Issue 28 Poetry

Kakosmos

By JILL PEARLMAN

Human systems exist in the mystery
always at the point of spilling 
over green, over and over their present containers
of cities and grids and human perception

for what of entanglements, what of catastrophes
what of black holes, of soot from burnt timber
what of seashells, snails, urchins in the pavement
of ancient Greek settlements 

Kakosmos
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Furry

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

Watch the poet read from this piece at our Issue 28 launch party:

 

“Happy and furry?” she inquires, 
                               of the TV— 
but I’ve tuned out. Uh-oh, this may be 
tough to unriddle. When you’re eighty-three, 

as she is, with creeping dementia—all 
sorts of imponderables float by, 
and everything the more inscrutable  

if other faculties are failing too… 
like hearing, perhaps. A few seconds later, 
though, we enjoy a breakthrough, 

as our breezy, blow-dried commentator 
re-airs his catchphrase, which I move to clarify 
by relaying it slowly: 
                                    “Happy. And. Free.” 

 

 … At day’s end, even so, I might prefer 
happy and furry, as though she 
might yet retrieve days when all of us were 

that peculiar entity, a big family— 
father, mother, four boys of various 
ages and stages—become, like any true family, 

inhabitants of a lair, 
wound and bound in a low common smell 
(our own must of sweat and hair),  

that familial furriness which cordons off a small 
walled area while informing a potentially 
invasive world, This is us. 

 

Happy and furry. The woman’s five years dead, 
yet just last week the phrase returned  
as I, watching a YouTube clip, was shepherded  

to an obscure nature site by a tag that posed 
a teasing test: TRY NOT TO CRY AS MAMA CHIMP 
MOURNS BABY. The test? Frankly, I’m not sure I passed. 

Embarrassed, as if being watched, I felt  
my eyes prickle as the blinking simian—so loving, 
so darkly puzzled—stroked and stroked the silky pelt 

of a torso strangely limp 
whose russet fire still burned, 
though warming neither the dead nor the living. 

 

… Furry, then, if not free. We mishear,  
misread, we go on misspeaking, 
and if our errors pain us, soon they disappear  

into an unseen, unseeable, ever-amassing crowd. 
Click here. Click. Now. Always, the furious din out there, 
and what do our answers count, everything so loud 

and larger always than yesterday? We learn to chart 
our growth by the billion-, trillion-fold: 
Vaster, faster numbers. See me. Click. Give me your heart,  

click. Like me…. So many voices, all seeking, 
as I suppose both mothers were, the warm, the old, 
the furred primordial lair. 

 

Brad Leithauser is the author of eighteen books. His nineteenth, The Old Current, a collection of poetry, will be published by Knopf in February 2025. A former theater critic for Time, he is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. 

[Purchase Issue 28 here.] 

Furry
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Cherry Pie / Postpartum Depression

By FARAH PETERSON

Still bleeding from birth
I looked up from you, daughter
your grandma was
shouting at me
in our hospital room
and I thought, enough
of this childhood pain
(an emancipation never
complete in my heart)
the next weeks your little fist
dimpling my breast was a
mere aesthetic
as she had not blessed me
I could not let her go

For the cherries from
Saturday’s market I used
a sharp coffee spoon
each bright heart-organ
hoards the clit of the fruit
I stabbed and extracted
hurting my thumb
sometimes I couldn’t get
all the meat off
you fetched a stool
each fruit, gravely chosen
now came lifted and pillowed
on your soft palm
then you drank all the juice
in the discard bowl

it ran down your chin
and onto the floor
I drained all the juices
from under the flesh and
you guzzled that too

Such gusto my dear
with each breath I bless you
go     go     go

 

Farah Peterson‘s work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Atlantic, The Best American Magazine Writing, The Florida Review, Ploughshares, and The Threepenny Review, and is forthcoming in the 2025 Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a law professor at the University of Chicago.

 [Purchase Issue 28 here.]

Cherry Pie / Postpartum Depression
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Europa

By CAMPBELL MCGRATH

Born in gilded fealty to the state, which was the people’s will, 
which was the refined sugar of suffering and indifference,  
which was the inherited burden of society, gift of the forefathers. 
Bathed in cream, I transmuted hayricks into silk and mirrors. 
I ate and destroyed, seeking relief from my depression.

Europa
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