September - Poem 24

Road Trip Noir / Laura Bandy

To get to Vermont, you first must pass some time in Akron. At the hotel,
two Dobermans in shock collars guard the desk where the owner stands, gray

ink over hard arms and crawling up his neck onto a shaved head. He tells me
he's in recovery when he hands me my room key, then reminds me the ice 

machine's out of service. I ask where I can get a pop and he blinks twice, like
an eye agreement you make when your tongue's cut out. "Stop and Go

across the way," he says. "Watch yourself crossing the highway." I dodge
cars like Frogger and make it okay. The cashier says she can tell I'm not

from around here. I ask what gave me away and she huffs while handing me
my Squirt and a lighter. "You got that lost look," she says, then winks before 

 
waving through the next in line. It's nine or ten at night, moon sliced right
in half and hole-punched in the black sky. Back in the hotel parking lot, I squat

on a thin stone parking block, yellow paint faded into the gray, and start up 
a cigarette before bed. No one knows exactly where I am, no one could find me

if they tried. Tomorrow, I'm meant to arrive in a different state but the smoke
I'm blowing seems to ring me in place. It's only temporary, though. No trace. 

The Sunset Continues in Another Part of the Country /  Jesse DeLong

Cento Title and Lines from Wetherington, Ford, Alam, Arendt, Alam, Graeber and Wengrow, Lin, Brown, Simmonds, Simmonds, Persson, Graeber and Wengrow, Tolbert, Fontaine, Tokarczuk translated by Croft, Tolbert, Jess, Khajavi, Miranda, Bennett, Brooks, Tsushima translated by Harcourt, Herbert, Cowles, Plumly, Leilani, Roberson, Sharma, Tsushima translated by Harcourt, Fontaine, Wetherington, Ford, Graeber and Wengrow, Boyle, Boyle, Ward, Ford, Leilani, Dimkovska, Morrison, Als and Leilani

1.

After the long, warm night of their drive,
proximity to the ocean always made her so tired.
Rootlessness as a conscious aim,
the kind of story they didn’t want their life stories to be:
(fir, spruce, redwood, yew and cedar)
the trees took up more space at night; the shadows added to their volume.

2.

Shore birds have taken to the porch, again.
Each voice shapehifts
exits the body a procession of elemental sonances,
quiet if there is one.

There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world.
The conclusive shape of happiness/ is a triangle
a kind of collective story they told together.

3.

Exotic as a salamander,
confession is the logical opposite/ of light.
A writhing, and then a rapture—
the ground why we desire  our own room
any language so long as they all say goodbye.

But what values?
Life must be aromatic,
desire must be released with no resistance—
a blister, all that was left of some lost yesterday. 
High enough for landscape.

4.

And, finally, an apology:
of a call, of a conversation, of a girl on the other end.
The dark drawer
of dreary, ugly ideas, of nonsense.
Yet he didn’t even have the name he needed
to carve you out of your life.

The carrion birds help/ still their circle,
master of flouts and jeers,
the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre.

5.

The moon is a parched place.
The moon pulls water towards itself.
The termites writhe in their ruined home.

He was killed, two months later, cleanly, by a bullet.

Even as we look at each other through borrowed faces,
we forget that we exist
there is a cold place one-half inch in any direction.
That is the true nature of difference.

All of it, even the love, is a violence. 

Aubade to Autumn (A Demi-sonnet) /  Shelly Krehbiel

Is it sacrilegious to choose the sun
instead of weeping, to crave abundance
instead of blaming myself for dancing
in the grass for no one, not even bees,
not even love. I resist the question.
Often, I am too tired to dance, and soon
it will be difficult to find warmth too.

The Buffalo Poetics Program,  /  rob mclennan

Dismantled. An insistence, shrill. How much gets purposeful, destroyed. A wall of nothing. To rebuild, lay out defeat. Crafted, dissolution. Lay down, think a speech. A long line takes a line long down. What plenitude, such twilight soup. Clemency, requires witness. Wellness, thus. By no means, heart. Pull, pull up. Distinguished chair. Of fireworks, or cunning. Fate. Lament, to rest in silence. Urgent. Strive for wanting, bitter. Further, pints. Of Robert Creeley, Steve McCaffery, Susan Howe. Charles Bernstein. Jessica Smith, where I first heard. An autopsy, words.

ZINEMAKER CENTO   / Piper Rasmussen

Lines from The East Village Inky #71, Thirteen Facts #26, Pencil Revolution Vol. 1 No. 5, Misfit Cinema Journal July 2025 aka Workprint #4, and Simple Steps to A Life Less Shitty: The Big Sad Sequel by Adam Gnade

You're home. 
experiences and obscure cultural

created over 300 paintings of mushrooms
on view to anyone visiting today

real fun -- dealing all the
safety harness, helmet, & experienced guide

may or may not have been “published” out of their offices after-hours
could possibly cure

and I would definitely be first in line to
get up to the front door.  

a) Salisbury steak on a plate b) Mom's homemade Beef Stroganoff
we left no stone unturned in our hunt for graphic smut! 

(Dodo : 1960s = Polar bear : now.)
the child stars of ZOOM! 

is awesome and kind of adorable, but it
all do it for you,

working constantly
melonfarming long. I got caught up

eight thousand copies
pencil factory, pencil aficionados

It occurs to me that I could ease up a 
Like Kenny Loggins once sang, "I'm going

down on the floor. She looks up at me with her little face and tells me "rheeeeeeeh" (I
you just gotta

the best in the land
I am chemically allergic to the phrase "my happy place”

and what the smell of wood and river water
5) Be a warm, golden sun to those around you.

FIENDISH IS THE WORD FOR IT
Diligence, clear perspective, and good ideas will

their level. They are meant to be a fun
Whatever, it's fine. 

love poem (after Hayes, after Lorca)  / Connor Simons

I want to walk and notice always the way a child
toddles towards its future. I want to name birds.
I want to wear a shirt made of morning glory petals.

I want to one day be older than my mother was
when she died and then outlive her father as well

and to forget that goal when the day passes. If squirrels
remember where they cached winter’s food, then I want
to wake each morning and see the sweet down that pastures

the point where your neck becomes chest. I want to
kiss you. I want you to laugh your stained-glass laugh

when we wait for the bus. I want you to see how
your hair won’t ever gray but will become summer
lightning. I want to feel lightning on my tongue

and I want to hide in the basement when the siren
blares and the sky turns green, the thrum and blare

sending the cat to wherever it scuttles behind the drywall
and I want to be that prefabricated cavern, that place

we never see but sense anyway the lure of quiet
and dark, spiderwebs and a feeling of rightness in being
there. If a honeysuckle can return each year, then I

want the name you would give me, to roll it in
on the ground like I would the marbles my father gave

me so kids in the complex wouldn’t think I’m weird.
I want to know what rain knows and be the constancy
of mason bees building mud homes each November. I

want to be in a room and know you where there. I want
to be the oddness of your fingers holding a sewing

needle. I want your mouth in my palm and to see
how my flesh can blossom into the first lilac sprig

of spring. I want to be the vase, but not the water.
I do not want to be pages left curling in the sun,
ink wilting into a dry liquid blur. I do not want

to be a book. When I let go of this body, my love,
I want to be the first breath of morning in your mouth.

Everyone went to bingo / Veronica Vo

There’s a zombie outbreak in Raccoon City. It’s obvious to anyone that’s not a character in the story but not to the characters. People never call things what they are before they’re sure. So there’s just an outbreak. We don’t know what’s wrong, only that something is wrong. Very wrong. Your mom starts forgetting words to everyday things. It only happens every once in a while, so nothing’s really wrong. Yet. A regular guy is dispatched to Raccoon City to deliver a package. He doesn’t know what he’s about to get into. He doesn’t know his life is about to have a before and after. That there’s quite some time between when he gets bitten and when he turns, time in which he knows what will happen but is still able to ignore it. Proceed as usual. Your mom starts calling you the wrong name. It takes her a minute to correct herself. It’s interesting because she named you. When regular guy sees the zombie virus at work, up close and personal, he says interesting. Interesting as another way to say heartbreaking, even if he doesn’t realize it yet. There’s really nothing he can do besides live until the virus controls him completely. In that kind of situation, when all the buildings are on fire and the cars have piled up onto each other in the roads. No time to ruminate. If you stop moving you die. The once-human, once-familiar creatures will get him with their tentacles and teeth and faces that unfold into flowers. Your mom watches informational videos on Alzheimer’s out loud. Your friend has just pulled up outside to take you to the movies. In a city far away, beyond the scope of being your problem, something is very wrong. Some kind of outbreak in Raccoon City. There’s nothing we regular guys can do.

Das Lied von der Erde    /  Melinda Wilson

When Gustav Mahler sat down at his Larkin Secretary desk  
to write The Song of the Earth, he knew it would be agony.  
Dipping his pen into the inkwell, he pulled from deep memory  
the days each of his six siblings had died. Then, from another  

lockbox of the mind, the day his own young daughter died  
of scarlet fever materialized. Her sandpaper rash, a pink-red 
eruption growing down her neck and chest. Her strawberry 
tongue could have been a product of the pear drops she sucked, 

but not this time. Dark is life, dark is death. Mahler wept. 
To get out of his head, he retreated to the seclusion  
of the Austrian countryside, to walk and walk and walk 
among the tragedy of the Alpine peaks. The ancient forests 

would soothe his aching heart. There the sky is forever blue,  
and the earth / will long stand firm, and blossom in spring. 
There Mahler wrote and wrote and wrote. Such contrast 
to the days he spent on the stage conducting his masterpieces. 

Rapt audiences overcome with grief as they listened to his 
composition. Controlling the orchestra using only his piercing  
eyes, Mahler bred pure tension, until, conducting the New York  
Philharmonic, he collapsed and said, I am coming to you,  
homely place of rest. 

September - Poem 23

When I am Asked What It's Like Being a Stepmom and Instead of Answering I Tell a Story / Laura Bandy

—for Titus

Sara was my favorite barista at the Chicago coffee shop I managed in my twenties. Eyes so light a blue it seemed you could walk through them like a waterfall, freckles everywhere as though someone had blown her a kiss with a handful of turbinado sugar, and a wild crop of curls the color of dusty corn cob, husk stripped, usually on the top of her head in a teetering mop. She was electricity in human form, a live wire who seemed to do the lindy hop while steaming milk, pouring perfect cappuccinos with the froth forming a white apple just so. Once, she came into the café for a shift wearing a hot pink tee that said TATE on it, and I asked if it was a band I’d not heard of yet. She pulled my face to her own so that our foreheads touched, her hands cupping my cheeks, and whispered, “It’s art, Bandy, on the modern tip.” Then, slowly, punctuating each word like a balloon popping, her breath hazelnut from the sweet lattes she sipped all through her shifts, she said louder, “Art. ART!” then shrugged and stepped back. “That’s what we’re here for.” She was a set designer for plays and sometimes drew murals for the café, patrons sipping and watching while she created strange vistas in muted colors—mossy greens and bloodletter reds, chatting amiably with coffee heads all the while—sometimes pausing to laugh with her whole body, bending backwards and whooping at the ceiling, hair flying everywhere, even into the paint.

One evening, the night crew invited us morning workers to a barbeque. They were so much cooler than us, real Chicago kids, unlike the early birds like me who all seemed to be transplants from elsewhere. They were known to be a fast crowd, vampiric in their hours and partakers of all the 90’s party drugs, living in city neighborhoods, never the suburbs. When we arrived, someone was grilling radicchio which turned out to be a bitter-buttery perfect bite, and candle-lit lanterns hung on origami strings above our heads; crane, boat, lantern, the pattern. The tree branches that swayed above were leaf-festooned as though in fluttering party frocks—a secret green space that felt our own little lush islet.

I was surprised by Sara, usually so voluble and effervescent at parties, a bubble water in the flavor everyone most wants to drink; but that night she was quiet, shy-seeming, sitting at the table patiently with a piece of paper naming a celebrity taped to her head. The game was loud, all the night crowd shouting over each other, and Sara’s smile was one I’d never seen on her face before, like an apostle just favored with a holy task. Our hosts were meeting her for the first time and seemed to enjoy teasing her: nudging her shoulder, asking about her most recent play, wondering how she was rolling in Rogers Park, where another barista had just been held up at gunpoint walking home but it had all turned out okay.

Sara smiled through the ribbing, sometimes looking above our heads at the lanterns, swaying back and forth in the black night sky, and at the stars like iridescent fish swimming above us in time to Charles Mingus on the hi-fi. Later, we rode home together on the L, both heading north to our beds. I asked if she had had a good time at the party and why she had been so quiet. Sara was drawing on the windows of our train’s car, her forefinger making shapes in the condensation: kites, stars, even an octopus. “I’m the youngest, you know,” she said, “the family surprise—my sisters and brothers have over a decade on me.” Her window art became loops, spirals like an ocean’s whirlpool. “They had whole lives before I arrived,” she said, “and so I waited until they asked, always.” She drew a little boat on her ocean, gave it a sail. “I wanted to be in the game, so I stayed quiet until they chose me.” Turning in my direction, Sara drew a wet heart on my forehead with her fingertip, then another on her own. “I’m so glad to be here,” she said. “I’m just so goddamn glad to be here.

Dark Force  / Alicia Boemi

I often forget,
I lose myself in your arms.
Why do I keep coming back?

In the darkness, I try to let go,
but
something always propels me,
at you,
a dark force.

And so I ask-
is this the only love I get in a lifetime?

Jesus Loves Me This I Know /  Jesse DeLong

The mom of my friend ran
a daycare in her house where
I wore a red cape all day.
Her sister that worked there told me
she didn’t believe
in hell, though I watched her son string up
and torture a grasshopper,
and later that day the grandmother
told me I could eat the crust
because the bread was baked fresh,
but they stopped letting me
write stories with their son
because of the violence in them.
The only line
I remember is our hero running
from a cave where he’d just encountered
a dinosaur, yelling, “It’s godzilla’s dog.”
They took me one weekend
to their church and after asked the pastor
to save my soul. They’d let me
place the five dollar bill in the collection plate.
I don’t remember anyone singing.
Later, they would sell the house
to a family that raised wolves
and we would drive by and watch the animals
pace the fence, their coats shiny
and glorious and grey.

Let me give this to you /  Shelly Krehbiel

He stands between harmony and exile
as though it is a choice. Let me give this to you,
he says. If anyone was there, they could not
be seen. He is only a boy. He is a good,
grateful boy. Why must every good thing
be broken, be taken away?

If anyone was there, they could see a stone
in his hand, a piece of quartz, rose quartz
with jagged, shiny edges. Did you think
it would be smooth, that stone?
Did you think he had found it in a park,
a stream? I thought so.

I want him to have a round stone, want
him to be giving it to someone he sees, a kind
ghost-dog, an invisible angel. A round stone
would fit so easily in his hand, would keep
its warmth and hold it like a gift. I want
him to know kindness.

He stands there a long time. He cannot
choose who he goes home to. He is not
holding out his hand. The points of stone
are pink in his palm, his fingers. Let me
give this to you, he whispers. Did you think
someone would answer?

Shine on, you crazy diamond,  /  rob mclennan

A moral commitment, to trees. This post, totally verbs. A continued, accumulated need. Contradictions are many. Infinite, newsy. Earl Grey Arnold Palmer. Tacky, rude, and beloved.

Prose Pilot III   / Piper Rasmussen

The pilots on this commercial flight are twins. They like to riff off one another. They both went to the Air Force Academy, but one went to the Academy to be an engineer, and the other wanted to fight a war. Neither got what they wanted, but they both got licenses. They decided to take their show on the road on the preflight announcement circuit in 1999. One tells only the truth and one likes to ask the passengers to hold elections. Sometimes one will use a high voice and the other will use a low voice. When they have different voices, different people laugh, and they share a goal of fair skies. 

what i don’t say when someone asks if i want children  / Connor Simons

yesterday   a dead sparrow tangled in hyssop shoots   a case of avian flu and the parched darkness on drought maps deepens every day   here’s the thing   speaking to the dead doesn’t take much practice   their voice has already burrowed in the dark of my ear and bringing up the body is no different than humming a lullaby my mother sang for me when my tired arms beat back sleep   but speaking to the never-to-be is something else   like the way making a heart a metaphor is easier than seeing it for what it is   a sinewy vessel sustained by air-suffused blood and electric current   so i use what tongue i have and know that some gaps are never closed   easy words like confession or sorry and confession comes from confiteri to acknowledge and so i acknowledge you now outside the quiet spaces where one partner says to the other no and the other nods and there’s no need to explain because look around   i acknowledge you and take away the public demurrals and the world will see the way a wildfire can keep burning underneath snowpack   will see the way people instinctively gather together when they flee   will see the way soil can crack at angles that destroy any hope of soft   but the world will never see you   because there’s nothing there except this acknowledgement and the bone deep knowing of every poem’s lack

Closed mouth that gets fed / Veronica Vo

after Little Shop of Horrors

People are too easy. They just want things
and the mere act of wanting makes them think
they deserve it. I knew this guy that liked a girl
in a bad relationship. He never would have been
brave enough to do anything about it. But after
the abusive boyfriend died, the guy fed him
to me and acted like he was doing something
righteous. All justification happens in retrospect.
Then he fed his own father to me. And eventually,
the woman he loved. Some love. What he loved
most was what he wanted, which is another way
to say what people love most is the wanting itself.

