I
Wondrous, the emptiness so close, close to an absent sea,
only sea-fields, wheat-fields, golden stubble,
though we were walking together on a path to find the sea.
Wandering together under a wide horizon.
On a road called Pas de l’Assassin.
New Work from LAUREN DELAPENHA, AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, ROBERT CORDING, and RACHEL HADAS
Table of Contents:
—Lauren Delapenha, “Exodus”
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “What They Didn’t Tell Me about Motherhood”
—Robert Cording, “A Sun”
—Rachel Hadas, “Matsinger Forest”
Exodus
By Lauren Delapenha
The Times article is about the president’s mind
and Xerox-based enterprises like Kodak, Blockbuster, dead-end jobs, and marriages,
and I am so glad the article mentions marriages
given my recent apophatic commitment to romantic
ruination, because who among us hasn’t pressed a finger into the scab
for that foreign roughness, that delicious, needling shaft of sunk cost and thought
that anything is probable in the desert,
even Moses neatly halving an ocean for a nation
New work from RODRIGO TOSCANO, OLENA JENNINGS, EZZA AHMED, and WYATT TOWNLEY
Table of Contents:
—Rodrigo Toscano, “One Like”
—Olena Jennings, “The Pine”
—Ezza Ahmed, “The River That Was and Wasn’t”
—Wyatt Townley, “The Longest View” and “Christina’s World”
One Like
By Rodrigo Toscano
“Couple Bach preludes, a binding ceasefire,
One Dickenson poem, and we’re all set”
That was the post, like a gleaming beach pier
Charming half way out, torn up at the tip
Battered by statecraft, departmental verse.
This month we bring you work by Dylan Carpenter, a poet new to our pages. Dylan also has poetry in an upcoming print issue of The Common.
Let me, for a little longer, ponder that familiar place
I remember but would not, could not, and had refused to face
Wholly as a place unto itself, instead of an idea
That concealed a recherché emotion: My Wallonia.
How do I begin? The place that I endeavor to portray
Languishes, a somnolent geography, and slips away.
Translated by LISA MULLENNEAUX
Photo courtesy of Archives Bouanani
This country
My country is this horizon with blank pages
where I see skeletons of broken children
wandering, begging for the light of thin wisps
of stories that might finally appease them
In hands the color of amaranth magic
they hold hippogriffs like dogs
a talisman to protect themselves from the lover
with hair braided into black shapes
Ontologies
The love the love that massively seizes me,
the typewriter’s
ribbon needs replacing,
the great imperial
power game the price of oil,
a call, a response, I know you know
how precious to care is, the voice on the record on
the turntable is singing.
Let ours be the most boring of love stories, the happy-ending kind,
the obnoxiously-spooning-in-public kind,
the kind with a long denouement, tedious for everyone not actually
living it. This time around, let the only fireworks
Not the girl
after the party
waiting for boy wonder
Not the couple
after the test
awaiting word
Not the actor
after the callback
for the job that changes everything
Not the mother
on the floor
whose son has gone missing
I am the beloved
and you are the beloved
We’re all beside ourselves
as the phone is beside ourselves
One hand grips the menu
the other covers the eyes
Now the phone rings
it is singing on the table
To the dog across the room
to the waitress who is waiting
To the cat on the carpet
to the couple in the next booth
But the heart is in the cupboard
breaking the dishes
Wyatt Townley is poet laureate emerita of Kansas and has published six books. Her work has been read on NPR and has appeared in journals from Newsweek to The Paris Review, and Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Commissioned poems hang in libraries including the Space Telescope Science Institute, home of the Hubble.
Donbas Days
this is not the fault of the people but it is
the people’s problem
a lack of nerve
a chance to make a little meat
and unemployment like a flood
November 6th, 2024
I wake in the night, check the news. Watch you
turn in your sleep, rest your cheek on my chest.
How everything and also this: the heat of your skin,
hand wrapping my waist, the off-beat of our breaths
finding rhythm in the dark.
In the kitchen, I cry to the sound of my mother’s sobs.
Count the injections I have left before the vials run out.
There is no point in asking how, in asking why. Empire
does not answer questions. Genocide does not answer
questions—the answers were right there.
At the train station, the man next to me cries,
turns his face to meet my own. Somehow, the sun
is shining. A dog barks. Someone laughs. Everything
fragments. A mother & daughter step up to the tracks,
squeeze each other’s hands.
Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, nonbinary writer, dancer, singer, cold water plunger, and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Brooklyn by way of Western Massachusetts and other strange and forgotten places.
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