Editor's Introduction

There is a hope to poetry. There is a hope that arises in poetry, arises as each word in the poem becomes active anew. Something other than habit occurs in the poem. While in everyday life language can become subservient to utility, can be spoken thoughtlessly, said in inattention—the poem asks us to attend to language, to let language amaze. The word does not follow its routine. And as the word does not follow its routine, in the poem, we readers are thrown from our own routines and follow the venturing word, listening to how, this time, it sings, listening to now, uniquely now, it speaks of the world.

            The poem opens to possibility. It opens to a possibility greater than the brief flash of linguistic novelty. Language shapes our encounter with the world. By breaking the old habits of language, by seeing language reborn, the poem opens us linguistic creatures to the possibility of new relationships with the world.

            The poetry of this issue of Interim delivers on the hope that is a hallmark of poetry, even the poetry of despair. This issue especially highlights selections from the finalist manuscripts of our sixth annual book contest, including two winning manuscripts: The Test Site Poetry Series Winner, The Long Now Conditions Permit by Jami Macarty, and the Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award winner, A Grain of Sand in Lambeth by Geoffrey Babbitt.

--Andrew S. Nicholson, Associate Editor

Carol Ciavonne

River and Ditch

                           Review by Carol Ciavonne

 Wonder about the  (2023)  winner 2022 Halcyon Prize  Middle Creek Publishing (Human Ecology) by Matthew Cooperman

The river and the ditch; two familiar sights to residents, friends, and lovers of the Western states, are, in this wondrous book, the signposts for the people, creatures and landscapes that inhabit them. Although Matthew Cooperman writes particularly in the context of the Cache la Poudre River in Colorado (the Minni Luzahan in the Sioux language) readers will find the beauty of  sagebrush, wildflowers and prairie dogs, as well as the ugliness of toxic waste, poisoned water, fracking and, perhaps as dangerous, human inattention, apt to regions everywhere. In its vast perception of what we have forgotten, how little we know, and what we need to pay attention to, Wonder about the ranges from the Pleistocene to natural and native history to the atom bomb, and Flint, Michigan in our own Anthropocene era.

Cooperman’s writing follows the trajectory of the river, beginning with the poem “Thesis,” featuring a Whitmanesque gazetteer of native tribal names: Arapaho, Ute, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Sioux, the names we retain as history, while the river “rolls on through vanquished and massacred body” then “through Larimer, Pitkin and Koenig body” where the nomenclature of the bankers and settlers has obliterated even the syllables of many languages once spoken here. Through “money, money” it rolls on, sometimes in the full spate of spring, sweeping history before it, sometimes in the soothing shallower rhythm of summer, allowing time and motion for perspective; it ‘rolls on beyond us.”

 “A River in Spring” evokes all the original wonder and the present-day depredation of the river even while “my heart gets pulled / to the surface / of the river.” Through the use of different fonts printed in various colors, Cooperman accentuates what a modern viewer might see: “train bridge a tag / of Rosas  a bicycle / blue  with plastic bags caught / in scouring elms.”

But in “Benzene Burns the Buttercup,” a beautifully lyrical poem about the deadly harm being done to nature and to humans, we start to see the specific effects of generational exploitation of people and land, and the acrid residue created by the fossil fuel industry :“love at the end of the pipe / mild today  chance of scattered acids / will be spraying down roads cover mouths.” The things that happen to us are happening to all creatures: “diversification rain in the prairie dog towns / gas ‘em in hubris in August with intention.” Indeed, there is “ no pollen rest for the weary wind / benzene burns the buttercup / weary bird in the sheening water...” 

The searing dichotomy between beauty and commerce is the subject of Cooperman’s daring project, and indeed, perhaps, the central issue for humans in our time, encompassing as it does destruction of natural resources and the habitats of animals and people, poisoning our health, and the stoking of the war machine.

Cooperman uses actual historical material such as quotations, maps, and newsletter excerpts, to resurrect our past, contextualize our present and issue both warning and hope for our future. In a poem called “The  Niobrara Blues,” Cooperman quotes from a Colorado oil and gas industry publication that notes the existence of  43,354 active oil and gas wells as of 2010. “Analysts believe there is more to be found.” In an accompanying 100,000 Well Prediction Map, we see the horrifying visual evidence of what is to come in bright red. Cooperman brings a large helping of irony to the newsletter headline “Who Wants to be a Shale’ionnaire?’ directing the reader to the connection between “diatom  drill bit  storage tank / energy complete or commerce completed.” In the “Second Report on the Niobrara Shales,” the poet replies to the corporate attorney who negotiated “ the very best deal we could get.” Addressed to “Michelle,” the poem records the loss of the very beauty in which we live, “under sugar pines / rosa woodsill / pale pink star / spangling sky / with white water…”  to remind her and all of us that “humans are not an area.”

This book demands attention to its construction as well as its scope. Cooperman has used size and color of font for emphasis, as well as loving and beautiful photos of river and ditches (taken by the author and his wife, poet Aby Kaupang) to accompany and augment the text. In his end notes, he pays homage to the poets and local residents whose work partly inspired the book. Above all, Cooperman’s rich and eclectic language electrifies his meaning, using Greek and Latin to dig at the roots of a phrase, and perhaps even to hark back to 19th century education, as well as definitions, scientific terms, and quotations. He has, in addition, created original erasures from the works of poets famous for their writing about place, from Whitman to William Carlos Williams, up to and including James Galvin.

 In “Look Up,” Cooperman describes what any passing motorist can see from the highway: “farmer in fields / carving wheat / what runs through his / frequency / turning bright Deere / its  green and yellow motion / a part of the field’s design.” This too, along with how we perceive the dinosaur-like “Backhoe with Gryphon Tail” connects us back to the geologic past of the country, as well as the reasons (settlers and farmers) we live here now. Even Lt. John C. Fremont of the US Army, one of the early governmental land usurpers, was moved by the beauty of the land. Cooperman quotes his description of “a beautiful circular valley… rich with water and grass, fringed with pine… and a paradise to all grazing animals.” After the US government banished the native populations, then claimed and opened up the land to the public, the settlers came, settled, and raised more grazing animals, as well as sugar beets and wheat. Cities grew.

In a last-ditch, if belated, effort to restore the land, twenty-first century environmentalists have sometimes been successful; for example, the Arapahoe National Wildlife Refuge was once the Iva Mae Ranch, whose descendant the author has interviewed as research for this book. Here too, are the manmade ditches, straight and shallow, dug to purpose for irrigation and as property boundaries; as Cooperman notes, “There’s labor in them thar fields.” “Dynamite, dynamite, mules / & Asian labor, mostly.” He asks, “Who are these ditches/named for, no not the person / who dug ‘em, nameless / dead from a foreign land, the / immigrants   Mules ate better…” (“Who Are These Ditches.”)

Cooperman indicts us as well for our loss of feeling for both people and land, in “Apple Ladder.” At some point book knowledge became a barrier to living-knowledge, or at best an inadequate replacement. As he says, “scholia made us/ lose our heads,” but maybe we can learn how to reacquire that knowledge through living: even “in our cushioned talk / we weep and rage / remembering / through learning / what we knew.” Whether this will be enough to stop and reverse the destruction, we can only hope. We have a long way to go. In “According to Their Relative Positions,” Cooperman’s experimental incorporation of William Carlos Williams’s “Paterson” alongside other sources gives character and definition to the land likely to be inundated by the planned Glade Reservoir near Fort Collins, which is now, but soon may not be “Glade  glad  a clearing in the woods / we gather together in the sunshine.”

As with many water projects, the need for such is at best, questionable (there being a number of existing reservoirs). Many people remain unconvinced, and the conflict between public and private water rights is ongoing and life threatening. Mixing the language of industry sources with human and ecological concerns, the author notes with barbed humor: “Several geologic hazards have been identified within the Glade Unit: flooding, landslides, rockfalls, graft, debris flows, faults, collapsible soils, hell and tarnation, ground subsistence, etc. The River requests a pause.”  

Cooperman identifies and exhorts us, as citizens of the world, to take action to preserve: “the world depends on Citizen  their singing / as well: daffodils/gentian, the daisy, columbine / what is watching  doing / Citizen rides the bus.” But what rejuvenates Citizen after the bus ride is always the beauty, the calm and the relaxation to be found on the river. And what we value, we will protect. (“Save the Poudre! No Things but in Existing Glades!”)

 In “Skin of River Dressed,” an afternoon idyll of tubing down the river, “now cold water, back / afloat on difference, mild / shock to settle butt / And go, turn, spin, drift, forget / ”  in “a summer’s dream/of floating, hot green sap through/ willow cathedrals.” On the banks, we see “picnic’ers, young / in sweet clouds of sweet green bud, / or older couples / planted in chairs, holding hands / chatting in clouds of sweet bud / dogs lolling, and dogs / swimming, and children in play.” Maybe these times where we can rediscover our relationship with nature, where “Boxelder rustles a soft / applause, Steller’s jay says go” will help us relearn to steward what we have around us.

We are caught in our greedy present, which is perhaps not so different from our greedy past.  But, as Wonder about the demonstrates,  if we can nurture hearts as large as our brains, we may still live to appreciate “all the creatures, past, present and future.” The poem “Second Circle” captures the sense of freedom, wonder, and longing that is our last, best hope.

