OCTOBER INTERVIEW with EDWARD SALEM
Edward Salem is a poet who hasn’t lost his sense of humor. “Palestinians,” he shares in our interview, “are insanely funny.” It’s this sense of humor that jumps off the page of Salem’s debut poetry collection, Monk Fruit, surprising readers, even as he’s tackling topics like the occupation of Palestine, American imperialism, torture, and genocide. Salem will take you to Gaza—but you’re going to stop by the tchotchke bin at Burlington Coat Factory on the way. Described by its publisher, Nightboat Books, as “like Rumi on acid,” Monk Fruit speaks to the immediacy of our current moment while also taking a 250,000-year lens to humanity, inviting readers to interrogate their place in it all—even, perhaps, without losing optimism entirely.
Edward Salem is interviewed by E Ce Miller.
FWR: Monk fruit doesn’t actually appear in any of the poems in Monk Fruit. For those not familiar, monk fruits are these trellised, blossoming squash, native to East Asia, named for having been grown in monastery gardens for thousands of years; now they are more widely known as a trendy weight loss hack/artificial sweetener substitute. Am I reaching too hard for a metaphor here? What were you hoping to evoke with the title of the collection?
ES: Thank you for bringing in this context. There’s definitely something to that, the play of high and low, like Buddha on a coaster. And I like how playful it sounds, “monk fruit,” and how slippery the associations can become when you read the book through the lens of the title—I think it manages to hold a lot of different motifs together: children, spirituality, sexuality, corporeality. Poems as fruit of the psyche. It can also serve as a metareflection on myself as a poet dabbling in eastern philosophy, but in this way that is kind of impish or outré.
FWR: There are so many flying insects in this collection. Some are trapped, before facing violent, untimely ends: crushed, clapped to death. Bees are military drones, hornets are “cancer picked from [a] mother’s lungs.” A few seem to offer a touch of whimsy, like the flea who is stunned by a fluffy sweater. What’s up with all the flying insects?
ES: I just saw the new Superman movie, and there’s a scene where Superman flies to save a squirrel from a falling building, acknowledging the sanctity of its life. It’s fun to imagine how busy Superman would be if his mandate included insects.
FWR: The poem “Buddha’s Bad Meal”, which describes a bee trapped in a juice glass, reminded me of this Buddhist koan about a dragonfly caught in a spider’s web, which essentially asks whether an observer should intervene and free the dragonfly. The most earnest students, I think, incline toward freeing the dragonfly. But what of the spider’s hunger?
The narrator in your poem says, “It wouldn’t matter if I rescued the bee or let it drown.” There’s this question many of the poems in Monk Fruit seem to be asking: Does it really matter what we do to each other, and if it does matter, on what scale? Can you speak to this?
ES: I love this question, thank you. And thanks for sharing the koan. It reminds me of an inspiration for the poem, a scene from Luis Buñuel’s film Viridiana. A man sees an exhausted dog tied to a moving cart, being dragged along the road. Out of compassion, he buys the dog from the cart driver to save it from this cruel treatment. But immediately after this act of mercy, another cart passes by, dragging another dog behind it.
Years ago, when I was living in Beirut, before I had really contended with Buddhism and Vedanta, a friend suggested detachment as the only adequate response to the cruelty of the occupation of Palestine. He was speaking to this notion that engaging, in and of itself, perpetuates injustice. That only through stillness and detachment can one move anything. I can’t tell you how appalled I was by his stance, as if we should lie down while our people are tortured and killed. But, as it goes with certain Eastern spiritual traditions, it’s only through direct experience that you start to understand a perspective that first seemed so cold. I think now that my friend was trying to say—how did Ram Dass put it? Police create hippies and hippies create police.
Back to the question of scale, I remember in the early days of starting City of Asylum/Detroit, we were meeting with a possible investor and he was like, so how many exiled writers will you bring over every year? He was expecting the answer to be like 100 or at least 10. When we explained how complicated the visa process alone would be, and that our mission was to provide deep, multi-year support to one fellow at a time, he was deflated. And I get it. At this moment, we’re supporting two Palestinians from Gaza through our new fellowship in exile (largely buoyed by the boundless optimism and energy of my cofounder, Laura Kraftowitz).