Lovesick Teen Shoots Up School   /  Melinda Wilson

We can say that our impulse is to forgive. 
Austin Bomber Was Nerdy and Kind. 
Or we can tell the truth. The police bought  
Dylann Roof a hamburger, after he killed  
nine people in a local church, because  
he said he was hungry. Nine Black  
parishioners dead at Bible study because  
he wanted to ignite a race war. But sure,  
the bug-eyed boy with a bowl haircut who  
came from a broken home and attended  
at least seven schools in nine years was  
hungry, so get him a hamburger. Get him 
a hamburger, but don’t forget that Evaline 
Hilda Burkitt was force fed 292 times 
for the crime of political agitation.  
A state-sanctioned torture called the Cat  
and Mouse Act, established to punish  
women who wanted the vote. And don’t  
forget that after ICE agents murdered  
Alex Pretti, firing ten shots in under five  
seconds into the ICU nurse, the Trump  
administration repeatedly referred to him as a domestic terrorist. So, please forgive me,  
but the title of this poem is actually  
After months of Aggressive Advances,  
Incel Targets and Kills Classmate  
to Feel Powerful Like a Fucking Prick.  

September - Poem 22

Word Play / Laura Bandy

Elephants fear a bee up their trunk.
Truncate a message, something is lost.
Losing’s no disaster, as we’ve been taught.
Tauten up those emotions, life is strange.
Strangers are just friends in process.
Proceed with caution, that last was a fib.
Fibonacci sequence? Who are we kidding?
Kids get it early—nothing will come of nothing.
No thing Cordelia says will please her father.
Fathom a king who rules justly—laughter heals.
Helium rises like a good joke told to a crowd.
Crows gather in branches outside the sleeping house.
Whose house is this? Who’s in charge here?
Hair down to your waist is just asking for trouble.
Treble is high pitch of a scream when you’re grabbed.
Grubby, those hands. Someone’s been in the mud.
Muddles are made when we don’t use our eyes.
I know, I know—sight lines grow smeary in trenches.
Trenchant, the king’s fool—truth’s a dog must to kennel.
Kin can be so tiresome. Well, you can’t choose your family.
Familiarity with the text is optimal but optional.
Options abound—Shakespeare, Bible, Quran, Seuss (Dr.).
Doctor it up, but alone is something you'll be quite a lot!
Lot’s wife was alone when God turned her to salt.
Salting your food is key, but white people forget.
Forgetting is something we’re very good at.
“At this time, I do not recall.” So say we all.
All of this down to playing war. Toddlers with napalm.
Aces palmed. Find a way out of here once crops are planted.
Plant pollinators, let the bees come. And over the Alps, elephants.
Quoted lines from:
Act I, scene 1 (King Lear)
Act I, scene 4 (King Lear )
Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

Underwater  / Alicia Boemi

Fall has arrived, 
chills in the air;
the lake is now still.
Ice forms around its edges.

Fall progresses to winter, 
ice blankets the lake.
Crackling, bubbling, noisy,
underneath the surface

A whole world underwater starts to develop,
waiting to be set free.
I’m reminded of...
me.

Maybe We Shouldn’t Have Let Each Live So Free Their One Wild and Glorious Life /  Jesse DeLong

The first one my grandfather shot
while he was trying to break through
the mesh wire of the chicken coop. That rooster
pecked my ankles for years after. An australian shepherd
with one blue and one brown eye got caught
in a bear trap. After my grandfather saved her,
she limped for days before the leg turned
gangrene. Still, on three good paws
she nipped the tires of passing cars
and was allowed in the mudroom
during storms
since she saw our cousin shoot a dog dead
inside our shed. I remember my mom moving
nervously around it but wouldn’t enter
before my grandfather cleaned it.
A brown lab so fat she ate a whole pack
of sausages died from some sort of cancer,
and later for my grandfather’s birthday
we gathered around his hospice bed
as he died, probably from the morphine.
He was embarrassed once when I,
just a child, caught him
smoking a cigarette beside his car. A smaller one,
a terrier, had its guts ripped open
by larger dogs, by other unleashed dogs,
while trying to protect the mother
of its pups, and she, not long after, would be hit
by a car on the same dirt road
where the shepherd harassed our neighbors
on their way to work. And this one, this one
here, can you believe it,
this one who is taken best care of,
who stays inside
most days and sleeps on the couch
and see’s regularly the vet—this one’s allergic to grass. 

Tilcayo (A Wayra) /  Shelly Krehbiel

We say discovered
as though your snarls were silence
without us. Small one, do not
trust us, keep secret sounds
shadowed in forests beyond us.

Notes:

1.   Leopardus tilcayo is a species of tiger cat, the first novel cat species identified in the last 100 years. It lives in the Yungas region of Bolivia.  (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)01110-3)

2.    The wayra is a poetic form of the Quechua people originating in Peru/Bolivia. Wayra is the word for wind in the Quechua language. It is a syllabic form of five lines. Syllable count is: 5/7/7/6/8. Traditionally it incorporates onomatopoeia within the lines. (https://christinebialczak.com/2024/04/08/looking-at-poems-around-the-world-the-wayra/)

The Marvel Cinematic Universe,  /  rob mclennan

For the endless, refurbished. Whisper, an approach. Casting decisions. At intervals, directed. Teasers, trailers, leaks. Revisions. Cast, or recast. Not like the books, no. Great, responsibility. Gendered, revelatory. Character driven. Stakeholders, plenty. Buildings topple, rewrite, cameo. Background, purpose. Rhythmic. Echoes, great responsibility. We can begin. To still, get up. To know the scope. Hulk hates fascists, corporate toadies. Refresh, detach. To let clouds enter. (22)

Prose Pilot II   / Piper Rasmussen

After Leslie J. Payne Flight Log, circa 1950

I met Airplane Payne on a cloud. He started his usual spiel, telling me to take no chance, but I said just a sec and I took a dive toward the earth. I swooped back up without my plane. Had to drop that off. After that, he decided that we should train as acrobats, so our bodies could be impervious to the sky and the ground. Why would we need planes if we could loop the loop? No more grabbing engines off old crab boats, etc. He promised to make us costumes for it, but he never got the chance. His life went his way, and mine went mine, but it's okay -- last time we talked, he was pitching white lace, and I wanted to dress in harlequin. Our act was doomed from the start.

what a drowned bike doesn't teach  / Connor Simons

the first thing you notice is the omnipresence of gray –
what was called life is made into a rotten tooth too

stubborn for extraction – the warped whitewash of multi-
family homes a dazzler of muddied light and sky that

in its blue once held the now-defunct promise
of a glacier’s constant growing and receding   the second

thing isn’t color or scene but a muttered ‘jesus’ as you
wonder what would happen if the mountains you know

just gave up one day   or even now when the mountains
are a memory what if the river by your house just said

‘enough’ and stopped? so the second thing is your own
fear and the way you’ve always ran to control   prep

the sandbags now   look up the cost of solar panel
installation   plan out your garden and a build a green

house and the third thing is a bike handle jutting up
from a deposit of soil embanked along the contours

of disaster’s temporary river as it flows downhill until
it reaches a terminus of drowning   you don’t know

the size of the bike and can only guess its use
maybe a child rode it while hawking sweets to

tourists determined to take pictures from the top
of the world or maybe a mail carrier brought

the news on these wheels   threats of ice buckling
in heat   rumors of war   sodden rice paddies

refusing to drain   or more likely it was just laid
there the night before by someone coming home

from work and was simply waiting to become
tomorrow’s rust   something piled up with

other drowned things as our refusal to learn’s
body count gluts the expanse of earth

tumbling from highland to low and back again

What rhymes with bad ghazal / Veronica Vo

My parents met her in college, but they had a story
that let them avoid the truth: that we, too, had a story.

One not fun to tell, somewhere between tragic and funny,
but maybe one day I’ll let go of it, this sad story.

For a long time I was afraid, then I wasn’t, and thought
this meant I was cured; my mistake, an iron-clad story.

Funny how the brain rewires itself without you knowing.
Believing I’m in control – just another bad story.

And I know about bad stories. Been telling one for years.
The girl gets the boy/girl. You know the rest, just add story. 

Quid Pro Quo / Quid Quid Quid    /  Melinda Wilson

When the apothecaries of the 14th century, furtively swapped  
one drug for another, they excused the abuse by saying they  
would go broke if they did not deceive those who required  
the medicine just to gut it out for one more day. Even Erasmus  
admitted, “quid pro quo, one thing for another. They do  
otherwise sell this thing for that.” And so, it would go. Those  
who had resources would hoard them and those that did not  
would mortgage their homes to find a way, to knuckle down,  
and carry on. And so, it went for centuries. Until one cold  
and dry winter morning, a man stood on the sidewalk in front  
of a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan and thought, “quid  
pro quo, one thing for another,” and then he pulled the trigger.  

September - Poem 21

Hammers / Laura Bandy

On a podcast, a Gen X comedian mentions, offhand, a game he played in grade school. “It’s just what it sounds like,” he said. “We threw them at each other.” The young host laughs, assuming a joke from the funny man. “Can you even imagine,” he says. “What if that were really a game kids played?” You can hear the sound guy laughing in the background too, hear the static when he shakes his head and the episode’s audio quality briefly falters. “I don’t have to imagine it, I lived it,” says the comic, and host, sound guy, probably listeners on their commutes, laugh even harder; love it when a guest doubles down on a joke. “Okay,” says the comic eventually, a shoulder shrug in his voice, “okay,” and the conversation moves on to other, less generationally confounding topics, while I’m thrown back in memory to a favorite game of my own childhood wherein my older brother would line my sister and me up against our backyard shed—wide, two stories high, white paint peeling with hoop at the top, crumbling concrete slab of a  basketball court in front, you get the general 70’s-era idea—and explain that we had to keep our backs touching the wall but could move side to side like rooks on a chessboard as fast as we liked. Do try, he advised, to avoid slamming into each other, inevitable while also evading the tennis balls he would hit at us as hard and fast as possible, one after the other after the other, until the afternoons became cooler, the late summer sun sank, and our mother called us in for dinner. We loved this game, loved any attention from our kind but necessarily distant over the range of his six-year lead on us, brother. “Practice,” the game was called, for his spot on the tennis team which was always in question since our family didn’t belong to the country club; or maybe practice for us, pre-teen twin girls in pigtails and terrycloth play clothes, sliding sideways with strict rules under the gaze of a man who made them; or perhaps practice for the wind bisected by an unasked for projectile splitting the airflow and becoming missile in the spin; or even practice for the ball taking a hard hit twice, from the catgut strings of a taut racket to its impact at the wood shed destination, only possibility of rescue to land against soft bodies that, from time to time, just could not, would not learn until much later how, to get out of the way. 

When Mourning  / Alicia Boemi

I can’t bear to lose you, 
even if you're already gone.
So I’ll wrap you around my neck,
and take you everywhere with me.

The Unclaimed Baggage Facility Is Real /  Jesse DeLong

And it’s in Scottsboro, Alabama, and claims
to be “the only national retailer of lost luggage.”
There you can find the Perfect Moment
Corentine Denim Jacket that Jackie has forgotten
after she let an older woman use it as a pillow
on a long flight from Tucson to Bainbridge.
You don’t like that? How about the Lipstick
Pink La Cagole Shoulder Bag that Linda left
when, ironically, applying her own lipstick, not pink,
as she boarded the plane and hoped to cajole
the stewardess into an early glass of Moscato.
No? You already have a bag? How about the “Jesus
Loves You” Silver Sterling Charm? If you turn it around,
its assures you: “This I know.” Though, Mellissa didn’t
when it slipped from its chain and fell
onto the grey carpet next to an empty
M&M’s wrapper. If for some reason
you can’t see yourself
in any of these, how about a pair of Tortoise
TF5959-B Square Prescription Eyewear.
They have that
awkward brown and black blend of shades
that only comes in frames. When Jonathan
set them down to chat up a woman behind him,
he never picked them back up. Anyways, here’s
the links, if you like, since I’m lost
on how to end this poem profoundly:

https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/collections/jackets-coats/products/dl-1961-excellent-womens-jackets-coats

 https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/collections/handbags/products/crossbody-balenciaga-good-womens-handbags-1

 https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/collections/jewelry/products/james-avery-misc-womens-jewelry-25

 https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/collections/eyeglasses/products/prescription-eyewear-tom-ford-good-mens-eyeglasses-36

 a2 + b2 = c2 /  Shelly Krehbiel

The DC Universe,  /  rob mclennan

Endless, interrupted. Start again. False starts, and ethos. Golden age. Elsewhens, dither. Dangle. Disappear. Flash, echoes. Hero, sidekick, hero. Hard hat, wings. Solid, unchanged. Start again. Which is it? Half-through, ultimatum. Superman, electric. Dies. Batman, wanes. Star City: Cleveland, Chicago or Seattle? The last Clark Kent story. Start, again. Until. Such endless, interrupted. Source wall, glory. Crisis, kingdom come. Reboot, reboot. Grounded. New gods thunder, wisdom, patience. Endless, gesture. Kirbyesque, square-fingered. Behold! Barricades. Interrupted, start. Half-measure. Endlessly, begin.

Prose Pilot I  / Piper Rasmussen

I am a pilot. I once fueled up a yellow Aeronca and aimed it toward Albuquerque, which I believed at the time was mythical. My father was teaching me how to fly. He fed me undercooked chicken thighs so I could understand birds better. He never pushed me off a ledge, but I'm sure he thought about it. After I took off, I realized my father had been in the back seat of the plane the whole time. He scolded me for not checking weight and balance properly. He was heavier than I was, so it was hard to land. There were shear winds. I was tempted by a sideways loop-de-loop into the green but chickened out. The grass-strip airport staff and my father nearly clipped my wings after that, but I distracted them by drawing cartoons in my logbook. 

fire sermon  / Connor Simons

The creation of boundaries is a kind of imagination; this not that. First a tryst then the marriage of self and exclusion. And if the fire line keeps moving, closer and closer, spanning the river, devouring the rye stalks – is that our unloved child? Our rough beast?  Its sleepless eyes a heat-borne whirlwind of hinterland’s lack and centuries of certainty?

In ignorance of desire / Veronica Vo

‍ ‍after Obsession

enough time passes this life that wasn’t supposed to be yours
and you don’t know what you want anymore what you’re watching
bodily autonomy horror-comedy
taken for granted true to form
what kind of person wants that the slasher isn’t the biggest evil
desire without free will a figure devoid understands
two things that must coexist innocence and performance
but does anything really matter in the end
real you screaming on the phone fake you smiling
will you speak to her like you always wanted to

Message in a Bottle   /  Melinda Wilson

I don’t have room for it all      all the letters I will write to the oneday world  
all the sentences to say    that I’m sorry we weren’t better      the words: 
I’m sorry    I’m sorry    I’m sorry          for everything I’m sorry 
The bottle is full and I am empty    and you    were most likely never  
even born because this beautiful earth couldn’t survive our gluttony
our violence      our disregard     And I am sorry      for my part in it all    
for not knowing  what to do when our neighbor countries burn      are on literal
fire and we  want to tax the smoke      and so what is to be done now    but light
a joint and rejoice    crack a beer and cry out     
                                           into the long night that is to come 

September - Poem 20

Nature Poem / Laura Bandy

The news is ugly, so I go outside. I decide
to write a nature poem. Most often when
I scribble, my poems contain humans.

Not this one. Who, then, is speaking?
Let’s begin with the trees, specifically
the new maple shooting up its sap green

leaves that teeter on a spindly stalk. We
brought him in as a replacement when
the most recent Midwest tornado took out

our beloved oak, split her massive 100-year
plus trunk like a wet toothpick, then shoved
her blooming arms through our window. See

how one becomes two? We want to root for
this baby tree to make it, want to care that he
bursts forth blazing orange growth in fall,

so that when the sun hits be-leaved branches
just right, our house is bathed in honey glow
as it was every autumn before the storm. But

we, weary beings, know this sapling can’t
deliver. Maybe turn this over to the birds who
find any high perch sweet, or the late summer

clouds that seem Nimbus today, rain-bearing,
ready to water any and all roots. Nature doesn’t
judge, has no opinion on past or future; only

present resonates—where the nuts and berries,
when the lightning strike, what furred creature
to run from in the dark—there is no why, no

how. Out this window, my husband’s car backs
down the driveway, fender drooping from when
I borrowed it and hit that deer that darted, as they

do, into the road at night. They leap that way
because they have to, nature demands it, then go
blind in bright headlights. You know who, now.

Worth the Money  / Alicia Boemi

The last time I saw my dad, he had yellow eyes.
I thought to myself: He will die; he is sick.
He handed me my grandmother’s straw hat and said,
“This hat is worth money.”

Everything worth something needed to be worth money,
to him.
Growing up, I just wanted to be worth something
to him.
He died five days later.
Sometimes I wear that straw hat.

Today, my toddler wore that straw hat,
crookedly on her tiny head,
it made us laugh and smile.
Worth it? I think so.

Marginal Notes on Calculations by Judith K. Walker /  Jesse DeLong

“The statements in mathematics are permanent, so really, they’re about your own inevitable death.”

When people experience a beautiful piece of music or a particularly moving piece of art, a specific area of the brain will activate. Neurobiologists have shown that this same area activates when mathematicians are fascinated by an equation.  

“He knew about the MIT study. He’d read about how they’d asked participants to pick a number between 1 and 20. He was aware that, mathematically, 17 was the most common answer. But no matter how many times he’d presented this choice to people he was familiar with—his wife, his son, his colleagues in other departments—they’ never fall in line.”

Like that Cohen Brothers' movie, A Serious Man, where a physicist up for review is asked what he’s published, and he looks at them stupefied, as if he’d never even thought about it, and responds, “I haven’t published anything.”

That one renga where the clapping of erasers is linked to thunder.

Grocery stores don’t even carry that brand anymore.

“He’d calculated the probability of the major events of his life, how likely they were to happen, and came away with the depressing realization that he was, like most of us, ordinary.”

Like the time in Geometry class when you noticed the line of ants running along the tiles towards a crack in the wall, and your teacher, careful not to disturb their order, stepped over them as she filled the board with equations.

