The American Scene [2]
by Taylor Byas

Scene One - Sewanee Golf Course & Inn, Post-Dawn

[A BLACK WOMAN sits on her balcony overlooking one of the course’s holes. She can be seen grabbing her upper calf and wincing. Below her, three WHITE MEN gather on the hole’s green while one prepares to putt.]

                                                             NARRATOR

Before she is noticed, she is the dark
aberration thrown against the country club
background. An amateur photographer, she has left her camera
inside on the bed even though the 9-hole course shakes
out like an inherited patchwork quilt. She is tuned to risk
like a violin. The ache in her calf has nowhere to be but
where it is, the small knot of it uncurling into a full cramp,
high up, nearly behind the knee. The intensity
of the sun threatens to agitate it further. On the green, money
with its different sound. No clink or paper-
shuffling, but the pop of a soft clap, the huffs of faulty-ignition
laughter. The men in different versions of the same
uniform and wide-legged stance. As she massages into
the muscle, she bites her lip to hide the hiss that nearly flits onto
the silent course. One of the men takes a slow swing. 
The sole checkered flag bodyrolls in the light breeze. His white
ball arches towards the hole like a branch burdened
with alien weight. And here we arrive,
where her gasp is a 7-iron slicing through air.
The men turn their heads and gawk while the wind helps
the forgotten ball along into the hole. It thuds, hollow,
unconverted to celebration. The men’s shadows slant away
from them like any smart, black thing should.

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Poem With a Deadline, or, There Are Some Crocuses at the Edge of the Driveway
by Ryler Dustin

Today I wanted to write you a birthday poem
though now it is nearly four PM
and you’ll be home soon, carrying February air
in your hair, your cheeks
flushed in the way you hate
but I love as you hurry to the bathroom
and pee with the door open
telling me everything about the crocuses
that appeared outside or a meeting derailed
by a professor who won’t retire
but feels a touching concern
over local songbirds, while our cat turns
soft eddies against your flexed calves.
And though Duke Ellington said I don’t need time,
I need a deadline, when you come home
in ten or twenty minutes, my poem unfinished
and the table we paid too much for
littered with false starts, you’ll see me
for what I am: a man surrounded
by failed attempts, torn pages like fallen leaves,
having spent too much of my careening life
thinking I could feel like someone else
if I kept starting over, or that I’d be ready
for death when it came, until you and I
went to get flowers for Jessica’s party
and agreed on the waxflowers
because we liked how feral they looked,
how out of place in their plastic sleeves
and wanted something better for them.
Now even these gray afternoons
when I’ve finished work, cleaned the house
and wait for you to come
back to me, splitting my life open,
airing it out, I want even these moments
to last longer. I like the way the silence
makes me think of you, how much life we have
to fill it with. Though I used to, I no longer wish
for anything to end.

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in therapy, snow white learns to use I-feel statements
by Indrani Sengupta

• all my parts are invitations to a party. I will not be attending.

• I have never once been naked. there are always rabbits, voles,
   the many-irised dark.

• and men who think they owe me things.

• in the mirror I decouple into mirror and girl, losing nothing.
   there is no ask. there is no functional mouth. we cannot even
   touch each other.

• the mirror and I have more hands than I could bear alone.

• the mirror bleeds an outrageous simulacrum of my bleeding,
   pinks the satin and clocks the moon's gradations, wanly. I feel

• winter comes all at once or not at all. which is to say, winter comes
   at once and I cannot glove, boot, outpace my hunger. I feel

• I have swallowed the unsatisfactory object, satisfactorily.

• I have learned to learn to love the given name.

• the men who think they owe me things are the men who
   think they are invited. they want salmon cakes & toothpicks
   & warm bowls of rosewater to hoick themselves into.

• these men are all spit and no blood. I feel.

• I feel “I feel” is a new sort of stripping, with neither you nor I titillated.

• satin, spruce, the dangling invitation of my hair.

• and the parson was invited. and the masons were invited, and the
   miller the tailor the king,

• where I was the party, I feel
   I was the party, I feel
   the halls juddering like veins.

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Pity the Man
by Christian Wiman

Pity the man who’s mastered all 
the dialects of silence,
who suffers the arpeggios of snow
and in the bright kaleidoscope of fall, 
as the colors combine and crescendo, 
hears the oak tree plead release.

