Amaal Al-Deeb

AMAAL AL-DEEB

---

ليسَ للذِّئابِ وَطن

...سَأُغَادِرُ

دُونَ فِرَاءِ الدُّبِّ وَخَاتَمِ الأَلْمَاس

دُونَ عِبَارَاتِ التَّغَزُّلِ في أُنُوثَتِي الفَرِيْدَة..

دُونَ انبِهَارِ القَتَلَةِ بالنَّظراتِ الزُّجَاجِيَّةِ لِمَقْتُوْلِيهِم..

سأرحلُ إلى فضاءٍ وسيعٍ

يحْتَوِي رُوْحِي

المُصِرَّةَ عَلَى التَأَلُّقِ..

حَتَّى بَعْدَ انْهِيَارِ الجَسَدِ الذي انْغَرَسَتْ فِيهِ آَلافُ النَّظَرَات

كَانَ فَاتِنًا بِاعتِرَافِهِم..

كَمْ تَغَزَّلُوا فِيهِ

تَمنَّى أَكْثَرُهُم أَنْ يَحْظَى بِدِفْئِهِ وَلَو لِبَعْضِ الوَقت..

الفَضاءُ يَضيقُ

أَطيافُ بعضِهم تحومُ حَولي

تَزعُمُ أنَّ مَا أَشعَلَ فِتنَتَهَا هُوَ ذَاكَ الشَّيطَانُ الـ"مُتلبِّسُني"..

كَيَمَامَةٍ تَنْقُرُ أَحْلامَهُم..

مَا زَالَ يُعَاقِرُهُم أَمَلٌ..

باحتِضَانِ طَيفِي..

أَو مُوَاقَعَةِ خَيَالِي الرَّابِضِ فِي رُكْنٍ دَفِيء

مِنْ إِحْدَى السَّمَاوَاتِ المُتَوَسِّطَة..

وَأَنَا أَهِيمُ..

أَو أَتَسَرَّبُ مِنْ خَلْفِ ظُهُورِهِمُ..

وَرُبَّمَا تَسَلَّلتُ عَلَى أَطرَافِ كِيَانِي ذَا

بَاحِثةً عنْ رَائِحَتِكَ في الأُفقِ المُحِيط

---

WOLVES HAVE NO HOME

I’ll leave

without the fur coat and diamond rings,

without the feminine trappings they’ve plastered to me—

I’ll leave these murderers, the outline of my shape 

still flashing in their eyes

and slip away

to a place where a soul might thrive

rising and flickering like a lit wick

even after its body has collapsed, riddled with a thousand looks. 

They admit my body was beautiful, admit they wanted it

so much they can’t stop eulogizing what they’ve crushed.

They’ll still seek even a moment of its heat

as the walls crowd in, 

they circle, stalking me in the dark. 

They claim their obsession has been sparked by the devil 

who possesses me,

who pecks at their dreams like a dove.

They’ll never give up the hope

of pressing themselves against my ghost

or sleeping with my shadow

even as it glides away into the silence of middle heaven. 

And so I roam,

sliding through arms to escape beyond their reach,

prowling along the seams of myself,

hunting for the scent of you on the horizon.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Amaal Al-Deeb is a poet living in Egypt.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

Amir Al-Azraki is an Arab-Canadian playwright, literary translator, Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner, and Associate Professor and Coordinator of Studies in Islamic and Arab Cultures Program at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. He is the author of The Discourse of War in Contemporary Theatre, co-editor and co-translator of Contemporary Plays from Iraq, “A Rehearsal for Revolution”: An Approach to Theatre of the Oppressed, and and has had co-translated poems published in Consequence Forum, The Common, POETRY Magazine, and Talking Writing. He has recently translated Representations of the Other: The Image of Black People in the Medieval Arab Imaginary by a Bahraini critic Nader Kadhim, which will be published by McGill-Queen's University Press.

Kirun Kapur is the author of three books of poetry, Women in the Waiting Room (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Julie Suk Award and the Massachusetts Book Award; Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015) which won the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize and the Antivenom Poetry Award; and the chapbook All the Rivers in Paradise (UChicago Arts, 2022). Her work appears in AGNI, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares and many other journals. She serves as editor at the Beloit Poetry Journal and teaches at Amherst College, where she is director of the Creative Writing Program.

Muna Al Assi

MUNA AL ASSI

---

مياه مشبوهة

خرجت من عيادة طبيبي، خفيفة كمغفرة

.تركت في حوض أسماكه رجالا كانوا يسبحون في دمي

.علّقت على جدران عيادته، الصور المبعثرة في ذاكرة مصباحي

,حتى الأسماء، التي كان يلقيها الأصدقاء تحت نافذتي كحبات قمح يابسة

.زرعتها له فيأصيص حبقته 

اصطاد كل النحل من قميصي ونظف ألوانه المائعة من الحدائق

,أنا خفيفة من قصائدي أغرقتها في كأس البيرة

.ومن أصدقاء كانوا يزدحمون في قلبي بلا أكتاف

خفيفة من عصافير كانت تعشش في جديلة قلبي

,خفيفة كوعد الغواية

,خفيفة إذاً من رجالي ومن أصدقائي

,من صوري ومن ملابسي

من نصوصي ومن نافذتي التطل على عجوز تكتب رسائل لله عن وحدتي

أنا

خ

ف

ي

ف

ة

سوى من اسم تسيل منه امرأة يابسة

---

MIRAGE

I left my doctor’s clinic—weightless with forgiveness.

In his fish tank, I left men swimming in my blood.

On the clinic walls, I hung photos scattered in the lantern light of

my memory.

The names recited by friends under my window, 

like dried wheat seeds—I planted in his basil pots. 

