By Julie Hanson

Featured Art: Dynamic Suprematism, 1915 or 1916 by Kazimir Malevich

We may intend well at the outset and persist
but much that happens
happens of its own accord.
We may awaken one day with but one bean left

but much that happens happens of its own accord.
You can set yourself right;
you can self-correct.
I have been changed greatly by things I have read.

And yet I don’t know how to do this simple thing:
lead another where it is best for me
for him to be. It happens sometimes, though,
mysteriously.

Maybe it’s a matter of pressure
or physics and moral equity, the combination
of any three things,
the planes are more aligned than we think.

When an explanation is provided, we don’t listen.
The mind will stop attending if it can.
I thought Algebra all those years ago
an exercise in patience;

little did I know that there’s a math
for each of us. For what was the present,
it was toil and struggle, try as one may,
try as one might,

the engine is flooded: variables
and integers, parentheses and coefficients . . .
and when I wondered why
the impact of History was outside of this,

Algebra gazed back at me, detached.
Surely there is no one left on Earth
who doesn’t love Bob Dylan, yet it’s possible that status
may not last. The mind will stop—

will stop attending if it can, and that’s got to be a problem
compounded by the plenitude of spam.
I received my first Christian case of such
on one February 26.

By Elton Glaser

Featured Art: The Simoniac Pope,  1824-7 by William Blake

I pay my sin tax
On cigarettes and booze, keeping afloat
The pious aspirations of Ohio.

A good smoke will corrupt the lungs
Just as sweetly as
London gin will weaken the liver.

There’s always a tangle of implications
That riff on the ineffable
And the strange banquets of the flesh.

I’m posting these dispatches to you
From my little boondock of the damned,
Eking out my last days

Among the living dead of the heartland,
The frightened corn farmers
And all those overdosed on drugs or Jesus,

Dope brewing in a duplex
Where the kids sleep in crusty diapers
And dogs wheeze on the fumes,

Three doors down from smalltown messiahs
Who vote against the liquor license
And for the blowhards and the jackboot.

Sometimes my mind is
The ripe green of late April, and sometimes
A dinge of old snow.

If you can stand it, what’s better than
The ammonias of intuition,
Which snap your head back

And make you come alert to
Everything around you,
Like a blind man in a minefield?

By Steven Cramer

Featured Art: The Convalescent, 1918-19 by Gwen John

We leased a two-story coloring book.
The peonies our neighbor planted

between our recto and her verso
turned out plastic to the touch.

She even kept them watered: pretty
funny, like the niblets we bought

in white cans named NO NAME.
But it’s the moon who found us

really hilarious that night—naked,
well-oiled from head to foot—

we swam across Lake MacBride.
No memories of you in snow . . .

I assume you sleep as I do, more
or less. When I can’t, can’t you?

Ginkgo trees canopied our one-
way street, no address to GPS.

Stopped for geese at Fresh Pond,
or the news on mute, I hear you,

also turned down low, say don’t
bother wondering if I’m dead. I do.

By Wendy Taylor

Featured Art: Blue Horse I, 1911 by Franz Marc

I’m at the Museum of Fine Arts
in Boston, drawn to Degas’
Racehorses at Longchamp. I remember
the first time you left a message
on my answering machine, mumbled
your soft voice, said, I’m in the mood
to go to the horse races tonight. A thing
I knew only from the Pomona County
Fair as a child where Grandpa lost our
dinner money and Grandma fell down. On
our date, we arrive before the 9th race, empty
lot, attendants gone, the turnstile jammed,
you jump over, I duck under. You dig a Daily
Racing Form from a Coke–spilled trash bin,
scrape up losing tickets off the cement. We sit
at a table with TV monitors, gloomy lights, no
view, no stands, no night air or dusty moon,
no romance, just stray cats licking nacho
cheese off chips, old men in torn fedoras
with dead faces and nicotine-washed fingers.
Today, I think of how your friends and I meant
to secretly scatter your ashes over the turf
after your memorial service, to let you rest
while the ponies and the trotters kept pace.
But I couldn’t give you up to the earth
or take you out of the race yet, and even now
through this oil on canvas, I can hear
you say, Put me on the favorite, baby.
You can’t win it, if you aren’t in it.

By Dion O’Reilly

Featured Art: Old Woman Seated by Honoré Daumier 

Looking at my X-ray, the doctor
says my hips resemble
those of an eighty-year-old woman.

