isn’t ugly he is beautiful leaning over to look at himself
in pond water or leaning over
masculinity itself leaning over the family
he has made for himself and the pond
is male because he owns the pond
and the guns are male because he owns the guns
and what’s happening is male because he owns the factors
that go into the car is male because he owns the police
and Home Depot is male because he owns and owns
and owns and all he can do is own
everything that will rot
like privacy or speech or porn or black swans
or my big tits which he misses
Fucking swans! A man decides to sit
next to me and he is frantically hitting
his Egg McMuffin on the table and then walks
outside and smokes a cigarette and returns
to his seat and starts hitting
his wrapped Egg McMuffin again
and then he sees my computer and asks
to check his Facebook so I let him
and then he wants to be friends on Facebook
and leaves his phone number on my page
and I “like” it and then in the background
the little boy’s like “She’s ugly, mommy
She’s so ugly mommy” and the mom
is like “Is she? Is she ugly?” And I think the mom
is ugly even though I don’t want her to be
and the other kids at the booth
are drinking milk and they are chubby
and eating fries and saying
“Yeah she’s ugly
Yeah mommy she’s so ugly
You wouldn’t want to meet her
because she’s so ugly”
from The Awl
JANE SPRINGER
* * *
Forties War Widows, Stolen Grain
For decades we’d witnessed dark murders
descend through crop-facing windows—
so left our eggs un-whisked in batter
for chase from sheer anger, suds rising, hot
faucet streams, we forgot our spatulas
forging to skillets, despite smoke we
flung coats on, knocked bills akimbo,
squashed pajamas in galoshes—Christ
Armageddon—we left our cats crouched
feral at raw bacon’s ledge as we winged
doors free, fell to knees, field-edge, braced
12 gauges—shot the thieves.
Someone has to clean up the
shells, toss grease-soaked papertowels, lick
the whisker, soap grass-stained knees,
sweep fresh tracks, fish the envelope
spilled down floor vent despite ash &
throw open the sash, zero out the still-
flaming gas, trash the molten utensil, hang
suds-logged rugs, straighten curtains on
the kitchen Idyll, from sheer obligation—
remake morning, scrub the afternoon clean,
search the crop-facing window—though the
crows were the only things we ever got back.
from Birmingham Poetry Review
COREY VAN LANDINGHAM
* * *
During the Autopsy
“She hid it well,” they say, gathered around the body. Some standing
in the gallery think of their god, big as an ox, and are thankful
for once not to be the chosen one. Her stomach opened to reveal
the tree growing inside her, seeming to take root near the navel,
branching out between the ribs. Thick bark falling away under
the scalpel. A man worries a pair of bats from her throat. Wings
raw from rubbing against the wood, panicky. Flesh houses
milk-white bulbs, new life, pale like her throat, a nice one.
A throat to be stroked nightly by some woodsman. And the bats
are the most vibrant black the man has ever seen. Their wings
And so he pictures the woman in the same light, tree its own
creature, not hers, not her, as he takes a bone saw to a branch,
or, with the smaller ones, snaps them off with his hands.
One must, at times, learn to ignore the body. In a dream
the man was once patron saint of ships. Not only did he build
the most seaworthy ships of his small town, but he blessed
all the vessels in the shipyard. Walking from wood hull to wood
hull, he would press his hands against them, speak to them with his
palms. And they would speak back. The man would carry their
stories with him from sleep, so that, in the morning, his hands were
still full with them, seemed to anchor him to the mattress, hands
heavy with whale bones and kelp nests. With crates of rotting
fruit, the smell of too many men together, skin sloughing off
like flakes of sel de mer. And the man had forgotten all this, until
his hands were around the trunk, growing like his own thigh,
and he could see each layer of the cut-into wood, which looked
not unlike each layer of the thick skin of the belly, the woman
not a woman, but a tree now. The tree, with his hands around it,
sang into him a high-pitched song, song of a siren, a woman’s
voice asking to be returned to the sea. Any sea. And as he
washed his hands after, thorough as always, as he walked
home in the rain to his wife. As he drank the glass of water
she had poured him from a clay pitcher, he could feel that voice
in his throat, and that night he woke—suddenly, salt water
covering his entire body—to that other woman’s song.