I hunt all the bees from my shirt & I clean the colors that melt over

gardens.

Every poem sinks in my glass of beer, & I’m light

of friends that crowded my heart without shoulders,

of friends that nested in my heart braids.

Lightness is a tempting false promise.

So—I’m not weighted by my men & my friends,

by my clothes & my photos,

by my writings & my window framing an old woman writing to

God about my loneliness.

I am

أنا

خ

ف

ي

ف

ة

Except for the weeping of the name: dry woman. 

---

TRANSLATORS’ NOTE:

The letters in Arabic spell out khafifah, meaning ‘weightless’ or ‘light’

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Muna Al Assi is a Palestinian poet and journalist, born in Syria in the Yarmouk refugee camp. She studied English literature at Damascus University and has worked in media for many years in Syria and Dubai; notably at The Gulf Emirates Newspaper. Her work has been published in French, English, Bulgarian, German, Flemish and Italian.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

Dima AlBasha is an entrepreneur and translator from Aleppo, Syria. Since coming to the United States, she has become a promoter of interfaith dialogue and intercultural understanding; as well, she’s given a TEDx talk which bridges gaps between people of different cultures and perspectives. Dima is a translator for the Her Story Is collective.

Jennifer Jean’s poetry collections include VOZ, Object Lesson, and The Fool. Her teaching resource book is Object Lesson: a Guide to Writing Poetry. She’s received honors, residencies, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, DISQUIET/Dzanc Books, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Her Story Is collective, the Academy of American Poets, and the Women’s Federation for World Peace. As well, her poems and co-translations have appeared in POETRY, Rattle, The Common, Waxwing, On the Seawall, and elsewhere. Jennifer edits translations for Consequence Forum and is the senior program manager of 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center’s online writing program.

Rebecca Foust

REBECCA FOUST

---

I KEEP HOPING

In our minds our sister is lost to us

even as she continues to walk

the earth, pacing the small rooms 

of her last home. Waking, sleeping,

barely eating, sleeping, waking, 

and effacing minute-by-minute 

into a ghost. She is lost 

to us, but I keep hoping

that in her own mind she is not lost

—in her mind she is back in her life

taking dictation at the pentagon

and coming home to work 

on her dollhouses till dawn,

painting lines fine as an eyelash

with a brush fine as an eyelash,

trimming tiny topiaries and 

Christmas trees with twinkle lights

no bigger than the spark 

that flies off a cap gun. No bigger 

than the beads flocking the trees 

in her shadowbox

with its “Winter White” theme

—she is lost to us—

and I keep hoping that in her mind

she is not lost but still there 

somewhere, taking dictation 

of what is being said

but not understood, unstringing 

the tiny, shining pearls 

of her memories, picking them up 

with tweezers and using a glue gun

to affix each one, beautiful, 

immutable, in its perfect place. 

---

SNEAKY LIKE THAT

In the sixth week of living by myself

during the pandemic, I set up a bird feeder

to feel less alone. Now birds

with plump breasts—pigeon and quail, 

nuthatch & towhee—are pecking at the trail 

of seed laid almost to my back door. 

They remind me of bird in The Poetics 

of Space using its breast to shape its nest cup 

of mud, hollowed and pressed

with so much persistence

that the nest could be said to be made, 

also, of suffering. 

Lately I’ve been gritting my teeth 

through the days, but I’ve also begun 

waking to birdsong.

The birds are so many, so close, 

&—it occurs to me—not all that fast 

or smart. It took a week

to coax them to the feeder, 

to teach them it was there—free food 

for the taking. Maybe one 

could be snared for my dinner, 

I think, when the food supply fails. In fact, 

I could eat their seed

ground into bread & could

in a real pinch actually catch one, 

or maybe it’s time 

to start thinking 

about buying a gun, you know, 

just for food and maybe, 

protection. That’s how 

the thoughts never thought before 

come in now, often, 

but rarely articulate—sneaky like that.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rebecca Foust’s fourth full-length book Only (Four Way Books 2022) received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly. Recognitions include runner up for the 2022 Missouri Review Editors Prize, winner of the Pablo Neruda, CP Cavafy, and James Hearst poetry prizes, a Marin County Poet Laureateship, and fellowships from Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Sewanee. Recent poems are in The Common, Five Points, Ploughshares, POETRY, and Quarterly West.

Richard Tillinghast

RICHARD TILLINGHAST

---

SMOKE

My schoolteacher friend drove me 

      in his schoolteacher’s-salary Subaru

  from the lighthouse in St. James, explaining.

I liked riding in the wet-wool fustiness

of that car, its car-heater warmth 

   and up-north funk.

I liked jamming my boots down into

   the days-old crumpled-up 

fast food wrappers and old newspapers,

     and I cleared with my glove

circles in the frost on the windshield

        as we bumped off the blacktop.

Then there we were on foot in the mud and rain,

circumnavigating the circle of stones— 

          I counted thirty-nine. We left offerings

    where others had left theirs—coins 

and trinkets: a St. Christopher, a couple of jacks, 

  a lipstick, a rabbit’s foot, a dime-store ring.

Someone had chiseled into one of the stones

    what looked like a rune. 

Was that a thousand years ago?

The weather had not erased it. My friend said

  that on the solstice the rising sun

     lines up across the circle’s axis.

And that was when the car full of Anishinaabe

appeared—Ojibwe from the look of them—,

              their car even older than ours.

I watched as they took tobacco from a pouch,

lit it and lifted up some words

            into the smoke and drizzle.

Did that smoke, did those words 

     keep their circle unbroken

in the life they lived among us in this America?—

invisible most days, their lives unchronicled

in the newspapers crushed underfoot 

     inside the schoolteacher’s car.

