by Siham Karami
When I was born, the brightness burned and I cried out;
by Sarah Jordan Stout
Here is your hollowed out ride, complete
with smooth, plastic seat-back. Come, climb in.
Let the water touch you with its cold
breath, but please don’t
trail your fingers, like the lover in a painting.
Behind the set, you catch glimpses
unmarked doors to storage closets,
yellow safety strips, the crew’s pathways.
Hiding from the riders,
they wipe dust from the eyes of
each friendly, woodland animatronic.
The half-hidden skunk, possum,
pileated woodpecker. One, a bobcat,
skull thrust back—its busted tape recorder
caterwauls in heat. Enter Melancholy
in a beam of light and nightgown
like a waterfall. It looks like a woman
chasing a man in a circle all day,
holding a rolling pin over her head.
Your parents never told you
about love. Your mother’s hands only gripped
the steering wheel on the way to school,
If a boy tries to get you to, she starts to breathe
but doesn’t, go to bed with him,
don’t. Around the corner,
a lumberjack’s face,
and the two boys with a camera phone
snickering in the
dark. Here is Tangletown.
No wonder these rides are so sad.
The wax axmen pivot to banjo songs,
plaid backs bent over forest stumps.
One sleeps on a pile of pine needles,
a felt hat pulled down over his eyes.
The trees talk as a way to tell you
that trees don’t talk.
Another turn and this is the quietest part of the ride,
as the boat drifts back to shore, cloud banks heap
into beds of violets. The cyclorama sky cradles a storm—
far off and flickering, like a body shivers
deeper than the skin, or a face that will flinch
before it’s punched.
You want to say you’re not scared anymore.
But you were. You still are, a little.
After all it could never touch you,
but here it is, touching you.
______________________________________________________________________
Sarah Jordan Stout has had poems in Connotation Press, Rust+Moth, Sleet, and others. She is an associate editor for Stirring: a Literary Collection, and Co-Coordinator for the online reading series Poets in Pajamas. She has a masters degree in literature from West Virginia University, and lives and writes in Houston where she works at an environmental nonprofit fighting pollution and fossil fuel buildout across the state of Texas.
by Meghan Sterling
The day began with the familiar madness—the fists to flesh of self-harm.
How embarrassing, this urge to beat at myself, to hammer, to pummel my brain
against a wall, pushed by something small, my daughter’s refusals, my husband’s
withdrawn and walled face. This morning, after a long night, my daughter spitting her
medicine onto my chest sent me out of the room, slamming my hands
onto my head, ramming my fingers into my skin, out of ear-shot but for that
satisfying thunder against my skull—how it quiets the noise, soothing like a ragged purr.
My mother used to pull chunks of her hair out, fistfuls in her red hands. White knuckles.
I too am a container that is over-full. I am a container for their wants and it is spilling
over into the thirsty dirt. My family wants my attention as though I can make flowers bloom
at a glance, the medicine staining my hands pink as a lie, the medicine spattered in fuchsia dots
across the ceiling, out of the reach of my sponge. I remember the hitting, how it seemed to come
like a tiger from behind a tree, but the rage like white spit on freckled lips—I know that now.
It lives with me, a sleeping cat that wakes to feed on occasion, wild with hunger, teeth displayed.
And still, I am broken, a container holding the pent-up tears of my family and bills like a flood
and the ancestral search for a piece of land to plant with sun-starved seeds and my daughter’s
toddler fury and the poems festering like scratches left by dirty claws where all I can do
is tear open a hole in my skin so that the whole vessel doesn’t explode.
______________________________________________________________________
Meghan Sterling lives and teaches workshops in Portland, Maine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Night Heron Barks, Cider Press Review, Inflectionist Review, Westchester Review, Pine Hills Review, and others. She is Associate Poetry Editor of the Maine Review, winner of Sweet Lit's 2021 annual poetry contest, and a Hewnoaks Artist Colony Resident. Her collection These Few Seeds is out in 2021 from Terrapin Books. Read her work at meghansterling.com.
by Kathryn Petruccelli
Puckered for a kiss, your flowers' golden lips beg
all the way up the trail. Are you just about the show?
Sticky Monkey—stage name to beat.
Look at the audience you draw:
bush lupine, prickly pear, Indian paintbrush, scarlet pimpernel.
Poison oak draped around you like it owns you.
It never used to be like this, all bustle and flame. You were salve,
eased fever. The Coast Miwok, the Pomo, they knew
you relieved burning. Have we forgotten your roots?
