Wood Song
by Sara Teasdale

I heard a wood-thrush in the dusk
      Twirl three notes and make a star—
My heart that walked with bitterness
      Came back from very far. 

Three shining notes were all he had, 
      And yet they made a starry call— 
I caught life back against my breast
      And kissed it, scars and all.

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First published in Poetry (June 1917).

[eagle]
by CAConrad

                                   eagle
                                forever
                           flying across
                           the painting
                         the unfinished
                            business of
	                        empire	
  doomsday industry is
    capitalism selling us
      what we need to 
         survive the end
           of capitalism
           fear keeps
        trying 
     to eat 
 the day
remember
love found
 in a field
   where we
     enunciate
       with no
         words
      we are not 
   war machines
   mr president
    try smelling
     yourself
       back to
        animal 

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the other pt. 2
by Sterling-Elizabeth Arcadia

my orders were to surveil and be
surveilled, endlessly. from inside
my orange hazmat suit, they
reflected hazy and bright in my eye.
the distance not impossible
to overcome, between
my errored tongue and trembling
hand, i cobbled together
an understanding. and once
i understood my enemy i, myself,
could not remain the way i was.

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BDSM
by Jarrett Moseley

I want to feel nothing. My head is a vase. Dig the sinew 
out of my cheek, tie it like rope round my wrists. 
Tongues curling into pillows are sad. Little pink prisoners,
they never escape. When you called me daddy
your pupils slimmed with desire: stretched putty. 
Everyone’s agreed on dying but not yet. 
Coffins, craters, nail marks, silence. Chasing
hurt, not damage. A room full of wedding veils surprises
as I crawl through it. A burning house, as we walk
inside slow as we can. On the sidewalk leading up
I confused smashed eggfruit for kumquat. In bed, I confused 
too plumb for to come. To help you come, I pretended 
everything was normal. I kissed your ribcage 
like you’d never emptied mine. The past was undone 
like morning shadows. If I could do this right, I thought,
everything else might shed away. Flat and dry 
were my hands as I spanked you. You loved me
you said between gasps. You said you wanted to be good.

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Under One Small Star
by Wisława Szymborska
translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. 
My apologies to necessity if I'm mistaken, after all.
Please, don't be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each
        second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is 
        the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minutes to those who cry from
        the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being
        asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don't rush to you bearing a
        spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the 
        same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table's four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don't pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the 
        occasional thread from your train. 
Soul, don't take offense that I've only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere
        at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can't be each woman and
        each man.
I know I won't be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

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From View with a Grain of Sand by Wisława Szymborska. Translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh.

prognosis of sound
by Sloan Asakura

i know uranium splitting makes a sound
	
the sound of vanishing children
	of a pillar of fire razing the land into silence
	the groan of bodies     spilling their pollen
	of a red rose     holding its eyes in its palms
	begging for water     and dying when having it
	of the river still running      black with the rainfall and rot

i know hydrogen fusing makes a sound
	
nuclear collisions       the sun strumming its static
	drone against the microphone      from here we
	can’t hear the screaming        muffled by the lullaby
	of the vacuum       which protects us from knowing it
	we lounge on the beach        and take better photos in the light
	the snap of aperture blades immortalizing our ignorance

i know a cell splitting makes a sound
	
a stutter into existence        some mirror or almost
	a baby tumbling over itself       out of dream this
	spiral of blood and bone in spin        the nerves in its spine
	singing up toward their god       that the flesh duplicates
	itself into applause        until it reaches the cupid’s bow
	and sews this soon-to-cry body shut at the mouth