Second Circle

white  buildings floating over tawny river bottom
            fleeting stay under a pebble of stars----
 

                                                       who sees

                                 the black mink

                                               loping wild

                                         in the wind

                                                      is free

                                 to Wyoming

Carol Ciavonne’s poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Interim, and New American Writing, among other journals. Essays and reviews can be found in Interim, Colorado Review, Rain Taxi, Entropy, and Pleiades. She is the author of Birdhouse Dialogues (LaFi 2013) (with artist Susana Amundaraín) and a collection, Azimuth (Jaded Ibis Press 2014). Ciavonne is an editor of the online journal Posit.

Khaled Mattawa

Eight Poems in Translation of the Poet Saadi Youssef

A Swan May Come Flying

You are not Abu Tammam[1]; the snow can’t trap you.
You are not the prodigal[2], on his long nights in Damoun.
Not Rilke in Duino
or Hamlet in that prison of Denmark.
And not ...
And not ...
But you refuse to go out to climb the hill
as if balls of lead weigh down your feet,
as if your veins were water
and your eyes mud ...
................
................
................
Don’t despair,
don’t be desperate,
A swan may come flying with wings of gold
and land on your head.

[1] Abu Tammam, one of the greatest Arab poets, lived in the 10th century in Baghdad.

[2] The Prodigal in Arabicla, or al-dhalil, is a reference to Imru al-Qais, one of great poets of pre-Islamic Arabic. In one of his poems, Imru al-Qais addresses the region of Dammoun stating, that the night has gone on for too long.

O Tree Flowering with Birds!

It’s not the kind of tree you find in a dictionary
or in poems.
This tree is not a carob tree
or an oak.
It is not a sycamore
(no sycamores here).
Not poplar
and (of course)
not one of the palms of Basra.
This tree is flowering with birds
golden birds that come from a nameless valley.
Only the birds know where it is
and the holy saints.

* Title borrowed from Juan Ramon Jemenez

Sandpiper

Over my house, here in the London countryside,
yesterday,
a sandpiper flew past.
Since the occupation of fragrant Basra, I have not heard his song.
But I caught its passing, this morning.
He says to me: Shiloa!
Should I leave then?
Tell me, where should I go?
Another country
or a trench to hide me,
and bring the exodus to an end?

Icarus

Close your eyes,
stop breathing a few seconds,
make your ears listen.
There’s a rustle
then a flapping of wings.
You are at the beginning of creation.
Don’t be afraid!
Let go.
Icarus will fly
alongside you
up there in the heights.

Starling Hunger

In the starling’s hunger I see
my days
and my years that have dispersed
like a cluster of bruised grapes.
O how the question gnaws at me: For what reason did we come?
And now,
I am certain that nothing will come from beyond the hill,
nothing except seeing the starling’s hunger
in agonizing detail.

Paradoxes

In ‘57
with sweaty palms and a shovel
I dug
with others
trenches around Damascus.
The marines were on the beaches
of Beirut,
and on the beaches too were dozens of girls
waving to the Marines,
with fragrant flowers
and ample bosoms.
Were they Christian?
The scene was not ambiguous,
but now
and from my window in London
the scene is ambiguous:
Thousands of boys
hoisting the head of some Hussein,
thousands of girls
waving the head of some Hussein
to welcome
the Marine Corps, as they cruise the streets of Baghdad.

Underwater Crossing

- Why did you choose to come to London from Paris,
on this train rumbling and choking under water?

- I don't know how to guide my feet to meet you,
and at which station?
I'm blind here, light can’t lead me there,
or the routes the buses take.

- Just choose a place nearby then.

- That’s fine, but I don't know what directions mean.

- Ok, let’s do this the right way!
Grab a cab,
give the Indian driver my address
and after an hour
you’ll see me,
worried and excited
standing by my door!

Nostalgia

Now you’ve come to
gridlocked Henry IV Boulevard.
You cut thorough it
and cross the Mirabeau Bridge
to enter the Institute de Monde Arabe,
its two thousand rooms long occupied by Syrian bureaucrats
and some French people who know very little beyond Parisian chatter.
The morning, as usual, is brisk
and you’ve come down from an abandoned attic to be among people.
You thought it’ll be easier than breathing.
But be careful,
the morning here is beyond you.
How do you get into it when you don't have enough for coffee?
When you can’t pay the metro fare?
Your woman is wearing her peculiar pair of jeans.
But what are you wearing?
The same threads you wore when you came to Paris.
Shabby, to say the least.
Leave your woman be,
my good man.
You must stay focused and walk straight:
Residence permit, then political asylum!

Saadi Youssef (1934-2021) is considered one of the most important contemporary poets in the Arab world. He was born near Basra, Iraq. Following his experience as a political prisoner in Iraq, he has spent most of his life in exile, working as a teacher and literary journalist throughout North Africa and the Middle East. He is the author of over forty books of poetry. Youssef has also published two novels and a book of short stories, and several books of essay and memoir. Youssef, who spent the last two decades of his life in London, was a leading translator to Arabic of works by Walt Whitman, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Federic Garcia Lorca, among many others.

Khaled Mattawa is the William Wilhartz Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. His latest book of poems is Fugitive Atlas (Graywolf, 2020). A MacArthur Fellow, he is the current editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.

Stephanie Strickland

History of Knowledge

At the Tree

Never again seen garden of animals
unenclosed
except by ice
ibex
mammoth
salmon
trout
Raid a ridicule
buffalo reindeer in herds in hordes in motion in fullness

Stay away from the tree

not divided into fields
divided by rivers

lest you plant it
by mistake
and call it your own

It is not a tree
It is not a garden
It is forest and
moor it is cloud scraping ridges
and piercing
valley caverns
It is long lone desolate somber moor and causeway

It is little horses
It is leaping lamprey
It is hazel trees springing from a cave roof
It is deeper in the caves
It is looking up
It is the maelstrom pool of stars slipping slipping slipping away

It is
bell

it is escapement
cerise

apricot
hazelnuts
It is at peace
it is in motion

It is tilted this much it is leaning outward

It is body in a fountain
it is her body reflection and shadow
conformed in water

It is off-center
It is adrift
It is unwinding
It is remarked
barque
kayak
coracle
& the trees are smiling


The trees are smiling

the lovers are loving with great
with extreme courtesie
with speech

For Kafka

subtly the praying mantis lifts
its leaf-stick body laced with fire glint
—engraved tracing of dioxin

a condensery become a crematory
—mint— was that
what was meant?

“a book” succumbs
the sea frozen fathoms thick
axe handle porous riddled : blight

Offered Up

1

Feed the dead. Dear god.
Do they eat? Do they get enough?

Must I go back to the door
in the cave where they wait,

re-enter it, undress,
make food of my flesh?

My life depends on
amnesia for its strength,

for its rhythms on shock : abrupt
reversals that do what they have to,

shut the child inside up.
I ask myself always

did she give in?
Did she smile and drop her head?

She has a strange deafness
hearing only what is said.

People feed the dead in Haiti.
I read it in a book.

2

Let the dead bury the dead.
Whoever grieves for flesh,

whoever serves it is
dead—that’s what I was told,

catechism I was raised on. It raised me,
though it was wrong, brutal

and felt cold
from the beginning.

Jesus speaking. Jesus preaching.
The disciples say to him

your mother is waiting.
I have no mother.

But where is she?
Was he fibbing?

3

A frightened child overhears. A terrified
child listens too hard—

does it mean
the ashes are embers that linger?

The kindest voice lied. Yes,
I heard wrong. What I heard right

is wrong. And has cost all I have, now
to bow down—and now to take up

lively Lord Death, sunglasses, rum breath, antic
strut, lime satin, tin cup. Stealing food

—and cigars—for Antigone alive in her cave,
I sidle, hunch. Disappear. Grin.

Keeping Company With You : Coma

—the gills still swimming

with you, breathing for you, tumbling backward
toward some

future. Shallow breath,

a passing shiver. Your dream of light,
knowing no other

time, moves inside

rocking shadow of water, as if some
one still

stood on the broken

patio, haggling for hours
the price of a pool

lamp, its broken cord.

Stephanie Strickland’s books include How the Universe Is Made: Poems New & Selected (2019) and Ringing the Changes (2020), a code-generated project for print based on the ancient art of tower bell-ringing. “For Kafka” first appeared in How the Universe Is Made. Earlier work includes True North, Dragon Logic, and The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil, as well as 12 collaborative digital poems, most recently “Liberty Ring!” (2020). Thanks to Lana Turner for publishing “History of Knowledge,” to Talisman for “Offered Up,” and to Tupelo Quarterly for “Keeping Company With You  :  Coma.” These poems are part of Truth Holder, forthcoming in 2025 from MadHat Press.  http://stephaniestrickland.com

Kimberly Ann Priest

The Storyteller Speaks to a Bird about Dying

To the caged, wings seem like an illness. But I cannot
bother my own body with these questions too much—whether
I feel less winged or more winged. Whether the birds
and the angels know something I do not. I open
a book to the light of this cold April morning and hear
you warbling outside my apartment window compelled to share
your poetry with me; and I understand your pre-occupation,
as well as what you are asking me to do. In years
of oppression, says the Iranian proverb, even birds die
in their nest.[i] This is to say, that no other living thing desires
so keenly to be totally released; greater, then, the consequence.
To the free bird, illness seems merely a dream. Perhaps,
this is our present universal paradox: no one really knows
what they want until that fleeting minute right before a death.
Maybe, we should all practice dying more often—yank
at the pivots, warm the muscles, sing our final notes into our darkest
hours, wake up the next morning a brand-new song again.

