DUNYA MIKHAIL
The End of the World

For Lori, who says “everything is happening now”

Everything is telling me
it’s the end of the world:
the astrologers,
the deadly new viruses,
the ozone layer,
the ant cavorting with the grasshopper,
the wars,
and his message, cold and curt.
But other things change my mind:
the clouds that always know their way,
the seashell that hasn’t quite disclosed all,
the wishes tossed with coins in the fountain,
and the flower, waiting to happen.

Believer
by Andy Chen

Weathervane of infinite angels, smoke sharpens the air. Below you, I’m supposed to be home. Slate shingles, flagstone. Flag that tells a country its folklore. Long ago songs blooming in gusts. Gutter giving space for a nest. Greenery crown, moss as soft as it looks. Moths—Hairstreak, Antler, Pale Grass Blue—I relish your applause. Weathervane winged. Light on bronze, arrow survived. Sometimes I blink and can’t believe it. A new web, sparked with dew. Horizon: I love how you withhold. Surface: how the pebble breaks you. Cicadas: the parting in your song. Stars: that your light leaves the night unseen.

KIM ADDONIZIO
To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall

If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for someone you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
I'm Over the Moon

I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do.
Confuse me, ovulate me,

spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient
date-rape drug. So I’ll howl at you, moon,

I’m angry. I’ll take back the night. Using me to
swoon at your questionable light,

you had me chasing you,
the world’s worst lover, over and over

hoping for a mirror, a whisper, insight.
But you disappear for nights on end

with all my erotic mysteries
and my entire unconscious mind.

How long do I try to get water from a stone?
It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

Better off alone. I’m going to write hard
and fast into you, moon, face-fucking.

Something you wouldn’t understand.
You with no swampy sexual

promise but what we glue onto you.
That’s not real. You have no begging

cunt. No panties ripped off and the crotch
sucked. No lacerating spasms

sending electrical sparks through the toes.
Stars have those.

What do you have? You’re a tool, moon.
Now, noon. There’s a hero.

The obvious sun, no bullshit, the enemy
of poets and lovers, sleepers and creatures.

But my lovers have never been able to read
my mind. I’ve had to learn to be direct.

It’s hard to learn that, hard to do.
The sun is worth ten of you.

You don’t hold a candle
to that complexity, that solid craze.

Like an animal carcass on the road at night,
picked at by crows,

taunting walkers and drivers. Your face
regularly sliced up by the moving

frames of car windows. Your light is drawn,
quartered, your dreams are stolen.

You change shape and turn away,
letting night solve all night’s problems alone.

Sometimes I tell a man I’m undecided about children 
to seem more like someone 
he would have children with.
I’ve never been one of those women, I say, 
shrugging in the dim heat of the platform. 
Then the train arrives, rearranging our hair with a wet sigh, 
the tail of the thought its own internal weather. 
The thing is, I want him to imagine me a mother, 
a reluctant one, surprised 
at the moon of my belly. 
Have you ever had a man tell you, I want to put a baby in you? 
Have you felt the ripple of his mouth 
giving you what he thought you wanted? 
These days, I’m trying to be more like water. 
Water isn’t afraid. It doesn’t hesitate. It carries 
anything. But all I know of love is that distance 
is kind. And all I know of mothering 
I learned from my mother, 
just like anyone else. 

See here on the ultrasound,
that thing that looks like a comma?
It will separate the elements
in a series. I can't believe we're even
having this conversation to begin with. 

The womb's a fine and private place,
or am I thinking of a doughnut?
You ask me, the hippies still have
a lot to answer for. But no one
ever asks me. I smell pasta.

I was a nurse during the war. 
The soldiers in their dying pleaded,
"Can you get one of the other nurses?"
I know what no duck knows. 
Tomorrow is Thursday. 

Come, Lord Jesus,
let us not bandy words. 
I too have followed the Dead.
I saw you and the devil talking. 
Tell me, bluntly, what he said.
Weren't you just a little tempted?