At the same time, compared to the number of Palestinians experiencing genocide, helping two people feels like a drop in the bucket. I live in the contradiction that exists between my philosophical pessimism, exemplified by the drowning bee or the abused dog, and the life-affirming hope inherent to providing these fellowships.
FWR: “Give What You Can” is a poem I read over and over—the way it is written invites readers into this sort of breathless repetition. It made me self-aware of how I relate to the media I consume. The poem mimics scrolling through social media, putting language to the image-heavy sensory excess most of us have grown accustomed to. I wonder about the effects of, for example, viewing footage of ICE raids in the same 1:1 framed feed as a best friend’s new baby photos, of considering an image of an infant starving in Gaza immediately before a celebrity’s ad for green laundry detergent—it’s all sort of occupying the same brain space, all landing in the same frequency in the sympathetic nervous system…
A few poems later, we get “The Palestinian Chair”, with the line “…you realize that / You were there. / For all of it. / It was all you.” These two poems struck me as a sort of call and response. Technology facilitates a sense of “being there” for everything while also fostering a kind of dissociation from all of it. Do you have thoughts on this?
ES: I recently watched a clip—on social media, of course—where Arundhati Roy talked about how unnatural it is for us to take in all of this information. How we can’t hold it and shouldn’t expose ourselves to it all, how she thinks it’s making us spiritually sick. And I agree with that. But in a time of live-streamed genocide, you have to reconcile that with the moral failure of not looking, or rather, looking away from the images that Palestinians in Gaza are asking us to witness. This poem sort of documents the dizzying experience of watching a nightmare unfold, and also watching the direct action and creativity harnessed to resist it.
I almost hate to say it, but I think a collection of poetry is often sequenced to give the reader a parallel sort of whiplash. You don’t want a stretch of poems to blur into one another, so you keep the reader on their toes through juxtaposition, tone shifts, etc., in a way that somewhat resembles the deliberate scramble of the algorithm. But the key differential is that poetry sensitizes where the algo desensitizes. Poetry is kind of the anti-social media.
FWR: For all the intensity in this collection, there are lines and images that I also found funny, if wry. The poem “Tchotchke” features a chrome Ganesh bought from the clearance bin at Burlington Coat Factory. “Fasting for Gaza” includes the line “Jenny Craig should advertise with Al Jazeera.” What do you think irony has to say to reverence, levity to gravity? Will we be telling jokes at the end of the world?
ES: The book is dedicated to my late father, to whom I owe my fucked up sense of humor. He was deeply disgruntled, disdainful of what Zionism and American imperialism were doing to his country and its neighbors, and at the same time, he was hilarious. After dinner, he’d stand up and announce to the family that he was going to the bathroom “to pray,” and when he emerged, he’d stand in front of us and make the sign of the cross, pronouncing Latin-sounding gibberish, “dominos patros bibiscos,” cracking himself up every time.
Palestinians are insanely funny. It’s something that gets lost when we’re fighting for survival in a genocide, but gallows humor is intrinsic to our culture. Yasmin Zaher is hilarious, Adnan Barq is hilarious, Mohammed El-Kurd is hilarious, Randa Jarrar is hilarious. My sisters are hilarious. We’re a funny fucking people, but there’s a pressure on us to be earnest victims, to one-dimensionalize ourselves. I’m just trying to be myself—and I’m my father’s son—by making room in this book for the full expression of that.
FWR: In “L’Origine du Monde”, you write, “Surprise myself every time I begin / a new poem without Palestine, // though nothing is my other obsession,”. The omission of “I” before “surprise” made me wonder if these lines were a command or (and?) an expression of surprise on the narrator’s part.
When did you begin writing Monk Fruit? Could you discuss the process of writing this collection? How do you experience writing poetry, which is perhaps the antithesis of the “hot take” in the face of… [gestures at the world].
