All posts tagged: Poetry

November 2024 Poetry Feature: New Work from our Contributors

Poems By G. C. WALDREP, ALLISON FUNK, and KEVIN O’CONNOR

Table of Contents:

  • G.C. Waldrep, “Below the Shoals, Glendale”
  • Allison Funk, “After Andrew Wyeth’s Snow Hill
  • Kevin O’Connor, “The Other Shoe”

 

Below the Shoals, Glendale
By G. C. Waldrep

I am listening to the slickened sound of the new
wind. It is a true thing. Or, it is true in its falseness.
It is the stuff against which matter’s music breaks.
Mural of the natural, a complicity epic.
The shoals, not quite distant enough to unhear—
Not at all like a war. Or, like a war, in passage,

November 2024 Poetry Feature: New Work from our Contributors
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Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar

Headshots of Raychelle Heath on the left and Caroline M. Mar on the right.

RAYCHELLE HEATH sits down with CAROLINE M. MAR to discuss reconciliation, poetic form, and Caroline’s new chapbook, Dream of the Lake.

Raychelle Heath: Dream of the Lake is such a beautiful read, and I have so many questions. Our first encounter with the lake takes us through the stages of drowning. So I’m wondering, how do you see that as an entry point into the world of the book? And why did you want the reader to encounter the lake this way first?

Caroline M. Mar: That’s a good question. I had been trying to write poems about Lake Tahoe for several years and the poems were not working. They were very sentimental, or I couldn’t get beyond “Gosh, it’s so pretty.” Because it is really beautiful. It is spectacular in a way that defies description. It was easy for me to get lost in all of the beauty of it, but I knew that that wasn’t complicated enough. I knew that I was trying to ask some pretty complicated questions of myself, of my reader, and of the landscape.

Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar
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October 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors

New Poems by Our Contributors NATHANIEL PERRY and TYLER KLINE.

 

Table of Contents:

    • Nathaniel Perry, “34 (Song, with Young Lions)” and “36 (Song, with Contranym)”
    • Tyler Kline, “Romance Study” and “What if I told you”                  

 

34 (Song, with Young Lions)
By Nathaniel Perry

All the young lions do lack

bones. They lie wasted on grass,

cashed out, exhausted and un-

delivered. A poor man cries

eventually. A troubled

friend cries eventually.

Garish and spent, the sun

hisses in the hot sea.

In the hot sea fishes

jump toward the sun. They don’t

know any different; your face,

loony lord, is always

mixed with the sun. The lions

nod off again in the faces

of it. I can see them all,

prone in the grass like people;

quiet, like people who are

resting. But in this place

sorrow, somehow, is often

transformed to joy, which is cruel,

unmaking the point of sorrow.

Various boneless lions are

wasted on the grass,

exhausted (lacking what

you were supposed to bring them),

zeroed out, and desolate.

 

36 (Song, with Contranym) 
By Nathaniel Perry

I suppose I am abundantly satisfied

with the fatness of my house, your house I mean,

landlord that you are, of the olive garden,

and of the highway, the town, and the whole scene

here, really. I pay your rent; I devise no mischief

on my bed. The place is actually pretty nice,

a fountain in the garden, windows’ broad smile

looking out on the tidy yard when it’s rimed with ice,

or is lolling in summer’s hammock, or is sexually

charged with spring, or filled with autumn’s floods.

 

Brittle floods, someone once called them, leaves

filling the corners of everything with the moods

of water, the moods of the river of your pleasure,

by which I assume we mean your will, not joy.

It’s funny how words can contain their opposite,

pleasure at once a freedom and a ploy—

a garden something bound and original

where anything, but certain things, should thrive;

the difference between loving-kindness and loving

like the vowel shift from olive to alive.

 

Romance Study
By Tyler Kline

I’m pushing a shopping cart full of mannequin heads through a ‘93 nor’easter. 

I’m feeding an orchid three ice cubes. 

I am paying to sit in a room so quiet I can hear my own blood.

I’m thinking of my dad wishing his heart into a dead dog so he could bury it.

I’m proving to the computer I’m a human because I’m good at identifying crosswalks.

I’m nailing wainscoting to the treehouse from my dream journal.

I’m pointing out the park with your Vicodin & wisdom teeth stitches.

I am washing your breasts like two miniature sports cars.

I am trademarking the way your bike lays on the lawn like poof! you’re gone. 

I’m hearing that everything’s in repulsion, that when I sit in a chair I’m technically 

hovering a tiny, tiny bit.

I’m feeling like the past is a horse without a face.

I’m saying that when you kiss me it’s like a bomb going off in a dictionary factory.

I’m sitting behind home plate humming Modest Mouse & giving you the signal to steal.

