MATTHEW NIENOW 
How to Love the Unfinished Dream

There it is again — that
little pop of possibility

sparking in my brain.
It’s an effervescent joy

I can map out fully
in my mind from blue-

prints to the manual.
I have all the tools

even & the know how.
O, what a bit of bare sky

& sun will do
to a winter mood.

It is the purest heaven —
& the only kind

I believe in: brief
& ending the very moment

awareness mounts
the stone staircase

of the mind. It was
good though, wasn’t it?

That little bite of bread
after so long without —

You survive the end of the world in Kayenta, AZ with your mother
by Kinsale Drake

in the Blue Coffee Pot. The waitress sets two tall plastic Coke cups
of water before you both. Today, everyone must be especially
generous to you.

All around: nalis with their tight tsiiyééls and jewels and long velvet skirts
that brush the floor. Your mother says that the turquoise

tear drops are a shield. Never take them off. The women smile
at their grandchildren. They don’t sit with any husbands. You’ve become

attuned again to their little song. Your mother says to you that a plate
of mutton will cure any ailment. You both eat with your hands. You could

have cried. Later, it’s back up to Monument Valley
where the rocks look like women, hushed together. KTNN buzzes:

I wanted to be your everything. The only station for miles. Rock formations
give nothing away. Not everything, you think. Your mother

tells you to use the grease left on your palms to heal your lips. You
smear your fingers across an eye instead. The other. The monuments flicker

and you hum a song about women with straight backs
and eyelashes strung pretty with rain, a song you heard most

while your grandmother still lived
and the roosters rampaged in her yard as she bent

over the fire with cardboard and a poker
and your mother smiled and swayed you on her hip,

looking off, off toward the mountain,
feeding you mutton with her hands.

Rose 
by Kathy Fagan 

The roses are sick but bud anyway on defoliated stems.
They won’t last long.
Only every other button needs to know,
I mean no one does,
as I am alone
and neither hot nor cold
with no corporeal desire except to live in peace.
Murders everywhere.
And though they bloom with abandon this spring 
the poppies are not a symbol because blood is not.
I am trying very hard not
to wish harm on those who profit from others’ losses
as if they held doctorates in money and still don’t know what blood costs. 
The roses were planted with fish heads, 
their eyes surprised by soil as it fell. I turned my eyes away
again and again. To classrooms, bedrooms, galleries, and bone rooms. 
The inscription above the skeleton reads:
I was once what you are and what I am you will also be.
The dead are not a symbol. The roses are not
because our lives are not.

DENISE DUHAMEL
Poem in Which My Speaker Is Bored by My Real Life

My speaker wants to make some big pronouncements, fly
with extended metaphors. She’s disgusted when I toss
the coffee grounds in the trash without even trying
to make an image. Don’t they look like loam,
the crushed beans once whole—yes, crushed and used,
the way I sometimes feel? My speaker wants to know
where the trash ultimately goes. Reminds me
about Thoreau—I can stand as remote from myself
as from another. I have long loved the way the poet
Ai’s name was pronounced “I,” but my speaker is bored—
I have written about this before. My speaker
wants me to be someone else in this poem—Dumbo
or Marilyn Monroe, or catapult back to my younger self,
a little girl wrapped in victimhood or a Superman’s cape
depending on the day. I tell my speaker the old joke
about the naive bride—First the aisle, then the altar.
Then her hymn—I’ll alter him. Hear the “I” in aisle? I ask.
But my speaker is unimpressed. Aye aye aye aye,
I am the Frito Bandito, I used to sing with my sister.
The first “aye” sounded like “I” and then
the next three sounded like they began with a “y.”
A Frito bandito robbed people of their chips
at gunpoint. He was a mascot of our youth. Back then,
we weren’t afraid of banditos or guns. They were just
cartoons. We weren’t outraged by any Mexican stereotypes
as we would be now. I could have never predicted
the gun violence so prevalent in my adulthood,
a recent mass shooting right on the beach
where I walk every day. A 15-year-old boy
who the medics thought was hit in the heart,
his left side torn open by bullets, lived. He had
a congenital condition that placed his heart
on the right side. Can there really be a feel good story
about a mass shooting? I think not. And yet
how giddy I was to hear this. I imagined
the shocked medic wondering at the magic
of this young man still breathing. Brig, a fiction student,
said I could use his image—the fluorescent light of lies.
He meant the ceilings of hospitals and the false promises
of enthusiastic doctors and nurses. He recently lost
his young wife. I, my mother. This boy will live, I told Brig.
This boy will live. The coffee bean unground, become whole
in reverse. This boy’s heart intact. I had walked
the same beach only hours early. I walk it almost every day,
my speaker wanting me to make big pronouncements—
today about violence, but most days about the dying sea.