ES: I love this question, and your interpretation of the omission of “I” as a command. Can I say yes? I think the truth is more that I have a habit of starting poems with “I,” and on a purely intuitive level it felt right to lop it off. In writing Monk Fruit, I trusted my intuition, even and maybe especially when something felt like it might be wrong or risky or too demented in some way. I wrote it concurrently with a second book, Intifadas, out this spring, which is more grounded. I mean, it’s still demented, but with Monk Fruit, I really followed that energy to work out my obsessions and excavate the weird, profane images living in me, without holding the reins too tightly on how they show up on the page.
FWR: Does your work with City of Asylum/Detroit inform your poetry, and vice versa?
ES: Naji al-Ali, the Palestinian political cartoonist who created Handala and who was assassinated because of his art, was one of my first and primary artistic heroes, especially in my formative years as an artist. Geoffrey Rush’s portrayal of the Marquis de Sade’s imprisonment in the film Quills also left a deep impression on me. His anguish, his defiance, how he fell apart, and how he smuggled his manuscript out—not unlike the Palestinian prisoner Wisam Rafeedie’s The Trinity of Fundamentals.
In another life, I was an artist. When I lived for a while in Ramallah, my family was always worried because I was making provocative performance art in public spaces. Of course, in Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority was the one to worry about, since they were the enforcers of Israel’s efforts to quell dissent. They arrested me once. Even for innocuous gestures, like a performance where I threw pillows over the Apartheid Wall, I had to have lookouts watching my back. But now I live in the US, and there is, at least for now, still a level of safety.
A friend from Mexico recently described living in the US as hiding behind a bully for protection. And my work at City of Asylum reminds me not to take that position lightly.
FWR: I want to end by asking if you have an answer to the question “Barbecue” posed:
“250,000 years after / the discovery of fire, / we still ate raw meat. / But good things come
to those who wait. // It took us a quarter / of a million years / to arrive at barbecue, / so give God a little / more time.”
Those of us who don’t have a quarter of a million years, which is to say all of us, how might we better fill our waiting? Or, perhaps, that is the wrong question—maybe it is in the constant, desperate filling that we are getting ourselves and each other in trouble? What do you think?
ES: At the risk of sounding like an optimist, I’m not sure we’ll have to wait that long. Demis Hassabis, the child prodigy who now runs DeepMind and who has spent his life researching artificial intelligence, puts our chances of creating AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] by 2030 at 50%. Other researchers and thinkers I’ve long followed in this space are similarly optimistic. Hassabis won a Nobel prize for his work using AI to fold proteins, which will likely be involved if we’re ever able to cure cancer. I wonder about a super-intelligent entity that could eradicate social illnesses like Zionism and capitalism while heralding in universal abundance. I do worry that the technology is coming faster than we can prepare for it, but I’m also trying to hold a bit of hope for the vast good it could do.
I really hate to say it, but no form of resistance so far—neither violent, nonviolent, nor symbolic, certainly not poetry or speaking out on social media—none of it has stopped the ever-escalating genocide in Gaza. I’m not saying we should stop resisting, just the opposite. But I do wonder, and I’m the first to admit this does sound fantastical and maybe a little escapist, but if we merged with AI, could there be a paradigm shift toward empathy and compassion? I know it’s de rigueur to believe the opposite, that the techno-feudalists are tightening their grip as we move deeper into fascism. But nothing else is working the way we need it to. Despite our best efforts, we’re still failing the people in Gaza, Sudan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Haiti, to say nothing of the eighty billion land animals we murder annually for food. Whatever the case, it seems likely that humans will evolve by merging with AI and technology. Monk Fruit deals a lot with the Big Bang, the origin of the universe and the nature of reality. I love thinking of the distant past, and the far future.
- Published in Featured Poetry, home, Interview, Poetry
SEPTEMBER INTERVIEW with Julia Thacker
Julia Thacker’s debut collection To Wildness was recently awarded the Anthony Hecht prize by Paul Muldoon. The book makes its way through the wilds of New England, grieving the family born and buried there. To Wildness is enamored with the world of sense, yet lingers close to the realm of the dead. It is elegiac, yet fiercely vital, prizes holiness as much as irreverence. It brings all of these loves to life through exacting, brilliant language.
Julia Thacker was published in Issue 26 of Four Way Review and is interviewed here by Amery Smith.
