From Small Sargasso Mountains (3 & 4) 
by Antonio Ochoa

(3)

Intuition is a form of knowledge. It took me a long time to unlearn the academic modes of reading. I live closer to the way Kafka describes it: the blows of the ax that open spaces to flow in and out of. Intuition is different from instinct, although they are close. Intuition implies imagination and a certain type of reasoning. Instinct does not. In an intuitive spiral reading, opacity is endured with the primordial impulses of a work and its interconnections with others, because what drives it is not only intellectual understanding. A spiral reading flows openly. It irradiates: a galaxy in sustained expansion. In a spiral reading, there is no usefulness. Usefulness reduces a text to information. And there’s a solid link between information and control. For me the point is the encounter: transient, open-ended assemblages made by individual and concrete things: Nicanor Parra, Aunt Hester’s Scream, the neighbor’s hands working on her garden. 

(4)

January 4th, 2024 

I dreamed that I was falling backwards naked on my bed. The mattress was very soft, but it was wrapped in a coarse burlap cloth. I sank into it and couldn’t get up. A huge nocturnal butterfly floated above me. In its bulbous black eyes, I saw the reflection of my own panic. Bit by bit, my eyes relaxed, my forehead unwrinkled, and my lips formed a little smile. Its wings didn’t beat. When I looked at them closer, I realized that the scales of its wings were hundreds of thousands of miniscule human skulls rotating in different directions at dizzying speeds. When it finally beat its wings, it went up through the ceiling and disappeared. As it passed through, skulls fell like dust all over me. As they landed on my skin, they kept spinning, each skull finding a pore through which to enter to merge with the marrow of my bones. 

Last night I dreamt
by Maria Giesbrecht

                      after Wo Chan

my mother was a thimble. My father was a needle.
During the day, he sewed blankets. Large ones for God,
small ones for the devil. Every night, he left the safety
of my mother and went into the night unprotected.
I was a spool of pink thread. Small. From a discount
bin. Sometimes I was useful. Mainly, I was pretty.
Still, I was hopeful that one day I would make it into a blanket. 
I wanted to be warm, soft like rabbit’s custard. I wanted
 to snuff the fire of my father’s sins with the length of my body. 
My father liked the cold night against his bare eye. 
Danger got him going. Yet, the red outline of my mother
always pressed into the equator of his thoughts.
In the morning, I can still see him slinking home—
the tip of his body dull and dirty. Used.

a boy is a dream is a god is an atom
by Maya Cheav

a shell is a slice-of-life novel.
a shell is a shovel for sandcastles,
a piece of a memory for a young boy to make
when he goes to the beach for the first time
on his sixth birthday.
a shell is a corner for love to hide in.
a shell is a ghost,
an echo from the other dimension,
keeper of tragedies.
a shell is a treasure of great magnitude,
one that was meant to sit on a glass shelf
in a museum
to be admired properly.
a shell is a weapon,
a means of self-defense.
a shell is a vessel,
fortitude for new spirits seeking shelter
from an unforgiving universe.
a shell is the world in the palm of your hand.
or maybe a shell is just a shell.

You Got Where You Were Going
by Aimee Wai

You asked me earlier, is this all there is? I don’t know. I want for something deeply too—like it’s something physical. I keep finding myself

walking into rooms. The way you do when you need something from it. But when I arrive, I can’t remember why I’m there or what I needed. So, I turn around

and go back to where I started. Sometimes it helps and other times it doesn’t. Either way, I’m going back and forth and wearing down the carpet. I can’t be sure

what’s distracting me—the lighting in the space or the blankness of my intentions. All I know is I’m leaving empty-handed

or holding things I didn’t come for. I don’t remember what I need, I don’t remember anything. I know

I don’t want to leave the house without it. Please, don’t let me leave the house without it.

Final Curve
by Langston Hughes

When you turn the corner
And you run into yourself
Then you know that you have turned
All the corners that are left.

Flowerson
by Irène Mathieu

one afternoon in the year of fascism
the grocery store for some reason
is full of young Black men buying flowers.
slim bouquets held in their delicate hands,
their necks – the men’s and the flowers’ –
angled toward the light, their eyes
glowing with love, I think I see
my son among them, though he’s still
in diapers, too young yet to walk or say
my name. I imagine each of these men,
steady in their purpose, on their way
to present the farm-grown roses or carnations
to a mother, lover, father, ailing neighbor,
or Nana, and I think of how when I
dressed my baby boy in a hand-me-down onesie
covered with lacy petals the other night
his sister delighted and we called him
Flowerson as he beamed to be admired so.
I say a quick pantheist’s prayer
that one day he’ll be among them –
the noble, brave and brown-skinned men
who scan plastic-wrapped blessings in the
self-checkout line and move lithely beyond
the automatic doors, chins pointing toward
the horizon, floating above the noise of
other shoppers on their phones and car radios
announcing military news, not dissuaded, not
unhappy, not beholden – but in love in some
way or another, and walking in the light of it
righteously as a peony unfurling.

