GUION PRATT 
Poem with misremembered Vermeer

Here is the line
where a colony

of purple-tooth
bracket fungi clashes

against a flank
of false turkey tails

across the surface
of the felled oak

by the creek. Deep
in the heartwood

the war beneath
the war: tendrils

of hyphae test
the border they make

with their bodies
urgent as knees

touching under
a table. Everywhere

I’ve lived already
had a fence

around it when I
moved in. It was never

in question whose property
the spruce tree was

though its branches reached over
to shade the neighbors’

trampoline. They’ve gone
back to Jakarta

until next summer
as they do each fall

but said to come jump
all we want. Said nothing

about the motorcycle
parked in the unlocked

shed. Sometimes, you
want to go somewhere

you can’t go, so you go
home and lie

down. Tonight,
I wanted the wine

in your cup. I mean,
to be it. Most days

what I want
is want, lucky me,

easy to come by
in this life. I want

a painting with good
exits, one

where the gambler hides
the ace behind

his back or the maid
pours milk into

the family bowl,
her eyes fixed

on something just
out of frame.

Homing
by Kate Welsh

An ornithologist tells me that all birds have a keel, a bony protrusion 
from their breastplate on which their wing muscles anchor, 

offering leverage for flight. Keel as in a ship’s first foundation, 
as in what keeps everything righted: stability in the waves, the air, 

in the surprise innate in both. Only recently I came to understand 
that messenger pigeons don’t know how to go anywhere but home.

Taken away from their coop, they orient solely towards what is familiar, 
returning again and again, relentless in their want for what they know.

Not travelers, then; not seekers. Despite their wings: rooted. 
For months last year, I had a new address every week. And now: 

a set nest, my own slippers by the door, a plant I must water.   
On the molting oak outside—my tree, I’ve claimed it—a small crew 

of tiny Odysseuses stop to rest. I welcome them. 

CONAN TAN
Self-Portrait as a Siphonophore


In my next life, I want to be a siphonophore.
Not a small creature by any means but a string
of queer lights. My body
less a body and more the living history of water.
Time passing through me like ghost
blue ripples. Big concepts, big joy, isn’t it?
The real terminology is less
romantic. Scientists would deem me a collection
of working parts. I prefer to think of the siphonophore
as chain and chiaroscuro. An expanse of brushstrokes.
Meaning I’ll have been touched
at least once. I’m trying to transparent
my shame into something beautiful. A depression
worthy of the Louvre. Vermeer deconstructed light
down to its photons and I can’t even
look the mirror in the eye. Four years of therapy
and every session ends with Julian thanking me
for being open, for being. For having
loosened this grief into a galaxy. I deserve
some gold stars by now, I say, and he smiles, grins even, almost
like a friend would. I wonder if the siphonophore
has friends, if it ever feels tired
at its own length. Its colonial weight and constellation.
All the visibility. I wonder if there’s anything
more tired than thinking of the self as fear and feminine
ache. That same night I empty
into bed and dream. I could be more
than the sum of my parts.

LENA RUBIN
Fort Plain

She gives me an electric saw and planks
of pine, and I run long, smooth, slow passes.
She teaches me to keep a strong core,
to hold it between my feet as it revs.
I straddle the machine, an excitable
animal. I take sandpaper to the wood
and even the grain.

The old dog pounces on me.
Flies buzz around him,
circling the scabs on his haunches.
In the painting above the door,
pastel-shaded cloud-sheep
loaf about a blue-green pasture.

I am asking language to do
what it can’t.
To be the handsome figure
who comes from his hidden grotto,
dripping with sea water,
to make love to me.
I batter down his door,
providing nothing in return.

At the demonstration farming
village, a man stacks chunks of
coal into the forge.
He pumps the bellows
and inserts the rough iron
into the fire, which emits
jagged sparks as it is shaped.

He takes a horsehair brush
to burnish the iron clean, his hands
gloved with soot, his heavy apron.
There is no shiny veneer,
no one to sweep me off
my feet. But there is the rough
work. There is the molten core.

