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The Darker Sooner
Then came the darker sooner,
came the later lower.
We were no longer a sweeter-here
happily-ever-after. We were after ever.
We were farther and further.
More was the word we used for harder.
Lost was our standard-bearer.
Our gods were fallen faster,
and fallen larger.
The day was duller, duller
was disaster. Our charge was error.
Instead of leader we had louder,
instead of lover, never. And over this river
broke the winter’s black weather.
Catherine Wing
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Admissions Essay
I am a good student. Voted most likely to try
harder. Not voted most likely for fairytales, though I have
been both hooded and wolfed. My honors thesis on the role
of motherlessness and love hunger brought the candied
house down.
I could’ve been valedictorian if the metric
was ardor and potential for transformation. I recognize
the chemical structure of oxytocin and how to calculate
my best chance for a free drink from across the room,
and both have strong angles.
I know how it feels when that hormone unlatches
my ribs, silks my legs. I don’t confuse that with love
because in each unit of intimacy, I enter slow. Adjust
my breath. Recognize the accusations that are
confessions.
I excelled in the serious ethics of kissing, how
it makes the body more image than idea, but I admit
that sometimes I like to lick mezcal and grapefruit from
a hero’s morally ambiguous mouth. I’m sorry.
That’s how I know I’m a successful candidate.
The temptations. The failures. The ever afters of forgiveness
I have already lived. For so long I offered others the love
I wanted to receive, the cursive letters and lost slippers.
The balanced equations and checkbooks. Years of service
in the scales of care. Change my story. Accept me.
Traci Brimhall
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MANUAL
MANUAL
Translate sky into flowers.
Dance fire knowing it by heart. Speak
obliquely, so it takes all my life
to understand. Use the field as
a mirror where clouds hide their
shadows. Dance me to my own
broken melody, help my melting
seconds linger, in wax and
melody. Print the world on my
heart in your language. Write
the answers on my back, make
me writhe before a mirror
to read them.
A. Molotkov
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ON WHETHER THE EARTH IS FLAT, ROUND, OR THERE AT ALL
dyspraxia, developmental
topographical disorientation
It means not knowing where you are in space,
your arms and legs, your clumsy feet, your hands;
the door, and how you get from here to there,
forgetting how this puppet walks or stands
(exhausting). And, more broadly, means not knowing
where you are in the building, or the street,
the suburb where you’ve lived for twenty years.
Means driving round till you admit defeat
in a tangle of roads that disconnect,
trying to find the familiar shop or school,
your work, your friends; this often brings on tears.
To travel is to struggle like a fool
because, despite the Google maps, the signs,
the sun, you stay as lost as when, at three,
you let go of your mother’s hand and stood
terrified, mouthing shopping-centre pleas;
it’s why you take a taxi, not a train,
miss entrances, ask people where things are,
eat in the one cafe you know, again,
because you dare not walk a bridge too far.
It makes the world veer, shift, and be nowhere.
Come here to me. Don’t make me meet you there.
Esther Ottaway
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For Desire
Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the lover who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I’m drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I’m nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are let off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here
and get down on your knees and tell me
just how fucking good I look.
Kim Addonizio
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TIME TRAVEL FOR BEGINNERS
Every crumb of starlight
sails across the universe,
the journey of a million years
to end inside our eyes.
Except I was looking at you,
canvas coverall cinched at the waist,
as you undressed me with photons,
wrapped me in stories,
painted with x-rays,
until everything glowed
with backstory—the names of trees,
the name of an extinguished star,
still visible, ghost in the sky,
climbing a staircase of optic nerve
into an afterlife of sight.
Hand on my hand you pointed to the past:
the sun, an 8-minute time machine,
the moon, one second old,
and the incredible now,
unfolding like a cone,
megaphone of memory stretched to the sky
and balanced on the tip was us,
a luminous shout
of life at the speed of light.
In a blink, this moment reaches the moon.
When we pack up the hammock, it floats
in the acid clouds of Venus.
Which means that somewhere, there is a spot,
past the gaps in Saturn’s rings,
beyond the storms of Jupiter,
outside the curved embrace of the Milky Way,
at least one place in the universe,
where you could turn around and see us,
back when we were still in love.