from The Southern Review
AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER
* * *
Passing Through Indian Territory
On horseback, I tell them to imagine me on horseback
going back to Boston, an oversized wool overcoat on top
of layers of things that make themselves warm against me,
old tops of boxes of pictures of horses pressed flat
to mesh and weave like cloth, I tell them it might take me
a few months to get home because I like to stop when I travel,
pull over so I can rest, and what about falling asleep
on the horse, what about what I did not imagine, smokestack
man slumped down snoring in the saddle, sliding over
to the edge of the grace of horses, their mercy, forgiveness
even for people who forget how the lines between territories
are made of the flesh of ghosts who had no words for where
land ends or where land begins or why there is a horse
waiting for me to answer for the uncle who killed her.
from The New Yorker
ELEANOR WILNER
* * *
Sowing
. . . she glided from the sky and ordered him / to plow the ground and then to plant within / the earth, the serpent’s teeth: these were to be / the seeds of men to come . . .
—Ovid, The Metamorphoses
. . . I can’t make up / a name like Turnipseed! Or that // I knew a man who went by such / a goodly name. . . .
—Maurice Manning
I knew a man by such a name, though didn’t know
until you told me so, that a turnip seed is tiny, it’s
a little bit of hardly anything. I should have known.
Miniscule—a man, a goodly man, his seed—
what’s that beside a war, misrule, history looming
like a tower that throws its shadow
as it blocks the sun—the way (an old
story) sin is cas
t on those most sinned
against; their coffins covered with a flag:
stripes like the backs of slaves back when,
and stars—perhaps the last thing that you see
when the landmine takes you—life and
limb, as the saying goes. My God. I knew a man,
hardly more than a boy, though the word’s
forbidden when the young man’s black,
as if you meant him disrespect. But he wasn’t yet
out of his teens, a sweet kid name of Turnipseed,
Carl as I recall, and I’ve always wondered how
the war turned out for him. Afraid, in fact, to know.
Showed up in class one day in uniform, but not
to stay—to say goodbye—resigned, a fatalist.
Why struggle in a net that tightens
when you fight its hold? Just say so long, and go.
All I could find to say was, please, take care
of yourself. I mean, what good are words. A little
bit of hardly anything. And seeds?
What good, as they said in ’Nam, when you
bought the farm—the field plowed with dragonseed,
from which those fratricidal armies sprang
and fell upon each other’s throats, and fell like dominoes
to join the ranks of headstones, row on row on row . . .
And Turnipseed? That seed was meant to grow.
from The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review
DAVID WOJAHN
* * *
My Father’s Soul Departing
Little soul, charismatic vagabond,
Honored guest, comrade of the body.
Now you shall depart into those regions
Fogbound, anesthetized, and barren.
Here your laughter served you well.
There, everlasting, your mouth’s stitched shut.
—Hadrian, “Animula”
Assume, dear vagabond, you are permitted
One last survey. Your 21 grams of sentience,
Little soul—the weight exactly
Of a ruby-throated hummer—shall hover
The foliated stamens of your
Earthly measure. How you dart & pivot,
Honored guest, your thirst unquenchable.
Here is Milbank, South Dakota,
The saffron dustbowl where your father,
Dear comrade, raises his belt to crisscross your back:
The five & twenty lesions. Here the state hospital,
Your mother ballooning with insulin
To induce the coma meant to cure the demons
Marauding the precincts of her abject brain.
Now you shall depart: a milk run in Duluth,
A quart bottle bursting on a frozen stoop, then
A troop ship bound for Tunis, & into those regions
Of desert where you wander your forty days.
You rifle the pockets of a dead Wehrmacht corporal:
Luger & a snakebite kit. & now you lean
From a baggage car door, hefting a postal sack
As the train slows for a station—Breckinridge
Or Sleepy Eye—slows but will not stop
For twenty-seven years. The railroad men’s
Hotels along the tracks, pulls of bourbon
From a dented flask. The white Dakota plains—
Fogbound, anesthetized & barren.
Montage of seven Chevy Biscaynes, the songbook
Of Ernest Tubb. A shingled ranch, deriving from
The GI Bill. GARDEN SIX TWO FOUR
SEVEN SEVEN, the receiver lifted from its cradle
As you weep to a stranger who’s purloined
Your pension. Pulls of bourbon
From a highball glass, from a coffee cup, the thrall
& ratchet of ECT, your dress rehearsal
For oblivion. What I remember: your laughter
Did not serve you well. Honored guest, comrade
Of the body, your farewell is complete.
