By Fay Dillof

But maybe you don’t have to be happy,
Kid, to be happy

you’re alive,
and it’s enough to stand on one leg, tilting,

and toss your heart like a stone.
To look at a magnolia tree

and see a magnolia tree. A crow, a crow.
Make something spectacular out of . . .

I hid, as a child,
notes beneath stones for my future self.

Now I am my future self
and could blame my upcoming operation.

Or the text I just wrote about my daughter,
not realizing she was on the thread. Roe,

overturned. Or my closest friends, all of them
away, it seems, in Italy or France

and how they won’t stop WhatsApping me.
But maybe you don’t have to be happy

to know what to do
with an afternoon as green as this.

By Fay Dillof

It wasn’t hard,
my mother said.
With a sad
mother-in-law
and two toddlers
in her house,
she was busy.
Plus, the NICU
was a 30-minute drive away.
And she didn’t drive.
So concerning
her new baby––
out of sight,
out of mind.
A strategy
which, because it worked,
became the trick
my infant brain learned
to play as well.

                                                                                 •

                                                                        Why is it, a friend asks, you don’t trust anything unless you can kiss it?

•
If
I
recall
every
word
of
a
song
I
learned
when
my
child
was
small
in
which
archipelago
was
rhymed
with
said
hello,
why,
every time my husband returns from a trip and sees the way I look at him,
does he have to ask Remember me?

                                                                       Hello?

•

                                                                         Like chains of islands . . . stretching across three sections of the brain . . . neural pathways

                                     form––fast––during experiences of
high intensity . . . then later reactivate, through associative . . .

leaps . . .

                                                                    causing–– thwack !–– . . . flash-

backs . . . as in when my cousin . . . who’s been shot at . . . heard his friend . . .
yet another friend . . . had been . . . It’s an automatic
response . . . the instant recall of terror . . . the sense . . . sudden . . . intrusive and

interrupting . . . that it’s happening

                    again . . . when are trigg . . . thwack . . .

thwack-thwack thwack-thwack . . .

•
I wanted to die
when my child was born.
Postpartum, I was pumped
to jump in front of cars,
be eaten by flames, brawl––anything
to save her. I called this
a mother’s instinct to protect.
What it felt like, though,
was lust.

                                                                •                                                   
                                                                One way to communicate lust
                                                                in ASL is by tracing a line from the head
                                                                down
                                                                to
                                                                the
                                                                nape
                                                                of
                                                                the
                                                                   neck,

                                                                like this:

                                                                                                                                •                               
                                                                                                                                Remember when
                                                                                                                       you showed me another?

•
I had a friend when I was young
who had a rat named Memory.

Do you want to hold her?

                                                                   •                                                     
                                                                Daughter, the day                        

                                                                you were born, I placed two hands

                                                                in front of my chest,       
                                                                making the sign for door,            

                                                                and out, from the shadows , tiptoed
                                                                                                                                                a deer.

By Fay Dillof

Remember waiting for the flight attendant to bring you your silver dinner? Then for her to free you of it? Buckled in, in blank suspension, confusing flying east with back in time? As if later, it might be anyone you ever adored, young as when last you saw them, waiting for you when you emerge, spacewalking through the humming tunnel.

And all the while, so far from earth, impossible not to think of death. All that life down there happening, heedless of one’s departure. Was it that––

a fright in how seamlessly the film is spliced?––or the pull of some half-belief in different planet, different moons?––that got me, long ago, to sleep with someone I didn’t want, cheating on someone who, up until then, I’d fooled myself I did. Lies exploding lies. Then universes.

