By Susan Browne

A woman was killed by a car as she jogged across an intersection.
A friend of hers I play tennis with said, “Can you believe it?”

I put my arms around her as we stood on the court & she cried into my shoulder.
I didn’t tell her my mother died in a car crash after buying towels on sale.

You’d think we’d be used to death coming out of the blue like lightning
striking on a sunny day, but we’re always surprised.

Then my mother’s accident became a story I told so many times
as if that could bring her back. The story was like the St. Christopher medal

tucked safely in her purse that a policeman found in the middle of the freeway
& that I carried in my pocket until who knows what happened to it.

I traveled all over Europe & even went to a place, if you can believe it,
The End of the World in Southern Portugal on the Vicentine Coast,

stood on cliffs 200 feet high & looked at what explorers thought was the edge
of the flat earth & I could understand why.

I was thousands of miles from home wandering beaches & piers, going into stone
churches when no one was there, lighting candles although my belief in God flitted

around like a bat in the rafters before it folded its wings & disappeared in the darkness.
At night in my hostel room, I ate sardines out of the tin & read the Tao Te Ching,

staining the pages with red wine & oil. The idea of the Tao was consoling:
An empty container that can never be emptied & can never be filled.

Darkness within darkness, the gateway to all understanding.
What in the world did that mean,

but it was like a kind of hope without hope so I could believe it.
A man I dated once or twice in California came to visit.

We had a beautiful time in bed. He was confused when, after a week,
I wanted him to leave. At the airport I apologized & kissed him goodbye

& we kept kissing. He said, “Why am I leaving, I can’t believe this.”
A few years later I realized it was because no one he loved had died.

The universe is forever out of control. The world is sacred.
I went to see my father.

In the restaurant the dining room was dark even though it was lunchtime,
the little candle on the table trying hard.

It had been over a year since we’d seen each other or talked or talked about her.
My father’s eyes were sober & clear. He said, “How’s the sandwich?”

We were surrounded by velvet paintings on the walls of the hobo clown,
Emmett Kelly, his red nose, his sad mouth, his crushed bowler hat.

In one of the paintings a monarch butterfly rested on the hat’s brim. I decided
to take that as a sign for whatever—whether I could believe it or not—happened next.

By Susan Browne

Kenneth’s elbow
have I ever seen it
I mean really looked at it
I’ve been away on a trip &
I would like to see his elbow
& other parts
I miss his smell
sometimes cinnamon & cumin
sometimes dirty socks & popcorn
I used to think love was a coma
my mother was in a coma
from a car accident then gone
my father was in a bottle
stuffed with suicide notes
I met Kenneth a few years after
he was from Denmark
I heard a beat of a noble heart
but also like Hamlet
he said he was going to the bottom of his life
there was nothing more attractive
unfortunately I was in therapy
I said good night sweet prince centuries passed
we met again
was it fate was it chance
did you go to the bottom of your life I asked
yes he said then offered me his arm let’s dance
his arm had blond hairs I felt them like furry
light all over my body
his elbow how important it is
it curved his arm around me
& I woke up for the first time
for all this time

By C. O’Sullivan Green

Learning the swoop of a lowercase a,
an egg with an axial tilt, tail that could
wag or stand on end.

The school bus arriving for the first time,
coming from an unknown place, driven
into the nebulous world.

Being small enough to be uprooted
and repotted.

Compounding educations, division,
language, and time—how sixty can be
as remote as seventeen.

That mercurial metal, the trust-fall,
which can support or fail with
equal surprise.

Seeing animals I couldn’t take in, but that I
hoped would escape to find me in my backyard.

The evolving and lengthening definition
of consequence, how far is too far,
in distance as well as boundaries.

The succession of small
choices in file that loll
around the corners of days:

will I go down the driveway
on my skates,

can I say a swear
to ask what it means,

how much
of myself will I compromise
to fit in?

Fit in, better translated, to
survive within an ecosystem
(of which there are many,
school, home, peers, self).

Adolescence, the thinning middle age of
childhood. Middle ages of fiefdoms,
of gossip and lore.

The slow and glitch-prone renaissance
of the late teens.

Discovering the machines
and machinations of industry,
its comforts and unregulated
sins.

The pain of learning how to yearn
and how to become.

Living the unknown answer
to the question that is your life.