JARRETT MOSELEY
Couples Therapy

I drive us out the front gate
of your neighborhood, past the stoplight
where, once, I missed
the light turning green
because I had leaned over
to kiss you on the cheek
and in that extra three seconds
a car barreled through the intersection
at speeds high enough to kill us,
and hold your hand
driving toward the generic office park
both of us taking turns
being silent for a year
the same streets and buildings turning
over in our heads as we move them
through us, radio on or off, doesn’t matter
now though mostly off
and in the parking lot we wait
in the Miami summer heat
I try to catch a lizard
scaling a thin dead tree
we take turns crying
for a year, on and off
occasionally holding
the other’s face we believe
if we keep a good grip
it will not disappear.

I made space for the loss by putting away so many others I’d lost count. Most of my friends knew this predicament well. I wasn’t alone in this. I was alone in this. A fairy godmother had told me to hold something back as a secret just for myself. As usual, I took it literally, choosing a locket with no photo inside. At first, I thought I’d fill the cardinal enameled trinket with something—a lock of hair, an image of my love. But the longer I left it empty the less likely it was I’d find just the right thing. I kept thinking, invisible tattoo, boat adrift, permanent roam.

Bathing at night, the hanged man watched me through a crack in the wall.
          Hunted me and touched himself. Just as the hoary bat feasts nocturnally

and tongues the plum of their lover’s vulva. Nothing is more judicious
          than cunnilingus — after yes. Only this was not that. Marooned by the

dark, a voice sang who’s there, stammering. She was no nightingale. Answering,
          the sound of Someone darting through brush, splintering. In the outhouse,

the water poured cold down my back, black cold as the roots of the
          cottonwood dig in the river. Pith of midsummer, even flame can shiver.

After, I could not sleep alone: a couplet of women curled on the floor
          by my bed. Coddled me like a puritan girl on the cloth of an old fever

and cough. As if being stalked can carve a child out of a woman. But I
          was no child. None of us could sleep. Leaving, they wrote me a letter

that said we will miss you. Which was to say, we hope he won’t come back.
          I have no such faith, I have no faith in men. When he came back, he came

dressed in the body of another man, shook off the rag of his skin in the
          bush, singed with a shame that cannot burn out. Under the malignity

of moonlight, dead men make young men tread. By the thorn I swore,
          scarlet in my heart: I sang to Death and Death sang the world to me.

Because the book you made
was not the sum of enough tears
but a bomb I want to be a bomb
so bad but I’m a grocery list instead
with 17 pounds on my bank account
do I have to have money for mascara
to be considered a monarch butterfly?
I promise I too have migrated across
the Great Lakes like the man you love
might migrate across your mouth
filling it with salt - and I love the taste of a man
but you’re not supposed to say it so I poured over
vinegar instead like I was in Hurt Locker
‍trying to cut the right wire trying to
stop the bomb the barrage the artillery the
metaphor and maybe the centre of the bomb
wasn’t shrapnel but a child alternatingly mistaken
for a boy and a girl who refuses to elaborate or
maybe there are bombs in the world that aren’t metaphors that fall on hospitals.