It’s always out there somewhere, isn’t it––the damage or potential for it, like floating space debris? Now, trembling trees, sideways rain––there’s nothing not in motion, vexed by unseen forces. Love,

like I know the moon’s, I know your face, its different phases––waxing, waning, full. And this one too––not new but the worst––dark and turned away from me. How I wish I believed in the multiverse––this life, only one articulation of some big and/or in which we get it right. And

/or, what didn’t bring me to you? You to me. We were always meant to collide. But how can it be that

Wind, wind––headlights of a passing car

By Maria Zoccola

probably it was dinner and dancing
or dinner and music or dinner and
i don’t know, some other postscript
to the initial round of consumption,
shooting or drinks or riding around
in his truck while he pointed out
land the company was buying up.
that’s not important. what i want to
remember is yanking the chain off
the door to get to him on the stoop,
evening sun slicing through every
chink in the slow-rotting pergola
overhead, den of carpenter bees
and termites eating their lives
straight into the bone. he smiled
at me, wire frames and pinstripes
and the same kind of watch my
father wore, and when he put out
his hand and said let’s get the hell
out of here, i grabbed on so tight
he cussed and had to shake me off
his fingers. it wasn’t always so
gory, is what i’m saying. or maybe
i mean that if there were problems,
i was still digging their roots.

By John Gallaher

I search “What to wear when meeting your birth mother,” and the first result
is “Ways to Ruin an Adoption Reunion.” So now I have this new thought
to occupy myself with. “Be interested,” it says: favorite foods; favorite music;
what did they like to do in school; favorite place to vacation;
share pictures of yourself growing up.

In high school, junior year, I was George Gibbs in Our Town,
the 1938 meta-theatrical three-act play by Thornton Wilder,
regarding small-town Grover’s Corners. I married Emily Webb,
who died during intermission
and ghost-watched us through the final act, “Death
and Eternity.” She asks the Stage Manager if anyone
truly understands the value of life, and he responds, “Not really.”

The idea of the Our Town graveyard though, that’s something
I get: the names in order, catalogued, in their folding chairs,
neat rows, the Stage Manager wishing the audience a good night.

We botch so many things, whole lives sometimes.
People should say “botch” more. It’s a useful word,
so we don’t have to say “fuck up” so often. That’s what
I could say when I meet my birth mother. It will be a Monday,
we’ll be strangers in a restaurant who bear a resemblance,
and I will want nothing but to suddenly appear
in all her old family photos, birthdays,
4th of Julys, Christmases. I’m practicing each of them
in front of the bathroom mirror.

By David Thoreen

Keep your line advancing north to south and east to west,
and that’s why you shut the overhead door against dust kicking up;
here’s how you light a grill and how to brush the grate

when it’s hot enough; and here’s how you fish an ice cube
from your drink and toss it on the sizzle and laugh;
and here’s how you sear the steaks two minutes each side at four-fifty

and how to pour a beer so it’s not all foam; here’s how you put two bottles
in the freezer to chill them quick; here’s how you install storm windows
in the fall; here’s how to tie a necktie in what they call a double Windsor;

and here’s how to pour a glass of wine so it doesn’t run down and stain
your mother’s good tablecloth; and here’s how you say a blessing
at Thanksgiving and how you tell Uncle Chuck to pump the brakes;

and here’s how you make an Old Fashioned by muddling sugar and bitters
in a short glass called a tumbler and add this much bourbon and then the ice,
stirring like you’re trying to decide whether to vote Republican or Republican—

and don’t forget the maraschino cherry; and here’s how after dinner
we’ll have dessert and football, if not necessarily in that order;
here’s how you cut a pie in slices the way your mother likes;

and here’s how you mix another one, and that’s how you get a first down;
and here’s how you wield a plunger; and here’s how you know it’s time
to call in the big guns; and here’s how you balance a checkbook;

and here’s how you polish dress shoes and drive to church in a snowstorm;
here’s how you shovel your walk and then your neighbor’s walk
because the lucky S.O.B.’s in Florida; and here’s how you light a fire

when the chimney’s cold and won’t draw; and here’s how you tell Uncle Chuck
he’s made his bed and now must lie in it; and here’s how you mix gin
and dry vermouth in a cocktail shaker and—no, you need a martini glass