Weeks later, when I huff into a tube
to blow out virtual birthday candles,
my allergist mentions
with what seems smug satisfaction
that my lungs whistle
like an eighty-year-old woman’s.

O hypothetical eighty-year-old woman—
you skeletal model
walking the hospital runway
in this year’s open-assed robe,
blue dots on cotton—
how do you like being the It Girl of Mortality,

archetype of: You are nearly nothing?

No, I want a physician who lists my body’s features
like a used-car salesman’s pitch—
here’s a real beaut, light-pink ’62
Plymouth Valiant with a push-button
transmission, perky butt fins, cat-print leather interior,
a spur hanging from the mirror,
and tires with some tread.

And its driver, an aging prima ballerina,
rose-red hair and rhinestone glasses
       out for a spin on a racetrack,
falling behind while the fans applaud
for old-times’ sake,
       looping and looping
before she veers off through a cow field.

By Dion O’Reilly

Featured Art: Hope, 1886 by George Frederic Watts and assistants

means whistle. A Spanish word
that sounds like silver
in the air, a little bird’s song
Oh My Dear. Oh My Dear.
Every year, the first time I hear
that smooth silbato,
it’s the first day of fall, a sparrow
with a small stripe lining its eye,
passing through
with the dying days
when the golden apple’s skin
feels softer than in summer,
a little more honey.
Oh My Dear. Little girl,
this is how it begins—
school, getting up early, not knowing
what you’re in for,
what your friends will do to you,
what you’ll do to them,
what being one year older
will mean in the world
of a girl. What to fear
and what to hope for.

Walk into the side of a mountain—
some cave of limestone and chert.
As the sparrow sings,
light a fire. It’s cold outside.
Let the flame flick the ceiling
with the ghosts of wild gazelles,
grab some coal, some ochre
the color of crusty blood,
and a rabbit’s thigh bones to trace them—
stickmen running with laughing legs,
spears carried high above their heads.
See who walks out
alive in spring.

By Kate Sweeney

Featured Art: Madonna, 1895 by Edvard Munch

threw a dead groundhog on my porch
the night after I stole her boyfriend.

My mother called the cops and the officer
knocked at its gut with his boot and blood drooled

from a bullet hole. That’s some good aim,
he said. Tell your daughter to watch out.

Years later, I tell this to a former student of mine
as we lay in bed, a Czech twenty-something

with a secret girlfriend in Prague.
Hanna, moje milovat—which he whispered

into his phone—was not hard to Google Translate.
I imagined how she could die. A slip down the stairs,

a misstep in front of the city bus. Rat poison is sweet,
the bottle under the sink whispered. Do not ingest.

Groundhogs are not native to the Czech Republic,
so he began to read about them, learned their nicknames,

the length of their burrows and lifespan.
He signed the tiny cards attached to my gifts, Love,

Your Woodcock. He probably meant Woodchuck.
And each time, I thought of Meg, the beautiful

redhead named after the Patron Saint of Animals
and how much she and that martyred rodent

did for my sex life: how the boy I took from her only
held me closer that summer in case she surprised us both

with her .22. Or, how I giggled when my Chesky
recited all the names for groundhogs in broken English,

marmot, monk, gopher, lawn-digger, woodchuck,
whistle pig, land-beaver, target practice, dirty rat.

And how his words were met with the same burn of jealousy
even when I opened my chest to him and he fired off again.

By Mark Kraushaar

Featured Art: Still Live with Bottles, 1892 by Roderic O’Conor

Donny Banya does the room repairs or
when he isn’t buzzed he does.
I’m the night clerk.
Alma runs the bar—plus she’s an artist.
Big John, the owner, does the books
and walks around and plans big changes
to the parking lot and ground-floor Men’s.
There’s other staff but tonight
it’s just the three of us, or four including John
who is dozing on the sofa by the magazines,

John who despite the plumbing in Room 21,
despite the mold and the mice, despite the blinking signage
and the boarded side-door, still thinks
he’ll put the Twilite right.
I got it on the cheap, he says. It’s beautiful.
He dozes and the rest of us chat

and Alma says she’ll sweep and clean the lounge herself—
“except I’ll need a hazmat suit.”
We all laugh, John stirs
and, stretching, sits up and lights a cigarette.
It’s already hot in June. And with the A/C on the fritz
and Alma set to quit and paint her nudes and trees full time
it’s as if, beyond the grimy carpets and the dingy stairs

the air itself is greased with disappointment.
Alma says the Twilite makes her sick—
the room keys, the doors and doorjambs,

TVs, counter tops, the complimentary cups—
the whole place is sticky. She says last week
she saw a fly that couldn’t free its feet for take-off
so she slapped it flat beside the guest phone
where it’s stayed three weeks.
Smudge with Reaching Wing, she calls it.