ثاء

On Wanting to Be Significant

a ghazal

No, nothing—if nothing—if call, if—nothing—if caw, then nothing—
hand, help, time—nothing—if pray, pray nothing—

say God, if nothing—in-part, or nothing—be not as nothing—
is wind for nothing—freeze tears—give nothing—

reframe—speak nothing—hold up, but nothing—like this is nothing—
for real, there’s nothing—amen, my nothing—

amen, my nothing—above is nothing, below, be nothing—
my soul, keep nothing—your words make—nothing—

your words: no, nothing—a word—is nothing—is word for [nothing]
for [ ] for [ ] [ ] [ ].

JOURNAL ENTRY written WHILE the First Saltmarsh Sparrows of Spring Visit My Window

for a lover, March 24th

In a year unknown, a woman takes her life. Maybe she lingers; maybe she finishes swiftly. What a cruel
knife love is in both its presence and absence. Today, the tides are fighting for the shoreline. I can
hear them slapping up against the rocks even from several miles away as though they contain many
voices—ghosts. My shadow goes missing inside the darkness of this apartment. I imagine she used a
cloth or rope as I read the brief description of Qabbani’s loss, a young boy who would become a
future poet, a man penning wildly on behalf of women in Syria. Simply put, someone I do not know
and know little about, but whose poetry entrances me; Love Letters he calls them, the poems. I want to
tell you about this, lover, how his sister haunts him. How, in each woman he writes of—their bodies
full of fire, form, and foolery—I hear his child heart breaking and burying itself in her dark eyes and
breasts. Wissal, it beats. I will find you. She does not answer back, her spirit floating above a firmament,
her body shrouded in the past. I want to say that I have never been her, that when he speaks, “All the
white doves / That will carry / Your wedding dress / On their wings,”[xix] I do not feel my body lifting
as a piece of torn tissue, blood splattered and broken from expecting any other outcome. In our youth
we yearn for connection, utter secrets in the ears of the people we trust, believe that flowers are a sure
sign of affection, poetry seeming reasonable even when nonsensical. I don’t imagine that, then, you
would have told me my mind needed mending, or even thought to utter the word disabled as if the way
I walked through an open field, talking as I went, ceaseless, were indication of affliction[xx] —you beside
me listening because this is how to be beside me. Now, you try to change me. You need a trail of logic
like tiny pieces of freshly baked bread because you are hungry, because “[l]istening” to fractured
banter, says Frank, “is difficult,” an illness stor[y] mix[ing] and weav[ing] different narrative threads.”[xxi]

I understand your need for coherence, but grief and trauma are never linear that way. I can’t feed you
more than water and salt—the cyclical waves pounding against a body of sand. Wissal refuses to marry
a man she doesn’t love, and her brother becomes her afterlife plumbing a woman’s perspective—her
point of view. We all deal with our traumas in our own way. I see you doing the same each time you
turn away from me, then turn toward me, naming me for this motion, a coping, illogical as poetry. Are
you less abled too? Everything is poetry. I think. A grasping for speech, a language we hope others will
hear and understand. See how Wissal’s voice, “like a green bird,” breaks Qabbani’s heart over and
over again—ah love “washing [him] with the rain of [its] tragedy.”[xxii] I peck at his language to weave
my own grief, asking to please join their discordant conversation.

________________________________________________________________________________
[i] The Iranian proverb, “In years of oppression even birds die in their nest,” was taken from Grace Goodall’s, “Bird Lore
in Southwestern Iran.”

[xix] Nizar Qabbani, “Love Letter Four,” Arabian Love Poems.

[xx] Say Freedman and Combs, “When [people] are approached as objects about which we know truths, their experience is
often one of being dehumanized. They can feel like machines on an assembly line. Also, even though a pill or a procedure
may make a person function better, she may think worse of herself [...] as broken or defective because the medication
was ‘required’ for their functioning,” (Narrative Therapy: The Social Construction of Preferred Realities, pg. 21). As Herman asserts
in Trauma and Recovery, a victim of trauma must feel that she is the one presiding over the discovery of her own narrative
and condition, not having it imposed upon her by individuals from outside of her experience who do not possess integral
knowledge of her suffering, (pg. 158). This knowledge is often ascertained in therapy, that Freedman and Combs argue,
should remain narrative in its focus so as not to pathologize the victim in her confusion and grief. Dina Shulman, when
speaking of her own recovery and adoption of the narrative therapy model writes, “When reading literature of a
pathologizing nature, I found myself once again awash with pain and pessimism,” but, when reading of narrative therapy
approaches, she says, she was left with “a feeling of optimism.” “Problems,” she asserts, “entrench you with pain, while
stories allow for possibilities” and “[...] when one gets a chance to reflect on one’s own life, choices multiply, instilling
excitement at the realization that the preferred outcomes are within one’s grasp,” (Freedman and Combs, Narrative Therapy:
The Social Construction of Preferred Realities, pg. xii-xiii). Given the opportunity to reflect and nourish her own story, a victim
may feel empowered by diagnostic naming of her condition if this diagnosis comes to her via discovery and in the context
safe relationships (such as a trusted therapist), allowing her to “[discover] that there is language for her experience” and
that “she is not alone; others have suffered in similar ways” as well as the necessary realization that her symptoms and
condition are “normal responses to extreme circumstances,” (Herman, Trauma and Recovery, pg. 158).

[xxi] Frank, The Wounded Storyteller, pg. 76.

[xxii] Nizar Qabbani, “Love Letter Eighty-Eight,” Arabian Love Poems.

Kimberly Ann Priest is the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry from the University of Nebraska Press for her book Wolves in Shells, as well as the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications) with books forthcoming from Texas Review Press and Unsolicited Press. A professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, she lives, with her husband, in Maine.

Joseph Lease

Self-Portrait as the Downhill Slide (Section 2]

This is not healthy—there is nothing left to taste—each day unwraps a packet of light and vomits into the sink—she tried to sell her waves—and there was no festival in the mud—crocuses, ice, sparrows—eyes moved in the branches and were gone—she invented a city to give to the demon—

She would keep him listening—inside the hill she tried to sell her words—the world did only paint and lie—painting the picture she painted when she believed herself—clean march sunlight, empty words—wash the wall, scrub it, let it dry—maybe I’m just nuts—wouldn’t that be fine—now the old bridge, half-dismantled—rust and moss-green iron—white trunk near the yellow air-hammer—

That’s like gold, a clown says—laughter is gold—what is rain—laughter is—the toilet says, It’s not about your childhood—all the children breaking now—all the children, lost, afraid—the sky is getting nearer, so are you—

Our words are poor or rich—and so it goes—we wash the evening off our summer clothes—beneath the evening silence lets us in—we drift like sunlight in a parking lot—the spirit passes through us like a wind—the spirit passes through us like a whim—we feel our double nature crack again—a different sense of power slits our eyes—

Contact all the fires of saliva—the fires of dawn—exaggerate, distort my angels—perhaps the big sister, steely and confident—perhaps the ordinary zombie, the humdrum lost souls, perhaps the big sister—I deserved a pastoral love affair for the first time clean sunlight came through the bus window—what you don’t know hurts you everyday—hurts you for so long everyday—jumping he jump jumps we jump jump in the snow leaves it was only my appointment book (“wake up: you’re not a child”)—cars rolling in the snow in the now—

In soft folds that roll like a road—what have you been—what sound has saved you—you who float like water lilies on the tense surface, witness—a thief and a cat—my family was always on the street—my mother walking, walking somewhere—and the soul made a path, and the soul was degraded—but her anger never showed, and she answered each accuser—the soul opened her mail, saying Daughter this is from Heaven—word from Heaven—and the green lake was shining—but the children had guns, and the soul said Daughter I cannot go, cannot fly away home—

Self-Portrait as the Downhill Slide [Section 4]

Shadows in the park—a carriage, a gem—crystal or Lucite—shadows under a bridge—sometimes you’re hit by lightning looking in a garbage can—sometimes the homeless man with the red mustache really is a mystic—

If that isn’t acceptable to you, just leave now—

Nerves torn to shreds—a flaw, a fault—cracking, pushing through the gap—all bare, loving what we feel, wide open, listening—wind fills violet sky with water—buds swell, spill into sound—in the snow leaves—it was only her appointment book—reading about Berlioz and sleeping in the sun she got angry because he couldn’t rest inside pleasure then she couldn’t rest inside pleasure either—gush me kabob—notice me shilly shally—O cream, your anger is a light show—follow the hawk through the eye of a noodle, reason’s large intestine—fate equals faith and here we go again—a talking mailbox said I am your dream journal, I feel squishy, noble, bloated—