for this; and here’s how you mix gin and lime juice and ribbons of cucumber
with ice in the cocktail shaker and strain it into a tumbler with fresh ice
before you top it with three ounces of tonic and stir like a man contemplating

the difference between sin and failure; and here’s how you burn rubber
if it’s a rental; and here’s how to freshen a lady’s drink; and here’s
a chart so you’ll remember which glass to use; and here’s how you prep

a surface for painting; and here’s how to get paint out of the can and onto the wall;
and here’s how you unbalance a checkbook; and here’s to God above
and save the middleman; and here’s how you change the sparkplugs

in a Ford; and here’s when you better start looking out for number one;
and here’s how you take a thermos to work; and here’s how you squeegee
a windshield; and that’s what happens when you fly too close to the curb,

and here’s how to change a tire; and here’s how to muddle your bitters;
and here’s how to take two tablets of Alka-Seltzer before work;
and here’s how to unwind after work; and here’s how to unwind some more;

and here’s how to slowly simmer and keep the lid on till there’s no
hiding that you’re a pot of boiling water; and here’s how you lie in bed
wondering why you didn’t make it.

By Linda Bamber

1. Cocktails with a Curator

Idle moment in the day
Cocktails with a Curator playing on my laptop
the Italian-inflected curator going through the idiotic ritual
of matching a cocktail to the featured painting but
urbanely
his dignity uninjured
(I love this guy!)

and I’m eating lunch, when
BOING!
something flashes on the screen.
Three men with rifles trudging home

very little to show for the morning’s outing
one measly rabbit
nine hungry dogs
village life. It’s Bruegel’s famous Hunters in the Snow
WHAM!

I keep using these caps in an attempt to express
the shock I felt
sandwich halfway to my mouth
stars coming out of my boinked brain

but Mr. Smoothie has moved on.
Up now is a portrait of Charles the First (Hunters’ first owner)
painted from below
so he’d look taller than he was.
Charles is all in silks

huge hat
hand on hip
elbow in the viewer’s face as if to say
fuck-you-I’m-King. In Hunters the figures all know

their own significance
as Charles the Short did not
or his very horse wouldn’t have had to be depicted bowing down to him
nostrils to the ground. For Bruegel

size is about perspective
not ego
the women stoking fire near an inn
smaller only because farther from the viewer
not less consequential.
Others bearing burdens down the hill
are smaller still

at the bottom on a greenish lake
a dozen skaters just
a few black brushstrokes each
but playing hockey
dancing
falling
rushing to the fallen one to help. Are you alright?
Are you alright? I’m fine
I’ve just had my head
mysteriously boinked

not chopped off like poor Charles’.
Who lived, says Smooth, in tumultuous times.

2. Not Dead

My basement is crammed with the past.
I don’t expect to lose my head betimes, like Charles,
but time’s a-wasting, so routinely I resolve to clear it out.
Suddenly

a photo of myself at six
stops me like a slap.
Behind me hangs a reproduction of . . .

Hunters in the Snow! The damn thing dwelt in my earliest home
wired my neurons
disappeared

so of course my head went wham when it came back!
Now here’s this little gap-toothed Linda
smiling to oblige
the photo’s edges crinkled
as if a pinking shears had cut it out. How many of me are there
back there / down here?

I feel a fleeting helpless obligation
to retrieve them all. Among the skaters
one
horizontal millimeter stroke of red reads as
some girl’s skirt.
Seconds ago she was holding hands with some fellow brushstrokes
now on their way to help the fallen friend. Will he disintegrate

without her
like my hasty, not-dead, brush-stroked life
dissolving as I go? Or (egregiously) find someone else?

No. This is Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow.
A fire is being stoked to roast a meal.
The hunters have come home.
No way this kid skates off with someone else.

By Angela Ball

Where we set foot
matters, is status
and purchase.

