The Road to Desire is However Many Doves
by Ellie Laabs

When we drove off that day, the sky 
was waning and the chickens of the heart 
had just come home to roost. For weeks, 
I ran my hands under water until my skin 
became the space where gravel used to be. 
All night, the darkness wove in spruce and howl. 
My gut splintered like a walking stick. After 
the gold rush, any narrative of servitude is easier 
than the truth. These days, I try to love less
like a maid. My solace lets its fingers out far—
the sigh of stallions in their pen, the scent
of pent-up longing. When you hold my hair 
in your hands, I picture the real world. 
Something golden and burning. 

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Look
by Laura Kasischke

Look! I bear into this room a platter piled high with the rage my 
mother felt toward my father! Yes, it's diamonds now. It's pearls, 
public humiliation, an angry dime-store clerk, a man passed out at the 
train station, a girl at the bookstore determined to read every fucking 
magazine on this shelf for free. They tell us that most of the billions
of worlds beyond ours are simply desolate oceanless forfeits in space. 
But logic tells us there must be operas, there have to be car accidents 
cloaked in that fog. Down here, God just spit on a rock, and it became 
a geologist. God punched a hole in the drywall on earth and pulled
out of that darkness another god. She—

just kept her thoughts to herself. She just—

followed him around the house, and every time he turned a light on,
she turned it off.

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First published in Poetry (October 2006).

Nine minutes and 49 seconds with Ludwig van Beethoven
by Paul Brucker

I wish to send you news of me today.
But, then, I think, by doing so,
I would be trying too hard to make myself important
to you again, 
after these 30 years.
It’s best to let the past enjoy its life in the past.
Yet, how often I wish to have people such as you
about me. 

I live far away from nearly everybody
whom I love or could love.
My best friends have not heard from me for years,
especially if we had a row.

If I think I’ve been mistreated and feel hurt, 
nothing can convince me I’m wrong. 
I know the purest, most innocent feelings can be misconstrued.
The pain you caused me has long since been forgiven.
There are moments I long to be with you.
I shall never find compensation
for losing you.

At the first light of day, I look out the window.
The forest is as lovely and vivid to me
as you and the day we parted.

They say I’ve grown more coarse, but remain honest and unaffected,
that I bluntly say whatever I think
and my thoughtlessness prevents me from seeing
matters in their proper light.
In my letters, they say it’s hard to find out what I mean.
Great thoughts drift through me
but I have no command over words.
What do I care for commas, semicolons or periods?
What do I care for prudence and self-restraint?
It’s all the same to me.

What most people wish to see and hear
is what they see and hear.
They have no sense for the power of beauty,
no appreciation for sweetness and light.
What they say amounts to nothing.
They do nothing to make themselves understood.
Mostly, they only see themselves in others.
But, then, I saw the best parts of myself in you.

I’m told you’ve never been back to Vienna.
Let me reassure you that you still cannot find an honest servant here.
From the emperor to the black boot,
all are worthless.
They jump about! They always begin right at the top!
Always maestros! Always D-flat!
They beat upon kettles and frying pans,
blow whistles and horns
to drive away demons of evil and ill luck.
As long as they have brown beer and sausages,
they will never know despair.

I still have enemies, by no means few.
Many pianists here are my deadly enemies.
Otherwise, I might enlighten them
on the right position and use of the hands,
particularly the thumb.

After we parted, I improvised every night,
sometimes variations on a given theme,
sometimes with no direction
except where my heart wandered.
I would later learn an enemy,
capable merely of fashionable melodies of no significance,
had noted down my peculiarities in composing
and passed off my music as his own.

One night I improvised at a social gathering.
Suddenly, I turned around and saw the fools were weeping.
I ran home, never to play for them again.

I, on the other hand, fear to hear other people’s music
on the off chance it would sacrifice my originality.

Did I bore you often with complaints about my teachers?
I’m still compelled to take exception.
They were envious and did not wish me well.
Of my first three trios, Haydn advised me not to publish
the C minor, though he knew it was the best.
Plus, he insisted I note on the title page, “pupil of Haydn.”
Yes, I had instruction from him
but I learned nothing from him.
Nor from Albrechtsberger (pedantic).
Nor Salieri (trivial).

Ah, whatever is good and beautiful needs no teachers.
It simply exists without anyone’s help.

And there was a chance, even after we parted,
I should be the happiest of men
if the demon had not forever pitched his tent in my ear.
If I had any other profession, it would not be so bad.
The very sense which should be more highly developed in me
than in other men,
a sense I once possessed in its most perfect form.

