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Issue 23 compiled by Darby Ricks

By Lara Egger

Featured Art: Form No. 5: Affection for Shapeless Things by Onchi Koshiro

My affection is a tabloid on sale at register three.
Citing moral reservations, the produce section

prefers not to get involved. Even the usually forgiving
cauliflower thinks my choices are questionable.

Have you noticed how some days the rush-hour light
makes the world look as if it’s snorkeling?

Stalled in the desperation of the strip-mall parking lot,
I tally my indiscretions, dog-eared romances

steadily expiring like glove-compartment coupons.
What would have been saved had I not agreed to love them?

Some nights my affection petrifies the lake,
a hush of ice tempering what lies beneath, and others,

a storm invites the water to trouble freely.
The clocks will be turned forward and then back.

Darkness falling, yet another way to describe twilight,
another way, dusk. Will you still think I’m a terrible person

if I tell you I meet emptiness everywhere and my heart
slips easily into its pockets? Up and down the supermarket aisles,

past cold-shouldered Kleenex and tight-lipped Lean Cuisines,
past the chorus of deli cuts chanting its condemnation: my affection

is a tabloid on sale at register three. When the night manager closes up
he pulls last week’s scandal from the rack—old stock

but his wife likes to read them. I write Catastrophe’s name
in steam on the shower door. I offer to give him a ride home.

By Danusha Laméris

Featured Art: Blue-tipped Dragonfly illustration from The Naturalist’s Miscellany by George Shaw

I wish you could see them: two thin blue needles
hovering above a bed of loosestrife and clover,
slivers of electricity, humming, almost invisible—
a glimmer of azure against the hillside. How
do their bodies hold the requisite organs?
Never mind the pull that makes them want
to wend their forms together this way. A tangle
of wires working themselves into union
this Sunday afternoon. Which, come to think of it,
is something I’d like to do with you, the portion
of desire I carry that much greater—as are the consequences
of crossing over into that lush country of dry grass
and end-of-summer weeds, where, if we weren’t
otherwise attached, we could make the most
of our own fleshly burden, lay it down
on the soft earth, its fine dust and buried flint,
the scattered flecks of fool’s gold.
Don’t you want to? Doesn’t it seem unfair
to be outdone by these mere fragments?
Almost more air than matter? But timing,
after all, is everything. And it looks like
I’ll have to appease myself with this tableau:
these two writhing out their little ecstasy
in broad daylight, coming together and then apart
and then together again, as if they had all day.
Which, given the brevity of their lives,
is quite a decadent expanse. Let’s try
and be happy for them, living into their late hours
with such abandon, while we are still
relatively young, the gift of want
stretched out before us, limitless and absolute.

By Patrick Meeds

Featured Art: Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz by Amedeo Modigliani

                                                                  —For Amy Dickinson

                                     You be a rubber bullet, and I’ll be fireworks
on TV. You dismantle your prejudices, and I’ll acquaint myself
with all the latest fads. You drag the river, I’ll manage expectations.
You shake your head and say yes, I’ll nod my head and say no.
I’ll call you Texas, and you can call me Nancy.

                                                                 Practical and precise, we
will compile a list of things we will need. Warm clothes
and synchronized watches. Miniature technology and hand-drawn
maps. Invisible ink and antique stationery. The music of Django
Reinhardt and a list of all the patron saints.

                                                                                    Things we will avoid?
Strict adherence to dogma and barbed-wire fences. Left-handed
compliments and uncomfortable shoes. Complex algorithms
and attempts at perpetual motion. Sing-alongs and potluck suppers.

                                                                   We will travel by train under
assumed identities and ride facing backwards. We will explain
ourselves to no one. Let’s be clear about one thing, reinvention
is the key. Look, there’s an abandoned car with a tree growing
through it. There’s an old bathtub with flowers planted in it.
There’s a fence made of old bicycle frames. There’s a car with an
antenna fashioned from an old coat hanger. These things were
one thing, now they are another.

By Lisa Ampleman

Everyone on television is apologizing.
      I’m sorry I kissed your sister. I’m sorry
I sold the dog. We watch, each with our own

TV screen we walk or run toward. The treadmills’
      wheels whine louder and louder.
In the strength training area, a man grunts

and drops a heavy weight. I wish I hadn’t eaten
      so many foods with high fructose corn syrup.
I’m sorry I got you addicted to sugar.