By Carrie Shipers

Featured Art: Voyages of the Moon, 1934-7 by Paul Nash

No one knows its origins. Like carpools
and happy hour, the Plan has simply always been.
Its awkward page breaks and stilted phrasing,
preservation of failed projects, employees

long departed, are evidence of its ambition,
how it defies the limits of language, software,
human thought. No one has ever read the Plan
in its entirety. Attempts to download it

result in system crashes, sunspots, and recession.
A single hard copy is rumored to exist,
its pristine pages collated and punched,
then stored in binders ordered on a shelf—

but no one knows exactly where. A hundred years
from now, when the company has ceased to be
and its headquarters crumble, the Strategic Plan
will rest among the rubble waiting to be found.

Lacking an exact translation, its runic nature
will give rise to cults that worship its straight lines,
its acronyms and colored fonts. It will not
inspire war, only art and rumination.

No one who encounters the Strategic Plan
remains untouched. It features in the dreams
of former employees who understand too late
its vital truth: Every aspect of the Plan—

its ever-shifting goals, its layers of revision
and appendices—acts as both map and goad.
The Strategic Plan is perfect even
in its flaws. It isn’t meant to be fulfilled.

By Carrie Shipers

Featured Art: The Purchaser, 1915 by Eric Gill

Do you pride yourself on your preparedness? For example,
have you already drafted a statement expressing shock

and sadness at the actions of Employee X? Did you
write it with a particular person and scenario in mind,

and if so will you say which ones? Given your choice
of disaster, would you prefer a product recall months

after concerns were first reported, high-level infidelity
involving interns and/or prostitutes, a flagrant

disregard for federal law, or embezzlement based on
shareholder fraud? Did you choose the challenge

you’re best poised to meet, or the one that sounded
the most fun? Speaking of fun, is it true most members

of your field make very poor decisions regarding alcohol,
sex and property damage, and therefore any conference

lasting longer than a day devolves into a bacchanal?
How often, in your personal life, do you attempt

to reframe information and influence someone’s view?
Is this a breach of ethics on your part, or would you insist

it’s simply human nature to want your own way?
Have you ever waged a secret, negative (i.e., “dark”)

campaign against a neighbor, coworker or person
sleeping with your spouse? Were your actions

as successful as you’d hoped? Despite your efforts
to predict what I might ask, were there any points

at which you felt compelled to obfuscate, equivocate
or hedge? Do you assume you did so with such skill

I couldn’t tell? On learning this was not the case,
would you feel more disappointment that you’d failed,

or relief someone finally had seen through your facade?
If the former, would your distress be eased by my sincere

apology, or do you doubt that such a thing exists?

By Justin Jannise

Featured Art: The Kiss, 1895 by Edvard Munch

Ban soap. Banish suds.
Sweep the dormitory clean
of polish. Let dust do
what dust does with no opinion

from feathers.
Invite musk. Be clothed
in scandal. Smear
and smudge and slander yourself

courageous. Fuck
courage. Stick your finger
in its wet mouth and kiss
its salty neck. Slip in

as many chickenshit deeds
as any deadbeat dad
ever did. Forget
birthdays. Ruin Christmas.

Run people over
in conversation. Let them finish
not one sentence.
Let them sit with their own nonsense

for a second. Leave them
tongue-tied and pent up
with unexpressed vexation.
Get off the pleasant train to nowhere.

Get back on with your most
regrettable self. Someone
will love you. Someone will still fall
madly in front of you.

By Ruth Bardon

Featured Art: L’Armoire à Glace, 1924 by Walter Richard Sickert

She is ignorant and admits to being
easily confused.

She tells her jokes with a cheerfulness
that shows how lost she is.

I want to help her and teach her how
the world works,

and I love this feeling of knowing
so much more,

but it also makes me hate her
a little more each time,

each time she admits she’s having trouble,
is helpless to assist,

like a mother of grown children,
who see her now

as someone who offers only facts
from the news,

a weather report or a small repertoire
of songs and stories,

like the mother I may become,
sitting and nodding

as if I understood the talk,
chiming in

and coming to attention
when my name is spoken.