Spitting Image
by Liz Femi

after Chen Chen

On the back shelf, wedged between two cans of condensed milk, 
               the shocked nerves of a dandelion. Dryad lion. Fountain of anxious 
light spooling from its head. And because it takes all kinds of lions 
               to corner Daniel in the den, some lion, too, has no choice but to be the kind of lion 
his lioness mama raised him to be. Most days, I dream of living as full blown 
               exoskeleton.  But that’s not enough time to condense bone into anything but what my mama raised me to be. I’m ready to admit that a spitting image is an image that spits out 
               its own kind. Flummoxed organs reject blood type, macrophages scream law & disorder the flags & they say at the end of the day isn’t family a kind of country?
               I am not a nice idea. I’m an aloof anthem. I’m an anxiously attached sermon. Resplendent 

flowering from my father’s immigrant head. Unordered, discountryed parts to assemble 
               into twelvefolds of a fortune teller or is that a crumpled love letter?  
I am not the anti-antigen my mama raised me to be. I’m a thrill-seeking dandelion. 
               In eighth grade, I pulled myself through the eye of a joke so I was a kind of exoskeleton but only for a short while since needles are tiny, obviously, & so I spit myself back out into the 
               joke, crawling on all fours through the jungle. In first grade, I learned clouds condensed into rain. I thought tears were condensed thoughts & the sky was trapped inside my mama’s head 
               & my mama was trapped inside the sky’s head & they kept each other company. I asked how she was. She cried as long as a book: the world was a bandage of dandelions 
               & my mama raised me to be a species of silence

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God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot
by Leonard Cohen

God is alive, magic is afoot
God is alive, magic is afoot
God is alive, magic is afoot
God is afoot, magic is alive
Alive is afoot, magic never died
God never sickened
Many poor men lied
Many sick men lied
Magic never weakened
Magic never hid
Magic always ruled
God is afoot, God never died
God was ruler
Though his funeral lengthened
Though his mourners thickened
Magic never fled
Though his shrouds were hoisted
The naked God did live
Though his words were twisted
The naked magic thrived
Though his death was published
Round and round the world
The heart did not believe

Many hurt men wondered
Many struck men bled
Magic never faltered
Magic always lead
Many stones were rolled
But God would not lie down
Many wild men lied
Many fat men listened
Though they offered stones
Magic still was fed
Though they locked their coffers
God was always served
Magic is afoot, God is alive
Alive is afoot

Alive is in command
Many weak men hungered
Many strong men thrived
Though they boast of solitude
God was at their side
Nor the dreamer in his cell
Nor the captain on the hill
Magic is alive
Though his death was pardoned
Round and round the world
The heart would not believe

Though laws were carved in marble
They could not shelter men
Though altars built in parliaments
They could not order men
Police arrested magic and magic went with them
Mmmmm.... for magic loves the hungry
But magic would not tarry
It moves from arm to arm
It would not stay with them
Magic is afoot
It cannot come to harm
It rests in an empty palm
It spawns in an empty mind
But magic is no instrument
Magic is the end
Many men drove magic
But magic stayed behind
Many strong men lied
They only passed through magic
And out the other side
Many weak men lied
They came to God in secret
And though they left Him nourished
They would not tell who healed
Though mountains danced before them
They said that God was dead
Though his shrouds were hoisted
The naked God did live
This I mean to whisper to my mind
This I mean to laugh within my mind
This I mean my mind to serve
Til' service is but magic
Moving through the world
And mind itself is magic
Coursing through the flesh
And flesh itself is magic
Dancing on a clock
And time itself
The magic length of God

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Excerpt from “Beautiful Losers” by Leonard Cohen (Viking Press, 1966), put to music by Buffy Sainte-Marie for her album “Illuminations” (1969).