By Andrew Payton

It is eight years now
and I still think of how you did not ask

that I look away
when you stripped sweat-soaked polyester

after our games of badminton, or how
you hefted the weight of the couch

onto your haunches while I rested
a hand underneath,

pivoting uselessly, or how
on the mountain you took

my blistered heels into your hands
and wrapped the wounds, replaced

my socks with your own, or how
before dinner you went into the basement

for a bottle of that Czechoslovak vodka
you bought in cases the November when students

flooded Prague, little water
you called it, and then

you inventoried forest biomass in Poland
and cheeks reddened with drink

theorizing
there were not enough trees for the furnaces, and,

touching the wool of your blue
peacekeeping beret, you

speak of the Serb who
served coffee from his porch in the morning

that was a smoldering crater by afternoon,
always you say goodbye you say in

the English you learned on Ohio construction sites
which never quite lost the pneumatic pop

of a nail driver, or how
the evening before I would leave

your wife threw me against the wall and bit my ear,
and I thought how

over the years with you
she must have forgotten to fuck

with anything
but violence.

By Andreas Nussbaumer

Forget everything you know
about contract law and the Chesterfield skink.
Continue to reframe every piece of art
you encounter in the bordello (replace
the last word with imbroglio and ditch
any diction associated with almanacs).
It’s important to hold yourself
to impossible standards. Embrace loved ones
often via ambush—with surprise on your side
you can’t lose. When in doubt
collect your old love letters and
if you don’t have old love letters then spill ink
like it’s milk—level of requitedness is irrelevant,
it’s the exercise itself that matters. Search frantically
for the deed of your house. If you don’t
own a house then buy one now. If you can’t
afford a house then make more money.
If you can’t make more money then get a better job.
If a better job eludes you then enter into organized crime.
I know a guy named Jimmy, he’ll set you right up.
Just tell him I sent you and thank me later.

By Kate Fox

“The best line of iambic pentameter is not in classical
poetry but in W. C. Handy’s ‘St. Louis Blues.’”
—Elizabeth Bishop

Let me end this song on a not-so-minor note,
rest my head on this 1926 Gibson, sing goodbye

to every lyric I have ever learned: the one about the boat
that can carry two and the lonesome picker, the one

about how Louise rode home on the mail train
and how walking is most too slow. And, of course,

the one about riding down the canyon that, even after
forty years, recalls my father on a Saturday night

wrapping the fingers of his left hand with adhesive tape,
swaying and slapping an upright bass in some

small-town dance hall while my mother waltzes
across a floor strewn with corn meal, and my brother

and I fall asleep among coats piled high on folding chairs
against the wall. He once told me music was the one thing

he could count on, married, as he was, in 1929,
his first child, a girl, born and buried a year later,

a life of lung trouble that finally sent him out West
to either die or get well. At thirty, I took him

at his word, picked up the guitar he gave me,
the one around whose neck he wrapped my fingers,

and taught me songs that survive on breath alone:
how the water is wide, how I won’t be worried long,

how I hate to see that evening sun go down.

By George Bilgere

I find an old air gun
and a can of ammo
down in the basement
in a cardboard moving box,
along with some other stuff,
flotsam from previous lives.
A teenager, a long-expired
me, used it to polish off
tin cans in the backyard,
and once a bright, golden
oriole, shot in mid-song,
blowing a hole through me
as it fell. Holding a pistol
is like shaking hands
with death. What the hell,
let’s see if the damn thing
still works. In the same box,
a volume of poetry, slim,
but not slim enough,
by a poet I never liked—
all smoke and mirrors—
a poet utterly, brutally
forgotten, although a blurb
on the back still calls his book
“an astonishing debut.”
I prop it against the wall,
pump, load, cock, and Blam
goes the gun as it hasn’t
in half a century. I inspect
the astonishing debut.
The pellet, as it happens,
made it farther than I ever did,
stopping on page sixty-two,
just deep enough to dimple,
not tear, a sonnet on the guy’s
divorce, how his wife ran off
with his best friend, how terrible
the betrayal, how deep his grief.
How losing her tore out his soul.
And now this.

By Pamela Davis

Do you see us? We park in our cars
all over town. Enjambed between jobs
and laundry at home, we stop time.
Toe-off shoes. Fan our bare toes. Exhale
the poisons of the day. Somewhere
in the car, there is chocolate. Aretha,
Mrs. Dalloway. Men pass staring hard
as cops. One asks if we’re okay. Sorry,
we mutter for the hundredth time.
Beyond the dashboard, the sun stalls
before sinking the ancient way.
An open road is ripe. One summer night
in the Sixties my Dad drove home from Vegas
in a gold convertible he bought playing craps.
Cheerios went limp in our bowls
the morning he came back, presenting
Mother with the car keys. Choking them
in one fist, she slammed out, gunned
the engine’s 385 powered horses
and thundered off. It became her way.
We were always left listening for the Pontiac’s
brakes to screech at the end of our street.
Tonight I point my car north and turn up
“Respect.” City lights leak out my rearview mirror.
I’ll be gone an hour or half the night.
Virginia was wrong. A room isn’t enough.