At least we were together before the demon claimed me in full.

What humiliation to stand beside someone who hears
a flute in the distance and I hear nothing.
In the theater, to lean against the railings
close to the orchestra and still not hear
the high notes or the singing voices.
And when people talk softly, to hear 
their tones, but not their words.

My ears whistle and roar incessantly.
I still have a burning terror I must reveal myself.
In conversation, it’s a marvel most people only think
I’m absentminded. 

Night and day, I avoid social functions.
Refined conversations, mutual effusions of thought
are denied to me.

I cannot bear to be yelled at
and I cannot bear to say to men, 
goddamn you, speak louder,
for I am deaf.

Lavater believed he could heal my sickness
through the power of his right hand.
For years, impudent doctors, like him, aggravated my affliction.

I easily might have put an end to my life.
Only one thing held me back: Art.
Oh, it seemed impossible to leave this world
until I produced all I feel capable of producing.

I live only in my scores and before one is completed,
another is already on the way.
I often write three or four works at the same time.

In these works, every theme is elaborated --
mysteries, uncertainties and doubts --
my notes functional rather than decorative,
in a manner peculiar to truth, different from the rest.

They pay me next to nothing
for the work that takes so much time and effort.
Owing to unreliable copying, I have to examine
each voice individually.
To translate my art to strings,
whole passages must be omitted or changed.

I do not need to change anything in my style of composition
though the difficulties of my work are often pointed out to me.

“Fidelio,” for instance, they can’t perform 
nor do people wish to hear it.

Meanwhile, for years, I prayed, let me find her at last,
a woman, such as you, who would strengthen virtue in me, 
and who is permitted to be mine.

But fate or the configurations of my brain
that dictate personality and ability
would not allow it.

As I demonstrated to you, I am not consistently virtuous.
Therefore I meet disgrace
and no woman can endure me.

Alas, I’ve considerably lowered my standards.
Recently, I set my sights on a peasant girl
whose father is renowned for slovenliness.

I spy her across the fence, pitchfork in hand,
She flaunts her charms on a cart laden with hay and manure,
and performs the waggle dance,
the one bees use
to communicate the direction and distance of food.

Oh how she ignores me as I wave my white handkerchief!
She prefers green farm hands
adapted to the environment
and most likely to reproduce.

Resignation! What a miserable refuge.
Yet for me it’s all that remains.
It’s a curse.
The most excellent among us derive joy
from suffering.

It’s only my music that matters.
I’m not a philosopher or saint,
a lover or father. 

In life, you travel and find a nice inn
and though you like it, 
it doesn’t mean you want to stay there forever.
For us, my darling, it was a place of passage merely.

I would be happy enough again to own an angora
waistcoat knit by your own hand.
The last one fashion has ages ago made unfashionable
and I can only hold it dear to me in my wardrobe
and fancy there’s still a scent of you inside it.

Recommend virtue to your children
because virtue alone, not money,
can grant happiness.
Give my best to your husband.
They tell me he is an excellent man.

If you go to the ruins at Baden, think that I lingered there.
If you wander through the mysterious fir forests,
think it was there that I composed.

I have not found anyone
who feels or understands my compositions as well as you.

However much you remember me,
my remembrance of you is greater.

Know this secret:
It’s you.
No other woman can fully possess my heart, 
ever. 

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From Blossoms
by Li-Young Lee

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward   
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into   
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

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Rose (1986)

The Dissonance
by GennaRose Nethercott

The man is holding his child
but it cannot be his child because
this child—she has no head.
A headless child
is no longer a child. Is something else.
To see it, you will say, that is no child
because how can it be? Children
do not rag-drape as a cloak in a father’s grip.
Children are not moonsilver with ash. 
Children do not end at the clavicle
where this child ends. Children do not end 
as children. 
Excuse me a moment—
I am informed that my latte is ready. 
(Surely a latte cannot be made 
while a child is unmade? Surely 
if this were, in fact, a child and not 
a fistful of tattered ribbon an ill-fitting suit
empty flour sack mannequin soiled tablecloth
things would be different here?) The father 
holds the naked thing to his breast. 
No forehead graces his shoulder 
like a roosting bird. The father, he is wailing 
in a way that embarrasses me
in this quiet café so I turn down the volume
on my phone. I keep scrolling. The father
and his daughter dance away, a mere
iridescence, a flash of light. Below:
an advertisement for shampoo.