The Little Flower
by Jean Valentine

I thank God, I have never taken to drinking, as many I know have, I 
     have never done that and my children should be thankful but they 
     are not, I have not been that kind, 
I say my prayers every night, 
Lots of them do and with less reason, I did once but put it from me, 
and with all the shocks I have had to bear, such shocks in those ter- 
rible years, you do not know, my father, my father was a mean man, 
Given to giving nicknames, 
He called me Susan B. Anthony because I was so strong I guess, I have
     never given way as others would have done. he called your aunt 
     Bunny because when her first two teeth came in he said she looks
     just like a bunny, she did look just like a bunny, we will call her 
     Bunny and so she is to this day I am eighty-three she must be 
     eighty, strange she was always jealous of my looks Bun was I was 
     tall and slim 
And very beautiful they all said so, 
And she thought I had all the looks always was a jealous kind of per- 
     son but you know she was very lovely too, I was jealous of her too, 
     isn’t that funny I always thought Bun had such nice feet and I al-
     ways thought my feet were ugly isn’t that funny, the things you will 
     get into your head, feet 
It hasn't all been roses, 
My mother was a Ross a Ross from Scotland, they were a noble clan, 
     your mother sent me a postcard once of the Ross castle, I have it 
     somewhere in these suitcases, it's in the north 
Oh I must set my things in order 
I must have help to set my things in order, so many papers, no one 
     will come and soon I will be gone and then who will, No now we 
     will talk it is so good, to have someone to talk to, is that chair all 
     right for you not in a draft, this room has a terrible draft you have 
     beautiful eyes,
A little like mine oh when I was younger 
You have always been a good child and you know you get funny all 
     alone in a room I hope I have never complained but you get and at 
     my age, no one understands what it is like to be old, does my mind 
     wander, that is what I 
I forget things 
Words do not come to my mind, my mother was a Ross from Scot- 
     land, they were a noble clan, she used to tell such wonderful stories 
     and sing us the old songs she would go on with those stories and 
     songs the children loved her, she came and visited us often and 
     stayed weeks and weeks, she was always there if I were sick, I hope 
     she always knew she had a home with us and I was sick so much 
     with the climate what it was and the miscarriages and the babies, 
     and she always came to be a comfort to me, but then she died, 
What it is like 
He had died long before that, there is a place for Bun and a place for 
     me with them in the plot in Minneapolis, I don't care about cre- 
     mation it seems the cleanest thing you don't mind talking about 
     these things do you, neither do I some people do but I don’t mind 
     talking about these things at all, look at my teeth, if I do not get to 
     the dentist, but I cannot even get dressed, just to get dressed but I 
     get so dizzy, when I stand I am so afraid of falling again, will you 
     look at my teeth, I try not to smile so as to show them, I always 
     had beautiful teeth 
It seems the cleanest thing 
Bunny has written me a long letter about it, she's going to be cre- 
     mated, Henry was too, you pack a bag with the clothes you want 
     to go in and if you go in winter like her Henry did, and a godsend, 
     they wait till Spring to put you in the ground, Henry's there, no I 
     don't mind about cremation as long as they make sure I'm good 
     and dead first, ha, ha, 
Look at my teeth 
The children loved her, she would tell them those stories over and 
     over, no I don’t remember any of them, not one, and the children 
     don't any more, I asked Louise and she said, No Mother, I like to 
     tell you these things because soon I will be gone and then no one 
     will remember all this 
My father 
There do you hear her, there she goes, eight or ten hours a day some 
     days, they say she is an opera singer, it goes right through my 
     spine, we would always come to New York here for the opera sea- 
     son, we always took the same suite at the Plaza Hotel, the manager 
     was a very fine gentleman, he always said to me, Mrs. Haran, your 
     children are the best behaved children who have ever visited us 
     here at the Plaza Hotel, and they were, so quiet 
They all said so 
Your grandfather used to love the operas and then we always had sea- 
     son tickets for the Chicago Symphony, I would take the children 
     every Friday afternoon, do you hear her, I have sent a note to the 