On one wall-mounted TV, two men in an octagon
      with netted sides try to kick each other
in the face. When one pins the other,

he moves gradually, pulling the loser’s arm
      further up, maximum pain. The other
struggles to buck him off. It makes me feel sick.

There are two minutes left in the round.
      I’m sorry I voted against you. I didn’t come here
to make friends. A few men shout

as they play hoops on a half court,
      but the rest of us are silent and alone
in our movement. We must contort our bodies

to give them fitness, here in the kingdom
      of calisthenics, our feet dully hitting
the treads. I’m useless; I can’t get rid of

this stack of Sears Catalogs
      or this broken walking cane. I’m sorry
that the house is full of trash.

“Exercises,” too, Ignatius called
      the spiritual retreats that “have
as their purpose the conquest of self.”

By Melissa Studdard

Featured Art: Children’s Games by Édouard Jean Vuillard

came early, sputtering and spilling
Kumbaya from the windows,
the little punks inside eating a breakfast
of Pop Rocks and candy cigarettes left over from Halloween
and hiding the wrappers in the creases
between seatback and seat. I never sang
but floated instead in my own world of thought.
All you had to do was look at an issue
of National Geographic to know everything
was extraordinary and people’s bones were full of stars.
Cecil, the driver, got his neighbors
to help paint the Jesus bus into a roll of Lifesavers candies—
all bright and vertically striped—green, yellow, red, and orange, 
Lifesaver in perfect white script across a strip of blue. Cecil,
tenderhearted conveyor of children to the terrible glory of New
Light Baptist Church, Cecil, who after nearly hitting a squirrel,
had to pull to the side of the highway to pray. Who could blame him
for not understanding that the grace he sought was already on his bus,
packed into forty-two little sugar-smacking bodies?
And hadn’t I once killed a frog by trying to save it?
Spilled it hard on the sidewalk like the spoils of an egg?
If the sky had ruptured above me, I would have cleaned up the clouds
and apologized for the mess. But the rebel gods kept
hanging around me like Woodstock hippies, so I dared some revival
to happen with the Christ frog. I was six and still
decades away from translating the voices tiptoeing through my mind.
Everywhere I went, I looked for spiderwebs with secret messages.
Maybe there was a pig to save. And when the bus backfired,
I thought I saw an afterlife emerge. Weeks later,
when I awoke screaming the fourth night in a row, I wanted
my parents to tell me it was possible for us to be alive
without hurting each other. I wasn’t dreaming of squirrels
or frogs. Just the Sunday School lesson on wartime and atheism:
how the good of us, when commanded by soldiers,
refused to stomp on a picture of Jesus
and so had their heads chopped off,
how I too should be willing at all costs
to keep my feet clean of my lord.
I was a good girl and learned my lessons well.
From others’ non-Christian necks would grow something
as secular and boring
as heads. But from my neck, an endless field,
and in that field,
congregations upon congregations of daisies—
all of them wearing the sad face of night.

By Claire Scott

Wile E. Coyote free-falling from a cliff,
Sylvester flattened by an iron safe,
scads of sodden Kleenex at my side.

I put my name on a waitlist for mercy
(a light-year long).
I murmur worn mantras,
send prayers to made-up saints:

Saint Jackson of bankruptcy,
Saint Tiffany of clogged toilets,
Saint Lester of shapeless days
& tedious tomorrows,
Saint Elmer of the toss-and-turn.

Someone else dreams my dreams at night.

Am I missing the point
or was it never there?
A diver yanks a rope,
a wrestler taps out.
I tip over my King.
Checkmate.

By Amy O’Reilly

Someone scratched out the C so it reads “Baby hanging Station.”
What isn’t conspiring to kill Baby?
Pillow. Blanket. Mother’s sleeping body like an island
resort battened down for the wet season,
the beds stripped of their festive linens,
clink of glasses beneath the bar while outside
the storm rages.

Motherhood turns out to be
less spot the warning signs,
more choose which ones to heed—

Like this floating table, its baby-sized crater
inundated with other tiny humans’ feces.
Beneath the black safety strap
my son looks sacrificial,
like he’s about to be experimented on.
Even when I’ve chosen right I have surely chosen wrong.

By Christopher Kempf

                   Or dearest theater.
                                                      Aren’t we
all, the premise is, for one
                                    half hour, in tight zoom, suitable
for history? The Lyndhurst couple
         married, this weekend, at the bagel shop
                                                on Central. Who met
               among the jams & pumpernickels.
                                                                           The suspect
who fled the Chevron holdup
                                                on horseback.