“When his son turned 17, he told him about the commonality of the number. His son simply looked down at the greasy egg on his plate, fried so hard the ends were dry, and flipped his hoodie over his ears.”

The word choice of ears, here, instead of head or hair.

How high school wrestlers will wear garbage bags and spit into plastic cups to make the perfect weight, and how, if at a meet, they find a scale more generous than others, they will form a line for the more lenient numbers.

“The number of years his parents had been married. His state rank on the high school chess league. The number of school’s he’d applied to. The amount of dates he’d had with his wife before asking her to marry him. The number of months they’d tried before conceiving. The amount of people he could count as actual friends. The distance, in kilometers, from his house to the university.”

That’s nice. But will you really use that in the real world?

Between Continents /  Shelly Krehbiel

Reykjanes peninsula, Iceland

this place says that when we leave each other, it will be a little at a time. sand filling in the gaps

until it can’t anymore. until it falls through. what then? do we just keep moving further and

further apart, millimeters at a time? look at how the shadows trail behind you for a while, like

oak branches shedding their first leaves in september wind. when the sun passes over it will be

my darkness stretching back, like the crow feather as it floated near the river. imagine what it

will be like when there is enough room for the ocean between us. a whole ocean. maybe it is

possible, unimaginable years from now, for us to meet again on the other side, versions of us

crashing together into a horizon of new mountains, an island no one expected.

For Fred Wah,  /  rob mclennan

What if we said we were. Pressure-treated, commonplace. Iron, shale. The treeline this morning. Confirmation. This, question. Turns, smooth and snow. Separation, dialogue. Monologue. Monolith. Walking path, trail. Further footsore, streaks. Eating weeds. You know what the continent. Hillside, or into a forest. A staircase, descends. Upon cobbled stone. Branches, fossil. Microscopic. History professors, the sweet summer wind. To set out as numbers. History, professes. All out of sequence. Glimpses, direct. Don’t speak, pause. Erosion, gathers. Ecocaution. Current threat level: high. These sticks, held in lake mud. The rear wheel. Vancouver loves you. Some feathers wet, Kootenays. I’ll have what he’s having.

Mesostic on Electricity, Sound, and Light,  Chapter 4: Galvanometer Constant of a Moving Galvanometer  / Piper Rasmussen

iT is seen
may not Remain constant
restAtement of definition

a unit magNetic pole
Since action and reaction are equal

51. The Motor rule.
imagined merely as an aId to thinking
elaStic
bandS endowed
with the followIng properties

pOles
repulsioN
one single lOop
toward the reader with a Force of [] dynes and the right
Side is urged away

suppose thaT
equilibRium is
Established
the result is precisely the Same
whatever itS shape
Expression
showS

Alpine/Nippon  / Connor Simons

NAME: Alpine COMMENTS: Near Skykomish
COUNTY: King ‍ ‍REMAINS: Nothing. 
ROADS: 4WD
GRID: 1
CLIMATE: Snow in winter, hot in summer
BEST TIME TO VISIT: Summer, early fall before snow

Nesting Doll Poem / Veronica Vo

Tears welling under fluorescent parking lot lighting,

say you love me and mean it,

even if you remind me of someone else.

The girl before you broke my heart and so will

the one after. You deserved more than me wanting you to

say you love me and mean it,

even when I couldn’t do the same, no matter

how much I wanted to. And I wanted to.

Growing up, my parents didn’t tell me they loved me,

but things changed and I can’t remember when. I used to

think it needed to be rationed. The more you

say you love me and mean it,

the less it means. I used to think like that. I used to think

a lot of things that were wrong. I still do, but I can’t tell

what time will tell. All I know is that it will.

My childhood best friend used to bring me nesting dolls

from Russia. She was good to me, but now she is

someone I don’t know and we don’t speak anymore.

The worst part is that I will always have her in my heart.

Saying you love me and meaning it,

that’s not the hard part. The hard part is knowing

rather than remembering. A friend asks if she can ask

me about my mother. Do you feel less close to her now,

because of memory? I ask her what closeness means.

I watched a video of someone breaking open

a container of red liquid on their chest with a hammer.

I don’t know what it means to know someone. There is so much

about me my parents don’t know. Does any of it matter?

Does loving require knowing? Knowing does not require loving. She

says she loves me and means it.

I know she means it. If I was born from her, raised by her,

does that mean she knows me? Even if we

spend so much time in silence. Even if she doesn’t want to know

that I will never love like she wants me to, my muse. A nesting doll

will always know where it came from, even if removed.

No Moonlight / No Moonshine     /  Melinda Wilson

No lumens tonight.  
Only stars’ blurry glow from  
behind cushion clouds.

September - Poem 19

Nocturne / Laura Bandy

On a dusk stroll down
our town’s prettiest street,

I pressed my nose
into plush petals of cream

hydrangeas, and a bee
blew out as though

I’d breached her home.
But a flower is not a home

any more than a holiday
party you attend on Christmas

is. Yes, there are chairs, tables
festive greenery that feels

familiarly domestic, yet
the photos in their frames,

the fussy canapes, even
pets you would like to stroke

and recognize as your own
are alien here—an interstitial

space, temporary transition
between you and your eventual

destination. Soon, the sun will drop
and moon rise in her white dress.

I get lost often, even on common
paths I’ve known all my life long.

When I walk back all my wrongs and
all the steps to my door, I know music

will be playing, usually a new tune
that my guy has found and spun

so that notes float out through nudged up
windows on this nearing autumn evening—

oh, you knew it all along. Home is a song.

True Love  / Alicia Boemi

 I lost my eternity with you.

Teardrops form,
but no noise comes out.

A sad song. 
Ooohh—Ooohh

It’s all a reminder of how deeply and desperately I miss you.
I can still hear your last heartbeat.
A noise I won’t forget.

ooohh—ooohh
Can you come home?

Now,
I know what true love is.

I Was Supposed to Write a Poem Today /  Jesse DeLong

I Was Supposed to Write a Poem Today, but Didn’t, And So Here Is a Blank Page That Represents My Shame, Though the Symbolism Doesn’t Really Work, Because Shame Feels More Astringent, Like a Hangover From Rut-Got Gin, Which Also Makes Me Wonder Why the Blank Page Often Represents Hope, a Feeling Also Unlike the Emptiness of No Words, And More Like the High Point of That Same Cheap Gin—That’s It, Maybe Gin Is the Thing We’ve Really Been Looking For.

[Kirsten, can you please give me enough blank space to represent a blank page?]

Cento for the Pale Princess /  Shelly Krehbiel

  (lines from Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins), H.D., W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot)

No apologies ever need to be made
for your chance smile.
How I envy you this.

I’m on my own.
I should have been a pair of ragged claws.
I’m the face in your dreams of glass.

All those angels with their wings glued on --
I have met them at close of day.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

What moonsongs do you sing your babies?

Graceful swans of never topple to the earth
And indeed there will be time
To find they have flown away.

Incomplete passage,  /  rob mclennan

Lord Elgin, what have you. A forest of English, the first stanza of listen. Sapper’s Bridge, Biddy’s Lane, Miss Harmon’s School for Girls. The Royal Sappers and Miners. Points, for a purchase. Such tangible counterpart. I wish for this book. How many heads, sunk. To grammar is born. The first round is simple, revolt. I’ll have a second. Combustion. As a reasonable centrist, what kind of hysteria. My present state, echoes. Of dirt roads and lines. A dispersion, pronouned. This wildlife of settlement. Iambic feet, Somerset, Cooper. Walks down. Above, all these seraphim. Conyer Livingston Clayton. This kind of translation. Scribe, you may slip. I think often, most likely. Sometimes, in sleep. Paralytic. Crows of Gloucester, John Smith’s Lane. Permanent dead links. Close the window display. Man says, give a twirl. Let me see you.

Annie Dillard's Writing Life  / Piper Rasmussen

When she sat in a windowless cabin
in the cold on the beach,
            and wrote

The line of words is a hammer. You hammer
against the walls of your house. You tap the walls,
lightly, everywhere.                 I was knocked & shaken.

A friend says, write from the wound.
Another says, write from                      the scar.

And at a party for writers,
other recs include:
                   write
‍ ‍like the man in the cage
and the children around him, also in the cage;

write like a dog, early, often,
begging for notice;

one holds off to the end like a key, taunting its lock
                    (or, when acknowledging the inevitable
                              or the deadline)              a puddle sinking into its mud

                                            & another warns that the more orgasms he has
the less he writes (he has accepted this quote from another
                                                                                                          into his body)

rumbles from another table           in the distance     suggest
write like a hailstorm, sudden
        ice-marbles    skittering

and seated, I learn it is
like     breathing,     effortful    when     sick    &       tired   
when done        just like     (& by the way I'm going)      home        

each direction                 reflects bright little mirrors 
inside           cataracted eyes    -- postmodern
                              alteration and absorption --
    a process    of processing    

but no party lasts long enough to keep us
from a windowless room   the hammer & I

Catullus writes Clodia a letter on the road to Bithynia  / Connor Simons

when we are tangled together   your leg between my thighs – odi et amo – there are languages i won’t speak   nameless of course – quare id faciam – isolates found only in the space between the nail and a palm   the frog’s eyes when it notices the first simmering bubble – fortasse requiris – and if your tongue ran across my clavicle – nescio – it might want to master the dialects of a country where lakes have evaporated overnight – sed fieri sentio – but find only the native’s glare   the one for when a tourist smudges glass panes with the pudgy oils filling the wrinkles of their fingerprints – et excrucior – 

What comes after / Veronica Vo

After Life asks, if you could bring one memory
with you into the afterlife what would it be.
My impulse is to choose one with a lover.
Instead, I settle on one with family: all five of us
in Vietnam at a restaurant by the beach, or maybe
in the city, I can’t remember exactly. Only that
it was night and it was cool. I’m making a face
I just found out I can make and it’s funny and
they’re all laughing so hard they’re crying
or barely breathing. This kind of moment
that can’t be orchestrated. A gift life gives you.
That only life can give you. Meaning,
that you have to be alive to experience. 

Dream Baby Dream     /  Melinda Wilson

Today the city exists in sepia tones— Wildfire smoke  
spreads and drapes a thick curtain over the island. Wild- 
flowers wilt, and I miss the blue skies over the peaks  
of the Catskills. At Inspiration Point, where we stop  
for a picture, the haze threatens to erase it all, the most  
ancient of our structures, and our purest desires. Can a planet  
commit suicide, rest hold of its future from our greedy hands?  
When Alan Vega sings, keep those dreams burnin’ forever,  
keep that flame burnin’‍         ‍keep those dreams baby, 
those dreams keep you free       I imagine the Earth’s  
canyons as smiles spread wide across its blue green face,  
and I think               dream, baby, dream.  

September - Poem 18

Body Count / Laura Bandy

My friend says he never got his license
since autos coming at him on the road
all to him just looked like coffins with wheels.
When he moved to L.A., city of end-
less freeways, it felt like the death drive. What
was it Freud said? In all organic things,
inherent tendency to return to
an inorganic state exists, in part-
icular when it comes to muscle
cars, drift battles, and high-stakes scrambles. That
last has Fast and Furious verbiage (I
did not know Freud was a fan). Fast cars and
sex go together like waterbeds and
charcuterie boards with tiny silver knives—
the combination seems a fine idea
at the time. Los Angeles County racks
up around 800 car wrecks per year,
while waterbed punctures are too rare to
track. You see the smart play here. Another
friend asked my body count and seemed surprised
at the number, though I’m not sure in which
direction. Ever heard of the pleasure
principle? Freud attributed most of
human behavior to the seeking of
sexual pleasure—libido in the
driver’s seat, y’all, or maybe backseat
depending on space and time. Dominic
Toretto would beg to disagree. He
uses cars as God and Dodge intended—
to race, to chase bad guys, and to drive his
family from place to place. In college,
all my friends were down the hall or across
the Quad. Now we’re spread from the start of Route
66 in Chicago, to the end
in California, and some even jumped
the pond. Love, death, family, final beds—
my sister is my twin, like the poet
Philip Levine had. In “How to Get There”
he said, the day will become something
it’s never been before, something for which
I have no name. I count on my fingers
but forget the math, forget who asked. 

Roll the Rock  / Alicia Boemi

Steady as the rock that rolls...
beyond the pines into the needle-filled forest floor,

I wonder...
have I told you I love you?

The trees won’t share my admission, only silence from them.
And so I melt into the moss without saying a word.

Maybe I need a bigger rock to roll.

People Who Wake Up to Fish Stews Every Morning /  Jesse DeLong

Cento titles and lines from Graeber and Wengrow, Boully, Pollan, Earling, Earling, Tokarczuk translated by Croft, Wetherington, Plumly, Davis, Ford, Joudah, Arendt, Moshfegh, Miranda, Ford, Brooks, Okada, Orange, Göransson, Sharma, Lundy Martin, Graeber and Wengrow, Long Soldier, Ford, Persson, Brown and Drake

Death would indeed involve luna moths and lilacs,
so let’s begin at the beginning, with fire.
I huddle over my belly like it is a fire that will go out.
The People died like rotten plums,
like a purple coat worn on holy days.

What does it mean to witness in language?

That was the moment I began to wear my father’s body.
The hummingbirds had been replaced by large moths that arrived at dusk.
The owls kept closer to the ground.
Still they shared the dead among them.
The mob was flesh,
an ominous kind of stillness, like a slingshot being pulled back too hard—
these new names for hunger.

What was to be said against that?
Pray, to pray?
People forgot and, in forgetting, forgave
how everyone lives in different states now.

This is how art works, through infection, contamination.
How it can crush me into bits how everything can.

What other place is possible besides
theatre or history,
winter water cold-steeped in pine needles,
hairbrushes, frying pans, and copies of Sappho?

The morning of the fish and roots.
Still, as the dead do
in our language full of light. 

Cheyenne Bottoms on the 17th /  Shelly Krehbiel

Some places feel like they shouldn’t exist. 41,000 acres
of wetlands in the middle of Kansas. If you don’t know where to look
you would never know it’s there. Unless you drive that particular road,
happen to notice the road sign. Unless you also follow the sign
and find yourself on a road with water on both sides and reeds and where
did it come from - this water? Maybe you arrived just at the right time
to see the cranes, whooping cranes on their 2500-mile journey
from north to south or back again. How do whooping cranes even exist –
white wings carrying their long bodies from far-from-here to another
far-from-here? You know there aren’t that many left, right? Cranes. Stopping places.
Three hundred sixty-four other kinds of birds use these waters too, one
name for each day of the year. What if you knew them, the names, the feathers?
What would come to you in the middle of the night? What dreams would show you
water and sky so far away you’d never know it existed if
you hadn’t woken in time to remember? There probably weren’t any
cranes that day. It was the wrong season. I didn’t even know cranes
could be there. I had to be somewhere, didn't I? It was just a sign.

First weather,  /  rob mclennan

An age of melancholy, rotation. Routine. Every few months. Blue Moon Café, this poutinerie. A wealth of nations. Uppercuts, into the air. The attention of sleep, infamous slices. What out-of-phase syntax. A corner, we round on. Against, or obscene. Kids, when the clubs hollow. Contrary. One lobbies for windmills, an ambient passage. Parodistic. Turbulence corridor, straight south from Wellington. What meaning, holds. The sheer force. Where the palm reader sat. By the window, just there. To procrastinate, panel. Great Canadians. A pure matter, faith. As the wind blows. I believe in you not at all. 

after C. P. Cavafy  / Connor Simons

no room to remember except in memory
and even then it’s mostly shades and senses   a stretch
of hair running down from the belly
button   nourishment’s first locus   desire’s starting point

and now   what can be familiar?

maybe a futon laden with throw pillows
an acrylic tapestry nailed into a wall
the swirling hues smudged by the first embrace
of moan   or maybe not that   maybe it was
a bed and maybe it was only
posters on the wall   now just items heaped
beside others in a rural landfill but there is
the scene of rodeo boys scowling when he held my hand

some part of his palm’s warmth   is that heaped too?

some afternoons   the arid sunlight still
tangles the dark hair on his calves

…   one night he decided to put me
wherever it is the ghosts of a bedroom go
a place contained in the dark space
where breath and tongue pass through lips

According to the Gospels / Veronica Vo

Jesus was tempted three times in the desert. Hunger, life, and splendor.
One of the stories I remember most from a lifetime of Catholicism.
I remember it again in a restaurant, telling a friend about my diagnosis
for the first time. The temptations to make friends tell me if my relationship
was working. I succumbed every time. I want things to be different.
I want to prove I can do it right. There it is again. Only belief.
Satan tests Jesus’ ability to feed himself and resist worldly splendors,
but the one that sticks with me the most is his ability to overcome death.
Devil takes Son to a cliff and tells him to jump. If God is real the angels
will catch him. Jesus says not to test God. Imagine that: a faith so strong
it doesn’t need to be tested. The crux of the problem: a feeling mistaken
for fact. Each temptation a test. They say if it’s hard it isn’t right. I said
this wouldn’t be easy. In the desert, any mirage can become reality.

The Infant Perdita    /  Melinda Wilson

Finding herself in the stormy wilderness of a shoreline 
that could not have existed and without a soul to take  
up her care, the infant Perdita turned to her instincts. 
Unable to speak beyond the babble of a babe, she broke  
into an expeditious crawl toward the tree line, joining  
her insect brethren under the elliptical leaves of the beech  
trees, where she pondered her condition. Her new  
and capacious consciousness whirled with quandaries:  
hunger and thirst, shelter from elements and predators,  
but chief among these agita was loneliness. Who would  
teach her the ways of this world? Who would take her  
in their arms, so she would know love? Who would help  
her bear her pain when it came for her? Who would  
be hers? Having exhausted herself with doubt, she fell  
into a numbing sleep and, in the mist, came upon a bear  
and a wolf. The bear, who called himself Spinoza, told her  
that the universe and the divine are one and therefore  
she could never be alone. She looked quizzically from  
Spinoza back to the wolf, who told her that there would be  
no survivors from this world, so in the meantime, she must  
rely on only herself, for every heart vibrates to that iron  
string. When she woke, she knew she must begin the work  
of living,  
ready herself to meet  
any joy, any terror. 