Nothing ever comes back. Not
the wave to the sea.
Not the syrup to the seashell.
But there’s nothing wrong with
a blue exploding star becoming the mind drifting
off through the description
of someone else’s surgery only to wake
with a new speculum sewn inside, impalas
in the pantry and a votive flicker
for a best friend. Poetry often affects a reader in
odd ways. If you watch a bee
close enough you might see it singing to
itself with no intention whatsoever of
suicide. But things happen.
They wouldn’t be things if they didn’t.
And not always fluffy floaty things.
Just because there’s no right answer doesn’t
mean you’re not wrong.
The sharpness of any knife is mostly
inclination. Wild hypnagogic berries grow
by the shore where desolate angels
may pour foundations, and demons design
the curriculum, and anyone who doesn’t know
they’re at the beck of strange mighty forces isn’t
eating in the same restaurants I am.
Watch yourself. This ain’t the shallow end.

Do you know about the blanket octopus? If we met while I had cancer, I made you watch the video. Among us somewhere in the galactic black. First, pale in the cruel beam of the submersible, her head glows bulbous, like blown glass—then wings swoop out to drop the shimmering mantle: falling silk, slow-motion arabesque in spectral pastel—can you believe this?—like a hex cast, or a chant sung through the gloom. Trailing yards of filmy gossamer, a bubble’s swirling membrane. Wielding, as weapons, as whips, tentacles ripped from a Portuguese Man O’ War. Think of that. Hovering like a Venusian spacecraft. How can I begin to say what it meant to me? That I had gone so long without knowing. That she was not washed ashore somewhere, deflated, gelatinous, a wet plastic bag—not this one—but soaring, a living aurora. And here on Earth, where I slept and vomited. That childhood’s magic rippled, rare and luminous, through that footage. Lighting my cadaverous face. This morning, in remission, I woke from the vision I had memorized, then forgotten, knowing I might choose it, if I could, as my last: actual alien, actual angel, the color of sunrise, of morphine, dream worlds, melting absinthe, orchids, lip gloss, innards, gumdrops, moonstones, oil slicks: this nebula warping through the infinite underworld—a kind of breathing, a kind of weeping—flung untouchable satin, seraphic, labial, ethereal. Just to live to see you, 
O phantom, O weird mysterium—it’s enough.

Compose yourself with a cat in your lap like 
a stopped escalator. The cat’s there
for connection to the living creatures of this planet, the 
simile connection to everything else,
the very thing your mother warned you about
but you’re going to have to do most of the heavy lifting yourself

and in that way it is like falling in love
and other maladies. Reports vary but everyone
is squished by at least 800,000 kilos of earthly burden like the 
squinched face at the bottom of the totem pole
when what you want is to be on top, wings 
coming from your forehead, upright worm 
that you are, quite a view.
A drink never hurt, the more flammable the 
better, a vocabulary of flames often comes 
in handy. Holy sword raised up,
acid reflux, too long in the sun. I 
believe it is time we stand up.
Orthostatic hypotension is the phrase for when you black out,
Hypotaxis for how modifiers wander off,
Ectoplasmic, wall-eyed, veering to the left.

You may have to take yourself apart. Really 
get some dirt in your nose.
Now stork-like lift one foot.
Balance. Let the mind assert its blank. Don’t 
quit. Now lift the other.

He’s supposed to call his doctor, but for now he’s the May King with his own maypole.
He’s hallelujah. He’s glory hole. The world has more women than he can shake a stick
at. The world is his brickbat, no conscience to prick at, all of us Germans he can ich
liebe dich at. He’s Dick and Jane. He’s Citizen Kane. He’s Bob Dole.
He’s Peter the Great. He’s a tsar. He’s a clown car with an extra car.
Funiculì, Funiculà. He’s an organ donor. He works pro boner. He’s folderol.
He’s fiddlesticks. He’s the light left on at Motel 6. He’s free-for-alls.
He’s Viagra Falls. He’s bangers and mash. He’s balderdash. He’s a wanker.
He’s got his own anchor. He’s whack-a-doodle. King Canoodle. He’s a pirate, Long John
Silver, walking his own plank. He has science to thank. He’s in like Flynn. He’s Gunga Din,
holding his breath, cock of the walk through the valley of the shadow of death. He’s Icarus,
hickory dickerous, the mouse run up the clock. He’s shock and awe. He’s Arkansas.
He’s the package, the deal, the Good Housekeeping Seal. He’s Johnson & Johnson.
He’s a god now, the talk of the town. He’s got no place to go but down.