 
I make little sounds when I sleep in my capsule—

The other name for home—drunk and prancing—nobody hates the tomatoes—be somewhat mean—just try to act like a human being, ok—it’s become a game now, how little he can reveal, how little to give away—Martin Luther’s pen slows down, waits—whatever it is won’t come—we thought we were freezing so we set ourselves on fire—no letter ever stays true, the face in the snapshot is pretentious, a hand held out—not in greeting—but in the middle of gesturing in annoyance, to whisk away recognition—how can I know what I have been—when the body shifting seeks its shifting refuge how can I know what hand is touching me where I am about to open—once in blue-gray dawn twilight I rode a broomstick—the gates of Heaven are my eyes and ears—sing and riddle when blue-gray shadows sweep from corner to alley—forgotten, you start to dance—daylight promised me marionettes and voices—daylight promised me night told the truth—

I was a spy, then I was a forest—I was a shipwreck, or I was a dog—I was a spy, then I was a forest—I was the sick clench that rides up your throat—I sang nonsense, I choked on my voices—knew patience and shadow—but they fell apart—a spider web, a falling star, an addict’s wound, a thought that hides—I am a fool, I had a plan, and water was my dirty name—

A fox stops on the slope beside Townshend Dam—trees sticking out of the ice—hey you’re as pretty as the Humanities, you’re as pretty as Arts and Sciences—walk through milky sunlight—maybe a scrap of a story from fourteen years ago—let it go—O when I was young—that phrase so silly—O when I was young—that phrase, so necessary—so far I still look young, though way too fat—but I’m not young (anything but)—those lines of Schuyler’s: “They were not my lovers, though / you were.  You said so”—smell as good as nine nectarines in a blue stone bowl—today I think of kissing, of shadows on snow, of pink sky over shadows on snow, and the smell of these nectarines—pink sky over snow—comes from a snapshot—I’m looking at it now—bright snow—death follows him—death is all business—snow in sun—green angels—faces of wolves—daylight’s long torso—moves slowly—bright snow—death is all business—listen in the snow—dark inside sun—all day our voices—were in our knees—how fresh and clean, O Lord, are thy returns: footprints on the river, footprints on the grass—see the market where imps play in pretty faces—thin birch branch, white t shirt, dew on grass—how fresh and clean—light in birch leaves, light on a mailbox—

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.

Robert Gibb

Invasive

                                    “Experts suspect the first lanternflies arrived in the United States
                                   in 2014 in Berks County, PA, aboard a shipment of stone from
                                    their native China.”
                                                                        —Bay Journal

The spotted lanternfly’s
Red hind wings

Red-flag the infestation
And no mechanisms

Like native wasps
To hold it in check.

Lycorma delicatula.
The thin dark wicks 

Of the antennae.
The “brick and mortar”

Patterning the tips
Of the wings.

That beauty such as this
Should be found

In destruction’s toolkit—
What are we to think

About that?
Delicate little lanterns

And no tree of heaven
For them to abide in.

Diptych (I)

                                    i.
   Christopher Columbus Monument,
     Schenley Park, Pittsburgh  

Within the makeshift grid of scaffolding
The cast-bronze figure still puts on airs,
                                                               pitched

As if on a quarterdeck, riding
The crest of the concrete plinth.

Below him, scrawled across the scrolling waves
And chiseled rows of inscription,

The words murderer and stolen land
Taunt the base of the monument, the spray-

Paint’s dripping script legible but faint—
A verdict they’ve been trying to scrub

All this week,
                        the crews who’ve been at it,
Hazmatted in masks and rubber gloves.

On deck, dead-reckoning, Columbus  
Stands his ground again, sanitized above us.

                                    ii.
  “Syria Mosque, Oakland, Pittsburgh”
  W. Eugene Smith, 1955  

A close-up shot of the Mosque: one of the pair
Of sphinxes bookending the stairs,

Her languorous lion’s body,
                                                 eyes lidded shut,
Pre-Raphaelite features lifted to the sun.

Her big paws and headdress-covered breasts.
A sash of “Shriner arabesques”

Frills the wall behind her. A fretwork turret.
The strip of calligraphy the light

Could be writing. Basking in her cast metal
She’s almost purring—
                                      a cat on a windowsill

Who never failed to thrill me as a child.
Nor did the names below her, compiled

 After the Armistice from lists of casualties,
Setting the stage for the rest of the century.

Diptych (II)

                                       i.
Deepwater Horizon

 First a doe breaking cover from the underbrush,
Chased by a pair of feral cats.

Then, days later,
                               the near wing-clipped collision
Of a nighthawk and bat.

They felt like omens when the rig went nova,
Riddling the reefs with those currents,

And the salt wedge of the estuary.
With crude oil and chemical dispersants.

After which,
                        the wrack of turtles and dying fish,
The tarred-and-feathered birds,

A sperm whale, fuchsia, filmed from above,
Breaching where the waters burned.

 I still can’t get past what the cameraman said—
“It looked like it had been basted.”

                                      ii.
“Zoo Owner Frees Animals, Kills Self”

The locks sprung on the cages, one by one, 
Like the seals in some trial-run Revelation,

He sent them out into the Ohio night,
Wild and baffled,
                                overwhelmed by the scents

They’d caught hints of through their fences—
Gray wolves, black bears, shadow-shaped cats,

All scoped now within crosshairs
And the infrared light of the flares.

All but that poor wayward creature
Who’s about to mouth a round from his gun.

Walkie-talkie static.
                                     Semi-automatic bursts.
The frost-lit lawns in lockdown . . .    

Ohio, where the passenger pigeon died
Whose flights once plenished the skies.

“Pittsburgh Coke Company…”

AT CLAIRTON, PENNSYLVANIA”

David Plowden, 1973

You can see why he took this photograph,
The massive black shapes,
Burning and backlit,
All you can see on the other shore,

Smoke cloudbank’d above them,
Twilight on the river
At the bottom of the frame.
It looks like ruins from a bombed-out city—

Scattered chimneys, stories high,
Alone as though
Left standing,
The toppled slant of the conveyor belt—

A jerrybuilt Hades whose ovens cook coal.
He finds our mill towns
“unspeakably depressing,”
Though the erupting, industrial, scale of things

Stun him with something like beauty.
You can see it in
The lush black surfaces
He’s lavished on the coke works,

The shimmer of heaven in the water below.
The turbulence
And tenebroso.
“Seductively photographic,” he confesses,

The click of the shutter fixing the image.
Flat shapes stacked
In congested space.
The underworld boiling over.

Robert Gibb is the author of 14 books including, most recently, Pittsburghese, (Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize, 2023). Other books include Sightlines (Prize Americana in Poetry, 2019), Among Ruins (Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, 2017), After (Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, 2016), The Burning World (Miller Williams Poetry Prize, 2004) and The Origins of Evening (National Poetry Series, 1997). He has also been awarded a Pushcart Prize, an appearance in Best American Poetry and Prairie Schooner’s Glenna Luschei Award (2012) and Strousse Award (2011).

Dennis Finnell

Hello. I’m nobody. Can we talk?

If it's not music promising
easy sex,
it's my men on all fours.

If it's not a stone
it's a whirlpool,
& home at gauntlet's end
wrinkles & mirrors us.

What's our story?
A quest for loopholes.

Cling to stinking underbellies
of rams one minute,
out-seduce
the seductress the next.

What's our light?
We make blackness into
Solomon's dusk.

Our best enemies are giants,
foul weather making us
a tribe of ire,
or great devilish nations,

so we use slings
or sharpened sticks
dipped in shit,
dress in motley,
in sleepwear, or as a forest
inching to the castle,
practice patience
plowing fields round and
round
the giant forever
falling down,

a project collapsing
in on itself.

Giants never need
to grow up,
but if they stop
nursing at the Earth
they petrify and weaken.

Then we make pilgrimages
to see them in stone.

Now it’s just a few drops

of red ink,

what you said turning your
head
toward my ear,
the theater emptying out,
a big opening, closing sound,
light amplifying it,
your warm breath at my ear.

 There   up ahead          a white
rectangle,         a scar in it.

The red letters
in the   epidermis
of your fingers,          difficult to
decipher,         you have to know
they're there, 

and in your      right cheek
a plea in a        simple code—
some would say
a blush,          others
a flaw, a blemish,

 but it's a way to know you,
to save           our ship.

 Please be quiet,
now just hush up
say goodnight.

In the morning
a box   on the bed,
at night          an empty movie
house,
in the morning          a box.

The sea is        charcoal,
ashes,
your cheek        a red ship in it
to the new,      improved dirt.

What I was told:

           He was chopping firewood.

 What I imagined:

  The long-handled axe
overhead
in a human-scaled
simulacrum
of the mercy stroke
coming down
inside               his heart.

And then a stone sermon
came to me
from some
            Alexandrian library
            of what time
has been,         is,        shall be.

            And then a picture
came to me
of a cathedral's
                  Gothic clock
with bronze figures
          revolving
                   out of a steeple's
stone archway
          to hammer
the bells,          tell time.

What was he   to me
but a    telephone voice full
of serrated       wit,
that       to listen to
was to hear
                   the natural

          and unnatural talk.