---

THREADS

When I say he was a presence 

in the house where I grew up, 

I don’t mean as a ghost. My dead 

grandfather would have had, I think, 

too much tact to return

after the dirt had been shoveled, the limousines 

parked, the black clothes folded and put away.

Still, his spirit inhabited our house.

He was born the last year of the war

in Tennessee, and he died

the last year of the war in France,

burning up with influenza the troops 

brought back from the trenches. 

When the Baptist preacher came to his bedside 

to pray for him, Grandfather asked him would he 

go out and get him a cold bottle of beer.

Grandfather died with his reserve intact. 

How little I know of the man!

I touch, wondering, the keys he left

among his things, their antiquated 

edges still sharp:

strongbox, cash drawer, lock box, 

office door and locks unknown—

keys to nothing.

When I was seventeen I found

in the back of the attic 

his silk frayed smoking jacket, his chesterfield 

coat with its velvet lapels. I wore 

his clothes until 

I wore them out, feeling his spirit

breathe through the threads. Here’s his gold 

watch on my table. I keep it wound.

---

REVIVAL

Abandoned on what was a road,

         a pickup truck, 

blue paint purpled by sun,

                  and a Model-A Ford

stalled on this shoulder of the mountain,

sumac growing up through the horsehair seats,

            rusty seed pods in league

                        with the rust of the machine.

Creeper interlaces the tines of an antique

                harvester in a field,

a cooking pot overturned in the yard.

Inside the house, pictures still hang on the walls,

   though they took their Bible with them.

I don’t hear the hymns they sang, do you?

And what has become of their church?

But let this homeplace speak. Let it tell its story

now that the machinery of the world 

               starts to misfire,

   stall out, and begin its slow deceleration.

Maybe it’s time to disappear 

down into the creek bed, quick as we can,

            ahead of what’s coming over the mountain,

follow the deer tracks

        and the strange cries of wild turkeys.

Flakes of obsidian, arrowheads, rusty bolts,

                a cannon ball from an old battle,

bleed into the stream 

           that obliterates our tracks.

Could we ride bareback again,

   plow the earth, hunt and trap,

                        sew and mend,

   rig a snare to catch the feral pigs,

            build a tabernacle

in the loneliness of the unpeopled mountains?

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Richard Tillinghast’s new collection, Blue If Only I Could Tell You, is the winner of the 2022 White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Blue If Only I Could Tell You is his thirteenth collection, in addition to five books of creative nonfiction, including Istanbul: City of Forgetting and Remembering, and most recently, Journeys into the Mind of the World: A Book of Places, 2017. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, The New Republic, The New Criterion, The Best American Poetry and elsewhere. In addition, he reviewed new poetry for the New York Times Book Review for many years. The recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Council, the Irish Arts Council, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Richard lives in Hawaii and spends his summers in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Angie Estes

ANGIE ESTES

---

SOLSTICE

Towards the end

                        of her life, my mother kept

                                    saying I’m going to be here

as long as I’m supposed

                        to be, as long as the days

                                    of June and as long as

Proust said a sentence needs

                        to be because it contains a

                                    complete thought, and no matter

how complex it may be, the thought

                        should remain intact because the shape 

                                    of the sentence is the shape

of thought: think how

                        the hummingbird feeds as long

                                    as it needs to, dipping

its tongue to make the nectar tremble,

                        although not nearly as long as I stayed 

                                    behind the Baptist church beneath

honeysuckle when I was ten, pulling

                        each flower’s pistil back through

                                    its throat to drip one sweet bead

onto my tongue before my parents

                        drove us up into the mountains

                                    for the all-day meeting and supper

on the ground, which always

                        seemed to me more like all-day

supper with cakes and pies laid out,

waiting

end-to-end on picnic tables, watermelons

                        soaking in their galvanized tubs

                                    of ice while the grills kept burning

until even after evening 

                        prayer, everyone still

                                    had mustard on their

folded hands and

                        faces, the nights so dark

                                    that all the fireflies were one

giant sparkler held up to tick away

                        the night in their hide-and-seek

                                    here-I-am, over there, here, now

here, as if the shorter

                        the days become, the longer the sentence

                                    needs to be.

---

LE PAYS OÙ JE DÉSIRERAIS VIVRE:

terra, cara, terroir: in the open

mouth of the wind, blue-black from all

                                    the kites it has eaten, blown back

like the past, where the family lives

                                    in Alexandre Dumas’ Le chevalier

d’Harmental : 5 rue du Temps-Perdu.

                                    In the about-to-bloom history

of wisteria, twisting while

                                    the soft gray paws of pussy willow

boom suddenly above me, a thunderhead

                                    nods like Mary at the Annunciation,

recalling

how Abraham said the journey is within, from

                                    inside us to inside us, nous même à nous

même. Where else could they be

                                    headed in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia when 

the chest of the Virgin Mary flies open

                                    to release the beating doves?

Celtic perigrini wandered 

                                    in “thin places,” sites in landscape

where the borders between

                                    this place and some other, past 

and present, feel most fragile, begin

                                    to fray the way bison painted on walls

in Grotte de Niaux move in

                                    and out of rock as if it were

a membrane between worlds. 

                                    Out back,

the mourning dove bobbing

                                    in the birdbath, one wing unfurled

and hoisted on its mast, doesn’t even think

                                    about sailing home. She’s somewhere

between Pavlov and Pavlova.