tell them just because they can’t hear the moon 
doesn’t mean it’s not screaming.
Tell them it’s just like being attacked
by a murderous lunatic in your own bathroom mirror or by 
your own jewelry or toothbrush or taco
or panthers, entirely in-the-mind panthers.
It’s like being handed a key
and it drops right through your open palm. Every 
30 seconds another wing goes missing. Every 10 
a breathing machine’s turned off.
Anyone who’s tried to write a poem gets exposed to 
some mighty whichway winds.
Everything is made of jumps. 
The sentence is always Life,
crepuscular hatchling fallen into the hand 
like one of your own organs,
weird stuff coming in the mail,
creepy bouncy eyeball, Neptunian quartz, once a 
broken cobwebby crypt-smelling music box from 
the unknown.
Maybe the unknown still loves me. Maybe 
it wants me dead.
A horse comes halfway out. 
The ballerina has no legs. 
Most of what we’re made of 
comes from outer space and 
wants to get back there.
A banana is a berry, a loofah
a gourd, the strongest glue on earth
is made by a whelk. Just try to introvert the 
ambulance. Try to get some nerve. Spiders, 
scientists tell us, could eat
the entire human race in less than a week, should 
they ever get in the mood.
Yellow mood of Van Gogh’s poison. 
Numbered mood of a tax return.
Here, I made a list. A neon larva
twists itself into a pupa from a single silken mood.
The soul is fletched. The soul is dashed 
across the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Is 
reality just a failure of the imagination? 
That’s not what the dandelion thinks 
breaking through the asphalt. Not what the 
sprinkles on your cupcake signal.
Sometimes pressure creates electricity but 
we always risk dust
in the confetti factory of the ant farm of consciousness.
People always try to turn me off
whenever I mention the Ant Farm of Consciousness, 
capitalized or not, but if my mother
couldn’t find that switch, good luck. Ecstasy 
is willingness.
I dare you to find a river any other way. I 
dare you to breathe.
Some cries never reach us even 
though they’re our own. The 
best endings are abrupt.

Why after all this one and not the rest?
Why this specific self, not in a nest,
but a house? Sewn up not in scales, but skin?
Not topped off by a leaf, but by a face?
Why on earth now, on Tuesday of all days,
and why on earth, pinned down by this star’s pin?
In spite of years of my not being here?
In spite of seas of all these dates and fates,
these cells, celestials and coelenterates?
What is it really that made me appear
neither an inch nor half a globe too far,
neither a minute nor aeons too early?
What made me fill myself with me so squarely?
Why am I staring now into the dark
and muttering this unending monologue
just like the growling thing we call a dog?

The day comes in strips of yellow glass over trees.
 
When I tell you the day is a poem
I’m only talking to you and only the sky is listening.
 
The sky is listening; the sky is as hopeful
as I am walking into the pomegranate seeds
of the wind that whips up the seawall.
 
If you want the poem to take on everything,
walk into a hackberry tree,
then walk out beyond the seawall.
 
I’m not far from a room where Van Gogh
was a patient—his head on a pillow hearing
the mistral careen off the seawall,
 
hearing the fauvist leaves pelt
the sarcophagi. Here and now
 
the air of the tepidarium kissed my jaw
and pigeons ghosting in the blue loved me
 
for a second, before the wind
broke branches and guttered into the river.
 