If on red,
you may be important;
on purple, royal. Stepping

out, stepping in;
stealing someone’s place
in a coffee line, pharmacy,

or marriage; watching a horseshow
without realizing that the horses’
high-stepping energy

comes from lead weights
added to their iron shoes. The riders
form a line. Slowly, the judge walks

horse to horse, checking
conformation, feeling
his trick knee, thinking of the arrogant

Nazis of his youth, whose goosesteps said
We will stamp you out forever,
vermin Jews.

By Kimberly Johnson

Wow, what a dumb universe: I’m the one
Always running after risk, who can’t walk
Past a vertical fancy of sandstone

Without eyeballing a route up, who’ll take
What the stranger offers, scoff the fire code,
Jump out of planes, rev the dirtbike

Past a hundred out on desert washboard roads,
Was me who bought the snake, sweet snuggly pet
For the kid but really because I love to fold

Its girth around my neck and stroll the street,
Half lightheaded and half charmed
To feel it clench its length around my throat,

Was you who kept your distance, so alarmed
At salmonella, as you were at heights,

Tight spots, stage lights, throngs, germs, and other harms,
Preferring to be imperiled by the night
Sky with its changing moon-moods, and by poems.

I crash around like rashness is my birthright,
Like I want to kiss death daily on the mouth.
Hellbent and headlong my nymphly feet

Stomp around on muddy fate’s doubtful path
Like it’s never going to stomp me back,
Like it’s not coiled down in the undergrowth,

Never going to rattle scales or choke
Around the windpipe in sinuous turns
Or ankle-prick with single venomed strike.

I’m the one holds the firework as it burns.
You’re the one safe as houses. Safe as urns.

By Kimberly Johnson

The birds are doing their birdy thing again,
Flustering about the feeders, thrust and wheel,
Giving the noisy business to the sun-

Flower seeds then whizzing to the windowsill
To inspect the hungry colors of the stained
Glass. I had thought that when you passed, they’d all

Pipe down, chill out, put some somber on and
Show some respect, for hell’s sake, for the guy
Who snuck them into everything he penned.

But the birds don’t mind. They’re like ghosts that way,
Those splendid, headlong numberless who fuss
Indifferent at the edges of our days

Mercilessly busy with the clamorous,
Headstrong work of refusing to be lost.

By Robert Cording

October 14, 2022, was the fifth anniversary of our son Daniel’s death. “Anniversary”—I use the word to mean the date on which an event took place. Not a celebration but the marking of something like the start of a war or, in our case, the day our lives changed irrevocably. The word comes from the Latin anniversarius, returning yearly, from annus, year, and versus, turning. This day that returns each year is like the turning and returning of the line in (versus) poetry; or, if one thinks of versus’s origin, the turn and return of the plow for planting. Of course, an anniversary is also an occasion that asks one to look back over what has passed—like the forty years of marriage which my wife and I just celebrated. A marriage that includes the birth of our three sons, the death of one of them, and the intimacies of love and suffering that have come with our time together.

By Robert Cording

It just appeared for three days,
then disappeared.

We never saw it arrive,
the closest we ever came to seeing it depart

later in the day was the trembling branch
it always sat on.

For three straight mornings, we woke
to the owl outside our kitchen windows.

It sat with an otherworldly calm,
like a god or a statue of a god

the year our middle son died, warming itself
in the late winter, early morning sun.

Hidden in plain sight,
its mottled and speckled body and wings

became the tree it sat in,
forcing us, again and again, to refocus our vision

to find it. Of course, we wanted it
to mean something—

but when we opened the door
for a closer look, it never moved, never

turned its head, never acknowledged
we were there.

It just hunched in the cold, unflinching,
nape feathers lifting in the wind.

By Steve Myers

That’s where a peacock lived,
its otherworldly mewling,

so like that of a hungering child,
now ceased. An emptiness grieved

as deeply as the too-soon
vanishing of its hi-def blue.

Don’t you long for the ghostly
passenger pigeon’s return, or

the Appalachian panther,
the pine martens, Eastern elk?