NORA SULLIVAN
America, Give Me a New Fighter Jet 

The US military is searching for a missing F-35 in South Carolina after the pilot ejected yesterday and the jet kept flying. If you have seen an F-35 in the woods, please contact the US Marines [at 843-963-3600].
                 --@flightradar24

America, give me a new fighter jet.
Give me every green head in the air. 
I’ll be the swarm. Give me time
in the afterlife to reinvent chaos. 
Give me an afterlife, a swan theory,
a dried duck. Let me bite at the water for scent.
Give me a woman in the back kitchen
pulling silver skin from a rack of ribs
with her hands. Give me the ribs 
cooked and cut. I’ll shake them 
like bells. Give me a child’s thrill
as she rides her bike up and down
suburbia’s beveled curb. Show me 
how far can she get on foot 
after riding over a thick shard of glass 
and popping a tire. 
She stands in front of the tv later,
blood drying scab-tight over her knees
and the cut opens again as she sits.
America, give me an exit hatch,
top gun dreaming, the sky overhead,
the trees like knives, the parachute,
the silk, the how-wait-no-
not-now, the broken radio, the cabin pressure,
the eject button blinking wildly,
the seat springing up
like a cartoon, the pilot hanging in open air
until he realizes the metal plane under him is gone.

I don’t need a job
I need money 
Nobody understands the difference anymore
I went hungry as a child
My shoes worn down
            to holes
               through which 
          the earth became my mother
I don’t need a partner 
I need love
I don’t need freedom
I need room
A room
        small room 
           with walls to beat
       and beat and beat and beat
              against my working body  
       until I am free

What flowers do so well
we struggle to:
with stamen, pistil, petal—
white-ruffled, yellow, wilder—
with style and stigma, 
anther, answer
new to new to new.
Mostly they do 
require, as we do, aid:
with ant or moth
or wind or butterfly,
in place, they orchestrate 
the shift, the yellow freight
of pollen to and fro, 
out of and into.
Using what they’ve made, 
in shape and shade
alive as cloud,	
they draw to them 
what-all of earth and sky
they need to fruit, to seed, 
kin to kin. We gather
ourselves, again.

Lord, when my mind goes,
let me have disposed
of most of my secrets,
let me have used up my lust
in good-natured rutting,
let me have thrown my knives 
at the hay bale, all of them, 
so what comes is, 
if a surprise, not
a terrible or even an insulting one
to whoever I am lucky 
enough to be around

Open not yet the windows. The screens can wait.
Somewhere, soft light is moving through the fields,
the mists, the mud, lying in tender pools.
Let it sit there, undisturbed, like the Lenten rose,
or the crocus, lighting its fires. And don’t
walk onto the ice, where you waited all winter
by the still breath of the fishing hole. The trout
will not answer you, any more than the cardinal,
blinking his hard eye, or the fox kits, blind
in their beds. Look to the deer, soft-footed in snow,
to the thin lines of their bodies. How they go even now
where you cannot follow, passing from one field
to the next, like light under a shade. All is
in motion: the air, the ice, the first shoots spinning
in darkness. Nothing is tame. Trust not the nights.

but yours is where the ache resides, site of a thousand delicate  
harms—soft of a cheek on the soft of a cheek—and hers  
a door upon which you try and try not to knock. Yes,  
remembering hurts, though you won’t indict the jaw, skin  
of the wrist, belly or its button, little hollow where the tongue  
in your mind still dips, conjuring the ghost of a moan from  
the mouth you have ceased to kiss for good. You don’t blame  
the hands, not yours or hers, not the animal they made  
when they touched, all sinew and heat. Type specimen  
and endling. Precious, I’m saying, then extinct. The fault  
is not the shoulder’s, warm or cold. The back is not the culprit,  
even turned. Body is setting, not plot, whether burning or  
burned. It’s the farm you already bought, and now—field sown  
with salt and somehow blooming—you’ll have to live in it.