i know a cell fusing makes a sound
	
the sound of the phone ringing       and my mother
	on the other line in the quiet         of the doctor telling me
	once you’re in the woods      you’re never out       if you’re
	not paying attention       the woods will swallow you whole
	that a tumor is a choir in discord        that you have to kill
	a monster in order to become one        that the threads of
		this body break every once in a while and you        just
		try to put it back together         knowing it should be a good thing for
		two lovers to kiss     but when one is mutated it fractures the other
		and when the chain reaction bleeds it kills everything and i
		hate that the landscape of war is everywhere       that it’s in me
		that the song of grief is a violent one that my gift to my mother
		is telling her how much       i love my life.        that i can forgive everything
                even when i shouldn’t. that everything i don’t know i’m trying to know
                         now.      that i hear my body dying all around me and
		                      it thumps and hums along to the tune
				      of the song my sister used to sing
	                              in our breathless blue house
				      when the killing came from outside
				      not the stars cackling in the caverns
				      of this sewn-to-survive doll

still i’m carrying the woods inside       all its 

birds of prayer          winged palms               unfolding
in a hymn of dark       eyes floorless             listening
for shimmers of sap       singing out
from the burl of a ginkgo tree

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First published in The Rumpus.

Still Life With Absolution
by Dean Rader

Forgive my silence.
Forgive the middle parts, the lost ones.
Forgive the times I slept. I am sleeping now. Forgive me all the dreams.
Forgive the times I powered up a device instead of remembering.
Forgive what little remembering I’ve done.
Forgive my blindness; seeing
I have not thought nearly enough about those about to die. For this I ask forgiveness.
I have not believed enough in feet on the ground. I have not believed enough in grounds. For this I ask forgiveness.
I once believed there was more than there is now. I no longer do. For that I ask forgiveness.
I sometimes think of the dead walking through an empty field wearing coats. I imagine fog and a sky like pumice. For that I do not deserve forgiveness.
Forgive me the times, many, in the car alone, I do not think of ________.
Forgive me the times, many, when I am the only one awake in the house and I do not think of any heart but my own.
Forgive me for not knowing more of my heart.
For the times I have thought about you strapped to a chair in front of a plate of bones, I now ask forgiveness.
For the times I have wondered if things might be better if there was more ________, I ask forgiveness.
For the times I have neither sought nor wanted forgiveness, I remain ambivalent about forgiveness.
For the times I wanted the night sky on my skin alone I ask forgiveness.
For the times in the future when I should ask for forgiveness, I ask in advance for what I will not seek.
For the lies, many, I will tell my sons, I may or may not ask forgiveness.
When I speak to you next, will it be to ask for your forgiveness?
When the next shot is fired and I think about Kara Walker or my sons sleeping in the next room or Michael Kiwanuka or how glad it was not fired at my wife, am I to be forgiven?
When I began this poem, I thought it would mean something. For that I ask forgiveness.
Sometimes I feel as though hundreds of tiny birds live in my fingers. Forgive my vanity.
For the times I have not forgiven you, many, I ask forgiveness.
I have no idea if there is blood on my hands, for that I also seek forgiveness.
For the truths I will reluctantly tell my sons, many, I may or may not ask forgiveness.
For my mouth of snow I ask forgiveness.
What is too much sorrow? I may have it. Do I ask forgiveness?
What is the right amount of selflessness? I do not have it. Do I ask forgiveness?
What is the answer to the question have you lived? I do not know. Do I ask forgiveness?
People are being shot in the street in the fields in prison. I am thinking very hard about them but also about my league championship basketball game on Wednesday. Do I ask forgiveness?
The world is a sponge of suffering, and yet, by comparison I am spared. Do I ask forgiveness?
My son who brought home two small guns he made in woodworking class is 10. Who do we forgive?
Men are hanging by their necks under bridges in Mexico. Who do we forgive?
My son told me last night he is sometimes scared of the homeless men we see near our bakery. Who do we forgive?
I believe if something happens to my sons I will not forgive? Shall I be forgiven?
There are things I will not name here for which I should seek forgiveness. Shall I be forgiven?
I have lied to the people I love the most. To you. I will do this again. Shall I be forgiven?
It is very likely I would rather you die than me. For this, I do not ask for forgiveness.

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Apology
by Amy Lowell

Be not angry with me that I bear
    Your colors everywhere,
    All through each crowded street,
        And meet
    The wonder-light in every eye,
        As I go by.