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To...
by Adam Zagajewski

Madam Death, I am writing to request
that you kindly take into consideration
an extension of my liability to
the institution headed by you
for so many centuries. You, Madam,
are a master, a violent sport,
a delicate ax, the pope, velvet lips,
scissors. I don't flatter you. I beg.
I don't demand. In my defense I have
only silence, dew on the grass, a nightingale
among the branches. You forgive it,
its long tenure in the leaves of one aspen
after another, drops of eternity, grams
of amazement, and the sleepy complaints of the poor poets
whose passports you didn't renew.

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Published in Without End by Adam Zagajewski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003). Translated by Clare Cavanagh

From Small Sargasso Mountains (3 & 4) 
by Antonio Ochoa

(3)

Intuition is a form of knowledge. It took me a long time to unlearn the academic modes of reading. I live closer to the way Kafka describes it: the blows of the ax that open spaces to flow in and out of. Intuition is different from instinct, although they are close. Intuition implies imagination and a certain type of reasoning. Instinct does not. In an intuitive spiral reading, opacity is endured with the primordial impulses of a work and its interconnections with others, because what drives it is not only intellectual understanding. A spiral reading flows openly. It irradiates: a galaxy in sustained expansion. In a spiral reading, there is no usefulness. Usefulness reduces a text to information. And there’s a solid link between information and control. For me the point is the encounter: transient, open-ended assemblages made by individual and concrete things: Nicanor Parra, Aunt Hester’s Scream, the neighbor’s hands working on her garden. 

(4)

January 4th, 2024 

I dreamed that I was falling backwards naked on my bed. The mattress was very soft, but it was wrapped in a coarse burlap cloth. I sank into it and couldn’t get up. A huge nocturnal butterfly floated above me. In its bulbous black eyes, I saw the reflection of my own panic. Bit by bit, my eyes relaxed, my forehead unwrinkled, and my lips formed a little smile. Its wings didn’t beat. When I looked at them closer, I realized that the scales of its wings were hundreds of thousands of miniscule human skulls rotating in different directions at dizzying speeds. When it finally beat its wings, it went up through the ceiling and disappeared. As it passed through, skulls fell like dust all over me. As they landed on my skin, they kept spinning, each skull finding a pore through which to enter to merge with the marrow of my bones. 

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SMALL SARGASSO MOUNTAINS / PEQUEÑAS CORDILLERAS DE SARGAZO (NIGHTBOAT, 2026)

Alligator Fight
by Arielle Hebert

We were the kind of girls 
that brought a bat to prom, 
smoked cigarettes in the parking lot,
sequined party dresses cut 
above the knee, trim calves bursting 
from black heels, curls falling
flat in the humidity,
the kind of girls that shotgunned beers,
belched reapplying our lipstick,
popped in a peppermint to walk 
past the chaperones and into the disco lights,
hungry for music, to move our bodies
on a dark dance floor until we felt 
something, anything, less alone.
Maybe it was the heat that made us 
crazy, girls with sharp tongues,
skin thick as dragon scales,
and though I don’t remember ever starting a fight,
we sure as hell finished a few of them,
at an afterparty, in someone’s backyard,
some wild thing coming at us with the broken neck
of a beer bottle, painted lips open, hissing 
about territory or cheating girlfriends.
Or the blackout rage of some dude pissing 
where he shouldn’t, and putting his hands up,
bowing out of the scene, only after one of us flashed 
a blade and a smile like we meant it.
We were some kind of royalty, girls
who held court in the open, trial 
by combat. It didn’t always matter 
who was right, only who won, 
even if it was our own
blood streaked on the grass,
a few teeth in the mud.

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first published in Redivider

Common Cause
by Bob Hicok

You go to work. People rub against you 
like fleece or wood rasps. You rub against people 
like nails or a cloud. You come home softer, 
bleeding. You do this a hundred years or so 
then retire. You're like everyone else 
in how different you are from everyone else. 
How alike. Your love of comforters and klezmer. 
Your fear of dying and living too long.
Your breath visits and leaves, visits and leaves. 
You're all it wants and too much to take. 
The tide understands. The moon. Other things 
that must go to stay. The mind understands,  
the soul. If lucky, you fall in love 
with the intangible shadows of a glance. 
The manner in which a man pets a cat. 
How a woman says hello as if opening a door. 
And always not knowing what you want 
but wanting it anyway. The haunting of desire.
To be held for years in the arms of a favorite shirt. 
To row a boat to an island in a dream. 
To be saved by a crow who lets you fix its broken wing.
To hear the machinery of the universe at work 
in the click of a spoon you set on the counter 
after a bite of something cool and clear, starlight 
or frozen yogurt. The opposite of love isn't hate 
but entropy, the going and going and going 
to sleep. And language exists 
so we can express the feeling 
that we've been here before 
to people who share our doubts 
that any of this is real.