     desk but they say there is nothing they can do, I must take another 
     room, on another floor, another hotel 
Just to get dressed 
Your mother always had a gift for music, she had lessons from the age 
     of five with the best piano teacher in the city, but no when she 
     married him she let it go, I told her, you will be sorry Louise, if 
     you have music you will always have that whatever comes, like 
     books, my children all loved books if you give children the love of 
     books they will always have that whatever comes, will you listen to 
     that woman, I have told them at least let her be still Sundays, at 
     least let me have peace Sundays but you know they are all Jewish 
     people in this hotel 
Not that I 
Not that I have anything against Jewish people if you like them I hope 
     I am not so narrow, it is all knishes, what are they, and lox and the 
     good Lord knows what on the menu, I cannot eat it, Ramon my 
     waiter says ¡Ah Mrs. Haran you did not eat! they all loved reading, 
     if I could only read but it hurts my eyes so 
Even the Tribune
With everything else I had to bear there were always books, I used to 
     read a book a day, oh yes and magazines, Edward used to tease me 
     for taking the Post but I have always said there are lots of fine arti- 
     cles in the Post I still take it but now I can hardly read the Tribune, 
     Dr. Giroux wants me to see an ophthalmologist 
Just to get dressed 
Edward your uncle Edward was a great reader, he was always reading, 
     he always said he loved to read with me there in the room, we al- 
     ways read together like that when he was little, those were bad 
     years, that was when it was just beginning, he was reading to him- 
     self at three years, his teachers always told me, Eddie has a wonder- 
     ful mind, they called him Eddie, I was always with him when he 
     was little, that was when your grandfather began to take too much, 
     then I was so ill and Edward would always come in and sit by me, 
     I was in bed so much, months at a time, Edward would say 
     Mother shall I sit with you a while, he was always considerate that 
     way most children are not you know, Edward was 
To be a comfort 
They were seven brothers the children's uncle Jack was first, the mon- 
     signor, then your grandfather, and the others were all born over 
     here, well they scattered around the middle west, mostly farming 
     and such, your grandfather was the only one of them who ever 
     made his way, and Jack, one went to California I think, oh the Lord 
     knows where they all are now living or dead, they all blamed me 
Listen to her 
We had an audience with the Pope did I ever tell you that I like to tell 
     you these things, Pope Pius X, he was a very charming man, 
     charming, a gentleman I shall never forget it, a private audience. 
     no he spoke English, your uncle Jack was at the American College, 
     he arranged it all, no I went to the Church long before I ever met 
     your grandfather I was still at home well it seemed to draw me in I 
     don't know why, my father said it was just like me, The Little 
     Flower he called me 
A religious man, they were all religious men 
I have always held that your church doesn't matter as long as you live 
     right you must give the children some faith to stand by them when 
     their troubles come, it doesn't matter what church I hope I am not 
     so narrow, but it breaks my heart to see Billy and her rising those 
     children without anything, he always went to the best Catholic 
     schools, I gave him that, and how can he stand by and watch her 
     rise those children with nothing, and how can she let him get 
     so heavy 
It's the drinking 
I'm sorry, I hope I've always been good to her the same as I am with 
     all of you yet she never brings them, they are my grandchildren 
     and I never see them, they do not know me, they lose that you 
     know, they will never have those memories, it is nice to have a 
     sense of family 
They all blamed me 
We went down, Jack had a summer place at that castle Gandolfo you 
     know, very nice, outside Rome, it was hot, I remember I was faint 
     do you hear her ah-ah-ah-ah, no no coffee for me I can't take it, 
     my lower intestine, well, and then I get so terribly dizzy, Dr. Giroux 
     has given me pills for it but I don't like to take them, just some ice 
     water is all, there in that green bottle, Tipperary was where they 
     came from but they were originally Normans 
Normans who came over from France 
Jack was good to us at first, for a while, at the beginning he would 
     take his dinner with us every night, so as to keep the idea of a fam- 