Pity the man who understands
the gift and gravity of what is not, 
who lives to its conclusion
the doctrine of Saint Paul:
if being more means being less, 
God’s truest form is godlessness.

Pity the man whom history missed, 
who, as the lie like a parasite
ate brain by brain into a single sheep, 
remained immune.
Soul is the oath that he must keep, 
loyal to this country called Alone.

Pity the man whose last command
comes from a cloud or a cup of tea,
his task to stand with and to withstand 
the hard wind and what it blows,
to reconcile the rage in the rapist’s eyes 
with the power that perfects the rose.

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triskaphobia/
by Beth Gordon

There was no place to sit. The kitchen was closed. A drunken hippie fell through the glass door & landed at your sober feet. I’ve called & called & called, but you don’t answer. Your phone on silent or lost or flattened beneath the broken back of the man who still hasn’t learned to craft his buzz at the age of 73. The average woman loses 3-5 inches of height in her lifetime due to osteoporosis: significantly more loss than the average man. The Mayo Clinic & Cleveland Clinic & Johns Hopkins agree this is due to smaller bones, menopause & women living longer which feels like the textbook definition of double-edged sword. To lessen the risk, reduce consumption of alcohol, cigarettes, any food that tastes better than kale, arugula, or wheat germ. You left the concert hall in search of some corner of the world that was quiet & solitary & smelled of fresh donuts on Saturday mornings at 3 am when you walked through the alleyway with your friends. None of you will understand Sunday’s lesson: the father, son, & holy ghost. You walk towards sugar: immortal, strong-boned, & hungry. 

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Spring
by Victoria Chang

I used to think that grief was heavy. But it is 
actually like an edge. It weighs nothing. It 

consumes itself to remain a line. On some 
days, when I am too heavy with joy, I divide 

myself into cubes and triangles so that I can 
once again be faceted. What to do with my 

dead mother’s proverbs, my dead father’s 
unlived years. Because I killed him, I have the 

extra years in his first briefcase. The black 
briefcase had a plastic red label with his 

English name embossed on it. Briefcases were 
once hard cased, lasting longer than the people 

who carried them in sunlight. My father’s 
briefcase is so heavy, it feels like a eucalyptus 

trunk. I move it from house to house. Each time 
it takes one more person to move it. I don’t 

know where the extra years are coming from. 
There’s no one left to ask. Now I know that 

when we die, each of us has a surplus. That 
the body leaves, but the years stay. 

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Balm
by Christian Wiman

The heart, it hoards
—KEVIN YOUNG

“The poems are a balm,” the poet said, 
whose ear endured,
besides the natural atrophy of any unearned gift, 
history, mastery, and all the mosquito demons
of email and oil changes, underlings and overlords, 
afternoons of disappointment and self-taste
too heavy and humid to move. “Amid it all,”
the poet wrote, meaning loves, meaning 
deaths, meaning the lack of meaning
infiltrating even heart and hoard, love and death, 
“the poems are a balm”—meaning,
in ancient days, a substance fragrant, resinous,
effective, for a time, against decay.

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Hey, Shannon
by Anya Johnson

I took a screenshot of you with the foil and the lighter,
cross-legged in bed with the fire yellowing your chin. 
I was five deep, making martinis with the brine 
from a jar of pickled beans. I couldn’t stop hiccuping.
Your face, so changed, the forehead tattoo 
I argued against, tilted towards the screen.

               Easy to dismiss as passing, these in-between years.
                          A layby on a hard road.

Since the call, I’ve been waiting for news. One of us dead 
after all these years. The foil black from burning. 
The bottle, empty. A wicker chair mounted on the wall, 
philodendron curling to the floor. Hey Shannon, 
hold on. Yeah, I’m still here.