When you said, Don’t get the wrong idea about me, 
I got so many ideas. The best of them were wrong.
Keats said hold your contradictions. Keats died young.
Maybe you were my contradictions. Maybe I held you.
Maybe we watched the ideas move in murmuration
over the barn. It was autumn. It was spring. The summer
hay was bailed in the loft. It was green. It was gold,
waiting for a winter match. Keats said yes to everything.
He called one cow Beauty and the other Truth.
You let them out while I found the kerosene and poured.
I promised this would be the last wrong idea. You coughed
up a nightingale. Fuck, I said, Keats is taking over this poem,
we’ve got to burn it down. You said yes. So we made love
in the burning barn, while all the ideas cindered and sang.

running the court, directing traffic, crossing over 
his defender and dropping him. He jumps a pass 
because he knows who’s scared to shoot. 
He pushes the pace, and what seems like chaos 
is just speed, what seems like noise is song: choir 
of collision, got-game gospel, heat-check harmony, melodies
that soar. You blink and he’s at the rim. 
You hear damn and ooo, but mostly sounds 
that can’t be spelled—before realizing you gasped too. 
Our language is violent: beast, steal, charge,
cut, hack, bury. Our country was built by these
migrant sons accustomed to sweat, these great-
grandchildren of slaves, those who grind and rebound 
and reach, and him with the crossover 
like a golden spike. A black court with white lines 
to remind us what’s worth what. He jabs, steps back, 
doesn’t even watch as his shot drops. That’s 20,
so you tie your laces. His shadow flickers by, his lava 
orange Kobes barely making a sound. Does it surprise you
that he talks the most trash? That his parents’ names 
are Sharpied on his soles? That opponents call him 
shifty? That he can dunk but never does? That
was game—you got next.

we were there at the slaughter
at the slaughter of Fala 

not all of us are guilty;
someone—not I—held the knife
and someone—not I—gave the order
but there are no innocents among us

some of us were inside the room
some of us were outside the room
some, just there by the door
but we were all in the same house

when Fala’s throat was slashed the blood splashed on us
Konko got it on his lips
Atteke got it on her fingernail
Tono’s throat was hit at the same place Fala’s was slit

Atteke wiped her hand on her skirt
Konko brought out his tongue and licked
and even those who did not see the blood
heard the cries pouring from Fala’s truncated throat

the ones who could stop it would not 
the ones who would stop it could not 
the ones who cared not numbered most of all; 
those who are not guilty must at least be shamefaced

we were there at the slaughter 
and none of our hands is clean

They are letting/not letting me return to Mexico the place that is/isn’t mine
I need to fill out a form to prove/disprove           my trip is/isn’t valid
The goal of immigrant paperwork is/isn’t      to see/unsee what our humanity
is/isn’t worth                If it is/isn’t there                    I will see/unsee my family
who are/aren’t mine                   to find out if my blood is/isn’t
image/flesh I can only see/unsee so many         pixel hands through Facebook
walk lost streets through Google Earth           I will return/leave to this
America where I won’t know               when/if             how/why           where/when
I will be deported            Undocumented/illegal
means my existence is                criminal
I am    a question of morals      un-American    citizen of            distance
Question 1a.:              Purpose of trip.
Answer: How much does my father look/not look like his father?
Answer: I want to hold/hold my grandmother’s hand.

Swimming beneath the swinging bridge
so much is Ozark green—the water's surface,

our necks, my skin beneath your silver.
Face to face we bob, our feet softly kicking

each other. It’s nothing to untie a string. To
let fabric rise and float. Who could see? Everyone

is working but us. We have to make a choice:
Move to the riparian zone, do this under dense 

cover, wrapped in smartweed, poison ivy.
Or brave smooth bank, laid out like a brash snake

heating itself over polished stone. I keep treading
in possibility and this is why I’m with you: you pull me 

by the wrist, through the water, out of options.
Vehicles begin to rattle above us, freeing rough

chert between the steel cables and rotting beams.
I collect the fallen rocks in the concave of my back.

Eyes shut, I could be anywhere; we could be anything.
They could be diamonds. This could be dancing.

But eventually, you are cross-legged on your own
sofa, in your own little apartment, eating
a piece of cake topped with sugared peach
and you’re drenched in the wet orange joy of it.

Every time you touch your fingertips
to your soft pale belly, you realise: you are living. What a dream
you could be wishing for in some other, darker, life:
to be here, now.

Bathtub full of tea, cotton bedspread speckled
with a hundred blue flowers, a thrift store ceramic
planter with a sunlit basil plant forming
itself right before your eyes.

You have come so far
to love your little life so much
that you would not trade a single scar.
Love it so much, that the empty side of the bed
is already full.