So I do for my wandered brother,
whose three-days-old heart leaked

his life’s blood out, whose sudden
abdication had me watching

years after for a flash of blanket,
listening for that high wild cry

I once thought I caught as I swung
through this hairpin past the empty pen,

window down, blue sky flaring
like the crest of Krishna, full of eyes.

By Nick Flynn

Your bible tells us that the Lord knows
why every bird falls. It isn’t for lack of want—
their song is seed seed seed. A canary’s
heart beats faster than light, fill a room
with them & it will glow. I once held a bird
in my hand, I once held a man in my arms.
I once let a doctor cut her way inside me
so I could live a little longer. Each was me,
circling myself, unable to land. As if I was
an astronaut & woke one morning in deep
space to nothing but silence. Here’s me,
beaming frantic signals back to earth, come
in, Earth, come in. Each cell in our bodies
is like this astronaut, each reacts the same
way—the moment we die, the cells want to
hold on. It takes a few hours or a few days
(our hair still grows in our coffins, fingernails
long when they dig us up) to understand
(heart brain blood / stopped quiet cold).
This morning I tell my daughter we are
canaries in a coal mine, I don’t know why
I tell her this—maybe the radio was playing
Another Iceshelf Gone. Do you know what
a coal mine is? I ask. It’s a hole, she says,
where they get the coal. The miners work in
darkness, a light strapped to their foreheads,
digging into walls. A canary is a tiny light in
search of seed—why would the miners bring
that canary down into that hole? To hear it
sing, she answers.

By Joanne Dominque Dwyer

When I get to heaven, I find the inhabitants shoeless,
braless, stock portfolio-less. Everyone has yellowed teeth.

Barbers save the hair they sweep up from the floors,
feed it to hogs, make winter hats with it. No such thing as

windows, only holes in the walls, and murals on the walls
of leaping antelopes and trapeze artists in glittery spandex.

People stare at the airbrushed pigmented semblances the way
they once bored their eyes into television and computer screens.

No one owns a car, speedboat, or lawnmower. No grass to cut,
as people eat the planted seeds before they can take hold in dirt.

Then soccer fields germinate and luxuriate inside their stomachs.
Jesus used the word inherit, and on long scavenging strolls I’ve

accrued my inheritance of eleven colorful elastic hairbands,
one snow cone-making machine, and a tiny dehydrated seahorse.

The most prized item in heaven is a black baby doll.
Inhabitants sign up years in advance to hold it for a day.

Self-same as on earth: alcohol is drunk as anesthetic.
I never tire of the pelicans pecking the mosquitoes

from the air; never get used to watching God eat
such a bounty of fried potato and caper sandwiches.

Though he stays as thin as the thrushes and threadsnakes—
and the pencils some of us hoard.

By Claire Bateman

The inaccessible phone is always just out of reach, caught in a field of mutual repulsion between the desire to communicate and the desire to withhold.

*

Almost too hot to touch, the incandescent phone is powered by rage—there’s nothing for it to want and it can’t forget anything.

By Bethany Schultz Hurst

Yes, there is a Paris, Idaho. No, it’s not very far from here.

Yes, there are potato fields adjacent. An ice cave whose mouth fills with mud in warmer months.

Yes, the man who sculpted Mount Rushmore was born nearby.

Yes, before Rushmore, onto a different mountain, he carved a tribute to
Confederate leaders.

Yes, okay, someone else technically finished that Stone Mountain; he only
sculpted Robert E. Lee’s head.

Yes, yesterday 31 white nationalists were arrested on conspiracy to riot. Yes,
that was here in Idaho, but, no, that was way up north.

Yes, there is ice shoved way back in the muddy cave even in Idaho’s driest
months.

Yes, taking a break from painting my son’s room, I scroll through the mugshots. Yes, I think mean things about their faces. Yes, I laugh at the insulting comments posted underneath.

No, you’re right. Laughter doesn’t diminish their danger.

But yes, they look blank and stony. Yes, I think I can tell just from looking that
they are dumb.

