Joanne Esser

GETTING LIGHTER

Our job now is to lighten,
to hollow ourselves, become
more like birds. A diet of greens and seeds.

To let go of old suitcases
stuffed with souvenirs we no longer need.
Readying ourselves for a weightless future.

Imagine opening the locked door,
letting air into the stagnant dark
of the attic, throwing the window wide

to clear a path for all you’ve hoarded.
Like dandelion seeds in a breeze,
one by one the things that have gathered

dust and cobwebs will at last lift
off their shelves, rise up out of their drawers
and float past you. You won’t care

any more, will no longer resist
as they drift out the open window,
seeing them now as just shells, empty

of what they once held. Relieved
of their musty odor, their dank weight,
you can feel like spring cleaning is done,

a duty you’ve known all along was necessary.
And the people standing on the sidewalk below
will look up, astonished to see

your flotsam and jetsam turning to clouds,
lifting away from this world,
out of gravity’s reach,

leaving your rooms spacious and light-filled,
your messy, tangled heart
finally washed clean.

FINALITY

To finally know autumn,
inhale rusty smokescent.
Watch the last
of the leaves
battered by cold
rain, the gorgeous
brutal scattering.
What was bright
is leaving us. Yet
we are still here, watching.

Joanne Esser is the author of the poetry collection Humming At The Dinner Table, the chapbook I Have Always Wanted Lightning, and the forthcoming All We Can Do Is Name Them, (Fernwood Press, 2025). Recent work appears in Echolocation, I-70 Review, Wisconsin Review, and Plainsongs. She earned an MFA from Hamline University and has been a teacher of young children for over forty years.

Oscar Oswald

FEDERALIST

from bough

mouth,

clump or clod

the pose a lizard

lifts

a fire in

with wind

and eyes

there is my testimony

of

the phrase,

grass,

jolly gram

harboring my golden things

here rusting

dust

red dust aground

for this

locality, my apogee—

all points a cluster

trembling its working

liquid shining

dry and easy

friendly

arrowland

should arrow land astray —

in Santa Fe,

in all I do,

all I look through

I listen to —

at home

and what I am

the falling

leaf

in rank of oaks,

the jay with dryburn forest

on a vacant cinder cone

all things contribute to. . .

and mine the authorship —

to name what moves they make

the well the center of the storm,

whose eyes are plaine

the bird or what it was

to swallow like a snake

an atom from my hand

and land that is

and will be aquifer,

water piped cleanwhite

that while the snow

the river is

is in ellipsis. . .

what is West

what is So

what of Me

in the rye

times of terror,

. . . if eloquence is remedy?

I trust whiteflower flare

make my entire life

the straw after my life

my gist a feeling in me

how pinecones to seed

crow lands the branch enact

its time a winter squash

I listen I wait

akin to water like a duck

should write back I should be

the vellum or the graph

the ambush or

the transcript of these papers,

one person writes their name

one person answers

service done

to make a place

this dram,

this absentee and deed

and so writ down

my words are spoken for

the earth is store —

the bottom of

the walk

a garden on

its half below

ripe as it goes,

rise or blow

disburse

or hold

I am what is before me

my estate is overstock,

baron

of

the tower cell and font,

that language race ahead of it

across

the page the imprint

spreads onto the sacaton

west of Searchlight at 8:00pm,

a fireshard

light swallows

with its flare,

stones and stems

damp with

the desert rain

that in the west

is all one note,

Mojave shining that

tell me the name of this:

the yucca

thorn

the distance

debths,

those are my company —

of them to be

incumbent,

I,

of my own

purchase

of this place the full I am —

among the else

and distant hum

redundant with

the plume

writ down puccoon,

my mountain looms

to read must rust

in what

is reft

of center fissure

burr deserter

bandit

bloom

or cull,

or compact with no strings. . .

I spill my watchword in the stream

I score a feather with black ash

I document and draft

inhale

and down the slope

what I profess, annex, sound or vow

each thing lifts up from level

from its contract

and hiatus

where cold mountains shine

white spotty land behind

a walker’s lane,

and stepping out, then too my questions will. . .