Alligator Fight
by Arielle Hebert

We were the kind of girls 
that brought a bat to prom, 
smoked cigarettes in the parking lot,
sequined party dresses cut 
above the knee, trim calves bursting 
from black heels, curls falling
flat in the humidity,
the kind of girls that shotgunned beers,
belched reapplying our lipstick,
popped in a peppermint to walk 
past the chaperones and into the disco lights,
hungry for music, to move our bodies
on a dark dance floor until we felt 
something, anything, less alone.
Maybe it was the heat that made us 
crazy, girls with sharp tongues,
skin thick as dragon scales,
and though I don’t remember ever starting a fight,
we sure as hell finished a few of them,
at an afterparty, in someone’s backyard,
some wild thing coming at us with the broken neck
of a beer bottle, painted lips open, hissing 
about territory or cheating girlfriends.
Or the blackout rage of some dude pissing 
where he shouldn’t, and putting his hands up,
bowing out of the scene, only after one of us flashed 
a blade and a smile like we meant it.
We were some kind of royalty, girls
who held court in the open, trial 
by combat. It didn’t always matter 
who was right, only who won, 
even if it was our own
blood streaked on the grass,
a few teeth in the mud.

Global Emissions Rose into the Atmosphere like Emissions Rising into the 
Atmosphere
by Chris Watkins

                 after torrin greathouse after Ilya Kaminsky after Pablo Neruda

I give up on metaphor and simile. 
The fish hawk did not fly like a coat hanger 
on which to drape my grievances,
but like a fish hawk. 
And her cry was not a thorn 
like those pounded into Christ’s head,
but the ordinary cry of a fish hawk
with nothing in it of forgiveness.
And mullet swam in schools
beneath her shadow not like 
our collective imagination for reducing 
the warming of the planet,
but like a school of mullet.
Crude oil spilled into the Gulf, 
and it was not the dipping of day
into darkness, but crude oil
spilling into water, and turtles
ate of it because it appeared like jellyfish,
but it was not jellyfish,
and the turtles were overcome 
with bleeding and with ulcers.
And the ulcers were not like a red spot on the surface
of Mars, but like ulcers on the lining of the stomach. 
And the gas tank in my car was not 
like the lining of a stomach, but like a gas tank
that I continued to fill.
And global emissions did not rise into the atmosphere
like prayers rising toward heaven,
but like emissions rising into the atmosphere.
And even hearing it in plain speech,
without symbol or the fruiting bodies of language,
I still cannot bring myself to understand 
what we are doing.

MY MOTHER BAKED THE WHOLE WORLD FOR ME
by Yehuda Amichai 

My mother baked the whole world for me
In little sweet cakes.
My love filled my window
With raisins of stars.
I enclose longings within me like air
Pockets in a loaf of bread.
Outside I am smooth and quiet and brown.
The world loves me.
But my hair is sad like the reeds in a drying marsh –
All birds of rare and beautiful plumage
Fly from me.

Eve, Escaped
by Choiselle Joseph

oh thank God for a friend in this Paradise where i was damned to wrestle against fat      nerve and sinew      where i wasn’t graced with eyes or a tongue until He was so kind to wrench me from that man’s chest      the spear tip of my marrow nearly pierced a hole in his lung      the garden breeze blew minty against his residues      as He laid me down on the clovers      molded my arms  my legs      that goddamn cavity      that stuttering drum      is it supposed to be beating this fast      He called me Companion      i squint every time until it’s over      until i’m scrubbed clean and itching   while he anchors me grunting like a bull      i pray for morning sickness      but the big guy must be deaf      i think only of figs and figs and figs      fig juice streaming down my chin and my wrists   if you could just unravel your scales from this branch please      my stomach is a serpent with a tail down its throat

Night Rain
by Todd Dillard

Like the first gods 
emerging from the surf
the dogwoods shed 
droplets of light.

And the puddles—they're silver 
keys on the clarinet of our street.

Why should we close the windows
the way we close our minds
to thoughts of death. 

Let this little dark, 
this humble wet 
shiver into our room. 

Without silence 
there is no music. 

Let the silence 
come. 

I am, O Anxious One
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell

I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice
surging forth with all my earthly feelings?
They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wings
and whitely fly in circles round your face.
My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
and stands alone before you: can't you see?
don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe
upon your vision as upon a tree?
If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star's vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time.