FWR: To start – To Wildness is your first book, but it’s also (as you mention in an essay you wrote for Women Writers, Women’s Books) the first sustained bit of poetry writing you’ve done since grad school. What do you think you learned about yourself as a poet after finishing the book, and returning to poetry after so long? What differences (craft, writing philosophy, etc.) have you noticed between “MFA Julia” and “To Wildness Julia”?
JT: My return to poetry was entirely intuitive. The desire to reengage with the genre simply came over me like a fever. What became clear to me at the outset was that as a mature person, I had access to a voice with more tonal range. As a young writer, I’d recognized that my poems, though well-written, were stilted by what I’ll call their “high seriousness.” Then and now, I admired the work of Denis Johnson, especially his collection The Incognito Lounge, which moves from a high register to the vernacular, from ironic to lyric to self-effacing in the course of a single poem. While few of us will ever hit those heights, as an older writer, I have access to a fluidity and range of tone I didn’t possess during my first go-round as a poet.
Completing this collection also confirmed for me that I am a miniaturist. For years, I wrote and published short stories in journals and magazines, and tried many times to weave these pieces into a full-length novel. When I picked up poetry again, I vowed not to quit until I’d published this book. Bringing To Wildness to fruition taught me I’m best suited to the short form across genre, and I’m fine with that. I learned to be true to myself.
FWR: When you say that “as an older writer, I have access to a fluidity and range of tone I didn’t possess during my first go-round as a poet,” what specifically about getting older do you feel gave you that tonal range?
JT: When I was young, I considered poetry the highest form of literature. I was intimidated by the genre. My early poems don’t reflect the wit and humor present in spoken language. Now, with a wide range of experiences behind me, I’m more at ease in juxtaposing lyric with the vernacular.
FWR: I wanted to ask you about To Wildness’s structure. Paul Muldoon praises the book’s four-part structure for its range, both thematic and formal. How did that structure emerge? What did you feel like the poems were telling you about how they wanted to be ordered?
JT: Indeed, as you suggest, I did listen to what the poems were telling me about how they wanted to be ordered. They are often smarter than I am, and I follow their lead. Most of the pieces in the first section were written early in the composition of the manuscript. They’re foundational. They establish the world of the book, its subject matter and elegiac stance. And in these initial pages I wanted a variety of styles and forms, a sense of surprise from poem to poem.
My work is dense with imagery. The Roman numerals announcing each of the four sections offer a pause, breathing room, the calm of white space. My hope is that each section stands as a unit with a distinct narrative and emotional arc. Part II is a six-page sequence in the guise of “notes” in fragments, each with a parenthetical title. The sequence depicts a mother/daughter relationship over a lifetime, but the chronology is fractured. The elliptical nature of this piece required a section of its own.
Part III of To Wildness further interrogates their themes and formal experiments in the previous two. Here, for instance, are what I call the “backwards” poems, with hard right hand margins and ragged left hand margins such that the lines seem to be floating on the page. Part IV is noisy with ghosts. Often referenced in previous sections, they come alive in this final suite, as though they’d been conjured.
To Wildness opens as the speaker is in late middle age. In the final poem of the book, she is a young woman living on Outer Cape Cod, a spit of land at the edge of an ocean, learning to be an artist. Over the course of the book, time is collapsed and fluid.
FWR: I think one powerful example of the many dichotomies To Wildness bridges lies in “Soul Wears a Crown of Milk Thistle”. We usually consider the soul to be the body’s direct opposite, separate from all the goods and bads we associate with embodiment. In “Soul Wears…Thistle,” though, the soul romps up and down the coast, isn’t afraid to get intimate or “vulgar” (“Washes her unmentionables / at the sink. Bleaches her mustache” and “swims in her drawers”), and — paradoxically — even has a body of its own (“Sand makes a dune of her body”). What led you to think about the soul in ways like this, in both this poem and in others throughout the book?
JT: I was brought up in the Southern Baptist church. My grandfather was a preacher whose dramatic and beautifully delivered sermons were something to behold. I am a secular humanist. And while I don’t subscribe to his system of belief, I am quite attached to the trappings of my childhood: the language of the King James Bible, the hymns, the paper fans decorated with reproductions of Biblical scenes and stapled to Popsicle sticks. The speaker in my poem “Doxology” declares “I am my own God, my own high priestess./Mine own book of timothy./… Protector of sayeth, goeth. It came to pass.”