---

COMMENT J’AIMERAIS MOURIR:

in Old English unweder, “unweather,”

weather so extreme that it seems

                        to have come from another

                                    climate or time, still holding

in my hand a lame, which bakers use 

                        to carve their mark 

                                    on bread—not to be

confused with l’âme, the soul—

                        while blackbirds line up

                                    to form an abacus on the wire 

above me, listening 

                        to the Arpeggione Sonata, which Schubert 

                                    composed for an almost

extinct instrument, like the moon

                        we keep singing to anyway—Casta

                                    Diva, pure goddess, shine

on, shine on harvest moon

                        up in the sky (the most difficult

                                    part of the opera, the soprano 

replied, was not crying after

                        her own death)—and the moon, too,

                                    a trace fossil, a sign left

by the impress of life rather than

                        life itself, as in the fitting

                                    of a bespoke jacket: all dots

and dashes, Cezanne’s

         taches, what’s left of Mont Sainte-

     Victoire when he is done painting it.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Angie Estes is the author of six books of poems, including Enchantée (Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize) and Tryst, one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize.

Valerie Duff

VALERIE DUFF

---

BIOME

There was a blue drink on the porch sill at the Black Whale

and it was summer.

So many things show up on tests.

This is how we live, adjusting odds, percentages

in our favor. Still I sweated in a hot back room

with windows seamed shut

googling survive googling fear googling possibility

the WiFi ghosting. Never death never radial

symmetry or prime mover. Meanwhile outside,

bumper cars and sand toys nested

in the oyster grass. Island birds pieced

their nothing songs from soft white sand

and little tar

not far from Three Mile Island

against the tide, the guard who held me upside down

for fun when I was five.

How close lifeguard

to diagnostic tool. I never felt the thing,

the jelly luminescent in my breast. Its Medusa stalks

a wave of supplication, umbrella pulse of dreams.

---

REPORT

Oh, honey,

the unspoken life of the body

and the world in which we drink

tea and eat the ruby

seeds that doom us half to hell.

To be so scared

when considering

the afterlife in the sentinel

pot where tea may steep too long.

A riverbed of tannin coats

the way a specimen lines a dish.

The body, its margin

assessment, has forgotten where it came from,

a snow-capped mountain that’s left

its origins behind, strata

too deep to feel, layered up

to melting ice. Its axillary

may one day give way

to a deluge that will hide

the dye stained earth, simply

spun to a surface of water,

a change so gradual

most don’t feel the slipping

of the shoreline until core

markers are submerged, until

all systems are undone. Because invasion

history of dragon fire

yields satellites

that wink and spread across the galaxy

leaving only vapors of ourselves,

prognostic rolls of the dice,

the wheel spins to reassess

when a medieval fortune teller

with the tarot comes to evaluate

the fireworks display.

All has turned to ash, to sack.

Only skin remains,

a cloak that lived the lie so long:

cutaneous tissue with no diagnostic abnormality.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Valerie Duff’s second book, Aquamarine (Lily Poetry Review Books), will be published in September 2023. Her first book, To the New World (Salmon Poetry), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize from Queens University, Belfast in 2011. She has held fellowships from the VCCA and Writers’ Room of Boston. She is currently working in Donor Relations and Stewardship at MIT and is reviews editor at Salamander.

Alison Granucci

ALISON GRANUCCI

---

ODE TO THE STAR-NOSED MOLE

It came out of the dark, blind   sniffing

for air   not light — it was

ugly & alone & without a thought, I scooped 

up this fleshy star 

into my fleshy palm — two organs

of touch   touching the unknown.

But I was not root or stone, worm or loam,

I had to put him down —

faster than a wink, he disappeared underground.

It was love. There is no other word.  

I longed to follow him down.

                                                                                                If soil were my home —

and my    fossorial nature   alive at last,

                        I’d use my tusky trowel claws

            to throw back the earth to the earth 

and burrow with a fury into the murk      

                                                                      tight corridor of dirt pressing me on

with no need for useless eyes,

I’d touch-bump in a blur, 

            hunting   with my sea anemone nose — twenty-two rays

         that sense my prey’s   electricity   through water & muck —

able to touch twelve things   

            in one second, I’d eat any of the twelve

           deemed grub   not mud —           

          a wonder of evolution, I’d stun worms 

        with my saliva & store them   in my scullery.

                                                                                    If I were not me —

I’d mine a truer tunnel 

my excavation urged                  

ever downward                                                             

by an inner weight                     

where on earth does a soul belong

clawing through rifts & grit    past fossil & rock 

                                  drawn deeper

                                            by a graver current —

                                                      the earth’s pulse

      electric   & receptive.

                                                                                    If I were a star-nosed mole —

I’d raise my own star, 

            ask it to guide me

                                  as I delve

                                  ever more elusive 

                                  to what is always   

                                               churning & iron hot —

                                                my descent toward   the   

                                                                               unreachable   

                                                                               root of all stars.

In this untold below, what prey   but my own fear    would I eat —

                                                                                         and for what would I pray?

To be held by the earth & rest — 

                                                         — and to sense, with my little dipper rays

as I approach the end

                                           how in my blind digging   

                                                                             all I ever touched was God.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alison Granucci is a poet, writer, and woodland gardener living in the Hudson Valley. She has poems published or forthcoming in EcoTheo Review, Crosswinds Poetry Journal, and a book anthology of bird poems by Paris Morning Publications. In 2005, Alison founded Blue Flower Arts, the fist literary speaker’s agency in this country to represent poets, and ran it until she retired at the end of 2019. A 2022 graduate of the Brooklyn Poets Mentorship Program, Alison serves as a poetry reader for The Rumpus and is at work on a book-length manuscript.