     ily for the children, he cared a lot for that, priests do they don’t 
     know, that was when it was beginning with your grandfather, the 
     stocks dropping and his partner and all and the never coming home 
The children never knew 
I spared them that, and the miscarriages, it was not so easy in those 
     days to have a baby, you girls today, and my back was never strong 
     to carry them, six months in bed before Billy, and then the broth- 
     ers tried to get me to have him back, they all blamed me 
Normans 
I was never off a penny in my books when I was spending thousands 
     of dollars managing Astor Street and now I'm always so confused 
     that is what terrifies me, my checkbook is in such a state and no 
     one, I ask Billy but he never comes, I guess she won't let him away, 
     I don't think much of a person like that, I like to keep two thou- 
     sand dollars margin in case I have to go to the hospital or so when 
     I go it will, but it's under that now I don't know how much and I 
     make mistakes in my arithmetic, and then these medicines, forty 
     dollars, fifty dollars, I feel awful, the children do not understand or 
     they would not be so 
What it is like 
None of you, but you are a good child, I always had a special place in 
     my heart even when you were little, of course I loved you all, and I 
     worry so about you, when you get old you worry a lot, there's some 
     nice cake in there on the shelf chocolate the kind you like, I got it 
     in last week expecting you, oh I know how much you have to do at 
     home, I hope you're through having children now, two is a nice 
     family plenty these days, you know just a phone call would mean a 
     lot when you have a minute 
The children do not know 
I hate to call you I know how busy you are, I hope I haven't asked 
     much of my family, I know you're all caught up in your own life 
     the family and all, you look tired, I loved my children I hope I 
     loved my children 
None of you 
I hope I was good to him, everything a wife should be, he was proud 
     of me, all my clothes were made specially for me, and I was never 
     off a penny in my books and they all loved to come to Astor Street, 
     I remember Mr. Fairbank a millionaire there, he used to always 
     come and he could have had anything in the world, he loved to 
     come to us, he said, Nelly I feel at home here, a charming man, a 
     very old family, no airs, no I never turned him away while he was 
     well, I was everything a wife should be, it wasn't easy but men are
     that way and I hope I never let him know while he was well 
Anything in the world 
He used to say, Nelly, you make me feel very grateful, and he tried to 
     be very considerate that way while he was well, not all men do, you 
     know, he did try 
Music whatever comes 
What could I do, it was such a shock, the money, and then him never 
     coming home and the drinking, I had the children to think of, 
     they never knew, Jack tried to help him, first talking himself then 
     the doctors, but nothing helped, he got worse, worse, he had had 
     so much, risen from nothing himself, and he became deluded after 
     the drop, losing more and more, he was on the telephone talking 
     business as if he were still what he had been, then I had to call 
     back, I was so ashamed, and explain he was not well, everyone was 
     very kind, I couldn't go out of the house 
I had the children to think of 
I kept everything just as it had been for them, Dr. Lapham their doc- 
     tor, he was a world-famous pediatrician, he died of pneumonia in 
     Boston, he had called on me the day before he went just to see 
     how we were getting along, he said, Mrs. Haran try to do for the 
     children just as you would have done, and I did, Billy went to 
     Canterbury and Harvard, Louise had a beautiful debut, I always 
     had all her clothes made specially for her and there wasn't a better 
     dressed girl her year, or a prettier, it wasn't as if we had a lot 
Dr. Lapham 
But I always remembered what Dr. Lapham had said, many women 
     would not have done it that way for their children, I should have 
     thought of my own old age 
Dr. Lapham 
They all blamed me when he was put in the mental home, it was the 
     best state institution in the middle west, I had the children to 
     think of, they said there was money enough for private care but I 
     knew what there was and I knew he couldn’t be helped, we had 
     spoken to the best doctors in Chicago, do you know what the pri 
     vate places cost, and he lived, he lived for years and years, he only 
     died three years ago, there wasn't that kind of money for him, look 
     how I've had to manage all these years, and I had to do for the 