My family was religious, but far from sanctimonious. They were hysterically funny. My mother, upon being promised she would one day take leave of her corporeal shell and ascend to Heaven in new form, a celestial body, said, “Well, I hope it’s a long, skinny one.” As for me, rather than thinking of the soul as a spiritual essence which requires redemption, I imagine her as independent and not at all well-behaved. In “Soul Wears…Thistle” she is free from the constraints of doctrine and social mores, free from the person to whom she is assigned. She lives as she pleases. I celebrate this world, this moment. What is more holy than wading in cranberry bogs or eating tomatoes off the vine?
FWR: The book switches effortlessly between prose and lineated poems, yet both succeed in using language spare and precise enough to close around the concrete or tangible. What do you think is the relationship between To Wildness’s prose poems and the other poems? What has writing prose poems taught you about line poems, and vice versa?
JT: Without lineation, a prose poem depends upon the sentence, its syntax, diction, rhythm and richness of language. There are writers I respect who don’t believe there is such a thing as a prose poem! I disagree. I’ve always been fascinated by that hybrid animal. One of my favorites is “Lavender Window Panes and White Curtains” by Juan Ramon Jimenez which I first read in a translation by Robert Bly. Here, metaphor, imagery and nuance are embedded in a tapestry of language which announces itself as a poem rather than a prose piece:
“I have been planting that heart for you in the ground beneath the magnolias that the panes reflect, so that each April the pink and white flowers and their odor will surprise the simple puritan women with their plain clothes, their noble look, and their pale gold hair, coming back at evening, quietly returning to their homes here in those calm spring hours that have made them homesick for earth.” *
I enjoy the challenge of varying the shape and form of my poems which are otherwise cohesive in their preoccupations and voice. In To Wildness, there are poems in couplets, tercets, sequences, lineated stanzas and of course the prose poems. Though they appear in various forms, they are all image-driven and in conversation with one another.
I don’t know that prose taught me much about writing poetry except perhaps how to sketch a character in a few strokes. Poetry, however, has informed my prose quite a bit in its particular use of language, concision and resonant detail. My story, “The Funeral of the Man Who Wasn’t Dead Yet” (AGNI 51), for instance, is image-driven and compressed with an attention to musicality.
*Selected Poems: Lorca and Jimenez, Chosen and Translated by Robert Bly (Beacon Press, 1973)
FWR: I also wanted to explore how To Wildness thinks about ghosts, especially as connected to grief. Mirroring how the book writes about the soul, To Wildness’s ghosts are surprisingly tangible. The ghosts populating the book’s final section find joy in working with their hands. They yearn for the fruits of the earth, and even taste them (“Aubade”) — in ways that mirror first-section poems where the living also do these things. I’ve pulled some lines from the first and fourth sections as a comparison:
To be elbow-deep in a barrel,
arms gloved crimson,
to make of simple labor
prayer…
……
Today we must work
with our hands until they are
no longer hands…
(excerpt from the poem “Plum Jam”)
Ribbed squash, king-pumpkin with its thick curling
stalk. Persimmons, verily orange and magenta, the weights
of sunsets in my hand. Egg-shaped plums shivering
on the conveyer belt.
….
Let me touch them as they pass.
Let me sweep up the shadows
of my boot prints and store them in a locked box.
(excerpt from the poem “Bag Boy Works Harder Now That He’s a Ghost ”)
What drew you to this way of thinking about the dead? Do you feel like it’s opened up new ways of thinking about (or even processing) grief?