These days, it feels like a matter of time—everyone at the party
knocking paper cups together, pointing manicured fingers at the view,
a petal away from combusting. Right now, in another place,
the blazes chase glossy black-cockatoos, water skinks, bristlebirds.
How deep is memory buried?
So beautiful—your scorched, little mouths.
______________________________________________________________________
Kathryn Petruccelli is a bicoastal performer and writer with an M.A. in teaching English language learners. Her work has appeared in places like New Ohio Review, Rattle, River Teeth's Beautiful Things, Poet Lore, december, and SWWIM Every Day. Nominated for Best of the Net 2020, Kathryn is a past winner of San Francisco's Litquake essay contest and a finalist for the 2019 Omnidawn Broadside Poetry Prize. She teaches online writing workshops from western Massachusetts. More at poetroar.com.
by Barbra Nightingale
by Alyse Bensel
My elbows are unable to bend, shoulders over
rotated. Dislocated. As Barbie’s third-closest friend
I couldn’t cut the rebranding. I compared waists:
mine a little thicker. A tight-lipped smile. Perpetual
-ly holding my breath. Apply too much pressure
and my arms snap right off. But I’m still more popular
than porcelain dolls. Here’s the difference: you can
find me in the trash with my cheeks in one piece,
my jeweled hair, tinged chlorine green,
smudged with gum. A midge fly, a beauty queen.
All I know is that there is a body. I must be moved
to act. My drowning is in hypotheticals. The girl
knows the motive. I know the murder.
______________________________________________________________________
Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press 2020) and three chapbooks. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Indiana Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference.
by Michelle Bitting
by Amanda Moore
Each cell tidy and tight with brood,
what’s mine now
is sunshine and breeze
a gyre of pleasure and labor within.
I can carry it all:
crumb of flower, spittle and weight,
apple tree, blueberry,
what they need but don’t want:
gloved hand or swab.
From a crack in concrete,
from weed
and bombshell I’ll pull
nectar and sweet, a surplus
stacked neat and ready for plunder.
My flight even
is beauty and my churr in the air
the way I scatter beam
and your attention.
But I am tired of being the sting
of closing the door in winter
and sifting wing dust and limb
out front come spring.
I am vein in a seething heart of heat
a single platelet pumped
through the bright organ:
alone I canker and pique.
I don’t want to be
vengeance, to see
in the world only what
I might yet forget to lance.
So I circle and comb,
tend brood, carry out
the dead, lead all
our voices to thrum.
______________________________________________________________________
Amanda Moore’s debut collection of poetry, Requeening (Ecco 2021) was selected for the 2020 National Poetry Series by Ocean Vuong. Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Best New Poets, ZZYZVA, and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting, and her essays have appeared in The Baltimore Review and Hippocampus Magazine. Poetry Co-editor at Women’s Voices for Change and a reader at VIDA Review and Bull City Press, Amanda is a high school English teacher and lives by the beach in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco with her husband and daughter.
by Sally Keith
1.
How do you picture the shape of a year in your head
Is a question my grandmother often asked.
The jog at dusk ends at the point to watch the sun disappear.
We drag sticks in the sand to spell out our names.
To myself I write: Happy Birthday.
The few trees before the beach in silhouette.
The sky is red, the boats in the small harbor, docked.
On the Rappahannock my grandparents moved to retire.
As they aged, my mother rented herself this house.
Because the land is the same level as the water
The house sits high up on stilts. At night, from bed,
The stars through the windows burn a circuit of lights.
It all depends on where you start. A year is a circle,
If not a point around which experience spirals.
Because our mother is gone, we do not need the house.
We tell ourselves this. Soon we will clean out inside.
______________________________________________________________________
Sally Keith’s fourth collection of poetry, River House was published by Milkweed Editions in 2015; she is the author of The Fact of the Matter (Milkweed 2012) and two previous collections of poetry, Design, winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and Dwelling Song (UGA 2004). Recent Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, she teaches at George Mason University and lives in Fairfax, VA.
by Carol Muske-Dukes
The pure amnesia of her face,
newborn. I looked so far
into her that, for a while,
the visual held no memory.
Little by little, I returned
to myself, waking to nurse
those first nights in that
familiar room where all
the objects had been altered
imperceptibly: the gardenia
blooming in the dark
in the scarred water glass,
near the phone my handwriting
illegible, the patterned lamp-
shade angled downward and away
from the long mirror where
I stood and looked at
the woman holding her child.