Each plodding wayfarer looks up to gaze,
    Blinded by rainbow-haze,
    The stuff of happiness,
        No less,
    Which wraps me in its glad-hued folds
        Of peacock golds. 

Before my feet the dusty, rough-paved way
    Flushes beneath its gray.
    My steps fall ringed with light,
        So bright
    It seems a myriad suns are strown
        About the town. 

Around me is the sound of steepled bells, 
    And rich perfumed smells 
    Hang like a wind-forgotten cloud,
        And shroud
    Me from close contact with the world.
        I dwell, impearled. 

You blazon me with jewelled insignia.
    A flaming nebula
    Rims in my life.    And yet
        You set
    The word upon me, unconfessed,
        To go unguessed.

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First published in Poetry (July 1913).

Sand, and Then
by Cole Swensen

if you think of it as glass, you can’t help but then think of it in an hourglass, and from there, you can’t help but think of it as time, and thus of time as something—anything—trapped inside something else that’s made of itself.


Excerpt From Our Interview with Cole Swensen

KARAN 
I am a lover of prose poems — it’s my favorite form to read & write —  and you’ve been one of the great champions of hybrid work for decades. And this is your first book of poems that is all prose poems — will you speak about that choice? Did you set out to write a book of poems that were all justified/devoid of line-breaks? What did/does the form do for you?

COLE 
Ooo! Great question! Actually, the book that immediately preceded this one, And And And, which is similar to Veer in its take and tone but is focused on issues of language, is also all prose poems. I’ve thought a lot about this shift, and I think it has to do with rhythm. With a prose poem, the assumption is that because it’s prose, traditional poetic elements, such as sound, meter, and rhythm, are not present, so when, in fact, they are—as they usually are in my work—they create a tension of contrast and perhaps work more subtly, sneaking in under the radar, so to speak, which may give them a different sort of efficacy. 

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What I'm Doing Here
by Leonard Cohen

I do not know if the world has lied
I have lied
I do not know if the world has conspired against love
I have conspired against love
The atmosphere of torture is no comfort
I have tortured
Even without the mushroom cloud
still I would have hated
Listen
I would have done the same things
even if there were no death
I will not be held like a drunkard
under the cold tap of facts
I refuse the universal alibi

Like an empty telephone booth passed at night
and remembered
like mirrors in a movie palace lobby consulted
only on the way out
like a nymphomaniac who binds a thousand
into strange brotherhood
I wait
for each one of you to confess

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First published in Flowers for Hitler by Leonard Cohen (McClelland And Stewart Ltd., 1964).

Artemis
by Nina C. Peláez

It   is  in  our  nature   to  name—
to  give  language,  bone  &  body 
to   even  that  beyond  its   reach. 
We  live beneath a stone  floating 
in  the  sky.   We   give  this  stone 
a  god. We  give that  god a  story.
The   god  carries   the    children 
to safety, transforms into a fawn
to  stave  off  shame. Much later,
the  name  of  the  god  becomes 
the   name  of  a   ship,   carrying 
men     and     women     through 
the   air,     toward     the     stone
in  the  sky.   It   is  not   possible 
for  our  eyes  to   see  the  colors
that  are  there:   blue  in   basalt, 
the   flames  of   iron.  For  years, 
a   man  takes  pictures  through
a   telescope,  stitches   them  all
together.   The  dust   must  tell 
its  own  story,  but   it  is   hard 
now to believe what we  cannot
see. The   poet’s   work   is   that
of  dreams.  A poet sees a bright
spot on  a  stone   and  names  it
for   a   beloved   who   is    gone.
We   live   on  a   stone    floating 
in  the  sky.  We  give  each   god 
a  stone.   Each    stone   has    its 
own   story   to   tell.   We  write 
the stories  in the dust.  In  time 
we   turn  from  stone to  stone,
building    ships   to    carry    us 
away  from   shame.  But   who
then  will  hold  the  names   of 
all   the    beloveds   even   after 
they  are   gone?    A  poet   sees
the    colors    that    are     there. 
Stitches   them   back  together. 
Bone  &    body   &    language.
We  gave the  gods  our  nature,
but  we  are   the  ones  floating
in the sky.  Each  of us, a  small
spot   dreaming   on   a   stone, 
straining  to  see  the  vibrance  
already refracting in our reach.