What questions can I ask you?
How will the sky answer the wind?
 
The dawn isn’t heartbreaking.
The world isn’t full of love.

Today the pleasures are too numerous to name.
Walking over the bridge and up the drive
to get the mail, then setting down the packages
to open by the front door, a fat swath of sun
falling against my arm as I open a box
of two slim volumes of poems, then a box
with blue ink refills for my favorite pen,
one that glides so nicely across the pages
of my grief. All this, I think all this, and also
the broccoli soup I made with bone broth
from last month’s turkey, blended to a creamy green.
Yes, the world is falling down, death taking
a stroll down every street. And yes, it’s getting hotter
by the hour. And still, today the wind
has quieted and the dogs next door announce
their gods, who, so far, keep lifting the sun
and letting down (just enough) rain.

	You ask us for peace, we get shot in the face
		—Minnesota Governor Tim Walz

It happened again:
a masked man 

loses a bullet 
in another man’s head.

It’s so careless to misplace 
something so small

it contains two
Americas inside. 

They say the bullet 
will never be found.

But we all know
where it is. I discovered

a shard embedded
in my grandson who

won’t go upstairs 
to the bathroom alone. 

A classmate was taken
from school by a man 

in olive drabs wearing a mask. 
I excavate another fragment 

the shape of a boy
in a blue bunny hat

from my arm.
A third I found in comments 

under a YouTube video. The fucker
had it coming, it said.

He meant the head.
The blood of a man

stains the icy streets of another US city.
On TV, a cad in military dress greens—

whose sidearm is sheathed
in a spit-shined leather holster—

says the bullet won’t
be missed.

I am shaking the fruit loops onto the bed.
I am reading a hastily annotated To the Lighthouse
intending to finish. I am Friday nighting

which means I am listening at the window
and running a bath. Outside, everyone is screaming
on their way to the bar. 

Whoever read this book before me wrote what?! 
in all the margins—I text a photo to my uncle 

who had been similarly mystified; in turn, 
he sends me a eulogy to edit for his friend 
who hung himself last Wednesday. 

In a postscript, he explains, “Amongst isn’t used correctly,
I think, but I don’t want to say despite or bound by…”

The pipes make a sound like a cosmic bowling alley.
Between the bath and the book, I make of myself 
an island on a sea of other people’s lives.

I read up to when Mr. Ramsay stalls on Q, 
the same passage that infuriated my uncle.
“Is he a dumbass?” is scrawled at the bottom of the page—

it’s like falling through a fishing hole into someone else’s brain!
Or having one foot in a rowboat moving definitely away from shore!

I realize the bath is a conduit and not an island or
the island is both a conduit and a private party.
This is what they mean when they say collective consciousness. 

I edit the eulogy.
I leave amongst alone.

That night, my dreams are like a long scene from a Kurosawa film
in which two samurai gallop from one end of the frame
to the other in a dense mist, never quite vanishing.

In the movie, just before the galloping scene, 
the samurai meet the white spirit. She delivers the prophecy;
a procession of men form and unravel. 

There are multiple timelines going at once. 
Everything gets muddled—laughter leaks in through the window,
I can’t find my horse, my email, my lighthouse. 

Strange is the world, the spirit howls, laughing.  
She is either turning a small wheel with a stick
or knitting an endless stocking for the newly dead.
She seems to be saying, life is a tale told by an idiot, etc. 

I think my uncle was talking about, or amongst, 
the freedom of knowing almost nothing.

In the end everyone suffered and then died—
in the book, in the movie, in the eulogy. 

The spirit said:

Oh, 
Fascinating.