Her face kept dissolving
into expressions resembling
my own, but the child’s was pure
figurative, resembling no one.
We floated together in the space
a lullaby makes, head to head,
half-sleeping. Save it,
my mother would say, meaning
just the opposite. She didn’t
want to hear my evidence
against her terrible optimism
for me. And though, despite her,
I can redeem, in a pawnshop
sense, almost any bad moment
from my childhood, I see now
what she must have intended
for me. I felt it for her,
watching her as she slept,
watching her suck as she
dreamed of sucking, lightheaded
with thirst as my blood flowed
suddenly into tissue that
changed it to milk. No matter
that we were alone, there’s a
texture that moves between me
and whatever might have injured
us then. Like the curtain’s sheer
opacity, it remains drawn
over what view we have of dawn
here in this onetime desert,
now green and replenished,
its perfect climate
unthreatened in memory—
though outside, as usual,
the wind blew, the bough bent,
under the eaves, the hummingbird
touched once the bloodcolored hourglass,
the feeder, then was gone.
_______________________________________________________________________
Carol Muske-Dukes is a former Poet Laureate of California and the author of poems, novels, and essays. Her ninth book of poems, Blue Rose, was a 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
by Devon Walker-Figueroa
by Tiana Nobile
Written on the white slip at the bottom
of a polaroid, cut off by the frame:
a name. Many years passed before I learned
surnames come first in Korea. I rode
my bicycle in circles around this reversal.
For years, my skin leaped from shadow to shadow.
I drank the darkness, or the darkness drank me,
but what’s the difference when your veins are full
of haunting? One day I will walk
the narrow streets of many cities full of ice
freshly frozen. I will hike through forests
of wind storms newly risen. I will learn
and forget the names of many trees,
of tea leaves plucked too early in the season.
I will orbit the earth like a moon
searching for its shadow. Where does a moon
find its planet? Or is it the other way
around? To be a recently hatched egg-moon,
curved shell pinned to the sky. I’ve spent my whole
life in orbit of other people’s light, celestial satellite
in ceaseless wane. How much can you learn
from a stranger’s surname? A young animal
crawls its way out of the womb, stretches its legs,
and feels cold for the very first time.
______________________________________________________________________
Tiana Nobile is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. Recently named one of The Gambit’s “40 Under 40,” her poetry debut, CLEAVE, was released by Hub City Press in 2021. She is a finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, and her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and Southern Cultures, among others. She lives in Bulbancha, aka New Orleans, Louisiana.
by Maggie Smith
It sounds like someone wound up the wrens
and let them go, let them chatter across your lawn
like cheap toys, and from here an airplane
seems to fly only from one tree to another, barely
chalking a line between them. We say the naked eye
as if the eye could be clothed, as if it isn’t the world
that refuses to undress unless we turn our backs.
It shows us what it chooses, nothing more,
and it’s not waxing pastoral. There is too much
now at stake. The skeletal rattle you hear
at the window could be only the hellion roses
in the wind, their thorns etching the glass,
but it could be bones. The country we call ours
isn’t, and it’s full of them. Every year you dig
that goddamn rose bush from the bed, spoon it
from soil like a tumor, and every year it grows back
thick and wild. We say in the grand scheme of things
as if there were one. We say that’s not how
the world works as if the world works.
______________________________________________________________________
Maggie Smith is the award-winning author of Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received several Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She has been widely published, appearing in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Best American Poetry, and more. You can follow her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.
by Achy Obejas
The March
I am about to step outside, I am about to step outside
to the elements and my anticipation is a long inhalation
that covers the world upon release. This is the beginning
of a movement based on facts and not on sentiment
or pronouncements, though both sentiment and
pronouncements are useful and worthy. As I begin to lift
my left foot, my sartorius muscle allows my knee to move
up towards my body. I am joined by others, however
they can join with me, others who have suffered and
are not afraid to continue suffering. What we seek is a
new majority rooted in justice for all whose conscience
is committed to ceasing wrongs and doing right. What
we want is nothing about us without us. What we want
is for each individual to define their own identity and
expect that society will respect them. We shift our weight,
unlock our knees. Arrange our bodies in the best way for
each of us. For an instant, most of us are standing on one
foot. We are not in a hurry. We are not dreaming. We are
ready to give up everything, even our lives. We shall do it
without violence because that is our conviction. What we
want is freedom, what we want is the power to determine
our destiny. As my left foot comes down, it is coordinated
with my right and they match the equivalent movement of
those who have joined me, and with whom I am joining.