Ardon Shorr
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Forgiveness is the smell of crushed flowers
My mother crossed the street, quickened her pace
tried to avoid the sound of him calling her name.
The flower shop on her walk home from school,
streetside windows fogged. Elaborate dresses, flounce
or lace, wasn't her thing—my grandmother
pushed her toward him, gentleman shop-owner,
a reputation, thumb on the scale.
She knew the scientific words for things he took,
to her like dance, taught her to stepwise,
stepwide through curtain, doorway, until everything
fell, face to the ground, no glimpse of sky or sun
to bend toward, just metal grates, hiss of steam heat.
She focused on the flowers enclosed in paper
or petals skimming water in white tubs,
thought, can you lightly drown?
Too much beauty inhaled at once lands you
somewhere like a hospital, a closet
a sofa you can't get off, like old wood floors
that creak and sway, the penny dropped
ends its run—cornered, or circling the drain.
My mother still can't walk through a door
with a bell, a shop full of flowers, without the fear
of her name, cooed or whispered.
A master gardener now, fingers curled
and stiff, the only easing of their ache,
her opening fist beneath the dirt.
Alise Alousi
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Sleep Thief
My wife had the brilliant idea
to put jasmine blossoms
beside the bed
to help carry me off
to sleep and keep me there
all night long—
sleep, blessed sleep,
like the elegant doe
you catch sight of
in the forest and then
it bounds away
—but in the night
my cat ate my wife's
brilliant idea
and stepped right over
my spinning head
and curled herself into
a black spiral
of unimpeded slumber
and thought nothing of it.
John Brehm
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Love and the Moon
When I see something beautiful I think of him,
my friend in love tells me. That’s how I felt—
for years, stepping outside to see the moon
tipped like a boat, or a vertical half
like an open book. Wherever she is,
I’d think, she also sees this moon,
and what I meant was each of our hearts
lifting toward it, the moon like a magnet
pulling our gaze from wherever we stood on the earth.
And if we were separate in time,
well, the moon doesn’t change. Just the shadow.
In those years I felt it pinned us in time together,
wherever we were. The physicists say
light doesn’t get old. But now when I see
something beautiful, I think of someone
no longer here. It’s just that beauty
hurts more now, and I can look
at almost anything but the moon.
Nan Cohen
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The Name in the Doorway
My daughter waits in the doorway. She mouths Mom silently. My name floats from her mouth, hovers wordless above my body in bed. A blue and humming three-winged bird, my name waits and waits, lands softly on my mouth to wake my body from sleep, soft as the start of a pistol, soft as a lurching coaster, soft as a table leg in the night. My daughter is gone. Only the blurred and glowing outline of her body fills the frame. Maybe the stomach ached. Maybe the spider shadow crept. Maybe the water empty. Maybe she never left her bed. Maybe only my name left her pillow, flew across the house, dropped on top of me in sleep. The name returns every night, every night to kiss my mouth, every night to steal my sleep and breath.
Allison Blevins
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Daughter, before you thought in words
did you think the sound of my singing, green of my eyes, give of my breasts, scratch of my pen? Did you see yourself in the glow of sunned snow-light from your bedroom window? Every room in our house is glowing and we are glowing. Today you are older, toothed and walking. I am older too. Your face spots pink when you scream. I see how anger spreads across your forehead, down your ears as a fever. I've lost so much time trying to burn the smell of you into me: wood and light like the sliver under my childhood door. Some part of me survives in your neck and mouth and ears. I press into you again and again. My only thought the celebration of our coming together and pulling apart.
Allison Blevins
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housekeeping chores
hurricane & tornado suck humanity’s
debris up their whirling, grey hoses
into nature’s vacuum.
monsoons toss their buckets over
the steps & stones of the world’s
back porches.
fire torches kindling, then leaps
& roars, purging the tallest manscapes
& habitat to cinder & char.
larvae strip pastures like hotel beds;
viruses eat away our intimate spaces
without a decent warning.
but darlings, take comfort. sunlight still opens
the store faithfully each morning, sweeping
grit from our waking lashes;
and a compassionate moon still lights
its floating candle, honoring possibility
and tomorrow’s opening door.
Kerry Rawlinson
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You on a Table in Someone Else’s Hands
In the cab, you turn pink from the streetlights checkering the window.