Yes, I keep taking the easy target.

Yes, I keep confiscating all of the Nerf guns that are gifted to my son.

Yes, when he was a baby I worried about a vacant look I sometimes glimpsed.
Yes, I worried something was lurking in that dark cave.

Yes, I was afraid I’d see that look on his pale, grown-up face in some awful,
awful picture.

Yes, my understanding of infant intellectual development was thin.

Yes, thank god, he is a sweet boy now who loves kitties, who thinks to help his limping grandfather up the stairs, though he’s not strong enough yet to offer real assistance.

Yes, we try to teach him to see his privilege, to watch out for traps of hate, for the lures that could reel him in.

But no, he cannot seem to keep himself from aiming soft Nerf bullets at the light fixture’s glass globe, at his little sister’s belly.

Yes, one day he will tower over me.

Yes, I am nervous about raising him in a state that seems to love its armed
militias.

Yes, at Stone Mountain the horse’s Confederate mouth is so big you could stand inside it to escape the rain.

No, that’s hypothetical. No, I don’t think you’d be allowed that close.

Yes, my son has promised me he’ll still be my boy even when he’s big enough to lift me off my feet. No, I promise, I didn’t prompt him to that speech.

But yes, I’m only painting one wall the deep teal that he selected and the other three a tasteful neutral.

Yes, I’m glad repainting gives me an excuse to take down the tacky sports car
poster he’d taped haphazardly to the wall.

No, at least I didn’t throw it away.

Yes, I thought I’d gotten the low-VOC paint, but still the smell is overwhelming.

Yes, I cracked the window. Yes, I realize how much I want control. Yes, I’m sorry,

we were talking about Paris, Idaho.

Population 667, it surprisingly does display a massive stone tabernacle at its
center.

Yes, I do have a friend who once booked a flight to Paris, Ontario, instead of
Paris, France. No, he didn’t realize until he arrived at the airport. No, I don’t
remember if he took the flight anyway. Yes, I like to think he did.

No, there is no opportunity for such confusion in Paris, Idaho, with its cropduster airstrip.

Yes, most of the nationalists traveled in from other states. Yes, the local news
outlets like to emphasize this.

Yes, the nationalists dream of Idaho as their homeland, as a territory imperative to reclaim.

Yes, they’ve been constructing that flimsy story for a while.

Yes, Paris, Idaho, is near a beautiful, massive lake, inside of which a cryptid is
said to live.

Yes, long, long ago the white settler who’d started that rumor confessed it was a “first-class lie.”

But yes, locals still argue about what face the cryptid wears: an otter, a cow,
walrus? Crocodile?

Yes, the sculptor preferred the colossal: blowing the real faces off of mountains, reshaping them into what he thought was a grander story.

Yes, he dreamed his thoughts were so big they could only be contained in such dimension.

Yes, now that I tuck my son into bed, I worry the VOC is getting stronger.

Yes, Mount Rushmore was blasted right into a mountain its Indigenous people consider sacred. Into something beautiful the wind and rain had long been making.

Yes, the sculptor was fond of dynamite.

Why, yes, he did have ties to the KKK.

Yes, the sculptor tunneled out a cave behind Lincoln’s face to house records,
some explanation of what he’d done.

Yes, he worried in the distant future the monument might not make sense.

No, the cave’s entrance isn’t through Lincoln’s nostril. Yes, I’d hoped so, too.

Yes, there’s always some half-baked design in Paris, Idaho, to lure the cryptid
from the lake. To see at last what kind of body it’s been hiding.

Yes, even the pioneers near Paris, Idaho, had hoped to trap him with a great
length of rope.

Yes, at the edge of the Pride celebration, the nationalists were crammed inside a U-Haul.

Yes, they were playing little army.

No, imagining doesn’t make them into something safe.

Yes, in the U-Haul’s mouth they pulled up gaiters over their faces, waited to be spit out with shields and smoke grenades.