We are firmly rooted. Whenever possible, we let our limbs
swing in a natural motion and keep our heads facing
forward. What we want is the complete elimination of
military forces, not just from this or that territory, but
from every corner, every outpost, on earth. What we
want is full and meaningful employment. What we want
is decent, safe housing. What we want is an education
that teaches us our true histories and their consequences
on the present. As each of us lifts our right foot (or
makes the equivalent movement to ambulate), we are
now a perfectly synchronized force, even in our
differences and occasional disorder. What we want is an
immediate stop to state brutality and the assassination
of black people, and native people, and disabled people,
and queer people and trans people, and women, and
children, and mothers and fathers who can only do so
much because they are shackled by the very state that
seeks to kill them for having foolishly believed they
were free. What we want are the doors flung open to
Folsom, Riker’s, Guantánamo, San Quentin, San Juan
de Lurigancho, ADX Florence Supermax, La Sabaneta,
Attica, Camp 22, Pollsmoor. It would be fatal to overlook
he urgency of the moment. As we advance, we are a
thunderous thrum. Some of us will run under the rain in
Seattle, and toward traffic to block Lake Shore Drive
in Chicago. Others will flood Wall Street and more will
storm the port of Oakland. There will be one lonely soul
in snowy Bethel, Alaska, and clusters in Little Rock,
in sweltering Ferguson, in Tallahassee and Flagstaff,
Baltimore, Detroit, Honolulu, Boise, in ancient Salem,
Wichita and Northampton, Oklahoma City and Spearfish,
South Dakota. Nerve and muscle adapt to the rhythmic
stimulus of our own noise, the noise we make together.
It is true that when in the course of human events, it
becomes necessary for one person to connect to another
and another and another in order to defend our equality,
our difference, our dependence on one another, then
Le marcha
Estoy a punto de salir, estoy a punto de salir a les
elementos y mi anticipación es une largue inhalación
que cubre le mundo tras soltarse. Este es le comienzo de
une movimiento basado en hechos y no en sentimientos
o pronunciamientos, aunque ambes sentimientos y
pronunciamientos son útiles y dignes. Cuando empiezo
a levantar mi pie izquierde, mi músculo sartorio permite
que mi rodilla se mueva hacia mi cuerpo. Me acompañan
otres, no obstante pueden unirse conmigo otres que han
sufrido, y que no tienen miedo de seguir sufriendo. Le que
buscamos es une nueve mayoría arraigada a le justicia
para todes aquelles cuya conciencia está comprometide
a poner fin a le mal y hacer le bien. No queremos nada
sobre nosotros sin nosotros. Le que queremos es que cada
individuo defina su propia identidad y pueda tener le
expectativa de que le sociedad le respete. Desplazamos
nuestro peso, desbloqueamos nuestres rodillas.
Disponemos nuestres cuerpos de le mejor manera para
cada une de nosotres. Por une instante, le mayoría de
nosotres estamos parades sobre une pie. No tenemos
prisa. No estamos soñando. Estamos dispuestes a
renunciar a todo, incluso a nuestres vidas. Le haremos
sin violencia porque ese es nuestre convicción. Le que
queremos es libertad, le que queremos es le poder para
determinar nuestre destino. Mientras mi pie izquierde
baja, está coordinado con mi dereche y coinciden con le
movimiento equivalente de aquelles que se han unido a
mí, y a les que me estoy uniendo. Estamos firmemente
arraigades. Siempre que sea posible, dejamos que nuestres
miembres se muevan de manera natural y mantenemos
nuestres cabezas hacia adelante. Le que queremos es
le eliminación complete de les fuerzas militares, no sólo
de este o aquelle territorio, sino de todes les rincones,
de todes les puestos fronterizes, sobre le tierra. Le que
queremos es trabajo plene y significative. Le que queremos
son viviendas decentes y segures. Le que queremos es une
educación que nos enseñe nuestres verdaderes historias
y sus consecuencias sobre le presente. A medida que
cada une de nosotres levanta le pie dereche (o hace le
movimiento paralele para moverse), ahora somos une
fuerza perfectamente sincronizade, incluse en nuestres
diferencias y desorden ocasional. Le que queremos es une
detención inmediate de le brutalidad estatal y le asesinato
de les negres, y les indígenes, y les personas discapacitades
y les personas trans, y las mujeres, y les niñes, y las
madres y los padres que sólo pueden hacer ese tanto
porque están encadenades por le mismo estado que busca
matarles por haber creído absurdamente que eran libres.