September - Poem 17

Sin Tax Triolet / Laura Bandy

My brother asks for a poem about either tax indexing or
the fragility of life. I confess—I know nothing of the first
and have politely ignored the second as a philosopher’s chore.
Why worry? Why contemplate how lickety-split our exit? Or
am I hiding… Time here is short: a wink, really, on God’s face, torn
wing of the angel who fell from father’s favor to father’s curse.
The tax for loving and being loved was always thus: play safe alone or
risk it all, let those brackets creep cloud high. And the last shall be first. 

Hollow  / Alicia Boemi

And I did love you at one moment in time.
Remember looking over the lake?

Longing,
wishing,
hoping.

You’d lean over,
seal it for us both.

But,
silence.

Love, it washed away in the waves.
What followed: a hollow heart on fire.

For My Birthday All /  Jesse DeLong

I want is to watch the Twilight Zone
while you fall asleep next to me
and for our child to sleep, soundlessly,
without disturbance, next to me,
and for the dogs to sleep,
without howling, and for me,
eventually,
to fall asleep,
and for this to be all
I ever really want. 

At the Corner of 18th & Friendly /  Shelly Krehbiel

As evening comes in, September sun crashing
into the rattling oak tree feels like an accident.

Then there it is, yellow everything.  

I said I’d never use the word crash casually again.
Yet there it is, in the same sentence as accident

making golden with the same words

that mean metal and smash and broken
and pain and bruises and not quite sure

what’s memory, what’s shadow, what’s now.

It’s equinox season. Two halves of horizon, two
hands raised into the air to feel warmth before

warmth is lost like shattered leaves.

It’s okay to be nervous, she whispers, takes
my hand in hers. And we go together,

to the place where it happened. 

The book of questions,  /  rob mclennan

Repetition, reset. Inarticulate. The man in the moon. Copy, fold, staple. Copy, fold, staple. A path marked in stone. My teenaged mother saw movies, the theatre next door. This was back in the fifties. A bare lot, might wither. Panopticon, gravel. A fire burns layers. Copy, fold, staple. Copy, fold, staple. Wood planning and turning, mill. Old colonial. Grandfathered, shadow. The walls might collapse. Abiding. Context: a chaise lounge in hell. At the season, flustered. Undefinable realms. Marking chairs, ottomans. Side tables, tasteful. A fire burns, layers. Copy, fold, staple. Copy, fold, staple. This is not where I started. If I am to emerge. Unscathed, if you will. A claim of last words. My freak is unmatched.

Othello  / Piper Rasmussen

is onstage in the parks
in Harlem & Columbus Ohio
like the cities' cycles
have synced up (a myth,
by the way, that menses
are more than a shared

anatomical habit). It's been years
since DC did Red Velvet, back
to back with Black Shylock.
James Shapiro's Shakespeare
has been in America a few years
now. A. Van Jordan's When I Waked

I Cried To Dream Again barely
saw the day, each of them
a More Than Ever to ride
like a wave. My kingdom 
for a horse that doesn't bolt
so quickly on, herald to a Lear

or Winter's Tale.
The following slot a vicious 
Richard, or a Bloat
of Henries. Then following 
the dogs of war 
a Midsummer reward, just As they Like It.

Back-to-school will flirt with Juliet,
or grown-up Cleopatra with her snake. Only then
might The Audience be Ready
for another Issue Play: a Caesar,
or a Merchant, or Othello Most Profound.
Pick 1 of 3.

The arc of justice bends
around again:
a slowly-bleeding public
sits and spins. 

a climate crisis tanka #3  / Connor Simons

mandible-wrecked ash
trees – emerald jaws girdle
and gnaw on sapwood;
if i put my ear to your
chest would i hear snowless months?

day of unbearable lightness / Veronica Vo

after Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen’s score: Towards an Unbearable Lightness (1992)

red Icee stain and beaded bracelets
shapes in the enclosure your hand
reaching through me on the other
side the reaching the reaching
the reaching my hand on your
knee and you smiling so hard
my light in an eternal summer
in conversations with myself
gradually every note changes
in this version a fermata at the end
you don’t let go and I never ask you to

Attempting to Regain Myself after a Long Period of Destruction    /  Melinda Wilson

The first mistake I made was to desire the past. The following mistakes  
were all repetitions of that initial error. When I looked in the mirror, I wanted 
to see the girl of my youth or the young woman of the not-so-distant 
past who thought she was on the right path. Foolish girl, but pretty and thin, 

and happy in her way to float from one day to the next without concern  
for her sins. The second mistake I made was to desire the past. Powerless  
in the unshakeable grip of nostalgia, I worked to replicate and remake feelings,  
which are autonomous interior spirits that will not be told how to fashion  

themselves. Products of the present, they laughed in my face, and I begged  
forgiveness and took my lashes. But still, I persisted.  The tenth mistake  
I made was to desire the past. With a bottle of E&J brandy in hand, I emptied  
our photo albums one by one. Removed every old ornament from the Christmas  

tree and delicately laid them in a felt-lined box because still I would not admit  
that they were trash. The one hundredth mistake I made was to desire the past. 
Visit the places where I knew the ghosts would be about, read Ashbery & Bishop  
in Tompkins Square Park. Believed in a future that would arrive with no scars,  

having simply pressed fast forward to a clean part of the tape. The one thousandth  
mistake I made was to desire the past.  One morning in Marble Hill 
I woke to the first mark of progress, a desire to admit the erosion of what once 
was. A willingness to endure the discomfort of agnosia that would come with each 

small switch. Instead of Dresden or Berlin, I would be like Rotterdam after the war,  
bearing less and less resemblance to the buildings that had been there before.  
I would not attempt to recapitulate myself but build a new self no matter the time 
that would pass in this process or what plague of growing pains. I let go of before.  

September - Poem 16

September  - Poem 16 / Laura Bandy

When the young woman sitting at the table next
in this small plates upscale bistro, Curate,
takes photos all throughout her dessert and ‘grams
them, making kiss-lips peace-sign influencer-
worthy selfies as she holds tidy forks-bites to
her face, then begins to slide down, slowly,
the way I imagine a 70’s waterbed might undulate
as you place a cautious limb on the mattress,
trembling, perhaps, after too many Bees Knees
cocktails out with friends: her flower of a mouth
already turning blue, cheeks waxen and eyes
aflutter in her skull’s slot machine, when… Forgive
me. Forgive the way my body freezes while
my brain continues on, like an alcoholic blackout in
reverse, spits out similes as though that might
help the girl on the floor right now, seizing, and my
hand considers extending, maybe to do some
thing other than hold a pen, I hear a woman’s voice
[clear as the water in my glass I asked be refilled
over and over, and could you add a lemon slice this
time, please, could you keep bringing me that
which makes this body go, flow forward, in contrast
to a body stopped] shout the phrase I’ve only
heard before in films and; what do you know? A
nurse in heels and sequins comes from back
of the shot, a long take, they call this, blonde
blowout floating up like (I’ll say it) angel
wings as she kneels, places purse between teeth and
tongue to save from the slicing bite, cradles
a stranger as if her own newborn, and then, then
I can move. And she, she, she. All three—
background, middle-ground, deep focus—all three
women (whose story is the eternal one)
begin again.

Howling  / Alicia Boemi

C h a n g e

m e.

C h a n g e

m e.

You, in your enormity, can do that,
right?
I howl.

Awoooooo

My neck splinters to look at you.
We’re in purgatory down here.
The ripe and rotting moon sees all.

Because Jonathan Franzen said a Book is Allowed One Cliché /  Jesse DeLong

I open the drawer in my office for snacks
but find only a millipede
scuttling over an empty M&Ms bag,
and earlier I read the passage
in Dracula where Renfield feeds
a fly to a spider to a bird
and hopes for a cat so that each
accumulation of life will add together. Maybe
there is a lesson there—not about the grotesque
fooderies, no, but about adding to and layering
experiences. How the millipede
is a gift on this lonely morning early
where no students will visit
and my wife and child are elsewhere.
Last night a perfect
rainbow (please, allow me this
cliché because it’s true) arched
out of a puff-ball of a cloud. I had never
seen that, not out of a cloud
like that, and I was glad I didn’t
have my phone on me to take
a picture. 

Ghazal for the Lost /  Shelly Krehbiel

Let’s get in the truck. You’ve got country
on your mind and on the radio: country.

Music still plays behind the bars of memory
though many things are lost in the country.

County roads are a way of counting. One tree,
miles until the next in straight-line country.

It’s not a question of losing myself. I’m hungry
whenever wind blows. I want to see country.

Don’t forget how it felt to stand, though angry
others have the power to bend good country.

Tip your hat, if you still have one, to the lost, see
their faces, the ones no longer left in this country.

Hawks and vultures ride the updrafts, so free,
while rabbits run for cover in open country.

Though I feel old dust in my throat, I must sing
for wide skies and wings, as I lose my country.

Love, love the Lax’yip, /  rob mclennan

To rend the earth. What are we doing. A line, on Prince Rupert. What is your truth? Bliss fulfillment. The hub, of the north coast. Skeena, Grand Trunk, Ts’msyen. Of the Rhine, Duke of Cumberland. My second language, is steps. Out, stretch the length. Pipeline, pipeline, shale. We will never admit we are buried. Such savagery. Historical, sequence. You can’t come into language, as into a mountain. Eras, end. What is fragile, we mangle, we purposefully break. Diagonals, research. Facts matter, notions. What the lungs suffer. Word, approaches the word. A subversive poetics. Predictable, loss. A sound toward leanness. Antiphonal, trees. To outlive, the company. Hudson’s Bay. What if we stopped. Just, stop.

Bob The Reader  / Piper Rasmussen

Bob didn't help to build the bigger house
even when his siblings heaved the spongy
wartime lumber. He was Bob the Reader --
the family's Encyclopedia.
When he tried to go outside to help,
he got himself bit by a frothing dog.

The mastiff ran away until his brothers
gunned it down, & until his sister dragged
the lumpen body home for rabies tests.
It was heavy, and Bob had to take
the Greyhound bus that left just after class
to a city with vaccines in stock.

When Uncle Bob enlisted, he was smart:
studied radios, and met the mark
to be assigned Technician on the spot:
a bookish man who'd had enough of shots. 

a climate crisis tanka #2  / Connor Simons

you bite at my neck
and the bruise waits ‘til morning
to ripen itself.
somewhere a wildfire smolders,
waiting for april’s first thaw.

Is it bad that I (still) want it / Veronica Vo

The lesbian pulp ending even if there’s all that
screaming and crying and heartbreak
in the middle. And at the end.
Doesn’t it all feel worth it, those moments
of bliss. Like trying to find beauty in the mundane
but instead of the mundane it’s the electrifying
feeling of simple connection. So easy.
The fallout is terrible. Trust me, I know,
been threatened with beheaded stuffed animals,
stalked, written about slanderously, ghosted in person,
on the clock, straight up left on heard in real life,
made the rounds of the tumblr shit-talking circuit,
seen the ex’s new girl that looks just like me, still,
it’s worth it, the moment when you feel understood
for a moment – seen, through the flecks of light
filtering through the green or brown of someone else’s eyes.
Sunlight coming through the trees.

Treehouse    /  Melinda Wilson

Call it a hole.  Call it a home. 
Call it a wound or a birthing canal.  
Whatever we’ve called it,  
we can’t seem to fill it.  

Philosophers muse over the void,  
but if we could build skyscrapers 

like termites – mountainous ruins 
of saliva and feces – all the holes 
in the walls would not jar us.  

We are not the only architects,  
erecting fixed homes of maximum 
stress. The little long-tailed tit 
integrates its nest with the landscape,  
hopeless to go undetected.  

Nature offers perspective 
on primates who won’t build: 
we are evolutionarily driven by fear,  
which drives all animal action,  
like the way I don’t want to live 

with you, but I value not being alone. 
Like coral polyps bound to our reefs,  
I can’t ever touch you. When worn down 
and dead, we’ll settle as sand on the sea- 
bottom, and then, we can be together 

with no fear of the future. For now,  
we must safeguard our weakest flesh. 
Shells are one of the most common 
and primitive forms of protection.  
Sometimes I fall in love with shells.  

None of us is as brave as the naked 
hermit crab stealing a mollusk shell 
that just might be perfect. 
It considers the decision carefully: 
should I change or not change? 
At most, we can remove obstacles 

to lie like lungfish in a pile of muck,  
taking awful gasps when the ponds 
have dried. We have been building 
this home all our lives. The sad part 
is that we never get more skillful,  
so our last work will be almost 
identical to our first.  

September - Poem 15

Drifter / Laura Bandy

Last night between rows at the grocery,
my husband sighed and said he wanted
not to know what he now knows. “Let me
crawl back in the Matrix,” he said, “I will
happily eat the fake steak.” He is a handsome
man, tall and blue-eyed of Irish and Quaker
stock, distantly related to Daniel Boone, and
his growing up was fraught (father in a
motorcycle gang, their side of the tracks
decidedly wrong). His song is a familiar one
from good white men who do good now and
are wistful, still, for former ignorance (blissful).
Same, you sons of bitches, same, only unknowing
was never an option for some (including XX
chromosomers, population of our household? One).

In the novel that I’m reading, a drifter comes
to town (not Shane) and causes quite a stir. He
has weary eyes that have SEEN TOO MUCH and
blur black when alone with pretty women (in a
sexy, not threatening way). It may be that he
has had to partake in some regrettable actions from
a mysteriously checkered past which, entomologically,
takes us back to century 14th (late) and game boards
marked with squares (exchequer) light and dark. It is
French, or maybe British, and those fancy tea-drinkers
use the Q instead (let them have this, their isle so tiny). We
here in the states understand the ying/yang of it all, the
need to acknowledge how evil deeds are sometimes bathed
in bright, baptismal, even neutralizing beams, so molten
you might find your heroic self on (liar liar, pants) fire.

Mirrored Souls  / Alicia Boemi

What do they say about us?
That we walk among the stars. 

Float across space. 

Travel time.
Hand in hand.
Mirrored souls.
A fire that burned away the others.

Step Back and Watch the Toad Plop in Your Drainage Canal /  Jesse DeLong

1.     Find, as long as it’s only ankle deep, the best entrance to the river. There will float a brown leaf.

2.     Allow the onions to caramelize slowly, never force them, so that they turn a deep and rich color.

3.     Drink, in the parking lot as the neon lights of the car cover electrify the light rain, this not-so-bad cup of gas station coffee.

4.     Find one more excuse not to weed out the wild blackberries from your flowerbed. The birds, mostly finches, will forge soon.

5.     Step over, no need for mercy, the cicada, rattling its death song on the walkway.

6.     Understand that, just because you’ve crossed off most entries in a list of things-to-do doesn’t mean you’ve had a worthwhile day. 

Ordinary Astonishment /  Shelly Krehbiel

A theory for alternating venues, /  rob mclennan

This continuous, present. Translated, The Rotter’s Club. When do you sleep. Open form, wired. A nuance of decades. I can write English. Short stature, thistle. A pub at one point. Two pints, a third. Where I met opposition. Brigands. What if, in this life. Over, ambition. It was true I was plenty. The sky, gives. Offers. This bustling lot. In order, excessive. Composure. In the beginning. A matter of energy, prejudice. Punk anthems, pink. A love of parentheses, career paths, karaoke venues. Is this antiquarian? The scent of used books, decomposition. Vanilla. Almond, and sweet. Lost, in a snowstorm. It all falls apart. I don’t know what this is.

Robert K Ryland, 1938: "after a print"   / Piper Rasmussen

the a/c rattles like it's full of loose washers
and David Speicher's name is being called

sounds like he's missed his summons
I could look him up, find him...  we are permitted to use our phones...

on the wall, a mural of Ft. George
& a trompe loiel painting of a clock

stopped at 4:30. visions of ships. I spend a waiting-long time
looking at that fort

a video from the Perception institute plays & shows us
triangles which we think are triangles

but lack sides, as if to say
all is not what it seems

imagine feeling secure behind a stone wall
when after 9/11, we are not allowed to take photos of the wall art

only a Faraday cage 
might save us now

on recognizing  / Connor Simons

beneath music a murmur

                                                a river
whose waters rush disappointment
                                                & goodbye
greeting & remembrance to whatever
                                                estuary all
waters go to     one woman brings
                                                her dog
to sit at the edge of the bar & another
                                                walks by
with her dog & today i’m wondering what
                                                i mean
when i say recognition   there is an
                                                older man
here every day & i know his name but
                                                i don’t think
he knows mine   each Tuesday he plays
                                                vinyl records
so maybe he thinks my name is rumors
                                                because i said
rumors is a good album   i don’t know but
                                                i do know
that i’ve created him   his daughter is
                                                older & lives
elsewhere   he sees her on holidays & his
                                                limp isn’t
a wound it’s just aging   in five years he hasn’t
                                                changed
his glasses so at least that’s not getting
                                                any worse
& now the dogs are barking shouting
                                                it’s you
it’s you it’s you it’s you over & over again
                                                & even that
is part of the susurrus i make when i
                                                put on
these headphones & make instead of
                                                recognize

Dream Science / Veronica Vo

The fastest way to fall asleep is to pretend
you’re already sleeping. If you want too much
to fall asleep you never will. No matter how
many sheep you count you’ll stay awake.
To become what you’re not you have to act
like you already are. As a child I was despised
simply for being myself. I wanted to be
beloved. I wanted to be celebrated for entering
a room and mourned when leaving it. I pretended
all the time I was anybody but myself. How
do you pretend to be asleep if you’re awake? How
can I ever be anybody else

What Would You Do for a Horehound Drop   /  Melinda Wilson

Drop the Klondike bar and head straight for Grandma’s 
crystal candy dish. Medicine or confection? No matter.  
These sanded drops delight the tongue and soothe any  
angry throat. I’d root through the cinnamon and butter- 
scotch discs, discard Dad’s Root Beer Barrels, scoff  
at the Starlight Mints and Lemon Drops. I’d pine for flavors 
of black licorice, sassafras, menthol, or dark tea. It didn’t 
matter to me. Take me to these suckers’ Mothership— 
the white horehound plant, a perennial in the mint family. 
Once my fingers found the desired wax paper, they’d 
work fast to unwrap. Then sweet contact between tongue 
and thick sugar dust, enough to offset the bitter notes 
of the herb and blast me off to another time and soil.