Paula Bohince

PAULA BOHINCE

---

THE UNRAVELING

This is the field where it happened: shotgun grass

quieting casings that fell from the lesson, where cans

yipped and the kennel hushed over the summer

when Gail got the news.  This is the field

where Big Jim bit the lip of his sonofabitch stallion

who’d kicked his gut, that sorrel mistake whose fetlock

went hinky, then lame, the stud fee spent

and then some, and this is the cherry, limber

in spring, blowing its kisses, and this is the walnut

stolen by arborists who promised a cut

then paid my mother in shame.  I’m 

on the stump, idiotic, still tasting the sawdust,

gripping a Queen Anne cordials box, her one

Christmas indulgence, bought from the Kmart before

the backroads unspooled, blue sirens

in aisles where our machine got its bobbins,

where guppies swarmed, oblivious in cities, 

where I chose my training bra for its dinky charm

so when a hubbub rang down the road

I jingled, my parents running at full strength,

taking up the muddy rope lassoed round

the horse’s ribs as he reared in the ditch, in fall chaos, 

the year undone, but surely there’d be another, 

another, until somewhere it all tipped over.  Just leave

me alone, my mother said.  I’m done with the past.

She whose future was inches, my muscular dad decades

gone.  I thought I’d die from confusion: unloved,

unraveled, with no one to braid me or pull.

---

ESCAPE TO FIJI

Swimming in a mirage, past the bull shark, sicklefin 

lemon, buoyed by a personalized ocean, psychosis floating 

me when I wearied, rescued thus by blue saturation, perfumed

and pumicing element, living

as on that Styx song in adolescence, trance overtaking fear 

on the papasan chair,

the same biblical sentence cycling 

until it engraved on my brain God’s authority.  I turned 

the watery page.  I went to the sun unashamed, submitting to new

species: boggling palms, animals like drawings.

Say toxin again.  Under a dome of aura, swirl over me

noni soap.  Oils of frangipani, 

verbena, gifted by the last true friend, color me in.

Flowers, include me ecstatic in your orgasm.  

Opening spheres of vistas, let me buckle with, unbothered

as clownfish or mollusk.  Erase me

lotioning little sister’s behind-the-ears, years of weeping

scales, skin like vellum, her head on my lap, our systems

changing    

permanently, in stress.  Benumbed, watching beauty queens           

departing an airplane, sisterly in leis and sashes.

---

WOOVES

Wait, what was he asking?  Wooves was how it sounded, jet-

lagged and woozy in the Highlands.  Slumped dumb on Laura 

Ashley, in woolens, drinking sherry, I heard, Do you 

have wooves where you live?  Ah, and then they came: bark-colored,

char-

coal and ash, suckling, adamant in autumnal red.  I left

Cadbury bars on his studio doorstep, each one

bigger than the next to break his politesse.  I bathed and watched

the rained on skylight.  Burns Night Supper brought haggis

and burred recitations, talk of vintages, fox hunts.  

The Oxford scholar slurred,

Did you have toy cars or a train set?  The smile melting

away was a revelation, fire snarling,

hissing at the question.  Alone, finally he confessed his mother 

was like the iceberg in Titanic and how he felt

about that Faber rejection.  A cough.  A twilit handshake.  

Clean as moss, I lay in castle-shadow, in moorish ambiance.  Wooves

were the lips of schoolboys at water fountains after 

shaggy play.  His tweed jacket as he bicycled to town for bottles

of ink.  Whine of the left behind echoing in the faraway.

---

MIDLOTHIAN GOLDFINCH

Giddy as dawn, as a promise of treasure, downwind 

from the Esk, a millennium of rain erasing the temple roof, 

allowing fields of moss and snowdrops.  Song alert

to brokenness, leant to voices lost in wind, echoing as

no one, no one.  Ecstatic bell in the steeple nest 

above saplings torqued as arrows landed in a chorus.  

Its call dims, in preservation, where knights once rested, grew 

avid, sacrificed youth to plotting and hoarfrost, to abide 

in a mutual heart, as brothers.  I’m yours, the gold murmured 

in dreams and waking, vocalizing each estrangement.

---

BONE FLUTE, 43,000 BC

Its wail fell into my feed unbidden, interrupting 

trance and techno looped during the zoned-out hour

after the funeral.  It called forth the cave, the ancient 

bear, the femur hammered by instinct.  The flutist in mother

Slovenia swayed in muslin robes, incandescent long

white hair a candle in the drip.  He played the stranger’s missive

while a virus wilded.  Ensconced in sunlight, like spiders 

crumpled in amber, we’d stood that morning before her 

name, 2021 not yet etched.  Just us and a priest in a flowered mask,

a muffled commendation of her spirit, Bible thick as the

Mabinogion.

We watched an unraveling thread on his vestments soar

as he spoke, snow overwhelming the daffodils.  After

the vigil, its startle tunneled through satellite and ether, laid 

to rest within the delicate bones of the future.  A miracle 

that it should exist at all.  And when tender improvisation shifted 

to Ode to Joy—the familiar rampage, the forceful Go on—

it touched an anguished hollow held inside my body, 

that flute the source of weeping and hope.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paula Bohince is the author of three poetry collections from Sarabande, most recently Swallows and Waves. She was the guest editor of Best New Poets 2022.  

Tim Nolan

TIM NOLAN

---

THINGS I DIDN’T KNOW I LOVED

after Nazim Hikmet

It’s November 2020.  I’m sitting

At a high-top table amidst

A pandemic in a hotel coffee bar.

On the West Bank of the Mississippi.

Minneapolis.  I just read the local

Newspaper.  The Vikings beat

The Packers.  I don’t care one bit.

What I didn’t know I loved—

The Mississippi River.  How it’s always

Been in my life.  Sometimes rushing by

As cold water from snow melt up North.

Sometimes lolling—in slow procession

Pulling me to the South and gentler lands.