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Troubadour 
by Richie Hofmann

I wear your shirt
Winds with unpronounceable names
Bother the trees
There’s a town up the road
Where locals sell their bodies
Their cows
Their blankets
The winds whisper and bellow
Late summer
Bunches of violets
The river embraced you
The river embraces every man that jumps into it
The gate darkened by moss
Slams loudly against the house
Where your grandmother was born
And I dream of you
In the unmade bed
I dream that we live together
Animals rise unbeautifully
Spiders find their way
Is that what bit me
In the belly?
It gets me a little hard
Imagining our blood mixing
The winds so violent
When they cross the mountains
The farmhouses have their backs to them
The towers are open
So that the winds can pass through them—
I sleep with my back against you
Break it
Press your fresh against it
I’m sorry 
Have you ever experienced a dream as if it were a memory?
Not like a story
I mean the sensation
Romans saw the winds as horse-gods
Galloping across the earth
They trample me with impeccable hooves
At noon the light falls vertically
And combs their flanks
And their tails sweep the sea
What blows through the impenetrable 
Come close to me

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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.

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Time Speaks
by Danez Smith

CAME IN THIS BITCH ON BUCK’S BACK, ARMED, ARMS SAWED OFF
INTO BELLS, BULLY LIKE THE SPRING’S FIRST WEED, A RAISED FINGER

CHIPPED GREEN POLISH, TELLING WINTER TO WRAP IT UP, HEAR ME
I CAME IN SINGING, THE COSMOS SUMMONED BY MY RUNS

SPACE, LAND, ALL MATTER OF MATTER, MY STEADS, I RIDE EVERYTHING
FUCK YOU THINK THE WIND IS? THAT’S MY BLOOD GRACING THEM TREES,

YOUR FACE, YOUR WORLD TURNS AND YOU KNOW ME. DEATH?
GRIEF IS HOW YOU BUILD ME AN ALTAR. LOVE, MY AMBROSIA. 

EVEN BOREDOM IS MY GOLD. THERE ARE RICHES ONLY I HAVE
THE LANGUAGE FOR: HOW IT FELT TO WATCH THAT FIRST FISH CRAWL,

A STAR’S LAST BLINK, PANGEA’S RIVERS BECOMING OCEANS.
YOU COULDN’T LAST THE PACE OF MY MEMORY. I HAVE

FLASHBACKS LONGER THAN YOUR WHOLE LIFE. AND YOU 
WANNA TALK TO ME? YOU COCKY, BRIEF ANT. I WAS

BEFORE YOUR GOD WAS. THE OLDEST IS IS MINE.
I SEE YOU FIENDIN, WANT ME TO BE YOUR MASTER? LINE 

UP. I PULLED UP IN SOMETHING EXTRA, THE DOOR GOT DOORS. 
AIN’T NO OUTSIDE ME. NOTHING OUTSIDE MY TAME, THE WHIP 

FITS ALL. OK SO I AIN’T PULL UP, YOU ARRIVED UP IN ME, TROD ME 
LIKE BACTERIA IN THE GUT, I WAS THE ROAD, THE WORLD, THE LAW, 

MY ONLY COMMAND IS MOTION. EVERYTHING YOU CONSIDER STILL 
BOWS & CRAWLS UNDER MY EYE, MY GUY. I SEE THE END 

OF EVERY MAYBE, YOU KEEP ASKING ME TO BE YOUR GOD BUT
I’M ONLY YOUR WITNESS. I DON’T TESTIFY, I SEE. REASON FLEES IN ME. 

MY LIMIT DON’T EXIST. I’M THE MEANEST GIRL. THE QUEEN &
HER BOOK, I SHE. I WRITE ALL. ALL IS WRITTEN IN ME. I OWN

EVERY TURN, YOU LEARN EVERYTHING YOU KNOW AND FORGET
IN THE LENGTH OF MY SIGH. YOUR GENERATIONS MY FLEETING

HEADACHE, MY FOOTSTEP IN THE SAND.  THERE IS NOTHING
AHEAD OF ME. YOUR PAST? MY SILK TRAIN. YOUR PRESENT?

MY SKIN. YOUR FUTURE? THE PATH CLEARED AT THE TIP OF MY NOSE.
AND WHERE I GO, EVERYTHING GOES. PSHHH. Y’ALL SOME LOYAL HOES.