 Now he is        what
he always was,

 a musical saw.

Today the world is:

wafted through
the beleaguered
           window's screen.
All the fine interstices
have trapped    a tan powder,
the evidence of days.

Do you see real mountains
from your window?

 Do you say to yourself—
            inasmuch as
                      your better half          
isn't around—
            I think I'll take
a little nap       now.
I could hear birds,      maybe
that wren
          who makes a wayside 
out of the trilled notes
in her throat.

What comes through
           your window screen
                     with the wren's fable
might be a breeze,
            with it a whiff
                     of balsam,
and this should be sufficient
            until tomorrow's
                      afternoon respite,
replete with the first lilacs.

 Then you'll be
once more an agent
passing the world on to us. 

After the days

lawn faced
the sky's blue indifference,

then the parade
of clouds
         rolling like floats west,

it looked up at
                   one or two stars
bordered by
           two darkening maples
and one big willow.

The lawn had
           no eyes
but the dizzy   boy and girl
lying at day's end
                      on it did.

            Then honeysuckle
along the rotting fence
gave away
             its sweet smell,
its nectar          to late bees,
to hummingbird moths.

And to a boy   plucking
its stamens
          and sucking
                     their sweetness.

Then other children
                      gathered
            with names like
Diane and Roger

and one was
blindfolded,   
                    spun,
the others disappearing.

Dennis Finnell is from St. Louis, had over thirty jobs in his working life—not that "retirement" isn't a job—from Chevy truck assembly line to real estate sales (where he sold zilch). He has taught at a few colleges and universities, including Tennessee, Wesleyan, and Mount Holyoke, and ended working life as a financial aid administrator. Dennis has lived with his blessed wife for the last forty years in western Massachusetts.

Nancy Eimers

A Whole Season of Lamination and Snow

It is lonely wearing a long green topcoat that falls
almost to the ground. It smells of soot
from the mills. A touch on the shoulder
was in some other life. O Lord, when we wear
each other's clothes may they not be too unkind
to remember us. Some nights the houses keep
to themselves like a hand of cards,
some nights the deer pass by the lit houses
that many nights in a row have lain dark.
Sometimes I lived in one of them. Snow falling in the dark
seems also to abide in the future, having extinguished
the kerosene lamp of me in the twentieth century.

As Guest That Would Be Gone

Clouds no longer behave the way they used to.
Or is it just that certain kinds of clouds are disappearing,
something about high carbon dioxide emissions, so how I used to think

of them as separated, named, specific kinds of clouds
will have to change, omitting certain categories while acknowledging
how much we don't yet know. And yet they still go

drifting over and across us like a language trying to explain
things change, things ever will, and that won't change,
matter being altered, other than it was, other than it will be,

which isn't very comforting. That we go on, not as us
but being on the point of becoming imperceptible.
“Ultimately," says one of the clouds, “the hope is that it will be

beautiful." I'm grieving for a friend whose passage wasn't.
Two months after she first collapsed, and she isn't here.
I don't always know how to read a face. I try replaying hers.

Imagination reinvents, and memory just shrugs its shoulders.
I'd hope her passage was like Dickinson's imagined summer.
Maybe that explains my dream, the one in which she said

she couldn't get together that night, she had plans
to meet with Divinity in the moonlight, and until I woke
I thought Divinity was some new-agey friend, and was hurt

to be replaced so easily. But it wasn't easy . . . was it?
“The inwardness of age," John Koethe wrote. I'd add,
“gets crowded." Friends leave, by dying or by living on.

All over town their faces light up on my mnemonic map,
or they wait as if in piles, face on face, unopened mail.
It happens when you live years of your life in one place

or it happens anyway, however many times you move.
Some rock star must have imagined something else
when he bought a modernist George Nelson home in Kalamazoo

sight unseen, including furniture: just the occasional visit
to write songs and “shake up my environment."
He won't seek friends but might buy groceries here.

That kind of house sits way back in the trees, so inside
it will retain its impersonally eccentric, Mondrian-esque color scheme.
Kind of like writing your dreams down in the future tense,

a glimpse of house through leaves, a bird just visible on a branch,
maybe one of spring's first orioles, then its sapphic phrase––
what am I here for––from the top of one of the trees.

So if from each other what we want is to be seen
I must admit each of you one at a time though
one way or another you dream the dream of invisibility.

Even Now We Are Glowing

In photos taken by long exposure, the stars in motion
look like trails of neon light (though really it is the earth's rotation),
the camera's shutter must stay open long enough
that the image can blur. You can ask someone
to walk across the frame and watch them turn into a ghost.
There she goes, my mother beginning to talk to herself or us
in a storytelling voice. How there was one gray bird that stood aside
while all the others chose their colors,
there was Little Tiny who stole the clothes off a corpse,
a wind that twice blew the meal from a wooden bowl
and the boy who travelled north thinking he could recover it.
Apparently even in daylight the body emits a dim glow detectable by a special camera.
The man in the first photograph from the test study had his eyes closed.
By the third photograph he had disappeared into light.
That was a good visit, my father always said on the night before I flew.

The Drift of All of You

Unanswered phone with a you inside
leaving a lengthy message,
following its own ups and downs,
isn't one half of a conversation,
it is something else, I don't know what,
I imagine a vase filled with flowers
beginning to bend down low
but that is just its own
little sad, unfinished thought.
Last night being at a party
was like wandering, or being blown along,
I could never catch on anything,
a softness, thorns in a voice . . .
standing still I could feel the motion,
attention spans that kept traveling
over each other's shoulders, out the window,
into the garden, up into the trees
as high as twilight would take us.
How I wanted to fill my own house
with flowers, big fluffy roses just over
the hill, petals going antique
from the edges in, how I wanted to talk
to anyone, maybe just about tennis,
maybe just about the exactness
of light weighing everything down
on a hot afternoon, one guy's white shirt
and another's royal blue sneakers,
green courts, the clean white lines,
polite applause like a roomful of ticking
clocks all going their separate ways.
Or what sometimes causes this misty feeling
to rise in my heart. The party
was for my friend's mother's birthday,
but turning ninety seemed just as much
about who wasn't there, we all had
someone, and the flickering shadows
of leaves on the patio, little troubles
and gossip the shadows behind our talk
take on. As if some part of everyone there
was adrift like a ghost in a white dress
holding a ghostly glass that holds nothing
but an old song, and a story about a name
and a brother who died so long ago
and my friend's mother talking
as if he were in the other room.
I'm imagining roses, too many of them,
in a small-mouthed vase,
and the blousiness of clothes on a line
when the wind tries them on
and shrugs them off again.
Sooner or later a subject is lost
or freed from the conversation,
the dead go wandering off,
fewer than, less than, the countable and uncountable,
the party flickering now like a kind
of candlelight telling us
nothing much, it is late, it is time
to feel lonely, can you remember
a sweetness like this?

Nancy Eimers is the author of Human Wishes (New Michigan Press), Oz (Carnegie Mellon), and three previous poetry collections. She has been the recipient of a Nation “Discovery” Award, a Whiting Writers Award, and two NEA Fellowships, and her poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Michael Tod Edgerton

Drift-Draft Drop on 17th (Afterglow, Fall-Out, Tech-Boom Zoom-In)

shimmying along newly arrived my face beaming

•

as my glance
over a stung-slapped instant trips over —

•

a tent
on the corner—unshoed—
socked feet sticking out—
at the intersection
of 17th and Castro and Market—
on Market, in front
of the shut-down
High Ends Up Barn—
falls

•

hits the brick walk like a sling-shot rock of the real
— broke-mouthless tooth —
singing a last gleaming in the refuse

* Originally published in Home: An Anthology of Lives In and Out of Place, eds. Sara Biel and Carla Brundidge (Colossus Press 2020, https://colossuspress.org/)

Missing You (Private Dancer Cover, Covid Era)

I.

Who is she? Who was she? Who does she hope to be? (Mart Crowley, The Boys in the Band)

I don’t miss happy hour courtyard well margaritas at Toad Hall
or lapping up all that eye tonic-and-tease lagniappe
of the Castro muscle boys dressed
down for The Mix the heat the patios they’re
always too smokin’, anyway.

 I don’t miss drag shows for the price of a $12 well drink at The Edge
so crowded, too narrow, but maybe we’ll meet new people we can
go out drinking and dancing with.
I don’t miss dancing
hot men and not-as-hot men

 like me and the ones you wonder
have any value at all on the
“meat market” they call it—like that guy
eyeing me now—shaking
their thonged dongs as if their lives…

 or maybe I don’t have even the slightest
whiff of longing for those hot-ass
go-go boys at Beaux
bending low on their poles
and stuffing their tips in

those perfectly cut jocks
as Tina tantalizes howlingly
(and yes, any music will do)
—   How much for teabagging?!?   —
Ain’t nothing free, girl!

 Maybe they do, maybe I don’t
go for all that. Maybe it’s a seller’s market
(but aren’t we all really rentboys in these Modern Times, anyway)?
                                            And to think (or so I thought) I always 
just gave it away.

II.

