Boer’s infected root,
Puppets roar, putrefying rot,
Horn marrow, slapstick milk.

Horn’s levers the engulfed level,
Incendiaries, figure-head levellers,
Intruders, morbid desire uniforms.

Corfield slain with his translators.
Corfield bled out with his lackeys.
Corfield’s body strewn to lappets.

Unconditional, force enfeoffed,
Coast-eroded Berbera engulfed,
Salt roses, gulf populace, bear it.

Roadside lamentation, hair sword.
Salt roses, braided and unbraided.
The triplet-stars and poem tactics.

To write a reportage, of the feelings.
To endorse nothing, and sweet love.
To hear the pain of a great suffering.

AND PLINTH: NOTES FROM A DIVINE VIOLENCE

Progress Lighting the Way for Commerce shone, against Bubbly Creek,
Via financial instruments blasted south from Haymarket to Bessemer,
Via a trillion moonlit packing-foam leaves to harvest the fruit of labor,
From the peels, the qlippoth.
”Had I known in 1890                                                                                   
“How long it would take me                                                                          
“To preserve a park for
“The people against their will I doubt if I would have undertaken it.”
The arrow of progress never arrives while all is, in time, run through.
Aaron struck his staff
To stand, between debt and peonage, the living and the dead, labor,
Supply lines, visible by earth’s curvature, as dispensation fills bellies
To fill uniforms, advertising wages the pants and shirts writhe from.
Futures sawed to dust
In the warehouses, to bear his agnomen, beyond the pier, the wharf, the country.
Montgomery Ward Co., birth of the fulfillment center, death of the closed shop.
Insurance travelers calendar: angel of Progress, Ward Tower, Currier & Ives 1899.
This is how I greet you.
Fantasies about love, lost,
Regained, public gesture
Houses, mausoleums, of
Communal feeling, the imperative
Of moods. Staked upon adoration.
Thine imperative mood,
Capital. Difference and
Repetition, restaurants,
Funerals, & restaurants. You bloody my dreams with processes linear and fatalistic . . .
A sown field is one repeatable row long, which moves acres in an hour, for picking
By the harvests of hands. Shipping land. The snow tunnels, onto the loading zone . . .
The anti-psychotic pill burnishes, what fog clears: 10 billion bullets to expropriate . . .
Lost in reveries — whereas
Life, the cigarette, burning in the trash, the thought did I leave the oven on the gas . . .
The stove is cold where we
Held each other and tried not to turn the knobs one way or another, pining on on
Dreams where recognition
Stations beyond its transit
The chiasmus of romance
Not to abuse the pills that
Keep my sanity’s vergence.
Flees and falls, back to earth, where, by the profanations, let be, can what might.     
What can wrought is awful,
How not none are forced to live, forced to fight, to die, in genres of military age,  
In workhouses and hours
Apposite to dying’s orchard and opposing grace, outdoors, against self-sacrifice.
Love, thy name is fair copy:
Let us meet where the music composes, where voices drift against civil twilights.
Irreal innocence, oh Lamb
Of God, thy cloven face of
Tradition open, it screams.
In the factory I could separate
My mind from my body.
No maudlin gestures. No evil
Thoughts. Oh sweetheart.
If you thought it was bad before.
The only window brings heaven.
Agape loading dock, seven
Garments dress your body,
No heat, inside a recycling
Factory’s aerosol cans’ exploded-open lung.
Bring real food for Stephen,
Who could not buy a meal,
He was hungry, and said so,
Every paycheck went home, for his mother.
Make time easy for Robert,
Paroled one week out, he told the smoking
Circle that he was a violent re-offender,
When he did not have to tell a solitary soul,
Just like a saint, for us, he bared his life.
The angel cannot say farewell, nor greet you,
The angel cannot call in the meantime.
The angel opens its mouth and it’s snowing.
Countless kinds of weather,
Countless kinds of trouble,
Countless signs of forgiveness, all forgiveless.
A song counters: It’s dawn.
A song counters: to end social death is to
End the world. Dawn be
Damned. Beauty would be justice only if
This world came to end.
The divine violence of clouds knows this.
The divine violence of clouds
Asserts. No more prisons. No more death.
Divine violence has nothing to do with
Storms. I am talking about the clouds, and
The beauty of them is justice.
Life, maudlin, by every inconsolation.
Life, maudlin as revolt, cried, uncried,
Common language.
Be easy. Be merciful.
An old god’s acts against mortal sanctuary
Look out on the day from the supervisor’s
Glass hut’s measured folly,
On your Wish Book, listless
Hands installed at gutters,
To process all goods. Hazards
Do not lift like the weather.
Math says what a history says.
You remain the pip on all the balance sheets,
The tightrope the overman crosses.
Plane tree edging water’s overdraft fee: fowl,
Get clean in it. Shipping catalogue
For miniature Thorne rooms. Model wealth
Behind poor wars, all
Detail, furnishing your memorial’s
Military preservation.
Ward proclaimed the park his legacy to silence the people’s mad war
Of living. He said, “They have made a dumping ground
Of the park, allowed circuses, masked balls and anything else there.”
Air is remote, distant, surveilled in a railyard of time’s preservation.
Stars will to heel. Cold-rolled in steel.
Each worker, a timepiece. No! This is life, this is life. Life! Autumn
Populations cut losses’ percentage from the fund of breath’s polish.