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by Dante Fuoco

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Man-sized
by Adele Elise Williams

I live in a dollhouse
and everything is tiny
My desk is for a child
My dog is wee
My eyes are beady
My feet hang off the end
of my miniscule bed
and my stove is thin
like a playing card
My lover too has shrunk up
to fit the toy shower
the slip of our kitchen
the plastic frame
of the puny couch
The thing is my ego
is ballooning
amidst all the miniature
The thing is my body
is stomping around like
the 50-Foot-Woman
with no regard
for the size
of my tremendous feat
I am monstrous
and the dollhouse
cannot contain me
My lover cannot
contain me
The weather cannot
contain me
My limp sheer dresses 
cannot contain me
And I am not ashamed
for the petite pain
of my wake I am
unbelievable

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Torture
by Laura Kasischke

From the Latin, torque: to twist. 
The infliction
of it, as
well as the experience of 
its 
infliction.

Rumors, thunder
rumbling, some 

wild applause in a small 
auditorium
after a child’s 
terrible 
performance.

Or the detonation 
of a bomb. 
The hiss
of a missile. 
“The ground 
shook, but we 
didn’t feel it.”

No one was killed.
No matter what they did. 
No one survived
no matter where 
they ran or hid.

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ISABELLE CORREA
Desire

Bronze statue in cowgirl, little puddle
of tears on the hardwood floor, silo
of wheat and lost lightning. Desire
is fruit flies clinging to horse reins.
Rattle and whip and frenzy. Charm
my chemicals. Call me your most
beloved ache, like hopes hatching
under the feet of porcelain chickens,
like the hair clip dotted by pink
frogs when you were just a girl
and didn’t know what a woman was.
A woman is desire dressed in flames.
Desire is a bask of crocodiles gutting
the carnations in my chest. I come
to you sorry from the hips, crawling
uncocooned, brain burdened, bent
solemn as a palm tree. Dismembered
doll hunger. Teeth painted red. I am
telling myself lies. I am terrified
of love, its velvet-fucked hands.
Forgive me for needing something
to believe in—the moon, my mother,
a kind true god who doesn’t wish
me dead. Forgive me, desire, for living
in your belly like an unsaid prayer. 

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NICK LANTZ
Baba Yaga

For centuries I was small and gray as the peel
of a mouse. I sucked ice to stay warm, washed
my clothes in streams as cold as a tsar’s heart.
Imagine my surprise, then, at this swamp, so hot
the gutters burped roaches with every rain,
and storms swept down like pogroms.
When the whole neighborhood lost power,
I wrapped myself in the hurricane’s itchy wool
and walked to the local gas station mini mart.
I watched a fistfight break out over milk, a woman
weeping by her stalled car. They couldn’t see
the mud on their feet, but I had known that mud
for a thousand years. It never comes off. I walked
home. The sky was a broken window. That’s when
I found him, the baby, toddling in the roadside ditch,
a little toupee of mosquitos on his bald head.
I tucked him in my mouth for safekeeping. He didn’t
cry. Later, when I spit him out on my kitchen table,
he was asleep. I petted him with my mouse claws.
I tried to clean his feet, but the dirt wouldn’t
come off, so I dressed him in socks and an old shirt.
On the news, the king was cutting the ribbon
at the newest mass grave. That could be you someday,
‍I said to the baby, pinching his bug-bit cheek.
He looked up at me then, and grabbed my hand
so hard my finger broke. Was it love I felt?

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JULY WESTHALE
Ode to Stepmoms Stuck in Washing Machines 

She would get the flowers herself.
Someone must be in want of a wife.
Someone in want of a fortune must be
in want of being a wife. A green & yellow
bird trapped in a corner yells Allez vous-en!
‍Many years later, she did not reminisce
about the day her father took her to see ice;
it is highly unlikely she ever faced
a firing squad. In her younger and more
vulnerable years, yes, it was her father’s advice
that haunted her. Happy families
may very well all be alike, what does she know.
About flowers, yes. Call her anything
you’d like. To women, all alike in dignity.
A call to the goddess of memory. It was always
the best and worst of all times. When she woke
from her bed, she found herself transformed
into a monstrous vermin. Can she still
get the flowers herself? I should mention
she was sleeping in what once had been
the gymnasium. They’re out there. She’s in here.
It was a queer sultry summer when they executed
her, not by firing squad, but by tedium. What
choice did she have, but to reach inside?

Read our interview with July on the practice of joy through curiosity here.

