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By Jon Fischer

Featured Art: Above San Gimignano by Tyler Thenikl

The 3D printer made a man and gave him a beard
to rub thoughtfully. It printed a book on mortality,
a pamphlet on sin, a monograph on time, and many other
fine things to keep in mind. Then it spun out two
of each animal and a boat around them. It printed rain
so long we thought it was broken, then
it printed an olive leaf. Its final act
was to print a 4D printer, which printed a memory
for the man, who said with his rubbery tongue,
I remember there were olive trees,
and he released one of the doves from its cage
below deck, where it spent the time we were given
under the gaze of two housecats and two weasels.
But the 4D printer started to print more
than the time we were given. Weeks rolled off in pairs, still
warm from the furnace of creation,
and wedges of space to move the stars apart
so the man had room to fill the weeks with many
fine things to keep in mind. That’s how we turned the world
into a dream, where time doesn’t know what to do with itself,
and you always end up falling.

By Jennifer Dorner

– for my mother

Season of moths in the strawberries.
An apple or two fallen from the tree.
Plums not yet ripe, through the cornstalks
are burdened with silk,
the vine tomatoes split,
and the sunflowers track the sun,
a bee in each dark center.

Late to the tasks you left me
I unfold the watering instructions again,
late to harvest the beds circled
on your hand-drawn map.

The evening is a haze,
sheets of starlings stretched
over the mown grass field,
a brush of red beneath
the shadowed tree line.

This week I read about the dying,
how those who have passed
can speak to the ones left behind
in the language of what they loved.
One man who tended rhododendron gardens,
a canopy of blossoms suddenly falling
over his first daughter’s car
while the second daughter
gathered a loose cluster
blown down into her path
the moment their father died.

I slide your patio door open, step over
trays of vegetable starts
on the faded rug
packed with potting soil.
Your handwriting vertical on the slim
labels beside each stem:
chard, fennel, romaine, madeley,

winterkeeper. I wish I’d known better –
this world of straw hats and arthritic wrist,
the duct-taped trowel,
these rubber boots that fit my feet.

By Jasmine V. Bailey

During his reign, four hundred bears.
On the bloodiest day, twenty-four.
On a hunting trip with friends, staged,
as they all were staged, twenty-two
and eleven for his friends. No one
tallied the boar and deer.
Ceaușescu sitting in his perch above a clearing a gamekeeper chases the bears through,
                 firing an automatic rifle.
One hundred thirty bears
in those last six years.
Brown bears, grizzlies in our West,
eat mostly plants
but Ceaușescu’s bears ate pellets
fed to them by the gamekeepers
who say they don’t like hunting anymore. 
He will die next to Elena
in December, nineteen eighty-nine, 
the shortest day of the year.
One hundred sixty-eight centimeters: Ceaușescu’s height.
The bears flourished with the kibble,
hunting forbidden to everyone but
Ceaușescu, their Conseil International de la Chasse points
unnaturally high.
Twenty thousand dollars 
to hunt a brown bear in Romania now
if you are a citizen of the EU. 
The population is smaller, each bear
smaller since Romania joined Europe—
seven thousand five hundred at the height
to fewer than five thousand three hundred
once the doors of the Carpathians opened. 
Forty-three grizzlies died
when Yellowstone closed its dumpsters.
Staggering in their final, worst hunger.
Once someone hatched a scheme
to raise bears for Ceaușescu’s hunts.
Two hundred twenty-seven 
bear cubs were torn from their mothers
who, crazed, had to be shot
to let them go, as I would have to be shot.
One or two: the number of toes cut off without anesthetic 
to create a code by which to identify each cub, 
who went insane with grief for their mothers,
who were never successfully raised for the hunt,
who all escaped or were released
haphazardly, dying on highways
and in circuses, ending in a daze
the daze of their lives.
Two: the number of days 
the cubs howled 
after their claws were ripped from their paws.
The number of suicides
during his twenty-four years as general secretary of the Communist Party 
of Romania:
not known.
Twelve weeks my daughter’s lived
outside my body.
I want to lie with her under one blanket
until God thinks better of so much. 

By Jasmine V. Bailey

I drove to meet you the first day of the year
at a B&B fifteen miles east of my childhood
on the White Horse Pike.
For three mornings we had a German pancake
and three cups of coffee 
with the black-haired innkeeper
whose husband coughed in another room,
whose philodendra vined her walls
and ceilings like a cage.

You led me down the beach that first night 
all the way to Longport Bridge
keeping secret what we were after.
Everything seemed a candidate—
the armor of some crab picked clean,
Polaris beneath the moon
like Marilyn Monroe’s mole.
When we got to the bay
I thought we might swim it.
Your face fell realizing
what we’d come to see was gone,
that you would have to tell 
what you’d brought me there to show.