And here in the background hum of empire
I think I’m the bomb that I’m hot shit I’m the
bees fucking knees being fucked on my
knees and it’s all quite funny isn’t it - the tab on your
tongue becoming an alligator when you said woman
and meant something that gets shot out of a gun
and meant you and when you didn’t answer
a text for over a week my heart fluttered to you as a monarch
butterfly look mom I can repeat a metaphor and I cleaned your apartment
which was like after a bomb see mom the English degree paid off and I
tried to make you sleep jaw wired shut on six
pills of Concerta and your heart wasn’t
a butterfly but an engine with a missed oil change shitting blood shitting poetry and
slurring over your triple vodka lemonade that
helped you sleep you said if you want to get into this you’ve
got to let go of definition and I did
three years later somewhere in North Greenwich I came
looking at the London skyline and I finally realised the bomb
wasn’t a heavy thing lodged in your diaphragm
but this here skyline, unfolding

Our phones on the tiny table
like decks of cards
are silenced, but they light, they shake.
We know that they’re thinking.

Billions of years
none of the cosmic issues have been settled.
Water’s still seeking its own level,
the planet needs a few more eons
to figure out what it all comes down to.
On the smaller scale, it’s hesitantly spring,
and the server says No problem, back in a few.

Where we want to be is exactly
where we are,
but there's no way to get there
from here.

Said—All dead things soon. Said—We hair.
Tonight, I have more than I ever had
and still feel loss. Tonight, we blind taste-tested
vodka—France won. The cheapest of the three. 
The Oujia board said—Belief autumn. Said—
Afternoon fairy of foxglove. Said—Forgive magnanimously. 
‍I asked—monogamously? Another article
on how to look younger, how to have the body
of a twenty-something. My brain skinny-dips
in the ocean, has a hot girl summer without leaving
my skull. Magenta child. Otherworldly.
Keep your cigars out of my creativity.
The Ouija board says—Love us
as foolish gods. Says—Late summer fireflies.
‍My goddess, my godliness, we gave our power away.
If the voices in your head still speak to you, make them
show you who they are.

you have to forgive
the snow for its
waking. ideally, you
occupy a land. you
are accommodated. you
are private school
broad, shouldering  
the quiver of a pollen
weighty spring. instead, you
occupy an apartment. you
are a tenant. you
are watching hived frost
slip through unsealed
window slits and sting
your sore thumbs blue. you
are fused to the mud, you
are dodging silverfish.
you are too broke
to buy space heater.

                     this is not the south you were promised:
                     marigolds, big and batwinged
                     off of yam-sun, blushing your neighbors’
                     lawns, taro ichor leaking from your nostrils.
                     it is january seventh, radnor lake grey
                     and heronless. snow webs white the orchid
                     lounge awnings. wind delivers a cold
                     that coagulates your blood to tubers.
                     the city, saltless, shuts down.
                     at the start of the week you bronzed
                     your wrists on bike handles,
                     thanked for shade the copses of trees
                     that keep the barred owls company.
                     you unnotched yourself from the palm
                     long icicles, the rockies’ paleozoic udders
                     that nourished you, in the name of sun
                     gorged skies. but the weather erupts,
                     unravels, unfurls the cartilage keeping
                     magnolia bloom bonded
                     to otherwise unimpressive bark.
                     This will be the most docile winter
                     of the rest of your life.
                     Soon, your grease sweet scalp
                     will gulp a warm hibernal rain.

I am okay
at writing poems about love,
but bad at actually loving.
Okay at walking through the rain
and thinking that each drop upon my skin
is like a tiny burst of love
but bad at actually loving.
Okay at basketball
and knowing the names of trees,
but bad at actually loving.
Okay at offering
advice to my friends about love,
or preparing a meal with love,
or being aware of the fact
that I am being bad at love
while I am being bad at it,
but bad at actually loving.
Okay at mythologizing and regurgitating
memories of love years later,
but bad at actually loving.
Okay at loving you
when you’ve fallen asleep in my arms
and I run my fingers through your hair
and feel your steady,
peaceful breathing
and my one job is to lie still
so as not to wake you.
Okay at loving you
in those narrow moments,
but I always wake you up
in the end by accident
by turning the pages of my book
or adjusting the pillow
or reaching over
to turn off the lamp—
and in the sphere of that silence
there is no greater crime
than disrupting your steady,
peaceful breathing. So I turn
to my attorney, who is a giant
praying mantis.
He explains the plea deal
the court of insects is offering:
one half of the rest
of whatever forever turns out to be.
Just a half, he says, nudging me.
In that moment, his expertise
is palpable. This
is a praying mantis
who has honed his knowledge and skill
through long, earnest hours of training.
He understands the legal process
and he is gazing at it calmly,
hoping I will be reasonable.
But what also
becomes terrifyingly palpable
is my realization that such expertise
can be so powerful and self-sustaining
it ceases to reflect reality.
I open my mouth
to explain myself,
but as I do my attorney
kisses me, and I am filled with green light.