JT: The way I think of the dead goes back to what my kin would call “my raising.” My family has deep roots in Harlan County, Kentucky. And they’re all great story tellers. My mother was raised in a series of coal mining camps, where my grandfather, Roscoe Douglas, was a crew foreman, and later a Baptist preacher. For them, life was precarious and death not uncommon. My great uncle Andrew, my grandfather’s beloved younger brother, was killed in a mine accident at 17. But even thirty years later, when I was a child, Andrew was constantly invoked, his movie idol looks, musical talent, the story of how after the slate fall that killed him, their sister went running through the camp to tell my grandfather before someone else got to him. Then she heard his voice a distance down the tram road and thought, “Well, Roscoe’s singing,” But as he got closer, she realized he was sobbing, and she couldn’t stand it, She hid behind a tree and stopped up her ears. That scene is as vivid to me as memory. My grandparents had eight daughters. One was stillborn. Another died of influenza as a toddler. Yet my grandmother always responded “eight” when asked how many children she had. Their names and the particulars around their losses were told and retold to us. My baby aunts. In the Upper South, Memorial Day is called Decoration Day when we carried picnic baskets, blankets to spread on the ground, and armloads and armloads of flowers to spruce up the family headstones.
In that culture, you might say the dead exist alongside the living. Storytelling is an act of devotion which allows us to process grief.
To Wildness contains so many references to ghosts that by the fourth and final section, it felt only right to embody them in all their eccentricities and desires, to give them voice. Some are benevolent and protective. Others are capricious troublemakers, like members of any extended family.
- Published in Featured Poetry, home, Interview, Monthly, Poetry
THE BABIES by Dara Yen Elerath
I am watching the babies. The gray one in sticky pants who keeps picking his nose. The pale one with headlice, scabies and fleas. I am watching the babies. This one choking on a plastic bottle. This one talking to itself in the dark. I am hauling the babies to the park, to the library, to the pool. The orange-hued baby is dirty and plays with crayons. The makeshift baby is taped together like a cardboard box. Where did these odd babies come from? Why are they languid and dull—limp in their cradles as loaves of bread? Why do I find them now in the garbage, now in the fork drawer, now in the kitchen sink? I grab a pink one crawling from between my thighs. I clutch a yellow one suckling upon my breasts. I find one hanging from branches like a piece of fruit. This one I dug from the dirt like a vegetable freckled with roothairs and worms. I gather the babies and turn them over, looking for the maker’s mark, but find no scrawl, no autograph, no trace of when or how these babies were made. I try to abandon them, but they come crawling after. I put them in a hamper, but they clamber out and grab my hair. These babies are my babies. I take them everywhere. This one carries my kneecap. This one carries my thigh. This one carries my heart.
- Published in Featured Poetry, Issue 33, Poetry
YESTERDAY AUSTIN TOLD ME TWO SWANS by Arro Mandell
drowned a local man
for coming too close and
Thomas and I laughed but
I still think if I don’t count my teeth
they’ll be taken, can’t
be careful enough out here.
Last night I stepped onto a
stage heaped with dead
fish. I was looking for the right
earrings and late to tea. An
army approached but
I couldn’t quite remember
to remember. Downstage
trenches crept closer and closer
to the cafe. The man with the sword
hoped to take my life. Twenty-six
teeth. More than I
started with but less than
I once had. Am I missing
something? The skirt of my blue
dress was just a little too tight
for me to throw punches
but I wasn’t worried–
the tea was so good
and so warm. The fish
stank and I didn’t notice.
That night my lover had made us
a bed in the open window so we
could sleep listening to the rain.
My days hemorrhage;
I can barely recall what
I’ve done with them.
Yesterday Thomas told us he
almost lost his hands
in a freight elevator and
afterwards looked at them
all day astounded and now
doesn’t think of them
anymore without getting
a little sick. Last night I woke
horrified at the war, at my body
pale as the fish, and stared
at the shadows of houses the gleams
of wet bushes the drunk trees and reached
for my lover’s sleeping hands.
I’d known them a couple
days didn’t want them
to cover any of my
confusions, didn’t need
to borrow a future from them.
They would kiss both my cheeks
quick and I liked to look at their eyes
the little chip in their left iris where the blue
dripped into the whites. I looked
as long as I could in the dim
morning with no sun and
no wind but they were already driving
cities away leaving me stunned
at what I didn’t have
and hadn’t known to want.
- Published in Featured Poetry, Issue 33, Poetry
PASSTHROUGH by Haley Lee
After the play we talk while
we wait for the C with our shoes
touching on the platform. Say,
when the magician unrolled
the sea, an old tunnel in us
burst open. Lights off, all
air – with you I believe
in water wrung from paper.