     children it would all have gone, what would I have done, no he 
     hadn't lost much yet but he would have if he'd gone on, I had to 
     save what I could
I knew 
They kept trying to get him away, one Christmas they got him out, a 
     trick, and brought him down to Minneapolis, it was Christmas 
     night, so cold, and we had to take him back, he was not respon- 
     sible then for what he said, he was ill the doctors could not do any-
     thing for him, the money was gone, all but what I had managed to 
     keep away, I had the children to think of, and myself 
He was not responsible then 
Then later Billy and your mother brought him east to another state 
     home, New York State, up here, they said it was a better place, no 
     they never visited him, he did not know them anymore they said, 
     that was when they were grown of course when they were young 
     they never knew 
They all blamed me 
Dr. Lapham did not blame me, I asked him, in the worst of it, I had 
     no one to turn to and I asked him and he said, it is very hard 
     Mrs. Haran, he understood and Edward understood he was older 
     than the others and I used to talk to him I had no one, oh of 
     course I didn't tell him the truth, but he was with me and that was 
     a comfort, Bun came but she did not understand ever, she always 
     thought he could be helped by the doctors, she never understood 
They all blamed me 
We didn't see her for a long while and then we didn't talk about it any 
     more, but I knew she blamed me, she used to say, he loves you 
     Nelly, she never understood he had never loved me never, only the 
     house and the clothes and that 
Edward understood 
He was always with me if it hadn't been for Edward there were times I 
     would have committed suicide, I know it's a terrible thing to say, 
     but those were terrible years, but for Edward who always under- 
     stood, and he was always there, later I wanted him to go out and 
     get a place of his own, make his life away from all my troubles, but 
     he always said No Mother and he always stayed until he died four 
     years ago, the night he died his car went over a bridge 
It was the eye drops 
He’d been reading Stendahl On Love, he was always a great reader, 
     when he died the doctor came in the middle of the night and gave 
     me an injection, she was so kind to me that country doctor, she 
     understood 
Edward understood 
It is a terrible thing to lose a child, no matter how old they are they are 
     always your children and you always worry, I gave them every-
     thing, and then he died, and the other two never come, what have 
     done, your mother came when he died to be with me, she 
     blamed me, I know she blamed me 
Never only the house 
She did not know how it was with Edward, the drinking and the 
     trouble, I never told anyone, he needed me, thank God I had the 
     money to help him out of his trouble, it was always the same, I 
     was always there 
Died, died 
I should have thought more of myself, other women would have saved 
     for themselves, learn from your grandmother 
Christmas night 
What it is like to be old, and alone, and sick, and I worry so about 
     money, not about leaving a lot behind, I have done enough I hope, 
     but I don't know how long I'll last, which will go first, ha, ha, the 
     money or me 
Always the same 
Every night when I lie down I think they'll find me in the morning, 
     always have the bag ready, that blue one dear you should know, 
     every night I wash my feet before I get into bed, they never think 
     what it is like, 
The children loved her, 
Thousands of dollars, I loved my children, I hope I loved my children, 
     what have I done that they are strangers to me, sometimes at night 
     when I can't sleep 
Whatever comes 
I never sleep till three or four in the morning or five and then at eight 
     or nine she starts up with her scales sometimes I think I must have 
     said something or done something to hurt them, something I do 
     not know, do you know? then I pray 
Deliver her soul, O Lord 
And that has been a comfort to me these last years, though what the 
     Lord has done for me I don't know, I hope I’ve always lived right, 
     and surely the Lord should not refuse His creatures 
And let my cry come unto Thee 
Most children are not you know, Edward was, they all blamed me, 
     always the same, gone, and then no one, look at my teeth, I am 
     afraid to die, you are young but you know you get afraid 
I knew 
It's good to talk like this to someone, and then I like to tell you these 
     things, never, only the house, died, died, died, soon I will be gone 
     and then no one will remember, there do you hear her, none of you.