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by Kazim Ali

            "the soul got to choose. Nothing else
            got to but the soul
            got to choose.”
            -       Brenda Hillman
 
 
I could never make you mythical 
 
Not Demeter who mourned that her son might live half his life in hell after tasting the bliss of the juice bursting from the seeds in his palm
 
Nor Niobe who wept like a stone after losing her sons to beauty and ambition
 
Perhaps I ought to have imagined you as a nameless mother, that of Orpheus who sang such verses to the dead they opened the very gates of hell for him
 
But myth does not do in the nights where it’s you who has gone from this world, flown from your shape into whatever is next
 
We turned the machines off at dusk and commended you to the earth the very next morning
 
At the graveside it was I, the Orphic son, who climbed into the ground to shake your shoulders to remind you it was time to leave this shape of earth to earth, that these forms were your home no longer
 
The verses sung from above were not of my making or my tongue and none from my own mouth came that day or since
 
Did the Greeks know something essential? That even were the soul immortal without the shape that held it close it would wander inaccessible lands forever, that it was the body left behind that would dissolve and rejoin creation
 
That borderless I might lose you to god, the single bright spark of you racing to rejoin some divine Whole
 
It had been dusk, I held your hand, we knew some part of you was gone and yet you lived and breathed
 
All I had were not words but gestures of body: I held your hand, rested on your shoulder, kissed your face, was that you or not you that I turned on your side in the grave, making a pillow of a chunk of earth so you could rest facing that mosque you loved on the other side of planet 
 
Does the soul get to choose? Did Orpheus’s mother know he relinquished women and spent his days drunk with poetry and song?
 
And who was she really, maybe no muse at all, but an ordinary woman, a tomboy from Hyderabad who sang and climbed trees and stole her cousin’s bike to ride around the neighborhood, laughing the whole way?
 
And what angel or devi who slipped a coin under her son’s tongue, cursed him with the knowledge he might reach past the screen separating the lived-in world from the dead?
 
He knew what happened when he looked back—he lost love forever, he was torn limb from limb by a world enraged, that even dismembered his body floated down the river singing those same syllables that moved ghosts to breathe again
 
If it were a myth I could nearly imagine that ragged screen of grief fluttering, somehow hearing a scrap of a voice in the wind, a flutter of wing. Could it all be more than ancient lies? Could it be perhaps now having left the shape of earth behind you are singing to me still
 
But it is not a myth and we are not mythical. 
 
You are you, both enveloped by this earth and gone
 
And I am I, torn asunder and cast adrift, 
no words left in my mouth with which to bewitch the king of the dead

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Read our interview with Poet of the Week, Kazim Ali, in which he discusses genrequeering in literature, writing about death, and the relationship between prayer and poetry. About this, he says:

“I trust poetry more than prayer, at least the traditional way it is thought of and used. Prayer as communication, as description, as observation or ode—all, too, are the provinces of poetry. I always thought prayer was a form of panic—when we are pushed to the edge of what we can process, accept, or react as humans, prayer helps us to stay in the abyss. But couldn’t poetry be a better action in that moment…”

by Andrew Hemmert

be honest with God, he who presumably already knows?
Better to be honest with your postal worker or cashier—
someone who can't call your bluff and therefore the honesty
means something. Honest to Sarah who scans my shopper's card.
Honest to Joe who delivers my bills, which is another
accountability. Yesterday the three half-wild mutts
that always get loose got loose, ran havoc through the neighborhood,
chased the mail truck down the cul-de-sac like archeologists
after the ark. I didn't remember God giving
Moses specific measurements for building it, but he did.
And what was the point of all that gold just to fill the ark
with dust? Honest to God I can only imagine
I would have been one of those at the foot of the mountain,
such little faith—worshipping the calf, then drinking its ashes.

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Read our interview with Poet of the Week, Andrew Hemmert, in which he discusses failure as the engine for change, the idea of God’s voice, and writing about the sublime through the mundane. About this, he says:

“I don’t think there’s a difference between the mundane and the metaphysical. There’s no seam in my poems because there’s no seam in the universe. I’m hardly the first person to say it, but the best way to get at the universal is through the personal. So when I’m cataloging the physical objects that comprise my day, my individual way of being in the world, I’m detailing my relationship with the infinite.”