By K.T. Landon

                                                                                                                For Jessica Jacobs

You say that a poem that contains a fox
and a henhouse must, at some point, include
a slaughtered chicken, that the rifle on the mantel
must go off in Act Three. But what I am telling you
is that my neighbor has built his coop to last
and surrounded it with a sturdy double fence
of chicken wire, and that that fox is out of luck
this time. And I know that good news for the chickens
is bad news for some vole or field mouse or hapless
housecat. So maybe all I’ve done is point that gun
in another direction or into another poem, but this
is a poem in which no chickens will die. A rabbit
will bound across the road and the car will slow
in time. The fox will discover the trampoline behind
the house next door and with it the wonder of flight.
Everyone I love will live and call me after supper
to say goodnight. My neighbor is a good man,
a minor god who has brought forth a paradise
for chickens. And I know those chickens, clucking
contentedly in their self-important obliviousness,
are too foolish to be a metaphor for hope
(though isn’t hope always foolish?) but in this poem
the chickens stand for joy—for feed scattered
with a free hand and fresh water in the trough,
for a swept house and a warm nest, for the sun
and the breeze and friends to admire your glorious,
feathered self and this single, glorious day.
And we’re in pretty deep now, aren’t we,
speculating about the Inner Life of Chickens,
but can you doubt, watching them watching us,
that they have one? That they, too, understand
the urgency of this still and incandescent moment
that is here and leaving already? I know
it’s not always this way. The gun goes off
eventually. One night the latch will fail to catch
or a hinge will rust through, and the fox will bring
terror and death, as foxes do. Every story ends
with a corpse. But, Jessica, it’s not Act Three yet.
My neighbor, the chickens, the fox, you, me—
we love what we love for as long as we can.
Right now, in this blue and breathing hour
that shines inside us all, those chickens are fine.

By Mark Cox

By David Dodd Lee

I counted eight cygnets (and two adult swans) on the river in May but then counted four
cygnets in late June and today the four have turned into three. My next-door neighbors

went from two to no persons then back to two after the deceased
couple who’d lived there’s daughter and husband moved in, then up to five

after the woman’s sister, her sister’s boyfriend, and their child
joined them. A note written on lined notebook paper that I assumed

(on what basis?) was written by the woman’s sister blew into
my yard. It said I want out of this life and I love you Jesus I do

but I don’t care anymore I’m sorry but for now they’re still five.
My house is one and sometimes two, especially on weekends, add

one cat and it goes up to three. I grew up in a house of six and then
there were five and then six again for a while and then five. My

sisters ended up in houses of six, five, and four eventually, I in houses
of two, four for about eight years, two again, now usually one . . .

The eight, four, then three cygnets take all summer to become close to
indistinguishable from their parents and then by spring each relocates

to a different pond river lake where they become two, then four, five, six, seven, etc.,
something you can count until counting no longer seems to matter anymore.

By Carol Tiebout

We traded Harvey Wallbangers, Velvet Hammers, and straight-up tequila,
kicked Nixon and Agnew around and came up with a board game
about Camp David that would use lacquered walnut shells and peas as markers.

When the acid slid in, clipping all the edges in clear light, we fell out
into the late-night street now stuffed with one hundred thousand
points of cool fog that wrapped the curbs and thinned under the lamps

into a series of three-foot worlds. A drunk appeared below us, limbs curled up
waving like a crab that had been tossed onto its back from its rocking bed to hard
granite while still holding the comfort of the sea. He looked up at me

with baby-kissed blue eyes and asked, “Are you an angel?” I thought for a moment
maybe I was, maybe in the realm of infinite possibilities, it could be there on certain
Tuesdays, my name in the index of Alan Watts’ book under A.

Fifty years later the sky opens up, raindrops the size of cats singing
the hood of my car as it curves past the turnoff to town
and in a loud whooosh, deafening as a splashdown, I no longer

understand why I would hold back any longer from
whatever walks into this minute
from the deep seams of the world.