I didn’t know I loved the trees that bank

The river—the elms and oaks—

The birches and scrub pines.  Especially

I didn’t know I loved the saplings

Clinging so earnestly to the rock shelf

Above the river.  I didn’t know I loved

The rock shelf.  Set this way since

The Ice Age.  I didn’t know I loved

The Ice Age.  Or any age for that matter.

Especially The Age of Now.  Which 

I didn’t know I loved.  This very now.

---

KENNEDY, 1963

That was when it all began—

The dread—The—I Suppose This

Won’t Work Out.  The obvious

Fix was in for anything that

Might remotely inspire us.  So

We became cynical.  I should say

I became cynical—at nine-years-old.

It was that Sunday morning when Oswald

Was shot in the gut on the TV screen.

How many times did he flinch that day?

As the old fashioned hat of Jack Ruby

And his snub nose pistol moved in?

I remember how his face was only pain.

So much pain in his face—it became ours.

In those few days we came to believe

Oswald did it.  Probably alone.  Probably

Just because.  We always make people

Crazy.  We are very good at that.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Nolan was born in Minneapolis, graduated from the University of Minnesota with a B.A. in English, and from Columbia University in New York City with an M.F.A. in writing. Tim is an attorney in private practice in Minneapolis. His poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and on The Writer’s Almanac and American Life in Poetry. Three of his four collections—The Sound of It, And Then, and The Field have been published by New Rivers Press, and the fourth, Lines, is from Nodin Press. Tim is the host of the series Readings by Writers at the University Club in St. Paul.

Jane McKinley

JANE MCKINLEY

---

SOLILOQUY

For Curtis W. Lasell (1953-2005)

Three weeks he’s lain with Shakespeare

propped against the knee that’s bent

on folding up, remembering the womb.

He’s learning to recite To be, or not

to be as if his life depends on whether

he delivers it without a pause, as if

a single hesitation might deliver him

to undiscover'd country, cut him down

mid-sentence, cutting short the tragedy

that is his own: elixir that is killing him,

a mother who would rather have him dead

than bear the shame of tainted illness.

He’s arming himself with words against

oblivion, against ammonia rising in his brain,

against weakness that prevents his doing

anything but think. Last time was different:

hurtled breakneck through night

to an abandoned station halfway there,

a place where time does not exist for those

arriving, those who linger on the platform,

unaware of what they’re waiting for.

On his return, he learned a week had passed,

but to his mind he’d only spent the night.

He can’t remember what he saw or heard

that haunts him, what it is that prompts: To be...

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble, a professional chamber music group based in Princeton, New Jersey. Her life as a poet began in 2003 when, haunted by an image, she began writing after a lapse of thirty years. Her manuscript Vanitas won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize and was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2011. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, Southern Poetry Review, on Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She earned a Bachelor of Music from Northwestern University, an MFA in historical musicology from Princeton University, and studied Baroque oboe in Vienna with the late Jürg Schaeftlein. She lives in Hopewell, New Jersey with her husband.

Tom Yuill

TOM YUILL

---

SAETA

freely after Antonio Machado

Tendrils groping,  

  blood

on Christ’s hands, 

songs of nails torn 

from Christ’s 

       wrists, 

  the songs 

Andalusions 

sing every spring

in search of 

      Christ’s 

pain. 

Their prayers

are like ladders,  

                     each day a bouquet  

for the Christ 

       of the Passion. 

Who do you 

love?

Who chews 

off his leg 

to get 

out 

  amble-

tumbling, as

each wince swims

against

  the

tug of

the  

mouths 

of the past? 

They 

 skin us—

   those songs. 

      Not 

  to 

pietas in 

  Christ’s pained 

         face 

do I sing,

  but the flower, 

ancient, 

that glides 

in the night, 

         to Christ 

as he 

      walks  

       on the 

  water.  

---

ACOUSTIC SHADOW OF BALLADE DES PENDUS

Villon

Freres humaines, qui aprez nous vivez,

don’t let your hearts get hard: the more 

you pity us, the more God pities you.

Not for you, to you, Brothers, do we pray.

We hang here by our necks, and Hell

and bile and hard tack acne glisten.

Magpies on our shoulders dab

our swollen cheeks. We’re scab

and bloated flesh, don’t laugh, just listen.

God loves, but doesn’t save us from ourselves.

We hang, we guess,

for not obeying laws, but see:

among us all just some will pass

as living their lives legally.

Hell’s thunder whelps 

us, Virgin Mary kisses us,

on Sundays sing the birth of Christ,

but neither Christ nor Mary save us from ourselves.

Lashed by sun, ligaments dried

and slapped by the dark, then kissed,

our brows are plucked, eyes

too. Cheeks like swollen thimbles. No mist,

no rest from whipped 

snow, never at peace.

We once decided what to do,

Now here, now there—we’re swept that way and this. 

Fuss of fat through thimble holes

the crows peck in our cheeks. Condemn us but don’t hate us, 

people. God won’t save you from yourselves.

Prince Jesus of bodies and of souls, just

keep us out of Hell. No wealth, nor hatred,

do we seek. Just people, please don’t send us there. 

Prince Jesus doesn’t save us from ourselves.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Yuill’s first book of poetry, “Medicine Show,” is published by the University of Chicago Press. He has poetry, translations and interviews published or forthcoming in Great River Review, A Public Space, Newsday, Literary Imaginations, Salamander and Dalhousie Review and featured on Poetry Daily, among others. Yuill is writing a literary biography of Francois Villon containing his own translations, adaptations, imitations and acoustic shadows of Villon’s poetry. He teaches in the World Languages and Cultures Department, Honors College, English Department, and guest lectures in the French Department, at Old Dominion University, and recently completed the first draft of his next book of poetry. Yuill also teaches various poetry classes at the Muse Writer’s Center in Virginia, and in the English Department at Norfolk State University.