 

What if I told you
By Tyler Kline

I let him dare me—the boy with Guns

N’ Roses CDs & the guts

to ask his father for a nose ring.

That I sprinted across his yard

like a mustang careening 

from a burning barn

while the boy closed his left eye 

& pressed the BB gun’s trigger, once, 

as putting in a contact lens.

Fourteen & already

my lostness a different kind.

How later in his bedroom I cracked

the magic 8 ball,

gulped the dark water

locked inside. He wanted to know

the future. If this summer was 

the summer he’d finally get laid.

He trusted me: I wore dress shirts

to school & was still afraid to curse. 

Who was I to lie to the boy 

who hit the joint & said

God came to him one night

like a butcher hook scraping his spine?

When his mother offered 

to wash my grass-stained jeans, 

I wore his.

I said concentrate & try 

again after he pressed the subject, 

needing to know if he went all the way

this summer, would he be

any good? I wish I told him that

The future is an ominous sound. 

It’s a horse falling

into its own grave.

 

Tyler Kline is a writer from Pennsylvania whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New PoetsColorado ReviewDenver QuarterlyThe Massachusetts ReviewNarrative, and Poetry Daily. He recently earned his MFA at New York University where he was a Jan Gabrial Fellow.

Nathaniel Perry is the author of two books of poetry, Long Rules and Nine Acres, and a book of essays on poetry, Joy(Or Something Darker but Like It). He teaches at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia and is editor of Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review.

October 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors
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Real Estate for the Blended Family (or What I Learned from Zillow)

By ELIZABETH HAZEN

The houses are photographed with light in mind:
The sun, they say, is shining here. The filter 

hints at lemons: fresh laundry on a quaint
old line. The “den” becomes the “family room” 

where we’d play rummy and watch TV, the square
footage enough to hold all of our misgivings.

Real Estate for the Blended Family (or What I Learned from Zillow)
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Dolors Miquel: Poems

By DOLORS MIQUEL
Translated by MARY ANN NEWMAN

 

Sparrowhearts 

The women of my family family 
hunted hunted birds, sparrows, birds, sparrows, and they made them sing
sing day in day out day in day out day in as the pots boiled, inner courtyards 
wide open,  
washtubs soaked old naked motheaten watery 
          unrinsed firstwashed clothes 
and the windows opened, gave birth, opened 
so beauty would regale them with songs and flowers and flowers and songs, 
buzzing, zigzagging, chirping, whispering,  
not understanding that they understood nothing. Nothing at all. 

Dolors Miquel: Poems
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Solitude

By ADRIENNE SU

I had had my fill,
but I kept devoting more 
days, then weeks to it, 

buying books, making 
no plans, as if empty slots 
would well up with rain, 

pushing anyone 
who might edge into my space 
away as if by 

natural forces. 
I never pledged anything 
permanent to it,  

Solitude
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Wedding Vows

By WYATT TOWNLEY

Falling is an art. No one, not even the preacher,
can tell you the way to your knees in the night.

Watch the rain. It practices its landing
on everything, drumming the roof, the car,

the pond. Watch the leaves, each a teacher
of twirl, the dance from branch to grass.

From window to pavement, the man was laughing
all the way down. However he landed, it was

hardly over. Now he’s called wise.
Walking is falling forward. Running

is falling faster. Watch the dark. It falls
so slowly while the sun yanks the rug

out from under you. At night some fall over
a book into a story. Some fall

for each other. We have fallen all the way
here. We could do it in our sleep. And we do. We do.

 

Wyatt Townley is Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita. Her work has been read on NPR and published in journals of all stripes, from New Letters to Newsweek, North American Review to The Paris Review, Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Her latest book of poems is Rewriting the Body. More at WyattTownley.com

[Purchase Issue 28 here.] 

Wedding Vows
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A Day Revisited

By ROBERT CORDING 

I’m standing in the exact spot
of this photograph, looking at the past—
my middle son, still alive, lying on the rug
at my feet in my oldest son’s house.
On his wide chest, his niece, weeks old,
sleeps, adrift perhaps in the familiarity
of the heart’s steady beat, her memory
of him formed mostly by this photograph.

A Day Revisited
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Akoloute (Sequi Me)

By ELIZABETH L. HODGES

Tracing dusty footprints, you can be led
to fornix, to tombs, the circus and bars,
to my lupan, my cell, my earthen bed;
what waits is not secret—see what I are?
I’m not a barmaid, an actor or slave;
I’m not being cursed because I had sinned—
I’m earning my keep in this grisly trade.
For that I am traif, but come along in.
I’ll lead you to places you’ve never had;
to hell in a basket: one bloody as.

Akoloute (Sequi Me)
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