The bioluminescence you’d seen
the night before I arrived
coaxing a glistering shore
out of the dark
was gone with the jellies
or bacteria arrived now in the Atlantic. 
You described it as a lit path, if
a narrow one, like the aisle
of an airplane you pace at night
when every passenger is asleep
because you no longer know
what your country is like
or if your mom will manage
to find her way to Philadelphia
to pick you up, or if there will ever 
be a child to grow so tired 
you have to carry her, sleeping,
all the way home on your chest,
her heavy head just starting to dampen,
her eyelids working against your heart—
and I saw it.

By Justin Rigamonti

With a bouquet
of ferns
and lemon
yellow roses,
she looks
incandescent
in the dug-up
photo of
“the time I
got married
the first time.”

Meaning,
pain followed
hot on this
happy woman’s
heels. Meaning,
don’t think
her life has
hummed along
luminously
ever since.

Life never does.
But won’t a smile
like a string of
holiday lights
still have been
a smile?
And joy
for awhile
was still joy.

By Emma Aylor

—1936–2013

Sleeping it off last night I dreamed I had one lung.
The other next to me in bed dark and putting
off smoke.                      When you were young
I passed my Virginia Slim so you wouldn’t get
the taste for it: I remember standing in the kitchen
lighting it up                                        for my girl.
You never did smoke after that. In front of the TV
last night I spilled the whole drink down my shirt
          a little in this world                                    a little in the other.

I’ve been Anne Moore for most of my life.
My last morning as Lester I looked
like Liz Taylor’s sister                        hair dark and glossed.
It’s hard to remember myself like that.
I depend on a picture to know I was beautiful—

waist a switch                in a virgin’s dress.
Couldn’t have done better at nineteen,
grew up so close to Tennessee.
We moved all over the plains for a time
and came back to Bill’s dad’s store.
I remember days up to my elbows in spicy chili,
nights raising you                               right up the hill.

My hands have shaken my whole life. Always think
it could have been worse. A favorite joke:
a parrot who swears is punished by being put
in the freezer. Once, it sees a frozen turkey
in the corner                          and says,
DAMN, that bird must                         have said fuck.
             I remember I told you and your daughter         you looked at me
like I didn’t understand a single stupid thing.
Would it make a difference if I did

that same house    your father repeating            GODDAMN IT ANNE
like a stuck station in front of you and all
my children’s                      children
                                                                    and

it’s morning in the bath now and I’m not getting up yet.
In the water a bruise on my arm
develops like a litmus paper                               a little
yellow—                                hardly acidic.

I remember leaving your daughter at the pool while I wet
my brain               came back to her sunburned
pink as a hot pig.              Remember she fell
off the bed and scarred her little nose
a white line still                            cut through the freckles.
Light through the bathroom                        glancing sideways.
            My daddy drank. I remember how bad.
It’s not really a reason                          but I remember enough.
My chest clutches                 a little
and then fills up.       Water gets a little bluer
with what comes off my skin.
It’s not possible that you remember me.

By Emily Sernaker

Featured Art: Black and Gray Metal Tool by _ Harvey

Maybe by the time you read this a golden retriever with a bandana
will be snuggled up against my knees. Or the man I love,
the one I get to keep, will be kissing me goodbye for the day
his lips tasting of cereal and coffee. Instead I’m living

with my college roommate Breezy in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Breezy just gave me a bottle of Unconditional Love
perfume she won at the gym. Her little Tootsie Roll
of a dog, Charlotte, a Boston terrier, keeps hiding bones

in my bed. My bedroom used to be Breezy’s dining room
before the divorce. It’s safe to say neither of us thought
this is where we’d be—but we’re making the most of it.
She owns wind chimes. I bought peonies. Outside our front

door someone has graffitied the words TROUBLE FUCK!
which we prefer to read as FUCK TROUBLE!
And we found that duck in Central Park, the mandarin
rainbow that isn’t supposed to be there but is.

Maybe by the time you read this I won’t be waiting
to be happy. The truth is things are going well.
Everyone I love is alive. Breezy printed a 12×16
of the misplaced firecracker of a duck. She had it framed

and matted it’s hanging in our living room.
He’s staring down the camera
saying: Aren’t you glad you got to see this?
I dare you to wish you were anywhere else.

By Margot Kahn

On Saturday I trolled for places back home.
Home as in the place I was raised,
not that elusive ancestor thing, the soul or—

just the place where my mother set plates
of flank steak in front of me, or left me
with a cardboard box, the frozen trays.

When everything’s up in flames,
I yearn for a yard I know the edge of—
for lightning bugs trapped in a punched-lid jar;

the lip of the brick fireplace where my father sang
his Navy songs, and the kitchen where my mother baked
blackberry pie that bled out across the floor;

the days I drove myself to school and picked myself up,
hotwired the minivan, got felt-up, and learned about loneliness
from a phone attached to the wall;

the place my parents were the first to be born to,
the place I had the privilege of being bored;
the place I had the privilege of leaving.

