By DIANE MEHTA
You can’t risk too much Jenga in a lift
but when you leave her, put your foot down,
exit to the steady earth we merely balance on—
you risk collapse, your knife-edge youth
retracts while you are full of spirit and mistakes.
By KAS BERNAYS
her voice crackled like a distress signal
interrupted as she told me
how in the bright haze
halfway between borders
and their certainties
the engine’s faltering stutter
had drowned under her daughters’ wails
and all desperation had coiled
into the kick of her unborn son
We wanted to say goodbye to the world we knew
so we drove the coastline north from Miami
as far as we could go. It was a farewell tour,
sure, but farewell to what? Not the ocean,
looming daily out the right-hand window,
not the water but what the water would erase.
Farewell to Florida, nipped in the bud, cheeky
and self-satisfied as a sun-worshipping infant—
goodbye, little baby Florida, goodbye!
Goodbye to Ocracoke and old Saint Simon,
Virginia Beach and Fire Island, goodbye
to all those literal-minded municipalities—
Surf and Ocean and Atlantic Cities—tossed up
like flotsam along that waterlogged littoral.
Six weeks and thousands of meandering miles later
we found ourselves at a picnic table outside
the Chowder Hut in Meat Cove, Nova Scotia,
where the final stretch of tire-rutted gravel
gives up the ghost: end of the road, folks.
By JOHN POCH
I try to wish the best for him, our rival. His lines which really amount to nothing, the phrases that his readers fawn over, “I’m here for it” or “What a time” or even single words he uses as lines like “Fair” or “Same” or “Cheers”… I shouldn’t let them get to me. He even rhymes Halloween/Thirteen in a sonnet called “Hell.” People have come to treasure the expected, lavishing praise on the nice and cute, but that is not poetry. Is there something else to it, or is it just a minor cult of personality, the same way cheerleaders are chosen? Those readers who believe in him are the ones who don’t believe in absolute truths so allow fiction in their nonfiction willy-nilly. Gossips, they know little poetry or even of poetry. They fancy themselves naturalists and italicize it. They are educators rather than teachers.
By SHARON DOLIN
—after Rilke
Yours, still the hardest face to see—
even the mirror lies, with your image
in reverse. To see into your life
you must look into the life of things:
take this brass candelabra shaped
into a circular set of stairs that,
when lit, sees into you, seizes
hold of your brokenness and
shows you all growth starts
with a wound. Think of the earth
in spring, split open by green shoots.
I gotta buy a cake for my kid.
Some kind of ice cream jamboree from J.P. Licks down in West Roxbury.
She’s gonna be 20.
When you are a parent, you just keep buying cakes for your kids.
You could be 80 and she’s 60
and still you head on out to Carvel in New Rochelle, Webster Avenue,
and get her the Fudgie the Whale 12-inch
even if you have diabetes and two busted kneecaps.
We had a quarrel, melee, detonation of hurt—
fisticuffs of invisible disfiguration in the countryside of Spain.
I slept that evening on a reclining lawn chair under the stadium of the sky.
You stayed in the bed, roof overhead. The next morning you left
in an economy red rental car for the village where you joined
a Catholic procession, walked amongst men carrying a wooden saint
above their heads down narrow cobblestoned streets and alleyways.
By SHANE MORAN
Hiding at Stolly’s in the Marais,
I asked Sara, the Martinican bartender,
for a Cheap Blonde in English.
After a tap of glass on plastic, those six euros gone,
I watched the Rams and the Panthers
in the mirror cornered above the bar.
my Grammy taught me right
from conception, her voice
iron & honey in my bones
endless like the alto line
of a Zion Convection Choir
full & bodied, darker than
than the mouth of the sea
The girl & I ate spaghetti
and carrot sticks
and we colored with crayons
mazes & Pokémon & cats
and rainbows & shooting stars
and then I gave her a bath,
which is the easiest way to
look at my phone
while I’m on duty.
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