September - Poem 14

What is the American berserk? / Laura Bandy

(A Cento with lines—in order—from Thomas Meany, Saul Bellow, Brigit Kelly, Carol Ann Duffy, Michael Van Walleghen, 
Donna Vorreyer, Carl Phillips, Brigit Kelly, Gail McConnell, Jay Bernard, Patience Agbabi, Fatima Asghar, Alice Hiller).

It’s there on the vomit-splattered decks of the Mayflower,
the purgation one can obtain only through rage,
the irises the soldiers are bedded in.
Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer utters itself
in knee-deep water and the hot acidic dark one full mile underground.
We try in vain to decode the soil’s erosion,
the grass not being flesh, nor flesh the grass,
while the one divides into two: the heart and its shadow, the world
and its threat.
You come to know the one against the other.
You kick the weeds and try to piece it back
like vodka on the rocks, like a slow-burning fuse.
I don’t know what will kill us first: the race war or
what we’ve done to the earth.
Note: this memory comes shagged with flies. 

Ache of Becoming  / Alicia Boemi

You loved me into someone you couldn’t keep in your embrace.
Not because I left,
but because I grew.
The prize of heartbreak is the ache of becoming.

Poem in which Your Snack Choice Tells You That You May Not Be Doing All Right /  Jesse DeLong

Maybe because the salt and pepper shakers
were always at the table, you never think
about how texture affects taste, how
you crave the sourdough nibblers
more than the soft pretzel. You’ve
had a long day and want to
collapse something
stable with your
teeth.

Let’s try this: /  Shelly Krehbiel

How to ride a bicycle, /  rob mclennan

To do so, with resolve. There is no “All Canadian,” whether boy or girl or elsewise. Or Canadian bacon. You can’t always take. A Canada Goose will strike, when threatened. Know your study, wildlife. Be clear, debate. The world is watching. Rarely, so precise. This list of facts. Coined, as caffeine. A land of freedom, there are many. You are not alone. To not deny the space. This lake, so named by original inhabitants. To behave, as a liquid. An ethical purpose. Offshore. Province, followed. Your gods, withdrawn. There is no “Far East,” “Middle.” North Africa, instead. The Gulf States. A colonial language, focused on far-distant London. Ask: what say the locals. Kilometres to go before I sleep. The German word for German is Deutsch.

Joke for Fishing Buddies  / Piper Rasmussen

When I learned to fish, my family recalled
Grandpa's vest, still loaded with line

in the rust-shut cabinet in the Old House, 
gathering dust for half a generation. My cousin

was the first to dig and poke
past runny rubber bait & broken hooks. Straightfaced,

she pulled me aside: 
You shouldn't use Grandpa's

lifetime fishing license.
It's expired.

when your mother resembles a parable  / Connor Simons

a slow roll then all at once   the change started in the womb when she first realized her fist could clench   the second was the hard slap of air and the knowing that oh god it’s always going to be like this and the thing is that she wasn’t always a spider or a tree murmuring a garbled mother mother mother as the bark slowly covered her mouth   her hands were human when she held me and her throat was made of the same muscle and sinew as mine the first time she said my name out loud   can i even call it a decision?   the loom was always there just waiting and the third change came when she said yes this is how i’ll live now and when i was younger the tone of these stories were axiomatic   don’t think you get to be proud   don’t think you can decide which way to run but now it’s not exactly heroic but the light of spider’s eye can bend light in ways that reshape all seeing and the way a bat an owl an eagle can cut across the sky at least makes meaning of arms sagging with the weight of boxed wine and if i want to i can cut through the park and place my hand on the tree and feel the wooden knots as they gnarl to shape the coo of the lullabies still humming in the dark of my ear

Why is everything romance / Veronica Vo

A poem made of signage spotted in NYC (& inspired by Sam)

First kiss was bananas
‍ ‍(what does that even mean)
Send feet pics
‍ ‍(it’s so cliché)
Everything will be okay
‍ ‍(everything is so cliché)
Tastes like cheating   
‍ ‍(and i don’t know what any of it means)
Do not disturb is cat
‍ ‍(let’s move on. Charli XCX said everything is romantic)
Protect yo heart
‍ ‍(but why even try. still, i keep trying)
I didn’t like what you said over text…about the future
‍ ‍(though these Hinge ads mean nothing)
Screaming inside
‍ ‍(i hate using dating apps)
Mess with the bull get the horns
‍ ‍(and all the meaningless language)
Your love is a gift to the world
‍ ‍(but i need to get over myself)
Can we still fall in love this summer?
‍ ‍(i’ve given up on making sense but not on love)
Give me your vape and I’ll give you a hug
‍ ‍(we want what we want. can we just say what we mean?) 

What Is Dead   /  Melinda Wilson

has more life. 
  For instance— 
the blowflies arrive   
sometimes in mere minutes  
to begin their work  
of breaking down the dead. 
What is dead 
has more life     
Because then— 
the water comes  
sometimes in floods 
sometimes as dew drops 
to carry what nutrients remain 
deep into the soil of the earth. 
So what is dead 
has more life still.  
All at once— 
we are reabsorbed into 
the eternal womb. Our energy 
recycled for new growth, new life,  
and for         forever death.  

September - Poem 13

Zero Visibility Sonnet / Laura Bandy

You wrote a sonnet and now
you hate it, the rhymes all
forced and volta manure (cow).
How you wish you could fall
into some other artistic bent,
do sculpture, say, or fingerpaint.
Switch up the form halfway done?
Who’s going to stop you, Donne?
Fuck it. I’m through with you, verse—
consider this my Dear John note. What
have you ever done for me besides purse
your thin and stingy lips when I bought
that, yes, perhaps ill-considered backless top
to wear in a Midwest blizzard? Oh, right—you are the whiteout (I forgot).

Another Postcard from Opportunity, Montana /  Jesse DeLong

Dear Linda,
another flock of birds on their long migration
have rested in the false lake
and died from the arsenic.
The best meal in town
is a pork culet pounded flat
and deep-fried in flavorless batter. It’s good,
of course, with mustard and a butter-grilled bun.  
When you think of us, think
of the children sledding
down the slag piles, unusually
high cases of muscular dystrophy,
the time that woman, thin around the eyes
the way addicts can be, bust
into your uncle’s apartment
to call him a cocksucker, not knowing
around the corner from where he sat
in his wheelchair we were trying
to find the missing piece to an old puzzle.
In a few months, the snow will be
too dry to pack into snowballs,
and so I will  
carefully take a handful inside
and sprinkle it with water, shaping
each side, hoping to form
a perfect sphere. 

To Whom She Wakes /  Shelly Krehbiel

Last night she dreamed of falling asleep again and again, then waking in a bed with someone different
each time. Repeating startles of intimate someones, of not knowing what had happened before, without
memory. Or maybe some memories upside down, some still becoming. These were dreams after all.
One was the lover she dreams most often, the first to touch lips to her waiting lips and turn them into
more. Ever since then, this one appears, long after she lost them, long after she stopped wanting to find
them (1) . They are her beginning. No matter how many times she’s replaced them.
One was a lover she’s never met. In the dream they seemed to know her best of all. When she woke,
they rolled toward her, traced her face with their fingertips. They got up to open the shades, knowing
she would want a few moments to wake herself, giving her space without going away. When she saw
their silhouette in that first light, she tried to wake up for real, just in case they were waiting.
One was the partner of a friend. Because this did not seem horrible to her, she felt guilty. The air
between them was like August, and her dream body wanted this lover more than any of the others.
They seemed to want her too but whispered that there were too many consequences and faded away
like a fog rising out of a valley into the mountains.
One was a real person she’s only just begun to know. She will say nothing else about this dream.
One was a famous person. This dream was much less fun than one might expect. She couldn’t
remember their name and when she asked what to call them (2) they said My Precious. Because she has
seen Lord of the Rings many times, she recognized the danger. Then she remembered it was a dream
and turned in her waking-world body, which erased everything except what they wanted her to be.
One was her mirror, same hair, same lips, same whisper. This one was not a lover, but a twin. Her other
self, or one of them. They knew each other, knew they would never see each other again. Tell me who I
really am, she said, who I will be. The other came close, very close. Just wake, she said.

(1) The use of pronouns is intentionally vague. The dreams contained many lovers, even more than are described
here, most of whom were never hers in waking life. She prefers to keep them as anonymous as possible and feels
that much about her is none of your business anyway. If she dreamed you, you or your dream selves may know.
(2) In the dream she did not remember, though you likely would know them if she could tell you.

Grief Can Walk   / Alicia Boemi

The day grief walked in,
it gloated and gleamed.
Noir hue holding sparks of life deep inside.

I did not take my time leaving the room.
Instead,
I ran as fast as I could.
Like it was a headless horseman after me.
Pumpkin and all.

I kept my pace.
I didn’t wallow.

I tried and tried;
climbed hills and saw valleys.
I drank from a creek;
from the bottom of a near-empty bottle, too.

And still;
plagued by time and energy—
I succumbed.

I hope it leaves— soon.

The dead lake chronicles, /  rob mclennan

El Nino, intensifies. Temperatures. Different speeds, tumbling lakeshore, mountain, green plain. Mouth. Uncertain, soar. Undone, at the hips, where the legs begin. To be assembled. Saltwater taffy. Lake water, boils. Heatwave, primer. Spills. What the crow, the seagull, said. Protect the plover. Variants, this speed, sensation. Cooked, exhaust. Do you know me. As anatomy, skin. Place your hands over ears. This mirror, think. Reveals what was hidden. Sweet creatures of flail, of clarity. Bombast. How could this happen. In a time of opportunists, monsters. Architects, of greed. I see silence, why and need. A finger, at the ready.

We are waiting for the train  / Piper Rasmussen

he has taken 
his whole life, dozens of times; 

I, in my life with him, 
also dozens. Forever fewer dozens,

but we will have taken nearly 
all the same trips

by the end. A train late by an hour 
or short by one car 

which travels 24 hours
across a country

is hardly late at all. 
The magnitude hardly matters: 

only the river 
behind the rain-spotted glass.

aubade  / Connor Simons

at the snelling and university metro station two people meeting in the damp dawnlight is a kind of rictus dance   two Ninjinksys as Petrouchka brought to herky-jerky motion by the holy smoke wafting upward from ad hoc censers of charred tin foil   someone quotes The Charlatan – they’re not really alive you know   that’s not flesh   it’s painted wood – others at the station are inclined to agree   their headphones blocking out splintered arpeggios composed of atonality   longing    and the din of people finding life among the piled receipts and frayed wool of a snow-beaten blanket

Memory Middle Distance Villanelle / Veronica Vo

In this version of the story I die
of happiness because everything goes the way I want it to.
I am remembered and don’t have to try

to be anyone I’m not. Or hide
the way it feels to lose the people I once knew.
In this version of the story I die

before anything bad happens. Which would imply
that I am never born. My mother wouldn’t like that, true,
but then I am remembered and don’t have to try

because never existing means I can’t be forgotten. What I
mean is when you see the cliff and drive anyway, you
accept that in this version of the story I die.

It’s not supposed to be melodramatic. This isn’t a cry
for help. I don’t know how to say what I want in a way that’s new.
Or be remembered and not have to try.

Every time she and I say goodbye
the time in between becomes blank space, love in lieu.
Only in the version of the story in which I die
am I remembered without having to try.

The Household Gods    /  Melinda Wilson

Demand clean bedding and dishes.  
Demand fresh water and snacks.  
Demand bathing and long walks.  
Demand toys and comfy socks.  
Demand love.  And what’s more— 
Demand the demonstration of love. 
Demand / Demand / Demand
The household dogs. 

September - Poem 12

People, Place, and Problem / Laura Bandy

The writer, Liz Moore, uses this template
in fiction instead of an outline. So doing,

she does not know what’s coming. When
the story hits a wall, makes a sticky mess,

she goes back to “the trunk of the tree,”
last time the story made sense. As an epic

messy-maker myself, I set it up. People:
the ones walking by outside my window

right now. Place: too dismal to name. Oh,
okay. I’m in a spaceship that seems to be

taking on extra weight, maybe smuggled
cargo from a new first mate, hold—I am

lying again. It’s raining in the Midwest and
Problem: too much water makes the soil

irate, soaks the crops including corn and
more corn, also soybeans and corn again

which offers stalks that shoot so high (knee-
high by July, men on tractors always say) but 

only when  the ground is dry enough to keep 
those roots from drowning, see, so that the less 

successful varietals go to feed the hogs, snuffling 
in pens like the men in our prison just down 

the way, and those high-quality ears can be used,
fused with other nutrients (don’t ask what

else, you won’t want to know) to feed us, and
humans kernels and karo syrup, dextrose and

bourbon, Xanthan gum and Chicha beer, hominy
and popcorn, even Vitamin C and cobs so sweet

you’ll swear you’re floating somewhere in cotton
candy outer space where plants are hard to grow

those in the know say, but maybe one day, one day
out among those stars igniting as “gravity compresses

together the hydrogen in their cores to the point that
the atoms splice, mutate” and, ah hell. It’s fine. We’ll
go to Mars.

—quoted lines from Reddit/Science query: Why are all the stars on fire? Why aren't

there just trillions of balls of gas that didn't ignite into nuclear furnaces?

That Dingy Old House   / Alicia Boemi

They are tearing down the old house across the street. 
I did not live there but, 
saw the bare inside of it and, 
couldn't help but see the ghosts of
memories forgotten and remembered. 
Time taken away, 
brick by brick, 
as the roof falls. 
A new house will be built —
new people will come and go. 
People turn to memories, 
turn to ghosts. 
And so life continues. 

Marginal Notes on Postcards from a Field of Slightly Askewed Dandelions by Chu Mu-yen /  Jesse DeLong

Each postcard slightly alters the original image, a woman with very short hair, looking startled as a bright light shines on her face, and in each successive image she turns slightly to the left, her face becoming more and more out of focus until we can only see the back of her head, which has been shaved.

“This isn’t a field you’d lay a quilt down in if you wanted your loved one to still love you.”

I tried, once, to pick them for tea. They dried, strung up, over my sink for weeks until I forgot about them and eventually threw them away.

Some patches, green, where the grass has flourished, and others, brown, where the hooves have trampled.

Sort of like that art exhibit in Greensville where you step through the series of partitions and view various projections of yourself, some looming like a too-large-shadow, some hued in an increasingly brighter red.

Though apparently you can eat them raw in salads and partake in your daily need for Vitamin K.

“The bumper, barnacled over in rust, looking like a ship-wrecked submarine.”

Art is the best-suited medium for appropriation, maybe because those who make it are constantly trying to fit themselves into a functioning form.

“like how you used to place gum at the entrance of a gopher hole.”

The artist, for instance, as frying pan.

“The electric fence doesn’t make a hum, the hum is inside you, and so you touch the taut wire just to see if you can feel the sound.”

If you tear out this final page, patiently at its slotted edge, careful not to rip the actual stamp affixed, and you wrote something about yourself, who, really, would you even send it to?

Didn’t you, though, hide in one once as your neighbor scanned the unusually starless night with his flashlight, looking for you, or someone like you?

Dark Oxygen (A Ribcage) /  Shelly Krehbiel

the same as what we breathe up here though no one knows
[how]
it is made. a secret, like so many others
[deep]
beneath the great waters. where mystery is all that
[can]
be proven. the assumption has always been that
[life]
created these molecules that make other lives
[be]
an anomaly come to life to life to life
[as]
breathing became creatures, became us.
[we]
think we should be able to explain everything,
[lose]
the beyond-us as we throw stones into waves,
[our]
way of casting something away, sending our small
[selves]
out into what we cannot see. they drift and sink
[in]
blue until blue disappears. and somehow down there
[each]
molecule matters. deepest darkness makes its own
[breath].

Knights in white satin, /  rob mclennan

To a glow, in hand. Robert Creeley’s example. They swirl. This altitude of thumbs. Fittingly. A theatre of mayhem, absurd. Mayhem, words, Catullus. Mind you, he? Mark every beat, set everything aloud. Aflame. Compare wheels, clouds, automobiles. Joys like this, this. No stone, unturned. Is this possible? Light. The reflecting pool, offers. Orange alert. I hear the orcas are vocal. Today’s horizontal. Vertical. The day swimming whole. Disarray, altitude. Fan theories, never. A conscious decision to voice. Of course, Michigan.