Beaudelaine Pierre

BEAUDELAINE PIERRE

---

PARABLE OF THE CIRCUS

Consider the following: 

I forced my son to ride to church 

with me,

a fine Sunday morning of worship services, 

untouched, yet, 

waiting for rest in a viral show of hopelessness. Our COVID-19 

isolation was too much to bear. 

It reached its peak the time 

city churches with much noticed vacant seats were slowly opening up their door 

in the heat of summer 2021. 

My daughter used my credit card in 

ordinary unnoticed pleasures, 

and my son met his friends only in Fortnite wars,

We needed help.

Last time I was at a church service and shall I say, 

some American version of it, 

the worship service, a group discussion, 

was battling the question 

“Have you ever doubted God?” 

in the lit candles of the Sabbath 

I have I said loudly, 

from a bare and steadfast soul, 

and from a certain pride, 

the gray shadow covering my soul. 

A big mistake, a sin, 

I quickly realized. 

The churchgoers haven’t. 

Churching I sighed wasn’t my thing. 

Just so, 

to see myself too ambiguous and too impure to instantly clean up for God or 

make it on time to church or 

to understand the right language. 

The language touch and felt from naked hearts can reach its end.

That morning my son and I returned to church 

I was giving myself away to the duality of things, 

their double edges and yang and yin, 

and to the cohabitation of light and blackness. 

On our way I warned my son whose vigil oil runs down madness like: 

the church is outdoor. 

I don’t care he screams, 

Nothing I hush back. 

Our morning enterprise was a diktat, after all. 

An usher standing at the main entrance, 

the church’s ordinary cornerstone and in the moment untouched, ushers: 

Take the next right, 

that she accompanies with a cheerful okay sign. 

A scream of another sort I returned with beatitude. 

I was burning out the pride, 

greeting the church’s boundless ark, vault, and scents. 

I finally packed the car in a corner of the church’s parking lot, 

asked my son, wait a minute, and

towards the usher I walked: 

where’s the worship service? 

We just have to walk straight from the parking lot and, 

she added in flux, 

near the food distribution area. 

I didn’t know there was a party. 

As my son and I found our way to the church service, 

I noticed a not so strange play of circumstances: 

jumping castles, inflatable trampolines standing up 

and performers rolling one-wheeled cycles, 

all of that lightening the outdoor. 

Like a lit candle of its own, 

my son suddenly voiced something I was painfully trying to contain inside my chest: 

isn’t this a circus show?

Equally unexpected

from the bright and jovial atmosphere, 

the worship team raises their voice, 

pure and humble and un-circuited above the fake castles, 

“Here I am to worship, Here I am to bow down,” 

a viral reminder 

no matter the circus show, we were at church.

We landed on our seat my son and I six feet apart and 

in between us, 

the notice of a young man as dark as dark charcoal standing tall and shoulders up in the middle

of the assembly. 

He is calmly pacing and lightning up the space like 

he was le maître des lieux. 

My son in his corner cloaked his face in his hoody on this bright summer day. 

May the young man shine on him! 

Truth be told, halfway through the worship service

my son stood up to walk his way, 

head down though, 

towards the party stand for a bottle of water, 

something out of his ordinary. 

The bright young man, 

tall as a castle and as dark as my son, 

was by this time dragging his feet here and there for all to see 

and holding in his fingers a screaming bag of hot Takis. 

The young lord lost his grace from being le maître des lieux 

to a light that has gone turbulent and too bright and very quickly flailing. 

I looked at my son, 

a sort of splendid torch, 

a clear and placid light I got hold of and, 

for the moment, my soul to rest. 

This is the irony of loss, of search, 

of hopelessness: a brief candle can disclose our end very quickly, 

and darkness, 

the shortness of our light.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Beaudelaine Pierre, journalist, scholar, and novelist, writes about her native Haiti and her adopted Youwès. She is the author of You May Have the Suitcase Now (New Rivers Press, 2021); and also, previously, of Testaman (Bon Nouvèl, 2002), La Négresse de Saint-Domingue (Harmattan, 2010), and L’enfant qui voulait devenir président (Harmattan, 2012). She is the co-editor, with Nataša Ďurovičová, of the trilingual anthology How to Write an Earthquake / Comment écrire et quoi écrire / Mou pou 12 Janvye (AHB, 2011). Her essay “I Live Under TPS” is featured in Unbound: Composing Home edited by Nayt Rundquist (New Rivers Press, 2022). Pierre is the 2022-2024 College Arts and Humanities Institute Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. 

Genta Nishku

GENTA NISHKU

Runner-Up of the 2022 Pink Prize for Poetry

---

EMBOUCHURE QUESTIONS THE PAST

i.

​​I deleted all adjectives.

Everything became [       ].

Subject to dictation, I copied words.

We learned to answer when called.

Someone was [  ], said nothing.

What did they mean by voice?

I moved my mouth, called your name,

no sound escaped.

The body, instrument for the voice,

like the oceans at the mercy of waves.

They held their tongues. I made myself mouth.

Your name changed shape.

I tried to mouth again. Again.

A Sunday, in other words, is called regret.

ii. 

Language took a different color.

Frozen like ice, grey-white.

In air too sparse for sound,

we held face to face.

Every new sentence became longer.

But longing, on principle, requires labor.

It’s the fault of the gale. Admit it. 

The swimmers had taken cover, 

Us, alone, braved it without narrative,

Or plot.

iii.

An isolated cove, then. A clear, turquoise water, then. 