Just as palpable, you grow inner-blue with hush, staring somewhere
beyond the moon. Post-surgery, wrapped in a massive scarf,
sunglasses on, you fall suddenly asleep. I have no choice but to watch
the world—it reflects off your dark lenses, a glittering that dims
then sparks again. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned in thirty-five years
it’s: if this is how it must go, it will. You breathe & we are one buoy
on the vast water, your breath uplifts me, your sleep rests my bones.
Captaining your breath, it’s clear the heartbeat is a comma. Grogged up
& numb in your hospital bed, you waved as if from across the sea,
“come here.” I was already here. While they opened your
breast, I sat down the street at Grey Dog, chewing a sloppy BLT
I wouldn’t finish, trying to siphon my mind away from you on a table
in someone else’s hands. We leave your seatbelt off to let the stitches
spider-webbing your nipple breathe. Wherever you were on that table,
now you’re speckled in sun & shadow, there’s no other way
to say it: life loves you. All I did—all I can do—is witness,
comma after comma after comma, & sometimes point “this
way,” so the driver turns down Flatbush while your eyes
open, as if for the first time, to flood the cab. You see
& the miracle of it—with each blink, your eyelashes
bow, rising only to bow again. Your brown-black irises, wet
& muscular as a horse’s back, effortlessly
take it all in. I want to brush my hands over such
seeing, just as the almost-evening takes a ride
on your seeing. Soon the street will be black & loud with boom
-boxes & swerving delivery bikes. You’ll see that too. Propped up
in our bed, slurping takeout, you’re alive: a fact. But only a fool
would concretize you, so I put away all futures & swim beside you,
your heel in my mouth, someone is laughing, who
can tell who, as inside your breasts the cysts
will or won’t. When your eyes meet mine, all commas flutter, all
rules undo, buttons unbutton, & the roof across the street breaks
into birds—
SHIRA ERLICHMAN
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Men and Birds
If it is possible for a woman to sling an arm
around the neck of a boyfriend who put her other arm
in a sling, a bird might love the man who took
a scissors to its wings’ primaries, careful, balancing
the damage to each side. I am trying not to
compare the falconer to Ike Turner. And I am trying
not to think the super who keeps rooftop pigeons
an orphan master; not to take for a pimp
the lonely guy in the park with a green parrot
epaulet, even though, like a pimp, he named her Jade.
A birdwatcher is not a peeping Tom. Still, it seems
purer to lumber into a rope swing, to dangle heavily
all day, to be old in a weaver’s nest, a hammock
chair, and from there to remark, across a gulf too wide
for craving, the hummingbirds’ hovering.
Jane Zwart
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I'm Making an Inventory of the World
things you can buy and things you cannot:
waves, dish-drainer, tree frog who moves
into the open when the rain comes
how the proportions have changed — how rare, resistant
the unbuyable has become
yellow flowered fennel covered in road dust
you can't pay for the dust, it comes for free
the roar of crickets on a back road —
what would you pay for this
night and its impenetrable
avalanche of stars
Meredith Stricker
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"LAST WINTER YOU LEAVE ME UNPLANTED”
& when you come back I will garland,
I will wreath, I will carnation, I will
braid gendhekaphool thick & globular,
I will inflorescence, I will faith, I will
doveaglecrow, my mouth will form the
words you tell me, I will blossom crêpe
paper jasmine delicate & jagged, you
will flush greater flamingo whitepink,
we will unearth with our pinnate hands
letting the soil imbibe & absorb into
frondfingers, I will not bury something,
I will not bury something, & I will not
bury something.
Arya Vishin
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Digging for Apples
Give me my shovel
of love for the sound
it makes slipping into
the gravelly ground
where we buried all the golden ones;
give me my boots
with weights in the heels
to root me where I am
not wanking off in fields
of rareripes and dandelions;
give me a backdrop
of what can't be controlled
to lend me by contrast
an air of great deliberateness, and I'll get
back to business, but first—
what if the poem itself
is what's narcissistic, irrespective
of authorship, and this is
what makes it appeal to us,
not because it can love us but
because it needs us to watch
it love being itself, and the surplus
we're left with in
the end is what we call
beautiful, like starlight on snowfall?
Timothy Donnelly
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