Service at Exotic Fragrance  / Piper Rasmussen

I also go to Catholic church occasionally…
the child in me desperately needs the bells and smells.
-Patty Duke

Closest thing to an apothecary
you'll see today. Catch the incense
from the subway, a drift of virga

all the way from 104th & Lex.
Walls lined with bottles,
never empty. Take-a-number

from the DMV-style paper roll as
bottles shimmer -- just glass,
but not just glass -- gifts & tonics

of the senses! You can inhale
everything inside. It's for you,
just for you, custom-made-to

order, always signature.
Go early and alone
or all the people will already be 

transformed: Ruby Orchid 
with L'Eau Rouge #1, and Essential
Neem. Ben's Diluent. Musk Oud &

Oud Santal;
Yves St. Laurent
and Palo Santo. Bodies

of all the saints in bottles.
Take a number;
wait to hear the bell.

ode to a dead black-capped chickadee in my front yard  / Connor Simons

it’s not that you’re beautiful   you’ve become the texture of cardboard left out in the rain
or the ragged contours of a gut whittled from years of cheap red wine   and what’s
calling you beautiful?   the same as when a mother walking her child sees you before
the child does and puts her hand on his shoulder   distracting him with the goldenrod
a neighbor has let sprout in their front yard   that black cap that used to furrow
as you pecked at stubborn seed walls is turning into something else entirely
a tooth   rain clouds hoarding their storm   the expanse of gaze looking back at the length
of disappointment   or not even that   not really   what you are now is a dead thing
losing its color   grass embracing your body in a way that sky most likely never did

Pink Room Bouncer / Veronica Vo

After Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me

The bouncer operates
on an outdated model of chivalry.
He says for every guy that pressures
you there’s another that will punch him.
Says, you’re girls in a big city, you should
know this.

Laura Palmer’s father says, I always thought
you knew it was me. Baby angel
face of porcelain. Who chooses who gets saved
and who doesn’t. By the time
this music crescendos and the lights stop flashing
you will understand what I mean.

Can’t hear anything over this music. Might as well
be speaking backwards. That time I was
pressured by a strange man, pure joy sullied
on the street barely 16, where were these
masculine defenders? Where were this bouncer’s
men. I could have thrown a stone and reached one.

The girl you knew dies. I want all my
garmonbozia (pain and sorrow). It looks like corn.
How can I make you understand. These rooms
are mirrors of each other. It’s so fucked up.
Dale Cooper asks which is harder to believe,
supernatural possession or the depths of men’s evil.

Not one did anything to help.
The man said, try to run. I was so scared
I didn’t even scream. In my best concert attire.
I learned why women are scared to exist at night.
Where were the good ones then. The gallant guardians.

That magically appear. To fend off the others. The bouncer pisses me off. We feed his ego to get in. Corn. He imagines himself a hero. A good one. It doesn’t matter. How many of them there are. I learned. It doesn’t matter. 

Worry Siren    /  Melinda Wilson

I am a woman who takes pills,  
often. Yes, daily, but that doesn’t 
mean I don’t face the demons. 
Really, the pills help me to hunt them.  
I seek them for their slaughter,  
which I see as a kind of saving.  
I kneel tall on my bed and call  
to the creatures my narcotic  
songs of sedition: Worry your bones 
if you will, but to dwell  
is to disappear,  
to sit surrounded  
by cliffs and rocks 
and to see only danger,  
no drop dead, bonny apparitions. 
And indeed, the male sirens 
all died off, disappeared from our history 
scrubbed off our stone slabs 
and torn out of our books,  
fed to the flames, then the ashes shoveled 
into the fields to better feed future soil.  
And that’s just the problem.  
The problem is the future 
and its potential for problems.  
So, I am a woman that takes pills,  
often. Yes, daily, and that doesn’t  
mean I don’t still break down,  
don’t still lose my shit and scream 
down the hall for the neighbors 
to keep it the fuck down, don’t  
cry at the smell of urine marking 
my walls or the very fact of the walls 
boxing me in, keep me close to the loss  
and the possibility that I will keep losing.  
But fuck that worry siren. 
I’ll check in with her tomorrow 
if tomorrow comes at all.  

September - Poem 11

Non-Con / Laura Bandy

In the romance novels I inhale, lists of trigger warnings often detail what readers might find
objectionable or too titillating to be born. When the spicy hits a full boil and the consent gets
dubious, it’s okay, really—we’re all on board with this pretend, we’ve all been warned. In poetry
though, the rules feel less set. I don’t check with the humans that have dotted personal
landscapes, don’t ask if they mind when I use their names. Some might call that non-con, but I
say… wait. Hold on. Let me rewind a tick. The trick with genre smut is choosing the right mix of
lovers and learning the lingo: female main character falls for male main character shrinks to
FMC/MMC, and sex saturation factor is denoted with, you guessed it, number of jalapeños.
Sister Sarah says she only reads M/M romance now, since believing that any man could really
love any woman when they so clearly want to kill us is just too far a stretch, even in fiction. Did
I mention that I never use last names? I’m a scoundrel, like Sebastian Ballister, the Marquess of
Dain, in my current Regency, but I would never never never never never never never never never
never never never never never never never never never never never never nevernever never
never never never never never never never never never never never never never never neve
never never never never nevernever never never never never never never never never never
never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never
never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never
never never never never never never never never never never never never never never never
never never never never never never never never never never never never NEVER put real
humans on the front page that way (maybe). Dub and non-con are popular tropes, with readers
wishing to fantasize about giving over, surrendering control safely, all between the clinch covers
of A Week to be Wicked, or Puck Me, if it’s hockey. You can get real naked, there, you can let
Sebastian or Xander or Julian or Enzo or Hunter or Dante or Levi take the wheel, you can revel
in the knowledge that you never really stood a chance because you’re smaller and softer, or
maybe louder and girlbossed, even sporty and muscled, could be long-haired or blonde short,
sometimes bratty and asking for… no. Not there. Let’s give a girl what she wants—the happy
ending, pearl necklace fairy tale, and since we’re mixing genres here, why not a werewolf, too,
who only wants you, his true love, in the flattering light of the blue full moon.

Poem removed for publication!    / Alicia Boemi

Congratulations!

Different Kinds of Currents /  Jesse DeLong

My mother used to buy me birds, usually finches, from the pet store. And my father, a man whose own family raised steer and who had to work the cattle before going to school, used to leave their cages unlatched on the porch. He told me he couldn’t stand to see them that way, it wasn’t natural, but of course finches can’t survive in the mountains of Idaho, so they likely died in the cold or the talons of a hawk. Later my mother would die in the bed beside him of liver failure, my father wiping her body clean. “You came,” she said, almost an empty shirt then, when she saw me sit at the table. “You came.”

that she should smile* /  Shelly Krehbiel

oh, Thalia of the gentle light
you look away as though your love
is one i cannot see, always
just beyond this canvas window.
comics say laughter is a way
to spin pain into another’s
joy. i wonder what desire you
hold for that other you cannot
turn from, whose sight sparkles your eyes,
lifts the corners of your closed lips.
but maybe it’s not a lover,
no, a scene: three children laughing
beneath an oak tree, playing catch
with a ball of string. a scrub jay
hopping through the branches above
watches as though he would join them,
his scruffy grey head betraying
his youth. should i become the bright
creek beside them, send happy light
to your watching eyes or should i
stay here, a distant guest, longing
to kiss your shoulder? muse, must i
make peace with your abandon, rest
my self in some idyllic scene
to become beauty’s smiling mask,
a character in your delight?

*a contemplation of the painting, Thalia by Giuseppe Fagnani

Four views of the solar eclipse, /  rob mclennan

Social media, glisten. Inarticulate, woe. Redemption. From where I stand. Once, once more. From where we sit. Televised. The poets, obsessed. Shake loose these limbs. Anything to do with the moon. Wolves, seasoned. The shape seems as distant. This ponzo illusion. Enlarged, at horizon. Sediment. Waves, incremental. The contours of what one forgets. The hope, in the centre. Circumference, absence. Subjective interest. By the waters of Perth, the Tay River. Six ancient coins. Aesthetically pleased. By the water, proportion. The moon, passes. Pulls, at clouds. TikTok, this view of curled fingers. Dissolve, list. We catch daybreak, news. Cycles, lunar. The Perseids, also. Every third word.

Welcome Back  / Piper Rasmussen

The laborers have had time to send their emails
confirming the new working season, post-Day. Scotty's back
on the bridge & turning up the flux capacitors for Cpt. Alice

& we're plunging into the wormhole,
 the autumn shortcut, student by back-to-school
   permission slips forward-looking

snaps September's rubber band, overfull with that thrill
of signing up, the checks the body can cash later,
for example, after Thanksgiving,
  grateful   for the opportunity,

or resolute (January)
or when beloved (February)

memorialized (May)

promises look different on the other end

Max  / Connor Simons

most days when someone says a wildfire
renews a forest i don’t even scowl   no
patience anymore   how many pinecones
can explode into seed before we stop
confusing cycle and disaster   potash coats
the forest floor and when i gather charcoal
ash to spread between the peppers i do
understand but it’s not that when i hold
you suddenly fingerbone trees seem like
they could one day regrow their flesh
you and i know the names that are just
names now and soon won’t even be that
but when i hear the way your voice ha
lowered or imagine the growing sharpness
of your chin i understand why we once
threw fat on the pyre and if the flames
flared up then something was being fed

Hometown Return / Veronica Vo

Back in the land of not a single other person

in the room who isn’t white.

It’s been minutes and I’ve already seen five

different iterations of Make America ___ Again

and none of these visions for the future include us.

Can realization be a feeling? Mostly, I feel for the girl

I was that didn’t know why she felt so out of place

growing up. I can’t be friends with anyone

who won’t bear witness. But I can be family.

The other day, a white person said, scoffing,

of course, it’s about race. Of course. 

I Wrote Like AI before AI Wrote Like I / Melinda Wilson

Before we taught the algorithms  

to approximate academic discourse, 

I labored over prose that insists  

on evidence over impulse.  

I contend that every claim must bow  

to the majesty of methodological  

account. No interpretation  

is to be accepted without scrutiny 

of bloodline, without the discipline  

of restraint. In the age of AI,  

the detached tone of the scholar  

is labeled computational, absent  

of confession, wanting for personality,  

desperate for rhetorical flourish. All  

diction becomes artifact of suspicion.  

All em dashes discarded in the e-waste  

dumping sites of our data centers,  

alongside the remnants of my little geek heart. 

September - Poem 10

Wet Work (after watching Furious) / Laura Bandy

noun: work involving murder or assassination,
used euphemistically.
—Merriam-Webster

Sarah does it. 
She likes it and
she’s good at it.

Don’t note the
guillotine necklace,
the ACAB earrings—

those are mere
trinkets. What I mean
is how when there’s 

twin girls, grown, one 
needs to manage 
men, close the cases

with a red pen, ink
streaming. Yet who
would have thought 

the old man to have
so much blood in him?
I’m the other one. I am

here to sponge up 
all messes. My neck-
lace is daisies, ears 

pierced with cream
enamel hearts. It’s true,
my trade is marshmallow

although, in the dark, 
you can’t tell us apart
and maybe I’ll cut you

a slice of fresh risen 
bread or find your
jugular with a shiv.

“Which twin is really
which?” the last one 
said. Weird sisters, newt

eyes, boil and blister—
which witch? You’ll never
know for sure, mister.  

—italicized lines from Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1.

Too Much Love   / Alicia Boemi

It’s never enough to say I love you. 
So I’ll walk alongside you for eternity. 
Feet to the pavement. 
Soul in the depths. 
Take me away. 

Poem That Was Supposed to Be an Imitation of “Field Transmission of Tulip Virus in Patriotic Colors” but became “8 Moods, All Similar, in One Day” /  Jesse DeLong

Not the tulip, which remains closed, but the burr,
which latches to your pants as you pass by.
Not the space key, which moves you forward,
but the bracket, which is meant to clarify or make a correction.
Not the free flowing but fully transparent stripes of a highlighter,
but the blotchy pen, messy enough to see
from the backside of the paper.
Not the blank white index card with its perfect lines,
but the old note found in a drawer, it’s references illegible now.
Not the bathroom vanity, her side, blooming with shower steam
and the smell of lavender soap, but the office window
turning a yellow-green from the air’s contaminants.
Not the white shirt fresh from the laundry, but the sock crumpled
and covered in cat hair beneath the nightstand.
Not the pill and its euphoric promise, but the hard, chalky
feeling of its passing down your throat without water,
or, maybe, its wearing away, yes, when it leaves
you—maybe the day feels like your body in a panic
because the pill has closed, like a tulip, your neurons. 

in the gaze of Melpomene* /  Shelly Krehbiel

how you tricked me with your dark eyes
in my dark night. there are such eyes
as this warned about in old books,
caught in snatches of filtered light.
on canvas your eyes are portals.
how I am drawn to their allure.

it’s too late now that i’ve seen more,
seen that sharp blade you hold so close.
not hidden. you never mean harm
as malice. you need pain to turn
into song’s purple enchantments.
you are why music requires night,
why daffodils need cold winter.

muse, because i want to become
what you promise, i will come close.
i will be taste against your skin.
i will be erased by sleeping
in the dream worlds you make of me,
of my blood spilt on beauty’s floor.

*a contemplation of the painting, Melpomene by Giuseppe Fagnani

The Marvel Universe, /  rob mclennan

Excelsior! For the endless, resurrected. Dime-store models, pulp. Those scrappy kids. Celestials, eternity, infinity. A cluster, stones. Behold! Creating history, continued. Continuity. The streets of Brooklyn. What the in-crowd, spoke. In whispers, secret. Chosen, many. Stringbean, puny, stretch. Big brain. These gods of thunder, hammers, patience. To still, get up. A method, marvels. Let, the perfect storm. To me, my Kirbyesque. When comics, woke. The war-time Captain, punched out Hitler. Great responsibility. My word, these hopes. My stars and garters. Exceptions, vary. The needs of the few. Amazed, we soapbox, are. We are still speaking.

Embryo  / Piper Rasmussen

Amanuensis, scribe
of innate knowledge, 
anamnesis endowed,
all amniotic handiwork.

Once she was anemone
alone & pluripotent
a minister, monastic.
An alluvial illumination,

a miniature marvel made manifest. 
Her caul a veil in the Mother's
cloister. What was once the nave,
her mammalian manse.

reading recent translations of Li Bai  / Connor Simons

Tuesday morning, up early with a kinked neck. I want
to rip apart the sky like a bored child pulling
at cotton balls while its mother sits on the edge
of the tub, waiting for the dye to set in her hair.

                               *

Shouldn’t a day be kinder? The dead mice who knew
the taste of peanut butter before the metal snap
broke their necks are an answer to that, I guess.

                               *

And once I spent a whole evening crushing silverfish
in our apartment bathroom with my big toe, turning
off the lights, sitting cross-legged on the toilet, turning
on the light and becoming a generational cataclysm.

                               *

Li Bai wrote that the road to Shu is hard – most are.
Who would travel so far to arrive here?
There are peaks, leopards, and stretches of pale mud.

                               *

It’s the heat, I think, that does this to me. I sleep
in strange positions so my cheek is cool and warp
my limbs like garden twine twisted to hold up
tomatoes who just want to flower then wilt.

                               *

And also wrote, ‘if only I owned the fabled parrot
to tell you of the feelings in my heart,’ which, yes,
being tongueless most days, I understand. 

Focus / Veronica Vo

ancestors speak through this ground you stand on

the trees bend in to listen

rub your hands together

feel that light

inside

a perpetual sky

a day’s blinding silence

forefathers through this

haunting as support: is the body not a vessel too?

Infinite Things (SENT 9/9)   /  Melinda Wilson

The pine forest does its holding in the dark,  
warns there is something wants to be feared. 

Something wants like I want the toilet to stop 
hissing. Something to be feared the way the dog 

recoils after the crackle map cracks on Jacobus.  
Has no way to know what it fears and no way 

to stop fearing it. Impossible to borrow 
another's design and step out of oneself. Unless— 

Useless. Better to shudder through it. To become 
intimate with the thing that one fears.  

Like I will always still somehow            hear it.  
The toilet’s hiss long after it’s been fixed.  

There is form of attack in maintaining calm, 
So I try to love the hiss, learn to stand the siren 

song of every sudden exhale. Work hard to recall 
the detail of my young nephew’s face when he fled 

the washroom  and the flicker of self that flared  
when he accepted the hiss  as his home.   

September - Poem 9

Questions and Advice My First Weeks Living in Mississippi: July 2009 / Laura Bandy

You’re from Illinois—rich. Don’t expect it, here.
You will never stop sweating. Get used to being damp.
Everyone eats sushi, even after the oil spill. Oishi is best.
Everyone goes down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Ignore
the X-marked houses. Katrina is over, we’re on the off ramp.
It’s tempting, but don’t join in saying “Bless your heart.”
You don’t understand.
You don’t understand where to shop—stop going
to the Wal-Mart on (redacted). That’s the Black Wal-Mart.
There is a white Wal-Mart and a Black Wal-Mart. There is
a Farmer’s Market. The egg lady will give you a bag
if you forget. If you forget where you are.
Don’t forget—Friday nights are Ladies Nights at Mag Bar
(girls drink free). Wear your cowboy boots.
Buy cowboy boots.
Nick’s Ice House has toilets for seats, part of the charm.
Brett Favre gets drunk and pisses on the floor there. Great tipper.
Miss Lula is your neighbor. She will bring you tomatoes
from her garden, also pickled cucumbers and honey biscuits.
Miss Lula likes to tell her stories. Some will curl your hair.
The bugs don’t die here and the spiders are poisonous. Just
be aware. Yeah, that’s a brown recluse. She’ll kill a gal.
“You’re a Yankee, ain’t you. Well, it takes all kinds, I guess.”
We don’t have snow. We don’t have fireflies. What is
snow like? How cold, now? Did you ever make a snowman?
Can you catch fireflies in your hand? Does it hurt when they
turn on their light? Ma’am, do you miss the North?
Don’t you know about Robert Johnson and the Crossroads?
He sold his soul to the devil there and we got the Delta blues.
They sent “Dark is the Night, Cold is the Ground” into space
in ’77, that’s how good our music is. Y’all got, what… pop?
All of life’s a tradeoff, Yankee, ain’t it. Phew. I think you hate it.
Down here, we understand. Don’t look at the levee’s rim
at the water rising. The water is always rising, the pot water
always getting hotter. We’re all lobsters. You all got lobsters
up there in Illinois? Crawfish? Just corn? I’m sorry for you. 