Le que queremos son les puertas abiertas a Folsom, Riker,
Guantánamo, San Quintín, San Juan de Lurigancho, ADX
Florencia Supermax, La Sabaneta, Attica, Campamento
22, Pollsmoor. Sería fatal pasar por alto le urgencia de
le momento. A medida que avanzamos, somos une ruido
de trueno. Algunes de nosotres correrán bajo le lluvia en
Seattle, y hacia le tráfico para bloquear Lake Shore Drive
en Chicago. Otres inundarán Wall Street y otres más
serán une tormenta en le puerto de Oakland. Habrá une
alma solitarie en le nevade Bethel, Alaska, y une puñado
en Little Rock, en le sofocade Ferguson, en Tallahassee
y Flagstaff, Baltimore, Detroit, Honolulu, Boise, en le
antigua Salem, Wichita y Northampton, Oklahoma City
y Spearfish en Dakota de le Sur. Le nervio y le músculo
se adaptan a le estímulo rítmique de nuestre propie ruido,
le ruido que hacemos juntes. Es cierto que cuando en
le transcurso de les acontecimientos humanes se hace
necesarie que une persona se conecte a otre, y a otre, y a
otre para defender nuestre igualdad, nuestre diferencia,
nuestre dependencia le une del otre, entonces
______________________________________________________________________
Achy Obejas is a Cuban-American writer, translator, and activist whose work focusing on personal and national identity has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, TriQuarterly, Another Chicago Magazine, and many other publications. A native of Havana, she currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area.
by Nikki Moustaki
My neighbor comes at one a.m. in her night
clothes to say my toilet’s screaming in the pipes
through her walls, and before I can turn her
away or tell her to joggle the handle she’s got it
disassembled, got her hands wet, and now I
hear the water too, wanting away in our old
shared pipes, trying to spin some long mystery,
filling and refilling the basin, writing with rust
in perfect lines, wasting while the whole town
sleeps, water incognito; my neighbor yanks
the chain, bobs the rubber stopper, the water
rests at last, my neighbor drags her damp socks
back to bed. This embryonic Tuesday flutters
in its darkness around me like a new moth;
crickets; an ambulance; my steam heat ticking
its own old pipes with some other ancient code—
I try to decipher sleep again, hearing the air
above my bed scratch its legs against the ceiling,
realizing I was smothered a little every night
by my toilet, of all the ridiculous things, renegade
water, or some tired bit of rubber permitting
the innocent water through, the hushing music,
like a friend saying don’t be lonely, or I’m lonely too.
______________________________________________________________________
Nikki Moustaki, author of the memoir, The Bird Market of Paris, holds an MA in poetry from New York University, an MFA in poetry from Indiana University, and an MFA in fiction from New York University. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry, along with many other national writing awards. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in various newspapers and literary magazines, anthologies, and college textbooks, including The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Publishers Weekly, The Village Voice, and Miami Herald, and her work has been featured in Glamour, O, the Oprah Magazine, Elle, and on NPR. She is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Poetry and the poetry collection Extremely Lightweight Guns.
by W.J. Herbert
herself…
well, nothing, really. It’s me
she wants to talk to but she doesn’t know how,
and I can’t help her. Sarah,
a counselor is saying, now that my daughter’s
finally opened a brochure
which lists follow-up services
hospice provides. Sarah…
this stranger is saying,
not gently, or slowly, or softly
the way I would have,
and now I’m picturing the brittle
filament that runs from his landline
to the receiver she’s holding:
Sarah, he’s saying
with a clipped “ah” at the end of it,
as if this syllable is that filament
about to break—
as if he is the one who is breaking it.
______________________________________________________________________
W. J. Herbert’s work was awarded the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize and was selected by Natasha Trethewey for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2017. Her poetry, fiction, and reviews appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, Hudson Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, she was raised in Southern California where she earned a Bachelor’s in studio art and a Master’s in flute performance. She lives in Kingston, New York, and Portland, Maine.
by Carlie Hoffman
Just now a woman in a yellow
dress and matching hair bands enters the train
holding a plastic microphone,
and, because at midnight she turned fifty-two,
will sing Happy Birthday through the eleven
screeching stops home. Happy birthday to me
she is stomping her suede purple heel
as she sways from one end of the car
to the other. Happy, happy
birthday, even in the elevator as I
make my way toward the subway exit, her metal cane
tapping against cement like a drumstick.