By Sarah Sarai

Jacinth looks at the pig and 
asks what she did in another lifetime 
to be so beautiful. 
Maybe not everyone would see it
but she’s perfect. 
I am not everyone. I agree. 
Alice is perfect, 
a hippopotamus made compact. 
I stroke her dark hide and feed her 
fruit cup from breakfast. 
Cauliflower and a toasted bagel.
Plum jam. 
With the pig, Jacinth and 
I break bread. 
Jacob, who is new to this poem, 
buries his cigarette in a late-fall lawn
to take a call from Quebec.
In bright sunlight Alice considers 
eternally recycling life. Is my guess.
Jacinth has no interest in me or Jacob
and praises only the pig, who is complete. 
Is her guess. The heart gets lonely 
some days. Is Jacob’s guess.
Feeding Alice renders longing and irritation 
irrelevant, without obliterating either.
Aspens snap their every yellow leaf. 
The trees expected we’d be gone by now. 
Their every yellow leaves don’t guess. 

By Damen O’Brien

Featured Art: Atardecer rosa by Rubi Villa

I climbed down into Wonderland following the paths of my memory.
Old playing cards ruffled like leaves, but his burrow was empty. It was
a shivering day, a pale sun peeking briefly into his cold warren. He was
long gone. Soft crumble of soil, colorless straw. He had vanished,
popping the buttons of his waistcoat on the far paddock’s fence.
All those years ago and we’d lost touch. One rushed note in 20 years, 
apologies for not visiting, complaints of lateness, and then nothing.
No phone number, no address. He has joined the ranks of the Missing, 
shutting the last yellow doors of Wonderland, boarding the windows,
battening down the root cellars, scrambling across the checkerboards
of desperation. He’s a gray exposure photograph on a billboard 
of the lost. He’s a file note numbered amongst the renditioned, the
compromised and betrayed, standing in a hopeless queue somewhere,
waiting for his portion of grass. We give the past away in exchange 
for the future. We foreclose the titles on our fairy tales for a handful 
of beans, until they’ve all gone, hitching out in the huddled back of 
rusty trucks, bussed in to the Big Smoke for a carrot or two, a cardboard
sign seeking work, selling our heirlooms for a passport, lying unmarked
and misremembered in a thorny field. It’s been such a long time. I was
a little girl with mud on the hem of my petticoat, but I always knew 
the world would one day come to Wonderland. He has gone on the last 
flight from the embassy’s roof, hiding his face from the government’s 
algorithms, sleeping in subways. I barely remember what he looked like. 
A twitchy nose, a neat tail, a pocket watch. If I were asked to identify him, 
I would say, he was a White Rabbit. He was always having to leave.

By Damen O’Brien

Seven hours under
bubbles to breakfast,
practicing his terminus
while they slap water
with the fowl’s carcass rag
and tempt him to spring-
loaded striking at 1 p.m.,
to the matador’s applause
each hot weekday and
twice on Saturday, but
he must only win once,
tangent to his target,
a holy investiture,
sacred digestion, and
every zookeeper has
one absent moment,
so he’ll wait forever
like the best missionaries,
for the one chance of faith
to find its grim purchase,
when in the coughing dark,
a child’s fever breaks
and prayer can be praised,
so one heedless heel
too close to the water,
then matter of fact,
not with any animus,
not out of revenge,
a final punctuation
for the slow god
of limitless perseverance,
cold-scaled leviathan,
to take and roll and roll 
until the silent ripple of
dismay which is
a crocodile’s patience.

By Corinne Wohlford Mason

It was winter solstice. As day faded, 
we drove to the appointment
through our city and over the river, 
a circuitous route, the golden light
ennobling the derelict brick, the industry
of the river, the winter hawks perching
on the floodplain. The news was 
not that bad, but still, bad enough. 
We had options. We drove home 
toward one bright star against the pink 
spill of sunset. Look at this light, 
we kept saying. Here is a neighborhood 
we have never seen before. The sky shifted 
sapphire to black. We floated 
premises; they floated away. We would 
choose later, let the longest night 
take its time. We would do this right.

By Kevin Boyle

As retirement began in May, I placed my little reminders 
around the house, “Every third thought shall be my grave,”
and for the first week I was dutiful, losing track of 

my lists of groceries or my dog’s empty bowl, thinking
of my grave easily a third of the time, keeping a running tab
of each idea on my phone, sometimes unsure of when

a thought might end and another begin, was the Carolina
wren’s call only one thought, and the white-throated sparrow’s another,
if so, then as I dug my garden with my rototiller 

that hurt my bones, I would certainly consider my grave
just then, the rectangle clearly a visual reminder and the soil,
only the treated lumber borders threw me off, so I thought of the pecans

so late to arrive in leaf, would they produce this year
those beautiful kernels, and then by early June I bumped it up
to every fifth thought, which allowed me to prepare to collect

on my investments, thinking it through without giving way
to tears, thinking of the garlic bulbs I planted, the scapes—
those green leaves—I ate in a frittata with salmon, line-caught,

very pure, innocent, and by the time the zinnias arrived
in July, the shortest in the front, the largest in the back
like a choral group arranged by range, I said, Damn it,