Dogs barking do you hear me do you hear me yes I do
the abridged version, sun having shone all day on their chains.
Late-lunch squirrels lathing loquats
with their buck front teeth and carrots

disappearing from the community garden for seasonal soups
no one likes to eat, least of all me. Unless there is good country bread
of course, and there is, often,
even if there’s little else in the house
to have. Simple black tea or green or white or green

beans and garlic. Mondays monkfish. Cheese and apples from the market
stalls selling ponytails of sage and premium coffee
we can’t afford and sometimes splurge on.
Your lipstick drying on a porcelain cup

by a line of  bruised apples. A free concert of insects singing
when the light withdraws and the air is cooler
and we prop the screen door open to the world and the boundary
that was false and never there is proved not there

between us or anything. You me the half-concealed palm out back
we fucked against once when our landlords were away,
and which no one owns or ever has, least of all
landlords, who even when they do can’t own a tree

If you were a pipe in a house 
burning down, if you were the water 
in the pipe, if you were the man 
standing outside in his pajama bottoms, 
holding your infant daughter in one arm,
your mother's urn in the other 
to keep her from being lost 
among the ashes of window sills
and joists, some of which fall 
like snow at your feet,
if you were the blanket 
slipped over the man's shoulders,
his only home in that moment,
if you were the warmth of one hand 
and then another on his back,
leading him away, if you were the moon 
doing its job above the fire,
pulling at oceans and imaginations,
if you were the fire fighter 
who saw a wolf in the flames,
saw it turn three times 
as if beckoning, and followed,
and were never heard from again 
not a word or bone from your body,
if the silence of the shadow of a life 
is all we have, all we leave 
if being has no skeleton,
if autopsies are dissections 
of zeroes, if your lips 
were cicadas against my ear,
if your teeth found their way 
to my heart, the red meal of love,
if you had wings, if Icarus called
from the sun, if Sisyphus said,
try again.

your uterus rots at the hospital dump.
the keys on the dresser spread like legs.

the boots by the bed are a ghost town.
you wear this rental house, the government 

of its bones, like a good foreigner. 
not just because it's july and the south,

because all is dust and fevered crickets,
you feel sifted. love is a scratched-out ticket,

a ship the dock awaits. a flock of gulls 
settling down in their dirty wedding gowns.

a mouse shrunk into a bloated blueberry. 
as the morning, doubled-over and thirsty,

enters the kitchen—that stateless space,
light as the jackboot hollowing your throat. 

All day with nothing on my mind, the soft old couch,
the heating pad, a book of Tennessee Williams’s letters,
tea, camembert, beer, soup, dozing, speaking in tongues
off in my drowsing mind, invoking this or that god, thinking
of raising my fortunes, thinking of all of this swimming forward
without me someday, this bag of small wishes, the greatest
sorrows indelible and indistinct in the afternoon’s haze:
I cannot remember who said that our salvation must come
from a turn within our own nature and that there are no turns
and there is no nature. Oh, it was so dark inside the wolf said
the little girl with the basket after the hunters had killed
that beast who had eaten her, after they had cut him open to
let her out, although you don’t hear that version so often anymore.
Surely this is significant. Who hasn’t lodged in the belly
of something, who hasn’t been devoured? Do you remember?
Maybe it is something for you like an old tune that haunts you,
that makes you so suddenly sad when you see a place where
the carpet is coming up or where the screen door is sagging
on a desperate hinge. Unbearable, this material music dissipating
the neighborhood around you into nothing. How does one rise
from this torpor and say, I don’t know what to do anymore?
Outside the trees have sneaked above the line of the neighbor’s
wall. How did I not notice? They make a tiny forest along
our city driveway. They are as dark and deep as it gets here.
I am still trying to rise up from the loveliness of dying objects
into the loveliness of whatever it is they point to. I’m trying
to get at just how things are, to adjust to that, but then I start
shaking. Isn’t that how it is with you? It was so dark inside,
but that’s not the whole story. They are leaving something out.
I can feel it in the sleepless night when I run my hands over
the openings in doorways. I can feel it when my own heart
delivers all my secrets to my enemies. I can feel it when
the poem doesn’t turn, but heads for the bottom with a hook
in its mouth or when the sky runs to the color of tin and
the sparrows disguise themselves as leaves in the hedge waiting
for their moment. Isn’t that how it is with you?