Here, from my kitchen window, the hills are first
to disappear. Then goes the fence, the garden,
the rutted gravel drive. My lungs hurt just watching it,

reading in sans serif that friends had minutes to flee.
I see the hill behind their house awash in light, ablaze—
a transcendental image for an Instagram age.

She posts it as they’re rushing away to the country
of the displaced—a land I know the scent of,
a language I, too, can speak.

By Emily Nason

I’ve taken communion in horse troughs
and creeks and off the back of a stamp licked
by the boy I love, and still I have nightmares.
Like this: every person I forgot to send
a thank-you note to brings it up the next time
I see them. Like this: the cicadas haven’t hatched
when they said they would. Years escape us.
Ancestral cattle herding calls, whole choirs
of Ozark harps, cotton looms starting to spin.
Splash of kerosene. Mildewed family photos,
faces burned out. Like this: I’m crouched
in the kitchen, watching my grandmother
throw a jar of Duke’s Mayonnaise against
the wall. And then she mops it up and repeats.
Same jar. I roll the stone up the hill,
and by stone I mean the rendered red roux,
and by hill, I mean the blackened pot.
My grandmother again, rehab parking lot,
threatening to kill herself, backing down
last minute by saying, I wouldn’t do that
to y’all even though you test me. Like this:
I date a man who buys instant grits.
Like this: Lindsey Graham. Copper chicken
wire of a welt around my thigh, no clue how
it got there, and a roomful of questions.
In the back of the country store, I sit and watch
my legs dangle from thick fishing hooks, two more
fatty thighs to cure and sell. Strawberry Moon.
Sturgeon Moon. Worm Moon. A night sky
with all three. My grandmother wakes me up
to look at them. She reminds me that I’m like her:
last to leave this long party, eyes shucked open.

By Emily Nason

And I can see them, see her
standing over the kitchen sink,
gray shrimp pinched
and the up-flick of her knife.

                                                                                                       (No stories in this poem,
                                                                                                       Emily. Stay in the room.)

Right. Doctor’s white gloves.
Gardenia white. This is my hand
on your thigh. Unpruned oleander.
You’re going to feel a pinch.

                                                                                                       (Stay just a little while longer.)

Hot examination room.
Small country clinic with one broken
air conditioner. The doctor sees
retirees and pregnant housewives,
mainly. Once, a man who took
a tree trunk straight to the sternum.

                                                                                                       (He survived, remember?
                                                                                                       It’s not your story to tell.)

I’ve forgotten to take off my gold
hoops. In the corner, nude lace bra
and underwear crumpled
in the chair. A blue jumpsuit—
It has pockets! Pockets!—I wore
that night in Ohio, when I fell
and sprained a wrist bringing
a dozen fresh eggs to a friend,
no carton, just my pockets.

                                                                                                       (Stop. Back to your body, now.)

Another pinch. Give me one big
cough. Formaldehyde in the veins,
moonshine in the eyes. I’m alive.
From crotch to toes: a cramp.

                                                                                                       (There’s been worse pain.
                                                                                                       Move it along.)

By Emily Nason

Featured Art: Mid Winter by Pamela Fogg

I am predisposed: toothed gardenia. Just like my mother’s
mother. I ask the doctor what to do. She says, Consult the oracles,

read the tea leaves. Which means, Keep taking your meds.
Which means, Watch who you procreate with. I’m not sure

I’m happier now. I just feel things less. Not quite a numbness,
but a lack. When my dog sees a dog that looks like her, she cocks

her head, as if to say, Huh. Isn’t that something? Smart girl,
but it frightens me that she knows, retains, what she looks like.

I am frightened of a lot of things, but not of what awaits. Side effects:
a comfort or ideation with fresh dirt and ashes. Visiting the family burial

plot, the caretaker tells us, We can stack ’em six deep. Economical,
I think. My mother asks him to trim the nearby tree, it’s obscuring

her mother’s grave. Two rows down, a marble headstone reads,
Stand back, I’m coming up! Okay. Where are you going to go?

By D. R. Goodman

On a night when something like fog obscures the city,
and dry trees loom through heavy wisps of gray,
I’m stopped, and stare. Faint orange lights shine through
at intervals in a breathless span of blankness
where any other night, the simple darkness
would glitter as if with pearls. This streetlamp, too,
is strange in its ashen haloed light, the way
it burns my eyes, and sweeps me through with pity.

That campfire smell, as we at first mistake it,
grows acrid—treated lumber, metal rail,
scorched cars, life’s treasures, all they had to show,
now airborne from a hundred miles away.
We’re stardust. On the airwaves, just today,
some rock star physicist proclaimed it so.
It burns my lungs. Bewildered, I inhale
the dust of those who ran and didn’t make it.