A Warm October  / Alicia Boemi

It’s all a cycle,
but there are no ebbs or flows. 
The universe is too too physically jagged and;
it continues to go and go.
Full circle— they do it to themselves—
men tear the heads off one another,
letting their rotting roots be exposed.  
Serrated edges of their headless bodies,
meander the landscape of a scorching earth.  
We’re in the throes of it.
Women wailing, “please no” 
to 
a God who cannot actually hear them.
Whether it’s their blood soaked desperate-for-more whispers through sweat stained lips,
or 
prayers;
their whimpers will always fall on deaf ears.
See, he’s allowing them to
tear off her limbs so you
can still hear her cry out for something better.
While everyone hides behind a modern day antenna. 
You see, it’s actually chaos out here—
we’re just too into our devices to see
what is actually happening
and that;
the mothers and the fathers are not in control.
In fact no one is, 
despite us wanting—
someone to blame.

Marginal Notes on The Fire-eater at Forty-Three by Grace Fontaine /  Jesse DeLong

A spelunker will hold a torch near the ground at a cave’s entrance, sweeping the flame back and forth, waiting to see if unsurvivable levels of carbon monoxide will turn the torch to smoke.

Critics point out that Fontaine was wise to have Emilia’s breakdown occur at forty-three, and not forty, as it seems like less of a trope.

“An experienced fire-eater will snuff the flame. Lock your lips around the handle, and the triangle will cut off the flame’s oxygen. It’s easy. You don’t have to injure yourself.”

How does this apply, I wonder, to a relationship. There must be some symbolism there.

“With the case of the record, that wasn’t possible. The pain blocked out sound. I couldn’t hear the inspector counting. I couldn’t listen to the crowd. The heat of the fire raised so much the temperature of my teeth that the heated bone burned my gums.”

The dentist told me that I grind my teeth in my sleep and that the dead white skin on the sides of my tongue is from me biting its flesh. I never remember, maybe mercifully, my dreams.

In some versions, you are the one holding the torch. In others, you are the unsurvivable levels of a certain type of atmosphere.

You can see how staring into the yellow Post-it notes and inspirational banners of cubical walls will do this to a person. The fake plant that doesn’t need watered. The secret brownie hidden in the back of a desk drawer for when you need a mid-morning pleasure.

Dickens may have had a better way of writing language that obfuscated the meaning, mainly, like here, that someone died: “Mr. Wopsle’s great-aunt conquered a confirmed habit of living.”  

There she is, Linda from accounting, talking about her kids again.

“I didn’t go about this the way I methodically moved through the rest of my life. There wasn’t a planner, no pros-and-cons list, no research. One Labor Day off from work, I picked up the Guiness Book of World Records, stuffed between the H encyclopedia and a box set of Friends Season 3, and I flipped to a random page, blindly pointed my finger, and wa-la, there it was. Fire-eating.”

Pablo Manríquez, using his connections as a political reporter, took a similar mid-life veer. He declared that, with no formal training, and never having painted anything, he would sell portraits of famous politicians. He watched YouTube Videos. He bought horse-hair brushes and acrylic colors like umber. There are several replications of Mitch McConnel, glum, looking out of the right side of his eyes. In one, there is red behind him. Another, the background is puke colored.

“I later learned that it can take up to 25 minutes to achieve full arousal, which made a lot of sense when I thought back on my partners. Apparently, it involved increased blood flow, and tissue engorgement, words I couldn’t really use with Charles when talking about sex. All I could say was, ‘It takes time. It takes time. Slow down a bit. That’s why it hurts.’ He never did, though, take his time. None of them did.”

In Prince George’s County Landfill, there are, possibly, still several versions of a Ruth Bader Ginsburg, some smiling, some not.

The contents of this desk drawer: transparent sticky notes, three highlighters, a stapler (out of staples) and a pack of 5 Peppermint Cobalt.

Isn’t it our habits, though, as Emelia knew, that keep us from actually living? 

Something I used to love is playing on the radio /  Shelly Krehbiel

The dishwasher is full. The sky behind
the city lights is a handful of stars.
I made something for dinner. I started
the washing machine. I finally found
the place on the streaming service website
to cancel the subscription. I cancelled
the subscription. And when it dutifully
asked why I was leaving, I selected
Other. Typed: Yesterday I met someone.
Tonight I turned off the lights early, left
the window open for cricket music
that might slip through traffic noise. I don’t know
if anything will come of this, but I
remember enough words to sing along.

For Claudia Lapp, /  rob mclennan

Oregon, trails. Sometimes the oldest, history. Abstraction. Arm to shoulder, leapt into the world. In the Atwater Station. To be attracted, to revelation. Doctors, and durability. Concurs. A Greek phrasebook, begins. Mediterranean, honey. Pixieish ecstasies, what the stars might reveal. Description, description. L, as in Lapp. The old woman in anyone. Full of Jungian dreams, a white stallion. John Abbott. A web full of wanting. Of home, kin. What afternoon light. Beneath your smile, this blue ceiling. A way through the winter. To use the right words. A long silence, indeed.

blithe  / Piper Rasmussen

why does NYC have so many
    sandwich-board &
neon-storefront psychics?      then again, where but

the home of Wall Street?      the city of 
        "See Something, Say Something" (& then     by the way
          Pay Something)

if every TAROT you walk by & every shop
that sells a lotto ticket with your sandwich 
leaves you cold,      & at the corner bookstore,  

you pass over    Beyond Black, the brilliant id
behind the curtain --

say you skip     every time
      the tickle & button click
and miss this moment
     mid-séance with Judi back at home     
   ("I can feel it in my base chakra" /  "probably trapped wind")

those who close their eyes     to all of that
miss also             the spirit
      the creaking-open
of the Golden Door

a crack           & the gifts that come raining
                                               down
on those who can see, those who can

    take     a falling anvil to the face
a little folly & disgrace         once in a while

bop at the end of a terminal summer  / Connor Simons

in august your body careens into wilting
think sunflowers with bloomless faces
think your mother crashing her van
into an already dented garage door   think
the creep of rot eating away at the cedar
wood frame of your bedroom window
 
as breathing flows – my mind secedes
 

the sky’s become a failing liver   sagging
unable to filter life’s daily poison
you’ve seen the world’s distended gut
before and know there’s only one
ending   the unfocused gaze   remnants
of a lake   copper-scented phlegm rattling
in a throat   all of life a warning sign
deferred until your day conflates with dying

as breathing flows – my mind secedes

you want a solution but you’re naked
and splayed on the linoleum floor   sweat
on the small of your back adhering you
to your own discomfort   there’s your
mother’s voice again   you get used to it
and a starving sparrow is dying in your yard

as breathing flows – my mind secedes

Nightmare / Veronica Vo

Locked in a room with a stranger it’s raining so hard
we can’t open any of the doors. I go fishing the stranger
offers to show me how. I know it’s just a dream
because of all the rain. The stranger is trying to keep me safe.

In an elevator that goes up thousands of floors, I go down
hundreds. I test a pit of rocks with my body for fun smile.
Someone spilled blueberries in the car the guts are impossible
to get out. It’s not working. Single digits I’m not having fun.
Guess that’s why the only options are triple or quadruple.
Up or down. Not out.

You Were a Girl Once  /  Melinda Wilson

In the womb    I was your default 
There’s still time to decide
All we want that to mean
In the days when doctors were
dictators   nightmares were 
still nightmares We will
never be gods  but we will feel
like gods when risks pay out
Like I’m waiting for a beer
to get cold in the freezer
next to the cauliflower pizza
crust. Cauliflower as stand-in
for flour. Flower as it stands
on its stem   Risk as replacement
for god The beer could be 
colder  but the air is warm
and I’d like to keep you forever
however you’d like to be
Let me see you with the flower

September - Poem 8

The moon must be behind the black clouds / Laura Bandy

Blood is red and
the lips. And light
is blue, and the eyelids.
And milk is white
and the neck.         

—Brigit Kelly, from “Sundays” 

Color hits different in Switzerland, shades seeming
to portend more in such a pretty place. Maybe
reductive to say “pretty” when what you mean is
impossible. Impossible that such a space 
exists at all, from fern green Alps to lapis blue
of Lac Léman which splits France from Switzerland, sun
gold lattice on the waves in daylight, moon salt white
in night’s shadow. From her balcony in Lausanne,
Silvia lifts her camera over violin 
wine from the vineyard of a friend who assures 
pinot vintage sublimity, a deep ruby 
grape, by playing his Amati to winery 
vines, lulling them to sleep. There is Gruyere cheese
too, and rosemary cracker crisps butter yellow
dotted with needle leaves that snap cleanly to share. 
Here is not there, here is not there: back home where all
our history’s shame is seeping up republic’s 
stew pot, suet floating the surface, translucent 
grease hardening. When Silvia moves to shoot her
moon snaps, a pitch-black veil smothers the light, like a
tablecloth shaken out to rid of crumbs, dust: then
lowered over America’s table to cloak
all manner of nicks and spills. She unstraps Leica, 
places it on the small stone bench, coin gray, stable,
all that will fit on this narrow terrace beyond
three thin metal seats. Across the water, house lights
waver as candles clutched by a child’s choir
on Heilige Nacht, an eve most holy. Silvia 
says what must be said but is not sad at the loss.
Over 85 years she has taken many 
pictures from many balconies at night and knows
how the moon comes and goes, waxes and wanes, even blurs
so that our eye can’t decide—silver, blood, oblivion?

Poem Removed for Publication / Alicia Boemi

Not For One Moment the Memory of Eternal Summer /  Jesse DeLong

Cento Titles and Lines from Wetherington, Anzaldúa, Groff, Groff, Vuong, Hart, Tokarczuk translated by Croft, Als, Swensen, Shakespeare, Lundy Martin, Tolbert, Okada, Cowles, Leilani, Boully, Choi, Joudah, Ford, Sharma, Persson, Wetherington, Long Soldier, Göransson, Ali, Ko, Alam, Plumly,

This is not a love story.
The winter is a sheet of parchment
that the small feet of birds, of vixens, of hares write upon—
ruin without location, like language.
Few of the hues survived.

What part of the heart believes, and what part is certain that none of it is true?
He knew enough about love—or, more specifically, about its offers and denials,
the sound of a letter slipping out of an envelope.

There’s rosemary/ there’s fennel/ there’s rue/ there’s a daisy
and we, here, amid a failure of images.
Even the body has become a gift we regret.

He had to light a match in the dark hallway to see the faded 2-B on the door.
There is always a door.
He says, I’m sorry, I was having a rough year.
Perhaps the aubade is, in fact, only a convention.

A woman named always
dreams of a scored white pill.
She drifted, all shadowy black silk,
like two magicians in someone else’s window.

The heart is like water,
flowers are a certain color,
how a comma can tip a phrase into sentimentality.

Another map: rotten fruit, my body, words in Swedish pop songs—
three moods in one day.
Think of other words/ not for you to know.
Clarifying in the way of orgasm.
Who am I, we sometimes ask ourselves, to have a life? 

Acts of Resistance /  Shelly Krehbiel

“Pray,” they said, and I laughed, covering myself
in the earth’s brightness, then stole off gray
into the midst of a revel, and prayed like an orphan.”
                             --Wendell Berry, “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer”

If butterflies dance at the edge of the field, why do I ask them to come closer?
Why must I want to see the swallowtails land on the last of my own lantana,
then soar up past me into the giant fir trees? What is this need
to make the unspoken mine?  I never have words
when you ask them from me - when you say the greatest praise is to beg for mercy.

                                                          Trees pray.
                                                          And sunlight.
                                                          The deepest, deepest earth,
                                                          the soil still being born
                                                          from dung, from rotting
                                                          branches and spiders.
                                                          Let decay ring out.

Once I danced at the edge of the field amazed as something like holy found me there, sky everywhere,
ocean so far beyond I could only dream it, dream running to taste the salt spray on my face.

                                                          Noise crashes
                                                          around me, but still
                                                          I dip my hand
                                                          to touch the rocky pools.
                                                          Somehow, I trust
                                                          the words of silent
                                                          anemones and urchins.
                                                          Words I will never speak.

I give them back to the deep away – the deep always – even here in this cacophony, especially here.

                                                          Let this be prayer.
                                                      Let butterflies dance along the edge.    

How to be a poet, /  rob mclennan

Forget everything, words. Nothing much to expect. Forget speech. Hold on to the hollow. One simple question, repeated. Wrap, your fingers. The magic of water. It falls.

Digital Preservation  / Piper Rasmussen

File size; Operation: Greater than; Values: 1000000 [bytes]
Safe_Forever_HowTo.fmv

roll it

.Full Motion Video
a film = a thousand pictures = a million words

.Filesize Maiden Veil
why is this smaller
where did she
why can't I open a

.Fix My Version
find an emulator
who makes

.Forever Maintaining Vitae
put in a grant request
hire a team. Passive file monitoring, byte by

.Fair Market Value
  kilobyte = a thousand = a small subscription fee

.Find My Version
= Amazon Web Services

.Finesse MoVe
record: 2 kB
record: 1 kB
record: [error]memory: free

the coal mine canaries' revenge  / Connor Simons

the living say:

                                    is it dead?
                                    yup, it’s dead.
                                    shit.
                                    guess we’ll try another shaft.
                                    i guess so.

the canaries say:

                                    imagine a body that is meant for flight and peck
                                    each feather and curve made perfect for seed

                                    and sky   the type of body that artists see the secret
                                    of light in   that poets come back to again and again

                                    imagine seeing our yellow   a yellow that only belongs
                                    to us   one of one hundred and forty-five and needing

                                    to cram that yellow into a lightless space where air
                                    isn’t stale   it’s stone   you’ve forgotten us before

                                    you turn away to the next task   just a dead bird
                                    a part of work   you need to know something

                                    important   the forgotten things come back   as in
                                    the hidden waters flying downhill to eat your home

Twin Peaks Watch / Veronica Vo

Josie turned into wood
and the little man danced on her deathbed.
Lying in a field the next day, I listen 
to ambient sounds and try to find 
meaning in the moment.
Life can be beautiful as long
as you’re not too desperate for it,
not too desperate to understand it?

The Fire in the Boiler of My Heart/  Melinda Wilson

Dies down, loses steam. Imagine –  
being halfway through any of life’s hard things.  
Labor.  The baby’s head and shoulders  
|are out, but I’m quitting now. Walking 
away from the mess.  
But the mess always 
follows. Or midway through any of the not  
so hard tasks, the shouldn’t be so damn hard  
tasks. Getting dressed, for example. I have  
my legs in the leg holes of these pants, but I can’t  
muster enough motion to get my arms in the shirt. 
Imagine. I am halfway to the airport,  
the plane is midmost in its ascent through the clouds.  
We both turn around. 
I am halfway through my life with you. 
I am midway through my life,  
and the fire in the boiler of my heart 
begins to wane. This task of living  left 
      incomplete.

September - Poem 7

Priest Collar, Nun Habit / Laura Bandy

Signs are key. How else can we decipher
the freaky world around us? Is this it?
Is this semiotics? Never paid attention

in class, Joe and I, although we liked
the prof… Oh, that’s a lie. I paid attention
like my very life rested on outcome: on whether

or not this literary theory made sense.
I don’t know about Joe, he slid into
my life and out so seamlessly, like

a baby born to a woman in the Mesozoic
squatting on the cave floor. That was
another class I liked until the professor’s

test struck us all as unfair, the too-minute
questions not signified by the study sheet,
not signed. Or do I mean Paleolithic? It

was Saussure who said, “ A linguistic sign
is not a link between a thing and a name,
but between a concept and a sound pattern.”

What does unknowing sound like? I know
what fear sounds like, tastes like, although
the bad ones can be hard to spot with mere

tongue. It feels like I failed that particular exam
every year. Probably should have prayed
about it, maybe thrown body against

cathedral’s barred front door, carved marble,
deep and wide, until someone shouted down
from Jesus Wept Red stained-glass windows

that organized religion won’t be invented for
another 100 years (it’s the Neolithic, stupid).
You can see why we are up in arms. How those

nuns thread their sometime thick limbs
through tight habits is a miracle, I guess.
It must be hot under all that black wool,

real hairshirt stuff. And don’t even get me
started on dog collars. I’m no animal doctor
and not remotely Catholic, but even I know

a trap when I see one. What’s another word
for hunger, for I thirst? Okay. You got me.
I’ll kneel. 

Micro Love / Alicia Boemi

Isn’t it all so odd—
and beautiful— 
to be a human?
My eyes staring 
into your blue eyes. 
Your eyes staring 
into my brown eyes. 
Thinking different thoughts 
in one moment of connection. 
Oh, the humanity of it. 
Moments and decisions shape what’s next. 
Will we walk away broken in pieces,
or fully whole?
Time. 
It tells the story of our human 
cruelty,
or delight. 