I don’t know if she is drunk on gin or some other
almost upper that slowly ends in disgust,
though that is not my story to tell.
Somehow it is autumn. Somehow, yesterday,
I managed to wash my sheets. Like you,
I do not know if happiness
is anything more extravagant than a goal
to shape our lives toward, and it’s
too early for the rest of our lives.
______________________________________________________________________
Carlie Hoffman is the author of This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021). Her second book is forthcoming with Four Way Books in 2023. A poet and translator, her honors include a 92Y Boston Review / Discovery Prize and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, and her work has been published in Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Boston Review, Jewish Currents, New England Review, and elsewhere. Carlie is the founder and editor-in-chief of Small Orange Journal. For more, visit www.carliehoffman.com.
by Jill Bialosky
lV. Snow of childhood
Snow of childhood,
of dreams, of our poems
& discontent, snow of our memories,
some distorted,
forgotten, trod upon, rendered
to a whiteout, snow that dusts
bridges, highways, roofs,
that tastes of rust
& weighs on the branches,
O don’t forget them,
insufferable snow that falls
on the pots that hold
the pods of the dead
in the brilliance
of the outdoor gazebo
we see from the window
of the care home for the aged,
to praise our matriarch,
our boots wet, snow in our hair,
look how pale she is, look
what she has bore, those veins
in which flowed the blood
that flowed into us—
LXXXIV. The winter where the sparrows quieted
The winter where the sparrows quieted, in which the snow
would not stop, in which the rats would not come out,
in which we feared for our safety & snow covered the bereft shrubs,
homeless (here I am, I am you) sought shelter, fearful stockpiled
water & provisions. The winter a strain of virus
quarantined us far into spring, in which another teenager
somewhere in the city is locked in a soporific fog,
helpless, forgotten, isolated in aloneness, landscape
shrouded in an unreasonable mask, winter of the symphony’s
grand crescendo—seats of council, judges, assemble to form a decree
citizenry run amok is not a matter of the individual, but society,
timpani, cymbals, snare drum, family of percussion.
______________________________________________________________________
Jill Bialosky is the author of four acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently The Players; three critically acclaimed novels, most recently, The Prize; a New York Times best-selling memoir, History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life; and Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir. Her poems and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, O Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and Paris Review, among others. She coedited, with Helen Schulman, the anthology Wanting a Child. She is an Executive Editor and Vice President at W. W. Norton & Company. Her work has been a finalist for the James Laughlin Prize, The Patterson Prize, and Books for a Better Life. In 2014, she was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry. She lives in New York City.
by Shara McCallum
May 2018: for my grandmother
When the dead return
they will come to you in dream
and in waking, will be the bird
knocking, knocking against glass, seeking
a way in, will masquerade
as the wind, its voice made audible
by the tongues of leaves, greedily
lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue
is a turning and returning, the dead
will not then nor ever again
desert you, their unrest
will be the coat cloaking you,
the farther you journey
from them the more
distance will maw in you,
time and place gulching
when the dead return to demand
accounting, wanting
and wanting and wanting
everything you have to give and nothing
will quench or unhunger them
as they take all you make as offering.
Then tell you to begin again.
______________________________________________________________________
From Jamaica, and born to a Jamaican father and Venezuelan mother, Shara McCallum is the author of six books published in the US & UK, including No Ruined Stone (2021). McCallum’s poems and essays have appeared in journals, anthologies, and textbooks throughout the US, Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Israel. La historia es un cuarto/History is a Room, an anthology of poems selected from across her six books and translated into Spanish by Adalber Salas Hernández, was published in 2021 by Mantis Editores in Mexico. In addition to Spanish, her poems have been translated into Italian, French, Romanian, Turkish, and Dutch and have been set to music by composers Marta Gentilucci and Gity Razaz. Awards for her work include the Silver Musgrave Medal, the OCM Bocas Poetry Prize (for Madwoman), a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (for The Water Between Us). She is on the faculty of the Pacific Low-Residency MFA and an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Penn State University. McCallum was appointed the 2021-22 Penn State Laureate. She hosts the weekly radio show “Poetry Moment” on NPR affiliate station WPSU.
by Tibni Reth