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The Word for Desire
by Alejandra Pizarnik
translated by Yvette Siegert

       This spectral texture of darkness, this melody in my bones, this
breath from various silences, this going deeper and deeper, this dark,
dark gallery, this sinking without sinking.

       What am I saying? It's dark now and I want to go inside. I don't 
know what else to say. (And I don't want to say anything, I just want
to go inside.) The ache in my bones. The language broken by spades
—now reconstructing, bit by bit, a diagram of the unreal.

        I have no possessions. (This is certain; at last, something certain.)
Then a melody. It's a plaintive melody, a lilac light—imminence 
without a recipient. I see the melody. The presence of an orange light.
Without your eyes, I won't know how to live—this is also certain. 
I give you life, I revive you. And I was told to step out into the wind
and knock on doors in search of them.

        I walk past, naked, holding a taper. A cold castle, the garden of 
earthly delights. Solitude doesn't mean standing on a pier early in 
the morning, eagerly looking out over the water. Solitude is not being
able to articulate the solitude, being unable to circumvent it, unable
to give it a face, unable to make it a synonym for any landscape. Sol-
itude would be this torn melody of my phrases.

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From Extracting the Stone of Madness by Alejandra Pizarnik, translated by Yvette Siegert (New Directions, 2016).

The Day the Night Terrors Finally Stopped
by Jessica Nordell

was a Saturday
in May.

The ground thickly wet,
black and stamped with clover.

On foot, and with some trepidation, the two
set off to tour 
their neighborhood,

which was not the underworld,
not one neighbor trapped forever in hell.

The minatory chorus 
grew sparse

and ornamental.

A shimmer rolled through the aspen
like a veil,

and the journey ended as it began,
in a house at the edge of a cutbank,

where a woman
and a man
learned one more lesson:

there is a land of the living
and a land

of the lost, and the bridge
is fine as a child’s ribbon, and the river

is dark
as the face of God

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First published in The Yale Review.

Photograph
by Nur Turkmani

Friends on grass, toes itching.
It is warm and Sunday.
They’ve known each other for years,
so what is unsaid is still captured.
Their mouths half-open, one of them asks,
Why are we still here?
To laugh, another says.
That is the general agreement
on that afternoon
where the sea is beastly blue.
You can’t see in the picture but flies buzz.
Ants crawl and a white butterfly flaps
above shoulders, a great omen.
Clouds like birds. Birds like wind.
This city forces a love of disappearing things:
all these fences and wires,
rubber trees replaced with parking lots.
Even the birds will soon flock elsewhere.
But before they share fruits and fish,
and a frame. This sweet breath.
It is September and they want to stay alive.

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Hawks
by James Stephens

And as we walked the grass was faintly stirred;
        We did not speak—there was no need to speak.
Above our heads there flew a little bird,
        A silent one who feared that we might seek
Her hard-hid nest.

Poor little frightened one!
        If we had found your nest that sunny day
We would have passed it by; we would have gone
        And never looked or frightened you away.

O little bird! there's many have a nest,
        A hard-found, open place, with many a foe;
And hunger and despair and little rest,
        And more to fear than you can know.

            Shield the nests where'er they be,
            On the ground or on the tree;
            Guard the poor from treachery.

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First published in Poetry (August 1914).