I don’t miss escaping our tiny Castro apartment
for a patio
a warm afternoon
for the price of a $7 cappuccino
—   worth it   —
to work in the open air on a poem on
my $1200 laptop with a water back and
guaranteed obsolescence.

 I don’t miss delicious fine dining special occasion “experiences”
with veggie plates that prove the vegetal world to be the
true realm of the sublime.

 I don’t miss poetry
readings
bookstores
libraries
discovering the luminously singular pleasures
of a person’s erotic
melancholic
philosophical 
bodily cum political 
troubling of lines—like a new language I instantly knew
I had to know.

•     •     •      

Maybe I do, maybe I don’t
very much miss having that

big place we only ever
video-toured, a wrap-around

balcony to write on for free
for the price 

 of a Bay Area mortgage
I mean

where we could throw parties
be invited to more parties

 make more friends
make our lives

better for an overhyped dinner, making
community or whatever

and a life, such a life
we’d never have

to leave the house
and wouldn’t even miss the outside

world we wouldn’t even miss
leaving the country

on a cheap-as-shit roundabout flight
to Mumbai Montreal Montevideo or Madrid

too few can afford
being immersed in a cityscape

a texture and atmosphere
designed to bridge

hand and head, raise spirit from
dead matter, to gather

us in, built without doubt
by exploitation but it’s here

so why not take it all
in, all that art in

all these galleries and museums (it’s cheaper
to get the multipass) that feeds the soul

or some such
(doesn’t it)?

Then bulbous gin-tonics in the square (it did,
I swear, I felt it) I could

feel it (oh, yes, girl
they have squares there)

 feeding me (or was that
on me), I felt something for sure

I did (this poor white trah-sa-shaying
Kentucky kid who

 grew to think he’d never
heel a cobblestone off North America)

 we should 
move there

                      or

maybe I should stay with my husband
in our too-snug apartment writing all day
and never venture out (or almost, rarely, as
rarely as now, in the pandemic),
or maybe I should leave, get

my own place and write poetry all day
every day
jack off
or go back on Grindr even
pay for it, shit, it’s

 easier and quicker god knows
and god knows time is…
poetry all night every night
I’m not hooking
up, poetry or sex and

nothing else
—but how
would I live?
So maybe a monastery
(Buddhist of course)

 and meditate and garden all day and
meditate and sleep all night
to the silence-like lack of sirens
or maybe also write
some poetry or

innovative new sutras for the 21st C. or some such
and have sex with
all the other monks
or sing and chant all day
and either way

 is it about cumming
or connecting,

words and nerves as receptors,
synapses and syntaxes

as transmitters

or both, are both
veritably the same
or opposites and either way—
disrobing monks or meditating,
writing poetry or planting seed,

sitting on monks or among the sage— 
either way
shed myself of myself
(if we can ever truly break
out of our skulls)

 and finally be nothing else but

 — here —

or there
should we move there instead,

where it’s so unseemly, engorgingly gorgeous I can’t
take it? I’d love to but

how would we
live? We strategize and stretch the ways

 after two days of La Biennale di Venezia
—   the Art of the World   —

in a drowning cathedral city almost no one 
calls home this late  

in the game, we little lost rats
in its narrows no car could pass, just like

Barcelona’s 12th C. Barri Gótic—no, there really is something
about a place built for walking around in

rather than driving over and through…
There must be or there once was

(once the whole city, this Roman outpost in what’s
now Spain, a real neighborhood once,

now used for day-bright boutique shopping and
nightlife tourist debauchery) once

 upon a time, a life—
we probably all just missed it

 like we almost missed our plane
and our cheap-ass tickets

 nonrefundable of course
—shit!—                

how could I forget—
karaoke at The Mint The Look Out

  —   Midnight Sun!   —
I wish I could say I know by my heart

A chaaa-ange is gonna come…
Yes, it will…say it will…

  •     •     •      

Maybe I do,
maybe I don’t,

just now, as I type,
sitting here in San Francisco

on our sagging-seated
blue velveteen couch.

Maybe I know,
maybe I don’t 

(it just feels so real
at times), late summer 2021,

standing outside
our apartment door and scanning out:

over the Castro, over the hills
of houses: Hazy morning, ringing noon, rainbow-lit night

(business signs, storefront lights),
knowing for sure (feeling

at least) this is what Getting-Back-to-
Normal’s getting back to: It’s what’s always only just

simmered beneath
that’s boiling over now.

Raging (Eco-Economics in the Age of Neo-Fascism)

San Francisco, October 2017

Afternoon leisure and lingering, a walk,
When an incensed scent of wood
Overtook the medicinal stench

Of weed on Valencia. Breathe it in.
Akin to kindling.
A kind of hearth-lit breeze.

Wine and singing days ago in Guerneville,
We fags and drag queens
Dancing warmly lit riverside

Beach party by fire pit.
Enjoying tastes along the way,
Jeff Cohn and Enkidu (swallow,

Don’t spit) along with Walt
Wines and Equality
Vines, to name a few.

The two of us
Drinking poolside a Monday noon
With the rest of the guests

Long poured out.
A final mojito
A fête accompli and now, back home, the

News Flies Open
Windscream
Sideways
Rainfire of embers
Spark Flash Blaze

Yesterday
Tomorrow
Whole towns

— Slammed down —

— Bombed out —

— Ground to —

Fog over
San Francisco
Not fog: indoor orders

Flames storming houses like a crazed Russian River
Gunning down Agua Caliente Road flooding
The valleys the hills the trees
The fire their sports car couldn’t outrun—ignited—
If only Chardonnay could shimmer back
To water to rain over

California 
To bottle for
Puerto Rico: No water

To drink, blacked-out and flooded
Weeks now—Maria (flashes of
Katrina)—only a

Bounty of neglect of in-
Difference to, these in-citizens of
Whose Republic—remaining

Ignored and more and more
Running, these U.S. refugees,
To the foreign shores of

Florida—imagine Florida without power
For months—all those spoon-shoveled
Gold-silvered sand castles stormed:

— Diablo —

— Winds —

— Raging —

* Originally published in Interim 36.1

Michael Tod Edgerton (he/they) is a Queerboy poet of lyrically fluid gender and genre alike. Author of Vitreous Hide (Lavender Ink), Tod’s poems have appeared in Boston Review (annual contest winner), Denver Quarterly, EOAGH, Interim, New American Writing, Posit, Sonora Review, VOLT, and other journals. Tod holds an MFA from Brown, a PhD from UGA, and has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and MacDowell. He serves on the poetry-editing teams of Conjunctions and Seneca Review, where he is also Book Reviews Editor. You’ll find him swishing along the streets of San Francisco and online at MTodEdge.com and WhatMostVividly.com.

Ned Balbo

Oblivion’s Heron

You do not guard the gate. You are the gate.
The tracks you leave on sand
are runes that wash away.
Whoever crosses you will not cross over.

You vanish in your stillness. A recluse curls
in a repurposed shell.
A toad is breathing song.
Long-legged like someone’s daughter, you withhold

the sharp spear of your bill—
Great Blue, gray-blue,
you could extend huge wings
(angelic, terrible)
but don’t. Instead, moon-yellow eyes alert,

you wait, tilting your clear gaze from the glare
against the gleaming water,
the better to see what trails
below in useless armor, scattering...

Why is it we feel useless—small, unseen?
Your bright beak opens slightly
as if to pose a question
you’d never let us near enough to answer.

Memory and the Hive

“Telling the bees” is the beekeepers’ practice
of informing the colony of major life events.
Not doing so risks disaster for the hive.
—Folk belief

The hive, after a death, does not go silent—
The cycle of its labors never ends.
Yet we must “tell the bees,” a mourning cloth
laid on the hive, its darkness not so dark
that light’s extinguished, nor our human grief
so deep that it resists all consolation.

Heads bowed, our voices low, we break the news
as if our grim misfortune is their own.
By now they’ve learned to recognize our faces
hazed by netting, gloved hands reaching through.
What do they hear, exactly, when we speak?
Our voices boom far off, like harmless thunder.

Each has her place: relentless foragers
who hunt for nectar sunup to sundown;
the gravid queen who checks each hexagon
for larvae deep in metamorphosis;
nurse bees who serve and feed them as they grow;
the mortuary bees who clear the dead.

What have we told them that they didn’t know?
The hum gets louder. Soon, they settle down.
The gift of gathered nectar, bee to bee
(reduced to honey as it’s passed along)
nourishes all. The fanning of small wings
inside the hive is delicate, angelic.

Such diligence brings solace.... But in the dark,
the hive’s hum soothing, some skilled forager
will seize the stage, the sun still on her mind,
to share the best route to her choicest troves,
conveyed by dance moves and the slant of light
she mimics in the waggles of her steps.

Is there a dance to signify the sad news
of our human world? The mourning cloth
laid on the hive is not so dark as night
when flowers shimmer brightly in the minds
of bees who dance, remembering their travels
—The gift of gathered memory, bee to bee.

Metaphors for Tymbal Music

Tymbals are the abdominal membranes that allow male cicadas to “sing.”