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Originally published in Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine (Alice James Books, 2024). Used with permission.

A Poem Wants You to Be Whole
by Ben Gucciardi

Tormented, the mind has no charity 
for complexity or excess. 
Art must reveal its purpose 
swiftly and with clarity.

A poem wants you to be whole
and willing to enter its small lavish palace. 
These are my silk curtains, 
it wants to tell you, this scroll

belonged to a twelfth century king. 
In black ink, a figure
in a rice field, a river
twisting south toward Beijing.

As you explore the scroll’s detail 
the poem will end abruptly, having been
depended on by no one, and proving only 
what a cloud proves when it veils

the midday sun and the olive trees
lose their shadows, and the words
slip through your mind wind
through silver leaves.

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Beneath My Hands
by Leonard Cohen

Beneath my hands
your small breasts
are the upturned bellies
of breathing fallen sparrows.

Wherever you move
I hear the sounds of closing wings
of falling wings.

I am speechless
because you have fallen beside me
because your eyelashes
are the spines of tiny fragile animals.

I dread the time
when your mouth
begins to call me hunter.

When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want to summon
the eyes and hidden mouths
of stone and light and water
to testify against you.

I want them
to surrender before you
the trembling rhyme of your face
from their deep caskets.

When you call me close
to tell me
your body is not beautiful
I want my body and my hands
to be pools
for your looking and laughing.

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From Selected Poems, 1956-1968 by Leonard Cohen (Bantam Books, 1971).

It's All Right
by William Stafford

Someone you trusted has treated you bad.
Someone has used you to vent their ill temper.
Did you expect anything different?
Your work—better than some others'—has languished,
neglected. Or a job you tried was too hard,
and you failed. Maybe weather or bad luck
spoiled what you did. That grudge, held against you
for years after you patched up, has flared,
and you've lost a friend for a time. Things
at home aren't so good; on the job your spirits
have sunk. But just when the worst bears down
you find a pretty bubble in your soup at noon,
and outside at work a bird says, "Hi!"
Slowly the sun creeps along the floor;
it is coming your way. It touches your shoe.

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First published in The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems by William Stafford
(Graywolf Press, 1999).

the other pt. 2
by Sterling-Elizabeth Arcadia

my orders were to surveil and be
surveilled, endlessly. from inside
my orange hazmat suit, they
reflected hazy and bright in my eye.
the distance not impossible
to overcome, between
my errored tongue and trembling
hand, i cobbled together
an understanding. and once
i understood my enemy i, myself,
could not remain the way i was.

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What I'm Doing Here
by Leonard Cohen

I do not know if the world has lied
I have lied
I do not know if the world has conspired against love
I have conspired against love
The atmosphere of torture is no comfort
I have tortured
Even without the mushroom cloud
still I would have hated
Listen
I would have done the same things
even if there were no death
I will not be held like a drunkard
under the cold tap of facts
I refuse the universal alibi

Like an empty telephone booth passed at night
and remembered
like mirrors in a movie palace lobby consulted
only on the way out
like a nymphomaniac who binds a thousand
into strange brotherhood
I wait
for each one of you to confess

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First published in Flowers for Hitler by Leonard Cohen (McClelland And Stewart Ltd., 1964).

Pictograph
by Alex Dawson

I am not myself. I am 
an early painting on the wall 
of my mother’s womb. My first 
poem is inside her, dripping

with her rage. I’m sorry, 
Mother, I have always needed
to create against destruction. 
I am a rearrangement 

of the many things that tried,
and failed to kill me. There 
was a wound. I crawled out of it 
toward a gash of light. Who am I?

All of these years, I have been 
asking the same question. I am
on my hands and knees, trying
to crawl my way back in.

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Poem Written Under Bedsheets
by Chrissy Martin

Today I want even the sun
to leave me alone. Curse the snails
and ladybugs. The neighbors singing
in the shower. Don’t touch me,
love. Don’t touch me, clothes.
Don’t touch me, wind-knocked leaves.
It’s not that I love dirty sheets,
love this bedroom or how thick
my hair gets when washing is a chore.
I sit in my sweat and silence.
If I turn on TV, that means leisure,
guilt. I chew on my hair, thank saltines,
kiss my palms, and touch
my eyelids. This anxiety is so
six months ago. This depression,
better fit with my homemade
bangs and lighter-soft eyeliner.
Where is my sick day? Where
is my just-not-today day?
Can I call in and be all excuse me,
I have no clean shirts for this day;
excuse me, I am tangled; excuse me,
everything in my fridge is growing hair.
Everything happens for a reason
is what I am told by people
who think everything is reasonable.
I light a lilac candle and blow it out,
toast the stale bread and put it back.
I want to make something
even if it’s just a mess.

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From Whole, Holy, Hot by Chrissy Martin (Write Bloody Publishing, 2026).

