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