Drowned bees on the water, surface tension held only by hope. 

The olive-covered hills, property of capital. Market it: the most [        ]

on the continent. Language takes its revenge. Yesterday, you were victim. 

I wanted to say something definitive, but I arrived too late. 

The mouths had been put away. Ears stuffed in drawers. 

Did you see me? Did you see my lips move? 

And the wind, hissing, and the branches, breaking.

And the rattling walls, the collapsing statues.

Headless, no longer mouthed. 

I voiced it to you, you kept it secret.

Worded it 

to yourself. 

---

MONTSERRAT SCREAMING

after a sculpture by Julio González

i.

Take inventory. Body: absent. 

Face: facade. Expression: shriek. 

Remove the adjectives. Iron is left,

welded until soft, the shape of a death 

mask, pliable evidence of suffering. 

Tell me, Montserrat, whose story is this? 

Who hears you now? Who sees the burned 

of your flesh? What frequency captures 

the empty of your scream, that echoes, 

forever, against the cold of your metal,

your body articulated into absence, 

your pleas to the gods who carry 

the names of men. Against their unspeakable, 

the challenge of your presence, Montserrat.

Who denies you now? Who claims you

voiceless? Ungoverned by their time, 

their laws, you become a pendulum 

unswayable, despite season or latitude.  

ii.

For Julio González, the shrieking human face was the most sublime expression. 

He sculpted, and painted, screaming head after screaming head. Their cries frozen in straight lines of abstract faces, the cries silent, but the expression so pained, so distinct from all other human experience, that no one looking could escape without seeing the screams. His screaming subjects are women, common and plain, kerchiefs covering their hair, knotted by their throats, concentrating our attention on the mouth. Lonely colorless figures, they clamor to be heard, Montserrat he named them, the common name, the one he forged out of iron, unglorified parable of all wars, grotesque twist of the mouth, a mouth filled with empty, a mouth’s unuttered scream.

iii.

Once, I heard of women

connected by invisible

threads of sorrow: 

a scream across lands &

oceans. Over there, hands

held out in supplication, 

over here, the wailing 

gone mute. They called

them kore, they called 

them montserrat, called

them hopeless, waiting 

ones, declared their 

speech untranslatable.

Have you never felt

all the ways to say 

lament? 

---

A HISTORY OF TEETH

A tooth key used as metaphor

means so little. Why delay the facts? 

The rich always knew how to hold 

power, manifest it as beauty. Teeth, 

ripped from the poor, volunteers, 

they’d say, into the mouth of ladies 

& gentlemen. Who speaks then? 

Whose macabre jaws give voice to 

the gospel, the constitution, the decree?

In the market for human teeth, losers 

inherit smiling gaps & distorted speech: 

onomatopoeia of the hopeless resounds 

in abscessed mouths. Do you hear it? 

It says, this is not a mouth, but a gape.

This is not a mouth, but a clot. Not a 

mouth, but sound: empty and coagulated.  

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Genta Nishku lives in New York and was raised in Tirana. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Bennington Review, Washington Square Review, Barzakh, B O D Y, CHEAP POP, and others. Find her at gentanishku.com.

Hannah Dierdorff

Hannah dierdorff

Winner of the 2022 Pink Prize for Poetry

---

EXTENDED SONNET WITH TURKEY VULTURES

inside the apartment complex, i practice belief in death

the way I once believed in god—the fall

from the balcony, the red bolt through the body,

then the holy emptiness, the self erased, cleaned.

six hawks in the distance, spiraling. turkey vultures

maybe. too far to see. the morning is a mirror

in which i do not recognize myself. carnivorous,

cadaverous. hidden litanies of death trailing everything

i name. i've seen the casualties of desire—scraps

of fur on october roads, bones and trash bleaching

in the weeds. chick-fil-a cup, rusted hub cap,

plastic sheetz bag. how to speak the word love

in a landfill. how to praise the body that continues

to eat. a rooftop vent flickers in the sun, exhaling

exhaust into a tree. i tell myself i'm learning

to touch the shape of my life like the gray trunk

of a beech in which a scarlet tanager sings

shureet shureet.

---

A BRIEF LESSON IN RIMMING

---

AN APOSTATE’S ABECEDARIAN

All fall i complain to you about the light. Two days

before the solstice, the optometrist explains the irregular

curve of my eyes. Astigmatism he says but i think stigmata:

desire converging to a point of pain on a saint's

exalted palms or feet, the sudden bloom of blood from

francis's side mirroring the wounds of his beloved christ. In

giotto's painting, beams of light extend from a

hovering crucifix through the kneeling francis as

if his body is just another window, a glass frame for

joy and sorrow to pass through. i never

knew the word miraculous even when i still

longed for a shadow i called lord to touch

me in the night. In the new year, you and i climb the cliffs

near summersville lake, your body above me in a blur

of opaline light. My neck cranes back, rope

passing between my hands as you ascend, the sun's

quiver piercing my eyes. Why this grief as you

rise away from me? Ice breaks open on the lake's blue

sheen. In the painting, gold rods pin his body into place,

thanks the saint's only reply. What ties us together is wholly

unholy: a dirty green rope knotted at our hips. i am

vicious and infested with vice. My vision muddies

when you bite my neck under the dark's stars and signs, your

sex pressed to my pelvis where god never came.

Yes, every second a supernova explodes. Some

zeal asks for pain in the absence of touch. Even at its

zenith, can tenderness say enough?

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Originally from Spokane, Washington, Hannah Dierdorff is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Virginia, where she taught poetry and writing. She is the recipient of the 2022 Dogwood Literary Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cut Bank, About Place, Arkansas International, Willow Springs, and elsewhere.