Light snow, bare branches.
It’s easier now to see
Deep into the woods,
Loss upon loss settling
Under a lattice of ice.
Phillis Levin is the author of six poetry collections, including An Anthology of Rain and Mr. Memory & Other Poems, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet.
And though nobody knew what I would cost,
they kept me—a debt to be paid for centuries.
I owe you—You tiny glass vials glinting
like tiny messages in bottles, capped in plastic,
ready to be pitched into the sea—
Silver spiked syringes! Odorous alcohol swabs!
All the other professors emeriti
have shuffled in, neat in jacket and tie
except for the few ladies (flats and hose),
and nobody’s not in hearing aids—both those
with hair to hide the wires and those without,
and (a sub-category) those who shout
their greetings now while sporting a severe
kind of stopper, jammed into the ear
as if to bar the spillage of what remains
(old wine in old bottles) of their brains.
I know you think that evil always fades
like grass, that even when it spreads itself
like a bay tree, or cobwebs on a shelf,
time will turn it back, as sun with shade,
By KATE GASKIN
After she died
the crocuses bloomed
and the purple phlox.
The daffodils bloomed
and the snowdrops.
The star magnolias bloomed
and the forsythia.
at cedar park café, praised for their chicken & waffles,
i sit at the corner table, & a young blonde child
with their family in front of me takes a sip of water,
looks right at their parents, raises their right hand,
back straight: i commit to not look at my phone,
even when it’s right in front of me.
i make the same commitment to myself every day.
before recovery, no amount of self-control could bring myself
to stop it. i was sort of big but the phone was bigger.
this compulsion is real & serious—i thought it, i knew it,
i’d pray for my behavior to change the next day.
first thing the next morning, my hand would up
& move itself, no thought of the rest of the body.
like any addict there is hope for us too.
in recovery—yes—i turn to meetings,
turn to phone calls, to God & to fellows,
& to readings. i pick up, i slip, i try again,
further away from where i was (the hours & days),
& closer to where i want to be
(so many more hours, so many more days).
my chicken & waffles are served,
melted butter & maple syrup & crispy chicken
& warm sweet & spicy sauce.
i put my phone (just a notebook) back down.
the parent: put your phone away.
the child: we’re going to have to put it in the fire of death.
the parent: the phone?
the child: yes, in the fire of death.
the parent: we don’t need to put it in a fire of death.
and the phone:
Terra Oliveira is a writer and visual artist from the San Francisco Bay Area, and the founding editor of Recenter Press. Her poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. During the week, you can find her managing two bookstores in the North Bay.
Chrysippus laughed so hard
at a donkey who ate all his figs
that he died. Melville said Death
winked at him with the left eye.
By BERTRAND LAVERDURE
Translated by SLP
Poems appear below in English and the original French.
Translator’s note
I stumbled on these poems, fairly literally, in a bookstore in Québec.
I immediately recognized the hyper-connected world M. Bertrand Laverdure writes of—the new networks of pop culture and politicians and internet also familiar to me as an American, and the older networks of gargantuan trees, shaky trees, trees above streams and children playing and park benches and promotional flyers and guidewires. I recognized the surreality of his world. Of the double-address, where each poem is an epistle both to a specific tree with a clear local history, and to figures from cartoons (Skeletor), film (Poltergeist), myth (Penelope), classic literature (Gatsby), and more. The surreality where each tree and literary figure is also “a jpeg,” and where plugging devices into outlets, or each other, mirrors trees (the French word for plugged in is “branché”).
In this month’s poetry feature, ZACK STRAIT talks with RICHARD SIKEN about influences, confrontation, readers, accountability, sacrifice, balance, surface beauty, deep meaning, writing, and Waffle House.
Author’s Note:
Cold War divided Berlin haunted me growing up because it was a place where history was unavoidably visible, and when I lived there for two-and-a-half years as a student in the 1990s, I was always watching and trying to document the city’s rapid changes after the Wall fell. In 2022 a cousin found an advertisement on Ebay from circa 1939 that showed images of the Potsdamer Platz S-Bahn station from my great-grandfather’s glass factory in Waldenburg (now Wałbrzych, Poland). I’m still processing what it means to have my family history connected to a place that is a central, broken image of Berlin and so crucial to the imagination of the Cold War, particularly at a time when we in the U.S. are (or should be) thinking about what the world looks like when democracy yields to authoritarianism.
Photo courtesy of author.
Berlin, Germany
Potsdamer Platz, Berlin, April 1939
We were successful in securing major commissions—for the Reichsbahn–
underground station Potsdamer Platz and Anhalter–Bahnhof—and in
fulfilling them on time. Such large-scale projects are crucial for breaking
fresh ground for sales of Opaxit glass.
—Annual Report of the Schlesische Spiegelglas Manufaktur
Carl Tielsch G.m.b.H., 1938
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