CHILCOT WHITEWASH

This poem is a bit of reportage on Chilcot’s statement on the Iraq Inquiry.



The Iraq Inquiry is 2.6 million words long
and supplies the unspeakable with an
unreadable number of pages in order
to conduct the double-bookkeeping entry
to an exit of war on Iraq, that follows
in each line that appears, that follows
in this poem, conducted by open reportage.
Perhaps, each layer of whitewash will
burn off, and not before appearing entirely.



Sir John Chilcot gave a statement on the Iraq Inquiry, to occasion the date
of the Inquiry’s publication, on 6 July 2016; the statement is twelve
pages long, and is a speech act against understanding the UK’s war on Iraq
from 2003 to 2011. Chilcot’s statement frames “the UK’s policy on
Iraq,” as spurious although he refuses to frame it as “the UK’s war on Iraq.”  
           

The Report, the Iraq Inquiry’s publication, it would not be published,
on the Inquiry’s website, until after Sir John Chilcot finished speaking.
Thus, the Report would bear Chilcot’s name, thus, the Inquiry would
bear Chilcot’s name, and thus, the Report is not what holds the power;
so, it is to Chilcot’s statement we must devote our attention. Botschaft! 







To hear Chilcot’s statement, the Iraq Report maintains four conclusions:
(1): “that the UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful
“options for disarmament had been exhausted. Military action at that time
“was not a last resort.” (2): “judgements about the severity of the threat
“posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction —WMD — were presented
“with a certainty that was not justified.” (3): “Despite explicit warnings,
“the consequences of the invasion were underestimated.  The planning
“and preparations for Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate.”
(4): “The Government failed to acheive its stated objectives.” To we who
listen closely, Chilcot’s Botschaft lets the war remain, still, the good news.



The word “war,” appears in Sir John Chilcot’s message only two times.
The first time in order to burnish this absolute half-truth: “In 2003,
“for the first time since the Second World War, the United Kingdom
“took part in an invasion and full-scale occupation of a sovereign State.”
This performs ritual by route on the UK’s body politic; whitewash,
piecemeal, of invasions of Egypt and Korea, including the full-scale
occupation of Northern Ireland, amid further post-colonial adventures.
The second time “war,” appears in the Iraq Inquiry is in quotation,
spoken by Blair, in January 2003: “‘the likelihood was war.’” The hood
of likeliness, put over Chilcot’s scapegoat’s head, tied by quotation
marks, holds “war” close, and keeps it restricted, to a past, future fabric,
thus, allots the context of war, in the UK’s policy on Iraq, to a hooded
head of state, alone, so the crowd can world out its own sacrificial body.




To reconstruct the state of Iraq, the Western
coalition assault needed a rockbed
of colonialism, such as: “The invasion and
“subsequent upheaval in Iraq had,
“by July 2009, also resulted in the deaths of
“at least one hundred and fifty thousand
“Iraqis — and probably many more — most
“of them civilians.  More than a million
“people were displaced.  The people of Iraq
“have suffered greatly.” Colonial powers
worlded an absolute catastrophe, or no, am I
catastrophizing, or not, am I catastrophizing,
is this just catastrophization? And then:
“After the invasion, the UK and the US
“became joint Occupying Powers. For the year
“that followed, Iraq was governed by the
“Coalition Provisional Authority. The UK
“was fully implicated in the Authority’s
“decisions, but struggled to have a decisive
“effect on its policies. The Government’s
“preparations failed to take account of the magnitude
“of the task of stabilizing, administering, and
“reconstructing Iraq, and of the responsibilities which
“were likely to fall to the UK.” In dreams
begin responsibilities. In mimetic desire begins a ritual
sacrifice of peoples, nations, worlds. So world no more.