The Eulogy I Didn't Give (I)
by Bob Hicok

My ambition to be done with ambition
suffered a setback at my father’s funeral
when I wanted to say something profound
that he would hear, that a tree could understand,
that the wind would feel, but the only words
I could come up with were a handful of dirt.
The sound of it hitting his coffin,
as if shouting at him, woke me up
and I took my clothes off and walked away,
back into my life as his child,
when all I wanted was to hold his hand.
I am now fathered but fatherless, a being
whose being can half be traced
to a hole in the ground,
where my father’s beard is,
and his bones. His beard will grow
for a while down there and his bones
will never cast a shadow, and I’ll always know
where to go to look at his name
cut in stone. Rain, with patience
and the greed of love
to hold, will slowly erase his name
and everything it touches, it always sounds
like a eulogy to me, the sky
trying to figure out what to say
about loss, and making a mess of it
like the rest of us.

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First published in The New Yorker, August 11, 2025 issue.

feet
by Ross Gay

Friends, mine are ugly feet:
the body’s common wreckage
stuffed into boots. The second toe
on the left foot’s crooked
enough that when a child
asks what’s that? of it,
I can without flinch or fear of doubt lie
that a cow stepped on it
which maybe makes them fear cows
for which I repent
in love as I am with those philosophical beasts
who would never smash my feet
nor sneer at them
the way my mother does:
“We always bought you good shoes, honey,”
she says, “You can’t blame us
for those things,” and for this
and other reasons
I have never indulged in the pleasure
of flip-flops shy or ashamed
digging my toes like ten tiny ostriches into the sand
at the beach with friends
who I’m not sure love me,
though I don’t think Tina loved me—
she liked me, I think—but said
to me, as we sat on lawn chairs
beside a pool where I lifeguarded and was meticulous
at obscuring from view with a book or towel
my screwy friends,
You have pretty feet,
in that gaudy, cement-mixer, Levittown accent
that sends all the lemurs scaling my ribcage to see
and she actually had pretty feet
and so I took this as a kindness incomparable and probably
fell a little bit in love with her for that afternoon
with the weird white streak in her hair
and her machinegun chatter and her gum snapping
and so slid my feet from beneath my Powerman and Iron Fist comic book
into the sun for which they acted like plants opening their tiny mouths
to the food hurtling to them through the solar system,
and like plants you could watch them almost smile,
almost say thank you, you could watch them
turn colors, and be, almost, emboldened,
none of which Tina saw
because she was probably digging in her purse
or talking about that hottie on The Real World
or yelling at some friend’s little sister to put her ass in her trunks
or pouring the crumbs of her Fritos into her thrown open mouth
but do you really think I’m talking to you about my feet?
Of course she’s dead: Tina was her name, of leukemia: so I heard-
why else would I try sadly to make music of her unremarkable kindness?
I am trying, I think, to forgive myself
for something I don’t know what.
But what I do know is that I love the moment when the poet says
I am trying to do this
or I am trying to do that.
Sometimes it’s a horseshit trick. But sometimes
it’s a way by which the poet says
I wish I could tell you,
truly, of the little factory
in my head: the smokestacks
chuffing, the dandelions
and purslane and willows of sweet clover
prying through the blacktop.
I wish I could tell you
how inside is the steady mumble and clank of machines.
But mostly I wish I could tell you of the footsteps I hear,
more than I can ever count,
all of whose gaits I can discern by listening, closely.
Which promptly disappear
after being lodged again,
here, where we started, in the factory
where loss makes all things
beautiful grow.

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First published in Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015).

Perimenopause
by Denise Duhamel

Last night I dreamed that I used a knife instead of a spoon to take my first bite
of morning yogurt and the blade cut right into my tongue. The yogurt mixed
with my blood like acrylics. I put a paintbrush right in my mouth and swirled!
Then I started painting everything pink. The tablecloth, the water glass, the
coffee cup, the bowl, the innocent spoon. If the teeth are male, then the tongue 
is a young girl. You may suspect the mouth is the vagina and you may be right. 
You may think a hole in the hand is stigmata, but according to my dream book,
it's also a vagina—unless the hole is on the back of the hand, in which case it's 
an anus. And blood from the mouth/vagina? Well, I haven't had my period in
four months. If you think people start to zone out when you tell them about your
periods, try telling them about menopause. They tend to yawn, their mouths
little vaginas, little drowsy moist caves. Oh white yogurt, I suspect I know what
you are.

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First published in Ka-Ching! by Denise Duhamel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).

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)