In an olive house in Medford 
I breathe in cheap smoke
& flash the mean neighbors 

to show them how big my boobs are.
I tried invisible 
& fell in love with the murmuring man.

He was checking my wiring, 
the light switches set up weirdly.
He borrowed a woman he didn’t know well. 

Shaving his head in the tub 
he had me play 
that song from the talk show, shivering 

like he had a fever 
& some kind of secret 
all bloody I thought it’d died. 

This morning the schoolbus drops me 
from the disco, my eyes glitter
glued shut. 

I eat his name for breakfast 
& look up celestial patterns in the bathroom. 
My hips hurt. 

I sanitize my yoga mat with red wine. 
Mid-meditation I pray to St. Anthony 
for a 100 dollar bill on the floor.

I hotwire a pickup truck & drive to therapy. 
It breaks down 
because it’s older than me. 

It’s near sunset so I leave my body 
to swim in Mystic Lake. 
Two wolves circle the dock. 

I know they are in love 
because if one attacked me, 
the other would get involved. 

The pink sun falls, like glass, into trees. 
In the dark I become something better.
It feels like someone is watching me on TV. 

We have all been in that position
sitting in a circle cheersing 
& everyone is supposed to look at each other 

dead in the eyes 
but someone doesn’t know about that. 
I try to drown. 

I wake up in an unfinished basement
—pool of my own spit 
& ambient music wheezing 

over an intercom 
like ice picks stabbing my eardrums. 
I go upstairs to middle-aged strangers

—a relief to be in a home 
that is not empty. 
The living room couch is the same print 

as my mother’s, a likely place for arrest. 
They feed me raw vegetables 
to reduce the risk of bleeding.

My skin looks really good, 
like leather or plastic.
Everyone is horrified. 

I remember this is a bad place to be. 
I swipe their lime green tricycle. 
I cruise to the Irish pub.

There is nowhere to park. 
Like a sports car I am loud 
in the way people want

but no one recognizes me, 
good because I’m escaping 
& doing crime.

A stringy child sneaks into my booth 
& tickles me,
his face frothy & translucent 

like a cartoon glass of milk.
I braid his hair & ask about 
his favorite things—horses, soup, flamingos.

We watch mildew 
spread above us in slow motion.
He puts chewed gum on his seat to save.

I pocket it.
I give him the tricycle. 
I give him the world. 

The morning world looks pale as old flannel,
and from here inside appears dead silent.
I'm not sure why this should feel like a gift. 
It rouses my inner paganism,
if that's in fact the word I'm looking for.
The stove keeps us warm right through the winter,
even the windows in some small measure,
and so when a flake of snow drifts sidelong
against the glass it dies in the instant.

A pan with ashes to dump in my hand,
I stand unmoving. It feels like a rite.
Outdoors, caught short by the cold, our crab tree
shows fruit that didn't get time to ripen.
I could forge a metaphor if I chose,
memento mori or some kindred thing, 
but I balk at that. It feels too easy.
Just past our ridge lies the long wide river.
Under ice, it rolls right on as ever. 

     Dear god                    once again  waking in a  field
hilts of swords   surrounding me          blindfolded
just kind of casually  tied up.                               again
Kind of  forgot     this happens           to me
             Momentarily  forget  what to do           Scream
but be quiet                                   since  he might still
be there
In the field   of my body    I feel  each of the eight
winds  distinctly          I know where they came from
                  their  grit         the taste of them along the sides
of my tongue                               the song of my stillness
      coming  to me         when  I need it
      My excuse  for each sword                     how it's okay
how he doesn't mean it    how he's actually really trying
     so I hold still


Jesus                       this field again                      how long
                                       have I  been standing here

to a construction worker singing along loudly
with his scratchy little radio, and I am in love
with everything. Even the wasps drinking the rotting fruit
at my feet. Even how each blow from the hammer jolts through me
and my solitude, though what even is solitude
in a world of cellular phones and satellites? I am
thinking the arrays orbiting miles over my head
look like frilled dragons with their neck skin spread out wide signaling
not fear but music. And the construction worker’s music
relies on a simpler signal. Those radio towers
reaching like the hands of fruit harvesters into a heaven
that aspires to, but cannot match, a peach tree in full ripeness
dropping its blushing stars into the mulch. Cannot match
this hope of going on, a stranger hard at work and singing.