Chilcot, you are dead now, dead as uncountable Iraqis are,
who you donated a line to, in your gospel, your Botschaft!

Matthew Moore is a poet and translator. His poems appear widely in journals and magazines including Annulet: A Journal of Poetics, the Carolina Quarterly, the Denver Quarterly, Interim, Lana Turner, and Second Stutter. He is the translator of Tomaž Šalamun’s Opera Buffa (Black Ocean, 2022).

Dustin Neu

5 poems
from No Prizes

No Prizes

Parents of an ill child
who stoke or aggravate minor
conflicts and insensitivities
an instance wherein the other
sets about the self, which i
am built into, which makes me
recognizable, or
again, other actions, amorous
language, one regime to another’s
complicity to coldness, to silence
the other sets about making a break
which disrupts my being present,
while i am
i'll never speak to you again
else that i am bringing
myself to my own impasse
never speaking
neither standing
nor lying down, ever

Gifts

Festivals are
what the cathedral is
in its place,
what we expected of our work,
an unheard of totality
stands there, the totality of
world withdrawal and decay

a mother, the object of her
child's jokes, whose ever shifting
yoke is that the mother's encountered presence
signifies satisfactions
beyond passions and
bygone landscapes; that
whatever we become can
never extend outside
what she’s modeled—that i
accept, implicitly, that
night whispered as the opposite of
whisper settled on rocky ground

but now i have before me
before me all the belongings;
my subsistence living
through the days as if my days
had fled me—accepting everything
i am given, never thinking of others,
and living this way forever

In Private

Depresses me. note not
much else be said of,
from memory,
a lot of what i’d learned
or invented—could
the analogy of the sum
of man containing his
impressions, rather the
sum of his impressions
of senses—that any image might

invoke a choice towards a
o mountain o lord, i’d’ve
once a’comin’ down the hill
towards the—and yellow
dotted surface of the—
down a steep grade
that felt like a set of stairs

For Everyone Else

When
you rained
on the ground
& put you
in a fire
that is placed
in a fire;
column
catching the sun

Limited Possibilities

On the heights and behind the favored
arrangement of heroic monuments.
blue uniforms having marked
the current, we once again,
having seen black clouds,
cannons, cannonballs, a carpet
of shimmering bayonets, felt
a weakness for
an hour or two, less
and less time in an overtly complex
survival plan and injured
grunts coming up from
the field. it was
the sum of modern
techniques and qualifiers that
were as weak as
they were useless, every
detail staged, and on
that stage the reality
is more difficult than
too difficult to bear

Dustin Neu is a poet and translator from rural California. He co-translated Alessandro de Francesco's Remote Vision (Punctum Books) from the Italian and his poetry has appeared in VOLT, Hardly Doughnuts, and 3am. He lives with his wife, son, and four cats in Napa and teaches high school.

Rachel Hsu

graphic poems

Fetch the Moon from the Seabed (海底撈月) excerpt

Rachel Hsu (b. 1992, Seattle, WA) is a Philadelphia-based interdisciplinary artist who works with visual art, language, and poetry. Inspired by absence, relational ruptures, and slippages in translation, she engages the yearning that emerges from distance and displacement to make mental exertion and emotional endurance felt within one’s body. She received her MFA from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture and BFA from Western Washington University.

Chris Gavaler

1 graphic poem

Metropolis 2

Chris Gavaler is an associate professor of English at W&L University, comics editor of Shenandoah, and series editor of Bloomsbury Comics Studies. He has published two novels and six books of scholarship, including mostly recently The Comics Form: The Art of Sequence Images (Bloomsbury 2022). His visual work appears in Ilanot Review, North American Review, Aquifer, and other journals.

Carolyn Guinzio

5 graphic poems

BREATHE OUT

THE ACCIDENT ARRIVES IN BRANCHES

THE AIR OF STRANGE PLACES

THE MUTE PLANT

THE ROOM DREAM

Carolyn Guinzio is the author of A Vertigo Book (The Word Works, 2021), winner of the Tenth Gate Prize, and six other collections. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The New Yorker and many other journals. Her website is carolynguinzio.tumblr.com