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Breathe (Copper Canyon Press, 2026)

Everything Is Free
by George Elliott Clarke

Wipe away tears,
Set free your fears:
Everything is free.
Only the lonely
Need much money:
Everything is free.
Don’t try to bind
The love you find:
Everyone is free.
Your lover’s yours —
Surrender force:
Everyone is free.
The sun melts down,
Spreads gold around:
Everything is free.
The rain is spent
Lending flowers scent:
Everything is free.
The love you live,
The life you give:
Everything is free.

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Whylah Falls (2001)

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,   
The only moving thing   
Was the eye of the blackbird.   

II
I was of three minds,   
Like a tree   
In which there are three blackbirds.   

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.   
It was a small part of the pantomime.   

IV
A man and a woman   
Are one.   
A man and a woman and a blackbird   
Are one.   

V
I do not know which to prefer,   
The beauty of inflections   
Or the beauty of innuendoes,   
The blackbird whistling   
Or just after.   

VI
Icicles filled the long window   
With barbaric glass.   
The shadow of the blackbird   
Crossed it, to and fro.   
The mood   
Traced in the shadow   
An indecipherable cause.   

VII
O thin men of Haddam,   
Why do you imagine golden birds?   
Do you not see how the blackbird   
Walks around the feet   
Of the women about you?   

VIII
I know noble accents   
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;   
But I know, too,   
That the blackbird is involved   
In what I know.   

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,   
It marked the edge   
Of one of many circles.   

X
At the sight of blackbirds   
Flying in a green light,   
Even the bawds of euphony   
Would cry out sharply.   

XI
He rode over Connecticut   
In a glass coach.   
Once, a fear pierced him,   
In that he mistook   
The shadow of his equipage   
For blackbirds.   

XII
The river is moving.   
The blackbird must be flying.   

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.   
It was snowing   
And it was going to snow.   
The blackbird sat   
In the cedar-limbs.

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The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954)

RITA DOVE
Postlude

Stay by the hearth, little cricket.
—Cendrillon

You prefer me invisible, no more than
a crisp salute far away from
your silks and firewood and woolens.
 
Out of sight, I’m merely an annoyance,
one slim, obstinate wrinkle in night’s
deepening trance. When sleep fails,
 
you wish me shushed and back in my hole.
As usual, you’re not listening: time stops
only if you stop long enough to hear it
 
passing. This is my business:
I’ve got ten weeks left to croon through.
What you hear is a lifetime of song.

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Playlist for the Apocalypse (2021)

ANTONIO OCHOA
from Small Sargasso Mountains

(1)

Big head. Small head. Pinhead. The head of a needle in the forehead of one of the circus performers. Madame Blavatsky’s reenactor had been trying to stitch on him a third eye of blue and green velvet. But he ran away before finishing, purple thread flapping, almost horizontal. “One of us, we accept you,” he yelled after him. At the entrance of the dining tent a man with a flag in each hand was rhythmically moving his arms. With a smile, he clarified as we entered, “today we are serving alphabet soup in the skulls of flying squirrels. You will be left hungry as only conjunctions fit in there. But don’t underestimate conjunctions,” he concluded, yelling. Still trying to carefully remove the needle from his forehead, the performer mumbled as he walked by, “or prepositions.” Blavatsky said that as children, when they used to cut the head off a flying squirrel while it was eating nuts on the branch of a tree, ten sprouted up. But in the after-dinner ruckus I couldn’t hear if it was ten walnuts or ten heads or ten branches. 


(2)

I never thought of dissecting one of the heads, but, advanced in years, I came to understand the need. And what I saw is that there’s not just stone inside the stone. Multiple mineral minds in metamorphosis melting. And they sing. The primordial power of the stone heads is the song of erosion. Rain. Wind. Sun. Rainwater digs holes of different sizes. The wind’s action is threefold: it smooths the stone’s surface; it sands microscopic spirals in each hole; and it sings. In the narrower, shallower openings, the songs of anguish take shape. In the deeper, wider ones: happiness. Sunlight reminds the stone that it’s the sun’s sister. 

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Small Sargasso Mountains (NIGHTBOAT, 2026)

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.

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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.

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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

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Published in Poetry Society

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.

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Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008)

by Anya Johnson

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. 

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by Michael Robbins

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?

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Second Sex (Penguin Books, 2014)

by Dean Young

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.

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Forthcoming in Creature Feature (Copper Canyon Press, 2026)