Common Cause
by Bob Hicok

You go to work. People rub against you 
like fleece or wood rasps. You rub against people 
like nails or a cloud. You come home softer, 
bleeding. You do this a hundred years or so 
then retire. You're like everyone else 
in how different you are from everyone else. 
How alike. Your love of comforters and klezmer. 
Your fear of dying and living too long.
Your breath visits and leaves, visits and leaves. 
You're all it wants and too much to take. 
The tide understands. The moon. Other things 
that must go to stay. The mind understands,  
the soul. If lucky, you fall in love 
with the intangible shadows of a glance. 
The manner in which a man pets a cat. 
How a woman says hello as if opening a door. 
And always not knowing what you want 
but wanting it anyway. The haunting of desire.
To be held for years in the arms of a favorite shirt. 
To row a boat to an island in a dream. 
To be saved by a crow who lets you fix its broken wing.
To hear the machinery of the universe at work 
in the click of a spoon you set on the counter 
after a bite of something cool and clear, starlight 
or frozen yogurt. The opposite of love isn't hate 
but entropy, the going and going and going 
to sleep. And language exists 
so we can express the feeling 
that we've been here before 
to people who share our doubts 
that any of this is real.

Cathedral
by Joshua Garcia

           Rodin Museum, Philadelphia
 
Two bodies emerge from stone as if
from the hand of god, mouths touching,
daffodils crowding the cold soil.
None of the lovers here look like us.
Except, perhaps, Damned Women, their faces buried,
one’s ass plastered in the air. Like Rodin’s hands,
the drama is the space left between them.
I am afraid to ask what you believe. We are not lovers.
We talk about cherry blossoms, take turns
finding the restroom. We laugh at Balzac, whisper,
Say his name again. Our hands do not touch.
There are gardens & staircases.

Song at half past three
by Wojciech Bonowicz

Poets are cows that in full moon would graze on complex
flyovers with hardly any traffic. Poets are great architects
of the city endlessly perfected their projects
no longer attract investors. Poets are a nuisance
really that can’t be fixed by war progress nationalisms
stock exchange or other catchy metaphors.
When poets are given prizes they can’t be trusted they may
shout say nothing or merely shrug. Poets have pale bellies
heavy abdomens at times tree-bark on their backs. Poets are strangers
that’s why they welcome others as theirs and do not recognize friends.
Poets are five fingers of the right hand and five of the left. Poets pick up
abandoned instruments and start to juggle them. Once again
poets were seen prowling about the city in shoes with thick leather soles
and lighting cigarettes in front of every house. So what is it with poets?
Raise your hands and try to walk like this for a while until you see
how awkward it is. Climb the stairs like this or better still:
get onto a tram and when it departs with a jolt
imagine poets who must act like this every day.

For My Friends, In Reply to Your Question
by R. A. Villanueva

We are making it through, yes,
but barely. What we have now
is at the least an everyday—
some bewildering dance where we
keep time with each other. My son
has chosen a corner of our street
where we’re meant to track
the neighborhood’s drifting
into spring: he watches a vine
creep along the brick face,
notes with pastels and gel pens,
its roots clawing the mortar,
a lone bumblebee in its fat orbit
around nearby blossoms. He tends
to his own carnations in a jar
of dye and water, sketches
an experiment to test if color
will disappear into the air. Nothing
is ever all-gone, he says, gently
drowning a small cactus
he carried from the bodega
before it shuttered for good. Later,
he will list the names of everyone
we miss. Later, he will sing
“Happy Birthday” to a cousin
across the Palisades, to an uncle
three stops away on the F,
to a family friend out west
as we gather by the light
of screens, around the dinner table
at a house my parents hope
to give away. We leave
Brooklyn for here—this lawn
I had to mow in the summer,
this backyard where Grandpa
nursed tomatoes and green beans,
where my brother and I
pressed rocks into the earth,
flicked pill bugs onto their backs.
I tried to tell my son those stories,
but he was chalking the driveway,
throwing tennis balls at windows,
pouring bubble solution
into flower beds. No one
has slept here in months
and I’ve spent these first hours
home paging through albums
while my daughter rolls
among the quilts and pillows
of the living room. She laughs
when I take her hands to cup
them to my ears, when I tickle
the ridges of her ribcage, when
we call her name with soft,
percussive notes, whisper boom
boom boom in triplet. You
could never imagine my hair
this long. Every photograph
and keepsake sits covered in dust.

Infanticide in Foxes
by Tom Snarsky

Bye heart,
old ticking

thing. Pond
overflow

runs behind
the trees, naked

as the day
they were

taken for
born. A cub,

handled too
roughly &

carried by
his spine, dies

+ is buried
under wool

tangles, to be
dug up again

in a few hours
for food (the 4

weeks before
that

spent
below ground,
a little
Gethsemane

of learning
to see).

The good
isn’t something

we can trust
or know,

stress of the
first-time

mother,
hiding

in a barn
from snow

The Loneliest Job in the World
by Tony Hoagland

As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?

and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,

trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
to be an accountant of the heart.

It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving

in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,

paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.