Oscar is a poet and teacher from the American southwest. He grew up in Santa Fe, NM, and has hopped around in Spokane, Portland, Las Vegas, and Moscow. His interests in poetry include modernist and postmodernist writers such as Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, and Erin Moure, as well as global literatures and in particular Eastern European and Latin American traditions. In 2013, Oscar visited the Slovenia poet Tomaz Salamun in Ljubljana, and he has recently developed an appreciation for poets in the Spanish Baroque style such as Luis de Góngora and Sor Juana de la Cruz. He spends his free time hiking and walking — always on his feet.

Mary Gilliland

CROWS WITHOUT A BARDO

Their calls louder than the day itself
would deafen the moment of death.
A tree of water in the center arcs translucent
branches, pelts its buds, stimulates the blood in
their pin feathers. They are murdering the bowl
in the double decker fountain.

Staccato overlays any time between lives, their wing
span night. Their beaks wrap any past life—
for their disputes are harmonies, their possession
of the fountain supreme. Discordant brown wet mulch
bedding thirsty annuals below the fountain's lip
cannot hold. A two-storied covered wagon—
the plaza of shops sets off into the world.

A lead crow perches, fills my good ear:
This train rolls, to desert or to coast, more
to come than anyone expects,
stops for a bicentennial, infinite
auditory delusions, dawn's early light.
We are hooped! don't trust the old ruts!

I open the parenthesis, climb down.
A black cat crosses the path. The wagon
backs up, lets me by—to take the blues.

Author and eco-activist Mary Gilliland’s award-winning collections are The Devil’s Fools (2022), which won the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award, and The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (2020), with poems anthologized most recently in Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems on Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice; Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms in Our Hands; and Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose. She is a recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, a Cornell University Council on the Arts Faculty Grant, and the 2023 International Literary Seminars Kenya/Fence 1st Prize in Poetry. Look for In the pool of the sea’s shoulder, forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. “Crows without a Bardo” is in Gilliland’s new book Ember Days.

Marc Vincenz

UNDUE CAUSE

Breathing in the pollen, she enters
The soliloquy, pulling and snapping

The leaves. The sun is just rising.
Now the tracks appear.

INTO A SALT MINE

A crack of waves on a bench above the ocean.

Words fall hard. Which story is yours?

Every culprit swallowed in Abyssinia,
Where the secretaries move at half-past

Six, where the only spoil is the numbers
On the fabric—set the currency to your clock.

Whose confession is this? Become a vapor,
An id in space-time, that you may tread

The awkward and sinful under the lion’s gaze.

Cast those kernels to the breeze.

SMOLDERING TIME

Extended evenings, the tree becoming
Its topmost bough. “There’s something
Underfoot,” someone whispers.

Was it just as I imagined?
All the time firm as if in a donkey’s head.
“The fig leaves fall flat,” I say.

And the gulls, the gulls far away
In their sometime blues of a slow waking sea,
Incomplete in all strands of literature.

“Come complete into the field,” she says.

Are you infected by the tree, darling?

“Compose us in the pasture,” she says.

Could the rivers run dry in one day?

“No special skills required,” she says.

Or something else that breaks the heart?

THREE CHILDREN DANCING IN A FOUNTAIN

Tantamount to success, divergent perhaps,
The English idiom breaks the heart.
What is life on man? Aside from the

Multitudes of creatures who call us home,
The syllables of the empty land before
The contemptible rivers run dry.

All you who knew the equipment for
Loneliness, open your middle eye, accept
Time’s teardrops, you Cyclops.

The rains of summer rain on them like brutes,
Like the whales great eyes from the River Dis.
Everything is native here. There are

All the forms of spring, the women, the wo-
Man, the man, the Gordian strings.
Do you hear the nightingales?

“Watch them play,” say the sages—some half-
Remembered passage from an entertainment,
A vexing history, something like Paris over-

Turned blue in aromatic seas. Either way,
The lighted house that shines a way
In the oeuvre of evening, the warm heart

Pulsing through the centuries, the well-
Spring in the hair, the you-are-
Where-you-are, the heavy money, all ended

In that wild, that drunken burst of nights
In the shadows. Like the tutor to the pupil
In the center of the turning world ...

And in the shade the old rocks swayed,
And as if spun on sea-glass,
The children played on.

Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, musician and artist. He has published over 30 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His recent poetry collections include, The Pearl Diver of Irunmani, A Splash of Cave Paint, and The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars. He is publisher and editor of MadHat Press and publisher of New American Writing, and lives on a farm in Western Massachusetts where there are more spiny-eyed voles, tufted grey-buckle hares and Amoeba scintilla than Homo sapiens.

Kathleen Weaver

BREUGHEL’S TRIUMPH OF DEATH

In Breughel's late painting
there's no hope for us.
Tiny skeletons
out of dark amphorae poured.

Burning, warring,
how awful they are, out to kill.
The dead finish off the living,
one by one.

Humanity's nonsense, farewell.
Grasses fail also,
the least bloom—
there's none of that

seasonal joy. It's over,
an apocalyptic rout.
Nothing seemly
or fruitful anywhere,

no harvest colors
that can restore a willing heart.
Is this what we came for?
The earth done with us, almost?

How lovely it was,
the toiling, the spinning . . .
the ice ponds, the yellow fields.
Even the wars

were interesting. This far, no further,
the sea trembles, the flesh
capitulates, a dog
eats the face of a child.

CORONAVIRUS SPRINGTIME, 2020

Nasturtiums assail with color,
tornadoes on Easter in the south.
Will one red drop of Christ’s hot blood
stream in an intubated dream? Here’s a lullaby—
see the church, the steeple,
on the road to the contagious hospital
where are all the people?
One sky, another, and on the wall a clock.

In Saint Peter’s Basilica, a prayer for peace.
A masked shopper appears.
I disinfect the doorbell, my naked hands,
a tin of albacore, spinach in cellophane.
No yeast for a rise.
The old are never so old as now.
In the dead of springtime
light rain belies protracted drought.

A beach is packed, sun-bathers, surfers,
cabañas on sand, people wade, swim out . . .
foreboding attaches
to any scene at all. How difficult
it is to grasp the cost of bread, of milk.
I’m upstairs, down, in kitchen, yard,
on days lent, not given back, pooled
like our shadows as we walk.

Did it ever belong to us,
e pluribus, a country,
which counts and recounts what people said.
Phantasmal banging of pots at dusk.
How odd time is, dragging, flying—
I can’t think, can’t even dream.
Refrigerated trucks collect bodies.
I wash my hands

with no inner singing.
Potter’s Field, Hart’s Island,
Long Island Sound.
Workers in hazmat align coffins,
seen from a great height
above the graves.
A hand lies folded in the other hand,
fingertips not far from the heart.

We’re in the streets now, we’re running,
the worst would be separation,
at the root of the great lacks, separation.
If a ledger records night-falls, this is an entry.
Several memories—
a nurse’s strained face, a heap of gloves,
a toy box at the back of the closet
affixed with faded cartoon decals.

NIGHT SONG

It's winter in Thoreau's journal, a flurried wing-sweep,
remains of a hunt on snow.
I think of a local bird: a cedar waxwing's
broken-necked carcass
in the basement freezer; a tin owl
could not avert a plate-glass accident. 
I revisit the cold body, see an otter pelt
hung from a nail.

On a frieze decorating a nursery wall,
the animals are vital signs, a hare, a fox,
a Matisse-like dove, its wings
nicely unfurled—
while everything I can think of wants safety.
The record extends, fragmented, detailed.
A child's florilegium is in evidence, a collection
of the most common blooms.

A riotous mess: confusion, insects drop in the heat,
how like our own, their rush to mate and die
Roses, linaria . . . which flower treats rage?
Marigold eases depression, gentian restores trust.
For each ill a remedy, a short prayer.
Phenomenal bird-song continues,
is part of the heresy
that promises earth to the humble,

the pure of heart.
The task of each day is to end,
but not before childish toys are shelved.
How wrong some wrongs are,
on a scale quite adult. No moisture
to ease the fateful drought. This is the present,
the long now we are living.
Water is another thing for sale.

I love and do not love the world.
Hatred tires me.
Can anything make it stop? I beg you,
make it stop, but that is impossible.
Less and less is the conscience afflicted.
Or is it more and more?
The thinnest moon is all tonight, O wanderer.

Kathleen Weaver is a poet, translator, and anthologist of international women poets. She is the author of Peruvian Rebel, The World of Magda Portal, With a Selection of Her Poems, Penn State Press, a biography of the pioneering social radical and champion of women's rights in Latin America. Hope and the Sea, a translation of Portal’s first book of poetry (1927), was recently published by Dulzorada Press.