Heartbeat or rainfall, will or whirlwind, kismet or chaos?
Lovers claim kismet wed them, but more love means more chaos.

‘What’s the secret ingredient of your ghazals, Amit?’
Rhyme is the chaos I use to make kismet.

She greets me with a meteor-strike
Kiss on either cheek. Bonjour, chaos!

The world is baking. Why fire clay in a kiln of form?
Beauty seeds a nostalgic naked ache in kismet.

Eros fires arrows, kismet, heart-seeking missiles
That burn up fools for fuel. At the warhead’s core? Chaos.

My sweet tooth hankers for whirlwind icing.
Birthday, doomsday, Thursday: layercake kismet.

Enough with catastrophe’s kissing cousin.
If this is kismet, I am all for chaos.

I plan the same mistake twice: Here, lightning!
Love doesn’t have the wisdom to ignore kismet.

The science of oops, the art of ricochet.
Not every cause has an effect. Take chaos.

The revolution looks like riots in the footage,
But the heart will dance through fire to restore kismet.

I’m sleep deprived. My mind is a wideawake chaos.
A true Sufi waves as he waterskis Lake Chaos.

One glance at the language, and Amit can’t control himself.
Through rhyme’s schematic chaos, at least he can force kismet.

write what you know: I know cicadas
swallowed by smoke. horizon choked by car
exhaust, bitter raincloud. butterfly
wings, halved by the heat

and highways. lullaby in grasses straining
to hush the uproar from the waterside. I know from
Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Miwok, Chumash
relatives: fire licks the carcass

clean. moss and acorns soothe a blaze’s hungry
belly, whet her all-consuming eyeteeth,
welcome slumber when she is satisfied. beneath the milkweed
root, cactus rot: alkaline kaleidoscope,

world of new bones. each layer of life-giving
a heavy clot ready for bloom. I thumb parched bark
from the pine in my backyard. shed the years
she has thirsted in this drought.

upstate, the Klamath boils away beneath
a muddy sun. suffocated by the lake’s severed
body, suckerfish skim the surface. their stiff enamel
eyes dried up on arroyo

bank. all that remains: deboned
ecosystem, corpse-black wash
of trees divvied in 1906 to quench greedy
soil, avocado trees, greenery too lush  

for desert-scape. oh, let her burn softly.
let the lake regain her scattered limbs. there is sweetness
in the scorching. gentle unshelling. let those who have known
this place reach the clear water

and drink

99 Cent Dreams, I wanted to buy you,
I wanted to buy America, really, hold everything
plastic and star-spangled in my starfish hands,
rows of dehydrated nail polish: garish, dried like
a mud flat, like a side effect, color of the soul of a clown,
color of my escape route to mainstream happiness.
What’s funny is, it’s all junk, but only
once you cross the threshold of the glaucoma
gates. It’s the only gold you know
when nose deep in a pile of blonde Barbies,
their sun-stained boxes, exoskeleton of a metallic
balloon family, papered poinsettias in mid-February,
foam pool noodles like discarded bucatini…
the most painful tragedy on my radar: a valentine,
crushed up blue jolly rancher, those zip off shorts.
My grandmother liked to say the best dreams are
made from water, in a landlocked town she put
sliced watermelon in a plastic bag, she put toasted
almonds in a plastic bag, she put jewels
in a flimsy case and flew across two oceans, actually
three – actually, dreaming runs in the family, but what
did I know of other lifetimes that could possibly hold me?
Could only understand: graveyard, treasure trove, half-eroded
dollar bills so soft like tissue paper… small town millionaire,
I wanted to buy and buy everything and then forget
about my riches by the time I woke up on Monday morning.