The banging of ten billion tambourines
What does it mean
Infinite shriek careening past a storm
What’s taking form
Ten thousand theremins make their escape
By changing shape
Waves booming, multi-tracked to the extreme
A lucid dream
Medieval chant uncertain of its pitch
Wavering, rich
Light aircraft engines idling over Rome
We’re almost home
The rattling of the D train far away
We cannot stay
An endless agonizing car alarm
The cause of harm
Foo fighters glimpsed by pilots lost in time
History rhymes
Six billion laptop coolers churning dread
How many dead
That same old treetop shriek across ten miles
Despite denials
A missile’s everlasting flight before
A call to war
In silent rooms, the pulsing of our blood
It does no good
An alien spacecraft’s hum & hovering
Discovering
The drone that drops deliveries from its claw
Nobody saw
All reasons that we hear or cannot hear
What’s drawing near
The gorgeous music that will leave us deaf
Praise what is left

Hatchling

I still remember how the bird spilled out
that summer day
we broke its egg to show the way
into a world we knew nothing about.

Except the bird was not a bird—not yet.
The pale blue shell
we’d cracked was not a prison cell
but all the sanctuary it would get.

That poor, ill-fated, half-formed embryo
sun-struck, lay drenched
in amniotic gold, the bench
on which it quavered all that it would know

of gravity and light: naked and blind,
more terrifying
because it was so quickly dying.
We were too young to know what we would find—

I’d imagined glossy wings, bright beak,
clear eyes that shone
with gratitude and met my own,
not some huge-headed creature, pale and weak.

I doubt you still remember how I climbed
a garden chair
to reach up to a bird’s nest near
enough to grasp, a bad plan poorly timed.

I’d introduced an uninvited guest:
the possibility
joy could turn to tragedy—
a shattered egg, an empty, ruined nest.

Did words like sorry stick inside my throat?
For what I’d done,
I ran as fast as I could run—
Another wrong for which amends are owed.

Jaguar Sun

The Jaguar Sun, a fire in the east,
ascends in radiance, descends at dusk,
and prowls beneath the pale horizon line
that meets the stars. Dark lords we do not see
are no match for his light. How warily
he watches while his adversaries feast
in Xibalba’s halls, immortal lives at risk
—How silently he takes them, one by one.

And then, it’s day again: the dawn’s pink light,
blood-tinged, returns. The Jaguar Sun is bright,
for now; the lords, forgotten in their hold,
must bide their time. Perhaps a brief eclipse,
one day, will warn of an apocalypse—
Till then, the sun’s more blinding than pure gold.

Ned Balbo's newest books are The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Poetry Prize), and 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award) whose title poem appears in the recent Cambridge University Press anthology Outer Space: 100 Poems. His third book, The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems, received the Donald Justice Prize and the 2012 Poets’ Prize. A former faculty member in Iowa State University's MFA program in creative writing and environment, he has received grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (translation) and the Maryland Arts Council. Recent poems appear in The Common, Ecotone, Gingko Prize 2019 Ecopoetry Anthology, Plough Quarterly, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. He is married to poet Jane Satterfield.

Geoffrey Babbitt (Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award)

His Flock

“How sweet is the Shepherds sweet lot”
—Blake, from Songs of Innocence
A social gathering, with a small group of artists—including James Ward, Sir Thomas
Lawrence, John Flaxman, and John Linnell—gathered around Blake and, nearby, a lady.

Blake: The other evening, taking
a walk, I came to a meadow,
and at the far corner I saw
a fold of lambs.
Coming nearer, the ground
blushed with flowers;
and the wattled cote
and its woolly tenants were of
exquisite pastoral beauty.
But I looked again,
and it proved to be
no living flock,
but beautiful sculpture.

Lady: I beg pardon, Mr. Blake, but may I ask where you saw this?

Blake: Here, madam! [touches forehead]

in Blake’s woodblock prints
of Virgil, the fourth woodcut
shows Colinet telling Thenot
that it will take all day to recite his woes,
which would leave their sheep
untended, to which
Thenot replies,“[Lightfoot]”—
Lightfoot, a most Blakean character
—“he shall tend [the lambs] close,”
—close!—as Lightfoot
overlooks shepherds and their flock
against the distant horizon’s light, an aiery figure
with crook and trailing herding dog
yipping at his buoyant heels
—is that a tree bough or a cloud
or the shape of the wind
dipping down from the top frame,
whisking him along?—in any case,
he is whisked on
by some animating force despite
the heavy medium of his rendering—something
spurs Lightfoot on as he
dances atop the hillside’s silhouette and across a bright, bright sky

Vision of Joseph the Carpenter

after Peter Ackroyd

if you want watercolors
that are more beautiful
and can survive sunlight,
then mix them yourself, William,
on statuary marble—indigo, cobalt, gamboge,
vermillion, Frankfort black, all freely
— ultramarine, rarely—chrome,
never—for white, get the best whitening
& powder it—mix thoroughly
to the consistency of cream, strain
through double muslin, spread it out on the backs
of plates, preferably white tiles, keep warm
over basins of water until stiff—

when painting colors on, apply
not with a sable, no,
but a camel’s hair brush—dilute
common carpenter’s glue and use
as a binder—like varnish—but
the portion must be just right—
when dry upon the thumb nail
or on an earthenware pot, it should have
so much and no more glue
as will defend it from being scratched off
with a fingernail—with these
methods, you may achieve
prismatic and tender brilliancy

The Ghost of a Flea

I.

Blake’s flea isn’t a flea but a flea’s
spiritual reality translated humanoid
into this hulking demonic
tongue thruster, its hunching musculature mid big stride— right hand pinching its tail or a dagger handle or thorn, a golden goblet or basket or bowl held in its left,
from which he drinks and drinks
to slake his bloodthirst—if the flea were large as a horse, Varley wrote, it’d “depopulate
a great portion of the country,” and J.T. Smith said
Blake said, “were that lively little fellow the size of an elephant... he could bound from Dover to Calais
in one leap”—its skin
scaly reptilian, thickly bulked
neck under small head, vertebrae
popping out above the shoulders,
eyes bulged, tongue
licking the air in eagerness for his blood cup,
dragon wings above ears
fanning back—and
in the floorboards in front
of his left shin, ever so faintly,
an actual flea

but Blake’s flea crosses a stage, curtains
on either side, and well beyond
the curtains, a cosmic background—astral, a comet’s fabulously long tail
dragging diagonally down

and in the curtains themselves, in the stars, even in the flea’s saurian skin, Blake’s worked thin gold leaf bits, and into the tempera, he’s powdered gold foil, giving the whole work an edge
of muted fire, a feeling of molten metal coursing under skin, this clash of contraries— human-bestial, infernal-celestial, at once familiar & otherworldly

II.

as he worked, Blake said to Varley,
“I see him now before me”—as we do—not the evidence of what Blake saw but
the darkly aureate shimmer of its envisaging

Solitary Traveler with a Staff

In through my window walks the solitary traveler—balding, high forehead, bright eyes. Carrying a staff in one hand and a hat in the other, he looks windswept, as if having walked a great distance....

Blake: [Humming a vaguely hymnal tune I do not recognize.]

I: Whenever we talk, my mouth clogs with flowers.

I hope you will excuse my delay.

How is Catherine? Will she be coming too? (Lavender.)

My Wife & Sister are both very well & courting Neptune for an embrace.

At Felpham? I can see them now, walking along the shore, collecting shells. Here we go—yellow
tulip petals issuing....

The sweet air & the voices of winds trees & birds & the odours of the happy ground makes it a dwelling
for immortals. A piece of Sea Weed serves for a Barometer.

I made a pilgrimage there, once, to your cottage. I loved the sound of the channel. The salty sea
air.

Our thatched roof of rusted gold!

Your garden.... A white shell among the tulip petals.

I have a thousand & ten thousand things to say.... But I do not wish to irritate by seeming too obstinate
in Poetic pursuits.

No such thing. I’m reading Jerusalem again. I’ll never finish with reading it.

Blessed are those who are found studious of Literature & Humane & polite accomplishments. Such
have their lamps burning & such shall shine as stars.

Hydrangea blossoms now.

Happinesses have wings and wheels; miseries are leaden legged and their whole employment is to clip
the wings and take off the wheels of our chariots.

Maybe it’s as Rimbaud said: if, demented, he finally loses the understanding of his visions, he
will at least have seen them. On my best days I worry I’m demented.

All Distress inflicted by Heaven is a Mercy.

Los at his smithy tormented by his Spectre. I do not always know whether to trust what I see.

I could tell you of Visions & dreams.

Well then, tell me!

A thousand Angels upon Wind! Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates. The time is now
arrived when Men shall again converse in Heaven & walk with Angels.

You can’t even talk of angels anymore. And I can’t know whether to trust what I sometimes see.

This World Is a World of Imagination & Vision. I see Everything I paint In This World. To Me This
World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination.

You see what you paint. We’ve been over this before. But are there things you see but choose
not to paint? And why?

My Style of Designing is a Species by itself—compelld by my Genius or Angel to follow where he led. If
I were to act otherwise it would not fulfill the purpose for which I alone live.

I have no angel. Evasive you are the closest thing.

I am the companion of Angels.

I’ve always wanted to dance with you. Would you? Strange, I know.

I know that you see certain merits in me which by Gods Grace shall be made fully apparent & perfect in
Eternity.