Bruce Bond and Dan Beachy-Quick

From Therapon, I

A stranger walks into a bar   and the bartender asks

the usual?   it happens all the time   but today the TV

is on fire   and then an ad   whose medicated sadness 

walks   into a pasture   oblivious to the possible

side effects   one of whom is death   which feels more

like a central feature   but today   a crippled willow

pours a little river   through the wound   of the eye  

whatever the lie   it keep breaking   out   of a circle

as worlds do in poems   violence in cartoons   and you

dear sadness   I want to ask   are you wearing a mask  

are you safe   I need you   the way an actor needs an act   

of faith   and then a curtain   and sometimes the tears

continue   long after   never knowing whom we mourn

Imagine a line against the dry horizon   call it

Pastura   call it south of the Sangre de Christos

a watering hole for locomotives   who bear

letters for a post that lo appears ex nihilo a chapel

a bar   a makeshift cross among the nameless

crosses of a field   say the word and I am there

says the word   and then by railcar a little news

and no this is no pasture soaked in blood we are

not angels   if you are not sure    ask a neighbor  

ask the choired zeros ever wider than the walls

or the ropes of smoke that disappear and ghost

the rise   and fall of towns   in waves   ask those

who linger after   whose tumblers runneth over

Eden is only some letters buried in a pasture,

Grass obedient to an inner law

Also commanding us, water inside a bone

No one can drink. The mind works its if-then

Logic, builds from nothing the architecture of is,

But the middle is excluded, the little hinge

Of the hyphen, that hidden ampersand, barren

For some, for others, the only form of prayer

God heeds. The dead speak in grammar of paradise—

No breath so no vowels, no pause between words, ask

Any question and the answer sounds the same, choir

Of twigs cracking as they burn, a song not of blame

Or knowledge, but something else, what runneth within & away.




Bruce Bond is the author of 35 books including, most recently, Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021), Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, 2021), Liberation of Dissonance (Schaffner Award for Literature in Music, Schaffner, 2022), Choreomania (MadHat, 2023), and Invention of the Wilderness (LSU, 2023).  Presently he teaches part-time as a Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas and performs jazz and classical guitar in the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

Dan Beachy-Quick is poet, essayist, and translator. His work has been supported by the Monfort, Lannan, and Guggenheim Foundations, and he teaches at Colorado State University, where he is a University Distinguished Teaching Scholar.

Joseph Lease

EVERYTHING MERGES WITH NIGHT

                                                                                           (it's a dream of the end (the mountain (the sun

                                                                                           (but  the world  is burning  (I don’t  care what I

                                                                                            know (I feel so sick

                                                                                          (the puritan diaries (“American” self

                                                                                         (maybe I'm a liar (half joke, half damage (rain

                                                                                          pouring  down  (the  big  branches  move (the

                                                                                          secrets  in  the  gutters  (the  dream death (the

                                                                                          corpse  gives  commands  (we  stay  inside our

                                                                                          city (cold city

                                                                                        (cold night (a picture of a thought (a garden

                                                                                        (skyscrapers, empty tombs (soul of bullets (I

                                                                                         was exploding

                                                                                       (everything’s corpse light (my mother won’t

                                                                                        speak (I tried to be joy (walking home (cold

                                                                                        night (red frozen sky

                                                                                                                                             (spin the night

                                                                                                                             (will we

                                                                                                                             kill the

                                                                                                                                      world

                                                                                                                                   (the sky

                                                                                                                                                         (is fire

                                                                                                                                           (shed

                                                                                                                                                       your

                                                                                                                                                                 skin

                                                                                                                                         (did we

                                                                                                                                         kill the

                                                                                                                                world

                                                                                                                                         (will we

                                                                                                                                         kill the

                                                                                                                               world

                                                                                                                                        (look

                                                                                                                                        (green water

CRACKED ACTOR

                                                                             (the soul was a spy, the soul was a forest, the

                                                                              soul was  a shipwreck, the soul was a mouth

                                                                             (“does God love me”