                                          Athens, for instance,
was less its democracy—solemn
                  ecclesia, Plato
                                            bent to his parchment—than
the price of goat’s milk in the Way
                                         of Sheepherders. Ahead

           at five—teens
     skipping sleep. Teens
                                        at St. Cecilia’s filling the boot
                            for Alzheimer’s. Teens trend-
                                 huffing. Behind the co-hosts
the city poses on its screen. Sunset
                                       flashes. For a minute
  our sundry lesser dramas—our bodies
            pulled from retention ponds, holiday
                                              toy lineups—form
a single American skyline. Small nation
           of lotto & weather radar.
                                             The ecclesia—they

did so, they believed, to banish
                       the idea of distance—prohibited
                                  star-gazing, so faithful
       they were to the stage
                                         & polis.

                                                      At Taco Bell
yesterday, two men
                     pulled knives on each other because,
            they said, of a woman. One
                                 drove off with her. The other
sacked Troy. We take you
         live, now, to Friday’s parade route. We
                                    will stay with this story
      as it evolves.

By Craig van Rooyen

Featured Art: Ce fut un religieux mystère by Maurice Denis

—After Ada Limon

Behind the rotting fence in their first house,
my mom and dad are eating canned mushroom soup
over buttered toast in a one-bedroom Kentucky clapboard
where a turntable spins the same Bill Gaither Trio record,
“Because He Lives,” until they go almost mad
with their stained Formica floor and overflowing toilet
and their longing for heaven, and I love them so.
She is crying at the stove because today
she crashed the rusted Dodge Dart and he has no way
to drive the circuit of his churches in the morning—
preaching at each about the Second Coming
and how to get right with Jesus. I want to offer
her a beer, but there I am in her womb,
kicking to be noticed among their other troubles
and, in any event, she has never had a drink.
He is thinking about his sermon,
the one that will end in an altar call because
he knows people need to walk toward something together
after they have walked away from each other all week long.
First the white church, then the black one across town.
And my father is going to save the country, and then the world
by baptizing its citizens one by dripping one.
Nights, they watch the news on a black-and-white
Magnavox, wrestling with the rabbit ears
to see, through the snow of static
what the world is becoming, believing
it will end in the best way possible.
During the week, she delivers babies
in her starched white uniform, knowing,
in these last days, they will never die.
Years later, some might say their hope
was not a hope, or was not the right kind of hope,
but rather a sort of escape from the reality of their time,
but I want to tell you some hope is better than none.
Look at them there, on their knees, praying
their small prayer. Not for the healing
of the nation, or for an end to the war,
but something more manageable, more
imaginable—for a car to start, for something
in its crushed innards to turn over and catch fire.

Editors’ Note:

If, at the turn of the 22nd century, there is still such a thing as an anthology. If readers of poetry continue to entertain the sometimes troublesome idea that ten or twenty poems can reflect whole movements, schools, trends. If the looking-back literati—skeptical of Automaticism, 2101’s prevailing poetic tendency—seek some sense of our long-gone zeitgeist . . . If all that. Then what poems will be read as representative of the early 21st century? Say, from 2001 to 2018?

We asked some of our collaborators to take their best guess.

We suggested that, first, they consider poems that are great own their own—devastating, voicy, gut-busting. But, second, we wanted to hear about poems that address the Big Issues—or what might be remembered as the Big Issues—of our day.

Adrienne Su, Emily Mohn-Slate, Anders Carlson-Wee, Tony Hoagland, Chiyuma Elliott, Keith Kopka, Veronica Schuder, and Mario Chard took up the challenge. Here are their choices:

                                        “The Woman in the Moon,” by Carol Ann Duffy • “The Kind of Man
                                        I Am at the DMV,” by Stacey Waite • “Among the Prophets” and
                                        “Breakers, before the Feds shut it down,” by Essy Stone • “Statue
                                        of Liberty,” by Ann Killough • “Since You Ask,” by Carl Phillips •
                                        “Epithalamion Ex Post Facto” by Joshua Bell • “A Small Gesture of
                                        Gratitude,” by Mark Bibbins • “Another Poem on Blue,” by Claire
                                        Bateman • “Love at Thirty-Two Degrees,” by Katherine Larson •
                                        “Look,” by Solmaz Sharif

These are poems, to borrow from Mario Chard’s title, that see the present deeply. They’re some of the Gems of the 21st.