But would you dance with me?

O What Wonders are the Children of Men! Would to God that they would Consider it That they would
Consider their Spiritual Life Regardless of that faint Shadow Calld Natural Life. & that they would
Promote Each others Spiritual Labours. Each according to its Rank & that they would know that.
Receiving a Prophet As a Prophet is a Duty which If omitted is more Severely Avenged than Every
Sin & Wickedness beside It is the Greatest of Crimes to depress True Art & Science.

A rose on the tongue is both too sweet and too bitter.

The Thing I have most at Heart! more than life or all that seems to make life comfortable without. Is
the Interest of True Religion & Science.... I am under the direction of Messengers from Heaven Daily &
Nightly.

Sounds exhausting!

I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand, even I used
to be in my youth.

I love thinking of you making art in Eternity, dancing with Catherine, and picking fights.

There is not one touch in those Drawings & Pictures but what came from my Head & my Heart in
Unison.

If I could lasso a crowd and show you a multitude singing “Jerusalem” in unison, rapt,
scattering red rose petals as they trilled.

Gratitude is Heaven itself.

Before you go, tell me: How should I go about my poetry?

See Visions, Dream Dreams, & prophecy & speak Parables unobserv’d & at liberty from the Doubts of
other Mortals.

Please give Catherine my love. Bring her with you next time.

My wife is like a flame of many colours of precious jewels. My wife joins me in love to you.

Please don’t leave just yet! I have so much more to ask you.

The Ruins of Time builds Mansions in Eternity. Pray remember me with kind Love.

And maybe next time we could share a little dance.

Geoffrey Babbitt’s first book—a verse-essay, cross-genre project entitled Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light—was published in 2018. His poems and essays have appeared in North American Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Notre Dame Review, Washington Square, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Utah and is currently an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, where he also serves as Editor-in-Chief of Seneca Review.

Jami Macarty (Test Site Series Winner)

Harbinger

December first’s morning fog thins and lifts noontime Anna’s hummingbird—
contour trace iridescence
taken as given
lived as given

defending the relevance of radiance

Of

such cloudless
utter absolute.
: :

Sun tinting its going everywhere as it goes.
A yellowish green in the Aleppo pine
edging the construction site.
Ruddy brown the pine’s bark, then
the loamy taste of spruce.
A blue-gray shade.

: :

Sun permeates into transparency
movers, dozers and dump trucks.

Tremors asphalt with a shimmer—

Westward on I-10’s conveyor semi-trailers and sedans
babble the freeway into sun’s paradise of sparkle.
: :

Of sun’s glittered advance—

: :

Of sun’s light-expended lingering, who is there
to utter praise for the warming the shining
constantly of risen generosity—

Nevertheless persisting—

breathing light into Wolf Moon’s
vanquished rabbit.

Seeker

Horizon’s love-sick fool

you pilgrim the Earth

chance the Ocean

Sky’s blue hands

emphatically open

Who is responsible for the death of a woman

Winter, for example—

an admixture
of a woman’s caused-by-reality

bracing of black ice, snow-gritted street.

Wind’s granular abacus counting
her anonymity and disappearance.

Snow more than expected—

waist-high as memory’s dark narrative
blue opaqued white beneath hemlock trees

but it does not take winter to vague a reason.

Whole Catastrophe

it’s obvious you feel herb-stained raspberry-
scratched so I ask      

 you wheel few words             
reset in silence
we walk until initial pretending wears off of
candid spontaneous    

 we circle a path to our unfolded chairs
a gorp of dried cranberries almonds
dark chocolate accompanying champagne you kept
perfectly chilled on your back

                 sun extends its light 149.6 million kilometers
visible eight minutes later
                                                  we’re happy in our chairs by
a fire by a river then reading

   as mood brightens so goes ours
faced we’re better like veggies roasted on a fire

 good I say the forest mood-useful
you say the forest
                 the forest living on its inner thriving
after a controlled burning grows

 some wrecked things unharmful
                                                  make sense as
our discreet rock-rimmed fire denounces
chilly hungry

  better we when faced as sunlight in a camp chair
as reading as a ladder-backed woodpecker knocks
as tree-wind tenderness as earthly ravine promises
the river river

   downstream the sun sends us there
our certain water transport

light-hammered rock-battered but we’re listening
the uncharred air             tenderness
                         the trees colander light
                                               colander our affection       

trees absent syringe concern
addiction prevention

absent city where meth stakes motherhood
her discernment a flop mom bonded to syringe but
really under drug scum she’s a star
                                 reflected in jade water

today my mother a chair in the sun
reading by visible light near the river
the forest an ally champions
an understory of late god-pitched flowers

  wakes as spooned agave syrup
bee-loud blue fortune 

wakes an us-ideal as the cloud-lifted whole-view
mountain peak the sun lights aplenty beyond our
thoughts even as we maybe
                      as industry maybes the forest the river

412.5 parts per million
atmospheric carbon in the air
we’re not even         a bee pane away from
out of doors  

good to lose the car     gain our legs
           we have a premiere camp emanating as real
as certain as bird and water musics chant to fix
though nothing’s broken                               

                  shore up we two on a spit on our chairs
in the sun to the chits and churls of birds

 and this fly      it’s here like us     of space of air
vibrates its slang        

                                    sit here with me listen      you know
I princess to horror and still believe in the sun-rain
exchange           a mystery bend of stem          
                                                     wind’s good age

  how I hate how I hate when you deny we
store irreducible flame      get up      stand forth
devotee of reality
chant the unbreaking bend of stem

mystery alive my diction           there’s your chair
renewed by me

hear it deliver basking
yes shame trails or if you squint it cinches
your hands behind your back       
                                             but just as easily

sun breeze river waterfall trees
puma’s padding over our affluent naptime

sometimes you choose stuck in a maze
                      sometimes I stop at the child’s grave

 but we unraveled the manacles   we may assume
  power to refuse to march behind any ruling ghoul

        this is why love loves a storm
tree canopy canopying

  our future futures thousands more moons
we’re young and old                    our sheets clean

kiss my mouth of its fizzy extolling
come here     life for you with me if you want

  our now rivered forested         many colorists
the forest animals       their angel haunches

 what never shall I be able to outrun   impossible
psychical cul-de-sac                aided by green discourse  

virtuoso palmate pinnate        moss lichen
tourniquet mistakes
                Summer Tanager shamans my ear
a tourniquet a river makes      two parts the sun

makes of us lip-synching agents weaving       
a statement of belief                         for clarity
voiced arguments
save unexpectedly

  words yours and mine
making ours flow the river        
tremble fear as fish in shady shallows or cliff-
frothed water below

             listen before fear drowns let’s intern to love
instead of power game

 let’s power water buckets       clap for a makeshift
shower of sun-warmed water     for love we endorse

for love as dusk charmbracelets the fireflies
your image no different  

listen we have to jiggle the handle at times
listen you intern to me as I intern to you

            you’re my mixologist I’m your vibraphonist
               we’re a snacks-and-chat smorgasbord

why listen to the self-war
why adore Gargoyles of the Year        
              why reckon our mutual dark oceans for bait 
instead wed a salmon of determination

 back-country long-walking hatches
                                                        lupin-lined paths       

Black-crowned Sparrows
little monks that chip

our minds animalized determination
after solicitors hell-blaze property        
waste river water                          
squeak legal dark mentions
but they can’t out-reverence us     idealists that’s our
department                 I say be gone greed infection
together we can ward
                            we can saturate as full moonlight       

 let’s never be ancient     but continually magnified
                       you by me by you          

let’s forget abandonment and night-rinse our bodies
until we’re clear of this and this and that and that

 then through the branches the billion stars
let this moment reign
           the Seven Sisters our minds
genuflect their light

if I’m a moment you’re a good rhyme
if you missed there’s next time

everyone does their best       sometimes crosses first
the finish line              other times violence
gets the prize or cruelty
                                       licks its chops 

  you’ll hear the cure     
Great Horned Owl’s old dusk song       

let’s talk and sweep out the tent
life damages and some call us
by skin     body part     gender pejoratives
as pain and love       

as fern fronds and chunky stew the best heirlooms
from the garden, they don’t resent consummation
in any gap we remedy by speaking
it’s so much better to speak by listening    

 the way sure by ears wins
        a horizon where capture and torture once were

Jami Macarty studied with Charles Simic at the University of New Hampshire, where she completed a BA in English, and with Jane Miller at the University of Arizona, where she completed an MFA in poetry. After graduate school, Jami was executive director of Tucson Poetry Festival (1996-2005), then moved halftime to Vancouver, British Columbia, where she teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University. Jami also works as an independent editor and a writer of essays, reviews, and poetry. Jami is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award - Poetry Arizona, and four chapbooks, including The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami is the recipient of grants from Arizona Commission on the Arts and BC Arts Council, and scholarships from Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, Community of Writers, and Napa Valley Writer’s Conference, among others. Jami's poems appear in the anthologies Cascadia Zen, A Journal of the Plague Years, Resistance, and Rumors Secrets & Lies and in literary magazines such as of The Capilano Review, Interim, Vallum, and Volt. For more information about Jami’s writing, teaching, and editing practices, visit www.jamimacarty.com.