                                                                                                      (the new warning is fire in your

                                                                                                      face

                                                                                                      (system collapse

                                                                                                                        (I

                                                                                                                         thought I

                                                                                                                         had a

                                                                                                                         future (I

                                                                                                                         (I want joy

                                                                                                                         (I taste poison

                                                                                                                         (I am the ghost of I, etc. (I was a fool,

                                                                                                                          I had a plan, and water was my dirty

                                                                                                                          name,  I’m writing inside death, I’m

                                                                                                                          in the room

                                                                                                   (in  the  sweet  exhale  of  July (where dead

                                                                                                   zones  pock  the mind (just west of the end

                                                                                                   of   the   world   (where  the  local  lost  boy

                                                                                                   nailed   dogs   to   the   walls   of   his   shack

                                                                                                   (where    the    headless    ghost    dogs    run

                                                                                                    through the waste

                                                                                                                        (and walls of flame (and walls of flame

                                                                                                                        (you  spin  the spin, you go insane, you

                                                                                                                         eat the light, you eat the pain

                                                                                                                                                           (fire

                                                                                                                                           tsunami;

                                                                                                                                           birds

                                                                                                                                           on fire

                                                                                                                                          (just breathe

                                                                                                                                           night,

                                                                                                                                                     breathe

                                                                                                                                           night

                                                                                                                                           (forever

                                                                                                                                           (just

                                                                                                                                            say

                                                                                                                                                   drop your

                                                                                                                                            eyes right

                                                                                                                                                              here

                                                                                                                                                        (“quick,

                                                                                                                                              learn

                                                                                                                               to die”

                                                                                                                                           (the animals

                                                                                                                                    are dead, are dying (mom,

                                                                                                                                    you read the books to me, and

                                                                                                                                     I tried

                                                                                                                (my   legs   are  trembling,  my   hands     are

                                                                                                                trembling  (believe  me, don’t  believe me, I

                                                                                                                don’t   care   (I   was   the   future,  says   the

                                                                                                                nothing  man  (I  was   the  future  for a day

                                                                                                                or two

Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include Fire Season (Chax Press, 2023), The Body Ghost (Coffee House Press, 2018), Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011), and Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007). Lease’s poems "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" and "Send My Roots Rain" were anthologized in Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. Lease’s poem "'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was anthologized in The Best American Poetry (Robert Creeley, Guest Editor). His poem “Free Again (Why don’t people)” was published in The New York Times. Lease is a Professor of Writing and Literature at California College of the Arts.

GC Waldrep

   
CHRONICLE (i)

systole of wanting
cuff this crude faith

voile mercies
lathe the sky-duct

in the ear’s
abandoned camp,
shadow-struck

the debris of wings
hammered
into the nation-state

the spear’s prey
averted in the long
vein’s
canopy dust

we are perhaps
beings in name only

the threshing blade
a prick in the dust’s
graph, shirred

star that ripens
into history’s honey

REMMNANT OF WALL
I-87 median, Ulster Co., N.Y.

shallow graft of want’s
clean thurible, pale
shimmer (-splendor)

tattooed in priory
a clef motion succors

visible from passage
& theft’s shed
interstice needling
hope’s urban specter

to “bewilder” vs.
to “estrange”
washing its blue claw

the oaks’
low congregational
absolves nothing
(in any [human] sense)

wolf-heft & wolf-
space, shadow (-nation)

milk-slat, milk-lath,

wreathe this sine-
minster, densest-mark

slowly the forest’s
gun going off
again & again & again

THORN DIALECT

enhespered wavelength

a bit of fur shaved
from some tether-lamb
bright in noonshower

your blue hiding places

at the cost of blood
& blood’s plaqued hand

seep-clot, breath-clot
dull foam of May-copse
replaced, a lightning

left parched in aseity

grown into man’s grasp

adrift in granite’s vast
unquarrying breast

define your inheritance

ARARAT

feeding from the archive
& the root

unlike my friend hawk

she takes her prey
on the wing,
says the other poet

I saw her take her prey
on the wing,
says the other poet

perhaps a robin
perhaps a sparrow

—better that than
to be counted

the orphan-
constellations
in their secret skins

(among debasements)

the polymath orchards,

whose debris
clutters these shores—

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America; and The Earliest Witnesses (Tupelo/Carcanet, 2021). The Opening Ritual is forthcoming from Tupelo in November 2024. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University.