[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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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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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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Theory of Violence
by Cydni Thompson

Tell you what, melancholy. 
Eat lunch. Stop spitting.

The situation outside 
demands your hardiest 
pants. Concrete is hazardous. 

Grannies walk to work without moving.

I sipped lemonade during 
the active shooter threat at
Roosevelt Field Mall™. I was very cool

about my fear. The day
you don't die, someone
else will. How's that

for your fair weather prediction?

Truth is, you only get free
espresso if you buy a Michael Kors
clutch at Macy's. And

on your phone, a dove
teaches better ways to sing.
Open your mouth wider.

Stop thinking about the show.

When it ends, critics will say
your pensive sadness was sexy.

Then they'll finish dinner. Be
grateful. There are kids out there,
surviving
on the starch of a word.

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on space and the space in between
by Sloan Asakura

she is only 238,900 miles away, which is a distance almost too close to differentiate from the hollows of my body. she’s stitching time into memory, the nerves in their spines cheering, unspooling their screams from their ears, wiping their red hands on their white shirts and pretending the smell of copper is preferred. she keeps telling the stories. i keep listening to them, despite everything else i hear which is this:

pay attention: every once in a while, the threads of the sun, the moons, and other great bodies of the universe, split open the heavens to the eye of man in sharp applause. and man watches from the window as light widens its palm around the frame, simultaneously awed and frightened, faithful witness to everything they can’t see. 

telescopes upturned, man seeks the secrets of gravity and color. it comes to them as dreams they don’t recognize as fact so they keep looking all their lives. and the aurora borealis is real but is best seen on long exposure shots and man doesn’t recognize this as a secret of color, only light and time. meanwhile, gravity is not at all a pull but a release, or perhaps instead it should be, which is half of its secret. 

when charon split in half, man chalked it up to ice and expansion and not the scream pluto let out when charon said he wanted to leave. charon’s violent orbit is startling to witness because no one’s used to seeing the dead move, especially this quickly, but indeed if we were pluto, we might be happy to swing some pile of bones around our heads like a lasso to catch shadow even if we can’t because it’s everywhere.

visible to the unaided eye is venus as it might be seen from the moon it doesn’t have, its atmosphere occasionally parting and rolling out a white lullaby muffled by the vacuum of space so it sounds like a whisper pitched through gritted teeth. man sends a satellite to record the song and chalks the eerie tune up to the pitfalls of the western ear, as if venus hasn’t turned her face into her ribcage looking for more poison to kill herself with.

man makes the metaphors and symbols, venus as desire, apparently all kinds. and the equation is man plus desire, any kind, equates to depravity and therefore violence but i’m not so sure this is a secret, but more an inevitability like god.

i’d like to hang up now, but six hours in and things are finally getting interesting as suddenly all sentences start with but what could i have done—then, she’s telling the stories again, sulfur spilling out from the seams indicating the stitches were never pulled tight—time is weeping and memory is dead and sharing a body, it’s only a matter of time before— i’m hearing things again. 

man tells me to disguise the self inside some metaphors so as to write the poem before she dies, but what do we ultimately lose? time’s as far off as the moon.

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ISLE OF LIFE
by Matthew Buxton

                    Arnold Böcklin, 1888, oil on canvas

Just after I asked you to marry me, I wanted to crystallize 
each sensory detail before they were compressed into PNGs
of memory, or legend—Time levelled to image: a hotdog
in Christmas-red foil, Spanish climbers swaying in the line
beneath the towering phallus of Expressionism pricking a sky
blue with its modest cross, sour salt in cold air, trap music blasting 
from a government building, the tourist standing dead center 
in the camera’s focal point. Our photographer said he’d Photoshop
the people around us out. Erasure is a strange violence.
As is all. When the doctored image was returned in water-
mark with a spindly AI-generated palm tree at the right edge
of November in Reykjavík, I knew we were doomed. We knew
the glaciers would be extinct in forty years. I took a photo
of them dying. The photographer was taking a photo of us
dying. I said something corny about gravity, and that I felt like 
I was happening to the world for the first time. With you. You said, 
yes. Asked if I had hired people to cheer. That you felt more 
physically aware of the world: saw rocks, the poet’s prayer 
engraved in the stone base of the church, mud under ice under 
a playground, the yellow-beaked gulls perched on an island
of ice in the pond—so still they looked frozen in sunset’s
paint. The swans swam up to our ankles, honking like begging 
gods, tangled black seaweed of legs. The photographer squatted 
down, looked in their eyes, said, “I have nothing for you today.” 

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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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