Blessèd the descent which beckons.
There, everlasting, your mouth’s stitched shut.
from AGNI
GREG WRENN
* * *
Detainment
In the undisclosed desert facility, they strapped me to a steel table and told me to recite the poem that would save the world.
(I had arrived there in a windowless, automated van driven inside the hollow mountain—
through the forest they had chased me to exhaustion.)
They polished metal tools I’d never seen before.
To break me down, at first one of them kept tapping on my nose and whispering lyrics, access codes, rapid sequences of Greek letters and English surnames.
One tried to interface with my brain, injecting a sort of horned electrode into Wernicke’s, then Broca’s. My larynx in spasm. My hands were hooves, then nightingale beaks, the fluorescent tubes above me were my white bones.
I chanted baby names during sensations of drowning, overwhelming nausea. Back and forth from ice-cold water, mock burials. They crowned me with electrified laurels.
They touched me, laughing.
They touched me and I sang and for what?
from Cream City Review
ROBERT WRIGLEY
* * *
Blessed Are
You, faithful ravens, staying on and saying
through the songbirdless winter
the biblical syntax of your declarations.
It is with great fascination I watch you excise,
with inordinate patience, the upward eye
of the fallen deer below the house.
I confess the sight through my binoculars
puts me eye-to-eye with both you
and the eye you eat and squabble over,
gustatory, opening now and then your great wings
in contretemps corvidae vexations,
like a scrum of omnivorous umbrellas.
Further plunder will require your partners, the coyotes,
slinking even now your way and awaiting
the night your plumage exemplifies
and under which they will open the carcass
for your further delectation and caws
the dozen mornings I imagine it will take.
Then the snows will bury it, and many mice
will gnaw its bones until it emerges yet again
from the melts of spring, a blessing for the blowflies
and the seethe of their maggots, until the vault
the empty brain occupied is emptied itself,
and I retrieve the skull and hang it on my shack.
There it will be filled with the thoughts of yellow jackets,
there it will grin its grim, unmandibled
half-smile out over the distances swallows
troll for the yellow jackets themselves,
and one of you will perch yourself upon a bare rib then,
to recite, for the world, your ravenous beatitudes.
from Southern Indiana Review
JAKE ADAM YORK
* * *
Calendar Days
One day you wake and they’re there, flecks of mud
weed-eaters throw against the window, moths
in their dark migrations, salmon that taste like dust.
All month long, they fall from the laundry, dead
receipts for burritos, coffees, books. They’ve lotused
toilet water, drinks left out from the night before.
They rifle into floodlights, their exit wounds
so much skin, so much powdered glue. April’s cruelty
is, isn’t it, just a rumor floated by May and June
while everyone fans the rice pag
es of their Bibles
in sermons’ hot wind. It’s the dry air makes them rise.
In these parts now they say sirocco, entirely
out of place. They say monsoon, which is a way
of not saying fire, virga, haboob. I’d like to feel
the milt wind off Erie or Ontario, fresh strawberries
and airlift oysters to chew, but I’ve got to rise again
to pull the locust beans from the choking gutters,
which I explain as a prayer for rain. Tomorrow’s
my birthday day in another month, a twelfth
of a reminder of something I can’t remember,
though they say I was there, Polaroid, Panavision
images dreamed or dreamed for me, half-holy
half-haunted, like the streets of Jackson slowly going
Kodachrome, gelatin silver, dim,
my father’s menthol still reporting in the tray.
You have to look away so the smoke’s cursive’s
written clear, my grandmother’s card, her best
farmer’s Palmer method, Our pride & joy,
flutter of money, even after all these years,
take the day off. But there are bills to pay,
even without stamps, days in advance
so they’ll post on time, someone born or someone
dying so near midnight, one day’s clocked,
the next not yet in. It takes a while to sort it out.
You may already be a winner. I check, of course,
the numbers each day, though I’ve often forgotten
to buy a ticket, as my father reads the obits to see
if he’s still alive. It would be a great excuse,
he says, call in dead for work. In the joke, God says
give me a chance. You should know, he says,
the trade-in on your car in case you want to ditch
it in a quarry, set it on fire, though the heat’s never
hot enough to melt it back to stone. The fireflies