I’ve never given blood, but I’ve donated hours
to strangers as an ear for trauma.

Isn’t the adage:
Blame others before interrogating thyself?

I eat a bowl of Lucky Charms
to stay in touch with my Irish heritage.
‍
Listen to Cat Stevens
to better understand Islam.

At university I learned
the “Book of Revelation” is Science Fiction,

which translated into Latin means,
Liberal Arts is the work of the Devil.

The only way to truly know any story
is to take a minor character out for beers.
‍
Some days I question my morning hit
of serotonin.

Other days I buy a lotto ticket
and sit next to a well of unfulfilled wishes.

It’s easy to fall in love with an idea
after reading 20 pages of self-help.
‍
More difficult to prostrate at the feet
of uncertainty. What I mean to say is,

before you walk a mile in someone else’s shoes,
make sure they fit.

         Do you dream of losing         do you dream of the harm
to our children
          Most people don’t like to think about the
harm to our children though most people helped cover up the
harm to our children

          No amount of naps takes away the
harm to our children       no amount of precision-engineered positive outcomes
takes away the harm

to our children
          Do the children dream of the harm

to our children do the children dream
of sleep

Butter on bread, your smile. Spread across your cheeks
Like clean sheets over the bed, minutes after my favorite
Meal of the day. (Did I just say that? To make you laugh?)

It’s true. I love the way you move. Beneath my mouth,
A billow. Clothesline laundry in the wind, the yard
We don’t yet have. Enough sex to make you happy.

If desire isn’t dirty, then at least admit we make a mess.
Skin, a surface like any other. So tell me, lover. How to feel
At home in a house that’s not in order? Because when

My body’s song runs dry, its echoes ring all over.
Every spill, an accident. Another blemish on the counter,
That mirror of my filth. But you. Live with hunger

Like it’s meant to happen. Are unafraid of unwashed
Dishes, their fairytale tower in the sink. So. Tell me
A story about delight. I want to know what’s next.

after Ada Limón

Sometimes I like to be a little dramatic,
thinking I would learn how to use these legs like
digits in a typewriter, so unlike the roots of a tree.
I haven’t forgotten that you said there are so many
stories to use, staring up from the bottom of a pool
somewhere in France. I thought about lust –
the desire of life to repeat more life, to be a seashell
to the universe’s body, the same blood forming an ocean
in the aural, looming into a past that felt mostly like
a baggage claim center, an old stolen metaphor.
And so I pick a suitcase. Carry it with me to the
end of the garden, where I try to imprint the
biotope into the poem. My birds and my bees.
And I’m twenty-five now, excited and terrified
of all the things that grow, me included.
I heard the biggest forest on the isles is in Scotland,
but I’m not sure there are any forests here at all.
Those dark living things. As a child, with my father
we visited the cashew of Pirangi, wide like a map.
I remember it was cool underneath, like a city but better.
And it means something to my father that I am here –
yet another hop, a confirmation bias for nomadic nature but
I still feel like that doesn’t explain it. Like I would
have done it anyway, if for no other reason than
to do it. Whatever happens happens. The growth no
longer hampered by sunlight or a perfect state.
Not because of, but despite.

There was light, the fake kind, the kind that always looks like it just chipped a tooth. There was a cigarette, maybe two, though it’s hard to count when your heart beats in multiples of hummingbird. I can’t figure out how much of my heart is fiction, but you haven’t tasted depressed in weeks, so I’m not worried about the spider climbing across the bedroom ceiling. Nine years later I watch you get dressed for tomorrow two hours early. Our bodies, older than we both remember—softer, achingly quiet, loose buttons on a flannel—though the sheets still smell the same, and the sweat on your neck is still my favorite drink to order at the bar. Nine years later and I am drawn back to the weather of ache. What they don’t teach you in college is that every house is haunted if someone fell in love in it. I could walk through a wall but where would I go? It is hard to say goodbye to what was already a goodbye. It took too long for me to learn that if you pour a beer into the ocean, it will become the ocean. When was the last time the moon was given a bath? My left hand is drunk. I wish magic was cheaper. Still, I am covered in clouds. Come see.