I shan’t be buried at all, I’ll amend my dying will to request
a cremation “ceremony,” and I went around the house
like in mid-January taking down every Christmas detail

including the manger with the unmoving donkey and lamb
who I might try to outstare, but now I searched for my grave
mnemonics, my construction paper cutouts, my calligraphy

that was poor penmanship, my silly arithmetic reminders
of death, and I could go eight, on a weekend, maybe ten thoughts
without a single visual of my body gone, my mind that knew

a thing or two just emptied like a bin or the compost jar
that I sometimes just toss right into the ground, not caring about
time, until the zinnias called it quits in early November, 

the grass stopped growing and gave some color away to charity,
and the birds, the birds felt something coming and shipped out
sometimes in great flocks of chattering that were frightening,

or sometimes, just a single bird that flew south, though
I knew and called out to it, Actually, you’re heading north,
I yelled at it, and still it sailed on, maybe a breeze was showing it

the quickest way to leave, or just the least painful, 
until its speck must have entered a cloud.

By Kevin Boyle

I missed it on holiday by a mile
or so, collapsing at hilly
Sacré-Coeur—calling out,

My hips, my knees,
my wife answering, 
My hibiscus, my hydrangea,

darling, though I wish
I had marched farther on the Parisian butte 
like a Communard, braving

it to see the song-and-dance bar beautifully
named Lapin Agile, the agile 
or nimble rabbit who would enjoy

the cruel, rugged landscape,
and while there, I’d hoist a tankard
to toast the artist Utrillo

who painted the bar a hundred times,
a thousand, always from the outside,
perhaps because he loved drink too much

and inside were the drams and drafts
and cups and absinthe, and outside 
there was weather and next door

a cemetery where he would later lie.
Perhaps it’s best for me to see the bar
framed, hanging on a wall, and not to toast,

from inside, the melancholy Utrillo—
why toast an alcoholic?—
but to focus on his focus, the repetition 

that always changes
somewhat, an idée fixe that lets you see
the seasons that are colors and leaves

or no leaves at all. I don’t need to travel
since I can see what there is to see 
(life!) here in my sleepy and flat zero-ass town.

By Carrie Shipers

If I said “Dead” you’d want me to describe
the cause and circumstances, promise 
my demise is unrelated to my work, 
which I don’t know for sure. Most days 

I’m awake to my impending doom,
but the details remain dim. “In your seat” 
would sound arrogant and also isn’t true. 
I much prefer a cubicle to losing 

my weekends or leading folks like me. 
I may be surrounded by robots, but I bet 
they’ll need a human standing by in case 
they walk into a corner and get stuck, request 

a reboot to erase having learned their tasks 
are stupid and endless. Given you’re 
a decade my senior—or else really 
fatigued—“Retired” might offend 

by rubbing in you’re nowhere close. 
Too much focus on the future strikes me 
as futile. Once the apocalypse begins, 
we’ll probably all do things we can’t 

imagine now. If I asked you the same, 
I wonder if you’d have an answer prepared, 
be flattered someone cared, or if you’d 
be upset by goals you haven’t met. 

Experience suggests I’ll be performing 
this same show for a new audience,
either because the company’s at risk 
of shutting down, or because I’m so frustrated 

I can’t bear to stay. I’m tempted to say 
“Standing on the roof,” then allow 
an awkward pause before explaining
there’s also a DJ and champagne 

to help us celebrate my latest great idea, 
which I won’t reveal until after I’m hired. 
I wish this question had come sooner 
on your list. I don’t want the words

I leave you with to ruin our rapport, 
but the longer we sit here the more 
my vision narrows to the door, 
the relief I’ll feel when I walk out of it.

By Carrie Shipers

Featured Art: untitled by JC Talbott

We don’t negotiate salary because we’re already certain 
what you’re worth. It may be less than you’d hoped, 
but it’s enough to live on if you’re practical. We don’t
negotiate benefits because we think you’re lucky 

to get any. The single therapist is prone to naps and lousy 
metaphors, but you’re so sad that you’ll keep going back. 
We don’t negotiate duties because the job ad was crafted 
to include everything that we don’t want to do, and then 

revised again when we got sued. Belonging to a group 
always requires sacrifices: someone has to do the dirty work 
for which no credit is received, take on difficult tasks 
where failure means you’ll probably get fired, and it’s not 

