By Laura Read

Featured Art: Seated Man and Woman by Célestin François Nanteuil

At the middle school meeting for parents of children
in Accelerated Learning, I sit at a lunch table across

the cafeteria from him. At first he is just
part of the scene, like the board listing prices

for soda and chips, or the English teacher addressing us,
famous for tearing up a kid’s paper if it wasn’t

double-spaced. She is talking about the importance
of Latin roots, this new language made from taking apart

what they already know. On the first day of school,
my son recited them to me from the back seat,

wearing his new cool sweatshirt and no longer carrying
a lunchbox, his lunch jammed instead into a plastic

bag like the ones he told me the other kids would have.
Port. Carry. Co com con. With. The man’s face

is starting to look like two faces, like that optical
illusion of an old woman and a young woman,

the same line for the chin and the nose.
The teacher tells us, They’re going to struggle.

They’re going to fail. They’re twelve. Let’s face it—
no one here wants to go back to seventh grade.

By Fleda Brown

Featured Art: Swan by Mary Altha Nims

1
I am full of irritation this morning
which makes folding the fitted sheet
a disaster, wrinkles smashed inside.
Down at the dock, the swan hissed
at me and I thought, good for you,
swan, what business do we have
in your life, anyway, making up myths
in which you rape, or die?
Beautiful things often hiss if you get
too close. Or if you try to neaten them up
like clothes. A swan’s neck is tough
enough to twist you into knots.
Beauty, I don’t know how to feed it
without getting bitten.

2
Swan’s wings are heavy enough to kill you.
Eleven swans at once have traveled our lake
in perfect synchrony in the boat wakes,
their heads so far from the wild bucking,
they seem to have forgotten their bodies.
Terrible flowerings, they are going
somewhere else, to do what they do.

3
A male swan is a cob, the female a pen.
Who thought those up? They make a kind
of sense, though, the same kind of sense
that turns a swan’s neck plus its reflection
into an ice-hook.

4
If a challenger comes too near the nest
the cob climbs on him and shoves
his head down until he drowns. Not shoves.
He rests his beak quietly, relentlessly
on the neck as if it were the challenger’s
decision to bow under, and he were
helping him stay there. His big body
covers the other, except for one wingtip.
There’s a leisurely quality, like love.

When swans mate, their heads and necks
form a perfect valentine. Or, they intertwine
necks. Last night I wanted to watch
the movie unencumbered by your hand
on my breast. I was touchy. You were all
winding; I, all hiss.

By Andrea Hollander

Featured Art: L’Heure du silence by Henri Georges J. I. Meunier

After I confessed, all I’d hear
was the scratch of my father’s ballpoint
against his prescription pad
as I stood before him at his office desk
on the first floor of our house. Yes,
I’d say, I did it, I left the mower out
all night, forgot
to turn the sprinkler off, lied
about the party,
the pack of cigarettes,
the exact hour I got home.

His hours or sometimes days
of silence entered our house
like an unwelcome guest,
an intruder we agreed
to treat with kindness,
each of us saying Sit here
when we didn’t want him
to sit anywhere.

After I apologized and promised
never to do it again, whatever it was,
after I made his coffee
in the morning, served it
with two Lorna Doones on the saucer
beside the china cup, sometimes
he would thank me.
But even then I didn’t know
if it would take one more
silent dinner or two
before I’d hear forgiveness
in his voice, that other guest
who arrived unpredictably
while I wept myself to sleep,
that guest whose safe return
I prayed for, the one
my mother prayed for, too,
she told me later, that guest
she thought she’d married
in the first place.

By Martha Silano

Featured Art: Mount Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cézanne

the Bible’s a Mount Everest of metaphor—
the seventh day more likely the seven

trillionth, the Holy Spirit about as real
as Casper the Friendly Ghost. My mother

who never once definitively sang
in the tune of Judgment, the lexicon

of flames. My equivocating, not-sure-he’s
the-Savior mother, who calls with an urgent

message: Billy Graham’s 95th birthday special.
Mother of Peace, mother who sanctioned

my Sunday school exodus when my teacher
refused to define adultery, who rolled her eyes

at shiny offering plates, who yadda yadda’d
the Lord’s Prayer, mother too busy browsing

The Female Eunuch to read to us from the book
of Jonah, to reason a man could live three days

in the belly of a whale, mother lacking sufficient
conviction to share the story of the loaves and fishes,

inciting me to fall to my knees as I did one day in 1974,
the man on the screen having told me I must.

By Billy Collins

Featured Art: A Caravan in the Desert by Narcisse Berchère

The camel felt nothing
as it stood outside the encampment,
its nose lifted in the thin desert air.

And no one in the caravan
even noticed the straw,
or if they did, no mention was made of it

that evening as they sat in a circle
inside a colorful tent
talking quietly under the numerous stars.

By Mary Angelino

Featured Art: Japanese Iris (Large Blue Iris) by John Edwards

His dad did coke. His mom died young.
We watched porn so I could learn—
he was my first. I didn’t know enough
to do things right like other girls.

We watched porn so I could learn
to say what I did and didn’t want,
to do things right like other girls.
He filmed me almost naked once.

To say what I did and didn’t want
was a trap, an argument that didn’t stop.
He filmed me almost naked once—
he lost the tape when we broke up.

A trap, an argument that didn’t stop:
he was my first, I didn’t know enough,
he lost the tape when we broke up,
his dad did coke, his mom died young.

By Patrick Ryan Frank

Featured Image: Merrymakers at Shrovetide by Frans Hals, 1616-7

Tumbling down that wide Niagara of laughter,
the blonde girls and the gray-haired men beside them
swirl away through picture after picture.
If there’s champagne, there’ll be a waiter’s smirk.
If there’s an ice sculpture, it will be a swan
weeping for its flaws. If there’s a pool,
a horrible beautiful woman will end up pushed
and the garden will quiet just to hear her thrash
within the weird slick of her ruined silk—
and then the jokes and it all begins again.
Oh vanity, why won’t you leave me home?
Why must you pull me by the elbow down
that crowded hallway then leave me by the wall,
awkward as an interrupted joke,
adrift in the back of half the photographs:
a face turned too far left, mouth spread too wide
to grin, gaping as if to gulp back breath?

By David Yezzi

Featured Image: Pink Roses by Fidelia Bridges, 1875
Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Across the net,
she wilts and falls
behind, so I let
a few balls

slide by
in the midgy air
and drawn sky
of late summer.

Is this
letting her win
a Judas kiss,
the warm sin

of fooling too
far a daughter
who,
slow to laughter,

stakes all in all
on a game?
She’s tall.
I call her name,

to snap her
back from the place
she goes, blur-
ring the odds: ace,

game, set.
Her stride returns,
as I abet
her. She learns

no lesson, nor
do I hint
at helping. After,
we sprint

on the road
home, our run
hung with gold
silk spun

by spiders in
patchy pines.
The threads glint
in sidewise lines,

cinches borne
by the air,
so loosely worn
they’re hardly there.