They didn’t need to use names
to make us understand the whole
premise is being alone at the
end. Can I say, I like when
the train gets stuck. For a click,
time stops dying in us. And
at the end, we only want to
go again. Against the current:
delay my breath.
- Published in Featured Poetry, Issue 33, Poetry
GOLD by Kunjana Parashar
Lately, I’ve been yearning for things: car keys,
houseplants, dhurries, cubes of ice, petals,
but really for something skin-deep. I keep
addressing myself as we; like I am the bull
& I am the matador. I am the prayer and
the devotee. We are prying open our mouths
to sing. We are the ear and we are the song.
We are two rundown radios talking
in a frequency none of us knows
how to reach, let alone emit our rightful sounds.
I’m trying to be someone other than me.
I’m trying to be the woman who shucks
oysters clean. Dredges them from
the depths of the sea with her bare teeth.
I’m trying to be her gold tooth, her
one and only, mended with the light
of the auric sun. Changing the form
of what’s obscene in me. Filigreeing
my fucking bones. All the crops
of all the lands genuflecting
to the bright brag of me.
- Published in Featured Poetry, Issue 33, Poetry
BLUE PERIOD by James O’Leary
It’s 9:31 PM where the end
of the city tinges the sea. An empty
spiderweb hangs motionless between
the blinds & the closed window leaking
the street’s neon onto the unmade bed. No
moon. Not even the comfort of wine,
bottles shaped like the body I want,
& will never have. I keep thinking about
the group of boys I passed huddled
around their broken car like priests over
an altar. I want to drink, to forget;
it makes the fashion of my sadness
tolerable. Driving on the highway, city
-fluxed, sober, trying to ignore my engine
light, my mind’s tidal drift reminds me
I never made it to my childhood
best friend’s funeral. Avoided it,
so I didn’t have to see his family,
the sharp angles of his still face. The radio
asks where the joy has gone; I try
to find it, I do, admire clouds, make food
for the people I claim to love. & the difference
between a claim & a lie is my hands,
their learned fluency in devotion
under the passage of each spent moon.
& the difference between the end of the sea
& the start of the sea, is how I feel
when I open the window & listen
to the pages of the water turn. Tonight
the sky tastes like ozone & time—I buy
a bouquet of chrysanthemums
for my beloved, a full tank of gas.
There’s safety from suicidal ideation
in imagining the material reality of the other
drivers, the names of their daughters
or sons as strange as wildflowers
a loved one might leave
on their sudden tombs. After
I spend the night piecing back together
what fragments I can still
recall of my first friend’s face,
I am however sober it takes
to watch the ghosts
of our hometown retreat
from the blanket of the rising sun.
- Published in Featured Poetry, Issue 33, Poetry
THE YEAR YOU DIED by Vasvi Kejriwal
05/19:
A tornado flung a fridge into the bones of a tree.
Its bark, gnarled, like the mouth of someone, new to grief.
05/22:
I found your pen at the edge of the dresser.
Yet to collect dust, it held your fading
fingermarks.
06/18:
Then, hunger as a thing to be unafraid of.
How the terrapin emerged from a wallow,
found two lions erasing blood from the jaw.
Alone, it tried to get them to leave.
06/30:
I wore my death wish in secret
like a talisman. A fifth ocean to drown in.
07/07:
The panda was no longer endangered.
08/10:
The smaller zipped pouch, within the larger zipped compartment,
of your toiletry kit—as if its innermost secret.
Here, I found a condom. Unopened, sealed in plastic.
Expired a year and 3 months before you passed.
09/27:
The moon came without menses.
Finally spoke: Go to sleep.
10/06:
I grew closer
to being older than you’ll ever be.
11/19:
While civilians reached Space, I reached
for the silhouette of a stranger.
My body, flailed, like a fish stunned with air,
underneath his weight.
12/08:
I made a word that combined surrender
with vomit—knees, cold with linoleum, bent against
what your body could not hold—picking up
what X-rays could not.
01/01:
The world spun without you in it.
02/05:
Skin prayed but there was no skin to touch it.
03/11:
Like an invasion on a thousand hooves, the monsoon
paraded town. The house you’d built, quivered.