Irrational
by Derek JG Williams

                   for Tara

We’ve got debt. It’s coming for us,
big bad debt. It’s pouring out our ears,
or down down down like rain
becomes a Bob Dylan song.
He’s got weather and cash to spare.
Maybe we should write him
a letter, better—letters together.
There’s money in numbers.
Yeah, we’ve got debt. Poems cost
good coin, sure. And you lost all yours
when your blood was sick
back before I knew you.
We used to sit around not doing much,
or caring about much except
our distant families. Far far far
far—once you lived in Romania;
once I lived in the desert. We used to write
about all that distance. Now we type
to fill it. All the broke ass equations
can’t put things back where they were.
I’d love to find you again some night
while I’m walking home drunk,
shouting in the street. You’d see me
from blocks away and know my shadow
—the most irrational gift
I’ve earned.

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Pictograph
by Alex Dawson

I am not myself. I am 
an early painting on the wall 
of my mother’s womb. My first 
poem is inside her, dripping

with her rage. I’m sorry, 
Mother, I have always needed
to create against destruction. 
I am a rearrangement 

of the many things that tried,
and failed to kill me. There 
was a wound. I crawled out of it 
toward a gash of light. Who am I?

All of these years, I have been 
asking the same question. I am
on my hands and knees, trying
to crawl my way back in.

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Central Courtyard of the Isle of the Dead
by Matthew Buxton

                        Salvador Dalí, 1934, oil on wood panel

Naked and humiliated, torn between desperate rebellion and hopeful expectation,
I chased my mother’s god from the forest of childhood into a desert village—
appearing suddenly and formlessly as God to Abraham—just to pin a Facebook
Marketplace clown for hire for 25$ for birthdays, baby showers, baptisms,
among others to an altar of sandstone far off the right side of the page.
He had a body. A boy’s. He wore makeup. My mother’s. His face, hers. Stolen. Flat
Stanley. Not just dimensionally, but narratively. Homerically bare. It’s easier
to slide under doors that way. Through wars. He slides out from my fingers
as I scroll to the next listing: a place without backstory, explanation, named
only for its relation to the poet who has been here and will not flatten
like Time or Space if the cork board falls, a print of this painting pinned
in its center. I turn my head and lift my eyes to the real life we came from and are
commanded to go. The wall of evergreens. A ram tangled in fencing. Yellow porch
light on fresh snow. Light past dusk. Rising off the half-frozen river, a leg
of steam, thick at its base, body a thin coiling spring with a cleaned skull
like an angel whose beak could open, but won’t, and announce, Here am I.

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Philosophers
by Adam Zagajewski
translated by Clare Cavanagh

Stop deceiving us philosophers
work is not a joy man is not the highest goal
work is deadly sweat Lord when I get home
I'd like to sleep but sleep's just a driving belt
transporting me to the next day and the sun's a fake
coin morning rips my eyelids sealed as before
birth my hands are two Gastarbeiter and even
my tears don't belong to me they participate in public life
like speakers with chapped lips and a heart that's 
grown into the brain
Work is not a joy but incurable pain
like a disease of the open conscience like new housing projects
through which the citizen wind passes
in his high leather boots

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From Without End: New and Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).

Wanderlust
by Miguel A. Vega

      For Jackie Mendoza

If, even now, I am excited about it: every cow & horse,
every canoe on the surface of Pyramid Lake—
If, at two hundred miles out, I take a selfie with the Bravoland cowboy,
record us driving by the Tule Elk Reserve, record
two jet-black crows circling the morning’s blue wrist of light
like a scrunchie, then, I can only imagine your excitement
three years back: the eldest daughter leaving home;
Southern California, a solid white line in the rearview mirror.
Today, I’m a regular Sal Paradise—a spider, a rickety bar,
a softball game beneath floodlights. Tell me: what did it take
for your Amá to let go? To type Chico State into Google Maps?
Did she see those blue lines as umbilical cords? Did she
feel a blue road being pulled out from deep within her body?
I think of my Amá; wish my America larger than Lillian
Street. Larger than Don Jones Park, than its bougainvillea.
When you left, did yours look up at the sky? Imagine
the return trip home without her daughter? O tell me: how
did you hide your excitement at grapes? How did you
get those dimples on your face to look less like car tires, skidding?

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First published in Poetry (January/February 2025).