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
for an eleven-day journey that would take forty years,
so let us pause here briefly to consider the particular acrid kindness
of delusion, as the bright line of it noiselessly Xeroxes the form
with my height, weight, urine colour, and reasons for visiting et cetera
with a precision I must admire while I undress, redress, in a paper sheath
in the too-large bathroom with the floor and the cord
I can pull if I need company, which is a relief, because when the nurse
with the face and the stage whisper asks the orderly, Why did you leave her
with a pen, I will taste a thing I cannot describe
before she pulls the curtain, bright-eyed, and asks me what I’m reading,
and when I show her a book of white man war stories
she nods, saying her two brothers went to Vietnam and only
mostly came back, and to illustrate she holds an open palm
a few inches from her head—this is where the war is—and I understand this, this
bright vastness, is what makes the machines, machines
and their bright orange music, necessary,
and though I will forget these things years later, not having a pen,
the subjunctive stutter of the president makes the Times article move
to Vietnam via an American talking
about the precedent of bodies and the problem of too many of them
dying because then you have to keep
going, and I might look over the nurse’s shoulder into that fluorescence promising
loss and see Norman Bowker, Vietnam vet, in a small midwestern town
circling the lake twelve times in his father’s Chevy, turning the whole town
into a dead end
and who, like all vets, would not die
of natural causes, but not yet, because today he is watching the fourth of July
fireworks burst in air in this small town in this vast nation
and believes, when his face is wet and shining
with the humming lakewater and the memory of the woman he loved, loves,
and cannot have, what he knows he cannot believe, that anything is tolerable
in America though we are both, like the body of God, made to be
broken, so that when the story said, He walked into the lake without undressing,
what I read was, He walked into the lake without understanding.
What They Didn’t Tell Me About Motherhood
By Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Sometimes when they were young, I felt like
I was underwater and couldn’t make out sounds
or reason or rhyme, only coral clicks and distant
whale songs. A shiver of eel near my ankle. But
trust me: one day you’ll surface. They start
walking, then running, and then they sit behind
a wheel. Then you sit behind a wheel, driving away
from their dorm. They grow smaller and smaller
until they’re as big as a guppy, and soon this
bubbly sea is not at all where you want to swim—
even though it’s what you always wanted for them:
that they’d grow strong fins—iridescent, fully unfurled
in the morning sun, curious eyes, big-bright and shiny—
and the only waves you know now mean good-bye.
A Sun
By Robert Cording
As though a sun rose inside me,
I cannot help but rise each morning
fresh with expectations that I
cannot meet. Still, I set out
towards them as if the expanse
between my son’s death and his life,
was but a measurable distance,
say a day’s walk that could be parceled
out into hours, into increments
I could check off as if they were no more
than items on a daily to-do list.
I fix my course, checking my watch,
timing how long my expectations
can outpace my self-deception, day
after day, as if there were an end in sight,
as if there could be an end.
Matsinger Forest
By Rachel Hadas
Old logging trails recently cleared and widened.
New plank bridge over a little brook.
Fragrance of new wood. Birdsong.
Ten people are walking through Matsinger Forest.
Traces of human habitation:
mossy logs stacked in a tidy pile.
Stone walls mark forgotten boundaries.
And stone foundations –
the house and barn, the garden and the people
long gone, but this almost Cyclopean
masonry retains its stony secrets.
Behind us, ghostly on the trail, Seferis
mutters old stones that cannot be deciphered.
And Robert Frost, who knew if not this forest
then others like it, mentions a cellar hole
now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
Families lived here,
hauled stones and logs with oxen, built their houses,
farmed, worked in the grist mill at Greenbank’s Hollow
until they and their way of life died out.
Houses, you know, grow resentful
when you strip them bare,
Seferis sighs. We walk in single file.
Couples form, chat, fall silent, part again.
More than half a century ago,
visiting an excavation
on the island of Santorini,
I happened on a cellar hole.
One of the team of archaeologists
put down her pickaxe and from a tall jar
propped in a corner produced a handful
of dried chickpeas, and proceeded
to pour them into my two cupped palms.
Someone took a picture of my hands
and what they held.
Where is that snapshot now?
Those chickpeas, two millennia old, they told me,
if planted would still sprout.
Or they could still be soaked and boiled and eaten
with salt and bay leaf, olive oil and garlic.
The chickpeas will have lasted
longer than any of us here now
walking through the pine duff single file,
pacing from the present through the past
and toward a future none of us can see,
this morning in Matsinger Forest,
late June, 2024,
making our way through time.
Robert Cording has published ten collections of poems, the most recent of which is In the Unwalled City. Two new books, What’s Possible: New and Selected Poems and Taking the Shadows Apart are forthcoming in 2025 and 2026 from Slant. He has won three Pushcart Prizes in poetry, and his poems have appeared in publications such as the Georgia Review, Southern Review, 32 Poems, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Image, The Sun, The Common, Agni, New Ohio Review, Orion, and Best American Poetry, 2018.
Lauren Delapenha is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. She earned her master’s in creative writing from the University of Oxford, and her work has received an Oxbelly Fellowship, a Helen Zell and Jamaica Poet Laureate’s Young Writers Prize for Poetry, a Grindstone International Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart nomination. She currently lives and teaches in Connecticut.
Rachel Hadas is the author of many books of poetry, essays, and translations. Ghost Guest and Pandemic Almanac are her recent collections; Pastorals is forthcoming (spring 2025). Hadas taught English for many years at Rutgers University-Newark and now teaches at 92y in New York. She divides her time between New York City and Danville, Vermont. For more on Hadas please see www.rachelhadas.net ; poetry videos made in collaboration with her husband Shalom Gorewitz are at www.rachelandshalomshow.com.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the New York Times bestselling author of two essay collections: Bite by Bite and World of Wonders. She serves as a firefly guide for Mississippi State Parks and her newest/forthcoming book of poems is Night Owl .