04/10:
A boy dipped out of a coma and stared at his own name
like it was combustible.
05/12:
When they came for clothes for the orphans,
your parka with the broken zipper—
I banished to the shadowed end of my drawer.
*
- Published in Featured Poetry, Issue 33, Poetry
TWO POEMS by Caroline Richards
Recovery poem with jargon
After reading Auden, I water my moth orchid with ice cubes
and watch a girl with green hair draw a benzene ring in white erase.
I pay attention to time. I arrange my table of books into heiroglyphs
and try to say something before the sun sets. In Midsummer Night’s Dream,
I am the forest. In tarot, the hanged man. In nightmares, the bottle
with infinite volume. Carpe noctem and carpe diem chasing each other
like clock hands. A möbius band. The shadow-harp. Carbon. Auden himself.
Recovery poem with an ocean between it
I came to understand vastness the way we come to understand anything.
The last seat opened in the church pew. I could see the top of the black casket,
I could smell the white lilies.
That’s just it, something in me moved to make room for one more.
Something bore a hole in my head and disappeared again.
The funeral came before the death, the grief before all of it.
In other terms, water is unlike dopamine except in its absence.
Then its presence is thorough as a flood. Gray water, downed trees,
pathways sealed. Chemical imbalance I was told in the white office
on the white paper, as though I could point from the same shore they did.
As though the tide had not come in and buried the sandbar where I once stood.
- Published in Featured Poetry, Issue 33, Poetry
TWO POEMS by Corinna Rosendahl
from Scenes from the Seconds
It was written
for an exhibition
that at
the end of her life
Louise Bourgeois circled back
to her birth1
When I did as asked
like long hair
I pulled my fire back
1Unknown
***
Henceforth and forever I am my own
mother2
crouched in dirt
squinting at the root
Oh but now
it’s just my look
loosened
to dive and surface
as if to risk worth
beyond birth
after which
the introductions are endless
2Roland Barthes, “Mourning Diary”
- Published in Featured Poetry, Issue 33, Poetry
PARIS by Elly Bookman
At seventeen I gazed a good ten minutes
at Saint Catherine Labouré’s incorruptible
palms around a rosary. Soon
I’d learn to drive a manual transmission,
the backward N of the ascending gears.
The still-war had been on for more than a year,
and there was something so similarly earned
in her un-atrophied grip. I knew
someone must’ve tended in secret to
the wax around her hands and face, and
that they’d given themselves a soldier’s
kind of grace, balancing deception against
the miracle it presented, like the clutch
and gas pedals at the moment of change.
It took a while to find the feel for it—
the confidence to hover between the two.
In the end it was something like joy, but
greedier. Like flying back across the ocean
to a peaceful country, where nothing decays.
- Published in Featured Poetry, Issue 33, Poetry
FLEVATO by Richard Siken
We are going to poison the rats, announced the Transit Authority. They had posted fliers but no one was reading them. The subway was crowded. I was late and trying to think diagonally, up and around the corners. I wasn’t used to it. I grew up in a flat land where there was no descending. The ground was too hard. The Transit Authority was responsible for a lot of signage—the trains had letters, the stations had names. There were arrows on everything. It was a lot to take in. I took the D train to work. I worked in a bookstore. I was responsible for fiction A through M. I took books out of boxes and put them on carts. I climbed the ladders and stocked the shelves. The ladders had wheels on them and slid back and forth in front of the shelves. I loved them. After work I would go drinking and then fall asleep on the train home and wake up in Coney Island. There was a sign at the far end of the Coney Island station platform that said FLEVATO. It had an arrow. I didn’t know if it was a place or a thing. I was always too rattled or blurry to check. It started to bug me. It was a mystery. I would climb the ladders at work and try to imagine it. I couldn’t imagine it. I lasted nine months. In the city, I mean. I burned through my savings, abandoned my things, and flew home broke. Before I left, I decided to find the FLEVATO. I took the train to Coney Island. I walked to the end of the station platform. The letters on the sign had peeled. The R was gone, the E was damaged. The sign read ELEVATOR.
- Published in Featured Poetry, home, Issue 33, Poetry