fair for you to skip your turn. We don’t negotiate 
vacation time because we’re angry it exists. You’re also 
not allowed to work from home unless you’re quarantined—
we tried it once and were so drunk by noon we answered 

our email with kitten pictures. We don’t negotiate 
office space because you’ll be assigned a cubicle, 
bottle of bleach to combat creeping mold. If you choose 
to decorate, make sure all items fit into a single banker’s box, 

which allows for ease of exit if you suddenly get fired. 
And should you have requests we haven’t covered, 
the answer’s No to those as well. We know winning 
a small concession would increase your confidence, 

make you feel truly wanted. But honestly you weren’t 
our best or favorite candidate. You were the one 
we settled for because you seemed most likely to say yes, 
and the fact that you’re still listening suggests 

we were correct. Regardless of your reasons for taking 
this job—debt, despair, misguided optimism—
we think you’ll fit in fine as long as you remember: 
We don’t negotiate because there is no need.

By Carrie Shipers

If I said solutionism was the greatest challenge
facing us today, how many whiteboards 
might you fill before the irony hit home? 
Was your attempt to privatize the Post Office 

short-lived because it was too hard to disrupt 
real objects, or because Jeff Bezos told you 
to back off? Are you more embarrassed by 
the bubbling sinkhole stinking up your campus 

quad, the fence that fails to block its view, 
or the studies stating that the Valley’s so-called 
“pipeline problem” is merely a myth you’ve built 
around a rigged system? Given the resulting 

poor publicity, do you regret deciding to: 
use live endangered animals to illustrate ideas, 
spend millions on a bonding trip at which 
most of your staff contracted STIs and salmonella, 

compete pants-less at the all-hands sack race?
Relatedly, what percent of the lawsuits 
you’ve had to settle might’ve been avoided 
by investing in HR before a second helicopter? 

Are you aware the word “founder” also means 
to sink or fail utterly? If yes, do you ever dream 
you’re drowning and wake up afraid, 
and does this perhaps explain your interests

in sea-steading and extreme longevity? 
If I suggested several of your famous Principles, 
e.g., Be Boldly New, seem cribbed from 
other companies, would your benign 

but somewhat flat affect pivot toward rage 
so fast I’d feel dizzy? Did you agree
to this meeting in the hope that seeming
open, honest, and sincere would counteract 

your current image as a greedy genius
hooking users on their own abuse? Or because
a public busy judging your ethics, humor
and haircut is less likely to notice or object

to your real work, which is not the thing 
you’ve gotten famous for? Assuming 
the latter, are you sorrier I’ve caught on 
or flattered by the depths of my alarm?

By Ronald Okuaki Lieber

In dry season in equatorial Chad, the Sahel is so hot the soil
Chars to red dust, the grass to a blond bristle, heat bearing down like affliction

And because the land blisters and coastal Africa is forested, humid and cool, air
Is sucked easterly, darkening the horizon with fury into which a man, tending

The village flock stares, a wave so sudden and massive the Dogon has little time
To corral the sheep before the air erupts with stinging needles. The storm

Sweeps across the continent until in the Atlantic thunderheads and wind
Marry the doldrums, and a hurricane is born. Its updraft plunges the ocean, and swells

Spiral westward across the open sea to loom large on beaches lining the American
Eastern seaboard as in Montauk Long Island where surfers

Scan the near horizon for the shadowed lines their kind read. It’s what they have prepared for 
The summer afternoons and cool September dawns before work, that one stirring

Pitched perfect just where a surfer waits, and he paddles to catch the lip, a chthonic uprise
Heaving him high to which he surrenders, riding the rollinglevel underneath

Into rapture that I as a ten-year-old in the thick of the Ozarks heard in the treetops
Swaying back and forth, a thousand miles away. The shepherd stokes the charcoal

Embers with dry twigs, the surfer packs his board, and the hurricane makes landfall
In Kill Devil Hills, splintering wooden homes. I am joined.

By Dion O’Reilly

Old Mother, you might, in your final days, bloom—
your century of violence, crumble,

to false memories of full tables, fire glint of quiet
evenings. You, Old Mother, might

become the benevolent queen
of my own, small country—

the open-assed cotton you live in might
become a ball gown of light, lit

web of warmth, and your fingers
witched by the urge to whip, become benediction

on the warm foreheads of babies. Look, Old Mother, you knew
how to love. Remember your chicks? You took eggs to the broody

hens, watched them sit, breathed in
the straw smell of fluff, watched the chicks slip

from slick serum and cracked shell.

So here I am again, in your final room, bringing
egg flower soup, hot tea, rice pudding,

thinking when I lift you from the commode,
you’ll whisper Thank you. That when I show

you the photo of my father, your
husband, both of you so young, soaring

in your early heat, you won’t say,
Throw him away. No, you won’t say that.