The Best Burger in the World was Cooked in 1992 at a Pool Party Sorry You Missed It /  Jesse DeLong

But then that guy no one
claimed to invite launched off the railing
while holding a lit “4” candle from the cake—
I swear to you I saw it lit—
and of course he missed
the water
and the blood of his knee was in the water
and when he came up, face folded
so he looked like a pug,
a yappy little mutt off leash,
someone concerned into the crowd
that he had AIDS
and he wouldn’t respond, he wouldn’t
say whether or not he did,
he just took one of the host’s towels
and lay it over his head and left
and later a man who wasn’t so good
at magic waved his hand around
as a Queen of Hearts floated there
above the pool where he bled,
the heart wafting, sort of like the blood in water.
I can see it now. The fishing line.
The way it tricked out the sun. 

close, closer /  Shelly Krehbiel

Cover art by Jack Kirby, /  rob mclennan

Pencils, a window. One can look into. Look out. A layering of buildings. Swings, an arm. Stand, firm and tall. Proclaims! Any technique, to be useful. Kurtzberg, the Lower East Side. Rewrite history, story. How the gods died, reborn. Punching out Nazis. Widescreen energy and motion. King, always. Young Romance, New Gods. I can’t keep them separate. Slippery, Providence. To leap off the page. Soon, soon. Not soon enough. Dynamic. This architect of the imagination. What we talk about Selkirk. Put a post on a website. Unfollow.

Shrink  / Piper Rasmussen

I have a wool sweater that is just the right size
and has never been dried. Never gone through
that felting -- that journey

of becoming too small and stretching and itching
and wriggling out and being left in the armoire
and that regret.

It's the same with the things which could separate
us haven't happened yet -- the deaths and failures
of body parts -- the art

that you or I may never learn to master. The faith &
the untroublement is troubling. But don't worry, I'm
anxious, so I'm working on it.

a climate crisis tank  / Connor Simons

lay your naked chest
on my stomach’s open length
the world is burning
and cardinals moan a song
for the nests they’ll never build

Measuring Closeness / Veronica Vo

Someone I met uses fish. One fish
attached to each of us, two fish
meeting in the middle. If there is a
large distance, there are bigger fish
between us. If there is comfort,
smaller fish. Another person I know
uses time. Specifically, time in line,
which feels different, as we all know.
If there is discomfort, that is a person
to join in a short line or no line at all.
Otherwise, join them in a long line.
I would have waited in a line of any
length with you. I never saw the fish
between us. Why didn’t you tell me
you did? That you saw an ocean, one
I spent a decade swimming across? 

Ask Me about My Multiple Sclerosis   /  Melinda Wilson

And I’ll tell you I have brine shrimp swimming in my spinal  
canal. I keep high resolution images of them on my laptop,  
like a child poring over her colony of magnificent sea monkeys. 

I’ll tell you I have intricate cobwebs collecting in the corners  
of my eyeballs. Their spiders skitter in my field of vision, and 
my hands fly up to swat them away from the front of my face.  

I’ll say that my body hosts nocturnal insect crawls on the surface  
of my skin—parades of ants, ground beetles, crickets,  
and katydids strutting their carapaces through my lucid dreams.  

I’ll explain that tiny earthquakes rumble through my nervous system,  
make my bones quiver, disengage from their sockets. I bounce  
like a marionette hung from rubber bands rather than strings. 

I’ll try to say each day that passes without a new symptom 
to join the litany of pests is a mercy or godsend, but truly 
each ailment is holy, more fellowship,               more friend. 

September - Poem 6

Harebrained Scheme / Laura Bandy

The more I read about rabbits,
the less I like them.

Hares, on the other foot,
interest me exceedingly.

What most don’t know
is the difference. Bunnies

burrow in the dirt, make
homes in cold soil. That’s

called hiding, right?
Hares may be a solitary species,

but at least they live
and scamper above ground. Some

poet, I forget who,
praised the creature, (a dog, maybe?)

who never crept,
never crept, never crept. The truth

is poets are forgettable,
just like most life. I might mean

lives. In college, my
apartment had once been occupied

by Hugh Hefner,
a selling point the realtor made sure

to talk up. It was
a walk-up, and friends and I spent most time

on the roof with coke and
rum, throwing water balloons at the stars.

Someone found a board
one night that seemed sturdy, “sea-worthy,”

we said, and placed wood
across air three stories up, a pirate ship plank

connecting roofs. Tipsy,
we sashayed across, no fuzzy bunny ears perched

but a strut implied. I
don’t remember thinking I could die or pondering

eternal return, but what
was in my small brain then? Rabbits clock 1.8 grams

cerebrum, while hares
come in at 3.0. Oh, these gray cells, these scurries,

these schemes! And what
do you know? The stars looked the same on the other

side— shiny and so close—
not hurtling towards earth, not already dying.

Micro Love / Alicia Boemi

Of all the things I have forgotten, 
I will never forget, 
or regret, 
you.

Because AI-Generated Food Loves Zero-Shaped Shrimp /  Jesse DeLong

From a colony on the moon, 
robots won’t eat
a glug of oil
like on the Jetson’s, but instead crave
the worm-like strings of cornbread,
how all rice and chicken crust
resemble maggots. 
From a colony on the moon
the colon
is in all patterns of speech,
as well as lists of three
and a particular typo 
to pass
as human. And if there is a bird
it will be, unlike the conspiracies say,
left alone, and prone
to fluttering, and real. 

Thirteen After One /  Shelly Krehbiel

The mural of Marge Simpson stares from across the street
like she is watching the one-way traffic drive away,
bumper stickers, license plates, tail lights always leaving.
She never sees them coming, never sees who decides
to take that street on a Saturday afternoon. Just
their head-tops. A bit of hair just over the headrest.
Sometimes a child turns around in their seat, notices
her slight smile, the great height of her signature blue hair
stretched up the building nearly to the roof, taking up
as much space as the rest of her. The child keeps watching
a long time, long for a child, before other buildings
cut Marge from view. So much depends on time and distance.
When did I stop looking back for you and turn around?

Mark Goldstein, Roblin Lake, /  rob mclennan

Left behind by glaciers. Soluble, water-logged. Game, to recognize game. This handmade quality of syntax. A flourish, of hardscrabble. Hewn logs, by the boundaries. Hammer, hold. This widespread mortality. Lake, a loon’s call. Ethos, each structural division. Of going on, without one’s knowledge. An outhouse, closed. This grey shape, framed by leaves. Little point of land. A can of beer, on sun-drenched deck. To ask this of poetry, sport. The local library. Remembering the world. His world, specifically. Al Purdy’s Ameliasburgh; such calm, warm water. A fossil lake, which corresponds to this sentence.

Storytelling  / Piper Rasmussen

Chen, Crow's Foot
flow, Fermi,
Venn, Feyman, 
box-and-whisker, bar:
tell me the story, Papa, 
how you would start the counting & separation 
machines first-thing in the morning, 
stumbling out of bed into a warm house. 
Tell me about the buttons on the sides
again! The lit power
& file & edit & the
warrens of mice
helpfully messengering 
instants, instantly --
about the processing power of the millions
of others in other homes working alongside
you, and their categories, their different 
roles & waters, their undersea cables 
and satellites
before the snarl
for a time
singly & together
charted 

parsing recovery / Connor Simons

you hear the garbage cans rustling at night and it might be the wind or it might be a starving fox – recovery goes back to healing recovrer: coming back to consciousness   rising off the sickbed and becoming yourself again – the word alcoholic gnaws down might be until it’s the marrow of is – healthy and able to work   to be a good husband – didn’t you spend each day after the first beer showing the ragged clot in your heart to anyone close enough to see the space between your ribs? – that body on the bed wasn’t you   those feet crashing into the side table as your spouse was sleeping weren’t your feet – aren’t there days when you need the world to watch the clot untangle? to watch the starving fox that haunts your life snarl at the aluminum frame you’ve trapped it in? – that box of knives rattling in the hollow of your larynx belonged to someone else – don’t you want them to know beneath this covering that is your everyday life is a set of teeth and claws   matted fur and hunger   yellow eyes glowing at night like marsh lights guiding you to the depths out past the reedy shallows?

Venn Diagram Retrospective / Veronica Vo

The Giraffes    /  Melinda Wilson

I’m on the treadmill and thinking 
about how useful longer legs  
would be. I wouldn’t have to scale  
the grocery store shelves or throw  
heavy but unripe oranges towards  
the pack of Scotch-Brite that I need  
to scrub the grout above the shower- 
head where the tile meets the wall.  
Such a task would require a step ladder 
if not for my newfangled, long, and  
commodious legs. My pitching arm 
is out of practice, but I still get  
the sponges eventually. The legs  
I imagine I now have, as I pick up  
my pace, increase the incline and sweat  
beads on my face, these courtly legs  
are without nerve damage or shin  
splits. Not like my everyday stock legs,  
on which I now run. However long  
I could grow them, they aren’t fit  
for running, not really. Too wooden  
and awkward, and if they must be  
wooden, then certainly not toothpicky  
enough, not like the giraffes’ my friend  
tells me about. They graze outside  
the window of his parents’ hotel at Disney’s  
Animal Kingdom Lodge. The giraffes  
delight his mother, and I am suddenly  
envious of so much. His mother’s love  
for these odd animals. The giraffes’ Tim  
Burton legs, how they are a little like  
they are not for this earth, as these legs  
are not for running on this treadmill.  
And that’s to say nothing of the neck.  

September - Poem 5

I am starting to wonder… / Laura Bandy

is a hilarious phrase because
you knew all along, didn’t you
says the notes app in my phone, and I
can’t imagine what I knew or thought
I could know, now. Today, the morning after
my birthday, I’m primarily knowledgeable
about this cup of coffee, my second large cup,
and the latticed peach pie waiting for me
at my mother’s house. She baked it for me,
for me! Not my brother, not my twin, and
this means, well into middle age, that yes—
I win. I am starting to wonder, though, at
the way things are going out there: I mean
there—the world outside my window, beyond
our red brick walkway my husband laid by hand
then chalked, in permanent white-chalk marker,
a Smokey the Bear RESIST sign; beyond Mr. Ritzo’s
sycamore, dying now, it seems, in commiseration
with his death by heart attack, I think they said, but
I’m starting to wonder if it was something more,
something that seemed to attack not just the broken
paths, the trees, our neighbors and my father, frankly,
who is waiting to share the pie his wife baked using
peaches from a tree he planted years ago, when they
were first married and life for a young white couple
from towns so small you could play every sport he
said once, and had to, otherwise there would not be
enough to play, and what’s life without a game, what
is life if not a game, this game set up for folks just like
my parents and me, rigged, really, yet I’ve never been
very adept at, the rules eluding at every turn, but I know
one thing and maybe only one thing, and maybe I
am only claiming what every poet tries to claim, is
desperate to claim for their own, would die for on
the page at any rate: this cup, this day, the thought
that there might be another day waiting for me after
pie and time with neighbors, husband, family, peaches,
cancer and what comes after cancer when they say
you’re NED, no evidence of disease, the wonder then,
the wonder.

Poem removed for publication! / Alicia Boemi

Congratulations!

Things Scraped Clear or Scraped Clean /  Jesse DeLong

1.  

A VHS recording of an Easter recital
overwritten with a random episode of The Price is Right
where that man in suspenders from Nantucket
won a Pontiac
and then slid his hands up the suspenders,
making the same sound as the VHS’s black tape spinning,
almost wiping clean the cloth
as it rose up in a tent before releasing
the band to slap his chest.

2.

Taking a long and sharp knife and sliding over
the split open insides
of a serrano, carefully removing with the point
each seed like the dot of an exclamation point.
You do this to reduce the heat
so that, later when you touch your wife’s face
the capsaicin of the peppers
won’t burn there in exclamation the skin.

3.

The scales, ignorantly, of a redfish,
and the butcher’s opinion of you
when you ask him to prepare the meal this way.

4.

The images, especially the first two, in this poem.

5.

The word “old” from the first line. 

It’s been a long time /  Shelly Krehbiel

since I picked up the ball. But today is a day of sun, and I want the air. I’m not afraid to be the old lady down the street shooting hoops in her driveway. Okay, not completely old yet, but old enough for a gray ponytail, old enough to know that later the right knee will want ice. Yes, the knee will hurt and probably the shoulder, even from only this basket and chase, dribble, basket and chase, basket again. I can still shoot, better than when I played in high school, when I was just the smart, quiet one. I wasn’t supposed to feel strong, not in my body. One game I forgot and just played, let go, scored more points than I ever had. After, coach said, Let’s see you do that every time. I probably only scored six points the rest of the season. I was afraid to shoot, to miss, just focused on rebounds and defense. I wasn’t supposed to be good, not like that, not in public. How I wish I could talk to that girl I was, tell her not to fear being her whole self, to love what she loves. Now it doesn’t matter. I’m just the old lady down the street, a ball in my hands, feeling the age and extra weight in my body shift as my muscles remember, trusting the angles, the elbow, the knees, to send the ball where I want it to go, to feel it fly.

orange ball in the air -
arc in time the body makes
as I disappear.

August, Prince Edward Island, /  rob mclennan

Gulls, aplenty. Green gables, white. Of small beginnings. Cows, abstractions. Towels. Grab your bathing suit. By the waters of North Rustico, harbour. Sea glass. By the sandstone, smooth on the beach. From away, then. To rearrange the rules. Acadian fisherman, just off the shore. Seawalk Park, such intelligence. Lobster traps, stacked. What if it stood. The same function holds. A vista of rippled hills, these coded, free roads. Paved, and unvarnished. Iron-rich. Full-fathom deep, boats and nets and traps. These wayward hopes. Pelagic, abyssal. A crest is formed. Flags, a thread of fine vintage. What people, always. This line in red sand.

Showcase  / Piper Rasmussen

Tennis balls ajangle underfoot, sticking out like lulu
lemons from the sticky legs of folding chairs, ma-
mas and papas shuffling slightly to make room for
program sheets in purses, rustle rustle, skrrt skrrt
floorshow quiet fuzz. A community remembers to
look alive: an offkey warble chorus sips its soup &
a little ping-pong ball pops up the stairs ungreen-
screenlike but she just gets up again and stumbles
behind the wobbly ballerina line, proud to be on-
stage, if you can call it a stage. Gymfloor tile: you
could shoot a three-pointer and the library books
would clap from over there. Shelves line the gym
in this moment of disrepair. Student activities have
been crammed into this room for the duration. So-
on. The little ball rolls along with a plié, a tendue.

“In July, St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her’s administration announced that it planned to clear the city’s three largest encampments, starting with Pig’s Eye on Wednesday, August 5th.”  / Connor Simons

The City of Saint Paul completed the planned closure of the Pig's Eye Park encampment on August 5, 2026. City outreach teams were on site to assist in safely transitioning individuals and their belongings. The closure comes after weeks of daily engagement from City and County outreach teams, alongside local service providers. City staff has begun remediation efforts at the encampment site.

This is a permanent closure. The City and County remain committed to a coordinated, supports-frst approach as this effort continues at additional sites. The primary focus for the City is to continue to provide coordinated support to help encampment residents transition toward safer, more stable housing and to access additional services and resources.

Inevitable Not Quite Mad Libs / Veronica Vo

after Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

Death blowing you a kiss. Watch yourself watch yourself, tits bouncing no pants on. The point is to feel something even if you don’t understand it. No language. Just body. Can it still be a bad ending if you’re not covered in blood? We turned on Five Nights at Freddy’s while he ____ his ____ in me and I kept watching the movie. He asked, sarcastically, do you want to keep watching. As if I couldn’t because of the ____. I looked away from the movie, finally. Final girl. Watch yourself watch yourself. Death danced here. I felt something I don’t understand. Jamie Hood writes that ignoring the continuity between the unpleasant and abject is laughable. Death laughed here. I should have told him I wanted to watch the movie. Would it have made a difference? I shouldn’t have had to say I don’t want to be ____.

For America’s 250th Birthday during a Heatwave in Bronx, NY at the Corner of Jacobus Place & 225th Street, Marble Hill/  Melinda Wilson

after Allen Ginsberg

America we’ve given you all and now we are nothing.

In the 1950s when McDonald’s first opened, a hamburger cost 15 cents. Today, the children of America are throwing hamburger patties in the cascading waters of open fire hydrants without spray caps. The mini floods sweep the pads of beef past the longing eyes and noses of the neighborhood dogs whose owners are walking them earlier than normal, hoping they will shit, so they won’t have to leave the apartment after dark when the street fireworks crack so loud windows will rattle, babies will cry, veterans will cover their heads, and the dogs will tremble with fear at our collective monstrosity.  

America when will you be angelic? / When will you take off your clothes?

In the 1970s, the Astro Lamp became the psychedelic staple of our mutual desire to free our asses and our minds. Today, the children of America are buried deep in their screens, thoughtlessly handing over all their private data to the tech moguls. They are posting lewd images of their bodies through heavily filtered apps, so when they see each other on the street, they are beyond recognition. Just more faces in a sea of screens. 

America when will we end the human war?

In the 1990s when the officers who beat Rodney King were declared innocent, the people of Los Angeles rioted in the streets. They looted, they assaulted, they let the mother burn. Today, the children of America walk across graduation stages, risking their diplomas to bear the flags of their parent countries. The valedictorians have the microphones pried from their sweaty hands when they do not comply, when they are steadfast and repeat “chinga la migra.” 

America why are your libraries full of tears?

In the 2010s when our colleges and universities started telling a little of the truth about the Trail of Tears, the Florida State Seminoles earned a spot in the ACC Championship game. The fans donned native war bonnets all over the city of Tallahassee, on their trips to Publix, their post office runs, and dentist appointments. They tomahawk-chopped their greetings to every passerby. Today, the children of America are taught to say “criss cross applesauce” instead of “Indian style,” but we still dress them as pilgrims at Thanksgiving. Then they ask ChatGPT what it means to scalp an Indian.  

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.

In the 2020s, New York City elected a new mayor. A Muslim and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. President Donald Trump called him a communist, and the Knicks won the championship for the first time in 53 years, despite the Mad King’s attendance at game 3, which was the only game the Knicks lost. The whole city chanted “my mayor is Muslim, my bagels are Jewish, the Pope’s on our side, Knicks in five,” and we all loved one another for maybe the first time. Today, the children of America might know how to hang on to the small amount of collective joy necessary to keep them alive. Because it is the children of America today who are perfect not the next world.