Yes, now that he is finally sleeping, I am convinced my son is breathing toxic
fumes.

Yes, it’s usually late at night when I lose what thin control I wield over my worry.

Yes, my future son will tower over me. But I can carry him now to my room,
where I think the air is safer.

Yes, he is heavy. Yes, this is probably the last time I can lift him like this.

No, the sculptor didn’t finish Rushmore, either; he left that mantle lying for his son.

Yes, like many settlers he was good at wrecking a terrain and then good at
wandering away.

Yes, the beautiful lake near Paris, Idaho, gleams lower and lower each year, due to persistent drought and irrigation.

Yes, a marker nearby shows where the sculptor’s childhood home no longer is.

No, I can’t see my son’s eyes roving behind his lids.

I mean, yes, I can see his eyes are roving, but, no, I cannot see his actual eyeballs behind his lids.

Yes, there is a little light left here, watery and blue.

Yes, once we parked near where we thought the lake began—where the waters recently had begun—and walked and walked into the shoreline mist weighed down with armloads of towels and beach toys and food. The kids ran on ahead. For a minute, no, we couldn’t see them. Then there they were, at the water’s distant edge like they’d always been there, their feet and hands disappearing into mounds of shell and sand. The lake was so teal and vivid, who could need another story?

Yes, in low water the lake’s boat ramps all were closed.

No, we didn’t see anything moving underwater.

Yes, the lake’s own exquisite face sufficed.

Yes, I am still holding him.

No, I can’t know what dream he has vanished into.

Yes, my son is heavy.

No, he is not a stone.

No, I can’t imagine when I’ll be ready to lay him down.

By Joyce Schmid

I try to keep my mouth shut so she’ll talk to me,
but unsuccessfully, and wondering with every word
about my hunger to be heard—
she a hummingbird at rest, and I so tired.
Her son—a rain cloud on the fishes’ sky—
angles for a large-mouth bass,
while over us, an airplane dangles hook and line.

Wild geese step high like toddlers in the grass,
pecking at a mallard hen,
but the hen’s the one who finds some food,
outnumbered as she is,
and small and plain, her only ornament
a flash of satin on her wing,
blue as longing.

By Ashlen Renner

I once watched my pet gecko eat his own skin. It was late at night, and I woke to his little nails scraping against woodchips and rocks. I turned on the light and rolled over in bed to see the gecko paused, mid-chew, as the inverted white glove of his hand protruded from his mouth. His pupils were straight lines, his little shoulders tensed. He was startled by the light.

By Wes Civilz

This human is making something, he is placing
garlic, dill, peppercorns, salt, and a splash
of vinegar into a type of jar he refers
to as a “Mason jar,” although

it is made of glass, not stone. Later research
reveals “Mason” to be a surname, not a material.
Specimen closes jar and shakes briskly
and vinegar covers all

and jar is left to ferment at room temperature
for an hour before sliced, salt-cured cucumbers
are added. Now a vinegar brine is mixed and heated
and poured in up to just under the jar’s lip.

Jar goes in refrigerator for three days.
Important to seal well.
Requires a hermetic seal.
Could be full of sickness

from tiny invisible squirming micro-beings
and all their bad intentions. But vinegar
is toxic to these tiny scary squirmers.
Also vinegar adds deep flavor.

Over three days the cucumbers become “pickles”
and evoke great joy upon their consumption.
Wide smile on the chewing, swallowing specimen.
Wildly happy, he views the cucumbers

as greatly enhanced by the vinegar, salt, and herbs.
He views pickles as better than cucumbers.
Feels happy simply looking at the jar.
Naps after eating large portion, a deep sleep

posing as death. The specimen wakes
in a mood of Value and Joy
and he focuses this Value-Joy feeling
back onto the jar in a feedback loop

evoking Goodness and Calm.
The specimen experiences the jar
as a Perfect Made Thing that enables
him to be a passable, okay self

moving forward through time
for a limited time
without significant negative emotion.
With what might be called non-sadness.

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.