There’s too much love, lost within
me, to imagine such a thing.

By George Kalogeris

That slender, dusty volume. When I was a student
Roaming the poetry aisles in search of a voice,
And never again so moved to open a text—
If only because its hundred-year-old pages
Had never been cut. That minor British poet.
So minor I can’t remember his name, though I took
His book home, and parted his late Victorian poems,
One by one, with the edge of a razor blade.

Nameless shade, I can’t unseal your lips—
But decade by decade, and ever more fervently, 
You speak to me from the gloom. Not even the epic
Poets, returning from the underworld,
Know what it means to be mute. Then back you go
In your slender jacket that couldn’t keep off the dust.

By Ken Holland

My friend and I stopped in a bar
we maybe shouldn’t have stopped in,
but we were on the way from here
to there and decided to pull off the road
somewhere in-between.

Somewhere in-between has its own charm
being a space where letters don’t get written,
and bills don’t get paid, and old lovers
just get older for all the time you get to ignore them.

A beer and a little space in-between you and
your friend who’s in the same in-between space
as you are, ignoring all the same things
you’re ignoring.

And the jukebox is lit and a record is spinning
beneath the needle but really what you’re listening to
is all the solitude inside your head,
one beer gone, another in its place
and you barely noticed the bartender’s hands.

The thoughts you’re having are of the breed
that pull up to the edge of a precipice
and make you wonder if anyone’s yet laid claim
to the dark acreage that lies below

              what the asking price might be

              just how much does the abyss go for these days

and your friend doesn’t even look
when you reach over to pick up the loose change
lying next to his beer. You already know
which tune he next wants to hear.
It’s the one in-between the one that just played
and the one you’ve yet to decide upon,

as if there’s no moment more merciful
than the one you’re edging toward.
The quarters in-between your fingers clicking
like tiny castanets on the brink of rhythm.

By David Hansen

With my sister, a lean, hard girl who looks like our mother, I discuss my trouble. When I’ve said it all, we talk about money.

“Just let me help,” I say.

“You are helping,” says my sister.

“Let me help more,” I say.

Now my sister fishes a roach out of a tiny bowl from which I, as a little girl, ate ice cream, and says, “You’ve changed the subject.”

“Have I?” I say.

“Yes,” she says. “We were talking about you. Whenever we talk about you, you try to talk about me instead.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I say. “But very well. What about me?”

She asks me whether I will do a certain thing about my trouble.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say.

In truth I will not do this thing, but I will come close. I will come so close that I cannot speak of this thing, even now.

My sister lights the roach and draws a gentle breath from it, leading it back into this life. Then she offers the roach to me.

“But should I?” I say.

“Probably not,” says my sister.

“I must warn you,” I say, accepting the roach, “that this will make me a mite dreamy.”

When we are both afloat my sister tells me of the business with her landlord, a bad situation she has only made worse by taking him to bed. I ask her how much she pays now. She tells me.

“For this?!” I say, but in truth, I adore this little place, with its seasoned hardwood and its hideous angels sculpted into the cornices.

By Jana Tigchelaar

While bodily autonomy and individual privacy are phrases commonly associated with the current discussion of reproductive rights in the U.S., the key term for understanding the culture of abortion starting in the late nineteenth century is knowledge, according to Kristin Luker in Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. As legal exceptions to the ban on abortion rested on a physician’s determination of medical necessity, abortion became the privileged ground of the doctor whose medical license gave him the sole ability to decide when abortion was medically justified. In other words, by the late nineteenth century, abortion became a question of who could lay claim to this specialized knowledge, and who could exercise their authority based on it. Luker calls this era from the 1880s until Roe v. Wade in 1973 “The Century of Silence” because while the medical community determined the necessity of abortion care, they also dominated the public narrative about abortion.

Other critics, however, point out that this was not a complete silence. In her book When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and the Law in the United States, 1867-1973, historian Leslie Reagan notes that women did “speak of their abortions among themselves and within smaller, more intimate spaces.” One such “intimate space” (which is paradoxically also very public) is within published literature. Abortion was a recurrent plot element in literature published in the early decades of the twentieth century; as Meg Gillette points out in “Modern American Abortion Narratives and the Century of Silence,” from “1910 to 1945, more than seventy abortions were contemplated or had by characters in modern literature.” This literature reveals a struggle that is firmly embedded in the narrative of knowledge and authority. In two of these texts, Edith Wharton’s 1917 novel Summer and Edith Summers Kelley’s 1923 novel Weeds, the question of knowledge is bound up with issues related to class, privilege, and connection—specifically the way the medical takeover of reproductive health care transformed the prior networks of knowledge shared among women.

By Emrys Donaldson

When I consider being pregnant myself, I imagine Sigourney Weaver from the original Alien: a wet head emerging, its teeth bared, as I scream and scream. What for others may evoke joy and anticipation for me evokes fear. In Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2021 horror novel Manhunt, pregnancy itself becomes a kind of body horror as testosterone turns people into sex-crazed zombies bent on cannibalism. A fertility specialist explains the process to a wealthy patient: “When they [the changed men] impregnate a victim, the baby is XY. No variation. It undergoes viral metamorphosis in utero and eats its way out of the mother at three or four months. A few hours later, it can hunt for itself. In a year, it’s sexually mature.” Gossip tells of “a woman in Vermont whose boy twins had eaten their way out of her.” In this science-fiction world, pregnancy is not only dangerous for all the usual reasons, but also because a zombified fetus might eat its way through the abdominal wall (just like in Alien). Abortion access saves lives. To abort, in this world, is to avoid being eaten from the inside out. Yet in the post-apocalyptic world of Manhunt, as in the twenty-first century United States, abortion access varies widely and depends on the pregnant person’s financial and social resources.

Under-resourced people undergo the brunt of pregnancy-related collateral damage in Manhunt, just as they do in real life. In the novel, a wealthy “bunker brat” impregnates a dozen women with her zombified boyfriend’s sperm to see if she will be safe trying to have a baby with him. Eleven women die; one gives birth to a girl infant. Yet, as seems to be the result of abortion bans everywhere, no one keeps close track of what happens to the infant once alive: one of the characters tries to convince herself, with no knowledge to support it, that “someone must have taken her. Kept her safe.” The desperate desire for a perfect infant at any cost leads, during the novel’s climax, to the death of the bunker brat at the hands of her wannabe baby daddy as well as the annihilation of the bunker, which was previously a walled garden for the wealthy. Class-based critique underpins the novel’s attitudes toward reproductive rights, as a safe pregnancy is a privilege only afforded to the richest people remaining.

By Jennifer Furner

Motherhood was not what I was expecting. I thought I had prepared myself—I read countless articles online, learned a myriad of soothing techniques, watched videos of women’s birthing experiences. But there had been no way to know what it would be like for me. And my experience was not at all like what I had been told to expect.

I was told any woman could give birth naturally if she breathed deeply enough, if she believed in herself. My daughter’s head was stuck on my pelvis, though, and in the end, it didn’t matter how much breathing or believing I did; I needed an emergency C-section.

I was told it’s a baby’s instinct to seek out the nipple and suck, but my baby only screamed at my bare chest.

I was told every mother had instincts that would guide her in how to care for her baby. But when my daughter cried for hours on end, my instincts told me nothing about what she needed, how to fix her problems.

Before my daughter was one-week old, I already felt like a complete failure as a mother.

Mothers and would-be mothers are told a lot of lies. “Motherhood is the best job in the world” is one. “Mothers put their children first” is another. These are lies, or at least certainly over-simplifications, because they imply that women stop being separate people once they become mothers, that they suddenly lose any ambitions they had for their own lives and think only about what is best for their baby. But mothers are people, and just like any other person, they have wants and needs. And flaws.

By Sarah Green

I first heard Lucille Clifton’s “the lost baby poem” when I was nineteen years old listening to some Napster download of a warbly and far away Ani DiFranco reciting it onstage: “the time i dropped your almost body down . . .” That year, although emergency contraception had recently hit pharmacies, a long holiday weekend in Ohio found me saved instead by a friend in my dorm who carefully counted out pills from a blister pack until they added up to the amount of ethinyl estradiol and norethindrone that would resemble a morning-after dose. To be clear, this was not an abortion. But I found myself thinking about the potential baby. I counted the months—it would have been a Pisces. I read Diane di Prima: “how am I to forgive you this blood? / Which was [. . .] to grow, and become a son?” Still, as I finished up a spring semester Incomplete and made an appointment to get on birth control, I knew I was lucky to be able to move on so smoothly.

Of two abortions she had as a young woman, Ani DiFranco—who would go on in mid-life to give birth to two children—writes in a 2019 LitHub essay: “I used to periodically count the ages that my first two children would’ve been if they had entered the world as such. [. . .] It was an exercise in the terrifying math of the near miss. Your life as you envisioned it could have effectively ended three, five . . . ten years ago. Just imagine. What kind of shell of your former dreams would you be now?”